The Cartoon Cure

With all the time I've logged just being sick this winter, you'd think that I'd have something profound to say about illness by now. But no. It's just something that robs you of your time and life. And every time it came back around to hit me this season, it seemed to get worse. It's been an entire week this time, and I'm still not completely over it. I tire so easily, and still seem to need a lot of extra sleep.

The good and soothing thing that happened this week that I'd rather write about was that a little bit of my past arrived in Wednesday's mail. The mid to late '60s were the golden age of TV animation, and three of my favorites finally snuck onto DVD last fall without my noticing. If my friend BC hadn't mentioned it, I might never have known the joy of being reunited with my televisual pals The Herculoids, Mighty Hercules and Frankenstein Jr.!

Mighty Hercules was, I believe, a syndicated show from Trans-Lux studios, the same company that created the '60s version of Felix the Cat -- the one with the magic bag. Trans-Lux were no Hanna Barbera, and the animation was quite limited. The main villain was always Daedalus (who sounds exactly the same as Felix's nemesis The Professor) , so the mythology wasn't at all right, either. The stories were short and swift, and usually had something to do with Hercules losing his power ring. My clearest memory of the show is the theme song, and the way Hercules grew into his logo at the end. I never knew the lyrics, but when I popped the DVD into the player I was pleased to hear that my recall of the tune was exact!

Mighty Hercules  was not terribly good. But I was quite young when it was on the air. In the main, I remember watching it during the summers that we spent at Lake Vermillion. Perhaps that's the reason why I remembered it so fondly: those were happy days.

Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles came on the year that the family moved to Maine, and I remember feeling quite traumatized at the notion that the TV stations would be different. What if Frankenstein Jr. wasn't on TV in Maine? This was too terrible a thought to endure.

Hanna Barbera thought that the stars of the series were The Impossibles, a trio of superheroes who were also rock and roll musicians and looked vaguely like "mod" versions of the Three Stooges. I knew otherwise! The real star of the show was Frankenstein Jr.! Unfortunately, the studio's inability to see this meant that there were two Impossibles cartoons to every one Frankenstein Jr. This was perhaps my first lesson that the universe is unjust.

Now that I see it again today, I realize that Frankenstein Jr. was just Hanna Barbera's gussied-up version of Jonny Socko and his Giant Robot, and not the terribly original concept that, as a kid, I thought it was. Oh, well. I still love the schtick and the usual great design work that H-B always brought to their projects (the villains, especially, always looked really interesting, even if all they ever did was shout "I've got you now, Space Ghost! AhhhHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!").

The Herculoids was different. The human family at the heart of the show weren't the stars. The stars were their fantastic pets. There was a dragon that shot energy bolts out of both his eyes and his tail (I'd like to know how he managed that), a giant Rock Gorilla, an eight-legged triceratops-like thing that could shoot blobs of lava out of its horn, and Gloop and Gleep: ghostlike and jellylike, able to take on any shape or stretch like Reed Richards.

I remember my mother complaining about the noise level of The Herculoids, and she was right -- it was a very loud and noisy show with most of the dialogue consisting of the dragon screaming (poor Mike Road!), the rock ape and the lava-shooting, eight-legged triceratops roaring at the top of their lungs, and Gloop and Gleep making their weird nattering sound (poor Don Messick!). The music, like all the music on H-B's dramatic shows, was loud and urgent, and there were constant explosions, whooshing and pounding. Twice every week, someone would unwisely attack the Heculoids, or they'd get into some kind of a jam, and twice every week all the pets would come charging to the rescue, screaming and roaring.

I loved this stuff. Gloop and Gleep no doubt influenced my own character, Sludge, in my Quirk comic strip. It was just great to watch these fantastic pets kicking villain's butts all over the screen. Sometimes the villains ended up in tears. Well, I guess I would, too, if all my evil plans were foiled and I got my butt kicked by a giant rock monkey.

I'm so glad to have all three of these shows back at last. Not that I'm ever far from being a little kid inside, it's a short trip, but the dangers of adulthood are so thick around us that it's worth going there every once in a while. I could definitely use my own giant robot or pets like what The Herculoids have. No one would argue with me. That's for sure.

-- Freder.

Grave Robbers

Last night I watched J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek for the first (and last) time. I have to admit that on one level, I couldn't take my eyes off it: in much the same way that you can't possibly stop looking at a train wreck when it happens right in front of you.

The most basic and obvious reason that I hate this movie is: DeForrest Kelley is dead, Jimmy Doohan is dead, Gene Roddenberry is dead, and here is Leonard Nimoy, playing Spock most likely for the last time, looking like death warmed over.

Meanwhile, here are all these Babies, these new non-entity pukes, all laboring to copy what the Original Cast did so well and so easily. Of all the new cast, the only ones who make no effort whatever to imitate their betters are the actors playing Uhura and Scotty.

For the same reason that I never accepted the impostor Kermit that was installed after Jim Henson's death, I don't accept this impostor crew of the Enterprise, or this alternate history of the Star Trek universe. You can't just keep something alive by pumping hot air into it, just because you're not done making money off it yet. But that's my problem.. What's not my problem is, this movie is just plain bad!

Let's get the good stuff out at the way at the outset, so that I can feel free to knock this piece of tripe from here to eternity. There was one thing and one thing only that I liked about J.J. Abrams's Star Trek:: the production design. They found a way to make the original uniforms work on the big screen, and for the first time since the original series went off the air, Star Trek finally looks the way it ought to.

But that's where it ends.

My biggest gripe is the device that everyone else seems to love: this isn't even our Star Trek anymore, an alternate timeline has been created and the entire original series basically never happened. I've seen this trick used several times before, and it always strikes me as creative arrogance. Abrams doesn't want to be bound by any established rules, so he's just declared that the rules simply don't exist. Like Kirk rewriting the software of the Kobiyashi Maru test, Abrams has declared that the rules are now anything that he wants them to be.

And what he wants is crap. The first twenty minutes of this movie contains some of the most eye-rollinging dumb material ever to come out of Star Trek, and that includes the godawful movie that Shatner directed. Never mind the comic melodrama stuff surrounding Kirk's birth, although that's bad enough. Kirk has always been a cocky piece of work, but never the complete Pain in the Ass and Menace to Society that Abrams has drawn him as here.

Beyond that, I just don't buy Kirk, McCoy, Uhura and all the rest, all at Star Fleet together at the same time. I don't buy Kirk hitting on Uhura all the time, and Uhura throwing herself at Spock on the elevator while they're both still on duty. It's like Star Trek 90210.

I don't buy blowing up Vulcan and killing off Spock's mother just on a whim, just on a plot point.

And I don't buy turning Star Trek into Raiders of the Lost Ark, into an Action Movie. Star Trek is not and never was about car chases, barroom brawls, things exploding everywhere, death drops, shootouts in space or big CGI monsters trying to eat people. Abrams can't seem to hold the camera still even when it's not even a bloody camera, even when it's a CGI shot of the Enterprise! Star Trek is supposed to have a brain -- but you wouldn't know it from this lobotomized, cannibalized monster. All it cost me was my time, and even then I was cheated.

-- Freder.

Holes. . . and a Discovery

I couldn't understand why the palm of my right hand hurt so much yesterday. It was over-all ouchie, but just at the base of my thumb it was particularly painful and red. I wondered about it all day. Then, around dinnertime, the coin finally dropped: on Saturday I dug two hundred and sixty holes in my lawn with a hand trowel. DUH! You think?

I'm a slow thinker. When rapid decisions are called for, I usually just freeze. If they got me on Hell's Kitchen, I'd probably just stand there with a spatula in my hand looking bewildered and repeating to myself, over and over again, "Oh my god! Oh my god!"


"Wake up!" Chef Ramsay would shout.  "What the **** are you doing?!"

"Yes, Chef! Sorry, Chef! Oh my god! Oh my god!"

Anyway. Two hundred and sixty holes exactly. I counted them.

A Hole is to Dig. I'm sure that my neighbors thought I was crazy, especially when I started in digging holes along the strip of grass beside the road. But I was planting daffodil bulbs. My father left a plastic bucket full of them on my doorstep. It's more than likely that some won't make it, but with any luck my yard will be dotted with daffodils next spring.

Most people plant daffodils in garden beds. But out at the old house we had a section of the back yard that was full of them every spring. My mother used to say that planting daffodils in that section of lawn was the best thing my father ever did.

I'm taking the idea one step further. I'm going to have daffodils all around my house. Don't know how I'll mow the lawn, but I'll figure that out when the time comes.

By the time I was done, having cut the grass just prior to the planting, I was so shagged out that I flopped on the porch and just evaporated. My shoulders were complaining bitterly at my treatment of them. My heart was beating so hard that I could feel it pounding against the back of the couch. But, yeah, it was a good kind of tired.

Today we've had two periods of torrential rain, so my daffodils are getting a good soaking.

Next, the hosta has to come out, to make way for hydrangeas. I don't think that's going to happen right away!

*

Yesterday I bought a combination printer and scanner. I wasn't planning on doing it. It was just there, with a sign overhead that said $49. I couldn't believe they were serious. Ah, but t probably doesn't work with a Mac, I tthought. Checked the box. Yes, it does! It's been so long since I was able to print or scan anything at home; even so, I stood there and thought about it for several minutes. I told you; I'm a slow thinker.

Later in the evening, printer / scanner ensconced and software installed, I cast around for something to test the scanning bit with. I finally settled on the black and white portrait of Mom that's been sitting in my kitchen here ever since I moved in. It was taken by her sister-in-law, my Aunt Sharron, maybe twenty-plus years ago, and is hands down the best portrait of her that I have.

In the process of taking it out of the frame, I found three more photos concealed underneath it. Photos that I had no memory of ever seeing before. All of them terrific. In one of them, she's seated on a wooden rocking horse with her brother, my Uncle John, standing beside her.

But my absolute favorite of the lot is the one that's heading up this post. Maybe it's that she's standing inside the "hoosegow" that's out in my back yard right now. Maybe it's because I've come to think of the structure as "my TARDIS," and this makes me feel as if she's just popping off for a bit, out for another lark in time and space, you know it's bigger in here than it is on the outside, possibility, possibility, possibility, see you later.

Maybe it's because she looks happier than I ever saw her, ever, in the last five years of her life.

I'm not putting it back behind the other pictures. This one deserves a frame of its own.

-- Freder.

Don't Go Back There

Television on my computer? Now that I've tried it, I'm not a big fan. It is quite the Brave New World, though, to discover that your computer really is a Time Machine.

The first TV that I watched full screen on my computer was Doctor Who. I was just discovering Stephen Moffat's re-imagining of the show, wanted to see the episodes that he wrote for the David Tennant years, but didn't like Russell Davies' Who well enough to pay fifty to seventy-five dollars for the full seasons. At a buck ninety nine an episode, I was willing to make an exception to the rule of "No telly on the iMac."

These five or six episodes really cemented my enthusiasm for Moffat's Who, but the viewing experience is nowhere near as good as that of watching a DVD on a high-def set. The resolution is notably lower, there are the glitches caused by dreaded vagaries of the interwebs -- and you can't share it, unless you allow your friends to log in as you. So taken was I with Matt Smith's debut on Who that I sat my father and his wife down in front of the telly and said, "Just watch." I'd have a hard time plunking folks down here in my study.

Cutting to the chase, last night I made two more exceptions. My friend DP has been singing the praises of Hulu, so I checked out the list of shows that they host. What to my wondering eyes should appear but Nanny and The Professor.

Watershed moment! Yes, really. Stop that snickering.

As a seven or eight year old kid I loved Nanny and the Professor, and adored Juliet Mills with the pure soul burning adoration that's only possible in childhood (actually both of the Mills sisters have been objects of my ardent puppy love at one time or another. Haley several times). Nanny and the Professor  is not now, nor has ever been available on DVD or VHS. I made that excited "sucking in of breath" sound that children used to make when they heard the ice cream truck coming down the street. I thought, "Nanny and the Professor! I'm in!!"

Alas, you really can't go back. While Ms. Mills remains as puppy-lovable as ever (though I see more calculation in her performance than I did when I was eight years old), and Richard Long brings everything he's got to the table to sell the thing, Nanny and the Professor is really just an awful, terrible, no good, very bad show. Looking at it with adult eyes, I have to wonder how it stayed on the air for two seasons! Or how the pilot episode ever sold in the first place!

I was never deluded that it was anything other than a down-market Mary Poppins, but it never seemed so very down in that market back in the day. The adult cast all do what they can, but the writing is lowest-common-denominator, the direction hideous, and those children -- egad! All of their dialogue is overdubbed, and many of their scenes look like they were cobbled together from the only useable takes lifted from other, differently planned scenes.

But the thing that really annoyed me was the little musical trill, the cue that they use every time Juliet Mills does something "magical."

She guesses the children's names correctly.

*TRILL!*

She talks to the dog.

*TRILL!*

She knows that someone is at the door.

*TRILL!*

It's the producer's way of saying "GET it?" {nudge, nudge, trill.} "GET it? Nanny is MAGICAL, see! SEE? Did you GET that she just did something MAGICAL?"

Just how dumb did they think the audience was?

Oh my, what a crashing disappointment. Until last night I would have been first in line to buy any DVD release of this show. Now that I've ridden the Wayback Machine across the televisual timestream, any DVD release of this is going to have me running in the opposite direction. Not even prurient thoughts about Juliet Mills would make it worthwhile. Yeesh, even H.R. Pufnstuf and Lidsville have aged better than Nanny.

There's something uniquely disappointing in discovering that as a child you had all the taste and standards of a toadstool. It makes me wary about trying to "rediscover" some of my other televisual favorites from that era, stuff like The New Adventures of Tom and Huck (I had such a crush on the girl who played Becky Thatcher, plus the body of the show was a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, plus Injun Joe was played by Ted Cassidy, Lurch from The Addams Family -- what, I say what was not for an eight year old to like?). Stuff like Mister Terrific, and Captain Nice. Stuff like Here Come the Double Deckers and The Partridge Family.

Being the glutton for punishment that I am, once Nanny had ended I cast around Hulu for some more lousy TV. And I found it.

I was vaguely aware that someone had made a cable series out of the Swamp Thing movies, and was curious enough about it to consider, a time or two, buying the DVD. Oh my! Thank goodness that never happened!

The original Swamp Thing comics are pretty good, and this looked to be hewing closer to the source material than the movies. Also, the first Swamp Thing movie is about as good as a really tacky, ugly, bad movie can be. Hulu has the series as part of their line-up. I had the time. Let's check it out!

I knew that I was in trouble from the first shot, which showed a dwarf tied upside down onto a pole in the middle of the swamp. It got worse. Why would you shoot a kid boating through the swamp from inside the bottom of the boat, with nothing but a cloudless sky for a background? Obviously, because your budget is so low that you're probably shooting the scene in a wading pool.

The dialogue! Oh my god! Dialogue is supposed to accomplish certain purposes, and this went in the opposite direction. And the way it's delivered by the "actors"! There's not a natural intonation anywhere within hearing. Rarely have I seen TV this bad, and it's not even good-bad. The writer, director, producer, cast and crew must all have been either drunk or on drugs when they made this lame-ass excuse for a TV show. The production values are so slight that the original Swamp Thing movie looks like Star Wars by comparison -- and it was strictly a poverty-row production.

I thank Hulu for saving me money, but even though it hadn't cost me a penny, I still felt cheated. Their line-up includes several other shows that I've long been curious about. . . but tonight, I'm feeling my curiosity draining away as surely as if someone had pulled the plug in my low-budget wading pool.

-- Freder.

Uncle Orly

My Uncle Orland died yesterday. He was my father's older brother.

We weren't close. My father moved us to Maine in the mid-'60s, and the families, which had previously been very social (we summered together at Lake Vermillion, always did the holidays together, and had dinner often at each other's homes) went their separate ways. I saw my Uncle Orly only twice after I reached adulthood. The first time he took the fedora off of my head and rearranged the creases. The second time he called my car "an American piece of crap" (well, he was right) and told me, "This is what 84 looks like."

That bluntness was characteristic of Uncle Orly, but also of my father and of their father, Grandpa Adolph. Uncle Orly often said things that he shouldn't have said, especially to my father. Once, he took my father aside and told him off for being so critical of me. He said, "Don't you see what you just did? He was working really hard, and when you cut him down he completely deflated."

Once, he took me aside and complained about my father's hair. "He has beautiful snow-white hair, and he makes himself look ridiculous by washing it out with that Grecian formula stuff."

Remembering comments like that makes me wish that I had known Uncle Orly better. He was right about a lot of things, but being right doesn't always make it right to say it. There were sometimes Inappropriate Incursions.

Uncle Orly had white hair for as long as I knew him. He had piercing blue eyes and a strong voice. I used him as the physical model (though not a character model) for Mr. Sentack in my short story "Punch & Judy" (available elsewhere on this blog). He liked the outdoors and he liked racing cars, and he liked being the Alpha Dog.

I didn't have those words to describe him when I was a little boy, but I could sense it about him, and it's confirmed when I watch the footage of him in our family home movies. When he entered any room he was in command, but somehow in command from a distance.

There were stories from my father about their scouting days, about pranks played. One of the pranks involved the streetcars of St. Paul, although the details are lost to me. I'll have to ask my father. On another occasion, a Scouting trip (this was back when the Boy Scouts were really Boy Scouts, and much time was spent in the wild), the boys were investigating an abandoned house and Uncle Orly rigged up pranks to play on the others, to make them think the place was haunted. According to my father, Uncle Orly was deeply engrossed in this when he sensed a presence in the room, felt a hand on his shoulder, turned around to find himself alone. But that may have been a prank as well.

Uncle Orly was legendary for the Treasure Hunts he would sometimes set up for us kids, if he was cajoled in the right way. My sister and I had a taste of this when his family visited us in Maine, I think during our second summer. He started in the front yard and went deep into the woods out behind the house, leaving us clues of various kinds at every step of the way. Some were written, some were blazes on the trees. Some were too hard for us to figure out ("What's a hoosegow?" we asked our mother. It was the jailhouse that now rests in my back yard). We spent the entire afternoon on my Uncle Orly's Treasure Hunt, and finally found a cache of lollypops and candy in the mailbox far down the hill at the end of the drive.

I have nothing but supposition to base this on,.but after the loss of his middle son Brian (who has been very much on my mind of late; I'm planning another post about him), Uncle Orly appeared to go into a tailspin. Bad things began to happen. I won't type about them here.

Based on what little I know about their relationship, I would describe Uncle Orly's marriage to Aunt Lucille as one based on mutual disrespect. And yet they married for life, and seemed to have some good times with the bad. If Uncle Orly treated my Aunt badly, he paid for it in later years when his health began to go and he had to rely upon her "mercy." Once he fell on their front step and broke his hip. Aunt Lucille walked right past him, she had a church function to go to and couldn't be bothered, she left him lying there in the front yard. That's probably the most extreme example of how she dealt with him on a daily basis in his last years.

This week, the nursing home called to let her know he was going. She had another church function and that was more important. By the time she got home from that, they had called again telling her not to bother.

From my father's reports of Uncle Orly's final days in the nursing home in conditions that I am certain he found intolerable, I do not feel sad for his loss. But I feel terribly sad for his family and for my father, who loved him warts and all. And I feel terribly sad for me: because it seems like they are beginning to drop like flies, and I know that within a decade's time I'll probably be all on my own. I cried all last night and this morning, and at the same time felt disgusted with myself for all the tears over someone that I never made the effort to know as an adult.

My mother disliked Orly, and she had good reasons, but they were the reasons of grown-ups, and as I've already pointed out more than once I really only knew Uncle Orly from the perspective of a child. Still, her feelings colored mine as I grew up, which accounts for why I regarded him warily on the occasions when we did meet.

She disliked the way he treated my father. My dad worshipped his elder brother, and in return Orly was often condescending at best. She disliked the way that he treated his wife. She disliked the whole Alpha Dog thing.

For my part, I prefer to remember him as the man who created the legendary Treasure Hunts.

-- Freder.

Mickey's Gala Premiere

*

. . . is one of my favorite Mickey Mouse cartoons ever -- and, really, one of the greatest cartoons of all time. It has no plot whatsoever. A new Mickey Mouse cartoon is having its premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater, and all of the Hollywood glitterati -- beautifully caricatured by the Disney artists -- turn up for the event. Garbo and the Marx Brothers are there -- hellfire, even Dracula, Frankenstein and Mister Hyde are there, laughing uproariously at all the inappropriate parts.

But that's neither here nor there.

My boss is the sort of person who will never call any job done so long as she can think of one single different way to do it. This is oftentimes infuriating to me, because I am the sort of person who calls a job done if it looks good and feels "right" and complete -- and it doesn't matter if I can think of a HUNDRED other different ways that it could be done. Everything can always be done differently, but will doing it differently make it better? Sometimes you just have to type the period and move on.

What I'm really typing around here is that my restoration / recut of the family home movies had its Gala Premiere at my father's house yesterday, to strongly positive reviews.

I pushed the job through, staying up until past three-thirty in the morning, because I'm basically seven years old on the inside and could NOT wait another day to get the finished product onto a DVD and watch it on my telly.

You know that you're working with some large honking files when it takes four hours to render them, another hour to export them to the DVD authoring software, and another forty-five minutes for the authoring software to compress them for DVD. At a couple of points I just wandered off and racked out on the porch while I waited.

The computer spit out its first disc a little after two AM, and of course I had to sit down and watch the whole thing, all 72 minutes of it (up from about 45 minutes in its original version).

All of which made going to work the next day a little bit heavy.

Over the next couple days I made ten more copies and packaged them up. Yesterday I hand delivered them to Dad, who, although he didn't know it yet, is my designated distributor to his side of the family.

My father's wife was acting extra weird yesterday. While Dad was updating me on my sister's condition following her heart attack (she's having a rough time of it), his wife interrupted twice to deliver lectures about asian cucumbers. What was that about?

I'd brought pizza makings with me to whip up a quick lunch for the three of us, and when I set the raw crust down on some paper towels to start working on it, she reached right in under my hands and flipped it over onto its top. Pause. I flipped it back. Pause. She flipped it over again. I finally said, "No, that's the bottom," and flipped it back. I mean, who's the pizza chef here anyhow?

All I can think of is that she's not used to having someone else working in her kitchen. I'd brought an eggplant with me to use on her portion. I meant to fry it up before putting it on. Instead, she grabbed it, sliced it -- and threw it into the microwave! Anyone who'd microwave an eggplant hasn't been watching Chef Ramsay as much as I have.

Without even giving me the chance to do it properly, she piled the eggplant so deep on her portion of the pizza (I mean, it was an inch and a half of eggplant stacked up) that all I could think of was "vomit." Sure enough, when it got to the table she took one bite, choked on it and beat a hasty retreat. That's what happens when you interfere with the guy who knows what he's doing.

I don't know how she managed it, but she did come back and choked the whole thing down somehow. She strikes me as the sort of woman who likes to prove a point.

I also learned that she is the sort of woman who, if she sees some job of work that she thinks needs to be done to your house, she will come over to your house while you are away and just do it whether you wanted it done or not. That's another thing that happened this week. I wasn't aware of it until they mentioned it to me yesterday. When I got home, sure enough, there was a metal plate screwed onto the side of my house outside the second floor landing.

You see what I have to put up with?

Moving right along. Dad wanted to watch the movies right then and there, so I had to sit through them again for about the millionth time. I guess my opening scenes were just about as effective as I thought they were, because not more than a few seconds in Dad announced, "I think I'm going to start crying."

Before yesterday, his wife had always refused to watch the home movies on the grounds that they were "his past, not hers" -- fuzzy logic if you ask me. But yesterday she sat down and joined us, and actually paid attention and seemed interested. If it was genuine, and I've no reason to assume otherwise, I call that quite an achievement. After all, I do imagine that there are few things in the entertainment world worse than having to sit through someone else's home movies. If I've succeeded in making them watchable and even enjoyable for people whose past it isn't, then I award myself two thumbs up.

-- Freder.

Out of the Past

While going through the family photos to select shots that needed to be incorporated into the home movies, I found this picture of my Grandpa Claude -- and my mother, when she was a toddler.

I'd never seen it before, and I think it's just smashing. It really shows Grandpa's spirit and personality -- and Mom, well she seems never to have changed in some ways. She loved toys and teddy bears to her dying day.

I can't use this shot in the home movies, because it falls well outside the time period that they cover, but you can bet I'll include it in the slideshow that I'm planning as an "extra feature" for the DVD.

I'm guessing that I scanned another hundred and fifty pictures today, and I've only just begun working on their restoration. It's kind of tedious work, and it's getting more emotional, too, because we're getting up to our earliest days at the farm in Albion.

In those days the house was bright and attractive and open. The plaster was clean and solid; it was a house meant for entertaining and my folks did a lot of that. By the End Days, the house had transformed into a deeply eccentric folly, shot through with cracks -- a funhouse, all right, but one with a distinct Gothic side, a shadow behind all the happy faces that stared out of every available space.

That world isn't covered in the Home Movies either, but somehow I feel that I must give it a nod. I'm not sure yet exactly how I'm going to end the new version of the movies, but I've been working hard all through the recut to give it the shape of a story with a beginning, middle and end. It seems to me that I have to at least indicate the shape of things to come, to at least point at the way it ended. I don't want it to be maudlin, but there needs to be some sense of the damage that time and trouble inflicts on us all.

-- Freder.

Robert Wise and Me

When I was in, I think, the eighth or ninth grade, I made a (very) short film. It was supposed to be a comedy, but it was really just a bad joke in more ways than one. It told the story of a Wacky Spy who steals a Top Secret document only to have it blow up in his face.

I was terribly disappointed in the end result. With no means of editing, we shot it in sequence and in one take for each shot. All the fluffs ended up in the "finished" piece. To make matters worse, I was shooting indoors with outdoor film under low lighting conditions, in the hope that this would give the finished film a yellow, faded "silent movie" look, the way it had done with one of the reels of home movies my dad had shot years earlier. Imagine my dismay when the film was developed and gaudy, bright seventies colors flooded the screen.

I didn't even get the title cards framed properly. They were dumb and unfunny enough to start with, but in the "finished" film you couldn't even read them. My venture into comedy film-making was an embarrassment.

I can only suppose that Robert Wise felt a bit that way about his venture into Star Trek movie-making. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was made under appalling conditions, with a script that was never finished and a schedule so tight that the movie went out essentially uncompleted. It never had a proper post production, no time for a sound mix or foley work, so the bridge of the Enterprise was dead silent. Effects shots were still arriving the day before the premiere and they were not what Wise wanted, but he just had to cut them in as-is. The next day he hand-delivered the "finished" film to the premiere. The print was still wet!

So in 2001 he jumped at the chance to do a "Director's Cut" that was far more elaborate than these things usually are. With a rule in place that his crew not do anything that wasn't possible in 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was completely rebuilt from the ground up. A new edit restored scenes that got lost in the rush of the original release, and removed dead weight; new effects shots were created, the picture was finally given a proper sound mix. Wise got the chance to complete his unfinished movie.

With the result that it is no longer the worst movie in the series. In fact, it's jumped both The Final Frontier and The Search for Spock to land in the number three position (I'm only counting the films that feature the original cast). Granted, that's not saying much, as both of those other movies are dismal. But Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with all of its story flaws still intact, now at least possesses a professionalism and polish that makes it worth sitting through.

And now I'm getting the same chance that Robert Wise got! Thanks to Apple's iMovie software, my stupid little one-joke "comedy" is getting the post-production that it so desperately needed.

The first thing I did was strip the color out. What an improvement! There's a reason why the great comedies (and even some bad ones like mine) are all in black & white: color distracts and overwhelms. In this case, the black and white also highlights the scratches and age of the film, which I like. And it's now (slightly) less obvious that I shot this in my bedroom and the upstairs hall of our house!

Next the flubs came out. At one point I walk into a wall, and then spoil the take by grinning. At another point I freeze in my tracks and tell the cameraman (my dad) to "Cut." You get the idea. A few frames of film shaved, a cross-dissolve added here, a fade to black there -- goodbye flubs!

Thanks to some stock photography I was able to add establishing shots, exteriors, that will help set the stage and clarify things: a "top secret government facility" (actually the Googleplex) and an "international spy organization headquarters." I'm creating new title cards and insert shots in Photoshop that are at least legible and, I hope, slightly more humorous. Finally, I'll score some silent-movie music from one source or another, and Voila! My stupid old one-joke "comedy" will no longer be quite the embarrassment that it once was.

It's still going to be a stupid little one-joke "comedy," nothing can change that. As with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the raw material is what it is. But I'm having a ball and learning new things and who knows? I've always wanted to write a script. With the tech that's out there now, all things seem possible. . .

-- Freder.

Restoring the Past

As I plow through the processing of approximately 175 pictures that I scanned yesterday, I'm faced with inevitable memories and emotions, and occasionally tears, although that's rare. I have the work to focus on, and these things are far enough away in the distant past to have lost some of their sting. The moments of hard sadness come when I'm at work, sneaking up on me suddenly when my mind is on other things.

The photos have yellowed with time, and restoring them to their original vibrance has an eerie effect: Some of them look like they could have been taken yesterday. Except for the cars and clothes.

I'm amazed at how much of the basic family furniture is now set up in my house. I see paintings that my mother did that are still with me, and others that are not. I wonder where they went.

I particularly like seeing the jailhouse standing beside the pool at the Edina, Minnesota house, sporting a different coat of paint, and knowing that it came all the way through all those years and four moves to where it now stands.

The picture above is an interesting one. I can't think of any better illustration of how different my sister and I have always been. Note that she has no problem encroaching on my personal space, and that her duck is agitated and scared. I would be, too, in his position.

Typically of my sister, she did not even allow me to name my own duck. She named them both, and that was that, and my parents just stood by and let her do it, they way they always let her have her way and allowed her to boss me around.

The ducks really landed my Dad in the doghouse. He just brought them home one night, without even consulting Mom. They grew up to be perfectly white. One day, they got out of their pen and disappeared into the neighborhood. We drove around and spent the whole day looking for them, but never found them. At the end of the day, they came striding back into our yard, side by side, quacking enthusiastically as if nothing had happened.

I think it was my Grandmother Mel who finally got rid of the ducks. She could not abide animals, even dogs and cats, the ducks were over the top for her. I was so sad when the car drove away with them in a cage on the roof rack.

When my mother was a little girl, my grandmother Mel just "got rid" of my mother's pet dachshund, Schnitzel, one day. I don't think Mom ever really got over that. I think that's why, at the first opportunity, Mom decided that she was going to have just as many pets as she wanted.

Oh, dear, I'm afraid this has all been a bit of a ramble. That's what old pictures do.

-- Freder.

Movie Mogul

Perfect casting: My sister is a vampire and I'm the clown.

Some things are coming together. Among them, the video project I had in mind involving the family Home Movies.

As you may recall, my first attempts to to get the raw files from DVD onto my computer in a working format ended in frustration. But this past week my boss tasked me with getting footage from a DVD into a PowerPoint presentation, and in the process of learning how to do that, the answer to my own problem came along. Last night I had a really productive evening ripping the Home Movie files from DVD and then converting them to QuickTime and importing them into IMovie, Apple's video editing software. Today I slept in late, had a few slices of white pizza for "brunch," then went straight to the computer where I've been working in IMovie all day.

I won't say that it's the most intuitive program to learn, but the help files are OK and I was sometimes able to figure things out for myself. While not a professional video editing tool, it's darn good. It's a breeze to add titles (using any font in your system) and background music and sound effects, and you can incorporate still images as well. I haven't begun to learn all the features; instead I spent a lot of time breaking the master film down into editable scenes, and inserting soft transitions in place of many of the hard cuts. The home movies are already a million times better, and I've only just begun. As an example, instead of the original hard cut from shots made in our back yard to footage of the family vacation on Ludlow's Island in Lake Vermillion, I was able to insert a map of the island, zoom in on our cabin there, and fade in to the action. Tomorrow I may actually go into work just to scan some more family photos for this project. I should just bring a box with me and scan the whole thing. Any photos I don't use in the video can be included separately as a slideshow on the finished DVD.

I'm excited to be learning new things and I love the results I'm getting. Dad will be impressed.

And it especially feels good to have a project again, one with immediate rewards. This project won't last forever, but for as long as it does I've got Direction and Momentum again.

Heck, it even justifies all the time I wasted downloading music. I've got a lot of good stuff to choose from. "Stardust" by Nat King Cole, anyone?

Tonight I get to watch a brand-new (to me) episode of the new Doctor Who. For today, anyway, Life is Good.

-- Freder

Closure

It's here! The jailhouse! There it is in its new home in my "formal" garden. The last piece in the moving puzzle. The final proof that home is here.

What is this thing? you may be asking. I'll tell you.

It is, literally, a drunk tank, dating back to around the turn of the last century. When a cop on the beat found some gent who was drunk and disorderly, he'd lock them in one of these things, where the person would literally chill until the paddy wagon came around to take him to jail.

That's its history. But to me, today, it looks and feels like my TARDIS.

My father had been very interested in using his truck to move the thing here. I had my doubts: he's getting on in years and has a bad back. But he insisted. Late last week, I asked if he would be available sometime over the long weekend with the provision that if it proved too much for the two of us that we STOPPED and I called in the movers.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, the plan got changed, and I didn't have much say in it. Instead of us going over together on Sunday or Monday, Dad and his wife wanted to go out there on Tuesday -- alone.

How do these things happen?

Well, thank goodness that as it turned out they had plenty of help. The new owner and his father were there, and they were anxious to get rid of the thing, and they did most of the work of loading it into my father's truck.

When I got home from work Tuesday afternoon, there was my father's truck with a hoosegow strapped down in back!

My backyard neighbor, R____, the one that I like, came out and climbed into my yard to see what the hell was going on. She was nice about it, a real sport, because she and her Significant Other will have this in full view of their back garden, and I can well imagine a lot of folks wouldn't appreciate that. Dad being the self-proclaimed raconteur that he fancies himself, he gave her the whole history of the thing.

She climbed up onto the truck and helped us unload it. We shored it up with a bit of stone paving from the garden and two stakes from the garage.

She actually laughed when I made my TARDIS comment. Sometimes I wish people wouldn't do things to make me like them.

As I was coming back from putting away the remaining stakes and the sledge hammer, I saw Dad talking to R____ seriously. I don't know what he was telling her, but she looked concerned and sad. The conversation broke up as I came down to them. I hate it when that happens.

R____ and my Dad's wife suddenly really started to hit it off. They're both gardeners -- and both outgoing. M_ went down into my neighbor's garden and she showed her the whole set-up.

Dad and his wife came in and cleaned up a bit, and then we toddled off to dinner at Ruby Tuesdays. They had a coupon. I used to take Mom there for lunch every so often on a Saturday. I'd forgotten that the first thing you have to do with one of their hamburgers is cut it in half.

*

On Monday afternoon I was doing what I could to recover from what felt like a minor case of heat stroke, picked up that AM working in the garden under the suddenly hot sun, when my friends from college, who live just down the block, showed up on my doorstep to invite me to dinner. This didn't sit so well with me, because it was unexpected and a disruption of my Routine, but I accepted because -- well, that's what I have to do to break out of myself, I guess.

When the time came to leave I threw the deadbolt on the back door and went out the front way. It turned out that Pandy Bear had been hiding on the front porch, so I had to get him back into the house somehow. I have no keys to any of the front doors. I went out the front, walked around to the back, tried to use my key to get in --

-- except that I had thrown the deadbolt.

"I'm in trouble now," I thought.

Thank god the downstairs windows were open, and thank god the screens aren't bolted to the house, and thank god I have a stepladder in my garage. I ripped the screen away, squeezed myself through, fell ass over head into my study here and banged my knee on the floor.

After that experience, a little bit of socializing was relatively easy.

But I must say -- as much as I sometimes get lonely and crave social contact, after two straight nights of it under these conditions I was glad to have things back to peace and normalcy tonight!

Gonna take out the trash (so I don't have to do it tomorrow morning) and scoot quickly around the block. G'nite!

-- Freder.

Journey's End?

Blogger's recent crash has coincided with a couple of milestones for me. It may take a couple of longish posts to catch up.

Plus, I just had a bad spell of tears. It's hard to organize my thoughts.

Last night I was so full of clarity. Tonight, not so much.

Just overnight, the first nasturtiums that I planted going on three weeks ago started poking their way out of the ground. Just overnight, the leaves on the trees finally popped and have started to enclose the house nicely.

This evening after work, I was staring into the flower bed to see what was what when a couple of young boys went by on their bicycles. I wasn't paying them any mind. The youngest one actually called out, "Good evening, sir!" and I turned and smiled and said hi. The older one said, "I like your mailbox!" -- meaning my Mechanical Man. I thanked him, and then they were gone.

Last night, some paper lanterns that I ordered arrived, and I wasted no time in hanging them along my front porch. I could hardly wait until dark to turn them on and see how they looked.

When darkness came, I was so happy with the effect that I wanted to see what it looked like from the outside. I put my shoes on, walked around the block, stood in the dark and admired my house.

Then I realized that this was exactly the same thing that I did all though the sad summer of last year.

The old house had been irrevocably changed by the loss of my mother. I used to take a drink out into the yard, sit at the garden table in the dark with all the lights on inside the house, and look in at the world that was.

Last night I stood in my yard outside the new house, and looked in on the world that is.

I realized that, although there is still some unpacking and work to do, it doesn't really amount to much compared to what's behind me, and it doesn't have to be a priority anymore.

I realized that, if life is divided into chapters like a novel, and if the last chapter of my life was titled "Transition" -- that chapter has drawn to a close.

I'm no longer in transition. I'm here. And everything that happens from here on in is, trite as this sounds even to me, a lot like my nasturtiums.

The seed's been planted. Now I just have to hope that something will come up.

-- Freder.

Sensory Overload

You're looking at a photo of the Living Room in the old house, taken after my mother's death, but before the auctioneers came to pillage, plunder, and destroy.

The whole house was like that, almost.

This is going to seem choppy and disjointed, but it's going somewhere, really, it is.

For the Store, I ordered Temple Grandin's latest book, The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperperger's. I was all over it as soon as I could decently do so (i.e., as soon as I was not on camera).

This may be the next step that my reading will take. Where the reading that I'm doing now is all still in the area of diagnosis and description, this is focused on living, and is overwhelmingly positive.

But for now, I'm still in the realm of basic learning. The Guide, as I've written here before, is eerily descriptive of my life. I keep seeing scenes from my own childhood, and explanations for my behaviour as an adult.

I've written about mornings in the old house before. I've written that I had to get up earlier and earlier in order to beat my mother into the kitchen, so that I could get my morning chores done before she came into the room.

It's true that this was made necessary because the house was so impossibly claustrophobic, so fully packed with Stuff, that it was hard enough to get from the sink to the refrigerator to the front door, hard enough to sponge the floor, when I just had to step over her chair. But when she was sitting in the chair, and I had to climb over her in order to get everything cleaned (sort of) and everyone fed -- well, that was just plain Too Much.

But there was more to it than that. I needed some quiet time, some alone time, some peace and solitude in the morning, in order to gather myself somewhat before I had to start Being Social.

And yes, I was drinking as a coping mechanism then -- I needed to get a couple of shots of vodka and orange juice into my system in order to cope with the assault that was about to come, the Daily Bludgeoning that is life as I know it.

As soon as my mother struggled into the room and sat down, the television came on. Some mornings, this was like a brutal slap across the face. The volume was always too loud, the insipid Morning Shows that she wanted to watch were intolerable to me with their huge casts of Preening Idiots all yammering to each other at the same time about Nothing At All. For some while, the local CBS affiliate ran Guiding Light in the morning, and that was barely tolerable, because it had a discernible storyline; but once Guiding Light was cancelled, morning television was just a daily ramming of nails into my forehead.

For my mother, it was her connection to the outside world, the only connection that she had. For me, it was an almost unbearable onslaught of White Noise. In my mother's world, the television was on 24/7, there was never any quiet, and I coped by retreating to my own end of the house, and by learning to block it all out when I could not escape.

The combined task of doing my morning chores, filtering out the noise of the television, and interacting with her in what I hoped was a meaningful way was, many mornings, more than I could cope with, an emotionally exhausting Chinese Water Torture without the actual cachet of Asian Spies gloating over me while I suffered.

I learned to fear the distant sound of her canes in the front hallway. Clack, clack-clack. Oh, god, I would think, she's coming., Have to hurry up and get this done.

And so I kept getting up earlier and earlier, in order to beat her there and get some of the basic things done, so that I would have a few less things to deal with when she came in.

The problem was, as soon as she found out how early I was getting up, she'd come in that much earlier, in order to be with me. She was desperate for some social contact, and I was desperate for some peace.

One morning I absolutely snarled at her: How freakin' early do I have to get up to beat you in here?!

She balanced herself on her crutches, and said, "I didn't know it was a contest."

I was wiping the floor under the cat food dish clean with paper towels. I think that I bowed my head and just sighed. I thought, she doesn't get it, she doesn't understand, but I didn't have the words to say that to her.

The next thing I knew, she was turning in place and struggling back out of the room.

"Well, for god's sake, don't go now that you're here!" I said.

"I'm going," she said.

Are you wearing shoes right now? Cross your legs, look at the soles, notice the Heel.

That's what I felt like.

And yet there was another part of me. The part of me that closed my eyes and closed my ears when the television came on and splashed over me like a bucket of ice-cold water every morning, the part of me that shouted inside Oh my god! Oh my god! Why does she have to have that so freakin' loud?!

As my mother laboured her way painfully back down the stairs, through the narrow and claustrophobic front hall, to sit on the padded stool in her own room, in front of her own television, most likely resentful, most likely not understanding why her son was "being so mean to her," -- as she said to me several times -- there was the part of me that gathered myself in silence, and sighed, and inwardly said:

-- Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

-- Freder.

Flowers for the Dead

I know that other people are thinking this, because I think it myself sometimes: It's been a year. Why aren't you over this? You should be over this by now.

In just a couple of hours, it will be -- would have been -- my mother's birthday. She was no worse off than she had been for some time. I thought she had a few years still left in her. Instead, she was gone in two weeks.

For the past two mornings, and tonight, this evening, I've had much more than the usual amount of tears.

I can't believe that it's been a year. My perception of time has been even more whacked-out than usual.

A year ago, the largest problem seemed to be my mother's financial troubles and the way that they were tapping me out, too. Every couple of months she'd come crying to me to ask for another thousand dollars. I didn't mind the drain on my finances so much, because I'd sold a piece of art for a lot of money and I could afford it. What I did mind were the waterworks.

She was so dependent on me for everything -- most especially for company -- and it was emotionally and physically exhausting. She used to complain that I stayed in my end of the house too much. But with the job and being responsible for absolutely everything around the house, I desperately needed my Alone Time to recuperate.

Now I know why. My senses were completely overwhelmed. No wonder I kept myself well pickled pretty much 24/7. Life was demanding the very things out of me that were the hardest for a Probable Aspie to give.

Last Spring was a good deal warmer and sunnier than this one. The weekends that began the month of April were sunny and hot. On Saturdays, we made our errands run into town. It took the whole damn day. Mom would walk out to the car, and then at every stop we made, I would pull her wheelchair out of the trunk, set it up, and she'd wheel herself through the various stores. It was a lot of work for her, and she performed like a champ.

Until we got home. Somehow, somewhy, the walk from the car back to the house hit her like a ton of bricks. The sun was high and bright and hot. She would collapse into a chair just short of the door, and I would have to stand over her with an umbrella to shield her from the heat. I'd plead with her to do what she could to get into the house where it was cool and she could rest -- because the umbrella wasn't helping much. A couple of times I ran into the house to get her a glass of ice water.

That walk from the car to the house was a real point of concern. On Friday the fourteenth of April, I was looking ahead to Saturday and worrying about that walk.

We never got that far.

On Friday the fourteenth of April, just a year ago, she walked out of the house for the last time.

That's another post. For now, there's nothing left but to cry and cry.

I spent the bulk of today planting more and more nasturtiums. . . in pots and planters, along the edge of the side back garden. I'm done now. I hope that they come up. Some stupid atavistic monkey stuporstitious part of myself still imagines that I can bring her back if I plant enough nasturtiums.

I Have a Dream

This morning I remembered my dreams, for the first time in months. Better they should have stayed unremembered.

My mother kept on dying, over and over again, and I sobbed dream tears, tears like I haven't had in several months.

There was a jagged hole in the floor. I was afraid that the cats would fall through it, one by one. I covered it over with a heavy rug, but that didn't put down the fear and anxiety.

My mother and I were watching a movie in a theater. It was a fun, colorful picture, but then it turned ugly. This is how you can tell it was a dream: Anderson Cooper came out of a dark, twisted doorway and smiled, proclaiming that he was going to rape the heroine, who had already fallen down on a fire escape. Vague menacing figures spilled out from behind him and rushed the camera.

My mother grew visibly anxious and distressed. I said, "Do you want to leave?" and she nodded.

Instead of getting her into her wheelchair as in real life, I walked beside her towards the theater lobby at the painfully slow pace that was, in later years, the best that she could manage. Mayhem unfolded on the screen behind us. There was screaming, and it could not be blocked out.

I woke with a heavy head, and my whole body feeling as if it was weighted. I felt as if I was walking through a foot of mud.

I used to love remembering my dreams in the morning. They took me to fascinating places and sometimes inspired me. If this is what my dreams have become, I'm glad not to remember them anymore.

I went through my morning chores, not feeling anxious or depressed so much as just heavy and tired. It was Trash Day, and as I carried my two garbage bags down to the street I saw an older woman approaching along the sidewalk from below the house. It was obvious our paths would cross. This distressed me in a minor way. I hate being seen by strangers on my own land, and I dread chance encounters, because you never know how they will work out.

This woman was coming along at a clip. She was quite cheery. She greeted me, and said, "It's going to be a beautiful day!"

There was a cold wind and I wasn't convinced. She said, "There'd be something wrong with us if we complained on a day like this!"

I said, "You're right. Thank you." I set the bags down snd she passed behind me, and we both went about the rest of our day.

The Biz

They've remade Arthur?

Why?

The original wasn't worth watching!

What was the original good for? A song. A chance to hear Sir John Gielgud swear like a sailor.

Honestly, Hollywood needs to get a clue.

This is nowhere near enough to hang a whole post on. Normally I would just chuck it into an email to my old friend BC. But Hollywood has become, if not a sore subject, at least a dead end between the two of us.

It doesn't matter if I write to him about a picture that I liked. It doesn't matter if I write to him about something that I didn't like. Hell fire, it doesn't even matter if we completely agree: the other night I wrote to tell him that I'd just metaphorically "walked out" on Spider-Man 3 because it was such a dreadful movie; in response, I got the same tirade that I always get from him these days when the subject of Hollywood comes up. Really, it amazes me that he has the patience to retype it so often.

The thing is, crap like remaking Arthur and True Grit and Mildred Pierce, crap like Hop and Sucker Punch and The Three Musketeers -- It doesn't just make it hard to argue a contrary position, it makes me not want to do so.

The movies get made, and people actually pay money to go see them. As long as that keeps on happening, it doesn't matter if people come away from the experience feeling cheated. What counts is the voting with money.

I don't believe that it's as fundamentally simple as BC appears to think. I believe that, in particular, young people are struggling with the culture that they've been given to live with. My last girlfriend, lo those many years ago, had a teenaged son and daughter. One afternoon the son had friends over and we all sat down to watch a movie.

It was Little Nicky, with Adam Sandler.

I'd never seen a Sandler picture before, so I was open to checking it out. The kids, all of them, told me "This movie is so funny! It's so funny! You've got to see this!"

Well, as the movie unfolded, it came as no surprise to me to discover that it wasn't funny at all -- rather, it was one of the dumber pieces of junk that I'd seen up to that point.

What surprised me was the reaction from the kids. They just sat there with blank looks on their faces.

I said to them, "I thought you liked this movie. I thought you said this was funny!"

All of of them nodded and affirmed, like True Believers, "Oh, it is, it is!"

I did not say it out loud, but I thought it: But, you aren't laughing. You're not giggling, chortling, snorting. You're not even cracking a grin or a faint Mona Lisa smile. You look as bored as I feel.

Shortly after that, I left the room. Better to spend time with C____ than to misguidedly attempt to "bond" over something as puerile as Little Nicky.

But now I think that they believed the movie was funny even though they weren't laughing. I think they believed it was funny because that's what they'd been told, and none of them had anything better to compare it with. I believe that those poor kids had never been exposed to real comedy, and so they took what they were given at face value.

I can only hope that some of them have been exposed to TCM by now. But I doubt it.

We're Americans: and so we are all very well trained to eat whatever shit we are served. So inevitably, the culture is doomed to suffer and endlessly spiral into -- not mediocrity, because we are already long past that point -- how can I put this politely?

Jacques Cousteau, "The Sea King," once said that he did not eat shellfish of any kind, "and you wouldn't either, if you knew what they ate."

So much of our culture is now made up of shellfish eating other shellfish eating other shellfish that it's sometimes hard to see a way back.

The difference between BC and myself is, I haven't given up on it. Still willing to view selectively, and rely on my instincts to steer me away from most of the junk.

Maybe it's because I've met so many people on Facebook and in life who are not willing to eat whatever shit they are fed, who do care about story and who love good movies and good books and can tell the good from the bad.

Maybe it's also because some projects still manage to get made that are worthy of being made. It doesn't happen so often as it used to, but it does happen. I wrote about Jean-Pierre Jeunet a couple of weeks back and think that he's a great example: all the more because he uses all the techniques, the modern and the primitive, including all of the CGI tools that are misused and abused by people with less talent: he shows us that the tools can be used for Good in the hands of an artist.

As long as there are people like that working in the industry, and thriving, I won't give up on the Dream Factory entirely. . . no matter if Peter Cook's Devil from the original Bedazzled often seems to be in charge.

-- Freder.

An odd relic

Pictured above is a side panel from one of the boxes I unpacked late this week. My mother had filled it with a wide range of her smaller creations -- candlesticks, necklaces and the like -- and then stowed it in the attic, lord knows how many years ago. When I found it, I exclaimed out loud: "Mom!" -- and of course it came with me.

It's hard to date this box, but it probably goes back to the late '70s. 9-Lives hasn't used that logo or design in longer than I remember. It's too bad; I like its retro stylishness, and the winking cartoon quat. You don't see many cartoon mascots for products anymore (although I've noted that Speedy is still around, and Mister Peanut never really left --  just changed his appearance a few times).

Can anyone else remember some cartoon mascots that have retired to the old mascots home, or ones that are still around?

The now-defunct (?) Hamms Beer, a local Midwestern brew, had a bear character that I always liked. We used to have a ceramic display piece featuring the bear. Haven't seen it since we moved from Southern Maine, but I popped onlike just now, and lo & behold, there was a picture of it:

Changing styles in advertising, clothing and design have always interested me, and I sometimes marvel at things like the 9-Lives box that once looked contemporary to us, but now, clearly, belong to a different era. Even the terminology has changed: "Tuna and Chicken parts" is much more open and honest than anything you see in these days of Designer Cat Food when "Tasty Temptations" and "Fancy Feast" are more likely what you see on the shelf. Back then, Quat Fud was Quat Fud.

That box goes back to the time when we had, get this, more than thirty cats outdoors, and close to twenty more indoors. My mother bought between three and five CASES of cat food every week. And as you can see on the box, there were twenty-four cans in each case.

When we fed the outside quats, we put down two big trays of food, each with at least three cans of food and whole mess of crunchies mixed in. A whole bunch o' quats would circle each tray. It was like feeding a bunch of small, furry pigs.

At that time we also had two dogs, two horses, one pony, a goat and a flock of sheep. The horses and pony were for my sister, but guess who had to help out, and guess who got stuck caring for all of them when she went away and got married? Sandy, her male palomino, hated all men, had probably been abused, but he ended up liking me better than he did her. I was the only man he ever let hug him around the neck. I was the only one he trusted, and I led him to his death.

That still haunts me to this day. He's buried at the old house, another sad memory to leave behind.

As for the cats -- one summer, I'm guessing it was in the early or middle '80s, a terrible disease swept through the yard. It killed quickly. It seemed as if a couple of times a week there was a new body for me to bury. By the time it was over, there were only about eight or ten hardy quats remaining. With comings and goings and people dropping their kittens on us, it stayed at around that number for a long time. It was only within the last decade that it got down to around six, then five, then four, then three, and finally Junior was the last to disappear. I wish he could have made it through the move. He was a sweet guy.

On her deathbed, my mother said, "Bring them in." I think she meant Junior, Whitestockings and Grumpyface.

But how could I? Grumpyface is too wild, Junior was an unspayed male, and I did try with Whitestockings. Longtime readers of this blog know how that turned out.

It's funny how something like the side panel of a cat food box can take your mind down some long-abandoned, branching pathways.

-- Freder

Putting The Wolf Behind Me

Yes, this is really Us. Although my costume   is Superman, my face is JFK. Which not only dates me, but is something to Ponder Upon, whether you agree with the connotations or not.

Right around the time this picture was taken, my sister sexually abused me for the first time.

From that day, to the day in the early '70s when she threw me out of the recliner because SHE wanted to sit in it, to the day a couple of years later when she threw me off of the toilet because SHE wanted to shit in it (never mind that there was a perfectly serviceable bathroom just thirteen steps down) to the day just a few months ago when she sold the old house out from under me even though I was willed the right to live there for five years --

-- from that day to this, I cannot think of my sister without thinking: "I hate you, Claudia."

And yet --

-- today, for the first time, I thought of her, and thought, as always, "I hate you!"

-- and then thought, But I don't HAVE to hate you anymore. You don't even know my address or phone number, and if I have any say in it you never will. You are Out of My Life, for once and for all, forever.

You bitch. I never have to put up with your abuse, ever again.

THANK GOD FOR THAT.

Life is so much better without you in it.

And yet, it comes at such a cost.

Somewhat more calm, no less angry, in need of moving on. . .

While casting around for some images of Bad Dads on the internet, I found this quite funny British blog post:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/feb/10/clip-joint-bad-dads

So that made me smile a little bit. There hasn't been much of that going on at my place over the past couple of days.

I wanted to write about Adaptation and The Frighteners, both of which crossed my eyeballs earlier in the week. I wanted to write about the progress I'm making on the new website (not much) and in setting up the new house (somewhat better).

Instead, I've been stewing in hatred, restless, unable to focus, gnawing on the bone of my father's latest betrayal, angry at myself for ever thinking that, just perhaps, he might have grown a vestigial sense of personal responsibility in recent years.

That he hasn't, and I fell into my own trap, that's my fault.

It didn't help matters that he sent he sent me three emails, one of them labeled "humble apology," and there wasn't anything humble or apologetic about any of them. Instead, it was the same old self-justifying crap that he always does, the same crap he pulled on mom all those years ago when he justified his affairs by telling mom all about them, as if that made it all right, because he was being honest, you see, he wasn't keeping a secret.

When I was seven years old I came home from school one day and found mom sobbing. Now I know why.

Last night I got drunk and flamed him from the bottom of my heart. I said, Do you know what you did? Do you know how bad this is?

 I said that this blog is just for me, it's my therapy, the only therapy I have, and what you did was the same exact thing as if you hid out in my therapist's office and eavesdropped on the sessions.

I said And then, and then, you had the unmitigated gall to write and tell me that my feelings, my own personal thoughts and feelings, where you were not even invited, were not valid.

I believe I then launched into a string of obscenities.

But it's true -- it's just as if he leapt out of hiding in the middle of the session and "corrected" me in front of the therapist.

.I should get over it. I need to get over it, this is just one more violation in a series. But right now I can't stop kicking myself, can't stop wishing that I could kick him. This is as big a betrayal as he's ever committed against me, but I gave him the opportunity to do it, knowing that nothing ever changes, knowing that you can't put a bottle in a drunkard's hands and expect him not to take a swig.

I have to pretend to work now. Maybe that will help me climb out of this bitter soup that I'm sitting in. My goal for tonight: take a few more deep breaths, and write that post about The Frighteners. . .

-- Freder.

Grooving to the Mellow Elevator Music Sounds

I'm not so much concerned about showing my age -- what does concern me is revealing what a dweeb I am. Most of my friends prefer real manly, beef-flavored music like The Rolling Stones and Johnny Cash, and I like that sort of thing, too, in its place . . . but, secretly, in my heart of hearts, I've always harbored a shameful love of smarmy Easy Listening ballads.

I owned every album by The Partridge Family that ever came out. I still do. Don't hate me for it.

Give me The Moody Blues and The Carpenters any day over The Rolling Stones. While others were listening to Pink Floyd, I was listening to my grandmother's records by the Mystic Moods Orchestra.

I know. Most of you are now pointing at your mouths and making gagging gestures. Sorry about that, but a person has to be who they are. I love elevator music. There, I've said it. I am free, now!

So when I discovered the power of ITunes a week or so ago, I began tracking down creaking oldies like there was no tomorrow. For the past three nights I've been up until after three AM, searching, ooooh child, searching ever-y wee-yee-yee-utch way-ee-ay-ee-ayee for old musical friends.

And last night I burned a 24-song compilation onto disk, have been playing it more or less continuously since then.

Speaking as a creative person, it is not a creative act to edit a short story collection or to compile a playlist. But for the compiler it does carry a kind of creative feeling, and the selection inevitably says more about the person picking the songs than it does about the songs themselves.

Here then, is my playlist -- with some commentary along the way:

1. A Summer Place -- Percy Faith
2. One Less Bell to Answer - The Fifth Dimension (I loved this group. They contributed nothing in terms of songwriting, but they knew how to make a song their own. Once, long ago, a friend proposed a party where only LIVE albums could be played as music. I chimed in with  "I've got a Live album by The Fifth Dimension!! -- The room fell silent.)
3. We've Only Just Begun -- The Carpenters
4. I'll Never Fall in Love Again -- Dionne Warwicke (I was quite little when this one came out. I always liked Dionne a lot until she became a psychic call-line con artist).
5. Alone Again (Naturally) -- Gilbert O'Sullivan (I never did understand the words until I heard the song on the radio again last year, and then they hit me hard. In particular, the verse "I remember I cried when my father died | Never wishing to hide the tears | And at sixty-five years old, | My mother, God rest her soul, | Couldn't understand why the only man | She had ever loved had been taken | Leaving her to start with a heart So badly broken | Despite encouragement from me | No words were ever spoken | When she passed away | I cried and cried all day | Alone again, naturally" are as honest and hard as any you'll find in a bouncy little pop ballad)
6. Galveston -- Glan Campbell
7. Both Sides Now -- Judy Collins
8. Ave Maria -- The Carpenters (the song is a family favorite, and although my favorite version is the one at the end of Fantasia, Karen does a nice job with it here)
9. The Lord's Prayer -- Sister Janet Mead (this might seem like an odd entry for a crusty skeptic, but I've always loved it. Sister Mead's singing is sweet and clear, and in particular the bridge of the song is just lovely. I wore out that part of my 45 copy by playing it over and over again)
10. Jean -- Oliver (I know some people who would run screaming from the room if I played this song for them. I love it.)
11. A Daisy a Day -- Jud Strunk (I saw Strunk live once, at the Thaxter Theater, home of the Portland Players. This was before he turned up as a regular on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. His brand of regional comedy didn't appeal to me any more than Tim Sample's does to this day, but he wrote hisseff a nice song here.)
12. Close to You -- The Carpenters
13. My Father -- Judy Collins (I first heard this beautiful song when Melanie did a terrific cover of it on her album Good Book)
14. Sugar, Sugar -- The Archies (Pour a little sugar on it, honey!! -- somehow, I think that might sting!)
15. The Morning After -- Maureen McGovern (I'd listen to her sing one of George W. Bush's speeches if I had to)
16. The soundtrack cut for this post. Click here to find out what it is! 
17. Angel of the Morning -- Merilee Rush (the only song on the compilation that I had to pay for. I just could not find this version anywhere. Juice Newton did a very competent cover, but it doesn't create the mood that this one does)
18. San Francisco -- Scott McKenzie (I never knew until just last night that Papa John Phillips wrote this song!)
19. I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing -- The New Seekers (still can't play this without hearing the Coke lyrics in my head. Mom loved this song and I've always liked it.)
20. Top of the World -- The Carpenters
21. Can You Read My Mind -- Maureen McGovern (wish they'd used this version in Superman: The Movie instead of Margot Kidder's spoken-word rendition that bleeds the romance right out of it)
22. I Don't Like Spiders and Snakes -- Jim Stafford (yes, it really is, kind of, a love song, about lad who doesn't know what to do with a crush!)
23. Right Down the Line -- the recently late Gerry Rafferty. And the perfect closing tune:
24. Put a Little Love in Your Heart -- Jackie DeShannon

Now I can put this CD on the player and putter around the house with little hearts, flowers and stars flying out of me just like a damn cartoon character.

There was one song that I couldn't find, because I couldn't remember its name or the name of the artist. This afternoon, it finally came to me: Love is Blue.

Can you sense the beginning of another compilation?

P.S. staying up until three AM three nights in a row does not make a person a very good employee by the third morning!

-- Freder.