Frozen Dead Guy Festival

People in Colorado party around a cryogenically frozen dead Norwegian known as Grandpa in one of the world’s weirdest festivals. The people in the small town of Nederland, Colorado spend a weekend each year celebrating Frozen Dead Guy Days. In 1989, Bredo Morstoel, a former landscape architect died in Norway and his grandson, Trygve Bauge had the body flown to the U.S., preserved, and stored in liquid nitrogen. Four years later, Bauge and his mother, Aud Morstoel brought the body to their home in Nederland, about 45 miles from Denver where they stored it in a garden shed. Their hope was to build a cryogenics laboratory to bring Bredo back to life in what they hoped would be the medically advanced future.

That plan didn’t happen.

It wasn’t long before the town of Nederland was on to the dead guy in the garden shed. They passed a law prohibiting the storage of frozen people within city limits, but they could not make the ban retrospective. So Bredo Morstoel remainedcooling his heels in the garden shed until the garden shed began to fall down. That’s when the frozen Bredo Morstoel became the center of civic pride, and the town adopted the body. A local storage company donated a new shed and a Denver radio station raised the money to maintain it.

The town now re-enacts the whole saga with its Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival complete with coffin races, snow sculpting and a grandpa Bredo look-a-like contest. There’s even a Champagne tour of the new shed with the body is kept, a rib-eating contest and a “Thaw Your Bones” chili cook-off.

Haunted Television

Stories of souls trapped or lost in television’s nowhere land permeated the folklore of the Sputnik Era. In 1953 the NY Times carried an article about a Long Island family with a TV set inhabited by the ghost of a mysterious woman. Jerome Travers and his 3 children reported seeing the woman during Ding Dong School.The Travers family was besieged by reporters, but the image never reappeared

 

In the 1960’s a Wisconsin woman claimed to have seen a couple arguing on a balcony and the call letters of a defunct radio station on her television screen. The vision was followed by a desperate cry for help. Rosella Rose was not the first person to see the KLEE station card almost twelve year after it was abandoned, and when news of her sighting appeared in the papers it reinforced public perception that television was a netherworld where even the most fleeting earthly message could be trapped.

Reports of electronic transmissions between the real and the spirit world in the early days of television were generated by public anxiety surrounding the new technology. For a viewing public unfamiliar with ideas like electromagnetic waves, static, and cathode ray tubes, a host of suspicions arose including the belief that a television set was capable of transporting individuals to another dimension, holding them captive in some sort of electronic limbo, and if conditions were right, becoming remote viewers for surveillance.

These paranoia made rich fodder for a host of science fiction plots on popular television series like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. Early television reception was also full of electronic deficiencies like double images, phantom transmissions, and sound distortions that gave rise to a host of sightings. Scholars have linked these sightings to quickly changing social realities that fueled public distrust. The cultural implications of ghost sightings at the dawn of the television age have been written about at length by social historians in books like Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraph to Television and The Revolution Wasn’t Televised. Public reaction today to a ghost in the machine is quite different as evidenced by the reaction of the giggling group in the YOUTube video showing above. Due to constant exposure to the video stream our reactions are now mitigated by both experience with the technology and our sophistication with the meaning and limitations of media.

Curse of the BIlly Goat Tavern

The Curse of the Billy Goat has its its roots in the 1945 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Detroit Tigers. According to the legend, William Sianis a Greek immigrant took his pet goat, Murphy to the Series, but instead of sitting in their seats, Sianis and the goat walked out on to the playing field to garner publicity for Siani’s tavern that was across the street. It didn’t take long before both man and goat were escorted off by ushers. The pair returned to their seats, but orders came down from the Cub’s owner, Philip Knight Wrigley to eject Sianis because the “goat smelled bad.” After Wrigley insulted the goat Sianis placed a curse on the team, saying that the Cubs would never win another pennant or play in another World Series at Wrigley Field. The Cubs eventually lost the 1945 World Series and have not been back to the championship series since. Sianis’ nephew has paraded a goat around the field a few times in an attempt to break the curse without any luck.

The Billy Goat Tavern was immortalized on Saturday Night Live when John Belushi and Bill Murray developed a skit that centered around the tavern’s menu and hasty ordering system. The “Cheeseburger!Cheeseburger! Pepsi! No Coke!” routine put the tavern on the map, making it a favorite of tourists visiting the windy city.

John Belushi was a comedic genius who got his start in the Second City Troupe in Chicago. His big break came when he was cast in National Lampoon’s Lemmings in 1972, he then went on to SNL and fame. Belushi was only 33 when he died, his tombstone reads, “I may be gone, but Rock ‘n Roll lives on.

Is There a Hell?

Pointy-tailed devils with pitchforks. Naked souls writhing in a lake of fire. The acrid smell of brimstone. (What is Brimstone anyway?) These are the familiar and iconographic images of Hell with which most of us are familiar. But does Hell really exist? Almost all religions believe in a place of future punishment. For some religions the concept includes eternal damnation and an eternity of sado-masochist torture. For others like Buddhists, Hell is just a plateau where the human soul stops off to be cleansed before moving on to another life. For those of you who believe in God and I know you’re out there because you’ve been sticking The Lighthouse in this sinner’s mailbox for years. The big question is whether or not believing in Hell means believing in accountability. Will people really get their props or be dissed for a minutia of earthly misdeeds come Judgment Day? (Just in case my bro Steve broke that window in 1971 not me.) Answer me this believers; Is your God and maybe my God just some kind of big heavenly accountant in the sky recording sins in his/her/ one trillion terabyte brain?

The notion and nature of Hell has been the subject of debate for religious folk, philosophers, and scholars for eons and eons. I know I’m not making any serious headway here, but it is an interesting topic for a reprobate to contemplate on a Saturday afternoon while avoiding real work.

In Spring ’92 the New Agers had their say about Hell when in the Journal of Near-Death Studies P.M.H. Atwater described some very interesting interviews with individuals who had experienced near death. These interviews revealed that for some folks the near death experience wasn’t all hearts and flowers and a tunnel of light.

“I had been looking up into the big glass cupola over the operating room. This cupola now began to change. Suddenly it turned a glowing red. I saw twisted faces grimacing as they stared down at me. Overcome by dread I tried to struggle upright and defend myself against these pallid ghosts, who were moving closer to me.I could no longer shut out the frightful truth. Beyond doubt, the faces dominating this fiery world were faces of the damned. I bad a feeling of despair, of being unspeakably alone and abandoned. The sensation of horror was so great it choked me, and I had the impression I was about to suffocate.” Curd Jurgens, actor in James Bond films revived after a heart attack.

You can take what you want from that bit o scariness but I think it was all about the hospital drugs. The concept of Hell in popular culture is a curious one and Hell has turned up in the movies including What Dreams Will Come, Little Nicky, Constantine, and Deconstructing Harry. If you feel like living dangerously you can put those bombs on your Netflix Q. In comic art Hellboy is a demon conjured up by Nazis in DarkHorse Comics. (Now there’s an imagination)

Hell is also a popular bar on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Now didn’t I really take the long way around to get to that?

Lost and Found Cameras

People lose stuff every day. Many items are often replaced by their owners, but cameras and the memories they hold of birthdays, weddings, vacations, and the people we love are often truly missed and irreplaceable. Cameras seem to be at the top of the list for items that are easily forgotten or misplaced. Recently I found a small Olympus camera in front of the house. It was inside a backpack. Guess someone had dropped it as they bicycled through the neighborhood. Looking for a clue to the owner’s identity I gave the pictures a quick look.

The shots weren’t typical. Road intersections, snow on cars, bicycle handlebars, and asphalt. There were also pictures of guys in hard hats. The camera is blue so I figured guy, right? Then I wondered how I could find the owner. First stop was the local Craig’s list where I posted my find along with all the notices of lost Yorkies, Pomeranians, coats, and driver’s licenses. Lisa Aschinoff— Quizno’s has yours.

I wondered if there wasn’t someplace to get some real visibility. I hopped over to Facebook and to my surprise there was already a group just for lost cameras. I added my find to the list of posts and checked to see if any matched mine. As I scrolled through a couple of pages I realized that there were many desperate postings by people who had lost cameras everywhere from Bangkok to Orlando, but none were for those that had been found. Discouraged? Not me. I rooted for the 1969 miracle Mets when I was a kid. I believe in fairy tales, one in a million shots, and improbable happy endings.

Where could I turn next. Then I discovered I Found Your Camera. On the website you upload the pictures from the camera and hope for the best. I was surprised to see that many cameras had been reunited with their owners. That’s hopeful news. Budget Travel did a good article about lost cameras and it repeats the information that I find to be true from my experience searching lost and found ads. People lose cameras on vacation, in transportation like taxis and buses, on top of slot machines, and at concerts. So be careful when you are distracted or in unfamiliar places. As soon as I can figure out how to retrieve the pictures from the Olympus I’m going to send them to the site. Maybe I’ll hit a home run like Tommie Agee. Could happen.

Here We Are Don’t Imitate Us

Here We are Now Don’t Imitate Us
Kurt Cobain died of a single gunshot wound to the head on April 5, 1994. The month before he survived a drug and alcohol induced coma brought on by the deadly combination of Rohypnol and champagne.

The list of the famous who commit suicide is a long and diverse one – George Eastman, Hart Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Freddie Prinze, Vachel Lindsey, Wendy O. Williams, Virginia Woolf, Phil Ochs, Brian Epstein, Sigmund Freud, Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Abbie Hoffman, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, to name a bunch. Single people it seems are more likely to commit suicide than married individuals, Protestants more likely than Catholics, urban residents more likely than rural folks. Musicians as a group have a lower suicide rate than literary and visual artists, but creative people in general are more vulnerable to depression and suicide, regardless of whether or not they become famous according to some studies. Sociologists don’t really know why creative individuals commit suicide. But many believe that artistic occupations by their nature magnify symptoms. Artists, musicians and writers often work alone. When they begin to feel upset or depressed, they don’t have as much support and encouragement as do athletes, scientists and business people who work with others.

Psychologists also speculate that mood disorders allow people to think more creatively. People with mood disorders also experience a broad range of deep emotions. This combination of symptoms might lend itself to prolific artistic creativity, but result in higher rates of suicide.

Hobo Signs

What you see here are hobo signs.  Travelers today use cell phones, but during the Great Depression tramps, hobos, and even migrating familes used signs like these to communicate. Signs, unique nicknames, language, and even dress are all part of the hobo culture.

The word hobo has been in the popular lexicon since the 1890’s and many believe the word originated from the term “hoe boy,” but no one is sure. Hobo culture sprang from the merging of two events: the civil war and the development of cross country rail lines in the late 1860’s. The original hobos were unemployed and homeless veterans. These displaced men became rail riders. Later on, jobless men looking for work in the wheat fields of the Mid-West joined the ranks. In the 1920’s hobo towns or “jungles” became a familiar sight beside railroad tracks and many elected their own King and Queen.

Although hobo culture has not completely disappeared, changes in the rail system such as railway consolidation, locomotive speed, and railroad police have all contributed to the demise of American rail riding. We don’t hear much about hobos any longer, but some people are still interested. I met a poet the other day who has just completed a book of poems inspired by hobo signs.

Many of us have seen a little rail riding in the movies: ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou, Emperor of the North Pole, and Boxcar Bertha all have train hopping sequences. Boxcar Bertha was one of Martin Scorses’s earliest films, an adaptation of a fictionalized autobiography, “Sister of the Road.” Boxcar Bertha was made on a $600,000 budget and looks like any other low budget exploitation movie. The film tells the story of Bertha Thompson and her lover, two train robbers who get caught up in in the plight of Southern railroad workers. The character Bertha Thompson, (Boxcar Bertha) long popularly thought to have been a real person, was actually a writer’s creation.

Bunker Spreckels

Taschen the world’s coolest publishing house recently released a new coffee table book about Bunker Spreckels, the one time hottie surf champ and errant stepson of Clark Gable. The book Surfing’s Divine Prince of Decadence was authored by TR Strecyk and has a slate of photos by surf veteran Art Brewer. Strecyk who co-wrote the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys was a close friend of Spreckels and one of the first on the California skate and surf scene. Stecyk’s glossy book is a decadent document that records the short and privileged life of one of the true Princes of Bel Air.Thrice married Kay Williams Spreckels was a model and stock actress for MGM when she took the plunge with Clark Gable and became his fifth wife. Bunker Spreckels born Adolph Spreckels III was five at the time and the child of William’s third husband, Adolph Spreckels II, the dissolute heir to a sugar fortune. The Spreckels of San Francisco were well known, wealthy, and occasionally loony. Besides alcoholism, early death, and reckless behavior Spreckel’s great grandfather, Adolph Spreckels I was convicted of shooting San Francisco Chronicle editor, Michael de Young. Seemed de Young had de famed him. De Young survived and Adolph Spreckels was declared insane.

And then there’s this tidbit:

By far one of the most unusual accidents in the ’30s occurred at Seattle’s Green Lake. On June 14, 1936, Adolph Spreckels was driving an F Class Hydroplane owned by Finley Webb. As he returned to the pit area after a heat, the throttle stuck open. Spreckels hit the beach at top speed. The boat flew over one woman’s head, then struck several other spectators before coming to rest against the sound truck. Spreckels was thrown from the boat and landed on a telephone pole, a climbing spike impaling his upper left arm. He hung there until rescuers were able to lift him down. Spreckels was badly injured and needed several operations to restore his arm and face. More tragic, however, was the fate of spectator Ord Lockhard, who had been watching the race from his wheelchair. He was struck by Spreckels’ boat and subsequently died.

Bunker started out with a bit of a stacked deck. A talented surfer in his teen years he made a name for himself in the sport, but when he turned twenty-one he went to the bank with an armored car and took his 50 million home in cold hard cash according to reports. Not long after he began his rapid descent into a hedonistic lifestyle filled with drugs and sex. In an interesting and weird move Spreckels invited both Strecyk and Brewer to photograph and film his life, but before the project called “The Player” was finished Spreckels suddenly died of heart failure. Quentin T. is rumored to be interested in the bio-pic, but even he may not be able to find a through line.

The New Narcissism

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain
I’ll bet you think this song is about you

Don’t you? Don’t you?

You know this profile is about you. About you. About you. About you. Looks like pedophiles and film critics aren’t the only dysfunctional personalities hanging out on social networking websites. A study published in the October 2008 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology reports that narcissists are all over Facebook and they are easy to pick out. No, it isn’t because they kept giving themselves gifts and joining Fans of Paris Hilton. Researchers at the University of Georgia studying Facebook discovered that the number of friends and wall posts that a person had in the virtual world correlated with how narcissistic they were in the real world.

According to the research, normal people behave on Facebook in the same way that they behave anywhere else. They socialize, post photos, invite you to events, chat, and so on, and so forth, but to narcissists Facebook is just another tool for self promotion. We’ve all been wondering about the implications of social networking and easy virtual friendships, but the good news seems to be that most people can tell the difference between online acquaintances and friends in the real world. The bad news is that virtual friendships can be disposable friendships if the price is right.

In January Burger King in a promotion called Delete Ten Friends Get a Whopper offered to give a free Whopper to anyone who deleted 10 of their friends on Facebook. The Delete Ten Friends campaign resulted in the severing of 233, 906 friendships. Not everyone who was deleted had a sense of humor about it and Burger King kept the ball rolling with “Whopper Sacrifice” where deleted Facebook friends could log on and fire back angry-grams against their former friends. (BTW the value of the Whopper coupon was 37 cents. OUCH.)

You’re So Vain was a blockbuster hit for Carly Simon in 1973. Today it is considered one of her most memorable tunes and is listed at #72 on Billboard’s Greatest Hits of All Time. The song has always been a bit of a mystery and guesses about the subject of the song have ranged from James Taylor to Warren Beatty. The smart money has always been on Mick Jagger.

Simon has refused to confirm or deny who is actually so vain. but she has dropped a few hints over the years giving up three letters A–E and R that she says are in the legendary narcissist’s name. That leaves Jagger and Beatty in the game. Beatty is adamant that the song is about him. About him. About him...

Birth of the Cool

Everyone knows what cool means. Cool is an aesthetic, an attitude, an amorphous but defining quality that is often difficult to explain, but easily recognizable. The Internet is full of cool places like The Cool Site of the Day and Daily Candy and other search engines that aggregate cool. Cool can also be found on the library shelf and any up and coming Hipster can turn to the pages of the book Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury and explore the beginnings of Fifties modernist influences on the West Coast.

Besides being an aesthetic and an artifact of culture–individuals and music can also embody cool. Nothing is cooler than Jazz and nobody is cooler than Miles Davis. Davis’ legendary album Birth Of The Cool was released by Capitol Records in 1957 with music from 3 recording sessions and the album is timeless cool and even inspired a whole school of jazz musicians in California known as the “cool school.”

Objects, film, and fashion are also cool. Take Ray Ban Wayfarers, Messenger bags, and Cloverfield. But material cool can translate into consumerism based on a desire to enhance prestige and status by owning certain “cool” possessions. However, this kind of cool is a diminishing equation–affluent affectations are never cool.

Gypsy Rose Lee

The dysfunctional Hovick family has once again been revived on Broadway in “Gypsy” the musical. This time with the considerable talent of Patti Lupone as Mama Rose and under the masterful direction of ninety-year old Arthur who also wrote the book. This tale of the most notorious show business stage mother and her stripper daughter is loosely based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee. The original 1959 musical was nominated for eight Tony awards and developed by Ethel Merman and David Merrick with music by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim lyrics.

Gypsy Rose Lee was born Ellen June Hovick in Seattle Washington in 1911. Her sister also strangely named Ellen June Hovick and later known as June Havoc was born two years later. When their parents divorced the girl’s mother, Rose Hovick developed a successful vaudeville act for her daughters aged five and seven, called Baby June and Her Farmboys. Although the act was making $1500 at its height, Vaudeville soon began to fade and Baby June eloped at 13 with a member of the chorus. Mama Rose though was hell bent on continuing without her main talent, and although Vaudeville was a dying art form–burlesque was blossoming and Gypsy Rose Lee was born.

Gypsy Rose Lee went on to a successful career as an actress, author, and talk show host. She wrote three books including the best seller Gypsy, and performed in 12 movies and , but the intimate details of smothering Mama Rose’s life didn’t feed public consumption until June Havoc wrote in her autobiography, Early Havoc. Rose ‘turned toward her own sex,’ at first ruining a lesbian boardinghouse in a 10-room apartment Gypsy rented for her on West End Avenue, and then owning a sort of lesbian farm in her country house in Highland Hills. At a party in that house, Rose pulled a gun on one of the girls, according to Erik Preminger Gypsy’s son and killed a young woman.

Mama Rose’s troubles may have started in her own childhood. Her mother, Anna, had left the family for long stretches, traveling to the Yukon with hats and corsets that she made, selling them to boom town prostitutes. Rose gave her own girls $1 a day to eat, kept them out of school, and rarely tended to their physical or emotional needs. She lived a hand to mouth existence, stealing from other performers, once pushing a pesky hotel manager out a window, and when June married a boy in the act named Bobby Reed, Rose had him arrested and brought to the police station, where she arrived with a hidden gun. When he moved to shake her hand she pulled the trigger twice, but the safety was on.

Hovick died in 1954, and after her death Gypsy began writing her memoirs and they were published in 1957.

Jazz Loft Project

Born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, W. Eugene (Gene) Smith was a legendary photojournalist who got his start working for Newsweek. Smith’s stubborn personality and prickly perfectionism however kept him from fitting in at the conservative publication. In 1939 he signed an exclusive contract with Life. Although his time as a staff photographer for Life would be short lived, his association with the publication would be lifelong and troublesome. The photographer would have numerous disagreements with Life and most were centered around the conflict between his singular artistic vision and the magazine’s policies.

When war broke out in 1941 Smith become a war correspondent for Ziff-Davis, publisher of Flying and Popular Photography.