"When Happy Met Froggie" on DVD!

One from the JSH News blog:


"Morris Book Shop at 408 Southland Drive now has a quantity of the brand new DVD release of When Happy Met Froggie available for sale!

The documentary, which recently had its world premiere in Lexington, includes footage from an interview with Jeffrey Scott Holland discussing his painting of the beloved clown-and-puppet pair whose children's show aired on local TV in the 1970s.

Support indie films and indie bookstores by trekking here to get your copy today!"

"When Happy Met Froggie" Film Premiere

Tonight's the night! Scott Hall and Michael Crisp's documentary When Happy Met Froggie makes its world premiere at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington at 7:30pm.

It tells the true story that Lexingtonians have been longing to hear told - the power and the glory that was a locally-made low-budget TV kid's show called Happy's Hour. Happy's Hour starred Happy the Clown and his puppet sidekick Froggie, plus an obese doppelganger called "Happy II" in the later years. It ran on Lexington's WTVQ-62 (which later became 36) from 1976-1980.

Yours truly makes an appearance in the film, as the producers sent a film crew to my house when they found out I'd painted Happy and Froggie's portrait.

I'll be there on the red carpet tonight for the premiere, come join us! And then find me later, because I'll probably be at Blue Agave Cantina.

James Best

You probably know James Best as the man who played Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard, or perhaps as Jim Lindsey on The Andy Griffith Show , but he's actually had a long and checkered career in the world of film - he was in The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart (1954), Seven Angry Men (1955), Forbidden Planet with Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen (1956), Cole Younger, Gunfighter (1958), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Ride Lonesome with Randolph Scott and Lee Van Cleef (1959), Three on a Couch (1966), Firecreek with Jimmy Stewart (1968), Ode to Billy Joe (1976) and Hooper with Burt Reynolds and Adam West (1978).

(But me, archivist of moldy old b-movies that I am, I know him best as the star of 1959's The Killer Shrews with Ken Curtis!)


He's also made over 280 TV show appearances including The DuPont Show with June Allyson, The Adventures of Kit Carson, Frontier, Sheriff of Cochise, Pony Express, Stories of the Century, Behind Closed Doors, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel,Trackdown, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Tombstone Territory, Whispering Smith, The Twilight Zone, Overland Trail, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Man and the Challenge, Combat, The Mod Squad, I Spy, Perry Mason, The Incredible Hulk, The Fugitive, Stagecoach West, and In the Heat of the Night.

And, as you've probably figured out if you've read this far, Mr. Best is a good Kentucky boy! He was born and raised in Powderly, a small town in Muhlenberg County, and his uncle was none other than Ike Everly, the country music bandleader who spawned the Everly Brothers. An even more surprising branch in the family tree, Best is the father-in-law of Michael Damian.


James Best will be back in his native Kentucky TODAY, March 5th, at the >Dale Hollow Lake Hunting and Fishing Expo. It starts at 9am and runs till 8pm, admission is FREE, and special lodge room rates for the weekend are only 50 smackers. Call 1-800-325-2282 for more information, and tell 'em I sent you by!

A Devil at Noon

There's a play currently showing at Actors Theatre of Louisville entitled A Devil At Noon, ostensibly thinly based on the life of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. As as longtime student of PKD's work, I was intrigued - until I read the review at Theatre Louisville.


It sounds positively dreadful, and I guess it shouldn't surprise me at all since I tend to loathe just about everything that comes from the Humana Festival of New American Plays. And it's a shame, too, because someone needs to bring a real play - you know, with an actual plot and an actual set? - about the real Philip K. Dick. Kentuckians gotta know.

Even without assessing his writing, he's a fascinating character all by himself: in 1974 he began experiencing hallucinatory visions, in which he allegedly re-experienced past lives in Biblical times, and began receiving telepathic information from a cosmic entity known as VALIS. He struggled to deal with these unsettling experiences until his death in 1982.

Was he crazy? Perhaps, perhaps not; but you can't argue with success - many of PKD's works have been turned into blockbuster Hollywood films. There's Blade Runner with Harrison Ford and Sean Young (see image above), Next with Nicholas Cage, Minority Report with Tom Cruise (see image below), Screamers with Peter Weller, A Scanner Darkly with Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr., and Total Recall with Arnold Schwartzenegger, among others.

Harry Dean Stanton Fest!

We're all huge fans of Irvine's own Harry Dean Stanton around these offices, so we are well pleased that the first annual Harry Dean Stanton Fest will be held February 2 through 4, 2011 at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington.

The itinerary is as follows:

February 2 - the world premiere of the KET documentary Harry Dean Stanton: Crossing Mulholland by Tom Thurman, the same guy who did the great Hunter S. Thompson documentary Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. Admission is FREE and refreshments are FREE.

February 3 - the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas, followed by co-star Hunter Carson making a personal appearance and answering questions after the screening. Admission is $10. (Also, the Sidebar Grill will be hosting an after-party with Harry Dean drink specials, it says here. I might catch up with you there.)

February 4 - you get two flicks at $5 each: Paul Newman's Cool Hand Luke (in which Harry sings and plays guitar!) and the Alex Cox 80s classic Repo Man (Harry plays the grizzled old repo man who hires Emilio Estevez and teaches him the trade).

Lookin' good, folks. Next year let's think about Escape From New York, Cockfighter, and David Lynch's Inland Empire.

Tod Browning

Tod Browning, the director behind such classic films as the original Bela Lugosi Dracula, was another good Kentucky boy who left the bluegrass for the bright lights of Hollywood, to bring civilization to the barbarians.

At the age of 16, Browning fled his home in Louisville, KY to join a traveling circus. For the next several years he toured the country with various carnivals and sideshows on the sawdust circuit as a performer, dancer, contortionist, blackface comedian, somnambulist and barker. He developed his own sideshow routine in which he was buried alive, Houdini-style, in a coffin. Billed as "The Living Corpse" and sometimes even "The Living Hypnotic Corpse", this gig was quite successful at raking in the rubes.

He also performed as a clown with the Ringling Brothers Circus for a time (do photos exist? I would love to see Tod Browning in clown makeup.)

Not only did Browning cheat death every night in his coffin act, but in 1915 he miraculously survived a head-on collision with a freight train in his automobile, though he was badly injured and required two years of rehabilitation. Browning's biographer David J. Skal theorizes that Browning may have been castrated in the wreck.


Browning's carny experiences helped shaped some of his greatest films, such as The Unholy Three (Lon Chaney plays a ventriloquist on the lam with a carny strongman, a dwarf and an ape!), The Unknown (Lon Chaney again, as an armless circus knife-thrower who throws knives with his feet and is enamored with Joan Crawford), and Freaks, whose cast was largely made up of actual circus freakshow performers, including Schlitze the Aztec, the Hilton conjoined twins, the bearded Lady Olga, and the "Human Caterpillar" Prince Randian (pictured above).

The Show tells the story of a Hungarian carnival troupe with a Grand Guignol ultra-violent decapitation show, a mermaid, a spider-woman (pictured below), and a poisonous gila monster.



And then there's The Devil Doll, a kinda-horror/sorta-science fiction film about a mad scientist who develops a formula to shrink people. The film is also notable for scenes with Lionel Barrymore in little-old-lady drag, hamming it up Mrs. Doubtfire style.

The most intriguing nugget in the Browning oeuvre, however, is London After Midnight, which has been lost since 1967, when the only known print went up in the accursed MGM vault fire. The film, about a vampiric Jack The Ripper-esque fiend being pursued by Scotland Yard, inspired a real-life copycat killer in 1926 when a man arrested for murdering a woman in London's Hyde Park claimed the movie drove him to it.


Browning also wrote scripts for other people's pictures, such as The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, a bizarre 1916 film about a Sherlock Holmes-like detective who is so addicted to cocaine that he keeps it by the barrel in his home and travels with an ammunition bandolier on his chest, filled not with bullets but with hypodermic syringes for mainlining cocaine and opium. They just don't make movies like this anymore.

Unfortunately, unlike fellow Kentuckian director D.W. Griffith (with whom he sometimes co-worked, such as on the film Intolerance and the aforementioned Leaping Fish), Browning's remains were not brought back home for burial; he was interred at Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Tod's uncle was also a celebrity - baseball legend Pete Browning, the original "Louisville Slugger", is buried in Cave Hill in Louisville.

Tom Cruise Climbs Burj Khalifa

Kentuckian Tom Cruise was recently spotted filming a scene for his upcoming Mission Impossible IV, perched atop the tallest building in the world - Dubai's Burj Khalifa. The Burj Khalifa was also examined on this blog here last year, when Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, came to Lexington.

Cruise's latest daring film shoot - which gives me vertigo just to think about it - came during the Islamic Eid al-Adha (عيد الأضحى‎), a religious holiday also known as "the festival of sacrifice". By doing his own dangerous stunt work, Cruise very nearly sacrificed himself by spending such a long time clinging to the top of the tallest structure ever created! In the past few weeks, he's also been seen swinging, Spider-man style, from a cable tethered to the building and - as in the photo above - hanging upside down from one of its highest windows.


(Fun facts about the Burj Khalifa: it's the tallest building on Earth, has the world's longest elevator shaft and the world's fastest elevators, has the world's highest outdoor observation deck, the world's highest Mosque, and the world's highest swimming pool at the 76th floor. It's so tall, you can see it for 60 miles away, and the weather at the top is at least 6 degrees colder with winds sometimes reaching 90 miles per hour.)

The Return of Happy and Froggie

A crew from Remix Films were just here at Chez JSH, interviewing me for their documentary film When Happy Met Froggie. The movie's all about the great lost Lexington 1970s children's show Happy's Hour, starring Happy the Clown and his puppet friend Froggie. And of course, my painting of them makes a prominent appearance. (Guess what, sniffers, the price just went up!)

Do you have any memorabilia pertaining to Happy's Hour, or any special memories or experience with the show, that may be of use for the documentary? It may not be too late - contact the producers and let them know!

MMX

Ten percent of the 21st century is already over. Think on that.

The arrival of a new decade, drifting out of the oughts and coming into the teens, has me thinking long and hard about - what else? - extraterrestrial contact.

Never mind that we're already swimming in a sea of invisible Lovecraftian beasties brushing up against our reality (you probably think I'm joking, don't you?) and never mind that certain microscopic critters most likely actually came here from interstellar space. I'm speaking here of more tangible, wrap-their-lunchhooks-around-you kind of aliens, which may or may not be little green men or Autogyro-piloting entities or what have you. (Some might even tell you to "Drop the Tunug" if you don't block their voices out with your Thought Screen Helmet.)

The tagline for the film version of Arthur C. Clarke's 2010 is "The Year We Make Contact". Given that all my high-weirdness detector readings are off the scale these days, I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't indeed the year that all humans finally realize (as John Titor once predicted) that we have not been living in the kind of world we've grown up thinking we're in.

With the upcoming full-throttle-firing of the Large Hadron Collider this year, some paranoid nuts - in other words, my dearest friends and associates - believe an interdimensional portal is going to be opened as a result. And something from somewhere else could end up here.

Perhaps it already has.




Our ally JLK's Ending Sentences With Ellipses blog has a great feature about the conversation between Helen Mirren and Roy Scheider about Kentucky in the 2010 film.

But when Roy says we play very good basketball, does he mean the Cats or the Cards? Most likely the Cats. But you never know. He may also have meant both, in a general, all-encompassing, Neutral Zone kinda sense.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that they still drink Kentucky bourbon in the future. Or I would be, that is, if the future were not right now.

Pitt vs. Cruise? Not!

A few days ago, a less-than-reputable German magazine widely - and falsely - attributed a statement to Brad Pitt in which he was knocking Kentuckian Tom Cruise's recent critically acclaimed film Valkyrie. Pitt has a part in a new film, Inglourious Basterds [sic], which, like Cruise's masterpiece, deals with Nazi-era Germany.

According to People Magazine:

Last week's widely picked-up statement attributed to Brad Pitt, unfavorably comparing his WII movie Inglourious Basterds to Tom Cruise's star vehicle Valkyrie, was not only "inaccurate," Pitt's manager tells PEOPLE, but "Brad has never even seen Valkyrie."

The uncharacteristically harsh remark was originally published in a wide-circulation weekly German magazine, and, as could be expected, was reprinted internationally. Problem was, it was never uttered.

Unfortunately, if you look at the vast majority of the amateur blogosphere, most are ignoring Pitt's statement decrying the rumor and instead they're going with the far juicier story that he dissed Cruise. Internet celebrity gossip columnists (among the lowest bottom-feeder scum of the Earth, IMHO) certainly don't let a little thing like truth stand in their way. Pitt and Cruise, who starred together in the classic film adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, are actually good friends.

Valkyrie, shot on a budget of $75 million, has currently grossed well over $250 million worldwide. Kentuckian Tom continues to laugh all the way to the bank despite his detractors.

Voodoo Video

My weird/fringe/noir video store, Voodoo Video, led a brief but fizzy existence in 2003, occupying the filthy basement of the Sqecial Media building, 371 South Limestone, Lexington.

I've always been fascinated with the fundamental mechanics of stores, businesses and trades, and the veil of mystery that shrouds their true nature to the average citizen. This veil of mystery increases proportionally as one goes from a more rural area to an more urban one. When a man in a big city wants to start a business, he does market research, seeks investors for startup capital, studies locations, etc. in a process that sometimes takes years before actually opening the damn thing. But when a man in a rural area wants to open a business, he basically just hangs out his shingle and declares himself open for business, simple as that, done deal. I like that.

Although misinterpreted by metropolitan eggheads as a work of fiction, the Beverly Hillbillies TV program reveals the true face of Southern entrepreneurship. When Jethro wakes up one morning and decides he wants to be a fry cook, he immediately sets out to make it so - before the sun sets that day. And when he decides two weeks later that he's tired of that and wants to be a movie producer or a double-naught spy, he just does it. When Granny decides one morning to open a dental office in Mr.Drysdale's building, she simply paints a sign that says "Granny's Dentist Office" and voila, it's done, with precisely the same sort of occult magic worked by the Federal Reserve when it declares the intrinsic value of the American dollar merely on their say-so.

That these enterprises aren't necessarily "successful" in a linear financial sense is not the point. The Medium is indeed the Message, and the reward is indeed the trip, not the destination. (And even with its "business as performance art" mentality, my store still turned a profit. Suck on that, John Maynard Keynes.)


It was with that in mind that I envisioned Voodoo Video in late 2002. It opened in the dirty, moldy downstairs of the Sqecial Media building in Lexington in January 2003, and as with practically everything I've ever done in my life, it was done with very little forethought, planning, or preparation. Like my paintings, it was all about immediacy, action, results. "This is a video store because I say it is so shut up".


Shelves were hastily slapped together from the cheapest lumber available at Lowe's, and a small fortune was spent on hastily stocking the place with the weirdest possible uncommercial movies: obscure art films, low-budget amateur porn, shoddy indie productions donated by friends, grade-Z horror flicks, foreign films with and without subtitles (some without boxes, even), and the most obscure selections from the Something Weird catalog. We even put out for rental "found" VHS tapes from yard sales and Salvation Army stores, containing the family reunions of unknown persons and shows they taped off the TV twenty years ago. Also an old Burger King employee training video, and a 1984 videotape of a hotel lobby where someone left a static video camera turned on for almost two hours for seemingly no reason.


Many bands performed after-hours in the moist subterranean cellar, with concrete walls and flooring plus shelving of video boxes providing truly squidgy and unorthodox acoustics for performances. Among the bands that graced the store's floor were hardcore punk band Cadaver In Drag, trippy experimental combo Lemonmoonhome, and the interplanetary transgendered garage band The Crunchies (see image below).


We also started the "Voodoo Video Cheesecake Girls", a feature on our website in which we encouraged female customers (and sometimes employees) to pose nude, near-nude, or just plain sexily right there in the store. This lowbrow exercise in art photography was short-lived but extremely popular. A late-night "after hours" invitation-only burlesque show held there was also a success, and showed promise for bigger and crazier things to come, had the store stayed in business. This was the embryonic beginning of the Voraxium series of shows.

Needless to say, however, all this public nudity and punk rock didn't sit well with the religious coffeehouse that moved in upstairs towards the end of Voodoo Video's lifespan. The coffee house, its obnoxious owner, and his frightening zombie-like teenage lackeys made the entire building an insufferable place to be with their constant complaints. They held disruptive "Christian Rave" events and fire-and-brimstone preaching on the sidewalk out front, using Jed Smock-style tactics of insulting passersby and yelling at them that they're all going to Hell. These events were broadcast at ear-splitting wind-tunnel volume with a huge and expensive sound system. Fortunately, the switchbox for power to the entire building was in the basement, in my store. I'm not ashamed to say I took special glee in pulling that switch on them more than once.

After almost a year of Voodoo Video, I was ready to move on, though. What had been conceived as an extremely elaborate installation/prank had quickly morphed into a very real and functioning alternative video rental store, and I don't have the patience to actually become a shopkeeper. I wasn't painting as much as I should (my only major show that year was Desperate Telegrams at the Gallerie Soleil) and I was being pulled in other directions by my photography work and paralegal duties. So, at the apex of the store's greatness, I baffled everyone by putting a gun to the store's head and calling it quits. It was fun while it lasted, but I had bigger fish to fry.

International Mystery Writers Festival

Every year, the International Mystery Writers Festival is held in, of all places, Owensboro, KY. This year's festival runs from August 12th to the 16th. Their website says:

Mystery lovers worldwide are celebrating the International Mystery Writers' Festival. The Festival presents unique opportunities to discover plays, screenplays, and short stories professionally performed, published, or produced for the first time.

Discovering New Mysteries celebrates the best of new mystery works through an annual competition offering more than $20,000 in prize money. Audience members cast ballots during the festival and select the winners for The Angie Award categories. "The Angies" are named for the legendary Angela Lansbury, Kentucky's First Lady of Mystery 2007.

Among the luminaries who will be in attendance:

William Link - Award-winning writer-producer of TV shows such as Columbo, Murder She Wrote, The Bill Cosby Mysteries, Mannix, Ellery Queen, etc.

Sue Grafton - Louisville's own best-selling mystery chronicler. Grafton's many works include A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, and C is for Cookie. (Okay, I may have hallucinated that last one.)

David Breckman - Hollywood producer, director, and former Saturday Night Live writer, currently writing for the hit television series Monk, starring Tony Shalhoub.

Zev Buffman - The Tony-nominated Broadway veteran actually lives in Owensboro, and is the CEO of River Park Center.

Gary Sandy - Best known for playing Travis on WKRP in Cincinnati, Gary really is from the southern Ohio area and will be attending the Festival to take part in the "Live Radio Theatre" enactments.

1904 "Wizard of Oz" in Kentucky

Those of you who thought L. Frank Baum simply wrote The Wizard of Oz and then they made the 1939 movie out of it and that was that, don't know the half of it.

There are actually 40 "in-canon" Oz books, 14 of which were authored by Baum himself. There were five previous Wizard of Oz films (one of which was never released) prior to the 1939 version we all know and love. These present a bewilderingly fractal view of what we think of as the classic story of a girl, a dog, a scarecrow, a lion, and a tin man who seek an eccentric Wizard at the end of a yellow brick road. Most alien of all to modern-day fans would be the 1902 Broadway Musical that continued to tour the nation for many years after its NYC run.

According to the book Oz Before the Rainbow by Mark Evan Swartz, the touring version of the Hamlin-Baum-Tietjens production came to Louisville, Kentucky for a short engagement of just three days: February 15, 16, and 17, 1904. Because of the immense popularity of the Oz books and the musical, these shows were surely packed in attendance to the rafters.

What Kentuckians saw that night would be almost unrecognizable to anyone from our generation, or our parents' generation:

Instead of Toto the dog, Dorothy is accompanied by a giant talking cow named Imogene.

The Cowardly Lion is in a much more realistic lion-like costume, doesn't speak, and is only a very minor character.

Much of the story is taken up not by Dorothy's quest to get home, but by the misadventures of a waitress named Trixie Tryfle and her lover, King Pastoria II. (Pastoria rules Oz but also secretly works in an auto repair shop in Kansas.)

The Tin Man has a girlfriend named Cynthia Cynch, also known as The Lady Lunatic.

Dorothy is given three wishes, but strangely doesn't use any of them to wish herself back home. Instead, one is wasted accidentally, one is used to bring the dead Scarecrow back to life, and the other is used, inexplicably, to be able to learn the lyrics to a song that another unfamiliar character, Sir Dashemoff Daily, has written for his girlfriend, Carrie Barry.

Instead of being assisted by the Wizard and Glinda, Dorothy is sent to prison and about to be executed by beheading. A tornado arrives just in time to blow her back to Kansas.

Most of the songs - such as "Gooda-bye Fedora", "Johnnie I'll Take You", "Sammy", "The Lobster Song", "Must You?", "Pimlico Malinda", "Football", "Marching Through Georgia", "Nautical Nonsense (Hurrah for Baffin's Bay!)", and "The Tale of the Monkey" - had little or nothing to do with the storyline, and only served to stretch the proceedings out to sprawling lengths of sometimes over four hours.

In short, it's all nuts, completely freakin' nuts; so much so that it makes the Judy Garland movie seem positively drab and linear. Oh, to have been in the audience in Macauley's Theatre during those three nights!

Patricia Neal

An entry from our Voraxica blog:



Film star Patricia Neal was born in a little spot in the road in Kentucky called Packard, in Whitley County.


She went on to study drama at Northwestern University in Illinois, then found fame virtually right out of the gate. Her first film, 1949's John Loves Mary, she had a small part playing opposite Ronald Reagan, and by only her second film, 1949's The Fountainhead, she was already headlining as a star with Gary Cooper. The Fountainhead was based on the novel by the always controversial Ayn Rand, who also wrote the screenplay for this adaptation herself.

During the shooting of The Fountainhead, Neal began having an affair with the then-married Cooper. She was 23, he was 48. Neal became pregnant by Cooper and had an abortion. Their secret relationship went on until 1950, when Cooper's family got wind of it somehow. His wife sent Neal a threatening telegram, and his daughter berated and spat on Neal in a public event.

In 1951, playwright Lillian Hellman introduced Neal to Roald Dahl, the British author who would go on to write Man from the South in 1959, James and the Giant Peach in 1961 and Charlie & the Chocolate Factory in 1964.


Neal and Dahl married in 1953, and their marriage produces five children. Unfortunately, their household was an ill-fated one. In 1961 their infant son Theo was badly injured when a taxicab slammed into his carriage Neal was pushing. They lost a daughter to measles in 1962. In 1965 Neal herself suffered a series of brain aneurysms and was in a coma for weeks. It took her three years to recover, with Dahl patiently helping her rebuild herself.

In 1983 Neal divorced Dahl when she discovered he had been having an affair with Felicity Crosland, a mutual friend. Whether or not Dahl reminded her that she herself had been on the rebound from a very ugly extramarital affair with Gary Cooper when she met him, we can only wonder.

After that, Neal became extremely religious. She converted to Catholicism shortly after her split from Dahl, and later become a "born again" Christian. Today she is still very active in showbiz, at the age of 83.


Though she's best known for her appearances in the films Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Hud, for my money, her crowning glory is A Face in the Crowd. Here, she found herself at the center of one of the most important pieces of 20th century film history, in the Elia Kazan story of an evil and manipulative drifter (Andy Griffith) who - shock, shock, duh - becomes even more evil and manipulative after they mold him into a successful radio/television star with a cornpone Tennessee Ernie Ford-type program called "Cracker Barrel". Throw Walter Matthau, Tony Franciosa, Lee Remick, and Grand Ole Opry ventriloquist Rod Brasfield (pictured below) into the mix, and what a pip it was.



The film Psyche 59 is another especially noteworthy notch in the Neal oeuvre. It's a peculiar noir-ish psychological drama that was way ahead of its time, way too dark and way too weird for audiences of that era. Neal's character suffers psychosomatic blindness due to emotional/sexual trauma (I betcha Pete Townshend saw this movie before he wrote Tommy), and makes a nearly-naked appearance in a scene that somehow amazingly got past the censors of the day.

It also starred Samantha Eggar (The Collector, Walk Don't Run, Doctor Dolittle) and Nazi concentration camp survivor Curd Jürgens (The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, The Spy Who Loved Me, and the Wernher Von Braun bio-pic I Aim At The Stars).


In one eerily prophetic scene in Psyche 59, Neal's character is asked what's wrong with her vision. She replies, "There's nothing wrong with my eyes. It's in my head. Pressure on the brain center from a brain hemorrhage."

The Kentucky Monolith

The indefatigable anomaly-watcher William R. Corliss, in the Jan-Feb 1997 edition of his newsletter Science Frontiers, tells of a fascinating instance of life imitating art, Kubrick-style:

T.M. Olsen has investigated a bizarre observation from Kentucky. The date was September 28, 1996.

"Vance C. Johns, a secondary-school horticulturist, lives a rural area east of Louisville. Sometime between midnight and 1:30 AM, he got up to use the bathroom and saw a strange object outside his bedroom window. His wife, Florence, keeps the drapes open on the center of three picture windows, and he immediately opened the other drapes for a better look. The open view through the windows, which face south, is of a grass lawn sloping to a curved driveway. This 0.8-hectare cleared area is devoid of trees and other objects. Two large, automatic floodlights illuminate the ground around the entire house, and under a full moon, it was bright enough to read a book. The night was clear and about 10°C with no noticeable wind. No aircraft were in the area.

"At a distance of 14 m (measured after the incident) from his vantage at the bedroom window, there appeared on the lawn an object resembling a common railroad cross tie but oriented in a vertical position, with one end on the ground. It was matte black, 2 1/2 - 2 3/4 m high and 30- 35 cm wide. The sides were smooth with a well-defined corner joining the west and north sides. The view of the top showed the west and north top edges were also welldefined. The object appeared solid but did not cast a shadow.

"As Johns watched in astonishment, the object began moving toward the front porch. He could clearly see two sides of it as it approached. As the top passed under the eaves, the bottom bent backwards over the bushes which border the 71-cm high porch, in the manner of a man's leg bending at the knee, forming an obtuse angle. At this point, he lost sight of it, grabbed his .38 handgun, and quickly went to the windows
on the other three sides of the house, hoping to again see the object in the ample illumination, but without success. Although the object had moved very slowly from its original position, total viewing time was less than ten seconds. There was no sound at any time during the sighting."

When Johns reported the above incident, he was advised to see the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which an eerie monolith is a key player. Johns did so and commented that said monolith "blew his mind." It was just what he had seen, except that it was wider and shorter.

(Olsen, Thomas M.; "Sighting Alert," report, 1996)

Comment. We can understand why the monolith of 2001 appeared: (1) to protohumans; (2) to lunar explorers; and (3) in orbit around Jupiter; but WHY in Kentucky in 1996?

After I happened upon this story last night, my first thought was to track down Mr. Johns and press him for further information past the sketchy details provided in this account. Unfortunately, it turns out Mr. Johns passed away in September 2003, and with that the door has seemingly closed on this mysterious incident.

Yarmuth offended by Michael Jackson tribute

Wow, I finally found something I disagree strenuously with Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth on. Mr. Yarmuth recently complained about the moment of silence held in honor of Michael Jackson last week on the House floor.

Yarmuth is quoted thusly on Politico:

"I thought it was outrageous," Yarmuth told a Los Angeles radio station Monday. "In my two and a half years, we’ve never done that for anybody else who’s a celebrity. We’ve done it for former members, and that’s about it, for former members who’ve passed away. … I basically got up and walked back to the cloakroom and got off the floor, because I just thought it was totally uncalled for and over the top."

Did I say "disagree strenuously"? Well, actually, I couldn't really care less if a bunch of old guys in Washington bow their heads in silence for MJ or not - it's mainly the principle of the thing, that Yarmuth felt it necessary to express umbrage about paying even this token respect to the most popular showbiz icon of our times since Elvis.

(Meanwhile, you can read my own cranky thoughts in defense of Michael Jackson's life and times here on the Transylvania Gentlemen blog.)

Versailles in Hollywood

In the summer of 2004, Versailles, KY was swarming with Hollywood film crewmembers for the shooting of Elizabethtown, a film directed by Cameron Crowe and produced by Kentuckian Tom Cruise.

An abandoned downtown athletic center was remodeled to look like an antiquated bait shop, and the facade of Woodford County Senior Citizens Center was transformed into a mom-n-pop candy shop.

Other notable Kentucky scenes were shot in Louisville's Cave Hill Cemetery and Brown Hotel, and in Elizabethtown itself.


Versailles also figured prominently in another Kentucky-themed film: Kurt Russell's Dreamer.

Goodbye, Analog World

Broadcast television will cease to exist today in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and everyplace else in these here United States.

But even after years of public service announcements, even after millions of taxpayer dollars spent on discount coupons to help people buy digital converter boxes, and even after President Obama extending the deadline to make sure that everyone's on the same page, there are still thousands of Kentuckians who are not ready for the jump. Many people still don't even know about this analog-to-digital bait-and-switch.

And they're the lucky ones.

Digital waves are what computers and other electronic devices use to transmit information, but analog waves are how our ears hear. The usage of certain digital waves can have the unnatural effect of reaching the brain without being detected by the ear. There's been a growing murmur on the internet "tinfoil hat" conspiracy circuit about the possibilities of digital audio and video as having the potential to be the ultimate brainwashing medium.

And I do believe they just might be right. Dr. Christine Aschermann warns of "significant negative health consequences" of increased RF radiation associated with digital broadcasting. Among the side effects she reports: "constant headaches, pressure in the head, drowsiness, sleep problems, inability to think clearly, forgetfulness, nervous tensions, irritability, tightness in the chest, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, depressive mood, total apathy, loss of empathy", and more.

According to a paper you can read on Scribd, a Pentagon psychotronics project called SSSS (Silent Sound Spread Spectrum) has already been in place for many years, only waiting for its moment to arise, with the advent of a Government-enforced all-digital world. That time would seem to be right about now.

The SSSS technology comes from US Patent #5,159,703, "Silent Subliminal Presentation System", October 27, 1992.

Researcher Judy Wall makes some wild claims: "There is evidence that the US Government has plans to extend the range of this technology to envelop all peoples, all countries. This can be accomplished, is being accomplished, by utilising the nearly completed HAARP Project for overseas areas and the GWEN network now in place in the US." NEXUS Magazine also carried a great article about Silent Sound in 1998, available here.


But even if it's all true (and it probably is), It doesn't take suspicion of an NSA mind-control conspiracy to get me to shun TV, I can do that just fine by myself.

"Reality" shows like Southern Belles Louisville and America's Next Top Model will turn your mind to mush and lower your IQ by several points just by watching such crap - no techno-brainwashing necessary. So-called "news channels" that consist of little more than the barking of insults and namecalling (yes, I mean both MSNBC and FOX when I say that) will reduce your empathy and heighten your apathy just fine, without any need for billion-dollar DARPA Pentagon gizmos. And with the barrage of loud obnoxious advertisements like that Shamwow guy, most cable television is, for me, nearly unwatchable.

My best advice is to get away from your TV sets and go outside. (Of course, my other best advice would be to also get off the internet. I never denied being a hypocrite.)

David Carradine in Lexington

One of the all-time greats of Hollywood, David Carradine, best known for his roles in the Kung Fu TV series and the Kill Bill films, recently left this world on an odd note.

On June 4, 2009, he was found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok, Thailand. A police official said Carradine was found hanging by a rope in the room's closet with his hands tied together and a shoelace tied around his genitals. According to ABC News, crime scene photos show the actor was wearing what appear to be fishnets and a wig at the time of death, and of course the media/internet merchants of negativity are having a ball with that bit of gossip.

Authorities are still trying to determine whether or not foul play may have been involved. (Considering that his wrists were tied together, seems like a no-brainer to me.)

Artifact Attic has recently unearthed footage of David Carradine performing with his band at the Midwest Entertainment Industry Conference in Lexington, KY, 2003. Click here to see it.

Shirley Ardell Mason

The name "Sybil" has become synonymous with multiple personalities ever since the book of that name by Flora Rheta Schreiber, which in turn became a hit movie in 1976 starring Sally Field.

The real-life Sybil, whose experiences were fictionalized in the book and film, was based on the life of Shirley Ardell Mason. Both the book and the films used the name Sybil Isabel Dorsett to protect her identity, but thereafter her real identity came out.


According to Wikipedia, Shirley Mason had at least 16 different personalities:

Sybil Isabel Dorsett: a depleted person; the waking self.

Victoria Antoinette Scharleau: nicknamed Vicky; a self-assured, sophisticated, attractive blonde; the memory trace of Sybil's selves.

Peggy Lou Baldwin: an assertive, enthusiastic, and often angry pixie with a pug nose, a Dutch haircut, and a mischievous smile.

Peggy Ann Baldwin: a counterpart of Peggy Lou with similar physical characteristics; she is more often fearful than angry.

Mary Lucinda Saunders Dorsett: a thoughtful, contemplative, maternal, homeloving person; she is plump and has long dark-brown hair parted on the side.

Marcia Lynn Dorsett: last name sometimes Baldwin; a writer and painter; extremely emotional; she has a shield-shaped face, gray eyes, and brown hair parted on the side.

Vanessa Gail Dorsett: intensely dramatic and extremely attractive; a tall redhead with a willowy figure, light brown eyes, and an expressive oval face.

Mike Dorsett: one of Sybil's two male selves; a builder and a carpenter, he has olive skin, dark hair, and brown eyes.

Sid Dorsett: one of Sybil's two male selves; a carpenter and a general handyman; he has fair skin, dark hair, and blue eyes.

Nancy Lou Ann Baldwin: interested in politics as fulfillment of biblical prophecy and intensely afraid of Roman Catholics; fey; her physical characteristics resemble those of the Peggys.

Sybil Ann Dorsett: listless to the point of neurasthenia; pale and timid with ash-blonde hair, an oval face, and a straight nose.

Ruthie Dorsett: a baby; one of the lesser developed selves.

Clara Dorsett: intensely religious; highly critical of the waking Sybil.

Helen Dorsett: intensely afraid but determined to achieve fulfillment; she has light brown hair, hazel eyes, a straight nose, and thin lips.

Marjorie Dorsett: serene, vivacious, and quick to laugh; a tease; a small, willowy brunette with fair skin and a pug nose.

The Blonde: nameless; a perpetual teenager; has blonde curly hair and a lilting voice.

After the events depicted in the book and film, Mason moved to Lexington, KY. In Lexington she operated an art gallery out of her home taught classes in painting. After Mason died of breast cancer on February 26, 1998, her legacy as an artist continues with the Lexington-based sybil.biz website.