Brace yourself, ’cause it ain’t no hoax! The Giallo Hotel podcast is back, fresh from our extended holiday season tour of purgatory and limbo.
Part Eight is the penultimate episode. Thus, the end is Nine. Be patient for a little bit longer. We’ll send Part Nine out as soon as it’s ready.
Comments: 0Yeah, yeah. I know. The “Giallo Hotel” podcast is really, really late. Really, I know. I’d give you a list of people to blame, but I’d hate to see all those people turning up dead. Bear with me. I’m working on it.
In the meantime, here is some sad news to wake up to. I should know. I did this morning. Actress and model Maila Nurmi died in her sleep about five days ago. We all know her as… Vampira!
Oh, c’mon. Play this up, fer pete’s sake.
Admit it. She made this world a fraction more cool than it was without her, don’t you think? She looked creepy and snarked about so-so monster movies long before it was fashionable.
And Halloween would’ve been a little less sexy. I’m sure lots of people thought to dress up like Morticia Addams before she did. But Vampira made it the in-thing to do.
Well, that and she was one of the few highlights in Plan 9 From Outer Space. She actually made that weird finger-wiggling bit pay off. I mean, it’s not a selling point or anything, but….
I’ll close with a correction. You won’t see this in the Wikipedia entry, but there is another musical tribute to Vampira worth noting, from singer-songwriter-and-really-cool-DJ Greg Kihn. Go to his website and buy his “Horror Show” album. Maybe I’m sentimental, tone-deaf, and in league with Jerry Falwell, but I swear the last track on “Horror Show” deserves to be a Halloween anthem.
Comments: 1Warnock’s Dilemma. Do you ever get this?
Make a posting, add a comment on a message thread, and get no response.  Putting your two cents in, and getting a fistful of Confederate money back. Opening your mouth, only to have a seagull poop right down yer gob from five klicks up.
Type out some thoughts. Think it through carefully. You’re pretty sure you’re not writing a flame, just speaking your mind, elaborating on a thought. Maybe you get somebody thinking. Maybe you’ll get corrected on a point. You’re not sure. Type out some stuff and hit “send.” The discussion stops dead. It’s like opening an airlock, seeing all the bloated, dead bodies on the other side, and wondering, “Gee, did I do that?” Or maybe they knew you were coming and decided to off themselves out of spite. Again, you’re not sure. Being dead, they’re not talking. Not even a note.
So yeah…Warnock’s Dilemma. You ever get that?
Comments: 0Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! But if you ever visit the Giallo Hotel, don’t try the lasagna.
That’s right. After a long frustrating delay, Ollin Productions is resuming the Afterhell podcast preview of Volume 3: “Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel.” A modern-day gangland war has become a zombie uprising, turning a mobster-run luxury resort into a slaughterhouse. Previous episodes have opened the door first to bloodshed, then tragedy. Now the stakes are higher than the body count. In Part 7, Boss Giallo and his men learn that surviving hurts even more than dying.
We beg our listeners for their patience. And we politely request the naysayers keep the groans down to a civil level. There are only two episodes left. We’re doing our best to deliver a high-quality, lower-class bloodletting finale for “Giallo Hotel.” And when the podcast is done, the entire story will be released as Afterhell Volume 3.
Beyond that, we have plans for a new storyline made especially for our podcast. And Afterhell Volume 4 is already in production.
“Afterhell” is just getting started. It’s not for everyone. It’s not polite. And it’s not going away.
Tuck in while it’s still hot, kiddies. Best wishes to everyone for the holiday season.
Comments: 0Here’s a fun way to make the world a better place. And all you donate is mouse clicks.
It’s a word quiz called “Free Rice.” You test your vocabulary, and for every right answer, the United Nations World Food Program gets another 10 grains of rice.
So really wrack yer brain!
Comments: 0Busy as all get-out on this trick-or-treat-a-geddon, but I wanted to pass this on to my two best pals, all and sundry.
75 years ago tonight, in my hometown of San Jose, a couple of merry pranksters pulled off a Halloween prank that made local history. They loaded a charge into an old howitzer in St James Park, fired it, and blew out the windows of the old county courthouse across the street. Their identities have been a mystery.
Until now:Â Halloween prankster outed 75 years later
Ironically San Jose and much of the Bay Area is recovering from the first major earthquake (and aftershocks) since the 1989 Loma Prieta quake.
Halloween karma is a funky thing. Everyone have fun… and come home safe.
Update:Â Since the Murky News is being a stick in the mud about registration….
Comments: 0Halloween prankster outed 75 years later
By Scott Herhold
Mercury News
Article Launched: 10/31/2007 06:13:27 AM PDTBeneath the statue of William McKinley in San Jose’s St. James Park, aimed at the old Santa Clara County courthouse, sits a 12-pound bronze cannon, a U.S. Navy howitzer cast in 1870.
To ensure it won’t be fired, the barrel of the cannon was filled long ago with concrete. And thereby hangs one of the more intriguing Halloween stories in San Jose history.
On Halloween 1932, a trio of youths exploded a charge in the cannon, breaking the windows of the courthouse across First Street and toppling the gun from its mounts.
For three-quarters of a century, the identities of the Halloween artillerymen have been closely guarded secrets. But thanks to a revelation from a San Jose historian, as well as some sleuthing, I can identify one and point to another.
The story really begins more than a century ago, on May 13, 1901, when then-President McKinley visited San Jose, four months before his assassination in Buffalo, N.Y.
After the Republican president was killed, San Joseans built a granite-and-bronze statue in his honor at a cost of $13,000, the equivalent of almost $300,000 today. Presumably to emphasize McKinley’s muscular foreign policy, the side facing the courthouse featured the 12-pound cannon.
Three decades later, the Halloween pranksters weren’t thinking of the record of the nation’s 25th president. If the story is right, it all had to do with a bet.
My source on the matter was historian and Superior Court Judge Paul Bernal, who during a recent courthouse tour identified one conspirator as Larry Zetterquist (1914-71), a San Jose bartender who had a reputation as a raconteur and ladies’ man.
To check it out, I called Zetterquist’s nephew, Jim Zetterquist, a member of the Preservation Action Council and a San Jose history buff, too. He filled in some of the blanks.
Larry Zetterquist came from a large San Jose family that lived on Anita Street, a long-gone street near the Guadalupe River. His father was a Swedish immigrant and his mother was distantly related to Tiburcio Vasquez, the famous bandit who was hanged in San Jose in 1875.
In the fall of 1932, Zetterquist was an 18-year-old high school dropout. As the story goes, he and his friends had a job blowing up tree stumps. Somehow, they fell to speculating about whether the explosive they used could fracture the then-unplugged McKinley cannon.
The story goes that the youths decided to test the matter. On Halloween night, the three stuffed explosives into the cannon and lit the charge. Shocked when it blew out windows in the courthouse, some 35 yards away, they “hightailed it out of there,” Jim Zetterquist said.
Exactly how many windows were broken has been lost to history. (The courthouse, deftly remodeled after a 1931 fire, has 20 that face the park.) A newspaper story the next day said there were “several.” The windows were made of expensive French plate glass, framed by cast iron.
Meanwhile, the force of the blast hurled the cannon from its bronze mounts. While police briefly held two men at the scene, they never found the real culprits.
Jim says he got the story from his father, Herman, a straight-arrow who was close to his older, more renegade brother. Both were superb athletes, although Larry suffered a teenage hip injury that effectively ended his athletic ambitions. “He was definitely a character,” Jim Zetterquist says.
Who were his co-conspirators? Here I’ll confess to being on soggier ground. Jim Zetterquist told me that one of the teens with Larry on Halloween also allegedly played a role in the Nov. 26, 1933, lynching of Jack Holmes and Harold Thurmond, the two men who had been accused of kidnapping and killing department store heir Brooke Hart.
According to the story Jim Zetterquist heard from his father, this youth contributed to the lynching by returning to his family ranch and grabbing the rope. That description seems to fit one man: Anthony Cataldi, a then-18-year-old who was the only one of the lynching party to boast about it publicly, giving an interview to United Press about how he got the rope.
Cataldi later disavowed that statement, but he was identified as one of the lynchers in Harry Farrell’s book on the case, “Swift Justice.”
I called Cataldi’s 80-year-old sister in Sacramento. She told me she had never heard of Zetterquist or the broken windows. She was only 5 at the time of the courthouse caper. But it’s fair to acknowledge that the identification of Cataldi in the Halloween blast is hearsay upon hearsay.
We know this: Standard justice was shattered on the night when Holmes and Thurmond were lynched. What makes for an intriguing footnote – a clue in concrete – is that the shattering had a more innocent and literal precursor on Halloween a year before. Chalk it up to the ghosts of William McKinley.
Newsflash! Afterhell is making another appearance on “The Sonic Society” with Jack Ward and Shannon Hilchie tomorrow night (4pm PST, 7pm EST, 9pm AST).
Tonight is the world radio premiere of “Sleepless Days.” But tomorrow night, “The Sonic Society” on CKDU 88.1 FM in Halifax will broadcast a slightly more worksafe version. We had direct input in the edits, bleeps, and bloops, so we’re cool with it. Dial it on your radio or stream it for some tongue-in-cheek dark humor.
Comments: 0Announcements! Hurry up and gather around before I collapse.
First, we’re going to be on the airwaves again… we think. You see, we would’ve mentioned this sooner, but we couldn’t get an official word from anybody. We got a semi-official word, though! And it goes like this:
KBOO 90.7 FM in Portland, Oregon is apparently scheduled to run an Afterhell episode. On Monday October 22nd, at 11pm Pacific Time, KBOO will run a late-night radiodrama double feature: Heather Breeden’s award-winning Gothic thriller Next Year’s Girl, courtesy of the Willamette Radio Workshop … and a radio (but still rude) edit of the Afterhell episode “Sleepless Days” by Jamie Lawson & Joe Medina. Dial it in or stream it online!
And if you’re in Portland, Oregon this Halloween, come see WRW’s annual live show at the McMenamin’s Kennedy School brewery. WRW is going to rock Halloween 2007 with “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Pit & the Pendulum” — straight from classic radio, performed before your very eyes, with sound effects and a full cast.
A double whammy of classic chills ‘n’ thrills, people! The Afterhell crew will be minding the swag table and watching the show along with you. Admission is free. Bring the kids and go trick-or-treating inside the Kennedy School where it’ll be dry and warm. Then join us for some family-friendly terror.
We hope you’ll share Halloween with us, folks! The company is great and the treats are better!
Comments: 0Okay, over the weekend I clued some of you folks on some backchannel shenanigans re an upcoming Afterhell episode, “Damning Praise.” I’m giving you some details and a touch of denouement on the QT. Don’t let it go to your head.
For those who came in late, this needs a little set-up.
“Damning Praise” is a dark, disturbing, nightmarish vision of fandom. At the climax, this version of the Harlan character does a few disturbing things. But he’s a protagonist, maybe even heroic in a Gothic sense. And he’s appearing in an obscure audiodrama piece that doesn’t exactly rake in bags o’ money. In other words, I didn’t think the real-life namesake of this character, Harlan Ellison, would care about it.
This script has been sitting around for a few years. After so many distractions — cats, family, losing our house to a predatory lender, making that lender go the fuck away, getting to know many other audiodramatists, working on various projects with them, learning from it all, applying that to my own work — I thought it was time to produce that script. I wanted to dust it off, give it a good polish, and record the sucker. With help from some friends in Boston and here in Portland, we got that process started earlier this year. Then more distractions came before I could pursue that further.
(I promised to get into some of that in later postings. And I will. Now shush. Who’s telling this story, me or you?)
Casting and setting up the recording session took the rest of the year… or at least, so it seems. For months, Jamie and I contacted actors, sent out scripts, and talked to them about scheduling. Everybody was busy, which only made sense. These are very talented actors, very much in demand. But the harder we tried to put it all together, the harder it got. Schedules clashed constantly. There were no more than a few days a month, nearly every month, where everyone could meet. And at the last minute, someone had to cancel. It raised the inevitable question, to recast or reschedule? I was paranoid about getting just the right performances for this one, so I chose to reschedule. And it kept on happening. D-Day wasn’t this hard to pull off.
Did I say “a little set-up?” Somebody shoot me now. No, belay that. It gets interesting here.
After oodles of wrangling, September was looking like our month. And it has been. Everything was falling into place, albeit with the grace of a drugged gazelle, but it was happening, dammit. I wouldn’t get a full cast rehearsal, but a chance to rehearse some important scenes. Then everyone would be there a few days for the recording.
But three days before that rehearsal, Jamie and I had to talk with one of our actors. He wanted to do this story. He just didn’t get it. It didn’t have the overtly comedic tones of Volume 2. This was more surreal, darker…
And the script needed a polish. Yeah, I thought it should have one too. It was written hastily, in the sort of white-hot creative burst that Stephen King and J. Michael Straczynski often extol. For them, it’s the crucible of their personal best efforts. But they didn’t say anything about tightening up sloppy dialogue and blah formatting… or when I was going to find the time to fix all that.
But there I was, answering for the slapdash results, explaining the story, plot, character backstories, my inspirations for the piece, what I would’ve fixed if I’d gotten the time, every single creative decision short of the choice of word processor. And somewhere in that whole oral exam, he heard what he needed to hear. He was good to go. We were back on track. Whew. We could relax.
The next morning, he sent us an e-mail. He was having second thoughts. It turns out that he’s a friend and colleague of none other than… Harlan Ellison. He didn’t want it to look as if he was tiptoeing behind Harlan’s back, so he asked if he could talk to Harlan about it.
Ugh, so the HE guy would have to hear about my sloppy scriptwriting and these goofy CD’s I was making. Oh well, the worst that happens is a stern lecture–
Whoa, there was a line in the e-mail that stopped us cold. Legally we were on thin ice? HE’s name is intellectual property?! Crap, I’d forgotten about that.
Before anyone starts going on about huge egos and control freaks, here’s an important fact. So many people have tried to smear, scam, and libel him that he’s had to resort to such tactics to keep all that lunacy down to a dull roar. If there hadn’t been so many attempts, nobody would have to sweat it.
But the devil of it was that our mutual friend, the actor with whom I’d just discussed the script at length, has been aware of that script and that story for the last two years. And he decided to slam the brakes on the whole production just a few days away from our recording date.
But hey, he considers the guy a friend. You don’t screw your friends over, not if you can help it. I told him to go ahead.
What I didn’t tell him was, “Damn it, we were set! We were good to go, you stegosaurus! For fuck‘s sake! Why didn’t this occur to you before, Rip Van Winkle? Why now?! Where the fuck was all this friendship when I first pitched this idea to you on the way back from recording Volume 2?! Son of a bitch! Shit… shit… shit!!!”
We were stunned. Dammit, we were so close. I’d just pulled us out of a nose-dive. Were we gonna crash and burn anyway? My intellect was saying one thing, that Harlan probably wouldn’t care, that it was small taters compared to the full-blown legalistic monkey crap-throwing contests he had dealt with in his time. The finished product might even amuse him, I thought. But the door to litigation had been opened. It was possible. And all the pre-production work Jamie and I had done, all the effort to write the damn thing, all the heated debates on the backchannel during that process, might have been for nothing.
So Jamie and I sweated for three more days, through the weekend, straight on till Tuesday morning. The whole time, we were on deathwatch and we knew it. Whether Harlan was a reasonable man wasn’t the issue. The whole situation was out of our hands. If our mutual friend framed it the wrong way, if Ellison was having a shitty day, if the planets were in the wrong alignment, if we pulled out a copy of the I-Ching and threw the fuckin’ magic Pocky sticks the wrong way….
Okay, that’s enough of that. You’re all in the loop, yes? About how the fate of this episode hinged on what Harlan Ellison’s reaction to the news was, right? You’re not going to start whining about spoilers when I spill? Crucifixion? Good.
The answer on Tuesday? Our actor friend called Harlan, and Harlan was cool with it. In fact he reportedly said, “Why are you bothering me with this? It’s not a big deal! It’s teeny! That other thing, I fought that for 29 years. Trust me. To get me into court, it has to be a big deal. This, not so much. Go ahead, do what you want.”
Verbatim, apprarently. And for that, our friend has a good memory.
Harlan asked for only two things in return. A note in the CD’s liner notes will state: The character of “Harlan” appears with the approval of Harlan Ellison. And we’ll send him a copy of the finished product.
So naturally we’re going to bust our asses on Volume 4… just as soon as we recover from the SAN loss for this whole incident.
And even better news! The last of the principal dialogue was recorded last night. And ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
audioboy himself just re-sent some special crowd walla, saving our exhausted bacon. We’re good to go.
Now I can concentrate on the last three parts of “Giallo Hotel.” No rest for the wicked.
Comments: 0Hey, folks, gather ’round! Updates for everyone.
The podcast, featuring “Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel,” has been delayed again. Yeah, sorry. Lots going on, it turns out. We’ll announce more of them as the details firm up.
That’s the thing about pushing the holiday season out earlier and earlier every year. Have you noticed that? Not just with Christmas, but everything. I don’t know about you, but all the Halloween stuff hit the store shelves around here the first week of September. And since that’s our busy season (three guesses why — and Hispanic Heritage Month doesn’t count), that means more work for us.
Also, tomorrow we’ll be recording a new Afterhell episode. And it’s a controversial one. No, really. The first draft of this episode alone set off a heated debate before we started work on Volume 1. Watch, no one’ll so much as blink for this one.
Oh, one last thing. Back to “Giallo Hotel.” (Hm, nice name for a sequel. I don’t think anyone survives it, though. Wait, I’d better check. Never mind.) Anyway… when we first announced the Giallo podcast, we said it was going to be a ten-part serial.
Not anymore. Now it’s nine parts.
That’s another reason for delays. We’ve been retooling plot structure and dialogue, tightening things up as we go. And when I say “we,” I mean me. And that’s another reason for the delays….
Sorry to make everyone wait. Hold on a bit longer.
The end is nine nigh.
