Pop Culture Gadabout

Pop Culture Gadabout

( 8/20/2008 06:33:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: Let's get into some Swedish Eurodisco with this cool Stéphane Manel animated video (love the Pong ref) for Pacific!'s "Hot Lips":

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( 8/19/2008 06:48:00 PM ) Bill S.

"ALL THE FLAT-TOP CATS AND ALL THE DUNGAREE DOLLS" Let's start with this uncontroversial pronouncement: if you care anything at all about the power and splendor of early rock 'n' roll, you need to have some Little Richard in your collection. A true musical wild man, Richard Penniman opened up the music in ways that were essential for pop's evolution. In a world of blues shouters, Little Richard was the first great musical screamer. A lot of rock vocalists owe their shredded larynxes to the man.

Very Best of Little Richard is the latest in a line of best-of collections capturing this divine mad man at his peak: the years 1955-6 when he was recording for the Specialty label. As venerable r-&-r liner note writer Billy Vera reminds us, Richard resigned from the music biz in '56 to take up the ministry after a burning airplane propeller made him very aware of his own mortality. Though the singer and pianoman would repeatedly return to playing the "devil's music" in later years, nothing quite matched the sheer lascivious power of the early Specialty cuts. As backed by the Upsetters (most memorably, saxman Lee Allen), this was the sound of horniness at its most unrestrained - even the bastardized attempts to refocus the youth of America toward Pat Boone's milk-safe covers couldn't tamp down the lusty truths that Little Richard was shrieking.

Take the man's first hit single, "Tutti Frutti." Even with the song's original ribald lyrics rewritten (depending on who you read, the song's original signature chorus was either "Tutti Frutti, good booty" or "loose booty" - and not "oh, Rudy"), there's no escaping the singer's intent. The singer's trilling whoops tell the story better than any words can. Or consider our man's version of Bobby Troup's "The Girl Can't Help It," perhaps the greatest tribute to bimbodom ever sung. If you've ever seen the grandly stoopid Frank Tashlin comedy for which it was recorded, it's impossible to hear this track without visualizing a pneumatic Jayne Mansfield strolling down the city sidewalks.

Prior to this newest CD release, the best Little Richard collection was arguably Rhino's 18 Greatest Hits, which also focused on the Specialty years. This new collection adds seven tracks of variable interest. None of 'em truly fall under the title Very Best, but when you've already run your listener through the original "Long Tall Sally," "Good Golly, Miss Molly, "Slippin' And Slidin'" and "Rip It Up," the final tracks almost serve as a cool down. Two marginally successful attempts at reviving Tin Pan Alley hits ("Baby Face" and "By the Light of the Silvery Moon") with a New Orleans beat much as Fats Domino did with "My Blue Heaven" mainly serve as object lessons in just how different the two singers were. Domino's tracks are more genial and slyly lecherous; Richard's strengths lay in shouting out his intentions.

Additionally, the new disc includes one of two blues tracks that Richard assayed for a demo tape. For hardcore Penniman fans, this is akin to Elvis Presley's early tape of "My Happiness": more interesting as historical artifact than as a fully realized piece of music. That someone (in this case, Specialty Records owner Art Rupe) was able to hear the manic potential buried deep within "Baby" is definitely Good Rudy.

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( 8/16/2008 11:18:00 AM ) Bill S.

"THIS ISN'T TEACHING, IT'S CHILD ABUSE!" When we first see Andy Wicks, the middle-aged middle-management protagonist of Alex Robinson's Too Cool to Be Forgotten (Top Shelf), he's standing in the dark, smoking what he hopes will be his last cigarette. Accompanied by his wife Lynn, Andy has come to a holistic medical center to be hypnotized out of his nicotine addiction. But once put under by a kindly medicine lady, he finds himself back in 1985 - a sophomore in high school. Balding Andy has seemingly physically regressed into his longhaired 15-year-old self even as he retains his unreliable memories of everything that's to come. Our hero first thinks that the reason behind his trip to the past is to revisit the moment he had his first cigarette and Just Say No this time. But, actually, there's deeper unfinished business for young Andy to resolve - and not just with the girl he had an unfulfilled teen crush on either.

Aficionados of '80s cinema will immediately recognize the sources for Mr. Wicks' time trek back to the hallowed hall of high school: Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married. Robinson knows this and even includes a variation on Peggy Sue's algebra joke - plus a ref to the "new Michael J. Fox movie" that's showing in town. But the writer/artist is after deeper comedy than either of these two gimmicky popcorn flicks. For Andy, his time-traveling experience proves more bittersweet than broadly comic. He half recalls his friends' and family's futures, but there are no simple sitcom solutions that will change the course of their lives. Even his big play for the girl he let get away in high school turns messy as our adult-minded hero suddenly freaks out in a moment of adolescent passion.

Andy's efforts at pushing his friends out their wholly age-appropriate shortsightedness prove ultimately futile but amusing. Robinson possesses a knowing eye and ear for the lives of eighties teens. ("TV and movies can make you forget how awkward and . . . unformed they are," our hero thinks of his peers. "Maybe a realistic portrayal would be too boring . . . or too painful.") He catches his believable characters with a clean cartoon work reminiscent in places of a kinder R. Crumb or a less self-loathing Joe Matt. There are some genuinely affecting character moments in this short little graphic novel, not just between Andy and his teen buds but also - in the book's big finale - between a boy and his dying parent. That last proves to be the real emotional impetus behind Andy's hypno time traveling, and if Robinson's foreshadowing of it is more than a little obvious, the book's climax is so convincingly rendered that we're willing to forgive a few broad missteps. While we leave Too Cool not entirely sure if our man has successfully given up smoking, we know that his brief visit to the past has yielded some potent life changes.

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( 8/15/2008 01:21:00 PM ) Bill S.

"CAUSE ONCE I'M STARTED, I CAN'T STOP!" I'm behind in acknowledging the recent death of soul great Isaac Hayes, but I've been playing a lot of his Stax work the past two days - the stuff he co-wrote with David Porter for Sam & Dave - since that's the material that hit my young ears first. "You Don't Know Like I Know," "Hold On! I'm A Comin,'" "Soul Man" and "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby." (That last's my personal fave.) Hayes would go on to make his name in a variety of ways: seventies era deep-voiced singer/songwriter, low-budget exploitation actor, the closest thing to an adult ever presented on South Park. But it's those early songs that linger with me in the middle of the night.

R.I.P. Isaac.

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( 8/14/2008 04:36:00 PM ) Bill S.

"THE CUCKOO CLOCK!" Courtesy of Mark Evanier, I was led to a site which tells you what the number one song in America was on the day you were born. So, what was my song on the pre-rock-'n'-roll date of June 17, 1950? "The Third Man Theme" by Anton Karas.

I like that.

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( 8/13/2008 10:30:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: After ruminating on the sonic weirdness that's the Residents, how about a burst of straight-up rock 'n' roll? Here's the incomparable Little Richard lip-syncing to a performance of "Lucille":

(A new Best-Of CD of Mister Penniman's Specialty singles - all the great fifties stuff - is reportedly on the horizon.)

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( 8/12/2008 10:50:00 PM ) Bill S.

"ALL THE SHEEP HAVE FOLLOWED THE SPOKEN WORD I'M COMING CONSTANTINOPLE" Even a hard-core pop-rock junkie can occasionally feel the urge for some bracingly ugly music: in the late sixties, that need was best met by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention; in the late seventies, it was a group of anonymous wiseasses named the Residents. Through a series of albums which simultaneously built upon and deconstructed Top Forty tropes (Meet the Residents, The Third Reich 'n' Roll, Fingerprince), this band of faceless conceptualists produced an amazing catalog of comically abrasive anti-pop pop: music designed to get on the nerves of even those who thought that punk was the pinnacle of musical rebelliousness.

Of the early Residents' releases, perhaps their best-known - and most accessible - was 1978's Duck Stab. Recently reissued by Mute Records in a handsomely designed hardbound booklet/CD, Stab first was released as a seven-song EP, which quickly was coupled with a second EP (Buster & Glen) into long-playing format. This gives the full disc a sort of Magical Mystery Tour feel - with two blocs of music jostling against each other. The disc's opening track "Constantinople" even gets reiterated with the chaotic seventh blues jazz cut "Elvis and His Boss," providing a sense of closure to the first batch of songs even if, lyrically, the listener doesn't really have a clue as to what it's really all about.

With the exception of one instrumental ("Booker Tease," which blends a soulful bassline with shrieking hornwork), the two sets of music follow a similar strategy: hooky tunework subverted by out-of-tune instrumentation - some of which sounds like the background arrangement from some old warped '78 - dadaesque poetry and cartoonish vocals which manage to make Captain Beefheart sound mainstream. In "Blue Rosebuds," for instance, a damaged singer's sappy love song is interrupted by a high-pitched voice declaiming absurdist putdowns ("Infection is your finest flower mildewed in the midst"), while "Sinister Exaggerator" undercuts its effectively ominous guitar stabs (courtesy of guest fingerman Snakefinger) with a barking background chorus that sounds like something the Manimals on the island of Dr. Moreau might've chanted. Good ambient music for those who've used the soundtrack to Eraserhead to put 'em to sleep at nights: the "In Heaven" song could've easily been non-sung by a Resident in one of his little girl voices.

Many of the songs that make up the second half of the disc (a.k.a. the Buster & Glen EP) toy with the themes of disconnected families ("Birthday Boy," "Lizard Lady") and body dysmorphia that the group would return to in their groundbreaking Freak Show CD-Rom. "Weight Lifting Lulu" features a narrator who's simultaneously appalled and aroused by his girlfriend's physique ("I hated your body but needed your touch."), while "Hello Skinny" describes a noodle-thin entrepreneur who sells a used copy of a Hello Dolly record to a truck driver - climaxing in a tuneless rendition of that musical's show stopping chorus. The whole shmear concludes with "The Electrocutioner," a warped little ditty sung by Ruby of the long-departed Rick & Ruby comedy troupe, a group with ties to Peewee Herman's old live comedy shows.

Depending on your tolerance for willful weirdness, you've either stopped listening to Duck Stab long before the Buster & Glen bits or immediately hit "replay" when you get to the end. To test their admirers' perspicacity, the group would follow this release with Eskimo, a totally tuneless aural collage filled with wind sounds, barks and grunts which purports to tell a tale of life in the frozen North. I still don't know what to make of that puppy - also recently reissued by Mute - but I'll happily cop to loudly singin' along with Stab's "Constantinople."

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( 8/10/2008 10:28:00 PM ) Bill S.

"IT TAKES A SPECIAL PERSON TO BE AN ASSHOLE FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE." In the future of Radical Comics' newest five-issue mini-series, Freedom Formula, the world's war-mongering governments have been overthrown by the people in a "global civil movement," leaving a self-described capitalist utopia ("Free enterprise for a free world!" two revisionist talking heads tell us) where the big conflicts are purportedly resolved through a cross-country race entitled Formula Infinity. "The generous corporations have modified the vicious cycles not for war," we're told, "but for sport and the celebration of freedom." Doesn't take too many panels to see that this blather is b.s., of course (the phrase "generous corporations" is the first big clue), and that our free market future is just as filled with downtrodden have-nots as the bad old world.

Among these are the Eugenes, genetically modified workers with barcodes tattooed on the back of their necks that do the crap work in the city, and the ordinary folk who live in the desert wastelands outlying the city. Among this latter group is a sullen boy named Zee, who has been given the task of delivering a mysterious package to the city. We don’t know much about Zee in the first ish - except that he's pissed off at his dead daddy who he somehow blames for his mother's death. Ah, family issues.

Striking off across the wasteland in his dusthopper, our hero winds up riding into the middle of Formula Infinity - where robot-suited racers think nothing of decimating competitors' road crews to give themselves the advantage. Zee is himself nearly dusted when a racer rams into a crew's vehicle, sending an electrical tower onto his dusthopper. He hooks up with a girl mechanic named Myles to make his way into the city of Los Petropolis, but completing that delivery isn't as simple as Zee thinks. At the end of the first book, his delivery brings him face-to-face with a menacing half-cybernetic creature who may or may not be a rogue former racer named Prometheus.

Influenced by drive-in fare like Death Race 2000 and the movie version of Damnation Alley, writer Edmund Shern and artists Kai & Chester Ocampo may not be traveling any unfamiliar territory here, but they do so slickly. Shern's script may be a little too parsimonious with the background info, but since some of it's being given to us via corporate double-speak, we can assume that much of this stuff will be clarified as the series progresses. Kai and Ocampo's art is moody, but I particularly enjoyed the few action panels where the duo dropped all the painterly coloring in favor of stark black-and-white inked figures against a bright red background. In those brief moments, Freedom Formula has a manga-esque feel suited to the series' Big Machinery. Frankly, I'd have preferred it if more of the book had been done in this style - if only to bolster the impact of the action scenes - but since Radical has made the painted look a part of its house style, I'm probably being too much of a graphic storytelling traditionalist here.

Of the three mini-series currently pubbed by the fledgling comics line (Caliber and Hercules being the other two), I'm personally least interested in a dark and gritty dystopian tale of robot/cybernautic racer/warriors. But for those who still get a charge out of Robotech/Micronaut/Transformer-y styled comics, than this book probably has the winning formula.

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( 8/09/2008 12:08:00 PM ) Bill S.

SONG TITLE OF THE YEAR: From the new Wreckless Eric/Amy Rigby collaboration: "The Downside of Being A Fuck-Up."

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( 8/08/2008 07:38:00 AM ) Bill S.

DOM: Fun to see Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell) as a doomed hostage taker on last night's Flashpoint. Recognized his voice seconds before we saw his face . . .

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( 8/07/2008 07:20:00 AM ) Bill S.

KAMEN: Read on Mark Evanier's blog this a.m. about the death of EC artist Jack Kamen. A prolific artist for the fifties era comic line, Kamen was much maligned in his day as the least favorite of the EC artists. Though a six or seven-pager with his byline could usually be found in most of the line's horror, s-f and crime comics, it's telling to note that when the horror comics first started seeing reprints in the sixties as Ballantine paperbacks, neither of the first two collections contained any of Kamen's pieces. The first Kamen illustrated horror comic I remember reading was his sole entry in the Nostalgia Press collection, EC Horror Comics of the 1950's, a humor piece entitled "Kamen's Kalamity" that made fun of his place in the comics line.

Per Mark, it's the artist's "clean shiny drawings" that seemed most out of whack with the rest of the line's artists, though some of the other ECers - Johnny Craig and Wally Wood, in particular - could be just as spotless with their work. To my eyes, it was more the fact that Kamen never seemed capable of truly letting himself go in the more outlandish horror comics. Unlike the equally prolific Jack Davis, for instance, you rarely got a sense of unrestrained imagination at play.

The artist was at his best, though, doing twisty crime comics. His acquisitive dames (there is no other word for 'em), in particular, are lovingly and believably rendered - as are his male dupes. Picked up a volume of Crime Suspenstories this morning to page through one of Kamen's entries: there's an appealing B-movie flatness to it that more visually inventive artists never quite attain. Kamen had it down, which is one of the reasons EC kept him in the bullpen.

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( 8/06/2008 06:51:00 AM ) Bill S.

"DID SOMEBODY SAY 'MATTRESS' TO MISTER LAMBERT?" For this week's mid-week music vid, let's join the boys of Marcy Playground as they pop in on John & Yoko with "It's Saturday."

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( 8/05/2008 07:00:00 AM ) Bill S.

GAUGES: Gotta admit I'm more than a little irritated by the stoopidity of the current Republican campaigners' recent ridicule of Obama's suggestion to keep your tires properly inflated. Living in a rough-road part of Arizona, I've grown more aware of my tires' inflation levels than I was in Illinois, but I know there were years when I didn't check my tire inflation as consistently as I do today. I've seen and read this simple suggestion in a multitude of news stories and articles over the past few months - most of which make the point that do so could result in regular savings for the savvy car owner. So, what? It's not a candidate's place to make common sense suggestions?

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( 8/04/2008 11:57:00 AM ) Bill S.

"A GREAT PLACE TO DIG UP THE DEAD – OR BURY YOUR CAREER!" In the grand tradition of top-heavy horror hostesses, corny puns and low-rent cinema, Morella's Blood Vision is the latest in a line of drive-in DVD anthologies provided courtesy of movie cheese-master Fred Olen Ray's Retromedia and Infinity Entertainment Group. A collection of three obscuro horror flicks from the sixties and seventies, two of which get introduced in shot-for-video sequences featuring the zaftig Morella, Blood Vision features Del Tenney's Zombies (which also was released under the much more evocative title, I Eat Your Skin), a Philippine horror item entitled The Blood Seekers and the seventies Southern survival tale Blood Stalkers. According to the DVD case, there's also supposed to be a trailer for something entitled Blood of the Man Devil on the disc, but I'm damned if I could find it.

Morella's brief opening sequences aren't much to speak of, though they do have that all-important one-take local channel middle-of-the-night feel to 'em. Don't know why there isn't an intro segment for Blood Stalkers, though I liked the way she stabs a turnip as a comment on the relatively bloodless nature of Blood Seekers. As a dirty-minded post-post-post-adolescent, I know I'd gladly watch more Morella.

As for the movies themselves, Zombie proves to be a very of-its-decade mid-sixties cheapie. In it, Tenney, who is perhaps better known for The Horror of Party Beach (once featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000), tells the tale of a swingin' bachelor novelist (William Joyce) who travels with his agent and his agent's blond bimbo wife to Voodoo Island to investigate dire doings on the tropical isle. Said evil deeds involve a mad scientist and his predictably fetching daughter, plus an army of zombies with bug-eyes and what looks like an excess amount of calamine lotion on their faces. In one of the movie's proto-dumb moments, our hero swims across a lagoon with a pistol in his pants, then pulls it out to fire at a zombie. Even the kids in the audience were shouting aw, c'mon! with that one, though they probably dug the bit where a fisherman's head gets lopped off by a machete wielding zombie. For the record, no skin-eating actually occurs onscreen, but we do get a lot of movie-padding voodoo dance scenes.

The Philippine-shot Blood Seekers is a notch more smoothly constructed, even if the speaking extras occasionally sound as if they learned their lines phonetically á la Abba. The plot centers on "a strange blood cult" that operates out of a barrio nightclub: its blond-haired leader is draining the blood of young girls to keep herself young. Our hero (Robert Winston) is an American (yup, another one!) called to the island to investigate the serial killings; though not as much the jaunty swingin' bachelor as the hero of Zombies, he still manages to romance the adopted sister of the island's dim police inspector - and, of course, rescue her when she's captured by the cult leader's bulbous headed henchman.

Though originally filmed in black-and-white, Blood Seekers was tinted post-production to give the illusion of being shot in color. Thus, scenes set in the movie's Barrio Club are bathed in a lavender glow, while the exterior daytime sequences are shown in a sickly sepia. Infinity's version of the film has a distinctly muttery soundtrack, but since much of our hero's dialog is comprised of unfunny wisecracks, it's no big loss. It's not as if you're missing any subtle character nuances here.

The third "Blood Vision" feature, 1978's Blood Stalkers, actually lives up to its gory title, though it takes its own sweet time getting there. The only entry with a vaguely familiar face (Ken Miller, who played the bongos in I Was A Teenage Werewolf and was one of the menacing gang members in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil), Stalkers attempts to blend Deliverance with Legend of Boggy Creek. If the results are a mishmash, at least you can see writer/director Robert W. Morgan (who also casts himself as one of the movie's overripe poacher swampbillies) trying something interesting. The flick concerns a quartet of flare-wearing tourists, led by brooding Vietnam vet Jerry Albert, who run afoul of the title Stalkers when they stay the night in a grunged-out deserted cabin built by the hero's dad.

Two moments in particular stand out: a sequence scored to a rousing gospel hymn where our hero futilely attempts to get help from a group of resistant townsfolk and a grisly reveal framed like something out of Herschel Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast. The lingering coda, where our shocked and bloody vet stumbles through the town past the people who originally refused to aid him, is also a nice moody touch. Too bad the director blows it by cross-cutting with end credit shots of the main cast grinning into the camera, a moment reminiscent of the timid finish to the movie of The Bad Seed - which also brought its cast back for an on-camera curtain call as if to tell us, "Hey, that little girl didn't really kill Henry Jones! He's just an actor!"

Still, that Blood Stalkers even has an ending to flub is more than you can say for a lot of flicks of this ilk. Its inclusion on the package makes Morella's Blood Vision a decent purchase for lovers of old-style southern-fried exploitation cinema - even if the folks at Retrovision couldn't bother to film an intro for it.

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( 8/03/2008 07:45:00 AM ) Bill S.

"THIS TOWN WAS BUILT ON SEX AND MONEY, SON." The central idea behind Vampyres of Hollywood (St. Martin's Press), credited to actress Adrienne Barbeau & Michael Scott, is an admittedly amusing one: it's that most of the big names in Hollywood, the glamorous ones who never really seem to age, are in fact vampyres. Many of the legends that Hollywood has concocted about the creatures were created by real-life Tinseltown bloodsuckers (Dracula director Tod Browning among 'em), while even Bram Stoker's original novel was influenced by a lovely vampyress who Stoker called "my Lucy." The increased otherworldly look that many big stars get over time isn't the result of excess plastic surgery but physical manifestations of their vampyre nature becoming more apparent as they age. The reason Orson Welles wore capes during the latter years of his career, we're told, was to hide a growing tail.

The Chatelaine of Hollywood - the one responsible for turning Welles and Browning, Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentine (who chafed at having to fake his own death) - is a sexy genre actress named Ovsanna Moore. Moore has managed the neat trick of "killing" herself and coming back as her own actor daughter twice, thus sustaining a career in the movie biz that goes back all the way to the silent era. That she's been able to get away with this under public scrutiny can in part be explained by the fact that the present Ovsanna primarily labors in self-produced horror flicks with titles like Tell Me What You've Seen and Vatican Vampires. It's not as if she's under a hyper-intense A-List entertainment news spotlight.

That situation changes, though, once a series of murders attached to Ovsanna's movie company, Anticipation Studios, begins. Promising young vampyre actors who were themselves turned by the scream queen start showing up dead for real at the hands of a serial killer called the Cinema Slayer. The increased attention makes more than a few Hollywood vamps nervous, and, when a high-profile homicide detective named Peter King gets assigned the case, Ovsanna is given a deadline to herself solve the murders. As the body count grows, it seems increasingly less likely that our heroine will be able to keep her secret from at least getting uncovered by the hard-nosed police detective.

Barbeau & Scott keep it all moving quickly, troweling on the sardonic movie biz wit and occasionally sneaking in a decent little in-joke. At one point, for instance, the narrating Ovsanna notes of HBO, "I think they lost their touch when they cancelled Carnivale." The book's narration alternates between Ovsanna and our seen-it-all copper, and, though the writers try to spice up the human's part of the story by making him a movie buff whose mother sells movie memorabilia, the fact remains that it's the shrewd vampire businesswoman who keep the story truly moving. If Vampyres had contained a genuine mystery we might have cared more strongly about Detective King, but the writers are more concerned with serving up and skewering Hollywood attitude than they are with inventing a truly twisty whodunit.

That noted, Vampyres of Hollywood proves a diverting zippy read: nicely gory, if not particularly scary, with beaucoup hard-earned industry cynicism. I could see Barbeau's former hubby John Carpenter (who provides the obligatory back cover blurb for the book) having a ball with this material. Perhaps they could pull the undead Orson Welles out of seclusion to play himself?

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( 7/31/2008 09:09:00 AM ) Bill S.

"IF YOU'RE ONLY IN IT FOR A WHILE, YOU BETTER MAKE IT COUNT!" Even if (like me) you folded up your pennants many seasons ago, the mythology of baseball still looms large. All those heroes and goats, drunkards and arrogant assholes, magical careers and disasters that make up America's Pastime can still plenty potent - even if the last stadium game you remember watching was when Ron (Pro's Pizza) Santo was still playing third for the Chicago Cubs. So when alt-rock b-ball fanatics Scott (Young Fresh Fellows, Minus 5) McCaughey and Steve (Dream Syndicate) Wynn announced that they'd be releasing a disc of mythologically-minded sports songs as the Baseball Project, my interest was definitely piqued. I've followed McCaughey through several musical projects - some fruitful, some less so - but this seemed perfect for his mournful/goofy voice. Turns out I was right.

Volume One: Frozen Ropes And Dying Quails (Yep Roc) proves an elegantly rootsy collection of tall tales, gentlemanly arguments and personal reminiscences of boyhood trips to the stadium. Singer/songwriters McCaughey & Wynn, abetted by REMer Peter Buck and beatmistress Linda Pitmon, look to the sport with an acknowledgement while that the game may be past its prime (the aptly John Fogerty-inflected opener "Past Time"), it's still the source for many great yarns. Whether it's Ted Williams indulging in his own foul-mouthed brand of self-aggrandizement to a Gary Glitter-y beat or Curt Flood grousing from beyond the grave about the ungrateful benefactors of his battle against the reserve clause, Ropes' clear-eyed love for the boys of summer provides some of the strongest music that either of these two songwriters have produced in ages.

Cases in point: McCaughey's "Sometimes I Dream of Willie Mays," which ruefully recalls the times the singer saw the great Giants centerfielder at the peak and nadir of his career. There've been other songs about the baseball great (r-&-b pioneers the Treniers did one back in 1954, with Mays himself in the studio), but none of 'em have ever been so melancholy. Or Wynn's "Harvey Haddix," a rollicking country folk track about a guy who pitched twelve perfect innings, only to lose it in the thirteenth. "Perfection is always flawed," Wynn notes in the latter, and part of what attracts the two songwriters to this subject, one suspects, are the human aspects of their larger-than-life figures. Whether it's young Jackie Robinson chafing over being muzzled in his early years as a barrier breaking Brooklyn Dodger or Mark McGwire contemplating his more contemporary fall from grace, the Baseball Project grasps its subjects in a way that even sports neophytes can recognize.

Good music; great stories - looking forward to Volume Two.

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( 7/30/2008 06:50:00 AM ) Bill S.

"THESE ARE ALL MY GUYS HERE!" For this week's mid-week music vid, let's look at the Baseball Project (Scott McCaughey, Steve Wynn, Peter Buck & Linda Pitmon) performing the opening track from their first album on Letterman earlier this summer. (Review of said new release to soon follow.)

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( 7/29/2008 12:46:00 PM ) Bill S.

"YOU JUST WINGED HIM - NOW HE'S A UNITARIAN!" Reading about the recent shooting at a Knoxville Unitarian-Universalist Church inevitably brought up remembrances of my own past experiences as a member of a UU church. Reportedly, the shooter was motivated by a desire to target Liberals, so he selected a congregation where the vile creatures were known to, err, congregate. (That his ex-wife was a one-time member of the church probably had a bit to do with it, too.) All the wire stories reporting the event have played up the political aspect of the story, which is understandable, though I'm reluctant to place too much credence on the motives of someone who is clearly mentally ill.

Back in Illinois, my wife and I were members of a local UU church - since we currently live two hours away from the closest one, our attendance these days is understandably spotty - and even served on the church board for a couple of years. If Unitarians like to describe themselves as religious liberals (fair enough), on political and cultural levels, they frequently can be much more diverse. Nowhere was this better demonstrated in our small church back in Bloomington-Normal than in a flap that occurred when we were on the board over the Welcoming Congregation.

The Welcoming Congregation was a simple enough idea. Each UU congregation, after offering up a series of workshops on the topic, would vote as to whether it was willing to declare itself welcome to gay and lesbian churchgoers: a safe haven, if you will. You'd think such a basic idea - hey, we're opening our doors to everybody! - would be an easy sell in a so-called liberal church. But it wasn't - at least not in the Heart of Illinois - and the discussions about the ramifications of being a self-advertized Welcoming Congregation brought all the fear-filled statements you'd expect. Several longstanding church members (straight and gay) wound up leaving the church in the midst of the imbroglio, and though the resolution ultimately passed, nobody knew for certain if it would until the final votes were tallied.

My point in even bringing up this recollection is to state the obvious. For all the easy mischaracterizations that get thrown around about Liberals and Conservatives, the fact is that when you throw together a group of people, the range of personal belief is much broader than the professional polarizers would have it. I knew UUs in our church who were anti-gun control and strongly pro-Bush. I don't know the demographics of that church in Knoxville, but I suspect that its membership could be just as varied as the one I remember from Central Illinois. That some broken man with a gun wound up bringing a rifle to church to smite the Liberals tells me that maybe it'd be a good time for some of us to consider toning down the more divisive rhetoric, eh?

Yeah, like that's gonna happen . . .

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( 7/28/2008 06:52:00 AM ) Bill S.

WHEELS: Watched the Mary (American Psycho) Harron-directed episode of Fear Itself over the weekend. Though anyone with a passing memory of either the book or mini-series adaptation of Tom Tyron's Harvest Home could see where this 'un was going, there was a small frisson attached to the concluding image of Superman Returns' Brandon Routh stuck in a wheelchair . . .

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( 7/26/2008 05:36:00 PM ) Bill S.

"GIVE LOGIC THE BOOT!" Two new anime import series debut on Sci-Fi Channel's "Ani-Monday" import block this Monday: Gurren Lagann and Now and Then, Here and There. Was recently given a sneak peak of the two premieres, and while the 27-episode Lagann perhaps arrives with the greater advanced fan buzz, to my eyes, the 13-ep Now looks like it'll be the more evocative series.

Both shows deliver the goods, especially if you like your s-f anime with big honking machines. Though each one centers on young male heroes, Lagann comes across as the more boyish creation: filled with characters spouting bravado and Kirby-esque robots. Set in an underground village and narrated by Simon, a young boy who is part of the isolated village's brutalized child work force, the series opens on Simon and his rambunctious friend Kamina's desire to escape the oppressive community by climbing to the surface world. Kamina tries to rally his friends by creating Team Gurren - all the while shouting a series of inspirational slogans to the skeptical villagers. But it isn't until the digging Simon comes upon a glowing green "treasure" while drilling that the boys are able to find their way to the top.

The glowing treasure proves to be the key to a robot creature called a "Gunman," and when another Gunman shows up to plow its way through the village, guess who gets to commandeer the first one? Even better, it turns out that Simon's found machine has drills on its hands and the top of its head: "That's your kinda weapon!" Kamina unnecessarily tells our narrator, after christening the machine the Mighty Lagann.

Also showing up: an ultra-curvy redheaded warrior babe named Yoko, who hails from a nearby underground village. Though Kamina is scornful of Yoko's origins ("Jeez, you're a pit chick!" he moans. "Get moving, thunder thighs!"), you know this is just the start of some serious sexual tension. At one point during the Gunman attack, Simon lands with his face right between her breasts, eliciting happy shouts from the most of the 'tween-age boys in the audience.

The presence of the Gunmen and the existence of the underground villages is somehow connected to an aboveground intergalactic conflict, though we're only given an unexplained glimpse of this in the pilot's opening. Future episodes, presumably, will provide more background, but for now, just getting our trio to the surface in the Mighty Lagann suffices.

If the first episode of Gurren Lagann is loudly boisterous, Now and Then, Here and There is more comfortable with slices of scene-setting quiet. The story of a young city boy named Shu who is accidentally transported to a war-torn dimension, it's filled with small, well-chosen images: whether of a bright sunset over the city river or of our hero picking his nose as he talks. Shu gets into his predicament after climbing to the top of a factory smokestack to get away from it all. When he sees a lavender-haired girl sitting on a neighboring smokestack, watching the evening sky, his curiosity is piqued. But before he can find out anything more than her name - Lala-ru - a third party appears with a squad of giant snaky robots.

They capture Lala-ru, in a wonderful sequence featuring our hero leaping for his life from collapsing smokestacks, and take both her and Shu back to their world. "It's only debris that got transported with us!" Lady Abelia, the uniformed villainess responsible for the abduction believes. You'd think, after all this time, that futuristic baddies would learn to comb through their garbage.

If the heroes of Gurren Lagann are pointedly proletarian (as they digdigdigdigdigdigdig their way through the ground), our boy Shu's more middle-class. We first see him with his family, complimenting his mother for a "gourmet breakfast," then taking Kendo lessons at the Seidokkan Dojo. As a student, he's the object of ridicule by his fellow students for his "slapstick moves," though he doesn't particularly seem to be bothered by this fact. In fact, Shu comes off a fairly easy-going sort in the opening episode, but from the looks of the world in which he's landed, that good nature will be sorely tested.

At heart, both shows are essentially telling the same basic story: young boy ventures into a new and dangerous world that could stand in for basic adulthood. Of the two, Now approaches this storyline in a less cartoony fashion - no pneumatic uber-babes in this 'un - but they both contain their share of crowd-pleasing action. One of the major advantages of anime: where so many live-action s-f shows load their pilots with a level of budget-busting images that they're unable to maintain over the long haul, animation has no such constraints. I'm thinking that these two imports'll find their fannish audiences on Ani-Mondays, though when it comes to future episodes, I'm personally setting the DVR for the more contemplative Now and Then.

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( 7/25/2008 01:20:00 PM ) Bill S.

PIGEONS ON THE GRASS, ALAS: So I'm home for lunch, and Becky has Headline News on the tube, and they're discussing the day's near air catastrophe wherein a Qantas jumbo jet managed to safely land despite a big ol' massive hole in its fuselage, and the newsreader tells us that "alas, there are no fatalities." Alas?!?! At first I'm not sure I hear this right, but then I see from the closed captioning that the word "alas" really was used. Yeah, it's so disappointing that we didn't get to see a tarmac strewn with charred and bloody bodies . . .

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( 7/24/2008 06:21:00 AM ) Bill S.

"IT SEEMS THAT DOMINIC ENJOYS STIRRING THE POT!" Both cast and writers have clearly hit their stride in the third season of the Canadian forensic procedural, Da Vinci's Inquest, which has recently been issued by Acorn Media as a four-disc DVD boxed set. Our title hero, Coroner Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell) remains, in the words of one character, a "bit of a prick," but you can hardly blame him. In season three, our man gets passed over for the Chief Coroner's position in favor of a numbers cruncher (Gerard Plunkett) and sees his proposal for a safe injection site get shot down. His relationship with his daughter Gabrielle (Jewel Staite, about to leave for more prominent roles) is so strained that we only get to see her for about ten seconds the entire season. In the season closer, our hero even finds himself attacked in court for being one of the few remaining coroners in Canada without a medical background. "I'm an anomaly and an anachronism, but I'm not alone," the former cop snaps at the attorney badgering him - and we wouldn't have it any other way.

The rest of the series cast - most particularly Donnelly Rhodes and Ian Tracey as partnering homicide detectives Leo Shannon and Mick Leary - have all settled into agreeable rhythms. Of all the supporting characters, Leo gets the most attention this season: dealing with an ailing wife whose periodic dementia gets her wandering the neighborhood, starting up dance lessons with an attractive lady instructor. In one of the season's funniest subplots, a distracted Leo's police car is stolen by a suspect. "They're never gonna let go of it," he grumbles in a later episode after one of his colleagues makes joking reference to the incident.

Leo's partner Leary gets less to do outside the job this season, though there are hints that his relationship with pathologist Sunny Ramen (Suleka Matthew) will be heading into creepy territory somewhere down the pike - perhaps at the hands of Mick's Borderliney ex-. He does have some memorable moments in "You See How It Happens," directed by Rhodes: struggling to tamp down his disgust as he questions a former Guatemalan policeman injected with a slow-acting poison by one of the émigré victims he once tortured. Midway into Mick's investigation, the focus shifts from uncovering the murderer's identity to getting the victim to reveal the whereabouts of the men and women he helped "disappear."

Unlike the first two seasons, there are no big crowd-pleasing serial killer storylines in this set. Instead, creator Chris Haddock and his writers work to cram each episode with several cases, resolving some and leaving others open. If at times, it feels as if the writers are attempting to push the open-ended tactic as far as the audience's patience will allow (perhaps most frustratingly in a story involving a pregnant mother who might be responsible for the death of her first two children), in most cases, the approach adds to the series' naturalistic tone. In one of the season's more affecting plotlines, for instance, a grieving father who is unable to accept the verdict of accidental death posted on his cokehead daughter reappears briefly outside Da Vinci's office in two later episodes, still looking for different answers. To the families of loved ones who've passed suddenly and unexpectedly any explanations are going to be woefully insufficient.

Haddock and his writers are often content to raise the issues brought up by their stories than definitively answering them. In "The Sparkle Tour," a Native Peoples activist is found dead after two Vancouver cops drive him out of town and leave the guy out in the country to walk back without his shoes. (The title refers to the sight of stars that the victim sees as he hobbles back home.) Though Dom and we know what occurred, the two uniforms responsible prove to have covered their tracks too well to get punished for their deed. There are no last-minute C.S.I. styled forensic discoveries to tie it all up neatly.

Which is not to say that Dom and company don't get their share of heady forensic victories - they do, though the means by which they get there aren't always as tidy as we see on American forensic procedurals. Crime and death are messy, a point that's made repeatedly in "All Tricked Up," an episode that contrasts two mysterious deaths with the more explicable magic tricks of Harry Houdini. What matters is returning each day/season to do the job - even if doing it can turn you into "a bit of prick" like Dom.

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( 7/23/2008 06:35:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: What could be better in the summer than an old old video of the Beach Boys from the Pet Sounds era, doing "Wouldn't It Be Nice"?

(Longer posts are on the horizon!)

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( 7/22/2008 06:00:00 AM ) Bill S.

BRENDA LEIGH: Is it me or are we seeing more of a half-clothed Deputy Chief Johnson this season on The Closer?

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( 7/20/2008 07:04:00 AM ) Bill S.

PROMOS FOR NEW SHOWS THAT PRETTY MUCH CONVINCE ME I DON'T WANNA WATCH THE SHOW: Example Two - the pudgy guy in a diaper for Worst Week. Didn't I already see this on C.S.I.? ("Are you a drinker or a stinker?")

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( 7/20/2008 07:02:00 AM ) Bill S.

"FRIGGIN' YANKEE WANKER!" First thing you can't help doing when confronted with the title of AiT's new graphic novel, Aces: Curse of the Red Baron, is mentally visualize Snoopy on top of his doghouse, the Royal Guardsmen singing in the background, the inevitable "Curse you, Red Baron!" thought balloon hovering over our hero's head.

But Shannon Eric Denton, G. Willow Wilson & Curtis Square-Briggs' (lotta complex names there!) GN turns to be something else again: a sci-fi buddy actioner featuring a mismatched pair of Yank and Britisher pilots who both claim to have felled the Bloody Red Baron. One of the twosome, dapper Englishman Heath Bennett, is in possession of a map he believes leads to the German ace's hidden treasure, and he convinces skeptical American Frank Grayson to help commander a plane in search of the uncharted island where it's supposedly hidden. What our scoundrel heroes don't know, of course, is that the Red Baron is still around and pissed that someone else has his map. He's soon pursuing our wisecracking flyboys in a ghostly plane that appears and vanishes mysteriously, as our heroes search for a seemingly unfindable Isle of Isdrinn. A series of hairbreadth escapes, naturally, ensues.

It's all connected to the Black Hand, the organization responsible for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and a dark haired German beauty named Wolf 1. It's not giving away too much to note that the explanations behind all this prove more science-fictional than supernatural - or that the Red Baron's "treasure" proves to mainly be a Macguffin. All this happy foolishness'd would play well on the big screen, where, hopefully, the right pair of actors could breathe more life into our somewhat monochromatic leads.

Artist Square-Briggs, utilizing brush and wash, bathes his panels in blacks and shades of gray. Even his dogfights take place in cloud and smoke, while a simple panel of our heroes standing casually in an airfield is also spattered with what looks like black ash. It adds to the period feel and what turns out to be the story's central clash between the smoky reality of early twentieth century Europe and a more mysterious future. If at times the artist's propensity for dark shadow comes at the expense of his characters' expressiveness, Aces moves with sufficient zip to keep you from worrying about it.

As a comics company, AiT has carved a niche for itself as a sharp purveyor of high-concept genre work. While Aces isn't up to the line's best material (see publisher Larry Young's densely satisfying Black Diamond, for example, which has recently been issued in a trade paperback collection), it still remains an entertaining lark. Snoopy, that imaginative WWI fighter pilot, could've gone far mentally playing with the material in this entertaining graphic novel.

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( 7/19/2008 10:05:00 PM ) Bill S.

PROMOS FOR NEW SHOWS THAT PRETTY MUCH CONVINCE ME I DON'T WANNA WATCH THE SHOW: Example One - the ad for The Mentalist which shows our title hero deducing that a man is gay because he has a pedicure. What? The guy couldn't have just been a onetime guest on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?

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( 7/17/2008 10:10:00 PM ) Bill S.

"BUT AT THE LAST MINUTE, I COULDN'T HELP BUT SAY, 'I'M HOME!'" Though I may be lagging by at least a year in relation to its American publication schedule, I'm still following Kazuo Umezu's hyperactive survival horror series, The Drifting Classroom. Recently finished volume five in the eleven-volume "Mature Reader"-rated series, and, lemme tell you, the series is as thrillingly messed-up as ever.

To quickly recap the first four volumes, Classroom centers on a young school boy, Sho Takamatsu, who finds himself and all his schoolmates trapped in a deadly wasteland after the entire building is mysteriously transported to what appears to be the future. It doesn't take long for all the adult teachers to kick it, leaving the elementary schoolers to fend for themselves in a profoundly hostile environment. When volume five opens, it's on the image of a schoolboy futilely fleeing a swarm of flesh-eating insects - and that's just the beginning.

Because of his demonstrated bravery, Sho has been elected "prime minister" of the students, but he's unable to halt the escalating scapegoating and divisiveness that begins to sweep through his schoolmates. They first focus on a likely victim, an imaginative student named Nakata, and blame him for somehow "creating" the bugs. When a despairing Nakata kills himself, the focus quickly shifts to other unfortunate students - especially after one of them turns sick from a mysterious plague. Before long, we see frightened schoolchildren attempting to burn down the nurse's infirmary and impaling potential plague-carriers with spears in an attempt to stem the fatal disease. Sho and his comrades, as the ones who first attempted to aid the sick boy, are chased out of the school grounds and forced to survive in the desert. Within this banished group, ironically, is Otomo, the original ringleader of the gang who'd earlier blamed Nakata for the insect attack.

Umezu's art is packed with images of open-mouthed, panicky kids - but he also demonstrates an unsentimental empathy for his young characters. In an early chapter in book five, for example, Sho and a group of classmates return to the school building that remains their primary shelter. As he approaches the school gate, he remembers the gate of his home and the way he used to eagerly run home after school. To keep from breaking down, he calls out "I'm home!" as he walks through the gateway. The words are so potent that the rest of the group takes up the cry, desperate to hold onto even this small act of normalcy: a surprisingly affecting little moment.

Still, the images that linger are more typically the disturbing ones - whether it's the violent mob behavior of Sho's schoolmates or the sight of a bloated mummified body found in a buried hospital. Umezu's stylized art is direct and unflinching. His regular depiction of small bodies hemmed in by both their surroundings and the book's shrunken, small panels emphasizes just how overwhelming his characters' plight is. It's an effective visual ploy.

As a manga series, The Drifting Classroom is definitely not for the easily upset, but for those with more adventurous tastes, Umezu's classic Babes in the Post-Apocalypse tale is damned unforgettable.

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( 7/16/2008 07:10:00 AM ) Bill S.

KEEP IT CLEAN KEEP IT CLEAN: As someone who's had his own grim experiences with addictive behavior, I get that the addict's life is sordid, repetitive and crammed with personal shame. That doesn't excuse A&E;'s new intervention drama, The Cleaner, from being so tedious, though. Watching the pilot ep, the only truly interesting moments for me came from watching Gil Bellows' grumpy interventionist bodybuilder and going, "That's the same guy from Ally McBeal?" And then they had to kill the character off in the last ten minutes . . .

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( 7/16/2008 06:29:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Let's check out the mini-budget video for the opening track to Canuck power-poppers Sloan's most recent disc, Power Play. Like I noted in my review, doesn't "Believe in Me" sound like somp'n REO Speedwagon could've sung in that Midwest band's glory days? Wish they'd shown Pentland's pappy on the keyboards.

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( 7/15/2008 10:15:00 PM ) Bill S.

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER.: The summer teevee commercial most likely to make me wanna throw a shoe at the television set: MasterCard's "Roots of Rock" ad, which shows happy card holders going to the clubs where Eric Clapton and Jon Bon Jovi first played for an audience - and checking out Kenny Chesney's tour bus. Kenny Chesney's fricking tour bus? In the first place, when is Kenny Chesney rock - and, in the second, how is a big ol' tricked-out tour bus equivalent to some small smoky joint? It just ain't right . . .

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( 7/15/2008 06:46:00 AM ) Bill S.

SHOULDN'T IT BE "ODESSEY"? Best pop joke on last night's episode of The Middleman: naming the company behind the behind the dissemination of zombie-making pike Odyssey & Oracle, which is also the title of a classic elpee by these guys.

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( 7/13/2008 10:06:00 PM ) Bill S.

"PURPOSE OF LIFE IS UNKNOWN AND HENCE HIDDEN FROM THE EYES OF LIVING CRITTERS." As a writer, Philip K. Dick's reputation has steadily grown since his death in 1982: a status that can only bring a sense of satisfaction to those readers who first came upon the man in cheaply glued s-f paperbacks in the fifties through seventies. Some of this cultural elevation can be linked to the writer's emergence as a source for evocative futuristic movies (Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly arguably being the most successful attempts at putting Dick's vision on-screen), but a more recent factor has to be the re-publication of Dick's seminal novels in a Tony hardbound format by the Library of America. Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s is the second volume in this series, and it's an attractive package indeed. Featured in the book: Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly. A heady selection, indeed - in more ways than one.

As a science-fiction writer, Dick is best-known for his reality-shifting plots (think of the "who's human and who's android" storyline of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a.k.a. Blade Runner), which I have to admit was his most salient feature for me when I first read his books as a teenager and college student. But as a fiction writer, he also was superbly gifted as a world and character creator. The Dick protagonist is unlike the hero of any other genre work being produced at the time. A profoundly average figure, he struggles to get by in the mundane world and just barely makes it - when all of a sudden even that modicum of stability slips away and our hero finds himself scrambling to hold onto his sanity.

So let's take a look at Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s one at time. First in the set is the 1964 Martian Time-Slip. I own a copy of the Ballantine paperback of this gem, and, like so many of Dick's first publications, the cover of the novel barely gives a hint of the strangeness within it. Set in a futuristic 1980's, the novel concerns a group of settlers who are living on the Martian dessert. As with many Dick novels, the point-of-view shifts between several characters, but the central figure is a service maintenance repairman named Jack Bohlen. Jack is a schizophrenic (an affliction that Dick apparently suffered in real life) in remission who has migrated to Mars out of the mistaken belief that its simpler, less complicated society will keep him less prone to dissociative episodes. When his black marketer neighbor Norbert Steiner commits an unexpected suicide, the act has repercussions for Bohlen and other members of the Martian colony.

Steiner, we learn, is the father of an autistic child named Manfred, who is presently being housed in a camp for "anomalous children." Manfred's autism, his therapist believes, is the result of the child's both living and perceiving outside the main stream of time. The boy sees his own future on a Mars where all the grand colonizing schemes have fallen to decay and entropy, though he is unable to communicate this vision to anyone around him.

Manfred's abilities attract the attention of Arnie Kott, head of the all-powerful Water Workers Local, who wishes to tap into the child's ability to foresee the future. He enlists Jack's aid in a dubious scheme to build a device that allow Manfred to "share his perceptions" with others around him. Before long, several colonists are experiencing Manfred's time-skewed sense - going through the same events repeatedly - and Jack feels his old schizophrenic paranoia once more manifesting itself. When Artie takes the autistic boy to Dirty Knobby, a rock held sacred by the aboriginal Bleekmen native to Mars, time and reality grow even more confused.

Kott is the novel's great villain: the first time we see him, he's in a steam bath pointedly designed to waste water on the desert planet. Acquisitive, capricious and incapable of seeing beyond his own short-term gain, he represents colonial capitalism at its most avaricious. (That he's the Supreme Goodmember of a plumber's union is an irony that probably played more strongly in the early sixties.) He pushes Jack to complete his project, even as he knows that doing so will most likely drive the repairman into a full mental breakdown. We wait for this greedy s.o.b. to get his comeuppance, and he thankfully does.

On the sidelines, striving to get a piece of the action, are psychiatrist Milton Glaub and Kott's sexy mistress Doreen Anderton. With Glaub, you can perhaps see Dick getting his writer's revenge after years of doubtless listening to insincere empathy and psychobabble. The shrink proves an inept social player who rationalizes his own failings by diagnostically blaming everyone around him. In one of the writer's typically inspired bits of social commentary, we learn that one of the jobs of the future psychotherapist is to attend social functions and stand in for phobic patients: "instead of curing the patient of his phobias, one became in the manner of a lawyer the man's actual advocate in the man's place . . ." The goal, then, isn't curing the patient but making it socially convenient for them to maintain their mental illness.

Doreen, while beholden to Artie, remains a surprisingly sympathetic figure. As a novelist, Dick was perhaps at his weakest working with female characters, who frequently come across as bourgeois, petulant and unsatisfied. (Which may partially explain the man's multiple marriages.) But Doreen proves to have a stronger sense of empathy for Jack than does the professional empathizer Glaub - and is the subject of a particularly disturbing time-slip vision from Manfred, besides.

Dick's futuristic worldview occasionally reflects the time of its creation. The United Nations, for instance, is a major power in the story, while one of the background subplots revolves on a proposed plan to close down the special needs children's camp which strikingly is named after David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister. But his core ideas and characterization remain transcendent; even if some of the jargon employed to explain the psychological ideas seem a bit dated. His Martian desert society has more than a trace of the American west - right down to land grabs and exploitation of the indigenous population - with a satirical overlay of good ol' twentieth century alienation.

In one memorable sequence, Jack is called to the colonists' Public School to do some repair work; the building turns out to be staffed entirely by androids. The malfunctioning unit, the Angry Janitor is designed to teach children to respect property. "Very righteous type, as the Teachers go," Jack notes, understandably uneasy about the human-seeming mechanisms. To Jack, whose first schizophrenic breakdown led to his questioning the living reality of everyone around him, the imitation humans prove particularly repellent.

As a science-fiction writer, Dick never saw the same level of public success in his lifetime as Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein. His writing intentionally lacks either the self-conscious poesy of Bradbury or the entrepreneurial optimism of Heinlein. Where the latter liked to pepper his works with ultra-competent spokesmen, for instance, Dick made his heroes struggling craftsmen. Where Bradbury honed his writing to make it moodily evocative, Dick maintained a fairly plain writing voice - the better to throw both his readers and characters when all of their assumptions about where the story's going are shown to be inadequate. For many s-f readers of his day, Dick was too beyond the fringe to suit their reading tastes. Happily, time has proved this visionary writer's salvation.

(Next: Dr. Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After the Bomb.)

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Pop cultural criticism - plus the occasional egocentric socio/political commentary by Bill Sherman (popculturegadabout AT yahoo.com) - now with hexa .. . hexa . . . hexachloraphine!