Brigham's Blog

27 Jan 2012

2012-01-27T08:45:00.003-05:00

Well, I tried. A documentary called Rembrandt's J'accuse (2008) was available via Netflix streaming video; it looked very promising. The plot: In his celebrated painting "The Night Watch," Rembrandt accuses a man of murder. The 34 visual clues are in the painting, but we - in a text-based society - are so visually illiterate, director Peter Greenaway has to describe how. Generally, I like European art house stuff like this, but I got about 30 minutes into it and gave up. It was boring, and the narrative wasn't up to the task of helping the viewer figure out what was going on and how the clues were related to one another. So I moved on to another work in my streaming queue.

Objectified (2009) is a documentary about our relationship with manufactured objects (potato peelers, chairs, an iPhone, etc.). I gave this one about 25 minutes and quit. The problem here was the highfalutin', pompous, excessively wonky quotes by designers. "An object has an intrinsic value and utility that is an innate objectified whole. Designers must appreciate the utility of objects they design, and seek to harmonize their worldview with the worldview of the user," etc. You catch my drift. Cari, who was sitting in another part of the room listening and knitting, fired up the B.S. alarm, and I agreed. So it was on to the next film in my queue.

(Before proceeding, I should mention that in the film one Germanic designer looked sternly at the camera and cited Apple Computer as being a place where good design flourishes. I'd agree, more or less, but three months into iPhone ownership I have a bone to pick. The featureless, slablike design of the phone leads to a recurring problem I'm having: I constantly have to look at it and feel around on it to turn it 180 degrees to get the button on the bottom where it belongs. There is no obvious and immediate tactile clue as to what end is up on that thing. Maybe make it a bit more shaped, so it fits into the hand naturally only one way? Or maybe it's just my colossal hands.)

Giving up on documentaries for the evening I lighted upon Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30 aka Meet Me Tonight (1952), a comedy trilogy. Can't go wrong there, right? Well, I liked the first two short comedies, the second, Fumed Oak, being one of the most wickedly mean-spirited (but funny) things I've ever seen. The adenoidal daughter was so horse-facedly homely and miserable she was actually hard to look at. Sadly, I cannot find an image of her in this role on the Internet. But let's just say she provides competition for Aki Kaurismaki favorite actress Kati Outinen in the "Ouch-She's-Hard-To-Look-At" category.

The last, alas, I dozed off during. It was the least successful of the three stories, I think. And it had the wry, funny, fetchingly pretty Valerie Hobson (shown above) in it - one of my favorite British actresses! So what have we learned? If you're doing a comedy, maybe it's safer to use homely women, not beautiful ones.

My pard Don Tracey found a hilarious write-up concerning the 37th Iowa "Graybeards" regiment and their wretched commander. Go here, scroll down. He instituted waterboarding 140 + years before the Global War on Terror! I think the tale of this unit is so funny and unique... I can well imagine the attitudes of these guys. I've see it in my reenacting career. At the start, patriotic and well-intentioned. Later on, peevish and resentful, culminating with an, "Oh, the hell with this" demeanor. War was simply not meant to be waged by men over about 35 or so. Not only are the bodies not up to it, neither are the minds. An older man, far more so than a twentysomething, is strongly disinclined to do things they think is a waste of time.

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to lose some weight. So I loaded the MyFitnessPal app onto my iPhone and started tracking my daily calorie intake. I also resumed walking at least three times a week for a half hour. (I clocked my pace on a marked trail yesterday: 3.6 mph. At my weight this results in burning about 250 calories.) Anyway, I have lost 7.2 pounds in three weeks, for an average of 2.4 pounds per week. Nice. I shall continue. My clothes are starting to fit a little better.

I attend the Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby tomorrow morning, the annual contest of father versus father. Okay, nominally, cub versus cub. But we know better. Some of these Dads are relentlessly competitive. So much so, in fact, that once, at the end of an especially long run as a Cubmaster I had become so disgusted I was ready to cancel the whole thing. Not having a horse in the race, so to speak, I may be at the finish line again, calling out the results. I do a schtick where the guy at the starting line calls out, "Are you ready?" and I bellow back, "Yes, O Great Leader" (with variations). At the last race I reply, in a world-weary tone of voice, "Yeah, let's get this over with and get out of here," which always elicits a laugh.

Have a great weekend!

26 Jan 2012

2012-01-26T08:09:00.002-05:00

My pal Don, always on the lookout for amusing Civil War tales as they relate to Civil War reenacting, has discovered an interesting real unit, the 37th Iowa "Graybeards" regiment, composed of men generally over the age of 45. Article here. They represent a way forward for an aging participants of the reenactment hobby. Unsurprisingly, their term of service was not considered "brilliant" and apparently their commander really sucked; I'm in the process of editing some text about him. More later.

Last night I watched Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight (2008), a documentary about this celebrated graphic artist. You know his work - he's the one wot did that "I (Heart) NY" logo and the now iconic profile of Bob Dylan. Interesting guy with much to say - but he needs to get out of Manhattan from time to time to see how the rest of the nation lives and what they believe. He is apparently possessed of the notion that people in New York City are superior because they're measurably more tolerant and broad-minded, etc. the usual liberal conceit. Do I need to mention that he did some anti-George W. Bush work?

I also watched the hands-down best zombie film I have ever seen: White Zombie (1932), starring the always-fascinating Bela Lugosi. I've known about this film all my life but have never seen it. Honestly, I expected it to be unwatchably corny. It's not promising: the acting is rather stilted, the dialogue is somewhat silly and the plot is rudimentary. Yet the whole far surpasses the sum of its parts and you wind up forgetting about the weak stuff. And Bela! With his Hungarian diction he could put more evil and menace into a line of dialogue than anyone else in Hollywood. He often emphasizes all the wrong words in a line of dialogue, but for him, it works. I find that I appreciate the classic 1930's horror films (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Black Cat, the Mummy, etc.) far more than their 1940's remakes. There's an earnestness there and a focus upon the horror that was lost later on.

A short biographical sketch: born Bela Blasko, which in Hungarian would be rendered Blasko Bela, he was born in 1882 in Lugos in what was then Austria-Hungary, hence his stage name, "Lugosi." The place has since been renamed Lugoj and is now in Romania. Romania, of course, is a nation associated with the historical Dracula, Vlad Tepes "the Impaler" (1431-1476). Vlad can get his own blog entry someday. Everyone knows Lugosi as Dracula, of course - but he also portrayed Jesus Christ in a 1909 Passion Play! Photos here.

Finding Hands of the Ripper (1971) as an entry in Netflix streaming, I checked that out as well. It's one of those Hammer films that mixes Kensington Gore with a hint of toplessness in one scene; by 1971 they were getting more daring. You know, it's one of those Brit horror flicks: "Cor, luv, wot's that in yer 'ands, then?" STAB, gasp, etc. The plot: as a small child, Jack the Ripper's daughter (!) sees him murder her mother and therefore becomes a murderess herself. You know, I always wondered how traits like that get passed from generation to generation - now I know. The end was cool: Molly Rippersdottir winds up in the whispering gallery at St. Paul's in London (a movie replica, not the real one - the request to film there was denied, go figure) with what is almost certain to be her next victim. Her mortally wounded psychotherapist (making his way all around London after being run through with a saber) calls to her from the level far below down below and... well, you can guess. A fun flick.

On the drive into work this morning I listened to the Oriental Rhapsody by Alexander Glazunov, an unfairly-overlooked composer who wrote in the Rimsky-Korsakov/Mussorgsky/Borodin late 19th C. nationalist style. (This is hardly surprising as Glazunov was a student of Rimsky's.) I think I'm going to like his work. Prof. Robert Greenberg exhorted his listeners to seek out this fellow's music, which I am glad to do.

Why I love Virginia: You can take a casual lunchtime walk (I work in Shirlington, which is part of Arlington County) and come across history. (There's another photo after this one - use the arrow to advance.) Neat!

I put up some Burbank stuff yesterday.

And that's all.

25 Jan 2012

2012-01-25T08:50:00.002-05:00

I listened to the Borodin Second Symphony on the way into work this morning; it's a work I first got to like in 1972, when I was sixteen. Whenever I hear this particular piece I think of back when I was a teenage hermit.

When I was twelve, in the sixth grade, I had a bad case of acne which persisted until eighth grade or so, when I was fourteen. As I recall, it finally cleared up when I was about fifteen. Sixth grade was miserable; according to a psychiatric exam I was borderline neurotic. Partially as a result of schoolyard taunting, partially as a result of puberty, I became almost pathologically introverted. People would address me and I wouldn't look them in the eye, and, in general, I avoided making contact with people entirely. Life was just easier that way. So, all through junior high school instead of eating lunch in the cafeteria I would walk to the library and read a book, by myself. If the library was closed for whatever reason, I would stand on the outskirts of the cafeteria and read, leaning against a pole, listening to the mayhem and noise going on - kids being social. In the three years I was in junior high, I can't remember ever sitting down to eat in the cafeteria for lunch. One teacher, on his daily way to something or another, would encounter me and ask why I wasn't in the cafeteria with everyone else. I forgot how I answered, but he took to calling me the "Pole-leaner." That's how he signed my yearbook: "Good luck to the pole-leaner."

It was during these days that I developed an ulcer. I really, really hated gym, and can remember getting terrible stomach aches in the class prior, which I would just endure because I suspected they were psychosomatic. I knew they would subside once gym was over. Years later, after my first endoscopic exam, the doctor asked me, "Did you know you once had an ulcer?" No... but I wasn't at all surprised. So junior high was pretty miserable for me, and when it finally came time to graduate I was very ready to leave.

I remember being pleased to learn that high school was a different situation: the student body was more mature, and, in general, I could fade in with the larger crowd and become unnoticed. Dances, sports games and proms were for other people. As was my habit in junior high, during lunch I brought a book with me to the library to read. After I discovered classical music, via special permission from the head librarian who liked and encouraged me, I would sit up in the upper floor storeroom by myself near a window and read, with the Wollensack cassette deck connected to a set of headphones. I used to plunk myself down next to a rather poor model of the Globe Theatre some student had constructed, undoubtedly in connection with a class module about the Shakespeare plays. And there I sat, reading, listening to Borodin's Second Symphony on the Wollensack, doing my best to avoid the rest of the student body. I assumed life would be this way until I graduated - and perhaps beyond.

My withdrawal from teenage society ended when I first met my friend Mike in eleventh grade biology class in September 1972. (He's the fellow I do the Burbankia stuff with nowadays; I mention him frequently in this blog.) He sat in front of me. I had no idea at the time that he would become my lifelong best friend. But as we began to hang around with each other and his church friend Bob (I communicate with him all the time now, too), I finally began to integrate back into society. We used to eat our lunches in the flatbed of Bob's Mazda minitruck, which was invariably parked on the same street in front of the same house near school. He put AstroTurf in the bed of the truck; I became enormously fond of those occasions, that AstroTurf and that truck. I am sure Mike and Bob do not know how much it meant to me, and what a turning point it represented. And I recall the occasion when they pulled up at my house after school and called for me with the P.A. system Bob had installed in the truck; I was enormously flattered. Hey... I now have friends!

As I write this I am finishing up watching all of the Wonder Years episodes, which perfectly capture the sweet, confusing and sometimes frustrating and sad years of teenage growing up. The protagonist, Kevin (who is described as being twelve in 1968 as I was) was no hermit - he couldn't be. If he was there would be no show, would there? The Wonder Years has caused me to reflect. At age 55 I recognize that regrets in life are pointless, but I now wish that I had eaten lunch in the cafeteria with everyone else, attended a dance, a game or a prom occasionally and had gone to Grad Night at Disneyland with Mike and Bob. It is true that I got something from all of that book learning: a substitute high school history teacher once asked me to lecture briefly about England after 1066, which I could do, easily. He kept asking me, "And then what happened?" and I believe I got us all the way into Elizabeth's reign. But I now fully realize what I missed, and it saddens me.

A late bloomer, I am not at all the person I was as a teen. A stint in the Marine Corps removed most of my uncertainties and turned me into an extrovert. Playing rugby for years completed the process. I talk to complete strangers easily, initiating all sorts of conversations in elevators, meetings and other occasions. And while I still like to read (I read somewhat voraciously), it's far from the be-all and end-all of life. In fact, lately I have become persuaded that reading isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Doing anything in excess is bad - even that. It shouldn't preclude having a normal social life.

24 Jan 2012

2012-01-24T09:21:00.002-05:00

I got about halfway through Windtalkers (2002) the other night and quit. It's a pity because it's about the Marine Corps Navajo Code Talkers - certainly a worthy subject for a film. It's a John Woo film; I'm told he's known for overdoing it with pyrotechnics. Yes... I drew the same conclusion. The main reason I quit is Nick Cage, doing a real bad Clint Eastwood imitation. Honestly, I don't how that guy gets work in Hollywood as a leading man. He makes me think of the kids at high school we used to throw against wall lockers. Another problem is Peter Stormare (the "Vee Dub in da haus" German automotive engineer in those great VW ads), who plays a Gunnery Sergeant - with an unlikely, thick Northern European dialect. (Stormare is a Swede.) This film is a mess.

Much more fun was Circus of Horrors (1960), a British horror film which could have been called Circus of Cleavage. This one starred another icy Teuton, Anton Diffring. He shows up from time to time in productions where a severe blue-eyed German villain is called for. In other words, he's more or less a professional cinematic Nazi. So... was he in Germany during the war? No. Ironically, he fled Germany in 1939 for Canada.

Some the dialogue is funny. A scantily-clad circus performer is strapped to a revolving table, where a guy dressed like an Indian throws knives at her. Diffring's henchman interferes with the table's motor, which causes the Indian's aim to miss - and he strikes the woman in the throat with a knife, killing her (which is what Diffring intended). "Quick, get her to a doctor," he says, "And send ze clowns in." Hahaha! About a woman who was formerly a prostitute: "I must say, she's even better at soliciting applause than she was at soliciting men." Much more fun than John Woo making stuff explode.

On the drive into work this morning I listened to a collection of Judy Garland Capitol recordings. Yes, Garland was one of the most justly-celebrated talents in Hollywood; nobody approached her ability to impart meaning and drama into a song. (Exhibit A.) I could listen to her sing a random page out of a phonebook. But as I listened to Miss Garland's perfectly-modulated phrases and exquisitely-executed vibrato, it occurred to me: I'd sooner listen to a CD full of Julie London than Judy Garland. Julie London had what she called an "oversmoked voice"; not a belter like Garland, her style was more intimate, more closely-miked and whispered. (One of my favorite examples is Bye, Bye Blackbird - with an amazingly focused bassist.) She's my fave. But I like Judy Garland, too.

What about Doris Day? Doris Day?!? She had a notable cinematic moment doing a torch song, and it's a good one: Ten Cents a Dance. Funny quote: "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin." - Oscar Levant.

I can't leave the subject of torch singers without mentioning one of my favorite scenes from film noir: Ida Lupino's cynical and worldwise rendition of "One for my Baby" from Road House (1948). Yes, yes, I know, Frank Sinatra owns this number. But Lupino personalizes it with cigarette burns on the piano.

Here comes the solar storm! Here comes the solar storm! I plan to check out the sky tonight; maybe we'll see some glow to the north. This last happened in Northern Virginia in 2001 (I think it was). I happened to notice an odd, unaccountable red glow in the northern sky, and called News Channel Eight, who confirmed that, yes, it was a very rare appearance of the Northern Lights and yes, we've been getting calls all night about it.

TSA detains a Senator. How silly! I don't know... I'm a pretty humble guy and reluctant to pull rank, but if I were Rand I think I would have come up with something like, "Look, I'm a United States Senator. There are only 100 of us in this nation of 300 million. I can call press conferences for fun. If you don't let me pass I'm going to give your boss, your bosses' boss, his boss and his boss some very bad publicity - not to mention a tough time in a Congressional hearing." Senator Rand allowed himself to be detained for two hours; which speaks very well for his sense of patience.

The Academy Award list has come out, yawn. We saw The Artist earlier this month. It was good. We liked it.

23 Jan 2012

2012-01-23T08:05:00.010-05:00

I was at the local Sunoco station this weekend when I noticed that the cashiers were wearing promotional tee shirts which read "Ask me how you can win a free cruise!" or some such thing. What does anyone immediately think of right now seeing the word "cruise?" That ship off the coast of Italy, lying on its side. Spectacularly bad time to have that particular promotional! As my kids would say, FAIL.

I found an old (1969/1970) TV ad from when I was a kid - I knew it would wind up on youtube eventually. I've been looking for it for years to see if I had remembered that little trumpet call correctly, and as it turns out I did. I always liked this ad; wry, very dramatic. And, of course, my family were big antacid customers...

I donated blood on Saturday, and yes, I took a cell phone photo. It was a satisfying experience to be in the room with the local community's minor nobility. Geez, the battery of questions and the size of the form has certainly increased since I last did this. I saw, "Please do not donate blood to determine if you have HIV." Sigh. You know what I noticed, looking around the room? No tattoos. Anyway, I look forward to getting back on a donation schedule.

We took possession of our Sleep Number full mattress on Saturday, and assembled it. Now guests have a newer, larger, more comfortable bed to use. I like a firmer mattress, Cari a softer one. It uses a compressor and what I was assured was a very high quality, leak proof rubber bladder to increase or decrease the firmness of the mattress. I hope we don't regret buying this the way we did our various leaky guest air mattresses. What a waste of money those were!

I finished The Wonder Years Season 5 over the weekend. While the show is not quite as funny as it was as Kevin grows up - I suspect the best season was probably season 3, when he was a junior high schooler - it still hasn't "jumped the shark." With the exception of one awful episode, they maintained the quality of the show. I have started Season Six - the last season. I'll be sorry to finish this show... it is now one of my all-time favorite television shows.

I also watched a couple of Professor Robert Greenberg lectures. The one on Arnold Schoenberg (the rather severe-looking fellow shown above) was a good try; an appeal to listen to and fully appreciate the music of this difficult composer. I like the way it began, "Welcome, you fine, good, brave people..."

Not familiar with the music of Arnold Schoenberg? He was one of the revolutionary musical figures of the 20th century. After writing music written in the style of late Romanticism (tonal, but pushing it), he developed a system of writing music using a twelve tone row. His idea was to "emancipate" the melody from the requirements of the key signature major-minor/tonic-dominant narrative style used for hundreds of years. For instance, a Beethoven symphony is written with a key signature, and the music is developed and modulated through various other keys in a way that tells a sort of music story. We have become conditioned to expect music to do this. Schoenberg's music is atonal, that is, there is no key signature and no one note is allowed to dominate the melody or harmony to give the piece a pseudo-key. How does it sound? Like so. In Neil Finn's words, "Try whistling this." Naturally, this kind of thing leads to humor.

Schoenberg's music is accused of being, "All brains and no heart," academic, difficult and hard to like. It is certainly not popular; nothing will kill a orchestra society's finances like a season of the music of Schoenberg and his followers. In the past I've listened to Schoenberg's stuff and tried to like it - but I always return to Bartok, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and other 20th century masters. His early pieces are okay: Transfigured Night, Pierrot Lunaire. But by and large I avoid Schoenberg and listen instead to his disciple Alban Berg, who was able to take the sow's ear of serialism and make silk purses. Berg's music is the subject of his very own blog which I may write someday...

I am now reading Thinking Small, by Andrea Hiott, a book about the development of the Volkswagen Beetle. It is a much better and more interesting work than Small Wonder, the more corporate-sanctioned and image-conscious paperback which you got from dealerships when you bought a Bug in the 1960's. (I didn't get one when I bought mine in 1975; I had to find it at a yard sale.) This book describes the very great interest Adolph Hitler had in Ferdinand Porsche's "People's Car" design. As it turns out, Hitler was a major Car Guy. Who knew? I didn't. This book is a sort of triple biography of Adolph Hitler (promoter), Ferdinand Porsche (inventor) and Bill Bernbach (ad exec).

20 Jan 2012

2012-01-20T09:10:00.002-05:00

A couple of stills from the upcoming Johnny Depp/Tim Burton adaptation of Dark Shadows. Way, way overboard on the Goth. This is going to suck, big time.

Yesterday I posted my Maurice Poirier article to Burbankia, a scoop, I think. Mike and I have been investigating Burbank history for decades and we've never heard of him. Fascinating guy! Rockets into space, innovative time devices for the aerospace industry, airborne weapons of war, over-the-air transmission of power, automotive independent suspension... this "ten ideas per minute" fellow was into everything. So... how come he appears in none of the Burbank history books, not even a mention? He seems to have been entirely forgotten. Well... no more. It appears that he died as recently as 1990. I wonder if some Poirier relative will be contacting us now...

Last night I watched another Professor Robert Greenberg lecture, this one on Bela Bartok (Greenberg's favorite 20th C. composer - shown above); it was one of his best. I, too, like the music of Bartok a great deal. I'm not sure if he's my favorite 20th C. composer, however. That might be Igor Stravinsky. But I do find myself listening to Bartok a lot. Last year I started listening to one of his string quartets - from Greenberg's lectures it now seems necessary to get to know his piano concerti as well.

Bartok wrote one of my very favorite operas, Duke Bluebeard's Castle, a moody, dark, impressive piece where the melodies and harmonies seem to have come, not from traditional Western concert music, but from a place hidden away deep in the Eastern European soul. Curiously, it is the one symphonic piece that invokes the idea of colors within me: deep, rich shades of maroon, navy and black. It is a one act opera, and is therefore only about an hour in length.

The plot is simple: Bluebeard arrives in his castle with his new bride, Judith. She wants to know all about Bluebeard's past and illuminate his life. But Bluebeard's past is bloody and forbidden to her. Nevertheless, she insists upon discovering what's behind the doors of his castle. One by one she opens them, to her eventual doom. I have a CD of this piece sung by renowned basso Samuel Ramey... one day I was listening to it when Ethan, who was then a little boy, came into the room. He asked what I was listening to, and I described the plot and what was in the room behind this particular door: a Lake of Tears. He shrugged and walked off. Sometime later he asked me about the "sad pond" music - haha!

I have blogged about Bela Bartok before. No doubt I will again. I shall conclude by noting that one of my very favorite British directors, Michael Powell, directed a version of this opera for West German television in 1963. I very much want to see it!

Speaking of things British, I watched one of the Pinewood Studios "Carry On" movies, this one Carry On Cruising from 1962. (It's the only one Netflix has.) The "Carry On" films are an English institution; I felt that in order to fully appreciate the culture I needed to see at least one of them. I can't say I liked it much - the humor was a bit too lowbrow for my taste. It reminded me of a goofy NBC sitcom from 1965. I liked the "Doctor" series better. My wife and I noted that part of the film's intended appeal was via showing the two blond lead actresses in their underwear, swimsuits and various states of disarray. One of them, Liz Fraser, was stunning. (And I knew that image would be on the Internet somewhere...)

Tomorrow I'm donating blood for the first time in over twenty years. I used to donate all the time, and then my ALT and AST (liver enzymes) rose with age and, probably, weight. It's genetic; my Mom had high ALT and AST readings, too. The problem is that twenty years ago those markers were partial determinants for hepatitis types B and C. I don't have hepatitis - I had it checked - but the policy of the American Red Cross was to refuse to use my blood so I (regretfully) quit donating.

I was in the local library late last year during a blood drive, and one of the workers asked if I would donate. I said "No" and explained why, and she told me that now the Red Cross has advanced tests to screen for hepatitis, and that if it was a simple matter of elevated liver enzymes they could now use my blood. Great! Problem was, however, that on the Caribbean cruise earlier that month I had visited a certain area of Guatemala, and therefore had to wait a year to donate. So tomorrow I expect to give satisfactory answers to the screening questions in order to donate once again.

Have a great weekend!

19 Jan 2012

2012-01-19T08:54:00.002-05:00

On the 11 January blog entry I mentioned that a YDNA match on my Clark line turned up, and that I sent an e-mail to the person with whom I share a common ancestor. I finally received an email from him today. As is so often the case with this maddening family, it sheds no new light on the central problem I am trying to solve, namely, who was my 3rd great grandfather Clark. I knew back in 1982 when I saw "unknowns" filled in by a clerk on the parents line of my 2nd great grandfather's 1888 death record that this would be a difficult puzzle to solve. Perhaps someday...

Last night I watched what had been a lost film (from 1938 to 1969), The Ghoul (1933), a British production starring Boris Karloff and a host of other notable British actors, namely Cedric Hardwick, Ralph Richardson, Ernest Thesiger and comic actress Kathleen Harrison - a favorite actress. (Have you ever seen that 1951 Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol? That brilliantly crazy cockney housekeeper is Harrison.) The good stuff: outstandingly crafted expressionist sets by Alfred Junge and marvelously eerie lighting. The cast, of course. And that stylishly 1930's art deco poster which I reproduce here. The bad: The plot and dialogue. It's one of those "old dark house" flicks from the early thirties, where all sorts of improbably odd things happen in a crumbling manse during a thunderstorm, and the cast alternatively shrieks and discusses them. It's a film genre that, let's face it, has not aged well.

Still, it's always fun to see Kathleen Harrison, and she's given full play in this. At one point she encounters a man who claims to be an Arab sheik, and is immediately smitten. (This was just after the Rudolph Valentino era, don't forget.) He mentions how sheiks treat female servants who don't behave: they strip them to the waist and whip them. Then he demands a pot of coffee. One of the sly, high points of the film is when Harrison shyly but hopefully asks what will happen if the coffee is no good. Also... when we travel and have to rent a car I'm fond of calling the cheesy compact cars we get (Chevy Cobalts, Nissan Versas, etc.) "reprehensible." At one point in this flick Harrison gets into the cramped back seat of a small, open car on a cold night and calls the car "unspeakable," so she's given me a new adjective for our rental cars.

I also watched another fascinating Professor Robert Greenberg Teaching Company lecture, this one on 20th C. French concerti. He mentioned that French composer Francois Poulenc was called "half monk, half hooligan." I could describe myself that way, I think. Anyway, as I have blogged before, Greenberg is wonderful; the best lecturer I have ever encountered. He's forgotten more about classical music than I'll ever know. I could listen to him for hours and, indeed, I have. I've heard all of his Great Music, Beethoven Symphonies, Symphony and Great Composers series; I'm almost done with the Concerti series. Great stuff, highly recommended, and a perfect use of one's time.

Greeberg spoke briefly about modern French composer Henri Dutilleux, about whom I would like to know more. I also need to spend some more time listening to his compositions. I came across a CD of his Cello Concerto (properly called Tout un monde lointain - "A Remote World") at a yard sale a few years back (!) and naturally bought it. It's an amazing work, which Greenberg covered all too quickly.

Dutilleux is not some long dead fossil... he's still alive and, presumably, at age 96, still working. He works very slowly, only releasing a new piece of music once in a while. But according to Greenberg they are all gems, masterpieces. Certainly that's the case with his Cello Concerto. From wikipedia: "It is one of the most important additions to the cello repertoire of the 20th century and is considered one of the composer's major achievements. In five movements, Tout un monde lointain is a nocturnal, mysterious work with a delicate orchestration and an eerily beautiful, yet highly virtuosic solo part. While most of the concerto is introspective and meditative, it also has occasional outbursts of violence and a frantic build-up to the ambiguous, suspended finale." I heard this piece played at the Kennedy Center: 2005 program notes. It was one of the highlights of the many concerts I've heard there.

I shall close with one of the Baudelaire lines used in Dutilleux' Tout un monde lointain, typically Gallic:

Hold on to your dreams
Those of wise men are never as beautiful as those of fools!

18 Jan 2012

2012-01-18T09:06:00.005-05:00

Our first grandchild is a boy! And here's how we learned: The Cupcake Reveal.

A boy. I remember when we learned this with our son after an ultrasound test in 1983. The first thing that ran through my mind was, "Maybe he'll like the same toys I did when I was a kid!" Indeed, Ethan became a Legomaniac, just as I was, and he enjoyed drawing comic books, just as I did. (But he was better at it.) My mention of furnishing yard sale Legos at the end of the video is not a joke. I have a bunch now.

They don't have a name picked out yet; Sarah was running on the assumption that the baby was a girl. The family genealogist - me - pointed out that ever since about 1814 or so, for nearly two hundred years, every male in my line has had "Wesley" somewhere in his name: Wesley H. Clark (c. 1814-1888), John Wesley Clark (1850-1922), Harry Wesley Clark (1884-1942), Wesley Harry Clark (1912-1983), Me, Wesley Harry Clark, Jr. (1956), Ethan Wesley Clark (1983). My half brother was John "Jack" Wesley Clark; his son is Steven Wesley Clark. No pressure...

(Why all the Wesleys? I cannot yet prove it, but I think it's because the family was Methodist after being Quakers for generations, and was honoring the founder of the faith, John Wesley.)

In the video Sarah mentions that the Clark name will be maintained after all. That's a reference to a short conversation we had over the holidays, when she asked if I preferred a boy or a girl. I said a boy, but then added that either one is fine, of course. I then mentioned that the reason I preferred a boy was that so, after the countless hours I have spent doing genealogical research on the Clark family line, that the surname be maintained into the next generation. A bit of scholarly selfishness, I guess.

During yard sale seasons I refrain from buying things "...for grandchildren I didn't have." What's to restrain me now?

My wife, that's what.

Yesterday I listened to Ralph Vaughan Williams' The Wasps (Aristophanic Suite) via a library CD. What a great piece of music! How come I never heard it before? VW went to Paris to study orchestration under Maurice Ravel (one of the great masters of scoring for musical instruments), and this piece shows it. It just sparkles.

I had a Webelos Den meeting last night; a wondrous and loud meeting of ten year old male minds. I think I mentioned that I have one kid who has some sort of bizarre potato fixation; he constantly mentions them. One of the requirements for the engineering activity pin was to draw an outline of your home, like a blue print. This lad did that. Can you guess how he labelled the kitchen? "Where potatoes are cooked." Naturally, outside, a potato patch was located on the front yard. When we discussed various types of bridges - suspension, beam, truss, etc. - he repeatedly volunteered "Potato bridge." Can you guess what his nickname is now? We have the pinewood derby a week from this Saturday. I told him that I would be seriously disappointed if the popular tuber didn't provide the design inspiration for his car. Last year his car was designed to look like a dollar bill on wheels, with his face, not Washington's, in the middle. Clearly, this is a merry soul who marches to the beat of his own accordion.

17 Jan 2012

2012-01-17T09:22:00.002-05:00

My new favorite boy's book: Do you know what I'm going to do Next Saturday?, by Helen Palmer, 1963. I like the hyperactivity and bravado - and the Marine Corps reference. (Note: There is an urban legend about a banned Dr. Seuss book - this ain't it.)

On Friday night Cari and I stopped at a local Starbucks for hot chocolate. I came across an article in the Washington Post about how youtube may be forecast to be the dominant new media provider. My video on the subject is here. Will youtube replace television in some way? I don't know or care, really. Although, there are times when I made a bowl of popcorn, sat at the computer and "channel surfed" youtube instead of watching a movie. When I did find interesting is that I could come across such an article, shoot a brief video with my cell phone about it on the spot, edit it quickly with free software when I got home and upload it onto my very own youtube channel for friends and family to look at. That's fun.

Is anyone "tuned in?" Does it matter? After all, it doesn't really affect my need to be creative. But, as it turns out, yes, somebody tuned in. Watching my "Mike are you there?" video, one person - a total stranger - commented "This is truly the greatest video ever. No joke." Wait... do you think maybe he's joking anyway?

Stranger: "This is truly the greatest video ever."
Kip: "As if anyone could know that, Napoleon."

Friday night my wife and I watched Onibaba, a 1964 Japanese arthouse drama/horror film. I gave it an 8/10, Cari gave it 2/10, later, 3/10. It's neat: It takes place during a civil war in medieval Japan. Wounded soldiers are ambushed and slaughtered by two desperate women living in tall grass, who strip them of armor which they resell for money and food; they toss the bodies into a deep hole. The horror elements occur when a male neighbor returns from the wars - there is sex, jealousy and resentment - and the sudden appearance of an unusual samurai wearing a demon mask, which is repurposed by one of the women. The black and white cinematography is excellent, and I especially like the confined, claustrophobic world of the tall grass the women live in. I am not a big fan of Japanese cinema, but this is one I like. A good short review is here.

I cannot say the same for Kaidan (2007 - not to be confused with the superior 1964 film of the same or nearly same name). It was overlong and kind of cheesy, I thought.

I've blogged before about J.W. Fawkes, olde-tymey Burbank inventor of the "Aerial Swallow," a prop-driven tram suspended by a cable. Turns out there was another later on, Maurice Poirier. He proposed an unnecessarily violent airplane, not to mention transmitting electrical power via radio. What was it about Burbank that fostered all this over the top creativity?

I finally got a listen to the Beatles' Let It Be... Naked, the collection of songs on the standard issue Let It Be album, but without the Phil Spector (over) production. The story is that in 1969 the Beatles gathered in a cold, drafty and inhospitable studio warehouse setting to record some songs. Squabbles and differences ensued, and the project was abandoned. "Wall of sound" producer (and, later, convicted murderer) Phil Spector was called in to create an album out of the various bits of tape, which he did in 1970. This was the standard Let It Be record. Paul decried the heavy-handed orchestrations, choirs and embellishments, and fans have ever since wondered what the production might have sounded like with a different producer. Paul spearheaded the "Naked" remix in 2003.

What a revelation! I never cared for this album much - it is, in fact, my least favorite Beatles album, but remixing and stripping the songs of their unneeded orchestra and choruses really improves them and makes them persuasive. John's Across the Universe and Paul's The Long and Winding Road and Let It Be are much improved. Good work!

On a personal note, we got a scare yesterday. My pregnant daughter-in-law was involved in a traffic accident when her SUV hit a jersey wall on a snowy/icy Utah road. She is okay, but sore. She went to see the doctor who said that all is well. Thank goodness! The SUV may or may not be totalled. My son hates that car, so maybe it's a blessing in disguise...

13 Jan 2012

2012-01-13T09:22:00.004-05:00

Grandparenthood Chapter Two: The Cupcake Reveal. So, young parents these days want to know what sex their baby is before actually giving birth. I kind of liked being surprised 2/3rds of the time. But my son and daughter-in-law are going to find out on Tuesday. What's planned is that the doctor will write the baby's sex on a piece of paper, which he'll give to Sarah, who won't look at it. She'll take it to a cupcake shop and have cupcakes made: blue frosting for a boy, pink frosting for a girl. They'll be in a sealed box. She and my son will open it for a FaceTime video connection with us in Virginia, which I, of course, will videotape and, this being 2012, post. Pretty neat, huh? So stay tuned.

This is what star quality looks like.

I downloaded Twitter onto my iPhone. I am not totally convinced yet that this is worth it. For instance, the Old Farmer's Almanac tweeted, "In times past, barbers were also surgeons. Among their primary tasks was bloodletting, a remedy thought to cure many diseases. The red-and-white-striped pole originally represented a bleeding arm wrapped in bandages." Hmmm. Sounded like an urban legend to me. But confirmation is here and elsewhere, and I can't find anything which debunks it. So, okay, OFA, I'll give you that one.

The Weird Al Yankovic tweets are pretty funny. But I find myself being compelled to come up with clever and original one-liners for tweets and, frankly, I don't need the literary pressure. (I suppose that last sentence counts as a tweet.)

Finally, it's unseemly for a former Marine to "tweet." (And there's another possible tweet.) So I may be giving that app the heave-ho. If I don't you may "follow" me - why would anyone want to do that? - at "@wesleyhclark."

My son pointed out - in a tweet, of course - that it's yet another way for he and I to communicate: e-mail, cell phone voice calls, Face Time videoteleconferencing, text messaging, comments on my blogs, Facebook, iChat (haven't tried that one yet) and face-to-face talking. Possibly telepathy is next.

...which smoothly brings me to the topic of a father and sons Wonder Years episode I saw, where Kevin describes the failure of he and his father to communicate. The situation is so bad that the idea of the two of them heading out to a men's store to buy Kevin a suit is something akin to torture. In this particular episode he is fourteen, which is, there's no denying it, a difficult age. Junior high school/middle school - eck. But I don't understand the episode. When I was fourteen my Dad and I went on many Sunday rides in his Karmann-Ghia, and we got along just fine. We stayed up late at night and watched old movies on TV. If there were any times of stunted communication, I don't remember them.

Likewise, while my own son went through some unpleasant stages (I remember thirteen as being rather bumpy - he seemed unusually insolent then, and worse, parted his hair down the middle), I don't recall times when we would just sit in a car and refuse to communicate. Anyway, I am happy to report that we get along just fine now. We always have, really.

Anyway, getting back to the subject of The Wonder Years, I am nearing the end of the fourth season. It hasn't jumped the shark yet. In fact, I am continually surprised at just how good the writing was for this show.

I found an amusing Flickr page, "j.i's photostream" (a more memorable title might be a good idea). Anyway, there's all sorts of interesting vintage images here, including covers to 1960's Scholastic books.

I got a kick out of:

The Dude magazine, July 1958 - Can you imagine telling your friends that you read The Dude magazine? Or, worse yet, Satan magazine? Wait, I know. Back then you didn't tell anyone you read these.

Adam magazine - I found a discarded copy of an Adam magazine, once, when I was a kid. In the letters to the editor section I learned that strippers afix tassels to their, uh, pointy parts, with a special purpose gum. It caused me to wonder, "Where on earth does one buy that gum?"

The Lunch Box Cookbook - "Taste-tempting?" Not entirely.

Chantal Montellier's 1996 - I loved this strip. Trying to figure out what the characters were saying was part of the fun.

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine - Undeniable appeal to kids, I would think.

Glazunov's The Seasons - I like this album cover.

Antal Dorati - So that's what he looks like. I have a bunch of his albums, none of which have his photo.

More attractive album cover art - Where did this guy get all these?

Till Eulenspiegel - My favorite, I think.

...and so many more. Take a look!

Have a great three day weekend!

12 Jan 2012

2012-01-12T08:55:00.004-05:00

Two mysteries solved!

#1: Yesterday I wondered about a melody I was familiar with; I mentioned that it was invariably connected with dogs and used as a sort of musical shorthand for walking down the street with a doggie. I got an e-mail from a reader named Andy: " Hey Wes - I believe the tune you referred to in your blog is the one Buckwheat "whistles" in (I think) "The Pinch Singer" - "The Whistler & His Dog," a Sousa-era piece - or maybe composed by Sousa? I'm not sure. I recognized it from the Buckwheat gag! Love the blog - Andy." A quick check on youtube confirmed that this is indeed the piece I am thinking of: recorded performance here - The Whistler and His Dog. It was composed in 1905 by Arthur Pryor and released as a novelty song. Andy was close - Pryor was associated with the Sousa band. Thanks, Andy!

#2: When I was a boy I had a recurring dream about Disneyland. I haven't had it for decades, but I've had it about three times in my life. Details are sketchy and half-remembered, as you might appreciate in the case of a dream, but the main feature of it was that I could get in and out of the park by a remote, little-known and little-used route across the railroad tracks which surround the park. The crossing was in the neighborhood of a place with Old West style buildings, obviously, Frontierland. But there was some confusion between this locale and Knott's Berry Farm, which had a Old West theme. "Am I in Disneyland or Knott's Berry Farm?" was a part of the dream.

Everyone who has ever been to the park knows that there is only one footpath into and out of the park: the main gate, past an image of Mickey Mouse's head made of flowers, through two tunnels. This was completely intentional on Disney's part - he wanted to impress guests with the illusion that they were leaving their workaday world and entering into a place of creative fantasy. In other words, he wanted to control the transition to the "show" that the park represented. So why did I have a dream about an alternate entrance into Disneyland? Why was this significant enough to form a recurring dream?

I mentioned that I am currently reading an encyclopedia about Disneyland which contains a description of every past and present ride and attraction. Last night I came across the entry for an old attraction called "Holidayland." It was a park area outside the berm, adjacent to the park. (It stood where the ride buildings for the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion now stand, where the expansive parking lot used to be.) It featured a tent for performers (often, TV Mouseketeers), a playground for children and a refreshment stand. Disney's intended use for the area was as a spot for corporate parties, picnics, softball games and gatherings; it was opened in 1957 and closed in September 1961. A map is here. A feature of this place was that it had its own entrance into Disneyland, across the railroad tracks and into a section of Frontierland - see my arrows in red. (I had a major Ah-Ha moment when I learned this.)

Holidayland closed in September 1961, when I was five and a half. Mystery solved! I am guessing that my parents probably took me through Holidayland and into the park before this date, quite possibly around the same time we also visited Knott's Berry Farm in April 1960, when Mom took home movies. I dimly remembered this via a recurring dream I had as a child. It also explains my confusion between the two places, Knott's and Frontierland in Disneyland.

At any rate, I feel gratified: I dreamed about an alternative entrance into Disneyland because, once, there used to be one - and I must have gone through it!

I posted a couple of cool old photos to my Burbankia site: Nixon in Burbank (1971), and Pacific Electric Car, 1955. Yes, I am well aware that there was color photography back in 1955, but it always comes as a minor shock to see anything beyond about 1957 portrayed in full color camera shots. Especially in images like this, where the dyes have shifted so little. Must have been Kodachrome. As Calvin's father (of the household with Hobbes, the stuffed toy tiger) once assured his son when they were looking though old family photographs, back then the world was in black and white. Color wasn't introduced until the 1960's.

One last thing and then I'll quit: I forgot to mention that one of the notable features of the Christmas visit to Utah was that Ethan and I watched the unbelievably awful two hour Star Wars Holiday Special as a RiffTrax production. (RiffTrax is like Mystery Science Fiction Theatre 3000, where viewers insult the film throughout play.) In case you're not aware of this legendary work, it was broadcast on television in 1978 and stars the Star Wars cast plus Harvey Korman, Beatrice Arthur and Art Carney, along with some others whom I am mercifully forgetting about. George Lucas has stated that, if he could, he'd destroy every copy. In the Internet Age that is, sadly, impossible.

Where do I begin? The intrusive and unfunny Harvey Korman scenes? The bar room song sung by Bea Arthur? The boring Boba Fett cartoon? The bizarre bronzer makeup on Mark Hamill's face? The exceedingly lame "Life Day" holiday Wookie plot? The clumsily erotic Diahann Carroll sequence, as viewed by a creepy, geriatric Wookie? Concentrated awfulness! This must be seen to be believed; I have never seen a franchise trashed so thoroughly.

11 Jan 2012

2012-01-11T08:56:00.003-05:00

I am excited! When I opened my e-mail inbox this morning I learned that a fellow surnamed Clark submitted his DNA for testing/classification via FamilySearch DNA, and that a match has been identified between his YDNA markers and mine. In layman's terms, that means we share an ancestor surnamed Clark. I sent in my DNA back in 2004 as a birthday gift to myself. Match results have come in ever since every now and then.

Statistically, the evidence is rather off-putting: In comparing Y-DNA 37 marker results, the probability that this fellow and I share a common ancestor within the last 4 generations is only 3.89%; 8 generations is 26.96%, 12 generations is 57.78%, 16 generations is 80.12%, 20 generations is 91.90%, 24 generations is 97.03%, and 28 generations is 98.99%. I can only go back five generations with my documented Clark research. Genetic links can go back considerably further than that - into pre-history, in fact. What the evidence is telling us (he also got an e-mail informing him of the link) is that in the Middle Ages there is an almost 99% probably that we shared a common ancestor down our father's father's lines - a Clark. Statistically the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) becomes less sure through time. BUT... his surname is Clark, the same as mine. That means that anything he gives me is a guaranteed piece of the puzzle, no matter how remotely related. Or closely related!

So I e-mailed him with a suggestion that we exchange genealogical information to look for a possible link. His earliest documented ancestor is a fellow who was born in 1801 and who died in 1864. This fellow is therefore a peer of my great-great-grandfather, Wesley H. Clark (b. circa 1814, d. 1888), my earliest known Clark. I am intrigued and am looking forward to his reply. (The odds are good that I'll get one. Doing a YDNA test costs just over $100. That sort of winnows out the lazy genealogists from the eager ones.)

We had Webelos Den last night; the boys were unusually noisy and boisterous. Funny thing, though... we discussed engineering and, to fulfill one of the requirements for an engineering activity pin, we went over various ways power can be generated. One of the boys mentioned nuclear power, and I used that as an opportunity to briefly tell the story of the 1946 Los Alamos "demon core" accidental radiation poisoning incident. As I did so you could hear a pin drop, it got so quiet. Come to think of it, the two other adult leaders had incredulous looks on their faces as well.

Over the years I have noticed that ten year old boys seem to be fascinated with the possibility of plague, accidental dismemberment, massive blood loss, grievous sickness and, in general, death. Want a quiet room of scouts? Tell how to treat for a cut artery, mention the flesh-eating bacteria or describe how poor hygiene can lead to influenza pandemics. That'll get their attention every time.

A boy's concern about fatality extends even into their communications with the Divine. It is something of a cliche in Mormondom that if you ask a young man to give a closing prayer he'll invariably request that, "...no harm or accident befall us as we travel home." And yet I've never ever heard about a family getting killed on their way home from church. I wonder how this nervous interest developed. Perhaps it's wholly genetic. I've heard that females are concerned with life, males with death. Maybe that's it.

Speaking of stories for children, I am currently watching some stories from the Storybook International series, gentle short tales adapted from traditional stories for children. Yes, they're for kids - but they're very well made and timeless, and so can also entertain adults. Well, I find them entertaining, anyway. I blogged about a set of these last May. Each begins with an animated sequence of a troubadour singing, I'm the storyteller/And my stories must be told... I used to watch them with my kids. You can buy all 64 stories in a ten DVD set. I may do that someday. For the grand kids, you know.

I am on another one of my musical crusades; these obsessive things come up from time to time in my life. I'm trying to identify the name of a melody. It was used a lot back in the 1940's-1960's, invariably, it seems, when a dog was shown. In fact, the link seems so complete you might call it "The Doggie Song." A few older gents recall it's circus music of some kind. Every baby boomer I've hummed it to knows it - but nobody knows it by name or context. I am uncertain whether it was from a cartoon, a movie or a television show. TV, I think. Youtube searches turn up nothing with the search terms I come up with. What's the melody? This one. (Sort of. I go out of pitch at the end.)

The last time I was on one of these crusades was with some 1960's introductory music used for the KTLA Channel 5 (in Los Angeles) Evening News. I finally identified that one using youtube. And then, about ten years ago I finally identified a tune in my head as being a 1964 Burt Bacharach song, Any Old Time of the Day. That took a while.

10 Jan 2012

2012-01-10T08:49:00.003-05:00

Yesterday we got an inch of snow. That's nothing to the rest of the country, but here in the D.C. area that's enough to thoroughly screw up traffic. Heck, a little rain does that. So it was with some hesitation that I drove into work this morning rather than take the Metro. As it turned out, things were fine, with only more or less nominal amounts of traffic and backups being apparent. No ice.

Still, there was a delay due to one of my pet peeves: a couple of police cars pulled somebody over - or somebody had a problem - and so there were two cop cars with their blue and red lights on at the side of the main road into D.C. This has the effect of screwing up traffic for miles as drivers slow down to see what's going on. It's disgraceful - the area police are one of the main sources of traffic problems in this area! I distinctly recall, as a kid, my parents having to slow down to 55 or so on the Harbor Freeway when emergency personnel were tending to a person injured in an accident. You could see the injured woman on a gurney being loaded into the ambulance! Around here that would cause things to come to a complete and resounding halt all across the region. In Southern California c. 1972 it only had the effect of causing people to slow to 55. Move along, people, and quit rubbernecking. There's nothing to see on the side of the road that you won't see in a television cop show.

On the way in I listened to a classic rock album I had never have the occasion to listen to before: Van Morrison's 1970 Moondance. I quite liked it! Of course I had heard the title song before; there's no getting away from it, and my bass teacher once had me learn it to work out how a walking bass line works. But the other songs were more or less new to me. It's a bit of a surprise to me that I would like it, as a Gaelic soul, jazz and R&B mix wouldn't normally appeal to me. And I've never been a Van Morrison fan.

I also recently tried listening to Miles Davis' 1960 recording Sketches of Spain. One of the big recent surprises to me was that I really liked his Kind of Blue, a 1959 recording I had found on a fifty cent CD at a yard sale a couple of years ago. Modal jazz! I guess I'm ready to listen to some jazz (I had never cared for it) - of the right sort. But I'm sorry to say that Sketches of Spain, which was recommended in various articles I had read, kind of turned me off. The problem is that I'm familiar with the melodies from their original symphonic settings. Listening to them as jazz just makes me want to hear the symphonic versions. It's like listening to people covering Beatles songs - it just makes me want to hear the originals. But... I think I'll give Sketches another try on some future commute.

I have started my VW Bug stories article. As I mentioned, posting it is one of my New Year's resolutions.

I watched another installment of the Doctor series last night; as I mentioned yesterday, these are British comedies made at Pinewood Studios (get it? Hollywood/Pinewood?) outside of London in the 1950's. (The 007 films were made there.) These comedies are amusing and fun rather than ha ha funny. There are a number of other installments in the series, but I won't be able to see those because Netflix doesn't have them. Drat.

There were some wonderful films made at Pinewood - check it out.

I am now reading my Disneyland encyclopedia, a Christmas book. I would have liked to be able to walk the park on Opening Day, in 1955, just to see what the Disney's original conception of the place was like. When you think about it, the creative process behind Disneyland was daring and brilliant: define large scale areas, themes or "lands" (Tomorrowland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, etc.), then define adventures within those lands. Then, with time, refine and "plus up" the shows and rides - add details, variations and evolve the idea. This has been going on there for 57 years now; there is simply no other place like it. What's great is that I remember the park from the 1960's and have seen how the creativity applied to the place has - by and large - improved it.

My mother's favorite ride was always It's a Small World, which, these days, seems trite and precious. The ride is essentially a mechanized doll show with an obsessive theme song and a somewhat sappy philosophy. But when I rode the attraction last June I was pleased to see that there were new things to see along with the familiar old sights. Somehow Disney had made it more colorful and more interesting by varying details. Best of all, that white stylized cityscape facade now serves as an evening screen for an amazing seasonal high-tech light show. Wonderful! How many other rides developed in 1964 seem as vital?

(We saw "The Magic, the Memories and You" show - check it out here, in full screen HD. It was amazing.)

My favorite thing about Disneyland is not the rides or the food or the show experience, as good as those are. It's seeing the applied creativity in almost every square inch of the park. The hidden or not so obvious features and the constant updates. Creativity unbound! Sometimes I feel like I have badly missed my calling, career-wise. Should have worked at Disney.

9 Jan 2012

2012-01-09T08:26:00.016-05:00

Somebody ripped off my lunch entree from the freezer at work on Friday. I'm thinking he or she must have been hungry and/or desperate. Or lazy and morally unconcerned.

We went shopping at the local Whole Foods store; I always feel like the only Republican on the premises. Anyway, they feature scary food: Packaging designed to give kids nightmares, bread that might bite back.

Over the weekend I watched a couple of the 1950's British comedy "Doctor" series: Doctor in the House (1954) and Doctor at Sea (1955). These are amusing and fun rather than ha ha funny; I like them. There are more - I plan to see them. The two I saw star a bluff, loud roarer named James Robertson Justice. I always thought Brian Blessed was the first of the English cinematic roarers, not so. This fellow came first. Bridgette Bardot played a generic French tart.

Anyway, I learned about these Doctor movies by watching a documentary about Pinewood Studios entitled The Golden Gong (1985), about Rank Organisation films. You know how Rank films always begin with a muscular fellow (the "gongman") striking a gong? Hence the gong. Whenever we encountered one of these late at night watching TV with my Dad, he'd say, "It's a Rank film!" (In another voice) "Oh, I didn't think it was that bad..."

I have read - and believe - that classic film buffs claim that what's about to follow that famous gong stroke is going to be special - the best the British can do. I have always always felt that way. I see that logo and think, "Post-war British. I'm probably going to like this."

It's worth noting that that famous gong is made of papier-mache, not bronze or brass. In the documentary Michael Caine taps it and it goes "thunk."

I also watched a lot of The Wonder Years episodes over the weekend. I am halfway through season four. I am happy to report that I haven't noticed it jumping the shark yet.

On Saturday Cari and I went to IKEA to purchase items for the Home Guest Bed Upgrade Program (we're replacing a twin with a full). We at first supposed that inflatable mattresses would be a good solution for visiting family members and friends. Wrong! I haven't met one of those wretched things that didn't develop leaks or simply mysteriously lose air through the night, leaving guests to wake up about an inch from the floor. I shall never buy one again. Those things are no replacement for a bed.

I am now reading an encyclopedia of past and present Disneyland attractions and main creative personnel. I don't recall Don DeFore's Silver Banjo Barbecue, however, but I do recall the Aunt Jemima Pancake House. I hated... wait. I already blogged on that topic. Never mind!

Over the weekend I also read a book about when Washington D.C. comes to Utah, or, in other words, when visiting presidents of the United States made visits to Utah. Utah being the reddest of Red States you might think that the closest and most cordial relationship between the Mormon church president and the United States President was between Ronald Reagan and somebody, but you would be wrong. It was between David O. McKay and Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson really appreciated counseling with McKay, and saw him as something of a father figure.

"I've met Billy Graham and the others," Johnson wrote in his journal, "...but there is something I like about President McKay." He even once had the pilot of Air Force One touch down on an unannounced call to Salt Lake City to chat with President McKay. Interesting. I suppose if I had people chanting my name and demanding to know a daily deathcount ("Hey, hey, LBJ/How many kids did you kill today?") I'd be in need of some heavy duty spiritual counsel as well.

6 Jan 2012

2012-01-06T09:05:00.004-05:00

It was Date Night for my bride and I last night. We had dinner at the Irish pub near where I work (bangers and mash - Irish sausages and mashed potatoes - I like bangers and mash) and then we took in a movie, The Artist (2011). We don't often go out to the movies because it's gotten rather expensive and something of a bother. It's far easier and cheaper to see movies at home, something the industry has been wrestling with since the 1950's.

Anyway, we liked this charming film. It wasn't epic or great - it was amusing, clever and entertaining. Leave it to the French! While everyone else is making grand IMAX 3-D productions with multi-channel sound, the French turn in a neat little movie with a stunningly retro theme in a black and white silent format with a nearly square aspect ratio! Mix A Star is Born with Singing in the Rain , a leading man who reminds one a lot of Gene Kelly and Douglas Fairbanks and stir in some je ne sais quoi and you get The Artist. Well done, recommended.

We saw this movie at the AMC Shirlington Theater. I asked somebody working there how old the place was, and he said, "Old." Not helpful. 1950's? 1970's? So while waiting for the film to start I did some quick investigation with my iPhone. I didn't find out how old the theater was, but I did learn that the place where I work, Shirlington Village, was one of the D.C. suburbs' very first major shopping destinations, begun in the 1940's. Modified through the years to suit changing retail tastes, the place is now built along "New Urbanist" lines.

I was unacquainted with the phrase. What's New Urbanist? A description is here, but, in short, think walkable, with traditional streets and gathering spaces. Definitely not an enclosed mall surrounded by a huge parking lot. Actually, New Urbanism is simply the stuff people were doing at the turn of the last century (the pre-automobile era), building with a sense of community. As with the film we saw, that which was passe is once again fashionable.

More evidence: It's official, Vinyl record sales were up 39% in 2011. I bought about six of them that year, but all at yard sales and library sales, however, so my contribution doesn't count. Could it really be that 33 1/3 rpm vinyl is making a comeback?

I finished my book about Volkswagen stories. Time to start on my own web page.

More Fawkes! I found the obit for J.W. Fawkes in the pages of the 29 June 1928 Los Angeles Times for this colorful early Burbank citizen. I don't know how I overlooked that before...

I learned of the death of a high school friend yesterday, Mike Acord. He died just over a year ago. We were in elementary school together as well as high school; he graduated in the class ahead of me. We used to play chess in study hall. I was a bit flattered by this because he was also a popular jock, but he was a well-rounded, intelligent jock. It lifted my spirits to know he was my friend. He was the kind of guy you wanted as a friend: stable, confident, personable, friendly, supportive and encouraging. The high school version of a man's man; I wanted to be more like him.

(Remembrance: The entire male population of our fifth grade class adored and worshipped Lori Marsalis; a girl of gentle demeanor and soft glances. Mike lived next door to her on Lamer Street, and we always considered him somehow favored because of this. We counted on him to impart special information about her - but none was ever forthcoming. The conclusion I drew later on in life was that the down-to-earth Mike and the fey and angelic Lori were not suited as a couple, and so they didn't communicate much.)

I am not at all surprised to learn that Mike had a happy 34 year marriage and that his wife misses him greatly. I haven't seen him since he graduated in 1973; I had always hoped that I would see him again at a reunion or something. Now I know I won't and it saddens me.

Well. The weekend arrives once again, as it does, by definition, each week. We have no plans. The Anglo-Saxon Horde at the National Geographic Museum looks promising, but that's open until March and therefore rewards procrastination. I got all my scrapbook archive DVDs produced and mailed off to the kids and friends, so that's done. Hmmm.

Have a great weekend!

5 Jan 2012

2012-01-05T08:29:00.003-05:00

Of all the Christmas presents I got last month, the best by far and away was my son Ethan's announcement of an upcoming grandchild, the first. (I couldn't blog about this before because Sarah didn't want the news to go out before she could tell her co-workers; this has since happened.)

The nominal purpose for gathering us all together at a Salt Lake City eatery was a late birthday celebration for Ethan. He cleverly used it for the announcement and, better yet, had the iPhone camcorder running. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree after all.

In the video, Cari points at Sarah and accuses, "You lied to me!" This refers to a Face Time videoteleconferencing conversation we had with her a week or so earlier. She reported that Buddy, her dog, was following her around ceaselessly. "Are you pregnant?" my wife quickly asked. "No," Sarah replied. Gotcha! The baby is due in early June, around the 5th.

Sarah asked me, "Do you want a boy or a girl?" "A boy," I quickly replied, but added, "...but either is fine." As things stand right now, Ethan is the last biological Clark. Given the countless hours of genealogical research I've done, I'd like the surname to persist in my family. But... daughters are fine, too. No pressure. After all, each new generation is genetically a product of half the father and half of the mother. It doesn't matter.

Me... a grandfather. As I suggest in the closing seconds of this video, it scarcely seems possible. We can't be that old. But we are! Like walking into a room and forgetting what you wanted, weight that won't come off, failing hearing, stumbling and groping for a familiar word or forgetting the names of people, it's yet another reminder that the years are now speeding by and we are aging.

Actually, the decades are now speeding by...

I once heard somebody say, "The worst thing about becoming a grandfather is that now you're married to a grandmother." Hmm. Well, this doesn't bug me as I've always found older women attractive.

I well remember when it was announced that I was to become a father to Ethan. I just stoically accepted it - restrained rejoicing, after my fashion - and reflected that life was about to become very different. So... what does a grandchild mean? For one thing, it has turned my wife into a knitting machine, and booties are in process. She bought a knit hat - a preposterous thing (which I'm assured is cute) designed to look like an acorn atop baby's head. For my part, I keep promising that I will be burying my kids with yard sale grandchild items. It's only fair! For years I have refrained from buying items for grandchildren I don't yet have (unlike the woman in my church whom I keep bumping into at yard sales who constantly shops for grand kids). Now the governor is off, whoo-hoo!

How does one behave around a grandchild? I have no role models as I never had grandparents. Well, yes, of course, I did - I mean that I never knew any of them. The last to go (Dad's mother) died when I was eight; thanks to the messed-up social structure of my family I never met her. Mom's father died when I was four; I never met him, either, for the same reason. Is this partially the reason why I compulsively do genealogical research? Possibly.

So. There it is. Upcoming grandfatherhood. I am assured by my grandfatherly peers that grand kids are heaps of fun; more fun than the kids were, actually. An added benefit is that when they act up or need changing you simply hand them back to your kids. I got the distinct impression that this was the case, observing my mother when my kids were little. She came alive when they started calling her "Gan'ma." In fact, I once saw my mother's face absolutely light up when my daughter Julie first referred to her in this fashion. So I expect this will be fun. Compensation for growing old, perhaps.

Expect much more blogging on this topic later this year. I will try to keep from becoming obnoxious about it, I promise. It's one of my resolutions.

I have blogged in the past about Burbank's very own nutjob inventor J. W. Fawkes and his weird, troubled, litigious relations with his brothers and parents. A couple of new Los Angeles Times articles from 1898 have come to light, dealing with a brother, Howard. Scroll down to July and December, 1898 in the link I supplied, if interested. I get a kick out of the reporter's words: "...the drear monotony of suburban life has been relieved, and the courts of the county have been prevented from stagnating by having the Fawkes cases to adjudicate." Ha ha!

My Burbank pal Mike, intrepid researcher wot he is, recently found a 1911 magazine article about J.W.'s claim to fame, his "Aerial Swallow." I reprint it here: Technical World Magazine Page one, Page two, Page three. These are uncommon photographs... they aren't in the holdings of the Burbank Historical Society that we're aware. Neat! Mike and I have now become, I think, the World Experts on All Things Fawkes. (Unless, of course, there are knowledgeable descendants running around somewhere. A directory search shows nobody surnamed Fawkes in Burbank. I wonder where they all got to?)

4 Jan 2012

2012-01-04T08:41:00.002-05:00

Last night I watched a third season The Wonder Years episode - "Goodbye" - that I think may have been the best 24 minutes of television I have ever seen. If you're familiar with the show, it's the one where Kevin, who is pulling straight C's in algebra despite working hard, accepts help from his enigmatic and reserved math teacher to try to get an A on the midterm exam. This particular episode won two Emmys for direction and writing - it certainly deserved them.

I have one more episode to watch and then I'm done with the third season. I am constantly impressed; what a perceptive, moving, well-written show this was! Truly quality television. It's such a pity that the TV landscape is littered with junky reality shows - the industry is capable of so much more.

As I mentioned, it's always fun to spot shooting locations in my hometown. A scene in this episode was shot in a parking lot outside of Burroughs High (my school's arch-rival), where my friend Mike and I once parked for the homecoming game. Another episode had a scene at DeBell Golf Course (the set crew weren't totally diligent at obscuring a sign in the background which confirmed what I suspected).

I am now listening to a library CD of the Who's Tommy, that is, the original 1969 recording. Tommy is a sound recording which is nearly always described as "thin" by critics; I am happy to note that the version I'm listening to may have been remixed or remastered - you can finally feel John Entwhistle's bass as well as just hear it. It sounds much better than the old Lp. I was introduced to Tommy in a ninth grade English class by Mrs. Belcher, a young teacher who desperately wanted to seem to be "with it" by introducing non-traditional works. We listened to the whole recording over two class sessions; I recall being scandalized by the Uncle Ernie song - Down with your bedclothes/Up with your nightshirt/Fiddle about/Fiddle about.... Eccch. I liked the two Lp set enough to buy it a few months later, however. But still, I would have preferred to have been introduced to some novel of enduring worth instead. I recall vaguely feeling cheated at the time.

The other thing I recall about this class was the pert blond who sat next to me (whose name I have forgotten); I was attracted to her. Until. I was starting to grow hair on the back of my hands and she subsequently nicknamed me "werewolf," which mortified me. Coming off of a couple of really embarrassing years of acne was bad enough... teenagers can be so cruel. It was just one more thing which caused me to avoid junior high school society and retreat into books, which is where I stayed until I met Mike in my second year of high school. You would never guess by knowing me today, but I was an easily embarrassed and sensitive kid.

My wife and I watched Superheroes (2011) last night, a documentary about the "real life superhero movement" (RLSH), that is, where ordinary people don costumes and patrol the city streets at night, seeking to thwart evil-doers. Honest! I was amused to learn of one collective calling itself the "Black Monday Society," a creepy bunch of Halloween costume wearing guys guarding the notoriously troubled streets of Salt Lake City.

How many of these people are there out there? Enough for a World Superhero Registry, apparently. (My fave: Angle-Grinder Man, in England. His mission is to remove the Rhino boots police have clamped on cars.) Comparison to the Tick or the Mystery Men seem inevitable.

Some of these guys are fairly pathetic - there's the Master Legend in Florida whose principal interest seems to be chatting up pretty girls and drinking beer. His costume is beyond idiotic. Another fellow, in San Diego, whose name I forget (something containing "xtreme") means well but looks fairly ridiculous and has a sizable paunch. And then there's a guy in red spandex calling himself "Superhero" (definitive article, I guess) who drives a Corvette.

I question some of the darker garb. Doesn't dressing like a demon put out the wrong vibes? I mean, don't these guys look at themselves in mirrors and ask, "Am I the baddie?"

Some seem credible: there's a fellow in New York City - the "Dark Guardian" (shown above) - who makes it his business to annoy and hound drug-dealers out of public parks. A dangerous avocation, indeed. A martial arts instructor (I believe), he keeps himself fit. He is accompanied by a fellow with a camcorder who records the drug deals taking place. They turn the information over to the NYPD who do... nothing. Which begs the question: how come the police aren't doing this stuff? I also like a rather nebbish Orthodox Jewish fellow who calls himself "Chaim," or "Life." Tallit fringes visible under his vest, he wears an eye-mask like Robin, a small hat and tie and goes about the streets of New York City comforting the homeless. Shalom!

So what's going on out there? Stunted adolescence? Too many comic books? Confusion about what it means to be a man in today's society? Frustration with lawlessness and a lack of social order? A seeking to become part of something bigger than one's self? A female police psychologist was trotted out for this documentary to try to explain it, but she did a rather poor job. The movie raised more questions than it answered. Comic book legend Stan Lee, who had a reality show about becoming a real life superhero a few years ago, bears some responsibility for the movement. His words were appropriate. Paraphrased, it was more or less, "These people seem well-intentioned. I hope they don't get hurt."

3 Jan 2012

2012-01-03T08:40:00.002-05:00

Sigh. Christmas and New Year's time off is now over - back to the grind. No more sleeping in. That's okay... I can sleep in when I'm dead, right?

Webelos scouts den meeting tonight... I'm going to show them how to make their Pinewood Derby cars move down the track faster. Yes! I shall reveal all my tricks and lore accumulated from decades of being involved in these things. How to use graphite, how to sand the axles smooth, how much weight to use and where to put it, etc.

Over the weekend I did a bunch of scrapbook scanning/formatting/color and exposure adjustment and filing. I'll be finished later this week - it's a lot of work. This is my annual year-end task. Throughout the year I fill up scrapbook pages with photos, then I scan the pages with my flatbed scanner and make a master archive directory from which I can extract DVDs to send to the kids. That way they have "copies" of the scrapbooks in which they appear and I am more sure that the contents and all my work will be preserved in some way, shape or form. I have family scrapbooks going back to 1980 saved in this fashion - 31 years! - along with other material (baby books, plastic pages of more or less unsorted photographs, yearbooks, etc.).

Genetically, you see, I was really born to be a librarian or archive specialist. What I love doing more than just about anything else - what grants me satisfaction on a nearly molecular level - is to take a disordered set of something (records, photos, computer files, tools, ancestor records, storage - whatever), file and categorize it and then, if appropriate, make archive copies.

I also did my yearly wesclark.com stuff: Updating my "letters" (e-mails) pages on Avocado Memories, etc. One of my new yearly administrative duties is to create the annual "etc" photo bin, here.

Last night I watched a movie entitled Topsy-Turvy (1999), about Gilbert and Sullivan, and, specifically, the Mikado. It's curious: I do not like Gilbert and Sullivan's productions (I think they're trite), the narrative flow of this movie was rather bad and it was certainly too long at 2 hours and 40 minutes. However, I still enjoyed it, such is the power of a fascinating British cast acting their little hearts out in a Victorian setting. I am such an Anglophile... Best of all, it contains Timothy Spall, whom I am now convinced is one of the best British actors currently working. (You may recall him as "Wormtail" in the Harry Potter films.) Jim Broadbent, another actor of great interest, stars in it. Does it persuade me to see a Gilbert and Sullivan production? Well - maybe.

I am now reading one of my Christmas books: A collection of owner stories about vintage air-cooled Volkswagen Beetles. It's a lot of fun to read. The VW Beetle was such a unique and quirky car that just about everyone who owned one accumulated stories over the years. I am discovering that many people named their cars. I became fascinated with the Beetle when I was twelve, when a kindly German car salesman named Otto graciously allowed me and my friend Richard to frequently sit in the showroom models. We must have been dealership pests, but I suppose he figured that if he was kind to me he'd eventually get me as a customer. He didn't - but only because by the time I was ready to purchase a Beetle the dealership had converted to a Porsche outlet. Better profit margin on those, I guess.

I owned two Bugs, a 1974 Super Beetle which I bought as my treasured very first car when I graduated from Marine Corps boot camp in 1975 (I kept it until 1978), and a 1973 Super Beetle I bought as a commuter car in 1989 (which I kept until 1998). So I have a lot of stories, too. One of my New Year's Resolutions, inspired by reading this book, is to write my takes up as a web page. Neither one of my Bugs, by the way, acquired names from me.

I currently own a 2007 New Beetle Convertible. Is it an authentic Bug in the sense of the old air-cooled ones? Well... yes and no. A lot of that celebrated funky 1960's vibe is there, and the fact that the manufacturer of the old ones calls it a Beetle is convincing, but it's inescapable - being water cooled makes it different somehow, more in line with what other manufacturers are producing. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But... I shall ponder the matter and incorporate my conclusions into the article when I write it!

30 Dec 2011

2011-12-30T09:44:00.003-05:00

I stumbled across this article on the Interwebs: Top 10 Worst Lyrics of All Time. Of all time? Surely not. This piece is laughably short-sighted and seems to confine itself to recent songs. It ignores that VAST treasure trove of truly awful song lyrics, namely, the 1970's. And for a taste of that, I recommend this page, which, ahem!, I have contributed to.

Look at this 1936 Stainless Steel Ford Coupe! Wow!

I had a little bird/Its name was Inza/I opened the window/And in flew Inza... Last night I watched a NOVA documentary about my favorite unsettling historical incident: the 1918 "Spanish" Flu Pandemic. (It's called Spanish because Spain was the only major European nation whose newspapers didn't have a wartime lock down of information, and people came to accept that the flu originated in Spain. In fact, it apparently originated in Kansas!) Did you know that the single deadliest month in American History was not associated with wartime fatalities, but with this pandemic? 195,000 Americans died in October, 1918 - at the height of the influenza's effect. It went on to kill upwards of thirty million worldwide.

The curious thing about it was that the principal victims were the strongest and most robust people in society: those aged between 21 and 29 years old. Often, robust young soldiers. In effect, their immune systems went haywire, and they literally drowned in the fluid in their lungs. People would be perfectly fine in the morning and dead by the evening. Horrible. H1N1 is nothing to fool around with! H5N1, the so-called "bird flu," could be just as bad.

Want to read a really, really scary book? Read The Great Influenza - The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry. It thoroughly creeped me out!

I watched a classic of French (and even world) cinema last night: L'Atalante, from 1934. It was... okay.

One of my Christmas presents was King Crimson's recording of Red, from 1974. I have blogged about this album before. Suffice to say that the DTS multi-channel mix is revelatory; you can detect all the various guitar parts that went into the making of each song. I was inflicting this Lp upon my poor wife at high volume levels last night. She is not the fan of the work that I am.

It was the second rock album I heard after finishing Marine Corps boot camp in January 1975 and returning to civilization. (The first was David Bowie Live.) I liked it immediately, and knew it was good. I think it has since moved from release to cult item to classic, validating my opinion.

Another Christmas present was fun: The Amazing Magic Robot Game. He's infallible and always gives the right answer! (Okay, wise guy: Who is winning next year's presidential election?) My son and I were looking at this one morning, figuring out how this was so. It's a very simple and clever process, based on a bar magnet's property of attracting opposite poles and repelling like poles.

Let's see... I also got some great books:

1.) The Disneyland Encyclopedia - Lists every past and present attraction.
2.) A book testing the X-Ray Specs and other arcane comic book kids' products
3.) A book about anecdotes concerning old classic Volkswagen Beetles by owners

I'll blog about these as I read them, of course.

Well, that's it for today. I have a lot going on. E-mail to process, "to do" stuff resulting from the trip to Utah.

Have a great weekend and Happy New Year!

28 Dec 2011

2011-12-29T09:05:00.007-05:00

We're back from Utah! We had fun doing things and spending Christmas with the kids; photos here. I just finished adding photos and captions and sorting them, etc. I think I'm done now. Actually, we got back the evening of the 27th; it's just that we were on the go all day yesterday. The day started with the morning wedding of the daughter of a family friend and ended sitting in traffic near the local big shopping all.

When we got home we collected our mail from the kid down the street who had been gathering it for us in our absence. I was very surprised to find a large box from Erv, the civil servant with whom I worked in Camp Pendleton's Base Telephone unit when I was in the Marines (photo above). I had previously sent him a Christmas card and he replied with a short letter - and then the box. I was very surprised to find my old construction hard hat in the box; Erv had taken it with him when he retired in 1978 - the same year I left the Corps - and kept it for 33 years! Photos here. I think we have a winner for the Most Unusual Christmas Present Award... It looks great hanging up in my garage over my USMC poster.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying, "The definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result." He obviously never worked with computers or software. Case in point: My son gave me one of his old wireless routers - it's far newer and better than the old one I've been using at home, so I decided to take it home and install it last night. Router configuration is widely acknowledged to be a pain, even with consumer grade equipment. So I printed up the IP address information from my old router and entered this into the new one. It repeatedly didn't work. I was flummoxed because I was sure what I was doing was correct. And then suddenly, with repetition something changed somewhere and it started working!

The same thing happened with getting my wife's Apple laptop to connect wirelessly. Try, fail. Try again, fail. Try, succeed. So... Einstein's quote needs an asterisk: "Except with software."

I have today off. It's my vacation day to sort of recover from vacation in Utah. Square away things at home, put the family scrapbook up to date, putter around and recover from jet lag, etc. Tomorrow I go into work (I'll save eight hours of leave) for what I think will be a short and uneventful day - we'll probably get early dismissal.

24 Dec 2011

2011-12-24T11:56:00.003-05:00

Having a wonderful time with family and friends! Photos here. Merry Christmas!

20 Dec 2011

2011-12-20T09:14:00.007-05:00

A happy anniversary to me and Cari, my wife. It was 31 years ago today that I acted upon one of the very best decisions - probably THE best - I have ever made in my entire life.

My friend Kacie trash-picked a great Iwo Jima memorial poster from work and gave it to me. It looks great in my garage. Every garage needs a little USMC, don't you think?

So I’m at the gas station with my VW bug yesterday, filling the tank, when this fellow walks up. I notice that he has an official-looking badge of some kind attached to his belt, but I can’t make it out. He smiles and says, “Hey, do you know who developed the Volkswagen Beetle?” I respond (somewhat wary of people who are even more extroverted than I am), “Yes. Adolf Hitler started a program whereby every German citizen could own a ‘Strength through Joy’ car.” “That’s right,” says he. “Do you know why they came up with the rounded beetle shape?” he asks. After a moment’s thought I replied that I did not. “The Romans. Their architecture, with the rounded arches, for strength,” he says. I don’t recall reading that in Small World, the paperback book about the car’s development that every VW buyer used to get, but no matter. Maybe I forgot that part. “Hitler was terrible – really evil,” he continued. Yes, I admitted that precipitating a war which caused upwards of 70 million deaths was indeed evil. “No,” he went on, “I mean evil. He was into Satan worship, the occult and the use of extraterrestrial technology!” It was then, that, rather than press for details about Hitler’s extraterrestrial technology, I decided to nod, smile and back away towards the Quik Market.

It reminded me of the old Twilight Zone episode Still Valley, whereby a Confederate officer (Gary Merrill) is offered a deal by the Devil to save his side from defeat. In the end, the Reb demurs, reflecting that if the Lord wanted the Confederacy to prevail He would have not let things get to the point it had in 1865. By this we see that not even the Southern Confederacy was as evil as Hitler, who was willing to take advantage of alien technology. Cheater.

Last night as I was channel surfing I came across a lurid program on the Spike channel entitled 1,000 Ways to Die. Since all programming on the Spike channel is designed to appeal to males, I found myself genetically drawn to it, drat those Y chromosomes! This show is morbidly fascinating. It's an account of actual odd and strange ways people have actually died - with lurid recreated scenes thereof. I mistrust it. It seems to be a curious mix of real history and tabloid television.

Anyway, I was curious about the segment about the terrorists who accidentally and fatally irradiated themselves while attempting to create a homemade nuclear weapon but, so far, was unable to find evidence for this particular incident on the Internet. This particular segment is a rare example of a happy ending on this show.

I did, however, stumble across this mind-numbingly odd story about a Brazilian who obtained some dangerously radioactive material from a hospital - caesium chloride - and intended to fashion a ring for his wife from the material. Fun fact: If you find some scrap material from a hospital which emits a deep blue glow, you should probably resist the temptation to create fetching jewelry and instead contact the authorities, pronto. That blue glow is not an LED, but is in fact Cherenkov radiation, nature's way of saying, "You need to have an advanced degree in nuclear physics to be dealing with me."

Great Scott, you can watch entire episodes of this show online! Here's the episode I saw last night. I was hooked by the initial tale of the Japanese rock star who was trapped in a theatrical coffin with cups of dry ice smoke. (Guess how he died.) Must resist the temptation to watch more...

But, hey, why not? My wife - she of the refined taste - has been watching episodes of Breaking Bad, and last night told me about one story which featured a severed human head placed upon the back of a moving tortoise. But wait! There's more! The tortoise had explosives in it which, when set off, blew off the leg of a DEA agent!

Sigh.

You know, back in the postwar era those films noir I love to watch were sometimes considered sensationalist trash. I am thinking especially of 1947's Kiss of Death when Richard Widmark, in his film debut as Tommy Udo, ties a handicapped woman to her wheelchair with electrical cord and, laughing maniacally, pitches her down a flight of stairs, killing her. There's a story that when John Wayne finally met Widmark he said. "So you're that laughing son of a bitch?" As it turned out, Widmark, as the psychopathic killer Udo, attained faddish celebrity in the role (the Academy Award nomination helped). College kids aped Udo's tough guy speech patterns and sartorial style. It was all very weird.

But when you think about it, high art can also be lurid. Look at most of the plots to operas - or Shakespeare. Ever see Titus Andronicus? Interesting plot there: a woman is raped and her tongue cut out so she cannot tell who did it and her hands cut off so she can't write it, either. The Rape of Cassandra was a favorite topic of Renaissance painters - as was Saint Sebastian, pierced with arrows. It was ever thus.

You may or may not be seeing updates here for the next week or so; I'm taking time off for the holidays to see the Fam. As always, what you'll see here is dependent upon how bored or active I am.

Merry Christmas!

19 Dec 2011

2011-12-19T08:02:00.011-05:00

This past weekend was a lot of fun! It started Friday night with a Cub Scout Pack Meeting. One of my Webelos scouts turned eleven so we "bridged" him out. (This involves walking across a wooden ceremonial bridge I constructed back in 1992.) It was an All-Marine performance on stage: the kid's dad just retired, there was me, and the Marine in charge of the eleven year-old Boy Scout troop is on active duty.

Saturday morning my wife threw a bridal shower at our house for a longtime friend of my daughter's. It's always jolly when a bunch of women gather in our house for a party. We were able to link my daughter in to the proceedings via our Apple laptop using Face Time - that was cool! Face Time... what a great invention! At last somebody delivered on the promise of videophones - and it wasn't one of the phone companies.

That evening we had one of the five families couples stop by for dinner at our place before driving into D.C. with us for the Navy's Holiday Show in the D.A.R. Auditorium. The concert was as good as always; this year featured little vignettes about sailors being on duty and wishing they could be home for Christmas, etc. It was quite poignant and well done.

The concert, however, was marred by a couple of things. The first was D.C.'s new regressive parking protocol. They now run the meters until 10 PM on Saturdays, with a two hour maximum. In order to get seats you have to get to the auditorium early, which means that in order to keep from getting ticketed you have to move the car during the show. From now on I'm parking on Constitution Ave. It's a further walk but there are no meters (now). I always dread going into D.C.; parking there is a nightmare. I think I'm going to write the Navy Band a letter encouraging them to move the venue to Northern Virginia, some place with better parking.

The other problem was the intense body odor of somebody sitting near us. When the air conditioning system breeze shifted in the right direction it was making me feel sick to my stomach. The husband of the couple we took said it was so bad his face was stinging! Our wives sat between us and neither one of them smelled a thing. Weird. See if I ever buy expensive perfume for Cari again. (Full disclosure: She had a clogged nose from an allergic reaction. It was a blessing in this instance.)

It's a sign of our twisted times that one gets lectured about wearing too much aftershave or cologne, etc., but there is no admonition to TAKE A SHOWER IF YOU STINK.

At the request of the orchestra director (a church associate), yesterday Cari and I did a multimedia Christmas show in the Washington D.C. - really Kensington, MD - Temple Visitor's Center. I read a Christmas message while the D.C. Mormon Orchestra played a piece called O Magnum Mysterium. Cari had the harder part: she ran the slideshow timing. It was my orchestral debut! A very short video is here. The spoken message is here. We performed the forty minute show twice for a total of nearly 1,400 people. It was well received; the ambassadors from St. Lucia and St. Kitts were in the first audience. I loved it, sitting among an orchestra and playing apart. True, this wasn't the New York Philharmonic, but it was still a lot of fun.

So... great weekend!

I have added two more 8mm family videos on my youtube channel to my Avocado Memories 8mm Home Movies page: Burbank Home Movies, 1970s and Santa's Village and Halloween, 1960. I think I have now exhausted my supply of Avocado Memories-worthy home movie footage!

I am happy to report that I have now completed all the Angry Birds levels. I am free! And no, I don't think I'll be buying the "Holiday" version.

16 Dec 2011

2011-12-16T08:41:00.004-05:00

I have added two more 8mm family videos on my youtube channel to my Avocado Memories 8mm Home Movies page: Pool 1960 and Pool, 1969. Same subject, just separated by nearly a decade of time.

I do not remember the little pool we had in 1960, I only remember the larger above-ground pools. All through my childhood we've always had pools, consequently I've always felt at home in the water. When I started high school, in physical education class on hot weather Fridays we'd sometimes simply swim in the school pool. I loved this because the coach would throw in a ball and we'd play a sort of aquatic murderball. The person who got the ball would be swarmed by other swimmers and compelled to give up the ball - eventually. I quickly realized that I was quite good at this and could hold my breath and onto the ball for very long periods of time. I loved the rough and tumble. It should have told me that rugby, not basketball, football, baseball or anything else, was my game. An adult realization was that it wasn't that I was bad at sports - it's just that they weren't playing my game in high school!

Last night my wife and I watched some of part two of Monarchy - The Royal Family at Work (2007), an engrossing six hour documentary. What struck me were the pains and efforts workers and institution managers take when a visit by the Queen is imminent. Glass is cleaned, new hotel towels are purchased, wood is repainted, sidewalks are spotless, the red carpet is rolled out, etc. etc. etc. in excruciating detail. Everything has to be just so for the visit. People want to make a positive impression on the Queen. But... why? After all, this is a modern constitutional monarchy. The Queen's powers and influence are sharply curtailed; she's not even allowed to publicly voice an opinion about politics. Why go through all the effort?

It occurred to me that there is something intensely noble about doing, or serving, in the absolute best fashion you can. Certainly the various cooks and servants do not think themselves demeaned by the effort they provide; they are proud of themselves and of the perfection of their service. Perhaps it's not the Queen that really counts for these folks - it's the effort. For her part, the Queen is shown during what must be a grueling workday for an octogenarian: making small talk, asking an endless variety of questions, attempting to show interest in the lives of others, making herself available, graciously putting people at ease. She's aware of the painstaking efforts made in her behalf and she accepts the service, just as she has for the previous 59 years of her reign. Does she take it for granted? I think not. I suspect there's an interesting give and take at play, here. Others provide service - she accepts it. She provides service for the state in her own fashion - the nation accepts it.

The impression I get is that the royal family are a net asset to Great Britain. Certainly, I am not aware of any American who has worked so long and so hard for his or her nation as the Queen has for hers. It also occurred to me that there is an advantage in a constitutional monarchy that we do not enjoy as a representative democracy: the nation is represented by a single human being who provides a focal point for patriotic feelings. As beloved as an American President may become (and, let's face it, this is very rare), he simply does not embody his nation as does the Queen. There is something mystical about it.

Well. I always knew that were I a British subject I'd be a Tory.

I also watched a Robert Greenberg lecture about the concerti of Sergei Rachmaninoff (shown above) - it was wonderful, as usual. He pointed out something I didn't know. For a German composer such as Johannes Brahms, who took a theme (or melody) and developed, varied, re-stated and modulated it, the important thing about the theme was what could be done with it. For a Russian composer such as Rachmaninoff (or Tchaikovsky), what was important was the theme itself, and themes follow themes without any need to develop them greatly. Which is better? I shall not weigh in. I like having both approaches just as I like having both Brahms and Wagner. (It's hard to believe now, but when they were alive a furious ongoing debate was waged about which one pointed the way to the future of concert music.) A Brahmsian work unfolds with interest upon repeated playings and provides an intellectual interest. A Rachmaninoff work simply sings and gladdens the heart!

Funny quote: "Some people achieve a kind of immortality just by the totality with which they do or do not possess some quality or characteristic. Rachmaninov’s immortalizing totality was his scowl. He was a six-and–a-half-foot-tall scowl." - Igor Stravinsky

I also started watching the third season of The Wonder Years. It was a very well written episode about a family vacation to the beach, which had as a theme how vacations are more stressful and less fun as they kids grow older and have interests, demands and agendas of their own. I have certainly been there! It also featured a clever summer romance theme involving the protagonist, Kevin. The young actress who played his love interest later went on to become a hardcore porn star. Nice.

The weekend! Tomorrow night we're going to the U.S. Navy Christmas show with one of the Five Families. On Sunday I put on a show of my own at the LDS Visitor's Center at the D.C. Temple; I'm doing the spoken part of a multimedia/live music Christmas presentation. I have no idea what my lines are or how I'm following the music. The fellow who is involved with it tells me that there may be an audience of upwards of 1,400 people. This should be interesting!

Have a great weekend!

15 Dec 2011

2011-12-15T09:01:00.003-05:00

A friend of mine at work who knows I like apples sent me this link. (I wouldn't normally read the Huffington Post.) Apple crispness analysts are getting replaced by machines!

Last night I finished season two of The Wonder Years. Two seasons down, four to go. Great show!

I have added two more 8mm family videos on my youtube channel to my Avocado Memories 8mm Home Movies page: Christmas 1960 (my toys) and Dad and Del/Pottery Shack (May 1960). More to come, as I have time in the evenings to make these videos.

An Avocado Memories reader remarked on my Facebook wall that it's nice to be able to hear my mother's voice (in the 1987 narration) relating stories via these videos. As I went to bed last night, however, I realized with a shock that I have no audio recordings of my father's voice. He died in 1983, before we had access to or owned a camcorder. And I never got his voice on audio tape anywhere that I can think of. It's funny: He died 28 years ago and only now do I feel bereft in this way. I would like to hear the sound of his voice again.

Last night I watched The Changeling (1980), with George C. Scott. Is it a ghost story? A political thriller? A detective mystery? It's all three! Actually, it's not too bad; a superior haunted house flick. I think my favorite film in this genre, however, is probably The Shining (1980), or The Haunting (1963).

The City of Burbank buried away another time capsule earlier this week - they seem to like those - this one being a special Centennial capsule. My pal Mike attended the ceremony, so I covered it here (12/14/11 entry). As they buried away a Centennial History book that cites our website, I am happy to note that my name appears in the capsule. Future generations can look at it and marvel.

I am now listening to the highly-regarded 1969 Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed, which I have never heard. I have read somewhere that this Lp documented the end of the peace and love hippie era; indeed, the infamous Altamont concert followed the day after the release of this album. So it's sort of like a rooster crowing atop a mountain of dung - which pretty much serves as a metaphor for that whole 1960's Woodstock thing. 1967: The Summer of Love. 1968: An ugly year of assassinations, social divisions and unrest. 1969: The cynical end of the decade. Altamont and Charlie Manson. And, as I have just read, the first confirmed American death from AIDS. A shabby year redeemed only by the Moon landing, as I recall.

Let It Bleed begins with Gimme Shelter, which is promising because it's my all-time favorite Stones song. One reviewer calls it "terrifying." "Terrifying?" He's easily frightened, I think. The rest of the songs (as I'm progressing through the Lp) all seem to have a Texas barroom aesthetic to them. Londoners in Austin. I'm not impressed... but then, I'm not a Stones fan. A few months ago I listened to their 1972 Exile on Main St. over and over again to see if I liked it, but it left me cold. When I was in the Marines I bought a Sticky Fingers cassette back in 1975. This was just before I drove from Los Angeles to Wichita Falls, Texas to report for duty at the Sheppard Air Force Base, where they ran a telephone cable splicing school. I have since associated that drive with that music - but haven't felt any interest in listening to the album since then.

I have a workplace Christmas (technically, "holiday") luncheon today. I am such a misanthrope... this feels more like an ordeal than something I'm looking forward to...

14 Dec 2011

2011-12-14T08:32:00.002-05:00

Time to re-visit our old friend the Higgs Boson. It appears they are closing in on seeing evidence of it; they haven't actually come out and said "We've found it," but it appears they are getting close. Which I am sorry to see and have predicted otherwise (without really knowing what I am talking about). Have you ever read an account of the Standard Model with the Higgs Boson? It is complex, complicated and inelegant. It seems to be that the truth is simple; quantum mechanical models right now are far from it and unsatisfying. Let's just say that I have a philosophical - not religious! - problem with the models scientists have come up with.

Earlier this week I got an e-mail from Agamemnon (real name not used), an Avocado Memories reader who needed help with a toy he had as a boy. He described it as a space toy that was "a globe on legs" - I immediately thought of the Ideal Astro Base and suggested this. (It was the one space toy I never owned.) He looked at the picture and said, in effect, Hmmmm... I don't think so, but promised to dig up an old photograph showing it. He did. Here it is, from fifty years ago. Yes, it was the toy I thought. But check out those pajamas! Hahaha! He confirmed that it was a case of "If you wear these pajamas you get the toy." I asked if I could run it in my blog if I concealed his identity (for fear of acute embarrassment) and he agreed. Enjoy.

Speaking of Avocado Memories, I have added three more 8mm family videos on my youtube channel to my Avocado Memories 8mm Home Movies page:

Me and Jimmy in 1964, part two (2 1/2 minutes) - Skateboarding down Robinson St. in L.A. on those horrible early "Roller Derby #10" skateboards. They had nasty metal wheels. In addition to a rough ride, the least little unevenness in the sidewalk would halt the board and throw you forward for an inevitable knee scrape. I recall having scabby knees for the entire summer of 1964. Note my clever use of Little rascals music. The youtube software apparently didn't know it in order to send me a warning e-mail about copyright infringement.

Disneyland Visit, 1969 (3 1/2 minutes) - I practically grew up in Disneyland, but this was one time when we brought the movie camera onto the People Mover. In 1969 I was especially fond of Tomorrowland, which, in 1967, had recently had a total renovation. It's my least favorite land now. Mom narrates; her favorite ride in the park was "Small Worl'."

Knott's Berry Farm Visit (April, 1960) (2 1/2 minutes) - I was four, and remember nothing of this visit. But Mom brought the movie camera and so we have footage - hooray! At the 1:03 mark Dad can be seen whispering sweet nothings into the ear of "Marilyn" (image above), a plaster dance hall girl who is one of the most photographed objects in the park. Generations of Dads have sat with her. Mom narrated this in 1987, but is somewhat distracted by the fact that the grandchild she was holding at the time, Julie, was busy filling her diaper.

How many more videos will I make? Until I run out of appropriate material or interest, I guess.

I am now almost done with season two of The Wonder Years; it's 1969 and Kevin has now turned thirteen, just as I did that year. As I mentioned, it's fun to spot places I know in Burbank. Last night I saw a street sign for Parish Place behind a character.

Burbank: I posted a neat photograph onto Burbankia, this one shows a crowded San Fernando Road for the evening of the 100th anniversary celebration, July 8th. We're in the City Hall tower with the mayor and some select others; I think we're concealed by that yellow ribbon, or off to the right - I don't know. Perhaps this image is a Photoshop composite. But we had a great vantage point to see the fireworks.

Yesterday, my pal Mike attended a meeting of the Burbank City Council, where he and others were recognized for contributions to the 100th anniversary celebration. I was in absentia. Mike got something or another in recognition; he's mailing mine to me.

It looks like I am doing a reading performance at the LDS Temple Visitor's Center this Sunday. A friend of mine is a professional musician (his wife is a viola player for the U.S. Army Band) who is doing a string arrangement with a slide presentation; I am speaking. What, precisely, I don't know yet. Something about Christmas, natch.

13 Dec 2011

2011-12-13T08:48:00.003-05:00

Yesterday morning when I got up it seemed unusually cold in the house. My suspicions were raised when I went to slice some butter onto my toast; we keep the butter in a covered butter dish on the kitchen table - it cut like it was frozen. Snap, snap. Confirmation came when I looked at the thermostat: it was 59 degrees.

I teleworked yesterday, so I attempted various things during the day seeking to fix the problem myself: I put new batteries in the thermostat, recycled the power, etc. The furnace would go on, warm up a bit, then shut off, never warming the house. So I finally called the tech. We paid thousands of dollars for a new furnace back in August, so I was NOT pleased.

As it turned out, a kink in an excess length of hose was causing moisture to back up, which caused a pressure switch to fail... etc. It was a quick and easy fix. I was happy to hear one of my favorite phrases from the tech: "covered under warranty." (It's right up there with "ample free parking" and "Mister Clark, your pizza is here.") We gave the tech some cookies, held the thermostat at 73 degrees for a while and I allowed my feet to thaw.

As my son would say, First World Problem. (Third world problem: the cattle died so there's no milk for the baby. First world problem: I can't find a good news app for my iPhone.)

My wife and I watched a documentary which sorely tried my patience the other night, Babies, a French production from 2010. It might instead be called The Lactating Third Worlder Film. It deals with the birth and first months of four babies, one in San Francisco, one in Mongolia, one in Tokyo and one somewhere in Africa. The African kid seemed to be continually hounded by flies, and when his pendulously-breasted Mom wasn't smearing red crap all over him she was wiping his bum with a corn cob. Nice. The Mongolian kid was surrounded by livestock and kept getting annoyed by his older brother. The San Franciscan baby's parents were hippy dippy types who sang idiotic songs about how Mother Earth will protect us. The only interesting segment was the kid in Tokyo. One reviewer called it "The feel good movie of the decade." I beg to differ.

On an entirely different track, we also watched Monarchy - The Royal Family at Work (2007), part one of a fascinating documentary. We Americans seem to have an insatiable appetite for the doings of the British royal family, so this was fun. Just before I went to bed I wondered, how am I personally related to her most Britannic Royal Majesty Elizabeth II Windsor? So I quickly found a text file on the Internet, royal92.txt, which lists Elizabeth's ancestry all the way back to the early Middle Ages, renamed it royal92.ged, merged it with a scratch file of my own ancestry and merged the individual I know we both have in common: Geoffrey Plantagenet (1113 - 1151). All this in about seven minutes. As it turns out, Elizabeth II descends from Geoffrey's son Henry II. I, however, descend from Geoffrey's illegitimate son Hamelin. Figures.

Anyway, I let the computer have at it and it turns out Elizabeth II is my 26th cousin, three times removed, through the Geoffrey Plantagenet connection. There may be a more recent common ancestor; I just don't know about him/her. As I announced this to my stunned and awed wife as she lay in bed, she asked, "So, am I related to Elizabeth II?" She knows that we are ninth cousins, three times removed, so the question is logical: If you are distantly related to the Queen and we are distantly related to each other, am I distantly related to the Queen? It's confusing, which is why I let a computer do the work. But the answer is no, my wife is not blood related to the Queen. Using the information I have. She probably is, I just don't know how, in other words.

I uploaded another couple of videos to my youtube channel:

My Beatles Party (1964) - When I turned eight in April 1964, my Mom threw me a birthday party. Since the Beatles were huge, she got us plastic guitars and we "performed" to Beatles songs. Five minutes, silent. Well... that is, I added some early Beatles music to the video. The youtube software scanned it when I uploaded it and told me via e-mail that I might run into a copyright issue with EMI and the music might be removed, but that hasn't happened yet. I hope not... the Beatles songs fit so well. But if they do yank it, I found an old 1960's Lp at a yard sale of "Music to Accompany Home Movies." I can digitize and use that - that ought to be fun.

Me and Jimmy, 1964, just over a minute. This is some footage of me and the great friend of my boyhood, Jimmy Rutherford, fooling around in my back yard. I used the most obscure 1960's music I could find that I liked and which I thought fit: Burt Bacharach's Any Old Time of the Day as performed by the Franck Pourcel Orchestra. It stumped the youtube software, anyway. I don't think I'll get into trouble with that one. Jimmy's sister Kathy met all the Beatles, by the way. She was the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Beatles Fan Club. I recall her saying once, "I'll KILL the girl who marries Paul. If I can't have him no one will!" I was shocked when I heard her say this. But... perhaps in time she found somebody else. Paul certainly did.

NOTE: My wife was not really stunned and awed.

12 Dec 2011

2011-12-12T07:58:00.010-05:00

On Saturday we drove to Occoquan, a nearby historic area, and walked around. We haven't been there in years - for good reason. Occoquan is what I call an Estrogen Towne, filled with shops containing goods that no heterosexual male could possibly be interested in: soap, bath linens, tole-painted items (often signs with slogans about cats), dried flowers, scented candles, knitted baby clothing, paperweights, thank you card and envelope sets and pillows. The contents rarely vary from store to store. There is a bead shop in Occoquan, a sewing shop, a cookbook store and some flamboyant store with windows dressed in glittery purple and pink items. I was never certain what they were selling. There used to be a Goddess/occult book store in Occoquan, but I guess the economy has been hard on those. If you don't have a job you don't have the money for tarot cards and how-to books about manufacturing dream-catchers.

There is almost always an Irish or Scottish store in these neighborhoods, which provides the sole interest for males. The one in Occoquan sold Guinness-themed items and, hang on!, rugby shirts. In fact, I was thunderstruck when we stopped into a store containing nothing but Christmas ornaments and village sets and found a rugby player Christmas ornament. I bought one because it was so unexpected; Cari bought glassy ornament of a slice of blueberry pie. She makes wonderful blueberry pies.

Getting back to Estrogen Townes, another characteristic of the shops in them is that I'm forever banging my head into things hung too low from the ceiling. On Saturday it was glittery snowflakes in the ornament store. The implied message is, I think, You are not expected nor wanted here. Why not simply hang no-male strips in the corners? Or a tole-painted sign which says If you have outdoor plumbing you may leave?

I think what happens is that the local jurisdiction designates the area as a historic district and a horde of women descend upon the place and open businesses designed to get other women out there for lunch and to buy trinkets. Old Town Alexandria is very much an Estrogen Town - except it has some pubs. (In fact, the most completely female store I have ever stepped in is in Old Town; we were there last week. It's crammed to the rafters with bath goods and three Bedlington dogs - see image above - roaming at will, looking very much like little sheep. It's run by three gay guys, one Bedlington for each gay, I guess.) As I recall, New Market, Maryland is another Estrogen Towne, as is Ellicott City, Maryland. Harper's Ferry, West Virginia is a wanna-be Estrogen Town. What's keeping it from full femininity is the presence of the National Park Service displays about gun manufacturing and the American Civil War, a really good history-themed bookstore and river and mountain overlooks. Also, I saw no Bedlingtons.

We had lunch at a cool little Occoquan "Belgian bistrot" specializing in Belgian beer, the "Cock and Bowl." I guess some canny small businessman figured there had to be at least one place in towne with contents appealing to males, and it's the old stand-by, beer. I want to eat there again.

We also visited a pie store that is reportedly haunted. I talked to a teenage girl who claimed to have seen the ghost of a "blue-coated" man walk by. Civil War soldier? She didn't know. It's odd, because the building is less than ten years old. Hmmmm. I was assured that Occoquan is haunted, and, like Old Town Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Harper's Ferry and many other historic districts, there is a Ghost Tour. Just tryin' to make a buck, which, in this economy, has become a noble effort.

There was a Civil War interest building in Occoquan, pictures here. Used as a general's headquarters. Now the home of a store containing, you guessed it, little of interest to a Y-chromosome bearer.

Yesterday was pretty boring, so I amused myself by watching episodes of The Wonder Years and making videos:

Gettysburg National Tower Visit, 1987 (3 1/2 minutes) - As a historical reenactor I was supposed to loathe this structure, but as a Dad I thought it was fun, if a little nerve-wracking, to visit with my little son. It was brought down with explosives in 2000 - good video.

Baby Thrill-Seekers (1 1/2 minutes) - This is a video which should cause you to go, "Awwwww."

The Marine Corps Follies (almost 6 minutes) - A collection of all the extant 8mm and Super 8mm footage of me in uniform. True to form, I am goofing around.

Oh, my pal Mike confirmed that the Arnold home in The Wonder Years is 516 University Ave. in Burbank. I see the 1988 cedar shake roof has since been replaced with a conventional roof. My high school girlfriend lived on University, up the street. I think the street was optimistically named by the developer who had designs upon USC or UCLA moving there - it didn't happen.

My son called to my attention a really appealing ad Apple did promoting their sale of Beatles music on iTunes. Here it is. I love it! It is great fun seeing all those familiar Lp covers being animated in this fashion.

I see Jerry Robinson died last week. He was a very important part of the early Batman artistic team. Bob Kane would have you believe he pretty much did it all, but no, it wasn't like that. It's one of the great scandals in the comic books world.

9 Dec 2011

2011-12-09T09:33:00.003-05:00

Now it's time for me to pursue a Social Cause. No, it's not the environment or racism or something like that. It's basic manners. I mean the R.S.V.P. It's a French phrase, Repondez, s'il vous plait, or, simply, "Please respond." For planning parties, gatherings, wedding receptions or some such thing which requires money and logistics, it's put on the invitation to assist the host or hostess in assessing how much food to buy, how many chairs to set out - that kind of thing. This year Cari and I have been stunned by how many people simply ignore these gentle requests. HOW RUDE. Look, when somebody wants to feed and entertain you, all they're asking via the R.S.V.P. is a simple question: Can we expect you there? You owe the host or hostess a response. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, here, but please pass the word along...

Whew! I finally got the Burbankia Slide Show posted onto youtube. My page with the setup and the links is here. When you consider the time it took to collect all this history, lore and information, format it into slides and present it - and then edit the video for posting, this represents a LOT of creative work. My pal Mike spent much time on it as well, finding the source materials and making the posters which adorned the library walls. I was looking forward to it and really enjoyed doing it, but I have to admit - I'm glad it's done. But that was our contribution to our hometown's 100th anniversary celebration, and it was a good one.

Mike tells me the library is talking about doing another one next year. We shall see.

I watched another couple of episodes of The Wonder Years last night, more Burbank. Curious, I did a couple of screen grabs and confirmed that the schoolyard shots were taken at John Muir Junior High. Mike remembers his PE coach yelling at him about doing sit-ups at the exact filming spot. (Mike went to Muir, I went to the other school, Luther Burbank Junior High.) I even have a tentative location for the Kevin Arnold home, on University Avenue. Mike is going to check it out. (Remember responsible investigative reporting from yesterday's blog? "If your mother says she loves you - check it out.") Last night's episode was laugh-out-loud funny; at one point, Kevin, thoroughly confused by girls, is knocked out by his jilted girlfriend and imagines he and his friend are in the Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain," wherein beautiful girls use wrist activated devices to incapacitate Kevin and his friends! (Earlier in the episode they had been watching that episode of Star Trek in the Arnold family basement.) Wonderfully clever...

In real life, the actress who plays Kevin's crush, Danica McKellar, is interesting. Wikipedia article here. Note that she graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from UCLA and is even credited with proving a math theorem, the Chayes-McKellar-Wynn Theorum. Not too shabby. I see by doing a google image search that she has done a lot of pin-up work as well... she seems to truly be Hollywood's Wonder Woman.

Cari and I watched Christmas With the Kranks (2004) last night. It was... okay. Cari liked it more than I did. The film was universally panned by the critics (they didn't like the message of the Kranks being shunned because of their non-conformity) but was a box-office success nevertheless. I got a kick out of the fact that Seventies stoner Cheech Marin portrayed a cop.

It's official: I am playing WAY too much Angry Birds. Last night I dreamed that I was using slingshots to fire CDs. In one level of Angry Birds there's a background which is meant to represent a city at night; for those I was flinging around film noir DVDs. At some other targets I was selecting classical music CDs - for another, pop CDs. I was shooting a Kinks CD in London. This has got to stop!

The weekend! I have no plans. We are done Christmas shopping so there will be no cursing and Scrooginess in the parking lots.

Have a great weekend!

8 Dec 2011

2011-12-08T08:59:00.003-05:00

I'm in the process of uploading Burbankia slide show videos to youtube; I thought I could do it in two chunks, a 41 minute segment and a 51 minute segment, but only "verified" youtube users can upload videos that long.

To become verified you need to supply your cell phone number. No, thanks. So I have cut it up into seven segments of under fifteen minutes each and am 4/7ths of the way through it. I should finish tonight. Uploading and processing takes rather a lot of computer processing time.

I'm been sitting on this video since about July; it wasn't until recently that I found a usable software tool with which I could edit. And there was the wedding, shoulder surgery, the garage project, etc.

I watched the 1968 The Odd Couple last night - it was okay. I originally saw this at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City when Mom and I visited in Summer, 1968. It was a notable visit: we saw a live show featuring the Rockettes doing that synchronized kick thing and the movie, I forget in what order.

I loved New York City... we took a tour bus and got to go up the Empire State Building. That is still one of my favorite things to do. Our tourist hotel had a red flashing hotel sign outside the window, just as I had seen in innumerable movies. (I didn't know it at the time, but these were films noir.) I got a real kick out of that. I remember looking out of the window at all the buildings and imagined Spider-Man and Daredevil swinging from building to building, just like in the Marvel comics I was reading at the time.

Mom and I took the ferry from Battery Park to the Statue of Liberty, and actually hiked all the way up to the crown. I can't recommend it. It was very hot - this was in August - and the view of New York harbor from the little triangular windows in the crown is anti-climatic and generally unimpressive. Can you even do that anymore? You couldn't when I was last there in 2005.

What I found impressive last time I was there was the museum in the base of the statue, which describes what the statue meant, how it was built, shipped over here and constructed, etc. Long time readers of this blog know I frequently stand up for the French, whom I think are unfairly singled out for scorn, and I intend to again. Who else but the French would have the audaciousness to construct a beautiful 150 foot statue for us and give it away as a goodwill token? Do you see anything remotely like that in the United States from England, Germany, Italy, Kuwait or anyone else? No. Let's keep that in mind the next time somebody proposes calling french fries "freedom fries."

By the way, I just read this morning that in blogging as I do, I am NOT a journalist. A federal judge says so. This means that I do not have the legal shielding that journalists enjoy. If I were to report that somebody is a thief and a crook (many names spring to mind - Twain once called Congress "America's only native criminal class"). I could get sued for libel and it would stick. I consider this to be a bit unfair for one reason: I have read, more and more often, articles written by supposedly credentialed journalists on supposedly credentialed news sites which read like the rantings of children. The standards are certainly not what they used to be! I have been longing for the days of Huntley/Brinkley "hard" news reporting for some time, now - this just reinforces my opinion.

In the article, the judge ruled that the blogger in question, "...had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts (my italics), evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story."

Okay. Let's set the controls on the Wayback Machine to the afternoon of 4 July 1983. I had just finished seeing a horrific accident at my first Civil War reenactment in a Kiwanis Park in Provo, Utah. A man who was serving as a member of a cannon crew had rammed a charge down the barrel when the charge, apparently lit by a remaining spark or ember, ignited the black powder, blowing off parts of both the man's arms. It was, as you can imagine, awful. Some hours later, my wife and I drove about an hour north to see her sister in the outskirts of Salt Lake City when I heard a report on KSL radio: "A man taking part in a Civil War reenactment in Provo was critically injured this afternoon when he was struck in the chest by a cannon ball."

This doesn't even remotely pass what we at work call the "Ho Ho Test." (That is, if uttered in a meeting, will people laugh?) Did nobody in the newsroom ask, "Are they actually using live rounds in battle reenactments? If so, what is the survival rate for reenactors? Is this hobby growing?" Yet the report was broadcast out to 160,000 or so people in the greater Salt Lake City region. There's a tale that a gruff old news editor once had a saying, "If your mother says she loves you - check it out." Apparently those days started to fade as long ago as 1983. At least in Utah...

I am a responsible blogger and try to get my facts straight when I write. For instance, in those Burbankia slide show video segments we had presented that Norma Jeane Baker - later Marilyn Monroe - worked at a Burbank airplane factory when a Yank magazine photographer discovered her and used her picture on a cover. We later found out that she worked in Van Nuys at the time; I include this correction with the text accompanying the slide show videos.

I like to think if myself as a dedicated amateur, somewhere between a dilettante and a pro.

7 Dec 2011

2011-12-06T22:28:00.010-05:00

Using the video editing software I described yesterday, I made a short family video I call We Are the Champions!, after a hand-clasping gesture my oldest child introduced to his graduating class. It's six years in two minutes. But you know what's annoying about the creative process? As soon as I finished it I thought, "Why not include the parts where the graduating classes all triumphantly throw their caps into the air?" Sigh. Maybe I'm not done with it after all...

I am now working on a pair of videos of the "Burbankia" slide show Mike and I gave in Burbank in July for the city's 100th anniversary. Part one is 41 minutes, part two is 51 minutes. These are taking longer because the computer has to process more video.

I watched a couple of episodes of The Wonder Years last night; I always get a kick out of spotting the Burbank locations in the backgrounds: the Verdugo Hills, the Burbank Power and Light structure, the path up the mountain that I hiked in 1972 and 1973, the YMCA building... what fun!

One episode was concerned with Christmas 1968, and how Kevin wanted a color TV but his father wouldn't buy one. It was revealed that they finally bought one in 1970. What's with them? My parents were both blue collar workers and we bought our first color set in mid-1965, geez. But then, there are two more kids in Kevin's family and it appears the wife doesn't work outside of the home - so perhaps we had a better (consumer) standard of life. The writers also blew it by covering Christmas 1968 in the first season - the major event everyone my age remembers is the Christmas Eve Apollo 8 broadcast of earth rise over the moon with the Bible reading. But this wasn't a part of the second Christmas episode. I call foul!

Also, one episode depicted a pretty young teacher showing Kevin's class a film of Martin Luther King giving his famous "I have a dream" speech; later she directs a school play about civil rights. Not in 1968! At least, not in my school district. This is obviously more flavored with the 1980's than 1968. Parents would have complained; the Generation and Racial Gaps in 1968 were very wide. So the authenticity of this episode was... not so much, as they say. However, the teacher was pretty in a foxy 1960's kind of way, and Kevin finds himself enchanted with her approving smile... he then stares at her breasts. For a twelve year-old boy, that was pretty authentic!

We had Webelos Den meeting last night and made paper bag puppets, crafted a fine script and put on a play to meet some of the requirements of the Showman activity pin (the little dude at the one o'clock position in the image above). The cast of characters included Santa Claus, "Boss Elf," an assassin, a ninja, a caped superhero, and, as the hero of the piece, Robert E. Lee (!). The kid who is fixated on potatoes - I mentioned him last week - came up with a number of creatures who are known as "Lomatoes," which seemed to be a combination of potatoes, watermelons and some other fruit or vegetable, I forget. They had wicked, jagged teeth. As you might have guessed, this production was an action play, with most of the paper bag characters confronting each other in combat over the theft of Santa's sleigh. The final scene was reminiscent of Mozart's Don Giovanni as staged in the film Amadeus, with noise, destruction, demons, confusion and the stage itself collapsing in a heap. The boys declared themselves mightily pleased. As for me, thirteen ten year-old boys all yelling makes my ears ring and puts me into a daze.

I am still in search of a good iPhone news app. I was using the Associated Press app, but on Saturday, when everybody knew that Herman Cain had dropped out of running as a presidential candidate, the AP app had nothing about it - at least not that I could find. The top story was still, "Cain will announce his decision on Saturday." Unacceptable! So I have loaded the ABC News and the BBC news apps. I tried the CBS news app again, but the very first thing that came up when I opened it was an obnoxious ad with audio - no thanks. (This app gets two stars by reviewers for this very thing, advertisements over news.) I'm unsure about the BBC app... it appears, unsurprisingly, to be somewhat Eurocentric. The only reason I loaded it is because I am an incurable Anglophile.

6 Dec 2011

2011-12-06T08:52:00.001-05:00

I was strolling around during lunch one day in Shirlington Village where I work; look what I saw.

I watched an interesting, if maddening, docudrama last night: England, My England (1995), purportedly about the life and career of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), baroque composer. (I saw Purcell's King Arthur not too long ago; I was impressed with the music but not the production.) Perhaps Purcell's most well-known melody is the Rondo from his Abdelazar Suite. (Hear it here. Do you know this melody?)

England, My England was well cast, well acted and very sumptuously produced - and the music was gorgeous - but, sadly, the narrative flow was a mess. It was a play within a plot within a movie kind of thing and it was often hard to tell what was going on. What's more, in this two and a half hour production, the adult Henry Purcell doesn't make an appearance until after an hour into it! It also lacked focus: arguably, it was more about Charles II and the Restoration than about Henry Purcell.

And why insert scenes of 1960's British anti-Vietnam protests in a film about Henry Purcell? (And why were the British even protesting in the first place? It wasn't like they were in any danger of being drafted...) I suppose the director was making a heavy-handed observation that there was political turmoil in Purcell's time just as there was 300 years later. But why point that out? There are always wars and political turmoil...

This film did feature an interesting sequence about King William of Orange and Queen Mary, and had a stunning performance of his stately and solemn Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. (A good performance of this short work is here.) In it, rather than one drum there was a whole line of them... it sounded wonderfully powerful. Weirdly, however, this film also used Wendy Carlos' synthesized version which served as the theme music for the 1971 Stanley Kubrick production of A Clockwork Orange. Why? I have no idea. To suggest the work's continued relevance, I guess.

Anyway, I was ready to give up on England, My England early, but the acting and setting hooked me in spite of the clunky plot development.

I watched another episode of The Wonder Years... series one is set in 1968. As I figured I would, I spotted an anachronism (I'm sure there will be more): in one scene Kevin's sister walks in the room carrying the well-known Panasonic "Plunger" model 8-track cartridge player. I am almost positive that those weren't available until after 1970 or so. They are now much in vogue among the 8-track set. (Yes, there is such a thing.)

Yesterday I spent some time figuring out the video editing software I was looking for: as it turns out, you can download Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 for free; it does just what I need it to do. (Unlike iMovie on my wife's Mac.) So I created what I think is a funny video account of the Clark Family grocery shopping in 1991, when the kids were little, and posted it on youtube. Yes, I actually took a clunky old VHS camcorder to the grocery store. I figured that it would be fun to look back on those daily life activities twenty years hence. So... I needed to figure out three software applications to produce this: "Bootstrap," the converter to take the video off a DVD and make a .mp4 file of it, Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 to trim it and make a title card, and youtube to upload it and create the annotation boxes.

I'm going to try something a bit more difficult later this week, where I have to cut and paste video for various sources, insert still images, etc. Once again, like the iPhone videos, old dogs learning new tricks.

There's a Webelos Den meeting tonight; one of the other leaders is going to do the "Showman" activity pin. I think we're making brown paper bag puppets. I'm the Enforcer: the adult leader who separates the overly chatty boys and compels one of them to keep all four feet of his chair on the ground. There are times I think this particular kid is going for some kind of a record by sitting in his chair with only one of the feet on the floor. If he could levitate off the ground, he would.

5 Dec 2011

2011-12-04T20:28:00.016-05:00

I graduated from physical therapy Friday, that is, after eighteen weeks I had my last PT session for my shoulder. That last thing left for me is to be able to crank my right hand up the middle of my back as my left can do - this is the last pain free motion to be restored to me. (I have some exercises with a strap to do to enable this to happen.) The surgeon says that in January I should be 100% healed and resume lifting heavy objects with my right arm. I can move my arm in all sorts of directions now without any pain - it feels MUCH better than it was back in late July, before I got the surgery. So... success!

Saturday was unexpectedly fun. After consuming a can of Coke (was it Diet or Regular? - as reported in the media, they look alike), we drove into Alexandria to look in the Pendleton store to see if I could find a replacement for my favorite but now sadly moth-eathen wool shirt, and stumbled into the Scottish Christmas Festival in Old Town; the place was packed. After finally finding a parking place we did indeed find me a nice shirt at 25% off - hooray!

There were guys in skirts, uh, kilts, all over the place and, of course, bagpipers: Bagpipes I, Bagpipes II. We also saw a beautiful 1972 Lincoln Continental Mark III parked on King St. We had lunch in a La Madeleine and strolled into some stores, and made our way over to the Carlyle House, where my Revolutionary War reenactment group the First Virginia had an encampment. We chatted with some old friends and left... lots of fun! That evening we had our church's Christmas party, for which we acted as servers/kitchen staff. That was fun, too.

By the way, since discovering that I could easily upload iPhone videos to youtube, I have created a "channel" for myself, here. I have eleven uploaded videos there now - that will increase. I'm also learning how to edit them - trim, add voice balloons, titles, that sort of thing. Another example of old dogs learning new tricks.

I finished reading all of the Neil Gaiman Sandman trade paperbacks. As I reported before, they are good. I don't feel they're as good as his fans claim they are - but no matter. The most fortunate creation in Sandman without a doubt is his winsome, cutey-pie older sister, Death, she of the goth garb and bubbly demeanor. Whereas the skeletal guy with the scythe is grim, she's a gamin. According to Gaiman, Lady Death is not a personification of death, she IS death. When the last universe dies its entropic heat death, she will be there to turn out the lights and shut the door. A very clever literary creation. If they ever do the threatened movie or television production, casting her will be a major concern. They need to get her character just right or people will be very disappointed.

The character's appearance is based more or less on a real girl named Cinnamon; maybe they can cast her...

2 Dec 2011

2011-12-02T09:12:00.003-05:00

Photo collage Don Tracey put together. The problem with doing this sort of thing - as I well know - is now it has to be updated each year! But I like it.

By the way, on my Picasa photo page I have an album entitled "Drop Box"; it's a collection of various images from 2011, mostly cell phones shots. It's not a family album, just a random sort of thing. Take a look.

A friend of my son's named Ian Friley is an amateur filmmaker; he does funny stuff. Here's his recent sixteen second short about the Friley Family Thanksgiving. I think it's hilarious; I love the Dad's reaction. He swears that this wasn't staged.

What do you get when you combine 300's visual style with the American Civil War? This. I suppose it was inevitable. I admit... I kind of like it. It's visually exciting, anyway. Madness? This is MANASSAS!!!

I watched the 1975 Akira Kurosawa film Dersu Uzala yesterday. It was excellent. It's the story of a Russian surveyor who befriends and is befriended by a hunter when they encounter each other out in the wilds of Siberia, no more, no less than that. Based on a true story. It reminded me somewhat of Nanook of the North (1922).

I also watched the best prison film I have ever seen: Le Trou ("The Hole" - 1960). That's saying a lot because the prison flick is a sub-genre of film noir, and so I've seen a bunch of them. This film is a lot like The Asphalt Jungle (1950) in that you become emotionally attached with the prisoners staging the jailbreak - the protagonists are not just criminals, they are human beings who have done criminal things (exactly what criminal things isn't described). So you're pulling for them: in Asphalt Jungle it's a heist, here, it's a prison break. It runs over two hours... normally, I prefer shorter films, but there was a method to the director's madness. At one point you see the prisoners bang and chip away on the concrete floor of their prison with a steel bar for what seems like an extended length of time, the message being, of course, that this is hard, hard work. Excellent film. Like Dersu Uzala, it was also based on a true story, by the way.

I am just over 8/11ths of the way through Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. For comic books they are quite good - with an asterisk. I think in this genre - comic books or "sequential art" - there is a temptation to mistake daring or outrage with quality. For instance, there is a nightmarish character (we are mostly dealing with dreams, remember) called "the Corinthian" who has teeth in the place of eyes. His schtick is carving out the eyeballs of his victims and eating them (presumably with the sets of teeth which are where his eyes should be). GAK! However, I suspect middle-aged comic book reading fanboyz around the world (who have never read Dante's Inferno or the classics which inspire Gaiman) think, "Kewl, this is SO awesome!" and praise Gaiman to the skies. Certainly, I have tired of reading the Introductions to these books, which consist primarily of some noted writer telling us how brilliant the whole series is. I quit reading them. And the Sandman graphic novel I finished up last night, Worlds' End, was awful, a real falling off from form. Still, I understand there is some talk of doing a movie; this could be promising.

Last night my clever wife brought home a couple of small sheets of Fornasetti wallpaper she had found as samples. We both decided that we really didn't have a place in the house where we could use it, but we like the style. Pietro Fornasetti (1913-1988) was an Italian artist who specialized in the use of the sun and time and black and white; his style is quite distinctive. I was first introduced to it when I was a kid via some coasters owned by Del Casher, a lodger/L.A. session guitarist who lived in a converted garage on the property of the house we were renting. A clean set of those coasters are now worth hundreds of dollars (or more!) on e-Bay... I made some imitations by doing digital transfers of Fornasetti sun designs onto square tiles. I'm still looking for a use for those in the house.

Well... the weekend beckons. Tomorrow night we're providing kitchen staff help at a church Christmas Party. (If I were the Corinthian, could I eat three times as much food?) Other than that, we have no plans. But that's okay: my wife recently admitted that both of us sitting in the quiet living room, reading, with a fire in the fireplace, was what she envisioned she wanted many years ago. So it's good.

Have a great weekend!

1 Dec 2011

2011-12-01T08:42:00.001-05:00

My nostalgic web site about my childhood in Burbank, CA, "Avocado Memories," is now fifteen years old on the web. Fifteen years! You don't find many web sites that old that have been on the Internet and continuously updated for all of that time. I should pat myself on the back. (Pat, pat.)

Yesterday (Mark Twain's 176th birthday) my pard Chris read Mark Twain's A Private History of a Campaign That Failed. It's an excellent short story - you should read it if you haven't. (Grab it from the link I provided and upload it to your smart phone or reader!) It's a highly fictionalized account of Twain's two-week service as a Reb in the Missouri State Guard. It takes place in Marion County, Missouri. It first came to my attention in 1983 or so, when I saw a teleplay of it broadcast on a PBS station; as I was starting Civil War reenacting at the time I found it engrossing. The production is also interesting because it incorporates another work of Twain's as a coda: his celebrated War Prayer.

The War Prayer was written by Twain but only published after his death. "Only dead men can tell the truth in this world," twain claimed. A rather poorly-written wikipedia entry describing the work is here. I am unable to find a video link to the Campaign that Failed PBS special, but here is a youtube link to the ten minute War Prayer part of it. Check it out, it's great!

It is no doubt a powerful work, and fully expresses Twain's disgust with the United States going to war with Spain in 1898. I suppose these days it is occasionally cited by activists as a blanket condemnation of war. As it is a strongly religious work - the strange messenger purports to be sent from God - let's look at that aspect of it for a moment.

Does God hate war? As He sent the Prince of Peace down to us 2,000+ years ago, the answer would seem to be a resounding "yes." I suspect it's a bit more complicated that that, however, and as evidence I suggest a reading of Deuteronomy 20:17, where the (admittedly Old Testament) God commands the Israelites to massacre the Canaanites and others. Verse sixteen uses the phrase, "...thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth." Whew. That's... genocide. Ethnic cleansing. We have all sorts of powerful phrases in use to describe this sort of thing when we humans do it. Subsequent verses are also interesting, and say, more or less, "Kill the people but save the trees." What's going on, here?

Well, if you are expecting me to describe the Mind of God - forget it. I can't. Others attempt to rationalize this, as this Biblical incident has caused Christians a good deal of concern over the years. I won't even try, save to perhaps use the old saw, "God works in mysterious ways, and His ways are not our ways." But I would have loved to read a late period Twain essay about God's dealing with the Canaanites. I don't think there is one, however. But Twain's various quotes about war suggest a strong antipathy; he was clear about that.

A couple of decades ago when I was writing articles for Civil War reenactment unit newsletters and a national magazine dedicated to the hobby, I attempted to write my Great Anti-War Article. After all, here we were, guys who ran around in uniforms playing war on the weekends, and it was an easy matter for journalists and the public to look at us with disgust and opine, "Those guys are weird - they love war." I wanted to refute that. But after some tries, I found that I couldn't. As Twain's creation Huck Finn said, it was like trying to pray a lie. I just couldn't honestly write the pat, "I hate war" prose.

My views about war are nuanced and hard to describe, exactly. But put simply, denouncing war makes about as much sense to me as denouncing cancer, or hurricanes. True, we humans cause war (unlike cancer and hurricanes), but I agree with the unknown (it's usually attributed to Plato) who said "Only the dead have seen an end to war." It seems to be a part of our universe. "This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games," said William S. Burroughs. I agree.

In the end the best I could do was to gather provocative quotations from wiser men on the subject of war and throw them up on the Internet as a webpage. I also finally eked out an article about men who feel bad because they did not take part in a war, or act as soldiers, and posted that as well. Perhaps some day - when I'm retired? - I will be able to fully explain myself.

30 Nov 2011

2011-11-30T08:53:00.003-05:00

Angry Birds! Yes... sadly, I, too, have become addicted. I saw Ethan playing this on his iPhone when we were stuck in the London subway for a time in March; this was my first exposure to the Birds. Remembering that, I loaded the app onto my own iPhone the other day and have been obsessively flinging angry, explosive, hypersonic and splitting birds around ever since. I have only played a handful of video games in my life - Tetris, Dig-Dug and Elf Bowl - but I do like this one. Death to the green pigs!

I have elected to watch Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. I expect I won't like it, but it's a continuation of my current mode of watching films I think I won't like. (Buffalo Rider!) Why would I do such a thing? Because people sometimes accuse me of being closed-minded when I'm really not. For a while I was watching dated and rather corny old church videos - I called it "Diminished Expectations Theatre" - as well as productions of Shakespeare plays people don't usually see - just to expand my horizons a bit. I never know... I might like this stuff. I didn't like Clerks, but I liked Trainspotting, for instance. And I found old church videos I really liked. Buffalo Rider, however, was pretty hard to take. One viewing is adequate.

As I reported, I have become hooked on the songs on the Kinks' 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. The first one that got stuck in my head is Picture Book; it's hard for me not to like a song about scrapbooks! Now that I think about it, wasn't this once used as a commercial by somebody? (Some research ensues) Ah, yes... I remember now: HP Digital Photography - a very clever ad!

I watched another Robert Greenberg Concerti lecture last night. He really likes Mozart. He asserted that it took the earth something like 4.5 billion years to evolve to the point where somebody like Mozart was possible. I had never considered the age of the earth in those terms, but he does. He also said that the best piano concerti ever written were Mozart's - "that's not subjective opinion, that's fact." Well! I confess that I am partial to Khachaturian's and Rachmaninoff's Second, but I defer to Greenberg's far greater knowledge of the subject matter.

He also introduced Mozart's Concerto for Flute, Harp and Orchestra in C major. The piece was commissioned by the flautist Duke of Guines, Adrien-Louis de Bonnieres, but the man never paid Mozart for this transcendent piece - he stiffed him. So Greenberg honored the Duke by calling him a putz: "Adrien-Louis de Bonnieres, Duke of Putz." Ha ha! These Greenberg lectures are so interesting and funny... I wish I knew half of what Greenberg has forgotten.

We did Forestry Activity Pin Part II last night in the Webelos Den; for some reason those boys were noisier than usual and I had to separate a couple. At the end I fed them all a spoonful of real maple syrup and let 'em run around in the gym for fifteen minutes. Why the maple syrup? Because, as I suspected, a quick survey confirmed that they're all putting Log Cabin or Mrs. Butterworth's on their pancakes. Paugh! High fructose corn syrup. As the son of a New Hampshirewoman I cannot let this pass. My Webelos scouts should taste real maple syrup. I am firmly convinced that God gave us maple trees, maple sap and, yes, Mozart, because He wants us to be happy. I instructed them to ask their parents to henceforth buy real maple syrup. And thus the brainwashing of the young continues apace.

Yesterday, as a part of my pack's rechartering effort, I watched the Boy Scouts of America Youth Protection Program video, which is mandatory for all scouting leaders. There was one sequence which defined and depicted "grooming," whereby adult men seduce boys - the idea being, of course, to be on the lookout for it. It was unsettling. I was surprised, with as many various "out there" movies as I have seen, by being creeped out with this sequence. A high "ick factor," as a friend once said.

Last night I also watched another first season episode of The Wonder Years. This one was about a countercultural creep who dates Kevin's sister. I was feeling hostile just listening to him. I hate hippies! Guess that particular episode elicited a visceral response from me. I have to smile, though, when I remember that a friend of my daughter's once arrived in a car with a "Shut Up, Hippie - Cheer Up, Emo Boy" bumper sticker affixed thereupon.

29 Nov 2011

2011-11-29T08:42:00.001-05:00

A tune has been obsessively bouncing around in my head for quite some time now... it's a flamboyant Syd Dale piece entitled The Hell Raisers; you may have heard it before. It's a two minute bit of commercial music written in 1968 intended to be used for... whatever. It was used as promotional music for a sleazy 1966 film about prostitutes called Another Day, Another Man, it was in an episode of the old animated Spider-Man show (you know, the one with the snappy "Spider-Man/Spider-Man/Does whatever a spider can" theme song) and was also used in network and local sports broadcasting. No doubt other stuff as well. But it's great! Very catchy. I know I sound old when I write this, but it's true: they just don't write over-the-top jazz band stuff like this any more. Do you, like me, enjoy this kind of thing? Search on youtube for "syd dale" or "kpm klassics." (KPM was the British music library Dale often wrote for.)

Last night I killed an hour and a half of my life watching an utterly ridiculous film from 1978, Buffalo Rider about, you guessed it, a man who rides a buffalo across the west and his adventures therein. Why did he decide to ride a buffalo rather than a horse? (A buffalo, like a 600 pound ape, pretty much goes wherever it wants to go.) I don't know. The funny thing is that this epic is supposedly based on the true life of an early conservationist Charles "Buffalo" Jones - but I can find no mention anywhere that Jones ever actually rode a buffalo. He was just interested in preserving them (after a stint as a buffalo hunter, that is.) I suspect the bit about Jones actually riding a buffalo is a result of some excessively creative thinking or bad weed on the part of the producers. I have to admit, there were some good laughs in this... when Jones finally learns to ride the buffalo there's a heartfelt theme song which is sung as incidental music which had me in tears. And the climatic scene, when Jones hunts down some murdering hunters, is pretty funny: he and the buffalo storm into a bar, knocking down tables and other furniture (buffalo don't care for such finery), Jones shoots up the place and the hunters, and departs. The narrator dutifully says, "... and nobody in the Crystal Palace ever forgot that day!" Well, I guess not.

I am ashamed to admit that my alma mater, Brigham Young University, had a hand in this daft production. Perhaps not surprisingly, the copyright has expired on this film and it is now in the public domain. You can see it here on youtube in its entirety, yeee-haa giddyup buffalo!

Syd Dale, Buffalo Rider... it wasn't all intellectual slumming last night. I also watched a couple of Robert Greenberg lectures. I learned something interesting about Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, especially about my favorite, #3 in G major. It's in three movements, but the second movement is nothing more than two chords, a "Phrygian half cadence." As the wikipedia article states, current performing practice can be anything from simply playing the two chords to improvising an extended cadenza to inserting another Bach piece. I've heard a number of recordings of this piece but I didn't know that! You can see it performed here, all fourteen seconds of it. As always, the youtube comments are funny: "I've got this WHOLE movement memorized," "This was written on a tissue while Bach went for a coffee break," "Isn't it funny that 247,487 people watched the shortest movement of baroque music ever?" Haha!

I'm currently on the Mozart concerti... thank goodness. I find baroque music to be pretty dry, actually. Most of it, to use Greenberg's own phrase in a prior lecture, sounds to me like musical wallpaper. I have always preferred the greater freedom and expressiveness in Romantic, late Romantic and 20th C. music. I am just now coming to appreciate the Classical period, however (via the Haydn London symphonies).

We got four new tires put on the VW last night at COSTCO: $435. Bridgestones were on sale. I wanted Michelins, but not for $150 more. (We have been slammed with expenses this year, not the least of which was a wedding.) I am happy to report that the car's ride feels grippier than before. A part of the recent "catch up on chores" weekend was putting a new headlight on the VW; what a pain. It's a good car and seems to be well-designed, except for the headlight assemblies, which require patience, accuracy, strength and technical acumen to remove and reinsert. In fact, when I arrived at work this morning I noticed that the headlight wasn't on - a shove on the assembly got it lit. %^#$%!$!@! I guess I need to tighten up on the locking cam when I get home. I needed a buy a 5mm socket to do it. Have you ever tried to find a 5 mm, 1/4" drive socket you can put on the end of a long shaft? Another delight.

28 Nov 2011

2011-11-28T07:52:00.013-05:00

We had a great Thanksgiving weekend; hope you did as well. We drove down to Solomon's Island in Maryland and had dinner with friends - it was very nice. I won a game of Trouble. As I've been trouble ever since I was a small child I'm well versed. In fact, recently one of my physical therapists greeted me with, "Hi, Trouble!"

This past long weekend was something of a "get the chores done" time. I finally got caught up on the scrapbooks, we got all of our Christmas cards out and I raked/vacuumed the dead leaves from both the front and back yards (a major chore). I mowed our new lawn for the first time: it looks great! I also washed both cars and rolled up and put away the front hose for the winter. Today it's new shoes for baby: $600+ in COSTCO tires for the VW.

I'm about halfway through reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic books; the local library has them all in bound form. They're good, but I don't think they are nearly as wonderful as the comic book types insist they are. Sometimes the illustrations are pretty awful and Gaiman's themes are mostly derivative (Greek myths, Shakespeare, the classics) - with added bits of nastiness. But I admit to a bias: comic books (or "sequential art" as it is pompously called), for me, will always take a second place as literature to books. The comic book producers hate that attitude, but, I'm sorry, deep within me I feel like guys over the age of about twenty who are still reading comic books need to grow up and move on to real literature.

I was a comic book reader and collector when I was a kid. I started reading Superman and Superboy comics when I was about eight or so and stuck with them (and others) until I turned thirteen or fourteen. Don't get me wrong - the comic books instilled within me a love of reading and were just the things I needed at the time. Had it not been for comic books I might not be the voracious reader I have been all my adult life. But then I switched to books: Poe, Doyle, Dickens, Steinbeck, Arthurian lit and the occasional adult best seller (in retrospect, perhaps not a good idea). I was done with comics. I would start reading them again when my son came along - it was a shared interest - but, in general, I feel that comics are for kids and books are for adults. To me there is something stunted, adolescent and creepy about comics for adults.

With the exception of one three month period - when I was in USMC boot camp - I have been constantly reading from book to book ever since I was about fourteen. Ever the archivist, I used to write the titles and page counts down in a little journal I kept - which I soon gave up maintaining! I tend to favor non-fiction over fiction and classics over best-sellers. I used to read the Dark Shadows serializations when I was a kid as well as the Doc Savage novels; it finally occurred to me that I was essentially reading the same novel over and over again, so I gave them up. In general, I try to stick with what I call "improving" books, books with themes of constant informative or uplifting value.

I have also now started another Professor Robert Greenberg Teaching Company classical music lecture series, this time on the subject of The Concerto. He is always fun to listen to - the man has an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter and an undoubted gift for teaching. Did you know that there is really bad descriptive verse that accompanies Vivaldi's (overplayed) The Four Seasons?

Thanks to the Shirlington library I found the Kinks' The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, a pop gem from 1968 that I wasn't aware of. Great album! I also like and approve of the overall theme in the lyrical content: there are old time things which are good and should be preserved. Let's be a little discerning with all this social revolution, okay? It was a totally unique message in the pop music of the time; the notion didn't become fashionable until the 1990s or so. It ties in with my belief that it's a bad idea to tear down walls and barriers until you've determined why they were erected in the first place.

I watched some videos over the long weekend:

Best of the Beatles (2005) - A documentary about Pete Best, who might reasonably be called The Most Unfortunate Man Alive. He was the Beatles' first drummer, and was sacked in favor of Ringo Starr on the eve of their superstardom. I think this will be my last film or documentary on the subject of the early Beatles; I'm getting rather burned out with the stories of Stu Sutcliffe, Pete Best, Astrid Kirchherr, Klaus Voorman, et. al.

Premonition (2007) - A rather disappointing Sandra Bullock thriller with not much in the way of a payoff as a conclusion. What really creeped me out about this film, however, was the leading man, Julian "Nip/Tuck" McMahon (shown above). Gahhh! What is with those eyebrows?!? They look like they're painted on! Or like they're two black centipedes who have decided to sit - absolutely horizontally - over the man's eye. How does a man get to be a star with eyebrows like that?

Mum's the Word (2005) - A dark comedy starring one of my favorite comics, Rowan Atkinson, and Maggie Smith, a veteran actress who is also always fun to watch. It was sort of a murderous version of Mary Poppins. Quite good.

23 Nov 2011

2011-11-23T08:53:00.002-05:00

One last note about Roberts E. Lee: I got a note from a reader who looked at what I thought was the best Lee impressionist from last year's Gettysburg parade. The reader wrote, "That picture of the man portraying Gen. Lee has one oddity about him (at least from today's viewpoint). It appears for all the world he is wearing a lady's handbag. I suspect when he stands it looks more manly, but while sitting, it looks lady-like." Hahaha! He's absolutely right! Being a reenactor I looked at it and thought "leather dispatch case" and left it at that. But yes, to a non-reenactor I suppose he could look like a bearded old queen!

I just noticed... the 19th C. gal in the background looks like she's snorting something. Perhaps she's one of those nervous, fluttery Victorian gals and is sniffing some smelling salts to compose herself after being in the presence of that Paragon Of Southern Manhood.

Last night I did my annual Webelos instruction for the Forestry activity pin; for this one I bring in various types of wood, explain what they are and what they're used for. As our hardwood floor is made of acacia wood - a very hard, dense wood - I brought in an excess slat of that and did the thing the cub scouts all think is funny: pointed out that in the Old Testament it was called "shittim" wood (Gen. 26:15). I keep hoping that they'll run home and gleefully tell their parents and I'll get released, but that never seems to work. I once considered a "Scared Straight" pack meeting at the nearby Lorton prison; that would have been taking it to the next level. The prison is now gone, however, so that possibility has disappeared.

Seriously, when I was the Cubmaster I once considered, as something different, a pack meeting ("Life Isn't Always Pretty") where we go to some of the nastier places in the county: the county dump, past the Lorton prisons and have lunch in the McDonald's parking lot next to the bin where they put the discarded fats. Those boys would never have forgotten it and most of them would have thought it was pretty neat!

Ten year-old males are a trip. Last night, one kid kept going on about potatoes. I'd ask what kind of wood I was holding, he'd say "Potato wood." We had them draw a picture of a tree with roots, trunk and leaves, and he drew potatoes on the ground. I passed around a can of turpentine and asked them to describe the smell and this kid said "potatoes." And he wasn't even the oddest one in the room...

We talked briefly about maple trees. Being the son of a New Hampshirewoman, I pointed out that maple syrup comes from maple trees. However, the stuff they're putting on their pancakes - Log Cabin, Mrs. Butterworth's, etc. - is high fructose corn syrup, not real maple syrup. I think next week I'm going to bring in some plastic spoons and a bottle of the real stuff and let them all have a taste - AFTER we get done with the instruction. No sense in sugaring those boys up when you're expecting them to pay attention.

Last night I watched a wonderfully entertaining 2010 documentary about the career of legendary cameraman and director Jack Cardiff. Martin Scorsese said that when you saw the Archer's logo at the beginning of a film (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's production company was called The Archers) with Jack Cardiff's name on the credits you knew you were in for something special - the very same thought once occurred to me.

I'm a great fan of Powell-Pressburger films; perhaps my all-time favorite film is their 1947 adaptation of the Rumer Godden novel Black Narcissus. Cardiff was responsible for the Technicolor work on it, and it is really a treat. It's a gorgeous film. He later went on to do another, far more exuberant, film for the Archers: The Red Shoes, possibly the greatest ballet film ever. The central "Red Shoes ballet" sequence looks amazing, even today. Even the music is credible classical music... a top notch production all around.

I could do several blog entries about Black Narcissus... It's a film about a group of British nuns establishing a convent in a former palace for concubines set high atop a mountain in the Himalayas. (Here's a youtube video of the first ten minutes to give you a taste of the production. The storytelling magic for me begins at the four minute mark, when the Palace of Mopu is described.) There's a part of the film and the book I never understood, and so in 1998 I wrote Rumer Godden - who I understood was still alive - a letter to her home in Scotland to ask her about it. A few months later I got a reply: Sadly, she had died just before my letter had arrived. It's another one of those unsolved questions in my life. I hate loose ends. I hope I puzzle them out before I die.

I also recently watched a quirky Australian neo-noir, Noise (2007). It was a pretty good production, and maintained suspense during most of its running time. The only problem for me was the dialect, which was hard to follow.

Turkey Day coming. For some reason I keep remembering an advertising jingle which was broadcast in 1968 or 1969 for what I think was a football game. A Peter Max style production - all psychedelic colors featuring a singing turkey and set to the last part of the tune "Turkey in the Straw": "The day after Turkey Day on ABC! (pause) ABC!" Sinister, the way the Media can implant things in your head which lasts for decades.

22 Nov 2011

2011-11-22T08:53:00.002-05:00

Back when I was in college in 1982, I strolled into a Radio Shack one day and saw the gadget of my dreams: a Moog Concertmate MG-1, a consumer grade synthesizer. I had always liked the "Switched-On Bach" recordings of Walter Carlos, and, later, the music of Kraftwerk, and so was interested. It had the necessary oscillators, filters, a small keyboard and, best of all, it was polyphonic! (That is, you could hold down two keys and get two tones - most synthesizers of the day were monophonic.) It was a nice little instrument, and it looked like a great way to learn all about modulators, low pass and high pass filters, portamento, etc. Best of all, it retailed for only $500. But I was a college student and it might as well have been $5,000. It was discontinued in 1983. By the time I graduated we had our first child and, soon after, mortgage payments. No Moog. (But I did buy other things.)

So it was some interest last night when I downloaded a minisynthesizer app for my iPhone for the princely sum of $2. Hey! It's not bad... Last night I hooked it up to my car stereo and played around with it and made the usual swooshing noises synthesizers made. It has two oscillators and various filters, attack and delay controls, echo and some other features, all realized in software. It is monophonic. Of course it is nothing like the Radio Shack Moog, but it's a lot of fun to play with. For only $2! On my cell phone!

After a trial of a few weeks I got rid of the Time magazine reader app. I knew it would prove to be a left-of-center publication, but thought it might be nice to read an article now and then. What galled me, however, was when a Time journalist called George Bush "crass" for referring to North Korea as the "axis of evil." Excuse me, anyone who can open a newspaper or who is in any way aware of world events knows that North Korea is a miserable, corrupt, totalitarian government that strips its citizens of not only their liberties and rights, but food and the basics of life as well. It appears that most of the government's energy is spent sabre-rattling and enforcing an exceedingly heavy-handed personality cult for that wretched man-child Kim Jong-iL. If that isn't "evil," what is? Enough of Time, and enough of their namby-pamby, slanted journalism. App deleted.

I mentioned the highly regarded British crime film Get Carter yesterday... other than being soulless and pointless (which are acceptable characteristics for nihilistic films noir), it uses that hokey-looking magenta fake blood. You know, that theatrical blood that just doesn't look right... it isn't the proper shade of scarlet. I've seen this in other films quite often - it must have had something to do with the Technicolor consultant determining a shade that came out looking right taking into account the film processing and the characteristics of the projector systems - I don't know. But on a DVD you see a scene with it and you don't think, "Gah! Blood!" you think, "Film!"

As Get Carter was a British film, it may have used an early form of a fake blood trademarked as "Kensington Gore." (I was going nuts trying to remember that phrase the other night.) Certainly, by the time Stanley Kubrick required thousands of gallons of it for the famous elevator sequence in The Shining (1980), the stuff looked like real blood. Kubrick, celebrated as being a perfectionist who endlessly re-shot scenes, would have never have accepted magenta blood!

(Ah, I see I have blogged about Kensington Gore before. I shall not re-tell my story about seeing the elevator scene as a trailer for the first time, then. I shall merely refer you to this.)

I do have something new and rather eerie to add about Kubrick's elevator sequence, however, which I came across when trying to find the phrase "Kensington Gore." It appears that if you look carefully, you can see that something falls out of or appears at the left elevator door during the shot. This web site looks at it in detail. Once again, Stanley Kubrick was a celebrated visual perfectionist and this is no mistake. It must be intentional. But what is it? (Fear not... it's not one of those pages that says "Look here carefully" then throws a ghoul face and a loud scream at you. It's legit.)

More of Gettysburg: It's funny... as I pointed out in my photographic essay, every year at the Gettysburg Remembrance Day Parade my pard Don gets his photo taken with one of the various Robert E. Lees strolling around. (You can't swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting a couple.) He used to do bunny ears behind them, but doesn't any more. "I'm maturing," is his comment. We thought this past Saturday was a Three Lee Day, but as it turned out it was really a Two Lee Day. As you can clearly see, Lee #2 is the same guy as Lee #3. Oddly, neither Don, nor Lee#2/3 nor I realized that we were shooting the photo that we had already taken earlier in the day!

But wait! Being reenacting, it gets weirder. The Lee from last year was the very same guy as last weekend! This poor guy probably thinks we're stalking him... Don Tracey: Stalker of Lees! Hahaha! This is why I love reenacting...

Final Note: The best-looking Lee, in my opinion, was the one we chatted with last year, this guy. He was in town to testify at a local public meeting as to whether or not to let a casino into town. The motion failed - no casino in Gettysburg. (Hooray!) Don and I reflected that he is one Robert E. Lee who won the Battle of Gettysburg!

21 Nov 2011

2011-11-21T07:44:00.008-05:00

I had lunch at a nearby Irish Pub Friday and met a former rugby coach of mine, "Schnauzer." Schnauzer is notable in my life because he bears a tattoo I once designed! The story is here and in the photograph which follows it.

Saturday was the annual Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade; this year Don and I marched down Baltimore and Steinwehr Avenues carrying the colors which were mounted on ridiculously tall staffs. It felt like we were carrying antenna masts. We spent the entire parade squinting upwards taking care not to snag telephone lines, tree branches or traffic lights. We won't be volunteering to do that again next year! Photos here.

As promised, I also got some videos of the Federal City Brass Band's sunset concert atop the Little Round Top: "Old Joe Hooker," "We Are Coming Father Ab'ram."

I also saw the U.S. Navy Band's wind octet perform in Alexandria yesterday; it was nice. Beethoven, Saint-Saens, Mozart. The Masonic Memorial amphitheatre is a cool performing space few locals know about. Access is easy, there's a ton of free parking and the acoustics are great.

My bride and I watched three films over the weekend:

Follow the Fleet (1936): A breezy and rather brain dead Irving Berlin musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. But who watches these for the plots? You watch them to see Fred and Ginger dance, of course. It was a bit overlong. There was one hilarious scene where Fred is teaching sailors on a ship how to dance - naturally, this being 1936 there are no dames aboard, so the sailors must pair up together. You might know just then a squad of Marines arrives and witness this; the tough old sergeant does the world's funniest 1930's double take and the inevitable fistfight ensues. Back then they didn't ask, tell or dance. I liked the opening number, We Saw the Sea, which my pard Don alerted me to.

Get Carter (1971): The Michael Caine one, of course, not the remake. (In general, I don't like remakes.) My first take on this film was that it was soulless and pointless, but the more I think about the film the more inclined I am to like it. It can still be soulless and pointless - there are plenty of nihilist films noir in the canon (1961's Blast of Silence is a notable example) - but what's winning me over in part is the bleak, windswept ending and the musical theme, "Getting Nowhere in a Hurry." There's a good video of the theme song being played here. I like the Indian percussion and treated piano, but then I would. I'm a fan of John Barry's scores, and this is very much in his style: a hooky ostinato with the main theme being played on an exotic sounding instrument.

The Sting (1973): Seven Academy Awards? This won seven? And beat out American Graffiti for Best Picture that year?!? Graffiti - a far better film, in my opinion - was robbed! I know why... this has Stars. It has an overly-mature Robert Redford (he attempts to portray a winsome twentysomething in this but was 38 when it was filmed) and Paul Newman, modeling clothes. See Paul Newman in his fedora and wife-beaters! See Redford in his striped suit and 1930's workingman's cap - then watch as he switches into his tux for the sting operation! Meh. Like a couple of Ken dolls. I could see the trick ending a mile away and I thought this flick suffered from terminal cuteness. A little too much sparkle and wit, thank you. And I also don't buy the plot: a mobster kills a black man and so various grifters and con artists extract revenge. Could that really have happened in 1936 Chicago? No. Like Redford's unauthentic hairstyle, the sensibilities of this film are firmly set in 1973's Hollywood.

It also doesn't help that the film ushered in a fad for Scott Joplin rags; I remember being really, really tired of hearing The Entertainer intruding into my classical station, KFAC.

Perhaps what I really disliked about this film is summed up by Roger Ebert as a compliment in his contemporary review: "The style here is so seductive and witty it's hard to pin down. It's like nothing else I've seen by Hill, and at times, it almost reminds me of Jacques Tati crossed with Robert Altman. It's good to get a crime movie more concerned with humor and character than with blood and gore; here's one, as we say, for the whole family." No thank you. I'll take my crime films straight.

Get Carter is looking better and better.

18 Nov 2011

2011-11-18T08:59:00.004-05:00

I posted another fifty or so Meredith-n-Chris wedding photos onto my Picasa photo album, they are here. These are the ones from the Las Vegas temple - they're the ones starting at #13, with a sort of golden cast (we caught the "magic hour" light). I made prints last night at COSTCO - I'll be spending a good part of the weekend putting all this stuff into the family scrapbook. Whew.

By the way, all of my publicly-viewable photo albums are here. Feel free. Since I started posting here in May '09 I've accumulated quite a few.

In March 1991, ever the family photographer, I brought the camcorder to the grocery store while we shopped for food, just for kicks and to document our daily lives as a family. Ethan was 7, Julie was 4 and Meredith was a toddler sitting in the shopping car. I highly recommend this: the segment has gone into legend in family lore because the kids weren’t behaving all that well – they were crawling around on the floor, dropping boxes from shelves, running up and down the aisles and whining for foods they couldn’t have, etc. In other words they were playing for the camera. It seems very funny now, seeing how exasperated Cari was becoming by the time we were nearly done. At one point she said, “Take some records of the prices,” which I did. I picked up a gallon of milk and said, “This milk is $2.31 a gallon. We think it’s expensive but maybe in twenty years it’ll seem cheap.” Indeed. An Internet check of a flyer for the very same store reveals that milk is now $3.99 a gallon (with a club card). That’s nearly a 73% increase.

I re-watched Les Bernstien's Night Train (1999) last night. I have forgotten what a sleazy flick this was. It takes place in Tijuana, Mexico - some reviewer called it the "greasy side of film noir." That pretty much describes it. I'd like to say that I enjoyed last night's viewing but... no... I didn't, really.

My son called my attention to a book entitled Mail Order Mysteries. These are, of course, the advertisements of dubious and non-existent worth I grew up looking at in the backs of comic books. Even as an eight year-old I wouldn't have fallen for the X-Ray Specs ad. I did, however, fall for the "Jet Rocket Space Ship X-1 - the Most Sensational Toy in America" for $4.98. It was a massive disappointment, which I describe here. The one that really captured my imagination - and still does, to a lesser extent - is the 1967 "Win this full size Gemini Spacecraft" contest by Revell. To this day whenever I visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in D.C., I gaze into the interior of the Mercury capsule with longing. I wanted so badly to be John Glenn! The Gemini one would be great: I could wire it up to "operate" and me and a grandchild could sit and play in it. That would be heaven on earth, without a doubt. Feed the kid freeze-dried spacefood lunches, install a computer monitor with space scenes for the windows... make the dashboard lights and switches do things... We don't need three spare bedrooms, do we? Can't we get by with two?

Tomorrow me and the pards (or the pard if Chris' kids don't get over their colds) attend the annual Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade. (The last two: 2010, 2009.) The weather forecast is tolerable: "Except for a few afternoon clouds, mainly sunny. High 52F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph." Not quite greatcoat weather but not entirely woolen sack coat weather, either. I may be cold. Perhaps I'll bring a warm shirt to wear under my sack coat...

I am hoping to hear a twilight concert by the Federal City Brass Band tomorrow - in the last few years they have been playing little impromptu concerts at the top of Little Round Top. They play authentic band arrangements of Civil War music using authentic period instruments. It is very cool. This time I hope to get an iPhone video of a performed song I can share with you.

Have a great weekend!

17 Nov 2011

2011-11-17T08:45:00.003-05:00

Wow, I had an odd dream last night. Before I describe it, however, I shall mention that I am never entirely happy with the result of describing dreams in this blog. I read them later and go, "Gak! Why did I put that in?" Nevertheless, I shall forge on.

Somehow or another I had been indirectly involved with the accidental murder of a person (I didn't do it, but I was an accessory), and it had been decided that we would hide the body in the back seat of a car and park the car in a small room of a big freezer warehouse facility. When it had been done, one of the guys said to me, "Are you in?" (Meaning, "Do we keep this secret?") And I reluctantly said "Yes," knowing that I would be haunted by guilt about it for the rest of my life. It had occurred to me that I had seen enough films noir to realize that you cannot escape your past, and unconfessed, unrepentant sins weigh you down as if you were carrying a leaden knapsack. I was happy to have awakened and realized that it was just a dream, and that I had no leaden knapsack of buried crimes. In other words, it was a dream about guilt. It probably was based upon the film I watched the night before.

I watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). I wasn't expecting much - the third X-Men film sucked out loud - so I was agreeably surprised. It was good. I won't be watching it again (I am sort of burned out with comic book movies), but it was okay. Wolverine and Sabertooth in the American Civil War - hahaha!

I have a photo album called the "drop box" where I can send shots from my camera to my Picasa site - here it is. It's a collection of odd and interesting stuff I see; I use my cell phone camera for these, mostly. Anyway, check out this tree. Interesting, huh? A totally natural sunburst finish on a tree!

I was also struck by a clever Steve Jobs/Apple display in the atrium of the Patent and Trademark Office, where I work. As I mentioned before, I am reading the third in Arthur C. Clark's "Space Odyssey" series. It occurred to me that a blank standing iPhone (in black, not white) bears a resemblance to Clarke's Monolith. Was this intentional, I wonder?

Ahhhh.... I see I'm not the only person who thought this.

Yesterday we got the Meredith wedding Las Vegas photographer's DVD in the mail, so I'll be spending a few hours going though those, Photoshopping my see-through hair, making prints and reformatting shots for web use. I may have them up tomorrow.

On the drive into work this morning I listened to the 1973 James Brown song Doin' It to Death aka Gonna Have a Funky Good Time, an unusual tune. It's not much a song as it is a beat with a really good bass (Bootsy Collins?) accompanied by James talking to members of his band - with a great trumpet solo. And, of course, Brown's unique and odd vocalizations: "I need a grit/Got the grit/Got a job/Need a job..." then he drops it and starts chatting with this trumpet player. What a great act!

I've loaded a free Mahjong solitaire app onto my iPhone; I used to play a PC version of this game. It's a fun way of wasting a few minutes. The problem, however, is getting all those tiles onto a small iPhone screen and being able to differentiate them without powerful reading glasses! My interest is partly the game and partly the cryptic and interesting glyphs on the tiles. How old is majong? Nobody is sure.

I am also becoming a bit frustrated with my iPhone chess app. Putting the difficulty slider bar in one position means I can never beat the machine. Backing it off from that setting one tiny little bit means that it makes dumb mistakes and I can beat it fairly easily. I may have to buy a better app.

It's time for new shoes for baby. We went to COSTCO last night to look at a set of four tires for the VW. Bridgestones are on sale; Michelins (what I prefer) are available for about $50 more. I have almost 44,000 miles on the Michelins which came new with the car - not bad. The last time I bought a new VW in January 1975, it came with a crappy set of Continentals which lasted me about 20,000 miles. In general, by the way, my 2007 VW has been solid and trouble free. No major mechanical problems for 4 1/2 years - nice. (I had a couple of minor things which were fixed under warranty.) Even nicer: the car is paid for. Every now and then I get a postcard from the dealership trying to sell me the newly-designed 2012 VW Beetle. As nice as it would be to have the greater acceleration a turbo provides, the fact that we're not making car payments means so much more. And they haven't introduced the convertible version yet, so no dice. I really like the top down driving.

16 Nov 2011

2011-11-16T09:24:00.002-05:00

I watched Cloverfield (2008) last night. It was okay, kind of. It's sort of a cinema verite Godzilla as told with The Blair Witch Project shaky cam. The plot can be summed up easily: a cocktail party of annoying twentysomethings ("Yo. Hey. What's up? Totally. Yo. Dude. Whatever.") is interrupted by aliens, who fling bits of New York City and the Statue of Liberty around. The government retaliates by destroying what's left of Manhattan. No big loss either way, really. Obviously, I was unmoved. The usual Hollywood tropes are in place, including a male being rescued by a spunky, physical, bellicose female (does Hollywood recognize any other kind?) and obvious product placement (the escapees linger around a Sephora storefront and use Aquafina water as first aid).

When I saw the Blair Witch Project back in 1999 I was intrigued because the filmmakers had managed to do a new thing: tell a story in a new way (via the plot device of "recovered" films). I also appreciated that the scares and bogeymen in that film were suggested or imagined, rather than explicitly seen. I always like that... it engages the viewer to use his imagination and thus become a part of the production. (Old-timers insist that radio was better than television because of this.) I had an idea that in its way, Blair Witch was a ground-breaking film. And so it has proven to be... Cloverfield and Gang Tapes, for two, owe a debt of gratitude to the earlier film.

And as for product placement in films, I would like Congress to pass a law requiring that identification of commercial sponsors be posted during the closing credits. Why? Because producers and directors don't want to do that. They like the little bubble of "artistic quality" they grant themselves and each other... I say phooey. If you're getting money from Taco Bell or Mentos for promotional consideration/product placement during your modern day reimagining of Love's Labors Lost or Dante's Inferno, I say fess up. You know, that Obama mantra: transparency.

After Cloverfield I returned to the real world and watched another episode of The Wonder Years, a breezy, fun and frequently thought-provoking half-hour. I mentioned yesterday that the junior high scenes were filmed at Muir. As it turned out it's the Burbank school where two - not one - of my best friends attended, and Kevin's locker was a row or two down from my pal Mike's when he attended there. As easy as it is to mentally insert myself into scenes with a twelve year-old Kevin, this makes it even easier. The show is about me and my friends. It is not for nothing that I have included the voice over from the final episode on the main page of my Avocado Memories (scroll down).

My next film is X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009); I'm guessing that I won't exactly fall in love with this flick, either. But it's an easy-to-check-out-and-return DVD from the nearby library. I'm trying to find Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (2004); I've seen it on the library shelves. Why? Because Korean-American comic Bobby Lee is in it - I like him. And, to be honest, I'm hoping to provoke a, "Dad, I can't believe you watched that!" comment from one of my kids, the way I did when I found a VHS copy of Clerks (1994) at a yard sale. I didn't like it, but I have a certain satisfaction in having seen it and thereby knowing who Jay and Silent Bob (pictured above) are. I also surprised my son and myself when I watched Trainspotting (1996 - another yard sale VHS), a thoroughly discreditable and irresponsible film which, as it turned out, I liked. Is it possible to make a worthwhile film which celebrates crime, drug abuse and a contemptible lifestyle? Yes - but only if it's British. I am SUCH an Anglophile...

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you will know that I tend to favor classic art - the kind of thing they require you to read, listen to or look at in school. I actually like this stuff! Shakespeare, Euripides, Vaughan Williams, Klee, Bartok, Homer... but I occasionally go slumming. When you think about it, the entire film noir genre - which I have spent many hours and much energy with - is a pretty dumbed-down pursuit. The source material for noir is usually pulp fiction, after all. It's just that since about the Seventies, critics have intellectualized film essays on the subject. When Gaby Rodgers opens the "great whatzit" at the end of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly, it isn't a sophisticated mid-century cultural essay about the paranoia consequent to the Atomic Age. Contemporary viewers would have simply taken it to be a big explosion. The director, Robert Aldrich, would be amazed at the scholarly text which has been produced about his little thriller movie since it was released in 1955.

15 Nov 2011

2011-11-15T09:01:00.005-05:00

I mentioned that my wife's friend's funeral was last weekend; here's a eulogy Cari wrote. I added some photos from our scrapbook. We will miss Pam.

I am now reading Arthur C. Clarke's 2061: odyssey three. I read the first in his trilogy, 2001, in 1968 just after I saw the movie. I was thoroughly perplexed by the film and, like the rest of America, wanted to know what the heck was going on. Undeterred by the fact that 2001 was nothing like Clarke envisioned it, I read the next installment, 2010, in 1984, just after I graduated from college. I also saw the movie; it was okay. It had nothing like the impact of Stanley Kubrick's magnum opus, of course... And, undeterred by the fact that 2010 was also nothing like Clarke envisioned it, I am starting this final volume. (Final because Clarke is dead. But perhaps I'm being premature, and some other author will be hired to write equally wrong forecasts of what the future will be like.)

I used to like science fiction more than I do now. For instance, as a boy I liked the original Star Trek series. A franchise that started out capturing The Wonder of It All (which is very much at the heart of good sci-fi) degenerated into Business as Usual, Except in Space by the time that Enterprise, the last series in the franchise, came around.

The other night I watched a favorite original series episode on Netflix streaming, The Cloud Minders (1969), as tarted up by the Paramount special effects team in 2006 for a 40th anniversary remastering reissue. In the original series episodes, whatever planet the Enterprise happened to be orbiting looked kind of murky. Now the planets look much more credible - and so does the Enterprise. While the story and acting behind the The Cloud Minders is badly dated and rather corny, I've always liked the idea of Stratos, the Cloud City. The original effect was pretty primitive. It got the idea across, but that was it. However, I am happy to say that in its new guise Stratos is much more impressive: Image one, image two - a place I'd very much like to visit. Good work, guys!

I should mention in passing that a feature of this particular episode is a little musical cue, a fanfare and an arpeggiated harp chord, which plays whenever the city is shown. I've always liked that, too.

In the story, the city of Stratos is dedicated to the genteel life, and is the repository of art, beauty and refinement. When I was younger I always thought of the Brand Library in Glendale - "El Miradero" - as being like that. Unlike the other branches, its holdings were specifically based on the Arts. I always felt at home there. I wrote up a little homage to the place. Whenever I visit Burbank I try to make it up there, look around, and do a little contented sigh. I wish we had such a library near where I live now.

One last thing about The Cloud Minders: At the end, as the cast credits flashed by, I cynically commented that, "...none of the guest actors were ever seen in anything else." How wrong I was! I didn't recognize him as a bearded older man, but the part of the High Advisor of Stratos - the chief guest starring role - was played by Jeff Corey. Who's he? In addition to being a sometime film noir actor, he was one of the most influential actors in Hollywood via his acting school. I have blogged about him before; here is his IMDb bio.

I watched the pilot episode of The Wonder Years last night. Given that its known as being a well-written and well-acted production, that the protagonist is supposed to be my age and grew up when I did (he's twelve in 1968) and that the thing is often set in Burbank (I recognized the Verdugo Hills right away in a street shot), I should watch all the episodes, I suppose. The IMDb says the school shots were filmed at John Muir Junior High in Burbank, where my pal Mike went, and John Burroughs High School, the rival school to Burbank High, where we attended. As I've mentioned before, that's the nice thing about being from Burbank - you see your home town in the Media a lot.

Funny story: I maintain an e-mail address, "wes@wesclark.com," via my website as a permanent address. It auto-forwards to an address I always check frequently. It stopped working recently, and people trying to send e-mails to me on it were telling me that they were getting responses back saying that the mailbox was full. So I checked. Ha! I hit my 300 MB mailbox limit on it with 37,000 e-mails - all of them spam and junk mail. So I contacted the web hosting service, who cleared it out and enabled some spam and virus filters I didn't know I had. Problem solved. Can you imagine? 37,000 male enhancement e-mails? Sheesh.

14 Nov 2011

2011-11-14T08:07:00.007-05:00

The events of my past three day weekend for your reading enjoyment (next time, consider improving the level of your reading):

Attended the funeral of our friend Pam; my wife was asked to speak and told some funny anecdotes of our times with her. In general, of course, it was a sad affair and caused us all to reflect upon our own mortality.

There was a "Spirit of the Civil War" concert I attended at the NOVA Alexandria campus. It featured Civil War music and slide shows... it was generally good, except that it was talky. If you are producing a program with notes to hand out, there is no need to repeat the notes at the start of each piece. The best piece was a number for brass band called "The Blue and the Gray," arranged during the centennial back in the 1960's. The least successful was the inevitable reading of the Sullivan Ballou letter while an augmented brass band played "Ashokan Farewell," from the 1989 Ken Burns TV special. (This is not a piece that is contemporary with the war, although people think it is. It was, in fact, written in 1982.) They should have throttled back the accompaniment to a quartet - with full band it sounded like the Narrator vs. the Brass Band. The brass band won that Civil War skirmish easily.

With the power I invest in myself, I hereby declare Yard Sale season to be OVER. The Little Red School House near me was open again, but this was just the stuff they couldn't sell last Saturday. Nothing new. I bought one book at another sale: a treatise about Monopoly strategy and tactics.

I was mesmerized and haunted by the rediscovery of a commercial jingle from my youth: the 1965 Polaroid Swinger jingle, sung by none other than Barry Manilow. Here is the link. Hey! Meet the Swinger! Polaroid Swinger! Open carefully... once this dratted melody gets into your head it doesn't want to leave! And yes, the brunette with the long straight hair is a pre-Love Story Ally McGraw.

Sometimes I dwell on the oddest things... this past weekend it was Bugles, Daisys and Whistles. I explain it all on today's Avocado Memories update here.

My wife and I watched the British television production of My Boy Jack (2007), an excellent work about Rudyard Kipling's son in World War I. It stars Harry Potter.

I also watched a bunch of other stuff...a documentary about building cathedrals (did you know Amiens Cathedral is falling to pieces because they didn't put the flying buttresses in the right places?), a documentary about the Great Financial Crash of 1929, a rather boring work about how D.C. Comics came to be, and, most interestingly, Kimjongilia (2009), wherein North Korean refugees talk about conditions within the realm of the "Dear Leader."

What a wretched, pathetic, miserable excuse for a man Kim Jong-il is! He's in the same category inhabited by Fidel Castro: the sooner he dies, the happier millions of people will be. Want to see a simple depiction of life under capitalism vs. life under communism? Here it is, a satellite view of the two Koreas at night. The South is lit, ready for business and booming. Vibrant. The North is dark and benighted, just like their government. Says it all.

Short of military action or diplomatic sanctions, what can those of us in Western democracies do about tyrants while waiting for them to die? Laugh at them, of course. I used to love Bobby Lee's Kim Jong-il segments on Mad TV: here's a good one, The Kim Jong-il Show.

I also played around with my iPhone some; learned how to take videos and post them directly to youtube. Video one, video two, Video three. Obviously, I need to work on production. Next time I promise I'll have an upgraded wardrobe, too. I also bought an app which allows me to display my .ged genealogical data - all 4,500+ names and 2,000+ families. I no longer have to lug my laptop with me when I do research - all my notes and data are on my cell phone!

11/11/11

2011-11-11T08:04:00.012-05:00

Veterans Day! And since I'm a federal employee, I have the day off. I felt the need to do a blog entry, however, to observe the date, 11/11/11 - the latest in a twelve year series of repeating dates I first commented upon in a rugby club e-mail on 01-01-01, more than a decade ago. And also to comment.

Veterans... what is there to say other than "thank you?" We literally owe them everything. The best expression of this is a quote which I insert here every year: "It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag." - Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC.

So true!

Last night I watched a documentary film about soldiers serving in Afghanistan, but, being oddball me and wanting a twist on the subject, I watched a production about Danish soldiers. Danes in Afghanistan? Yes, indeed, Denmark is our ally on the Global War on Terror and sends military units to serve. The film was Armadillo (2010), and it was excellent. The title is taken from the name of the fortified camp where a unit of Danes spent a six month tour serving alongside British troops. It is a good companion piece to Restrepo (2010), if you've seen that.

There's are interesting scenes at the start where parents bid their sons goodbye. Someone asks, "I don't know why Denmark is involved in this," or words to that effect. This is easily answered: because terrorism in New York City, Washington, D.C. or London can easily become terrorism in Copenhagen. Or Madrid, Paris, Athens or Rome. Radical Islamic terrorists hate secular Europe and will attack wherever a target presents itself and they are ready.

And so veterans answer the call and the young become new veterans. It's a quote that Plato may or may not have have said, but it is attributed to him: "Only the dead have seen an end to war." It has the sort of truthful, self-assured finality I attribute to classical Greek thinking... I certainly believe it.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all get along on a global basis? Certainly, it seems to be the case that war is becoming unpopular, if this graph is true. (Or it could be the case that modern war results in comparatively fewer deaths but more wounding? I don't know.) But despite the apparent fact that free democracies are reluctant to wage war on each other, there will always be some tin horn dictator, some tyrant, some historical grudge between peoples or some lust for empire which will prevent a perfect peace. And so the veteran takes his place among society's essential citizens.

My thoughts this year turn especially to the matters of war and peace because last month my youngest daughter married a young man who is scheduled to be commissioned in the Army to serve. The matters of war and peace move directly into my extended household, in other words. No telling where he will be deployed. As Chris has been assigned to serve within the Army Signal Corps, it appears that his first stop will be in Georgia for training; that's where the Signal Corps has its headquarters. After that, who knows? Only the Army's planners.

My mind is also occupied on matters of life and death, as well. A dear friend of my wife's died earlier this week - the viewing is this evening and the funeral is tomorrow. The family are longtime church associates and friends of ours; I had their youngest son in my Cub pack and Scout troop back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

So Happy Veterans Day to all vets! God bless you!

10 Nov 2011

2011-11-10T08:57:00.005-05:00

Happy Birthday United States Marine Corps! 236 years young today. The Nobel Committee are fools: There is simply no better peace program on earth than U.S. Marines armed to the teeth.

I had a dream last night where I was at a party and a woman asked me what my I.Q. was. I said, "That's rather a personal question, don't you think? But to answer it, my I.Q. is high enough for me to appreciate symphonic music but not high enough to give me a swollen head about it." Good answer; I wish I was that glib when I'm awake!

My business trip to Boyers, PA was fun. The Annandale mine was created in 1902 and abandoned in the mid-1950's, when a company decided to buy it to house archival information. The successor to that company is Iron Mountain, Inc., the current owners. Whizzing around in the mine in a golf cart reminded me partially of the Snow White ride at Disneyland (heigh-ho!) and partially of an old episode of Dr. Who which takes place underground. Speaking of Disney, they have a storage area there; their door has their castle logo painted thereupon. The original Snow White film - in addition to many others - is housed within. Check out this video - you can see who else has a presence there.
We got a data center tour (the company is eager to sell data center space). When you think about it, the place is ideally suited to such a use. The rock walls stay at 55 degrees year-round - they act as a perfect heat-sink, in other words. And there's a lake above the mine with all the chilled water you would need. It's like the Lord is saying, "Build here."

Like most other travelers on the Pennsy Turnpike, we stopped in Breezewood, PA, one of the most charmless areas on the East coast. It's primarily a truck stop. How do I describe it? Take every crass food franchise, hotel chain and gas station and condense them - and their signage - into a retail strip district about a mile long. That's Breezewood. Nevertheless, the place does have some interest... read about its history here. Business Week stated in 1991, Breezewood is "perhaps the purest example yet devised of the great American tourist trap...the Las Vegas of roadside strips, a blaze of neon in the middle of nowhere, a polyp on the nation's interstate highway system." Precisely. I sent my friend Mike a postcard!

My son likes the place because they sell fireworks.

Here's what I saw recently:

They Live (1988) - An odd and funny little sci-fi flick about space invaders living among us. WWE wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper stars. He can only see the invaders as they really are with special sunglasses. And guess what? These aliens are Reagan Republicans! It's director John Carpenter's really lame attempt to criticise what he saw as the evils of 1980's affluence. (Not to fear, Obama would help solve that problem decades later...) It also stars Meg Foster, she of the uncanny slate gray eyes. She doesn't portray an alien, however... she just looks like one.

Maxed Out (2006) - A left wing diatribe about predatory lending. How does one deal with predatory lending? Don't borrow from predatory lenders, maybe? In this all the bad guys are Republicans and all the good guys are Democrats including, get this, Chris Dodd and Eliot Spitzer! Hahaha! What's even funnier is that this production greatly laments the rise of government debt. (It was made in 2006; Bush was in office and therefore it was a safe criticism.) I wonder if the producers would totally ignore the Obama years in an update? Anyway, I quit watching after about 40 minutes. Crap.

Magnificent Desolation (2005) - I wouldn't have thought it possible to make a boring production about walking on the moon, but this one succeeds. I guess you need to see it in 3-D and in the original IMAX format. It isn't very impressive otherwise.

Einstein's Big Idea (2005) - A docudrama about everyone's favorite equation, E=mc squared. I liked it as it dealt with Faraday's work with electromagnetism and Lavoisier's work with the conservation of mass, both of which played into Einstein's insights about space and time and their interconnectedness. Einstein cheated on his first wife; I guess one of his other insights was that marriage vows were binding only in a relative sense. With his enlightened views about sex and morality, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that Einstein was a political liberal - in fact, a socialist. Yet another example of really intelligent people holding really dumb views. Thank heavens we're not all as smart as Albert Einstein!

Time to give some credit and attention to an otherwise neglected basso, Thurl Ravenscoft. He was cool for so many reasons:

1.) He was the voice of the original Tony the Tiger.

2.) He sings the basso signature song Asleep in the Deep better than anyone. Check out that descending passage leading to that last note - wow! (His rendition of A Life on the Ocean Waves is also great.)

3.) He's one of the singing busts in the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland.

4.) He sang You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch.

5.) By all accounts he was a nice guy, active in his church and married to the same woman for 53 years to her death.

6.) That name, "Thurl Ravenscroft," is unsurpassably cool.

8 Nov 2011

2011-11-07T11:30:00.004-05:00

No update today or tomorrow. I'm visiting this place.

7 Nov 2011

2011-11-07T09:08:00.003-05:00

Well, I was disappointed by the U.S. Navy. The tuba/euphonium concert didn't come off. They did a substitution of a woodwind quintet instead. I mean, it was good... but I wanted to hear tubas! Even worse, Chris brought his family out for this - no tubas. So we left early...

Yard sales were good: I bought three classical CDs, two LPs and a book (every New Yorker cartoon ever printed). I also got a Tower of London keepsake: a CD of a Yeoman Warder describing some of the stories attached to the place. Quite nice. One of the Lps is Tennessee Ernie Ford singing Confederate Civil War songs (which, as it turns out, I already have - I need the Union one, now) and a 1977 Lp by Charo (depicted) - the wet tee shirt cover. "Cuchi-cuchi?" Mine is autographed by Charo!

We had to have our new Hyundai towed on Saturday: Cari got into the car and it wouldn't start. Fortunately it's covered by warranty but it's still a bummer. The service tech thinks it's a malfunctioning brake switch.

My daughter Meredith got herself a generation 4 iPhone on Saturday, so now we can do Face Time conversations - nice.

By the way, I added some of the professional photographer's D.C. and Virginia reception photographs here. They're in the last rows.

I watched some movies:

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008) - The tale of an influential but down and out rock band attempting to recapture their early Eighties fame. This was pretty funny. It's best described as a true life version of Spinal Tap. In fact, the comparisons are uncanny: Stonehenge, a knob that goes to eleven, redemption via Japanese audiences... even a (non-combustible) drummer named Robb Reiner. A lot of fun. One of the better rock and roll movies I have ever seen.

The Kings of Pastry (2009) - This, too, was excellent. It's about a high-level pastry bake-off in France for entry into the MOF (Meilleur Ouvrier de France), the Best of the Best, in other words. The sugar pulling and baking these guys were doing was simply incredible. What seemed especially hard-hearted was the requirement to move the brittle and breakable finished products from the kitchen to a judging area; talk about nerve-wracking.

The Wolfman (2010) - I am a fan of the 1941 original, and so wasn't really keen on watching this remake. But... it was better than I thought it would be, despite some modern day Hollywoodisms. (For one, Anthony Hopkins is in it, so you know automatically he has a major part in the plot. The rule is, if a major star is in the film, he isn't a secondary character. See the Ian Holm Jack the Ripper film.) It looked great and it appears that Universal has treated one of its properties well. I enjoyed it. Funny thing is, Ebert calls this a "date film." Huh? It might be if your date doesn't object to seeing guts and body parts flung about. Unlike the 1941 original, which had to conform to the standards of its time, this is a very bloody, gory film.

Plymptoons (1991) - The handmade cartoons of Bill Plympton. I've heard of him but have never seen any of his work. I was not especially impressed.

A Day at the Races (1937) - The Marx Brothers classic with comedy, musical performances, slapstick, singing tenors, an elaborate Negro dance production and a Busby Berkley-style water carnival. They threw everything they had into these old flicks! I remain staggered by the convention of Groucho's painted on big moustache and enormous eyebrows. People stare right at him but nobody ever comments on them during the productions. Weird!

Roxy Music Live at the Apollo 2003 - I've always liked this band and this was an excellent concert video. They're a Seventies/Eighties band, but in 2003 were still credible. Great songs... they have a solid back catalog of stuff to play.

4 Nov 2011

2011-11-04T09:06:00.005-04:00

The Face Time feature on the iPhone is a great way to stay in touch!

Yesterday I mentioned Scared Straight!, the famous 1978 documentary about wayward teens visiting the Rahway, NJ maximum security prison and getting yelled at by lifers (murderers, drug dealers, thieves and the like). The update section on the DVD asserts that only one of the teens is today in prison - oddly enough, the young man who predicted that his career would be crime. Well... that's not quite true.

In the original documentary a scrawny teenage boy with large, soulful eyes - Angelo Speziale - made his appearance in prison; in the update he is shown playing ball with his kids and described as being stable and happily married. (Despite the fact that he's had a few run-ins with the law subsequent to his prison visit as a teen.) He repeatedly asserted that the Scared Straight! experience reformed him. However, it turns out that Mr. Speziale is indeed speziale.* Earlier this year DNA evidence provided Bergen County police with the ammunition to convict him for the 1982 rape and murder of his next door neighbor. (Details here.) So, guess where he is now. That's right, the Rahway prison he visited as a teen. Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.

Last night I watched In the Shadow of the Stars (1991), about the more or less unsung folks who sing in opera choruses, specifically, in this case, the San Francisco Opera. In any theatrical or performing arts troupe you're likely to find divas, drama queens, flamboyant extroverts and homosexual men ("theatre people," as Victorians sniffed), and this production was no exception. I liked the scenes where the sopranos are all gathered, chatting about opera. Some are Toscas, some are Carmens. Intelligent, pretty female musicians - what fun! The documentary pointed out that what most people don't know about opera choruses is, 1.) They are professional musicians and many can also be solo artists, 2.) Like the stars, they, too, have to know how to act on stage, and, 3.) It is paid work. They don't do it for free. It was interesting and I will never again view an opera chorus quite the same way.

Did I mention that we now have a freshly sodded new lawn? Indeed we do. Here it is. Home improvement continues. Hopefully we won't have the enormous dandelion crop this spring we normally do. Who is "Albo?" A Republican running for Virginia state representative in our district. We normally don't put political signs up at our house but Dave is different because he requested that I play bass in a musical rock ensemble in his annual "Albopalooza" fund-raiser. (But I'm not.)

It looks like I'm going to have to move government bureaucrats off their hind ends for my benefit; never an easy job. Back in 1993 I paid nearly $1,000 to "buy back" my four years in the Marine Corps in order to improve my retirement benefit; I have a photocopy of the paperwork and the front of the check. (Sadly, I do not have a photocopy of a canceled check, or the check itself.) Unfortunately, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), doesn't have a record of this, which suggests that my agency screwed up somehow. So now I have to have personnel office people investigate. If I buy it back now it will be over $2,400 due to interest. It's still worth it, but grrrr. I may have to initiate a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request... a little voice in my head is telling me that this will ultimately be fruitless. And this is the organization that people want to run their health care?

The weekend approacheth! Sunny weather tomorrow for yard sales; in fact, I know of a number of flea market type activities being held in indoor venues. The season is winding down fast - tomorrow might be it until March.

Tomorrow night the U.S. Navy Band is putting on a Tuba/Euphonium quartet (shown above) performance near where I live. They are described as being an international "driving force in low brass music." Huzzah! This I want to hear! My pard Chris, who used to play the tuba, may or may not be going.

I wish the Navy had one of those clever four man saxophone ensembles, like the kind you hear on Main St. at Disneyland... I like those sonorities. Next time I go I'm going to make a point of finding out when they play so I can hear them live...

Have a great weekend!

* My little pun is not quite accurate. "Speziale" in Italian means "apothecary," not special. But I couldn't resist.

3 Nov 2011

2011-11-03T09:39:00.003-04:00

My wife and I finished the Edward VII series last night with the last DVD - Good Old Teddy! Excellent series - on Netflix DVD. Recommended.

I also watched as much of Young@Heart (2007) as I could take. It's a documentary about a geriatric choir who sings rock songs. At the start of the film a little old lady with a cane totters up to the microphone on a stage in a packed hall, screams, and, with her British dialect and an interrogative speaking/singing style (the Germans called it sprechstimme), begins the punk song Should I stay or should I go? What gives this particular choir its uniqueness - in addition to the fact that their average age is around 80 - is that none of them are professional musicians. It's an hour and a half work that really merits about an hour; that's about when I tuned out. The trailer is here, if you'd like to see a group of old folks sing Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze.

I also watched the 1978 classic Scared Straight!, wherein a group of wayward teens are led into a prison - a New Jersey prison, no less - and are screamed at by inmates. The murderers and lifers describe (in graphic language) day to day existence around the prison, and what generally happens to handsome young men as they arrive as newcomers. Would a convicted murderer screaming in my face about anal sex have a transformative effect on my developing life of crime? Oh, yes. There's also a "twenty years later" update describing what happened to the teens and the inmates as time went by. One became a preacher; nearly all reformed after the experience. It seems that a high proportion of the inmates later died of AIDS - go figure. Wikipedia link here.

Yesterday I mentioned MadTV; wikipedia has what sounds like a funny skit based on Scared Straight!: "On Mad TV, Will Sasso & Aries Spears play as two convicts in a program called "Scared Straight Anywhere" in which they are used to scare people straight literally anywhere such as at a business meeting, a Boy Scout meeting and Hollywood." Ha ha ha!

The Jersey girls who showed up to prison that day were scared to death and decided to avoid a repeat of the experience in their subsequent lives. Thing is, however, they all turned into scary middle-aged Jersey women with strange hairstyles. And is there anything an unmelodious as that heavy, working class Jersey/New York dialect? I think not. My Dad was from Brooklyn but he never used "dese" and "dems" - thank goodness.

I just finished reading a fascinating chapter in my Michael Wood book about England; it's about a house in Devon, built in 1619 upon earlier foundations. Wood did some research on the surrounding area and it appears that the house sits within what was a Roman fort. And, even earlier, Neolithic finds were recovered in the area. There is such a long continuity of use in places in England - it's immensely interesting to me. I shall never forget visiting the wonderful Guildhall Art Gallery in the "Square Mile" in London - and then finding that the remains of a Roman amphitheatre was in the basement level! An amazing place...

iPhone apps: I think AP wins the news feed app war over Fox and CBS. But why confine myself to just one? I can create a folder called "News" and put all three in here. User configurability is one of the great advances in recent computer devices, I think. Yesterday, on a shuttle bus to and from facilities at work, I played chess on my iPhone. The software is interactive in that it increases its playing ability to match yours. It was doing stupid things like giving up the queen in peril, but it has now stopped doing that and is getting harder to beat.

The iPhone protective case I ordered via amazon.com came in the mail yesterday, but they sent me the wrong item. So a call to one of their reps (a South African; I commiserated with him the recent loss of the Springboks to achieve the Rugby World Cup) set things right. Or at least I think it has... we shall see.

2 Nov 2011

2011-11-02T08:42:00.005-04:00

We got a 617 page Restoration Hardware catalog last week; surely the magnum opus of catalogs. It's the type of thing not seen since the glory days of the Sears catalog. What struck me about it as I thumbed through it one morning while eating my corn flakes was that it is composed of 617 pages of cheerless, drab, depressing rooms of a severely limited color palette, all dark browns, grays, blacks and off-whites. No cheery reds, greens, oranges, purples or yellows anywhere that I could see. An occasional beige-toned room, but that's it. Their signature color now seems to be slate. Is this seriously what's in? People want to live in homes which look like Tim Burton movie sets?

I think I have this figured out: Restoration Hardware is currently helmed by a fellow named Gary Friedman - but he's really Killer Bob from Twin Peaks. He just got a haircut so he'd look more corporate. The whole idea of those depressing interiors is to spread misery and despair throughout the country, just as Killer Bob did in the little city of Twin Peaks. (Garmonbozia, if you remember the show's lore. And I don't expect you do - you'd have to be as weird as I am for that. So I provide a link.) So just remember, the next time you step into a Restoration Hardware store and enter into one of those lachrymose interiors: smile and laugh. They hate that.

Speaking of laughter ("Does anyone remember laughter?" as Robert Plant once asked in the Led Zeppelin live album), last night I was watching some hilarious episodes of the late, lamented MadTV's "The Lillian Vernor Game Show" sketches. It is a signal bit of unfairness that MadTV is off the air but its pallid competitor Saturday Night Live is still broadcasting episodes of shallow wit. Here, check out these Lillian Verner sketches:

Lots of Crap to give away
The contestant with no chin
the Segway episode
Survivor Probst as host

There are more; look on youtube.

The comedian who puts this sketch over the top is, of course, Michael Hitchcock as Simian Dyson, the hopped-up announcer. He also served as a writer on the show.

Last night I watched two documentaries, one female and one male, if you will. The female one was Tupperware!, a PBS American Experience production about the invention, promotion and, especially, sales of this iconic American product. It specifically dealt with the efforts of Brownie Wise, the energetic and charismatic sales executive who developed the "party plan" system. A fun documentary! Like every other household in America, we have some Tupperware. My wife insists that there is no better product for the storage of staple foods. As a follow up show I wanted to watch the Eerie, Indiana episode "Forever Ware" about the kid who sleeps in a Tupperware vault and never ages, but Cari declined and went to bed.

That left me to watch The Matador (2008) myself. The DVD cover has, "Barbaric, Elegant, Primitive, Erotic, Revolting, Thrilling... more drama than most blockbusters!" - Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times. The whole title is, "The Matador - A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Triumph and Love" - not to mention superlative phrasing! Seriously, however, this production was excellent. Watching it, I felt as I did the first time I watched a televised rugby match or read a Greek tragedy: I could really like this. It's called bullfighting, but the common error people make is in thinking it's a sport. It isn't. It's the ritualized killing of an animal bred for the purpose. What makes a bull ring different from a slaughterhouse, however, is the fact that the bull can fight back and kill or maim the matador.

Yes, yes, I know, it's not politically correct at all, and the PETA people hate it. (Which is reason enough for me to like it.) In the film someone says "Spain without bullfighting is inconceivable," and I agree. I shall not defend the indefensible; it's savage and a bit revolting. But it is also fascinating. There is something primitive and grand about a man dispatching an animal many times his weight and strength. True, the bull is exhausted by the time the matador finishes him off. But he's still dangerous. And it's the danger that makes the thing so fascinating. I am also intrigued by the fact that advertising is not allowed in the bull ring... good for the Spanish!

The film centered on the career of David Fandila, "El Fandi" (shown above), a young man every bit as athletic as the most advanced professional rugger.

For years I have wanted to see a bullfight. I'm told that you can take a bus in Southern California into Tijuana to see one; the bus returns later that day. The next time I visit Los Angeles and Burbank I plan to check it out... Ole!

1 Nov 2011

2011-11-01T09:10:00.002-04:00

The first of November... what some reenactor friends and I used to call "Cranky Season." The days get shorter, there are no more outdoor events to do and, with me, I think, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) starts to set in and the world seems a less cheery place. And this coming weekend we go back to standard time, which means go to work before the sun's up and come home as it's setting. UGH. Certainly last night was a bummer; Halloween is no fun without kids. I thought of all the Halloweens I did 1985-2003, taking a kid or kids from door to door, and sighed. I miss that.

I'm playing around with the apps for my iPhone; I'm looking for a good news app. Right now I'm trying Fox, CBS and AP. MSNBC is out of the question - they're way too liberal. While I like the "look" of the CBS app (I have always liked their television eye logo - I'm glad they never changed it), the Associated Press app seems to have a fuller and more unique set of links to news stories, which they seem to change more often. I'm not concerned about op-ed features, talking heads or videos (too many ads); I just want an app that will take me to the latest news and breaking news articles. News in detail I can get elsewhere. And yes, I have the Drudge app.

I am quite enjoying using the Face Time videoteleconferencing feature on my 4th generation iPhone. Last night my wife and I had a running conversation going on while my daughter Meredith was baking cookies; Chris showed us their new apartment. I have also Face Timed my high school friend Bob and my Civil War pard Don, as well as CW pard Chris, who has a non-iPhone smart phone. I use Tango for that and it seems to work okay. Bell Telephone heralded the videophone for the future all the way back in the 1964 World's Fair - it has finally come about.

It's funny. Back in 1994 or so, when we first exchanged e-mails across the Internet with one another, with a fine sense of occasion Don's first message to me was the famous 1844 message Samuel Morse telegraphed between Baltimore and Washington D.C.: "What Hath God Wrought?" Don't laugh... we take it for granted now, but e-mail was a big deal back in the early Nineties. I recall being astounded the first time I exchanged e-mails between with a Scotsman in Glasgow from my home PC. Anyway, when Don's face appeared on my smart phone I repeated this line and we both laughed. When they get full dimensional 3-D holographic telephony (the next obvious technological leap) going we can use it again. And then again when they get quantum displacement transportation worked out...

My son is encouraging me to get games on my iPhone, but the only one I have is chess. It's the only game I need. Free app. (I like "free.")

I also loaded the NASA app: that one has great photos. Ever since I was a kid I've been interested in the planets, and it seems I can never get enough of looking at photos of them. (I hope I see a good image of Pluto-Charon before I die.) And, of course, I got an astronomical app, Planet Finder. The way it works is that I can find a planet, star or constellation, hold the phone up and point it around until it's found. Or, conversely, hold the phone up to a star and it tells me which one it is - nice. I paid $2 for that one.

I am looking for a useful genealogical app... the ancestry.com app I tried repeatedly seems not to work at all. What I want is a carry-around reference to all 4,000 + names I've entered into my genealogical database. I may have to buy a .ged (a standard file format for genealogical data exchange) viewer for $4 or so.

There's a Nike-iPod app that came with the phone. I think it does timed exercise walks and plays your mp3s, and then figures out calories burned, or something like that. I'll play with that later this week. And I should get serious about losing weight again and find an app like the web page I used to use, where you enter in your age, weight, height and activity level and it tells you how many daily calories you need to confine yourself to to lose 1 or 2 pounds a week. That would be very useful to have. It just might kick start my interest again...

I loaded the Netflix app and actually watched a movie on my iPhone: Microcosmos: le peuple de l'herbe (1996), a rather astonishing film about insects using macro lens, incredible resolution and sensitive directional microphones. It seems somehow fitting to watch a film about the microscopic world on a cell phone. Like my wife I'm not a big fan of insects, and so seeing a spider pounce upon its prey and beetles warring against one another, etc., kind of made me fidget a bit. And there's a scene of mating snails set to what sounds like an opera aria by some soprano - that I could have done without. But all in all, an amazing film. Leave it to the French!

I was also able to download some of my own mp4 videos to the iPhone. This is cool because I can watch 50 years of family films and camcorder videotapes which I have previously digitized. The iPhone is only an 8 GB model, so I can't put them all on there. (I have over 300 GB of this material.) But I can load and watch them one at a time for use on planes, etc. Neat. I have my daughter's brilliant short comedy Dumpster Divers loaded as part of the permanent collection - ha!

Of course I loaded a flashlight app. And I also loaded a Wikipedia interface; I note that when I'm away from my computer the resource I most want to access is an encyclopedia, to answer questions. ("Let's see... when did Edward II reign?") I also loaded the Shazam app my son demonstrated for me - amazing thing. Cause it to "listen" to a song playing on the radio and it identifies it for you. How does it do that?

The rugby world needs a good iPhone app. The best one I could see is a England rugby app, but that's just one nation. I want an app that reports the scores of matches, etc. on a worldwide basis. The IRB - International Rugby Board - would seem to be the logical producer, but all there are from them are Rugby World Cup 2011 apps, and that's over.

WQXR, the New York City area-based classical station, has an app I've loaded, but I haven't listened to it much yet.

And that's about it for now. As with many of the things in my life I expect I'll be dorking around with iPhone apps for a while yet, and then move onto something else.

31 Oct 2011

2011-10-31T07:59:00.011-04:00

Trivia question: When was the last time John Lennon and Paul McCartney jammed with each other after the Beatles breakup, and where did it happen? London? New York City? The answer is in this link. And yes, as you might guess, it happened in Burbank or I wouldn't be asking.

We didn't get the huge Saturday snow storm that the Northeast did in Northern Virginia - we got rain all day, with big, wet snowflakes falling but not accumulating. As it was 40 degrees and rainy I didn't even try to look for yard sales. We stayed in the house just about all of the day and wrapped wedding gifts to ship to Meredith and worked on fixing the drywall around the master bath tub.

I watched a bunch of movies:

Night and Fog (1955) - A half-hour French documentary about the Holocaust, mixing present day shots of concentration camps with archival footage with narration. The most moving and gripping work on the subject I have ever seen.

I (Heart) Huckabees (2004) - This is a film like Napoleon Dynamite; it is reportedly difficult for the Netflix software to make predictions about whether or subscribers will like it, so for that reason I checked a copy out at the library - to see. The Netflix software, based on my 2,000 reviews of other films, predicted I'd give it one star. In other words, I'd hate it. I did. I got about twenty minutes into it and gave up. My wife lasted another ten minutes or so. We both agreed that it sucked. Silly nonsense; not funny at all.

Sputnik Declassified - A NOVA production about how the Russians initially won the first stage of the Space Race by putting a satellite in orbit. However, it is now apparent that Werner von Braun's team in the U.S. could have done so months earlier if Eisenhower had chosen. As it turns out, Eisenhower was very interested in getting cameras into space to spy upon the Russians, so he commissioned a Navy team to work on a satellite project - which failed. Von Braun's team, however, was successful. There was also a political concern: Eisenhower worried that the Russians might consider a satellite orbiting over Russia a violation of their airspace. However, the Russians did us a favor by launching Sputnik and making the whole subject moot. (If they can launch an orbiting satellite over many nations' airspaces, it must not be a problem, right? And thus a legal precedent was set.) An interesting production.

The Deer Hunter (1978) - A dreadful, dreadful movie. Overlong at three hours - the first hour is nothing but a wedding - it could and should have been edited into a 90 minute film.

The Russian roulette scenes were ridiculous... was this popular in Vietnam? Were there actually "professional" Russian roulette players? (And, if so, do they have long careers?) I think not. I got the distinct impression that the filmmaker actually wanted to make a film about Russian roulette, and overlaid Vietnam onto it as a supporting framework. Daft.

And DiNero's beard... what was that about? A decorated U.S. Army Ranger Sergeant wearing a beard with his full uniform? Please.

I wanted that three hours of my life back after seeing this. And yet - this stinker won five Academy Awards. Why? I think I know: it was the first big budget production about Vietnam to be made by Hollywood, and the adulation was more due to guilty emotions about the war than to the quality of the film. In other words, the director happened to have the right subject matter at the right time. But it's awful. Worst 'Nam film, ever. Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, We Were Soldiers, Hamburger Hill... all of these are better.

And no, I am not watching Coming Home. I don't do Jane Fonda films.

The Rape of Europa (2006) - We all knew that the Nazi gang (as Churchill called them) were among history's biggest killers, but this film makes clear that they were absolutely first class thieves as well. This film deals with the chaos the Germans inflicted upon the art world via their practice of looting European museums and trotting the goods off to Germany for Hitler's envisioned art museum. The confusion of who legally owns what and what famous paintings are where (if not destroyed) is still very much with us. For instance, a few years ago it was announced that the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia has 70+ German works of art that were taken by the Red Army at the end of World War II. The Germans want them back. One Russian points out, "The Germans began the war. Over twenty million Russians died as a result of it. For them to insist upon the return of those works for 'moral' reasons is obscene." You must admit, the fellow has a point. It will probably takes additional generations to sort this out once and for all.

On Saturday I bought an iPhone; an 8GB 4th generation one - not the recently announced 4S. I'm having fun dorking around with videocalls via Face Time and installing and removing apps. On an associated note, my son and his wife went to a Halloween party this weekend in Utah. He went as Steve Jobs and she went as an iPhone. Sarah calls Ethan's iPhone his "mistress" because he spends so much time with it; witht his party he has now succeeded in doing something no other husband has ever done: combining wife and mistress into one!

Elsewhere, in Burbank, my pal Mike presides over PumpkinFest 2011.

As for us... well, we'll be giving out candy. That's it. Without kids in the house Halloween has lost a lot of its interest for me.

28 Oct 2011

2011-10-28T09:31:00.002-04:00

When the Germanic Anglo-Saxons had overrun Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, and pushed the native populations to Cornwall, Wales, Brittany and the north, the archaeological evidence indicates that, for the most part, they did not occupy the old Romano-British cities, villages and settlements. Instead - probably because of superstition or a cultural bias - they used the building materials to build anew somewhere else. For instance, Roman Londinium was a thriving city. Yet, when the Anglo-Saxons arrived they did not occupy the city in what is today called "the Square Mile," or, definitively, "the City" - the oldest part of London. Instead, they founded a settlement about one mile west of Roman London and called it "Lundenwic." It's more or less where Covent Garden stands today. When I last visited London I paid a visit to the London Museum and stood in a reproduction of a Lundenwic home.

Why didn't the Angles and Saxons simply occupy the old dwellings and places? We'll probably never know for sure, but the old Anglo-Saxon language is unique in having a term to describe the contemplation of dust, dustsceawung. Why contemplate dust? My guess is that it's a sad reflection of past times and past people, things that were done that are done no more, and possibly a fatalistic look at the future. Certainly, fate - or wyrd - was very much a part of the Anglo-Saxon musings in Beowulf. It's in the national character; think of the playing of (the admittedly Scottish tune) Auld Lang Syne every New Year's Eve. Indeed, the very English director Michael Powell has a scene in a film - 1937's The Edge of the World - where the transparent ghosts of an abandoned Scottish island are showing walking by. It's an effective scene.

I had a dustsceawung experience somewhat like that last night. I visited the Springfield (VA) Mall to look for belts at the J.C. Penney, one of the relatively few viable stores in the mall. The mall is scheduled for a total remodeling, but that hasn't happened yet and there has been no firm date announced for the start. So the majority of the mall is covered by great tracts of blank drywall and is empty of shoppers. It's really depressing, because as I walked around last night I remembered taking my little son for a birthday party at the Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor, buying a stylus for my turntable at the Needle in a Haystack store (yes, they specialized in selling styli!), bringing the family to the highly anticipated "Wedding of Jean Gray and Cyclops" X-Men event, watching my youngest daughter do a cheer demonstration with her squad in an open area, going to see Fantasia with my mother and the kids in the early Nineties, etc. Mom's gone, the little kids have grown and the stores are gone. Dustsceawung. I'm not stepping foot in the Springfield Mall again until after they've renovated it. It's depressing.

A reader of mine called his readers' attention to a Halloween song entitled Skin and Bones. Somehow I've never heard it before! Perhaps it wasn't fashionable in the 1960's, when I was trick or treating. Cool song...

Hey! My pal Burbank Mike found an aerial photo of the neighborhood where I grew up! (Click here.) My house is in it! See that circular thing just to the left of the (eucalyptus) tree in the center of the shot? That's our above-ground swimming pool, and it enables us to date this image. We put the pool up in 1965 and took it down in February/March 1969 when we bought our in-ground pool, for which construction started in May 1969. In the wider shot, Mike thinks he recognizes a 1969 model year car, which would have gone for sale in about September 1968. So this photo was taken between around September 1968 and about March 1969!

You can see the nearby Vickroy Park in a detail from this shot, one of my hangouts. I climbed many a tree there. See that tall light pole in the sandy section at the right? It used to be the counting base for Hide and Go Seek games. And just to the right of it, looking like two whitish pillars, is the Shoe. I do believe I was the very first kid to play upon it when construction was finished in 1966; I made a point of climbing upon it when I bicycled home for lunch one day. The construction crew said I could. It was a source of amusement and satisfaction to me to take my son Ethan there to play upon the Shoe in 1985 during a Burbank. The park has been remodeled out of recognition, the shoe is gone and so is that funny little boy - dustsceawung.

You can also see Spector's grocery store in a detail; it was another one of my childhood haunts. I used to sit at the base of the spinner rack and read comic books there. Later on, I brought in malfunctioning tubes to test when I fixed our television sets (back in an era when consumer electronics were user-serviceable). My best Spector's story, however, involves canned whipped cream. When I was a boy I used to nonchalantly stroll down the diary section, remove one of the whipped cream in a can products, pop off the top and - KKKRRRRRRRR - fire some into my mouth and replace the cap. (NOTE: This was before they introduced tamper-proof caps, when it was apparent that somebody had previously opened the cap.) I guess I was about nine or ten.

Once, when I was incautious, one of the employees caught me doing this and dragged me before Mr. Don Spector, who looked at me sternly. "You owe me forty-nine cents," he said. "I expect it the very next time you come into the store." Well, never going into the store ever again to evade the payment was unthinkable; it was too much a part of my boyish lifestyle. So I fretted about how I would save up the forty-nine cents. Suddenly offering to do odd jobs around the house was unacceptable - it would raise suspicions. So I took all of my change and began roaming the vacant lots looking for discarded glass bottles to bring into Ralph's to exchange for money. (Small Coke bottles gained you five cents, a large bottle ten, as I recall.) Eventually I came up with the forty-nine cents and paid Don Spector. Having learned my lesson I never again sprayed whipped cream into my mouth at a store. But I have at home!

Warning: If you visit and we offer to put some whipped cream on one of Cari's pumpkin pies and you observe that it doesn't come out of a tub - decline.

Yard sales tomorrow? I think not; the weather killjoys are calling for rain and maybe even some wet snowflakes. Ugh.

Have a great weekend!

27 Oct 2011

2011-10-27T09:20:00.002-04:00

Padam, padam, padam... a song with a beat that hammers in my head incessantly. Edith Piaf sang this back in the day. Check it out. She sings with the same dramatic power that Judy Garland was famous for, but, of course, in French.

Hey, look at this: a 250 year-old previously unencrypted document has been cracked - by a computer. Cool... the document seems Masonic.

I watched The Simpsons Movie (2007) last night, a library rental. It was okay. It seemed like a superior episode, but longer. I'm not the fan my son is - I didn't grow up with it on TV as he did - so my enthusiasm is muted. Actually, we didn't watch it in the house when the kids were little. I had the notion that Homer Simpson, a wretched excuse for a father, wouldn't do us any good as depictions of fatherhood. My son mostly saw episodes in friends' homes, or on the sneak. I once wrote a short article entitled "Father No Longer Knows Best," and pointed out that the last good television father I can think of was Bill Cosby. There may be one on nowadays, but as I don't watch broadcast TV I wouldn't know.

I suppose it goes without saying that The Simpsons serve the same purpose as Punch did for the British in the early 1900's - a sort of national satirical bellwether. If there's an emerging national trend, the producers usually jump on it with some commentary. I'm expecting that the Occupy Wall Street mob will make their way into an episode at some point.

(Ever look up the word origin of "bellwether?" It's interesting.)

I also started to watch the Ridley Scott Robin Hood movie (from 2010), but gave up after about a half-hour. I'm interested in the setting and characters, but the movie appeared to be the same old Hollywood action production. (Especially with the inevitably mannishly tough-spunky-sexy Marian character using a bow and arrow. In Hollywood there are no females other than mannishly tough-spunky-sexy ones.) In other words, I've seen this film before more than once. I pass!

My bride and I also watched yet another episode of the superior Edward VII series. Queen "We Are Not Amused" Victoria gets fatter and more disapproving, and Edward gets balder and more idle. I always think about the Max Beerbohm caricatures of Victoria and Edward VII when watching this. Movies and teleplays about British monarchs are almost always good...

Somebody called my attention to this science photos slideshow. Favorites: Saturn's Aurora, Nanowires, Toucan thermal image, Computer-controlled beetle, Skeletons in love.

26 Oct 2011

2011-10-26T08:40:00.002-04:00

When I was a teenager and interested in King Arthur legends and classical music, I happened upon a library Lp of Henry Purcell's semi-opera King Arthur while thumbing through the library bins. This one had an attractive Howard Pyle illustration of the title character on the cover. "Cool!" thought I, "This might be good!" Alas, no.

The opera premiered in 1691 and is a Baroque Epic (also called a Restoration Spectacular), complete with flying metaphysical characters like sprites, special effects, explosions, the Goddess Venus and a large cast. And, sadly, harpsichords, lutes and baroque music (which I consider to be like musical wallpaper). Not the kind of Arthurian thing I was interested in at all. For one thing, my King Arthur wasn't a king at all, but a gritty warrior leading Romano-British cavalry against invading Saxons. For another, the idea of his being portrayed by effete baroque ensembles was impossible. I returned the Lp to the library a sadder but wiser teenager.

Fast forward 38 years and I am again thumbing through a library collection, this time DVDs. I happen upon a recorded performance of Purcell's royal work, and this time decide to give it another chance. After all, I have learned a great deal about classical music and have much broader taste than I did as a teen. Accepting the baroque instrumentation and late 17th C. style for the piece, it might have something to offer, after all. Besides, as I am something of a completest, I'd like to be able to speak on the subject of the opera intelligently. This might be good!

Alas, no. While the musicians (led by Nicholas Harnoncourt, who specializes in baroque music and has solid credentials) are all top notch and well qualified to interpret baroque music, and while Purcell interpreted the Arthurian story as appropriate for the audience of his time (this is a story of Britons vs. Saxons with arias about love; there is no Lancelot or Guinevere), the 2005 staging is an abomination. It's a dumbed-down, colloquial, Eurotrash production featuring modern thrift store dress, lines bellowed, screamed and belched in German (revenge for World War II, I guess) and an over the top amount of absurdity. Worst opera staging, ever.

How bad is it? King Arthur is generally portrayed as a hapless buffoon. During a parley, Oswald, the Saxon leader, and Arthur pull out bottles of beer, which they proceed to pour into their trousers. "Oswald is sooooo hot!" and "Arthur for King!" is scrawled upon a wall as graffiti. At one point when the weather is freezing, everyone is dressed as penguins, and then, shortly thereafter, the cast strips down to modern beach clothes, holding tall drinks with little paper umbrellas therein. Three topless women have "Thor," Freya" and "Woden" painted upon their breasts. Merlin arrives in the audience to hold up the show and discourse about how people will complain about how the classics are treated in the music hall. (Well, yeah - what did you expect?) A loathsome gnome tempts Arthur from a sofa in the shape of a giant pair of lips. A pagan priest, wearing a tee shirt with "sex" written upon it, runs after Arthur's love interest Emmeline with the intent to ravish her. And so on. Concentrated awfulness. But don't take my word for it. Read all the one star reviews on the amazon link I provided above.

I am hoping that some British impresario, conductor or musical ensemble leader sees this, utters "Damn Jerries!" and becomes mightily offended at seeing the Matter of Britain treated so, and stages a more conventional production of the work that pays some respect to the composer, librettist and subject matter. Covent Garden would be a good spot for it, I think.

Last note: The image above is from the DVD box. That's not Arthur on the cover. That's Oswald the Saxon King. If they had portrayed the production as it really is on the cover I'm convinced that nobody would buy the DVD.

And now a blast from my past: Do the Cigarette Mash! Hot girls dancing on cigarettes! It looked so "with it" in 1984... now it looks so... EIGHTIES.

Another video blast from my past: The Kraft Suspense Theatre title sequence (c. 1964), featuring the unsettling shadowy dude (well, I found him so when I was nine) and music by a young John Williams.

Last one: I recall seeing this title sequence on the late show with my Dad when I was about eight or nine. I was fascinated by it. Not enough to watch the movie, however. I recall also liking the music - which is hardly surprising as it's perfect film noir music. I love it when my taste is consistent across the decades...