Leon and the time traveler!

A picture from World War II. The man on the right in this photo is my late father, Leon, with a fellow platoon member. It was taken in 1944. They were stationed in New Guinea during their time in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

 I found the picture among my mother’s storage, scanned it and showed it to my brother. It is one of several photos neither of us had ever seen before. Besides getting a laugh over seeing him in a towel, these pictures are a reminder that like millions of other men Dad did his service during that time.

But something caught my eye...what is that his friend is holding in his hand? It looks like a...gasp...cell phone! 

Is my father standing next to a time traveler who dropped in from our modern era for a visit to a long ago time and faraway place in the Pacific during a time of war? Such is the way Internet rumors start, and not just any rumors, but rumors of fantastic proportions beyond the scope of reality.

A couple of months ago I featured photos from a television program that shows a still photo dated 1941. The picture is interpreted by some to be a time traveler from the future who dropped in to watch a bridge in Canada being dedicated. It would seem an odd choice for a time traveling destination, but it did not stop those with fertile imaginations from working overtime on the most outrageous explanation for the man’s “modern” appearance (according to them) or for holding what they interpret as a digital camera. You can see the post by clicking on the link to “Time travel that goes nowhere”.

It is in the nature of some people to extrapolate the most outrageous explanations for what are really everyday things. It is part of the tendency of some to see conspiracies and dark forces, or to use imagination rather than logic to explain what they cannot readily understand.

The cell phone-shaped object in the other man’s hand is not a device unknown in that era, but a much more common item: a kit holding a razor for shaving. Even if I did not know that already logic would tell me that based on one thing I have no evidence of, time travel, and the other I am sure of, that there were no cell phone towers in New Guinea in 1944.

But this was a surprise, a rare color photo of Dad and his buddies. I know color film was available for years before the war, but the norm was black and white. Dad is kneeling behind the man wearing glasses, and his “time traveling” friend is center front, with a straw hat on his knee.

Carrie Mathison goes for a piece of Pi

Carrie Mathison, the main character in the Showtime series Homeland, is a seriously troubled person. She has bipolar disorder, had an affair with a married man and bore his child. In Season 4 Carrie handed her baby over to her beleaguered sister and went back to her CIA posting in Pakistan. Carrie has big fish to fry in Islamabad. She is seeking out a terrorist who was supposed to have been killed in a drone strike in episode one.

The way to the terrorist is through his nephew, Aayan. Carrie pulls out all the stops with this young medical student. She seduces him. The end of the latest episode, “Iron in the Fire,” fades out as Carrie is about to introduce this virginal young man to the ways of sex. Her goals are quite different than his. He wants to get out of the country, go to medical school in England. Her idea is to distract him from her promise — actually a lie — of sending him to London.

The boy, Aayan Ibrahim, is played by Indian actor Suraj Sharma, who was the star of Life of Pi (holding his own against the incredible special effects Bengal tiger, Richard Parker).

I photographed these from my DVR, pausing the recorder so I could get the best picture. Sorry about the bar on the bottom.

The naïve dupe, Aayan, listens to Carrie talk, finding it hard to comprehend what her body language is saying, that by golly, she is making a move on him.

Move she does. Then she asks him, "Have you done this before?" His answer, "No."  

Carrie gives him a sympathetic look. He has been through a lot. Her dark eyes are ablaze with “sympathy” — not only is Claire Danes an award-winning actor, but Carrie gives an Academy Award® performance of her own.  

Could you resist the hypnotic stare of the bird of prey as it paralyzes its victim?  

Neither can Aayan.   All of that foreplay aside, as Sally and I watched it my mind was clicking back to what had gone on in the episode. Aayan took money from Carrie to give to a nurse in a hospital, who was getting him drugs for his uncle. He slept outside the hospital all night waiting for the nurse’s shift to end. I told Sally, “I’ll bet he smells like a goat.”

My observations are ignored by the filmmakers, of course, because sex is about to happen. We cannot have Carrie say, "Oh, Aayan, how about hitting the shower before we crawl between these clean sheets?" It is because there is a fantasy about sex that ignores personal hygiene and the need for instant gratification. Gettin' it on is more important than stinky armpits, oily skin, smelly feet that have been in one pair of socks for five days, and teeth that have an eighth of an inch of encrustations from eating spicy foods and not brushing or gargling with Scope.

Blowing the dust off the old video tapes

Sally asked, “What are you going to do with those boxes full of video tapes?”

Beginning last spring Sally and I set out to de-junk, reorganize and get our basement into some sort of shape. It looked like Fred Sanford’s house, or a reality show about hoarders. There were some large boxes full of videos, stacked haphazardly in a room along with all of our holiday decorations, and anything else for which we had no other designated spot.

I said, “Let me look through them and see what I have.” And I did. I took about half of the tapes for thrift store donations. But there were still at least a couple hundred video tapes, factory-produced movies, and even many that I had recorded from HBO or other cable channels in the '80s and '90s. I got those organized, and when it was done I found space for them on a shelf.

But I had no VCR on which to play the tapes. I haven’t had one for several years. I looked in thrift stores. I had a remote for my old long-gone Zenith VCR, so I went to the same place where I had donated the tapes, and for $5.00 I found a perfectly good Zenith VCR. The remote works with it. I even buy movies, like the ones whose covers I have scanned for showing today. At the Deseret Industries store, just about a quarter mile from my house, they sell video tapes for 50¢. So every time I go in the store I find something to add to my collection. And yes, I watch them. I watched this one today:

 An action movie, and like many action movies entertaining but silly. In real life nothing would go as smooth or as easy as these two thieves make it look. But then, that is why it’s a movie, not real life.

I haven’t watched this yet. I saw it years ago. Chris Elliott is still active, still making movies and TV. His father is Bob Elliott of the famous Bob and Ray comedy duo, so he has comedy genes built in.

 Another one I’ve seen and don’t remember. I bought it because I like both Martin Short and Kurt Russell.

Here is a classic I never tire of. I believe it is Danny Kaye’s finest movie. I have some nostalgia for it because my parents took me to see it in a theater when it was released in 1955. For years my father quoted a line from the movie, “Get in, get it over with, and get out.” It became his philosophy for covering a whole range of situations. My personal favorite is the snappy and alliterative tongue-twisters about which of two drinking cups holds deadly poison: “The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle. The flagon with the dragon holds the brew that is true.” And then there is Kaye’s turn at impersonating Giacomo, “King of jesters, and jester of kings.” ...I could go on and on.

 If it takes place in space I like it. I have seen both of these movies before.

There are a lot more where those came from. Unfortunately with these 50¢ vids I am fast replacing all the movies I gave away.

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A bit of history...

I bought my first VCR in 1979, an RCA dinosaur. Big and heavy, it had clunky manual controls (the remote was actually plugged in to the VCR via a wire, and “pause” was its only function). If you remember there were a couple of formats for home video taping and playback, VHS and Betamax. My friends bought Sony Betamaxes. If Sony had licensed the technology to other manufacturers instead of keeping it all for themselves, Betamax might have been the industry standard. Anybody could license VHS, and that quickly took over. I seldom, if ever, see Betamax tapes.

That RCA cost $779 at a local discount store, Stokes Bros., closed now for over two decades. It was where everyone went for a bargain. Department stores were selling VCRs for around $1200. Even at the price I got it took me a year to pay off the RCA. There were no video rental businesses at that time. They began to open sometime in the '80s. The first rentals for a movie were $5.00 per movie for one night. That was a lot of money in the early '80s, and I went a little crazy for a while renting movies. My wife was upset with me. I wonder if any of the residue of her anger at my obsessive-compulsive disorder, renting movies and spending $$$ we could not afford, bubbled to the surface when she asked me to get rid of the video tapes.

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A funny clip from The Court Jester. If you have the time you can go to YouTube and watch the whole movie, which is also available. You don’t need to spend 50¢ like I did. (My standard disclaimer: if the screen below is black it is because of YouTube, not me.)

Make your own zombie movie

The Living Dead Festival was held this weekend in Evans City, Pennsylvania. The Festival is an annual event in recognition of Night Of the Living Dead, the great-granddaddy of all films featuring walking corpses that want to eat living flesh. The first part of the movie was made in the Evans City Cemetery. Among the guests was the writer/director of that famous film, George Romero.

 Big George in the (living) flesh!

I first saw NOTLD in the early '70s, and recognized in it some of the themes that were common to my nightmares: being in a confined space, and besieged by monsters who wanted to get in and get me. Yikes. Romero had filmed my bad dreams!

I have always  compared other movies in that genre to the original. I’ve seen many, but not all, so-called “zombie” movies (which is a misnomer, according to Romero, who does not call his animated dead zombies. They eat human flesh so they are ghouls). Many of those movies do not work for various reasons. Sometime in the past couple of months I watched World War Z with Brad Pitt which I thought failed. It had a reported 190 million dollar budget, was full of special effects and action, and yet for me it flopped. Why? My guess is that it was too big, and got away from elements that make the best of those stories memorable: the sense of isolation, being trapped, and of course total paranoia.

As successful as the TV series The Walking Dead is, it often strays from those tenets, yet it works. I guess it has to do with the ongoing characters and some interesting situations involving them. Once we identify with characters a movie or TV show is halfway home. Add to that several scenes each episode of “walkers” getting their heads blown apart, or stabbed through the skull, or beheaded in graphic detail, and you have a recipe for success as a cult hit. The violence, the same reason many will not watch it, is why some others love it. For the record I don’t turn away from the violence, but I think it is overplayed. I prefer it to be an ever-present threat to the living people, but used less often to much better effect.

Last week I watched a German movie with those common zombie movie themes called Rammbock, subtitled Berlin Undead. The movie is only 63 minutes long. It gets right to the action and does not waste any time making its point. I appreciated that, but thought except for it being in German and set in an apartment building in Berlin, it added absolutely nothing to the  genre.

I felt I could make a movie like that. You could too.

For one thing, Rammbock was filmed on a small budget by some clever filmmakers who used real locations and a bunch of friends to play the dead people. Most zombie movies just copy other movies. In Rammbock they did some things right that you could copy in your own movie.

First, use an ordinary guy as your protagonist. In this movie Michael has come to Berlin from Austria to give his ex-girlfriend, Gabi, her keys, and to try to win her back. As he walks into her apartment he finds out she is not there and there is a plumber banging on the radiator. The plumber is the first we see of the victims of the particular virus that causes murderous rage.

This seems ridiculous to us Americans who all carry high-powered assault rifles and .44 Magnums at all times (or so it seems, especially to folks in other countries), that the plumber’s young assistant is shooting at zombies with a slingshot. A slingshot! But it always works in movies to get away from more traditional ways of killing zombies with something more exotic than guns or knives. Maybe you could try killing a zombie with a cocoanut, or dropping a piano on it. It does not really matter what you use to kill them with, just make sure it is interesting and bloody.

Rammbock seemed to skimp on the traditional zombie appearance, depending more on make-up and frothing mouths than more elaborate rotting-face appliances. Why are zombies’ faces all messed up, anyhow? Well, for horror movie shocks, that is why. If you think about it, it seems that some of them would be funky-faced, and others would not. But I guess there is nothing scary about a zombie that doesn’t look like what we expect a zombie to look like. So, on second thought, go with what the audience expects, rotting faces.

You can do like the movie did, and show a crowd of zombies from a distance, and in motion. This was done with a hand-held camera, which gives it a frenetic feel. A bunch of undead running around, grunting and growling, camera moving jerkily, adds to the atmosphere.

The other thing that adds to the atmosphere is, as I mentioned earlier, setting it in a small space. In this case an apartment complex, confined to a few dingy rooms. There were times in the movie when I thought the real-life apartments they filmed in looked squalid enough to be depressing. But it added to the overall atmosphere of fear, anxiety and that good old paranoia.

Before the final scene the main character goes to the roof and looks out over Berlin, with some matte shots of smoke rising above the city. That is a good way to show that everyone is being affected, not just his little group in the apartments.

Unlike Rammbock you could also have a few sex scenes and some naked boobs. Earn your R-rating with more than gore.

I have written before of the original Night of the Living Dead and why, despite its low budget origins, the movie still has the ability to frighten and disturb the viewer. You can read about it in my 2008 post “The Forty-Year Night.”

A spoonful of opium helps the medicine go down; or, Nineteenth century over-the-counter addictions; or, Passing laws that make drug problems worse.

They Laughed When I Sat Down by Frank Rowsome, Jr came out in 1959 and was a best seller. The book is a look back at advertising in America, especially the early advertising of the prior century. Chapter Four, “Shake Well Before Using,” is the story of patent medicines and their excesses, both in advertising claims and contents. The inevitable result was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Selling concoctions of flavored water, herbs, alcohol and opium will at some point cause major concerns.

Scans are from the McGraw-Hill first edition. Copyright © 1959 Frank Rowsome, Jr

Stories of children in day care (and yes, the 19th century did have day care centers; but they were probably informal and not regulated) being dosed with Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup to keep them calm and sedated during the day lead me to speculation as to how patent medicines caused addiction that lasted after the products were taken off the market.

This 1999 comic, Brave Old World, has a frank view of an era many view as nostalgic, but on examination was far from the rosy images of later generations. This sequence of panels illustrates what I'm talking about:

Suddenly having the supply of cheap narcotics bought at the local drug store yanked away caused people to ask doctors to prescribe. Many then got their drugs legally. However, the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 brought a stop to that. It stated that addiction is not a disease, therefore not a medical problem and could not be treated by a doctor. So, no more prescription pad relief for addicts.

We are a society geared to punishment. We believe that weaknesses by others should be listed as crimes and handled through the prison system rather than medically. Even modern era painkillers, which have a definite purpose but can be abused, are controlled by the Feds through intimidation of physicians. Trying to cut off the supply of drugs by making them illegal has only led to criminals stepping in as the suppliers.

The War on Drugs, which is one of the most miserable failures of the past forty-plus years, has been like Prohibition of the twenties and thirties. It does not work. Yet for the billions spent trying to stop the flow of illegal drugs only a small portion is spent on treatment for addiction.

According to the online article, “History of Drug Use and Drug Users in the United States” by Elaine Casey, in the 1920s “addiction became a federal crime . . . the [Supreme] court thus lowered narcotics use into the underworld, forcing addicts to migrate to the urban centers of illicit supply. It also forced formerly decent and responsible citizens who had acquired an unfortunate habit to become aggressive and violent criminals. It made addicts conform to the image of nonscience, as they robbed or cheated or prostituted themselves to support the illicit price, they did indeed become debauched, corrupt and depraved. In 1923, as many of 75 percent of the women in federal penitentiaries were Harrison Act prisoners (Clark, 1976).”

In 1918, a Congressional committee released findings that showed that the underground traffic in narcotic drugs was about equal to the legitimate medical traffic. Instead of opting for lessening of the laws to allow treatment or handling of addictions by physicians the Harrison Act was tightened. As the article says, “. . . the nation was finding that ridding itself of heroin would require considerably more than legislation.”

 Caution on the bottom of the label: “May be habit forming.”

I have heard recently that cracking down on doctors prescribing the heavy-duty painkillers has just turned prescription pain pill addicts to that old standby, heroin. It is the Law of Unintended Consequences in action. The Feds put the squeeze in one area, and it opens up more business for the traffic in illicit drugs.

The past century has seen various attempts to control narcotics and illicit drugs and nothing seems to work. In many ways, by just putting the stuff on store shelves as was done in the 19th century, seems almost better than what has happened since then with the attempts to turn people away from illicit drugs.