IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Betty’s winning job interview. Picture courtesy of H.o.p.

Sat down at the computer at 2:30 and though I’d been working continually with no goofing somehow after three hours I’d not managed to get much done at all when H.o.p. puts on one of his new Betty Boop DVDs and Marty sits down to watch after a minute and says hey come look at this twisted bit of Boop-oop-ee-doo in which Betty is sexually harassed by her employer, calls the police and ends up making out with the boss.

I ask H.o.p. to play it from the beginning as I figure it’s best not to remark upon until I’ve seen the whole seven minutes — and found the tale’s slightly more convoluted.

“Betty’s Big Boss”, 1933, directed by Dave Fleischer, opens with a veritable Big City Babylonian Tower (looks like an old cotton mill smoke stack) upon which is posted the sign, “Girl wanted - top floor - female preferred”. Flapper Betty in hat and one of her more demure dress choices (sleeves and a full bodice with collar) passes by and seeing opportunity she races upstairs along with a multitude of jobless women, it being about three years into the Great Depression.

The Big Boss is indeed a Big Boss, about as wide as he is tall. When he asks what Betty can do, it’s time for a song. IMDB gives the tune as Irving Berlin’s “You’d Be Surprised”.

Here’s the original:

You’d Be Surprised
Music and Lyrics by Irving Berlin (1919)

He’s not so good in a crowd
But when you get him alone,
You’d be surprised.
He isn’t much at a dance
But then when he takes you home,
You’d be surprised.
He doesn’t look like much of a lover,
But don’t judge a book by it’s cover.
He’s got the face of an angel but,
There’s a devil in his eye.
He’s such a delicate thing
But when he starts to squeeze,
You’d be surprised.
He dosn’t look very strong
But when you sit on his knees,
You’d be surprised.
At a party or at a ball,
I’ve got to admit he’s nothing at all,
But in an easy chair,
You’d be surprised.

But Betty has a job to win and tailors the lyrics to better suit her application.

I don’t know how to type write
but if you take me home
you’d be surprised.

The Boss has visions of how he might be surprised as Betty crawls over his desk, continuing,

I don’t judge a book by it’s cover
I’ve got the face of an angel but…

At which point what Betty says is politely drowned out by the disgruntled brayings of the other job applicants as the Big Boss opens a great trap door and does away with them.

You’d be surprised!
I didn’t go to school
but when I sit on your knee
you’d be surprised!

The rewards of hiring Betty seem obvious. So, when she flips her hat up on a coat rack and settles down at a desk to type, it’s not much of a surprise that the Boss has other ideas for his working girl. Portrayed as almost a jovial clown up to now, his chin sprouts a thorny scraggle of whiskers. “How about a little kiss?” Oooo, “Naughty, naughty, ” Betty demures. When she attempts to flee, the door is locked, trapping her. She calls the police.

All the world loving Betty, the police and the troops respond. Betty’s in danger! Rescuers clamber up a ladder. The Big Boss machine guns them down. Betty, wanting a piece of the action, machine guns the Big Boss’ bottom with lead via a pencil sharpener. The police machine gun the building, whittling it down from the base up to the top floor. As the top floor meets earth, we see through a window-blind Betty and her boss apparently locked in combat. When the blind is raised? But of course, Betty and her Big Boss are smooching. She scolds everyone for peeking and the blind is lowered as Betty and the Boss return to business.

During a second viewing, when the gun battle between the Big Boss and the police began, H.o.p. asked why they were fighting. Confounded, I didn’t know what to say. A misunderstanding?

What happened between 1932 and “Boop-oop-a-doop” in which Betty’s Ringmaster boss tries to kiss her, she slaps him and sings, “You can feed me bread and water, or a great big bale of hay, but don’t take my boop-oop-a-doop away!”

The cartoon that follows on the DVD is also 1933 vintage, “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers”.

Betty invades the nursery. Picture courtesy of H.o.p.

The toy factories exhaust themselves, deflate, go kaput, with the production of a mysterious something, a package that is picked up and eventually delivered, via plane, stork-like, down the chimney of a toy shop. The fires part for a box from which springs Betty Boop in one of her racier dresses, the one with no back and no straps, . The contents of the toy shop spring to life with her arrival. Toy bunnies, clowns, rabbits, elephants, and in particular toy soldiers. Wink, wink. A wet dream has invaded the G-rated nursery. Betty Boop, sex toy. The ensuing rumpus–Betty Boop crowned the Queen of Hearts–awakens King Kong who goes on a rampage. After we’re treated to Kong threatening a wind-up, watermelon eating “Darkie” type doll with white lips and deciding it doesn’t fit his purposes, he beheads a Mandarin Chinese doll and pursues Betty’s head as the perfect replacement.

Uh, what’s up with that? This Beast’s love of Beauty is of a different sort than Kong’s love of Fay Wray.

Eegad, King Kong means business, strapping Boop to a table saw. The army rallies to Boop’s defense. The toys beat Kong but as they march victorious, led by Betty Boop, they remind a little too much of Dough Boy WWI survivors put back together in a wrong kind of way because there was no right way anymore–that is, except for Boop. As the cartoon closes we see them relegated to the damaged shelf along with Boop. As Betty Boop looks fine as ever, we are supposed to wonder, “What’s up with that?” The punch line is that when she turns around it’s revealed she has lost the back of her dress and we’re rewarded with a full rear glimpse of her drawers.

The cartoon has me thinking what about the Great Depression and the Veterans of WWI? In a weird way Boop may be expressing solidarity here with the 25,000 World War I veterans who traveled to Washington D.C. in June 1932 to camp out until they got their bonus pay. They didn’t get it. Instead Hoover signed, in July, a Transportation Bill to help them get home–because they were destitute, because he wanted to get rid of them–July 24th being the deadline for them to leave. Those who didn’t leave were cleared out by Federal Troops under General Douglas MacArthur and the encampments burned.

“We were heroes in 1917, but we’re bums now.”

About as compassionate as the Bush Administration has been with its military veterans.

Darn, I start out to scold Betty and end up turning sympathetic. Except, y’know, for the seeming racism and sexism.

But Betty was a big fan of jazz and her 1932 “Minnie the Moocher” features Cab Calloway and his band in what may be the earliest footage of him. Cab Calloway and band also performed in “Betty Boop in Snow White” (1933) and “Old Man of the Mountain” (1933). Louis Armstrong and band are shown in Boop’s “I’ll be Glad when you’re Dead and Gone, You Rascal, You” (1932) but in that one Betty’s fighting off the natives in Africa.

I start looking around and find that Phoenix Morric, in “The First Feminist Cartoon: Betty Boop” states she was loved by Gertrude Stein and that the KKK threatened the studio because of their use of black Jazz artists. Morric gives no sources, however, and I can find nothing further on Stein, but the KKK threatening Fleischer studios is mentioned at Dennisnybackfilms.com in“The Birth of Betty Boop (Or My Life as a Dog)”.

“What are your daughters watching?” at “The Cheers” gives Betty as simply teaching girls to be adorable and dumb.

Betty did not have to be clever or even smart. Betty got along just fine with flashy garters and red lipstick. Miss Betty Boop was the shining example for young girls that said that it was much better to be adorable and dumb than not so adorable and socially co-dependant (as in the case of poor Olive Oyl). Both these women were stuck in the idea of what women’s roles were supposed to be according to cultural feminism.

Boop’s a more complex figure than that. A number of her early cartoons are surreal bewilderments which amaze me and are pretty entertaining. If she’s remembered as only a sex object, it could be because of decades’ divorce from the issues of the time that her cartoons may not explicitly reference but would have been understood by the audience. I’m talking Boop pre-Hays Act, 1935, before Betty underwent a pretty extreme change for the censors. Does she confront racism or peddle it? Does she confront sexism or give it a kiss? When I think of “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” I see Betty flashing her garter and undies and her leading the Parade of the Bonus Veterans. The more I puzzle over “Betty’s Big Boss”, considering the title, the more I am focused on the Big Boss Babylonian tower that gets blasted down to size.

It’s a queer contradictory set of images Boop can leave one with.

Still too much in a flu (well, stomach bug) haze (my pregnant sister landed in the hospital with it Wednesday-Thursday, and thank goodness she’s OK) and staring at the wall being still not an option but an occupation, I am pulling out of Bigsofa archives a blog of “The Sound of Music”. Note that several things now associated with Homeland Security were in the film the explicit territory of Nazis.

The Sound of Music

Directed by Robert Wise
Julie Andrews - Marie von Trapp
Christopher Plummer - Captain von Trapp
Eleanor Parker - The Baroness
Richard Haydn - Max Detweiler
Kids

Released 1965
Rates: Good movie but really twisted politics

I read “Sound of Music” is the most watched movie of all time, which means it must be blogged. After all, the most watched move of all time must resonate deeply with a host of people.

Decades have passed between now and then and I suppose my palate has been cleansed enough of my introduction, at age eight, to the hype of “Music”. A monumental production with pioneering aerial cinematography! Wow! But what I recollect most is the rumor that “Sound of Music” was to be the last of something like good, solid, wholesome cinema, that it was the last of the musicals–laws were to be written against them, Julie Andrews was to be banished by Congress–and from here on out it would be all decadent breasts bouncing out of Hellwood, no more family fare.

For that reason “The Sound of Music” was as holy as Salk and as much a must as the polio vaccine. Gather up the Girl Scouts and hustle them down for an afternoon audience with the holy mother, Andrews the new icon of god-fearing American entertainment, a young Saint Joan who had shorn her hair that we might heed the great sky god who spoke to her upon the mountain, only the desolate she gathered in were Kennedy’s orphaned children and their suburbia-addled mothers whose land-locked lollipop ships were under heavy assault by the British pop-rock invasion and its shaggy boy beasts. And what I remember almost as well is my mother disliked Julie Andrews, her voice, her looks, everything about her, and because of this and her contempt for the Julie Andrews’ hype I was unable to wholly throw myself into the experience of “Music” as were the rest of the dedicates who swore loyalty to Julie and resistance to what the Dark Powers of the World had sworn to do to her. Women cried. Maybe it was a Northern thing. The South had “Gone with the Wind” and Scarlett O’Hara. The Yanks had “The Sound of Music”. One wanted the return to plantations and the thirteen-inch waist. The other wanted to turn the clock back before WWII and absolve the Old World gods who had disdained crossing the Atlantic. They were going home to pack their suitcases and carry them across the waters before they went murderously senile.

Fear of the death of god was an up-and-coming concern in suburban homes. In a few years “Life” magazine would headline a possible obituary. Right up there on the endangered list with god was his compatriot spirit, music. Atonal Shoenberg and his 12 note serial method hadn’t killed it. Safe to say that those who feared what they sited as meaningless 60s pop lyrics had never heard of Shoenberg. The old standard “Yes, we have no Bananas”, now that was all right, as long as it didn’t go by its original title, the “I’ve Got the Yes! We Have No Bananas Blues”.

The Old World gods they trusted to Julie Andrews to carry over the Alps knew nothing of the Blues.

Julie Andrews would later attempt to remind she was an entertainer and dissociate herself from being holy mother of the American musical, drunkenly baring breasts in “S.O.B”.

But for now it’s 1965 and as “The Sound of Music” opens we are treated to stunning big screen aerial shots (I recollect, watching on my 20 inch tellie) of clouds which make me feel yes, I should be remembering something, been here before, so familiar, coming in through the clouds, over the mountains, shades of the primordial, the creation of the world (was I there?), several years hence Kubrick will use over hill and dale aerial cinematography to ferry us silent screaming to Jupiter and beyond but right now it’s 1965 not 1967 and Julie Andrews’ latest hit was as the Heartland’s dream governess in “Mary Poppins”, which also opened with clouds, Julie taking a cumulous cab…

Indeed, I have been here before! Is that Mary Poppins’ magic carpet bag in the poster for “The Sound of Music”? Is Andrews incapable of keeping her feet on the ground? But no no no folks and folkies we are not riding into dirty old London (which turned around and shafted us with Carnaby Street). Instead, we descend through frigid pristine fogginess to alpine greenery, twittering birds, violins, horns, flutes. Our spirits should soar even as we glide to earth and be still my heart, there she is, Julie Andrews singing to the hills her cheery positive take on loneliness, skipping over stones, being blessed with the sound of music until church bells chime and she is sent hastily, clumsily seeking her fallen habit, flying fleet-of-foot to mass. A veritable Diana who belongs to field and stream but no man.

Which is when we realize we have stumbled upon a novitiate whose senses still tie to the physical world in a manner that those who never mix peas with mashed potatoes would have believe ill becomes the sacred, the protestant-puritan corps d’esprit to whom the film ironically caters though espousing a certain common sense acceptance of sensual joys which the film’s Catholic nuns realize are god-given and essential to most. That kind of world -is-fundamentally good Sisterhood so popular in 60s Holywood movies. There is, by the way, not a single priest exhibited in the film. I don’t know if this is something people realize, but certainly the subconscious takes note. The film belongs spiritually to mother earth. Which is a why it succeeds despite lousy politics. Had it belonged to venerable pater it would have belonged to the fatherland and ultimately to Hitler, and I don’t believe the film ever refers to the fatherland, instead only to the homeland.

Cut from Julie’s spontaneity and hills of green to stone courtyard and chapel dotted with somber women in black, the aged and middle-aged congregating for chapel and worship. Order and containment. A world into which Maria doesn’t fit, the Sisterhood admits. The absent Maria adores animals. And if one has not found her in the usual places one is to look for her in the unusual. (Get it? We will not hit you over the head with sacred allusions.) Maria is likeable and not so likeable, loveable and not so loveable. She is rebellious, and always in trouble. How do you solve a problem like Maria?

“Who are these guys?” my seven year old asks.

During the 60s Hollywood seemed intent on priming prepubescent females for the nunnery with a string of popular nun films. Debbie Reynolds was “The Singing Nun”. Guitars and folk music played prominently. Spiritual hipsters swung rosary belts. It was Hollywood’s manner of expressing the notion of 60s musicians as priests and priestesses leading a spiritual new wave. I would discuss this some more but Maria–tomboyish, short-haired Maria–is running about slamming doors and is about to be showed the gate for the wolf pack with which she’ll be most at home.

No, no, Maria pleads that she belongs at the convent, that she grew up on the mountain and the mountain led her to the convent. Something like that.

Not for a second would anyone in the American theater buy that Julie Andrews grew up on that Alpine mountain. Andrews is, after all, American–oh, that’s right, British, sorry–but Americans interpret as they please and as the movie intended, for this is not the story of Austrian Maria Von Trapp. Andrews instead speaks to the several generations’ removed American immigrant who carries the mountain with them over the American prairie in their portable strudels and cuckoo clocks. The American German-Austrian is no more German to the Austrian-German than the low German-German was to the Imperial Aristocratic Hapsburg. Or oops I suppose I shouldn’t go there.

Anyway, yeah, right, Maria grew up on the mountain. In Colorado. And the Mother Superior informs her the will of god is that she leave the convent for a time, to learn what she really wants, which is not what the enthusiastic Maria wants to hear, that she is to take care of the seven children of a retired officer of the Imperial Navy, Maria expressing the kind of dismay one wouldn’t expect of 60’s Catholic opponents of The Pill (contraception a hot subject of debate at the time for Catholics, and see I told you the film was aimed primarily for Protestants). Not a good sign that the retired officer of the Imperial Navy is unable to keep a governess but we all already know that story and what will happen, how Julie will win their hearts and marry the Captain and flee with him over the mountains from Nazi-occupied Austria to Switzerland, so obviously we aren’t at the movie to have that question answered for us.

Why are we here?

“When the lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window,” Maria voices the wisdom of the Mother Superior, bolstering her confidence as she exits the convent.

And suspension of disbelief collapses. It was already difficult buying Julie Andrews as a wannabe nun. It was difficult that Andrews was about 30 in this role and if you stood her up against a door frame the emotional maturity of the character seemed to be about 16 years of age tall on tiptoe. One of the more major problems was that Julie had short blond hair and everyone knew that Mary Poppins had brunette hair she wore back in a bun. Oh, but what we are now forced to accept! For she is dressed in a doudy gray ill-fitting dress of schoolgirl cut, a rough-textured brown jacket four sizes too small, and broad school-girlish hat brim crowning her blond Julie brow (which was the death knell for broad-brimmed schoolgirl hats which had been Sunday popular beforehand). There was nothing the least bit attractive about this Julie, nor was there intended to be, except her brash, rash enthusiasm and her shiny blond hair. It doesn’t occur to us at first what we have here is Julie Andrews as Charlie Chaplin. Instead, we long to rescue our dear nanny, Mary Poppins, from this terrible, unfortunate hazing as she sings this is what she wanted all along but was afraid of it, shoring up her confidence through song as she boards her bus, is clumsily stuck on the bus steps by her guitar as she disboards, as she skips and whirls in a naive, supposed unfeminine manner down the road, and I think y’know Julie really did throw her heart into this performance and begin to be won over as she comes up onto another gate, her other opening door, to the Captain’s overwhelming mansion, the Leopldskron Castle where the front exteriors were shot.

Breathless, Maria rings the bell. Just in case one of the audience imagined her outfit was appropriate for the culture and time, the butler’s reaction informs that just as she was ill-suited to the convent, so she shall be ill-suited to life in the house of a captain of the Imperial Navy.

Maria, in sackcloth, is intended to be each female viewer: an ugly duckling, the every day peasant girl whose exceptional individuality attracts the prince to recognize in her heart a royal kinship, thus transforming the atypical talking toad into the proud beauty which she always really was, in other words a Cinderella story, her dead mother embodied both in the Captain’s dead wife and the compassionate Mother Superior.

Cut to castle’s interior and ain’t it the truth, Maria nearly breathless at the grandeur of old Austrian wealth. Down Cinderella steps she’s drawn, her curiosity promptly leading her through closed doors right into Bluebeard’s secret, gold-walled, opulent closet. Bang. On the threshold he appears, the Captain. The pretty frog meets the beautiful beast. “There are certain rooms not to be disturbed!” he growls, which is of course an open invitation to disturb, to brush away wintery ghosts with fresh spring leaves. Hollywood expects that every female, aged 10 to 90, has fallen at once for the gruff Captain and having fallen they’ve replaced Maria with their own face and form and will be loyal to the end as long as Maria doesn’t metamorphosis into an ideal that would threaten to outshine them, and as long as they get what they want, a doting prince.

Hollywood has had a love for stories of authoritarian fathers and the Captain’s character is of the same blood line, both military and royal, expecting royal and military discipline at all times. When the captain blows his whistle the children promptly marshal forth in pseudo naval uniforms with proper bows and striping. The message is that children kept under a tight rein shall find freedom whatever way they can. We love authority but hate it and rebel against it. We honor the handsome, harsh Captain but…

Ok the kids are introducing themselves. One by one, calling out their names. Ages 16 to 5. A point of identification for nearly everyone. If all the women in the audience are now Maria, nearly every single child in the audience is now imagined in the role of one of the Captain’s children. Every single one of the children in the audience loves it that Fraulein rebels against whistles. Every single one of the children in the audience imagines they are the one who slipped the fat frog into Fraulein’s pocket because they know it’s going to be ok, she will love them regardless, so of course they put a welcoming pinecone in her dinner seat and Julie, cross still hanging about her neck in a loud “Not Available” way, bringing god to the table, nimbly contrives prayer to be followed by tears of contrition on the part of her charges, children fleeing in shame of their tricks. They have met their love match and from now on out will be capering lambs.

Thus is the power of the Andrews-Nanny. It’s a wonder that no one has capitalized on the winning combination with a chain of “Poppins’ Au pere’s”.

Daddy is no doubt in love by now as well but, unlike real life, there’s a story line to be negotiated.

Enter the villain. A young Nazi-in-training arrives at the mansion. We recognize him as such as he is blond and severe and all Nazi youths of this era, in Hollywood, were blond and severe. He is Liesl’s beau and she runs through the garden of adolescent Eden to find her Rolfe. May she be his possible redemption? Despite their secret and supposedly forbidden love, Rolfe boosts conformity, being careful, in both matters political and romantic. He is the last of the “I’ll tell you want to do” Old World men, I take it. The scene is a charming example of contrariness, the lyrics painting Liesl as timid and shy when she’s as rarin’ to go as a family film of the time permits her to be. As they dance together in the gazebo, Liesl running the circle of benches, I’m reminded of the Lipizzaner stallions which were wildly popular when they began touring in 1970, and well known beforehand so that all horse-loving girls who ever played horsie, galloping about their suburban lawns, were no doubt aware Liesl was a horse and Rolfe her ring master. Which is why I’m reminded of the Lipizzaners. One was supposed to be reminded. The Lipizzaners belonged to the Royal House of the Austrian Hapsburgs. Rolfe may have a rein on Leisl now, but the spirit of General Patton waits in the wings to free the noble-born from the rough commoner who would kidnap power rather than undergo the trial of the glass slipper.

In this film, Royals shoulder their awesome power with a dignified sense of responsibility. The bad butler is the commoner who wants what the Royals have and doesn’t understand his natural-born place. If Andrews is the commoner who makes good, well, it should be considered that she was first engaged to god.

The Royals may serve as a metaphor for humankind’s, uh, nobler, higher self, but their joints are creaky. Denied the request for material with which to make play-clothes for the children, Maria pulls a Scarlett O’Hara and makes clothes of curtains. This is America declaring its independence from Britain. How do I know? Because the colonies, symbolized by the children, all gather in Andrews’ room to sing about their favorite things, and as they all are American (er, Austrian) then Britain must go. Except for Andrews, who is American at heart. She can stay. Skip Ellis Island, go straight to California.

Ironic foreshadowing when Maria learns the Captain is preparing to marry, and she voices she’s been sent to prepare him for his new wife.

“That’s Mary Poppins?” my son asks.

“Yes,” I reply, remembering how stunned we were as children when Poppins went from long dark hair to short blond hair. And married…

But, oh, that Beast Von Trapp! Not only was Maria’s joyful folk music not permitted in the abbey, it is verboten at the Captain’s house.

Maria don’t care. Though the Captain says no to play-clothes she makes them anyway. A miracle, the children are now sunny and cheerful running about with baskets and kerchiefs through town and countryside, following Maria with her guitar. If the Captain says no to music, then she will raise his imps to be minstrels. Anti-authority Maria, in Beatnik brown and sensible flats makes yummy meat loaf of Folk for the American audience. Anti-authority Maria in peasant dress stands outside the home of the Beaver Cleavers, bowl of hippy granola in hand (”No, see, is Old World Goodness, not unbathed hippies, yah?”), and fifes for the children to follow her to the Alpine wilderness (very clean, uncluttered) where they will discover their Boy and Girl Scout natures and find that inside every mid twentieth century American is a little Austrian in Leder Hosen.

Julie became our music teacher. “When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything!” Do-re-mi-fa-so-la! A whole generation has Julie to thank for knowing that tea goes with bread and jam.

By the time the Captain returns with his baroness, the children have become Austrian wood fairies and elves teasing traffic. And more foreshadowing. The outrageous Max accompanies, who is looking for new talent for the Salzburg Folk Festival. Bob Dylan need not apply.

A contrast is made between the glittering salons of Vienna and the pastoral, the Baroness suggesting the Captain prefers it in the country, may even be poetic, may be running from memories.

“I do like rich people,” Max says. “I like the way they live. I like the way I live when I’m with them.”

The Captain discovers Rolfe tossing pebbles at Liesl’s window. Embarrassed, cowed, confused, Rolfe sides with the only comeuppance that his witty mind can come up with. “Heil Hitler!” he announces allegiance, aware how it will grate the royal Captain.

“You know I have no political convictions,” says Max who loves rich people. “Can I help it if other people do?”

“Yes!” exclaims the Captain, overcome with consternation at the New World Order growing up around him.

The Baroness attempting to lighten the mood, I would like to be cynical but she is written not to be despotic but flawed and human, and Maria appears with the children in a boat out of which they promptly fall, cups of excitement overflowing at the Captain’s return, welcoming the baroness, the baroness laughing. And we all know if anything it is Baroness Schraeder who will prepare the Captain for his wife, for Maria, smiling graciously in her fire engine danger red dress, discreetly removing herself as the Captain prepares to climb all over Maria for her permitting the children to climb trees, Maria soaking wet nearly yelling just love them, love them all, they want to be loved, the Sound of Music (hark) intruding just as the Captain orders back to the nunnery Maria who had taught the children to sing for the Baroness Schraeder.

Cloaked in a hazy Vaseline glow, inspired, the Captain turns out also to be one who goes to the hills when his heart is lonely, taking up the song. Stunned, all fall silent. Baroness Schraeder’s suspicions begin to be confirmed that wedding bells are ringing but not for her. Not with the Captain falling into the arms of his children then running out to find Julie and apologizing to her.

Man, I want to be cynical and tart about it all but I can’t be. These people are just too damned happy, when they have been so sad.

Now the puppet theater scene where the children in the audience feel they get a real taste of Austrian culture. I remember that blue dress of Julie’s with the wide butterfly sleeves. I hated that dress and was of course destined to wear one like it in a few years. The story of the lonely goat herder is not quite what one would expect from a novitiate, but Julie is, as she earlier announced, preparing the Captain for his new bride. Despite fluttering eyelashes and the sexual super and subtext, it is a scene for the kiddies. My seven year old rewinds and plays it over and over.

“My dear is there anything you can’t do?” inquires Schraeder of Maria in her politest kitty tone. The citified Viennese have lost their way and haven’t the pure hearts of the country Austrian.

Maria entices the Captain to play guitar, and he does, much to the dismay Schraeder. “Why didn’t you tell me to bring along my harmonica?” she quips.

Clean and bright Edelweiss, blooming and growing, bless my homeland forever. “Bless my homeland forever,” the Captain sings to Maria, his home.

“The Von Trapp family singers,” Max dubs them, having found his new-found talent, a singing group that will be the talk of the Salzburg Folk Festival.

Thrilled beyond words, Baroness Schraeder announces a need for a party.

The doors of the forbidden golden ball room flung open, it resounds with music, people swirling in waltzes, the elegant Baroness receiving visitors at the Captain’s side, heir apparent. But a guest is appalled by the display of the Austrian flag in the hallway. There will be no return to the world that was.

Outside on the patio, Julie teaches the children the steps of an old Austrian (Hollywood) folk dance. This is the version of Cinderella where she doesn’t quite make it into the ballroom, the Prince instead leaving the company of his peers to join her. He breaks in on the dance. They, of course, perform perfectly together, rooted in the folk ways of their country which bind them. She puts out her hand to follow him. Tension. The children have disappeared. Maria and the Captain gaze into each other’s eyes. The children return. “Your face is all red.” Ah, Maria, the shame of it! “What a lovely couple you make,” the baroness admits. Maria flees.

The children, under Maria’s tutelage, sing the cuckoo clock good night song. So long farewell. Auf weidersehn good-bye. Max declares Maria must stay for dinner. Baroness Schraeder at last makes the move to protect her territory, aware it is now or never. The blond ice queen informs Maria that she is in love with the Captain and the Captain believes he is in love with her, then slinks downstairs in her sun-gold dress. (The 50s blond goddess was still having it out with the new more natural beauty Hollywood was swinging toward, but would soon lose her apartment in New York and move to Green Acres.) We have only seen Maria’s bedroom twice–the night she arrived, and now again when she leaves in a terrified panic, taking cover in her old sackcloth. The baroness attempts to take Maria’s place with the children. But can’t play ball. “Boarding school,” she says to Max, who wants the children to rehearse, but the children are unable to sing without Maria. The hills are no longer alive with the Sound of Music. The Captain announces his intention to marry Baroness Schraeder. As the children kiss her reluctantly, Max and Ms. Baroness exchange glances (he keeps her honest). Then the children go to the abbey to look for Maria. “Our abbey is not to be used as an escape,” Maria is told by her Mother Superior. “I can’t face him again,” Maria pleads. And as my son squishes marshmallows on his face, Mother Superior turns to sing that Maria should climb every mountain and ford every stream, follow every rainbow until she finds her dream, Maria standing within a pyramid of light.

Meanwhile back at the mansion, the Captain cordially attempts to find out why the children were late for dinner. Maria returns but this time not in sackcloth. “You left without saying goodbye, even to the children,” Captain says. The screenwriters permit Maria to return on her own rather than being pursued. Permit the Captain to break it off with the Baroness while permitting her also to break off in turn, giving him leave to go to Maria, allowing her to be a character more complex than Snow White’s evil queen mother. One senses that she did care for the Captain who spares no time casually sauntering across the garden toward Maria who wears again the blue dress. In the gazebo where Liesl had danced with Rolfe, Maria sings as to how in her wicked horrible youth she must have done something good to deserve this. The Captain nuzzles her hair and says he fell in love with her the moment she sat on the pinecone. She fell in love with him first, when he blew the whistle. There’s something not right about the scene. I’ve never believed either of them. It doesn’t matter. It couldn’t be any other way. And that’s weird.

Weddings were once really big events in the movies. Maria released from the near risk of the self-imposed prison of the Sisterhood, literally advancing beyond bars into the cathedral, approaching the Captain in a display of virginal white that seems intended to break the Hollywood wedding bank, the last of the capital M movie marriages, makes for an oddly anti-climactic moment, peculiar in its brevity. Unattended, Maria gives herself away, which creates a sense of markedly different. The guests are the world for whom the principles serve as stand-ins. The processional is all. An end tied up in a beginning. One feels the House of Hapsburg receding into the mist.

Indeed. The Captain and Mrs. Von Trapp return from their honeymoon trip (despite the wedding having belonged to the world, one has a hard time imagining bride and groom leaving the country) to find that the Captain is expected to take his place in the New Order, the Third Reich. “We make it our business to know everything about everything,” Rolfe says, reminding us that there was once a time when the American public thought it dangerously fascist to collect and hold data on the citizenry (at least in principle, if not in fact). Maria probably one of the first successful Hollywood stepmothers (replacing empty air makes one not much of a threat), dressed now in a mature suit with a lower cut neck, the new Empress, sings to Liesl, who’s heartbroken over Rolfe, that when you truly love your old ideas of life go away, grow dim, you are someone’s wife and belong to him. Oh well. But there’s no time to think about Maria’s conversion to this new altar of love, they must escape immediately. The evil butler watches with satisfaction from the window of the mansion, the evident heir, as the Von Trapps are caught trying to sneak off in the dark. “I had the impression the contents of telegrams were private, at least in the Austria I knew,” the Captain says, reminding us that there was once a time when the American public thought it dangerously fascist to collect and hold data on the citizenry.

I was ambivalent about the chemistry between Andrews and Plummer as a child and still am, but had it been more intense their relationship would have likely overshadowed the children so was perhaps the right temperature. This is, after all, the ultimate in family films. I would love to be cynical about it, to unravel its feel-good fabric until it stands threadbare, but the writers have been a little too deft, Andrews was too successful a clown, Plummer was too successfully adult in his letting the clown come or go, not chasing her down with boyish histrionics. Andrews and Plummer didn’t so much as make chemistry with each other as with the screen, a great big screen, the anonymous other, and because of this the viewer (at least a viewer who’s the least bit willing) is never alienated from them. Maybe that’s a reason the movie has become so popular as a kind of performance, interactive fest.

However, I can’t let pass the Von Trapp performance at the Salzburg Festival, backed by that extraordinary theater overseen by Nazi authority in an archaic setting that is the ghost of Roman coliseums and out-of-control empires. I can’t let pass when the Austrian audience all joins in singing, “Bless my homeland forever” and one is given the impression that the last thing the Austrians wanted was a Hitler and the Third Reich.

Because Austria’s Germans, after WWI, became less contemptuous of Germany’s Germans, and provided quite a dedicated following for National Socialism following the 1938 Anschluss. I read that though they were only eight percent of the Third Reich’s population, the Austrians comprised fourteen percent of the SS and “forty percent of Nazi personnel involved in genocide”, and that attacks on Jews by Viennese mobs, following the Anschluss, is “common knowledge”.

What is peculiar also is the song “Edelweiss” which is the one performed at the Salzburg festival in the movie, all the audience joining in as a supposed protest against the Anschluss. Peculiar to me for the Anschluss became known as the “flower war” as ” flowers and arms outstretched in the Nazi salute greeted the Whrmacht as they drove toward Vienna.”

What gives?

I read a class lesson that uses “The Sound of Music” as a base for learning history. It discusses the Edelweiss, that it was the national emblem for Austria, states the flower was adopted by the Nazis into their uniform after the Anschluss, and asks what “effect” this would have on the Austrians. I have the feeling the students are supposed to report this would be devastating to the Austrians as nothing is mentioned in the lesson about the “Flower War” and the receptivity of the Austrians to Hitler (who was anti-Hapsburg by the way) and his policies.

Why was Austria portrayed in the screenplay as it was for an audience barely a generation removed from the truth? And Richard Rogers, who was Jewish, and the German-American Oscar Hammerstein II, both who would certainly have been aware of the “Flower War”, what was their intention with “Edelweiss”? Was the song meant to be redemptive, concilliatory, an accusation, or all of these things?

Finally, the Von Trapps hide from the Nazis at the convent. Rolfe discovers them. Plummer faces off with him. “You’re only a boy, you don’t really belong to them, come away with us You’ll never be one of them…” Was it Wise or Plummer who shifted gears from paternal reassurance to fraternal contempt that must ring like fatherly derision in Rolfe’s ears. “You’ll never be one of them.” A nearly fatal error on the part of the Captain, both military and personal, which casts Rolfe’s deciding vote with the Nazis. Senseless as the goose that laid the golden eggs, that screamed against Jack every moment he was rescuing her, Rolfe alerts the Nazis to the presence of the Von Trapps in the church cemetery where the Trapps must certainly have generations interred. Still, the Von Trapps manage to escape and last we see them are climbing every mountain, father leading family out of Austria to the U.S.A. (Vermont’s just over that hill), mother shepherding behind.

I like the film. I can’t help but like the film as I’m vastly amused by Andrews and Plummer in it. But it’s the film’s politics that increasingly occupy my mind as I watch, and continue to occupy me afterward. What they did not reveal about Austria in the 40s, what they couldn’t help but reveal about America in the 60s, and what they infer about the America now.

THE BLOB ATTACKS! Seriously, it does. Look around you, it’s everywhere. That bright light falling from heaven, the meteor that ruptures and spills out amorphic ooze that goes around gobbling up people? Considering the beliefs of the directors and producers of “The Blob”, it’s a safe bet it’s the fallen light of Lucifer deluding and absorbing humanity. Maybe not so confessed but I’d be seriously surprised if it wasn’t the quality inspiriation behind this Sci-Fi, horror flick that, despite poor acting, effects, script and lighting (no, I was never impressed), scared the begeezuz out of untold numbers of children. But for those not destined to be part of the Choice 144,000 reserved for the Rapture, the BLOB may instead remind of the tenacious growth of the ultra-conservative Dominionists and Neo-Dispensationalists, the absorption of millions into their faithful ranks, and their seeming bottomless pits of wrath and hunger.

Actually, there is no consensus among Dispensationalists on whether the 144,000 mentioned in Revelation 14 refers to those raptured, or to saints who are preserved and go around preaching the gospel after the rapture, or if they are raptured and immediately descend again with Christ, or if they are raptured and then immediately thereafter all other believers are raptured. Also, there are many different brands of dispensationalist and what makes a person a neo-dispensationalist or a progressive dispensationalist or this or that dispensationalist is unclear to me and from what I read seems sketchy to many who should be in the know. Rapture terminology is not even found in Revelation and didn’t appear until 1830 when a young Scottish girl, during an illness, had ecstatic visions in which she perceived Christ coming not once but twice. Or maybe not. Maybe instead it was a preacher in 1832 who originated the notion of the rapture. Somewhere around then, a charismatic revival followed one or the other with its outpouring of charismatic gifts which proved to individuals the end was near. Maybe John Darby picked up on this new doctrine and spread the word on the rapturous secret removal of the church or maybe it was first someone else followed by John Darby. But a man named Cyrus Scofield (not a theologian) eventually put together the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), an end times training kit that followed Darby’s teachings with notes on dispensations and prophecy for the layman. After Scofield’s death, his pupil, Lewis Sperry Chafer (not a theologian), went about spreading the word and founded the Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924 which, along with the Moody Institute in Chicago, became a key dispenser of dispensational theology.

The Rapture? It is said that Ms. MacPherson, the ill girl who had the ecstatic visions had also a friend who shared in her interests. Together they would in states of ecstasy appear as statues barely touching the ground, nearly levitating, such levitation known as the “rapture”. In Revelation, in the Greek, the whisking away is instead harpazo which connotes a powerful seizing, carrying away of something.

Much like the blob, Rapture theology morphed and grew and morphed and grew so that now it is fairly synonymous with Xtian fundamentalism and evangelism and conservative Xtianity in general. Never mind what the theologians believe in their colleges. It’s what the layman believes that’s important here, and I imagine one would be hard pressed to find an American layman Xtian who hasn’t been influenced in some way by Apostolic pentacostal thought (baptizing in the name of Jesus rather than the Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and the rapture theology of evangelicals and fundamentalists. It’s been heavily mainstreamed since the 1970s.

Maybe some visitors remember Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” (1970). His book was a prime vehicle of Rapture thought in the 70s and was popular with the Xtian student group that went around capturing high schoolers through veiled means. Young Life. I know I was a naive thing when invited to a Young Life meeting which was presented to me as just some kind of get-together with friends. I was 15 it was the beginning of the school year and I’d never heard of Young Life. Someone played guitar. They sang Bob Denver songs and Kumbaya. I realized immediately that I’d been duped, that the group had an agenda and the agenda was Christ, but a friend promised boys and the prospect of romance was a powerful incentive to go anywhere and my friend seemed to have a great time. I went to maybe three meetings but about the only boy worth anything who kept showing up was an ex boyfriend from when I was 14 who I had dropped and who had not only become quite Xtian (a surprise, he’d not been when we were together), he was also with someone else, and I wasn’t interested in him and I wasn’t interested in anyone else who showed up so I stopped going because it felt weird, and it felt weird being around him, and everyone was always quite normal big happy and singing and stuff and this became very stressful to me after a while as there was nowhere for my angsty self to fit in. So, as angst was a foreign element that just seemed perplexing to all else, and as there were no boys to be had (more precisely, no boys with angst and alcohol or drugs) I stopped going. But what Young Life did do was put “The Late Great Planet Earth” in my hands because I saw everyone else reading it and I wondered what it was about.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature provides a somewhat disarming biography of Lindsey.

Hal Lindsey, formerly a tugboat captain in New Orleans, attended the Dallas Theological Seminary, the heart of American Dispensationalist apocalyptic inquiry, where he studied with John F. Walvoord, author of the 1974 best-seller Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis. After touring extensively with the Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelic ministry, Lindsey established Christian Associates, a prophetic ministry based in California. Deriving his authority from apocalyptic scripture alone, he has spoken on an impending third world war (as Armageddon) to U.S. military intelligence committees, the American Air War College (an Air Force strategic training center), the U.S. State Department, and the Pentagon itself.

Lindsey’s most influential book, The Late Great Planet Earth (1971), proved immensely popular in the troubled early 1970s. Its publishers claim that it sold over 28 million copies; it was made into a documentary film in 1978, narrated by Orson Welles. The importance of Lindsey’s writing lies in his reshaping and popularizing the elementary apocalyptic scenario into a third world war involving nuclear weapons and a Russian invasion of the Middle East.

Hal Lindsey has a website, with cartoons! Like this one. Which is not satire. And this one. And this one in which all the Republicans are carried off by the Rapture.

But back to THE BLOB!

THE BLOB was directed by two individuals although only one is credited. The credited individual is Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. who in 2004 died in an automobile accident in Jordan where he had been working on the building of a theme park called the Jordanian Experience. Yeaworth was born in Berlin in 1926 but was in Pennsylvania by the age of 10. The son of an ordained minister, in 1952 he founded Good News Productions and began his career of making films for the Christian market. He also headed the Pennsylvani company, Valley Forge Films, which produced noncommercial short subjects on religious themes. Yeaworth had already directed the morality flick “The Flaming Teen-Age” (1956) when Jack Harris, producer of “The Blob” invited Yeaworth to direct it. “4D Man (1959)”, “Dinosaurus!” (1960) followed but didn’t do as well, and Yeaworth returned to Valley Forge Films. In the 60s he directed the Christin comedy “The Gospel Blimp” and “Way Out”, a horrors of heroin addiction film with an “I found Jesus” ending. His mini-bio at IMDB gives his later religious films as a return to his first love, and he apparently made some films with Billy Graham, then later worked on World’s Fair and theme park pavilion design and production.

Jack Harris was a native of Pennsylvania who linked up with the movie ministry of Forge Fillm Studios and is connected also with “4D Man”, “Dionsaurus” and “The Eyes of Laura Mars”. He also directed and wrote “The Unkissed Bride” (1966), a comedy in which a couple’s honeymoon is disrupted by the groom’s childhood obsession with Mother Goose. When the groom is unable to consummate the marraige they go to a psychiatrist where LSD is used as treatment. (Where in the hell is a copy of this film? I’d love to see it!!)

Finally, to our current friend of The Rapture, an uncredited director of “The Blob”, who was also associate producer, was a Russell S. Doughten Jr. He has in his list of credits: “The Hostage” (1967 producer, director), “Fever Heat” (1969 producer, director), “A Thief in the Night” (1972, executive producer, story), “Happiness is…” (1975, writer, director), “All the King’s Horses” (1977, producer, writer), “Sammy” (1977, director), “A Distant Thunder” (1978, executive producer, screenplay, story), “Image of the Beast” (1980, executive producer, writer), “Home Safe” (1981, writer), “The Prodigal Planet” (1983, executive producer, screenplay, story), and “A Stranger in the Forest” (1988, executive producer).

Doughten, raised in Iowa, was in the Navy during WWII, studied at Drake University and then the Yale Graduate School of Drama. He must have been interested in the movie ministry because I read he then looked for work among companies that made religious films and was thus he was invited to join Yeaworth’s Good News Productions in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania.

Eventually Doughten returned to Iowa where he founded Heartland Productions and Mark IV Pictures and produced dozens of Christian movies, including the “end of day” series that is so popular and for which the youth of America had been primed by “The Late Great Planet Earth”. Heartland and Mark IV closing shop in the 1990s, Russ Doughten Films was formed. At the website, one can purchase an “End Times Prophecy Chart” for only $11.99, and “A Tribulation Map” tract “written as a guide for unbelievers who miss the rapture. (Don’t miss out on that one!)

Doughten’s “A Thief in the Night” is a rapture film in which a woman wakes up to find millions have mysteriously disappeared, followed by earth-shaking events. This woman, Patty, reappears in “A Distant Thunder”, a fugitive from evil, finally captured by UNITE forces (United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency). “The Image of the Beast” is the third film in the series, in which the anti-Christ establishes a one world government. The 4th in the series is “The Prodigal Planet”, in which a man escapes from UNITE Detention Center and “leads an expedition across the United States with a secret that could scuttle that evil system and bring hope to the surviving believers.”

Doughten appears in all his films as a survivalist preacher, The Reverend Turner, who doesn’t fully believe in the bible but has a chart of the End Times.

Rev. Turner is doomed. He dies in the first movie. Then he comes back and spends the entire series obsessing alternately over his personal tribulation chart and the fact that he’s still around, post-rapture. Turner was a Christian-in-name-only, you see, and he misled all of his parishioners. Because of his this, and the fact that he’d heard the gospel message and rejected it, God will not have him. No matter how much Turner learns and despairs, he is cut off from God’s grace, and boy are you going to hear about it.

Source: http://www.jesus21.com/content/movies/rapture2.html

I read that Patty screams a lot. With a whine. She also, poor dear, buys the farm in the 1981 “Image of the Beast”, a film which opens with her shrieking over the beheaded body of another character who has been doomed not to continue with the contination of the series. She is strapped into a guillotine by the forces of the anti-Christ. An earthquake happens. Her persecutors run. Terrified, Patty pleads to receive the mark of the beast but she has been abandoned in the parking lot where she still lies strapped in the guillotine. She attempts to free herself, but…bye-bye Patty. Main character focus in the series then switches over to bad ass David Michaels who goes about wooing the ladies and sharing the gospel with them, but not sleeping with them.

Dan Raeburn, in his analysis of Jack Chick’s comic books in The Imp, correctly identifies a deep sexual undercurrent to much of the “witnessing” that takes place. While neither Image of the Beast or The Prodigal Planet is quite as blatant as Chick’s work, it’s fitting to see David as a cinematic analog to Chick’s “Crusaders” team of soul-winning studs.

Source: http://www.jesus21.com/content/movies/rapture2.html

I’m going to have to take Jesus21’s word on all this because I’ve not seen any of these movies. Nor do I think I’m up to renting and viewing them. Though I may decide eventually it’s a must if they’ve been such a powerful influence among fundamentalist and evangelical Xtians.

Does Patty make it to heaven or does her lack of faith under the shining guillotine’s blade, her plea to receive the mark, seal her as destined to eternal hell. Had Patty not said, “I’ll do it!” would her head have rolled?

Bloody, nasty stuff! Do they show this to all Fundie and evangelical Xtian teens? “Here, role models!” I much prefer the “Rapture” that I saw on television when I was 15, vintage 1965, starring Dean Stockwell as a fugitive with whom a teenager (Patricia Gozzi), whose only previous experience with men is a scarecrow, falls in love. He was in love with the maid but Patricia runs the maid off. Dean and Patricia get together and run off to Paris to set up household together. Tragedy ensues. I sobbed for years.

Patricia Gozzi was a fine actress and Dean Stockwell is a great actor and the story was great and the cinematography was rich and the musical score was wonderful, but how many people have seen “Rapture” as opposed to Doughtsn’s films?

The first Christian filmmaker to turn to prophecy theology was Donald Thompson. Thompson’s four prophecy films spin contemporary action-adventure stories around the apocalyptic events that many evangelicals believe are predicted in the Bible. Although it was never released in conventional theaters, the first film in Thompson’s series, A Thief in the Night, “has been translated into three foreign languages, subtitled in countless others, and its international distribution continues strongly…six or seven hundred prints now circulate, in addition to videocassettes.” Randall Balmer explains that,

“In the United States, where distribution is limited to church groups, camps, youth organizations, and the like, it is difficult to quantify the number of people who have seen the film. When I pressed Russell Doughten [the film’s co-producer] for a figure, he reluctantly estimated that one hundred million people had seen A Thief in the Night in the United States, a figure, he hastened to add, that would include those who had seen it more than once. Even if you slash that number in half to account for hyperbole, fifty million is still a staggering figure, a viewership that would be the envy of many Hollywood producers. ”

Source: Excerpt from: Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Yeah, no kidding! 50,000,000 people interested in a rapture movie that leaves you with hell and antichrist and guillotines and bad acting and and bad production values and sex as tease and horrendous non-plots and no one interested in a rapture where a confused, emotionally-stunted, Patricia Gozzi and confused, fugitive Dean Stockwell make love in the fields and run off to Paris and try to build a life in a dirty tenament and she loses their money in the gutter and you say, oh no, please, Patricia, don’t leave Paris and go back home but she does and he follows her and…sigh…like I said, I sobbed for years.

Doughten paved the way for the mega-selling “Left Behind” series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins who credit Doughten as a primary influence.

Sigh.

I don’t know if this is coincidental. Like the weather balloon, “Rover”, that always prevents Patrick McGoohan, “The Prisoner”, from escaping the parnoia-inducing village in which he finds himself, early shots of the blob are a modified weather balloon. McGoohan says the weather balloon was a stand-in for an idea that didn’t work. But how many people immediately think of weather balloons as cold war, paranoia-ville, people-eaters? No, the balloon doesn’t eat Patrick McGoohan but in a sense that is it’s function, to force his personality and will to be consumed with terror so that he will become a sort of Clockwork Orange.

Some Sources:
http://www.imdb.com
http://www.blogofdeath.com/archives/001117.html
http://irvin-yeaworth.biography.ms/
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?id=3199
http://www.explore-religion.com/religion/R/Russell_S._Doughten.html
http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/20century/topic_3/crystal.htm
http://www.timlahaye.com/about_ministry/index.php3?p=bio&section=Biography

Several times last week I had an almost, not-quite exchange with laizzes-faire “well, this is unacceptable so certainly it will be taken care of blitheness”, variation of a too nonchalant “this too shall pass” which left me disoriented, sapped of strength, as if the words were an invisible red-and-white striped straw that had unexpectedly found vein, tapped, then breezed along. My outrage over the murderous sadism of naked bodies suspended from and dying on Terror War chains, or the routine stripping of stateside prisoners for purposes of police state humiliation and dehumanization distanced with words of a tourist casual aloofness. I was in horror of the routine humiliation of real people with names and lives, easily imagining my flesh and person in their place, when around the corner strolls a mind that touches my own and I find myself in a place where velvet crowd-control ropes direct the traffic through medieval death dungeons, the victims are historical artifacts that make the price of the ticket, the chained a perpetual fact of life, the essential oddity that makes the attraction, but quickly and ultimately a prison cell is small and boring so move along. The lack of interest embraces and seems to want to win me over to its view and carry me with it. I become detached and disoriented. So this then has no meaning? Belongs to a world of shadowy “other” that has no relation to the tourist basking in the sun. They go to find something to eat and I am left in a state of slight, mute shock. Hollowed.

It’s been a long time since I read “Catch 22″. Just thinking of it now I realize that we probably no longer have the novel. A disintegrating paperback I’ve not seen around in a long time, which means it must have fallen apart and turned landfill sometime between then and now. Had the paperback already when I was 18 or 19, but I’d not read it before I went to see the movie, “Catch 22″.

The movie was one of those special college shows. The sound was muffled. About all that I remember is the cinemotography and lighting. It seemed I’d climbed into someone else’s mind and was living their world.

And I remember two scenes from that once and only viewing of the film. The old Italian man. Did he say something about the sun being different in the Mediterranean? I’ve read this so many times elsewhere, witnessed it in photos, I don’t recollect if the old man had said this or I’ve come to attach this knowledge to this scene (though the quality of sun is different everywhere). But I recollect him talking about time, about what lasts and what doesn’t. In the book, he questions what is a country, pointing out the artificial nature of national boundaries. I don’t remember all that he said in the movie, but he shocked the soldier with whom he was speaking, telling him that America would one die, which hadn’t occurred to the GI. I’m going purely on memory here, and the movie is different from the book. He spoke against nationalism and yet something about parts of his reasoning seemed steeped through with nationalism (to me) and I felt off kilter. Perhaps “all is vanity” was the primary theme. The memory isn’t clear, only that I felt a great hostile vacuum expanding as he spoke. There is a way of approaching the vanity of the human which is hostile and a way which is compassionate. The vacuum overwhelmed and I began to drown. At least that is what I remember feeling, the sun on the movie screen weakening the thin and watery images, muffled voices disintegrating, the ragged film stock chopping up words, breaking thoughts. I started to feel physically ill.

The light. Something about the light was too much.

Then the beach scene. The screen was full with Hollywood, familiar faces, but the film was breaking them up too, splintering them, making them into a lifetime of someone else’s real memories piled up over the years, experienced in the piecemeal hash of dream review. I felt like I was in a trance. I don’t know if this is how it happens but I remember a pier, a man standing on the end, Paula Prentiss and Arkin and others wandering away, perhaps down the beach. The plane with McWatt flying it and he’s coming in to buzz the others, which he gets a kick out of doing. The man on the end of the pier is waving (Kid Sampson in the book). The plane comes in too low and off in the distance the propeller strikes the man on the pier and slices him in half. Paula screams. McWatt’s plane (we are not shown McWatt flying it I don’t believe) turns, flies high, plunges down into the ocean, McWatt killing himself. At least that is how I remember it.

And the light. The light. Which was now terrifying.

I didn’t know if I was sick already and had just begun to feel it while watching the film. But I was overcome and unable to tolerate the film anymore, had to get out of there. I felt as if I’d received a terrible shock and the world had split apart at the seams with screaming hell pouring out of its core. I wasn’t the only one leaving as my husband was with me, and I felt terribly out of place as I made my way up the aisle, which was difficult. I was struggling not to pass out. The faces in the auditorium were bright with the light reflected off the screen, all caught up in the movie, and it felt odd having to turn my back on the film. I wanted to forget. The cheapness of life. Alienation. A person as hunk of flesh that when ruptured revealed only meat, was already only meat animated by futile sense of self in which no one else participated, all selves orbiting their own heart-suns until the heart stops and the sun simultaneously darkens and all the worlds that were in one perish in the freezing cold. I wondered why I was the only one who had to leave. And the film followed. The old Italian. The sun. The watery images. Kid Sampson waving one second and sawn in two the next.

I felt weak, as if I was missing something that should have been able to keep me in my seat with the others. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t stomach it. None of the ideas explored in the black comedy were new to me, but for some reason I’d not been able to confine this particular film to fiction, to movie magic. I was thinking the movie wasn’t even that good. Disjointed. But the disjointedness, the light had amplified the alienation.

As it turned out, I was physically ill. Quite sick. But that night and the following days I had a difficult time sorting out the physical from the emotional and mental shock I’d gotten in the theater. There is illness that can make one more susceptible, marrow deep.

It was a number of years before I could bring myself to read the book. I’d pick it up and examine it. Joseph Heller. Catch 22. A slim book with yellowed pages brown at the edges and the paper brittling. The glue of the binding brittled and no longer holding.

Books don’t remain static for me, changing sometimes as I change. I might pick it up today and reading it would be a new experience.

So, last week, feeling somewhat disjointed from lots of Benadryl fighting a particularly bad week of allergies, I was thinking of the devastating weaponry of humiliation and dehumanization and of the brand of “this too shall pass” that casually distances and makes all meaningless and I thought of “Catch 22″ and the old man and the futile vacuum and of the hell of Kid Sampson evaporating into no meaning whatsoever. It’s the kind of hell I taste singeing the edges when I collide with commodity culture.

Not that my life is bursting at the seams with meaning. But commodity culture is pretty remote from it.

Considering my intense reaction to the light, I find it interesting to read that the DVD release has Nichols talking about the cinematographer, how Watkins insistence on the perfect natural light meant sometimes there was only shooting for two hours a day.

On Monday Son went to see the new Grossology exhibit at the Natural History Museum. He loves the Natural History Museum. When he was five he liked the Science Museum though confused by the stuffed animals on exhibit. I knew the question would come sooner or later as he stood and stared. Why did they do that to the animal? At the Natural History Museum the exhibit before this one was on Frogs. He loves frogs. They had as part of the exhibit a display to do with a dissected frog. Son came home and said he was not going back to the museum until the dissected frog was gone. “Why did they do that to the frog?” So he went back after the Frog exhibit was gone and before the new exhibit opened. And then was all eager for the new exhibit to open. As soon as his dad was up Monday morning, Son was sayng, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” The exhibit is billed as a gross delight for kids dealing with the human body. Son got there and saw giant steroided-out Mad Magazine constructions of intestines and stuff and said it was gross and promptly wanted to leave and said he wasn’t going back until that exhibit was gone. He wasn’t amused.

Maybe because everything is already big to my son. Amplified. And the whole world is alive and talking. He’s like me when I was his age. Like I still am, actually. Other children can look at water coming out the faucet into the sink and wonder where it comes from, what’s the conduit. My son looks and sees water alive and talks to it and think it’s talking. He used to ask what is the water feeling.

Intestines on steroids were too much.

I later thought of Yossarian and the soldier with the intestines spilling out of his body.

I ought to read the book again. Perhaps I should see the film again. But I should read the book again. I wonder if any kids in high school now are reading “Catch 22″ for class, are thinking about the war being fought by the military professionals and hawks as different from the war fought by Yossarian, who pragmatically is simply interested in living, the legalized insanity of war driving him into a state of paranoia where Nately’s “whore” suddenly appears everywhere trying to kill him after he delivers the message to her of Nately’s death.

What are they teaching kids in school today about war?

In my email:

Proposed Legislation Would Put an End to the Slaughter of Buffalo Crossing
Yellowstone’s Borders

In a bold effort to end the senseless slaughter of America’s last wild and genetically pure buffalo, U.S. Reps. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Charles Bass (R-NH) introduced legislation on May 18th to protect the Yellowstone herd. The Yellowstone Buffalo Preservation Act (H.R. 2428) would end years of seasonal hazing, capture, and killing of buffalo in and around Yellowstone National Park by federal and state agencies until specific, common sense conditions are met.

Please write a letter to your representative, http://www.firstgov.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml, asking him or her to cosponsor H.R. 2428.

More information can be found here.

In the opening of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Depp’s hellhound train passing a herd of bison, he watches in disoriented amazement as all fly to thrust rifles out the windows and gun down the bison with gluttonous, whooping glee.

It’s impossible to accurately estimate the number of buffalo populating the area west of the Mississippi at the close of the Civil War, but it’s believed there were millions and perhaps tens of millions.

In 1871, Colonel R. I. Dodge traveled along the Arkansas River through an immense herd of American bison (Bison bison). Dodge estimated that the herd was at least 25 miles across and after consulting with hunters and other travelers, concluded that it must have been at least 50 miles long.

Source: Bisoncenter.com

Frank H. Mayer, who had lived a Buffalo Runner’s life, later had recorded via Charles Roth:

I’m often asked now what my feeling is toward myself that I helped wipe out a noble American animal by being a sort of juvenile delinquent with a high-power rifle. I always am frank in answering. I always say I am neither proud nor ashamed. At the time it seemed a proper thing to do. Looked at from a distance, however, I’m not so sure. The slaughter was perhaps a shameless, needless thing. But it was also an inevitable thing, an historical necessity.

What I mean by that is this: the buffalo served his mission, fulfilled his destiny in the history of the Indian, by furnishing him everything he needed — food, clothing, a home, traditions, even a theology. But the buffalo didn’t fit in so well with the white man’s encroaching civilization — he didn’t fit at all, in fact. He could not be controlled or domesticated. He couldn’t be corralled behind wire fences. He was a misfit. So he had to go.

And there was another reason, not so commonly known. You will understand it better when I tell you that the buffalo was hunted and killed with the connivance, yes, the cooperation, of the Government itself. That this will be denied I have little doubt. As I put my words down I weigh them.

Don’t understand that any official action was taken in Washington and directives sent out to kill all the buff on the plains. Nothing like that happened. What did happen was that army officers in charge of plains operations encouraged the slaughter of buffalo in every possible way. Part of this encouragement was of a practical nature that we runners appreciated. It consisted of ammunition, free ammunition, all you could use, all you wanted, more than you needed. All you had to do to get it was apply at any frontier army post and say you were short of ammunition, and plenty would be given you. I received thousands of rounds this way. It was in .45-70 caliber, but we broke it up, remelted the lead, and some runners used government powder. I didn’t. I was a stickler for the best, and used imported English powder which I will be describing to you in a little while. I had no trouble trading my government powder for things I wanted — tobacco, bacon, flour, and other things.

Maybe you are wondering at the theory behind this. Let me tell you. I think I won’t: I will let a high ranking officer in the plains service do it for me. One afternoon I was visiting this man in his quarters. The object of my visit you have guessed: free ammunition. I got it. Afterward we smoked and talked. He said to me:

“Mayer, there’s no two ways about it: either the buffalo or the Indian must go. Only when the Indian becomes absolutely dependent on us for his every need, will we be able to handle him. He’s too independent with the buffalo. But if we kill the buffalo we conquer the Indian. It seems a more humane thing to kill the buffalo than the Indian, so the buffalo must go,” he concluded.

It wasn’t long after I got into the game that I began to realize that the end for the buffalo was in sight. I resolved to get my share. I went into the business right. I invested every cent I owned in an outfit. I have no apologies for my participation in the slaughter. I hope that answers the question.

By 1880 there were only a few hundred remaining.

In 1902 there were 50 native bison conserved at Yellowstone. Now there are about 4000.

I am drinking the worst coffee in the world. That came out of my very own French press. Hours ago. It was this bad hours ago. It was this bad when fresh. Tasted like the proverbial 20 year old Converse sneakers that climbed up on the counter and said look I’ve got holes in my soles I really am a pot, try me. What is this, certainly not coffee, I thought. But it was made out of the same beans as any other time so I drank it, because it should have tasted the same. Same beans, should be same taste. Every time I picked up my cup and had a sip, same “Eeeeeewwwww gross” reaction on my part and still I drank the nastiness. I woke up a couple of hours after bedding down (not unusual for me) and came in and poured myself a little of what was left and the pucker up eeewww gross reaction was still there, it was still as bad, it was never going to transform into coffee. I don’t know what it is. And I suppose it says something about me that today I stubbornly stuck with drinking the nasty brew when I should have tossed it. And am only now brewing a fresh pot, like, “Ok, you had your full day in which to get into shape and you didn’t so out you go.”

While I’m sitting here with the nasty rotted sneaker taste of that coffee lingering in my mouth some fifteen minutes after my last sip of it, I’m thinking how everyone is crawling all over Rove and how it seems like I should be, really should be interested in this whole Rove thing. I should be using his effigy as a trampoline. “Hey, look how high I can jump!” Should be bounding, should be touching the ceiling. Except, I dunno, I figure with someone like Rove, he may look like he’s down for the count and I’d end up whacking my head good on the ceiling, coming down in a passed-out crumple and waking up to find the effigy gone. Like somehow one of those anti-murder mysteries, the kind where Jane Fonda goes to bed with someone and wakes up and they’re lying dead by her side? Only instead Jane had done the guy in via some lethal means that is too much trouble for me to figure out and she passes out and wakes up and wanders into the kitchen to find the guy making flippin’ pancakes.

Not that I believe Rove will squeegie his way through this mess. I haven’t even given it enough serious thought to consider if he may.

Or might.

To me it’s bad Roman theatrics that briefly mistakes itself for Greek tragedy, goes to the oracle and the oracle simply says go away, don’t bother me.

Because that’s what my oracular innards keep telling me. They said it the first time, “Go away,” and I every so often go back and knock on the door and say, “Hey?” and again I get the turned-up nose, go away, quit bothering me. And kind of taking their cue, Rove has wandered by with my slinging nary a line in his direction.

Making my coffee just now, taking out the bag of beans, grinding, dumping them in the French Press, I did a little prayer, “Please, be good this time and don’t come out tasting like sneakers”.

I’m afraid that when it’s done brewing, I’ll take a sip and find myself again going Eeewww gross.

And from now on all my pots of coffee will taste like, “Eeeewwww gross.”

Am I that much a pessimist?

Ok. Ready? I just poured myself a new cup from the new fresh pot. Even traded out my Marvin the Martian cup for my Tazmanian Devil cup. It’s hot. I take a sniff. I guess it smells better. Maybe. I’m thinking I can’t remember the last time I had a cup of coffee that made my taste buds tingle, don’t know why that is.

Ok, ok. Much better. That tastes like coffee. Like plain old Columbian French Roast.

I suddenly want a really really really good cup of coffee and this isn’t doing it for me.

Something’s up with my computer. When it goes into idle, when I move the mouse the monitor isn’t coming back. It stays black. I have to cut it off and on several times before it will respond. This has been happening the past few days.

People are having all kinds of fun with Rove, tossing him about, and his effigy sits on my shelf wondering why I’m not flinging him about and maybe I’m wondering a little too.

I’m going to take an aspirin for a headache now.

Rove is like a dead man to me, when I think about it. I can muster up a Marilyn-Aphrodite to pursue Tom Delay and mock him. Remember the old Blackglama furm ads? Was it Blackglama? Something like that. “What becomes a legend most?” I keep thinking what road kill would best suit Rove. And I can’t come up with anything and I realize it’s because he’s like a dead man to me. I guess that means he walks through walls and doors. Funny, with Tom Delay, I would look at pics of him and think of the things he was doing and his Achilles heel was positively screaming. “I am an alcoholic with a heap of history kicking my ass to where I am today! You think it’s sitting around a corner waiting to crumple me in the future. Hell, it’s eating me live now!” But Rove? Nothing. Open the can and there’s nothing there. A true demon in that sense. A zero. Which is why he can walk through walls. No hint of a Green Goblin anywhere in his face. Empty. I’d say maybe a tad of spite is observed in his flesh but that too I’m convinced is just part of the robot facade for what is best magically self-programmed to suit the situation.

If I reach really really really really deep I can find Rove in the musical “Oliver” singing “Where is Love?”

MRS. SOWEBERRY(spoken)
Right then, Oliver Twist, your bed’s underneath the counter. You don’t mind sleeping
among coffins I suppose? It don’t much matter whether you do or you don’t cause you can’t sleep
nowhere else!

OLIVER
Where is love?
Does it fall from skies above?
Is it underneath the willow tree
That I’ve been dream of?
Where is she?
Who I close my eyes to see?
Will I ever know the sweet “hello”
That’s only meant for me?
Who can say where she may hide?
Must I travel far and wide?
‘Til I am bedside the someone who
I can mean somethin to …
Where…?
Where is love?

Who can say where…she may hide?
Must I travel…far and wide?
‘Til I am beside…the someone who
I can mean…something to…
Where?
Where is love?

Only it’s not Oliver singing. It’s Rove as Nancy. Breasts bursting at the seams as much as they are able without horrifying the G rated audience. And it’s a very very long time ago, right before Oliver Reed shows up in the middle of the song and beats her skull in and that’s all there’s written for Nancy, Rove has been dragging her around at his heel for the past 50 odd years but no one can see her there because Reed, when he was done bashing her skull, ran her through a meat mincer.

And somehow out of this Rove became Rove. Because he had to deny Nancy. He had to tuck the breasts in. He couldn’t let them hang out and climb up on the table and dance and sing for the boys and let his hair run wild and free. He had to shred the red velvet gown. Bury the cute Victorian boots and corset. He even had to get rid of the shawl, which was the last straw. Because what harm was a shawl. But no, couldn’t keep Nancy’s shawl either.

Thus was born Rove.

It’s all I can muster up for him. The only vague read I can get. It’s like in the movie “Oliver”, and after Oliver Reed kills Nancy you want to see the body, you have to see the body but you’re deprived of that, she moves so completely into ghostdom that there’s nothing but a bag, clothes and a wig, Nancy’s gone, but because there was nothing at all left to mourn that wig hangs around and begins to pick up its own unresolved life. If Oliver Reed hadn’t fallen to his death he would have eventually put on that wig and dress and been forced to play Nancy out, continue strutting her stuff for her. But Oliver Reed fell to his death and somehow all that was left was Rove, neither Nancy nor Oliver Reed acting out Nancy’s ghost. Just Rove.

I haven’t figured it out yet.

Hanford Tap Dancer, Declassified
Digital painting
2005-2006

Original photo from the “Hanford Historical Photo Declassification Project”.

I don’t know anything about this woman and am assuming she is tap dancing, perhaps in a talent contest. Whether she’s concentrating or uncomfortable is difficult to tell. Either she is focused on and straining to push out those beats and has forgotten to smile or she’s not the first act and knew before taking the stage she didn’t have a chance, that it was a senseless exercise , but the show must go on and while it runs her legs begin to feel too long, too naked, too short, too heavy, her feet sweat, her hands sweat, her shoulders chill, they prickle with goosebumps. She’d wanted to be Shirley Temple, Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, but her time is up and she’s on a stage sponsored by the atomic bomb rather than in Hollywood.

Or the photo could have been taken at a wrong moment and a couple seconds in the future she had blasted a hole in the floor with her mighty shoes.

But I doubt it. She reminds of the humiliated, red-head singer in Altman’s “Nashville”, whose slumped shoulders begged the timid removal of her bra during a disastrous performance turned impromptu striptease, which had less to do with her pursuit of stardom and everything to do with submission to the demands of the group of wolves in which she found herself, then rationalizing a fair exchange afterward. Indeed, if I remember correctly, Altman had her dressed in a cape with hood. She was Suleen Gay, played by Gwen Welles, and one of the more heartening moments in film is when she returns home after the failed gig and Wade, played by Robert Doqui, runs off the wolf who’s carted her home, then risks Suleen’s rejection when he tells her she can’t sing and that her only pay will be to be abused and demeaned, her soul ripped to shreds if she continues. Suleen tells Wade that he’s wrong, that she’s been promised she’ll be singing at the Parthenon and stalks off. Left alone on the steps to the building, Wade says to himself, “I don’t know why I stick around. She just makes me so god-damned mad.” And it’s not sad. Wade is a dishwasher who happens to be black and knows the game and Suleen is a white Red Riding Hood and it feels like one of the more hopeful relationships in a film where betrayal is the daily diet.

This photo was numbered 5437. The photo of a group of black dancers was number 5347. They were taken on the same stage, which I know from another photo was the stage of the Hanford Theater. Perhaps they were taken the same night.

There are over 127,000 documents in the Hanford Declassification Project, and over 70,000 images. That means there are about 50,000 print documents. After some searching I don’t believe anything is in there about the radiation survey to which I was subjected in the 4th grade along with my schoolmates, nor have I so far found any pictures concerning it.

Hanford was part of the Manhattan Project, and as Oppenheimer directed the Los Alamos end where the bombs were manufactured, one would think there would be documents in the project concerning Oppenheimer, but a search only shows one document, dated November 1, 1944, and is a paraphrase of an October 1 teletype message sent to him. The document concerns the start-up of a reactor following a communication from Oppenheimer. It is largely illegible and seems to have been scanned without much thought given to legibility.

There are however pictures of dancers and a community going about what seems to be a mundane, daily life in which music played an important part, easing the stress of war.

Certainly music eased the stress of war on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, as well

Originally I had just tinted the image. In the Winter of 2006 my husband had the pleasure of recording a world-renowned koto player of an age to have experienced WWII. While he was recording her, I pulled out this image, decided to paint it, and added the koto player.

A Little Cheesecake with that A-Bomb, Declassified
2005
Tinted photo
Film poster held by Jean Nelson, from the “Hanford Historical Photo Declassification Project”. The original is black-and-white.

Don’t miss this vital film! “You can beat the A-bomb.” Free showings. Columbia High School, Feb. 19 thru 22. Get tickets for yourself and family from your supervisor today.

That’s what the promo reads. The woman smiling makes one feel hopeful about the bomb, and seems the movie says there’s good reason to be hopeful according to a review at PicPal’s.

You Can Beat the A-Bomb (b&w) is an amazing piece of atomic propoganda that basically says a nuclear attack may be a tad inconvenient but it’s nothing to get too upset over. Just close the windows, hide under some furniture, stay inside for about an hour, then start to clean up. It also contains some hilarious what if? scenes in which Mom unplugs the iron before taking shelter. Dad, however, is the big know-it-all who can spout off a credible sounding yet suspect answer to any nukie question thrown his way. For example, when his kids ask, Can we catch radiation from you, Daddy? Daddy answers, No, I’m keeping it all to myself! as he scrubs the fallout off with a quick soap lather! And remember, if you get radiation poisoning, lie down and rest.

As a child, I likely saw You Can Beat the A-Bomb. I believe I did as I think I remember mom’s unplugging the iron and how that made me paranoid about irons. I also likely saw Duck and Cover (which you can catch over at The Internet Archive) in which children are exhorted to keep on mind at all times the FLASH that will clue them in to unannounced atomic warfare. Keep it on mind as you walk to school, as you play at school, never let the knowledge go, so that when the moment comes you’ll reflexively dive under your nearest schoolmate. If you’re out on your bike and no schoolmate is available as a shield, pull your coat over your head to save yourself from the bomb’s knack for delivering a scorching sunburn (the film doesn’t mention you better be wearing a light-reflecting coat) and wait for your nearest Civil Defense worker to tap you on the shoulder when all’s safe. Eluding harm is just about that simple.

Which it was not and is not and watching the propaganda it’s clear that the film existed not to save your hide with sticks-and-stones era measures, but to dedicate Citizens John Jr. and Sally to a lifetime of fear and trembling.

In the pic’s background, out the window, it seems a desert duststorm may be blowing so I colored it brown. There appeared to be dark streaks of mold staining the all beneath the window. On the desk, which was likely Jean’s, was a coffee cup beside a thermos. That thermos and the inviting smile on Jean Nelson’s face make the room seem almost as cozy as Jean Nelson appears confident that she can beat the A-bomb. One wonders how she got stuck with the duty of cheesecaking this sham of a comforter, or instead of a promo was it a cynical or satirical comment on the film by Jean and the photographer and was never intended for use, just a photo on the tag end of a nearly used-up roll of film.

All Boomers will remember the terror of the atom bomb dropping at any time. In Richland, plutonium being its excuse, that fear was a little more focused than in a place like Get Yer Beef Here, Texas. 80% of the jobs in the Tri-City area of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick were dependent on Hanford, directly or indirectly. A bright face was put on plutonium and at one time the idea for a Nuclear Industrial Park with up to 50 reactors was being talked about as a good idea. But the regular air-raid drills reinforced the knowledge you were part of something kind of, uhmm, dicey special, and I imagine was a little reflected in the following child’s bike safety poster.

Child’s bike safety poster, from the “Hanford Historical Photo Declassification Project”.

We were targets.

That’ll do something to a kid’s psyche, being raised as a target. We thought the Cold War would never end. Fear would be eternal as the U.S. of A’s supposedly eternally established and ordained-by-god borders. There was no other way. The end of America would be apocalypse for everyone. There would be no world on the far side.

Bad bombs were always launched by another power. At some point the Uptown Theater showed a movie called “And A Voice Shall Be Heard”. It was produced by “The March of Time” and presented by General Electric. A poster for it reads, “See how Syracuse NY intends to fight back against the A-Bomb.” I guess that means the bad A-Bomb belonged to someone else, while America had good A-Bombs that only served for defense.

The government spends a fair amount of time telling today’s children they’re targets. In the 1950s and 1960s, the dread was a retina-scorching flash on the horizon followed by a mushroom cloud billowing in the sky. Today the threat is any time, any where. The person seated next to you on the bus might have been a cold war spy, a commie infiltrator in the 50s and 60s. Today, the person seated next to you, the envelope in your mail box, the knapsack on the train may be instead the carrier of certain and immediate death. The intention, as before, could be nothing but to instill fear, not to train in safety measures, as duck and cover was just as absurd as today’s duct tape and plastic.

If you didn’t have an outfit to protect you against The Bomb, hopefully you would have a hard hat and canned goods and a shovel of sand. The below display shows “Items Recommended for Every Richland Home” included tomato juice, Spam, formula, a battery radio, a can opener and first aid kit. One’s local grocery would “soon be able to quote you prices and take your order for canned water.”

We ate a good deal of Spam in Richland but I think that’s because my dad liked Spam and it was easy to fix.

The government spends a fair amount of time telling today’s children they’re targets. In the 1950s and 1960s, the dread was a retina-scorching flash on the horizon followed by a mushroom cloud billowing in the sky. Today the threat is any time, any where. The person seated next to you on the bus might have been a cold war spy, a commie infiltrator in the 50s and 60s. Today, the person seated next to you, the envelope in your mail box, the knapsack on the train may be instead the carrier of certain and immediate death. The intention, as before, could be nothing but to instill fear, not to train in safety measures, as duck and cover was just as absurd as today’s duct tape and plastic.

H.o.p., my seven-year-old son, saw Duck and Cover tonight. He came in as I was watching it and was immediately attracted by the Bert the Turtle whose security is his shell out of which he is reluctant to emerge. And he didn’t say a word until the end. Just stood silent by my side, watching. No fidgeting, no playing with anything else while he watched.

We may laugh about these films now, but that’s some captivating and thus effective piece of child-targeted propaganda.

Boy am I feeling lucky. First over at Euroyank I click on a link to Soul Sight at an Altered State of Life. I left brief praise in the comment area. Then back to Euroyank where I visited Euroyank Video Theater and found at the top of the list “Atom Age Vampire”. I could only watch the first several Italian minutes of it right now, but that was enough to get me giddy, stomach fluttering with happy butterflies over the awesome seedy badness of equilibrium-blowing, tin can dialogue and bleached blondes in flight (literally). I’d feel guilty for neglecting to mention the serious postings I just finished reading over there–and I do, feel terribly guilty–but you don’t know…you don’t know what a spotless wonderful wreck the opening minutes of “Atom Age Vampire” are. And how much I’m looking forward to watching the rest. Not to mention it was a serendipitous conjunction of finds as the other night I was watching 50s atomic bomb preparedness films for the kindergarden set, and one which was developed especially for Hanfordites in order to reassure them that radiation really wasn’t too bad after a day or so, streetsweepers followed by a splash from a firehose cleans a radiated city quite nicely, plus radiation is easy to wash off your vegetables and down the drain, and one of the films opened with a beautiful atomic eye that I saved down to my computer. Then this AM I go straight from a link to “Soul Sight” to “Atom Age Vampire”. Yes! I had no clue how badly I needed “Atom Age Vampire” until after the first uhm twelve seconds.

A good night’s sleep wouldn’t hurt either. But you were probably aware of that half-way through the above.

Here follows the IMDB plot summary for “Atom Age Vampire”:

A stripper is horribly disfigured in a car accident. A brilliant scientist develops a treatment that restores her beauty and falls in love with her. To preserve her appearance the doctor must give her additional treatments using glands taken from murdered women. His unexplained ability to turn into a hideous monster helps with this problem but does nothing to win her love. The doctor’s woes multiply as the police and the girl’s boyfriend begin to close in on him.

Someone named Glenn has given it a bad review, failing to appreciate the bad dubbing. He thinks the film ought to be remade, preserving its haunting and disturbing qualities. But those flaws which he holds in contempt are indispensible building blocks for a quality disjointing of mind.

Now I’m all eager to watch “Zabriskie’s Point” again. Wonder if the used-to-be-great-now-stocks-Hollywood video place still has it. I imagine not.

I was going to post something on how the New York Times picks on those of us who consider futons to be legitimate furniture for which one need not apologize, but joy hath dissolved my desultory nitpickiness.

Ciao!

Well, I will try a second time with this posting that is mainly all links to Blondesense today. I am soooooo pissed. I just did a post with a bunch of clips on different sorts of inviting and disgusting news and bam it disappears from the screen right before my eyes and my browser hops away to the “manage” page. This happened yesterday too when I was posting. And the day before that. What the hell is up with my blog and why does it keep throwing away my posts? At first I thought it was some key stroke weird new thing making it go bezerk. But no, I realized yesterday and today it’s just flinging the posts into the ozone. So I will diligently”save and continue editing” the posts every few seconds because if I don’t it may vanish.

I don’t have a virus. My virus protector tells me so.

Anyway, why did I look up at the SF Gate to see what time Venus was setting there recently? On Oct. 27th it set at 8:38 pm. The reason I was looking this up is because Blondesense has a link to an article with photos of two bright lights cavorting and mimicking one another’s movements near midnight on Wednesday night. People as far as Las Vegas saw them.

An astronomer says it was Venus and Mars.

Aaagggh! It just did it again. I had written two paragraphs yet again on another posting at Blondesense but had forgotten to save and whoosh, away into the ozone it disappeared as I was looking at it.

Back to topic. Venus had already set! What the hell are they talking about, “Never mind, it’s Mars and Venus, folks.”

Besides, when Mars was really close in 2003, we were several times down at the observatory and Mars looked nothing like that.

And aaagh it just did it again! I had written two paragraphs on another posting at Blondesense and whoosh it disappears before I think to save again. I was noting Liz’s post on the Senate voting to cut Medicare and Medicaid by $10 billion over the next five years. Santorum says we’re not hurting the little people. Instead we’re putting the big squeeze on fraud and providers. (Dirt bag.) And in the same article to which Blondesense refers, there is also noted the proposal to cut food stamps by $1.1 billion over five years, shaving 300,000 working families off the rolls, tightening eligibility requirements.

Then Peter Lonetree posts at Blondesense on a Vermont Convention meeting to talk about seceding from the American Empire, America having lost its moral authority and being unsustainable. (Save and continue editing, now.)

We were watching the cute movie “Robots” the other night. In it there’s a big-hearted inventor and corporate bigwig who’s outmoded, and a young slick thing with a rabid mom (her design seems to be based on the duchess with the piglet child in “Alice in Wonderland”) cuts out spare parts which older and impoverished robots need, instead making only available expensive upgrading. If you can’t afford the upgrade then you’re swept up and melted down. Led by a brave lad and the outmoded big-hearted inventor and corporate bigwig who has been lent the voice of Mel Brooks, the robots revolt. Yeh! It’s easy and quick. Evil mom gets dumped in the kiln. Big hugs. Everyone dances. Watching, I wonder what in the world is on Hollywood’s mind. “Revolt! It’s easy!” Or maybe to give people, through identification and on screen wishfulfillment, the feeling of revolt done, did, nothing happened but we heard your desires and here it is, taste the sweetness, now get back to work feeling just a little bit better about things because the robots are OK, they were saved. Another fairy tale. There were lots of old fairy tales about evil kings and queens getting just deserts, a lot of discontented people sitting around the fire and dreaming about tossing their rulers into prison.

Libby doesn’t begin to cut it for me. Maybe someone can tell me why I should be all excited about Libby?! I’m not. The machine rattles on. Libby, for all I care, is a fucking distraction. Sure, go after the dude but he’s not The Ones. And people keep dying. And Bush is all frisky about Syria. The machine rattles on. Doesn’t even bother with smoke and mirrors for the most part because it doesn’t have to. What happens happens and disappears into the trash bin when the next wave of revolting news hits the day following. The machine rattles on. Chug a chug. Eat eat. Chug chug. Gobble gobble. Spits the bones back in your eye and chuckles.

The grandparents of the Power Puff Girls are those big-eyed waif pictures from the 60s and 70s that went so well with Tang, the space-age powdered orange drink choice of astronauts. The prototype were those painted by Margaret Keane, and despite the cutesy factor, the world looked cold for those parentless child