Friday on a Tuesday

Please enjoy what was to be a "holiday weekend post" to send the reader off into a holiday weekend with a good feeling.

Now it's something to help you coast through a short work week.

First is a cut from the long-gestating third full-length recording by Quasimoto:



Our thinking is that greedy heads will eat this up and share it, as we have, because if not stupendous, at least it's something. But our untainted devotion to The Unseen and The Further Adventures of Lord Quas give us hope that there's much more to Yessir Whatever. Quas's latest comes out June 18 and yet, nobody has given us a copy. Curses.

And while you listen to that, you can look at this variant cover artwork by Kevin Wada. It's for the new X-Men comic book simply titled X-Men, which is a funny title on account of the team comprises women only. Go ladies! (For non-geeks the players are, from left to right: Rachel Summers, Shadowcat, Psylocke, Storm, Rogue and Jubilee.)

Despite the Fitzgerald-ish look of the mutants, the book does not take place during the 1920s in upstate New York. Oh well.

"... when someone whistles"

The Tin Pan Alley/hot-jazz tune "Mysterious Mose" spins the ballad of a ghost who haunts the bandstand. Mose hangs around graveyards and deserted houses too -- he's pretty much responsible for that shiver you get when you're alone at night and have that strange feeling that you're. being. watched.

But it's all in the name of fun and er, doing the Charleston. Oh! And puppets and animation:

[courtesy of turbannedruffian]
That version uses the Radio All-Star Novelty Orchestra's recording from 1930, sometimes billed with bandleader Harry Reser's name above the orchestra.

Max Fleisher used "Mysterious Mose" as both a soundtrack and a basis for the "plot" of a Betty Boop cartoon, with Boop's sidekick Bimbo taking the role of Mose. [And yes, Ms. Boop has dog ears. This was 1930 when she was transitioning from her original canine self to the flapper temptress we all know.] Watch all six minutes of the cartoon here.

And if you're not tired of hearing the song yet, a marionette performer and "soft yard haunter" named Larry Schmidt did a puppet routine to another version of "Mysterious Mose."

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.