Tag Archives: Duck and Cover

Dracula Does Not Suffer Fools

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I enjoy joining a group of online groupies, most of whom I’ve never actually met, on Saturday nights when I can to watch, ridicule, and gush about the usually dreadful films screened by Svengoolie on MeTV. It’s a fun, irreverent group of tolerant enthusiasts, mostly younger than yours truly, but then what in the world isn’t.

Many of the participants, if you believe their protestations of innocence, are seeing these dubious gems for the first time. While it’s daunting for a grizzled cinematic dumpster-diver like me to find any comfort in the thought that voting-age folks will be casting those first votes sans (that means “without”…sorry, Groucho Marx joke) the seasoning of multiple viewings of THE RETURN OF THE INVISIBLE MAN, PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, and KILLER KLOWNS OF OUTER SPACE, I do find solace when I see their delight in discovering;

  •  The power of random flames serving as a modern, purging deux-et-machina when troubles (aka monsters) become insurmountable, yet still flammable (dozens and dozens of European horror flicks).
  • Or that interplanetary, mutant children can be thwarted by imagining a brick wall (Village of the Damned).
  • Or that alien attackers who have just blinded 99%+ of the human race can be driven back by spraying them with sea water (Day of the Triffids).
  • Or that body-less flying brains can be shriveled by a Kenneth Tobey-type guy blowing up an atomic radio station in Canada (Fiend Without a Face).
  • Or that the potential lycanthrope menace can be nipped in the bud when his dad smacks him with a cane (The Werewolf, with Lon Chaney Jr).

It’s comforting to sneer and giggle at these masterpieces, and about as practical as my generation’s intense training in “duck and cover.”

And it’s a pretty nice clambake with no clams being hurt.

Last Saturday though, I couldn’t make it and I kinda wanted to. It was a flick I hadn’t seen (there are still one or two ‘em out there). I thought I’d be experiencing it for the first time like many of the other participants. Might be fun. Hell, I might turn into a twenty-something again.

Old fools…dream foolishly……

I recorded the flick instead and watched it this afternoon. I’m glad I did.

The film was BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA. This is not the 1992 film with Gary Oldman: it’s the British 1974 made-for-TV flick with Jack Palance playing the sanguinary Count.

There are no more menacing actors on the screen than Mr. Palance. This is unrelenting mean-ness. He can’t be reasoned with…or shamed…or redeemed…he is a vector of evil. Sounds like Ol’ Drac to me.

There’s scene where a tuxedo-clad gent who looks like Dudley Moore tries to stop Dracula with a pistol. Our vampire dismisses the impediment and the bullets with a disdainful backhand…just as you’d expect Jack Palance to handle a threat from Dudley Moore. That’s artistic integrity for you.

Disdainful backhand…

That’s what I had when I played at tennis in my 20’s. However, it was my opponents who did the disdaining.

In my 20’s…

…sigh…

Old fools……

Hootenanny Wind

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Hey!

You millennials!

Don’t trust anyone over 30.

That was the advice proffered by my generation in the sixties. That would be the 1960’s, though after a morning of pulling weeds, it feels like a hundred years before.

My friend, Jim Sherburne, wrote an interesting novel concerning that generational advice;

RIVERS RUN TOGETHER. In it, he describes a 30-something writer in Chicago in the summer of 1968, during the Democratic presidential nominating convention. The protagonist’s heart was pining to be part of the protests happening behind police lines in the parks in Chicago, while his carbon-dated time on the planet consigned his bag-o-bones to the streets nearby. I recommend the book…especially now.

I’m over 30.

Dammit.

So…don’t trust me…but read this…it might help bridge the gap when next we meet.

In the early to mid-sixties, I was politically born.

On an August day (no school that day), Martin Luther King revealed his dream to the largest crowd I had ever seen, in Washington. It was on TV and I could not look away.

Earlier that year, a new music show had appeared on TV. It was called “Hootenanny” and it featured folk music.

That same year, radio station WBKY (now WUKY) had a late Saturday night show hosted by Ben Story featuring even more obscure (to me) folk music.

I was twelve.

What’s folk music?

Who’s Martin Luther King?

Why’s he black?

Does that mean something?

Is somebody doing something to him they shouldn’t?

What does Pete Seeger mean when he asks “Which side are you on?”

Sides? There are sides?

I was twelve.

Patrick Sky reached for a laugh in his now-forgotten classic “Talking Socialized Anti-Undertaker Blues”; “Formaldehyde and alcohol, we’ll pickle you, and that ain’t all; black or white, to us you’re all the same.” Where’s the laugh? It plumb evades me. What’s black or white got to do with it?

I was twelve. I had to look up “formaldehyde.”

Phil Ochs’ sad musician-turned-wino in “Chords of Fame” complains in an alley; “Reporters ask you questions. They write down what you say.” Why would they do that? Aren’t reporters supposed to be covering real news in 1963? The Cold War? Polio? Cuban missiles?

I was twelve and still eating vaccine sugar cubes and mastering the scary yoga of “duck and cover.”

Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger were asking “What did you learn in school today?”

Well… I really was taught things like;

“I learned that policemen are my friends
I learned that justice never ends
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.”

I was twelve. It had not yet occurred to me that all that might not be OK until Tom and Pete suggested I cipher on that a little more.

I listened as Judy Henske and Judy Collins and Joan Tolliver sang about the problems in the coal fields using the words of Billy Edd Wheeler. Mountains being stripped, towns abandoned, rivers poisoned? In Lexington, we didn’t have rivers or mountains.

But Mr. Wheeler’s words have stayed with me for over five decades.

All their words have. I learned much from these foreign-to-me teachers.

Mostly what I learned from these singers and preachers and yes, my Sunday school teachers was to always do the next right thing. Picking sides, recognizing colors and genders, knocking down mountains, fighting diseases, corrupt authorities……….just do the next right thing.

Mortgages, and insurance bills, and utility bills, and 401K’s have distracted me.

Stormy Daniels, and the Ukraine, and Confederate flags, and face masks are thrown at me now to continue to distract me.

I learned better in 1963 and what I learned still holds true.

Stay focused on Rev. King’s dream.

It’s the next right thing to do.

Trust me on this……no…wait……don’t trust me…go vote……do this yourself.

Turn Yer Radio On

Junesboy, Lexington-70's, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I was eleven years old when I first started falling asleep to the radio. I still do whenever possible. It’s a sound that assures me it’s OK to fall asleep.

I think those pre-slumber sounds have been important to others in other times…

<<<< Night sound #1 >>>>

The call rang out in the dark. “Post #1 — One o’clock and all is well.” A twenty-something Union prison guard in Western Kentucky was listening and questioning the wisdom of leaving New York for this blue uniform and a nocturnal duty of vigilance over tattered Southern wretches. Still, it was reassuring to hear of the continued existence and thriving of Post #1. He scanned his portion of the prison ground for anomalies and finding none answered; “Post #2 – One o’clock and all is well.” He assumed Post #3 would be similarly comforted…hell, those Southern boys might like to hear a pleasant word as well. >>>>

In 1962, when I was eleven, it was my battery-powered cigarette-pack-sized transistor radio tucked under my pillow, ideally tuned in to a late night baseball game from the West Coast between my hallowed Reds and the despiséd Dodgers or haughty Giants. To drift off to Waite Hoyt’s description of Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson battling Maury Wills and Sandy Koufax, or Willie Mays and Juan Marichal was bliss. If the Reds weren’t available, the local overnight disc jockey, Tom Kimball on WVLK touting “Nighthawk Specials” at Columbia Steakhouse and a mélange of pre-Beatles rock was a pretty good Plan B for a pretty good night’s sleep.

A half-century later, not much has changed for me…

<<<< Night sound #2 >>>>

About two miles from our home, a train whistle rewards our summer-open bedroom window with a long, long moan that croons; “We’re out here travelin’, workin’, carryin’ on…don’t you worry none…we’re here…all’s well.” >>>>

Each night, I pessimistically set my clock radio to play the radio for two hours. Then I proceed to become comatose in about two minutes. I try to find a live sporting event first, then classical music or jazz, then settle for any music or live programming.

It has to be live programming.

Television won’t do the job. Television is visual and I find it hard to fall asleep when my eyes are open. Go figger.

Recorded music won’t do. There’s no currently awake mind behind.

Live programming…that’s the ticket.

Why?

<<<< Night sound #3 >>>>

Sirens pass, shrieking. Hospital helicopters wop and chop overhead. Each heralds an urgent problem. Each assures that responders are responding; “All’s not well, but we’re on it!” >>>>

I think my need goes back to 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In the fall of 1962, Nikita Khrushchev got the neighborly idea of putting Russian missiles in Cuba, ninety miles away from the Florida Keys. Jack Kennedy realized quickly that missiles in Cuba threatened to sharply amplify the hazards of a determined Duval Street Crawl beyond a drunken face plant on a Key West sidewalk, a night in the Key West slammer, and your name on page two of the Key West newspaper. The hazards could logically portend an end to Western Civilization which, hard as it is for my acquaintances in the Keys to believe, involves bigger issues than a cold beer (or five) and a well-done conch fritter (one is enough). Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to intercept a missile-laden Russian ship headed for Cuba.

The whole country felt a spasm of fear. A nuclear conflagration seemed eminent.

<<<< Night sound #4 >>>>

My dog farts in bed and sighs. All is well and evidently well-fed. >>>>

My sixth grade classmates and I at Yates Elementary were schooled the day after the blockade was announced in the intricacies of “duck and cover.” We knelt in the school’s halls with our heads down and covered by our hands.

But I had seen images of Hiroshima.

I didn’t raise a ruckus in school about our atomic training, but I was silently and forlornly convinced that “duck and cover” wasn’t gonna cut it.

No, Lexington’s best hope was in the fact that there was no military reason to nuke it. I found a soupçon of solace in that, though it would be a few more years before I knew what “soupçon” or “solace” meant.

But I still fretted about the rest of the world. If the random angry world powers ignored Lexington but obliterated themselves, how would I know?

On the radio of course!

All’s well…