Trick or Treat of the 1930s By Enver Perez

“Shrieking, wailing, full of banshee mirth they ran, on everything but sidewalks, going up in the air over bushes and down almost upon yipping dogs.” – Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).
Witch. Apeman. Skeleton. Gargoyle. Beggar. Mr. Death Himself. Those were the costumes worn by Bradbury’s fictional boys in The Halloween Tree, one of his many tributes to the spookiest of holidays and his memories of trick-or-treating in the long-ago years when virtually every child in town became “Someone Hidden Behind Yet Another Mystery of Muslin and Paint,” as he expressed it.
Once-upon-a-jack o’ lantern-time all Halloween costumes were homemade – old sheets with eyeholes cut out for a ghost; some charcoal smudges on a face, and one of Dad’s shirts stuffed with a pillow created a hobo; a homemade dress and toy tiara to make some little girl a princess of the candy kingdom.
The use of pre-fab, store-bought costumes gained popularity in the 1930s – ironically, the era of the Great Depression – as community groups in the 1920s and ’30s tried to move young people away from the vandalism that had long been associated with Halloween.
So what kind of costumes were popular back in those days and how wide-spread was the commercially made costume trend? A nostalgia and history article written by Charles Brinkman for the Grafton (W.Va.) Sentinel, January 15, 1942, describes some of what had been available in that small town’s stores a few years earlier. Some outfits on that list have fallen from favor while others remain perennial.
As you might expect, Grafton’s five-and-dime stores had costumes that let youngsters dress up as clowns, devils, gypsies, hobos, jesters, pirates, witches, and ballet dancers. There was also a bellhop costume, not surprising since the “Philip Morris bellhop” advertising icon was quite popular at the time.
Today, pop culture icons like Spiderman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are in vogue with the kiddies; back then, there were Jiggs and Maggie costumes, from the popular comic strip, “Bringing Up Father.”
There were also ethnic-based costumes that would likely be considered offensive today: Negro, Jew, Chinaman, Mexican and Turk were all mentioned in the Sentinel’s article; however, let it be noted that a “Mexican costume” of sombrero and serape is available today, one of the last ethnic outfits still sold.

A serious threat to Pop Culture by Mike Favata

A bill is pending in congress that can seriously hurt our First Amendment rights and Popular Culture as we know it. If this bill passes a company can shut down a website for posting a picture of something they own. This can kill pop culture, sites like Tumblr are how pop culture lives on. A lot of the time what happens is someone posts a picture of something from decades ago and it get more and more popular. Then Hollywood catches wind of it and they reboot it in some shape or form. I don’t understand how a bill like this can even be considered. No one can stop online piracy, it’s like terrorism. No one can stop it. This bill is just another way for the man to control everything.

Dennis Salumu

Dennis Salumu

Elderly drivers: not a threat.

Aging doesn’t automatically mean we need to stop driving. Everyone ages differently, so there is no arbitrary cutoff as to when someone should stop driving. For many seniors, driving is an integral part of independence. Many older adults have fond memories of getting a driver’s license. Seniors may experience a profound sense of loss having given up driving, because of age discrimination. People age seventy and older should be allowed to drive.

People age seventy and older should be allowed to drive, because they have more experience. Which driver is safer to follow? The older driver with the slower reflexes; poorer vision, and cautious driving style. Or, the younger driver: with faster reactions, better eyesight, and driving over the speed limit? According to DMV.org the legal age for driving in Massachusetts is 18years night and 17 years without passengers. By the time a person reach the age of seventy they have been driving for fifty-three years. An article in Buy car InsuranceToday.com shows that taking a senior citizen driving class and having good driving record will help to receive a discount in car insurance.

According to statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the safest drivers are in the age group between 64 and 75 years old. And studies of the data reveal that teenage drivers; especially male teenage drivers are the most dangerous drivers on the road. One of the reasons for senior’s safer driving statistics is that they tend to be more aware of their limitations and drive accordingly. There may be several factors as to why seniors appear to be safer drivers, one of which may be that most teens are novice drivers and seniors have been at it a lot longer.

People age seventy and older should be allowed to drive, because they deserve the same rights as younger drivers. Elderly are still performing great achievements that are so beneficial to our world today. Ethel Percy Andrus, retired school principal founded AARP at 74 in 1958. And Harry Berntein, author, published his first book: The Invisible Wall at 96 in 2007. Elderly work and pay their taxes like the rest of the population. Paul Newman was a world class, winning, sports car and endurance racer well into his 70s. and won a SCCA national title not long before he died. Some seniors are so weak and ill at 65 that they can barely walk, let alone drive. On the other hand, seniors in their 80′s who are spry and alert as many much younger than they are. So how does government regulate that? They can’t. A standard needs to be set by doctors and other health care providers required to notify the registry once a person can’t meet the driving standard. This should have nothing to do with a specific age. In fact, if you try to tie it to an age you will be guilty of discriminating against seniors. There are many people under 65 who are not fit to drive either. There may be more above 65, but those under should be subject to the same screenings.

There are many things you can do to continue driving safely, including modifying your car, the way you drive, and understanding and rectifying physical issues that may interfere with driving. To drive safely, it does mean that we have to pay attention to any warning signs that age is interfering with our driving safety and make appropriate adjustments. By reducing risk factors and incorporating safe driving practices, many of us can continue driving safely long into our senior years. Aging does not automatically equal total loss of driving ability.
By: Dennis Salumu.

 

Death of the internet? – Josh Foisey

Lately I’ve been seeing these videos being shared on facebook and tumblr that are hinting at what could be the death of the internet. The videos describe how the government is trying to rid of all platforms on the web that host illegal file sharing. They have realized the scare tactics of sueing people for stealing music is not working. People are never going to stop finding ways to get things for free, and they acknowledged that. In respponse they want to shut down sites like mediafire, megaupload, rapidshare, etc. They don’t want to stop there though, the law they are trying to pass os that they can sue a site for someone posting a link to one of the sites. So say if someone on facebook posts a mediafire link of a leaked cd, the government wants to sue the user and facebook. This is rediculous. Most sites that support these things are outside of the US and the government wants the right to shut down and sue those sites as well. There have been threats like this before and the chances of it actually hapening are still ip in the air. The thought of it potentially happening is still daunting. The industry needs to realize that with the internet being what it is, their media is going to be stolen, and a lot of bands have embraced that for their benefit. This law may soon may it that we may not even have wordpress to usee, which in turn would mean we wouldn’t have to do these blog posts….so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it gets ppassed

Internet Censorship!?

I’m sure many of you have heard of the SOPA Act Congress is currently considering. The stop internet piracy act would ultimately result in most of the internet being censored. The point of this act is apparently to “protect American copyrighted material against piracy and counterfeiting.”  Dozens of popular websites such as Facebook and Tumblr would be accused of “facilitating” the spread of pirated material if one of their users posted some form of copyrighted material. The attorney generals office would then target these websites and force internet service providers to block access. Search engines would be forced to block links to offensive websites as well as prevent these sites from receiving any online payments by sending termination notices to their payment processors, without a court order. In other words, We’re doomed.

The drive to push SOPA comes from the MPAA (motion picture association of America). Michael O’Leary, the vice president of the MPAA, claims this bill is mainly about jobs. According to him, without SOPA, millions of Americans associated with the production of movies will lose their jobs. Critics claim the passing of this bill will transform America into a “repressive regime”, strangle free speech on the internet, harm our economic competitiveness, and ultimately betray the constitution.

-Kevin Soares

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the Amerian Myth of the West – Jackson

John Ford’s 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is an ode to the end of the classic western, a satiric look at the civilizing of the once wild American West. Ford deliberately uses stereotypical characters and situations to undermine and reexamine the same myths that he forged as one of the country’s seminal directors. His is a world of moral certainty and untamed villainy, where legends are born, and cowboy heroes ride free in wide-open natural landscapes and dusty towns administering justice, taming the wild frontier. To the consternation of critics and audiences of 1962, Ford removes all the grandeur of his previous masterpiece, The Searchers. That film’s ambivalent hero was a cunning reexamination of the myth of the west. The hero of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is not made nor born, but manufactured by the media. As the editor of the Shinbone Star says; “This is the West. When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”

That legend concerns Congressman, Ransom Stoddard (played in typical earnest aw-shucks fashion by Jimmy Stewart) who, after journeying west by train to the small town of Shinbone to honor the death of an old friend, tells the tale that begins the story. Recounted in flashback, we see that decades before the railroad crisscrossed this untamed land, Stoddard, then a young lawyer traveled west by stagecoach to seek his fortune. He was “following Horace Greeley’s advice, ‘Go West, Young Man’”. There encounters a gang of stagecoach highwaymen, led by arch-villain Liberty Valance, who rob and beat him mercilessly. As played by Lee Marvin, Valance is deadpan, over-the top evil. With his lethal black whip and his giggling and glowering henchmen (played by Strother Martin and Lee VanCleef), Marvin is unabashedly nasty and taunting at every turn. His uncompromising performance is one of the pleasures of the film.
Stoddard is found and brought to Shinbone, by Valance’s nemesis, that stalwart icon of the heroic west, John Wayne as Tom Doniphan, whose code of honor is as solid as his skill with a six-gun. Doniphan knows that might rules the west, and will inevitably vanquish evil. But Stoddard’s mission is to see that justice is done through the more civilized rule of law. Of his nemesis Valance, Stoddard says; ‘I don’t want to kill him, I just want to put him in jail!’ Not likely, in John Ford’s west.

Into the mix come a parade of character actors whose vivid stereotypes have enlivened westerns for decades: Edmond O’Brien as the drunken but noble newspaper editor; Andy Devine as the whimpering, good-hearted, but cowardly sheriff; Woody Strode as the silent, noble black man, backbone of the west; and last and most essential is Vera Miles as Hallie, for whose heart our heroes compete. It is in that romantic triangle that the real heart of west may be won. In this way the Hallie, like the cactus rose she carries to Doniphan’s funeral, becomes a bittersweet symbol for the loss and the hope of the new west.

Ford makes Liberty Valance into a western that seems to examine itself as a western. He removes the window dressing to focus on the intricate play of characters and symbols. Gone is the Technicolor of the Searchers. This is in stark black and white. Gone are the outdoor landscapes of Ford’s west. Most of the film looks like it was on the back lot, and many scenes take place indoors. He moves his camera in on faces not vistas. The world of 1960′s America was changing and beginning to reexamine the usefulness of certain cultural mythologies. The new decade was about people; the grand ideals of postwar America were being reexamined and were about to become even dimmer with the assassination of President Kennedy. America was beginning to be about recognizing unique individualities, about embracing change, about individual rights, strong women, sensitive men. Ford didn’t like that much, I imagine. The film’s characters are flawed and cartoonish. I suspect his film was a wry satire on his own mythology and a critique of what he viewed as a softening of American society. Some critics didn’t get it, while others consider this one of his more remarkable films. There is no doubt that it is nothing short of brilliant the ability to balance the elements of satire and seriousness, comedy and melodrama.

As the train leaves Shinbone, the truth forever gives way to the legend. The conductor leans over to light Stoddard’s cigar saying; ‘Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.’ In that moment we are incredibly moved. This is, after all, about the creation of stories. But in those stories live truths about human nature that are universal and forever

Total Noise – Jackson post

Too much time spent in front of short attention span media like television, videos, social media posts, texts, twitters, gossip on cell phones, channel surfing, pausing and fast forwarding “through slow parts” of DVDs has got to be  affecting our concentration and changing our relationship to information. In addition, the sheer amount of information available makes us feel knowledgable, maybe eve smart, but eclipses time for actually thinking, investigating, understanding, or using information. This is what David Foster Wallace called “Total Noise”

“the consumption [of which] tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that’s also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen”

Now it is impossible to absorb or make sense of all this information. This use to be called “narcotizing dysfunction”. The shear amount of information actually leaves us in a numb state, like a narcotic, high but affect-less. Learning become a matter of editing down and digging in.

What This World Has Come To – Mike Antal

Upon my arrival to Yahoo to check my email to get my mind off this week’s loss against the Giants, I was blown away by the first headline that was present in Yahoo’s “news stream”. While there are many important things going in the world at this point in time, it is sensible to think that the top headline should be something political and/or intellectually relevant? For what may or may not have been a surprise, the answer to that question was a most definite NO, rather I was looking at a headline that reads as follows: “Emma Watson faces off with fashion twin”. To sum up the article, all that needs to be known is that the popular ‘Harry Potter’ actress wore the same apparel to an event as another actress of similar age, THAT’S IT. There was no altercation between the two actresses on anything whatsoever, hence the absence of an actual “face off” as was indicated in the article’s title. The question of WHY is this news immediately comes to mind, but unfortunately, that same question can easily be answered just as quickly as it can be asked. The easiest and most convincing way to answer this question is by looking at the comments board directly below the text of the article. And unfortunately for the state of the public, it’s way too easy to see that far too many people just eat this stuff up.

Now the bigger question to all of this is, why do people eat this stuff up in the first place? There are so many more important things going on in the lives of just about everybody alive on this planet that warrant (or should warrant) much more interest than what two celebrities are wearing on any given night. Does it make people feel better about themselves to feel as though they are “involved” with these popular culture higher-up’s? Do they think their opinion actually matters in the grand scheme of things? To keep things as open-ended as they are in reality, there obviously is no clear and sensible explanation to explain why any one person or group of people feel so strongly about these “issues” as they do, all I know is that this widespread caring for situations as stupid as this one scare the life out of me. If the feelings towards situations like this are this strong now, imagine how bad it is going to be 10 years down the road? I guess popular culture really has taken a strong stranglehold on our American culture, it’s just a shame it’s taken root in all of the wrong areas.

What is art?

William Braswell, October 25, 2011

it’s pretty interesting to know what a product of popular culture and a product of art are, and sometimes I still don’t know the difference.  There are some films that I have watch seen over the years that are very artistic and yet they are part of are culture.  Some films by Stanley Kubrick likeClockwork Orange and 2011: a Space Odyssey are very artistic and yet they have become products of our culture, especially Clockwork Orange.  But I guest you can say the same thing about Leonardo Di Vinci’s  The Monalisa.  But if there is one film that really makes me ponder what it is, its the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane. Now this film is most likely a product of art but Just recently I saw a TV commercial talking about the Blu-Ray Release of the film and I don’t know why but it just me think about weather or not this film is a work of art or a product of popular culture. If there is one I have learned from my popular culture class, its that art should mean something and should show the expression of the artist who makes it.  As for the audience, I think its there responsibly to discover that what the art is trying to say. And to me these films are some of the most greatest work of art in the world.

Marketing with Zombies

Last spring I was approached by a friend/rapper, MC Chucklehead who wanted help marketing his second CD. On his new CD Zombies Don’t Have Feelings, features the single Zombie Mash, which he wanted a music video for. He told me that the reason he wanted to do a song and music video with the Zombie theme, because Zombies are a big thing in popular culture. The thoughts are if he made this CD and music video, it would project him more into the lime light.
The Zombie craze in America and possibly world wide helps people to escapism, where one fantasies about death behind every corner and the act of killing is promising and exhilarating. The laws, no longer, money, no longer, weapons, water, food and safety are the only necessities. This idea of playing off the popular culture is no new thing, but surely can help the smaller human rise. Much like myself, MC Chucklehead has started small and is looking for ways into “the system”. There are many ways about it but targeting the escapists whom many of us are, could hold poetical for the word about his new CD spread like a disease.

Music Video: http://youtu.be/IkIqUY_RlSM

-Cody Sousa-