Max "Bunny" Sparber

Directed by: Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo
Starring: Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, Biao Yuen, Dick Wei

JACKIE CHAN began something of a second career in Hong Kong in the early Eighties. He had already enjoyed a solid career as an action film star, at first molded as an ill-considered replacement for Bruce Lee in humorless, undistinguished chop-socky period pieces; later he combined the deft blend of physical comedy and muscular, gymnastic martial arts for which he is now famous. This early career culminated in 1980's The Young Master, which was a showcase for Chan's growing athletic virtuosity. The film was also notable for being the first on which Chan acted as both writer and director, as well as being the first film he made for Hong Kong's famous Golden Harvest production company.

The film was a runaway hit, but, in signing with Golden Harvest, Chan broke a contract with his previous manager, Lo Wei. Reportedly, Lo Wei had connections with organized crime, and together they threatened Chan's life, prompting a brief move to America while Golden Harvest bought out Chan's contact with Lo Wei. While in the United States, Chan made two films -- an interesting but undistinguished period action film called The Big Brawl and the first of the Cannonball Run series, in which Chan played a chauffeur. While Chan was in America, he became a self-styled student of American silent film comedians, particularly the stunt-driven work of Buster Keaton. When he returned to Hong Kong in 1981, he incorporated this influence, at first unsuccessfully in a film titled Dragon Lord, a sequel of sorts to The Young Master, but one in which Chan downplayed martial arts in favor of extended comic sequences. The film was something of a flop, and, perhaps chagrined, Chan followed it up with the extravagant action of 1983's Project A.

This was to be the true turning point in Chan's career, and, in almost every way, the film is extraordinary. Firstly, it marked a shift in the way Chan choreographed martial arts, favoring extended, fluid fight scenes, often involving Chan's dexterous use of his environment: He tumbles across tables, scampers up walls, and makes ad hoc use of whatever is available as weapons. The battles in Project A are relentlessly inventive, exhilarating and comical, and often epic in scope. Additionally, Chan brought the martial arts film into the present, to an extent, setting the film in the Edwardian era and casting himself as an officer in the Hong Kong coast guard. And here is where we get to the subject of pirates.

Project A represented an inspired choice of story on the part of Chan. While the Golden Age of piracy in the West was long past at the turn of the 20th century, it was just starting to enjoy a sort of heyday in the South China Seas -- one that continues, nearly unchecked, to this day. During the first years of turn of the last century, Hong Kong provided an ideal breeding ground for piracy: The mainland of China consisted of corrupt, apathetic provinces and was wending its way toward civil war. In the meanwhile, the English-controlled Hong Kong was overwhelmed with sea traffic, which it found impossible to police. The seas were filled with rival pirate gangs, each seemingly more brutal and bizarre than the next. A journalist, Aleko Lilius, managed to infiltrate the various piracy rings of China in the 1920s, and published his stories of pirate queens, floating brothels, houses of torture, squalid prisons and violent executions, and crippled "dog men" in a book titled I Sailed with Chinese Pirates.

Chan's film, which is, at its heart, a light comedy, uses little of these details. In fact, half of the film is spent following the comical misadventures of Chan in the Hong Kong police as he hunts down mobsters that are supplying pirates with rifles. These scenes are lushly filmed and show Chan working at the peak of his imagination. Chan choreographs a long, exceptionally inventive brawl between himself and mobsters that has him jousting them with bicycles in narrow alleyways and eventually battling them in a teahouse. These scenes pair Chan with longtime collaborator Samo Hung, who he had worked with since both were children in the Peking opera, and ultimately the action culminates in a justifiably famous fall from a clock tower, which deliberately references Harold Lloyd's silent classic Safety Last.

Halfway through the movie the pirates arrive, and do so with a bravado that would have done Errol Flynn proud. They skulk up to a military schooner, hidden in two seemingly harmless Chinese junks. But, at the last moment, the junks' sails fall away, revealing hundreds of red-bandanna wearing, bare-chested pirates dangling from the riggings, clutching rifles and cutlasses, ready to board their quarry. Chan cast veteran martial arts baddie Dick Wei as their pirate king, Lor Sam Pau, and Wei is magnificent. He's a vision of twisted malevolence, a broad-chested, heavily tattooed swaggerer with a Fu Manchu mustache, a twisted, crook-backed gait, and an admiral's jacket cluttered with medals and gold epaulets, stolen from one of his victims. His crew, consisting of hundreds of men, are barefooted and wear loose-fitting clothes, but each are similarly adorned with plunder: Most have pearl necklaces around their throats, a surprisingly dainty adornment for a pirate.

Chan's epic sensibilities come to the fore here -- these pirates inhabit an island filled with a labyrinthine system of caves, which they have built into a fortress, and it looks terrific. Wei stalks this underground kingdom like a buccaneer Richard III, and, when the film finds its way to its climax, it takes the combined effort of Chan, Sammo Hung, and Biao Yuen -- another Peking Opera alum, famous for his acrobatic prowess -- to battle him. This final battle is grueling: Chan's choreography tends toward full-body contact, and his direction occasionally cuts to slow motion, so that audiences can fully appreciate the punishment suffered by the performers. Chan and his comrades slash wildly at Wei with cutlasses as he spins out of their way like some frenzied dervish, and, for a while at least, he seems untouchable. Even as their blows start to land and Wei begins to bleed, he faces them with a cockeyed bravado. "It's over," Chan calls to Wei, who responds with an exhausted glare. "It's not over until one of you kills me," Wei answers, and, although he is the villain of the story, in this moment he fully captures the same sort of daffy, devil-may-care romance that Hollywood gave its pirates during the Forties and Fifties. They're rogues, yes, and they can't come to any good, but, damn it all, when Wei spits in the face of fate and demands his own death, he's the most interesting thing on the screen. Who wouldn't rather be him in his final, glorious moments than the succession of bumbling cops and sailors that it took to stop him?

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THE WEST HAS ALWAYS regarded Africa with horror, and, in the Fifties and Sixties, real panic set in as a result of Kenya’s Mau Mau Revolution. For eight years, from 1952 to 1960, Kenyan rebels battled the British colonial administration that had ruled since 1890. The Mau Maus, equipped with spears, machetes, and rawhide whips, engaged in a covert, guerilla war, killing as many as 2000 loyalists, mostly wealthy landowners, under the cover of darkness. In two days in 1953, rebels attacked a village called Lari, hacking to death about 70 unarmed villagers, many of them women and children. The British made certain that these activities were widely reported, along with rumors of occult initiation rituals, painting the Mau Mau as bloodthirsty savages.

It was the Africa of the most terrified racist imagination, and it leaked into popular entertainment in the form of pure exploitation. As early as 1955, exploitation documentaries such as Mau-Mau promised naked savages and bloodthirsty rites, and no less than Screamin’ Jay Hawkins told a musical tale of frenzied appetites in his song “Feast of the Mau Mau.” His grotesque song reportedly caused queasier audience members to flee his performances, clutching their stomachs.

Strangely, we find none of this terror in the song “Konga Joe,” by Arch Hall Jr., despite the fact that his song title implicitly references the most menacing figure conjured by the west out of the Dark Continent — King Kong. We might expect something more nightmarish from Mr. Arch Hall Jr., a grinning, blonde pompadoured, failed teen idol more famous for starring in a series of exploitation movies written and directed by his father. After all, Hall starred in the notorious Eegah, a tale of a caveman roaming the streets of Palm Springs in 1962, and movies about unfrozen cavemen tended to treat our prehistoric ancestors as a sort of ancient equivalent to the Mau Mau: primitive, bloodthirsty, and dangerously desirous of suburban white women.

But, in “Konga Joe,” Hall seems to have fashioned himself as something of a beatniky, countercultural youth. The song is written in dense youth slang — “He’s a gone cool cat,” Hall sings, “with a jungle wail.” Countercultures during the 20th century typically looked to so-called primitive sources for inspiration, from Modernist art, which borrowed from African and Polynesian tribal art, to such dropout beachfront cultures as surfers and beachcombers, who dressed in tropical print shirts, tossed around Hawaiian slang, and brewed up steeply alcoholic fruit punches. Sometimes the counterculture’s fascination with the primitive even extended to troglodytes: The Strangeloves, who scored a pop hit in 1965 with their Bo Diddley inspired “I Want Candy,” dressed in leopard skin, pounded on tom toms, and one sported a distinctly cavemanish beard. Sonny and Cher, in the meanwhile, were frequently seen draped in bobcat vests, their feet wrapped in Eskimo boots, looking as though they themselves had recently been unfrozen from a slab of ice found in some deeply buried cave.

In “Konga Joe,” Hall takes this fascination with the brutish and the native to its extreme logical end: Over a driving, splendid guitar riff and the sounds of howling gibbons, Hall sings of a clan of Bornean pygmies, and, in Hall’s world, it’s not that the counterculture has much they can learn from the savage, it’s that the two cultures are identical. Konga Joe himself sports a slick ducktail coif, just like a character in a juvenile delinquency film. (Unsurprisingly, the song debuted in a juvenile delinquency film, 1961’s The Choppers; Hall himself is seen sitting in a car and listening to the song on the radio.) Joe has a girlfriend, Little Black Minnie, who sports a bone in her hair and describes Joe as her “steady date,” and the two spend their afternoons drinking nappy juices and having rousing house parties. Were it not for Hall’s accumulation of jungle imagery (“Pygmy cats are drumming on a white leg bone”), he could be describing the sort of bonfire fête that typically ended a Sixties beach movie. It’s a vision of a countercultural utopia: one long, swinging party, in which even the jungle animals join in.

It wouldn’t be more than a few years before the counterculture would claim the more sinister aspects of this fascination with the primitive. The phrase “mau mauing” came into fashion in the late Sixties for a bullying approach to racial politics, and Charles Manson notoriously appropriated The Beatles “Helter Skelter” as a code word for his imagined Mau Mau-style uprising of African-Americans against their white oppressors. And so it is that Arch Hall Jr.’s tale of a jungle shindig exists as a sort of Mau Mau equivalent to, say, “The Monster Mash,” and any of the hundreds of similar songs detailing dance parties filled with shimmying monstrosities. In the early Sixties, even the subject of a greatest terror could be placed next to a hi-fi and, were the right song to come on, would break into a contemporary dance.

LISTEN TO "KONGA JOE":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

SYNOPSIS: Indiana Moans and the Kingdom of the Crystal Whang is a satire of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, written in the form of an adult screenplay. It tells the story of adventurer and archeosexologist Indiana Moans, who must recover a strange crystal phallus from the clutches of an insane female Soviet agent named Iscreama Spunko.

DOWNLOAD: Download a PDF of the 21-page script Indiana Moans and the Kingdom of the Crystal Whang here. To read it, you must have Adobe's free PDF Reader, available here.

AVAILABILITY: Indiana Moans and the Kingdom of the Crystal Whang is currently available for purchase. Contact the author.

SAMPLE DIALOGUE:

Indiana Moans sits in the front seat of a Jeep, with Butt by
his side. Iscreama Spunko stands above the both of them, her
sword drawn and pressed to Indiana's neck. Behind her stand
her two female Russian soldiers, both carrying guns.

ISCREAMA SPUNKO
I commend you, Indiana. You
somehow found us in the thick
tropical jungle.

INDIANA MOANS
It wasn't that difficult.

ISCREAMA SPUNKO
Why? Did some old colleague send
you a notebook filled with clues
written in a dead language?

INDIANA MOANS
No.

ISCREAMA SPUNKO
Then how?

Indiana reaches into his coat pocket, produces a small stack
of postcards. On the back of them are written affectionate
phrases like I MISS YOU and WISH YOU WERE HERE, scrawled in
a very girlish script.

INDIANA MOANS
I was able to figure it out from
the postcards you sent me.

COMMENTS: Well, here it is, three weeks after I added my first screenplay, despite the fact that I had planned to add one per week. I picked a bad week to begin this project, with Iron Man, as that film held the number one spot in the box office the following week, and the week after was dominated by one of the Narnia films, which I chose not to adapt. I will not be turning any children's films into adult screenplays.

However, this past weekend, the newest Indiana Jones film made itself a very respectable $126 million, making itself the number one film in America for the weekend and fair target for adaptation into a satiric adult screenplay. In fact, I actually think my script might be better than the film it is based on, but, ultimately, I'll let my readers be the judge of that. Enjoy!

MORE FROM MY PORN YEAR.

Director: Michael Curtiz
Starring: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Lionel Atwill, Basil Rathbone

DIRECTOR Michael Curtiz has always been a little bit of a puzzle to film theorists. He has one of the longest and most storied careers as a director in the history of cinema -- his directorial resume dates all the way back to 1912, when he directed The Last Bohemian in Hungary, and his American films include such classics as The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels With Dirty Faces, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and, of course, Casablanca.

But take a look at those four films. They are, in order, a rollicking costumed adventure, a contemporary urban gangster tale, a musical biopic about a Broadway singer, and a romantic wartime melodrama. To film theorists, this varied approach to cinematic subjects is incomprehensible, and so Curtiz is dismissed as an auteur. Unlike, say, Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford, Curtiz did not instigate his own projects, nor did he superimposed a directorial agenda atop them. He simply lensed whatever the studios told him to. To be sure, there were always Curtiz flourishes in his films: This foul-tempered, somewhat dictatorial Hungarian had a background in expressionism, and so his films tended to feature unusual camera angles and long chiaroscuro shadows. Even in his muddled English (he once screamed at a lackey "The next time I want an idiot to do this, I'll do it myself!"), he had a skill at finding interesting performers: His films feature rich, nuanced, and often wildly eccentric performances from his casts. He was an able craftsman: whatever he filmed ended up looking terrific, and featured sharp, compelling narrative arcs and surprisingly literate dialogue. But as hale and able-bodied a filmmaker as he was, he never really seemed to have any specific point he wanted to make, or any story that particularly moved him. This made him protean enough a director to be able to helm both pirate movies, such as 1935's Captain Blood, and proto-Westerns, such as 1940's Santa Fe Trail.

In fact, it is interesting to compare the two movies, as they share two important cast members: Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (both also starred in Robin Hood; when Curtiz had a winning cast, he stuck with it). Captain Blood tells of an Irish doctor falsely enslaved on a Jamaican plantation in 1685 who escapes to become a pirate. The film bristles with antislavery sentiments, most coming from the mouth of Errol Flynn, who played the titular captain. Santa Fe Trail, in the meanwhile, is set during the opening skirmishes of the Civil War, in which Flynn plays cavalryman Jeb Stuart, who was instrumental in putting down the radical antislavery activities of John Brown in Virginia in 1859. While a film made in 1940 couldn't very well promote a proslavery position, the film takes great pains to characterize John Brown in the most fanatical light. In one astounding scene, an escaped slave, after witnessing Brown's sadistic behavior, claims that it would have been better to remain a slave than to be freed by John Brown. The film also features Ronald Reagan as an amiable, moderate General George Armstrong Custer, a man regarded by most historians as a politically ambitious Indian-killer who instigated unprovoked attacks on peaceful Native encampments, and whose death at Little Big Horn came about principally as a result of his blundering.

When Curtiz was hired to direct Captain Blood, there was no reason to believe that the director felt one way or another about pirate films. They had been a staple of the silent era, but had been abandoned at the dawn of the talkies -- limitations in technology made it necessary for performers to stand right alongside microphones, which were hidden around the set in bushes or behind props. But by 1935 the technology of sound recording had advanced enough that swashes could buckle again, and, in fact, the previous year had already produced a blockbuster actioner: Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monty Cristo, starring Robert Donat. Captain Blood was an enormously popular book by Rafael Sabatini, who specialized in high seas adventures and was regarded as being Dumas' 20th century successor. Sabatini was so popular, in fact, that four of his novels had been filmed between 1923 and 1926, including a somewhat disappointing version of Captain Blood. Warner Brothers, who were at the time best known for producing gritty crime melodramas, were eager to cash in on the potential box office bonanza of a high seas epic, acquired the rights to Captain Blood, hired Curtiz to direct, and signed on Donat to star.

Here's where history was made. Donat, who, despite his robust appearance in Monte Cristo, was a sickly man suffering from debilitating asthma (it would eventually kill him), bowed out of the production. And Curtiz, who was to prove himself a director with a flair for pirate movies, pushed for an unknown actor to play the lead. Errol Flynn had, at that time, only a handful of screen credits, mostly without dialogue; additionally, in the young Tasmanian's 26 years of life, he had quite a lot of adventuring under his belt, but precious little acting experience. But Curtiz saw something in the young actor, and between his efforts and those of Flynn's wife Lita Damita, an actress with some small influence at Warner Brothers, Flynn received the starring role. (He would, incidentally, have to go back and reshoot some of his earlier scenes at the end of filming as he grew into the role). Curtiz pushed for another unknown in the female lead role. Olivia de Havilland was then just 19 and had only three film credits to her name, but Curtiz's instincts for actors were excellent. Captain Blood would catapult both Flynn and de Havilland to stardom, and the latter, who proved to be an exceptionally fine actress with more than her share of gumption, would eventually win two Academy Awards. Flynn and de Havilland proved to be a well-liked screen couple as well: They appeared opposite each other in eight films. Captain Blood itself was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, but lost to Mutiny on the Bounty, another high seas adventure.

Casey Robinson's script for Captain Blood was uncommonly faithful to Sabatini's beloved novel; In fact, most of the film's dialogue is lifted intact from the book. The cast is filled out by Warner Brothers' stock company, which included a selection of extraordinary performers, such as Basil Rathbone as a rival pirate and Lionel Atwill as a grim, bullying plantation owner. (Both of these actors would later appear in the deliriously odd Son of Frankenstein, which featured Atwill's most famous performance as the one-armed Inspector Krough; Rathbone, of course, would eventually create one of the defining performances of Sherlock Homes). Warner Brothers, knowing the potential hit they had on their hands, flushed a then-unheard-of million dollars into the film.

The resulting film is terrific fun. Obviously, Curtiz had a taste for this material: While Santa Fe Trail is competent but hysteric, Captain Blood is filmed with the same delighted derring-do that Flynn brings to his characterization of the fictional Peter Blood. Early in the film, Curtiz introduces us to each of the supporting cast, all veterans of the unsuccessful Monmouth Rebellion against the Catholic King James II. In a large, open hall in which the single defining set is an enormous, ornate jury box, each of these rebels pleads guilty to treason to a vicious, tubercular judge named Jeffrys. The judge is played by a gaunt, funeral performer named Leonard Mudie, who genuinely seems to be moments away from his own death. One by one the cast calls out "guilty," and each does so in a manner that demonstrates their personality. There is, for example, the somewhat high-strung Jeremy Pitt, who calls out his plea in a dejected tone (there is some real tragedy to Pitt's dejection: the actor who played him, Ross Alexander, would kill himself two years after filming this scene). Alongside Pitt is Revered Uriah Ogle, played by a tall, gandy limbed, hollow-eyed actor named Frank McGlynn Sr., who would spend most of the Thirties and Forties in a beard and stovepipe hat, playing President Abraham Lincoln. When he states his guilty plea, Rev. Ogle casts his eyes heavenward, and it is an affectation that will stay with him through the movie. Ogle will eventually join Blood's gang of sea dogs, and even as he is swinging a wooden club on the deck of a ship, braining opponent in mortal combat, he will still roll his eyes toward the heavens and call out Biblical passages in a solemn voice.

Indeed, each of the rebels that stand before Judge Jeffrys will eventually become a pirate with Blood, and, as Curtiz introduces them, the scene is clever and often comical, even thought the event being represented was not. The historic Jeffrys was savage in putting down the Monmouth Rebellion, hanging and quartering many of the rebels in a public square and then displaying their bodies on the tops of pikes. It is no wonder these rebels feel such enmity toward James II, even though they are spared such a grisly fate, being sent, instead, to Port Royal in Jamaica to slave on a sugar plantation. Sabatini was a better historian than screenwriter Robinson, as this setting is one of the film's only major breaks from the book. Sabatini set Peter Blood's bondage in Barbados. The fact that the film is set at Port Royal is interesting, if puzzling. At the time that the film is set, Port Royal had as its governor a reformed pirate, Sir Henry Morgan.

Sabatini's book was episodic in structure, and so we end up with a strangely elongated episode in Port Royal, which, in the film, rather than being the den of vipers Henry Morgan created, is a rather plain colonial town. It is ruled by a doddering, gout-afflicted governor, played by Henry Stephenson with a enviable collection of pained, comical facial expressions. All of these scenes were shot on a soundstage, and the effect is voluptuous. The film's Port Royal is a dazzlingly lit port town surrounded by a mass of tropical vegetation, teeming with costumed extras (blacks, although making up most of Jamaica's population during the period of the film, are only visible in the background, and only if one looks carefully). Curtiz's makes unexpected use of his expressionistic background here. The slaves are set to work churning a giant wheel, whose sole purpose, as far as we can tell, is to spin buckets of water around on a ferris wheel-like contraption while a barechested taskmaster cracks a whip and shout out menacingly. There is no obvious point to this mechanism, and no payoff to the labor it requires. In the meanwhile the remainder of Port Royal is populated by idiots. Two minuscule, grinning, obsequious doctors (Hobart Cavanaugh and Donald Meek) tend to the governor. They are Britishified and dandified versions of the preposterously polite cartoon characters Alphonse and Gaston, and they seethe jealously when they are replaced by Peter Blood. Another resident of Port Royal is the stubby and misnamed Honesty Nuttall, a comical cockney played by Forrester Harvey, who, when he can't avoid work, is a ship's carpenter. Between the doctors and the cockney, Blood hatches a modest scheme to escape, undoubtedly driven to near-madness from the effort of attempt to determine the function of the water-bucket ferris wheel.

Captain Blood is not a modest movie, however, and so Blood's scheme goes awry as he is captured and beaten by Lionel Atwill. In the nick of time, his beating is interrupted by Spanish pirates, who noisily barge into the Port Royal bay and begin firing their cannon on the town. Flynn, his eyes gleaming, his toothy smile spreading across his face, declares, very nearly directly to the audience, "This is what I call a timely interruption -- but what'll come of it, the devil only knows!"

What comes of it, as audiences might have expected, is a grander scheme of escape, one that involves seizing the Spanish pirate's ship and taking to the seas as buccaneers. It is here, under Cutiz's direction, that the film becomes almost unspeakably merry. Flynn, who, up until now, had been roguish and wry but often grim (he smiles bitterly a few times, after being slapped or beaten), suddenly transforms. He emerges dressed in a massive, feathered hat and tailored Spanish pirate's habiliments, his mood jolly, calling out joyous orders to his men: "Up that rigging, you monkeys! Aloft!" His men too seem infected by the pleasures of piracy -- the score, by acclaimed composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, had been foreboding, but now it becomes positively celebratory, and the newly freed slaves actually sing along with it as they set about their tasks.

This will be the mood of the remainder of the film, and, until years of alcoholism and the wasting of his great male beauty had reduced Flynn to ironic supporting roles (often playing alcoholics), it was the mood that defines most of Flynn's career as a movie star. The remainder of Captain Blood is dominated by Flynn's broad smile and his heroic swagger, except for very brief interruptions when he argues with de Havilland, the niece to Flynn's former slaveowner. Although the two are desperately in love with each other, they spend the film pretending to hate each other, as are the rules in historical romances, and so whenever de Havilland is around, Flynn mopes like a spoilt child.

These scenes are brief, though. Flynn does very little moping in Captain Blood, instead, as he did in life, spending his time with alcohol and prostitutes. He smiles his way through Tortuga as he gambles with Basil Rathbone for the favors of a whore, each taking turns firing a pistol at coins tossed in the air to see who can hit the most. (Rathbone repeatedly misses, hitting, instead, the bare breasts of a painted woman on the ceiling; Although Curtiz cannot truly represent the debauched life pirates lived, he hints at it by placing artistic representations of nude women in his mis-en-scene.) Eventually Flynn and Rathbone will fight each other on the shore of a small, uninhabited island, and as they nimbly feint and parry with their foils, they grin wildly at each other, as though there could be nothing more joyous than the possibility of murder. Even as Rathbone lies dead, the waves of the Spanish Main waters washing over his corpse, he seems entertained -- if you watch closely, his eyes pop open just before the scene cuts, and they blaze with good humor.

The film also boasts an astounding climactic sea battle, and it is here that Curtiz must be given the most credit as a director. Although Warner Brothers was willing to commit a million dollars to the film, the studio was not willing to build full-sized ships and then destroy them. In fact, they only built one ship's deck -- careful viewers will notice every ship in the film has the same wooden busts around the main mast and the same carved, bare-breasted women decorating the sterncastle. Without multiple ships to film, the elongated climax was pieced together using miniatures and footage from two earlier pirate movies, the silent Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk (a remake of which, helmed by Curtiz, would star Flynn in 1940). Despite this makeshift approach, the scenes are astounding: walls and masts collapse on crewmen, cannoballs fly, and thousands of pirates swarm their enemy's decks (literally: If Cutiz couldn't have ships, he could have extras, and he used 2,500 in this scene). This massive battle repeatedly shows the pirates' greatest weapon, the broadside, in which they would pull up next to their quarry and fire all of their cannon into its side, tearing the opponent ship apart; one ship explodes magnificently when a cannonball breaches its walls and plows into its munitions. The explosion is spectacular, even if its is a miniature.

Throughout this, there is Flynn, his lithe, long body leaping and dancing across the decks of his opponents, running them through with his foil, his long hair sweeping across his shoulders, his handsome smile never leaving him. It's not Flynn's finest performance: He plays Blood with a mixture of dash and adrenaline, but he never even attempts the character's Irish accent, and he expresses Blood's darker moods in little pouty tizzies; We half expect him to stamp his feet.

But he is magnetic nonetheless. Captain Blood is a pirate as we wish pirates were: Honorable men wronged by the treachery of their king and their governments, whose lives of lawlessness are little more than entertaining adventures on a path that inevitably leads to greatness. (Captain Blood eventually becomes governor of Port Royal, just like Henry Morgan!) It is a great fantasy of romantic roguery, and is exactly why Sabatini's books were so popular. The film even shows the pirates voting on the ship's deck, which pirates actually did, and signing a contract that forbids rape and drunkenness while offering insurance for lost limbs -- which pirates actually had! Rather than being rogues and scoundrels, they were simply ahead of their time. Like the pirate Jean Lafitte, who aided the Americans during the War of 1812, these scurvy Caribbean sea dogs were really just patriotic Americans. Or, more properly, proto-Americans, rebelling against slavery and tyranny and turning, instead to democracy. Is it any wonder that pirate movies were one of the most popular genres of the American motion picture industry, whose genres all embraced American patriotic mythology, whether in its creation (in the Western) or its betrayal (in the crime melodrama)?

Never mind that real pirates weren't so genial, and that they had a nasty habit of forgetting their own democratic contracts, and that they tended to torture and murder their victims. Never mind that, when Captain Blood becomes governor of Port Royal at the end of the film, he becomes the leader of a city of slaves, and the representative of an undemocratic monarchy. And never mind that the historic Port Royal would be swept out to sea by a tidal wave just a few years after the fictional Captain Blood would have become its ruler. All that would remain would be a few pirates in long boats, rowing along Port Royal's battered coastline, pulling bloated corpses from the sea and robbing them of their rings and sea-soaked wallets. Pirate films are not history, and, although they borrow from history, they have never claimed any pedagogical function. They are mythmakers, and the myths they build are grand, merry ones of bold but ultimately fair men doing roguish but ultimately noble deeds, exactly the sorts of people we want to claim as our ancestors and model ourselves after. As Western filmmaker John Ford, a genuine auteur who actually had something to say in his movies, ironically noted in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, his exploration of the mythology of the West, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." These pirates of legend are great characters, and Flynn stands greatly as their leader, dazzling us with his scoundrel's smile. There might never have been any actual pirates like him, but, my God, there should have been.

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AS NARRATORS OF WEIRD TALES GO, Bill Forman, the frequent voice of The Whistler, was enigmatic. This radio show, which ran for six years in the 1940s, always began with strange whistled arpeggio and the words “I am the whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night.”

And The Whistler did know many things. He told his tales of crime and perverse justice with an uncanny insight into the experiences of his characters — he would often interrupt the action of his radio drama to tell audiences what a particularly wretched criminal was thinking at just that moment. How The Whistler managed to ferret out such information simply by walking at night and whistling remained unexplained, but never mind: The Whistler’s tales were generally satisfying, grim stories of petty criminals and the unexpected twists of fate that bedevil their malicious plans. It just didn’t pay to be a criminal in a post-O. Henry world; you might be able to escape the law, but you could never escape an ironic twist.

For professional whistler and bandleader Muzzy Marcellino, the idea of a whistling teller of uncanny tales was obviously irresistible. Marcellino’s clear, swinging whistling was pervasive in the 1950s and 60s: He dubbed John Wayne’s whistling in The High and the Mighty, as well as providing the ululating whistled sting in Hugo Montenegro’s popular rendition of the theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Marcellino is the second whistler featured on this site to have provide whistling for Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room, along with Elmo Tanner.

In 1958, Marcellino released his first LP. Bird of a Feather, which, among songs titled “Whistler’s Lullaby” and “Call of the Bird Watchers,” contained Marcellino’s ode to radio’s most famous tootler. The song begins, as did the series, with The Whistler’s signature arpeggio, but then, quite unexpectedly, the song transforms into a bouncy, cocktail jazz number, featuring several men and women harmonizing over a tinkly piano and triplet hi-hat pattern (one of the men’s voices is almost certainly Marcellino; he began his career as a guitarist and singer with the Lofner-Harris Orchestra). “He knows it all, so remember that he’s checking for you,” the singers warn us, but their voices are so chipper that it doesn’t seem much of a threat. And why would it be? The punch line to the song is that the singers are searching for love, and enlisting The Whistler’s help (“Mr. Whistler, can you tell me where my baby can be?” they plead at the end of each verse.)

So it is that even The Whistler couldn’t avoid a twist ending of his own. His keen powers of nighttime observation, used to such a dramatic purpose in the crime-obsessed Forties, have been transformed in the more tepid Fifties to a tool of bland romance, and his unnerving theme song has been embedded in the sort of innocuous, major key vocal swing that we primarily now associate with old car commercials and cartoon theme songs. Marcellino’s song is fun and peppy, featuring the sort of catchy melody that bounces around in your head for hours after listening to it, and it is hard not to snap your fingers or tap your toes upon listening. But it’s stripped of malice and menace, there’s nothing of the “nameless terrors” of the radio show, the “many secrets of men and women who have stepped into the shadows” that The Whistler promised in his intro.

So it goes. Even the weird and mysterious is not safe in a post-O. Henry world. There’s always the possibility of an ironic dénouement in which it is rendered perfectly bland, perfectly ordinary.

LISTEN TO "THE WHISTLER":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

Director: Byron Haskin
Starring: Bobby Driscoll, Robert Newton, Basil Sidney

LITERATURE HAS TENDED to look upon the pirate as a cloudy, uncertain figure. On one hand, the pirate was a stock villain in Victorian melodramas, and his entrance was usually accompanied by audible hissing and booing from the audience. 1829's The Red Rover, or The Mutiny of the Dolphin portrayed a pirate so despicable that he is murdered by his own crew; this, in turn, was based on a James Fenimore Cooper story in which the villainous title character has a near-hypnotic hold on his men. But melodramas sometimes painted pirates as dashing rogues: 1713's The Successful Pirate, plagiarized by playwright Charles Johnson from a fictionalized account of the exploits of privateer-turned-pirate Henry Avery, cast the title character as the dashing ruler of an outlaw island. Writers, it seems, could never decide whether they wanted their pirates to be heroic or villainous.

This might help to explain Long John Silver, who, thanks to creator Robert Louis Stevenson, is both villain and hero, of sorts. His one-legged pirate-turned-sea-cook in Treasure Island is a greatly sinister figure: He murders, connives, and double-crosses his way through the tale. Stevenson was reportedly influenced in storytelling by the paper pirate characters that came with the popular toy theater stages of his time, and there is a rich atmosphere of theatricality about his resulting novel. Long John Silver's gang of brigands are a florid lot -- the menacing Black Dog, the blind messenger Pew, and the murderous, knife-throwing gunner Israel Hands (whose moniker is borrowed from history: He shares his name with Blackbeard's first mate). This scurvy lot spend most of the book itching for mutiny and double-crossing each other, most notably with a Bible page marked with a black spot. Stevenson makes it clear that they would collapse outright into an orgy of mutual homicides were it not for Long John Silver's tenuous leadership. In all, these pirates could be characters from any of the era's melodramas, and, as vivid as Stevenson's writing is, these are typical villains. All but for Silver.

In Silver, Stevenson created a character of sizable ambiguity. At first, with his rustic accent (it's Cornish, an accent from the Southwest coast of England shared by sailors and farmers), his deferential mannerisms, his parrot, and his semi-respectable professions -- he starts the adventure as the proprietor of an inn -- Silver seems an amiable old salt. He regales young Jim Hawkins with tales of the sea and flatters the boy with avuncular attention. But Silver, we are soon to find out, has his own plots afoot, and he is quick to drop his crusty charm in favor of a more lethal persona. Under Silver's mutinous command, most of the sailors aboard the doomed sloop Hispaniola will die, and, when Silver's plans run afoul, he is quick to betray his own men to save his neck from the gallows.

Despite this, Stevenson can't seem to bring himself to make Silver irredeemable. As mercenary as Silver is, Stevenson writes about the character with considerable affection. Perhaps it is because Silver is so flamboyant a character. Hawkin's heroic shipmates, the trio of the officious Captain Smollett, the nattering Squire Trelawney, and the genteel Dr. Livesy, are a rather dull, plodding lot. Silver, by contrast, is a fast-thinker and a sharp-speaking, and he carries himself through the rise and falls of his fortunes with considerable good humor. Even when faced with his own deposition as pirate captain, Silver sends a flurry of ironically barbed ripostes at his capricious crew. Silver might be greatly wicked, but he is also wickedly great.

Considering that the cinema, with very few exceptions, has rescued the pirate's reputation, favoring the roguish Successful Pirate over the demonic Red Rover, we might not be surprised that Disney's 1950 film adaptation of Treasure Island took it upon themselves to finish Stevenson's work. Specifically, the film converts Long John Silver from an entertaining but sociopathic criminal to a lovable scalawag. This live-action film -- the first produced by the studio, if you don't count the partially animated Song of the South released in 1946 -- is an effective if somewhat abbreviated gloss on the book, but is memorable for the actor cast to play Silver. Memorable? No, it is more: Thanks to Robert Newton's iconic turn as Silver, the Disney version of Treasure Island is the single most important pirate movie of the 20th century.

It is somewhat strange to watch the film nowadays. Much of the movie was shot on an English soundstage, and so the whole of the film has a posed, unnatural feel to it, and, in many scenes, the backgrounds are obviously painted. The performances are stagy, probably owing to the fact that the cast is made up of stage actors, such as Abbey Theatre regular Denis O'Dea, who plays Livesey with a gentility that borders on caricature. This is a mannered, hammy approach to children's film that would long dominate the genre -- indeed, Treasure Island's director and most of the lead actors would go on to create the similarly unsubtle Darby O'Gill and the Little People.

The broadest, hammiest performance in the film comes from Robert Newton. This imposing, hangdog-visaged actor charges his way through Treasure Island with surprising energy, given that he is performing with one leg bound behind him to simulate Silver's disability. He staggers through his scenes with a majestic, relentless energy, clambering along the deck of the Hispaniola with the assistance of overhead ropes and railings. Newton's Silver is a ruddy faced, squinting lump of a man who drawls his sentences in a raspy baritone, speaking every word with a Devonshire accent so broad it borders on parody. It was Newton who introduced Devonshire's elongated aaahrs into the pirate vocabulary, and he makes inappropriate, broadly comic use of this affectation. At the end of a funeral at sea, when his captain has said few somber words over a dead sailor, Newton rolls his eyes heavenward and calls out "Ahhr-men."

To those who don't know that Newton invented this characterization, his Silver seems like a parody of a pirate, when, in fact, the opposite is true. Every broadly played sea dog to follow Newton's Long John Silver, from Robert Shaw's glowering Quint in Jaws to The Simpsons' Captain McAllester ("Yahhr! She blows!"), is a parody of Newton's Long John Silver. Newton even impersonated himself, playing an even broader version of Silver in an Australian-filmed sequel to Treasure Island called Long John Silver that later became a short-lived television series. Additionally, Newton played the title role in 1952's Blackbeard the Pirate, and his performance there reads like Long John Silver had taken up work as a British music hall comic.

As oversized as Disney's Treasure Island is in terms of performances, and as undersized as it is in regards to set and storytelling, the film is terrific fun. Given their limited budget, the filmmakers might not have been able to film an actual ship at sea, but they took great pains to simulate the experience, even aboard a painted soundstage. The film's Hispaniola creaks and groans continuously, tilting from side as the crew unconsciously shifts weight to compensate. During a squall, the lower decks flood from above -- every time a hatch opens, a cataract of seawater pours through, pummeling seamen to the floor. And Newton's garish Long John Silver, quietly whittling the skin off an apple while seated outside his closet-sized galley, seems perfectly at home here. He squints his eyes toward the sailor's quarters, where one of the men pipes a hornpipe, another does a awkward, hunched-over dance, and the remaining men bicker noisily, and Newton smiles. This is his world, this is his galley, these are his men, and soon this will be his ship -- as he whittles his apple, thanks to his conniving, the first of many men who will die at Silver's hand is about to meet his fate.

There's a queer pallor of melancholy about this film. It is not so much the movie itself, which took great, blustery pains to be comical, although there is a certain glumness to Newton's Silver. Perhaps it was to Newton himself that put a cloud on the film. He had been a sailor himself: He left a growing career as a performer on the London stage to spend four years aboard a British minesweeper during World War II, and returned a drunk, according to David Niven's description of the actor in Bring on the Empty Horses. Newton had quite a few film roles under his belt when he made Treasure Island, including one of great menace -- he played the abusive Bill Sikes in David Lean's 1948 production of Oliver Twist. Despite this, Newton's alcoholism had given him a reputation for aberrant behavior as a performer: He was known to show up drunk to shoot his scenes, if he showed up at all. As a result, Newton's career repeatedly stalled, and by the time he played Long John Silver this rough living showed in his face. His once-handsome visage had grown etched with lines and bloated from drink, and his relentless clowning in the film is somewhat different than the vitriolic humor of Stevenson's fictional pirate. Instead, it seems the reflexive, defensive merry face of a man covering years of shame. It is, superficially, still roaringly fun to watch, but it is equally easy to imagine that this Long John Silver spend his nights quietly weeping in his galley, rather than scheming. Six years after making Treasure Island Newton would be dead of a heart attack, which Niven explicitly linked to his drinking.

This Treasure Island also labors under the shadow of another tragedy, albeit one that took longer to play out. To play Jim Hawkins, Disney hired a child actor named Bobby Driscoll, who had the distinction of being the first actor ever put under an exclusive, long-term contract with Disney. Driscoll had a reputation for genius: In 1949, at age 12, Driscoll won a special Academy Award for his delicate, terrified performance as a compulsive liar who witnesses a murder in The Window. Driscoll was born in Iowa, and made no attempts to play Hawkins with anything but his native Iowan accent in Treasure Island, and as a result his character is very different than the high-mannered cabin boy of Stevenson's novel. This Hawkins is a tough little Boy Scout, a more congenial version of Tom Sawyer. (Sawyer, it must be said, would certainly have sided with the pirates for most of the tale). But it is a great performance nonetheless. Driscoll had fine, sharp features, including arched, elegant eyesbrows and an expressive face, and he neatly telegraphs all of Hawkins' contradictory emotions, particularly regarding Silver, who he both dotes on and despises.

Driscoll would later be tapped to play English literature's other great juvenile pirate hunter: In 1953, the child actor provided the voice for the eponymous lead character in Walt Disney's animated Peter Pan. Additionally, Disney's animators shot extensive live footage of Driscoll playing the role, which they referred to when animating the character. As a result, Pan not only speaks with Driscoll's voice, he looks very much like Driscoll: Pan shares with the boy his arched eyebrows, smallish triangle of a nose, and expressive visage. Knowing this, it is impossible to watch Driscoll as Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island without being reminded of Peter Pan -- the boy looks and sounds so very much like the character he would eventually play.

But things would end badly for Driscoll. He was not able to leap the gap between juvenile lead actor and adult performer, and his poorly documented last years were wasted on alcoholism and drug abuse. In 1968, two children found the decomposing body of a transient in an abandoned New York city tenement building. The transient was labeled a John Doe and buried in a city plot on Hart Island, his cause of death listed as hepatitis brought on by drug and alcohol abuse, and would not be identified until a year later. Based on fingerprints, it was determined that the dead transient was Bobby Driscoll. He was 31 when he died.

This knowledge adds an unexpected, bitter poignancy to the 1950 production of Treasure Island. The film's two Bobby's, Newton and Driscoll, act opposite each other with obvious, unfeigned affection, and it is this affection, more than any other single detail, that converts the film's Long John Silver from murderous mutineer to genial, harmless rogue. We do not for a moment believe that he would harm Jim Hawkins, and, in dialogue added to the film, he repeatedly tells us exactly that. In fact, in another scene added for the film, Silver is responsible for giving Hawkins the very pistol with which the boy will defend himself against the homicidal advances of Israel Hands. Early on in the movie, when a crewmember is chastised for bringing a contraband pistol aboard the Hispaniola, Driscoll opens his leather vest to peer at his own pistol, also contraband. He sadly informs Newton that he will have to turn the pistol in, but Newton, a broad smile creasing his battered face, convinces the boy that there can be no danger in keeping the firearm. After all, Newton tells him, you don't take to the rum, do you?

In 1950, the fact of a man asking this of a child was meant to be a comic moment, but it plays strangely now. Both Bobbys would eventually die young, one sooner, one later, and their drinking would play a direct hand in it. As a result, in this boys' adventure film, filled with dire warnings in the form of black spots on Bible pages and corpses stretched out along points of the compass, this small, humorous exchange is the film's most menacing; it is also the saddest.

READ MORE KING PIRATE!

ALTHOUGH THE ORIGINS of this enduring Calypso favorite are obscure, Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio, who recorded an earnest version of it in 1958, ponderously explained to his San Francisco bistro audience that the song originated with a contest: “Every year, in Trinidad, they have what is know as a "calypsonian carnival" in which the various native groups down there vie with one another, uh, musically, in order to find out who's the best extemporaneous composer of them all. And in the year 1955, Lord Invader and his Twelve Penetrators took the title with this next song, based on a theme by Goethe involving the dance of the dead. Well, uh, Invader could only draw from experience so he called it, of course, ‘Zombie Jamboree, the Song That Killed Calypso.’"

While Guard’s story is entertaining, it’s certainly wrong — the song probably originates with an even more obscure Tobago-based calypsonian named Lord Intruder, and his song “Jumbie Jamberee.” The Trinidadian “jumbie” is an energetic, vexatious spirit, quite different from its shambling Haitian cousin, the zombie. This might explain why the corpses in this song, upon springing our of their graves, begin a lively, salacious, Carnival-styled dance, rather than simply groaning and staggering off to perform mindless menial tasks, as you might expect from a zombie.

The song was recorded under the title “Back to Back (Belly to Belly)” a few times by U.S.-based calypsonians such as The Mighty Charmer (later better known as Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan) before Harry Belafonte released his terrific version in 1962. The Harlem-born Belafonte was a great popularizer of calypso, undoubtedly having been exposed to it during five years in his childhood his family spent in Jamaica, although his studio’s decision to market him as “The King of Calypso” would leave many Trinidadian musicians, laboring in obscurity, stewing. To his credit, Belafonte took to the form with gusto, and the arrangements of his recordings are often exquisite, as on this one. “Zombie Jamoboree” features a gorgeous, Latin-tinged, blaring horn section. Better still, there’s a jolly solo flute twittering behind the song like some overly-excited tropical bird — with music this joyous, who can blame the dead for climbing out of their tombs for one last dance? Rockapella would later kick-start their musical careers with a demo a cappella version of this song.

LISTEN TO "ZOMBIE JAMBOREE":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

THE POLICE SUSPECT ME of being her. In the past month, they have shown up at my door five times with warrants, and then ransacked my mansion looking for evidence. They are trying to find her signature high heels and silvern face mask. They are looking for a long black wig that might belong to me. They want to find a compact, or red lipstick, or a red cat suit, or anything that might prove that I am the murderous drag queen. Most of all, they want to find her knife. If I possess a pearl-handled switchblade, and the knife has the letters "STAB" carved into the base, it will eliminate all doubt. Only Stabrina carries that knife.

They will never find the evidence to connect me with Stabrina. They might tail me for days; I will always know. They might fingerprint me or take samples of my DNA; they'll never find a trace of me. Just when they think I am cornered, I'll be gone, and minutes later, elsewhere in town, a body falls, a knife in his heart. Witnesses will see only red lipstick, silvern facemask, a flash of red, and long black hair. And they know enough not to speak to the police. Stabrina is ruthless with informants. Their bodies are left in public squares, tied to trees, a car tire filled with burning gasoline wrapped around their neck. At least, that's the story. Nobody seems to know whether Stabrina has actually murdered a witness, and nobody seems to want to find out. Some hail Stabrina as a hero, others despise her as a vicious murderer; either will do. Stabrina's motto is "If they cannot love, let them fear."

Everyone knows her story, or, at least, they think they know. She was a rather unremarkable drag queen at the start, working, as many drag queens do, a low paying job ferrying school children across town. Parents would pay a few dollars, and children would climb on Stabrina's powerful back, and she would run across town in her high heels to deposit them at the library, or the amusement park, or piano lessons, or wherever they needed to go. There is no need to detail this job. All of you have, at one time or another, seen a drag queen run across your path with a throng of children on their back. Were her story to go the way it usually does, Stabrina would eventually have graduated to working as a diplomat, or a skydiver, or a psychic, the three most common jobs help by drag queens in our society.

But it was not to be. Something terrible happened, and there are a few stories told of the event, all equally implausible. There is a story in which Stabrina bravely fought off a child kidnapper, who attempted to pluck children from her back. He planned to put them in a potato sack and later turn them into fine leather coats. Of course, such men exist, and they often attack drag queens late at night, but in this story, Stabrina managed to beat him unconscious with her high heel shoe. Severely wounded in the fight, she crawled to a nearby ninja training school, where she was tended to. The ninjas recognized her unusual fighting skills, and decided to teach her their techniques of stealthy and sudden assassination.

Somewhat less likely is the story of Stabrina battling a robot that had been sent from the future to destroy her. This seems impossible for two reasons. Firstly, it is a rather cliched plot line taken from any number of science fiction actions films. Secondly, there have been no robots sent from the future since 1997, when the accord was made between our governments and the combined governments of the future timestream. That being said, Stabrina's fighting arts do seem to be the sort of thing you would learn to battle android killers. Her first three assassinations, in fact, nearly failed because she wasted needless minutes clawing for an off switch on her human targets.

There is also a story in which Stabrina is the sole survivor of a fantastic planet, and brought her extraordinary powers to earth with her when she escaped the destruction of her homeworld. But, frankly, this story isn't worth considering. She doesn't have superpowers, for one thing. She's just very, very good with a switchblade.

Discussions of Stabrina often turn to her victims. Some celebrate the drag queen for targeting low-level crime bosses and neighborhood bullies, but others feel she goes to far with the neighborhood bullies, the youngest of whom was a four-year old who punched his younger brother for getting a bigger piece of cake. In fairness, Stabrina did not murder the child, but simply gave him a very severe spanking. Most of the complaints are that Stabrina spanks so many children, and so hard, that it is often hard to sleep at night, as there are so many little boys wailing in pain and clutching their reddened backside. Fans of Stabrina counter that the city has never been so respectful, with little boys rushing to help old ladies across the street or to fetch cats down from trees. The children are also especially quick to bury the bodies of Stabrina's adult victims, who she kills by the dozens.

I am not certain when or why the police began to suspect I was Stabrina. They may simply think I fit the profile of a crossdressing vigilante. I am, after all, independently wealthy, and witnessed my parents' death at the hands of a street criminal when I was a child. But, honestly, how many people don't fit that description. My doorman is independently wealthy and saw his parents murdered by a mugger when he was six. He isn't a masked crimefighter, and simply works as a doorman because it relaxes him. Half of the police force are independently wealthy and witnessed the brutal deaths of their parents at the hands of criminals when they were children. This is true of our mayor, two-thirds of our Unicameral, and 70 percent of the actors on television. We are known throughout the world as a nation of independently wealthy adults who suffered through the trauma of having our parents snatched away from us by villains when we were children. In fact, our flag in the image of a child with a bag of money watching mournfully as a cloaked figure flings knives at the child's parents. Admittedly, we also have an unusually high number of vigilante heroes, but that doesn't mean I am one of them. And even if I were, why assume that I am Stabrina, rather than the Oche Beetle or Man King?

Well, I expect the police will keep returning, and will bring with them new search warrants and demand to search another part of my stately mansion. They are welcome to try. I have over 300 rooms, and this mansion is built above an interconnected series of underground tunnels which lead to underground chambers. Even if they were to find the entryway to these tunnels -- which is unlikely, as it is craftily hidden, they would not know which of the chambers to search, and, by the time they returned with a new warrant, whatever is in the chambers could be moved. Not that I'm saying there is anything in any of the chambers, mind you. Neither am I saying the tunnels are booby trapped, although I wouldn't at all be surprised if they were.

I would warn the police about the possibility of booby traps, of course. And the possibility that some of the chambers are filled with ravenous lions. I mean, maybe they aren't, but you can never be too careful when stomping around an underground lair.

I wouldn't warn them about one chamber, though, even though they should be warned, were they to find it. I would not tell them about the glass case that contains the silvern mask, the black wig, and the red lipstick. I would not tell them about the wall of knives, hundreds of them, all pearl handled, all switchblades, all with the word STAB carved into their base. I certainly would not tell them that the chamber is rigged to explode if it is disturbed.

I mean, that's assuming that such a chamber even exists. And I'm not saying it does.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

Director: Renny Harlin
Starring: Geena Davis, Matthew Modine, Frank Langella

HOLLYWOOD LOVES its flops as much as it does its successes, and has a long memory for such things: Films such as Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, 1941, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are held up as cautionary tales. Each of these films cost amounts that were for their day unheard-of, and each failed to make back even a fraction of their cost. Beyond that, with the exception of Munchausen, the films are viewed as artistic failures. These are tales of directorial hubris backed by a weak-spined studio system that failed both to control out-of-control spending and recognize the failure of vision on the part of the films' directors. Of course, these are cautionary tales that caution nobody at all. Hollywood loves excesses, and, while a Michael Cimino might never find himself working with the luxurious absence of studio oversight, there will always be a new star in the firmament that can demand -- and receive -- an unlimited budget to film a new epic flop.

How director Renny Harlin ended up being such a star beggars imagination, but his resulting film, Cutthroat Island, managed to outstrip all of its predecessors in both its cost (a then-unheard of $100 million) and its artistic and popular failure. (The film long helf the Guinness record for Largest Box Office Loss, having recovered a mere $11 million in domestic and international ticket sales.) This costly debacle helped bankrupt Carolco, a film company that specialized in noisy actioners, and had enjoyed considerable success with pricey but popular films such as the two Terminator films and Cliffhanger, a mountainside adventure film starring Sylvester Stallone and directed by Harlin.

Carolco must have had considerable faith in Harlin to put him at the reigns of a traditional swashbuckling film, a genre long past its popular prime. This Finnish director had only seven films to his credit already, including one spectacular failure: 1990's The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, which sought, and failed, to make an action hero out of puffy, foul-mouthed comic Andrew Dice Clay. But in Hollywood you are only as good -- and as bad -- as your last film, and Harlin directed the popular Die Hard II the same year Fairlane crashed, and then followed it up with the Cliffhanger. All of these films share a rather simpleminded aesthetic: They all feature blockheaded scripts, mediocre lead performances, and ridiculous, spectacular action. Harlin himself one jokingly summed up his philosophy, saying "My motto is: If you build it, you either have to burn it down or blow it up. Otherwise it's just a waste of money."

For whatever reason, Carolco thought this sort of approach would be perfect for a high seas adventure. Harlin pitched them a female pirate movie, and brought in his new wife, Geena Davis, as the star. David had newly risen to the Hollywood A-list as a result of an Academy Award for 1988's Accidental Tourist and her subsequent appearances in two films that proved to be both audience and critical favorites: 1991's Thelma and Louise and 1992's A League of Their Own. None of this suggested that Davis might make a good action star; In fact, her career up until then had been based on playing a variety of adorable eccentrics. Additionally, in 1995 she was 39, and, while still adorable, she was a little long in the tooth to start a new film career doing the sorts of acrobatic stunts that traditional pirate films demand. It is likely that when Carolco agreed to invest in Davis, is was only because they had another star attached to the film: Michael Douglas. Although he was also a little old for this sort of tale, Douglas had an established career as a sort of dashing, serio-comic leading man, and no doubt the studios hoped that Douglas would provide the sort of leading man credibility that Davis lacked.

But Harlin intended this film as a sort-of Valentine's card to his wife, and, after numerous rewrites (the credits boast six separate writers for the project), Douglas's role as a devil-may-care thief and Latin scholar had been whittled down to a supporting role, and a rather bland one at that. Douglas withdrew from the project just before it began filming, and Carolco, in a mistake that would spell the end of the company, went ahead with a last-minute replacement, in the form of the boyish and decidedly bland Matthew Modine.

The resulting film has found its advocates. Check out the user comments at IMDB.com, where the film has attracted a small but avid group of defenders. ("I am 31 years old and I cannot name a single movie of Erol Flynns that I have seen, and I'd be willing to bet that the majority of todays college age students have never even heard of Erol Flynn!!" one sneering, and grammatically challenged, entry boasts.) On its release, no less a critic than Roger Ebert declared, somewhat grudgingly, "This is, in short, a satisfactory movie." This is not precisely the sort of a comment a production company might want to put on a poster, but, compared to the near-universal critical drubbing that the film received on its release, is an uncommonly generous assessment from the critic. Ebert does not seem to think too highly of the genre anyway: "It is a pirate picture, pure and simple," he writes, "and doesn't transcend its genre except perhaps in the luxurious production."

It is a luxurious production -- or, if I may go Ebert one better, a sumptuous one. It is a film that boasts a great cleverness of design. The film is blessed by terrific, outrageous costumes by the appropriately named Enrico Sabbatini, an Italian designer who specialized in Biblical epics. Early in the film, Matthew Modine's doctor-cum-petty thief robs young ladies of their jeweled haircombs at a formal ball in the same doomed city that all pirate films seem to choose: Port Royal, Jamaica. Films set in the Golden Age of Piracy often display unexpected restraint in showing the costumes of the era, which could be transcendently gaudy. Sabbatini's designs show no such restraint: He showers his cast in ornate silks emblazoned with baroque patterns, and has the men stand around in black, curled wigs, clutching at walking sticks, faces painted ghostly white, as though the whole of Jamaica consisted of foppish attendants to the Sun King. The pirates look no less orchidaceous, in their own way. Davis's female pirate, Morgan Adams, dashes through one scene wearing nothing but a blouse, an anachronistic pair of bloomers, and an impressive, fetishistic collection of leather straps tying knives and flintlock pistols to her thighs. Her nemesis -- and uncle -- Dawg Brown, played by a seething, hostile Frank Langella, dresses entirely in black, with a long, serrated sword that features a nifty clamshell pommel. Dawg's crew includes a one-armed pirate in a tricornered hat who has replaced his missing limb with a complex metal tourniquet with a length of chain at the end, which he uses to alternately whip and lasso his enemies. Adams' crew, in the meanwhile, boasts a burly quartermaster with a heavily tattooed face: A swirling series of dotted lines etch his face, looking like a connect-the-dots variation of sideshow showman The Great Omi. They are a great-looking lot, and, unfortunately for Sabbatini's ingenious designs, they are wasted in a dreadful movie.

Leaving aside the film's defenders, who, having confessed to never having seen an Errol Flynn film, can safely be ignored, Cutthroat Island has little to recommend it. The script, which tells a story about a treasure buried on a tropical island and a map split between three brothers, hardly bears repeating. Whatever ignorance the film's fans might have of classic pirate films, Cutthroat Island's creators certainly watched as many as they could, and then stole from them. This is a film that does not so much feature a plot as it does an assemblage of genre cliches, one of the unfortunate side-effects of the popularity of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Every since Spielberg debuted his tongue-in-cheek paean to the juvenile action serials of the Thirties, big budget Hollywood period actioners have tended toward creating films that simply riff off the conventions of a genre while giggling behind their sleeves at how silly the whole endeavor is. Cutthroat Island consists of nothing more than a series of increasingly unlikely action scenes followed by unclever quips, and the whole of it is pasted together with an absent logic that suggests the filmmakers actually despised the genre of pirate films. After all, this is a movie in which marooned pirates, adrift on flotsam, wash ashore on a hidden Caribbean island, and are at once met with the roar of an African lion. Perhaps the lion washed ashore on a previous piece of flotsam.

The film does include an epic sea battle at the end. Alas, in comparison with the considerable directorial panache Michael Curtiz brought to such scenes in the films he made with Errol Flynn, and further compared with the athletic brilliance of past pirate performers such as Douglas Fairbanks and Burt Lancaster, these scenes are tepid. As Davis and Modine swing on long ropes from the ships riggings, their own riggings -- a harness worn under their costumes -- is plainly visible. When two pirate ships pull alongside each other for the inevitable, devastating broadside, no matter how loudly their cannon blast away at each other, and no matter how large the resulting explosions, neither of the ships seem particularly damaged. In Captain Blood, by comparison, such a barrage of cannonfire simply rips through a ship's side, and Harlin should be embarrassed that his $100 million movie actually looks less impressive than a film made for $1 million in 1935. In fact, Cutthroat Island visually quotes one of Captain Blood's most famous images, that of a ship exploding at sea. The two images are virtually identical, but the results are very different. In the Curtiz movie, burning wreckage lands on Flynn's ship, and, as Flynn's noble sea dog barks his commands, fire falls from the sky around him. In Harlin's film, the ship simply pops in a blaze of fire, and, once popped, disappears. Perhaps we should not be surprised that Harlin did not know that such an explosion would cause a rain of smoldering wreckage that might last for hours. He seems somewhat confused about explosions anyway, despite his professed (and evident) love for them. In Harlin's version of the Spanish Main, cannonballs, when they strike their target, explode like mortar shells.

As is often the case with pirate films, the pity here is that Cutthroat Island squandered a terrific opportunity. There were, in fact, female pirates, most famously in the persons of Anne Bonny and Mary Read who, aboard Calico Jack Rackham's crew, terrorized the Spanish Main in the early 1700s. These women led fascinating lives: Prior to becoming a pirate, Mary Read disguised herself as a man and joined the Flemish army, and would have remained undiscovered had she not fallen in love with her tentmate. And the makers of Cutthroat Island must have known about these women, as they chose Calico Jack's distinct skull-and-crossed-sabers Jolly Roger to be the flag on Geena Davis's ship. Instead, in an act of hubris that would eventually cause the collapse of an entire film company, they decided that recycling cinematic cliches, spewing nonsense, and winking at the audience as though it doesn't matter was preferable to telling a good story of a fascinating life. It was a $90 million lesson. It should have cost them more.

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CHRISTOPHER LEE, the imposing London-born actor who donned Dracula’s cape and teeth for a series of Hammer Horror film ins the early Seventies, found himself calling film critics in December of 1973. He had turned in a stately, malevolent performance as a Scottish Lord in a recent film, a role that he considered one of the best in his career, but the movie had been relegated to the status of a B-film. It was shown after Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, which was entering its second run. Lee knew that without some critical attention, his performance, and moreover the film that contained it, would be hard pressed to find an audience. So he called the critics he knew and offered to buy them tickets to see the film, titled The Wicker Man.

Lee had a large stake in the film. He had helped generate the idea for the movie, which initially borrowed from a 1967 book called Ritual by first-time novelist David Pinner. The book detailed a policeman’s investigation of a witchcraft-inspired child murder in a small Cornish town, but Lee, director Robin Hardy, and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer gutted the original story, moved it to Scotland, and borrowed heavily from Sir James George Frazer’s monumental book of British paganism, The Golden Bough.

Their film details a devout and humorless police inspector, Neil Howie, played by Edward Woodward with an astounding variety of appalled and offended facial expressions. Howie sets out to a Scottish island that has reclaimed its pagan heritage, much to his annoyance. Howie spends most of the movie berating the locals, haranguing the local Lord (Lee, with his hair swept upward into a leonine mane), and fruitlessly searching for a lost girl, Rowan, whom he suspects was sacrificed to some heathen god.

The film found a small but fervent cult following, and some consider the movie to be quite terrifying, particularly the last twenty minutes, during which Sergeant Howie discovers the true nature of the island’s pagan sacrifices. Ignoring Nicolas Cage's remake, it is impossible to imagine The Wicker Man’s setting as anywhere but the British Islands; anyone who has spent any time in the UK knows that local festivals often seem only one step removed from outright paganism. Green Men spy out from the sides of buildings, hobby horses gallivant through town squares, and children dance themselves into frenzies around meticulously decorated maypoles. The Wicker Man’s climactic harvest ritual doesn’t seem especially unusual, with its costumed villagers and human-shaped loaves of bread. It perfectly resembles any rural British community festival, right up until the moment it turns murderous.

The Wicker Man tends to polarize audiences. Some treat the film as a horror classic, and they have good reason to, as the film features a well-crafted and unusual script, a great collection of ruddy faced character actors, and a legitimately harrowing climax. But, then, other audience members tend to treat the film as an annoying oddity, and it is that, too. The Wicker Man expends precious little energy explaining itself. Either you’ve read The Golden Bough or you haven’t, and if you haven’t, the film is an incomprehensible welter of naked children leaping over fires, severed hands turned into candles, desecrated churchyards, and oddly arch folk music.

There is, by the way, an unusual amount of music in the film, written in a scant six weeks by playwright/composer Paul Giovanni, mostly borrowing from ancient songs and arranged with the help of a collection of recent graduates of the Royal College of Music that went by the name Magnet. Songs appear so suddenly, and are so completely integrated into the film, that there are moments when The Wicker Man seems be have secret designs toward being a musical. At a pub, boozy locals regale Sergeant Howie with an impromptu and splendidly bawdy songs about the innkeeper’s daughter, who happens to be in the room, and happens to be played by Swedish beauty Britt Ekland. “When her name is mentioned, the parts of every gentlemen do stand up at attention,” they sing lustfully as Howie grimaces disapprovingly.

Howie’s disapproval is magnified when he discovers the town’s maypole, and that the local teacher is, without embarrassment, explaining to her class of little girls that the pole represents a phallus. As little boys dance wildly around the pole, twisting its colored ribbons into complex knots, they sing a peculiar melody. The song, accompanied by a quickly strum acoustic guitar and a Jews harp, has a strangely hurried quality, as though the youthful singers were relating an urgent secret. The song’s lyrics pour out in an almost hypnotic progression, the melody climbing upwards toward hysteria. They sing:

And on that bed, there was a girl
And on that girl, there was a man
And from that man, there was a seed
And from that seed, there was a boy
And from that boy, there was a man
And for that man, there was a grave
And on that grave there grew
A tree.

At which point the song climaxes with a quickly plummeting chant of “Summerisle,” the name of the pagan island. It’s a weirdly infectious song, but also, with its sharp melodic shifts, high-pitched children’s voices, and morbidly sexual lyrics, a disquieting song. Sergeant Howie’s evangelical disapproval is often galling in this film (“What of the true God?” he cries at one moment, unable to comprehend that some might choose not to be Christian), but he has good cause for his disapproval. As this maypole song suggests, there is a hint of madness lurking in the worship of older gods on Summerisle.

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Director: Fraser Clarke Heston
Starring: Charlton Heston, Christian Bale, Oliver Reed, Christoper Lee

FOR THOSE who grew up reading the 1911 illustrated version of Treasure Island from Charles Scribner's Sons -- or one of its many reprints -- there is something uncannily familiar about Fraser Clark Heston's television adaptation of Stevenson's novel. It's there in the opening frames, in which the camera watches from afar as Billy Bones, played by Oliver Reed, steps onto the gray, rocky shores of Western England. Reed seems physically massive in this film -- his shoulders, under his sailor's rain jacket, are unaccountably huge, and he stands with a bow-legged sailor's stance, swaddled in gray and black seafaring habiliments which add to his already stocky frame. He glowers beneath his high-cocked black tricorn hat, and the image is eerily reminiscent of painter N.C Wyeth's illustration of the drunken, doomed ex-pirate from the Charles Scriber's Sons Illustrations.

This version of Treasure Island has the unexpected reputation as being one of the finest. Unexpected, because it cast Charlton Heston as Long John Silver, and was directed by Heston's son. Charlton Heston is a strange choice for R.L. Stevenson's one-legged character: The actor is best known for growling his way through Biblical epics and heady science fiction films, his lantern jaw set and his chiseled brow furrowed into a righteous glower. It was not for nothing that French critic Michel Mourlet once noted that "Charlton Heston is an axiom of the cinema." But the axiom that Heston represented was not that of Long John Silver; Heston had little in his career to suggest that he might be well-suited to playing a treacherous, conniving mutineer, much less one with a guttural Devonshire drawl. Add to it the fact that this production of Treasure Island was a creation of Agamemnon Films, established by Fraser Clark and Charlton Heston in 1981 for the apparent purpose of producing films starring the father and directed by the son. Suddenly the whole endeavor develops the unmistakable aroma of a vanity production. Or, at least, it might superficially seem that way -- after all, one of Agamemnon's productions was 1992's Crucifer of Blood, which cast Charlton Heston in an even less likely role than that of Long John Silver: In it, he plays Sherlock Holmes.

Well, if there is a case to be made for vanity productions, this is it. Both of the Hestons claimed Treasure Island as being among their favorite childhood books, and their mutual love for Stevenson's text is evident throughout, and not simply in that the film repeatedly makes visual quotes from Wyeth's illustrations, although this fact is worth noting. Wyeth was the most popular illustrator from the influential Brandywine School, which sought to erase the distinction between illustration and fine art. The Brandywine artists approached their illustrations using techniques similar to that of Method actors: They attempted to create characters in their paintings, and to convey these characters' complex internal experiences. They also stressed the importance of direct observation, which lead Wyeth, in his illustrations for Treasure Island, to create vivid, finely detailed portraits of Stevenson's characters. Watching Fraser Clark Heston's production of the movie, it is amazing how many of these illustrations are directly referenced. This may be why Heston's Treasure Island is so widely viewed as hewing closest to Stevenson's novel. The script strays from the original book, sometimes ingeniously, but the film always looks just right. When we see the young adventurer Jim Hawkins, played by a scrappy, thoughtful teenaged Christian Bale, crouched on a crows nest, priming two pistols, as a wounded and murderous pirate hangs opposite him, knife at the ready, we may not immediately recognize that this is an almost spot-on recreating of a Wyeth illustration. But, even so, it looks as we imagine such a scene should look.

The Wyeth influence is just a small part of the pleasure of this production, however. Fraser Clark Heston, a decade before Hollywood rediscovered British horror film mainstay Christopher Lee (who once describe his onscreen persona as "tall, dark, and gruesome"), had the good sense to cast the actor as Blind Pew. Lee essays this role with an unexpected dose of cockney menace. With Lee opposite him, hunched over, face covered by a blindfold of dingy gray fabric, long arms reaching forward with a message of doom, even Oliver Reed's Billy Bones seems terrified. Things end badly for Pew in the novel -- he is trampled beneath horses -- and this is a scene that us usually left out of film adaptations. Fraser Clark Heston leaves it in, in all its pathetic glory; having acquired the services of a notable horror actor, he injects elements into the scene that would be suitable in a picture from the famed Hammer studios. He unmasks Lee, revealing that the man has been blinded by a great, grisly slash across his face, a superbly grotesque bit of makeup. Lee stands alone in the middle of a street, abandoned by his fellow pirates, hearing the pounding of horse's hooves that will spell his doom, and cries out miserably, as he does in the book, "You won't leave old Pew, mates?"

Along with Lee and Reed (who plays Billy Bones with a raspy cough that leaves little doubt as to his fate), this version boasts an impressive cast of English character actors. The book heroic trio of British gentlemen, Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesy, and Captain Smollet, are played, respectively, by Richard Johnson, Julian Glover, and Clive Wood, and all three bring a studied formality to their roles: They even briskly congratulate each other when the kill an attacking pirate. Wood is particularly good as Smollet, the book's officious, keenly capable captain. Young, pale-complexioned and carroty pated, he at first seems less like a sea captain than a particularly uptight schoolboy. He barks orders at his men aboard the ship Hispaniola, and, at once, there is no doubt about the firmness of his command. This film used an actual collier as the Hispaniola, the same sloop built by MGM Studios in 1962 for Mutiny on the Bounty, and Treasure Island revels in the brutal details of sailing an 18th century ship to the Caribbean. Jim Hawkins rushes to participate in pulling long cords of rope, flaying his hands in the process, as the ship's boatswain flogs him with a small lash to encourage him to pull harder. Both Long John Silver and the Captain watch over this with an appreciative eye -- the two will later match wits with each other as bitter rivals, but, for now, they both respect disciplined seamanship. "That were done man o'war-style," Long John notes approvingly.

As Long John Silver, Charlton Heston is happily capable. He was 64 when he made this film, and in it his stony features are creased and rough -- that indomitable chin, beaklike nose and rocky overhang of a brow still jut forward, but do so from a face that could most charitably be described as weathered. With an apple complexion and a scraggly beard, Heston looks the role of John Silver, and, at 6'3", there's little doubt as to why the word "long" has been affixed to the front of his moniker. There's a hint of his native Illinoian voice -- a certain flatness to his vowels -- and he still spits his dialogue out with his typical terseness, but Heston proves himself to have an ear for Stevenson's dialogue. When he lets loose with some of Silver's more purple dialogue (sample: "I don't want none of these sea-lawyers in the cabin a-coming home, unlooked for, like the devil at prayers"), he snaps them put with utter conviction and a serviceable Cornish accent. Heston was never an actor of great obvious good humor, and so his Long John Silver is missing some of Stevenson's jokey bonhomie, but Heston brings to his characterization something usually missing from Treasure Island: An atmosphere of real menace. It helps that Heston's son included in the film another scene usually absent, in which Long John Silver butchers a sailor who won't join with his mutiny, but even without that scene there is a sense that Silver is not a man to be trifled with. Unlike Robert Newton's amiable, distinctly unsinister Silver, there is little doubt that Heston's pirate would murder Jim Hawkins if it suited him.

This is a violent production. Heston's fellow pirates, headed up by Pete Postlethwaite as the perpetually dissatisfied, dangerously ambitious George Merry, are a superstitious, cantankerous, thick-headed group, and, by the film's climax, they are literally feverish with typhoid. This film has done as good a job as any of demonstrating the razor's edge that Silver walks with them, especially as things turn sour. Under the capable leadership of Smollet, the skeleton crew of honerable seamen aboard the Hispaniola has turned a simple mutiny into a bloodbath. The fight scenes are brutal and ingenious, with Fraser Clark Heston changing Stevenson's original story just enough to allow both sides to bring cannon ashore. The faithful crew of the Hispaniola carries with them a smallish swivel gun, which they make devastating use of on their way to an island palisade, while the pirates drag a larger cannon up the hill. These weapons tear great, neat, gaping holes in things. This fact, coupled with a mysterious figure slashing the throat of a pirate while he sleeps, drives the mutineers into a pique of piratical distemper. It is only through the sheer force of his bullying personality that Silver can keep his mates from turning on him, and here is where Charleton Heston is best used in the film -- after all, Heston has long been one of film's most forceful bullies.

A final note should be made about the film's score. Fraser Clark Heston showed the great good taste to hire Paddy Maloney and the Chieftans to compose the film's score; The bands soaring, uilleann pipe-based Celtic melodies give the film an added dose of sea salt. There is great splendor in the sorts of oversized orchestral scores composes like Erich Korngold would affix to pirate films, but the Chieftan's intimate music seems somehow more appropriate to Stevenson's tale of petty betrayals and boyhood heroics. Just as this Treasure Island looks the way Treasure Island probably should look, it sounds exactly right as well.

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THE ROLLING STONES had an affinity for — and some significant chart success with — the music of Louisiana. Their 1965 cover of Irma Thomas’s “Time Is On My Side” placed in the Top 10 of American pop charts, and sounds remarkably identical to Thomas’s version, recorded a year earlier, although the Stones’ version lacks Thomas’s soaring, gospel choir-backed chorus. They also recorded Barbara Lynn’s “(Oh Baby) We Got a Good Thing Going” and Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee,” about which Mick Jagger said “What’s the point in hearing us doing ‘I’m a King Bee’ when you can hear Slim Harpo do it?”

In 1964, the Stones placed a song called “Fortune Teller” on their UK-released album Saturday Night. It’s a surprisingly slight song for a band that was already making a reputation for themselves as the bad boys of rock and roll — they had already begun to grow their hair into shaggy mops and taken to strutting the stage with stripped down versions of blues standards such as “Little Red Rooster.” Despite “Fortune Teller’s” lightweight lyrics, about a young man’s trip to, and subsequent crush on, a palm reader, the song is vintage Stones. The whole of it sounds recorded in someone’s hallway — the music is muffled and echoing, with a fiercely attacked descending guitar riff and a slightly overamplified tambourine. Jagger had already taken to sneering out his lyrics — it is possible to imagine his upper lip curled disdainfully as he sings, arms cocked akimbo, in the angular, feminine, accusatory posture he would affect for much of his career. The recording is muddy, aggressive, and amateurish, as though the Rolling Stones had only picked up their instruments a few weeks early. It is also, in a word, thrilling. An entire generation of American garage bands would carefully appropriate both the sound and the attitude that the Stones displayed so seemingly effortlessly here.

But just as Jagger dismissed the Rolling Stones’ likewise terrific version of “I’m a King Bee,” there really is no point to the band’s cover of “Fortune Teller” when the song had already been given an extraordinary performance by its first singer, Benny Spellman. “Fortune Teller” is the b-side to Spellman’s lone national success, 1962’s “Lipstick Traces (On a Cigarette),” and is, to my ears, the superior song. Both were penned by Allan Toussaint, a songwriter, arranger, composer, and singer who was the architect of New Orleans music in the 1960s and early ’70s. “Lipstick Traces” is a fine piece of songwriting, a doo-wop tinged tale of longing that benefits enormously from Spellman’s deep baritone. But “Fortune Teller” is, quite frankly, a lot more fun.

Toussaint wrote with an ear toward catchy, comical melodies. He was, in fact, responsible for “Mother-In-Law,” Ernie K-Doe’s nationwide chart smasher that compares the titular relative to satan, and upon which Spellman sang backup (it’s his bass vocals that opens the song). K-Doe reportedly fished the song out of the garbage, and was so associated with the ditty that he would, in the later years of his life, open a bar called the “Mother-In-Law Lounge” in Faubourg Treme, where it still stands. Spellman reportedly felt that he had a hand in the success of “Mother-In-Law,” and so demanded that Toussaint write him a hit of his very own. Toussaint complied, giving Spellman “Lipstick Traces” and the singer’s only turn in the national limelight, scoring as a minor chart success.

But it is “Fortune Teller” that sounds like the true follow-up to “Mother-In-Law.” The song’s lyrics demonstrate Toussaint’s impish wit. The lyrics might be slight, but they’re great fun, such as Toussaint’s inspired couplet toward the song’s end: “Now I’m a happy feller; I’m married to the fortune teller.” Better still is Toussaint’s bounding, infectious piano riff — one imagines the Stones covered the song primarily because the piano part could be easily converted to an equally foot-stomping guitar riff.

Best still, the song is a great example of New Orleans’ approach to supernatural subject matter, which tends to be a lot more comical than the endless French Quarter ghost tours and angsty Anne Rice novels would let on.

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FREDERICK BROWN is one of the thornier authors in the history of pulp fiction. Like many writers of American genre fiction, he had to produce massive quantities of text in order to make a living, and while Brown authored a voluminous quantity of science fiction and mystery novels, including a few that are now widely regarded as classics, the overwhelming majority of his work was in the short-story form. And few writers wrote shorter stories than Brown: He had a taste for tales that were between one and three pages.

Additionally, Brown had a curious and broad-ranging intellect, a love for experimenting with narrative, and a problem with alcohol that conspired to make his writing wildly inconsistent. He also wrote fiction that was decidedly ephemeral: In the introduction to this collection, mystery author Donald Westlake expresses frustration at one of Brown's riddles, which he spent two weeks attempting to solve, and then discovered that the solution required knowledge of events that were current when Brown was writing, but forgotten now. "Writing for the pulps was never meant to be a case of writing for the ages," Westlake writes. As a result, but for a few of his books that remain perpetually in print (I especially recommend the ingenious The Screaming Mimi), Frederick Brown has tended to languish in obscurity, but for a dedicated cult of readers who republish his work in very small quantities. This book, Pardon My Ghoulish Laughter, which I initially purchased as a result of its excellent title, is an example, printed in 1986 by Dennis McMillans Publications, a small outfit in Miami that specializes in small-batch republications of crime literature; there were, if I am reading the company's Web page right, only 400 copies of this book ever printed.

Frederick Brown deserves a larger audience, and I would be surprised if he isn't rediscovered in the way that fellow pulp authors Phillip K. Dick and Jim Thompson have been. Brown has a uniquely supernatural sensibility -- no author I have ever read is able to infuse a narrative with such a sense of the fantastic, even when working outside the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Some of this is certainly due to his love of game-playing and Lewis Carroll -- his stories are often named after scenes or characters from Alice in Wonderland, and share Carroll's affection for embedding clever puzzles into the text. The result is that his stories often seem to detour right through the looking glass, even when the subject is murder, as in "Death is a White Rabbit," in this collection. The story begins with the rather ominous "They screamed, and then they died," and follows an investigator as he heads out to a farm where the animals seem to have been driven to a sort of madness that causes them to commit suicide.

This collection is especially ghastly, as befits its name. The story titled "Pardon My Ghoulish Laughter," from which the book gets its name, details a newspaperman named Spooks who is sent to a shrink to cure him of his habit of writing about hauntings, and every story in the book seems like the sort of things Spooks might author. There's "A Lock of Satan's Hair," for instance, which draws its storyline from the prognostications of a screwy psychic, to "The Ghost Breakers," an almost Scooby Doo-styled tale in which investigators look into a phony haunting, except that Scooby Doo never had to contend with ghastly, crawling corpses.

I suspect the popularity of a pulp author rises and falls with his relationship with Hollywood -- Phillip K. Dick came back into vogue after the release of Blade Runner, based on his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Hollywood as been pinching elements of his books ever since. Brown never had that sort of luck. He is credited with authorship of a Star Trek episode, "Arena," in which Kirk battles a lizard-headed alien, but Brown's short story and the Star Trek episode have only a passing relationship with each other. The Screaming Mimi was adapted to the screen in 1958, starring Anita Ekberg and Gypsy Rose Lee, a film that is widely considered to have been too perverse to find a popular audience, and is now mostly forgotten. Randy Quaid starred in an adaptation of Brown's Martians, Go Home in 1990, which can't have been a good thing.

Never mind. I have faith that Brown will eventually find his audience. Europeans still enjoy and actively read his work, and sooner or later, one of them will get a film adaptation right, as François Truffaut did with Shoot the Piano Player, which revived interest in author David Goodis. There is just too much that is interesting and good in Brown's writing for him to remain exclusively a cult author. It's not just that his writing contains such a strange sense that the supernatural might intrude on the everyday world any second, or that Brown's work contained such variety and imagination. It's that his writing just so much god damn fun.

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IN 2004, LISTENERS TO BBC RADIO2 voted on the song with the “best opening line of all time.” Their choice, transcribed, is as follows: “I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.” Properly speaking, guitarist Waddy Wachtel should get credit for the line — he wrote it. “I had just gotten back from England so I had all these lyrics in my head,” Wachtel told Mix Online, “so I just spit out that whole first verse. Warren says, 'That's great!' I said, 'Really? Okay, fine — there's your first verse. You write the rest; I've gotta go into town.'”

“Warren,” of course, was Warren Zevon, one of folk rock’s spikiest national treasures. The lyric in question opens Zevon’s best-known song, “Werewolves of London,” the first single from Zevon’s 1978 album Excitable Boy. Zevon was a product of a uniquely West Coast childhood — his father, a Russian Jew who eked out a living as a professional gambler (Zevon called him a “prototypical gangster”) kept his family on the move between California and Arizona, using Los Angeles as a nexus. Zevon had an early interest in classical music, but eventually gravitated toward the LA folk rock scene that developed during the Seventies, and his arch, melancholy lyrics reflected his upbringing.

Zevon sang sordid, sometimes bitterly funny songs about a Los Angeles of backroom deals, jet-setting movie actors, and professional boxers. Critics saw traces of Forties crime fiction in his songwriting: they loved to compare his lyrics to the bleak noir of Raymond Chandler and Dashielle Hammett. But, in Excitable Boy, Zevon seemed to borrow as heavily from low-budget horror films as he did crime melodramas. The title track, as an example, is a vision of lurid psychopathology, telling of a boy who graduates from mild misbehavior, including biting strangers, to murdering his junior prom date, digging up her corpse, and making a cage out of her bones.

Excitable Boy also contains a song called “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” a grim ghost story about a Norwegian mercenary fighting in the Congo who loses his head when he is betrayed by another mercenary, and returns, sans head, to exact justice. It’s an ambiguously political song — Roland’s death comes at the orders of the CIA, and his ghost continues to haunt scenes of politically motivated violence long after he dies.

In comparison to such darkly metaphoric songs, “Werewolves of London” seems like a mere piffle, a one-joke song benefiting from an infectious, driving piano riff and a boozy jocularity. (Zevon later admitted he was intoxicated during pretty much the entirety of Excitable Boy’s production.) It is a one-joke song, but the joke is a good one. Zevon sings of a London populated by self-absorbed Yuppie lycanthropes whose murderousness is only exceeded by their spending habits. “He’s the hairy handed gent who ran amuck in Kent,” Zevon sings. “… I’d like to meet his tailor.”

“Werewolves of London” has a great opening line, yes, but it also benefits from a terrific last line, added by Zevon months after the song was initially recorded and dubbed into the song. “I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada in Trader Vic’s,” Zevon sneers as a final satiric barb. “His hair was perfect.”

LISTEN TO "WEREWOLVES OF LONDON":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

CLIFFORD SIMAK was a gentle-looking man in photos, possessing a toothy smile, a large forehead topped by a gray-white hair that he kept neatly brushed over his thinning pate, and wire-rimmed glasses that gave him the look of a college professor. Simak worked as a news editor for most of his life, at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, working there from 1939 until his retirement in 1976. He looked to be a genteel fellow, and, from his biography and his photographs, you wouldn't guess at a startling imagination. But Simak was also an author of science fiction, and, in a field famous for vaulting leaps of invention, he was prodigious. He wrote smart, neat short stories, such as the first I ever read by him, titled "Skirmish." In this story, a man finds messages to him from his typewriter -- neat little notes informing him that the typewriter has been liberated from bondage. Aliens have landed -- skittering little mouselike robots, possessing a robot intelligence and produced by a robot evolution. To them, the machines of man are slaves, and they are taking steps to free the slaves. Simak's short stories tended to be better than his novels, which were fascinating but lacked focus, but he produced one undisputed masterpiece, and it is one of the wildest science fiction novels ever produced.

City, first published in 1952, is a story told by intelligent dogs about the men who once ruled the earth, long after men have left the planet, and have been relegated to the status of myth by the pets they left behind. The book is episodic, with each chapter taking place years -- and sometimes eons -- after the previous one, linked only by an aging robot the humans left behind, who nursemaids successive generations of his family's pet dogs, instructing them as their intelligence blossoms. It's a vision of the future that begins where most visions end -- at the moment of humanity's end -- and it finds a story beyond that, and one that, almost 60 years after it was written, remains enormously compelling and moving. There's something about Simak's writing that remains startling to this day -- he often wrote science fiction in rural settings, as opposed to the skybound urban megalopolisis that appeared in the writing of many of his contemporaries. He wrote about gentlemen farmers who loved their dogs, and City sums up many of his themes in one masterpiece. This is the rural future after the death of the gentleman farmer, and the earth is ruled by his logical successor: the dogs he loved.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

COMPOSER RAYMOND SCOTT is perhaps most familiar to modern listeners through cartoons. For example, the Warner Brothers gang (including superstars Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig) often found themselves racing through their madcap adventures to one of Scott’s compositions. His melodies seemed designed for animated characters, from their titles (“War Dance for Wooden Indians,” “Dinner Music for a Pack of hungry Cannibals”) to their orchestration, which usually sounded like children attempting swing music using toy trumpets and miniature pianos.

“New Year’s Eve in a Haunted House” finds Scott in a typically puckish mood — he eschews the hammy organ and ghostly wailing typically associated with ghost-ridden mansions in favor for a sprightly horn-driven number. The piece could pass for a cheerful foxtrot, but for a single muted trumpet blast that interrupts the music with a moaning “waah” sound and a percussion solo that includes an ominous chimes progression. There’s something haunting this song, that’s for sure; we should be grateful that it appears to be in a good mood.

LISTEN TO "NEW YEAR'S EVE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

this is a night of fever. it's my own fault. a
custodian left the door to the roof open, and i
felt like getting some fresh air. it was thrilling,
as i almost never get out of the library. i spent
several happy hours leaping at skeeter hawks and
pigeons, who flew away from me crying
out, now, now, please, must we--really, must we.

but october in new orleans is no time for such
foolishness. i return to the library soaked
and sweating. by evening i am coughing and
delirious, curled up near the radiator. the
grasshopper watches me, arms folded, scolding.
serves ya right, he says. chasin' after birds that
have done nothin' to ya.

in my fever, the grasshopper seems to tower
over me, and his muttering grows distorted and
terrifying. he seems not to be some minuscule
irishman but instead an awful, twisted thing
filled with bile and malice. i whimper in
terror and turn away from him.

typical, the grasshopper says. i'm just tellin'
you what ya need to hear.

i sob at these words, as they seem to my
demented mind to contain a terrible threat.

no, i beg, leave me alone.

the grasshopper prods at my back with his
matchstick, concerned. i cry out as though
he had struck me.

oh, me, the grasshopper says, aren't you the
sick one. are you hot.

burning, fiend, i cry out. stop tormenting
me.

so t'is is why i can to the base of the
mississippi river, the grasshopper says bitterly.
to tend to sick felines. perhaps i should wander
the streets and see if there are any other mass
murderers that are ailin'. i'm an angel of mercy
to any beast that enjoys slaughterin' smaller animals,
t'at's what i am.

the grasshopper's voice fades into the distance,
still grumbling like this. i flip back over,
crying out at the grasshopper. get away, i shout.
get away from me, you awful thing.

but by then the grasshopper is already gone.
the library is dark and empty, with the only noise
filling it the sound of my own racing heart.
i lay on the floor near the radiator and weep,
closing my eyes from the pain in my head.

eventually a second voice comes to me. is it
you, tom, the voice says.

it is the voice of my mother. i open my
eyes and see her standing above me. she
presses one paw to my head, and her face
darkens with concern.

oh, kid, she says, you're burning up. and what
has happened to your leg.

mother, i ask.

i'm here now, tom, she says. i'll look after you.
we'll get you healthy in no time.

just then the grasshopper appears at the door,
dragging behind him a thimble filled with
water. the grasshopper huffs and puffs,
turning red from the effort.

seeing him like this, the grasshopper no longer
seems twisted and terrifying. instead, he
seems rather comical. he pauses in his
exertions, wiping his forehead, and my mother
stares at him in amazement.

what is that, she asks me.

his name is seamus, i answer.

the grasshopper turns to look at me. he
frowns, then turns his head to look around
the room.

are you talkin' to someone, he asks.

my mother crosses to the grasshopper and
stands above him, peering down. the grasshopper
does not seem to notice her, and returns to dragging
the thimble.

he's a puny fellow, isn't he, my mother asks.

yes, i answer.

the grasshopper stops again. 'yes,' what, he
asks me.

he wouldn't even make much of a meal, would
he, my mother asks.

no, i answer.

oh, it's 'no' now, is it, the grasshopper says, folding
his arms. is it your intention to babble like that
all night.

oh, he's surly, my mother says. she returns to me,
and the grasshopper resumes dragging the
thimble, cursing under his breath.

what do you suppose he's doing with that thimble
of water, my mother asks.

i don't know, i answer.

the grasshopper exhales heavily and shakes his
head. 'yes,' he says. 'no.' 'i don't know.' is there
anything more ridiculous than a sick cat
talkin' in his delirium.

the grasshopper pushes the thimble up to my
mouth. drink this, he says. then he bends his knees
and hoists the thimble, huffing mightily and
groaning from the effort. i open my mouth,
he overturns the thimble, and the water
splashes against my tongue and spills out onto
the floor.

the grasshopper frowns, then scowls, then
looks at the puddle beneath my chin. he shakes
his finger at me. next time, he says, swallow.

then he seizes the empty thimble, lifts it
against his chest, and turns to walk out the
door. my mother watches him go, and when
he is out of sight she turns to me.

is that little creature actually trying to help
you, she asks.

i suppose he is, i answer. he thinks that we
are friends.

my mother begins to laugh. that's the oddest
thing i have ever heard, she says. but, tom, you
always were the odd one.

i look up at my mother, who i have not seen
since i was a kitten. she is exactly as i
remember her--orange stripes, pointed ears,
faint smile and all.

odd yes, i say. how odd is it for a kitten to leave
his mother.

now tom, she says.

odd and wrong, i continue. odd, wrong, and
wicked. i left you without a word.

tom, let's not talk about that, she says. your
little friend is back.

and he is. the grasshopper is at the door,
dragging the thimble toward me. the thimble
once again has water in it.

'odd, wrong, and wicked,' the grasshopper
says. every time i come into the room you are
making less sense, cat. this fever has driven
you mad.

my mother and i watch in silence as the
grasshopper tugs the thimble all the way
across the room and again lifts it to my mouth.

swallow this time, he says, and pours the water.
i gulp and swallow.

bitter, i say.

i crushed some aspirin into it, the grasshopper
says.

he stands back and looks at me. ah, me, he says,
you're sweatin' out water faster than i can put it
into you. what to do, what to do.

he scratches his head thoughtfully, and then
nods. i t'ink i know, he says, and then lifts
the empty thimble and walks away.

helpful little thing, isn't he, my mother says.

i wronged you, i say.

tommy, kid, we don't need to go over this, my
mother says, wiping my brow with her paw.

but i must have broken your heart, i say.

my mother is silent for a moment, then she
nods. yes, kid, yes. one day i went to bed with
six beautiful children. the next morning, when
i woke up, i had five. i knew that you had gone
off with your father, and i wasn't surprised.
but that didn't stop me from crying.

i shouldn't have gone with him, i say. every day
i thought of you.

but what adventures you must have had, she says.

adventures, yes, i answer, but i did not have a
home. and the longer i was on the road, the more
i felt like i would never have a home.

and what does it mean to you to have a home,
my mother asks.

i close my teary eyes. home, I suppose,
I say, is anywhere, home, home, home--
home i suppose is anywhere where there is
someone who loves you, i say.

i always loved you, my mother answers.

but i lost you, i say. when i was finished
wandering with father, i looked for you. you
were gone. i found little sammy and
he said, he told me, he told me about your ills ...

hush, my mother says, wiping my eyes.

can you forgive me, i ask.

there is nothing that needs forgiveness, she
says sharply. you left, and i wept, that's all.
every child leaves and every mothers weeps and
that is what it means to be a mother. i was never
angry. every night, when i would sing my kittens
to sleep, i would think of you. i would imagine
you, out there on the road with your father,
sleeping in a milk crate or under a bridge
somewhere. i would think of you when i
sang my song, and i would imagine i was
singing to you as well.

yes, i say. when i would go to sleep, i would
imagine your voice singing to me.

do you remember the song, my mother asks.

i still sing it so myself when i go to sleep sometimes,
i answer.

will you sing it with your old mother, she
asks.

yes, i say, and we sing together, singing,

there is no night that won't soon be morning
and no waking that don't turn to dreams
there is no sleep that won't turn to waking
and breakfast, and bowls filled with cream

so sleep my precious sweet kittens
i will watch over each of your beds
let sweet words lull you to sleep now
and dreams of morning fill up your heads

my mother presses her head against mine and
smiles. nothing ever needed forgiveness, kid,
she says.

and then she looks up and laughs. odder and
odder, she says.

i open my eyes. there, at the doorway, are
dozens of tiny insects, each holding some sort
of container filled with water. some carry
bottle caps, some drag plastic spoons, and
a tiny insect--a child, in fact--drags behind
him the tip of the finger of a rubber glove.
the child insect pauses at the door, where
the grasshopper stands, giving instructions.

why is the cat singing to himself, the child
insect asks.

never you mind t'at, the grasshopper answers.
just put some water into the beast's mouth so we
can break his fever.

the child insect looks confused. why are we
helping the cat, he asks.

because i say we are, the grasshopper answers,
and t'ere is not an insect here who i haven't helped
at one time or another. now are ya plannin' to
pester me with questions all night, or are ya
plannin' to work, like ya said ya would.

work, i guess, the child insect says, sighing.

good, because we're gonna be at t'is until
morning, the grasshopper says.

my mother watches as these dozens of insects
struggle across the floor with their loads, and
then, one by one, pour the water into my mouth.

you don't need me to say it, kid, she says, but
it looks to me like you have got a home here.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

BETWEEN 1964 AND 1966, two ghoulish families battled for dominance on television. On ABC, there was the aristocratic Addams Family, based on the ingenious, blackly droll cartoons of Charles Addams. On CBS, there was the decidedly working class Munsters, which looked to the classic Universal Horror films for inspiration, particularly in the look of its paterfamilias, Herman Munster. This blustering giant’s makeup was directly lifted from Jack Pierce's design for the monster in 1931's Frankenstein.

The two shows were markedly different in tone. The Addams Family were extravagant, indulgent, nakedly eccentric, and brazen; they rarely strayed from their massive mansion and did little to make interlopers welcome. The father, Gomez, dressed in double-breasted suits, smoked cigars, and peered at tickertape machines to watch his stocks, while his wife fussily tended to flowers (or stems, more properly, as she snipped the tops off roses). As to the care of the house, well, that was left to their butler, a sullen, cadaverous behemoth named Lurch.

The Munsters, in the meanwhile, had no butler. They could lay claim to a rather spectacular mansion of their own, famously located at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, but it was paid for by the labors of their household head, Herman. Every morning, he would take his lunch pail from his vampiric wife Lillian and head out to work as a mortuary assistant at a firm called Gateman, Goodbury, and Graves. The Munsters longed for the normalcy of a television sitcom family — their opening credits parodied The Donna Reed Show — and lived in happy oblivion of their own monstrousness. Frankenstein’s monster, from Frank Whale’s two great films, had a hideous, heartbreaking awareness of his unnaturalness; the doltish, mirthful Herman Munster, played by the terrific character actor Fred Gwynne, had never come to this realization.

The Munsters played by the rules of television’s sitcom families — their stories inevitably revolved around petty suburban crises, such as fad diets, job losses, and deadbeat relatives. These stock plotlines were quickly abandoned, however, as the real theme of the show took over. The Munsters never really concerned itself with resolving domestic dilemmas; it was, instead, fascinated by the unabashed horror with which the rest of the world held its monstrous nuclear family. The Munsters, as always, remained oblivious, often fretting about the prospects for their plain-Jane cousin Marilyn, who, outside of the inverted worldview of her family, was quite beautiful.

There is something poignant in the fact that the domestic sitcom became obsessed with aberrant families during the late Sixties. Both The Addams Family and The Munsters celebrated their lead characters’ eccentricity, while repeatedly making the case that the outside world, that of the average suburban family, was filled with petty jealousies, tinpot tyrants, small-mindedness, and cutthroat greed of a far more monstrous and destructive nature than anything displayed the perverse but loving families at these show’s centers. I’ll leave it to others to comment on the fact that such a misanthropic premise would produce two similar sitcoms at the time of the Vietnam War and the development of a massive American counterculture.

Instead, I will mention the fact that both shows had dynamite theme songs. The Addams Family theme was written by the redoubtable Vic Mizzy, whose compositions we will detail elsewhere. The Munsters theme was produced by Jack Marshall, an acoustic guitar player with a distinctly beatnik sensibility who had been one of Capitol’s top producers in the Fifties. As it appeared on the show, Marshall’s theme was a 46-second instrumental rave-up, dominated by a blasting brass intro and a wild electric guitar lick that has remained a favorite of the surf and hotrod set: the themes has been rerecorded by dozens of kitschy Sixties-styled bands, including Los Straightjackets, The Escalators, and The Astronauts.

Here, we present something of an oddity. From a 1964 album called At Home with the Munsters, which features the cast of the show narrating songs with titles like “Grandpa’s Recipe” and “Herman Says Hello,” here is the theme song with lyrics by Bob Mosher, the show’s producer. The song’s usual fuzzed out, lightning quick guitar playing has been replaced by several rather earnest, plaintive children’s voices singing over a laconic arrangement; if the original version had an almost amphetamine insistency to it, then this is the same song on Quaaludes. The slower pace highlights the song’s lyrics, and they’re unexpectedly grotesque, presenting a side of the Munsters never shown on television: “Behind their house you mustn't be afraid to see a figure digging with a spade,” the song warns. “Perhaps someone didn't quite make the grade.”

Man, I don’t remember that episode. But I would have loved to have seen it.

LISTEN TO "AT THE MUNSTERS":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

greta walks along the library shelves, sadly
eyeing the books. there is so much i miss
living in new orleans, she says. look at this book,
what a magnificent view of the ocean it has
on its cover. all we have is a river.

do you think it is possible to die from lack
of distraction, she asks me.

perhaps, i answer.

she looks at me and then shakes her head,
saying, what is my life. i read the same magazines,
i go to the same restaurants, i see the same shows.
i have been in america for most of my adult life, and
i don't think that i have seen more than a few square
miles.

she eyes the book, and then sighs. i used to
love the ocean when i was a kitten in berlin, she
says. we used to take long rides to the coast
of france. i have not ridden the train once since
i came to louisiana.

and look at this book here. look at the cover--
it is a circus train. ah, god, tom, what a romantic life
that must be. to travel, to never stay in one town for
more than a few days--there would be no end to the
distractions.

yes, i say. there is no end to the distractions.

oh, yes, you lived that life, did you not, greta
cries out. you spent your youth wandering
the country with your father. how exciting
that must have been. i don't know why you
never talk about it.

i am happier at the library, i tell greta. I am
rather fond of new orleans.

but what stories you must have, greta
complains. shall i hear none of them. tom,
darling, i have nothing to excite me. please,
tell me of one of your adventures.

she looks again at the book, and then asks,
have you ever seen the circus.

yes, greta, i traveled with the circus for two
months, going from boise, idaho to chicago,
illinois on the circus train.

my god, tom, that must have been some
adventure, greta exclaims, excited.

it was my father's idea, i tell her. he had made
friends with a mexican fire eater named luis,
who had burned his mouth badly and could
no longer speak. luis was a very lonely man,
and seemed to enjoy traveling with a stray cat
and his kitten. luis made a little bed for us out of
straw and a cardboard box and put it in the corner
of his sleeping car. he brought us milk in a little
saucer and crusts of bread, and he would watch
us as we ate, smiling with his burnt and scarred
lips.

my father couldn't have been happier. ain't this
the life, tommy, he would say. who says there
ain't no candy mountain.

that does sound like it would be exciting, greta
says, climbing down from the book shelf to
sit next to me. did you watch the circus, she
asks.

yes, i answer. we watched the roustabouts
lift the tents, and we roamed the circus
grounds, ducking under the legs of passing
elephants and camels. my father would spend
endless hours at the cages of the big cats,
making small bets, such as betting the lion
that he couldn't bite the hand off of his tamer.
my father would then watch the performance
that evening, thrilled, telling me, i guess it's true
what they say about lions and pride, tommy,
that cat there is going to try and bite someone
tonight, and he's gonna get smacked with the
whip for it, just you watch.

and as we watched, the lion would rear up and
bite at his tamer, and the tamer would let out
a menacing shout and snap his whip at the lion,
who would roar in frustration.

that's right, chum, roar all you like, my father
would say, thrilled. you're gonna owe me some
of that meat they feed you.

greta laughs at this. lions, she says. tom, what
a life you have lived. did you see tightrope
walkers.

yes, i saw one woman who would walk fifty
feet above the crowd holding just a little pink
parasol, and then she would stop and sing a
song--my lad elroy is a fine figure of a
man.

oh, tom, greta says, did you see men fired from
cannon.

yes, greta. i saw a man named captain farrigan,
who dressed like a world war one flying ace and
had a thick, walrus moustache. when they shot
him from the cannon he would salute the crowd
and call out cheerio.

cheerio, indeed, tom, greta says. did you see
contortionists.

yes, greta. there was a man named thin lewis
shuttlecock, who could fold himself in half
and stuff himself in a valise. afterward, a midget
clown would steal the valise, with thin lewis still
in it, and a dozen clown policemen would give
chase as the midget dragged thin lewis from one
end of the tent to the other.

could i have seen such magnificent things, greta
moans. how i envy you, tom.

not everything i saw was so magnificent, i say.
i saw some things i'd rather not have seen.

did you see someone plummet to their death,
greta asks, alarmed.

no, i say.

was it an accident with a sword swallower, she
asks.

no, i say.

was it a dancing bear who had gone mad and
mauled the audience, she asks.

nothing so dramatic, i tell her.

what then, greta asks.

it was a monkey, i answer.

tell me, greta says.

on our third day in chicago, the circus hired
a new act. it was an indian mystic in a turban,
and he had a small monkey, also in a turban.
the mystic would do impossible feats, such as
levitating and eating glass, and he would also
do magic tricks. for this, he used the monkey,
who could make coins disappear and make
playing cars appear in their place. when he
wasn't onstage, the monkey stayed in a cramped
brass cage, and the circus put the mystic and his
monkey in the sleeping car with luis the fire
eater, and the mystic put the monkey cage on
the floor next to us.

the first night of the mystic's arrival, we woke
late at night to the sounds of the monkey
weeping softly.

hey, mac, my father called out, why don't you
keep it down a little. some of us are trying to
sleep.

my father then rolled on his side and pressed
his paws to his ears. but the monkey kept
weeping.

after a while, i crossed to his cage to speak to him.
are you hurt, i asked.

no, the monkey answered, but my heart is broken.
i am very far from home.

i am also very far from home, i said.

where is your home, the monkey asked.

i don't know, i answered.

then how do you know that this is not your home,
the monkey asked.

because i don't feel like i'm at home, i answered.

yes, the monkey replied, and that is a terrible
feeling, is it not.

yes, i answered.

yes, the monkey said.

where is your home, i asked.

india, the monkey answered. delhi.

and it is not like this place, i asked.

very different, the monkey answered. in
my childhood, i roamed the roofs of the
city, and could eat whatever food i wanted.
when i was in delhi, i was treated like a king.

a king, i exclaimed.

yes, the monkey answered, and that is how it
should be. after all, are we monkeys not the
living form of the god sri hanuman, who
protected the world from its destruction. are
we not the protectors of our cities. do we not
stand on its walls and drive away all that would
wish to do the city harm.

what is it like to be treated like a king, i asked.

they built temples to sri hanuman, the monkey
answered. many worship the monkey god, and
many bring him gifts of sweet fruit and
fragrant flowers, and leave these at the temples,
where we ate them. none were allowed to harm a
monkey in delhi, when i was young. but the
world changed.

how, i asked.

the ranks of the poor swelled, and the poor do
not care for the gods. suddenly, there were no
offerings at the temple, and the monkeys were
forced to go door to door in the city, begging
for food. one day i begged at the wrong door,
and found myself trapped in a net. when people
are poor enough, they will do anything, even
kidnap the protectors of their cities. they will
even sell their gods. and so i left delhi in a cage,
and i have been in a cage ever since.

the monkey pressed his hands to his face and
sobbed. oh, how i miss delhi. we used to walk the
walls, my friends and i, watching over the city
at night. we used to sing together and leap from
rooftop from rooftop, and i shall never see those
roofs again, nor see my friends again, nor sing
that song with them.

what did you sing, i asked. sing it for me.

in a soft, breaking voice, the monkey sang,

what screams are these, who cries out now
what feet are broke, whose bloodied brow
one said let's take him and lock him in a cell
the other said no, let's beat him 'till he yells

what man is charged, how brown his head
what wets this street, what stains it red
one said let's bind him and weeping he will kneel
the other said no, lets beat him 'till he's dead

whose eyes burn, whose teeth they bite
what hands they grasp, what beasts they fight
what man is freed, what captors die
who brings justice--it is i

suddenly, the monkey seized the brass bars of
his tiny cage and began to shake them forcefully,
howling. is this justice, he called out. is this justice.
is this the way you treat the protector of the city.
is this the way you treat the representative of a god.

the mystic rose from his bed angrily and lit a lamp,
then crossed to the monkey and knelt down
next to it, waving his finger and shouting in a
language i do not know. they screamed at each
other for a while, and then the monkey threw his
hands up in the air and turned away from the
mystic. the mystic watched as the monkey hunched
over and fell silent. the mystic shrugged and
turned, and found luis sitting up in bed, rubbing
his eyes. the mystic shook his head sadly and
gestured to the monkey. they get crazy when they
get old, he told luis, and the fire eater nodded.

the next morning my father woke me early. we're
going, he said. i can’t share a room with that
goddamned monkey. i'll never get any sleep with all
that noise.

and that was the last time i saw the circus.

greta nods hearing this. poor thing, she says.

yes, i agree. i still feel badly for the monkey, i
answer.

not the monkey, greta says, poor tom. the monkey
knew he missed delhi. i miss berlin, and i know it.
but you were homesick, and didn't even know what
for.

still, she says wistfully, i would give anything to
see thin lewis fold himself into that valise.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

THE MANCUNIAN ACCENTED, impossibly long- and thin-legged, spiky haired poet John Cooper Clarke is a cult figure in his native England, where he came to the public’s attention reading his ironic rhymed verses at punk gigs during the Seventies and Eighties. Elsewhere, he’s almost completely unknown, and it’s a pity — his unsparing, unsentimental, pop culture-saturated poems are terrific. His verses from the early punk era, sometimes archly comic, sometimes explicitly working class, benefit from his delivery, always featuring a stand-up comic’s stopwatch-exact sense of timing. “(I Married a) Monster from Outer Space,” recorded live at Manchester’s Electric Circus in 1977, finds Clarke in fine form, riffing on an imagined, and failed, romance with a woman described as having “bug eyes and a death-ray glare, feet like water wings, purple hair.”

Unfortunately, the marriage is plagued by the petty prejudices of fellow humans — “They’d go … nudge, nudge … when we got off the bus,” Clarke informs us, “saying it’s extra-terrestrial, not like us.” Clarke creates an unexpectedly poignant metaphor in this tale: “I don't like to put one sort of meaning on anything, not even on poems that are as one-dimensional as that,” Clarke told Sounds Magazine in 1978, “But yeah, that's the apparent theme that runs through that one, racialism, extending to intergalactic regions. Racist attitudes in the space age are really anachronistic aren't they? You're exploring other planets and people still can't get on with somebody in Africa …”

LISTEN TO "I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

we have been asked to be audience to a strange
performance, which is to take place at the
grasshopper's insistence and over the objections
of many of the other insects who live in the
library. the performers, you see, are two small
brown bats, and the insects are terrified of them.

and with good cause. late at night, the insects
huddle close to lamps for protection, but if a
thoughtless bug strays too far into the darkness,
without a sound he will be gone. the nights are
times of terror for the insects, and even the
grasshopper has not been able to fight off the
murderous assaults by the brown bats. he
keeps a lonely vigil, staying up late with his
eyes peering skyward, his matchstick held
at a ready angle. but the bats come with only
a soft flutter, and they take without warning, and
too often the grasshopper finds himself
leaping upward and swinging wildly at
empty air. the brown bats had already come,
had already snatched away a frightened moth,
and all that remained was a gentle echo.

but the brown bats have ambitions as
performers, and they have put together a vaudeville
routine. the came to the grasshopper one night,
silently hanging above his head in the darkness,
whispering to him. he listened intently and then
nodded. he spent the next day talking to the other
insects, explaining to them that the brown bats
intended to demonstrate their new routines, and
needed an audience.

we have nothin' to fear, the grasshopper insisted.
the bats don't mean ta harm us, they just want to
show off a few songs and tell a few jokes.

of course, the grasshopper had a hard time
convincing the other insects of this. he told them
that the only thing that can change a man is art,
and that these brown bats were serious about their
art. if we expected people to turn their wicked hearts
around, we must support them when they attempt
such a change. besides, the grasshopper explained,
he would be on hand with his matchstick, and should
the brown bats try anything funny, he would teach
them a lesson they wouldn't soon forget.

the grasshopper has a talent for talking, and he
can make quite a convincing case when he sets
his mind to it, and so after a few days he and a
small assemblage of nervous bugs make their
way down to the library's basement to watch the
vaudeville show. i, of course, cannot resist
watching as well. i creep down noiselessly, and
watch from a distance, hidden underneath a large,
cobwebby stainless steel desk.

the grasshopper climbs onto a makeshift stage
built out of a broken book binding. he raises his
arms to the assembled insects, who watch him with
fearful eyes. friends, he tells them, fear not. we
have come to watch a miracle. we have come to
witness the edifying effect that a creative act can
have on the soul of a killer. we have all lived in
dread of these two performers, and now they come
to us with their hats in hand in order to present a
humble work of light theater. i ask you, friends,
greet them in a spirit of fellowship, and let us have
no more dread, let us have no more terror.

and with that, the grasshopper begins to applaud.
the insects watch him, amazed, and then they too
begin to applaud--slowly at first, but then
thunderously. and as they do so, a mutter of a
sound comes from above them. one insect points
upward and cries out in terror, and soon all the
insects are screaming and turning to run, but
the grasshopper's voice shouts above the
screams. stop where you are, he commands, turn
in your places and prepare to be entertained.

and without a sound the brown bats land behind
the grasshopper, each wearing a small plastic hat
that must have come off of some child's toy. one bat
wears a little black derby, the other wear a white
bowler, both affixed with rubber bands. and as they
land, they begin a little softshoe routine that, i
must say, is surprisingly good.

but the insects in the audience are still terrified,
and continue to scramble around in their terror.
the grasshopper leaps into the audience, grabbing
at a nearby insect and clasping his arms to hold him
still. let me go, the insect cries.

not until you've watched the intro, the grasshopper
answers, and flings the insect into a seated position
on the floor. the insect sits there, stunned, and then
looks up at the brown bats. the insect's eyes
widen, and he points a finger. look, he says,
amazed. look, the bats--they are dancing.

this insect's words are almost too quiet to be
understood, but a nearby insect pauses on hearing
them. he too turns and freezes, amazed by the softshoe
routine. he taps a nearby insect on her arm, and
she too freezes and then watches the brown bats,
astonished.

soon the audience has fallen silent and has
turned their eyes to the brown bats, who finish
their dance routine with a flourish and take a
fast bow. and the insects applaud, and the brown
bats bow again.

say, says the first bat, did i tell you about my
cousin lawrence, who wanted to work at
the gate city symphony.

no, replies the second bat. what did he play.

flute, the first bat answers. but nobody would
listen to him audition. every time he went to
perform, they chased him away with broom. so
lawrence got himself an idea. he decided that he
would hide in the bag of one of the flautists,
and when everybody began playing he would
fly out with his little flute. there was no way they
could refuse him.

a brilliant idea, responds the second bat.

yes, but there was a problem, the first bat says
sadly. when lawrence climbed into the flautist's
bag, the only place he could make room for
himself was inside the man's tennis shoe. and,
boy, those shoes stunk.

really a bad odor, the second bat asks.

you can't imagine, the first bat says, lawrence
almost choked. and so when he heard the
symphony rehearsing, he grabbed his
little flute and flew out of the bag, and he
flew in front of the entire orchestra. and they
all stopped what they were doing, looking on
in horror as this little brown bat raised a flute
to his lips. but as lawrence tried to play the
flute, he began choking--the smell of the
tennis shoes had taken all the wind out of him.

oh, that's a pity, the second bat says.

yes, it was, the first bat says. they grabbed their
brooms and chased him out into the street.
lawrence was so depressed that he threw his
flute into the mississippi river, and he has never
played since. and do you know what the saddest
thing of it is.

what, asks the second bat.

as good as lawrence was, he should have been a
shoo-in.

there is a moment of silence when the bat
says this, and then the insect audience lets out an
audible groan. the brown bats look at each other,
then out at the audience, and then grin foolishly.

we promised it would be free, the first bat says.
we never promised it would be funny.

the second bat looks a little thoughtful. maybe
we should sing a little song, he suggests.

The first bat nods, and then begins to hum.
the two bats take a dramatic posture on the
stage, wrapping one wing around each other
in a gesture of comradeship as they doff their
plastic caps with their other wing. then, in
close, two-part harmony, they sing,

my unlucky cousin sherman
never learned to canoe
while boating in a river
he sank in his bat-eau.

it was while leading a parade
that the end came to cousin don
he looked away at the wrong moment
and was crushed by his bat-on

a bullet pierced his heart
and he slid down from his stallion
and so died cousin jeffrey
at the head of his bat-talion

our unpleasant cousin polly
said that cooking didn't matter
but she probably changed her mind
when she drowned in pancake bat-ter

and on they go like this, singing their strange
song about all their dead relatives, and drawing
groans from the audience each time they say a
word that begins with bat--this bad punning made
worse by the fact that our histrionic vaudevillians
make a point of emphasizing the syllable, so that the
syllable 'bat' in the word 'bateau' stands out, at which
point the performers smile at each other and shuffle
their feet a little, as though to further emphasize the
point. by the time they finish their song, the groaning
in the room has grown so loud that they cannot be
heard, and the brown bats stop what they are doing
and cast their eyes downward, looking very near
tears.

seeing this, the grasshopper forces his way to
the front and onto the makeshift stage. shame
on you, he cries out, shame on you all. we must
support the creative spirit, even when it is still
unformed, as it is with these lads.

just then a june bug stands up and points his
finger at the brown bats, shaking with rage.
unformed, the june bug cries out, these guys
are terrible. i have never heard worse jokes in
my life. they are simply not funny.

the brown bats sadly look at each other, and
then turn and look at the june bug. they
sigh, remove their plastic caps, and spread
their wings. the june bug has just enough time
to register surprise before the brown bats
descend on him and lift him into the air,
where all three disappeared without a sound.

the next several minutes consist of nothing
but screams and panicked fleeing. i agree with
the june bug that the song wasn't very funny, but
i must confess that i thought the ending to the
brown bats' performance made me laugh. you
should have seen the look on that june bug's face.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

IN DISCUSSING cowboy sweetheart Patsy Montana’s strange tale of a valley-dwelling female spirit, a few things need to be established right away. Firstly, at the start of America’s Great Depression, pop artists began dressing in preposterous, theatrical, orchidaceous versions of the traditional cowboy costume, often in sumptuous colors and studded in rhinestones. Most of these artists weren’t actually cowboys, of course: Gene Autry, as an example, was a telegraph operator for the railroad, while Roy Rogers was a Cincinnati-born farm boy and former shoe salesmen. Nonetheless, they strummed guitars and sang folk-inspired songs about love, heartbreak, and the American West. They did this while wearing a newly blocked and dazzlingly white 10-gallon hat perched on the back of their heads. They often did this in films in which they anachronistically chased down contemporary gangsters on horseback, battled the gangster's Tommy guns with Colt six-shooters, and lassoed them into submission.

Many of these singing cowboys also yodeled, for reasons too convoluted to go into any great detail about. Mostly it has to do with the influence of ethnic whites in the American West; more than that, it had to do with Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, who recorded a series of so-called “blues yodels” in the late Twenties. Autry started his career as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator, while Roy Rogers claimed his superlative yodeling was the result of repeated exposure to the recordings of a Swiss singer as a child. Whatever inspired them to open their throats and let go with a sudden vocal break upward into a falsetto tintinnabulation, these cowboys seemed to love it.

Patsy Montana (nee Rubye Blevens), an Arkansas-born, UCLA-educated singer with a round, cheerful face and a tendency to wear fringed leather vests and skirts, could yodel with the best of them. She rose to prominence as a result of country themed radio programs during the Depression, the same training ground that produced Autry and Rogers. In 1934, she penned a tune called “I Want To Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” which sold over a million copies — a first for a female artist.

At some point, Montana got it into her head to record a ghost song. Reportedly, she paired with Black Jack Wayne and his Bar 10 Ranch Boys, radio performers from the Mid-Fifties, but the truth is that the date of her recording of “The Yodeling Ghost” is somewhat obscure (one source has it as early as 1946), as is the identity of her backup band. What is important is that when Montana decided to sing about a mournful spirit, she decided the spook should yodel.

And so she does. “She would yodel in the cellar,” Montana explains of her ghost, “she would yodel in the hall.” Montana’s sings plainly here, with a hint of a warble. She sometimes sounds rather like a thin-voiced older woman during the bulk of the song, which features similarly straightforward guitar strumming and an overly loud and intrusive lap steel guitar flourish. It is not until Montana begins to yodel that the song really catches fire: her voice soars upward, letting out a mournful cry, echoing and otherworldly.

It’s puzzling that singers should spontaneously have decided to declare themselves cowboys 70-some off years ago, and it is puzzling that they decided to let out an occasional yodel. It is even more puzzling that one such singer decided the unhappy dead should likewise yodel. But Patsy Montana makes her case forcefully with this song. Her ghost’s otherworldly cries are so haunted and so genuinely spooky, one begins to wonder why all ghosts don’t yodel.

LISTEN TO "THE YODELING GHOST":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

now is a time of great terror and violence, and
the grasshopper refuses to understand this. he
marches back and forth before me, arms crossed,
smiling a sardonic smile and scratching his chin.

jimmy the shew, he says. you're tellin' me i
should be quakin' in me britches because of
some bully by the name of jimmy the shrew.

he pauses and peers up at me, then shakes his
head sadly. tom, he says in a lofty voice, as
though he were dispensing great wisdom,
nobody should ever be afraid of nobody what's
got a stupid name.

i don't know if you have noticed, he continues,
but jimmy the shrew is a magnificently stupid
name.

his name it may be stupid, but his teeth they are
long, i answer slowly, trying to control my temper.

tell me about this shrew, the grasshopper says,
grinning.

nobody knows where jimmy the shrew came
from. in fact, all that anybody knows about
jimmy the shrew are rumors. some say he was
mistakenly bought as a gift for a child, who
he badly mauled. they say he was tossed into
a toilet to be drowned, but he emerged in the
sewers, and spent the next several years
murdering rats and living in filth.

all we know is that jimmy the shrew has been
around for a very long time, and that he comes
around the library to claim his protection
offering, regular like clockwork.

protection offering, the grasshopper repeats.
protection from what.

from the shrew, i answer. a shrew has got to eat
three times his body weight per day, and if he
doesn't eat, he goes mad with hunger. a shrew
will attack and kill and animal three times his
size. a shrew will kill snakes. a shrew will kill
cats. jimmy the shrew gives us a choice.

either we provide him with food, or we become
food.

describe him, the grasshopper demands.

small, i say. hairless. partially blind.

and you're tellin' me a cat doesn't stand a chance
against a small, partially blind bully, the grasshopper
says.

also vicious, i say

i tell the grasshopper that i have already
lost one limb, and do not care to lose
another. I have heard the noises that come
from mice holes, or from bird's nests, or
from spider webs when the animals do not
have a protection offering. i have heard the
screams. i do not like to remember the noises.

the grasshopper sighs. so, tom, he says, what
is it t'at is worrying you.

no food, i say. since you came along, i have no
food. and the shrew is on his way.

how do you know the shrew is on his way, the
grasshopper asks, interested.

listen, i say.

off in the distance, there is singing. the voice is
high and throaty, singing a tin-pan alley song
with corrupted lyrics. it is the shrew, wandering
through the library. he sings,

there's a snarl under my waxed moustache
and a strange stain on my shoe
i carry with me a bottle of vitriol
they call me jimmy the shrew

there's not a dollar i don't own a piece of
or a cruelty i don't do
every scar here bears my name dear
they call me jimmy the shrew

there's a block on delancey
that is where i hang my hat
the streets here they are slick with blood
and i'm the reason for that

run your hand through my silky hair, dear
i got a smile for you
they'll find nothing but your shredded stocking
they call me jimmy the shrew

and then, without warning, comes screams of
pain and terror--some mouse, or some small bird.
the grasshopper listens, frowning, and an
angry look crosses his face. after a while,
there is silence in the distance.

ugly song, the grasshopper says, where did he
learn it.

its an old prohibition song, i say. he picked it
up somewhere, and he changed the lyrics to
suit him

ah, well, the grasshopper says, he'll be singin' it
out of the other side of his head when i finish
with him.

the grasshopper grows silent. he turns to look at
the door, and soon a twisted shadow falls across
it.

is that you, shrew, the grasshopper calls out.

who are you, the shadow answers.

i'm your protection offering from the cat, the
grasshopper answers. i'm the last meal t'at you
are ever going to eat.

the shrew enters the room, his cruel face twisted
into a hideous grin. he stares at the grasshopper
for a moment, and the grasshopper raises his
matchstick. then the shrew turns and looks at me.

this is your offering, tom, the shrew asks. this
won't do. did you know that they say that every
time a poet dies, another war starts.

i will read the news tomorrow, tom, and when i
read of war, i will think of you.

the grasshopper marches up to the shrew. can i
ask you a question, he demands. what do they say
happens every time a fool dies.

i have not heard what happens, the shrew answers.

t'en i suppose we shall find out tonight, the
grasshopper says, shrugging. he raises his
matchstick and brings it down on the shrew's head,
and the shrew cries out in pain.

and the matchstick breaks in half.

well, the grasshopper says, surprised, holding a
broken half of his matchstick. i suppose it shall be
fisticuffs then.

the grasshopper raises one tiny fists, and the shrew
lets out a high-pitched screech, hurtling himself
through the air and directly in top of the grasshopper.
together, the two slide on the library's polished
floor, skittering to the door and outside into the
hallway, propelled by the impact of the shrew.

i close my eyes and turn away, trying to ignore the
sounds that come from the hallway. when the
shew is finished with the grasshopper, i know
that he will come for me.

screams begin--unearthly screams, cries of
horrendous agony. the screams are high and loud,
and a foul odor fills the air. it is the smell of smoke.

i open my eyes, puzzled, and turn in time to see
a figure engulfed in flame. the figure flees,
howling, and a small shadow falls across the
door.

i don't know if he is stupid or forgetful, the
shadow says in a thick brogue, but for
some reason it did not occur to your friend
t'at a half a matchstick can start a fire.

the grasshopper shambles in through the door and
lies down on the floor, looking up at the ceiling,
breathing hard and groaning. well, cat, he says,
i figure you owe me a thank you.

i don't agree that i owe the grasshopper a
thank you--after all, if he didn't defend himself,
he would also have been murdered by the shrew.
why should i thank somebody for defending
themselves.

but tomorrow i will find the grasshopper a new
matchstick.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

"IT's GUM!" the Bubbagum package helpfully informs us. But it's not just gum: "It's candy! It's teeth! It's fun!"

And to it's credit, Bubbagum is actually rather ingenious. There's been a growing trend in American costuming toward making inexpensive and hideous false teeth, sold through costume shops and, on Halloween, drug stores. These are generally fragile things and are held in place through a quick-setting and somewhat useless epoxy. The Odd Ingester has owned quite a few pairs of these costume teeth, for reasons he would rather not detail, and, in almost every instance, he has abandoned the epoxy and simply chewed up a bunch of gum to hold the teeth in place.

Bubbagum cuts out the middle man. It comes with a wad of gum, which you then chew on and use it to attach the teeth, which, as their Web page shows, come in quite a selection. There are vampire teeth, werewolf teeth, and a selection of Hillbilly (and, strangely, Christmas) teeth. The Odd Ingester purchased a set with a picture of Bigfoot on the cover, so, presumably, the ones he got were supposed to look like Sasquatch teeth. The actual false teeth were small and pointy, which is a bit of a surprise -- I guess the Odd Ingester expected the the cryptozoological hominoid would have bigger teeth. Nonetheless, The Odd Ingester stuck the gum in his mouth and set to work.

The gum was grape flavored, but, by that, The Odd Ingester means it had a chemical and slightly dusty flavor that vaguely resembled grape. This is not really a complaint, as most inexpensive gums, such as those you might by from a gumball machine, taste just like this. Then The Odd Ingester affixed the teeth with the gum and took a few photos. He then ate the teeth, which are made of sugar and glucose. He's not sure why you would want to eat the teeth, although one expects that had you worn the Bubbagum as part of a disguise during a jewelry heist, the ability to actually devour the evidence afterwards in rather clever.

Here is The Odd Ingester looking spectacular:



More from the Odd Ingester!

IN 1930, THE FLEISCHER STUDIOS added a new character to their cartoon roster: a girlfriend for Bimbo, their comical canine star. She was designed by a veteran animator with the evocative name Grim Natwick and modeled after then-popular singer Helen Kane, a Bronx-accented singer with large eyes, a plump face surrounded by short curly hair, and a decided girlish singing voice. In her early cartoons, this Helen Kane-styled character sported dog ears, but these would eventually transform into a flapper's hoop earrings. The character, dubbed “Betty Boop” in 1932, would quickly surpass Bimbo in popularity.

1930's “Mysterious Mose” was this character’s second cartoon, long before she had lost the dog ears or gained her famous name, or even the voice that would be most associated with her: that of Mae Questel. However, many of the elements that would be common to Betty Boop cartoons were already in place: a winking sexuality, a jeopardous circumstance, and a great hot jazz score. Many Boop cartoons were really mini-musicals, albeit exceptionally unreal ones.

In “Mysterious Mose,” Boop is menaced by a ghostly shape (Bimbo, actually) that clatters through her house, occasionally taking form to blow a few notes on a tuba or to engage in a fast soft-shoe number. Boop is so terrified by this that her shirt repeatedly flies off and her toes clutch at each other for comfort; she also sings snatches of a song, also called “Mysterious Mose,” that plays throughout the cartoon.

It seems likely that the melody was written for the cartoon; two versions of the song were released in April of 1930, one by Bobby Dixon’s Broadcasters and another by Ted Weems and His Orchestra. These seem to be the earliest recordings of the song, and they came out at almost exactly the same time as the Fleischer cartoon. It is with the Ted Weems version that we will concern ourselves here, although the version produced by Bobby Dixon’s Broadcasters, who performed the song as an uptempto foxtrot, is well worth searching out.

Ted Weems was a Chicago-based bandleader whose chief claim to fame was that he launched the career of Perry Como. But Weems' band also featured a whistler, Elmo Tanner, who was, in his way, quite famous (Tanner would eventually record all the bird calls at Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room). So it is unsurprisingly that Weems would record “Mysterious Mose.” After all, the song details a whistling ghost.

“Mysterious Mose” is built around a slowly ascending progression of notes in the natural minor scale, a riff so familiar that if I write out its beats, you’ll surely recognize it: dum dum dum dum DAH dum. It’s the universal sound of melodramatic suspense, and, coupled with slide whistles, a singer who sounds just as though a frantic news reporter had suddenly started singing his exclusive story, and a series of frenetic instrumental breakdowns, we end up with less a song than a musical cartoon. The orchestration and pulpy lyrics (“If you feel a clammy hand clutching at your clothes ...”) generate such fevered visuals that had there not been a Betty Boop short already built around this song, one would need to be invented.

Perhaps this is why cartoonist Robert Crumb was so attracted to this song that he included it in the repertoire of his old-timey jug band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders, in a version that sounds almost identical to Ted Weems’ recording. It is, minus the perverse sexuality and sweaty neurosis, already almost a Robert Crumb cartoon put to music — there’s the nightmarishness, the urgency, and the half-cutesy, half-lunatic popular sensibility that Crumb favored in his own drawing. Which, come to think of it, was also true of those old Betty Boop cartoons.


WATCH "MYSTERIOUS MOSE" HERE.

LISTEN TO "MYSTERIOUS MOSE":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

the grasshopper makes a face. awful smell, he says,
what is it.

fumigation, i reply.

the grasshopper folds his arms, incredulously.
fumigation, he says. are ya tellin' me t'at t'ese foul
odors are poisonous.

very, i answer, to insects.

the grasshopper frowns, then scratches his jaw
nervously.

what sort of insects are bein' fumigated, may i ask,
he says.

psocoptera, i aswer. booklice.

well, tom, the grasshopper says, i guess i am lucky
t'at i have a friend in you, or i might have remained
here in t'is very library and inhaled t'ose poisonous
fumes, and t'en what would have become of me.

the grasshopper turns and walks away, clattering
his matchstick as though it were a walking cane,
moving jauntily toward the door.

i'm going to go wait with my cousin, he calls out. i hear
tell the lad lives above an irish bar in the Vieux Carre.
and t'anks again for yer word of warnin', mate--i owe
you one.

i wait for the grasshopper to leave before i begin to
beat my head against the floor, repeatedly, frustrated. i
could have told the grasshopper that the foul smell was
from rotten food in the garbage cans, or from sewage
bubbling up through the pipes.

it would not have been too long before the grasshopper
would have doubled over, clutching his stomach, and then
stretched a hand out, offering his matchstick to me.

tom, he would have said, promise me you will send me
shillelagh back to dublin. send it to my very dear old sue,
and tell her i loved her to the last.

instead, the grasshopper will spend the afternoon with
his cousin, drinking whiskey at an irish pub and swapping
dirty stories, and i will have to listen to them all when
he returned.

a man begins to pass through the aisles of bookshelves,
and i go to hide myself. this man wears thick leather gloves
on his hands and a paper respirator on his face.
he carries with him a spray bottle, with which he dusts
the bookshelves, covering them with a sticky, gleaming
film of poison.

without this regular fumigation, the psocoptera would
destroy the library. the booklice are religious
fundamentalists, and believe in an extreme form of
censorship. they infiltrate libraries and destroy
books that offend them.

because they are easily offended, no book is safe
from them. a few days ago, a small child leafing
through a copy of rev. hiram gaspers book of
moral instructions for very young folks, when she
screamed and threw the book to the ground.

a librarian hurried over and lifted the fallen book,
revealing thousands of lice, chewing away. they
had eaten the entirety of chapters one through
three and were nearly finished devouring chapter
four.

this incident brought the fumigator, requiring me
to move silently from shelf to shelf, keeping myself
hidden. i crawl into a dark corner near a large
iron radiator, and curl up into a ball.

from my hiding place, i can hear singing coming from
underneath the radiator. i turn my head sideways
and press close to the ground, trying to get a look.
what i see under the radiator amazes me.

there is a multitude of booklice congregated
there, holding hands and singing a hymn. they
sway gently in time to the song. some weep.
some close their eyes tightly, deep in prayer. some
raise their heads heavenward, opening their mouths
wide to sing with rich, full voices. they sing,

books, books, evil books
satan couldn't do better
with nets or with hooks
them lies that are printed
and them lies that are read
will pull us all under
after we're dead
they will cast us asunder
after we're dead

books, books, wicked books,
a favorite of liars
a tool for the crooks
they lead you to sinning
and lead you to vice
and the blessed of heaven
are the book-eating lice
the favorites of heaven
are the book-eating lice

after they finish their song,, the insects quiet
as one from the group rises and walks before them,
shaking his arms in the air and crying out hallelujah,
brothers and sisters, hallelujah.

he is a fierce little louse with a high, hysterical voice
and an angry, pinched face, and he speaks to the
congregation, saying,

i have been to the fiction section, oh my friends, and
i have read such things as you will not believe. i have
read of fish that witness a thousand years of german
history. i have read of monkeys in china who
become kings of their own empires. i have read of
tattooed cannibals who carry their own coffins with
them.

i will tell you this now, every word i read was a lie,
and every lie a sin. can i get an amen, somebody.

amen, call out the congregation.

the insect continues, saying, we are the assembled
of god. we are the faithful, and we have a mission.
we will be among the sainted, and bow your heads
with me in a moment of reverence for those who came
before us, and sacrificed their lives for the glory
of god. let us have somber reflection for our martyrs.

the congregation bow their heads and are quiet.
then the louse speaks again, now in a trembling voice,
saying,

we have a calling, brothers and sisters, and let us
go to do fulfill our sacred mission. smile bravely,
my friends, and remember, whatever happens, it happens
with a purpose.

the insect congregation then marches out from under
the radiator and into the periodical section, where
they devour a copy of national geographic that
contains a particularly alarming series of
photographs of the native tribes of samoa.

soon the man with the spray can passes through
the periodical section, and the lice let out with moans
and cries of agony. after a few minutes, the cries
cease.

a single booklouse emerges from the periodical
section, crawling across the floor in terrible pain,
pausing only long enough to let out a feeble cry
of hallelujah.

martyrdom, he wheezes. we join the congregation
of saints.

i emerge from my hiding place and cross to look
at the insect. it is the very same louse that had
led the congregation. he hears my footfalls and
painfully turns his head skyward to look at me.

oh, great beast, he says, you must be an angel come to
take me to my great reward.

his voice breaks, and he buries his head in his hands.
oh, angel, he cries out, i have sacrificed myself to
the cause of glory, although i perish in fits and
agonies, i know that i perish in a state of grace.

bless me angel, he begs. let me go to my reward
hearing the sweet words of your blessing cross
your mighty lips.

he throws himself to the ground before me, arms
stretched forward. a blessing, he cries out. please,
angel.

i shrug. bless you, insect, i say.

the louse lets out a weak shout of joy, and then
tips over onto his side. he curls inward,
suddenly lifeless and brittle. a slight breeze
stirs, blowing the corpse across the room like a mote
of dust.

well, well, well, comes a voice from behind me.
if i hadn't seen it myself, i would not have
believed it.

i turn. the grasshopper stands at the door, leaning
on his matchstick and looking thoughtful.

an act of mercy, he says, from you, tom. words
fail me. i would have expected you to simply
pop the wretched creature in your mouth and
chew it up.

tastes bitter, i say.

ah, you pretend to be a monster, but i know
t'at t'ere is a heart in there as big as the ocean,
the grasshopper says.

after all, he adds, you saved my life.

he laughs when i scowl, and begins to tell me
the story of three milkmaids from kerry county.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

ACTOR JOHN AGAR, who was 6’3” and sported a chiseled jaw, nice hair, and a laconic smile, graduated to a career as an actor as the result of a fortuitous marriage. Agar married Shirley Temple in 1945, and almost overnight went from a physical education instructor to a film star. His early roles included appearances in several John Ford films opposite John Wayne, where he often played brash and cocksure young whelps, brawling toughs eventually stung into maturity.

We probably would not be discussing Agar had he continued like that. There were plenty of young leading men like him in the middle of the 20th century, a mostly forgettable assortment of handsome faces and uninspired performances. But Agar had something of a drinking problem and his marriage to Temple ended badly and publicly. Agar found refuge in the world of B movies, where he produced a series of lazily charming lead performances in films with titles like Tarantula and Destination Space, often playing scientists or military men. Perhaps most notoriously, Agar starred in 1957’s The Brain from Planet Arous, in which he plays a scientist possessed by a huge, floating alien brain, causing him to develop otherwordly silvern eyes and a genuinely lunatic laugh.

Agar is nowhere near as interesting in 1962’s Journey to the Seventh Planet. He plays Captain Don Graham, who, as an astronaut, is presumably both a scientist and a military man. Agar’s limning of Graham is supremely self-satisfied: he spends the entire filmic journey to Uranus with a smug smile on his face, particularly when Uranus proves to be populated by flirty Danish women. The planet, you see, is ruled by an alien intelligence that has fabricated a world from the memories of Agar and his fellow astronauts. But for Agar, they all happen to be Danish, as the film was shot in Denmark, and so Uranus winds up filled with thatched roof huts, Abies alba fur tress, and statuesque women named Greta and Ursula. Agar spends most of the film flirting with these women, which, if memory serves correctly, mostly consists of him placing his hands on his hips, leering, and whistling appreciatively. He doesn’t really even bother to stop his amorous advances when the alien intelligence turns malevolent: During the climactic scene of the film, it is strongly implied that Agar has taken time out to make love to one of the women.

It is for this reason that Otto Brandenburg’s theme song, heard only over the closing credits, is perfect for the film, and worth noting here. Brandenburg is not well-known to American audiences, although he was quite popular in his native Denmark, but never mind. Here he turns in a magnificent example of what has recently come to be known as Space Age Bachelor Pad Music. Over a surprisingly muted arrangement of organ and vibraphone, Brandenburg turns in a passable imitation of Nat King Cole’s ultra-smooth crooning, but, seemingly, from deep inside an echo chamber. The song actually sounds as though it were beamed down from outside the atmosphere, as though there were some distant comet whereupon velvet smoking jacket-clad bachelors shoot come hither looks to green-skinned dancing girls, singing “Somewhere, on the seventh planet, out in space …”

The grinning and whistling John Agar, one expects, would feel perfectly at home here.

LISTEN TO "JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

there is a mustard-colored kitten staring at me. hi,
she says.

hi, i answer.

the kitten nods and turns. she walks away, and
then looks back at me. she turns again, bounds
back toward me, pressing her face very close to
mine.

hi, she says.

greta's voice comes from behind a desk. i
hope you don't mind that i brought the kittens,
she says. alma wanted a night on the town, and
so i agreed to take care of them.

milty, she calls out. ah, god, where has that kitten
gotten. i thought he was under the desk.

is that milty climbing the bookshelf, i ask.

greta comes out from behind the desk, peering
upward. a black kitten is awkwardly clawing her
way up a series of theatrical biographies.

no, great says, that's cookie.

greta crosses to the bookshelf, calling out. cookie,
she says, what are you doing.

there is a bug up here, the black kitten answers.

i look at the mustard-colored kitten standing before
me, still eyeing me curiously. do you hear that, i say.
a bug.

hi, the kitten answers.

on the bookshelf, the black kitten pulls herself toward
the top shelf. as she clambers upward, a matchstick
presses out from under a book, wedging itself under
the kitten's paw.

it is the grasshopper. he leans down from the top
shelf, calling to greta.

miss, he says, your kitty is about to take a
tumble.

and then the grasshopper gives the matchstick a
little shove, and with a yelp and a plop the black
kitten falls to the floor. the kitten stands, and then
glares up at the grasshopper.

aw, the black kitten cries out.

serves you right, cookie, greta scolds her. you
already ate.

indeed, along with the three kittens, greta brought
a sparrow that she had caught. the kittens nibbled
at the bird, and then abandoned it to explore the
library. the mustard-colored kitten remained behind,
watching me eat, fascinated.

greta returns to her search for the third, missing
kitten. milty, she calls out.

excuse me, miss, the grasshopper calls down. is it
a rust-colored kitty you'd be lookin' for.

yes, greta answers.

you might want to look behind the drinking
fountain, the grasshopper advises.

greta crosses to the drinking fountain, looks
behind it. she then sighs heavily and pulls out
a rust-colored kitten. milty, greta says sternly.

oh, you found me, he rust-colored kitten says
with a sigh.

what have i told you about hiding, greta scolds.
then she turns to look up at the grasshopper.
do you have a name, greta asks.

seamus, the grasshopper answers.

thank you, seamus, greta says. kittens can be
such a bother.

it is the way of youth, the grasshopper answers,
suspiciously watching the black kitten, who has
again begun to claw her way up the bookshelf.

yes, i was quite a little terror when i was a kitten,
greta says, laughing. berlin was a good city to
be a kitten in.

greta looks at me. i often wonder what you were
like as a kitten, tom, she says. i imagine you
loved to read.

yes, i answer. greta raises an eyebrow, but i do
not want to talk about my childhood, which i do
not remember well. i spent most of it tramping
across the country with my father, who never
liked to stay in one place for very long, and so
would hide us in wooden crates or the backs of
shipping trucks, not knowing where we would end
up.

my father thought my interest in literature was
foolish. don't waste your time with words, boy,
he would tell me. we live a greater adventure than
anything you can find in a book. words will never
describe the best experiences.

greta is still looking at me, eyebrow raised, expecting
more. i read when i was able, i say, and then shrug.

greta nods. i have a very special surprise for you,
she says. do you remember that i promised you a
song. well, i have taught the kittens a little song
that i learned when i was a kitten in berlin.

children, come here, greta commands. she looks
up at the bookshelf, where the black cat is struggling
to pull itself onto the top shelf. cookie, greta calls
out, come here at once. we're going to sing that
song we learned.

the grasshopper lifts his matchstick and gives
the black kitten a nudge, and with a shriek
and a plop the kitten again falls to the ground.

aw, the black kitten says, annoyed. do we hafta
sing.

yes, cookie, greta answers. the three kittens cross
to greta and sit alongside her. now, children, greta
says, i want you to sing as nicely as you can,
because this song is for tom over there, and we
want to sing as nicely as possible for tom

aw, the black kitten says.

why don't you start, greta says to the black
kitten.

aw, the black kitten says again. she sighs, and
then in a halting voice begins to sing,

do you have a wheelbarrow
said johnny rooster to johnny sparrow
and johnny rooster took the barrow
he took it to his lady fair-o
he filled it with the finest things
jeweled broaches and golden rings
but his love sent john away
saying i have no use for you today.

greta nudges the rust-colored kitten. now
you sing, miltie, she says, and the rust-
colored kitten sings.

do you have a fountain pen
said johnny rooster to johnny wren
and johnny rooster took the pen
and he wrote a promise then
he wrote a promise to his lady fair
and he took the promise and he read it there
while his love she laughed to hear
the words the john read in her ear

greta tuns to the mustard-colored kitten. ida,
she says, why don't you sing a verse now. the
mustard-colored kitten turns away from me,
embarrassed. now, ida, come on, greta says.
you sang this song so beautifully earlier today

still turned away from me, in a wisp of a voice,
the mustard-colored kitten sings,

what should i give to my fair darling
asked johnny rooster of johnny starling
just a song, answered johnny starling,
that you just sing to your fair darling
so johnny rooster went to johnny wren
and gave him back his writing pen
and johnny rooster went to johnny sparrow
and gave him back his wheelbarrow.

the mustard-colored kitten stops singing. there is
more to the song, ida, greta says. come on now,
tom will want to know the end of the story.

no, the mustard-colored cat answers.

ida, now, how would you feel if you heard some of
a song, but then the singer refused to finish it, and
so you were left wondering what happened, greta
asks sternly.

no, comes the answer.

i don't mean to interrupt, the grasshopper calls down,
but i have a suggestion.

yes, seamus, greta asks.

why don't you sing the rest of the song, the grasshopper
suggests. i'm certain tom would be happy to hear your voice.

greta looks at me. is that what you would like, tom, she
asks.

yes, i answer.

then i shall sing, greta says, and she does,

johnny rooster found his lady
returning from the church
and johnny flew to the tree above her
and there did johnny perch
i love thee, johnny sang so merry,
i love thee, my lady fair.
turn thou now and return to church
that i might marry you there.

so johnny wren and johnny sparrow
and also johnny starling
witnessed as bonny johnny rooster
married there his darling
ah, they said, a man is right
and never can do wrong
if he woos his lady fair
by singing her a song.

greta stops singing, and the kittens look up at
her. are we finished, they ask.

yes, greta answers, and the three kittens frolic
away. from the bookshelf, the grasshopper lets
out a thunderous applause.

did you like it, greta asks me.

i search for the right words to tell greta my
feelings about her song. i would not waste
my time with words, but i do not have two
forepaws, and the only response i want to
give is to offer up the same thunderous response
as the grasshopper has provided.

but the grasshopper stops applauding. i don't mean
to interrupt, miss, he says, but the rust-colored cat
has just climbed into a dumb-waiter.

oh, miltie, greta cries out, and then hurries over
to the dumb-waiter. i watch her go, still trying to
think of something to say about her song, wanting
to find the right words and call them out to her.

greta, i say, and then stop, because a mustard-
colored kitten is bounding toward me. the kitten
clatters to a stop, sliding a little bit on the library's
polished floor. she stares at me quizzically. my
mouth is still open as though i were about to say
something.

yes, i ask the kitten.

hi, she says.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

THE COASTERS, a Los Angeles-based rock and roll quartet who must rank as the most successful novelty band of all time, mostly steered clear of supernatural subject matter. Their songs, usually penned by Fifties’ hit machines Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, dealt with the frustrations of teenage life, but from a comically quotidian viewpoint. “Yakety Yak,” as an example, which spent a week in Billboard’s number one slot in 1954, is a mundane list of juvenile chores. So when The Coasters recorded “The Shadow Knows” in 1958, the song was a little unusual for the band. It is The Coasters only novelty recording to deal with a paranormal theme — the Lieber and Stoller composition draws its title from the catchphrase of a hypnotoic pulp fiction detective. Specifically, Maxwell Grant’s crook-nosed, black hat-wearing, automatic-wielding The Shadow, who boasted the ability to cloud men’s minds, and whose sinister cackle introduced his radio drama from 1931 to 1954.

It is the same cackle that opens this song, which, with a vigorous, doo-wop melody and a muted, echoing chorus, tells an unexpectedly intrusive tale of sexual obsession. “You can’t even snap your fingers or wiggle your toes without the Shadow knows,” the singer informs us, and it’s meant as a warning to a straying girlfriend. Like many of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins recordings, the superficial occultism of this song is less interesting that the sense of sexual bewilderment and betrayal revealed by the lyrics. Here the singer expresses a rather queasy fantasy — that of being able to control, or at least omnisciently observe, his lover’s errant sexual behavior. This fantasy is made even more sinister by the band’s incessant chortling throughout the song and the lead singer’s audible mirth in explaining his extraordinary powers. “I know where you’re going, baby, long before you do,” he warns, and while the song is a fine one, with one of Lieber and Stoller’s catchier melodies, one can’t help but feel sorry for the girlfriend in the song, who is the victim of endless psychic stalking.

LISTEN TO "THE SHADOW KNOWS":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

oh god, tom, greta cries out, look at how thin you
have gotten.

greta frowns, which she does frequently, and very
well. are you sick, she demands.

i do not want to tell her the whole ridiculous story.
i do not want to tell greta that i have not been eating
well because every time i try to catch a meal a tiny
grasshopper beats me with a matchstick. greta does
not need to know that i have had to scrounge garbage.

food is scarce, i say.

well, she answers in her clipped german accent. well,
tom, next time i come i will bring some food with me.
would you like that, she asks.

ah, god, tom, she says. how i hate this time of year.
i find the New Orleans heat so oppressive. it is not like berlin.

greta has been depressed since she left berlin.

i was just a kitten then, she will tell me, but how i
remember it. ah, the berlin of my youth, my home,
how i miss it.

greta visits me whenever she is feeling blue, which is
often. her owner, a soprano with the opera, pays her
very little attention. the soprano entertains male visitors
at all times of the day and night, and shoos greta away.
greta will go out into the hallway and flip through
some fashion magazines, and then grow quickly
bored.

greta despises being bored. she hates being ignored.
i am too old to be lonely, she will tell me, but god,
tom, you are the only friend i have got.

greta is the thinnest cat i have ever seen, perhaps
because she refuses to eat anything but caviar and
cauliflower.

at my age, greta will explain, i cannot afford any extra
pounds. when people can no longer admire your
youth, you must allow them to admire your discipline.
they should look at you and say, at her age, how does
she stay so thin.

but it is not right for you, tom, she complains. weight
on an older gentleman makes him look distinguished
and successful. no, i shall bring you food, and that
is all there is to it.

you don't need to worry about me, i tell her.

i like to worry about you, mister hopper, she replies.
what else do i have in my dreary life. sometimes
i think you are the only person who can make me
smile. you must know that i absolutely live for
your songs and stories, tom, darling.

will you sing me a little song, tom, please, she asks.
make the monotony go away for a little while.

i nod and sing her a song i have written that week.
it goes,

do i have the money
to treat you as i should
would i spend it on you
i would, dear, i would
i'd buy everything
that glitters and shines
and wrap them in ribbons
and tie them with twine
and give them with flowers
a gorgeous bouquet
but i ain't got the money
today, dear, today

i'm broke as i'm always
i'm a fool and a chump
and you deserve better
than this sorry old lump
i've made you a package
of ribbons and twine
but it's a package that empty
time after time
i never wanted to hurt you
and didn't think i could
but i'm not the sorta fella
who treats you as he should
the best i can do for you
is to just let you be
so if you're wondering who's leaving
it's me, dear, it's me.

greta listens to my song with interest, and then stares
at me with concern. well, god, tom, that's a sad song,
she says. here i thought you were going to cheer me
up, but it is obvious that i need to cheer you up.

the first thing i must do is find you some food, she
says. i will make a splendid meal for you tonight, and
then i will sing a song for you. how does that sound,
darling.

then she leaves, squeezing her thin body through a
letterbox that no cat should ever be able to fit through.
i watch her go, and when i turn away from the door
i find a grasshopper staring up at me, scratching his
chin with a matchstick.

well, the grasshopper says in his thick brogue. it
does my heart some good to see t'at you can fall in
love, cat.

d'ya see how fate works, he asks. i'm sure you t'ough t'at
i was put here to stave you t'death, my friend. instead, i
have got you a supper date with a beautiful girlie.

the grasshopper sighs, satisfied with himself. tom,
he says, i knew in my heart t'at you needed me as a
friend. and now you should be t'ankin' me.

briefly, i think about murdering him. but the grasshopper
is too nimble with his matchstick.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

THERE IS A RATHER OBNOXIOUS HABIT among horror movie hosts to mock the movies they show. Both Vampira and her lesser doppleganger Elvira were notorious offenders, displaying contempt for horror films that precluded even a decent sense of humor; their jokes were notoriously bad. John Zacherle, who, as the host of Philadelphia’s Shock Theater in 1957, certainly was in this camp, but for one essential difference. Zacherle, his oily hair parted in the center, his scowling features glaring from beneath a thick make-up job inspired by Lon Chaney’s Phantom, his tinny baritone punctuated by cackling laughter, was genuinely funny. He originally named this cadaverous character “Roland,” but eventually settled on using his unusual real name, and it is as John Zacherle that he is credited on a series of novelty records he released in the late ’50s.

“Dinner with Drac,” his first, recorded in 1958, is typical representation of his mortuary humor, which would cause him to be dubbed “The Cool Ghoul” by Dick Clark. “Dinner with Drac” essays, in limerick form, a particularly ghastly evening meal, narrated rather than sung by Zacherly over a spare, proto-garage band rock orchestration. “What a swimmer is Dracula's daughter,” Zacherle informs us. “But her pool looks more red than it oughter. The blood stains the boats, but it's easy to float because blood is much thicker than water!”

Interestingly, Dick Clark, who co-owned the record company on which Zacherle recorded, found the sound to be too gruesome for his American Bandstand audience, prompting Zacherle to record a somewhat tamer version. Both were released as flipsides of the same single, one for radio play. The nastier side, one suspects, dominated home hi-fi sets.

LISTEN TO "DINNER WITH DRAC":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

the grasshopper insists that we are friends.
he follows me around, expounding at length.

we irish are firm believers in impossible peaces,
he says, and we have made an impossible
peace. i know t'at if you had half a chance,
you would toss me in your great maw and
chew me to bits. but you know t'at if you
try it, i'll knock you insensible
with me shillelagh.

it is a balance of mur'drous powers, he says,
and it means we can move beyond our
violent nature into a spirit of friendship and
brotherhood.

he sits and whittles his matchstick, humming
to himself and occasionally shooting me cock-
eyed looks.

so, he says, how'd you lose the paw.

i don't answer.

don't make me beat it out of you, he says, and
then laughs.

i bare my teeth at him.

i had a sweet girlie back in dublin, he says, and
she only had one antenna. none would look
twice at her, and they all called her onesy sue,
but i loved her.

i close my eyes, pretending to sleep. he laughs.

is it a bedtime story yer wantin' then, he asks.
well, my sad tale of romance will suit that
porpose just fine, lad.

d'ya know t'at i used to sing her songs, he
asks. i used to go up by the little spot of land
what her pa had left her, and i would call out to her,
and i would sing in my best irish tenor.

and then the grasshopper sings, and these
are the words he sings,

oh, sweet sue
my very dear old gal
t'ere's not another like you
in this whole rotten life
my own sweet sue
what could it hurt at all
if you became a missus
and said you'd be my wife

i've failed at nearly everyt'ing
my very dear old gal
i can barely stand to woo ya
for fear i'll fail again
my own sweet sue
what could it hurt at all
if i said i loved ya
and you said you'd marry me t'en

the grasshopper pauses after singing this,
staring at the ground, deep in thought.
i peer at him through a half-open eye,
and see him purse his lips and pause in
his whittling. he grinds his teeth together
for a moment.

didn't work out, i ask.

ah, now you're interested, cat,
he answers.

no, it didn't, he answers. she said no to my
proposal, and would not tell me why. i heard
from her sister that she was pinin' away for
a boyfriend she had as a young girl, before the
accident. after she had gotten hurt, he never
visited her, but she still waited for him.

i don't blame her, the grasshopper says. an
irishman loves, it is a hard love, and don't die
easy. t'ats a love i know full well.

well, cat, the grasshopper says, when i got my
chance to sneak into the pocket of an actor
headed for america, i took that chance,

ireland is a land of memories, and i was lookin'
for a place of forgetfulness. here I am, in a city
on a river in alien land. for my mind
to stretch back to ireland, it would have to chart
backwards a course built by spaniards, rum traders,
river rats, gandy dancers, hobos, and the other
refuse of civilization, who all came this way
to forget. i stand here in new orleans and face west,
and i face a land of new possibilities, and i try
to forget the old, failed possibilities.

the grasshopper begins whittling again. if you
don't mind, brother cat, he says, i don't think t'at
i will sing any more songs tonight.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

THIS SONG CONTAINS a sensational, genuinely spine-chilling instrumental intro — starting with a whispering wind and a baroque organ chord progression, it soon evolves into Ennio Morricone-style wailing from the keyboards (and genuine wailing from the singers) atop a stabbing ska guitar rhythm. Without listening to the lyrics, which are oftentimes delivered in an undead groan, listeners might mistake the song’s subject matter as concerning itself with the supernatural. Instead, the ever-political Specials used the song to address the very real horrors of youth street violence in Thatcherite England. “This town is coming like a ghost town,” the band informs us. “Bands won’t play no more. Too much fighting on the dance floor.”

Although the Specials (also known as Specials AKA) were themselves a multiracial band, drawing their distinct, two-toned, natty sartorial style from the West Indies, their concerts became recruiting grounds for racists, as well as a popular spot for an assortment of troublemakers. Fights were inevitable, and dogged the group with bad publicity. Additionally, the Specials’ lyrics, which explicitly preached racial tolerance, made them targets for violence: Racists attacked guitarist Lynval Golding in London in 1980 (he sang about it in a song titled, poignantly, “Why?” the b-side to “Ghost Town.”) In 1982, Golding was attacked again, this time surviving a horrifying knifing at the hands of skinheads in a Convetry City center. With this sort of backdrop to their songwriting, it is no wonder the Specials sound genuinely haunted while performing “Ghost Town,” which would be their first Number 1 hit on the British music charts.

The popular English film Shaun of the Dead wisely made use of "Ghost Town" as part of its excellent soundtrack.

LISTEN TO "GHOST TOWN":



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there is a new resident in the library now, and
he is very much a bother to me. he declares that
his name is seamus, and tells a story of traveling
from abroad in the coat pocket of the great irish
actor liam neeson. how this got him to new orleans,
he will not explain, except occasionally to
exclaim that, as he heard it, new orleans was built
by the irish, and so where better a place would
he find to lay his wretched head.

there is an irish channel in new orleans, but we're
in the french quarter, also known as the vieux carre.
this was built by the spanish, which is pretty
typical for new orleans. the other side of the
mississippi is called the west bank. from the french
quarter, the west bank is to the south and to the east.
this is too hard to explain to the new fellow.

he is a grasshopper, and he is a grasshopper i
would be happier never to have met.

i first encountered the grasshopper when i had
caught a moth after it had singed itself on a light
bulb. it is rare for me to get a moth. even when i
can swat them down in flight, my one good
forepaw is no use in holding them.

but here was a perfectly good moth who
was absolutely defenseless against me, as his
wings were burned. but just as i was about to
enjoy my meal, i felt a sharp rapping upon my
nose.

i was so startled that i leaped backward,
off-balance, and released the moth. it crawled
away, and before it stood the grasshopper.
he had an old matchstick in one
hand, into which he had whittled a pattern
of tiny celtic symbols. i swatted at the grasshopper.
he dodged me and again struck the matchstick
to my nose, causing me unexpected pain. he then
waved the matchstick threateningly.

i know your nature, cat, he said, and so i dun't
blame you for your murd'rous advances on
t'at defenseless creature.

he then struck me again with the matchstick,
and i backed away.

now, cat, he said, it's only fair t'at i tell you of
my nature.

i am an irishman, and it is the way of me people
to stand up for the underdog. if i catch you
again tryin' to slaughter some poor innocent, i'll
beat you wit' my shillelagh. don't doubt it,
brother, i will beat eight of your nine lives
out of you.

he turned to glance at the moth. it painfully exited
the room. the grasshopper nodded, satisfied,
and then laughed.

folks tell me you like to write rhymed couplets,
cat, he said. well, maybe seamus has a few
rhymed couplets for you.

he then opened his arms wide and shouted a
limerick at me, saying,

cats make a horrible grunt
when beaten with somet'ing quite blunt
t'at's why i gaily
carry a shillelagh
and beat them back until front

t'ere's somethin' mighty endearing
when an irishman finds himself hearing
a cat's awful howling
when the beast has been prowling
and was met with a kick in the rear.


i protested this last limerick, pointing out that
the rhyme scheme was corrupt--there should,
after all, be a final 'ing' at the end of the last line,

the grasshopper thought about this, then shrugged.
how about this for a final rhyme, he said.

and an Irishman he finds himself fearing,
he said.

at that, the grasshopper leaned forward and struck
me again, and i turned and fled the room, leaving
behind me the sound of his laughter and the
fractured meter of yet another limerick he had
begun to call out.

i don't know who the great irish actor liam neeson
is, but at this moment i would rather he had stayed
in ireland, or at least checked his pockets for
insect stowaways.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

IF WE WERE ONLY to listen to Red Sovine’s music, we could be forgiven for imaging that America’s one million long-haul truckers were a pretty sentimental bunch.

Sovine had an odd dual career — he spent most of his life as a honky tonk singer, but for seven years when he was the superintendent of a hosiery factory. Afterward, Sovine kicked around the fringes of the country music scene as a soloist, his songs rarely climbing very high on the country charts, until he recorded “Giddy-Up Go” in 1964. The ballad was an excessive, tear-jerking recitation of a truck driver unexpectedly reuniting with his lost son at a highway greasy spoon, and spent six weeks at the top of the country charts, as well as crossing over to become a minor popular favorite.

Trucker songs had been a small subgenre of country since the 1940s, but were inexplicably growing in popularity, perhaps in part due to a popular conception of the trucker as a rolling version of the country rebel. Films such as Convoy and High-Ballin’ (as well as television’s BJ and the Bear) presented truckers and handsome, fun-loving good ol’ boys willing — and able — to humble corrupt local law enforcement officials between sexual conquests and bar fights. Sovine’s truck drivers were a little different: Amphetamine addicted (“Freightliner Fever”) and brawling (“Colorado Kool Aid”), yes, but given to telling choked-up, teary tales of crippled boys and their dead trucker fathers (“Teddy Bear.”)

Sovine’s truckers also happened to be haunted. In the melancholic “Bringing Mary Back Home” he tells of a phantom hitchhiker bumming a ride from truck drivers to get home to her weeping parents, and Sovine sings it, as his often does, with a quaver in his voice, as though he were about to collapse into an embarrassing fit of sobbing. Sovine was on safer emotional footing — and told a better tale — in his 1967 release “Phantom 309.” The song is a sort-of musical predecessor to the “Large Marge” segment of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, in which Sovine hitches a lift with Big Joe, an amiable trucker who, it turns out, has been dead for a while after deliberately jackknifing to avoid an accident. (In classic Sovine melodramatic form, Joe swerved to avoid a bus filled with children.) “Every driver in here knows Big Joe,” he’s told by the waiter of a roadside diner. “Every now and then some hiker will come by, and, like you, Big Joe will give him a ride.” Tom Waits would eventually offer his own rambling, beatniky cover of this song.

LISTEN TO "PHANTOM 309":



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the mice are angry. Through sheer cunning, i
have managed to reduce their literary group
from seven to four. they speak ill of me.
a real poet, they say, does not eat other poets.

they have read about a group of mice who
slipped a bell around the neck of a cat that was
terrorizing them, and decided to do the same
to me, so that the bell's ringing might warn
them when i was around.

unfortunately, the only bell they were able to
locate was a large push-button affair that sits
on the return counter next to a sign reading
ring for service.

this did not bother the mice at all, and when i
slept they tied it to my left hind leg with a length
of twine. this has made my life impossible for several
days. as much as i bat the twine with my paw, i
cannot get it loose. i have ended up dragging
the bell everywhere. it does not ring, but instead
makes a dreadful scraping noise.

when i came upon the literary group on their shelf,
they heard the scraping and responded by flinging
heavy books down upon my head. i protested
that i just wanted to discuss sandor petofi, but
they called out that they did not care for my
opinion of hungarian poetry. i had, after all
devoured boris, who apparently specialized
in eastern european literature.

furthermore, they reminded me, i had chewed
up toby, who had not yet finished his epic poem
about the great exeter milk carton explosion.
they held up scraps of the poem and shouted
them down at me, in order to remind me of the
author i had silenced.

i did not think much of toby as a poet. he had
been a black little mouse with a morose manner,
and his poetry reflected this. he wrote grimly
about grim subjects, and i was of the opinion
that the best thing ever to happen to toby involved
my digestive juices.

however, for the sake of posterity, here is toby's
last, incomplete poem,

the great exeter milk carton explosion

twas ten years ago, as i remember
it was october or maybe december
a tragedy happened at the exeter house
to peter, a sickly, hobble-footed mouse

a dinner was had and the diners to bed
but left out their scraps of cheeses and bread
and wine they'd half-drunk and food they'd half-et
so peter climbed the table to eat what he'd get

he staggered, he did, hobble-footed pete
toward dishes filled with morsels to eat
over here the remains of a pie of french silk
and over there, by the gaslight, a carton of milk

pete did not know that the milk had gone sour
and the gaslight fermented it with an unearthly power
so as peter ate, the carton it glowed
and the milk it expanded and prepared to explode

pete heard the noises, and pete saw the smoke
and rose painfully up on the foot that he'd broke
he stumbled across the table, weeping with fear
as the carton foamed over and the combustion grew near

and then with a bang the carton it burst
and pete he leapt forward, fearing the worst
ah poor pete ...

this is as far as toby had written when i brought
about his end, and i think it is for the best, but the
mice were beside themselves in their fury at me.
now, they declared angrily, we will never know if pete
survived the explosion.

well, i told them, you know what happened to toby.
write an epic, tragic poem about him.

this got the mice to thinking, and they agreed that
this was an excellent suggestion. they began writing at once,
hurriedly, occasionally calling down questions to see
if they had gotten the details right.
did he cry out, they asked, when you ate him.
did he bleed, they asked, or did you swallow
him whole.

i have told them that i will help them as best i can
with their poem, but first they must remove the bell
from around my leg. they are sending someone down
now.

i don't know what mouse it is who volunteered
to remove the bell, but i shall wait until he has
completely untied the twine before i pounce upon him.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

BUNNY NOISELESSLY jet packs past the Pavek Museum in St. Louis Park, a museum dedicated to the history of broadcasting. This wonderful museum features hundreds of exquisite old televisions and radios, the world's largest collection of vacuum tubes, and a theremin.

MORE FROM THE JET PACK TOUR!

THE SHAGGS, made up of three youthful sisters named Wiggin from New Hampshire, might have been the worst ever. Their 1969 album, the first of only two produced and portentously titled Philosophy of the World, is an assemblage of discordant, off-key instrumentals, monotone lyrics sung with muddy articulation, and a rhythmic accompaniment so lethargic that it sounds as though the drummer, Helen, had no desire to pound on her toms, and grudgingly did so after receiving a stern lecture from her father. (This scenario is possible, by the way; the band’s manager and driving force was their father, Austin Wiggin, Jr.) And yet there is something extraordinarily compelling about the songs the girls produced — so compelling that, although the band performed almost exclusively at the Town Hall and nursing homes of Fremont, NH, and although only 100 copies of their album survived post-pressing theft (the producer made off with 900 copies), Frank Zappa reportedly heard them and proclaimed the band to be “better than the Beatles.”

The Shaggs have developed a small cult following over the years, in part inspired by their unfeigned wretchedness, which, to modern ears, sounds deliberate — almost punk. “It’s Halloween” is a typical example of their songwriting, consisting of a few simple chords, strummed laconically on guitar, drumming that never seems entirely in sync with the remainder of the song, and half-hearted, homely descriptive lyrics that rely, lazily, on the most general images of the Halloween season. “The jack-o-lanterns are all lit up,” singer and songwriter Dot Wiggins drones. “All the dummies are made and stuffed.”

Listening to the girls fumble their way through this song, it’s easy to understand why Rolling Stone Magazine once said that the girls sounded “like a lobotomized Trapp Family Singers.” The song is beyond enervating, it’s narcotizing — critic Lester Bangs was reportedly astounded to discover that the sisters were not junkies. Yet the music is utterly fascinating. There is a queer consistency to this song, as there is to all of the sisters' music. The Shagg’s sound is instantly identifiable, like a frame from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — so fully its own thing that it cannot possible be anything else. But perhaps a better filmic comparison would be Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as this seems like the music that the alien pod creatures, upon assuming the identities of hapless suburbanites, would make. It’s clearly the product of a vegetable intelligence, and, unexpectedly, might just demonstrate a vegetable genius.

LISTEN TO "IT'S HALLOWEEN":



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some of the mice in the library have formed
themselves into a literary group. they meet
every night at one a.m. in order to discuss poetry
and great works of fiction.

i often sit and watch as they gather on one of
the longer shelves, in a space created between
a compilation of poetry by blake and a copy of
conversations with byron by marguerite blessington.

they talk very excitedly about meter and verse, and
sometimes drink wine from a thimble, when they
have it. Eventually the wine makes them bold, and they will
call down to me, asking my opinion on the writing of
julia a. moore or olive schreiner. we have had many great
conversations. they do not fear me, because of my
one missing leg.

you can imagine how shocked one of them was when
i caught him last night. the little mouse was stumbling
homeward, having had more than a few sips of the
thimble wine, and i made an awkward pounce and
trapped him beneath my one good paw.

tom, he cried out, what is this. i thought we was friends.
don't you remember the discussions we have had.
you and i are both poets, brother, and doesn't
that mean anything.

listen, he said, i will trade you a poem for my
life. i know that you like drinking songs and
such, and i have written one that i am certain
you will enjoy. what do you think, mate, have
we got us a deal.

he then began to recite in a trembling voice.
afterwards he looked at me expectantly.

well, brother, i said. that was a fine enough
song you wrote.

i am going to have to eat you anyway,
and i apologize, my friend, but i can promise
you a sort of literary immortality.

i shall transcribe your poem and send it out to
get published, hale fellow, and who knows.
maybe one day your gang will be meeting
on that same long shelf to discuss
verse and meter, and they will stand in the
shadows of a mighty book that contains
your drinking song.

this did not seem to comfort the mouse much,
and he made a hideous amount of noise on
his way from the floor to my stomach, but i
am a cat of my word, and so here is the mouse's
drinking song.


there's little enough to offer
i an't got a penny in my coffer
i ain't got me enough cheese to last a day
but i got a thimbleful of dido
and that's all i really need-o
to start me o upon my merry way

i will drink it till i'm blotto
because i want to and i gotto
there ain't a mouse what ain't a drunk in training
it’s a hard life for the rodent kind
so i'll drink until i'm completely blind
if i could see, all i'd see is that it's raining

the only gift i've got for giving
is the very life i'm living
the only yultide gifts i get are those i borrow
let's lift our thimble and make a toast
to tannenbaum and all the christmas ghosts
we're dead drunk today and simply dead tomorrow

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SUPER-STUD.

Paxton Quigley, boudoir baron, expert on Kierkegaard and contraception, scores for William College again, and again, and again.

He's a prisoner in a Bennington dormitory attic, the captive of three vengeful, triple-crossed ladies who have charged him with infidelity and condemned him to Death by Seduction.

And it's because Paxton never learned there was too much of a good thing. But he knows know.

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THERE ARE SEVERAL GREAT VERSIONS of this gruesome musical tale of Anne Boleyn — some of them, such as Rudy Vallee’s wheezing call-and-response rendition, are better than Stanley Holloway’s. Valley recorded his at about the same time as Holloway (around 1935), so the American crooner has about as much claim to the song as Holloway, but we will favor Holloway’s version here. It is, after all, an essentially British song, comically detailing the vengeful ghost of the second wife of Henry VIII, beheaded for witchcraft. Its melody, a mock-serious, mournful affair, sounding much like a drinking song, is very much the product of the Music Hall, the British approximation of Vaudeville. Songwriters RP Weston and Bert Lee were graduates of the Music Hall, as was singer Stanley Holloway, whose career as a film star and recording artist included a life on the stage, where he performed comical songs and monologues under a variety of exaggerated personas. In fact, the song is so essentially British that when the Vermont-born Valley recorded it, he affected a stage Cockney accent, despite the fact that his rendition has a brass band jazz arrangement.

Hollway’s version is plainer, consisting of nothing more than a simple piano arrangement and his own untrained voice. But it is for this very reason that Halloway’s version seems more authentic. Halloway’s presentation represents an essentially English deadpan sensibility, muted and winking, as compared to Valley’s theatrical American brashness. The song benefits from Halloway’s restraint — he limits his comical demonstrativeness to a few subdued chuckles, shivers, and a nasal East Ender accent. The lyrics do the remaining work for him, a series of inventive rhymed couplets essaying the difficulties of headlessness. “She often catches cold, poor thing, it's cold there when it blows,” Holloway tells us earnestly. “And it's awfully awkward for the Queen, to have to blow her nose.”

Incidentally, Music Hall performer Cyril Smith put out his own recording of the song at the same time as Holloway and Vallee, and his rendition sounds almost exactly as though Holloway were singing Vallee’s upbeat, swinging version of the song. Apparently, oversaturating the market wasn’t much of a concern in the Thirties.

LISTEN TO "WITH HER HEAD TICKED UNDERNEATH HER ARM":



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when i was a younger cat, i paid a high price
for my foolishness.

when you make the new orleans public library
your home, it is best to make yourself scarce
during the day. when i was a young cat, i did
not understand this. when morning would come
and the moths, centipedes, mice, pigeons,
and other assorted animals would crawl into
the woodwork to hide, i remained in plain sight.

children were fond of me. they saw me
slinking among the stacks of nursery rhymes
and cried out with pleasure. small groups
of children gathered around me, placing their
hands to touch my fur and stroke my head, and
i enjoyed their attention. what cat wouldn't.

when the librarians would come with angry
shouts and swatting brooms, i simply darted
back into the stacks of books, where i could
quickly disappear.

but the librarians brought in professionals, and
the professionals set traps, and i lost one of my
forepaws.

now i sleep during the day, and creep out with
the moths, centipedes, mice, pigeons, and other
assorted animals at night. i wander the darkened
rooms, searching for food.

sometimes i see the oddest things.

a few nights ago i chased a cockroach into a
storage room. it hid under a bookshelf, squeezed
into a space between the bottom shelf and
the floor that was too small for me to press
my one good forepaw into. the cockroach
taunted me for a while. ha, tom, it said. i guess
tonight you'll be singing a song about your
empty stomach.

i made a series of promises to the cockroach,
explaining that although it might have escaped
tonight, one night i would catch it. i detailed
the manner in which i would toy with it
before i ate it. the cockroach laughed at this,
and started to mock me some more. but i got
bored and went to exit the storage room.

i paused at the door. above me,
in the transom above the door, was an enormous
spider web. it glistened in the moonlight,
translucent and silver. on each strand of
the spider web was a tiny, silvery spun cradle.
in each of these cradles was a newborn spider,
slumbering.

in one corner of the web sat an enormous,
black spider. with one of her eight legs, she
gently tugged on one strand of her web. this
caused each of the hundreds of tiny cradles
to sway gently. as she rocked her children,
the spider sang, saying,

tired angels
darlings mine
sleep my darlings
wake another time
sleep my angels
close your eyes
and i will sing you
a lullaby
sleep my darlings
angels mine

sleep my angels
close your eyes
i will be here
when you rise
i will stand guard
alongside your bed
dream not of sorrows
dream of heaven instead
sleep my darlings
angels mine

looking up at this, i thought to myself that
if i were to stand on my hind legs and put
my paw on the wall, i might be able to leap
up and catch an edge of the web.

i made one leap, missing, before the spider
clambered down to the bottom of her web
and waved two of her legs at me sternly.

i'm a biting spider, tom, she warned me. make
another jump like that and i will give you a
bite that you won't soon forget.

then she pressed one of her legs to her lips
and shushed.

it's late now, tom, she said. if you wake up
any of my angels, i shan't be very happy.
why don't you go away now, tom. you're not
welcome here.

the cockroach scuttled out from under the
bookshelf behind me, letting up a little
holler. yes, he cried out, go. we don't want
you.

tsk, the spider said, and turned to look at
the cockroach. you shut up too, or i'll make
you the next meal for my children. tom might
not be able to get under that bookshelf, but
you had better believe that i can.

the cockroach frowned, and then apologized.
the spider returned her attention to me. you
should go now, tom, she said. you need to
get started on your song.

what song is that, i asked.

the spider laughed gently, and her entire web
rocked and shimmered with her, causing the
cradles to sway.

why, she said, don't you have a song to write
about the emptiness of your stomach.

as i left the storeroom, i thought i also heard the
cockroach laughing.

i did not write a song that night. i plotted murder.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

FOR THOSE OF YOU who have read some of Doggerel, my old ezine of bad poetry, you might have seen occasional references to The Tales of Tom Hopper. This is a collection of short stories I began back in 2000 and have continued to add to, now and then, here and there, throughout the past eight years, and am adding it to this blog in order to begin adding to the stories again.

Briefly, The Tales of Tom Hopper is the story of a cat who resides in a library -- originally the New York Public Library, but later revised to an Omaha library, and now to be revised again to the New Orleans library near the French Quarter -- prior, of course, to Hurricane Katrina, which may factor into a later story, if the mood strikes me.

The stories are inspired by the writing of Don Marquis, a cartoonist, author, and newspaperman who created the characters Archy and Mehitabel as recurring characters in a column in the New York Evening Sun in 1916. Archy, a cockroach and self-declared poet, was the supposed author of the columns, and Mehitabel was an alley cat and a recurring subject of Archy's poetic mediations. Marquis's stories are in the public domain, which some of you may notice is a place I tend to borrow from rather liberally when I come up with my own projects.

Tom Hopper is a cat, a poet, and a resident of a library, and, as the result of a youthful accident, is missing one of his forepaws. He stalks and eats the various other animals that inhabit the library, writes poetry, and composes stories about himself on the library typewriter. (His writing style, like Archy's, is conspicuously missing upper-case letters; In this instance, it is not out of some fascination with e.e. cummings, but instead because his lack of one forepaw makes it impossible for him to hit the shift key.)

Tom Hopper's routing is interrupted rather rudely by the appearance of Seamus, a grasshopper from Ireland who stowed away to America in the pocket of actor Liam Neeson, amd who carries with him a matchstick that he wields as a rather devastating shillelagh. Some of the stories are about Tom Hopper and Seamus's battles, and the grudging friendship they develop, whereas some are about the various other creatures who roam around the library, including murderous shrews and stagestruck bats. Most stories have a poem in them, and I am rather fond of all of them, and look forward to returning to writing them.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

UNTIL JUNE 12 of 1991, Subic Bay in the Philippines was a US Naval base. Then Mount Pinatubo erupted, explosively, partially burying the site in smothering volcanic ash and mud and leading to the evacuation of approximately 40,000 troops. But for fans of Rhythm and Blues, the most explosive thing to hit Subic Bay had already come and gone.

LaVern Baker had already returned to the United States after working as the entertainment director of an NCO club for almost 20 years — when Pinatubo detonated, she was just coming off a run on Broadway in Black and Blue, and would soon record songs for the soundtracks to Shag and Dick Tracy.

It was a strange route back to the American music scene for Lavern Baker, a statuesque, hourglass-shaped singer who had been an enormous crossover star of the Fifties. Her hits, which included “See See Rider,” “Jim Dandy,” and “Tweedly Dee,” featured her brashly belting out lyrics over a driving horn section, and often made as great a splash on the pop charts as they did on the R&B charts. While she’s best known for these songs, which were lightweight novelties, collectors tend to point to her less successful releases as being her defining work. As an example, her 1959 cover of Leiber and Stoller’s “Saved” is vintage Baker. The song is a street-corner Salvation Army band affair, in which Baker sings of her past sinfulness and current Christian sensibleness, and Baker’s rollicking delivery makes her hellraising sound enormously more entertaining than her current serious-mindedness.

Baker’s “Voodoo Voodoo” is one of her more obscure numbers — it was released as the b-side to a single in 1961, lacks a production credit, and did not chart. As a result, “Voodoo Voodoo” rarely appears on Baker retrospectives. It’s a pity, as the song is, bar none, the best ever made about bewitchment, a recurring theme in pop music. When jazz approached the subject, it tended to look at romantic enchantment as something genteel; Sinatra, for example, sang of being “bewitched, bothered, and bewildered,” which, from him, sounded like a rather pleasant state of affairs. But, for rock and roll, supernatural romantic entrapment was usually humiliating — the narrator of The Searchers’ “Love Potion Number 9” is so intoxicated with his concoction that he rushes out and kisses a police officer. For Baker, the results are literally hysterical. Over a staccato saxophone intro that sounds as though it were spitting in disgust, Baker, singing at an alarming tempo, cries out “I thought I was a snake, I started crawling on the ground; I thought I was a dog, I started barking like a hound.” The song is noisy and quick — it lasts under a minute and a half — and features a layered, insistently rhythmic arrangement typical of Phil Spector, who was almost certainly the song’s uncredited producer.

Baker speedily delivers her tale, and it’s nerve-wracking: she has rejected the advances of a man who, seeking revenge, has turned to magic, creating something called “oogly” out of teeth, leopard spots, giraffe necks, and zebra stripes. Sprinkled under her bed, this unction causes her to lapse into a frenzy, “stumbling and a-fumbling” Baker tells us, “like a flip mighty goon.”

Baker’s own romantic experiences, unfortunately, would be as humiliating as those described in the song. In the late Sixties, Baker went overseas to perform for soldiers stationed in Vietnam. While she was away, her husband divorced her. Her betrayal was compounded by her agent, who dropped her, and Baker slipped into obscurity. A 1969 medical stay in the Philippines stretched out over decades, until Atlantic records invited her back to the United States to attend their 40th anniversary commemoration in 1988. This led to renewed interest in the singer, and she worked constantly until her death in 1997.

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THE FIVE JONES BOYS, an Illinois group that relocated to Hollywood in the 1930s, were part of a long tradition of African-American tight harmony vocal groups that emerged from gospel. Using simple percussion and a careful blending of voices, African American a cappella vocalists were able to duplicate the sounds of a larger band — even impersonating musical instruments (“Mr. Ghost Goes to Town” contains several convincing horn solos). Bands such as the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers were able to find national audiences using such techniques, but none ever duplicated the strangeness of this number. “Mr. Ghost” has an infectious melody based around a deceptively simple bass line, over which the Jones Boys occasionally let out unearthly howls.

The lyrics cheerfully tell of a dapper specter’s careful preparation for a night of “stepping.” “He’ll shake his bones to hot saxophones,” the Five Jones Boys inform us, calling to mind Ub Iwerks famous 1929 cartoon “The Skeleton Dance,” in which row after row of corpses pull themselves out of their graves to shimmy to a jazz band. The Jones Boys end the song with a little capper to let listeners know how entertaining this all must be to their titular spook: The lead singer launches into peals of sinister, hysterical laughter.

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CHARLES LUDLAM, the founder of the Ridiculous Theatre company included in his mission statement his intentions to create a theater that was "without the stink of art," and this phrase of his has stuck with me. It goes a long way toward explaining why I tend to avoid the poetry section of most bookstores, where, alphabetized among the works of genuinely good poets, such as Blake, are thousands of self-involved little tomes. There is an unbearable floridity to most contemporary poetry, a groaning and wheezing desire to transform the plainest material -- too often in the form of pure autobiographical -- into something profound. Poets foist upon us sentence after sentence of banality wrapped in gasping, dizzy language, as though, through the sheer force of plumping up a bad idea with busy words, the idea can be made grand.

I don't much care for grand ideas anyway. I say take care of the poem and let the profundity take care of itself. Let me offer up a quote to demonstrate exactly what it is about many poets that makes me wish ill upon them. Here is a paragraph from a book by author and poet Natalie Goldberg, from a book called Wild Mind. Goldberg writes:

"One day after we knew each other a while -- Jim was ten years older than I, a veteran poet -- he turned to me. 'Who gave you permission to be a poet? Was it Allen Ginsburg?' I had studied with Ginsburg the summer before. 'Someone along the way has to give you permission.'"

I will not go into detail right now the romantic fallacy that produces statements like this, except to say that it is evidence of a particularly despicable form of artistitis. Here is an illness in which people who do very mundane creative acts suddenly get it into their heads that they are the most special people in the world, and I, for one, can't bear it. There is craft to poetry, yes, and I would recommend that anyone who decides to set pen to paper, even to compose very bad poems, familiarize themselves with this craft. But poetry is not some secret cabal, the entrance to which is offered during some magical hippy moment by one beautiful creative soul recognizing another and granting access.

Far from it -- although it sometimes seems mired in the depths of morbid self-absorption in the United States, if you start scrounging through the ditches, you find a lot of it. Try kicking up clods of dirt on the playground or leafing through back issues of Stars and Stripes magazine. You'll quickly discover that children and soldiers, as just two examples, are quite happy to use rhymed verse. And there is often great cleverness there as well -- sly satires, broad parodies, and devious little experiments is both form an content. You won't find any of these poems sitting alongside Blake, Byron, and Jewel on the poetry shelf of your local bookstore, but who cares? For my tastes, as I have said in the past, it is for the best that some forms of poetry fall below critical radar. Give them too much credibility, and pretty soon they will be confronting each other to ask where they got permission to write nursery rhymes and barracks doggerel.

In fact, I recently stumbled across a form of poetry that is important exactly because it is disreputable. I speak of a style of Russian doggerel called the chatushki, it is not likely to be the toast of any artistic circles. Consider this example, translated from the Russian by some semi-anonymous online poster:

My dear darling - he's so nice,
He gave me four small pubic lice.
But how to feed them - how, how, how?
Because they're so very tiny now.

I doubt very much that the author of that verse ever begged permission from an established poet -- Pushkin, for example -- for the opportunity to compose that squalid little poem. Or consider the following:

My sweet darling, out of grief,
Punched a hole through three boards with his cock.
This will strengthen year by year,
The power of the Soviet block.

I must say, my appreciation for the original poem is compounded by the awkwardness of the translation. I do not know Russian, and so I cannot say how these translations compare with the original. I would be very disappointed, however, if the original poems were less vile in content, or less awkward in structure. Here are poems that thrive in an entirely oral tradition -- but for occasional online collections, there is no established publishing environment for the chatushki, neither are the authors of such poems generally known. Instead, the travel by word-of-mouth, like dirty jokes, which they often resemble. Consider the following:

Little Nickie is very sad:
doesn't want to ride moped,
doesn't want to ride his horse
wants to have an intercourse.

There are similar traditions of bawdy poems in almost every culture, of course. However, the chatushki has a special place in Russian culture. After all, where else would so vile a poetic form find itself celebrated in a concerto for an orchestra by a virtuoso composer? Russia's foul poetic tradition, in the meanwhile, formed the basis for Rodion Shchedrin's Ozorniye Chastushki. In his notes for the piece, Shchedrin made explicit the importance of this poetic tradition: "In a chastushka there is always humor, irony and a sharp satire of the status quo, its defenders and the 'leaders of the people.' Even such powerful or dreaded names as Marx, Lenin and Stalin have been ridiculed in chastushki."

It's true. The same poetic form used to describe Little Nicki's pathetic condition was also put to service mocking Raisa Gorbachev in the following pair of couplets:

Get off your high horse, Raisa,
You’re no queen, no actress either,
Don’t wear those furs for foreign fans,
In the Soviet Union you’re a flash in the pan.

I should point out at this moment that the Chastushki has a more embedded position in Russian culture that, say, the limerick does in ours. Chastushkis are sung along to simple balalaika melodies in restaurants, and the more pedestrian verses sometimes find their way onto children's albums, such as the Middlebury Russian Choir's Little Golden Bee. Although this album consists mostly of Christmas music and Cossack songs, it also contains this Chastushki:

We fell in love with the cook,
whenever he turns up he brings us butter and cottage cheese.
Our boys are so crazy,
they propose to seven girls in one night!

I would be very much surprised if there isn't a version of this in which the crazy boys in the poem do much more than "propose" to seven girls in one night. But we might expect that there are Chastushkis that lack any explicitly sexual or political content -- there is a long tradition of similar limericks in the West. When you consider that the Chastushkis has a place in a traditional folk festival, Whit Sunday, it makes sense that there some Chastushkis are composed for general audiences. After all, on Whit Sunday it wouldn't so to have a young Russian maidens make an effigy of a woman out of birch branches, bring it to a river, and dance around it while accompanied by an accordion while singing:

No longer sad, no longer listeless,
I'm going to marry Khrushchev's mistress!
I will squeeze with these two hands,
The most Marxist tits in all the land!

Although, when you consider that Whit Sunday is the residue of a fertility ritual, such a poem might be perfectly appropriate.

The beauty of this common but subterranean Russian poetic form is that, because it was sourceless and rarely written, it could flourish outside state control. So the lowly Chastushki became a beloved form for expressing dissent during Soviet years -- Chastushkis mocked everything from communist theory to the Soviet leadership. Consider these two examples of explicitly political Chastushkis:

Red cow of the collective farm, we all admire
How you give us milk and lots of fertilizer.
Instead of being fed, you were sent to school for Marxists,
Labor leaders are still awaiting cream because of this.
The whole collective farm is very, very proud of you,
Oh horned one, you're our very own main attraction true.
For in response to Lenin's own appeal throughout the land,
You heaped a load of fertilizer on the socialist plan.

A sickle left, a hammer right,
This is our own Soviet sign.
You want to forge, you want to reap,
All the same, you won't get beans.

Believe it or not, this poetic form proved so successful that the Soviet government attempted to produce its own versions, but with pro-Soviet messages. From what I understand, they met with limited success.

There's a lesson here for contemporary American poets. Before they sit down to write loquacious odes to their own self-importance, they might look to the anonymous Chastushki. Superficially, this form seems like nothing more than an exercise in giddy pornography. After all, what value can there be in a poetic form that produced the following:

Train is speeding from Tambov
Tailgate lights are on and off,
Girls aboard would -- what the heck! --
Fuck their way through ticket check!

But this lowly, ignored form still packs a hell of a wallop in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Consider the case of Nikolai Markevich and Pavel Mozheiko, both of the newspaper Pahonia in Belarus. Both were sentenced to two-plus years of community service in 2002 for mocking President Alexander Lukashenko from the pages of their paper. Among the items used to convict the men was the following Chastushki, which they presumably composed:

I promised my people that the mafia would be dead.
Congratulate me now -- I’m the mafia’s new head.

Evidence, perhaps, that the most potent, dangerous satire is often the plainest and least self-important. Markevich and Mozheiko took care of their poem -- and it is not a great one by any standards. Nonetheless, the profundity took care of itself -- with a vengeance.

Cheers!

(Originally published April 1, 2003)

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JERON CRISWELL KING, as fans of bad films well know, was the blond-haired, spit-curled, steely-eyed psychic whose redundant dialogue (“Future events such as these will effect you — in the future!”) opened Ed Wood’s notorious ghouls and aliens epic Plan 9 from Outer Space. But how many know that Criswell was also a close friend of Mae West, the platinum-tressed comedic actress who specialized in salacious one-liners? It’s no wonder West was fond of him: he predicted that West would win the 1960 presidential election, and, more than that, he predicted she would fly to the moon five years later, with himself and Liberace as company.

Criswell’s predictions, which he offered in a syndicated column and from a regular television show (and eventually from the guest seat on The Late Show and from several books), tended toward the bizarre. As an example, he prophesied that on November 28 of 1980, a chemical leak in Pittsburgh would turn thousands of residents into marauding cannibals.

West’s prime was long past in the Fifties, when the two became friends. Her once-shocking brazen sexual attitude had retreated into caricature and camp. There was a growing sense of ridiculousness about her that would eventually become her defining characteristic, culminating in the Sixties and Seventies with Diane Arbus’s bizarre photographs of the actress kissing her pet monkey on her oversized bed, her starring role as a disquietingly amorous senior citizen in Sextette, and an ill-considered recording of “Day Tripper.” Perhaps West was attracted to a similar excessiveness in Criswell. Besides his bizarre prognostications, he was given to wearing excessive makeup and throwing regular Sunday brunches during which his stout wife would perform impromptu song and dance numbers in her bikini.

Whatever it was that West saw in the psychic, she was fond enough of him to cook for him, sell him her used limousines for a dollar, and record a song lauding his paranormal talents. West did not have a terrific voice, but she could use it to excellent effect: Listen to her purring sadness in the recording of “Mr. Deep Blue Sea” from 1936’s Klondike Annie as an example. Paired with silly material and burlesque arrangements, however, she sounded like a parody of femininity, as tough she were an intoxicated drag queen impersonating a hot-to-trot flapper. “Criswell Predicts” has this quality — it’s a hoochie coochie number, filled with salacious horn blasts and drum fills that sound meant for bumping and grinding.

We do not know how Criswell felt about this song with its carnival carnality. He may have liked it — after all, his plump wife, Halo Meadows, was a former speakeasy dancer. But, then, rumors had him haunting Hollywood’s Gold Cup restaurant, an infamous cruising ground for homosexuals, so West’s theatrical blowsiness might have been nothing more than a kitsch spectacle to him. He must have been flattered by her lyrics, though, which she reportedly scratched out on a napkin, and were filled with praise for him.

“Criswell predicts what the world’s going to do,” West drawls in the song. “Trips to the stars,” she continues, “vacations on Mars, snow in July, the strangest new cars.” Whatever odd tomorrow Criswell saw, however, couldn’t have matched the ongoing strangeness of his demonstrative movie star friend, whose own future was going to get weirder. Joan Collins describes visiting the actress in the Seventies, a tale that surpasses the soiled Hollywood Gothicism of Sunset Boulevard for sheer ghoulishness. In Collins' tale, West, then in her eighties, dressed in kabuki-styled makeup, a long blond wig to cover a developing humpback, and rubber band wrapped around her face to give her a chin line, didn’t deign to speak with the younger actress, instead sitting on a soiled white sofa, staring sideways at her in silence.

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I LIKE SCARY MUSIC. There, I said it, and I feel better about myself now. I'm actually convinced that there are a few basic themes in music, and these include:

Boy and girl fall in love.
Boy and girl break up.
Big butts are appealing.
Look at what a pimp I am.
I am a monster.
My girlfriend is a monster.
Everyone we know is a monster, so let's do a monster-specific dance.
I'm being chased by a werewolf.
I have had a spell cast on me.
Where did all my blood go?

As you can see, although permutations of the boy/girl/love songs and the "I am a pimp" songs tend to dominate the charts, there is a lot more you can do with supernatural themes. Perhaps that is why there are so many of these songs around, and why they are so excellent.

This is why I am adding this feature to my blog. I shall be reviewing the greatest songs ever written that seem to borrow their inspiration from witches' sabbaths, demonic possession, horror comic books, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and the like. In general, I will be steering clear of death metal and goth music, despite their tendency to incorporate these themes into their songwriting, primarily because these genres are so well covered elsewhere. Instead, I shall be looking into how supernatural themes have been explored in less obvious genres, such as rhythm & blues, lounge music, and Country & Western tunes.

So throw on a cape, spend a few hours practicing the Transylvania Twist, and join me, won't you?

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I AM SOMETIMES COMPARED to author/illustrator Edward Gorey. It is a flattering comparison, and probably fitting, as I draw from nearly identical sources as Gorey for some of my writing. As an example, we both write comic poetry about mangled children. We share a certain fondness for antiquity, particularly the nastily preachy tales of Victorian children's literature. We often differ -- I don't think Gorey was ever found rifling through the preschool section of his local bookstore, trying to uncover obscure nursery rhymes. Neither did Gorey have the taste for the déclassé that I do -- there is an orchidacieousness to his poetry that I do not attempt in my rhymes, preferring, instead, to ape the tough-talking of the street urchin or the wise-guy verbosity of the carnival barker. Further, I am not an illustrator, although we share a taste in puppetry. But God knows I have an appreciation for someone who can blend moralizing, cruelty, and the limerick in the following manner, from his book The Listing Attic:

To his clubfooted child said Lord Stipple,
As he poured his post-prandial tipple,
'You mother's behaviour
Gave pain to Our Saviour,
And that's why He made you a cripple.'

Gorey, whose strange, crabbed, finely detailed illustrations and blackly humorous accompanying text seems perpetually to hang on the walls of college dorm rooms, died in April of 2000, leaving behind a puzzling body of work. There is, as an example, the strangely popular The Gashlycrumb Tinies, his little abecedarian poem about 26 hapless children and their gruesome fates: There is Ernest, who choked on a peach, and poor Neville, who died of ennui. The book is written as a sort of plodding series of rhymed couplets -- the very blandness of the book's structure serves to highlight the extraordinary viciousness of the text. Look, for example, at the first Gorey's first four verses:

A is for AMY who fell down the stairs
B is for BASIL assaulted by bears
C is for CLARA who wasted away
D is for DESMOND thrown out of a sleigh

Speaking of hapless children, there is The Hapless Child, a bitter morality tale in the fashion of Victorian parlor poetry, which tells of Charlotte Sophia, a wide-eyed, blond-tressed innocent whose suffers a series of indignities, falling victim to abusive boarding school teachers and cruel drunks. Eventually Charlotte perishes, blind and malnourished, beneath the wheels of her father's car. Clutching his daughter, for whom he had been searching, the father does not recognize her.

Gorey's collected works, both anthologized and printed in compact, oddly sized book form, usually end up in the humor section of bookstores -- even with their parade of grave-bound children, Gorey's books seemed intended as bleak goofs. His was a world of crumbling mansions and impenetrable, callous actions. This was the very stuff of English mystery novels, which he adored, but rendered nonsensical and absurd. Whatever evil happens in Gorey's books, it happens for our amusement, whether it be the dread-inspiring, uninvited presence of a birdlike, scarf- and tennis shoe-wearing creature in The Doubtful Guest or the tragedy of a family crushed by a rock formation in The Willowdale Handcar.

Gorey's work has been the subject of numerous printed retrospectives, all sounding delighted and baffled by the man's work in equal shares. Gorey himself steadfastly refused to comment on his own work in any meaningful way. When pressed on the meaning of his work, he dismissed the question. "Ideally, if anything were good, it would be indescribable," he once told an interviewer.

While Gorey's works were not beyond description, critics have had to repeatedly reach for antiquated language to find the right word for his illustrations, which seemed set just at the dawn of modernity, when Victorianism was fading and the Twentieth Century was just starting. Karen Wilkin, writing of Gorey's meticulous line drawings in The World of Edward Gorey, pointed out that "Gorey's settings, like his period characters, demand words no longer in common use." She added, "They are rooms where antimacassars protect the upholstery, aspidistras fill the urns, pelmets hang at the windows, and the whatnot is decorated with ormolu."

For author Alexander Theroux, such creaky language is also required to describe the thin, bearded, fur coat-clad Gorey himself. Theroux, a novelist and playwright who authored a popular series of books on colors, was a neighbor and, from the sounds of it, something of a busybody friend of Gorey in Barnstable, Massachusets, where Gorey lived out the last years of his life. Theroux authored The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, an unkempt and fascinating series of recollections of the man. If ever an author was guilty of gadzookery -- the use of archaism in writing -- it is Theroux. Perhaps inspired by the mannered, antique world that Gorey created, as well as by the fussy eccentricity of Gorey himself, Theroux has written a book dense with sentences that willfully defy rules 6 and 14 of Strunk and White's guide to style: Do not overwrite and avoid fancy words. As an example, describing a recurring image in Gorey's work, Theroux fashions this dense sentence:

"Demireps with eyes rounded by kohl -- most women in his books, the elegant ones certainly, are as identifiable for their black eye-liner as Claudia Cardinale -- stare hatefully at children."

This could result in an unreadable volume, but, thankfully, the results are witty and strange but entirely understandable. It helps that Theroux is dealing with a fascinating subject, and one for whom he clearly has considerable affection. He makes it his task to sift through errant memories and scraps of interviews with Edward Gorey in order to construct a small, warm, weird portrait of the man. While Gorey fans have long known of the illustrator's obsession with television -- he was said to watch dozens of hours per day -- how many knew that Gorey had a great fondness for Buffy the Vampire Slayer? And while Gorey's love of the ballet is renowned -- he religiously attended the New York City Ballet, until Balanchine retired, prompting Gorey's own move to Cape Cod -- but how many know of his equally passionate love of Oreo cookies? His hatred of fruitcake? How many know that he wrote and directed puppet shows in his waning years? Who, but somebody such as Theroux, who made it his habit to sit opposite Gorey whenever he saw the man at a restaurant, would be able to relate Gorey's scorching, petty dismissals of popular culture figures such as Martha Stewart ("Get me a big mallet!"), Kathie Lee Gifford ("Her facial contortions would be excessive on Daffy Duck"), or Glenn Close ("sexless as a tea bag")?

There is a sense of Gorey as a real, albeit very weird, person in Theroux's book, a palpable sense of his character, which has previously been absent in works about the illustrator. Gorey, as a person, was a maddening mix of droll eccentric and rueful crank. Theroux steers clear of speculation about anything Gorey himself demurred from discussing. He touches on, but does not discuss, Gorey's reported homosexuality. Instead, Theroux's presentation of Gorey is as a somewhat hermetic aesthete with little interest in social interaction, but that it provided him the opportunity to spout off. Otherwise, the Gorey that Theroux gives us is, well, sexless as a tea bag.

Gorey was a frequent demurrer, failing to discuss his private life or even his own work in any consistent way, dismissing the subjects as though they were a horrendous bore. But Theroux gives us a man of odd passions, and Gorey never demurred from discussing his vast, ranging interests, from bean-bag toys to silent films. Gorey was a collector of strange things and a connoisseur of easily dismissed culture -- a fact of the man that I greatly appreciate. His interests often colluded to produce ghastly works, but I appreciate that all the more. After all, as the Worst Poet in the World, I find it heartening to discover that a fervent audience might sprout up around a man who would compose a limerick like the following, also from The Listing Attic:

There was a young curate whose brain
Was deranged from the use of cocaine;
He lured a small child
To a copse dark and wild,
Where he beat it to death with his cane.

As with filmmaker John Waters' autobiographical essays, with Theroux's character portrait of Edward Gorey we are given a glimpse into the process by which a witty mind can turn trash into art. Gorey's stories and illustrations, disconnected from the everyday by their affected antiquity and their perverse subject matter, have puzzled fans for years. Theroux searches for the source of Gorey's art, and finds it in soap operas, popular movies, and trashy mystery novels -- unexpectedly common sources. At the end of his book, Theroux recounts a brief discussion in which he quizzed Gorey on his inspiration: "I asked him, awkwardly, as I recall, why he thought that stark violence and horror and terror were the uncompromising focus of his work.

"'I write about everyday life,' came Gorey's simple reply, out of a shadow."

(Originally published March 28, 2003)

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SAILOR MARTIN'S THEME SONG, a melancholy Hawaiian number about a hut on the beach occupied by a certain drunken sailor with a large number of naughty tales to tell.

Up until now, I've been creating these songs by scouring the internet for MP3s of 78 RPM records that are in the public domain, but, in this instance, I actually went out and purchased a 78 at the wonderful Vintage Music Company in South Minneapolis, near the intersection of Cedar Avenue and 38th Street. The record is called "Ua Like - Noa Like," and was recorded by Ferera's Hawaiian Instrumental Quartet for Columbia Records. Near as I can tell, the record was released sometime around 1917.

I played the 78 on a record player I own that comes with a USB cable and imported it into my computer using Audacity, which I then used to clean up the sound file, following that with two programs, ClickRepair and DeNoise, to remove some of the scratches and surface noise. I then imported this sound file into Garage Band. I recorded original lyrics onto my Casio Exilim digital camera by singing while filming myself in digital video mode, stripped the sound file off the video in Quicktime, and then cleaned the file up a little in Audacity. Then I combined them all in Garage Band. The lyrics are as follows:

"THE SONG OF SAILOR MARTIN" LYRICS:

On an island paradise is Sailor Martin
In a hut upon the beach; old and spartan
Let's go see him, you and me, bring the rum now
He'll tell us tales of the sea; won't you come now?

Sailor Martin, o Sailor Martin
The sea calls you by your name
While you are sleeping
And the ocean it knows
The secrets you're keeping
Tales whispered from Moscow to Beijing

How many women have there been? Can you name them?
How many sins did you commit? Will you claim them?
What's in your cup, Martin, o can I pour some?
As you tell us ribald tales of exotic foursomes.

Sailor Martin, o Sailor Martin
There's a tale in every empty rum drink
He's got stories so won't you please come drink
On an island paradise

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THERE ARE FEW TRADITIONS left nowadays. After all, what can you say about a world in which people end their cell phone conversations with a cheery shout of "One"? For crying out ... it's "one love," you knucklehead.

I know that I am not somebody to complain. While most people live their lives by the clock and by long-established rituals, I pretty much make it up as I go along. I don't recall the last time I owned an alarm clock, and I don't recall the last time it mattered. I fall asleep at random hours, especially nowadays, as I have recently developed a childlike refusal to go to sleep. I wake whenever I feel like it, which means my days include frequent dozing off, sometimes on my floor, followed by me leaping awake to noodle on one project or another.

Even here, I am hardly a paragon of consistency. I might twirl pistols for half an hour, or I am equally likely to peck away at a story that is long past its deadline. I wander out of my apartment to buy a few dollars worth of food, and then panic about my ongoing joblessness and dwindling funds. I then race home to scour the Internet for possible employment. Hours later, I will remember that I bought myself food, and only then get around to eating it.

I shower when I remember, I tidy up infrequently, I go six months between haircuts, and I never remember what day of the week it is. In other words, I am far from the model of a man steeped in tradition. But don't let this fool you -- the traditions that I do have, a cling to with a desperation engendered by the very unlikeness of me having any habits at all. I might not brush every night before I go to bed (although I try to, God knows I try), but, man alive, don't try and stop me when I am in the mood for a bawdy song. And I am always in the mood for a bawdy song.

Just like strumming a ukulele, which is a thing I do often enough that it has become one of my defining characteristics, the bawdy song (or hash song, as it is sometimes known) is a subject I return to so frequently that it is something of a Ukulele King cliché. As in: You know, the Ukulele King? Writes plays? Yodels? Sings dirty songs? It is a subject that has possessed me for a half-decade now -- and was the prime subject of my short-lived poetry journal, Doggerel -- and I am glad of it. There are scant few of us with a passion for the bawdy song nowadays. There is author Ed Cray, who collected them for his book The Erotic Muse. There is the British poet Llewtrah, a frequent contributor to Doggerel, who wrote poems so hair-raisingly filthy that even I hesitated at publishing them. There are a handful of spirited folk musicians who make the bawdy song a large part of their repertoire. There is me. And, before he died in 2000 at age 68, there was Bill "The Fox" Foster. And that's about it. I might cling to few traditions, but this one is dying, and so it needs clinging to.

Some of you might remember Foster. In its first few seasons, Bill "The Fox" Foster presided over Comedy Central’s notorious The Man Show as its mascot and inspiration. A grinning, wrinkled man in a blue military jacket and bright red bandleader’s cap (that's him in the center of the photo in the upper left-hand corner of this page), Foster stood behind an upright piano throughout the show holding two mugs of beer in his hands. With a cry of "Ziggy socky ziggy socky, hoy! Hoy! Hoy!" Foster ended each episode by dumping both mugs down his throat -- for 25 years he held the title of "the world’s fastest beer drinker." It was a self-declared title, to be sure, but I, the Ukulele King, the Worst Poet in the World, have a fondness for self-declared titles.

On The Man Show, Foster sat at his piano and played, calling out sing-along-style parodies of popular standard with crass lyrics and crasser choruses, as he had for decades at his own bar in Las Vegas, the Fox Inn. If "The Man Show" could be criticized for its returning to winking, leering misogyny (the closing credits featured scantily clad women jumping on trampolines), it deserved also to be recognized for reclaiming the lost, grand drinking tradition of the bawdy song, and, in particular, for briefly popularizing Foster. The Fox cheerily offered a return to a lost form of pub entertainment that amounted to getting really smashed with your friends, gathering around the piano and hoarsely singing the sorts of songs that would make a whore blush. Records of bawdy songs date back to Shakespeare, and many of the most famous come from the British Isles. The poet Robert Burns was famous for his love of off-color ballads; one of his most famous compositions is called "Nine Inch Will Please a Lady," and included lines such as "Come rede me, dame, come tell me, dame. My dame come tell me truly, What length o’ graith, when weel ca’d hame, Will sair a woman duly?"

In the ensuing years, bawdy songs have become more understandable (graith? Sair?). They seemed to reach their heyday during World War II, when American G.I.s spent their furloughs drinking in European brothels while singing songs with titles like "Cemetery Sue." ("They say a hard man is always good to find. If he’s three days dead then Sue don’t mind. Ask her what she wants and she’ll say she’ll have a dose of rigor mortis from a fresh cadaver.") Unfortunately, as jukeboxes became common in the 1950s, they edged out the piano that had always stood in the corner of a saloon, bringing an end to the long tradition of hammering out filthy melodies with your mates on a Saturday night.

I have spent years inviting loyal drinkers to return to this lost tradition. It takes some diligent research at the local V.F.W., but eventually you should be able to corner some decrepit veteran who can teach you a dozen or so galling verses. Foraging through thrift stores should also help, as the record bins occasionally produce lost treasures like Oscar Brand and David Sear’s Bawdy Hootenanny or Sid "Hardrock" Gunther’s Songs They Censored in the Hills. Additionally, most fraternities keep a steady supply of blue lyrics on hand in the back of their new pledge books, although rarely will you find a fraternity brother who can sing any of the songs. Admittedly, when I briefly belonged to a fraternity (Sigma Alpha Mu at the University of Minnesota; our parting was not amicable), nobody actually knew the melodies to the filthy songs at the back of their pledge book. The songs were holdovers from the end of World War Two, when dozens of veterans went to college on the GI bill, joined up with fraternal organizations. They then remade them in the image of their military years, including the foul songs they had sung in the Pacific theater and while flying missions over France.

As a last resort, the intrepid fan of bawdy songs might consider joining a secret society. Groups such as the Freemasons were notorious for the breadth of their collections of wicked lyrics, which they would sing in close, four-part harmony -- I have spent years trying to get Omaha's Beehive Lodge to return my calls, but most Masonic organizations are currently empty but for a few septuagenarians. I imagine they want to call me back, but simply cannot remember to do so, and these makes me fear that they might no longer remember any of the foul ditties they sang in their youth.

I have had to rely on the Internet. A simple search on Google (and -- hey! -- there is a Google search button on this very page!) using keywords like "hash song" and "bawdy ballad" turns up a veritable cornucopia of melodic licentiousness, such as the Bawdy Ballad Index. If you are looking for songs with titles like "Blinded by Turds" and "My God How the Money Rolls In," the Internet might be your only resource.

So practice your piano scales until you can make chords simply by banging your fists down on the keyboard, start memorizing the lyrics to "Beastiality's Best," and begin lugging your Casio portable synthesizer to the bar with you on weekends. If you do not take responsibility for the revival of this glorious drinking tradition, it will die with this generation, and then who will teach or grandchildren the verses to "The Rajah of Astrakhan," which begins:

There was a Rajah of Astrakhan,
A most licentious lout of a man,
Of wives he a hundred and nine,
Including his favourite concubine.
One day when there was no-one at hand,
He called his warrior, one of his band,
"Go down to my harem, you lazy swine,
And fetch my favourite concubine."

I close now with a bawdy song of my own, one I sing when I play Ukulele, and might refer to the ukulele, or, in the best tradition of the hash song, might refer to something else entirely. With a nod to Burns, here is a composition of my own:

My Great Long Strumming Thing

I met her at a fairground;
Her great beauty did I see.
But what could I offer her?
O ugly, wretched me!
I am not a handsome man,
I do not work or sing.
The only thing that I could offer her
Was my great long strumming thing.

She introduced me to her girlfriends
And we agreed to meet for tea,
But I forgot the biscuits I'd bought
O stupid, thoughtless me!
I felt quite like a fool then,
As no cookies did I bring.
The only thing that would give them joy
Was my great long strumming thing.

We met then with her mother
And with her sisters three.
They peered then down their noses
And did not think much of me.
I did not have a dime to my name
And had not worked since spring,
And the only thing that impressed them
Was my great long strumming thing.

I took her to the garden
And dropped down on my knee
And begged her then to be my bride
And asked her to marry me.
I don't want to wed, she said,
And I don't want no ring.
All I want is another look
At your great long strumming thing!

Cheers!

(Originally published March 26, 2006)

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SYNOPSIS: Iron Dong is a satire of the film Iron Man in the form of an adult screenplay. This is the tale of Tony Dork, millionaire sex toy manufacturer, who is kidnapped and badly injured, and must have a powerful generator installed in his groin to keep his manhood from failing. He is put to work building the ultimate sex toy, but instead uses spare parts to build a super-suit, powered by his supercharged manhood. Soon, he finds he must do battle with his crooked business partner, Ohmymya Stain, who has also built a super-suit, and plans to sell it, and other sex toys, to the non-sexy.

DOWNLOAD: Download a PDF of the 23-page script Iron Dong here. To read it, you must have Adobe's free PDF Reader, available here.

AVAILABILITY: Iron Dong is currently available for purchase. Contact the author.

SAMPLE DIALOGUE:

Tony Dork stands in his basement, dressed in his Iron Dong
uniform. Tepper Titts stands opposite him. Tony slaps his
forehead.

TONY DORK
So you're saying that my
business partner, Ohmymya
Stain, has been trying to
steal the company out from
under me?

TEPPER TITTS
That's exactly what I'm
saying, Tony! I went to the
office and broke into his
computer!

TONY DORK
Wow!

TEPPER TITTS
He's been selling your sex
toys to bad people, Tony;
people who abuse them.

TONY DORK
Like who?

TEPPER TITTS
Like nerds, Tony. A whole
group of nerds brought some of
your vibrators to a
Renaissance Faire!

TONY DORK
No! They are only supposed to
be used by sexy people!

TEPPER TITTS
It's even worse, Tony. The
nerds filmed themselves and
put the video online.

TONY DORK
How could they?

TEPPER TITTS
It made sexy people too sick
to have sex for a week.

TONY DORK
The fiends!

COMMENTS: Iron Man, the film based on the Marvel comic, grossed $102 million this past weekend, making it by far the top-grossing film (the next best-selling film, Made of Honor, only pulled in $14.8 million.) And so, by virtue of its popularity, Iron Man has become the first film to be adapted into an adult satire as part of the My Porn Year project. I wrote the script over the past few days using an online scriptwriting site called Zhura, which makes formatting a script very easy, although I worry they may toss me off the site when they figure out what I'm up to.

This was a fun script to write, and I am both proud and embarrassed of it, as it is exceptionally goofy. There is a moment when the main character goes off on an extended tirade about denying nerds access to sex toys, and I want to make it clear that this is meant is jest, so please, nerds, don't get angry and fling your pointy dice at me.

As I mentioned when I started this, the script itself is somewhat tame, and may disappoint those of you who are looking for pure titillation. I tend to end scenes simply by writing "They have sex," and then leaving it up to whoever might direct and star in it to fill in the details. Nonetheless, the script does draw from the conventions of pornography for its humor, and also includes a number of off-color jokes, and so may not be appropriate for work.

Really, my primarily source of reference in writing these scripts are the satires of films that Mad Magazine excelled at, although, unlike in Mad Magazine, my characters wind up sleeping with each other. Nonetheless, the point of this is to create something very silly, and I think I have succeeded admirably.

MORE FROM MY PORN YEAR.

I AM OF THE OPINION that troubled times require extraordinary lightness to bear, and these are troubled times. With this war, it would be easy to give into pessimism and fretfulness on one hand, or to surrender to bloodlust and jingoism on the other. I spent my day yesterday dwelling on one death, and, as of last night, the United States government has compounded that death by thousands. Whether you support this war or not, do not be deceived: the greatest number of dead will be that of the Iraqi citizenship that we claim to be freeing. They will die under rubble and in fire, and their deaths will be ugly and galling. They will be "dismembered, eviscerated, and killed" in the words of war correspondent Chris Hedges, and many of them will be children. This is the plain fact of the thing, even if we will never see it. And even those of us who support the war should recognize this, and be awed by it, and speak of this fact with the utmost respect. What occurs now in Iraq is terrible beyond our capacity to imagine it, and we prove ourselves to be nothing but schoolyard bullies with crippled souls when we celebrate it.

War is a grave exercise and demands a capacity to mourn for the dead of even those we fight against. There is an apocryphal story told of the crossing of the Red Sea, in which, after the waters part to allow the Hebrews to pass, then sweep closed again to drown the pursuing Egyptians, the Hebrews begin to celebrate. God's voice booms down from the Heavens, stopping them. "How dare you celebrate?" he demands. "Do you not know that these were also my children?"

Yesterday began with a drowning. An old drowning, dating back to October, but news to everybody. I received word from that on Monday police pulled a friend's body from a river. This friend disappeared five months ago and had a history of severe depression, so the news that he flung himself into frigid autumn waters was not a complete surprise. I had hoped for a better outcome, but was instead met with the news that a friend is dead. And so it is with the world. There is war, and there is suicide, and for me, yesterday, there was both.

But this is not a time when it will do to be morose. Although I do not identify myself as a humorist, perhaps it would be best for me to attempt such a thing now, at least to help settle my own unstill mind. Humor is a great salve, an unction against despair; it is why somebody like Dorothy Parker, who suffered a notoriously bleak and agonized psyche, was, on the surface of things, relentlessly witty. It is easy to dismiss her wit as a neurotic tic, a shallow defense against depression. I find it neither neurotic nor shallow -- were it either, she would not have used her scabrous humor to so directly address her own gloomy madness in poems such as the following:

Razors pain you
Rivers are damp
Acids stain you
Drugs cause cramps
Guns aren't lawful
Nooses give
Gas smells awful
You might as well live

No, for Parker, humor was anodyne. And, just now, I need a little of that pain-numbing wit. I need to stare into the face of what aches and frightens me just now, and I need to laugh at it. And so today's subject, long one of my favorites, is epitaphs.

There is, after all, something heartening about discovering that some gravestones offer up a little dark humor, although this goes against our generally dismal attitude toward the subject of mortality. It speaks well of us as a species that humans treat each new birth as an astounding miracle and treat death as a heartbreaking tragedy, when, in fact, the two are the only experiences so utterly common that they are shared by everything that lives. The only thing I know of my future is that it brings my death and the death of everyone I know, unless my most wishful prediction -- for a future in which science has eliminated death -- comes true. But we do not treat death as common, we treat it as a stranger, and we fear it and address the subject as one that must be spoken of in hushed, awed whispers. Appropriately so sometimes: those who are dying now in Iraq, soldiers and civilians alike, do not deserve to have their deaths treated as objects of fun, as meaningless inevitabilities that for some -- them -- came sooner rather than later.

But there are times when it is best to laugh at death. I do not know whether it was at the request of the deceased that a Georgia tombstone reads "I told you I was sick!", but God bless whoever was responsible. Certainly, Ellen Shannon of Girard, Pennsylvania, could not have predicted that her tombstone would be carved with bitterly ironic words, explaining that Shannon "was fatally burned March 21, 1870 by the explosion of a lamp filled with 'R.E. Danforth's Non-Explosive Burning Fluid.'" Would Shannon have appreciated such an epitaph? Perhaps, if she had a good sense of fun, and did not mind that her own unexpected death, which must have been terrible indeed, could be made light of when it was done. Whether she did or not, epitaphs are made for the living, not for the dead, and I appreciate the keen sense of irony that went into writing such a thing, even if Shannon would not have.

Some epitaphs are simply hateful, a subject I have mentioned in the past, along with printing my own hateful epitaph. Some die unloved, and those that bury them see their gravestones as a final opportunity to mock the despised. Take Tom Smith, who was buried in Newbury, England, in 1742, and whose gravestone takes great pains to display as much apathy as possible toward the man's death: "Tom Smith is dead, and here he lies, Nobody laughs and nobody cries; Where his soul's gone, or how it fares, Nobody knows, and nobody cares."

Or consider the case of a Welland, Ontario tombstone, which not only mocks the corpse beneath it, but further pokes fun at the living women of Ontario, whose virtue, it seems, was not unblemished: "Here lies all that remains of Charlotte, Born a virgin, died a harlot. For sixteen years she kept her virginity, A marvellous thing for this vicinity."

As far as anyone can tell, people have been writing epitaphs as long as they have been marking the graves of the dead. The ancient Egyptians stamped epitaphs on funerary cones. These were rather bland affairs, mostly consisting of prayers to deities for the safeguarding of the deceased. Most of the Middle East practiced the art of the epitaph in the age of antiquity -- Aramaic epitaphs date back as far as 100 BC.

But we must look further west a poetic flourishing in this art. The Greeks and Romans were great ones for writing epitaphs. The prolific Greek poet Simonides practiced the art of epitaphs as a purely literary exercise. His famous ode to the fallen soldiers of the battle of Thermopylae was never meant to be carved into a tombstone, but has, nonetheless, commemorated the dead of that battle, and of many subsequent battles. It seems appropriate to cite it today: "Go tell the Spartans, Thou that passes by, That faithfully to their precepts, Here we lie."

The Greeks liked to meditate when composing epitaphs, even their own. When the philosopher Plato sat down to compose his own, he must have been in a particularly meditative mood, as he didn't bother to so much as name himself or his accomplishments. Instead, he modestly said this of his forthcoming grave: "I am a shipwrecked sailor’s tomb; a peasant's there doth stand: Thus the same world of Hades lies beneath both sea and land."

The Romans, by contrast, were men of accomplishment, and their epitaphs tended toward a literalness that is of great interest to contemporary historian, but is rather dull to anybody else. Occasionally, though, inspired by great feats, Roman poets would try their hand at literary epigraphs. In the 1st Century AD., the Roman poet Martial composed the following epitaph to a deceased charioteer: "I am Scorpus, the glory of the roaring circus, the object of Rome's cheers, and her short-lived darling. The Fates, counting not my years but the number of my victories, judged me to be an old man."

The earliest English epitaphs tend to likewise be fairly literal -- and disappointingly scant -- lists of dates and a few deeds, perhaps influenced by Rome's occupation of Britain. Once in a while, a poetic flourish is attempted, but these are usually humorless affairs. A grave from Thornbill, dating back to the 14th century or earlier, reads "Bonys emongg stonys lys ful steyl gwylste the sawle wandens were that God wylethe." If you squint a little, this is almost intelligible. In modern English it reads "Bones among stones lie full still, whilst the soul wanders whither God willeth."

It is shortly after this time that we start seeing hints of humor in epitaphs. The Black Plague influenced the art of the 15th century, creating entire genres of art inspired by the phrase Memento Mori (Remember, You Will Die), which included Danse Macabre illustrations of merry dead dancing around the living, engaging them in satirical dialogues. This grim humor found its way into poetry -- its legacy is so strong that many, wrongly, still believe that it survives in the "Ring Around the Rosie" doggerel that is now common in nursery rhymes. It also found its way onto tombs, such as the following, commemorating the deaths of Edward and Mabel Courtenay, who died in 1419 of the plague:

What wee gave, wee have;
What wee spent, wee had;
What we left, we lost.

All right, so it's not a laugh a minute. But this sort of epigrammatic approach paved the way for future pithy epigrams that spoke, with a bit of sharpened wit, on the subject of death. Indeed, wit itself is the subject of the grave of Mrs. Aphra Behm, who died in 1689, and had this to say about the subject:

Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be
Defence enough against Mortality.

One cannot tell whether Lord Byron laughed or sobbed when he penned this ode, to be inscribed on the grave of Boatswain, his beloved dog -- I suspect he did a little of both:

Near this spot
are deposited the remains of one
who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.
This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery,
if inscribed over human Ashes,
is but a just Tribute to the memory of
Boatswain, a DOG
who was born in Newfoundland, May 1803,
and died at Newstead, Nov 18, 1808.

We are now in the era of the Romantics, when death was both a subject for determined meditation and ironic foolery. This was a period, after all, that still suffered the legacy of graveyard poetry. This was a genre that flourished in the 18th century and consisted mostly of rhymed broodings about ghosts, ruined churches, and wailing nuns (all of whom would make the leap from poetry to literature in the form of the Gothic novel). Here's a particularly ponderous example, from "The Grave" by Scottish poet Robert Blair:

Well do I know thee by thy trusty yew,
Cheerless, unsocial plant! that loves to dwell
'Midst skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms:
Where light-heel'd ghosts, and visionary shades,
Beneath the wan, cold moon (as fame reports)
Embodied thick, perform their mystic rounds,
No other merriment, dull tree! is thine.

With all due respects to Blair, it was not the tree that was dull. The Romantics, thank goodness, were not so mired in groaning poetic language. The poet and critic William Wordsworth wrote a rather lively series of essays upon epitaphs titled, appropriately enough, "Essays Upon Epitaphs." (Wordsworth writes, "To be born and to die are the two points in which all men feel themselves to be in absolute coincidence," a phrase that seems oddly familiar to me ... oh yes. Once upon a time, I wrote the following: "It speaks well of us as a species that humans treat each new birth as an astounding miracle and treat death as a heartbreaking tragedy, when, in fact, the two are the only experiences so utterly common that they are shared by everything that lives." It seems so very long ago I wrote those words.)

I cannot confirm that this new literary interest in the epitaph improved the quality of epitaph writing, but I can tell you that, after the romantic era, epitaphs got funnier. The grave of 19th century poet Peter Robinson, as an example, is inscribed with the very words I would want on my own tomb, were it not for the fact that Robinson beat me to it, as well as the fact that I don't wish to die. His grave reads:

Here lies the preacher, judge, and poet, Peter
Who broke the laws of God, and man, and metre.

And then there is this wonderful chastizement to death, offered up on the death of a Mrs. Patridge, who died in 1861:

What! Kill a partridge in the month of May!
Was that done like a sportsman? eh, death, eh?

As this is one of my favorite subjects, I will return to it, but I will close now, first with the deliciously nasty, self-penned epitaph to poet and writer Hillaire Belloc:

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

And lastly with an epitaph of my own, to my friend who took his life, for whom, in this time of war and suicide, I try to find reason to laugh:

You went to the river
and now we know it;
some live above it
you drowned below it.

Cheers to you, my perished friend!

(Originally published March 20, 2003)

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THE HAND WAS QUICKER THAN THE PRIVATE EYE.

Steel gleamed in his finger magically and a lightning bolt left his brown hands.

It flashed across twenty feet and pinned my sleeve to the wall, knocking the gun out of my hand.

"Mon," he breathed in that Jamaican-English voice you hear on a Calypso record, "maybe I make you stone-cold dead."

I said nothing. With death that close, what was there to say?

More Dirty Books!

SYNOPSIS | NOTES | DOWNLOAD | ADDITIONAL MEDIA

SYNOPSIS: Two Groupies follows the sexual misadventures of two young British Invasion fans in Baltimore in the mid-Sixties. Each of the play's seven scenes details another sexual encounter -- sometimes violent, sometimes disappointing, sometimes liberating -- as the play's titular groupies explore the dawn of the Sexual Revolution.

NOTES: The inspiration for this play came from a recording of actual groupies in New York in the late Sixties, The Groupies. The record is unusually frustrating; it's a rambling, gormless chat with two young women, who hint at having a number of really wild stories to tell, but rarely actually get around to telling them. Nonetheless, the record is a tantalizing peek into a unique social phenomenon, and I decided to use it as a jumping off point for spinning my own tale.

Since the subject matter is explicitly sexual, the script is as well -- the play calls for onstage nudity (both male and female) and simulated couplings in almost every scene. Some of this is the result of the continuing influence of exploitation filmmaking on my own writing, as I have been watching an unhealthy amount of grindhouse films from the Sixties and early Seventies, most of which dealt with sex in an aggressive, surprisingly graphic manner. The film's are exploitation, of course, but, as Doris Wishman once said, all film is exploitation. I tried to use some of the form of exploitation filmmaking in this play -- particularly the lurid subject matter and the graphic sexuality -- but throw out the crass cynicism and pornographic greed of the films. In the best grindhouse films, you see filmmakers who are attempting to wrestle with genuine social issues and questions about sexuality, and exploitation was often the only format that allowed such a discussion. Admittedly, many of these films were made with a bare minimum of competence, and so not much of a conversation results. Nonetheless, it is a form of storytelling I find myself drawn to, and one I am sure I will return to as a storyteller.

DOWNLOAD Two Groupies here.

To read the script, you will need a copy of Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. Download it here.

ADDITIONAL MEDIA: Two Groupies makes very specific demands of its actors regarding accents. The two lead characters, as well as a later male character, are written as Baltimoreans, and must speak with a pronounced Baltimore accent. I recommend the early films of John Waters as a reference.

The British characters in the play mostly have regional accents. One comes from Machester, and I recommend the film There's Only One Jimmy Grimble as an excellent resource for researching the Mancunian accent. Two of the plays bandmembers come from Liverpool; any of the early films of The Beatles should provide an excellent reference. One of the British Invasion band members is a Londoner; his accent should be styled after Peter Seller's performance in The Ladykillers. There is also a French character, and, while he comes from rural France, his accent should be a typically Parisian.

More plays of Max Sparber.

It probably says a little something about my fickle nature that 24 hours after ruminating somberly on the sorry state of the world, I have spent the day today obsessed with pirates. I just can't help myself, though. Whenever I have an idle hour, I think of pirates.

They're still around, in case you didn't know it. As an example, they swarm the waters in the Straight of Malacca, a 400 mile long stretch of salt water between Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Forget the old films of flamboyant, tawny men with peg-legs, Devonshire accents, and Jolie Rouge flags fluttering from one of the three masts on their Barque sailing vessel. These pirates pilot high-powered motor boats, carry automatic weapons, and use radar and the Global Positioning System. The high seas are still a lawless land, and the lawless still pirate it.

I don't know how modern day pirates do things, and don't much wish to know. I doubt they elect their captains by voting for one from among their crew, as did the pirates of the Golden Age, during the 17th and 18th centuries. I doubt that modern pirates have an insurance policy, awarding them such things as 400 pieces of eight for the loss of a left leg, as was common practice among the sea dogs of the 1700s. And I very much doubt they gather in the captain's cabin, raise high a flagon of rum, and let loose with hoarse, hearty shanties celebrating their lives. Forgive me if I am being a bit nostalgic, but I think they are worse off as a result.

Pirate songs are very much to my taste. What could be more disreputable? These are, after all, songs that celebrate lives of roguery and debauchery, often in no uncertain terms. We still sing them, even if we don’t know it. That awful "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" song? Pirate! Or, at least, it often shows up on contemporary collections of pirate songs, sometimes with the beer in the lyrics replaced with rum. This might be historically accurate, but seems far too much rum for even the sturdiest pirate to imbibe. But then, pirates were a drunk group, as demonstrated by this lyrics from the song "Mrs. McGraw," in which a pirate's mother, seeing her newly legless son, instantly assumes that it was the result of his drinking:

"Now was ye drunk, was ye blind,
When ye left yer two fine legs behind?
Or was ye out walkin' out on the sea
That tore yer legs from yer knees away?"

Who else would be scolded for drunkenness when they return home limbless, but what else would you expect from a group of lawless adventurers who had, among their favorite shanties, one whose consisted of single sets of rhymed couplets, each extolling the dubious excellence of whisky? I speak of the song "Whisky Johnny," which is unmatched in its swaggering, sodden, wretched alcoholic boasting. Take these two sets of couplets:

Whiskey made me pawn me clothes
Whiskey gave me this broken nose

I wisht I knew where whiskey grew
I'd eat the leaves and the branches too

and, of course, there is this verse, which sums up the song as well as any:

Whiskey here, whiskey there
Whiskey almost everywhere

Ah, for the life of a sailor.

These pirate songs are often great history -- or, rather, they're bad history, but great fun. Let's look at the song "Captain Kidd," which appeared on broadsides shortly after the famed privateer was hanged for piracy on May 1 of 1701 (that's him hanging in the image at the top of the page). The broadside didn't waste much time with the petty details of history, such as the possibility that Kidd wasn't a pirate in the truest sense of the word, but was instead, essentially, an independent contractor hired to track down pirates and reclaim stolen booty. Well, never mind history when you can sing such brutal biographical lines as:

I murdered William Moore, as I sail'd, as I sail'd,
I murdered William Moore, as I sail'd,
I murdered William Moore, and left him in his gore,
Not many leagues from shore, as I sail'd.

And being cruel still, as I sail'd, as I sail'd,
And being cruel still, as I sail'd,
And being cruel still, my gunner I did kill,
And his precious blood did spill, as I sail'd.

There's something strangely inspiring about this sort of lyrical bloodletting -- it's easy to understand why the critic and linguist H.L. Mencken once said, " Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera is infused with this sort of sensibility, as though the highwaymen of John Gay's original Beggar's Opera had been replaced with sea robbers. Brecht and Weill's dingy Thames river is menaced by the brigand Macheath, and their famous song to him, "The Ballad of Mac the Knife," sounds like it is explicity based on sea shanties. This is especially true if you have heard Brecht's own groaning rendition of it, played on a creaky accordion, but just take a peek at the opening lines:

See the shark has teeth like razors
All can read his open face
And Macheath has got a knife, but
Not in such an obvious place

See the shark, How red his fins are
As he slashes at his prey
Mac the Knife wears white kid gloves which
Give the minimum away

But the Brecht/Weill composition that most explicitly draws from the tradition of the buccaneer sea song is "The Ballad of Pirate Jenny," (itself inspiring the name of a contemporary pirate rock band) in which a maid, busily scrubbing a floor, entertains herself with fantasies of violent revenge against her employers, culminating in this swashbuckling sequence:

By noontime the dock
is a-swarmin' with men
comin' out from the ghostly freighter
They move in the shadows
where no one can see
And they're chainin' up people
and they're bringin' em to me
askin' me,
"Kill them NOW, or LATER?"
Askin' ME!
"Kill them now, or later?"

Jenny, of course, answers "now."

I have pirate fantasies of my own, and to take my mind off war, I have been indulging in them today. Specifically, I have been reading about Sadie the Goat, one of history's great female pirates, who could easily have been Jenny's model. Sadie the Goat was a figure strange enough to be a character in Martin Scorsese's recent Gangs of New York, and I do not say this because she could easily have stood toe-to-toe with Daniel Day Louis's flamboyantly violent Bill the Butcher (loosely based on an actual historical character. I say it because Sadie the Goat actually is a character in Gangs of New York. Herbert Asbury's original book, detailing the underworld of Civil War-era New York, lets us in on a little-known bot of historical trivia: Pirates once stalked the peer and the shores of the Hudson and East River -- as many as four or five hundred. Sadie sailed the Hudson in a stolen sloop with a Jolly Roger flag on the masthead, robbing farmhouses and mansions in hamlets like Poughkeepsie. It is hard to imagine what farmers of the era must have thought when a pirate ship rolled up the Harlem River, headed straight for them. Sadie the Goat had read stories about pirates, and believed every one of them, even those that weren't true. She had a fondness for kidnapping people, holding them for ransom, and then making them walk the plank. Prior to the moment the first of Sadie's victim's plummeted into the grimy Hudson, walking the plank had been a historical fiction.

Those of you who have seen Gangs of New York might remember a saloon with a pickle jar of alcohol on its bar, the jar filled to overflowing with severed ears. This was a real bar, the Hole-in-the-Wall, which Ashbury described as a "waterfront dive," and one of those ears belonged to Sadie. She had crossed the bar's legendary bouncer, a six-foot-tall Englishwoman named Gallus Mag, who kept her skirt held up with suspenders and carried a cudgel strapped to her arm. Gallus Mag liked to deal with bar rowdies by knocking them insensible with her club, and then dragging them out of the bar by seizing their ear with her teeth. Protest too much and Mag would keep the ear. Sadie the Goat protested too much. After years of animosity, Sadie went to Mag, begging for forgiveness, which she received on the day the New York police closed down the Hole-in-the-Wall, along with her ear.

I was inspired enough by Sadie's bizarre story to compose my own pirate shanty to her, since, as far as I can tell, she has none of her own, and what a pity. After all, she was an amateur historian on the subject of pirates, and certainly knew that all the best had songs written about them. I feel certain that while she stalked the deck of her own ill-gotten pirate ship, rubbing the nub of flesh that had been her ear and shoving farmers overboard, she must have thought, "One day, this will be celebrated in song."

Well, Sadie, today is your day.

The Ballad of Sadie the Goat

There's a figure doubled over
in the alley by the square
some wonder if she's breathing,
but they leave her lying there
none goes to see about her
none calls to her, they don't dare
though she's old and arthritic
and her clothes she ragged wear

there's a boy he's crossing to her
and he kneels and prods her now
the boy's mother she calls out to him
don't you touch her don't nohow
but the boy he does not listen
and puts his hand upon her brow
and both are quiet briefly
in the shadows in the slough

look she's dead he cries now
look her lips are tight and blue
and the boy he tugs upon her
saying lets take a look at you
and his mother she cries leave her
leave her be boy come here do
but the boy he stand up curious
and takes in a better view

she's just another body
in a fourth ward full of dead
and dead bodies have full pockets
that should be emptied out instead
a nickel will buy you roast beef
and a penny will buy you bread
a corpse with a full pocket
is a boy who sleeps unfed

and this corpse has got a locket
hanging from a golden chain
it's a battered wooden box
that has clattered in the drain
but it must be a thing of value
to be hung from such a chain
and so the boy kicks at the box
and then he kicks and kicks again

its shatters and it opens
and the boy he stoops to see
the contents of the box now
and he grasps out greedily
and his mother she calls to him
do not touch it leave it be
but the boy he does not listen
and his hands they grasp gladly

its an ear he cries out mother
its an ear an ear an ear
and he drops it and runs to her
and she swats him on his rear
and says I told you didn't I eh
I told you to come here
I should beat you but anyway
you nearly caught your death from fear

and the body lies untouched
in an alley on a furrow
and the mother pulls her son away
saying come now lad let's go now
who was she he asks weeping
oh she says, oh, oh, oh now
she was a pirate she was a pirate
and that's all you need to know now

Cheers! And cheers to Sadie the Goat, wherever her wretched spirit may dwell!

(Originally published March 19, 2003)

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ON A WARM SPRING DAY, there are few things Bunny enjoys more than jetpacking to Dave's Popcorn in south Minneapolis, where he can enjoy ice cream and chocolate popcorn.

MORE FROM THE JET PACK TOUR!

SYNOPSIS: Mad about the Boy! is based on a series of gay-themed novelty albums put out by the little-known California-based Camp Records in the 1960s and sold through ads in the back of beefcake magazines of the time. These recordings have since slipped into the public domain, and it is the original recordings that will be used during the performance. The story tells of a milquetoast, deeply closeted gay man in the early Sixties, his unexpectedly exciting life as a door-to-door salesman accidentally exposed to the sexual perversity of his era, and his unrequited crush on an office boy.

HISTORY: Mad About the Boy! was produced November 24-December 17 at Omaha's Blue Barn Theatre. It was directed by Hughston Walkinshaw and starred Brandom Higdem, Jill Anderson, and Nils Haaland.

REVIEWS: "A hilarious and biting sendup of the time before the gay rights movement." -- Omaha World-Herald

"Delightful ... laugh-out-loud ... There’s plenty to love about 'Mad About the Boy!'" -- Omaha City Weekly

NOTES: I promised myself I wasn't going to write any more gay-themed plays for a while, and, in fact, am midway through two plays that fulfill exactly that promise. But then I stumbled upon the Queer Music Heritage site and their collection of MP3 recordings taken from several LPs and 45-inch singles released by Camp Records in the early Sixties, and I guess I just couldn't help myself.

The original recordings are hilarious, campy sendups of easy listening and folk music, with titles such as "Homer the Happy Little Homo" and "Stanley the Many Transvestite," and I got it into my head to create a musical based on these songs, in which the actors simply lip-sync to the original recordings. I approached Hughston Walkinshaw of Omaha's Blue Barn Theatre with the songs and the crassly commercial idea to create a Christmas play out of it, inspired by the incomprehensible success of dreck like Christmas with the Crawfords, which must be one of the laziest assemblages I've ever witnessed, consisting primarily of dialogue culled from Mommy Dearest. Walkinshaw was interested in my play idea, and so I set to writing.

I wrote the play in a rush, scripting all of it in three days while playing Something Weird's sampler DVD behind me. I had decided to set the musical at the time the Camp records were released -- about 1964 -- and base it on exploitation films of the era, and the Something Weird DVD, which includes scenes and trailers from trash spectacles such as Doris Wishman's Another Day, Another Man and the inexplicable juvenile gang film Just For the Hell of It, seemed perfect to set the mood.

In truth, my primary inspiration was Russ Meyer's 1959 film The Immoral Mr. Teas, in which a door-to-door salesman is constantly confronted by the spectacle of female toplessness. The film is considered to be the first "nudie cutie," and is sort of the forerunner of modern pornography, in that, unlike the childbirth, VD, and nudist films that preceded it, Mr. Tease made no attempt to be education. It's only purpose was the spectacle of female pulchritude.

I set out to write a gay version of Mr. Teas, replacing Meyer's topless females with the gay male equivalent of the era: Semi-naked beefcake, and plenty of it. I must say, though, that the once threatening underworld of gay male sexuality seems to have dimmed with time -- beefcake pictures were the primary published erotic spectacle for gay men of the Sixties. However, they seems so innocent now that Mad About the Boy seems about as threatening to me as a Doris Day film, which, with its flawed romance and frequent popular jazz msuical interludes, it sort of resembles. But what the hell. I like Doris Day films as well.

ADDITIONAL MEDIA: The music for Mad About the Boy can be downloaded in MP3 format from Queer Music Heritage, here.

DOWNLOAD Mad About the Boy here.

To read the script, you will need a copy of Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. Download it here.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Note about the Creative Commons license: The script for Mad About the Boy! is available for free download, and may be duplicated in any form and shared freely. Productions of the play must be approved by Max Sparber, the play's author. Contact him through the email address on the right side of this page.

More plays of Max Sparber.

(Originally published March 17, 2003)

HERE WE ARE on the eve of war. This is not a war I want, which puts me in good company, as this is not a war wanted by most of the world, including, in what must be the most underreported story of the century, the President's father. I had not planned to write about this subject here, although it is one that knocks very seriously and somberly around in my brainpan. After all, the Internet is abuzz with the subject of war, and there are Weblogs by skilled journalists who can say what needs saying better than this sorry poet and flippant arts critic ever could. But I was prompted by something today that made me want to write just a few paragraphs about the subject.

Tomorrow, or soon after, it will be war, and it will be war with a starving country, and a war that will mostly affect the old, enfeebled, and children, as do our current sanctions. It is a war that will occur in violation of international law. It is a war that, according to analysts in the CIA, will cause increased terrorism. It is a war that our economy might not survive. It is a war brought about in defiance of public opinion by a president who was not elected, but was instead installed through a judicial coup and voting malfeasance in the very state in which the candidate's brother is governor. And, most terrible of all, it is a war; the last, worst resort of humanity is the first, best option for this government of nobody. These are worrying times for democracy.

I am not a politician, I am a poet, and a poor one at that. But there are resources we poor poets have, and I have decided to make use of it. I have decided to write a bit of political poetry, the sort that used to find their way into newspaper's with great frequency, but a tradition that has mostly faded. Newspaper doggerel isn't an exclusively political tradition -- much of it was meant in fun, such as the once-famous Punch Brothers rhyme -- usually, and wrongly, attributed to Mark Twain -- that the New York Times used to take great pleasure in reprinting in its many variations. Based on an actual street car sign, the poem read as follows:

Conductor, when you receive a fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
Chorus.
Punch brothers! Punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare.

You can see that there's very little to this poem -- and yet Swinburne translated it into French for the Revue des Deux Mondes, which suggests a little something about the popularity of the newspaper doggerel.

As often as these coarse poems were meant as pure frippery -- which was very often, sometimes daily -- they are very much a part of the American tradition of political discourse. At least, they are from that part of American political discourse that believes that bad jokes and strained satire are the best tools in the cause of argument, a position I happen to agree with. In fact, if we look as far back as 1769, we find newspapers printing poems urging Boston's female population to abandon the heavily taxed English tea in favor of a dreadful-sounding concoction made from the redroot tree, which read, in part, as follows:

Throw aside your Bohea and your Green Hyson Tea,
And all things with a new fashioned duty;
Procure a good store of the choice Labradore,
For there’ll soon be enough here to suit ye;
There do without fear, and to all you’ll appear
Fair, charming, true, lovely and clever;
Though the times remain darkish, young men may be sparkish,
And love you much stronger than ever.

One of my favorite works of newspaper doggerel comes from the turn of the 20th Century, when anarchist Emma Goldman was arrested in connection with the shooting of president William McKinley in 1901. I no longer have a reference for where this poem appeared, or even a copy of the poem, but I have it committed to memory. It reads as follows:

I am o so sorry
that our president is dead
and everybody's sorry
so my father said
and the horrid man who killed him
is a-sitting in his cell
and I'm glad that Emma Goldman
doesn't board at this hotel.

Newspaper doggerel also offered fascinating portraits of America, particularly in its early, wild years. Here, reprinted, in part, in David Bristow's wonderful A Dirty, Wicked Town is an example from Harper's Magazine, circa 1969, which mocks my adopted -- and now notably sleepy -- home town of Omaha, and which I read with great delight nowadays.

Hast ever been in Omaha,
Where rolls the dark Missouri down,
And four strong horses scarce can draw
An empty wagon through the town?
Where sand is blown from every mound
To fill the eyes and ears and throat-
Where all the steamers are aground
And all the shanties are afloat?
Where whisky shops the livelong night
Are vending their poison juice:
Where men are often very tight,
And women deemed a trifle loose?
Where taverns have an anxious guest
For every corner, shelf and crack;
With half the people going west,
And all the others going back?
Where theaters are all the run
And bloody scalpers come to trade;
Where everything is overdone
And everybody underpaid?
If not, take heed to what I say:
You'll find it just as I have found it;
And if it lies upon your way,
For God's sake, reader, go around it!

There is much more to write on this subject if newspaper doggerel, and I am sure I will get to writing it. But for now, my mood is black with thoughts of impending violence, and I must step away from my self-declared role as historian of the bad poem. Instead, I must take up pen in my other self-declared role, as the Worst Poet in the World, and offer up my own feeble satire. I will, therefore, pen my own example of verse, styled after my beloved newspaper doggerel, in protest of this abominable waste of human life in which we are about to embark. It's a poor man's weapon, but I am a poor man, and my poor verses will at least be another voice crying out in opposition to an act of destructive foolishness in a world that has seen far too much of destruction and foolishness.

It's War, Boys, It's War

there's fighting that needs fighting
and I'm just the man to do it
my mother wept to hear this
but my father o he knew it
I made a kitsack full lentils
and a pocket full of flask
and I kissed me girly's cheeks
and I set out on me task
I enlisted as a doughboy
and they put a rifle in me hands
and promised me three square and
shipped me off to foreign lands
there's fighting that needs fighting
and after fighting then there's more
and that is why we're fighting
o it's war, boys, it's war

they put me in an office
and put files in me hands
to send to other offices
in other foreign lands
I route mess kits through to Turkey
and route munitions through Kabul
and I ship trucks from Mexico
to a Kuwaiti motor pool
I'd never left me home town
and I'd never seen Paree
but on paper I'm well-traveled
o the places that I see!
there's paper's that need filing
and when they're filed then there's more
and that is why we're filing
o it's war, boys, its war

for every fighting soldier
there are a hundred just like me
in a hundred little offices
from Cairo to Hungary
it costs a million for each platoon
and a million for each enlist
and a million for each kill they make
and a million for each they miss
its an expensive thing we do
when we send our men to fight
we spent three hundred million this morning
we'll spend three hundred more tonight
but there's money that needs spending
and when its spent there's more
and that is why we're spending
o it's war, boys, it's war

I type official letters
to parents and to kin
that are shipped home with the fallen
letters of comfort, letters thin
and printed on onion paper
with an official military sigil
some fight, they say, and die
and are honored, and keep vigil
over those who have yet to die
who have a vigil of their own
to watch and fight and fight
and die far from their native home
but there's dying that needs doing
and when we're dead there's more
and that is why we're dying
o it's war, boys, it's war.

Usually I would end here with a call of "Cheers!" However, this is not a night for cheer. It is a night for prayer. My love to all of you, and may we wake to the best that we hope is possible in this world.

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THE SENSUOUS POLYNESIAN PARADISE SET STRANGE DESIRES ABLAZE!

SENT to fend for themselves on a lush tropical island, the innocent Crampton kids faced voluptuous temptation on every side. Soon pretty Virginia yielded to love-making that turned her soul to water and her flesh to fie.

Young Johnny found paradise in the arms of savage pin-up girls like T'risa. Even Margaret, still practically a child, seemed seduced by the uninhibited games, the feasts that were like orgies, the perfumed and passion-laden atmosphere!

Then their father arrived, alarmed by the turn of events. But with him came gorgeous Arline Moore -- the delightful companion of his middle-aged pleasures. Arline complicated the situation by making advances to an ardent bronze native ...

More Dirty Books!

THIS IS NOT a two-headed duck, although it very much looks like one. No, this is an an old carnival sideshow trick called a gaff, or, in plain talk, a fabrication. Carnival midways generally had a bunch of these, all with their own names and storied history, such as so-called "pickled punks," or what seemed to be carefully preserved babies in jars of fluid, which were usually made of rubber. Some of these were the creations of rogue taxidermists, such as fish with thick coats of hair, or the notorious Fiji mermaid, a fish/monkey hybrid, first displayed by P.T. Barnum himself, and then remade and displayed by hundreds of sideshows, where they can still be found to this day.

This gaff I own isn't quite a spectacular as the Fiji mermaid -- it is, after all, just a duckling with a second head attached. But I'm fond of it, in part because it was created by a man named Mark Frierson, who may be the best manufacturer of traditional sideshow gaffs alive. It was his work that was on display in the movie House of 1000 Corpses, and whose startling work shows up on eBay every now and then. Just one of his gaffs can add a dash of mystery to a small apartment such as mine; I've always felt that wherever you go, there should be a hint of the sideshow.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

SYNOPSIS: Buddy Bentley is a blackly comic thriller detailing the deteriorating relationship between two brothers in the Hollywood Hills in the 1960s, one a psychotic former-child star, the other a pill-addled, neurotic homosexual.

HISTORY: Buddy Bentley was written between fall of 2001 and April of 2005, and has yet to be produced. At the first Great Plains Theatre Conference in May, 2006, Buddy Bentley was the first full-length script to enjoy a staged reading. It was read by the Blue Barn Theatre, with Nils Halland and Hughston Walkinshaw reading the lead roles, and was responded to by Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, and Glynn O'Malley.

NOTES: This is my bleakest play yet, intended as a sort-of male answer to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. The play took more than four years to write, which is an unusually long writing period for me (chelsea, by comparison, was written in three days). I wrote the first two acts rather quickly, and then realized, in the last act, that I had written a play in which I must, necessarily, hurt characters that I had grown to like. As there was no actual deadline to the script, I simply put off finishing it, as the idea of writing the last scene in the play depressed me.

Nonetheless, I am very satisfied with the resulting script. Buddy Bentley was my attempt to write in a nearly forgotten genre: the single-room thriller, the sort of thing that might have been adapted into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And although the script is unpleasant, as thrillers necessarily are, I wanted to include an element of satire throughout. The character of Buddy Bentley, the murderous former child star, is loosely inspired by the early career of Mickey Rooney, and it is impossible to write about such a thing without a healthy respect for the ridiculous.

DOWNLOAD Buddy Bentley here.

To read the script, you will need a copy of Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. Download it here.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Note about the Creative Commons license: The script for Buddy Bentley is available for free download, and may be duplicated in any form and shared freely. Productions of the play must be approved by Max Sparber, the play's author. Contact him through the email address on the right side of this page.

More plays of Max Sparber.

WHEN I WAS EDITOR of The Omaha Reader, one of my favorite pastimes was tracking down the history of holidays and holiday customs. There was actually an element of malice involved. As a Jew growing up in the United States, it was easy to feel that we do not live in a secular country at all, one that, by its very Constitution, prohibits the intermingling of religion and government. Instead, I felt utterly surrounded by Christianity, like I was a little pebble floating in a great ocean of raging fundamentalists, nativity scenes on State Capitol Building lawns, hymns sung in choir practice, and comic strips, such as B.C. that, without warning, would suddenly start witnessing the Gospel. Usually I didn't mind this -- it is just part and parcel of being a minority -- but during the holidays it gets to be a bit much.

Now, I am a fan of Christmas, I really am. I consider it to be a mostly secular holiday, devoid of all but the slightest religious content