Like many, I was disappointed by the quick fizzle of the Bigfoot Body hoax in Georgia.  I suppose I should wax explicit, and carefully explain that no, it’s not because I think Bigfoot is a real flesh-and-blood beastie, or because I was expecting, or even wanting, evidence.  The stories are real enough; and have their roots deep, deep in many cultures.  For whatever reason, homo sapiens tells tales of big hairy bipeds: Amerind sasquatches, Aussie yowies, Chinese yeren, Tibetan yetis.  That’s what hooks me.

The hoax is a delicate art; and, in the right hands, a thing of beauty.  Some hoaxes are just jokes — like Hugh Troy’s student stunt of stamping rhino prints around the Cornell campus.  Others are satirical, like the many mock “avant garde” poems and paintings by conservative artists.  But perhaps the richest genre is ostension.

Ostension — the manifestation of a myth — is part of the folk tradition: telling a story by action, rather than words.  The best of them — crop circles, photos of UFOs and lake creatures — are beautiful in themselves, and stir the magical thinking that feeds the myth to begin with.  The “thought photos” of Ted Serios are so lush and oneiric that you wish they were genuine.  The crop circles were so well designed and executed that many people insisted they couldn’t have been done by humans — even after multiple confessions.

The myth of Bigfoot (and his multi-culti counterparts) is that of primordial man: the wild man, the mountain man, the apeman.  It’s a romantic story.  The Patterson-Gimlin film pushed the right buttons: a few seconds of a free and elusive being; you wanted more.  So did the footprints in the snow of Mt. Everest.  So did an earlier Bigfoot Body, the Minnesota Iceman: frozen in a cake of ice, like a Siberian mammoth, glimpsed now and then in traveling carnivals.

But a gorilla suit, stuffed with offal and crammed into a jumbo cooler?  It was ugly; it was no fun to look at.  You didn’t want it to be true, and that’s fatal to a hoax.

So — I was disappointed.  It’s been a rough month; I was looking forward to a nice artful hoax.  Maybe next time.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

This stylish edition of the old game “Slap Jack” was published by Russell in 1935.  It was “A Big-Little Card Game,” and measured 1 5/8″ x 2 2/3″.  That must have called for precision slapwork.

(Posted by Doug Skinner) 

Facts Can Be Fun!

Interactive gadgets and gizmos to aid learning have been popular for decades, perhaps longer. Often used for the basics – ABCs, vocabulary, numbers, math, music, spelling, verb conjugation, and foreign languages, for example – they have been packaged as calculators and electronic devices, paper wheel charts, games, puzzles, wooden blocks, and computer software. For the most part, however, fact acquisition was until recently the province of simple mnemonics: multiplication tables, flashcards, and acronyms like ROY G. BIV (the seven colors of the rainbow); KPCOFGS (the Linnaean system of classification), and Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me (classification of stars).

Here is a neat little gizmo with which one could learn some basic facts about George Washington, “Father of his Country,” while also puzzling out how it worked: ultimately a dual lesson in history and simple physics. Can you guess how?

(click to enlarge the image)

To use this as a learning device, one must:

1) Open the card and read the informative fact-filled text on the inside left panel, keeping in mind the goal, which is to learn something about George Washington.

2) Test what you’ve learned. Turn and point the blue arrow on the right panel to a question of your choice. (In this case, “What was George Washington’s first job?”)

3) Try to answer the question on your own.

4) Check your answer by closing the card. The pointer will indicate the correct answer. Amazing!

Most facts of this kind – unless they are directly related to a conscious learning process – have now become reclassified as trivia. Maybe this is just as well; when will the fact that Washington became a surveyor when he was 16 ever come in handy? Then again, who can say where and when a fact that became lodged in the brain will spur the imagination?

Now that you know one more thing about George Washington, have you figured out the secret mechanism of the card?
n.b. This was a birthday gift from Doug Skinner, who knows how much I like low-tech educational gizmos.

(Posted by Lisa Hirschfield)

It’s Friday; another children’s card game comes from the box for your aesthetic pleasure.  “Crazy Faces,” a variation of that old favorite, “Crazy Eights,” was published by the E. E. Fairchild Corporation. It apparently came in two editions: one with the kid-TV host Captain Kangaroo on the cover, and one without.  All of the faces do, indeed, look crazy.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Let me add that the stories meant to amuse children often teach different lessons than the textbooks and tracts.  This toy magic lantern slide, for example, has an unusual moral: no dinner until you destroy the furniture.  Your teachers do not want you to emulate the pig; but every child will admire its inventiveness, envy its contentment, and prefer it as a role model to the dittoheads in the primers.

I don’t even think those apples belonged to the pig.  They do now.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

As a prelude to the Ullage Group’s next event, “Through the Blackboard,” and because we are entering the Back to School season, I’m presenting some education-themed ullage for your consideration. For me, the phrase “Back to School” always heralded the few short weeks when a kind of premature nostalgia for a summer gone too soon did battle with a growing excitement and eagerness for the new – new people, new experiences, new knowledge – just around the corner. In the blistering-hot Central Valley of California, the prospect of cooler fall weather (even though it never failed to arrive until the end of October) added to the pleasures of anticipation.

(School days long behind me, I still feel this way; I think it must result from 12 years of institutional conditioning, with an extra seven thrown in for good measure. This of course is the result of a 10-month school year. I’d be interested to know if people who had year-round schooling experience something similar.)

The promise of “new knowledge” can sometimes become a threat, of course. Ask any teacher: these days, curriculum and pedagogy are often rivers you can never step in twice. In the long view, the basics of what we are taught probably hasn’t changed much in the last couple of centuries, in theory anyway: the difference between right and wrong, the 3R’s, and Good Citizenship. But the specifics of what we learn, where we learn it, and how we learn it are always up for review. In public schools, after what turned out to be merely a hiatus, Creationism has returned to the stage as Intelligent Design; New Math and Phonics continue to vie with Back to Basics; and Multiculturalism and Language Immersion remain topics of controversy, to say nothing of Sex Education. Experiential Learning and Information Technology would seem to be the new kids on the block but group play has always provided the means to explore the imagination, build confidence, increase physical skills, and learn about cooperation, sharing, and who to steer clear of in the schoolyard. And, there have always been new gadgets and techniques for access to and retention of information: the slate, the primer, the slide-rule, the crib-note, and – let us not forget – the text book. (Most of these, however, didn’t promise eventual access to an unlimited source of porn.)

On that note, here is a prophylactic to more benign temptations in an early form, probably intended for home or Sunday school use. Click on the link below if you’d like to read the text.

the-moral-picture-book

(Posted by Lisa Hirschfield)

Ed-U-Cards was entrusted with the reponsibility of publishing the “Official 1964-65 New York World’s Fair Children’s Card Game.” There is, of course, a splendid Unisphere in the deck, but I thought you might enjoy the Astral Fountain.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

As we gape at the continuity and chaos of the world, a chance meeting draws our attention. One way to approach the ineffable is to consider the mismatched pairs that time and space have thrown together. Here’s one.

ERIK SATIE AND LE PÉTOMANE

Satie is sometimes depicted as a sort of musical monk, writing his radically simple pieces in poverty and solitude. But he was also a man of the theater, who composed music for many occasions: cabaret waltzes, satirical songs, Rosicrucian ceremonies, a Christian ballet, a Satanic play, a mass, a marionette opera, cubist ballets, dada spectacles, an experimental film — and much more.  He was out and about.

And when we think of Joseph Pujol, le Pétomane, we recall the photos of him, ass upturned, and marvel that fin de siècle Parisians flocked to see someone fart. But, of course, Pujol was also a man of the theater, and crafted a show.

We may not imagine Satie in Pujol’s audience.  But here he is, joking about one of Pujol’s specialties, in a letter to his brother (my translation, as usual):

To Conrad Satie

December 6, 1902

Me, I’ve got a bad sore throat, and nose; I also sometimes let out farts — in front of everyone, for example.

As soon as I’m alone in my admirable lodgings — a model of elegance — pow pow pow.

What’s that? the neighbors ask: it is your humble servant, who amuses himself by extinguishing the lamp with his behind.

Erik Satie

Pujol is also thought to have inspired Satie’s postcard (May 30, 1917) to Jean Poueigh, a critic who had panned Satie’s score for Parade: “…But what I do know is that you are an asshole — if I may say so, an asshole without music.”

I also like to think that Pujol inspired the contrabassoon part in Satie’s score for Cocteau’s aborted production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  You never know where the continuity and chaos will lead.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Look: a collection of props from the puppet shows Michael Smith and I performed back in the ’90s.  There’s the wishing well; there’s the mic from Cory’s club act; there are the signs from Kevin and Jason’s fort.  Ah, memories.

It’s from “The Puppet Show,” curated by Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; Terence Gower designed the survey of puppet artifacts, “Puppet Storage.”  The show also includes a number of Doug and Mike videos.  The catalogue is now in print; the exhibition is now on tour to Santa Monica, Honolulu, Seattle, and Houston.  And our invigorating DVD, Doug and Mike’s Adult Entertainment, is still available from 2nd Cannons.

I will join my cartoonist colleagues at Jim Hanley’s Universe (4 W. 33rd St., Manhattan), August 6, 6-8 pm, to sign copies of Danny Hellman’s beautiful new anthology, Typhon #1.  (See the previous bulletin for more info on this.)  Come meet the people who draw the funny pictures!

The next Ullage Group event, “Through the Blackboard,” is slated for September.  We will regale you with dubious science toys, questionable classroom material, the evolution of the school lunch, and other curiosities about education and indoctrination.  Details will follow.

The Ullage Group has acquired an overhead projector; we can now show transparencies, as well as slides, filmstrips, magic lantern slides, and DVDs.  John Keel also gave us the slide projector used in all those New York Fortean Society meetings way back when; we will use it responsibly.

Carmen Borgia and I play Jobim’s immortal “Boy From Ipanema” in Kron Vollmer’s new video, Pieces of the True T-Shirt.  A first cut was shown recently at Chashama.  May there be many more!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)   

“Contraband” was published by the British firm Pepys — no date, I’m afraid. The objective is to smuggle valuables through customs by bluffing and lying. Many of these games are just frivolous; it’s heartening to see one that also teaches a skill.  And please note the beautiful rendition of the ullage.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)