January 29, 2003
Under the black flag
And speaking of pirates, I have to confess that I, like Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing, am looking forward to Pirates of the Carribean. It's vaguely disconcerting that movies are now being based on circa-1967 Disneyworld rides (although I suppose it can't be worse than The Country Bears. It's more disturbing that the movie will be a product of Jerry Bruckenheimer, a man who seems to have legally changed his first name to "schlockmeister". But I can't help it; I'm a sucker for pirate movies, and I doubt there will ever be that many new ones. But why? What could be more cinematic than a tale of good, evil, and swashbuckling on the high seas?
(more...)
January 26, 2003
Mutiny on the gridiron
Some people are calling today's Super Bowl the "Gruden Bowl" after Jon Gruden, who left Oakland for Tampa Bay last summer. (His current team one.) But since it was the Oakland Raiders vs. the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I think it should go down in the books as the Pirate Bowl. Pirates have obvious merits as sports team mascots. They're instantly identifiable. They're graphically interesting. They're mean. Both teams depict their pirates as pasty white guys, which slights the proud tradition of African, Arab, and Chinese piracy but forestalls any of the complaints that spring up when you name your team something like "the Redskins". (At least Louis Sockalexis played for the Cleveland baseball team, even if they weren't actually named after him; the great Jim Thorpe played for a number of football teams, but not Washington.) The Pittsburgh Pirates got their name after "pirating" Louis Bierbauer away from the Philadelphia Athletics, but both Oakland and Tampa are port cities. However, where Tampa celebrates regional (and presumably nonexistant) pirate José Gaspar with its annual festival of Gasparilla, Oakland celebrates pirates by dressing up like extras from The Road Warrior. Raider Nation may be full of crazed, aggressive fans, but they're not really crazed, aggressive, pirate fans. Better luck next year, Oakland!
January 23, 2003
Neither fish nor foul nor good red herring
The American West is a little smaller today. Douglas Herricks is dead (link via Boing Boing). Herricks, whose name I did not know until today, was a young man in Douglas, Wyoming, when he and his brother returned from a hunting trip with an oversized jackrabbit:
Returning home and in a hurry to get to dinner, they tossed their hapless jack rabbit kill into the taxidermy shop.
The carcass slid right up to a pair of deer antlers, and Douglas Herrick's eyes suddenly lighted up.
"Let's mount it the way it is!" he said, and a legend was born -- or at least given form.
The two engaged in some creative taxidermy, and their creation, the jackalope, went on to enjoy more commercial success than any ersatz monster since the Feejee Mermaid.
(more...)
January 20, 2003
I have seen the mountaintop
Public Enemy's last great song is a historical artifact now that even Arizona honors Martin Luther King's birthday with a holiday. Unfortunately, Dr. King now inhabits a similar role in the American iconography as Washington or Lincoln. It's an odd term to use for a man who was "the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers", as his masterful "Letter from Birmingham Jail" put it, but King has become a secular saint. It's not a fair characterization of a complicated man. Reading about his epic struggles with Richard Daley gave me more of an impression of how he operated as a politician. J. Edgar Hoover's attempts to ruin him as a symbol of the civil rights movement (which transformed from an investigation of Communist influence at the Southern Christian Leadership Center to a pure smear campaign focussed on King's sexual proclivities) brought to light not just a government agency that had gone out of control but also a very human, very fallible man. In his last speech, given in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis the day before he was assassinated, Dr. King lectured on the parable of the Good Samaritan:
You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"
What the hagiographies of King fail to get across is that you don't need to be the master rhetoritician that King was or a saintly, selfless figure to do good in the world. You just have to be willing to recognize the difference between right and wrong and to stop for a moment to do something about it.
January 19, 2003
What a maroon! What an ignoranimous!
Occasionally I see someone online make a particular insulting comment: "What a maroon!" When I am particularly lucky, I will see another person put forth an indignant defense (thanks to Dan of Tinyblog for the illustrative example) of the term "Maroon". Maroons, we are reminded, were free blacks who formed communities throughout the Carribean and Americas, most notably in the Great Dismal Swamp and Florida. These people were bravely attempting to set up a parallel existance to antebellum American society! They fought in the Seminole War, the only Indian war that ended without a peace treaty! How can we use the term "Maroon" as an insult? The problem is that while all these things are true, they have very little relevance to someone quoting Bugs Bunny mangling the English language. It's a case study in how associations are not always apparent to one's audience. Language drifts.
(more...)
January 15, 2003
Slower than molasses in January
Eighty-three years ago today, Bostonians were enjoying unseasonably warm weather. The temperature had shot up forty degrees in three days, allowing lunching workers near North End Park to doff their jackets. Little did they know that they were about to be swept up in American history's most laughable urban disaster. An huge industrial tank was about to explode, sending a "roaring wall of death" down Commonwealth Avenue with a "a horrible, hissing, sucking sound." January 15, 1919, was the day of a "wet, brown hell" was unleashed, the day of the Great Boston Molasses Flood. It sounds like an urban legend, but contemporary reports make it clear that it was no joke. The tank held almost two and a half million gallons of molasses, roughly fourteen thousand tons. When it ruptured, molasses sprayed out with a pressure of several thousand pounds per square inch at an estimated speed of 35 miles per hour and leveled several city blocks.
(more...)
January 14, 2003
Collector scum
Last year, George Gelestino, the owner of the late, great Vinyl Ink record store in Silver Spring, Maryland, passed away. When I was a teenage indie kid in suburban Maryland, I only knew of a few choices for where to go to get that Harriet 7" all the zines were raving about: Soundgarden in Baltimore, Vinyl Ink, and later Go! in Arlington. The local chain, Kemp Mill, wasn't going to cut it. Musicland was a joke. Tower was a distant urban dream; I mostly went when I was in visiting relatives in Cambridge, Mass. Until I got a car, I did most of my record purchasing through the mail, buying from distributors like Parasol and a million and one tiny labels with ads in the back of Option and Punk Planet and Caught in Flux. But it was still good to go to Vinyl Ink, even I perceived it as the sort of collector scum-dominated store that knew people existed who would pay four hundred bucks for a rare Stereolab single on clear vinyl. As a deeply insecure 15-year-old, I always found it slightly dizzying to shop there; Vinyl Ink seemed cool, cool in a way that I was not.
(more...)