I am now reading "Henry V - the Scourge of God" by Desmond Seward. Excellent book. If everything you know about Henry V is from Shakespeare (who was writing for effective drama, not historical accuracy) or Kenneth Branaugh, you'd think he was wonderful. But Seward makes the point that he was one of the biggest bastards of the Middle Ages. The French hate and resent him for some very compelling reasons. Read this excerpt about Henry's siege of Caen, Normandy, in 1417.

Of course, you can buy a nice Royal Doulton figurine of Henry V at Harrod's in London for $25,000. He doesn't seem to be crying "Havoc!" in it, though, and I don't see any headless mothers...

The neat thing about being from Los Angeles is that you frequently get to see places you know in movies. Last night I watched a couple of J.D. films where this was the case.

The first was "Teen-Age Crime Wave" (1955) - Yes, that's actually the name of this movie. A bit overwrought considering that the total number of J.D.s in this was three, but it was still an effective film. An alternative title was "Jail Bait," so the producers were clearly going for shock value with the title. The story: a couple of teens (who, as usual, look like they're really in their mid-twenties - which they were) hold a gentle old Bible-reading couple hostage in their own homes while on the lam. That story line always pushes my buttons and makes me tense - I keep looking for opportunities for somebody to plunge a kitchen knife into somebody's ribs or something. The climax of the story takes place at Griffith Observatory (just as in "Rebel Without a Cause," filmed that same year), a place I know well. I was there last November, in fact. Anyway, not a bad film, but not in my mental list of the Top Ten J.D. Films.

The other was something of a multi-tiered teenage opera, with the high school dance, Duane Eddy and his twangy guitar, James Darren, sex, armed robbery, a negligent and trashy mother, an abusive father, football, a strict principal, an earnest young teacher with an unfortunate past (Dick Clark!), homework and gangs with switchblades all lumped together in one Brylcreem-slicked, adenoidal brew. Whew. I'm talking about "Because They're Young" (1960), where there are so many things going on you'll miss a major plot point if you blink. The high school in this - Harrison High - was really Hoover High in Glendale, but I'm reasonably sure that the football field used in a couple of shots was the one at Burbank High, where I attended. (Burbank and Glendale are neighboring cities in Southern California.) There'a an unmistakable church across the street that was immediately familiar to me; I jogged past it many times during PE on that field.

Dick "The World's Oldest Teenager" Clark plays the ultimate cool teacher in this, popular and over-involved in the lives of his students. He's just as adept in managing dangerous gang standoffs as he is in teaching American history or reforming a former thug. Of course he announces the school dance musical performances with his suave, trained radio voice. ("I give it an 8, Mr. Clark, it has a good beat that you can dance to.") Was there ever such an awesome teacher?

He and I have two things in common: we both lived in Burbank and we're both married to a Cari Clark.

Baand Staaaaand.

29 April 2008

Watched "The Delinquents" (1957) last night. As TCM promised, it's a cult film. It was a brisk little 72 minute film which I quite enjoyed. In fact, my daughter liked it, too.

Clearly out of the Hollywood mainstream, it's possibly the earliest film I have ever seen to admit that humans have bodily waste elimination functions. There's a surprising scene: the J.D.s drive up to a gas station, where one of them yells out to the attendant, "Hey, where's the can?" The attendant gestures that it's inside, and the J.D. goes there and uses the restroom. Until a toilet flush could be heard in a 1971 episode of "All in the Family," the bathroom was taboo in the film and TV arts due to the Hays Code and various television standards and practices.

Nowadays producers and directors venture into the restroom all the time, and I cannot assert that this has been a good thing. But I digress.

The Delinquents was also out of the mainstream due to a fleeting depiction of head trauma... the gas station attendant is hit in the head with a gas pump nozzle, and a shot is shown of his head in a pool of blood, his hair all wet. Very unusual for a 1950's film, where bloodshed was kept to an absolute minimum.

This film was also the film debut for character actor Richard Bakalyan, who began his career playing J.D.s. Convincingly, as this IMDb bio states: "He and fellow actor Dickie Jones were arrested in Kansas City for "vagrancy" while shooting The Cool and the Crazy (1958) on location in that city. The pair were standing on the sidewalk between takes, in full "JD" getup, when they were noticed by police who thought they actually were teenage gang members and hauled them in. It took several hours for the film company to straighten things out and get the two released from jail."

The Delinquents was an early film of Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin. He's good in this - can't say that for any of the Billy Jack films, which I rank among the silliest and most tedious films ever made... And finally, it was the directorial debut of Robert Altman, who went on to much bigger things.

So it gets added to my growing list of recommended J.D. flicks. Oh, yeah, note: nobody wears leather jackets in this one, either.

TCM also broadcast a British J.D. film, "Violent Playground" (1958); set in Liverpool (were the young Beatles familiar with these locations, one wonders), this one has a 1950's British coolness factor going for it. It's always great to watch old Britmovies because there are fascinating shots of streets, store fronts, advertisements, funny-looking cars, trucks and rowhouses. The kids play in areas which look like bombed out remnants of the Blitz - perhaps they were. David McCallum, who later achieved international stardom playing Illya Kuryakin in "the Man from U.N.C.L.E." is excellent as the anguished young gang leader. Good flick, and it's interesting to see how the Brits interpreted the whole J.D. movement. (Not content to use a mere switchblade, at the end of this one McCallum is provided with an automatic weapon, and in one scene he fires it at a elementary school girl!)

No leather jackets here, either.

One last note... yesterday I mentioned the Flamingos hit song "I Only Have Eyes for You" from 1959. I have the oddest memory of this song. At one point in my young life, and I'm sure this would have been prior to about 1962 when I was six, my parents and I were driving somewhere at night. It was out in the desert, I think, or in some other isolated place. The radio was on, and this song came on. My parents were silent all through its playing. We made a stop at a country crossroads, where I could see a Chevron station's neon sign (in those days neon signs were quite gaudy and bright, the designs being composed on tubes of light rather than flat plastic surfaces). When we got past the glare of the sign, I could see the stars, as described in the song. We drove on, and I had the notion that out "there" - in the night - everyone was listening to this song, with its dreamy sh-bop/sh-bop arrangement, at the same time along with me. It was a magical moment, and this became a favorite song immediately, on the first hearing. As with the first time I heard it, I'm convinced that it is best listened to at night.

I must have been a precocious child.

The following year the Flamingos came out with a far lesser-known copy cat follow-up song, "Till the End of Time." Same arrangement, same meter, same tempo, same production - it could darn near be the same song. This drives my wife nuts, and she thinks this is crass. But I don't care... I like them both. Can't get enough of those dreamy Flamingos songs.

28 April 2008

So, my wife does Jazzercise. Nothing wrong with that except that in addition to the other 468 catalogs we get in the mail, we get one from them for sports wear. In it is the woman who my wife claims is the president of the company; she models the clothes. My wife assures me that she looks good for whatever age she is - I don't know, 93 perhaps - but what bugs me about her is her hair. It's arranged so that it makes her head look pointed, like a bullet. How weird. And this woman ensures that her face and hairstyle is on the cover of every catalog we get. It gets annoying. But recently, she has begun to remind me of something else that I couldn't place in my head until I looked through the Battle of Bosworth book I just finished, and there it was. That hairstyle makes her head look like she's wearing a Fifteenth century sallet (helmet). See for yourself.

She ought to get a perm.

Over the weekend I saw Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), one of those Ray Harryhausen special effects films. 1950's Science Fiction used to scare the crap out of me when I was a little boy - Invasion of the Body Snatchers was especially creepy. In this one, flying saucers wreck D.C. until scientists discover that aiming guns of high frequency energy at the saucers cause them to freak out and crash. The aliens are a lot like teenagers, apparently.

That concert Friday was perfect; I liked every piece. I was sitting way, way up in the nosebleed section of the concert hall, but the sound was still great. When they rolled out that Steinway concert grand I could hear every note on the soundboard clear as a bell. The conductor, Hugh Wolff, arranged the NSO in an unusual way - he lined up the basses on a podium in the back and put the violas where the violins usually go and vice versa. As I wasn't sitting front row center I couldn't hear a difference, but it was cool seeing the basses taking center stage.

On Saturday my pal Don and I stopped at a place called "Fleming's Ultimate Garage" on the Rockville Pike, which specializes in old cars. It's much more than a simple dealership - they should charge admission. A '56 Chevy Belair will set you back $35K; the fuzzy dice will cost but a bit more. What classic American style! I was especially impressed with this amazing '58 Impala convertible... but it will set you back $120K! I immediately recognized it as Ron Howard's car in American Graffiti; that is, he drove a '58 Impala in the film. And here's the very car, now in Spokane, Washington.

Shoo wop sh-bop/Shoo wop sh-bop/Are the stars out tonight?/I don't know if it's cloudy or bright/'Cause I only have eyes/For you/Dear... I love that Flamingos song. It was used in the film when Toad was up on Inspiration Point, making out with Candy Clark in the Impala. I once had a bet with a musician friend at work that it was original to the 1959 Flamingos version. Nay. It was originally a dance number by Harry Warren, used in "Dames" (1934). Listen to the original verison sung by Dick Powell in 1934 - considerably different than that perfect moody doo-wop nocturne of 1959. Sometimes rewrites are better than the originals...

25 April 2008

More about those disruptive, destructive, troubled teens...

Last night I watched "Over the Edge" (1979), Matt Dillon's first film. A work with a promising premise (what happens when you build a modern planned community but fail to take into account teenagers' needs?) and credible acting that degenerates into a very unlikely, over-blown (literally - stuff gets blown up) conclusion. Summary: The middle-school age kids are restless and bored, and get into drugs and crime. Their recreation center is removed. By the end of the film the parents are locked into the middle school, where the teens blow up the cars and generally reenact The Lord of the Flies in the parking lot. Incredibly, the police and adults are powerless to act. As is often the case, Roger Ebert has an accurate take on the film.

One interesting feature of this film is that it inspired Kurt Cobain's well-known song "Smells Like Teen Spirit." You know, the one with the line, "Life is stupid/And contagious..." - my son drove us nuts singing that refrain over and over when he was about eleven. Well, that is it inspired the song or the video for the song, I'm not sure. (And really don't care.)

Another interesting feature of this film is that it was based on an actual event. But I am very suspicious. I cannot believe that things got as badly out of hand as depicted in the film: a cop (named Doberman!) killed, teens blasting cars with shotguns and handguns, colossal explosions, etc. What little research I have done suprises me... an actual account seems not to be posted on the Internet anywhere. What, for a film that inspired Kurt Cobain's most famous song? A notable pop culture shortcoming.

The question is, what actually happened with middle school age kids in Foster City, California, in 1974? Apparently it made headlines, but I don't remember ever reading about it. I have the e-mail address of a person who is supposed to be the real life main protagonist portrayed in the film; I'll ask him!

I had an interesting conversation with a 69 year-old coworker yesterday, discussing high school gangs. He got beaten up by one in 1955. And no, they weren't wearing leather jackets.

I am now back to late Fifteenth Century England, reading "The Battle of Bosworth" by Michael Bennett. Given that this battle is one of the most important in English history, as it ended the 331 year reign of the Plantagenets and ushered in the age of the Tudors, it's surprising that we don't know a lot about it. But I'll be better informed when I'm done. (It is not a thick book.)

I turn 52 on Sunday, and as a treat to myself I'm going to hear a concert at the Kennedy Center this afternoon by my favorite musical instrument, the National Symphony Orchestra. The program is interesting, with a piece by an modern French composer, Henri Dutilleux, that I don't know and orchestrations of Debussy piano etudes that I do know. Also, Debussy's "La Mer," a famous and splendid symphonic piece which will probably cause me to wish that I was at the beach. I always get the cheap seats for these occasional Friday afternoon performances, and find myself one of the youngest people in the concert hall, which becomes a sea of white hair. Smells like Geriatric Spirit. Some day, wearing white hair myself, I hope to have a season ticket with a better seat - but that's in the future, possibly.

Have a great weekend!

24 April 2008

Watched "The Lord's of Flatbush" (1974) last night. It's an early Henry Winker and Sylvester Stallone film. Boy, did it suck. It's so lame it even incorporates a grammatical error in the title. (IMDb trivia: "The title on screen is actually a shot of the back of the jacket of one of the gang members, and the ungrammatical "The Lord's of Flatbush" is exactly how it is rendered, to show that these guys may be lords of Flatbush, but they're not lords of English grammar." Ha ha, hilarious.)

What is it with Brooklyn, anyway? (Flatbush is in Brooklyn, if you didn't know.) A decidedly interesting place. My father was from there - specifically, Greenpoint, the northernmost part of the Borough. He said that during World War II he never had to buy himself a drink if he mentioned that he was from Brooklyn. (This didn't work in Brooklyn, of course.) Two celebrities once bought him drinks, Nigel Bruce and Alfonso Bedoya. Bruce played Dr. Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes in the Holmes movies of the 1940's. Alfonso Bedoya played the Mexican bandit in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," who gave us the immortal line, "Badges? We don't need no steenkin' badges!" Anyway, during the war Brooklyn was viewed as being the uber-American city, the place where characteristically American Americans were from. And there always seems to be a G.I. from Brooklyn in war films. (And he usually gets killed, for added pathos.)

Dad had a mild New Yawker dialect, but didn't utter the deese, dems and doeses of the stereotypical Brooklyner. He had some funny, memorable phrases, however: (about a singer he didn't think was talented) "He can't sing for sour owl shit!" (About my frugality): "You're tighter than a frog's ass stretched over a rainbarrel." Watching TV and seeing some politician he disapproved of: "What a rat bastard!" Dad had a great sense of humor, which I have captured here.

Doing some Brooklyn research, I came across this article that, unbelievably, begins with the phrase "As a convert to Brooklyn's charms..." Oh, look, it has a photo of the "Lord's" of Flatbush in it.

23 April 2008

I watched an excellent film noir last night: Blast of Silence (1961). Spare (77 minutes) and elegant, it describes a hit man's contracted job, the murder of a gangster. Naturally, that's not all there is to it, and it has a suitably bleak ending. Most of the action is told in narrative and it has many wonderful period shots of New York City in evocative black and white. This is considered a rediscovered classic; I think people viewing it in 1961 probably figured, "good little film" and that's it. Nowadays we see it as it fits in the tail end of a long film noir cycle (1940-1961). In fact, this may just be the very last true noir of the classic period. The Criterion DVD has a neat little features section showing the locations as they looked in 1961 and now; it's surprising just how much the look of the places has changed. NYC in the 1950's and 1960's has a very different look than the city of today...

I also watched a movie by a director described as "the Walt Disney of the Soviet Union," Alexander Ptushko: "Ilya Muromets" (1956). To us, it looks somewhat cheesy, 1950's and foreign. To a Russian in 1956 it was a prestige epic. I have to admit liking these commie sword and sorcery flicks... they have a certain degree of charm. I own two other films by Ptushko: "Sadko" (1953) and "Viy" (1967). I have a word of advice, however... if you should ever desire to own a Russian DVD and order one online, do not give an e-mail address that you use frequently. You will get put on every Russian junk mail list in existence. I get at least twenty junk e-mails in Cyrillic every day from .ru domains. (Oh, look, here's one even as I write.)

My survey of J.D. films is leading me to a conclusion. The idea we have in our heads about J.D.s and ordinary high schoolers wearing black leather jackets (as in the musical "Grease") isn't borne out by the visual depictions of them in period films. The J.D.s in 1950's and early 1960's films are usually wearing what appear to be cotton jackets, often with the gang names spelled out on the backs in sewn-on letters. Some of these look incredibly dorky; for instance, one gang in one period film called the Scepters had jackets with cloth scepters sewn on the backs. Intimidating, it wasn't. I think we're confusing the biker movies and biker gangs - who did appear to wear leather jackets - with the street gangs.

I may be able to confirm my suspicion by watching the eight film run of J.D. flicks to be aired on Turner Movie Classics next week. Of course the best thing would be to interview somebody who lived during those times. I would be looking for a guy who was about eighteen in about 1959, or a man who is about 67 now. The question would be, "Did the gang members in your high school wear black leather jackets?"

Or perhaps a viewing of this might provide an answer (from a wikipedia article): "Bronx filmmaker James Hannon is currently working on a documentary series on Bronx Gangs of 1950s & 1960s. The first in the series will be about the Ducky Boys Gang -- A real 1960s gang that was portrayed in the fictional movie The Wanderers. This documentary is slated to be released in early 2008. The 2nd in the series after that will be the Fordham Baldies - another real 1950's gang in the Bronx featured in the The Wanderers."

Somehow or another we also formed a mistaken idea of what Civil War soldiers looked like... I have yet to figure out why Americans think they wore sideburns. Even a quick glance at period photographs will demonstrate that they didn't. Many book and magazine article illustrations from the 1960s show soldiers with sideburns. And I remember ads for art schools in the backs of early 1960's magazines, "Draw the Reb" or "Draw the Yank," showing soldiers with sideburns. I think what happened was that Americans remembered Elvis Presley (famous for more or less introducing sideburns to 1950's male grooming) appeared as a Reb in "Love Me Tender" (1956) and knew that a general named Burnside gave his name to sideburns, and drew the conclusion that Civil War soldiers wore sideburns. Well, that's my explanation.

By the way, how many of you were aware that Elvis' hit "Love Me Tender" is an rewrite of a Civil War song entitled "Aura Lea?"

22 April 2008

Ha ha ha! I've read S.E. Hinton's "the Outsiders" before, I just forgot I did! Somewhere in the middle of the third chapter it occured to me that the book was familiar... jumping ahead to the end I realized that I had read this a few years ago. So, how can I describe a novel I read and forgot I read until I started reading it again? "Unforgettable" wouldn't be the word.

I am now reading another paperback I bought at yard sale, "Seventeen" by Booth Tarkington. Tarkington also wrote "Penrod," which is a favorite work; Tom Sawyer put into the early 20th century might describe it. Seventeen is summarized on wikipedia thus: "'Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summer Time and the Baxter Family Especially William' is a humorous novel by Booth Tarkington that gently satirizes first love, in the person of a callow 17-year-old, William Sylvanus Baxter. Seventeen takes place in a small city in the pre-World War I Midwestern United States." I'm about half way through; it's amusing. The object of the young man's affections speaks baby-talk to a little dog named Flopit. Frankly, I can't imagine a world where a young woman speaking baby talk would be considered enchanting, which means that I have something in common with a frustrated middle-aged man who has to listen to it endlessly spoken on his front porch, where the young woman entertains besotted young men.

I handled a minor crisis over the weekend: my VHS player kept malfunctioning and popping out videotapes. Thinking that perhaps it's time to replace the device, I went out and priced replacement equipment, combination VHS players/DVD recorders. The one I want is $275 at COSTCO. For some reason having the tuner circuitry in the unit raises the cost unreasonably - geez, it's just a chip or a chip set extra, why the premium? Feeling irritated and somewhat victimized by our buy-it-and-throw-it-out economy, I decided to take the VHS machine apart to see if I could fix it. What I found was that a folded Post-it note (how did that get in there?) had somehow jammed the works. I had also found an odd plastic and metal part sliding around free in the unit. Anyway, I reassembled the thing and delightedly discovered that the unit once again works just fine - without the plastic and metal part, which I could not place in the mechanism. I'm sure that somehow, something isn't going to work because that part isn't in there, but I don't what, yet.

So I staved off having to replace my VHS unit. Corporate America, screw you!

I'm not planning to get rid of my VHS tapes any more than I'm planning to unload my Lp's ("vinyl") or cassettes, by the way. For one thing, it's too convienient and cheap a means of recording broadcast TV. For another, I can get perfectly good media at yard sales for next to nothing. On Saturday I paid fifty cents for two VHS tapes - four hours - of WWII veterans discussing their experiences during D-Day. I didn't go out to yard sales knowing that I wanted to see this, but I was pleased to find it when I did. My philosophies about media are largely driven by yard sale economics...

Also, as the Video Vault guy will readily confirm, there are many movies and media that have never made the transition from VHS to DVD. For instance, I have 20+ tapes of original Little Rascals shorts (lovingly remastered in 1996 with the original title cards, etc.) that still exist on VHS only. They look great and are vastly entertaining. Does it matter if the source material is a tape rather than a digital delivery format?

The most important consideration is that I have about fifty hours of camcorder VHS tapes of my kids growing up from 1986 on. Priceless, irreplacable media. Sure, I can (and have) transfered it to DVD, but it's important to be able to play the tapes in the original format. And the DVD transfer quality just isn't the same... I need a DVD recorder, I think. The PC-based means I use isn't very good. So I'll always need to have a VHS machine to play those family tapes.

I agree with the philosophy of the people who still collect eight track cartridges: State of the art is in the eye of the beholder. The VHS format is perfectly good for the way I use it. DVDs are a pain in the butt in many ways, and really aren't the perfect media that they were claimed to be. Rental disks often have digital drop outs and seem very sensitive to smudges and mishandling; they're much less robust than VHS tapes seem to be. (The Video Vault guy, who is in the business, agrees with me.) And, frankly, I don't often care to listen to hours of "extras" comments by the actors, director, wardrobe master, title font designer, etc. Some of these are interesting but many are a waste of time. Games and web link extras? Please. And easter eggs are just annoying; when I want information I want it readily available, I don't have the time to bother searching a DVD for it.

Last but not least, I refuse to put myself at the mercy of the media marketers. I will not invest in thousands of dollars of expensive electronic equipment that have built-in obsolescence dates. Blu-ray? No thanks, not until it becomes an inexpensive, reliable, commodity standard. Crummy old conventional resolution scan, two channel stereo (Dolby 5.1 multi-channel is a pain) and VHS tapes are fine for me, thank you. It suits film noir and the stuff I usually find myself watching and listening to. When producers and directors make new media that is as good as the old stuff, maybe I'll start investing - but I won't be holding my breath.

Viacom, Time-Warner, Corporate America... to quote my daughter in a video she did about dumpster diving, screw you!

21 April 2008

Ugh. The only thing that could make a Monday morning worse is gray, dreary weather. And we have that.

I watched some J.D. films over the weekend. (Executive summary: they all sucked.)

The Black Rebels (1960) - a.k.a. "This Rebel Breed." The premise is jaw-droppingly stupid: the LAPD, in order to work from the inside on a high school narcotics job, use an obviously white-looking detective (who is supposed to be half-Mexican) to attempt to infiltrate a black gang. The actor looks like he has a coat of shoe polish on his face! What really puts this over the top on the stupid meter, however, is an occasional gratuitous scene, inserted for a re-release in 1965, of some topless women cavorting about. Oh, and the teenagers look like they're pushing thirty. An early film/embarrassment of Rita Moreno, an actress who has won a Tony, an Emmy, a Grammy and an Oscar. (But not for this one.)

Curfew Breakers (1957) - Originally titled "Narcotics Squad," I think this one was hastily repackaged with a quick frame with the words "Curfew Breakers" to fit with the J.D. film craze. Only they left the original "Narcotics Squad" title sequence in. Incredibly boring. In fact, I fell asleep during it.

Naked Youth (1960) - THERE ARE NO UNDRESSED YOUTHS IN THIS FILM. It may not be apparent from the films I'm reporting on here, but I do have standards... The title is "naked" as in "Naked City." In other words, the real, unvarnished story. One IMDb reviewer wrote, "Unfortunately, there isn't enough kitsch to make this a 'so bad it's good' classic. It remains reasonably amusing for fans of this type of junk." Wrong! It wasn't even reasonably amusing. It just sucked.

Juke Box Rhythm (1959) - Okay, not a J.D. film. It's an early rock and roll film. I normally find those amusing ("Bop Girl Goes Calypso" is a good one), but this one was just way too prissy. In fact, I quit watching nearly half-way through.

Turner Movie Classics is airing an eight film run of J.D. flicks next week; I shall put tapes into the VHS recorder and let her run! I see one of them is The Delinquents (1957), which has been recommended to me. Looks sort of promising.

Whenever TCM airs cult films they have a little promo spot featuring directors commenting about cult films in general. One quote is apt: "A director cannot make a cult film. The audience does." True enough!

I am now reading S.E. Hinton's teen classic "the Outsiders," which I somehow missed reading during my own youth. (My high school pal Mike recommended it.) After I finish it it'll be back to Fifteenth Century England. I got it for a quarter from what looked like a ten year-old girl at a yard sale! I refrained from asking if she had any novelizations of "Naked Youth."

I started by saying the only thing thing that could make a Monday morning worse was gray weather. I was wrong! Here's Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers as performed by the Portsmouth Sinfonia. That ought to do it.

18 April 2008

Teens! Crime!

I watched two more J.D. flicks last night. The first was an entry from 1979; in that year two similar films were released with similar titles, "The Warriors" and "The Wanderers." The first is the better-known film which I've seen and like. (How could I not? It's based on Xenophon's Anabasis.) Last night I watched the second one. Found in the comedy section of Video Vault (not the right place for it), The Wanderers was quite good. In fact, I think I'll watch it again! It takes place in 1963 and is a mix of elements also found in American Graffiti, Grease and the Warriors. It's not as surreal as the Warriors, more true to life than Grease, and not as true to life as American Graffiti. Interesting how filmmakers can come up with four takes on what is essentially the same material.

(And for those of you who object that 1963 was not the 1950's, I will agree but make the observation that the Sixties didn't really get started until the JFK assassination and the arrival of the Beatles. Indeed, there's an interesting scene where a prototypical, oily-haired 1950's teen stares into the window of a coffee shop and sees Bob Dylan - or a wanna-be Bob Dylan, I wasn't sure which - singing "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and realizes that a whole new world is beginning out of his reach or understanding.)

It surprises me that this film isn't better known than it is; it could almost be classified as a cult film. Anyway, it's recommended and is a happy discovery of my current cinematic interest. A perceptive review is here.

The second film I watched was one of Roger Corman's exploitation classics: Teenage Doll (1957). The IMDb has this one listed as a film noir, and I can't argue. The plot, a teenage girl involved in a death is pursued by a Deb gang, is noirish. It fits into a J.D. noir sub-category along with High School Big Shot (1959), a personal favorite. The first five minutes or so have undeniable impact: an expressionist title sequence leads into a basin of dirty dishwater thrown on the body of a young woman laying dead in an alley. Whew! I guess it goes without saying this is a black and white film. The most accurate summary I can give is that it's 71 minutes of bleak sleeze, shaky acting, attitude and outrage thrown up on the screen in the finest Roger Corman tradition. I loved it.

Director Roger Corman is legendary in Hollywood for never making a film using his own money and never losing a dime. For this film, the IMDb has the following trivia item: "While shooting an exterior scene in a suburban neighborhood, one of the neighbors turned on their sprinkler system in hopes that director Roger Corman would pay them to turn it off. Instead, Corman used the free special effect to make it a rain scene which worked out better for the shoot." Ha!

While there are male gangs in this film, Teenage Doll is essentially the story of a Deb gang. (Debs, debutantes: Females attached to a male gang. In this one, the male gang, the Tarantulas, have the Black Widows as the associated Deb gang.) It's grimy. Even the hapless pretty blonde runs around with blood on her clothing (which a blind beggar can smell). The rumble sequence at the end is effectively staged in a junkyard. And a notable sequence shows the semi-feral and hungry kid sister of the head Deb living alone in a squalid, darkened kitchen, eating cardboard and crackers. When Roger Corman goes for outrage, he lays it on thick!

And it has Bruno VeSota! He appears in all the best worst films: Daddy-O, Dementia, Female Jungle. His bio is here. For me, VeSota's most impressive scene is a nightmarish sequence in Dementia where he eats a chicken, the camera coming in close to show the chicken fat on his lips and chin.

You can't find that kind of thing in mainstream Hollywood product, by golly.

In fifteenth century England, teens like Edward IV and his brother the Duke of Gloucester (later Richard III) were involved in the dynastic rumble known as the War of the Roses. Here's a passage in my current book on that subject about the capture of their hapless enemy Henry VI; it jumped off the page for me due to the oddness of the names: "Betrayed by a monk and chased from his dinner at the house of a sympathizer not far from Clitheroe, he was caught in a wood near a ford through the Ribble called Bungerly Hippinstones, deserted by all save two priests and a groom." A ford through the Ribble called Bungerly Hippinstones. And people think J.K. Rowling makes stuff like this up. Only in England.

Have a great weekend! I've got "Curfew Breakers" (1957) to watch.

17 April 2008

Last night I watched the latest installment in my survey of 1950's teen films, "I Was A Teenage Werewolf" (1957), which is a better film that the title would suggest. (It would almost have to be.) While I liked it, I think I might pass on its stablemate, "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein" (1957). It's not quite what I'm looking for, which is the great Leather Jackets and Switchblades movie of all time. I was talking to Jim McCabe, the Video Vault guy, about it yesterday; he drew a mental blank. We sort of agreed that it must be "Blackboard Jungle" from 1955. We also speculated that the best film of this type wasn't made in the 1950's, but later.

I also watched "Teenage Wolfpack" (1956), which was an oddity from West Germany. I found this one to be pretty slow-moving. It perks up at the end with a few gunshots, but otherwise, eh. What's more, it's hard to take JD's named "Gunter" seriously. Sounds too art house, or like something featured on Dieter's "Sprockets" show.

Personally, I think the two greatest teenage crime films are Luis Bunuel's "Los Olvidados" (1950) and William Wyler's "Dead End" (1937). While both are personal favorites, neither are what I'm looking for. The first film takes place in Mexico City, and the second is a work about crime in Depression era slums.

If you ever get a chance to see Los Olvidados, you should. It is truly excellent, and one of those films that you find yourself thinking about the next day.

Dead End was billed as a Humphrey Bogart-Joel McCrea film, but the Dead End Kids steal the show. They became so popular that this film was followed by no less than six other Dead End Kids films before the kids turned into the Bowery Boys and had yet another run of films (which were no where as good as the originals). Read about them here. As a personal note I will add that Bernard "Milty" Punsly later became my mother-in-law's doctor. He was the last suriving Dead End Kid, and died in 2004. My father-in-law bitterly complaining about him one Christmas Eve is a memory I'll always cherish.

Reading my personal account of juvenile delinquency in yesterday's entry, my pal Don writes, "When I was about ten and got thinking of hitting the big one three, my big fear re: juvenile delinquency was that on becoming a 'teenager' one automatically became a J.D." He's absolutely right... I recall a feeling of inevitability about it as well. Perhaps it's born out of a fear for being taken as something that you really aren't.

Here's something interesting; my friend Chris points out that the Earth hums. What's it humming? I know: "Duke, duke, duke/Duke of Earl, earl, earl/Duke of Earl, earl, earl/Duke of Earl, earl, earl..."

16 April 2008

An interesting quote for you to ponder, from my desk calendar: "Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." - Dr. William C. Dement. Funny last name, huh? (Dement, dementia...)

Continuing with the 1950's juvenile delinquency movie theme, last night I watched "High School Hellcats" (1958). Note that the reviewer in the link came up with a better name for Dagmars - "rocket bras," which neatly describes this 1950's fashion fad.

Alas! The film was disappointing. Way too tame - not at all what I'm looking for. And that poster at left doesn't accurately represent what the film was like, as was often the case with what we now call "exploitation" films. So... what is the great leather jacket and switchblades film from the 1950's, I wonder? I've seen "Blackboard Jungle" (1955) and I can't believe that's it. I thought "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) was pretty unimpressive, too. It's out there, somewhere.

I distinctly remember being afraid of juvenile delinquency when I was, I'm not sure, five or six. Before I started kindergarten, I think. I recall seeing some news report about the rise of teenage gangs, and became apprehensive about stepping foot in an elementary school for fear of being beaten up or threatened by big kids in leather jackets who carried switch blades - as seen in the news report. While I got through kindergarten without incident (save embarrassingly wetting my pants in class one day), I did have a couple of nasty encounters with big kids later on. "Big" being defined as, say, twelve or thirteen.

Let's see... when I was about seven or so some kids - who happened to be black - grouped around and threatened me one day while I was playing in a supermarket parking lot. One held a switchblade (or was it really something else like a comb?) to my neck and threatened to "cut me open."

As I recall, the incident fell along the usual lines of predictable dialogue:

Big kid: You think you can beat me up?
Me: No!
Big kid: You want me to cut you open?
Me: No!
Big kid: You gonna tell the police on me if I let you go?
Me: No!
et cetera...

After terrorizing me for awhile they got bored and left. Not surprisingly, I remembered that little encounter for the rest of my life. About a year or so later some big kids - who happened to be white - waylaid me while walking home from school and forced me to walk to their house where they let me go. I guess leading a little kid astray was that afternoon's sport. I was consequently about an hour late to get home. Mom demanded to know why, and I told her. She packed me into the car and angrily drove to the house, where she gave the big kid's trashy mother holy hell as only an angry, big-boned French-Canadian woman could.

Nowadays I'm fairly confident the school and the police would have gotten involved.

All this took place in the Silverlake District of Los Angeles, which was, in the early to mid Sixties, declining (as they say). Nowadays the area has become chic, except around where the supermarket parking lot was. I visited the site (now a parking lot for a moving company) when I was in L.A. last November, and felt an odd apprehension in my belly. Mentally I'm over it, but physiologically I'm not, I guess.

Anyway, it was the catalyst for Mom and Dad to move out to the San Fernando Valley, to Burbank, which was deemed safer. (It was.)

Funny thing, though. I was nearly nine when we moved out of Silverlake. At the time I was a junior member of a gang of older kids led by a twelve year-old; we were beginning to be engaged in petty crime (breaking windows, lighting match fires, trespassing, etc.) and it makes me wonder how I would have turned out had we stayed in L.A. Perhaps I would have morphed into what I feared.

Or not. After all, the mid-Sixties were considerably different than the late-Fifties/early-Sixties. Violence trended out and drug use trended in.

Still reading my book about the War of the Roses. It has Henry Payne's dramatic "Choosing the Red and White Roses" on the cover; you can't read about the war without encountering that painting over and over again. Good write-up on that linked page...

15 April 2008

Mad magazine fold-ins cleverly rendered into HTML. Normally I don't bother with the New York Times, but here I think they're found a niche, presenting the work of a superior publication.

I watched a notable relic of the 1950's pop culture last night: "Daddy-O" (1959). You know you're in Elvis territory when there's a scene where the protagonist is in a nightclub eating and the saxophone player from the house band demands that he get up and perform a song. ("Sweeter than cherry/Boysenberry!/Sweeter than coffee/English toffee!/Sweeter than jam is candied yams/Rock candy, baby, you're mine!") Well, okay, maybe you're in wanna-be Elvis territory; that's where Daddy-O is at. And yes, there's a Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this film. But I don't watch those... noooo. I watch the original released versions.

The lead in this is Dick Contino, who in real life played the accordion and was billed as "the World's Greatest Accordion Player." His signature piece was a truly horrible song entitled "Lady of Spain" that I used to hear frequently in the Sixties, causing me to dry heave. And I have nothing more to say about that wretched instrument save that my father used to call them "stomach Steinways."

In Daddy-O Contino wears his pants way, way too high.

This film was specifically recommended to me by the owner of Video Vault ("Guaranteed Worst Movies in Town!" - my wife calls this place "Eccentricity Central"). What he failed to mention was that the title theme was written by what must have been a very young John Williams; this is his first film score. Nice to know that he went on to better things.

One last thing: the female lead, a dishy platinum blonde with Dagmar breasts drives a white Thunderbird. I wonder if she provided the inspiration for Suzanne Somers' mysterious character in "American Graffiti?"

Anyway, I am now on a 1950's juvenile delinquent/rock and roll film kick. I plan to rent films this week from the section of Video Vault called "Troubled Teens." A lingering Grease influence, I suppose.

However, my current reading material couldn't be further removed. I have now started the book I've been avoiding for eight years: "The War of the Roses" by Desmond Seward. So far I'm finding it a good read and not at all as difficult as I had feared. Watching all those Shakespeare plays is helping me to sort out the characters in my head. Here's an image of one, Louis de Gruuthuyse of Burgundy. And once again I wonder, is this what he really looked like? Geez. Nice Sonny Bono hair...

14 April 2008

Some -ologies, from my desk calendar. "Ripperology": I've always had an interest in the Ripper crimes, and, like many others, have always wondered who Jack the Ripper could have been. Donald Rumbelow, a former City of London detective, wrote my favorite book on the subject, and said the following: "I have always had the feeling that on the Day of Judgment, when all things shall be known, when I and the other generations of 'Ripperologists' ask for Jack the Ripper to step forward and call out his true name, we shall turn and look with blank astonishment at one another as he does so and say 'Who?'"

From all the reading I've done, I think the most likely suspect was Montague John Druitt; that's where I'd put my bets, were I a betting man. Popular writer Patricia Cornwell opined that he was Walter Sickert - mainly because she says so. And the debate continues... But I'm inclined to agree with Rumbelow - it was "Who?"

By the way, have you ever seen the photographs of Ripper's victims? Most people haven't. Mary Kelly's - his last victim - is truly ghastly. (Warning: I'm not kidding.) Now that you have a picture of Ripper victim in your head he's a slightly different character, isn't he?

Another desk calendar page: "Perfect women." And the score stands Jews 1 (or 2), Christians 1, Muslims 2.

My daughter did her last high school mainstage performance (Rizzo in Grease) on Saturday night, which means that something my wife and I have been involved in since 2002 (activity as drama booster parents) is drawing to a close. I'll miss the hectic preparations that went into the performances, seeing those kids act their little hearts out, selling sodas and candy to the audiences, the cast parties, the backstage work, the photography, etc. Being around teens makes for a lively experience, that's for sure.

It's funny, as I get older and my hearing and eyesight deteriorate, my sense of smell seems to be improving. At one point in the play the kids come in through the back doors. I can smell the leather, sweat and Brylcreem before I actually see or hear them. That - and cigarette smoke - must have been what the Fifties smelled like.

At one point during a cast party I realized with a jolt that I was one of the few people there who could actually remember the Fifites. I was three in 1959, and recall watching a television show called "Discovery '59." Also, looking at family films dated that year, I recall the toys I played with, etc. Yes, my rugby club is right, I'm afraid.

From what I've seen, Grease (the original 1972 off-Broadway musical) is an interesting play, and is quite a bit different from the John Travolta movie everyone is familiar with. For one thing, it's a lot raunchier. Anyway, I'll have to take a break from my current obsession with English history and read it.

But until then I'm still reading my book about London. See this illustration; I'd like to see this play, "The Roaring Girle, or Moll Cut-Purfe." Looks like a hoot.

11 April 2008

I took over 600 photos of last night's production of "Grease"; as I mentioned, my daughter played Rizzo. Now to sort through them all. I'm guessing I'll delete about 100 of them for being out of focus, poorly composed or badly exposed. I should end up with about fifty good ones.

One thing that didn't help was that the student lighting director chose to not throw much light on the stage a lot of the time, making it hard for my camera not to blur, even at high ASA settings. And then, when I got the settings more or less adjusted for a character in dim lighting, he or she would walk under a spot light and burn out... In my experience, trying to capture good shots of a stage production is much more difficult than shooting the fast action on a rugby pitch. At least rugby is (normally) played in the daylight, where there's sufficient light to freeze action at fast shutter speeds.

Getting back to Grease, funny thing is, some of those boys look a lot better with greasy Fifties hair and leather jackets than they do in the current high school style. It must be me, just being used to what might be called historic style. I recall noticing at one point when I was doing Revolutionary War reenacting that pointed hats, regimental coats, stockings and shoes with buckles seemed to finally make sense and no longer looked odd. In fact, it suits some guys quite well. Historical looks take a while to get used to, but when you do you just sort of accept them they way you do greasy hair and leather jackets.

Likewise, Civil War era dress and grooming. I got used to looking at goatees long before they came back into fashion. (Doesn't mean I like 'em. Frankly, I'm sick of looking at guys with goatees.) I suppose at some point shaved heads, tattoos, piercings and goatees - what I call "the inmate look" - will being to look stale and tame.

I suppose that's what drives the fashion industry: the brain's willingness to accept new looks. Indeed, there may even be a desire on the part of the brain for novel visual stimulation in the way of clothing and grooming.

I always find it interesting to look at some actor whose looks I get used to from some historical film; after an hour or two, his or her looks begin to fit the period. Then you see a shot of her in current dress and a sort of surprise or mental confusion takes place. For instance, Cate Blanchett. The only films I've seen with her are the two Elizabeth I films. Okay, vibrantly red wig, pasty white makeup and excessive clothing. After a while it kind of suits her. Then you see this and think, Whoa. (Frankly, I think she looked better in the Elizabethan freak show get up than here.)

While we're on the subject of London women... from Trease's book I'm reading, London kissing - commented upon (favorably) by medieval male visitors. Whether or not one would look forward to being kissed by Blanchett would depend upon what she looks like that day, I guess.

Have a great weekend!

10 April 2008

Henry VIII: Worst Shakespeare play, ever. After boring you to tears for more than two hours, the final scene has the Archbishop of Canterbury holding the infant Elizabeth in his hands, making all sorts of rosy and gushing prophecies regarding the wonderful future reign of this child. I mean, could Shakespeare have written a more obvious Tudor suck-up?

Okay, I exaggerate. Even second-rate Shakespeare has its high points, and these include the speeches given by Catherine of Aragon refusing to knuckle under as Henry demands an annulment. But other than this, this is a pretty dreary play and, as I wrote, my least favorite.

In 1613 a fire destroyed the Globe Theatre during a performance... while I wouldn't take this drastic a step to end it, I can understand why somebody would.

I am now reading "London - A Concise History" by Geoffrey Trease, another one of my books waiting on the shelf for a reawakening of my interest in English history. In my readings I keep looking for the site of the oldest part of London - where is it now? - and reading between the lines I see that it must have been around where St. Paul's Church is now, and where the present day London Bridge is, on the north bank of the Thames. However the book also notes that prehistoric man lived in today's Kensington and Wimbledon, outside of what is known as The City.

Being an old movie buff (than is, liking old films) I am usually uncaring about new films coming out - I find that when I see them I often am disappointed - but I must confess to being intrigued about two new ones. The first is Iron Man, which has a promising trailer. Okay, make that a very promising trailer. But Hollywood has long since mastered the art of making great promotional shorts out of films that suck, so who knows? I always liked the comic book character when I was a kid; so much so that I created my own rip-off character: Captain Tin. (Read it and you'll see why I suspect Hollywood won't be approaching me for filming rights.) Iron Man premieres next month.

The other film is Forever Strong, about rugby - specifically Utah rugby. I confess to having an interest because I once interviewed Larry Gelwix, the coach of the Highland High club profiled in the film, and... well... it's about Mormons. Or should be, at least partially (as my interview makes clear). We shall see. To be released in fall. Here's the official site which begins, as a lot of good rugby does, with a haka.

9 April 2008

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been digitizing some Monkees Lps - music, clicks, pops and vinyl noise all contributing to the sonic image and the Sixties ambiance. Some of these tracks are even monophonic! But as I learned from my record collector friend Vern, who plays his Lps on a cheap, circa 1967 portable record player, what's important is the music, not the medium. Taking this to heart, I have recently decided that two channel stereo is my preferred audio delivery mode. Screw Dolby 5.1, DTS and complex digital sound field creations. They're a bother to implement. And, as the 8-Track cartridge enthusiasts maintain, "State of the Art is in the Eye of the Beholder." But I digress.

I must confess a recently-acquired fondness for the Monkees. Their management sensibly obtained the services of some of the best pop song writers of the day (Neil Diamond, Carole King, Boyce and Hart, etc.), and it shows. Their music sounds fresh and yet familiar to my jaded ears. It's a mix of a circa 1966 Beatles band production with an American pop lyrical approach, with some manic antics from the TV show thrown in. So what I've been doing is recording the songs not usually found on their "greatest hits" CDs and listening to them.

Hey, I can't listen to the Portsmouth Sinfonia all the time.

Despite the fact that they were a music industry assembled band, the Monkees had some impressive accomplishments (as listed on wikipedia): They were the first band to use a Moog synthesizer in a top-10 album ("Star Collector"), they gave the Jimi Hendrix Experience their first U.S. concert appearances, they compelled another David Jones to change his surname to Bowie to avoid being confused with Davy Jones, the Monkees reunion tour was the largest grossing tour of 1986, the Monkees outsold the Beatles and Elvis combined in 1967, they were the first music artist to win two Emmy awards, the first actual live concert footage to be featured in a motion picture was in their "Head" (1968), they had no less than seven albums on the Billboard top 200 chart at the same time (six were re-issues during 1986/87), their Lp "More of The Monkees" spent an amazing 70 weeks on the Billboard charts becoming the 12th biggest selling album of all time (Billboard.com), and, finally, they had no less than four number one albums in a year span. Not too shabby.

And, frankly, right now I'd rather listen to them than Led Zeppelin, who have been relentlessly overplayed since the early Seventies.

So let's have some respect for Mike, Peter, Davy and Mickey. Click here to listen to the strangely endearing throwaway song "I'm Gonna Buy Me A Dog."

I'm finishing up my Shakespearian English kings chronicle with a viewing of his Henry VIII. It's not good. Like King John, it's dull. They can't all be Hamlet, I guess. But what's even worse, it soft-pedals what a thorough monster and tyrant Henry VIII was. Why? Probably because he was the father of Shakespeare's patron, Elizabeth I. I'm pretty sure that horny blob is my least favorite English monarch; whenever I read an English history book my bile starts to rise when I get to the chapters dealing with his misrule. Certainly he kept a steady flow of people imprisoned in the Tower and sent to Tower Hill, where the executions took place. It's one of the ironies of history that his reign, which caused the deaths of so many to maintain Tudor power via a male heir, resulted instead in a legacy based on a daughter (Elizabeth). And that that daughter would remain childless, ending the dynasty.

This is Tech Week (a.k.a. Hell Week) in the Brigham Household. My daughter Meredith appears this weekend as Rizzo (yes, the bad girl) in the high school production of "Grease," and this week is set aside for final rehearsals, stage building, light and sound design and music coordination. Since my wife is the Drama Boosters president (coordinating dinners and microphones, etc.) and I am the drama dogsbody and photographer, it's hectic. However, this being the last school production involving my last child, I suspect I'll miss it in the future. Certainly, the acting bug is contagious. I watch these shows, think, "It looks like fun and I can do that," and want to take part. Perhaps that's the Next Thing, theatre.

I mentioned that I was at the Smithsonian American Art Museum last week; here's something that impressed me.

8 April 2008

Last night I was playing around with a turntable I once bought at a yard sale, digitizing some Lps I haven't gotten around to. (Namely, Monkees Lps.) I came across one of the odder records in my collection, the notorious 101 Strings "Sounds of Love" Lp, perhaps their biggest lapse in taste. (101 Strings was a budget "easy listening/beautiful music" format orchestra who specialized in theme records available at grocery stores. A wikipedia article is here.) Just for kicks I digitized the jazz/big band classic "I've Got it Bad (And That Ain't Good)" track for you, "vocals by Bebe Bardon." I'm not sure what employment Bebe found in the 1960's, with her moaning and gasping talent... a precursor to the 1980's telephone call-in singles lines, I suppose. Anyway, see if you can listen to this without laughing or feeling uncomfortable.

(By the way, a far, far better recording of this venerable torch song is by Julie London, my favorite chanteuse. Here. It also has a truly first class old school jazz guitar break.)

Oh, wait... doing a google search on Bebe Bardon, I see the Mystic Moods Orchestra also did an easy listening/erotic crossover masterpiece - click here. I'm telling you, the Sixties and Seventies were not only stranger than you think, they were stranger than you can think!

Some kitschy 101 Strings theme record covers:

The Soul of England
East of Suez
Sounds and Songs of the Jet Set
Sounds of Today
Que Mango!

...you get the idea. My dad, no doubt attracted to the Sixties babes on the album covers, used to pick these up in the local Ralphs (grocery store chain in Southern California) for $1.99. I grew up listening to them on the family stereo.

What do you call it when the government is run by...?

In reading that book about the Tower of London that I'm reading, I've come across a reference to a cell that was supposedly within the Tower precincts, the "Little Ease." It is called this because it's a cell so small that a man cannot stand up, sit down or lie down in it. Problem is, however, that the location is lost; this cell cannot be found anywhere within the Tower complex. The location was supposedly in the White Tower - the big square main part - but no space answers to that description. So where is it? I have an answer: a economy class seat on a British Airways flight to London.

7 April 2008

BBC's April Fool's video. I like the shot of the penguins lifting off, watched by the other penguins.

Over the weekend a friend of mine begged for another Portsmouth Sinfonia piece, so here it is. Rossini's William Tell Overture. Well, an approximation thereof. Play it LOUD.

I am now reading "The Tower - The Tumultuous History of the Tower of London from 1078" by Derek Wilson. From this you might think there is one tower, but in fact the Tower complex includes no less than twenty: the Bloody Tower (or the Garden Tower), Bell Tower, Beauchamp Tower (pronounced 'Beecham'), Deveraux Tower, Flint Tower, Bowyer Tower, Brick Tower, Martin Tower, Constable Tower, Broad Arrow Tower, Salt Tower, Lanthorn Tower, Wakefield Tower, Byward Tower, St Thomas's Tower, Cradle Tower, Develin Tower, Middle Tower, Well Tower and, of couse, the White Tower, which is the notable big part that sticks above all the rest on the London skyline. Next to the White Tower, I found the Beauchamp Tower to be the most interesting, as it has been turned into a political prisoners' museum of sorts.

My Tower of London page, copiously illustrated with photos, is here. A fascinating place, like a Disneyland for those interested in English history.

I'm sure you heard that one of the greats, Charlton Heston, died over the weekend. He was my favorite actor ever since I was a kid watching repeated showings of "The Ten Commandments" with my friend Jimmy; Hollywood has nothing remotely like him. Everyone knows about his roles in historical epics and science-fiction, but the one Heston film I really want to see, but haven't, is a film noir: Dark City (1950). It's usually panned, but I want to see it anyway as I like Liz Scott, one of noir's great femme-fatales.

Finally, on a personal note, I recently did the last of my "blue chair photos," this time with Meredith, my youngest child. (Her brother and sister Ethan and Julie.) A tradition begun in 1984 thus ends.

4 April 2008

I watched a great old film the other night: The Great Train Robbery (1903). Yes, 1903. That's 105 years ago. It's considered to be the very first narrative film, and clocks in at only ten minutes or so. The plot and action are pretty forgettable; what makes it interesting has to do with what makes it historic. First of all, it's in color! Sort of. Some things in it are colored by tints applied to the surface of the film. Gunsmoke appears as a weird, orange-red cloud - it looks like they're firing paprika at one another. And one woman wears a yellow dress that seems to move independently of her.

The interior sets are pretty funny. Three dimensional details, like a pot-belly stove, are painted on flat surfaces and still appear flat. The door to the train station doesn't seem to close properly. And what looks like a projection shot of an arriving train can be seen through a window, which is perhaps the film's oddest-looking effect since it's out of scale with the interior (the train looks like it's an inch or two away from the building).

But, of course, this film is considered a landmark because of what it does well, which is tell a story. Prior to 1903, films didn't do that; at least not to the extent that this one does. And it's also the first film where somebody is made to dance when somebody else fires a revolver at his feet. That cliche is so old that I don't think we've seen it since the 1940's, but it got its start in 1903.

The most celebrated scene is the one everyone knows, where a cowboy (pictured above) - the first in a long, long line of cinema cowboys - points a six-shooter at the audience and fires. Turner Movie Classic film critic Robert Osborne says that people in the audience actually ducked! Those were different times, to be sure. Nowadays teenagers watch epics made for hundreds of millions of dollars and dissect the flaws with the CGI.

I mentioned that I was at the National Portrait Gallery the other day. While there I saw the celebrated portrait of Stephen Colbert between the doors to the restrooms. Uhhhh... okay. From what little I've caught of the Colbert Report, I suspect this fellow isn't as funny as he thinks he is.

I also once again saw a favorite work that I am somewhat conflicted about, Ole Peter Hanson Balling's "Grant and his Generals." On one hand, the Union patriotism of the piece appeals to me. What drama! (Never mind that fact that a Reb shell exploded overhead would take out the entire executive corps of the Union war effort.) And it's the most unique serious art depiction of U.S. Grant there is. On the other hand, I think the notion of portraiture while astride a fiercely galloping horse is pretty ridiculous. See how dignified my pose and the look on my face are whilst I control this rampaging steed. Grant was a legendary horseman, but come on. The silliness is magnified by having all those other posing generals tossed in for good measure. An impossible snapshot in time.

This time I noticed the discarded canteen at the bottom of the canvas. Some Reb, seeing all that Union brass galloping his way, dropped it and fled.

Anyway, Balling's work reminds me of Gilbert Stuart's "The Skater." I find the whole notion of athletic setting portraiture to be odd. If you're going to have your face recorded formally for posterity, sit still (and try to look intelligent).

Have a great weekend!

3 April 2008

I normally wouldn’t take this blog into the men’s room with me, but I’m a curious guy and, the other day, I was wondering.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that in public restrooms, the stalls and other fixtures are attached with one-way and security screws. (What’s a one-way screw?) The question is, why? Are men’s room stalls in any great danger of being stolen? Does this happen often?

Being a believer in Occam’s Razor (“The simplest answer is usually the correct one”) it must be that facility managers are having problems with theft and vandalism. Why else invest in specialty screws and screwdrivers to combat a non-existent problem?

Doing some Internet research, I turned up a place where somebody wondered the same thing I did, and got answers on a place called askville.com.

Note the rather surprising third answer about theft and vandalism in the ladies’ room. This reminds me of something my father once told me. He had a job at Lockheed aircraft as a maintenance painter – and sometimes found himself having to paint facility restrooms. He told me that he observed over the years that the ladies rooms are invariably messier and more damaged than the men’s rooms. (I have heard this elsewhere from a credible source, but I forget where.) Now, this flew in the face of the notion that females are generally well-behaved and insist upon civilization, order and manners. For instance, name one male etiquette column writer. But the reality within the tiled walls argues otherwise!

Women can be real she-beasts. A Confederate soldier once famously wrote in his diary, "This war would be over if not for the women."

...which ties in with Shakespeare. Part of the fun of watching the three Henry VI plays I just watched was seeing Julia Foster wail, roar, howl and rage as Margaret of Anjou (Henry VI’s dominant wife) – perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest hellion, and a real stall-breaker if ever there was one. She has a plum scene at the end of Richard III: Sitting atop a big pile of bleeding bodies (a result of the War of the Roses) she cackles and laughs insanely, while cradling her enemy Richard’s battered corpse. It’s not Shakespeare but it’s memorable!

But... being male I’d rather think about an idealized sort of female and not the ones who rage, shriek, scream, demand, badger, harp, etc. and sit atop small mountains of bleeding corpses. Which brings me to... Ginevra.

I was in the National Portrait Gallery the other day – which is attached to the Smithsonian American Art Museum – and came across a truly stunning female. One so beautiful, with ideal features and expression, that I had to stand and gaze. Here she is, Ginevra, by Hiram Powers. I cannot describe how lovely this sculpture is – you have to see it. It is beauty and perfection in cold, smooth, 166 year-old marble.

The story behind the name is interesting, too. I read Rogers’ poem cited in the Smithsonian plaque; it’s provocative. Was Ginevra the bride murdered? No... she crept into the chest for reasons of her own (she was described as a lover of pranks) and a latch caught, locking her in. On her wedding day. For some reason nobody heard her banging away to get free; I guess they were all at the wedding party. Nobody smelled a decomposing body, either. Incredible.

I've read tragic things like that happening with children in discarded refrigerators (Ginevra being only fifteen was but a child), but nobody wrote poetry about it.

Victorians. Sheesh.

(Today's blog entry was one of my occasional forays into sexual politics, an area most men fear to tread. Another little essay from March 2002 is here: The Weaker Sex. Hope I don't sound too boorish.)

2 April 2008

Finished watching Henry VI part three last night. Wow. I'm going to take a night or two to sponge the blood and muck off myself and wade into Richard III later this week, where I will be further embloodied. I've seen it before, years ago, but I need to see it again to appreciate it in light of all the chronicle plays that preceded it. So... two left to go: Richard III and Henry VIII.

I've seen Shakespeare's King John before (the BBC version), but it's something of a yawner and doesn't really fit into the chronicle canon.

I am now reading "A Guide to Royal London," by Christopher Hibbert, a book I probably should have read before visiting the place! Here's an excerpt that we can call the Coronation Follies. I'm sure King Charles' coronation will come off better than some of these, when it happens.

By the way, Prince Charles could be crowned as Charles III, but he doesn't have to be. He can pick out a different regnal name. From wikipedia, that wonderful resource: "It is rumoured that Charles, Prince of Wales (Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor) would wish to assume the regnal name of "George VII" upon his accession to the throne as opposed to "Charles III" in light of the perceived unpopularity of both previous British kings who reigned using the name Charles. Charles I was beheaded for treason during the English Civil War (1642-1660) following his trial. His rule remains controversial; his son, Charles II, while in many ways popular, was nonetheless regarded with suspicion for his Catholic sympathies—suspicions borne out by his deathbed conversion—and for allowing the succession of his outwardly Catholic brother, James II. The regnal name George is dynastically acceptable to the Windsor family. Another possibility would be the double-barrelled Charles George."

You read it here first!

But what's in a name? A lot, apparently. I have a bunch of French-Canadian ancestors who had "dit" names. "Dit" in French in this context means "called," and is used when a person named, say, Isaac Aucoin (my maternal grandfather) wants to be known as Isaac Wedge. So he would be Isaac Aucoin dit Wedge. "Aucoin" in French means, roughly, "in the corner." So an Anglicizing of it might be "Wedge." Or even "Conners" (corners), which I have also seen. Why on earth would they want to do that? Because, years ago, the French in Canada were something like second-class citizens and some wanted to fit in with the (Anglophone) crowd. Those days are gone, now, and the French-Canadians celebrate their heritage. Are very forward about it, in fact. I was considering attending the CONGRÈS MONDIAL ACADIEN in 2004, but didn't. Maybe next time.

Personally, I think my French-Canadian ancestors came up with dit names to make my genealogical research more difficult. If my mother is any indication, they were a difficult bunch.

1 April 2008

Every now and then you come across a news piece that just warms your heart and tells you, yes, all is right in the world, and it's a fair place after all. Here is an example of one of those: 84-year-old ex-marine kicks robber. (Proofreading note: The word "Marine," when applied to one of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children, is properly capitalized.)

Marriage terminology.

Last night I watched nearly half of Shakespeare's Henry VI, part three - the BBC production. I am really, really enjoying these. I don't believe I ever read these plays when I was a teen; I tended to avoid the War of the Roses because it's so complicated. Also, I didn't like Henry VI and found him generally uninteresting. But in the hands of The Bard, this stuff is fodder for fascinating drama. (Probably not accurate history in many ways, but fascinating drama.) In fact, I'm enjoying these productions a lot more than the much, much bigger budget Lord of the Rings films. (Oh, by the way, Bernard Hill, who plays the Richard of York in this, also played Theoden in the third Rings movie. Good actor.)

I like the director's approach to the trilogy: the first installment started light-hearted, almost comic, and got progressively darker and somewhat more bloody. The second installment is darker (the sets becoming worn and tatty looking, reflecting the effect that the wars have upon England) and the costumes become grayer. The color palette begins to shift to black, white, gray and blood red. More heads on pikes are seen - in the rebel Jack Cade sequence from part two, Cade has two heads, spitted upon pikes, kissing each other! (Which historically happened.)

Part III is darkest and bloodiest of all, with revenge and hate becoming a major part of the dramatic motivation. The production begins with a camera sweep of dead, bloody bodies heaped upon one another - the battlefield result of a Yorkist victory. And Peter Benson's portrayal of Henry VI (see yesterday's entry) is really growing on me. Nuanced and sympathetic, he emerges as a really interesting character after all. While nearly everyone in these plays grows consumed by hatred and bloodlust, King Henry, a spiritual doddard badly out of place, remains holy. Whenever I think of Henry VI, I shall see Benson's unmistakable features and hear his measured cadences in my head. A wonderful performance.

As dark and bloody as Henry VI, part three is, however, it serves as the prelude for the chronicle play with Shakespeare's untoppable villain: Richard III. The deaths really mount up in that one. I've seen the BBC production of this before, years ago, but without having seen the Henry VI trilogy which precedes it. Now I have a much better appreciation for Richard III as the last chapter in an entire cycle of works. What is Shakespeare doing, other than creating great art? Arguably, creating propaganda. For Shakespeare, the Tudor family (Henry Tudor - Henry VII - topples Richard III) can be seen as the welcome end to the incessant bloodshed of the previous kings. Henry Tudor was, after all, the grandfather of Elizabeth I, his Queen.

Anyway... I am really enjoying seeing all these plays in chronicle order. Should have done this years ago...

31 March 2008

Monday... the morning breaks, the shadows flee. The dawning of a brighter day majestic rises on the world. Spring is here and the little birdies are all a-twitter. What we need is some morning music! Here's an approximation of Edvard Grieg's well-known "Morning Mood" from his Peer Gynt Suite. The players are, of course, the Portsmouth Sinfonia. (By the way, I wrote a short review of the album from whence this came for amazon.com.)

Because it was written by Edvard Grieg, and people know he's Norwegian, they think this piece depicts sunrise somewhere in Scandinavia, over a fjord. It doesn't. This was incidental music for sunrise in the Sahara desert. Hey, sunrise looks pretty much the same the world over. Have you read Ibsen's Peer Gynt? Interesting work. My favorite part is where, towards the end of his life, he peels a metaphorical onion, layer after layer. The nothing at the core of it reflects the nothingness at his core. What a dreadful fate! I once read an account by a mad man about staring into a mirror and seeing nothing staring back, like an existence-vampire.

(You know, like how vampires can't see their own reflections? Oh, never mind.)

I watched the BBC Henry VI parts one and two over the weekend - about six hours of Shakespeare. After that you begin to hear period phrases in your head: "How now, sweet coz?" "He shall attend your majesty presently." "Be it not so, my lord! I was ever a faithful servant to the King!" etc. The BBC productions I'm watching are distinguished by their casts, Britons who know what they are saying. (Which is a pleasant change from high school Shakespearians.) The actor playing the foolish but devout Henry VI - Peter Benson, see image above - was born for the role. He can certainly act, I think a given with a BBC production of Shakespeare, and with his beakish nose and heavily-lidded eyes, he has a face that looks like it came right out of a period painting... which brings up a topic...

A question I sometimes ask myself when I look at old paintings is, "Do people look like that anymore? Did people really look like that then?" It's hard for me to give a general case since there are so many old images, but let's take the doddering and simplistic King Henry VI (Henry V's only child) as an example. Here are a bunch of images gleaned from the Internet. What did he really look like? I suspect the casting of Benson as Henry VI had more to do with the fact that he's a gifted actor with convincingly medieval-looking features rather than being a likeness of the real thing - because the real thing is elusive.

When I was on the London Underground I spent a lot of time looking at the faces of Londoners, and I came to a few conclusions:
1.) There are a lot of natives from foreign lands (that comprised the former British Empire) in London nowadays. The Anglo-Saxon capital doesn't look heavily Anglo-Saxon to me. And while watching TV at night I came across a news spot about London "white flight."
2.) The English (or British - I can't be sure who is a Welshman or a Scot, etc.) are, generally speaking, a handsome bunch. I saw a lot of women who I can only call "dishy"; blondes with startling blue eyes. Almost like California Girls without the tans. A lot of the men looked like rugby players (no surprise there).
3.) I saw quite a few faces that looked like the faces in medieval paintings: large noses, thin lips, heavily-lidded eyes, etc. Far more so than among Americans. So it kind of answered my question - yes, they must have looked like that back then.
4.) There is a subtle difference in looks between an American of Anglo-Saxon heritage and an Englishman. I can't quite pin it down, but the English don't look like Anglo-Saxon Americans (perhaps it's the racial "mutt" factor of an American mixing bowl).
5.) That whole bad teeth thing isn't really in evidence in London, from what I could see.

Back to the BBC productions... Brenda Blethyn, who played Joan of Arc in part one (with a broad English dialect I found kind of odd), is supposedly born with an extra finger. But look as I did, I couldn't see it. Also, Trevor Peacock, a favorite of mine who appears in a bunch of these productions, plays the hero Lord Talbot and the rogue Jack Cade. Not only does he act Shakespeare, but, during the Sixties, wrote pop songs for the likes of Herman's Hermits (he wrote "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter.")

I greatly prefer British actors to American ones... they're nowhere as annoying - and they can act.

28 March 2008

My latest book is "The Princes in the Tower" by Elizabeth Jenkins. It's about Edward V and his brother Richard of Shrewsbury, executed by... somebody. Nobody knows who. Now, *I* think it was Henry VII, but most people think it was Richard III. I'm keeping an open mind, however. One encouraging aspect of a life after death that I look forward to is interviewing these people and finding out for myself:

Brigham: Ed, everyone knows about your unfortunate demise at the hands of... who? Who did it? It's one of the great mysteries attached to English history. Do tell.
Edward V: I'm not certain, fair cousin. I was asleep in the Tower one night and I awoke feeling a pillow come down 'round my head. Then I was here. I know my good uncle Gloucester (Richard III) is blamed, but, faith, 'tis Henry Tudor (Henry VII) wot ordered it.
Brigham (a bit put out over the use of plebe slang): That's what I always thought! Well, see ya. I have to move on and find out who Jack the Ripper was. Good luck with the harp lessons.

The whole thing is one, well, two of many murders in a hoary bit of extended business known to history as the War of the Roses - the great English dynastic blood-letting that can be a real bear to keep straight. For instance, check out this passage from the book. Got all that? I came across it at 6:45 AM this morning. And they say rugby is hard.

I'm suddenly remembering why this book has been sitting unread on my shelf for the last eight years. Comparatively speaking, trying to figure out whose Division of the Army of the Potomac was advanced under a withering fire against whose Division in the Army of Northern Virginia, is a breeze. But! Onward and upward with the Beauforts, Yorks and the murderous Margaret of Anjou. It's what I'm into now.

Here's some fun! Last night I was doing some digitizing of Lps, and, just for kicks, I digitized a section of a Charles Ives piece for a piano tuned for quarter-tones. (That is, a piano tuned for the tones between the cracks in the keys - sort of.) Check it out. Sounds weird, huh? Ives was an interesting guy; his father was a Civil War bandmaster who used to have his wife and kids "stretch" their ears by putting on family recitals in which each member sang the same melody - in different keys. Needless to say, when Ives grew up he had some peculiar notions regarding tonality. As usual, wikipedia has a useful quarter tones article, if you've a mind to it. The whole subject of music tonality is fodder for a big blog entry. For instance there's equal temperament, Just intonation, Pythagorean tuning, etc. I can't pretend to understand it all... it's too mathematical for my poor head. I'm the liberal arts type.

Speaking of music that doesn't sound quite right, last night I also digitized the landmark 1974 Portsmouth Sinfonia Lp. You will of course recall that musical ensemble; it's the orchestra of non-musicians who do "approximations" of well-known classical pieces. (I've been using their rendition of Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" on giveaway Christmas CDs for years.) Click here for the wikipedia article. I found their album "Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics" at a library sale - I held it up and gave an involuntary shout of "Yes!" when I saw it. Fifty cents, that's all I paid. And some might say I was ripped off at that. Nonetheless I have, for you, their "approximation" of the opening to Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra," aka the Theme from 2001. Enjoy.

Had some fun last night removing a big holly stump from near my garage. As the bush has had perhaps twenty years to put down roots, it required the use of my friend Luben and his Tahoe with chains. It was apparent to me that he was gleeful at the prospect of using horsepower to tear something out of the ground. The actual event, however, was anticlimactic as I had sawn the spreading roots apart with my Saws-All - the thing pulled out with nary a struggle.

...and thereby we may discern a great social verity. If you want to dismantle civilization as a whole, begin with the roots. (The roots being, of course, the family.) Attack families individually and you will see society wither and die. You may then easily uproot it whole, should you have a mind to do something so evil.

And here I end my sermon, Amen. Have a splendid weekend!

27 March 2008

I am now finishing up a book entitled "Crispin's Day - The Glory of Agincourt," which, with a title like that, was obviously not written by a Frenchman. In fact, it was written by an Englishwoman, Rosemary Hawley Jarman. It's a book that has been sitting on my shelf for eight years, waiting for my return from a place like London and the inevitable reawakening of my longtime (but dormant) interest in medieval English history.

(I have a library book waiting to be read, "Voices of the Civil War: The Wilderness" that I suspect I won't be getting around to.)

For completeness' sake it has in it what I regard as the all-time worst contemporary depiction of Henry V. He looks like a crowned Ichabod Crane. The standard of artistic depiction in the early 15th century was pretty bad (as seen by the this frequently-used portrait of Henry V). However, look at this contemporary drawing of Henry V's brother, Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester. That's more like it! A pity this artist didn't draw a similar portrait of the king.

Humphrey was an interesting guy. Another interesting fact (to me), was that in visiting the Greenwich Observatory earlier this month I also visited the site of his estate and Tower.

Okay, here's some Henry V/Agincourt-related fun: I have digitized some music for you. Click here to hear an mp3 of the Agincourt Carol by John Lydgate, performed in authentic 15th C. style by the Musica Reservata. (I bought this Lp when I was in my early twenties.) It was played for Henry as he rode in victorious procession through London. Here's what the sheet music looks like, in medieval notation. You can just make out the lyrics. What are they singing? A combination of Latin and Middle English, described here.

In 1944 William Walton (now Sir William) took this 15th C. melody and orchestrated it for Olivier's production of Henry V. And here it is. The brasses play the original carol melody and the strings go up and down in embellishment. There's a brief middle section, the music is modulated up and... well... if you don't find this stirring you must not have any English blood in you, that's all.

Here's Walton's music for the Agincourt battle sequence - the charge of the French knights. I've been listening to this and the Agincourt music since I was sixteen. Great favorites. Here's a youtube link to the Olivier version battle sequence. That arrow storm is great! Jarman makes the case that it was the repeated commands to the archers Notch! Aim! Release! that essentially won the battle for Harry.

Finally, here's Jarman's account of what happened on the battlefield in later days. It begins with a description of the mass trench dug to bury the French dead. Curious that the site of a great medieval slaughter of French by the English would form a World War II resistance site against the Germans, but there it is...

Okay. No more. I'm Agincourted out.

Just for kicks I extended the line of kings from my 25th great-grandfather Geoffrey Plantagenet (Henry II's father) to Henry V in my genealogical software; it tells me that I am his 8th cousin 18 times removed. But I'm sure I can find a better connection than that - I was lazy. Something to do in my idle hours, I guess.

26 March 2008

From my desk calendar: English public school slang. So you can understand the next Harry Potter film.

I did something this morning I have never ever done before: fried a thumb drive. I had today's update all ready to go on the drive, but when I plugged it into the PC I felt a static shock in my finger. Now I can't read the drive at all.

I hesitate to admit this, but last night my wife and I watched the recent Nancy Drew movie. Yes, Nancy Drew. My wife used to read the books as a girl, and I was looking forward to something lighter than Shakespeare, deep history documentaries, blood, murder and warfare - which is my usual movie subject matter.

Also, I placed a library hold on the Henry VI part one videotape; it hasn't come in yet.

Anyway, parts of the Nancy Drew movie were filmed in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles, an area I'm somewhat familiar with. So I was watching a car chase scene in slow-mo, scanning the backgrounds. (In point of fact, I was looking for a factory sign which reawakened some creepy childhood memories I saw there on a trip last November, but that's a long story.) Have you ever done that before? If you do, you'll notice something interesting: they reuse locations and set-ups a lot. For instance, in the Drew movie, there's a scene where they take a couple of tight curves. The way it's edited looks like they're different curves. But slow it down and look at the store signs in the backgrounds and you'll see that they are, in fact, repeating the same turn.

Next time you watch the celebrated car chase sequence in Bullitt (1968), run it in slow motion and look at it carefully. You'll see the same thing: a shot of one intersection edited to look like it's a different part of the chase. In fact, in Bullitt a green Volkswagen (the same green VW) keeps getting in the shot! But don't take my word for it - the chase sequence is described carefully here, in the IMDb trivia section.

Being from Burbank, California is kind of fun in that movie producers use Burbank streets I recognize a lot. (Warner Brothers, Disney and Columbia all have facilities in Burbank.) For instance, in "Back to the Future" (1985), when Michael J. Fox is shown hanging onto a car and being pulled on his skateboard on his way to the professor's house, he goes by a restaurant my dad and I used to frequent all the time. And at the end of "Blazing Saddles" (1974) when a crowd bursts out of the Warner Brothers studios they cross Barham Boulevard - which intersection my pal Mike and I used to drive through all the time to get to Tower Records in Hollywood. There are many other examples.

The Nancy Drew film was okay, by the way. Nice escapist fare. By the way, the last time I was in Burbank her "sleuth kit" and costume was on display in the main Burbank public library. (I was there to do additional research on the Second Battle of Cahuenga Pass.) An incentive to get kids to read, I guess.

25 March 2008

I watched all 2 hours and 45 minutes of the uncut BBC 1979 production of Henry V yesterday. It's interesting to see how it varies from the 1989 Kenneth Branaugh and the 1944 Laurence Olivier versions. For instance, in the uncut BBC version, when the boy (guarding the baggage during the Agincourt battle) is killed by some marauding French, Captain Fluellen has a little speech about how wrong it is and contrary to the accepted practice of war (which Branaugh keeps) - and then goes into a ridiculous and semi-comic, out of place discourse about Alexander the Great. The King then arrives, sees what happens and describes his anger. In the 1989 version, Kenneth Branaugh cuts the Alexander middle part, sensibly retaining outrage and drama.

In the BBC version, fearing a counterattack during the battle, Henry is shown giving the order to have the throats of the French prisoners cut - this is missing in both the Olivier and Branaugh versions as it lessens the laudable character of the king for a modern audience. (Henry actually did give that order to his men; it made him very unpopular. The common men went into battle in large part to enrich themselves with the randoms for noblemen taken during battle. Dead noblemen fetch no ransom.)

Another sensible cut Kenneth Branaugh made concerns a quarrel one of Henry's men had with Henry as he roamed about his camp the night before the battle; one of his men - not recognizing him as the king - challenged him to combat after the battle with the French. In the uncut version, this silly bit of business is concluded after the Agincourt battle, and takes away considerably from the importance of the battle in the play.

Most interestingly of all, the gritty speech Kenneth Branaugh's Henry gives before the walled city of Harfleur about how his men will run loose and sack the town, commiting all sort of outrages against the women and children unless the town council surrenders, is missing from the Olivier version. Why? I strongly suspect it's because Oliver produced his version in 1944, during the Second World War when such horrible atrocities actually were happening. He probably felt that it came way too close for comfort for a wartime movie audience.

Having seen these three versions I have to conclude that the Kenneth Branaugh one works best in terms of sensible drama for a modern audience. Having said this, though, I still greatly like the Olivier version. The charge of the French knights to the William Walton score is thrilling, and I like the way the play moves from the Globe Theatre to small medieval sets to the open fields of Agincourt and back to the Globe again. Very clever.

What the heck? See them all! There are certainly bigger ways to waste your time. (Like seeing 10,000 B.C.)

NOTE: It seems that most critics agree that the most successful film adaptation of a Shakespeare play is the 1968 Romeo and Juliet, and I agree. Still, Branaugh and Olivier come pretty close...

24 March 2008

I'm at home out sick today; I caught a cold over the weekend and am sneezing my head off. I feel like crap. So... there's nothing to do other than read a book and watch TV.

Still under the influence of having visited London, I've decided to watch the local library's set of BBC Shakespeare tapes from Richard II to Henry VIII; his kingly chronicles (for lack of a better name). Richard II, Henry IV part one, Henry IV part two, Henry V, Henry VI part one, Henry VI part two, Henry VI part three, Richard III, Henry VIII. These were filmed in the late Seventies/early Eighties with excellent British casts and are staged just as I like to see them: set in the proper time with the appropriate clothing. (I dont like it when directors set Shakespeare in Kabuki, say, or Napoleonic times.)

Last week I saw Richard II; over the weekend I watched Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. Funny thing, Henry IV is barely in 'em. They're mostly about the mostly wayward Prince Hal and Sir John Falstaff. I know Falstaff is claimed to be one of the great characters in English literature, but I don't like him much. I don't find Shakespeare's humor all that funny (mainly because I barely understand the jokes) and he seems to impede the flow of the action.

So today it's one of my favorite Shakespeare plays: Henry V. I've seen and like both of the filmed versions - Olivier's of 1944 and Branaugh's of 1989 - but I've never seen the BBC's staged version.

Now if you'll pardon me I'm going back to bed.

Oh, if you're interested in seeing 10,000 B.C. - don't. My daughter saw it and said it sucks out loud. At one point a woman is killed, and a woolly mammoth walks along, stops, looks at her, and restores her to life. This caused a guy in the audience to yell, "I WANT MY MONEY BACK!" According to my daughter, the audience laughter and participation were the fun parts of the film - which is never a good thing.

21 March 2008

Happy Easter!

I added some photos from Buckingham Palace, Carnaby Street, the London Eye and horrible new architecture to my London page - which is now finished. Whew.

Last night I watched a pretty lame film entitled The Attack of the Puppet People (1958). No Goofers to redeem it. As bad as it was, however, it wasn't as bad as a film I started watching but quickly abandoned: Hair (1979), after the Broadway play but about a decade too late. No wonder it flopped. Another stinker I started watching but quit was The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), a sword and sandal epic with Rory Calhoun! (One reviewer wrote, "Alas, movies such as this just aren't made anymore," to which I say, "Good.") And, finally, I started to watch the well-regarded Brit flick "Look Back in Anger" (1958), but found Richard Burton's personality too annoyingly nasty, so I gave that up as well.

So there, despite what you may think it's not true that I'll watch just anything.

I am now reading "The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell - Sex in the Civil War" by Thomas P. Lowry, M.D. As our Civil War took place in Victorian America, ferreting out the sexual aspects of it took some detective work; as Lowry says, it wasn't written home about. In the opening chapters I am learning the details of the not so astonishing fact that prostitution invariably followed the armies, north and south. Well, duh. Group tens of thousands of healthy young men together and that's what you get in response to the usual economic forces of supply and demand. Not to mention biology.

Speaking about biology, isn't it odd that nature more or less balances out the numbers of males and females born in society? I've always considered that interesting. The small-scale view is that a male and a female get married and have kids, some couples having all boys, some all girls and most a mix. The larger scale view is that the aggregrate number of sexes in society more or less equals. It's like the man asking about how a Thermos flask keeps hot liquids hot and cold liquids cold: how does it know when to do that?

I understand that in China - where boys are favored over girls and female babies are often aborted or abandoned - they're flirting with social disaster due to unhappy young men unable to find enough females in society. I have also read about poor Eastern European communities where the females head West due to financial pressures, leaving young men in society unable to find wives. Sounds like it would make a fascinating documentary or a film. What happens in a world where there aren't enough young women to go around and the usual customs about marriage and social stability no longer apply? Simple answer: we turn into savages, probably. But how, exactly? Is this the basis for a film? If so, I'm unaware of it.

Well. This weekend couldn't arrive fast enough to suit me. Returning to work after a nice vacation is always a culture shock. Have a great weekend!

20 March 2008

I added some photos from the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum to my London page. What a fabulous collection of stuff! I especially got a kick out of seeing the famous Rosetta Stone. You've got to love the Brits: they travel the world, nicking other nations' riches and art treasures and bringing them back home for Londoners to view at leisure.

Famous last words. My favorite is Oscar Wilde's: "That wallpaper is atrocious. Either it goes or I do." And of course there's Robert E. Lee's "Strike the tent," which neo-Rebs get all weepy about. I think what he actually said was something more along the lines of "Aaarrrgggh. (Gurgle.)"

I saw an unusual movie last night: "Bop Girl Goes Calypso" (1957), one of the stranger entries in the early days of rock and roll film genre. It's something of a cult film, I learned. The plot is curious: Two academic types investigate the phenomena of mass hysteria - using sound pressure meters in clubs - and whether or not rock and roll is fading from popularity in favor of calypso music. Yes, calypso music. A young man ("Calypso has tremendous potential for excitement!") convinces a female rock and roll singer, the "bop girl" of the title, that rock and roll's days are numbered, and she converts. Her final number, where she performs a calypso song wearing two small straw hats pinned to her boobs and a larger one pinned to her butt, is memorable.

What really sends this one over the top, however, is the manic presence of the Goofers (shown above). They do a rock and roll song where a trapeze is lowered down, and first the bassist (with a double bass, yet) and then the trombonist play their instruments upside down while swinging frantically from the trapeze. Their next song, "I Want To Rock and Roll 'Till The Day I Die," is performed by them while lying in coffins, wearing ghoul makeup. Here's one of their zany publicity photos. I get the impression these guys went over in polite society like a wet fart at the Ritz.

More Goofers photos. My new favorite band! (Hey... there's a youtube video of them...)

Still, my all-time favorite youtube video remains Reg Kehoe and His Marimba Queens. It's mesmerizing. That bassist may not be hanging from a trapeze but he's still tearing it up!

19 March 2008

The Tower of London gets its own write-up, here. There are text and photos - much better than the Tower's own online virtual tour, I think. I still have write-ups to do for the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum; both were excellent, and we saw a lot of interesting stuff. That's later this week.

I am now watching Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), a library rental, which I am finding unexpectedly fun and interesting. Roger Ebert is right: it reminds me of the joy I felt when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time. And I very much like the retro science-fiction 1930's look of this film... it's like thumbing through the pages of a glorious old comic book. If you like giant robot films, this one is much, much, MUCH better than Transformers (which I thought was a real watch-glancer).

I made the great mistake of checking out Edward II, which was originally a play by Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare. This filmed version, however, is nothing more than 20th C. political propaganda - and I hate when directors do that with old material. The Variety review is spot on: "(Director Derek) Jarman fails to make the film accessible to heterosexual male audiences. Pic seems to be provoking straight viewers while celebrating the play's homosexual theme." 'Nuff said about this stinker.

Speaking of English homosexual kings, I am still plowing through Shakespeare's Richard II. The play sets up the action for the following three plays (the "Henriad": Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2, and Henry V) and describes how the perplexing War of the Roses got started.

And no, it wasn't called that in the 15th century.

I have a confession to make: since my teenage years I have read many books about English history and the War of the Roses, but I must admit that keeping track of which Lancastrian Duke of Where killed the Yorkist Earl of What, perpetuating the whole bloody thing, is a major challenge. I have had a book sitting on my bookshelf about the War of the Roses that I have avoided reading for eight years, now. I've not pitched it out because I know someday the time will be right to read it, but I keep putting it off. Perhaps, having visited London and getting turned on to English history again, that time draws near...

By nature I always take sides, and when it comes to the Wars of the Roses I tend to be a Yorkist. Who killed the princes in the Tower? I expressed my opinion in the Tower of London here - I think Henry VII did it. Richard III has had a bad rap - thanks mainly to Shakespeare, who I think was biased.

18 March 2008

I added a bunch of captioned photo links to my London page; check 'em out. The Tower of London and the British Museum will require pages of their own... those come later this week.

I WANNA GO BACK TO LONDON - WAAAHHHHH...

I am now reading another little blast from my past, "Arturo's Island," by Elsa Morante. It was adapted into a movie of the Italian neo-realism school which my father and I watched one night, when I was about fourteen. I have never forgotten it. At the risk of sounding pretentious, it's one of those works with a deep psycho-sexual subtext, as this summary suggests. Like Bartok's opera "Bluebeard's Castle," where the action is only a part of what's going on, or is representative of something else.

Heather Mills McCartney - a real class act. I hereby bestow upon her honorary American entertainment celebrity status. So Paulie is worth "only" 800 million dollars. Whew. There's one guy who can shop at Harrod's without concern.

On our last evening in London my wife and I strolled over to where a couple of Metropolitan Police were guarding the street across from Kensington Palace (the Embassy of Israel is there); they were happy to talk. Mick Jagger has a luxury flat near where we stayed off Kensington High Street, not far from Hyde Park. So do a lot of other rich Brits. They're there infrequently. The cops were telling us about their own situation... we think it's expensive here in the D.C. suburbs. It's really bad around London. One cop makes a 80 mile commute twice a day - and he's still paying an arm and a leg for his smallish detached home.

Now I know why Brits live here...

17 March 2008

Happy St. Pat's!

I'm back from vacation! My wife Cari and I had a week in London, England. It was WONDERFUL. My new favorite city. I now have photos and stories to bore you with for the next month or so... Here is a page I put together as a start. I'll be adding links to it as I go along; I start with an account of a visit to Greenwich.

I still have London in my head. When I left I was deeply into the Civil War battle of the Wilderness. That has now been supplanted by English history. (Yesterday I went to the library and checked out a VHS tape of Shakespeare's Richard II, which I am watching.) I am blown about by too many winds of influence...

I am now reading a fondly-regarded book from my youth, "Me and Caleb" by Franklin E. Meyer. I read it when I was eleven, and found it to be a lot of fun. It still is - I love it when that happens, when something that was great as a kid is still great as an adult. Anyway, it is apparently something of a classic among people in my generation. So much so that old copies were selling on e-Bay for some pretty steep prices. Now it has been republished - brought back by popular demand.

It's a book about boyhood near the Ozarks, and it is refreshingly not PC. For instance, there's a chapter about all sorts of tricks being played on people on Halloween night with no text about how it's wrong. It's just understood that boys will do things like rub bacon grease on doorknobs, open fire hydrants, etc. I plan to read this one to my grandkids. They ought to love it. It belongs on a bookshelf next to Twain's Tom Sawyer, Booth Tarkington's Penrod and the now-forgotten Peck's Bad Boy. (I own a copy. When I was a kid my dad and I visited a family friend, who took one look at my torn jeans and somewhat dirty appearance and said, "You look like Peck's Bad Boy." I recall thinking, "Who?" and resolved to find out.)

9 March 2008

I watched two horrible Ray Dennis Steckler films: "Rat Pfink A Boo Boo" (1966) and "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?" (1964). And yet, when I say they're horrible that's not quite the same as saying they're unwatchable. To use a well-worn analogy, watching a Steckler film is like seeing a car wreck: it's hideous but you can't turn away.

The first starts out as a reasonably promising stalker film (with interesting Los Angeles locations that I recognize as a boy), then, mid-way through, the tone completely changes and it becomes a terrible Batman and Robin parody. The story is that the filmmaker, Steckler, got bored and decided to change the film without worrying about mundane things like thematic continuity.

The second stars Steckler with his way cooler acting persona name Cash Flagg; this was one of the "Fifty Worst Films of all Time" according to a documentary I rented last week, but I disagree. I can think of far worse films. This one has interestng footage from the Long Beach Pier amusement park and also the Angel's Flight, which my Mom took me on when I was four or five. The story? Eh. Who cares?

It's kind of funny... when I was watching TISCWSLABMUZ!!? I was interrupted by a phone call. It was a movie industry researcher. When I responded to his question about the film I had seen last ("Rat Pfink a Boo Boo") he quickly said "thank you" and hung up on me. Guess he only wanted to talk to people well within the Hollywood mainstream.

Notice: I am off on leave next week and will certainly not be providing any updates to this page. So... go here in the meantime; James Lileks will take care of your browsing needs.

7 March 2008

Last night I watched a library VHS tape about Gettysburg, which included acting by reenactors - never a good thing. In general, the acting was more wooden than the trees in the scenery.

Tubby bearded guy rides up on a horse: "General, what are your dispositions?"
Another tubby bearded guy: "(Pause - awkward salute) We have men coming up the Emmitsburg Pike (looking at the camera) who will do their duty, sir."
TBG: "(Pause) Excellent. (Long pause.) If they hold firm we shall (pause) prevail."

After about a half hour of this I cried "Enough!" and popped it out.

Still, I have to admit that my old pal Andy Waskie (above) did a credible acting job as General George G. Meade. He has an appropriately boomy voice and the necessary comb-over. When we were in the same unit - the 110th Pennsylvania - I used to do Andy Waskie impressions. ("IT'S TOO HOT TO BE WEARING BLUE WOOL. MY CROTCH IS CHAFING.") They were dead on and made everyone, including Andy, laugh. Twenty years ago my Waskie voice required me to drop down into my chest voice. Nowadays, having gotten older, I do that quite naturally. It's one of the few kindnesses of age; yesterday I was in a meeting where an engineer who must be in his late twenties was speaking. As he did, every now and then his voice would break and a word would be rendered an octave above. When you're my age that no longer happens.

I recall seeing a skit on the old David Letterman show that featured "Camping with Barry White." Letterman demonstrated a walkie-talkie with a huge woofer attached - needed to properly reproduce the low tones of Barry White's voice. DAVID. COME QUICK. I GOT BIT BY A SNAKE. DAVID. Hilarious.

And Sinatra... he started out as a baritone with some tenor range. In later years he became a baritone. Too bad he's not still around - maybe he'd morph into a bass.

I think I saw another reenacting friend this morning on a new poster in the Duke Street Metro station: "Live Passionately. Virginia Is For Lovers." It shows him in Revy War garb clutching a flag and yelling. This particular guy once accused me of not having a pot to piss in. He, of course, did. Click here and go down to the third and fourth bullet for the amazing story.

The all-time hands-down winner of the reenactor who appears most often in coffee table books about history, however, is Bob Schindler. Thumbing through them at COSTCO I've seen him in at least three. You can see why: he goes the whole route with that beard. He looks like the Real Deal. A beard is necessary for authentic Civil War credibility, but as I don't like facial hair I've never grown one. (Well, okay, once, in 1984. It lasted about three weeks.) It just doesn't fit my aesthetic.

Bob Schlindler is a guy who just looks like he stepped out of a history book. His Revolutionary War counterpart is another friend of mine, Bob Fleming. We nicknamed him "the Continental" because of this image. (He's wearing the uniform of the 1st Continental, a prominant unit in New Jersey/Pennsylvania.) See how insouciant he appears. "Bayonet charge on the British at Germantown? Why, certainly."

One last Schlindler comment: at a friend's invitation my wife and I once attended an Elvis Night at the Masonic Shrine in Fairfax. An Elvis impressionist was there, doing Elvis songs and passing out sweaty scarves to middle-aged women. The funny thing was that Elvis led to a discussion of the Shriners' in house "Oriental Band," which was led by a tubby bearded guy who was shirtless and wore a jewel in his navel. He'd march along ahead of the band, brandishing a saber. You guessed it - Bob Schlindler.

Well, that's it for today. I could go on and on with reenactor tales.

Have a great weekend!

6 March 2008

On a whim, I looked up Colonel Bleep in ToonTracker the other day. Colonel Bleep, I should mention, is a cartoon I used to watch in the morning just before heading off to preschool. So that means I was watching it when I was five!

(Through the magic of youtube, you can watch Colonel Bleep, too! I distinctly recall waking up in the morning to the sound of that countdown.)

Anywaaayyy… the show took place on the fictitious “Zero Zero Island," where the Equator meets the Greenwich Meridian. Where is that exactly? Off the coast of Africa. North of St. Helena, where Napoleon died in exile under the kindly care of the British.

When I read "Zero Zero Island” in wikipedia in a subsequent quest for information I immediately flashed back to a memory of triumph, when I found the spot on a world globe I had at the time. I clearly recall intersecting the red ribbon band of the equator with the dotted line that read "Greenwich Meridian" and feeling, like Little Jack Horner, older than my five years. As I am nearly 52, that is a 47 year-old memory that lay dormant and buried in my mind. As I wrote on the 4th, the memory was always there – it was the recall function that had to be jogged. Isn't that interesting? No?

Maybe this is.

I am now reading "The Broken American Male - And How to Fix Him" by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of the interestingly titled "Kosher Sex" and the counselor on TLC's Shalom in the Home. Not because I feel broken - maybe a little fractured sometimes - but because I think the name "Shmuley Boteach" is cool. Here's an excerpt. Isn't that awful? Can you imagine having your spirituality given a numerical value by somebody in the media (the media!) to appear on a nationwide list? What then? Fret about your placement? "Last year I was #9, this year #12. I need to get a popular TV talk show or something..." Heavens!

I do not suffer the brokenness that the good rabbi describes, mainly, because for me, work is a means to an end and not the end in and of itself. And also because I'm a fairly religious guy (it doesn't show here) and so my goals tend to be spiritual, emotional or attitudinal and not material. But it's still an interesting and worthwhile book for anyone, broken, whole or fractured, to read.

Last night I did something I've been looking forward to for a long time: I stepped into the library and selected books to read. What fun! I've read my way through my stack of yard sale and library book sale purchases and am now a free intellectual agent, able to follow my whim wherever it takes me.

5 March 2008

Still on a documentary kick. I watched "Look, Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of Superman." It was gratifying to hear Margot Kidder state that it was a mistake for her character - Lois Lane - to have sex with Superman (Christopher Reeve) in the second (1980) movie. I immediately knew that back then. Bad call.

For me, raised in the late Fifties and Sixties, George Reeves will always be the definitive Superman. The others may be younger, more hip and more attractive to females, but for me they entirely lack the father figure authority and 1950's American appeal of Reeves.

I also watched "Blood in the Face," a documentary about an Aryan Nation/Neo-Nazi gathering in Michigan. It was not so much shocking or scary as merely tiresome. But, sometimes the worst thing you can do to someone espousing a bad cause is to merely film him stating his beliefs without providing additional comment, and the filmmakers wisely did that.

It seems that most of the Aryans, Klansmen and neo-Nazis at this gathering sported mustaches. I wonder why?

For me, the most interesting scene in this is when a man wearing a Scotch bonnet walked out to the farm road where the bigots were gathered and announced that they should move their cars away from the field where the cross-burning would take place later that night. The cinders from burning crosses sometimes land on the cars, pitting the paint finishes. Who knew? But in general, the cross burning scene in this was nowhere as impressive as the choreographed one in "O Brother Where Art Thou?" It was mopey, dull and pathetic. Not that I have any standards in mind for cross burnings, mind you... it just seemed to be more of a bother than it was worth. (Requiring everyone to move their cars and such.)

When in the final shot some hate-filled bigot asks the interviewer, "Have we made a convert?" I mentally answered, "Only among the terminally uneducatable."

(Note: The title, "Blood in the Face" has reference to some obscure lore among white power types about blood in the face making flesh pinkish in hue, and therefore making blushing more apparent. Or something like that. I didn't quite follow the logic, which was a running problem throughout this documentary.)

I am now reading "Y - The Descent of Men (Revealing the Mysteries of Maleness)" by Steve Jones. It's a genetic look at maleness. It sucks. I checked it out of the library because it was sitting next to the empty spot where the book I really would have wanted to read was "(The Seven Daughters of Eve," another work about genetic heritage.) I'm bringing it back to the library tonight and finding something else.

By the way, there seems to be an odd theory among geneticists that the male - or, rather, maleness - is headed for extinction. Or the Y chromosome is, I'm not sure. I don't have the details yet, but if I learn them I'll fill you in. Not to worry: it's not scheduled to happen until 125,000 years or so from now. In the meantime we can go on merrily monopolizing the remote control, peeing in the outdoors without concern and parallel parking correctly.

4 March 2008

Star Trek themed funerary products. "The STAR TREK Casket styling has been inspired by the popular 'Photon Torpedo' design seen in STAR TREK II: The Wrath of Kahn." I was going to make fun of this until I realized that I knew how to properly spell "Khan," so I guess I'm part Trekkie. Might even be laid out in one of these some day, for the final beam-me-up.

Up for auction: Elvis Presley weaponry. Return fire with a revolver that once belonged to The King.

Watched another documentary last night: Comic Book Confidential (1988). It was... okay. I will never understand Zippy the Pinhead. I've never thought it funny or clever, just weird for the sake of being weird. And as for comic books, I think the comics for adults movement ("sequential graphical art") of the last forty years or so is lame. Read books, people. Grow up. (I realize that this is a major sacred cow for some people, which suggests to me that they're secretly embarrassed to still be reading comic books.) I enjoyed reading them as a kid and I enjoyed reading them when my son when he was a kid, but "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (1 Cor. 13:11)

...writes the guy who dresses up and plays war on the weekends...

I'm finally at the end of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidency part of the Grant biography I'm reading. Whew. Heavy going, compared to the Civil War parts. But Jean Edward Smith has written one of the better Grant biographies I have read, perhaps the best. Recommended.

Last week I watched a documentary about Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and his creation, Rat Fink. For some reason this has sparked off a dimly-held childhood memory in my mind that I've been trying to reconstruct with no success. I don't know if it's something that actually happened to me or a dream I once had.

(The screen goes all blurry in the way that Hollywood signals a transition to a flashback or dream.)

I'm in some stranger's back yard. This actually happened to me all the time as I used to walk along the tops of the cinder block walls that separated neighbors' property where I grew up, in Burbank, California. I'd occasionally hop down and find myself in somebody's backyard, and think, "I'm not supposed to be here. If I'm caught I'll get in trouble" - you know, the feeling that every rightly-constructed boy has fairly often. (My wife says, "It's called 'trespassing, Wes.'") But the part I'm not sure actually happened is finding myself inside the home and hearing the occupants talk in some room, and then stealthfully making my way out the front door onto the street, where I'm safe. Must have been a dream I had as a kid; I can't believe I'd do that.

(The screen clears up, signaling the end of the flashback or dream.)

Then again there's a lot of things I did as a boy that, nowadays, cause me to wonder about my motivations. Like the time I got in the alleyway of the retail building, pulled the main power switches and shut down the power in businesses on an entire city block. Why did I do that? To see what would happen. I suppose the time I was caught by the janitor in the boy's room with a basketball in a urinal, enthusiastically pushing the flush handle, was the same sort of thing. (The janitor looked at me, then looked at the ball and quietly said, "You bastard.")

But a stint in the Marines sorted me out, and here I am, Mister Citizenship, Mister Dad, Mister Bastion of Society, with no ill effects to civilization.

Unlike some politically-motivated gender writers, my wife and I have had children of both sexes, and we realize the essential differences between males and females. A female can be warned not to do something, told why, and most of the time will be content to leave it at that. A boy may be told, but if it's something he wants to do for some reason he'll weigh the risk, assess the chance of punishment and do it anyway. The sense of risk is addictive. Hence the male-female disparity of inmates in the United States penal system.

Back to the nature of memory... part of growing old is the increasing malfunction of the part of the brain that calls up memories. They're in there - names of people, places and things that have happened, "it's on the tip of my tongue" - it's the recall feature that begins to fail more often. So many times my memory has been jogged by something I've seen; I try to capture it and, like a dandelion floating in the air, it drifts away, lost. It's a good thing I constructed Avocado Memories (my account of growing up) when I was in my 30's and 40's. Nowadays it would be harder to reconstruct.

3 March 2008

...and another fun-filled work week lurches into place with the usual Monday.

I watched a couple of interesting documentaries over the weekend: "Dark Days" (2000), about some homeless people who lived underground in a tunnel with the Amtrak in New York City. In a space of perpetual darkness - overrun by rats - they constructed houses from discarded plywood, got their power from the electrical circuits nearby and their water came from leaky pipes. Fascinating. In one of the unused DVD extras, one guy tells a story about his homeless friend who had a process for killing, skinning and eating cats. (He used kittens for sandwiches.) A whole new world. Highly recommended.

The other is better known, but I found it less compelling: "Grey Gardens" (1975), about two dotty but otherwise seemingly intelligent women, a mother and daughter (Jackie Onassis' aunt and cousin, in fact), who lived in squalor in a run-down mansion in the East Hampton section of Long Island. The film is an hour and a half of them talking and roaming around the house, which they shared with cats and raccoons. The two man film crew had to wear flea collars around their ankles. I see the documentary is the basis for a film to be released this year. It already was a musical. My wife found this one far more interesting than I did. I'm sure the release of this doc must have thrilled Jackie Onassis.

So, yesterday, my wife and I toured the Grey Gardens equivalent home in Springfield, an abandoned house on Gambrill that was once lived in by an older woman I used to call the "cat lady." (What is it with crazy old women and cats?) I walk by it on the way home every day. But I haven't seen the cat lady for years, which tells me that either she died or her family moved her into a nursing home. The basement is filled with water, the in-ground swimming pool is surrounded by out of control bamboo, and a pile of cat food bags lay on the kitchen floor. At least four feral cats roam the place, presumably trying to figure out how to break into the kitchen. I once counted eight cats on the property during the summer; when it gets hot the place smells like a litter box.

Also yesterday, fueled by my reading of that biography of Ulysses S. Grant I'm working on, my wife and I visited parts of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Chancellorsville Battlefield. Driving the Wilderness roads in the Bug with the convertible top down is one of my favorite pastimes.

For the first time in many years, I visited the "Mule Shoe," or "Bloody Salient" at Spotsylvania, site of what I think was the most savage and frenzied battle of the entire Civil War. Soldiers were bayonetting, clubbing and shooting each other at point blank range, the bodies getting trampled into the mud of the trenches. This went on for hours. A 20" diameter oak tree on the site was felled by the minie balls from the volume of musket fire - it's on display in the Smithsonian. Took my photo near the 15th New Jersey monument.

In the news:

Still think I'm cute? (I get this all the time from people who knew me as a child. I am what I am.)

French ditz figures that now that she's gotten an Oscar she needs to sound as informed as the typical Hollywood celeb.

Third in line to English throne doesn't like England all that much. Fine. He can move in with the cat lady.

NYC apartment building uses high-frequency screech to keep teens away. I once read somewhere that classical music played in inner-city public parks has the same effect on drug-dealers.

29 February 2008

Leap Year Day!

I can attest to the day being considered unlucky. In 2000 we had rugby practice on leap year day, and I felt unwell. I threw up twice (in my mouth) while running laps, and had to hurriedly dash off to a gas station because of a bad case of diarrhea. When I returned and rejoined practice, I was kicked in the nards when a guy I was hoisting in line out practice inexplicably raised his feet (rugby boots) on the way up. It was then that I decided to just go home.

An augur of Spring: the is blooming at the library. It's usually the first color I see.

Yesterday was a special "two for one" day for documentaries at Video Vault, so last night I watched "Tales of the Rat Fink" and "The Fifty Worst Movies Ever Made."

Any male who grew up in the late Fifties or Sixties will know who Rat Fink is: the creation of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, Southern California artist and way-out car customizer. (And, in later life, Mormon.) His posthumous official site is here. Rat Fink came about because Roth was weary of Mickey Mouse, and of the sweetness and squareness of the famous mouse. So, while waiting for a cheesburger at a restaurant, Roth sketched his repulsive version which was later silk-screened onto a tee-shirt. Turns out, young males loved the disgusting rat as well, and Roth made a fortune by putting Rat Fink's likeness on tee-shirts, plastic models, skateboards, rings and keychains. (I owned a Rat Fink ring.) Ugliness was "in" in the countercultural Sixties - girls owned trolls and boys owned Rat Fink items.

I also liked the "Weird-Ohs" models (my favorite was Freddy Flameout), but those weren't Big Daddy Roth products, they just looked like it. Every kid I knew drew veins in eyeballs in imitation of Roth and Weird-Oh art.

As to the second documentary, I have seen eight of the fifty worst movies. I plan to see three more I learned about if Video Vault has them: Spider Baby (1968), Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967) and The Wild Women of Wongo (1958). I see Something Weird Video has an inspired DVD of this last one paired with Bowanga Bowanga and Virgin Sacrifice. I know what I'm renting next!

Personally, I know what the Worst Movie Ever Made is: Gummo (1997), which my son once rented in a moment of weakness or indecision. Craptacular, as Bart Simpson would say.

Ulysses S. Grant book: I am now at the chapter describing the Siege of Vicksburg, one of Grant's best examples of generalship. It never fails: every time I read an account of Ulysses S. Grant at this point in his career I get annoyed and frustrated with his boss General Henry "Old Brains" Halleck, and of his plodding, anal-retentive ways. I mean, look at the man. He looks exactly like what he was - a dolt in uniform. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had his number, stating that he "originates nothing, anticipates nothing. . . . takes no responsibility, plans nothing, suggests nothing, is good for nothing." So, of course, modern historians, in their usual revisionist manner, claim he really wasn't as bad as the people who had to endure him claim. There's more money and notoriety in coming up with a new slant in writing history than in simply recording it.

Whatever. They're all dead now, as my Mom used to say. And as Big Daddy might have said, have a far-out gasser of a weekend.

28 February 2008

I finally watched the Who's Quadrophenia (1979) last night. As I was a major Who fan in my youth, I've waited for a long time to see it. (Well, it would be more correct to say that I put off watching it because I became occupied with other things.) It's an excellent film, however - a real time capsule of the Mods vs. Rockers in Brighton Beach, 1964. Written by the Who's Pete Townshend and their second so-called "rock opera" after "Tommy," it sparked off a late-70's Mod revival in the U.K. Interesting. My daughter, walking through the room while I was watching it, asked what it was and gave her perfect assessment: "So, it's an English 'American Graffiti?'" That it is.

One of the themes of this work is that of being associated with a scene, or a social movement. ("Being a mod... that's sumpthin', innit?") In one of the songs, "The Punk and the Godfather," we have: "And on the dance floor broken glass/The bloody faces slowly pass/The broken seats in empty rows/It all belongs to me, you know." It's an odd connection, but when I do Civil war reenacting I sometimes think of this line. And in the air the musket smoke/The sutlers trying to make you broke/The porta-potties in neat blue rows/It all belongs to me, you know.

When I was a teen the Who were my favorite band, and I learned all the Who/Quadrophenia lore: Mods, Shepherd's Bush, GS Scooters, Marshall stacks, leapers, Meher Baba, the dawn breaking out at Woodstock while the band was playing See Me/Feel Me/Touch Me/Heal Me, etc. In retrospect I could have and should have been channeling my energies on surfing. But that's okay - a failure to recognize opportunities when they present themselves is a characteristic of youth. Youth is wasted on the young. And I practically wore out my "The Who Live at Leeds" cassette. (These days I listen to some of the Who stuff on it and cringe.)

I shall close with the Who by expressing the opinion that Keith Moon was the world's greatest rock drummer, bar none. His work in Quadrophenia was frantic and explosive - some of his best. I have always loved his Quadrophenia signature song "Bell Boy," and it's true: the beach is a place where a man can feel he's the only soul in the world that's real.

The real music of my youth is classical, which I still enjoy - even the stuff I've listened to hundreds of times. Containing melodic, orchestral and harmonic nuance, it's much better suited to repetition than rock.

My wife and I ate at a Five Guys last night, where they had Bob Segar on the stereo, blasting his give me that old time rock and roll song. Frankly, I'm tired of rock, and especially tired of rock songs that have been overplayed for the last thirty years. (Boston's "More Than A Feeling" causes my jaws to clench.)

I'm aging, I guess. But that's not bad. In fact, it's perfectly natural. It causes me to cast about for new things, and in doing so I've discovered Civil War music, bluegrass, Porter Wagoner, Berlin caberet, Western Swing, folk, the Ditty Bops and... Tom Lehrer.

Speaking of whom, here is his wicked little song about the Boy Scouts, Be Prepared. "Don't solicit for your sister/That's not nice/Unless you get a good percentage of her price." Once again, bear in mind that this was written in 1952, when the Boy Scouts were the universally-admired and unimpeachable bastion of all that was right and good about America. Very subversive.

Having dabbled in Greek mythology, I also get a kick out of his Oedipus Rex ("...you may have heard of his odd complex"). In the spoken prelude he mentions a recent film on the subject that didn't do well in the box office; he's referring to Oedipus Rex (1957), which I have seen. Fun fact: William Shatner is behind one of the masks, in the chorus.

I'm at the part in my Grant book where he just finished investing Fort Donelson, demanding Unconditional Surrender. The press, then as now casting about for a story angle, associated that with his initials, and he became "Unconditional Surrender Grant" for the remainder of the war. I suppose he figured that if it lessens the amount of bureaucracy I have to endure from Washington, it's all good (to use a modern phrase).

27 February 2008

Public libraries are cool; ever since I was a kid I've used them, but I never expected to make money at one.

The library near me sells donated records (Lps, vinyl) for fifty cents each. I am always in the market - they will get my turntable from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. One day I picked up three Tom Lehrer records there. And years later I found a copy of his 1952 self-published 10" Lp, "Songs by Tom Lehrer." Click here. According to the price guide my $2 investment is worth at least $90! Not bad.

I've mentioned Tom Lehrer in this blog before; suffice to say that he's one of America's best musical satirists and a devilishly clever songwriter. Active primarily in the 50's and 60's, he turns 80 this year. You can see some excellent youtube videos of Lehrer at the piano here. Be sure to watch "Send the Marines."

My favorite Lehrer song is a little ditty about the sweet, down-home folks of his youth in "My Home Town" - by all means, listen. I always get a kick out of the guy who monogrammed his wife. And bear in mind that this was written in *1952*. People have this notion that the 1950's were staid, Republican, white bread, conservative and boring. Far from it. There was an distinct alternative culture at play with the beat generation of Kerouac, Ginsburg and Burroughs. Lehrer fit right in.

I watched a National Geographic special about Tsar Peter I "the Great" the other night; he had his son tortured to death. Tsar Ivan "the Terrible" IV killed his son by striking him with an iron staff. Geez.

At the urging of my son, I watched "Pan's Labyrinth" yesterday. It was... okay. Not really my kind of film, and I found the mix of the Disneyesque story line (fairies, a faun, a princess) and the bloody violence somewhat off-putting. But it was good. The star of the show is the celebrated eyeballs-in-the-hands monster. I saw Bobby Lee doing a send-up of this a while back on Mad TV and wondered, "What the heck?" Now I know.

Did you know that, for a short time, Ulysses S. Grant, the man who more than any other single man save Lincoln brought down the slavery-supporting Confederacy, owned a slave? True. As the article states, at this time in his life he was in desperate financial straits and could have cashed out, but didn't. As I maintain, Grant was a great man.

26 February 2008

I am now reading "Grant" by Jean Edward Smith (a male). This is about the eighth biography of Ulysses S. Grant that I have read; obviously, he's my favorite Civil War general. My interest in him began when I was a boy and learned that he and I share April 27th as a birthday. (I have not developed similar interests with Carol Burnett and Barbra Streisand, who also have April 27th as birthdays.) Later on I got interested in the American Civil War and sort of adopted him.

I find that generally, the angle or slant of the biography depends somewhat upon when it was written. I once read a Vietnam war-era biography that highlighted the futility of war. Another, written during World War II, highlighted Grant's understanding of modern war being between economies and not only between armies. I suppose one written after 2001 will attempt to connect Grant with the suppression of terrorism... I know: his understanding terms at Appomattox prevented Southern guerrillas (terrorists) from forming to plague reconstruction efforts. You read it here first, Gentle Reader.

An odd one advanced the notion that Grant disregarded human life but cherished and protected animal life; making Grant a 19th century PETA extremist, I guess. One, published in 1969 by a descendant - Ulysses S. Grant III, in fact - highlighted family associations.

(By the way, yes, there is a Ulysses S. Grant IV. He once appeared on the Groucho Marx show "You Bet Your Life" and answered the immortal question, "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?" There is also a Ulysses S. Grant V - he sold some of his great-grandfather's goods. And I even found mention on the Internet of a Ulysses S. Grant VI. I suppose there will be a Ulysses S. Grant LXVII in the far future, unless one of the Grants marries a female who is not so understanding and cries, "Enough!")

The funny thing, considering all those honorifically-named descendants, is that General Ulysses S. Grant wasn't really named that; it was a result of a screw up on the part of a Congressman when his paperwork was sent to West Point. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant. (Resulting in a cuddly monogram: HUG.)

I am now with Grant in the Mexican War, and have learned this interesting fact.

My wife asked last night, "Why was Grant great?" which led to my giving her ten or fifteen minutes of answer. For myself, I like the fact that Grant rose from a semi-destitute street corner seller of firewood to General of the Armies in only a few short years. In other words, he always had greatness in him, but it was situational. The circumstances for his qualities to become apparent had to appear. I'd like to think that's the case with me - or, indeed, any of us. (Coming of age in the Seventies I'm something of a populist in that way.) When the Man met his Hour. May we all meet ours.

One of Grant's many qualities I have always admired was his refusal to swear or use bad language. For a time, during the Seventies, I was doing quite well with this, keeping Grant in my mind. Then I entered the Marine Corps. With Grant, refusing to use filthy language was instinctive. With me it's a matter of self-control rather than prudishness. And I think that if you can discipline yourself you will perhaps know what to do when Your Hour arrives.

More about Grant as I proceed, you may be sure of that.

25 February 2008

Agggrrrrgggh. Monday. Not ready for a Monday. Don't want a Monday. Go away, Monday.

Adding additional disgust to the dreary start of a week is the fact that I weighed in at 256 this morning; a full three pounds over what I weighed at my lowest point last month. A big fat bacon cheeseburger burger and malt on Friday, greasy Chinese food on Saturday and about 153 Oreos at a church munch and mingle yesterday didn't help. I must govern my passions or they will surely prove to be my undoing.

Ponderisms. One of the heads of the Five Families (one of the middle-aged social groups my wife and I form a part of) sent this to me; I removed the lesser ones and kept the best.

I watched a bunch of movies this weekend:

Endless Summer (1966) - The surfing classic and a minor masterpiece. I bought the VHS at a yard sale months ago; I just got around now to watching it. Now that I weigh about 55 pounds less than I did when I first tried surfing I'd like to see if it's easier for me to get up and ride a wave while standing on the board. It would almost have to be, I think. Anyway, wonderful, innocent evocative film.

Equus (1977) - A flawed movie about a young man's unnatural attachment to horsies. I read the play when I was in the Marines and didn't really get it. Frankly, I still don't. I think the playright and film director should have emphasized the psychiatrist's (Richard Burton) interest in Greek drama and put in more references to the classics; it would have given the play some additional layers of meaning that it needed. (When you finally learn why the boy blinded the horses it's anti-climactic.) Lots of full frontal male nudity; it kind of reminded me of rugby. And, of course, Harry Potter recently played the character in the buff on the stage in the U.K. (No photos here - as he's underage that would be child porn!) My final assessment: Equus (play and film) is way overrated.

Flic Story (1975) - It helps a lot of you know that "flic" is French slang for "cop." This is a film noir from the land of brie, Citroens and ooh-la-la. Set in 1947, it suffers from the usual problem with French cop and gangster films: in style it seems too derivatively American, like the actors are all trying their hardest to look and seem like mobsters from 1930's Cagney and Bogart films. The film is lit with the same saturated color and light that we'd see in a 1966 episode of, say, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. That's always jarring to me in a foreign film. Still, in the spirit of my mother's reversible opinion style this film wasn't too bad, even enjoyable, though. Speaking of Citroens, it was funny listening to the car doors slam in this movie. They sounded really cheap and thin.

In real life, the movie's gangster, Emile Buisson, was sentenced to death and guillotined in 1956. This is not shown in the film. It was particularly gruesome in that it took two tries. (During the film my wife and I were discussing the relative merits of the guillotine over lethal injection and the electric chair... I must make a point of sharing with her what I learned about Buisson's execution. Chop. Sigh, ewww. Chop... now we got it!)

The Oscars, Hollywood's orgy of self-congratulation... I ignored it entirely. I prefer old school films and old school actors. My guess is that Ben Stein's 2006 article still held true last night. I had a college English prof who once opined that you could take the total amount of real art coming out of Hollywood and contain it in a thimble; as I greatly respected this old gent his is also more or less my opinion.

I finished that excellent book about Civil War battles. I now badly want to walk around in the Wilderness... which is my usual response to reading a good book about the Civil War. (I want to visit a battlefield site.)

I am now finishing up a short book about Joseph Smith - the 19th C. Mormon prophet - and his short-lived presidential campaign of 1844. (It was short-lived because he was; he was gunned down by a mob.) Interestingly, his platform included the abolition of slaves. That, of course, wouldn't happen until 21 years years and much money and bloodshed later. In 1844 his abolitionist views alone would have prevented his election to the office.

That's all for today. Tomorrow is Tuesday, 20% better than Monday.

22 February 2008

Quick, words ending in -gry. How many are there? (Hint: More than you think.)

Today is the birthday of George Washington, an indispensable man. What a great thing to be called, huh? Indispensable. I wish, at the end of my life, somebody would call me that.

I am now watching "Il Bidone" (1955) - "the Swindle" - a Frederico Fellini comedy/crime film. It has Fellini's wife Giuletta Masina in it; she steals every scene she's in. You just can't not look at her face, it's so mobile and entertaining. Have you ever seen Fellini's excellent La Strada? She plays the innocent and somewhat feeble-minded Gelsomina; in Nights of Cabiria she portrayed a prostitute. Both wonderful films... but Il Bidone perhaps seems to be one of Fellini's lesser works.

Bob and Ray! A dry white male comedy team of the 1950's and 1960's. Yesterday reader Eric Elfner showed me his "Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular" from 1958 - the web page is here. Check out Lena Horne's "New-Fangled Tango." Also, the mammoth Radio City Music Hall organ is heard in a Frankensteinian performance of "The First Noel." It's in STEREO!

One of the endearing things about early 1960's albums was the Organ Craze. My Wurlitzer is mightier than yours!

Organ Moods
The King of Organs
...there are countless other organ LP covers which I am, for some reason, unable to find right now. Trust me.

...which could lead to a paragraph or two about Terrible Album Covers, but I'm not going there today. (I must confess, however, a curiosity about the career of German singer Heino, whose nightmare-inducing looks - he looks like one of the mutants in The Omega Man - were apparently not an impediment to his success.)(In Germany.)

But, let's face it, it is all too easy to make fun of foreign singing stars. (Nana Mouskouri's glasses. Edith Piaf's eyebrows.) So I won't. (Did I miss anyone?)

Oh, all right. Here are more awful album covers. I like Si Zentner's "The Swingin' Eye." John Bult's "Julie's Sixteenth Birthday" is a favorite on many "worst of" collections, I notice. As I have a daughter named Julie I find it especially creepy.

Wait a minute! Looking up Heino on wikipedia, I find that he has Grave's Disease - that's why he wears those sunglasses. I just made fun of a guy with a condition he can do nothing about. I feel awful.

But not awful enough to remove all that HTML I coded.

Whatever. Have a great weekend!

21 February 2008

Last night I watched a movie with a high yuk-factor: Farinelli (1994). Who was Farinelli? A castrato singer from the 18th century (pictured at right). And yes, a castrato is exactly what you think it is, a male singer with something less. Why would I watch such a thing? I was asking myself that same question after about the first half hour. But it seemed preferable to what my wife and daughter were watching on the Discovery Channel, a program about Indonesians covered with large, hideous warts and other dramatic facial viruses.

A natural question might be, Why would anyone do this? (Be castrated for art, that is, not watch a film about a guy who was castrated for art.) It's a long, complicated story which I won't go into. Suffice to say that, 1.) It wasn't voluntary, and 2.) A castrato soprano is a unique sound, the high range of a female voice with the power of a male voice. For the film a male's voice (counter-tenor) was mixed with a female's voice (soprano) to produce the sound. Personally, I prefer the sound of a good bass-baritone or a bass - see entry for 1 Feb, Samuel Ramey. Okay, anyway, I saw Farinelli; I can cross it off my list.

If you have a mind to, you can read about the unique qualities of the castrato voice here. There is even a link where you may hear one - Alessandro Moreschi, the "last of the castratos." He died in 1922. Perhaps not surprisingly, being a castrato is out of fashion these days... (Well, unless Hillary becomes president, in which case there will be lots of castratos.)

I learned two interesting new details from reading the Civil War book I'm reading: 1.) In Stonewall Jackson's famous flanking march at the Battle of Chancellorsville, only approximately a third of Jackson's Corps made it in time to assault Gen. Howard's XI Corps. The rest were straggling and couldn't come up in time to form up and attack. I had always supposed that the entire Corps made the attack. Not so! 2.) At the Battle of Gettysburg, General Pickett started the Assault of Longstreet's Corps (later celebrated as "Pickett's Charge") but didn't complete it. He got about halfway, apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor and turned his horse around and retired to the starting point, where he watched the attack utterly fail. This is generally not mentioned in history books. I always suspected that Pickett was something of a putz - now I'm convinced.

So, it's like I wrote yesterday: You can have read books about the Civil War all your life and still learn something new.

Did you see the lunar eclipse last night? I watched through a good set of binoculars. It was cool. The sky was so clear that I could also just barely make out the rings of nearby Saturn. You can still see Saturn this weekend. Go here for the appropriate video describing it. As I mentioned, a good set of binoculars are about as good as a cheap telescope.

20 February 2008

I did some reading. To answer my own question about when the events described in Taras Bulba could have taken place (see yesterday's entry), it seems to be about the time of the Chmielnicki Uprising, or 1648-1654. In other words, the 17th century, which is what I thought. However, the costumes in the trailer for that Russian movie look Napoleonic - especially that high-waisted dress the woman is wearing. But this is about as far as I intend to delve into unpronouncable Cossack history, thank you very much.

Well, maybe one more interesting thing. It turns out that one of the groups that Lenin disapproved of and tried to exterminate were the Cossacks. He eliminated a third of them, or more, depending upon sources. That's the depressing thing about Russian history: it oftentimes seems to be built on a foundation of great heaps of dead bodies.

I was browsing around on wikipedia the other day and came across this: "In the United States, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling is generally recognized as the nation's first baby boomer. She was born in Philadelphia on January 1, 1946, at 12:00:01 a.m. Casey-Kirschling applied for Social Security benefits on 15 October 2007, signaling the start of an expected avalanche of applications from the post World War II war generation. Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, a former teacher from New Jersey, applied for benefits over the Internet at an event attended by Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue." Why is this notable? Because at least two generations (yours included) are going to be working to pay for her benefits, and for the benefits of her peers.

I had always considered myself a baby boomer, but, increasingly, it appears that I am not. Since I was born in 1956 (and therefore never subject to the Vietnam War draft - described as being the defining event for the Baby Boomers), I am instead in "Generation Jones." "Jones" in this context describes an unfullfilled desire (jonesing). I can relate to this, as I describe here. Despite the fact that I am now 51, in some ways I feel like I was never accepted into the Adults' Club! It's odd... I watch old films noir and think, "Those are real adults," despite the fact that I am now older than most of the protagonists in the films. Perhaps adulthood is merely attitudinal.

Maybe even adultery is attitudinal, too.

Sorry for that.

Watched Hawaii (1966), the partial film adaptation of the James Michener novel. Eh. After three hours I was kind of sorry that I spent the time. I mostly watched it because when I was a kid I liked a Martin Denny adaptation of the Elmer Bernstein theme music, and was wondering how it was used. It seems that whenever I watch a film because I'm curious about the incidental music I have come to like, I'm disappointed. (Major example: John Barry's score for "Somewhere in Time.") I'm not doing that any more.

By the way, for a while when I was about thirteen I was reading adult best-sellers like The Boston Strangler, Hawaii and Clavell's Tai-Pan. What a mistake. The only parts I can now remember are the lurid sexual parts!

I am now reading a book given to me by a friend, "Campaigns of the Civil War," by Walter Geer. Written in 1926, it is the first of its type, a one volume survey of the tactics and strategy of each major Civil War battle. Later on other authors wrote more or less in that format - Shelby Foote comes to mind - but this one is concise and readable. If you want to get an idea of the general circumstances surrounding each major battle, this is a great place to start.

I have been reading Civil War books, on and off, since 1973. The one thing I would have greatly appreciated at the start is if some author explained the basic fact about tactics that I am now about to impart to you: All company, regiment, and brigade movements are based on the necessity of getting men into a position where they can deliver massed musket fire to the front, where the enemy is. But if the enemy is not in the front but on the side (or flank), this is called "enfilade fire," and creates enormous problems. The problems arise because there is no easy way to get long lines of men two ranks deep turned 90 degrees to take and return fire. We can do it with some confusion during a battle reenactment because nobody is really getting killed, but in reality, the situation quickly becomes impossible and the only solution is to retreat, withdraw and/or be routed. (A rout is, above all, an emotional response to life-threatening danger.) Or die! Hence the many, many references in the books I've read to units "getting turned," and "flanking maneuvers" and the great importance of the associated tactics.

It only really makes sense if you've done Civil War era company and regimental level close order drill, when you can experience for yourself the mess and confusion of getting men in the right position. It's sloppy enough while not under fire - add to it uneven ground, smoke, noise, blood and body parts getting splashed and flung about (with the associated fear and panic) and the words on the pages of the books begin to make sense. So for that reason I, being a longtime reenactor, have an advantage over the casual or non-reenacting reader of the American Civil War. A combat veteran has an ever greater advantage.

It's so funny. When I was a nineteen year-old in 1975, after having read many books about the Civil War (I focused on that subject with great intensity), I thought I pretty much knew it all. But now I know that this was not the case, is not now the case and can never be the case - there is always more to learn. In fact, the one overriding thing I learned in college is just how much I didn't and don't know. For instance, for every mathematical theorem and shortcut I was given to memorize, there were countless years of hard work by incredibly dedicated and intelligent people. Every fact I read in a book was arrived at by the combined work of historians and archivists. We become consumers of knowledge without really ever appreciating the work involved.

Perhaps the realization that you don't know it all, and can't, is the start of educational maturity.

19 February 2008

The BBC would like to caution you against intemperate listening.

I watched the 1962 film treatment of Taras Bulba over the weekend, something I've wanted to see for years. Taras who? He's the title character in a book by Nicolai Gogol. I read it years ago, after becoming familiar with the symphonic score by Leoš Janácek. It's a very gritty and harsh book; for instance, Taras shoots one of his sons for being a traitor to the Cossacks (he falls in love with a Pole), and the other son is tortured to death. Taras himself is nailed to a tree and set aflame at the end, yelling defiance. The background is the 17th century (I think) Cossack battles with the Poles. The Hollywood treatment is nowhere as cruel as the source material, of course, and stars Tony Curtis (real name: Bernie Schwartz), of all people. But the cavalry battle scenes were pretty good, being shot in Argentina and featuring the Argentine Army. Not too bad, for 1962. However, a promising new production of it is now in the works, featuring a Russian-Ukrainian cast. (Check out the excellent trailer here.) Looks wonderful... it's about time the Ukrainians did something proper with their own epic. Anyway, if you liked "Troy," "Braveheart" and "Gladiator" and similiar big budget historical epics you may want to watch for this.

All through the 1962 movie, however, I found myself wondering, "What year is this?!?" (I hate when I have to do that.) It's always hard to tell with a Russian story because the nation is so backward. What looks like the 15th or 16th century with a European reference could very well be in the 17th century (or later) in Russia. Gogol unhelpfully doesn't give a date for the action, and one writer speculates (correctly, I think) that the 16th century dates given on the DVD case are wrong. If I had to guess I'd put Taras Bulba in the late 17th century.

I found a Lp price guide and discovered that my all-time rarest Yardbirds Lp (see entry for 2/15) is only worth $25-$35 - how disappointing.

I also watched another two-fisted film, Charleton Heston's 1965 The War Lord, set in the late 11th century. Heston plays a Norman knight - Richard Boone is his crusty but faithful family retainer, Bors. An excellent and underrated film, and the only one I'm aware of that deals with the provocative topic of droit de seigneur. (Fun fact: The Norman keep constructed for the film was located in Studio City, California, on the Universal City Studios lot. I used to attend a European Fair held there in October and was fascinated with this structure. Never got to go in, though, more's the pity. I have also seen the Camelot set at Warner Brothers constructed for the 1967 film of the same name - the War Lord tower was more impressive.)

Finally, at my daughter's request I once again rented Heisser Sommer, the East German socialist musical from 1968 - a cult film in my household. This time she shared it with a friend, who also found it engrossing. I, in turn, lent it to my Civil War pard who speaks German. The music is maddingly ingratiating (the tunes are in my head even as I write) and it's a prime example of what is now called, in Germany, "Oststalgie" (a fond looking back at socialist East Germany). This time I copied it to tape so I don't have to rent it anymore.

There are times when I find that my kids are just as odd as I am - which is unsettling.

15 February 2008

Love, love, love.

I mentioned yesterday that I was listening to a bunch of old Lps (aka "vinyl" for you young'uns) on my mp3 player - digital recordings by a friend. Here's a stinker by The Association from a mercifully-forgotten 1969 Lp; the song is entitled "Broccoli." It sounds like a joke song by those guys who do the Spinal Tap music. And, for the record, I do not think broccoli is at all groovy. I hate it.

Record collecting was, and is, cool. I have a number of Lps that are now forgotten that I treasure. For instance, I am the only person I know who has all of the U.S.-released Sadistic Mika Band recordings. In fact, I can still hear one of their songs, "Funky Mahjong," in my head. And then there's Seventh Wave's "Star Palace of the Sombre Warrior," an over-produced synthesizer song from their one and only album, released in 1975. I still have it. Does anyone remember Seventh Wave? No, not even wikipedia. And oh, look, I have a copy of the rarest Yardbirds album. Bought it in the PX when I was in the Marines. (I wonder how much it's worth?) I can see why Jimmy Page obtained an injunction against anyone releasing it in CD; the audio quality sucks.

The all-time best record collection I know of belongs to my friend Vern Stoltz, who spent years "thrifting" in Goodwills and yard sales looking for one-off and obscure Lps. I could spend hours just looking at the funny album covers. I was at a tiki party of his, once, and he gave me his second copy of the infamous 101 Strings Erotic album. (The 101 Strings - "the World's First Stereo Scored Orchestra" - was an easy listening orchestral ensemble of the 1960's. Their erotic album, from 1972, features string arrangements of jazz standards with the sound of a woman's pleasured voice mixed in.) I don't play it often - it's embarassing to listen to. But merely having it is fun!

I started reading Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native," but after about four chapters it just wasn't grabbing me, so, under my new reading rules, I gave it up. As I grow older I see that there are too many books and too little time, so now I read for enjoyment rather than being able to say that I read a book I didn't like (which is the case with most Russian literature I have plowed through as a teen).

I read Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger" yesterday; his story about Satan's interactions with Austrian villagefolk during the Middle Ages. Certainly not a major work but not a bad one. It provokes some thoughts about the nature of evil, but the main theme seems to be "Life is but a dream," which is not exactly original. (Shakespeare invoked the idea in "The Tempest": We are such things as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.) Is life but a dream? Is our whole reality of pain, happiness, suffering and joy merely a subset of some greater reality? Will we, upon dying, "wake up" in another reality, and perhaps look around like Dorothy at the end of "The Wizard of Oz," and say "You were in my dream. So were you. And you." I think so, and so did C.S. Lewis, but only the dead know for sure - and they aren't talking.

With that weighty philosophy I shall close for this week. Enjoy your president's day holiday, Gentle Readers.

14 February 2008

St. Valentine's Day - the pressure is on. As usual, Wondermark has an interesting slant on the subject: Hallmark Hoops. Heh... I like that phrase, "Hallmark hoops."

Another section from "A Tom Sawyer Companion" by Mark D. Evans: Mark Twain's Prophetic Dream. Interesting, no? I wonder if it's true... (Twain never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.)

One more: A Body on the Floor - this took place in Mark Twain's father's office building, which is just across the street from Twain's boyhood home. I took a photo of it when I was in Hannibal.

...and that's it with Mark Twain for now, I think, except that I want to see the claymation "The Adventures of Mark Twain" (1985) that my son told me about. Can you view youtube videos? If so, then check out this five minute segment. Pretty weird, huh? If the rest of the production is anything like this, this is something I want to see! Anyway, this segment is adapted from "The Mysterious Stranger," which I plan to read. I presume the three claymation kids are Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and Huck Finn.

I suppose I shouldn't let the subject of Twain and Hannibal drop without mentioning that I used to play at being Huckleberry Finn when I was a boy. (Being myself was no fun in those days.) My Becky Thatcher was a girl named Viki Gardemann, with whom I sometimes exchange e-mails. A widow with five kids, I hope to see her (for the first time since 1984) later this year at the 100th anniversary celebration of my high school.

A Baby Boomer friend of mine has been digitizing his LP collection for the past six months, and kindly gave me the results of all that work (2,424 files) in exchange for a big collection of mp3s I gathered. The great majority of mine are digital remixes - all of his are analog recordings. But I have a lot to sift through; music that was in vogue 20, 30 and 40 years ago, some by artisits I know I like, some by artists I've never heard of. But as I sort of consume music via an mp3 player as I do my walking, I'll have plenty of opportunitites to listen to it. "Many a good tune played on an old fiddle," as my father used to say (about older women).

Last night I watched a yawner of a film noir, The Unsuspected, from 1947. The only really interesting part was visual: bad guy Jack Lambert (an ugly actor who made a b-movie career out of playing toughs) sits in his room at the Hotel Peakskill. Inevitably, the sign is flashing on and off outside his window, but the only part you can see is "KILL," which he stares at. Somewhat heavy-handed, but interesting. (When my Mom and I visited New York City when I was twelve, we stayed at a hotel that had a flashing neon sign outside the window. I felt like I was in a movie set.)

13 February 2008

I read Tom Sawyer yesterday (a quick read); I am now reading the essential "A Tom Sawyer Companion" by Mark D. Evans. It gives the real-life background to the events Twain describes in his book. I am doing this to shed some light on what it was I saw in Hannibal. I am very sorry that I couldn't take the guided tour, but we arrived on a Saturday night and the Sunday tours didn't begin until Noon. We also wanted to see Nauvoo, IL that day, and I knew that an approaching storm would make it difficult for us to get to Omaha. (As it turned out, we got no farther than Iowa City, IA when we were forced to pull over in 8" of snow.) Someday I'm going back to Hannibal to see it properly...

I last read Tom Sawyer when I was twelve or so - maybe I read it again when I was in my early twenties, but I forget. Anyway, reading it now is enlightening. For instance, in one part of the book Tom keeps a pinch bug in a percussion cap box. When I had read that the first time I didn't know what a percussion cap was, let alone what a percussion cap box was. A percussion cap is what goes onto the nipple of a musket. It contains fulminate of mercury that ignites when the hammer hits the cap, sparking off the main black power charge in the base of the barrel. I have done this thousands of times in reenacting. Anyway, a percussion cap box is tin and circular; large for musket caps, small for pistol caps. I own several. They used to make them out of metal, but lately, they're (inevitably) plastic.

Also, when Huck and Tom watch Injun Joe, Muff Potter and Dr. Robinson approach the grave that they plan to rob, Dr. Robinson is described as carrying a tin lantern, one of the perforated types that cast small dots of light everywhere. I own one of these and have used it at reenactments. Just as Twain says, it casts small dots of light everywhere, like a 19th century disco ball. It's another example of where my reenacting experience has illuminated (forgive the pun) my reading of Tom Sawyer.

Cardiff Hill in the Hannibal of Twain's boyhood was known as Halliday's Hill. I suppose the local Chamber of Commerce renamed it. In Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas (who later adopts Huck Finn) is described as living on the summit. I'm sorry now I didn't look around up there when I was in Hannibal. Twain wrote, "We used to undress & play Robin Hood in our shirt-tails, with lath swords, in the woods on Halliday's Hill on those long summer days" - just as he has Tom Sawyer and friends doing in the book.

The Becky Thatcher home, in modern day Hannibal, was the home of Laura Hawkins, a childhood crush of Twain's who served as the model for Becky Thatcher. There exists a charming photo of them together in their old age. The relationship is explained in a passage in A Tom Sawyer Companion.

A fascinating story from Twain's childhood is recounted here; it forms the basis for the passages about Tom Sawyer's terrible secret in the book. The jail from Twain's boyhood is gone - all that remains is a plaque near the Mississippi River. A hilarious continuation of the story about Twain and the immolated drunk is further explained in a passage in A Tom Sawyer Companion. Mark Twain's brother is Henry Clemens, the inspiration for Sid in Tom Sawyer.

Twain makes light of it, but I suspect that this was an exceedingly dark chapter in Twain's boyhood life. Nowadays we deploy legions of pediatric grief counselors and therapists for lesser things...

I voted yesterday, but wasn't proud of it. Instead of voting for the least offensive candidate I voted against the most offensive one. Some choice.

12 February 2008

From my Schott's almanac desk calendar: some shapes and British Army nicknames. I see that I would be "Nobby." Sounds like a horse. I think I like "Brigham" better, in which case I would require the surname "Young."

From a friend: Penny Postcards. When I was driving to Utah last week I sent a postcard to a friend every day, reporting our progress. A quaint, old-fashioned activity I got into the habit of when my son was on a mission. From Fairfax County, VA: Pohick Church - I live about ten minutes from this, and have visited it often. There is Civil war era grafitti on the outside walls; guys writing their regimental unit numbers, that sort of thing. Cool. From California: Bing Crosby's house - Toluca Lake is really the tony part of Burbank, my home town.

I am now reading Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," one of the favorite books from my childhood. Why? Because I visited Hannibal, Missouri, and am now curious to see the places from Twain's own boyhood that made it into the book. After I'm done with Tom Sawyer I'll re-read a neat little book I obtained some years ago, describing in detail how places and incidents from Twain's life made it into Tom Sawyer. Connecting the literary dots with the tourism dots, as it were.

Finally, I added photos to my Utah Drive journal. Check 'em out.

11 February 2008

Greetings, everyone! Honda Marriage Encounter 2008 (see entry for 2 January) is over and I'm back in Virginia. My illustrated trip journal is here.

I will now go into a topic that I have normally avoided in this blog: politics. But, with the events of Super Tuesday sorting out the three apparent front-runners from both parties, I feel that I can now write about politics in this blog since I dislike all the candidates!

It's now Pushy Shrew vs. Tax-and-Spend Liberal vs. Angry Nut Job - you may decide which is which. I can honestly say that since I came of age to vote in my first general election in 1976, I have not seen a less encouraging slate of candidates.

It appears that, in the collective wisdom of my political party, my religion (Mormon) is unacceptable. Therefore, the Grand Old Party is now unacceptable to me. And, frankly, I feel like I've held my nose and voted for inferior candidates in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004. So I'm not doing that in 2008. (Well, not unless the Pushy Shrew gets the nomination, in which case I will once again sigh loudly and vote, under duress, the ABC ticket - Anyone But Clinton.)

But it's not like my vote will matter, is it? My favored candidates got eliminated by people in other states long before I get any say in the matter.

Am I bitter? A little. But, being an upbeat, optimistic kind of guy, I think that if life gives you lemons it's time to make a cool, refreshing pitcher of lemonade. So I have decided that I will vote for none of the candidates on the ballot and will instead write in my choice, which I have never done before. How liberating! It'll be nice to vote *for* somebody rather than to vote *against* someone for a change. And you won't be able to blame me for the inevitable mess the major candidates create.

But who? That is the question. After some consideration, I have decided to advance the candidacies of Greg "Elvis" Hough for President and Chris "Kermit" Cahill for Vice-President. I call it the Rugby and Beer Ticket. After all, we've had inflation, Iraq, illegal immigrants and the economy as national concerns… isn't it time for some rugby and beer?

I cannot take part in the beer aspect of the platform, of course, but the rugby plank is one I can enthusiastically advance. More Americans should play rugby. (I was especially convinced of this after witnessing all the silly bombast involved with the recent Super Bowl.) And who better to popularize and epitomize rugby than Elvis? He has been an untiring player, match secretary, secretary and all around Club Man for Western Suburbs rugby for years. He'll do a great job in the Oval Office. (I just hope he's sober when his defense advisor tells him that Iran just launched a cobbled-together atomic bomb towards Israel.)

And anyone who has ever attended the Cape Fear Sevens or St. Pat's tournament in Savannah can attest to Kermit's abilities with logistics. He's another dedicated, untiring Club Man - just the guy I want to step in as a replacement in case Elvis does a fatal tackle on the pitch. (Well, not much danger of that since he doesn't tackle much.)

So there it is, the Hope-Change-Rugby-Beer ticket for 2008: Write in Elvis/Kermit in 2008!

(Seriously, I do not come to my decision to write in candidates easily. I have always felt that the voting franchise, being ultimately bought with the blood of patriots and not the ink of bureaucrats, is sacred and should be used as effectively as possible. But the current field of viable candidates is about as encouraging as wet gray paint and I'm suffering from intense political fatigue. I once asked my boss, a somewhat elderly man, if he was a Democrat or a Republican. He replied, "Neither. A pox on both their houses." I now understand what he meant and have arrived at his political evolution.)

1 February 2008

A couple of pages from my Schott's Almanac desk calendar: retronyms (never heard of the word before) and counting sheep. ("Dicks" and "bumfit": sounds like a New Zealand sheep joke.)

My pard Chris sent me this: Welsh cell phone salesman amazes crowd. Tenors get all the attention. I prefer baritones and basses, but tenors are the male divas in the opera world. My daughter and I were watching a bit of "the Three Tenors" last night - yecch, how cheesy. My favorite male opera singer is Samuel Ramey, a bass. He specializes in devils: Boito's Mefistofele (pictured), Gounod's Faust, and Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust. He was once described as having a hell of a career. Ramey also sings a mean Bluebeard.

Back to the Welsh amateur: He's not bad. But for opera, he has a minimum entry level of talent. He was a bit faltering and "pitchy" on that upper note. I would like to have heard the entire piece and I wish that audience would have shut up while he was singing. It takes stamina and major muscle control to sustain that kind of singing for five minutes or so... and act at the same time. The demands that opera places upon singers is unreal; I am certain that it's the most demanding field in the arts. The best sing well, can act convincingly and look good - and have that undefinable characteristic, presence.

By the way, men in Wales sing as naturally as American men watch football. Welsh men's choirs are world renowned. As are Russian basses.

Speaking of Russian basses, I have to include these interesting shots of Feodor Chaliapin (bass) as Ivan the Terrible in Rimsky-Korsakov's the Maid of Pskov the as the title character in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. He cornered the market in tsars the way Ramey did with devils.

Another friend sent me this: Twelve tips for improving camera phone photos. Good stuff.

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through "Weird U.S." by Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman. One of my favorite sections was on the fascinating Voynich manuscript, which I had never heard of before. What language is it in? Or is it meaningless gibberish - a fake? I was interested to see that, in the 1950's, an "informal" team of NSA cryptologists attempted to crack it and couldn't. (I suspect the term "informal" was inserted to save some embarrassment over their failure.)

I used to be a spook at the NSA; it was my first job out of college. I'd write more about it, but that would invite a visit from the black helicopters...

Seriously, the stuff I worked with is now badly out of date. In fact, it's in museums.

I'm taking the week off next week, so blog entires will be brief or non-existent, depending on how bored I am.

Have a great weekend!

31 January 2008

It pays to increase your word power (with a nod to Reader’s Digest): I saw something the other day that said, “…tender meat strips in a savory sauce…” Now, I always thought the word "savory" meant “delicious,” and so thought it a bit odd that a menu would include an adjective like this. (After all, if everything on the menu isn’t delicious, why eat there?) But no, savory is an herb. But that’s not our word of the day.

Looking savory up in wikipedia led to the following “five basic tastes”: saltiness, sourness, sweetness, bitterness and… umami. Umami? The others I know, but what on earth is a umami taste? You can read about it here – oddly enough, it’s why oriental food often has MSG added to it. (Contrary to conspiratorial thought it's not put there intentionally to make Occidentals sick.)

Umami - How I love ya, how I love ya, my dear Umami….

As is nearly always the case with wikipedia, one interesting thing leads to another, this time to the concept of the Supertaster - a being with powers far beyond that of ordinary man. Okay, perhaps not, as 1 in 4 humans may be Supertasters. For a rugby player, however, the Supertaster is a poor, pitiful creature, as he has little interest (according to the article) to alcohol.

Frankly, I have a theory of my own about ruggers: I think we're somewhat less responsive to pain than the average guy. How else does one explain our apparent love of injury? But… maybe I'm up in the night on this one. If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you kick us, do we not retaliate?

And again, following a wikipedia link leads us to Tetrachromacy, or beings with sight that can distinguish between colors where humans cannot. "One study suggested that 2–3% of the world's women might have the kind of fourth cone that lies between the standard red and green cones, giving, theoretically, a significant increase in color differentiation." I wouldn't be a bit surprised - not at all - based on exasperating conversations with my wife about colors. "That's teal!" "No, it isn't." "Yes it is!" etc.

Interesting article: "Looking for Madam Tetrachromat" - heh. I'm married to her.

Following another link we find that birds can see in ultraviolet light. Trippy! We tried to do that kind of thing with black light posters in the Sixties, but that went out of style. So… why would birds need to see in UV? "...behavioural experiments have already shown that the ultraviolet component of plumage colours is important in mate choice decisions." Sex. It always comes down to sex, doesn't it? Geez, can you imagine what human sexuality would be like with the added dimension of ultra-violet light detection?

And here I'll wait while you ponder that one.

As for myself, I am losing my senses. Literally. My evolving hearing loss makes cell phone conversations frustrating, and most of the films I watch are in black and white. Some day, I suppose, I'll morph into Tommy the deaf, dumb and blind boy, playing at a PC keyboard instead of a pinball machine.

But in all of biology (my worst high school subject, by the way), what puzzles and freaks me out the most is synchronous menstruation. Ever hear of it? A friend told me about this years ago and it led me to believe that not only are women stranger than we thought, they're stranger than we can think. Straight Dope Cecil explains it here. Okay, okay, not only is the synchronization possible, but some women are menstrual pacesetters: they make other women conform to their cycles.

(Weird, Twilight Zone music plays here.)

I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the menstrual pacesetters are tetrachromatic Supertasters. Gentlemen, I give you the Uber-Fraulein.

30 January 2008

When I sometimes write that Civil War renacting is weird, I know what I'm talking about. For instance, I got this e-mail the other day: "I just found this and just about died laughing. You really need to see this book: "Civil War Trivia Book," by Peter Darman, published by Barnes & Noble, 2007. Check out page 222 - the question and answer at the bottom of the page… Q: Why was the field artillery piece the "Parrot Gun" so called? A: In the late 1840's, an exotic bird craze swept the United States. Parrots and parakeets were imported by the thousands. The birds became major problems in cities. In response the authorities ordered the development of artillery pieces to solve the problem. Two models were speedily developed: a ten-pound parrot gun for medium and small birds, and a twenty-pounder for larger parrots. The guns proved a failure and were put into storage, only to be brought out again for use in the Civil War."

Why is this funny? Because this whole business about unwanted exotic birds (in a published book by a published author from a major publishing house, mind you) is from a satire my friend Don Tracey wrote circa 1986, which I posted on my JonahWorld! (Civil War reenacting) website. I put up a web page explaining the joke here. Those kinds of things have to savored with web pages of their own.

It calls into question Peter Darman's assertions about World War II uniforms in his other books!

By the way, a *factual* account of how the Parrott Rifle got its name can be found here on wikipedia. See? Nothing about parrots or parakeets.

I suspect that the same sort of thing has been happening for years about the origin of rap music. That was another satire on my JonahWorld! website. I get a report every week on what people have been entering into the search windows of my websites, and for JonahWorld!, almost without fail, I see "origin of rap music" as one of the searches. So somewhere there's a group of people with the idea that rap music came from Colored regiments during the Civil War...

Now, I recognize that there is a class of person who feeds false information into wikipedia and other resources and generally enjoys misleading or misinforming people, but I am not one of those. Far from it! Like Chaucer's scholar, I gladly learn and will gladly teach. So I will gladly teach you one of my little Internet look-up secrets: snopes.com. It is the best urban legends reference site on the web, and I have used it for years to cement my reputation as an oracle. For instance, did you receive an e-mail from a well-meaning but slightly gullible friend about how green M&Ms are aphrodisiacs? Look it up in the snopes search window and debunk it with this. There are countless other examples; I'll get people who e-mail me asking, "Wes, is this one true?" Understanding that "If you give a man a fish he'll have one meal, but if you teach him to fish he can feed himself," I usually provide the snopes URL and respond, "Look it up yourself."

Here's one last bit of gore (and fecal matter) from "Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle" by John Michael Priest. This one involves a freakish incident with a minie ball and a watch chain.

I am now reading a book entitled "Weird U.S." by Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman; it was a Christmas present from my daughter. It's a collection of folklore from across the U.S. (For instance, Virginia's famous Bunnyman Bridge gets a mention.) I was interested in reading a section about the various "Crybaby bridges" (where cries of babies can be supposedly heard) in the United States. Reading it, I immediately thought of Bobby Gentry's 1967 hit, "Ode to Billy Joe." In the song, a mysterious object is seen being dropped from the Tallahatchie Bridge. What was it? The song doesn't say, and a generation or two of listeners has tried to figure it out. (I get mail on the subject every now and then as a result of my webpage.)

Anyway, I now wonder... did Bobby Gentry derive her idea of something being thrown off the bridge from knowledge about a Crybaby Bridge? Or is it just coincidental? Somebody providing data for wikipedia must have thought the same thing, because in the entry there's a link for The Mystery of Ode to Billy Joe.

There was a film made about the song (!), Ode to Billy Joe (1976) which gives an explanation, and, I thought, it wasn't a bad one. The object was a doll that symbolized childhood for a girl who was preparing herself to have sex for the first time. Problem is, the young man she wants to have sex with is a repressed homosexual. Tragedy ensues.

Oh dear, I just gave the plot away.

29 January 2008

A few people, knowing I'm a Mormon, have asked me if I'm going to address the following news story in my blog, so here it is:

You may have heard that Gordon B. Hinckley, the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon), died Sunday night. My wife heard about it from my son in Idaho two hours after he died. Out there news like that flashes around like lightning. I tried to pull up the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune for details, but both sites were apparently jammed due to high amounts of traffic. President Hinckley is the head of the Mormon Church - sort of like the Pope of the Mormons, to use an inexact phrase. Unlike in the Catholic Church, however, his successor is pretty much already determined: Thomas S. Monson (photo here),the senior apostle of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The process is described here.

I'm sure that this story is getting more distribution than it normally would because it's an election year, since this time a Mormon (Mitt Romney) is running for president. Anyway, President Hinckley was 97, a good old age. His wife of 67 years, Marjorie Pay Hinckley, died in 2004, and I recall the sad little mention of her ill health that he related at a conference. Now they're together. Gordon B. Hinckley lived an exemplary life of service and great accomplishment, and I strongly suspect that when he reports to the Pearly Gates, he will be receiving the coveted WDTGAFS. ("Well done, thou good and faithful servant.")

I'm almost done with "Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle" by John Michael Priest. Actually, I'm warming to this book. It helps greatly that I know and have walked - many times - the places where the battle took place: the Dunker Church, the Cornfield, the D.R. Miller Farm, the Bloody Road, the West Woods, the East Woods, Burnside's Bridge, the Hagerstown Pike, etc. What Tom Sawyer said - "There's ain't nothing so good as seeing a place a book has talked about!" - works in reverse, too. Reading a book about a place you know is pretty cool. Did you know that Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was at the battle? Her monument is at the north end of the battlefield. There are some bricks from her Massachusetts home there aligned to form a red cross.

Antietam is sort of "my" Civil War battlefield - it's the first I ever visited, and the first I take visiting tourists to. Gettysburg is like a Disneyland of the Civil War, with all sorts of tourist sites and attractions; Antietam is isolated, not built up and still pretty much looks as it did in 1862. The town of Sharpsburg hasn't grown much, either - it's about the same population as it was in 1862. I think you get a far better idea of what a Civil War battlefield was like by visiting there rather than Manassas or Gettysburg.

I have memories of the place (many volunteer sessions for the Park Service as a reenactor), and have camped there a number of times. That's interesting! I can't say as how I've ever gotten a good night's sleep on the battlefield. I will not admit to being a psychic, and I have never seen any ghosts or experienced anything truly metaphysical there, but the place sort of hums on a plane that is not easily described. My first night there was disturbed by flashes of light and commotion in my head all night. Nothing tangible, just commotion. And visiting the Sunken Road at 1 AM is a creepy experience. One can't help but thinking of the photograph taken there on the day after the battle.

Anyway, Antietam impresses me and always has. I wrote a little article about it for a reenactor newsletter in 1986. What I wrote then still holds for me today, with the exception of where I wrote, "Men fought and died there for ideals that they considered to be more important than life itself..." That's true in an extended sense, but I have since come to learn that that is not true in the tactical sense. In general, men fight and die for other men, not ideals and ideas. Twenty-two additional years of reading books about war has convinced me that men fight in battles because they don't want to appear as cowards or let their fellow soldiers down. It's what I have come to recognize in rugby as the pack mentality and is very strong among men. It's what makes otherwise impossible tactics, like firing lines separated by only 50 yards or so, possible.

Well. I'll close by stating that if I ever move away from this region I'll miss not having Antietam to visit.

28 January 2008

I had an interesting dining experience Saturday night; The Five Families went to a Moroccan restaurant called The Casablanca in Alexandria. They had a couple of belly dancers doing their thing, which was certainly interesting. The next day at church I couldn't get the image of a belly-dancer balancing a sword sideways atop her head out of my mind. The restaurant took every effort to provide an authentic Moroccan experience, which is to say that a stabbing took place in the booth next to us, it took a hefty bribe to get our cars back and a fat man wearing a fez lurking in an alley told us in muted tones that we were in great danger.

I jest.

I can report that the food was tasty despite the fact that I was urping up the unfamiliarly-seasoned meat the rest of the evening and the morning after. We might go there again sometime. Certainly recommended. Belly dancing every evening at 8 PM. And, no, yours truly did not get up and throw some moves.

"The Five Families?" It's one of my many social groups. When my middle child graduated from high school in 2005 she was an active part of the drama troupe; so were the kids of the other four parents. As we all all to work together closely during a teacher/program upheaval (long story) we became close and still see each other socially fairly often. We used to meet each other with all the kids at social events, but lately, as we're all moving towards empty nests, it has just been the parents - which is great! (Far less backtalk.)

I am now reading one of the most sanguinary books about the Civil War I have ever read, "Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle" by John Michael Priest (a library sale purchase). The book is put together from soldiers' accounts of the battle, and, as you might expect, there is a constant litany of blood, pain and brain matter. A few excerpts give you a general idea of the style of the work. I have no doubt that the battle of Antietam, in the macro sense, was actually like that. Most accounts are larger and more strategic in nature; this book is a collection of person-to-person details put into tactical context.

It's a good book, but every now and then I find I have to sort of mentally wipe the blood, bodily fluids and brain matter off myself and continue. It kind of reminds me of some truly bizarre conversations which took place between my mother and her sister when I was in the back seat of a car on a vacation in New Hampshire. I was twelve. Somehow the conversation had turned to survival in the New Hampshire woods during the winter, and began with a horrible story about some hunters trapped in the woods during a heavy snowfall. I forget the details, but what made a real impression on me was the fact that they had to drink urine in order to stay hydrated. Drink their own urine! "That's horrible!" I thought. (The fact that there was available frozen water all around somehow didn't register with me.) Anyway, after my aunt was done my Mom, feeling somehow that she had to play oneupmanship with her sister, gave a horrible account that she had read or heard somewhere of her own. Urine-drinking was also a part of this one. "Yuk!" I thought. My aunt retaliated with yet another story, but this time the urine drinking was a sort of throw away mention, the impact being considerably lessened with repetition.

Now that I think about it, I'm fairly confident that these two crazy French-Canadian women were having me on. Or fervently believing their own made-up yarns - which isn't beyond the realm of possibility, truth being a fungible thing in some cultures. Anyway, the moral of this story is that constant mention of bodily fluids (whether in a book or overheard from the back seat of a car) tends to wear a reader or listener down.

I have finished Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; I didn't like it at all. It seemed pointless. I have now heard Tannhauser, Parsifal and his four "Ring" operas - Die Meistersinger is the only one where I've felt like I was wasting my time.

Monday is weigh in day, which I will readily report: 253.0, even. About a pound and a half less than last Monday and a new low. Maybe I'm not on a plateau after all. Of course, I could probably accelerate my weight loss with a steady diet of my own urine (like John Lennon, Gandhi and Jim Morrison), but I'm not that desperate or faddish.

25 January 2008

I was in D.C. yesterday and stumbled upon what has to be the worst public art in the Nation's Capital: the Boy Scouts Memorial near the Ellipse. An Internet page has this: "The bronze statue consists of three figures. The Boy Scout represents the aspirations of all past, present, and future Scouts throughout the world. The male figure exemplifies physical, mental, and moral fitness, love of country, good citizenship, loyalty, honor, and courage. He carries a helmet, a symbol of masculine attire. The female figure symbolizes enlightenment with the love of God and fellow man, justice, freedom, and democracy. She holds the eternal flame of God's Holy Spirit." Yeah, okay. Too bad he wasn't wearing a bit more "masculine attire." Apparently nobody in 1964 was thinking in terms of future problems with Scouting - possibly they couldn't envision any - but still, this is unfortunate. It wouldn't clear a committee these days.

My son is an Eagle Scout, by the way - winner of a Heroism Award, no less. (Why?) I was a Scout leader for about nine years - Scoutmaster, Cubmaster, Den Leader, etc. I have no doubt that the days I spent doing Scouting stuff with my son will be among the greatest and most fulfilling days of my life. Scouting is a worthy program; I give it as my personal opinion that it's a shame that it is considered politically incorrect these days by some.

My own career as a Cub Scout was short-lived and unsatisfactory, but I learned some profound life truths from it regarding parenting. I made lemonade from lemons, I guess.

I was also roaming the halls of the Herbert Clark Hoover Building, home of the United States Department of Commerce, and came across this odd sentiment hanging on the wall. For the life of me, I'm not sure whether this is one of those cheesy Successories motivational posters or a parody thereof. (NOTE: In my career I have noticed that there is a direct correlation between the worst management dweebs I have ever encountered, and these things appearing on the walls of their offices. In fact, the all-time biggest jerk I ever knew had three in his office, in addition to a soothing little water sculpture I badly wanted to urinate in. I am content to have photos of my wife and kids and reenactment and rugby stuff in my office. The message I give to visitors is, I have a life.)

While in D.C. I also came across the William Tecumpseh Sherman equestrian statue in Sherman Square (near the Hoover building), an impressive work that I somehow haven't gotten around to ever visiting. Next time I'm bringing a camera! The small statues of a Yank and a Reb standing nearby are commendably authentic; I notice the sculptor even included the buckles under their cartridge boxes - impressive. I like taking photos of statues. Unlike live subjects they are handsome, well-posed and patient - they don't move about. If I ever become a professional photographer doing one of those glossy coffee table books this would be my shtick.

From my Schott's Almanac desk calendar: swords and their wielders.

...and that's it for this week. I sincerely hope you have a great weekend, Gentle Reader. I'm stopping by Fort Ward Park in Alexandria tomorrow to see a couple of cool old silent nickelodeon films about the Civil War that I was unaware of. Free! I love that word. Real good for free. I honestly believe that the worth of a society can be measured by the value of its volunteer work. Take wikipedia, for example. But... that is perhaps a subject for another blog entry...

Brother Brigham, over and out.

24 January 2008

I am now half-way through Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; I don't like it. I would suppose that a 4 1/2 hour opera would be epic in theme, in order to justify the length, but this one isn't. Far from it. It's sort of intimate and catty, with a rather pallid love plot. Eh. But, having made it halfway, I feel I must finish it.

The music is excellent, though.

My mother used to do that kind of thing: issue an unfavorable remark about something or somebody, then, at the end, reverse it and end the sentence with "though" or "too." Very odd. I called it the reversible opinion. Let's say, for instance, she was invited to share her opinion about Las Vegas lounge singer Wayne Newton. A typical pattern would be this: "Oh, I don't like him. He's just... I don't know. (Pause.) He's a sissy - all those clothes... And his voice isn't much, either. I don't like him. (Longer pause, and here's where the reverse comes in) "He's a good entertainer, though." That was the kicker; just when you thought she was speaking definitively on the matter, she changed her mind at the end.

The World's Largest Swimming Pool. Geez, can you imagine having to clean out the skimmers on that?

That book I finished yesterday, "The Quest for Theseus," gave me a new-found interest in the Minotaur, half man, half bull. I think one reason why lore about him has persisted for thousands of years is that he's an archetypical or perhaps psychological representation of men in general. A brutish side tempered with humanity. Uncivilized/civilized. Doesn't that describe us? Especially with rugby players - and rugby forwards, where the pack mentality is apparent. Beasts on the pitch, but educated beasts. It is a fact that in the nearly nine years of writing for and about ruggers, I have never felt like I needed to speak down to them. To my surprise, I discovered that, on the whole, we are a very well-read bunch. Perhaps it comes from rugby mostly being learned in college (in the United States, anyway). I recall once I wrote a rather difficult piece about thermodynamics for a club e-mail - and got an immediate reply from a forward, correcting me on a minor detail.

In 1974 our friend the Minotaur was updated and altered slightly for a new audience; he's now called Wolverine of the X-Men. After all, what is Wolverine but a bestial man, or a human beast? I believe he's popular with comic book readers for the same reasons why the Minotaur has been of interest for so long: he stikes a chord of recognition among readers. We know him. Perhaps, he is us.

I especially get a kick out of the sculpture of the Minotaur reading a book I found yesterday. That's me, kind of. Big guy, little paperback.

I got an interesting e-mail from a reader named Tim, I reproduce it here. He tells a couple of funny stories about visiting Knossos, Crete and seeing Maila "Vampira" Nurmi perform in a nightclub. Topless housemaid wielding a battle ax - Ha!

23 January 2008

Of all the odd reality shows on that media wasteland known as broadcast television, surely one of the oddest must be "The Biggest Loser," a show about a collection of fat people competing to lose weight. Only in America. This show is in its fifth season; I've never heard of it before now. This means, I think, that I do a commendably good job of ignoring broadcast television. I caught my second episode last night, as my wife and daughter were watching it. I normally wouldn't bother, but a little voice suggested that as my youngest daughter leaves for college this August, I should choke down my distaste for cheesy television and spend these little unscheduled moments in time with two of the people I love best in the world.

Two person teams are grouped in social and familial ways: husband and wife, mother and son, sisters, brothers, ex-football teammates, etc. One thing this show highlights (as my wife tells me in a rather resentful tone of voice) is that men can lose weight far more easily than can women. As I always love it when nature proves politically correct theorists wrong about how men and women are really the same, I appreciate this. Better than that, as I lost 55 pounds myself last year, I positively revel in it. Muscle raises metabolism, which burns fat. You build muscle, you lose some fat. But, as I learned from my home weight training days, unless you're a professional you cannot build muscle without adding some fat, and you cannot lose fat without losing some muscle.

Anyway, I point out to my wife that females still have the last laugh (literally): statistically they'll live longer. (Question: Why do husbands die before their wives? Answer: They want to.) I'm not sure if this is still true in the world of the morbidly obese, but I suspect it is.

One of the really difficult parts of this show to view is the climatic weigh-in, when the men are bare-chested and the women are wearing sports bras. Yeech. Last night one of these guys grabbed his rather butch female trainer, triumphantly carried her up to the scales and gave her an enormous, flabby and probably sweaty all-enveloping hug. That was pretty hard to watch.

Anyway, the brothers team - dressed in black like the New Zealand rugby XV - is consequently regarded as the show's major threat. So I'm rooting for them, insofar as I'm rooting for anything on this over-the-top display of maudlin emotion and hype. I do not plan to tune in next week.

Still, the show has a salutary effect on me: it encourages me to exercise and not to over eat. Perhaps coincidentally I weighed in this morning at an all-time low of 254.0.

I would have listened to more of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg last night, but guess what I was doing instead?

I am on the last chapters of "The Quest for Theseus" by A.G. Ward. This section examines the Theseus myth in terms of Renaissance depictions, and therefore takes us into some decidedly bizarre territory. Example: "Daedalus, Pasiphae and the Bull" by Giulio Romano. To appreciate the full weirdness of this scene, read the explanatory text here. "Blatantly abnormal" is right. Women mating with bulls. Sometimes I get the feeling that the ancients had way, way too much time on their hands...

The book makes the argument that the Minotaur, half man, half bull, remains a powerful visual element, and I have to agree. It's been a favorite of artists for millennia. Let's look at some:

An Athenian vase.
In the modern style.
Sculpted in bronze.
Gustave Dore engraving.
Minotaur reading (!)
French Romantic bronze statue.
19th C. Painting.
Comic book art.
Picasso.

That last one, by Picasso, is interesting. Picasso identified with the Minotaur - was obsessed with it, even. An interesting article with a possible explanation why is here.

...which, in turn, reminds me of a funny old rock song by Jonathan Richman, "Pablo Picasso." Have you ever heard it? Funny lyrics.

To conclude, I will mention that I, myself, was born under the astrological sign of Taurus, the bull.

22 January 2008

Nice three day weekend...

I am now reading a book entitled "The Quest for Theseus" by A.G. Ward; it's one of those Greek hero books, combining a literary survey with archelogy. Pretty interesting, as I like reading about Bronze Age Greece. There's a section about the famous bull-leapers of Bronze Age Crete - they're depicted in the palace of Knossos and in pottery, etc. A very dangerous pastime; the book posits that this may have been the factual, dimly-remembered activity that led to the myth about Theseus defeating the minotaur in the Labyrinth. Lots of young people confront a bull - few survive.

So... is bull-leaping possible? You might expect that American Rodeo participants would know something about it, but no... we have to look to France, where it's called the Course Landaise. Yes, it's possible and yes, they do it. And yes, people get killed doing it.

The labyrinth is interesting... nowadays we know it as a sort of maze, thanks to the legend, but the word origin is different. "Labyrinth" comes from the word labrys, referring to a double, or two-bladed, axe. The axe motif appears frequently in the palace of Knossos. However, looking at a plan of the palace, it's easy to see how it became associated with a maze!

Another question is, did the bull-leaping take place in the palace itself? Archelogists aren't sure. On one hand, it's difficult to imagine a powerful, wild beast being controlled in such a place... if he got loose, he'd cause no end of havoc in the rooms designated for the women, etc. The proverbial bull in the china shop. On the other, there is interesting pictoral evidence that suggests that the contest did take place in the palaces.

Toro! Olé!

Last week, on one of my walks around Alexandria, I encountered boundary stone SW1, on the corner of Wilkes and S. Payne, in somebody's front yard. That's what I find interesting about this part of the country, there are little bits of history everywhere. By the way, a good D.C. boundary stone page is here.

I am now about 30% through listening to Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only comic opera. I haven't laughed once.

I weighed in at 254.8 yesterday and 255.2 today - hovering around 255, where I've been since mid-December (allowing for a spike during the holidays). I'm definitely at a plateau. I can eat less or exercise more. I think I'll exercise more.

18 January 2008

I couldn't find any obstructions in the furnace pipes... but the furnace is presently working. I suspect I'll be calling the tech back, but at least this time I'll be able to tell him to exclude a pipe obstruction from his troubleshooting.

My piece on Vampira on Wednesday, and my suggestion that Carol Borland may have been the first devil/bat girl archetype, prompted one of my clever readers to e-mail me and ask simply, "What about Gloria Holden?" As it turns out, I know who Gloria Holden (pictured at right in the "mystery lighting" publicity photo) was without having to look it up. She appeared as the title character in "Dracula's Daughter," which I have seen. A surprisingly good flick. It starts where Dracula (1931) ends, with Professor Van Helsing driving a stake through Count Dracula's heart. Problem is, "Dracula's Daughter" came out in 1936; a year after Carol Boland's film "Mark of the Vampire" was released, so Boland still holds the title. (I think.)

(And to head off an e-mail asking, "What about Theda Bara?" I'm discounting her. While she was known as "the Vamp" it was because in her case the term "vampire" was applied to a sexually-predatory woman, not an actual, blood-sucking vampire.)

But hang on. Perhaps the Carol Boland character was really more of a visual reference to Dracula's brides from an earlier film than a character of her own? In which case Morticia Addams would be the first. Hmmm.

Found elsewhere in Count Dracula's household is "Dracula's Dog" (1978) which is another film I once saw during my last week in the Marine Corps. (The Camp Pendleton Base Theater was famous for showing really obscure and low budget films.) I share the opinion of a IMDb reviewer: "This film is great. Dog lovers should get a kick out of this movie. Seeing Zoltan lick his chops after biting both humans and fellow dogs is worth a chuckle or two. The Reinfeld-type character is probably the ugliest human being I have ever seen. The dog that plays Zoltan is the second best actor in the movie. Overall, if you don't expect too much you won't be let down. Definitely a gem in the 'so bad it is good' genre. Check it out while downing a few beers."

His comment about the acting abilities of the dog are dead on (excuse the pun); I recall leaving the theater surprised that a dog could act. But, in my opinion, the all-time Best Supporting Performance by a Canine Actor was in David Lean's immortal "Oliver Twist" (1948). The Oscar goes to Bill Sikes' dog Bull's Eye, in a truly brilliant murder scene, when Sikes' beats Nancy. It's depicted not by showing the murder, but by showing the dog's frantic and hysterical reaction to it. An amazing scene. Later on, the dog is appropriately cowed and fearful. But he gets his revenge, and leads the police to Sikes.

Shifting topics yet again (keep up), when I first saw it, the murder scene reminded me of... rugby. Yeah, I know, it's odd, but have you ever noticed the reactions of some dogs to a scrum? They start barking, sometimes frantically. Why? Is it because, not knowing it's a game, they think there's a riot going on? Is their master in the scrum and they think he's getting beaten? Or are they merely afraid? I have always wondered. (I have a rugby poster in my office that says, "Sure, 'scrum' is a weird name, but 'assault and battery' was already taken.")

The other day, while browsing through the "What's New?" section of snopes.com (the urban legend debunker I use to maintain my reputation as a know-it-all), I found this blood-boiling tale: "Marine's car defaced?" The key-wielding lawyer in the tale, Jay R. Grodner, has quickly achieved Internet infamy, as a google of his name indicates. That'll learn him: don't mess with the Corps.

Have a great weekend!

17 January 2008

Adventures in home-ownership!

I am currently in the throes of troubleshooting a gas furnace. It stopped working the other day, so we had a repair guy come over to fix it. As is my practice, I observed what he was doing and asked questions in order to possibly stave off repairs I could do myself in the future. This fellow was quite willing to explain what he was doing. The problem was that the igniter wasn't switching on; in other words, you couldn't see gas flames in the view window. (No gas flames, no warm air.) The igniter wasn't switching on, apparently, because there was a blockage of some kind in an intake pipe, causing a pressure or vacuum problem. In other words, the igniter was starved for air. The problem could be fixed by removing a cap near the igniter. When he did that a little suction was heard and whoosh, the igniter kicked on, flames were seen and we got hot air out of the ducts. He then replaced the cap and the system worked - for about ten hours. $105 bill for the visit, an expensive class.

He explained that there could be a blockage in the pipe - a long, 2" PVC pipe that runs from the furnace in the basement up through the garage roof to the air outside. Because it's warm, animals sometime work their way into the pipe, causing a blockage, or sometimes they make nests, which also restricts the amount of air fed to the igniter. He also explained that the usual way to clear obstructions was to force nitrogen up the pipe under high pressure - a $400 operation. (Which seems way, way overpriced to me.)

So... the system having failed again yesterday I climbed up into the garage attic and cut the pipes (they are easily repaired), looking for obstructions. Right now the system is drawing air from the attic (lots of suction felt), not the outdoors, and the system is working properly - which leads me to suspect that the blockage is somewhere a few feet upwards. So I now must peer up 2" PVC pipes looking for daylight or using flashlights and mirrors, and also run a tape up to see if the path is clear.

If I can't find a blockage or restriction it must be something else and another visit is warranted (the company waives another $105 visit charge for thirty days). But at least I'll be able to say with confidence that the pipe is clear.

What is true of furnace systems is also true of human beings: You've got to keep the pipes clear! And on that lame analogy I'll close for today.

16 January 2008

What do old folks and rugby players have in common?

As I've gotten older I've noticed that more and more often, conversations with my peers include topics about various health ailments. This can be about the increasing health problems of the people my age or, most often, about geriatric parents. Last Saturday night my wife and I had dinner with four other fiftysomethings and had a doozy of a conversation about parents and their health problems; I drove home pondering death, corruption and dissolution. Of course, conversations with parents and in-laws usually includes long passages about their health - my wife calls this the "organ recital." My determination for my own old age is to try to avoid the organ recital and instead focus on ideas, hobbies, history and, in general, things of interest other than the bursitis in my left elbow, shoulder tendonitis, therapy sessions, etc. We'll see how that goes.

Rugby is the only hobby I know of where extended conversations about injuries take place, a sort of organ recital for the young. In the years I played actively I learned more about ACL reconstruction and all the nasty things that can happen to knees, shoulders, collarbones, ribs, cartilage and joints than I ever thought possible. It's to be expected, I guess. Rugby is an intensely physical game; it shouldn't be a surprise that topics of physicality get brought up all the time.

Vampira is dead. (Who? Click here.) Long before I ever saw "Plan 9 From Outer Space," her magnum opus, so to speak, my father told me about her late night television horror movie show during the Fifties. The opening was unforgettable: she would emerge from the shadows, mutter "I...am... Vampira!" and utter a piercing scream. (There used to be youtube clip of this, but I can't find it.)

She claimed her measurements were 38-17-36. 17?!? Indeed, the woman had no waist. A short youtube clip of her is here.

As noted, she did not originate The Look. That came from Charles Addams' Morticia Addams, but I'm pretty sure Vampira was the first live characterization of it. (Carol Borland in 1935's "Mark of the Vampire" may have been the first archetypical vampire/bat girl, however.) Others have followed: Elvira, Moona Lisa, and to a lesser extent, Vampirella... I'm sure there were others.

I'm done with the Eric Sloane weather book. Two last illustrations: sonic boom and stairs.

15 January 2008

From Eric Sloane's Weather Almanac, a note about witching. There is nothing supernatural about this method, sometimes called dowsing or witching, and I can do it easily. So can you, probably. I learned it from an experienced cable splicer I used to work with when I was in the Marines. He fashioned his wands out of a coat hanger, which he made into two L-shaped wands. Each is held in a hand thumbs up, somewhat loosely, and when one walks over a buried cable the wands would cross or, sometimes, move apart. I am at a loss to explain exactly how this works, but it's probably just the object in the ground (a water or utility line) causing a disruption in the earth's magnetic field, causing the rods to move.

I demonstrated this one day in the microwave lab at college for a bunch of my fellow engineering students; they refused to believe it worked. As it turned out, the rods would come together and move apart at regular intervals as I walked. I surmised that it was probably due to the ballasts powering the fluorescent lights overhead. A little more than half of the students could do it and repeat my results. This is consistent with a demonstration I later did for my Boy Scout troop, when I was a Scoutmaster. I had everyone make their own rods from coat-hangers. Not everyone can dowse in this fashion - I'm not sure why not. Perhaps it has to do with varying levels of electrical resistance in the body. Anyway, try it yourself sometime.

Having written all that, I will mention that there are better and more accurate ways of finding buried telephone cable. Our usual method was to place a tone on one of the pairs and use an inductive device to listen for the tone. When you're using pick axes and shovels in baked solid soil and mud, accuracy is good.

Another interesting part of Sloane's book: What happened to the Mayflower? A short additional account of this is here. I didn't know this! It bears repeating that we're talking about Buckinghamshire, England, U.K. - not in New England somewhere.

Another interesting Sloane illustration: thunderclaps. I think I knew this but forgot. (An artifact of aging.)

Here's where today's blog entry gets looney: Sloane takes on the famous lunar optical illusion - or why does the moon appear larger on the horizon than midway in the sky? I had always read the explanation about it being caused by objects for comparison on the horizon that Sloane discounts. There is something to his explanation about color psychology, I think (how red supposedly comes toward you and blue goes away from you). I once bought a record (Lp, "vinyl") that had some small text printed on the back. As I recall, it was scarlet text on an electric blue background. It looked like the text stood off of the page. Weird.

Anyway, a much more detailed page about the age-old lunar optical illusion is here. (Executive summary: "The final word has not yet been written on this subject.") More good lunar stuff: The Man in the Moon and others, described. Did you know that the moon appears different below the equator? (I didn't.) The Moon's age (days past new moon). In case you want to set one of those clocks with the moon dial...

14 January 2008

Look, people, I've lowered my price on the skull mask I've been trying to unload for the past year or so - $7, down from the $10 I paid for it. It's awesome, guaranteed to scare you right out of your pants... or skirt... or whatever you wear! Gee, doesn't anyone want this thing? (Backstory: I found this at a yard sale and, after considerable mental turmoil, bought it. I have regretted it ever since. I also made the mistake of admitting this to my wife, who makes a sour face at me whenever she sees it. So it sits in my closet, a continual affront to my common sense and pride. I'd throw it out or simply give it to somebody, but I feel like I need to get some money out of the deal in order to not feel like a sap.) Contact me. Please.

My dear wife (the same that occasionally makes faces at me) bought me a Christmas present that was back-ordered and only arrived recently: "Rugby - The Golden Age: Extraordinary Images from 1900 to 1980" by John Tennant. It's excellent! From my amazon.com review: "Classic rugby in black and white, large format film glory! This is a great photo book. It's interesting to see how the game used to look: twentysomething men in tweed suits, often smoking pipes, with hair styles that suggest one's grandfather. They hold huge rugby balls, wear huge shorts and long socks. They don't appear anywhere as fit and muscular as today's pros, but they were stroppy, tough and admirable men... rugby just doesn't look like this anymore. You also get images of some of the greats: Napier, Wakefield, Prince Obolensky, etc. I once wrote an article about some of the old school ruggers depicted in this excellent coffee table book - click here - read it and you'll get a taste for the content in this book. Tennant mentions that in the photographic era before modern digital photography the game was depicted differently than today; you can certainly see this in the photos in this book, and it's fascinating."

Some photos from Tennant's book:

Floodlit night practice, 1930
Twickers weathervane, 1950
Twickers weathervane again (I like weathervanes)
Dive for a try, 1960

There are many, many more, but this being a large coffee table book, it's awkward to scan on a flat scanner located on a crowded table.

Looking through this book makes me want to play rugby again. There is nothing quite like the thrill of playing a match on a pleasant day, or the feeling you get when you finally come off of the pitch and sit down to unlace the boots. You feel like you've accomplished something of worth and that the world is a wonderful place. Even if your XV has lost the match, you still feel ennobled for having played. It's true, "The only loser in a rugby game is the guy who didn't play." I distinctly recall the feeling I've gotten on a number of occasions, running down a pitch with the ball, in support of the guy with the ball or running after the opposition player with the ball - that these will be some of the choicest moments in my life, and aren't you glad you took up the game? Those of you reading this who have played or play now, know what I mean. Those who haven't will just have to take my word for it. Rugby truly is the world's greatest team sport, nearly impossible to retire from.

I am now reading Eric Sloane's Weather Almanac, another one of my Christmas presents. It's like his other books, well-written, very well illustrated and unique. (See 19&20 April entries here.) Every time I read one of his books I learn all sorts of new things. For instance, I didn't know warm fronts and cold fronts were shaped differently. His illustrations, as usual, are clever and exactly to the point. He's a wonderful writer...

11 January 2008

A check on the ever-useful amazon.com tells me that some of the Oscar Brand songs I've been listening to are available on a interestingly titled CD: "Bawdy Briny Ballads: Oscar Brand Sings Sea Porn." Sea porn... reminds me of my favorite Spongebob Squarepants episode, "Sailor Mouth." Spongebob learns a swear word. Have you seen it? Hilarious.

By the way, it was through this episode that I learned about the amazing nematode. See the 21 July blog entry here.

Hey, check out Guy Budziak's excellent film noir woodcuts. Pretty neat - the black and white format of the woodcut is a good look for the black and white noir, which often featured high contrast lighting. I like the one he did for The Narrow Margin - Marie Windsor's black and white night gown looks great! (Well, duh. Of all the blatantly obvious statements I have ever made, that one takes the cake.) As you might have guessed, That woodcut image is taken from a still in the film.

That's a celebrated night gown among noirheads, by the way. I recall discussing The Narrow Margin with one guy and he said, "Marie Windsor's night gown..." and I nodded my head, knowing precisely what he meant. Sounds like a great name for a band: Marie Windsor's Night Gown. I think I'll bring it up to my bandmates and see if we can't change our name to Marie Windsor's Night Gown.

Here's an account of a great moment in investigative science, ennobling the art of the detective.

Johnny Grant, "Mr. Hollywood," is dead at age 84. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that he was only 84 as he seems to have been around forever. I met him one night when I was ten, at the 1966 Santa Claus Lane Parade on Hollywood Boulevard. My friend Jimmy and I were running around where all the cars and celebrities were being staged, making general nuisances of ourselves. I ran up to the convertible where he was seated and got his autograph, along with many others. (No, I no longer have the book.) An account of this interesting evening, with square format Kodak Instamatic photos, is here (scroll to bottom). The highlight of the evening was looking down Kathy Garver's dress. (Kathy who? Turn down your speakers and click here.)

More obscure trivia: I have also met Kathy Garver's "Family Affair" costar Johnny Whitaker - he's the red-headed kid in the right of this promotional photo. I was in an office of the BYU Fine Arts Department once when he stepped in. (He was a student taking classes there.) When he did, the somewhat starstruck receptionist I was talking to announced, "...and here's Johnny Whitaker!" I immediately started doing a cheesy imitation of the "Family Affair" theme song and he gave me a surprised and annoyed look.

Really, I don't know why I do things like that... but my head is more often in control of my mouth these days. Still, it's probably better that I not meet celebrities (even minor ones) at all.

37 pages left to go in that book about the Ark of the Covenant I'm reading. I already know what happens at the end: the writer is not allowed to see the Ark which supposedly sits in the Tzion Maryam Church in Axum, Ethiopia. His quest is incomplete. Gebra Mikail, the guardian of the Ark tells him, "There are worse things in life than disappointment"; sage words, indeed.

You've got to like the photo of Mikail. Look at that smile. Does this man actually have exclusive access to the most famous and legendary archeological treasure in the world, a golden, 3,400 year-old symbol of Judaism and God's interaction with Man? We may never know.

Have a great weekend...

10 January 2008

I listened to Volume Two of Oscar Brand's "Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads" last night... as I suspected, there's a limit to how bawdy Brand got with the particular lyrics he used. (This was recorded in the mid-Fifties, after all.) In one song, "Christopher Columbo," I wondered if the lyrics weren't cleaned up a bit. Turns out they were cleaned up considerably! (And I accept that by providing this link I am straying from my usual limits.)

By the way, this kind of thing - censoring song lyrics and other material - is sometimes called "bowdlerization." I first heard the term in a college English class. I raised my hand and asked the prof where the word came from, and, as I suspected, he said it came from a person's name, Thomas Bowdler.

Is censorship bad? Always? When I was young - before I had kids - I used to think so. I came of age in the Seventies and, like everyone else my age, I had a knee jerk reaction to the idea. Besides, an aversion to censorship fashionably reinforced one's intellectual or artistic credentials. But raising three kids, I became aware of many, many fidgety moments when we went to movies, saw videos or watched television - or even watched the supposedly "family friendly" hours of broadcast time. (The tv shows may have been okay, but the promos for the other shows they played on the commercials weren't!) I'm certain there are many parents out there who know exactly what I mean; I know because we've spoken about it.

Later on, I freely bowdlerized movies that my kids wanted to see, like 1989's "Batman," which my son couldn't get enough of. Despite that, I have a home video of him, age six, in the Halloween Batman costume his mother made him, holding up a toy batarang and delivering one of the Joker's lines: "I'm going to give this town an enema!" Cute.

My youngest is now seventeen, and the other two kids have moved out of the house. Barring religious considerations and the possible, er, probable criticism of my wife, I can watch anything out there. But I don't. As my longtime readers know, I prefer films made between about 1940 and 1965 (especially the style known as film noir). The main reason why is because, in general, I think there was a higher overall standard of artistic quality in the films produced during that era. If you disagree, that's fine... I recognize that there are arguments either way.

What I have especially come to appreciate is the old-fashioned practice of artistic restraint. Sure, you can graphically show a man being violently beaten or being bloodly punctured by gunfire. But suggesting things has a power all its own. I have read and heard the opinions of the generations previous to mine about radio; they often state that radio was better than television - and I can accept the reason why. When you graphically see something being depicted you are more or less a passive spectator. But when you only see part of it, or a suggestion of it, or merely hear it, your imagination comes into play and you become an active participant.

There are artistic merits to restraint, too. Igor Stravinsky, perhaps the greatest classical composer of the 20th century, once wrote a piece he called Le Sacre du Printemps, or The Rite of Spring. It's a ballet about pagan spring rites - at the end a virgin dances herself to death. It is incredibly loud, dissonant and flew in the face of traditional art music. When it was first performed it caused a riot. Hearing it today, it is still an astonishing work and has lost none of its power. It broke new ground - after that, the sky was the limit insofar as tonality and orchestral sound was concerned. But for his next works Stravinsky did something interesting - he drew back. Radically. He confined himself to a neo-classical style for fewer instruments and his music became more emotionally austere and reserved. He still wrote masterpieces, but he never again wrote anything as bombastic as Le Sacre. This astonished the artistic world.

So... sometimes less is more. In fact, I think most of the time less is more.

9 January 2008

A clean white sheet of blog screen to fill. What should I write about? What have I learned?

Well, how about this: That book I'm reading, "The Sign and the Seal" (The quest for the lost Ark of the Covenant) by Graham Hancock, mentioned the origin of the name "Icabod." It comes from the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 4:19-21. When the Ark of the Covenant had been taken from the Israelites by the Philistines, a pregnant woman spontaneously gave birth when hearing the news (she gave a great cry of grief and said "The glory is departed from Israel: for the Ark of God is taken") and gave the child the name, which means, "Where is the glory?"

Now, why a parent would want to do that to a kid is beyond me. Getting off on the wrong foot, isn't it? For instance, consider the name Tristan; it's uncommon in the U.S. but fairly common in the U.K. It comes from the name of one of King Arthur's knights and means "Of sorrowful birth." Geez, nice, Mom.

Well, okay, perhaps not. Drystan is the actual Celtic name; Tristan is derived from it in the legends. Tristis is a Latin word meaning sad. (Jean Sibelius wrote Valse Triste, sad waltz.) But Drystan isn't a whole lot better - it means riot or tumult. (And those of us over forty will recall the formerly well-advertised cold remedy.) Perhaps there's a need for a new English language name meaning, "Screaming-loud-curses-at-the-father-while-writhing-in-excruciating-pain-on-the-delivery-bed-in-the-maternity-ward-of-the-hospital."

Well... I no longer wonder why parents name their kids funny names, I merely document some of them.

I'm on page 366 of 515 of Hancock's book, and it has started getting shaky. The previous chapters are excellent - well sourced and logical, speculations kept to reasonable limits. However, the sections where he writes about what the Ark of the Covenant actually was strike me as being overly fanciful. Okay, let's assume Hancock is an atheist or an agnostic and denies what the Bible maintains, that the Ark is a physical manifestation of the power of God. Fair enough. The problem is that casting about for a alternative explanation, Hancock instead supposes that the power must be from... magic. Or some long lost Egyptian lore or engineering prowess, Moses being a formidable magician after the manner of Pharoah's court astrologers and priests. No... I have an easier time accepting the power of God explanation than I do an occult one. I think these sections of Hancock's book are its weakest.

By the way, are you familiar with all of the wonderful attributes of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, or are you, like most Americans, really only familiar with it by what Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones) says about it? Take a minute or two and browse here; it's interesting, to say the least. I own a big coffee table book about the Ark: a replica was meticulously constructed, under Rabbinical supervision, and photographed. Fascinating.

A small replica of the Ark is available for $34.95 + shipping. Order now! Nancy is standing by! But don't open the lid! Nooooooooo!

Finished listening to Tannhäuser last night. Sure enough, his gal Elisabeth gives up her life in supplication to the Lord for his forgiveness, and Tannhäuser is forgiven and kicks the bucket, buys the farm, assumes room temperature. I get the distinct feeling that this was wishful thinking on Richard Wagner's part. After all, he was a rotter. A colossal egotist, a vicious anti-Semite (he once wrote that the Jews ought to be destroyed in what looks a lot like the 19th century version of Hitler's Final Solution), and was what we would now call a home-wrecker, having an affair (and several children) with the wife of one of his most ardent supporters. Nice guy. Tannhäuser cavorts with Venus and, failing to gain forgiveness on a pilgrimage to Rome, obtains it by the death of a selfless admirer. Was Wagner hoping for his own salvation by someone else's death, perhaps?

Okay, I'll stop speculating. But of all the classical composers whose lives and personalities I have learned something about, Wagner's is the least impressive - and hearing his opera Tannhäuser didn't help.

Let's just say that if Richard Wagner came across the Ark I'd suggest he pop open the lid.

8 January 2008

My son sent me a youtube link, a trailer for the upcoming Batman movie, "The Dark Knight." Sadly, the clip was withdrawn due to a copyright infringment claim by Warner Brothers, but you can see it if you go to see "I Am Legend" in selected theaters, I guess. It might be the first seven minutes of the film, it might not. I am struck by the resemblance of the Joker Gang masks to one used in a Stanley Kubrick film noir, "The Killing" (1956). An hommage on the part of director Chris Nolan, perhaps.

By the way, if you haven't seen the Kubrick film, you should. It features one of film noir's most notable (and unlikely) married couples: Elisha Cook, Jr., who always played a weak little guy, and statuesque knockout Marie Windsor, who always played a tough, sarcastic b-girl. Their dialogue together is magical. A typical exchange:

Cook: "I'm gonna have it, Sherry. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a half million."
Windsor: "Of course you are, darling. Did you put the right address on the envelope when you sent it to the North Pole?"

Another:

Cook: "Tell me something, wouldya Sherry? Just tell me one thing. Why did you ever marry me anyway?"
Windsor: "Oh, George. When a man has to ask his wife that, well, he just hadn’t better, that’s all. Why talk about it? Maybe it’s all to the good in the long run. After all, if people didn’t have headaches what would happen to the aspirin industry?"

My favorite line, from Windsor: "It's not fair, I never had anybody but you, not a real husband, just a bad joke without a punchline." Ouch.

Longtime readers of mine will know that I cannot mention Marie Windsor without also mentioning that she was once Miss Utah and a graduate from BYU. I'm proud of that girl.

I got Paul McCartney's "Memory Almost Full" CD for Christmas -it's pretty good. Excellent, in fact, one of his best non-Beatles/non-Wings efforts. As reviewers note, it has more than a few looks backward and a note or so about mortality. (Beatle Paul singing about death? What's up with that?) It's clear that his thoughts are refocused since the death of his wife Linda, and his music is all the more mature and insightful for it. I am hoping he has put Silly Love Songs long behind him, as Johnny Cash turned to songs like Hurt toward the end of his career.

I have one more Lp side left on Tannhäuser. He went to Rome to seek the Pope's forgiveness for his wayward ways with Venus, but didn't get it. So it's clearly going to have to be one of those Wagnerian Reedeeming Power of Divine Love things taking place.

On the completely opposite end of the musical subject spectrum, I am now starting to listen to a curious set of Lps I bought at a yard sale a few years back: Oscar Brand's six record collection of "Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads," issued in 1955. The songs seem to be mostly about whores and sailors. Pretty funny. There's one old tune called "Sam Hall" (I have a 2002 recording of Johnny Cash doing it) that has truly interesting lyrics. Check out the Sam Hall wikipedia link... scroll to the very bottom and see what Brand used to do with it when he spotted a young person in the coffeehouse. A complete set of Sam Hall (clean) lyrics, with a midi rendition (turn down your speakers) is here.

Also included is a bawdy song set to the tune The Lincolnshire Poacher, which I know from two other settings. During the Civil War it was adapted to the Union cause as "The Yankee Volunteer," or "The New York Volunteer"; I have a jaunty old recording of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing it. The other use is mysterious - it's a famous numbers station, apparently broadcast by the British Secret Service.

Canadian folksinger Oscar Brand is an interesting character. From the wikipedia link: "He has been hosting the radio show 'Oscar Brand's Folksong Festival' every Saturday at 10 p.m. on WNYC-AM 820 in New York City. The show has run more or less continuously since 1945, making it the longest-running radio show with the same host, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The show celebrated its 60th anniversary on December 10, 2005. Over its run it has introduced such talents to the world as Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Huddie Ledbetter, Joni Mitchell, and Pete Seeger."

Gee!

7 January 2008

Weight rebaseline today: I weighed in at 254.2 (this new scale does fractional pounds). So I lost a pound since the 19th of December - not bad for the holidays! (What I'm not counting is spiking up a couple of pounds as a result of many parties and dinners. It took me until today to lose it.)

I've gotten about 2/3rds of the way through Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser over the weekend. One theme seems to be, which is better, sex (the title character takes part in orgies with Venus) or ideal love (his love for the very Christian Elisabeth)? Since this was written in the 19th century, you can perhaps guess.

I'm nearly half way through a very interesting but difficult book, The Sign and the Seal (The quest for the lost Ark of the Covenant) by Graham Hancock. As I wrote on the 3rd, the working question is, did King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba have a son who took the Ark down to Ethiopia, where it still exists today? Prior to reading the book I would have answered, "What rubbish." Now I'm not so sure. This work cites as evidence all sorts of information from various scholarly fields (Arthurian literature, Templar lore, medieval Prester John lore, ancient Jewish customs, language, etc.); I'm learning a lot more about Ethiopian religions and anthropology than I ever expected to. Some of the Templar lore cited in this book reminds me of another provocative and excellent book I once read, "Born in Blood - the Lost Secrets of Freemasonry" by John J. Robinson. Great stuff! Much, much better than "The Da Vinci Code," if the movie (which I thought sucked) is in any way representative of the book.

I learned from this book that medieval Christians identified three arks: 1.) Noah's, 2.) The Ark of the Covenant, and 3.) Mary, the mother of Jesus. (The idea being that an ark is a vessel of something holy.) As they say, you learn something new every day...

I see all sorts of stuff based on other things I know that relate to the Ark of the Covenant that are not mentioned in the book - perhaps an email to the author is in order.

I had a weird dream the other night, it concerned walking to work. Some big company, CSC or somebody like that, had built a building and erected a promotional jumbotron monitor extolling the virtues of said company square in the path of where myself and others used to walk to work in the morning. This created pedestrian gridlock as we had to walk a circuitous path to work around the monitor. In my dream I had become furious about this, and had resolved to take the matter up with the local fire marshal. Then, in a half-awake, half sleeping state, I realized I was only dreaming and asked myself, "Don't you have enough real workplace issues to get upset about without having to invent more in your dreams?" Good grief.

4 January 2008

Art and design are all very well and good, but functionality is critical. My daughter and I had lunch at the Dulles airport during the holiday break; she had a salad. The bowl they served it to her in was a curious design. Artsy, but no matter what she did bits of salad kept falling onto the table. So it wins my Poor Design Contest. (Past winners: the Pontiac Aztek, the Pohick Regional Library in Burke and the all too easily breakable Motorola StarTAC cell phone antenna.) If interested, check out the baddesigns.com site. My favorite is "This is a Mop Sink." Ha!

I got this curiously-phrased e-mail in my inbox the other day: "May peace break into your house and may thieves come to steal your debts. May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet of $100 bills. May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips! May your clothes smell of success like smoking tires and may happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy. May the problems you had forget your home address! In simple words ... may 2008 be the best year of your life!!!"

Also, here's a little video I got in an e-mail, associated with a gratitude campaign. While the campaign is directly associated with those serving in the military, I'm all for increasing my sense of gratitude in general. I have much to be thankful for, and living one's life in gratitude is becoming. I admit that it's not an attitude I would have readily embraced as a somewhat arrogant younger man, but one of the blessings of growing older is (hopefully) growing wiser.

I grew up in the Sixties and Seventies, when a general tearing down of existing structures was the order of the day. Sadly, much that was worthwhile was also done away with or devalued. For instance, gratitude. An entire nation heard JFK ask, "Ask not what your country may do for you - ask what you can do for your country," but asked instead, "What's in it for me?" This led to the Seventies, known also as the "Me Decade" (a phrase coined by author Tom Wolfe).

A Ralph Waldo Emerson quote I list on my Jonah Begone quotes page is, "The most original genius is the most indebted man." What on earth does that mean? I think it means that very little, if anything, is entirely new. We all build on a foundation set up by others, and even things that seem revolutionary and wholly new, seemingly brought forth by some genius, are really more adaptations or new uses of existing ideas or things. So it shouldn't lessen our sense of indebtedness.

(As a side note, I should mention that JFK's famous "Ask Not..." quote is not wholly original, either. I will not speculate on his level of genius, but merely mention that Warren G. Harding (of all people!), in his address at the Republican Convention of 7 June 1916 in Chicago said, "In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.")

I started listening to my boxed set of records of Richard Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer ("The Flying Dutchman") the other night, but as my libretto was misprinted and lacks any text or translations for all of Act Three, I pitched it. That's okay... listening to it, I got the impression that the best thing about it was the overture, with which I am well acquainted.

When I was a teenager, staying up late on Saturday nights with my Dad, watching television, we happened upon a film called "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" (1951). The first notable thing about it, to me (in full teenage hormonal mode), was Ava Gardner in vivid Technicolor, one of the most gorgeous women who has ever appeared on film. The other, of course, was the interesting nautical legend of the Flying Dutchman, aptly described in this wikipedia entry. The legend's continuing appeal is such that SpongeBob Squarepants and the currently fashionable Pirates of the Caribbean movies cite it.

The notion of a man doomed to forever wander because of some past arrogance is also a theme of at least three Twilight Zone episodes. Perhaps the notion is so horrible (and thus, fascinating) to us because it flies in the face of our deepest hopes. What, no forgiveness? Ever? Unredeemable for time and all eternity? That's pretty bad.

Well, that's him, not me. Have a great weekend!

3 January 2008

No long blog entry for today. I'm in bed, trying to get over a chest cold that is not willing to relinquish the field. I'll be reading "The Sign and the Seal" (Discover the most shattering historical secret of the last three thousand years - the quest for the Ark of the Covenant) by Graham Hancock. So far it is interesting and well-written.

It's an examination of the Ethiopian legend about the Queen of Sheba having a son by King Solomon; this son, Menelik I, moved the Ark from Jerusalem to Axum, Ethiopia - where it supposedly is today. There is also Arthurian grail lore involved - attention Bob Fawcett. I suppose this book is more or less along the lines of "The DaVinci Code," since it's an historical detective story, but so far my internal alarm bells haven't gone off about historical implausibility. It's not a thriller or crime novel, and the author is proceeding along a logical, well sourced path. (There are references for every assertion.)

2 January 2008

Back to work after a twelve day break - ARRRAUUGGGHHHH. Culture shock! Well, it's been a great break. I spent time with my daughter Julie who we flew in from Utah, went to all sorts of parties and dinners, did social stuff, had multiple Tyson's Corner trips, had some enjoyable spiritual church-related activities, visited a battlefield, bought a car, tested out a camera... all sorts of things going on. Lots of non work-related stimulation, just the kind of thing my semi-ADHD temperament needs, I guess.

My goal over the holidays was to maintain a weight - not gain any and not really try to take any off. Since it's a new year with a new bathroom scale, I think I'm going to reboot my weekly weigh-in for this coming Monday the 7th. That gives me some time to recover.

I spent a lot of time cleaning up and working on that car we bought... since it's a dark plum or wine color, I call it "The Grape." It looks like my wife and I are going to be driving it up to Utah in another month, so my daughter can use it - Marriage Encounter '08. Can two middle-aged married people spend long days on the road with each other in a Honda without driving each other nuts? We're planning to spend about four or five days driving, stopping at various attractions along the way (Nauvoo, Illinois; Hannibal, Missouri - I have always wanted to see Mark Twain's boyhood home) so it's like another vacation. Cool!

Well, a vacation, that is, if we don't have mechanical mishaps or extreme weather. Then it becomes something else. The last time we did something like this was in June 1984, when we drove out from Utah to the D.C. area after I graduated from college. That trip opened my eyes about America. Overcrowding? Yeah, right. You can spend hours and hours crossing North America and see nothing on either side of the road. I suppose that overcrowding looks like a problem if you live in L.A. or New York City, but if you live in, say, Nebraska, I would guess that the subject rarely comes up.

I recall my seventh-grade (1969) science teacher, Mr. Keys, taking us on a field trip to some very rural canyon spot somewhere within an hour or two from Los Angeles. As we disembarked from the bus he intoned, "Look around. With the population explosion by the time it's 2000 this area will be wall to wall with people." Ha! The problem with the phrase, "If present trends continue..." is that they often don't.

In the next few weeks I'm going to be listening to some Wagner operas to clear some shelf space for other records. I've had these boxed sets for a decade - high time I listened to them.

My chest cold has resulted in my usual bass-baritone voice becoming a bass. When I speak, now, glass things rattle. Barry White lives!

1 January 2008

Happy New Year!

Out with the old, in with the new. I have moved all my 2007 text to an archive, see links above.

Last night, as is our custom, we rang in the new year with friends. My wife stated that she would just as soon go to bed early and forget the whole thing (she wipes out at about 10:30), but we went anyway and had a great time.

At some point the conversation turned to the topic of immigration, legal and illegal. This is one of those topics like gun ownership and abortion, where emotion plays a part with reason. During this discussion, based on a comment by a young person, it occurred to me that history is interpreted in at least three ways in America: 1.) The textbook account, which is a more or less consensus view and represents formal, peer-reviewed "taught" history. 2.) Erroneous Media accounts, which can be colored by politics or agenda (for instance, the notion that black churches in the South were frequently burned down by racists or that Superbowl Sunday is a night in the year when many wife beatings take place). 3.) Genealogy, the study of history based on studies of families as opposed to studies of great historical figures or social or technological movements. I'm sure there are other ways, but those three occur to me readily.

As you may perhaps guess, I took the young person's view of the particular history we discussed last night to be mostly influenced by the Media account.

I think I mentioned this before, but one of my great historical revelations came to me when an elderly genealogist lady once told me that if you wanted to learn the true history of America you'd have to talk to a genealogist, not a historian or an anthropologist. And I think she's right, mainly because people cannot really be easily classified as monolithic entities based on race or economic status. We vary, based mainly by family.

For instance, my wife's mother's family is Italian. Are they Catholic? A historian would reply, "probably." But the family genealogist would point out that a rift took place years ago when a family patriarch had a disagreement about a parish priest and consequently took the family away from the religion.

So that was my first revelation of the New Year: Any meaningful detailed account of history should include some relevant genealogical research.

A good friend from my earlier reenacting days phoned me yesterday and paid me a high compliment. He's a reader of this blog, and perhaps responding to yesterday's mention of Hector Berlioz, Hannibal, the Punic Wars and how they relate to modern history, suggested that this blog is like a series of poor man's liberal arts lectures. Ha! I responded that if he thinks that, then he is exactly the type of person I write for. I strive for what was once described in a Joni Mitchell song: Real good for free.

Gentle Reader, I do not know exactly who you are - I get e-mail from time to time giving me a partial idea - but, as Gene Roddenberry found out years ago with the Star Trek franchise, there is money to be made in assuming your audience is at least as intelligent as you are. I'm am not making any money by writing these blog entries but I am rewarded by your interest. Thank you!

Despite my best intentions, I woke up after only four hours of sleep because of a developing chest cold and an unquiet mind and watched the winter sun ignite, the first sunrise of 2008. Now I'm going back to bed to try to get some sleep...