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[school-discuss] etc... june 3rd-9th broadcast



hello,

the program is a nice mix of new music, books and live readings.

Peter Pan (they reach the island in this episode) - computer synth reading.
Henry Butler - "The Game has just Begun" NEWLY RELEASED.

-----> look for Henry's show on these broadcasts in July.

The Dain Curse - live reading.

Behold, Eck!
An Outer Limits Episode that owes everything to FLATLAND,
the first science fiction novel.
Atlantis - computer synth reading.

mike eschman, etc...
"Not just an afterthought ...
http://www.engima.com 
BEHOLD, ECK!

Peter Lind Hayes, Joan Freeman, Parley Baer, Douglas Henderson, Sammy Reese, Marcel Hebert, Paul Sorensen.

An optical expert develops some glasses which allow him to see aliens.

QUICK SCAN...
This is a pro-glasses episode, in which a spectacles wearing optician makes some special lenses, in order than an alien can see in our dimension. Peter Lind Hayes is wry and entertaining as Dr. Stone, the optician. The FX of Eck, the alien, are pretty good.

SYNOPSIS...
An optician finds his store wrecked. Later, an odd, fire crystalline creature shows up.

Glasses the optician develops allow people to see the "monsters". Others can not see the aliens.

The optician develops a special lens which will allow the alien to see in our dimension. The alien finds his escape route and exits, first returning the special lens to the optician.

Director Byron Haskin's BEHOLD ECK! is one of the better, later "Outer Limits" episodes.

Peter Lind Hayes, as "Dr. Stone", is a pretty cool customer. Early on, Hayes tours the ruins of his optical center. "It's interesting. Very interesting," he murmurs, like an emotionless Vulcan.

Joan Freeman, as Stone's Associate "Elizabeth Dunn", offers fine support. She radiates class, and a certain sense of aristocracy, though not snobbishness.

The dialogue in the film, (Teleplay by John Mantley; Story by William R. Cox), is flip, almost camp. When the cops ask Dr. Stone who would have a reason to smash his optical center, Stone quips, "Probably someone who just doesn't like spectacles."

BEHOLD ECK! appeared rather late into "The Outer Limits" run. At a time when many episodes were either great, ("Demon with a Glass Hand", "The Inheritors"), or misfires ("Cry of Silence", "The Brain of Colonel Barham"), BEHOLD ECK! scores a double, a solid "B" for you non-sports fans out there.

Eck, a twirling, burning crystalline-like alien, is done via decent FX. The 'Creature' was designed and photographed by Project Unlimited, Inc. The effective Optical Effects are courtesy of Butler-Glouner, Inc.

The episode's music, by Harry Lubin, is appropriately mysterioso. It's also a nice change of pace from Dominick Frontiere's usual, by-the numbers, spook score.

BEHOLD ECK! should be fairly watchable for most Sci-Fi fans. Those viewers who wear glasses will especially dig this episode. BEHOLD ECK! is definitely well worth beholding!


Born in New Orleans, pianist/composer Henry Butler started singing at age seven in the boys' glee club at Louisiana School for the Blind. Continuing his studies in classical piano and voice, Butler attended Southern University in Baton Rouge and completed his master's degree at Michigan State University.

From 1980 to 1987 he lived and performed in Los Angeles, where he recorded two albums for the MCA/Impulse label while working in radio and as a music consultant for Motown and the Stevie Wonder organization.

He furthered his education by studying with musicians Roland Hanna, George Duke, Cannonball Adderley and Harold Mabern. He spent three years living and performing in New York City before accepting an Associate Professor of Music position at Eastern Illinois University. In 1996 he returned to his home town, where he now concentrates on his composing and performing career.


Butler's musical influences range from German lieder and Schubert (whose chromatic style Butler says has been highly influential on his own) to his New Orleans predecessors Professor Longhair and James T. Booker.

Jazz Times

"Henry Butler's name is not a household word, but over the last decade he has established hirnself as the finest all-around pianist in New Orleans, a city known for its piano masters. Butler is equally at home in jazz, blues, or r&b, and has toured with the Verve Big Band as well as being an acclaimed club performer in his own right............ "

Jazz Times, Review of Henry's "For All Seasons"

Reviewer:   Paul Dana (see more about me)  from San Francisco, CA USA
Of all the protagonists Dashiell Hammett created -- Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, Ned Beaumont -- the Continental Op, for my taste, is the most enduring and compelling. Professedly amoral, "only a hired hand with a hired hand's interest in your troubles," this 'middle-aged fatman' demands that you take him at face value . . . and yet Hammett's genius is such that you're pulled to look beyond that self-description, to look under the "calluses on the calluses" on his soul.

The Op beat, bludgeoned and shot his way through countless short stories, several of which Hammett later "cannibalized" (to use Raymond Chandler's term for a process he himself would employ) into two novels, one of which is "The Dain Curse," originally serialized in Black Mask magazine before its book publication.

Melodramatic in tone, ranging from San Francisco's Pacific Heights to the semi-fictional town of Quesada (an interesting blend of Monterey and Half Moon Bay, in actuality), the novel follows the Continental Op as he solves several seemingly disparate mysteries before he realizes that those "solutions" are bogus and that he can only get to the true bottom of matters and achieve a genuine resolution by "lifting" the "curse" which 20-year old Gabrielle Leggett is convinced dooms her.

She has a drug habit. Through a mixture of cajolery and bullying, the Op sets out to cure her. And Hammett's true genius begins to show itself:

Throughout the first half of the novel, Gabrielle is, frankly, insipid and easily dismissed. Yet once the Op begins to focus on her as the key to everything else, she emerges as a sympathetic and compelling individual, and this has everything to do with the question of motive: Is the Op simply helping her as the means to an end (i.e., his refusal to be manipulated into a false resolution), is he motivated rather by a refusal to allow her to be victimized any further, or . . . are his feelings not quite so impersonal as he claims? Tantalizingly, his statements to her and his subsequent comments at the novel's end are contradictory and -- in the latter case, at least to this writer's sensibilities -- not altogether convincing. Which, I'm completely convinced, are exactly as Hammett intended. Each reader is called upon to reach his or her own conclusion.

Suffice to say, without spoiling anything here, that justice is ultimately done (and how!) and the Continental Op continues on in his -- supposedly -- cold-blooded way. A "sleuth" or "manhunter," to use his terms. A "thieftaker," to use the 18th century British expression.

And yet, ever so much more. Whether he chooses to admit it or not. Ever so much more.