Your chance to win Cleveland-centric books from Gray & Company Publishers

*Update* this contest is officially over. Congratulations to our winners!

Here at the Cleveland Movie Blog, we love movies. Well, except for Charles, maybe. But sometimes it's good to take a break from the almost non-stop audio-visual stimulation of modern life and actually read a book. Not an e-book on your Ipad or Kindle or whatever, but an actual, honest-to-goodness book made out of paper. If you feel the same way, you're in luck. Our friends at Gray & Company Publishers have provided us with copies of two of their latest books to give away – 'Damn Right I'm From Cleveland' by Mike Polk Jr., the stand-up comedian who unleashed those “Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism” videos on Youtube, and 'Cleveland Christmas Memories' by Restaurant Hospitality magazine editor Gail Ghetia Bellamy.

'Damn Right I'm From Cleveland' makes for great bathroom reading, which I mean as a sincere compliment. It's a bunch of short, funny essays and cheap gags about all things Cleveland. 'Cleveland Christmas Memories' is a collection of photos and remembrances of the way Clevelander's have celebrated the holiday in the past, so you can bet there's some mention of Mr. Jingleling and Halles.

Dope Island: Harry Potter and the Cranky Blogger

By Charles Cassady, Jr.

I was reading the trashy UK tabloids online (where it doesn't count; only buying them off the newspaper rack makes one complicit in the fall of civilization), and there was a big story about how Steven Spielberg says he doesn't watch many of the mainstream movies made in the last 30 years. He prefers the classics, by John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock etc.

Shock! Horror! As the Brits like to say. Personally I don't blame anyone for skipping most of the movies made in the last 30 years, especially 2011 - but the irony of course is that megastar director Spielberg is largely responsible for the commercial-blockbuster aesthete that has shaped mainstream Hollywood shite (another British vulgarity. So is "wanker," but I don't know yet how I'll work that into this column. Maybe I'll save it for a Cleveland City Club address) for more than a quarter-century, ever since his JAWS practically invented the summer "event" mega-picture, and his occasional collaborator George Lucas finished off the 1970s period of cinema for actual grownups with a little thing called STAR WARS.

Dope Island: The Best Movie Book Nobody's Ever Heard Of

I've recently been enlightened that the Cleveland Movie Blog is open to book reviews as well. I suppose I always guessed that, but the full reality was too much for me to face. It's bad enough I go on about miserable movies all the time. You don't want to let me loose going on about books.

That's because of my complicity in assorted crimes against the art form. True, thanks to my early Super 8mm experiments and now dabbling on YouTube, I can sort of claim to be a "filmmaker," as shameful a confession as that is. But there's no getting away from it that I am, with no libelous exaggeration at all...an author.

Dope Island: John Steakley we hardly knew ye

By Charles Cassady Jr.

Someone at one of my menial part-time jobs - wow, what fun it is, to be an internationally published writer - remarked that the first part of the newspaper he turns to are the obituaries. Because he wants to see if anyone he knows is in there. Including himself. I thought I was the only one who did that.

Despite my strenuous efforts to keep up, not only checking the death notices in The Plain Dealer but also the addictive BlogofDeath.com, one fatality got past me. John Steakley, dead at 59 last November (my despised birth month, during which no good happens) in McKinney, Texas. Cause was cited as a longstanding liver condition.

Why should you care? Steakley was a science-fiction and fantasy author of something less than prolific output. He only wrote a handful of short stories and finished two novels. Even with that, I can't claim to have read anythying more by him than the one of those novels that made a whimpering dent in Hollywood history, Vampire$.