Category Archives: Photography

That Gum You Like is Going to Come Back in Style

Twin Peaks - Midget Gum

While the midget (later learned to be Mike’s arm) prattled on about polymer oral treats, twas the girl who looked almost exactly like Laura Palmer who told Agent Cooper in the Red Room who killed Laura Palmer…but as all Twin Peakers know…that was 25 years later. After the series finale, were we to believe Agent Cooper (and/or his doppelgänger?) would be trapped in the Black Lodge all that time until the gum he liked was going to come back in style?

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought it would be the cat’s pajamas if David Lynch and Mark Frost would indeed take us back to Twin Peaks 25 years later to see how Coop and Annie and all our friends were doing. Well…it’s been 23 years since we first visited Twin Peaks, which means they have 2 years to get their act together – and naturally rumors abound with Lynch allegedly thinking about returning to TV (hell, isn’t playing Gus the bartender on The Cleveland Show enough for him?) and Frost reminding people how he and David always imagined Twin Peaks as a continuing story. Meanwhile copy-cat shows continue with The Killing still killing on AMC, Bates Motel scaring up viewers on A&E and Netflix attempting to get people hooked on Hemlock Grove.

Thankfully, a new viral campaign to Bring Twin Peaks Back to TV has started over there on the Facebook and apart from the standard fan art, nostalgia, pining and petition signing, they’ve come up with a mondo clever Agent Cooper MISSING Poster Campaign where fans all over the world have been plastering posters every place they can and posting the photographs online.

Continue reading →

New Orleans in November

What better way to cure a Hurricane Sandy hangover and escape a bitter Nor’easter than by flying down to the place that knows bad storms the best…New Orleans!  By pure happenstance (my little sojourn was planned about a month or so ago), I was flying down to the Big Easy for some rest and relaxation in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and just before a Nor’easter battered my home state of New Jersey.  It was also Election Day – more on that later.  I had chosen New Orleans as my destination on a whim.  I had never been there (alas, an aborted attempt to go my junior year of college still haunted me) and I wanted to go somewhere different, somewhere a little more exciting…somewhere completely unlike my normal R&R spots in Upstate New York.  A morbid thought also burrowed its way into my mind, as New Orleans is one of the few places in the US that at some point in my lifetime might no longer exist.  Little did I know that much of the Jersey Shore and parts of NYC would fall into this category as well just a week before my trip.

Sunny 70-degree weather, cool nights and leisurely bustling but not overcrowded streets greeted me as I touched down in Louisiana.  Good food, good drinks, good people and a city like no other (this has to be the most laid-back city in the United States) - it was just what the doctor ordered. 

Below is the patented Schleicher Spin rundown of my time in NOLA. Continue reading →

Random Places I Have Been in 2012

Ausable Chasm – Upstate New York -This past spring while up at Saratoga Springs for some R&R I took a scenic drive up I87 towards the Canadian border and stopped at Ausable Chasm.  I don’t recall much of this - only that there was a pretty cool waterfall…

Original Photograph by D. H. Schleicher

…that brought to mind a rather Twin Peaks-ian moment…

Original Photograph by D. H. Schleicher

Continue reading →

A Wheel Upon the Earth

While living for six years in the New South at the turn of the millennium, I was struck by a certain I-don’t-know-what-ness.  Underneath the smothering yet genuine gentility and kindness there was still an undercurrent of “sticking to your own kind” – and it wasn’t just down lines of race, but down political, religious and social class lines.  Birds of a feather should flock together.  This certainly isn’t unique to the New South.  This undercurrent (sometimes seen as a tidal wave) has always existed to varying degrees across the world.  But what made it unique in my eyes, and positively Southern, was that it was coupled with this melancholic and melodic nostalgia for a time before that was better than now – yet it was a time that was not clearly defined, only dreamt about, perhaps having never really existed and only ever dreamt about.  It begs the questions, when exactly was it better?  What about the good ol’ days of Jim Crow?  Was it better during the Great Depression?  Was it better during the days of Slavery?  Or maybe it was better before any white or black men set foot on the land and there were only trees, beasts and Native Americans? 

Yet even I found the milieu intoxicating…the whole “Country Time Lemonade” commercial-ness of it all – lazy Sunday afternoons on the porch, Ma and Pa sipping on sweet tea, the kids running barefoot through the tall grass - the kind of laid-back twilight feeling that “once upon a time…it was always like this…it could always be like this…if only….”  And for the better part of those six years I yearned to let my North East jackass-ery and uptight-ness slip away into a world of Yes, Sir’s…No, Ma’am’s…and Thank You Kindly’s.

I think maybe writer director Robert Persons was trying to capture that I-don’t-know-what-ness of the New South in his troubling yet haunting experiment, General Orders No. 9, which exists as an amalgamation of poetic voice-over, ambient music, stunning images verging on still-life, animated maps and an overall “otherworldliness” of bygone times set to the crawling cadence of 72-minutes on film. Continue reading →

Photos from Fonthill Castle

Sometimes I need to take a break from writing about the pictures (as in films) by going out and taking pictures (as in very amateur photography).  On a recent drive out to Doylestown, I stopped at Fonthill Castle for some photo ops.

Click here to learn more about Fonthill Castle and the neighboring Mercer Museum.

More of my photos from the castle and its hollow-esque surroundings can be found below: Continue reading →

Revisiting the The Third Man – The Best Film of the 1940′s

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. “

More so than any other decade in the brief history of film, the 1940′s showed that with great tribulation came great inspiration.

Behold the following cinematic masterpieces created amidst a world at war:  Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Grapes of Wrath, Bicycle Thieves, Double Indemnity, Shadow of a Doubt.

In any given year in any given decade any one of these films could easily top anyone’s list.  Some of them are routinely bantered about as the greatest film of all time.

And then there is…THE GREATEST FILM OF ALL TIME.

THE THIRD MAN.

If the 2000′s were emblematic of my generation, and the 1970′s belonged to the generation of my parents…then the 1940′s were where my grandparents’ generation left their indelible mark:  the decade of the Greatest Generation that clawed their way out of the Great Depression to rise triumphant out of the calamity of World War II.  Film mirrored this struggle with tales that showed the human condition is made up of trouble every day.  We saw some of the greatest book to film adaptations ever with David Lean’s Oliver Twist and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath.  Speaking of wrath, Carl Theodor Dreyer delivered his bewitching Day of Wrath, while Hitchcock produced the film closest to his heart and mine, Shadow of a Doubt.  Clouzot was going tete-a-tete with Hitch across the pond in his native France with the allegorical Le Corbeau and the wildly entertaining police procedural Quai des Orfevres while the Italians were rising from the ashes with their neo-realism movement marked by De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Rossellini’s Rome Open City.

And beyond briefly mentioning, I haven’t even touched on Casablanca and Citizen Kane, two films deserving of their own full write-ups and tributes.   Yet even those films don’t hold a candle to Carol Reed’s descent into GreeneLand and ascent into film history. Continue reading →

Of Baseball, Beer, Bats and Caves

Well, I just got back from another successful excursion to Upstate New York for some much-needed rest & relaxation, and I even got some writing done while up there, too.  The weather was perfect – sunny with patchy clouds and blue skies, a cool breeze and mid-60 degree temperatures – and the water was high and gently rushing down the mountains from the recent thaw.  The roads and hills were once again open for the taking.

Some highlights from this time around included: Continue reading →

Eat Explore Gamble

While Cooperstown has become a second home to me, I thought it was about time to explore other areas of Upstate New York.  As a last-minute autumnal getaway, I ventured up to the Adirondacks as far north as Lake George while also stopping in Glens Falls — home to the Hyde Collection — and Saratoga Springs — home to one of the friendliest casinos I have ever been to.  There’s something inherently adventurous when driving up a highway that has signs for Montreal — less than two-hundred miles away — and this civilized wilderness boasts some of the oldest settlements of both Native American and European origin.  The drive up marked the first time I was ever able to leave New Jersey without paying a toll — quick, someone fact check this…is the 287 the only way to get out the Garden State by car for free? — and the Catskills and Adirondacks unfold in gently rolling forms on the horizon as one heads up I-87N.  It’s astounding to think these now weather-worn and inviting mountains were at one time higher than the Himalayas.  Taking in all the gorgeous lakes and interconnecting canals and creeks flowing into the Hudson and eventually down to NYC, it’s no wonder the French, English and Indians all wanted to not only live here, but also control it.  Archaeological sites like Forts William Henry, Ticonderoga and Edward beckon us to stare into our Pre-Revolutionary past and see why this land…this wilderness was the first to be conquered. 

The fresh air is meant to be drunk…the humble expanse breathed in…the fall colors tasted…. Continue reading →

Children of the Corn

…and The Schleicher Spin’s 564th bad horror film you should not watch this Halloween season:

Children of the Corn – and all its misbegotten sequels.  Like seriously, what the hell was Stephen King thinking?  How much corn whiskey was he drinking back then?  Instead, you should watch these films or this film.

 …and here are a few shots from inside a corn maze in Egg Harbor City, NJ taken a few weekends ago:

Disclaimer:  No corn was harmed during the making of these photos.

Photographed by David H. Schleicher

Of Canals, Lambertville and Nomad Pizza

There’s really no better way to spend a day off from work midweek than taking a long drive.  It’s especially nice on a beautiful pre-Fall day, and if it’s the first day your car has been out of the shop after an overnight stay for repairs, it’s even better.  I’ve long extolled the wonders of Bucks County, Pennsylvania with all of its wineries and covered bridges, but the towns running parallel to Bucks along the Delaware River on the New Jersey side offer their own rustic charms and often get overlooked.  Quaint historic towns running along the Delaware Raritan Canal in Hunterdon County and stretching across gorgeous wooded back roads into Mercer County (home of Princeton University) are more an extension of the small-town meets gentrified rural setting of Bucks County than they are a connecting strip to the New York-influenced North Jersey and Philly-influenced South Jersey megalopilises.

Last week I ventured up that way, stopping off at Washington’s Crossing State Park on the Jersey side before spending a few hours strolling through Lambertville. Continue reading →