Pennsylvania Leads the Way

With apologies to Bill Crider, the Commonwealth of Penn and Trees has been giving even Florida a run for the crazy-stakes of late, not least in official treatment of the Future, in the form of the younger generation. While the truism is that Penna is Kentucky bookended by Philly and Pittsburgh, the Philadephia 'burbs have been the latest to represent, with a lawsuit involving school administrators activating the webcams in the laptops assigned to students...for the purpose of spying on the kids in their homes (and, apparently, hoping to catch at least someone in the household in some degree of undress). This follows the recent kamikaze attack by Harrisburg, PA's own unfavored son on the Texas IRS offices, and various PA prosecutors leading the nation in the Mighty Battle to put away teens who are "sexting" (sending provocative phone-photos of themselves, usually) each other as child pornographers...yes...I'm wating for the first of these idiots to attempt to prosecute one of the kids as an adult for the crime of sending a swain a picture of her- or himself, which is a crime of course because she or he is a juvenile. And all this following last year's revelations of children being sentenced to private juvenile prisons, for posting critical comments on discussion boards and similar crimes against humanity, thanks to the fine jurists who were picking up a little cash on the side from those private prisons (a practice so ludicrously evil that when used as a story element in the fine CBS tv series The Good Wife, it was set up very gingerly so as to be believable).

It's quite a state we're in...and we really should be doing something about it.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Jorge Luis Borges, THE BOOK OF SAND; Italo Calvino, THE CASTLE OF CROSSED DESTINIES

The Book of Sand, as translated by Borges himself and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, was published in English by Dutton in 1977 and proved to be the last collection of fiction Borges was to assemble during his life...it was also the first collection of his I was to read, and I was hooked for life.

Contents:
The Other (El Otro)
Ulrikke (Ulrica)
The Congress (El Congreso)
"There Are More Things" ("There Are More Things")
The Sect of the Thirty (La Secta de los Treinta)
The Night of the Gifts (La noche de los dones)
The Mirror and the Mask (El espejo y la máscara)
Undr (Undr)
Utopia of a Tired Man (Utopía de un hombre que está cansado)
The Bribe (El soborno)
Avelino Arredondo (Avelino Arredondo)
The Disk (El disco)
The Book of Sand (El libro de arena)

Almost all of these stories were written after Borges's blindness had progressed to the point that he could no longer read for himself, and that perhaps contributed to the emphasis on memory in most of these, and perhaps some of the vivid imagery (not that that these elements were absent from the work of the younger Borges). "'There Are More Things'" was his slightly sardonic tribute to Lovecraft, thus nudging Borges into the elite class of Lovecraftians, however briefly (though their concerns with existential horror were not dissimilar, their approaches to the subject could hardly be more unalike: Borges is cool and offhanded where Lovecraft tends toward the perfervid). "The Book of Sand" itself is a masterful reapproach to the same concerns as drove "The Library of Babel," but more compactly...rather than an infinite library, the newer fiction offers an infinite book, or at least a book with an apparently infinite number of pages, and likewise containing all the possible combinations of characters. "The Night of the Gifts" was one of Borges's too-infrequent gaucho stories, Argentine westerns; "The Disk" another charming, if slight, peak at the same sort of fantastic visual device that was the McGuffin of "The Aleph"; "The Other" one of several encounters (like "Borges and Me" and "The Other Death") by twinned personas of Borges himself. "Utopia of a Tired Man" is a fine science-fictional encounter; "The Congress" a fine paranoid conspiracy tale...these are all pretty much examples of past mastery at play and work. It's a continuing shame that this edition is pointedly out of print because of the hassle between di Giovanni and the Borges estate.

I have less to say about the charming The Castle of Crossed Destinies, the 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition translated by William Weaver, other than it was the first Calvino book I took on, and it might be the most Borgesian of his I've read so far (it was the also the only one I've attempted, with very modest progress, in the original Italian). A series of interlinked vignettes driven by tarot cards Calvino was fascinated by (a fascination shared, of course, by many other fantasy writers, including such students of tarot as Rachel Pollack and K. A. Laity), Calvino has always struck me as someone who was trying to bring the experience of the spoken tale to the page in a more immediate way than most writers, certainly than those who use frames such as having a tale told within their stories (contrast Borges, who was more interested in playing with the forms of literary genre itself, or Fritz Leiber, whose work I was reading as quickly as I could find it at the time I first read these books, who constantly threatens to, when he doesn't actually do so, break into actual playwriting in his prose fiction). At least this one's in print!

For more Friday books, please see Patti Abbott's blog

The Lawrence Sweeney Mix (BBC Radio 4 improvised comedy series)

The Lawrence Sweeney Mix is a fine project of Josie Lawrence (most visible in the States as a stalwart of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway?) and Jim Sweeney, and aside from being quite funny (by me), and unusually for Radio 4 on a "stripped" (Monday-Thursday) schedule rather than offered weekly...so one can (at this hour) hear three of the four episodes they are going to do in this second "series" (or "season" for us in the States)...what's most unusual about it for those used to the "Chicago school" of improvised comedy and drama is that they flagrantly break the Yes And rule...Lawrence and Sweeney frequently say No, or completely undermine the reality the other is suggesting, but are deft enough to keep the game going.

Good audience participation as well. (And do check this out sooner rather than later, as Radio 4, at least, usually keeps items such as this up for only a week...though Radio 7 and the World Service might have it up for longer...).

Monday's "Forgotten" Soundtrack: BANDITS by (more or less) Bandits (1997)

If the Go-Go's were the Beach Boys of post/punk all-women rock bands of the early '80s, and the Bangs/Bangles were the Byrds, it took a while for the Monkees correspondent to come along...but they did, with Katja von Garnier's 1997 film Bandits (not to be confused with the later, somewhat less good Bruce Willis vehicle). A German film, ineptly promoted upon its 1999 US release despite a glowing New York Times review by Lawrence Van Gelder and apparently grossing something like $25,000 nationally here, it was a smash in Europe, where the soundtrack album reportedly became the bestselling in European history, ahead of the Beatles' albums, or anyone else's, in that market (the first-year figure is usually given as 750,000 copies). [Late bulletin...it seems that Bandits in the US suffered from an internal hassle at Stratosphere Entertainment, wherein moneyman Carl Icahn pushed his esthetic partner, the one who was buying films like Bandits, out the door.] The film involves a prison band, in a women's facility rife with casual brutality from some of the staff, while some (with some overlap) pride themselves on their progressive attitudes toward reform. The quartet, with a new drummer whose first days at the prison we follow, are trotted out to a Policeman's Ball as show ponies, but they are harassed beyond tolerance by the guards on the way over, and they manage to steal the police van before they are delivered to the ball. Meanwhile, Luna, the somewhat bullying primary songwriter and guitarist of the band (played by Jasmin Tabatabai, who here is almost a dead ringer for Selma Blair, perhaps a bit more muscular), has submitted demos of their songs to various record companies, and while they are on the lam, one of the companies releases their demo recordings as an album, which does very well with the attendant publicity. Von Garnier and Uwe Wilhelm's script resembles both Thelma and Louise and The Monkees' various productions (and, of course, the Beatles' before them) in being comic with both surreal and somewhat seriously desperate edges, and the songs the band performs, or can be heard having performed at various points in the film, reflect this admirably.

Tabatabai, who would go on to collaborate musically with von Garnier on her next project, HBO's English-language feminist historical drama Iron Jawed Angels, and star in such notable productions as Unveiled, was well established as both musician and actor before coming to Bandits, as were two of the other principals, Katja Riemann (who plays the taciturn, sharp-witted Emma) and Nicolette Krebitz (who plays the essentially sweet-natured, rather insecure Angel). All three women sing on the recordings of songs they in various combinations wrote (along with a number of cover versions), but only Tabatabai plays her instrument (rather as with guitarist Roger McGuinn on the earliest Byrds' releases, or the early Monkees releases) for the soundtrack recording. However, Riemann and Krebitz were competent enough on drums and bass respectively to tour in support of the soundtrack album as Bandits.

The film begins with the audience's introduction to the prison, with a cover of "All Along the Watchtower" (it's notable that aside from a German folksong they cover, all Bandits songs are in English, even if at times definitely English as a second language, or in Tabatabai's case her third at least [she is German-Persian, and was born in Iran], though Tabatabai is probably the most comfortable with idiomatic English lyric-writing). Tabatabai reportedly, in at least one interview, wanted to use a vocal take that was more energized, and I think she's right in this, but it's still a good performance with a nice arrangement of the song:



After their escape, and before much of the rest of the events of the film, the record exec who gets lucky with the demo can be seen enjoying a little nose candy while playing one of Tabatabai's nearly-solo performances, "Another Sad Song"--while the women are enjoying, however briefly, an idyll of freedom out in the German countryside (Jutta Hoffmann, a non-musician actress, plays the band's somewhat older keyboardist and harmonica-player in the film; her character is a bit daffy to the point of slight senile delusion, but generally the most emotionally grounded of the four--even also despite a suicidal tendency):



A somewhat more punkish Tabatabai song (I'm always happy when neo-garage features some harp-playing):



One of the two singles from the soundtrack, the delightfully slinky "Puppet" (Tabatabai again, with solid vocal support from the other two):



And here's the MTV-oriented promotional video they did for this single, from a Korean site. Mixed in among the video clips is apparently some club-date performance by the touring band.

The Thelma and Louise parallels aren't limited to their initially escaping from nasty men; rather cocky yet strangely sympathetic cops pursue them, even as their music starts to become a major sensation, as they attempt to formulate a plan to get out of the country and collect enough wherewithal (including their royalties if possible) to do so, and have various encounters along the way.

Including sexual (Krebitz's primary song on the soundtrack, and one which is quite engaging when seen in context):



And, rather in the same mode Tabatabai's makeout song, and an even more engaging scene, if a bit, um, muddier:



But sex on the run can have consequences, and these women have already been dealing with a fair amount of consequences...this being one of the two most overtly feminist songs in the film, and one employing the most rude language...the next one, which features all three women trading lead vocals in a quasi-rap, also has a bit, with justice, since the bleat, a sort-of coda, "I'm your sister, and your mother!" isn't a joke at all, nor the suppressed moan of rage that follows--the first song's name is "Blinded" but the Germanophone YT poster typoed that:





Somewhat lighter in tone, but similar in spirit, are two covers--Billie Holiday and that German folksong (the latter performed first acapella in an early Cool Hand Luke-reminiscent moment, then, as one fan notes, Riot Grrl style):





More lighthearted yet, giddy even, is the song of their early days of escape, their Beatles tribute too, I suspect, again trading lead vocals:



But the sadness that has dominated their lives is never too far away, whether wistful:



or rather more elegiac (and this is Riemann's primary solo showcase, as *MILD SPOILER FOR THE FILM*

her character mourns the loss of her fetus...she was imprisoned for murdering her paramour, who chose to beat her so badly she miscarried).

*END SPOILER (the song is not a spoiler, but is more meaningful as one learns of the spoiler fact):


And all resolves with the other single from the album, "Catch Me," Bandits' slightly reworked version of British band Saint Etienne's more ethereal and dirge-like "Hobart Paving," only with the faintly suicidal morosity of the original turned into something a bit more life-affirming, if not any less world-weary (and adding at least one more layer of meaning in the use of the phrase "Catch Me")--here's the promo video for the single:



Which takes us through nearly the whole soundtrack album, except for two more versions of "Puppet," the first an essentially acoustic version featuring only Tabatabai singing lead and playing guitar and Krebitz humming in accompaniment, the second the extended chase-sequence remix (including the dialog wherein they decide on their band name)...:





...and the extended mix of "Catch Me", as presented in the film, and not quite a spoiler:


In short, an excellent album and a film which actually improves upon repeat viewings, as one sees how well put-together it is, even in its excesses. The mockery of police and recording industry types is not overdone, and the flaws in the characters of the quartet aren't glossed over. The domestic release of the video, with really inept dvd box art but also the two videos included, is still barely available, but the soundtrack is only in print, unsurprisingly so, in its import editions for we Yanks.

Since I don't own a legit copy of the latter, I'll be picking one up soon. (For regular Saturday Soundtrack items, see Rick Robinson's The Broken Bullhorn, though this meme/feature is on a brief hiatus...George Kelley and Patti Abbott (see sidebar) have joined in a bit as well...

And, just for a fillip, a slightly horizontally-stretched upload of the US trailer (it's Not an "Upbeat Thelma and Louise"...but thanks for playing.)

Friday's Frequently Overlooked: Our (Paper and Ink) Fiction Magazines

The three or seven people who look at this blog regularly already know that I'm a fool for fiction magazines. I've been reading them, at first spottily, for essentially all my literate life (my earliest reading memories include a DC comic and what was probably either an Ultimate Publications or Popular Library [the 1960s Wonder Stories or its successor] pulp-magazine-fiction reprint magazine, and scattered issues of Children's Digest, Humpty Dumpty and Hightlights followed soon after), and consistently since (finally) discovering where I could buy new issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in December, 1977 (having been tempted to invest the Whole Dollar in an issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in late 1975, when my comics still cost a quarter, and the quarters weren't that common [I did manage to scrape up a dollar for a National Lampoon about then, much to my mother's disapproval]).

So, in these days of circulation falling for all sorts of magazines, and the continuing collapse of the remaining decent newsstands (even in the big-box bookstore chains, themselves struggling to survive), giving the current crop a try is worth considering...there's a Real Good chance that a post here is only preaching to the converted, but in the off chance that any of this is useful and/or new information...and these are only the items that I believe to be still publishing and which are not solely webzines, or even webzines which are getting some best-of anthologies published in book form. Though of course all or nearly all of these have some web presence today...and some of the better magazines, such as Subterranean and Fantasy Magazine, have gone web-only after a run as paper-and-ink publications with at least some limited newsstand presence. And in each category below, my suggestions are not exhaustive (though in crime fiction they might well be close).

The Crime Fiction Magazines:
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
The Strand Magazine
Crimewave
Hardboiled
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine
Out of the Gutter

Prose Humor (even if the first is much more widely-read online, and the second is largely, not completely, cartoon-oriented):
The Onion
Funny Times
Mustard
Private Eye

Fantastic Fiction/Speculative Fiction Magazines (a very imcomplete list):
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Weird Tales
Cemetery Dance
Realms of Fantasy
Black Gate
Black Static
On Spec
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
Electric Velocipede
Shroud
Asimov's Science Fiction
Analog Science Fact and Fiction
Interzone
Albedo One
Postscripts
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
Space and Time
Shimmer
Dark Horizons

Eclectic/Contemporary Mimetic Fiction Magazines (a very, very, incomplete list, heavily weighted toward the ones I see and read most often):
Zoetrope All-Story
Black Clock
Tin House
Alaska Quarterly Review
Conjunctions
Boulevard
A Public Space
Iowa Review
Pleiades
Southwest Review
Ploughshares
Fiction
Epoch
The Antioch Review
PGS: Philippine Genre Stories
McSweeney's
Rosebud
The Paris Review
Glimmer Train

Western and other historical fiction, and romance and erotica (and other sports!):
While there have been a number of western (most impressively Louis L'Amour's Western Magazine) and romance titles (Five Great Romances ran for about a decade) over the last thirty years (one newish romance title was publishing last year, but I haven't seen it since), and there have been even a couple of wider-ranging historical fiction and adventure-fiction magazines (Paradox recently became web-only), there are no non-virtual magazines of these stripes currently publishing that I'm aware of. Romance, particularly, is heavily invested in three-novella and other anthologies. Erotica, which had a number of non-virtual literary magazines going a decade or so ago (ranging from Yellow Silk to Paramour to Blue Blood to Libido) seems to have shrunken, in the cold bath of the current climate, to Penthouse Letters and perhaps a few straggling imitators which I never see. The most prominent sports fiction magazine, baseball review Elysian Fields Quarterly, has not returned from its planned and possibly permanent hiatus begun in 2009.

See Patti Abbott's blog for the roundup of Friday's Forgotten Books

Fridays "Forgotten" Books: Joe R. Lansdale and Pat LoBrutto, editors: RAZORED SADDLES

from the Contento Indices:

Razored Saddles (with Patrick LoBrutto) (Avon 0-380-71168-0, Oct ’90 [Sep ’90], $3.95, 285pp, pb, cover by Lee MacLeod) Reprint (Dark Harvest 1989) original anthology of 17 Western horror and fantasy stories.

Razored Saddles ed. Joe R. Lansdale & Patrick LoBrutto (Dark Harvest 0-913165-49-2, Sep ’89 [Aug ’89], $19.95, 268pp, hc) Original anthology of 17 western horror and fantasy stories, illustrated by Rick Araluce. A slipcased deluxe limited edition of 600 copies signed by the editors and contributors ($59.00) is also available.

11 · Introduction: The Cowpunk Anthology · Joe R. Lansdale & Patrick LoBrutto · in
15 · Black Boots · Robert R. McCammon · ss *
29 · Thirteen Days of Glory · Scott A. Cupp · ss *
37 · Gold · Lewis Shiner · nv *
71 · The Tenth Toe · F. Paul Wilson · ss *
89 · Sedalia · David J. Schow · nv *
111 · Trapline · Ardath Mayhar · ss *
119 · Trail of the Chromium Bandits · Al Sarrantonio · ss *
129 · Dinker’s Pond · Richard Laymon · ss *
143 · Stampede · Melissa Mia Hall · ss *
161 · Razored Saddles · Robert Petitt · ss *
175 · Empty Places · Gary L. Raisor · ss *
183 · Tony Red Dog · Neal Barrett, Jr. · nv *
211 · The Passing of the Western · Howard Waldrop · ss *
225 · Eldon’s Penitente · Lenore Carroll · ss *
237 · The Job · Joe R. Lansdale · ss *
241 · I’m Always Here · Richard Christian Matheson · ss *
249 · “Yore Skin’s Jes’s Soft ’n Purty...” He Said. (Page 243) · Chet Williamson · ss *

-punk. Cyberpunk, splatterpunk, steampunk, Paul Di Filippo was hoping to stir up some ribofunk, but that didn't have the Right Extender. Joe Lansdale, rather an unwilling occasional resident of the splatterpunk drawer, actually the best of the writers who at least moved in that colloquial, at least sometimes extremely graphic, and irreverent direction, published his seonnd western anthology in a year, after the slightly more conventional The New Frontier (Doubleday), in collaboration with Doubleday editor LoBrutto...the first of what has since been at least a small handful of western/horror crossover original anthologies. The Avon paperback is actually tagged, on its spine, "cowpunk"...a term that hasn't ever fully caught on (at least in literary circles...in music, where "splatterpunk" also made some inroads, it gained greater currency).

And, of course, when one assembles an eclectic mix of writers for an inherently eclectic anthology concept, you get some diversity in results...and a large portion of these stories aren't supernatural horror, though many of those without fantasticated elements are suspense or at least crime stories. One of the most memorable, "Eldon's Penitente" by Lenore Carroll, isn't even quite that so much as psychological study of the protagonist, and the morose burden he carries. Lansdale's own "The Job" involves two pieces of what John D. MacDonald liked to refer to as Mean Furniture, one of them an Elvis impersonator, out on a hit...I have to wonder if this story was an ancestor of "Bubba Ho-Tep" when the Elvis as Action Man nudge wouldn't leave JRL alone. Neal Barrett, Jr's "Tony Red Dog" is a contemporary western crime story about the title character, rather sharper than Lansdale's killers, who needs to extricated himself from hit contract as the target, and is perhaps the best single story in the collection.

The worst is certainly the Chet Williamson, which, like Scott Cupp's mildly diverting piece, attempts to get Big Laffs out of homosexuality in the Old West...while the Cupp makes the Alamo into a haven for homosexual liberation arrayed against the repression of Santa Anna, the Williamson posits an illustrator who is an utterly incredibly self-deluding gay man as the target of horrible abuse by two hulking monsters. But, doncha know, them gay bo's is Different. Not That different...this story has been inexplicably praised in some quarters.

Howard Waldrop and David Schow are among those who provide the kind of story one might almost expect of them, as does Lewis Shiner with an historical peice with a pointed sociological agenda. I haven't revisted Al Sarrontonio's story, but recall it as less goofy than the usual run of his work, if as eager to please. Solid contributions from the rest of the assembled, and a book which really shouldn't be out of print, as with most or perhaps even almost all the entrants in this weekly roundup...and certainly one of the least "Forgotten" of the books I've highighted.

Joe Bob would definitely tell you to buy. Please see Patti Abbott's blog for the rest of this week's titles and links.