Favorite first-time watches thus far in 2023

Where Chimneys Are Seen

Marjoe

Synecdoche, New York

Through the first five months of the year, I haven't watched as many movies as I would have liked. There are a lot of reasons, including getting into a daily rut that involves winding down for bed around 8:30 p.m., the fact that Ashar and I have been primarily watching streaming series and, of course, taking care of the many cats 24/7.¹

Last year I shared a list of my 20 favorite "first-time watches." I looked over what I've watched so far this year (written down in my cat-chewed Story Supply Co. notebook) and started mulling what might make the year-end list for 2023.

The best movie I've watched this year is 1953's Where Chimneys Are Seen, directed by Heinosuke Gosho and starring Kinuyo Tanaka and Hideko Takamine. It's an outstanding drama that revolves around a group of struggling Japanese citizens and how they deal with a baby that is suddenly thrust into their midst.

This is my short list of first-time watches that are most likely to be considered for the year-end list:

• Dead of Night (1945)
• Where Chimneys Are Seen (1953)
• Marjoe (1972 documentary)
• The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)
• Synecdoche, New York (2008)
• Game Night (2018)

My most recent first-time watch was 1958's Black Cat Mansion, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa. It's part of the delightful Japanese subgenre of "ghost cat" films. It is also, decades before Ringu/The Ring, an early example of the Japanese horror trope of the slow-moving supernatural entity with long hair covering its face.

Now I want to track down some other films by Nakagawa. He's most famous for 1960's Jigoku, but I've read a lot about that one, and it sounds too grim/depressing/sadistic for my taste. One that I would like to watch is 1949's The Adventures of Tobisuke. With this poster, how can you go wrong?

Footnote

1. That includes the growing population of outdoor feral cats. This morning I had multiple visits between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. from Creamy, Fjord, Mittens, Cirque, Big Boi and Mamacita and her still-unnamed but very hungry kitten (pictured at right). Also, I discovered yesterday that Cirque has at least four kittens of her own, which are about a month old. They're in the neighbor's yard and inaccessible because of a tall wall, which is a conundrum. Also, Mamacita is almost certainly pregnant again. We need to get the TNR into a higher gear.

Book cover: "The Witchfinder"

• Title: The Witchfinder
• Author and illustrator: Mary Rayner (1933-2023). Unknown to me before I started working on this post, Rayner died just two months ago, in late March, at age 89. There are obituaries for her in The Guardian and The Telegraph. She was best known for the children's books she wrote and illustrated about a family of pigs. Rayner also illustrated Dick King-Smith's 1983 children's book The Sheep-Pig, which was adapted in the delightful 1995 film Babe. In 2020, Rayner published her memoir, No More Tigers, which includes an introduction by her daughter, Sarah Rayner. It's described as "a beautifully written and deeply moving account of a family who for several generations lived in Colonial Burma, and of what happened to them when World War 2 shattered their lives." Sarah Rayner has also written a number of books.
• Publication date of this edition: 1976. (The book was originally published in the United Kingdom in 1975, with the hyphenated title The Witch-Finder.)
• Publisher: William Morrow and Company, New York
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 160
• Dust jacket price: Not sure, because it's been clipped
• Dust jacket excerpt: "From England comes a story of witchcraft and possession guaranteed to hold readers spellbound. The setting is a country village near an ancient circle of standing stones known as Wansbury Ring."
• Dedication: "In memory of A.H.G. and for Sarah, whose idea it was." 
• About this book: In Rayner's obituary, The Guardian wrote: "Although she began by writing a novel, The Witch-Finder (1975), a tautly written family story infused with a sinister creepiness very unlike her subsequent warm and benign picture books, she had always been as interested in illustration as writing." And The Telegraph similarly stated, "Her first book, The Witch-Finder (1975), featured a young girl whose mother has fallen under the spell of strange standing stones near their home. It conveyed an unsettling atmosphere very different from the comforting happy family theme of her pig books."
• First two sentences: "Only a few yards to go. Louisa struggled through the water, her heart pumping, taking great gulps, now of air, now of water."
• Last sentence: I'm going to skip that, as it's a possible spoiler.
• Random excerpt from the middle #1: "Her mother's mocking words seemed suddenly to carry an air of menace."
• Random excerpt from the middle #2: "The shelves behind the librarian's head blurred over suddenly in thick mist, and the line of books began to rock up and down."
• Reviews: There's not much to be found online about this short novel, with its themes of UK folklore and folk horror aimed at juvenile readers. Kirkus published a short review at the time. I learned about the book through an article in issue No. 5 of the zine Weird Walk. The relevant passage: "If ancient customs were rich pickings for the burgeoning market in eerie children's tales, so too were ancient monuments. Avebury was famously used as the setting for the 1977 TV serial Children of the Stones, fictionalised as 'Milbury.' Two years earlier, Mary Rayner's The Witch-Finder had made Avebury 'Wansbury' and used the stones as a plot device to transform the central character's unfortunate mother into a witch." The Weird Walk article serves as a great jumping-off point for discovering similar books aimed at teenagers in the second half of the 20th century. 

Here's one of Rayner's interior illustrations... 

Presto Magix for Ozark Air Lines

As a Generation X kid, Presto Magix sets were firmly in my wheelhouse in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My favorites were the Star Wars and superhero sets, of course. I also liked the historical battles, such as the Battle of Midway (which I didn't know a damn thing about), and the generic outer space panoramas featuring rockets, space stations and jetpacks.

I mostly remember getting Mom to buy Presto Magix for me at the pharmacy sometimes. They were displayed on those spinner racks that usually held paperback books. Pharmacies had a much higher "coolness quotient" in those days. That's where I got many of my Star Wars figures. They also sold baseball cards, plastic toy soldiers and those tiny paratroopers you could throw into the air and then (hopefully) watch their parachute open. And sometimes they had those Yes & Know invisible ink booklets — another Gen X treasure that deserves its own post someday. In retrospect, I'm sure our parents dreaded letting us go with them to the pharmacy.

One of the odder Presto Magix sets was this collaboration with Ozark Air Lines in 1980. They were designed to hand out to kiddos traveling with their parents on Ozark flights. It doesn't seem they made much of an impact. Unopened sets from more than 40 years ago are regularly listed on eBay for less than $10. 

Ozark Air Lines was purchased by TWA in 1986 and TWA then was merged into American Airlines in 2001, so Ozark has long since fallen from most memories. But at least we still have these Presto Magix sets to tell us that it existed.

Finally, though I had to shake off some rust, I can happily report that this Presto Magix set still worked after more than four decades.

Guest post: Finally finding a "white whale" book from childhood

I recently connected with Caroline Stevermer and was thrilled that I was able to get her a copy of a long-lost Ruth Manning-Sanders novel from her childhood. Stevermer is an author who writes fantasy, most recently The Glass Magician from Tor Books. Her website is carolinestevermer.com. I'll let her tell the full story of this book reunion:

Mystery at Penmarth, by Ruth Manning-Sanders, illustrated by Susanne Suba. Robert M. McBride & Company, 1941 (first U.S. edition)

Like many if not most of us, as a child I read with reckless abandon. Even when a book delighted me, I often forgot the title and author. I relied on my memory of its location on the library shelves to find and reread it.

I came to regret my recklessness when those shelves were no longer available to me. I learned that if I wished to reread these books of delight, I had to hunt for them. Hunt I did. By recounting what I remembered of the plots to children's librarians, book-finder websites, and fellow bibliomaniacs, I have able to identify and reread those lost books. Every book but one.

Mystery at Penmarth was my white whale. I had lost hope of ever finding it again. 

(tl;dr — I've found it!)

A few days ago, thanks to Peggy MacEachern, book-finder extraordinaire, I learned its title and author. I have received a gift copy of the book from the incredibly generous Chris Otto, journalist and Papergreat blog-master. 

So I reread Mystery at Penmarth for the first time in sixty years. Spoilers ahoy! If you want to read the book without knowing more about it, stop here. 

Five children (delightfully portrayed in Susanne Suba's illustrations throughout) unite to form a secret society. There is most definitely a mystery for them to solve, and they solve it. There is a secret room, a message to decipher, and a mission which they successfully carry out. There is archaeology. There are ponies. 

No wonder I loved this book. It has everything.

What I completely failed to notice reading it in childhood was how adroitly the story is told. Rebecca, our first-person narrator, keeps the minutes of the secret society meetings, which allows her to recount the stories the children are told by subsidiary characters — local gossip, ghost stories, and folk tales. Ruth Manning-Sanders is famous for her anthologies of fairy tales and folklore. I can certainly see why. The stories aren't just a source of clues for the children. Such is the author's skill, they stand on their own.

Honesty is valued highly throughout the book. Although the children are truthful, the secret society is only dissolved once they carry out their final mission, something they keep a secret from the grownups. As an adult reader, I found that small secret a large part of how satisfying the story is.

My memories of the story were not always accurate. The children are responsible for the fire that destroys part of the house and all of the adjacent stable. In my memory they had been unfairly blamed for it. A big part of my love for the story came from what I remembered of the children communicating with the ghost of Penmarth, but there is nothing like that in the book. Anything that could be considered ghostly is given a rational explanation. However, Manning-Sanders conveys the atmosphere and mood of the secret room vividly. It is a ghost story, as far as this reader is concerned.

As I opened the book, I admit I dreaded a visit from the entity James Davis Nicholl has dubbed the Suck Fairy. Very often when a book from the twentieth century is never again reprinted, there is good reason to neglect it. Although this story is not without its embarrassments, it wasn't ruined for me. 

There are definitely issues of class, no surprise in a book published in 1941. The local accent is conveyed through spelling. I could ignore it, but I can easily imagine readers who couldn't. There is also at least one moment that denigrates Romani people. Probably I have missed other problems.

I am delighted to be reunited with my long-lost book. Peggy and Chris, I can never thank you two enough.

Lost Corners food humor and a recipe from a Vincent Price book

As regular reader(s) of this blog know, Papergreat has a strong interest in preserving tiny corners of the internet — personal blogs and websites, message boards, social media — that are especially susceptible to disappearing and/or being forgotten. The Lost Corners label features those posts from over the years.

I recently came across a Twitter thread from four years ago that was started by comedy writer Cullen Crawford¹, and I knew I wanted to "tuck it away in an envelope" for preservation. It's a laugh-out-loud look at food horrors that left at least two of us in this household ROTFL.

Here's the original post, plus my curation of the best (most horrifying?) responses, where things really get rollicking.

 

Nothing worse than sleeping at a friend's house and their family has some weird ass thing like calling spaghetti "Billy Dinner" or some shit

— Cullen Crawford (@HelloCullen) May 14, 2019

• @karakabangpow: "Sleepover at my friend's house, 8 years old, she served us an appetizer of saltine crackers with some weird spread on top. I asked her what it was she said 'its more crackers but I chewed them up!' like it was a normal thing."
• Cullen Crawford: "Jesus lord!"
• @karakabangpow: "I forgot she called them Kelly Crackers!!"
• @RecreantA: "That’s enough internet for one...lifetime."
• @MaraWilson: "My aunts made macaroni from a box of macaroni and cheese but without any cheese or butter or salt. It might have also been cold?"
• @Arithered: "Other People's Families are like the first experiences we ever have with the warning signs of cult indoctrination."
• @snartdeco: "I knew someone whose entire family called spaghetti 'daddy noodles' and I cannot"
• @alexvtunzelmann: "I’ve never forgotten some absolute lunatics who claimed that in their household they put orange juice on their breakfast cereal instead of milk. I assumed they were joking. Then they did it and lapped it up"
• @SocksUnterShoes: "Reminds me of my cousin. Always went to this friends house after school. They had something called 'sweet milk' and he loved it. Then he slept over. Sweet Milk is when you finish your cereal and pour your leftover milk into the Sweet Milk container."
• @mimva: "SCREAMING INSIDE MY SOUL FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. I CAN NEVER UNREAD THIS."
• @mtobey: "It was always something normal that was ruined by an extra ingredient like spaghetti with raisins"
• @Blarrknulp: "This tweet has opened up a secret door in humanity's unconsciousness."
• @EricDSnider: "I don't think we ever inflicted it on guests, but my mom made something with macaroni, cream of mushroom soup, and ground beef that she called 'Hamburger Whoop-Dee-Dee.'"²
• @LynnAAR: "I had a college roommate who made soup with chicken broth, a ton of pepper and a can of spray cheese.  Sometimes she'd throw in chopped celery."
• @HELLA_GIRTH: "my idea of spaghetti as a kid was plain noodles covered in a mixture of melted velveeta block cheese and milk, with chopped-up hot dogs"
• @AdamPateman: "My family would eat cereal 3 hours after dinner and call it Bed Lunch."
• @Gadgetgirlkylie: "My dad would make something he liked to call 'Daddy’s Gunge' it was a mixture of crushed up spam and tomatoe ketchup. It was gross. Yet he seemed proud of it like it was the best food ever made."
• @emikaj2: "my dad made 'Dad Ramen' which was ramen, black beans, and feta cheese. 2nd grade was a nightmare."
• @pixelkitties: "Went to have dinner with a new boyfriend's family for the first time.  Sat down and there was nothing to drink at the table.  No glasses, no water, nothing. Partway into the meal I asked for a glass of water and they looked annoyed, like I farted at the table."³
• @emzeewoolzee: "This cursed thread made me recall a repressed memory. Must have been 8-10 yrs old...first and only sleepover at strange friend’s house. They gave me honeydew melon with kraft singles melted on top in the microwave. oh god."
• @HoustonBig3: "First time I ate a meal with girlfriend and her parents, they crack out an appetizer and I thought it was a joke. A banana sliced lengthwise...with mayo slathered on it...and the mayo topped with crushed peanuts. They were not pranking me. I respectfully declined to partake."
• Cullen Crawford: "I didn’t ask for any of this"

* * *

OK, we need a palate cleanser, after all that. So, obviously, we'll turn to Vincent Price. It's my 10-year anniversary this month of switching to a pescetarian diet, so here's a summer recipe for ice-cold gazpacho from Sobrino de Botín in Madrid, Spain. The recipe was included in Price's 1965 book A Treasury of Great Recipes. (I'm going to take a much deeper dive into that incredible volume one of these days.)

Vincent Price at Dodger Stadium

Footnotes

1. Papergreat is in full solidarity with the Writers Guild of America in its ongoing strike. Writers deserve fair payment and fair residuals payments for all uses of their work.

2. We had "Mommy's Favorite Hamburger Hash," which, to the best of my recollection, was ground beef, cream of mushroom soup and chopped-up hard-boiled eggs poured over toast.

3. That same thing happened to me once, and it's probably my only uncomfortable experience while eating at someone else's house. I guess I was pretty lucky. But now I'm wondering if I really examined all the crackers and spread I've had over the years.

Another terrific Jack Gaughan cover illustration: "Almuric"

I've previously featured a handful of great cover illustrations by Hall of Fame science fiction/fantasy artist Jack Gaughan (1930-1985):

• Three Against the Witch World
• Time and Again
• Beyond the Stars 
• The Escape Orbit 
• Gather in the Hall of the Planets 

It's always a good time for more Gaughan, so featured today is the cover for the 1964 Ace edition of Robert E. Howard's Almuric. It's a fantastic illustration, with its winged creatures and dark tower in the background. To me, it sort of raises the cool-as-heck idea: What if Conan had traveled to Mordor?

Gaughan was an inspiration for so many readers and fellow artists. The 2010 book Outermost: The Art & Life of Jack Gaughan collects many of his pieces and preliminary sketches, offering some insight into his mind and process. Reviewing the book for Amazon, Tim Lukeman's only "complaint" is that the book isn't longer. Of Gaughan, he writes: "His art encompasses kinetic sketchiness, blazing swaths of saturated color, finely detailed linework, semi-abstraction, psychedelic imagery, caricature, exquisite B&W renderings like Medieval woodcuts or Lotte Reiniger's paper silhouettes … he could do it all. And yet, as I say, it's still recognizably Gaughan, never to be mistaken for the work of any other artist. There's an intensely personal essence to all of it."

As for the short novel Almuric itself, here's the rest of the rundown:

• Cover secondary text: "Alone on an uncharted planet"
• Author: Robert E. Howard (1906-1936)
• Original publication date: It was serialized in three issues of Weird Tales magazine, starting in May 1939. Because this was first published three years after Howard's death, there has been some question whether the work is entirely Howard's. "It may be that Howard created a draft for such a story that was later finished by another writer," Wikipedia notes. Writing on Grognardia in 2011, James Maliszewski opines "I suspect the real truth is that Almuric is a rough draft, lacking the polish of REH's other tales, and that this roughness accounts for its seeming 'un-Howardian' qualities in places. Taken as a whole, though, it's hard to credit anyone other than Robert E. Howard as the author of Almuric."
• Publication date of this edition: 1964
• Publisher: Ace Books (F-305)
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 157
• Cover price: 40 cents 
• Back cover excerpt: How Esau, alone on Almuric, with nothing but his wits and his muscles to protect him, faced Almuric's worst perils to make him master and monarch is a novel worthy of the creator of the Conan stories.
• First sentence: It was not my original intention ever to divulge the whereabouts of Esau Cairn, or the mystery surrounding him.
• Last sentence (deep breath, and trigger warning for colonial mentality): And we two — I an Earthman born, and Altha, a daughter of Almuric who possesses the gentler instincts of an Earthwoman — we hope to instill some of the culture of my native planet into the erstwhile savage people before we die and become as dust of my adopted planet, Almuric.
• Random sentence from the middle: I saw it plainly then — a gigantic spider, bigger than an ox.
• Which reminds me: We discovered another spider in our Arizona garage last night, so that was fun. Note sure whether it was a brown recluse or a wolf spider. It was not, however, the size of an ox.
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.77 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review excerpt: In 2008, Graham wrote: "As a stand-alone adventure, it’s a decent piece of writing, absolutely jam-packed with the kind of thrilling adventure and chaotic battle scenes that Howard made his own."
• Rating on Amazon: 4.3 stars (out of 5)
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2012, Suzanne wrote (slightly edited): "I am happy I read this book before reading the John Carter of Mars series because Almuric is more or less a rip-off of that series. ... I can ignore the fact that it's a rip-off because its an enjoyable rip-off, but the aspect I cannot ignore is how the main character is some kind of uber-fighting machine and how he doesn't really have any challenges in the books. His punches are like anvils and the poor aliens simply don't stand a chance. It is a bit like reading Harry Potter, where everything is handed to the main character on a silver platter."
• Another take: James Enge wrote a thoughtful review of the good and bad of Almuric on Black Gate. 

Dusty makes her first appearance on Papergreat.

2014 snapshots from Geppi's Entertainment Museum

In February 2014, Joan, Ashar and I took a trip to Geppi's Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. I snapped a lot of photos with an iPhone 5C and, for a long time afterward, I was planning to put together a dandy post for Papergreat about all the cool ephemera that was showcased there behind protective glass.

But the post never materialized. Maybe it was because I didn't like the quality of the smartphone pictures that I took of objects behind glass in a dark museum. And then, sadly, Geppi's closed its doors for good in June 2018, with most of its contents being donated to the Library of Congress.

So today, more than nine years after our visit, here are some photos from this now-vanished museum of American pop culture. In addition to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, items featured include Captain Marvel (aka Shazam), Star Trek, Dick Tracy, McDonald's and more.

Bonkers book title: "Garlic, Grapes and a Pinch of Heroin"

• Title: Garlic, Grapes and a Pinch of Heroin
• Cover secondary text: "Disappearing heroin and a missing brother ... can she prove his innocence and stay alive?"
• Author: Elaine Turner, about whom I cannot find any biographical information. Contact me if you can help out!
• Cover illustrator: Unknown, but we can assume the artist knew very little about the plot or actual genre.
• Publication date: 1977
• Publisher: Manor Books, which was in business for about a decade, from 1972 to 1981. As Wikipedia notes, "A marketing gimmick used by Manor was the Seal of Guaranteed Reader Satisfaction, which offered compensation if the customer was not pleased with his purchase." This book, however, does not offer that guarantee.
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 226
• Cover price: $1.50 (about $7.44 today)
• Strange hyphenation in back cover blurb: "hi-jacker"
• First sentence: Wisps of fog danced, slowly encircling the evergreens.
• Last sentence: "I don't think we have to worry about his answer, but whatever it is, not much, not much at all."
• Sentence from the middle #1: Her detecting had produced a big fat zero.
• Sentence from the middle #2: Violet's formidable array of cosmetics were arranged on the dresser, a magazine lay on the slightly mussed bed.
• Excerpt from the middle #3: "Well, howdy, it's sure been good to see ya'all. The tour's been mighty dull without you," Bernie boomed.
• Online review: This book is rated 3.33 stars (out of 5) on Goodreads and there are no ratings on Amazon. But there's only one actual review online, and it served as the inspiration for this post. The review is by Justin Tate of SpookyBook, and it begins: 

"Let’s take a moment to admire that title. Wow. I mean, if that doesn’t catch the eye, what will? Of course the cover is less appealing. It has all the ingredients of Gothic standard, but on an eighth-grade art class budget. Nevermind that the novel itself is 0% Gothic."

Please go and read the entire excellent review. Other books reviewed by SpookyBooky include Lord Satan, The Ladies of Holderness, The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories, and the wonderfully titled Let the Crags Comb Out Her Dainty Hair. In addition, Tate wrote wrote a journal in the first half of 2020 that combines thoughts on the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic with a first reading of Stephen King's The Stand. It's well worth reading and an important time capsule of a moment in history.