The Ullage Group’s eighth event will be a change for them.  John A. Keel, author of Jadoo, The Mothman Prophecies, and other books on unusual topics, died in July 2009.  Some of his friends and fans, including Doug Skinner, Anthony Matt, Lisa Hirschfield, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, and probably others, will mark the anniversary of his death with readings, audio and video clips, and other memorabilia from his long and sometimes unbelievable career.

It will all take place at the Jalopy Theatre, 315 Columbia St., in Brooklyn, Sunday, July 11, at 3 pm.  As usual, we charge a pittance (a $5 pittance), just to cover our expenses.  More info on Jalopy can be found at www.jalopy.biz, and about John Keel at www.johnkeel.com.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)    

“Card Game of Flags of the United Nations” was published by Russell — no date, I’m afraid.  That’s a commendably descriptive title, I think.  The countries are divided into a number of categories: Veto Countries, Island Countries, African Countries, etc.  The “CC” indicates that Mexico is one of the “Costume Countries.”

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Just do your work and don’t be lazy,
Like Giambattista Piranesi.

The only drawback of vegetarianism is always being preached at by ghouls.

All human speech is monkey chatter;
It makes no sense; it doesn’t matter.

A woman recently upbraided me for writing a song that didn’t rhyme. I tried to explain that not all verse needed to rhyme, but she didn’t listen. “It could have rhymed,” she snapped, “if you’d spent more time on it.”

The swan looks graceful on the lake;
Don’t drink the water in her wake.

Why are you taking a shower? That won’t pay your rent. What do you really do?

Although Filippo Marinetti
Wrote diatribes against spaghetti,
He still was known to fill his belly
With great amounts of vermicelli.
For strict consistency eludes
Those men containing multitudes.

Project: a phenakistascope made with bas-relief clay modeling, so it looks like claymation when spun. Or: simple basswood carvings (maybe painted).

My family kept feral cats in the yard. My mother refused to spay or worm them, since she believed they wouldn’t hunt mice if she did. Sometimes they hid under the car, and were killed when she pulled out of the driveway. She once told me brightly, “I’m surprised I don’t run over more of them.”

colliding calliopes

For all philosophy’s palaver,
We still end up as some cadaver.

(Posted by Doug Skinner.  The sketch is by Thackeray.) 

One of the unpleasant aspects of cinema is its passivity.  The movie is blasted at you, and there’s nothing to do.  You don’t have enough room to move, enough light to read, or enough quiet to carry on a conversation.  Alcohol — even a harmless beer — will be confiscated.  Food is available, but little that appeals to adults.

There are a number of gambits you can use if you do happen to find yourself trapped in a theatre.  One, of course, is to sleep.  In the classic radio show “Vic and Sade,” the writer, Paul Rhymer, has Vic defend the practice to Sade:  “I had a good time.  My dreams were pleasantly embroidered with the speeches of the people talkin’ on the screen.  ‘I adore you, Everett.’  ‘Try to understand, mother, that I can’t live without Cynthia.’  ‘Hands off that girl, Bernard Breen, or I’ll forget you only got one leg.’  The theatre was dark, my chair was comfortable, an’ the sweet breezes from electric fans bombarded me deliciously.  I got value for my twenty-five cents.”

Another technique was suggested by Robert Benchley, in the essay “Block That Plot!”, from his collection After 1903 –What?:  “In order to play the game it is necessary to come into the theatre in the middle of the picture…  The idea is to take a quick look at the characters on the screen, listen to what they are saying, and reconstruct what has gone before, along the most improbable lines…  You’d be surprised how often it works out to make sense.  At least, it keeps you guessing.”

Following these examples, I have some potentially useful suggestions for ludic interaction with the dialogue.

You could, for example, feign paranoia, and take each line as a personal message to you from God, or from some cartel of conspirators.  Along similar lines, you could imitate the remarkable Louis Wolfson, whose mental illness made him so hate his “mother tongue” that he had to translate all English words that he heard into cognate forms in other languages.  Or, you could adapt the exercise in Aleister Crowley’s LIBER III vel Jugorum, and slash your forearm with a razor whenever you hear the word “I” (or another word of your choosing).  This has nothing to do with Crowley’s original purpose, but will help to pass the time.

Devotees of General Semantics might also try de-Aristotlizing the dialogue by suppressing the verb “to be,” and rephrasing it all subjectively — silently, of course, so as not to wake your neighbors.

You could also work your visual imagination by picturing to yourself what the scene would look like if all the actors were fifty years older, or bears, or robots; or what might happen if a small pig trotted across the set, or ice crashed through the ceiling, or one of the actors started yawning uncontrollably.

I hope these ideas will be useful in your hour of need; best of luck.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)  

The “Bowling Card Game” (Ed-U-Cards, 1962) let you enjoy the sport without getting any exercise.  And you could enjoy some colorful early ’60s graphics as well.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

You should always wash the hand which
You will use to hold the sandwich.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who joke that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t; and those who don’t.

My father made breakfast with a stopwatch; so that the eggs, toast, and coffee would all be done at exactly the same time.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they quote the Bible.

The moth cannot resist the light;
Its children eat your pants at night.

A woman approached me on the subway platform. “Is that a ukulele?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Oh,” she said, “that’s a good instrument for children, or for people who find the guitar too daunting.” I explained that I preferred the uke to the guitar. “Oh,” she sneered, “maybe you should learn to be more tolerant.”

Recently, I went with friends to a bar, only to encounter a bouncer who wanted two forms of ID, which he also wanted to scan, so there would be a record of who was in the bar and when. We went elsewhere.

How convenient that the alphabet is in alphabetical order!

Excuse me, sir; I beg your pardon:
Please don’t do that in my garden.

Actually, it’s not “Notre Dame”; it’s “Votre.”

A harpy cannot play the harp,
Because her talons are too sharp.

(Posted by Doug Skinner.  The drawing is by Frank C. Papé.)

Built-Rite is responsible for the “Zoo Fun Card Game.”  There is no date, I’m afraid: just pictures of birds, fish, and mammals: on “New shaped cards — to fit the hands - easier to hold.”

(Posted by Doug Skinner) 

Sometimes mechanical reproduction is not the most accurate.  In the 1890s, the composer Erik Satie bought seven identical velvet suits, and wore nothing else for seven years. In photos, they look gray: his biographers duly noted that; a record of his music was even entitled “The Gray Velvet Gentleman.”  Later, scholars unearthed several color sketches by his friend Grass-Mick that showed the outfit as yellow: it just photographed as gray.

Here comes jolly Mr. Sun!
Won’t you wake me when he’s done?

picnics for nitwits

I never met a man who never met a man he didn’t like that I like.

Why did St. Francis have to preach to the birds? Did it ever occur to him that he might learn from them? 

On one occasion, I visited my family out in Oklahoma; and my father wanted to know what kind of beer I drank. I said Guinness, only to learn that he’d never heard of it. In fact, none of my family had; and they were quite hostile to me for drinking some weird foreign beer that nobody had even heard of.

When you cross that busy street,
Don’t forget to move your feet.

Project: a row of geared phenakistascopes, facing a long mirror.

Won’t someone help poor Dionysus?
He’s out of wine, and that’s a crisis.

Today, I heard a newscaster call Arlington Cemetery “Arlington Seminary.”

How very noisy is the bigot!
To hear him bellow, turn his spigot.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)   

“Cowboys and Indians” was published by Ed-U-Cards in 1960.  It featured soberly rendered illustrations of cowboys and Indians, six-shooters and tommyhawks — and one cowgirl.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

I recently obtained a copy of Joscelyn Godwin’s book Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World (Inner Traditions, 2009).  I mention it here so that I can plug it: it’s a wonderful overview of the 17th century savant, studded with 400 examples of his charts, maps, inventions, and other illustrations.  There’s been somewhat of a Kircher revival recently; this trove will fuel it.

Here, for example, is Kircher’s Parastatic Microscope: a glass disc, painted with small images, mounted in a wooden case.  The disc rotates; the images are viewed through a lens.  As Godwin points out, it’s much like a modern slide viewer.  And it comes close to providing a moving picture: all it needs is a shutter (like a film projector), or slits broken up with blackness (like a zoetrope or phenakistascope) to separate sequential pictures and trigger the persistence of vision.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)