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Author: Thomas Parker

Third Time’s the Charm: Avram Davidson’s The Enemy of My Enemy

Third Time’s the Charm: Avram Davidson’s The Enemy of My Enemy

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We all have our favorite obscure or neglected authors, writers we get touchy about and on whose behalf we’re instantly ready to jump on top of a table, ball up our fists and yell at the top of our voices, “HEY!! Don’t forget THIS GUY!!!”

For me, Avram Davidson is at the top of that list. I’ll knock over the Parcheesi board for him any day of the week.

As is often the case with such semi-forgotten writers, he wasn’t always obscure or neglected; though never a behemoth like Heinlein, Clarke, or Bradbury, during the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s Davidson was quite well-known. He had three World Fantasy Awards to his credit, won a 1958 Hugo Award for his delightfully paranoid short story “Or All the Seas with Oysters” (read it and you’ll never turn your back on a closet full of coat hangers again) and was briefly the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Few people in the genre were more well-respected or personally beloved.

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Shouldn’t the Missing Be Missed?

Shouldn’t the Missing Be Missed?

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I’m a big fan of mystery stories, and I’ve read a lot of the genre’s major writers, from well-mannered Brits like Doyle, Christie, and Chesterton to hard-hearted Yanks like Hammet, Chandler, and McBain. A lot of their stories begin with a disappearance (even if they end with a corpse), and though in fiction the Great Detective always solves the case, in real life many disappearances remain unsolved, which makes them the most baffling mysteries of all. That may be why people still debate the fate of Judge Crater, search remote islands for a trace of Amelia Earhart, and argue over whether the New York Giants snap the ball over the remains of Jimmy Hoffa.

I don’t spend much time worrying about those folks — what really bothers me are the people who disappear on the internet, without Hercule Poirot or Philip Marlowe ever so much as lifting a finger to find them.

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Movie of the Week Madness: The Horror at 37,000 Feet

Movie of the Week Madness: The Horror at 37,000 Feet

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I’m sure you’ll agree that William Shatner is a man apart. Still going strong at ninety-four, he appears to maintain an admirable sense of humor about himself and the ups and downs of his long career, and he seems to have come to comfortable terms with Captain James Tiberius Kirk and Sergeant T.J. Hooker, and also with his appearances on Dr. Kildare, The Twilight Zone and scads of other television shows, which, considering the highly variable quality of the medium, was undoubtedly a wise decision.

Never having met the man, this is just a guess, but I think there might be an exception to his amiable acceptance of his service record; I suspect that there’s one of his television assignments, the mention of which might well provoke a lapse into sullen silence or prompt an eruption of foul-mouthed fury: the made-for-TV movie The Horror at 37,000 Feet.

I’ve often sung the praises of the iconic ABC Movie of the Week, but old-school network television being imitative if nothing else, CBS and NBC also bombarded a supine 1970’s public with their own original TV films. As with ABC, all the usual genres were on display, and the shows ranged from the socially serious to the unashamedly schlocky; the quality level veered as wildly as a drunk trying to walk a straight line on an episode of Adam-12, and most of these films were as disposable as what is euphemistically called “bathroom tissue.”

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Heroes and Humanity: Jack Kirby at the Skirball Center

Heroes and Humanity: Jack Kirby at the Skirball Center

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Last Friday, as an early Father’s Day gift, my wife arranged for us to spend the afternoon at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, which is hosting a wonderful new exhibition dedicated to the memory and achievement of a great American artist. Titled Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity and running until March 1, 2026, the show is a must-see for any admirer of the King of Comics.

Jack Kirby is arguably the most influential person in the history of mainstream American comic books; his work, more than that of any other artist or writer, defined the visual grammar of the superhero. Along with his partner Joe Simon, he created Captain America in the 1940’s, soldiered through the postwar superhero slump of the 1950’s doing work in all genres — science fiction, war, horror, western, and romance (it’s an often forgotten fact that Simon and two-fisted Jack Kirby created the romance comic book) until, in the 1960’s, when DC showed that there was a reawakening market for costumed heroes, he teamed up with Stan Lee to create the “Marvel Universe”, though they didn’t know that’s what they were doing when they did it.

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A Hand-Crafted World: Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction

A Hand-Crafted World: Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction

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Is there anything more dispiriting than the ceaseless quest for novelty, especially when it seems bound to end in disappointment? It’s something I feel just about every time I turn on the TV. We’ve never had so many viewing choices, but so often everything feels reheated, recycled; we’ve seen it all before. The genuinely different is so rare that when you do see it, you know it — and you never forget it.

Sometime in the 70’s I saw an old black-and-white movie on television; it was called The Fabulous World of Jules Verne and it was the most extraordinary-looking thing I had ever seen. Guess what? I never forgot it.

A few years later I saw a movie on the late-night tube about the world’s greatest liar, Baron Munchausen. This time I couldn’t say that I had never seen anything like it because there was one thing that it reminded me of — The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. It was only years later that I learned that both films were the work of the Czechoslovakian director, Karel Zeman.

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The Old-Fashioned Way: Tove Jansson’s Hobbit Illustrations

The Old-Fashioned Way: Tove Jansson’s Hobbit Illustrations

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Okay — close your eyes and visualize Middle-earth. I can’t be certain what you’re seeing behind your eyelids, but I think I have a good chance of guessing; five will get you ten that whatever you’re conjuring bears a strong resemblance to the Alan Lee Lord of the Rings book illustrations and to Tolkien’s world as envisioned in Peter Jackson’s films (on which Lee and John Howe did much of the production design).

The austere, rather chilly (once you’re out of the Shire, anyway) Lee/Howe template has become the default picture of Middle-earth for many — if not most — people, but there are other ways to view Tolkien’s realms and their inhabitants. I have already sworn my fealty to the first such visualization that I ever encountered: the beautiful Tim Kirk paintings that were featured in the 1975 Tolkien Calendar.

I am also partial to another version that’s not nearly well enough known, the gorgeous illustrations done by Michael Kaluta for the 1994 Tolkien Calendar. (Kaluta is probably best known for his comic book work, especially on the 1970’s Shadow for DC.)

One thing that makes both Kirk’s and Kaluta’s art so attractive to me is that its depiction of Middle-earth is just different from the one that has become the current standard. (Kaluta’s work is especially striking because it is so extravagantly colorful compared to Lee’s and Howe’s bleached-out work.)

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The Lost World

The Lost World

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You may have heard about the recent statements made by Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, a man who combines all the best qualities of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and Alaric the Goth in one natty package. As reported by Variety on April 28th, the streaming mogul declared that the precipitous decline in in-person movie attendance which began several years ago and has reached near-catastrophic proportions in the years following COVID is easily understandable; indeed, it communicates a clear message:

What does that say? What is the consumer trying to tell us? That they’d like to watch movies at home, thank you. The studios and the theaters are duking it out over trying to preserve this 45-day window that is completely out of step with the consumer experience of just loving a movie.

Relegating the theater experience that has defined the industry (to say nothing of wider American culture) for the past nine decades to the dustbin of history, Sarandos shined a dazzling light on our murky cultural landscape:

Folks grew up thinking, I want to make movies on a gigantic screen and have strangers watch them and to have them play in the theater for two months and people cry and sold-out shows… It’s an outdated concept.

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Writ in Water: V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Writ in Water: V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

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How many times have you heard (or even repeated) the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for?” Of course it’s a cliché, a commonplace beloved of parents and primary school teachers the world over, but such chestnuts sometimes actually contain the distilled wisdom of the human race, and you ignore them at your peril, as is demonstrated (or not, maybe) in Victoria Elizabeth Schwab’s 2020 dark fantasy, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. It’s a spirited, stimulating read that gives you something to think about.

The story begins in a small French Village, Villon-sur-Sarthe, on a summer evening in 1714. A young woman named Addie LaRue is “running for her life.” Her family has affianced her to an inoffensive but crushingly dull young man. Addie, however, doesn’t want her life to be yet one more colorless copy of the bland existence that her mother (and her mother before her, and her mother before her, and her mother before her…) has led.

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Life Lessons from David Cronenberg

Life Lessons from David Cronenberg

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Let me begin with two assertions, each of which is, in the immortal words of Vincent Vega, “a bold statement.” First: David Cronenberg is one of our greatest directors, and there is nothing he has done that isn’t worth seeing. Second: I am the dumbest, most suicidally foolhardy person you will ever meet. The first statement is arguable, ultimately a matter of opinion, but the second is not, because I can prove it. In fact, I can use the first proposition to establish the validity of the second one.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past fifty years, David Cronenberg is the Mutant King of body horror; in stomach-churning, Manson Family date movies like Rabid (an extremely icky form of vampirism), The Brood (nasty little “rage monsters” popping right out of poor Samantha Eggar), Scanners (you want exploding heads — you’ve got exploding heads), and Videodrome (I… I can’t even talk about it, and to this day, neither can James Woods) he set new standards in shockingly gross special effects and in the number of times he forced audience members to barf in their popcorn buckets or make panicked rushes to the restroom.

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Odd Old Indie: Night Tide

Odd Old Indie: Night Tide

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Growing up in Southern California in the 60’s and 70’s was a movie lover’s dream. Late night and weekend television in those days was almost completely given over to old movies, especially on the Los Angeles independent channels: KTLA channel 5, KHJ channel 9, KTTV channel 11, and KCOP channel 13.

The independent stations were especially prone to showing independent movies, small films that hadn’t cost much and hadn’t made much and could be acquired cheaply to occupy all the time that had to be filled until sign-off and the test pattern. Many of these movies were from the House of Corman (The Little Shop of Horrors, The Masque of the Red Death, Dementia 13), but most weren’t, and any night of the week you could watch a pulse-pounder like The Flesh Eaters, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, or Beast of Blood (once you had advanced — or descended — to Filipino horror movies you could consider yourself a schlock PHD.)

Most of these films were awful, of course (that’s how you wound up on channel 13 at two in the morning), but sometimes a (relative) diamond could be found among the ashes. One movie that I discovered during those years was Night Tide, an odd little indie that aimed a bit higher than the usual cheapie thriller. I was always happy when it popped up in the week’s TV Guide listings.

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