Red Cup mania

Rembrandt tulips
 

Back when I ran bookstores for a living, there was a very successful paperback reprint of Charles Mackay's 1841 opus, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". One of the chapters examined the tulip mania of the 1640's. Basically, a plant virus struck the Netherlands and caused breaks in the colors of tulips. The desire to possess the affected bulbs built into a frenzy. Fortunes were quickly amassed, and spent, investing in their acquisition. Prices for just one bulb reached to such heights that a well off merchant's lifetime earnings could not afford the purchase of one single bulb. Although the term would not come into use for a number of years, the "economic bubble" burst, destroying both fortunes and lives. The descendants of these tulips still exist: they are usually sold under the name "Rembrandt".



Just one portion of the Solar Hill gardens last June. The entire space,
including my garden, would comprise about eight squares of this size,
including all of the area around the tree center left.

When I last posted, I had just finished planting the tulips. I'm in the process of shutting the gardens down for the winter.  It is a large task (I've also been tending Solar Hill's gardens.) As plants go into their dormancy,  it's a good time for many of them to be transplanted. Several peonies, asters, a daylily, etc. were either being overgrown by their neighbors, or were getting less sunlight due to tree growth, etc. For good garden culture, plants should be cut back, leaves cut off and disposed of to prevent overwintering of diseases, and so on and so forth. I've accomplished most of it, but am still in the final stages of getting it all done.

Generally, I've been in the garden four to five days a week recently. Today was going to be a long garden day, as there weren't a lot of other things which couldn't be put off - I want to finish putting the garden to bed this week. Now, last night there was a meeting of our all volunteer community radio station's Board. This was our first meeting after our annual bash, so yearly Board elections had to be held. I've been returned to the position of Board President/Station Manager. This morning, about 7am or so, I sat down to fire off a few emails based on discussions from last night. Then the phone rang with a DJ's questions. The man calling is learning disabled, and calls several times a week, often asking the same question he asked the day before. He hasn't finished his training, but wants to fill in time slots which other DJs have posted that they won't be able to make. He has a case of radio fever, which often affects new DJs. I've repeatedly told him he has to finish his training, and must have the person who helps him present when he does a show. But he still calls and tries to get me to say something different. There is a DJ doing her last show today, so there needed to be posts to the station's email list, the station's Facebook page, etc. The upshot is that I finally stopped working on station business at 3pm. (By the way, an 8 year old, who has been doing a show with her mother since she was old enough to talk, just did her first 'by herself' show at 2pm. She put many of our adult DJs to shame. There were almost no children's songs that would have been heard on the show she does with her mother. Nope, this kid is into Spearhead, and jam bands.)
The station is another sort of garden.

I did spend about a half an hour of personal time on Facebook, checking responses to posts for my radio show, what a few of my friends and family were up to, etc. There were several Facebook sessions, sending messages to people about station business and etc. It was therefore impossible to escape the issue/outrage of the moment: the Red Cup. It would seem that all of Facebookland is obsessed with the red cup. Folks are posting impassioned diatribes about the issue. Memes, images with a slogan which are easy to repost allowing the poster to avoid having to think through what one might say, are spreading like soft butter on a hot skillet. There is a veritable red cup mania.

What happened is this: some church (or church official) that no one ever heard of called for a boycott of the Starbucks coffee chain. The problem started when Starbucks began using their holiday themed coffee cup. It is red, with a Starbucks logo in green and white. The church was offended, nay, outraged, that there was no "Merry Christmas!" scrawled across the cup. No "Season's Greetings" (which would have caused more of a "War on Christmas" fervor). No pictures of Santa Claus, the Christ child in the manger, nothing. Why, it is another example of the persecution of Christians! This little bit of idiocy has become a target for everyone who wants to outdo their friends by posting an ever more incisive meme (which I still unintentionally read as 'me me') in a frenzy of self righteousness equaled only by the original call for the boycott.

Warning: this being the year 2015, and social media being what it is, one of the examples of the red cup memes contains expressions of common vulgarity.

" ...whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
                                                                       - Charles Mackay, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"

Of course, my own cynicism leads me to wonder if the church and its representative actually exist. The large coffee corporation could have hired someone to start all of this just to get themselves a lot of free publicity.
                                                        
Another object of mass intoxication is the once wonderful holiday of Halloween, which has been built into a merchandising bonanza. The madness now begins in August when "pumpkin spice" English muffins hit the shelves of the supermarkets. Of course, there are no pumpkin spice muffins to be had anywhere near Halloween itself. This past September, in a Halloween products commercial I saw on television, the Halloween goods were displayed in front of a group of fir trees, which were decorated with colored lights. Holiday creep is upon us. At any rate, I never got my radio show of October 31st, Halloween,  posted - so here's that show, mostly big band Halloween songs. I know it seems odd to be posting it over a week late, but I'd like all my shows to be here for friends and family from away who might have some crazy interest in just what I've been up to these last few years.



Well, I thought I might go on about nothing in particular (there a whole 'nother mess o' memes being posted about a Republican Presidential candidate who has been playing fast and loose with the truth, and expressing somewhat surprising opinions such as his belief that the pyramids were built by the Jewish patriarch Joseph to store grain. He is the current Republican frontrunner in the reality show contest for the Presidency of the United States. Instead of continuing in this vein (by the way, I swear I'm not making this stuff up), I think I'll go sample the pumpkin bread I baked while composing this missive.

Herewith, my radio show from this past Saturday, November the 7th, in which we listen to excerpts from the radio, as well as a few of the songs on the jukebox, around early November, 1944. The featured broadcast at the end of the show is one of the Eddie Condon Jazz Concerts, with guest stars Lee Wiley and Red McKenzie.



As always, I hope any listeners enjoy the show(s).

Blocked!

The Recycled Radio show for October 25th is, at this writing, blocked from playing. The service I am using to stream the program sent the following message at 12:53 am this morning:

"Our automatic content protection system has detected that your sound "Recycled Radio 10 - 25 - 14" may contain the following copyright content: "Part 1" by Orson Wells, owned by Orange Leisure. As a result, its publication on your profile has been blocked."

At issue is the very beginning of the program which uses a clip of a few minutes duration of the 'War of the Worlds' broadcast of October 30, 1938. That broadcast, produced by the 'Mercury Theatre on the Air' and aired by CBS, has long been considered to be in the public domain. Copies of  it may be freely downloaded or streamed from many websites such as archive.org; a webpage page dedicated to the Mercury Theatre; and etc. You Tube has it available from several different accounts. After getting the notice, I did a search and found that Orange Leisure sells a CD of the broadcast for $7.99. The disc offers the broadcast, plus a new additional track which I assume is the basis for their copyright claim.

Sadly, I have no paper work to back up my assertion that the Mercury Theatre broadcast is in the public domain, and I do not have the financial resources to be able to argue the matter if Orange Leisure continues to use their claim to prevent others from accessing the material. Of course, there are many publicly available sources to stream or download the entire' War of the Worlds' broadcast for free.

It's too bad.
It was a good show.
In the meantime, you can download my October 25th show from Google Drive at the following link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Ef_lS2knGHYTJCV2NKSUNZS1E/view?usp=sharing
If you have a google account, you should be able to stream it as well - on the menu bar at the top will be "Open", with a downward pointer. Click on the pointer, select "Music Player for Google Drive".
     
           
ADDENDUM - I forgot to mention one thing - in the notice from Soundcloud, as well as in the advertisement I saw for the Orange Leisure disc, they misspelled Orson Welles' name.

   
          

My First

While I haven't given the matter a lot of thought, it has always seemed to me that as far as songs, movies, tv shows, and etc. go, people generally prefer the version they first encountered. This preference goes beyond nostalgia for the music and tv shows that were current during the years in which they came of age. It is as though their "first" became neurally imprinted as the version by which others are measured. For me, this is especially true of Vampires, Frankensteins, and Wolfmen.

When I was just a lad, television was still new. My formative years were spent in an unathletic and rather private family. I was neither encouraged or allowed to go outside to play. Any such activity could only occur after all school work and chores had been completed, and by that time, it was dark outside. I was not allowed out when it was dark. I spent a lot of time watching tv. Back then, to fill programming needs, it was common for tv stations to show old movies. Although I certainly wasn't aware of it at the time, those movies usually came from RKO, Universal, or Warner Brothers.

Aside from RKO's King Kong, and Warner Bros. Adventures of Robin Hood, my favorite movies were Universal's horror series. My initial encounter with their Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein provided something of an apotheosis, as it contained the holy trinity of Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman. A 3 minute long condensation of it was the first 8mm movie I ever purchased. And Dracula was played by THE Dracula, Bela Lugosi. (Although Lugosi played many a vampire, this was the only other time he played the role in a movie. It was also his last big movie; the rest of his career being spent in grade Z cheapies.)

I got to thinking about all of this a week or so ago after the pay-extra-for-it cable channel Turner Classic Movies broadcast a beautifully restored print of the 1958 Hammer version of the story starring Christopher Lee as the Count. Although it was titled "Dracula" in England, here in the U.S. it was retitled "The Horror of Dracula". As much fun as that version is, Lee just isn't my Dracula. The Dracula story has many film adaptions, and any number of similar stories. But my first Dracula is, for me, still the best. And that is the 1931 Universal version I memorized from televison.

The 1931 version was more or less directed by silent film director Todd Browning, who would also direct the strange and fascinating Freaks. The production was plagued by problems from its inception as a silent film in the vein of the same studio's Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, with Lon Chaney slated to star. Sound and the Depression arrived in Hollywood around the same time. Universal had already purchased rights to the Bram Stoker novel, but now needed a revised speaking script. They purchased a melodramatic stage version which had been a success in 1924 to be the basis of their new script. Depression budget constraints ruled out many of the studio's plans for the project. Lon Chaney, a good friend of Browning's, died from cancer. During the shoot, the usually meticulous Browning was often absent, leaving cinematographer Karl Freund to direct parts of the picture.

Young Bela Lugosi

Initially, neither the studio nor the director wanted Lugosi for the role of the Count. Lugosi was a Hungarian actor who had distinguished himself as an officer in the ski patrol on the Russian Front during WWI. Due to his work for an actor's union, he was forced to flee his homeland during the Hungarian Revolution. He eventually made his way to the US, and won the role of Dracula in that 1924 New York stage production. By the way, it was for that production that Dracula acquired his black cape. Along with a high collar, it enabled the Count to seem to "vanish" into the darkness onstage.

Lugosi's rhythms of speech in the role derived from the natural patterns of speech in his homeland. It is often said that this was due to his limited knowledge of English. At the time he won the stage role, he did learn part of it phonetically, but by the time the movie was made he was quite familiar with the English language.

So what is it about this particular version of Dracula? It's wonderfully atmospheric. There is almost no background music (early sound problems and budget constraints). The title cards are backed by a few bars from Swan Lake, which in this context has a sinister quality. A carriage careens along a mountain path and arrives at a village inn. Frightened women peer out of windows. When the coach's passenger insists on continuing on to the Borgo Pass, an old woman produces a cross for him to wear, "For your mother's sake".

 

 

Before long, we are introduced to the Count himself, slowly descending a castle's stone staircase with menacingly savory and quotable lines that continue for several scenes:

"I am Dracula. I bid you welcome."

(responding to wolves howling in the distance)
"Listen to them, children of the night. What music they make!"

"The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield."

"I never drink. Wine. "

Mist seems as ever present as dust and cobwebs. There is no explanation for the appearance of Dracula's wives - they just appear, floating, gliding, through a nightmare.

Lugosi's Dracula was not an ugly deformed monster, but a handsome nobleman. He approached his victims with a longing sensuality - and with repulsion for his own deeds. Maybe that's a bit of projection onto the character, but it fits and it works. He's a monster, but he's our monster - somehow, we slightly identify with him. I think that is partly due to Todd Browning, who spent many years working sideshows in circuses and carnivals. He knew a thing or two about outsiders.

After the action moves to London, things go downhill a bit and descend into Victorian melodrama. Nothing explicit is ever shown on screen, but there are still more than enough creepy moments to satisfy. There's Dwight Frye, who changes from an assured clerk insisting on going on to the Borgo Pass to a madman craving insects and rats for food.

 

There's Carfax Abbey. There's an incident with a mirror. And there is Dracula, stiff yet leonine. Angry, yet composed. Knowing, perhaps too knowing; "There are far worse things in life than death."

 

Lugosi's menace was so pronounced and memorable that years later Disney artists used his Dracula movements as a guide for drawing the demon Chernabog in the penultimate section of Fantasia.

 

 

Over the years there have been many Draculas. A personal favorite is Francis Ford Coppola's German Expressionist version, with Gary Oldman as a romantic hero of a Count. It works. I like it a lot. I like many of the screen vampires. I like vampire humor. In Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, our young hero (Polanksi) confronts a shetl's vampire innkeeper by brandishing a crucifix. The inkeep responds, "Oy, have you got the wrong vampie-ar!" Interview With a Vampire was a good read, and a good movie - but Brad Pitt would have been the better Lestat and Tom Cruise would have been better as Louis. In recent years we've had vampires that sparkle. And at the end of the month, a new tv series begins with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Dracula. That's all very well and good. Everybody has their Dracula. Mine, however, is the one and only. He was my first.

This is Halloween

One of those bothersome poets noted that the best laid schemes "Gang aft agley".  I'd had many plans for a series of Halloween posts. In previous years I posted stills from my collection of Halloween Hollywood starlets, Victorian Halloween postcards, and I don't remember what else. I haven't had the time to look. This year time and events have played out in such a manner that my plans went agley.

I do love this season for any number of reasons. When I was - hmmm, I'm not sure how old I was, maybe six or seven, I went into hospital to have my tonsils out on Halloween Day. I dare say that had something to do with the crushed and maimed adult I became. My father designed his own house, into which we moved in August of 1959. It had a huge open basement. I can remember having at least one (but I think it was two) Halloween parties, complete with bobbing for apples in those big old tin basins that I haven't seen since those days. No one in my family asked me about my costume, and I was left to cobble together an outfit out of an old robe, a pillow case belly, and my great grandfather's cane. There is  a bit of 8mm home movie of that one, but I haven't had the time to find it - it will have to wait for another year, I suppose.

It had been my intention to have a post I would have called "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" which was going to focus on my love of the old fashioned Hollywood "horror" movies. Horror movies today are horrible, but in another way. I've greatly enjoyed things like "The Bride of Chucky" and a number of the other slasher/gore fests - which can be quite inventive and quite funny, depending. I do not care for the trend of the last decade or so of more or less realistic torture horror movies. No, real horror movies to me are those wonderful old creaky atmospheric gems like 'Frankenstein" et al. There is too much real horror in our world as it is.

My favorite is, and always has been, the 1931 Universal version of "Dracula" directed by Todd Browning. (Unless you give credence to the stories that Browning often didn't show up and that most of the direction was actually handled by his cameraman, the great Karl Freund. Freund photographed The silent era German classics The Golem, The Last Laugh, and Metropolis. He also directed the Boris Karloff version of The Mummy, the wonderful Mad Love, and - I Love Lucy!) So, I'd meant to write about the 1931 Dracula, and an encounter with a soap opera actor roommate of a friend of mine, who insisted that Dracula was a socialist expose of the ruling class living off the blood of the workers. From there I would have segued into the current political election here in the states.

I was trying to salvage the idea and actually working on a few frame grabs from Dracula when I got the email about Larry. (The friend who notified me didn't have my current phone number, which was just as well. I think it was easier reading the news). Back in the early days of radio free brattleboro, the two of us tried to plan elaborate radio Halloweens - unlicensed and pirate radio in those days considered it a special national holiday. I wish I had more time to work out this post, but I must get ready and leave for work.

Happy Halloween, everybody.

Residual Effects

Have you ever worked retail? Have you ever wanted to kill a customer, or at least beat them around the head with your cane? Last night (Halloween) this fellow, all too obviously not from around here, came in with his family. Two freaked out sullen kids, a wife that kind of reminded me of a demure Cousin It. The younger child, a girl of about 6, was wearing a mask. They group headed straight to the Halloween candy display, grabbed several bags and approached the counter to purchase them. As I was ringing up the sale, the father beamed as he gave the little girl the bags of candy and proclaimed "This was the quickest Trick or Treating we've ever done".

Yesterday there was a new poll which caught my attention. It asked what president you would like to see in office to deal with our country's current financial and job problems. The overwhelming choice (36%) was Ronald Reagan. FDR placed second at 29%. Thomas Jefferson placed third at 14%. Reagan was chosen by a crowd that was 68% Republican, 16% Democrat and 34% independent. FDR, meanwhile got 16% of the Republicans, 43% of the Democrats and 26% of the independents. Okay, I am frightened and horrified now.

Also in the news was an announcement that MF Global had filed for bankruptcy protections. The brokerage firm was in the process of being sold when a $700 million discrepancy in the books was discovered. CEO Jon Corzine had no comment. It was confirmed this morning that the brokerage had used customer money as their own. The best guess at the moment is that the missing funds were used in an attempt to save the company - which purchased massive amounts of European debt, betting that it would recover. It hasn't. If this sounds kind of familiar, it's because Mr. Corazine was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. He was ousted from that role in 1999. He had been the primary force behind taking Goldman public. His earnings from the IPO were estimated at $400 million dollars . You remember Goldman Sachs, don't you? That's the firm that made $4 Billion from betting on the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. It was one of the bank-brokerages at the heart of the 2008 banking collapse.

Frightened yet? Mr. Corazine, between Wall Street employments, was a Senator and them Governor of New Jersey. Wanna notch that up a bit? Other former top Goldman Sachs people include  include Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson both of whom served as United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.Then there's  Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of Canada since 2008, and Mario Draghi, governor of the European Central Bank.

I can just hear these guys; "This was the best Trick or Treats ever!".

Happy Halloween - now with Heat!

I got out of work early yesterday (Sunday). Not long after I got home, the electricity went out for about 45 mins. When the power came back on, the heating unit worked for awhile, and got my room up to 65 degrees before conking out again. It gave me a clue towards a temporary solution, so I had some heat last night (the coldest night yet this season). The people who installed the unit came by this morning and are fairly certain they know what's wrong. The question now seems to be whether or not there is a part in stock or if it has to be ordered. With any luck, I'll have heat and hot water again today or tomorrow. In the meantime, Happy Halloween!

Here's a little something to frighten the town:

 And then, for the rest of us:

Trick or Treat for UNICEF?

Back when I was about 4 and 5 years old, when we kids went out on Halloween, many of us also held up a donation box while asking, "Trick or treat for UNICEF"? The idea originated with the wife of a Presbyterian minister from nearby Philadelphia.  Mary Emma Allison had seen a UNICEF booth collecting funds to send powdered milk to children in need around the world. WWII had been over for 5 years when she started with her own children and little Presbyterian Sunday School kids from her hubby's congregation. At the time , children were starving in Europe. They remained so until I was at least 8 years old. But by that time, I'd long stopped raising coin for my fellow less fortunate children. After all, it turned out that UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) was a Communist front. Oh, the shame of my earlier wicked ways.

It was a year or two after the UNICEF fiasco that I was warned by Aunt Lorraine to go through my trick or treat haul carefully. There had been a story on the news that someone had put razor blades into an apple. You just couldn't trust people anymore. What was this world coming to?

One year, after Dad had the house on Lakeview Drive built, it was my turn to host the Halloween Party. I have a little bit of it on 8mm film. I really must try to get that stuff digitized... In the home movie, you can see us marching around (musical chairs, maybe?), bobbing for apples, drinking cider,. Oh, my God, cider. I just loved apple cider. One of the villages north of Swedesboro (which was the "big" town where the farmers market - a commercial enterprise - was located). Swedesboro had had the post war population boom and finally made it to 2,000 people - which officially put us on the map as a 'town'. Anyway, just north of Swedesboro on Kings Highway (the King of Sweden actually had marched down Main Street - but that's another story) was Mickleton. In the center of the village was a blinking yellow light at the only intersection around. If you turned right and drove about 100 feet, you'd be right at Mrs. McCaffrey's cider mill. Attached to the main house was a side barn area. Inside was a giant round wooden cider press. You could smell fermenting apples as you marched up to a spigot, held your glass gallon bottle to the tap, and let it go. Ahhh, the pleasure of it all. By local standards of the time, it was practically a hedonistic experience. And this was real cider. Take it home, put in a cool place, and if you don't get to it within a couple of days, "mother" would start rising. It was becoming hard cider, on its way to vinegar. You don't see gallon glass jugs much anymore. But on the rare occasion I do, I'm right back at McCaffrey's usually on the days I got to see them turn the mill press, powered by a configuration of rope attached to a small horse, walking in circles around the vat.  It's all gone now. I think the apple orchard was plowed over for housing. I heard that the mill itself was sold and has been rebuilt elsewhere. Ah, well.