Eddie Mack Live at the Open Face Sandwich CLub

Eddie Mack 

Live at the Open Face Sandwich Club
Penthouse magazine ad, July 1975

Leafing through the pages of old copies of Penthouse magazine, I run across all sorts of odd pop culture ephemera. This includes a full-page advertisement in the July, 1975 issue for a record album by Eddie Mack.

The Open Face Sandwich Club was a lounge in California, someplace, and it was popular with Hollywood actors and other celebrities. The name apparently had 'wink-wink' smutty connotations in the 1960s Mad Men / bar culture. 

Eddie Mack was a veteran lounge singer when, in 1965, a performance of his at the Club was recorded and pressed into vinyl. The LP apparently only was available with membership in the Club, as advertised in the 1975 Penthouse.

Biographical information about Eddie Mack (not to be confused with the blues singer of the same name) is scant.  A post at Reddit states:

Eddie grew up to be a talented pianist, singer, and actor. He was married and divorced six times. (The beauty perched on the piano [of the LP] was married to him for a brief period – Eddie was old-fashioned and didn't believe in "shacking up.") In 1969 he was on stage in Toronto as a member of the touring company of There's a Girl in My Soup (starring Don Ameche) when his throat started hemorrhaging during a song. He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with throat cancer. Greasepaint was in his blood, though, so even though he couldn't speak while recuperating from surgery and radiation, he got a job leading the orchestra on a cruise ship and communicated with the musicians via gestures and a Magic Slate. By KARA KOVALCHIK 10/10/2011

The full album is available at YouTube. It's not bad stuff, but I get the sense it's best listened to by travelling back in time to 1969, and sitting in some dimly-lit lounge, with a scotch on the rocks and early-stage lung cancer....................

Book Review: Night and Demons

Book Review: 'Night and Demons' by David Drake

4 / 5 Stars

David Drake passed away at age 78 on December 10, 2023. He certainly was a familiar writer to many of us who enjoyed science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction during the era (1968 - 1988) covered by this blog. He played a major role in reviving the genre of military sci-fi after it had fallen into disfavor during the New Wave era. 

Save for Joe Haldeman and 'The Forever War' (1974), few works about war and combat in the sci-fi milieu, that were anything other than thinly coated diatribes against militarism, were published when I was a teenager. Indeed, the only anthologies to deal with the subject were the 1975 anthology 'Combat SF', edited by Gordon Dickson, and Haldeman's 1977 anthology 'Study War No More'. Drake's short story 'The Butcher's Bill' was one of the standout stories in 'Combat SF'. 

I've had a review of 'Night and Demons' banked away in my draft pages, and it seems condign to post it at this time.

‘Night and Demons’ is a thick chunk of a mass market paperback, at 768 pages (though the last 68 pages are a bibliography of David Drake’s published works). It was published by Baen Books in December, 2013 and features cover art by Alan Pollack. 

Multiple anthologies of Drake’s short fiction have been issued over the years, most notably ‘From the Heart of Darkness’ (1983) and ‘Balefires’ (2007), but ‘Night and Demons’ is the most comprehensive, as almost everything appearing in the earlier anthologies is accounted for in ‘Night and Demons’.

Each entry in ‘Night and Demons’ features an introductory remark by Drake in which he imparts a personal reminiscence of how the story was composed and its initial fate when submitted to the editorial world of fantasy / horror publishing in the 1970s and 1980s.

My capsule summaries of the stories in ‘Night and Demons’:

The Red Leer (1979): sometimes Indian burial mounds are better left alone. A decent 'monsters on the loose' tale.

A Land of Romance (2005): a humorous treatment of the mythic Storyland of childhood.

Smokie Joe (1977): the only horror story I am aware of that features a particularly unpleasant venereal disease as a major plot point. Is it Proto-Splatterpunk ? I'd like to think so !

Awakening (1975): short-short story about an elderly couple with an interest in the occult.

Denkirch (1967):  a deranged scientist investigates Cosmic Mysteries. There are consequences.

Dragon, The Book (1999): written as an entry in the Martin Greenberg and Andre Norton Catfantastic V anthology, this is the tale of the wizard Hardin and his cat companion. For reasons that are unclear, Drake smothers this story in pulp prose and a surfeit of adverbs, adjectives, similes, and metaphors. Maybe that's what's expected in contributions to a Catfantastic anthology ?

The False Prophet (novelette; 1989): this features Drake’s recurring character Vettius, the Roman soldier. Here, Vettius and his friends investigate a mysterious holy man who has enthralled Rome’s wealthiest and most influential citizens. The initial pages are filled with conversation and are quite boring, but the story closes with sufficient energy to justify the early investment. 

Black Iron (1975): Vettius and his friends hear the tale of a magic sword.

The Shortest Way (1974): Vettius and his friends decide to take a shortcut that the locals take care to avoid. An atmospheric tale, and one of the best entries in the collection.

Lord of the Depths (1971): Greek sailors come upon a deserted city, where lots of treasure is lying about. This may be too good to be true……..another of the better tales in the anthology.

The Land Toward Sunset (1995): Robert E. Howard’s characters Cormac Mac Art and Wulfhere the Skullsplitter find themselves cast away on an island ruled by wizards with ulterior motives. There is much sword-and-sorcery action. 

Children of the Forest (1976): who knew Bigfoot roamed German forests ?!

The Barrow Troll (1975): Ulf Womanslayer, a Viking warrior, gets wind of buried treasure and decides it should be his, even though it's guarded by a very nasty troll............

Than Curse the Darkness (1980): Lovecraftian hijinks in deepest, darkest Africa. The prose is painfully stilted; this is the first time I ever have encountered the simile '......like an ant run blown by carbon disulphide.'

The Song of the Bone (1973): in Viking Land, Gage the herdsman is an enigmatic figure.

The Master of Demons (1975):  a short-short story about a medieval mage who seeks to master Arcane Forces; this never is a good idea.

The Dancer in the Flames (1982): Lieutenant Schaydin is troubled by disturbing hallucinations.  

Codex (2003): first written in 1967, but not published until 2003 when it appeared in a chapbook, this is the tale of some University students who decide to translate a Medieval text from Latin into English. What they learn from the translation offers access to otherworldly wealth and power. 

Firefight (1976): U.S. soldiers fighting in Vietnam choose a bivouac location with a disturbing history.

Best of Luck (1978): Another story set in wartime Vietnam. Dog Company seems to be getting the worst of it in firefights.

Arclight (1973): In wartime Cambodia, an encounter with an ancient artifact leads to problems for an armored unit.

Something Had to Be Done (1975): a US Army team sets out to deliver bad news to a soldier's family. A much-anthologized horror story from early in Drake’s career, and one of his best.

The Waiting Bullet (1997): first composed in the early 70s, Drake later completed this story for inclusion in the final issue of Whispers magazine. It’s a story about a violent death in the piney woods of North Carolina. For reasons unclear to me, Drake uses the adverb (?) ‘shudderously’, which I cannot find in any online dictionary.  

The Elf House (2004): Cashel the barbarian comes to the aid of a servant girl who insists on venturing into dangerous places.

The Hunting Ground (1976): people are disappearing from an urban neighborhood in North Carolina. Lorne, a Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, decides to investigate. Another of the better stories in the anthology.

The Automatic Rifleman (1980): some anarchists are up to no good. 

Blood Debt (1976): overly purple prose weakens this story about Judson Rigsbee, who lives in the suburbs and practices black magic.

Men Like Us (1980): in post-apocalyptic America, not all settlements are particularly welcoming to strangers.

A Working Bibliography of David Drake's Writing, by Karen Zimmerman: a listing, current as of 2012, of all of Drake’s published stories, novelettes, books, and essays and nonfiction pieces.

Summing up, ‘Night and Demons’, like practically any anthology, has its share of worthy, and less worthy, content. There is enough of the former to justify giving the anthology a Four Star Score. Drake fans will of course want to have a copy in their possession. Those with a fondness for fantasy and horror literature of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s may find it appealing, as well. 

Book Review: The High Crusade

Book Review: 'The High Crusade' by Poul Anderson

3 / 5 Stars

'The High Crusade' first was published in 1960 in hardcover by Doubleday. That same year it was serialized in Astounding / Analog. It has been issued in mass-market paperback format since 1962. My copy of the novel was published by Berkley Books in March, 1978, with the cover artist uncredited.

The novel opens in 1345 in the English countryside. Sir Roger de Tourneville of Ansby has assembled his soldiers for participation in King Edward the Third's campaign in France. As the troops await orders and occupy themselves with drinking, wenching, and squabbling in Ansby's muddy streets, suddenly a spaceship descends from the sky. Blue-skinned, humanoid aliens - known as the Wersgorix -  step out of the airlock and immediately try to intimidate the assembled throng. This proves to be a mistake, as the English archers respond........and the aliens are cut down. 

In due course, assisted by the first-person narrator, Brother Parvus, Sir Roger takes possession of the craft, piles his soldiers, their wives, and livestock on board, and orders the alien pilot, Branithar, to fly all of them to France. This is to be the first step on Sir Roger's crusade to introduce the beneficence of English rule to those otherwise disinclined to accept it.

Although forced to operate the ship under duress, Branithar is not stupid, and he sets the autopilot for the star system ruled by the Wersgorix Federation. Once Sir Roger, Brother Parvus, and the noblemen of Castle Ansby realize what has taken place, it is too late to intervene and the party finds themselves set down on Tharixan, an Earth-like planet where the Wersgor hold the populace in thrall. 

The remainder of the novel relates the adventures of Sir Roger and his compatriots as they confront the Wersgor, who are dumbfounded that a tribe of medieval humans should have the audacity to defy the Wersgor's military capabilities. But as the aliens are to discover, beneath his primitive exterior, Sir Roger has a cunning and calculating mind, one that will serve him well in the conflict with the Wersgor forces on Tharixan. Well enough, to eventually mount a challenge to the Federation itself........

Poul Anderson was one of the more capable science fiction and fantasy authors of the postwar era. While Anderson wrote for a living and certainly was prolific, he was as good as, if not a better, prose writer than many of his contemporaries (such as Isaac Asimov, Murray Leinster, Clifford Simak, and Keith Laumer, among others) and 'The High Crusade' is a competent example of sci-fi on the cusp of the New Wave.  

In a novel that only is 167 pages in length, Anderson keeps his characterization concise, his dialogue believable, and the action flowing. The novel is in many ways a satirical / comedic portrayal of technologically superior aliens stymied by the craftiness of the enterprising Terrans, but it does have moments of pathos that keep it from getting overly glib.

The verdict ? 'The HIgh Crusade' retains its status as one of the better sci-fi novels of the early 1960s and while I wouldn't necessarily recommend searching it out, if you're in a secondhand book shop and see a copy, it's worth picking up.

Penthouse December 1981

Penthouse magazine

December, 1981

It's December, 1981, and the top single in the land is Olivia Newton-John's 'Physical'.

Let's all gather around the Christmas tree and open our presents.........including the December issue of Penthouse magazine !

We'll see advertisements for the must-have gift for the year: the Atari 'VCS' model gaming system ! (At my household, we didn't get an Atari, mainly because our TV was a modest little 17-inch black and white affair and, at $130, the Atari system was a little pricey).

Additional consumer electronics included a cutting-edge Sharp 'solar' calculator, and another 1980s must-have item, the Boombox.......especially one endorsed by Earth, Wind, and Fire, who happened to have the No. 3 single on the Billboard Hot 100: 'Let's Groove' !

For those of a more sensual bent, we had 'Denim', a macho men's fragrance, and 'Bodylicks' and the 'Original Mink Whip' ! Rowr, nasty !

One of the pictorials features the spectacular Gabrielle Sagan, who sports a vintage Louise Brooks hairstyle and a bronzed body that gleams in the sun.

Interestingly, Gabrielle since has become a Meme, at least, in the artwork of Linda Adair.........or perhaps it's a case of Synchronicity ?!

Champagne and Sunshine, by Linda Adair, 2022

The December issue has some funny cartoons that take advantage of the holiday theme.........

The subject of the Celebrity Interview is none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, looking for cinematic success with the forthcoming release in 1982 of the movie Conan the Barbarian.

The articles section has some interesting items. There is a piece on Jerry Falwell, who earlier that year had lost a lawsuit against Penthouse.

UK socialite and writer Anthony Haden-Guest pens an article about crime and passion in New York City. The article is an excerpt from his 1983 book Bad Dreams.

There's an examination of the phenomenon of motocross racing, a sport rising in popularity.

There's an ad / article for Omni magazine, which by the end of '81 was a major outlet for science fiction writers. But Penthouse itself continued to showcase science fiction, as Gardner Dozois got a story in the December issue:

Let's close the pages of the December issue with a look at another pictorial, this one featuring a man-woman couple and imaged with such the 'gauzy filter' look that it's an exemplar of the Penthouse approach to photography.

And so we say goodbye to December, 1981................Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everybody !

Night and the Enemy

Night and the Enemy

by Harlan Ellison and Ken Steacy

'Night and the Enemy' was a collection of comics, graphics, and illustrated text bundled into an 81-page graphic novel from independent comics publisher Comico, and released in November 1987. 

The stories in 'Night' were adapted from the so-called 'Earth-Kyba' stories Ellison published from 1956 to 1987.

The Comico edition of 'Night and the Enemy' is long out of print, so Ellison enthusiasts were pleased when, in 2015, a trade paperback reprint edition (85 pp.) was issued from Dover. The 2015 edition reprints the entirety of the 1987 volume, and includes some ancillary material in the form of an 'Afterward and Pictures' section.

Canadian artist Ken Steacy (b. 1955) teamed up with Dean Motter to produce the comic, and later graphic novel, of 'The Sacred and the Profane' in the mid-1980s, so he was familiar with the process of composing and rendering science fiction content.

The stories in 'Night and the Enemy' all display Steacy's distinctive art style, both in color, and in black-and-white. Rather than speech balloons, dialogue is presented in a minimalist manner, as typeface with tails to indicate who is speaking.

As I noted in my review of 'The Sacred and the Profane', Steacy is not a traditional comic book artist in the sense of using art that lends itself to dynamic action. The artwork in 'Night and the Enemy' has a static quality, even in scenes of action, and while this works well for some of the stories, it is less effective in others. But the reader is invited to view the book and make their own judgments.

As for Ellison's writing, the Earth-Kyba stories were intended, in that inimitable Harlan Ellison style, to be vigorous repudiations of the sci-fi ideology of the postwar era, where virtuous Terrans battled malevolent alien invaders and won a noble victory. The tales in 'Night and the Enemy' avoid jingoism and remind us all, in a blunt way, that War is Hell.

There are a couple short stories included in 'Night and the Enemy'. 'Trojan Hearse' is a two-pager that gets the job done, while 'The Few, the Proud' takes the theme of the war hero and subverts it with a particularly caustic, 'surprise' ending.

Summing up, 'Night and the Enemy' is one of the better efforts to mingle Ellison's text with graphic art. It's on par with 'The Illustrated Harlan Ellison' from 1978, and superior to the comic book series 'Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor' from 1996. So, if you're an Ellison fan, you'll want to have a copy of 'Night and the Enemy' in your library. 

Book Review: Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street

Book Review: 'Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street' by Preston Fassel

4 / 5 Stars

'Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street' (145 pp.) was published by Encyclopocalypse Publications in 2021. Author Preston Fassel is a writer of fiction and nonfiction works on horror, alternative cinema, and pop culture.

Bill Landis is one of the more interesting figures in the fringes of 1980s pop culture, as well as the Founding Father of the practice of appreciating 'trash cinema', that is, low-budget, transgressive movies. 

Landis began it all in June 1980, with the first issue of a newsletter / magazine called Sleazoid Express, aimed at the patrons of the grindhouse theaters on 42nd Street, and the hipsters attending events at the 'Club 57' art cafe in the East Village.

Before there was Shock Cinema, Psychotronic Video or Deep Red, before there was Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez, and only a year or two after Josh Alan Friedman began chronicling Times Square, there was.…Sleazoid. 

The wave of reviews and analyses of schlock and sleaze cinema that arrived in the 1980s, and coincided with the rise of VHS tapes, took inspiration from Landis and his newsletter.

Jimmy McDonough (left), unidentified patron (center), and Bill Landis (right) at a theater on 42nd Street, photo by Yara Cluver

Sleazoid quickly became a must-read among hipsters and film fanatics. I remember finding out about it late in 1984, perhaps from some column or article in the magazine Film Comment. I placed my order early in 1985, and got a bunch of issues before Sleazoid ceased publication later that year.

Issue of Sleazoid Express, circa 1985

The success of Sleazoid opened a path for Landis to write pieces for aboveground publications like Fangoria, Variety, Screw, and The Village Voice during the 1980s and 1990s. 

Landis's 1986 Voice piece, 'Using and Losing on Times Square', about down-and-out Times Square hustlers in the era of AIDS, was particularly memorable.

 

Article by Bill Landis for the February 1982 issue of Fangoria

Later in the 1990s, Landis and his wife Michelle Clifford revived Sleazoid, and issued a new magazine called Metasex.

In 2002, Landis and Clifford published a book called 'Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square', which was a retrospective of Landis's days as a movie fan and critic, as well as a primer on sleaze cinema. Issues of Sleazoid continued to be published, before tailing off as the decade began to close.

In 2008, Landis died of a heart attack; he was only 49, estranged from friends and family, and living in drugged-out squalor in an apartment in Chicago.

Unidentified Sleazoid staffer (left) and 'Gummo', New York City, mid-1980s

In 'Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street', Fassel gives a very readable account of Landis's life and times. While Fassel is an unashamed Landis fanboy the book is not a hagiography, recounting Landis's faults (he frequently was not a very nice person to be around) with candor. 

Fassel also doesn't shy from relating his subject's descent into self-abuse and self-degradation in the mid-80s, when Landis became a live sex-show performer and porn actor under the stage name 'Bobby Spector'. 

And Fassel acknowledges that Landis was a bullshitter, and much of Landis's autobiographical writings must be taken with a degree of skepticism.

One area where 'The Story of a Real Man' falls a bit short is in the lack of graphics; save for a black-and-white photo of Landis, there's no other illustrative material in the book. Some scans of Sleazoid, stills from some of Landis's X-rated films, and portraits of Landis taken over the years, all would have helped round out the book. Fassel has indicated that the rights to reproduce Sleazoid are stalemated by a uncommunicative Michelle Clifford, but still, some visual content would have helped lend more perspective to the Landis phenomenon.   

Who will want a copy of 'Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street' ? Aside from the obvious answer of Landis fans and trash cinema fans, I believe anyone interested in New York City's seedier side, as it was in the halcyon days of the 1960s through the 1980s, will find the book engaging. 

Fifteen years of the PorPor Books Blog

Fifteen Years of 'The PorPor Books Blog'

When I started this blog fifteen years ago I wasn't anticipating it would be so much fun that I'd do it for fifteen years, but somehow that has turned out to be the case. 

Back when I started things were a little different when it came to acquiring media with nostalgia value. 

You could go on eBay and buy a box of old DAW books for $30, plus $10 shipping. Or you could find a collection of National Lampoon magazines from the 1970s, for $25 plus shipping. At amazon, you could get a copy of Pierce Nace's schlock masterpiece, 'Eat Them Alive', for five bucks. You could get an original mass market paperback edition of Stephen King's 'The Stand' for under $10. You could go to the comic book store, and in a cardboard box out in front of the store, find a heap of old Marvel Vampire Tales black and white magazines from the 1970s on sale for a couple of bucks each. And inside, they'd have some back issues of Heavy Metal magazine on sale for three dollars each. Stuff that the fanboys, coming in for their pulls of 25 issues of X-Men comics, ignored. But nowadays, you're going to pay a little bit more for such things (if you can find them).

I thank all my readers who continue to visit the site ! While Google Analytics 4 is not a very user-friendly application, it says my Page Views for the past month numbered 6,652, or about 220 page views per day. So there are people who find the blog worth visiting.

It's enough of an inducement to continue the blog for another five years. Fingers crossed !