Tuesday February 9, 2010
Our nation's leaders may be up to their rhetoric in freshly fallen snow - but here in the Piedmont, we're moving on. You know what that means: Pothole Watch. Seems those jagged gaps in the blacktop are of towering import these days, what with the Superbowl over. Actually the smotherage of said pavement patches are as much as winter tradition as riots in the bread aisle. I don't know how you news crew roll in Buffalo, but here in the contiguous Southeast, we top off a good snowstorm with two or three days of intense hand-wringing... Will the Earth open up and swallow our city whole? Could your kids school bus get sucked into a crevasse? How DO you get drive-thru coffee out of real Corinthian Leather? Yes, it's a veritable telethon, but reporting on Pavement Quake 2010 is about as earth-shattering as covering a hole in the ground.Not that your average news crew craves excitement. We get plenty of that. It's just pointing lenses at a future mud puddle carries with it a certain indignity. Don't believe me? Bum-rush an asphalt patch crew and tell them you need to shoot video of them working. They'll let you, but it's awfully hard to feel good about your career path when the guy with the bucket of highway sludge thinks your job is stupid. Still, ours is not to judge, so Emmy Award winning Chad Tucker and I tried to give it our finest effort - it being Monday and all. First we hunted down the City Worker in Charge of Filling Potholes and Fending Off News Crew. I'm not sure if that's what his business card say, but a guy I know only as Dwight spent much of the morning answering our questions, wrangling work crews and rolling his eyes. Not always in that order. Then again, when you have a half dozen journalists phoning you with breathless queries about crumbles in the infrastructure, a little sarcasm is all but required.
Undue confession: Chad and I bagged on our assignment too. It's hard not to when your utilizing thousands of dollars in electronic equipment to get to the bottom of a four inch ditch. And while I'd like to apologize to the minivan mom who found my roadside presence so distracting (Eyes on the road, lady!) and to that pedestrian who asked me what was going on (Foghat is NOT reuniting), I for one harbor no remorse towards the gang-bangers who nearly stopped my heart with their ill-timed horn blast and indecipherable knuckle language (Hey, I don't roll up in your workspace and spotlight the bodybags... Oh wait -- I do!) Hmmm, where was I? Oh yeah, complaining about Pothole Watch. Wouldn't my talents be better served examining the human condition or at least chasing a dog in a funny hat? I mean, c'mon producers, who really gives a rip about some hole in the road anyway?What's that? Folks are flocking to our website to report their own potholes? Newsrooms phones are ringing? In-boxes are flooding? Servers are crashing? Rating diaries are being rewritten?
Forget I mentioned it...
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Monday February 8, 2010
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Phil Wadsworth (D)
Guilford County Commission District 9
Carolyn Q. Coleman (D)
Guilford County School Board, District 6
Jeff Lee Belton
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President Obama's secretary of health and human services fired off a sharply worded letter to a California insurer Monday, demanding to know why it is raising rates for individual policyholders by as much as 39 percent.Hands off our healthcare so that insurance companies can jack up our premiums by a third doesn't seem like such great rallying cry.
The unusual salvo offers a reminder that, even as health-care legislation lies in limbo in Washington, the battle over surging health care costs continues in other venues.
Anthem Blue Cross of California sent out notices earlier this month to many of its roughly 800,000 holders of individual policies, informing them that the costs of their plans would sharply increase to cover rising health-care costs. The increases do not affect employer-provided plans in the state.
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RecycleBill surveys his little corner lot in Greensboro, North Carolina almost every day and rare are the days I don't pick up other people's trash from my yard. At my business we currently spend $1,000.oo a month hauling away other people's trash. And that's after we fill the giant green trash can that is collected by the city owned garbage truck each and every week. That's a thousand dollars I could be putting towards hiring another worker or buying a new piece of recycling equipment that would allow our little company to buy and recycle things we can't currently recycle. And if we were to buy a machine we'd most likely have to hire and train someone to run it.
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Census road tour plans Greensboro stop
The Business Journal of the Greater Triad Area
The 2010 Census Portrait of American Road Tour is planning a stop in Greensboro on Tuesday.
The event is planned for 2:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesday on the upper level of the J. Douglas Galyon Depot, 236 E. Washington St. It is free and open to the public.
Attendees will have the chance to learn about the Census process and find ways to become involved. The event will feature interactive kiosks and promotional giveaways.
City officials say a complete count for Greensboro in the census will ensure appropriate levels of political representation and access to federal funding. More information about Census 2010 and Greensboro is available online at www.greensboro-nc.gov/census.
Link to:
Greensboro census information
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While the government continues to tout toxic mercury filled Compact Fluorescent (CF) light bulbs to save energy and replace the soon to be outlawed Incandescent Bulbs most of us are still using, a few companies are leading the way with Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) that save even more energy than CF bulbs and will probably never have to be replaced. Even the Environmental Protection Agency is unable to tell us how to protect ourselves from mercury poisoning cause by broken CF bulbs and unlike Fluorescent bulbs, LEDs will even work in extreme cold as they require no heat to make light. That why this post is #81 on our list of Green Start-up Ideas.
While widely in use as Christmas tree lights and for other outdoor lighting needs, your "local" big box retailer doesn't carry 120 Volt LED bulbs and if asked will probably tell you there is no such bulb in existence. A quick look at the brands of lighting products they carry will help you to understand the GEs and Sylvanias of the world have invested so heavily in CF bulbs they simply aren't willing to make the switch to LEDs.
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Staff Writer
Normally, I like reading Penn Gillette's comments. More often than not, he hit the nail on the head. On this occasion, complaining about Obama using Las Vegas metaphorically, I think this is one of hot "not" instances.
At one point, he asks (rhetorically, I HOPE) how many people ask the President for travel advice. Next, he says that Obama's comment would be expected to cut down on tourism traffic. I think he's lost track of what he wants to say.
The bottom line should be that his personal bottom line should not be affected. I seriously doubt that Las Vegas will have any trouble keeping busy, any more than it already has been. And for sure, no one will drop out from the line to get Penn and Teller tickets.
But the comment that he objects to, about the difference between going to Vegas or sending their kids to college, was a metaphor that all Americans can relate to. The President could have as readily said "Jersey City." Everyone knows that both places are the prime gambling spots in the country; Obama wasn't joking, and he wasn't telling people not to go to Vegas. Gillette needs to thicken up that skin of his in the area of his home-town's reputation.
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NC Senate District 28
Katie G. Dorsett (D, i)
NC House District 57
Jon Hardister (R)
NC House District 58
Alma Adams (D, i)
NC House District 62
John Blust (R, i) (5630 Christian Place, Greensboro)
Jeffery Simon (L)
Guilford County Clerk of Superior Court
David L. Churchill (D, i)
Guilford County Sheriff
BJ Barnes (R, i)
Harlon Costner (D)
Guilford County Commission, District 3
Linda O. Shaw (R)
Guilford County School Board, at-large (nonpartisan)
Nancy R. Routh (D, i)
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Don Vaughan (D, i)
NC House District 61
Gerald T. Grubb (R)
Guilford County Commission, District 6
Kay Cashion (D, i)
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All warfare is based on deception, …when able to attack we must seem unable, when using our forces we must seem inactive, when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far…, when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Sun Tzu
China’s hawks demand cold war on the US
…almost 55% [...]
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Branson warns that oil crunch: Energy crisis threatens to be more serious than credit crunch
Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years.
…Other British executives who will support the warning include Ian Marchant, chief executive of [...]
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Govs feel the weight of wielding budget ax
…Since taking office last year, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has criticized accounting gimmicks and borrowing that, she has said, led to the Grand Canyon State’s current budget “crisis.”
But now Brewer is defending a compromise she struck with state legislators that relies on the same type of budget [...]
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I dropped by the election office in the old courthouse just after noon and found Katie Dorsett and Linda Shaw sitting side by side waiting to file for re-election.
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All warfare is based on deception, …when able to attack we must seem unable, when using our forces we must seem inactive, when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far…, when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Sun Tzu
China’s hawks demand cold war on the US
…almost 55% [...]
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Branson warns that oil crunch: Energy crisis threatens to be more serious than credit crunch
Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years.
…Other British executives who will support the warning include Ian Marchant, chief executive of [...]
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Govs feel the weight of wielding budget ax
…Since taking office last year, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has criticized accounting gimmicks and borrowing that, she has said, led to the Grand Canyon State’s current budget “crisis.”
But now Brewer is defending a compromise she struck with state legislators that relies on the same type of budget [...]
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Staff Writer
A soldier waterboarded his four-year-old daughter because she was unable to recite her alphabet.
Good to see him using his military training for civilian purposes.
Joshua Tabor admitted to police he had used the CIA torture technique because he was so angry.
As his daughter 'squirmed' to get away, Tabor said he submerged her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.
Tabor, 27, who had won custody of his daughter only four weeks earlier, admitted choosing the punishment because the girl was terrified of water.
...
Tabor, a soldier at the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Washington, was arrested after being seen walking around his neighbourhood wearing a Kevlar military helmet and threatening to break windows.
Police discovered the alleged waterboarding when they went to his home in the Tacoma suburb of Yelm and spoke to his girlfriend.
She told them about the alleged torture and the terrified girl was found hiding in a closet, with bruising on her back and scratch marks on her neck and throat.
Asked how she got the bruises, the girl is said to have replied: 'Daddy did it.'
See, it's not torture, not according to O'Reily, Hannity and Beck
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Several high school wrestling teams from the area will begin competing Tuesday in the N.C. High School Athletic Association state championship tournament for teams.
Matches in Class 1-A are scheduled for Tuesday and Saturday. Matches in the other classes are scheduled for Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
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Update on homeless friend who burned hand in campfire, 2nd comment here: http://bit.ly/9MbnM0
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Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota spoke to the Institute for Emerging Issues here in Raleigh today. The theme of this year's forum (the 25th annual) is “creativity,” specifically how creativity could be used to spark economic development.
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"Who is at fault for this situation? It seems the public would be well served if the press were to investigate how their initial case failed to result in long-term imprisonment."Good question. Good suggestion.
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You will recall that Risk Management Associates of Raleigh was the agency that produced the infamous "RMA Report," the report that hoodwinked a lot of as-yet unapologetic elected officials into thinking that the GPD command staff was discriminating against black cops. The once-"secret" report was discredited in large portions by subsequent facts, many documented by Jerry Bledsoe in the Rhino Times.
Brady had tried to file a complaint against RMA regarding their report with the North Carolina Private Protection Services Board, the licensing board for private investigators in the state. The board declined to act on Brady's complaint, saying he did not have standing because he was not a client of RMA's. The judge's ruling apparently reverses that decision.
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A lot of my battle for some semblance of justice has been for my parents. Mom & Dad did not deserve what got dished out in our lovely little small town (aided and abetted by some of their so-called "friends") any more than I did. And they did not raise me to run from a righteous fight - in life or online.
We played Johnny Cash's cover of "Life's Railway to Heaven" as folks left Dad's funeral service. I remember stepping out onto First Baptist's front steps alone (after giving his eulogy), feeling a cool breeze on my cheek, and turning to look up at the steeple . . . where I sensed Daddy had stopped to linger (another time/another story) before hopping the Paradise Express.
When we got back to my parents' home, all of the clocks in the house had stopped at the same time. I'd like to think that meant Pops approved of his send-off.
I had not seen this video of the recording session (with Earl Scruggs and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) on You Tube before last night. There's a riff towards the end with a fiddle/accordion/ukulele (at least that's what my ear picks up) that always brings a tear to my eye . . . as it reminds me of some very special times in New Orleans.
One day our circle will be unbroken.
Unless something earth-shattering happens, I'm taking a break for the rest of the day.
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In this Edwardian sex tape business, is it just me or is Judge Abraham Penn Jones exceeding his authority by finding Andrew Young in contempt for refusing to immediately cough up the video (on the premise that the Court will then put it under "safe" lock & key) during the course of a civil lawsuit?
I'm sorry, but I just do not believe the tape will be safe from John Edwards or one of his trial-lawyer or judge cronies (and rest-assured, he still has friends) if it's "locked up" in a North Carolina courthouse.
I'm not that naive anymore.
And I really don't get it. All the judge really had to do was issue a restraining order against releasing the tape until the matter of ownership was resolved.
As Edwards zips in and out of the country . . . and visits Bunny Mellon . . . and is clearly financing Reille's effort (because we know she has no money of her own) to get the tape back (so it can be destroyed), where are the Feds?
For all of this seems to me to be Law & Order 101: (1) Reille threw the tape in the trash. (2) The Youngs are material witnesses in a Federal case (i.e. the misuse of funds funneled through the campaign to prop up the candidate's mistress), and (3) the tape is evidence of that crime. The Youngs, although I'm sure sorely tempted (putting myself in their shoes, I would be), have not sold or publicly distributed the tape.
So (despite what all the Edwardian groupied at the N&O would have you think) this couple caught up in John & Lizzy's web of denial and hubris have actually demonstrated that they do have some scruples.
It's already locked up/in a safe place right now . . . with one copy already in the Feds' hands. They've refused offers to sell.
And if I were Edwards, I would not push their buttons.
And/so, could Reille's lawsuit (which is really John's lawsuit) . . . not to mention Edwards visiting Bunny Mellon while an investigation is in play . . . be interpreted as OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE?
And why would a North Carolina Superior Court Judge play along with that???
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After all, according to some of the journalistic geniuses in our local blogosphere, what happened to Dr. Mary Johnson in Asheboro couldn't possibly be relevant to a story on the front page of the New York Times (yes, that was sarcasm).
Pops would agree with the sentiment. And he wouldn't mind.
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Did you know they don't make drop-side cribs anymore? I found this out the hard way: part of the sliding piece on Benjamin's crib broke off Friday afternoon! I called Babies R' Us and was informed that not only do they no longer make drop-side cribs, they don't even have replacement pieces for them. Luckily, we had a camp cot we could unfold for Benjamin to sleep on. (Even more luckily, he actually slept on it!)
So, after mulling over our options, Bill and I decided to buy a twin bed for Andrew and move Benjamin into the toddler bed. We're calling the toddler bed a "big boy bed" and the twin a "bigger boy bed."
When picking out sheets for his bed, Andrew liked everything. He finally settled on some with a sports motif. I'm writing this on Sunday afternoon, in anticipation of how the boys will spend the first night in their new sleeping arrangements. Both beds have freshly laundered sheets on them, as well as the special blankets that help the boys ease into dreamland. I hope both of them will have sweet dreams, so I can, too.
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It's Monday after the Super Bowl. Forget Snowmageddon, the talk today is all about Indianapolis kids going to school late, that amazing onsides kick, and of course, the commercials. One that stuck out for me was CareerBuilder.com's commercial with a bunch of people in their underwear for casual Friday. Maybe because it was on while my small children were up and still watching, and the half-naked bodies were slightly disturbing. But like all of their commericials, most of us can usually relate, we've all worked in places where we're just not happy. But sometimes, we're lucky enough to work in a place where we actually enjoy getting up every day and going to our office. If that's you, then nominate your company for this year's Family-Friendly 50 awards.
Each year, Carolina Parenting, Inc. recognizes 50 companies throughout the state of North Carolina that promote family-friendly values at their workplace, whether it's through flex-time options, great maternity leave benefits or just a comfortable work environment for parents. Visit our Family Friendly resource page for a list of last year's winners, links to articles on some of the ways local companies are helping their employees create a better work/family balance and articles explaining some of the national trends. And don't forget, nominate your own company! We want to make sure the Piedmont is well represented in this year's competition.
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Some quick thoughts on the Super Bowl:
Very good game that was contested deep into the fourth quarter. One of the gutsiest calls in Super Bowl history by New Orleans to open the second half with an onside kick.
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By Liv
Staff Writer
So Shannon wakes up this morning to tell me about a dream in which I'm pregnant. Apparently for months it doesn't move and then we discover it's a calcified piece of pizza. She woke up laughing so hard she started crying. She says she felt sorry for me, all the while apparently I had miscarried my lunch.
On the other side of the coin I had a dream I was sleeping on a plane bound for London, and I was making plans for what I'd do when I landed. I was so excited when I woke up to get through customs I made it half way down the hall before I tripped over the dog and realized I'm actually waking up in my house... not a plane.
...but what I really don't get is these people who have 12 miscarriages yet are starkly against abortion. I'm not anyone to tell anybody what to do with their body, but after 3 or 4 times shouldn't you give up and adopt? More importantly by their own definition, if abortions are killing itty bitty babies, isn't your miscarriage making your little children suffer their deaths over and over again? Isn't it the same thing? How can these fruity mothers who apparently just didn't win the evolutionary lotto of reproduction able to justify a decade long attempt at arguing with the obvious: they're not going to reproduce, just continue to abort/miscarriage. I mean, I get it. You want kids. You want them to be yours. But how do you stand and say abortion is killing babies, when you're doing the same thing over and over, and over, and over?
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Get free Clinique beauty products when you spend at least $21.50 on Clinique items at Belk.
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Fender-benders can be deadly for a fetus, according to several studies discussed in an article by Sherry Boschert. Even minor trauma, including low-speed car accidents and falls, can lead to placental abruption. The condition causes the placental lining to separate from the uterus and can cause maternal and fetal death.
Crash testing using “pregnant” dummies and computer modeling shows that “a frontal impact first throws the uterus forward against the abdominal wall,” and then the torso flexes forward and crushes the uterus between the torso and the knees. “All this creates a high degree of negative pressure in the back of the uterus that can pull the placenta off the uterine wall,” according to Dr. William G. Barson in Boschert’s article.
Symptoms of placental abruption vary and may include vaginal bleeding, contractions, abdominal tenderness, and decreased fetal movement. Though vaginal bleeding is typical in most cases, 20% of abruptions are associated with a concealed bleeding because the blood collects behind the placenta and is undetectable without internal observation. In the absence of vaginal bleeding—especially after the patient has experienced some minor trauma—contractions and uterine tenderness are revealing signs of placental abruption.
Abdominal trauma is a major risk for placental abruption, and commonly occurs during even gentle motor vehicle accidents. Lower seat belts should always be worn across the pelvis, never over the abdomen. Pregnant women involved in auto crashes should seek prompt medical care even if they have no symptoms.
Early detection of placental abruption is essential because even a relatively stable patient may rapidly progress to a state of hypovolemic shock. Electronic fetal monitoring should be performed for four hours on any pregnant woman who suffers an impact to the torso. In a study by the Jichi Medical School, cardiotocogram and echogram performed immediately after minor maternal trouble can reveal placental abruption and prevent further complications in women who are asymptomatic.
Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Pierce Egerton
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1. Beginning with none of the oxygen that we breath, it is estimated that life on Earth has been around for about 3.9 billion years.
Somewhere in the first billion years or so, some life forms started excreting oxygen, which [...]
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1. Beginning with none of the oxygen that we breath, it is estimated that life on Earth has been around for about 3.9 billion years.
Somewhere in the first billion years or so, some life forms started excreting oxygen, which [...]
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Jimmy Teague has resigned as Greensboro College football's offensive coordinator. Teague will be the new head coach at George Washington High School in Danville, Va.
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Ferrum, Va. -- The Greensboro College men's basketball team plays at Ferrum College tonight. Live stats are scheduled.
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Ferrum, Va. -- The Greensboro College women's basketball team faces Ferrum tonight. Live stats are scheduled.
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On Jan. 21, Ned van Buren wrote a Counterpoint, “What Washington needs is term limits.” Following that article, two young men responded positively and added their own suggestions. I want to also express my approval.
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If you ask me, Skip Alston is the real racist one! It absolutely disgusts me that he always tries to pull the “race card.” I applaud Mayor Knight and our City Council members for standing up for themselves.
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If Greensboro wants to improve its image and attract more tourists, I suggest having decent taxicabs available for transportation. The taxicabs available now are mostly dirty and often lacking in seat belts and air conditioning. At least one has a broken door that sags. Some are of ancient vintage.
It takes more than a new hotel to impress visitors.
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The president’s new plan to help the middle class is long overdue. This will help the working middle class get a break and may be the light at the end of a long tunnel.
The most immediate effect of helping the middle class could be increased consumer spending, which could directly improve sales and job growth in the retail and manufacturing sectors.
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I was shocked to hear of the 17-year-old kid who was gunned down, by the people paid to protect us, in his own yard. I cannot believe the officer had no way to stop a kid other than to shoot him in the chest.
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Thank you for your anniversary coverage of the sit-ins. It mirrors your courageous job 50 years ago, giving banner headlines to the first sit-in and responding to the long struggle ahead with fair, inclusive coverage.
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SUNDAY's results
SWIMMING
4-A CENTRAL REGIONAL
Girls
200 medley relay: 1. East Chapel Hill 1:53.15; 2. Reynolds 1:53.31; 3. Grimsley 1:55.26 (Natalie Harris, Rachel Gentry, Natalie Labonge, Sarah Walker.
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Just in case you missed it, tonight was #brandbowl AKA #sb44 . . . or as most of us here on planet earth like to call it "They paid how
I was reading on @CBSnews that the high prices for ads have dipped - but c'mon people . . . 2.5 MILLION dollars for 30 seconds? . . . do you know all the amazing things you could do to help your community?! Hmm do you?
30 seconds will not create a brand advocate. It may get you some buzz around the virtual watercoolers - but if you think people are going to be loyal to your company with an ad like this - you need to up your meds. Seriously.
Now, for those of you who are wondering - the reason you didn't see any @pepsi commercials during the game tonight is because they decided to invest their money in social media to help support their refresh project. You can get the scoop from @daily_finance here.
Just in case there is any doubt on who I think the winner of the #brandbowl is - here is a great article from @mashable on @l99k : 'How Social Media Is Changing the Super Bowl'
#teampepsi
– Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog
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Three books on my to-read list:
"The Help." "The Politician" and "Game Change."
Each, admittedly, more out of curiosity than the search for great literature.
I tried the much-chronicled "Game Change" two weeks ago and Books-A-Million was a book short: It had sold out and was awaiting a new shipment.
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Sunday February 7, 2010
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RecycleBill wants to take a moment to thank those who refer readers to our website, the readers themselves and those communities who recycle the most according to our internal website tracking. Thanks for helping to make the world greener.
The most popular articles for the last 7 days were:
Top !0 Ways To Go Green Without Going Green
RecycleToons 17
Organic Mold Removal Services
Let's End The Burning Of Insulated Copper Wire
Make Your Blog Carbon Neutral! For Free!
Our most frequently used search term was "green start up ideas."
The community that most used our Local Recycler Search was
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For Pops (who would have been 75 tomorrow): The Dukes of Dixieland
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Partisan warfare in Washington gets out of hand.
They really should have canceled that basketball game at Maryland yesterday.
Except for a few shady spots, High Point's slow-but-sure solar-powered snow-removal system finally has cleared city streets.
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"Charles Davenport Jr.: Race irrelevant to hotel project"
Sunday, February 7, 2010 By Charles Davenport
Add your comments on the story here.
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If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences.
Joseph Goebbels
Statistics mask real economic pain
The jobless rate improved this week. It’s now [...]
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If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences.
Joseph Goebbels
Statistics mask real economic pain
The jobless rate improved this week. It’s now [...]
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I'm now late for Sunday morning rounds.
But I've gotten several e-mails this morning on this story in the New York Times. Dave Ribar sent me a link to a post on his blog.
It's old news in the medical blogosphere. I've already done two posts on the case . . . as well as commented both at Kevin's and Respectful Insolence.
The thread at Insolence felt rather like a "Coning" . . . because (being a former indentured servant in Hillary's village . . . and always on the crap end of Sleazely's notions of transparency & accountability . . . not to mention clearly living in the wrong America), I'm clearly not a fan of the Democratic Party's notions of reforming "healthcare". As I did blog-battle at "Insolence" (people rarely talk back to the great Orac), I was actually grateful for the "training" I got in the Greensboro Blogoshere.
I even was just a little bit grateful (not really) for a certain blogger-turned-cyber-stalker. My skin is pretty thick these days.
Retaliation against whistle-blowing doctors & nurses is a HUGE problem in this country (Texas, in particular, is not a good place to practice medicine if you're the least bit "disruptive") . . . be it by simply firing someone . . . or via bad-faith peer review . . . or going after them on some hacked-up criminal charge. For all of the noble blather about what doctors are supposed to do for patients . . . NO ONE GIVES A RAT'S TAIL ABOUT DOCTORS WHO GO THE EXTRA MILE (AND THEN FALL ON THEIR SWORDS) FOR PATIENTS.
Five years after I jumped into their pool, the really sad thing about "citizen journalism" and the Greensboro blogosphere is that, in this case, the journalists in it could have collectively taken the lead on what is clearly now going to be a big/on-going story.
In fact, if they had taken the lead, what is happening to these nurses right now might not be happening.
The Greensboro blogosphere had the chance to embody its rhetoric and actually BE relevant . . . to run with a good story right under their (mostly stuck-up/deep blue) noses.
It's really kind of pathetic and sad if you give it any thought at all.
But the problem has always been that, once-upon-a-long-time-ago, I rescued a doctor who was employed by an affiliate of the mighty Cone (Hospital). The ensuing cover-up was always about market share and economics . . . and protecting/preserving Randolph Hospital's "cooperative relationship" with the bigger/deeper pockets 30 minutes up the road.
John Robinson could not have anyone in his blogopshere dissing his biggest advertiser, and "Blogger-King" Edward Cone could not have anyone peeing in his pool.
And God knows, no one converging remotely near Greensboro can dare question Elizabeth Edwards. She's the real healthcare expert here.
Meanwhile, I'm a "wack-job" who doesn't know anything about anything.
Yeah, right.
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This week's column.
The name Jim Renick is rarely seen or heard these days in Greensboro.
Even less so after the school's Board of Trustees abruptly erased the former N.C. A&T chancellor's name from the new education building then under construction in 2007.
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RecycleBill understands that the burning of insulated copper wire is illegal for good cause. Burning the PVC and other plastics from the wire releases dioxin and other toxic chemicals into the air we all have to breath but that doesn't stop people from burning the insulation from their copper wire so that they can get a higher price when they sell to me. Or to remove the evidence that the wire was first stolen.
Now there are instances when the burning of copper wire came from a house, car or equipment fire but if all the burnt copper wire that I've bought in the last year came from accidental fires then I must be writing this from Chicago in October of 1871. I promise you I'm not.
In the recycling center or processing plant, machines are used to strip insulation from wire without burning it. In some instances this allows for recycling the copper and the plastics-- something fires never do.
Now I guess I could simply refuse to buy burnt copper wire altogether but that won't stop my competitors and the local scrap metal fences from continuing to trade in burnt copper wire. All I can hope to accomplish by refusing to buy burnt copper wire is to turn away business. Besides, what about the wire that comes from house fires and such-- should that not be recycled being that the damage to our environment is already done?
Local laws won't help either. If any city, county or even state government were to pass a law banning the buying of burnt copper wire then the illegal trade will simply cross the line to the next city, county or state where the burnt wire can be sold, making it even harder for local police to track the many thefts of copper wire in their jurisdictions. I'm told the EPA mandated fine for deliberately burning insulated copper wire is $10,000.oo first offense but do laws deter criminals? If laws actually deterred criminals then we'd have no need for prisons or police. The fact is: The EPA has no real means to enforce their rules over individuals. Companies yes-- individuals no,
So I'm proposing a new Federal law be passed that requires sellers of burnt copper wire to secure a one day only, single use permit from their local sheriff's department each and every time, before they sell the wire and that the permit be surrendered to the recycling center to be kept until the recycler sells the wire and passes a copy of the permit along to the processing plant. That way, the trade in burnt copper wire could be tracked, giving local law enforcement and the Environmental Protection Agency yet another tool with which to fight copper theft and make the air safe to breath. After all, most of the people who sell burnt copper wire aren't going to walk into any sheriff's department unless you first put them in handcuffs.
If you agree this is a good idea then please use the following links to locate and ask your Senators and Representatives in Congress to draft this into law. You can copy and paste the entire text of this post or simply copy the link to Let's End The Burning Of Insulated Copper Wire to your e-mail.
Yes, this will mean more work for myself and everyone else in the metals recycling industry but if I wanted to get rich I would have gone into the fossil fuel business-- I run a recycling business because I want to make the world green. And nothing makes me happier than watching our local police put handcuffs on metals thieves while they're standing on my truck scale.
And please forward this post to your friends requesting they take action.
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Learn about special Valentine's Day gifts, gourmet chocolates, roses, free brunch and more in today's Savvy Shopper column.
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1. Earth revolves around and receives light and energy from the Sun, whose core is estimated to be 27,000,000° F. The Sun’s interior could hold 1.3 million Earths.
The Sun appears to have been active for 4.6 billion years and may [...]
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1. Earth revolves around and receives light and energy from the Sun, whose core is estimated to be 27,000,000° F. The Sun’s interior could hold 1.3 million Earths.
The Sun appears to have been active for 4.6 billion years and may [...]
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We have already used up about 10 percent of the 21st century. Most observers will agree it is not a great start for Americans by a long shot! The first eight years ended disastrously. This was a humongous missed opportunity.
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I am a social work intern from UNCG and have been working with the homeless population at Greensboro Urban Ministry and the Interactive Resource Center. Our biggest challenge, apart from transportation, has been finding employment for our clients. Without income, everything, from housing to health care, is an enormous challenge.
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To the members of Congress, please help our president, Mr. Obama, get this economy back on track. This is America and we don’t quit!
Eleanor Wonce
High Point
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Corporations are not the people, and nothing in the Constitution or any amendment thereto fairly lends itself to any such interpretation. It was only an act of judicial and intellectual fraud by which any contrary holding could emerge.
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It occurred to Anne Mitchell as she was writing the letter that she might lose her job, which is why she chose not to sign it. But it was beyond her conception that she would be indicted and threatened with 10 years in prison for doing what she knew a nurse must: inform state regulators that a doctor at her rural hospital was practicing bad medicine.Commentary on this case seems like something tailor-made for North Carolina's Dr. J.
...But in what may be an unprecedented prosecution, Mrs. Mitchell is scheduled to stand trial in state court on Monday for “misuse of official information,” a third-degree felony in Texas.
The prosecutor said he would show that Mrs. Mitchell had a history of making "inflammatory" statements about Dr. Rolando G. Arafiles Jr. and intended to damage his reputation when she reported him last April to the Texas Medical Board, which licenses and disciplines doctors.
Mrs. Mitchell counters that as an administrative nurse, she had a professional obligation to protect patients from what she saw as a pattern of improper prescribing and surgical procedures — including a failed skin graft that Dr. Arafiles performed in the emergency room, without surgical privileges. He also sutured a rubber tip to a patient’s crushed finger for protection, an unconventional remedy that was later flagged as inappropriate by the Texas Department of State Health Services.
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Saturday February 6, 2010
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Police officer gets his job back after an appeal
Friday, September 25, 2009
By Ryan Seals
Add your comments on the story here.
UPDATE: This story is being discussed here, here, here and here.
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Latin King leader accuses police of home break-ins
Sunday, September 20, 2009
By Gerald Witt
Add your comments on the story here.
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Just checking in, with 3.5 days to go until race morning. I ran eight miles on Monday morning and three miles this morning with Stacy, and I'm not exactly feeling fresh. My hip flexors, both sides, feel increasingly like I'm running with the parking brake on. I'm just hoping that no runs between now and Sunday morning, popping some Alleve here and there, and stretching a bit will make things a bit better.
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At least, that's what I learned today. Over bagels and coffee after my 12-miler today, I whined to Thad. (Poor guy, he started a running blog and now all he gets from us Saturday morning Blueliners is our fitness questions.)
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In case you didn't hear, Joan Benoit Samuelson ran a 2:49:09 in the NYC Marathon this past Sunday. It's an event record for women over 50, by more than four minutes, and it's just one second off the American marathon record that she set last April during the Olympic Trials for women 50 and up.[Full article]
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I was twenty-five and living in Boston. I had broken up with my college boyfriend and was trying to date casually. It didn't work. Instead, I developed a huge crush on the tall, dark-haired guy who worked in the office suite down the hall.
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I have pondered time -- minutes and seconds -- more in the last few months than ever in my life, thanks to this Boston qualifying business. For most of our days, minutes fly by like nothing -- there's so many of them that we can't possibly notice each and every one.[Full article]

In no particular order:
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I'm all alone tonight and savoring it. Another hot bath, hot as I could stand it. All that time in the bathroom, though, forced me to scrub a bit and vacuum up one layer of dog hair afterwards, perhaps ruining the mood.
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I've joked for a half year or so about how my Sunday morning yoga class is my church. But to some degree, it's true. Those 1.5 hours of yoga each week have certainly been my salvation as I build running mileage again. Yoga tends to undo a lot of that damage. Running tightens the hamstrings and hips, yoga pulls at them to stretch and open up again.
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If there was one thing from your experience thus far that has helped you get into character within this William Inge world of the 1950s in Kansas,
what would it be?
Here's how some responded:
Emily Mark playing Christine Schoenwalder said, "If I had to choose one thing that's helped me the most I'd say it was the opening scenes from The Wizard of Oz. The flat landscape, the farm images, the way that people (especially Margaret Hamilton!) spoke, all of that has been the strongest influence for me. "
Matthew Carlson playing Alan Seymour said, "For me, its been Alan's car keys. My entrances in both Act I and II are preceded by the sound of a car, so I asked for a set of keys to use. It's been a subtle reminder of class difference for me, creating a little social distance and a pride that sets Alan apart."
Amy da Luz playing Rosemary Syndey said, "Images are big for me, I always cut and past a lot of historical and geographic (to set time and place), but also conceptual. Which is often a lot less "literal" as you know. Anyways, this one clicked for me in a big way for Rosemary. Everything about it. What it once was. What it is now. The proud stalk still standing - but with the hopeless droop of its head. The washed out fence behind it. It worked for me on several levels...
Funny thing is, I had no idea the state flower for Kansas was the wild sunflower until after I had cut the image. Who knew?"
Jim Crawford playing Howard Bevans said, "There were a lot of helpful visual images, but the thing that helped me the most on Picnic came from Chris Morris, our dialect coach. She recommended that we listen to Kansas-based Farm Radio (KFRM link). I listened to it often in my apartment. There is a particularly midwestern way of talking about business--the rhythm is clipped and upbeat, and it's simultaneously friendly and keeps people at arm's length. It helped me to get a handle on my character, Howard the shop owner, more than anything."
Beth Ritson playing Flo Owens said, "For me its the image of the landscape: flat, barren, and endless, but with a beauty so extraordinaire that its pioneer ancestors said, 'Let's stop here.' "
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Read the review.
“Even an isolated prairie village can produce a killer or an artist, a thief or a saint, a dreamer or a builder: whatever possibilities human beings have anywhere else, they have also in the Midwestern village. That such an environment is uniformly wholesome and unerringly beneficent was a myth that had been well exposed by such Inge predecessors as Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters, who was also a native of Kansas. William Inge, however, was the first American writer to expose that myth in the dramatic genre.”
-Ralph Voss
Mr. Voss visited us last time to speak about William Inge we did Bus Stop way back in the fall of 2004. If you are interested in getting season tickets to our InSight Sunday matinee click here.
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(Blogger has a limited format, to see it bigger go click here.)
AND we got a nice (and rare) review from Shane Hudson, theatre maven of NC.
His "Theatre North Carolina" blog is linked on the right.
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The Board of Trustees of Triad Stage met at our shop located off Swing Rd. in west Greensboro. Typically, the board meets at the theater downtown, but we wanted them to see where production team works & creates. They were able to meet most of the staff (who weren't loading in the Oleanna set) and tour the facilities. Many are sitting on chairs from the furniture stock we have out there, as well. The room you see them in now is the paint room where very large pieces of scenery can be painted and stored.
Christy Wright (production manager), Steven Box (director of sales & marketing), and Kathy Manning (vice-chair board member) look on as matters are discussed.
We had an invited artists panel to come talk to the board about being an artist at Triad Stage. Donna Bradby gestures as Krista Hoeppner and Beth Ritson look on.
Board members Hayes Clement, Ron Johnson, & Willie Taylor listen to the artists panel as Rich looks on.
Sherry Barr (director of audience services), Beth Ritson (actor), Donna Bradby (director & choreographer) and David Smith (sound designer).
The shop's main floor where sets are built in large pieces and then taken apart for transport and then loaded into the theater and put together onstage.
Managing Director Rich Whittington shares a little about the history of the shop as Christy Wright gets the board ready for a tour.
Board members listen as Christy Wright (production manager) describes how the departments work and how she has overseen tons of materials recycled or thrown away to in order to reorganize the shop.
Kelsey Hunt (resident costume designer & costume shop supervisor) explains how the costume stock is organized (by gender and decade).[Full article]
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Oleanna by David Mamet has now entered tech/dress rehearsals at Triad Stage.
Kaylyn Lowe runs the sound board.
Ginny Lee talks to Preston Lane as Lee Spencer looks on.
Lee Spencer as John wrangles with a telephone call. (The sound designer, David Smith, called the telephone a veritable 3rd character.)
A shot from the control booth.
"What do you want of me?"
There are many things in this play that raise tensions...~
Lee Spencer plays John.JOHN: To provoke you.
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To link to our Triad Stage YouTube channel click here.
OLEANNA runs October 18th through November 8th. For more info click here.
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Ginny Lee (Carol) has also been seen at Triad Stage in Brother Wolf.
From the perspective of the dramaturg...
(i.e. me.)We have been reading through the script, answering questions and trying to find the right rhythms.
Lee Spencer (John) has also been seen at Triad Stage in Little Foxes and the Upstage Cabaret production of Dracula. Sitting next to him is Scout, who is the assisant stage manager for this production.[Full article]
The load-in and build for Picnic has begun. Here you can see the groundplan and carpenters working.
Source 4's at the ready.
Master Electrician Nick Hussong handling pipe.
This is a pile of sod--which will be laid down between the two houses.
During the same day, someone kindly donated a couple dozen old shoes to our costume shop and our Production Manager, Christy Wright, inspects the goods.(OMG, shoes...)
And then the costume ladies descend... Kelsey, Sasha, Kate, & Ms. Cassstevens.
Matthew Carlson & Joe Tippett go over their scene with Preston Lane.
Joe Tippett & Matthew Carlson.
On a break from rehearsal, Matthew, Preston and Joe discuss how the 1970s produced the greatest films of American cinema.
Meg Steedle resting on the fence post during a break from rehearsal.
Meg Steedle
Chris Morris, dialect coach, watches rehearsal.
Cheryl Koski resting on the fence post during rehearsal.
Chris Morris sits as Emily Mark and Joby Strachan anticipate their entrances as school teachers.
Meg Steedle, and Cheryl Koski (who play the sisters Madge & Millie) rehearse as Beth Ritson readies for her entrance as their mother, Flo, before most of them go to the picnic.[Full article]

The technical director, Christian Young, checks something off a list.
The crew have cut out two seats from the house right seating area in order to make a door for Mrs. Potts's house. 
Nick & Scout explain to Julie how scrollers (a fixture attached to the front of lighting instruments that has color scroll through at the lighting designer's choice) get power from that little black box.
Nick attaches a scroller.
Nick prepares to attach another scroller with help from Julie.
Photo taken on Wednesday.
Scout coils cable.
Jenny the carpenter nails in shingles as Christian the technical director rigs some wires.
Rich Whittington, our Managing Director, conducts the company meeting we had earlier this week.
Julie, Jenny, and Kalyn listen at the company meeting.
Then they listen to people introduce themselves.
Beth Ritson as Flo Owens in Picnic.
Meg Steedle tries to dodge explaining what getting romantic means to her mom played by Beth Ritson.
Preston watches as Lorraine (Mrs. Potts) consoles herself with a pair of boots.
Amy Da Luz plays Rosemary Sydney.
Chatting about Greensboro history before rehearsal begins.
Amy Da Luz, Matthew Carlson, and Cheryl Koski listen to Preston recount part of the violent history of Greensboro.
The marketing staff interviews Meg Steedle (and others) on video for our forthcoming website addition.
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Beth Ritson, Cheryl Koski, & Lorraine Shackelford relax as an entrance is restaged with light.
Preston Lane, Kate Muchmore, Sasha, and Kelsey Hunt watch from the seats.
Kate Muchmore (assistant director), Howard Jones (scene designer), & John Wolf (lighting designer).
Meg Steedle as Madge asks for her cue.
Preston at tech notes at the end of the day following rehearsal. Tech notes happen after every technical rehearsal and performance preview. All the designers, the director, and the crew get together to go over what needs to be fixed, changed, adjusted, reblocked, refocused, hemmed, or painted.
Amy creates prop newspapers with actual articles from 1950s newspapers. You will be able to see Amy's handywork on display in our lobby.
David Smith (sound designer) talks with Preston Lane (director) as Meg listens.[Full article]
On the first day of rehearsal for William Inge's Picnic, Preston explains a couple important features of the set designed by Howard Jones.
This is the second time in Triad Stage's history that we have produced a William Inge play. (The first being Bus Stop back in the fall of 2004.)
Kelsey Hunt, the costume designer, explains the overall neutral color palatte and the reasoning behind her choice.
Here is a sample of one of her renderings AND to see more you should go to the"Closer Look" page on our website.
Cheryl Koski (playing Millie) and Beth Ritson (playing her mother, Flo) react to questions about the script during tablework.
Amy Da Luz (playing Rosemary) and Jim Crawford (playing Howard) listen to Preston explain his thoughts on their tenuous relationship.
Phillip Eggers (playing Bomber) and Cheryl Koski (playing Millie) listen to others read during tablework.
Matthew Carlson (playing Alan) and Emily Mark (playing Christine Schoenwalder) listen to others read, as well.
Joe Tippett (playing Hal) and Megh Steedle (playing Madge).
Preston on Inge: "I found in his work an authentic regional voice, a writer who places his work firmly in a specific context but reaches far beyond his small corner of Kansas toward the universal and the true."[Full article]
We had our PostScript for Picnic last Thursday. This is where we invite the audience to ask questions of the actors' choices and experiences with the play. We always hear very funny and insightful comments from the cast. For example, the audience becomes enthralled so much with the exchange between Rosemary & Howard that people begin vocalizing suggestions to the actors such as, "Why don't you slap him?!"
(photos by Charles Howard)
We will also be showing Splendor in the Grass in our Upstage Cabaret on our 3rd floor. William Inge won an Oscar for this 1961 screenplay.
Price: $7.00
Date: Monday, September 21, 2009
Time: 7:30pm - 10:00pm
Location: Triad Stage's UpStage Cabaret
232 South Elm Street
Greensboro, NC
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The playwright and the composer talk to the cast during rehearsal for the reading.
Cinny Stickland reading Levathy Lovell.

Yours truly reading the stage directions.
Laurelyn Dossett on banjo with Christine Morris and Noah Duvarney reading.
Jeff West, Katy Sink, & TJ Austin.
Josh Yoder, TJ Austin, & Lee Spencer reading Nurvel Greene, Chance Presnell, & Jackson Johnson.
Josh Yoder & Ginny Lee.
App. Heights where we where we resided and where we had a tech picnic.[Full article]

Ginny Lee
DB: Because it was first performed in 1992 and mislabeled an “issue play,” why do think Oleanna is still relevant for audiences today?
GL: Well, at the forefront recently we have the Sotormayor confirmation hearings, which are completely relevant. Not only that she is a woman, but a Latina who has openly expressed her opinion that with her experiences as a Latina woman she might be able to reach better conclusions than a white man.
I think this play will always be relevant, not only within the political realm or issues of sex, but because it speaks to the everyday trials we go through as human beings as far as power and miscommunication go (within the workplace, relationships, etc). It's inescapable.
DB: What do you remember from your first play ever?
GL: My first play - I was in Annie with the Ashe County Little Theatre when I was 4 yrs. old. My mom played Miss Hannigan and I was third nameless orphan from the left. I remember loving every thing about being there, and being a little jealous that I couldn't be in all the numbers. During rehearsal I would crawl onto a table during "It's a Hard Knock Life" and act like I was scrubbing the table, I think in hopes that someone would see how dedicated (and good) I was and put me in the number. Oh man, I had put that out of my memory, until just now. :)
DB: What was your favorite book in college?
I was reading tons of plays in college and I was blown away by Titus Andronicus. The audacity of the action, the images, and the language amazed me.
DB: Who was your favorite teacher and why?
The one that had the earliest impact on me was my third grade teacher, Mrs. Francis. I think why I loved her so, was because she engaged our imagination--there was a tree house in her room, I still remember the stories I wrote for her, she taught us about Egypt and the pyramids which was so magical to me, AND she came to class dressed as a witch on Halloween and even though we suspected it was her she wouldn't let on and played the role all day, even going as far to write in squiggly letters on the blackboard.
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Lee SpencerDB: Because it was first performed in 1992 and mislabeled an “issue play,” but why do think Oleanna is still relevant for audiences today?
LS: Good writing stands the test of time. The play is well crafted and the conflict is so emotionally charged on both sides that it continues to make for an intriguing, albiet uncomfortable for some, evening of theater. People fighting desperately for what they want, what they need, is at the heart of all great pieces and that is why all the great works continue to be performed. I would put David Mamet material in that category of great playwrights.
DB: What do you remember from your first play ever?
LS: My first play ever was Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House in high school. To be honest my only vivid memory is of walking onstage, saying these lines I had memorized, and hearing the audience laugh in response. The feeling is hard to describe but for better or worse I got the acting bug and have been unable to shake it for 30 years.
DB: What was your favorite book in college?
LS: My favorite book in college that was required reading was Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting --a sort of the Bible for all acting students at that time. My favorite non-required work I read at that time was and continues to be Of Human Bondage by Sommerset Maugham.
DB: Who was your favorite teacher and why?
LS: My favorite high school teacher was Dan Seaman because of his encouragement and his infectious love of the theater. My favorite college teacher was Thelma Carter at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, because of her tremedous support and encouragement in my abilities. My favorite acting coach from the L.A. years was Bob Morrissey, himself a full-time working character actor who instilled in me the thought that ultimately I have to be my own judge of my work, and to guide my own career because no one else will for me.
~
To find out more about this production of Oleanna click here.
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There are a lot of funny entrances & exits...
Heather Vandergriff, the draper, works on Mariane's skirt.
Emily Robertson, the assistant costume designer, stands with a wig in our greenroom.
Costume renderings with image research by Kelsey Hunt.


I am seen here cutting dramaturgical boards for the lobby that have embellished truths. (wink)
Josh Yoder (as Cleante) & TJ Austin (as Damis) converse in character.
Jason Scott Quinn (as Loyale) inspects a snack.(He's a snacker.)
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Cumulus clouds pile up over the mountain tops boasting how beautiful Boone can be in the summer.
John Wolf, the man of light & shadow.
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There will be dancing...

There will be heartache...
And there will be romance.
Amy da Luz plays Rosemary Sydney.
Beth Ritson as Flo Owens is asked by Joe Tippett playing Hal Carter if she would "mind a little fire?"
Matthew Carlson as Alan Seymour.
During a rehearsal, Preston Lane sits and chats with Meg Steedle and Joe Tippett.
Linda Carlisle, the Secretary of Cultural Resources for North Carolina, volunteered to help in the box office on our first preview night as a part of the national initiative United We Serve.
Here is Ms. Carlisle helping with will call tickets.
This is Sherry Barr, director of Audience Services.
Here is Amanda Waterhouse and Jennifer Blank who help bartend but also work respectively as a box office associate and adminstrative intern.[Full article]

Our Tecnically Talking talkback occurred this past Tuesday, where the designers the directors get together and answer questions from the audience about the play. Pictured above are myself, Howard Jones (scene designer), David Smith (sound designer), Preston Lane (director), Kelsey Hunt (costume designer), and John Wolf (lighting designer). Photos by Charles Howard.
Howard Jones talks about the sod and how he was inspired by the artist David Hockney when it came to designing the sky.
Kelsey Hunt describes the reasoning behind the neutral choices for costume colors.
David Smith describes how he sampled George Winston, but reconfigured the piano music to mold the moments of the play.
A patron peruses the dramaturgy boards in the lobby that include the prop newspaper created by Amy Peter.
The theater at rest.(But just imagine all the seats filled.)
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Drew Rush center, Business Manager of Triad Stage, and Jeff West right (a sometimes actor of ours) read from the Laramie script.
(All photos by Kevin Davie.)
Our own Preston Lane also read that night as well.
At the end of the reading Molly McGinn played a wonderfully evocative song dedicated to Matthew Shepherd entitled "Scarecrow." Though the song was orginally written by Melissa Etheridge, Molly gave it her natural grit & passion and made it sound even better.
The whole night was affirmation of how telling American stories about can affect communites and the nation. Myths were debunked and voices were heard both with heartening and disheartening clarity concerning how hate crimes tear people apart and bring them together.
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James Whale is best remembered for such classic fantasias as Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), though he himself preferred his 1936 version of the venerable musical Show Boat. One of Whale's more obscure efforts is 1933's The Kiss Before the Mirror, William Anthony McGuire's adaptation of a Ladislaus Fodor play, which the director remade a mere five years later as Wives Under Suspicion. Unlike the public domain retread, the original is currently unavailable on home video, but TCM premiered a lovely fullscreen print of this pre-Code melodrama on April 26, 2009.Universal wanted Charles Laughton and Claudette Colbert for the leads, but they were otherwise occupied, so Frank Morgan and Nancy Carroll were loaned from Paramount. Morgan stars as Viennese attorney Paul Held, who defends his friend Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas) against the charge of murdering Bernsdorf's adulterous wife Lucie (Gloria Stuart, whose early exit from the film was considered startling for its time). Bernsdorf follows Lucie to the home of her nameless bachelor lover (Walter Pidgeon), then shoots her through a window as she disrobes in silhouette. (Pidgeon also exits the picture at this point, never to return, and--for all the chatter of betrayal--seems largely forgotten.) Morgan's politically-incorrect defense strategy is that Bernsdorf was driven to the point of madness by his wife's infidelity, and thus was not responsible for his actions. Bernsdorf's first inkling that his wife was seeing another man occurred less than an hour before the murder, when the devoted professor canceled his evening lecture to return home to his beloved, only to endure her look of disgust at him, in stark contrast to her earlier emotion, as he kissed her neck and shoulders at her makeup mirror. ("You've ruined my hairdress!" she rants.) Lukas is believably anguished as he recounts the frenzy that overtook him, a frenzy immediately infecting Held.
Most appropriately for a film with "mirror" in its title, Held and Bernsdorf, as well as their wives, reflect one another. It transpires that the lawyer's spouse Maria (Carroll) is also unfaithful to her husband, though she feels considerably more guilt about her affair than the late Lucie. As Held observes her making herself up in the looking-glass, he suddenly realizes the truth about his wife, later trailing the anxious woman to a rendezvous with her lover (Donald Cook). Held's scheme, which he confesses to the horrified Bernsdorf, is to get the professor acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity, then immediately murder Maria. "All men suspect their wives," the enlightened Held assures the professor. Significantly, both men are considerably older than their spouses, while the women's lovers are closer to their own ages. Held already seems to be feeling the press of time, as he praises the opera Faust for its idea that "one could look forward to the years with such complacency if one knew that at the age of seventy, a kindly devil would touch him on the shoulder and make him young once more."
Maria attempts to break off her affair with her (nameless) paramour, while being driven around the bend by her obsessed husband. Held requests that she be present in the courtroom when he delivers his closing address ("I want to see your face when I speak"), and a memorable summation it is. His antics are enough to get any attorney ejected from the courtroom--especially when Held flourishes a revolver to Maria's terrified shrieks--but the largely male jury rules in the professor's favor, and the lawyer finally regains his senses. (Bernsdorf spends much of Held's speech hiding his face in his hands, and makes an amusing contrast to the hysterical counselor.)
The Kiss Before the Mirror functions as a footnote in Whale's horror and science fiction cycle. The countryside set through which Bernsdorf trails his wife is cannibalized from Frankenstein's exteriors, while the accused's cell suspiciously resembles the room in which Colin Clive kept Boris Karloff. Karl Freund's camera is appropriately Expressionistic, as befits the greatest of all German cinematographers; particularly memorable is the scene in which the eerily-lamplit Morgan explains his mad scheme to Lukas, as well as a 360-degree pan of the courtroom as Morgan delivers his closing argument. Stuart, who found renewed fame many decades later as the octogenarian Kate Winslet in James Cameron's Titanic (1997), returns from The Old Dark House, and would later play Claude Rains' fiancee in The Invisible Man.
Whale's film fairly sizzles with sexuality, as Morgan harps on Lucie's disrobing in her lover's bedroom as often as the judge and the censors let him get away with it. When the distraught Maria asks Held if Lucie's murder is justifiable "because she loved someone," Held counters that it is "because she lied." "That's no reason why she should've been shot down like a mad dog," Maria protests, to which he smoothly replies, "That, my dear, is a matter of taste." The director works in a homosexual newspaper sketch artist for between-the-lines followers of his films, while Held's office manager Hilda (Jean Dixon) is a definite free spirit who makes veiled reference to her randy private life: questioned by Maria as to whether she's "a lawyer or a new kind of woman," Hilda responds that she's a lawyer by day, but "at night--well, you might be surprised." (Such forthrightness is not to be found in the Wives remake, which recasts the cuckolded lawyer as a District Attorney.) Whale packs all this outrageousness into an economical sixty-eight minutes. The Kiss Before the Mirror is eminently worthy of DVD release, and hopefully TCM's screening will facilitate this.
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Consider the avenging ant. The power of this mighty soldier has been well-represented cinematically by the Marabunta invasion of Byron Haskin's The Naked Jungle (1953) and--more memorably--by the atomic mutations of Gordon Douglas' Them! (1954). Saul Bass examined the world of these (anti-) social insects in 1974 with Phase IV, which Paramount, in association with Legend Films, has recently released as a no-frills DVD. The picture, which took the Grand Prix at the following year's International Festival of Science Fiction Films in Trieste, was a commercial failure in its time, but a cult has steadily grown around it in the intervening years, and Phase IV is ripe for rediscovery.
Bass, best known for his incredible title sequences for Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), later directed the Academy-Award-winning short Why Man Creates (1968), but Phase IV remains his only feature. It is an experimental work, absorbing the surreal vision of 1972's Oscar-netting pseudo-documentary, The Hellstrom Chronicle (along with its microcameraman, Ken Middleham), while adding a dash of (then-) New Wave style. An intentionally vague interstellar event has somehow advanced the intelligence of various ant species, who put aside their traditional antagonisms to evolve strategies against human beings in the American Southwest. Biologist Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) and information specialist James Lesko (Michael Murphy) investigate the disappearance of the insects' primary predators, as well as the mysterious erection of several eerie anthill towers (recalling the 2001 monolith), from their hive-like experimental station in the Arizona desert. Several families have already been forced out of the area by the insects, and the creatures stage an assault on the remaining Eldridge family's farm, ingeniously floating--like soldiers on a raft--on a piece of bark across the fuel ditch the family has dug as a defense, and devouring the very structure of the family's house until it collapses. The ants also attack the station, forming a chain of insects to short-circuit the truck powering the biosphere's generator.
The Eldridges' car is totaled in the chaos after ants invade the vehicle, and the farmer, his wife, and their farmhand are poisoned by the defensive insecticide shower the scientists rain upon the creatures. Only their granddaughter Kendra (Lynne Frederick) survives, rescued by Hubbs and Lesko as they emerge in their protective suits and insect-eyed goggles to inspect the carnage. The girl goes ballistic when she spots Hubbs' test ants in their glass maze, shattering the glass and causing Hubbs to be badly bitten. As his arm swells and his health--physical and mental--deteriorates, the creatures prepare for the next move in their human-insect competition, a game the smug, technocratic Hubbs savors. "We challenge with yellow chemistry," he says admiringly of the insecticide-adapted army, "and they respond with yellow creatures."
Davenport's performance of the lead scientist is pitch-perfect in its detached ruthlessness, recalling his military survivalist in Cornell Wilde's No Blade of Grass (1970). Murphy offers an effective emotional counterpoint, the warm American to Davenport's cold Anglo, and Frederick is appropriately understated as the withdrawn Kendra. Mayo Simon, who scripted everything from Judy Garland's final film, I Could Go On Singing (1963), to the underrated Futureworld (1976), here turns in his best work, exercising considerable restraint and sustaining an increasingly dark mood of meditative ambiguity. Too few science fiction films since the Seventies have explored ideas, but Phase IV is actually about something: it's ecology at its artistic deepest, outlining a grave new world in which mankind is but a minor inconvenience--mere human insects, as it were--in the Great Chain of Things. The film offers an ironic spin on the eternal battle of the sexes, as Hubbs realizes that, in order for the ants to be defeated, their queen must be destroyed. "It is she who speaks," the delirious man intones, but he is too far gone in his faith in scientific know-how to realize that she must be obeyed. An ant matriarchy is rising as the human patriarchy collapses like all great civilizations. "We knew then we were being changed and made part of their world," Lesko observes in voiceover as he and Kendra somberly await their new roles at film's end. "We didn't know for what purpose, but we knew we would be told."
Dick Bush's photography coats the screen in eerily vivid Technicolor (especially striking are the saturated blues of the biosphere at night), while Middleham's microcameras capture the insects patrolling their earth tunnels like cave warriors in some sword-and-sandal epic. One astonishing sequence--a pan of rows of dead yellow ants that the surviving blacks have arranged--is unexpectedly moving in its formalization of ritual and respect. Perhaps the film's most celebrated image--and the one referenced in the picture's deceptively tawdry poster--is the shot of ants emerging from three holes in a corpse's hand, a powerful hommage to a similar moment in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929). In hindsight, it's a shame there's no title sequence for Bass to work his wonders on, but the absence of one is certainly in keeping with Phase IV's understated atmosphere. According to Jay Cocks' Time review (October 14, 1974), Bass deleted the film's original ending--"a montage of hallucinatory images suggesting man's destiny after the ants have had their way"--because it was "too abstract." A fair amount of computerized psychedelia is present at the climax, however, and the picture's closing shot of the rising sun is effectively elegiac. Brian Gascoigne's score (realized in conjunction with David Vorhaus and supplemented by Stomu Yamashta's montage music) is anxiously ambient, occasionally employing fretless bass to acrobatic effect.
The 84-minute film is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, an approximation of its 1.85:1 theatrical ratio. Bass died in 1996, but the main actors are still with us, so it's regrettable that no audio commentary is provided. For that matter, there's no trailer, either, even though one is available on Volume Three of Synapse's 42nd Street Forever: Exploitation Explosion compilation; Paramount and Legend's omission is frankly inexplicable. The transfer reveals occasional grain (especially evident in the amazing montage of Lesko--resembling an extra from George Romero's The Crazies [1973]--scattering insecticide on his anguished trek to the queen ant's chamber), but is scarcely a distraction. Paramount's DVD, which contains a dozen chapter stops, is a definite improvement over the label's earlier videotape version, but the absence of supplemental material is a major disappointment. Perhaps, one day, a label like Criterion will treat Phase IV to the definitive edition that this film deserves.
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Cretinous handyman Willie Loomis (John Karlen), convinced that the legendary Collins jewels are hidden in the family mausoleum, unwittingly liberates the slumbering vampire from his hundred-and-fifty year confinement. Barnabas, posing as an obscure English cousin in those pre-googling Seventies, spends his time restoring the "Old House" on the Collins estate and courting Maggie, when he's not vampirizing the rest of the cast. Dr. Hoffman, who's researching the Collins family, realizes that Barnabas is undead when he casts no reflection in her compact mirror, and struggles to reverse his curse before giving him the business after learning the object of his affections. His handsome visage rejuvenated by a sanguinary feast, Barnabas plans to wed the entranced Maggie in the family's abandoned chapel, but her artist boyfriend Jeff Clark (Roger Davis) intervenes with a crossbow at the altar, accidentally shooting Loomis in the back. Loomis, who also adores Maggie, manages to stake Barnabas before he expires, and Clark finishes the job. You can't keep a good vampire down, however, and Barnabas turns into a bat after the credits.
Test audiences complained of the film's pacing, so Curtis removed approximately twelve minutes of footage--material which, unfortunately, appears to be forever lost. (The 1971 sequel, Night of Dark Shadows, suffered a similar fate, losing an astonishing thirty-seven minutes.) The opening sequence, in which the titles distractingly appear over a fair amount of to-ing and fro-ing, excised a scene in which Maggie's charge, the bratty David Collins (David Henesey), pretends to have hanged himself in order to shock his governess. This action, coupled with the unwillingness of the boy's father Roger (Louis Edmonds) to locate the little monster, motivates Maggie to leave Collinwood for good. The studio feared that impressionable youngsters would either be distressed by, or attempt to duplicate, the child's prank, but the scene's removal obscures Maggie's reason for packing. (Barnabas, of course, convinces her to stay.) A conversation between Maggie and Jeff in the Collinwood greenhouse was also eliminated, causing further confusion. In the theatrical release, Barnabas tells Loomis that he's "done something for" Jeff, but the audience has no idea that Barnabas has recommended his rival to a local gallery so that the artist won't interfere with his plans for the governess. Finally, a sequence of Dr. Hoffman's associate, Professor Stokes (Thayer David), learning from Loomis that Barnabas is indeed undead was deleted, blunting the impact of the Van Helsing stand-in's later confrontation with the vampire at the Old House. (Stokes abruptly, almost randomly, sprouts fangs near the picture's climax, as does Roger Collins, while Roger's sister Elizabeth [Joan Bennett] retreats into a fugue state and disappears; ideally, House should have been two hours, not ninety-six minutes, long.)
MGM released this film and its sequel on videocassette in 1990, following with a double feature laserdisc three years later (all are out-of-print), but the pictures have yet to debut on DVD. The original series is available on disc, as is its 1991 NBC resurrection. Fullscreen transfers of both 1.85:1 features, sporting the same ludicrously unconvincing day-for-night shots found in theatrical prints, appear from time to time on Turner Classic Movies. Warner Brothers has announced plans to revamp Dark Shadows for the big screen with director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp, so perhaps House and Night will eventually return, like Barnabas, from their home video limbo.
I hereby apologize to all those patrons, including my family, whose enjoyment of House of Dark Shadows I spoiled nearly four decades ago.
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James Card (1915-2000) was fortunate enough to experience these seminal shadow plays firsthand. As he remembers in the preface to his remarkable memoir, Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994 [319 pages]; reissued by University of Minnesota Press, 1999 [336 pages]), "When dialogue arrived and the silent film almost vanished, some of us were so infuriated that we actually refused, for many months, to even look at a talkie." The epic theatres of Card's Ohio youth, where moviegoers "dressed to watch Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo as they would to attend a concert of the Cleveland Orchestra," offer a striking contrast to today's shoebox cinemas and their backwards-baseball-capped spectators. Theatres were magical palaces, as opposed to places to gab, text, and tweet mindlessly while high school projectionists screen computer-generated images through projectors deliberately dimmed to lower electricity costs. Concession stands were unheard of in Card's youth, while showtimes were so obscure that audiences "did not know what had gone on before the moment of being seated" by white-gloved ushers. The atmosphere was one of ritual anticipation, and the author set out to possess the sacred images unfolding on the silver screen. In 1921, our cinephile, who admits his "own hell would be to have a projector and all the films [in the world] but no one around to see them with me," acquired a hand-cranked Keystone Moviegraph whose thirty-five-millimeter reels held a mere twenty-five feet. Several years later Card's erector-set ingenuity allowed him to progress to thousand-foot reels, and he was soon swapping items with his fellow fanatics. Providentially, a friend's city court judge father treated the Shaker Heights lads to material censored by the Buckeye State's morality guardians. (In an amusing sidenote, Card reveals that Jesus' intertitle in Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 King of Kings, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," was stricken from Illinois screenings because censors had forbidden the word "sin.") The excised material offered the author his first glimpse of "greasy man" Erich von Stroheim, the magnificent scoundrel and self-mythologizer whom Card considers a wildly overrated talent, and certainly a better actor than auteur. Soon Card was reading Kirk Bond's New York Times essay, "Lament for the Cinema Dead," which introduced him to Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). The author became obsessed with finding this film, a compulsion "that changed my life and shaped what would ultimately become a kind of career."
Card began renting movies for his Theatre Guild, screening such masterpieces as Fritz Lang's 1924 Siegfried (the Knopf edition incorrectly dates this picture to 1922) in a high school auditorium. (Lang's film constitutes the first half of Die Nebulungen, but Card offers no word on whether he programmed its same-year companion piece, Kriemhild's Revenge.) The author finally tracked down a nitrate print of the elusive Caligari in 1933, screening it for "my family and a few of their dispproving friends"--as well as the projectionist, who hated the film. Card attended Western Reserve University, then ventured on a scholarship to the University of Heidelberg, where he gorged on Teutonic cinema. His procurement of a nine-point-five-millimeter Caligari exhausted his college funds. After a "somewhat misguided" attempt at filmmaking, Card journeyed to Danzig to document the beginnings of the Big One, running afoul of the Gestapo in the process. He made it back to America, directing a New Deal documentary, then wound up as "buck-ass [Army] private" at Astoria Studio, pulling KP with the likes of George Cukor.
Card was especially entranced by Herbert Brenon's 1924 version of Peter Pan, and one of the book's highlights is his decades-long quest for a copy. Card was introduced through an old soldier friend to Chum Morris, recording man for the Eastman Philharmonic. Morris had stumbled across a cache of lost treasures in the Eastman Theatre's student organists' screening room. Musicians had practiced with these prints, learning to play in time to the unspooling images. Peter Pan was only one among many movies stored in this forgotten section of the theatre; others included John S. Robertson's 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Morris showed to Card's "almost unendurable joy." The author convinced Morris that, if they didn't act to duplicate these rare pictures, they would be forever lost once safety experts learned of their existence and sent the reels to their oblivion in silver reclamation tanks. (Nitrate from X-ray film had been blamed for a 1929 Cleveland Clinic fire which killed over a hundred patients, though Card believes that poison war gas was being developed at the clinic and was the true culprit.) The men's scheme, which Card rationalizes as a combination of cultists' obsession and post-war liberation fervor ("For the allies," he writes, "the term 'liberation' came to be extended beyond a purely political sense") was derailed when Philharmonic conductor Guy Fraser Harrision remembered the Eastman cache, and one of its jewels, Henry Kolker's 1921 Disraeli, was resurrected for the theatre's silver anniversary.
Card traces the origins of film preservation to Boleslav Matuzewski, royal court cinematographer to Tsar Nicholas II, an early subject of the Lumiere Brothers and "the world's most highly placed movie buff of the nineteenth century." Matuzewski documented everything from the Russian royal family to surgeries at the imperial hospitals, and in 1898 he published an exceedingly rare book, La Photographie Animee, describing his work and arguing for the historical and educational value of film. He and the Czar attempted to establish, in the City of Light, an international cinema archive chain, but endowments for this then-relatively-new art never materialized, and Matuzewski's archive fared poorly during the Bolshevik Revolution.
The critic Burns Manthe also called, in 1921, for a cinema archive, but such as existed at the time contained specialized films held by the major military powers, in order to review battles and armaments. Finally, in the 1930's, Britain, France, and Germany combined their collections to form the FIAF (Federation Internationale des Archives de Film), and MoMA installed the merciless Ms. Barry. Card observes that, due to her cultural unfamiliarity with the country, Barry cared little for American pictures, and cites as an example her dismissal of Edward Venturini's The Headless Horseman (1922) as "difficult to view without boredom." The author admonishes her obliviousness to the film's employment of a Negro youth to rescue Ichabod Crane (Will Rogers) from a potentially lethal tarring-and-feathering (a scene, incidentally, nowhere to be found in Washington Irving), arguing that, for the time, "such noncaricatured use of a black character is without parallel in American movies." "For many years," Card notes disdainfully, "the British enjoyed castigating Americans for their cultural mistreatment of blacks--through the years before the wholesale immigration of Indians to the British Isles." He also takes to task American Marxists who considered any Soviet film, "however stupid, [to be] a splendid example of 'the people's art.'"
Indeed, the author has plenty to say, little of it positive, about the business of film studies. Card challenges former music critic Siegfried Kracauer's thesis in From Caligari to Hitler (1947) that the bulk of German cinematic masterworks "harbor the sinister principle of National Socialism," and points out that Kracauer's most "ominous examples" were actually created by Jews. Herr Kracauer's low command of English, Card submits, "was just sufficiently obscure to make his points ambiguous enough to delight the pipe-smoking elbow-patch English professors of our universities. After all, ambiguity is their way of life." Semiology, Card insists, is even worse, leading him to wonder if its practitioners are "prisoners of inferiority...hid[ing] themselves in the jungles of jargon, where they are protected from the awful responsibility of lucidity."
Card further notes that the crowds who attended silent films came not for the directors, but for the stars, and Seductive Cinema is rife with his reminiscences of such actresses as Joan Crawford and Ms. Swanson. He is, however, gentlemanly discreet regarding his relationship with Louise Brooks, the G.W. Pabst siren whose reputation Card resurrected in the Fifties. (He also restored and popularized their dismembered 1927 classic Pandora's Box.) Recalling his first encounter with Crawford, Card confesses that he didn't recognize "the short, freckle-faced girl who answered the door" of her home. Swanson he met at a department store luncheon for the actress, who was promoting her Forever Young dress line, and Card "had just sense enough not to tell her I'd been watching her in films ever since I was a little boy."
The author examines the world of "Vanished Vamps," from Alice Hollister and Theda Bara to Negri and the bewitching Garbo. But women were not the only stars. Card evaluates the work of John Barrymore, wondering if the Great Profile's maddeningly erratic performances were the result of either "despair over [his] failing powers, or a deep doubt of the ultimate merit of what he had accomplished in his most serious efforts." (Barrymore's real passion was not acting, but illustration.) Card scrutinizes the oeuvre of DeMille and Josef von Sternberg, highlighting DeMille's obscure 1915 classic, The Cheat, and devotes several amusing pages to such irregular talents as Stroheim ("the realism touted in his films is nonexistent") and D.W. Griffith. He scolds scholars whose celebration of these artists is "so utterly irrational as to be comparable only to religious fanaticism."
Of course, any discussion of Griffith will inevitably involve The Birth of a Nation (1915). "A dedicated woman seeking to improve the social climate in Rochester" requested from Eastman House a series on bigotry for a combined black and Jewish audience. Card gave it to her with both barrels, programming Griffith's adaptation of Thomas Dixon's notorious novel and play The Clansman (the film's original title), and incensing this mistress of uplift. "'When I came in here tonight,'" she told Card "in a voice trembling with emotion," "'I was an enemy of all censorship and felt that I would be ready to put my life on the line against any threat to freedom of speech or expression.' Her voice suddenly grew strong, and she almost shouted: 'But that film should never be shown anywhere to anyone!!'" Card recounts a visit he received by black community leaders, who informed him of the NAACP's staunch opposition to Birth's public exhibition, which he had scheduled for the Dryden Theatre Film Society. The delegation's leader told Card "that if I persisted in the plan to show the film, the chances were very good that I might not survive the protests of their more activist groups." Card defied their bullying, and the movie was screened without mischief. Griffith's epic was banned for a time in the author's home state, and MoMA was so intimidated by the picture's controversy that it withdrew Birth from circulation, but fortunately the film has not become extinct like too many other silents.
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"If the origins of art are to be found in religion," the authors argue, "the movies are surely the universal secular faith of the twentieth century." Theatres are cathedrals, reinforcing the wisdom of sociologist Edgar Morin's dictum that "no one who frequents the dark auditoriums is really an atheist"--a word, incidentally, that Alain de Benoist identifies, in his magisterial On Being a Pagan, as being "practically meaningless" in the world of antiquity. Movie palaces were and remain polytheistic temples, for the gods and goddesses of the silver screen will never tolerate the totalitarianism of a lone desert deity. Divinity in the Bijou is diverse, and diversity is divine.
Hoberman and Rosenbaum identify France's Cinema MacMahon, with its enormous lobby photos of the "Four Aces" (Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey, Otto Preminger, and Raoul Walsh), as the first theatre to harness the energy of cultism. Late shows were mounted at the Cinematheque Francaise and the Styx, which specialized in horror films, as well as at London's Electric Cinema and the Paris Pullman. In the United States, exhibitors programmed spook spectaculars and New Year's Eve revels. On the smaller screen, broadcasters needed to fill late-night air time, and motion pictures--particularly the killing kind--were an obvious solution. Human beings, hard-wired as we are for worship, require constant nourishment in our faith. How we hungered for the wee-hours appearances of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and all the other stars who seemed to come alive, like satellites and vampires, only at night. The counterculture vultures who subverted the Sixties were famished for visions that told them where they came from, what they were, and where they were going. Enter the underground. Andy Warhol was there in silver hair, as were George Romero's flesh eaters and John Waters' "filthiest people alive."
The authors dissect these artists chapter by chapter, beginning with the seminal efforts of such dark angels as Drella and his collaborator Paul Morrissey, as well as Kenneth Anger, Ken Jacobs, and Jack Smith. New York's Bleecker Street premiered Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) and other freak-outs, but filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas claimed that the theatre's managers were worried that the "low quality of the underground" was tarnishing the Bleecker's reputation. His defiant response was a manifesto celebrating the "Baudelairean Cinemas" of the new auteurs ("a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh") and their marginal appeal: "There is now a cinema for the few, too terrible and too 'decadent' for an 'average' man in any organized culture." Epater la bourgeoisie!
Mexican mage Alexandro Jodorowsky "[asked] of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs." His self-styled "quest for sainthood" El Topo (1970) reversed the polarity of the New Western, cross-pollinating Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah with Panic Movement perpetrator Fernando Arrabal and rascal guru G.I. Gurdjieff. Jodorowsky, his ego inflating to heroically mammoth proportions, maintained that "'there was no difference between filming and reality," and expressed his "'hope [that] one day there will come Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies.'" John Lennon was so affected by the picture that he convinced his manager Allen Klein's Abkco Films to procure what would become the pivotal midnight headtrip. Ben Barenholtz was suitably impressed to book the movie for his Elgin Theatre, where El Topo played for six-and-a-half months, enrapturing pothead audiences but dividing critics. Vincent Canby belittled Jodorowsky as "an intellectual William Randolph Hearst," while Peter Schjeldahl proclaimed El Topo "a monumental work of filmic art."
Unfortunately, Jodorowsky's subsequent release, 1973's The Holy Mountain (a work superior, I submit, to his preceding effort), was outshone at Cannes by Marco Ferreri's notorious La Grande Bouffe, and failed to duplicate El Topo's financial success. It had, however, an impressive sixteen-month run at Manhattan's Waverly. Jodorowsky, however, was never again able to pack so many seekers into theatres, and his following features--among them, the memorably gruesome Santa Sangre (1989)--faired poorly at the box office. Another film, 1980's Tusk, was barely even released, but the artist took everything in stride: "What I am doing is making my masterwork, which is my soul."
Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) marked a well-acknowledged turning point in horror cinema. "Until the Supreme Court establishes clearcut guidelines for the pornography of violence," Variety complained in that year's October 16 number, "Night...will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example." The Sixties were coming apart at the seams, and Romero's Image Ten troupe were documenting the decade's self-destruction. Indeed, Hoberman and Rosenbaum opine that the picture's title "could have been a beatnik poet's metaphor for the 'CBS Evening News'" in what was supposedly "the most violent year in [U.S.] history since the end of the Civil War." Romero's zombies remain potent symbols of a disintegrating society, though the director's conception of his ghouls has evolved significantly over the years, culminating in the post-9/11 (re)visions of Land of the Dead (2005) and his "fictuality" reboot, Diary of the Dead (2007).
Romero's first few follow-ups to Night--There's Always Vanilla (1971), Jack's Wife (1972), and The Crazies (1973)--made little critical or commercial impact, and masqueraded under various titles (e.g,. The Affair, Season of the Witch, and Code Name: Trixie). The Pride of Pittsburgh fared better with 1976's vampire character study Martin, which ran for forty-three weekends at the Waverly (where it faced stiff competition from David Lynch's Eraserhead). Romero hit paydirt again with Dawn of the Dead (1978), which shifted the Anubian siege from farmhouse to shopping mall. (Dawn, incidentally, was my first midnight movie experience, and it occurred--most appropriately--in a now-demolished mall.) Night has endured two remakes, while Dawn and Day of the Dead (1985) have weathered one each. The inevitable Crazies reworking is scheduled for winter release.
Waters' "prison and...pleasure dome were American suburbia." The Pope of Trash's Pink Flamingos (1972), with its infamous coprophagic climax, threw down the transgressive gauntlet. The director's remark that "if someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like a standing ovation," may be wishful thinking, but there's no doubt that Waters touched a nerve in the damaged American psyche. The authors examine his stock players (Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Edith Massey--several of whom spawned their own cults) and chronicle his celluloid misadventures from Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964) to Polyester (1980). Flamingos, of course, towers over Waters' oeuvre, flopping at midnight at New York's Orpheum, but playing for five nights a week for fifty-eight weeks at the Elgin, as well as forty-five weeks at the New Yorker. Inescapably, an element of danger crept into these screenings. "The audience was very bad," Barenholtz bemoaned. "[Flamingos] started getting Jersey and Brooklyn crowds, especially these gangs coming in and saying, 'Let's see the fag eat shit,' and throwing things at the screen.'" Waters went relatively mainstream with 1988's Hairspray, which became a Broadway musical and was itself filmed in 2007. The Court TV narrator is currently threatening a sequel.
Barenholtz also booked Lynch's hallucinatory urban horror Eraserhead (1977) at the Cinema Village where, after a slow start, the picture scrambled brains for a year. The film additionally had significant runs at San Francisco's Waverly (ninety-nine weeks) and Los Angeles' NuArt (over three-and-a-half years). Rosenbaum points out that Night and Eraserhead are rooted in "the fortress mentality of the fifties, an attitude becoming more prevalent again today" in our balkanised culture. Hoberman identifies Lynch's film and Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978) as "the only midnight movie[s] which [have] really addressed" the Seventies, and, in an intriguing footnote, the authors connect the industrial nightmare to New York's seminal punk bands--particularly Richard Hell and the Voidoids' anomic anthem, "(I Belong to the) Blank Generation," which they contend constitutes "a striking analogue to" the film. Eraserhead's mutant infant--whose special effects secrets Lynch, like a good magician, has never disclosed--reflects the double anxieties of delivery and abortion, and the film chillingly charts the dubious destiny of a decaying world.
Lynch's Oscar-winning sophomore feature, The Elephant Man (1980), performed admirably at the ticket booth--scoring singularly well with inner-city audiences--even as efforts to resurrect Eraserhead at theatres screening the John Merrick biopic were unsuccessful. The director belly-flopped with Dune (1984), but returned to popular myth-making with Blue Velvet (1986), the Twin Peaks teleseries and film (1990-1992), and the magnificent Mulholland Dr. (2001). The authors ascertain "a modified pop Hinduism" in Lynch's work--he's also a prominent transcendental meditation advocate--and, of all the artists profiled in their volume, the Missoula, Montana Eagle Scout comes closest to approximating the spiritual surrealism of Senor Jodorowsky.
Admittedly, no survey of midnight cinema is complete without an analysis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). The gender-bending musical really took off at the Waverly, where disciple Louis Farese, Jr.'s so-called "counterpoint dialogue" (in the hallowed tradition of the Glass Teat's horror movie hosts) was picked up by his coreligionists, and soon spectators began arriving for the picture dressed as cast members. Toronto's Roxy preceded their late-night screenings with cartoons (Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle), while the Neptune accompanied Charle Chaplin shorts with the tight harmonies of the BeeGees. Frank-n-Furter personator Tim Curry's erotic energy galvanized viewers, and Hoberman and Rosenbaum proclaim him "the very embodiment of Andre Breton's polemical desire to 'change my sex as I change my shirt.'" Homosexual audiences flocked to the film, especially on Saturdays at San Diego's Strand. A newspaper article on the midnight spectacle attracted the attention of what cultist/ethnographer Margery Walker Pearce described as "hard-hat types" (not, apparently, of the Village People variety), who arrived at the theater shouting obscenities and "threatening to 'kill the faggots.'" Ultimately, the lads fell in line, and Richard O'Brien's and Jim Sharman's glam slam miraculously continues to unite very discrete groups.
Other chapters survey Punk Cinema (Beth B. and Amos Poe), Camp (Mommie Dearest [1981]), Gore (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974]), Drugs (Reefer Madness [1940]), and Agit-Prop (Tod Browning's infamous Freaks, of which Hoberman amusingly observes that "the most militant counterculture film was made in 1932"). An especial delight is the book's conclusion, in which the authors discuss the then-state of the late-night nation. Midnight movies aren't so much born as (to borrow an old tagline) kicked out of Hell, but different films reflect the concerns of different socio-economic orders. Dawn's audience, for example, is distinctly--though not exclusively--proletarian, whereas El Topo's eminence "was predicated on the existence of the kind of marginal leisure class that wouldn't think twice about going to see a midnight flick in the middle of the week."
Hoberman and Rosenbaum offer their choices for great unsung midnight movies, and impressive ones they are: Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished Ivan the Terrible trilogy (1944-58), "which intermittently comes across as the greatest Flash Gordon serial ever made." Other possibilities include such "epic, environmental" experiments as Warhol's twenty-five hour **** (1968--screened only once, at the New Cinema Playhouse) and Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (1971; a mere twelve hours and forty minutes). Rosenbaum nominates Frank Tashlin's "prophetic avant-garde masterpiece" Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and Hoberman suggests "a two-hour combination of Busby Berkeley's greatest hits."
Rosenbaum deplores such canonical splatter platters as Blood Feast (1963) and Basket Case (1982) ("neither of which I would have seen if we hadn't been doing this book"), but Hoberman wonders if gore cultists "[identify] with a lumpen, vengeful, rebellious element in popular taste," and laments that films "have turned out to be...a 'passing amusement.'" This is especially evident in the new millennium, an age whose youth prefer the virtual violence of video and computer games to traditional artistic experiences. Perhaps, in the final analysis, films aren't interactive enough, despite the call and response of the midnight mentality. As the authors note in their 1991 afterword, the enchanted era was ending by the time of the book's first edition "and we were speaking about a historical phenomenon." The mainstream sucked in the surreal, leading to a double-edged victory: Rosenbaum remarks "that midnight movies succeeded rather than failed" as their creators went Hollywood, "but it's a kind of success that resembles failure on certain fronts; it's like saying that socialism in this country succeeded rather than failed when it became part of the New Deal." Today's audiences, at any rate, crave more immediate sensations, and pushing a button or manipulating a joystick are, for them, less passive than watching a film or reading a book. The sons of night, and maids who love the moon, have, I fear, for evermore exchanged the midnight flower for the eye of vulgar light.
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(Above is a photo from Technically Talking when we had the designers join us onstage along with the actors who are seated on the right.)
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The tour ranges from the stylized kink of the Olga trilogy (1964-66) and other early roughies to women-in-prison epics and mondo movies. Their creators are creatures of the night: shadowy, often pseudonymous people who move with hand-held Bolexes through the margins, where magic usually happens. Film distributor Stan Borden "was slobbering, but he was personable." Producer George Weiss "had a Jungian feel for the sordid American S&M unconscious." Andy Milligan made movies for as little as $750, and the costumes for his gory period pieces were loudly colored so as to survive the blowup to thirty-five-millimeter. Once, when his Sweeney Todd ripoff Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970) was resurrected at the Lyric, a censored throatslitting--performed to appease the MPAA--resulted in the hurling from the balcony of a small refrigerator. "The crowd became agitated," Landis notes dryly. These were dangerous places to displease an audience.
The Cameo purveyed industrial-strength hardcore, while the Anco "sat on a nest of rotten eggs." Genderbenders from Ed Wood to Doris Wishman unreeled while "Latino junkies on the lam after a quick strongarm robbery slumped in the aisles." The Rialto programmed an unrelenting gore apocalypse; the Roxy's blaxploitationers "were as inflexible and distinct as the troublemakers sitting in the audience." These theatres form an infernal roll call as the authors invoke the Dark Gods of the Tenderloin.
Of course, conjuration demands sacrifice, preferably bloody. Roughie pioneer Michael Findley was decapitated in a helicopter crash atop the Pan Am building. Laurence Merrick, director of 1972's Oscar-nominated Manson documentary, was murdered several years after the film's release, as was interviewee Ronni Howard. The toll was also psychic. William Sanderson, best known today as hillbilly Larry from Newhart, hanged a black pastor's wife in Fight for Your Life (1977), a picture "calculated to drive inner city audiences berserk with rage." He told Clifford he was afraid the film would come back to haunt him. (Landis, who was present at an Empire screening, reports that "white patrons tried to leave the theatre as unassumingly as possible"). Many filmmakers never made any money from their work. Distributors sold prints to subdistributors, who could reissue them with impunity while their creators received no residuals whatsoever. Roger Watkins was unaware for years that his pseudo-snuff Last House on Dead End Street (1977) was actually playing somewhere and even turning a profit, as well as stomachs. The Dark Gods have a voracious appetite.
The title of Larry Buchanan's High Yellow (1965) "was so offensive you had to call the boxoffice." David Durston, director of Boy-napped (1975), spent a night in the pokey after star Jamie Gillis ran through Little Italy with a pistol, alarming the locals. Bob Roberts' 1976 porno take on the Patty Hearst saga, Patty, was closed by court order after only one week. Landis and Clifford enthusiastically convey the grit and the grime of psychosexual cinema in the funniest Deuce memoir since Josh Alan Friedman's Tales of Times Square.
This is not to suggest the book is without faults. The authors perpetuate the myths that Milligan directed 1964's The Naked Witch (it was Buchanan), and that celebrity monologist Spalding Gray appeared as the depraved El Sharif in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976). They also claim that Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was the director's response to Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox/Make Them Die Slowly (1981), when it's the other way around (though Lenzi did inaugurate this notorious subgenre). Ivan Rassimov, and not Massimo Foschi, is listed as the star of Deodato's The Last Survivor/The Last Cannibal World (1977), and so forth. These are curious errors for film cultists to make, and Sleazoid Express would have benefited from tighter editing.
To take this tour, however, is to experience by proxy the movies' anti-canon, a refreshing alternative to that puffed-up mainstream that imagines As Good As it Gets (1997) is as good as it gets. The socially disreputable sorcerers of cinema remain as vital as ever in this age of Hollywood product whose innovations are inversely proportional to their stratospheric budgets. Really, now: Wouldn't you rather watch I Drink Your Blood (1970) or White Slaves of Chinatown (1964) than the latest groaner from Jerry Bruckheimer? (Video companies are helpfully appendiced.) See them and die a thousand deaths.
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Anger made test shots for an adaptation of the Comte de Lautreamont's Les Chants des Maldoror, but--once again--no funds were forthcoming, and French surrealists, led by Ado Kyrou, allegedly promised bodily mischief if the director proceeded. Lautreamont's "Hymn to the Ocean" sequence was filmed, however, and the so-called war of pins and flies was photographed inside a glass container. Anger journeyed to Egypt in late 1951, where he began the outline for Hymn to the Sun, which reads much like a Paul Bowles scenario of magic and menace. This project, too, was never realized, and he soon settled in Rome. He still had film stock left over from the Pantheon project, and envisioned Eaux d'Artifice (1953; 13 minutes) as a four-part, increasingly-graphic account of the Sixteenth Century Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, whose family built the Tivoli Fountains.D'Este, the second son of Lucrezia Borgia, was a hedonist whom Anger revered as a sex magician into golden showers: "...the whole garden is actually a private dirty joke. It has ten thousand fountains and everything is pissing on everything else and it's like inexhaustible piss." D'Este is perhaps a kindred spirit of Hellfire Club founder Sir Francis Dashwood, who (legend has it) designed a formal garden on his estate to resemble a nude woman whose double flowerbeds and shrubbery triangle were equipped with hidden fountains--much as Anger's Water Witch (Carmilla Salvatorelli) echoes minor Hellfire member the Chevalier d'Eon: both have been identified as persons of ambiguous sex. The performer was in fact female; she was a circus dwarf recommended to Anger by Federico Fellini. Taking as his model Giovanni Piranesi's etchings, Anger used her small size to suggest a greater scale to the water garden than actually exists, and the effect is stunning. This mysterious masked figure patrols the fountains under heavy gowns and an enormous headdress (which resembles frozen waves), observed by the streaming faces of baroque statues and accompanied by the staccato strings of Antonio Vivaldi's "Winter" section of "The Four Seasons."
Despite the fact that he was able to realize only a portion of the d'Este project, Eaux d'Artifice--whose imaginary French title puns on fireworks ("feux d'artifice")--remains Anger's most sensual picture. Visually, it expands upon such pioneering waterworks as Jorris Ivens' Regen ("Rain," 1929) and Ralph Steiner's H2O (1929); erotically and metaphysically, it expands the intersection of Nature and Supernature. One of Anger's greatest strengths is his manipulation of myth to create sacred space, a pagan zone just on the other side of things, accessible through the four elements. It's as if the camera has captured a time and place that never begins, yet never really ends. The backlit gardens employ natural sunlight to look like no night on earth, while the glowing serpentine water (its drops isolated at different camera speeds) recalls the gemlike hues in the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" sequence of Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). By the time Salvatorelli, after playing hide and seek with the viewer, merges with the glittering spray, one is eager to join her in this incandescent darkness.
Fantoma derives its internegative from the original reversal A/B rolls. The restored blue tints of this black-and-white film (photographed through a red filter) enhance its oneiric appeal; especially enchanting is the emerald coloring of Salvatorelli's hand-held "fan of Exorcism," which is alchemically aglow like some enormous winged insect.
Anger says nothing about d'Este's exploits in his commentary, instead praising his actress and pointing out the use of magical coincidence in the film's most memorable sequence. A clog had caused the fountains to overflow on one level; this led to Salvatorelli's stately descent of the flooded steps, which shimmer in the shadows. Silent siren Louise Brooks considered Eaux d'Artifice Anger's "sexiest film," and certainly the spectral, spurting water is like an extended medley of the Dreamer's seminal submission in Fireworks. In 1993, the picture was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress.
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Anger was down and out in Paris, and approached Cahiers du Cinema with the idea of compiling Hollywood's secret history. The journal suggested that he channel his gossipy, and not always accurate, tales of celebrity misbehavior into a book, which Jean Jacques Pauvert (who had previously defied French censors by publishing the Marquis de Sade) would release. Opening with a Crowley quote, "Every Man and every Woman is a Star," from Magick in Theory and Practice, Anger traces the hellish movements of his heavenly bodies in lurid, Bestial prose. "I have developed a case of enormous, petrified, extremely sour grapes over the subject of Hollywood," Anger once declaimed, and this mocking, overwrought chronicle--Tacitus in Tinseltown--is the destitute director's attack on the land in which he never became a Star. The picture-filled book is essentially a surrogate film, a documentary done for coffee tables. Anger dishes dirt on everyone from "Fatty" Arbuckle to "Monster" Mae West, climaxing in the "Hollywoodammerung" of various performers (replete with disturbing corpse shots of Lewis Stone and cover girl Jayne Mansfield). It's deconstruction by death ray, and it spawned numerous imitations in the fields of music and television. Anger later claimed to have written Babylon "for one reader in a thousand"--in other words, the book was supposedly composed in a secret code that no one has ever been able to decipher, if it even exists (though Anger did offer a thousand dollars to anyone who cracked it). The book's publishing history is as lurid as its sensationalism. Marvin Miller, who had earlier made a mint ripping off Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press, brought out an unauthorized, rewritten edition in the mid-Sixties, and later a softcore film of it. Anger was never compensated, though book and movie were ordered withdrawn by a federal court; bootlegs of both have surfaced periodically. Miller, whose outrageous career encompassed everything from embezzlement to arson, was eventually sentenced to eight years in Wire City, and Hollywood Babylon ultimately received an official American release through Rolling Stone's Straight Arrow imprint.
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Anger's other recent projects include Don't Smoke That Cigarette (2000), a compilation of ancient coffin nails commercials intercut with cancer footage, scored to the accompaniment of Hank Williams' "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette." A commentator at the Internet Movie Database complains that "Anger has simply taken a videotape produced in the 1990s called SMOKE THAT CIGARETTE, added 'Don't' and his name to it, and portrayed it as his own." If true, perhaps this act of cultural appropriation is an hommage to Marcel Duchamp. Ich Will! ("I Want!," 2000), described as "an ironic re-editing of Nazi propaganda films dealing with...the Hitler Youth," was commissioned by, and premiered at, Austria's Donau Festival. Anger Sees RED (2004) is a brief high-definition video in which Anger follows the titular muscled youth through the streets of Hollywood and De Longpre Park. Elliot's Suicide (2004) is a tribute to Anger's late neighbor, former Heatmiser singer Elliot Smith, who terminated a promising solo career by stabbing himself in the heart. The long-delayed Mouse Heaven, also completed the same year with the help of a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts grant, is a delightful collage of rare Mickey Mouse memorabilia from the legendary Birnkrant collection. Anger prefers the character's original incarnation as a demonic rat, and possibly this piece is his revenge on Walt Disney, of whom he once remarked, "When I meet [him] in hell I'll kick him in the balls" for emasculating poor Mickey. Mouse Heaven was shot on video, includes songs by Ian Whitcomb and the Proclaimers, and marks Anger's first use of CGI. Finally, I'll Be Watching You (2007) and Foreplay (2008) revisit the voyeurism of Anger Sees RED: in the first film, a lovemaking security guard and bodyguard are observed by another man on a surveillance monitor; in the second, the camera erotically scrutinizes a practicing soccer team.
In 1995 Anger himself received the Babylon treatment with the publication of Bill Landis' unauthorized biography. Anger unleashed his lawyers on Landis, the publisher of underground cinema journal Sleazoid Express, comically and ludicrously demanding that the book contain no pictures of him. Landis carefully delineated the many discrepancies in Anger's legend, and for thirteen years seemed to have weathered the spell the director placed upon him--a defiance trumpeted on the Sleazoid website: "The book he couldn't curse away! Feel Ken Anger's agony of being pressed between two covers!" (Landis succumbed at age 48 to heart failure in December 2008.) Alice L. Hutchison's more recent tome (2004), a nominee for the New Zealand Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, was produced with Anger's full cooperation, and unsurprisingly steers clear of the various inconsistencies of its subject's life and work. It does, however, offer stunning stills from his films, which Anger has exhibited in galleries around the world as part of his "Icons" series. Also invaluable is the reprinting of Anger's 1950 statement on Fireworks, "Application d'Artifice," originally published in Jean Boulet's St. Cinema des Pres, as well as 1951's Cahiers du Cinema essay, "Modesty and the Art of Film." Readers should be aware that Hutchison has been accused by Miriam Dagan of plagiarizing the latter's post-graduate thesis on Anger, as well as a Carel Rowe essay on the director, charges Hutchison vehemently denies.
Anger has been credited with penning Atlantis: The Lost Continent, but this work was actually composed by Crowley for part of his Equinox series, while the director contributed an introduction decades later. He also translated Lo Duca's A History of Eroticism into English (1961), although he has falsely been attributed authorship. Deborah Allison, reviewing Hutchison's monograph in the online Film Journal, states that Anger provided forewords for Anton LaVey's last two volumes, The Devil's Notebook (1993) and the posthumous Satan Speaks! (1999), but those introductions are actually credited to Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey and musician Marilyn Manson, respectively. Anger definitely wrote the foreword for David K. Frasier's 2002 compilation, Suicide in the Entertainment Industry, and his essay, "A Vivianne Romance: Ode to a French Screen Legend," composed in suitably Babylon-ian style, appears in Jack Stevenson's 2002 sexploitation survey Fleshpot.
Anger completed Hollywood Babylon III some years ago, but complains that E.P. Dutton rejected the manuscript for being "too rough." Observer journalist Sanjiv Bhattacharya, investigating this claim in 2004, notes that Dutton's editors "know nothing of such a manuscript." This third volume is said to contain various explicit sexual and violent images, including an alleged photo (which Anger has been promising to reveal for at least three decades) of Marlon Brando performing fellatio. There's also an expose of Tinseltown's Scientology connection, and Anger believes that fear of Church litigation has hindered publication. The director's autobiography, Look Back Ken Anger, has also been promised. Authors Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince have recently published their own Hollywood Babylon, and Anger's curses are once again flying through the ether.
While the world awaits Anger's new literary efforts, a lovely tribute to the director is available on YouTube. Verdi Cries (for Kenneth Anger) sets Natalie Merchant's song to a montage of Cycle scenes, but is slightly compromised by printed scrawls praising the director, when surely his images should be sufficient. Anger is battling prostate cancer, and expected to die on Samhain 2008, but happily the Magus is still with us. Erstwhile Soft Cell crooner Marc Almond, who himself nearly perished in a motorcycle crash several years ago, has recently covered Scorpio"s "Devil in Disguise" for a planned tribute disc to the director.
The most interesting recent Anger-related work is Zachary Lazar's 2008 novel Sway, which recreates and reimagines the Sixties through the cultural collision of Anger, the Stones, Beausoleil, and Manson. It's an absorbing, vaguely DeLillo-esque exploration of the underside of the hippie dream, from Brian Jones' swimming pool to Altamont and Spahn Ranch. Lazar captures the madness that constituted this decade as accurately as the filmmaker's magick lantern. Anger is the subject of Elio Gelmini's Anger Me (2006), and appears in Nik Sheehan's 2008 documentary about Brion Gysin and his Dreamachine, FLicKeR. He also performs on theremin with guitarist Brian Butler as the "magick ritual of light and sound" duo Technicolor Skull.
If Kenneth Anger has chosen to reign in the underground rather than serve in Hollywood, the cinema has been immeasurably enriched by his rebellion. His career is an extended psychic enchantment, a radiation of astral realms though the display of trapped light. Despite his dark influence on film and music video, one cannot truly imagine this iconoclast being absorbed into the mainstream; rather, he has absorbed the mainstream into his work, deforming and transforming it. Manipulating his Ektachrome and digital demons by the might of his will, Anger reminds us that, as P.D. Ouspensky so memorably put it, "Man has within him everything from a mineral to God." He is the world's most significant pagan filmmaker, and Fantoma's splendid restoration of the Magick Lantern Cycle at long last gives this devil his due.
Anger, Kenneth. Hollywood Babylon II. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984.
Baddeley, Gavin. Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship & Rock 'n' Roll. London: Plexus, 1999.
Barton, Blanche. The Church of Satan. New York: Hell's Kitchen Productions, 1990.
Barton, Blanche. The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey. California: Feral House, 1992.
Bhattacharya, Sanjiv. "Look Back at Anger." The Observer, August 22, 2004.
Bissette, Stephen R. "Harrington Ascending: The Underground Roots." Video Watchdog No. 14, November/December 1992.
Carter, John. Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons. California: Feral House, 1999.
Crowley, Aleister. The Book of the Law. Maine: Weiser Books, 1976
Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. New Jersey: Castle Books, 1991.
Hoberman, J. and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Midnight Movies (revised edition). New York: Da Capo, 1991.
Hunter, Jack (editor). Moonchild: The Films of Kenneth Anger. London: Creation Books, 2002.
Hutchison, Alice L. Kenneth Anger: A Demonic Visionary. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004.
Landis, Bill. Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger. New York: Harper Collins, 1995.
LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Devil's Notebook. California: Feral House, 1993.
LaVey, Anton Szandor. Satan Speaks! California: Feral House, 1999.
Lazar, Zachary. Sway. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
McKenna, Terence. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. California: HarperOne, 1992.
Madenwald, Marc. "Who Slew Curtis Harrington?" Psychotronic Video No. 16, Summer 1994.
Mannix, Daniel. The Hellfire Club. New York: ibooks, 2001.
Onstead, Katrina. "A Life of Anger." Guardian Unlimited, October 27, 2006.
Pendle, George. Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. California: Harcourt, 2005.
Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (revised edition). New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
Schreck, Nikolas. The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated History of the Devil in Cinema 1896-1999. London: Creation Books, 2001.
Sutin, Lawrence. Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2000.
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The Films of Kenneth Anger, Volume One covers the first half of the director's Cycle, from finished projects to fragments and fragments to finished projects. (Regrettably, such teenage efforts as Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat [1941], The Nest [1943], and Demigods [1944] are nowhere to be found and likely no longer exist.) The set opens with the Prix Henri Chometter-award-winning Fireworks (1947; B/W, 15 minutes), lensed at Anger's parents' house when the Anglemyers were out of town (though Anger's brother Bob has located the shoot elsewhere), and unreleased for two years. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum have credited its creator with "provok[ing] the first major scandal of American avant-garde" cinema, and it's easy to see why: when Anger's hallucinatory homoeroticism was unspooled at London's Royal Film Society in 1950, the Indian Ambassador's wife cried, "That film should be burned," and left in a righteous huff. Seven years later, exhibitor Raymond Rohauer was convicted of disseminating obscenity for reviving Fireworks at his legendary Coronet Theatre. His conviction was overturned in 1959 by the California State Supreme Court, which imperiously declared "that homosexuality is not to be approved of, but society should understand its causes and effects." Sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey was so impressed with the picture that he obtained a copy for his archives; this marked the beginning of Anger's decades-long relationship with the Institute, for which he did volunteer research.Anger has pronounced Fireworks "all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July." The Dreamer (Anger) wakes from his troubled sleep to cruise a darkened men's room, which opens into an alternative universe of freeways, a painted bar backdrop Anger liberated from an old western set, and swooning sexual violence. He encounters a body-building sailor (Bill Seltzer), who shows off by flexing his muscles and walking on his hands. Anger is swatted by Seltzer when he produces a cigarette and asks for a light (a common enough come-on, but one which, in Anger's psychoverse, contains magnetic resonance), has his arm twisted by another sailor, and is finally scourged by several chain-wielding tars, who rip open his chest to reveal a ticking electrometer. Anger's Eleusinian mini-epic offers male sadomasochism as mystery initiation, achieving apotheosis in the notorious money shot (seamen/semen) of a Roman candle phallus. Anger's subsequent transmogrification into a Christmas tree, which is consumed in the family fireplace, echoes his earlier Tinsel Tree (1942), while ritually lampooning the cult of the Dying Father. Sacrifice, a theme permeating Anger's work, would find further release in other projects, from the killing of an Aztec prince in 1950's Golden Bough-inspired The Love That Whirls--destroyed on grounds of obscenity, a then-frequent practice, by the Comstocks at Eastman-Kodak--to the more overtly Crowleyan ceremonies of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Lucifer Rising.
Anger prepared at least five different versions of Fireworks, two of which (an early draft and a 1966 hand-painted print) are lost. Anger's friend and fellow filmmaker, Ed Earle, notes that the sequence of the Dreamer lying naked in a public urinal was originally longer and contained additional violence. The director's narrated prologue has been restored by UCLA from the surviving prints; the original negative A/B rolls are themselves lost, leaving only positive copies. (Mystic Fire's and BFI's print, which contained red-lettered title and end cards, does not appear here but would have made a nice supplement; the title card is reproduced in the set's lavish booklet.) Emulsion scratches are present but scarcely distracting; if anything, they enhance the film's rich rawness. The source music, a melancholically martial excerpt from Ottorino Respighi's "The Pines of Rome," alternates with silence throughout. According to Anger, the original release also contained music by Ernest Schelling, but it is not retained in any video version.
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Anger tinkered considerably with this film through the years. Microtonal composer Harry Partch provided him with tapes of his work, but threatened to sue over its inclusion in the picture. In 1958, the director, emulating the climax of Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927), prepared a three-act-and-screen print for the Brussels World's Fair. Landis recounts the event with relish: the German projectionists were not scrupulous enough for Anger's satisfaction, "and [he] charged into their booth, screaming inflammatory epithets....[Anger] dragged his head against the stucco wall of the booth until his blood seeped down it." This impassioned protest, not surprisingly, marked the end of the Brussels version, but Anger exhumed Pleasure Dome eight years later as the psychedelic experience par excellence. Supplemented with Leon Janacek's intense "Galgolithic Mass," this version was screened, along with his earlier films, in New York for the Spring Equinox. Anger designed a playbill for this occasion, urging audiences to "follow me into the flower called nowhere." This slightly shorter edition has become Anger's standard cut, and incorporates several shots from Puce Moment.
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Anger began making private reels during this period, one of which--perhaps his greatest film maudit--briefly landed him in hot water as a federal fugitive. Freelancing for the Kinsey Institute, he recorded a sadist doctor putting his masochistic patients through stiff workouts in the man's soundproof torture chamber. The acts were consensual, but when Anger foolishly had the footage developed at a drugstore, the San Jose County police thought they had a bona fide snuff film on their hands. The doctor was arrested and Anger was interrogated, an experience the director appears to have relished. The Institute came to his aid, but Anger, who was to be the state's witness, defied an order to remain in California and ventured to Colorado for a film festival. He was taken into custody at director Stan Brakhage's house by the town sheriff (a friend of Brakhage's) and a San Jose County Assistant District Attorney. Brakhage's friendship with the sheriff, who now opened a file on him, ended then and there. One hopes that Anger's footage did not suffer the same ignominious fate as The Love That Whirls.Anger made more private reels and returned to San Francisco to document the hippie scene. By now he had joined his friend Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, and his new project was a "fallen angel manifesto" called Lucifer Rising. Inspired by Crowley's "Hymn to Lucifer," Anger searched for the devil he considered "the patron saint of the visual arts." Lucifer is the Roman name for the planet Venus, and was worshipped both as Aurora (morning star) and as Vesper (evening star). The Gnostics revered Lucifer as the Herald of the Dawn, and Robert Graves speculated that the rebellious King of Babylon in the Book of Isaiah was derived from the observation that Venus is the last proud star to defy the sunrise, and that it must have been punished for its disobedience. Lucifer is also a surrogate for Horus, the "Crowned and Conquering Child" whose id dominates his superego, and he manifested himself in the form of Bobby Beausoleil. Beausoleil ("beautiful sun") was a guitarist and artist who'd been an early member of the Los Angeles rock band Love; he was also a member of Charles Manson's entourage.
Beausoleil became Anger's chauffeur and moved into his house, a former Russian embassy. The pair presented the Equinox of the Gods ritual for Mabon at the Straight Theatre, where Beausoleil's band, the Magick Powerhouse of Oz, performed. Inevitably the two fell out, with Anger accusing Beausoleil of stealing his Lucifer footage from his car trunk after the guitarist decamped. This was the impetus for the full-page October 26, 1967 obituary for himself that Anger ran in The Village Voice to mark not the end of his life, but his cinematic career: "In Memoriam Kenneth Anger Film Maker (1947-1967)." The advertisement recalled Crowley's 1930 mischief when the Beast staged a suicide in an unsuccessful attempt to interest a publisher in a novel about just such a stunt. Anger recycled what was left of Lucifer as his "attack on the sensorium," Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), which won Film Culture's Tenth Independent Film Award that same year.
The director traveled to London, drifting into the orbit of the Rolling Stones, to whom he functioned as a kind of Cagliostro figure. Beausoleil had by this time been arrested and sentenced to death for the murder of Gary Hinman in a drug deal gone sour, though his sentence was commuted to life after California's abolition of capital punishment. The Stones' biographer Tony Sanchez contends that the group believed that Anger actually inspired Beausoleil to homicide, which made him a "perversely fascinating" figure for the rockers. Mick Jagger, whom Anger involved in his Lucifer project, is credited with "sound" on Invocation--an abrasive drone created on a Moog Modular synthesizer. (This same keyboard, which appears as a prop in Jagger's feature debut, Nicholas Roeg's and Donald Cammell's Performance [1970], was sold by the dissatisfied singer to Berlin's Hansa by the Wall recording studio, and ultimately wound up in the capable hands of Tangerine Dream leader Edgar Froese).
If ever a movie looked like a spell, Invocation of My Demon Brother (color, 11 minutes) is that picture in spades. The film is bookended by three yellow circles forming "as above, so below" triangles, effectively uniting starry world with atom. Horus appears in a painting under the titles. Anger combines frantic fragments of the Mabon ritual with shots of a dope-smoking funeral for his feline Midnight (LaVey cameos here in full devil gear, a shrunken cat head in each hand), as well as the Stones' disastrous, butterfly-obliterating Hyde Park concert in memory of their late guitarist Brian Jones, and looped footage of American soldiers disembarking from a helicopter in Vietnam. (This footage, printed on a C roll and playing to the A and B rolls, appears throughout Invocation and is allegedly visible through infrared glasses.) The albino Wand Bearer (Speed Hacker) presides over images of nude boys lounging and a hanged man's contorting legs, his photophobic eyes contracting in seemingly speed-induced muscular spasms. Back at the Straight Theatre, Beausoleil's band grooves while the Magus (Anger) holds aloft Mercury's symbol, burns Crowley's "Testament of Oz," and widdershins around a magic circle to summon Lucifer--Beausoleil's body with a solar swastika projected onto it. Images come at the viewer like missiles, kaleidoscopically and subliminally: the Eye of Ra, the Eye in the Triangle, Beausoleil's glowing orbs--more than any other Anger film, Invocation watches us while we watch it. The death-obsessed bikers of Scorpio have become the expendable legions of our National Security State, impulsively going to their doom in the eternal return of American empire-building, playing the war games of the War God. Anger's flame imagery is as powerful here as it is in Pleasure Dome; light scorches the retinas in pagan pyrotechnics. The film's most astonishing sequence is a smoky accelerated shot of Anger descending the staircase of his Embassy like a marble statue come alive, to (de)generate into a voodoo doll bearing the sign, "ZAP! YOU'RE PREGNANT! THAT'S WITCHCRAFT!"
Fantoma's internegative is taken from the original reversal A/B rolls and looks fine. The disc features, as a delightful bonus, part of the Magick Powerhouse of Oz's original recording sessions for Lucifer Rising--indeed, this is the band's only recording, period. This quasi-Indian forerunner of Beausoleil's later, definitive score was located by television producer Brian Butler, and was originally released as the second disc in White Dog's 2004 Lucifer Rising CD package. Fantoma urges the viewer to understand that this jam session is "not intended as an alternative soundtrack," though it makes a fascinating footnote to this film's strange history, and--given Anger's extensive modification of his work over the years--it deserves acceptance, and utilization, on its own considerable merits.
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After Scorpio's breakthrough, Anger reverted to fragmentation with Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), which shifts the juvenile romance of the machine from motorcycle to muscle car. Again this was to have been a much longer work--the Ford Foundation had awarded Anger ten thousand dollars for the purpose--but only three minutes were completed when his living expenses and film upgrading efforts consumed the rest of the grant. KKK combines astrological blues and pinks in a Pop Art evocation of Knight and Chariot (or, as Anger prefers, "Pygmalion and his machine mistress"), all set to the Paris Sisters' hypnotic version of "Dream Lover." The Maker's (Sandy Trent) All-Chrome Ruby Plush Dune Buggy is polished by the driver until it gleams lustily, offering the camera a dynamic range of slithering reflections. The powder puff with which Trent polishes his vehicle resembles a fat white cat, while the customized seats envelop his body in their warm womb. Like the mythical sculptor, the Maker has fallen for his creation and the feeling is one of erotic worship.[Full article]

Filmed at various occult "power points" across the globe, Lucifer Rising juxtaposes long shots of the four elements with Anger's invocation of the Light-Bearer. Along the banks of the Nile, Isis (Miriam Gibril), the Life Force, signals to her lover Osiris (Donald Cammell), Lord of Death. The Adept (Haydn Couts) rises De Brier-like from his bed to continue their godly work, stares out his window at a golden dawn (symbolizing the Victorian occultists whose members included Crowley, MacGregor Mathers, and William Butler Yeats), and sacrifices a fair maiden. Lilith (Marianne Faithfull), Lucifer's rejected bride, awakens in a sarcophagus to the full moon, extends her arms under the Sphinx, and mounts the sacred solar temple at Externsteine where the Nazis initiated their Hitler-Jugend. The Magus (Anger) consecrates a magic circle, banishes the Lord of Chaos (Sir Francis Rose, one of Crowley's friends) in the center, and summons Lucifer (Leslie Huggins, whose jacket recalls the studded back in Scorpio Rising). The film climaxes with the reunion of Isis and Osiris as Wally Beavers' flying saucers soar above temple columns and the Sphinx, a charming bit of science fiction anticipated by the Mark VI birthday cake earlier presented to the Light Bearer.
Anger's Lucifer commentary is the most gossipy and entertaining of the bunch. He says of Gibril that she "had beautiful breasts and she wasn't at all shy about showing them." Cammell, who shot himself in the mid-Nineties, "was fascinated with death, and what're you gonna do?" (Curiously, Anger doesn't address Cammell's claim that he was one of Crowley's illegitimate children.) The most amusing recollections involve the drug-addled Faithfull: "Whenever she attempted to commit suicide, it was always with someone within range that could save her." Lucifer Rising, in truth, is littered with suicides; Cooper, who also photographed album covers for the Beatles, later took his life. (In typical fashion, Anger claimed responsibility for Cooper's final exit "because I bawled him out too often.") Anger deplores Faithfull's chain-smoking, "but Capricorns are very stubborn and you can't do anything about it. At least I don't care to." He also takes her to task for putting his crew at risk by smuggling a box of heroin into Egypt, a firing squad offense. The dope, which she concealed in a cosmetics case, "looked like gray powder, and since her makeup was gray anyway, I think sometimes she forgot herself and powdered herself with heroin."
Anger asserts that his crew observed an actual saucer at dawn, but the object moved too quickly for the camera and had to be recreated. It's worth noting that the contemporary vogue for UFOs dates back to 1947, the year of Parsons' Babalon Working, as the sorcerer scientist believed that alien spacecraft was an enigmatic engine in The Book of the Law. "The UFO is an idea intended to confound science," ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna wrote, "because science has begun to threaten the existence of the human species as well as the ecosystem of the planet." Our collective unconscious is thus alerting us to the ethical danger "whenever history builds to a certain kind of boil." The world inside our skull is transmitting hallucinogenic signals, but Anger states that, even though he "considered it like a sign from the gods that something was happening," he's "glad I don't know what it means, because it's a mystery....I certainly don't want the answer to everything." Anger's attitude extends to the rest of his commentaries, as he rarely discusses the esoteric meanings of his films.
Fantoma offers another sparkling transfer from a new internegative, and the score has been digitally remastered at Absinthe Studios from original sources. Beaulsoleil's soundtrack disc, though currently out of print, is available in digital download format, and is well worth seeking.
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The fledgling artist staged puppet shows for friends and began making movies with his parents' wind-up sixteen-millimeter camera. He graduated from an interest in the French occultist Eliphas Levi (1810-1875) to the Thelemic work of Crowley, the Englishman who translated Levi's The Key of the Mysteries and proclaimed himself, among other outrageous identities, the magician's reincarnation. It is Crowley's antic post-Christian spirit that animates Anger's filmography, as well as his occasional literary endeavors. Mikita Brotman has argued that Anger was the first artist for whom "film, properly used and respected, is a spiritual form, a magical ceremony involving the display of trapped light." The Magick Lantern facilitates Crowley's "raising of the whole man in perfect balance to the power of Infinity," uniting microcosm with macrocosm through the incantatory medium of celluloid.
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Anger moved to Paris after the destruction of The Love That Whirls. A collaboration with his admirer Jean Cocteau, Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, based on the latter's ballet, collapsed due to further money woes. (Cocteau's novel Les Enfants Terribles, filmed in conjunction with Jean-Pierre Melville, had earlier inspired The Nest, while Fireworks had taken the Poetic Prize at Cocteau's Film Maudit festival.) Anger labored in Henri Langlois' Cinematheque Francaise, most notably restoring a montage reel from Sergei Eisenstein's abandoned 1931 folk opus, Que Viva Mexico!, which the impressionable youngster had first seen at age five when it masqueraded under producer Sol Lesser's Thunder Over Mexico cut. The director then received some stock from a Russian team shooting in France, and was allowed to work in the Films de Pantheon studio during the four summer weeks it traditionally closed. The result was his only thirty-five-millimeter venture, Rabbit's Moon (B/W, 17 minutes). This fragment of a proposed longer project languished in the Pantheon's vaults until 1971, when Anger reduced it to sixteen-millimeter and scored it with classic doo-wop mixed with a Balinese monkey chant. Rabbit's Moon combines Japanese myth and imagery with the Commedia dell'Arte, the mysteries of sol with those of luna.As the director notes in his commentary, what looks to the West like the man in the moon resembles a rabbit to the East, and Japanese children still put out rice cakes for this creature at the full moon. Against the stunning forest Anger constructed in perspective--itself not terribly dissimilar to Midsummer's (Holly)woodland dark and deep--the primal figures of Pierrot (Andre Soubeyran), Harlequin (Claude Revenant), and Columbine (Nadine Valence) enact their timeless triangle. Harlequin, the film's Lucifer surrogate, bedevils Pierrot by juggling invisible balls, planting invisible flowers, and conjuring an eighteenth-century magic lantern that projects an image of Columbine that Pierrot covets. Columbine, however, rejects the clown's loving offer of a full moon; she's a lunar illusion, a hope on the edge of eclipse. Pierrot's soul, symbolized by the hare, leads him into another, more lethal realm; his plummet from the satellite (a jarring dummy toss exorcising the director's contemporaneous suicide attempt) leaves the solar Harlequin triumphant as ever. Anger chose his cast from Marcel Marceau's mime school, and their poses, which he intended to suggest carved ivory figures, are picture-perfect. Revenant's movements, an entrancing trickster prance, are brilliantly contrasted to Soubeyran's hangdog haplessness, while Valence sparkles as a Bijou eidolon.
UCLA's reconstruction marks, astonishingly, the first time that Rabbit's Moon has appeared in its original left-right image orientation. The film underwent a reversal in reduction, producing a mirror image of Anger's photography. (The reversed-negative is being preserved in sixteen-millimeter and thus does not appear as a supplement.) The original blue tints, interspersed with magical red symbols, are even more otherworldly in this restoration, though a few vertical lines persist. Fantoma's disc provides a handful of silent outtakes.
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The Films of Kenneth Anger, Volume Two opens with the pivotal picture of the artist's career. After returning stateside and encountering a gang of bikers at Coney Island, he created the most successful underground film of its time. "From the moment that Kenneth Anger's arachnid talents flashed on the silver screen," critic and director Gregory Markopoulos wrote of Scorpio Rising (1963; color, 28 minutes), "everyone knew, indeed felt, that an extraordinary motion picture was being unfurled." Scorpio Rising positively detonated in cinemas, sending shockwaves in every direction. Los Angeles theatre manager Mike Getz, who regularly programmed experimental movies, was found guilty of having exhibited "an obscene film" after an American Nazi Party nimrod was offended by Anger's eroticisation of Third Reich iconography. Prosecutor Warren I. Wolfe, as Hobermann and Rosenbaum recount the trial, "had taken pains to exclude all those who 'customarily enjoyed books and movies'" from his all-female jury, which never viewed the entire film, but was shown instead blown-up stills of Scorpio's male nudity. Susan Sontag, Martin Ritt, and Allen Ginsberg testified for the defense, but to no avail. Fortunately, as it had done for Fireworks, the California State Supreme Court overturned the verdict.Partially dedicated to Jack Parsons, the Hell's Angels, and assorted celebrity suicides, Scorpio Rising reflects Anger's own astrological sign, functioning both as Triumph of the Will-styled propaganda and trickster machismo parody. The film follows a gang of motorcyclists from their obsessive work on their bikes to an orgiastic Halloween party and a deadly race. Scorpio (Bruce Byron), the central figure, is an impoverished man's Marlon Brando/James Dean, an absurd fellow with delusions of fascist grandeur. Scorpio devours comic strips, snorts crystal meth, pretends to shoot a menorah and a cross on his tiny television screen, and desecrates an abandoned church in Brooklyn Heights. He's the most fleshed-out of all the director's characters: adrift in dreamland, but with the power to cross over into the waking sleep of this world. Anger pulls no punches as the film accelerates towards annihilation, unleashing the full force of Ra Hoor Khuit, the vengeful wargod who concludes The Book of the Law. His masterstroke is the cultural appropriation of the low-budget Lutheran-produced biblical drama, The Last Road to Jerusalem, a copy of which was, he claims, accidentally delivered to his front porch by a confused postman. (Landis believed it was actually purchased in a camera store.) "With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross," Crowley wrote in Verse 51; thus does Anger juxtapose Jesus with the heretical Scorpio, the messiah in the temple with Dionysian revelers. It's a return to the Pleasure Dome, but Anger's scope is paradoxically wider here; the involution from gods to men like gods illuminates the madness lurking in the shadows of popular myth. Scorpio is youthcult in full, thorny flower, bringing down the temple of Jehovah and other "crapulous creeds." Ranting and raving to Nazi images, commanding his imaginary armies, he's the inevitable consequence of blind devotion--the dystopian death dance of all mass movements. (A split-second shot of Byron's masked eye powerfully echoes Anger's convulsive cyclopean appearance as Hecate.) The real-life fatal crash that climaxes the film (photographed by Anger on the bikers' last run from Brooklyn to Walden Pond), as startling as it at first seems, is in fact mere punctuation, a point brusquely emphasized by the silver-studded word "END" on a belt that is casually tossed to the floor. We're not, in the final analysis, the demigods we like to think we are.
Scorpio Rising marks the director's first ironic use of pop songs, a strategy that has provoked many commentators to proclaim this film the forerunner of the music video. Thirteen tunes simultaneously underscore and undermine the visuals, opening with Ricky Nelson's "Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread)" as Anger unveils one of the most startling title sequences in motion picture history: Scorpio Rising studded on the back of a biker's leather jacket, with the director's name on his belt. The Randells' "Wind-Up Doll" accompanies shots of toy police cyclists traveling in aimless circles. When the Grim Reaper appears in a greaser's garage to the strains of "My Boyfriend's Back," the viewer understands who the real fatal lover is. The cyclists' party primping to "Blue Velvet" is as narcissistic as Puce's siren's (Anger's camera caresses and teases them), while Scorpio's amphetamine-fueled meltdown to "Point of No Return" and "I Will Follow Him" parodies Pan's Pleasure trip.
Fantoma offers a new internegative derived from the original reversal rolls, though the usual traces of grain remain. As with the earlier films, the sound is splendid. Scorpio Rising won numerous awards around the world, including First Prize for Documentary at the Poretta Terme Festival of Free Cinema in Italy; it also netted a Golden Mermaid at Rapello and First Prize at Foothill College's Third Annual Independent Filmmakers' Festival.
Byron wanted money and fame, but Scorpio took him nowhere fast. Powerless to turn the performance to his advantage--Landis depicts him as a clueless creature who "spent his life living up to Kenneth Anger's satirization of him"--vengefully obsessed with the director and his own lost shot at the Big Time, Byron haunted screenings of the film through the years, haranguing audiences. Anger doesn't address Byron's pseudo-stalking in his commentary, but he does complain about the intense smell of the ex-Marine's cat-filled bedroom ("I'm a dog person myself"), expresses amazement that the volatile soldier was ever honorably discharged, doubts the pistol Byron brandishes onscreen was legal, and wonders if the actor stole one of his Nazi flags that appear in the church sequence. (They went missing during production.) He also points out, as many others have, that David Lynch duplicated his use of the Bobby Vinton ballad, and reveals that the Lutheran Church sued him over his sampling of their Grade-Z epic, but the court ruled that he had "fair use" of it. "They should be ashamed to show such a corny film to their children," Anger sniffs. Apparently they are, as the picture has been permanently pre-empted by Scorpio Rising, and exists publicly only as framents in Anger's film. Discussing the climactic death sequence, Anger is unexpectedly defensive: "I'm sorry the fellow was killed," he says, "but it wasn't like I tripped him." He points out that the dead biker's arm tattoo, which has always been difficult to make out, most appropriately reads, "Blessed, Blessed Oblivion."
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The Man We Want to Hang looks fine in its digital rendition, and Anatol Liadov's music is perfect accompaniment. Fantoma's second Anger volume is slipcased with another booklet containing more behind-the-scenes photos, as well as appreciations by Guy Maddin and Gus Van Sant, plus additional hosannas from Scorcese. Bobby Beausoleil's essay, "Fallen Angel Blues," poignantly recounts his Freedom Orchestra's attempt to "[reach] out of the darkness to touch the inner light of their better natures." Restoration before-and-afters are included for all pictures except The Man We Want to Hang. The sets make a handsome pair, and sport Lucifer Rising's sphinx/saucer logo on both covers. All films appear in their original fullscreen ratios.
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The boy's continued mischief has motivated the Blue Fairy to turn the child back into a puppet, who lives with his father Geppetto and dog Fedora in the old man's toy shop. Pinocchio wants to be a boy again, but he's not making much headway in his studies: "The planet Venus is twenty-six million miles from Earth. Mars is thirty-five million miles away. I wish school were a million billion miles away!" Meanwhile, the just-launched Cosmos II satellite has been destroyed--the third in a week's time--by the picture's Terrible Dogfish/Monstro surrogate, an interstellar rogue whale named Astro. When Pinocchio sets off for school the next morning, he's waylaid by the Fox and the Cat (called in this version Sharp and Groovy), and winds up parting with his lunch money for a hypnosis primer. He later encounters interplanetary operative Nurtle the Twertle from Twertle-D, who's overshot his orbit and imagines he's on Mars, where he's been sent to investigate atomic energy on the presumedly dead world. Pinocchio, hoping to haul in Astro with hypnosis and (not incidentally) get out of going to school, climbs aboard Nurtle's spacecraft, and the two journey to the Red Planet.
At this point, Pinocchio in Outer Space becomes quite interesting. Our adventurers, after encountering a magnetic storm, touch down on Mars and spot a mysterious city, which resembles a futuristic Disneyworld, in the distance. After narrowly escaping being devoured by colossal, drooling sand crabs, Pinocchio and Nurtle explore the city, which upon closer inspection is deserted and disintegrating. The puppet suggests that Astro must be responsible for the destruction--indentations in the ruins reveal ominous whale shapes--and Nurtle agrees that "there's something fishy here, all right." The pair examine the city's underground chambers as organic-looking machines hum eerily. They discover a flowing canal, as well as pits of regular-sized crabs and scorpions, and deduce that the contraptions dispensing radioactive food to the creatures are mutating them into giants. Other monstrosities, including enormous spiders and turtles, make their presence known, and the astronauts flee down a long tunnel. (How this subterranean sequence fired my prepubescent imagination!) The pair also encounter a pod of whales, from which Astro has undoubtedly escaped. A colossal sandstorm begins to blow, and Pinocchio and Nurtle take off in their spacecraft before sand reaches the atomic reactors and the city explodes.
Astro, of course, awaits with snapping jaws to consume the ship. As the duo drift among swallowed satellites, seemingly doomed to be digested, the Blue Fairy appears to the puppet, inspiring him with the idea of exiting through the creature's spout. (In a nice touch of swish humor, Pinocchio cries, "That's the Blue Fairy!" and Nurtle--to whom she's invisible--skeptically replies, "Sure it is, and I'm the Queen of the Moon.") The ship's stabilizer, alas, is damaged in its trip through the darkened spout, causing the craft to spin. "By the time we get back to Earth," Nurtle informs Pinocchio, "I'll be twertle soup and you a box of toothpicks." Astro is awakened by the commotion and gives chase, only to be hypnotized by the brightly-twirling ship and captured. But re-entry into Earth's atmosphere is deadly, and Pinocchio sacrifices himself to save both the spacecraft and the planet by reversing Astro's spout. Fortunately, the Blue Fairy returns to resurrect him in flesh and blood.
It's fluff, admittedly, but compelling fluff nonetheless. Some reviewers have found the picture's trio of songs intolerable, but I must confess a grudging admiration for the Fox's ditty, "Doin' the Impossible." Pinocchio is voiced by Peter Lazer, while Nurtle is rendered by Arnold Stang of Top Cat fame. (Most, if not all, of the cast were drawn from radio.) Image offers a colorful transfer of this sixty-five minute feature, with odd bits of grain here and there. Supplements include a still gallery containing poster, lobby card, and production boards. Universal's original six-minute U.S. prologue, which tours the Milky Way, is also included, and the opening "Little Toy Shop" sequence is available for inspection sans titles. Martin Caidin, whose novel Cyborg inspired television's Six Million Dollar Man, is credited as the film's technical advisor.
Ladd's audio commentary redundantly describes the onscreen action, in addition to praising Animation Director Goossens' work and pointing out the various performers. (For some reason, he identifies Lazer twice.) The film's narrator, Bret Morrison, who was radio's Shadow, is best remembered among cultists for his trailers voicework for Radley Metzger's Audubon Films erotica; he, rather than Fox personator Conrad Jameson, also renders "Doin' the Impossible," as the studio preferred Morrison's silken stylings. Ladd observes that the obliterated city's mushroom cloud took four months to complete, while the feature required four years. He further notes that the cosmic clouds in the background of the penultimate space sequence were often invisible in dense theatrical prints, but Image's transfer renders them distinctly. A separate commentary is included for the prologue, which combines government and privately-made footage with impressive animation effects. Pinocchio in Outer Space appears in its original 1.78:1 ratio (enhanced for widescreen sets), and contains fifteen chapter stops. Image's Dolby Digital Mono disc is as easy on the ears as Mr. Morrison himself.
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This also got me to thinking that neighborhoods like Glenwood, Arlington Park and Ole Asheboro have tons of old, majestic shade-providing, air cleansing trees and if these areas don't qualify as affordable housing, then I don't know what does. Does she think these neighborhoods would be better off without trees? My very own house is completely shaded by trees on its east side and substantially shaded by a large pecan tree on its south side. I can get by most days without running the AC because of these trees. This would not be a remote possibility if I didn't have those trees. I would be baking in this house.
I've never heard of a more reasonable idea than keeping or planting one measly tree in a yard. This is absolutely a social justice issue...that somehow poor people don't deserve trees is absurd. The reality is, because they are low-income, they are less likely to plant a tree after moving in, but if it is already there (adding $3 to the cost of the house per City research on the issue), they will reap the benefits of that tree for years.
Seriously, Mayor Pro Tem Groat, please think a little bit more deeper on this subject.
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If you have an overgrown lawn or an abandoned vehicle, you will get a letter from the City informing you of your need to correct the problem.
BUT, if you are renting a property that doesn't have a RUCO certificate, you will NOT get a letter from the City, according to Local Ordinance Enforcement. LOE states that it can not enforce RUCO until someone moves in. Why they don't understand that a letter to the property owner informing them of the need to come into compliance with the certificate requirement would help with compliance, I can't understand.
Imagine renting the property at 912 Haywood which doesn't have a RUCO Certificate, moving in and gettled settled into your new home as a tenant, only to have the City then come in and say the house does not meet minimum housing conditions. Whose life is disrupted? The landlords? No, it is the tenants, who, depending on the amount of repairs needed could be inconvenienced enough that they will need to move out and find a new place. This change in policy would be simple and cost the City practically nothing...in fact, it could save the city some money in enforcement if they can voluntarily get property owners to comply.
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Here is the problem, per city staff, enforcement will only be taken if someone has moved into the unit and only then if there is evidence of a lease. I know that in one case, students living in a home two doors from me, had only a verbal lease but were living in a home without a certificate. They moved out at the end of May and now new tenants have moved in to the same house. Once again I looked the address up in the City's database and there is still no certificate for the property and so today I called them again. My sense with this issue, and with the front yard parking ordinance, the City is happy with the image that they are doing something about an issue by creating an ordinance, but an ordinance is only so good as the willingness to enforce it. The City really needs to step up to the plate in the early days of these ordinances to show that they mean business.
At some point, I will plan to request from the City a listing of all of the violations of RUCO since the law went into effect and what actions the City has taken. Same for the Front Yard Parking Ordinance. Maybe there are some other folks out there interested in accountability who would be willing to help me with this task. In the meantime, I will continue to report violations of the RUCO ordinance to the City's LOE.
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Below is the release from the City about the workshop on Sept. 22. The City is only pursuing High Point Road right now and the the remainder is unfunded despite the passage of the $148 million dollar transportation bonds last November. For reasons unknown the me - but perhaps to spread the funds around the City - only half of the estimated $15 million dollar cost of the project was funded. To complete the rest of the project would require releasing more bonds in 5-7 years according to Adam Fishcher, the Acting Director of Transportation. Which, with crude calculations will tell you that it will be 2020 before Lee St. is upgraded. Once again the Glenwood neighborhood gets the short end of the stick.
What do you want to see in Greensboro’s Central Gateway Corridor? Members of the Central Gateway Corridor Partnership want to hear your ideas about how to best implement the recommendations of the High Point Road/West Lee Street Corridor Plan.
To kick off this process, a public workshop will be held on Tuesday September 22, 2009 from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm at the Doubletree Hotel located at 3030 High Point Road. Everyone with an interest in the corridor is encouraged to participate. See the attached flier.
Workshop participants will identify preferred design standards and regulatory approaches for the High Point Road/ West Lee Street corridor between South Eugene Street and Veasley Street.
This is the first in a series of public meetings over the next several months related to the development of design standards for the corridor. The results of these workshops will be used by the Central Gateway Corridor Partnership to begin developing specific design guidelines and regulatory tools to be used as new development and redevelopment proposals are made in the corridor. These design standards will complement the streetscape planning and design process currently underway.
Phase I of the High Point Road/West Lee Street Corridor Plan was adopted by the City Council in December 2008. The Central Gateway Corridor Partnership was formed to guide the implementation of the plan’s vision and recommendations. The plan can be downloaded from the City of Greensboro website: www.greensboro-nc.gov.
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I have been told that if I remove the mortar from the bricks (the pile is about 4 square feet) and stack them that it would not be an issue and I'm told that I have to move the logs placed end to end because if I don't they will rot and they are not an approved border material - never mind that there is no such thing as a list of approved border materials, but that the Inspector is classifying logs neatly placed end to end as "yard debris". When asked what problem these logs pose, I was told that they will rot and "create a mess." I let him know that the rotting is a good thing as I have very little soil on my property and that this will be a good thing for my property.
The reality is that given the vagueness of the nuisance ordinance, the inspectors have no choice but to enforce it equally. My small pile of bricks isn't differentiated from the huge pile in someone else's yard. It is believed that the ordinace addressing nuisances (Chapter 17 of the municipal code) dates to the 70's and has not been updated. It NEEDS to be updated. The problem with the way it is written currently is that it creates inefficiency among the inspection staff as it gives them no leeway to decide which properties need more attention than others; and so, in many cases, they are forced to spend time on minor violations like mine.
I really don't need another wagon to haul around right now, but I can't see any other option than to push for the updating of the nuisance ordinances so that our limited city staff resources are used appropriately and are not wasting their time on minor items like my property. (It's of special note that my house never would have brought any attention if it wasn't for local slumlord Bulent Bediz's dislike for me. No other rational person or neighbor can care less about the fact that I have a few bricks lying on the ground or a few twigs lying in a pile in the back yard.) That being said, the City isn't really left with many options since the code does not allow them any leeway.
Part 3 to come....I'm sure of it.
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GGNA will be serving up hot dogs, hamburgers and drinks for the event. Bring a dish to share and come hang out with fellow Glenwood residents!
* * *National Night Out is designed to:
Heighten crime & drug prevention awareness.
Generate support for, and participation in, local anti-crime programs.
Strengthen neighborhood spirit and police-community partnerships.
Send a message to criminals that neighborhoods are organized and fighting back!
* * *Steelman Park is located on the 900 block of Highland Avenue & Gregory Street.
We hope to see you there!
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UNCG will host a Public Involvement Meeting to discuss plans for a Railroad Pedestrian Underpass project. The meeting is scheduled for 6:30 PM on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 to be held in the Alexander Room of the Elliot University Center located at 507 Stirling Street. Parking is available directly across the street in the Walker Avenue Parking Deck.
Stephanie Hachem with Kimley-Horn and Associates will conduct the presentation and description of the project as well as invite public input and comment regarding the project.
Please attend this meeting and pass this invitation along to others who might be interested.
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To clarify the story that was written in the News & Record on this topic, the following is important to know.
1. Rawls Howard, with the City's Zoning Department issued a request of all neighborhoods (through the Neighborhood Congress) in April of this year to help the City identify any homes that would not be in compliance when the ordinance went into effect on July 15th so that the City could do some pre-education.
2. On May 18th, I posted on this blog, my preliminary findings.
3. On July 21, I sent the spreadsheet upon which my blog was based to Rawls Howard with the following email:
Rawls -
Attached is a spreadsheet with 298 addresses in the Glenwood neighborhood that, based on my interpretation of the new Front Yard Parking Ordinance, are out of compliance. (Some clarifying notes are provided where I thought it would be helpful.) These addresses were compiled doing a windshield survey during mid and late June, 2009. I'm submitting this to you as a resident of Glenwood (1007 Haywood St.). From my stand point, the ones most critical to addressing are the addresses where the 40% front yard threshold is exceeded. A majority of the other addresses fall into what I call the "grass and gravel" category. Typically, there was gravel placed for a driveway at some point in the past, but now grass grows around, within and over top of the pad, and has worn away to reveal dirt patches and/or the gravel pad does not have a defined edge.
In submitting this I have a few questions that I am unable to derive from the ordinance.
1. How will compliance be handled? A letter (to property owner or tenant)? A notice posted to the door?
2. How long does the property owner have to come into compliance once they have been notified?
3. What are the penalties for not bringing a property into compliance?
Thanks for your time. I have high hopes that this ordinace will be a key piece in making the Glenwood neighborhood more attractive.
3. Rawls responded on the same day asking for the neighborhood association (note the above email was NOT sent on behalf of GGNA) to prioritize the list of violations to which I provided the following response:
Rawls -
I had been giving this some thought. I did not submit the list on behalf of the Glenwood Neighborhood Association - in fact I don't think they are all in favor of strict enforcement, which I am. As such, my opinion is that all of these properties be treated equally under the ordinance and it is not my job to prioritize or select which ones the City chooses to enforce. I would prefer to see action on all of them - at least in the form of some communication from the City. If you don't have enough staff (which I understand), I'd rather take my case to City Council to request they find you additional temporary staff to deal with the increased workload created by passing the ordinance.
I've cc:ed my district representative, Dianne Bellamy-Small on this correspondence so she is aware of the challenges you are facing in implementing the ordinance.
Thanks for you understanding and I look forward to continue to work with the City in improving the quality of life in Glenwood.
Once enforcement begins, fines can be levied until it reaches $500. I was concerned that homeowners (not landlords) who did not have the ability to pay to bring their property up to code nor do they have the ability to comply with the ordinance by parking on the street that the City provide some mechanism of relief to assist this homeowner with coming into compliance. The City is going to look into a program by which, in using a currently defined definition of poverty, or low-income, they would be enabled to assist a homeowner with compliance. Two important notes, a person is out of compliance when the City is contacted about a potential non-compliance by a concerned citizen, OR a city employee that has information about a non-conforming property is required to notify the resident that they are in non-compliance.
The reality is that in Glenwood, many people will be able to comply with this ordinance by simply beginning to park on the street. In other words, there is a distinction between not wanting to comply and not having the ability to comply. I have no doubt that this raises concerns about vandalism and property theft and "property rights", but this is going to be an available solution for many people. Not complying will not be an option. Ironically, or not, having more cars parked on the street would have a net effect of causing traffic through the neighborhood to slow down.
In such cases, where there are site limitations to comply with the ordinance, a homeowner can make an application to the City's Technical Review Committee to review their specific circumstances.
And, like nuisance ordinances, noise ordinances and other neighborhood issues, the effectiveness of this ordinance in contributing to a cleaner, more aesthetic neighborhood relies, in part, on citizens taking a role in identyifying properties that are not in compliance. To do so, call the Planning Department at 373-2144.
If you have further questions, or want to see a copy of the Frequently Asked Questions, you can contact Fred Boateng at 433.7258 or fred.boateng@greensboro-nc.gov.
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The City of Greensboro and the Community Sustainability Council would like your input on strategies for the City’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant application.
This will build on priorities identified in public meetings held this summer. Feel free to print or forward this email or the attached flyer to anyone you think may be interested.
Date: Tuesday, October 13th
Two opportunities to attend: 12 to 1:30 or 6:30 to 8
Where: The Nussbaum Room of the Central Library, 219 N. Church Street
Free parking will be available in the Church Street Deck
For more information, contact Sue Schwartz at sue.schwartz@greensboro-nc.gov or 373-2349, or visit the CSC website at www.greensboro-nc.gov/
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- Assist neighborhoods with the logistics and planning for community gardens
- Assist agencies, institutions, and individuals with the logistics and planning for growing of local food.
- Act as a liaison between those who are growing and those that are looking for a supply of local foods
- Develop a comprehensive local foods policy, provide recommendations for the necessary ordinances required to protect growth of this portion of the economy.
- Staff a Local Foods Coalition that could bring together the Ag Extension Service, the universities, and local foods professionals to exchange information and knowledge.
- Assist with the identification and establishment of additional farmer's markets in the City. (The growing pains at the current Farmer's Market, I believe, are a key sign that we need additional alternatives to purchasing local food other than on Wednesdays and Saturdays on Yanceyville.)
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Today (Tuesday, Nov. 4) from noon to 4pm, Leon's Beauty School at 1305 Coliseum (across from the Coliseum parking lot), is having an open house celebration for "Going Green" and the start-up of the 35 kW PV array (solar electric) installed by Extend Energy, LLC. Leon's also installed a solar thermal system. You will be able to see and learn about both systems. And there will be cake, balloons, and green shirts for sale.
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A Discussion on Sustainable Foods
Slow Foods: Dr. Anne Marie Scott, Nutrition
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): Dr. Susan Andreatta, Anthropology
Friday, November 13
11:30 am to 1:00 pm
401 Gatewood Building, UNCG Campus
Space will be limited! RSVP by November 10 to 334-5980 or HES@uncg.edu
Sample local and organic foods from Zaytoon's Restaurant
Take home recipes for a Slow Foods Thanksgiving
Purchase organic cotton HES Sustainability T-Shirts (cash or check only)
Browse at the Sustainable Foods Book Fair
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You will want to see this intriguing discussion with A3 Technologies, Alan Morris as he brainstorms on possible real world applications for 3d technologies in inventory and warehouse management. After viewing you will be asking "What if..."
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Above is a collage of the vibrant discussion Joel Leonard had with Paul Berberian of Alignment Supplies. Paul stated that close to 50% of all rotating equipment failures can be traced back to misaalignment. Check back to SkillTV in the coming weeks to see this and other interesting discussions filmed at the new SkillTV partner Fayetteville Technical Community College campus.
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Patricia Del Buono of Atlas Copco Compressors explained to Joel Leonard that there are lots of opportunities to leverage technology of compressors to reduce energy and costs. Check SkillTV in the coming weeks to see this interesting discussion.
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Dr. Larry Keen, president of Fayetteville Technical Community College shares his educational vision of utilizing i3D technologies to accelerate learning and workforce development. He met with the group of industry experts that SkillTV recently invited to FTCC to explore some of this new technologies.
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Over 200 engineers and facilities leaders attended Joel Leonard's session at Facilities Decisions Conference on how to Fight the Maintenance Crisis in Las Vegas in September of 2009. Numerous resources cheered Joel on and accepted the invitation to join the fight.
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We just learned that Grainger.com is not only providing a first place prize, a Gatorade Cooler, but also second and third place prizes: Tool Kits.
We also want to clarify: send your entries (only up to 3 per person) to Joel@SkillTV.net by August 20th. Feel free to add caption to your pictures as that may add to the message.
Need ideas? SkillTV would love to see kids with tools, equipment, working, etc. Also we would love to see examples of generational exchange with kids and their mentors. Let us know if you have any questions.
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During the Fayetteville Tech Technology exploratory, we had the pleasure of introducing educational and business leaders to the power of Infrared. During this taping FLIR's Jeff Dale hooked up a FLIR camera and we alternated throughout the discussion to the video and infrared camera. Check out Joel Leonard's hand print left after he touched his chest and how dark the cold water was depicted in infrared. Also see how the white heat of his eyes after removing his glasses. Although fun to play with, this technology helps companies uncover serious energy loss and can make a signficant impact to the bottom line.
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Here at SkillTV we want to honor their efforts to FixIT Forward by sharing details below: http://www.tcspromise.org/tcspromise/Default.aspx
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Adrian Messer of UE Systems shared with Joel Leonard the latest Airborne Ultrasound technologies during the special SkillTV Technology Taping at FTCC. Adrian pointed out that companies typically get payback from the purchases of ultrasound leak detectors within the first month if not the first day.
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Maintenance Evangelist, Joel Leonard was delighted to learn that his session at Facilities Decision was the largest session of Vegas event. Joel will be attending AFE Facilities America Conference October 29th, AEE World Engineering Energy Congress in DC November 4th in the coming weeks.
If you want to join Joel for a taping of SkillTV contact him at Joel@SkillTV.net.
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Below is an email I got from Ralph "Pete" Peters, founder of the Maintenance Excellence Institute. He believes so much in our efforts that he is donating prizes to the cause.
JOEL::::>YES >>>>>A) AN MBBP HARD COPY BOOK ($50 ON PRIDE) + B) AN MBBP ELECTRONIC VERSION ($30 VALUE ON PRIDE) + C) A SCOREBOARD FOR MAINTENANCE EXCELLENCE IN ELECTRONIC ($195 VALUE ON PRIDE).
Ralph W. "Pete" PetersFounder & President: The Maintenance Excellence Institute-6809 Foxfire Place, Suite 100, Raleigh, North Carolina 27615 -2625 East Beach Drive, Oak Island, North Carolina 28465Office: 919-270-1173 Direct Cell: 919-280-1253Web: http://www.pride-in-maintenance.com/ Skype: PRIDEnWorkE-Mail: Pete@PRIDE-in-Maintenance.com & RalphPetePeters@aol.com
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After delivering the presentation on Fighting the Maintenance Crisis at the Washington State Society for Healtcare Engineers, Joel Leonard was presented this gift that although would have been fun to play with, he realized that TSA would probably confiscate at the Airport. This event was great at shooting down stereotypes and misperceptions of the maintenance and facilities engineering function that inhibit performance.
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Unfortunately, once he became a uniped, his landlord became a douchebag, refusing to make a wheelchair ramp for the unit, or more outrageously, to put up a handicapped parking sign in front of it. His reasoning? "I don't want to encourage other handicapped retirees to move in to this complex." Or at least that's what he allegedly said to my stepmother.
The bastard claims to be within his rights, saying that the 1989 Amendment that extended the Fair Housing Act to cover handicapped accessibility only applies to multi-family dwellings that had their first use after 1991, and dad's apartment complex has been operated continually since the 50s. I wanted to at least publicize his landlord's behavior, with the hopes of shaming him into relenting, but Dad and my stepmother want to move out. They've lived there for 18 years, but don't want to stay on with such a bastard as their landlord. Can't say I blame them.
But moving out takes money, and they're on fixed incomes and I can only send them so much at a time. To raise them some additional funds, I'm holding an eBay auction of what may be the rarest and most collectible item I own.
Back in the 80s, I wrote CRAZY CREATIVE WRITING: STORY STARTERS AND WORD BANKS for Carson-Dellosa, a local publisher of educational workbook. "Story starters" are the beginnings of simple short stories, accompanied by a "Word Bank" of possible words to use in completing the story on the blank lines under the beginning paragraph. My book contained 30 of these, and was aimed at teachers of grades 1-4.

In the 90s, when I was going to a lot of science fiction and fantasy conventions and working on my first novel, I asked various professional writers I'd met to complete stories in the book, just like they were kids in an elementary school classroom. Neil Gaiman (SANDMAN, AMERICAN GODS, CORALINE), Poppy Z. Brite, Kelly Link, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Mehitobel Wilson and others complied.
Here's Neil's contribution (with some of it blocked off for the eBay auction, so that I'm not giving away the entire story).

At the time, a couple of contributors teased me about how I was pestering them into creating a unique and potentially very valuable collectible. I knew that was true, but I was mainly doing it for a lark, and over the years since then, I've felt guilty about trying to sell it, not so much because it has huge sentimental value but because it seemed like a mercenary response to their friendly generosity.
However, in lieu of my parents' circumstances, I've changed my mind. When I asked Neil if he thought this was mercenary of me, he replied no, not at all, "it's not like you're going to use the money to buy edible kittens or something." I've been giggling at that phrase ever since.
So I just listed it on eBay. Neil, Poppy and Caitlin have agreed to publicize it on their blogs. The item # is 280364723261
Here's the auction.
And yes, I know I misspelled my own damn name, leaving out an "l" in McDowell! Poppy kindly pointed this out to me, no doubt snickering to herself as she did so. It will have to stand, as I don't seem to be able to edit an item's description while the auction is active.
Wish me luck. I'm not posting it here because I think this blog is widely read that it will get me any more bids, but so I'll have a link that I can point other people in the fantasy and horror communities at, so they'll learn the story behind the auction and perhaps pass on information about it.
UPDATE: Up to $500 in 24 hours That's a good start, methinks.
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I can't give an unbiased review of something shot by and starring people I know and like, but I was more impressed than I expected to be. The digital video photography looked surprisingly good projected on the big screen. Local reviewers have compared the film's look to Sin City, but as my friend Tim remarked, in some ways it more resembles that of Pi. Micah and Blake originally wanted to release the film in black and white, but then realized no distributor would touch it if they did, and the burnished, sepia-with-bursts-of-color look they settled on is quite striking.
Eric Jacobus, of the San Francisco based Stunt People, stars (and did the choreography). He's not a polished actor and doesn't yet have oodles of charisma (he looks kind of a like a short David Boreanaz), but his cinematic fighting skills are pretty damn impressive and he knows how to stage a good brawl. Huyen Thi, who plays the heroine, isn't great but doesn't embarrass herself, and she's pretty damn hot, even if she doesn't look even slightly Chinese. But then, none of the Chinese characters other than Wei, the hero's kung fu teacher (played by writer/director Moore's real-life sifu Brian Lee) do, since they're cast with Vietnamese and Thai locals (Greensboro doesn't have a Chinatown, but does have the makings of its own Little Saigon or Thai Town).
Like Jet Li's American starring debut Romeo Must Die, this is a Romeo and Juliet story involving rival mobs (Chinese and Italian here, as in the original script for Romeo before it was rewritten to feature African-American gangsters). But despite some clunkers in the dialogue, I think it actually has a more interesting script (admittedly, that's not all that hard), one with a few surprises and some nuance, as well as characters who don't always do what you might expect. And while Jacobus doesn't have the screen presence of Jet Li, he gives himself better fight scenes than Jet got in that or any of his Western films other than Unleashed or Kiss of the Dragon. And these fights are better edited than those in the latter.
While those fight scenes suffer from director Moore's use of Gladiator-style step-printing (something I told Micah after the show tonight), they're still really impressive, with long takes, no cheating edits, and lots of real contact. As an imported-from-LA enforcer called The General, co-action-coordinator Ray Carbonel (also of The Stunt Boys and micro-budget film Contour) isn't a much better actor than Jacobus, but he's equally impressive in the brutal fights, taking on our hero, and before that, our hero's best friend (and sifu) Wei.
Wei, who's essentially the film's Mercutio, is actually the most interesting character, a drunken horndog and easy-going party boy who is both a kung fu master and a handsome young Chinese-American. Brian Lee, who teaches at the Triangle Arnis Kung Fu Academy here in NC, is a better martial artist than an actor and some of his comedy is too broad, but he has looks and charisma and would have made for an interesting lead himself (he had what was essentially the Romeo role in his student and friend Moore's viral internet video Ninjas Vs. Pirates a couple of years ago). When he and Carbonel square off, he gets to use Shaolin Long Fist and other traditional techniques against The General's mixture of MMA and Muay Thai, which adds some nice variety to the deadly brawl.
The best actor in the cast, and the one with the most professional credentials, is Bill Oberst Jr. as Mob lieutenant Vitorio. Oberst, who played William Tecumseh Sherman on the History Channel a couple of years ago, isn't given enough to do, but he has a hell of a lot of screen presence and looks like a combination of a younger, skinnier, redheaded Harvey Keitel and a sandblasted Daniel Craig.
The biggest casting mistake was writer/director Moore giving himself the role a scar-faced Russian hitman called in by the Italians. Micah is a pretty impressive martial artist on the screen and in the real world (a couple of years ago, I saw him kick the ass of a much bigger drunken frat boy who crashed one of his parties and who got confrontational after not winning the Limbo contest!) and he might be an effective actor if he played up the incongruity of his real-life image as a goofy, gangly hipster who happens to have some serious kung fu skills. But he doesn't look very intimidating (which has worked to his advantage in some real life fights), at least not unless you're standing beside him and notice the muscles in his forearms and the size of his fists (which I hope he doesn't use on me after reading this), and this role is simply out of his range, with him deploying an accent that made him sound like he was out to get Moose and Squirrel.
But he shows real promise as a director, and I'm not just saying that because he's a friend. As I've said, I wasn't fond of the step-printing, but he knows how to frame action and when NOT to cut, and many of his compositions are unexpectedly lovely. And despite some clunker lines, he also shows promise as a writer, with a couple of character moments that would have really stood out in a production with more polished actors with better timing.
As Joe Scott said in his blog review about this film, it's a much better way to spend your time and money than Transformers 2. And not just because you get to see some locals kicking ass and taking names. Ian-Bob says check it out. It's only playing for six more days at the Carousel (and for only one screening each night), so see it while you can. Plus, during each showing, they'll be selling $1 beers, and yes, you can take them into the screening room with you.
Official Trailer here
(Apologies to the other locals, including friends like the lovely Heather Meek, whom I've not mentioned in this review, but whom I really enjoyed seeing on the big screen).
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I don't know what photographic genius at the Times decided on a side view that obscures one of North Carolina's most striking faces. Customers of Tate Street Coffee on (duh) Tate Street may recognize Luva as The Blood-Splattered Barista, one of my mock exploitation movie coffee posters on permanent display there (admittedly, my poster doesn't do justice to her 1960s European film goddess features, either -- I make her look like a combination of Liz Hurley and Penelope Cruz, but she's actually more beautiful than that).

Here's the "36 Hours in the Research Triangle" slide show that accompanies the main piece at the Times online.
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1) They were called ninjas.
The word "ninja" is derived from the Japanese Shinobi-no-mono, which is written with two kanji characters that can also be pronounced as nin-sha, but only if the Chinese pronunciation is used. In modern Japanese, they are usually referred to as Shinobi.
2) They wore those nifty black pyjamas.
Those costumes are actually relics of the 19th century Japanese stage, which helped form the modern image of the ninja, one that has little to do with the historical reality. In mythology, ninjas were supposed to be able to turn invisible, so actors portraying them adopted the same outfits as the stage hands and puppeteers who were supposed to be "unseen" by the audience. In reality, ninjas, if they ever really existed, dressed like peasants, or women, or soldiers in the enemy army.
3) They used a straight sword called a ninjato.
Another relic of the 19th century stage, where it was a useful way of distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys (ninjas were usually villains in the theater). There is evidence that some "ninjas" may have used a modified short (but curved) sword with the hilt and scabbard of a long sword, as this allowed them to draw it at very close range (and to hold it out with one hand as if it was being offered in surrender, then whip out the short blade with the other hand when the unwary opponent came within range), much like some Italian assassins may have used a dagger with a rapier's hilt that fit inside a scabbard. But even this claim is controversial.
4) That sword's scabbard could also be used as a breathing tube and blowgun.
Fun movie bullshit, but bullshit just the same. This is totally the invention of 20th Century practitioners of "ninjitsu," the LARPers of the martial arts world.
5) A shuriken could kill at great distances.
Generally speaking, a shuriken couldn't kill at all, unless one got very lucky or the victim later died from infection (always a possibility in those days). It's not meant to kill, it's meant as a distraction, to be used at fairly close range. For instance, when an armed opponent was closing in on a ninja, the ninja could throw a shuriken at his face. While the opponent was cursing and pulling the pointy metal star out of his face, the ninja could either attack with his own primary weapon or (more likely) attempt to escape.
6) Ninjas used smoked bombs and "black eggs" filled with esoteric powders.
Again, pure bullshido from the LARPers of the modern martial arts world. This myth also has its origin in the 19th century stage, where actors playing ninjas affected "disappearences" via the same kind of theatrical pyrotechnics used by European magicians (and actors playing Devils and magicians in stage melodramas).
7) Ninjas had special shoes that let them walk on water.
In reality, some ninjas MAY have used snowshoe-like footwear that allowed to walk on the surface of rice paddies and over mud without sinking in, but these contraptions don't work on actual water, as MYTHBUSTERS has shown. And while these are displayed in a couple of "ninja museums" in Japan, there are skeptics who feel they were actually used only by rice farmers, not by stealthy spies and assassins.
In Japanese, these shoes were called "water spiders." Apparently the Taiwanese makers of NINJA: THE FINAL DUEL took the metaphor literally!
8) Ninjas were master assassins.
Despite their prevalence in the mythology of many cultures, there have almost certainly never been any real world secret societies of master assassins. Throughout history, most assassinations have been performed by amateurs who happened to have special access to the person being assassinated. When feudal Japanese lords wanted to kill their rivals, they bribed the ministers, courtesans or personal bodyguards of those rivals to do the dirty deed, rather than dispatching teams of skulking black clad swordsmen.
Ninjas, as much as they ever existed, were primarily used for scouting and reconnaissance and in siege warfare. Any martial arts they practiced were to defend themselves if discovered, or when sneaking into castles and fortifications, to kill guards and soldiers in order to create a distraction from the main siege party outside.
9) There are modern schools of "Ninjitsu" that can actually trace their techniques back to those used by historical "ninjas."
In the 1970s, Masaaki Hatsumi founded the Bujinkan Association in Japan. Sensei Hatsumi claimed to have studied shinobi martial arts techniques under Toshitsugu Takamatsu, who in turn claimed actual ninja lineage.
These claims are dubious at best (rule of thumb: most martial arts schools are full of BS about their lineage). Masaaki Hatsumi is a formidable martial artist and his various schools teach some very effective techniques, but he is also a canny showman who is not above making bogus claims in order to sell books and entice students. How much he actually learned from Takamatsu, and how Takamatsu's own martial arts styles may have differed from mainstream jiu-jitsu and karate (i.e., possessed any uniquely "ninja" component) are highly disputed matters that are almost impossible to prove.
As for anyone else claiming to teach "ninjitsu" (or "ninjutsu" or "ninpo"), it's almost certainly pure bullshido. Some of these instructors may teach practical and effective self-defense techniques, but their actual historical "ninja content" is nil.
Note: some the above information comes from Peter Nepstad's excellent article at:
http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/cinema/archives/ninja.php
I already knew some of this stuff, such as the theatrical origin of the black outfits and the smoke bombs (Peter doesn't really get into the latter) and the less than deadly nature of the shuriken (something which should be obvious to anyone who's ever thrown one at a target), but it was from his old article that I learned the origin of the word "ninja" itself, and his comments about the historical record and its indication of ninja success (or lack thereof) are not to be missed.
My opinion of Masaaki Hatsumi is entirely my own (although one shared by many contributors to the forums at www.bullshido.net).
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The North Carolina State Fair sure has changed since I was a kid. These days it's all livestock and the standard rides and various fried foods. Mind you, I'm not adverse to any of that; I like petting cattle as much as the next animal-loving city boy, I eat far more fried foods than I should, and the more frightening the ride, the better. But those homespun pleasures are a far cry from the marvelously seedy and more than slightly disreputable old-school fairgrounds of my youth. Where are the beast-men, the peepshows, the giant man-eating animals? Where have all the big-boob strippers gone, long time passing?
I've never been to Coney Island, sadly, or any boardwalk other than Myrtle Beach's, but back in the early 70s the North Carolina State Fair had that kind of vintage ambiance, like something out of CARNIVAL or a Tom Waits song. There were freaks and fortune tellers and singing mermaids and venerable ballyhoo attractions like "See the beautiful girl turn into a gorilla before you very eyes!" (one of the few classic illusions that actually WAS done with mirrors).
There was the World's Largest Rat, which was claimed to have killed three men when it was captured in the depths of the Amazon basis. In the painting on the outside of the railer, it stood on two feet and was nibbling a headless human corpse (the anonymous artist had actually cribbed a bit from Goya's famous painting of Saturn devouring his son, which I was familiar with even at that age). Inside, of course, was just a sleepy capybara, an inoffensive 100-pound South American rodent whose deerlike legs and lack of a tail kept it from looking disturbing ratlike (even as a kid, I was used to seeing hapless capybaras devoured by anacondas on National Geographic TV specials).
There was the "giant" octopus, displayed live in a tank built to look like like a diving bell, the glass portals of which had magnifying effect on the pulsating cephalapod inside, enlarging its probably soccer-ball-sized head to beachball proportions. There was the World's Largest Crocodile and the World's Largest Snake, which had allegedly crushed over a dozen native porters when it was captured in Darkest Africa (never mind that it was a perfectly ordinary Burmese or Indian python, probably less than 18 feet long). There was the boxing chimpanzee, billed as possessing a black belt in karate, whose owner challenged all comers to battle his martial simian in the ring. The ape, a real adult male chimp bigger than me, handily kicked their asses. At my elementary school, and later my middle school, every other kid claimed to know somebody whose Green Beret big brother had beaten or even killed this pugilistic primate, a common urban legend that a google search shows has even been attributed to the young George W. Bush (who, of course, could no more beat up a chimpanzee than he could outwit one).
And most deliciously horrifically, there was the Iceman, which I saw several times. Billed as the frozen corpse of an actual Bigfoot (it appeared to have been shot through the eye!), it was displayed in a block of ice in a refrigerated trailer, chilled by aging compressors that made marvelously alarming groaning noises. The thing had been touring all over the country since the early 60s and would continue to do so for several decades. Here's a sketch of it by former zoologist turned author and monster-chasing crackpot Ivan T. Sanderson

And here's an article that takes the Iceman ballyhoo at face value:
http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/mnbf/iceman.html
I still remember walking up the creaky steps into the Iceman's trailer, which tilted treacherously to one side. The interior stank of cigarette smoke and freon from the faulty refrigeration unit. I can't recall what the attendant looked like, but I remember the overpowering smell of his cologne. I had to walk up a ramp and peer over a rail to stare down at the frozen "caveman corpse" -- the ice was real, not plexiglass or anything like that. The surface was clouded with condensation, obscuring what lay beneath, and the attendant laughed (I was the only spectator in the tent) and gave me a greasy rag. "Wipe him off so you can see him better!" Reaching for the cold ice with the dirty cloth, I did. And there, right beneath my hand, was the Iceman's face! In some ways he looked more like an eight-foot-tall naked Wolfman than my mental image of a yeti. His one remaining eye was open and seemed to stare right at me. The other was a bloody socket (in an article on the Iceman for FATE! magazine, Sanderson claimed to have been able to tell that the entire back of the Iceman's head had been blown off by the exiting bullet that had apparently killed it/him). I jumped back and nearly fell right off the ramp.
None of the various blurry photos I've seen of the iceman over the years have indicated how realistic and genuinely creepy it was, probably due to the difficulty of photographing it through the ice (it didn't help that the guy exhibiting it didn't want it to be carefully studied). Back when HELLRAISER 3 was filmed here in Greensboro, I had a conversation with the film's makeup artist in which I told the story of the Iceman. He said that he'd heard of it, and that the rumor in his industry was that it was actually created by John Chambers, the guy responsible for the make-up in the original PLANET OF THE APES (some have claimed Chambers also made the bigfoot suit seen in the famous 8-millimeter film of an apparently female Sasquatch striding across a meadow).
While dad let me see the Iceman, there the other, more mysterious Adults-Only exhibits that I knew better than to ask him to buy me tickets to, but I practically memorized the ballyhoo on the outside of the various tents and trailers. There were the odd little "educational" show tents, presumably some sort of multimedia thing. Some of these, such as the ones depicting childbirth, had been touring since the 30s, I later found; the attraction was that you actually got to see a woman's vagina, even if a baby was emerging from it (of course, by the time I was a kid at the fair, there was such a thing as actual porn, and so exhibits like "The Miracle of Life" were on their last legs). I still recall being particularly intrigued by one called "Sex Vs. The Pill." What the heck was that about?
And then there were the strippers. The North Carolina State Fair was the first place I ever saw a woman's breast -- well, most of one -- outside of the PLAYBOYs under my father's bed. No, dad, never took me into the tents in which the strippers did their acts, but when not performing the women would sprawl in lawnchairs outside, wearing half-open bathrobes, or sometimes just pasties, g-strings and high-heels, smoking and shooting the breeze with the carnies. Some of the acts were nationally known ones like Lilly St. Cyr and Busty Russell. On one particularly memorable October afternoon, I nearly walked right into the literally water-melon-sized breasts of Chesty Morgan, the infamous star of DEADLY WEAPONS, the film in which Ms. Morgan takes revenge on the mobsters who killed her boyfriend by smothering them beneath her titanic ta-tas. I'd already noticed several posters proclaiming Ms. Morgan's presence at the fair, all with some version of this image:

Dad had actually embarassed the Hell out of me by laughing when he saw me staring at one of the posters, patting me on the head, and saying "tits that big can be fun to look at, but believe me, they only get in the way!" After the initial shock of hearing my father use the word "tits," I kept turning that image over in my mind, wondering how he knew this, and just what sort of inconvenience was afforded by such astonishingly large boobs. Perhaps if I'd not been so shy of talking about things like that with my father (he never gave me the standard lecture about the Facts of Life, expecting me to learn about them from my peers, as I did), the discussion of how they "got in the way" might have made for an interesting parental bonding conversation, but instead it became the subject of several schoolyard arguments, after I told my friends the story of what I'd encountered at the fair.
A bit later that afternoon, I'd just finished riding the marvelously rickety wooden roller coaster and was headed towards the barbecue tent where dad was waiting for me at one of the picnic tables. My route took me past the stripper tent and, as I rounded a cotton candy booth, there was Ms. Morgan in the swaying flesh, all 76-28-36 of her (well, that's how she was billed; I suspect her actual measurements were more like 56H-40-44). Her famous assets were constrained by nothing but flowered pasties and they hung almost to her waist, bouncing metronomically as she walked towards me. She wore shocking pink hotpants and open-toed pink stacks. Her ill-fitting wig was even more askew than in the photo above and her eyes were hidden behind heart-shaped shades. Behind her and to either side, men were staring with varying degrees of astonishment and interest, the young black men and the soldiers being more vocal in their approval than the white civilians, while most women either scowled or snickered. Several outraged parents had clapped their hands over their childrens' eyes.
Chesty seemed oblivious to all this. I swear to God, I remember her as smoking two cigarettes, one in each corner of her mouth, like the chain-smoking prostitute in the Louise Brooks film PANDORA'S BOX. She carried a plastic cup full of beer in one hand and a footlong hotdog in the other. As she passed me, she nodded, smiled and gave her nearest breast an extra jiggle in my direction, then tottered off towards the stripper tent. I turned around to stare after her, my face burning, glad that my father wasn't nearby and grateful for the fact that nobody was looking at me (any pickpockets in the crowd would have had a field day). Even though her back was now completely too me, I could still see her swaying breasts, first one, then the other, bobbing into partial view on either side of her elbows as she walked. This sounds like a frightening sight and from a more mature perspective, I might find it so, but you have to remember I was 11 years old and A REAL LIVE WOMAN'S ALMOST NAKED BREASTS HAD JUST PASSED WITHIN A COUPLE OF FEET OF MY FACE. My preadolescent hormonal reaction was something very different from disgust. Indeed, it was so strong that one of the hooting GI's actually noticed me, nudged his friend, and cackled "boy got him a boner! Son, you want us to buy you tickets for her show?"
My face burning, I ran towards the barbecue tent, where fortunately my father, absorbed in his beer and his paperback Matt Helm novel, hadn't noticed any of this, his view obscured by the milling crowds. The embarrassment passed soon enough and the seedy, "man, this is really grown-up!" excitement of the fair returned in force. "I just saw boobies!" went the litany in my head, "the biggest boobies that ever were! Wait until I tell John Bass and Joey Miller and the other cool kids who always have the best stories!" When dad and I left a couple of hours later, I remember thinking how I couldn't wait to be old enough to go by myself, so that I could see all the forbidden sideshows and exhibits, and maybe even pay the fifty cents that would get me into the stripper tent.
But I never did, not until after the fairgrounds of my youth had gone the way of Eckerd's soda fountains and comic book racks and Woolworth's lunch counters and Godzilla double features at downtown movie theaters that served orange soda in plastic orange-shaped containers with built-in straws. There are no more stripper tents, no freaks, no frozen yeti corpses, no giant rats and gators and snakes. But if I stand on the midway and smell the sawdust and the cotton candy and listen to the creaking rides, I can still bring it all back inside my head.
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When I was in the 4th Grade, everyone at Glendate Acres Elementary School in Fayetteville, NC, played a game called Doctor in the Butt. It was something many of us heard of in the 3rd grade, a mysterious ritual of the Big Kids. In the 5th grade, while it was sometimes engaged in, it was generally considered pass. By the 6th grade, it had become expunged from memory. But in the 4th grade, it was all the rage.
This would have been the Spring of 1968 or 1969. Can you comprehend me being that old? I often can't; its like another lifetime, or one several times removed in a chain of reincarnation. The Spring before the Summer of Love, not that that particular Summer ever dawned in Fayetteville, right beside Fort Bragg. The only time I ever saw hippies was on class trips to the Planetarium at Chapel Hill, where wed lean out of the bus windows and shout Hey, hippies! and theyd raise two fingers and go Peace, little dudes! It was a time when we talked about the episodes of STAR TREK, then in its original network TV run, that wed just seen the night before while standing line for our chocolate milk and leathery little hamburgers in the cafeteria.
But I digress. The subject of this blog is Docotr in the Butt, not how fucking old I am. Onward.
Doctor in the Butt was played by a Doctor, a Patient and a crowd of onlookers. It was played at recess, in the tall grass at the edge of the playground, behind the outbuildings that had been used for 1st graders but were empty that year. There were no teachers or monitors watching us; at recess, we were pretty much left to our own devices, and before we discovered Doctor in the Butt, we played a game called War, which was essentially a gradeschool rumble, with us fighting each other en masse, and nobody ever got in trouble for that, either, not even when I jumped on John Bass, who was much bigger than me, successfully brought him down to the ground (where he could be satisfactorily pummeled by other boys my size) by sinking my teeth into his ear and hanging on to him like a hyena on a wildebeest.
But I was talking about Doctor in the Butt, not general grade school hooliganism.
The patient was induced to lie on his and the patient was always male, as girls would sometimes agree to be doctors, but never, ever patients stomach in the tall grass, with his pants and underwear pulled down to his ankles. The Doctor arrived at a diagnosis by inserting a twig, a number two pencil or a forefinger between the patients buttcheeks. I dont recall anyones anus actually being penetrated, so the twig, pencil or finger was never stuck in very far. It was basically what these days is called an Oil Check (thanks for that term, Scott). The finger, twig or pencil was left nestled between the (usually squirming) patient's buttcheeks while the Doctor sloooooowly counted to 20.
Once a diagnosis was arrived at, a Treatment was prescribed. This consisted of dropping either an M&M, a pebble, a red berry, or a pillbug (yes, a rolly-polly) into the patient's posterior crevasse. The Doctor would then slap the patient hard on each cheek and tell him that he should put his pants back on, as he was free to go.
And that's it, or all that I remember of it. I dont recall much of how I felt about it at the time, whether it was a guilty thrill or idle curiosity. I believe that I was a doctor far more often than I was a patient, which I suppose makes me a Doctor in the Butt Top.
Beyond contributing to my general weirdness, I dont think it had any obvious effects on my psyche. Ive never been the active or passive partner in anal sex and Im more of a tit and leg man than an ass man, although I certainly appreciate a nice derriere, make no butts about that. I have no fetishes about pebbles or pillbugs, nor is that part of my annual physical when I bend and cough a secret pleasure of mine.
Maybe it was just a few kids that played it, but I remember it being a huge crowd. Realistically, we probably only did it a few times, but I recall it happening almost every recess from the first warm weather until the school let out for the summer.
And now you know. And knowing is half the battle.
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Monster Boomer" is term that I first started seeing in the early 90s, when David J. Skal's book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, was published. It's an exceptional work, and must reading for anyone who's ever wondered why about the place monsters in American culture, and how they went from scary to cuddly, but I'm being longwinded enough without attempting to review it, so here's a link. http://www.monstershow.net/work2.htm
I'll just say that I read it with a shock of recognition. Suddenly, I knew who and what I was. Not just a baby boomer, not a post-hippy or pre-punk, but a Monster Boomer!
The Monster Boom is generally agreed to have begun in 1957, when the first "Shock Theater" package of old horror and science fiction movies was syndicated on American television. The next year saw the debut of Famous Monsters of Filmland.
In 1961 the first Aurora model kit of Frankenstein's monster hit American toy and hobby stores. It may not have had the impact of the hula hoop or the frisbee, but was a niche market sensation.
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Confessions of a Monster Boomer, Part One
About a decade ago, I realized I had my own socio-cultural-generational niche. I'd long accepted my status as nerd and a geek, even before I knew those actual words. But my geekiness hadn't seemed pegged to a particular generation. Despite having some vivid memories of both the 60s and the 70s, I'd never associated myself with any of either decade's major cultural trends. Indeed, for much of my early life I was perpetually out of the loop, and even when genuinely cool (as opposed to merely trendy) stuff was part of the zeitgeist, I tended not to catch up with until years later.
I was aware of the Beatles as early as 1965, and can remember being seven years old and arguing with a neighbor kid because I thought their haircuts meant they were girls. But I don't think I voluntarily listened to them until 1974, when I caught Yellow Submarine on the ABC Movie of the Week and was bowled over by "Eleanor Rigby." In 1966, when I was eight years old, I thought that Bruce Lee's Kato on The Green Hornet was the biggest badass on T.V., but five years later, I didn't go to see Fists of Fury in the theater, nor see any Bruce Lee movie until 1980, almost a decade after he'd died. When my fellow high school seniors were grooving to KISS, I was discovering Bob Dylan (I'd sing "It's All Right, Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" while walking to school). I got my second ever hard-on over a black woman (the first having been Lt. Uhura) upon finding a Pam Grier pictorial in some second-string skin magazine (probably Gallery) in 1974, but I didn't see Ms. Grier's specRACKular talents on display in Coffy and Foxy Brown until I was working at a video store in the 80s. I wasn't aware of Gordon Lau, the Master Killer himself (and later Pai Mei in Kill Bill) until the mid-90s, although a bunch of his 70s Kung Fu films had played in downtown Fayetteville theaters (where I'd have been scared shitless to have sat amongst the G.I.s and the pimps, an audience I'd enjoy rubbing elbows with now). I knew that Shaft was the slick private dick who was a sex machine to all the chicks, but had only seen him in his short-lived, watered-down TV show until I started watching Blaxpoitation movies in the early days of homevideo. And so on.
Oh, I wasn't out of EVERY cultural loop. I saw most of the episodes of Star Trek in their original run, as it became a ritual for my father and me, but it wasn't really something I shared with my gradeschool friends. Maybe if I'd been, say 12, rather than 8, when it first aired, I might have later become a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie, but while I loved the show, I didn't worship it, it wasn't part of my interior life. Same thing with The Avengers and The Prisoner, both of which I saw during their initial American network TV runs and loved, but which didn't effect me quite the way they would have if I'd been slightly older.
And yes, speaking of the word "older, I am indeed quite the remarkably well preserved fossil.. Cue the du rigeur exclamations of "I can't believe how young you look!"
I make jokes about that now, but it was a subject I avoided when I first got on MySpace (and before that, on Friendster). At that time, I still tried to think of myself as being in my EARLY 40s and hid my real age by claiming to be 100 years old. I wasn't trying very hard to fool anyone, but for some I was less comfortable about admitting that I was 44 than I saying that I'm 48. Maybe the fact that some women in their early 30s (and even a few in their late 20s) seem to be more amused and intrigued than dismayed by my age is part of my coming to terms with it. Or maybe it's that I've actually met some forty-something women whom (unlike the ones I used to meet on dating sites) I'm genuinely attracted to (indeed, the last two Greensboro women I made overt passes at were, respectively, 41 and 43 years old, although one of them immediately shot me down in favor of some dreary ageing hippie, while the other preferred to play the tease rather than actually go out with me).
So, yes, just like Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, I grow old, I grow old, But while I may not wear my trousers rolled, I remember a lot of things that many of you don't. I can remember when Southern cities actually had downtowns, and one saw first-run movies in downtown theaters, rather than at malls or multiplexes. Many of those theaters had balconies, and in their concession stands, they sold little plastic bottles of orange soda that were shaped like oranges, with built-in straws (what the Hell were those things called, anyway?) I can remember when one could see freaks and fake monsters and "educational" sex-oriented slideshows and big-titted strippers at the sleazy old-school NC State Fair (I wrote one of my best old blogs about this). I can remember eating at Woolworth lunch counters, and ordering chocolate Sundays and sodas at Eckerds, and buying comic books for 12 cents from spinning metal racks at Rexall and 7-11.
I've written elsewhere and in this blog about Doctor in the Butt, the weird game we played at Glendale Acres Elementary School at recess. One thing that strikes me about it now that seems almost as alien as the fact that we were merrily putting pebbles and pill-bugs up each other's asses is that we were COMPLETELY UNSUPERVISED. Our school was beside a patch of woods, and nobody watched us at recess to make sure we didn't wander into those woods. I lived in a neighborhood about six blocks away from the school, and other than the one crossing guard, we didn't see any adults from the time we left our houses until we stepped in the classroom. And part of that five-days-a-week journey took use behind a church and down a dirt path through a patch of woods. Nobody thought that was strange.
Until 7th grade, meeting black kids were something that happened at other schools. We weren't entirely whitebread, in that some of the most popular boys and girls at Glendale Acres were of Lebanese ancestry (there's actually a long tradition of Lebanese families – just Christian ones, of course – living in the American South, my kung fu teacher Dennis Makool being a prime example of a fifty-something Lebanese-American Baptist good ole boy), and there were some Asian kids, and the first girl whose newly developed boobs I can remember staring at was Josephine Hoffman, whom nobody picked on for being Jewish. But we didn't have any "coloreds," as we called them, although I met (and got beat up by) plenty of them once I was old enough to be bussed off to the Seventh Grade. I could go on, but I suppose that's really a subject for another essay.
So, why I am I calling this blog "Confessions of a Monster Boomer" instead of "Confessions of a Deceptively Youthful Rake Who's Really an Old Fuck?" Like the fate of Han Solo, frozen in his cozy Carbonite, the answer is . . .
To Be Continued.
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The story you’re about to read is true. Nobody’s name is changed and nobody is innocent. And oy, did I just date myself with that Dragnet riff! You young whipper-snappers are probably thinking “what’s that duffer going on about, anyway?”
I’ve told this story before and will again. It formed the basis of the rather belated “Christmas” letter I mailed out to various friends since this last Spring. I've also sold a version of it to the local arts and politics tabloid Yes! Weekly, where it's the cover story of this week's issue. My editor there thought my title above too subtle and understated, and called it "A Haunting on Holden," even though the actual address is on Friendly Avenue.
When I was a kid growing up in the vibrant sin-filled metropolis of Fayetteville, NC, my grandfather would regularly bring me here on weekend trips to Greensboro, where his brother and sister-in-law lived on a poultry farm in the middle of the suburbs, at the intersection of Friendly Avenue and Holden Road.

My uncle (actually, my great-uncle) Olan had owned that farm since the surrounding land was countryside, and although the city had grown up around him, he was grandfathered in and allowed to keep chickens and geese and pigeons until he died in the mid 1980s

I loved the visits to the farm, even though I was a bit freaked out the first time my uncle deftly picked up a chicken, snapped its head off with a single twist, and dropped it, watching it stagger around in circles and chuckling at how "that damn fool thing still has more brains than most folks I know." Once the chicken collapsed (which might take some time), he would pick up the headless corpse, dip it in scalding water to loosen the feathers, and then it was my job to pluck it for our supper that night.
I wasn't disgusted or horrified by this. Even as a small child, I understood that the food we ate came from animals, and was fascinated rather than disturbed by the connection between a drumstick and the carcass it once came from. Whenever my mother cooked a turkey or a capon, she would always show me the liver and heart and giblets and explain how each functioned in the living fowl. She also liked to put Cornish game hens (a phrase, which she explained to me, was nothing more than a euphemism for “a little chicken barely out of grade school”) on her hands and make them “dance” on the tabletop for me.
That didn‘t bother me, and the plucking and cleaning of a recently living bird‘s carcass held no horrors for me. What did bother me was the way a decapitated chicken could still stagger around sans head, a spasmodic reflex that became downright terrifying the time one flapping victim came stumbling right at me and seemed to chase me no matter which way I turned, until it finally collapsed in a kicking heap..

Rather than being sympathetic to my terror, my usually taciturn uncle laughed, saying "don't be such a sissy-boy, Ian Keith, the damn thing can't exactly peck you any more, can it?"
Life was hard for the poor chickens on my uncle's farm, in more than just the usual ways. Olan owned a friendly (well, to me) drooly pitbull bitch named Ginger, who lived in a chain link run beside the chicken coop

Every so often an unlucky chicken would fly over the fence and into Ginger's territory. No, she wouldn't eat it or tear it to shreds, Instead, she buried it, taking apparent care not to injure it in the process, leaving behind a small mound of earth with the poor chicken's feet sticking out of it. My uncle liked to joke that Ginger was trying to grow herself a chicken patch. If he found one of Ginger's victim's while the smothered bird was still relatively fresh, we ate chicken stew that night.

Ginger and my uncle weren't the only chicken killers who lived on the farm. There was my Aunt Virginia's rangy black tomcat, who'd lost an eye and half an ear in his battles with chickens over the years (roosters are pretty damn tough).

When he was just a kitten, the cat had been named, ahem, "Niggerman,“ just like in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls,“ but my mother told my great-aunt that she didn't want me hearing that word, and thus the cat was re-christened Tar Baby. My uncle hated Tar Baby for the way he kept killing chickens (oddly enough, he generally left the pigeons, which should have been much easier prey, alone) and continually threatened to shoot him or feed him to Ginger, but my Aunt Virginia would then sweetly say "Olan, anything happens to that cat, I'll invite my sister Margaret to come live with us." That always shut him up.
Now, Tar Bay may have hated chickens, but he loved me, and whenever I visited, he spent the night on the pillow beside my head, purring like an electric engine.
One weekend when I was maybe eleven or twelve years old, I'd come with my grandfather on one of his regular visits to Olan's and Virginia's. I forget what I'd done that day, but I'll always remember that night.
The house was very old and drafty and creaky, full of heirlooms and dust. The guest room I slept in was on the third floor (fourth if you count the basement, which was actually ground level around back, as the house was built on a steep incline). I was supposed to be sharing a bed with my grandfather, but he preferred to fall asleep in the big recliner in front of the floor-model Westinghouse television in the second-floor living room, while I'd go upstairs to read myself to sleep after Wrestling (or as my grandfather called it, "My Fights") was over (well, on Friday nights, I would; on Saturdays, I'd stay up to watch Shock Theater).
So there I was, alone in the wee hours in that high creaking room under the attic eaves, Tar Baby purring in my ear, drowsing off while reading a book of horror stories from Whitman Classics (a line of small, cheap children’s hardcovers that were sold in the toy sections of department stores) called More Tales to Tremble By. I still own this excellent little anthology of horror stories, which cost $.69 at Woolworths and which was my introduction to such classics as Saki’s “Srendi Vashtar,” H. R. Wakefield’s “The Red Lodge” and M. R. James’ “Casting the Runes.” I still own it.

When my eyelids got heavy, I put the book on the end table, laid my glasses beside it, and switched off the light. Sometime after that, I’m not sure how much later, I became aware that someone else was in the room with me.
For most of my life, I've been troubled by dreams, or apparent dreams, in which I'm lying in bed, apparently still awake, and a dark form enters the room. In my childhood days, the form was usually a menacing one, a monster or boogeyman, and I'd awaken with a shout or a scream. A few years later, it would be a female one, sometimes that of a girl I knew and had a crush on or lusted after. In those later waking dreams, the figure (which was generally a silhouette, but which I could "see" far more clearly that I would actually have been able to see anyone or anything in a dark room while not wearing my glasses) would remove articles of clothing as it approached., and I often felt more frustration than relief at the way I always woke up before she either got completely naked or actually climbed into the bed with me. This apparition may have been a harbinger of those hormonal adolescent fantasies, but it was not erotic or tantalizing.
The whole experience much clearer and detailed and more coherent than my usual dreams, and at no time did I think "oh, I must be dreaming." I could feel my beating heart, hear my own breath and the creaking of the ancient house around me. And the figure was more than just a silhouette.
That house, which still stands, is on the corner of Friendly Avenue and Holden Road, a busy intersection, and there was a street lamp on that corner. Filtered through the tall trees that surrounded the house, that light formed a pale rectangle on the bedroom wall. I "awoke" conscious of someone in the room with me and immediately knowing it was not my grandfather, and when that figure stepped in front of the pale rectangle of light, it was more than just a shadowy form.

It was a woman, dressed in a long dark old-fashioned dress with a high neck, and a pale apron with dark stains on it. The light illuminated her from the shoulders to just below the knees, so that I couldn't see her head or her feet.

Standing silently there, she began to undress. It wasn’t a striptease (not that I’d seen one at the time). There was nothing lascivious about it. She undressed like someone preparing for bed at the end of a long and draining day. First the stained apron came off, then layer after layer of clothing, including a girdle and bloomers, until at last she stood there nude.
She didn't look like any nude woman I'd ever seen or thought about. At that age I’d never actually viewed a naked woman in the flesh, but I imagined them a lot, and sometime sketched them in the secret drawing pad I kept behind my bookshelf. In doing this, my primary model was 1970 Playmate of the Year Marilyn Cole (yes, I was actually able to remember her name without looking her up in the delightfully named boobpedia.com). Her “hot librarian” photo spread in my father’s hidden magazine had been burned into my subconscious, and was invariably what appeared behind my eyelids whenever my hormonal imagination conjured up on undraped female form.

But that’s not what happened in this case.
The female figure that had begun undressing in the guest bedroom of that creaky old house nothing like a Playmate. She had wide hips, meaty thighs, small floppy breasts. Much like a typical nude in a late 19th century photograph, albeit even fleshier and somehow older and more careworn.

She began to walk towards me. As she padded closer to the bed, the rectangle of light from the window moved her up her body, illuminating the place where her head should have been. There wasn't even a stump, just a depression between her shoulder blades.

I did four things more or less at once. Woke up (assuming I'd been dreaming and this wasn't really happening). Hurled the cat curled up beside my head at where the headless apparition was standing. Switched on the light. Fumbled for my glasses.

There was nothing there. Just Tar Baby, crouched stiffly in the middle of the floor, glaring at me with his one eye in way that seemed to say "What the fuck is your problem?"

Then he sat down and began to lick his own balls (he was not a neutered tomcat), before stalking back to the bed, jumping up beside me, and sitting with his head pointing away from me and his ass in my face, which was his way of getting me back for throwing him like that. But he was a forgiving sort, at least with me, and in a few minutes he was curled up and purring again.
I never said anything about this dream, if it was a dream, to my aunt or uncle or my grandfather. Decades later, when my grandfather and my Uncle Olan were dead and my Aunt Virginia had sold the farm and moved into the Quaker Friends home, I attended a party in that house, which was owned by a local doctor and rented to a bunch of Guilford College students. One of the girls who lived there said that the house was haunted, and that the ghost was that of a woman. I asked her if the ghost had a head. She said she didn't know, that she herself had never seen it, and that those who claimed they had simply described brief glimpses of a female form in a long trailing dress disappearing around corners. On one of my last visits to my Aunt Virginia in the Friends Home, I asked her about this, but she was badly failing at that point and couldn't give me a coherent answer.
Do I actually think I saw a ghost? No, I do not, at least not in the daylight, or when I'm sober. I'm very much aware of the vagaries of memory, and of how our subconscious can lead us to construct coherent and detailed narratives from badly recollected and impressionistic scraps. Late last year I was reading the World Question Center website, where a variety of leading scientists and intellectuals were asked “What have you changed your mind about?” For Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, it was the fundamental nature of memory:
Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed. Research on this topic, called reconsolidation, has become the basis of a possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and any other disorder that is based on learning.
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_1.html#ledoux
It's true that, if my childhood self had been asked to sketch a naked woman, that mini-me would have drawn someone like a temptress from a Frank Frazetta paintin or a Playmate. So, no, the apparition didn’t have the kind of female body my eleven or twelve-year-old imagination would have conjured up. And before she disrobed, she was wearing a long dark dress of the sort that the students who later lived in that house described.
But this doesn‘t convince me. As LeDoux says, memories aren’t a digital video loop that plays back over and over again in the same form. Today, and ten years ago, upon thinking back to that night, I "see" the body I've sketched in here, but that doesn't mean I really "saw" it that way then. I have the writer's instinct to make stories detailed and convincing, and I suspect this "memory" has mutated quite a bit in the many years since it happened.
Still, I've found myself thinking about it in the last couple of years, and I think I'd like to find out who's living in that house now, and ask them what they've heard and seen and dreamed while under that creaking roof
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But Neil and Kelly are friends, albeit friends that I've not talked to in several years, and I think Kelly is one of the two best short story writers currently working in the English language (Neil agrees with me on that) and that Neil is hugely talented and deserves his huge success, even though I don't read him as much as I used to (I strongly disliked American Gods, which seems churlish of me to admit, as I'm one of the many people he thanks in the afterword).
Surprisingly, Kelly's book proved easier to find, as it was prominently displayed on the New Releases shelf at the front of the Young Readers section. Neil's I couldn't find at all, causing me to check the fantasy and the graphic novels sections, to see if it had been shelved where his older fans might notice it, but no, it wasn't there, and the bookfinder workstation claimed it was in "Juvenile Fiction." I finally asked a dottering old guy in a Barnes and Noble apron, but he couldn't find it either, and it took him asking a goth girl co-worker "have you seen the new book by that Neil Guy-man fella?" to turn it up. It actually had its own display rack, but one buried away at the very back corner of the Children's section.
At least I hadn't tried to find it at the local Borders, where I'm told by a former manager that their computer claims they don't have it yet, even though they really do, similarly buried in the back of the children's section where none of the staff knows to look. This seems odd, as the book has been getting a lot of press; a rave from Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields in the New York Times Book Review, a rave at the Onion's AV Club, an NPR interview, etc.
I actually prefer Kelly as a writer to Neil (it's okay for me to say that, as he'd immediately agree with me), but I saved hers for last and am currently midway through his. It think it's the best thing he's written since Coraline (which I consider to be his most artistically succesful non-comics work). That it's essentially a riff on Kipling's The Jungle Book, with an orphaned boy being raised by ghosts (and a vampire who is essentially the Bagheera character) in a crumbling graveyard, only adds to the delight.
In the last couple of weeks I've seen Apaloosa and Tell No One in the theater. The first is a really fine old-school kickass Western that tweaks the traditional plots (there are several) in unusual ways, with exemplary work from Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen as gunslingers who are practically a platonic couple and some really well-staged shoot-outs, refreshingly nasty and quick. Plus, Lance Henricksen! The second is a terrific French thriller based on an American novel by Harlan Coben, the plot of which it actually improves considerably. I can't recommend it strongly enough; the performances are all first-rate, there's a scary female henchman (an Asian male in the book), a splendid tense foot chase through Parisian traffic, and a nice sense we're seeing the "real" Paris rather than the usual movie one. Plus, despite the pace, it gives its characters room to breathe and they aren't just there to serve the plot. For instance, Kristin Scott-Thomas (who's been working in France for years) plays the wife (yes, wife) of the hero's sister, who is also his best friend. In an American thriller, you know she would end up either the killer or a victim, but I think it's one of the film's virtues that neither happens, and that her friendship with the protaganist is treated as something that just IS, rather than a red herring.
Now to watch the season finale of Mad Men, once it pops up On Demand.
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It's almost a heartbreakingly beautiful day in this part of North Carolina. For no particular reason, other than a way of taking my mind off heavier and more foreboding matters, here are some recipes. First off, one for the unabashed carnivores.
Get you some goddam pig ribs! Open a can of PBR. Drink it. Open another can and pour it into a big bowl. Pour in a can of chicken broth. Pour in 1-2 cans of water. Boil that shit. Once it gets all bubbly like, throw in the pig ribs. Let 'em boil for about a minute.
Mix up some salt, pepper, apple butter, molasses, vinegar and Worcestershire sauce. Now, I don't hold with that "proportions" shit and don't get all pansy-ass with measuring cups and table spoons, so all I can tell you is to mix it till it tastes right.
Paint it on the ribs and put them suckers on the grill. Turn 'em regular, and slather on more of the sauce as they dry out. The beauty of boiling them in the beer and chicken broth first is you don't have to worry yourself so much about them not being cooked all the way the through and giving you some god-awful disease, so you can pretty much take them off the grill at the first sign that they're done.
That's some damn fine eating. An ex of mine, a little Jewish gal who despite having grown up all Hebrewsky was fine with the swine, said it was the best bone-in pig she ever did eat.
Okay, for you pesky pescadaria, here's another recipe.
Go to your local carnaceria and get some whole tilapia. Don't be a pussy and get all worried about not speaking Spanish, or, if you do, that you don't know the Spanish for tilapia. Look for whole fish that resemble Oscars from the aquarium section of a pet shop (they may actually be Oscars, since "tilapia" is not a species but a broad term that covers a range of cichlids). When he or she sees that you're a gringo, the butcher or fish monger may ask you if you want them filleted or otherwise cut up. You don't. That is to say, you want them gutted and scaled, but you want to leave the tails, and particularly the heads, attached. It's okay to cut off the fins (other than the tail) , though.
Now, you or the people you're planning to serve may be the sort of candy-ass separated-from-nature middle-class whitebread Americans who get all knicker-twisted at the sight of food with a face on it. If so, you can always cut the heads off after you've cooked the fish. But as Latinos, Asians and Europeans already know, fish tastes better when it's cooked with the head still on it. That's because the head contains 60% of the fat.
Once you're back home with your fish, mix some apple butter (or, if you prefer, honey), soy sauce, lemon juice and minced garlic in a pan. As I said above in the colorful whiskey-tango patois of my people, I don't generally hold with exact portions, I just mix the stuff until it tastes interesting. Rub it into the fish, inside and out, and then soak some tortillas in it. Sprinkle the fish with sea salt, basil, cilantro and freshly ground pepper. Put some lemon slices in the fish's body cavity. Wrap the soggy tortillas around the fish, covering them completely in a mummy-like wrap. If the tilapia are of any size, you'll need several tortillas per fish.
Put either a banana leaf or a sheet of tin foil on the hot grill. If you opt to use a banana leaf, you can get these at many Asian and Latino markets. They're usually sold frozen, so be sure you've thawed it out in warm water. The banana leaf or tinfoil keeps the fish and its soggy tortilla cocoon from sticking to your grill. The advantage of the banana leaf is that it adds a nice smoky flavor as it cooks. If the fish weigh less than a pound each, grill for about 4-8 minutes per side. If they weigh more than pound each, grill for 8-10 minutes per side. When the fish is done, you can serve it in its crispy tortilla cocoon as though it were en papillote, or you can pry off the tortilla casing and cut off the heads for more your squeamish guests.
You want some vegetables, you say? Sweet white corn is particularly easy. Don't take it out of the husk. Put a cup of sugar in a large pan of water and bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Put in the ears of corn, but only after the water has cooled a bit, as you're not trying to cook it. Soak it for about twenty minutes, then put it on the hot grill. Turn it every few minutes until the outer husk starts to get a bit black and crispy. Peel off the husk and sprinkle the ear of corn with sea salt and black pepper. Add a little butter if you're feeling decadent.
Goddam, now I'm hungry.
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There maybe five hundred of them, maybe even more, fists pounding the air, shouting "O-bam-a" and "U-S-A" and "Yes we can!" I didn't mean to suddenly feel, not like I was watching history, but I was part of it. I thought I'd stand on the sidelines, like the cops who'd come roaring up sirens blaring, and who only recently had still been debating amongst themselves whether to disperse the crowd so cars could pass or block the street so that the cars couldn't attempt to drive through the throng.
I'd come down to Tate Street, a block and a half from where I live, because I thought a drink and the company of engaged and enthusiastic friends, acquaintances and quasi-strangers would keep me from getting too depressed. An hour earlier, I'd found out that doctors are most likely going to be cutting off my father's foot this weekend, or maybe even his whole leg, that the femoral graft he'd had some years ago had failed, as he and I had been warned it eventually would, and that gangrene had set in.
For a moment, I felt horrible about not feeling horrible, and then, for a while, I didn't even feel bad about that. A cute little blond whom I'd only previously known by face came charging across the street to kiss me. People I knew and people I didn't know were clapping me on the back. The cops had gone from looking apprehensive or even annoyed to smiling.
Years ago, I'd sat in the bar that I was now standing outside of and watched the Berlin Wall come down. At the time, I'd idly wondered what it must feel like to be live that, to not just watch it but to be part of it.
And now, for however briefly, I knew, or thought I knew, and the rush was so powerful it was almost scary.
I don't know what I'll feel tomorrow. Probably, after I've called my father's hospital room and talked to him, the dreadful things he's facing will be real to me, realer than the crowd, realer than the history. But not yet, and if I'm lucky, as selfish as I feel for saying this, maybe not until I wake up.
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Those wacky Germans gave Saint Nicholas a hairy demon famliar who beats bad children with sticks, stuffs them in barrels or sacks, and drops them in streams. And no, Der Krampus isn't just some half-forgotten Medieval tradition; he (or they, as in some cases there are roving mobs of them) takes an active in of Xmas festivities in modern Germany, where revelers lovingly make their own costumes, complete with real goat horns and real goat ears. That's so completely awesome.
I don't know who this woman is, but she's cute.
Krampus revelers:
Krampus parade in Graz
A Krampus attack on noplused American tourists in Austria:
Krampuses (Krampii?) outside Salzburg.
Some really impressive horns on these guys!
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The Greatest Gift:
A Tale for Christmas
by Ian Keith McDowell
Author of The Little Lame Angel,
The Tender Ducklings and other Yuletide favorites.
It was Christmas in the little village of Leaking Festers, and snow was falling from the sky like cold down, to spread across the fields in soft white blankets and pile up against doors and shutters like bags of heavy laundry. It was a day for the roaring hearth and the wassail cup and the smell of goose and pudding and more than anything, it was a day for children. At least, that's what little Simon and Emily's mum had said, before taking the broom to them and driving them outside.
"Go play in the snow, then!" she'd snapped softly, "and for Christ's sake, give me a moment's bloody peace!" Not that she was likely to get that, with the baby screaming and carrying on so, like a cat dropped in a bag of hot coals.
"Not so nice of Mum to toss us out like that," said Simon, picking a particularly fine booger from his frosty nose, inserting it into a snowball, and throwing it at Emily, who ducked instinctively. "And us without good boots, even!"
"Ah, she's just wanting some, what'cher call it? . . . privacy, that's it, so she can drink her gin. You know how Mum is about her gin."
At this point, they met Mrs. Sheepshanks, who lived down the lane. "Why children, you shouldn't be out in this cold without proper boots," said Mrs. Sheepshanks.
"We ain't got none, you stupid cow," said Emily in the forthright manner that made her the darling of the village. "Mum spent all her money on gin."
"Well then, my little dears," said Mrs. Sheepshanks, "you must come and warm yourselves before my fire. My husband's gone to buy a goose for our dinner, and I'll be glad for the company, as the Good Lord has not seen fit to bless us with darling children of our own."
And with that, she took them back to her house. On the way, Simon leaned close and whispered to Emily. "A goose indeed; everyone knows the Sheepshanks haven't any money." "Quiet, you git," responded Emily, elbowing him sharply. "She's bein' nice to us. Besides, they might have something worth stealing."
As it turned out, the Sheepshanks did not, but the children still spent a pleasant hour before the fire, while Mrs. Sheepshanks told them marvelous stories of all the things she and her husband had seen during the Indian Mutiny. Simon especially like the part about tying mutineers to the mouths of cannons, and it made him laugh no end, as he tried to imagine the expressions on the faces of the Sepoys just before
the stout British soldiers blew them in half. Mrs. Sheepshanks, for her part, was charmed by the children's manners. "It's a shame," she said, "that a drunken slut like your mother should have such fine lambs, while John and myself
have remained childless."
"Goose-less too," said big bluff John Sheepshanks as he came tramping in the door. "Prices have gone up, and what few pennies I've saved couldn't fetch a scrawny chicken. It's turnips for Christmas, I'm afraid."
"How unfortunate that we once were wealthy," said Mrs. Sheepshanks, "and could dine on goose and oysters and suckling pig. But the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Would you dear children like to take some turnips back to your mother?"
"No thank you, m'am," said Simon. "We have plenty of those."
Casting one furtive look around the small cottage, the children departed for home.
When they got there, they found their mother sprawled drunkenly in her chair, smelling of gin and snoring, while the baby wailed in his cradle. "Oh, be quiet, Algie," said Simon crossly.
"I think we should do something Christmas-like for the Sheepshanks," said Emily thoughtfully. "Give 'em a nice present."
"Like what?" asked Simon. "We've not got much."
"Well, how about Algie here? He ain't good for much, is he, except bawling and peeing in his diaper. And Mrs. Sheepshanks was all sad they don't have children."
"Wizard!" said Simon. "We can leave him on their doorstep with a note pinned to him, like he was from Father Christmas."
Emily got a pencil and laboriously wrote "Fer you, frum Father Christmaz" on a piece of paper, which she deftly pinned to Algernon. Unfortunately, she pinned it to his little chest rather than his diaper, and he began to bawl even more fiercely
than before.
"Crikey," said Emily as she handed her squalling bundle to Simon. "Can't you shut him up? They won't want him if he's all loud and nasty. We got any of that laudanum stuff?"
"No," said Simon, "but maybe I can stun him a bit." Saying
that, he took Algernon by the heels and swung his little noggin sharply against the stones of the hearth. Unfortunately, he swung a bit too hard.
"Now you've done it, clumsy," said Emily. "His head's all bashed in. What will they want with a dead baby?"
Simon, who was good at thinking quickly, looked about the cottage. "Well, let's see. Mum will be out for a while, and the stove is still hot. We have turnips and such for dressing, and a little of that cranberry sauce you nicked from the
Sexton's house. I bet we could dress him out like a goose and cook him, and the Sheepshanks would never know the difference. They're a bit thick, I think."
And that, dear reader, is exactly what they did. Mr. and Mrs. Sheepshanks opined that it was the best goose they'd ever eaten, although Mrs. Sheepshanks wondered what the children had done to it to make it taste so much like suckling pig.
Little Simon and Emily just smiled bashfully, and Mr. Sheepshanks was so moved, he immediately declared that such clever children should live with him and his wife forthwith, and not with their drunken slut of a mother. And that is what happened, and they lived very happily ever after, or at least until the next winter, when they all died of the Small Pox.
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It's interesting how the subconscious works. That ad was one of the last things I'd seen before shutting off this computer and tumbling bedwards, and I'd seen it just after looking at Tom's profile (I'd only recently tracked him down on Facebook, after writing about him in a previous blog). I have no idea why the woman in the ad has the old-school-porn-style black bar over her eyes, as the other women I've seen in ads for that site do not. I don't think I was particularly traumatized by the ad itself (and Cthulhu knows, I'm generally something other than traumatized by big-boobed brunettes), as when I saw it, the ad mainly reminded me of browsing magazines at Tyler's News and Camera in Fayetteville, NC, when I was a kid and my grandfather would take me there before buying me dinner on Friday nights.
No, no, I wasn't looking at porn when I did that back then, even though I've already mentioned such black bars as being a feature of really old-school (i.e., before even my time) pornography. But back in the 70s, there were a lot of magazines on the stands devoted to professional wrestling, and along with the usual stuff about the big-name "wrasslers" (as my grandfather called them) of the day, such as Johnny Weaver and (of course) Nature Boy Rick Flair, they usually had a photo-feature about "Apartment Wrestling." In these photos and articles, hot girls in underwear (or sometimes less) would "wrestle" in "private sessions" for the benefit of "wrestling afficianados." Even then, I could tell that the photos were staged and that no actual wrestling had taken place, but my twelve-year-old-self was excited by them anyway, even though I was confused by why the women in the photos always had black bars over their eyes (and over their nipples when they tore off each other's bras). So that's what the Facebook ad reminded me of, and it wasn't a particularly traumatic childhood memory (indeed, for a moment it made me smell my grandfather's tobacco smoke and anticipate a meal of broiled chicken at the Greek restaurant he always took me to after buying me comics and monster magazines and Conan novels at that newsstand).
But in my subsequent dream, the woman was SCARY and I was desperately trying to get away from her. In a weird way, I think this is because I'd seen Coraline (which I recommend highly, whether you see in 2D or 3D) earlier in the evening, and the floating black bar over the pursuing woman's eyes was in some way a distorted id-reflection of the black button eyes in the movie (and in Neil Gaiman's original novel, his best work until The Graveyard Book).
Which, when you think about, is a really weird, and weirdly random, chain of associations. But that's the subconscious for you. Or at least that's mine. That's why so few dream sequences in films and TV shows are psychologically convincing; they're just never arbitrary enough.
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So, with that caveat, forward, or rather, backward, to my degenerate adolescence. Seriously, folks, this may well be my most depraved story ever. I'm not actually sure that I want random strangers reading this, but I can't seem to help myself.
When I was fourteen years old, or maybe fifteen, I'm not sure which, I was greatly enamored of Lisa Hill (I’ve changed the name for obvious reasons), who sat in front of me in my algebra class. Lisa was a tall solidly-built redhead who scowled at the world through big hippie-chick glasses and who strode through the hallways with a loping Bigfoot stride. She was, in modern parlance, "thick." To put it another way, she looked like she'd been co-designed by R. Crumb and Russ Meyer.

Now, I must confess that, at that age, I wasn't the suave and sophisticated charmer I am now. To say I was socially maladroit, even by the norms of early adolescent geekdom, is a gross understatement. Truth to tell, I was utterly unsocialized and downright creepy. I didn't talk to very many people, and none of the few I did talk to were girls. As the character Jeff once remarked on the Britcom Coupling, it's very hard to talk to people when you're imagining them naked. Being a spotty little perv, that's what I was doing most of the time, my hormonal imagination fueled by fantasies about Pam Grier, Adrienne Barbeau and Frank Frazetta's cavegirls.

I never talked to Lisa. I never even smiled or made eye contact with her. But five days a week, I sat behind her, gazing straight into the inviting abyss of her butt prominent cleavage. It was hard not to. Although Lisa seemed nearly as introverted as me, she didn't dress in concealing nerdgirl clothes, but favored tight high-riding t-shirts and low-riding bell-bottoms that exposed her buttcrack when her ample freckled bottom was squeezed into the seat in front of me. Five days a week, I stared into that delicious strawberry abyss, and if the abyss didn't stare back, there were times when it seemed to be speaking to me.

"Iaaaaaan," it whispered, "Iaaaaaaaaaaaan! Here I am, just waiting for you. Go ahead and stick your finger in me. You know you want to."
Eventually, I obeyed.
I'll always remember the first time I touched her skin. It was not an insertion, just a glancing touch, the first knuckle on my right hand brushing against her right butt cheek. I expected her to protest, to at least shudder or gasp in muffled outrage, and God knows what I would have done if she'd whipped around given me that witheringly direct stare of hers (or, even more deservedly, a sound thrashing). But no, she just stolidly sat there. Not a sigh. Not a gasp. Not a quiver. I hand might have been as insubstantial as that of a ghost or The Vision in Marvel Comics’ The Avengers.
So, I did it again. Again, no reaction. From her, I mean. My own body reacted plenty, from heart-beat to hard-on.
I spent the last five minutes of Home Room with one knuckle pressed against the base of her spine, right above the deepening cleft of her butt, that quarter-inch of skin-to-skin contact a conduit for a heady rush of feelings I can't even begin to describe.
And then the bell rang, and I snatched my hand back, and she got up and walked past me without looking at me, head held high and massive chest thrust out, the same formidable loping stride as always. Nothing about her attitude suggested she was fleeing or even stalking out in an indignant mood, just going about her business. My eyes followed the stretched denim covering her bulging bifurcated backside out of the room, as I sat there waiting for my tumescence to subside.
I spent the next day's Home Room with my knuckle pressed against her butt the whole time. Once again, she didn't acknowledge the contact in any way. She shifted in her seat, as anyone does when sitting in one of those uncomfortable chairs, and sometimes her movement broke the contact, but at other times, it pressed her cleft back against my clenched digit.
After a week or so of this, I finally dared to extend my forefinger and actually insert it into the top of her exposed butt-cleavage. Not deeply, not a full oil check, and no, the experience never became proctological. Just to the first joint, which, considering that she was almost as voluptuous in the rear as she was in the front, wasn't all that far at all.
And so, day after day, and then week after week, I spent Home Room with my finger in her butt and neither one of us acknowledging it.
You'd think this would have been my cue to, you, TALK to her, to ask her on a date, to make eye contact and smile. But no, I couldn't bring myself to do that. Which, in retrospect, makes absolutely no sense. What kind of creepy perv finds it easier to stick a finger into a girl's butt than to talk to her?
Even then, I was more comfortable putting things in writing than saying them out loud. Clearly, I told myself, Lisa in some way welcomed my bizarro attentions, or at least didn't seem to mind them. Clearly, I needed to declare myself. Clearly, I needed to let her know that I wanted to know her. Yes, really. I wanted to know what she watched on TV, what movies she went to, what she read, what she did for fun. But I couldn't ask her these things out loud, even after I'd been putting my finger in her butt for almost a month.
Besides sitting behind her in Home Room, and occasionally passing her in the hall or seeing her from a distance in the cafeteria or library, there was another space that Lisa and I shared. We rode the same bus to and from school. Our stops were far apart, we never got on the bus at the same time, and she tended to sit in the back, with the only friends I ever saw her talk to (I can't even remember who they were or what they looked like), whereas I was always reading a Conan novel or a comic book up front. Even after a couple of weeks of physical contact in Home Room, this routine didn't change. Yes, I surely could have managed to "accidentally" end up sitting near her, or even beside her, but I never did. I never even tried. I didn't have the guts.
Instead, I decided to write her a note. For some deranged reason, I felt it should be an anonymous one. I'd write her, tell that I had an aching crush on her, ask her if she'd be willing to hang out with me after school. But I wouldn't sign it, and would instead give her instructions on how to reply if she was interested, how she should write me back and where she should leave her response. But that wasn't enough. I had to do something more than that.
So I decided to take a Polaroid photo of myself wearing nothing but a mask and wrap that the note around it and stick it through the vent in her locker. Clearly, this was a plan of genius, the masterwork of a master seducer. Don Juan and Casanova and the Fonz were looking down on me from Heaven in awe (well, not so much the Fonz, as he not only wasn't dead but had yet to jump that shark).
I know it makes no rational sense. What can I say? Fourteen-year-olds are fucked-up. I was more fucked-up than most. I truly am better now, I promise. Really. Please don’t be scared.
At the time I had a neighbor named Tom Savini. You may have heard of Tom. He's a veteran make-up and special effects technician who designed Jason for the original Friday the 13thand several sequels and did gore effects for dozens of slasher films in the 80s. He played the biker Sex Machine in From Dusk Till Dawn and a deputy in Planet Terror. To the readers of Fangoria and other such magazines, he is a god, or used to be.

At the time, though, he was an amateur actor who performed in plays with my father at the Fayetteville Little Theater and the Fort Bragg Playhouse, where he also did some very ambitious make-ups. His house was full of masks and costumes, some of which he'd built himself. I liked to borrow his gorilla suit and terrorize the younger kids in my neighborhood. At the time of my infatuation with Lisa, I had also borrowed his full over-the-head mask of the Frankenstein Monster, which he'd carefully constructed of molded latex and real human hair.

After some experimentation with lights and mirrors, I managed to take a Polaroid picture of myself wearing nothing but the Frankenstein mask. And Keds.

I took that picture, wrapped my long and passionate note around it, and slipped it into Lisa's locker. In the note, I told her that, if she was interested in meeting me, in finding out who her naked admirer was (because she'd NEVER guess it was the guy who'd been putting his finger in her butt in Home Room all these weeks!), she should call the phone number I included at the bottom of it between 4:30 and 6 p.m. in the week day afternoon (that is, after I'd gotten home but before my father had).
That day, I got on the bus, wishing I was already home, because I sure she was going to call. How could she not?
My reverie was interrupted by the fact that everyone was staring at me. Some were smiling. Some were laughing out loud. And they were passing something from hand to hand. Something that looked like a Polaroid photograph.
It was, of course, the picture of me in the Frankenstein mask.
Lisa sat with her cronies in the back. Hers was the only face that was expressionless. For what may have been the first time ever, our eyes actually met, but her expression didn't change a whit. She didn't smile. She didn't sneer. She didn't frown. She didn't wink. She looked at me exactly the same way she looked at everyone else, and seemed oblivious to the hilarity around her, even though she must have initiated it by sharing the photograph. And the note, which someone, I forget who, began to read aloud.
I backed off the bus, squeezing past scary Tyrone Gibbons, who told me to watch where the fuck I was going and to keep my fucking clothes on the next time I decided to take a picture of myself. In the back of the bus, someone continued to read my note aloud, mispronouncing several key words. My feet on the sidewalk, I continued to back up, and then I turned, and was walking, then running, away.
That was early Autumn. For the rest of that year, I walked the four miles to and from school. Even during the winter, which proved to be one of the coldest in Fayetteville's history.

Addendum: Since writing an earlier draft of the above, I think I may have found Lisa on MySpace, or at least a redheaded Lisa who went to the same school at about the same time I did. She appears to be gay and a professor of Women’s Studies at a major university in another state. I considered sending her a friend request, but thought better of it.
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1 rabbit (2.8 lbs)
6 large quail
8 whole fresh drumsticks
8 split seasoned drumsticks
1 Dozen quail eggs
5 lb bag of Idaho potatoes
2 lbs turnip greens
8 tangerines
4 12-ounce Mexican Cokes (made with sugar cane, not corn syrup)
1 pint of green tea icecream
Total cost: $44.99.
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Yesterday, we re-posted an article dealing with how society might respond to "offensive" or "inappropriate" comments made by those in the public eye. We suggested that the same principles might be applicable to Rep. Joe Wilson, tennis stars Serena Williams and Roger Federer, and entertainer Kayne West.
Some of these individuals have since made apologies, or have attempted to do so. Back in February of this year, we generated another post, "The High Price of Stubbing Your Toe," which focused on apologies by public figures, and whether society's response to "apologies" truly motivated others to apologize.
It occurred to us that there is a difference between "embarrassing conduct," and "offensive" or "inappropriate" comments. We are therefore re-posting our earlier piece on apologies, and we have changed its title to "The High Price of Putting One's Foot in One's Mouth."
© 2009, the Institute for Applied Common Sense
Owning up to one’s mistakes seems to be one of mortal man’s most difficult acts.
In January 1998, for example, Bill Clinton famously said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky,” though months later, after surviving the ordeal of impeachment, he admitted that his relationship with the young woman had been “wrong” and “not appropriate.”
A cloud of presidential hanky-panky has hung over him ever since, likely diminishing his legacy, though it’s possible that his efforts around the world will offer some degree of redemption.
Lately, a new parade of politicians, celebrities, business people and athletes has come forward to face the white-hot glare of public scrutiny.
The former governor of Illinois, for example, a man seemingly caught red-handed in blatantly illegal activities, stonewalled and attempted to make the case for his innocence on America’s talk shows, at the same time the impeachment machine moved forward unimpeded.
Earlier this month, we saw Michael Phelps admit, without hesitation, that he made a mistake. Despite this, lucrative sponsorship deals that resulted from his eight Olympic gold medals were immediately withdrawn, and law enforcement conducted an investigation to determine whether criminal charges should be filed.
Not long ago, another athlete, Alex Rodriguez, arguably the best baseball player of all time, admitted to using performance-enhancement drugs, sullying his past accomplishments and calling into question whether any records he may break in the future will be legitimate achievements.
In Washington, a respected former Senator, Tom Daschle, up for a key cabinet post in the new administration, ran into a buzz saw when it was revealed that he hadn’t paid taxes on benefits he had received in the position he had held prior to his nomination.
Daschle’s mea culpa was “too little, too late,” according to his critics, though the same comments were not levied against Timothy Geithner, now Secretary of the Treasury and head of the IRS, when his nomination was questioned over his back taxes owed.
Later, Geithner, in a pro-active sleight of hand, said that mistakes would be made in the Administration’s effort to stimulate the economy.
Watching all these large and small melodramas unfold – believe us, Michael Phelps’ mistake was a small one in the big picture – it occurred to us that immediate benefits ought to accrue to those who admit fault and accept responsibility.
We admire our new president’s forthright response to the Daschle incident.
“I screwed up,” he said.
And take note. He said, “I,” not “we” or “my people in charge of vetting cabinet nominees.” Like the small placard that sat on Harry Truman’s desk, the one that read “The buck stops here,” he took ownership of the problem.
Unfortunately, public reaction to admissions of culpability suggests that we, as a society, may be at risk of making it more and more difficult for people, as the expression goes, to fess up.
We have become a society that, in many ways, salivates for red meat from the mouths of talk show pundits and late night comedians.
As children, our parents and teachers encouraged us to tell the truth, even if it meant punishment.
As we matured, we appreciated that doing the right thing, while not always rewarded at the time, would ultimately prove to be in our long-term interests.
Somehow, society must create an environment in which citizens, particularly our elected officials, are permitted, even encouraged, to stand up and admit mistakes, with society viewing such admissions, not as signs of weakness but instead, as individual strength.
At some point, we have to change the culture of denial. Revisiting the potential legal liability associated with acknowledging mistakes might be a start.
We applaud the Obama administration for initiating the climate change, however underappreciated the effort may seem.
While the costs to our pride and social standing in the short term may appear to be high, the failure to pay that price up front may have a far greater cost over the long haul.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just plain Common Sense.
© 2009, the Institute for Applied Common Sense
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Last year, a giant of modern American political thought, William F. Buckley, Jr., passed away. Earlier this month, we lost another giant, Irving Kristol. Although their views of the Universe did not always mesh with ours, we respected their thought processes, and the fact they did not rigidly adhere to the positions of any particular party.
They had the ability to analyze each issue objectively and present their positions with clarity. Perhaps more importantly, they did not find the need to yell or scream, thus prompting more people to listen to their views. We were big fans.
David Brooks of the New York Times has written a column about the life of Mr. Kristol, and his thoughts are provided below. To give you some sense of Mr. Kristol, the following is a quote attributed to him:
"There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."
David Brooks: Three Cheers for Irving Kristol
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
By David Brooks
“Irving Kristol was born into a fanatical century and thrust himself into every ideologically charged battle of his age. In the 1930s, as a young socialist, he fought the Stalinists. In the 1940s, as a soldier, he fought fascism. In the decades beyond, as a writer and intellectual, he engaged with McCarthyism, the cold war, the Great Society, the Woodstock generation, the culture wars of the 1970s, the Reagan revolution and so on.
“The century was filled with hysterias, all of which he refused to join. There were fanaticisms, none of which he had any part in. Kristol, who died on Friday, seemed to enter life with an intellectual demeanor that he once characterized as ‘detached attachment.’”
To view the remainder of the article, click here.
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© 2009, the Institute for Applied Common Sense
In what areas is the United States still No. 1? Was it ever? Or was this exalted status something we told ourselves to boost our sense of pride and accomplishment?
In a previous post about the mark made by political thought giant Irving Kristol, columnist David Brooks wrote something which struck us:
“He [Kristol] was unabashedly neoconservative. But he also stood apart, and directed his skeptical gaze even on his own positions, and even on the things to which he was most loyal… ‘There are no benefits without costs in human affairs,’ he once wrote. And so there is no idea so true and no movement so pure that it doesn’t require scrutiny. There was no position in this fallen world without flaws.”
A question might be raised as to whether it would be a good thing for us, as a Nation, to acknowledge that others have surpassed us in certain areas, or are nipping at our heels. There’s lots of rhetoric these days about our “great nation” and how this is the most powerful nation in the history of humankind.
But resting on one’s laurels has its problems, as does continuing to do things the same way, simply because they worked in the past, or through rigid adherence to a particular philosophy.
The Father of one of our friends claims that golfer Tiger Woods can cruise now in his career, “since he has already made his money.” But whether it is Tiger Woods, or legendary basketball star Larry Bird, the existence of talent without continuing effort, and a desire to excel, yields few championship trophies.
In order for the Road Runner to have existed all of these years, he had to outrun Wile E. Coyote everyday, and come up with new ways to “out-coyote” him.
His survival is dependent upon his speed and agility.
Yesterday, the 2009 National Book Festival, founded by former First Lady Laura Bush in 2001, commenced in Washington, D.C. That such a festival was only started recently might come as a surprise to many, but may reflect something about us.
Many of us consider a good education and the ability to read as givens. Yet, the percentage of functionally illiterate citizens in America would probably shock most.
At least those of us who can read.
A friend of ours spent some time teaching courses at a community college. He often tells the story of a student who, while taking a math test, summoned him. He told her that he could not assist her.
She noted that the issue was not a math issue, but a word issue. When he looked at the problem, she pointed to the word “suspension,” and said she did not know its meaning. Without knowing its meaning, it was impossible for her to perform the calculation necessary.
In response to this revelation, our friend decided that even in his math classes, his students would learn 10 new words each day. After announcing his new policy to his night class and the reasons for the change, a student approached him after class, and said that he was one of the people about whom the instructor had spoken.
When our friend inquired as to what the student meant, the student related an amazing story. He said that although he was not very proud of it, he got kicked out of high school one month before graduation, and did not learn to read prior to that time.
Imagine an educational system where a student can be promoted for 12 years, and still not manage to read. And consider the fact that no one single factor, teacher, school, or system can be singled out for this travesty.
One of our other friends has been in collegiate and professional athletics for years. He has always contended that he’d rather have a bunch of C grade players who hustled and gave their best, than a team of A grade players who didn’t.
After listening to the introductory speakers during the opening ceremonies for National Book Festival, it occurred to us that we have a long way to go in getting the most out of our human resources, and that acknowledging that many of our current systems are perhaps not the best in the world, might be a good starting point.
For some reason, this line of thinking made us re-visit one of the longest running marketing slogans around, that for Avis Rent a Car, the number two agency behind number one Hertz. “We try harder.”
We did not know who started this campaign, but we had a suspicion, and looked it up. And yes, it turned out to be another Bill Bernbach masterpiece.
Its beauty is in its simplicity.
It’s neither un-American, nor un-patriotic to question our standing in the world, and investigate whether what we’ve been doing is really in the long-term, national, collective interest.
Societal responsibility is not dramatically different from personal responsibility. A nation can’t complain about its standing in the world, if it hasn’t done all that it can do to excel, and use its human resources to the fullest extent possible. That includes equipping all of its citizens with competitive tools, and ensuring that they are ready for the fight.
And that’s just plain Common Sense.
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Many thought that when President Obama was elected he would become the "Great Unifier." Instead, we have witnessed the full panoply of factions which are dissatisfied with some aspect of his governance and policies thus far. Furthermore, they are not afraid to express their dissatisfaction in very personal, and colorful forms.
Thomas Friedman has some concerns about what is taking place in our country, and expresses them in the following piece. He eloquently articulates something which we have felt for the past few months, but have had difficulty putting into words.
September 30, 2009
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Chris Morris sittin' a spell between her bookended scenes.
Assistant Stage Managers Mary Beth, Sam, & Molly wave as Jason Scott Quinn waves his baguette.


































