Embracing Your Inner Librarian

 

My father kept a small library in an alcove beside the den, and I used to love standing in there just looking at all the titles, trying to decide what to read, what I could read, and what I would read in the future. Titles that I specifically remember discovering on those shelves were Lost Horizon,  The Flight of The Phoenix, The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, the Poppy Ott adventure series by Leo Edwards (Edward Edison Lee), and Dickens’s Bleak House in the original parts — thank goodness I still have that one on my shelves today!

I was learning to love storytelling and fiction in all its forms at a very young age, and also learning that if you made a place for it in your home, no one could take it away from you.

That was the problem with TV and movies. Not only could they take it away from you, they could prevent you from seeing it in the first place.

At the age of seven, my favorite TV show was a Hanna-Barbera half-hour adventure that combined live action with animation called THE NEW ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Look it up; all I’m going to tell you about it that Ted Cassidy, the actor who played Lurch on THE ADDAMS FAMILY and who appeared on STAR TREK and many other series of the day, was the regular villain; and that I was desperately in love with Lu Ann Haslam, the Older Woman who played Becky Thatcher on the series.

I was in my sixties before I ever was able to watch the entire series. Did it live up to my memories? That’s beside the point.

The point here is that the show aired early on Sunday nights: one of those Time Slots of Death where the network put shows that they were Trying to Kill. The Elephant’s Graveyard for TV shows in the ‘60s. Programming was a game that networks played with millions of dollars at stake, and Sunday nights were the slots of planned Loss Leaders. Because Sunday afternoons were when the football games aired, and if the football game ran over time, “your regularly scheduled program” would be “joined in progress.”

That is, if it aired at all. 

The football game always ran over time. I missed so many episodes of my favorite show, or was forced to join them halfway through, because of those fucking football games.

And so some other things that I learned at a very young age were to hate football with a deep and abiding passion (still with me to this day), and to learn that if you missed your favorite show, you missed it. Shows aired once in those days, maybe twice if you were lucky. Grown-ups would say to you (as they forbade your favorite show because it was past your bedtime or for some other equally dumb-ass and self-serving reason), “You can watch it another time.”

I knew that this was bullshit even before I knew the word “Bullshit.”

In those dark days, every kid knew the rules of television: that TV series had a cumulative effect greater than the sum of their parts, that to everything there is a season, that when it was gone, it was Gone Forever, and as for binge watching, what the hell was that? Even the word didn’t exist yet.

Nowadays of course we live in a world where it’s all Out There, all available, all the time.

Except when it isn’t.

Because the Suited Corporate Bastards who control everything (and who share about equal status with football in my estimation) are always trying to find ways of taking things away from us in the interest of monetization — and preventing us from having anything that they think can’t be monetized.

This is why I’m now quite worried about the preservation and restoration of our silent movie heritage, or for that matter any art or fiction created in or before 1929. It’s all in the Public Domain now; the upshot of which is that the Suited Corporate Bastards will find it harder to bleed money out of any of it.

In the great Ray Bradbury’s still-alarming novel FAHRENHEIT 451, small personal libraries were humanity’s only record of the past, and people became Living Books to preserve literary works from destruction at the hands of the government. That day could still come. That day is closer now than ever. Just sayin’.

Personal libraries are more important today than ever before, and will likely become vital in the near future, unless you are one of those people who will contentedly eat whatever shit you are fed, and smile and say “Give me more of that shit!” 

The whole culture is dying, because everyone who knew how to create it is either dead or disenfranchised. When all the chefs die off or are let go, the food becomes inedible. The same principle applies to culture. Oh, the food will continue to be prepared, but it will be less and less nourishing, less and less flavorful, until we’re all eating Spam.

And yes, there’ll always be that one guy who shouts out, “I’ll eat your Spam! I love it! I’m having Spam eggs bacon Spam Spam Spam and Spam!” If I have to explain that reference to you, all I can say is that you’ve got your cultural work cut out for you.

But riddle me this, Batman. Name one single person working in the industry today who is capable of writing anything even halfway as good as THE PHILADELPHIA STORY. Maybe you’ll have to take time out to track down and watch a copy of THE PHILADELPHIA STORY before you can answer that. That’s okay, I can wait.

You can’t do it. Because they don’t exist.

Thankfully, in 2025, it is easier and more practical than ever before to live in the past. But you’ll need to become your own personal teacher, librarian, programming director and technician to do it. You’ll need to be hunter/gatherer, archeologist, archivist, detective, technician and intrepid cultural explorer. You’ll have to learn to not to be distracted by the obstacles that get thrown in your path, and to not have any age-ist prejudices about the past, how to recognize and follow a lead. 

It’s a lot of work, but there are pleasures to be had, including the pleasure of re-connecting with lost dreams, and the joy of making New Discoveries.

—Thorn.

Dreams and Where to Get Them: Grow Your Own part 3

 

As I type this, I’m in the process of ripping thirty-plus Hopalong Cassidy movies from their DVD source to digital files. The DVDs were the only way I could ever have gotten to see all these pictures, and the price was more than reasonable, but the discs are poorly compiled: the movies were just shoveled onto discs all anyhow, all out of release order, with no attempt made to organize them. With the movies ripped to digital format, I can stream them from my server in their original release order, with no loss of quality (like we used to get when we copied VHS off the air), and because the Cassidy movies all have runtimes of just over an hour I can fill out an evening’s programming with other content that I have, without having to pause to switch out discs or jump from one player to another. Behold the supremacy of physical media combined with the the power of digital playlists!

If I’d been paying for a streaming service . . . First of all, I don’t know of a streaming service that offers the complete catalog of Hopalong Cassidy westerns; second I’d be at their mercy for  having to view the pictures (probably riddled with commercials) within their time frame, before their rights ran out and the movies got removed; and third I’d have had to pay out a LOT more money, paying the service every single month for a mess of content that I don’t care about in order to access what I want. This way I have Hopalong’s whole ouvre at my fingertips, in my collection, whenever I want to view them — and the suited corporate bastards CAN’T take them away from me!

It should be clear by now that if you don’t have at least a little bit of the Librarian / Collector in your blood, or if you’re one of those people who’s so very very contemporary in your mindset that you can’t stomach anything that was made longer ago than last year, this series of posts is Not For You. 

However if you agree with Peter Bogdanovich that “There are no old movies; just movies that you haven’t seen,” then it’s my hope that something I type here might possibly help you along your journey. 

And if you think of yourself as a film enthusiast but you don’t know who Peter Bogdanovich is, what the hell is the matter with you? Were you raised in a barn? Go out and LOOK HIM UP! Cheezits, what do you think the internet is FOR?

That last point maybe needs to be clarified. Because of course if you’re a young person who didn’t live through it, you can’t be expected to know history by osmosis. But you should have enough curiosity in you to find out. Don’t just say “OH, I don’t know about PAPER MOON or THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, they happened before I was born!” Of course they did, moron. But the stuff is out there. Go out, track them down, research them and WATCH THEM. Nobody blames you for the accident of your birth, but if you have no curiosity about things — that I do blame you for. KING KONG, Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, THE WIZARD OF OZ and the Universal monster movies were made a long time before I was born, but that didn’t stop me from filling my head with their goodness at the earliest opportunity!

Also, I had the advantage of growing up in a world that was not yet glutted with content. Just three networks, and maybe three or four local affiliates who filled out their broadcast day with syndicated reruns and packages of old movies. I also had a father who shared with me his love of ’30s comedians, and access to publications like THE MONSTER TIMES and Forry Ackerman’s FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, both of which which helped feed my taste for horror movies made in a time before they became really horrible.

So add my voice to the growing chorus: Physical Media, Physical Media, Physical Media. It is the Great Savior of the film buff. Much more economical than any streaming service, plus it puts the power of choice into your hands. If you don’t like the space that it takes up, or don’t have space for it to take up, you can always rip it to digital files, as I described above. Of course this is just one of the reasons why the suited corporate bastards don’t like physical media and don’t want you to have it, and why we must keep buying it. MakeMKV is a really useful little app for converting discs to digital files without loss in quality. You can find it here: https://www.makemkv.com, and if you need instructional videos on how to use it, there are several on YouTube. Connect a disc player to your computer, slide in a disc and you’re off to the races. If you need the files in some other file format than MKV (iTunes won’t play anything other than mp4 Or m4v), then another great little app called Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr) is here to make the conversions.

You already know where to find physical media. Hell fire, your local library probably has a lot of it on loan! If you’re buying, as an alternative to Amazon, you might try www.deepdiscount.com. Critic’s Choice and VCI are two other good sources, and both are publishers as well as retailers, so buying from them encourages future releases. 

But somewhere along the way you are going to discover the value of having digital files in-house that you store on your own media; either discs, a hard drive or a NAS. When that happens, you will want to start exploring the regions of the utterly VAST vaults of the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/). I visit them frequently, and never fail to make a Happy Discovery or three — like for instance, a restored-from-35mm-print of Richard Williams’s vastly under-appreciated animated classic RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY, in the original widescreen (never issued to home video), available to watch online or download to your system, here: https://archive.org/details/raggedy-ann-andy-a-musical-adventure-1977-35mm-ultra-hd_202307/

And — if your appetite for film, TV and music is as voracious as mine, somewhere along the way you’ll run into something called torrenting. I’m not here to tell you that you should do it, I’m not here to tell you how to do it, but I will say this much: get a VPN. You will need it. I use NordVPN, but it’s in no way a paid promotion, so you’ll have to search on it.

Anyway — searching is a good habit to get into. Don’t know the answer? Not a problem and not a kick against you. You know where to find the answer, and that’s literally All That Matters. Search, search. Search. How else do you learn? How else do you make Wonderful Discoveries? And no matter when you were born, or where your interests lie, Wonderful Discoveries are what it’s all about. 

—Thorn.

Bits and Bobs: Grow Your Own, Part Two

 

There’s a fellow over on YouTube who found a way to recreate Twentieth-Century-style television in his own home. As I understand it, he populated a server with three different playlists offering three full sets of content, operating live and independently, and then plugged it into a vintage analog television. While I’d never go this far, it does show what’s possible using everyday tech that we didn’t have access to back then, with a little ingenuity and some programming skills. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/k_BkD85yIg0?si=8WhzrqTXJUcJruQG

He managed on a much grander scale what I’ve been doing for the past decade and a half: acting as the Programming Director for my own imaginary TV station. This currently involves gathering,  planning and implementing three hours of entertainment every night, the equivalent of what used to be considered Prime Time back in the day.

It didn’t start that way, but the writing went up on the wall back in the early ‘80s with the introduction of home video machines: VHS and Betamax. I was an early adopter, or as early as I could afford to be. It was the Big Game-Changer for we the Great TV-viewing public: suddenly we were no longer at the mercy of the Big Three all-powerful TV networks (plus PBS). Not only could we decide what we wanted to watch when we wanted too watch it, but we could preserve our favorite television series and films so that they would always be there for us when we wished (and had the time) to revisit them.

The concept of the private individual as video librarians had never really occurred to professional TV programmers until that day — but some of us were already well-acquainted with keeping personal libraries of the books we read and the the records we loved and the comics that we gathered. Adding TV and Movies into the mixture was a natural. The introduction of DVD turned the trickle of home video enthusiasts into an explosion. And I guess the point of this longish ramble is that if you’re going to take on the responsibility of being your own Programming Director, it helps if you already have that Librarian Instinct, and you’ve been Gathering Material for a long while. That’s part of the job that never stops. 

I don’t have to tell you that cable and networks and streaming services are crap, and Expensive Crap at that. It’s something I hear all the time. What you should know is that you don’t need them. What you should know is that no one understands what you like better than you do, and nothing is more satisfying than arranging your life by your own design. Whatever that means to you. In the area of video entertainment, paying for streaming services is far and away the least cost-effective way of doing it. 

I lost access to free over-the-air TV when I moved into town from the country in 2010. This was a blow, as I’d lived all my life with free over-the-air TV.  For a while, I tried filling the gap with a DirecTV subscription; but this was really unsatisfactory for reasons that you’re all probably familiar with. Oh, I found a few things to watch, even discovered some new things — but I also found that the old reliable DVDs, and then Blu-Rays, and then digital files streamed in my own house from my own computer, served me better. 

I now have a set-up that relies on all three, plus the odd free service such as YouTube. It’s a set-up that I figured out for myself, over a long time; and though it’s hardly the state of the art, it works for me. Your mileage may vary, and there are plenty of tech-savvy channels and articles out there to show you what’s the latest and greatest. My interest doesn’t particularly lie in the tech side of things, and it’s not what I’m going to be focusing on in this series, but you’re going to need something akin to these basics at the start:

• A television and sound system that’s right for your space
• A blu-ray player
• A region-free DVD player (very important!)
• A TV steaming box (I use AppleTV, but any will work so long as they offer the ability to connect to your server)
• A dedicated server computer. If you have an older computer that you’ve retired for everyday use, it will be perfect for this purpose. It doesn’t have to be the best and the brightest. It just has to run.
• Home Wi-fi.
• On the software side you will need installed on your server (or TV box or both) some kind of media player: Itunes and Infuse are the two I use.
• And most important: Time, plenty of it, and the librarian’s dedication and curiosity to sniff out the programming that tickles your fancy wherever it may be.

Here’s a tech link that I found helpful: https://theaterdiy.com/how-to-set-up-a-media-server-for-a-home-theater/

Connect your TV to the speakers, the disc players and the box, make sure the Wifi is up and running, connect the box to your server computer, and you’re ready to roll — that’s all the tech I know or care about. The only thing needed now is to take responsibility for the Programming. 

Because just as it’s true that You Are What You Eat, it’s also true that You Are What You Put into your Eyes and Ears and Brain, and you need to feed yourself a Balanced Diet. You wouldn’t walk down the street picking up and eating any piece of trash that you saw, would you? The same is true for content. And creating the daily menu is a job that will suck up just as many hours as you care to throw at it.  

The good news is that you have all of History to choose from, without limit. Over the next few installments I’m going to post links to resources, providing examples, discussing the history of broadcast entertainment and going over my own weekly schedule in detail. I hope you’ll follow me down this odd Road of Yellow Bricks. If you do, I’ll be the Man Behind the Curtain at journey’s end.

—Thorn.

Pop Goes Pop Culture: Grow Your Own, Part One

 

Some writers still use the words “Pop Culture” as if they were considering a present and abiding thing.

Sadly, the entity formerly known as Pop Culture has been dead now for (conservatively) fifteen years, and what we are doing today is picking and licking at its bones.

By definition and by name, Popular Culture was the power of art, music and media to unite masses of people in a single moment: to coalesce whole generations, and numbers of generations, even if individuals lived miles (or years) apart, even if they never met one another. To share the same love of music, film, radio, television or print, was to be connected beyond age or geography, beyond social standing, beyond clan, beyond blood. Pop Culture was a glue that bound us all, if not to the same page, at least to the same volume.

But it’s clear now to anyone with eyes that Pop Culture was a fleeting  phenomenon of the twentieth century, born of the rotary press and murdered by “the global system of interconnected computer networks” — a by-product industry and invention, ultimately killed by the same forces.

Moveable type, the typewriter, the Linotype machine, the development of photography, telegraphy and telephony, then moving pictures, radio and talkies, then television, all drew us closer to one another and helped shatter the boundaries of space and time. At first, the internet held more of the same promise. Instead, a strange thing happened. All of us, alone in our little rooms, clutching our devices, were offered more and still more to choose from than ever before — and we chose so-called social media and began shrieking at one another. Art was reduced to Content. More and more “content” was needed, to be shoveled into the gaping, insatiable maw of the internet users. With thousands of choices being dumped on our heads, we stopped connecting to one another and started going our separate ways. 

Nor can we any longer even approach a commonality of standards. The art of criticism died early on as access media required that critics become nothing more than promoters. As blogs and YouTube gave a platform to anyone and everyone to spew out their often ill-informed opinions, objectivity fell by the wayside. 

It seems now that the last act of a Popular Culture in its Death Throes was to transform some of us into the Peter Ustinov character from LOGAN’S RUN: dotty old codgers doing what little we can to save the culture that made our lives worthwhile from the ruins of Time. We create and conserve our own worlds now, living off the bits and bytes that come our way. Pop Culture is dead. We live today in the age of Personal Culture.

And Personal Culture comes with a Responsibility: We are now the curators, program directors and librarians in our own lives. And we have an obligation to ourselves to not accept whatever dross the suited corporate clods choose to make available to us on this or that individual streaming service. You are what you eat, and that includes the culture that you consume. Here at the end of Popular Culture, we must take control of what we put into our heads just as we control what we put into our stomachs.

Dump Netfix.

Dump Disney.

Dump Paramount.

Dump them all. You don’t need them. They won’t keep you healthy.

It is YOUR CHOICE: What I’m telling you is the same old advice everyone gives about choices: make yours mindfully.

Take up the reins and become your own Programming Director. Do it With Intent and Purpose. Technology has made it possible for each of to create our own Streaming Service. Over the next few posts (likely coming at an exceeding irregular pace) , I’m going to tell you how I do it, and how easy it is. Mine is just one way of many. I will try to point you in the direction of multiple solutions. Because Taking Control of your culture is not only good for you — it’s fun, too.

As TV announcers used to say, “Don’t Touch That Dial! We’ll be Right Back!”

-- Thorn.

Watch the STEAMPUNK PUSSYQUAT Trailer!

Docking Soon in the Tarot Store: STEAMPUNK PUSSYQUATS!

“I believe cats to be spirits come to earth.

A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.” 

― Jules Verne

The boiler is firing!
The gears are spinning!
We are gaining altitude!

FULL STEAM AHEAD!

Climb aboard the good airship Tarocco Gatto. Let the Steampunk Pussyquats be your guide to the whirling flywheels of life. Your destination? That is yet to be Revealed.

This traditional 78-card Tarot pack was created in an accessible, evocative steampunk style for the curious newcomer and skilled practitioner alike. 

Edition Details :

Packaged in a two-piece tin box!

Tarot-sized cards, 2.75 x 4.75. 310 Linen, glass finish.

78 cards cards, plus two extra cards, including a “cover card” that you can use to dress up the tin box.

Only as many copies will be printed as are actually ordered, making the edition extremely limited.

I hope you enjoy this deck as much as I did making it! 

 Landing in late November!

--Thorn

Kickin' Monster Ass -- In More Ways Than One

 

It's the season for Monsters to Come Out and Play, and this week I celebrated by revisiting Fred Dekker's wonderful 1987 creature fest THE MONSTER SQUAD -- with monsters by the great Stan Winston.

The movie is terrific fun, and ideal for the season, but it also makes me angry. Why?

Because although it features all of the classic Universal Monsters, Universal did NOT make this movie. And they should have.

But no -- since at least the early '80s, Universal has been managed by the biggest pack of braindead, drooling morons ever to take up office space. When Capcom approached them with the brilliant idea to do a fighting game based on the Universal monsters, those idiots said NO.

Capcom went ahead and made the brilliant DARKSTALERS -- to this day one of the classics of the genre.

And when Fred Dekker approached them to do THIS movie, those idiots said NO. again.

Every time they've had an opportunity to give the fans of their monster movies something that actually honored and respected the original classics, those idiotic twats have said NO.

And instead, they've given us nothing but STINK BOMBS like Tom Cruise in THE MUMMY, or DRACULA UNTOLD, or the utterly failed "Dark Universe" -- dumb-ass "re-imaginings" and reboots, and now in a few months they'll be dropping the latest pile of flaming shit on our doorsteps with their remake of THE WOLF MAN.

If they really wanted to keep their legacy alive, they've had their opportunities. But instead of listening to people who LOVE the old Universal monster movies, they've been listening to people who've never even bothered to WATCH those classics, and to people who who don't have the brains, talent or background to do it RIGHT.

Dear Suits Who Are Running Universal Into The Ground: someone should drive a stake through what passes for your hearts.

-- Thorn

The Shortest Story I Ever Wrote

Once after midnight I was out walking when a man with the face and features of an owl came up to me unexpectedly out of the dark. He was clad in black from head to toe. He would not let me pass, but stared at me silently.

“What do you want of me?” said I.

“Who?” he said.

“I get that you’re an owl. But you haven’t answered my question.”

“Nor will I. Walk beside me a while.”

I stepped around him, and went on down the empty block.

“I’m beside you,” he said. “If you know it or not.”

I was alone in the street. There were no lights ahead, and none shone from the blocky black slabs of buildings on either side of the pavement, only a dim white bulb depending from the streetlamp at the corner I had just left. Still the road ahead grew brighter, though without any further detail becoming visible.

I raised my hands before my eyes. They had aged visibly since I had last seen them. 

The sleeves of my coat had turned to grey feathers.

--Thorn.