October 30, 2003
Laugh in the dark
"When hinges creak in doorless chambers and strange and frightening sounds echo through the halls, whenever candlelights flicker where the air is deathly still, that is the time when ghosts are present, practicing their terror with ghoulish delight." So begins the soundtrack of the Haunted Mansion, Disney's take on the "dark ride" genre of amusement park attraction. It's not surprising that Disney's version has attracted a number of fan sites (1, 2, 3); it's a bit more surprising that rides like the Haunted Mansion at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware's Funland or Elysburg, Pennsylvania's
incredible, impressive experiences, but we don't get into those on the site. Plenty of other sites are devoted to the Haunted Mansion. We focus on the old stuff, the tawdry, noisy, run-down, low-tech seaside amusement park rides.
If there's a place in America, where tawdry, noisy, run-down, low-tech seaside attractions survive, it's Coney Island. One much-beloved haunted house on the Coney Island boardwalk, the Spook-A-Rama, that is still operating, but the cornucopia of rides, including the "Magic Carpet," "Dragon's Cave", and "Devil's Pit," have vanished into history, along with the great majority of the rides made by the Pretzel Ride Company of Bridgeton, New Jersey, considered the pinacle of the art. (The company's name led to possibly the scariest pretzel logo ever made by man, on a surviving 1927 "Ride the Pretzel" attraction.) Work like Pirate's Cove by a later designer, Bill Tracy, is still around, but the shuddering, low-tech funhouse is dying out. Some masterpieces of the form have gone and more are threatened. Fans are trying to rehabilitate some dark rides, but insurance liability and the disappearance of the small theme parks of the Rust Belt and Northeast theme parks where dark rides thrived have made dark house construction a dying art. When New Orleans' House of Shock opens their dark ride, it will be the first new Pretzel-style haunted house opened in twenty years. But this is a world in which hobbyists build their own cruise missiles, in which thrill-seeking foodies seek out unlicensed underground restaurants. The team working on the House of Shock's ride is posting schematics of their designs. Amusement parks have spurred innovation, before. Somewhere out there are fans with access to a barn, a few soldering irons, and time on their hands. When dungeon walls drip with glowing blood and skeletons dangle from the ceiling, when homemade carts zip down darkened halls, that is the time when hobbyists are present, practicing their art of terror with ghoulish delight.
October 27, 2003
To cloud the minds of men
Sixty five years ago this Halloween, CBS's Mercury Theater scared the living daylights out of America. Long-standing belief in life on Mars, some talented performances, a bit of razzle-dazzle with a fake program of dance music, and a forty minute gap between announcements that they were performing H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds combined to produce a classic example of mass hysteria. The Mercury Theater's young founder, Orson Welles, must have loved it. There have been pranks in the American mass media for as long as there's been an American mass media, from Edgar Allen Poe's airships to George Plimpton's Sidd Fitch. But Welles love of untruth. Richard Hell (that Richard Hell) notes that Welles' father owned a hotel filled with retired vaudevillans and suggests that Welles developed his fascination for performance there. Welles was a regular at the Magic Castle in Hollywood and, according to his friend Jim Steinmeyer, quite an accomplished amateur magician. His breakthrough role as the Shadow was a part particularly suited to someone interested in stage magic, puzzles, false identities, illusions. Welles' lost documentary on Brazil was to have been called It's All True, the sort of objection that only a man who would later go on to create something like F for Fake would need to raise. The somewhat boggling claim that Stalin targetted John Wayne for assassination makes a bit more sense with Welles as a major source. Welles said that he wanted descriptions of him to be flattering, not accurate; why shouldn't his story of the cowboy and the dictator be the same? And so we arrive at Welles' Batman. Why shouldn't Lamont Cranston have taken a crack at playing Bruce Wayne? Basil Rathbone would have made a brilliant Joker! Welles could have wrung a magnificent performance out of Marlene Dietrich as Catwoman! (For that matter, Welles discovered Eartha Kitt.) Alas, the whole thing seems to have been a product of Mark Millar's fecund imagination, but it was believable for a minute. Orson Welles would have been proud.
October 24, 2003
All that is solid
There's a certain class of con games that involves selling something that is not what it seems. The fiddle game involves selling a cheap pawn shop violin as a Stradivarius. Pigeon drops can involve forged lottery tickets or cashier's checks. The gold coin game is a slight update on selling gold bricks, a con that dates to the 1880s and was tired in O. Henry's day:
(more...)"When I looked at the farmer, the little devices I had in my pocket for buncoing the pushed-back brows seemed as hopeless as trying to shake down the Beef Trust with a mittimus and a parlor rifle.
"'Well,' says he, looking at me close, 'speak up. I see the left pocket of your coat sags a good deal. Out with the goldbrick first. I'm rather more interested in the bricks than I am in the trick sixty-day notes and the lost silver mine story.'"
October 22, 2003
A star was born
Silent film stars had reason to be nervous at the arrival of "movitones", the New Yorker's 1928 term for the "singies" or "talkies." Film sound was a remarkable technical and entrepreneurial achievement. It was also going to put a lot of people out of work. Japan's benishi, the silent film interpreters who had honed their performances to an art, hung on until the mid-thirties; the most famous of the benishi, Tokugawa Musei, was narrating films as late as the early 1960s. Argentina's tango orchestras relied on income from performing film soundtracks. But the most visible targets of the "cruel and relentless myrmidons of science," as Robert Benchley puts it, were those actors "whose speaking voices could hardly be counted on to put across the sale of a pack of Fatimas in a night club."
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October 16, 2003
Billy goats and football wars
The Chicago Cubs had a chance to reach the World Series for the first time since 1945. Last night, it ended in tears, of course, but just like the '86 Series, everyone's going to remember Game 6, when the Cubs suffered a complete (though not unprecedented) meltdown, giving up a staggering eight runs in the seventh inning. The curse of the Bambino may be a myth, but Cubs fans across the nation are wondering if the curse of the billy goat. During the Cubs' collapse, 26-year-old fan Steve Bartman prevented Cubs left fielder Moises Alou from catching a foul ball that drifted into the first row of the stands. Unlike the wretched Jeffrey Maier, the Bartman wasn't actually reaching over the wall, but his instinctive reaction to make the catch was unfortunate. In a statement released yesterday, he apologized, saying that he just didn't realize Alou was going to try to make a play. Cubs fans were not immeditately forgiving; Barman was pelted with beer and escorted out by security for his own protection. He skipped work the next day as online fans started baying for his blood. Remixes of his picture are cropping up on the Internet. His parents received death threats. Last night, as the Cubs added another chapter to their history of failure, a police helicopter hovered over his home. Bartman's life isn't going to be very pleasant for the next few months, but he should be consoled by the fact that America isn't a soccer-worshipping nation.
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October 13, 2003
Six degrees away
Friendster, the hugely popular "social networking"/hookup engine, has attracted attention from venture capitalists, lonely twenty-somethings, and at least one friend of mine looking to add a little extra oomph to a breakup by defriendsterizing her ex. It's also attracted fakesters, people who have decided to enliven the site by adopting identities like Giant Squid, Bat Boy, or Patty Hearst. People like the fakesters; Giant Squid had 335 friends tied to his account. The Friendster corporate team doesn't care for them nearly as much, and they've been angering some users by shutting down fake accounts left and right. Fakesters like "Ecstacy" and "Tootsie Roll" have entered the graveyardster; innocent non-fakes have been caught in the purge. One particularly vulnerable group, apparently, has been DJs; they're sociable, well-liked, and oddly named, three symptoms of fakester behavior. It's not easy being popular.
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October 12, 2003
Stages for actors to act on
The Progressives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fought for the recall initiatives that brought Gray Davis down. They also fought against the "smoky room" nominating process that allowed party elites to control nominees to elected office. Over the last hundred years, campaigns have changed in ways the Progressives could never have imagined; one of the equalizers for unseating an incumbent is name recognition. Celebrity has power. Turning fame into a political career is hardly original to Arnold Schwarzenegger. California turned out not just a well-known actor turned Governor, but Senator Sonny Bono, dancer turned right-wing Senator George Murphy and Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. Douglas, a singer and Broadway actress, wasn't really a film star; her only Hollywood role was as the title character in the film adaption of H. Rider Haggard's She. But her husband, Melvyn Douglas, provided enough Tinseltown credibility for two. Later, two-term Congresswoman Douglas was smeared as a Communist sympathizer by Richard Nixon during their 1950 battle for a California Senate seat; she'll go down in history as the first person to label him "Tricky Dick".
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October 02, 2003
Statutory acts
In 1950, a man named George Lerner invented a toy. His brainstorm was a set of comical pin-backed noses, mouths, and hairpieces. Given a set of the pushpins, Lerner reasoned, children could amuse themselves for hours with only a starchy vegetable into which to jam the things. Two years later, Lerner and a small Rhode Island toy company bought back the rights to the toy from the cereal company then manufacturing it as a premium. Later, the toy company realized that actual potatoes got kind of gross after you let kids play with them for a couple days and switched to plastic; four decades later, Mr. Potatohead is still going strong. Mr. Potatohead was the first major success for the Hassenfeld Brothers (his grin is part of the company's logo); today Hasbro is America's second largest toy company, the corporate parent of Milton Bradley, TSR, and Tonka. The Pawtucket-based company is also one of the largest in Rhode Island, and when the state decided that it would commission some themed public art, Mr. Potatohead was a natural choice. Rhode Island was following in the path of cities large (Chicago's cows) and small (Bloomington's corn) and everywhere in-between in trying to attract some tourist attention with a series of identically shaped, differently decorated statues placed throughout the city. Statues of Rich Uncle Moneybags painted a festive gold or Serpentor wearing a rain slicker probably seemed like a bad idea, so the project's planners chose the unthreatening and iconinc Mr. Potatohead. Except for some complaints that the statues were ugly (and one accusation about a supposedly racist, darkskinned Potatohead), the program went smoothly enough. The program ran throughout 2000; eventually, most of the six-foot-high statues were donated to a charity auction. Last week, one of the statues was stolen. People do all kinds of terrible things to public statues; three beloved Muscovite ducks were stolen in 1999, and last month someone dynamited Copenhagen's Little Mermaid (link via MeFi). The ducks were probably sold for scrap; many Danes are just sick of the Little Mermaid ever since the Disney movie. But statues can be kidnapped out of a misguided sense of love. For years, students at Amherst tried to steal (and display to rival classes without having it stolen in turn) Sabrina, a statue of a nymph. No less a law-abiding type than Justice Harlan Stone took part in the kidnapping. (The Harvard Lampoon's ibis statue has been the target of similar crimes.) Fortunately, Mr. Potatohead has been found abandoned in a field. One can only hope that he had adventures while he was gone.