Last week I got to go to a car show here in Ventura.  I took a couple pictures with my phone of some interesting cars. On the way back home we stopped at a small gallery that used to be a bank in the early nineteen hundreds.  So I took some pictures from inside the vault.  Here is a closeup of the time lock system and the emergency ventilator in case you got trapped inside.

In a couple weeks is the Turner Classic Movie film festival in Los Angeles.  They have a very exciting lineup including some very big guests.  I will probably be going to at least one of the film showings.   The last day they are showing Metropolis,  I will definitely try to get into see that.  Here’s and article all about this latest version including a piece of film they found in South America that had be missing since the 1920’s.

This week I watched the film The Magician (1926)  It centers around a magician who needs the blood of a virgin to create life.  It was a pretty dark movie for the time.  One of my favorite parts was the giant demon statue one of the characters was carving during the film.  The book came out years before the movie, and the character of the magician was based on Aleister Crowley.  I thought that was interesting since my Aleister Gurdeff character is based on him and another esoteric man from the period.  When the book came out Aleister wrote a letter that was published in Vanity Fair Magazine.  He accused the author of plagiarism, but also succeeded in enhancing his own mysterious reputation. Here’s a quote from his letter, “I found phrase after phrase, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, bewilderingly familiar…”

“Bewildering,” I love that, what a ham.

Hello, a lot of onomatopoeia this week, I guess it just seemed to fit.  If anyone has any questions or suggestions drop me a line!  I usually disable comments after a few days because of spammers, but I read all of them, and thanks for those of you who have commented so far, either here or on my facebook page.

This week’s movie from 1930’s Hollywoodland is Heat Lighting.  It’s a short movie, only about an hour.  But it provides a nice snapshot of 1930’s cross country travelers.  The whole movie takes place at a gas station in the middle of the desert where some criminals and rich divorcees cross paths.  A lot of pre code Hollywood moments that only a few years later they wouldn’t be able to get away with.  According to TCM this  movie made the Legion of Decency’s list of movies that Catholics shouldn’t watch. Also watch for an appearance by Jane Darewell who played Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.

I give it two stars out of 4, with an extra star for the very realistic garage scenes, desert setting, and the Mexican family that stops at the gas station and serenades the campers there at night. So that brings us to a grand total of 3 stars!

The team is splitting up for now. The first page of the second chapter finds some members at the Carbon and Carbide building in Chicago, an art deco landmark. And some members on the Zephyr, a historic piece of art deco machinery.
In 1934 the Pioneer Zephyr set a speed record between Chicago and Denver in a famous run called the “Dawn-to-Dusk” dash.

Oh and by the way, I just picked up Bioshock 2 special edition today, very nice packaging, nice art deco style posters, hope it’s as good as the first one!

Well, I am moving next week, and I just went to New Orleans last weekend, so between those two events I am sort of taking this week off.  I say sort of because I have gone back and redone the first page of the first chapter and changed a few things that were bugging me on pages here and there.  Next Episode Chapter Two starts, I have decided to include a little peek at one of my long term projects, a board game based on The 19XX.  These are just a couple of the character cards from the game, artwork is not final of course, but that is Fay Wells, and a character you won’t see until Chapter Two, Glänzen Schädel, or Shining Skull in English.  So that’s the end of Chapter One, more of a prologue I guess, but either way, I hope you found it mildly amusing!

Not much to say this week, I’m going to New Orleans in two days, so my mind is kind of on that.

Ok, wait I thought of something…

The line about the runway being too short… I went to the Minter Field Air Museum in Shafter last summer.  It was something like 110 degrees outside and a B-17 was supposed to be there.  But when we got there we learned that the runway was too short for the plane to land on because of the heat.  If it landed it wouldn’t have been able to take off again.  So instead of landing the Flying Fortress did a fly by over the airfield.  It seemed like we were trapped in the heat and the smog and no one could save us, the ship they sent couldn’t even land, it could only fly past and look at our helpless faces, camera lenses, and pathetic waves.  I hope it found someplace better to land. Some place safe.

Minter Field B-17

John the Conqueror Root

So, in 1833 Frederick Douglass was a slave who rebelled against a brutal farmer and went on to become “The Sage of Anacostia” and is one of the most prominent figures in African American and United States History. Well that’s according to Wikipedia. But I read this interesting story* about another version of his rebellion. The story said that one day after a brutal beating Douglass ran out into the woods to hide. While he was out there he ran into an old Black man. The man told Douglass that he had something that could help him out with his problem. He handed Douglass some John the Conqueror root. He said that the root would protect him from anyone wanting to do him harm. So Douglass took the root and went back home where the brutal farmer continued to beat him. But this time Douglass lashed out at him and overcame the farmer. Douglass won this confrontation and the man never tried to beat him again. What’s interesting is that later after winning his freedom and writing his first autobiography, Douglass retold the story and attributed at least in small part his new found strength to the John the Conqueror root. But later in life he told the story again in another biography and this time left out all mention of the man in the forest giving him the root. So what really happened? Why did his story change? Did the root really protect him? Who knows..

*Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation -Mitch Horowitz

It took me way too long to find an appropriate paper clip from the 1930’s. I finally settled on this smart little guy called an owl clip, handsome fella isn’t he?

I watched this movie a few weeks ago called the roaring twenties. James Cagney played this character who’s story was a lot like Riskin’s, minus the demon hand of course. It was a great story about how so many small time gangsters were just out of business after the repeal of prohibition. In the movie the only thing James Cagney’s character held on to was one taxi cab out of hundreds that he used to smuggle alcohol in. I pictured Riskin the same way, except the one thing he was able to hold on to from his old life was the sports car.

My favorite line from roaring twenties:

“It was a dangerous, lawless, high tension era, that will grow more and more incredible with each passing year, until someday people will say it never could have happened at all.”  -1939

The plane that Fay is flying is the Gee Bee racer. The G B stands for the Granville Brothers who first created the aircraft as an air racing plane in 1931.

I got the idea for the remote controlled plane from a documentary I watched on Tesla by PBS a while back. It was an excellent program, I highly recommend it. In that program there was a segment about a device that Tesla said would end the need for wars. He brought out a small boat that was only a couple feet long and set it in the water, and to the amazement of the onlookers, the boat started moving around the water by itself, turning, and stopping and starting. They even made Tesla open up the boat to prove there wasn’t a little man inside. Tesla had been controlling the boat using radio waves. Of course now this technology has its place in war in the form of the Predator drone system, or remote controlled bomb robots, but it took decades for people to accept the idea of radio controlled devices as anything other than a toy.

This week I have a couple new pages in addition to the new post. I’ve set up a t-shirt page with three new designs. I’ve also set up a map of the 19XX’s journeys, so you can see where they are.
Click here to see them…
Here is one of the shirt designs…