Last One?

This marks the end of my “required” blogs for class.  I have not decided, but I may still keep this thing going.  I like expressing my thoughts and having others appreciate the knowledge (some useful, but most is not) that I have acquired in my 27 years. 

I got an email from one of my favorite bands of the time, the Decembrists.  They have a new album coming out in January.  I can hardly wait.  If you have never heard of them, their music is a breath of fresh air. The strange part of the context of their songs is that most of it is in an older dialect. Men are referred to as “rakes”.  Each song tells a different story, but all are married to the sea.  The band is from Portland, or so it makes sense that the ocean would permeate.  The band’s sound is hard to describe.  They use a variety of instruments including the bouzouki, accordion, fiddle, steel guitar, and the hurdy gurdy to name a few.  Each song is like a sea shanty.  One of my favorites is about a boy whose mother is given consumption by a fiendish rake.  With her dying breathe the mother tells the boy to avenge this wicked deed.  It takes the boy most of his life to find the rake, but he does and they end up in the belly of a ship that had eaten their respective ships. I will tell no more, the song is called the mariner’s revenge song. If this sounds appealing to you, check out the Decembrists.    

 

To wear or not to wear...

I remember watching a movie with my mom when I was a little boy, and not being able to take my eyes off of the man on the screen. That man was Harrison Ford and the movie was “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Ever since I can remember I wanted to be Indiana Jones. I wanted to wear that fedora. I always got a new whip around Halloween from the costume store. I wanted to go to faraway places searching for mysterious objects of lore, and be very cunning and smart. Mainly, I wanted that hat. Flash forward: Marty McFly wearing a fedora when he goes back to 1955 in “Back to the Future: Part II.” A few years ago, I saw “The Blues Brothers”. Belushi will be eternally cool in his fedora. But the moment I told myself I had to get my own fedora was when I saw “Casablanca”. Humphrey Bogart looked like that hat was part of him. He wore it like no other, and paired with a khaki trench coat, it became a classic. Another person who makes a fedora look cool is Frank Sinatra. How he felt at the moment changed the tilt of his hat. When he would push it back and show more forehead, he was showing vulnerability. When he would pull it down, always with a tilt toward the right eyebrow, he was darker and more debonair. Jimmy Stewart also knew how to wear a hat. Hunter S. Thompson has been seen in 1975 wearing a fedora along with his RAF sunglasses and cigarette holder.
I have since embraced hats. I have a lite felt brown Bailey, and a black Stetson fedora. The brims and shapes are different. When I put one on, I just feel cool. I just purchased a plaid Ivy cap. I am looking for tweed and a hound’s-tooth one. I wish it was the 1940s and I couldn’t leave the house without a hat and a three piece suit. If you are interested in old-time style, the village hat shop online has tons. Locally, On-Time Fashions down Texas Street has an unbelievable collection. (Not all are bright colored as you may believe, and they don’t all resemble “pimp” hats there) Do not be afraid to be timeless.

History of All Hallow's Eve

Halloween brings many macabre visions: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, goblins, and witches and warlocks. The root of Halloween to many people is candy. Many of us might have forgotten the real roots of Halloween. All Hallow’s Eve is a mixture of ancient Celtic practices, Catholic and Roman religious rituals, as well as European folk traditions that eventually blended together over time to create the holiday that we know today. Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity and life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. Halloween has long been thought of as a day when the dead can return to the earth, and ancient Celts would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off these roaming ghosts. The Celtic holiday of Samhain, the Catholic Hallowmas period of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day and the Roman festival of Feralia all influenced the modern holiday of Halloween. The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland in the United Kingdom and the northern section of France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the New Year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter. By A.D. 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween. In the 19th century, Halloween began to lose its religious connotation, becoming a more secular community-based children's holiday. Although the superstitions and beliefs surrounding Halloween may have evolved over the years, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people can still look forward to parades, costumes and sweet treats to usher in the winter season.

Memories

As a DIRECTV subscriber, I am used to new channels popping up out of nowhere. For this reason I have not added any channels to my favorites; I would rather search channel by channel to check and see if any new ones have cropped up. The first one I stumbled across was called Chiller. I immediately liked it because it showed the little known serials of “Freddy’s Nightmares” and “Friday the 13th: The Series”. Also, the channel shows Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery”. “Night Gallery” begins with the tagline, “Good evening and welcome to a private showing of three paintings, displayed here for the first time. Each is a collector's item in its own way -- not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare.” Serling himself then describes the painting as it is shown on the screen and the episode begins. The show can be compared to Serling’s previous serial, the well-known, “Twilight Zone”. “Night Gallery” reminds me a lot of the “Tales from the Crypt” serial that ran unedited on HBO in the 1990s in that it had a who’s who of actors in bit roles on the show. For instance, appearing in “Night Gallery” are: William Shatner, Vincent Price, Burgess Meredith, Bill Bixby, and other notable actors. I don’t have a favorite “Night Gallery” episode, but a few “Tales” are flawless. One is called “Fitting Punishment”. In this episode, A cruel, crooked funeral home director from Alabama gets an unexpected new addition to his home when his 16-year-old nephew , who was recently orphaned, shows up. The boy is always playing basketball and sometimes even bounces it in the house. The caretaker grows tired of his new ward, and pushes him down the long stairwell that leads down to the morgue, where the embalming takes place. The old man only has one casket, but it is about two to three feet short. The unscrupulous caretaker takes his saw and chops off the boy’s feet so he will fit in. The boy is buried and no one is any the wiser. One night while working on the embalming table, the caretaker hears and then sees a basketball bouncing down the stairs. His eyes grow wide as he sees one bloody stump followed by another. When the boy gets to the bottom of the staircase his eyes are all black and he mutters something to the caretaker. The old man is scared shitless as he should be. Unfortunately, the boy gets his revenge off camera. Another classic episode is called “Abra Cadaver”. IT stars Beau Bridges as Dr. Martin Fairbanks and Tony Goldwyn as Dr. Carl Fairbanks, brothers who are doctors. One birthday Martin suffers a heart attack due to the Carl’s practical joke. As a result, the Martin’s hands are not as steady as before. His work as a doctor begins to wane. He decides to get his revenge after he isolates a chemical that causes a person to become dead, but the brain is still alive. He injects his brother with this serum, and at the climax of the episode, Carl has a tear drop from his eye as an doctor presses the button and starts the saw to open his skull for the autopsy. He says inner monologue, “Martin was wrong about one thing, the sense of touch isn't the first thing to go... it's the last!”

On DIRECTV there is a new channel called Huboom. It is channel 264, I think. Hub shows programs that I remember from when I was a kid. The original TRANSFORMERS and G.I. JOE cartoons from the 80s come on, as well as Fraggle Rock. It also features programs from the 60s: Batman featuring Adam West, Laverne & Shirley, and Happy Days. Hub is featured on Comcast as well, somewhere around Cartoon Network. If you are a fan of these shows, I hope you watch them; They bring back pleasant memories for me.

The Horror!

Halloween is my favorite time of the year. One reason is that the cold weather is a welcome sensation to the burning of the summer sun. Another is the horror. Oh yes, the horror. Horror films show us the dark side of humanity. They show us lunatics in masks that kill because they were made fun of. They show us the fears of old. They give us social commentary. The gritty, realistic ones truly scare, while the over-the-top ones give a genuine chuckle. Films like Hellraiser, exposed many of us to the underbelly of sexual perversion, that delicate line between pleasure and pain. Pinhead is one of the most fearsome characters to be placed on the screen. His blatant disregard for humanity is what scares. John Carpenter introduced us to the slasher genre with Halloween. Michael Myers hides behind a Captain Kirk likeness of William Shatner mask. He could be anyone. We don’t get to see his face until the sequel. He looks normal enough, except for his eyes. They are wild and sunken. He scares because he hides in the dark and stalks his prey silently. He could be behind you anywhere. Jason Voorhees, of hockey masked Friday the 13th fame, is almost invincible. He has been deemed “too stupid to die.” This does not mean he is not creative in the ways he disposes of stereotypical camp counselors year after year. A film of the silent era, Nosferatu, gives a face to Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula. His are the eyes a child can see through the window of your home in the dark if you look hard enough. He is the stuff of nightmares, a fiend in black, thirsting for blood to keep him alive. It takes life to give life. The Wolf Man is the stuff of legend, a star crossed as well as cross bred man-beast. He scares because who has not seen or believed they have seen a large animal in the woods at night? Some characters are based on actual people. Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs are all based on Ed Gein, the killer of Plainfield, Wisconsin. These characters scare us because they could unsuspectingly be your neighbors; neighbors who wear other’s skin because they do not like their own, neighbors who developed a taste for flesh fighting in a foreign land, neighbors who seem normal, but lurking below their façade is pure insanity. When the police raided Gein’s home after report of a strange stench, they found human skulls used as bowls, furniture composed of bones, skin used as lampshades, and hanging bodies in his garage. He was the mild-mannered guy that was quiet and kept to himself. Sound like one of your neighbors? Starting in 1968, with Night of the Living Dead, George Romero has used zombie movies to criticize America. In Night, it was the horrors of the Vietnam War along with the strained race relations in the wake of integration. The hero of this film is black, which was away from the norm during this period. He survives the zombie attack only to be killed by white policemen who only “thought” he was a zombie. In the 1978's Dawn of the Dead, the setting of the mall highlighted America's brain-dead, blind consumerism. Some classic films are attributed to the genre, but it is often overlooked. Some recommendations: If you want to get sick, Cannibal Holocaust or Zombie provide plenty of stomach churning action, not for the weak stomached; If you want a good movie that just happens to be a horror film, watch any of the Universal classics or The Omen, The Exorcist, or Jaws. American Psycho is one of my personal favorites. On TV many channels show the Nightmare on Elm Street(s), Friday the 13th(s), Halloween(s), and any other well recognized franchise. Another gem is The Evil Dead. John Carpenter's The Thing is excellent and features an all-star lineup. Dario Argento's Suspiria is another vivid tale in technicolor. Enjoy.

Haunted places I have heard of

Since Halloween is around the corner, I figure I will share some of the haunted places I have heard of around Shreveport and Bossier. For as long as I can remember, I heard people refer to a section of Swan Lake Rd. in Bossier Parish as “JuJu” Road. It was named after a slave who was hanged for looking or possibly raping a young white girl. The tree he was hanged upon is right next to the road and at night, one can see him hanging from the branch. When I first got my driver’s license, I drove on this road often. Let’s say, There were a few times I got extremely spooked. Another place I always heard was haunted is the abandoned school on Ellerbe Road in Shreveport. It was a school for blacks before segregation integrated it. There are a few stories surrounding this place. One is that a fire raged while the school was still open, killing numerous children. Another is that the janitor at the school molested the children and one day he disappeared with a few of them. It is said that at night you can hear children laughing, moaning, and crying. Believe what you will. If you decide you want to check the school out be advised that it is indeed private property. Just a warning, not saying do it

Numero Quatro

What do Humphrey Bogart, Justin Timberlake, Shirley MacLaine, Billie Holiday, Rocky Marciano, Pablo Picasso, Nat King Cole, George Clooney, and I have in common? We are all Boxer owners! Boxers are actually a cross breed between the now extinct German Bullenbeisser and the English bulldog. According to the AKC, the Boxer was developed in Germany in the 19th century. Boxers were originally used for dog fighting and to run down and hold large game such as wild boar and bison until the hunter could arrive. Also, they were used to control cattle, as their jaws lock on to whatever they choose, in this case, a cow’s ear. The breed gets its name because it stands up on its hind legs and bats at its opponent, appearing to box with its front paws. I also like to think they are called this because they seem to be wearing gloves. Imported to America after World War I, they began to grow in popularity in the late 1930s. Boxers are a bright, energetic and playful breed that tends to be very good with children. They are active and incredibly strong dogs. They come in two recognized colors: fawn and brindle. Some are even reverse brindle, which my dog is. She has symmetrical tiger stripes running the width of her rib cage. Boxers are unlike any other dog. They are full of life and character. Gypsy Louise Cox is three years old and means the world to me. We have been through a lot in such a short amount of time. When I was told that a puppy was to be a present for me, I was excited. My girlfriend and I looked in a few different papers and found a breeder in Castor, LA. The breeders had eight puppies to choose from. The one I chose, in fact, chose me. I stood still surveying the pups when one came over and sat next to me. I looked down at her and she looked up at me (they can look up, to think they can’t is ridiculous) with her puppy dog eyes wide, and began wagging her tail. I picked her up and she asked (with her eyes) to go home with us. A few weeks later, one night, my girlfriend came home with something to eat. She called me and asked if I could help her bring it inside. I went out and did so. We went inside and began to eat. When I finished, I asked, “Where’s Gypsy?” She was nowhere to be found. I ran outside and called her at the top of my lungs. She never came. I ran down every street in Swan Lake screaming until 4:00 in the morning. I’m sure everyone hated me. The next day we made signs and put them up on many a telephone pole in Bossier City. I received a few phone calls, none of which were valid. Then, someone called and said, “I know where your dog is.” Somehow I knew that she really did. I asked her where she worked, which happened to be at the Burger King on Industrial Drive, right down from the house. I called the police and told them the situation. They came with me and told the girl to give up the dog’s whereabouts or she would be taking a trip to the slammer. I waited until she got off work and we drove by where she said the dog was. No cars were in the driveway, so she told me another place where my dog could be. We were driving up Old Minden Road when suddenly she screamed, “There she goes!” I asked if she was sure, she said yes, so I slammed on the gas and began my pursuit. The dodge pulled into the parking lot of Super 1 Foods. Then, I saw my girlfriend pull up next to the car. I could not figure out what was going on. I got out and Christian did too. There she was, safe and sound. I held her and hugged her and she whined and whined. She was so happy to see us. There is no telling what she went through for those two God awful weeks. The people who gave her back to us said the girl from Burger King had sold them my dog! Christian took Gyppers to the house and I told the BK girl to get in the car. I was so mad. She then had the audacity to ask me for the reward. I told her to get the fuck out of my jeep. She complied and I left her on the side of the road, far from her home. I could not believe that she sold my dog, was going to keep the money the people paid for her and take my reward. What a piece of work she was. We decided collectively that Swan Lake was not the place to be and moved to Shreveport. A few weeks later, she didn’t seem to be herself. She was droopy and lifeless. Then came the white vomit… I knew something was amiss, so I called a veterinarian. She said, “It sounds as if she has parvo, bring her in first thing in the morning.” I hardly slept. I woke up early and took her. All she did was sit in my lap. She refused to move unless it was with me. We had to leave her for three days. It was agony. I cried and worried and cried some more. I love her very much and had become very attached to her. When we returned on the third day, she ran out to meet us! We took her home and all was back to normal, albeit I owed the vet over one thousand dollars. We have been through a lot and hopefully that is the end of it. She went to the vet this morning for a checkup and has been on my mind ever since. If you want a fun life partner, invest in a boxer.