Thursday, July 30, 2009

Oopsies!

Uh oh - more names leaked from that 2003 drug test that got A-Rod earlier this year - this time coming closer to home - cheating swine Manny Ramirez and the sainted David Ortiz are named. Shocking news! Meanwhile, Ortiz wasted little time getting the Boston faithful to put this difficult revelation behind them, hitting a home run to win the afternoon's game....

Personally, I am rather grateful for this revelation. Boston fans were a bit too eager to go after A-Rod or Bonds or Canseco back in the day - local commentary is a bit too willing to sniff at those poor deluded fools in LA who welcomed Manny back with open arms after his suspension. Now - they'll have to find other ways to make fools of themselves. I am happy to report that I have generally not been too stern in my judgments - Manny, getting caught this year, is pretty pathetic - but, he did the time, he's back, there you go... and people like Bonds and such - it was a fact of the game back then. There's no grounds to get self-righteous about it - never was, and every name that comes out just proves it over and over again. There's been a certain amount of talk lately about Bill James' take on steroids - one of the keys of James' argument is that whatever "rules" existed against steroids before 2002 or 3 were openly unenforced, if not simply unenforceable. It was hard, in the 90s, not to see the steroid era as a deliberate policy on the part of major league baseball - home runs put asses in in the seats, most of the promotion of the game was promotion of home runs - not for nothing was the home run contest THE attraction of the all star break in that era. I don't know how to get around this. The plain obviousness of the rampant use of steroids, and the obvious acceptance of this at every level of the game. Maybe not the "purists" - as posturing a bunch of blowhards as you are likely to see - but everyone else. Not that you had to like it - I'm a pitching defense, walks and doubles guy myself, a fan of the national league game stuck in a quintessentially American League city, alas... but it's what it is - or was what it was.

The questions about the hall of fame are coming up, more and more - that's what James is writing about; the other night on one of the Red Sox games, Gordon Edes said almost the same thing - you don't know who used and who didn't - in the end, the odds are almost everyone from 95-05 will have used something - so you probably have to accept it as a fact of the game as it was played and vote for the best players of the era. That is how I feel. Using steroids isn't admirable, but it was done, and done widely, and hall of fame voting (for instance) is always about comparing players to their peers. Now - it might be more of a problem to compare those players to the players who came before - what are the raw totals worth? How much do you have to discount Manny Ramirez to compare him, accurately, to Jim Rice? Personally - I think steroids are already starting to work the other way - I think Jim Rice got into the Hall of Fame mostly as a reaction to the steroid era. I suspect - much as I adored Jim Rice as a ball player - that without the steroid era, Rice would never have made it in. He wasn't getting in before the strike, before McGwire and Sosa and Bonds hitting 60s of home runs, and so on. If they hadn't, even if they had put up the kinds of numbers you would have expected them to - a couple hundred fewer career homers, maybe; topping out around 52-55 in a season, I imagine - I don't think Rice would have gotten in. I don't know if I would have voted for him, for anything except as a home town favorite... I suppose that goes for the juice boys - I don't know if Sosa was really any better than JIm Ed - McGwire was just a power hitter... ON the other hand, steroids or not, I don't see any case for keeping Bonds or Clemens or A Rod out of the hall - if they were cheaters, they were plainly better than all the other cheaters, and probably better than a good many non-cheaters... So...

Baseball. In the end, I expect to treat steroids the way you treat Coors field or the dead ball - one of the conditions of the game at a certain time, that changes the way the stats look.

Meanwhile, to turn to less controversial subjects - I see metro Boston's last big horrendous news item has reached a kind of conclusion, as President Obama's "beer summit" occurs, bringing Henry Louis Gates and police sergeant James Crowley together for a brewski and a few words of wisdom.... I hope those words of wisdom include something to the effect of, "you know, sergeant, while it's true I should not have called you stupid in front of the national media, you really did screw up." It's rather amazing that a significant number of people don't think the cop is essentially to blame. You can't go arresting people for breaking into their own house - or for being pissed off when you show up and investigate them for breaking into their own house... of course, there's some sign the cop knew that, and got Gates to follow him outside in a rage, where he could arrest him for creating a public disturbance - hard to say. But hard to see anything in the story that puts the blame for the arrest anywhere but on the police.

Anyway, it seems to be winding down now. Just as well. Though I hope something more comes out of this than another round of solemn intonations to Never Antagonize An Officer of the Law! Usually from the same people who solemnly intone that Socialized Medicine Will Take Away Your Right to Choose Your Own Health Care! Right. By god, if we've gotta have a police state, let's at least have free health care!

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Memories



July is not a good blogging month for me - there is too much to do: vacations, mine and people visiting me - softball games - baseball to watch, too hot, usually to do a lot of writing... And I suppose I've been a bit burnt out, after taking too classes in the spring, then knocking out a bunch of Japanese film posts in June... not a lot of posts, but longish posts...

Excuses excuses. There are things to do - one thing to do is post a response to Joseph B's Mr. Bernstein Meme. The principal is simple - a memory, with the same kind of disproportionate importance of the girl in white on the ferry, cited by Bernstein in Citizen Kane. Which also puts me in mind of Caveh Zahedi's monologue in Waking Life about Holy Moments... I have been thinking about memory - I have been scanning slides - which create whole webs of associations. The knowledge about who is in the pictures, where, what they are doing - the memories, the sense memories, of the things in the pictures (when I remember them) - and the memories of watching slides themselves. My family had - well, probably thousands of slides. Once a month or so, we would set up a screen, make a big bowl of popcorn, turn off the lights and go through them - grabbing boxes of them blind, going through them almost randomly... An event.

So - that is what I should write about - but it is harder work than it should be. And - I have a lot more slides to go through - making it easy to procrastinate.... Now: I can stick pretty close to Bernstein's memory - a girl, spotted once... In this case - an Asian girl, college aged, throwing a frisbee with some friends in JFK Park, in Harvard Square, 12-15 years ago. Summer - she had short hair, shorts and a tee shirt, she was really good with he frisbee... I don't know what about her stuck - I have spent lots of afternoons in JFK park, eating lunch, reading, whatever - lots of kids throwing frisbees (and playing soccer and volleyball and sunbathing and walking dogs and kids and everything else people do, lazy summer afternoons...) But I remember her.

Though I hope I can write something about this, say:



A train, photographed somewhere on the line from Northern Vermont, NIagara Falls and Toronto, sometime in the summer of 1977 or 78. Nothing spectacular - and honestly, it doesn't really spark any memories. What it does do, though, is remind me of James Bennings' RR - and that film sparks memories. All of it - but especially, starting with shot #4 (the link above has pictures of all the trains in the film), of waiting or trains to cross roads. I had forgotten that - it's rare, now, to have to wait for a long train to cross a road - but when I was a kid, it happened quite a lot. Maybe it happened most when we were traveling in Canada - I remember long trains, trains crossing roads, or running alongside roads. I remember counting the cars of trains, especially when they were crossing the highway. And - some of those big monsters - 100 plus cars - I remember some of those. I remember counting cars on trains - one of the games we played when we were driving (my family) - counting horses, counting snowmobiles, not to mention road bingo - games we played, driving to Vermont, Canada, etc. There's a lot there....

And finally - that train, that trip, to Niagara falls - that's the picture at the top. I haven't come to the rest of the Niagara slides. That's likely to bring back some memories, when I dig them up.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Distractions



I have nothing much to say here. I have spent this week with a lovely new toy - a little slide scanner, nothing special, but it works. My family took slides - up to the middle of the 80s, maybe - 70%? more? - of the pictures we took were slides. It's been years since anyone bothered to bring out the projector, the screen, all that stuff - they were in danger of disappearing into - nothingness... So this has been a blessing. Quick and simple process getting them on the computer (the machine scans to SD cards) - the quality doesn't seem to be all that good, though it might just be the fact that these are 30 to 50 year old slides, snapshots at that. But it does what it does and does it very well... I've gotten a few hundred done this weekend - god knows how many more there are at the family homestead, but I might get them all in there. I am happy...

Anyway - here is a picture that probably explains a lot. It's hard to see - but that's Johnny West on the arm of the chair; and those are Hardy Boys books on the chair and in hand. That's me at 8 or 9, every inch the nerd I would become...



Now this picture - thankfully, I never became the evil clown I foretold here...

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

This may be scientific, but it's pretty horrible

For of the Spirit of Ed Wood blogathon, literary division.



I know next to nothing about Dr. John Button, but if anyone exemplifies the spirit of Ed Wood, it was Dr. John Button. Who was Dr. John Button? Whatever else he was, he was a ghostwriter for the Stratemeyer syndicate, mass producers of children's literature from the beginning of the 20th century to - well, today, in spirit at least. Now Edward Stratemeyer - that's what people like Ed Wood, enthusiastic purveyors of unabashed pulp fiction, aspired to be - knocking out stories by the score, first whole books, then outlines, that he farmed out to his ghostwriters, all of it written to spec - 25 chapters, 200 or so pages, one after another... all of it immensely popular, and some of it pretty damned good - with a few series that changed the cultural landscape. The Hardy Boys - Nancy Drew - maybe Tom Swift and the Bobbsey Twins... That's Edward Stratemeyer.

I loved the Hardy Boys when I was a kid - yes I did. I think I read the first one in second grade, and was addicted from the start - I read every one of them I could find. I emptied all the libraries I had access to - and since I had access to some old and shabby libraries, I read the original set of books along with the current set of books. (The Syndicate rewrote the early books starting in 1959: they dumbed down the prose, turned the boys squeaky clean, took out the racism [which was pretty bad for a while], and most of the characterization to boot.] Now I wasn't the most discriminating reader when I was 8, but I had my favorites, and there were some head-scratchers in the series - I was pleased to discover on re-reading them that my faves were actually pretty good, and the dubious ones were actually pretty bad... Okay. The fact is, I suppose, the Stratemeyer's techniques were bound to create a very uneven series - only as good as the outliners and the ghostwriters currently employed. It is no surprise that the first 10-11 are the strongest - they were written by Leslie McFarlane, a more than fair writer; the were probably outlined, at least some of them, by old Edward Stratemeyer himself. He died in 1930, and it's the early 30s when things go south - the stories get dumber; the racism gets more pronounced; the characters get more caricatured... And then, in 1938, with McFarlane gone, the syndicate hired our hero, Dr. John Button, to write the books....

He wrote five: The Secret Warning; The Twisted Claw; The Disappearing Floor; The Mystery of the Flying Express; and The Clue of the Broken Blade. Even when I was a kid, I could tell these were a bit - off. Not that the rest of the series is great lit - the first 11 (say) are pretty damned good for what they are; there's a nice renaissance in the 40s and 50s (the stories tend to be sillier, but there's a nice sense of atmosphere to a lot of them, some cool set pieces, and a couple better than average detective stories); but they grow increasingly perfunctory and formulaic in the late 50s and 60s onward, and are near unreadable by the 70s. (An opinion I held in real time...) But the bad books and bad stretches tend to be boring and drab affairs - flat prose and flat stories and predictable action and....

Not the Dr. John Button books. No. They are bad, but they are bad in the finest tradition of Ed Wood. (Though bad a decade or so before Ed Wood started to be bad.) They are bad for all the normal reasons - lazy plots, built on coincidence and caricatured characters, realized in dull, awkward prose, full of implausible events and - more or less uniquely in a property this closely controlled by its owners - jammed full of continuity errors. Like getting characters' names wrong - like the Hardy Boys mother's name wrong. That sort of thing.... They are bad for those reasons - but they are also bad for - well - let's cut to the chase: the Plan 9 From Outer Space of juvenile fiction, and the source of this humble blog's name, and its blogger's screenname - The Disappearing Floor.

If you were to click on that last link, you'd find a couple summaries of this book - both of which give up after 4-5 chapters. Let me give you a partial itinerary for the boys: they start at a train station - go to a place called Great Notch, somewhere in the hills - they hike into the woods - they fall into a cave (and meet their father) - they leave the cave, find a bag of silver dollars, and head off to return it to some place called Wayne City - after driving a cab into the river, precipitating a riot at the bank, and discovering that the bag contains $82,000 (in silver dollars) - they go back to the woods, where Dad has been KO'd - once more into the cave, more trouble there - they haul Dad to a hospital - they go back to Bayport - then up into the woods with a bunch of girls and their Aunt Gertrude. There - Dad turns up and is mauled by a tiger that the boys kill with pointed sticks (no, really!) and a rock - they take him to the hospital again, send the girls back home - go back looking for the bad guys and are attacked by another tiger, and rescued by the villain - they go to thank him, but are worried he'll recognize him so they drag up. Then it's off to the town of Erie, for another bank robbery - they follow the robbers who bury gold in a cemetery - later a crazy old man digs up the gold during a thunder storm - the boys capture the head robber - then get kidnapped - go to an Old Dark House - are frozen solid and set adrift in a rowboat - go back to the house - where most of the rest of the story takes place... Though they do leave a few times, once to fly from Erie to Columbia to buy a book, then back, tailed by the wolfish gangster Weeping Sam himself - they hide at an amusement park, then back to the house, where Fenton Hardy gets electrocuted and frozen solid....

Right. It's like that - constant motion, until they reach the house, and even there they go in and out, up and down, as does the house (the title coming from a room with an elevator in the floor) - contending with a mad scientist who grows plants with electricity, has a device for quick freezing people, immobilizes people with magnetic fields, has a system of electric ghosts to scare off intruders, as well as more prosaic electric traps and locks, has the whole place bugged ("the listening ear"), has a machine that can force you to tell the truth - etc.... What happens in all these places - never mind the science fiction - is wildly absurd: randomly finding bags of money, people turning up and disappearing at will, the boys dressing up as old women to fool Duke Beeson, and later pretending to be Duke Beeson to fool Weeping Sam - and full of extremely strange things. Two Tigers loose in the woods? a group of -sun-worshippers? "Ozonites" - led by Chief Shining Light - an Indian Prince (native of India, that is) - who's really Duke Beeson? I don't know how much of this is the fault of the syndicate's outliners (Edna Stratemeyer Squire, in fact, daughter of old Edward) and how much is Button's, but whoever it is - it's a pretty amazing performance....

It's bad - but it sneaks up on you. It's like those Ed Wood films - however silly the story is, however badly acted, shot, written it is - it has a kind of total, warped commitment. It's ridiculous - but you can't parody it, you can't make fun of it. The Hardy Boys books, over all, are pretty easy to make fun of - the coincidences, the convenient disappearances and reappearances of Fenton Hardy, the frequent blows to the head, Chet and his hobbies, his appetite, his cowardice - everything rolled out like cloclwork... But this one plays like a parody of all that - Button never met a cliche he didn't like, and could execute them with all the obviousness and lack of grace that Ed Wood would have later - so if Fenton Hardy turns up unexpectedly in a cave, Button isn't going to waste any time looking for a way to make it seem plausible - no: he's just there! if the outliner lost track of where the bag of coins was, Button doesn't care - Oh! it fell in a hole! it looks like a rock! And far be it from him to change the dollar amounts - if the outline says it's a bag of coins in the first chapter, he's not going to quibble too much about what 82,000 silver dollars would weigh in the next chapter, nor let carrying that amount of money slow the Hardy boys from swimming out of a sinking taxi cab... And if you are going to set most of the story in an old dark house, you can bet that you get to the old dark house by way of a thunderstorm in a cemetery at midnight with a cackling madman digging up buried loot...

And that - along with the pace and the sheer weirdness of it - makes it a surprisingly fun read. It's a hoot. It doesn't hurt that, compared to most of the series, it contains some really memorable villains. That's something of a Dr. John Button specialty, in all his books. The bad guys in most Hardy Boys books are a pretty bland lot - snarling swarthy brutes, plus the occasional con man or cold eyed pretty boy assassin, who never really do much beyond whack the boys on the head and explain their evil schemes after they've been captured.... Not Button's villains - they sneer and menace and get lines - lots of lines - and names - Dick Tracy type names: Kuntz the deep sea diver (in The Secret Warning); Pierre the French Canadian Pirate (in the Twisted Claw); and in this book - Duke Beeson, alias Chief Shining Light; wolfish Weeping Sam his main henchman; Louis Butts; three stooges named (as they should be) Pudge, Runt and Spike. They carry on, they get in fights, they scheme against one another and the boys - and when Eben Adar (the mad sceintist) points his truth tellign machine at them, they tell their life stories. At least Duke Beeson does: "The first thing I ever stole was my teacher's pocketbook," he said in a drawl.... HIs books as a group do this - make the villains much more prominent, treating them like, well - Dick Tracy, and other comic strips - or the better Hollywood adventure tales, giving the bad guys scenery to chew... it goes a long way toward making these books enjoyable.

And finally - there's the dialogue. This has more than its share of Ed Wood worthy lines. The boys find the bad guys frozen solid - "This may be scientific," concluded Joe, "but it's pretty horrible." Or in re the tiger they have downed, and possibly killed - "Give me your stick. I'll poke him." Or perhaps this exchange: the old madman, Eben Adar, is giving Aunt Gertrude a tour, showing her his electric flowers...
"-and this species here, Getrude, this is a rare variety of Ch'lienglien, a Chinese flower of exquisite beauty. Ah, but the Orientals have never seen this."
"Gracious, it is huge, Eben..."

Which I suppose brings us to a final point. You have to start to wonder - all this absurdity - the obvious, unapologetic coincidences and cliches, the heavy handed foreshadowing, and - well - lines like that one? or the inclusion of those sun-worshippers? Given that "sun-worshippers" usually turns up in old books and movies and comics as a reference to nudists... and the boys, dressing up as old women? and - well - maybe - I can't help suspecting that maybe Dr. John Button was in on a bit more of the unintentional comedy than he lets on. But in the end, I suppose it doesn't matter - the book is - utterly ridiculous, but funny as hell anyway, packed full of stuff, completely shameless - and a joy to read. As much fun as an Ed Wood movie, and it would be just as funny if it were all meant as a parody, as it is, thinking it's just ineptitude. There's a fine line between clever and stupid - and sometimes, the line doesn't matter in the least.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Summer Vacation



Well, here I am, back from vacation, a week in the rain, with little hints of sun there toward the end. Sun's out today, though - a bit confusing and all. Meanwhile, the blog world rolls along - there are events and blogathons, planned and spontaneous - going on now, or recently concluded...

The blog world rolls along: Cinemastyles celebrates Ed Wood and the 50th anniversary of the release of Plan 9 From Outer Space with The Spirit of Ed Wood blogathon.

Edward Copeland, meanwhile, is watching and writing about the films of another low budget maverick, Werner Herzog.

And - being out of town - I've barely glanced at Radiator Heaven's Michael Mann week, which was, I'm afraid, last week.

There are also a couple posts I need to catch up on for the Film of the Month Club's June film, ...No Lies. And discussion of this month's film, Hands over the City, is underway...

Finally - keeping track of all the film related special events on the blogs is a daunting task - Ed Howard is the latest to take a crack at it, posting a Film Blog Calendar...

Finally: the joys of a month of rain - a hole in the middle of the road: [Updated, since I seem to have left out the hole in the road first time...]