VISITING YOUR PARENTS

This is a blog about visiting your parents, something that most adult children dread, probably with good reason. I'm a parent myself so I can see it from the other side, but even I have to admit that visits home can be something to be endured. Parents are so...clinging...so boring...so judgemental.

I don't blame old people for that. They're just victims of predatory salesmen, like the kind that sell Lazboy chairs. NEVER give in to the temptation to buy one for your parents, even if the thing is on sale. Even if it's free. You might as well buy them heroin. Old people can't resist the things and once they settle into them and turn on the TV you won't be able to pry them out with a crowbar.

 So what should old people do? That's a good question, and I don't know the answer. Some moms knit. Maybe that's the answer.

You can always tell a home that's occupied by a knitter. They don't know when to stop. They knit everything. Knitters are not as common as they used to be, and that's because the hobby is slowly being supplanted by another one...

...cat hoarding! To qualify as a cat hoarder you have to have at least 6 or 7 animals. It's hard to talk people out of cat hoarding because the practice has been ennobled in their eyes by people who call it "cat rescue" or "cat sheltering." Old folks see themselves as providing a home for abandoned cats...cats who probably escaped from other cat hoarders.

It's always a good idea to take your parents out to a restaurant, but they'll probably insist on going to a place like The Copper Kettle, which is a favorite of people with knitted sweaters who smell like cats.

The Kettle specializes in dishes like canned spinach and macaroni and cheese, the kind of dishes that are called "comfort food." Old folks like it because the portions are big and the spoons and forks are clean.

 Thanks to the 60s a new type of older parent is with us, the aging hippies. They're not above hoarding cats but they also like marijuana brownies. They eat things like kale, which is like green leather, and are quick to point out that whatever you like to eat is probably full of toxins put there by the CIA to produce a population of zombies.

Faced with the massive intimidation of Copper Kettles and cats and kale, visiting young people have come up with a weapon of their own...the cel phone. You can always tune out your parents by dialing up your friends to see if their nails are dry.

THE STRANGE CASE OF LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE

That's James Witcomb Riley above, author of the poem "Little Orphant Annie." You probably think he stole the character from the comic strip but actually the comic derived the character from Riley, from this poem as a matter of fact.

The poem isn't perfect. You get the idea that an even better one might have been made from the same structural elements, but millions of kids memorized it without much coercion, so it must have had something going for it. Here's (below) a link to a little two year-old girl reciting it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp_ESjq7eGI

The poem was so popular that Harold Gray made a comic strip (above) out of it. Gray must have liked writing because the strip was the most wordy comic ever. It's a wonder that the characters didn't get stoop shouldered from having to scuttle around under word balloons as big as pianos.

Gray solved the balloon problem by running the excess dialogue down the characters' backs and over their faces and chests.

Annie was so goody-goody that she spawned a zillion sex parodies. I'm guessing that Annie was second only to Little Red Riding Hood in that regard. Here's (above) Little Annie Fannie by Harvey Kurtzman.



She was well represented in radio and film, too.  If you have the stamina to listen to this 45 minute video of Jean Shepherd's radio show you'll hear the story of the boy who got the shock of his life when he decoded Annie's secret message and discovered she was a rip-off artist.

Wood (above) did a sexy take-off, too.

Even Tijuana Bibles got into the act. Poor James Witcomb Riley. He was a gentle soul who probably never dreamed his poem would would spawn a whole cottage industry of sex and crime parodies.

BTW: Thanks to Steve for turning me on to Riley.

VACHEL LINDSAY'S "CONGO."

Here's a poem by Vachel Lindsay that every kid used to learn in school. It's almost unique in that it has a driving rhythm that makes parts of it very hard to forget. I wouldn't be surprised if hearing it only once addicted millions to the sound of English words.

Unfortunately the poem sounds sounds racist to modern ears and so isn't read as often as it once was. That might be okay if there was an adequate substitute, but there's not...none that I know of, anyway. There's the beautifully paced prologue to "Romeo and Juliet": "Two houses / both alike in dignity / in fair Verona / where we lay our scene." There's also Blake's famous stanza about the tiger.  They're great, and very hard to forget...still.....

Anyway, if you can forgive the racial content, here's (below) an excerpt from Lindsay's "Congo."

THE CONGO

by Vachel Linsay

Well, it goes on.

Here's a reading by Lindsay himself. Fans regard this as definitive, but I can imagine one that might be even better. See what you think.

PECULIAR 19TH CENTURY CITIES

Oh, to have a time machine and be able to visit 19th Century Europe! I'd wander the streets, trying to keep a low profile, buying bread, cheese and wine when needed, maybe availing myself of horse-drawn cabs if I could afford it.

Since in the present we're surrounded by skyscrapers, we imagine 19th Century buildings as being being low to the ground, but the evidence of old etchings and photography is that a large number of city structures were actually pretty tall. 

Even before elevators people liked to build'em big. That's odd because tall buildings had to be climbed, step by laborious step.

Castle motiffs were common. There must be a reason for that. 

 Like castles some buildings had plain, sheer walls with few windows close to ground level. That's also odd. This was an era when rooms were dark and often lit by slow burning twigs because candles were so expensive. You'd think people would have welcomed any chance to bring sunlight in. 

Balconies were high, I used to think in order to discourage burglars. Now I'm not so sure. No doubt they were high because rooms had high ceilings in those days. But does that make sense? Heat rises, so high ceilings would have made rooms cooler in the Summer, but also colder in the Winter. It's as if people had a choice and deliberately chose comfort in the Summer over warmth in the Winter. That's odd, don't you think?

Also, lower ceilings would have enabled builders to put a greater density of people into a given space. Why such high ceilings, and therefore high buildings, when space in the city was probably at a premium?

 The only thing I can think of that explains all these biases is that people wanted to live in buildings that resembled castles and cathedrals, even if doing so was inconvenient. Huzinga said that medievals were exceptionally imaginative and sentimental people. Maybe 19th Century people were the same way. Maybe this was the common man's way of living like mythic Lords and Ladies.

Of course not all buildings were the way I described them. Pictures of the period were full of imaginative variations of Roman public buildings. Were many of these actually built? I doubt it, but what do I know?

TIM BISKUP REVISITED

Gee, I like this guy's work. Tim Biskup, I mean. In my opinion he's one of the best painters out there now. 

What I see in Tim's work is an intelligent, civilized mind that delights in fun. Seeing a picture like this (above) reminds me how lucky I am to have five senses. It makes me think of the world as a gourmet feast served up because somebody out there likes us.  

That dripping, green paint is a happy counterpoint to what's underneath.

For me a skull (above) represents mortality and intelligence. To see it covered with painterly color like this celebrates the emotional side of intellect. Since it's a skull it also underlines the tragic nature of our short life span, but offers the consolation of "Think of what you saw. Think of what you experienced. Wasn't it great?"

Haw! It occurs to me that artists usually disavow artsy fartsy explanations like this. 

Here's a photo of Biskup's studio. I love to see artists' workspaces.



 Here's (above) the man himself. Is that April March's music in the background?

40S CRIME COMICS [EXPANDED]

Here's (above) Fredrick Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent, the book that provoked censorship of the comics and ended what a lot of fans consider a golden age of newsstand comics. I love those comics myself but I have to admit that Wertham had a point.

If you're a parent you don't want your kids to read comics with stories like this (above).  

   There used to be lots of crime comics and the most popular of all was Lev Gleason's Crime Does Not Pay. I like to think the edge that title had was its two artist/writer/editors, Bob Wood and Charles Biro. They favored a more cartoony style than the other crime comics, and Wood really did seem to understand the criminal mind.

I thought you might like to see samples of the work of some of the CDNP artists. We'll start with Rudy Palais (above and below) who drew the most gruesome stories. 

Here (above) Palais shows a woman kissing a man to death.

And here (above) he has a man kill a baby. 'Pretty gruesome stuff!

This one's (above) by Dick Briefer who also did the Frankenstein comics. I can't believe a story like this ever appeared in mass market comics.

Hmmm...I've seen this artist's work (above) before but I don't know his name. I'm guessing that the editors had had a hand in the continuity here and Bob Wood's knack for injecting humor into horror is evident.  

Now you can understand why Wertham thought crime comics had gone too far. They really had. Censorship was inevitable.  

Here's (above) one of my favorite CDNP artists, Bob Q. Siege. His anatomy is either very bad or very good, I can't figure out which. For a year he shared an apartment with Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder. I think I can see the influence. 

Last but not least is Charles Biro (that's his work, above) who was an artist as well as an editor.  He drew a lot of the covers. He wasn't an exceptional draughtsman but he knew what to draw and sometimes that can be almost as useful as knowing how to draw...well, sort of. Can you count the perspective cheats in this picture?

Bob Wood and Charles Biro were friends as well as co-workers. They shared hobbies: drinking and gambling. . . hobbies that were to prove fatal for Wood. 

Wood had a good feel for crime...maybe too good a feel. He psyched himself into the criminal mentality so effectively that he actually murdered somebody in real life.

That's all I have to say about that comic but I'll take the opportunity to speculate about the excessive censorship that followed the excessive media that brought it about. My guess...and it's only a guess, with no facts to back it up...is that the mob had a hand in magazine distribution and paniced at the spotlight Wertham was throwing on that trade. 

 According to this guess the mob helped to push through unnecessarily stringent censorship, the heavy-handed kind that was inflicted on Barks later stories for Western Publishing. That kind of thing crippled magazine creativity for decades to come. Once again, that's pure speculation and I could be wrong. 

WHO INVENTED BRITISH GENRE FICTION?

I can't resist starting this post about Horace Walpole with an illustration (above) from a vampire story. Walpole liked scary images so I think he would have approved. Anyway, Walpole was one of the most influential storytellers ever to work in the English language. He's credited with inventing the British Gothic novel and, since that morphed into horror, romance and crime and detective fiction, you could make a case that he was the father of British genre novels in general.

The mansion he built, Strawberry Hill (above), illustrates most of this post and is regarded as the first example of Gothic Revival architecture. I like the house but it takes a while to get used to. Apparently Walpole tried hard to create something gloomy and scary but he was temperamentally so good-natured that he was always modifying his intent when it came to the details. The result was a kind of Disneyland version of Gothic.

Maybe this (above) is closer to the way Strawberry Hill appeared in Walpole's time in the mid 18th Century. The whitewash was probably added in recent times to increase it's appeal as a spot to host weddings.

He ran low on funds while building so he had to cut corners. Look at the ceiling (above). It's painted on. Not only that but exterior battlements were often made of cardboard. It's funny to think that Ann Radcliff's creepy 1790 thriller "Mysteries of Udolpho" was inspired by such a cheerful house.

Cheerful (above). This room is positively cheerful. It's beautiful but I don't think any self-respecting ghost would haunt something like this.

Walpole's excesses touched off a kind of arms race among his imitators. Here's (above) a print from 1814 showing novelist William Beckford's house. The gallery was 350 feet long and the tower over 285 feet high. In the fireplaces 60 fires were always kept burning, except in the hottest weather. Yikes!

I think the tower collapsed sometime in the future but, since Gothic fans liked ruins, that wouldn't have prevented tourists from visiting.