French-Goth-Surf-Pop

The French band La Femme has a decidedly surf- and noir-influenced sound, with just the right shades of psychedelia, ye-ye, and first-generation goth (Banshees, Bauhaus, Specimen).

And lucky for us, they made a long-form video for their song "Hypsoline." A long form video. That's so ... Duran Duran.

The film creeps around as if a loose adaptation of an M.R. James or J. Sheridan Le Fanu story, finally wrapping around to a nightmare party that we'd still happily attend. (French girls!)

It's lightly spooky and a great exercise in matching song to visuals. Here, drink this ...

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.

Notable Illusionists of History [No. 3]

Collect 'em all!

Editor's note: Due to the rousing success of the "Sexy Astronomers of History" series in September 2012, The Typing Monkey has followed Hollywood's lead by offering a sequel nobody asked for. Enjoy.


Alexander Hermann aka Hermann the Great
(Feb 10, 1844 - Dec 17, 1896)

Birthplace: Paris Profession-changing contribution:  Herrmann capitalized on his Mephistophelian appearance and openly comedic performance to build his following. His performances were as much about the humor as they were about his illusions, sleight-of-hand tricks and road-tested magic. As a result, he was a favorite of the American public at the height of the Victorian era.
Fun fact: Herrmann was the youngest of 16 children. His father, Samuel, was a physician who dabbled in magic performance. The eldest son, Compars (aka Carl), became a famous magician in Europe and, upon seeing Alexander's natural skill "kidnapped" his 8-year-old brother, taking him on tour with him throughout Russia, while the family fretted back in France. The brothers performed as a duo for many years before Alex went solo.

Movie Time!

Surely you have a three minutes to spare for some George Melies magic circa 1896?



Watch more like these at Silent Film House's Youtube channel.

Great Old Ones

Wanna read some H.P. Lovecraft but don't have any scratch to put toward buying new books? Or maybe your local library banned you after that unfortunate misunderstanding regarding the copy machine?

The H.P. Lovecraft Archive has you covered. A disturbingly generous selection of Howard Phillips' writings are available to you with just a couple clicks of the mouse. It's there, deep beneath the surface of the Web, undistrubed in its slumber, waiting, but still stirring a nagging feeling in the dark recesses of your mind ...

[Cthulhu image courtesy of The H.P. Lovecraft Wiki]

The Monkey Reads: Roald Knows How to Pick 'Em

Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories
Various; Introduction by Roald Dahl
(Macmillan)
To curate this collection of haunted tales, Dahl read more than 700 short stories, which he admits with a wry “so you don’t have to” attitude in his superb introduction. Note, these are not stories written by Dahl, but rather stories he found to be of high quality and wanted to share.

 

His original intent was to adapt these stories for an American television program – an anthology show in the vein of The Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. But after a pilot was produced, the show was nixed and Dahl was left with a stack of stories to share.

The best entry in Ghost Stories is Robert Aikman’s “Ringing the Changes.” This tale of a newlywed couple on their honeymoon in a quiet, nearly abandoned seaside village in England has its own strange rhythm that rewards greatly with sheer creativity as it builds a genuine sense of dread at what’s coming.

Edith Wharton and Cynthia Asquith contribute a story each, with Wharton’s “Afterward” burying the scares under an affecting sense of loss, confusion and grief, as a woman attempts to figure out what happened to her missing husband. Asquith’s “In the Corner Shop” has such descriptive prose that it works even though you know where she’s headed after a page or two.

Jaded, over-stimulated modern brains will recognize the plots of some of these stories, as they’ve been repurposed many times, and, as with “On the Brighton Road” by Richard Middleton, read like urban legends.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t still take pleasure in high quality writing of A.M. Burrage’s “Playmates” or F. Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth.”

Reference material: Own a copy of The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories? You may have already read some of these, but can likely find something new. And anyone who will stay up late to watch a favorite episode of The Twilight Zone should enjoy Dahl’s collection.

Ladies of Sport and a Love Letter to Disco

The real story here is that Typing Monkey publisher S.L. Kreighton has joined Twitter. Please, just ... you don't know what the past week has been like. He reads and chuckles all day, mumbling about Drunk Hulk and Snake & Bacon.

However, he has shared a few items of value with us and we would bebad friends if we didnt' share the following link with you:

 

http://worldinsport.com/2010/11/sportswomen-of-past-homage-with-vintage-html/

It's U.S. Library of Congress photos of Victorian era (and just beyond) women who played sports -- in full Victorian dress. You'll see the Bennett Sisters and many others.

***

In the interest of variety, we also highly recommend reading Dorian Lynksey's convincing argument from The Guardian, asserting that disco lives on in the form of most modern pop music. "Long Live Disco" will either make you nod in agreement or hassle the person sitting next to you with your counter argument. You will lose.



[Photo: Detail from "Miss Isabel Tennant"]

Fond of Cigarettes

Heh heh. Click and enjoy this Victorian illustration about uppity dames, brought to our attention by Hark! A Vagrant on Tumblr.

Holiday Jeer

A Jetson Christmas Carol
(Hanna Barbera; 1985)
Subject yourself to this retelling of the already tired Dickens tale and you may root for Mr. Spacely’s Scrooge before the Christmas spirit gets the best of him.

The story barely follows the story arc of Dickens’ hoary holiday heartwarmer. George Jetson, the comic everyman of the 2062, stands in for Bob Cratchit, with his boss, Cosmo G. Spacely, president of Spacely Space Sprockets, as Scrooge.

Spacely wants Jetson to work late on Christmas Eve. The boss’ demand is supposed to be seen as a heartless act of cruelty on par with Scrooge’s abhorrent treatment of Cratchit in the source material.

If the reader is at all familiar with the upper middle-class/retro-futurism of Orbit City, the setting of The Jetsons, then the reader also knows it’s no analog to Victorian London. Please apply that same math to the Spacely::Jetson equation.

Meanwhile George’s wife Jane and the kids, Judy and Elroy, head off to the mall to finish their shopping. Again: The Jetson family wants to finish their shopping. None of the Jetsons will greet a bare floor beneath the tree come Christmas morn.

Astro, the family’s talking dog, gets into the gifts already under the tree, breaks a toy and accidentally swallows a sprocket – a sprocket manufactured by Spacely Sprockets. The dog is in a bad way and may die. And because it’s 2062, there are no 24-hour emergency veterinarians.

Spacely has his Scrooge moment, visiting a past where he is supposed to be depicted as a selfish young man. Instead, he seems like a pretty reasonable guy. He meets and falls in love with his future wife and is working hard to be a successful business owner.

Not to get all objectivist on The Jetsons, but what’s wrong with Spacely’s motives in his early life? The implication is greed and the eventual disregard for those he loves. But in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge has no one and may die unloved and unremembered. We know that Spacely is married to the same woman he met years ago as a teen and based on the Jetson family’s standard of living, Spacely pays a respectable wage to his employees.

The alternate future via Christmases Present and Yet-to-Be has Astro dying and the Jetson family suing Spacely for all he’s worth and using their litigious wealth to purchase a mansion and fancy clothing.

Pardon us if we feel that this whole setup makes George Jetson seem like a bit of a jerk. Spacely didn’t cram the sprocket down Astro’s throat, and it was an act of pure chance that nobody is home to get help when the dog is in need.

Regardless, Spacely is moved to bring his personal vet to the Jetson home, Astro is saved and Spacely gives Jetson a raise. The viewer is excused if overcome by the urge to grab Spacely by his future lapels and slap some sense into him.

The problem here isn’t that A Jetson Christmas Carol feels cheap and lacking sincerity. (It is both of those things.) A Jetson Christmas Carol comes off as if it were written by a kid who only ever watched the dozens of bad imitations of A Christmas Carol that television has churned out over the decades.

Dickens’ story is sentimental hogwash for sure – a template for too easily converted villains to come. But at least Dickens gets the tone right by keeping the Cratchit family broadly sympathetic and Ebenezer Scrooge dry and despicable till the last act. The folks behind this Jetson conversion didn’t even get that right.


Reference material: You'd be better off watching the Disney adaptation from 1983 which packs plenty of charm by comparison. However, if you must watch the Jetsons version, you can see the whole thing here. You'll need to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas twice just to get the taste out of your mouth.

[Orbit City image sourced from Cracked.com; London street scene sourced from VictorianLondon.org]

Movie Time!

Mike Mignola, the illustrator and writer most famous for creating Hellboy, did a one-off comic book in 2002 called The Amazing Screw-On Head.

The titular character works as a secret agent for President Abraham Lincoln. Screw-On Head, an expert in the occult, is literally what his name implies, a mechanical wonder who attaches himself to various mechanical bodies equipped to carry out his duties.

In 2006 the Sci-Fi channel (now SyFy, boo) commissioned an animated pilot of The Amazing Screw-On Head and Mignola delivered.

Alas, it was not picked up as a series despite boasting the voices of Paul Giamatti in the lead role, Patton Oswalt as Mr. Groin, David Hyde Pierce as the villain Emperor Zombie and Molly Shannon as Patience, Screw-On's ex, now a vampire aligned with Zombie.

The show, like the comic, is wickedly creative and very funny -- a steampunk melodrama well aware of its own ridiculousness. Here's the trailer:



You like? Watch the whole thing here. It's only 22 minutes long.

An Old Fashioned American Devil-Baby

Hull House still stands in Chicago and you can read about it's origins as part of the "settlement" movement in the United States if that interests you. And it should.

But if you read far enough in most mentions of the house, you'll come across mention of it being haunted and further, the place where once a demon baby was born -- allegedly.

Jane Addams, one of the co-founders of Hull House, actually wrote about the Devil-Baby at Hull House for Atlantic Magazine in 1916. And through the miracle that is the intertoobs, you can actually read her article.

From the Audience-Endurance-Test Files

Sometime around 1893, French composer Eric Satie wrote "Vexations" -- a one-page piece of music for solo piano that has a repeat at the end. That repeat has a note indicating that it is to be repeated 840 times.

On May 15, 2010, a group of pianists in Seattle will do just that. Do you have what it takes to witness this?

Details here. We're heading up to the helipad to take a little journey to the Emerald City. If you attend this event, we want to hear about your experience. Write us at:
typingmonkey@live.com

Zoinks!

Typing Monkey publisher S.L. Kreighton's love of Victorian horror and supernatural literature means the entire staff gets extra long lunch breaks in October so we can read from his copious library in an effort to "get into the spirit of the season."

At least that's his claim. We've leaned against his office door during these lunches and it's apparent that he's just as often watching Night of the Living Dead or listening to his battered copy of Disney's Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. [And drinking? -- ed.]

So the rest of us have recently turned to the DVD collection of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? for cheap lunchtime thrills. This collection is the first two seasons of the Scooby-Doo cartoon, from 1969 and '70.

Before celebrity guests, before Scooby-Dum, Scooby-Dee, or that awful Scrappy and all the later permutations of Scooby and the Mystery Inc. gang, there was Where Are You? -- perfect 22-minute mysteries that closely emulate the Victorian-era fiction that married the detective story with the supernatural tale.

Somewhere in the clause after that em-dash above is a graduate thesis. And we're making the new intern Marie take copious notes as we watch. The early Scooby-Doo plots fill the first act with ghost scares until power of reason gradually takes over the second and third act. And yes, there's plenty of absurd slapstick aimed at the children who tuned in.

Don't think Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? deserves to be taken so seriously? Jay Allman, the man behind Toon Zone agrees with us. And for several years has maintained the Website The Scooby-Doo Case Files. He's got plot summaries, a monsters index, a food index (including a worthwhile essay about the motivations of the Mystery Inc. gang), and tons of other fun info and media related to the early years of Scooby-Doo's television history.

Grab a a Scooby Snack and dig in.

[All images courtesy of The Scooby-Doo Case Files.]

The Monkey Reads: Mr. Gorey Presents

The Haunted Looking Glass: Ghost Stories Chosen by Edward Gorey
Various Authors
(New York Review Books Classics)
Even if the reader has previously encountered some of these 12 supernatural tales, the collection is well worth a look. The late Edward Gorey -- an illustrator, writer and critic with a gift for the comically macabre -- selected well when he assembled this line-up of short stories.

Most of the stories come from the Victorian era, a boom time for horror writing in England and the United States, as the Industrial Age was steamrolling magic and wonder out of day-to-day existence. Consequently, a good number of the authors pit logic and reason against events that defy any sort of explanation or scientific confinement -- a horror fiction trope that still has plenty of tread left on it.

Gorey's good choices include some literary giants. Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker offer, respectively, "The Body-Snatcher" and "The Judge's House." And Charles Dickens surprises everyone with his perfectly readable and uncharacteristically efficient "The Signalman."

But it's the lesser-known writers, some of them icons to fans of Victorian horror, that deliver some of the best scares in Looking Glass. Algernon Blackwood's "The Empty House" is the rare haunted house yarn that hits all the expected notes without feeling clichéd.

L.P. Hartley's "A Visitor from Down Under" uses flashbacks and meticulous pacing to set up a genuinely creepy tale of revenge from beyond the grave. And W.W. Jacobs' frequently imitated and referenced "The Monkey's Paw" should compel the reader to seek out more of his bleak but comical work.

And if you've seen the excellent Jacques Tourneur film Night of the Demon, then you're already familiar with the story it's based on, "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James. The film is good, the story is excellent and closes this collection on the highest note possible. Can a torn up piece of parchment terrify? Yes. Yes it can.

Reference material: If 100-year-old horror writing is new to you, there's no better place to start than The Haunted Looking Glass. J. Sheridan LeFanu isn't included here, but the Irish writer is a pre-Victorian horror superstar and worth your attention. And Dover Thrift Editions offer numerous cheap collections of classic horror writing.

The Gentleman's Self Defense

Let's say you're walking home from your local after enjoying a drink in the company of friends when suddenly a young tough emerges from the shadows and demands your money. Also, it's Victorian London. You may hand over your purse and still receive a thrashing. Or you may do something like this:

Edward William Barton-Wright studied jujitsu and Japanese wrestling, among other Eastern martial arts. He combined these methods with Western boxing and wrestling techniques, and fencing, into a fighting style called Bartitsu, possibly the first mixed martial art. (Some Bartitsu maneuvers utilize walking sticks or parasols as weapons, and encourage using your hat or coat to distract an opponent.)

Barton-Wright also helped develop the first self-defense classes for women, which were especially popular with members of the English women's suffrage movement. Suffragette and martial artist Edith Margaret Garrud used her jujitsu skills to fight off police and civilians attempting to attack demonstrators for women's rights, all while decked out in the heavy clothing of a proper Victorian woman.

Learn more about it at Bartitsu.org.

Horror for Her

Note: We figure our intern, Francine, generally ignores the actual content of The Typing Monkey. Since we were the last option on the bulletin board at her community college, it stands to reason that she took the job here in order to get the credits required and will leave at the end of the school year. But it turns out she's been paying attention, and recently shared with us some notes on her dissertation, "Death Becomes Her: On Feminist Themes in Horror Cinema."

So we set Francine loose with a password and she began typing:

The casual film goer may think of horror movies as kids stuff, and more specifically, boys' movies -- a marginally acceptable outlet for adolescent fantasies of sex and violence that would bore Sigmund Freud.

However, a more informed viewer can view and review horror films from a feminine perspective, finding a surprisingly rich genre.

Yes, male fantasy stereotypes are doled out by the coffin-load. Horror movies often feature one or more of the following archetypes: The virginal heroine, the preying vamp, and even the ultimate failed-fantasy woman (The Bride of Frankenstein) for a certain type of man we should all avoid. (If ever there was a film that acted as an antidote to dreary romantic comedies, James Whale's comically bleak warning against "the fix up" is it.)

Every genre of fiction has certain tropes that can be as crippling as they are necessary, and when used well, exemplary. Some horror films recognize that the damsel in distress may stop running, falling and screaming at some point and fight back against whatever nasty nightmare the filmmakers dreamt up as an antagonist.

Ladies: If you're not a fan of horror films, you're not paying attention. If the gore bothers you, there are many less-gruesome alternatives that provide superficial scares -- the most basic enjoyment the genre has to offer, aka, the film-as-thrill-ride -- but also unexpected depth. Please understand though, eventually you're going to see a zombie gnawing on human flesh, or some other awful thing. It's only a movie.

Here is a short list of suggested viewing to get you started. Freak out the man of your choice when you invite him to watch one of these with you. He'll think he's got a free pass to watch a movie and nothing more, but you'll scare him good when the film ends, you turn off the television, and begin Platonic discourse on perceived feminist angles to the story.

***

Cat People
Dir. Jacques Tourneur
(1942)
Context adds much to the feminine -- not necessarily feminist -- themes here. The United States had just entered WWII, and American men were leaving home to uncertain, violent conflict across the globe. So the story of an upstanding American male hero (Kent Smith) tempted by a dark, mysterious European woman (Simone Simon) is psychologically loaded. The wholesome American blonde (Jane Randolph) may prevail, but not before the lusty, unpredictable [batshit crazy? -- ed.] brunette nearly kills him. It's a beautiful black and white film with great performances and genuine tension ... and also gypsy curses.

Black Sunday
Dir. Mario Bava
(1960)
What could be more offensive and terrifying to the shaky grip of the patriarchy than a woman who dares to master arcane knowledge of the pagan arts? For the crime of witchcraft, Princess Asa (Barbara Steele) gets the iron maiden and stake-burning treatment from the Christian men of 17th century Moldovia. Two centuries later she rises from the grave to make good on her promise to exact revenge. Her 19th century doppelganger, Katia (also Barbara Steele) isn't the alter-ego of Asa as much as a repressed version of her. Does Katia even want to be rescued by the valiant, well-intentioned Victorian men who would rather not see her possessed by a 200-year-old Satanist? Though the film isn't terribly scary, it's a visual feast with gorgeous gothic ruins and moody cinematography.

Season of the Witch
Dir. George A. Romero
(1973)
This is the most openly feminist horror movie made, and an under-seen gem. Joan (Jan White) has everything a modern housewife could want: husband, kids, suburban home, and an endless string of cocktail parties to plan and attend with the other wives she calls her friends. She's bored to the point of numbness. Experimentation with witchcraft leads to real life horror. There is not subtext here, as Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero lays it out plainly in a film released at the height of the Women's Liberation movement.

The Descent
Dir. Neil Marshall
(2005)
Is this the first true post-feminist film? Should it even be associated with feminist ideas? Neil Marshall's dread-filled tale of spelunkers trapped in an already occupied cave terrifies and thrills with an efficacy lacking in many modern horror movies. What prompts the inclusion of The Descent on this list is that all the leads are played by women and there's absolutely nothing remarkable about that fact. Yes, by design the dynamic between them is different than if they'd all been men. But the script, performances and directing does not comment on their gender at all, and that's why it works so well.

***

Some worthy runners up include Alien (Sigourney Weaver's consummate badass performance as Ripley set the bar high for tough women on screen) and Halloween, with the Freudian symbolism and Victorian subtext of the chaste heroine (Jamie Lee Curtis) surviving while sinners around her die. We'll toss A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream in there too though the former's a stretch and the latter might cause fights that fall outside the parameters of civil debate.

This list is meant as a launch pad. Get out there, find some horror movies with potential for feminist discourse and dig in. You may find more than you anticipated.

The Monkey Reads: It's Hard to Believe It

Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural
By Jim Steinmeyer
(Tarcher)
Writer Charles Hoy Fort's life, at a glance, follows a Victorian literature arc.

After a privileged but suffocating childhood and a stint as a cub reporter at a farm-league newspaper, he traveled for a short time as a hobo (albeit a vagabond with a secret property income), married below his station and struggled with poverty as he tried his hand at fiction, before finding his calling as an eccentric philosopher who may or may not have believed what he wrote.

Biographer Jim Steinmeyer clearly admires Fort's mercurial goals and Puckish stance of challenging both science and religion. As a result Fort can feel like a love letter. But it's easy to get caught up in Steinmeyer's appreciation and elevate Fort to a status he may not have deserved -- and based on this biography, didn't necessarily want.

Fort collected the odd stories from the back pages of small town papers, almanacs and published journals. The clips he sought were accounts of what today's audience would call unexplained phenomena, supernatural occurrences and mysterious sightings.

What made Fort's efforts noteworthy was his methodical yet playful analysis of the data. Fort shot down scientific explanations of a well-documented rain of frogs for being too sloppy. Alternately, Fort neither rejected nor embraced a divine machine behind such events.

So what's left? Fort's outsider ideas that are ultimately no stranger or less plausible than anything religion or science has to offer -- reorganizations of the cosmos and science-fiction sounding ideas on worlds above, below and concomitant to the one we know.

Steinmeyer avoids getting too bogged down in the tangle of Fortean philosophy -- a smart move that allows him to pull back far enough to show how Fort's writing inspired both outrage, scoffs and, worst of all, disregard.

The wider scope also gives an affectionate look at Fort's positively mundane, comfortable life once he settled in with his wife Helen. The man who discussed UFOs a good 20 years before the rest of the country paid attention spent his days in the library and his nights with his wife drinking beer, eating snacks and going to the movies.

Fort's contemporaries included ally/true believer Theodore Dreiser; harsh critics H.L. Mencken and H.G. Wells; and a few, such as Ben Hecht, who thought of the man as a crackpot savvy enough to laugh at his own cosmic jests.

Based on Steinmeyer's take, Hecht may have been closest to the truth.