In “Drink My Red Blood...” we have a poignant tale of a boy, told as only Matheson could tell it. It is scanned from its appearance in Imagination Volume 2 Number 2, 1951.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
A Halloween treat by Richard Matheson
For Halloween I present a short and shuddery tale by master storyteller Richard Matheson. Matheson, born in 1926, died this year, and in his long career produced such classic books as I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man, but is also known for his screenwriting credits for television (The Twilight Zone), his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for Roger Corman, and numerous books and stories produced over a long career.
In “Drink My Red Blood...” we have a poignant tale of a boy, told as only Matheson could tell it. It is scanned from its appearance in Imagination Volume 2 Number 2, 1951.
In “Drink My Red Blood...” we have a poignant tale of a boy, told as only Matheson could tell it. It is scanned from its appearance in Imagination Volume 2 Number 2, 1951.
Friday, October 25, 2013
Damned by YouTube
A Tourism Department photo of the alien landscape of Goblin Valley.
You might have seen the YouTube video showing some jerks destroying a natural rock formation in Goblin Valley, a state park in Utah. The video has been taken down, and all that’s left is a notice of copyright by the idiot who took the cellphone video.
Like many before them, these guys found out that when something goes viral on YouTube it can give instant fame, either for bad or for good. In the case of these two it wasn’t good. They both lost their positions as scout leaders, and are facing state felony charges for vandalism. Besides a photographic record, what got them in trouble was their celebration after the vandalism. Guys doing good deeds don’t need to high-five each other.
“Slip me some skin, fellow moron!”
They claimed they thought they were doing a good thing. They thought the rock was ready to tumble over onto a passing family. Their excuse sounds fishy. To me the whole incident dovetails into something else.
The goblin-toppling incident can be seen as metaphor for events that came before. Two other vandals, Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, caused major damage during the government shutdown. They offered flimsy reasons when called on their misbehavior. Both the former scout leaders in Goblin Valley and the senators in Washington D.C. said they were doing damage in order to save people. Obviously most people saw through those excuses and they will be held accountable. The goblin guys will have their day in court, the senators will have to answer to their constituents come election day. Let’s hope all four get the justice they, and the public, deserve.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Up on the roof
Yesterday I completed the second half of a ritual I have performed each year since 1975. I climb a ladder to the roof of my suburban split-entry house, and I prepare the evaporative cooler for winter.
The ritual of the cooler usually begins in May, when the weather starts to get hot, or as I have learned, as soon as the weather person on television says it will be getting hot. I go to Lowe’s, buy some cooler pads, climb the roof, install the pads, make sure everything is working and my water line isn’t leaking, and then I switch on my cooler for a summer full of hot temperatures outside, cool temperatures inside. That’s the theory, anyway. What usually happens is the cooler, which is above the main hallway, really only cools the living room, so I also have to set up fans in the various rooms in a vain hope of circulating air.
The cooler, which works on a principle discovered during the 18th century by Napoleon’s soldiers when they kept food in wet burlap bags, depends on low humidity to work at peak efficiency. Typical summer humidity in our area is about 10% or less until the season of thunderstorms, so-called “monsoonal moisture” which sets itself up above us for at least a couple of weeks in late July-early August. If the humidity gets to 25% or higher I might as well not have the cooler on, because the humidity is cancelling out the evaporation.
My house is the proverbial oven, located in the proverbial desert hell. This past summer the temperatures were hotter than any summer before, over 95º F for almost two months, and inside the house with the swamp cooler working it was kept at a relatively reasonable 75º in the living room, but in all other upstairs rooms it was more like 80º. I have lived with this so long I should be used to it, but I still do my fair share of kvetching and complaining about the heat.
When we bought our house in 1975 swamp coolers were preferred for home air conditioning. I read once that about 75% of homes in my area used the evaporative cooler, but now it has flip-flopped, and more people use a central air conditioner with their furnace than use a swamp cooler. The central air is much more expensive to run, because people have a tendency to want it cooler than necessary in summer, just like they want to be warmer than necessary in winter. There’s a comfort zone in there somewhere, which I have found to be about 72º. The other thing I read is that running all of these central air conditioners is actually making it hotter outside. The good thing about my rooftop cooler is that it is no more expensive to use than a light bulb, and it doesn’t really contribute to outside pollution.
The swamp cooler is a simple device: a motor turns a large drum inside the box, a pump moves water from the tank of the cooler to the pads to evaporate. The cool air is forced down into the house through a duct to a diffuser built into my ceiling. Every year I am forced to make repairs, which can be repairing a leak in the waterline to the cooler, or replacing the pump or cleaning out the tubes that pour the water onto the pads when they get clogged. I have had summers where I felt like I was on the roof sweating over keeping the cooler running more than I was in my living room being cooled. A typical summer I’d say means from five to ten trips up the ladder to the roof to get everything adjusted and to keep it that way. It’s usually a big relief to get the cooler ready for winter. The process takes about a half hour to an hour, and there is always a satisfaction of knowing that I’ve got about 7 or 8 months of not having to worry about my cooler. No, I just worry about my ancient furnace, but that’s a whole other story.
Getting the cooler winterized entails taking up a bag of supplies; a 6 x 8 foot tarpaulin (those blue things you buy at Walmart for $6.99), a 1/2” wrench to detach the water line to drain it, some strong string or twine to tie the tarpaulin onto the cooler to prevent it from blowing off in a strong wind (that has happened to me a time or two).
Yesterday was a reiteration to me of the old cliché, “this shit is getting old.” It is getting old because I am getting old. When I moved into this house I was 28 years old, and now I’m 66. Making several trips up and down a ladder is getting harder every year. I know most guys don’t like to admit they can’t do this sort of thing after they reach a certain point of their biological clock, but I’m not afraid to admit it. Yeah, next year I should hire someone to do it for me. I don’t want to crawl up on that goddamn roof one more time in my life. But then, I’ve said that for at least the last five years.
There are all makes and models of this type of cooling unit. This is as close a picture as I could find online to one that looks like mine.
The ritual of the cooler usually begins in May, when the weather starts to get hot, or as I have learned, as soon as the weather person on television says it will be getting hot. I go to Lowe’s, buy some cooler pads, climb the roof, install the pads, make sure everything is working and my water line isn’t leaking, and then I switch on my cooler for a summer full of hot temperatures outside, cool temperatures inside. That’s the theory, anyway. What usually happens is the cooler, which is above the main hallway, really only cools the living room, so I also have to set up fans in the various rooms in a vain hope of circulating air.
The cooler, which works on a principle discovered during the 18th century by Napoleon’s soldiers when they kept food in wet burlap bags, depends on low humidity to work at peak efficiency. Typical summer humidity in our area is about 10% or less until the season of thunderstorms, so-called “monsoonal moisture” which sets itself up above us for at least a couple of weeks in late July-early August. If the humidity gets to 25% or higher I might as well not have the cooler on, because the humidity is cancelling out the evaporation.
My house is the proverbial oven, located in the proverbial desert hell. This past summer the temperatures were hotter than any summer before, over 95º F for almost two months, and inside the house with the swamp cooler working it was kept at a relatively reasonable 75º in the living room, but in all other upstairs rooms it was more like 80º. I have lived with this so long I should be used to it, but I still do my fair share of kvetching and complaining about the heat.
When we bought our house in 1975 swamp coolers were preferred for home air conditioning. I read once that about 75% of homes in my area used the evaporative cooler, but now it has flip-flopped, and more people use a central air conditioner with their furnace than use a swamp cooler. The central air is much more expensive to run, because people have a tendency to want it cooler than necessary in summer, just like they want to be warmer than necessary in winter. There’s a comfort zone in there somewhere, which I have found to be about 72º. The other thing I read is that running all of these central air conditioners is actually making it hotter outside. The good thing about my rooftop cooler is that it is no more expensive to use than a light bulb, and it doesn’t really contribute to outside pollution.
The swamp cooler is a simple device: a motor turns a large drum inside the box, a pump moves water from the tank of the cooler to the pads to evaporate. The cool air is forced down into the house through a duct to a diffuser built into my ceiling. Every year I am forced to make repairs, which can be repairing a leak in the waterline to the cooler, or replacing the pump or cleaning out the tubes that pour the water onto the pads when they get clogged. I have had summers where I felt like I was on the roof sweating over keeping the cooler running more than I was in my living room being cooled. A typical summer I’d say means from five to ten trips up the ladder to the roof to get everything adjusted and to keep it that way. It’s usually a big relief to get the cooler ready for winter. The process takes about a half hour to an hour, and there is always a satisfaction of knowing that I’ve got about 7 or 8 months of not having to worry about my cooler. No, I just worry about my ancient furnace, but that’s a whole other story.
Getting the cooler winterized entails taking up a bag of supplies; a 6 x 8 foot tarpaulin (those blue things you buy at Walmart for $6.99), a 1/2” wrench to detach the water line to drain it, some strong string or twine to tie the tarpaulin onto the cooler to prevent it from blowing off in a strong wind (that has happened to me a time or two).
Yesterday was a reiteration to me of the old cliché, “this shit is getting old.” It is getting old because I am getting old. When I moved into this house I was 28 years old, and now I’m 66. Making several trips up and down a ladder is getting harder every year. I know most guys don’t like to admit they can’t do this sort of thing after they reach a certain point of their biological clock, but I’m not afraid to admit it. Yeah, next year I should hire someone to do it for me. I don’t want to crawl up on that goddamn roof one more time in my life. But then, I’ve said that for at least the last five years.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
The Man in the Black Hat
Years ago I found the first edition of a 1941 anthology, The Other Worlds, in a Salvation Army thrift store in California. It reprints stories from magazines like Weird Tales that just weren’t getting much attention in their day. Being published in pulp magazines was something of a stigma. The editor, Phil Stong, although relying heavily on those pulps, went beyond them for his collection, including “Aunt Cassie,” a charming and interesting ghost story by his wife, Virginia Swain, and a true classic of the macabre, “The Graveyard Rats” by Henry Kuttner. So he went from gentle fantasy to gruesome horror in one volume. Good show!
As good as many of the stories are, one of my favorites is “The Man in the Black Hat," by Michael Fessier, reprinted from the February, 1934 issue of Esquire. It has been anthologized several times, (also adapted for radio and television) and for good reason. It presents a situation that is unusual, with a premise difficult to fathom. It leaves the reader wondering how it happened. I love that in a short story. A good story should have a punch, and keep the reader’s mind engaged after the story ends.
Copyright © 1941 Wilfred Funk, Inc.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Anthony Hopkins enjoyed Breaking Bad with fava beans and a fine Chianti
Anthony Hopkins binge-watched the five seasons of Breaking Bad, and wrote star Bryan Cranston an e-mail to tell him what he thought of the acting.
Dear Mister Cranston.
I wanted to write you this email - so I am contacting you through Jeremy Barber - I take it we are both represented by UTA. Great agency.
I've just finished a marathon of watching "BREAKING BAD" - from episode one of the First Season - to the last eight episodes of the Sixth Season. [Ed note: There are in fact five seasons of Breaking Bad; this might have been wishful thinking.] (I downloaded the last season on AMAZON) A total of two weeks (addictive) viewing.
I have never watched anything like it. Brilliant!
Your performance as Walter White was the best acting I have seen - ever.
I know there is so much smoke blowing and sickening bullshit in this business, and I've sort of lost belief in anything really.
But this work of yours is spectacular - absolutely stunning. What is extraordinary, is the sheer power of everyone in the entire production. What was it? Five or six years in the making? How the producers (yourself being one of them), the writers, directors, cinematographers.... every department - casting etc. managed to keep the discipline and control from beginning to the end is (that over used word) awesome.
From what started as a black comedy, descended into a labyrinth of blood, destruction and hell. It was like a great Jacobean, Shakespearian or Greek Tragedy.
If you ever get a chance to - would you pass on my admiration to everyone - Anna Gunn, Dean Norris, Aaron Paul, Betsy Brandt, R.J. Mitte, Bob Odenkirk, Jonathan Banks, Steven Michael Quezada - everyone - everyone gave master classes of performance ... The list is endless.
Thank you. That kind of work/artistry is rare, and when, once in a while, it occurs, as in this epic work, it restores confidence.
You and all the cast are the best actors I've ever seen.
That may sound like a good lung full of smoke blowing. But it is not. It's almost midnight out here in Malibu, and I felt compelled to write this email.
Congratulations and my deepest respect. You are truly a great, great actor.
Best regards
Tony Hopkins.
Now that's praise that has some teeth in it!
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Three apocalypses: Zombie, climate and Republicans
In zombie movies, by the time we see the dead, whatever was once human is now gone. Zombies are walking shells that were once people. So of course that gives surviving humans the right (nay, the responsibility!) to blow them away, usually with high calibre bullets to the head, although anything that can be used to kill the brain is good. In the aforementioned Walking Dead episode the zombies are outside the fence of the prison where the good guys have taken refuge from enemies: bad guys, both alive and undead. But by being undead the zombies aren’t really bad guys, are they? Sure they’re trying to chow down on living flesh, but they can’t help it. Usually in fiction we try to kill the people who deserve to be killed. What makes the zombies the object of our subjective lust to kill is not their personalities — being dead they have none — or whether they deserve it. It’s just because they are what they are, scary and ugly as hell. The situation in the season opener of Walking Dead sets up a lot of camera shots where humans are on one side of a chainlink fence stabbing sharpened poles or knives into zombie heads, with big gouts of blood. We get all the visceral thrills of killing with none of the guilt. We can’t really kill dead people, can we? We can just stop them from shambling on over to where we are to try to bite us.
Something they don’t get too deep into in these shows is disposal of large piles of corpses, which mostly goes on off-camera. Corpses would stink the place up something awful, but even if they are walking they’re still dead, and I assume still decomposing. But I never hear anyone in one of these stories say, “I smell a bunch of decaying zombies! They’re heading our way!” Since they’re still decomposing it may explain why all zombies in movies have to have messed up faces. Unless they’ve been in a horrible accident most people don’t die with their faces looking like raw meat.
The zombie movies are part of fiction about the collapse of civilization. The best thing is, despite all of the things that can happen to crush a civilization including sneak attacks by enemy nations, hordes of barbarians sweeping over the land killing all in their path, natural disasters, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and such, the only apocalyptic vision we will never have to face is a zombie apocalypse.
Not so a Republican apocalypse. As I write this, and if nothing is done to avert it, we have about two days until there will be a crisis which has evolved out of Republican hard-headedness and general disregard for their fellow citizens.
That’s an apocalyptic vision to scare normal folks.
Further on down the road is the climate change apocalypse, which is not only a subject of denial by those same right wingdings, but far enough down the road that their view of the impending apocalypse is blurred.
The latest apocalyptic scare is an article that came out the other day claiming that by 2047 (a mere 34 years) the coldest winter will be hotter than our hottest summer.
I’m worried by the thoughts that my son and his family will be around in 2047 to bear what has been created by people of prior generations — including my own — who will have brought upon our descendents such an apocalypse out of denial, greed and stupidity.
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Walt Disney and the American Dream
On a December day in 1966 I heard that Walt Disney had died. I thought it was the end of an era, that the Disney entertainment empire would probably fall apart after Walt’s death. It seemed to me that the person of Walt Disney and his company were the same thing.
It’s true that Disney did have the final say-so over the products released under his name. He was very hands-on that way. But despite losing Walt the Disney organization has survived and flourished and now it is much, much bigger than I think even Walt himself envisioned.
To consider the worth of the company bearing his name it’s easy to forget that it all had to start somewhere. Disney was once a poor cartoonist trying to start a company and sell his animated cartoons. Even when things got rock bottom he never gave up on his dream.
Disney was very down-and-out at one point in the early 1920s during his time in Kansas City trying to make his Laff-O-gram Films company a success. You’d think any other person would give up, then go out and get a job in a warehouse or the Post Office. Not Disney. He kept trying and trying and working harder and harder until he made his dream a reality.
The book, Walt Before Mickey, by Timothy S. Susanin, published by University Press of Mississippi in 2011, tells several stories of Walt’s poverty, including one anecdote that shows how bad it got:
“As the end of 1922 loomed, Laugh-O-gram Films was . . . ‘down to its last penny . . .’ [But then] Walt was asked to make a live-action educational film. Dr. Thomas B. McCrum, forty-six, a dentist . . . asked Walt to produce a film that Dr. McCrum could use to educate children about dental care. Dr. McCrum offered to pay $500 for the film, but Walt’s dire financial straits prevented Walt from agreeing to meet with Dr. McCrum:
“One night the doctor called [Walt] to say, ‘I’ve got the money. Come over and we’ll set the deal. ‘I can’t,’ Walt told him. ‘Why not?’ the doctor asked. ‘I haven’t got any shoes,’ [Walt] said. ‘They were falling apart. I left them at the shoemaker’s shop downstairs and he won’t let me have them until I dig up a dollar and a half.’ ‘I’ll be right over,’ Dr. McCrum said. He paid the shoemaker, took [Walt] back to his office, and together they worked out an agreement to make the film he had in mind.”
Walt’s earliest employees included some of the real legends of the animation industry: Hugh Harman (and for a time, Hugh’s older brother Fred (Red Ryder) Harman), Rudy Ising, Ub Iwerks, and even Friz Freleng.
Disney did have a problem with keeping employees, who often moved on to better offers or just to get away with Walt. From descriptions of Walt’s single-minded vision and drive I believe he may have had a narcissistic personality disorder. Not disabling, but enough that he saw himself as the center of a self-contained universe. After having several arguments with Disney, Friz Freleng quit. Freleng had called in sick one day, but actually went to the movies. Disney saw him on top of a double-decker bus that Disney was driving behind. The next day Freleng’s desk was cleared out, another argument ensued, and Friz was out.
Freleng had said of his relationship with Walt, “Walt and I had personalities that clashed.” As a result, “I just couldn’t take him anymore . . .” Friz felt that, “Walt was just a hard person to work for. I think a lot of people have said the same thing, you had to please Walt, you couldn’t please yourself.”
From an historical point of view Freleng is vindicated in quitting because he went on to such fame as an animation director at Warner Bros.
From the book:
“When he was eighty-four, Freleng gave an interview to the Kansas City Star in which he appeared to be at peace with his rocky relationship with Walt, saying, ‘Walt was a genius, and a genius does what he wants. He doesn’t do what you want.’”
Since Walt’s death most of the people who helped build the Disney brand have received their recognition. Walt Before Mickey has certainly identified most, if not all, of the major players in Disney’s early career, especially with the amount of minutiae the author has presented. Much research has gone into Disney’s career. It appears that no surviving receipt or newspaper notice has been missed in the scholar’s zeal to document everything that concerned Disney and his companies, leading up to the major breakthrough that came about with the creation of Mickey Mouse.
Another excellent book on Walt’s early career is Walt in Wonderland (Johns-Hopkins University Press, 2000), about Disney’s silent films.
At some point, despite the characters the Disney studios had created and marketed successfully, the most interesting character to come along was Disney himself. In the mid-fifties after opening his Disneyland theme park and his Disneyland television program, Disney became the spokesperson for the studio. He came out and did a bit of dialogue before each program, and created the role of the friendly “Uncle Walt” to his young audience. We all bought it. I thought for sure I could write Walt a personal note and he’d come to my home to speak to my scout troop! Luckily my mother didn’t let me send it, telling me, “Mister Disney is a very busy man, with a lot of important things to do.” I was a bit crushed, but that was the friendly image he projected. “Uncle Walt” was a CEO of a major company, with all of those attendant duties. Later in life I understood how Walt Disney created a company, memorable cartoon characters — and later live action, like Davy Crockett — while creating himself for the Baby Boomer generation. By his clever use of television to cater to the largest group of youngsters to come along in the history of the United States, he had virtually ensured himself of immortality for that generation. The proof of that is in the Disney name, still known and revered around the world.
__________
A day after posting the above I found this on my Peanuts page-a-day calendar. I believe I can tie it in to what I just said about Disney being his own greatest creation.
Sunday, October 06, 2013
Tea party: traitors and treason
Tea party: more Benedict Arnold than Paul Revere.
It’s hard not to look upon the dysfunctional mess that is Congress in 2013 as being anything more than a body filled with traitors fomenting treason. What else would you call individuals within a group who try to derail a whole government and its functions for the goal of killing a law they don’t like?
Many people are blaming both Democrats and Republicans for being obstinate, not moving to compromise. But if I were President of the United States what would I do? I’d know that what the Republicans are trying to kill is a law that has already gone into effect, has already passed Constitutional muster by the United States Supreme Court, and is wanted by a great many citizens. So I’d stand my ground and force the traitors to cave to the will of the people.
Forget what you learned about in your high school civics classes about the three branches of government. The United States government has more than three branches. With the Citizens United ruling, ironically by the very Supreme Court that declared Obamacare constitutional, (so one good, one bad decision), we have added an unconstitutional “special interest” fourth branch of government, which covers multi-billionaires and corporations and lobbying groups, including the National Rifle Association. They have added a whole other level of sinister intentions with their own purposes in mind, rather than the common purposes of the populace.
And why? Well, fear for one thing. Fear of losing power, especially.
Add into this paranoid fear a president of color, and whooboy, the racist nuts are out in force. Tea party lawmakers may have left their burning crosses and white hoods at home, but I see those symbols of racial hatred superimposed on them. Electing a man of color not once, but twice, has fanned those flames of race hatred from the embers of the past to the firestorms of the present.
At the tea party center I see a racist organization, just a more sophisticated hate group than the Ku Klux Klan or American Nazis. And they will always find spokespeople, provided with money funneled in from those aforementioned special interest groups. That idiots like the tea party members can be elected says a lot about certain segments of the American electorate, but can such an organization continue to exist? As long as they are willing to sabotage everyone else’s rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for their own treasonous purposes they can fool enough fools to go on for a time. Our country has weathered such groups before, and this is just one more group of disaffected radicals to deal with.
People who identify with the tea party may picture themselves as Paul Revere, but they are more like Benedict Arnold.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Trader Horn and the one-time-only movie star
I am fascinated by this article about the filming of the movie Trader Horn from the June 1968 issue of American Heritage magazine. The movie, which was MGM’s first talkie, cost nearly $3 million to make. That was an astonishing sum in those days, and if you believe in comparing dollars now to dollars then, the equivalent today would be $42 million. And this was just as the Great Depression was starting.
The cast and crew of Trader Horn filmed on location in Africa for a year, and the female lead, Edwina Booth, a 21-year-old Mormon girl from just south of me in Provo, Utah, made it through the filming, but was sick with jungle fever for six years. After some subsequent minor roles she left the movie business. Easy come, easy go! She had walked in to the audition as a young starlet, and walked out with a major movie role, and then it was all over. Booth married a Mormon gentleman and they spent their time doing church work. Because of her illness rumors had spread that she had died, but she had just taken a low profile. She died in 1991 at age 86.
Duncan Renaldo (who, I was surprised to learn, was born Renaldo Duncan), was her male costar. You may remember that Renaldo did The Cisco Kid TV series in the 1950s, and was famous for his closing line with his costar, Leo Carillo, “Ohhhh, Ceesco...” “Ohhh, Pancho...” Born in 1904, as was Edwina Booth, Duncan Renaldo died at age 76 in 1980.
Copyright © 1968 American Heritage
The cast and crew of Trader Horn filmed on location in Africa for a year, and the female lead, Edwina Booth, a 21-year-old Mormon girl from just south of me in Provo, Utah, made it through the filming, but was sick with jungle fever for six years. After some subsequent minor roles she left the movie business. Easy come, easy go! She had walked in to the audition as a young starlet, and walked out with a major movie role, and then it was all over. Booth married a Mormon gentleman and they spent their time doing church work. Because of her illness rumors had spread that she had died, but she had just taken a low profile. She died in 1991 at age 86.
Duncan Renaldo (who, I was surprised to learn, was born Renaldo Duncan), was her male costar. You may remember that Renaldo did The Cisco Kid TV series in the 1950s, and was famous for his closing line with his costar, Leo Carillo, “Ohhhh, Ceesco...” “Ohhh, Pancho...” Born in 1904, as was Edwina Booth, Duncan Renaldo died at age 76 in 1980.
Copyright © 1968 American Heritage
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Joseph Smith, UFO contactee?
As a former Mormon I found the 2012 “Mormon moment” interesting. I thought it would provide political enemies of Mitt Romney an opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of the more arcane beliefs of the religion.(1)
Mormonism was discussed publicly, but its origins not so much. Republicans, even those who were holding their noses while supporting Romney, didn’t want to obscure the issues of the election with beliefs of the church that offend so many conservative Christians. The Mormon church has been known to deflect some discussions of its past that don’t fit its modern message. They can’t get away without the linchpin of their faith, though: their earliest history that involves Joseph Smith and his claims of dealings with supernatural beings.
Joseph Smith’s story of meeting with an angel and receiving plates of gold inscribed with ancient writing he “translated” into the Book of Mormon is usually dismissed by non-believers. But devout Mormons don’t get a choice whether to believe or not. According to this from the article published in the October, 1962 issue of American Heritage, “The Farm Boy and the Angel” by Carl Carmer, a belief in these tales is paramount. If they don’t believe Joseph Smith’s story they can’t consider themselves Mormons.
That was where I found myself at the point I left the church. How much did I believe in Joseph Smith’s story? I didn’t, and over the years I haven’t had any reason to believe I made a mistake. I see Smith’s claims of interactions with the divine as fraud mixed in with some imagination (it took an imaginative mind to concoct and write the Book of Mormon). The church has gained legitimacy over the years due to its public relations, charity and organizational skills, but its beginnings are common to cults.
Since I think of Joseph Smith’s visions as being made up by him for whatever purpose, what then to think of books like Our Haunted Planet, written by John Keel, or a more current book, Contactees, A History of Alien-Human Interaction by Nick Redfern? Both of these books appear to treat Joseph Smith’s story at face value.(4) The difference is they don’t see the entities who visited Smith to be spiritual or of God, but alien beings. Keel called them “ultraterrestrials,” (described by Keel as UFO occupants he believed to be non-human entities capable of taking on whatever form they want(5)) and Redfern considers the Angel Moroni to be akin to the aliens who could have “just as easily stepped out of one of the saucers that landed before Adamski, Van Tassel, Short, and countless other Contactees in the 1950s.”
To backtrack fifty years, I read George Adamski’s book, Flying Saucers Have Landed, at the same time I was active in the LDS faith. At that point in my life I was ready to accept whatever wild story someone came up with because I was a naïve adolescent and I didn’t believe people would lie about such things. Adamski claimed to have met a spaceman standing outside his flying saucer on the side of a lonesome California road. Unlike the small, gray aliens we envision today the aliens of the early Contactees appeared to be Nordic, with long blond hair. Adamski’s alien, named Orthon, was one of what became known as the Space Brothers. Those long-haired beings from Venus who were visiting Earth were here to warn us of the dangers of our nuclear weapons. From that Adamski created his own cult of believers.
While fascinating in their approach to Joseph Smith’s visitors being not of this planet rather than from “traditional” angels, it is harder to accept the theories from Keel’s and Redfern’s book than it is the official church version. Keel talks of many religions, even Islam as founded by Mohammed, which began with visions. This may be true, but I also believe they were visions that originated in the visioneers’ own brains, either from a brain disorder, psychological problem, or even hallucinogenic substances.
Joseph Smith’s story of his visitations with supernatural holy beings takes place over a long period of time, years from his first “visions” to completion of the Book of Mormon, and all the while he was drawing more people, including his family, into his circle. He was either very skillful at manipulation or told big lies in such a way as to convince his listeners. Or perhaps his family members were in on the overall scheme.
What the LDS Church rarely publicizes is well known to historians. In New York State, in that era and place where Smith and his family lived, there were a lot of superstitions and tales of supernatural beings and devices like “seer stones” that would lead people to treasure, buried Spanish gold. Carmer wrote that Smith accepted a job with farmer Josiah Stowell to use his stone to find treasure. But after a time, as recounted in the article:
Continuing the story:
Although the court found Smith guilty, there is no record of a fine or punishment.
Smith’s description of the moving trunk seems a lie, a fanciful tale by someone trying to explain why he isn’t able to perform the feats of magic he is hired to do. That sort of magic, like Harry Potter, we can dismiss as fiction. Tales of elementals or spirits guarding treasure are standard in folklore.
Why angels, or God, would visit Smith seems to me to be a made-up concoction of religion and fantasy, and why Keel or Redfern might theorize that those fantastic visitors were not of this earth, somehow tied to UFOs seems even more incredible, stretching credulity past the breaking point.
(1)I even contributed one article, “Does Mitt Romney believe black people are cursed?”
(2)Also referred to as LDS.
(3)Joseph Smith, An American Prophet, 1933.
(4)To be fair, they treat all the stories they tell in their books, whether they concern UFO/flying saucer cultists, bigfoot sightings, or any other oddball occurrences, as if the persons telling the stories were reporting the exact truth without lies or embellishment. In Keel’s case I think he believed the stories. Redfern is a reporter, telling stories without declaring prejudice, so the reader can make up his own mind as to veracity.
(5)Wikipedia entry on John Keel.
Mormonism was discussed publicly, but its origins not so much. Republicans, even those who were holding their noses while supporting Romney, didn’t want to obscure the issues of the election with beliefs of the church that offend so many conservative Christians. The Mormon church has been known to deflect some discussions of its past that don’t fit its modern message. They can’t get away without the linchpin of their faith, though: their earliest history that involves Joseph Smith and his claims of dealings with supernatural beings.
A nineteenth century woodcut of Joseph Smith, Angel Moroni and the golden plates. The angel is more of the popular conception; Mormons don’t believe in angels with wings.
Joseph Smith’s story of meeting with an angel and receiving plates of gold inscribed with ancient writing he “translated” into the Book of Mormon is usually dismissed by non-believers. But devout Mormons don’t get a choice whether to believe or not. According to this from the article published in the October, 1962 issue of American Heritage, “The Farm Boy and the Angel” by Carl Carmer, a belief in these tales is paramount. If they don’t believe Joseph Smith’s story they can’t consider themselves Mormons.
“This is the ‘origin story’ of the religious sect known formally as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, informally as ‘the Mormons.’(2) All conversion to the Mormon creed begins with the acceptance of this miracle-fraught narrative. John Henry Evans, Mormon historian, who has written one of the most objective and thoughtful biographies of Joseph Smith(3) delivers plainly the accepted Mormon attitude: ‘Mormonism has its basis on the miraculous element in religion, or it has no foundation at all on which to stand. They are fooling themselves, whether within or without the Mormon church, who think they can accept the faith of Joseph Smith and at the same time reject the visions of Joseph Smith. No such choice is permissible. One must believe these supernormal experiences and Mormonism, or one must reject Mormonism with the visions.’”
Since I think of Joseph Smith’s visions as being made up by him for whatever purpose, what then to think of books like Our Haunted Planet, written by John Keel, or a more current book, Contactees, A History of Alien-Human Interaction by Nick Redfern? Both of these books appear to treat Joseph Smith’s story at face value.(4) The difference is they don’t see the entities who visited Smith to be spiritual or of God, but alien beings. Keel called them “ultraterrestrials,” (described by Keel as UFO occupants he believed to be non-human entities capable of taking on whatever form they want(5)) and Redfern considers the Angel Moroni to be akin to the aliens who could have “just as easily stepped out of one of the saucers that landed before Adamski, Van Tassel, Short, and countless other Contactees in the 1950s.”
Our Haunted Planet is from 1971, Contactees was published in 2012.
To backtrack fifty years, I read George Adamski’s book, Flying Saucers Have Landed, at the same time I was active in the LDS faith. At that point in my life I was ready to accept whatever wild story someone came up with because I was a naïve adolescent and I didn’t believe people would lie about such things. Adamski claimed to have met a spaceman standing outside his flying saucer on the side of a lonesome California road. Unlike the small, gray aliens we envision today the aliens of the early Contactees appeared to be Nordic, with long blond hair. Adamski’s alien, named Orthon, was one of what became known as the Space Brothers. Those long-haired beings from Venus who were visiting Earth were here to warn us of the dangers of our nuclear weapons. From that Adamski created his own cult of believers.
Artistic views of the tales told by Smith of his meeting with Angel Moroni, and Adamski’s first meeting with Orthon.
While fascinating in their approach to Joseph Smith’s visitors being not of this planet rather than from “traditional” angels, it is harder to accept the theories from Keel’s and Redfern’s book than it is the official church version. Keel talks of many religions, even Islam as founded by Mohammed, which began with visions. This may be true, but I also believe they were visions that originated in the visioneers’ own brains, either from a brain disorder, psychological problem, or even hallucinogenic substances.
Joseph Smith’s story of his visitations with supernatural holy beings takes place over a long period of time, years from his first “visions” to completion of the Book of Mormon, and all the while he was drawing more people, including his family, into his circle. He was either very skillful at manipulation or told big lies in such a way as to convince his listeners. Or perhaps his family members were in on the overall scheme.
What the LDS Church rarely publicizes is well known to historians. In New York State, in that era and place where Smith and his family lived, there were a lot of superstitions and tales of supernatural beings and devices like “seer stones” that would lead people to treasure, buried Spanish gold. Carmer wrote that Smith accepted a job with farmer Josiah Stowell to use his stone to find treasure. But after a time, as recounted in the article:
“Then, as spring began, one, Peter Bridgeman, intolerant of such goings-on, swore out a warrant for the arrest of Joseph Smith as a ‘disorderly person and an impostor.’”
“Joseph was brought before a justice of the peace at Bainbridge on March 20, 1826. Of the five witnesses at his trail, three told of their certainty that the defendant could ‘divine things’ by ‘looking into a hat at his dark-colored stone.’ One of these said that Joseph had told him how a money trunk was situated, and that after he had dug down several feet for it he struck upon something sounding like a board or plank. At this moment, the witness testified, Joseph remembered that the last time he looked into his stone he had seen the two Indians who had buried the trunk quarreling until one slew the other and threw his body into the hole beside the trunk where it remained as a spirit-guard. It had proved its protective power, the witness continued, for as long as the digging went on the trunk kept sinking and remained constantly at about the same distance from the diggers.”
Smith’s description of the moving trunk seems a lie, a fanciful tale by someone trying to explain why he isn’t able to perform the feats of magic he is hired to do. That sort of magic, like Harry Potter, we can dismiss as fiction. Tales of elementals or spirits guarding treasure are standard in folklore.
From Contactees by Nick Redfern.
Why angels, or God, would visit Smith seems to me to be a made-up concoction of religion and fantasy, and why Keel or Redfern might theorize that those fantastic visitors were not of this earth, somehow tied to UFOs seems even more incredible, stretching credulity past the breaking point.
(1)I even contributed one article, “Does Mitt Romney believe black people are cursed?”
(2)Also referred to as LDS.
(3)Joseph Smith, An American Prophet, 1933.
(4)To be fair, they treat all the stories they tell in their books, whether they concern UFO/flying saucer cultists, bigfoot sightings, or any other oddball occurrences, as if the persons telling the stories were reporting the exact truth without lies or embellishment. In Keel’s case I think he believed the stories. Redfern is a reporter, telling stories without declaring prejudice, so the reader can make up his own mind as to veracity.
(5)Wikipedia entry on John Keel.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Beatles short and un-winding road to serious critique
I was 16 and my brother 13 when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. We were the perfect ages to be infected by Beatlemania. We were also the perfect ages to grow in age and maturity as the Beatles continued to refine their music into something beyond the pop classics of their early years.
In 1968 with the release of the double album The Beatles it was acknowledged that the Beatles had gone beyond the pop music stage, and they were taking the rest of the music business along with them. Time, which would normally be reviewing Broadway, jazz or classical music, picked The Beatles to review as a musical event, rather than just another album. The fact that over 45 years later the Beatles have just as much musical credibility says something about their enduring legacy.
Copyright © 1968 Time-Life
In 1968 with the release of the double album The Beatles it was acknowledged that the Beatles had gone beyond the pop music stage, and they were taking the rest of the music business along with them. Time, which would normally be reviewing Broadway, jazz or classical music, picked The Beatles to review as a musical event, rather than just another album. The fact that over 45 years later the Beatles have just as much musical credibility says something about their enduring legacy.
Copyright © 1968 Time-Life
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Feeling bad: On meeting Breaking Bad’s inevitable end
I watch Breaking Bad in a very specific way. I record it on my DVR on Sunday night, along with its sister program, Talking Bad. Sally is not interested in the show so I watch it when she has gone to work at her volunteer job.
This final group of episodes, as any Bad fan will tell you, has been rough on us.
Today I watched the episode that is third from last. Two more episodes to go and of course I have to see them, but after each episode this season I feel beat up. I never know where the blow will come from, but because of some scene or revelation in the show I will be punched in the head and sent reeling. My fellow fans who have watched the episode will know that it is one of the most difficult in the series. It kills off a character we have all known for a long time.
My usual pattern is to hit the fast-forward to get past the commercials, but in this episode I let them play so I could catch my breath. I was relieved to hear Talking Bad host Chris Hardwicke tell the audience that when he watched the show the day before he could only watch it in 15-minute increments, after which he would stop it and have to recover enough to watch more.
So how does a show get to a point where it becomes almost torture to watch, and yet we want to watch every scene, every line of dialogue? Well, it gets there by an awful lot of hard work on the part of many people, including writers, directors, and one of the strongest casts of characters ever to appear on a series television program.
Bryan Cranston has at last gone full out on show creator Vince Gilligan’s oft-repeated pitch to the network about what the show would be about: “I want to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface.” Just as Al “Scarface” Pacino begins to lose it in that classic movie, so is Walter White, cancer-stricken former high school chemistry teacher and family man, finally turned fully into Heisenberg, the drug kingpin, crazy with paranoia and rage.
Who knows what will happen? Two more episodes to go, two more chances to have us fans knocked down and pummeled by a storyline that is going all the way into…what? Well, the show has surprised us many times so far. We’ll see exactly what. But based on what we’ve seen in five seasons, probably something that will have us saying, “Did I really see that?” as we pick ourselves up off the floor.
This final group of episodes, as any Bad fan will tell you, has been rough on us.
Today I watched the episode that is third from last. Two more episodes to go and of course I have to see them, but after each episode this season I feel beat up. I never know where the blow will come from, but because of some scene or revelation in the show I will be punched in the head and sent reeling. My fellow fans who have watched the episode will know that it is one of the most difficult in the series. It kills off a character we have all known for a long time.
My usual pattern is to hit the fast-forward to get past the commercials, but in this episode I let them play so I could catch my breath. I was relieved to hear Talking Bad host Chris Hardwicke tell the audience that when he watched the show the day before he could only watch it in 15-minute increments, after which he would stop it and have to recover enough to watch more.
Bryan Cranston has at last gone full out on show creator Vince Gilligan’s oft-repeated pitch to the network about what the show would be about: “I want to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface.” Just as Al “Scarface” Pacino begins to lose it in that classic movie, so is Walter White, cancer-stricken former high school chemistry teacher and family man, finally turned fully into Heisenberg, the drug kingpin, crazy with paranoia and rage.
Who knows what will happen? Two more episodes to go, two more chances to have us fans knocked down and pummeled by a storyline that is going all the way into…what? Well, the show has surprised us many times so far. We’ll see exactly what. But based on what we’ve seen in five seasons, probably something that will have us saying, “Did I really see that?” as we pick ourselves up off the floor.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
World’s oldest man dies, and world’s oldest-feeling man hangs on to dear life
Today I read that Sulustiano Sanchez-Blazquez of New York died at age 112. He was the oldest man in the world, or at least the oldest man whose age could be proved. His birth certificate showed he was born June 8, 1901. He said he ate a banana every day, and that’s why he got to be so old. Order me up a bunch.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that Sally and I knew several people who were born in the nineteenth century. Our grandmothers, for instance. But they died in the 1980s, and then their children, our parents, who were born sometime around World War I or shortly thereafter, began to die in great numbers.
The world’s oldest woman, as I write this, was born in South Africa in 1894, so does that mean she is the last living person who was born in the nineteenth century? That can’t be true. Somewhere there have to be other people who are supercentenarians, but born in places where birth records were spotty, or even non-existent. We forget in our Internet age that there are people out there whose births, lives and deaths go basically unrecorded.
Maybe there is a village tucked away in the Himalayas, unknown to anyone but its residents, where the people live to be 200-years-old on a diet of yogurt and yak-butter, and are still chopping wood at age 150 with all the vigor of a 30-year-old in our society. Maybe, but we have pretty much covered the planet in the twentieth century, and hidden places are no longer hidden.
Along with the article on the world’s oldest man today I read that nursing home care for us Baby Boomers will be half of what it is for people now in nursing homes. They are talking about twenty years from now, when those of us born in the years right after World War II will start hitting our eighties, if we live that long. That’s because we had less children than our parents. We were heeding the call for zero population growth when we started our families and now our concern for the planet has come back to bite us on the butt!
In the meantime, despite the headline of today’s post, I feel pretty good. I’m not sure how 66-years-old is supposed to feel. I have arthritis, my joints are wearing out, I need stronger reading glasses every year, and I’m thinking of buying an ear trumpet so I can hear what my wife says to me, but other than that, I seem to be moving into my dotage fairly well.
In her declining years, but before she got deep into her dementia, my mother watched a lot of television, and thought the commercials featuring the tiny Pillsbury Doughboy were cute.
Since I was always grasping for ideas as to what to give her for Christmas, when she told me that I seized on getting her some merchandise using that character. I bought her some mixing bowls, salt and pepper shakers, and a Pillsbury Doughboy cookie jar. A few months later I noticed she had not put them out on her counter. I asked her why and she hemmed and hawed a bit, but my brother later told me, “She is afraid they will come to life.”
Aha.
The other day Sally and I were cleaning out some stuff from the basement and found those items, which I had brought from my mother's apartment when she went into an Alzheimer’s nursing home. We put them on display in our kitchen, which now looks basically like a stall in an antiques mall, but I digress.
I woke up the other night and thought, wouldn’t it be creepy to walk out into the kitchen and have these little doughboys running around on the floor? Then I thought, man, I am entertaining my own dementia. I turned on a light and read a book for a while and went back to sleep. The doughboys, as you can see in the above photo, are right where we put them.
I am aware of the way men’s and women’s minds work, and when we look at the same thing we can see something different. Perhaps I should say we may focus on something different than someone of the opposite sex.
I have an e-mail correspondent, who is a friend of both Sally and me. Trying to prove my point of different perceptions I sent her this picture and said, “I’ll bet when you look at this picture of the girl in the white jacket you notice first the fashion, the jacket and boots. Me, my first thought on seeing the picture is, "I think she’s naked under that coat!”
She wrote back, “I was thinking exactly the same thing. So what does that make me?” Well, I didn’t think that made her anything...I just need to find a less-obvious picture to test my theory.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that Sally and I knew several people who were born in the nineteenth century. Our grandmothers, for instance. But they died in the 1980s, and then their children, our parents, who were born sometime around World War I or shortly thereafter, began to die in great numbers.
The world’s oldest woman, as I write this, was born in South Africa in 1894, so does that mean she is the last living person who was born in the nineteenth century? That can’t be true. Somewhere there have to be other people who are supercentenarians, but born in places where birth records were spotty, or even non-existent. We forget in our Internet age that there are people out there whose births, lives and deaths go basically unrecorded.
Maybe there is a village tucked away in the Himalayas, unknown to anyone but its residents, where the people live to be 200-years-old on a diet of yogurt and yak-butter, and are still chopping wood at age 150 with all the vigor of a 30-year-old in our society. Maybe, but we have pretty much covered the planet in the twentieth century, and hidden places are no longer hidden.
Along with the article on the world’s oldest man today I read that nursing home care for us Baby Boomers will be half of what it is for people now in nursing homes. They are talking about twenty years from now, when those of us born in the years right after World War II will start hitting our eighties, if we live that long. That’s because we had less children than our parents. We were heeding the call for zero population growth when we started our families and now our concern for the planet has come back to bite us on the butt!
In the meantime, despite the headline of today’s post, I feel pretty good. I’m not sure how 66-years-old is supposed to feel. I have arthritis, my joints are wearing out, I need stronger reading glasses every year, and I’m thinking of buying an ear trumpet so I can hear what my wife says to me, but other than that, I seem to be moving into my dotage fairly well.
**********
In her declining years, but before she got deep into her dementia, my mother watched a lot of television, and thought the commercials featuring the tiny Pillsbury Doughboy were cute.
Since I was always grasping for ideas as to what to give her for Christmas, when she told me that I seized on getting her some merchandise using that character. I bought her some mixing bowls, salt and pepper shakers, and a Pillsbury Doughboy cookie jar. A few months later I noticed she had not put them out on her counter. I asked her why and she hemmed and hawed a bit, but my brother later told me, “She is afraid they will come to life.”
Aha.
The other day Sally and I were cleaning out some stuff from the basement and found those items, which I had brought from my mother's apartment when she went into an Alzheimer’s nursing home. We put them on display in our kitchen, which now looks basically like a stall in an antiques mall, but I digress.
I woke up the other night and thought, wouldn’t it be creepy to walk out into the kitchen and have these little doughboys running around on the floor? Then I thought, man, I am entertaining my own dementia. I turned on a light and read a book for a while and went back to sleep. The doughboys, as you can see in the above photo, are right where we put them.
**********
I am aware of the way men’s and women’s minds work, and when we look at the same thing we can see something different. Perhaps I should say we may focus on something different than someone of the opposite sex.
I have an e-mail correspondent, who is a friend of both Sally and me. Trying to prove my point of different perceptions I sent her this picture and said, “I’ll bet when you look at this picture of the girl in the white jacket you notice first the fashion, the jacket and boots. Me, my first thought on seeing the picture is, "I think she’s naked under that coat!”
She wrote back, “I was thinking exactly the same thing. So what does that make me?” Well, I didn’t think that made her anything...I just need to find a less-obvious picture to test my theory.
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