The Site of My Upcoming Novel, “Revolution Calling,” the Former North Carroll High School

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 17 Comments

My forthcoming novel, Revolution Calling, to be released soon by Raw Earth Ink, is set in the year 1988, the year I graduated high school. Funny enough, we are about to celebrate our class’s 35th year reunion next month.

My alma mater is North Carroll High School, doubled as Merriweather High in Revolution Calling. Back then, you could call North Carroll High a rural-suburban school as its homebased town Hampstead was in the midst of gradual, resistant industrialization. It’s one of the themes I explore in the story.

North Carroll High School officially closed its doors in 2015 due to a population burst prompting the opening of a new school in the neighboring town of Manchester. Beyond that, however, a decline in school-aged children ensued as much of my generation and that behind me began to move from the area. Frankly put, North Carroll was left to flounder in the shadow of upgrade one burg over. Considering Manchester Valley High won bragging rights by its newness, North Carroll was repurposed in part for the local police. In recent times, the Coppermine fitness company bought into the building and its outdoor facilities, keeping the premises operational for sports and theater inside the former school’s auditorium. This, still sharing the back end of the school with the Hampstead police department.

Having spent nearly two years writing Revolution Calling after first coming up with the concept of an Outsiders type of story for Generation X heavy-metal-style while in the music industry, I took a walk around the campus of my old school. The first thing I thought of was to look at myself now versus the longhair grit who used to prowl these halls from 1984 to 1988. I know my peers from North Carroll, many of whom I’ve stayed friends with and have routine dinner and drink dates with, probably laugh even harder at the sight of khaki cargo shorts, a peach tee and hair shaved to two inches.

I took a lot of pictures of scenes which appear in Revolution Calling and I’m happier than hell they match what I wrote. At least, to my mind’s eye and hopefully those who went to North Carroll High with me. For everyone else, the fictional Merriweather High and their cougar school mascot is a thinly-veiled disguise for North Carroll Panthers. As we all say amongst our North Carroll tribe across the decades before its closure, we are Panther Strong.

So have a look at these pictures before Revolution Calling’s release and I hope it’ll help put some context to the story. What you see in these pictures is where my characters breathe. The two protagonists of the story, Rob and Jason, are me divided into two leads. I didn’t rely upon actual friendships and relationships from my high school days. Only a handful of characters are based on real people. The story is built around my life back then, collecting the hardest moments of my teenaged life and compressing the events into a two-month narrative for the story. Most of Revolution Calling happened to me, until it hits the violent side in the story, which evolves into fiction.

I laughed the hardest in my revisit tour at the “Senior patio” I use in the story, where students of the day were allowed to smoke outdoors, if you can get your head around that.

Finally, I ran a gazillion miles around North Carroll’s track after graduation and I was pleased to see it felt and looks exactly the same. The track has a pivotal moment in the story for Jason’s evolution, as it doubled my own struggle to belong as a metalhead infiltrating the jock life by taking three years of Weightlifting class and becoming accepted by those guys in time. Same as with the rest my classmates. It had become a rare thing where a headbanger had found social acceptance amongst so many different walks of life in the high school social strata. My precise thesis for writing Revolution Calling.

Sometimes you really can go home…

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

New York, New York, Is It Everything They Say?

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 27 Comments

I’ve been in a New York state of mind all week, obviously, so I’ll conclude this week’s blog love for Manhattan and New York City with a final photo dump, also from last Saturday. I have a gazillion other photos of New York from trips prior, but for those who’ve never been to New York, it’s a pilgrimage every American should make in his or her lifetime. Right down to the aromas, good and bad, hot dogs with real meat and a screechy hightail underground on the subway, New York, New York, is everything they say, to quote Huey Lewis and The News from back in 1983.

Next trip, I’ll be on the hunt for roads lesser traveled in NYC.

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

The Wooden Escalators at Macy’s Herald Square, Manhattan

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 6 Comments

Over the weekend, I took my son up to New York City for the day and we tramped more than 60 blocks between Midtown, Downtown and Central Park, with a gazillion stops in our travels.

This included the original Macy’s in Manhattan, the same site of the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade. Originally built in 1902 and certified a historical landmark in 1978, the nine floor Macy’s is something you’ll never forget as the largest retail store in the United States. I’ve always called this Macy’s location “a city within a city.”

Comprised of 2.5 million square feet total with 1.25 million feet devoted to retail space, Macy’s, like most New York commercial stores, is a multi-tiered adventure. I’m still holding vigil for the long-gone four level Virgin Megastore, always a past mandatory stop anytime I’ve visited New York. This trip with my kid hitting my 14th time.

Macy’s Manhattan, plotted in the neon-cast shadow of Times Square, with its massive block circumvention of 34th and 35th Streets, Broadway and Seventh Avenue, has its own McDonald’s and one of the few remaining Toys ‘R Us outlets. It’s biggest charm, however, is those 20 oak and ash Otis jumbo cleat wooden escalators running through the fifth and ninth floors. It’s irresistible not to imagine a century’s worth of New Yorkers and visitors, taking the same exact mobile pathways.

Yes, they’re modernized and braced to meet inspection code, but the retro rickety resonance remains the same. Macy’s Herald Square is hardly a road lesser traveled, especially if you’ve been to New York enough times to know a public bathroom is a rarer commodity than homegrown horticulture. Yet, those wonderfully giddy wooden escalators are a must-do blast from the past joy ride whenever you hit the Big Apple. My sixth, for the record.

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

“Americana,” an Old Poem by Ray Van Horn, Jr. for The 4th of July

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 6 Comments

I wrote this one during my open mike days nearly 20 years ago already. Not my greatest work, but somewhere between Norman Rockwell and John Mellencamp, not the varied shades of wing did this piece come to me. I got a couple of standing ovations when I read it back then, so, in the Spirit of ’76, the birthday of my country, which has its problems yet still has the capacity to shine brightly, here’s “Americana.”

Americana

Oh, take me there

somewhere on backroad Indiana

cape cods in Massachusetts

or upstate New York

where cornfields sway

to the consoling breeze of democracy

the land where homeboy politicians

dig up their grass roots

where contemplation and imagination

are nurtured in libraries

still made of brick

I’m in search of

Mellencamp’s pink houses for you and me

and Springsteen’s glory days so they don’t pass me by

where pickup trucks

are like pickup games of sandlot ball

all part of the norm

where women adorn themselves

not in ostentatious composition

but the in the veracity of continued existence

where life is thankfully naïve

and blind to the swinging corporate noose

where the day skies are bluer

and there’s no doubt

which Dipper is which

where people think nothing about wearing

foam cheese wedges on their heads

where Frisbees are more entertaining

than Playstations and iPhones

where the young grow up as they should

ultimately lost

to gridirons, baseball diamonds

and ice cream parlors

yes

take me there right now

where I can wave to the tractor brigade

then salute Old Glory

painted down their silos

and flapping high above their stalks of sustenance

where tomorrow’s Sunday

and nobody will be working, God bless

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

By Request From My Son: Ray’s Top 25 Favorite Movies (and 5 Crap Classic Guilty Pleasures)

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 21 Comments

We’re hours away from heading out to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and it’s been a hot run of films we’ve seen at the local Cinemark in succession this year: John Wick 4, Evil Dead Rise, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Multiverse. This time we’re going as a full pack, and I have a good feeling the final Indy romp will fall in the middle of the best-of list for this beloved franchise. I can still see myself and my parents in complete awe of Raiders of the Lost Ark back when it first came out in 1981. Just an experience amongst many that will live on in my memories as epic.

Last night I pulled up the Eminem semi autobiography 8 Mile, which I haven’t seen in ages and I’m happy still stands the test of time. My son and I were watching a round of Childish Gambino videos on YouTube when I decided to pull up 8 Mile for my rap-addicted kid. He only poked in and out while I watched, but he’d wanted to know if I considered the film in my top 50 films of all-time. “Kid,” I said, “not even close. Do you know how many films I’ve seen in five decades of life? 8 Mile is a really good flick, though, and Eminem (aka “Rabbit”) gets the mother of all lyrical get backs. I recommend you take the time to watch it all the way.” The fact I was up late and wide awake on a Friday night had impressed my kid to the point he’d figured 8 Mile had to be something special that I hadn’t nodded off in the middle of it.

“Well, Dad,” he said after that, “what would be your all-time favorite movies? Top 10, no 25.”

Hence, after telling him to let me sleep on it after I finished 8 Mile at 1:20 a.m., I got to thinking, especially after he and TJ, who know me best, automatically figured on Blade Runner 2049 as my top pick. Aside from the original Star Wars trilogy, there is no movie filmed I haven’t watched more than this masterpiece sequel to a masterpiece of dystopian sci-fi. Both Blade Runner films and their respective ambient synth scores are my therapy, 2049 especially. I watched 2049 a ton of times during a long, difficult stretch for me; it’s in my DNA at this point. Would that I could’ve included BR49 director Denis Villanueve’s first installment of Dune in this list, it’s become an instant classic for me. TJ and I are licking our chops for the second installment of Dune this summer.

Now my list here will have some of the obvious hitters from any respected all-time greats of cinema list. Some you may not know or even just go to yourself, hmmm, interesting choice. I’m missing decades worth of classics and greats, but that doesn’t mean I’ve shunned them or consider them lesser that my listed movies. Those who know me will be shocked not to find any superhero movies on this list, though I am a geek for them as much as comic books. Superman II, Spider-Man 2, Black Panther, V is for Vendetta, The Dark Knight, Batman (1989) and Captain America: Civil War representing my upper echelon in that genre. It just means the list I’ve compiled here is in answer to my son, who wants to know what makes his old man tick and what movies resonated more than others. Some having me dash to the laptop with inspiration to write. So here you go, boyo. It wasn’t easy.

1. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

2. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

3. Blade Runner 2049

4. Fast Times at Ridgemont High

5. Halloween (1978)

6. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

7. Blade Runner

8. American Beauty

9. A Clockwork Orange

10. The Shining (1981)

11. The Virgin Suicides

12. Alien

13. The Breakfast Club

14. Citizen Kane

15. Raiders of the Lost Ark

16. Ex Machina

17. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

18. A Fistful of Dollars

19. Nosferatu (1922)

20. Spartacus (1960)

21. Purple Rain

22. Boogie Nights

23. Get Out

24. The Revenant

25. Lust/Caution

And My Top 5 Crap Classic Guilty Pleasures:

1. Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers

2. Halloween III: Season of the Witch

3. Trick or Treat (1986)

4. Krull

5. Graduation Day

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.