Rosenbush Cafe

Peter Churchmouse: An Early Favorite

WARNING: Language and themes will be offensive and inappropriate for some readers and gratuitous for all others! Special thanks to Paul DaliHouse Dorsey

By Henry B. Rosenbush

I have been a collector the vinyl long playing records since the 1950s, a passion that began when my father played Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade on a set of 7-inch 45s. It would be the early sixties before I learned Шехерезада was actually a symphonic suite in four movements rather than a collection of shorter works; such was the limitations of the 45 format.

Over the years I was fortunate enough to explore every new technology from Victrola to Hi-Fi for Small Fry, as they called record players for children, and then stereo. When stereo first arrived, much like the transition from black and white television to color in 1964, Beta to VHS or the most recent change from analog to high definition, there were few true examples of stereo recordings. One could play a stereo on a Hi-Fi record player but without the ability to have two channels or multiple speakers it was difficult to enjoy on the intended level.

Our first stereo system was a huge clunky affair; a long enclosed set up with record player, AM-FM radio and two moderately sized speakers. Naturally, you could play Hi-Fi recordings, 45s, 78s (many children’s records were 78s as well as jazz recordings) 33 1/3rd the standard 12-inch discs and 16, which could be practical in school for slide shows and film strips but less practical at home unless you had instructional manuals to investigate.

It would be the combined work – separately – of three men that led to the disc records that dominated the music industry until compact discs appeared in the 1980s effectively ending the gramophone record. French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott, would design in 1857, the phonautograph, which basically allowed a depiction of the visual characteristics of sound but not for playback purposes until Thomas Edison developed the phonograph in 1877, which could play back recordings but was primarily used for dictation and further developed by Edward Guilliard, who would spend the next quarter of century fighting for credit since Edison incorporated Guilliard’s innovations into his own patent.

The phonograph cylinder dominated the market starting in 1880 but as lateral-cut discs, created by Emile Berliner in 1888, began to appear musical recording began to change. Edison produced his own version, the Blue Amberol Record, in 1912, to compete with the Berliner Gramaphone label offering recordings as long as 4 minutes! By 1918, patents for lateral-cut discs expired and the market was open to countless manufacturers and by the twenties, the Amberol cylinders became merely a memory.

Our Victrola was a right-sized hand cranked device which used steel needles and there were two small doors on the front that by opening and closing ‘controlled’ volume, pitch, treble and bass! Naturally, there was no such thing as control: you cranked the cylinder beneath the platter for speed, which was generally enough for one side of a record before it s l o w e d d o w n and s t o p p e d…

The needles were designed to be used once - I had to special order stainless steel needles from New York in the 1980s because record store employees, usually college-aged students, had no idea what the hell a Victrola was never mind “steel needles!” Imagine sitting on your front porch in 1926 listening to Mario Lanza or Al Jolson for the first time. We take for granted today not only the experience but sheer volume of availability of product. In the beginning, the earth was unformed and so was the music industry.

Thanks to dad, I was more aware of Glenn Miller, the Dorsey Brothers (Tommy & Jimmy), Benny Goodman, the Ink Spots, Mills Brothers and classical music before I was introduced to Elvis Pressley! My aunt Virginia took me to see the Swan Lake Ballet and the opera, La Traviata, in the late 1950s so even Tchaikovsky and Verdi preceded my knowledge of rock ‘n roll (1954-63).

My First Purchase: Around the World in 80 Days (1956)

Like most children, I had albums and 78s by The Flintstones, Quickdraw McGraw - and sidekick Baba Looey, Peter Churchmouse (I only have one of the two LPs left and no cover - sigh), The Gingerbread Man and my first acquisition, the original soundtrack recording of the first motion picture I ever saw, at age three, Michael Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Boy did I grow up with a crush on redheads thanks to Shirley McLaine! Purchased in 1961 at a yardsale of a woman who lived next to my aunt and grandmother, Rosa, in Homewood, Alabama, it was the beginning of a collection that would eventually climb into the thousands!

When Southern humorist Brother Dave Gardner played the University of Alabama in 1963 I was fortunate that one of our tenants at The Henry Apartments left behind the album of his concert and my collecting days began in earnest as I began searching for his other recordings and even got to see him in a Birmingham nightclub in 1971…that’s another story for another time, however.

By 1967, when I bought The Bee Gees “First,” their great ballad-driven album, which was acquired thanks to Virginia: “What do you want for your birthday?”

“The Bee Gees first album.”

She gave me the necessary $7.98 and I went to the record store and now knew the experience of wanting a particular record; I mainly wanted it for the song, Turn of the Century, but soon learned every song was worthwhile.
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RESERVED SEATING!
PARKING IN THE REAR!
AIR CONDITIONING! IT’S COOL INSIDE!
Brrrrr!
Hurry, Final Days

Those are of few announcements today’s younger movie going public have never heard. Imagine an era when most homes, let alone businesses, had air conditioning so when you were out on a sweltering summer day to find the promise of cold was a blessing now taken for granted.

Experience movies when tickets were One Dollar for adults! Taste the hot buttered popcorn, sip a Coca Cola and pop Milk Duds for the price of a 2007 small drink! Remember the picture of the Penguin? Cool Inside. Brrrrrr? Today’s audiences wouldn’t think of sitting through Martin Scorsese’s two hours plus, The Departed, sans air conditioning. Movie theaters advertised when they had AC because often many of its audience went home to homes with this luxury, At one time, AC was a luxury as was owning a TV let alone two or more and all in black and white.

teasers of specials Coming Soon the the Café:

Here we are on a Sunday night, after Super Bowl 41 has ended with Indianapolis defeating Chicago 29-17 and Simone, sitting next to me, promising completion on his surveillance story. Simone has been under veterinarian care for the past week with a reoccurrence of his gingivitis and will be editing his work, and Henny’s temperament types story, through Tuesday.

I have promised an update on Cool Side of the Pillow relating my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and consequently my experiences. She is currently residing in a psychiatric hospital ward recovering from a nasty UTI. Her kidney infection profoundly impacted her already fragile mind and made her belligerent and physically aggressive. At 92, a birthday later this month and she is 93, Frances is as cantankerous now as she ever was when well. Until November 9, 2006, she was still at home with me her only caregiver. My partner left to teach uni-level Spanish another state, and the kitchen about to collapse from forty years of water damage, I was faced with the expensive task of placing her in a nursing home until the repairs were completed.

Without assistance from Medicare or Tri-Care, it is all on me. Savings for the rainy days of the future have suddenly been swept away in a maelstrom of reconstruction both physically and emotionally.

As January drew to a close I was juggling the sudden reality of four vacancies, the decision as whether or not to sue two of the tenants and myriad other problems on every conceivable level at my business and home. I have been waiting over a week on one plumber to install a faucet for the kitchen so I can wash dishes and accoutrements and begin the next phase of remodeling, moving furniture and cleaning carpets, painting and moving mother back home.

Plumbers have the self importance I only thought brain surgeons could demand.

So, here I am in February and she is still institutionalized. Her anger towards me was manifesting as profanity and attempts to slap or hit me. Although disconcerting to hear one’s own mother call them names when she well that she would have blushed at hearing, let alone repeating is unsurprising. In the latter stages of the disease and with the breakdown of the brain’s ability to control emotions language barriers are also dissolved.

As in the John Locke interpretation of tabula rasa or blank slate we end as we begin with a mind free and uncluttered by a lifetime of memories. I have never scoffed at the grim facets of this illness; it is a frightening occurrence to observe the disintegration of a personality first hand. It is equally disconcerting when the person is a relative or friend.

Additional updates for CSP will explore the early stages Alzheimer’s, its effect on Frances, my late father, Bernard and I, and coping mechanisms we all need to learn.

El Cine Presents: First times At the Movies

My fondness for movies goes back childhood in the 1950s and the wonderfully array of films that I saw; Around the World in 80 Days, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds House on Haunted Hill, Disney classics and a fascination with television in the form of The Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff’s Thriller to name two and the adventure of staying up late enough to see the Indian on the Sign Off screen! Most people today have either forgotten or never seen the Indian Chief after sign off or the early weather forecasts denoted by a camera slowly panning twenty four seven along a wall of meters; barometric pressure is falling as the temperatures rise! They were a mere series of round clock like gauges that were simple and more reliable than today’s The Weather Channel with their boring repetition of meteorological information.

To illustrate the changing morality of the motion picture industry in the mere fifty three years of my life I have compiled a list of firsts in movies that may not strike as profound, but hopefully will provide a smile or a recollection. After all, I grew up in the fifties where American movies were tamer by far. For those of you too young to recall going to a movie in 1959, here’s some examples:

There was little profanity, perhaps hell or damn but no multi-syllabic vulgarities or blasphemy. No nudity, graphic sexual situations or the realistic portrayal of coitus. Titillation was somewhat fetishistic like a peek at woman’s stocking tops and garter belt straps or maybe in a slip and bra. Violence was either bloodless or over done with too much tomato-based blood.

I never dreamed that one day movies like George Romeo’s Zombie movies would present graphic dismemberment and cannibalism or that The Lord of the Rings Trilogy could introduce a fully formed world that finally interpreted JRR Tolkien beyond the imagination. By now, I have set through so many movies in theaters and on television that I cannot think of anything I haven’t seen.

My first movie

If you enjoy the big screen experience of movies as much as I do you then I’m certain you’ll enjoy this column. Any movie review is available now, from the silent era through film noir and French New-Wave. There are innumerable web-links devoted to movies and virtually anyone with a point of view (a-hem, look who’s talking) and a computer can post their opinions on these myriad sites. As an avid movie buff who remembers his movie experience, the 1956 classic, Around the World in 80 Days, I have always been fascinated by that art form. Even at age 3, I was mesmerized.

I can still recall how I became enthralled with redheaded women due to the casting of Shirley MacLaine as the young Princess Aouda, rescued from forced suicide (in order to join her late husband in the afterlife) in India by hero David Niven, as Phileas Fogg, and his ingenious valet Passepartout (Cantinflas).

Fascinating how our first memories are tempered by circumstances beyond personal control; a movie establishes my predilection for a hair color that only became a fantasy element in my life not an obsession as I’ve only been on one date with a red head my entire life! Examples of our first memories impacting our lives are not a rare occurrence; however, today’s youth are inundated with technological marvels, many of which were mere elements of the movies in the 1950s! Imagine if you will, the excitement in 1953 to House of Wax, in 3-D, with popcorn and paddle balls bouncing in your face! I was born in 1953 and as I got older listened to my parents’ reminiscence about a movie experience when I was still in the womb!

My first taste of the gruesome was in the 1959 British shocker, The Horrors of the Black Museum were a woman is murdered with large ice tongs and lies in a pool of obviously non realistic hemoglobin. A show girl is decapitated in bed with a guillotine erected over her bed. I convinced my mother to take me to it after seeing the trailer because they promised unique deaths. Best one was the pieced eye balls with the needle-booby trapped binoculars. She was horrified and I was not the least bit frightened.

Several years ago I finally found the movie on VHS Video in Widescreen format and was appalled at how boring it was! As a child it was the opposite. The build up to the decapitation was tedious with far too much incidence and filled. If she had screamed less and moved faster she could have escaped the death. The best was still the binoculars scene although all you see is the person position them before their face, a little sound effect denoting the piecing and a scream followed by two hands before the face with fake blood between the fingers.

My point is that my memory filled in the blanks and for good or bad filmmaking it succeeded; they want you to see the violence in your imagination. Any of the great CSI franchise episodes can show you a realistic eyeball trauma.

There were a number of firsts for me as it would be for anyone and I’ll share some with you. Some are silly, some are profound and some are naughty, so be forewarned here! There are also spoilers, whereby I reveal key plot information.

First profanity: Steve McQueen as Bullitt (1968) answering bullshit to co star Robert Vaughn and for a good reason. A good cop is shot and a look-alike mobster murdered and the Vaughn’s Chalmers exude mendacity throughout. The only cop movie I’ve ever seen where the hero only draws his gun once, at the climax, and uses it to kill the real mobster accountant in the SF airport. Favorite scene: the amazing eight-minute car chase through San Francisco’s steep streets between McQueen in a hot Mustang and stunt driver extraordinaire Bill Hickman in the Charger.

Famous Chase from Bullitt

First boner: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) Katherine Ross, when forced at gun point by Robert Redford’s Sundance Kid to begin disrobing. Favorite Scene: Finale with Redford and affable Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy arguing about going to Australia.

Opening Scene from Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid

First nudity: Barbarella (1968) of all the women to see naked first and it’s Jane Fonda - ugh - dad called her “scrawny” and he was correct. No boner here! Favorite scene: Killer metal-toothed dolls biting and ripping her flesh through fish net hose.

Killer Dolls

First R Rated Movie seen alone was Easy Rider (1969) in Tuscaloosa. Although it didn’t make me want to be a drug dealer, it did make traversing the country on a motorcycle appealing. One of the best rock scores ever assembled before copyright vultures made buying one song more expensive than the entire dope-purchasing budget of the film! (Listen to the docu on the DVD). Favorite Scene: Jack Nicholson getting stoned on reefer by the camp fire and pontificating on UFOs to Peter Fonda’s Captain America and Dennis Hopper as Billy.

Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson smoking real pot

Scene from Midnight Cowboy

First X Rated movie alone was Midnight Cowboy, in Columbus, GA. I sneaked away from my fellow high school thespians to see it. I was blown away by the verisimilitude; you could truly smell Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo’s body order and you felt empathy for the naiveté of Jon Voight’s Joe Buck. Favorite Scenes: the science fiction movie oral sex scene in which a nervous Bob Balaban goes down on Joe. There is no nudity just Voight’s reaction and the on screen action, wherein the ejaculation is paralleled by an explosion on a space ship! The ending with the bus taking the two protagonists to Miami, where the tuberculosis-ravaged Rizzo believes his destiny lies. While talking to him about how there lives will be better, Joe looks back at Rizzo to see he has died on the outskirts of Miami. The suspended tear in Rizzo’s left eye left me weeping. For an X rater, the only Oscar Winning Best Picture with that designation as been reissued in R and PG versions, yet there is far more left to the imagination. In 1969, however, homoeroticism was only recognized as aberrant. The rating was really for the overall sexualized content; hetero or homosexual mattered not.

First X Rated Movie caught viewing at the Skyline Theater, US 11 N, behind Elk’s Lodge: The Sex Lives of Cleopatra. I was spanked by mother all the way from the fence to the lodge.

First Movie I saw too many times in succession: What’s Up Doc? (1972) as only usher for one week at Capri in 1972 6 times a day for 7 consecutive days. Aieeeee!

First and Only movie to scare me enough to leave a theater: The Time Machine (1960). Signature scene: as the Morlocks grab Weena from the bushes before she is rescued by George I have succumbed to the escalating fear of being trapped in the future and running low on matches! I have seen this movie so many hundreds of times since on television, video and DVD, and including a year later at the same theater, that I often cannon conceive of it scaring me. It did once and I’m thankful.

First movie I fell asleep during: Cleopatra (and who hasn’t?) at the Dale Drive (1963). Luckily, my parents took me wearing my pajamas so they must have figured I’d never stay awake for 4 hours and 6 minutes and they were right. Year’s later, but for different reasons, I’d fall asleep during Poltergeist (1982) after a long week as newspaper editor in Moncks Corner, SC.

Highlights of audience participation:

Godzilla vs. the Cry Baby

Trailer

During Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster with 150 children and only three adults, one child began crying during a tête-à-tête between G and Hedorah. The older child told her sibling it was OK G was just a man in a suit to which several other children who must’ve believed in Santa and Easter Bunnies cried, too. Innocence ended during a silly monster movie that sometimes monsters were only men in suits. Pity the children unprepared for the future of vampires, cannibals, face huggers and gore by the pore.