My Mind and My Bedroom

Among the things I clipped from early 1970s magazines was this jewel:

Surely it was part of a bigger ad, but I couldn't tell you what that might have been.

As a teen, I was allowed to do several wacky things in my bedroom.  Posters were all over the walls, of course.  I also strung speaker wires along the wall-ceiling line and hung little speakers liberated from transistor radios in the corners of the room, connected to my stereo.  This was along with the two regular speakers.  My idea was before its time:  surround sound!

I also had this gem of a vinyl sign taped to the outside of my bedroom door.

The "teacher" and "stupid" were rub-off words, probably from some MAD magazine insert.  Likewise the grinning goofus along the right-side white border.

Any good Bartian could tell you about the neon yellow-green sticker at the bottom.  It was a handy-dandy public-service sticker provided by one of our local funeral homes.  The sticker was intended to be mounted on the backside of your phone handset.

Remember them?

Well, friends, come back next Monday.  Yes, on February 4th you'll get a special Valentine's gift of love from moi.

Super Clothes #6

According to its label, this Underoos undertop is size 7-10.

I only know that it was a perfect fit (and a preferred article of clothing) for a three-year-old at our place.

More Super Clothes are coming in forthcoming months.

See you on Monday.
 

MA-135 - One Word 80s

In my vast and purely subjective survey of pop music from the 1980s, one clump of songs leapt out at me for a simple reason:

They all have one-word titles!

01 - People - F-Systems - 1980   (3:40)

02 - Freak - Bruce Foxton - 1983   (3:23)

03 - Dance - Odd Stories - 1981   (2:22)

04 - Aggression - Secret Life - 1985   (2:48)

05 - Downstream - The Rainmakers - 1986   (3:31)

06 - Observer - The Stripes - 1980   (2:33)

07 - Vanity - Trial Offer - 1981   (2:49)

08 - Bug - Cleavers - 1980   (2:22)

09 - Mundane - The White Liberals - 1985   (3:26)

10 - Television - The Modes - 1985   (3:55)

11 - Now! - Cement Trampoline - 1989   (3:25)

12 - Amnesia - Fingerprintz - 1980   (2:44)

13 - Secrets - The Staff - 1981   (2:31)

14 - Girls - The Orchids - 1980   (3:28)

15 - Breakout - Drinking Electricity - 1982   (3:25)

16 - Radio - The Lookalikes - 1980   (3:05)

17 - Carefully - Krisma - 1983   (4:37)

18 - Sanctuary - New Musik - 1980   (4:15)

19 - Cameras - Motifs - 1982   (3:54)

20 - Voices - 17 Pygmies - 1986   (3:06)

21 - Channels - I Spy - 1982   (2:21)

22 - Intimacy - Linn Vann Hek - 1982   (4:01)

23 - Intercontinental - Afraid of Mice - 1981   (2:54)

24 - Jungle - Significant ZerØs - 1981   (3:13)

The background Wall of Words is from the October 13, 1988 Bush-Dukakis debate.

The background text for the disc art is from a Gorbachev speech on December 7, 1988.

https://www.filefactory.com/file/2yoe836ojhxs/MA-135.rar

Those of you familiar with the 1982 film Megaforce and its slogan will find something familiar here too.

See you on Thursday, fellow mavens!
 

Celebrating the Big Show: Haunts of Showbiz

Haunts of Showbiz

          Horror and show business are often intertwined by devilishly inventive creators . . .

           The Phantom of the Opera, familiar in novel and film form, concerns a cast-off fellow named Erik.  After a stint with gypsies in their freak show, Erik moves into the catacombs below the Paris Opera and begins a reign of terror as he searches for the owner of the perfect female voice.

          “Return to the Sabbath,” by horrormeister Robert Bloch, first appeared in 1938.  In this creepy little tale, a film producer tracks down the star of a disturbingly realistic horror film and signs the fellow as his next acting discovery.  Trouble ensues as we discover that the devil worshippers in the original film are real, and want their revenge.  

          The story was adapted in 1964 as “The Sign of Satan” for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, starring Christopher Lee as the horror actor whose death’s-head role becomes all too true.

          Fritz Leiber’s 1965 story “Four Ghosts in Hamlet,” first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, concerns a traveling company that accrues an extra ghost in the cast while performing Shakespeare, due to some too-successful Ouija board sessions.

           While the trail of deaths that followed Karidian’s Shakespeare Troupe in Star Trek’s 1966 “The Conscience of the King” were decidedly non-supernatural, the uncertainty and suspense conjured by Barry Trivers’s story make for a fun and unsettling hour of sci-fi TV.

          The 1980 horror film Fade to Black features a psychotic movie buff who is spurned by a Marilyn Monroe lookalike.  He decides to take revenge on his boss and other enemies, dressed as early movie stars—Karloff’s mummy, Cagney’s Cody Jarrett, and Lugosi’s Dracula, among others.

           Perhaps the ne plus ultra of showbiz horror is Bradford Tatum’s 2016 novel Only the Dead Know Burbank.  It tells the story of Maddy Ulm, an adolescent German girl whose death in the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic is only the beginning of horrors.  She rises, undead, in a Berlin ravaged by WWI.  After joining a German film company, she singlehandedly creates the templates of film horror as she journeys to Hollywood and Universal Studios.  She cuts the final version of Chaney’s Phantom; her traveling partner, a wounded WWI soldier, inspires Jack Pierce’s design for the Frankenstein Monster.  Maddy also inspires the writer of The Wolf Man, and in other unbelievable ways lays the foundation for the horror-media industry.

Perhaps now, through your knowledge, some of these ghosts have been laid …

  

From the 1970s: Oil Transforms Bartlesville!

In my attic I came across a box containing this Public Service Ad about my hometown, Bartlesville, OK.

That oil (funneled through Phillips 66) fed, clothed, and raised a few tens of thousands of folks in B'ville.

I remember hearing rich folks say, "Fill 'er up with Flite Fuel!"  Of course, we just got regular gas.

See you once more on Thursday, fellow seekers of truth.