Carlos Allende, the most mysterious man

Carlos Allende was an enigmatic man who wittingly or unwittingly propelled the bizarre whispers of the Philadelphia Experiment into a wider public knowledge some decades ago. I had vaguely heard of him, due to my interest in conspiracy theories and the paranormal, but just now became enthralled after reading Berlitz's book about the Philadelphia Experiment.

The more Allende tried to disappear, the more he was hunted. The Navy published a book of his strange marginalia, or gloss-writing in a copy of Morris Jessup's UFO book. He seemed to be an unhinged outsider--but apparently the U.S. Navy was concerned about too many connections he drew to their advanced scientific projects.

Obviously I had to google him, to see what his fate had been. He died in Greeley, Colorado, in the summer of 1986. Allende had written about Albert Einstein's work on the Unified Field Theory, speculating that the physics had been applied by the Navy. (The Phili-Experiment was supposed to have been concerned with invisibility fields and teleportation.)

I can't really get my head around Unified Field Theory (unifying electromagnetism, gravity, and space-time), but I am struck with space intersecting with time. In the mid 80s I saw a fair amount of Greeley, the unprepossessing town where Allende lied low in his final years. In those years I attended the University of Denver, and often took the Greyhound bus to my grandparents in Laramie, Wyoming, spending some weekends. The bus would almost always be waiting or passing through dusty, frozen Greeley in the wee hours. The town was a transit point, a naked lightbulb lonely train whistle night town, a place in between, a netherworld passed through.  I was always happy to arrive at my destination, to drink buttermilk and hear a gentle tick of a clock on the bed stand.

Character Actors

Last month I bought Quinlan's Illustrated Directory of Film Character Actors at a used bookstore up in Oslo. It has proved a delight, inspiring this drawing. I won't mention who these guys are--I hope film buffs (especially B movie lovers) will recognize some of their mugs. I will hint that two are in the land of the living, both 74 years old now.

Quinlan's has a British style of clinical mercilessness, which makes for an entertaining read.  He has a knack for hyphenated adjectives, honing in subtly on particular qualities that a said actor displays in his specific roles. "fair-haired, blue-eyed actor...with carved lips, Frankenstein Eyebrows..."; or "Tall, spare, permanently-wizened, beak-nosed, small-eyed, bald, parrot-like..."

Though arranged alphabetically, the book is designed for thumbing through, with good photos of thousands of actors. It's a different mentality than we seem to have landed in recently, what with the IMDB, which requires that one knows the name of the actor first off, before researching. I do love web surfing, but it's also nice to have good reference books like this on hand. The book seems to be out of print, another internet casualty.

The Doctor

Yesterday one of the extremely old memories of childhood bubbled up in my head in the form of a bobble head doctor. I tend to think of my grandparent's basement a lot, the repository for so many memories. Not only my own memories, but those of the atomic culture of the time, c. 1960. 

The basement, where my father and uncle had lived, and whose rooms full of artifacts were preserved (unlike my own childhood rooms, which shifted during several moves my family undertook), was a sacred repository of mystery and imagination. Especially as a very young kid certain objects were not just fascinating, but downright terrifying.

Such was this thing, found in shadowy, neglected nooks in the ever-dim light of the sweet limestone- smelling space. (For a sound background, put in a David Lynch hum, a thudding breathing from the old gas furnace, supplying the ambient sound.) This little doctor doll was an object of horror, inexplicable, with it's malevolent head flopping and jiggling, as if suffering a neurological disease. The shaking, living quality would always be there, no matter how long you averted your gaze, hoping it to stop the next time you were unfortunate to look at the thing. Better yet would have been, to have the thing be gone entirely.

And so it was. Who removed it? It was not just hidden (as a cloth hid the bear head, which scared my brother.) The doctor never popped up again. He may have been simply thrown out by a concerned parent or grandparent. 

And so the doctor doll was consigned to the dustbin of memory--until I searched for it on Ebay. Sure enough, that was it, all right. I found that it was made by a company called St. Pierre and Patterson. Google as I may, I find no information about this cryptic, forgotten concern. They certainly had talent and wherewithal. I newly have a respect for anyone in the ceramics field, since I make slip molds myself. Many of their other figurines have this same style of grotesque humor (judging from others on offer on Ebay.)

My imagination runs wild... I imagine a Haitian folk artist being discovered by a declasse Anglo somewhere in the deep south. St. Pierre has a raw energy, while Patterson (wearing seersucker) has a salesman's gift, and some knowledge of the porcelain trade.  They land in Texas after a year or two, when the post War boom years really start simmering... Large fans whir overhead as Mexicans paint the wooden plaques and airbrush the finishing coats of underglaze...

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!