Wednesday, December 31, 2014

A Very Merry Un-New Year!


For me this is a totally artificial, made-up holiday still Ill bow to tradition and hope that the Wheel of Fortune turns well for you all in 2015.

We are bound, unfortunately, to the Christian calendar  but the pagans actually have this right: the year ends on October 31 and begins on November 1.

And really  if youre vowing to do something differently today, then youre doing something wrong the rest of the year. In the words of the Great Sage Buster Brown: Its the fellow who does wrong who resolves to do right."

http://circustarot.blogspot.com

Looking Back Through the Playbook

... I am reminded by my friend BC that I posted my Pornographic Version of "Frosty The Snowman" way, way back in 2010 when the blog was still in its early, unformed days and I was still basically a mess and using this as self-therapy.

Well, I say some things are too good to get lost in time! Here it is, in all its glorious Disrespect:

http://www.ducksoup.me/2010/12/from-my-evil-twin-frosty-rauchy-snowman.html

-- Freder.
www.ducksoup.me

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Duck Soup's Un-Holiday Graphic Novel Sale!


I have a few too many copies of my graphic novel series sitting here in my office, taking up much-needed shelf space. So -- because I want to A) get rid of them and B) encourage folks to try them -- especially B -- I'm offering them on sale here for about half-price.

That's the equivalent of a movie matinee ticket for all the adventures in Space and Depression-Era Hollywood that you can shake a stick at. Although why you'd shake a stick at it is anyone's guess. 

The running time of the sale isn't limited, but the quantities are very limited. This special price on the books is only available on this page, in this post, using the special PayPal links below. 

If all this has you scratching your head and thinking "What the heck?" you can learn all about Tinsel*Town by clicking here, and all about Quirk by clicking here -- or click around over there in the sidebar for both -- plus a whole lot of other stuff worth your attention. 

TWO-VOLUME SET:
QUIRK vol. 1, "Pulp Friction" and QUIRK vol. 2, "Termination Alley"






TWO-VOLUME SET:
TINSEL*TOWN vol. 1, "Ashcan Blues" and TINSEL*TOWN vol. 2, "Love & Death"




QUIRK vol. 1, "Pulp Friction" -- single copy SALE:




TINSEL*TOWN vol. 1, "Ashcan Blues" -- single copy SALE:





Happy Un-Holidays, Y'all!

--Freder
www.ducksoup.me

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

I See Dead People



I saw my mother in a dream again last night. This happens on average about once a month.

I went over to the old house and found her there, looking a decade younger than was when she died, and standing on her own two legs -- no canes and no prosthetic.

She's unhappy about what's happening there, as am I. I do honestly think that it's a sin to tear down something that other people built and cared about. 

We came up to the back of the house, the northwest side, and saw that all of the walls had been ripped out and the house was standing open to the air. We went in, and there were just piles and piles of things that I had left behind, being sold in a kind of rummage sale by the new owners before they take the whole place down. While she kept them occupied I loaded up my car with stuff, telling myself that it wasn't stealing, because it was mine, I had simply not been able to take it with me at the time. Then the dream changed into something else, and I was far away in another situation.

Mom now knows that she is dead. This is a change from earlier encounters with her in the dream world.

She is not happy with me. The last time I saw her, before last night, was in a dream that was quite similar, except that she just stared at me, not speaking, from the back seat of the car while I loaded it up with all the cherished things that I had left behind. 

The house actively started falling apart almost the moment that she died, as if she had been the glue holding it together. Once, during the summer after she was gone, I found water literally running down the inside walls ... true, I had left the windows open that day, but it had not been raining. I attributed it then to the awful humidity we had been experiencing but I lived in that house for 35 years in all sorts of conditions and never saw water running down the inside walls before. It was like the house was weeping.

Now I worry that she's stuck over there, all alone with the house coming down around her, leaving her with no place to be connected to. Is it possible to invite a ghost to come and live in another place? Would I even want to do that? No wonder she's not happy with me.

-- Freder.
www.ducksoup.me

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Leaving The Zirkus...


At last, at last, at lonnnng last, the companion book to my Tarot of the Zirkus Mägi is finally completed, in the can, and on sale now. This was easily the most painful aspect of my whole “tarot journey” and I’m pretty much ecstatic to have the thing behind me.

But it’s more than just the book: and it comes with a sense of both accomplishment and sadness to note that my time with the Zirkus Mägi — at least my active, creative time — is now done. Of course I’ll still be spending some time promoting the finished product, something I need to do with all my various creative “children,” but the time of actual work, of The Making, is All Out and Over, to paraphrase one of the card meanings.

This brings to mind an aspect of work that faces all creative people at some point: the issue of Completion.

In one facet or another, I have been actively working on the decks and their offshoots for (conservatively) the past twenty months. That’s a fair chunk of time to be focused on a thing: it takes me about that long to write a novel. The Tarot of the Zirkus Mägi has been one of the most significant projects of my creative life, and now it’s done. Complete —

Finishing something can actually kill a creative person. The wise writer, the wise artist, has another project already in the works that they can take up immediately. This can mean the difference between a smooth transition from Route 66 to Highway 99 — or driving off of a cliff.

Just Starting is the hardest thing that any creative person, no matter their discipline, has to face. It’s a lot like trying to start your car when it’s ninety below zero out there. Everything inside you that needs to be flowing in order to accomplish the work is frozen up harder than an Ice Palace. 

So, when you’re faced with the situation of having to start something new while you are simultaneously in free-fall over the ending of your last project, a project that may have been the primary focus of your life for some considerable time… this is a recipe for disaster. 

You must have another project already In Progress when you finish something major. It’s the only way to avoid what could become a catastrophically fallow and depressing period. 

In my case, I have two, and a third in the wings. And thank goodness for that. As an alcoholic, the last thing I can afford to have in my life are Empty Days. 

Take a moment to look back and savor the completion, yes. Take a moment to pat yourself on the back for Having Accomplished Something, and even allow yourself to feel the sense of wistfulness that naturally comes when something that you have been intensely focused on for a long period of time is finally ended. But be sure that you have something else in motion so that you can grab hold and keep right on plugging along. Not following this simple rule will have consequences that some artists never overcome. 

My Tarot of the Zirkus Mägi and its offshoots can all be found here: http://circustarot.blogspot.com

Meanwhile, over there in the sidebar you will already find links to the “new” projects that will keep me going. This is one god-damn time in my life where I have been a Good Boy Scout and am fully prepared with something to get me through the let-down.

Good fortune to you on all your great works, my friends.

— Freder.
www.ducksoup.me

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Just a Thought



I'm going to take the unpopular path on eBooks. Here's why Amazon is right about the cost of eBooks: when you can buy a used copy of the physical book for significantly less than the eBook, eBook prices are too high! Neither the author nor the publisher benefit when we buy used books. But as long as eBooks are more expensive than used, I'm going to buy used every time, or not buy at all. Mainstream Publishers are so freakin' short-sighted on this issue and others that it's no wonder they are dead in the water and don't even know it.


When I publish an eBook version of one of my books, I make sure that it's $5.00 or less. The Kindle version of my novel Persephone's Torch is just a buck-ninety-nine. I don't feel that eBooks should cost more than that. They cost nothing to produce and are 100 percent add-on revenue. In asking publishers to reduce the cost of eBooks, Amazon is still allowing them to sell eBook versions for considerably more than they are worth. 


I've been in the book trade for thirty years and I know how it works. Mainstream publishers are simply Being Greedy on the one hand, and Fearful on the other: fearful that cheap eBooks will kill their sales. This is pure myopic bullshit. Publishers cannot continue to live in the Dark Ages for much longer and expect to survive. 


-- Freder

www.ducksoup.me

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

It's a Good Thing...


One year ago yesterday, the Majors version of my TAROT OF THE ZIRKUS MÄGI was funded at Kickstarter! It was the best birthday present anyone could possibly get. Its been a whirlwind year since then with a second successful Kickstarter to fund the complete 78-card deck, and all the activity surrounding the production and distribution of two decks  single-handedly, I might add! Thanks to everyone whose support  and I dont just mean the funding  made it possible. This has been the only truly successful project that Ive ever had, and watching it unfold has been one of the happiest  and most anxious  times of my life. Whats ahead? Not even the cards can tell that...


-- Freder
www.ducksoup.me

Sunday, November 23, 2014

The Thanksgiving Post... Three Years On


Don’t anyone tell me to have a Happy Thanksgiving. I don’t do the state-mandated holidays anymore. 

In part, this is because I don’t have any family left in the area. True, my sister lives about twenty minutes away, alone now, but she is family only in the strict biological sense. Regular visitors to this blog will no doubt have unearthed at least some of the bile that I’ve spewed in her direction; but even though I’ve mellowed out a bit in my feelings towards her, the fact is it’s a “Fool me once / Fool me twice” kind of situation. She claims to have reformed. I doubt this very much, but whether she has or hasn’t, never again will I give her the opportunity to prove me right. I’m not nearly the dominant personality that she is, but I have limits, and once you push me up against those limits you will find that I am an immovable object.

People do take pity on me and invite me to their holiday dinners, but intruding on another family’s holiday is just plain awkward. It’s nobody’s fault. 

I don’t see the need for an authorized, mandated Day of Thanksgiving anyhow. If you’re only thankful for life one day out of the year, and even then you’re only thankful because you’re being told that you have to be… then something is wrong with your life that needs to be repaired. 

Three years ago, and for decades prior to that, I was in that boat. I tried it with life, I really did, but it wasn’t working out, and in the end all that I wanted from life was to get out of it. Especially for the six or seven years prior to 2012, life was nothing but a continual, daily torture for me, “torment” not being too strong a word. Thankful? Is the Inquisition victim thankful for the rack and thumbscrews?

I don’t know if it will last, but beginning finally in late 2012 life finally began to turn around. Just being able to be my own Master has a lot to do with it, but ohmigosh, the years between 2010 and late 2012 could have ended so badly for me: instead, I have a home of my own, I have my three wonderful pussyquats, I have my own work, I have peace for the first time ever. And believe you me, I don’t let one single day go by without thanking my lucky stars (and everyone who helped me along the way) for all of that. Even if I lapse once in a while into despair: this is largely biological, and I’m able to mentally work my way back to the truth, which is simply that I’m so god-damned lucky it’s practically unbelievable. From late 2012 until now — these have been the best months of my whole life, and I don’t need a damn holiday to be thankful for them.

No — beyond Halloween I pretty much don’t do modern holidays at all. Winter solstice: that moment when we are halfway through the dark and the days begin to lengthen once again — now THAT is a holiday worth celebrating, and I do mark that day. Celebrate? Yes, I suppose, insofar as a single guy with Asperger’s and no social instincts or inclinations whatsoever can do. But I haven’t celebrated New Year’s in a long time (as one gets older, New Year’s just gets more depressing), and as for Valentine’s Day… pardon my French, but don’t fucking make me puke. Walpurgis Night, more or less corresponding with the pagan Beltane: this one I celebrate. Where All Hallows is the rising of the dark, here is where we put the dark to rest at last. If that’s not worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.

You might say that I’m becoming a pagan — except that I hate ceremony and ritual with a purple passion, and pagan rituals are no less irksome to me than Christian ones. Just let me mark my days, thank you very much, quietly and in my own way, muddling through as best I can. So I won’t wish you a ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ or a ‘Joyous Christmas.’ I wish for you and everyone the same things that I wish for myself: Freedom, Peace, Comfort, Security, and Good Works that mean something to you. And not for just one or two pages in the book of the year.

— Freder.
www.ducksoup.me

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Two Love Stories, Separated by Sixty-plus Years - and Talent.


I don’t suppose it matters — because the picture is so much fun — but why is The Shop Around the Corner set so resolutely in Budapest? Is it because Ernst Lubitch was feeling homesick for Europe?  Is it because the story, even by 1940 standards, is so very much a contrived fairy tale that the studio believed no one would swallow it unless it was presented as happening in a far-off land? 

It’s very curious. This is the only odd or off-key note in the whole silly, wonderful movie. We are never shown any views of the city, the shop could be located almost anywhere in the world. Indeed, the names of the characters are Hungarian… but that’s where it stops. In all other aspects the employees of this shop are as American as apple pie. After all, we’re talking principally Jimmy Stewart, Margaret Sullivan and Frank Morgan — the Wonderful Wizard himself, out of Oz and balancing a small department store against a faithless wife. Only two of the supporting characters — including Felix Bressart doing essentially the same things that he did in Lubitch’s Ninotchka just a year before — have even remotely foreign accents, and the young messenger boy sounds as if he was pulled straight off the streets of New York. None of them would seem out of place if the picture was set in say, Chicago at the turn of the century. 

Everything about The Shop Around the Corner is so very damned American that it’s jarring — it pulls you out of the story every time a reference is made to Budapest. It makes no sense! Why, O Why did they do it? 

There’s never any doubt in The Shop Around the Corner as to where the love story is going, what’s going to happen next and how it’s all going to turn out… it’s the kind of picture that the audience can and does write in their heads alongside the action unfolding onscreen. But Lubitch has such a lightness of touch that we can never take our eyes off the thing even when we can practically recite the dialogue alongside the actors. In one sense, the performances are unremarkable: the cast is doing just exactly what they are noted for always doing, bringing to the screen exactly the same qualities that they always bring — but when you’re talking about Stewart and Morgan especially, that thing is always a great pleasure to watch. As for Margaret Sullivan’s Klara — she comes across as more than a little bit of a spoiled brat, and in this she may simply have been playing herself. 

It doesn’t measure up to Ninotchka, but then, what could? If Ninotchka is a beautiful lemon meringue pie of a movie, then The Shop Around the Corner is a perfectly serviceable chocolate cream. Bring a bib and tuck in. It’s nothing you haven’t eaten before or won’t eat again, but it’s tasty nonetheless.


So, if The Shop Around The Corner is a completely artificial and contrived love story that somehow works wonderfully as a cinematic confection, why is Last Chance Harvey, made sixty years later when you would have thought that evolution would have amounted to something, a completely artificial and contrived love story that stinks like last year’s cheese? It is at least as sincerely and skillfully acted; ah, but “sincerity” is the one thing director / screenwriter Joel Hopkins isn’t guilty of.

Dustin Hoffman plays a past-middle-age sad sack with essentially nothing to live for. The first half-hour of the movie is spent more or less gleefully driving spikes into Hoffman’s neck, hammer blow after hammer blow. Just when things are at their worst, here comes a “chance” (Hah!) encounter with Emma Thompson to save his life and make everything All Better. Ms. Thompson works in the international airport in a capacity that is elusive to say the least. Essentially, her character works in the airport because that’s the only place that the Hoffman character could reasonably expect to cross paths with her.

It gets worse, coincidence piled on improbability. In real life, the Thompson character would call the cops on Hoffman — but no, they walk. As they walk, they talk. This takes up a good chunk of the movie, and it’s the best part of the thing… the only part that gives Last Chance Harvey at least a reasonable claim to being a movie for adults, about adults, with no explosions in it. As noted, the performances are as flawless as you would expect. Hoffman is as vested in this as in any of his roles, while Thompson basically has to look tolerant and give a wistful smile every now and then.

At no point is there any kind of a cynical twist that would lend at least a hair of realism to the thing. Even The Shop Around the Corner has an affair and a misunderstanding in it: Last Chance Harvey is just gushing sweetness and light. The final blow occurs just at the end. Unsatisfied with providing phony happy endings for everyone else in the picture, Hopkins backtracks and provides Thompson’s mother (the great and woefully misused Eileen Atkins) with a phony happy ending of her own. Because nobody is compete without love, right? And everybody’s got to be complete, right? Anything less and it wouldn’t be a product of the insipid and unforgivably pandering Modern Cinema. There is a genuine sophistication buried deep, deep, way down deep under The Shop Around The Corner; but beneath Last Chance Harvey there’s only emptiness and manipulation.

— Freder
www.ducksoup.me

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Whoever he is behind that Mask...



After forty-however-many years, the 1966 Batman TV series is finally out of legal purgatory, and the long-awaited, long anticipated DVDs are here! I meant to approach them with discipline and limit myself to the two-episodes-a-week that originally ran all those years ago, but as usual my sense of self-restraint is negligible at best: like a pig, I dove right in.

Oh, my; 1966 happened a long time ago, but the premiere of Batman on ABC was one of those moments that you never forget, even if you were only seven years old. There are certain scenes from episodes 1 and 3 that I remember vividly from my first viewing; and I remember going to my bedroom after watching them to draw picture after picture of Batman and Robin, of scenes from the show.

I was one of those kids who didn’t get that it was a comedy. 

Batman ’66 took an awful beating from comics fans throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Maybe this was based on resentment: not just for making comic books, which we took so very seriously at the time, look silly and trivial, but for our own naïveté, for making us realize, once we had grown up enough to “get” the jokes, that we had been duped as children; that the show we watched breathlessly as kids was really an over-the-top pie in the face.

But I suppose the thing has come full-circle: today, Batman ’66 is being as openly (and lucratively) embraced by the comics biz as it was reviled for thirty years prior. Even DC publisher Paul Levitz, who once actively opposed the home video release of this show as “not being the image of Batman” that he wanted to perpetuate, is now on board and happily promoting away as if his job depended on it. Ain’t money wundafil? Don’t money do wundafil things?

The truth is that DC brought it on themselves: stylistically and in content, the TV series is almost slavishly faithful to the Batman comic books as they were in the mid-sixties. With villains whose plots were outright silly and trivial, and Bat-mite here and Bat-everything else there, Batman comics were simply goofy and over-the-top… which is perhaps why DC Comics was, around this time, getting its collective ass kicked all up and down the block by a certain upstart called Marvel and its Master Schemer, Stan (the Man) Lee.

So instead of dissing the Batman TV show, comics fans really should have looked at the comics that it was specifically based on and realized that here was actually a pretty damned savvy and sophisticated realization of a character and series that, by rights, should have been 100 percent unfilmable.

Dosier’s Green Hornet — another series I wish would come to DVD — wasn’t, as I recall, nearly as overtly camped out as Batman, because the comics were that much more sensible; but thank goodness his Wonder Woman series never got made! The pilot alone is enough to make your teeth curl.

But for Batman: these are things I still remember from the first viewing all those years ago: The Riddler cackling away as he prepares to crush Robin’s head in a vise… The Penguin dropping a gigantic umbrella into the middle of a crowded Gotham City street, Bruce Wayne slowwww-ly being rolled into the furnace at the end of that episode. I remember the knockout performances by Gorshin and Meredith and Romero and Newmar, and to a lesser extent by Victor Buono and David Wayne and Anne Baxter and George Sanders. I remember the gaudy polychrome color and the wonky camera angles. And let’s not forget Adam West’s courage, his comedic timing, his still-remarkable voice and the way that he used it. I remember all these things and need little more inducement to weep for a world that’s gone: because it was never just a TV show.

At our house, in those days, we had the only color TV set in the  extended family; and so, when my uncles and aunts and cousins realized that the show was no good without color, they would all come over every Wednesday and Thursday night to watch the show with us… a regular family event.

It was shortly into the second season of Batman that my Father pulled up the stakes around our little family and moved us halfway across the country from Minnesota to Maine. I know this only because we were still living in Edina, Minnesota when the Batman movie came out between seasons one and two. I never got to see that movie in the theaters, but I did get to see the trailer: it was showing in front of a stop-motion animated picture called Willy McBean and His Magic Machine. I had pestered my father and made a general nuisance of myself until he consented to let me go to Willy McBean, but as it turned out I forgot the movie almost immediately, while I vividly remember the trailer for Batman to this day!

The move to Maine was a shock to the system from which TV shows like Batman and Frankenstein Jr. were the only constant. In fact it was Batman that got my parents to finally postpone my bedtime… the show aired an hour later on the east Coast than it did in the middle of the country. 

The point is that we had a Pop Culture in those days. We had a culture that connected us. With only three TV networks, no cable, no internet, if we weren’t actually watching the same show as our friends, schoolmates and families, we at least knew what they were watching. I would argue that there’s no such thing as a Pop Culture anymore, nor can there be, because the amount of entertainment options that we have before us today are so vast that very few of us are on the same page.

The rights battles surrounding Batman ’66 were so lengthy and venal and chewed up so much money that I suppose it’s to be expected that the DVD release is, despite all the touted extras, really a kind of bare-bones affair. The episode menus are utterly generic, the package design is nice, but looks as if it took a skilled designer about an hour to slap together. Ditto the booklet that comes with the set.

But at least the show is here, at last — with the full uncut episodes as they have not been seen since its premiere. The image has been gently restored, although not sweetened. Likewise the sound: a 5.1 surround remix might have been lovely, but wouldn’t have reflected the show as it aired. What we get is the original monaural track… it gets the job done. There’s been some complaining about the price tag, but I got mine for around $150… with all three seasons included on 15 disks, that’s about ten bucks a disk and fair is fair. It seems to me that Just Making This Release Happen was an expensive proposition; if they had to cut costs to keep the price reasonable, they’ve cut in the areas that were best cut.

Given my own druthers, I might only have picked season one. I doubt that I’m alone in this, which may be why the show is only available as a complete unit. Batman burned very brightly indeed for one season, and then, as even Adam West notes, began to flame out in a hurry with Season Two. By season three, the producers were frankly desperate. I could have lived without Seasons Two and Three… but then again, Yvonne Craig wears that Batgirl costume awfully well…

Even to modern eyes, it’s easy it see why these remarkable first season episodes made such a colorful splash in the black-and-white world of the mid-sixties. But what makes Batman ’66 a classic today?

It was much, much more than a simple TV show. It was a Time, and it was a Place. It was a Milepost against which we measured our lives. It was a great, gaudy, polychrome Grand Opera. It was both the beginning and the end of an Age.

— Freder

www.ducksoup.me

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Monsters Within, Monsters Without...


It’s a reasonable argument that all the great screen Mawnsters of film history — your Draculas, your Wolf-and-Cat People, your King Kongs and your Creations of Dr. Frankenstein — are not simply “misunderstood,” but destroyed for the very reasons that make them beautiful.

For most of them, especially in the days when Mawnsters didn’t so much kill people as just look at them out of the movie screen with their hands or paws raised in a vaguely defensive pose, their only real crime was in Daring to be Daring — for rejecting the bland, and for being (much) more interesting than anyone else in the movie. If there’s one thing that angry villagers can’t stand, it’s people who have the temerity to reject the villager’s life of quiet desperation and instead color outside the lines, with all their innate individuality and talents on display for the world to see… the ones who choose Live Large in a world of pygmies.

Because God Forbid anyone should be Different. God forbid anyone should reject the Status Quo, and live a bright, burning life as a Magnificent Mawnsteh! Quick, John-Boy, light the torches! We have one of those pesky individuals to burn.

That began to change in the early-to-mid 1940’s, when Hitler and WWII had finally impressed upon audiences that the real monsters were not the ones who just needed a haircut or who happened to have bolts plunged into their necks, but were instead people just like themselves. In the movies of the ‘40s that I’ve been watching this Halloween season, the monsters (they don’t deserve to be called “Mawnstehs”) are altogether commonplace.

Queen of Spades, a British thriller from 1949 starring Anton Walbrook and Dame Edith Evans in her first screen role, does have a supernatural element… but it’s less in the way of a horror movie and more a cautionary tale with some chilling bits. Nonetheless, the chilling bits are genuinely chilling, as Walbrook frightens an old lady to death in his attempt to wrest from her the secrets of gambling with cards. Later, her spirit comes to call on him in his lonely garrett — bearing a gift that we all know he shouldn’t ought to take. This being the era of human monsters (that is, common people who give in to their lowest, darkest instincts), he of course ignores common sense and charges blindly and happily to his doom. It’s all done with shadows and candles and snow and dark passageways. To twist the old joke, when you look up the word “atmospheric” in the dictionary, Queen of Spades is the definition. 

In at least two of the classic chillers that Boris Karloff did with Val Lewton, there is nary a Conventional Monster in sight. Isle of The Dead presents us at first with a standard “quarantine” drama in which a group of people are stranded together in a place from which the only escape may be death. Death Himself is present from the opening frames of the film, and dogs the characters (there are no heroes) throughout. Karloff not only lends it gravitas, but leads us on; his character resides in the dark of human experience. But the real monster in Isle of The Dead is simply these: Superstition and Ignorance. It’s because of these that something horrible, something not at all supernatural, happens to a character that we had previously dismissed as insignificant: and from there on the final ten minutes of the picture become a Shakespearian drama of Fate playing out in the most horrible of ways. Isle of The Dead teases and sets us up for its entire first hour, and just when you’re starting to nod off it delivers a single shock of the first magnitude, after which all you can do is watch helplessly.

Bedlam is even more terrifying: because it’s real, and because it could still happen today. Karloff plays the apothecary general of a notorious London madhouse, whose cruelty towards the inmates is only exceeded by his greed, and the obsequious subservience he displays to his Tory patrons. Since the story is all about a moral and philosophical awakening, we begin with Anna Lee in a decidedly anti-heroine role, as the protege (more than somewhat arrogant herself) of a fat Tory lout. But when she objects to the treatment of the asylum’s inmates (and, more specifically, when she clouts Karloff across the face with a riding crop, a sin for which you know very well that she will not be forgiven) — you guessed it, Karloff pulls a few strings, and his rich patrons see to it that she is herself committed into the asylum — and into Karloff’s waiting hands.

This is the single scariest thing about the picture: you know that this happened all the time, and you know that it still happens all the time. Stand up for what’s right, make a nuisance of yourself to the wrong Rich People, and see how fast you’re put away in a dark place where no one will ever hear from you again. 

We still live in a world where people can be spirited away for no good reason… where people can have their property and even their children taken away from them; where they can be murdered by the police just for having the wrong skin color, or for standing on their rights. Here indeed are the monsters that are more terrifying than any werewolf, any vampire, any Frankenstein’s creature: here are the brainless Angry Villagers who have been empowered by the wealthy to enforce the Status Quo. Reject the principles of enslavement, color outside the lines… and watch how fast they light the torches. 

— Freder
www.ducksoup.me

Thursday, October 23, 2014

There's a Circus in Your Pocket


Whether you're on the fence about ordering the physical pack,
or just want to have the Zircus available to you wherever you go,
The Fool's Dog app version of Tarot of the Zircus Mägi is for you! 

Packed with features, including an expanded version of the "Little White Book"
included with the physical deck and the original novel that inspired the deck,
this bargain-priced package puts the Zircus on your device
-- with beautiful Retina graphics -- in all its gaudy glory!

Available for both Android and iOS (universal iPhone/iPad app) devices,
this is your budget ticket into the Big Top ... but be warned,

Android users click here to view and order:

iOS users click here to view and order: 

THIS IS
The Great Circus of Life:
in the PALM of your
HAND!

-- Freder.
www.duscksoup.me

Monday, October 20, 2014

We Were The Last


I had a dream about the old house last week. My mother and her brother (my Uncle John) drove me out there in the dead of night, and I broke in through the back way. It turned out that I had left things there, and I needed to collect them and save them. There were things from my mother’s collection that the auctioneers had somehow passed over, and that I hadn’t had the time to take. I went through the whole house in the dark, grabbing up loads of my mother’s past and mine as well. I made trip after trip out to the car, filling up the back seat. My mother and Uncle John just sat in the car beside each other while I worked. I didn’t like the way that they looked at me. 

Before he moved out West, shortly after the funeral gathering for my brother-in-law that I did not attend, my father passed on the news that the new owners of the family house out in Albion were going to tear it down.

He said that the big barn was already gone. This is the main reason why I could not bring myself to attend my sister’s husband’s service: their house is just a quarter mile or so and around a corner from the Old House, and I can’t bear to ever go out to Albion again, not for anyone, not for any reason. It’s done, it’s done. It’s done. 

But still the news made me so sad, just made me shake my head. Sure, the old place needed work, but it was basically sound; and more than that it was a grand rambling house with so much potential, so much that could have been revived. It needed a new roof, mainly… replacing this with the original cedar shakes would have been unimaginably expensive, but a metal roof could have been put on the place quite economically, and I’m no longer as opposed to metal roofs as I used to be. For one thing, the snow slides off!

Once that was done, there were a handful of interior walls that needed repair, but I see this done all the time on the plethora of home remodeling shows that are all over TV these days. Take the opportunity while you’re doing it to re-insulate with modern materials, it could have been the grandest house once again.

But they waited too long. The roof needed to be done ASAP, and in the four years that they’ve owned the place they did nothing. And when, in a strange mood, I looked at the most recent satellite pictures of the house from above, I saw that the roof had fallen in over the bedroom right next to mine… there it was, a big, gaping hole in the roof. 

I feel now more than ever that somehow, some way, my mother was the glue holding the old place together. As soon as she died, so did the house begin to die. I wrote about all this four years ago here on the blog, so I won’t rehash it here. 

The house needed the new owners to be saviors. Instead, they spent all their efforts cutting down every single tree and bush around the place so that it looked like it was sitting in the middle of the Sahara. And now it’s too late for them. For it. For the place.

All of this has been on my mind lately, not because I’m unhappy in my current place (which is the opposite of true: every single day I thank my lucky stars for my current home, and especially for the way it has embraced all of the past history that I brought to it; I am so very lucky) but because I do believe that houses have spirits; and the news that my Dad gave me felt like another Death Knell in the family. The Old House was my home for more than thirty-five years. Now it’s going — perhaps it has already gone as I type this. 

The Google Earth pictures were bad enough: looking at them I felt the way people in wars must feel when their homes get bombed into rubble. I didn’t dwell on them long. I know that I could never go back out there again. It’s why I couldn’t go to my brother-in-law’s service.

And yet there is a perverse part of me that is a little bit glad that no one will ever live in that house again. We were the last. It served us well, just exactly as long as it needed to. 

— Freder
www.ducksoup.me

Monday, October 13, 2014

Where's Count Floyd When You Need Him?


I have to confess, my Halloween viewing has been pretty danged dreary so far this year; and it’s been full of reversals. Well, a guy can change his mind, right?
I started with a few Universal programmers from the ‘forties, of which the ones I liked best were the ones I remembered liking the least. It just goes to show, I suppose, that low expectations can go a long way. I particularly enjoyed a B horror/comedy called Horror Island, with Dick Foran starring and Leo Carillo in a colorful role as an ex-pirate. Carillo was one of those steady supporting players who was really, really good at doing what he was good at: providing the color, much of the charm, and the comedy relief. The picture is a complete toss off intended as filler for a double bill… not even remotely scary and only a little bit funny, but I did find it enjoyable this time, strangely.

Of course King Kong is still the monster of all monsters; still a great picture with hardly a frame of wasted footage, and a picture that in no way needed to be remade by anyone… much less turned into the ponderous, overbearing sap-fest that is Peter Jackson’s version. But Mystery of The Wax Museum, made that same year and starring Kong’s leading lady, Fay Wray? I had fond memories of this… only to fall asleep on it last night. It’s good bits are still very, very good indeed (and the final revelation of the villain remains the best and most effective unveiling of any criminal mastermind, bar none, as Fay pounds Lionel Atwill’s face in self-defense) … but the good bits are so far between: after an arresting opening the thing descends into a very ordinary procedural headed by a very uninteresting Gal Reporter. Fay isn’t introduced until almost halfway through, and then the director doesn’t know how to photograph her to best advantage. Atwill is marvelous when we see him, but we don’t see enough of him. When this was remade as House of Wax nearly three decades later, the procedural was dumped and the filmmakers wisely did not fall into the trap that Mystery does of revealing the monster’s face early and often. I can’t say House of Wax is a better movie but — in all but that one single scene, that one single shot of Atwill’s face cracking and breaking under Miss Wray’s blows — it is smarter.

Probably the biggest reversal of all was the movie version of Todd MacFarlaine’s comic series Spawn. The first time I saw this a couple of years ago, I thought it was harmless, goofy fun, with lots of well-designed demons filling the screen and lots of action. 

What the hell was I thinking? Was I drunk? Ehhhh, could be. This is one of the worst funnybook movies I’ve ever seen, and I have seen some stinkers! Poor John Leguzamo mugs underneath literally piles of make-up; meanwhile, Martin Sheen gives hands-down the worst performance of his career (actually embarrassing to watch), Nicol Williamson phones it in and collects his check, and the hero never ever seems to put the mask on to cover his ugly face. Mix it up with an old, old revenge motivation, a really cringingly painful script and direction from poverty row… and I feel asleep on this load of crap, too.

Honestly, for this and other reasons, this Halloween viewing season has been mostly disappointing. Who in hell is the damn programming director? Oh, wait… that would be me.

— Freder
www.ducksoup.me

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Shake, Shiver, Rattle, Roll III: The Annual Halloween Music Playlist for 12014


I thought that I had my annual Halloween playlist carved in stone a couple of weeks ago… but instead I have been tinkering with it to no end. I like the songs to have variety and to contrast with each other in both tone and style, and I like the transitions to be as seamless as possible, and the list this year just wasn’t gelling for me. I have been distracted most all of the year, and the last month has been especially, ehm, “diverting.”

But at last, with a little more work just this morning, I think I have the coffin lid nailed down on this puppy. At last — at last — I am able to present my annual Halloween playlist for 2014.

This year I’m going to make you an offer. Some folks have wondered where to find these cuts, and you know, the thing is you find them everywhere and I’ve been kicking around a fairly long while now. A handful of my closest friends will get copies of this list on CD, but I obviously can’t include every Bela, Boris and Morticia on the distribution list. However — if you want to send me a blank CD and a self-addressed return envelope with sufficient return postage already affixed, I’ll be happy to burn you a copy of this year’s list. Include three CDs if you want the lists for all three years that I’ve been doing this. Click on the “Contact the Duckmeister” link in the sidebar and shoot me an email if you’re interested.

And without further ado, let’s draw back the moth-eaten curtain on this year’s sampling of music for the only worthwhile Holiday Season!

1) Emilie Autumn is a recent discovery for me… but instead of her music, I open the playlist with an evokative spoken-word piece of hers called “Words From The Asylum.” It makes for an arresting opening… the more so because this girl really is crazy (I mean that in the Nicest Possible Way… she’s one of My People) and the piece is only slightly fictional.

2) So far, I haven’t been able to resist using a cut from The Birthday Massacre somewhere on the list. They add a purple bite. This year’s entry is “Falling Down,” from their album Walking With Strangers

3) Heaven help me, I actually love a group called Adrian H and The Wounds. I’ve got both of their albums. Adrian himself has a voice like sandpaper and the group takes advantage of it. “Murder In the Forest” from their self-titled second album is one of their absolute best: a clunky, noisy, broken-down truck of a song.

4) Arch Obler, the great Horror Impresario of Old-Time Radio, creator of Lights Out, is up next with a cut from his LP Drop Dead. It’s a remarkably efficient (and also very funny) example of gross-out horror called “I’m Hungry”… and I don’t know who the actor is, but he gives the best bang-on impression of Peter Lorre ever, bar none.

 5) The Hi-De-Ho Man, Cab Calloway is back on the list this year with an early version of “The Saint James Infirmary Blues,” one of his signature songs and kind of an obvious choice, really…

6) How I managed to leave that crazy Screamin’ Jay Hawkins off of last year’s list is beyond me… but he’s back this year with “Frenzy,” — a song that I first heard when it was used in the X-Files episode, “Humbug.” It is Pure Crazy and wonderful.

7) I always try to include a classical piece and this year’s selection is more whimsical and evocative than scary: “Aquarium,” from Saint-Seans “Carnival of the Animals.”

8) From Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows I needed something short that also was representative of his/hers/its inherent gruesome weirdness. “The Dog Burial” certainly fits the bill. 

9) Making her debut appearance (but not her last) on these playlists, Blues Diva Besse Smith serves up her “Graveyard Dream Blues,” from the two-record set, Any Woman's Blues, that I inherited from my buddy Bruce Canwell (he of the great Library of American Comics) when he made vinyl a thing of the past in his music collection. 

10 and 11) Next up are two cuts from a long-defunct jazz ensemble known as The West Coast Workshop. They’re from The Wizard of Oz, an album from the late ‘60s that uses Harold Arlen tunes as a jumping off point for the most amazing modern jazz riffs. “The Dowser and the Thaumaturgist” is both eerie and wistful (two good qualities for All Hallow’s Eve), while “Ozwind” starts out almost painfully nostalgic before going full-out mystical and spooky. I’ve written about this album elsewhere on the blog. Great stuff!

12) After a one-year absence from the list, Bobby “Boris” Picket and the Crypt Kickers are back — not, as you might expect, with their hit “The Monster Mash,” but with an even funnier piece that led off side two of their only album, “Me and My Mummy.”

13) … which is the perfect lead-in to a selection from Tales of The Frightened, a spoken-word story of love from the other side, told by the genuine Boris Karloff!

14) The only problem I have with “Flood II” as a blood-pumping mood piece is that it runs six minutes, which is about two minutes too long. Still, it makes for a good contrast to the last few cuts. It’s by The Sisters of Mercy (who are all men) from their album Floodland.

15) Nox Arcana’s albums are all largely of a piece, and any one of them will do for the season. From their Poe-inspired album Shadows of the Raven, I selected “Melancholia.” The music certainly captures the spirit of the title, and I imagine Morticia Addams’s melancholic sister Ophelia sitting beside an old gramophone, cuddling her lilies, with this piece playing.

16) 2014 was the year I officially “discovered” the musical sub-sub-genre Gothabilly… here, from a group called The Spectres, I offer “Blooduckin’ Cowboy.” It’s from a Skull Records “sampler” album called Gothabilly Razin’ Hell.

17) Johnny Cash joins the list this year with a song I can’t listen to without tears: “Wayfaring Stranger.” 

18) And again for a change of mood (because we need one after the seriousness of Cash’s cut) here’s the head-banging, pulse-pounding metal group Halestorm with a little number from their album The Strange Case Of… called “Love Bites — And So Do I.” 

19) While your head is still pounding from that baby, you’ll appreciate the much more soulful Loreena McKinnett with her soft, melancholy, seasonal ballad “Samhain Night.”

20) Almost there: Just for fun, Inkubus Sukkubus is back with one of their more whimsical cuts, “Goblin Jig.”

21) And I wind it all up by going all serious on you again, as Folk legend Ola Belle Reed regales us with her unique Southern Gothic style in “My Epitaph.” Don’t bring me flowers after I’m dead!

And we’re out of here! I’m tired of typing and my head is ringing. See you in the graveyard!

— Freder
www.ducksoup.me

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Briefly Noted...


Because I wanted to focus on my TAROT OF THE ZIRKUS MÄGI (and it's worth focusing on... you can check it out here if you haven't already), I let a couple of milestones go by quietly, just adding links over there in the sidebar to the right. But they are worth noting here in plain sight...

First, the new mini-site devoted to my next novel is up and running. It's a strange little number called Baxter Bunny Escapes, and among other things to come you can now read the first two chapters complete online. Chapter Three is coming soon. Although my work on this project has been slowed by one thing and another (oh my goodness, just scroll on down to the older posts if you're wondering what the delay could possibly be...) I'm still hoping to have this ready for print early next year.


But that's not the only project on my to-do list, by a long shot, and I've just launched another mini-site that will allow you to follow the creation of The Marvelous Oracle of Oz from the very beginning right up to the moment that it goes to print. Only six cards have been designed so far... but even that small amount ought to give you a good feel for what the deck is going to look like. I'm really hoping to have this project done by Christmastime. Yeah -- wish me luck with that...

So -- go explore! These are two fun projects that are on my front burner... and any and all input / feedback / thoughts would be welcome.

Onward!

-- Freder.
www.ducksoup.me

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Bring On The Monsters


I’ve written about the TV series Supernatural before and don’t want to overdo it, but it’s worth noting that just as I was falling out of love with the thing it gobsmacked me with two smashing episodes back to back.

If I hadn’t ordered up Season Four before I watched the last three episodes of Season Three, I might not have ordered it up at all. The show has always skirted pretty close to the very edge of what was acceptable to me, blood-and-gore-wise, and at the end of season three they didn’t just cross the line, they leaped over it. In two otherwise interesting episodes, sequences of explicit Saw-style torture porn horror were included, in one case including the graphic cutting out of a man’s heart while he was still alive — making the show (for me) pretty much unwatchable. It was with that bad taste in my mouth that I began Season Four… and discovered that the whole series had gone South in a different way, and for different reasons.

Without warning, Supernatural goes all Holy and Christian on us, with Angels and even Mister God His-sef becoming Main Characters. Suddenly, Dean is morphed into a bible-toting crusader for the Christian faith. Even if I was a bible-thumper myself, which I emphatically am not, I’d have to say that God has no place on a show like this. Besides which — in a world where the supernatural can encompass all the mythologies of the world, it seems downright stupid of the show’s producers to marry the series so completely to The Bible. How to Limit Your Options in One Easy Step. 

So I deeply suspect that Season Four will be my last… I just can’t buy into all this Angel crap. But before I go, it was danged good to get two powerfully fun and successful episodes back-to-back in the last couple of days. Both fall into the category of “Tragical Comedies or Comical Tragedies,” but that’s where the similarities end. 

In “Monster Movie,” which was filmed in black-and-white in a manner that strongly evokes the great Universal Monster Movies of the thirties and especially the forties, Sam and Dean go up against no less than the vintage film incarnations of Dracula, The Wolfman and The Mummy… and the script cannily ties it all into Supernatural’s own distinct canon. It is immensely enjoyable, with some laugh-out-loud moments, some good creepy chills, and a great Ultimate Monster. How close is the detail? One scene even mimics the distinctive “shock” close-ups of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula by highlighting the vampire with spotlights that actually miss his eyes by inches! Fans of the 1931 picture know what I’m talking about.

The next episode, “Yellow Fever,” opens with a scary-suspenseful sequence that abruptly turns into what is undoubtedly the biggest out-loud belly-laugh of the entire series, bar none. So again it’s a comedy episode, with Dean literally in danger of dying of fright, but the monster at the core of the story is tragic enough to lend a little weight — and a couple of genuinely chilling moments — to an episode that shows off Jensen Ackles’s comic timing to the maximum.

So — even though I’ll probably be parting ways with the Winchester boys after I finish this season somewhere around Halloween — I’m happy to know that despite some really dumb over-all planning, the show still has some genuine juice left in it. I felt the same way about The X-Files in Season Two: the over-arcing story of UFOs and government conspiracies was already becoming tedious to say the least — but then like a shot in the dark came the wonderful episode set in a circus sideshow, “Humbug” — probably my favorite show of that entire series. 

P.S. Proving that every TV series misfires at some point, this year’s new batch of Doctor Who has been a decidedly mixed bag. Is it a creative friction between Peter Capaldi (who is wonderful as The Doctor, don’t get me wrong) or has Moffat just gone off his rocker? For almost all of the first five episodes Moffat has been trying to turn it into The Clara Show… which pisses me off to no end. The Companion is important, but The Companion is not the star of the show. Last week’s entry, “Time Heist,” finally nudged the thing back in the right direction. We’ll see where it goes from here. I can’t just give up on it yet — Capaldi is too good, and one hopes that he will finally be allowed to star in the show that bear’s his character’s name…

Onward…

— Freder.
www.ducksoup.me
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