December 25, 2009
Merely a big workshop
Nicholas Webster seems to have been good at his job. He directed the classic football documentary The Violent World of Sam Huff. He directed the Johnny Cash special Ridin' the Rails. He directed episodes of Mannix, The Waltons, Bonanza, and Get Smart (the delightfully named "I am Curiously Yellow"). He helmed the non-musical adaption of Ossie Davis's play Purlie Victorious, featuring Ruby Dee and a young Alan Alda, and a modest little crime drama called Dead to the World, which seems to be mostly notable for a Charlie Byrd soundtrack. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason he would have directed a legendary atrocity committed upon the movie-going public; it may be that making workmanlike directors into the butt of punchlines is just part of the magic of Christmas.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is not the worst Christmas movie ever made. The MST3K presentation of SCCtM propelled it into the public eye, but a genre which has provided Christmas Evil, Magic Christmas Tree, Santa's Slay, and Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose — not to mention these or these — is surely too wide-ranging to give us only one worst movie (although the connoisseur's choice must be Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny). But SCCtM is surely the most surprising entrant on the list. A kids' movie directed by nudie cutie auteur Barry Mahon or grindhouse wizard-of-gore Herschell Gordon Lewis is going to be a weird proposition, but nothing before or since in Webster's filmography (or, for that matter, child star and musical number chanteuse Pia Zadora's) suggested that they were going to create something jaw-droppingly strange, the weirdest offshoot yet of a patriotic expirement from 1871.
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December 30, 2008
A world he never made
As 2008 draws to a close, the memorial lists have arrived. Some of the names are to be expected. Paul Newman was an icon for decades whose stature as an actor and a star never entirely overpowered his reputation for decency as a human being. Albert Hoffman, Mildred Loving, and Bobby Fischer were all thrust into the spotlight as icons of their times. Some lived smaller lives: the leftist micro-capitalist Ron Rivera; blogger Doris "Tanta" Dungey, perhaps the most lucid explicator of madness at the end of America's great real-estate boom (the first mention I saw of her passing after her co-blogger's memorial message was from Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman). Some absences from these lists, however, must surprise no one.
Steve Gerber died this February. His fascinating and unsatisfactorily-ended Omega the Unknown, the story of an orphaned boy and a lookalike, silent alien, prompted Jonathan Lethem to take a crack at the series in in 2007, but that's not why anyone remembers him. He was responsible for the KISS comic and Foolkiller. Alongside the omnipresent Mark Evanier, he worked on the Dungeons and Dragons Saturday morning cartoon, the animated G.I. Joe, and Thundarr the Barbarian. They're not why he's famous either.
(more...)December 25, 2007
Merry and bright
A Belarusian Jew named "Israel" might not seem the most likely person to write the great American Christmas carol. But Israel Isidore Baline, the greatest songwriter of the dying days of Tin Pan Alley, had a brainwave one winter day at a spa in Phoenix, and wrote the best-selling song of the first hundred years of recorded music. Baline, working under his adopted name of Irving Berlin, excised the somewhat sardonic framing narrative of the song, about a California millionaire wishing for the snowy Christmases of his youth, and things took off from there. Fred Astaire, to whom he presented the song, liked it, but it ended up sung by Bing Crosby in the Crosby/Astaire film Holiday Inn. Although the hotel chain took its name from the movie, "White Christmas" was Holiday Inn's true legacy.
The movie is less known today than it might be, perhaps because of Crosby's blackface-and-dialect number in celebration of Lincoln's birthday in the February sequence, perhaps because it wasn't terribly good, and perhaps because the song's unexpected success — millions of singles sold, an Academy Award for Berlin — prompted Paramount to release a musical starring Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Rosemary Clooney. White Christmas was the top-grossing film of 1954 and focused on war buddies putting on a heckuva Christmas show in Vermont, leaving out all the extraneous Independence-Day-and-Thanksgiving-type songs. ("Abraham" makes an appearance, as an instrumental only.)
(more...)December 24, 2006
So jolly and quick
The small town of Kale in Turkey has a few claims to fame. There are some lovely Roman ruins around town; one of Turkey's major industrial conglomerates, the Kale Group, is based there; and the city surrounds the ancient city of Myra, jewel of the Lycian Alliance. Myra was part of early Christendom, and its bishophric produced a man of renown in the fourth century: Nicholas of Bari. Little is known about Nicholas' life; veneration began relatively soon after his death, and to this day, his remains are said to miraculously generate water ("manna of Saint Nicholas") held to have curative properties. Nicholas is one of the most important saints in several Orthodox traditions; he is the patron saint of sailors, pawnbrokers, children, and thieves. And yet in America, he is, by and large, remembered thanks to two lines from one poem, written by a farmer named Henry Livingstone and for a hundred years published under the name of Clement Moore:
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there
Why pick on Saint Nick?
(more...)November 21, 2006
Hello, I must be going
Some holidays are regional. Sweetest Day is celebrated almost entirely in the Great Lakes region. It's Valentine's Day in October, a day invented out of whole cloth by Cleveland candy manufacturers to spur October chocolate sales in an era before Halloween was a festival of cavity-inducing gluttony. Huge amounts of newspaper advertising, candy gifts to newsboys, and a promotional push by the great Theda Bara, Hollywood's original vamp, failed to break it out of its regional shell; Buffalo and Detroit are among the few areas other than Cleveland where Sweetest Day continues to move heart-shaped boxes off the shelves. Some holidays are pointless; not even the popcorn people admit to knowing who came up with National Popcorn Day. And some are wholly spurious; the purportedly Inuit Festival for the Souls of Dead Whales probably goes over well among String Cheese Incident fans, but bears no relationship to any historically celebrated Native Alaskan holiday. But some, like World Hello Day (link via the similarly bewildered LGM), manage to combine all three qualities. Who are these McCormacks who came up with the idea? Why November 21? Why on earth do they want us to say hello to people, when holidays would ideally celebrate people leaving one another alone? And perhaps they do things differently in Arizona, but even if Esquivel, Seamus Heany, and Olivia de Havilland all say it's a fine idea, a holiday dedicated to introducing oneself to strangers seems likely to get one killed in, say, New York. Far better than World Hello Day would be Hello World Day, celebrating 32 years of every programming manual's stock first example. Global diversity could be honored by recognizing our rainbow of programming languages, from Pascal to Brainfuck, and when we were done we could all sing a song, examine some art, and return to our homes without bothering anyone.
July 14, 2006
The dogs of war
Carthage's most famous son is best known today for his tactic of marching elephants through the Alps (or possibly for having a name that rhymed with "cannibal"). But his sharp mind for tactical advantage, including the cavalry techniques that enabled him maintain a fifteen-year campaign against the Romans in Italy, weren't the first instance of his military innovation. Hannibal was the first man in recorded history to engage in biowarfare, flinging urns full of snakes at enemy ships in the Mediterranean. Use of cavalry predates the Battle of Cannae, of course; the chariot was invented around the year 2000 B.C., and the invention of the stirrup — a profoundly simple invention with drastic world-historical effects in both Europe and Asia — meant that cavalry could ride horses directly. (Other animals, such as the Carthaginian elephant or the Arizona camel, were also used.) But Hannibal's snakes were another technology entirely: animals not as a tool of soldiers, but as weapons themselves.
June 19, 2006
Swap meets
It's about that time of year again; while the rest of the world worries about the beautiful (if bloody and tragic) game, nebbishy number crunchers here in the last remaining superpower fret about Melky Carbera's VORP. Fantasy baseball may be widely derided as having turned a manly sport of drunken brawlers into something that only sabermetricians, lonely shut-ins, and boys named Theo care about. But this point of the season, when weaknesses start to become really glaring, offers a form of ritualized combat that most people in today's effete society can only dream of: the chance to rook one's friends and coworkers and then mock them mercilessly for having made the dumbest trade of the year.
(more...)May 31, 2006
Tubular bells
Kevin Kelly is a technophile, and has been since his Whole Earth Review days; like many people who really like tools, he often finds that specialized and old-fashioned implements are the cheapest, most efficient, or most aesthetically pleasing way to get jobs done. And if his theory that "species of technology do not go extinct" is correct, then he's in luck -- those lovely speed levers and screw punches will be around for generations to come. Kelly acknowledges the counterexample of Greek fire, the terrifying napalm-like weapon used by the Byzantines to ensure their naval superiority. Various glazes, perfumes, and dyes are gone, but it's doubtful that Kelly would consider the failure to replicate particular shade of blue stained glass a "species extinction". He's right that in an amazingly wealthy world, it's possible to find almost anything. Even if we can't duplicate a Stradivarius (ignoring the debate about whether Stradivarius himself had any secret techniques), it's possible to buy a violin in any well-equipped music shop; given enough time and money, you could acquire a brand new pianoforte or glass harmonica. The problem isn't with Kelly's insight; it's with his metaphor.
(more...)March 31, 2006
Proteus brought the upright beast
When Gen. Edward Bragg nominated Grover Cleveland to be Democratic candidate for president in 1888, he said that the American people loved him most for the enemies he had made. The DC Comics superhero the Flash must therefore set a record for the least-loved long-running character in the four-color world. It's not just that he travels through time with a Cosmic Treadmill; that the original character's death was the capstone on the most baroque storyline in the history of American comics; or that he was played by Dawson's dad on a dreadful t.v. show. It's the bad guys.
Batman faces distorted reflections of his own warped psyche: the researches into the theory and praxis of fear conducted by the Scarecrow; the three-steps-ahead planning of Denny O'Neil's eco-terrorist Ra's al Ghul; the Manichean worldview of Two-Face. Superman, the All-American boy, fights the military-industrial complex personified in the body of evil billionaire (and ex-president) Lex Luthor. Wonder Woman fights the very gods of Mount Olympus. Despite a history dating to 1939, including some lovely, loopy early stories written by Gardner Fox, the Flash's rogues' gallery doesn't measure up. He fights people like sinister violinist the Fiddler, ice-skate wielding villainess the Golden Glider, and Australian menace Captain Boomerang. It denotes a certain lack of seriousness -- or perhaps something in the water at DC -- when the most you can do for a nemesis is a superintelligent gorilla.
(more...)January 31, 2006
Live in vain
Isaac Asimov was one of the most successful science fiction writers of the Twentieth Century. His Foundation series was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, projected into the far future and with one man attempting to turn back the waves; his "Three Laws of Robotics" led to both an OED entry and a Will Smith movie. Asimov spent the vast majority of his life within the Northeast Corridor, venturing out from the Boston-to-New-York axis only occasionally. He stopped teaching as an associate professor at Boston University in 1958, with no major research to his name (although he wrote a college textbook; given his consumate skill as a popular science writer, it was probably a better read than most). He was afraid of flying (he flew only twice in his life, both in the course his military service during World War II). Isaac Asimov spent the vast majority of his life staying in one place and writing. It showed, both in his often prolix novels and hs staggeringly lengthy bibliography. He is, most likely, the boringest man ever to inspire a deranged Japanese death cult.
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