Ballion Me Back to Old VirginnyGee- it's been awhile since I've been able to update this thing, and a lot has happened. So let's get right to it.
We have two new family members. On the Memorial Day Holiday we went to my ancestral home of Manchester, Ohio with a double-tined purpose, (a) to visit with my grand aunt Mabel, who is 86 and is recovering from cancer (!) and to pick up a kitty from my Mom. My mother loves cats, but can't have them as they aggrivate her bronchial condition. Nonetheless, she took one in who proceeded to produce four more. Aunt Mabel agreed to take on the Mama cat, and persuaded us to take on two kitties, even though we had only planned to take one back to Michigan. When we got back with the new kittens, our longtime cat Cathy was NOT amused, but she warmed up to them within about a week and now mothers, cuddles and preens them like their her own. At this juncture I would like to yield the floor to Remy, who will fill in some of the blanks:
My cat's names are Violet & Buttecup. Violet has green eyes and is very shy and sweet. Buttecup has yellow eyes and is adventurous and outgoing. They like to play with each other, but sometimes I get worried because it looks like it hurts. But it turns out in the end that they are just playing. I have another cat named Cathy. She's kind of like a supervisor. I'm kind of glad that she's there, otherwise I would be watching over their shoulders day and night. Just once, I would love to get a picture of all three of them. But they won't stay still...
Back to Dave: de fenestra is on hiatus. We were hoping to play a date at some hole in the wall in Chicago on July 30, but Phil is unable to make it. Depending on how things go, perhaps Will Soderburg and I will play solo sets instead.
I am having a LOT of computer trouble. The "old" computer is dead now, and the "new" one is working, but only intermittently. This is writ on Mrs. Lewis' computer, who isn't crazy about my doing so, but she's sleeping and doesn't want to be bothered. Al took a part-time, night time job, which means that we are all walking on eggshells during the day and barely able to sleep a full night.
I'm supposed to go down to Cincinnati next Friday and do the final work on the Shake It! Hospital Records compilation with David Davis at QCA. That puts the release date and reunion show in Cincinnati in October. This will represent the realization of a long-standing dream of mine, to make that 1980s music once again available. I remember back in 1995 or so Mike Stewart in BPA had saved some money to put a new roof on his house, but was sorely tempted to redirect the capital into reviving the Hospital Records stuff. I think some of the other fellows hoped that he would do so (I may be wrong about that, BTW - I don't know), but I advised him to please, put a new roof on your house. Someday all those recordings will take care of themselves.
I'm glad I did in retrospect, as the timing would've been awful had it been in 1995. There is interest in this stuff now, whereas there was none whatsoever in '95 - "Grunge" was in decline and Hip Hop was in an upswing. Our music is neither, but today there are plenty of current day groups who are reaching back into the 'eighties for ideas and figured somehow that they missed something. I think critics, too, are beginning to wake up in some instances, out of their REM and U2 induced snooze on the post-punk period.
When I See Mommy I Feel Like a MummyRecently got the wonderful Universal Monsters DVD set of the Mummy cycle. The four 1940s films I hold so dear come as "extras" to the 1932 Boris Karloff The Mummy. There have been so many questions I have had about the bewildering nature of continuity and mythos among these films over the years that are finally getting answered. The Mummy cycle, of course, is not at least strongly based on literary sources like Dracula and Frankenstein so much as it is reflective of urban myths developed in the wake of the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922. "Lot No. 249" is an Arthur Conan Doyle story often cited as a possiible stimulant for the Mummy genre, and it was very effectively realized as an episode of "Tales from the Darkside," but it seems very different from the type of ethos expressed in Universal's Mummy cycle.
I really can't go into a full-blown essay on the topic, as I have to do laundry and clean up packing peanuts from all around the apartment that the kitties have scattered. But in short, I was never able to figure out the whole Mummy cycle as I was not able to access the films in a way that made sense. The last four of the five are interconnected in a way that they are not wholly interdependent of one another, and it is impossible to make sense of them when you can only see one at a time, such as I did watching them on TV back in the days of three VHF stations and two UHF ones. A few years ago, AMC showed them all on a single night hosted by Linda Blair, but out of sequence which is REALLY confusing.
I first saw "The Mummy's Ghost," my favorite of the cycle, when I was nine, and found it the most hopelessly confusing picture imaginable. A white streak appears in the hair of the heroine which other characters notice but do not speak about. Much of the emotional investment in the picture is towards this woman, Amira, who is being posessed by the spirit of the ancient Egyptian princess Ananka. When she turns ancient, shrivels up and is carried down into the swamp by the mummy at the end, it was most disconcerting to my nine-year-old eyes, but is really the most effective ending they could've contrived for such a difficult and complicated picture.
I had to look long and hard for a positive review of "The Mummy's Ghost" - after all, the very title of the picture is oxymoronic. I did find one, and it was written by a critic who understood its relationship to the whole cycle.
The original 1932 The Mummy is a stand-alone project, and as such is excellent. "The Mummy's Hand" is not a sequel so much as it is a new picture roughly based on the old one, and the successors -"The Mummy's Tomb," "The Mummy's Ghost" and "The Mummy's Curse" are sequels to "The Mummy's Hand." "The Mummy's Tomb" is both a sequel AND a remake, in that the same basic story is told as in "The Mummy's Hand," only 30 years later, with the characters from the previous picture aged. The heroes of the old picture become the victims of the sequel, thus realizing "the curse." All told, the four films have an internal dating spanning some 60 years, but never depart from the settings of the 1940s. George Zucco's character dies of natural causes in "The Mummy's Tomb," but it must've been a bad spell of indigestion, as he is alive and well enough to commission John Carradine's character in "The Mummy's Ghost."
One of the possible literary sources for the cycle, and one incidentally NEVER mentioned by the critics, is a story published in 1922 with Harry Houdini as nominal author but H. P. Lovecraft as actual writer. I forget the title but it is something like "In the Belly of the Sphinx." It is clear to me now that Lovecraft is referenced throughout "The Mummy's Ghost" - the order of Arkham is the one to which Zucco and Carradine's characters belong, and the University in the picture might be Miskatonic. This has got to be the earliest Hollywood movie that is sourced from literary ideas owing to the Weird Menace circle. Although the onscreen credits are only to two writers, the cycle was written by committee, and a lot of the participants, such as writer-director Curt Siodmak, were Europeans who were in Hollywood to escape the war. Siodmak was fully knowlegeable about Surrealism and Brechtian alienation technique, and in a late interview claimed that the ellipses in the Mummy films' storyline were deliberate, to confuse the audience and thus deepen the sense of unreality and fear.
Even though these are low budget entertainment thrillers, it is not right to judge their merits upon the same values that we would use for the Frankenstein and Dracula series, which are based on solid literary properties. Anyone interested in deconstructionism cannot fail to be entertained by Universal's Mummy series, even if the majordomos of horror movie criticism do not have much in the way of enthusiasm for them.
Uncle Dave Lewis