Mr. Hudson

Upstairs Downstairs vs. Downton Abbey

 The last week I have been watching Downton Abbey, an Upstairs Downstairs-type of series. It is set in the same Edwardian era as the original early 70s show.
The new series is cast well, with high production values. It is more operatic than Upstairs Downstairs was, episodes being more dependent on the  overall narrative. The setting is more romantic, taking place in a large country estate, rather than a London townhouse.



With all the drama between the servants and their masters, butlers and lordships, I cannot help but recall the greatest butler of them all, Gordon Jackson in his role as Mr. Hudson in the original series.  With just a silent shift of his lips, he was able to express concern or disdain. Jackson died eons ago it seems (1990), but the expressions and opinions of the Scottish butler remain indelible and fresh in my mind.

I feel that we know the thoughts of Mr. Hudson far more than those of the butler in the modern series. Is this a tribute to the writers and actors of Upstairs Downstairs, or simply the way things have changed for me as a viewer? I saw the old show over the course of many years, gradually, growing up with it.  The modern show is something seen quickly, over the course of a week or two.

When we consume modern media in such a way, is it no wonder that it does not impress and move us in the same way that earlier works did?

Charles Bronson, the Quiet One

While watching the wonderful Vincent Price film House of Wax (1953) the other night, I noticed an oddly familiar face playing a deaf mute named Igor, a staff member of a wax museum studio. The face bothered me; darned if it didn't look like Charles Bronson.

When I investigated, sure enough it was the great quiet tough guy, in his very early movie career (then named Charles Buchinski), before he assumed what would be his stage name. As I figured, Bronson has been gone for a while, dying in 2003. He's one of those late actors that you just don't hear about anymore, unlike tough guys Lee Marvin or Robert Mitchum, who, despite being dead, live on as muses or idols for a certain type of musician or artist (Tom Waits, Jim Jarmush, etc.) 

Though a great icon, Bronson fell a bit on the wrong side of the spectrum. His features were unusual; they were rugged but not concurrently seizing in the correct way (a hint of the asiatic perhaps?) His roles tainted him for the young and hip, dark leather-wearing band crowd (for whom a special political perfume is needed.) He had too much the whiff of rightist vigilantism about him, his most famous role being the protagonist in Death Wish.

And by extension, dare I say... Bernie Goetz, the real life vigilante. This type of vigilantism, once the stuff of folk-hero mythos and TIME magazine covers, does seem somewhat dated. It hasn't aged well in the following decades, what with a changed context of "going postal", Oklahoma City, Militia Movement, and a litany that forever grows.

But back to the early Bronson, mute Igor:

Directors of the Vincent Price horror films really had fun. One ingenious trope is that of the living head amid the inanimate, such as Igor holding watch amid wax dummies. Another great use of this was in a much later film, Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1973), wherein death-head scarred Vincent Price coyly watches Egyptoligists in a tomb, camouflaged as he is by lifeless skeletons.

Sandy Duncan, urban-mythic Cyclops

When one can't chart the history of associations that have allowed him to arrive at a thought, it's called the Sandy Duncan Effect. I found this out recently--she just popped into my mind, the same way she has done for fellow bloggers. We don't know why we think of her, we just do.

She is a still-living personality that I seldom consider. This makes her image all the more vivid, lit in front of a David Lynchian purple velvet curtain in the spotlight of the mind's eye.

It could be argued that Peter Falk is the patron saint of this blog. His character Columbo has inspired a great deal of entries, being that the series has compelled me to google a panoply of character actors. I revere Falk. His cyclopian aspect makes him all the more special. His Columbo character has keen insight, Odin-like. He is locked into an archetype, like the original cyclopses, seeds of  Uranus' castration.





I assumed there must be some such aura surrounding Sandy Duncan, one of the first one-eyed celebrities I became aware of. Well I remember the fascination, within the knotty-pined and cane-covered TV world of childhood family rooms, when my mother related to me the story of Duncan's cyclopia. Doubtless Duncan was performing in a variety show, full of sugar-sequined curtains, when mom explained that the actress had had a brain tumor, requiring the removal of her eye, to be replaced by a glass eye. It was astonishing; there must be a divine feminine force that propelled her glass eye into a field of high performance, looking so real. Unlike the expressions of her male counterparts, (think of the glare of Sammy Davis Jr., or Peter Falk's inscrutable, swart pebble under his crusty brow)  Duncan's eye was amazingly life-like.

How do such urban myths evolve? Now I have found out it is hogwash. Sandy Duncan never had a glass eye. We may bemoan much of this digital age, but at least the new access to information makes these urban myths easy to bust. Some of the magic is lost, too.

 I look back to my times in school, hearing the strange pronouncements of teachers, who  sometimes built whole lessons--neigh, whole units-- around pixie dust.
My favorite of these fallen myths is the one woven into my memories of Social Studies, maybe 8th Grade. With the look of a pastor, voice full of awe and portent, our beloved teacher relayed the sad story of  Kitty Genovese, victim of modern society. She screamed for help in the Babylon of New York (remote and dark city of imagination, decadent as the original Babylon of mustached caliphs and sword-dancers.) Her cowardly neighbors lay in bed, callously ignoring her, letting her die. This story has since been shown to be inaccurate.

 Now, parents and authorities have lost their power to myth-shape.

I find that the certainties of childhood have largely fallen through the thin ice. Myths develop because of our wish for certainty, for explanation.

Grandson of Psychoanalysis

You know you've missed something sometime somewhere when you are reading a newspaper of a beloved or at least well-known figure, and there is a steady use of verbs in the past tense. And it's not an obituary--what's going on here...

Such a thing happened to me the other day, when reading about Lucian Freud, the British figure painter known for jarring portraits, obsessively detailed and full of impasto, paradoxically. Included in any  paragraph about the painter, usually set within the first sentence, would be the note that he was Sigmund Freud's grandson. When I wikied him, I didn't feel too weird about his lateness, seeing that he had died only a year ago.

 (It wasn't like others, such as Ed Bradley, 60 minutes newscaster, who had been gone for eons before I found out about it. As an expat I sometimes experience holes of knowledge, being somewhat removed from my culture, even though I am fairly plugged into the world.)

What jarred me, more than missing the younger Freud's death, was reading that he was 88 years old! My word... I had been laboring under the idea that he was part of that younger generation, the rock stars that had reshaped the world--Beatles, David Hockney, that sort--the mod squad. Sure, all of them are getting older, Mick Jaggerish in their leathered skin... but getting up into the late 80s? The upper years, wherein grandmas survive tenaciously? This age seems more fit for Sigmund Freud's son, but his grandson already? Is the father of psychoanalysis so far back there in the grainy era? Are we not still enjoying all the things Freud made possible or informed--Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, cartoons, surrealism, (photoshopping) Sci-Fi B movies... Time is really marching on!

Rodney King

Rodney King takes me back to NY in the early 90s, when a feeling of martial law engulfed the city during one evening. The city was battening down the hatches, as were other cities, fearing contagion of the riots then incinerating LA. It turned out that NY remained calm, with nary a fatality. I seem to remember one Korean shop worker was killed, but that would have been a standard statistic, when the city was a rougher place than it is today (homicide rates were around 3,000 per year.)

The King riots might be the last of the great racial/class riots of the US. Though still breaking out in Europe (remember last summer's U.K. hoody mayhem) this phenomenon has cooled down much stateside, since it began in the 1960s. In one way the King riots signaled the end of an era, but in another way, his video-captured beating brought in a new era.  The ubiquity of camera phones and Youtube have probably altered police behavior.

I was surprised to read of King's death. Just a month or two ago I had heard an interview with him, when he was publicizing his memoir. He seemed a happy man, mellowed by time generously compensated, thanks to a civil suit. His swimming pool death is eerily familiar--seems that many LA celebrities, or their spouses, die this way.

Rich history of childhood ghouls

Recently I read Kirk Demarais' wonderful book, Mail-order Mysteries (Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads) and was jolted to see several artifacts long forgotten. Perhaps the best was the Ghoul, a mask not thought of for perhaps 40 years.

This book explains dozens of fascinating things I only imagined--because I was a kid of too modest means, never being able to afford anything in the advertisements at the time. (Heck, I couldn't even afford the comic books in which these ads were printed, relishing the one or two comics my Grandma would buy for me each summer, before a camping trip!)

But some of the things in this book I actually saw and touched in childhood, finding treasures in my grandparents' basement. This place held a tremendous, intoxicating pull for me, for it offered a window into the world of of my uncle and father's childhood or teen years in the 1960s, a rich place. Literally rich, apparently. They evidently had had access to resources enough to have purchased things like this Ghoul Mask in their youth.

I had a good childhood, but in retrospect I see that it was probably more puritan, more modest than the generation before me. (This perhaps steeled me for the age of austerity that grinds on endlessly year after year, thanks to factors of globalization and technology. Are we hapless zombies or potato sack-wearing somnambulists, stumbling in the great "race to the bottom?") 

Not only were my means more modest, I suspect that my mother would have forbade much of the grotesque and muscular expressions, the monsters of the early 60s youth culture. A perfect example is this mask, the Ghoul, made by Topstone Company of Connecticut. Holy Mackerel--can you imagine something like this coming out of CT today?

Though I can't recall the exact moment I discovered this mask in the basement, I can imagine that I probably thought it first a slightly crusty rag, as I withdrew it from the corner of a drawer of closet, sharing the sweet dust of Outer Limits cards or gumball charms. Unfurling the rubber, I would have discovered this thing was a ghastly mask, a magical thing. It was scary enough just to handle, with its texture of mummified skin, in some places flaccid, in others, crusty, the latex aging. I think I scared the bejezuss out of my younger brother when I wore it (or was it the reverse, when he wore it?) Who knows what happened to it?

Thanks to books, the Internet, and eBay, I can see it again, rekindling a moment of wonder and horror long dormant.

Dick Clark

Here's a rare collector's item from yesteryear, inspired by the B-movie spate of "I was a teenage" movies of the 50s/60s.

I heard of Dick Clark's death last week, and was propelled into the multiverse, experiencing Art Bell's  phenomenon of the Nelson Mandela Paradox. (The experience of being sure that such and such a person is dead in one's familiar universe; when hearing that the person is alive, or has just died, it gives you a jolt,  giving question to your firm place in time and space.)

This phenomenon happens most relative to personages with whom you have little strong association--just neutral bits of culture. Such is the case with Clark, representative of tribal youth culture and its  artifacts.