Remembering Mike O’Neal on his birthday.
Helloween
Author: DOuG pRATt
Sound Noir
The Big Sleep this ain’t. It’s the Firesign Theatre’s gleefully twisted parody of the hard-boiled detective genre, “Nick Danger, Third Eye”.
The Zombies Live
Andrew at Parlogram Auctions has an appreciation of one of my all-time favorite albums, the absolutely superb Odessey and Oracle by the Zombies.
Here’s the album in all its creative perfection.
Taking the Fat Out of Music
If you look carefully at record labels, many have the letters BMI.
BMI is Broadcast Music, Inc., a music licensing company. Founded in 1939, BMI was acquired this year by New Mountain Capital, a private equity firm.
BMI is also widely known as body mass index. An article in MIT Technology Review suggests that BMI should be replaced with another measurement — SAD, sagittal abdominal diameter.
Perhaps under its new ownership, BMI will develop a method for measuring the fat content in music.
Brother, Can You Spare a Loan?
Along with Covid, we continue to live with the profoundly harmful effects of the 2008 financial crisis. I don’t know if this documentary is any good. I’m putting it here to watch later. Maybe you’ll see it before I do.
Follow-up: It’s all right. There’s no new information, but I liked that somebody brings up how the excesses of the trading floor spilled over into the private lives of the brokers; i.e., cocaine and hookers.
The documentary begins with an independently operating Ponzi schemer who got caught and went to prison. He’s the sort of guy who you’d expect to see on an episode of American Greed. From there the theme is, “Why him and not the big Wall Street bankers?” The most interesting comment, and one that I agree with, is at 46:45.
The Hubbard Space Telescope
Before thinking up Dianetics and then Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard was a pulp fiction writer. As you can see in the photo, he cranked out yarns in various genres, but mostly Hubbard was a science fiction writer.
Hubbard’s 800-page sci-fi novel Battlefield Earth was published in 1982. I spotted a hardcover copy in a bookshop, marked down to ten bucks from $24. I bought the book and really liked it. John Travolta later produced, and starred in, the notoriously bad movie adaptation.
On a Facebook group, somebody posted a Battlefield Earth cover with different art from my copy. I don’t know who painted the original cover, but there’s no mistaking the other artist. It was Frank Frazetta.
My motivation to buy Battlefield Earth was remembering how much I enjoyed reading Hubbard’s Fear. I’d picked up an old, beat-up 1950’s reprint of the 1940 novella at a convention for cover price — 35-cents.
“Enjoy” may not be the right word to describe reading Fear. I recall it was genuinely unsettling. With Halloween a week away, I thought I’d read Fear again, but I no longer have my old paper copy. During the time when I was an occasional contributor to the (defunct) Comics Buyer’s Guide, I sent it to Don and Maggie Thompson for a reason I don’t fully recall. Fortunately, the Kindle edition is only $3 on Amazon.