New school year, old memories

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This time of year – particularly as a parent of a school-age kid — my thoughts dwell on the beginning of a new school year.

And not just any school year, but my first grade year.

I didn’t go to kindergarten — something about where my birthday fell made me too young for one year’s incoming class and too old for the next, apparently — so first grade was my introduction to school, obviously, but also to the big wide world out there.

I had a fairly isolated existence before I started school. I grew up on 20 acres of farm land that was mine to roam. I had a 100-year-old barn to explore and livestock to watch, including chickens that seemed determined to claw my eyes out. I think about those scary little suckers every time I have a chicken nugget.

So joining the school population in first grade was thrilling and terrifying at the same time.

Mrs. Schull — Marjorie Schull to the grown-ups — was my guide through this new world. I still remember Mrs. Schull’s patient teachings of letters and numbers and, oddly enough, the mechanics of functioning in the world of school.

Early in the year — maybe even the first day — Mrs. Schull used a plastic cafeteria lunch tray to show us how to go through the cafeteria line. I still remember that she used a pencil to show us where to put our utensils. Strangely, I remember her telling us that when we boys grew up, we would carry a wallet in our back pants pockets and that our pockets would have a button on them to secure that wallet. I still remember being resistant to that idea. For some reason that I can’t remember, I didn’t want a button on my back pocket.

The early 1990s-era building where our elementary classes were held is long gone now, but the structure — where I attended classes until we moved to a brand new elementary in fourth grade — looms large in my memory: Its three stories, steep but wide wooden stairways, mammoth windows and hissing, spitting radiators linger in my dreams.

I found a photo of the building on the Cowan Facebook page. It’s at the top of this blog entry. I’m kind of dumbfounded by how small the building looks. I remember it as larger-than-life. Mrs. Schull too.

And of course. Mrs. Schull was right about the button on my pockets. I have one or two on the back of almost every pair of pants I own.

Hunter S. Thompson: When the going gets weird

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… the weird turn pro.

Any fan of “gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson will recognize that line from the self-proclaimed “hillbilly” writer and early practitioner of the art of participatory journalism.

My favorite of Thompson’s writing is still the 1972 classic “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” in which the drug-crazed journalist and his Samoan lawyer crash a convention of district attorneys.

That book, like much of Thompson’s work, began life as an article in Rolling Stone. This week, the Internet site Gothamist published a 1971 letter, purportedly written by Thompson, on Rolling Stone stationery, to Mike Peterson, a South Bend man who had submitted an article to the magazine.

Thompson was a master of excess in every way, but especially in his writing. Nevertheless, the letter is a classic, a blistering rejection note that manages to be delightful at the same time. Who wouldn’t want to send a letter like this to an unworthy correspondent? Who wouldn’t want to have this type of rejection letter in his or her file?

Forewarned: The language is as vulgar and abusive as it is creative.

Planet of the movie ads

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I’m gonna confess to a particular kind of geekiness here. As a pre-teen and young teen, I was a huge fan of monster and science fiction movies and TV shows. (That’s not the geekiness I’m confessing to. In a world where superhero movies dominate the cinema landscape, we’re living in a post-geek world. Anyway.)

As part of my geekiness, I kept scrapbooks of pictures, newspaper and TV Guide ads and other bits o’ stuff. Most of the contents could be had for the price of  a newspaper. Unfortunately I also cut up issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine for pictures to add to my scrapbooks, only to have to pay to replace them years later. Those beloved monster mags are a subject for another entry, however.

The less traumatic elements of my scrapbooks were the movie ads. I used to cut them out of the Muncie newspapers, of course, and would on occasion buy copies of papers from Indianapolis and beyond for their ads.

I’ve lost track of many of those clippings and scrapbooks somehow, but I dug up a few the other day and thought I would share them — and their nostalgia quotient — with you.

Forgive the quality of the pictures. I don’t have a scanner, so they’re snapped with my iPhone. But you get the idea.

Above you’ll find an ad for a Muncie Drive-In dusk-to-dawn screening of the original Planet of the Apes movie series. This screening took place sometime after May 1973 when “Battle for the Planet of the Apes,” the last entry in the series, had been released.

My most vivid memory of this was that my friend Jim and I were taken to the Kilgore Avenue drive-in by my parents. We had to leave after just a couple of movies, however, after Jim came down with some unknown and highly suspect illness. Since I was the oldest and we were like brothers, I held it against him for decades after.

Of courses, Apes movies weren’t the only feature at Muncie drive-ins or indoor theaters.

Here’s a Muncie Drive-In ad for a trio of grisly horror movies toplined by “Raw Meat,” a 1973 film. I’m not sure I went to see these. Two of the three were R-rated and I would have been 13 at the time.

Muncie’s Ski-Hi Drive-In Theater is represented by this ad for a five-movie “spook-a-thon.” The ad notes that coffee and doughnuts were served during the final feature and a “vampire woman” — in her coffin — could be found in the drive-in’s lobby.

That kind of goofy “extra” was one of my favorite things about going to cheap and cheesy exploitation pics like these. I remember going to a drive-in screening of “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies” in which ACTUAL MONSTERS — teenagers hired by the theater’s manager no doubt — roamed the aisles. Since the movie was originally released in 1964, I must have seen it at a re-release.

A year later, the same director, Ray Dennis Steckler, made “The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters,” a horror movie spoof. As you can see from this ad, Muncie’s Rivoli theater screened this classic. I was there.

“Girls bring your boyfriend! Learn if he’s man or mouse!” the ads taunt. Considering the movie was rated G, I’m guessing nobody’s boyfriend died of fright.

The Rivoli — the subject of a blog entry still to come — was the scene of a lot of fun screenings over the years. Here’s an ad for “The Green Slime,” a 1968 Japanese monster movie released in the states. As you can see, this is a silly “teaser” ad for the movie but the fact that it’s personalized — “The Green Slime” Covers Muncie — makes it that much sweeter.

I miss movie ads in newspapers. Not just because of the convenience of picking up the paper and checking out showtimes, but because movie ads like these were little works of marketing art. In these days of “sophisticated” marketing, we won’t see their like again.

 

 

Abandoned Six Flags New Orleans

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I couldn’t post the “LA Light” video and not post one of the creepiest, most effective videos I’ve seen online.

This is a tour of the former Six Flags amusement park near New Orleans. The park was closed in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on Louisiana and never reopened.

Watch this video and try not to think about the end of the world.

In which I’m as tall as Arnold Schwarzenegger

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I used to be about five feet 10 inches tall. And I used to write about movies.

What do those two factoids have in common?

What if I threw in a third factoid: I’m as tall as bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-governor-turned-tabloid-fodder Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Or at least I used to be. Or Arnold used to be.

Confused yet?

Even though I’ve written about weightier subjects for most of the last 20 years, the first dozen or so years of my journalism career were devoted, primarily, to feature and entertainment writing. Besides writing for the now-defunct Muncie Evening Press, I wrote for some Indianapolis-based entertainment tabloids, Hot Potato and The Alternative, and some fan-published magazines.

I also tried to write once for a nationally-distributed entertainment magazine, but my submission — an in-depth review of an early, unused script for the 1989 “Batman” movie — earned me a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Bros., the makers of that movie. That’s a story for another day though.

For a guy writing about books, music and movies in a town the size of Muncie, I was pretty ambitious. I requested and received opportunities to do phone interviews with directors like John Carpenter (“Halloween”) and George Romero (“Night of the Living Dead”). I got to interview Julie Walters — now better known as Mrs. Weasley from the “Harry Potter” films — early in her career.

I also went on press junkets, in which studios flew entertainment writers to big-city screenings of upcoming movie releases. They put us up in a hotel, screened the movie for us and let us interview, in brief fashion, the stars. Sometime I’ll tell you about getting to meet Nick Nolte that way.

But it was at one of those press junkets where I got the opportunity to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Now, this isn’t the Arnold Schwarzenegger we all know today. This was in 1982, and Arnold was publicizing “Conan the Barbarian.” He had been in a couple of movies by that time, but the Arnold that would be the stuff of action movie legend — “The Terminator,” “Commando,” and many more films — hadn’t happened yet.

This Arnold was still a fairly unpolished guy. I mean, he was dressed up for the press junket, in a suit and tie. And he was unfailingly polite. But I remember him as being rough around the edges, even in front of the press. He was outgoing and friendly but maybe a little louder than you would expect of a Hollywood type. I also remember he seemed flirty toward the female journalists in the group.

These press junkets are run like an interview factory. Arnold and co-stars Gerry Lopez (a surfer-turned-actor who played Arnold’s sidekick in the movie) and the gorgeous Sandahl Bergman (a dancer-turned-actor who was also seen in “All That Jazz”) were brought into a hotel room rented by the movie company and seated for 20 or 30 minutes with a group of four or five entertainment writers. Each writer threw out a couple of questions, in turn. I mostly found myself hoping that the only interesting questions wouldn’t be asked by somebody else first. Once that session was done, the writers were herded to another room to interview the next cast member and a new group was brought in.

The TV interviewers got one-on-one time with the actors but they were all cursory interviews, really. There’s not much time for an in-depth discussion in 20 minutes.

I don’t remember a lot about the interview with Arnold that my group conducted. Questions were asked and answered and it all sounded a lot like the kind of stuff you see on TV and online to this day. Yes, making the movie was a lot of fun. Yes, the cast got along. Yes, the stunts were a challenge.

But what I do remember was thinking, “Wow. Arnold is just about my height, maybe a little taller.”

Yes, it’s a strange thought to come away from the interview with. But Schwarzenegger — who was, with “Conan,” just beginning to build a larger-than-life image — was already being marketed as a big guy. Certainly he was “pumped up,” to quote Hans and Franz, but height-wise he seemed like a normal guy.

Arnold’s height has been the subject of some conjecture over the years. In researching this blog entry, I found an Internet site, www.arnoldheight.com, that takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to solving the mystery of just how tall he is. The site speculates that the actor is somewhere between five feet nine and six feet two. But if offers photographic evidence — mostly by matching Arnold up against some famous c0-workers — suggesting that the actor, who claims to be six feet two inches, has perhaps — ahem — fibbed a bit about his height.

In the nearly 30 years since my encounter with Arnold, I’ve met a number of actors and TV personalities. I’ve found that many of them are kind of on the small side, probably because TV and film cameras make most of the general population look like hideous, hulking creatures. The camera adds 10 or 20 or 50 pounds, all of it ugly.

As for me, I’m shrinking in my declining years. I’m not sure I’ll ever measure five feet 10 inches again, even on a good day.

And if I’m shrinking, one can only imagine that Arnold is, nearly 30 years on, experiencing the same effect.

I used to be five feet 10 inches tall. Maybe, just maybe, Arnold can make the same claim.

Not that he’d want to.

Summer nights watching the skies

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I’m not sure I’ll be up after midnight tonight to try to catch the Perseid meteor shower. I haven’t even found any real indication online that we’ll be able to see it around here.

But the idea of staying up late and being out under the Hoosier summer sky really takes me back.

When I was a young adult, my friends and I were night owls. Most weekends, when I didn’t have school or work, I was up all night, greeting the dawn with the satisfaction of a night spent in the company of buddies — and the first twinges of a hangover. But we didn’t spend those nights outside. We were more likely to have spent our evening and night moving from restaurant to movie theater to midnight showing to somebody’s house, where we stayed up late watching TV and chattering like geeky monkeys.

Back then, nighttime wasn’t a time for falling asleep exhausted from a day of obligations. It was playtime.

But even years earlier, when I was growing up, I loved the summertime night sky.

I fell asleep each night with the window in my upstairs bedroom open. I usually placed my bed where I could see out the widow. Since we lived in the country, my view was of the cornfield across the road, the railroad track on the other side of the field and the night sky above.

I’ll forever associate the mournful sound of a train whistle, the rustle of wind among cornstalks and the deep, dark blue of a country sky.

I still remember seeing “shooting stars” — maybe the Perseids, although I’m not certain — out my window on moonless nights. They were more than a show. They were my nightlight.

(Note: The photo above is not out my childhood window. It’s an iPhone picture I took recently, at dusk, not far from where I live today.)

New life for “The Stand?”

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More than 30 years down the road, I still vividly remember the thrill of reading Stephen King’s “The Stand.”

I was already a fan of King by 1978, when the book came out, having read “Carrie” and “Salem’s Lot” and “The Shining.” I admired “Carrie” for the writing exercise that it was — pieced together from newspaper articles and journal entries and what-have-you — but was genuinely creeped out by “Salem’s Lot” and “The Shining.” These were the real deal: Scary tales by a talented writer. We’re not talking hack stuff here. How many of us cringed even as we eagerly anticipated what we would find behind the door to Room 237 in “The Shining?”

So I was expecting a lot from “The Stand” but not quite sure exactly what. There was that strange cover on the hardback, for instance.

But when I dug into the book, boy oh boy. King’s tale of the end of the world and the real battle that begins after was everything I wanted from a novel: Great if flawed good guys like Stu and Larry and Frannie; a frightening bad guy in Flagg who surrounded himself with bullies and hoods, just as you would expect to happen in real life; characters like Harold whose fall from grace propelled the plot to new heights even as you wanted them to be redeemed.

Somebody, somewhere, has written the definitive article or thesis on all the book’s influences on the pop culture that followed it, and I won’t attempt to do that here. But how many books and TV shows (including my beloved “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) were able to go where they went because King had gone there first?

There was a pretty good TV miniseries adaptation of “The Stand” in 1994 featuring Gary Sinise in a damn-near-perfect portrayal of Stu Redman.

So it’s with a mixture of anticipation and dread that I read Hollywood is making a big-screen version of “The Stand.” It’s comforting knowing that Steve Kloves and David Yates, who wrote and directed the most recent “Harry Potter” films, are tentatively scheduled to make the movie (or movies).

I thought Stanley Kubrick horribly bungled the movie version of “The Shining,” but Kloves and Yates just might pull this off.

And even if they don’t, as the author himself  is fond of noting, “The Stand” will still be there, on my shelf, ready for the next time I want to jump into King’s post-apocalyptic world.

iPhoneography: Indiana State Fair Part Two

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Yes, the people watching at the Indiana State Fair is wonderful. But what about those wacky signs?

First things first, though: My friend Andy Tooze today uttered the wittiest and most literary remark that will be heard on the fairgrounds this week. Maybe any week.

I spotted a guy wearing a T-shirt with a reproduction of a book cover for John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” noting that wasn’t a typical T-shirt among fairgoers.

“Perhaps he’s here to see the rabbits,” Andy replied.

And what about those signs?

Yes, we all know about the corndogs and lemon shakeups. But what about this?

Gotta say “Hot Beef Sundae” sounds more like a male revue than fair food.

Now here’s a tempting offer:

I don’t think they really mean a burger made of baloney. Fried baloney is awesome enough.

How’s this for enticement?

Uh, no thanks. I’ll just wander over to the horse barns.

And last but in no way least is this statue, which might be the strangest, kinkiest, dirtiest way of advertising corndog sales ever. Ever.

That is just all kinds of odd. Happy dining!

 

iPhoneography: Indiana State Fair

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I try to get to the Indiana State Fair at least once every year. I really enjoy fairs because my son loves the rides. For me, it’s the people watching and the photography opportunities. Not the rides. Definitely not the rides.

Monday’s state fair visit was a good time: Not too hot — the fair in 2010 was blisteringly hot — and the rain arrived only a little while before we were due to leave anyway.

The change in weather gave me the opportunity to capture the fair under both pretty blue sky and ominously gray sky.

Here’s the pending storm perspective on the Ferris wheel:

The sky made the drop tower look like Mordor from “Lord of the Rings.”

Little things at the fair catch my eye. The rubber ducks carnival game, for example.