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...