PETER SALETT - IN THE OCEANS OF THE STARS

By R. O'DONNELL
GENRE
FOLK
PUBLISHER
DUSTY SHOES MUSIC

Peter Salett is a very gifted musician. He has written, scored, and performed multiple songs for such films as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Ten, Down in the Valley, The Baxter, The Maldonado Miracle, Wet Hot American Summer, Keeping the Faith, and the soon to be released documentary 21 Below. Directors love him because his music compliments and enhances their visions. People like listening to him because his sound is so profound, intricate, and dreamy, a “play it again, Sam,” over and over only to find something you missed listening to it the fifth or sixth time around.

His most recent fifth CD offering, In The Oceans Of The Stars, is a stellar achievement that doesn’t disappoint. Whether it’s the oh-so melancholy ethereal ride of "Magic Hour," the tender sway of "Far, Far Away," a timeless folk duet "Between the Dark and the Light" (thank you Amy Miles,) or the gentle acoustic gem "Sunshine," song after luscious song is a mini-picture show inside your head. It’s just so damn cinematic. This is a headphones secure, do not disturb listening experience to clear the mind of all the daily chatter that plagues us. For my jaded, tired ass, I’m so obliged to simply and so completely "Fly Sparrow Fly" away with it. I think we all deserve that, and Peter Salett knows that just as well. I picture him composing these haunting American stories in his head while walking in the rain down a gritty Manhattan street, and then while lying on his back in a field of wheat next to an old trestle tracks, a solitary train whistle echoing up above.

I notice a lot of name comparisons–which happens with true indefinable talent–everyone from American folk/roots pop singer-songwriter Josh Rouse to Academy Award–winning songwriter, singer and pianist Randy Newman, that I just smile and think, no, no, no… Peter Salett. That’s it. Its just time to give the man his due. Salett is just so boldly original that you don’t want it to ever go away. The traditional comparisons to other more recognizable talents only helps secure that hope. But whatever the mainstream press is comparing him to, you might want to start by getting In The Oceans Of The Stars drifting through your headset as fast as iTunes will allow you to download it. You’ll be happy to meet the exceptional singer/songwriter who is as he will always be "True In Time."

source: r-productions

THE KREEP GET’S LOST IN STEPHEN KING’S THE MIST

I read Stephen King’s The Mist on a lengthy train ride from Media, Pennsylvania (where I had delivered a trivial lecture on my latest book of poems Arsenic n’ Art,) to my lair in the city of brotherly love: Philadelphia. In short, The Mist really frightened me, as it had first-rate scares galore. It nudged, pinched, and stung my insecurities so that I had night sweats n’ nightmares for hours, days, and weeks to come. This was just a short story, dear fellow foes, you understand? Yet it held me in the grip of trepidation and woe. When it was then announced some 25 years later that award-winning film director Frank Darabont (The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption) was giving it a go, well, I booked my seat well in advance. I was pleased I did so.

> Read 100% of Nothing: The Kreep’s Korner

source: r-productions.com

Nightmare Before Christmas widget

Help us celebrate THE KREEP’s latest podcast on iTunes: The Nightmare Before Christmas Poem brought to you by R. Productions and Static Multimedia. Available Wednesday, the 20th, on iTunes, The Kreep returns with yet another kreepy poem recited by The Kreep himself. All this is in tribute to the 15 year anniversary of Tim Burton’s holiday classic The Nightmare Before Christmas on a super-duper Blu-Ray, Hi-Def 2-disc fully loaded DVD released August 26, 2008.

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R. Productions

IN ODD WE TRUST – NOT!

By
Ricky Burke

Created by Dean Koontz; Written by Queenie Chan & Dean Koontz; Illustrations by Queenie Chan
Del Rey, July 2008, $10.95



Manga’s hot, no doubt about it. Their graphic novels are a cultural phenomenon that’s spreading from one end of the globe to the other. Here in the states, young American’s can’t get enough. With each new character, plotline, and author, now being plucked from the New York Time’s bestseller list, the Manga franchise is a publishing gold mine, with no end in sight. I’ve got not beef with it. Great, why not, right? The more diversity we can bring to any art form all the better in my book. In Odd We Trust…right? Not.

Best-selling author Dean Koontz with his popular Odd Thomas series doesn’t make the transition smoothly. His premiere offering In Odd We Trust in collaboration with Chinese-Australian Original English-Language manga artist Queenie Chan of Del Rey Manga is an odd affair. The story about a ghost seeing flapjack flipping boy with a tough gun-totting girlfriend sure sounds the best of pulp fiction, but doesn’t translate well here at all. The artwork is, um, odd, kind of rough around the edges, and not very spectacular for a mystery yarn while the story is slow and foreseeable. With everyone from Christine Feehan (Dark Hunger) to Erin Hunter (Warriors) making the crossover from mainstream novel to manga, I’m betting it seemed a sure thing. Just like the LA movie industry, that thinks by assembling some of the hottest talents in the biz they’ve got themselves a blockbuster (dare I mention Cat Woman?) now that formula has been embraced by another playing field. Let’s hope this is just a glitch.

Seeing dead people and communing with Elvis–Awwww, thank you, thank you very much–isn’t the most original of quirks for a central character however. For young readers that haven’t had the chance to see Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino’s guns ablazing True Roman, where our hero communes with Elvis (played by Val Kilmer) and of course M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense of I see dead people fame, this must all sound very enticing on the back of a manga paperback. I just couldn’t dig all that much.
You do get over half a dozen written pages, a sort of teaser for the original Odd Thomas series by Dean Koontz, which was originally published in 2003. If you want to eliminate the peculiar art work and water-downed characters and go straight to the bestseller. And there’s an artist sketchbook, which shows Queenie Chan going from awful to worst, if that might turn you on, I dunno.

My favorite moment in Odd We Trust was when the ghost of Lyndon B. Johnson mooned our hero. That image set-off a whole series of internal dialogues about the dead ex-president that I enjoyed a helluva lot more than reading this mind-numbing thriller. I really laughed out loud. In fact, there our several gut busters throughout, although I’m not sure they were intended.

CONAN RECAPTURES THE SWORD & SORCERY DAYS OF OLD

By
Ricky Burke

*** ½

Conan #50
The Hand of Nergal
Dark Horse Comics
Truman, Giorello, Villarrubia, Harris, Starkings

I kind of gave up on the Conan franchise. It just didn’t do it for me anymore, didn’t hold my interest at all. The love was sadly gone. A faded memory of the past, a kid with the covers over my head, flashlight in hand, turning each page with great anticipation. But Dark Horse’s series just left me all bored and yawning big-time, falling asleep, waking up to find that I drooled all over the nifty artwork, the soggy pages sticking to my face–not good at all. There was something missing, and I just didn’t have the time to figure it out. I just stopped reading them altogether. Credits roll. End of story. And then, Conan #50, The Hand of Nergal comes along just in the nick of time: 64 pages of blissful, that’s the way, ah-huh-ah-huh, I like it, epic blood n’ guts. I’m a die-hard fan again. It was the “heart” that was missing all along.

Remember the early Conanan the Barbarian days? Sure… when Conan art and story really made you feel as though you were reading something so visual, almost cinematic that you felt as though you were standing right next to the hulking Cimmerian. Knee-high in the bloody aftermath of his manic slice n’ dicing you looked up at your hero with a big thumbs up. Until one of the bodies dying on the battlefield impaled you on their sword. Oh well, well worth the fantasy. I’m happy to report that the great barbarian and all the awe and wonder he deserves has returned! Ten-fold. Thanks in large to the splendid artwork by Tomas Giorello. His drawings are all so traditionally eye-popping, that you can first attack the 64 pages taking in the visual aspects of the tale alone, just like in the old days. The writing by Timothy Truman is also quite good, so tight in fact that I can safely say that this breath-taking finale is the best of the Dark Horse bunch–hands down. And now that the story arc has departed from harping on his endless days of thieving, what has emerged is a drama of wonderful emotional nooks n’ crannies that I finally finished thinking, what’s next? I can’t friggin’ wait. This is the beginning of something good.

And that’s not all! You get the original telling of The Hand of Nergal by Roy Thomas & John Buscema. The complete tale to insert into historic context is presented at the end of the book. The Thomas Giorello scetch gallery is way cool (a few more pages wouldn’t have hurt, but hey…) and all for a measly 5 bucks! Not bad at all. Thank you Truman, Giorello, Villarrubia, Harris, and Starkings for keeping me awake until the wee hours of the morn. I once again envisioned I was standing next to one of the heroes of my youth as he winked, and in a gruff voice barked, “you ain’t seen nothing yet!”

KREEP’S KORNER: POLTERGEIST–THEY’RE HERE!

My kreepy fanatics of dismay: tonight we open the vaults to sip a vintage thriller from the summer of 1982: Tobe Hooper's horror banquet Poltergeist starring Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams and the late Heather O'Rourke as the beautiful Carol Anne. A delicious jolt from beginning to end, this Steven Spielberg produced horror film was another blockbuster that scared the bejesus out of everyone. We just didn't see it coming. It was such a successful scare that it spawned two sequels that really depart from the original recipe so avoid them if you care. Rent or buy the first however. But remember, my horror connoisseurs Poltergeist has shards of glass within the feast, so be careful where you bite. Bon Appétit!

In eternity,
Brazillia R. Kreep

KREEP'S KORNER: THERE HERE!

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‘OUT OF PICTURE 2′ IS A BIG FAT PRETTY ART BOOK

Out of Picture, Art From The Outside Looking In, Volume 2,is the anthology series companion to, you guessed it, Art From The Outside Looking In, Volume I. The title is explained on the clever inside flap that tells you that the “Out of Picture” expression is a film term meaning literally on the cutting room floor. Now, I know we want to see the origins of everything these days thanks in part to good documentaries, History Detectives, and The Criterion Collection’s classic foreign film preservation kick, but as demonstrated by the Apocalypse Redux fiasco (sorry Frances) sometimes painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa’s cool for about the first five minutes-but that’s it. That’s kind of what you got here: page after beautiful page of vibrant, flowing, dazzling, in-your-face art with… mustaches illustrating middle-of-the-road tales. The kind of work that’s first placed on a project meeting table and then managed by scores of others into something great and wonderful on the shelf.

From the same folks at Academy Award® winning Blue Sky Studios (Ice Age, Robots, Horton Hears A Who) Out of Picture 2 just falls a tad short of their overall vision: “to pioneer creatively superior photo-realistic, high-resolution, computer-generated character animation for the feature film, television and entertainment industries.” This is an anthology series, with lots of pretty pictures and light on the text and plot. C’mon already. Who wants to compete with Frank Miller (The Dark Knight) Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso (100 Bullets) and Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night) forgeddaboudit. Right? So it’s really an art book perfect for, um, each one of the talents to, um, show-off to their friends and family.

Don’t get wrong, it really is lovely cover t’cover, fun to look at, but nothing can survive the missing copy. There’s just too much going on out there that you better serve-up a big hefty helpin' of groundbreaking. And it’s not all that. And that’s just too damn bad. Because there certainly are a lot of great ideas here. Solid beginnings, some righteous middles, and no ends in sight. I mean, I kept turning the pages saying, wow, this would’ve made a great film or a nifty graphic novel or anything but a big fat book full of unfinished themes and plot fluffer-ru. God, I’m going t’hate myself in the morning for that… but I really wanted to fall in love with Out of Picture, Art From The Outside Looking In, Volume 2. But alas I must decline. But keep the box of candy and the flowers too. No, no, really. I’m flattered that you asked.

One saving grace of Out of Picture 2, however, is the Development Gallery in the back of the book. It’s hot. Seeing the sketches and all the rest of the illustrated innards was a lot more fun then sifting through the ton of glossy tree bark. I dug it the most. And the freakin’ weighty thing is almost worth it for that alone. Um…gulp…almost.