My Back Still Sucks, My Knee is Knocked, But I Return Anew...

Another period of feeling fantastic followed swiftly by an absolute assault on nearly every portion of my body. That's what hit me the last couple of weeks. Every time I get rolling -- exercising fully, walking several miles a day, hitting the crunches and whatnot (while simultaneously keeping the writing muscles loose and limber) -- something sidelines me. First, a bad cold a couple of weeks ago. This led to coughing fits which kept me straining to not throw out my back again like I did in a most severe way last year. Then, once the cough went away, and I was punch-drunk with giddiness over feeling good, the back went in a totally unrelated way. Then the knee again, due to manner in which I ended up walking due to the lower back pain.

I managed to fit in a post a week through much of June -- far below my normal routine, but the need to finish the Roadshow quartet kept me focused in those few pain-free moments. And thanks to laying about a bit more, I piled up massive amounts of viewed films. I am still not tip-top -- even now, sitting at the computer, the back is making me cringe every time I move too severely, but I am back to running about at my normal Mach 5 speed and looking forward to catching up on my usual expansive piddling about on the Pylon. Sorry for you, good for my mental well-being.

It's what this is all about anyway. And once I start feeling fantastic once again, I am sure I will step wrong to avoid crushing one of the dogs and I will be thrown backwards over the coffee table and the back and knee will go out at the same time... and then a month later, I will be tapping out another one of these largely unread reaffirmations of my personal prime directive, stating my purpose to once more begin spewing out media-related diatribes in the spirit of my usual prolific self.

It's my cycle, it's vicious to a certain degree, and -- what the hell --- if it's the way things must be, I might as well own the damn thing. See you tomorrow, me!

The Roadshow More Traveled, Pt. IV: Attitude is Nothing, and Neither is Your Damn Book...

I suppose that I had seen glass fire extinguishers before, but I had never really given them pause for thought. But there they were, the fourth of five items on the list of things that the Antiques Roadshow does not appraise at their events. It just seemed such an odd, specific thing to be on a list comprised otherwise of coins, currency, stamps or vehicles. I later asked our Roadshow "in," Rod, exactly why one cannot bring, assuming one is amongst that surely limited class of collectors, a glass fire extinguisher, and his answer was pretty definite. Yes, it probably isn't a good idea to bring in an antique, fragile item filled with potent and highly combustible chemicals into a crowded convention center.

But why not my stamp collection? Rod's answer was the problem of keeping qualified experts at each show, but I also proffered up my take on it, which he agreed might be a good reason too. Go to even a relatively small town and you can find stamp and coin shops readily available. There seems to be no shortage of places at which one can get a stamp collection appraised. It's much harder to find someone who can take a qualified glance at that ancient portrait of a grinning fisherman that has been handed down in your family for innumerable generations. And so they keep the stamp and coin people to the strip mall shops, and offer up the Roadshow services to everyone else that thinks they might strike gold.

Which is something I knew that I would never do, given what I was bringing to the show in lieu of being able to bring in my uncle Sam's stamp book. I had to scramble, and it was only the day before that I finally decided on bringing my precious volume of The King in Yellow and that old 8mm camera. The point for me wasn't to learn anything much at all. The point was that each ticketholder is told from the onset they must bring two items to the event. Assuredly, I have a great many things that could have been easily brought for appraisal. My problem is that I know what most of them are worth... or not worth. I have an Avengers #1 from 1963 that my pal Tony gave me as a present. I have 1950s Topps baseball cards once owned by my father with the likes of Mantle, Aaron, Williams, Clemente, Mays, Snider and Maris in their ranks. In fact, I have a million baseball cards and 12,000 comics, many of them a certain value, and that is exactly why I couldn't bring them to the show. Because I already have a fair idea of their worth.

The stamp book was different, but now I couldn't bring it. And so my focus for the show was just on enjoying the experience, studying how they film the show, and taking part in a unique cultural event. I already had a fair idea of what my Chambers book went for in the market, and I knew the camera was merely to carry about something old and interesting, as it was of little worth. And compared to the jewelry line, which seemed long until one looked at the painting line, which itself could wrap around the entire jewelry line about a dozen times over, my waits amounted to nothing. The Science and Technology line, for the camera, held but a single person. The Books table, with three appraisers chewing through the inferior texts like the bookworms they really were, only held four visitors when I strode up to it. If I had gone to the show by myself, once I made it inside the place, I would have been done in ten minutes.

With the camera taken care of already and my brief wait in the Books line ending, I could learn what I really wanted to know: how to take care of The King in Yellow. With a home full of old "Oz" books and so many other collections, the drive since I gathered all of my belongings once more in a single central location has been on finally taking care of everything properly. That means new boxes and bags for the entire comic collection, a thorough listing of every single baseball card, and the cataloging and proper storing of my full library. Much of this has already been put into play to varying degrees, but I have never known what to do with my old books, especially since the change in climate when I moved from Alaska to the far hotter and drier Southern California air.

It's hard to ignore the slightly Dahmer-esque vibe of the appraiser with whom I became, through sheer luck of the draw, acquainted. Admittedly, the guy sort of put me on edge from the beginning, and I instantly went on the defensive. (More on this in a second.) But he's a smart one, and he had me sized up from the very second that I handed him The King in Yellow. He surmised immediately that only someone reasonably familiar with this book would have taken the time to bring it, outside of a couple of boxes or a giant stack of other antique books, to this show. Instead of hitting me with a "What you have here is..." type of statement, he looked into my eyes and said, "Tell me what you know." Which I did: the Sam lead in, the Lovecraft discovery, the eventual readings, the obsession, and my knowledge of what it was trading for over the net. Upon telling him that very good copies of the same vintage were currently being offered for between $1000-1250 on some out-of-print book sites, he sniffed and said, "Oh, I was under the impression that these usually went for around $300 or so."

It's only natural that I wanted to hear him say, as most people at these events wish, that my particular copy was a true treasure that would bring me unfathomable riches and would allow me to retire and purchase a yacht. This was the furthest thing from my mind, but there was that moment as I unreeled my tale of legendary discovery, probably much like a thousand other tales he has heard from eager book holders, when I fervently hoped he would find something unique about my copy, like a hidden mark that revealed it as the very first copy in the run or something else equally ridiculous.

Instead, he chose to do his job and pick apart my copy, pointing out the wear along the top edge which he declared would mark it down considerably, and also the trio of wormholes along the spine edge of the back cover (which I had initially pointed to him). He did state that my copy was in good to very good condition, but didn't close with a dollar amount. I didn't want him to anyway, and he probably sensed this. And then I asked him about caring for the book, and he looked at what I had done -- wrapping it in a mylar comic bag -- and said I probably couldn't do much more for it than taking one of these bags and cutting a cover for it in which to encase it, and keeping it as cool as possible. Easy to do where once I lived; impossible to do now. Maybe I just need to re-rent my old apartment on Tudor Road and keep my library up in Anchorage.

And that was it. He barely glanced at the Oz book I brought, and for good reason. It was tattered beyond belief, but I only wanted him to put a date on it. And here's where I was struck with this notion: that the bulk of people here are expecting a price. And most of them are also expecting that price to be a miracle. And that these guys, these appraisers, who don't get paid to be at the Roadshow, but merely get publicity for their own businesses, must -- they must! -- get tired of these expectations. But they also probably get tired of the back-pedalers too: those people who hear what their junk is really worth, and then insist that all they really wanted to know what it was worth, and then pretend they had no intentions at all of selling their items if they had turned out to be incredibly high in value.

Myself, I also announced this very ideal to my friendly appraiser. But in my case, the statement was undeniably true. Maybe I would sell the stamp book, and maybe I would, were it worth more than a dime, sell the Oz book too. But there is no way I will ever sell my copy of The King in Yellow, and not just because it is inscribed to a remote member of my family in the 19th century. It almost seems as if I was meant to have that book, and also meant to include it in the string of events that led me to even gain the awareness that I owned such a book.

Back at the Roadshow, the ladies made sport of mocking me as a know-it-all, because not only did I have to show off what I knew -- "He asked me to tell him!" I insisted, to a slew of girlie giggles -- but because I bristled at his even more knowledgeable response, arguing his every point. Oh well... I can't help that. It's the way I am built.

And after my slightly depressing encounter, a stand in line for the Prints table (which lasted for about an hour) allowed me the time to reflect and center myself. Since the line ran past the back of the filming area, I took in the television production itself, watching the director and seeing how they used the cameras in concert with one another, and seeing how they prepared to film the next setup on one of the three stage areas. We were also amazed at how people cutting through our line also seemed to do so exactly where we were standing, no matter where we were. The hour elapsed (in retrospect) far quicker than I would have liked for my purpose of studying the filming, but soon enough, all of us slightly demoted in our feelings about our respective treasures, we departed the Antiques Roadshow for good.

Of course, I would do the whole thing again, but next time, I am going to play the bumpkin, and pretend not to know a goddamn thing about nuthin'.

Now, where can I find me one of them there glass fire extinguishers?

I'm Gonna Wash that Grey Right Out of My Blog!

So, you heard me whining the other day about those "little grey spots" that started to appear on my blog (but only if you were looking on a Mac) about two weeks ago. My pal Chewy couldn't see it on his end, and thus was unable to assist me. I contacted Blogger through their Help Forum, but naturally didn't hear back on this, though I never really expected anyone to do so. And as I said before, I signed up for email responses to my inquiry, which enabled me to happily (grrr...) receive a daily email, in which dozens of new and old Blogger problems were made even more confusing by the general public's inability to construct even a halfway intelligent missive. (Just because you don't have to write letters anymore doesn't mean that you shouldn't be clear when asking for help...) And, naturally, not a single response on any of these emails to my problem with the little grey spots.

In receiving the latest version of the Million Problems on Blogger email, and upon not seeing, yet again, a solution to my misery, I decided to check out my original query in case I had missed something along the way. Assuredly, there was no reply logged there, so I did a search for the word "grey." Instantly, tens of similar inquiries to mine popped up, all of them wailing about these little grey spots appearing on their Blogger pages. The one logged just before mine, from Pop Guru on March 29, detailed nearly the same sad story of which I had made great and public despairing, and checking out his blog, there was indeed a box sitting right on top of his opening post. But then, checking the "grey" search page again, the message just below Pop Guru's was from some kind soul responding to yet another grey-embattled blogger.

They supplied a link to an earlier thread detailing how to fix the problem: reduce the number of posts on one's homepage. So simple. Myself, I had the Pylon set to only 30 days, which sometimes could mean about 20 posts or so, and sometimes only a dozen. But I went into my settings page and knocked it down from 30 days to 15 posts.

In the immortal words of Mumford the Magician: ALA PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICHES!! POOF!

The spots are gone!

Fearing that Pop Guru would go unanswered (after all, his blog appeared to still have the problem for at least three months), I replied to him with the same thread in order to keep this thing moving along. It's sad Blogger doesn't have a clearer way of alerting its users to these various problems. It would seem to me that with proper organization and design, a way could be found to make these things less vexing for everyone, including Blogger. Certainly, they don't have time to answer everyone personally, but man, is it a pain in the ass when something weird happens out of the blue (for a long time I had about a 100 posts on my homepage for three years, and never had this little grey spot problem; I knocked it down to 30 days only about six months ago).

But, Blogger is absolutely free. So, what do you want for nothing? R-r-r-r-r-rubber Biscuit?

The Roadshow More Traveled, Pt. III: Stamped Out In Its Prime

The other reason for bringing The King In Yellow to the event was not as direct as simply gaining information on the book's value. You see, I really had no choice.


I had initially wished to bring a far different item to the Antiques Roadshow, an item which I had also obtained in the exact same manner as the Chambers' book: through my granny and my various trips to Wisconsin as a youth. It was my late, great uncle Sam’s postage stamp collection. It doesn't sound all that exciting, does it? But wait...

I received this book as a child when I was flush with my own burgeoning interest in stamp collecting. I had received a starter set as a present at some juncture, and for a short while, truly became vested in the hobby. I somehow obtained a then recent set of Scott's Catalogues at some point, got a few first issue envelopes, and collected what my youthful mindset believed were stamps of truly ancient vintage: stamps from 10, 20, 30 years ago. Friends gave stamps to me by the dozens, neighbors were happy to give me their opened envelopes, and I had endless stacks of what were actually completely worthless stamps of the current times. But I didn't care. And I didn't know it...

Then I went to Wisconsin. My granny was so taken with my usual overabundance of joy in the subject that she eventually bestowed upon me, on a subsequent trip, Uncle Sam's amazing stamp book. Here's the kicker: the stamp book was published in 1945, stands about four inches thick, and any stamps in it after 1945 are purely a coincidence. They are scattered about on open sections of pages where there is room, but the chief concentration of the book is the fact it is an international postage stamp book. It's not just for American stamps, but for the whole world. And a quick peek through its pages reveals stamps for dozens of countries, and the vast majority of them before 1945.

While the percentage of American stamps is high (mind you, this is only from a spot check, and I have no actual statistics), the bulk of stamps in the volume appear to be of foreign extract. Given that my family stems from Wisconsin, it should come of no surprise that a great many of the stamps are of Scandinavian origin. There are any number of stamps from Sweden, Norway and Denmark. But Britain also gets a good turn, as does Germany (there are a handful of stamps emblazoned with Hitler's sourpuss visage) and France. Most surprisingly, there is a vast reservoir of Russian stamps contained in its pages. Not Soviet stamps, though: these are all from the 19th century, and some of them date as far back as the 1850s. It became apparent to me even as a child that perhaps my great uncle Sam had been brought into the hobby in the same way as I: a spurt of interest, and then emboldened by the passing down of stamps from older relatives and friends.

I don't know this for a fact -- I don't know much about Sam at all, really -- just that I have a postage stamp book and several boxes of books that sat in his tiny home for a multitude of years, including The King in Yellow. Myself, I never truly got into the stamp world. Despite the boost from Granny, my attention was soon divided (and very swiftly) by baseball cards. Once I hit twelve, I was lost to the National Pastime, at least in the collecting sense. Sam's stamp sat undisturbed for numerous years, except for occasions where I would take it out of the box in which I stored it, and fleetingly glanced through its pages. Each time, I would tell myself that I really should get back into the hobby, and make a survey of Sam's collection. And I would even -- every couple of years or so, even recently -- take some time and work on my own collection, in the assumption that this time I was actually going to make some headway. Another secret is that I have always collected every stray stamp that has come my way, for over thirty years now, and I have squirreled them away for a future where I would actually have some time to relax and enjoy the hobby. But it has never been so.

And so, when I first heard we had tickets to the Antiques Roadshow, my first thought was "Why not bring Sam's stamp collection?" Instead of hiring an appraiser, I figured an expert's cursory glance at such a show (in a safe environment) would be enough to ascertain whether or not I had something of a certain worth that required a little bit more care than I was currently (and for three decades) giving the collection.

But it was not to be. Because, on a list of a scant few items that cannot be brought to the Antiques Roadshow, "stamps" is the very first thing on the list...

[To be concluded next Saturday...]

There's A Little Gray Spot On My Blog Today...

...It's the same old thing as, well, the past week or so...

Somewhere, somehow, a large rectangle of grayness has splashed down on the Cinema 4 Pylon in the past ten days. If you are reading this on a PC, you probably won't see it. I have checked on about a half dozen computers at work, and it never shows up. But if you are looking on a Mac -- and I have checked on three different ones in this time, and it shows up on all of them -- then it's a different story. Since a large proportion of my personal friends and family use Macs, I am hoping that some of you out there can tell me what the hell is going on here.

If you glide down the Pylon homepage about three or four posts, you will encounter the aforementioned blot of gray, superimposed basically over about a paragraph or two of whatever post it is splotched over at that time. As I add new posts, the position of the blot on the blog changes, but since I didn't post for a couple of days over the weekend, it stayed fixed over one post in particular, for a good while. (Luckily, it only occurs on the homepage. If you click on the title of a post, it will not show up -- so far -- on the individual posting pages.) At first, I thought something had merely happened to the code in that post, so I grabbed the text and deleted the post. Once the post was gone though, the blot just jumped to the next higher post, meaning that the opening paragraph of my latest Spout review was getting trounced upon. I reposted the DVR post, and the blot moved back to its original position. At least I knew it wasn't the fault of any post, but now the question was: where the hell is this coming from?

A look at my layout HTML betrayed nothing to me, but then, I am not fully immersed in HTML-speak. And it definitely didn't show up as a result of my playing around with the layout, because except for tweaking the font size every now and then, I have not touched the layout for quite some time. Certainly, I have learned a lot about it in the past two years since I started working with Dreamweaver and even here on Blogger, but I am not fully confident that I can just remove something willy-nilly on the Pylon template and not screw up three years of diligent posting. I will probably have Raw Meat take a crack at it here in the coming week, if he is willing, but for now, after looking the template over for the umpteenth time, I have no answers.

And especially no answers from Blogger itself. I went to their immensely cluttered help area, and left a message on their Something Is Broken page, relating my frustration with this mass of gray blankness -- which grows ever larger in my mind every time I think about it, evolving slowly from a simple blot to a veritable blob in its destructive capability. To be able to leave this message, though, I had to subscribe to their email updates to the page. Couldn't they just send me an email automatically when some faceless tech-head finally responds to my query? Because now I have gotten four straight days of emails with nothing relating to my problems whatsoever, just endless answers to questions for which I care not a single iota. Assuredly, I am not holding my breath waiting for a resolution from this angle.

So, if one of my pals out there might have some advice, please toss it my way. It's not a major concern, but I have gotten a couple of emails asking me why I have a big gray rectangle hovering about the place. It would be nice to get this fixed up once and for all.

And I haven't even started on the weird shit that has happened on the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc...

[A footnote: Once I put this post up initially today, another gray spot showed up -- right smackdab in the middle of the post about this very problem. What perfect effing timing! Smiles, everyone...]

The Roadshow More Traveled, Pt. II: The King In Yellow

Before I continue with our visit to the Antiques Roadshow, I offer to the reader a rather largish nugget of background:

I first met The King in Yellow in the early 1980s in Alpha, Wisconsin, though it was only an acquaintance. The end of a pleasant vacation at Huntley’s Few Acres, my grandparents’ wonderful home (of which I am crazily nostalgic even though I was only ever there on a handful of occasions), found me leaving the environs with a brace of boxes in my possession. My granny had thrust into my hands numerous volumes of antique books that had passed down through various members of her family. Since I was nuts about books in general, she decided to send me back to Alaska with a couple of boxes full of them.

One of these books was a copy of Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, much fabled by my mother as a book (along with the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley), that would get read to the family. It was also one of the few books in the batch – outside of some Twain, Zane Grey and the Hardy Boys – which I recognized. Amongst the unrecognizable in the lot was a book by Robert W. Chambers, a gorgeously adorned, small but plump volume from 1895 called The King in Yellow.

It sat undisturbed on my bookshelves for about a decade, without my really knowing what wonders there were to behold inside its slightly moldered pages. The key to its treasures lie somewhere else, in another book altogether, Lovecraft, a splendid and meticulous biography of H.P. Lovecraft by L. Sprague de Camp, which I happened to stumble upon at a garage sale which I had accidentally stopped by just because I happened to be in the neighborhood on another matter. Destiny? Fate? Who knows? But it all seems slightly ominous given the books and their subjects of which we are speaking. Whether it be unseen force, divine providence or sheer coincidence behind this ladder of discoveries, causing me to climb ever higher into a musky, beshadowed attic of weird literary connection, it hardly matters. All I know is that the book mentions Robert W. Chambers as an influence on Lovecraft, a writer of whom I had been most enamored since a teen. (I was more than just slightly less enamored of ol' H.P. once I discovered what a reprehensibly racist shithead he was, but I still enjoy his writing.) Supposedly, after Lovecraft read Chambers’ more macabre stories, especially The Yellow Sign, one of the tales in The King In Yellow, he was intrigued enough to begin reflexively incorporating (some would say stealing) some of the names in Chambers' work into his own, as well as experimenting with some of Chambers' narrative concepts.

Even at this point, having only fleetingly glanced at the cover years earlier and then having stored away the book, I had to think a while about Robert W. Chambers. "Where had I seen that name before? It is so very familiar to me," I mused for numerous weeks. (Mind you, this is long before the internet made such research an instant task.) A search at the local library revealed nothing at all to me, as there were no books on the shelves (or in the card cabinet) bearing Chambers’ name. Since I worked for a bookstore chain, I consulted our Books in Print volumes within one of our satellite locations, and managed to discover that Mr. Chambers was the author of The King in Yellow, though the book itself was not currently in print then. But at last I knew! I had read his name in my very own reserves! It was in that monstrous pile of old books from Wisconsin!

Following a quick and successful scan of my own bookshelves, I found myself suddenly immersed in the then nearly 90-year old volume, carefully turning the pages as timidly as one could possibly turn the pages of a book while one was filled with longing to race unfettered by concerns over the decrepit state of said pages. A mysterious, all-knowing agent with missing ears and fingers who gets attacked constantly by his feral pet cat, a possible future (in the 1920s) where suicide is not only legal but endorsed through the construction of public gas chambers, and the aforementioned malignant text, which is only hinted at through the course and connected tissue of the opening quartet of stories – these wonders and more await the reader of The King In Yellow. Also awaiting those that enter this realm are stories later in the book which are more draggingly romantic than the darker tales which begin it, so its discovery is not thoroughly engaging. But at its best, it’s enough to make one wish, once one reads further into Chambers’ oeuvre, that he had stuck with his short fantastical career. That he was influenced by Poe, Bierce and Wilde, just as he further jolted Lovecraft, is readily apparent, and I was glad to move my one overlooked copy over to a shelf crammed with my favorite titles. Truthfully, The King In Yellow has remained by my bedside since I moved to California, though to reduce wear on the ancient text, I have replaced it with a more recently published collection for reading purposes.

A swift peek at the internet revealed to me a handful of copies of this same printing and vintage available for purchase at various out-of-print book sites, and the price range often fell into the $1000-1250 range for a very good copy. Despite my library, I was really not adept in the details of book collecting, so I couldn’t really say where my copy resided on the ever so very testy chart of condition. This question became the second part of my reason in taking the copy to the Antiques Roadshow on Saturday.

[To be continued on Sunday…]

The Roadshow More Traveled, Pt. I

Jesus, I’m glad we didn’t bring a painting to the Antiques Roadshow this weekend.

OK, we did have a print of Jesus in hand – not Jen and myself, mind you, but Jen’s aunt – so we ended up waiting in the Prints and Posters line for a rather long while to have it appraised fleetingly by one of the Roadshow’s experts. But that line was nothing compared to the Hands Across America state of the queue of show-goers who spread themselves across the inside the Palm Springs Convention Center yesterday, their greedy hands mostly festooned with Red Skelton clown paintings. While some lines weren’t even really lines at all – one could just slide immediately up to certain areas without waiting behind a single soul – if you brought a painting to the event, you were going to be standing for a couple of hours at least, even with most appraisals taking a mere two or three minutes apiece.

Fortunately for us – Jen, her mom Sande, Jen's aunt Sue, and myself – we only had that devotional print of Sue’s, Jen’s pair of jewelry items, Sande’s awesome collection of Beatles albums (including UK editions and that famous “baby butcher” cover) and my pair of antique books and an old 8mm movie camera. Our lines, comparatively, were reasonably brief (outside of the prints queue), and in the case of my items, no wait at all. We also were able to skip another potential major time-killer through the use of an insider: Sandy’s old pal Rod, who now occasionally works for Antiques Roadshow and was able to score us a quartet of tickets that enabled us to skip the usual process of timed entrances. Most patrons of the event (which is free, by the way) have specific times printed on their tickets at which they have to arrive well before that time, line up, and then they will gain mass entrance with that particular group sometime around the appointed time. That “time” group then moves forward to join the main entrance line already in wait, which is already rather lengthy itself, but moves along at a fairly rapid clip. Our special tickets allowed us merely to be considered “generic” – their term – and we went immediately into the main entrance line.

Inside in less than an hour, when we went into the main hall, our items were inspected briefly for type. We were then each given tickets for whatever category into which our items fell. Sande’s albums fell into the Collectables group; my camera was considered Science and Technology, etc. We initially sought to all stick together as a group, going to each line in succession. We first hit the Jewelry line, also seemingly long but nothing compared to those around us, and once we arrived at the front, we discovered the snag in the plan.

Due to the mass of people swirling around us, and the noise level such a gathering engenders, it was hard for all of us to hear what the appraiser was telling Jen about the pearls and ring she had brought. We were so used to watching the show and seeing the detailed appraisals – miked, clear, and unfettered by the clutter of humanity – which I guess we just assumed that standing at one of the tables, we would have a similar experience. But the truth is that often you are at the mercy of the personality of whichever appraiser you happen to meet when you get to the table. Some of them are extraordinarily quiet and reserved, while others jump about and are clearly more used to entertaining with their opinions. (The ponytailed burst of energy at the Collectables table was a particular joy to behold, and very sincere in his appreciation of his genre.) The appraiser that we happened upon of the three seated at the Jewelry table was very helpful and knowledgeable, but due to the noise of the place, only Jen and I were really able to hear her comments. We decided that splitting up to various areas might be a good way to go, since the Collectables line was somewhat lengthy, and my two weren’t at all.

Sande’s albums were pretty damn cool, it was agreed by all (especially by women of a like age in the Jewelry line), but as we expected, the main one of note was the justly infamous “baby butcher” cover of Yesterday and Today, the one featuring the Fab Four covered in doll parts and chunks of raw meat. Controversial for the time – in fact, probably even now in some areas – the supposedly gory cover was replaced with another less interesting one, only on the early pressings, Capitol merely slapped the new picture over the original. Enterprising teens like Sande and Sue during those days of the British Invasion knew full well what to do: steam the boring new cover off to reveal the disgusting old one. Which they did indeed do, and it was an act that Mr. Ponytail recognized right away, with a tremendous grin on his puss, the very second that Sande held it up. Our joy was mitigated by three factors: 1) the albums were much loved in their time, and therefore, not necessarily in the greatest condition, 2) the appraiser barely looked at the remainder of the albums, except to comment that if Sgt. Pepper’s read “mono” at the top instead of “stereo,” it would have been much better, and 3) there was a guy in the line about twenty people ahead who also had the “baby butcher” cover. The appraisal came out to about $15-20 for each of the albums, except the “baby butcher,” which he said could go easily for between $600-800, even in this condition.

As said, my lines were nothing. The Science and Technology table was a wait behind a single person, and if there had been more than one appraiser there, no one at all. The Tools and Instruments appraiser offered to help me, depending on what I had, but he didn’t know anything about old movie cameras. (He was exceedingly bored, and had only appraised a dozen items all day long, so he was desperate to talk to anybody at all.) My great pal Alexis had given my Bell and Howell Filmo Double Eight camera to me several years ago (I can’t remember if she found it at a garage sale or an antique store), but I didn’t know anything about it otherwise. Chiefly, I wanted to know the date, but the appraiser (kind of a tall cross between Doctor Who’s David Tennant and Freddie Mercury’s overbite, and with a soft British accent to boot) merely told me what I knew already: basically, all of the production information that I too could glean from the trappings of the camera itself, and a production date between the 1930s to the ‘40’s. (I suspect investigating its serial number elsewhere would get me more information.) He said there was no real market for 8mm, since they were so widely manufactured in those days, but that I could probably fetch $50-60 for it. Since I will always keep it as part of my film collection anyway, it doesn’t matter.

Which now brings me to The King In Yellow…

[To be continued on Tuesday...]

Spout Mavens Disc #9: The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004)

Director: Asia Argento
Palm Pictures, 1:38; color
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

Perhaps a movie can exist solely to make you glad your mom isn’t a goddamn whore.

I’m sure director/lead actress Asia Argento had artier ambitions when she took on The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, a film version of a supposedly fictionalized account of a supposedly real author’s supposed childhood, than giving me warm fuzzies about me own dear mum. But in the end, after ninety-plus minutes of extremely horrid mothering, child rape after child rape, gender confusion, religious torture and brainwashing, I felt a deeply abiding satisfaction with my own personal upbringing. The worst moments in my childhood didn’t even come within miles of even the slightest suffering the young boy in this film faces. It even nudged me into calling my mom later that evening to catch up on things, and while the onslaught of lurid imagery captured within the film still flashed behind my eyes whilst I spoke to her, I was relieved to speak to someone who would never have lead me down the path of evil that Argento’s Sarah does to her son in this film.

Of course, except in a case where a filmmaker would wish to suffuse a film with an air of forced surrealism, no one would dare cast Argento as a normal housewife, let alone an upstanding mother. Not that she couldn’t pull off the role, but it really wouldn’t suit her strengths. She knows this, and she smartly casts herself in the part of the drug-addled prostitute mommy, who drags her son through a series of misadventures and molestations with a pill-and-meth-beaded string of scumbag boyfriends and husbands. That the helpless and confused child seems to be equally attractive to these men as his sexually vivacious and seemingly insatiable mother really seems a mystery – the child does nothing at first to either attract nor repel his molesters, and while many women do have a certain “type”, it stretches plausibility that she would hit the target so perfectly time after time (not all of them do him harm, it should be mentioned) – and then the issue is remarked upon in the film itself when Sarah starts to not only dress the boy up in her clothes (causing her latest man, played with appropriate creepiness by an almost unrecognizable Marilyn Manson, to confusedly ravage the child), but later introduces him to her tricks at a truckstop as her “little sister.”

Besides Manson, an amazing array of well-known personalities or up-and-coming actors inhabit the shells of this circle of fiends that the boy –- played in his older, slightly more cynical incarnation by those Zack and Cody twins, Dylan and Cole Sprouse (light-years away from the Disney Channel) and as a wide-eyed youngster by Jimmy Bennett –- meets during this tour of hell. Outside of Jeremy Sisto, though, this rogue’s gallery has hardly enough screen time to make much of an impression beyond the cruel actions of their characters, and the same effect could have been made with a series of complete unknowns. In fact, such a move may have made the movie even harder to deal with emotionally, stripping the artifice (though certainly the professionalism) that known faces can bring to a project. Argento herself, however, is a consistently fascinating creature to behold, as always. Some of her character choices are just so far beyond what a normal actress would bring to this role, that I could not stop delving into the sordid world, even when good, caring Psyche herself reached out through the ether and sought to convince me that such continued behavior could only serve to cause me irreparable brain damage.

I withstood these suggestions, this better judgment, and this is because, despite the subject matter, the film is compulsively watchable, mainly thanks to the magnetic Argento, both on camera and off. Her camera, and the screenplay which she and Alessandro Magania have fashioned from the book by J.T. LeRoy, does reflect a certain impatience with details, almost a jittery nature that makes one ask questions well after a scene has ended. The film just moves, taking just enough time at each stop to wallow slightly in one degradation before passing to the next. This is also the film’s downfall, eventually, as things, perhaps reflecting the further deterioration of Sarah into a full-blown mental case, become so haphazard that one wonders whether anyone on the set has any control over the situation. (There is some small evidence here, though, that she may already be a better pure director than her more famous father, laden as he is by a bag of vaudeville magician’s tricks out of which he has been unable to crawl these past twenty years or so.)

I am not going to go into the controversy surrounding the author’s true identity, and whether or not the horrible things that pile up on the film’s youthful protagonist really did or could happen to a single child. Seeing as I have not, nor will I ever, read the source material, I just don’t care about the debate. And it has no bearing on my opinion of this movie, outside of the question as to why, if one wasn’t writing autobiographically (or even strictly biographically about another), would one have the drive to bring such squalid imagery of child abuse into a world already deathlessly paranoid about the subject, unless these creators were provocateurs of the most deviant variety. An artist’s deeper intentions or impulsions are theirs with which to wrestle and suffer, and eventually they will wrangle these demons into their particular mode of art. If “J.T. LeRoy” or his/her actual handlers felt this impulsive need to bring this slice of their world, however real or imagined, to nasty, gnashing life into ours, then so be it. Fly forth and spew your savage (and politically conspicuous) vision of the world onto paper. And if a renegade and rising talent of a director happens to come along and turn that vision into a oddly watchable but alternately despicable marvel, then so be it, too.

But don’t thrust your assault at me and tell me this is a reflection of the world in which I dwell, because I will deny it. Just leave me out of it. Keep your drama away from me. It’s certainly a world that crudely fascinates the viewer on the screen, but it is simply not my world. It’s not a reality in which I have ever found myself. So help me, it is not my world…

Or maybe it is now, since I can’t get some of these images out of my mind…

And maybe this is that moment where I really need to remind myself of how lucky I have been thus far.
Mommy…!

Q: Are We Not Sets? A: We Are Dee-Vee-Arr! - Pt. 1

The latest insipid issue of Entertainment Weekly (really, why do I subscribe again?) featured a two-page spread in its television section, miles apart from the insipidity to which I am referring elsewhere in the issue, of the TV ratings for the entire 07-08 season. I do not care about ratings in the least, and am weirdly proud that many of the shows which I do favor tend to up in the bottom third of the list each week. Sure, it might mean lower ad revenue, and therefore, a short life span for my favorite shows. But at least it will keep the things I love from turning into friggin' ER, having to steal a respirator from its own set to keep itself stumbling through year after ridiculously extended year, all on rubbery legs that should have been sheared off when Julianna Margulies and George Clooney left the show. (If not then, then at least when Anthony Edwards bowed out.)

I scanned the chart fleetingly, mainly to see where How I Met Your Mother ended up (64rd, one notch below the far less comically epic Big Bang Theory, and sadly tied with that obnoxious MacFarlane show) -- and then I would have been done with the list, but I decided to read the little bubbles on the side of the chart which pointed out the kind of facts that I find generally irrelevant. And for the show Gossip Girl, which I have never seen, I read this: "Though you may have heard that DVR viewers pump up The CW soap's ratings, the net's One Tree Hill BLAH BLAH BLAH infinity..." The closing of the fact isn't important here... remember, all ratings are estimates. They're like popularity polls for presidents. A thousand people do not a country make. And if those thousand people are in a single designated area or a single select type of person, they are even less so, because the cross-section is not broad enough to account for all of America.

For the record, I have been part of a Nielsen household three times in my life, and I lied like a motherfucker every single time. If there was something on I wanted to watch, but I was unable to actually see it or even record it (those lost VCR days, baby...), I still marked it down like I was home. Some shows I did watch, but was embarrassed to put it on record that I did, I left off. And, man, was I an ass about it. Somewhere, deep, deep, deep in the Nielsen records in a warehouse locked away forever, is a log where I wrote down the names of every single hardcore flick that appeared between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m. each and every night on pay-per-view. And then I took some oil and smeared it on a couple of pages, and then I purposefully stuck about four pages together in the log to make it appear like I couldn't stop working my stick even while filling out a ratings guide. As I did this, I could just imagine the face of the underpaid Nielsen drone who started to knock this info into a computer, and then slowly realized that this log had been filled out by some major perv. I also then imagined that same automaton finishing work on the remainder of the book while clad in a haz-mat suit, tearing the pages apart with robotic pincers in a containment bubble, just so they could finish their damn ratings poll. (And this was only the second time I did a Nielsen book. They actually came back for more, which makes me wonder if they even looked at the second log...)

The chief thing the EW ratings chart did was stress to me how secure we are now in the age of the DVR. For the record, Jen and I are now severe DVR-aholics. We still have two VCRs, but I haven't recorded a single thing for about 18 months. At first, though, I was entirely skeptical about this development in home video. My pal Mattman was the first person I knew to purchase a TiVo, and he spent ages trying to convince me it was the wave of the future, and the way in which I needed to swerve. Of course, then I moved away from Alaska at just about the time I was seriously considering TiVo myself. Once it came time to get cable here in OrCo, after our initial traditional cable box bit the dust, thanks to the evolving ways of the cable industry, we found ourselves accidental tourists in the DVR age (I believe our combined reaction to the offer was "We can get that? Cool."), and we haven't looked back.

The case of Gossip Girl also pointed out to me the extent of our DVR use, and exactly how it has changed the way we view things. Once upon a VCR-heavy time, I would watch most of my favorite shows live, and only record things if I really wanted to keep them (Buffy episodes, pre-DVD release or obscure films) or if we were going to be out. Or if one of us would be out, and wanted to catch up with the show later. This was the case, too, with the DVR originally, but only because we were still mired in our VCR-dependent haze. Two weeks after we had a DVR, a new trend was becoming more and more apparent. We hardly ever watched shows anymore at the times at which they aired. The first reason was because series recording options made it even easier to record those things we love without ever having to think about them except for that first entry. The second reason was, given the opportunity to never have to deal with advertisements by zipping past them like the friggin' Flash, even being home in time for a show meant starting it a few minutes late to exercise that ad-blasting option. Add to this the means by which one could freeze programs at any point, or review or fast forward directly on the broadcast meant that listed start and end times only meant something for the literal recording of the show, not for the enjoyment of said program. Everything we once accepted about television has been upended.

And so should the ratings system. The networks are lame ducks anyway. Cable, the internet, satellite radio and a myriad of other entertainment options have seen fit, if not end the reign of the current Big 4 (and an upstart underclassman), to at least give them a swirly as a warning of the future atomic wedgie to come. Their once dependable and often giant audiences are gradually becoming more and more splintered, and the methods once used to determine their audience need to change with the times. The side column in the aforementioned EW ratings chart is possibly one way to start this, but its a small start. If Jen and I were affected so swiftly by the use of the DVR on our viewing habits -- in which a monstrous proportion of our regular viewing is no longer completed live anymore -- if our method was changed so dramatically in such a short turn, I cannot imagine that others -- a great many others -- also haven't been affected in a similar manner. And with cable companies increasingly making the DVR device the standard for their company, in much the same way that advertising is going to have to change to get around the fact of ever easier fast-forwarding, the ratings system will have no choice but to shift their chief focus on who is watching what. Because pretty soon, it seems that the audience actually watching shows at the time at which they are scheduled to begin is going to slowly dwindle down to a scant few. In my household, they are all but extinct.

So, what exactly am I recording on my DVR? [To be continued...]