August 30, 2004
Set us up the bomb
For most of his lifetime, only a privileged few knew about the work of the late, great Ed Wood. Wood's fobiles were obvious: the dreadful actors he dug up, jaw-droppingly appalling production values (Wood's best known movie, the breathtaking Plan 9 from Outer Space has a continuity and common senes errors list that runs into the dozens of entries, and that's not even counting the famous double for the late Bela Lugosi, who died just after filming had begun), a seeming lack of familiarity with the basics of establishing a scene or a character or even a shot. But they brought him some notoriety late in his life; an alcoholic ruin, he had drifted away from the little slice of Hollywood he had carved out for himself and was making softcore movies and writing hardcore books. The Golden Turkeys rescued him from obscurity. Randy Dreyfuss and Harold and Michael Medved cranked out a book giving their views of the worst films in the history of Hollywood, and Ed Wood, that conflicted visionary who had brought the world Bride of the Monster and The Sinister Urge, was their selection for the worst director in Hollywood's history and Plan 9 the worst movie. Wood's reputation grew; film festivals and midnight screenings began to occur; people like Tim Burton, who would go on to make his best and least likely movie about Wood's life, discovered his work and became fans. And why not? People love exploitation films. Whether they're made by the delightful Russ Meyer (who describes his work variously as "crowded on one side by hardcore films and on the other side by major product that is very explicit" and a worthwhile opportunity to get into starlets' pants) or the repugnant Andy Milligan, cheap movies can be dreadful (the climax of a current favorite of mine, Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, features a hair metal guitarist wrestling Satan WWF-style), but they are rarely boring.
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August 25, 2004
That launched a thousand ships
People can misplace many things: hundreds of poems (link via Bookninja), silent film masterpieces, the occasional ship's crew. But losing an entire city still stands out as an impressive feat. Plato's Atlantis -- and his apparent original source material, the Egpytian "pillar of the sky" Keftiu -- has been variously identified as the Cretan island of Thera, destroyed by a volcanic explosion, the Iberian peninsula, Antarctica, and, most recently, Ireland. (It has also been identified as the product of space aliens and a home for prehistoric life, the latter being a particularly nice lost world touch; the Lovecraftean city beneath the waves off the coast of Cuba seems to have fallen out of fashion, but presumably somewhere in the world someone is working on a book proving the relationship between Havana, Atlantis, and Innsmouth.) People who are convinced that they've stumbled onto the true meaning in Plato's words seldom seem to consider the possibility that Plato was just borrowing a myth, using an invented example to prove his points. Any number of counterexamples showing that Plato knew of this obscure technique or that their theories defy Occam's razor go unheeded. Fortunately, Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann was just such a true believer.
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August 24, 2004
Ripley's game
Believe it or not, Leroy Ripley was a ballplayer; he played semi-pro ball in Santa Rosa and tried out for the New York Giants while still a cartoonist. But he never made it to the bigs, so he had to fall back on every sport's fan's backup plan: a headful of trivia. Ripley was working as a sportswriter; his great contribution to the vernacular of his trade was to coin the phrase "Murderer's Row", commemorating the potent bat of hard-luck Wally Pipp, the man who missed a game for a headache and saw an unknown rookie named Lou Gehrig take his space (believe it or not!). His cartoon, Champs and Chumps, arrived 1918, a few years after an injury had ended Ripley's dream of being a professional baseball player. It featured sports trivia: the first strip, written and drawn as a spacefiller, contained items about backwards walkers and broad jumps on ice. Ripley soon abandoned the sports conceit and sloughed off the name, just as he had abandoned "Leroy" in favor of the more athletic-sounding "Bob". His new strip, Believe It or Not (originally drawn and researched by Ripley; eventually researched by a crack staff aided by the New York Public Library and drawn by assistants and freelancers, including an adolescent Sparky Schultz), was a modest success. And then Ripley took a jab at Charles Lindbergh. He claimed that the celebrated aviator, then at the pre-isolationist height of his popularity, was not the first or the second man to fly across the Atlantic, but the sixty-seventh. Outraged letters poured in by the tens of thousands, but Ripley was right -- two airships had made the journey before -- and Ripley's next book sold hugely. From there, Ripley moved on to radio, television, and, of course, his Odditoriums. The Odditoriums are descendents of the dime museum and the carny sideshow; as any visitor will tell you, the wax figures and portraits in toast have a certain charm, but what I think really sold tickets was the shrunken heads. Jivaro's shrunken heads may not be the Körperwelten, that Germanic corpseworld, industrial charnel house (link via Long story, short pier), but shrunken heads are plenty outlandish enough to put fannies in the chairs. The Mütter Museum has the Ripley-esque thrills of giant tumors, human horns, and monster babies, the Philippi Mummies are both creepy and unthreatening (with the appeal of the mysterious embalming fluid created to rival that of ancient Egypt), but the Jivaro heads (most originally from Ripley's own collection) appeal to impulses that would have made Barnum proud. They allow tourists to think about hearts of darkness (no matter that they're from South America) and the superiority of Orlando, Chicago, and other outposts of Ripleyana. They allow people to gape at freakish spectacle while masking it as mere anthropological interest. They invite the viewer to ask whether they're real or fake, and, in either case, how they were made. And they are, in their own horrible way, iconic and even cute. Racing backwards and broad jumping couldn't hold a candle (not even that of the Lighthouse Man) to a genuine artifact of oddity like a shrunken head. And with a showman's insight that might have done Barnum proud, Ripley prospered, becoming the first cartoonist to make a million dollars, marrying a beauty queen, and devoting less and less time to his strip and more to his travels before dying young during the filming of the first season of his television show. It's since been revived twice, and today the name, the still-running comic strip, and all forty-odd Odditoriums are owned by Jim Pattison, a Canadian billionaire. And if you read the story in the newspaper, you just might not believe it.
August 20, 2004
Running the numbers
Mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon single-handedly invented the field of "information theory" with his seminal paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Shannon spent the Second World War working on anti-aircraft weaponry and codemaking (his trans-Atlantic colleague Alan Turing had worked more as a codebreaker); after the war, he worked as a researcher for Bell Labs, and it was while engaged in this more prosaic pursuit that he made the conceptual leap that will mean that scientists two hundred years from now will know his name even if his wonderful toys, scientific juggling, and computer chess are forgotten. While working on the problem of noisy phone lines, Shannon proved that it was possible to reduce the possibility of errors in the transmission to arbitrarily small numbers, simply by using well-designed error checking algorithms. (Designing these algorithms then occupied very smart people in the telecommunications industry the next fifty years.) Showing this required Shannon to invent the idea of a communication's "entropy", thus providing a measurement of the padding built in. Language is fragile where it is not redundant; a missed digit in a binary number could be disastrous, but every English reader can figure out who "Wm Shksper" is meant to be. From Shannon forward, information theorists looked at language as hovering somewhere between redundancy and noise. Information was surprise.
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August 17, 2004
Beauty and the Beast
Fay Wray died last week at 96. Her career started in the days of the silents; she starred in Erich von Stroheim's great (if not universally acknowledged by her contemporaries) The Wedding March. But it was for three decades worth of B-movies that made her famous. Wray starred in Doctor X (not the Humphrey Bogart-starring sequel or some other Frankensteinian mad scientist flick), Dragstrip Riot, The Most Dangerous Game, Hell on Frisco Bay. And it was one B-movie, perhaps the greatest movie at all, that made eulogies for a 92-year-old actress who hadn't been in the movies in over twenty years and whose period of greatest fame was seventy years behind her. But what a B-movie it was: King Kong. Kong, the first and greatest of screen giants, was inspired by naturalist Douglas Burden's 1926 discovery of the Komodo dragon, which proved the existance of the gigantic lizards, long presumed extinct. Producer Merian Cooper had done work on nature films -- King Kong is basically a nature film writ large -- and he reimagined Burden's giant lizard as an even more giant ape. Skull Island is the lost world of the picture; the first time one sees the movie, it's almost shocking how much of the film is spent watching Kong battle the denizens of Skull Island rather than travelling to New York. Animation pioneer Willis O'Brien created a masterpiece, a stop-motion ape who seemed to be genuinely acting, genuinely interacting with with the other characters (thanks in no small part to Cooper's novel improvements to the rear projection technique used to superimpose actors on previously filmed footage). And then, of course, there were the Manhattan sequences, setting the standard for rampaging urban monsters for all time. All it took for cinema immortality for Vina Fay Wray, a ranch girl from Alberta who took drama classes at Hollywood High, was one great ape's fist, one iconic Art Deco skyscraper, and one mighty scream. They are forever linked. For fifteen minutes last week, the Empire State Building dimmed its lights, paying tribute to the most famous woman ever to make it to the top floor the hard way.
August 12, 2004
Dr. X will build a creature
Almost from the very first, there were monsters stalking the silver screen. In 1895, the Lumiere Brothers invented the experience of seeing a movie with an audience, and a man at that first performance, Georges Méliès, decided to buy a camera of his own. But the Lumieres were documentarians; Méliès was a magician, and he was astounded by the tricks he could commit to film. His Le Voyage Dans La Lune, with its Wellsian Selenites (acrobats Méliès recruited from a Parisian theater), is a classic; its famous shot of the man in the moon remains instantly recognizable. But Méliès went beyond whimsy and charm; he wanted to shock, to thrill, to put the audience in his theater's seats, even if they'd only need the edge. He played the devil twenty-four times, made movies about walking skeletons and mad scientists, and crept up towards the first vampire film. Goerges Méliès was interested in making magic on the screen; the horror movie was simply an intersection between commerce and his love of special effects.
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August 09, 2004
Vinlandia
It was wrapped in a poplar's roots when Olof Ohman found it, grubbing a stump outside Kensington, Minnesota, in 1899. He couldn't read it, so he gave it to a banker in town; the banker couldn't read it, so he sent it on a professor at the university, and there it was translated: "After we came home found 10 men red with blood and dead." That professor, O. J. Breda of the University of Minnesota, dismissed it as a fake. The runes were wrong, the dates seemed wrong, and there weren't any Goths and Norweigans in Minnesota in 1362 to chisel a record of their mysterious fate into stone. A few years later, Newton Winchell of the Minnesota Historical Society and a geologist, took a closer look at the stone and Ohman's account of finding it and pronounced the Kensington Runestone genuine. And experts have gone back and forth on the matter ever since. For instance, there were discrepancies between the runes scholars in the early twentieth century would have expected from an expedition in the fourteenth century expedition. Later scholars noted that a number of the oddities can be found in historical sources. Still later, a nineteenth century letter using the same slightly weird runic alphabet was discovered; what was thought to have been proof of a fourteenth century origin might simply have been a Scandanavian trade code. But if the runestone's supporters were not discouraged when expert opinion universally held that it was fake, they won't be satisfied by the mere appearance of a suspicious similar set of letters five hundred years too late.
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