Joanna Russ: a speech from Philadelphia, 1969

Dirty Wordies, or, The Fiendish Thingie transcribed to the web from the NYC-based fanzine Luna Monthly, a special issue? tagged Luna Prime (or so I suspect).

Russ on free-speech matters, and definitely worth the look.

Yet More links: Tuesday's into Wednesday's! Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: 7-8 June

At least two reviews that should've been here yesterday were not... (Not counting my still-delayed review of clever, flawed Canadian sf films, now finally added.) So, apologies to Michael Shonk and Eric Peterson, and you kind readers, for patience. And thanks to all for participating and/or checking in...and Juri Nummelin adds an archived review, below.


Bill Crider: On Guard (aka Le bossu) (1997)

Chuck Esola: Vice Squad (1982)

Eric Peterson: Shame (1987)

Evan Lewis: "Popeye the Sailor"

Iba Dawson: The Wings of a Dove

James Reasoner: Gun the Man Down

Jerry House: The Last Man on Earth (with short subjects on frankfurters/hot dogs/wieners)

Juri Nummelin: The First Charge of Machete (aka La primera carga al machete) (a Juri classic!)

Michael Shonk: The Cases of Eddie Drake (Part 1) (and Part 2 about the confusing history of this early tv series)

Patti Abbott: Birdy

Randy Johnson: The Case of the Howling Dog

Scott Cupp: Dinosaurus!

Steve Lewis: The Panther's Claw and Storm in a Teacup

Tise Vahimagi: Prime Time Suspects 3.0 and 3.1

Todd Mason: Last Night (1998) and Xchange (2000)

Walter Albert: Modern Love and Cinevent 45

Yvette Banek: Diva , The Man Who Never Was (1956), and The War of the Worlds (1953)

Related matters:
George Kelley: Covert Affairs

Jackie Kashian: The summer's comic-book films

Marc Edward Heuck: For Sandra Bernhard's birthday

Megan Abbott: Films for pre-adolescent girls

delayed Tuesday's Overlooked Films: LAST NIGHT (1998) and XCHANGE (2000)

...for the list of all this week's titles and links, please see here.


or...the utterly pleasant upper mid-range of Canadian sf films.


(above: Bussières and Baldwin; at right, Oh and McKellar)









Last Night details the last night of the Earth's existence, or at least apparently the last day/night of life on Earth...scriptwriter/director/star Don McKellar keeps the exact nature of the apocalypse vague, aside from lingering shots of a bright Sun in the sky, and so one is allowed to wonder if the Sun is becoming a red giant, or somehow expected to go nova (though the latter wouldn't explain the midnight sun in Toronto), set to destroy the Earth's surface, at least, precisely at midnight Toronto time. This ambiguity, meant to further the metaphorical strength of the film, can be distracting...but in the film, the characters all know, and have known for some time, that The End is nigh, and promptly at 11p Central Time, 9 Pacific (12:30a Newfoundland). Xchange has a very derivative premise, involving personalities being temporarily switched from body to body via a popular if expensive commercial process, and then does a reasonably good job of working up a corporate terrorism plot around it. Both are well-performed by largely Canadian casts, with medium to small budgets, and both have nice touches and are clever and engaging enough to be worth seeing.

The Toronto-dwellers and suburbanites we meet in Last Night are for the most part not frantic in the face of doom...very little of the stylized savagery of most post-apocalyptic films is on display here, perhaps in part because everyone's aware that there will be no survivors, no matter how rugged. Most people are either having last extended parties, or doing or trying to do the things they've always hoped to do, such as Geneviève Bujold's piano instructor having trysts with as many of her former students as have likewise fantasized about that and who have sought her out, before settling in to hear a final recital by another former student. Others, such as David Cronenberg's electric company manager, attempt to go about their regular business as much as they can under the circumstances, fulfilling their responsibilities a last time. Sandra Oh, as the Cronenberg character's wife, gives what might be her best and most moving performance, as one of the few who visibly cannot reconcile with the end of everything and the injustice being visited upon everyone. Even where some of the dramatic business of the climax seems to go a little over the top, Oh's performance as a desperate, terrified, but essentially sane and loving person helps to make this modest film art; she's not alone in elevating the proceedings, but I suspect most people who remember the film remember Oh and McKellar's final scenes best.

Xchange, written apparently by neophyte writers (who had presumably read their Robert Sheckley and John Varley, among many others) and directed by Allan Moyle, a man with good and witty but not too much commercially robust work on his resume (I'm fond of Pump Up the Volume), has some cheesy and obvious aspects to it, but nevertheless it moves, with Stephen Baldwin (the least talented of the Baldwin clan) used well and such fine Canadian talent as Pascale Bussières and Janet Kidder helping smooth over the more purple passages...as a man (Kim Coates, more recently seen in Sons of Anarchy), using for business purposes the body-switching technology available to his class of executive, finds himself stranded in a commercial clone, and needing desperately to return to his original body before a rejection process inherent in the body-swapping technology plays out; unfortunately for him, his body is being used by a very connected conspirator in a corporate and political power-play, so that he has no one to turn to for help but an ex-womanfriend and, less reliably but crucially, a recreational sex-partner of some years previous who has some useful connections of her own. Meanwhile, the conspirators are trying hard to wipe him out, unwilling to simply let his time run out in the cloned body...among the methods they employ is a rather clever conception of a very personal drone aircraft with a very specifically targeted small-explosive missile as its cargo. Along with the performances (including Kyle MacLachlan as the Other Token Yank in the cast, playing the body-stealer in his original form), Moyle's direction and the camera work and editing are deft, keeping the film engaging and fun to watch even when the relatively low budget shows through...and there are nice touches throughout, little bits of realism that crop up even in the midst of the more outre events, and some effectively pointed satire.

FFB: THE SECRET SONGS by Fritz Leiber (1968)

Contents, courtesy ISFDb:

Contents (view Concise Listing)

Smoke Ghost • (1941) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee • [Simon Grue] • (1958) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Mariana • (1960) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Coming Attraction • (1950) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
A Pail of Air • (1951) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
The Moon Is Green • (1952) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
No Great Magic • [Change War] • (1963) • novella by Fritz Leiber
The Secret Songs • (1962) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
The Girl with the Hungry Eyes • (1949) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
The Winter Flies • (1967) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity • (1962) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Introduction (The Secret Songs) • (1968) • essay by Judith Merril

Contents, courtesy the William Contento Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections:

The Secret Songs Fritz Leiber (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968, 25/-, 229pp, hc); Also in pb (Panther 1975).

· Introduction · in
· The Winter Flies [“The Inner Circles”] · ss F&SF Oct ’67
· The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity · ss F&SF Mar ’62
· Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-Tah-Tee [Simon Grue] · ss F&SF May ’58
· Mariana · ss Fantastic Feb ’60
· Coming Attraction · ss Galaxy Nov ’50
· The Moon Is Green · ss Galaxy Apr ’52
· A Pail of Air · ss Galaxy Dec ’51
· Smoke Ghost · ss Unknown Oct ’41
· The Girl with the Hungry Eyes · ss The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, ed. Donald A. Wollheim, Avon, 1949
· No Great Magic [Change War] · na Galaxy Dec ’63
· The Secret Songs · ss F&SF Aug ’62

Apparently, what we have here is the index to the Hart-Davis hardcover, followed by the index to the Panther paperback. Or so I assume.

However, either way, this is a book of mostly brilliant stories by Fritz Leiber, not all the short stories he wrote which changed the way horror, sf, and fantasy fiction were written in his wake, but a fair sampling of those. And two of the three very autobiographical stories, in dramatic form (actual playlets) which are not sf, fantasy or horror per se, though they deal with tropes from those forms, since they are about Fritz Leiber's life..."The Secret Songs" is mostly about his and his wife Jonquil's addictions, his to downers including alcohol, hers to the commonly available uppers of the time, including over the counter speed. "The Winter Flies," which for some reason Edward Ferman at F&SF retitled "The Inner Circles," is about the Leibers at home with their son, Justin, but mostly about Leiber wrestling with his existential terror. "237 Talking Statues, Etc." is the missing one, about Leiber's relation with his mother and particularly his father, Fritz Leiber, Sr., and both the parents professional actors...Senior, for example, has a key role in the film The Spanish Main, while Junior, who pursued an acting career for a while, has a smaller key role in Camille (the Greta Garbo version).

While it's ridiculous that no Leiber collection so far has put those three plays together, this book helps redress this for its reader, at least, by also including such, it's hard to overstate, epochal stories as "Smoke Ghost" and "Coming Attraction." These are among the stories that Leiber used to demonstrate how little thought too many of his contemporaries were bringing to the fantastic-fiction field, and how obvious that seemed after these stories were published. The latter, a science fiction story which suggested that people really didn't necessarily behave in the ways you might want them to or that they led you to believe they did, and that your "heroism" might just be playing into their little fantasy-games, seems so obvious in retrospect...but was a corrective to entirely too much lazy thinking in the field at the time. As well as being pretty savagely satirical in at least two ways when most of the best fantasticated satire depended on the mostly-"outsider" crew of the likes of Huxley or Orwell...Leiber demonstrated that he was in their league, which he would continue to demonstrate (particularly with the "Change War" stories such as "No Great Magic" and the short novel, a play in prose, The Big Time), but never with more immediate impact. The effect wasn't unlike the cumulative effect of Dashiell Hammett's early short fiction in crime fiction.

"Smoke Ghost" simply created an approach to modern horror, much as Robert Bloch's fiction and that of some of the others in the little post-Lovecraftian knot flourishing in the 1940s did...Shirley Jackson, John Collier, to some extent Cornell Woolrich, certainly Algernon Blackwood and a slew of others were incorporating the advances of the Edwardians (E. F. Benson, Saki, et al.) and the honing of existential terror Lovecraft had taken up (and to some extent his peers, including the young Leiber and Bloch) from the thread HPL traced in Poe and his heirs. But few stories are so blatantly an example of an introduction of a new paradigm as "Smoke Ghost." Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat," perhaps. And even as "Smoke Ghost" recast how the supernatural might be dealt with in the modern urban environment, "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" helped redefine vampirism, to get past the concretized metaphor that the spilling of blood, or any other body fluid, represented, to get at the elan vital aspect of the predation...and how mass culture might be such a predator's natural tool.

And then there are other simply brilliant stories, less influential but no less a joy to read..."A Pail of Air" (about coping with life on an Earth without the Sun), "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" (connected to the pathbreaking novel Conjure Wife, but not dependent upon it, a dancing bit of wit with the more sinister implications buried deep inside), and such.

This collection was never published in Leiber's native United States. Other slim collections nearly as good were. There's never been a sufficiently representative collection of his work published. He's not alone in this, but it's particularly ridiculous in his case. At the time of his death, he had more major awards for fantastic-fiction writing than any other person...Algis Budrys was genuinely angry, as well as resigned to the answer, when demanding in 1978 as to where was Leiber's National Book Award, his Pulitzer.

Where is Borges's Nobel? Awards, like justice, are only sparingly applied correctly.

For more "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Iris Bahr, and THE UNCHOSEN ONES

Podcasts are really digging in this summer...Jackie Kashian's The Dork Forest has been doing even better (and deeply autobiographical) episodes of late (whether dealing with high-school violence or Kashian's recent tour of military bases in the Arab world), and Iris Bahr was the guest on today's WTF with Marc Maron, and I enjoyed that a lot, and so sought this below out, which I enjoyed just about as well...and having seen few scraps of her running character for an HD Net sketch comedy series, Svetlana, I'll be trying to catch that, as well, as I finally have regular access to a cable system which offers HD Net (even if they think they don't have to carry the local clearance of MHz WorldView, something I'm about to take up with them).

As with the HD Net show, Bahr plays several characters here, including a BBC TV documentarian and a relatively hapless young woman on a J-Date marriage tour, as they make their way through Israel:

The Unchosen Ones by Iris Bahr from Guy Ross on Vimeo.