On Saturday Afternoons in 1963

image from The Zirkus Lenormand

It’s taken me almost as long to recover from having guests as it took me to have them. It may end up taking longer. “Getting” your groove back and “got” it are not the same, and I’m still in the category of “getting.”

I have no fresh, eye-opening insights about the trial of guests coming to stay. It’s hard, and that’s all. When the guests are family, it’s even more of a trial. When one is your parent and the other thinks she is your parent — that’s the worst of all. 

My father and I, as you already know if you go back a while with this blog, have not been on good terms for most of my life; so to have that relationship Mostly Functioning, even after an event like this, is a triumph and a miracle. Sure, it would have been easier to spend the same amount of time with him if we could have spread it out over a couple of months — but that’s not an option for us anymore. Gone are the days when we could meet for lunch and go our separate ways. We have entered the era where any visit amounts to a Home Invasion.

Of course parents never stop being your parents, even when you are in your fifties and thought you had attained, at long last, a hard-won Independence. It’s worse when you have a basically submissive personality, as I do whenever I am not sitting at the word-processor keyboard.

For a solid week I walked around feeling four feet tall, feeling like I had no authority in my own house. Dad alone I could have handled: but his wife is an out-of-control, runaway steam engine, and the two of them together completely overwhelmed me. 

On her own terms and turf, she is who she is and that is fine. I accept her as my father’s wife, as someone who is important to him; but there is a line that cannot be crossed, and I will not accept her as my “step-anything.” I had one mother. She was enough. This woman’s position as my Dad’s wife buys my respect for her in that position… and that is all.

So to have this steam-engine, this whirlwind, swoop into my life and begin "fixing" everything from my upstairs toilet to my home mortgage was a mind-numbing-event, an imposition of staggering proportions. 

“That’s just the way she is,” Dad says, in the process putting up with behavior that he would not have tolerated for an instant from my mother. “You just have to take her as she is.”

She is a woman who has clearly never asked herself the question, “How would I feel if a guest came to my house and behaved as I am behaving?” This is a woman who has never heard of the Golden Rule and would brush it aside if anyone confronted her with it. 

On their first night, as we passed the bathroom, I showed them the towel rack. I said, quite clearly: “This is the hand towel. That hanging over the shower is my towel that I dried off with this afternoon. These hanging here are clean towels for you.”

They weren’t listening to me. I could tell. And the next morning, sure enough, the two towels they had used to shower with were the hand towel and mine. The two nice clean towels I had set out for them were ignored. It’s just perfectly symbolic of the whole week: they didn’t think they had to listen to me about anything.

She re-arranged my refrigerator, so that I couldn’t find my milk or my eggs. When I put it all back the way that I wanted it, she re-arranged the fucking thing again.

She roared through my gardens and imposed her cyclonic will upon them, not stopping at ripping up trees that I had planted with my own two hands. I am trying to cultivate a gothic look: this was not part of her agenda, and not to be respected.

She “fixed” my upstairs toilet (although I am pleased to say that this was a failure: it’s as bad now as it ever was) and re-caulked my bathroom tub. 

The food that I bought to feed us all for a week is now sitting in the freezer, because she made it impossible for me to plan a single meal: she doesn’t like the way I cook things, which is as they should be cooked. I use real butter, not margarine (which even microbes don’t recognize as food), and sea-salt — a substance forbidden in her house. I cook things in the oven and on the grill and in pots and pans. She cooks absolutely everything in the fucking microwave — even meat. My hero Gordon Ramsay would take her apart in nothing flat, and I desperately needed Gordo to swing by the house and yell at her.

She left coffee mugs and spoons and shit sitting out in my cooking space, and then used the area meant to handle the run-off from drying dishes as her cooking space. My cats walk there. It’s not a sanitary cooking space. But you can’t tell this woman anything. Try to tell this woman anything and she will yammer you to death in her high-pitched pigeon English.

She even tried to re-arrange my basic finances, by proposing to buy my mortgage from the bank — and then giving me just 24 hours to make the decision. 

I’m a person who can’t decide what to have for dinner in that amount of time. In the end, out of sheer frustration at not being given enough time to think about it, I turned her down: and only now, more than a week later, do I appreciate the wisdom of that decision. 

I could not work, on anything, the whole time that they were here. I could not even meditate to clear my head or emotions. Technically, I had the time  to do the latter: but only at the end of the day, when I was too shagged out and emotionally exhausted to do anything more than check my email and then drag myself to bed. 

Tougher than any of this was having to watch the two of them together. Nothing is simple with them: even the smallest decisions they make have to be negotiated. I saw a different man from the one I grew up with. I saw him being careful and considerate and affectionate. He never treated my mother with even the tiniest fraction of respect that accords this woman. Seeing this side of him now, and knowing that he broke my mother’s heart, that he turned her into what she became… I had to turn away to hide my tears. 

They literally drove me to drink. As soon as they left on Saturday morning, I went to the stupor-market and bought myself a big bottle of vodka. It turned out not to be as bad a lapse as it could have been, because at some point I was able to say to myself: “Don’t let them do this to you. Don’t let them have this effect on you. You have work to do. Get on with it.” And so — a little the worse for wear, I did.

It wasn’t all bad. Dad and I were able to “make some memories.” I enjoyed much of the time that I was able to spend with him. We did some things together, we talked a lot, we had some fun. It’s a reminder, I guess, that nothing good comes cheap.

— Frede
www.ducksoup.me

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

Announcing the tip of an Iceberg:

For many years before and after World War II, both in her native Estonia and in America, Mme. Loviise MÄGI plied her trade as part-time aerialist and full-time fortune teller with the little family-owned ZIRKUS MÄGI *. Upon her death in October  1968 at the age of 72, among her effects was found a strange hand-made divination deck, purportedly created at least one hundred and fifty years earlier by her great grandmother, the cartomancer KATRIN LAINE KALLASTE. Indeed, Mme. Loviise’s only child, Mirjam Vargas, remembered the deck well, and confirmed that her mother used it only for personal and family readings. 

From the early 1800s until her death at a relatively young age late in 1832, at approximately the same time when a certain Mlle. LENORMAND was making such a name for herself in and around Paris, Mme. Kallaste plied her trade among the Balkan nobility and visiting Russian heads of state, gaining a notable reputation as a seer of outstanding ability, using a system of her own creation. Upon her sudden death under mysterious circumstances, however, both her name and the system that she created — widely believed by all who had been exposed to it to be more effective by far than that created and used by Mlle. Lenormand — sank into obscurity. It is believed that she had made a specific enemy of a certain German Nobleman, who enlisted the cooperation of the Lutheran Church to destroy Mme. Kallaste’s reputation and suppress all memory of her system. 

Now in 2015, with the support of the Mägi estate and its executor Annunciata Katrin Vargas, Duck Soup Productions is proud to re-introduce this “scorned oracle” to the world, which we will be doing in two editions. The first is a straightforward reproduction of the hand-made deck from the family collection, in the original Estonian, with notes jotted into the margins of the cards by Mme. Katrin Laine Kallaste herself. The second is a completely modern version, in English, created with charming vintage photographs and Mme. Kallaste’s notes translated into English-language keywords.

 Click the images to enlarge.

Both versions will be available in the final quarter of the year. Stay tuned for more details as this large project nears completion.

Any history of Mme. Kallaste reads like an adventure novel. We hope to announce more projects surrounding her life and works in the coming months. 

— Doug Thornsjo, Creative Director, Duck Soup Productions.

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

www.ducksoup.me

*An incomplete history of the family and their Circus can be found in the nonfiction volume See Them Dance, published by Duck Soup Productions last year. The Divination deck created by Mme. Loviise herself in the early 1930s is also available from Duck Soup Productions in both a facsimile edition and a more compact "Roadshow Edition," under the name Tarot of the Zirkus Mägi. 

PUNCH IS HERE

Now Available

A Slightly Twisted "New Vintage" Tarot

78 cards, 2.75 x 4.75, printed on premium 310gsm casino quality cardstock (linen finish),
origin of material from France. Shrink-wrapped.

$59.95 postpaid, anywhere in the world.

Wholesale rates available. Contact duckmeister@ducksoup.me

 

Photos of the Finished Deck -- Click to Enlarge

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Mister Punch's Tarot comes with a standard card back available in three colors! Choose Red, Green, or Blue, no extra charge! 

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Add $12 and I will Personalize your Deck with a Custom Card Back, Your Name, Monogram, Text -- anything you like!

Choose from the custom back designs below (more designs coming soon!), or send your own image. Then add your name, monogram, a quotation or your own graphic (back E is especially suitable for that) -- anything to make your deck completely unique. If you can imagine it, I can make it happen!

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The Tragically Comic or Comically Tragic Tarot of Mister Punch

and all original material copyright © 2015 by Duck Soup Productions, all rights reserved. 

Along the Lines of Moon Pitchers

For the first time in the five years since I moved into in the All-New Duckhaus, I can say that I am Fully Unpacked… at least, as unpacked as I am ever going to be.

This startling development came about because I am expecting a visit soon from my father and his wife. They will be staying nine days (which ought to be a real challenge for all concerned)… this meant that I had to get the guest room ready to receive customers. Before I could even think about vacuuming, I needed to get the boxes up off the floor. And as that’s the room where I keep the lion’s share of DVDs, I needed to get the closet space organized, too.

It took me probably three, three and a half hours spread out across two days to re-organize the whole lot and shelve five years’ worth of accumulated DVDs. During this time I was reminded of something that I knew, but don’t often think about: When you sort movies by the year of their issue, you create a timeline of your own life.

It’s not so noticeable when you’re working with movies that were made well before you were born. Unless you were passing through some significant event the first time you saw, say, Casablanca, or unless there’s some special memory attached, like seeing The Wizard of Oz in a movie theater on a big screen after a lifetime of watching it on television, the pictures made before you were walking on the planet constitute history, and are largely safe from associations.

But now that I am well into my middle years the films that were made in the last three decades of the twentieth century and beyond all carry memory with them. Yesterday, as I was sorting material that was made in the last fifteen years, I was able to look at the shelf and say, this is where Mom’s leg was amputated — this is where she died. Everything beyond that point represents a new life. The hard last years of her life occupy maybe a foot and a half along the shelf, along a timeline that extends back and back and is filled with other connections: this is where I started working at the newspaper, this is where I was dating such-and-such a woman, this is the last movie that all my friends and I went to and watched together. 

We’re the sum of our experiences after all; and a life spent in the cinema is a life that can easily be retraced along a row of dusty old DVDs. I suppose the same thing is true with comics, which also tend to be sorted by their issue date rather than by such things as title or author or LOC. But I more or less stopped reading comics in the mid-eighties, by which time Marvel had been thoroughly ruined by a succession of moronic editors-in-chief… movies are the consistent path leading me straight through and beyond my comic-book-reading years, in both directions: here’s where I started drinking (the Gerry Anderson TV series UFO is, I found out, so much more entertaining when you are slightly soused). Here’s where Mom and Dad broke up. Here’s where I met my best, longest-lasting friends, one of whom left us here; here’s where I graduated from High School, and visited my cousins and grandparents in Minnesota for the last time. 

The shelves are fraught with beginnings and endings. The movies don’t just belong to the people who created them: they are woven into our lives.

— Frede.
www.ducksoup.me

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

The Tarot of Mister Punch

Click to enlarge.

My next Tarot project, The Tragically Comic or Comically Tragic Tarot of Mister Punch, is really very nearly completed. In fact I'm just waiting for the printed proof to arrive. My target on-sale date for this May 2nd. It's been a lot of great fun to make, and I hope it will be fun and informative to use. You can see this and all my tarot projects, including lots of boring written bits on how the decks came to be, at my tarot website, www.tarotbyducksoup.com. And this isn't the end, by any means! Stay tuned, Mystic Ones!

-- Frede.

www.ducksoup.me

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

The First Ten Minutes

I’ve now seen, at long last, the first ten minutes of Peter Jackson’s first movie culled from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and some of his surrounding writings; especially the Appendices attached to The Lord of The Rings.

Why only ten minutes of the first film? Because I’m saving the rest of the movie trilogy for the first week of May, when my Dad and his wife come to visit from Out West. It’s one of the few movie-type-thangs that the three of us share an interest in, and it was the chance for us all to watch it for the first time, together, that justified in my mind the expense of getting in the digital HD versions of all three movies.

Having gotten the damn things in, I just couldn’t resist peeking. It’s only human — and Hobbit — nature. 

My first impressions are as complicated as you might expect, if you know me. The movie has the feel of a terrific theme-park ride, and is a rich and vivid imagining of Tolkien’s universe as a whole; but as an adaptation of Tolkien’s little novel, his children’s tale about an awakening, Jackson’s Hobbit does real violence to the source material.

Tolkien’s novel starts out in a hole in the ground, and that’s a big part of the whole point. Mr. Bilbo Baggins is a provincial type, living with blinders on. All he knows of the world is what is in front of him: his village and his hole in the ground. Then, one fateful day, Something Happens. Something happens that makes Mr. Baggins suddenly realize that… there may be more to the world than he previously imagined. 

Therein lies the whole point, the entire purpose of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. He is telling you, the reader, to take off your blinders and climb out of your hole and look, just look at all the wonders out there that exist in the world. 

The rest of the story is just that: a little story that opens up nicely to reveal the only other part of Tolkien’s overall intent, which is to make the point that actions have consequences, and consequences reverberate outward.

We start in a hole in the ground, we open up as people and we see that if we are not careful, even in our isolation, our actions can have unintended consequences — consequences that future generations will have to bear. This is almost the opposite of what every insipid modern Tolkien-inspired fantasy tries to tell us, and something that bears more consideration.

Well, Peter Jackson chucks all that right out the window. He opens his telling of the story in the outer world, and spends the first ten minutes or so revealing the entire recent history of the dwarven race, providing us with backstory details that we are not supposed to have until, if you are following Tolkien, much later on in the narrative. 

And it is gorgeous. Jaw-dropping. This is what Peter Jackson does better than anyone and if you don’t think to yourself “WOW — WOW-ee-WOWW” in the first ten minutes of the picture than something must be wrong with your sense of wonder. It is, it must be admitted, a glorious visualization of Middle-Earth history, and a smashingly dramatic opening to a movie trilogy. Really, it is. I mean — you have to give Jackson that. Entertaining? Absolutely, one hundred percent.

Is it Tolkien’s The Hobbit? Ehm, no… and not even close. There is a huge philosophical divide between this movie Hobbit and the book, and one doubts that Tolkien would be happy with it. My tattered old paperback copy of The Hobbit bears the tagline “A Prelude to The Lord of The Rings” — even though it wasn’t written as such, but as a stand-alone story. Jackson’s movie is clearly designed not to be a prelude to anything. Instead, it is a follow-up, and an expansion upon, the movie trilogy.

I suppose that there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But those of us who just wanted a clean adaptation of Tolkien’s novel that we could watch before a screening of the movie trilogy are still going to have to settle on the animated Rankin-Bass version. 

— Frede.
www.ducksoup.me

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

Post Haste

My first email campaign is flying out even as I type this. Those of you not on my mailing list can ogle the thing here:

http://eepurl.com/biZuNX

Goodnight, Miss Farnaby

I'm very sad to learn, two months after the fact, of the Geraldine McEwan's death. I adored this woman. She was Miss Farnaby in Mulberry (a lovely short dramady series co-starring Karl Howman as the mysterious title character); she was deeply disturbing as Sister Bridget in The Magdeline Sisters, she was the captivating Lucia in two series of Mapp & Lucia, she was definitive Jean Brodie, she had a theatrical career spanning more than 40 years. She even voiced a character in Wallace & Gromit. It was the twinkle in her eyes and the suggestion of hidden depths that made her, by far, the most interesting Miss Marple. And so another great tree has fallen: and the world is diminished once again. Goodnight, Miss McEwan. 

--Frede.

www.ducksoup.me

www.tarotbyducksoup.com