Tuesday's Overlooked Films And/Or Other A/V: the links

Thanks as always to the contributors here, and to you readers of these reviews and citations at the links below. And, as always, if I've missed yours or someone else's review this week, please let me know in comments. Thanks again!

Bill Crider: They Might Be Giants (credits theme/stills) (see Yvette Banek, below)

Brent McKee: Gang Busters (1952: television)

Brian Arnold: Krull; Davy Jones and The Monkees

Chuck Esola: Nothing Lasts Forever

Ed Gorman: Raquelle on The Dark Corner; Davy Jones

Evan Lewis: Overrestored: Guns Along the Trail aka Paradise Canyon

Frederik Pohl: Jack Robins/Rubinson's The Ivory Tower

George Kelley: Richard Goode in recital

Iba Dawson: Coco Avant Chanel

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr: "Millie, the Model" (Mayberry RFD); The Story of Temple Drake



Jack Seabrook: Robert Bloch on Television: "The Big Kick" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents:)

Jackie Kashian: Merrill Markoe

James Reasoner: The White Gorilla

Jerry House: Fear in the Night

John Charles: OSS 117

Juri Nummelin: trailer for Twilight of the Gods

Kate Laity: The Bedsitter; PCon and Mark E. Smith and H.P. Lovecraft

Mark Hand: Shale Gas Watchdog: Sharon Wilson Fills Void Left by Industry Lapdogs; Noam Chomsky on Occupy Protests

Michael Shonk: Hunter (1977)

Mickey Z.: Michael Moore is not a leftist… but he does play one on TV.

Mike Nevins (Francis M. Nevins): Mirage (1965)

Patti Abbott: Accident

Pearce Duncan: An American Werewolf in London (BBC Radio 1994) (Comments: Jeff Segal; Steve Hill; Mike Stamm; Todd Mason)

Prashant Trikannad: Scram!

Randy Johnson: Key Largo

Raquelle: Love is a Ball

Rod Lott: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold

Ron Scheer: Whispering Smith (1948)

Scott Cupp: Fantastic Voyage (1966)

Sergio Angelini: Stolen Face

Stacia Jones: The Phantom Creeps (cont'd.); March films to watch for

Steve Lewis: Partners of the Sunset; Jim Doherty's Top 10 PI Series

Todd Mason: Nobody Waved Goodbye; Solitary Man

Walker Martin: The Pulp Auction of the Century

Walter Albert: Passport to Suez

Yvette Banek: They Might Be Giants (see Bill Crider, above)

The CW network announces summer series...one of them potentially interesting, two aggressively inane

The ballet series has the slightest chance of being half-decent; adults playing musical chairs or yet another "reality" show attempting to be a sexual tease on broadcast tv, essentially no chance.

From the CW (the sixth or seventh or possibly eighth largest US broadcast network these days, the product of the merger of the WB and UPN networks) this afternoon:

March 5, 2012 (Burbank, CA) ─ The CW Network today ordered three new original reality series for summer 2012: THE STAR NEXT DOOR, a nationwide music competition series from Queen Latifah; BREAKING POINTE, an inside look at the competitive world of ballet; and THE CATALINA, which follows the employees and guests at a rocking Miami hotel. These three new shows will join the previously announced game show OH SIT! on The CW’s most aggressive summer slate ever. Premiere dates and times will be announced at a later date.

“One of my first goals here at The CW was to increase the number of hours of original programming, both throughout the season and during the summer. With these four new reality series, we’re launching our biggest summer schedule yet which will boost our circulation during the summer months and provide us with a promotional platform for our fall launch,” said Mark Pedowitz, President, The CW.

From executive producer and hip-hop icon Queen Latifah and executive producer Dave Broome (“The Biggest Loser”), THE STAR NEXT DOOR will go on a nationwide search for undiscovered artists on the verge of stardom. In this new take on the music competition genre, superstar mentors, including pop legend Gloria Estefan and country star John Rich, will travel to where the talent is, immersing themselves in the lives and towns of these local performers and preparing them for the chance to represent their home city on stage, live, in front of America. THE STAR NEXT DOOR is produced by CBS’ Raquel Productions, 25/7 Productions and Flavor Unit Entertainment. Additional mentors and host will be announced at a later time.

BREAKING POINTE goes behind the stage curtain for an intense, unfiltered look at one of the most competitive ballet companies in the country, Ballet West, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Beneath the beauty and glamour of the dance and costumes is a gritty dog-eat-dog world of extreme athleticism, focus, dedication, passion, pressure and, of course, the hunt for the unattainable…perfection. Kate Shepherd (“Big Brother: According to Russell Brand”) and Bill Langworthy (“The City”) are executive producers. Izzie Pick Ashcroft and Jane Tranter are executive producers for BBC Worldwide Productions. BREAKING POINTE is from BBC Worldwide Productions.

With a nightlife as hot as the sun-soaked beaches during the day, THE CATALINA centers on the young, wild staff of The Catalina hotel in Miami’s South Beach. The fun-loving group, who form their own dysfunctional family unit, run a glamorous destination hotel while partying even harder than their guests. Eric Bischoff (“iMPACT Wrestling,” “Confessions of a Teen Idol”) and Jason Hervey (“iMPACT Wrestling,” “Confessions of a Teen Idol”) are executive producers. THE CATALINA is from Bischoff Hervey Entertainment.

OH SIT! is a fun, high-stakes, high-octane musical chairs competition, in which 20 thrill-seeking daredevils race head-to-head through five physically demanding, obstacle course-style eliminations as they each compete to claim a chair, to the sounds of a live band. At the end of the hour, only one contestant will be left sitting triumphant to seize the cash prize. OH SIT! is created and executive produced by Phil Gurin (“The Singing Bee,” “Shark Tank,” “The Weakest Link”), Richard Joel and Deena Dill. The series is from The Gurin Company and 405 Productions.

science fiction, speculative fiction, science fantasy, slipstream fiction...

Patti Abbott on her blog asked the assembled on Sunday, what's the difference between science fiction and speculative fiction? And, having read a story in the anthology of newly-published short fiction Stories edited by Al Sarrantonio and Neil Gaiman, she wondered what was so imaginative about that particular story...Richard Robinson was among those who answered her, and more completely and correctly than anyone else had, and namechecked me for what I might have to say about the matters at hand...

Hard to resist, so:

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Richard, and I agree with you about everything but the uselessness of speculative fiction as a term.

And, Patti: "Oh this genre thing is a slippery slope." Politely, I'll respond, No kidding. That's where the useless pigeonholing starts. Because, yes I'll say it again, nothing escapes genre.

So, if we go back to where the label "speculative fiction" comes from (as I hope the WSJ article [Lorin Eaton cited earlier in comments] managed to trace), Robert Heinlein suggested it as a less-misleading alternative to "science fiction" in the 1940s, but he didn't push it too hard; Judith Merril, as an anthologist beginning in the latter 1950s, picked it up to use it the way Lloyd suggests above, as a catch-all for fantasticated fiction of all sorts, since what she had been using for that purpose, "science-fantasy," had an already established, more specific meaning that might be applied to fiction that mixed elements of sf and fantasy, such as much of the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance or (Ms.) C. L. Moore. So speculative fiction ruled OK for Merril, who was also very interested in the expansion of idiom for sf and fantasy writing, embracing the innovations and avant-garde approaches of some of the folks writing for FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASTIC, AMAZING, to some extent the GALAXY group magazines, and in Britain NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY magazines in the early '60s, and coming to a head particularly in NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY (then renamed IMPULSE) in the later '60s...so the "snobbish" appeal of "speculative fiction" arose then...as people who were trying to break new ground in sf, particularly, were prone to embrace the label (hard science or no hard science didn't really enter into it, as such work as John Brunner's from this period was often both "hard" scientifically and stylistically untraditional, even though the most stereotypically technological magazine in the field, ANALOG, was also the bulwark Against such attempts to move away from the plain tale plainly told, while also if rarely featuring a little of this--ANALOG had been, under the old title ASTOUNDING, the prime mover in getting such literary ambition started in the late 1930s and 1940s, after all).

So, speculative fiction is a vague term that can mean what you want to mean, but perhaps most usefully describes all of fantastic fiction, from fables to surfiction to metafiction and very much including sf and fantasy. Science fiction (about what is possible, though not under current understandings or conditions, but possible with certain theoretically possible changes in place) and fantasy (about what is commonly understood to be impossible, though obviously imaginable, with "magical realism" trying to pretend it isn't fantasy) are sympathetic but relatively distinct approaches.

I haven't yet read my copy of STORIES, but I did read the intro when I bought it, and the ambition there, beyond the hype (any Sarrantonio anthology is going to have a hyperbolic introduction just as any Sarrantonio fiction is going to be at base very goofy), was to present good stories, that might well interest the usual sf and fantasy reader and not necessarily be sf or fantasy.

This leads us to the ridiculously unnecessary, even distorting and remarkably popular term "slipstream," which pretends that sf written by people who likely don't know that ANALOG was once ASTOUNDING, or perhaps even of ANALOG's existence as a magazine at all, can't really be sf, but has to be some hybrid of sf and the (mythical) mainstream of literature...you know all that stuff that isn't sf, or isn't sf or mystery or romance, except when it is, as defined by shelves at a B&N (since Borders is gone, there is no more western nor horror "genre"s, of course, because B&N doesn't segregate those out of "fiction" as Borders used to).

4:55 PM
Blogger Todd Mason said...

Yeah, having now skimmed the Tom Shippey article, he's definitely drunk the "slipstream" Kool-Aid. What bullshit. Particularly as Atwood and others such as Kurt Vonnegut definitely did read the "insider" sf and were inspired by it, and have contributed to it on occasion, and in those two cases particularly were hoping not to lose too much audience of foolish snobs because of their interest in it. (Of course, that just inspires the foolish snobs among sf "insiders" to dismiss their work.)

FFB: THE AMERICAN FOLK SCENE ed. DeTurk & Poulin; BOB DYLAN: DON'T LOOK BACK transcribed & ed. by Pennebaker et al.; DANGEROUSLY FUNNY by Bianculli

Hoots and Hollers: Folk Music and Its Extensions at Midcentury (...and Up Till Now...)



"Folk music is like country music for people who aren't conservative?" --James Adomian, contemplating the current Billboard folk/acoustic music album chart, on Who Charted?, uploaded February 29, 2012

Three books this time coming at and attempting to explicate and/or contextualize the varying flavors of the popular folk-music movement of the 1950s and '60s, and particularly some of the most popular performers (and lightning rods) of that field and time. The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival is, like The Age of Rock reviewed here briefly, a somewhat haphazard collection of magazine essays, from sources ranging from the folk-music "insider" Sing Out! to Time, that attempts to give a mildly panoramic view of the folk-music scene as it was not quite dissipating, but instead not just bifurcating but polyfurcating if one might be forgiven a neologism...the pop-folk of the Kingston Trio and Judy Collins and many of their peers not quite riding the top of the charts any longer but still retaining an audience, while a number of the younger musicians were moving into folk-rock or were drawn to the new opportunities in country music, while others yet were remaining more or less traditionalist purists...and not a few would hop from one field to another as mood or the commercial vagaries struck. G. Legman is as dour as always, with his "Folksongs, Fakelore, and Cash" and Nat Hentoff (his name misspelled in the citation of this book in the library database WorldCat [see full citation of the anthology's contents below] and dutifully parroted in the Amazon listing) typically sensible in "The Future of the Folk Renascence" and Richard Fariña briefly represented, writing about his sister-in-law Joan Baez and this Zimmerman kid. The essays are, of course, not all equally valuable, nor does one come away with a particularly complete understanding of the "scene" as it was even at time of assembly...but it's a start. (My copy is buried deep in storage, at the moment.)



The first time I ever heard Bob Dylan sing I knew he would be a success.
He sounded exactly like Woody Guthrie, an earlier folksinger, and I
figured that if he added a few more imitations–-maybe Bette Davis and James
Cagney–-he would have an even funnier routine. --Mike Royko, "Dylan the Great"

Meanwhile, Zims, who started calling himself Dylan rather early in the 1960s, had already started making a serious name for himself by the time CBS, due to John Hammond's endorsement, started recording him in 1962, and D. J. Pennebaker did no disservice to his own reputation by putting together a cinema verite documentary of Dylan's second tour of the UK, eventually released as Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back (and including, in one early performance sequence filmed around a civil rights protest encampment from several years earlier, footage taken by Ed Emshwiller for an unfinished project that Emshwiller gave to Pennebaker). Released in 1967, the film spawned an interesting 1968 book project, which combined transcripts of the lyrics and dialog from the film with stills (this being as close to a take-home version of the film as most fans could afford in those years), not a unique project but still not that common (the Ballantines, who were always ready to innovate, were then still in charge of the publishing house that bore their name), and it's a deft job...Pennebaker warns that it's no substitute for the film, but it does provide a nice supplement to some fleeting or murky dialog...my copy of the book is from the New Video reprint of the Ballantine edition, released in 2006 as part of the "65 Tour Deluxe Edition" of the film on dvd, with a bonus disc of outtakes and related recordings and a little flipbook that allows handheld animation of the promotional film for "Subterranean Homesick Blues"...


Jack Paar: "I like folksingers. I hate hillbillies. What's the difference between hillbillies and folksingers?"

Tom Smothers: "Well...hillbillies sing higher." --Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour


David Bianculli's book is still in print from a traditional (if megaconglomerate) publisher, as opposed to being a premium in a dvd set, and it shows the signs of being a megaconglomerate book...notably a lack of copy-editing, or of editorial guidance that might've sent Bianculli back to get a little deeper into the background of his subjects. The television reviewer seems to think the Weavers disappeared from the face of the Earth after their first break-up in 1952, for example, rather than having reformed in '54 and helped foster the folk revival the Kingston Trio and other commercial acts sprang from, for the most part...Bianculli even manages to mention Burl Ives and Harry Belafonte repeatedly without tumbling to the fact that Ives and other folksingers and their colleagues in bringing calypso to the US charts were also keeping a presence for pop-folk in the popular consciousness. Even about his subjects at hand, he manages to bobble--while attempting to demonstrate the Smotherses' influence on the next generation, he (rather obsequiously) overpraises Ken Burns and quotes Bill Maher's accurate memory of the song "Mediocre Fred"...without noting that that song was written by Pat Paulsen, a fact which would strengthen Bianculli's point in the passage in question. But DB clearly loves the SmoBros' work, and got some good interview material from them, their sister, and many of the others around them, and I'm not sure he overstates the importance of the Comedy Hour and its spinoffs and the fights with CBS they had. By no means a perfect book, but interesting both for the light it sheds on their early career, and their careers since the firing (and replacement by that other comedy and music series, only in this case much worse comedy and sometimes rather similar music, Hee-Haw...which CBS would high-handedly cancel in turn in its purge of "rural", older-skewing series in favor of the post-All in the Family wave of more "urban/suburban," "hipper" shows...the kind of thing the Smothers were providing when they were fired).

from WorldCat:

The American folk scene : dimensions of the folksong revival

Author: David A De Turk; A Poulin
Publisher: New York : Dell Pub. Co., 1967.
334 p. ; 18 cm.

Contents:
Pt. 1: Folk and the folk arrival. Folk and the folk arrival / Sandy Paton ; Why folk music? / Pete Seeger ; Who invented the folk? / Stan Steiner ; Why I Detest Folk Music / Robert Reisner ; The folk music interchange: negro and white, / John Cohen ; The singer of folksongs and his conscience / Sam Hinton ; The performance of folksongs on recordings / Robert S. Whitman and Sheldon S. Kagan ; "Hootenanny": the word, its content and continuum / Peter Tamony ; Folk music in the schools of a highly industrialized society / Charles Seeger ; The folksong revival: cult or culture? / B. A. Botkin --

pt. 2: Mine enemy, the folksinger (topical-protest songs). "Mine enemy, the folksinger" / Kenneth Keating ; The position of songs of protest in folk literature / John Greenway ; Songs of our time from the pages of broadside magazine / Gordon Friesen ; P-for-protest / Jon Pankake and Paul Nelson ; Topical songs and folksinging, 1965, A Symposium / Don West, Phil Ochs, Ewan MacColl, Chad Mitchell, John Cohen, Moses Asch, Josh Dunson ; The topical song revolution at midpoint / Irwin Silber ; Sing a song of freedom / Robert Sherman --

pt. 3: Woody and his children: four for our time. Woody Guthrie: the man, the land, the understanding / John Greenway ; The ballad of Pete Seeger / Peter Lyon ; Sibyl with guitar ('Time' magazine) ; Joan Baez, an interview ; Baez and Dylan: a generation singing out / Richard Farina ; Bob Dylan / John Pankake and Paul Nelson ; "Highway 61 revisited" / Irwin Silber and Paul Nelson ; I will show you fear in a handful of songs / David A. De Turk and A. Poulin, Jr. ; Pete's children: the American folksong revival, pro and con / Jon Pankake --

pt. 4: Folk, rock, cash, and the future. Folk rock: thunder without rain / Josh Dunson ; Folk music and the success syndrome / Irwin Silber ; Commercialism and the folksong revival / Ron Radosh ; Is cash killing folk music? / Josh Dunson and Moses Asch ; Folksongs, fakelore, and cash / G. Legman ; The future of the folk renascence / Nat Hentof]f].

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Hannes Bok cover art

Apologies to IE users on this huge gap, but Mozilla Firefox doesn't always work or play well with imagery in Blogger.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films And/Or Other A/V: a few more links

With probably a few more stragglers to come, here's this week's collection of links to reviews and citations to (mostly) overlooked audio/visual experiences, or at least items overlooked by the writers up till now...thanks, as always, to all the contributors and to all you who read (and comment if you like) these...and please let me know in comments here if I've overlooked your or someone else's review.

Bill Crider: Morgan the Pirate (trailer)

Brent McKee: The Life of Riley (1949 television series)

Brian Arnold: Mumford; Adventure Time

Cullen Gallagher: NoirCon 2012

Dan Stumpf: The Bat Whispers

Ed Gorman: James Wolcott on Lee Marvin; My Favorite Films (after Max Allan Collins)

Evan Lewis: Westworld

George Kelley: The Adventures of Tintin; Match Point

Iba Dawson: Street Scene

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Flame in the Streets

James Reasoner: Jungle Jim; Hawai'i Calls (television version) featuring Martin Denny

Jeff Swindoll: The Dead (2010)

Jerry House: Beulah

John Charles: Killing Machine (aka Shorinji Kenpo)

Kate Laity: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore; An Appointment with the Wicker Man

Michael Shonk: Awake (2012)

Mildred Perkins: The Dead (2010)

Patti Abbott: Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Randy Johnson: In Old Arizona

Rod Lott: Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs

Ron Scheer: The Man from Colorado

Scott Cupp: The Animation of Tex Avery

Sergio Angelini: Twilight (1998)

Stephen Gallagher: The Reprisalizer and "A Gun For George"

Steve Lewis: There Ain't No Justice

Todd Mason: Ten Teen-Focused Horror and Suspense Films That Are Better Than We Have Any Reason to Expect; Girl K(iller) (aka Killer Girl K); "They're Made Out of Meat" (2006); Sound Opinions

Girl K{iller) (as the onscreen-title has it) or Killer Girl K (as Hulu and cable channel MNet have it), and there are more title variations for this Korean miniseries, is yet another child of The Professional and to a lesser extent Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with a remarkably adept adolescent assassin manipulated by a corporate private security/assassination force. The choreography of the fights is deft, the Korean soap-style approach to the young Cha Yeon Jin (Han Groo)'s existential crisis isn't too obtrusive and only slightly sticky, and her quest to avenge the murder of her mother makes for kinetic if not terribly groundbreaking viewing...but it's fascinating, to at least some extent, to see how these materials are handled in this context, particularly with such typically Korean elements as the most conventionally beautiful woman in the cast being perhaps the most ruthless single character (not unknown elsewhere, to be sure, but particularly common in the Korean materials I've seen). And it does move, and only has five episodes in the current series...with MNet cablecasting them a week or two ahead of clearance on Hulu.

"They're Made Out of Meat": Terry Bisson's very short story has been adapted by a number of folks, I see...perhaps as Stephen King (iirc--or was that Joe Lansdale?) does with some of his short stories, Bisson has been renting his story to any earnest filmmakers for a dollar; before seeing this version on an apparently fading On-Demand service called Illusion, the only a/v version I'd encountered was the Seeing Ear Theater audio version (which was over-frantic as this version is laid-back). Sadly, the online postings of this short film seem to varying degrees to be slightly out of focus, but this posting the least distractingly so of those I've checked; this film is worth seeing, even with that flaw (if you don't have access to what's left of Illusion)...


Sound Opinions fatuously misidentifies itself as "the world's only rock and roll talk show," and that's not where the fatuity ends...I haven't forgiven the hosts, Chicago-based rock reviewers, for not bothering to learn how to pronounce Miriam Makeba's name nor the title of her biggest US hit ("Pata Pata") in their otherwise also clumsy attempt to eulogize her at the time of her death. But in the episode which played locally Monday night, their guest Dessa made an excellent showing for herself, and didn't allow the hosts to go into their usual dim verbal noodling (they often come across as the kind of people who want you know, hey, get this...man, Grass is green!), or at least over came that hurdle. Deborah Harry was able to do likewise, to some extent, a few weeks earlier. So, these guys can be ameliorated by their guests. Seems a very weak recommendation, and it is, but I hadn't heard Dessa's work before, and I'll give them that.

Walter Albert: The Actress

Yvette Banek: Angels and Insects

1968: Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm put together an ad against the Vietnam War...

...and it appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in Galaxy, Worlds of If and International Science Fiction magazines (the latter three of which are published by the same publisher, Robert Guinn of the Galaxy Publishing Co., and edited by Frederik Pohl, the first edited by Edward Ferman and published by his father Joseph Ferman), along with a corresponding ad from "hawks" who are moved by Wilhelm and Merril's canvassing.

Frank Hollander was kind enough to transcribe the lists from the ads for the FictionMags list:


We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to
fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country.

Karen K. Anderson
Poul Anderson
Harry Bates
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
J. F. Bone
Leigh Brackett
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Mario Brand
R. Bretnor
Fredric Brown
Doris Pitkin Buck
William R. Burkett, Jr.
Elinor Busby
F. M. Busby
John W. Campbell
Louis Charbonneau
Hal Clement
Compton Crook
Hank Davis
L. Sprague de Camp
Charles V. de Vet
William B. Ellern
Richard H. Eney
T. R. Fehrenbach
R. C. FitzPatrick
Daniel F. Galouye
Raymond Z. Gallun
Robert M. Green, Jr.
Frances T. Hall
Edmond Hamilton
Robert A. Heinlein
Joe L. Hensley
Paul G. Herkart
Dean C. Ing
Jay Kay Klein
David A. Kyle
R. A. Lafferty
Robert J. Leman
C. C. MacApp
Robert Mason [not my father, but the Vietnam vet who would eventually write the novels Weapon and Solo, and the memoir Chickenhawk]
D. M. Melton
Norman Metcalf
P. Schuyler Miller
Sam Moskowitz
John Myers Myers
Larry Niven
Alan Nourse
Stuart Palmer
Gerald W. Page
Rachel Cosgrove Payes
Lawrence A. Perkins
Jerry E. Pournelle
Joe Poyer
E Hoffmann Price
George W. Price
Alva Rogers
Fred Saberhagen
George O. Smith
W. E. Sprague
G. Harry Stine (Lee Correy)
Dwight V. Swain
Thomas Burnett Swann
Albert Teichner
Theodore L. Thomas
Rena M. Vale
Jack Vance
Harl Vincent
Don Walsh, Jr.
Robert Moore Williams
Jack Williamson
Rosco E. Wright
Karf Würf

We oppose the participation of the United States in the war in Vietnam.

Forrest J Ackerman
Isaac Asimov
Peter S. Beagle
Jerome Bixby
James Blish
Anthony Boucher
Lyle G. Boyd
Ray Bradbury
Jonathan Brand
Stuart J. Byrne
Terry Carr
Carroll J. Clem
Ed M. Clinton
Theodore R. Cogswell
Arthur Jean Cox
Allan Danzig
Jon DeCles
Miriam Allen deFord
Samuel R. Delany
Lester del Rey
Philip K. Dick
Thomas M. Disch
Sonya Dorman
Larry Eisenberg
Harlan Ellison
Carol Emshwiller
Philip José Farmer
David E. Fisher
Ron Goulart
Joseph Green
Jim Harmon
Harry Harrison
H. H. Hollis
J[oan]. Hunter Holly
James D. Houston
Edward Jesby
Leo P. Kelley
Daniel Keyes
Virginia Kidd
Damon Knight
Allen Lang
March Laumer [Keith Laumer was still in active service, I believe, and probably constrained from adding a signature to either]
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fritz Leiber
Irwin Lewis
A. M. Lightner
Robert A. W. Lowndes
Katherine MacLean
Barry Malzberg
Robert E. Margroff
Anne Marple
Ardrey Marshall
Bruce McAllister
Judith Merril
Robert P. Mills
Howard L. Morris
Kris Neville
Alexei Panshin
Emil Petaja
J. R. Pierce
Arthur Porges
Mack Reynolds
Gene Roddenberry
Joanna Russ
James Sallis
William Sambrot
Hans Stefan Santesson
J. W. Schutz
Robin Scott
Larry T. Shaw
John Shepley
T. L Sherred
Robert Silverberg
Henry Slesar
Jerry Sohl
Norman Spinrad
Margaret St. Clair
Jacob Transue
Thurlow Weed
Kate Wilhelm
Richard Wilson
Donald A. Wollheim

Contributions to help meet the expense of future ads are welcomed, and
should be sent to:

Judith Merril or Kate Wilhelm Knight
P. O. Box 79
Milford, Pennsylvania 18337

Ten Teen-Focused Suspense and Horror Films Which Are Better Than We Have Any Reason to Expect

Having just seen again, after a decade or so, Night of the Comet, it strikes me as clever and well-worked-out for the most part, and while usually given the credit it deserves by most reviewers, it's an easy film to underestimate, in its utter lack of pretense. And while there are acknowledged classics involving such matters as teens and near-teens dealing with very grave peril indeed (such as, obviously, Lord of the Flies, or, with lesser crime involved, The 400 Blows), Night of the Comet is one of a number that might be slighted in one's memory, particularly if one didn't catch them when maximally willing to give them their best shot, i.e. when a teen one's self.



And it reminds me of others nearly drowned in the sea of slashers and similar drek (such as the "torture porn" children of the slashers), such as The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane, featuring the adolescent Jodie Foster as a prodigy who is doing quite well living a fairly isolated life with her father, whom no one ever seems to see. Sentiment akin to nostalgia will probably always allow me to forgive the rougher edges of this film, also clever and well-cast, with Martin Sheen as relentlessly creepish as he was in Badlands (a film which almost makes the cut for this list).



The opposite of prodigies populate the much later River's Edge, loosely based on the actual experiences of some small-town teens who covered for the murder of one of their friends by another. Perhaps the best single example to offer to those who enjoy insisting Keanu Reeves can't act, and the rest of the cast is impressive.



Meanwhile, even more blatantly satirical, a touchstone for many fans from its debut in the 1980s, is Heathers, which takes a few easy choices but also mocks the John Hughes sort of teen-stroking flick among many other targets.



Another mockery of most of the other most popular teen films of the previous decade is Not Another Teen Movie, which is apparently not currently being pirated on the web-clip services (this post being an exercise in part in demonstrating how many are), due to Universal keeping a close eye on this film, which was originally released by Columbia. This could be the choice among these ten that would generate the most disapproval, anyway, particularly from those folks who would insist this film is crude hack while describing the inane Scream films as deft.



Meanwhile, April Fool's Day (1986) is one of several films starring Deborah Foreman, best remembered for Valley Girl, which fall solidly into the Better Than You'd Expect Category. A witty reworking of the And Then There Were None... formula, and marketed incorrectly as a slasher, this still suggests more of a kinship with RKO/Lewton Unit The Seventh Victim than probably should be.













The Chocolate War was a credible adaptation of Robert Cormier's YA novel about the rise of fascism in the microcosm of a private school, but while the novel remains one of the more popular in its class, the film seems to have been ostracized. (It probably doesn't help that, as with many of the other films cited above, its releasing studio is long dead.)






Massacre at Central High is a low-budget 1970s film with some remarkably inappropriate music, and it's been decades since I've seen it (cut for television), but I remember it as an eventually persuasive study of young psychosis (played by actors rather too blatantly superannuated, as too often the case). A legitimate YT posting, apparently, perhaps as it's in the public domain.


And two films of fairly recent release to round out the selections here, both more the focus of somewhat scandalized chatter rather than much close analysis, but both devoted to observations about sexual politics, exploitation, and no little challenging the blithe attempts of too many teen oriented films to highlight women, very much including young women, as still the Other...Deadgirl and Teeth. Neither a perfect film by any means, but both unafraid of controversy and more complex than they were often given credit for on first release...

Satuday Music Club: Sweet Baby Jesus (aka Sweet Baby when signed to WB) and Smart Went Crazy (Dischord)

West Coast and East Coast. Or, really, Berkeley and DC.

FFB: Wilma Shore: WOMEN SHOULD BE ALLOWED: A Verbatim Report on the Imbroglio Between the Sexes (short stories) Dutton 1965

There are no images online (that I've found) for the cover of Women Should Be Allowed, the only collection of Wilma Shore's short fiction to be published during her life (or, ever). My own second- (or third-)hand copy is missing its dust jacket, and there was no paperback edition, as far as I can tell. As the biography at the Jewish Women's Archive notes, she in 1929 as a 16yo left the US (having been born in NYC and spent high school years in California) and went to Paris to study painting, and "Leo Stein, Gertrude Stein’s brother, declared her a leading talent of her generation." However, as noted there, what she became, as a professional artist, was a writer.

She had made an apparently bad marriage to an actor in 1932, had her first daughter, and by 1935 was married to writer and producer Lou Solomon, with whom she would have another daughter and with whom she wrote at least one radio script for The Orson Welles Almanac, "Something's Going to Happen to Henry" (12/1/41, as Welles's archivists date it). Meanwhile, 'Shore’s second story "The Butcher" was included in The Best Short Stories of 1941, and she continued to receive their honor call mention in subsequent years. Shore published widely in magazines, including The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, Story Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, The Writer, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Antioch Review, McCall's and The Nation. In 1950, her story “The Cow on the Roof” was included in the O. Henry Awards Prize Stories.' She and Solomon continued to write for electronic media, and he became a producer...in fact, "Shore also wrote for television, was commissioned to write a song for Carol Channing, and had stories included in the anthology series The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1965 and 1973. She also published autobiographical pieces in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and the Women’s Studies Quarterly.

"A dedicated teacher, Shore taught at the League of American Writers' School from 1942 to 1944 and at the People’s Education Center until its dissolution. She then taught from her home.

"Shore’s involvement with these schools, her work on the editorial board of the California Quarterly, a politically progressive publication, and other left-wing political activity caused her and her husband to be blacklisted during the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings." Like most of the blacklisted, Shore and Solomon turned to other work and simply continued to work under other names in the blacklist-sensitive industries...Solomon was eventually a producer on The Great American Dream Machine for PBS.

Skip ahead: a paid note in the New York Times, published: May 12, 2006:

SOLOMON--Wilma Shore, 92. Writer, painter, wit and friend; wife of the late Lou Solomon; mother of Hilary Bendich, Berkeley, CA. and Dinah Stevenson, Hoboken, N.J; grandmother of Nora, Jonathan and Bridget; great grandmother of five; great great-grandmother of one. We welcome donations in her name to feminist, humane, or environmental organizations or those actively opposed to the Bush administration. A Memorial Gathering will be planned.

And, dated with the month of my birth, that first contribution to F&SF, the brilliant and gently caustic, if such a thing is possible, "Bulletin from the Trustees...", a story I first read ca. 1972 in my father's battered copy of Robert Silverberg's anthology Voyagers in Time. Meanwhile, note below the contents of that issue of F&SF, which include Shore's story as the lead, Fritz Leiber's important "When the Change Winds Blow" as the cover story, and early stories by Joanna Russ (her own gently caustic parody of Lovecraft) and Dennis Etchison (just after the start of his brilliant career) and Thomas Disch (likewise). Avram Davidson, noting the passing of artist and writer Hannes Bok, and otherwise brilliantly curating the magazine.


The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1964:
4 • Editorial (F&SF, August 1964) • [Editorial (F&SF)] • essay by Avram Davidson
5 • A Bulletin from the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Research at Marmouth, Mass. • short story by Wilma Shore
12 • "I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket . . . But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!" • [Cthulhu Mythos] • short story by Joanna Russ
22 • Books (F&SF, August 1964) • [Books (F&SF)] • essay by Avram Davidson
27 • Poor Planet • novelette by J. T. McIntosh
54 • Nada • short story by Thomas M. Disch
71 • Hannes Bok (Obit) • essay by Avram Davidson
72 • The Red Cells • [The Science Springboard] • essay by Theodore L. Thomas
73 • Epitaph for the Future • poem by Ethan Ayer
74 • A Nice, Shady Place • (1963) • short story by Dennis Etchison (Originally published in Associated Students, L.A. State College)
87 • Redman • short story by Robert Lipsyte and Thomas Rogers [as by Robert M. Lipsyte and Thomas Rogers ]
95 • The Days of Our Years • [Asimov's Essays: F&SF] • essay by Isaac Asimov
105 • When the Change-Winds Blow • short story by Fritz Leiber
113 • In the Calendar of Saints • short story by Leonard Tushnet

The next year, E. P. Dutton publishes Women Should Be Allowed, which includes the following stories, each with a long introduction in which Shore archly, wittily highlights a point or three the following story might highlight, mostly feminist points in those months after The Female Mystique and the Civil Rights Act and the ferment around the liberation movements of the previous decade-plus had no doubt given Shore at least some new hope, thus:

"A Mammal in a Black Crepe Dress" (published as "The Point of No Return of Gloria MacAdoo" in Good Housekeeping in 1957)
"All Sales Final" (as "The Dress from Bergdorf’s" (ss) Cosmopolitan Jun 1959)
"By the Still Waters of Ethel Wilkie" (as "Do You Take This Man?" GH 1955)
"Go and Catch a Falling Star" (Good Housekeeping Aug 1949)
"The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" (apparently first published in this collection)
"Some Kind of Lousy Cinderella" (as "It Was Different with Cinderella" (ss) The Saturday Evening Post Aug 24 1963)
"Good-bye Charlie" (as "What's Happened to Charlie?" GH, 1957)
"Yours Very Truly, (Miss) Leona Freemantle" (Antioch Review, 1960)
"I Can Get Along Fine" (as "I Get Along Fine" GH 1946)
"A Reasonable Facsimile" (as "Marry Me a Million" (ss) Cosmopolitan Feb 1949)
"May Your Days Be Merry and Bright" (The Saturday Evening Post Dec 21 1963)
"The Whole World Takes Off Its Hat to Sheree Wallach" (Ladies Home Journal May 1961)

--as the subtitle following the book's title might suggest, this book stands in at least partial refutation of the likes of James Thurber, and these stories, with their feminist messages unblunted by their titles being fiddled with by the women's magazines (when not the Saturday Evening Post or a little magazine) they were published in, often cheek by jowl with their era's equivalents of today's "service" articles "How to Suppress Everything About Yourself to Snare That Man!" and "Why You Should Give In, For the Sake of the Marriage" and "How to Subvert the Lout without Him Catching On...", feature in most cases not so very enlightened young women learning better...about their current conditions, about the loutish swains they have been putting up with (and the often just as loutish if more polished men they aspire to) and their own often corrosively unsupportive families, about what really matters as opposed to Why It's Important to Be Married by 25 (though her characters almost to a woman do bristle, however subconsciously in some cases, at the notion that they need to be Safely Ensconced in marriage before they have had much chance to figure out what they need for themselves, while their potential mates have at least a decade or so more to help come to some similar conclusions). A few stories deviate from this pattern, such as "May Your Days Be Merry and Bright," from the perspective of an empathetic woman in a retirement hotel, comparable to the upscale condo communities of today, watching the interactions of her colleagues and their families, the little power plays and jostling for prestige, or the most savagely critical piece here of its female protagonist, "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," about a boundary-free monster of ego and how she blithely "improves" the lives of her husband, son, and everyone else around her. Even the canniest of young women protagonists here, that of "A Reasonable Facsimile," finds her utter pragmatism in the face of Women's Estate in midcentury NYC shaken, probably if unsettlingly for the better, by the end of her story.

Wilma Shore was a hell of a writer, and her work richly rewards your attention. I probably should add to this critique, but I've my own pragmatic quotidian matters to attend to...though another, comparable writer I've not written well or enough about previously, Carol Emshwiller, is treated a bit more elegantly by James Sallis here.

Meanwhile, going to the FM Index at the link below and clicking through to the magazine issue contents, often seeing the context in which these satiric feminist stories were published (and often how much other fiction was published, even rather recently but not recently enough, by the women's magazines particularly, with Shore sharing space thus with John D. MacDonald and Daphne Du Maurier and A. A. Milne and Hughes Rudd and Hugh B. Cave, is another reminder of Times Changing).

from the FictionMags Index
SHORE, WILMA (1913- ) (chron.)

* The Butcher, (ss) Story Nov/Dec 1940
* Dress from Bergdorf’s, (ss) Cosmopolitan Jun 1959
* Go and Catch a Falling Star, (ss) Good Housekeeping Aug 1949
* It Was Different with Cinderella, (ss) The Saturday Evening Post Aug 24 1963
* Lock Stock and Barrel, (ss) Short Story Magazine #78 1951
* Marry Me a Million, (ss) Cosmopolitan Feb 1949
* May Your Days Be Merry and Bright, (ss) The Saturday Evening Post Dec 21 1963
* The Moon Belongs to Everyone, (ss) Short Story Magazine #70 1950
* The Ostrich Farm, (ss) Short Story Magazine #71 1950
* Someday I Have to Buy a Hat, (ss) Good Housekeeping Nov 1942
* Something of Her Own, (ss) McCall’s Mar 1944
* The Whole World Takes Off Its Hat to Sheree Wallach, (ss) Ladies Home Journal May 1961

From ISFDb:
Legal Name: Solomon, Wilma Shore
Birthplace: New York City, New York, USA
Birthdate: 12 October 1913
Deathdate: May 2006
Webpage: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/shore-wilma

Short fiction (in sf/fantasy magazines):
A Bulletin from the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Research at Marmouth, Mass. (1964) (F&SF, 8/64)
Goodbye Amanda Jean (1970) (Galaxy, 7/70)
Is It the End of the World? (1972) (F&SF, 3/72)
The Podiatrist's Tale (1977) (F&SF, 4/77)

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.