Culture Curator

For Halloween, a Carol Burnett Show tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. I wanted to see “Rebecky,” their spoof on Rebecca, as I recently read the book and watched the 1940 Hitchcock adaptation, but tragically, I could not find it.

Will It Come to This?

I came across this delightful comic strip while searching the Seattle Times archive for issues mentioning the Titanic, both before and after the sinking on the morning of April 15, 1912. The comic appeared in the evening edition of April 15, when reporting on the disaster was still tragically misinformed. The headlines in the upper left of the full page relay a surreal version of events.

TITANIC, DAMAGED BY BERG, SINKING; PASSENGERS SAFE

Vessels Towing Largest Ship in World Racing for Shallow Water to Beach Liner Before She Goes Down.

Wireless Averts Terrible Disaster

Carpathia Takes Off 1,470 Travelers on Board Unfortunate Craft--Eminent Persons in Number.

At the time these words were being printed, the Titanic lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and approximately 1,500 people had died.

I like to think that there’s an alternate universe in which the reported outcome is the real one. Perhaps in another universe, acrobatic feats were the dance craze of ‘29 and breakdancing caught on in 1950.

(Between the jumpsuit and the possible breakdancing, that’s not a bad prediction for the ‘70s--except the people would be Black youth instead of white adults. Also, what exactly was the artist afraid it would come to? That dancing would be fun? Spot the difference: the people in 1912 are very happy doing their foolish dances.)

Our First Public Parks: The Forgotten History of Cemeteries | The Atlantic

Before 1831, America had no cemeteries. It’s not that Americans didn’t bury their dead--just that large, modern graveyards did not exist. But with the construction of Mount Auburn Cemetery, a large burial ground in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the movement to build cemeteries in America began....

Vincent & Frankenweenie

This video showcases two of Tim Burton’s early works:

Vincent (1982)

Burton wrote and directed this stop-motion short while employed as an animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation. Drawing inspiration from Dr. Seuss and Edgar Allen Poe, the film tells the story of a 7-year-old suburban boy who wants to be like Vincent Price. The end product has a very Gorey-esque feel.

Price, who provided the narration for the project, reportedly called the tribute, “the most gratifying thing that ever happened. It was immortality--better than a star on Hollywood Boulevard.”

Burton has compared 7-year-old Vincent’s melodramatic fantasies to his own experience as a child in Burbank, CA.

Growing up in suburbia, in an atmosphere that was perceived as nice and normal (but which I had other feelings about), [B-horror] movies were a way to certain feelings, and I related them to the place I was growing up in.... I remember when I was younger, I had these two windows in my room, nice windows that looked out on to the lawn, and for some reason my parents walled them up and gave me this little slit window that I had to climb up on a desk to see out of.... So I likened it to that Poe story where the person was walled in and buried alive [“The Cask of Amontillado”].

Source: Animation Worldwide Network

Frankenweenie (1984)

Before Frankenweenie became an animated feature-length film in 2012, it was a live-action short starring Shelley Duval, Daniel Stern, and Barret Oliver of The NeverEnding Story. The film is considered to be both a parody of and homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and specifically alludes to James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation of the story.

Olivia Wilde Directs a Different Kind of Sex Scene in her film ‘Booksmart’ | The Off Camera Show

I think that this conversation demonstrates the potential for diversity in TV and film production roles, especially directing, to revolutionize the medium--not only because diverse creators will tell different stories in new ways, but because they will challenge accepted conventions around how things get made.

The Off Camera Show is full of great conversations like this, and it’s one of many YouTube channels that I follow on the topic of TV and film. (They also have full episodes available on Netflix.) Rather than share those channels here piecemeal, I’ll just create a list to be updated periodically.

How America Lost Its Mind | The Atlantic

Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.

... In other words: Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

This article is a little outdated (it's from 2017), and there are aspects of it that I could quibble with (hints of ethnocentrism and paternalistic attitudes toward “developing countries"), but I still think of it every time I see strains of mysticism and pseudoscience perpetuated online: the insidious world of wellness claims; the words "natural” and “chemical” posed as antonyms, with a halo over “natural” and a skull and crossbones over “chemical”; the similar perversion of the term “detox”; any citation or content sourced from the “Environmental Working Group”; sincere references to the usefulness of astrology; the “law of attraction” and other feel-good gibberish. I’m even annoyed by relatively innocent low-stakes nonsense like MBTI tests and those stupid celebrity polygraph videos.

Obviously, there are varying degrees of belief, and plenty of people enjoy these things with a grain of salt. Even when the belief is full-blown, it’s tempting to see it as harmless. In isolation, it probably could be. But the qualities that enable that kind of belief--intense suggestibility, uncompromising suspicion paired with equally uncompromising faith, refusal to accept contradictory evidence, or an absence of evidence--are the qualities that make people susceptible to manipulation and conspiracy theory of every kind.

Anyone who knows how to appeal to your proclivities and anxieties can take advantage of you. That’s why most of the things I mentioned--from "wellness” marketing to Myers-Briggs personality tests to The Secret--end in piles of cash for their purveyors. Pliable minds are profitable minds. This is true whether the goal is material wealth or social influence.

Given that we have more information, and more misinformation, available to us than ever, what you know is less important than how you know it. The world is full of contradictions and complicated realities, and it can be difficult to get at some semblance of truth. As such, the pursuit of absolutes and easy answers only tends to lead us further away from it.

Related links:

[1] In this relevant video, food scientist Ann Reardon debunks a popular “fake food” video with far more patience than I could have managed.

[2] When I was reading about the “NASA’s trying to take away our astrological signs!” freakout of 2016, I came across this headline from a site called AstroStyle: “Your Star Sign Is Still The Same: Here's What NASA Got Wrong.” Thanks for the laugh of the century, AstroStyle.

[3] Of course, logic and reason are not ironclad concepts and, too often, white men have viewed themselves as their gatekeepers. Here’s a fantastic article on “the magical thinking of guys who [claim to] love logic.”

Beyond the Ghost Stories of the Winchester Mystery House | HouzzTV

This is an interesting look at some of the aesthetic elements and engineering features of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, CA. It’s nice to see a treatment of the house that isn’t sensationalized for once. I feel lucky to have grown up in the area and been able to tour it in person several times.

I grew up with the legend of a shadowy and disturbed Sarah Winchester, putting her inexhaustible resources toward unending construction on her house as an appeasement to the restless ghosts of people killed with Winchester rifles. It wasn’t until recently that I learned how little basis this narrative has in historical fact. An article in SFGate cites Colin Dickey’s book, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places.

The legend of Sarah Winchester...combines our “uneasiness about women living alone, withdrawn from society” and “the gun that won the West and the violence white Americans carried out in the name of civilization.”

“It's a compelling story, perhaps, because it's one in which Sarah Winchester is punished for her transgressions," Dickey writes. “...We've projected shame on her."

Neil Gaiman: ‘Good Omens feels more apt now than it did 30 years ago’ | The Guardian

Although he couldn’t find somewhere to put it in the TV show “that wouldn’t have sounded nightmarishly didactic,” he’s still attached to a line from the book about how “you could find more grace than in heaven and more evil than in hell inside human beings, and the fucker of it is that very often it’s the same human being, and that was sort of the point of view that Terry and I went in with when we wrote the book, and it’s still strangely true, only now he’s dead and I’m some kind of lunatic elder statesman.”

She was the “queen of the mommy bloggers.” Then her life fell apart. | Vox

In the time that [blog creator Heather] Armstrong had been absent from her site, bloggers had been almost wholly replaced with social media stars who relied on Instagram to gain a following. The word “influencer” had taken over, and quickly. Bloggers had risen to fame thanks to deeply personal posts; Instagram personalities operated in a much more visual medium, relying on photos of cute kids and beautiful homes for likes.

“The biggest stars of the mommy Internet now are no longer confessional bloggers. They’re curators of life. They’re influencers,” the Washington Post wrote in 2018. “They’re pitchwomen. And with all the photos of minimalist kitchens and the explosion of affiliate links, we’ve lost a source of support and community, a place to share vulnerability and find like-minded women, and a forum for female expertise and wisdom.”

The “mommy” sphere isn’t one I’ve ever been interested in, but the trend described here has prevailed in all types of blogging. Long-form personal writing has largely been supplanted by short-form text, and text in general has given way to pictures and video.

The key difference is that, in writing, your life can really only be as interesting as you are. You can’t enhance it with a high quality camera, the right angles, or a nice filter. You can’t pass off affluence, aesthetic, or a symmetrical face for a personality. Writing immerses people in your perspective--your inner, lived experience--whereas visual media are all about the optics of your life relative to an observer.

Writing is an interpretation of what is, and can help you relate your reality to someone else’s. Instagram photos and YouTube videos often present an idealized reality that leads to negative self-comparison, which creates an aspiration, which in turn encourages spending to rectify the sense of inadequacy.

It’s not surprising that one is conducive to community-building while the other amounts to a lot of advertising. In the past, banner ads might have accompanied content. Now the content is the advertising. An “influencer’s” job, after all, is to influence people toward a certain lifestyle, generally through the acquisition of certain products. Their online life is seamlessly integrated with sponsored posts, product placements, and affiliate links.

Of course, no medium is ever all good or all bad, and old-school blogging and modern social media are not polar opposites. Like today’s influencers, some bloggers did make lucrative careers out of converting their lived experience to online content. And like anything created for consumption by an audience, blogging could act as a form of personal branding. My own writing today couldn’t be further from spontaneous; if it’s worth writing, it’s worth obsessively editing. That’s my motto. I see my writing as authentic (another word I can’t use now without cringing), but it is a highly crafted form of self-expression.

Today’s social media can be as confessional and cathartic as early blogs; people still find solace and support in other people’s content. They can still develop a sense of friendship with people whose content they regularly engage with. (Often expressed in the same disturbing sense of ownership over the details of creators’ lives, and the same sense of entitlement to new content. One-sided friendship is an illusion, and people sometimes forget that.) Communities still form around content creators, and subscribers can still find real-life friends through mutual fandom. (Though again, there is a difference between someone you consider yourself a fan of and someone you think of as a peer. A person who peddles merch constantly and charges you money in exchange for access and proximity to them is not your friend.)

The act of observing inevitably changes that which is being observed, and this applies to anything posted online, past and present. Old and new forms of social media share a lot of the same benefits and drawbacks, so maybe it’s all a wash in the end. But I really miss LiveJournal sometimes.