Halloween Horrors

I recently stumbled across an amazing web site dedicated to halloween music... including downloads! So I downloaded about one hundred hours of music and started digging in! There's tons of monster movie soundtracks from the Universal days up through the mid-70s plus lots of unique finds.

One nice treasure, for me in particular, is a record my family had called "Halloween Horrors." The first side is a spooky story about an old southern mansion, complete with tons of sound effects. While the adult me finds it amusing the kid me, as well as my brothers, found it pretty creepy stuff! Side two of this album is fifty or so sound effects that you can use to make your own scary tale, including every sound used on the first side. I don't recall that we ever made a scary tale but perhaps we tried and it was such a let down that I've erased it from my memory. It was a blast hearing these again after so many years, remembering things like how we laughed at the kitten sound effect. Ooooo.... scary kitten!

Of note is a snippet of violin music that was strategically used on side one. Years later I finally found out that this was from Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, a piece that isn't particularly frightening unless Romantic composers creep you out.

The web site? Right here at Universalhorrorsounds.blogspot.com. The links to download the files are in the comments section.

Enjoy!

The following is a true story:

Last night I stopped by Pios, a local old timey meat market to pick up something to make for dinner. While I make my way to the counter I overhead a lady ask "Do you want steak tonight?" I look over and she's asking what appears to be a ten year old girl. "Must be nice," I thought. When I was a kid we rarely got steak and even now steak is a luxury. But I'm all for those who work hard and don't begrudge anyone what they've rightly earned.

Except this lady and her daughter and her twelvish looking son in their baggy clothes and greasy hair didn't exactly look like go-getters.

As it is a small store they have plastic baskets to put your food in instead of the giant Walmart-type carts. "Carry that basket up the front so mamma can pay."

"I can't. It's too heavy!"

By this time I'm by the counter and can see a basket overflowing with bundles wrapped in white butcher paper, capped off with a side of ribs. Again, I loves me some good ribs but it's not something I can afford, opting instead of the more affordable pulled pork.

Somehow the basket gets to the front of the store while Neil gets my order together (two and a half pounds of hamburger which I will stretch to feed a family of seven, if you must know) and I overhear the lady approve of the candy her kids have picked out. I take my solitary purchase and walk to the front of the store in time to see this lady pay for her feast of meat with a food stamp card.

I sure was glad that I could help pay for her $84 of meat. This wasn't the first time I'd been standing in line behind someone buying $50 of meat using food stamps while I pay cash for a pound or two of hamburger, sometimes seeing these same people drive away in nice new cars out in the parking lot while I climb into my 1995 Ford Taurus.

What's wrong with this picture?

Generic October Entry

I haven't been writing much here because I've been writing elsewhere. Or rather I've started submitting my short stories for publications. So far I have a stable of five stories (six if you count that I changed one slightly to "Christianize" it for a particular magazine) and and have received five or six rejection notices. YEAH! I'm not taking it personally, though, 'cause volume is the name of the game. Sure, after 100 rejections and not one bite I might feel the sting but for now it's onward ho!

The plan is to write one short story or make two submissions per week. I found an amazing site that lets you plug in the type of publication and it will give you a massive list of on-line and print magazines, how much or if they pay, their criteria, etc. For the most part it seems that my genre is "slipstream", which not surprisingly is a fancy word for "weird and offbeat." Go with your strengths, I suppose.

I also completed the Fruit Bat song... nine months in the making from melodic and lyric-snippet conception in January, hastily sung into a digital recorder to be revived a few months later when I had time to flesh it out. The amazing Greg Flesh, guitarist for Daniel Amos and The Swirling Eddies, laser scientist for NASA and potential Lutheran pastor, was generous enough to add lead guitar tracks all the way from California. Now it's time to work on a song for a Gene Eugene tribute album ("Hide Away") and two cover songs for Melynda for Christmas.

Backlogged

Not much to talk about lately. Well, not much chance at least. I still need to regale my 1.72 readers with the exciting garden battle stories complete with pictures (spoiler: the humans won but not without casualties).

Right now, though, I'm busy with catching up on my music. It's a tough life. At this very moment I have 100+ albums that I've yet to listen to or listen to enough to know if I like it or not (tagged with an "In Process" label in my database). I'm a junkie. Plus there's my wife's collection that she brought into the marriage that I chip away at now and then. Many of these are probably ready to be rated and moved off the "In Process" list but they're so good and I feel that I haven't plumbed their depths completely and I know that if they move off the "In Process" list that they probably won't get the attention they deserve. SOMEONE GET ME AN INTERVENTION!!!

So for no other reason other than I'm a dweeb, here are the albums currently being pumped through my brain:

Phil Solem's (of The Rembrandts) unnamed unreleased solo album (it's quite good!)
Thrush unreleased songs
Electric Light Orchestra - A New World Record (how did I manage to evade ELO for all these decades?)
Keane - Under the Iron Sea
Sam Phillips - The Turning
Mark Heard - Stop the Dominoes
scaterd-few - Sin Disease
Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left
George Harrison - Thirty Three & 1/3
Gentle Giant - Octopus
Peter Case - The Man With the Blue Post Modern Fragmented Neo-... Guitar
Aimee Mann - Lost in Space
Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Hoodwinked Soundtrack
Recess Monkey - Field Trip
fun. - Aim & Ignite
Kevin Moore - Ghost Book
Neal Morse - Sola Scriptura

Of course I've paid the record companies for each of these.

A Successful Failure

It looks like boycotts are alive and well. When conservatives do a boycott it's shutting down free speech but when liberals do a boycott it's a grand, heroic thing. In addition to the boycott on Whole Foods because the founder published a very neutral, well thought-out position on the health care debate ("How DARE he express his opinion which is different from OURS! We are only tolerant of those opinions which are exactly like OURS!")

Now Color of Change, those fine folks who brought you "BUSH IS KILLING BLACK PEOPLE IN NEW ORLEANS" is pushing a boycott against Glenn Beck for stating that Obama is a racist. HOW DARE HE! Unfortunately for them Beck has video proof of his claim (see below), proof that would convince anyone who hasn't already made up their mind (i.e. the closed-minded). But then again, when has facts and proof ever been of value to liberals when there's so much to FEEL about?

So this boycott is being trumpeted as being "one of the more effective boycott campaigns in years”. YEAH FOR BOYCOTTS! But read to the bottom of the article...


For its part, Fox News said through a spokeswoman that while some advertisers have "removed their spots from Beck," they have just shifted to "other programs on the network, so there has been no revenue lost."


So how is this boycott successful? Fox is not losing money and if anything more people are tuning in to find out what all the hullabaloo is about. The boycott, like most things liberals try to do in the public realm, IS A FAILURE!

But then again, don't let verifiable facts get in the way of what you feel.

Saturday Morning Stuff

Eighteen months ago I bought some mid-80s Fangoria magazines off eBay... and then their warehouse holding all their back issues burned down. These five or six issues gave many hours of enjoyment, nicking down to my basement man-cave now and then to read about "upcoming" horror movies or books or special effects gurus.

But recently when this supply ran out I had the great fortune to win a massive auction of 40+ Fangorias from this era! Sure, some are missing covers and the earlier ones have some oh the pictures cut out (long with bits of the article on the other side... seems the previous owner liked Mad Max) but all in all it's a historical treasure trove of the golden age of horror films.

Last Saturday I sorted through the lot and this morning I started in on the earliest - #16 from 1981. Even at almost three years into it's publication it's interesting to see the transition away from science fiction and its sister publication Starlog. The ads, especially, run heavy on sci-fi and fantasy as the demand for scarier fare had, as yet, only created a few "A to Z" type monster books.

I read only one full article, one on Chris Tucker, the man who did the makeup for The Elephant Man, the wonderful movie directed by David Lynch. In Lynch's first film, the nightmarish EraserHead, there is a creature that is startlingly realistic, one created by Lynch who has never divulged how it was created and has said he never will. However in the article Tucker gives some insight into how this earlier effect was most likely achieved:

"According to Lynch's own account in a British film trade publication, his idea was for a suit built in layers that would have an 'incredibly organic' look [just like in EraserHead -ed] and would require five hours to apply each day. 'It was perfect in theory,' Lynch said. 'Like a ten-thousandth of a second, when I it on John Hurt the first time, he looked all right; then, the next ten-thousandth of a second... there was no way."

The ErasureHead creature was a puppet kind of thing that laid in a bassinet. It moved but only slightly. Lynch would naturally try to use the methods that he knew- thus some kind of tissue-thin layering to create the organic look.

Okay, so maybe it's not step-by-step instructions of how Lynch built the creature but it was more information on the subject than I had ever heard divulged.

Mink Car Revisited

Originally I found the 2001 They Might Be Giants album Mink Car to be a mediocre album: a few good songs and lots of stinkers. In my nerdy CD database I had given it a 6. This morning I gave the album a fresh listen and was impressed by the number of great songs that kick off the album: Bangs, Cyclops Rock, Man It's So Loud In Here, Another First Kiss, I've Got A Fang and Hovering Sombrero all appear in the first half with Older, She Thinks She'd Edith Head and Working Undercover for the Man on the second half. A couple of those are classic status and the rest a good goofy fun! Why didn't I like this album more?

Oh wait... it's songs like Mr. Xcitement, Yeh Yeh, Drink!, Wicked Little Critta... songs where Flansburg has seemingly fallen off his musical rocker. HEY FLANSBURG... YOU'RE NOT SINATRA!

It's also of note that most of the above-listed great had previously been released on E.P.s or other collections so I can see how, in 2001 after waiting five years for a full album only to receive a few new songs that were good and an equal amount of new songs that were MAJOR stinkers, well, a six might have been generous.

As it stands I want to give this album an 8 but the Good to Stinker ratio is still frighteningly high. I'll bump it up the a 7 and hopefully will like their kids album (SCIENCE! - due September 1) better.