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Saturday, November 10, 2007 ( 11/10/2007 07:47:00 AM ) Bill S. JACK OF ALL SONGS: Good bud and periodic reader Karl Neidershuh writes to tell me that the one-name radio format that I kept coming upon during our trip west is called "Jack radio," after Denver's originating FM station KJAC. The format is designed to simulate a shuffling IPOD in its seemingly random play of songs, though considering how often I heard many of the same '70s and '80s era AOR "classics" from station to station, I'd guess randomness is not all it's cracked up to be . . . UPDATE: In Comments, Ken Lowery rightly chides me for forgetting to mention that he'd first commented upon the one-name radio format. (My reason for even writing this brief post was primairly to include a link Karl N. sent me to a Business Week article on "Jack radio." But I foolishly blew the html coding when I first posted it.) My apologies, Ken! # | Friday, November 09, 2007 ( 11/09/2007 05:21:00 PM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: Pets are so relaxing. You know, they’ve done serious studies showing how just having a companion animal around the house can lower your blood-pressure and the like. So here are Kyan Pup and Ziggy Stardust, contributing to the Everything's Mellow tone of the Gadabout household by loudly growling and wrestling on the new living room floor (note the still unpacked boxes in the background).  THE USUAL NOTE: For more companion animals, check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Thursday, November 08, 2007 ( 11/08/2007 06:29:00 AM ) Bill S.  "IN FOR A LONG STAY IN THE WORLD OF DREAMS": The face that we see on the yin-yang cover of Mike Dubisch's mind bender of a graphic novel, Weirdling (Strange Fear), is one of two shifting personas named Anna Mandretta. A medical technician on an intergalactic battleship fighting a polymorphous alien enemy called the Xax, she's just another grunt in a universe of prolonged warfare. Her counterpart is a respected surgeon living in Victorian New England. This second Anna gets touched by a Lovecraftian deity which has taken control of a local couple conveniently named the Vessells. Depending on how you choose to read Dubisch's calculatedly slippery s-f horror tale, the "real" Anna could be either of these two characters.To Anna One, her Miskatonik Hospital counterpart is the creation of a "Lucidream" virtual reality emitter to which she escapes between Xax attacks. To Anna Two, the perpetually embattled world is another dimension (one of many existing "at different vibrations of the cosmic ether") that she's able to access via an experimental device called the Neural Cryptometer. As Weirdling progresses, however, figures and events from each respective Annaverse begin spilling into the other. Someone has tampered with the first Anna's virtual reality device, turning her into a "virt addict." And as with Anna Two's contact with the Elder God, Azag-Thoth, the experience has given her unfathomable powers. Maintaining this kind of balancing act, juggling malleable realities without either being too schematic or tumbling into incoherence, can be tricky business. Writer/artist Dubisch by and large pulls it off, though there are times in Weirdling where he makes his dialog more expository than believable. To my eyes, his art is more convincing when he tackles the early century setting than it when the action shifts to his future ship. At times, when Anna is the proper Miskatonik medico, I found myself pleasantly thinking of underground horror commix artists like Greg Irons and Jack Jackson, particularly in their attempts at rendering Lovecraftian pastiche. Dubisch's futuristic battle scenes, despite his attempts at imparting an element of visual mystery on his alien creatures, have an air of tentativeness about 'em. Perhaps that's intentional: the writer-artist's way of visually undermining the "reality" in which Weirdling both opens and closes. ("I find myself not caring about the state of the ship," Anna says near the book's conclusion. "It seems so flat. Literally two dimensional.") And even in the mist of the multi-dimensional chaos, Dubisch provides some solid creepy images - zombified crewmen and villagers (each of the realities' monsters has its own way of turning humans into walking automatons), mutated children, monstrous drug-induced visions - to bolster his story's subtler psychological horrors. An unpredictable genre work packed with plenty of hybrid vigor, Weirdling is recommended for both followers of the Cthulhu Mythos and the labyrinthine uncertainties of Philip K. Dick. # | Wednesday, November 07, 2007 ( 11/07/2007 06:40:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: From the soon-to-be-reviewed recent release by Canada's Golden Dogs, Big Eye, Little Eye, here's the very white video for "Never Meant Any Harm." # | Tuesday, November 06, 2007 ( 11/06/2007 10:58:00 PM ) Bill S. I'M SORRY AND SO IS BRENDA LEE: Hey, closed captioners, if you're gonna do the lyrics to an ultra well-known rock song (like Golden Earring's "Radar Love" on tonight's episode of Reaper), why not get the lyrics right? It's "Radio's playing that forgotten song/Brenda Lee coming on strong," not "Brand new day coming on strong." Sure, I know the average CW viewer is probably too wet to even know who Brenda Lee is. But it kinda flubs the ending when the ep's last scene shows Ray Wise's devil sitting in a bar, listening to one of Little Miss Dynamite's hits play on the jukebox. # | ( 11/06/2007 06:32:00 PM ) Bill S. BLOG THAT BLOCK: Ever go through one of those periods where every sentence you write seems gawky and totally off point? (I mean, more than usual, dammit!) Well, that's where I currently find myself. Please bear with me as I strive to wrestle three recalcitrant reviews into postable submission . . . # | Sunday, November 04, 2007 ( 11/04/2007 09:26:00 AM ) Bill S. "IT WAS DUSK. I COULD TELL BECAUSE THE SUN WAS GOING DOWN." My first Halloween with a DVR, so naturally I took advantage of it to collect monster films off Turner Classic Movies that I hadn't seen in ages. Got five in all and watched the first on my list, Roger Corman's Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) last night. A no-budget horror comedy, Creature is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Little Shop of Horrors and Bucket of Blood. (All three flicks were quickly dashed off by scriptwriter Charles B. Griffith.) But where the two earlier flicks were held together by their broadly goofy anti-heroes (Jonathan Haze's Seymour and Dick Miller's Walter Paisley, respectively), Creature makes its central figure a third-string Bogart (Anthony Carbone's Renzo Carpetto) and keeps the more overtly cartoonish characters (such as an unfunny retarded muscleman who mainly speaks in animal sounds) on the sidelines. The results, alas, are much less consistently watchable. A few traces of Griffith's hipster humor survive in the flick - most of which revolve around future Oscar winner Robert Towne's performance as government agent Sparks Moran. Sparks (who also calls himself Agent XK150) delivers the film's ludicrous narration with such amusing deadpan seriousness that you wish he'd been given more to do in the actual picture. (As the movie's good guy, he's fairly negligible.) Purportedly, Creature was written in less than week after Corman - who had just finished shooting Last Woman on Earth in Puerto Rico – asked Griffith to deliver a new script quickly so he dash off a second picture with the same cast and crew. Perhaps if Griffith'd been given two weeks, he might've given Corman a fuller movie script. As it is, the script is a mess. The plot, such as it is, aims for early sixties currency by being set in post-revolution Cuba. As a jerkily animated cartoon tells us in the movie's opening, anti-Castro elements looted most of Cuba's treasury in the final days with the idea of using that gold and money to finance a counter-revolution. Sicilian Renzo Capetto (Carbone), eager to offer his yacht and his assistance, contacts some of these Batista loyalists with the aim of ultimately ripping 'em off. His scheme is pick the Cubans off one by one, blaming the killings on a sea monster that supposedly inhabits the waters. But, of course, the real creature shows up to ruin Renzo's plans. As for the title creature, it's as lame as you'd expect: a guy in a mossy covered wet suit with no neck, eyes that resemble overcooked eggs and strands of plastic seaweed dangling from his arms and torso. The scene where the monster comes on board Renzo's boat to grab Betsy Jones-Moreland's gangster's moll is so ridiculous that it's shown up on at least one "wacky" teevee commercial over the years. Per cheapie tradition, the monster is largely kept out of clear camera sight until its big attack at the picture's conlcusion (though we earlier see several quick underwater shots of its head in the murky waters). The version TMC broadcast appears to be the original release: purportedly, Corman had Monte Hellman shoot about ten minutes of extra footage a couple of years later to pad the flick for teevee release, adding a theme song performed by Jones-Moreland. Somehow, I don't think I missed very much. # | |
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