Foods from my childhood

My whole family had a very sweet tooth.  In the 70's we were allowed to buy one candy of our choice each whenever we were at the store.  My father would put his in the refrigerator while my sister and I gobbled down our treats.  Then, a while later, my father would pull his out of the refrigerator and eat it.  When we complained he would say, "it's not my fault you ate yours so quick".  And of course he was right.  Soon we were allowed to buy two candy choices, one for right away and one to savor later.  My sister's favorite items were penny-candies because she kept pennies in her little purse.  She'd buy a lot of wax lips and such, which had very little flavor and were like chewing on a candle.  However, I did like the little wax straws or bottles filled with sweet liquid.

My favorite candy bar was the Abba-Zaba bar.  It was made with white taffy lightly strewn with nuts and had a peanut butter center.  You could flatten it out (to make it more chewable) with your fingers to the size of a pancake and the peanut butter would ooze out.  Delicious!  If you didn't play with it first, it would remain tough like those filling-pullers Super Sugar Daddies (the caramel and sometimes chocolate bars on a paper stick).

For some reason our little rural town was a test market for General Mills and other cereal manufacturers.  We were able to eat Chocolate Crunch Berries long before anyone else in the country tried them.  I fondly remember the Cap'n Crunch line our local market was testing out.  It had the regular Cap'n Crunch which featured a punch out cardboard model (inside were the plastic masts and sails) of the Cap'n trusted ship The Guppy.  The Crunchberries had a different ship; same with the chocoberries, but the one I liked the most and enjoyed the cereal flavor too, was the Vanilla Whale.  It was the Cap'n's nemesis and the box had the biggest ship in the line...a whaler complete with harpoon.  Not exactly very P.C., especially since the Vanilla Whale was cute, with big eyes and long eyelashes.   My father really liked the two flavors (blueberry and red-rasberry) of Baron Von Redberry and his enemy for which I can't remember the name.  We seemed to be the only ones eating it though since it sat and sat on the market's shelves.  When we brought home their last two boxes of the cereal and opened them for breakfast in the morning, they were filled with silk and a whole bunch of little worms.  We got our money back that day.

I loved Frankenberry, Count Chocula, Boo Berry and then Fruit Brute.  If I can remember the premise correctly, Fruit Brute was a little mild mannered accountant who would change into a crazy werewolf that could only be calmed down with the fruity cereal.  Either that, or the cereal would cause him to become the wolf.  I can't remember. 

My father and I were Sci-Fi nuts (and Medieval things too), so of course we loved outer space.  We enjoyed the wonderful nutritious Tang instant orange flavored drink that the Astronauts ate.  Then came the Space Food Sticks.  They were delicious, especially the peanut butter ones.  They were a bit expensive, but they were very nutritious.  I can still remember their particular taste and have never quite found a reasonable facsimile.  There's a nutrition bar out there (I think it's the Tiger brand) that is peanut butter flavored, and it comes kind of close.

At one point in our candy-loving days we were no longer limited to two choices at the store.  Each time we came home from the market we'd have quite a large number of different bags of candy.  We'd chose the types we most loved, then our second choice and then we'd even pick candy we liked but really didn't love.  This would all get dumped into a large ceramic bowl on the living room coffee table.  Right after dinner we'd all pile  onto the couch in front of the t.v. and start snacking.  It's really no wonder my father ended up diabetic.

For whatever reason, my parents grew concerned about the amount sugar we were consuming.  They probably saw some kind of story on 20/20 or 60 Minutes.  So my father promptly replaced the large bowl of candy with a huge bowl of carob flavored protein tablets.  Unfortunately I was the only one who really liked them and would eat handfuls every day.  They lasted quite a while because Dad had bought a gigantic barrel-like bottle of them, and neither he nor my mother touched them.  I think I ate those tablets nearly every day for a year before they were completely gone.  And then I missed them.

More toys from my childhood

Fisher Price was the master of playsets long before Lego started creating large scale fantasy settings and that uber-expensive Playmobile started cranking out fully fleshed-out scenes.  My cousin Michael had many of the Fisher Price playsets including the Sesame Street set (which my sister also had) and the Main Street USA set (with the dentist chair which even had a spit bowl) and this castle.  The tower where the dragon is sitting had a trap door which would send a little character down a slide to the "dungeon" (the little yellow lift gate at the bottom).   

I actually had two of these at different times.  I don't know what happened to the original one, I think my mother gave it away, but at one point I clearly remember my grandmother giving me one that had the Exxon label at the top.  The little gas tanks were cool, but of course the main attraction was the little lift planks which would propel your Hotwheels or Matchbox car into the waiting elevator.

My sister had this toy, the TreeTot family.  The top was spring loaded so you could hit the button under the handle and the whole tree canopy would lift up to reveal a four room house complete with elevator in the trunk.  There was a swing, a garage, and even a dog house which looked like a bush.  The people would fit perfectly in Fisher Price playsets, but I don't think they manufactured this particular toy.

For those that couldn't afford official Star Wars merchandise, there was the "Star Team" action dolls.  Obvious rip-offs of C3PO, Darth Vader and R2D2.  I only had the robots and didn't like the green-headed guy.  However, the little robot actually lit up and had a revolving interior mechanism and concealed tank-tread tracks on the bottom.

Not only did this stuff stink, it tasted extremely salty.  How do I know what it tasted like?  Well, of course I tasted it since it was non-toxic!  Duh!  For the most part there was nothing you could do with this toy except put it on someone who really didn't want it on them.  I believe it predated the Nickelodeon shows.

I have no idea why this toy fascinated me.  I didn't own it, but one of my friends did.  It was just a plastic oval about foot across filled with two different colors of sand (blue and white).  As you shook it, or turned it in your hands the sand would make sea-like patterns.

Now this toy I really loved.  It belonged to our next door neighbor Susan, two years my junior.  However, eventually she ended up giving it to my sister.  I loved how the entire kitchen was compressed into this six sided toy.  Each appliance could be "motorized" and lit up by turning the entire "karosel" into place and turning a dial.  The oven had three roasting chickens on spits that would turn.  There was even a washing machine/dryer with a spin cycle.  I'm not sure how the room around this Karosel Kitchen would be arranged, but it's still an intriguing design!

When I was about five or six my father took me to visit one of his good friends.  The Adams family (with only one "d") had children that were much older than me.  There was a girl who ended up becoming our babysitter for a while and told me an awful lot about sex.  One of her older brothers who was no longer living in the family home had collected a huge amount of Hotwheels track.  For some reason they gave me the whole shebang.  The photo above is not mine (I downloaded it from the Internet).  I had tons more than this including a service station that you could wind up and it would add speed to the cars passing through it.

A friend of mine told me that his mother used to use one of the long orange plastic tracks to whip him.  Such a bad memory for such a wonderful toy!

At one time I had a really wonderful gift; it was a vinyl-over-cardboard suit case that when opened revealed a molded plastic city with streets and bridges and a tunnel with a few buildings, a lake and park, and a couple skyscrapers (which would pop up and had snaps to make them square).  It was the right scale to use my Matchbox and Hotwheels cars, but was an off-brand.  I played with this city for a very long time.  One year my parents told me they were going to buy me another city-in-a-suitcase that was three times the size and I waited in anticipation.  When the Holiday arrived they brought out a giant box which I assumed was the new suitcase.  It turned out to be empty.  I was terribly disappointed but then my father wheeled in my new bicycle.  I acted extremely surprised and delighted, but I really had wanted the city-in-a-suitcase.  We lived on a dangerous logging-road and a steep hill.  There really wasn't anywhere to ride the bike.

a few true stories from a strange world

My sister and I were very hungry and on our way to some important destination, so we popped into a drive-through.  I can't remember if it was a DQ, Wendy's, BK or McD's, but that's not important anyway.  We pulled up to the illuminated menu board and speaker where a friendly female voice asked us to "please go ahead with your order" before we had any time to actually look at the board.  My sister managed to blurt out, "Ummm, I guess we'll have..." when the speaker suddenly crackled and said, "thank you, please drive forward".  My sister looked at me in bewilderment.  She leaned her head out of the car and said, "excuse me, but..." and the speaker repeated, "thank you, please drive forward".  Again my sister tried, "I'm sorry, but"; "thank you, please drive forward."  Finally my sister was able to scream out "we haven't ordered yet!", to which the speaker answered, "please go ahead with your order".

cherished memories

One wonderful year I was given a gift I actually asked for.  I had asked, and asked and kept my mind locked on this one toy.  The Micronauts mobile exploration lab.

I didn't know that Mom & Dad would not only get me the expensive toy, but also three wonderful little Micronauts to man the expeditions!  I had the clear plastic one at the right of the photo above. The other was green painted metal with spring-action pop-out wings, which I pretended was the clear guy's best friend!  I can't remember their names, if they even had them.  However, their enemy was Acroyear (or at least I figured he was their enemy): 

Of course, looking back, Acroyear was probably a hero based on the architypical Japanese designs.  My Acroyear was more of a minty blue color than this green version.  Ah how I loved these little guys.  These were my first action figures.

When Star Wars came out I was getting an allowance for doing chores around the house and helping to take care of my little sister.  It amounted to only a couple of dollars every two weeks, so I had to really save up in order to buy the action figures of R2D2 and C3PO.  My mother, for some reason, was furious.  To her I had wasted my money on two tiny chunks of plastic.  She had no idea what they meant to me; how much the movie itself had affected my brain.  She made a dramatic show of throwing them into the trashcan in back of the garage, and forbade me to dig them out.  Of course as soon as possible I retrieved them.  They are still a treasured possession.

The next year my parents gave in and bought me the huge Millennium Falcon.  It would take quite a few years though for me to get all the figures to go inside of it.  

In 1977, the same year StarWars debuted, our family went to Disneyland for the first time.  I was 12, my sister Ginger was 4.  I was able to buy a Darth Vader helmet with my savings, along with a large map of the theme park (I've always loved maps, especially ones that feature buildings so prominently).  My sister bought a large stuffed Al from the Country Bear Jamboree along with a small Mickey & Minnie.

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My favorite movie of all time! (part 3 of 3)

In the final third of the movie, Fellini decided to take some liberties with the story.  This part of the book is really fragmented, so it's not a completely unreasonable decision.

At the dinner with Trimalchio, the host decides to read some of his own poetry only to have a drunk Eumolpo make fun of it.  Outraged, Eumolpo is thrown into the kitchen oven, only to be "saved" by Encolpio.  They are both thrown out and languish in the field outside.

I adore Fellini's eye for light and drama.  Many scenes in the Satyricon are forcefully homoerotic by nature.

Abruptly Encolpio, Ascylto, and Gitoni are captured on thrown onto a slaver ship.  The owner of the ship, Lychas likes to wrestle to the death and catches Encolpio spying, so decides to wrestle him.  As he is about to finish Encolpio off, Lychas is entranced by Encolpio's beauty and decides instead to marry him.

Nero was accused of publicly marrying a young boy named Sporos.  Petronius was a good friend to Nero and yet this scene was in the original manuscript.  Perhaps Nero had a good sense of humor about his affairs, or the detractors created the charge.  Sporos was indeed at Nero's side throughout his life and even at his death, so it's not inconceivable.

In a nod to realism, Fellini has the seamen kill a whale.  It's the little details like this that makes me love Fellini so much.  It has nothing to do with the plot, but it makes the setting more realistic.

There is a major regime change and the old Emperor has evidently been dethroned.  Those patrons who were  supportive of the old regime are now on the outs with the new one.  In a scene directly from history, a rich couple sends off their children and slaves to another land and then take their own lives.  In Ancient Rome it was better to die by your own hand than to be killed or enslaved.  It was all about honor and the law.  With their suicide, their descendants are allowed to inherit instead of everything going to their killers or the new Emperor.  Armies march and loot is taken from temples and cities in the only real montage of the film.  Lychas ship is boarded and he is killed and evidently the slaves are set free.  Ascylto and Encolpio escape and come upon the near empty villa of the suicides.  I don't know where little Gitoni went, because he never shows up again.

Ascylto and Encolpio have a three-way with a black slave girl in a very tender scene.  The film garnered much attention for this scene considered too risqué for many theaters.

In a scene that wasn't in the book, the two boys come upon a thief who talks them into kidnapping a local demi-god, a hermaphrodite child who is reportedly able to cure sickness.  The idea is that they could ransom the child, or use him/her to accumulate wealth.  However, the hermaphrodite is sickly and soon perishes, spoiling their scheme.  The thief turns on the boys and they have to escape.

In keeping with the fragmented nature of the book, Fellini now suddenly skips to where Encolpio is forced into a maze and made to fight the Minotaur.  When Encolpio is finally face to face with his doom, the Minotaur pulls off his mask to reveal a handsome man who laughs at the boy.  Then, to his horror, there is an entire population laughing at him.  The King explains this is a special holiday where everyone must laugh, and to kick it off there must be a very big prank pulled on an unknowing pawn, hence the Minotaur vs. Encolpio.  To make it up to Encolpio, they provide him a beautiful woman for him to make love to.  Encolpio is quite proud of his sexual prowess, but can't actually do the deed in front of whole town.  This makes him a laughing stock again and he is embarrassed.  In order to "get his groove back" he and Ascylto journey to a special brothel where sexual healing is practiced and they meet up again with Eumolpo.  Nothing seems to work though and Encolpio is beginning to worry that his "sword will be forever blunted".  They then travel to see a witch who can supposedly cure him.

Through the use of hallucinogenics and trickery, Encolpio is indeed cured, but as he declares his victory, Ascylto is killed outside by the ferryman.

Encolpio is saddened and decides to take off on a ship full of ex-slaves to whereabouts unknown.  As the book ends (due to not having the actual end of the book) so the movie concludes.

Many people have hated this movie because of the fragmented scenes and the strange way Encolpio gets away from each situation simply by being cute.  Even more are put off by Fellini-esque directions such as the "breaking of the fourth wall", the "ugly" beautiful people, or the bizarre soundtrack.  However, this will remain one of my all time favorite movies, forever!

My favorite movie of all time! (part 2 of 3)

The Satyricon has come to us mostly in fragments, but the largest and most intact part is called the "Dinner with Trimalchio".  It is where our young hero Encolpio tags along with his poet friend Eumolpo to a fabulous dinner at an incredibly rich patron's house.  The author Petronius pokes fun at Roman tradition by having Trimalchio be a super-rich but super-superstitious person who flaunts his money, has no real friends, and throws these ridiculously over-the-top lavish dinners.

As a tradition, Romans would bathe before a meal.  This usually consisted of simply washing one's hands, but in the book and in Fellini's film, the bathers are all in a mass bath, jumping up and down.  Only one of Trimalchio's over-the-top gestures to appease the "luck Gods".

During the dinner Trimalchio provides entertainment for the guests which includes a short poetic Greek play in the Homeric tradition.  He also has his belches read by a "reader" who proclaims there will be much wealth to come.  The dinner begins with a reading of all the wealth and lands Trimalchio owns.  He jokes that he owns lands that he has never visited, nor will ever visit; in fact, he doesn't even know where some of this land is.

Why use napkins when you can simply wipe your hands in the hair of a slave?  This was supposed to bring good luck to those who did it.

Trimalchio is so self-centered he is having a giant mosaic of his face created on the dining room wall.  This is one of Fellini's excessive sets, but done to terrific authenticity.

The dining room is an authentic recreation.  The patron lay down around the center runway where food and some entertainment was staged.  The food was so extravagant and ridiculous in the book, Fellini decided to go even further by making most of it unintelligible.  At one point the chef brings in a giant, bloated pig.  Trimalchio is angered because the pig looks cooked, but ungutted.  The crowd wants him to spare the chef's life, but Trimalchio still wants to have him killed.  However, when the pig is cut open, all sorts of cooked meats spill out to the crowd and Trimalchio's amusement.  It was a clever trick played by the chef. 

Again, Fellini likes his characters to break the "fourth wall" and suck in the viewer.   During the dinner Trimalchio pays creepy, undue attention on his young nephews while his wife kisses another woman.  He demands that she gets up and entertains the guests with a dance that ends up being a bit too overtly sexual.  He is angered at her and humiliates her in front of everyone. 

The dinner is concluded by a quick trip to Trimalchio's mausoleum.  He lays down in the grave and everyone pretends to be distraught over his passing.  He is even moved himself at the world's loss of such a great man.  He gives coins to the guests he feels best displayed sadness.

End of part 2 of 3.

My Steampunk Art

Some of you may have already saw this stuff.  It was a phase I was going through, which really isn't over yet, I just don't have the same amount of time to devote to it.  If you're not familiar with Steampunk, the concept is:  What if current technology had been invented when we were still using steam engines for our main power source?  Movies such as "The Golden Compass", "Delicatessen" and "City of Lost Children" are considered to be in this style.  Whenever you see a lot of rivets, tubes, pipes and gauges mounted to modern technology, it's probably Steampunk.

This is the punishment device from Franz Kafka's "The Penal Colony".  The operator would type in the crimes of the prisoner (I show the input on the back side of the device), the prisoner would be strapped down to the porcelain table (with little built-in troughs) and then the myriad needles would lower down and "write" the crimes into the prisoner's skin.  The story was about cruel-and-unusual punishments and whether or not they are actual crime deterrents, moral, etc.

The upper image is of a DVD Player (the "the Light Disk Optical Reader") and the lower one is of a "Boom Box".

This is my revisioning for the HGWells Time Machine as first envisioned by the George Pal design team.  If you had read my book "The Beatnik, The Gunslinger, and the Movie Star", this is the Master Chronometer George uses to flip back and forth through time.

My favorite movie of all time!

When most people see Fellini's Satyricon for the first time, they are confused.  The story seems to skip major plot lines and jump around a bit. This is because the actual story, written around 50AD has only three major portions surviving (out of possibly 80 books).  It was like a soap opera for the Romans.  Each installment was waited for in great anticipation and it was very popular.  Fellini created incredible sets and costumes and embellished the story a little to make it his own version.

In the first scene, the college student Encolpio tells us that his young lover Gitoni has gone missing.  Encopio's roommate Ascylto is at the baths, and is telling us that Encolpio pretends to be pious when in fact he's a whore.

The lighting in these scenes is dramatic.  Fellini, as you will notice, liked to have the action in his scenes take place in a corner, typically the right hand one.

Turns out that Gitoni had gone with Ascylto, but always needing money, Ascylto sold Gitoni to an old actor.  Encolpio rushes to the theater to take back Gitoni.

Encolpio is on the left, Gitoni on the far right and the actor is in between.  The crowd doesn't like the play which makes fun of Caesar so they demand the actor gives the boy back to Encolpio.  Encolpio and Gitoni go back to their flat in the poor section of Rome, but they get lost.  This is the maze-like section of Rome that burnt down during the great fire only a few years after the original manuscripts were written.  At one point the boys come across a group carrying a toppled statue's enormous head, presumably of a past and disfavored Emperor.  An old woman directs the boys to their flat, but actually she sends them into a huge brothel where all sorts of crazy things are happening. 

Once back at the flat, the boys make love.  However, in the morning Ascylto returns to find them in bed and he starts a fight with Enclopio.  Ascylto says he'll move out, so they begin to divide up everything.  Ascylto then points to Gitoni and asks how they will divide him.  It is decided that Gitoni will decide whom to go with. Of course Encolpio thinks he'll stay because he's in love and Ascylto sold him once, but Gitoni ends up going with Ascylto and Encolpio is devastated.  Suddenly an earthquake occurs and in one of my favorite scenes, the entire district crumbles, including the wall of the flat.

The earthquake scene is made more dramatic by the panicking horses.  There is one little still that I love: an old woman is crouching in the corner of her tumbling room with a look of sheer panic.  It is awesome.  Fellini liked to find people in the streets and put them into his films.  He didn't want traditionally beautiful people, he wanted people with distinctive faces, crooked noses, gnarled teeth, strange eyes.  He called these people beautiful because they were real and had such strong traits of humanity in their visages.

Another of Fellini's famous methods was to put extras into the frame of the scene who look directly at the camera.  This "breaking of the fourth wall" was to invite the viewer into the scene by making them a part of it.

 

And then suddenly, without segue, Encolpio is at an art gallery with his poet friend Eumolpo.  This is, of course, the way the book flows too since there are many scenes we have lost.  This fragment is about Eumolpo commenting on the lack of real quality in art; how it's mass produced or without character.  It's very much apropos today when people buy art simply to match their interior palette and not on the merit of the art itself.  In the wall of the art gallery is a large open hole where a scaffold of workers slowly moves by.  The sets for this film were brilliant and expensive and of course Fellini kept going over budget as he'd change things constantly.

This is only the first third of the movie and so I'll continue the rest later. 

other sexy ships!

The Irwin Allen counterpart to Land of the Giants' Spindrift was the Flying Sub from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.  It had the same front cockpit windows and the same interior structural beams.  Outside was a beautiful bright yellow casing with dark cobalt blue accents.

The lovely interior had light-up yellow hexagons on the floor - for whatever reason.

The sub would launch from the bay underside the larger submarine "Seaview", and as its name suggests, it could leap out of the water and fly through the air.  So smooth and curvy!

The third ship I loved as a kid was the Proteus from the movie Fantastic Voyage.  The film was about Raquel Welsh showing off her ta-tas...no wait, it was about a very important man, perhaps the premiere of Russia, I don't really remember, but he had some medical condition that was threatening his life.  If they could save him he would be able to give them the secrets the military desperately needed.  However, the surgery would be too invasive and he'd die.  So, logically, they shrunk the surgeons down inside a craft (the Proteus) and injected it into his bloodstream where they had to travel through his body and do the operation.

My favorite part was when they were in the ear canal (or passing nearby) and no one in the big room could make any kind of sound or it would cause the little ship to be smashed from the sound waves.  Sure enough some dummy knocks off a bunch of metal instruments onto the hard polished floor.

This ship didn't have the bright colors of an Irwin Allen show, but it had nice curves and was extremely believable.  The actual set was designed to have a full interior.