Tempting tales

In our souls, we need to know that wild things are out there. "Wild things" is a pretty general term, and can cover all sorts of weirdness.

The legend of Haunchyville is florid and violent, like a half-remembered synopsis of Tod Browning's Freaks. A group of little people are employed by the circus. Their boss is an abusive prick. When they've had enough, they kill him by cutting off his arms and legs. Then they make their own settlement in Wisconsin's Waukesha County. An albino child visits the town and they take him in. He becomes their guardian, a deadly one if needs be.

Stories like this, even warnings like "Here be dragons", individualize the world. They make it possible to believe that more than one kind of place exists.

A writer on his second professional trip to the part of Wisconsin where all this was supposed to have happened found a disappointing sequel:

Returning to the site on a bright and clear early afternoon five years later, I find my old fears confirmed: what was once a tantalizingly wild and undeveloped area—perfect for a colony of vindictive little people!—is now an upscale and bland subdivision. Pre-fab houses dot the bulldozed landscape. Front lawns the size of golf courses stretch on for miles.

The word for this is "Empire". Power expands far from where it was before, and reshapes its new settings in the image of the one it just left.

But empire can't expand forever. Eventually the new logos fall off and the land is in new hands.

Big yellow

Here's something to see. It's a giant public sculpture in Rochester, New York, known as Threshold. The color is what they call safety yellow. Whether it's actually the color most easily registered by the brain, which the article asserts, I don't know. But it is a color that comes up a lot in children's media of all kinds.

On the other hand there are the shadows it casts. Shadows and light, the brightness of the mellow setting up a contrast. A very neat use of negative space, as this was all left-over material.

Wish-ship

I only ever saw the first two episodes of Stranger Things and it didn't really grab me. But reading in this column about the fans known as Bylers doesn't surprise me. 

My first exposure to the term "queerbaiting" came through Supernatural. Supernatural, which was on a smaller network for fifteen years, was a horror-adventure show where two all-American boys with frayed psyches and shotguns hunted demons and vampires all over America, almost entirely filmed in Vancouver, BC. Anyway, in the later seasons "Destiel" became a big thing. "Destiel" was the shipping name between Dean (Winchester)―one of the two brothers at the center of the show―and Castiel―an angel who helped them in their fight against evil of all kinds. A number of fans, some of whom had toyed with a brother-brother angle I won't go into right now, had convinced themselves that these two characters should be a couple. Of course Dean was pretty flagrantly heterosexual and in the context of the show getting romantically involved with an angel was always a bad idea. Anyway, the writers made the mistake of acknowledging the fan's desires but never fulfilled them. Resulting in much denunciation.

Fandom is a double-edged sword. These days almost nothing has what would have been considered a big audience in the 20th century. If some of the people who do watch get really involved and talk about your work on social media, that would seem to be a good thing. But in a number of cases they have expectations, and don't like being told no. Look at the world of fanfic. Now some people who write fan fiction may be good writers, or could develop into such. But as a rule it takes what is already a fantastic environment and pushes it further towards simple wish fulfillment. Sometimes this is sexual, which gets all the attention, and sometimes not. But a lot of this stuff is united by an attitude of "I want this to happen, so it will happen."

If, as deBoer says, this approach has been spreading to real world politics, that's not a good thing. Politics is a two-way street. You have to recognize that other people will want different outcomes from the ones you want. If you just expect to be indulged and you don't pay some respect to those who dissent from you, the long term results will be destructive whether or not you get what you want in the short term.

Just get on back to the twilight zone

Something I read a few years ago and am somewhat heartened to see is still online is a blogger's track-by-track review of The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, which I think on balance is the best Bonzo Dog Band album. She's pretty on-target that the Bonzos were satirizing the popular pretensions of the time, and found a striking and funny way to do so. Most of those pretensions lived on, but what can you do?

I'd add a couple of things. First, it's true that John Lennon adopted some counterproductive attitudes toward Art in the latter half of the Beatles' career. Luckily, something in him knew better than to completely follow through with them. His solo work contains wordplay and quirky musical touches, even if he thought or at least claimed to think that they shouldn't.

Also, the "We are normal and we want our freedom" line apparently comes from Marat/Sade. Love was actually the first band to make use of it, in their song "The Red Telephone".

Language just keeps getting weirder

Here's a sentence you wouldn't have heard fifty, or even twenty years ago. "I just ate an edible." Congratulations? It might be more worth mentioning if you had eaten an inedible.

This is of course a result of cannabis culture, which has expanded since many states started on the road to legalization but which doesn't interest me. As for what they call edibles, even if you can retain the flavor as you add the stuff that contains THC, I'm not sure I'd want to eat anything that could make me paranoid. Or drowsy, beyond the usual. But to each his own, I guess.

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕

Rahko is a creature in Finnish mythology. This Rahko being is connected with the moon, but exactly how is a question. 

In one version, he is a thief who was bothered by moonlight, which can perhaps be a nuisance if you are a thief. He decided to paint the moon black with tar. This results in the new moon, and also the face you may see when looking up at the moon. 

In another version, spirits known as kapeet eat the moon, and the Rahko forges a new one out of cow hooves and fat. 

So in the aggregate, the Rahko is responsible for either the moon being there or for it not being there. Or perhaps both. After all, the phases of the moon are cyclical.

What the market will bear

Say what you want about this:

It does prove that the sixties were weird on a level you don't often hear about. Of course when people talk about the sixties, what they often mean is the early seventies, when bands in faded jeans were all over FM radio and All in the Family proved that hippies were just your annoying son-in-law.

But in 1967, it was apparently all about ad men and publicists going down Sunset Strip and trying to convince the freaks that commercials are a real happening, man. There's a bit of the put-on in all this, but it was also real. An actual agency commissioned these skits and songs. From the sounds of it, they even got Thurl Ravenscroft involved. It all adds up to a huge "What the hell am I listening to?"