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captainsblogI haven't posted in close to two days. This post will capture the overriding theme from those.
All's I had to say about Friday, ON Friday, was that the Sabres' announcer got named to the Hockey Hall of Fame. That left out most of the actual experiences of my day, which were mixed but okay. I finally got to keep my 12:30 appointment from the day before, almost exactly 24 hours late, and it resulted in about half the lawyery goodness I'd been expecting the day before. It was enough of a win for a minor celebration, though, and I spent it at the new home of an old friend in Rochester- The Bop Shop.
Since my early 80s years there, this was a record store that defied labeling and celebrated everything. Days before, our friend Deanna mentioned that she'd booked an in-store jazz gig with her trio there for this coming November, and she also told us they'd moved. They'd gone from a gritty old warehouse "mall" east of downtown to a strip plaza in Brighton- doors down from Sofia Shoe Repair (proprietor: "Johnny Ex-Marine," which was fixing my computer bag at that very moment) and the Lipman Kosher Meat Marker. Talk about defying labeling.
I wanted to visit for two reasons. First, to see if they had the new Shawn Colvin album in stock, which NPR's World Cafe had been playing live cuts from at that very hour (they didn't, but I scored it later in the day from our Record Store Day fave back here- and Shawn's as awesome as ever:). But also, I wanted to make my occasional pilgrimage to their vinyl record section featuring the most bizarre of the bizarre- from Ed McMahon covers of Beatles songs to Lithuanian language lessons, it's all been in there over the years. Back in the day, they called it the "Why'd They Bother Bin."
And it's still there- if renamed, just as appopriately, as
As we so often say around here, this will be important later.
----
The rest of that afternoon went okay, and the weekend's been relatively quiet, enough for me to catch up on this past/current week's New Yorker double issue on the subject of science fiction.
There's plenty of good content in there- from a sadly precient essay by Ray Bradbury, to a surprisingly theological piece by Anthony Burgess of all people- but I was blown away by this one, a coming-of-horrible-age essay by author Colson Whitehead. Growing up in 70s/80s Manhattan, with the same influences I had from not that far east of there (the 4:30 Movie "Monster Week" features on Channel 7 and Crazy Eddie's Tape Asylum), he became a true connoisseur of the truly horrible once the genre reached its slashiest, bloodiest stage:
Billed as the “First Monster Musical,” Ray Dennis Steckler’s “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?” (1964) is a masterwork of incompetence. After hearing about it for years, I finally saw it in 1996, on a double bill with “Rat Pfink a Boo Boo,” Steckler’s Batman-and-Robin pastiche (don’t ask). I was in my twenties, long past my B-movie phase, and working on what would become my first published novel. In the eighties, when I was reading up on exploitation flicks, I’d seen “Incredibly Strange Creatures” routinely characterized as a celluloid atrocity, “the worst movie ever made,” mostly on account of its title, I think.
...Steckler was in his mid-twenties when he made this film, on the ultra-cheap, for thirty grand. Padded out with tepid dance numbers, miserable musical interludes, and a pathological amount of B-roll, “Incredibly Strange Creatures” follows a juvenile delinquent named Jerry as he is inducted into a murderous menagerie. It’s never quite clear why the fortune-teller Estrella brainwashes her victims with a Hypno-Wheel, disfigures them with acid, and then locks up her minions in the back of her shop, but with this type of film it is not enough to suspend your disbelief—you have to throw it in a gunnysack and drop it off a bridge in the dark of night.
In interviews, Steckler came off as surprisingly earnest, oblivious of the world’s derision. Under the handle Cash Flagg, he played the lead role of poor, doomed Jerry, and, during the film’s first run, he put on his monster getup and dashed through the aisles at the climax, to spook the audience. It wasn’t enough to write, direct, and star in “Incredibly Strange Creatures”; Steckler continued shooting his monster movie long after he’d returned the cameras to the rental place.
All of which led me to a singular conclusion: I NEED TO SEE THIS FILM.
Netflix has heard of it- at least its MST3kizing from the 90s- but according to them, its release date is, as with most horror endings, UNKNOWN?!?!?!?
Yet Amazon has it:
Can Terrorama be worth 15 bucks? How could it not?
----
So when co-workers and clients ask me tomorrow how my weekend was, and I tell them, incredibly strange, you'll back me up, right?
All's I had to say about Friday, ON Friday, was that the Sabres' announcer got named to the Hockey Hall of Fame. That left out most of the actual experiences of my day, which were mixed but okay. I finally got to keep my 12:30 appointment from the day before, almost exactly 24 hours late, and it resulted in about half the lawyery goodness I'd been expecting the day before. It was enough of a win for a minor celebration, though, and I spent it at the new home of an old friend in Rochester- The Bop Shop.
Since my early 80s years there, this was a record store that defied labeling and celebrated everything. Days before, our friend Deanna mentioned that she'd booked an in-store jazz gig with her trio there for this coming November, and she also told us they'd moved. They'd gone from a gritty old warehouse "mall" east of downtown to a strip plaza in Brighton- doors down from Sofia Shoe Repair (proprietor: "Johnny Ex-Marine," which was fixing my computer bag at that very moment) and the Lipman Kosher Meat Marker. Talk about defying labeling.
I wanted to visit for two reasons. First, to see if they had the new Shawn Colvin album in stock, which NPR's World Cafe had been playing live cuts from at that very hour (they didn't, but I scored it later in the day from our Record Store Day fave back here- and Shawn's as awesome as ever:). But also, I wanted to make my occasional pilgrimage to their vinyl record section featuring the most bizarre of the bizarre- from Ed McMahon covers of Beatles songs to Lithuanian language lessons, it's all been in there over the years. Back in the day, they called it the "Why'd They Bother Bin."
And it's still there- if renamed, just as appopriately, as
As we so often say around here, this will be important later.
----
The rest of that afternoon went okay, and the weekend's been relatively quiet, enough for me to catch up on this past/current week's New Yorker double issue on the subject of science fiction.
There's plenty of good content in there- from a sadly precient essay by Ray Bradbury, to a surprisingly theological piece by Anthony Burgess of all people- but I was blown away by this one, a coming-of-horrible-age essay by author Colson Whitehead. Growing up in 70s/80s Manhattan, with the same influences I had from not that far east of there (the 4:30 Movie "Monster Week" features on Channel 7 and Crazy Eddie's Tape Asylum), he became a true connoisseur of the truly horrible once the genre reached its slashiest, bloodiest stage:
Billed as the “First Monster Musical,” Ray Dennis Steckler’s “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?” (1964) is a masterwork of incompetence. After hearing about it for years, I finally saw it in 1996, on a double bill with “Rat Pfink a Boo Boo,” Steckler’s Batman-and-Robin pastiche (don’t ask). I was in my twenties, long past my B-movie phase, and working on what would become my first published novel. In the eighties, when I was reading up on exploitation flicks, I’d seen “Incredibly Strange Creatures” routinely characterized as a celluloid atrocity, “the worst movie ever made,” mostly on account of its title, I think.
...Steckler was in his mid-twenties when he made this film, on the ultra-cheap, for thirty grand. Padded out with tepid dance numbers, miserable musical interludes, and a pathological amount of B-roll, “Incredibly Strange Creatures” follows a juvenile delinquent named Jerry as he is inducted into a murderous menagerie. It’s never quite clear why the fortune-teller Estrella brainwashes her victims with a Hypno-Wheel, disfigures them with acid, and then locks up her minions in the back of her shop, but with this type of film it is not enough to suspend your disbelief—you have to throw it in a gunnysack and drop it off a bridge in the dark of night.
In interviews, Steckler came off as surprisingly earnest, oblivious of the world’s derision. Under the handle Cash Flagg, he played the lead role of poor, doomed Jerry, and, during the film’s first run, he put on his monster getup and dashed through the aisles at the climax, to spook the audience. It wasn’t enough to write, direct, and star in “Incredibly Strange Creatures”; Steckler continued shooting his monster movie long after he’d returned the cameras to the rental place.
All of which led me to a singular conclusion: I NEED TO SEE THIS FILM.
Netflix has heard of it- at least its MST3kizing from the 90s- but according to them, its release date is, as with most horror endings, UNKNOWN?!?!?!?
Yet Amazon has it:
Can Terrorama be worth 15 bucks? How could it not?
----
So when co-workers and clients ask me tomorrow how my weekend was, and I tell them, incredibly strange, you'll back me up, right?
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no subject
Date: 2012-06-11 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-11 01:50 am (UTC)Especially because I've also found a copy of Rat Phink a Boo-Boo on Amazon, which just gets the whole thing above $25 for free shipping but might just explode my brain on arrival.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-11 01:57 am (UTC)(By the way, the straight line I was feeding you was from W.C. Fields and Charlie McCarthy.
McCarthy: So how small a bird is this duck-billed platypus? Do you have to have glasses to see it?
Fields: Yes. About three or four...)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-11 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-11 03:59 am (UTC)Congratulations re the Mets. I don't understand sports at all, yet I know you like it, so I don't have to understand it to be glad you're happy.
And I'm very relieved that Cam is OK and with you. Good save.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-11 04:05 pm (UTC)I think there was supposed to be a backstory for Estrella, there are signs of it being cut out, or maybe it was just other stuff that was cut. It's weird, but it's fun.