Thursday, September 27, 2012


Darling, It's Simply A Mystery And Much Too Awful To Talk About

"I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me ... the most dreadful thing..." Peter Straub, Ghost Story, 1979

 

True crime horrifies me.  Perhaps this is because I have personally known people who were victims of evil deeds...


Forty plus years ago, I knew a girl who simply vanished and never again returned to our junior high classroom.  Her body was eventually found in a remote wooded area.  The newspaper article spoke of skeletal remains chained to a tree.  Local whispers spoke of a drunken father with unnatural desires...
Ghost Story: Alice Krige as Alma Mobley aka Eva Galli aka
a woman who didn't appreciate being killed by a band of rich
young drunks


Horrible stories fascinate us.  And I am not immune to that fascination, though I prefer the nightmares that I am able to end by closing the covers of  book or pushing a DVD player OFF button...



In the early 1800s, a jurist in Germany wrote stories of fantastic happenings that caused shivers to dance the spines of his genteel readers.  He was a man of many talents but E T A Hoffman made a non-career enhancing mistake by using them almost as soon as he sat down at his desk for the first time in his first job.  Rather than chill folks with grisly and eerie tales, he thought to amuse them with sketches.  Unflattering caricatures of military officers were passed around at a ball in Posen during the Carnival season.  It took the authorities little time to figure out who drew them...
 

Young Hoffman was showing promise and his superiors in Berlin were loath to dismiss him over an act of misguided youthful dissolution.  So, to teach him a lesson, he found himself "promoted" to a remote post in the boondocks of the boondocks of Prussia with duties that included finding surnames for Jews who were slow to understand their duty to acknowledge the cultural superiority of their gentile neighbors.  [The process of forcing Jews living in Teutonic lands to use European style family names began in 1787 as a follow-up to the "Edict of Tolerance" issued five years earlier.  Napoleon liked the ideas of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph II so well that he, too, decided in 1808 that Jews living in lands under his control wanted surnames.]...

 
Ernst Hoffman, despite tendencies towards alcoholism and syphilis, lived with an active and restless mind that expressed itself as a composer of music, playwright, sketch artist, and writer of stories where the grotesque and macabre merged with the ordinary lives of men and women.  His novelette, The Nutcracker and The Mouse King, inspired Tchaikovsky's ballet which every local dance troupe in the United States forces itself to inflict upon the neighboring community during the Christmas season.


Hoffman's The Sandman adapted for the stage by Bob Fisher
and performed at the Oracle Theatre, Chicago
[Sigmund Freud was particularly impressed by Hoffman's The Sandman as was Ernst Jentsch, a psychologist who investigated that curious psychological phenomenon which we all experience at times: something ordinary and extremely familiar suddenly seems alien and foreign to us. 

 

Elaborating on Jentsch's turn-of-the-century research in a 1919 essay, The Uncanny, Freud saw such moments as linked to unconscious desires, forbidden feelings too horrible to publicly acknowledge or admit to ourselves. 


The element of blindness in Hoffman's story corresponds, to Freud's way of thinking, to the Greek tale of Oedipus who blinds himself upon learning he has joyfully bedded his own mother after killing dad.  For Sigmund, self-blinding equates to self-castration.  He seems to have been fixated on genital mutilation:  writing in Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud argues "Circumcision is a symbolical substitute of castration, a punishment which the primaeval father dealt his sons long ago out of the awfulness of his power...."]

Edgar Allan Poe: a troubled man who did not
well at West Point but who excelled at traipsing
life's darker paths
 

The darkness of Hoffman's stories helped inspire a dark and troubled genius across the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe, to pen "The Murders In The Rue Morgue", often said to be the "first detective story"...


Two women, a mother and her daughter, are brutally murdered in a locked fourth story apartment in Poe's tale.  A man named Adolphe Le Bon is charged with having done the savage deed although no evidence can be found to link him to the crime.  The streets of Paris are, unfortunately, not safe despite the arrest of M. Le Bon.  A gentleman named C Auguste Dupin takes an interest in the affair for he is intrigued by the mystery of it all and does not wish to see an innocent man mount the steps to the guillotine...
 

Dupin eventually solves the "murder" by deducing that an escaped "ourang-outan" killed one of the women as it attempted to shave her with a straight razor as it had observed its owner shave himself on a daily basis.  The sight of blood filled the ape with a lust to cause more death, inciting him to strangle the daughter who walked in on this scene of horror...

1932 film adaptation of Poe's Murders
Monsieur Dupin and his skill in using intellect to solve an impossible mystery provided a useful role model for Sherlock Holmes during his investigation of the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, apparently at the jaws of a supernatural hellhound, a rather common creature in British folklore.  This adventure, the third novel in Arthur Conan Doyle's series of stories about the English detective, first saw print in serialized form from August 1901 through April 1902 on the pages of The Strand magazine, a popular British periodical which published fact and fiction by writers such as Doyle, H G Wells, Agatha Christie, and Rudyard Kipling from the early 1890s until 1950...
 

Holmes, being a rationalist, arrives at a reasonable solution to the demise of Sir Chuck.  His creator, however, had a fondness for the mysterious.  A Conan Doyle, MD, held a firm belief that spirits of the dead could communicate with the living (a faith born out of the tragedy of his son's death during battle in World War One) but ultimately saw his reputation suffer when he vigorously defended the authenticity of photographs which appear to capture fairies at play with two teenage girls in the English countryside...

Miss Elsie Wright converses with a Fairy, circa 1920, in a
photo of dubious authenticity defended by Arthur Conan Doyle
 

[In Doyle's defense, we might note that many men of science took strong interest in the question of the survival of the personality after death during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Among them was the dogged pragmatist Thomas Edison who reportedly spent the last decade of his life working on a device that would allow the living to speak with the dead.]
 

Doyle took the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles from legends attached to Squire Richard Cabell, charitably described by contemporaries as a "monstrously evil man" who lived to hunt foxes and murder wives.  Inasmuch as the local peasantry held to the opinion that Squire Richard sold his soul to the Devil, they were not particularly upset when he died in July 1667.  However, the very night that Cabell was entombed near the village of Buckfastleigh in Devon, a pack of phantom hounds came baying across the moors to mourn at his gravesite.  A year passed.  On the first anniversary of Squire Richard's death, his brutish specter led the ghostly hellhounds on a hunt.  And it has done so, the story goes, each July 5th since...


Aaron Campbell illustration for A Conan Doyle's
The Hound of the Baskervilles
 
Sometimes life's dark side has a mundane explanation for what seems inexplicable to the viewer...


Here I recall an elderly woman who lived near me when I was a child.  We never met and my eyes saw her but once in more than ten years.  Her home was a spacious and columned affair as befits the Deep South.  The grounds were a manicured jungle of flower-filled shrubs and majestic trees towering over a neatly trimmed carpet of Saint Augustine grass.  Yet this lady rarely stepped beyond her front door.  A local grocery delivered her food.  Her help-- a maid and a gardener-- ran other household errands and took whatever needed to be mailed to the post office...


Late in the twilight on one summer's day, I happened to be walking past her home as she stood on the front porch and surveyed the lilies and hydrangeas of her garden.  She was a small and slender woman.  She wore an ankle length black dress with long sleeves.  Our eyes met.  She looked down towards the ground immediately.  A few seconds later, her front door closed behind her...

Ghosts and Old Oaks: A Southern Love Story
 

The local story was that her son had been a prominent officer in a local bank.  He had embezzled funds.  Upon discovery of this betrayal of an employer's trust, he chose the gentleman's way out, sparing his family the disgrace of a public trial.  Knowledge of his misdeeds became public despite the suicide.  His mother, once a vibrant butterfly of the Central Louisiana social scene, withdrew into herself because of the shame, becoming a mystery created by the personal horrors of her life...
 

Past sins intruding into the present fuel many literary and cinematic excursions into the oft intertwined realms of mystery and horror...
 

I recently found a wonderful example of this linking of themes in my own home library while sifting through a stack of "when I have the time to just relax, sit down and read" books.  The long ignored title was Peter Straub's If You Could See Me Now which tells the story of Miles Teagarden's terrifying summer twenty years after his last meeting with his beautiful cousin Alison Greening on the night of June 21, 1955 at a moonlit rock quarry near the farming town of Arden, Wisconsin, as they skinny-dipped...
 

Miles was thirteen, Alison was fourteen.  They kissed playfully as they swam naked...

Ghost Story:  The Chowder Society wishes
Eva Galli had never died
 
Then they held each other, bodies coming together in a moment that others would call sinful and shameful and evil, but one they knew was divine and ordained of old...


Afterwards, Alison extracted a promise from Miles that, come hell or high water, they would meet at the rock quarry twenty years later.  Teagarden is on his way to Arden as Straub begins a deftly worked tale of memories and vengeance.  Now a lecturer at a college in the Northeast, Miles hopes to complete his doctoral dissertation in the balmy summer of 1975.  But, far more importantly, with a failed marriage to haunt his thoughts, Teagarden hopes to reconnect with his beloved Alison...


Miles finds himself unwelcome in his mother's hometown.  A local girl, the first of many, has just been savagely murdered and mutilated.  And the very long memories of small town preachers and gossips recall his scandalous coupling with Alison Greening, seen both Teagarden's other cousin, Duane, and a high school jock who grows up to be the local chief of police.  Neither could resist telling the story of Miles and Alison's frenzied adolescent coupling to all who would listen, the violence and fury of their love-making...
 


A Conan Doyle also gave us the adventures of Professor
Challenger who found dinosaurs on a remote plateau in
the Amazon
 
Alison never answered any of the hundreds of letters Miles sent her afterward.  He has assumed her shame quenched her love for him but he desperately hopes she will keep the vow they made with God as a witness to meet again at the place of their sin.  Now, back in Arden he learns that he has repressed a horrible memory-- of awakening at the quarry, to find Alison nude and lifeless, her skull shattered by rocks pounded against them...

 

The pious townsfolk of Arden have long believed Miles Teagarden got away with rape and murder because of his youth and his family's prominence in the community.  But they were wrong in their finger-pointing.  A surly cousin named Duane and a future police chief took advantage of Miles' exhausted sleep to know the pleasure of Alison's flesh and then to brutally and eternally (or so they thought) silence her tongue.  But, now, a girl long dead returns to avenge her murder and find the cousin she adores so he can share death with her, forever in her arms...

Alice Krige as Bathsheba
 
[In the way that unconnected things are sometimes connected, I note a coincidence in Straub's story to the Concho Valley where I live.  We have our own little town of Arden in Irion County, named for a pioneer couple who settled the area in 1885.  It is now a ghost town.  And the surname of Straub's troubled and forgetful protagonist has its own Concho connection--  Jack Teagarden, one of the jazz world's most highly regarded trombonists, grew up in San Angelo where he first played music professionally.  He went on to perform with Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong, becoming one of the first white musicians to show racial barriers the contempt they merit.]


Reading Straub's story, his third novel, I was struck by its thematic resemblance to his fifth book, Ghost Story.  The heroes of both tales are young teachers unable to fit into the world around them gracefully.  The two stories feature long dead women who seek vengeance against those who made them dead.  Memories of violence and sex-- too horrible to be spoken aloud-- are repressed but find their own voice and wreak havoc when they speak...

Gustave Dore illustration for Poe's The Raven
Critics took to Ghost Story, a long and complex novel which tells the story of a group of elderly men, prominent lawyers and doctors in the town of Milburn.  Each week, these members of the "Chowder Society" meet to outdo each other in the telling of gruesome horror stories.  This is their way of honoring an agreement to never speak of a night in 1929 and the death of a woman they knew as Eva Galli...

 
But the critics were not overly fond of the novel's film version.  I do respectfully disagree.  Ghost Story, the movie, tells a vastly condensed version of the tale, removing a number of characters and plot twists.  But the true test of the movie is whether or not if provides a good grisly afternoon for the viewer... 


It does do this.  There has long been, and always shall be, a debate on the merits of a written piece of fiction and one which unfolds across wide silver screens.  But they are different genres and it probably as realistic to denigrate a filmed version of a novel as it would be to criticize a painting of musicians for failing to delight the ear of the viewer...

 
Plus, we have Alice Krige in the filmed Ghost Story.  She plays the dual role of Eva Galli and Alma Mobley, her returned-from-the-grave incarnation.  There is a scene in this film which also stars Fred Astaire and John Houseman-- a scene most pleasing to the eye-- where Alma stands at a window, staring out a restless sea before she turns and slowly walks toward the camera.  But I digress, perhaps revealing too much of why I say critics be damned if they don't love the movie as I love it...    

Ms Krige was born in South Africa,  She often plays beautiful and wicked women.  Her laughter is throaty, delightfully devilish in its implied menace.  Oh, If a girl must be bad for the sake of the story, let her be as lovely and charming as this one who also has portrayed Bathsheba, the wife of a Hittite captain, whose rooftop bathing caught the eye of King David.  Readers familiar with this Biblical story know what David did and how Uriah's wife became the mother of Solomon...


The beauty of a woman, the sin of a king: Bathsheba bathes
on a rooftop

Unlike many tales, though, what David did was awful but it was not too awful for an ancient chronicler to talk about.  Nor was why he did it too much of a mystery.  We today speak of a king's sin.  He intentionally sent a man into battle, knowing that the man would die and his wife would be free to lay naked in the king's bed... 


But what would we have done had we too gazed out our palace window as Bathsheba loosed her robes?  That is a mystery we cannot answer.  Knowing what we would do is simply too awful to talk about, for, as an unseen Presence once advised Cain, sin couches at our door and its urge is ever toward us.  But few are those who remember that they may yet be its master...    

 
Ghost Story

 
 

 

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CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Photograph by Ben Fuchsen of Bob Fisher's adaptation of The Sandman by ETA Hoffman performed at the Oracle Theatre from timeoutchicago.com; Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932, Universal Pictures, Director: Robert Florey) memorabilia from tumblr.com; Alice Krige as Bathsheba stills from King David, 1985, Paramount Pictures, Director: Bruce Beresford; illustration for A Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles by Aaron Campbell from aaroncampbellillustration.blogspot.com; Fairy offering flower to Elsie Wright, circa 1920, photographed by Frances Griffiths from www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/doyle.htm; poster for The Lost World (1925, First National Pictures, Director:Harry O Hoyt) from supra-quintessence. com; Ghost Story (1981, Universal Pictures, Director: John Irvin) poster from movieposter.com; stills from Ghost Story (1981) digitally altered by Louis Nugent; "Ghosts and Old Oaks" from Louis Nugent (faa.com)

Thursday, September 20, 2012

A Gallery Of Thorns

 

"West of Fort Concho, it (mesquite) becomes dwarfed into a shrub of very large roots... in central Texas and southward beyond San Antonio, the mesquite sometimes has a diameter of two or more feet.  Its wood is very durable, makes good fuel and has large tanning properties.  A decoction of (mesquite) roots is said to be a good remedy for bowel complaints."-- S B Buckley, Second Annual Report of the Geological and Agricultural Survey of Texas, 1876
 

Southwest Texas is a land of thorns and spines...

 
This week we look at some shrubs and cacti native to the country around San Angelo.  Many of them have been mentioned in our Journey To The Desert's Edge series and it is long past time to introduce these hardy shrubs to readers who have not yet met them...

 
With the exception of ocotillo and Desert Hackberry, each plant listed here is either abundant or fairly common in a thirty minute drive from the Oasis of West Texas.  Desert Hackberry, according to information provided me by Mr Burr Williams, director of the Sibley Nature Center in Midland, Texas, has an aversion to the cold temperatures which occasionally assault the San Angelo vicinity in winter.  A hardier relative-- Celtis reticulata-- can be found in Tom Green County. Ocotillo, sadly, like lechuguilla and creosote bush, doesn't become widespread until our travels take us to Reagan and Crockett counties to the city's west and southwest, respectively...

Mesquite "forests" near Turkey Creek, a draw in west central
Tom Green County.  Once healthy desert grassland, this area
was overgrazed into non-productivity.
 
Tom Green County, regular readers of this blog know, is home to San Angelo.  Plant life here consists of short clumps of grass, odd looking forbs, and a host of xeric succulents and shrubs.  Rains usually fall late in the spring.  After the land dries and the wildflowers disappear, these plants cover approximately 50% of the ground surface.  The other 50% is bare soil and rock...

 
Mesquite and redberry juniper are probably the two most common Tom Green County shrubs.  The latter dots mesas and parts of the desert plains surrounding the flattened hilltops.  But the former appears in almost every corner of the county, coating overgrazed rangeland for miles.  Mesquite grows so thickly in places that a traveler can think he or she is driving through forests of stunted trees...

Prosopis glandulosa-- Mesquite-- in bloom (see credits)
 

Mesquite covers a wide area outside its native Chihuahuan and Sonoran Desert homes, so much so that some Texans fail to recognize it as primarily a desert shrub that spread out of the drylands.  It ranges into southern Kansas and eastern Texas and California's western desert country.  R J Ansley, writing in The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, observes that the distribution and density of mesquite has increased greatly since the late 1800s.  Possible explanations for this include livestock grazing, decreased numbers of wildfire, climate change, and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.  We know, from an 1849 military survey conducted by Lt. F T Bryan, mesquite was once but lightly scattered across the eastern Concho Valley of Texas.  Prosopis glandulosa dominates this area nowadays.  Mesquite (like Catclaw Acacia and Fragrant Mimosa, discussed below) is a bean producing plant, a member of the botanical family Fabaceae...

 
Many dry country dwellers have another name for Catclaw Acacia and it is not Acacia greggii.  They call it "Wait A Minute Bush" due to an uncanny ability to snare the clothes of a passerby with hooked thorns identical in size and shape to a cat's claw.  If these hooks actually latch onto a man's flesh, he is prone to use more colorful nouns and gerunds to describe the plant.  Acacia greggii rarely ventures outside northern Mexico and the "hot deserts" of the United States-- the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Mojave.  But it can also be found in drought-prone Central Texas and the Rio Grande Plains...

An Acacia greggii-- Catclaw-- branch shows off several of its
hooked thorns.  (See credits)
Distribution of Acacia greggii in southwestern United States
Readers who remember their Greek myths may recall Boreas was the god assigned to rule the north wind.  The same readers may suspect the "borealis" in Mimosa borealis hints at a northerly range for Fragrant Mimosa.  They would be correct.  Entering the United States from Mexico, the shrub ranges up to the dry plains of Colorado.  Fragrant Mimosa loses its leaves in cold weather (like its cousins acacia and mesquite) and is a thorny little booger (also like them).  In normal desert conditions, the shrub rarely exceeds three feet.  It thrives in poorly leached limestone soils.  Pink blossoms and delicate leaves make M borealis an excellent candidate for xeriscaped gardens...

Mimosa borealis-- Fragrant Mimosa (see credits)
 

Not surprisingly, thorny plants play an important role in providing shelter and food for wildlife in the Concho Valley and the rest of the Chihuahuan Desert.  Large mammals rarely appear in large numbers in dry environments-- little or no shade and widely scattered non-toxic waterholes and rivers make this a necessity... 
 

Two species that do appear in the countryside near San Angelo once co-existed in a delicate balancing act of prey and predator.  Cougars prey on deer.  In turn, deer browse mesquite pods and cactus tunas (the fruits produced by Prickly Pears).  But cougars do not have long lives when they encounter ranchers or farmers with guns.  With an abundance of mesquite pods available thanks to overgrazed ranges, deer proliferate.  Nature becomes unbalanced...

 
But we digress.  There are other plants important to the survival of desert quails and desert jackrabbits.  Lotebush, discussed next, and agarita, discussed shortly, being among the most important of them...
Ziziphus obtusifolia-- Lotebush-- between rains (see credits)

Lotebush loses its leaves as the year progresses.  But this loss is not entirely related to changing seasons or drops in temperature.  Ziziphus obtusifolia sheds its foliage when sporadic desert rains become almost non-existent.  The shrub is not dead.  It is dormant.  This survival mechanism reverses itself when water becomes available again.  The plant's spiked pale branches become almost invisible under a thick coat of small green leaves.  Lotebush, also popularly named Gumdrop Tree and Graythorn, rarely dominates a plant community.  Look around if you come across one in the dry country of West Texas-- you're likely to see mesquite and pencil cactus in the neighborhood...
 

[Losing leaves is a fairly common survival mechanism in desert plants.  Creosote bush, the hardiest North American drylands species, sheds older leaves and entire branches during extended and extreme drought conditions.  Younger and still partly developed Larrea tridentata leaves remain and can survive, according to research conducted by Robert Chew and other University of Southern California scientists, a reduction in water content to less than 50% of their dry weight.

 
At least two other plants found in the Concho Valley utilize leaf loss strategies to cope with dry conditions.  These are Allthorn (Koeberlinia spinosa) and Goatbush (Castela erecta).  Unlike Lotebush, both tend to leaflessness almost year round. (When leafed, incidentally, Goatbush and Lotebush appear almost indistinguishable to unpracticed lay eyes despite the fact they belong to different families.)  Photosynthesis takes place in the spine-tipped branches of some species, e.g. K spinosa, to compensate for the early leaf loss.]  
Lycium berlandieri-- Wolfberry-- (see credits)

 
Wolfberry aka Lycium berlandieri belongs to the Solanaceae family.  Sometimes, I am reluctant to list it as a desert shrub.  Healthy green leaves, clusters of bright red berries, and slender gracefully flowing branches don't seem to belong to a drylands species.  Then I recall one its other popular names is Desert Thorn and look at a distribution map.  Wolfberry closely follows boundaries of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, sneaking slightly outside of them to dot occasional counties of the dusty, dry Texas Panhandle and Rio Grande Valley locales.  Wolfberry grows below 3000' elevations and frequently associates itself with prickly pear and mesquite...
 

Yet more thorny plants grace our West Texas drylands...

 
According to a Tucson Botanical Organization description, Desert Hackberry thorns are "cleverly disguised as branches or cloaked with rough, small, oval leaves".  In Texas, it grows on plains above the Rio Grande where locals call it Granjeno and in the dry Big Bend and southwesternmost Concho Valley in Crockett County.  Elsewhere, Celtis pallida sprouts up across southwestern New Mexico and throughout central and southern Arizona.  Native peoples discovered Granjeno fruits to be slightly bitter but edible.  Scientists say these little orange globes contain up to 20% protein.  They are also a good source of calcium and phosphorous...

Celtis pallida-- Desert Hackberry-- (see credits)
[Desert Hackberry offers us some insight into the challenges faced by scientists as they attempt to understand the natural world and make it comprehensible to the rest of us.  Among botanists, one daunting task is to identify and name plants with universal consistency.  As part of this ongoing process, the venerable name Celtis pallida is slowly giving way to Celtis ehrenbergia.  The romantic in me resists this since the older name celebrates the pale branches of this relative of elm trees in a linguistically satisfying way.]

 

 
Agarita also produces edible berries.  These can be used to make a slightly tart jam.  Small and red, they appear and ripen after yellow flowers in the late winter and early spring months make an already attractive holly-like plant more beautiful.  At home on limestone soils, Mahonia trifoliata belongs to the Berberidaceae Family.  The shrub survives in other soils if they are well drained and the plant receives much sunlight.  Agarita (aka Algerita and Chaparral Berry) is not strictly a thorn plant but is included here because its leaves are made up of three leaflets, each of which ends in razor sharp tips.  Small mammals and birds hide in and under Agarita, an ideal ornamental plant that may be placed under windows to discourage burglars...  

Mahonia trifoliata-- Agarita-- (see credits)
Folks new to desert living or people thumbing through a glossy coffee table sometimes mistake Ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens) for a species of cactus.  It is actually a "bizarre desert shrub", as Delena Tull and George Miller comment in their Wildflowers, Trees, and Shrubs of Texas.  Ocotillo does not venture outside desert climates in its natural range which is the western Concho Valley and Trans-Pecos of Texas, the southern half of New Mexico, almost all of Arizona, southern Nevada, and southwestern California.  It is a wandlike plant which can reach a height of 30'.  Ocotillo is generally leafless but may be covered with simple, alternate leaves and red tubular flowers when the desert receives rain.  A century ago, ranchers cultivated Ocotillo to create living fences, knowing that only drunks or fools would brave the countless thorns protecting the sole member of the Fouquieriaceae family in the United States...     

Fouquieria splendens-- Ocotillo-- (see credits)
 

BONAP lists at least a dozen cactus species growing on Tom Green County rangeland.  Prickly Pear is the best known, both locally and in the world beyond Texas.  The most common member of the Cactaceae family in the county is likely the Prickly Pear known as Opuntia engelmannii... 

Opuntia engelmannii-- Prickly Pear Cactus-- (see credit)
 

Like mesquite, it is a plant that escaped its desert environment to spread to slightly moister climates.  Prickly Pears can be found in the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan Deserts and as far north as the southeastern corner of Utah.  But it also grows in the Texas Hill Country and is no stranger to the Texas Gulf Coast.  Prickly Pears-- like all true cacti-- are natives of the Western Hemisphere.  Travelers to distant corners of the globe may encounter them as introduced species.  Historians tell us, for instance, that Prickly Pears were brought to Australia from Brazil in 1788...

 

Immature Prickly Pear Fruit
 
 

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CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Prosopis glandulosa photograph by Russ Kleinman from wnmu.edu; Acacia greggii twig photograph by Steven J Baskauf from cas.vanderbilt.edu; Mimosa borealis from photos.wumple.com; Ziziphus obtusifolia from wnmu.edu; Lycium berlandieri photograph by L R Landrum from swbiodiversity.org; Celtis pallida photograph by Thomas Van Devender from swbiodiversity.org; Fouquieria splendens from abdnha,org; Mahonia trifoliata from georgiavines.com; Opuntia engelmannii photograph by Richard Felger from wnmu.edu; Distribution maps from BONAP.org; Mesquite Forests and Prickly Pear Fruits photographs from Louis R Nugent 

 

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Critically Reviled Film, Part Two

 
Note: Due to scheduling conflicts, this week's edition has been published early.




Allison Hays as Nancy Archer: about to get all charged up in
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman
 

Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, 1958, Woolner Brothers Production Company, Director: Nathan Juran

 

[Fifty Foot Woman is on one level a late 50s sci-fi flicks that's so bad it's good.  But the character of Nancy Archer, refined and assayed by Allison Hays, became an icon of female empowerment and women's liberation in ways the Woolner Brothers Production Company probably never intended.  Nancy encounters a giant semi-transparent alien who looks like a bald Roman warrior.  This chance meeting in the Southern California desert transforms her into a towering babe of vengeance who ain't gonna be cheated on no more and who ain't gonna let her no good fortune-hunting husband get away with trying to kill her again, especially when he's publicly humiliating her by hooking up with barflies and floozies.  The Woolner Brothers, Larry and Bernie, got into the film producing business after they opened drive-in theaters in New Orleans and Memphis, respectively.  We can thank them for classic cinema such as Hercules and the Captive Women, Hillbillys in a Haunted House, and The Sin of Adam and Eve.]

Absolutely breathtaking special effects define Attack of the
50 Foot Woman
 

Plan 9 From Outer Space, 1959, Reynolds Pictures, Director: Ed Wood, Jr

Maila Nurmi as one of Plan 9's zombie dead,
resurrected by aliens bent on conquering Earth
 

[Wikipedia's biographical entry lists several characteristics that sum up Ed Wood as a film director fairly well: low-budget films notable for technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, large amounts of ill-fitting stock footage, idiosyncratic dialogue, eccentric casts and outlandish plot elements.  On a personal note, I attest to the fact his Orgy of the Dead cures insomnia at any time of the day despite the fact that most of the flick is devoted to fairly attractive strippers disrobing.  Many viewers lovingly refer to Plan 9 as the worst movie ever made.  This honor seems to have been first publicly bestowed on the film by critic Michael Medved and his younger brother Harry in their 1980 Golden Turkey Awards celebration of inane cinema.  It does not appear in Harry's collaboration with Randy Dreyfus, The Fifty Worst Films Of All Time, published two years earlier.]

Plan 9 From Outer Space: More special effects wizardry!
 

The Deadly Mantis, 1957, Universal International Pictures, Director: Nathan Juran

 

[Goldurn them dang South Seas volcanos!  One of them erupts.  Next thing you know, polar icecaps begin shifting and 200' praying mantises get released from their Arctic prison.  This means it's a bad thing to be military personnel assigned to remote radar outposts in northernmost Canada when a giant hungry bug flits past the neighborhood.  What eventually happens in situations like this is handsome (and single) Colonels get sent to investigate and pretty (and single) girl photographers from museums tag along.  And it don't take no genius to know that when handsome fellers and pretty gals has to fight off monsters, they gonna fall in love even if they been fightin' like cats and dogs for the previous 79 minutes of black and white photography.  Craig Stevens who played the handsome Colonel is best known to classic TV buffs as detective Peter Gunn.  The lovely Alix Talton who co-starred with Stevens in Mantis was a former Miss Georgia.]

Big Bug's on the loose in The Deadly Mantis
 

It Came from Outer Space, 1953, Universal International Pictures: Director: Jack Arnold

It Came From Outer Space: he comes in peace...
 

[It Came from Outer Space was the first Universal Pictures movie to be filmed in 3-D.  Director Jack Arnold (born Jack Arnold Waks) masterminded the making of some of the very best low budget sci-fi flicks of the 1950s-- It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, Creature from The Black Lagoon, and The Incredible Shrinking Man.  Ray Bradbury provided the original screen treatment (and the then highly unusual notion alien visitors to Earth are not necessarily hostile to humans) for It Came from Outer Space. It boosted the career of Barbara Rush: her performance as school teacher Ellen Fields netted a 1954 Golden Globe Award.]

One suspects there are much better ways to spend a Friday night
with Barbara Rush than look for meteors and stray UFOs
 

 
 

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CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: all images are still photographs from the films reviewed.