The Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone is an American media franchise based on the anthology television series created by Rod Serling. The episodes are in various genres, including fantasy, science fiction, suspense and psychological thriller concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist, with a moral. A popular and critical success, it introduced many Americans to common science fiction and fantasy tropes; the original series, shot in black and white, ran on CBS for five seasons from 1959 to 1964. The Twilight Zone followed in the tradition of earlier television shows such as Tales of Tomorrow and Science Fiction Theatre; the success of the series led to a feature film, a TV film, a radio series, literature including a comic book, novels and a magazine and a theme park attraction and various other spin-offs that spanned five decades, including two revival television series. The first revival ran on CBS and in syndication in the 1980s, while the second revival ran on UPN. TV Guide ranked the original TV series #5 in their 2013 list of the 60 greatest shows of all time and #4 in their list of the 60 greatest dramas.
In December 2017, CBS All Access ordered the third Twilight Zone revival to series, helmed by Jordan Peele. The series premiered on April 1, 2019; as a boy, Rod Serling was a fan of pulp fiction stories. As an adult, he sought topics with themes such as racism, war and human nature in general. Serling decided to combine these two interests as a way to broach these subjects on television at a time when such issues were not addressed. Throughout the 1950s, Serling established himself as one of the most popular names in television, he was as famous for writing televised drama. His most vocal complaints concerned censorship, practiced by sponsors and networks. "I was not permitted to have my senators discuss any current or pressing problem," he said of his 1957 Studio One production "The Arena", intended to be an involving look into contemporary politics. "To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was prohibited." CBS purchased a teleplay in 1958 that writer Rod Serling hoped to produce as the pilot of a weekly anthology series.
"The Time Element" marked Serling's first entry in the field of science fiction. Several years after the end of World War II, a man named Peter Jenson visits a psychoanalyst, Dr. Gillespie. Jenson tells him about a recurring dream in which he tries to warn people about the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor before it happens, but the warnings are disregarded. Jenson believes the events of the dream are real, each night he travels back to 1941. Dr. Gillespie insists. While on the couch, Jenson falls asleep once again but this time dreams that the Japanese planes shoot and kill him. In Dr. Gillespie's office, the couch Jenson was lying on is now empty. Dr. Gillespie goes to a bar; the bartender tells him that Jenson had tended bar there, but he was killed during the Pearl Harbor attack. With the "Time Element" script, Serling drafted the fundamental elements that would distinguish the series still to come: a science-fiction/fantasy theme and closing narration, an ending with a twist. "The Time Element" was purchased but shelved indefinitely.
This is where things stood when Bert Granet, the new producer for Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, discovered "The Time Element" in CBS' vaults while searching for an original Serling script to add prestige to his show. "The Time Element" debuted on November 24, 1958, to an overwhelmingly delighted audience of television viewers and critics alike. "The humor and sincerity of Mr. Serling's dialogue made'The Time Element' entertaining," offered Jack Gould of The New York Times. Over 6000 letters of praise flooded Granet's offices. Convinced that a series based on such stories could succeed, CBS again began talks with Serling about the possibilities of producing The Twilight Zone. "Where Is Everybody?" was accepted as the pilot episode and the project was announced to the public in early 1959. Other than reruns at the time "The Time Element" was not aired on television again until it was shown as part of a 1996 all-night sneak preview of the new cable channel TVLand, it is available in an Italian DVD boxed set titled Ai confini della realtà – I tesori perduti.
The Twilight Zone Season 1 Blu-ray boxed set released on September 14, 2010, offers a remastered high-definition version of the original Desilu Playhouse production as a special feature. The series was produced by Inc. a production company owned and named by Serling. It reflects his background in Central New York State and is named after Cayuga Lake, on which Ithaca College is located. Aside from Serling, who wrote or adapted nearly two-thirds of the series' total episodes, writers for The Twilight Zone included leading authors such as Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, Earl Hamner, Jr. George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, Reginald Rose, Jerry Sohl. Many episodes featured new adaptations of classic stories by such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Jerome Bixby, Damon Knight, John Collier, Lewis Padgett. Twilight Zone's writers used science fiction as a vehicle for social comment, as networks and sponso
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was an English film director and producer regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Known as "the Master of Suspense", he directed over 50 feature films in a career spanning six decades, becoming as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films, his hosting and producing of the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Born in Leytonstone, Hitchcock entered the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer after training as a technical clerk and copy writer for a telegraph-cable company, he made his directorial debut with the silent film The Pleasure Garden. His first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, helped to shape the thriller genre, while his 1929 film, was the first British "talkie". Two of his 1930s thrillers, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century. By 1939 Hitchcock was a filmmaker of international importance, film producer David O. Selznick persuaded him to move to Hollywood.
A string of successful films followed, including Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, The Paradine Case. His 53 films have grossed over US$223.3 million worldwide and garnered a total of 46 Oscar nominations and six wins. The "Hitchcockian" style includes the use of camera movement to mimic a person's gaze, thereby turning viewers into voyeurs, framing shots to maximise anxiety and fear; the film critic Robin Wood wrote that the meaning of a Hitchcock film "is there in the method, in the progression from shot to shot. A Hitchcock film is an organism, with the whole implied in every detail and every detail related to the whole." By 1960 Hitchcock had directed four films ranked among the greatest of all time: Rear Window, North by Northwest, Psycho. In 2012 Vertigo replaced Orson Welles's Citizen Kane as the British Film Institute's greatest film made. By 2018 eight of his films had been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, including his personal favourite, Shadow of a Doubt.
He received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979 and was knighted in December that year, four months before he died. Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 in the flat above his parents' leased grocer's shop at 517 High Road, Leytonstone, on the outskirts of east London, the youngest of three children: William, Ellen Kathleen, Alfred Joseph, his parents, Emma Jane Hitchcock, née Whelan, William Hitchcock, were both Roman Catholics, with partial roots in Ireland. There was a large extended family, including Uncle John Hitchcock with his five-bedroom Victorian house on Campion Road, complete with maid, cook and gardener; every summer John rented a seaside house for the family in Kent. Hitchcock said that he first became class-conscious there, noticing the differences between tourists and locals. Describing himself as a well-behaved boy—his father called him his "little lamb without a spot"—Hitchcock said he could not remember having had a playmate. One of his favourite stories for interviewers was about his father sending him to the local police station with a note when he was five.
The experience left him, with a lifelong fear of policemen. When he was six, the family moved to Limehouse and leased two stores at 130 and 175 Salmon Lane, which they ran as a fish-and-chips shop and fishmongers' respectively, it seems that Hitchcock was seven when he attended his first school, the Howrah House Convent in Poplar, which he entered in 1907. According to Patrick McGilligan, he stayed at Howrah House for at most two years, he attended a convent school, the Wode Street School "for the daughters of gentlemen and little boys", run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus. The family moved again when he was 11, this time to Stepney, on 5 October 1910 Hitchcock was sent to St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill, Tottenham, a Jesuit grammar school with a reputation for discipline; the priests used a hard rubber cane on the boys, always at the end of the day, so the boys had to sit through classes anticipating the punishment once they knew they'd been written up for it. He said; the school register lists his year of birth as 1900 rather than 1899.
While biographer Gene Adair reports that Hitchcock was "an average, or above-average, pupil", Hitchcock said he was "usually among the four or five at the top of the class". His favourite subject was geography, he became interested in maps, railway and bus timetables, he told Peter Bogdanovich: "The Jesuits taught me organization, control and, to some
Mütter Museum
The Mütter Museum is a medical museum located in the Center City area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It contains a collection of anatomical and pathological specimens, wax models, antique medical equipment; the museum is part of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The original purpose of the collection, donated by Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter in 1858, was for biomedical research and education; the Mütter Museum originated as a collection of specimens and medical tools used for education in medicine. Now the museum boasts a collection of over 20,000 specimens; this does not include the large literary collection contained within the Historical Medical Library, housed within the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The Mütter Museum is home to over 3,000 osteological specimens, including several full skeletons. One of the most famous of these is the articulated skeleton of Harry Raymond Eastlack, who suffered from FOP. Eastlack donated his skeleton to the Mütter collection to assist in further medical understanding of the condition.
Other osteological specimens include: The Mütter American Giant, the tallest human skeleton on exhibit in North America, at 7’6" tall. The Hyrtl Skull Collection, a collection of 139 skulls from Joseph Hyrtl, an Austrian anatomist; this collection's original purpose was to show the diversity of cranial anatomy in Europeans. The Mütter Collection comprises 1,500 wet specimens acquired between the 19th and 21st centuries; these include teratological, cysts and other pathology from nearly every organ of the body. Augmenting the real human specimens on display are numerous wax models displaying various examples of pathology in the human body; these models produced by Tramond of Paris and Joseph Towne of London, were used for training in lieu of real human remains. The museum's holdings include: A malignant tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland's hard palate The conjoined liver and plaster torso death cast of the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker A piece of thoracic tissue removed from John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln A section of the brain of Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James A. Garfield The Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection The Mütter Museum is the only place where members of the public can view slides of Albert Einstein's brain on permanent display.
Many of the museum's collections comprise a permanent exhibition. The museum hosts thematic exhibitions: A Stitch in Spine Saves NineAn exhibition demonstrating the development of spinal medicine and surgery Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits: Injury and Healing in Civil War PhiladelphiaThis large exhibit examines the history of medicine through the Civil War, how the conflict contributed to improvements in medical science in the Northeast US, it displays a collection of Civil War-era tools and instruments, contextualized via historical documents from the Medical History Library. Other artifacts include a USCT Muster Roll, which recorded soldier's military histories and death; the exhibition is accompanied by lesson plans and a nine-part documentary mini-series about the Civil War experience in Philadelphia. Dr. Benjamin Rush Medicinal Plant GardenDr Rush help found the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1787, now home to the Mütter Museum. Dr. Rush pushed for the maintenance of a medicinal garden to allow College Fellows to replenish items in their medicinal chests.
The Garden was founded in 1937. It displays between 50 and 60 medicinal herbs and plants, is accompanied by an audio-tour for visitors to learn more about the original medicinal properties and uses of the botanical specimens, which include strawberries and bugleweed. Special exhibitionsThe museum is host to a variety of changing special exhibits. On display: Vesalius on the Verge: The Book and the Body, celebrating the 500th birthday of the famous anatomist Grimm's Anatomy, including rare illustrations from the Brothers Grimm A bi-annual art exhibition in the museum's art space, Thomson Gallery; these art exhibits invite established artists to complement the themes of the Mütter Collection, presenting medicine as both a science and an art. Philadelphia Neuroscience-Artist Greg Dunn's collection of neuron paintings and etchings have been shown. Gretchen Worden remains the best known person associated with the Mütter Museum, she joined the museum staff as a curatorial assistant in 1975, became the museum's curator in 1982 and its director in 1988.
Worden was a frequent guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, "displaying a mischievous glee as she frightened him with human hairballs and wicked-looking Victorian surgical tools, only to disarm him with her antic laugh" and appeared in numerous PBS, BBC and cable television documentaries as well as NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" on the museum's behalf. She was instrumental in the creation of numerous Mütter Museum projects, including the popular Mütter Museum calendars and the book, The Mütter Museum: Of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. During Worden's tenure, the visitorship of the museum grew from several hundred visitors each year to, at the time of her death, more than 60,000 tourists annually. After her death, the Mütter Museum opened a gallery in her memory. In an article written about the gallery's September 30, 2005 opening, the New York Times described the "Gretchen Worden Room": There are jars of preserved human kidneys and livers, a man's skull so eaten away by tertiary syphilis that it looks like pounded rock.
There are dried severed hands shiny as lacquered wood.
Gothic rock
Gothic rock is a style of post-punk that emerged from post-punk in the late 1970s. The first post-punk bands which shifted towards dark music with gothic overtones include Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division and the Cure; the genre itself was defined as a separate movement from post-punk due to its darker music accompanied by introspective and romantic lyrics. Gothic rock gave rise to a broader subculture that included clubs and publications in the 1980s. According to music journalist Simon Reynolds, standard musical fixtures of gothic rock include "scything guitar patterns, high-pitched basslines that usurped the melodic role beats that were either hypnotically dirgelike or tom-tom heavy and'tribal'". Reynolds described the vocal style as consisting of "deep, droning alloys of Jim Morrison and Leonard Cohen". Several acts used drum machines downplaying the rhythm's backbeat. Gothic rock deals with dark themes addressed through lyrics and the music's atmosphere; the poetic sensibilities of the genre led gothic rock lyrics to exhibit literary romanticism, existentialism, religious symbolism or supernatural mysticism.
Musicians who shaped the aesthetics and musical conventions of gothic rock include Marc Bolan, the Velvet Underground, the Doors, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and the Sex Pistols. Journalist Kurt Loder would write that the song "All Tomorrow's Parties" by the Velvet Underground is a "mesmerizing gothic-rock masterpiece". However, Reynolds considers Alice Cooper as "the true ungodly godfather of goth" due to his "theatrics and black humor". Nico's 1969 album The Marble Index is sometimes described as "the first Goth album". With its stark sound, somber lyrics, Nico's deliberate change in her look, the album became a crucial music and visual prototype for the gothic rock movement. Gothic rock creates a dark atmosphere by drawing influence from the drones used by protopunk group the Velvet Underground, many goth singers are influenced by the "deep and dramatic" vocal timbre of David Bowie, albeit singing at lower pitches. J. G. Ballard was a strong lyrical influence for many of the early gothic rock groups.
In 1976, Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice was published. The main character, although dark, wanted love; the book, according to music journalist Dave Thompson created an audience for gothic rock by word of mouth. The same year saw the punk rock band the Damned debut; the group's vocalist, Dave Vanian, was a former gravedigger. Brian James, a guitarist for the group, noted, "Other groups had safety pins and the spitting and bondage trousers, but you went to a Damned show, half the local cemetery would be propped up against the stage". Critic John Stickney used the term "gothic rock" to describe the music of the Doors in October 1967, in a review published in The Williams Record. Stickney wrote that the band met the journalists "in the gloomy vaulted wine cellar of the Delmonico hotel, the perfect room to honor the gothic rock of the Doors"; the author noted that contrary to the "pleasant, amusing hippies", there was "violence" in their music and a dark atmosphere on stage during their concerts.
In the late 1970s, the word "gothic" was used to describe the atmosphere of post-punk bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division. In a live review about a Siouxsie and the Banshees' concert in July 1978, critic Nick Kent wrote that concerning their performance, "parallels and comparisons can now be drawn with gothic rock architects like the Doors and early Velvet Underground". In March 1979, Kent used the gothic adjective in his review of Magazine's second album, Secondhand Daylight. Kent noted that there was "a new austere sense of authority" to their music, with a "dank neo-Gothic sound". In September, Joy Division's manager Tony Wilson described their music as "gothic" on the television show Something Else, their producer Martin Hannett described their style as "dancing music with gothic overtones" In 1980, Melody Maker wrote that "Joy Division are masters of this gothic gloom"; when their final album Closer came out a couple of months after the death of their singer, Sounds noted in its review that there were "dark strokes of gothic rock".
Not long after, this appellation "became a critical term of abuse" for a band like Bauhaus, who had arrived on the music scene in 1979. At the time, NME considered that "Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Ants and by Joy Division" opened up "a massive market" for newcomers like Bauhaus and Killing Joke: however, critic Andy Gill separated these two groups of bands, pointing out that there was a difference "between art and artifice"; the second Siouxsie and the Banshees album, released in 1979, was a precursor in several aspects. For journalist Alexis Petridis of The Guardian, "A lot of musical signifiers – scything, effects-laden guitar, pounding tribal drums – are audible, on Join Hands". However, Bauhaus's debut single, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", released in late 1979, was retrospectively considered to be the beginning of the gothic rock genre. According to Peter Murphy, the song was written to be tongue-in-cheek, but since the group performed it with "naive seriousness", how the audience understood it.
In the early 1980s, post-punk bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cure included more gothic characteristics in their music. According to Reynolds, with their fourth album, 1981's Juju, the Banshees introduced several gothic qualities and sonically, whereas according to The Guardian, Juju was art rock on certain album tracks and pop on the singles, their bassist, Steven Severin, attributed the aesthetic u
Quintessentially Unreal
Quintessentially Unreal is the debut album by American Neo-Cabaret artist Jill Tracy, released in 1996. It was nominated for California Music Awards in 1997 and 1998. Selections from the album were used on an NBC Hard Copy segment on Absinthe. All tracks written by Jill Tracy
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. He worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction and mystery fiction. Known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, his science-fiction and horror-story collections, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, I Sing the Body Electric, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers. While most of his best known work is in speculative fiction, he wrote in other genres, such as the coming-of-age novel Dandelion Wine and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale. Recipient of numerous awards, including a 2007 Pulitzer Citation, Bradbury wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted to comic book and film formats. Upon his death in 2012, The New York Times called Bradbury "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream". Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Esther Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a power and telephone lineman of English ancestry.
He was given the middle name "Douglas" after the actor Douglas Fairbanks. Bradbury was related to the American Shakespeare scholar Douglas Spaulding and descended from Mary Bradbury, tried at one of the Salem witch trials in 1692. Bradbury was surrounded by an extended family during his early childhood and formative years in Waukegan. An aunt read him short stories; this period provided foundations for his stories. In Bradbury's works of fiction, 1920s Waukegan becomes Illinois; the Bradbury family lived in Tucson, during 1926–1927 and 1932–1933 while their father pursued employment, each time returning to Waukegan. They settled in Los Angeles in 1934 when Bradbury was 14 years old; the family arrived with only US$40, which paid for rent and food until his father found a job making wire at a cable company for $14 a week. This meant that they could stay, Bradbury—who was in love with Hollywood—was ecstatic. Bradbury was active in the drama club, he roller-skated through Hollywood in hopes of meeting celebrities.
Among the creative and talented people Bradbury met were special-effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen and radio star George Burns. Bradbury's first pay as a writer, at age 14, was for a joke he sold to George Burns to use on the Burns and Allen radio show. Throughout his youth, Bradbury was an avid reader and writer and knew at a young age that he was "going into one of the arts." Bradbury began writing his own stories at age 11, during the Great Depression — sometimes writing on the only available paper, butcher paper. In his youth, he spent much time in the Carnegie library in Waukegan, reading such authors as H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe. At 12, Bradbury began writing traditional horror stories and said he tried to imitate Poe until he was about 18. In addition to comics, he loved Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan of the Apes Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series; the Warlord of Mars impressed him so much. The young Bradbury was a cartoonist and loved to illustrate, he drew his own Sunday panels.
He listened to the radio show Chandu the Magician, every night when the show went off the air, he would sit and write the entire script from memory. As a teen in Beverly Hills, he visited his mentor and friend science-fiction writer Bob Olsen, sharing ideas and maintaining contact. In 1936, at a secondhand bookstore in Hollywood, Bradbury discovered a handbill promoting meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. Excited to find there were others sharing his interest, Bradbury joined a weekly Thursday-night conclave at age 16. Bradbury cited H. G. Jules Verne as his primary science-fiction influences. Bradbury identified with Verne, saying, "He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a strange world, he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally". Bradbury admitted that he stopped reading science-fiction books in his 20s and embraced a broad field of literature that included Alexander Pope and poet John Donne. Bradbury had just graduated from high school when he met Robert Heinlein 31 years old.
Bradbury recalled, "He was well known, he wrote humanistic science fiction, which influenced me to dare to be human instead of mechanical."In young adulthood Bradbury read stories published in Astounding Science Fiction, read everything by Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and A. E. van Vogt. The family lived about four blocks from the Fox Uptown Theatre on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, the flagship theater for MGM and Fox. There, Bradbury learned how to sneak in and watched previews every week, he rollerskated there, as well as all over town, as he put it, "hell-bent on getting autographs from glamorous stars. It was glorious." Among stars the young Bradbury was thrilled to encounter were Norma Shearer and Hardy, Ronald Colman. Sometimes, he spent all day in front of Paramount Pictures or Columbia Pictures and skated to the Brown Derby to watch the stars who came and went for meals, he recounted seeing Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, whom he learned made a regular appearance every Friday night, bodyguard in tow.
Bradbury relates the following meeting with Sergei Bondarchuk, director of Soviet epic film series War and Peace, at a Hollywood award ceremony in Bondarchuk's honor: They forme
