“You have to be sentimental to be sensitive to impressions of terror, mystery, or the occult. After all, sentimentality is nothing more or less than an overactive imagination, a tendency to try to dramatize impressions.”- FREAKS director Tod Browning, quoted in BELA LUGOSI: DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES by Gary D. Rhodes with Richard Sheffield (Collectables, 2007)
Welcome to the John Wooley website, maintained, supervised, folded, spindled and mutilated by my No. 1 son, Jonathan (check out his award-winning Witch Cop shorts on the new DVD from VCI Entertainment, VCI: Short Films Contest Winners – with, in what I’m sure Jonathan and his filmmaking partner Joey Hambrick see as a primo example of typecasting, yours truly cast as the cranky character “Sarge”).
If you’re one of the new listeners to my Swing on This western-swing radio program (found in the Tulsa area at 89.5 FM and streaming everywhere else in the world at www.kwgs.org every Saturday night at 7 p.m. Oklahoma time), scroll ‘way down on the left-hand side to find (theoretically) the latest two playlists for the show. Maybe you’ve just discovered the show. Perhaps you were in the audience at Snyder, Texas, early in June, when I was honored to emcee the West Texas Western Swing Festival and plug the show. Whatever the circumstance, very glad to have you aboard.
I’m writing this the day before my friend and colleague John McMahan and I leave for the annual Pulpcon in Dayton, Ohio, an event I’ve been attending since the late ’80s. It’s a grand celebration of pulp literature, of a time when working-class folks – and others, of course – found escape from the Great Depression and other challenges of everyday living in the pages of garishly colored, cheaply printed all-fiction magazines. Not meant to last, these pulps from the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s are slowly if inexorably deteriorating, but even though most of them have to be read with care these days, there are those of us who believe there’s nothing better than to read an old Spider or Hollywood Detective or Operator No. 5 in its original form, with the indescribably transcendent smell of the decaying wood pulp adding another sensory level to the experience.
A few Pulpcon attendees are working to preserve some of the best of the thousands of pulp tales printed in the first half of the 20th Century. I’ve been honored to be able to work on some of those projects with my friends John Gunnison at Adventure House (www.adventurehouse.com) and John Locke at the relatively new Off-Trail Publications (so new, in fact, that the usually tech-headed Locke doesn’t yet have an Off-Trail website.)
John McMahan (enough Johns for you?) and I are going to be talking about some pulp projects with both these gentlemen – perhaps over a martini on the rocks with blue-cheese stuffed olives on the top floor of the Dayton Crowne Plaza, but more likely over a few hearty glasses of box wine in one of our rooms – and I should have a new pulp-related project or two to announce here soon.
Meanwhile, I should tell you that Off-Trail has just published a dandy called Doctor Coffin – the Living Dead Man, a collection of stories featuring a character created by early-Hollywood denizen Perley Poore Sheehan. Imagine what might have happened if Lon Chaney had decided to become a crimefighter, and you’ll get a pretty good idea of these immensely entertaining off-kilter tales. I wrote the introduction, and on the back John decided to dub me “the world’s foremost authority on Hollywood detectives.” I guess that’s kind of like being called the fastest gun in the West, except there aren’t as many people gunning for you.
The next weekend, July 13-15, I’ll be at the Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma, doing a Saturday morning panel and signing copies of my current music book, From the Blue Devils to Red Dirt: The Colors of Oklahoma Music – now in its second big printing – as well as the music-related ghost story, Ghost Band. It’s my first time at the annual event, and I’m looking forward to seeing shows from several of my favorite acts, including the Red Dirt Rangers and Kevin Welch.
In other news: Forgotten Horrors 4: Dreams That Money Can Buy, is now out from Midnight Marquee Press. Once again, my pal and prolific Renaissance man Michael H. Price has been good enough to let me gravy-train the franchise he started with the late George Turner, and while Michael is always responsible for the bulk of the work on those books, it’s been a real trip getting to visit, or revisit, some truly strange pictures from late 1946 through 1948, and then put my impressions down on paper. One of those films is Beauty and the Bandit, whose innocuous title masks the most bizarre Cisco Kid movie ever made.
There are, I’m guessing, a couple hundred other titles of that same ilk, with lots of illustrations and an introduction by Michael that is absolutely riveting – and, in fact, that ties in with the recent post-deathbed revelation from a Roswell, New Mexico scientist re: the alleged crash-landing of a flying saucer in ’47, the very year that the bulk of the films in Forgotten Horrors 4 were released. It’s a weird but persuasive personal reminiscence, chilling and funny and mighty fine.
You can order Forgotten Horrors 4 from your local bookstore, the virtual bookstores, or the Midnight Marquee website at www.midmar.com.
In other news: Michael and I continue to write the “Forgotten Horrors” columns for the world’s No. 1 horror-movie magazine, Fangoria. Next up: The amazing story of how Baptist minister Lynn Lemon, of Plan Nine from Outer Space, found himself in the quasi-skin flick, Invasion of the Bee Girls. The story comes from the 90-year-old reverend himself – who, by the way, is an extremely good guy!
Please continue to look for my feature stories, publishing under the general heading of “The Insider,” every other month in Oklahoma Monthly. And Best In Texas magazine is set to publish a piece of mine on Red Dirt Music very soon.
Finally, those of you in the Tulsa area who are matriculating right now should know about the courses I’m teaching on the OSU-Tulsa campus, under the auspices of the American Studies program in the History Department. Starting in late August, I’ll be teaching a 3000-level course called Studying Oklahoma’s Culture Through Music and Movies, and then in the spring I’m set to do one called Horror Movies: Reflecting America’s Fears. These classes will satisfy a number of different requirements, depending on what program you’re in, so if you’re interested, check with your counselor.
That’s it for now. As always, many thanks for dropping by.