What is there to read around here...?

I’ve had a tough couple of weeks. My knee, which I damaged somehow before going to Los Angeles, got swollen and painful from doing a lot of walking during my time in Southern California. I’ve had an off-and-on complaint since I got back; some days are worse than others. For the past couple of days it has been painful to even sit upright and work at my keyboard.

To pass the time I usually just go to my reading material. I always have a bunch of books and magazines I haven’t had the time to crack. Enforced idleness is a good excuse to read, even if it includes positioning an icebag around my knee before opening a book.

Author Andre Norton was born Alice Mary North in 1912. She died at age 93 in 2005. She chose a gender-neutral pseudonym because when she began writing science fiction and fantasy it was a male genre. She began her writing career in Cleveland, Ohio, and before 1950 worked for the library system in that city.

Stand To Horse, a 1956 novel of a U.S. cavalry unit in New Mexico just before the Civil War, is the type of novel not usually associated with Norton, but like her fantasy and science fiction is full of action. A group of soldiers pursuing renegade Apaches become the hunted. It was written for young readers but is of interest to anyone who likes Westerns, or cavalry, or stories of America’s wild frontier. Norton researched it by going to old journals and contemporary accounts of the time.

I checked and the book is available for Kindle right now at $3.99. One seller has listed the paperback edition I bought for 50¢ in a thrift store at $192 (!) on Amazon (good luck on getting your price, seller). Another seller has a hardback edition for sale at a much more reasonable price.

A library book sale got me this book about the self-promoting showman, P.T. Barnum, which includes the information that Barnum was his own top attraction.

Bennett Cerf, who wrote a series of books over several years with funny anecdotes about the celebrities and politicians of the era, published The Life of the Party in 1956. I found this first edition at another thrift store.

Besides Cerf’s witty writing, it is illustrated by one of the top cartoonists of the era, Carl Rose.

I haven’t yet read this edition of She by H. Rider Haggard. I like Haggard, but I keep putting novels by him at the bottom of the stack. I assume I’ll get to it someday.

Perry Mason books by Erle Stanley Gardner are like popcorn for me. They are so entertaining I can read two or three of them in a row, as I did with these two.

There are magazines stacking up, waiting to be read. These two issues of  the art magazine, Juxtapoz, are library copies. I was happy when my library subscribed. A good use of taxpayer money, and I’m not being sarcastic. Someone at my county library system is really sharp, and their purchases belie the fact we are in one of the most conservative states in America.

 

And then there is The New Yorker. Not only am I unable to keep up with the new issues, I buy old issues at thrift stores, and get behind on them, too.

The Barry Blitt cover of the retired Pope Benedict is funny.

I grabbed this 2003 issue with its Gary Larson cover as soon as I saw it. It is a cartoon issue, something that used to be an annual event, but along with the yearly fiction issues, something I haven’t seen in a while.

The issue features this funny story by cartoonist Roz Chast. My wife spent last weekend in Vegas with her niece, who was celebrating her 25th birthday. She didn’t report any experiences like these, although the two of them saw the sights, and more important, did no gambling.

Two days, two obituaries

Over the weekend I saw obituaries of two men I briefly worked with in the 1970s.

I met them both at the school district warehouse where I worked at the time. Mike I met first, in 1976. I worked with him for a couple of months. He was just out of the Army after having a career that had lasted since the Korean War. He had told us he was just waiting until the Postal Service took him on. Sure enough, he got the call and went to work for the USPS, never to be seen again by me until his obituary appeared. I notice it says he spent 18½ years as a letter carrier.

The other, Bernie, I met when he was hired to be our supervisor. I believe Bernie had a problem with supervising guys in their twenties, which is what we all were in those days. Being young we were profane. Bernie was a religious person, as it says in his obituary. I thought he was a churchgoing person at the time, based on his reaction to said profanity. Bernie was memorable to me because he got the supervisor job I had applied for and I was somewhat indignant at being assigned to train him. He only worked for three days before quitting. He walked off the job, probably because our lack of civility offended him.

There may not have been another person like me who saw both of these obituaries, whose path both of those men crossed. Of the hundreds of people I worked with in my 45 years on various jobs, these two, whom I worked with very briefly decades ago, stuck out in my mind. Then I saw their obituaries at the same time. I take note of coincidences when they happen.

Blue Velvet’s strange world

Blue Velvet, written and directed by David Lynch, was released in 1986 to puzzlement and even hostility by critics, including Roger Ebert. It was a failure at the box office until being praised by Pauline Kael. It is now considered a cult film and surreal movie classic.

It’s no wonder initial response to it was shock. Blue Velvet is not an easy film to watch. If you’re like me and you’ve seen it at least three times in the past 10 years the story gets more comprehensible, but it remains difficult to accept what you’re seeing on screen.

There’s a long documentary on the making of Blue Velvet included with the 2002 DVD release. Lynch tells of his initial inspiration from the 1964 song of the same name by Bobby Vinton, to casting the actors, to the characters’ motivation and intricacies of filming on location. It is all a very interesting look into the mind of a true film auteur, and to some very dark visions.

The late Dennis Hopper played one of the screen’s most bizarre bad guys, Frank Booth. In the documentary Hopper told how he had just come out of rehab for years of drug and alcohol abuse when he was offered the part. He made crazy, violent Frank memorable, one of the all-time great movie psychos. His performance is inspired, right down to his use of nitrous oxide. According to Hopper that was his idea. Lynch was amenable to ideas from his cast if it improved the story.

Co-star Isabella Rossellini, who was most famous as a model, was doing just her third film. She was extremely nervous about the part. In its own way it was groundbreaking, and was the cause of Roger Ebert’s original complaint about the film, that it exploited her. She explained her nudity. If the viewer accepts her motivation as an actor it gets easier to understand, that far from exploiting her it made her more realistic as a woman who has been completely subjugated by a psychopath.

In the documentary she explained the scene where she is commanded by Frank to “spread her legs.” The scene is shot showing her from the back. She claimed she was not wearing underwear (she said the strap was seen by the camera, so the decision was made for her to do the scene raw. It sounds flimsy, but it’s her story.) She was nervous about doing it, and apologized (!) to Hopper beforehand, that he would be looking at her vagina. He waved it off by saying, “I’ve seen that before.”

“By being rude, he made it easier,” she laughed.

The young leads, Jeffrey and Sandy, who stumble into the mystery, are played by very young Kyle McLachlan and Laura Dern, both of whom are intelligent, open-faced and attractive characters.

The movie begins with saccharine-sweet and quick cuts of bucolic small town life, down to a hardware store, fire engine, and colorful flowers against a white picket fence. It ends with a happy ending that is also over-the-top in its optimism, with one jarring note. A robin sits on a window sill with a bug in its mouth, which causes amazement by Sandy, Jeffrey, and Jeffrey’s aunt. The bird is supposed to be real, but it’s obviously mechanical. As Hopper said in his interview, “it’s American surrealism.”

Between placid scenes of normalcy and happiness is a very twisted plot and bizarre film; a dark counterpoint to sweetness and light.

The Bobby Vinton song that inspired the movie:

Flame on!

A recent case in Oklahoma has revived the old stories of spontaneous human combustion, where a person is quickly immolated from no apparent cause.

“Danny Vanzandt May Have Died from Spontaneous Human Combustion”

The notion of such an event has been believed by some and simultaneously disbelieved by others for centuries. Personally, I think people just like a good story, and if it's entertaining enough to tickle the imagination some will believe it. This article from a 1966 issue of Adam takes an entertaining yet skeptical view of the “phenomenon.”

Life of Crime: TV brings it into our homes

I look at this Life article on the 1951 Kefauver hearings — a U.S. Congressional investigation of organized crime — in a historical context for television. By being able to see the faces of criminals, including crooked cops, judges and politicians, it forced them out from the underworld into the TV lights, and therefore to the American public. Television was still fairly new, but was already making a strong impact on our culture.

We take it wholly for granted now, but our ability to see events in the moment from half a world away or around the corner, was once considered a miracle.

Copyright  © 1951, 2013 Time-Life

Real life Barney Fife

When I started my three decades-plus at a suburban school district in 1976, the district had just over 60 schools covering about 400 square miles of county. To protect it we had a security department, led by a small, slender man who reminded me of Barney Fife.

(My guy may have reminded me of Barney, but there will never be another character like Barney Fife from The Andy Griffith Show, played by the genius Don Knotts.)

If ever I met a real-life Barney it was him. He was officious, self-important, and he threw around what little weight he had. I said he was like Barney, but not totally. As a boss he ran a tight department, and he was effective in that sense. In time during the tenures of two school superintendents he lobbied the administration to expand his security department. He built it into a police force, with officers trained in the State Police Academy. They had full police powers anywhere in Utah.

It was funny to me that our police chief, who had started out wearing civilian clothes, really got into the uniform thing. He wore a black police uniform, which made me think of the Nazi S.S.

Barney was a guy who took his job seriously. Not only was he sworn to protect the schools (which his force did, and well), but he was also charged with protecting the district against employee theft.

It is a large organization. When I left at the end of 2008 there were over 100 schools and 7,000 employees. It is like a small town. Barney had a dozen or so employees, including a dispatcher and even a detective working alongside the uniformed officers.

I knew Barney because I saw him often, at schools, in the district offices. He knew me, he knew my wife. He was always polite, but he had the puffiness of self-importance, and it wasn’t just grunts like me who noticed it, but his higher-ups, also. The police department budget got bigger every year, and the school board had a lot of questions about why they had a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year operation when there was a county sheriff’s department that could be counted on when needed. Our police operations seemed superfluous and overly expensive to some.

There were always murmurs and stories about Chief Barney. Over time he began to take on more of the persona of a Captain Queeg. There were tales of paranoia and accusations and threats. One of my fellow employees told me he had been suspected of stealing. He was later cleared, but during the investigation Chief Barney had come to his house to grill him. He also interrogated him in his office. He wanted to know “who runs the theft ring”? That struck me. Stories started coming in that Barney was obsessed by a theft ring with a mysterious leadership, a large and coordinated operation to rip off the school district. Barney was known to call some employees late at night and make threats, then ring off by telling them, “If you tell anyone about this call I’ll deny it.”

It was obvious Barney was obsessed and deadly serious about catching culprits who may or may not have existed.

But Barney's paranoid fears and threats did not cause his ultimate fate with the school district. Barney’s unraveling was caused by school board members who thought the police department unnecessary, and who frankly wanted Barney out of there. I remember the actual event that led directly to Barney’s forced retirement. One of Barney’s rookie police officers had a gun stolen out of his personal vehicle. Another of the officers, Barney’s assistant chief, whom I’ll call Tim, got a tip on who had stolen the gun. He and a couple of his fellow school cops went to the suspect’s house. The suspect ran out the door, so Tim pulled out his gun and shot him in the back. The suspect lived, but sued, and within a period of time Barney was forced out and retired, Tim was prosecuted by the County Attorney for an unlawful shooting, and the school board went about the business of downsizing, although not eliminating, the police department.

I saw Barney a couple of times after his retirement. He was very bitter and spoke out about his bosses and their vendetta against him. But that was while I was still working when I’d see him at a retirement function for someone we both knew. One day after I retired my wife and  I were shopping, and ran into Barney in a grocery store. I started the conversation. I told him some of the problems I’d had with my own boss that led to my decision to retire. Barney looked uncomfortable so I stopped talking and went about my business. I later noticed he’d left quickly. I told my former coworker, Brian, the story and said, “I think he left the store rather than talk to me!” I wasn't joking. I had a pretty clear impression Barney didn’t want to talk to me.

This is all a long story, isn’t it? The ending to the story happened recently, the week before Valentine’s Day, when I took a package of Valentine gifts for our grandkids to the Post Office. I walked in right behind Barney, who casually looked over his shoulder at me. I acted as if I didn’t see him. He dropped some letters into the slot. I loitered a bit, looking at something else, until he left, which he did without looking in my direction. Barney looked bad; he looked ill. He’s had some health problems, probably because he smoked for over 50 years.

I told Brian about the Post Office Barney-sighting a few days later and added, “I scared him away from the grocery store, and haven’t seen him there since. I didn’t want to have him afraid to go to the Post Office because he thinks he might run into me.”

How the mighty have fallen. It’s kind of sad.

Life of Crime: The model and the creep

I watched a Dateline: NBC on Friday, March 1, about Oscar Pistorius. For any of you who have been living in a cave, Oscar, from South Africa, is an Olympic athlete with two prosthetic legs. His nickname is “Blade Runner.” Until he killed his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day he was held high in public esteem. He was a hero. But as we found from watching Dateline, Oscar is an insecure person. He worries a lot about being a victim, especially when not wearing his legs. He had a gun and claims he thought his girlfriend, who was in the bathroom in the middle of the night, was a prowler. He shot through the bathroom door, killing her. He claimed it was a horrible accident, but he was arrested for first degree murder. In a strange twist, because of some problems with the police investigation, Oscar is currently out on bail.

Pistorius’s girlfriend-victim, Reeva Steenkamp, was a blonde beauty, a young model and star of a reality TV series in South Africa. Any man would be proud to be seen with her. Oscar, as it was revealed in the program, has problems with anger and jealousy. My feeling is that despite his achievements and fame he might have felt vulnerable in the girlfriend department, maybe that his girlfriend would find someone else who wasn’t missing parts of his anatomy.

I think Oscar is just one of a long line of men who have been in love with a beautiful woman and then felt compelled to do things they would not normally do.

This story from a 1951 issue of Life isn’t quite so dire as the Oscar/Reeva saga. As you will read a man fell in love with a beautiful model and lavished her with expensive gifts. When the truth came out it was discovered he was an embezzler who had spent most of his ill-gotten funds on her. For this she called him “a creep.”

I don’t know what has happened to either of the two principals in this story since it broke 61 years ago, whether they are still alive, or whether they both eventually found their soulmates. Beauty fades over time and I wonder how a woman who has had men falling at her feet feels when one day she realizes they are not only not falling at her feet, they are passing her by without a second look. Or how a guy feels when he’s had the intervening years between youth and old age to think about how at one time a woman made him crazy. That’s the part I know about.

Copyright © 1951, 2013 Time-Life

Wayne LaPierre and his Wayne’s World paranoia

If a stranger came up to you and ranted that the government would come to your house and seize your property, what would you think? You're a law-abiding citizen. What reason would the government have to seize anything of yours? If you asked that person what facts he has based his fears upon and he said, “They want to keep a list of your property so they can take it!” you might wonder where he’s getting his information, and you might also think that person needed psychiatric help. Basically, you wouldn’t believe him.

But a lot of people listen to Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, and they do believe what he says, even if he has absolutely no evidence to support it. It’s the kind of place Wayne lives in. The one in which he wants you to take citizenship, Wayne’s World, where paranoia is a way of life, and living in fear is part of the national psychology.

Here’s a fact: for spreading paranoia Wayne earns over $1,000,000 a year.

As evidence for my assumption that Wayne inhabits a special place inside his own head, I offer his recent speech to a group of 1,200 in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he again spoke of the NRA (and Wayne’s) opposition to registering firearms: “It’s aimed at registering your guns,” said LaPierre, “and when another tragic opportunity [Newtown] presents itself, that registry will be used to confiscate your guns.” (Salt Lake Tribune, Sunday, February 24, 2013.)

A couple of personal observations about Wayne’s speech: one, I must give my fellow Utahns more credit. Only 1,200, far fewer than I thought would attend, actually sat through the paranoid rant. (That's still 1,200 too many, but I'll take what satisfaction I can from the low turnout.) Second, as far as I can tell, Wayne LaPierre has never said how “the government” might actually come in and take guns from the millions of gun owners in the U.S. There are over 55,000,000 guns out there. That’s a lot, and a lot of firepower. Any agency charged with actual confiscation would have to have some plan in order to seize all of those weapons. I’d think they would have to strike fast and hard to get the most guns possible. Otherwise many gun owners could just stash their guns somewhere else, or wrap them in plastic and bury them in the woods until the Feds left the area.

The fear that Wayne LaPierre spreads just can’t happen in this country. The country is too big, not only with population but area, and there are too many weapons. All anyone has to do is consider the logistics of such an operation and they’d know that even if the federal government was eager and willing to seize firearms owned by individuals, we would always have their track record to assure us it couldn’t happen: they can’t stop the massive flow of drugs into this country, nor can they stop the flow of undocumented aliens coming across our borders. There is not enough manpower. At best they can make token seizures and arrests. A GENERAL CONFISCATION OF GUNS ISN’T LIKELY BECAUSE IT JUST ISN’T PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE. The costs would be too high, with too little chance of success.

I have to finish up by saying that in Wayne’s World a “tragic occurrence,” as he alluded to in his recent speech, is not evil because a gunman using a semi-automatic weapon with a large-capacity magazine killed 20 children and six teachers, or in other recent cases a gunman entered a theater and shot up the patrons, or a crazed person went to a political event in a shopping center parking lot and killed nine, but that those events triggered criticism of gun ownership. To Wayne and his fellow Wayne’s World gun nuts those “tragic events” are evil because they make the public think about all the guns out there. LaPierre just hasn’t expressed to anyone’s satisfaction sorrow for the victims or the parents. To Wayne human life just doesn’t seem to be as important as owning a weapon, so he doesn’t show empathy for the victims. And that’s the Wayne’s World in which I especially do not wish to live.

Citizens of Wayne’s World are encouraged to express their sincerely held political beliefs by the most obvious means.

Burn, Beatles, burn...and the evils of Elvis

If you remember the mid-sixties you may recall the big Beatles flap. In a print interview John Lennon was quoted as saying the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” It led to boycotts and Beatles-record burnings. It was all a bunch of nothing about nothing. A Salt Lake City disk jockey said, “We don't care about what a bunch of nuts are doing in the South...we’re still playing our Beatles records.”

Even in other conservative communities like mine the Beatles were essentially criticism-proof. Their popularity with their audience overwhelmed the religious opposition.

Even Paul got into the spirit of the thing.

A decade earlier there was a similar eruption from church groups, and even the local law in certain areas of the country, over Elvis’s early success. The trouble was over his bump-and-grind moves. I think if Elvis had not caused such loud and frenzied female reactions his gyrations would have been overlooked. Elvis’s style and music were incomprehensible to an older generation, but well understood by his teenage fans. I sat with a group of adults who scoffed at and scorned Elvis’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, while my 15-year-old cousin, Judy, sat in front of the television squealing, then collapsed in tears over the adults' derision of her idol. Me, I didn’t understand the Elvis appeal exactly — not the way Judy did, anyway — but I loved the music.

This first page is from Life in April, 1956, the rest of the pages are from an article from August, 1956 when the Elvis fireworks were exploding all over the world.

Copyright © 1956, 2013 Time-Life