Hapa time

Hapa is the Hawaiian word for half, and it's come into use to describe someone who springs from a union that is of a parent of one ethnicity and the other another...as in "hapa-haole," "half-stranger" literally and "half-Caucasian" in practice, first used to describe the kids from the earliest most common sort of union between Hawaiians and visitors to their archipelago. My (hapa) friend Keiko (of multi-gen German-American and first-gen Japanese-American ancestry) and I were bemoaning the premature cancellation of the fine NBC science-fantasy series Journeyman, which co-starred hapa actress Moon Bloodgood (who had previously co-starred in the similarly good, similarly strangled time-travel fantasy series Daybreak on ABC the summer before). "It was so nice to see a[n Asian-Caucasian] hapa actress on every week," Keiko mentioned...which immediately made me realize that we have a plethora of hapa actresses on television these days, even more when we count those not quite acting, such as Attack of the Show co-host Olivia Munn or NBC news anchor/reporter Ann Curry, vastly more regularly seen on US tv, at least, than we see of women or men of "purely" Asian ancestry...and a few more of hapa African/Caucasian descent, such as Rashida Jones (of The Office). I came up with a list of about twenty names, and it just grew and grew, even if a few, such as Lexa Doig (late of Andromeda), aren't currently regulars on a show in production...a few who weren't at that time, such as Lindsay Price (now on Lipstick Jungle) have gotten a new regular gig (meanwhile, one of the most prominent "purely" Asian-American actresses on US tv lost her similar gig, Lucy Liu on Cashmere Mafia).

France Nuyen, the most prominently-featured hapa actress on 1960s US television (and the 1960s were for some reason the most friendly decade for Asian-Americans on television, at very least till the current one) clearly has blazed a trail. I suspect the 1960s saw a Lot more Asian-Americans in series than the 1970s and 1980s, with the often weak exceptions of M*A*S*H and Hawaii Five-0 and the almost purely Cauc Magnum, PI, because they could be seen as both wildly exotic and remarkable in their American-ness, when someone needed to make a point about how we were all Americans together...and Asian-Am actors could be used to make African-American actors, most obviously Bill Cosby in the first season of I Spy, that much more all-American by contrast.

But it is something...as we might be seeing a hapa US President soon, and almost certainly a hapa nominee from the Democratic Party, a little more hapa consciousness might spread around.

Friday "forgotten" book: Gary Jennings's THE LIVELY LIVES OF CRISPIN MOBEY

Here's the Locus Index's accounting of this book, easily the most obscure title by bestselling writer Gary Jennings after he began publishing his string of huge successes, including Aztec and Spangle:

The Lively Lives of Crispin Mobey (as by) Gabriel Quyth (Macmillan Atheneum 0-689-12023-0, Oct ’88 [Feb ’89], $18.95, 243pp, hc) [Crispin Mobey]; Humorous fantasy fix-up novel of nine stories featuring missionary Crispin Mobey. Quyth is a pseudonym for Gary Jennings. Published in 1988 but not seen until 1989.

1 · Sooner or Later or Never Never [as by Gary Jennings] · nv F&SF May ’72
39 · Kingdom Come [as by Gary Jennings] · nv F&SF Jan ’78
66 · Lhude Sing Cuccu! [as by Gary Jennings] · nv F&SF Sep ’77
93 · Let Us Prey [as by Gary Jennings] · nv F&SF Jun ’78
117 · Be Jubilant My Feet! [as by Gary Jennings] · ss F&SF Dec ’78
142 · Ignis Fatuus [as by Gary Jennings] · ss F&SF Sep ’79
169 · P.U. · ss
193 · Homo Sap [as by Gary Jennings] · nv F&SF Mar ’79
217 · Not with a Bang But a Bleep [as by Gary Jennings] · nv F&SF Jun ’77

Now, I have to admit I've never held a copy of this book, so I believe I've never been able to read the story "P.U." (the comedy of humors rules OK in these stories...one memorable bit has the Reverend discover, much to his immediate chagrin, The Kindergarten Guide to Gonorrhea, the first page of which is inevitably "See Dick run"). You will not be surprised to learn that old P.U. is our bumptious missionary protagonist's alma mater, as I remember it...for I read all the Mobey stories I could find in back issues and as they were published in '78 and later in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Jennings, who like Richard McKenna, Allan Eckert and Michael Shaara before him was a no-two-ways about it fantasy and sf writer before Hitting Big with historical fiction, the next field over in one direction, also published such wonderful, terrifying fiction as "How We Pass the Time in Hell" in F&SF (November 1971, for that one) and elsewhere (well, "How..." certainly made an impression on young me, with its ultraviolet humor and bleak invention).

Mobey, of the SoPrim or Southern Primitive Baptist Church, can't help but stumble upon outre or utterly supernatural phenomena in his attempt to somewhat hamhandedly spread the good word, misunderstanding as much of what's going on around him as he possibly can most of the time. Jennings apparently didn't think his bestseller audience was quite ready for the caustic portrayal of religion and so much else in these stories, so he published the book under that odd pseudonym, and Atheneum apparently did little to draw much attention to the book, even with a coy Guess-Who campaign.

I certainly would've bought a copy back when. And, if one can be had reasonably, might yet soon.

The other Friday Forgotten Books are findable at Patti Abbott's blog, here.

Overlooked films--one impressive and could've been even better, one joyously bad: PRIME CUT and THE EXPLOSIVE GENERATION

Steve Allan (not the late television guy) inspired Patti Abbott to post about Do the Right Thing by posting about Evolution, but this meme has yet to take flight (or am I confusing memes with nenes, a sort of goose...). A good enough excuse for me to cite two films, to help thicken the stew...

Since Prime Cut has been ***Rediscovered*** since 2008 (and thank goodness) and therefore yanked from YT, here's a video featuring Justin Chang and Charles Taylor discussing the film:
Prime Cut is a film that could've been champeen, nevermind contender. Directed by Michael Ritchie as his second feature, after the overrated but beautiful Downhill Racer and just before the brilliant The Candidate and a string of films nearly as good (The Bad News Bears brought home the groceries), and written by the even more uneven Robert Dillon, Prime Cut features a great cast (Gregory Walcott got to show what he could do when working with the likes of Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, and the debuting Sissy Spacek) and a story that turns Deliverance inside out...instead of suburbanites venturing into the evils of the rural/natural, mobsters out of the big city, Chicago in this case, have go down to the outskirts/suburbs of Kansas City to deal with a megalomaniacal sort who's setting up his own empire (did you guess that was Hackman's character? Gold star.). The problem, as far as this film goes, isn't so much what's bizarre and semi-mythic about it, but how haphazard it is...its releasing company, National General, was collapsing as it was being made, and I suspect the hastily-edited, throw in all the footage you shot feel of the film at various points was the result of a desperate desire by NG and/or its creditors to get some sort of money out of the project before the offices were shuttered. A sequence that involves the interaction of the Chicago mobsters' limo and a thresher/bailer just goes on and on...it's somewhat hypnotic, but clearly this is not how the finished work was going to be. A rather awkward sequence where Lee Marvin's character escorts the nearly nude Sissy Spacek into a restaurant stretches and stretches...it still manages to be less preciously pseudo-rebellious than a similar sequence in Flashdance, but as presented in this less than prime cut, only slightly less.

As a whole film, it's still a hell of a thing to see. You just wish Ritchie had been able to finish it. (I'm pretty sure I saw this first as a kid on something like the CBS Late Movie, wherein the fairly frequent nudity would've been cut, and perhaps even more footage spliced in...or perhaps the tv edit might actually resemble what was hoped for originally, but I somehow doubt that.).

This film is Not office-friendly. (Even less so when removed altogether!)


The terrible, hilarious film is The Explosive Generation. I have to thank Bill Crider for digging out a compound trailer for this and another film...I saw TEG for the first time on late night television as a teen in Hawaii, and if you don't think William Shatner as an idealistic youngish sex-ed teacher, doing his best to Relate to the kids in the kind of film that Mort Sahl characterized as always having a scene where at a meeting of parents one arises to announce, "I just want to say that I'm going to call my kids now, and ask for their forgiveness!"...if you don't think that sounds like bad fun on a grand scale, I have to tell you to think again. In that it's mildly exploitive while theoretically on the kids' side was a stroke of minor genius, and I'm surprised the film didn't do any better than it did...perhaps the similarly goofy TheBlackboard Jungle did so well in comparison because it was earlier by several years, but no fresher, and hostile to the kids, who got to be Kool Rebels, just like that Flashdance welder-stripper.

Previously here: the dual trailer that Bill has up, also advertising a British film called That Kind of Girl, which was classed up for the US (no doubt drive-in) market as Teen Age Tramp: (and has since been taken down by YouTube, so here's this):


And here's an abridged, I believe, certainly battered, copy of the trailer for Explosive on its own:


And a long clip, which The Onion's AV Club wants you to note features a boom mike that no one thought worthy of reframing out of the final edit...

Most annoying television theme songs that come to mind:

In the order they occur to me:

1. Everyday A syndicated morning chat show, as I remember, which was utterly forgettable, and had the theme song that should've indicated that--endless repeating of the word "Everyday" in three-note ascending and descending series. Took the composer perhaps five minutes...and they asked the audience to sing along with it at show's close.

2. What's Happening!! Boiing!!! (the second-worst sitcom, at least of any durability, in the US in the 1970s, which probably doesn't help my assessment, any more than does the two, not one nor three exclamation points...but the theme is just offensive.)

3. Three's Company Theme to the worst durable sitcom of the 1970s in the US, it's a fairly innocuous tune, except that it's cloying and a misleading come-on for the horrors to follow.

4. Charles in Charge (original theme) Creepy lyrics ("I want Charles in charge of me!") set to a bad ripoff of the Bangles' "Dover Beach."

5. WKRP in Cincinnati (second theme) Also just a bit cloying, but would also slip by as innocuous if it hadn't supplanted the fine, goofy, incoprehensible original theme, which was preserved as the closing theme.

Remarkable how few truly awful themes we have these days. Perhaps all the bad composers are working, with the good ones, on videogames.

ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, the Ed Hoch Memorial Issue

You might just need the June, 2008, issue of EQMM...it's their memorial issue for Ed Hoch, and includes reminisces from a number of writers and editors along with one of the last stories, though not the last, in Hoch's unbroken string of contributions to every issue since 1973 (Hoch had contributed regularly going back into the '60s, after first selling to Robert Lowndes's magazines in the late '50s). I met him at the 2001 World Crime Fiction Convention, the BoucherCon, in the Virginia DC suburbs only weeks after 9/11, and he was a complete gentleman, as everyone else's testimony seems to agree (you don't get too many criticisms under these circumstances, but the worst I've ever heard about him was that he tended to include one of his own stories in the volumes of the series of the Year's Best CF stories he edited for a couple of decades...may this be the worst anyone can say about any of us).

Hoch's story in the issue is made slightly unbelievable by featuring an insurance detective who chooses not, at this late date, to have a cell phone of his own, though it's a decent example of what Hoch did; Peter Lovesey likewise contributes a typical, not the best, example of his usual work, unbelievable but amusing enough in its tale of a Regular Bloke sucked into impersonating a thug, who manages to do so Very Well indeed; things look up with a typically unmelodramatic Clark Howard and an amusing conceit involving a Nero Wolfe wannabe (in a world where there already is a Nero Wolfe in the copious flesh) by Loren D. Estleman. That's as far as I've gotten with the fiction, so far, but as usual Bill Crider and Jon Breen's columns are helpful, deft, and could be longer.

Friday "Forgotten" Book: Avram Davidson: THE ENQUIRIES OF DOCTOR ESZTERHAZY

A collection of historical fantasies that might just barely brush up against sf fleetingly...


The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy might just be the most brilliant book the most brilliant Avram Davidson saw published...and, of course, it was published as a paperback original (Warner Books, 1975) with little support and in a clumsy package, egregiously mislabeled "science fiction" (although as historical fantasies, the linked stories within touch on sf from time to time). Currently in print only in the expanded small press edition The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, the earlier edition is in several ways preferable...most importantly because the later stories Davidson wrote involving the extremely learned Doctor were slighter and a bit less inventive on balance, still good but not as lapidary and achingly Right as the earlier set. Also, the typesetting leaves a bit to be desired in the newer book, which at least is a well-built hardcover. But to know Eszterhazy is to want to have all the stories, so one must eventually have the Adventures; it's simply a pity that circumstances so rarely rewarded Davidson well enough for him to consistently do the work of which he was capable.

Eszterhazy is a sort of Holmesian figure, only both more accomplished and yet also more believable; his efforts on behalf of the small Mitteleuropean nation in which he resides usually at very least brush him up against the supernatural. These stories, some of the best work ever published in those great fiction magazines Whispers, Fantastic and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, display the ready wit, the easily-incorporated erudition, the passionate love of life and play, and the weary disappointment in the worst in humanity that Davidson's other best work displays, only rarely as concentratedly as in these accounted investigations. If you let them, these stories will educate you, amuse you, surprise you, break your heart occasionally, take your breath away at least as often.

I remember well sitting in the lobby of Discovery Bay, a condo tower in Waikiki, having both just moved in 1979 to Hawaii and discovered affordable back issues of Fantastic and others at a secondhand store called Froggies, reading "The Church of Saint Satan and Pandaemons," in an anniversary issue of Fantastic. The chair wasn't overwhelmingly comfortable, and I would jump a bit from time to time when someone would come in through the front door or knock to beg entrance past the expensive lock; I was down in the lobby to get some peace and quiet while my parents and brother watched television in the one-bedroom apartment we survived throughout that summer, with my then 7yo brother and I sharing the foldout couch bed in the living room. Didn't matter...the allusive, often hilarious, deeply strange narrative of Davidson's was easily the highlight of the issue. His non-Eszterhazy "Hark! Did I Hear the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?" in another, later Fantastic in my stash was nearly as good, even more improvisational and seemingly haphazard--the character of John Carter appears suddenly at the end, as one might guess from the Burroughsian title, but until that time it has been a nostalgic romp through mid-20th century New York City--but one feels the extra jolt with the Esterhazy stories of an author gently parodying as well as sympathetically representing himself with his protagonist.

They are necessary reading, and have only appeared in collected form in two rather obscure editions.

(This is another response to a Patti Abbott challenge, to cite a book in serious danger of being forgotten. See links to other answers to the call here, where Patti is also proudly hailing her daughter Megan Abbott's win of an Edgar Award for her novel Queenpin, and well she might!)

Avram Davidson was also an Edgar Award-winner, in fact the first person to have won both the Edgar and Hugo awards, and perhaps the first to have won both of those and the Howard (though his occasional collaborator Harlan Ellison might've beat him to that punch...I first became aware of Davidson through the Ellison in collaboration collection Partners in Wonder). Davidson's most fully-realized novel is also one with a modest publication history, Masters of the Maze; since his death, his ex-wife but lifelong friend and occasional collaborator Grania Davis, a talented writer in her own right, has made an effort to get nearly all of Davidson's work back into print, with impressive collections of his crime fiction and his tales of contemporary Jewish-American life as well as his fantasies, horrors and sf...most recently a collection of his similarly brilliant tales of an expatriate American finding odd things indeed in an alternate Guyana, Limekiller!.

And I've just discovered that the Eszterhazy story "The Odd Old Bird" was collected in neither book...now, I have yet another grail...

***and another Late Bulletin! Hot on the heels of Megan Abbott's 1 May win of the Best Paperback Original Novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, Patti Abbott on 2 May herself picks up the vignette Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society...it's a good week to be a writing Abbott, and, of course, since awards are only as good as the recipients they're given to, both awards have been elevated as well...here's the winning story, "My Hero."