The Strangeness of Muffet

I live with a delightfully strange cat. People have asked me how Muffet and I have been getting along, and the best short answer I can give is "delightfully strange."

The long answer is that she's incredibly annoying and funny. If she were slightly more annoying or slightly less funny she'd be unbearable, but even when she's going completely bonkers -- ricocheting off walls five feet in the air, for instance, while emitting a constant babble of shrieks and growls -- she is still entirely lovable. And sometimes she knows to leave well enough alone (though rarely).

She's too curious and active. She needs to explore everything, and if she can't climb inside something she needs to either push it or break it. Socks must be removed from sock drawers and shower curtains must come crashing down, usually at 3am. She must also be allowed a certain time on my shoulders, a game which we call "hunchcat" and which sometimes ends with her biting my neck.

Did I mention the fighting? We're always fighting. When she rolls onto her back, that means she wants to mutilate my right hand. I am a bad parent because I do not let her win, and at the end of it all I clutch my bleeding wrist and she looks at me with hatred in her eyes, huffing peevishly.

So yes, she's annoying and requires constant maintenance and she will destroy things if I don't pay attention to her. But I love her to death, and she puts on a convincing charade of loving me. At the roller derby last weekend I sat next to a woman who had to entertain her precocious eight-year-old daughter, and I saw an uncanny reflection of my own behaviour: the coaxing, the distracting, the humouring, the happiness, and the unfeigned tolerance and love.

SIDENOTE: A few months ago she managed to climb the bookcase where I keep her treats, and by the time I caught her she'd eaten half of a full bag. I put the treats in an even higher and more inaccessible spot, and the next day she'd managed to eat the other half. She expanded into a very fat cat shortly afterward and it's been a struggle to maintain her new diet, but let's just say she doesn't get treats anymore and that my shoulders have needed to become a lot stronger.

Long Weekend Cartoon by Peter Arno

Goat-Goo in Roman Plays

I've never had a sense of human history; other than Geography, History was the class I was LEAST interested in during school. But now I'm learning everything for the first time from scratch, and what fascinates me most about human history is how little we have changed.

It's for this reason that I'm thoroughly enjoying "Five Roman Comedies," a collection of Plautus and Terence plays translated into "modern verse" (eg., "the modern verse of Classical Studies professors in 1970").

It is really, really wonderful to know that we find the same things funny today that we did 2200 years ago: the irony of confused identities, the bumblings of a cocky idiot, the old routine of "Go quickly! And wait, don't forget what I told you to do! Now go, hurry! Wait, remember to be careful! Now hurry up and go! Wait a second, don't forget to be as quick as you can!"

Isn't this touching? Obviously our brains have changed little (if any) since Roman times, but neither have our joys and fears. And there is something ESPECIALLY touching that -- so long ago -- we had a theatrical system to entertain each other with, and that -- against all odds -- so many of these works have survived for us to read today.

Anyway, while reading these plays I'm torn between enjoying the "modern verse" translations and wishing they were a bit more literal. Like, I know instantly what "knucklehead" means to us today, but I sort wonder how the ROMANS had expressed such a thing. I'm currently reading the hilarious "Mostellaria," and the translator (Palmer Bovie) has really gone to town with the idioms. Here's my favourite section, which I hereby decree to be the best part of any play, anywhere:

TRANIO:

Why don't you go up in smoke? I'll see you inhale first,
you halitosis garlic-green rotten excuse for a rustic
retreat, with goat-goo on your feet. I repeat:
You whiff of damp air, what's it like down there in your pig-sty?
Whew! What a combination of nanny goat and mongrel bitch!

That's great stuff! Then, as now, we've always found it enormously funny when two unlikeable people insult each other.

Overheard at the Pet Store

CHILD: So you don't want a hamster.

FATHER: No I don't.

CHILD: Have you ever thought that a hamster might save your life?

I'd like to say that -- when pressed -- the child told an imaginative and brilliant story about a life-saving hamster, but instead he totally choked and couldn't provide any rationale for his statement.

But he was only about five years old and the statement was brilliant. The rationale will come.

"Brats! Brats! Brats!"

I love this movie, and somehow this scene makes me happiest of all!

A Cigar for the Battered Husband

The P. Lorillard Company advertised these "little cigars" with an amusing ad campaign. While the name "Between the Acts" suggested a person who wanted a quick smoke during a theater intermission, the advertisements focused on more entertaining moments when the protagonist had very little time to spare.

I can't remember any of the previous ones right now, but I get a kick out of this one from May 17, 1930. There are so many cute symbols involved. I'm not sure why he has a feather in his tophat, but he's obviously the drunk husband coming home and trying to sneak into the apartment without his wife seeing him. He's holding his shoes in his hand so he can move silently, and because he's smoking a "Between the Acts" cigar we know he only has a few seconds before his wife clobbers him with her rolling pin.

I particularly like the way she's rolling up her sleeve in the background, and the fact that you can't see her face. This is such a fun, ominous, and perfectly-designed image!

PS: When will people stop recognizing the rolling pin as a weapon wielded by disgruntled housewives? I'm not even sure how *I* recognize it, except that it was probably a staple of cartoons throughout the '40s and '50s. Like so many symbols of the times, the cartoons serve as an unintended method of feeding the public consciousness. Someday children will only recognize trees because they saw them in Merrie Melodies.

PPS: Who was the mysterious artist "F.G.C."? I'm unable to find out. I've certainly seen his/her work elsewhere in the magazine, and you can find a few references to his advertising copy online, but other than that...

The World of Tomorrow

This makes me laugh and laugh and laugh:



It's from season two, episode four of "Look Around You," a bizarre British spoof of '80s educational programs. While most of the show requires complete viewing to enjoy, this clip stands alone. I can't describe how much I love it.

If you want more, here's the clip that got me hooked: a look at synthesizers with "Synthesizer Patel." My God.

Scrutable Poetry Corner: "Guestroom Books" by Newman Levy

"Guestroom Books" by Newman Levy (The New Yorker, April 12, 1930).

Beside my chaste and downy cot
There stands a goodly number
Of stately tomes of prose and pomes
To lull the guest to slumber.

The verse of T. S. Eliot,
A copy of "Ulysses,"
As though to say "No place you'll stay
So cultured is as this is."

The works (in French) of Baudelaire,
And Keats "Epipsychidion"
And next to it The Holy Writ
Purloined, I fear, from Gideon.

A goodly and narcotic list
Of literary glories,
While down below my host, I know,
Is reading Snappy Stories.

"God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton

The New Yorker panned this book, but it sounded so interesting that I couldn't resist finding a copy: "God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton, published in 1929. As you can see by the tag list for this post, it contains elements of pretty much everything I talk about in this blog.

Barton was a popular '20s cartoonist and caricaturist, and he seemed to be trying to establish himself as a writer before his manic-depression prompted his suicide in 1931. I'm not surprised that he killed himself two years after writing this book. "God's Country" is a bitter thing indeed.

It's a satirical, absurd history of the United States, beginning with Christopher Columbus and ending with a bizarre dystopia in which women have taken over the government, radio advertisers have inadvertently caused widespread looting and domestic terror, and poison gas has destroyed everybody except for eight criminals who -- following the intentions of the pilgrims from the beginning of the book -- set out to wreck everything all over again.

Oooo, it's nasty. Barton has equal loathing for Democrats and Republicans (known in the book as "Uniboodlists" and "Multiboodlists" for reasons I didn't understand), Presidents ("Misters"), businessmen ("Interests"), newspapers (who dictate "Public Opinion"), and the everyday citizens who allow the aforementioned to get away with everything they do, over and over again, throughout the entire history of democracy.

Is there anybody Barton doesn't hate? He appears to have sympathy for Native Americans, he finds few unpleasant things to say about Abraham Lincoln, and he goes out of his way to avoid lampooning African Americans, but for the most part "God's Country" is a relentless, snarky skewering of EVERYBODY. And that means you too, reader. And me.

You can imagine how tedious such a book can be. It's especially tedious to somebody (like me) who doesn't know the finer points of every President -- errr, Mister -- in American history. Barton goes through them all, giving them the names of monarchs ("St. Abraham," "Franklin the Debonaire") to highlight one going theme throughout the book: the American obsession with electing "jus' plain folk" who are -- in actual fact -- part of the social elite who have been carefully groomed to appear otherwise.

This obsession is one element of the book that still holds true today (see Palin, Sarah). Another element is the reliance on FEAR to manipulate public opinion, as formented by business requirements and amplified by the newspapers. We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the disgusting collusion of politics, business, and media is a relatively new phenomenon. "God's Country" will tell you different.

After 250 pages of spot-on satire, Barton comes to women's suffrage and temperance activism. I can only assume that he really, really didn't like women, as the book tips from "cutting satire" to "cruel stereotype" in the space of a few pages, detailing a world where women with "blacksnake whips" run around emasculating everybody and turning them into "ex-males." They conceive arbitrary rules and devise irrational schemes to enforce them, finally bringing about the downfall of the already-tottering country. It's ludicrous and leaves a bad impression, and is probably one of the reasons The New Yorker reviewer panned it.

But there are great moments, especially near the end when everything goes completely off the rails. The businessmen are discovered to have retreated into a secret society with its own language ("Six huh pcent a fi million dollas is thutty million dollas. Fiscal.") and in a mysterious desert pilgrimage they invent golf. This presentation of Big Business as a totally self-interested, self-contained, and illogical cabal is ominous in light of the subsequent financial collapse.

When the new breed of radio announcers start to amuse themselves by shouting demands like "Desire to see a prize fight!" and "Long to see a movie about Arabs!", the book provides an amazing insight into '20s popular culture. It's like reading a Readers Digest Condensed Version of The New Yorker between 1925 and 1929:

[They were] soon being ordered to deodorize, to smear mud on their faces, to hate New York, to play Mah Jong, to do cross-word puzzles, to ask each other questions, to bathe in violet rays, to develop personalities, to practice numerology, to adore the Russians, the negroes and aviators, to eat Eskimo Pie, to throw bits of paper out the window, to have themselves psychoanalyzed, to engage in Marathon contests, to eat liver and to perform a thousand other like obediences.

When "God's Country" is good, it's very, very good, but most of it is the 1920s brand of screwball, sledgehammer burlesque that leaves me exhausted, alternating with some surprisingly dry historical dissection.

More importantly, however, it is a clear expression of the immense disgust that an intelligent, educated, creative, and mentally-tortured man had for all the things he saw in the world around him. If he'd had a more balanced view of human nature then "God's Country" would be an easier book to read, but it never would have been written in the first place.

Unearthing Forgotten Bits of Culture: William Lyon Phelps

Reading old issues of The New Yorker clarifies a lot of things about life in the '20s and '30s, but it also raises new mysteries. It was written -- obviously -- for people who knew the current events of the day, so things can be a bit muddy for the 21st century reader, especially when the writers neglect to provide Googleable clues.

Several months ago I solved The Mystery of Mitzi Hajos. This afternoon I solved The Mystery of Nothing Like It.

Written by Christopher Ward* in the March 8, 1930 issue, "Nothing Like It By W-M L-N PH-L-S" is obviously a spoof of a particular book reviewer. This reviewer is obsessed with his airtight Christian morality, and even more obsessed with his social connections; each review degenerates into a long-winded story about how he is on friendly terms with the author. He also makes some really terrible puns.

Most enjoyable is his "Faery Queene Club," which he offers membership to anybody who has read the poem, including a nine-year-old named Abram Goody who wants "a badge or something" ("No, Master Goody, the only reward is a consciousness of superiority to your parents and friends, and your name in this magazine"). He also gets a letter from a chorus girl:

I have read quite a lot of the book you give me. Its certainly wrote swell. Its away over poor little me. Anyhow I want to join your Fairy Queen Club. I suppose its like the others sos I can go there when the shows over and get a drink and see a little life. Ime getting along fine they have gave me a better part. Ime in the front row now. Let me know about the Club where its address is and everything.

Besides proving that people haven't changed much in the last eighty years, the spoof posed a mystery...who was W-M L-N PH-L-S? Obviously a '30s reader would know, but what about me?

I tried inserting letters into the blanks...obviously "Phelps," but what about "W-M" and "L-N?" "Wim Lon Phelps?" Nothing was working, so I tried reverting the spoof column name ("Nothing Like It") to what I assumed was the original ("Something Like It" or "As You Like It"). Nope, no luck.

Then I tried "The Faery Queene Club," and whoopee...it really existed, and was run by William Lyon Phelps, who wrote a regular column called "As I Like It" for Scribner's Magazine! More importantly, every mention of Phelps online waxes eloquent about his intelligence and fame, but they never ONCE mention his supposed pomposity.

So by writing this post I am not just crowing about my internet sleuthing...I'm also pointing out that William Lyon Phelps was once considered annoying enough to inspire a spoof column, and a very funny one indeed.

* Bonus Mystery: I assume that "Christopher Ward" was Christopher Lewis Ward, who was known for writing burlesques around that time.

"Seals in the Workforce"

Here's an excerpt from a documentary that Schnapps and I were in many years ago!



Behind the Scenes Featurette

I usually take a short nap before going out to a club, because I'm old. Sometimes I'll wake up early because my blood sugar is low, and the combination of pseudo dream-state and nutrient-starved brain is the usual inspiration for a Schnapps video.

On Saturday it was the "seal song" idea (including the complete lyrics, which I woke up with), and as I stumbled around eating raw sugar I came up with a few scenes in a potential Schnapps documentary.*

As usual, these things must be simple and easy to film. I shot everything that night except for the "They don't hire seals" thing, which I realized was necessary when I began editing the footage. You can tell I wasn't drunk when I shot that scene because the Schnapps voice is all wrong.

Anyway, a combination of voiceover and footage filmed in various rooms -- including an unexpected refrigerator hum in the kitchen -- meant that I had to apply all sorts of denoisers, noise gates, and selective EQ to everything. What's the best way to disguise imperfect audio? Other than music -- which seemed inappropriate for such a stark subject -- the best solution is to make the audio sound even MORE imperfect!

So I added a wonderful "crackle" loop courtesy of the Soundtrack Pro library, as well as intermittent "pops" (a click sample pitched downward) and an occasional rustling noise similar to a dirty audio track on a piece of old film, produced by gently rubbing a sock over a microphone.

As usual, I'm amazed at the difference between raw footage and finished material. Each clip viewed in isolation is total crap -- leading to a lot of discouragement yesterday when I began pulling everything together -- but when I trimmed it and assembled it in the right order, it began to be funny...even WITHOUT the voiceover.

The lesson, as though you didn't know: editing is half the final product.

* This is not the first Schnapps documentary ever, but it's the first one that didn't turn out so bad that it was thrown away.

Boxing Day Miracle

Walking home from breakfast this morning, I passed a small boy on a crazy carpet trying to slide UP the bare sidewalk of Bluevale hill. He'd lie on the carpet, push himself a few inches, and moan as the pebbles on the sidewalk scraped and grated against the plastic.

His father stood quietly near the top of the hill, but finally he lost his patience. He shouted at the child -- and I quote -- "Hey, Jesus! Let's rock and roll kiddo!"

Merry Christmas 2009!

Drive safe! Don't trip over your tripods!

"Stinkin' at the Club Savoy"

Since I didn't do anything last night except schlump around the house, I am not currently dealing with a hangover or the inevitable post-party regrets. But for all those who are I present Virginia O'Brien singing "Stinkin' at the Club Savoy." It proves the timelessness of certain things.



PS: O'Brien was known as "Ol' Stone-Face," because her schtick was to sing with virtually no expression whatsoever. This strikes the 21st century viewer as totally bizarre, but I'm sure in the '40s it was easier to deal with.

Burlesque, Then and Before Then

The state of burlesque occasionally appears in the pages of the old New Yorker, and every few years the reporters mention Minsky's. The Minsky Brothers kept a high-profile burlesque show going at the National Winter Garden, even through the late '20s and early '30s when the artform was unappreciated.

In the February 1st, 1930 issue of The New Yorker, theatre reporter Robert Benchley compared the cleaner Minsky style of burlesque with the "old Fourteenth Street or Old Howard days." Besides the somewhat "cleaner" costumes and a greater reliance on "effects," Benchley makes a (perhaps backhanded) compliment to the fuller figure:

The most noticeable change in burlesque...is in the structure of the ladies of the chorus. Gone are the leviathans of an earlier day, when women were women and gold teeth flashed like beacons above Scyllas and Charybdises which could sink a ship if given half a chance. The burlesque girls of today are agile wisps for the most part, although here and there one detects a form which, if given its quota of starches for a year or two, might approximate those which used to ply back and forth in irregular array behind Clark and McCullough, Tom Howard, and Jim Barton.

I love Robert Benchley's theatre reviews. "Scyllas and Charybdises?" Holy cow!

Anyway, Benchley goes on to say that what sets Minsky's burlesque apart from regular Broadway shows is the "informality in chorus dance routines." Each dancer can do whatever she wants "so long as they all get on and off the stage at the same time," though he bemoans their attempts at synchronized arm-raising.

...

Everybody needs a great cartoon on a Friday morning.



(The cartoon -- from December 28, 1929 -- by Leonard Dove, a frequent contributor of covers and cartoons to The New Yorker until the early '60s. As is usual with artists and poets of the time I can't find a biography for him)

I Totally Understand

"Oh the rent--the rent! What about my career!"

(It's by William Crawford Galbraith, who did a lot of artwork for The New Yorker but appears to be otherwise forgotten).

The Yo-Yo - Helen Kane - Poop Connection

If you've been reading this blog today, you've been wondering what yo-yos have to do with feces. I myself wasn't aware of any connection but a November 23, 1929 advertisement from Reubens gives us this, a note handwritten by Helen Kane.


I mentioned this morning that one of the 1929 yo-yo tricks was the "Boop-a-doop," obviously derived from the Helen Kane song "I Wanna Be Loved By You." Then, later in the day, I told three stories about poop. Now I give you a note written by Helen Kane in which she says

I wanna be loved by you --
Poop Popp Poop Poop

There you go! I don't just write about random things! It's all connected, just sometimes you have to wait a bit!

PS: I find it hilarious to think of Broadway star Helen Kane being so drunk at Reubens that she can't even remember the lyrics to her one hit song.

PPS: A long time ago I posted some of the choicest Reubens advertisements. Remember? They would spy on their celebrity guests, and then write about what they ordered and what terrible pigs they were. As of 1929 the new Reubens schtick is to publish celebrity quotes, and then somewhat more discreetly call them pigs.

A Voyage to Purilia

During the latter months of 1929, The New Yorker ran a continuing series called "A Voyage to Purilia." Written by Elmer Rice -- a playwright with some early successes -- it's the fictional tale of two earth men who travel to a planet where social norms (and even the laws of physics) follow the unspoken conventions of popular films.

This "popular film" angle is never stated, but Rice sure as hell milks it, and for the most part it's clever and funny. The citizens of Purilia all behave according to their caste (hero, vamp, villain, virgin, or mother). The businessmen do a vague sort of work which is never explained. Farmers live on tiny plots of land, always inches from being foreclosed by a dastardly landlord. Prisoners who are sentenced to death are always saved at the very last minute.

In part seven, after speculating that high-caste Purilians rarely get diseases because their "susceptibility to wounds, bruises, contusions, fractures, and swoonings" has caused immunity, and revealing that low-caste Purilians who suffer disease (influenza, delirium tremens, gout, parasites, and "maladies of the teeth") are always subjects of mirth, the narrator describes an upper-caste malady which IS taken seriously:

Chief among these are heart-failure and apoplexy, both of which are deemed highly respectable and worthy of the expenditure of a good deal of emotion. The symptoms of these twho ailments are almost identical. The victim opens and closes his mouth several times in rapid succession, rolls his eyes, and then slumps heavily either upon the floor or into a chair. If the attack is particularly acute, he dislodges a vase in his fall, or else clutches at a tablecloth, with a resultant breakage of crockery.

This is typical of the incredibly detailed descriptions in "A Voyage to Purilia." It's simultaneously a fun adventure, a vicious satire, and a checklist of hundreds of film tropes. It's also an indication that not much has changed in Hollywood during the last eighty years. If you have a copy of the New Yorker DVDs lying around, I recommend you go back to the fall of 1929 and start reading.

Scrutable Poetry Corner: "Work for the Censor"

Rabbits
Have horrid habits;
Shad
Are pretty bad;
Pigeons
Have no religions;
Bees
Expose their knees;
Terrapins
Parade their sins;
Moles
Have damaged souls;
Albatrosses
Are total losses;
Snakes
Are dreadful rakes;
Spiders
Are law-deriders;
Bears
Won't say their prayers.
I'm shocked to see that unabridged zoölogies
Are still permitted in our schools and colleges!

(By the always-wonderful Arthur Guiterman, from the October 26, 1929 issue of The New Yorker).