In the interest of full disclosure (something I am not REALLY interested in) I thought I'd tell you about a little odd habit I have developed. Just a funny thing I do sometimes, which brings me a certain joy.
It is in the morning, when I make my oatmeal on the stove, or, alternately, re-heat some saved oatmeal in the microwave. I'm making my oatmeal, in any case. This is my standard breakfast.
I like to put some cut apple bits and some nuts in the oatmeal. I have been using Fuji apples, but just yesterday, since Whole Foods was out of Fujis, I picked up 6 or 7 Jonagolds instead. (This is not the odd thing I do. We'll get to that.)
Jonagolds are good.
And the nuts? Oh, pecans, definitely. Just a handful of pecans, mixed up with the nuts in the thickening oatmeal.
Then, even though I might have been cooking it on the stove, the last step is to heat it up good in the microwave. I've found that 1:30 or 1:45 will do it.
So, we're getting closer and closer to my charmingly odd habit. Something I do.
But we're not there yet.
As the thick breakfast concoction is re-heating in the 'wave, I'll put away the bag of pecans (into the cabinet) and the extra oatmeal in the plastic Tupperwaresque container, and the partially-wedge-sliced apple (in the refrigerator.) I'll make sure my morning reading is on the table, ready for me. I do what takes about a minute and a half or so.
Then! The oatmeal comes steaming out of the microwave! Steaming! Giving off steam!!
(Steaming is the key here to this wonderful experience of the morning.)
A bowl of hot oatmeal SHOULD be steaming (or misting or vaporing, or whatever it is really, scientifically doing. I know it isn't 'steam,' really. Doesn't matter.) don't you think?
I do.
I love a steaming bowl of oatmeal, and I love the steamingness of it.
So, I have searched for ways to make that bowl really steam. And I knew that it steaming had something to do with it being extra hot. But not just extra hot. It had to be extra hot and in cold air, too.
So what did I do? I put it in the presence of cold air, naturally!
I experimented with holding it just below the window sill on these still-cold still-winter mornings. Because I know a certain amount of that cold air is making it in around the window frame, and we know, of course, that cold air falls, so, yes, sometimes I would hold the bowl just under the window sill.
That worked ok.
But I was not satisfied with the aesthetic effect. I mean, like, the oatmeal bowls on the COMMERCIALS are putting off a shitload of steam! And this bowl held under the window sill on a cold morning?
Well, not so much. No. Not a shitload. Some, but not like a commercial or anything.
OK, so then I tried opening the freezer door (up above the refrigerator) and holding the just-heated bowl under the lip of the freezer. Cold air (it FALLS) should be cascading out of the ice-encrusted freezer compartment.
And it was! And the oatmeal steamed in quite a wonderful manner. Especially if I spooned it a bit. Then great gouts of steam were given forth!
Nice.
But I still was not satisfied, my readers. No. There was something too industrial and unnatural and artificial about holding the oatmeal under the open freezer door.
It just wouldn't do.
Then a vision bloomed in my morning brain. A vision straight out of an oatmeal commercial, or maybe from an illustration in a children's book! And what did I see?
A bowl of oatmeal I saw. And where was this bowl?
On a window sill. With the window open. And the bowl was steaming its head off!!
So I resolved to try it. And try it I did.
One of these past mornings, maybe last Monday morning, or maybe last week sometime, after taking the now-hot oatmeal out of the microwave, I went over to my back window, which looks out on the back parking lot of the renovated apartment building-cum-condo behind my place. I carefully pulled the strings which lifted the mini-blinds, watching out for that one broken slat in the middle. Then I lifted the sash window. Lifted it a foot or so, and let it stay in place of its own accord.
Cold air came in with a whoosh!
I placed the bowl of oatmeal on the window sill.
And how it steamed! Lovely! Steam (or vapor or whatever) came pouring off the bowl, flowing in with the cold air. I spooned the oatmeal, uncovering especially hot spots, and steam just burst forth! I lifted glops of oatmeal (oatmeal comes in glops) and watched the steam flow and pour and cascade and stream and gush and deluge from the spooned-up glops!
Ah!
Then, inevitably, eventually, the joy of the moment fades. My brain speaks up, and it says that my oatmeal is getting cold, and so I had better close the window.
So I close the window. And I lower the blinds.
The moment is gone, but the joy remains, like a bird perched in a tree. I smile slightly as I sit down to eat and read.
27 February 2011
07 November 2010
It Happened at the Museum
Last night I set out to attend Denver's Night at the Museums.
In the early evening, I circled around and around the Museum of Contemporary Art looking for a parking place. No luck.
So I abandoned downtown and drove through the Denver night east, toward my alternate choice museum for the free admission event: Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Eventually finding a space in the underground parking there, I headed into the museum. People--most of them with kids--were out in droves last night.
I figured I would hit the temporary exhibit, Amazon Voyage: Vicious Fishes & Other Riches. As the title suggests, and as their website has it, the exhibit "mixes real scientific research, light humor, and whimsical artwork into a fun, interactive experience for visitors of all ages. . ."
I had a good time watching groups attempt to lift the 60-pound rubber Anaconda and pose for pictures, and was interested in the interactive video time line showing how once-saltwater creatures became part of the biologically diverse Amazon ecosystem. I could not believe that I had lived all these years without knowing or realizing that the Amazon rises 30 feet in the rainy season, and that many villages are therefore either floating structures or built on stilts.
The exhibit opened with Captain Mo telling us about the 7 Perils of the Amazon, being various huge fish and snakes and amazing creatures that want nothing more than to eat us. At the end of his video spiel, the jolly riverboat captain said, "Well,that's what I tell the tourists, anyway" and suggested we now enter the exhibit to find out the truth about the Amazon and its burgeoning flora and fauna.
With all this concentration on the Amazon's biodiversity, the irony was that there were precious few actual living things in the exhibit. A few tropical fish in a big tank over here, some piranhas segregated over there. And then there were the cockroaches.
I approached a mild gray-haired woman who stood behind a waist-high exhibit table. On the table in front of her was a shoebox-sized clear plastic box. And in the box were 20 or so large flattish brown winged creatures. They were Amazon Cockroaches. All males, the docent told me, remarking that "we don't want to get into the business of raising cockroaches here."
The bugs were about 2 inches long by an inch and a half wide. They were light brown with darker markings. They had some sticks in the box to climb on, and a paper towel, that, wet once a day, supplied all the water they needed.
The bugs in the box were almost entirely still. One in the corner was fussing around a bit, and this was the main question the woman got to speculate on: what was this guy doing? And why were the others so still?
Well, they actually have two boxes of Amazon Cockroaches. One is kept under the exhibit table, in the dark. The bugs like that. Apparently they are very active down there in the dark, and remain active for only a few minutes after brought out into the glaring museum light which shone right down on this table. Slowly, they would slow down and eventually stop, settling into the lethargic state we saw them in.
I hung around a bit and watched, fascinated. The woman was equipped (or should I say "armed") with a long red plastic stick. There were holes in the cockroach box, and she could reach in there and move things around a bit. Not that she was going to bug the bugs. She might move their food pellets ("dog poop," she told me) around, or their leaves and sticks.
She had great, decorous respect for the creatures in her charge.
People came up to look at the bugs. She explained about the lights and the second box in the dark. She speculated as to why the one roach in the corner was the only one moving. People left.
Eventually a fellow docent came over to see how she was doing. This younger guy, in his thirties, had apparently manned the cockroach gig at times. The lady was explaining to some new guests about the other roaches in the box in the dark and why these weren't moving.
"So, if you took the other box out of the dark, how long would they be moving?" I asked.
"Oh, about two or three minutes," she said, "then they'll settle down again like this."
"I usually just shake 'em," her fellow docent chimed in.
We all chuckled nervously. "Don't do that!" I think I said.
The lady continued with her spiel about the roaches. The new guests nodded their heads.
The younger docent reached out and grabbed the box.
"No! Don''t!" said the docent woman.
"You just close your eyes or turn around," said the younger man.
I might have said "Don't do it," or I should have, but I was riveted by the horrible thing about to happen.
The guy turned the box over and--shake! shake! shake!--gave it three vigorous ones. Cockroaches rattled against the sides like wooden nickels.
He put the box down on the table again. "See? There!" swaggered this schoolyard lout of a docent as the cockroaches scrambled around in terror. One had climbed to the very top of a stick and clung there.
It was a moment both hilarious and horrible. In that moment, all scientific objectivity was gone, all respect for nature trashed. The whole enterprise, this museum all around us, crumbled down into dust.
It only lasted a moment.
Then: "How long do they live?" asked one of the guests.
"They have a lifespan of about a year, in captivity," the lady docent replied.
Pause.
"That is, if we don't shake them," she added.
18 September 2010
William Carlos Williams' Birthday Tribute
William Carlos Williams was born on September 17, 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey.
He lived for 79 years, until March 4, 1963.
I was 5 years old, living just 18 miles away in blissful ignorance of the great poet when he died.
Roger Ebert posted a marvelous birthday tribute to WCW on his blog yesterday. It consists of a series of paintings, artworks, songs and video pieces all illustrating or inspired by "The Red Wheelbarrow."
Well worth a look, here.
He lived for 79 years, until March 4, 1963.
I was 5 years old, living just 18 miles away in blissful ignorance of the great poet when he died.
Roger Ebert posted a marvelous birthday tribute to WCW on his blog yesterday. It consists of a series of paintings, artworks, songs and video pieces all illustrating or inspired by "The Red Wheelbarrow."
Well worth a look, here.
18 July 2010
Precious Images
In 1986, I was working at the Denver Center Cinema (a repertory film theater in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts), when we were chosen as one of a handful of small theaters in the country to participate in an exciting year-long program by the Directors Guild of America (DGA). In celebration of DGA'S 50th Anniversary, the DCC would host a different American film director each month. Throughout a weekend, a famous director would make appearances, speak, answer questions, and present a selection of his favorite films. It was a film nut's dream come true!
However, the precarious situation of such movie houses in the late 80s, when ready availability of home video kept people away from art and repertory cinemas in droves, affected even such an auspicious program as the DGA's. After just four months the DGA could no longer sustain the countrywide directors-in-person offerings. Like animated dots on the map showing one, then another and another Kane newspaper dying, the program went dark in revival movie theaters across the country. As if to teach us landlocked masses where true culture resided, the DGA continued the series event at only 2 locations: one cinema each in New York City and Los Angeles.
It was a fantastically exciting program while it lasted, though. Legendary American directors came. They talked at length about their films and their careers. They answered questions. Alan J. Pakula showed Klute and All the President's Men. Peter Bogdanovich arranged last-minute shipping of his own personal print of The Last Picture Show when the good-but-not-perfect one we had obtained just wouldn't do. The great renegade director, Samuel Fuller, strode back and forth restlessly, telling stories, answering questions, and alternatively gesturing with and chomping on his trademark cigar. I don't remember if it was lit or not.
The program was kicked off in January with a visit by the affable, gracious once-President of the Director's Guild, Robert Wise. I'm hesitating to call him a genius, but only because it is a misunderstood term. Look at just a handful of the films he helmed: The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Haunting, The Sound of Music, The Andromeda Strain. Lesser-known gems of his include the great boxing film noir with Robert Ryan, The Set-Up, and the Oscar-winning performance by Susan Hayward in the riveting death-penalty melodrama, I Want to Live! (one of the films that Wise chose to present when he came to the Cinema.)
OK, "genius" will do.
Wise arrived at the Denver Center Cinema carrying under his arm a special treasure in a film can. He had brought a brand-new short film with him, a film produced by the Director's Guild "in honor of the 100th Anniversary of Film," as an opening title says. Wise was visibly excited and very eager to share this film with us. Except for some screenings for DGA members, no one had seen it.
As we few employees of the Denver Center Cinema joined Robert Wise in the dark of our 255-seat theater, we wondered what we were in for. What could have this great director so fired up?
By the end of the 8-minute short we knew.
That extraordinary short film was called Precious Images.
Precious Images is a moving tribute to the hundred-year history of film, made entirely of short film clips set to various pieces of classic film music. The approximately 470 clips are recognizable and often iconic gems from a kaleidoscopic variety of mostly American films: sound and silent, black-and-white and color, comedies, dramas, westerns, thrillers, musicals, even a few animated features.
From these beautifully-chosen raw materials, director Chuck Workman has fashioned a marvel and a wonder. Brilliantly arranging these fleeting images by first grouping them into broad thematic categories and then very cleverly juxtaposing individual clips in subtle, witty, and emotionally powerful ways, Workman's film carries the viewer along on a ride that's alternatively heartwarming, funny, thrilling, stirring, and intellectually satisfying.
Precious Images is aimed squarely at film lovers. Watching it is a fascinating kind of meta-film experience. Its power relies on how many of these films you have seen. As its scores of images cascade by, an image here and an image there sparks recognition: I know that film, seen this one, or, look, that's Bette Davis/Gary Cooper/Sissy Spacek/Edward G. Robinson/Marlene Dietrich/Paul Newman/Lauren Bacall! The clips flit so fast (at an average of a second per clip but in some sections much faster) that there's often no time to attach a film title or a actor's name to a particular image before ten more catch the eye. These multiple sparks of recognition transcend the verbal, and quickly become visceral. They hit the eyes and the neural pathways like a clattering shower of gems. They evoke memories, and flashes of strong emotion accumulate like a lightning storm. And very soon, even if you've only seen one in ten of these films, you find yourself awash in emotion woven from these connected flashes of recognition.
This crude, basic description of technique barely touches the miraculous emotional power of this film. Workman's editing choices are subtle, clever, often brilliant. They show his understanding of the history of American film, of the meaning of particular images, and of deep correspondences across the decades. It's a huge understatement to say that Precious Images stands up to multiple viewings. I have seen it dozens of times and always am able to pick out some clever juxtaposition of images or music that I'd never noticed before.
Look at the first two images in the film. It starts off with the snow globe resting in the hand of the dying Charles Foster Kane from the first scene of Citizen Kane. Cut to Casablanca: Ingrid Bergman in closeup, saying "Sing it, Sam," and Sam (Dooley Wilson) does: "You must remember this. . ." On the word "this," and as the song continues on the soundtrack, we switch to a clip-after-clip section of couples embracing or kissing, bang-bang-bang-bang, including Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen and the eating-spaghetti kiss from Lady and the Tramp. Now we know that Sam is singing not just to Ilsa in Rick's Cafe, but to us and to our memories of films: "You must remember this..." That word "this" kicks off the whole 8-minute memory cascade.
But go back to that first image: Kane is still holding the snow globe when we see it at the beginning of Precious Images. We have to wait to the very end of the film to see Kane's lips pronounce "Rosebud," and for the globe to fall and break. It is as if all the other truly precious images, all our memories from films down through 100 years, are contained within that glass globe. They are the illusions that break when Charles Foster Kane dies.
These are just a couple of examples of the really well-considered editing choices that Workman makes throughout the film. The deeper you look, the more you discover. His use of music is perfect as well, with individual lyrics or musical cues underlining the images, sometimes brilliantly.
After that first screening of Precious Images at the Denver Center Cinema, we could not get enough of it, and neither could our audiences. We programmed it before films as often as we could, and soon it spread to other theaters in Denver. It was common in the summer of 1986 to see Precious Images before your feature at several theaters in Denver.
The film won a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Live Action Short for 1986. In 2009, it was named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as a film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" to be preserved for all time.
I started wondering about the film again a few years ago. I found that it was not available on DVD, and more recently saw that it had been pulled from YouTube. Some sources stated that it cannot be shown anymore, due to a massive tangle of copyright issues.
Chuck Workman, however, dispelled these ideas in a recent email. He assured me that not only is the film available to any theater in the world from the Director's Guild (dga.org), but that it can also be obtained by museums, schools, and other media arts centers. Non-profit organizations can get the film from the Film-Makers Cooperative in New York (film-makerscoop.com).
So I urge you to urge your local film organization to investigate getting a copy of this really extraordinary film.
For my readers in Denver, you have an upcoming chance to see Precious Images on the big screen. Word at the moment is that it will show at the Starz Film Center on the first Saturday of August, at 7pm, before that month's Tattered Cover Free Classic. Call the theater to make sure, however!
At this writing, you can view Precious Images here.
However, the precarious situation of such movie houses in the late 80s, when ready availability of home video kept people away from art and repertory cinemas in droves, affected even such an auspicious program as the DGA's. After just four months the DGA could no longer sustain the countrywide directors-in-person offerings. Like animated dots on the map showing one, then another and another Kane newspaper dying, the program went dark in revival movie theaters across the country. As if to teach us landlocked masses where true culture resided, the DGA continued the series event at only 2 locations: one cinema each in New York City and Los Angeles.
It was a fantastically exciting program while it lasted, though. Legendary American directors came. They talked at length about their films and their careers. They answered questions. Alan J. Pakula showed Klute and All the President's Men. Peter Bogdanovich arranged last-minute shipping of his own personal print of The Last Picture Show when the good-but-not-perfect one we had obtained just wouldn't do. The great renegade director, Samuel Fuller, strode back and forth restlessly, telling stories, answering questions, and alternatively gesturing with and chomping on his trademark cigar. I don't remember if it was lit or not.
The program was kicked off in January with a visit by the affable, gracious once-President of the Director's Guild, Robert Wise. I'm hesitating to call him a genius, but only because it is a misunderstood term. Look at just a handful of the films he helmed: The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Haunting, The Sound of Music, The Andromeda Strain. Lesser-known gems of his include the great boxing film noir with Robert Ryan, The Set-Up, and the Oscar-winning performance by Susan Hayward in the riveting death-penalty melodrama, I Want to Live! (one of the films that Wise chose to present when he came to the Cinema.)
OK, "genius" will do.
Wise arrived at the Denver Center Cinema carrying under his arm a special treasure in a film can. He had brought a brand-new short film with him, a film produced by the Director's Guild "in honor of the 100th Anniversary of Film," as an opening title says. Wise was visibly excited and very eager to share this film with us. Except for some screenings for DGA members, no one had seen it.
As we few employees of the Denver Center Cinema joined Robert Wise in the dark of our 255-seat theater, we wondered what we were in for. What could have this great director so fired up?
By the end of the 8-minute short we knew.
That extraordinary short film was called Precious Images.
Precious Images is a moving tribute to the hundred-year history of film, made entirely of short film clips set to various pieces of classic film music. The approximately 470 clips are recognizable and often iconic gems from a kaleidoscopic variety of mostly American films: sound and silent, black-and-white and color, comedies, dramas, westerns, thrillers, musicals, even a few animated features.
From these beautifully-chosen raw materials, director Chuck Workman has fashioned a marvel and a wonder. Brilliantly arranging these fleeting images by first grouping them into broad thematic categories and then very cleverly juxtaposing individual clips in subtle, witty, and emotionally powerful ways, Workman's film carries the viewer along on a ride that's alternatively heartwarming, funny, thrilling, stirring, and intellectually satisfying.
Precious Images is aimed squarely at film lovers. Watching it is a fascinating kind of meta-film experience. Its power relies on how many of these films you have seen. As its scores of images cascade by, an image here and an image there sparks recognition: I know that film, seen this one, or, look, that's Bette Davis/Gary Cooper/Sissy Spacek/Edward G. Robinson/Marlene Dietrich/Paul Newman/Lauren Bacall! The clips flit so fast (at an average of a second per clip but in some sections much faster) that there's often no time to attach a film title or a actor's name to a particular image before ten more catch the eye. These multiple sparks of recognition transcend the verbal, and quickly become visceral. They hit the eyes and the neural pathways like a clattering shower of gems. They evoke memories, and flashes of strong emotion accumulate like a lightning storm. And very soon, even if you've only seen one in ten of these films, you find yourself awash in emotion woven from these connected flashes of recognition.
This crude, basic description of technique barely touches the miraculous emotional power of this film. Workman's editing choices are subtle, clever, often brilliant. They show his understanding of the history of American film, of the meaning of particular images, and of deep correspondences across the decades. It's a huge understatement to say that Precious Images stands up to multiple viewings. I have seen it dozens of times and always am able to pick out some clever juxtaposition of images or music that I'd never noticed before.
Look at the first two images in the film. It starts off with the snow globe resting in the hand of the dying Charles Foster Kane from the first scene of Citizen Kane. Cut to Casablanca: Ingrid Bergman in closeup, saying "Sing it, Sam," and Sam (Dooley Wilson) does: "You must remember this. . ." On the word "this," and as the song continues on the soundtrack, we switch to a clip-after-clip section of couples embracing or kissing, bang-bang-bang-bang, including Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen and the eating-spaghetti kiss from Lady and the Tramp. Now we know that Sam is singing not just to Ilsa in Rick's Cafe, but to us and to our memories of films: "You must remember this..." That word "this" kicks off the whole 8-minute memory cascade.
But go back to that first image: Kane is still holding the snow globe when we see it at the beginning of Precious Images. We have to wait to the very end of the film to see Kane's lips pronounce "Rosebud," and for the globe to fall and break. It is as if all the other truly precious images, all our memories from films down through 100 years, are contained within that glass globe. They are the illusions that break when Charles Foster Kane dies.
These are just a couple of examples of the really well-considered editing choices that Workman makes throughout the film. The deeper you look, the more you discover. His use of music is perfect as well, with individual lyrics or musical cues underlining the images, sometimes brilliantly.
After that first screening of Precious Images at the Denver Center Cinema, we could not get enough of it, and neither could our audiences. We programmed it before films as often as we could, and soon it spread to other theaters in Denver. It was common in the summer of 1986 to see Precious Images before your feature at several theaters in Denver.
The film won a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Live Action Short for 1986. In 2009, it was named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as a film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" to be preserved for all time.
I started wondering about the film again a few years ago. I found that it was not available on DVD, and more recently saw that it had been pulled from YouTube. Some sources stated that it cannot be shown anymore, due to a massive tangle of copyright issues.
Chuck Workman, however, dispelled these ideas in a recent email. He assured me that not only is the film available to any theater in the world from the Director's Guild (dga.org), but that it can also be obtained by museums, schools, and other media arts centers. Non-profit organizations can get the film from the Film-Makers Cooperative in New York (film-makerscoop.com).
So I urge you to urge your local film organization to investigate getting a copy of this really extraordinary film.
For my readers in Denver, you have an upcoming chance to see Precious Images on the big screen. Word at the moment is that it will show at the Starz Film Center on the first Saturday of August, at 7pm, before that month's Tattered Cover Free Classic. Call the theater to make sure, however!
At this writing, you can view Precious Images here.
13 June 2010
Time Machine
We often can benefit from other people's obsessions.
Nowhere is this more truly or more often dramatically demonstrated than on the internet. How many times have you just discovered or been told about what to you was a new, bizarre, but fascinating topic, only to find that there is an extensive Wikipedia article about it, as well as a healthy selection of websites where variously driven people have explored the obscurantist subject thoroughly?
One of these came to me today by way of my brother, Roger, in Germany.
Roger is a big baseball fan. He also has a burrowing mind that delights in origins, in history, in the roots of things. Through an investigation of the source of the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," Roger chanced upon a marvelous page of old recordings.
Here's where the obsession comes in. Glenn Sage, who apparently is behind the site www.tinfoil.com, is gloriously obsessed with and very knowledgeable about old recordings.
And when I say old, I'm not talking lps or 45s or even 78s. This is a site entirely dedicated to wax cylinder recordings, an early improvement on the very first recording medium, invented by Thomas Edison.
In case you have never heard of or seen these amazing, original recordings, there is an excellent, concise, illustrated history of them at the tinfoil site. But briefly, Edison invented the pioneer recording machine in 1877. With the first device, a needle scratched grooves in tinfoil strips wrapped around a 4-inch-diameter cylinder. This primitive and ephemeral tinfoil recording medium was replaced ten years later by a more durable standard: 4-inch-long and 2-inch-diameter waxlike cylinders.
[A brief detour back to my New Jersey childhood. Following a family outing to Edison's laboratories in West Orange, that same brother, Roger, maybe 11 years old?, built a replica of the original recording machine. It recorded on aluminum foil wrapped around a tin can. And it actually worked! I'm pretty much in awe of my brother!]
Edison used the machine to record hundreds of bands, performers, and speakers. And Edison's was only one of dozens of companies that recorded on wax cylinders during the last years of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century.
The delicious, wondrous bounty of the tinfoil site, however, can be found at its Cylinders of the Month Archive. Since 1997, Sage has been posting detailed information about one interesting or special wax cylinder recording each month. So now we have this mammoth page, a compendium of all the past Cylinders of the Month. Just click on the highlighted date to the left of each entry's title and you are transported to a detailed page about that particular recording.
Best of all, though: from the detailed page it is only one more click to the recording itself. Yes, you can LISTEN TO any of these more-than-hundred-year-old audio documents!
And taken together, they compose an enchanted aural time machine! These are songs, speeches, comedy bits and musical numbers such as you have never heard, and that you'll never hear anywhere else. Just listening to the scratchy, ancient recordings takes you back to another time, and the content of the pieces places you firmly there. We're not in Kansas anymore.
Or, technically, we ARE in Kansas in one comic song that spoofs the violent temperance reformer, Carrie Nation. It's called "Carrie Nation in Kansas." There are "ethnic specialities" here that have long ago fallen to the axes of political correctness. Listen, for instance, to an Irish comedy bit, "Casey as Umpire at a Ball Game." (I found this piece--from 1898!--hilariously pertinent, considering the recent Detroit Tigers "near perfect" game debacle!) Where else would you be able to listen to several hundred-year-old "minstrel" numbers?!
The "category" column of the Archive page indicates the variety you'll find here. In just a random listing, there are selections tagged as "Band," "Clarinet Solo," "Hebrew monologue," "Talking & banjo," "Baritone," "Tenor solo," "Serio-comic song". . ."Minstrels." Here you'll find orations by William Jennings Bryan and William H. Taft, numbers by Sophie Tucker and "Sousa's Band" (Stars and Stripes Forever March recorded in 1901!). But mostly you'll see no-longer-familiar groups such as Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette, Issler's Popular Orchestra, Herr Dr. Professor & George Donahue, and many individual performers.
Though there is tremendous variety here, I found that all the pieces I listened to worked mysterious magic on my nervous system, transporting me, for two or three scratchy, pop-punctuated minutes at a time, to a strange world of very different assumptions, ideas, and styles than our quotidian own.
It is a trip well worth the taking.
Nowhere is this more truly or more often dramatically demonstrated than on the internet. How many times have you just discovered or been told about what to you was a new, bizarre, but fascinating topic, only to find that there is an extensive Wikipedia article about it, as well as a healthy selection of websites where variously driven people have explored the obscurantist subject thoroughly?
One of these came to me today by way of my brother, Roger, in Germany.
Roger is a big baseball fan. He also has a burrowing mind that delights in origins, in history, in the roots of things. Through an investigation of the source of the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," Roger chanced upon a marvelous page of old recordings.
Here's where the obsession comes in. Glenn Sage, who apparently is behind the site www.tinfoil.com, is gloriously obsessed with and very knowledgeable about old recordings.
And when I say old, I'm not talking lps or 45s or even 78s. This is a site entirely dedicated to wax cylinder recordings, an early improvement on the very first recording medium, invented by Thomas Edison.
In case you have never heard of or seen these amazing, original recordings, there is an excellent, concise, illustrated history of them at the tinfoil site. But briefly, Edison invented the pioneer recording machine in 1877. With the first device, a needle scratched grooves in tinfoil strips wrapped around a 4-inch-diameter cylinder. This primitive and ephemeral tinfoil recording medium was replaced ten years later by a more durable standard: 4-inch-long and 2-inch-diameter waxlike cylinders.
[A brief detour back to my New Jersey childhood. Following a family outing to Edison's laboratories in West Orange, that same brother, Roger, maybe 11 years old?, built a replica of the original recording machine. It recorded on aluminum foil wrapped around a tin can. And it actually worked! I'm pretty much in awe of my brother!]
Edison used the machine to record hundreds of bands, performers, and speakers. And Edison's was only one of dozens of companies that recorded on wax cylinders during the last years of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century.
The delicious, wondrous bounty of the tinfoil site, however, can be found at its Cylinders of the Month Archive. Since 1997, Sage has been posting detailed information about one interesting or special wax cylinder recording each month. So now we have this mammoth page, a compendium of all the past Cylinders of the Month. Just click on the highlighted date to the left of each entry's title and you are transported to a detailed page about that particular recording.
Best of all, though: from the detailed page it is only one more click to the recording itself. Yes, you can LISTEN TO any of these more-than-hundred-year-old audio documents!
And taken together, they compose an enchanted aural time machine! These are songs, speeches, comedy bits and musical numbers such as you have never heard, and that you'll never hear anywhere else. Just listening to the scratchy, ancient recordings takes you back to another time, and the content of the pieces places you firmly there. We're not in Kansas anymore.
Or, technically, we ARE in Kansas in one comic song that spoofs the violent temperance reformer, Carrie Nation. It's called "Carrie Nation in Kansas." There are "ethnic specialities" here that have long ago fallen to the axes of political correctness. Listen, for instance, to an Irish comedy bit, "Casey as Umpire at a Ball Game." (I found this piece--from 1898!--hilariously pertinent, considering the recent Detroit Tigers "near perfect" game debacle!) Where else would you be able to listen to several hundred-year-old "minstrel" numbers?!
The "category" column of the Archive page indicates the variety you'll find here. In just a random listing, there are selections tagged as "Band," "Clarinet Solo," "Hebrew monologue," "Talking & banjo," "Baritone," "Tenor solo," "Serio-comic song". . ."Minstrels." Here you'll find orations by William Jennings Bryan and William H. Taft, numbers by Sophie Tucker and "Sousa's Band" (Stars and Stripes Forever March recorded in 1901!). But mostly you'll see no-longer-familiar groups such as Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette, Issler's Popular Orchestra, Herr Dr. Professor & George Donahue, and many individual performers.
Though there is tremendous variety here, I found that all the pieces I listened to worked mysterious magic on my nervous system, transporting me, for two or three scratchy, pop-punctuated minutes at a time, to a strange world of very different assumptions, ideas, and styles than our quotidian own.
It is a trip well worth the taking.
21 May 2010
Canterbury Tales Rap
Since there can never be too many viewings of this absolutely marvelous and ingenious setting of the Prologue from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I throw it out here on my blog, on the off-off chance that it catches a new pair of eyes. If you have not seen this before, please leave me a comment!
This gem was the brainchild of Jon Wilkerson. The slick video editing, direction, and organization were done by Kirk Anderson. The piece is performed by Jon, Kirk, and DeShawn Jones, to music created by Darren Lawless.
I feel like I've become an evangelist for this piece over the past couple of days. I can't explain why. The music, the beat, the images, and the middle English words have routed my defenses and now have taken possession of a small but significant plot in my brain.
It has gotten tens of thousands of viewings on YouTube, and there are lots of testimonial comments from high school students who used it to help them memorize the beginning of Chaucer's Prologue. Teachers have also weighed in, saying that this is now required viewing for their English Literature classes.
And it should be.
So, surely you know a teacher, a student, or a word nerd friend who would get a kick out of this.
If you like it, pass it on. Tell somebody about it!
16 May 2010
Fear Friday
For a variety of reasons, mostly involving neglect, disinterest, and sheer laziness, I do not have TV service at home.
What I do have is a 20-year-old 19-inch TV that I use to watch my DVDs on.
Recently I am thinking that this has got to change.
One of the reasons I can state in two words. Fear Friday.
On many Fridays, I go down to Littleton to spend the afternoon and evening with my stepmother, Amy. We'll do errands and go out to eat, then come home and inevitably watch some TV.
So, these Fridays are my only real TV viewing time for the week. I'm devoted to the rantings on The McLaughlin report. We'll usually watch the local news at 10 pm.
Amy will nod and drift off and fall asleep on one end of the couch as I sit flipping channels on the other. She'll stay dozing there for quite a while before she wakes up just enough to decide to go to bed. She always tells me to stay as long as I like.
I used to leave just shortly after Amy went to bed.
But a few times I stayed and channel-surfed through the dreck of her Utterly Basic Cable, which she got really just so she could continue to receive the local channels. And sometime about a year ago I chanced upon it: Fear Friday.
Of course, as of yet I didn't know what Fear Friday was. Nor did I have any devotion to it. All I knew was that they were showing the original classic Night of the Living Dead, and I couldn't resist watching the last 45 minutes or so of the ur-zombie movie. Then, I noticed, the station followed it with another, highly inferior, zombie flick. I watched just a little bit of that one and hit the road.
But there was something fun about being up in the middle of the night here in the family room at one end of the darkened house while Amy slept at the other end, watching the beloved low-budget film that launched the whole zombie cult. In between the ads I saw AMC's promos for upcoming film series, tied together always with their new slogan "Story Matters Here." And always just before the movie itself was firing up again, the words FEAR FRIDAY jerkily staggering around the screen and finally aligning themselves in lurid black on red. (Or maybe white on red?)
I didn't think anything of it, never crossed my mind, until maybe a couple or three weeks later, when the end of a Friday of errands and dinner with Amy found me once more settling down on the couch to see what a little channel surfing might turn up.
And this time it was both the old and the new versions of The Fly, back-to-back! I got sucked in again, this time just in time to watch the disgusting, unlikely, horrifying and somehow hilarious climax of David Cronenberg's The Fly, with the creature that used to be Jeff Goldblum sliming up his laboratory and Geena Davis, who finally blasts him to pieces with a shotgun. Really a tour-de-force of disturbing imagery, that film! Wow. I either missed or purposely left without seeing the Vincent Price version, which has a few joys of its own.
But Fear Friday had bit me again.
After two or three chance run-ins with the show like this, I began to realize that it was a show. The facts started to coalesce in my brain like so many zombies converging on the big white house where the still-living are holed up.
Fear Friday is a Friday night horror movie festival on AMC. They show two or maybe three horror films in a row, often connected thematically.
Part of the fun of the presentation, for me at least, comes with AMC's plugs for the week's upcoming (non-horror) film series. They throw films together under an umbrella theme, and the little ads feature well-edited film clips of a bunch of disparate movies. The fun lies partly in trying to ldentify all these films from just a shot here and a shot there. And the promos reveal progressively a little more each time. It is a clever promotion. Fun to watch and it keeps you guessing.
So now I knew just what Fear Friday was, and approximately when it comes on. But I wasn't obsessed with it.
Yet.
I didn't yet look forward to the next Friday night's selection, wonder what they might be showing. I didn't yet talk at length to people at work about it. I hadn't yet even really spoken the words "Fear Friday."
But I would. I would.
In recent weeks, some of the joys offered up by AMC on Fear Friday have been:
Poltergeist - Utterly ridiculous fun which could be described in TV Guide as: "Suburban family is menaced by over-the-top self-indulgent state-of-the-art special effects!" But the film's core and its germ, I'm sure, and its worthy, lasting place in American culture, is that it enshrines the now-lost-but-not-forgotten eerie moment when the TV stations go off in the middle of the night, abandoning you to the existential challenge of snow and white noise. The first thing you hear in Poltergeist is the Star-Spangled Banner, signalling, you soon find out, the horrifying end of another broadcast day.
The Amityville Horror - Creepy film from an older era, before special effects took over. I kept seeing parallels between this evil-house-that-caused-previous-owner-to-kill-his-entire-family film and Stanley Kubrick's masterful The Shining. Was Kubrick. . .or possibly Stephen King. . .influenced by this film? The creepiness here revolves mostly around everyday things, like flies and toilets backing up and unsettled dogs. But these items are put together in odd ways, exaggerated, played up. As in The Shining, one child has an evil imaginary friend. And then there's the great performance by Rod Steiger, as a priest who is brought in to bless the house, and whom the house progressively takes apart, blinds, and ruins. Fun film. Terrible ending.
The Shining - We were sitting there on the couch, Amy and I, when I chanced to tune in to the baseball bat scene in this terrific film. What an amazing scene, in how it develops and how long it goes on, and the escalating dialogue as Jack Nicholson threatens the pleading Shelley Duvall across the lobby, eventually backing her up the stairs as she swipes at the air pathetically, ineffectually with the bat! The scene is sustained for unbelievably long! The actors are so well-matched here, Nicholson sarcastic and terrifying and insane, and Duvall's Wendy beaten down and whimpering but fiercely protecting her son. Jack keeps cajoling her, "Give me the bat, Wendy!" and eventually, she does. She gives it to him. Right in the side of the head.
I appreciated that film more than ever viewing it that night. It is so wildly over-the-top, so fiercely hilarious! I cackle with laughter as Nicholson sails off the deep end!
Then there was the great double-billing of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the original Bela Lugosi classic. This was inspired. The Frances Ford Coppola film, so deliciously lush and visually inventive, contains so many self-conscious hat-tips to its 1931 inspiration. Gary Oldman intones lines that we all know from Bela's delivery of them: "I am Dracula. I bid you wel-come!" Playing the two films back-to-back like this really showed how excellent they both are, and what a worthy successor the Coppola film is to the original.
So now Fear Friday's got me.
I might just have to buy a TV.
What I do have is a 20-year-old 19-inch TV that I use to watch my DVDs on.
Recently I am thinking that this has got to change.
One of the reasons I can state in two words. Fear Friday.
On many Fridays, I go down to Littleton to spend the afternoon and evening with my stepmother, Amy. We'll do errands and go out to eat, then come home and inevitably watch some TV.
So, these Fridays are my only real TV viewing time for the week. I'm devoted to the rantings on The McLaughlin report. We'll usually watch the local news at 10 pm.
Amy will nod and drift off and fall asleep on one end of the couch as I sit flipping channels on the other. She'll stay dozing there for quite a while before she wakes up just enough to decide to go to bed. She always tells me to stay as long as I like.
I used to leave just shortly after Amy went to bed.
But a few times I stayed and channel-surfed through the dreck of her Utterly Basic Cable, which she got really just so she could continue to receive the local channels. And sometime about a year ago I chanced upon it: Fear Friday.
Of course, as of yet I didn't know what Fear Friday was. Nor did I have any devotion to it. All I knew was that they were showing the original classic Night of the Living Dead, and I couldn't resist watching the last 45 minutes or so of the ur-zombie movie. Then, I noticed, the station followed it with another, highly inferior, zombie flick. I watched just a little bit of that one and hit the road.
But there was something fun about being up in the middle of the night here in the family room at one end of the darkened house while Amy slept at the other end, watching the beloved low-budget film that launched the whole zombie cult. In between the ads I saw AMC's promos for upcoming film series, tied together always with their new slogan "Story Matters Here." And always just before the movie itself was firing up again, the words FEAR FRIDAY jerkily staggering around the screen and finally aligning themselves in lurid black on red. (Or maybe white on red?)
I didn't think anything of it, never crossed my mind, until maybe a couple or three weeks later, when the end of a Friday of errands and dinner with Amy found me once more settling down on the couch to see what a little channel surfing might turn up.
And this time it was both the old and the new versions of The Fly, back-to-back! I got sucked in again, this time just in time to watch the disgusting, unlikely, horrifying and somehow hilarious climax of David Cronenberg's The Fly, with the creature that used to be Jeff Goldblum sliming up his laboratory and Geena Davis, who finally blasts him to pieces with a shotgun. Really a tour-de-force of disturbing imagery, that film! Wow. I either missed or purposely left without seeing the Vincent Price version, which has a few joys of its own.
But Fear Friday had bit me again.
After two or three chance run-ins with the show like this, I began to realize that it was a show. The facts started to coalesce in my brain like so many zombies converging on the big white house where the still-living are holed up.
Fear Friday is a Friday night horror movie festival on AMC. They show two or maybe three horror films in a row, often connected thematically.
Part of the fun of the presentation, for me at least, comes with AMC's plugs for the week's upcoming (non-horror) film series. They throw films together under an umbrella theme, and the little ads feature well-edited film clips of a bunch of disparate movies. The fun lies partly in trying to ldentify all these films from just a shot here and a shot there. And the promos reveal progressively a little more each time. It is a clever promotion. Fun to watch and it keeps you guessing.
So now I knew just what Fear Friday was, and approximately when it comes on. But I wasn't obsessed with it.
Yet.
I didn't yet look forward to the next Friday night's selection, wonder what they might be showing. I didn't yet talk at length to people at work about it. I hadn't yet even really spoken the words "Fear Friday."
But I would. I would.
In recent weeks, some of the joys offered up by AMC on Fear Friday have been:
Poltergeist - Utterly ridiculous fun which could be described in TV Guide as: "Suburban family is menaced by over-the-top self-indulgent state-of-the-art special effects!" But the film's core and its germ, I'm sure, and its worthy, lasting place in American culture, is that it enshrines the now-lost-but-not-forgotten eerie moment when the TV stations go off in the middle of the night, abandoning you to the existential challenge of snow and white noise. The first thing you hear in Poltergeist is the Star-Spangled Banner, signalling, you soon find out, the horrifying end of another broadcast day.
The Amityville Horror - Creepy film from an older era, before special effects took over. I kept seeing parallels between this evil-house-that-caused-previous-owner-to-kill-his-entire-family film and Stanley Kubrick's masterful The Shining. Was Kubrick. . .or possibly Stephen King. . .influenced by this film? The creepiness here revolves mostly around everyday things, like flies and toilets backing up and unsettled dogs. But these items are put together in odd ways, exaggerated, played up. As in The Shining, one child has an evil imaginary friend. And then there's the great performance by Rod Steiger, as a priest who is brought in to bless the house, and whom the house progressively takes apart, blinds, and ruins. Fun film. Terrible ending.
The Shining - We were sitting there on the couch, Amy and I, when I chanced to tune in to the baseball bat scene in this terrific film. What an amazing scene, in how it develops and how long it goes on, and the escalating dialogue as Jack Nicholson threatens the pleading Shelley Duvall across the lobby, eventually backing her up the stairs as she swipes at the air pathetically, ineffectually with the bat! The scene is sustained for unbelievably long! The actors are so well-matched here, Nicholson sarcastic and terrifying and insane, and Duvall's Wendy beaten down and whimpering but fiercely protecting her son. Jack keeps cajoling her, "Give me the bat, Wendy!" and eventually, she does. She gives it to him. Right in the side of the head.
I appreciated that film more than ever viewing it that night. It is so wildly over-the-top, so fiercely hilarious! I cackle with laughter as Nicholson sails off the deep end!
Then there was the great double-billing of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the original Bela Lugosi classic. This was inspired. The Frances Ford Coppola film, so deliciously lush and visually inventive, contains so many self-conscious hat-tips to its 1931 inspiration. Gary Oldman intones lines that we all know from Bela's delivery of them: "I am Dracula. I bid you wel-come!" Playing the two films back-to-back like this really showed how excellent they both are, and what a worthy successor the Coppola film is to the original.
So now Fear Friday's got me.
I might just have to buy a TV.
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