Ask The A.V. Club - May 8, 2008
The
Circle Game
I've seen a number of references lately to a
"tree" chart that Rolling
Stone published in the 1970s documenting all of Joni Mitchell's romantic
liaisons in the music industry. She was quite offended by it, evidently. I want
to see it, but I can't find it anywhere on the Internet. Is it possible that
some censorship is in effect, or are my Google skills just feeble?
Carlton
W King
Noel Murray is willing to risk the ire of a
65-year-old:
Carlton, I consulted my DVD-ROM of Rolling
Stone: Cover To Cover,
which contains every page of every issue from 1967 to May of last year, and I believe
I've found the chart you're referring to. It's called "Hollywood's Hot 100,"
and it ran in the issue cover-dated February 3, 1972. It's a two-page
spread—with no byline, tellingly—that lays out "Southern
California's Aristocracy Of Amplification, a High Society whose membership
comes from (loosely) half a dozen identifiable 'families.'" The intro goes on
to explain, "It is almost as if rock & roll has been given the ultimate
legitimacy of having its own haute monde. It is fitting it happened in Tinseltown.
There is, of course, no way for these relationships to be absolutely accurate,
comprehensive, or sensibly organized, but if you'll bear with us, dear reader,
if you'll follow them flowing (and dotted) lines, that bouncing ball, if you'll
track the trail of broken hearts, why, some patterns might begin to emerge
sufficient to Explain all Mysteries."
As you might've guessed, "Hollywood's Hot 100"
isn't just about Joni. It features dozens upon dozens of SoCal and UK rock
stars, grouped by label or "scene," with lines connecting those who'd worked
together or slept together. Joni Mitchell appears smack in the middle of the
second page, represented by a lipstick print, and connected by arrows to James
Taylor, Russ Kunkel, and each individual member of Crosby, Stills & Nash.
On the surface, her depiction is fairly benign, but as "Kakki B" points out on
the "Only Joni" newsgroup, "The majority of the connective lines on the chart
signify musical
alliances, with the romantic alliances being sort of secondary. Joni does not
even rate her own box as a musician on the mostly male dominated chart. If you
look at it from her perspective, you can see how she might feel marginalized,
and made to look as if she were nothing more than those guys' star groupie."
Given that Mitchell was reportedly irritated and offended by her own label's
attempt to sexualize her with ad copy like "Joni Mitchell Comes Across" and
"Joni Mitchell: 90% Virgin," this fan's assessment of her irritation makes
sense.
As for why the chart is hard to find on the
Internet, it's probably not so much a matter of Rolling Stone trying to pretend it
never existed as the publication not seeing the need to put its complete
archives online, especially when it's trying to sell DVD-ROMs. Also,
"Hollywood's Hot 100" covered two pages of a tabloid-sized magazine back in
1972. It isn't the kind of thing that easily reproduces on a computer screen,
as you can see:
But here's the Joni part, which you might find
more useful:
Sex And
Death
I have been
searching for two movies, and apparently I am not using the right combination
in my search. If you could help with either one, I would greatly appreciate it.
The first is from the late '60s or '70s. I believed it was one of those movies
that contained three short stories. What I remember is someone trying to kill
someone else to get an inheritance. There is a painting on the wall (by the
stairs, I believe) that is of the house and the cemetery nearby. When a young
man first looks at the painting, he sees a fresh gravesite. When he looks at
the painting again, he sees a corpse coming out of the grave. Then when he
looks again, the corpse is walking toward the house. Each time he looks at the
painting, the corpse is nearer the house. Finally, the corpse reaches the door.
I believe the young man dies of fright, and that the butler was responsible for
the paintings. The way it ends is, the butler looks at the painting and sees
the young man coming out of his grave.
The second movie also
contained three short stories, all taking place in France before the
Revolution. The stories contain nudity and dealt with sex between the classes.
One story was of an aristocratic couple not having any sex until one or both of
them spy on their maid romping
around naked and screwing a young man in the greenhouse. I believe the
aristocratic couple is so turned on by this that they also end up screwing in
the greenhouse. A second story deals with a maid coming to work at the mansion
of a man she finds out has locked his son away ( I forget the reason given).
She ends up screwing the son. You find out it is a game that the father and son
have going, to see how long it
takes to "seduce" a maid. I think they might even have alternated who
was locked away. The story ends with the maid being dismissed, and as she is
walking away from the house, she passes the new maid. I don't remember the
third story.
Dee
A.V.
Club team-up powers, activate! Christopher Bahn slowly lurches toward the
answer to your first question:
The story is
"The Cemetery," from Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Airing from
1970 to 1973, Night Gallery followed a similar format to
Serling's better-known, earlier anthology series The Twilight Zone, but with a
focus that leaned more on tales of horror and the macabre, featuring a mix of
Serling-written stories and adaptations of works by writers like H.P. Lovecraft
and Richard Matheson. Each episode usually featured a number of shorter
stories, linked by an introduction narrated by Serling as he stood in the
gallery of the series' title, looking at a ghoulish painting linked to the
story. As Serling put it in the first episode, "Each is a collector's item
in its own way—not because of any special artistic quality, but because
each captures on a canvas, suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a
nightmare."
"The
Cemetery" was the first of three stories that formed the pilot for the
series. (The second segment, "Eyes," has the distinction of being
Steven Spielberg's TV directorial debut.) Roddy McDowall stars as the young
nephew of an old, dying artist, whom he kills by leaving the window open on a
cold night in order to get his inheritance. Ossie Davis plays the butler who's
secretly responsible for the apparently mystical movements of the painting. You
can find a detailed synopsis on
this page at tv.com. The first season of Night Gallery
is available on DVD, and there's also a pretty good fan website covering the
basics of the show at nightgallery.net.
(Our Denver editor, Jason Heller, also points out that the idea of a monster
that only moves when you're not looking at it is also used in the recent Doctor Who episode "Blink." It's possible that
"Blink" was inspired by "The Cemetery," though I haven't been
able to confirm that one way or another.)
Oh, and here's
the end of the episode, though sadly, the sound and visuals are pretty badly
out of sync:
Tasha Robinson steps in
for the second half of the tango:
As to your second question,
Dee, there's a lot less information available out there on it, since it's kinda
amateurish foreign-import softcore rather than the debut episode of a
well-regarded series by a well-regarded master of suspense. Basically, you're
lucky I had Cinemax (a.k.a. Skinemax, a.k.a. Softcore Central) in college, and
I happened to catch part of what you're describing. The anthology with the
maid-seducing game was called The Secrets Of Love: Three Rakish Tales. It consists of screen
adaptations of three erotic stories by well-regarded, pre-20th-century French
authors: Guy de Maupassant, Marguerite de Navarre,
and Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne. At least one of the installments, de
Navarre's "La Fessée," or "The Spanking," was apparently edited down from a
longer version made for a French TV show called Série Rose; at least one source online claims all three episodes
were, which would explain the uniformly high production values.
I never saw
the first story you're describing, with the aristocratic couple, but it's called
"The Greenhouse." The maid-seducing story is called "The Pupil," since the
supposedly imprisoned young man gets into the maid's petticoats by pretending
he knows nothing of the female body or this thing called love, so she
volunteers to educate him. "The Spanking" (which is the short I used to track
down the anthology) seems to have been the one the Internet cares about, to the
degree that it cares at all; there's marginally more information on it. As far
as I recall, that story involved an aristocratic woman who's been reduced to
servant status, getting brutally whipped for sleeping with the help. So she and
her lover scheme to have the lover seduce their master's wife—the bitchy
mastermind behind the beating—and have her get caught. The piece ends
with the master whipping his wife, as well. (The lover, who was probably a
stable-hand or some such, gets off scot-free; he claims he thought he was
getting into bed with the cook, and the master gives him a sort of "Boys will
be boys" shrug and blames the wife for taking the cook's place.) It doesn't
seem like Secrets Of Love is available in the States, but as I
recall, you aren't missing much, apart from some really terrible
English-language dubbing.
[pagebreak]
Jesus Is Da Bomb
Need some help with the gospel. A while back,
some friends and I were going on a road trip that ended at an airport in a
borrowed car. About halfway through, we ended up fighting and not talking to
each other. In an effort to ease the mood, someone threw in a cassette that
just said "gospel." AVC staff, I tell you, it was a fine mix-tape, but one song
has stuck with me, and I'd like to know more. All I can tell you is a snatch of
lyric: "Mmm, everybody's worried about that atom bomb / But nobody is
worried about the day my Lord will come / 'Cause when my Jesus gets here, he's
going to hit like an atom bomb." There might be a cute sermon in the
middle, and the rest of the lyrics all sort of juxtapose imagery of
Jesus/savior and a-bomb/God's wrath.
Orson
Rev. Donna Bowman is here to deliver the word:
I have no doubt you need some help with the
gospel, Orson, along with all those other lost souls out in A.V. Club-land. The song is called
"Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb," and as you might imagine, it's a
gospel number from the post-World War II era. It was recorded by many gospel
groups around 1950, most notably the Pilgrim Travelers, the Soul Stirrers, the
Famous Blue Jay Singers, and Lowell Blanchard And His Valley Trio. Blanchard's
version is the soundtrack for this homemade apocalyptic concoction:
The premise of the song is that, as recounted in
Genesis 9:11-17, God promised Noah after the Flood that he would never again
destroy the world with water. Many gospel songs subscribed to a particular
theological conclusion derived from that pledge—that the next
world-destroying event would be fire. (The title of James Baldwin's essay
collection The Fire Next Time is a reference to this
belief.) After the introduction of the atomic bomb to warfare at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the prospect of the world ending in a blaze of atomic fire seemed close
at hand, and with the discovery of Soviet weaponry a few years later, the fears
got deeper: "Nineteen hundred and forty-nine / The USA got very wise / They
found that a country across the line / Had an atom bomb of the very same
kind." Americans should worry less about nuclear holocaust than the day of
judgment, cautions the lyric, but if they "trust King Jesus," they'll
be safe from the terror God demonstrated to the priests of Baal when he rained
down fire from the sky on the altar in answer to Elijah's prayer (I Kings
18:19-40).
The title "Jesus Hits Like The Atom
Bomb" re-entered the public's musical consciousness as the name of
Tripping Daisy's 1998 album. (The song doesn't appear on the album.) One of the
more recent gospel recordings of the tune is by John Alexander's Sterling
Jubilee Singers in 1997, on an album of the same name.
"Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb" is far
from the only gospel tune that uses current events as metaphors for matters
spiritual. On the same theme in 1950, the Swan Silvertone Singers produced
"Jesus Is God's Atom Bomb": "Have you heard about the blast in
Japan / How it killed so many people and scorched the land? / Oh, it can kill
your natural body / But the Lord can kill your soul." The Pilgrim
Travelers returned to their Cold War sermonizing in 1951's "Jesus Is The
First Line Of Defense": "If all the people, every day would get down
on their knees and pray / Then make the H-bomb and atom too / Tell the Reds
we'll turn them loose / Our boys will stop dying, the land'll be free / 'Cause
God said 'I'm the Prince of Peace.'"
Of course, the use of trains, automobiles,
airplanes, and other technological features of 20th-century life as hooks for
blues, country, and gospel lyrics has always been widespread. We haven't had to
wade over Jordan for a long time—all kinds of modern conveyances are ready
to take us to the promised land. An atomic bomb is just another kind of fiery
chariot, swingin' low, isn't it?
The First Question On This Subject
Do you have any idea what compels people to be
the first to reply to a bulletin board or blog post with "First!" or
"Firsties" (or other variations?)
When did this begin, and why do we find it so
annoying?
Steve
Tasha Robinson was the first to respond to this
post:
I can't tell you where it started, Steve, though I
suspect it was some busy, busy comment board like Fark or Slashdot, where
anyone who actually arrives at a thread in time to be the first person to post
feels as awed and giddy as Neil Armstrong putting that initial footprint on the
moon. I've seen it on any number of other sites, too—including sites with
a lot less comment traffic, where "Firsties!" might as well be "Onlysies!"
Why do people do it? People do things for a lot of
reasons, and I'm betting even the people who do it here don't all have the same
motives, if they have any coherent motives at all. Here are a couple of the
ones I'm betting are most prevalent:
a) It's about marking territory, like a dog. Any
scene belongs to the first person who can get there.
b) It's about showing off what a dedicated Club fan you are. Only the
people refreshing their web pages endlessly and mechanically actually get to be
first to new content. (Alternately, it's about crowing over a little bit of
random, fortuitous luck.)
c) It's about showing off. One of the great motivators in life is
the need to stand out from the crowd by accomplishing something no one else can
do, and there can only be one actually first post on any article. Which is
beyond miniscule in the fame game, but so is writing your name on a bathroom
stall, carving it on a tree, or spray-painting it on an underpass, and people
constantly do all those things, too. It's just one more tiny way of saying
"Hey! I exist!"
d) It's about following the crowd. Some posters
report that they've seen so many firsties that they can't resist joining in on
the fun, even if they hate other people's firsties. At this point, "Firsties"
is like any other in-joke that comes up over and over on the boards; people
throw it out there just to be joiners.
e) It's about irony. Even people who seem to think
everyone else's firsties are moronic somehow seem to think their own firsties
are heaped with sarcastic "See, isn't this stupid?" commentary.
f) It's just plain about pissing other people off.
Remember, to your basic troll, even angry, ranting attention is better than the
usual no attention. Maybe the ranting attention is better, because it shows
you've gotten under someone's skin in a meaningful way.
"Why do we find it so annoying?" Well, I have no
idea why you
find it annoying, or why anyone else you're putting under your "we" blanket
would find it annoying. Again, different people no doubt find it annoying for
different reasons: because it's repetitive, because it's childish, because they
didn't get there first to do it themselves, dammit. And some people don't find
it annoying at all—even some of our staffers think it's cute, or at
worst, meaningless and harmless. So don't assume firsties irk everyone.
Personally, I find them annoying because I mostly
read the comment boards in hope of some sort of cogent discussion, and "OMG,
first!" is about as far from that as you can get. Firsties tend to drag down
the whole tone of a comment thread, by guaranteeing that the initial 20 posts
on any piece of content here will be people arguing and insulting each other
for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the content itself. It's
vaguely insulting to spend hours reading or watching something and attempting
to craft a meaningful analysis, and then having any resultant discussion
derailed by people who clearly haven't read the content and don't care about it
at all—kind of like pouring your heart into carefully crafting a
sculpture, and then finding out that the locals only care about whether it's
fun to climb on. It seems to me like the "Firsts!" and the subsequent firstie-hater
vs. firstie-lover wars that always break out discourage the commentators who
might have something substantiative to say. But that's just me.
And yes, we're working on a new comments system,
one that will let logged-in users help mod out the trolls and the imbeciles and
everyone else they hate. At which point maybe we'll finally find out for sure
whether a majority of people really do hate firsties enough to mod them down
into invisibility, or if the firsties army is bigger and stronger and more determined
than we think.
Next week: Stumped! returns. Send your questions to [email protected].