Robert Smith's Favorite Songs from the 1980s

Below is a solid list from Robert Smith of the songs that he most admires from the 1980s (excluding his own, of course). New Order's “Everything’s Gone Green” is my favorite along with “Persephone” and “Gigantic.” All three are unrelenting driving forces of the New Wave genre and not to be missed.

ABC, “Look of Love”
The Associates, “Tell Me It’s Easter on Friday”
David Bowie, “Let’s Dance”
Kate Bush, “Cloudbursting”
Cocteau Twins, “Persephone”
Christina, “Things Fall Apart”
D.A.F., “Sex Unter Wasser”
Depeche Mode, “Personal Jesus”
Dinosaur Jr, “Freak Scene”
Echo and the Bunnymen, “Killing Moon”
The Fun Boy Three with Bananarama, “It Ain’t What You Do…”
Peter Gabriel, “Red Rain”
Human League, “Human”
The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Some Candy Talking”
Joy Division, “The Eternal”
Chaka Khan, “I Feel For You”
Madness, “Return of the Lost Palmas Seven”
My Bloody Valentine, “Lose My Breath”
Mel & Kim, “Respectable”
New Order, “Everything’s Gone Green”
Yoko Ono, “Walking On Thin Ice”
Pixies, “Gigantic”
The Pretenders, “Don’t Get Me Wrong”
Prince, “Starfish & Coffee”
Psychedelic Furs, “Heaven”
Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Dear Prudence”
Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”
The Sugarcubes, “Birthday”
Suzanne Vega, “Small Blue Thing”
Tom Waits, “In the Neighborhood”

What, no Smiths or Morrissey on the list? :-)

#RobertSmithFavoriteSongs #Best80sNewWave

Review of The Postman Only Rings Twice by James Cain

Review of The Postman Only Rings Twice by James Cain

Frank Chambers is a thug and a criminal who has been through a string of Southern California jail cells. In between prison visits he tries to get a little cash by working odd jobs such as picking crops or busing tables. When he jumps off the back of a truck and comes across the diner/gas station run by Nick Papadakis and his beautiful young wife Cora, he finagles a low-paying job without many questions asked. Frank and Cora plot and sulk and use terms like “flimflam” and other great words from the 1930s to form the seduction/want, crime, payback trifecta of crime noir novels.

That kicks off James Cain’s stripped-down, gritty, sexy crime romp he titled The Postman Only Rings Twice and published in 1934. The kicker is that no postman makes an appearance in the novel. One can only surmise that the postman is a metaphor for the grim reaper. Cain admitted as much in his preface to Double Indemnity where his fellow screenwriter Vincent Lawrence told him the postman would also ring his doorbell twice. Cain adapted the phrase as being applicable to the end of his novel and went with the title.

The Postman Only Rings Twice didn’t invent the crime genre, but rather a sub-genre of it much like Edgar Allan Poe did with the first locked room murder crime story—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” almost 100 years earlier in 1841.

And what was Cain’s sub-genre exactly? It’s now termed Roman Noir or hardboiled crime and is defined, more than anything else, by the writing style employed. Cain uses a basic--almost sanitized--style of writing that is devoid of exposition and rarely provides the name of the character speaking. It makes one wonder if his editor gave him a strict word limit that forced him to go back and cut every superfluous word in the final edit. It is reminiscent of the way Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises in 1926 (his first novel and in the roman à clef style of real life story having a fictional façade), which Cain must have certainly read given its popularity. Cain’s stripped down writing, just like Hemingway’s, gives readers the feeling there is an iceberg of information floating under the surface of his criminal sea.

The Postman Only Rings Twice is an interesting tale and well worth your reading efforts. I give it an 8 out of 10.

#PostmanRingsTwice #JamesCainReview

"Tales from the Smith" Illustrated Books Series Launched by Butcher Billy

In a play on the popular TV horror show "Tales from the Crypt" that aired in the 1990s, Butcher Billy has combined his love for The Cure and Robert Smith with his talents as an illustrator to launch an illustrated books series. It employs creative use of Cure lyrics into the title. Check it out!

The cover above is The Cure's most claustrophobic song and could very well be the cover song for The Iron Shroud by William Mudford, the tightest science fiction story you will ever read.

#ButcherBilly #TalesfromtheSmith

First Trip to the Moon in a Science Fiction Short Story

With all the hubbub about Star Wars: The Force Awakens swirling in our cosmic movie atmosphere, I am reminded of the ever-present space alien that populate the screen. Before there were movies of this nature there were science fiction short stories.

Which one was the first to feature a lunar alien? What about a trip to the moon from earth?

That huge literary honor belongs to "A Visit to the Lunar Sphere" published in 1820, nearly 200 years ago today. The trip was by balloon, not rocket. By watching the The Force Awakens one can see just how far the genre has progressed in 200 years thanks in no small part to modern technology.

Did the first Lunarian in a sci-fi short story have a name? You bet--Zuloc. But who was the author? Well, the story was published anonymously, but in Mesaerion: The Best Science Fiction Short Stories 1800-1849 I ascribed the author to be none other than Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848).

#ScienceFictionShortStories #FirstLunarAlien

Did Edgar Allan Poe Write Short Stories?

The basic questioned posited as the title of this article may seem rudimentary to some, but to those new to Edgar Allan Poe it is not. The short (story) answer is that Edgar Allan Poe wrote many short stories. It's debatable which is his most popular, but surely these are in the Top Ten Poe short stories: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Gold-Bug," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Cask of Amontillado."

Below is a complete list of Poe's short stories:

"A Tale of Jerusalem" (1832)
"Bon-Bon" (1832)
"Loss of Breath" (1832)
"Metzengerstein" (1832)
"The Duc de L'Omelette" (1832)
"Four Beasts in One" (1833)
"MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833)
"The Assignation" (1834)
"Berenice" (1835)
"King Pest" (1835)
"Lionizing" (1835)
"Morella" (1835)
"Shadow" (1835)
"Mystification" (1837)
"A Predicament" (1838)
"How to Write a Blackwood Article" (1838)
"Ligeia" (1838)
"Silence - A Fable" (1838)
"The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839)
"The Devil in the Belfry" (1839)
"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839)
"The Man That Was Used Up" (1839)
"Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling" (1839)
"William Wilson" (1839)
"[The Bloodhounds]" (1840)
"The Business Man" (1840)
"The Man of the Crowd" (1840)
"A Descent into the Maelström" (1841)
"Eleonora" (1841)
"Never Bet the Devil Your Head" (1841)
"The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841)
"The Island of the Fay" (1841)
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
"Three Sundays in a Week" (1841)
"The Gold-Bug" (1842)
"The Masque of the Red Death" (1842)
"The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842)
"The Oval Portrait" (1842)
"The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842)
"A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1843)
"Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences" (1843)
"The Black Cat" (1843)
"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843)
"Mesmeric Revelation" (1844)
"Thou Art the Man" (1844)
"The Angel of the Odd" (1844)
"The Balloon-Hoax" (1844)
"The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." (1844)
"The Oblong Box" (1844)
"The Premature Burial" (1844)
"The Purloined Letter" (1844)
"The Spectacles" (1844)
"The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" (1844)
"Some Words with a Mummy" (1845)
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845)
"The Imp of the Perverse" (1845)
"The Magazine Prison House" (1845)
"The Power of Words" (1845)
"[The Rats of Park Theatre]" (1845)
"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" (1845)
"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)
"The Domain of Arnheim" (1846)
"The Sphinx" (1846)"Hop-Frog" (1849)
"Landor's Cottage" (1849)
"Mellonta Tauta" (1849)
"Von Kempelen and His Discovery" (1849)
"X-ing a Paragrab" (1849)

#PoeShortStories #EdgarAllanPoe

Review of The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Long before there were salt of the earth people getting instantly rich off the lottery only to curse the windfall they had received, there was a tiny little nugget of a novel called The Pearl. The novel was published by John Steinbeck in 1947. True originality in the novel is lacking because it is based on a folktale from Mexico.

The Pearl has been influential on popular singers. Below are a number of songs based on--or influenced by--The Pearl.

"Angry"                 Matchbox 20         Mad Season 2000
"Colored People"                 dc talk         Intermissions 2000
"Colors of the Wind"                 Vanessa Williams Pocahontas 1995
"Half-Breed"                 Cher                 If I Could Turn Back Time 1999
"How Can I Keep from Singing" Eva Cassidy         Eva by Heart 1998
"I am Woman"                 Helen Reddy         Helen Reddy's Greatest Hits 1987
"I Got a Name"                 Jim Croce Photographs and Memories 1985
"I Write the Songs"                 Barry Manilow Greatest Hits 1978
"The Pearl"                 Fleming and John
"Reach"                 Gloria Estefan         Destiny 1996
"Songs"                 Joan Armatrading What's Inside 1995
"Sunshine on My Shoulders"         John Denver         Behind the Music 2000
"To Have and Not to Hold"         Madonna         Ray of Light 1998
"The Pearl"                 Joshua Kadison Delilah Blue 1995
"Seek Up"                 Dave Matthews Live At Red Rocks 1995

Pros: If you want to read an artistically written book, bursting with fine prose, then is the novel for you. It is also on the shorter side and could be called a novella.

Cons: The characters of The Pearl are monotone and the dialog is lacking. In actuality, there is little dialog at all. I also found the plot rather simplistic and as mentioned above, lacking in true originality.

Rating: 6 out of 10 stars.

Tolstoy Footage on Film

Few photographs exist of Leo Tolstoy and even less moving pictures. The video below shows Tolstoy as he had gotten up in years.

Most of footage was shot after he had published his excellent Tolstoy short stories of love, war and as a guide to his beloved peasants. On his grave Tolstoy asked to die as a peasant. At this time of the year he makes think of a skinny Santa Claus.

Review of The Outsiders by S. E. Hinson

If you have yet to read The Outsiders by S. E. Hinson that was published in 1967, you may have seen the 1983 film direct by Francis Ford Coppola. It had a star-filled cast that included Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, and Matt Dillon.

This post, however, is about the excellent novel. It is set in Oklahoma and pits Greasers (boys from a blue collar families) against Socs (kids from white collar families). I admit that I was a little disappointed to learn that the novel centered around gang violence, for which I have no interest. But I stuck with the novel if for no other reason than the writing was top notch and the characters were believable and somehow real.

When I finished the novel, I realized that I really like it and now hold it in high regard. Mrs. Hinson has done a difficult trick for writer and that is to get someone (many tens of thousands of someones) to love her novel when they have little interest in the subject matter.

#TheOutsidersReview #SEHinson

Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe as Read by Jeff Buckley

Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe

One of my favorite Poe poems is "Ulalume" published in 1848. It is his only poem centered around October--a month Poe owns like no other. Read Edgar Allan Poe's annotated poems.

Check out this haunting reading by Jeff Buckley. It has a Jim Morrison feel.

Black Cat Song by Broadcast

Recently I posted Edgar Allan Poe's haunting short story "The Black Cat" along with a photo of the house in Philadelphia where he wrote it. One of the best songs ever written about the scary short story is:

Song: Black Cat
Band: Broadcast

I'm sure Poe would have loved this song. Check it out on SoundCloud!

#BroadcastBlackCat #BlackCat #EdgarAllanPoe