further video adventures of THIS AMERICAN WIFE (episodes 3-5)

The frequently brilliant audio podcast parodists of US public radio continue their video parody of the Showtime cable version of This American Life,  This American Wife.







Previously:  
Episode 1: The Pledge Drive 
Episode 2: Reply Girls

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

In Your Hands

Below, today's set of reviews and citations of audiovisual works and related matter, with the posts at the links... as always, thanks to all the contributors and to all you readers for your participation. And, as usually, there are likely to be additions to this list over the course of the day, and if I've missed your, or someone else's, post, please let me know in comments...thanks again.This week, and while it's close, it's interesting that perhaps our least overlooked item is a stage play...

Borgen

Bill Crider: Steamboat 'Round the Bend  ...trailer

Brian Arnold: The Original VJs of Classic MTV

BV Lawson: Media Murder

Dan Stumpf: Crime without Passion

Ed Gorman: TCM on The Prowler; Cannes's worst posters

Ed Lynskey: Acts of Violence (1948 film)

Allee Willis and Toni Basil

Elizabeth Foxwell: The Star and the Story pilot: "Dark Stranger"

Elizabeth Grace Foley: The Magnificent Ambersons

Evan Lewis: The Shadow (unaired tv pilot)

George Kelley: Borgen

Iba Dawson: The 2013 Columbia University Film Festival

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Naked City (tv); Ripchord and more...

Jackie Kashian: Allee Willis (composer and Detroit benefactor)

Jacqueline T. Lynch: You Are Here (and lectures)

Jake Hinkson: Top of the Lake

James Reasoner: Catlow

Jerry House: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)

Kliph Nesteroff: Tomorrow: Sterling Hayden interviewed by Tom Snyder

The Palm Beach Story

Laura: Run Silent, Run Deep

Lucy Brown: Scott & Bailey, series/season three

Martin Edwards: The Mousetrap

Michael Shonk: The Manhunter (1974 tv)

Mystery Dave: The Sea Hawk

Patti Abbott: The Palm Beach Story

Prashant Trikannad: 35 Underrated Actors

Randy Johsnon: The Crowd Roars;  The Bounty Killer (aka El precio de un hombre)

Rick: The Long Hot Summer (1964 tv)

Two Rode Together

Rod Lott: The Frozen Ghost; Game of Death (2000 film)

Ron Scheer: Two Rode Together

Scott Cupp: Iron Sky; Orlando

Sergio Angelini: In Your Hands (aka Contre toi)

Stacia Jones: What Maisie Knew

Steve Badger: Anthony Mann

Television Obscurities: Accidental Family

This American Wife: Joel Hodgson; Peter Mehlman

Orlando

Todd Mason: The Fred Allen memorial episode of What's My Line?, with Toshiko Akiyoshi and Cyd Charisse

Yvette Banek: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959 film)

Saturday Music Club on Memorial Day: random acts of video: Toshiko Akiyoshi on WHAT'S MY LINE, Twinkle and The Who on the last SHINDIG; 2 war songs

A young, newly emigrated Toshiko Akiyoshi had the unfortunate timing of appearing on the episode of What's My Line? memorializing Fred Allen, who'd passed in the week before taping (and whose last regular gig WML was).

The Dangerous Minds blog, in Richard Metzger's post yesterday, points us toward a video from the last segment of the last episode of Shindig!;  Metzger is highlighting "Twinkle" (as teen Lynn Ripley initially billed herself), and in this segment of the tv program, Twinkle is clearly lip-synching (and the backing track is probably of the most musical interest); the Who are clearly playing live, and Keith Moon threatens to blast the others off the stage (see here for better audio and worse visual of all three of the Who performances from that episode).


A historian on WHYY's Radio Times this week was rather cheerfully nominating "Over There" as the best war song ever, as it was ever so peppy and all...I'll countersuggest that at least these two are among the not actually antiwar songs that I might offer first:

some hyperrealist/figurative realist paintings

Lee Price:

part of a series of often nude self-portraits, usually with food, from directly above

Charles Bell:

Bell had a recurring interest in candy machines, colorful toys, pinball machines.

Marilyn Minter:

Wettest Pam (2009)

 

Alicia St. Rose:

Terracotta Jungle

Chesley Bonestell:

Saturn as Seen from Titan (1944)

Saturday Music Club: Some rock albums from the summer of 1966

Among the notable aspects here...nearly all of these allow, if one pops out the links to watch/listen to them at YT, track selection.

Also notable, perhaps, is that these key albums of the Byrds' and Beatles' careers are also their jazziest albums...for the Byrds, not solely "Eight Miles High" and "I See You" but even "Hey, Joe" feature heavily jazz (most obviously John Coltrane)-influenced guitar riffs on McGuinn's part, and McCartney reaches toward pop jazz in "Good Day Sunshine," "For No One" and particularly "Got to Get You into My Life," and while the tape loops and other experimentation running through "Tomorrow Never Knows" owes more to post-serial electronic music innovators in the classical world, that and some of the other Lennon songs (and Harrison's playing around with Indian classical influence) all have a certain free jazz flavor to them (not quite the MC5, but along the path).  Perhaps some of my fondness for these stems from the Wailers being essentially still a ska band, moving toward the creation of reggae, and that the Animals, the Stones, and of course the Yardbirds, while growing more adventurous, were still not quite ready to shed their partial identities as blues bands...

The Wailers: The Wailing Wailers (issued at the end of 1965 in Jamaica, but of uncertain date and availability in the US and elsewhere...leading off with special pleading)


The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds (released May 1966)


The Rolling Stones: Aftermath (released in the US June 1966; UK April 1966)


The Animals: Animalisms (released June 1966)


The Yardbirds: Roger the Engineer (aka Over Under Sideways Down) (released July 1966)


The Byrds: Fifth Dimension (released July 1966)


The Beatles: Revolver (released August 1966)


Jefferson Airplane: Jefferson Airplane Takes Off (released August 1966)


The Mothers of Invention: Freak Out (official release July 1966; this an alternately sequenced and produced album released as bootleg)

FFB: two by Charles Platt: FREE ZONE and TENDER LOVING RAGE (a partial reconstruction from memory of Alfred Bester's novel)

Charles Platt has been a mercurial and often challenging figure in sf, and on the fringes of it, for nearly half a century...in the last decade or so, he has been much more active writing nonfiction for Wired and Make: magazines, and for them and others about his passions, very much including cryogenics, than he has any kind of fiction, but he'd already contributed rather impressively to several fields, not least with Free Zone (1989), which he cites as his favorite of his own novels, and his reconstruction of at least part of the "lost" Alfred Bester suspense novel published as Tender Loving Rage (1991); I have to seek out Platt's collection of essays Loose Canon, or my copy of the novel itself, where Platt explains to what degree he had to replace from memory missing pages in the manuscript, which had originally been written, iirc, in the year or so after Who He?, Bester's similar contemporary suspense novel dealing with life in advertising and commercial writing. Bester's original title for the long-unsold novel was Tender Loving Rape, and the events of the novel were often as brutal as the title suggests, while also being Bester's only attempt at an odd sort of love story, at novel length. While Bester was exorcising some of his demons, including a rather jaundiced view of relations between the sexes (Bester was increasingly uncomfortable as a closeted, eventually mostly-gay man), this was already familiar territory for Platt, as well, albeit while Bester increasingly wallowed in misogyny by the end of his life, Platt in retrospect finds some of his unexamined youthful expressions of frustration, in such novels as The Gas and Sweet Evil, not altogether flattering nor comfortable.

But it's easy to see why Free Zone might be Platt's pride and joy; he had the notion of attempting to incorporate, into one reasonably short novel, every major science fiction trope and cliche which came to mind; a chart at the back of the book cites 71 examples. Platt has always been most comfortable with at least a certain measure of humor to his writing, and Free Zone is breezy and deftly-written fun, as a libertarian socialist enclave, the FZ, in a future/alternate world Los Angeles is not only chivvied by the collapsing fascist state the US has become around it, but directly invaded and/or besieged by all sorts of fantasticated menaces, including aliens, and Nazis from an alternate Earth in which they were victorious in World War II. The heroine, Dusty McCullough, is the chiefest if relatively informal administrator of the nearly anarchist FZ, with a tech-genius/geek male life-partner, and friends and fellow free citizens (including gang bikers), pitted against the sentient dogs and troglodytes, among others, who attack them...also assisted by a hyper-sophisticated robot from the future, sent back and capable of seeing into multiple realities. Platt at his website reports that at least some readers would complain about the affectionately satirical nature of the work, whether because they felt Platt was showing disrespect to his predecessors, or because they wanted a more serious extrapolation along the same lines, or both. I'd suggest the novel moves at an excellent clip, a tribute to how well Platt studied his literary idol Bester, and makes seemingly every point it intends to make, even if he seems at times to think he's created the concept of libertarian socialism (which would've come as news to people ranging from the Anabaptists through the Communards to Noam Chomsky)...I've needed to seek out more of Platt's fiction for quite some time.
simultaneously.

Patti Abbott has the lists of contributors this week and probably a review or two...