What I'm Reading - May 10

Greenlights 

My dear friend (and former football trainer) gave me a copy of Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey.  I met McConaughey briefly when they were shooting A Time To Kill and had no clue he would be such a powerful and charming writer.  

Part autobiography and part philosophy, McConaughey gives a very frank and candid review of his life and how he managed and interpreted it all.  Greenlights is a very Southern book, both in his experiences and attitude.

Although I primarily use kindle to read now (mostly a matter of storage), some of you may know I'm something of a bibliophile snob, especially when it comes to the physical book.  This first edition of Greenlights (my copy came from the fabled Square Books) is a joy to touch and leaf through.  They use heavy rag paper, almost like expensive drawing paper with a substantial tooth.  It switches between different colors of ink and shades of paper so often that I wonder if this book was printed on a web press at all.  Some of the signatures may be from a sheet-fed press, which is unusual.  

Greenlights earns its spot on the best-seller list, primarily on the strength of the writing alone.  This is a book of life, not your typical Hollywood expose.  It's a book that speaks especially to Southern men in a voice they'll find familiar.

The Screwtape Letters.

I tell people that I"m an agnostic because I am, and I believe everyone is; no matter if they claim absolute belief or absolute disbelief, everyone has questions and doubts.  I've read many Christian apologists through the years, and I can only call Lewis beloved, at least by me.  This is my third time through on Screwtape and probably not the last.  

Written before he lost (and ultimately regained) his faith, Lewis dedicates Screwtape to his dear friend and fellow scribbler, J.R.R. Tolkien.  It's a fictitious series of letters written from a supervisor daemon to his nephew, advising his efforts to collect the soul of an English "client" recently converted to Christianity.  

In this and other works, Lewis makes Christian apology entertaining and digestible.  Lewis has a pragmatic opinion on Christian practices and philosophies, which come through almost effortlessly here.

Like the Narnia books, The Screwtape Letters is a quick read and a staple of English-speaking Christianity.  

Meeting Big Bird and Kermit The Person

 Mine was a very loving mother.  She often found humor in taking advantage of our naivete,  "fooling" us, and getting us into more than a few adventures.

Using a congressional grant, the Public Broadcasting System went on air in 1969, bringing several local public stations into a national network.  Mississippi Public Broadcasting went on air the following year, with their studios located on 16th section land off Ridgewood Road in North East Jackson.  

My father had a Missco Employee come and install UHF antennas on the massive VHF antenna hidden in our attic.  Seven-year-old Boyd could then see the new hit show on PBS called Sesame Street.

Although Sesame Street utilized a generous grant from the Carnegie and Ford Foundations, they still needed money, so by 1972, they began doing roadshows featuring some of the show's cast.  Somehow they picked Jackson for a stop, and it was the biggest event for the short-pants set that year.  Bob, Gordon, Susan, Mr. Looper, and Big Bird were slated to appear.

I think the adults were more excited than the kids.  Somehow my mother had the job of picking up some of the cast at the Jackson airport.   I suspect it had something to do with the Junior League because other mothers had a similar task, and the Junior League was always up to something. 

Mom's task was to pick up two men from the cast in our Ford station wagon and deliver them to their hotel near the Coliseum. I saw the circus, the rodeo, and the Harlem Globetrotters at the Coliseum, so that was pretty much hollowed ground for little guys.

At the airport, we waited and waited.  Eventually, two bearded men hopped in the car.  One was older than the other and carried a large, oblong bag.  Mother introduced them to me.  One was Carrol, and one was Kermit.  "Kermit, the frog?" I asked.  "No, no," he said, "I'm Kermit the Person.  I make muppets like Big Bird and Oscar." 

Kermit Love was a Broadway designer and a long-time collaborator with Jim Henson.  He fabricated Big Bird, Oscar, Mr. Snuffleupagus, and Cookie Monster.  A gentle creature with a Santa-sized beard, he explained how "Snuffy" operated with two men inside.  The bag in his lap contained Big Bird's head!  He undid the zipper and showed me how to work Big Bird's eyes with the pinky of one hand. 

"Carrol is Big Bird!" Mother said.  Mother fooled me before, so I was dubious.  I wasn't rude enough to say it, but this fellow was clearly a young hippie and NOT Big Bird.   He must have met this reaction before because he raised one hand above his head, moved his fingers like a mouth, and said, "Hi!"  Suddenly Big Bird appeared before me.  I was a believer.

I wanted that drive to last forever, but it didn't.  We dropped the men off at their hotel, and that was the last I ever saw of Kermit The Person.  The show was great, featuring a few skits and songs with human characters, and Big Bird was the star.

After the show, I saw a cluster of even littler kids crowded around Carrol Spinney at the door to the Coliseum Green Room.  My sister and Lee Kroeze, her childhood companion and neighbor, were among the pint-sized fans. Spinney must have taken the heavy bird body off and only wore the Big Bird legs 

Carrol Spinney and Kermit Love
 on the set of Sesame Street.

working the puppet head above his own. Talking to his young fans in Big Bird's voice, I don't think they noticed his body was missing.  

My sister got his autograph and saved one of the dyed-yellow turkey feathers constantly falling off Big Bird's costume.  She displayed her Sesame Street autographs and her Big Bird feather in a frame in her room for many years. Hopefully, she still has it somewhere.  

Spinney and Love Shoot an outdoor scene.

Godzilla and Perry Mason

 In 1954, Japanese studio Toho, released Gojira, a copy of America's Beast From 20,000 fathoms, remade with political and strong anti-nuclear overtones.  It quickly became the most attended, highest-grossing release in Japanese film history.  

The uncut film in Japanese found a limited release in the USA, almost exclusively in Japanese neighborhoods.  In 1956, American producer Joseph E. Levine paid Toho $25,000 for the American rights to distribute Gojira.  Gojira was a made-up word with no English equivalent, so Levine sounded it out phonetically and came up with "Godzilla."

Afraid American audiences wouldn't appreciate the film's political overtones, Levine trimmed out almost twenty minutes.  He then injected scenes shot in Los Angeles with American actor Raymond Burr with body doubles of Japanese characters in the original footage to try and match the existing Japanese footage.  He randomly picked Steve Martin's name for Burr's character many years before the banjo-playing comedian became famous for his song "King Tut".  

Adding the subtitle "King Of The Monsters", Godzilla was released to American Audiences in 1956 to the same baby boomer, drive-in audiences that fueled the 50's sci-fi craze and rivaled the success of many home-grown films.  

The original Japanese version was hard to come by in the US.  As monster obsessed as I was, I never saw it myself until bootleg versions became available on VHS in the 90s.  

In 1957, CBS hired Burr to play Perry Mason, one year after Godzilla King Of The Monsters.  Mason was a pulp novel character featured in over eighty novels beginning in the 1930s.  He appeared in films and radio with other actors before television.  

Perry Mason flipped the typical pulp novel detective formula by making the title character a defense lawyer rather than a policeman or a private eye.  Perry Mason never really defended anyone as we know it. His clients were never guilty.  He used detective skills rivaling Hercule Poirot and invariably proved his clients never committed the crimes they were accused of. Often he exposed the true culprit in the courtroom itself! 

Burr's original run as Perry Mason ran from 1957 to 1966, revived in the seventies, and several made-for-tv movies in the eighties.  Burr was tall, steely-eyed, and wore impossibly angular suits.  He had the looks of a matinee hero, and he was also quite gay, in a time when American men were being arrested just for being gay.

Burr had a short-lived, studio-arranged marriage to a woman he hardly met.  Following that, he simply lied and made up two more wives, both of which he invented melodramatic deaths for, making him a grieving widower in the public's eye.  

Burr's actual life partner was actor Robert Benevides.  They were together from 1960 until Burr's death in 1993.  Benevides was not a terribly successful contract actor who had small parts in The Outer Limits and The Monster That Challenged The World.  He gave up acting to do production work on Burr's projects, including executive producer of all the Perry Mason TV movies. 

After 1975's Terror Of Mecha Godzilla, the fifteenth Gojira film, Toho Studios put the character in abeyance for nine years.  In 1984, Toho considered reviving the character for its thirtieth anniversary.  Koji Hashimoto took over the reins as director, with the working title: Gojira Returns.  Hashimoto took the bold step of making his film a direct sequel to the 1954 original, ignoring all the intervening fifteen films.  

Roger Corman's New World Pictures purchased the rights to distribute Gojira Returns in the US.  Renamed Godzilla 1985, they again reached out to Raymond Burr to shoot American sequences to cut into the Japanese footage.  Burr was delighted to comply, expressing a fondness for the monster.  In the thirty years since Godzilla King of The Monsters, comedian Steve Martin became a star, so Burr's character was renamed just Mr. Martin.

Corman negotiated a deal with Dr. Pepper for product placement in the American shots.  Burr refused to comply, so another actor was shot constantly holding a Dr. Pepper can
.  Burr's scenes took a little over a day to shoot.  He reportedly wrote Godzilla's epilogue himself.  

Gojira Returns gave new life to the series and new Japanese and American Godzilla films continue to this day.  Perry Mason returns to television without Burr and both franchises thrive into the twenty-first century.

Terror and the Symphony Ball

I'm reprinting this for my Sister who was only three at the time, and I found out yesterday she doesn't remember any of it.

When I was a kid, there was such a thing as the Jackson Carnival Ball, put on by the Jackson Junior League. It was a really big deal. Patterned after the New Orleans Mardi Gras Krewes.  They had a king with a court and pages, costumes, and dancing, and the whole thing was held in the Jackson Coliseum.

The idea was to make money for the Jackson Symphony (now the Mississippi Symphony). I don't know if it didn't actually raise any money or if it was too much trouble or what, but they haven't had a Carnival Ball that big in a long time. 

My mother wasn't the kind of person to join a volunteer organization like the Junior League without doing any actual volunteer work so one year, she ended up in charge of all the costumes for the Carnival Ball, and my brother was enlisted as a page boy. I remember racks and racks of costumes filling the living room and the dining room of our house and strangers in and out to try them on. 

That year, the King of the ball was the governor of Mississippi, John Bell Williams. Williams was a World War II hero and lost one arm in battle when his bomber crashed. Sometimes he wore a mechanical prosthetic arm that ended in two curved metal prongs. 

Williams was an old-style Democrat and previously served in Congress in Washington. He supported segregation, but, as governor, he didn't fight the court order when it came down to desegregating Mississippi public schools.

Arrangements were made for the Governor to come by our house and try on his king costume before the ball. My dad supported Williams' opponent in the governor's race, so this was a slightly delicate moment. 

 My mother pulled us kids aside to tell us that a very important man was coming to the house, and we were to be on our best behavior and be very polite and say "yes, sir" and especially not to stare because he had only one arm. 

Determined to be a good boy, I spent the next day and a half preparing myself to meet this important man with one arm. I wasn't going to stare, and I wasn't going to say anything stupid like, "Nice to meet you, we voted for William Winter." or "Hey mister, where's your arm?". 

The big day came, and a nicely dressed older man came to the door in a dark suit with a hat. I was six years old. Now, my mother was wise to warn us about meeting a man with one arm, and I was ready for that, even though I'd never met a man with one arm before. What she didn't tell us was that he had replaced that arm with what looked to me like a gleaming metal HOOK like Captain Hook from Peter Pan! Captain Hook was a bad guy, so I ran and hid, not to come out until after the Governor had left.

And that was my first awkward experience with politicians.

HBO's Julia, Episode 7 Foie Gras

I've remarked before how much I'm enjoying this program.  This week's episode is especially good.  

If you enjoyed the banter of David Hyde Pierce and Bebe Neuwirth on "Fraiser" you'll find this episode a treat.  Later in the episode, Julia encounters Betty Freidan, author of "The Feminine Mystique", a foundational book involving the burgeoning feminist movement, for a powerful tet-a-tet about Julia's program and its influence on the role of American Women.

Toward the end of the episode, Julia has a moving encounter with someone most of you will recognize.  I have no idea if it's based on a real-life encounter, but I'd like to think so.

HBO hasn't yet decided about a season two of "Julia".  Let's hope they pick it up.  

Flowers In The Ponder Heart

If you ever visited Eudora Welty's home, you'll know she loved gardening and flowers, so it's not surprising she often mentions them in her books.  

In her 1953 novella, The Ponder Heart, she mentions several varieties of flowers and plants well-known to Southern Gardners, including: 

• Railroad lilies (orange daylilies) (Hemerocallis fulva)
• Narcissus Nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus)
• Red Nasturtium (Tropaeolum minus)
• Verbina (Verbena officinalis)
• Chinaberries (Melia azedarach)
• Althea (Hibiscus syriacus)
• Salvia (Salvia officinalis)
• Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora)
• Etoile Rose (Etoile de Hollande)
• Fig Tree (Ficus carica 'Celeste')

These little touches really help create a mental image of the scenes she describes if you're from the South.  As I re-read her other works, I might make similar posts about them.  I suspect this aspect of her work has been covered many times before, but it will still be fun.   

Miss Eudora Tending Her Garden (1940s)

View Our Eudora Welty Collection

The Offer Episode One

 

I watched the first episode of "The Offer" on Paramount Plus, and here's the review I promised.

It begins in the late sixties, an exciting time in the American movie business, on the rubicon of the early seventies, one of the greatest eras for Cinema.  It's a show made by Paramount, about a Paramount picture, with many scenes in the famous Gower Street Paramount studios, telling the story of how "The Godfather" came to be.  

Many people, myself included, consider "The Godfather" one of the greatest films ever made.  With all this rich material, the show is off to a good start.  First episodes are always awkward because you have to fit in a lot of basic character introductions and exposition. 

I felt the writers were struggling to fit it all in here.  They have to introduce the producers, Albert Ruddy and Robert Evans, the writers Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, and real-life gangster Joe Columbo and set up the story's basic premise.  That's a lot to accomplish in an hour.  

The cast so far is competent but not bowling me over. It's too early to tell, though.  I did find Matthew Goode, playing Robert Evans, a bit annoying, but let's see how it goes.  The sets and costumes are also competent, and the cinematography is very good.

There are dozens of easter eggs strewn throughout this episode, both to movie fans of the era and Coppola fans.  One I enjoyed was seeing Coppola handling his wind-up 16mm camera.  His "home movies" shot on set are pretty well known to Godfather fans.

So far, I'm definitely in for another episode.  The show moves along pretty quickly and does not pull punches on some of the known issues associated with "The Godfather," like how Frank Sinatra reacted to the book.

The series is ten episodes, released every Thursday night on Paramount Plus.

Mississippi Mummy

In the 1920s, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History purchased an extensive collection of Native American artifacts from Colonel Brevoort Butler.

Included in these artifacts was one item that was clearly not of Native origin, an Egyptian mummy said to be a princess.

For decades the mummy was displayed in the Old State Capitol Building, becoming a much-loved attraction and source of local pride that Mississippi should have such an exotic item.

In 1969, Gentry Yeatman, a local medical student interested in archeology, asked the museum for the "human remains" to study for evidence of disease.

Permission was granted to remove the mummy and send it to the University of Mississippi Medical Center for an autopsy, where radiological examination showed quite a surprise!  

Inside the mummy were a few animal ribs and several square nails holding together a wooden frame. He discovered the "mummy" primarily consisted of paper-mâché, including German newsprint and pages from an 1898 issue of the Milwaukee Journal.  Our prized artifact was a forgery!

The fake mummy is 

The Mummy and the X-Ray

more famous now than ever and considered a prized possession as an artifact of Mississippi Folklore.  The Old Capitol Museum often displays the Dummy Mummy around Halloween.

Links:

The Case of the Dummy Mummy 

The Dummy Mummy

Monkey Island Jackson Zoo

 The Jackson Zoo opened on a 79-acre tract of land purchased by the city from Samuel Livingston in 1921.  In the 1930s, the city began constructing a series of exhibits, including a Sealion pool, Aligator Pond, Monkey Island, and two Duck Ponds.  Water flowed from the Sealion pond downhill through each of the other exhibits and overflowed into the sewer from the second Duck Pond.

All of the exhibits had sandstone walls quarried here in Mississippi.  The Monkey Island pond featured an island in the center where they constructed a red limestone castle quarried near Raymond Ms.

The exhibit housed around a dozen macaque monkeys.  There were cages inside the castle structure where the monkeys slept, and keepers could feed and care for them.  Keepers used a tunnel from the down-hill duckpond under the ramada and the Monkey Island pond and came up inside the castle.  Around the castle were wood and concrete Christmas Village houses crafted by Jackson Firemen a decade before when the zoo was at the Central Fire Station.

By the 1980s, shifting soil made the access tunnel unsafe, so the exhibit was switched from monkeys to flamingos.  Stories floated around that the switch was due to tuberculosis, but that was incorrect.

Today the exhibit holds the zoo's alligator collection
but remains a picturesque and popular spot in the zoo.

Color Postcard From the 1940s

Monkey Island In the Snow

The Real Carfax Abbey

 In Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, we are told that Harker procures a Carfax Abbey in Whitby, London, England, for his client, Count Dracula, to reside.  Carfax Abby is an imaginary creation of Stoker but based on Whitby Abbey, an actual structure in the same location.

The initial construction of Whitby Abbey began in the 7th century.  It housed Benedictine monks until it was confiscated at the orders of Henry VIII in his battles with Rome in his efforts toward the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-1541).  It was abandoned after this and remains a ruin to this day.   

Stoker visited Whitby in 1890 and found the gothic ruins the perfect setting for a story. 

Henry Irving

At the time, Stoker worked as an agent for Henry Irving, the actor.  His first thought was to make his vampire story a play for Irving, but when Irving decided he had no interest in the part, Stoker used Irving's likeness and personality to create his vampire, Dracula.

There are other real-life locations used in the novel, but I thought you might enjoy a photograph as this one was so remarkable visually.

Learn more about Stoker's visit to Whitby and how it gave him the idea to create Dracula

The Empathic Life

I'm not psychic by any means, but I am empathetic. It's not that I can always tell what other people feel, but I almost always feel what they feel to some level. I think we're all born with this ability, but learn to tune it out as we get older. If you watch small children, they laugh when other children laugh and they cry when other children cry, even if they don't know what they're laughing at or crying about. As we get older, these empathetic feelings get in the way of whatever we're trying to do or whatever we're trying to feel so we learn to block them out. They're still there though, always there. The problem is that most of the time other people feel angry or annoyed or frightened or distracted and almost always lonely. Feeling those emotions of your own is bad enough, but when you share them from the people you encounter, it can become quite a burden. It can be such a burden, that sometimes I prefer not to be around anyone at all. Feeling nothing but my own thoughts and my own emotions, although quite lonesome at times, is often better than sharing the suffering from the rest of the world. A friend once suggested that I surround myself with happy, successful people and then I wouldn't mind sharing their empathetic experience. There problem there is that most happy, successful people don't usually feel that way, and if they do, they're often almost completely empty inside. There is a payoff though. People do sometimes feel joy, love, laughter and beauty. Sharing these emotions with them can be a privilege. These things are valuable though because they're rare, and sometimes it can be a long dry patch between bright moments. Sometimes I meet people whose need to share what they're experiencing is so great, that being around them almost crushes me. I let them do it though because I can feel how badly they need to share their experience, but it's pretty draining, and afterward I usually need sometime alone to recharge. John Donne said "No man is an island", but he's wrong. All men are an island. We're close enough to signal each other and exchange goods, but ultimately we have to isolate ourselves to keep any identity at all.