Cranium Not Included

Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” may be the birth of American fiction but the lore of a headless horseman roaming the woods of upstate New York was not his original creation. Mind, we do not begrudge Irving for taking an urban legend and running with it toward lasting fame. Shakespeare himself re-purposed myth and legend for many of his great works.

Headless horseman folklore varies slightly from region to region. One German variant (there are several) casts the specter as a benign force, whose appearance warns hunters to take the day off, lest tragedy befall them.

Most Celtic stories lean on more sinister depictions of the rider from the great beyond. By far the most gruesome of these is the Irish dulachán (dark man) who carries his own head tucked under his arm and wields a whip made from a human spine. A human spine!

Irving perhaps combined some of these iterations to arrive at his famous Hessian soldier who died in an unnamed battle during the American Revolution. And thanks to numerous paintings, illustrations and a really terrific Disney cartoon, most of us Yankees envision a black-caped, barrel-chested horror on a sturdy black steed, ready to lob a flaming Jack-o’-lantern at timid Ichabod Crane.

That’s pretty much what’s happening in the U.S. Postal Service stamp from 1974:

Designed by Leonard Everett Fisher

For no extra charge we offer two more artistic interpretations of the Headless Horseman:

By Abigail Larson

Cover art by Gil Kane and Ernie Chan

[Tip o' the jack-o'-lantern to Weird Tales for the Larson and Kane/Chan artwork.]

Witch Folklore From the Midwest

Mysterious Heartland "focus[es] on unsolved mysteries, true crime, ghost stories, folklore, and books and movies about those topics." Yah, sure, you betcha!

Tradition holds that most tales of witchery in the United States center around New England, thanks to Salem, Massachusetts and those buzzkilling Puritans who pretty much thought everyone who wasn't a Puritan fellated the Devil on a regular basis. Only the sweaty bayous of Louisiana rival New England in terms of black magic stories set in the U.S.

But Mysterious Heartland editor and writer Michael Keen says hold on to your scrapple for five minutes. The American Midwest has some witch lore too. And he dug up ten good ones. Now, most of them read as pure urban legend, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with having a few new weapons in your ghost-story telling arsenal next time you need to scare your nephew.

Read Keen's list and enjoy the common themes it shares not just with other witchcraft yarns, but scary stories in general. There are false accusations, angry mobs, ghosts, curses, and lots of evil revenge. Sound familiar?

Yooper?

TL;DR -- Cage Loves Comics

Actor/force of nature/internet meme Nicolas Cage owns some pricey comic books. And nearly 15 years ago, some were stolen from his home. Read Sandro Contenta's story about the crime and how an LAPD detective with a name that sounds like a character from a Superman comic solved the mystery.

It's exactly as strange as it sounds.

Everybody Loves a Doris

Please accept The Typing Monkey's apologies for the long absence. Shit got real over the past few weeks and nobody at the offices felt like lifting the pencil or finding a piece of paper unbesmirched by memory and loss.

Let's get back to publishing with a belated birthday wish of health and happiness to Doris Day, who turned 90 on April 3.

It's easy to dismiss Day as a peroxided, harmless cutie whose sole purpose was to be irritated and flummoxed by Rock Hudson only to come around and fall in love in the third act of the many meringue-light romantic comedies the two made together during the 1960s.

That's fine, but we've always preferred the rom-coms with James Garner as her foil/paramour, as Garner's gravelly nature played better off of Day's sugary charms. Her outing with David Niven ain't bad either.

Better still is to remember that Day is the secret key to the success of Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much. James Stewart does great work in the film, but it's Day's determined, crafty mom who finds a way out of the international intrigue mess they're in. It's a shame she didn't get more roles of this nature, as Day holds her own in a way many probably don't expect.

Her delivery of the song "Que Sera Sera" is not only a great plot device in Too Much, but just straight-up great selling of a song that uses Day's velvety delivery to great effect, given that the lyrics are actually quite clear-headed when put up against many other romantic tunes of the day.

And with that we arrive at Day's other great gift: The woman could sing. She's on par with other lauded Big Band vocalists (Kay Starr, et al.) and her creamy vibrato stands proud alongside Dinah Shore (another singer who rarely gets her due.)

Day could deliver the sad and heartbroken as well as the dreamy lovestruck material. And The Typing Monkey says if you want a real snapshot of what Day could do, look no further than "Everybody Loves a Lover."

It's not a showcase for her vocal abilities the way "Dream a Little Dream" or "When I Fall In Love" are. Instead it's a testament to Day's ability to inhabit the material. Where she's both mother and child -- and all realist -- in "Que Sera Sera" Day plays the wholly self-aware woman who is both confident and stupidly in love in "Everybody Loves a Lover."

It's an almost Bugs Bunny-like performance culminating in Day's round-style duet with herself. She found a guy she loves who loves her back and has no qualms floating by the rest of us, flaunting her luck and (subversively) the hint of the skills she employed to snag her man.


[courtesy of VinylNostalgia]

Ain't Got No Head

Two very different takes on the Headless Horseman of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

First, Frank Frazetta:

That man could draw horses like few others. For real. You know why Maurice Sendak decided to use monsters in Where the Wild Things Are instead of his original plan for horses? Because he realized how hard it is to draw horses.

Second is Kate Beaton's knee-slapping script-flip of Ichabod on the run:

Read the short strip here.



[A doff of the Jack O'Lantern to Weird Tales for the Frazetta art.]

Nyuk Nyuk

Do a little time travelling with us via the United States Library of Congress.

It's easy to fall down any number of information rabbit-holes there, so allow us to point you in the direction of "The American Variety Stage, 1870 - 1920" collection , then creep a little further into the audio archives and enjoy wax cylinder recordings of some vaudeville routines and songs from the era.

Given these were recorded both for posterity and mass consumption, we can't help but wonder how many blue routines were deemed unfit for preservation. That's our loss.

Show Folk

Lovers of art and art history who don't have a lot of money are probably familiar with Taschen publishing. The mostly photo, but also fine art and design books put out by Taschen can class up your library and give your eyeballs a little vacation when you want to look at pretty pictures.

Thanks to Flavorwire, we discovered a Taschen book that will soon join the Typing Monkey library:  The Circus Book: 1870-1950. Flavorwire republished some of the photos a couple years ago, so in honor of National Clown Week (Aug 3, 2013 is officially National Clown Day), we link to those galleries.

One is "Rare Color Photos of Circus Showgirls of the ’40s and ’50s" the other is "Incredible Vintage Circus Photos of the '40s and '50s."

They're brief, fun looks at the romance and greasy glamor of human circus performers. Here's a sneak preview to entice you:

Circus people, 1955; courtesy Taschen; via Flavorwire

Wackys Found

For a certain kind of kid, probably most kinds of kid, the phrase "Wacky Packs" triggers immediate memories of playground conclaves in which the titular cards and stickers were shown off and traded as aggressively as pork bellies at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

For those sadly left out of that Venn diagram, this is a Wacky card:

It's a simple concept. A silly, unexpected or gross-out pun on a popular consumer product is played for laughs. Children, slobbering teens and adults with severe cases of arrested development in the pop culture realm, fell under the sway of Wacky Packs.

Most of the artists responsible for Wacky Packs were of the '60s and '70s comic underground movement. We hope Topps, the baseball-card and petrified gum company that produced Wackys, paid the artists well because kids spent plenty of allowance and paper route earnings on the cards.

Seeing Wackys now gives us a better understanding of how a bunch of Mad magazine types helped shape a generation or two of consumers happy to bite the tail of the commerce beast. We may eat Doritos, but we can laugh along with Don't Eat Those.

There are two astounding archives of Wacky Packages, and probably more, on the web. Lost Wackys catalogs some of the rare specimens, while WackyPackages.org is a buyer's guide run by a fellow named Greg, who will also sell you sets.

Before we release you into the galleries of Lost Wackys, we want to share with you two examples from the '70s era sets that simply wouldn't fly today. "Hostage Cupcakes" is far too grim for modern parenting and "Commie Cleanser" requires both a knowledge of the existence of Comet cleanser and Communism. Discuss?

Whoa, Dude

When former Typing Monkey publisher/editor-in-chief/ombudsman S.L. Kreighton asked the staff to join him in a video conference this afternoon, we thought it might have something to do with May Day.

After all, our Fearless Leader, Emeritus, has taken to aimlessly travelling the highways and byways of the West Coast, so it's entirely possible that he'd take up with activists and bohemians, laughing on the inside the entire time, knowing that his deep pockets and secure retirement plan means he only sleeps on freight trains because he wants to.

What was it he wanted us to tell us? He had links for two websites that he "got from a friend from Mildred Street University." [What? -- ed.]

Before we could complete the orbit of our collective eye-roll, our mouths were shut for us by this:

and this:

The first is a John Buscema splash page, colored for maximum black-light ka-pow. It's part of Nick Derington's Flickr gallery "Marvel Third Eye Posters."

And the Dr. Strange splash, from the good doctor's brief run in his masked mystic costume, was drawn by Gene Conlan. That comes from Richard Guion's blog Giant Size Marvel.

Friend, both of these destinations are worth blowing off whatever chore you had planned. Sincerely.

Aloha, Pineapple Princess

Actor/singer Annette Funicello died today. Her twilight years were complicated by multiple sclerosis, but she will be remembered as the Mouseketeer who vaulted to teen flicks for Disney and a handful of squeaky-clean/covertly salacious "beach movies" for American Pictures International during the mid-1960s.

Her beach movie co-star was usually Frankie Avalon, but later another Disney grad, Tommy Kirk joined her. It was with Tommy Kirk that Funicello starred in The Monkey's Uncle, a live-action Disney caper released in 1965.

In the opening credits for Monkey, she's billed simply as "Annette" because she was just that famous at the time, ya dig? But crazier still is the theme song, recorded and performed during the credit sequence, by Annette and The Beach Boys:


[Thanks to j peoplemover for the Youtube upload.]


Good-bye, Ms. Funicello.

Black and White In Color

One of the most wonderful aspects of the Web is that reading (or listening to, or watching) things you know, or are at least have intention to know, can take on some of the traits of conversation with friends who are smarter than you.

Perhaps you're reading posts from comic book writer Kurt Busiek and in a matter of seconds, find yourself staring at amazing photos by Gordon Parks, on a terrific art blog called Messy Nessy Chic.

Specifically, Messy Nessy was highlighting a series of incredible color photographs from Parks, a frequent contributor to the pages of Life, that were discovered after Parks died. Parks shot in black and white most of the time, but he opted to document the "softer" side of life in a segregated United States in bold color.

Softer, we say, because, as Nessy notes, most of us are accustomed to pictures of the Civil Rights era, and the years leading up to it, depicting violence or clear indications of a nation about to boil over.

These shots instead show an almost mundane, yet still massively loaded, everyday-ness of living in a world of denial.

Check out the Parks page on Messy Nessy, then dig around the rest of her site. Who knows where you'll end up.

"It is usually about murder ... "

At some point in your life, maybe not this very moment, but some time in the future, you will hear reference to Raymond Chandler's "how to write a good mystery story" guide disguised as a critical essay "The Simple Art of Murder."

You will wonder: "Have I read that?" Which means you probably haven't. Luckily, the University of Texas at Austin's American Literature Archive has made it easy to read Chandler's incisive work anywhere you have access to the Web. From 1950's ink-on-paper, to your 21st century electronic device: ta da!

And, should you care, they also have a virtual copy of Flannery O'Connor's 1960 essay "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction."

Norton!

Perhaps you missed the news about a "Frankenstorm" called Sandy that slammed into the Eastern Seaboard just before Halloween, leaving unavoidable destruction of the natural disaster sort.

As residents of New Jersey, New York, et al. clean up and assess damage, the staff at Norton Records found that their Brooklyn warehouse took quite a bit of water damage.

There are few things that make us sadder than books and records (CDs, LPs, 45s and such) being destroyed. And Norton does good work, providing new and re-issued music that concentrates on the r&b, soul, early rock, surf, garage, jump blues and general outsider tunes from the first half of the 20th century. They've also been re-issuing obscure pulp paperbacks too, which you can imagine got us all in a dither.

Norton's staff is still cleaning up the mess, but when they're done, help 'em out by buying something. The wheels of Capitalism are greased with your hard-earned dough, so you might as well grease the wheels you like, no?

Oh, no

Farewell to Chris Wedes, better known to Puget Sound residents as J.P. Patches. He died Sunday July 22, 2012.

His passing set frequent Typing Monkey contributer Kris Kendall to reminiscing about The J.P. Patches Show. It's entirely possible Kendall's still talking, with a faraway, misty-eyed look, about Wedes' importance to local television.

We've taken this valuable piece of information from his ramblings and posted it here:

"By 1980, when J.P.’s show was three years from cancellation, I think I was the only kid at my school who still watched. Most mornings during the school year, my friend Mike would ask me, as we walked to school: 'Did you watch Star Blazers this morning?'

My answer was always 'No, I watched J.P.' And  I couldn’t understand why he didn’t."

Good bye J.P. Patches. You're one of the rare ones, about whom we can genuinely say, they just don't make 'em like that anymore.

Open The Good Stuff, Drink and Remember

Norma Zimmer, aka The Champagne Lady from The Lawrence Welk Show, is dead.

If your first reaction is "who?" then you are either too young, or grew up in a household that didn't tune in regularly to the Welk Show. Zimmer was a singer and dancer who joined the show in 1960, thus spending more than 20 years with a show that ran nationally for nearly 28 years.

Her singing style recalled the Hit Parade era of Doris Day and similar pure, unaffected delivery of pop tunes that sound schmaltzy to the modern ear. Let go of irony and your rock & roll ways and Zimmer's buttery vibrato feels like a hug -- possibly a hug from grandma, but who couldn't use one of those from time to time?

[Image courtesy of WelkGirls.com]

Zimmer's death falls into place after a string of deaths we should have noted here. Yvette Vickers' passing was certainly the most tragic. Gone as well are Arthur Larents, John Walker, Body Snatcher rebel Dana Wynter and Dolores Fuller.

We probably should have given a nod to Wynter's passing, for if you need a smart woman by your side as alien invaders gradually infest your sleepy coastly burg, she was the lady for the job. And Vickers -- what could we say that hadn't been said already?

Norma Zimmer died on May 10, 2011. She was 88. There are other Welk Women still dancing, singing and playing, but only one got the title The Champagne Lady.

"No point in running'"

... or Look What Dr. Fred Did

We are obligated to like things that our friends and family create. Knowing the artist behind a work of art makes us more likely to say "yes" to something we wouldn't normally seek out or pay close attention to.

Reader you have been there: A friend gets a gallery opening, publishes some writing, the band they're in plays a show, a dance recital. Love and pride and sometimes a desire not to wound makes us embrace the the effort if not the result and sometimes that's more important.

And then there are those rare instances when the result is good and worth sharing and talking about, not because you know the creator but because you know the creation.

The Typing Monkey enjoys a fair amount of kismet when it comes to talented family, friends and associates. We knew Dr. Fred Beldenstein's songwriting stirred at smoldering coals of heart-damaged music, and his previous efforts climbed closer and closer to that glow.

With his new-ish band The Great Tribulation, Dr. Fred has reached the light via his song "Sure As the Rain." It's a comforting bit of musical reassurance and understanding that these are, to crib a line from Jon Stewart, hard times, not end times. [How ya like that, Fred? -- ed.]

Singer Jeni Lee Richey doesn't sell the lyric so much as offer it because she understands that we need it. The voice, the words, the syrup of the slide guitar all reach out and pull you into an oddly personal shelter before Dr. Fred's quiet-storm guitar opens up and gushes. They call it "folk noir" and "dark country" -- sure. American to the core and as honest as a pair of dirty hands.

Go to the band's Facebook page and scroll down to the entries for Feb 23 to hear "Sure as the Rain" and visit their Reverb Nation page to hear more from The Great Tribulation.

Death and the Mouse -- Part II

Yesterday The Typing Monkey joined the crowd of horrified/mesmerized/guiltily titillated onlookers and shared the story of the very first homicide in Celebration, FL.

Today brings more fascinating Lynchian news from the no longer quiet village.

We could blurt out some collegiate nonsense and dig into the sociological, philosophical and cultural implications of these stories. But TMI is confident that our readers can and will do that on their own. So stop reading this and go talk to somebody about murder and suicide in the town that Disney built, as it's very much worth conversation.

But keep it civilized please. Two people are dead, afterall.

Death and the Mouse

In Florida is a town called Celebration. Disney built the planned community in the late 1990s. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, somebody murdered on of the residents of Celebration. It's the first murder in a town designed to shelter its residents from the harsh realities of the outside world.

That's all there is to say about that, though you should read this if you'd like to know what little else there is to know. Speculate, because you know we are.

Where Were You?

The End Times played their final show on Friday April 16 in a dark loft snuggled deep in the mixed-industrial spaciousness of Georgetown, a south Seattle neighborhood where the soot and jet-fumes set the right mood for the trio’s stark, Southern gothic sound.

Patrons sat quietly, leaning in as Abi Grace sang, supported by Fred Beldin’s acoustic guitar strums and the woozy curls of slide guitar from Tyson Lynn. The End Times show felt like a church service -- a little Robert-Mitchum-in-Night-of-the-Hunter, but mostly comforting in a “we share your pain” way.

Grace’s voice has the specific charm of the graveyard cherub -- she’s plenty sweet but the words she’s singing ain’t necessarily so. And as Beldin and Lynn hunkered over their instruments, the whole procession felt like the sharing of some secret that the audience knew they needed to hear.

Seeing this line-up of the band again is about as likely as seeing Elvis at the Stop-n-Shop, but that shouldn’t prevent those who never witnessed a live performance from picking up The End Times LP (or buying the download).

This is folk, for lack of a better label, but not of the life, love and unemployment variety. Sure, These Are the End Times could class up your local coffee joint, but you’re better served spinning this on those mornings when you sit in the kitchen and sip something stronger than French roast. It’s thinking music for the wandering mind.

Good work End Times. Seattle still needs you, so thanks for the document.

***

Post Script
Opening band Pillow Army did their Americana-pop thing -- a surprisingly loud collection of stringed instruments, drums and sometimes flute. If you thought the orchestra nerds from high school didn’t dig the rock, Pillow Army has something to play for you. Bookending The End Times on the late side of the night was The River Empires, an Albany, Oregon outfit (drums, bass, keys/guitar, vocals/percussion, vocals/keys/et al.) that knocked out an impressive set of chamber pop that edged into mid-‘90s Britpop territory. Quite good and a shame that they not only played to a mostly empty house, but had to pack up and drive for four hours back home after their set. Ah, the rock & roll lifestyle.

Haunted Radio

We are unashamed to proclaim our love of listening to the radio. But it's frustrating that Halloween-happy listeners are supposed to be content with the pittance offered by most stations on Oct 31, in the form of "Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers. (It's a delightful novelty hit, though The Typing Monkey prefers "Monster's Holiday" because we like to root for the underdog.)

That's why we tune in every year to "The Roadhouse" on KEXP FM. It's an American blues & roots music show that airs Wednesday evenings from 6 to 9 p.m., Pacific Time.

On the Wednesday just before Halloween, "Roadhouse" DJ Greg Vandy usually fills his three hour show with all manner of murder ballads, blues numbers about pacts with the Devil, hillbilly songs about dead lovers and probably a fair selection of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and other early r&b and rock & roll shouters who dabbled in the dark arts.

Don't live within the station's broadcast range? You can dial it up via the Web and for two weeks after the show airs, you can listen to an archived podcast of the program. We haven't contacted Vandy, but tune in on Oct 28 and the chance of spooky satisfaction is high.

Various shows on WFMU pull out lots of good Halloween- and horror-themed music too, and we'd be reprehensible boors if we didn't also mention Dr. Demento.

If all else fails, The Monster Club hosts hundreds of old time radio dramas in the horror, mystery, supernatural and suspense genres. (You'll need to subscribe to get the download password, but it's otherwise free.)