American Graffiti.

Some people call it ugly. Some people call it art. I call it urban enhancement.

Stick With Gingerbread.

Author: December 11, 2021 8 Comments

Full size gingerbread house. Source: Wikipedia

I’ve never understood the tradition of gingerbread houses. I do get the idea that it’s kind of fun to take food and construct something out of it—gingerbread houses are an acceptable way to play with your food—but I’ve never found out if or when you get to eat the gingerbread house. When I was a kid I’d see them around at school and other places, and sometimes in people’s houses, but if there was a time when they were eaten I never got to be around for it. And after a while I’m sure the gingerbread and frosting and probably some of the candy got stale and who cares? It was gingerbread and frosting and candy and I would have been happy to eat it no matter how stale it was just to get that sweet sugar rush.

This year, though, the trend is to eschew the sugar in favor of little houses made of meats and cheeses and vegetables. And I get it: it’s putting the cute in charcuterie. I also don’t get it. At least a gingerbread house will hold up pretty well for a week or two, but if you build a domicile out of cheddar and shingle it with salami it’s not going to last, especially if you keep it in the warm house. Even if you use a cracker or bread base the oils from the meat and dairy façade are going to make the whole thing a soggy mess within a day at most. And if you have a pet then surely I don’t have to spell out the dangers of having a cat or even a dog and a carefully crafted plate of meat and cheese is going to be extremely inviting. And it may be just as well to lose it that way because a meat and cheese home is going to be edible, at best, for a day or two.

No, just no. Please stop this. Source: National Post

The history of gingerbread baking in Europe dates from the 11th century when crusaders brought ginger back with them, and in the 17th century its production was even strictly controlled by guilds, except at Easter and Christmas when anyone was allowed to bake gingerbread, making it a special holiday treat. The gingerbread house that Hansel and Gretel find in the woods either inspired the tradition of making gingerbread houses or was inspired by it. Either way it’s a pretty old tradition, but do you know what’s not an old tradition? Building little homes out of cheese and meat and there’s a good reason for that.

American Graffiti.

The Real Elementals.

Author: December 4, 2021 4 Comments

Source: Luciteria Science

One Christmas when I was a kid I got a chemistry set. This wasn’t a surprise. I was interested in chemistry and had specifically asked for a set, and although this was after the era when radioactive elements were included in chemistry sets it was still during the era when sodium ferrocyanide was included and my parents had to warn me that mixing it with either hydrochloric acid, which I’d gotten a bottle of from the hardware store, or sulfuric acid, which I’d gotten from an old car battery, could create cyanide gas and kill me and anyone else nearby too. And I did once almost set the garage on fire, but I learned my lesson from that experience and only ever almost set the garage on fire two more times, in entirely different ways, so that was good.

Source: Hamlet’s Danish

I had a lot of fun with the chemistry set. It came with a book of experiments, including a whole section of “chemistry magic” and I went straight for that because I thought I had an interest in chemistry but really I had an interest in making colored liquids and blowing stuff up. My real interest, though, was the elements. I was fascinated by elements in their pure, or almost pure, states and wanted to get as many as I could—as many as could be safely stored, anyway, without setting the garage on fire or killing anyone. So anything radioactive, even if I could find it, was out, and so were gases, but I had samples of pure sulfur from a bottle I bought at the drugstore, and lead from the weight on a car tire, and that was so soft I could cut it into small shavings with a pocketknife. The chemistry set also came with a small alcohol lamp that burned hot enough to melt the lead shavings back into a solid lump which is pretty impressive considering that the melting point of lead is 621.5°F, or 327.5°C, but when it’s that hot it really doesn’t matter if you’re using Fahrenheit or Celsius because you’re not going to be around for long. I also had a bottle of mercury my grandfather had given me—I have no idea where he got it, but it was at least enough to fill a hundred old thermometers.

Source: Luciteria

I really wanted some of the more unusual, exotic elements, and that’s why I wish Luciteria Science had been around when I was a kid. Or maybe it was but there was no internet so I couldn’t find it. They sell elements in cubes, and a cool display case for holding them, and I’m more than a little fascinated not just with the range of elements—mostly metals—but the prices too. A gold mirror cube is just $65.00, but an iodine cube—and, yes, iodine is a solid, contrary to what my seventh grade science teacher said—is $500.00. An aluminum cube is just $6.00, or you can get a highly polished one for $25.00, which is impressive considering that aluminum used to be more expensive than gold. Beryllium—which tastes sweeter than sugar but is highly toxic—is just $5.00, and so is boron, but a cube of calcium will set you back $119.00. Niobium cubes, $13.00, are multi-colored, but the polished mirror cube of the same element is a plain silver, and speaking of that, a plain silver cube is $30.00 but a cube of palladium is $2100.00.

And, honestly, I’m more interested in the aesthetics than the economics, although most metals just don’t look that different from each other. They’re still pretty cool, though, and they all come in a plastic case so they won’t set your garage on fire or kill anyone.

American Graffiti.

Hey Vern! It’s Graffiti!

Author: November 27, 2021 4 Comments

It’s been a long time since I spotted any local graffiti, much less any that was worth stopping and looking at, since circumstances have mostly kept me at home. That’s only part of what made this particular piece so special, though, but before I get to that let me describe a bit of where it is: it’s on a wall next to an interstate. The berm in front of the wall is fenced in which I suspect is designed specifically to keep out the sort of person responsible for the graffiti. There’s a gate in the fence with a loose chain and a padlock which are clearly there to say, “You can’t come in here unless you push a little bit.” I don’t know when it was done but it’s big and pretty impressive so I suspect it was done at night, which makes the way the sunlight highlights the silver, which in turn stands out so well against the red, even more impressive.
Then there’s the name. If you’re of a certain age and grew up with U.S. pop culture the name Vern probably makes you think of a very specific character: Ernest P. Worrell. You probably even know the actor behind Ernest, Jim Varney, from his Saturday morning TV show Hey Vern, It’s Ernest! which I loved, in spite of the fact that I was already getting too old for Saturday cartoons–or maybe because I was getting too old for Saturday cartoons. It could be described as Pee-Wee’s Playhouse with a Southern accent, but it was so much more than that; Varney put on other characters, including my personal favorite the supervillain mad scientist Doctor Otto.
The cliche of the sad comedian is, of course, a cliche because it’s so often true. In a November 1999 issue of the Nashville Scene titled, appropriately, “The Importance Of Being Ernest”, Varney talked about having depression and his cancer diagnosis. At the time of the profile his prognosis seemed good and doctors thought the lung cancer which had spread to his heart and brain was in remission. Unfortunately it came back and he’d pass away just four months later.
In that same profile for The Scene Varney reflected on how good the character of Ernest had been for him, making him financially successful, and he enjoyed meeting kids as Ernest, including hundreds of terminally ill children, and he was glad he could brighten their lives. 
He was also, he hoped,on the verge of a creative breakthrough, having gotten good reviews for his portrayal of Jed Clampett and his role in the indie film Daddy And Them. He said, ” I would like to do some new techniques, stories that haven’t been done before. I want to be artsy-craftsy and get into my Orson Welles stage.”
He never got to that stage. He’ll forever be Ernest or, occasionally, Slinky-Dog from the first two Toy Story movies.
Was the artist responsible for the graffiti also thinking of that? To me it represents another cliche: the artist who can’t break through, held back by circumstances, bad luck, who needs to break in just to be seen, and who’ll get painted over, forgotten.
That’s a lot to read into something that was probably just done by some guy named Vern.

 

American Graffiti.

It’s Curtains For You.

Author: November 20, 2021 6 Comments

A friend of mine used to have a Mondrian-themed shower curtain but in spite of that I never thought of shower curtains as an art form until Bored Panda posted forty different ones that elevate it and now I can’t stop thinking about how whole dissertations could be written just about the simple shower curtain. There’s the not-so-subtle eroticism in the way it conceals and the knowledge the person behind it is wearing, at most, a layer of soap suds, there’s the fact that it’s the size and shape, more or less, of a large painting, and it’s a utilitarian object but not really needed if you’re taking a bath or if you angle the shower head the right way. And that’s only scratching the surface of what a shower curtain says. I haven’t even gotten to the fact that what most of them say is “I was on sale at Target.”

Here are a few of my other favorites and I find it interesting that there seem to be some recurring themes:

 

I’d love any one of these but the bookcase one is really my favorite. I may never live in an old manor with false bookcases that hide secret passageways but at least with that one I could pretend I did.

Source: Imgur

 

 

 

 

 

American Graffiti.

What Does The Fox Say?

Author: November 13, 2021 5 Comments

Yes, I know, the Ylvis song dates from 2013, and I remember at the time a lot of reference librarians I know were annoyed by dozens of patrons sending in the question “What does the fox say?” every day, but I couldn’t resist, and anyway I still like the song and I think the statute of limitations has passed.

And what reminded me of it is this video of a man serenading a wild fox, which the fox seemed to appreciate:

 

It’s an interesting thing at this time of because, well, in the United States in a few weeks a lot of people are getting ready to roast and eat a large bird that’s been purposely fattened up, beheaded, plucked, and, in most cases, frozen for shipment across long distances—that is if supply chain issues don’t keep causing trouble. And in Canada they did it a few weeks ago, while in Europe the Christmas goose, or other bird–including the turkey, or, at one time, an imported African fowl–isn’t far from meeting its own demise.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’ve eaten plenty of Thanksgiving turkey, and plan to eat more, but, to get back to the guy serenading the fox, it did make me think about how our relationship to animals is, to put it mildly, complicated. And that’s partly because we are animals ourselves. We may think that what we call civilization sets us apart but, at heart, our hearts aren’t that different from those of our fellow mammals, which is what makes our interactions with them so layered.

Some animals we love and invite into our homes, some we fear, some we just eat. Foxen are among those that defy easy categorization. They’re metaphors for beauty, cleverness, ruthlessness, they’ve been hunted for their fur, and they’ve been hunted as just vermin. They’re wild creatures and yet there’s a funny line going around of people describing foxen as “dogs running cat software”.

I think that’s one reason the traditional English fox hunt is declining. Well, that and fox populations are declining. And, well, a traditional English fox hunt ultimately only has one goal: to kill the fox. Say what you will about Thanksgiving but at least we eat the turkey.

American Graffiti.

Light Up The Sky.

Author: November 6, 2021 7 Comments

Aurora borealis seen from space. Source: NASA

I have friends in the Pacific Northwest who’ve been making me jealous with their pictures of the recent aurora borealis, apparently generated by a large solar storm that may or may not have affected power grids and other communications. My wifi has gone out a couple of times but that’s pretty typical—in fact a couple of weeks go it went down right in the middle of a conversation with my boss and when it came back we talked about how wifi tends to go out when it’s too sunny. Or too cloudy. Or dark. Or if it’s too hot. Or too cold. Or if temperatures are too average.

There have been a few times when the aurora borealis has been intense enough that it’s been visible from Nashville. I’ve never seen it at those times–mainly it seems to have only been spotted from places like the Dyer Observatory, but one of these days I hope to see it in person. Or the aurora australis which would be equally cool–maybe even cooler since Antarctic temperatures dip even lower. Until then, though, I’ll have to make do with pictures.

And they always made me think about our little planet’s place in the solar system, and the greater galaxy and the universe beyond, something I also think about on cool nights when the stars shine with a crystalline brightness. Auroras are a phenomenon we know isn’t unique to Earth, although we have to go all the way out to the gas giants to find others. Yes, there may even be auroras at either end of Uranus, but that’s another story.

At this time of year I also usually reread Wallace Steven’s poem The Auroras Of Autumn, which makes me feel connected not just to the galaxy beyond but to this little world we stand on too.

American Graffiti., Keep Looking Up

Here There Were Dragons.

Author: October 30, 2021 4 Comments

An adventure isn’t worth telling if there aren’t any dragons in it.

-Sarah Ban Breathnach

 

O to be a dragon,

a symbol of the power of Heaven — of silkworm

size or immense; at times invisible.

Felicitous phenomenon!

-Marianne Moore

 

Sorrow in all lands, and grievous omens.

Great anger in the dragon of the hills,

And silent now the earth’s green oracles

That will not speak again of innocence.

-David Sutton

 

Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

-C.S. Lewis

 

Dragons teach us that if we want to climb high we have to do it against the wind.

-Chinese proverb

 

“Beware of Dog,” the sign on the castle gate said.

The intruder, unworried, would later decide that Dog was an odd name for a dragon.

–James Miller

 

I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull.

-Rita Mae Brown

 

It’s a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s also a bloody great hot flying thing.

-Terry Pratchett

 

People who do not believe in the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons.

-Ursula K. LeGuin

 

Puff, the Magic Dragon, lived by the sea,

And frolicked in the Autumn Mist

In a land called Honah Lee…

-Peter Yarrow

 

Never laugh at live dragons.

-J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Dragon kind was no less cruel than mankind. The Dragon, at least, acted from bestial need rather than bestial greed.

-Anne McCaffrey

 

My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,

For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,

And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger,

At whose approach ghosts, wandering here and there,

Troop home to churchyards.

-Shakespeare  

American Graffiti.

Bob’s Burgers Could Save Your Life.

Author: October 27, 2021 4 Comments

Source: eonline

So much has been written about Bob’s Burgers that I don’t know where to start, but then that’s part of what makes the show so great: you can start almost anywhere with it. Hey, I love Bojack Horseman, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Schitt’s Creek, but those shows have long story arcs that extend over seasons, or the whole series, making it hard to pick out a single episode to watch on its own. Bob’s Burgers is an animated sitcom you can drop into almost anywhere and have a good grasp of things by the time the opening credits finish.

Just because the stories are small, though, doesn’t make the stakes any lower. The Belcher family deals with serious crises, even if it’s in a light and funny way. In the episode “All That Gene” Linda, the mother, worries she’s a bad parent, something every good parent thinks at some time or other (maybe bad parents do too, but they don’t care enough to do anything about it). And Bob says, “I mean, we both screw up. All the time. Sometimes we’re okay, I think. But a lot of times, we screw up.” It’s not eloquent or even reassuring, but he goes on to say, “I just think, as long as we’re trying our best, that’s as good as we can do.”

It’s like life: not everything is an extended ordeal. People do the best they can and move on, and not everything resolves neatly, but sometimes you just have to erase the chalkboard and move on because your daughter made up a joke Burger Of The Day.

Source: Eater.com

And the show does emphasize that the Belchers and their friends form a supportive community, which brings me to what I really want to talk about which is the season eleven finale “Vampire Disco Death Dance”. And that just happens to be the name of movie Bob wants to take his oldest daughter, Tina, to see.

This is how Bob describes Vampire Disco Death Dance: “It’s a dress-up-sing-along interactive experience. There’s an emcee, people talk back to the screen. At one point, people even throw confetti.”

Yeah, he’s really talking about The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but the world of Bob’s Burgers is a quirky alternative to ours so instead of Brad and Janet you have the son of a garlic farmer who goes to a nightclub and falls in love with a vampire.

Source: imdb.com

The other kids, Gene and Louise, are too young to see it—and if there were any callbacks to previous episodes someone would probably bring up the time they secretly screened the Jewish deli zombie movie Again With The Living Dead and terrorized all their friends—but Tina is thirteen, the same age Bob was when he first saw Vampire Disco Death Dance.

Source: AVClub

Every story has a conflict, of course, and Tina’s is that she wants to bond with a group of friends at school—and one of the show’s few ongoing elements is her on-off relationship with Jimmy Pesto Jr., the son of Bob’s rival who runs the Italian restaurant across the street—but she feels she doesn’t exactly fit in with them. They play a game called “drinking or not drinking” which she thinks is pretty stupid, but she’s a kind and generous soul, and the game is really, really stupid. It may also be a really obscure reference to a scene from Andy Warhol’s Blood For Dracula, although the writers of Bob’s Burgers don’t usually go for the obscure.

Bob is also trying to make Tina a part of his community too. He wants seeing Vampire Disco Death Dance to be just as meaningful to her as it was to him at thirteen, and that’s not going to work. They’re different people with different perspectives in spite of their shared lives. There’s a lot here about how communities are made of individuals and the give-and-take being part of a community requires, especially when Tina tries to get her friends to see the movie with her and they’d rather sit in the lobby and play “drinking or not drinking”.

There’s also a B-plot of Linda, Gene, and Louise setting up a miniature restaurant for the raccoons in the alley which goes as well as you’d expect. It’s not tied to the main plot but nicely mirrors it, giving Linda, Gene, and Louise their own parts: Linda cooks for the raccoons, Gene plays music, and Louise gets to play with fire. Or at least light candles. And it emphasizes that while you can’t artificially create a community we all still want to be part of one.

Source: Facebook.com

And that’s why I want to get back to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the documentary in progress Rocky Horror Saved My Life. And, really, the documentary’s title says it all. Before the internet Rocky Horror was a place where a lot of us who didn’t fit in anywhere else did fit in. The audience participation gave us a feeling we belonged, even if—no, especially if we were among strangers.

Bob tells Tina that Vampire Disco Death Dance meant a lot to him when he was thirteen:

I remember sitting there, looking around the theater at all these people in costume, all of us singing together, and I thought, Wow, I’m–I’m not alone. I’m with people who, you know, kind of get me.They exist.

Yeah, he’s really talking about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The moment is especially poignant if you know Bob’s mother died when he was young and he didn’t get along with his father and didn’t have many friends, but you don’t need to know that because at that moment Bob was really speaking for all of us.

Source: tumgir

American Graffiti., Submitted For Your Approval.

These Really Took Brains.

Author: October 23, 2021 6 Comments

Source: Creative Arts Group

There’s something innately creepy about scarecrows. I guess it’s the uncanny valley issue, and also the fact that they’re usually out in cornfields or other vast empty spaces that, thanks to horror films, now have an aura of menace about them because it’s now ingrained in our consciousness that there’s a chainsaw-wielding maniac or a bunch of creepy kids hanging out there. As a kid I even found something disturbing about Scarecrow in The Wizard Of Oz. He was and still is my favorite character—a lot of times I can really relate to the lack of a brain, but that’s another story—but the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion can defend themselves pretty well. Scarecrow can barely even stand up when Dorothy first helps him down, and it’s bad enough that the Wicked Witch threatens him with some fire. I’m pretty sure the part where he gets all his stuffing ripped out gave me nightmares.  

And he’s the only cinematic scarecrow I can think of who’s actually friendly. There are so many others who aren’t: the one in Jeepers Creepers, the Batman Villain, the scarecrows in the Doctor Who two-parter Human Nature and Family of Blood, the scarecrow in The League Of Gentlemen who’s actually a guy who was caught sleeping with the farmer’s wife and who’s left tied up in a field by a pair of creepy twin girls who call him their “special friend”. Now that I think about it the British seem to have a real thing about scarecrows.

Source: Tumblr

Source: Tumblr

Then there’s the town of Sierra Madre, California, which has an annual scarecrow festival. There are more than a hundred entries this year and they are brilliant. Some are more traditional:

Source: Creative Arts Group

But there are also a lot of hilarious pop-culture inspired ones:

Source: Creative Arts Group

Source: Creative Arts Group

And some puns:

Source: Creative Arts Group

It would be really cool if where I lived had a scarecrow festival like this one. Surely we’ve got enough brains around here for that.

And also here’s this “high tech scarecrow” that can scare off pretty much anything.

American Graffiti.

The Candlestick Makers.

Author: October 16, 2021 4 Comments

It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness. UNLESS THE CANDLE ITSELF IS CURSED! Or if you have a really cool decorative candle like the ones made by Norris Hunt Candles which you can find on Etsy, Instagram, and Facebook. And they are fantastic.

Source: Etsy.

Laura Norris used to work at the same library where I work, which is how we met, but then moved to Texas where she is now a librarian for the Texas Talking Book Program, which is important year-round, but deserves an extra plug since October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. I asked how she got started making candles, and she said, “I was trying out different artsy hobbies, seeing what struck my fancy. I’m practical and we burn candles so I thought, this might be fun.” She went on to explain that her husband creates some of the designs himself and buys some from other artists. They then create a master using a 3-D printer, and, as Laura explained, “the master is like a plastic version of the finished candle. And then we pour silicone around it to make a negative space of the master. Pour wax in there and you wind up with a candle that looks like the master.“

Source: Facebook

It does seem like candle-making would be fun, and the level of artistry in these is amazing. The often dark themes also make them perfect Halloween party decorations or, if you’re like me, perfect for any time, since I spend eleven months of the year preparing for Halloween, but that’s another story.

Several are also useful for summoning up eldritch gods, if that’s your thing.

Source: Facebook

Candles are by nature an ephemeral art form. They’re meant to be used, and while it’s a shame to destroy them many of these have an extra feature: they bleed.

Source: Etsy

Source: Etsy. Check out the title of the book on top.

And when they’re gone you buy another one, so it’s a feature, not a bug. Also this is a feature, not a bug:

Source: Etsy

Not all are horror-themed, in case you want to, you know, lighten up.

Source: Facebook

Some are aimed at role-playing gamers, although I’m pretty sure the Venn diagram of RPGers and people who’d want horny little devil candle accenting their tabletop is a circle.

Source: Etsy

They also come in a wide range of scents that are cleverly paired with the designs, including dragon’s blood. Seriously, there’s nothing better than having your house smell like dragon’s blood for Halloween or, if you’re like me, any time. And now it’s time to curse the darkness.

Source: Facebook

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