Malcolm X is still misunderstood - and misused

Fifty-five years after his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, we still get much wrong about Malcolm X.

Read the full article on Al Jazeera here

How to Humiliate an Absolute Narcissist

The challenge of beating anyone whose only goal is to remain unbeatable.

Read the full article on Psychology Today here

Book Review

Book Review

Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution

by Patrice Higonnet

     History books about the French Revolution can be perplexing. The ideologies and motivations of the participants are complex, contradictory, and not easy to grasp in the context of today’s political paradigm. This is complicated by the way that ideologues have projected their own biases and agendas onto their writings on the subject. Otherwise the meaning of the French Revolution can gets sidelined as some authors grapple with the easier to manage narrative of events and participants. That is not Patrice Higonnet’s method or intent in Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution. Instead his history dissects and examines the thoughts and beliefs of the Jacobins while minimizing the importance of what actually happened.

     The book starts with a quick and simple timeline of events from the Fall of the Bastille to The Terror and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is a sketchy narrative. Readers who are new to the subject of the French Revolution would be wise to read a more clearly and detailed account of what happened before starting Higonnet’s book. Having said that, it is also clear that Goodness Beyond Virtue is far better than Thomas Carlyle’s muddled babbling in The French Revolution which should be avoided by anyone who values their own sanity. Higonnet is a chronicler of ideas and his abstract writing style does not function well in describing people or what they do.

     From there, the rest of the book is about the Jacobins, what they did, and what they believed. The Jacobins were a social club that splintered off from the Freemasons but they were not a secret society and their membership, at least for quite a while, was open to almost anyone and their activities were not clandestine. They were not the ones who started the French Revolution but when it began they were there to give it shape and guidance. The Jacobins were primarily middle-class, the proto-bourgeoisie as Karl Marx would have it, and intent on recreating the world from scratch by ending feudalism, government by monarchy and aristocracy, and rule by the Catholic church; all this was to be replaced by a Parliamentary form of government. They wished to usher in a new era of rationality based on the values of the Enlightenment. Patrice Higonnet points out that their ideals were too lofty to be realized by mere mortals. In addition, the heart of their theories contained a fundamental contradiction that, in addition to the previously mentioned problem, eventually led to their downfall. This contradiction was their belief in both individual freedom and communitarian principles. On one side, they thought that every human being had the right to live to their full potential but on the other side they thought that this meant a maximum amount of civic engagement. They never took into account that the two sides of the equation placed restrictions on each other that proved to be irreconcilable.

     It is difficult to situate the Jacobins in today’s conceptualization of the political spectrum. They called themselves libertarians but that term meant something entirely different to them than it does to the conservative extremists who use the term now. “Libertarianism” for them had a lot to do with social justice and equality; the idea was that by removing the governing forms of the Old Regime, all citizens would have a chance to participate in political decision-making and this would lead to greater socialequality across class lines, The rich, the middle class, and the poor would all have equal say in government despite their financial status. Curiously enough, the Jacobin clubs allowed members from all sides of the political spectrum to join; initially both liberals and conservative worked together for the common goal of initiating the modern era of politics. After a while this alliance did not hold, though, and the schismatic conservative Girondin faction separated and began bickering with the leftist Montagnards who began the Terror, a time when the Parisian Jacobins introduced the guillotine to remove anybody they saw as standing in the way of progress.

     Goodness Beyond Virtue is written in a very French writing style that may be frustrating for readers not used to this. There are a lot of long, run-on sentences that sometimes have evasive meanings. Some paragraphs and chapters read like lists of thoughts that do not appear to have any central idea. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this style; it is just the way French authors write.

     Higonnet also leaves a lot out. The writing is largely oriented to the left wing faction of the Jacobins and little is said about the Girondins. Danton, a major figure in the revolution, gets skimmed over too and a lot of the writing revolves around Saint-Just, Marat, and Robespirerre. But this all serves the author’s intentions well since his whole purpose in writing this book is to exonerate the Jacobins. He clearly states that the Terror was a terrible mistake but that Jabin ideology was in the service of a noble cause and should be honored despite the bloodbath that the French Revolution became in the end. Higonnet wants to save the Jacobins’ reputation from conservatives and reactionaries who believe that their ideology was the cause of the Terror. He argues that the atrocities were a political miscalculation rather than the result of a flawed and dangerous doctrine.

     Goodness Beyond Virtue is not a good place to begin your studies of the French Revolution. It is an examination of a set of thoughts, beliefs, and ideas. When abstracted and disembodied from the people who produced them, they might seem a little too obscure to be of any value. However, if you are already familiar with this time and place in history, it can do a good job on enhancing your understanding of it.

Higonnet, Patrice. Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: 1998.

Watching Aldous Huxley Die – 1963

As he lay dying, Laura Huxley asked her husband if he wanted some LSD. He did. This is what she saw...

Read the full article on Flashbak here

This Is What Happens When You Take 550 Doses of LSD At Once

Accidental LSD overdoses are not fun. But for some, they can have a bizarrely beneficial effect.

Read the full article on Vice here

Leading Santa Muerte Expert Interviewed on the Fastest Growing New Religious Movement in the West

What prompted your interest in the Santa Muerte phenomena?*

I am a specialist in the religious landscape of Latin America and was conducting research for a book project on the Virgin of Guadalupe when in March 2009 I saw the news that the Mexican army had demolished 40 Santa Muerte altars on the border with Texas and California. I have more than 3 decades of experience in Mexico so I was already familiar with the Mexican folk saint of death but had no idea that she had become religious enemy number one for the then Calderon administration. I saw that very little had been published on Santa Muerte, particularly in English, so I decided to put the Guadalupe book project on hold and write the first book in English on “Saint Death,” which I did. Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint was first published in 2012 and the second edition in 2017.

Read the full article on Cult News 101 here

Memory Hole

Memory Hole:

I. The Meaning That You Choose

II. Clown Town

III. Death Will Be the Best Part

IV. Halloween for Ever n Everrr

V. The Cops

VI. Horrors of Being

VII. Haunt the Child

short video art films

The Memory Hole Youtube channel can be found here

The Shocking True Tale Of The Mad Genius Who Invented Sea-Monkeys

In a 2002 interview with Erik Lobo of Planet X magazine, Harold von Braunhut comes across as the kind of charming old guy who might detain you in conversation a bit too long if you were volunteering at a home for the aged. An inventor and entrepreneur who brought us legions of wonderfully gimmicky toys before he died, at 77, in 2003, von Braunhut holds forth about times gone by, interrupted only when his cockatoo chews at the wire connecting his hearing aid to the telephone.

Read the full article on The Awl here

Parliament Funkadelic: The Mothership Connection

Parliament Funkadelic: The Mothership Connection

Live in Houston (1976)

Tangerine Dream at Coventry Cathedral

Tangerine Dream at Coventry Cathedral

short film directed by Tony Palmer (1975)

Curiosity Is the Secret to a Happy Life

Engaging with the unfamiliar can keep mind and body fit. So how to pump up one’s levels of curiosity?

Read the full article on Elemental here

Can David Lynch Resuscitate the Theater of the Absurd?

David Lynch’s short film released on Netflix, What Did Jack Do?, works as both a gift to Lynch fans and a troll on Netflix viewers. In the film, Lynch portrays a detective who diligently interrogates a monkey suspected of homicide. Shot in black and white, Lynch stages a minimal scenery: a table top illuminated by a small window. Lynch–dressed to the nines in his Gordon Cole black suit–compulsively smokes cigarettes, and projects the disciplined strength and steely reserve of Humphrey Bogart at his most leathery and film noir. The monkey Jack, who speaks in an uncanny, distorted tone, is nervous and disturbed. As the conversation moves through the interrogation, the language grows increasingly bizarre and absurd as it builds towards a climax that never really materializes:

Lynch: Don’t you ever wonder about anything?
Jack: The wonder was in my heart, but you wouldn’t understand something like that.
Lynch: There’s an elephant in the room. Now it’s time to start talking turkey.

Read the full article on Filthy Dreams here

Book Review

Nightmare Of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr.

by Rudolph Grey

     Edward D. Wood Jr., the godfather of psychotronic and cult films, was a man who had it all. Well , had it all except money managements skills, control over his drinking impulses, and talent. So maybe he didn’t really have it all but what he did have was a nice house in Hollywood, a group of loyal friends, and a huge collection of angora sweaters. He also has a lasting influence on outsider art and counter-culturalism that has lasted to this day. What more could a man want? Rudolph Grey’s biography Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. examines this auteur and pulp sleaze author. By connecting all the dots presented in these pages, you might even be able to see why films like Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space have survived in popular and unpopular culture.

     Nightmare of Ecstasy is an oral biography. Grey interviewed people who knew Ed Wood personally and put their accounts together. It is not a linear narrative and is actually more like commentaries on different aspects of Wood’s life. Separate chapters focus on things like his military service in World War II, his transvestism, his friendships with Bela Lugosi and other stars of 1950s horror cinema, his alcoholism, his involvement with the porn industry, and the sad and unsettling end of his life. The book ends with a list and commentaries of the known books and movies he worked on. What was surprising about it all was that the chapters about his movie productions were the least interesting parts of the biography. The stories and descriptions of the man himself were what really made this a good read.

     What kind of a man was Ed Wood? By most accounts he was friendly, humorous, open minded, generous to a fault, charming and extremely good looking. People loved to be around him and his parties were popular. He worked in most aspects of the cinematic industry and his most famous films are just a small part of everything he did professionally. He did know some important people in Hollywood but he also made friends with a host of other eccentrics like Criswell, Tor Johnson, and Vampira. His identity as a heterosexual cross-dresser made him accepting of other people with unconventional ideas and even gained him entrance to a secret club of male celebrities who liked to dress up as women. As Ed Wood became more and more comfortable about cross-dressing in public, his drinking problem got worse. The chapters at the end are harrowing accounts of his descent into self-destruction. He may have only lived at the margins of the Hollywood in-crowd but he had a good life in his younger years and a lot of people loved and admired him. Reading about how Ed Wood lived in hell in the end was a little disturbing.

     Grey’s biography gives details about the life of Ed Wood but it could have benefited from a chapter examining his legacy. He is often laughed at for the being the world’s worst film director but that designation is neither fair nor accurate. Glen or Glenda can be seen as a groundbreaking film and one of the first to explicitly deal with a sexual behavior that was once considered a mental illness but is now considered harmless by most people. Even if few people saw it when initially released, you have to admit it took courage to produce and star in it it in the 1950s.

     While Plan 9 from Outer Space is not a good film by conventional standards, it was far better than even a lot of monster movies made in Ed Wood’s time. While those films may have had bigger budgets, higher production standards, and more professional acting, most of them were boring and formulaic with the same plot: a monster appears and threatens the world, inevitably followed by an hour of people talking about how to kill it. In the last fifteen minutes, they fight the monster and it dies. Only the end of movies like The Crawling Eye or It Conquered the World are worth watching. Plan 9 from Outer Space is actually fun to watch from beginning to end. His films have had an influence on not only trans people and punks but on indy film makers and underground artists as well. In a John Waters kind of sense, being called the world’s worst film maker is an honor, not an insult. Besides, Ed Wood’s films are far more entertaining than anything Bruce Willis, Keanu Reeves, or Sandra Bullock have ever done. I can’t even sit through half of a Quentin Tarantino movie without falling asleep and yet I’ve sat through Plan 9 from Outer Space at least ten times. His books are coveted by collectors too. A copy of the novelization of Orgy Of the Dead sold on Ebay for more than $400. It must be a strange book considering that that movie was little more than a feature length film of women dancing topless in a cemetery. But Grey’s book ends with Ed Wood’s death and does not explore the meaning or significance of what he accomplished.

     Nightmare of Ecstasy shows, maybe indirectly, what sets the films of Ed Wood apart from other b-movies and exploitation films. Ed Wood was a funny and charming guy to work with especially when directing movies in drag; he inspired a lot of people by just being courageous enough to be who he was. The casts and crews he worked with had fun during production times. They knew they weren’t making anything profound or artistically correct. They didn’t care either. This sense of playfulness and joy is what makes his movies interesting despite themselves. They are possessed of the same kind of naive spirit that animates so much of outsider art. Ed Wood and his friends did not take themselves too seriously and that is maybe why he is remembered to this day while other so-called “serious” films like the academy award winning Kramer Vs. Kramer was forgotten a long time ago. Maybe that’s what is missing in today’s world: people who aren’t afraid to be themselves, people who don’t take themselves too seriously, and people who just do what makes them happy. Maybe that is what is needed to revive the jaded film industry we have in the 21^st century.

     The people who knew or remembered Ed Wood are mostly dead now. Being the marginal figure he was, there was not a lot of documentation about him either. This will probably be the last and only biography about this good man. For this reason, Nightmare of Ecstasy should be cherished by fans of Ed Wood and connoisseurs of the unusual and obscure. 

Grey, Rudolph. Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. Feral House, Portland, OR: 1994.

People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia

The possible explanations could help us better understand the condition.

Read the full article on Vice here

THE MOST FASCINATING RIOT YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

The Astor Place Opera House Riot of 1849 combined two of 19th-century America’s favorite pastimes: going to the theater and rioting.

Read the full article on The Outline here

BLOODY THURSDAY: KILLER COPS AND THE BATTLE FOR THE PEOPLE’S PARK, 1969

BLAM!!!

Fifty years ago, the rules of engagement changed. On Thursday May 15th 1969, police opened fire with shotguns on mostly peaceful, unarmed student demonstrators who were protesting the seizure of the People’s Park in Berkeley, CA.

Read the full article on Dangerous Minds here

Sex, Satanism, Manson, Murder, and LSD: Kenneth Anger tells his tale

He told where the bodies were buried in the third issue of Kinokaze Magazine circa 1993. Or so it seemed, as no subject appeared to be off-limits. Drugs, murder, and movies. But then again, Anger rarely if ever veers from the script as he is a man who has carefully controlled his myth and reputation for decades.

Read the full article on Flashbak here

The Best of Ernie Kovacs

The Best of Ernie Kovacs Volumes 1-4

(1950-1962)

Book Review

Death Drive: There Are No Accidents

by Stephen Bayley

     In 1965, Kenneth Anger published his notorious classic Hollywood Babylon. It was an easy-to-read, rumor-mongering book about the seamier side of movie star glamour. One thing that stood out was its combination of black and white photographs side by side with the text; they were integrated in such a way that reading it felt at times like the writing was an integral part of a film reel. Death Drive: There Are No Accidents by Stephen Bayley has a similar effect.

     While both books are about the cult of celebrity, they both deal with their subject matter in different ways. Anger’s book was a sleaze-fest and more or less a work of fiction, giving the audience a heavy dose of the vicious gossip they want to hear. Bayley’s book, which makes reference to Hollywood Babylon in the chapter on Jayne Mansfield, focuses on a more precise part of the public’s fascination with the famous: the cult of celebrity car crashes. Bayley also treats the death-by-car-wreck theme in a different way. His writing style is plain, descriptive, and factual without much embellishment, literary license, or interpretation.

     The introduction does not give too much information. Bayley explains his vague criteria for which victims he chose to write about. All of them were part of the glamorous elite and people with some kind of irony attached to their deaths. All are highly sexualized and regarded as icons of style. Then the concept of Carl Jung’s “synchronicity” is explained in reference to the book’s title. All coincidences have a purpose, Bayley believes, but he leaves the audience hanging and does not thoroughly examine this theme in the book.

     Each chapter is laid out according to a repetitive formula. The first page has a pixelated portrait of the subject. Mixed with the text are photos or advertisements for the cars each celebrity crashed, and then at the end, or close to it, a picture of the car after it had been wrecked. The photography is of high quality and each appears to be a work of art. The writing is equally formulaic. Some details of each person’s life are given including their major accomplishments. Precisely detailed descriptions of each car’s design and mechanics comes next, followed by the details of the crash that killed each celebrity. The mechanical descriptions can be dull if you are not an automobile enthusiast and they are written with detail that leaves nothing to the imagination, almost like the descriptions of genitalia you might find in the letters section of Penthouse magazine. These descriptions are so redundant they have the same effect you might get from being stuck in a room with someone who can’t stop flicking a light switch on and off because they have obsessive-compulsive disorder. The crash details are brief and seem almost trivial. Bayley gives the impression he does not want to sound morbid, sadistic, or gross so he downplays the gore. Some of the chapters discuss ironies or conspiracy theories related to the each subject. Conspiracy theories were abundant regarding the deaths of James Dean and Princess Grace of Monaco, probably because some people could not handle the cognitive dissonance when such glamorous people died in such mundane circumstances. Some interesting ironies are the fact that James Dean filmed a public service announcement about driving safety before getting killed in a high-speed crash. The American war hero General George S. Patton suffered a fatal head injury in a low-speed fender bender with a truck manned by a stoned driver who wasn’t paying attention. Then there were a number of professional race car drivers that died due to routine mechanical failures or skidding during the rain on ordinary roads.

     The conclusion is a short neo-Romantic essay in which the author longs for the days of the mid-20th century when automobiling signified individuality, power, and freedom. Now mass produced cars no longer look stylish and have become an economic and environmental liability as well as an impediment to traveling efficiently. Cars have become a nuisance, especially for people living in cities. The use of cars for the pursuit of freedom and luxury may have failed in the end but it was the dream people were chasing that made automobiles exciting.

     The writing in Death Drive is not great. Its style is limp and often boring. The interaction between the photos and the text is what makes it unique and the design of the book appears to be its main purpose. The design draws attention to itself as design and the physical quality of the book makes it feel more like a functional art object than a literary work. It is good for a single read but it does not go far enough to truly be memorable.

Bayley, Stephen. Death Drive: There Are No Accidents. Circa Press, London: 2018.

Al Dobritch and the Shadowy Side Of the Shrine Circus

     Modern American circuses have always been places where shadows meet the light. Immersed in darkness, the audience peers out into a brightly lit arena where wild animals do tricks, where shady looking clowns do stunts and play pranks on each other, where freaks display their abnormalities for the entertainment of so-called normal people, and trapeze artists and tightrope walkers flirt with death in as elegant a way as possible. The performers are transients who come into town on trains and trucks; who knows what they might be doing in their glittery costumes while they wait in the wings. Lion tamers can get mutilated, clowns can get trampled by elephants, tightropes can snap, and trapeze artists can fall uncontrollably into the air. Always on a fine line between high talent and sleaze, people watch this for fun. They bring their children. And some say Al Dobritch was the greatest Shrine circus producer ever.

     After the Civil War, the Ancient Arabic Order Of the Nobles Of the Mystic Shrine, more often referred to as the Shriners, were formed in New York City. They were an elitist spin-off from the Freemasons. Only 32^nd degree members of the Scotch Rite or York Rite were allowed to join. Their pageants and rituals were elaborate performances where successful businessmen play-acted at being Muslims. The Shriners’ emphasis was on fun but their rowdy behavior and heavy drinking earned them a bad reputation as a boy’s club for debauchery. They established their charitable Shriner’s Hospitals for children who were victims of burns or physical disabilities as a means of correcting and managing their public image.

     As the Shriners grew in popularity and their rituals became more elaborate, funding for temple activities became increasingly more expensive so they began holding circuses to raise money for their clubs. Contrary to popular perception, the Shrine Circus was not established to support the hospitals. But the Shriners themselves never hesitated to give out tickets so sick and disabled children could see the shows for free.

     Before the 1950s, circuses were strictly traveling acts. In the warmer months of the year, tents were erected in vacant lots, freelance performers were brought in, and many of them worked for three quarters of the year moving from city to city. During the winter they were unemployed. The great innovation of the Shrine Circus was to hold engagements in indoor arenas when the climate was too cold for the big top. The Moslem Temple in Detroit built the first and most prominent auditorium for the circus. Audiences had a place to come in from the cold during the dreary months of snow and the clowns, acrobats, and animals did not have to worry about going hungry for that segment of the year.

The circus producer Eddie Stinson was given command over the Moslem Temple’s venue. Stinson was a businessman though, and he had no flair for showbusiness. He hired the acts and delegated the workloads but paid no mind to the quality of performances. 

     By 1960, Detroit’s annual Shrine Circus had grown redundant and dull and attendance went into decline. Stinson was out and the nobles began shopping around for a new producer. They settled for L.N. Fleckles from the Chicago Medinah Temple circus. Fleckles made some cosmetic changes and hired new acts. His biggest change was adding an hour-long intermission in the middle. His circus was lackluster and not much better than the Eddie Stinson productions. The highlight of 1960 was when a daredevil got shot out of a cannon while sitting in a tiny car; the car missed its target and bounced off the side of the netting and crashed at the base of the bleachers. There were no serous injuries but spectators agreed that it was the most entertaining moment of an otherwise boring day. The managers argued and grumbled amongst themselves and finally decided to continue shopping for a new producer. By 1961 they had found their man.

     Al Dobritch was born in Sofia, Bulgaria to a family of circus professionals. World War II ended and communism swept across Eastern Europe. When it reached Bulgaria, Dobritch and his Polish-German wife named Pia fled with their son Sandy to the U.S.A. By the 1950s, the Dobritch family members that stayed behind had earned the possible dubious distinction of being the most prominent circus producers behind the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, Al Dobritch and his family tried to establish themselves as a trapeze act in the states. They proved to be mediocre performers but did manage to land a gig on the Super Circus television show. The audience fell in love with the adorable little Sandy so they hired him for a permanent part as the clown named Scampy. The role was originally intended for a midget but the one who signed a contract to perform never showed up for work. So they settled for Sandy as a replacement.

     By then, Al Dobritch had quit climbing the ladder to the trapeze and had begun climbing the ladder to management instead. The television producers took him on as a talent scout. When he made a few good connections he moved on to hiring acts for The Ed Sullivan Show then began producing his own small-time traveling circuses.

     The Shriners first got word of Dobritch because he was being sued for defamation by the increasingly unpopular L.N. Fleckles. Dobritch met with some nobles of the Shrine and agreed to produce high-quality circuses for costs significantly lower than the other available choices. Al Dobritch signed his first contract to run the 1961 Moslem Temple Shrine Circus in Detroit.

Dobritch had energy and passion for production. The size of the circus was increased by expanding it from two rings to three with two elevated stages between the rings. To the two white spotlights he added two more, one red and one blue. The sawdust in the rings was colored bright blue while the sawdust on the hippodrome track around the rings was dyed deep red. The clowns were more cheeky. The animal acts were more complex. The highwire walkers and trapeze artists did more daring and dazzling acts. The stuntmen and acrobat performances grew more dangerous. Dobritch sequenced the show so that it became more exciting as it went along, eventually reaching a climax where glitter and balloons were dropped from the ceiling into the audience at the end of the show. Low-paid employees given the task of blowing up those multitudes of balloons were disgruntled and discontented.

     The audiences went wild and attendance grew rapidly. Al Dobritch became the darling of the circus world. He also became more cocky, more abrasive, more arrogant, and eventually more difficult to work for.

     For 1962, Dobritch was brought back with a modest increase in salary. He added even more acts. Veteran lion tamer Clyde Beatty came out of retirement. There were equestrians, a man in a gorilla suit, human cannonballs and the then-dead tradition of the ringmaster in his black stovepipe hat got revived. Most significantly, the famous Wallendas, a family highwire act, was brought in. Their most famous act was the Human Pyramid, a feat where one man walked out on the tightrope with a bar on his shoulders; three men holding their own bars balanced on that bar and two men stood on those bars holding one bar between them. On top of that bar sat a woman on a chair. The man on the bottom walked out across the wire while holding them all in the air. When he reached the middle, the woman stood up on the chair and balanced there until they finished crossing to the platform on the other side. One night in January, the death-defying feat turned deadly. One of the Wallendas lost his balance and the pyramid toppled over. Two of the men fell to the ground and died of fractured skulls. Three men grabbed the wire as they fell and another two held onto the woman on the chair while the circus lackeys scrambled to get a net under the wire. She fell but landed in an awkward position and ended up paralyzed for the rest of her life. The crowd panicked but they quickly took the dead and injured bodies away on stretchers. As you might guess, safety nets thereafter became a necessity for all performances. They immediately resumed the show to distract the audience from the tragedy. When the press later asked Al Dobritch about the accident, he coldly said, “It’s terrible but the show must go on.”

     The years 1963 to 1966 saw attendance and profits rise steadily by approximately 40 or 50% annually. Al Dobritch worked contract to contract and other producers were eager to get in on Detroit’s Moslem Temple circus which had, by then, established itself as the showcase for Shrine Circuses all across the nation. Dobritch’s coarse behavior and rough manners made others feel as if they had a chance to bump him out of the way and rise on his coattails to success.

After the Wallenda’s disaster, the Shriners and Dobritch began to fight about liability and demanded part of his expenditures go to workman’s compensation insurance. Dobritch would have none of it and refused to pay but they worked out an agreement where the fraternal order would cover insurance costs if they were waived from all accidentally injury or death liability with Al Dobritch being solely responsible for anything that could go wrong.

     Shrine Circus attendance continued to grow so the number of engagements was increased throughout the month of January. Each year Dobritch’s show became better too. Tarzan Zerbini, the Lord Of the Jungle, swung into the arena on a rope and into a cage full of lions and tigers where he proceeded to make them do tricks. Walt Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Alice in Wonderland made their first circus appearances ever. Nationally famous clowns like Blinko, Oopsie, and Bozo put in appearances and the midget clown Captain Bob Lo Short entertained the crowds while dressed in a military uniform. The renowned Alfredo Landon got hired to choreograph the clowning antics and took their gags to a whole new level.

     But while Al Dobritch was ascending to his throne as king of American circus producers, his wife Pia left him. His behavior became more erratic and tempestuous. Then eyebrows were raised when he married Rusty Allen. Born in a small town in Texas, she was a gorgeous redhead and C-list actress whose most significant credits were a Walt Disney production called Jumbo, a part in an Elvis Presley movie, and a starring role in an exploitation film directed by David Friedman. The wives of the Shriners took an immediate disliking to her and when the wives do not like somebody, ordinarily the husbands do not either. The problem was that Al Dobritch had reached the age of 51 and his wife Rusty had just turned 21. As the Shriners began to give Dobritch the cold shoulder, he became more obnoxious. Finally, he tried to make amends with the brotherhood by throwing a cocktail party for them and their wives but nobody showed up. The unsympathetic fraternity gave Dobritch his walking papers and hired L.N. Fleckles to direct the 1967 Moslem Temple Shrine Circus despite the overwhelming success of Dobritch’s shows.

     Needless to say, L.N. Fleckles’ production skills had not improved at all since 1960. Shrine Circus quality began to decline and so did profits and attendance.

     By 1968, Al Dobritch had negotiated to produce a circus for a rival secret society called the Aries Grotto, a cheap and less elitist knock-off of Shriner wannbes. The advertisements billed the show as Al Dobritch’s circus with illustrations of clown wearing red fezzes. A county fairground on the outskirts of Detroit was leased for a one month run. Dobritch brought some of the best acts from his Moslem Temple Circus and even convinced Adam West to put in an appearance as Batman at the height of that television show’s popularity. But the crowds were small. The general public knew the Shrine Circus’s brand but the name “Al Dobritch” was unfamiliar; no one had ever taken any interest in the managerial staff working behind the scenes to bring them great entertainment.

     By then, Rusty Allen had left him so Al Dobritch took another job producing a circus in Los Angeles. Dobritch had great admiration for Martin Luther King and when the great Civil Rights leader got assassinated, he plunged into a dark mood. To make matters worse, the Los Angeles circus was staged near an African-American neighborhood; when the riots broke out, attendance dwindled down to almost nothing and that particular show would no longer go on.

     By the end of 1968, Al Dobritch had filed for bankruptcy and took a job as talent scout for the Circus Circus Casino in Las Vegas. That’s when things really started to get weird. First, Dobritch began seeing prostitutes. Then he got involved in an extortion scheme with a friend where they cornered several strippers and threatened to kill them if they did not cough up part of their earning in exchange for protection. One night Dobritch got arrested. He frequently got into fistfights with a man named Peter Costello. Dobritch paid his friend to help him hurt the man. The pair found Costello walking down the street with his girlfriend. Dobritch began punching her while his friend pistol whipped Costello into unconsciousness. When the two were knocked out, they put them in the trunk of Dobritch’s car. The police later showed up at his apartment and found the couple battered, bloodied, and unresponsive. They were taken to the hospital. Al Dobritch and his friend were booked on charges of assault and battery and kidnapping.

     In March of 1971, Al Dobritch entered the lobby of the Mint Hotel in Las Vegas with a woman. They registered for a room under assumed names. The bellhop who carried their luggage up to the 15^th floor later said the woman did not come with them. Twenty minutes after checking in, Dobritch’s dead body was discovered splattered all over the sidewalk. Police investigators broken down his hotel room door since it was locked from the inside. The window was open. His female companion was not in the room. There were no signs of struggle. The police ruled Al Dobritch’s death a suicide.

McConnell, John H. Shrine Circus: A History Of the Mystic Shriners Yankee Circus in Egypt. Astley and Ricketts, Detroit: 1998.

The Word “Robot” Originated in a Czech Play in 1921: Discover Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Universal Robots)

When I hear the word robot, I like to imagine Isaac Asimov’s delightfully Yiddish-inflected Brooklynese pronunciation of the word: “ro-butt,” with heavy stress on the first syllable. (A quirk shared by Futurama’s crustacean Doctor Zoidberg.) Asimov warned us that robots could be dangerous and impossible to control. But he also showed young readers—in his Norby series of kids’ books written with his wife Janet—that robots could be heroic companions, saving the solar system from cosmic supervillains.

Read the full article on Open Culture here

Le Mans Disaster (1955): Historical Events

The 1955 Le Mans disaster occurred during the 24 Hours of Le Mans motor race at Circuit de la Sarthe in Le Mans, France on 11 June 1955.

Read the full article on Learning History here

Clean Up

anti-litter public service announcement 

directed by David Lynch (1990s)

Ford Pinto Crash Test Film 

(1972)

Driver Safety Public Service Announcement

with James Dean (1955)

Book Review

The Metal Monster

by A. Merritt

     Serious record collectors will be familiar with rock genres like prog rock, krautrock, space rock, and heavy psych. These kinds of music had themes of mysticism, science fiction, fantasy, space travel, drug trip, and the experience of alternate dimensions. Some of it had high technical proficiency while at other times the bands had more imagination and enthusiasm than musical ability. They spanned the full range from profound to downright goofy. The best of these bands are obscure. What all those genres had in common was a strong desire to offer their listeners a mind blowing experience. A. Merritt’s novel The Metal Machine is like a literary version of those genres, albeit one that was published 40 years earlier, and it would appeal to the same kinds of people.

     Something has to be said about Merritt’s writing style. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. He was a pulp science fiction author who set himself apart by writing in a Victorian style with long sentences, highly detailed descriptiveness, and an over-abundance of adverbs. Some of his sentences seem like little more than strings of adverbs so much so that the meaning of the sentence gets lost. But the descriptions of characters, their surroundings, and the metal creatures they encounter are precise and easy to visualize. Merritt’s dialogue tends to be wooden but conveys the meaning of the story clearly. His descriptive writing style does not work so well with landscapes and background scenery which come off as sketchy, sparse, and sometimes confusing. It does not work so well in passages of violence, warfare, or action either; these battles move slowly when a leaner vocabulary range would have sped up the fights to a normal pace. I do not know if there is a literary equivalent to slow-motion film sequences but if there is, A. Merritt found it. He did have the ability to write descriptive prose well; he just applied it to the wrong parts of the novel. The Metal Monster was serialized, written in monthly installments for a pulp sci-fi magazine and this does effect the flow. There are times when reading it can make you drowsy but if you concentrate and pay attention to all the fine details, it is a rewarding reading experience. Lazy readers, people with short attention spans, and anyone who gets bored with writing that lasts longer than a Twitter post aren’t going to get anything out of this.

     Then there are the characters. Professor Goodwin is a botanist, traveling from Persia to Tibet with a Chinese cook he hired in Tehran and a pony, neither of which figure significantly in the story. The cook gets killed off early in the narrative. Goodwin is searching for a rare plant; you may wonder if it is some kind of hallucinogen considering Merritt himself was a botanist who specialized in psychedelics. As he enters a valley filled with blue poppies (yes the poppies used for making heroin), he meets up with his friend’s son Dick Drake. They move on an eventually encounter two more friends, Ventnor and Ruth, who are also brother and sister. How four old friends just happened to meet up with each other while wandering in a remote region of Central Asia is a mystery. If you get too caught up in it, you will not be able to focus on the more interesting aspects of the novel. When strange things begin to happen, a beautiful sorceress named Norhala appears like a fantasy woman and protective mother figure straight out of the pages of Playboy. She saves them from getting killed, falls in love with Ruth, and takes her away to another dimension. Of course, Dick Drake has fallen in love with Ruth and Ventnor is her guardian brother so they have to chase after the two pretty lesbians.

     The thrust of the story is that an ancient city of Persians has somehow survived in the valley, untouched by time and living the way they did thousands of years ago. The Persians are ruled by Cherkis, the son of Xerxes whose people had been chased away when Alexander the Great invaded. These timeless fighters are engaged in constant conflict with Norhala who commands a giant metal monster made out of cones, cubs, and spheres. It can change forms according to the needs of the time and works well as a serious ass-kicking war machine that defeats the Persians every time.

     A large portion of the book is taken up by descriptions of the metal creatures who are actually parts of a metal city which is a complete living being. The metal city/monster is controlled by a giant upside down cross and an oval disk; they drain energy from the sun to feed the smaller metal particles who do the bidding of Norhala according to her needs. The metal monster is actually peaceful and not inclined to harming anything unless necessary.

     In the middle of all the action is Ruth. She is a one-dimensional character, sometimes partially nude and twice tied up for some light bondage scenes; like Helen of Troy, she gets kidnapped and tossed around like a ball from captor to captor. When the Persians abduct her, she is the prize sough after by Norhala the lesbian witch and the metal monster who engage them for the final confrontation.

     The key to the meaning of The Metal Monster is revealed when Ventnor explains the dreams and visions he had while unconscious. The metal monster exists sometime in the future; it is literally metal technology that evolved to the point where it became self-conscious and no longer needed humans to control it. The only surviving link between humanity and the metal monster is Norhala and her servant Yukun, a grotesquely deformed eunuch dwarf who is enslaved to her, worships her, and does whatever she commands. He is the symbolic remnant of a human race that is no longer relevant. The novel can be read as a conflict between humanity’s barbaric past, represented by the Persians, and the technological future, represented by the metal monster. The moral ambiguity is that the metal monster is capable of exterminating humanity and nature while the brutal and sadistic Persians show strength and humanity in their reverence for beauty and the desire to fight for survival. Technological advancement comes at a price. Caught in the middle of this struggle are Professor Goodwin and his friends, the representatives of contemporary humanity.

     This novel can be considered dated but some knowledge of the cultural context from which it came can go a long way in making it comprehensible. This is a place where context DOES matter so I will politely tell postmodern literary theorists and deconstructionists to fuck off at this point. In the 1920s, metal was a valuable commodity; industrialization, architecture, and the rise of the automobile industry made it one of the most sought-after materials. America was emerging from the Gilded Age and sleek, steely, shiny objects were revered along with their artistic counterpart in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco stylizations. New discoveries in science were changing the understanding of the relationship between matter and energy. America and Europe had just finished World War I, a meeting ground for primitive barbarity and technological power where the possibility of the mass slaughter of human beings was witnessed by many firsthand. The animistic and occult theologies of Gnosticism and Theosophy were in vogue in some literary and artistic circles. Some writers saw the American version of the English language as a degenerate form of traditional English so they wrote with a Victorian idiom, mistakenly believing themselves to be prese0rving the true English language. Add all these elements into the mix and you can get a clear picture of where A. Merritt was coming from he wrote this.

     Finally, I can hear some stoners out there saying, “he must have been doing some heavy drugs when he wrote this”, as if that is a default answer that some people have to anything mystifying, strange, or far out of the norm. I have to say though, even while reading for deeper meaning, there are some passages in The Metal Monster that made me say, “yeah he must have been tripping pretty hard when he wrote this.” There are some long passages that appear to be little more than a light show meant to dazzle people under the influence of LSD. But if you, ahem, are one of those who have experimented with mind-altering substances then those passages can be quite enjoyable. Even if those sections are flawed, along with other aspects of the book, there is still a lot to be gotten out of this unique work of fantasy. You have to make the effort though. 

Merritt, A. The Metal Monster. Avon Publications Inc., New York: 1920.

R.I.P. Andy Gill

Gang of Four guitarist

THE RISE OF SMART CAMERA NETWORKS, AND WHY WE SHOULD BAN THEM

THERE’S WIDESPREAD CONCERN that video cameras will use facial recognition software to track our every public move. Far less remarked upon — but every bit as alarming — is the exponential expansion of “smart” video surveillance networks.

Read the full article on The Intercept here