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

Thanks as always to all the contributors here, and there might well be a few more by the end of the day...the films and other presentations cited below are reviewed, or at least described, at the links. If I've overlooked yours or someone else's, please let me know.

Bill Crider: The Pick-Up Artist (trailer); Prologue Books Podcast: Ed Gorman

Brian Arnold: The Wizard of Oz In Concert: Dreams Come True (1995)

Dan Stumpf: Whistling in the Dark (1933)

Ed Gorman: Steve Eifert: Crime Wave (1954)

Evan Lewis: Captain Blood (1935)

Eric Anderson: Diary of the Dead

Francis M. Nevins: Fred Steiner on the theme to Perry Mason

Iba Dawson: The Grass is Greener (1960 film)

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Jungle Queen (1945); "Palm Springs, Here We Come" (Mayberry RFD, 1969); Buck Benny Rides Again

Jack Seabrook: Robert Bloch on Television: "A Home Away From Home" (The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 1963)

James Reasoner: Band of Brothers

Jerry House: Pittsburgh Zoo, Aquarium, Carnegie Science Center and Sports Science Center; Overlooked (or Vanished) Characters

John Charles: Silent Sentence; Jack the Ripper Goes West

Michael Shonk: I Deal in Danger (re-edited from episodes of Blue Light, 1966); Hong Kong (1960-61)


Mike Doran: "Lady in Waiting" (87th Precinct, 1961); "Deadlock" (Bob Hope's Chrysler Theater, 1967)

Patti Abbott: My Three Sons

Pearce Duncan: La piel que habito (aka The Skin I Live In)

Prashant Trikannad: First Blood

Randy Johnson: Day of the Outlaw

Rod Lott: Sinderella and the Golden Bra

Ron Scheer: The Lonely Man (1957); The Sea of Grass

Scott Cupp: Trollhunter

Sergio Angelini: The End of the Game (1975)

Stacia Jones: The films of James Hong

Steve Eifert: Desert Fury

Steve Lewis: The Lawbreakers (1961)

Todd Mason: Insight (197? episode); Inside/Out (PBS, 1972-73); Time for Beany (KTLA 1948-50/Paramount Television Network 1950-55) The Grandmother (1970); There Are Monsters (2008)...please see below.

Walter Albert: North of 36

Yvette Banek: Marple: Nemesis (aka Nemesis)

As it's the day after Western Easter, and on the run up to Orthodox Easter (the folks who consider yesterday to have been Palm Sunday), I am reminded of one of the most striking dramatic portrayals of the terrible as well as great burden for the individual that accepting supernatural faith can be, along with its comforts (and, of course, for the believers, the acceptance of fact). Unsurprisingly, it was an episode of the often playful and allusive Paulist Production Insight, which presented an anthology series for nearly a quarter century that ranged from the rather blatantly hortatory to the relatively subtle, and managed to engage some surprising as well as unsurprising talent on camera and off...episodes were written and/or directed by the likes of Jay Sandrich, Michael Crichton and William Peter Blatty, and featured actors including Cicely Tyson, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett, Walter Matthau, Patty Duke and Gene Hackman. I'm not sure of the title of the early '70s episode that stuck with me, involving a man who finds himself utterly alone on the shorefront of a town or city...it's late at night, and yet the streets seem utterly deserted...except for one figure who keeps following him, getting ever closer, but never close enough for the protagonist to get a good look at him. The sinister potential of all this was well-played up, until the reveal at the end, when the protagonist walks over to the water's edge where his pursuer has fallen, and sees a wooden statue of Jesus of Nazareth bobbing. If you know which episode this is, I'll appreciate the reminder. Insight was a syndicated series throughout its run.

Patti Abbott recently asked her readers what their favorite children's film was, particularly if they had different ones now than they did when children (a very parental/grandparental question by any standard, as she notes), and it occurred to me that it was easier for me to cite my favorite television series in childhood, inasmuch as I had so much more access (and living as I did as a kid in suburbs of large-enough cities, or towns with several large cities nearby, I usually was able to see a fair amount of what was on at any given time, no Just Three Channels (or fewer) for me even before cable became common. (So, reader...what were your favorite children's series in your childhood, if any...and what might they be now? Please feel free to leave responses in comments...)

And one of my favorite series aimed at kids was the PBS problem-drama anthology, in 15-minute episode format, Inside/Out. It's certainly overlooked these days, but it was a very intelligently put-together one-season series that ran, as its Wikipedia page notes, forever on at least some PBS stations and on PBS-like TV Ontario (the YT-video linked to below was taped from KLCS, the LA County schools' PBS station). This wasn't the best episode of the series, "Home *Sweet* Home" (with asterisks here standing in for the strikethrough), but it does offer a rather typically deft presentation of a very dysfunctional family, and in contrast a simply reasonable if somewhat uptight one, and the kind of realistic crises the series regularly presented its characters with...the series won the Emmy for 1974 for "Outstanding Instructional Children's Programming," according to IMDb, which manages to misidentify it as a syndicated series. (Now vanished from YT, and replaced here by another episode I remember seeing back when: "Can Do/Can't Do"...):


Among the intelligent children's series as far away from Inside/Out as one could get, tonally and in its nature, puppet show Time for Beany (which would eventually become the animated Beany and Cecil) does share one other characteristic with I/O: this series is often not quite correctly identified as having been a syndicated series, when it was initially one of the relatively few national offerings of the not quite stillborn Paramount Television Network, which ran alongside and in contentious dispute at times with what should've been its partner/cousin, the DuMont Network, of which Paramount was a part-owner. But Paramount owned a few stations of its own, most importantly KTLA in Los Angeles, which were the core of their small network from 1950-1955, the PTN operations coinciding almost exactly with the operations of DuMont. And the early pre-Beany and Cecil episodes had such talent as Daws Butler (the Mel Blanc of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, the voice of Huckleberry Hound among others) and Stan Freberg working the puppets and providing the voices...


And, to return to the ever-crowd-pleasing angle of abused kids and their means of coping, here's a suitably surreal and at times grotesque yet typically All-American vision (curdled a bit around the edges, but more resilient at its core than it seems) from the young David Lynch, writer and director of this short film, The Grandmother (1970).


Or, if you prefer your web-video horror in shorter and more conventional-narrative doses (and one where the fun is along with the kids...and adults who might too much resemble kids), here's one of the more widely-seen horror shorts on the web...which doesn't mean that it's caught up with you as yet (and, certainly, you don't want what it portrays to ever catch up with you and yours)...There Are Monsters (2008), written and directed by Jay Dahl (and you might want to hit that little button on the bottom right, to manipulate the image so you can get a full-screen effect here):


Relevant podcasts today:
How Did This Get Made?: Pluto Nash
The Dork Forest: Jim Gaffigan

Paramours in Elysian Fields: recent (and some not so recent) fiction magazines, beyond crime fiction, fantastic fiction & contemporary-mimetic fiction

***By the bottom of this post, some images might well be NSFW...

Fiction magazines over the last four decades or so (the years I've been reading them) have often been almost as specialized as some were during the pulp era (leaving aside the nostalgic jape collections featuring Spicy Zeppelins, or injoke magazine/anthologies featuring athletically heroic fiction-editors)...even if many of the most specialized magazines have been even less likely to flourish than the mayflies of the pulp chains (where at least a few titles could depend on their popular stablemates to subsidize them briefly, till they could find their own audiences). We've had an historical fiction magazine:





































...and attempts to revive the hero-fiction magazine (stepping back from the comics that took over the heroes from pulps, for the most part, along with "men's adventure" novel-series...and some other series characters in crime and particularly espionage fiction...):

































While there have also been lamentably brief attempts to revive the title of the first great/true pulp magazine, Argosy, have both offered elaborate little-magazine treatment, and both utterly eclectic though the more recent one seemed more literarily adventurous, less devoted solely to adventure fiction.














































Latter-day sports fiction magazines, aside from a notable special experimental issue from ESPN magazine, have largely been comprised of EFQ for baseball fiction, etc., and the ongoing Aethlon, formerly Arete, devoted to all sports.































Louis L'Amour Western Magazine, from Dell, was the best western-fiction magazine we'd had at least since the Dell version of Zane Grey Western Magazine...even though the Dell Grey was revived after a fashion in the late '60s by Leo Margulies's house, and in the later '70s, we saw the brief run of Far West...while Ranch Romances had become the last of pulp magazines to continue publishing (with an expanded title), aside from the sf magazines Amazing and Analog, which had moved further away from pulp format and the concerns of their pulp-era predecessors...and, of course Argosy, which, like Bluebook had stopped being a pulp or fiction magazine altogether, and was more of a downmarket, but more machismic, imitation of Esquire, just a shade less testosterone-soaked and blinkered than Bluebook, True or Saga; Adventure, having taken a similar path for a couple of decades, staggered for its last issues into the 1970s as a "men's fiction" magazine so labelled, thus another lonely peer of RR.




















































































































































































Meanwhile, among the occasional romance-fiction magazines per se we'd see, at least these two were relatively long-lived, and ready to run a little actually-good fiction along with that willing to slavishly follow formula...































And one way in which the romance-fiction magazine were still furthering their art was in not shying away from sex in romance...something the following erotic fiction magazines also had no problem with...Evergreen Review having been one of the first of the high-profile magazines to challenge bluenoses, particularly in the blue uniforms of the US Post Office, from its first years of publication in the 1950s...something that Eros would also attempt less successfully in the early '60s. Among the latter-day entries of the '80s and '90s,Yellow Silk might've been the most artistically ambitious, Blue Blood the most youth-oriented and Gothic-focused, Nerve the most nervous about its ultimate goals (resembling, as it did, the quickly-failed Future Sex of a half-decade before; Nerve's print edition was also shortlived) while Libido tried to be the most lighthearted. Paramour was, by me, simply the most consistently erotic. (And, among magazines not primarily devoted to fiction, the young women's magazine Bust is the only extant, consistent newsstand source of erotic fiction with which I'm familiar...with their "One-Handed Reads" in nearly every issue...)






































































































































































































And, of course, still the bestselling of all current US fiction magazines, of a less exalted stripe (leaving aside the political and astrological, of course--even in diminished circumstances, Penthouse Letters not only outsells all of its imitators but everything in those other classes of magazine, as well, at least here in the home country)...among other likely and unlikely contributors, even Robert Silverberg has written fiction for PL (or, should that be, given the remarkable range and prolificacy of Silverberg, even PL couldn't escape his contribution...and it was collected in Susie Bright's best of the year anthology, the pioneer in that field).


Some cover images here courtesy of Galactic Central. (Some of us manage to forget that it's this day...so, happy Easter, for most Xians ((and Palm Sunday/Feast Day, Orthodox))! Happy continuing Passover, Jews! Happy Buddha's Birthday, Japanese Buddhists! Happy International Romani Day, Romani!)

Saturday Music Club: 3rd Stream: George Russell; Ran Blake/Jeanne Lee; Lennie Tristano; Oregon; Air; Ellington/Roach/Mingus; Brubeck/Braxton/Konitz/Haynes/Six; Taylor/Braxton Quartet; Sextet of Orchestra USA: Lewis, Dolphy, Hall, Golson, Schuller, Duvivier

George Russell Smalltet including Bill Evans: "Ye Hypocrite, Ye Beelzebub"

 

George Russel Sextet with Sheila Jordan: "You Are My Sunshine" 

Sheila Jordan on how this version arose.

Ran Blake and Jeanne Lee: "Something's Coming"  

Ran Blake and Jeanne Lee: "Laura"  

Lennie Tristano: "Requiem"

 

 

Lennie Tristano Sextet: "Wow"

Oregon: "Redial"  

Oregon: "Dark Spirit" 

Air: "Midnight Sun"

 

 

Air: "Ragtime Dance"

Ellington, Roach and Mingus: "Money Jungle"

Brubeck, Konitz, Braxton, Haynes and Six: "All the Things You Are"

Cecil Taylor/Anthony Braxton Quartet  

Sextet of Orchestra USA (Lewis, Dolphy, Hall, Golson, Schuller, Duvivier): "The Stranger"

FFB: Algis Budrys BLOOD & BURNING (Berkley 1978); William Kotzwinkle JEWEL OF THE MOON (Putnam 1985)

Two collections, the third of Budrys's short fiction and the first of Kotzwinkle's (after a linked collection, Trouble in Bugland, aimed at young readers), by two writers who have been among those (many) who have through no great polemical effort but simply through their artistry put the lie to the notion of a legitimate and inherent distinction between the literary and the popular, between the "serious" and the "generic"...a distinction that so many of us who enjoy fiction of all kinds are too willing to insist is indeed a something that must be reckoned with, aside from the mere prejudices of the ignorant, whether those ignorant be reviewers or marketers who have decided they know their marks (or do I mean customers) very well...and in many cases, but not all, are not incorrect.

And, certainly, the careers of both men can be instructive, as Budrys is perhaps most widely remembered today for his involvement with the Scientology-funded Writers (and Artists) of the Future program, which became through his involvement somewhat similar to the venerable Clarion Writer's Workshop with more (and vastly more controversial) money behind it; Kotzwinkle has become best known, not for his often subtle and usually extraordinary playful but grounded moral fiction, nor even at this date for his E. T. -related fiction, but for the work of his and his writing-partners' and his illustrator-partner Audrey Colman (in for the usual Joe Servello) on a series of easy-readers about Walter, the Farting Dog. Thus, the rewards of furthering the art. (Berkley and Putnam were the same corporate entity, and note the undistinguished covers given these books, seven years apart, and I can assure you the promotional effort for both was about as lackluster.)

The books in question today are fine slices through the career of Budrys and the early career of Kotzwinkle; such major Budrys stories as "The Master of the Hounds" (an Edgar winner) and "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" (and the grim little fable "The Price," which he read for his album reviewed here last week) are cheek by jowl with the likes of "Scream at Sea," an interesting example of a contemporary-mimetic oceangoing survival story, aimed at Ziff-Davis's all but stillborn 1950s Tales of the Sea fiction magazine, and then published in Fantastic (editors and publishers have for some reason been more comfortable putting contemporary-mimetic stories in fantasy magazines over the years, perhaps because they've tended to be more eclectic with horror and frequent sf content).

While the Kotzwinkle groups longer examples of borderline fantasy/historical fiction such as the title story with telling little mimetic vignettes such as "Tell Her You Love Her..." and some slight fantasies of perception as "The Curio Shop", all imbued with the kind of wit and hints of strangeness (when strangeness is not a main ingredient) that his later work, tending toward fantasy and fable when aimed at adults (Walter's adventures being a bit more prosaic, though not entirely), would continue to deliver. Even when what Borges would refer to as the unfortunate temptation to the young author of Fine Writing is in evidence, Kotzwinkle's wit helps, even in the example of the slightest of the work here. His early patronage by Penthouse perhaps is in some evidence as well...a young literary man's fancifulness about sexuality is expressed frequently.


From the Contento and Locus Indices:

Blood & Burning Algis Budrys (Berkley 0-425-03861-0, Sep ’78, $1.75, 227pp, pb)
1 · Introduction · in
4 · Be Merry · nv If Dec ’66
51 · Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night · nv Galaxy Dec ’61
74 · All for Love [“For Love”] · nv Galaxy Jun ’62
93 · A Scraping at the Bones · ss Analog May ’75
110 · The Price · ss F&SF Feb ’60
114 · The Ridge Around the World [“Forever Stenn”] · ss Satellite Dec ’57
124 · The Girl in the Bottle · ss Fantastic Universe Dec ’59
131 · The Last Brunette [“The Ultimate Brunette”] · ss Playboy Sep ’65
146 · Scream at Sea · ss Fantastic Jan/Feb ’54
155 · The Master of the Hounds · nv The Saturday Evening Post Aug 27 ’66
184 · The Nuptial Flight of Warbirds [Laurent Michaelmas] · nv Analog May ’78

Jewel of the Moon William Kotzwinkle (Putnam 0-399-13113-2, Dec ’85 [Nov ’85], $14.95, 160pp, hc) Collection of 15 stories. Most are very short fantasies.
9 · The Day Stokowski Saved the World · ss *
15 · The Curio Shop · ss Omni Sep ’80
21 · Jewel of the Moon · ss *
41 · Postcard Found in a Trunk · ss *
49 · Sun, Moon, and Storm · ss *
65 · Tell Her You Love Her with a Ring from DAVE’S HOUSE OF DIAMONDS · ss *
69 · Disturbance Reported on a Pipeline · ss *
77 · Mr. Jones’s Convention · ss Penthouse Nov ’74
87 · Fading Tatoo · ss *
93 · Victory at North Antor · ss Penthouse May ’75
113 · A Man Who Knew His Birds · ss Omni Feb ’85
123 · Letter to a Swan · ss *
133 · Star Cruisers, Welcome · ss *
141 · That Winter When Prince Borisov Was Everybody’s Favorite · ss *
151 · Fana · ss Penthouse Sep ’72

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

covers by Jeff Jones