RED LIGHT BYTES: The Red Light Roundup (5-15-2024)
Classics, Deep Cuts & All-New Killers in Art & Entertainment...
I’ll let the podcast take the lead on saluting the late-great moviemaker Roger Corman, who we’ve officially lost at the grand old age of 98, because I'm gonna be blunt and admit we’re hitting the “I want off the ride, but I can’t” point of the offseason. Not out of creative burnout, but simply because there’s so much to do, and the time I have to get these newsletters assembled grows short. So instead of dispensing with the Wednesday post entirely, let’s give you a lightening-round of classics and indies worth checking out.
And a comparatively long album review, but that’ll be a one-time exception.
I’m probably gonna adopt this style of posting for the remainder of the offseason, so let’s get on with it and dig in.
SHORT FILM: Galaxia by Sabin Bălașa
One of these days I’ll make a full review/short documentary on this man’s peculiar work, but the upshot is this: Sabin Bălașa is a Romanian painter, muralist, and sculptor. His style is a self-described “cosmic romanticism” that can often be as fantastical and poetic as it is antiquated in its pseudo-hieroglyphic approach to human form.
From 1966 to 1979, the prolific artist produced nine paint-animated short films, a technique used most recently in the 2017 biographical drama Loving Vincent. I’ve watched all nine of his shorts, and I don’t think his unique, oddball blend of peculiar figures, dreamlike progression, and sumptuous landscapes and abstracted imagery comes together quite like the gorgeous Galaxia.
KICKSTARTER: SWORD & SCANDAL
There seems to be quite a bit of sword-and-sorcery love in the air. From Lyn Perry launching the Sword & Heroes E-Zine (don’t mind me, just jotting down another submission window!) to Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 of the original Marvel run of Conan the Barbarian due out later this year, it seems like the blades are drawn and the blood’s just begging to be spilled.
Joining this rising force is weird fiction maverick J. Manfred Weichsel with the promise of a new anthology that, as his body of work will attest, is sure to pull no punches. Marketed as an “NSFW heroic fantasy,” if you want to see the wonderful world of daring heroes and bizarre magic melded with the unvarnished extremity of classic Italian exploitation, consider backing Sword & Scandal for a bloody good time.
RADIO DRAMA: The Russia House (1994)
It was after discovering the streaming options for its 1990 film version that I decided to take the glasnost spy drama from genre veteran John le Carré for a spin. However, when informed that the role of jazz-loving, drunken publisher Barley Blair would be lent the sumptuous baritone of 4th Doctor Tom Baker, René Basilico’s 1994 dramatization for BBC Radio 4 had my full attention.
This is another “I’m not finished with it, but I love what I’m hearing,” but once you allow yourself into le Carré’s dry, honest world of stiff-upper-lips and situations made messy by people and their imperfections, you are enveloped and hooked for the ordeal’s duration, which, seeing as I’m about halfway through, will certainly grow more tangled as Baker’s Blair and Valentina Yakunina’s Katya soon find themselves more than just contacts in a game of world peace.
ALBUM: Invincible by Michael Jackson
One week it’s the Emperor, the next week it’s the King.
If this and my nod to the 1980 Jacksons album Triumph hasn’t tipped you off yet, I am indeed a fan of Michael Jackson. A most exclusive club as you can imagine! And I’ve chosen Invincible very specifically because never before have I seen an album that so beautifully captured the essence of a special period in time, but whose legacy ultimately serves as a parallel to that very time denied us.
Some of you may recall when white-walled spaceships, glassy black leather, and liquid chrome were all pop calling cards of what the new millennium could offer man after a century spent building up all sorts of ideas about the future. And some of you may also remember how one pivotal day in September of 2001 and a swift economic dive thereafter irreparably changed that view of the future.
Beginning its campaign on the eve of this change, and released in the seismic wake of the 9/11 tragedy was Michael Jackson’s Invincible.
The comeback that could’ve been was marked by a bleeding-edge production style and a heart firmly planted in honest soul-balladry and slamming hooks, Invincible wears MJ’s futurism on its sleeve. The striking white-and-gray headshot, accented by subtle pixel art, soon reveals New Jack Swing at a time when the genre shouldn’t have sounded as fresh as it does on tracks like “Unbreakable,” the rolling thunder of quiet storm deep cuts like “Butterflies” and “Break of Dawn” to the glitch-laden proto-dubstep of “Heartbreaker,” “2000 Watts,” and “Threatened.” Even with some classic Jacksonisms in tow, like obligatory message songs and the occasional lapse into diabetes-inducing balladry, this album could have set the standard for pop going forward. And then it just came down all around the guy.
Between his infamous 2005 trial, hounding by the press leading to many a PR nightmare, and his own record company more interested his stake in the company than their biggest star’s latest record, Invincible seemed a perfectly ironic title by the time of Jackson’s untimely death in 2009. But nothing pulls the whole affair into focus quite like the fact that the second of the 30th Anniversary shows in Madison Square Garden occurred on September 10th. It was after this concert series that the world tour for Invincible was to begin.
An album so preoccupied with the future, with a halcyon vision of it and armed with the technology to make it so, dashed in a few sour months which rolled into years of strife. And yet, Invincible earns its name on the back of its music alone, and perhaps when I can learn the secrets of parallel dimensions, I take a slip sideways through time, just to see the King reign once more.
Conclusion
I think doing things this way will be for the best for now. I get to not fret over this section, and you still get those quality recommendations, some of which may point to what’s influencing the series right now. As always: stay searching, stay jamming, and always dig where no one else will. Be seeing you, soldiers!
FUNDED ON KICKSTARTER WITH ONE WEEK LEFT!
Don’t miss out on the space-faring, cyberpunk excitement of JD Cowan’s STAR WANDERERS from Cirsova Publishing, with music by yours truly! Eight sensational adventures with two of the universe’s bravest agents of justice!
Thank you so much for sharing about Sword & Scandal!!!
Thanks for the HT. I thought I was a subscriber already. Lol sometimes Substack is just too dang complicated!