Like The Fog, Urban Legend (1998) has its own anniversary. The Stanley Hall Massacre took place on April 24th. The movie takes place on days prior to and during the anniversary of the Stanley Hall Massacre which is now celebrated on the college campus as only Frat houses can.
It actually took Richard from Doomedmoviethon and I several watches before we figured out when in the year this movie best fit. Now that we have mapped out the year of holidays we are often asking ourselves “when do we watch such and such?”
By chance I ran across John Myers Myers’ Doc Holliday (1955) when I was knocking about some used bookstore with my Dad, or perhaps in one of those fabulous pokey places in Florida tourist traps. It was engaging and turned my passing curiosity about Doc Holliday into a full blown obsession. I read several more books about Holliday since, but it was only recently that I went looking for Myers’ book again and started investigating his writing. John Myers Myers was a writer who seemed to tackle anything. He wrote for newspapers, novels, and historical works. His most well known book, Silverlock, exposes just how much he also consumed other people’s writing [wikipedia].
Silverlock is a reader’s book. And I mean the challenge of getting every reference to classical and popular literature is well known among people who have read and loved Silverlock. The main character of the book washes ashore on the Commonwealth of Letters, a Land of Story. As the main character moves through his own journey he encounters characters, battles, and lands living their own stories in real life. The references within are the kind that make you glad you suffered through all that assigned reading in literature, classics, and history classes. Newer editions of Silverlock include descriptions of an intriguing fan subculture that the internet seems to have never learned about.
According to Deuce Richardson (2021), just after Silverlock came out in 1949 it disappeared, but the dearth of sci-fi fantasy in the 1950s made it a popular read via word of mouth. According to the Silverlock Companion, published together with the original story as Silverlock: Including the Silverlock Companion (Nesfa’s Choice, 26), this word of mouth community included writing and performing melodies to the many songs recorded as poetry within the story.
In an addition I managed to find first, an introduction by Poul Anderson heaped praise upon the book and described the subculture as though it was something vast and far reaching. Richardson (2021) talks of the fandom spreading through Anderson’s circle. Perhaps the subculture was relegated to a tight knit group of friends.
I can’t say I have many people to whom I would recommend Silverlock, if only because it is a hefty and challenging read that is only improved by knowledge of a great deal of other books, though this knowledge is not required. I am excited to read more of John Myers Myers work, especially his non-fiction and historical fiction.
My collection of old recipe books has grown to include a number of community cookbooks circa 1940s-80s from the mid-west, some courtesy of family who all came from Ohio and Pennsylvania. Community cookbooks are a snapshot of interesting and sometimes unappetizing dishes. They were also compiled and consumed mostly by women. As such they hold hints and secrets about how the women of a community lived and interacted, as well as how the community dealt with immigration, shifts in kitchen technology, and food shortages (Dutch, 2018). Throughout my cookbooks are lesson or advice recipes that capture and enforce the expectations of motherhood and domesticity, like ‘how to cook a husband’ and ‘recipe for a happy home.’
There are also jokes, snapshots of community values, culture, and folk humor, the repetition of which through many different community cookbooks shapes and shares community identity (Dutch, 2018). The last three or four cookbooks I paged through in my perusal for spring time recipes to try had instructions for Elephant Stew. By the last one, I felt compelled to snap a picture and share it.
And yet, there is something about the recipe for Elephant Stew that seems to be hiding more than it is sharing. Why elephant? Elephant meat is consumed in many different countries on the African continent. So I turned to one of my favorite resources, Chronicling America, to try and find earlier mentions of the joke recipe or information that might point to its origination. I found that the early 1960s mentions of elephant stew were far from the beginning of the story.
The Bemidji daily pioneer. [volume] (Bemidji, Minn.), 04 Nov. 1919. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
“Have an Elephant Stew” showed up over and over in the 19-teens in newspapers all over the country, usually tacked at the end of a column – seemingly unrelated to anything else on the page. Even further back in the 1900s, 1890s, and 1880s are references to elephant stew in serialized fiction, and before that as reports of haute cuisine that might be found in Paris.
This really only germinated more and new questions in my mind. I mean, is this relating of a menu a joke, an exaggeration, or accurate? And if accurate, why the abundance of game from Africa in fashionable French restaurants? The Scramble for Africa took place in the late 1800s to early 1900s. European powers sought to expand their territorial claims and to exploit resources on the African continent until most of the continent was controlled by European countries in 1913. Could Parisian exploration of exotic game meats be an early indicator of France’s interest in African resources?
And could the stories circulated of the adventurer/explorers of Africa in service to their countries have infiltrated American news and culture until elephant stew became a joke? I’m not claiming that my hastily done and half hazard research shows any link between exploitation of Africa in the early 1900s to the crafting through iteration of a joke recipe to be passed down through the century in community cookbooks. But I think the recipe for Elephant Stew didn’t appear from nowhere, and it means more than it says.
One more addendum to our Holidays in the Movies: the Big Game! My house isn’t really sports oriented, but we know what’s going down when the deli section at our grocery store fills up with wing varieties, chips pop from every end cap, and the beer isle (also where the ginger beer is) is crushingly full of bodies and carts. This year we celebrate! The Schmidt way:
The Replacements (2000) : there’s something about bittersweet sports movies, especially when they are based on bittersweet reality.
Cheerleader Camp (1988) : okay, we stole this one from summer solstice, but the summer solstice has plenty of movies and what’s a Big Game without cheerleaders?
Absurd (1981) : a killer terrorizing a community, a police man hunt, and hospital shenanigans all while a bunch of parents are partying is a pretty good way to sum up a lot of slashers. But is that party a 10pm Big Game watching party where men clad in three piece suits eat spaghetti in front of the TV? Not usually!
Exposition: I’ve had these doodles sitting around and I have even taken the time to color them to some extent, but they don’t really stand as anything on their own. So…doodle dump.
Way back in August of 2010, I used WordPress for the first time. I had migrated my website to a WordPress installation. Up until 2010 I had been blogging on an Angelfire account. For the most part, migrating to WordPress also changed how I blog. My early years of blogging were similar to some of the blogs I follow- combing the internet for cool things and then putting all those things into one place for my imaginary readers. For me, really. Purely consumptive. And lost to y’all, I’m afraid. I backed as much of them up as I could, but I never migrated any pre-2010 content.
Since that 2010 post I have written over 1,200 posts on the Bean. Now I tend towards more ‘original’ content, when I manage a post at all. I’ve combined my blog with art and comic posts, and then separated my comics from the blog once again. There are still some consumption based posts, but nothing like the stream of links to other people and places that I began with.
Well that post back in August 2010 was about I Write Like. I fed it a blog entry from the old site and was told that I wrote like Ursula K. Le Guin. I had not read Le Quin’s work at that time and I am sorry to say, I have not read it still. Obviously this is a missed opportunity that I will have to address. Guess what! I Write Like is still around! And now it includes a full markdown editor and AI manuscript editing assistant.
I fed it some more of my writing to see how I may have changed. I haven’t been doing much fiction or blogging recently, but I write all the time for work: proposals, guidelines, articles, etc. According to I Write Like, a book chapter draft that I wrote within my research assignment at work is written like Isaac Asimov. A blog post from my Every Month Is History Month series is like Kurt Vonnegut, and my kid’s story, Penelope Sea is like J.K. Rowling. I think I Write Like is just trying to butter me up.
This is just some gratuitous cat love. I thought it would be a hoot to illustrate cat personalities by the commands we use for them every week. And then I thought the post was missing a heap of cat photos, so I added them. You are welcome.
Over the past few years we have been cultivating holiday themed watching to get us in the right frame of mind for every holiday. We have now amassed a list complete enough to get it into a chronologically arranged table of contents post for all the holidays in the movies posts.
This one was hard. We’ve tried some thematic watching for other holidays that don’t have a lot of movie representation, but figuring out what to do for Father’s day stymied us for years. We have a line up for this year that I like to call: It’s So Hard For a Girl to Make Her Daddy Proud.
Footloose (1984): Ariel has been pushing against the constraints of her father, the Reverend Moore long before Ren arrives in town and starts testing his own boundaries in the town.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985): Janie breaks from her military routine to take a chance on her dreams and audition for Dance TV. Her father doesn’t accept that it will mean her running loose in a new city on her own.
Dirty Dancing (1987): Baby finds her own summer adventure helping staff at the summer resort, and for the first time falls out of her father’s favor.
And for a little horror diversion: Hellraiser (1987) is a great father and daughter relationship movie as well.
Sometimes movies aren’t just a way of celebrating a holiday, they are a reason to have one: a movie holiday of sorts.
John Carpenter’s 1980 The Fog takes place very plainly on April 21st, so April 21st is the day we watch The Fog to celebrate the anniversary of Antonio Bay.
April 8th is Rex Manning Day! Because sometimes movies create holidays of their own. This year, Rex Manning Day just happens to coincide with a solar eclipse. So why not pair a rewatch of Empire Records (1995) with The Awakening (1980).
