Joe Haldeman had his first full physical therapy session on October 19, Gay Haldeman reported on SFF.net. He stood up from his wheelchair a couple of times and walked six small steps. “It was wonderful to see him standing and walking,” she wrote. On October 20 he had a longer PT session, standing and sitting. Plans are for Joe’s trach tube to be removed October 21.
Monthly Archives: October 2009
Tim Hamilton Coming to SB Library
- Tim Hamilton
- Ray Bradbury
Tim Hamilton, creator of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, The Authorized Adaptation, will appear at the Santa Barbara Public Library on Thursday, October 22 at 7 p.m. Hamilton will give a presentation on his process in creating the art for his graphic novels and other work. Book signing follows.
The library will also be welcoming science fiction film fans to free public screening of Something Wicked This Way Comes on Sunday, October 25 at 2 p.m.
The Central Library is located at 40 E. Anapamu St. in Santa Barbara.
Composer Vic Mizzy Dies
“Two finger snaps and you live in Bel Air,” Vic Mizzy said about the success of his theme song for tv’s The Addams Family. The film and television composer died of heart failure October 17 at the age of 93.
The 1964-66 tv series based on Charles Addams’ magazine cartoons starred John Astin as Gomez and Carolyn Jones as his wife, Morticia. The Los Angeles Times says that Mizzy himself performed all the bits that comprised its signature:
For his theme song, Mizzy played a harpsichord, which gives the theme its unique flavor. And because the production company, Filmways, refused to pay for singers, Mizzy sang it himself and overdubbed it three times. The song, memorably punctuated by finger-snapping, begins with: “They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky, they’re altogether ooky: the Addams family.”
Mizzy also wrote the theme song for the 1960s sit-com Green Acres.
Reading about The Addams Family brought to mind that other horror-comedy series, The Munsters, and its highly recognizable theme. I learned that The Munsters theme composer Jack Marshall died in 1973. He wrote many tv theme songs. And his son is Frank Marshall, producer of some of the best-known sf/f movies, including Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future.
TV Misguidance
TV Guide
I was at a friend’s house last night and picked up his copy of TV Guide to read the story about Flashforward. Immediately, I crashed into the insulting statement that the series is based on a 1999 novel that nobody read.
I believe I’m repeating the line almost verbatim; some of you subscribers can check me. (I should have surreptitiously torn out the page to take home. When I searched the TV Guide magazine site today I found a great deal of that issue’s contents online, but not the segment containing this brutal comment.)
It seemed to me the writer’s intended point is that nobody can predict the story arc that the tv series will follow by reading Robert Sawyer’s book. But what an unfortunate line. And rather out of synch with the rest of the magazine’s favorable coverage of the series, judging from the other articles online.
NYRSF’s Hallowe’en event –
Lovecraft Unbound reading
The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings on October 27 will feature Elizabeth Bear, Richard Bowes, Michael Cisco and Caitlin R. Kiernan reading from Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow.
The full press release follows the jump.
[Thanks to Jim Freund for the story.]
John Cleese’s Alimony Tour
John Cleese will perform his one-man show, “A Final Wave at the World (or the Alimony Tour, Year One)” at the Alex Theatre in Glendale on November 14. That’s literally next door to the Mystery and Imagination Bookstore which has hosted so many of the Bradbury events reported here.
A Glendale News-Press reporter interviewed the Monty Python veteran and got some remarkably frank answers:
Q: Is your tour something you had been wanting to do for a while?
A: No, no. Not at all. It was just that, as I said, I do have to earn a million a year to hand over in alimony and that means I’ve got to get out and earn money and this is not a very good time.
Cleese said he enjoyed the Monty Python troupe’s recent reunion very much, prompting this question:
Q: Any chance of a new project together following this seemingly renewed group chemistry?
A: I don’t know what we’d do really because it always took us a long time to write whatever we were up to and it’s very clear Eric has done some terrific work for “Spamalot,” but he doesn’t really want to work with us. He doesn’t want to cooperate with us artistically or creatively. Because I offered to work with him, even without Monty Python, but ?he didn’t really want to do that. So I think he likes to work on his own.
Cleese is 70. He has been living in Southern California for the last decade.
Vonnegut Postscript
A never-before-published Kurt Vonnegut story appeared in the Los Angeles Times on October 18. As the LA Times’ “Jacket Copy” blog explains:
“Look at the Birdie” is the title story of the collection to be released next week, two and a half years after his death.
The same post treats readers to a reprint of Harlan Ellison’s 1969 review of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five with this self-revealing verdict:
Which is not to say it is anywhere near “The Naked and the Dead” or “From Here to Eternity.” Vonnegut fights his wars with feathers rather than with jackhammers. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is funny, satirical, compelling, outrageous, fanciful, mordant, fecund and at the bottom-line, simply stoned-out-of-its-mind.
It is about Billy Pilgrim who travels to the planet Tralfamadore in a flying saucer, but no tilted-nose critic would cop to Vonnegut’s being a science-fiction writer: “It’s too good to be science-fiction,” they would say. But Vonnegut doesn’t care, and you won’t care, either, because this is a writer who leaps over genres.
No doubt as he typed these words Ellison seethed with frustration because the literary establishment was refusing to recognize that he, too, the author of ingenious satirical fables like “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”, was a writer able to leap over genres.
A few years later Ellison tried to force the issue when he turned his guest-of-honor speech at the 1975 NASFiC into an I’m-quitting-sf announcement. He made the point often at other times and places down the years without ever persuading fandom to loosen its coils, until the message became part of the black humor of the genre.
Eventually Ellison himself participated in the joke. When Coraline was up for a Nebula, Ellison promised that if it won he’d read the acceptance speech Gaiman had written. It did win. And in those remarks Gaiman played with the illusion that this promise gave him the power to make Ellison say literally anything he’d written:
I could write down the words “I, Harlan Ellison, am actually a science fiction writer” in my awards speech, and he’d have to say them. I wouldn’t actually do any of this, though, because Harlan’s revenge would be swift in coming and incredibly funny whenever he told people about it. Well, incredibly funny for everyone except me, anyway.
Calling Sergeant Van Buskirk
When I read that nearly three dozen extrasolar planets have been found, “some just five times the mass of Earth and others five times heftier than giant Jupiter” I had the random thought that one of them might become the future home of those formidable Dutch Valerians.
As you’ll remember from Galactic Patrol, “Sergeant Peter van Buskirk led the storming party of Valerians-men of human ancestry, but of extraordinary size, strength, and agility because of the enormous gravitation of the planet Valeria-in wiping out those of the pirate crew not killed in the battle between the two vessels.”
Monty Python Documentary on IFC
This will be the second post of the day to mention Mike Glicksohn. During Torcon II he introduced a room party full of American fans to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, then being aired on Canadian television but not in the U.S. The episode — The Spanish Inquisition — fulfilled even the wildest expectations. We went home wishing for more. Fortunately, the series began running on PBS at the end of 1974.
That party came to mind when I read in today’s Los Angeles Times that the 40th anniversary of Monty Python’s British debut is being commemorated by a six-hour documentary series, “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut),” beginning October 18 on the Independent Film Channel.
The Independent Film Channel publicized the program by reuniting the five surviving members of the troupe in New York on October 15 for a public “conversation” at the premiere of a feature-length theatrical cut. The Monty Python Reunion can be viewed online:
Watch the historic event reuniting all five surviving members of the Monty Python team — John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin — as they take to the stage for a Q&A discussion with the audience.
Post Office Shows “Greater Want of Skill”
The Canadian post office lost a collector’s rare Alexander Pope poetry book, so they offered him some stamps for the loss, reports the Montreal Gazette.
The article says of the poet, “Alexander Pope survived being trampled by a cow and overcame tuberculosis of the spine to become ‘the defining poetic force of his age’.” Many a postal customer can profit from that lesson in fortitude. Indeed, it will be the only profit seen by those of us on the U.S. side of the border – no free stamps accompany the shredded bits of our fanzines that show up in those plastic baggies marked “Destroyed in handling by the US Postal Service.”
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]