Sweet Freedom

Saturday Music Club: FLiP: "Night of the Revolution," "Kagome Kagome" and "Kaa to Nyaa go"

2012-01-28T12:58:00.002-05:00

from Dear Girls, their debut ep:

FFB: Bob Shaw: MESSAGES FOUND IN AN OXYGEN BOTTLE and Terry Carr: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (NESFA Press 1986)

2012-01-27T12:59:00.005-05:00

OK, this almost feels like a bit of a cheat...another fannish collection, or in this case two collections, and the double-volume, like PITFCS, is still in print (and is sold by the same folks, the New England SF Association, who handle sales for Advent: Publishers). But Terry Carr and Bob Shaw, whose professional careers were both really sparked by the Ace Science Fiction Specials series that Carr edited and which published several of Shaw's first novels, were frequently brilliant writers who made a mark but died too young (not as kids, but too young), and this volume, a souvenir item for a convention at which the two men were guests of honor, collects a nice sampling mostly of their fannish essays and fiction, though also including Carr's gem of a fantasy "Virra" (from The Magazine of Fantasy & SF in 1978), published shortly after the one collection of his short fiction, The Light at the End of the Universe (1976) and thus left out of that only other volume of Carr's shorter work not devoted exclusively to his fannish writing. Both men were legendary contributors to fannish literature, and mainstays of fandom even after becoming fully professional writers and, in Carr's case, even more visibly an editor; certainly Shaw was one of the leading lights of Irish fandom, and Carr one of half-dozen or so most revered among contributors and publishers of fannish writing in the subculture. These selection were chosen for their excellence and their accessibility...not too much (if a little) Utterly Insider fannish reference (though, for example, it will help if you remember the claptrap Erich Van Daniken made a fortune promoting in the latter '60s and early '70s in enjoying "The Bermondsey Triangle Mystery," the transcript of a parodic convention speech Shaw offers as his first entry). The tenor of much of the lighthearted work from both men falls somewhere between James Thurber and Dave Barry, with the particular worldview of the more acute sort of fannish mindset applied, as Shaw is quick to note in his introduction. We still have some comparable folks, such as David Langford, still with us, but Carr and Shaw probably had more to give, and certainly deserved the opportunity to do so. But go look for justice in the universe.

For more largely unjustly neglected books and such, please see Patti Abbott's blog (and spare a good thought for her).

January's Underappreciated Music: the links and RIP: Joe Morello and Paul Motian

2012-01-26T13:29:00.005-05:00

Patti Abbott: Kalena Kai

Bill Crider: The Sons of the Pioneers; Don Gibson

Jerry House: Bessie Smith

Randy Johnson: Jake Holmes, exploited by the Yardbirds (and that minor successor project of Jones and Page)

George Kelley: Some Girls (remastered) by The Rolling Stones

Charlie Ricci: The Turtles

In 2011, we lost two of the great jazz drummers of the post-bop era...major contributors to third stream and other adventurous music of the era: Joe Morello and Paul Motian. Two New England guys, of Southern European extraction at a time when that wasn't always comfortable in America (Morello Italian-American, Motian Armenian-American), about the same age (Motian a few years younger), and both began as string-instrumentalists: Motian was a guitarist, Morello a wunderkind violinist. Instead, they moved over to being among the most impressive and influential of drummers, usually but not exclusively as jazz players, and both thoroughly engaged in musical education (Morello particularly formally, as the creator of texts and a/v materials and as an instructor, Motian often in taking in younger players in his bands). With the loss of Max Roach and Elvin Jones and Art Blakey and Connie Kay and Kenny Clarke and a slew of others over the previous decade or so (of that generation, perhaps the only prominent survivor is Chico Hamilton, but I'm probably being criminally forgetful), it's a Change of the Guard, and not necessarily a welcome one.

I met Morello once, and he suggested that this was among his own favorite performances:

Some further examples:

Of course, Morello wasn't a part of the "original" Dave Brubeck quartet; just the best one.

Paul Motian (has there ever been a better surname for a drummer?), with his first great band:
(the loud hiss is kicked down with the beginning of the music)

With Paul Bley and Gary Peacock:

with the Charles Lloyd Quartet:

Rest in glory.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

2012-01-24T15:00:00.000-05:00

Thanks to all contributors here, and to you readers (particularly those of you fighting your way out from under the weather, as I am this morning). If I've missed any links/overlooked any of the overlooked, please let me know in comments...thanks again!

Bill Crider: Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (trailer)

Brian Arnold: Memoirs of an Invisible Man

Dan Stumpf: Manpower

David Schmidt: The Whisperer in Darkness

Ed Gorman: Man with a Camera

Evan Lewis: The Oklahoma Kid (1939)

George Kelley: Kiss Me Deadly (1955; Criterion Blu-Ray package)

Iba Dawson: The Star (1952)

Ivan G. Shreve: Radio comedy/variety of the 1940s/50s

James Reasoner: Coronet Blue

Jeff Segal: The World Beyond (aka The Mud Monster); Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (aka Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue among other titles)

Jerry House: "Young Couples Only" (based on "Shipshape Home" by Richard Matheson) (Studio 57)

John Charles: Dog Eat Dog (aka When Strangers Meet)(1964)

Juri Nummelin: Himmelskibet

Kate Laity: Elgar; Melancholia

Mildred Perkins: I Saw the Devil

Patti Abbott: Will Penny

Prashant Trikannad: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin; Return to the 36th Chamber; The Jaipur Literary Festival

Randy Johnson: Grand Central Murder

Rod Lott: The Flesh Eaters (1964)

Ron Scheer: The Iron Horse (1924)

Scott Parker: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, as read by Carolyn McCormick (audiobook)

Sergio Angelini: The Dark Mirror (1946)

Stacia Jones: Neil Diamond in Retrospect (in several media)

Steve Lewis: Pleins Feux sur L'Assassin (aka Spotlight on a Murderer)

Todd Mason: Coffee House Rendezvous; Kongo (please see below)

Walter Albert: Sally, Irene and Mary (1925)

Yvette Banek: I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Coffee House Rendezvous is, by me, a charmingly goofy attempt by some organized body within the coffee industry to drum up a little business among teens, rather late in the 1960s (apparently 1969) by the time they got the film assembled (and added that remarkably dire recurring opening theme), who were encouraged to open not childish lemonade stands but household coffee bars for the delectation of their peers. Well, it keeps them out of the arcades and the supermarket parking lots, no? And gets them to swill some delicious 8 O'Clock or perhaps some Sanka in those late nights (Postum's for squares!). Somewhat larger outfits were also surveyed. The post-MST3K Riff Trax crowd did their take on this film, almost inevitably (I have yet to hear this, having just come across the parody track), but it stands by itself in its utter awkward opportunism and gawky attempt to exploit the Zeitgeist to hawk some beans.

Kongo, the sound-era, pre-Code remake of West of Zanzibar (and like the silent based on the stage play of the latter title), isn't quite as powerful as I remembered from seeing it about forty years ago, when very young, but it's still a pretty fascinating slice through some desperate behavior from characters who are beyond merely shady (these are the folks one would've hoped the default racism and other sorts of chauvinism of the time might've been restricted to, but we were never that lucky); Walter Huston is almost as is impressive as Lon Chaney, Sr., in the silent film, and Huston has to treat with the dialog...as often with films of this vintage, among any other sins in retrospect, things seem a bit rushed. But this film, which seems never to have been cleared for legitimate home video release, is at very least an interesting curio.

FFB: Robert Bloch: DR. HOLMES' MURDER CASTLE (1983)

2012-01-20T14:02:00.009-05:00

Robert Bloch's career after 1960 was haunted by the dual shades of the real serial killer Ed Gein and the fictional one he created, Norman Bates (and Bates's two faces, the one resembling Calvin Thomas Beck whom Bloch wrote about, and Tony Perkins's in the film role), that little cluster joining an immortal Jack the Ripper in Bloch-career-haunting (since shortly after he published the ridiculously frequently plagiarized "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" in Weird Tales in 1943). But in what he wrote about, there are at least as many words expended on H. H. Holmes (aka Herman W. Mudgett...perhaps not coincidentally two of the names "Anthony Boucher" used along with Boucher as pseudonyms, as Bloch and William "Boucher" White were long-term colleagues and probably friends). American Gothic was for years probably Bloch's second-best-known novel, and I wondered how much the title American Psycho was an attempt by the best-selling pisher to pay a sort of tribute to Bloch; certainly Erik Larson's Holmes/Mudgett history, The Devil in the White City, has since become more popular than Bloch's two notable long works about the Chicago-based murderer...the other being the long essay "Dr. Holmes' Murder Castle", among the most obscurely-published of Bloch's works; it has appeared only twice, originally in a book from Reader's Digest's "condensed books" division that is not a "condensed" book, but an original anthology of true-crime and supposedly-true paranormal accounts, all written by writers better-known for fiction (with the arguably weak exception of Colin Wilson, who loved to muck around in these fields of mostly-nonfiction). It was later collected in the third volume of The Lost Bloch, an impressive collection also including Bloch's wife (then widow), "Elly" Bloch, and Gahan Wilson's reminiscences of the man, and an unedited form of the interview Douglas Winter conducted with Bloch for the interview collection Faces of Fear; this volume only saw 776 copies produced, apparently (and most of the copies for sale I see are de-accessioned library copies of the pricy less-limited edition of 750).

It's a fine, novella-length account, and while I like American Gothic better (and Devil in the White City has more room for more evidence and detail, including that dug up since Bloch wrote this, presumably at the turn of the 1980s though perhaps earlier), I'm glad to have "Murder Castle" at hand, and it's an ornament to both books it appears in.

from ISFDb:

Title: The Lost Bloch, Volume Three: Crimes and Punishments edited by David J. Schow (Subterranean Press, 2002)

7 • The Head on the Bloch • (2002) • essay by David J. Schow
17 • Weird Adventures of the Odd Little Band • (2002) • essay by Gahan Wilson
23 • The Shambles of Ed Gein • (1962) • essay by Robert Bloch
31 • Hell's Angel • (1951) • novella by Robert Bloch
91 • The Finger Necklace • (1945) • short story by Robert Bloch
115 • The Noose Hangs High • (1946) • short story by Robert Bloch
139 • It's Your Own Funeral • (1943) • short story by Robert Bloch
165 • Dr. Holmes' Murder Castle • (1983) • essay by Robert Bloch (aka Dr. Holmes's Murder Castle)
239 • Three Whole Hours and Then Some with Robert Bloch • (2002) • essay by Douglas E. Winter
279 • My Husband, Robert Bloch • (2002) • essay by Eleanor Bloch

Title: Tales of the Uncanny editor uncredited (Reader's Digest Association, 1983)

Dr. Holmes's Murder Castle • essay by Robert Bloch
Curious Encounter • essay by John G. Fuller
The Possession of Sister Jeanne • essay by Norah Lofts
The Remarkable Daniel Dunglas Home • essay by Julian Symons
The Captain's Return • essay by David Beaty
Strange Affair at Stratford • essay by Barbara Michaels
A Novelization of Events in the Life and Death of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin • essay by Colin Wilson

For this week's other books, please see Patti Abbott's blog

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the newly augmented links

2012-01-17T23:30:00.006-05:00

Thanks as always to all contributors and to you readers...there are a few more citations to be added a little later this morning or early this afternoon, including those from Steve Lewis and the gang at Mystery*File, but the Very Slow Machine I'm working with has a tendency to get hung up on Yvette Banek's illustrations among other things...so I'll be switching to a somewhat less underpowered device for the later links and the M*Fers! Please let me know if I've missed yours in comments...
Bill Crider: The Iron Mistress (1952) (trailer)

Brian Arnold: Blacke's Magic

Chuck Esola: duBeat*e*o

Dan Stumpf: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; the Robin Hood legend

Eric Peterson: Rock Radio 103 WIQB

Evan Lewis: The Three Musketeers (1948)

Iba Dawson: Me and Orson Welles

Jackie Kashian: Mary Jo Pehl (Cinematic Titanic, MST3K); Andrew Kole, Provocateur

James Reasoner: Blue Light

Jerry House: The Black Cat (1934)

John Charles: Black Belt Jones; Hot Potato; Black Samson; Three the Hard Way

Juri Nummelin: The Collector

Kate Laity: The Devil and Miss Jones

Patti Abbott: Lord Love a Duck

Pearce Duncan, Jeff Segal, Jason Cavallaro, How Did This Get Made?: Drive Angry

Randy Johnson: Red Sun (1971)

Rod Lott: Nancy Drew, Reporter (1939)

Ron Scheer: Pale Rider

Scott Cupp: Ladyhawke

Sergio Angelini: Hysteria (1965)

Stephen Gallagher: Douglas Fairbanks and me

Todd Mason: National book-chat television. There's a dearth of it today, in the US, particularly now that Oprah Winfrey has closed down her self-celebratory "Oprah's Book Club" along with the rest of her weekdaily herself-fest, to retire to new levels of self-adoration on the second cable channel that was meant to be hers (as Oxygen was at its foundation, as well), OWN. The only remaining chat show host on the networks who makes a point of mentioning his reading habits is Craig Ferguson, of CBS's graveyard series, probably in part due to he himself being a novelist (how good or bad, dunno yet); Ferguson is a big fan of Lawrence Block, and has had him on the show several times.

But, at least on C-SPAN, there's no shortage of bookish events, with their Book TV weekends and various other author-readings, interview sessions and seminars. Of course, C-SPAN has chosen to make their website harder to use over the last several years (it was no picnic before), but, for example, the three-hour In Depth series can be accessed this way and thus, which latter is how I dug out Katha Pollitt's fine session from some years back. Such other C-SPAN series as After Words are also accessible at the site, even though C-SPAN will tend to go for "media-savv" and "colorful" figures, including the Ann Coulters and the Michael Moores, at least as often as someone more substantial. Noam Chomsky's been on...but not so very often...and C-SPAN is a bit smug about how they favor nonfiction books...until they land a fiction writer or poet who redounds to their sense of Tone.

And while C-SPAN generally does a good job (though the sound quality of some of their archived material leaves something to be desired), I had a very pleasant time today listening to (I suspect) a gray-market (at best) archive of the soundtrack of an episode of Lewis Lapham's PBS series from two decades back, Bookmark, the episode featuring Paul Fussell, having just published his book Wartime and discussing it with Studs Terkel and Lapham. Bookmark was perhaps my favorite chat show so far, of any kind, and it ran for a couple/three seasons on PBS around the turn of the '90s, and was as necessary a weekly catch as China Beach, a scrap moreso than Twin Peaks.

Walter Albert: They Dare Not Love

Yvette Banek: Without a Clue

Related matters:
Brent McKee: Rob

Ed Gorman/Lee Pfeiffer: The Bates Motel (revival)

Evan Lewis: Hopalong Cassidy posters

George Kelley: Barry Lyndon

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr: Sanford and Son

Jack Seabrook/Peter Enfantino: Batman in the '70s

Michael Shonk: The Firm and the Future of Television

Prashant Trikannad: Peter Benchley's Jaws and The Deep; General Electric comics

Todd Mason: tv notes; The Best Television Political-Drama Series...that I've seen...

The Best Political-Drama Television Series...that I've seen...

2012-01-17T23:29:00.012-05:00

The Good Wife
Well, this one is probably my default choice for the best serial drama on US television, and its clear-eyed accounts of the best, worst and middling impulses of politically ambitious folks, among its many other concerns, doesn't hurt a bit.

Borgen ***Do hit this link, and consider watching Borgen, which is repeating from episode 1 online and on the cable/satellite/KRCB (SF Bay Area, CA, broadcast) Link TV in the US... I've been pushing this one since catching the pilot a few months back, with its clever and well-worked-out and rarely melodramatic account of the changed lives of its cast of characters when the leader of the small Radical Party (in the series redubbed the Moderate Party so as to step on no toes legally) becomes the new Prime Minister of Denmark, its first female PM and one who is trying to cope with coalition maintenance, home life as a wife, and mother of two, and with her closest associates facing their own repercussions in the new reality. We in the US got to see this Next Project from the originators of The Killing before even the Brits did, and there's a second season due soon. "Borgen" is apparently Danish for "castle," the nickname for their Parliament building.

Yes Minister & Yes Prime Minister

The first great UK sitcom, and its sequel series, about governance, that I had the privilege to catch.

Absolute Power

The second, albeit with focus more on the spinners.

The Thick of It

The third, bringing it all back home, and spinning off a feature film, In the Loop.

The Wire

While all the seasons of this attempt to sum life in Baltimore at least touched on governance, one season took state politics as its focus...and it didn't hurt that that was one of the most sharply-written seasons.

Tanner '88

Funny, insightful, and with a much-later sequel series of its own. Probably set the tone for at least some of the later British as well as US productions.

The Prisoner

McGoohan and company's surreal and frequently deft critique of modern society, going a bit further than even Danger Man/Secret Agent had previously, did not spare either the ruling classes (of all stripes) nor the ease with which democratic efforts can be flummoxed and subverted.

The Gordimer Stories

A selection of eight short films, including an interview with Nadine Gordimer herself, which was shown on at least some PBS stations as a series, all the drama set in South Africa in depths of apartheid and the small and large tragedies those laws force upon the characters, and the attempts to subvert and overcome the noxious racist regime.

Parks and Recreation

A clever, intentionally goofy series, which nonetheless does manage to capture (in caricature) the range of governmental bureaucracy at least at the local levels in the US, from the almost insanely dedicated to the utter clockwatchers, the cranks who managed to land in a position and somehow keep it and the crusaders who know just what will save their villages even if...

honorable mentions:
Lou Grant
The Agency
Da Vinci City Hall
The Politician's Wife

All solid. If I'd seen more of the latter two, I'd perhaps move them into the first category...The Agency was CBS's one-season CIA drama, vastly better than its contemporaries 24 and Alias...but, then, Once A Thief the series, in syndication for its brief run in the US at that time, was better than they were, too, by being simply pleasant.

"the opposition" (not so great, in fact scoundrels, though often dearly loved by others):
The West Wing
--cute wish-fulfillment fantasy for centrist Democrats. Aaron Sorkin can write, but in the excellent Sports Night and the pleasant-enough Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip he was writing about life in television, which he actually knew something about.
Commander-in-Chief
--Rod Lurie, whom I knew in high school, loves to pick rather melodramatic subjects for his scripts, and load them with ringing speeches for his characters to deliver, thus making them catnip for the inner ham looking for gravitas. Sadly, Lurie almost never can make any of that sound like actual conversation nor come up with a believable character...firing Lurie off the series, as ABC did, and replacing him with Steven Bochco, who has his own tic-laden stylization, didn't help much. Geena Davis had fun with it.
Spin City and Benson and Murphy Brown
--Just shallow sitcoms, where it was assumed that making a topical reference or getting a cameo from someone actually working in politics or news reporting was the soul of wit. Actually, Benson didn't even try that hard. Pity...nearly everyone involved with these did better work elsewhere.

FFB: PITFCS: The Proceedings of the Institute for 21st Century Studies, Theodore R. Cogswell, ed. (Advent: Publishers 1992)

2012-01-13T09:51:00.009-05:00

PITFCS was a fanzine of sorts, that was a aimed mostly at professionals in sf and fantasy writing...in those heady times of the turn of the 1960s, some contributor/recipients preferred to vocalize the abbreviation as "pit-fix" and others, more jauntily, as "pit-fux"...the informal magazine was originally issued as Digit, but quickly took on the more importunate title, and became one of the focal points for discussion among professional and semi-professional writers and a few of their interested friends, at about the same time that Earl Kemp, one of the mainsprings of Advent: Publishers, was putting together another fanzine, Safari, and its special issue, Who Killed SF?...about the commercial and apparently spiritual if not necessarily artistic collapse of the science fiction/fantasy literary community by the end of the 1950s, after such a bustling late 1940s/early 1950s. PITFCS wasn't the only fanzine with significant input from the professional writers in the field(s), as most of those writers had been fanzine-publishing or at least -contributing fans before making most or some of their professional careers in writing the fiction; it isn't even the only one which has seen a hardcover selection of its contents appear over the last two decades, as the fine The Best of Xero, Patricia and Richard Lupoff's major fanzine of the early '60s, was issued not too many years after this one hit some rarefied shelves. But what was notable about PITFCS, was the degree to which it became, in those years leading up to the foundation of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a place for pros particularly to socialize in print. Damon Knight and Lester del Rey had copublished a magazine called the SF Forum in the late '50s, but only two issues of that, and in even in two issues it had threatened to become a focal point for the discussions of the pros who were particularly prone to discuss, the ones who, for example, would attend the Milford Conferences Knight, Judith Merril and James Blish put together. (When SFWA was founded, with Knight as its first president, the Forum title was revived as an in-house organ for the body with content not altogether unlike that of PITFCS.) Not every major writer of fantastic fiction contributed informal (and some formal) essays, doggerel, letters, marketing gripes, self-assessments, and the kinds of observations Harold Ross used to refer to as "Casuals" when The New Yorker published them, but a remarkable range contributed here, from Fritz Leiber to Kurt Vonnegut to Avram Davidson to Kingsley Amis to Algis Budrys to Marion Zimmer Bradley to Isaac Asimov to Miriam Allen de Ford to Harlan Ellison to Brian Aldiss to Kate Wilhelm to Sam Youd ("John Christopher") to Basil Davenport to Arthur C. Clarke to Anthony Boucher and, of course, Merril and Blish and Knight on through to such less-well-known but often impressive writers as Betsy Curtis, Katherine Maclean, Allen Lang, and Bob Leman. And so many more.

Much of this material was rather quickly executed, some in the heat of passion, and only some of it was meant for the ages, but what this essentially complete reprinting (in a more legible form than the original fanzine was produced in) of the contents offers is definitely a slice of literary (and the concomitant social) history of certain subculture, and as such, even the most slight contributions take on a certain charge. It makes a great counterpoint to the selectiveness of the Xero volume, and an interesting comparison to such similarly freewheeling fora as Richard Geis's various magazines in the late '60s and 1970s. The $50 price tag on this tall, hefty (and still in print) volume is steep even two decades after its first publication, but I've had no regrets about buying two copies...so far (and NESFA has reduced the mail-order price to $40...a bargain!)

Patti Abbott is back! -and reviewing as well as compiling FFB at her blog.

tv notes: Ebert, Community on Hiatus, the best spy cartoons so far, & leaderless movements...

2012-01-12T15:06:00.000-05:00

A video melange that won't allow for embedding, for no obvious reason, features some 1970s crime-drama theme music, unsurprisingly leaning toward jazzy themes and opening with several Quinn Martin Productions items. Among some pleasant reminders, it's answered a nagging musical question that's been bothering me in a very minor way for some years...what was that ITC program with the slightly lugubrious theme music? The Persuaders, it turns out.

Among the missing in broadcast television at year's end: two series that haven't actually been cancelled, but are on Hiatus, which often means cancelled, NBC's relatively inventive sitcom Community (which will "burn off" some new episodes in the spring) and the American Public Television-syndicated Ebert Presents At the Movies; the latter has had its seed funding fall apart, the former was simply even lower-rated than the other good to excellent NBC Thursday night sitcoms. There's a chance both will be back, but don't bet the farm. However, never fear, Two and a Half Men and Extra are still with us. ("That's a joke, son.")

The World network, one of the smaller public-broadcasting networks that clusters around PBS stations particularly (much of its programming is comprised of PBS repeats) is offering a national live feed of an interesting-looking episode of the Boston-based Basic Black series on Friday night:

BASIC BLACK #4308 has been added to the WORLD schedule for Friday, 01/13 at 19:30 EST
BASIC BLACK #4308 – A Drum Major for Justice
As we head towards the Martin Luther King holiday we look back at the past year of protest at home and abroad. In the era of the civil rights movement, much of the attention focused on the leadership; but in this new era of protests, the focus has shifted to the masses. Have leaders become obsolete? Our conversation this week on Basic Black looks at the new role of leadership in grassroots movements, from the Tea Party to the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement.

The two best animated spy-comedy half-hours I'm aware of are still with us, happily, in the form of The Venture Bros. (Cartoon Network's Adult Swim) and Archer (FX). Not, on balance, the most crowded field of artistic achievement, but thus we are fortunate to have both on now...of the two, Venture, which takes as its springboard being a parody of Jonny Quest (as befits a series in Adult Swim, a block of programming spun out of the messing-around with Hanna-Barbera characters in sophisticatedly goofy ways, beginning with semi-real/semi-surreal chat show Space Ghost: Coast to Coast over a decade ago), is the more rococo of the two series, delving into conspiracies of history and rummaging through all the sorts of cod-sf and fantasy and adventure fiction, drama, and comics tropes the scripters can lay hands on; Archer is more straighforwardly in the tradition of Get Smart!, albeit with an even more dysfunctional agency full of characters with sharper repartee...Adam Reed, producer/creator of Archer, had placed work with Adult Swim previously. Both are currently in repeats, with new episodes arriving soon. It's perhaps rather sad that between them, they have two, arguably three, major characters who are African-American, the rest essentially all pale Caucs, but as cartoons, they do tend to throw their characters up against rather strange things. Along with the revived Futurama and the odd bit such as Adult Swim's Frankenhole, we have an alternative to the rather tired set of unkidsy animation Fox is offering on broadcast. (And a fine pair of scores for both series, as well.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links (plus one more...)

2012-01-11T22:00:00.000-05:00

...with a few more likely to pop up, as frequently, thanks to all you contributors of these reviews and remembrances, and to you readers of them at the links below. Please let me know if I've missed yours or someone else's in comments. Todd Mason

Bill Crider: The Big Town (trailer)

Brian Arnold: Animalympics

Chuck Esola: S*P*Y*S

Ed Gorman: ABC's Movie of the Week

Ellen Gallagher: Acting in Murder Rooms

Evan Lewis: (Heckle & Jeckle) "The Power of Thought"

George Kelley: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Five

Iba Dawson: So Young So Bad

Ivan Shreve: Upcoming on Turner Classic Movies

Jack Seabrook: Robert Bloch on TV: "The Landady" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents:)

James Reasoner: Garrison's Guerillas

John Charles: Lisa Lisa (aka Axe aka...)

Kate Laity: Penda's Fen

Michael Shonk: Broken Badges: "Chucky"

Patti Abbott: Slings and Arrows

Prashant Trikannad: The Day After and...

Randy Johnson: Bad Day at Black Rock

Rod Lott: Fright Night on Channel 9; Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th

Ron Scheer: “The Significance of the Frontier in an Age of Transnational History”

Scott Cupp: The Man from Planet X

Sergio Angelini: Paranoiac

Stephen Gallagher: Murder Rooms

Todd Mason: Channel 13, Newark, New Jersey/New York, New York Most of my paying gig involves working with various public broadcasting networks and stations in the US, and the US arms of a few international public broadcasting networks. Channel 13 in New York City (with a license assignment to Newark) has been an innovative station throughout its history, not least (in its years as WNTA, the National Telefilm Associates station) with the ambitious syndicated The Play of the Week (1959-1961), which put the likes of Waiting for Godot, Juno and the Paycock, and The Cherry Orchard on commercial stations, averaging better thus than even such revered live anthologies as Studio One or Playhouse 90 from a few seasons earlier. WNTA apparently was not a big moneymaker, however, and a group hoping to establish NYC's first (though not the nation's first, by any means) educational television station began organizing to make a bid on the license...and by 1962, were successful. WNDT, as today's WNET was first known, was born with a broadcast hosted by Edward Murrow, of which this is a portion:

WNET became one of the central stations in the loose NET (National Educational Television) network and one of the contributors to the Public Broadcast Laboratory newsmagazine+ project...two entities which were contributors to the eventual formation of PBS in 1970. Such regional networks as the Eastern Educational Network, the first US importers of Doctor Who and Monty Python, became the basis of the major public-broadcasting syndicators, in that case American Public Television (perhaps best known currently for Globe Trekker and the now on "hiatus" Ebert Presents: At the Movies).

NET had at least one impressive dramatic showcase of its own, in NET Showcase:

Yvette Banek: The Harvey Girls; Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death

Friday's "Forgotten" Books (and some decidedly Unforgotten Books)

2012-01-06T20:00:00.002-05:00

Thanks to everyone who has been contributing to this weekly collection of reviews and remembrances, and to you readers...founder Patti Abbott has been On Assignment, but will be hosting again next Friday at her blog.

Sergio Angelini: Perspectives on McBain (among 87th Precinct reviews)

Yvette Banek: Trojan Gold by Elizabeth Peters

Joe Barone: Motor City Blue by Loren Estleman

Bill Crider: The Fiend in You edited by Charles Beaumont

Scott Cupp: Dickson! by Gordon Dickson

William Deeck: Terror at Compass Lake by Tech Davis (Edgar Davis)

Ed Gorman: Down There by David Goodis

Jerry House: Haunts & By-Paths and Other Poems by J. Thorne Smith, Jr.

Randy Johnson: The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

George Kelley: Valor’s Choice by Tanya Huff

B. V. Lawson: Death on the Rocks by Michael Allegretto

Evan Lewis: My Forgotten (Books) Year

Steve Lewis: Murder in Waltz Time by Mignon G. Eberhart; Night Lady by William Campbell Gault; The Case of the Frightened Girl by Rex Hardinge

John F. Norris: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

Juri Nummelin: The Terror Contract as by Axel Kilgore (Jerry Ahern)

Richard Pangburn: In the Land of the Blind by Jesse Walter

Eric Peterson: Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe (Donald Westlake)

James Reasoner: Wild Bill #1: Dead Man's Hand as by Judd Cole

Karyn Reeves: Uneasy Money by P.G. Wodehouse

Ron Scheer: The Squatter and the Don by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton

Jack Seabrook: Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat by Andrez Bergen

Gerard Saylor: The Collaborator by Gerald Seymour

Kevin Tipple: The Affair by Lee Child; Murder New York Style: 21 Stories By Authors Of Greater New York edited by Randy Kandel

"TomCat": The Gold Gamble by Herbert Resnicow

Prashant Trikannad: All Quiet on the Western Front by E. M. Remarque...in three media...

"Zybahn": The Collector by John Fowles

...with a few more to come, I suspect... (Please let me know in comments if I've missed yours or someone else's entry...thanks!)

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links (with more likely to come)

2012-01-03T12:00:00.001-05:00

Thanks as always to all contributors and readers...and there will, as is traditional here and into the new year, be some stragglers coming in, myself first among equals...

Bill Crider: No Name on the Bullet (trailer)

Brian Arnold: Quick Change (1990)

Evan Lewis: My Overlooked Year

George Kelley: Anna Nicole

Iba Dawson: Persuasion (1995)

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Rain Without Thunder

James Reasoner: Freebie and the Bean

John F. Norris: The Lemon-Drop Kid

Kate Laity: Sherlock Holmes (Granada television); My Fair Lady

Mike Tooney: "Punchy Cowpunchers"

Patti Abbott: AbFab; Bigger than Life

Peter Enfantino: 13 Assassins and other 2011 favorites

Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri: Kolchak: The Night Stalker

Philip Schweier: After the Thin Man; Cry Danger; Five Steps to Danger; 99 River Street; The Naked City; Call Northside 777; Cry Vengeance

Prashant Trikkanad: Whiteout; The Back-Up Plan

Randy Johnson: Rebel in Town

Ron Scheer: Comanche Station

Scott Cupp: “The Saucer’s Reign”

Sergio Angelini: D.O.A. (1988)

Stacia Jones: "These Amazing Shadows" (Independent Lens)

Walter Albert: The Turmoil

Yvette Banek: Heights (2005)

Zybahn: Tales from the Darkside

Related Matters:

Brett McKee: Booth & Brennan And The Norwood Builder

Ed Gorman: Helen Mirren To Play Alfred Hitchcock's Wife In 'The Making Of Psycho'?

J. Eric Mason: Tempast (the development of an iPad game)

John Charles: 2011: The Year in Movies (fairly comprehensive)

Paul Brazill: My Top Five Crime Films 2005

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: with another link

2011-12-30T23:23:00.000-05:00

Yvette Banek: Favorite Books of the Year; 200 Decorative Title-Pages edited by Alexander Nesbitt

Joe Barone: The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen

Bill Crider: First Flight (aka Now Begins Tomorrow) edited by Damon Knight

William Deeck: Nine Doctors and a Madman by Elizabeth Curtiss

Ed Gorman: Black Friday by David Goodis

Randy Johnson: Run, Come See Jerusalem! by Richard C. Meredith

George Kelley: 3 Novels by Michael Moorcock (originally published as by Edward P. Bradbury): Blades of Mars aka Lord of the Spiders; Warriors of Mars aka Cities of the Beast; Barbarians of Mars aka Masters of the Pit

Evan Lewis: 3 Novels by W. T. Ballard: Say Yes to Murder; Murder Can't Stop; Dealing Out Death

John F. Norris: The Poisoner's Mistake by Belton Cobb

Ray O'Leary: The Old Contemptibles by Martha Grimes

James Reasoner: Winter Girl by Harry Whittington (aka The Taste of Desire as by Curt Colman)

Karyn Reeves: Penguin (Books) reading and collecting 2011

Gerard Saylor: Indigo Slam by Robert Crais

Ron Scheer: Lights on a Ground of Darkness by Ted Kooser

Kevin R. Tipple: Shot To Death: 31 Stories of Nefarious New England by Stephen D. Rogers

"Tomcat": Too Much Poison by Anne Rowe

The variant title version I have a copy of...TM

December's Underappreciated Music (w/links): RIP: Sam Rivers, and Johnny Cash: DESTINATION VICTORIA STATION (Columbia Special Products, 1975)

2011-12-30T00:45:00.003-05:00

It doesn't seem too likely that a promotional item for a gimmicky chain restaurant might be one of the best anthology albums of the career of someone of Johnny Cash's stature, nor the best collection of train songs I've encountered (even when compared to Cash's own early themed album Ride This Train); the Wikipedia entry on the record states that most of the recordings were new for this album (seems possible, though that wasn't the usual procedure for CBS Special Products releases, but this is Cash, and some of his favorite songs). But it's the very fact that this album cherry-picks wisely from the catalog of Cash's recordings for CBS that makes it such great listening, even with the fleshing out by Cash of his Victoria Station jingle into a pleasant, unmemorable "real" song at the tag end.

Look to this selection:

Casey Jones (Johnny Cash) 3:01
Hey Porter (Cash) 2:41
John Henry (Traditional) 2:51
Wabash Cannonball (A.P. Carter) 2:39
City of New Orleans (Steve Goodman) 3:38
Folsom Prison Blues (Cash) 2:45
Crystal Chandeliers and Burgundy (Jack Routh) 2:27
Wreck of the Old 97 (Trad. arr. by Cash, Norman Blake, Bob Johnson) 1:49
Waitin' for a Train (Jimmie Rodgers) 1:46
Orange Blossom Special (Ervin T. Rouse) 3:05
Texas 1947 (Guy Clark) 3:16
Destination Victoria Station (Cash) 2:20

--and you see it's not only a good representation of Cash's career, but a not too terribly unrepresentative slice through the history of country music and the folk music which it came out of. And Cash is, unsurprisingly given that this is a cherry-picking anthology, at his best, with some of his best bands and arrangements, throughout. When I picked up this LP at a rummage sale for 50c, I wasn't aware of the Victoria Station chain of restaurants, and I still haven't been inside of one (if they're even still in operation), but even given the promotional nature of this record, it's still a gift from Cash and his colleagues, and we're lucky to have it as a measure of their legacy.

"John Henry"

An incomplete reading of "City of New Orleans" but a similar if less accompanied version:

"Texas 1947"

"Hey, Porter" (similar vintage, same arrangement)

Scott Parker usually has a list of participating blogs in this monthly meme...but if none arises over the course of the day, I'll probably compile what I see...

...and I've been missing the news a lot of late, so missed till just now the note that the seminal jazz reed-player (primarily a saxophonist, but also flautist and more) Sam Rivers died on 26 December, in an item Bill Crider posted. Rest in glory; two of his tracks for Blue Note albums, when he and Eric Dolphy were the primary free jazz innovators for that label:

"Involution"

"Dance of the Tripedal"

More recent big-band work: "Pulsar"

THE LINKS:

Patti Abbott: Etta James: "At Last"

Yvette Banek: John Williams: Score to Superman (1978)

Sean Coleman: The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin

Bill Crider: the music of Robert Mitchum

Jerry House: hymns

Randy Johnson: Chuck Mangione: Children of Sanchez

George Kelley: Linda Eder: Now

Kate Laity: The Cundeez

Todd Mason: the music of Sam Rivers; Johnny Cash: Destination Victoria Station

Eric Peterson: Demon Knight (soundtrack album)

Charlie Ricci: Chicago: Hot Streets

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links (all have trickled in!)

2011-12-28T22:30:00.001-05:00

As always, thanks to everyone contributing a review or remembrance, and to all of you who are reading these (at their links below). If I've missed yours, please let me know in comments.

Bill Crider: I Married a Monster from Outer Space (trailer)

Brian Arnold: "A Case of the Stubborns" by Robert Bloch (Tales from the Darkside); Get Crazy

Ed Gorman: The Tall T; The Hot Spot

Eric Peterson: World Gone Wild

Evan Lewis: lost films: London After Midnight; Queen of Sheba; Charlie Chan Carries On

Iba Dawson: Woman in the Window; How to Survive a Plague

Ivan G. Shreve: The Classic TV Western Collection

Jack Seabrook: Robert Bloch on TV: “The Greatest Monster of Them All" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents)

James Reasoner: Blackthorn

Jerry House: Sydney Greenstreet (on film and radio)

Juri Nummelin: Dragonslayer

K. A. Laity: Dundee Cemetery

Kent Adamson: Christmas Holiday

Mark Hand: Coverage of the Occupy movement and anarchism

Michael Shonk: The Files of Jeffrey Jones

Patti Abbott: Whistle Down the Wind

Prashant Trikannad: Annapolis

Randy Johnson: The Brain Eaters

Rod Lott: Don't Open till Christmas

Ron Scheer: Sky High (1922)

Scott Cupp: Devil Girl from Mars

Todd Mason: Interesting Misfires, Close and Insane: Barry Munday and The Young Sinner

The Young Sinner, aka Like Father, Like Son, aka Among the Thorns, and with the working title We Are All Christ, is the kind of clumsy religious allegory you might expect to be written and directed by the young Tom Laughlin, with the principal shooting apparently done in 1960. Laughlin, who turned 29 that year, plays a high-school senior (yes) and football hotshot named Chris Wotan (you feel the dice being laden already, eh?) who has a steady girlfriend in Ginny (Stefanie Powers, who at least was 18 while playing a senior) with whom he supposedly has a solid, and (he admits in voice-over) playfully, romantically sexual affair, with both quite sure they will be wed soon. Good Christian's pagan temper, however, is more problematic, and gets him into Billy Jackesque beefs with petty martinets on the high-school's athletic staff, particularly after he and his similarly superannuated buddies break into the high-school's swimming pool for some goofing around with a couple of girls from the (even) richer school district up the road. Like his father, a rather well-groomed and tidy but supposedly shiftless and pathetic alcoholic, Chris's impulse control isn't quite what it should be; but Ginny has her own rather wild mood swings: extremely threatened that Chris should accept an invitation to dinner with Tury (? nomenclature not one of Laughlin's strong suits) and her family, whose father is interested in offering Chris a football scholarship to a local university, even when Ginny herself is also invited, Ginny threatens to break off their engagement if Chris goes. He does so behind her back, only to discover that perhaps Ginny's suspicions aren't so far-fetched, as Tury asks him, y'know, simply as an experiment, to "pet me; make love to me"...she wants to compare and contrast her feelings for a college boy she's been dating, with what they might be with Wotan. After checking in with Ginny (to the latter's understandable concern and upset), he goes ahead with the proposition, only to be caught by Tury's parents; Tury's father orders Chris out of the house as the camera lingers on the father getting ready to beat his terrified daughter with a belt he's looping around his hand, while Tury's mother looks mildly irritated with her in the background.

Irresistible Chris has also caught the eye of the most famous jailbait in town, 14yo Joan Meyers (Roxanne Heard, at least about 22, I'd guess), and Chris's goon friends enviously goad him into accepting her advances. Joan, too, seems to have a healthy libido which is stigmatized (perhaps 30yo high-school seniors aren't her ideal partners), but her youth and lust eventually appall Chris, particularly as her favorite makeout spot is a largely unused upstairs room in the local Roman Catholic church (another Heavy metaphor throughout this film is how abandoned that active church is, almost always). So, by the time of the wraparound events of the film, with Chris smashing some icons in the church and referring to it as a pigsty, and his long confession shortly thereafter which allows flashbacks to various incidents (a primitive nonlinear approach to the story not altogether unlike Quentin Tarantino's favorite method of script construction is employed here), he's lost his girl(s), his hope of a high-school diploma and college scholarship, and his "reputation"...but at least the progressive young priest, in less Dutch Uncle terms than the one HS athletic coach he respects, holds out hope for him to put his life back together. Thus ends this remarkably awkward, poorly-written, -directed and -acted US Angry Young (Christian) Man (well, supposedly young, anyway) drama, which was barely released in 1961 and picked up for distribution to television in 1965 (despite some relatively "strong" language, such as Chris calling Jesus et al. "bastards"...a word which was getting by the censors overseeing the series The Big Valley at about the same time probably with much wrangling and a careful hewing to its literal meaning). Shelly Manne's "score" is made up of rather hilariously tipped-in concert recordings that seem to be emanating from nowhere, not even a radio nearby, and often aren't terribly appropriate to the scene they're applied to. Aside from Laughlin's typically bootless arrogance (pun intended), and a very few cleverly arty setups for a few scenes (a despondent Chris is seen isolated between two statues in one lingering shot), there is little to recommend this film except as an example of the kind of bad-laugh variation on the AYM films (The Explosive Generation being another, the wildly overpraised earlier The Blackboard Jungle being yet another), the underside of the genre that Patti Abbott has been highlighting of late, and I, too, somewhat less consistently (I still need to write up Nobody Waved Good-Bye).

Meanwhile, the recent Barry Munday is interesting as a misfire mostly in that it has such an impressive cast (even if the eponymous protagonist is played by the just professional-enough Patrick Wilson), and it's based on a novel, Life Is a Strange Place by lawyer/writer Frank Turner Hollon, with whose work I'm unfamiliar (the Amazon blurb from the publishers, a smallish imprint, says "trumpet-wheedling father" where it means "-wielding"). Being based on a literary property never stopped drama from being offputtingly twee, of course, as is this Also Heavily Metaphoric tale of Munday, a remarkably improbable (even though pathetic) "player" and more-convincing porn aficionado, who loses his testicles after the aforementioned father even more improbably manages to walk up and smash them while Munday sits in a cinema seat next to (another!) jailbait character, the trumpet-wielder's daughter (Barret Swatek, 32yo at time of filming). Almost immediately after his release from the hospital, he finds himself the target of a paternity suit from a woman with whom he'd had a drunken, one-time tryst, which he has (almost) no memory of (she's suing, yet wants no money from him). Wacky circumstances ensue, and lessons are learned (about how testicles don't make one a Man, natch, among other rather obvious ones), particularly since Barry had no father, and (as Kate Laity can be faintly heard to be saying from somewhere in Anglophone Europe) Daddy Issues are the key to Everything, or entirely too much of everything that gets greenlit in Hollywood. But the cast here does what they can with what they have, led by Judy Greer as the suing mother (and she's supposed to be ugly, too boot...Hollywood ugly in this case being beautiful but tired-looking with slightly frazzled hair), Jean Smart as Munday's mother, Chloe Sevigny as a porn actress (or is she?) acquaintance (and Cybill Shepard and Malcolm McDowell as Sevigny's parents), and on and on, with such fine players as Colin Hanks and Christopher McDonald in small supporting roles). This film, like The Young Sinner, has earned its obscurity, but unlike the Laughlin was put together by professionals (even if it was the first feature by its director and screenplay/adapter), and it's genuinely a pity that these folks weren't given more promising material to work with. (IMDb commenters have a bit of a field day with Wilson's consistent involvement with films involving castration and impotence, including Hard Candy, Little Children, and Watchmen.)

Walter Albert: The Fighting Blade

Yvette Banek: Kiss Me Kate

Related matters:

Brent McKee: Sherlock Holmes v. the current television procedurals

George Kelley: Favorite Films, 2011

John Charles: Tim Lucas interview

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links (a work in progress...please let me know if I've missed yours!)

2011-12-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

Patti Abbott, the originator and usual host of Friday's Books, is traveling, so I'll be compiling the links for reviews and citations on others' blogs for the next several weeks. Happy Solstice Holidays, everyone!

Yvette Banek: Jingle Bells by J. P. Miller

Brian Busby: Love is a Long Shot by Ted Allan (as Alice K. Doherty)

Bill Crider: My Best Science Fiction Story, edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend

Scott Cupp: The Passionate Witch by Thorne Smith and Norman Matson

William F. Deeck: Method in His Murder by Thurman Warriner

Martin Edwards: In Whose Dim Shadow by J.J. Connington

Ed Gorman: On the Loose by Andrew Coburn

Jerry House: Still is the Summer Night by August Derleth

Allen J. Hubin: Merry Christmas, Murdock by Robert J. Ray

Randy Johnson: Tama of the Light Country and Tama, Princess of Mercury by Ray Cummings

George Kelley: Murder for Christmas, edited by Thomas Godfrey (and illustrated by Gahan Wilson)

K. A. Laity: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Evan Lewis: Jim Steranko S&S cover art for Lancer Books editions of H.S. Santesson anthologies and a Dave Van Arnam novel

Gloria Maxwell: Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith

Eric Peterson: Thieves World (and its sequels) edited by Robert Asprin (eventually et al.)

James Reasoner: A Corpse for Christmas by Henry Kane

Karyn Reeves: Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski

Gerald Saylor: All the Young Warriors by Anthony Neil Smith

Ron Scheer: The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers

Kevin R. Tipple: Flank Hawk by Terry Ervin II

"Tomcat": Crime on His Hands by "Craig Rice" (Georgiana Craig) and possibly Cleve Cartmill, as by George Sanders

Prashant Trikkanad: Christmas covers for comics (and one Ed Emshwiller Xmas cover for Galaxy)

"Zybahn": Winds of Change by Jason Brannon

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

2011-12-20T22:25:00.002-05:00

Thanks as always to those who have contributed reviews and such, and to you readers. Please let me know if I've missed your contribution, this week...

Bill Crider: Bronco Billy (trailer)

Brian Arnold: Noel (NBC 1982); "Miracle on 34th Street" (The 20th Century Fox Hour, 1955); The Great Santa Claus Switch

Chuck Esola: A*P*E

Evan Lewis: 3 Lost Films: Babe Comes Back; Tarzan the Mighty; Charlie Chan's Chance

George Kelley: The Girl in the Cafe; Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Iba Dawson: It Happened on Fifth Avenue; O. Henry's Full House; About a Boy

Ivan Shreve: Dragnet (the radio and television series)

James Reasoner: Trail of Robin Hood

Jerry House: The Six Shooter; Captain America (1944)

John Charles: Mean Johnny Barrows; Death Journey

Kate Laity: Spacedog

Michael Shonk: The Delphi Bureau: The Merchant of Death Assignment (pilot for the series)

Mike Tooney: "The Accused" (Daniel Boone)

Patti Abbott: I Want to Live

Pearce Duncan: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil; Trapped Ashes; The Woman

Randy Johnson: A Page of Madness

Rod Lott: Point Blank (1998); Grave Encounters; Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

Ron Scheer: Just Tony

Scott Cupp: Attack of the Mushroom People (aka Matango)

Sergio Angelini: Nightmare (1964)

Steve Lewis: Torn Curtain; East Lynne

Todd Mason: Coming Apart:
A 1969 cult item, which might well've influenced such later films as The Conversation...this Milton Moses Ginsberg film has been his only full-length feature (as writer and director) aside from the somewhat similarly unusual The Werewolf of Washington, released four years later, though he has been relatively busy as a film editor over the last two decades. Coming Apart features Rip Torn as Joe, a philandering, somewhat unstable NYC psychologist who sets up a hidden film camera with sound-recording equipment in a small but well-appointed apartment he's using for trysts and infrequent legit therapy sessions. The "kinetic sculpture" he hides the camera in helps mask its noises, as he records various encounters with women, young and less so (but most younger than Torn, already in his late 30s when filming this), most often an ex-patient of his, Joann (Sally Kirkland), though by no means Joann alone. In fact, Joann, who has been active as a sex-partner-swapping "swinger," brings a party of fellow libertines to Joe's apartment, slightly improbably including a tranvestite homosexual man who was not "provided for" in their party of six; after initially flirting and playing with "Sarabell" (dressed initially as a clown similarly to The Howdy Doody Show's Clarabell), Joe simply stares at him, after he removes his falsies and reveals his XY status, while Sarabell moans a bit as the other two couples, more conventionally hetero, make out around the room. The various women who come to visit Joe seem improbably attracted to him, though the film suggests that he might only be filming those with whom he's likely to have a tryst (aside from a pair of McCarthy for President campaigners who surprise him at one point), and he does prefer to keep company with women he can manipulate relatively easily, the primary exceptions being his wife, and his former mistress (Viveca Lindfors; the scenes with Torn and Lindfors are the most blatantly actorly and stagy, whether because of the nature of their relation or due to everyone losing some of their grip on the project isn't quite clear). All the action takes place in the apartment, from the vantage point of the camera in its box/sculpture, facing a large, mirrored wall, and the camera theoretically stutters and jumps frequently (we are quickly given to understand that this might well reflect Joe's state of mind rather than his playing with switches or the unreliability of his [various sorts of] equipment), noisily cutting in and out in the course of a single action on the part of its subjects, the film frequently running out in the "middle" of a scene. Very much a film of apparatus, with the final scenes apparently reflective of the self-medicating Joann's perspective instead (with time-dilation), and a soundtrack that, when the characters play music, intentionally makes the dialog hard to hear (and in the Kino Home Video version I saw, the music was rather obviously replaced from original contemporary songs by newly-written and recorded music to avoid rights issues, but which required tricky rerecording of the dialog around the music which distorts the voices even more). An interesting, flawed film, and one which has never had particularly reliable distribution...unless one picks up a copy of the out-of-print Kino dvd, one has to watch it, as far as I know, as I did, in pieces on DailyMotion (and one must register, for free, with DM, to cut off the "family filter" which blocks access to half the segments; Amazon streaming no longer has rights to show it), which probably doesn't detract too much from its cumulative effect given the intentional technological limitations of the project. Barry Malzberg offhandedly cited it as an important film, and one which I just might've heard of, some years back, due to a John Simon or other review, and which is definitely largely Overlooked these days.

Yvette Banek: The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)

Related Matters:

Bill Crider: The Vampire Film

Ed Gorman: Jerry Lewis; James Franco

Stacia Jones: The Hammer Vault

Todd Mason: television notes:
I've been catching some of the more important, or most interesting, or at least most hyped of the productions on some of the more overlooked channels. Borgen (The Government), the Danish political drama, remains consistently good and intelligent and believable, and a real feather in the cap of Link TV; I haven't yet returned to Starz's Boss, but the companion Encore channels have begun offering a British mob crime-drama import of some interest and no little brutality (probably too much, as the series goes on), The Take.

In a co-production with BSkyB, Cinemax has been offering another import, Strike Back, more into kinetic hugger-mugger than its closest correspondent, Showtime's Homeland, but similarly obsessed with terrorism and espionage in this New World Order we find ourselves in...in this case, a British counterterrorism detail, somewhat segregated from MI-5 or MI-6, tries and rather often fails to aid victims around the world (and mostly in Commonwealth states) of arms dealing and its collateral damage, while pursuing a Pakistani zealot and his organization. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the series is the toll, in casualties and psychic discomfort, taken on the members of the task force; plenty of aw, shucks machismo, but also a pretty fair indictment of the use of political violence by anyone, including all governments. (Iba Dawson pointed out to me in comments that the season I saw was actually the second, with the first not yet imported to the States at all...the third season is apparently in production.)

Another small group is the focus of the public-broadcasting project V-me (a name which puns on the Spanish-language command "Watch me" or "Veme") import from Spain's Antena 3, El barco (The Ship...or The Barque), a goofy (because) Lost-inspired science fantasy series involving the adventures of the crew on an oceanographic vessel meant for educating high school and college-aged young adults, with adult supervision and ship's officers, in a world suddenly submerged by the oceans after a vaguely-referred-to incident at the Swiss particle accelerator. Not atypically for a telenovela, the cast averages even more improbably pretty, particularly the female cast, than even a comparable US production, but there is a certain charm about the two episodes I've seen, and doped out in my halting Spanish (if you think closed captioning is weak for entirely too many Anglophone productions...goodness).

Thanks to LionsGate's pay channel Epix, the other weekend I got to see a kinescope of the 1954 Climax live production of "Casino Royale," famously the first dramatization of the James Bond novels, with a Yank Jimmy Bond (Barry Nelson) conspiring with a British variation on Felix Leiter to best Le Chiffre (Peter Lorre), with the uncertain loyalties of Linda Christian's Valerie Mathis a question at first. This version has almost inevitable early-tv awkwardness (watch Bond's taking shelter behind a pillar to avoid the least adept attempt at a drive-by ever); however, it makes Le Chiffre's predicament rather more stark than the recent film bothered to. Happily, this item is also available for online viewing:

In part since this hasn't been the best season for the larger broadcast or cable tv sources (with such series as House and Dexter having their still-watchable worst seasons so far), I'm happy to also see little bits of history popping up on the nostalgia-oriented broadcast networks This TV and Antenna TV (competitors Retro TV and Me TV aren't easily viewed in the Philadelphia area, even if the quasi-competitive FamilyNet is accessible), such as This's run of The Hospital, the 1971 black comedy starring George C. Scott and Diana Rigg, somewhat censored but not too terribly (I'm sure it was chopped far worse when I first saw it on a large network in the '70s), or the Antenna run of two 1964 episodes of Kraft Suspense Theater aka Crisis aka Suspense Theater (the series title depends on whether you were watching the first run, the summer repackage, or the syndicated repeats), from some of the same folk who would produce I Spy for NBC the next year. The better of the two, "That He Should Weep for Her," featured Milton Berle of all people (the series apparently enjoyed stunt casting) as the accidental killer of the younger of two stick-up men at his jewelry store; the sister of the slain young man (Carol Lawrence) cozies up to Berle's character, with thoughts of at least humiliating him, which she does...not realizing that the man (Alejandro Rey) who got her brother involved in the holdup, and who seems to think he has a right to her love, was ready to kill the jeweler in jealous rage, stoked in part by her continuing rejection of him and in part by his band-mate buddy, a cross between Iago and Eddie Haskell, who also wants to get next to the sister. It's all rather like a somewhat more realistic, somewhat less ramped-up (if a bit rushed), noir tale, scripted by tv veterans George Kirgo and Halsted Welles (notably the adapter of 3:10 to Yuma, among his film work). Anthony Boucher was script consultant to the series, Franz Waxman did the scores, with the main title theme attributed to "Johnny" Williams. It is interesting to see this NBC series, otherwise comparable to such contemporary (or nearly so) anthologies as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, The Twilight Zone, or The Outer Limits, in color, if indeed the same sort of faded colors that I Spy tends to sport these days.

And, of course, I await the return, particularly, of Children's Hospital and NTSF: SD: SUV to the Adult Swim block, and have been meaning to catch a few of their new series, including Chris Elliott's new show. And CBS's The Good Wife still remains my favorite dramatic series, even given the strong challenges from the likes of AMC's Breaking Bad and even Showtime'sShameless, the US version with an increasingly engaging cast (as the younger kids grow into their roles) and not quite too much cuteness about its rancidness.

Update: Maggie and Terre Roche's SEDUCTIVE REASONING slated for reissue in January

2011-12-19T12:19:00.004-05:00

Revivalist label Real Gone Records has Seductive Reasoning, with the original sleeve art, slated for reissue after the turn of the year...one "Trurl" quoted my 2010 review of this impressive album on Metafilter as a hook to hang this announcement on, which happifies me slightly...my back-posts do tend to get a fair amount of traffic, which means I'm doing something at least half-right. (And half-arsed, entirely too often.) And I'm happified that this label has the Roches' album, and some other interesting things of similar vintage and feel, back out in the marketplace...

Stuff I shouldn't be eating: sandwich cookies

2011-12-18T01:54:00.005-05:00

Well, I suppose there's no harm (except calorically) in eating the sugar-free sandwich cookies offered by Kellogg's Murray division (aside also from the possible deleterious effects of the artificial sweeteners and other ingredients, taken in too much haste particularly)...but aside from the only three (3) flavors (chocolate, vanilla and lemon) offered by Murray, when you can find even all three of them on a market shelf, the flavor variety of their sugary competitors is rather compelling in comparison. Kellogg's itself (through the kinds of mergers and acquisitions that seem to be the trend among successful medium-to-big-sized companies over the last several decades--in this case, Kellogg's thus becomes too big to crumble) manages to offer both Keebler and Famous Amos cookies, the latter's chocolate-wafer sandwich the more-or-less closest equivalent available to the Sunshine Hydrox of yore, moderately famously loved by such folks as blogger Kim Burton and writer Harlan Ellison...the Amos wafer part of the cookie, like the Hydrox though perhaps a bit less so, tasting more cake-like and less candied than that of Hydrox's younger rival, Oreo, which managed to outmuscle Hydrox over the decades in the marketplace (Sunshine's Vienna Fingers, however, were dominant in that arena, and Keebler and Kellogg's have kept them available). The sugar and fat white stuffing of both the standard Amos and Oreo are perhaps the weak point, which is where Keebler made much of its early mark, with chocolate-"creme" slathered between its wafers as "E. L. Fudge," and the original "Grasshoppers," with chocolate wafers and spearmint filling (the more recent imitation-Girl Scout-cookie Grasshoppers of the last couple of decades are less worthwhile, but have allowed various competitors to rush in with their products).

Trader Joe's "Joe-Joes" brands offer several flavors (including the distinctive peppermint, then candy-cane, flavor that seems to excite people to Hydrox levels of lust), but the champeen of flavors among the national brands seems to be Newman's Own (particulary the ginger sandwich), despite the Nabisco attempts to do all sorts of things to excite us further about Oreos (including ridiculously overpriced sugarless ones, disgusting "Cakesters" and the not-bad not-quite vanilla "Golden" Oreos) and a few sustained offshoots, such as the less sugary Nutter Butter peanut-butter sandwiches. Famous Foods of Virginia, if I remember correctly, used to offer rather good oatmeal-cookie and chocolate-chip-wafer sandwiches that no one else seems to be marketing these days...rather a pity (the same folks used to have something exactly like the Girl Scout-cookie "Samoa"...which only made sense, as FFV at that time apparently was the baker of GS cookies). And perhaps the Whole Foods (aka Whole Wallet) "365" brand chocolate and vanilla wafer sandwiches are the best of that ilk, among the national brands.

FFB: COMIX andTHE BLACK CASTLE and its sequels, by Les Daniels and DYING OF FRIGHT, edited by Les Daniels

2011-12-16T10:40:00.002-05:00

Les Daniels died on 5 November, and I hadn't gotten around to mentioning that on the blog yet...Kate Laity, who's been a congoer to a much greater extent than I have, got to know him as a fixture at Necon, the small horror convention which takes over a college dorm and is often tabbed Camp Necon by its regulars, where Daniels enjoyed taking on all comers in the annual trivia fest in costume. The New York Times obit, and the Locus obit.

His Living in Fear, both a history of evolution of horror fiction and drama and related matters and also an anthology of short fiction, meant a lot to me as a young reader...it wasn't the first item of literary history and criticism that I'd read as a kid, but it was easily the most compelling to date when I came across it not long after it was published, as noted in a previous FFB entry. I read his Comix next, and when it appeared the more straightforward anthology Dying of Fright, a fine anthology in similar coffee-table format to Living in Fear (I managed to completely miss his third and last such book, an even better selection in some ways).

Comix wasn't the first history of comic books to be published, but might've been the best book-length study by a single writer published by 1971 (as usual, the Times manages to not quite get it right), and it was certainly the first run through the complete history of comics I was to read, and it did introduce me to Help! magazine and the late '60s underground scene, some of whose participants were, by the latter '70s, moving into more "above-ground" arenas or at least getting some current national newsstand exposure in the likes of National Lampoon and its offshoot, Heavy Metal, among other magazines and collections.

And his Don Sebastian vampire novels, which I would catch up with long after the first publication of the first, The Black Castle, in 1978 (I began reading them a decade later, as I recall), are a fine series of historical horror adventures, not quite the utter literary and pop-culture historian's delight that Kim Newman's later and not altogether dissimilar Anno Dracula series of novels and stories is, but well-written and rather deft at making their point that the evils Sebastian finds himself among, including the invasion of "the New World" by the Conquistadors or the London of Jack the Ripper, are often at least as great as any that can be encompassed by a vampire, no matter how mythically dangerous (and Sebastian is not to be trifled with)(and the Daniels novels are more consistent than the Newmans, where The Bloody Red Baron, recently reissued, is not quite up to the novel it follows nor most of the work which follows it).

Daniels only began publishing short fiction nearly a decade after his first novel, but the stories in such key anthologies of original fiction as Dennis Etchison's The Cutting Edge and Skipp and Spector's The Book of the Dead were witty and, as much as their content would allow, charming.

I'm very sorry I didn't get around to telling him directly how much his work meant to me.

from Tabula Rasa: Living with Fear: An Interview with Les Daniels

Les Daniels Bibliography

Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, 1971.
Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (aka Fear), 1975.
Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre, ed. 1976.
Thirteen Tales of Terror, ed. with Diane Thompson. 1977.
The Black Castle, a Novel of the Macabre, 1978.
The Silver Skull, a Novel of Sorcery, 1979.
Citizen Vampire, 1981.
Yellow Fog, 1988 (this work originated in a novella published as a hardback special edition in 1986).
No Blood Spilled, 1991.
The Marvel Story, 1991.
The DC Story, 1995.
Superman: The Complete History, 1998.
Batman: The Complete History, 1999.
Wonder Woman: The Complete History, 2000.

from ISFDb:

Title: Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre
Editor: Les Daniels
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons

The Adventure of the German Student • (1824) • shortstory by Washington Irving
The Masque of the Red Death • (1842) • shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe (aka The Mask of the Red Death)
Ethan Brand • (1850) • shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Squire Toby's Will • (1868) • novelette by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [as by J. Sheridan Le Fanu ]
The Upper Berth • (1885) • novelette by F. Marion Crawford
Lost Hearts • (1895) • shortstory by M. R. James
History of the Young Man With Spectacles • (1895) • shortstory by Arthur Machen
The Yellow Sign • (1895) • novelette by Robert W. Chambers
The Red Room • (1896) • shortstory by H. G. Wells
Oil of Dog • (1890) • shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
The Willows • (1907) • novelette by Algernon Blackwood
The Voice in the Night • (1907) • shortstory by William Hope Hodgson
August Heat • (1910) • shortstory by William Fryer Harvey [as by W. F. Harvey ]
The Exiles' Club • (1915) • shortstory by Lord Dunsany (aka The Exile's Club)
The Call of Cthulhu • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1928) • novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
A Visitor from Egypt • (1930) • shortstory by Frank Belknap Long
The Graveyard Rats • (1936) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner
Rope Enough • (1939) • shortstory by John Collier
They Bite • (1943) • shortstory by Anthony Boucher
Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper • (1943) • shortstory by Robert Bloch
Homecoming • [The Elliott Family] • (1946) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury (aka The Homecoming)
The House in Goblin Wood • (1947) • novelette by John Dickson Carr [as by Carter Dickson ]
The Man Who Never Grew Young • (1947) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Born of Man and Woman • (1950) • shortstory by Richard Matheson
Levitation • (1958) • shortstory by Joseph Payne Brennan

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

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

2011-12-15T13:38:00.001-05:00

Thanks as always to all contributors and all readers of this weekly collection of reviews and citations of insufficiently remembered (and occasionally insufficiently notorious) films, television, radio, stage presentations and other largely narrative performing arts...there might be a few stragglers this week. Please let me know if I've missed yours or someone else's citations in comments, and thanks again...

Bill Crider: A Rage in Harlem

Brian Arnold: "Christmas in July" (Punky Brewster animated); "Miracle on 34th Street" (The Twentieth Century Fox Hour, 1955)

Chuck Esola: Stop Me Before I Kill!

Eric Peterson: Off Beat (1986)

Evan Lewis: The Sign of Four (1932)

Iba Dawson: Away We Go (2009)

Jack Seabrook: Robert Bloch on TV: "The Changing Heart" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents:)

James Reasoner: Time Again

Jerry House: Tuba Christmas

John Charles: Terror Circus (aka Barn of the Naked Dead; aka Nightmare Circus)

Juri Nummelin: Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Kate Laity: The Long Kiss Goodnight

Mike Toomey: "Back for Christmas" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents:)

Patti Abbott: The Knack...and how to get it

Philip Schweier: I Wake Up Screaming; I Walk Alone

Randy Johnson: Two Flags West

Ron Scheer: High Plains Drifter

Scott Cupp: Supergirl

Sergio Angelini: Maniac (1963; aka The Maniac)

Stacia Jones: Nana (1926)

Steve Lewis: Black Moon (1934); Illegal Entry; Offbeat (1963)

Todd Mason: Why Do You Write Horror Fiction? Gahan Wilson, Joseph Payne Brennan, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long and Manly Wade Wellman at the First World Fantasy Convention, 1975 A convention panel (paired with one on fantasy publishing featuring Bloch, Wilson, Donald A. Wollheim, Elsie Wollheim, and [I think] Lester del Rey) that allows us to hear these worthies...all but Wilson now deceased...discussing what drew them into the field, how they think the literature should be marketed and how it is marketed, and basically how they came to be at the first World Fantasy Convention. Unfortunately, the recording stops abruptly on the first panel...in his First World Fantasy Awards volume, Wilson recalls Wellman eventually deciding that why he wrote horror fiction was simply...he enjoys the thought of his audience's eyes bugging out. (Wilson also mangles Vonnegut's urinal metaphor in the KV essay "On Science Fiction," where Vonnegut mentioned that the "drawer" labeled sf is too often mistaken for a urinal, particularly by uninformed critics and readers.) While Frank Belknap Long can be a bit windy, and Joseph Payne Brennan a little less so since also feeling a bit timid, it's still a good piece to hear, as is the marketing discussion which follows. (Recording uploaded to Archive.org from a cassette supplement to fanzine Myrddin 3, 1975)

Walter Albert: Nightmare (1956)

William I. Lengeman III: Mr. and Mrs. North (1942)

Yvette Banek: The March of the Wooden Soldiers

Related Matters:

Dan Stumpf: Jackie Chan: 5 Films

Frederik Pohl: Harlan Ellison (and Long John Nebel)

George Kelley: Jackie Chan: 4 Films; John Le Carre narrates his Absolute Friends

Jackie Kashian interviews actor/Planet of the Apes superfan/collector Brian Peck

Paula Guran (courtesy Ed Gorman): Behind the Bates Motel: Robert Bloch

Prashant Trikannad: World War II movies

FFB: DANCING NAKED: THE UNEXPURGATED WILLIAM TENN, V. 3, by Philip Klass (aka WT), edited by Laurie Mann (NESFA Press)

2011-12-09T10:00:00.008-05:00

Philip Klass (1920-2010), who never quite 'fessed up to wanting to run a pun on the name "William Penn" with his pen name for much of his fiction and nonfiction writing (including some of the best and most influential satirical sf written so far, not least such short stories as "Child's Play" and "The Liberation of Earth"), was a genteel man, open and friendly and in all the good ways professorial, in meeting even bumptious long-term readers such as I...and, as this collection mostly of his nonfiction writing (with some early campus-magazine fiction and other bits) informs us directly and indirectly, who'd learned a few skills in the presentation of himself, as a man of great passions, over his years of teaching at Penn State (a university currently more famous for harboring an accused serial child-rapist for years, because the pampered head football coach thought the other guy useful) and elsewhere. The previous two volumes in this series from NESFA Press collected his fantasticated fiction; while this one by no means gathers all of his nonfiction, it seems a fair representation, including such reasonably famous highlights as his PS magazine essay "The Student Rebel: Then and Now" (an essay with new relevance in these de-Occupied times) and "The Bugmaster" (about electronic surveillance), apparently commissioned by Esquire or some comparable magazine but then spiked in favor of a similar staff contribution, which became probably the only piece ever published by the men's sweat magazine True to be collected in the then-equivalent of Best American Essays, in 1968. Also, such outliers as his short story "Murdering Myra" (from the cf magazine Suspect), a 1901 E. E. Kellett short story Klass suggests, in the essay that precedes it in the book, might've helped inspire Shaw's Pygmalion, an introduction by Klass writing student David Morrell, and an essay by Klass's brother, Morton Klass (a writer, editor and professor in his own right) help round out the book, which also includes excellent long interviews with Philip Klass by Josh Lukin and Eric Solstein.

This is a book which "jumped the queue"...I'd meant to read others this week, but in my typical time-crunch I kept turning back to this one, with its autobiographical essays about the early life of this British child-immigrant, his Marxist father having been an illegal alien here for decades after fleeing England for daring to volubly oppose WW1, and Klass himself only becoming naturalized, back in London no less, after entering WW2 military service; the continuing point of amused pride that he, Klass, had never managed to obtain a Bachelor's degree in his campus career yet served for decades as a full professor at PSU; his adventures in Greenwich Village in the '50s, hanging with Calder Willingham, Theodore Sturgeon, Judith Merril, Dylan Thomas and others; and the less happy duty of memorializing old friends (a selection of his obituaries is included, along with several of his introductions to his anthologies and the collections of others).

One of the few books I've cited in this series which is not out of print (though not nearly as well-known as it might be), and worth looking into even for those casually interested in Klass and the subjects he deals with.

from the Locus Index:
Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn William Tenn (NESFA Press 1-886778-46-9, Sep 2004, $29.00, 427 + vi, hc, cover by Bob Eggleton) Non-fiction collection of 36 articles and essays, many autobiographical, published to commemorate his being GoH at Noreascon 4, Worldcon 2004. Includes a bibliography of the author’s work. Introduction by David Morrell. Available from NESFA Press, PO Box 809, Framingham MA 01701; [www.nesfa.org/press]; add $2.50 postage.

iii · Master Class · David Morrell · in (*), 2004
1 · Myself When Young
3 · In the Beginning · William Tenn · ss The Evolution of William Tenn or Myself When Young, Pretentious Press, 1995
5 · Anecdote [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · vi Apprentice, 1939
7 · Eleven P.M. [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · vi Apprentice, 1939
9 · The Apotheosis of John Chillicothe [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · ss Apprentice, 1939
15 · Incident Gourmandien [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · vi Apprentice, 1939
17 · Sonnet [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · pm Cargoes, 1935; restores author’s preferred text
19 · Personal Story
21 · Constantinople [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · ts U.S. Catholic, 1994
31 · The Enormous Toothache · William Tenn · ts Stories, 1985
41 · The Frank Merriwell Compulsion or Winning the Championship the Hard Way [“Frank Merriwell’s Syndrome”] · William Tenn · ts Rogue Apr ’63
49 · What’s Wrong with My Daughter? [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · ts The Reader’s Digest, 1992
53 · My First Deer · William Tenn · ts *
57 · Creative Fiction and NonFiction
59 · Murdering Myra · William Tenn · ss Suspect Detective Stories Nov ’55
69 · 8 Eyes on Strange New Worlds · William Tenn · ms Esquire, 1966
71 · The Bugmaster [“Mr. Eavesdropper”] · William Tenn · ar True, 1968
91 · The Student Rebel: Then and Now · William Tenn · ar P.S. Jun ’66
107 · Notes Toward a History of Science Fiction
109 · On the Fiction in Science Fiction · William Tenn · ar Of All Possible Worlds, Ballantine, 1955; revised from “The Fiction in Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Adventures March 1954
119 · Jazz Then, Musicology Now · William Tenn · ar F&SF May ’72
127 · An Innocent in Time: Mark Twain in King Arthur’s Court [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · ar Extrapolation Dec ’74
143 · “The Lady Automaton” by E. E. Kellett: A Pygmalion Source? [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · ar Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 1982, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982
153 · The Lady Automaton · E. E. Kellett · ss Pearson’s Magazine Jun ’01
171 · Welles or Wells: The First Invasion from Mars · William Tenn · ar Synergy SF: New Science Fiction, ed. George Zebrowski, Gale Group/Five Star, 2004; revised from an earlier version in The New York Review of Books 1988 as by Philip Klass
183 · It Didn’t Come from Outer Space · William Tenn · ar The Digital Deli, ed. Steve Ditlea, Workman, 1984
185 · Author Emeritus Speech: Given Here Without the Gestures, Intonations and Pauses Which Made It Moderately Funny in the First Place · William Tenn · sp The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 1999
193 · Intros and Obits
195 · Introduction to Children of Wonder · William Tenn · in New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953
205 · Introduction to What Mad Universe [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · in Pennyfarthing; San Francisco, CA, 1978 [Fredric Brown]
215 · From a Cave Deep in Stuyvesant Town—A Memoir of Galaxy’s Most Creative Years [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · in Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, ed. Frederik Pohl, Joseph D. Olander & Martin H. Greenberg, Playboy Press, 1980
219 · Introduction to The Ova Hamlet Papers [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · in Pennyfarthing; San Francisco, CA, 1979 [Richard A. Lupoff]
225 · John W. Campbell, Jr.: A Memoir [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · ob Pennsylvania English, 1984 [John W. Campbell, Jr.]
231 · Sturgeon, The Improbable Man · William Tenn · bg Bright Segment, North Atlantic Books, 2002 [Theodore Sturgeon]
237 · Judy Merril [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · ob Locus Nov ’97 [Judith Merril]
243 · Poul Anderson [as by Philip Klass] · William Tenn · ob Locus Jun, 2001 [Poul Anderson]
245 · Dancing Naked: The Interviews—and a Bit of PR
247 · A Jew’s-Eye View of the Universe · Dr. Josh Lukin · iv Para*doxa, 2003 [William Tenn]
279 · Eric Solstein Interviews William Tenn · Eric Solstein · iv * [William Tenn]
403 · Philip Klass: Wit with a Flair for the Incredible · Anon. · ar Penn Stater, 1973 [William Tenn]
409 · Klass Class
411 · Recruiting New “Huddled Masses” and “Wretched Refuse”: A Prolegomenon to the Human Colonization of Space · Morton Klass · ar Futures, 2000
423 · Bibliography · Laurie Mann · bi *

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

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V

2011-12-06T14:43:00.003-05:00

Thanks to all contributors (of the critiques of films that are linked to below...some readers of the notes I send out to various lists have noted today that they are uncertain as to what the names and titles imply when they see the weekly lists) and readers...there will be a few more entries, I suspect, including my own (squeezed by morning meetings and such vagaries...).

Bill Crider: Dark City

Brian Arnold: One Magic Christmas

Chuck Esola: Lisztomania

Dan Stumpf: The 3rd Voice

Evan Lewis: The Rider of the Law

Geoff Bradley: Tough Love

George Kelley: A Perfect World

Iba Dawson: Enchantment (1949)

James Reasoner: Zorro's Black Whip

Jerry House: Rage at Dawn

Juri Nummelin: My Friend Ivan Lapshin (aka
Moy drug Ivan Lapshin)

Michael Shonk: The Best of B.L. Stryker

Mike Tooney: Edward D. Hoch and Hollywood

Patti Abbott: The Pumpkin Eater

Philip Schweier: films of The Shadow

Randy Johnson: The Last Musketeer

Steve Lewis: The Vicious Circle (1957) (aka The Circle)

Ron Scheer: Bend of the River

Scott Cupp: The Laughing Dead

Tina Silber: Nero Wolfe (CBS 1959...never aired)

Todd Mason: Wainy Days

Sergio Angelini: The Mirror Crack'd

Walter Albert: Life in the Raw

Yvette Banek: All That Heaven Allows

Related Matters:

Prashant Trikannad: Lady and the Tramp

Stacia Jones: December Cable Movie Highlights

FFB: HARD LANDING by Algis Budrys...and SFBC's Gary Viskupic covers

2011-12-02T17:00:00.003-05:00

Algis Budrys's last novel, which was featured in the October/November 1992 "double" anniversary issue of F&SF and published in both hardcover and paperback by Questar with a remarkably ugly cover design the next year, has been almost criminally neglected (the October issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine that year featured a Joyce Carol Oates novelet, "The Model", which I thought a nice parallel...).

His first long fiction to be published in fourteen years (after "The Silent Eyes of Time" [F&SF 1978] and Michaelmas [Berkley 1977]) and the last he would publish, it is a graceful and well-worked-out account of a handful of humanoid aliens, forced to crash-land on Earth in midcentury, and choosing to hide themselves among the Americans they find themselves among. It traces their progress, if it can be called as much, and the investigations of various US/human agencies and plenipotentiaries...a fairly rich situation for Budrys to work through his obsessions with coping with the often puzzling foreign society and attempting to conform, at least superficially, with the stresses of hierarchy and self-realization (both obvious concerns for a child of military/spy/diplomat parents, who was probably the last living citizen, by US State Dept. reckoning, of pre-WW2 Lithuania for a decade or so...he only became a US citizen after Lithuania gained independence again). His graceful prose, his wit, and his informed take on political and media matters are on display, as his characters deal with their specific situation and the larger-world developments of the four decades starting in 1940. Perhaps because of his already having engaged heavily with the Church of Scientology's publishing arm, administering their Writers of the Future workshop and prize (and helping launch its related) programs, this late work was ridiculously underappreciated...as Scott Cupp notes in comments, most of his work from throughout his career is underappreciated, perhaps least the novel that served as the climax for the first decade of his interrupted sf-writing career in 1959, published by Fawcett Gold Medal as Rogue Moon (and finally republished under one of his preferred titles, The Death Machine not long before his death). Budrys seemed a natural for Gold Medal, as his sf novels have the same sort of alienation and sense of contending with fate as the most fondly-recalled of GM's crime fiction, even if they couldn't leave such titles as Halt, Passenger (for "Rogue Moon") or The Iron Thorn (for "The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn," an even more ridiculous meddling).

Speaking of ugly covers, including for Budrys's first magnum opus, I'm not sure we've had a worse run of covers by an artist of some talent (though Kelly Freas's for Laser Books was close) than Gary Viskupic's series of rotten covers for Science Fiction Book Club dustjackets for books with no previous or negotiable hardcover editions for SFBC to reprint covers from:

It wasn't as if Viskupic isn't talented...I believe he's still alive, but might well be retired from professional illustration, as these examples of his newspaper work (I particularly like the Andrei Sakharov portrait and the montage to represent the beginning of the 1973 US syndicated run of the Thames Television series The World at War, from Viskupic's primary '70s gig at the Long Island/NYC-area Newsday), and even jacket images from A.E. van Vogt and P. J. Farmer novels attest (even if the Farmer, perhaps well in keeping with the work, seems a somewhat jejunely jokey pastiche of the kind of work Diane and Leo Dillon are most famous for, such as these illustrations for Ellison's work.)

But then there are all these others he'd done...even given the Del Rey, and perhaps even the Slan, aren't terrible...but I suspect he was given probably very little time to do them, and little incentive to do his best for them.

My own late Overlooked Film/Other A/V item(s) for this week...NOBODY WAVED GOOD-BYE and MORT DIGS HORROR

2011-11-29T23:21:00.005-05:00

But I don't have time to write up Nobody Waved Good-Bye the way I'd like tonight, any more than I've had time to review it (after decades)...but this entry will be revisited! (And since on some browsers the National Film Board window can't be expanded properly, I've added the link to the film page on the title...)

Meanwhile, independent film and radio writer/director/and more David Schmidt has set up a web series which recommends the overlooked among horror films, Mort Digs Horror:

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: a few added reviews

2011-11-29T15:45:00.002-05:00

Thanks as always to all contributors and to you readers...

Bill Crider: Cotton Comes to Harlem (trailer)

Brian Arnold: An American Christmas Carol

Chuck Esola: Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

Dan Stumpf: Deadlier than the Male (Bulldog Drummond) (1967)

Eric Peterson: Rolling Thunder

George Kelley: Sigur Ros: Inni

Iba Dawson: Center Stage; The Company (2003)

Jack Seabrook: "The Cuckoo Clock" (Robert Bloch on Alfred Hitchcock Presents:)

James Reasoner: Only Angels Have Wings

Jeff Segal: Hallowe'en Marathon viewing (slightly delayed)

Jerry House: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

John Charles: The Dirty Game (1965)

Juri Nummelin: The Sadist (1963)

Michael Shonk: Charlie Wild, Private Detective

Mike Tooney: "Knife in the Darkness" (Harlan Ellison's Jack the Ripper script) Cimarron Strip; "The Mind Reader" (The Rifleman)

Patti Abbott: The L-Shaped Room
Pearce Duncan: Warlock (1989)

Philip Schweier: The Mr. Wong films

R. Emmett Sweeney (courtesy Ed Gorman): Runaway Daughters (1994)

Randy Johnson: Little Chenier: A Cajun Story

Ron Scheer: Meek’s Cutoff

Scott Cupp: Destroy All Planets

Sergio Angelini: Taste of Fear (aka Scream of Fear)

Stacia Jones: The Phantom Creeps, Chapter 5

Steve Lewis: Assassin for Hire; Criminal Investigator; Time Lock

Todd Mason: Nobody Waved Good-Bye; Mort Digs Horror

Yvette Banek: Bite the Bullet

Related Matters:

Brent McKee: You Deserve This

Prashant Trikannad: In the Heat of the Night (1968)

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: 54.40 Edition (O Canada and other Pioneers)

2011-11-25T12:45:00.007-05:00

This the link list for this holiday week, featuring at least a few choices that emphasized Canadian writers and their work (even as FFB founder and usual host Patti Abbott is escaping Canadian proximity for some time in Arizona, though not New Mexico to solidly pound in the irony--as it turns out, this trip is upcoming, and the ducking out was simply to NY this go 'round). If I've missed your review, please let me know in comments, and I'll happily add it...and apologies!
Patti Abbott will be hosting the links again next week.

Patti Abbott: Depth Rapture by Carol Bruneau

Sergio Angelini: Necessary Evil by Kelley Roos

Yvette Banek: Salamander by J. Robert Janes

Joe Barone: Merry, Merry Ghost by Carolyn Hart

Brian Busby: The Hidden Places by Bertrand W. Sinclair

Bill Crider: D'Shai by Joel Rosenberg

Deb: Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen

Martin Edwards: Tour De Force by Christianna Brand

Ed Gorman: The Last Match by David Dodge (please see below) Original version

Jerry House: What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies

Randy Johnson: Suspicious Circumstances by Sandra Ruttan

George Kelley: Tempest-Tost by Robertson Davies

Richard & Karen La Porte: The Gathering Place by Jon Breen

B. V. Lawson: Fool's Gold by Ted Wood

Steve Lewis: A Real Gone Guy by Frank Kane

Todd Mason: The Ways We Live Now: Contemporary Short Fiction from the Ontario Review edited by Raymond Smith; review delayed by reviewer cleverly hiding the book from himself shortly after beginning it.

Kent Morgan: The Kate Henry Series by Alison Gordon

John F. Norris: Novels by Frank L. Packard

Juri Nummelin: The Flagellator by "Carter Brown"

Richard Pangburn: "Horseman" by Richard Russo

Eric Peterson: Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason

James Reasoner: The Master of Dragons by H. Bedford-Jones

Karyn Reeves: Our Hearts were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner & Emily Kimbrough

L. J. Roberts: The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall

Richard Robinson: Never Cry Wolf and And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat

Gerald Saylor: Black Fly Season by Giles Blunt

Ron Scheer: Smith and Other Events: Tales of the Chilcotin by Paul St. Pierre

Kerrie Smith: A Landscape of Lies by Peter Watson

Charlie Stella: Let It Ride by John McFetridge

TomCat: St. Peter's Finger by Gladys Mitchell

Mike Tooney: The Best of Ellery Queen by "Ellery Queen" (edited by Francis Nevins and Martin Harry Greenberg)

Prashant Trikkanad: The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas and Upon This Rock by Frank G. Slaughter

John W: Look Behind You, Lady by A.S. Fleischman

...and, Pre-emptively: Doug Levin: The Adjustment by Scott Phillips

Ed Gorman:
The Last Match by David Dodge
Dictionary: The word “picaresque” is taken from a form of satirical prose originating in Spain, depicting realistically and often humorously the adventures of a low-born, roguish hero living by his/her wits in a corrupt society.
This is the only word I can find to adequately describe The Last Match by David Dodge, a 2006 Hard Case Crime presentation. In a winningly cynical voice, a young swindler tells us all about working scams in places as far flung as Cannes, Tangiers and Lima, among others. He is particularly deft with women.
Good to remember that Dodge was also a travel writer of considerable note, so the backdrops here are almost as vivid as the characters, who are mostly low-borns working their way downward reeking of sweat, booze and occasionally blood.
Dodge hangs a good deal of his tale on the romance between Curly and a fetching young woman of British royalty named Regina. She, unlike most other humans who trod the earth, seems to feel that Curly’s soul is worth saving and she attacks this task with almost saintly (and sexy) determination.
I didn’t care much about the story, but was won over completely by the high style of the prose, the incorrigible personality of the narrator and the unending list of badasses who appear along the various map points. This has the feel of a memoir rather than a novel, and that makes it all the more realistic.
I think you’d have to say that Dodge – who wrote this novel sometime in the early ’70s even though this is its first publication – didn’t have much interest in the usual tropes of genre thriller fiction. Graceful and sardonic writing seem his biggest fascination, a true world view with some gunfights, fist fights and bad ladies thrown in every once in a while to honor pulp expectations. I should note here that early in the first chapter, Dodge struts his stuff, introducing us to an attractive and appealing middle-aged woman who is using him as her current boy-toy. You know you’re in the hands of a real writer when Dodge makes us like and even respect the woman. Not a cliché in sight. I knew right off I’d like book just because of its opening chapter.
His daughter Kendal Dodge Butler provides a loving, even endearing afterword about her father. He seems to be about what I expected: a man who had his darkest adventures early on and then settled into a respectable middle-aged family life that allowed him the leisure and luxury to pursue his writing where he got to polish up some of those old adventures and display his wide knowledge of cons and scams.
–Ed Gorman

November's Music: Comedy songs for a Blue T-day

2011-11-24T16:54:00.011-05:00

My father remembered a version of this one from his childhood (I've found a number of people remember extra or improvised verses to this one), though I suspect he learned his "Ain't We Crazy" from the older, second recording below:

Constant readers here know I'm a lifelong Smothers Bros. fan, due in part to receiving Aesop's Fables the Smothers Brothers Way as a one of my first records to play on my portable phonograph ca. 1968...no tracks from that album are easily swipable, but this charming medley, with Donovan Leitch and Peter, Paul & Mary, from the Smo Bro CBS series, is worth the time:

And, being as I was a child of the mid-'60s, my first babysitters, at least, made sure I heard and saw the Monkees:

Which of course set me up for appreciation of the likes of the Kinks

Or the Zombies (even if this ragged copy of "Come on Time" as messed with and worked into a trailer for Bunny Lake is Missing kills most of the the humor of the "Just Out of Reach" reworking the band did...see the fine Big Beat-label complete Zombies recordings set to hear how "Come on Time" should sound.)

And Utopia

And the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band

(and if you've missed it somehow over the years...George Harrison on Rutland Weekend Television, which might or might not've directly led to Bonzos and Pythons forming the Rutles)

And Gil Scott-Heron

Not actually one of Mose Allison's wittiest songs, but in a similar mode:

As opposed to this live reading of his classic:

And a nice, if slightly long, a cappella version:

And speaking of classics:

Nellie McKay:

Garfunkel and Oates (note the climbing budgets)

And for a genuine T-day song, Howard Kremer as Dragon Boy Suede:

(and another rap from DBS in the spirit of giving and appreciation)

Happy Thanksgiving, folks...
For more of this month's forgotten music, see the links at Scott Parker's blog.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

2011-11-22T15:00:00.002-05:00

Thanks as always to all contributors and readers...and we have at least a few new contributors this week. And I suspect we'll see a few more links over the course of the day. Happy Thanksgiving, USians (Canadian Thanksgiving is on a different day), in the event I don't post again before Thursday...and Friday will be the links list for Friday's "Forgotten" Books, with a Canadian emphasis...be there or be post-US T-day w/o FFB...and wouldn't that be a sad state?

Bill Crider: A Reasonable World (trailer)

Brian Arnold: Hot Hits 98 WCAU-FM in the 1980s; Home for the Holidays

Chuck Esola: I Don't Know Jack

Dan Stumpf: Dick Barton Strikes Back

Iba Dawson: A Taste of Honey

James Reasoner: 3-Way (2004)

Jerry House: "The Getaway Car" (based on John D. MacDonald's "The Homesick Buick"), Studio 57 (DuMont Network/first-run syndication)

John Charles: Storm Troopers USA

Juri Nummelin: Romeo is Bleeding; and two films which don't, in comparison, help deal with backache

Patti Abbott: "A Christmas Memory" (narrated by Truman Capote, as well) ABC Stage '67 (ABC 1966)

Philip Schweier: Homicide for Three; Exposed (1947); London Blackout Murders; The Spanish Cape Mystery

Prashant Trikannad: Suddenly

Randy Johnson: Spy in Black (aka U-Boat 29)

Ron Scheer: The Winning of Barbara Worth

Scott Cupp: The Lost World (1925)

Sergio Angelini: The Snorkel

Stacia Jones: White Shadows in the South Seas

Stephen Walsh: Two Lane Blacktop

Steve Lewis: Accused of Murder; The 39 Steps (1959; 2008 adaptations)

Todd Mason: Sins of the Fleshapoids (please see below)

Yvette Banek: The Thief of Baghdad

Related matters:
George Kelley: American Masters: Woody Allen (PBS); The Swerve as audiobook; Tower Heist

Michael Shonk: Covert Affairs (USA Channel)

Prashant Trikannad: Father-Son Movies

Stephen Gallagher: Memorabilia

Todd Mason:
Sins of the Fleshapoids is a 43-minute film first presented in 1966, which was shot in several people's houses or apartments on the tiniest of budgets...such indy poor-mouthers as El Mariachi (Robert Rodriguez's first film to see commercial release) or even such student films as the first (terrible) version of THX-1138, had budgets many multiples of the outlay for this, essentially a silent film with music and narration and (!) drawn-in dialog balloons (and a bit of faked monolog--moaning--at the end, as a character gives birth), shot on 8mm Kodachrome stock (as auteur Mike Kuchar notes, Kodachrome has the kind of saturated colors that help make this film stand out--though similar, if higher-budget no-budget films such as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies also have similar saturation, while shot on more typically professional stock, by a crew in this case including Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács...both using pseudonyms. What Kuchar doesn't mention, but what is just as obvious, is the red tinge that Kodachrome tends to take on.) Mike and George Kuchar, who co-directed many short home-movie style camp melodramas and films that come up to the edge of "acceptable" or at least non-actionable sexploitation in their day (starting in 1957), split up as co-directors for this one, with George taking a key acting role instead (they had both tended to appear in all their previous work, as well), though apparently the scene where Donna Berness admires herself in a mirror, while wearing some of the most ridiculous pasties devised for the screen, was directed by George.

This is very intentional camp, and some of it is actually funny...it mocks, affectionately, the kind of earnest no-budget sf film prevalent in the first half of the 1960s, including its perhaps most direct inspiration, Creation of the Humanoids (1962), a very poor ripoff of Jack Williamson's novel The Humanoids (1948), and the kinds of films that litter the cv of such "talents" as Arthur C. Pierce (Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Dimension 5 [which seemed extravagant to the British distributors, so they retitled it Dimension Four], The Navy vs. the Night Monsters etc.). Set "a million years in the future!" in a world where humans supposedly shun technology except for the humanoid robot slaves called "fleshapoids," the beefcake antihero tears into a Clark Bar and then into a bag of Wise potato chips, after finishing his ice-cream cone. Later, to flee with his paramour from the castle of her husband, the prince, they dress him in a football uniform complete with pads and laced pants. Relatively few fetishes involving clothes that can be packed into such a short (and "futuristic") film are overlooked, including a female fleshapoid with gartered stockings; while much of the film is intentionally terrible, some of the shot compositions are actually pretty handsome, even striking, and the spirit of the film is certainly the odd mixture of artistic striving and put-on goofiness that is a somewhat more self-conscious version of what Ed Wood or Phil Tucker were doing before the Kuchars, and what contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and his collaborators and such other no-budget campers as Andy Milligan were attempting (only Milligan seems simply inept in comparison, Warhol unwilling to take nearly anything about such work seriously); John Waters consistently notes how important this film was in molding his esthetic, and certainly such others as Anna Biller almost certainly owe the Kuchars, if not specifically this film, a debt. Ripping off Howard Hanson's music for the soundtrack, behind the narration, is simply good taste, if (probably at least at first) theft.

Here is the film in its entirety, in five parts on YouTube (and looking rather impressively good as a print...I wonder if the video was shot from a 16mm print or better?):

For some reason, part 4 isn't easily found among the links at the end of part 3, so here 'tis (part 5 is easily found in its postlinks):

nostalgia: reproductions I had on my bedroom wall as a youth

2011-11-21T19:46:00.007-05:00

The first three from items purchased at the Hirshorn in a series of visits there in 1978.

FFB: YOU'RE ALL ALONE by Fritz Leiber (also published as THE SINFUL ONES) (and a consideration of other 1950 magazine fantastic-fiction)

2011-11-18T08:15:00.005-05:00

You're All Alone is the second of Fritz Leiber's three (essentially) no-bones-about-it horror novels (all of them also noirish novels of social observation with considerable philosophical underpinning and literary innovation running throughout, as these are Fritz Leiber novels with him working at the top of his form, and this one perhaps necessarily the most noirish of the trio); it, in its apparently original form (though it might've been trimmed down to long-novella wordcount), was first published in Fantastic Adventures magazine for July 1950.

(Very Long Digression: I took a quick spin through the contents of the fantasy/sf/horror-fiction magazines of 1950, after I decided to write about the Leiber, one of a number of fairly to very important novels to be published in the magazines in that year...the year after Street and Smith folded or sold all their fiction magazines except Astounding Science Fiction [and I suspect they kept that one mostly because they wanted to keep its editor around to edit the aviation and technology magazine they kept launching, folding and relaunching in those years to no sustained success], so such major pulp titles as Detective Story, Western Story, Love Story, Doc Savage and The Shadow bit the dust [or at least the pulp-paper confetti, which Kurt Vonnegut compared to dandruff]. Perhaps that contraction of the market, or other factors, not least that nearly all the fantastic-fiction magazines were being edited by reasonably talented to brilliant editors in 1950, meant that every damned magazine extant in the field in that year had some serious bragging rights, from the ridiculously successful Galaxy [in the black financially after three issues, in fact already apparently with the largest circulation in the field, and fiction including Leiber's "Coming Attraction" and Clifford Simak's novel Time and Again, under the magazine's title "Time Quarry," didn't hurt] to the barely-eking-out little magazine Fantasy Book, which offered, in the first of two issues in 1950, a lead story by Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl, stories by (promising] Alfred Coppel and [old hand and star of the 1930s] Stanton Coblentz and [reliable pulpster] Basil Wells and, mixed in the middle there, "Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith. John D. MacDonald had stories all over Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, including the novel Wine of the Dreamers, along with Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Margaret St. Clair and other major and emerging players...Leigh Brackett and Poul Anderson and Bradbury were featured in Planet Stories [of course] and Bradbury and Robert Bloch and St. Clair and Manly Wade Wellman were prominent in Weird Tales [also of course] and those folks were also in the new Avon Fantasy Reader and/or the newer The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in the latter along with some more crime-fiction amphibians such as Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, Miriam Allen de Ford, and Robert Arthur, and this new kid Richard Matheson's first story; an early Matheson story also appeared in Damon Knight's shortlived but impressive 1950 launch Worlds Beyond, despite the stereotype of Knight as a destroyer of Matheson love. L. Ron Hubbard was pretty visible in several magazines, though only Astounding was publishing Dianetics articles by him, while Amazing, now edited by Howard Browne with help from Lila Shaffer and William Hamling, had dumped the comparably enervating "Shaver Mystery" quasi-mystical paranoia fiction--and they moved with former Amazing editor Ray Palmer to his new magazine Other Worlds...but OW also published Gustav Meyrink, Clarke, Bradbury, and others, including the classic Eric Frank Russell (as Richard Moore reminds me) story "Dear Devil". While Amazing remained filled mostly with minor stories, albeit some by Bloch, William McGivern, Simak, and Leiber were better, its companion Fantastic Adventures also featured Theodore Sturgeon's novel The Dreaming Jewels and frequently other more impressive work by Bloch, Simak, McGivern, Philip "William Tenn" Klass and others.

Even the slightest magazines were often readable, and frequently surprising. It's small wonder that the number of titles would briefly but eventually double over the next few years, before the great winnowing by decade's end. And end of digression.)

You're All Alone was originally meant to follow Leiber's first novel Conjure Wife, and such major short fiction as "Smoke Ghost" and his first published sword & sorcery fiction, into the pages of Unknown Fantasy Fiction magazine, but when that magazine folded in 1943, Leiber set the unfinished manuscript aside. It is a delightfully paranoid story, in which the protagonist finds himself dragged out of the clockwork existence he and the vast majority of people are a part of, through an encounter with a terrified and furtive young woman who is trying her best to avoid the murderous gang of other escapees (not Leiber's term) from the automaton existence who are pursuing her. Certainly The Matrix is only the most obvious later elaboration of a similar trope, only there is no conspiracy of evil computers behind the illusory existence here, nor even the kind of Lovecraftian Old Ones the younger Leiber might've been tempted to employ, but instead simply the cold, empty way of the universe...where those who have broken free from going through the motions of life are a very small group, scattered thinly, indeed, and some are very jealous of that freedom (and ability to exploit those still trapped in the clockwork). The rest of the novel involves the man and the woman attempting to come to grips with their status in relation to the grand machine of the universe, and to escape the murderous ones. Some of the setpieces in the story, such as the protagonist's attempt to talk to his wife, who quickly reveals herself to be responding in a conversation he might've been having with her if he hadn't been "pulled out" rather than in the increasingly desperate conversation he is actually having with her, are resonant (the alienation metaphor is deftly employed) and memorable. And, of course, noir fans, not only are the villains out to get our heroes, but (of course) the very nature of the world is, as well.

This short novel had to wait several more years before being accepted for publication in book form, and then the offer came from erotica-oriented Beacon Books (unrelated to the later small press Beacon), who had their editors insert clumsy softcore sex passages and publish it in a "double-novel" as The Sinful Ones with a very forgotten item called Bulls, Blood and Passion. Leiber saw the novella form finally in print from Ace Books in 1972 (in a volume that also included two novelets) and did what he could to rewrite the sexual passages to his taste and republish the longer-form text as The Sinful Ones with Pocket Books in 1980.

While Conjure Wife and his third horror novel Our Lady of Darkness have been reprinted several times, frequently together in an omnibus, You're All Alone has been neglected over the last two decades and more, and that is a pity, given the appeal of its initial conceit and the popularity of similar materials, even when they aren't loosely based on Philip Dick fiction that was probably at least lightly influenced by this. Below, the 1966 issue of Fantastic which reprints "You're All Alone" from its FA appearance.

Also please note the reuse of a certain Victoria Poyser cover painting below (Baen Books, 1986) and above (Carroll & Graf, 1990). For more of today's books, please see organizer Patti Abbott's blog. Next week, I'll be compiling the links to other blogs while Patti is traveling, so please let me know if you have an item, particularly if you are an occasional contributor to Friday's Books...thanks.

one book I'm just finishing, one which just arrived...Jules Feiffer and Walt Kelly-related video added

2011-11-17T16:30:00.001-05:00

The Feiffer is a bit diffident about nearly everything in Feiffer's (very own) life and career; the prose material provided with the strips in the Kelly (including Jimmy Breslin's preface) is not exactly fawning, but certainly helps trace Kelly's not altogether different path (Kelly was a little better at making friends with some of his bosses). Pogo and Sick, Sick, Sick have been my favorite newspaper strips so far...and picking up these books on big discounts didn't hurt my feelings (the memoir from a collapsing Borders, the strip collection on pre-order from Amazon).

You can also see the excellent animated short from Feiffer's work, "Munro", here; and Brian Arnold brought to my attention, at least, the webposting of the disappointing Chuck Jones/Walt Kelly anti-collaboration for television here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links and comment

2011-11-15T23:45:00.003-05:00

Bill Crider: The High and the Mighty

Brian Arnold: FM (1978)

Chuck Esola: Trancers

Dan Stumpf: Mysterious Dr. Satan; The Drums of Fu Manchu

Eric Peterson: The Annihilators

George Kelley: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Iba Dawson: Gaslight (1940)

Ivan G. Shreve: Theodora Goes Wild

Jack Seabrook: "Madame Mystery" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents:): Robert Bloch on TV

James Reasoner: Albuquerque

Jerry House: Danger on the Air

John Charles: The Checkered Flag

Michael Shonk: The Sentimental Agent

Mike Tooney: "Over Fifty? Steal."; “Odd Man In” (Hawaii Five-0 1970, 1971)

Patti Abbott: He and She

Pearce Duncan: Dracula (1992)

Randy Johnson: Massacre (1934)

Ron Scheer: The Quick and the Dead (1987)

Scott Cupp: The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow

Walter Albert: Taxi! (1932)

Yvette Banek: The Adam Dalgliesh Chronicles; The Man from Earth

Related Matters:

Brent McKee: Last Man Standing (2011)

Enfantino & Scoleri: To the Batpoles! (the entire 1960s Greenway/Fox Batman series blog)

Kate Laity: Know-vember: What Films Make You Cry?

Todd Mason: some TV notes: Some of what you might be missing:

With television as atomized as it has ever been, you might not've caught the following (mostly fairly recent) items, and in some cases that's no great loss, but in others...

PBS has one of the rather disappointing ones, in America in Primetime, a series about television, and even more superficial and disappointing than their previous similar series, Pioneers of Television (despite hokey historical re-enactments in the second season, some of the episodes of Pioneers actually had some useful data to them, albeit the sf episode, where I knew the most about the territory they covered, most emphatically didn't; Primetime avoids the goofiness but instead rapidly edits in some of the most superficial interviews a mixed bag of television veterans could be expected to grant for a project such as this, with many of the people discussing sitcoms, for example, insisting that they are about workplace "families"...when, of course, the better ones are nothing of the sort, since workplaces are not familial groupings).

Borgen, which I praised previously here, remains an intelligent and engaging political and personal drama as it continues, and I think will amply reward the time of any viewers who are unafraid of subtitles. After being up for three weeks rather than the promised two, the posting of the first episode is now down, but there is a precis posted to help ease one into episodes two and three which are currently streaming from the Link TV site (Link is also feeding them on weekends in its cable/satcast clearances, and through such affiliate stations as KRCB in the San Francisco Bay area). I particularly enjoy that the fifth episode, still forthcoming on Link, is named in sardonic honor of the real title of the so-called The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo...the episode is called "Men Who Love Women."

We in Philadelphia have recently lost the clearance to MHz Worldview, due to a capricious decision of WYBE (please feel free to write them and ask for its return) to replace that feed with France24, a pleasant but repetitive newschannel, some of whose programming is viewable on Worldview...and RT, the Putinesque similar Russian channel (and they, too, get Worldview clearance for some of their news programs). Around the US, however, Worldview affiliates are continuing to feed the rather good assortment of Italian, German and Swedish crime-drama series as the International Mystery wheel on Sundays and Tuesdays, augmenting that with other film packages, the Italian Mafia series The Octopus (La Piovra), and such occasional specials as this just-announced item: Wallander’s World (26 November, 9pm ET/6pm PT): "Detective Kurt Wallander is one of the most popular figures in modern Scandinavian crime fiction. This program traces the character's development and appeal, through interviews with author Henning Mankell and actor Krister Henriksson, plus the producers who brought his adventures to TV audiences around the world. An MHz Networks original production. Broadcast in English."

And there are a raft of new cable series, many of them on the (extra-)pay or "premium" channels, such as Showtime, which has offered the well-mounted but rather flopping-about Homeland (and why is it that cable series are even more likely to be US remakes of foreign series, such as this one based on an Israeli series, than even the broadcast offerings?). Somewhat less trumpeted is Showtime's new humor series, Dave's Old Porn, in which comedian Dave Attell and guests from the comedy and pornography-production worlds briefly comment on examples of VHS-era (and slightly earlier) skin flicks; I'm fond of Attell's work, his old series Insomniac and his standup, and this series has been amusing (and comically censored enough to allow Showtime to not feel too threatened) so far.

The other pay channels, particularly longtime industry leader thus Cinemax, have had their own adventures in relatively explicit/smutty series go forward, such as (!)Richard Christian Matheson's not entirely witless (but not good) Chemistry, and of course the most popular of these, Starz's Spartacus franchise (from the same production folks who used to bring us Xena, Hercules, and The Legend of the Seeker). Even somewhat less perfervid programming with heavily sexual themes, such as HBO's Hung, can involve mildly surprising talent (in this case Alexander Payne, of such films as Election and Citizen Ruth).

Among the more "prestigious" product the pay stations are offering this year, Starz's Chicago political corruption serial Boss starts off fairly well, but I haven't seen past the pilot yet (and one suspects that a perception of its combination of the appeal of CBS's The Good Wife, still the best dramatic series on US tv, and HBO's Boardwalk Empire, which I'm told is improving, are responsible for this one going forward), and I've also yet to sit through more than a few minutes of the Cinemax espionage/war/explosion drama Strike Back.

I've also been recording, but haven't yet caught, American Horror Story on FX; I did catch the four broadcast episodes of the NBC US version of the BBC comedy Free Agents, the first sitcom fatality of the season; the first two episodes were genuinely amusing, but the mechanical contrivance had already begun to take over by the third, and its quick death probably wasn't too much a pity (far less a pity than the ridiculous censorship BBC America has been putting their run of the original series through, for cable clearance).

I have caught a couple of episodes of Ion's Canadian import Flashpoint, which had a brief run on CBS and is now the only original series on Ion's primetime schedule (otherwise all repeats from other networks or from cable stations); earnest and attempting to be evenhanded, and pleasant viewing, as far as it goes. Pity Ion didn't have the wherewithal to keep Men of a Certain Age, which they also briefly broadcast, in production. Meanwhile, the ridiculously overpraised espionage/soap Pan Am seems likely to be grounded soon, and the fantasy series Once Upon a Time (ABC) and Grimm (NBC) are just dull enough, in my experience of them so far, to be missable.

Far more disturbing real-life family drama comes in the form the short documentary The Marina Experiment, one of the most compelling of the offerings of the (US) Documentary Channel (Canada has a Documentary Channel, as well, with different ownership). And, far cheerier and less likely to be disappointing than the other PBS item mentioned above, Great Performances will for their 27 January episode feature the video made of the recording of Tony Bennett's Duets II album.

Thanks as always to all the contributors and to all you readers this and every week. Please feel free to leave comments at the various blogs...

FFB: NEGLECTED VISIONS edited by Barry N. Malzberg, Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander (Doubleday 1979)

2011-11-11T08:10:00.008-05:00

Neglected Visions is an interesting anthology in several ways, not least in being a fine collection of short fiction, much of it previously uncollected and all of it out of print at time of publication in 1979; also, it was the first collaborative anthology between prolific anthologists (and frequent collaborators) Barry Malzberg and Martin Harry Greenberg (Barry, whom I've quizzed briefly about this book, remembers Joseph Olander's role as being relatively slight, and that Olander was approaching his retirement from work with Greenberg), as well as being a relatively early book in both their compilation careers. Also unusually, Malzberg and Greenberg/Olander take credit for discrete selections here, with Barry putting in the Mark Clifton, Kris Neville, Peter Phillips, Norman Kagan and F.L. Wallace stories, and his collaborators including the Christopher Anvil, Randall Garrett, Robert Abernathy and Wyman Guin items. Along with getting one more story in, Malzberg also provides a general introduction, and the selectors switch off introducing the stories themselves. Malzberg and Greenberg would do something altogether similar again in Uncollected Stars (Avon, 1986), which I briefly reviewed sometime back, with collaborators Piers Anthony and Charles G. Waugh (in that same review I cited Ramsey Campbell's Fine Frights, which shares the Phillips story with this one...the only story among them I'd read before picking up Neglected Visions).

None of these stories are particularly well-known even among most fantasy and sf "insiders" with the possible exception of Randall Garrett's remarkably thoroughly worked-out "The Hunting Lodge" (a breathless adventure of an assassin's attempt to kill one of the nearly-immortal "senators" who have divvied up North America into personal fiefdoms), a work cited by James Blish as well as the editors here as a jewel, sadly rare in the torrent of facile work he produced to order to fill the pages of Astounding Science Fiction in the latter 1950s and early 1960s, when editor John W. Campbell, Jr. seemed to have grown weary of his task, and was often editing on autopilot (Garrett, by himself and in collaboration particularly with Robert Silverberg or Lawrence Janifer and often under pseudonynms, apparently appeared more times in the magazine than any other contributor of fiction). Garrett would actually try again with his frequently impressive Lord D'Arcy stories in the early '60s and onward (among scattered other examples of solid or better work), but old hacking habits died hard. This cover inspired a lot of machismic discomfort in the sf-fan community at the time, inspiring jokes about, ho ho, the model being John Campbell's "wife"...

Big Digression: It's little wonder that along with the winnowing of the flood of digest-sized sf and fantasy magazines that popped up in the early 1950s to augment the pulp titles, with opportunist publishers aware of the success of the new Galaxy (particularly), Fantastic and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the reinvigorated, more mature and briefly more successful than ever Startling Stories and its stablemates, that Earl Kemp's Who Killed Science Fiction? struck such a chord in 1960, as the book publishers were pulling back from their experiments with sf in the early '50s, the potential for ever more mature, well-written and adventurous sf seemed to be disappearing, and as Astounding and Galaxy languished [along with the latter's newly-purchased stablemate, If, treated as a commercial step-sibling] even as they continued to include good and better fiction with the mediocre and worse, F&SF under Robert Mills was the blandest it would be for decades, if still good [Mills had done better at the shortlived companion Venture Science Fiction previously], and Fantastic and Amazing were only beginning to recover from the utterly disinterested editorship of Paul W. Fairman, under his former assistant, the green but adventurous Cele Goldsmith...and all the other magazines in the field were dead by the end of 1960, H.S. Santesson's Fantastic Universe (the last issue had a garish cover and the beginning of a serialization of The Mind Thing by Fredric Brown and stories by Robert Bloch and Jorge Luis Borges; it was a stablemate of the US edition of The Saint Mystery Magazine, which Santesson also began editing in '59, succeeding Sam Merwin, who had edited Startling and would move on to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine) and Robert A. W. Lowndes's Science Fiction (the last title of the Columbia pulp and digest chain, publishers of some of the last crime-fiction and western pulps and the last sports-fiction pulp) being the last stragglers to fold. End of digression, pretty much.

The book begins with a story by retired psychologist Mark Clifton, who turned to sf as a medium for social criticism with vigor, but also (as Malzberg notes) with a keen commercial sense of how to appeal to his primary editor, John Campbell, by writing the kind of stories (about psionic abilities and other ESP-related matters) that JWC was particularly fascinated by in the early to mid 1950s; with "Clerical Error," Clifton was able to strenuously criticize specifically his former profession and the adjoining one of psychiatry, the government cult of classified information, and the tension between actual creative thought and survival in bureaucracy, essentially all matters close to Campbell's heart as well; Barry suspects the rather easy ending was created either in anticipation of Campbell's desire for such, or at his editorial command. The story has not aged badly, as, ridiculously, the degree of these problems hasn't lessened in the slightest since 1956, where it hasn't worsened. Barry has been championing Clifton fairly consistently since the latter 1970s, at least, and has been instrumental in bringing at least some of his work back into print, though the collection (co-edited with Greenberg), The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton (Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), as Barry recalls, sold less than 700 copies--not that SIU Press did much to support it. Clifton's novel with Frank Riley, They'd Rather Be Right, won the second Hugo Award given to a novel, in 1955.

"Christopher Anvil" (Harry Crosby)'s "Mind Partner" is also a story about madness, identity and perception, by another "pet" writer of Campbell's, though perhaps it's notable that this story, which Barry suggests is Anvil's best and it's certainly the best I've read by him, was published in Frederik Pohl's Galaxy instead. This one offers a private investigator trying to help bust an apparent drug ring, who move from mostly well-appointed house to house, but leaving a wake of despondent, psychotic addicts whenever authorities close in but fail to apprehend them. It turns out the pushers can alter perception in remarkably labyrinthine ways, including those of anyone who threatens them; our protagonist goes through a not quite recursive set of experiences as dark (in implication often more than in incident) and as well-told as the best of Philip Dick's similar work, and even though this was not one of Barry's choices, it's certainly akin to Malzberg's work in this mode, as well. Like the Clifton, it has a rather too-neat ending, but remains strange and engaging throughout.

Kris Neville's "Ballenger's People" is the story in the book closest to Malzberg's heart, "the best thing [Neville] has ever written and the best American short story published in its crazy year." as he puts it in the story's headnote; yesterday, he noted in email, "[It] had an enormous influence on my work; I read it at exactly the right time (1967 when published in Galaxy)." It tells the story of a man named Ballenger, whom we discover contains multitudes as well as a pure and abiding love for a percussionist named Angelique and, not irrelevantly, a bone to pick with a Columbia Record Club-style company he had bought his previous love-interest's videotapes from. It is a deft study of not quite functional madness and its affects on those around the madness or treating with their own less obvious sort, akin to both Malzberg's work and Robert Coover's, among others'. And thus, it, too, as is the Garrett which follows, to a great extent another story about identity, perception of identity, and distortion.

"Lost Memory" continues to be a very grim joke, both the title pun and the story as a whole, losing little of its power on rereading, about well-meaning robots doing their best to return an apparently fallen alien machine to mechanical health...while the human within the damaged spaceship they've found does his best to find a way to help them understand his plight. Malzberg notes that he almost chose Phillips's "Dreams are Sacred" over this one, but noted that what made the choice easier was how many writers had echoed "Dreams" over the years, including Barry himself, while "Lost Memory" seemed to serve as the last word on its theme. "Junior," by Robert Abernathy, which follows, is a much lighter sort of conceptual breakthrough comedy, involving a rebellious young male among a society of sentient and hidebound as well as shellbound mollusc-like creatures. It's a bit cute for my taste, but is pleasant and clever enough. It was a Greenberg/Olander choice and Barry also looks upon it fondly.

"Laugh Along with Franz" by Norman Kagan was another important story in Barry's career, inasmuch as it challenged him to consider writing sf professionally, as well as providing the example that the kind of thing he wanted to write could be published in sf media. Rather in the mode of the film of The Graduate, only more imaginatively and earlier, and even moreso in the mode of such satirical writers (at least when in that mood) as Herbert Gold and Herbert Gold and Bruce Jay Friedman or Muriel Spark, only as informed as their fellow-travelers Ray Nelson or (Ms.) Jody Scott (and certainly Malzberg as well) by sf tradition and, of course, by such allied work as Kafka's as well as by the Beat-begetting-Hippie counterculture, the story deals with a young software engineer at IBM (redubbed ICM) coming to some realizations about what really matters in life, and what might just be a tissue of lies, convenient for the powerful.

Wyman Guin, perhaps more exclusively famous (to the extent that he is) for What Is Reality fiction than anyone else in sf, thanks to his once widely-reprinted "Beyond Bedlam" (far superior to Evan Hunter's slightly later drugged society story "Malice in Wonderland," if perhaps missing the snappy ad lines of Huxley's most famous fiction), is instead represented here by a mildly misogynist but otherwise deft fantasy, "My Darling Hecate." Guin didn't quite learn the right lessons from Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife, in this story of an accidental but nonetheless powerful witch, who has remarkable powers she can barely control, when she puts her mind to it. But, again, it plays out rather cleverly, particularly in the manner in which her subconscious plays havoc with the world around her.

I'd just begun the Wallace story, as I write this, the previous night, and while it starts promisingly, with yet another sort of spy or agent making his way through a dangerous city on a world inhabited by amphibian humanoids, I might or might not get to finish it before revising this later today. Barry is almost as enthusiastic about Wallace's work as he is about Clifton's; he sees Wallace's fiction as similar in approach and in reframing the questions we should be asking in science fiction, though Wallace was writing for (the no less demanding, and in both similar and different ways eccentric) H. L. Gold, founding editor of Galaxy, who grew more removed from his editorial work in later '50s less from simply burning out, as Campbell was, than by the weight of failure to achieve his ambitions with his magazine, and the effects of both WW2-induced agoraphobia and pain meds he took, even before an auto-accident during an attempt to go out nearly killed him; this is why Frederik Pohl was apparently editing Galaxy and If in all but title no later than 1960, and gradually doing more and more of the work for some time before that. That Wallace was so strongly associated with Gold's version of the magazine might've been a contributing factor in Wallace leaving sf in the late '50s, not finding Pohl the same sort of editor; as Malzberg notes, Wallace published some mystery novels and then ceased writing fiction.

And I've finally noted, all these stories come from either Campbell's Astounding (before its retitling as Analog in 1960), or from Gold's Galaxy and Beyond, or Pohl's 1960s Galaxy (and Pohl had been pretty deeply involved with Galaxy as a contributor of fiction and literary agent for a lot of the other contributors from nearly its beginning under Gold).

All told, while this book (moreso than the latter Uncollected Stars), has fiction which tends to cluster, as repeatedly noted, around questions of perception and identity, while touching on rather than for the most part dealing directly with other great themes that sf can lend itself to, it's an excellent book to sit and read. And, like the later volume, if not quite to the same extent as the Clifton collection, it was not a commercial success. Like nearly every other book published in the Doubleday Science Fiction imprint, particularly at the production nadir of that line in the late '70s, it's poorly bound (the trade hardcover has a glue binding, not sewn, and in every other way is identical to the probable SF Book Club edition of the time, another arm of Doubleday), given an inept cover (in this case moreso than most even for D-day...just look at it), and, as Barry notes, "Doubleday packaged the book contemptuously and dumped it as they dumped all Doubleday sf. Sales were miserable." The Doubleday Science Fiction imprint depended on library sales for nearly all of its income (and was hardly unique in this in hardcover publishing at the time, or for at least a decade or so beforehand and after), and expected those sales to come to a certain amount whether a given book was good, bad or indifferent; no one in Garden City was going to make much effort to help distinguish any given item published thus. The Asimov books would sell better, and Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology too, or at least sell consistently for longer, but Asimov didn't write much sf any longer, and his sf books from Doubleday were usually about as clumsily-packaged as everyone else's. Everyone else could cry themselves a river. And even as The Simarillion was setting sales records for hardcover fiction, and the Levin/Tryon/Blatty/King/Rice horror blockbuster trend was starting to become impossible to ignore, no one at D-day was going to try to suggest that a Doubleday Fantasy or Doubleday Horror imprint might be a useful, much less a profitable, idea...nah, those books could continue to be "Doubleday Science Fiction" if they were by some writer a D-day staffer had editorially/promotionally decided wrote sf, five or fifteen years previously...hence, for example, the mislabeling thus of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer novels in their original editions. (Wellman's historical fantasy novels, too:)

And, frankly, these stories remain (at least) good reading, though they also remain difficult to find without seeking out this long out-of-print volume or their original magazine appearances...but you could do much worse with much more effort. The story headnotes and the pointers to more work by the assembled alone might be worth the few bucks to pick up a library discard like mine, in decent shape (mine from the Public Library of Des Moines).

And many thanks to Barry Malzberg for letting me pepper him with questions.

upgraded slightly from the Contento index:
Neglected Visions ed. Barry N. Malzberg, Martin H. Greenberg & Joseph D. Olander (Doubleday, 1979, hc) 212pp. Each of the stories is followed by a selective bibliography of the author's other short fiction (and the anthologies and collections where they have been reprinted) and novels.

vii · Introduction · Barry N. Malzberg · in
1 · Clerical Error · Mark Clifton · nv Astounding Feb ’56
35 · Mind Partner · Christopher Anvil · nv Galaxy Aug ’60
65 · Ballenger’s People · Kris Neville · ss Galaxy Apr ’67
77 · The Hunting Lodge · Randall Garrett · nv Astounding Jul ’54
109 · Lost Memory · Peter Phillips · ss Galaxy May ’52
122 · Junior · Robert Abernathy · ss Galaxy Jan ’56
130 · Laugh Along with Franz · Norman Kagan · nv Galaxy Dec ’65
153 · My Darling Hecate · Wyman Guin · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Nov ’53
171 · Delay in Transit · Floyd L. Wallace · na Galaxy Sep ’52

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

Dizzy Gillespie, Dudley Moore, Faith & John Hubley, et al.: "The Hat"; "The Man Who Planted Trees," too...

2011-11-10T17:53:00.000-05:00

Music and dialog improvised by Dizzy Gillespie and Dudley Moore; animation/film supervised by the Hubleys.

And a bonus item, for Richard Robinson..."The Man Who Planted Trees":

The Man Who Planted Trees from Max Urai on Vimeo.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the early links

2011-11-08T08:45:00.017-05:00

Left: The Luis Ortiz biography of the Emshwillers referred to in the Carol Emshwiller interview.

Below: From the publisher's note: Carol Emshwiller's fiction has received an NEA grant and a Pushcart Prize, as well as the Philip K. Dick, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. In 2005 she received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Thanks to all contributors and readers...and I suspect a few more links might be on their way in today...we shall see!

Bill Crider: Mr. Brooks (trailer)

Brian Arnold: comedian John Pinette; Tales of the Tinkerdee

David Schmidt: Curse of the Black Widow

George Kelley: Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

Iba Dawson: Rope

Ivan Shreve: Detective Story (1951)

James Reasoner: The Dakotas

Jerry House: An Interview with Arthur Conan Doyle (1927; early sound newsreel)

John Charles: Reel Injun

Juri Nummelin: The Jericho Mile

Lawrence Person: Frankenstein (1910)

Patti Abbott: Love with a Proper Stranger

Randy Johnson: The films of Herb Jeffries

Ron Scheer: Buchanan Rides Alone

Scott Cupp: The High Crusade

Stacia Jones: The Phantom Creeps (cont'd)

Todd Mason: The International Animation Festival (1977-78) and its components; the short films of Ed Emshwiller and an interview with Carol Emshwiller; from Roy Wheldon's musical setting of Rudy Rucker's novel, Like a Passing River (please see below)

Walter Albert: Michael Shayne, Private Detective (1940)

Yvette Banek: The Adventures of Tartu

Related matters:Brent McKee: The US Commercial TV Status Report

Ed Gorman: The Bride Wore Black

George Kelley: Page Eight; The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael
Patti Abbott: Margin Call

Todd Mason:
MaxiCat was a Yugoslav cartoon character who flourished in a series of shorts for television out of Zagreb in the early 1970s; I first came across the cartoons in the thoroughly enjoyable International Animation Festival, aka the International Festival of Animation series on PBS, hosted by Jean Marsh, in 1977-78 (there were two seasons of 13 episodes each).

Sadly, some of the more clever MaxiCat cartoons aren't posted as yet, but perhaps they still exist somewhere. These two aren't bad examples:

And among the other work the Festival introduced many of us to was Munro, which I highlighted previously, and the 1974 short animation Oscar-winner, "Closed Mondays":

Or such National Film Board of Canada productions as "Hunger":

And the Hubleys' charming "Moonbird"

And what might well be the first animated film:

I'm pretty sure I first saw Ed Emshwiller's pioneering animation "Relativity" on the Festival as well, but alas that film doesn't seem to be up, either. But the also pioneering "Sunstone" is:

And "Thanatopsis":

And this study of landscapes and forms and of his wife, the writer Carol Emshwiller (also the film's title; she served as model for so many of the paintings he signed as "Emsh", such as the right-side-up one at the head of this post):

A brief interview segment, featuring Ed Emshwiller and Morton Subotnick:

Ars Electronica 1988 - Morton Subotnick, Ed Emshwiller from ars history on Vimeo.

And an interview with Carol Emshwiller, on her 90th birthday this year, about her work as a writer (and her Collected Stories) and tangentially about her work with her husband:

And, finally this week, the central song from Roy Wheldon's setting of Rudy Rucker's autobiographical novel All the Visions to music, the song "Like a Passing River" (featuring lyrics translated by Gary Snyder from the poet Han Shan):

FFB: THE WESTERN HALL OF FAME and THE MYSTERY HALL OF FAME ed. Bill Pronzini, MH Greenberg (& Chas. Waugh), HIGH GEAR ed. Evan Jones

2011-11-04T10:30:00.007-04:00

Some quick takes this week, but nonetheless some important books, the first one at least to me.
The first edition.

High Gear was the first anthology of sports fiction I read, as a kid; my father was a (mostly) amateur auto-racing driver (mostly sports cars, both track and auto-cross racing--the latter long-term road-racing, sometimes with my mother as navigator) in Alaska in the early and mid 1960s, and the Bantam Pathfinder edition of this anthology presumably caught his eye at the racks or someone else's eye who thought it would be a good gift. Certainly it was to me...it was my first encounter with the fiction of William Campbell Gault, William F. Nolan, John D. MacDonald, William Saroyan (beating out first exposure to My Name is Aram by a year or two), war-correspondent legend Bill Mauldin and some guy named Steinbeck; it wasn't my first experience with Thurber, but close, as well as with such sports-fiction specialists (along with Gault) as Ken Purdy and Henry Gregor Felsen. I don't know anything about this Evan Jones (there seem to be, possibly, several active in the literary world in the last century) except that he also seems to have edited some western and otherwise frontier-oriented anthologies...and that he had excellent taste as an editor here.

(High Gear and The Western Hall of Fame contents courtesy the Contento indices)
High Gear ed. Evan Jones (Bantam Pathfinder EP32, Jul ’63, 45¢, 184pp, pb); Reissue (original: Bantam, Mar ’55).

1 · First Skirmish · Henry Gregor Felsen · ss, 1954
16 · Change of Plan · Ken Purdy · ss Atlantic Monthly Sep ’52
23 · Dirt-Track Thunder · William Campbell Gault · ss Argosy, 1946
38 · The Ragged Edge · William F. Nolan · ss Sports Car Journal, 1957
52 · The Affair of the Wayward Jeep · Bill Mauldin · ss The Saturday Evening Post Jun 27 ’53
68 · Elimination Race · John D. MacDonald · ss Colliers Sep 13 ’52
83 · Smashup · James Thurber · ss New Yorker Oct 5 ’35
89 · Head-On · Robert Switzer · ss Esquire Feb ’53
94 · Hearse of the Speedway · Peter Granger · ss Esquire, 1936
105 · 1924 Cadillac for Sale · William Saroyan · ss, 1948
110 · Money on Morgan · Robert Westerby · ss Esquire, 1938
117 · The $20,000,000 Decision · Cameron Hawley · ss Colliers Jan 22 ’54
136 · Throttle Shy · Frank Harvey · ss Argosy Sep ’52
150 · The Phantom Flivver · Frank Luther Mott · ss The Saturday Evening Post Jan 28 ’50
161 · A Model T Named “It” · John Steinbeck · ss Ford Times Jul ’53
165 · The Magnificent Torpedo · Dean Evans · ss Argosy Oct ’51
178 · Flags in Castelfiorentino · Francis Steegmuller · ss New Yorker, 1951

A rather blurry image of the Pathfinder reprint edition my father had, which he's given to me.

The Western Hall of Fame ed. Bill Pronzini & Martin H. Greenberg (William Morrow and Co. 0-688-02220-0, 1984, $17.95, 376pp, hc, cover by Terry Fehr) [Western]

5 · Introduction · Bill Pronzini & Martin H. Greenberg · in
11 · The Blue Hotel · Stephen Crane · nv Colliers Nov 26, 1898
45 · The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County · Mark Twain · ss, 1867
53 · The Outcasts of Poker Flat · Bret Harte · ss Overland Monthly Jan, 1869
67 · An Afternoon Miracle · O. Henry · ss Everybody’s Magazine Jul ’02
81 · Tappan’s Burro · Zane Grey · nv Ladies Home Journal Jun ’23
131 · Wine on the Desert · Max Brand · ss This Week Jun 7 ’36
141 · Stage to Lordsburg · Ernest Haycox · ss Colliers Apr 10 ’37
159 · A Day in Town · Ernest Haycox · ss Colliers Jan 1 ’38
177 · The Indian Well · Walter Van Tilburg Clark · ss, 1943
197 · A Man Called Horse · Dorothy M. Johnson · ss Colliers Jan 7 ’50
215 · Outlaw Trail · S. Omar Barker · ss The Saturday Evening Post Jan 3 ’59
231 · Blood on the Sun · Thomas Thompson · ss The American Magazine Jun ’54
249 · Stubby Pringle’s Christmas · Jack Schaefer · ss (YA chapbook, Houghton Mifflin, 1964)
265 · The Winter of His Life · Lewis B. Patten · ss The Colorado Quarterly, 1953
275 · Isley’s Stranger · Clay Fisher · ss (Legends and Tales of the Old West, edited by S. Omar Barker for WWA, Doubleday 1962)
309 · Lost Sister · Dorothy M. Johnson · ss Colliers Mar 30 ’56
323 · Paso Por Aqui · Eugene Manlove Rhodes · nv The Saturday Evening Post Feb 20 ’26 (+1)

What's notable to me in this anthology, with its stories chosen by polling the members of the Western Writers of America, with a simplified Australian ballot (essentially, please name your choice for best western short story ever, and your four or so [more if you like] other suggestions for the anthology) is in who isn't in the book...such younger writers as Joe Lansdale and Loren Estleman were still establishing themselves in 1983-84, but the absence of the Els--Elmer Kelton and Elmore Leonard--seems a bit odd, though perhaps their stars have risen among their peers in the last quarter-century. (Old favorite of mine Shirley/Lee Hoffman barely wrote any short fiction in the western field, pretty much going straight into the novels with The Valdez Horses and her first-novel Spur; rather comparable to Samuel Delany's entry into the sf scene.) Also, and even more surprising to me, is that not a damned one of these stories was first published in a western-fiction magazine, pulp, digest or otherwise, though the "Clay Fisher" story was apparently first published in the "1962 Doubleday WWA anthology," as the Spur Awards page on the WWA site puts it (not bothering to name the anthology!--though Pronzini and Greenberg fail to do so, as well, in the copyrights detail page). I've just received this book, so haven't yet had the opportunity to go through it...though it does look inviting, save the Zane Grey story (which, I'm amused to note, was first published in The Ladies Home Journal...given the machismic anxiety of some western readers, I'm sure that datum wouldn't help, but of course Grey, in the manner of Stephen King, wrote badly enough on a regular basis to transcend the usual audiences for his kind of fiction at the time...and perhaps, as I occasionally am with King, I'll be pleasantly surprised by this novella).

(courtesy WorldCat)
The Mystery Hall of Fame.
New York : Morrow, 1984
edited by Bill Pronzini; Martin Harry Greenberg; Charles Waugh; from polling of the Mystery Writers of America.
467 pp. ; 22 cm.

Contents: The purloined letter / Edgar Allen Poe --
The adventure of the speckled band / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle --
The oracle of the dog / G.K. Chesterton --
The monkey's paw / W.W. Jacobs --
The problem of cell 13 / Jacques Futrelle --
The hands of Mr. Ottermole / Thomas Burke --
The two bottles of relish / Lord Dunsany --
The gutting of Couffignal / Dashiell Hammett --
Accident / Agatha Christie --
Red wind / Raymond Chandler --
Rear window / Cornell Woolrich --
The house in Goblin Wood / John Dickson Carr --
Don't look behind you / Fredric Brown --
The nine mile walk / Harry Kemelman --
The specialty of the house / Stanley Ellin --
Love lies bleeding / Philip MacDonald --
Lamb to the slaughter / Roald Dahl --
No parking / Ellery Queen --
The oblong room / Edward D. Hoch --
Sweet fever / Bill Pronzini.

Now, this selection seems less surprising, though to find Kemelman muscling past the likes of Ross Macdonald, or John D. McD for that matter, seems not so much a gross injustice as a product of the time of the polling. However, as wonderful a story as W. W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" is, it has essentially no business being in this book...as opposed to the Silverberg and Greenberg The Horror Hall of Fame. The Pronzini was polled in, and published here over Pronzini's objection (a jusst case of modesty overruled). There is perhaps one too many classic stories here of murder and eating the evidence, but the gimmick was pretty irresistible, and the stories are indeed classics (though John Collier's "A Touch of Nutmeg Makes It" might still be the most insidious of this class among the early stars). (Also notable to me is the number of typos in some WorldCat listings...fixed above...) Another recent purchase (simultaneous, actually), but I've read more of the selections above before, and don't actively dislike the work of any of the writers collected here, so expect to have a more familiar good time going through this one.

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

And, a late bulletin: it seems that, even as Robert Silverberg has edited or co-edited two poll-driven Fantasy Hall of Fame volumes, that Dale Walker (again with the WWA polled? Yes, as it turns out) produced a 1997 Western Hall of Fame (index from Contento):

The Western Hall of Fame Anthology ed. Dale L. Walker (Berkley 0-425-15906-X, Dec ’97, $5.99, 268pp, pb) [Western]

vii · Introduction · Dale L. Walker · in
xi · Author Notes · Dale L. Walker · ss
1 · The Defense of Sentinel · Louis L’Amour · ss 5 Western Novels Magazine Oct ’52
11 · Gun Job · Thomas Thompson · ss Colliers Feb 28 ’53
33 · The Luck of Roaring Camp · Bret Harte · ss Overland Monthly Aug, 1868
45 · The Blue Hotel · Stephen Crane · nv Colliers Nov 26, 1898
77 · To Build a Fire · Jack London · ss The Youth’s Companion May 29 ’02
95 · The Burial of Letty Strayhorn · Elmer Kelton · ss New Trails, ed. John Jakes and Martin H. Greenberg, Doubleday, 1994
109 · Hell on the Draw · Loren D. Estleman · ss The New Frontier, ed. Joe R. Lansdale, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1989
125 · A Horse for Mrs. Custer · Glendon Swarthout · ss
145 · The Face · Ed Gorman · ss The Best Western Stories of Ed Gorman, Swallow Press, 1992
159 · Candles in the Bottom of the Pool · Max Evans · ss, 1973
189 · The Shaming of Broken Horn · Bill Gulick · ss The Saturday Evening Post Feb 13 ’60
207 · No Room at the Inn [Sabrina Carpenter; John Quincannon] · Bill Pronzini · ss Crime at Christmas, ed. Jack Adrian, Equation, 1988
221 · Geranium House · Peggy Simson Curry · ss Frontiers West, ed. S. Omar Barker, Doubleday, 1959
233 · Three-Ten to Yuma · Elmore Leonard · ss Dime Western Magazine Mar ’53
249 · The Tin Star · John M. Cunningham · ss Colliers Dec 6 ’47
267 · Permissions · Dale L. Walker · ms

--that certainly redresses some of the slights of the first set...while adding some more! At least this one (and the second Silverberg) could've been, as the SFWA sf HOF volumes were, tagged Volume 2...

...and, for the hell of it, here's the comparison of the two Fantasy Hall of Fames, the first from a World Fantasy Convention attendees poll, the second from a SFWA poll a decade and a half later:

The Fantasy Hall of Fame ed. Robert Silverberg & Martin H. Greenberg (Arbor House 0-87795-521-2, Oct ’83, $16.95, 431pp, hc)

9 · Introduction · Robert Silverberg · in
13 · The Masque of the Red Death · Edgar Allan Poe · ss Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine May, 1842
21 · An Inhabitant of Carcosa · Ambrose Bierce · ss San Francisco Newsletter Dec 25, 1886
26 · The Sword of Welleran · Lord Dunsany · ss The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories, London: G. Allen, 1908
42 · The Women of the Wood [earlier version of “The Woman of the Wood”, Weird Tales Aug ’26] · A. Merritt · nv The Fox Woman & Other Stories, Avon, 1949
76 · The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan · Clark Ashton Smith · ss Weird Tales Jun ’32
86 · The Valley of the Worm [James Allison (past lives of)] · Robert E. Howard · nv Weird Tales Feb ’34
110 · Black God’s Kiss [Jirel of Joiry] · C. L. Moore · nv Weird Tales Oct ’34
143 · The Silver Key [Randolph Carter] · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Weird Tales Jan ’29
157 · Nothing in the Rules · L. Sprague de Camp · nv Unknown Jul ’39
191 · A Gnome There Was · Henry Kuttner · nv Unknown Oct ’41
221 · Snulbug · Anthony Boucher · ss Unknown Dec ’41; F&SF May ’53
239 · The Words of Guru [as by Kenneth Falconer] · C. M. Kornbluth · ss Stirring Science Stories Jun ’41
248 · Homecoming · Ray Bradbury · ss Mademoiselle Oct ’46
263 · Mazirian the Magician [Dying Earth] · Jack Vance · ss The Dying Earth, Hillman, 1950
282 · O Ugly Bird! [John] · Manly Wade Wellman · ss F&SF Dec ’51
296 · The Silken-Swift · Theodore Sturgeon · nv F&SF Nov ’53
318 · The Golem · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF Mar ’55
325 · That Hell-Bound Train · Robert Bloch · ss F&SF Sep ’58
341 · Kings in Darkness [Elric] · Michael Moorcock · nv Science-Fantasy #54 ’62
375 · Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes · Harlan Ellison · nv Knight May ’67
399 · Gonna Roll the Bones · Fritz Leiber · nv Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967
424 · The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas · Ursula K. Le Guin · ss New Dimensions 3, ed. Robert Silverberg, Nelson Doubleday, 1973

The Fantasy Hall of Fame ed. Robert Silverberg (HarperPrism 0-06-105215-9, Mar ’98 [Feb ’98], $14.00, 562pp, tp) Anthology of 30 fantasy stories from 1939 to 1990, chosen by SFWA members. Introduction by Silverberg; individual story introductions by Martin H. Greenberg.

vii · Introduction · Robert Silverberg · in
1 · Trouble with Water · H. L. Gold · ss Unknown Mar ’39
21 · Nothing in the Rules · L. Sprague de Camp · nv Unknown Jul ’39
47 · Fruit of Knowledge · C. L. Moore · nv Unknown Oct ’40
77 · Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius [1941] · Jorge Luís Borges · ss Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962
91 · The Compleat Werewolf [Fergus O’Breen] · Anthony Boucher · na Unknown Apr ’42
137 · The Small Assassin · Ray Bradbury · ss Dime Mystery Magazine Nov ’46
153 · The Lottery · Shirley Jackson · ss New Yorker Jun 26 ’48
161 · Our Fair City · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Weird Tales Jan ’49
177 · There Shall Be No Darkness · James Blish · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr ’50
211 · The Loom of Darkness [“Liane the Wayfarer”; Dying Earth] · Jack Vance · ss The Dying Earth, Hillman, 1950
221 · The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles [as by Idris Seabright] · Margaret St. Clair · ss F&SF Oct ’51
225 · The Silken-Swift · Theodore Sturgeon · nv F&SF Nov ’53
243 · The Golem · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF Mar ’55
249 · Operation Afreet [Steven Matuchek; Ginny Greylock] · Poul Anderson · nv F&SF Sep ’56
277 · That Hell-Bound Train · Robert Bloch · ss F&SF Sep ’58
289 · Bazaar of the Bizarre [Fafhrd & Gray Mouser] · Fritz Leiber · nv Fantastic Aug ’63
311 · Come Lady Death · Peter S. Beagle · ss Atlantic Monthly Sep ’63
327 · The Drowned Giant · J. G. Ballard · ss The Terminal Beach, London: Gollancz, 1964
337 · Narrow Valley · R. A. Lafferty · ss F&SF Sep ’66
349 · Faith of Our Fathers · Philip K. Dick · nv Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967
379 · The Ghost of a Model T · Clifford D. Simak · nv Epoch, ed. Roger Elwood & Robert Silverberg, Berkley, 1975
393 · The Demoness · Tanith Lee · ss The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories #2, ed. Lin Carter, DAW, 1976
405 · Jeffty Is Five · Harlan Ellison · ss F&SF Jul ’77
423 · The Detective of Dreams · Gene Wolfe · nv Dark Forces, ed. Kirby McCauley, Viking, 1980
439 · Unicorn Variations · Roger Zelazny · nv IASFM Apr 13 ’81
461 · Basileus · Robert Silverberg · ss The Best of Omni Science Fiction, No. 5, ed. Don Myrus, Omni, 1983
477 · The Jaguar Hunter · Lucius Shepard · nv F&SF May ’85
501 · Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight · Ursula K. Le Guin · nv Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Capra Press, 1987
527 · Bears Discover Fire · Terry Bisson · ss IASFM Aug ’90
537 · Tower of Babylon · Ted Chiang · nv Omni Nov ’90

Two covers that leave much to be desired...the newer book's being a bit less dire...

anthologies from fiction magazines...

2011-11-03T21:07:00.024-04:00

collects stories from Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories

Almost five years of blogging here, almost 400 posts, almost 60K pageviews since May 2009 (for some reason, that's when Blogger started tallying). So, here's a post that will just grow, I suspect...

Fiction magazines that have had anthologies abstracted from them:

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
Amazing (aka Amazing Stories aka Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories...)
Analog (aka Astounding Stories of Super-Science aka Astounding Science Fiction...)
Antioch Review
Argosy

Beat to a Pulp
Beyond
Black Mask
Botteghe Oscure

Clean Sheets
Cricket Magazine

Dime Detective
Doc Savage

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Elysian Fields Quarterly
Event Horizon
Evergreen Review

Famous Fantastic Mysteries
Fantastic
Fantastic Novels
Fantastic Universe

Galaxy

If (aka If: Worlds of Science Fiction; aka Worlds of If)

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (aka The Magazine of Fantasy)
Manhunt

New Worlds
The Noble Savage

Omni/Omni Online
Ontario Review

The Paris Review
Partisan Review
Planet Stories
Playboy

The Saint Mystery Magazine
The Saturday Evening Post
Sci-Fiction
The Shadow
The Smart Set
Space Squid
Startling Stories
The Strand Magazine
Strange Tales
Super-Science Stories

Tin House
Thrilling Wonder Stories
TriQuarterly

Unknown Fantasy Fiction (aka Unknown Worlds)

Weird Tales
West
Whispers

Yellow Silk

Zoetrope All-Story

Tuesday's Overlooked Film and/or Other A/V: a few more links (and some text) added...

2011-11-01T19:45:00.002-04:00

Thanks, as always, to all contributors and readers...and hope you've had a fine Hallowe'en (and All Saints Day), so far!

Bill Crider: 3 Godfathers (trailer)

Brian Arnold: The Pogo Special Birthday Special; The Devil and Daniel Mouse

Chuck Esola: Trick or Treat (1986)

Dan Stumpf: Transatlantic

Ed Gorman: The Seventh Victim

Eric Peterson: Keys to Tulsa

Evan Lewis: Three Little Pigskins

Iba Dawson: Whip It!

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

Jackie Kashian: The Comedy Bureau: Morning Debriefing

James Reasoner: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

Jerry House: "Ricky the Drummer" (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet)

John Charles: You Will Die at Midnight (aka Morirai a mezzanotte)

Kliph Nesteroff: The Schleppers: Stale Gags & Stale Food in Mid-Century Manhattan (courtesy Jackie Kashian and Marc Maron)

Patrice and Joe Green: "Burning Man 2011"

Patti Abbott: The Girl with Green Eyes

Randy Johnson: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold

Ron Scheer: Go West (1925)

Scott Cupp: The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini

Stacia Jones: "Jenifer"; "Pelts" (Masters of Horror)

Todd Mason: Borgen (aka Government [literally "Castle"]); The Big Broadcast Hallowe'en Special (classic radio drama)--please see below...

Yvette Banek: Holiday (1938)

Related Matters:

B.V. Lawson: Media Murder

Brent McKee: Man Up; Charlie's Angels (2011)

Elizabeth Foxwell's The Bunburyist

Frederik Pohl: The NASA Conference on Speculative Technology

George Kelley: Margin Call

John Charles: Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide

Stacia Jones: November Films to Watch For (on cable)

Borgen is, as US carriage station Link TV (visible mostly on cable and particularly satellite services, but cleared overnights on KRCB in the San Francisco Bay Area and some other broadcast sources) is quick to note, from the same producers as the original, Danish version of The Killing (a US version is seen on cable station AMC). I haven't watched either version of The Killing yet, but Link is also rather happy to compare Borgen to The West Wing, but to judge by the first episode, the Danish series is far less about cutesy wish-fulfillment than the Sorkin thing was, and is more comparable in most ways to The Good Wife, only without the criminal court matters to inject the more melodramatic notes. Instead, some reasonably well-prepared-for quick tragedies and problems (sudden death, drug abuse, complex sexual and romantic matters) intrude instead, in what is mostly the account of Birgitte Nyborg, the head of the posited Moderate Party (rather comparable to the actual Radical Party of Denmark; all the parties are somewhat renamed here, so that the Danish Social Democrats become the "Labor Party" in the series, and Venstre, the Danish liberal party, becomes the "Liberal Party"), and how she is, in public approval, catapulted ahead of the leaders of the Liberal and Labor parties by her "Gary Hart moment" during the last televised debate before a parliamentary election (as the expected winners have their own Mondale-Glenn-style spat). The pilot episode is witty, reasonably well-worked out (even with the melodramatic flourishes mentioned above), and bodes well for the rest of the series...for the majority of, at least, the US that can't see Link TV (most visible on Dish Network and DirecTV), Link is posting the episodes for two weeks after their debut on their website. If you enjoy politically-engaged drama that involves well-developed characters, who are quite aware of how the professionalism of their work in politics, television news, or public relations is often the most corrupt aspect of that work, you should definitely give this well-captioned series a shot (and since it does involve Danes, they occasionally speak in English, as well, sometimes for half a sentence, sometimes at length).

WAMU-FM (in DC) has been broadcasting the umbrella program of radio drama and variety The Big Broadcast since the early '60s, when some of the programs it plays regularly had just gone off the air (CBS wrapped up their last two regular dramatic series in 1962, and would try again in 1973, with the CBS Radio Mystery Theater). At this point, The Big Broadcast has settled on some recurring favorites for Hallowe'en week, for the 2.5 hours which follow the usual first 90 minutes devoted to their usual offer of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Dragnet and Gunsmoke at the top of the package...and they took the opportunity to run among the grimmest and most graphic of the Dragnet and Gunsmoke episodes (for that matter, host Ed Walker seems almost apologetic at times for running a horror-themed special package at all).

Here's the rundown:
The Big Broadcast: October 30, 2011

7:00 p.m. Johnny Dollar
11/27/60 #716 The Empty Threat Matter (CBS) (21:18)

7:23 p.m. "The Chicken Heart" from Arch Oboler's Drop Dead album

07:30 p.m. Dragnet
09/24/49 #17 The Brick Bat Slayer (NBC) (29:30)

08:00 p.m. Gunsmoke
02/21/53 #44 The Meshougah (Sus.) (CBS) (29:46)

08:30 p.m. Suspense
12/05/46 The House in Cypress Canyon w/Robert Taylor (Roma Wines) (CBS) (29:50)

09:00 p.m. Escape
11/05/47 #013 Evening Primrose (Sus.) (CBS) (29:30)

09:30 p.m. Quiet Please
08/09/48 The Thing on the Fourble Board (Sus.) (MBS) (24:30)

10:00 p.m. Mercury Theater on the Air
10/30/38 #17 War of the Worlds (Sus.) (CBS) (59:34)

--The adaptation of the John Collier story for Escape isn't exactly subtle, but it is vigorous. If you've missed any of these over the years, you can always pick and choose with your audio playback device among them...but they're all at least pretty good, and the Quiet Please certainly deserves its classic status (the Gunsmoke nearly as good). You have a little less than a week, till Sunday night ET, to listen to these on the archived link given above...and, as noted, not quite two weeks from now to catch Borgen's pilot online (it's available on DVD, but I'm not sure yet if it's a Region 0, as much as that usually means now). TM

among the best stories I first encountered in K-12 textbooks:

2011-10-31T01:36:00.020-04:00

My 6th grade Scott, Foresman reading text

It saddens me to report that not a one of these below was actually assigned or read, as far as I know, by anyone in the classes but me, even when the text was in use in a classroom...though, for example, Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" was so employed, from the 7th grade text referred to below. More guidelines for our teacher to use the Bradbury, I suspect. And, of course, she recognized that name.

"Desertion" by Clifford Simak...a Scott, Foresman 7th-grade reading text

"Brightside Crossing" by Alan Nourse...the same text

The Door in the Wall, a novella by Marguerite de Angeli, which won the 1950 Newbery Award, found in a paperback text anthology on sale at a W.T. Grant's for 33.3c ca. 1974

"The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse" by William Saroyan (the first chapter of My Name is Aram), which I first read in a slightly battered copy of a junior-high-school reading text when I was about ten or so.

A basketball novel by William Campbell Gault (probably not Showboat in the Back Court, but an earlier one), which was the final work in a eighth-grade text for slow readers (part of the Scott, Foresman Open Highways series, if I remember correctly) that I read when I was in fifth grade (having read a few of Gault's sports-pulp short stories in various auto-racing and other sports-fiction anthologies)

"The Joker's Greatest Triumph" by Donald Barthelme, in an American literature text from 11th grade...almost certainly also a Scott, Foresman...(we did read, in class, Arthur Miller's All My Sons from that text...)

"Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos" by Jorge Luis Borges, in Imaginacion y fantasia edited by Donald Yates and John Dalbor, a literature text for Anglophone Spanish language students I picked up as a remainder somewhere ca. 1979 (certainly not the first Borges I read, but the first Borges in the original...was even able to read it to my AP Spanish class with apparently reasonably good comprehension on my fellow-students' part)

and, cheating a bit by citing classroom-use magazines rather than texts:
"Test" by Ted Thomas, reprinted in an issue of Read, the Xerox Educational Services magazine, ca. 1976

"The Battle of Chickamauga" by Ambrose Bierce, reprinted in either Scholastic Scope or Literary Cavalcade, the Scholastic Magazines publications, ca. 1976

Read through its ages...

in 1962

in 1971, looking much as I remember it

in 2011

The 1950s textbooks I would occasionally collect often seemed rather exotic. Certainly exuberant and expensively-produced. Earlier similar items often seemed very drab in comparison.

A selection of Mike Hinge digest-sized magazine covers (and a few other items):

2011-10-28T23:47:00.022-04:00

Close inspection will give evidence of some pretty impressive literary contribution to these issues, as well. Mike Hinge, Rest in Glory.

Phoebe and Jack Gaughan: two digest-sized magazine covers

2011-10-28T23:26:00.004-04:00

Two striking covers I'd not seen before today, one definitely a collaboration between Phoebe and Jack Gaughan, the latter the overworked staff artist for the Galaxy group of fiction magazines in their early years as properties of UPD, Universal Publishing and Distributing, best known for erotica publishing but moving into less "shady" lines such as Tandem and Award at the turn of the 1970s...while, shall we put it, not really keeping the accounting books too well.

But Mr. Gaughan did some brilliant work for them, which I've highlighted here before, but I wasn't aware of Ms. Gaughan's work...but, then, I haven't yet taken the opportunity to read my recently-purchased copy of Luis Ortiz's biography and collection of images, Outermost.