Cross-posted, as usual, from Outpost Mâvarin (except the pictures here are bigger)....
Weekend Assignment: We're making a Halloween Music Mix! Suggest a song. The song can be scary, spooky or silly, but it should fit into Halloween somehow. All genres are acceptable; indeed, I'd be very interested to know of a country or samba song that would work.
Extra Credit: Are you spooked easily?
You know, I could swear I've written about this before, complete with posted photos of my Haunted Mansion and Buffy Once More With Feeling CDs. But Google says no. AOL Journals search says no. Actually reading titles on the Musings archive pages for 10/05 and 10/04, and looking at any entries that sound as though they might contain what I remember, I still can't find it.
Yes, well, okay, I did find my "Haunted by the Mansion" entry, but that wasn't so much about the music. I don't care. I remember writing about party music involving Disney attraction music and Buffy and Quantum Leap...oh. Okay, that's the problem. It was party music in general, or sf and fantasy party music, not specifically Disney or Halloween. Even if I still haven't found the entry. It was probably on the Outpost, anyway.
So, for the record, I'll just recap the Halloween standards around here before moving on to some other selections:
The Haunted Mansion 30th Anniversary CD. Features the entire Disneyland attraction narration and music and effects, outtakes by Paul Frees and others, a clip from the Florida one, a Vincent Price narration for Phantom Manor, and even a Japanese Ghose Host. But the main drawing card is still that great song, "Grim Grinning Ghosts," with Thurl Ravenscroft as one of the singers.
Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. I don't actually have this on CD, but I used to play the sound effects side of this Disneyland record every year when I was a teenager.
Pirates of the Caribbean CD. Same kind of deal as the Haunted Mansion one. It's not as overtly Halloween, but you gotta love Paul Frees intoning "Dead men tell no tales!" On the CD, several dead men proceed to tell tales in outtakes.
But, as I say, I've already expressed by appreciation for these recordings. Let's change the channel - literally.
The new Frigidaire
This afternoon, as I waited for the refrigerator to arrive, I turned our digital cable on to the music channel labeled "Sounds of the Season," and immediately got to hear "Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon. 11 hours later, that channel is still on, on its second run through its surprisingly large Halloween playlist. I've heard three different songs by Bobby "Boris" Pickett (two of which of boringly derivative of his one real hit), soundtrack music by John Carpenter, Elvira sounding a little like Julie Brown, "Bewitched" (the tv theme) by Peggy Lee(!), a parody song called "Drac the Knife," two songs from Rocky Horror Picture Show, songs by the Ramones, the Cramps, Bing Crosby, Andrew Gold, Michael Jackson ("Thriller," of course) and whatever unknowns someone called Drew recorded on surprisingly decent cover versions of songs for Halloween party CDs. Good stuff, some of it, plus a lot of forgettable stuff, and a few clunkers, such as "Dracula's Theme from Swan Lake," in which a silly, badly acted spoken word scenario in a graveyard is combined with Tchaikovsky.
Still, classical music does deserve its rightful place on the Halloween playlist. On the Fantasia soundtrack alone (which I bought on LP back in college, and had to exchange several times due to a bad pressing) has Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the quintessential spooky organ music, plus Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. (Actually, I was reading today that the Fantasia version of Night on Bald Mountain I know was heavily revised by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Leopold Stokowski.)
But my favorite spooky classical piece (albeit less so now than when I was a kid) has always been Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns. (Listen to it here.) It's based on a medieval allegory about dancing skeletal figures from all walks of life - the rich and the poor, the powerful and the peasants - all called by Death. (Hey, these people were dealing with the Plague at the time.) I remember being exposed to this musical masterpiece back in elementary school, and even seeing a cartoon that went with it. But like that blog entry about spooky music, I can't prove that what Iremember ever existed. Yes, there's a great Disney cartoon called The Skeleton Dance, the first Silly Symphony ever made. I've even read claims that the music for that was the Danse Macabre, or, at least, that brilliant cartoon composer-arranger Carl Stalling adapted the Saint-Saens for it. But it just doesn't sound like it to me. Ah, well. Next you'll tell me there is no wooden bridge in Lucerne, Switzerland that depicts the Dance of Death on its wooden panels. But there is. I photographed it when I was 15 years old. And no, I don't have the pictures.
Extra Credit: well, I am a little spooked that I can't prove what I remember, and also that it's past 2:30 AM already!
Karen
Marry, but 'tis certain that my hostess has more capacity than cause for complaint! As I understand it, this flat box, marked with letters and numbers, on which she is pounding away at this moment, is a means of communicating from one end of this old world to the other, very nearly at the speed of thought. Yes, I do know that though we often speak of "the ends of the earth," in truth there is no end to it, unless it is to go into the sky itself, and seek out the moon and stars. The rest is all connected - sea and shore, lake and river, mountains and sand. But in the life I know, charting blue-green courses from one bit of land to another may take weeks or months, sometimes even years. Posting a message across all that distance and more, to the interior of a country, and putting it in the hands of the intended recipient - this, too, is a lengthy and uncertain process, and often dangerous as well. I therefore have little sympathy for a woman who sits in a well-lit room, far from danger or any real discomfort, and sends my words spinning gaily through the world, mere moments after I utter them. I am convinced that Karen has never suffered any real hardship - troubles, yes, as do we all; but no true privation.
This flyer first appeared in a corridor of Unnamed Largish Company about a day after Carly announced her husband Alan's idea for this week's 
Maybe not, though. When these balloons arrived in our department a week ago, I waited until nearly everyone had left for the day, and then took some pictures of the balloons. I say nearly everyone, because at the sound of the first photo being taken (my digital camera has a sound effect turned on so I know it took a picture), one of my co-workers popped up to jokingly ask whether I was photographing company secrets. I said that I was photographing the company balloons. I went on to reveal for the first time that I have "a significant online presence." My co-worker went home that night, Googled the word "mavarin" and found this blog. He was disappointed, though, because I hadn't posted any balloon pictures. Well, here's one of them, D.!
As you can probably guess, there are definite drawbacks to filling a room with helium balloons nearly two weeks before the holiday you're celebrating. Within two days, a couple of the black balloons, including mine, were hanging instead of floating. It was so sad! I felt as though I had a defective balloon. By now, of course, all the balloons are like that. At least they were, until people started taping them to the tops of cubicles, as I soon did, or removed them entirely.
It doesn't really matter, though. The balloons (the orange ones, anyway) still add color to the drab, cubicle-filled room, and the fact that they're "hanging" like that adds a macabre touch. One side of the room got cobwebs, too, which I like a lot. We didn't get them on our side, probably because our part of the room isn't visible from the door. But I brought in my own little rubber spider web, and strung it between my black balloon and my hanging baskets.
Please visit the journals of all of this week's Round Robin Participants: 
Steven...sometimes photoblog
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