Other peoples' stuff: buying memories

 I wrote this originally in 2006. With some editing and some updating I am presenting it again.

You walk into any thrift store in America, I don't care what it is, Goodwill, Salvation Army, Thrift Town, whatever, about 95% of what you see will be typical thrift store fare.

By that I mean you'll see the same 1970s stoneware dishes, the same coffee mugs that say, “World's Greatest Fisherman,” the same Andy Williams or Herb Alpert LPs. I go in trying to find something different so I've got a practiced eye at mentally sorting the everyday from the exceptional. My granddaughter, Gabby, went into a thrift store with us last summer, and liked what she saw. She said, “We get to buy other peoples’ stuff!”

Like these photos. A few years ago I went looking for a nice photo frame. I found what I wanted and when I got it home took a good look at it. What I thought was the original advertising print in the frame was actually a school photo of a pretty high school girl.

I don't have any idea who she is, or why her picture was in a thrift store. Stuff like that happens occasionally, and it’s probably some sort of mistake. I could give back the picture, but I don't know who she is.

She is a cutey, though. Maybe 16 or 17-years-old, nice broad forehead, connoting smarts — probably an AP or 4.0 student — pretty brown eyes, nice chin, but an especially pretty smile. Young woman, I'm sure that to this day when you turn that smile on you melt hearts.

I don't know how to date this picture. Probably early ’90s; the moussed hair is a clue.

A couple of years later the same scenario: I’m looking for a frame and come across this picture I call Yankee Baby. What the — ! This one I spotted immediately as a family picture. It even came with a name on the back and maybe someday I’ll google that name and see if I can locate the subject.

The photo appears to be from the late ’40s or early ’50s. I love the Yankee outfit! I tried to sell this on eBay once, shamelessly listing it with the name “Yankees” prominent in the headline. I had no bidders. I guess Yankee fans don't want pictures of babies dressed up like Babe Ruth. To me it gives new meaning to the nickname, “The Bambino.”

Family pictures are so intensely personal. They mean something to the family, very little to anyone else. Still, I like the subjects in both these pictures. As a former school district employee, I saw hundreds of high school girls every day and I didn’t take much notice because there were so many of them. But there is something about the frozen moment aspect of a photograph, the attention to the subject that school photos specialize in, as well as that pretty smile that draws me back to her picture.

I've already talked about how many Baby Boomers there are in this country, and the little Yankee Boy looks like he fit in with my generation. Maybe the scenario is something like this: his mom took him to the photo studio and proudly put him on a stool and told him to look at the birdie and smile. Awwwwww, how cute he looks, she thought. Then years later she’s dead, he’s an executive with IBM living in Hong Kong; someone cleans out her stuff, selling it in an estate sale. The new owner looks at this picture along with the van load of other stuff he got at the sale, says, “What the hell do I do with this?” He tosses it in his junk box. From there the picture makes its way into the donation pile at my local thrift store, and ultimately I buy someone else’s memory for 50¢.

The coincidence: Me, The New Yorker, Mindy Kaling and J.D. Salinger

Are there such things as coincidences? Yes. They happen to me on occasion. But I have never known what they mean, if anything.

Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño said, “Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are.” If you go to the Internet you get a couple of dozen quotes about coincidences, a lot of which contradict each other. Some people see coincidences as part of a grand plan of God’s, others as interesting, yet random happenstance.

What I know about coincidences and me is that they come to me out of the blue. I may go months without noticing anything particularly coincidental, and then get a surprise.

The surprise happened to me yesterday morning. I have been reading a book, About Town, The New Yorker and the World It Made by Ben Yagoda. In a section about author J.D. Salinger I read that Salinger , “. . . wisely chose not to reprint [his story] “Hapworth”* in book form, and as a result many libraries’ bound New Yorker volume containing the June 19, 1965, issue is missing pages 32 to 113, their removal effected by some fanatic devotee of the author’s.”

 The famous issue.

I put the book down and read my newspaper. With the paper is a supplement magazine, American Profile, that comes out on Monday. In an article called “Christmas Memories of the Stars” I read a quote by actress Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project) of a favorite gift: “I am a huge J.D. Salinger fan. I had a boyfriend who gave me all the uncollected J.D. Salinger stories that were published in magazines but were not compiled into book collections. That was a nice Christmas present.”

Now that I resoundingly claim as a coincidence.  It also explained who had been cutting up the New Yorker!

Did anyone ever ask Salinger how he felt about coincidences? Or cutting up the New Yorker, for that matter?

Because of the aforementioned unknown nature of coincidences it could be months or years before I am surprised by another. As to whether a coincidence means anything, I will leave that for someone else to figure out.


*The story, “Hapworth 16, 1924” is, as I write this, available in both the New Yorker archives (you have to be a subscriber to the magazine to read their archives) and a convenient PDF at GoingWiMax.com. If you click on the link and get an error then the link has been taken down. Sorry, but it wasn’t me who did it.

War by remote control

Look out below!

“The Unblinking Stare” by Steve Coll in the New Yorker for November 24, 2014, is a chilling reminder that there are places in the world where the United States is an angry god — sending death from the skies to those sinners who have incurred its wrath. As described by Coll in the article:

“Being attacked by a drone is not the same as being bombed by a jet. With drones, there is typically a much longer prelude to violence. Above North Waziristan [Pakistan tribal area], drones circled for hours, or even days, before striking. People below looked up to watch the machines, hovering at about twenty thousand feet, capable of unleashing fire at any moment, like dragon’s breath. “Drones may kill relatively few, but they terrify many more,” Malik Jalal, a tribal leader in North Waziristan, told me. “They turned the people into psychiatric patients. The F-16s might be less accurate, but they come and go.”

All I have to do is use my imagination and think what it would do to me if I saw a drone in the sky over my house. Psychiatric patient, indeed.

The idea of a pilotless aircraft able to attack enemy forces is not new. It was shown in this page from the January 9, 1956 Life magazine. Despite being attached by a wire, even the wingless craft shown here seems fairly sophisticated. I don’t know how far this particular project went, or if there were other projects before it that led to the one in the photo. I can surmise that for decades the American military has been working on just such a project. Right now a pilot can sit at a location in the United States and fly a craft halfway around the world. It then can be then used to bring death and destruction. As with all weapons, sometimes it takes out the innocent as well as the guilty.

Bill Cosby and Bob Hope and that old devil Sex

Bill Cosby, one of the most popular American actor-comedians of the latter half of the 20th century, is experiencing a definite fail when it comes to public opinion. Several women have come forward to allege that they have been raped by him. The reason he isn’t in prison right now is because he paid them off. And, in that grand legal tradition, the statute of limitations on the crimes has expired. Whatever he did then he cannot be prosecuted now.

Bill Cosby might be wearing this very expression as you read this.

Reading the stories of the women has been a reminder of the Janus-faced ability of some men to be good guys in public, yet criminals in private. The stories about Cosby began to surface some years ago, just about the time his 37-year-old son, Ennis, was murdered on the side of a freeway. Public sympathy swayed toward Cosby and the rape stories were quickly buried. Of course Cosby, as well as his publicists, have vehementally denied that there is anything to the allegations. Why wouldn’t they? At this stage of Cosby’s career if he admitted he had been drugging and having sex with semi-conscious females, then paying for their silence,that would put a real damper on a magical and trail-blazing career. Cosby was one of the first African-American comedians to break through to the larger white audience in the sixties with his popular mainstream comedy albums. His appearance as a lead in a popular television, show, I Spy, that decade was equally groundbreaking.

Cosby refuses to talk about any of the allegations, preferring to issue general denials and then stand mute on specific charges.

It is probably too late to salvage his reputation.

I did an Internet search, hoping that cast members of his sitcom, The Cosby Show, might have come forward to tell their own stories, or deny that they knew of, or were privy to, any of the stories about Cosby. So far the only one I have been able to find is from Raven-Symoné, who says any stories of her being taken advantage of by Cosby are false.

No quotes from Phylicia Rashad,* Malcolm-Jamal Warner, or Lisa Bonet, as of this date. Are they being approached by reporters and asked their opinions? My guess is that when they were on the show they signed non-disclosure agreements.

Besides Cosby’s fellow sitcom cast members being quiet, I haven’t heard a lot of outrage from the general public. Maybe we have become immune to celebrity scandals. We love them, but maybe we just aren’t so surprised when we find out people we have put on pedestals don’t really deserve such an honor. Yet we also have a problem when we have a public persona that is well established, when we find out there is a darker side we have not experienced. There was some resistance to the stories about Cosby the first time around. The repetition of the charges has now sunk in. The women who have come forward with stories of Bill Cosby’s crimes found out firsthand that just because a person makes you laugh does not make them a good person. Just someone who can tell a joke.

Bob Hope. Ethel Merman...really?

Another famous 20th century celebrity, Bob Hope, is the subject of a new biography by Richard Zoglin, Hope: Entertainer of the Century. I have not read the book, but reviews have picked up the non-traditional view of Hope as a serial adulterer who cheated on his wife, Dolores,** throughout their marriage. A review in The New Yorker describes Hope having sex with Ethel Merman — of all people! — in doorways on 8th Avenue in New York. The difference with Hope’s sexual proclivities is that none of them are described as rape. Hope is linked to other women, including a longtime affair with Marilyn Maxwell.

Maxwell and Hope in 1953 doing a little squeeze for Off Limits.

The difference with Bob and Dolores Hope is that they are dead. Hearing about the secret histories of the long dead is just more historical record. It has little impact on me now to know that Bob Hope, a man I thought was a straight-arrow type, was another horny male...much like the character he played on radio, television and his movies.

*UPDATE, January 21, 2015: Rashad did come forward in early January, with statements that spanned two days:

Ms. Rashad, speaking to Roger Friedman of Showbiz 411, said that she had never seen any of the behavior attributed to Mr. Cosby, a longtime friend.

. . . “Forget these women,” Ms. Rashad said. “What you’re seeing is the destruction of a legacy. And I think it’s orchestrated. I don’t know why or who’s doing it, but it’s the legacy. And it’s a legacy that is so important to the culture.”

The next day, ABC News quoted Rashad:  "We are really missing what is wrong here, which is, this is the United States of America. I know it's changing, but it's still the United States of America and there are tenets that we live by," she told ABC News today. "There is the Constitution of the United States, which ensures innocence until proof of guilt and that has not happened.

“But what has happened is declaration in the media of guilt, without proof. And a legacy is being destroyed because of it. It's being obliterated."

Rashad, 66, worked with Cosby for more than seven years, playing his wife, Claire Huxtable, on The Cosby Show. While she never intended to publicly speak about the allegations made against her former co-star, she said she was dismayed to see that she was falsely quoted as saying, “Forget about these women" in a recent story by Roger Friedman's Showbiz 411.

"I am a woman. I would never say such a thing. I would never think such a thing," she said. "My message is, what happens to a nation in which people knowingly and willfully disavow the tenets that describe the nation? ... This is not about the women. This is about something else. This is about the obliteration of a legacy."

 **An unusual fact is that no marriage certificate has ever been found for Hope and Dolores. His divorce decree from his first wife is found, but his marriage to Dolores is not supported by documents. 

Writing worth reading: William Tenn and Jean Shepherd, and two examples of the humorous essay

There is an old saying: I can read writin’, but I can’t write readin’. That would be true if we did not let precedents be our guides. Reading is a good way to learn how to write, and if you are going to do that why not learn from the best?

William Tenn (1920-2010), whose real name was Philip Klass, was a writer who wrote humorous short science fiction stories. He also wrote this essay about his mother for the magazine, P.S., in 1966. Using the quirks of a late parent is fair game for a writer. Tenn’s story, “My Mother Was a Witch,” about the curses Yiddish women used to lay on others in the New York of the 1920s is very funny. Is it exactly true? I don’t know. But it is a great example of the humorous personal essay.

Copyright © 1966 William Tenn

I don’t think anyone believed Jean Shepherd’s stories of his childhood, his mother, brother, and his “old man,” were true. He wrote at least a couple dozen of them for Playboy in he 1960s. I read them when I was in the Army and passed them around to my friends. We looked forward to a Jean Shepherd story as much as the Playmate of the Month. Shepherd (1921-1999), a radio personality, was great at extemporaneous stories for his program, but he was also a genius at writing carefully crafted funny fiction. They were collected in books like In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories, and The Ferrari In the Bedroom. But what made Shepherd’s indelible and enduring mark on the world was his distinctive voice as narrator telling a tale of his childhood in a movie adapted from several of his Playboy stories, A Christmas Story.

Here he got away from his personal stories and did something any writer can do, collect humor from the daily newspaper. “Triviata Globus” is a collection of various news articles Shepherd took as the basis for his wry observations. It is from the same issue of P.S. as the piece by Tenn.

Copyright © 1966 Jean Shepherd

In the Internet Age, revenge goes viral

This tale of an employee resignation came to me via e-mail. I have no way of knowing whether it is true or not, but it is funny. If true, the unnamed young woman has been wronged by a boss and airs her grievances using a public forum. She uses today’s technology to spread her story.

I wonder if it was a YouTube video and someone made screen grabs to create this funnies-like sequence.

I almost feel sorry for Spencer, the former boss. In the not-so-distant past this would have been a private conversation within the company about sexual harassment and a hostile workplace environment. It has become a public scolding. I also wonder about the potential future employers of the young woman. Will they think they should pass her over because what she has done here could also happen to them?

She might have thought it out a bit more; she cannot call it back at this point. But had she squelched it after second thoughts we would not have had the pleasure of seeing this:

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.

**********

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.

**********

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.