Fission for Sci-Fi

Here's a re-post of two compilations.

In the Olden Days of the late 1970s, I used to hold the microphone for my "cassette-corder" up to the three-inch TV speaker to tape TV shows, including their themes.  This started me on my quest to collect my favorite SF/F movie and TV themes.

Most of these tracks are from CD or internet, but a very few are still edits from TV sources.  I've re-done this compilation because last week I came across ten or so cassettes on a shelf in the Comics Closet in the Fortress of Markitude, and listened to them.  One tape had a dub of Track 2 my Star Trek TV theme edit, that didn't have the in-and-out, swishing/phasing noise that had been on WHAT I THOUGHT was my best copy.

So here it is again.  There are notes as to sources included.  While all the elements from Track 2 were indeed dubbed from a TV screen, I still think I did a pretty good job patching this thing together.  Especially since my editing was from one cassette deck to another, using the PAUSE keys of a JC Penney cassette deck much like this one:

Tracks:

01. Star Wars Suite - John Williams (12:32)

02. Star Trek TV (edit) - Alexander Courage (1:33)

03. Twilight Zone The Movie Overture - Marius Constant & Jerry Goldsmith (5:55)

04. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - Anything Goes - Cole Porter & John Williams (2:51)

05. Star Trek The Motion Picture (edit) - Jerry Goldsmith (3:27)

06. Doctor Who (1980-1985) - Ron Grainer (2:43)

07. The Prisoner - Ron Grainer (4:13)

08. The Wild, Wild West (2nd Season edit) - Richard Markowitz (1:39)

09. The Martian Chronicles - Stanley Myers (2:04)

10. Tales of the Gold Monkey (edit - Mike Post & Pete Carpenter (1:18)

11. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (edit) - Stu Phillips (1:12)

12. Star Trek II and III Suite - James Horner (15:56)

13. Scarecrow & Mrs King - Arthur B Rubinstein (1:13)

14. Alien End Titles - Howard Hanson (2:51)

15. Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. - Jerry Goldsmith & Gerald Fried (1:19)

16. Battlestar Galactica - Stu Phillips - Eric Kunzel & Cincinnati Pops (3:31)

17. The Greatest American Hero - Mike Post & Stephen Geyer (1:47)

18. The Day the Earth Stood Still - Bernard Herrmann (1:48)

19. Themes from ET - John Williams & Walter Murphy (3:47)

As music fans know, the end credits sequence for 1979's Alien was an excerpt from Howard Hanson's Symphony 2, "Romantic."  I was thrilled to get a copy of the actual recording/performance of this work that was used in the film -- that's Track 14.

Let me know if you like it, and if you appreciate the old low-rent sound editing, smile with indulgence and let me know.

MA-06 - Science-Fiction and Fantasy Music  NEW 2021 LINK

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And here's another obsessive collection of songs for and against the Nuclear Age:

1   Jesus Is the First Line of Defense      Pilgrim Travellers   1951

2 Atomic Kisses      Earney Vandagriff 1955

3   Hydrogen Bomb      The Laurels      1961

4 The War Drags On Mick Softley 1965

5 Atom and Evil General Electric 1966

6 Please Don't Drop That H-Bomb on Me Country Joe & The Fish 1967

7 Wooden Ships Jefferson Airplane 1969

8 Political Science Randy Newman 1972

9 Nuclear Babies Oingo Boingo 1980

10 Let's All Make a Bomb Heaven 17 1981

11 Run Like a Villain Iggy Pop 1982

12 World Suicide Defuser   1983

13 Uranium Rock The Cramps    1983

14 Surfin' USSR Ray Stevens    1988

15 The Bomb Lifesavers Underground 1992

16 Atomic Power Uncle Tupelo 1994

17 The Bomb Inside the Bomb We Are Scientists 2002

18 Nuclear Blues Frances Plante-Scott 2004

19 Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.1954 Ted Leo and the Pharmacists    2007

20Atomic Bomb Brian Butler    2008

21 Atom and Evil Heaven and Hell 2009

22Atom Bomb Blues The Naptown Jug Busters 2009

MA-18 - Goin' Fission!: Pop & Rock with a Long Half-Life  NEW 2021 LINK

See you Monday!

 

T S Eliot’s Easter Eggs in the Crime Novel Over Tumbled Graves

Jess Walter’s 2001 novel Over Tumbled Graves describes the attempts of police detectives in Spokane, WA to track down and catch the perpetrator of what seems to be a set of serial murders.

            The main protagonists are Alan Dupree and Caroline Mabry, and they’re only a couple of the law enforcement people who become involved in the investigations.  Many personal dramas and traumas are part of the character’s lives.  It’s an interesting, moving, and absorbing story of fallible people who try to do the right thing.

            These notes apply to the 2001 trade paperback edition by ReganBooks.  Page number references, therefore, are to this printing.

            When I came across the book in the library stacks, the title prompted me to pull the book out and give it a deeper consideration.  It was only when I got home and settled in to begin reading that I read the epigraph and entered a new mental realm of expectation.

            

            The epigraph is from T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, the iconic 1922 “postmodern” reflection on the emptiness of modern society, the failure of human dreams, and the desolation of selling yourself cheaply, viewed through a prism that contains facets of then-popular culture, post-WWI ennui, and Arthurian Legend. The novel’s epigraph reads,

          “In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

          “Over the tumbled graves.”

These lines are from the poem’s last section.  The graves mentioned in these lines are outside the Grail Chapel, which itself is empty and impotent.

            The novel’s narrative is divided into five parts, with the same titles that Eliot used for his poem:

1. The Burial of the Dead

2. A Game of Chess

3. The Fire Sermon

4. Death by Water

5. What the Thunder Said

            It’s up to you, the reader, to decide how well these names apply the the parts of the story contained in each section.

            When I noticed the name given to the book’s Part I, in light of the epigraph, I kept reading with pen and paper nearby and an eye/ear to what might prove to be Eliotian cadences.  These fragments I have shored against my ruins, as somebody once said.

            The investigation is sparked by the discovery of a girl’s mutilated body.  She’s discovered during the search for a drowned small-time drug dealer.  As more bodies are found, it appears that prostitutes who frequent a certain run-down district are the casualties.  One of the girls who may or may not be missing is nicknamed Pills.  This name, of course, reminded me  of the lines in Part II of The Waste Land in which one of the unnamed characters talks about taking an abortifacient:  “It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.”

            The first sentence of Part II of the novel echoes the first line of Part II of the poem.

·         Eliot: “The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne”

·         Walter: “The chair she sat in was a throne of leather and dark-stained oak ….”

            One of the locales that Dupree and Mabry investigate is an unnamed bar where their presence disturbs the regulars and the bartender, who quotes a (to-me) familiar line from the end of Part II of the poem, “Hurry up please, it’s time.”  And, sure enough, when the patrons are named, they are Bill, May, and Lou, just as in the poem:   “Goonight Bill.  Goonight Lou.  Goonight May.  Goonight. Ta ta.  Goonight.”

            The Spokane River, with its eddying pools of trash (page 151) is not dissimilar to Eliot’s descriptions of the Thames “sweating oil and tar.”

            In chapter 30, the criminal profiler Blanton states that “These bodies are his tools, his chess pieces” (page 191).  This of course is reminiscent of lines 137-138 of the poem, “And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.”  Eliot’s characters, though world-weary, aren’t expecting that knock to bring news of another prostitute murder, as happens in the novel.

            About the only thing about this novel which disappointed me is that the Eliot/Waste Land references peter out over the rest of the novel.  Other than continuing to use Eliot’s poem-division titles for the rest of the sections of the book, this poetry-fiend couldn’t detect more “Eliot Easter Eggs.”  I was expecting the final confrontations between good and evil to take place outdoors, interrupted by “a damp gust, bringing rain.”

            Or at least a reference to thunder, or to peace (the poem’s conclusion).

            Instead, I was left with a sense of unfulfilled possibilities, kind of like the disappointment seen in this angel’s eyes as he looks at Gawain before the ruined Chapel.

 

            So, as a crime/detection novel, Over Tumbled Graves is a fine example of story, construction, and heroes deserving compassion.  As material for an English paper, it sadly tapers off, with me wondering why the author didn’t persevere to the end.