The
536th Soundtrack of the Week
is Thriller 2, the second superb re-recording
of Jerry Goldsmith's music from the television show Thriller,
brought to life by conductor Nic Raine and the City of Prague
Philharmonic Orchestra.
On the CD are thirteen tracks of music from six episodes of
the show, each episodes getting a longish suite of cues in addition
to a "Prologue/Roll Call" and, in one case, a nocturne for violin and piano.
2018 September 21 • Friday
The comics medium often seems at its best when
dealing with subjects otherwise found in history
books or biographies or any other kind of reference
book or text book.
The number of ways writers and artists can create and
assemble words and pictures together on pages has
enormous potential, and lucky for us, people are tapping into it. Economix was one such book, being an extremely
informative and illuminating guide to economic history and
the recent global financial crisis whose effects have not yet
vanished. With a similar title and tackling even more daunting
subject matter is Logicomix, a brilliant presentation
of, more or less, the life of Bertrand Russell and the ideas
(from the worlds of mathematics, logic, philosophy, etc.)
and people (Wittgenstein, Gödel, et al.) woven into his story.
The writing is credited to Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H.
Papadimitrou and the art to Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna.
In a book like this I imagine everybody to be contributing
to everything and the creators themselves are part of the story. There are two framing devices, one being Bertrand Russell
giving a lecture to an audience that incldues anti-war protestors
who want Russell to sign on to their campaign that the United
States not enter World War 2. (Russell was a pacifist who
was jailed for his opposition to World War 1.) The other is the creators themselves, as they discuss
the book they're making and argue among themselves
about details and directions, serving sometimes as
annotations, others as a Greek chorus, a theme that's
developed at the end of the book as the Oresteia
is used as an epilogue. Right away I felt that I was in extremely capable hands. This panel
was my first clue.
Here you have one of the writers confessing that he needs
someone to help him find his way through this territory.
And in the right corner you see a backpacker, studying
a map. We all need help finding our way sometimes. Maps themselves are also a theme that returns and becomes
important to the story. Having it foreshadowed like this (assuming
that it was intentional, as I do) is a great touch. Elsewhere the combination of word and image are used
as simply, elegantly and impressively as a pirouette.
A book like this can't get to everything, of course.
Russell's second wife was a very interesting person but
not much of a presence here. She probably needs her own book. But the creators fearlessy dive into very complicated
ideas that people spent decades smashing their brains against
and manage to convey—I think!—what they're about and why
they were considered so important to these specialists. More relatable and accessible is Russell's personal life,
his sad marriages and the plight of his children. More uplifting
is his consistent stance against war, the ultimate irrationality.
Apparently this book was a bestseller. It took me years to get around
to reading it but I'm very glad I did.
2018 September 19 • Wednesday
On the way to picking up some more Dan J. Marlowe titles,
I came across a whole book about him! Charles Kelly's
Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of
Dan J. Marlowe is the kind of very specific reference
book that I love, an attempt to discover, arrange and present
all the relevant information about a not especially well known
author.
The first line is "The headaches seemed to well up from the
green hell enveloping him, pounding pain emerging from the
sticky heat pungent with saw grass, moss, cypress and
brackish water".
Right away we're off in new territory. I didn't know that Marlowe
suffered these headaches and that they led to eventual
amnesia, most likely the result of a stroke. This almost
gives him the chance to enact one of his own novels,
Never Die Twice, about an amnesiac, though
the parallel pretty much ends there. Another revelation was his long relationship with convicted
bankrobber Al Nussbaum, who got in touch with Marlowe
after being impressed with The Name of the
Game Is Death, the first in a long-running series
about a bank robber eventually known as Earl Drake. Nussbaum and Marlowe traded practical advice, about crime
and writingm respectively, and Marlowe helped Nussbaum
to get published and paroled. Later in life Nussbaum returned the favor, helping
the amnesia-stricken Marlowe to write and publish again.
The two even lived together in Los Angeles. Kelly relates the characters and their settings very well
and does an excellent job conveying the texture
of Marlowe's life: his work, his politics, his sexual
activities and turn-ons, his friendships and travels.
It's a better biography than most, despite the limited
amount of information that can be known. Sometimes Kelly has to take a guess at the title
of a story or pick between two conflicting accounts of an event and he's
always upfront about his sources and decisions. As a book that's a window onto an extinct species
of professional writing and one of its more interesting
practitioners, Kelly's must be one of the best.
2018 September 17 • Monday
Joe Greene’s music for On Her Bed of Roses, apparently
also known as Psychedelic Sexualis,
based on Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, is the
535th Soundtrack of the Week.
The record opens with a full blast of some of the most exciting, forward-looking and avantgarde music I’ve ever heard composed for a score.
2018 September 14 • Friday
Here's another ephemeral item, Metallurgy and Wheels: The
Story of Men, Metals and Motors by Technical Data Department
of the General Motors Research Laboratories Division, published in 1938.
There are "Other Booklets of a Similar Nature" advertised in the
back and they include Electricity and Wheels,
Optics and Wheels and Chemistry and Wheels. The cover alone was enough for me to risk five dollars on it.
Inside I found some dynamic illustrations that are like a cross
between woodcuts and Charles Burns.
2018 September 12 • Wednesday
Here's another bit of ephemera from Oceans of Books by the Sea:
Driver and Pedestrian Responsibilities,
the second in a series of five "Sportmanslike Driving" books printed
by the American Automobile Association. This is from 1936.
A quick perusal seems to reveal a lot of sound advice mixed
with some colorful observations of human nature.
The babyish adult makes a miserable driver for the same
reason. He has never outgrown his babyish egotism. Sometimes this
is not his own fault. He may have had the kind of training
that makes a grown person act like a baby. But if he
realizes his own infantile egotism, it may not
be too late for him to acquire a social point of view. Realizing one's own infantile egotism doesn't seem to be
a popular idea these days. Was it ever?
The theme is picked up later, when they discuss "The Show-off".
There's a vivid metaphorical illustration for warding off traffic accidents.
And an even more vivid illustration of how centrifugal
force can work on a car, trading in illustration for either
photo montage or a blend of photography and illustration.
And finally and perhaps most touchingly,
near the end of the book comes a hand alteration of
one of the illustrated figures. Was this done
by a high-school student in 1936?
With his normal psychological make-up, the baby
would make the worst possible driver. He would consider nothing
but his own interests and immediate desires.
Like the egotist,
the man who shows off discloses that he has never
properly grown up. He has never managed,
no matter what his age, to get both feet on the ground
and to see himself in his proper place among men
and women. He is exactly like the child who enjoys
dangling his lolly-pop in other
children's faces! He is unduly competitive and boastful.
Often he is suffering from a half-recognized sense of
inferiority which he is trying to cover up by false
appearance of superiority.
2018 September 10 • Monday
It was my birthday last month and for a present I bought
myself a collection of soundtrack music by Edward Artemiev.
My friend Mikael told me about it and after mulling it over
I decided to go for it, which meant wiring money to a Russian
bank and hoping for the best! It took maybe about two weeks but eventually a package
with many Russian stamps on it showed up here and inside was an
11-CD box set. It seems to be a limited edition of a thousand
copies and I got #425.
So onto the music! The 534th Soundtrack of the Week is
Edward Artemiev's score for The Detective.
The opening and end credits both make use
of a dual-electric guitar line, in a funky, percussive,
wah-wah sort of way that should immediately make you think of
the 1970s. On top of this, though, is a soaring and inspirational
line for horn that changes the character of the piece as
soon as it enters. "A Forest Park" is a melody with some similarities to the credits
music but it's handled by acoustic guitar and flute with
some textures and backing provided by what sounds like a synthesizer. This is followed by "Lyrical Theme with Variations", which
lives up to its title as it presents different arrangements
with different feels of the same composition, one in waltz
time, one in 6/8, one very open yet cloudy and so on. My favorite cue is probably "The Bog", which seems influenced
by early-'70s Miles Davis and is a slow-burning, slinky, funky
piece of music with some very nice sonic textures, particularly
a fuzz guitar sound. This is followed by "A Nightmare" with flute and another wind instrument
handling
the melody while a staccato keyboard instrument recalls
the score to The In-Laws and snare drum and
some other instruments fleshing out the piece. It ends
with an unexpected organ and drums entrance. After this comes the placid "The Watcher's House",
which is almost all solo flute, with a bit of support
from some other instruments. It's a very lonely sounding cue. The last cue presented here from this movie is "Tricks",
which is another funky one, a bit more up tempo and straightforward
with electric bass guitar or tuned-down electric guitar
taking the lead. This is similar to some of Goblin's work and
is likely to please fans of that.
2018 September 07 • Friday
A funny thing happened to me on the way to middle age.
I appear to have abandoned the whole "so bad it's good"
approach to things.
There's almost always something good in a movie even if
the movie itself is bad. And if it's really, really bad,
I'll just stop watching it. But appreciation of so-called camp value no longer exists for me, except
perhaps for some trace elements still lurking in
my system. What I love about Mystery Science Theater 3000, for
instance, is how they re-write the movie to make it funny.
They could do this with any movie. Way back when, they gave
their treatment to movies that were nominated for Academy Awards,
and were just as funny as they were with any obscure, low-budget,
drive-in trash. Which is why I wasn't flabbergasted or howling with laughter
when I sat down to watch Godmonster of Indian Flats.
It'sa movie about a giant sheep monster and admittedly
there isn't much to work with as far as the monster effects
go, but the story and characters are good and the movie consistently
delivers great images. This shot of a fortune teller, for instance,
is beautifully composed.
One of the appeals of movies is the virtual travel
element and Godmonster of Indian Flats delivers
in a big way, bringing the viewer to 1973 Nevada and
an orgy of local color.
Those folks are drinking Olypmia beer,
a regional lager once brewed in Tumwater, WA, not far
from Olympia. Apparently this beer still exists but,
according to Wikipedia, is
"contract brewed by MillersCoors in Southern California". We also get a look at the Bonanza Days celebration.
But my favorite bit has to be this bachelor
pad set with its reel to reel tape machine
that's either mounted on the wall or sitting on its own dedicated
shelf.
That guy has to have been a proto-hipster.
2018 September 05 • Wednesday
A couple of months ago on Cape Cod I picked up one of Dan J. Marlowe's
"Drake" novels and was so taken with the opening paragraph that I anticipated
paying some attention to Marlowe in the near future. I had read a few of his books back in the
1990s and didn't remember much about them.
The place to start seemed to be a return to the origin
of the Drake series,
The Name of the Game Is Death, which had been reprinted
as part of Vintage's Black Lizard line and is thus fairly easy to find. Conveniently enough I found a used copy on Cape Cod when I was
there again a few weeks ago. The Vintage edition has a terrible cover. It could be
improved tremendously simply by removing the photograph and
not replacing it with anything.
The original Gold Medal cover is quite nice, as
Gold Medal covers tend to be. It also depicts a scene
from the book.
After reading it again, I was extremely impressed. It's
pretty much a perfect hardboiled crime novel, following
a professional criminal as he improvises in the aftermath
of a bank robbery gone wrong, while cutting back to
his childhood and young adult years so we see where he came
from and some of the events that formed him. He kills without remorse. He does pretty much everything
without remorse. As a child he encountered cruelty and corruption
and abuse of power and in each case hit back at it as hard
as he could and suffered massive pain and abuse in retaliation. All of that just made him harder. He loves animals, though, and they love him. The defining
moment of his early life concerned a kitten and in the adult
thread of his story, a dog plays a major role. (He's about to
murder the person who hurt the dog but stops himself because
it's too risky a move in the game he's playing.) A quick trip to Wikipedia shows that Marlowe had an interesting
life which included a friendship with an actual bank robber,
which presumably informed some of the details in this book,
such as the main character's having got useful information
from subscribing to "Banking, the Journal of the American
Banking Association". There was a time when the most common advice parents
gave to their children was to have both a skill and a trade.
The protagonist of The Name of the Game Is Death indeed
has both, his skill being robbing banks and shooting guns—he's
an ace shot—and his trade being, unexpectedly, tree surgeon. It's another nice detail, the kind of thing that really animates a book
like this. After his one and only time in jail, Drake, as he's
not called in this book but will be called in subsequent ones,
worked in a lumber camp in the Pacific Northwest. "The work damn near killed
me at first, but I grew to like it. When I came out of there
I could handle a crosscut saw and a double-bitted axe with the best
of them, and I could do things with a handgun people
pay admission to see." And this man likes guns better than anything, better than sex
or money or gambling, all things he spends a lot of time with.
It's his real turn-on but he's also an artist and a craftsman,
not an addict or thrill-crazed trigger-puller. It's a crime novel, a mystery, a vicious coming of age story,
a delivery system for action, violence, sex and sadism. And
also a story of someone who gives up on justice
after colliding with cruelty and corruption, yet who
retains some compassion, particularly for the true
innocent creatures of the animal world. It has
everything!
2018 September 03 • Monday
Most horror movies wouldn't work without a lot of help from their music.
Psycho and Suspiria are obvious examples
and when I recently re-watched The Shining I was struck
by how much the music does in that movie.
Another case in point is
The Changeling, whose score, mostly by Ken Wannberg and Rick Wilkins,
is our 533rd Soundtrack of the Week.
The movie is okay. Much of it doesn't really make much
sense, as is often the case. And the climax lacks
suspense since by that point it's been established
that the vengeful spirit can just straight-up murder
if it wants to, so if our main characters are still
alive, it's because the ghost doesn't want them dead. It is handsomely photographed, though, and the music
is a big part of its watchability. The score veers from melodic and romantic to
pure ghost story menace and suspenseful atmosphere. Howard Blake contributed some music as well, including
a theme that begins one of the main character's compositions
and also the tune played by a music box belonging to the ghost.
