The Weekly Essay

November 16, 2012

"I’ll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon." -Steve Martin

A coffee shop in Britain has changed its menu to use simpler terms. Instead of offering latte they offer "Really really milky coffee". If you want a mocha you need to order "Chocolate flavoured coffee", and they don’t serve espresso, but you can get "A shot of strong coffee". And this inevitably raises the question: why? Yes, we’ve all stood in the line at the coffee shop trying to decide between the double chip mocha affogato and the skinny ristretto latte (over ice). And as much as it annoys us when someone else does it I’m pretty sure we’ve all held up the line still trying to make up our minds because most coffee shops have so many options you need binoculars to read the menu even up close, especially when it’s hand-written on a chalkboard in twenty-seven different colors. And even though fancy coffee drinks have been around for at least a couple of decades now I think it’s still a really good idea to add explanatory notes to coffee menus, because, in spite of having drunk enough of them to fill Lake Michigan, I’m still not entirely sure what a frappe is. But if I go up to the coffee shop counter it’s going to take me a lot longer to give the long version to the guy taking my order than it would to just say I want "a frappe", although it’s really not the time factor that concerns me. After all if they include explanations of their drinks it’s probably going to take even longer for people to decide what they want because they’ll be standing there slack-jawed and saying, "So that’s what a doppio is" before they order one and then, ten minutes after drinking it, head off to fill Lake Michigan.

Having detailed explanations would at least solve the problem I sometimes have in coffee shops of asking the guy behind the counter, "What’s the difference between the Sumatran sallow and the Belizean blonde?" and having him say, "Uh, one’s made from beans…" which makes me want to punch him in the cash register. At the other end of the spectrum, of course, is the guy who knows way too much about the coffee. As long as I’m not holding up the line I really don’t mind a long explanation, although usually somewhere between being told that the Chiapas blend has hints of cherry, chicory, and charcoal and that it’s harvested by attractive mountain people who are paid a decent wage and have a dental plan I want to say, "Okay, I’ll take a large, Captain Soulpatch, you can talk and pour at the same time." No, my real problem with the simplified coffee menu is that it’s a dumbing down of the language. Instead of asking people to learn and use new, well, relatively new, and interesting words it’s going backward. Language is supposed to evolve, and, since language shapes how we think, adding new words to our vocabulary expands our mental range. At the very least new words add subtle gradations to our speech. Think about the difference between telling someone your house is painted green and telling them it’s painted sage.

Any attempt to simplify language reminds me of no less a person than George Orwell suggesting English writers should, as much as possible, restrict themselves to Anglo-Saxon words rather than using Greek and Latin derivatives. That kind of attack makes me wonder if Orwell ever read a novel called 1984, written by an English author whose name escapes me at the moment. Although I also think that as long as we’re importing new words into our language the least we can do is get them right. Specifically I mean the Italian word "espresso". Look carefully at that word and you’ll notice there’s no X in it. It’s not an expresso. Expresso is a brand of stationary bike that you get on to burn off the calories from that large double caramel mocha you had this morning. It’s fantastic that Americans have imported espresso and rebranded it as our own so we can sell it back to Europeans at greatly inflated prices, but I think as a matter of courtesy we should at least pronounce it correctly. If you go to a coffee shop and ask for an "expresso" you should be given really really milky milk. With a shot of milk. And a twist of lemon.

November 9, 2012

Several liquor stores in my area have begun selling something they call "moonshine". I hate it when people play fast and loose with the language like that. If it’s produced, bottled, and distributed by legitimate businesses it’s not moonshine. Moonshine is made in hollers and gulleys by men missing fingers and eyes because their stills occasionally blow up. If it’s got a fancy label and is sold in broad daylight in a legitimate establishment it’s not moonshine. At best it’s a distilled alcohol product that hasn’t been subjected to a traditional aging process. If that’s too much of a mouthful then just call it really, really expensive turpentine.

Moonshine is sold in jelly jars and clay pots with XXX on the side, or at least it was before XXX was appropriated by the porn industry, but moonshine remains much more dangerous. Moonshine might make you go blind, whereas some porn will simply make you wish you were blind. Running moonshine was, supposedly, how NASCAR originated, but I find that highly questionable. I think all automobile racing originated with the invention of the automobile because even if you give two guys two completely identical cars the first thing they’re both going to think is, "Let’s find out which one is faster." And it gets worse. There are now also so-called reality shows about moonshiners. I say "so-called" not merely because, as we all know, there’s very little reality in reality television, but because shows about moonshiners must be fiction because the production of moonshine is illegal. If the reality shows are really about real moonshiners they’re making it a lot easier for ATF agents who will no longer have to wander through hollers and gullies looking for illicit stills but can just follow the film crews.

I believe these reality shows must be no more real than Otis on The Andy Griffith Show disappearing into the woods to tie one on, presumably because Mayberry was in a dry county, otherwise he would have been able to hang out in the local bar or buy a bottle of gin at the liquor store before ambling to the sheriff’s office to lock himself in his favorite jail cell. I realize the bottling and reality shows are an attempt to give moonshine a whiff of respectability, but, open-minded as I am, I don’t think moonshine should be made respectable. I’m an open-minded guy and think there are a lot of things society has kept on the fringes that should be embraced, but is moonshine one of them? Several years ago I took a friend to visit the Jack Daniel’s Distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee. I’ve toured the distillery at least a dozen times since I was very young because my parents would often take visiting guests down there-a tradition I’m proud to have continued. Most of those times that I went Moore County, where Lynchburg is located, was a completely dry county.

For the British and other aliens I’d like to take a moment here to explain that a "dry county" is one where alcohol can’t be sold. That was part of the charm of the Jack Daniel’s Distillery: they could make it there, but they couldn’t sell it. You had to drive to a neighboring county to buy it. Except the last time I was there they had a three-foot by three-foot square in the distillery itself where you could buy a special bottle. And I felt like a small part of my childhood was gone, which, in itself, isn’t an argument for keeping things the way they were, but I haven’t really got an argument, so bear with me. Recently efforts have been made to make Moore County, well, for lack of a better term, wet, allowing the sale of liquor, including Jack Daniel’s whiskey, which would deprive the distillery of that "You can look, but can’t touch" element that makes it special. One thing that hadn’t changed, though, was the distillery’s tour guides. A side effect of visiting the distillery so many times is I became a connoisseur of its tour guides, the same way some people become connoisseurs of fine scotch, although my hobby is significantly cheaper. The first time I ever visited the distillery our tour guide was funny and outgoing. He was like Willy Wonka but looked like Jim Varney. In fact he may have even been Jim Varney. The last time I went our tour guide was at the opposite end of the spectrum, but equally superb. He was approximately a hundred and three, wore overalls and a conductor’s cap, and was perpetually hunched over. The first thing he said to us was, "Y’all git on along now." His face was contorted into a perpetual snarl, although he did smile just once when someone asked him if he got free whiskey for working at the distillery. He quietly said, "No, but they pay me enough that I kin buy it."

The rest of the time, though, he was straightforward, matter-of-fact, and very thorough in explaining the process by which Jack Daniel’s is crafted. He was clearly not a man who suffered fools, particularly when a guy with a Midwestern accent asked, "So what do they do with the bad whiskey?" It was the only time the man looked at any of us directly. He fixed the questioner with a steely glare and said, "There ain’t no bad whiskey here." They do have a term for bad whiskey in Moore County, though. They call it moonshine.

November 2, 2012

Recently London’s Telegraph newspaper published a list of fifty things every dog should do in its lifetime. The first thing I thought was, wait a minute, since when did dogs start reading the Telegraph? But then I thought I was being too hasty. You know how sometimes you hear about something and you think it’s idiotic and then you look into it more deeply and it turns out to be more complicated and not nearly as stupid as you originally thought? Well, this is not one of those times. And the more I thought about it the stupider it seemed, not just because dogs can’t read the list or understand the concept behind it but because of what it says about us as humans.

To be fair I do get that the article was tongue-in-cheek, and that it’s really aimed at people who live with dogs, and that the message is, "Here are fifty things you should allow your dog to do." Such as: play in the snow, play frisbee on the beach, eat dog ice cream (yes, there is such a thing), and have a special spot on the sofa. These are things that are going to enrich the life of any dog who gets to experience them. Although in an apparently desperate attempt to pad out the list they included some things no dog is going to care about, such as: meet a famous dog, be a ring bearer at a wedding, and receive your own personal birthday card. And in an even more desperate attempt to pad out the list they included some things no dog really should do, including "Create a diversion and steal another dog’s dinner". That’s not cute or funny. That’s a recipe for a dog fight, and even if it weren’t it’s like telling a teenager, "Try heroin just once in your life."

Although the Telegraph didn’t call it a "bucket list for dogs" that’s how I originally heard it described, and that’s basically what it is. Maybe they didn’t call it that because the title of the movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman is proprietary, or maybe just because bucket lists have been around a long time but most people didn’t call them that before the release of The Bucket List. And I’ve gotta say I have a real problem with the bucket list concept. Don’t get me wrong. I think having plans and hopes and dreams for the future is a wonderful thing. There are a lot of things I’d like to do before I die. But assuming that I’m still conscious on my deathbed, or wherever I happen to be spending my final moments on this planet, I want to reflect on happy memories rather than sighing and saying, "I guess I’ll never see Venice", even though if I’m facing a firing squad that would be a pretty funny last line. And, like I said, I have nothing against plans, hopes, and dreams for the future, but instead of encouraging our dogs to be like us I think the Telegraph should have taken the opposite tack and encouraged us to be more like our dogs. Anyone who’s ever lived with and really loved a dog knows they take pleasure in the moment, enjoying happiness as it comes and not worrying about the future. Yes, we should worry about the future, unless some peoples’ beliefs about the Mayan calendar turn out to be right and we only have a little less than two months of the future left, but that’s another story. But anyone who really is keeping a detailed list of things they feel they must accomplish before they die needs to get over it. And possibly get a dog. My wife trains and runs our dogs in the sport of dog agility. One of them, our girl Boo, was the first female Dalmatian to ever earn three Masters Agility Championship titles. Since agility is a team sport my wife tells Boo when to go over a jump, when to go through a tunnel, and when to knock with two clubs and take the trick, but part of Boo’s success was a result of her love of running, jumping, and occasionally doing what she’s told. Even though agility is a competitive sport she wasn’t competing. There was no Cocker Spaniel Chris Everett pushing her to excel. She was just having a good time, which I’m sure made the cake and ice cream she got after winning each of her titles that much sweeter. Although on her way out of the ring after her third title I did hear her mutter something about booking a flight to Venice.

October 26, 2012

The other day I saw a trailer for a new film called Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Have you ever had the experience of watching a thirty second film trailer and feeling like you’ve seen the entire film? That was how I felt. Maybe I’m being unfair, but I feel like I’ve been to this rodeo before: there’ll be a lot of fast-paced CGI fights where you have absolutely no clue what’s going on but everyone will still be able to walk away after what looks like the sort of pummeling that would, in the real world, reduce a person to a bloody pulp. And there’ll probably be some anachronistic jokes. Maybe Gretel can speak to the birds using a magical "twitter" ability. And in the end they’ll have to take down the biggest witch in the world, although I’ve known quite a few witches, and they’re generally nice people, so I don’t know why we’re perpetuating the idea that they need a smackdown, but that’s another story.

I do understand that it’s hip right now to draw directly on fairy tales, although, really, a lot of films-even ones you wouldn’t suspect-are intentionally or unintentionally based on fairy tales. Alien is a warped retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, When Harry Met Sally is The Frog Prince, Jerry Maguire is the Arthurian tale of The Fisher King, and Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King is the Arthurian tale of The Fisher King, just to name a few. Jung called these stories and the characters in them archetypes, and whether they appeal to us because these tales seem to be about experiences so many of us share or because they strike a deeper chord in our genes is something I don’t know-something that may even be unknowable. It would be wrong to say that fairy tales fulfill our desire for happy endings. After all not all fairy tale heroes end up living happily ever after. Quite a few tales adapted by the English author Andrew Lang end with a variation of "And if they have not died then they are still living", which may be a happy ending, but is ambiguous. Maybe they’re still living but have the flu right now. And depending on the translation many of the Tales of The Arabian Nights end with something like, "And they lived happily until Death, the devourer of worlds and destroyer of all things, came for them." Sleep well, kids! Also a lot of scholars say that fairy tales are all about teaching morality and defending the status quo, and that’s just wrong. A lot of fairy tale heroes completely upend the status quo. As for morality I’m not sure we ever really learn lessons from fairy tales, at least not simple ones.

Okay, I do think fairy tales can be instructive. Rumpelstiltskin, for instance, teaches that you shouldn’t promise to give crazy homeless people your children, although if you think they can spin straw from gold you’re probably not sane enough to be a fit parent yourself. And if there’s one thing I have learned from reading fairy tales it’s that if you’re walking through the woods and a fox asks if he can have half your lunch you should give it to him, but after you’ve changed your pants, because talking animals tend to startle most people. But if you laugh at him or tell him to get a job you’re going to end up in an ogre’s lair with no chance of getting out and chained up so you can’t change your pants. For the most part in fairy tales if you help someone, especially a talking animal or old woman, since they usually turn out to be good witches, they’ll return the favor, but if you mistreat or ignore them it’ll come back and bite you in the ass later. There are, however, some pretty obvious exceptions. The first fairy tale I ever remember hearing was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I can’t have been more than three or four, and there was a couple my parents would play bridge with on Friday or Saturday nights. Late in the evening the man would take a break from the bridge game-maybe he’d knocked with two clubs and lost the trick or something (I really don’t know anything about bridge) and he’d come into my room and tell me the story. He did this quite a few times, and it was always the story of Goldilocks. I was too young to think to ask him if he knew any other stories. But I did always wonder why Goldilocks got away in the end. It seemed to me like the bears should have grabbed her and said, "Forget the porridge, let’s have roast leg of Goldilocks". It seemed wrong that the story’s message was "Theft, vandalism, and vagrancy are okay if you can run fast!" As much as I still love fairy tales that was the beginning of my distrust of their messages, and I’d have serious issues with other tales later on.

Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling is often held up as the original it-gets-better story, but it should be noted that being born a swan makes things considerably easier. No one who’s read Andersen’s biography thinks he was born to grow up to be a successful writer. His story should have been The Ugly Duckling Who Was A Duck, Not A Swan, And Realized That Ducks Are Groovy And Worked Hard To Became The Best Duck He Could Be. Beloved tales also, in some versions, take some pretty dark and ugly turns. Most people are familiar with Snow White through the Disney version, so they think the evil queen is driven off a cliff by the dwarves. Since all the kingdom’s cops were probably on the queen’s payroll it’s arguable whether this act of vigilantism was justified. But in the version the Brothers Grimm wrote down the queen–who’s not a stepmother but Snow White’s real mother–attends the wedding of Snow White and the prince. And at the reception the queen is forced to wear red hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dies while everyone watches. If Snow White considered torture and murder fun entertainment for her wedding reception clearly the poisoned apple didn’t fall far from the tree. And then there’s the fairy tale that, in any version, always struck me as having a terrible lesson: Jack and the Beanstalk. Sure, you can think of it as the classic tale of the little guy triumphing and achieving success, which is always the sort of story I enjoy, but I always look at this particular tale from the giant’s perspective. If the giant were stomping around the countryside flattening houses or selling magazine subscriptions I think the story would have mentioned that instead of focusing on Jack selling the family’s cow for three measly beans. So he wasn’t. He was just hanging out in his cloud not bothering anyone. Then one day this beanstalk shoots up through the giant’s yard and some kid from down below steals his gold and his harp-shaped MP3 player. Sure, he wanted to grind Jack’s bones and use them for bread, apparently because he had a gluten allergy, but think about it. If some vermin got into your house and was stealing your stuff you’d probably eat it too. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t, but you’d probably set some traps baited with gold bags or peanut butter. And when the giant went to get his stuff back the kid cut down the beanstalk and the giant fell to his death. If you’re ever taking a break from a bridge game and decide to tell your friend’s children the story of Jack And The Beanstalk be sure to end it with, "Now how would you feel if you were the giant? Sleep well, kids!"

October 19, 2012

It’s pumpkin season. Pumpkins are everywhere. I remember a time when the appearance of pumpkins meant only two things: jack-o-lanterns and pumpkin pie. Although technically they really only meant jack-o-lanterns, since I’ve never known anyone to make pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin, only the canned stuff. Anyway it now seems like pumpkin is being used for everything. There’s pumpkin bread, pumpkin baklava, pumpkin rolls, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin tea, pumpkin tacos, pumpkin torte, pumpkin tubesteak, pumpkin teriyaki, pumpkin chips, pumpkin guacamole, fried pumpkin, broiled pumpkin, coconut pumpkin shrimp, and at this time of year every Chines restaurant has a pumpkin pupu platter. I personally have tried over three thousand different pumpkin beers ranging from a pint of a pleasant porter to a powerful pumpkin piña colada. Anyone wondering why there’s an obesity epidemic could be forgiven for thinking our fall diet is producing a population of pumpkins.

Still the pumpkin deserves props. It’s featured in numerous fairy tales and nursery rhymes from Cinderella to Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater. Well, okay, those are the only fairy tales and nursery rhymes where the pumpkin plays a part, but it’s a poignant performance. And there are pumpkin patches, there’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and there are farmers who produce everything from petite pumpkins a mere fraction of a pound to monsters that are practically the size of pachyderms. There are pumpkin harvests and pumpkin festivals, and every year in Delaware there’s the Punkin Chunkin’, an event where pumpkins are propelled through the air. And of course there are still jack-o-lanterns everywhere. After Halloween was over I loved to take the top off my jack-o-lantern and smell the candle-roasted pumpkin flesh. And I still find the story behind them fascinating. According to various sources jack-o-lanterns originated as a Scottish tradition of children carrying candles in hollowed-out turnips. And if you’ve ever tried turnip pie you know it’s a good thing they switched to pumpkins, but that’s another story. The legend of the jack-o-lantern is that there was a man named Jack who was so evil Heaven wouldn’t take him and Hell was afraid he’d take over, so he was forced to walk alone through eternal darkness. But the Devil took pity on him and gave him a flame, which Jack carried in a turnip he had handy because, well, it’s not like he was going to make a pie with it. That’s the story, but every time I hear it I wonder what Jack could have possibly done that was so awful that neither Heaven nor Hell had a place for him. Okay, I can understand Heaven has some strict rules regarding entry, but I didn’t think Hell was that picky. Or maybe it is.

The entry to Heaven is often pictured as a large golden gate with a bunch of fog machines going full blast around it. For numerous reasons I imagine the entry to Hell as the front of the Copacabana. And Beelzebub is standing there holding the velvet rope saying, "Hitler, nice to see you, Pol Pot, come on in, guy who invented that thing that tells you how many people are ahead of you when you call customer service, so glad you could make it." And Jack gets to the front of the line and is told, "Sorry, we’re full." And so he just hangs out by the dumpster and after a while Beelzebub gives him a flame to keep him warm, and all Jack can do for eternity is wait and hope that Al Capone’s entourage will get bored and decide to go see what’s shaking over at Purgatory, which I’m pretty sure is somewhere near Rhode Island.

October 12, 2012

If you ever feel like our culture is over-saturated with sexy, tragic, goth, emo vampires I’m pretty sure you can blame Bram Stoker and his novel Dracula. I suppose it’s because he was a Victorian, a period in history that was really groovy if you overlook all that repression, child labor, prostitution, and really terrible food. Although vampires have never fascinated me as much as certain other creatures of the night (I wasn’t pissing on the fence for kicks) there’s enough overlap in the folklore that I’ve gotten pretty well acquainted with mormos, vrykolakes, loogaroos, and other assorted bloodsuckers. And I can say with pretty fair certainty that before Bram Stoker vampires weren’t that sexy. They weren’t even necessarily bloodsuckers. That’s the tricky thing about vampires. They’re hard to nail down, even if you are Hugh Jackman and wielding a stake-shooting crossbow.

If you’re an average person here’s probably what you know about vampires: you become a vampire by being bitten by a vampire, vampires rise up from their coffins at night, drink blood, hate garlic, can’t be seen in a mirror, and can be killed with a stake through the heart or a crucifix. First, if you’ve ever wondered how vampires first came to be if the only way to become a vampire is to be bitten by a vampire, it may sound like a chicken or the egg question, but in fact there are numerous ways to become a vampire. They include:

Get a vampire’s blood on you.
Eat meat from an animal that’s been attacked by a wolf.
Die of the plague.
Commit suicide.
Be a terrible person in life.
Be unpopular with your neighbors.
Be murdered.
Be excommunicated.
Be buried prematurely.
Be buried in unconsecrated ground.
Be born with teeth.
Have your corpse carried out of your house head first.
Have your corpse carried out of your house feet first.
Have any animal jump over your corpse before it’s buried.
Have a cat jump over your grave.
Have a prominent birthmark.
Have red hair.
Have red hair and blue eyes.
Live in Transylvania.

With a list like that it’s not hard to figure out where vampires come from. In fact it’s harder to understand why there aren’t more vampires, especially since being buried prematurely is one way to become a vampire, and at one time premature burials were believed to be extremely common. At one time it was even estimated that over most of the 19th century in America at least one person was buried prematurely every week. The evidence for this is usually that claw marks were found on the insides of coffins, which always makes me wonder why so many coffins were being dug up and opened. I realize in the 19th century people didn’t have computer games, but were they so hard up for entertainment that they’d go dig up Uncle Charlie to see how he was decaying?

By the way, if you’ve ever worried about being buried alive you can relax. Modern embalming techniques are not only fun at parties, they’ll guarantee you’re dead long before you get put in the ground, oven, or gross anatomy class. And the frequency of premature burials has been greatly exaggerated. Corpses move and can even claw at the insides of their coffins, and while your hair and fingernails really don’t grow after death they do get longer as the body loses water and the skin shrinks. Corpses even make noises as they decay, which may have led to the belief that you could hear a vampire chewing on his shroud, although that makes me wonder why people were hanging around graveyards with their ears to Uncle Charlie’s grave.

Also not all vampires rise up from their graves at night, although some are destroyed by sunlight. Some project a spectral version of themselves, and can even come out during the daytime. These specters don’t always drink blood, but drain it from their victims by, I don’t know, teleportation or something. They cause their victims to waste away. When people in a village began wasting away the first thing they usually did was go to the graveyard and start digging up the recent dead. Vampires could be identified by the lack of decay of their bodies, and they’d also often appear red-faced and bloated. So if you find W.C. Fields sexy you could be forgiven for thinking there were sexy vampires before Bram Stoker. Also some saints’ bodies didn’t decay, so keep this in mind: if you’re a saint and your body doesn’t rot it’s a miracle. If you’re an ordinary person and your body doesn’t rot you’re a vampire. And I’ve never found any record of anyone checking for a corpse’s reflection in a mirror. The bloating and redness are caused by natural processes, and certain soil compositions can actually inhibit decay.

And sometimes earthquakes or other disturbances will push corpses to the surface so the dead appear to be rising. It’s even been suggested that vampire myths are most common in places with loose, rocky soil where it’s hard to keep a body buried. In the old days bodies that wouldn’t stay buried led to vampire myths. Now they lead to the wacky hijinks of movies like Weekend At Bernie’s and Shallow Grave, but that’s another story. If there is one area where traditional and modern folklore agree it’s that vampires hate garlic. One traditional way of stopping a vampire was to dig up the body suspected of being the local vampire and stuffing a clove of garlic in its mouth, although in some areas a lemon works just as well. The stake through the heart worked too, but according to some it couldn’t be just any stake. Oak, beech, or t-bone wouldn’t do-it had to be a hawthorn stake. Although a knife that had never been used to cut bread could also work. Or just plain nails. And contrary to Bram Stoker crucifixes and crosses weren’t a popular prophylactic, so forget trying to make a cross with your fingers, although this is also an area where traditional and modern views overlap, since in movies from Once Bitten to Interview With The Vampire crosses and crucifixes don’t work.

Fire, on the other hand, could take care of a vampire problem. Sometimes in the old days a priest could exorcise a vampire, but usually people had to deal with it through secular means. In addition to the hawthorn stake and the old lemon in the mouth trick these included cutting off the head and putting it under the feet of the person in their coffin, so the vampire couldn’t reach it to put it back on, cutting out the heart and filling it with millet or grain, cutting out the heart and boiling it in millet or grain, cutting out the heart and boiling it in wine, or sprinkling millet, mustard, or poppy seeds around the grave, although agent Mulder found that sunflower seeds work too. Vampires will feel compelled to stop and count the seeds. Centuries before there was a Sesame Street vampires were obsessed with counting. They also have a fascination with knots. A fishing net placed over their grave or over the door of a house will stop a vampire. They have to stop and count the knots, but they’ll keep losing count and have to start over until the sun comes up and destroys them, because vampires are supernaturally stupid. In fact traditional vampires are more like contemporary zombies, especially since, prior to Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, most vampires were common people. Bram Stoker made Dracula thin and pale, but traditionally vampires were fat and red-faced and looked like they spent all their time at Chinese buffets.

One exception was the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who some people thought was a vampire, and who reportedly murdered over a thousand young girls. But she wasn’t really a vampire because she didn’t drink her victims’ blood-she bathed in it to stay young, making her both the most popular and controversial member of The Real Housewives Of Budapest. Vlad Dracula wasn’t a vampire either, and in fact many Romanians considered him a hero for fighting back invading hordes. Many Romanians still consider him a hero for bringing in invading hordes of tourists. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about vampires it’s that there are exceptions to every rule, and, prior to Bram Stoker, there is at least one story of a sexy vampire. In Hungary a man died unexpectedly, was buried, and a short time later came back as a vampire, wandering through the streets in a shroud. He’d go to his former home where his wife was, and, according to her, and based on the screams that people could hear, would torment her for hours then leave just before dawn. But she insisted that because he was a supernatural creature no one could help her. People got tired of this, and one night a couple of village vigilantes captured the vampire…and found he was the dead man’s brother. It turned out the wife and her brother-in-law had murdered the man and were using the belief that he was coming back as a vampire to cover up their very public, and apparently very loud, affair. With all that it’s a wonder the dead man didn’t really come back as a vampire, maybe even a sexy one.

October 6, 2012

“This reminds me of Bucket Of Blood.”

That was my mother’s response to an exhibit of sculptures by George Segal that my parents went to. Segal’s sculptures look like people roughly coated with a layer of plaster. Bucket Of Blood is a 1959 movie about a mentally disturbed man named Walter Paisley who desperately wants to be an artist but, lacking any talent, makes sculptures by killing people and covering the corpses with clay. So my mother’s comparison was somewhat accurate, although Segal’s sculptures aren’t made from corpses, and they’re in the poses of bus drivers or people waiting at crosswalks or walking, whereas Paisley’s sculptures are caught in the throes of dying.

When my parents told me about the exhibit and my mother’s reaction to it they explained that on one of their first dates, maybe even their very first date, it was the movie they went to see . My father asked, “Have you seen Bucket Of Blood?” I said, “Seen it? I’ve got it on DVD.” My mother looked unsurprised, and my father rolled his eyes and said, “I should have known.” You may be thinking that a film called Bucket Of Blood would be an odd choice for a date, especially a first date. What I thought was that the fact that my parents chose it as an evening’s entertainment more than a decade before I was a notion, even before they were married, may explain a lot about how I came to be the adult I am. It’s a Roger Corman film.

Even before I knew Roger Corman from Shinola I had a fascination with many of his films. They’re cheap and silly and often over the top, which is why when I was a young teenager they were the films broadcast on the local UHF station I looked forward to every Friday and Saturday night. Corman made me an Edgar Allan Poe fan before I read a single one of his stories, thanks to the film versions of The Masque Of The Red Death, The Pit And The Pendulum, and especially The Raven. When Vincent Price looked down at the raven and asked it, “Shall I ever hold again the radiant maiden whom the angels call Lenore?” and the raven replied, “How the hell should I know?” I said to myself, “Wherever this movie is going I want a front row seat.” And as a kid who’d grown Venus flytraps on his windowsill I was beside myself with joy when, one Saturday afternoon, Commander USA’s Groovie Movies featured the original Little Shop Of Horrors. A few years later, still not aware that many of the movies I’d enjoyed so much were all the product of one director, I saw an interview with Corman on a late night talk show. He was promoting his book How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime. The subtitle seems to me to sum up Corman’s film philosophy. Some people make films because of deep and driving artistic ambition. Corman made films to make money. There’s nothing wrong with making a profit, but filmmaking seems like an unlikely profession for someone whose primary goal is money. But Corman’s also a fiercely independent guy for whom working up the corporate ladder wasn’t an option. As director and producer he could jump straight to the top, even if his films were made on shoestring budgets, and looked like it.

He’s famous for the list of talented people who’ve worked for him who became famous in their own right-a list that includes Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, and Francis Ford Coppola-but that may be luck rather than planning. Talented actors and cinematographers work for the same rate as hacks when they’re unknowns. Corman shot whole films in the time it takes some directors to shoot scenes. He famously made Little Shop Of Horrors on a bet that he couldn’t shoot a film in twenty-four hours. To keep costs down he frequently reused sets and kept the same actors around. For Little Shop Of Horrors he used sets and some of the cast from Bucket Of Blood, including Dick Miller, who’d played Walter Paisley. You may think you don’t know who Dick Miller is, but chances are you do. Look up a picture of him and you’ll probably say, “Oh yeah, he’s that guy who was in.that thing.” He’s made a career of playing bit parts-short-order cooks, pizza delivery guys, cops, holographic maîtres d’. As far as I know Bucket Of Blood was his only leading role. The film was billed as a comedy, but Miller, and the story, evoke more pathos than laughter. Paisley’s a coffee shop busboy whose ambitions are bigger than his abilities. When his “sculptures” are a success-before anyone realizes what’s underneath-he dons a beret and ebony cigarette holder, affecting an “artistic” look. The art critics and beatniks at the coffee shop, the people Walter wants desperately to imitate, give him a paper crown and a toilet plunger painted gold for a scepter. If this was meant to be funny it’s not.

Walter’s lack of awareness that he’s being mocked makes it even worse that the people mocking him see him as an idiot savant, when, tragically, he’s got a disability that makes him unable to understand the extent of his crimes. He’s not unlike Lenny from Of Mice And Men. And the film definitely has its moments, such as when Walter is running from a mob and his shadow is projected on a wall. He’s an outsider, a man without substance, and any stature he had is illusory. And that, sadly, also highlights the films weaknesses. Bucket Of Blood was hastily written and hastily shot, and all on a very low budget. Dick Miller said that it could have been so much better, and he’s right, but it’s not necessarily the low budget that hampered it. Big budgets don’t make great films, as anyone who’s seen Cleopatra, Waterworld, or Howard The Duck knows. Bucket Of Blood could be a study in the romantic idea of genius and madness, and how tempting it is to forgive the crimes of great artists. It could also be a comment on art history. It was released just as abstract expressionism was giving way to Pop Art, a movement that George Segal was part of. Bucket Of Blood could have been a criticism of the art world’s obsession with the new and its celebration of destruction as a creative process, a world of absurdly inflated prices where ideas often completely supplant aesthetics. It could have been all those things, but we have to judge a work of art by what it is, not by what it could be, so Bucket Of Blood drowns in a sea of would-be classics. Yeah, I love it. Mark Twain said, “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds,” and I think a similar principle applies to Bucket Of Blood. Maybe I love it because I see the swan that Corman’s ugly duckling didn’t grow up to be. Or maybe I only love it because it somehow touches a deep chord in my genetic unconscious, if there is such a thing, because it’s the film my parents went to see all those years ago. Or maybe that’s just a coincidence. It could be that, rather than my parents influencing me in that direction it’s really been the other way around. There’s an old saying that insanity is hereditary-parents get it from their kids. I thought about the odd history my parents and I share with the film Bucket Of Blood when they called me to say they were really looking forward to seeing a play the theater group in their area was putting on. They didn’t know very much about the story, but my father said, “It’s called The Rocky Horror Show. Isn’t that the title of that movie you and your friends used to go and see every Saturday night?” Close, but not quite. We went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the film version of the stage play, but before I corrected my father I rolled my eyes and said, “I should have known.”

September 28, 2012

The house where I spent most of my childhood, from the time I was four, was built on a hill. We lived on the upper end of one side of a cul-de-sac. At the top of the hill there were vacant lots and low-rent condominiums that my imagination could make anything from a dungeon to an alien spaceship. The hill overlooked a broad low-lying area, and in every direction, at varying distances, the land rose up. From my bedroom window or the backyard I could look around and feel like I was on the inside edge of a very large bowl. Sometimes, especially in the fall, there would be foggy patches in the low area, or, on rare occasions, fog would fill it entirely.

I think I remember the first time I saw fog, before I even knew what it was. My friend Troy and I were standing on the section of driveway behind my house that formed a sort of level platform. At its edge there was a gentle slope down to the backyard. Troy’s house was at the bottom of the hill, and the edge of the fog just touched it before it stretched outward, obscuring the houses beyond. We were five years old, always up to something, but the whole scene made us still. Off in the far distance, even through the fog, we could see cranes rising up. This must have been part of the development boom that was sweeping through the whole area. The house my parents had picked to move into had been built just a few years earlier, and now, where the rise formed the opposite side of the bowl, there were office buildings and more apartments going up. But we only saw machines, like the skeletons of dinosaurs. Troy said, very quietly, "A cloud fell. They’re trying to put it back up." I don’t know if this was a joke or if he really thought that’s what was happening. When I remember this I remember hearing the faint sound of gears, of chains clanking. Maybe those sounds are my imagination enhancing a memory. Maybe I really heard them. I don’t know. I believed a cloud had fallen and that the machines, filled with men in hard hats, were working to put it back.

A year later, on a trip to Maine, we would drive through fog so thick phantom headlights, the cars coming from the opposite direction invisible, would pass us, but at this moment I couldn’t remember ever seeing fog before. And from there I imagined a whole cloud world, that there were people who lived in the tops of clouds. I imagined it must be paradise up there, always sunny, and that whatever anyone needed could be made from cloud stuff. Homes, buildings, fantastic bridges were all built from piled up cloud. But my imagination conjuring all this just as quickly came to a precipice and couldn’t go any further. I could only wonder. Were cloud people like us? What separated us? Could I ascend to live in the clouds, or were cloud people only born there? What did cloud people think when they looked down on us? I wondered if cloud people even knew we were below them, if they watched us and wondered about us, or if they were only aware that there was a world beneath them when they fell.

September 21, 2012

I used to work in customer service, so I understand that customer service isn’t a job that requires a lot of skills, and the skills it does require-being articulate, polite, able to read from a script, and knowing when to hand off a question to somebody who knows more like the glorified receptionist customer service people usually are-aren’t that hard to find. It’s why I’m occasionally pleasantly surprised when I have to call a customer service department and speak to someone who’s got all those skills and seems to really want to help me. Of course I’m more often unpleasantly unsurprised by customer service departments where the head of hiring decided all they needed was a bunch of warm bodies and has hired a group of eight year olds who don’t know which end of the phone is the one you speak into, and who all had their lower jaws eaten off by the same wolves who raised them. But no matter how much companies want to cut costs by cutting what they see as unnecessary expenditures-pensions, employee health plans, safety shields that might have prevented the fifth employee this week from falling into the meat grinder-I don’t think they’ll ever be able to completely eliminate customer service. And they’ll never be able to automate it either, although it has been tried.

Recently I dealt with automated customer service. I got a notice that a series of handbooks the library I work at subscribes to will no longer be published in print. Since this was secondhand information I needed to call the publisher to confirm it. Since I didn’t have their number handy I went to the publisher’s website. Let me explain that, whenever possible, I prefer to call customer service departments rather than emailing them. I do this for three reasons. The first is I like to get a problem off my desk as soon as possible, and if I send an email it’s going to go down a black hole and I’ll have to send two or three more emails over the course of two or three days before I get an answer. The second is that I want companies to feel the money they spend supporting their customer service departments is justified. If no one’s calling then customer service people are sitting around doing nothing. When I worked in customer service we weren’t allowed to read or carry on non-work related conversations during calls, which is how I learned to relate a bout of athlete’s foot to the trucking industry, but that’s another story. When people aren’t doing anything that looks to the corporate bigwigs like waste, and I’d hate to contribute to a bunch of customer service people being laid off, at least the ones who weren’t raised by wolves, since the ones who were can always find work in the circus or trucking industry.

And finally the worst customer service experience of my life was because of email. I won’t name the company, but it was a company that makes personal computers that’s known for its innovations, its charismatic former chairman who passed away recently, and its devoted fanbase. And their logo is a fruit. That should be obscure enough to protect all innocent parties. I emailed this company about a problem I was having with one of their programs. I got an answer back from someone named Roger who said he’d be happy to help me if I could describe the problem in more detail. I replied. Then I got an answer from someone named George who said he’d be happy to help me if I could describe the problem in more detail. I replied that Roger was already helping me. Then I got a message from Roger saying that he couldn’t help me if I didn’t respond to his email. I responded to Roger telling him I’d already responded, and forwarded my correspondence with George. Then I got a reply from someone named Phil, which included my reply to George, saying he’d be happy to help me if I could describe the problem in more detail. When I got a reply from someone named Mike that included my correspondence with Roger and George asking me to describe the problem in more detail, and messages from Roger, George, and Phil telling me they considered the matter closed since I never responded to them I gave up. And that’s why, even though it may be a 20th century way of dealing with things, I use the phone. Anyway, I went to this publisher’s website looking for a phone number, but they didn’t have one listed. Instead they had a "live customer service chat" link. So I clicked that, got a message that a representative would be with me shortly, and then got this:

Agent: Hi. I’m Kevin. What can I help you with today?
Me: Hi. Is it correct that your handbooks will no longer be published in print?
[Kevin is typing.]
Agent: We publish the handbooks. They’re our premier publication, full of useful information that every company should have.
Me: Are they going to be published in an online format?
[Kevin is typing.]
Agent: I can assist you with that.
Me: Will they be available to libraries?
[Kevin is typing]
Agent: Our handbooks are a virtual library of information that every company should have.

At this point I was pretty sure I was dealing with what computer people call a "chatterbot", a program that looks for key words and provides pre-scripted responses. If you owned a computer in the 1980s you probably played with a chatterbot at some point, so you know if you typed in something like "Your mother rides a vacuum cleaner" it would reply "Tell me more about your mother", since, for some reason, all chatterbots are written by Freudian computer programmers. I had a feeling "Kevin" was going to be about as useful, so I decided to throw a curve ball.

Me: Is it available via IP authentication or is access strictly limited by username and password?
[Kevin is typing]
Agent: These are excellent questions. For further assistance with your concerns dial 1-800…
[Kevin is typing]
Agent: Is there anything else I can help you with today?

I told a friend of mine about this, and he said, "It could have been worse. The response to your last question could have been, ‘Dave, I don’t think you should do that.’" And that would have been terrifying, but what really happened was almost as scary. Since I now had the publisher’s number I called it, and the person who answered said, "Hi, this is Kevin. How can I help you?" And in the background I could hear howling.

September 14, 2012

Recently a controversial study came out that found that organic vegetables aren’t healthier than vegetables that are, well, I guess inorganic. And while no vegetables would fall into that category I’m pretty sure there are some inorganic foods out there, especially junk food, some of which never has contact with a living thing until it’s actually consumed, although whether a guy sitting back in his armchair munching on imitation pork-flavored Cracklins (and try the new chipotle flavor!) is actually living is a matter for some debate, especially if you ask his wife. And I’m pretty sure vitamin pills are inorganic, especially the new gummy ones for adults. Every time I see those I wonder why adults need gummy vitamins.

Of course as a kid I hated gummy candies because they all tasted to me like a lightly sweetened eraser, but I also think that when you’re a kid it’s understandable that adults get you to take your vitamins by making them taste like candy, but when you’re a grown-up you need to be responsible and take your grown-up medicine without it tasting like candy and being shaped like a dinosaur, but that’s another story. The study that found that organically grown foods aren’t healthier than foods grown with fertilizers and pesticides isn’t controversial because anyone thinks the results are wrong. It’s controversial because most people who buy organic vegetables aren’t necessarily doing it because they think the vegetables themselves are healthier. Some people say they prefer organic vegetables because they don’t want to eat or feed their families pesticides, but I think most of us are smart enough to realize that a cucumber grown out in a sunny field from seeds by a farmer who looks like he was in audience at Woodstock is going to have pretty much the same vitamin content as one grown from a tissue culture in a styrofoam tray under fluorescent lights.

As nutritional science I’d say the study was probably valuable, but there are a few people who like to point at it and feel smug and say that it proves people who prefer organic vegetables are stupid for being willing to pay more for the same thing. Of course nothing of the sort has been proven, and even though the study wasn’t intended as social science the way people respond to it says a lot about us. And that’s the danger of studies: they can easily be misused. Or misinterpreted. Legitimate results can be skewed depending on whom you ask. Several decades ago lots of people thought DDT was a great thing, and there was very little reason to disagree until someone thought to ask the bald eagles what they thought of it. Studies don’t always take the big picture into account, which is why, whenever I volunteer for studies, how my results will ultimately influence the research. Of course the studies I participate in are slightly different than the one about organic versus inorganic vegetables, mainly because I’m not a vegetable, although there are times when I’m sitting back watching TV when that’s a matter of some debate, but that’s another story. In the interests of science I’ve volunteered for quite a few studies. I’ve been poked, prodded, had my blood drawn and my urine collected, and sometimes, in the process of having these things done to me, been asked, "Hey, have you ever thought about volunteering for a research study?" Maybe it’s a matter of respect that no one conducting the study has yet called me a guinea pig, even though I always think of guinea pig as a generic term for scientific study participants, whether they’re voluntary or not. And I’ve always wondered why.

It seems like most scientists use mice or rats, probably because mice and rats are active little critters who like to run in their exercise wheels when they’re not sitting back in an armchair watching TV. I never had a guinea pig as a pet, but several of my friends did, and I could never understand the attraction of keeping a pet that rarely moved but mostly sat in one corner of its cage and ate and occasionally shrieked. If I’d wanted something like that I would have asked my parents if Aunt Gerda could move in with us. I volunteer for research studies because I like to think my participation benefits humanity, although it doesn’t hurt that researchers usually pay, so it also benefits my wallet. But I do put limits on what I’ll volunteer for. I won’t volunteer for anything that puts my health or life in danger, although there are studies like that. And there are some incredibly brave people who will volunteer for those kinds of studies. There are even some researchers who will purposely put themselves in harm’s way. One of my favorite stories is of Professor W.J. Baerg who, in 1922, decided to study the effects of the black widow spider bite. He studied it by getting himself bitten. He experienced several hours of difficulty breathing, paralysis and pain in his muscles, and spent three days in a hospital, but, at a time when toxicology was still a new science and black widow bites were a lot more common it was pretty important research. And the amazing thing is he didn’t even get paid for it.