Balladeer’s Blog’s fans know that I don’t consider myself a music expert. I may enjoy anything from operas and symphonies to all categories of pop and rock, etc but I never claim that my tastes are governed by some overriding musical aesthetic. I just know what I like and what I don’t like.
And that brings us to Mark Gormley. At first this guy’s work struck me as music’s answer to oddball filmmaker Neil Breen and I assumed that his cult following loved Gormley in an ironic way. The more I look into it, though, there are many people who seem to be providing actual, profound justifications for considering the man genuinely talented. Those same people even praise his “Power Stance,” which I have always found incredibly silly.
Below is one of Mark’s music videos preceded by a brief introduction from the Uncharted Zone‘s hosts. Let me know if you think I’m a musical Philistine for laughing at the Gormster or if you think those who hail him as a genius are just keeping the straightest faces this side of Leslie Nielsen. I’m open to being set straight if I’m missing something about this guy but he strikes me as a hybrid of Ned Flanders, Floyd R Turbo and Tiny Tim. Here he is with his song Little Wings:
All that and a great musical number during an excellently mounted 1870s Fourth of July Celebration. Injun Joe gets a much more merciful end in this movie than he did in the book, so that’s a plus, too. 
THE HUMAN METEOR 
BLACK ORCHID 
Comment: Judy Allen’s partner at her Private Detective practice was Rocky Ford. In an amusing twist he was secretly the superhero called the Scarlet Nemesis. Ridiculously, even though Black Orchid and the Scarlet Nemesis worked together several times they never figured out that the other costumed figure was their own investigative agency partner. Some “detectives”. 
BREAKHEART PASS (1975) – (Frontierado is coming up August 7th and, as always, it’s about the myth of the Old West, not the grinding reality.) Alistair MacLean may be more closely associated with espionage and crime thrillers like When Eight Bells Toll, The Eagle Has Landed and Puppet on a Chain but his lone Western, Breakheart Pass, is a very solid story which transfers MacLean’s usual themes to the American West. 
Some critics bash this above-average film because they apparently thought Alistair MacLean’s name on the script meant it would be an over-the-top Western Spy actioner along the lines of Robert Conrad’s old Wild Wild West television series crossed with Where Eagles Dare. Instead, Breakheart Pass comes closer to grittiness than slickness and is all the more enjoyable for that. 
Following the Civil War the slaves in Indian Territory were declared Freedmen like the slaves in the late Confederacy, and as citizens of Indian Territory those Freedmen were in theory entitled to some of the money that was still being paid to the tribes in the Territory and to land. In reality the Five Civilized Tribes who called Indian Territory home were resentful of their former slaves’ new status and often used violence to drive out the freed slaves, even burning down their homes in many cases. 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
ROMAN CATHOLIC 
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
