The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Last night I was thinking about the first Earth Day. Well, specifically I was remembering an hour of it, and only vaguely. I don’t have any solid memories of what I did, but I know precisely where I was: in Mrs. R’s art class at Alamo Heights Junior High School in San Antonio, Texas.

Alamo Heights was a wealthy neighborhood, and while I didn’t quite live on the wrong side of the tracks, I was only a block or two away. It wasn’t a fun place to be. I got bullied a lot, although I have to admit I gave them lots of fodder: I was poor, socially inept, had crossed eyes, loved to read, and had yet to learn the simple fact that the things I find most fascinating irritate the hell out of muscular, slow-witted classmates.

The teachers there were pretty stodgy. San Antonio didn’t cotton to most of the shenanigans the rest of the country had been engaged in, and this was Alamo Heights, after all. Most of them were nice enough, although one was utterly horrifying. (The social studies teacher was a middle-aged man with some kind of skin condition, and once in a while when we were supposed to be reading we’d catch him chewing on the back of his hand. I believe that class is where I first heard the immortal phrase, “Ewwwwwww! Gross!”)

But there were two wonderful teachers there: Coach Ploetz, about whom I intend to write about in detail later, and Mrs. R. (I’m giving Coach Ploetz’s real name because he has since passed away. A wonderful man who may have saved my life.)

Mrs. R was young, and she wasn’t at all like the other teachers. She wore bright modern clothes, and laughed a lot, and treated you like a human being instead of an unpleasant duty. She did gorgeous psychedelic ink and watercolor drawings in class. She drove a really cool car, too, an old Rolls-Royce. She may have even gone barefoot in class once in a while. She was, dare I say it, almost a… a Hippie!!! We all had huge crushes on her, of course.

I’ve been in schools where the kids complained about having to go to art class. Not there, though. Everybody loved her classes. She was, therefore, in frequent trouble with the school authorities.

That first Earth Day was one of her biggest transgressions. I can’t remember any specifics across the gulf of forty years, but Mrs. R. led us on a march for Earth Day. Keep in mind that at this time environmentalists were considered roughly on par with a crazy uncle that suddenly starts barking at the milkman. The principal was not amused, and it took weeks for the hubbub to die down.

So last night I was thinking about Earth Day and Mrs. R, and I decided to see if I could find out what happened to her. I started googling her last name (I don’t think I ever knew her first name), but all that kept coming up was a famous author who wrote a series of fantasy novels that are my daughter’s favorite books of all time. One of them has been made into a very popular movie. I kept scrolling through, trying to find Mrs. R, when I ran across a reference to this author having been born in 1964 and graduated from a San Antonio high school.

Hmm, I thought. Nah, it couldn’t be. Still, it was just possible. I started googling for this author’s mother. I found her name, which did not begin with R, and googled her. She is a respected educator in Texas, with art being one of her many subjects. Okay, I thought, this is looking more and more likely. I found her Facebook page, and left a message asking if she was a teacher at Alamo Heights Junior Hgh in 1970 or 1971. This was at 2:30 in the morning.

When I woke up this morning and checked my email before beginning a massive debug (computer, not vermin), there was a reply. It was her! I had actually found Mrs. R! We caught up a bit, and now we’re friends on Facebook. Oh, and it turns out the car was an old Jaguar Mark X, not a Rolls. I’ll be asking about the march. Memory is a funny thing.

The best part of all this? Telling the story to my daughter and watching her eyes get very big and bright.

About ten years ago I came up with a great title for a science fiction story. (This was back in the days when I had deluded myself into believing I was a writer.) Unfortunately, try as I might, I was unable to figure out a plot that could live up to it. Anything I wrote would ultimately be a let-down.

This evening, after reading the hilarious Charlie Anders short story A Serial Killer Explains the Distinctions Between Literary Terms and reflecting on his brilliant title, I had an epiphany.

The title I had thought up, in and of itself, actually is the story. It’s hermetically sealed; nothing more is required.

So here it is, a short story consisting only of its title:

And now, after that tour de force, I shall turn my attention to transmogrifying quantum physics…

I’ve got a special treat for you today: the Sullivan Studio’s greatest silent film star in all his feline glory: Felix in Hollywood, from 1923. There is some controversy over who created Felix the Cat, but the amazing character animation was done by Otto Messmer. Messmer’s technique was the complete opposite of later cartoon production: each frame of Felix was penciled and inked on a sheet of paper, and the backgrounds were drawn on celluloid that was laid on top.

Felix was the first cartoon character to bring patrons into theaters on his star power alone, predating the popularity of Mickey Mouse by almost a decade.

This is one of the earliest examples of an animation sub-genre: the Hollywood caricature film. Ben Turpin, Will Hays, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and William S. Hart all make appearances. A few of these people you’re probably not familiar with. Turpin was a popular comedian with crossed eyes who actually had them insured by Christie’s in case they ever uncrossed, leaving him without a schtick. Hart was the first cowboy star to actually attempt realism in westerns. Think of him as the Clint Eastwood of his day.

And Hays, who you’ll notice gets his own paragraph, is THE Will Hays, of the infamous Hays Code. This is the asshole guy that introduced arbitrary and capricious censorship to the movies. I happen to know something pretty funny about him: the actual “Hays Office” was in a tall building from the early silent era, when things were much less restrictive. Although it was too high up to make out from the street, running around the top of the structure was a ceramic frieze depicting the filming of a gladiator movie. Yes, the Hays building was covered in naked men. It was still standing when I lived in Hollywood in the eighties.

If you’d like to get a higher-resolution version of this cartoon, you can find it at the Internet Archives. (You really can’t appreciate the nuances of Messmer’s beautiful character work in this flash clip.) This, and all the other classic cartoons you can find there, are in the public domain, free and perfectly legal, so download to your heart’s content.

Model railroading is a strange hobby that breeds strange people. They gather in clubs to run their trains and discuss things profoundly uninteresting to anyone but themselves. But mostly, they build layouts.

In basements, rec rooms and attics all over the globe these men (and a handful of women) build their miniature worlds. Some of them spend decades and fortunes doing it. And I have to admit that even I am a sucker for a good model train layout. (There was one at the Los Angeles County Fair in the mid-eighties that was pretty sweet.)

But the king of all HO scale layouts is the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany. So far it covers about 900 square meters, with 9,000 meters of track. There are 2,800 structures and bridges, and 90,000 tiny human figures.

A funny thing about those tiny human figures, though. As I mentioned, model railroaders can be strange people, and one of the strangest things they like to do is hide little jokes in the layouts. In Miniatur Wunderland there are some real doozies:

• What appears to be the US Border Patrol rounding up illegal aliens

• A couple of sailors on leave checking out some prostitutes

and my personal favorite,

• A charming crime scene depicting a nude dead body at the bottom of a stream surrounded by police divers

Recently CSI had an episode about a serial-killer/model railroader that featured a hilariously morbid layout, but I don’t know if it was built specially for the show or was pre-existing. If anyone’s got information about it, or any other twisted train layouts please send it my way and I’ll put it all together on a special page.

I am about to confess to a Federal crime, just so I can link to an article on a goofy research project. Yep, we lay it on the line here at Atomic Deathray, folks.

But first, some long-winded background.

When I was a teenager I made the happy discovery that George Washington bears an uncanny likeness to Groucho Marx, and I chose to use Washington’s portrait on the one-dollar bill as the medium through which I would alert the public to this fact. Every once in a while I would add eyebrows, glasses, a mustache and a cigar to The Father Of Our Country and send the bill on its merry way. Over the years I figure I did about a hundred “Groucho Dollars.”

On occasion someone would tell me that it was illegal to deface United States currency. This is not entirely true, though. It is illegal to deface United States currency, but only with intent to remove it from circulation. (Drawing on money is a fine American tradition, by the way.) Yes, I was defacing the bills, but I wanted them circulated as widely as possible. I hoped my “Groucho Dollars” were circling the globe, making people smile wherever they crossed a palm.

I continued doing this for several decades, until my gradual maturation into The Fine Civic-Minded Fellow Standing Before You put an end to the practice. (Translation: I became a cantankerous old bastard.) But that’s not the crime.

In 1982 or so, one of my bills caught the attention of a woman who was a major player in the Los Angeles mailart scene. Mailart was an art movement that used the US Postal Service as its canvas. People sent decorated envelopes and hand-drawn or rubber-stamped postcards and such through the mail, sometimes to each other, and sometimes to mailart shows held in various galleries around the world. Anyone could be a mailartist, and she suggested that I give it a try.

Other than the continual annoyance of having to explain to people what the hell mailart is, being a mailartist was a lot of fun. I specialized in strange little humorous postcard collages. (To this day my nickname is “Doctor X-Acto” because of the craft knife I favored.)

One show in Germany had an assigned theme of “Inspiration and Temptation in Modern Life.” I found an old engraving of a Russian eighteenth-century outdoor public bath which depicted dozens of carefully posed naked men and women lounging around on a bunch of rocks. I put a little thought bubble containing an exclamation mark above every head. I heard it got a lot of laughs at the show.

Up to this point, all of my forays into mailart had been ordinary rectangular postcards, with the artistic element being the artwork it contained. But one day I had an idea: what if the actual item being mailed was the point of the piece? I decided to mail a postcard that was completely non-rectangular, just to see if it would be delivered. I glued a photograph of a tropical fish onto card stock, and carefully cut it out, preserving every intricate little anatomical detail. I addressed it to another mailartist in San Diego and dropped it into a mailbox.

It arrived in two days. Success!

But where to go from there? I wanted to really test the limits of what could be sent through the mail. At first I thought of slapping some stamps and an address on a hard-boiled egg, but then I had a better idea. Something superbly transgressive.

Keep in mind that during this period of my life I considered myself first and foremost an artist-with-a-capital-A. To me, art was something almost sacred that could change society for the better. Snicker all you like; it was my governing philosophy. Now, of course, I know that art is really just a branch of show biz, sort of like writing but more corrupt.

So when I was told, mistakenly as it turned out, that artwork was exempt from the normal laws relating to defacement of currency, I believed it.

Okay, now we’re finally to the crime part.

I took a dollar bill, cut out the oval where Washington’s head is, replaced it with a computer-generated picture of a robotic ant clipped out of a magazine, wrote “In Bug We Trust” over and over in tiny letters all around the border, glued it to some cardboard, addressed the other side and then laminated the whole thing in plastic.

Which is pretty much the very definition of “mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued.”

I didn’t know it, but I was now afoul of the Secret Service, who do the Treasury Department’s dirty work. I could have been fined up to $100 and/or been sent to jail for up to six months! Not only that, but I’d sent the evidence through the US Mail, which is obviously a government agency, without an envelope!

Luckily for me, nobody came knocking at my door in the middle of the night, but still it took five weeks for the flagrant felony to go from Los Angeles to San Diego. It had obviously attracted some official attention en route. I figure I dodged a bullet.

So you can imagine my surprise this evening when I read that a group of researchers have been doing the same sort of mail experiments I did all those years ago, including laminated money:

$1 bill. Sealed in clear plastic, with label attached with address and postage. Days to delivery, 6.

$20 bill. Days to delivery, 4.

Football. Days to delivery, 6. Male postal carrier was talkative and asked recipient about the scores of various current games. Carrier noted that mail must be wrapped.

Pair of new, expensive tennis shoes. Strapped together with duct tape. Days to delivery, 7. When shoes were picked up at station, laces were tied tightly together with difficult-to-remove knot. Clerk noted that mail must be wrapped.

Man, that takes me back. I wonder where I put my old X-Acto knife?

This weekend the fine folks at Turner Classic Movies are broadcasting the Mount Rushmore of trash films, Russ Meyer’s 1965 masterpiece Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

If the title alone doesn’t make you willing to perform just about any degrading act imaginable to see it, then you have no Elvis in you.

It’s about cat-suited lesbian go-go dancers with huge breasts karate-chopping their way across the Mojave Desert in a tricked-out Porsche while generally wreaking havoc and snarling lines like “I never try anything. I just do it. Wanna try me?” Filmed in glorious mid-sixties black-and-white, it stars an actress named, I kid you not, Tura Satana.

That’s as close to being everything you need in a trashy movie as you’re ever going to get. It’s John Waters‘ favorite film of all time.

I’d tell you the time it’s playing, but TCM is a bit confusing on the subject. Their website claims that Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is showing October 20 at 2AM Eastern, but that makes little sense, since the film would be playing the night of Thursday/Friday and this movie is made for Friday nights. I suspect it’s actually playing October 21 at 2AM Eastern, the night of Friday/Saturday. In any case, check your local listings.

On a personal note, I am very fortunate to have spent a rainy afternoon talking with Russ Meyer back in the mid-eighties. He was quite a guy, and one of the good ones.

It’s happened to us all: you head down to the local Tiki Bar for happy hour with a few of your fellow cubicle-slaves, and seven or eight Piña Coladas and a montage sequence later you wake up with a tattoo of Kaiser Wilhelm on your wang.

The fine folks at type brighter have commemorated these epidermal indiscretions with several pages of really bad tattoos. Any fluids you happen to be drinking when you view this will be shooting out of your nose.

STERN PATERNALISTIC WARNING: the site in general, and especially some of the more cringeworthy examples, are definitely NOT work-safe, and would disgust a one-eyed 57-year-old El Paso table-dancer.

Last night I was watching a Simpsons episode from the ninth season entitled “Dumbbell Indemnity.” (Episode number 194 Production Code 5F12, for those of you who will never have sex.)

The plot involves Homer helping Moe the bartender commit insurance fraud by stealing his car and parking it on the railroad tracks so it will be destroyed. On the way, Homer sees that one of his favorite films, Hail to the Chimp, is playing at the drive-in theater and decides he has time to watch it before the train arrives. Of course, he falls asleep, and wakes up just as the train passes.

At this point, I alarmed my wife by sitting straight up, sputtering and pointing at the TV. Not because I’d finally had that brain aneurism the hordes of my enemies have been praying for, but because I recognized the image on the screen. A very obscure image. Specifically, the artists on The Simpsons had quoted a photograph from 1956 named Hotshot Eastbound.

The only reason I even spotted the visual reference in the first place was because the story behind the picture was in the December 2005 issue of The Smithsonian Magazine. The photographer’s name was O. Winston Link, and he chronicled the end of the steam locomotive era.

I wasn’t absolutely sure I was right, though, so I hunted around for some screen grabs of the sequence. Not only was I correct, but there is a detail I hadn’t spotted last night: there’s a jet in the same orientation on the drive-in screen in both versions. The Simpsons shot is about a quarter-second behind the photograph, but as you can plainly see they’re essentially identical.

I haven’t found a discussion of this visual joke anywhere on the web, so I may have actually been the first person to spot it. Makes you wonder what else they’ve buried in the margins of the show.

There’s an inconvenient little secret that the official art world has tried to keep hidden for the last seventy years or so: realism takes a hell of a lot more talent and discipline than hot-gluing a bunch of blackboard erasers to a beheaded department-store manikin and calling it “The Rape of Education Part IV.”

Of course genuine talent is by definiton a rare thing, and acknowledging this unpleasant fact would make it more difficult for Mumsy and Daddums to justify spending a couple hundred grand sending Heather dear off to Chicago so she can dress in black capri pants and pretend to be an artist. It would also make it much harder for galleries to sell six-figure piece-of-crap canvases to rich idiots who couldn’t tell an original Modigliani from a Botticelli poster found in the bargain bin at Spencer’s Gifts.

Australian-born artist Ron Mueck, however, is the real deal. The man has talent, pays attention to detail, and he works hard. The sculpture shown here, entitled “Boy,” is five meters tall. It even has skin pores. This guy’s really, really good, and well worth a look.

Obligatory Axe-To-Grind Disclaimer: I’m an artist with a number of gallery shows under my belt, and my work hangs in several private collections. I have struggled for 45 years to improve my abilities. I was once informed by some snot-nosed little beret-wearing first-year art-school remora who couldn’t draw a convincing stick figure that what I did wasn’t art, it was “illustration.” They still haven’t located the body.

If you’re into that whole Ten Commandments™ “Thou shalt not covet” thing, then don’t follow this link or you’ll make the angels cry. An artist named Mark Ho has built an incredible, tiny hand-machined posable robot sculpture.

I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it …

Ahem. Sorry. I was overcome by technolust. Does anyone know how to get drool stains off of a monitor?

By the way, the parent site of that page is quite interesting, in a hard-core old-school obsessive sort of way: The Internet Craftsmanship Museum.