Kristi Noem, the Republican Governor of South Dakota, has endorsed Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for 2024. In her words, Trump has her “full and complete endorsement for President of the United States of America.”
This means, of course, that she will not be endorsing DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Pence, Scott, Haley, or Christie, unless one of them edges Trump aside and wins the nomination. Barring some dramatic turn of events, that prospect is looking more and more unlikely all the time.
The Governor of South Dakota is no fool. She knows that Trump won’t run with Pence again. Those two could probably not safely stand in the same room, following the events of January 2021, and the subsequent back-and-forth in the press.
She also knows that if Trump wins the nomination, he will pick a candidate who is “diverse”. (“Diverse”is simply a polite way of saying “not a white male”.)
Trump would have a lot of choices in the diverse category: Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and many, many others. Any one of them would make a competent vice president, and a suitable candidate to take the baton in 2028. Almost all of them would make stronger GOP nominees for 2024, too.
Trump is notoriously and predictably susceptible to flattery and obsequiousness. The best way to curry favor with Trump is to well, curry favor with him. And Kristi Noem, I repeat, is no fool. What better way to position oneself for the vice presidential slot, than to endorse Donald Trump almost a year before the Republican National Convention of 2024?
Steve Harwell, the lead singer of the 1990s band Smash Mouth, passed away earlier this week.
I will confess that I was a lukewarm fan, not because I disliked Harwell or his music, but because of my age. By the time Smash Mouth broke out, I was already in my late twenties. I had largely moved on from that phase of life in which one feels compelled to keep up with the latest in youth music.
Nevertheless, the news of Harwell’s passing has led me to explore some of Smash Mouth’s material retroactively. I recall hearing “Walkin’ On The Sun” in the late 1990s, but I never paid much attention to it. I just watched the video on YouTube, and I keep rewatching it. It’s downright addictive.
Smash Mouth’s music typifies the youth music of the 1990s. Whereas 1970s music was (often unnecessarily) heavy, and 1980s music was bombastic and preening, 1990s pop music was usually just fun.
That’s a fairly accurate description of “Walkin’ on the Sun”. There’s no discernible sociopolitical message here, not even any adolescent angst. Just tongue-in-cheek exuberance.
That was what the 1990s were all about. In those years before 9/11, the war in Iraq, and pointless culture wars at home, American culture was mostly optimistic and mostly enjoyable. I miss the 1990s, back when “woke” simply meant “alert and awake”.
Steve Harwell was arguably a perfect lead singer for that era. If you watch him in the aforementioned video, he isn’t going out of his way to be moody, sexy, or confrontational. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, like a Robert Plant or a Mick Jagger. Harwell is just having fun. And he makes you want to have fun, too.
Although Smash Mouth is remembered most fondly by Millennials (who were in their youthful salad days in the late 1990s), Steve Harwell, born in 1967, was a GenXer.
Nothing particularly odd about that. It is the preceding generation that typically creates the bulk of youth cultural artifacts for the current generation. In the 1980s, Gen Xers watched the teen movies of Baby Boomer John Hughes, and listened to rock musicians who were almost exclusively Baby Boomers.
Harwell’s life was much too short. And while there is doubtless a lesson in his passing about the pitfalls of alcohol, we’ve seen and heard similar stories before. Back to my era: Gen Xers recall the 1980 deaths of AC/DC singer Bon Scott and Led Zepellin drummer John Bonham. Both of these musicians’ lives were cut short that year because of alcohaol.
I’m sorry Steve Harwell is gone, but I’m glad I discovered his music, albeit belatedly.
I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s. Life was not perfect then, to be sure, and the perils for children were many. This was the era in which “stranger danger” really took root. I remember several Halloweens during the 1970s when there were rampant stories of razor blades and drugs being placed in trick-or-treat candy.
These were likely just urban legends, but such was the mood then, among parents: the safe, reliable world of postwar suburban America had been swept away with the 1960s, the decade that destroyed America’s innocence, probably forever.
One question my parents never had to consider, though, was how much exposure I should have to drag queens, and adults twerking in public to express “pride” in their alternative sexualities. Nor was any adult authority figure in my midst nutty enough to encourage me to “question my birth-assigned gender identity”.
Gay celebrations have their place. They did in the 1970s and 1980s, too. Pride parades were already a thing, even in Midwestern cities like Cincinnati, where I grew up. No one was locked in a proverbial closet who didn’t want to be there.
But in that era, most of the adults in charge were actually….adults in charge. They recognized that what is appropriate for adults is not always appropriate (let alone necessary) for children.
Nevertheless, there is a sector of our society that seems determined to immerse children in as much aberrant sexual content as they can. Apparently, this is how the “woke” crowd shows how open-minded they are.
This same individual (a biological man) was previously arrested for child porn, in a case that was later dismissed. At least we can assume that he doesn’t dislike children.
Needless to say, a backlash has ensued.
This may have been an administrative mistake. That’s what I suspect. Since the dawn of the “if you can’t do, then teach” mindset more than a generation ago, the human capital in our public schools has declined precipitously. Could they miss something like this? Sure they could. Remember whom you’re dealing with here.
I suspect that this particular situation will be worked out. Within days, we’ll learn that this individual has been sacked, and someone of at least slightly less dubious background put in his place.
This will, however, be yet one more chink in what remains of public confidence in our public schools. Yet more ammunition for advocates of homeschooling.
Paris Jackson, the only daughter of the late Michael Jackson, recently posted an Instagram video in commemoration of her father’s birthday. She received some negative remarks about her armpit hair.
Based on the photos I’ve seen, Miss Jackson’s armpits are unshaven but trimmed, not what I would call overgrown or hirsute, by any stretch.
But this raises a question. How does untrimmed body hair affect beauty and sex appeal? Body hair—on both men and women—seems to go in and out of fashion. National and cultural factors also seem to exert an influence.
I am naturally hairy, for better or worse. I had chest hair when I was still in junior high. I also have hair on my arms, legs, and back.
I was born too late to capitalize on all this excess bodily carpet. In the 1970s, chest hair was associated with male sex appeal and masculine virility. Burt Reynolds and a handful of other hairy male celebrities drove this trend.
By the time I reached full adulthood in the 1990s, however, things were going the other way. This was the dawning era of the manscaped metrosexual.
Then both men and women began trimming and shaving their pubic hair. I won’t go too far down that line of inquiry, so as to keep this post safe for work. But the larger message here was that body hair was out of fashion.
I was late in picking up on this, as I am on so many things. One day, a friend flippantly asked me if I planned to show up at a summertime social event in a tank top with my “back hair hanging out”. (This person is not a friend anymore, but that’s another story for another time.)
I might have replied that in 1976, my ample body hair would have been considered the height of sexy. But this conversation took place well into the twenty-first century.
I have since succumbed to the manscaping trend. I now keep my back hair in check with a battery-operated device called a Mangroomer. I have become accustomed to having less body hair than I once did, and I’ll pull out the Mangroomer when I start feeling a little shaggy back there.
As far as women’s armpit hair goes: I suppose I’m a prisoner of my early biases. In my formative years, women religiously shaved their armpits but never shaved their privates. Once again, my inclinations and preferences are the exact opposite of twenty-first-century trends.
Eleanor Herman’s Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House, is well worth reading both for its historical content, as well as its human interest angle.
In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.
There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)
Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.
According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)
While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.
Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.
But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”
Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35th president.
Marlene Dietrich
JFK
Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.
For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.
And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.
What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)
We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.
It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)
Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.
But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.
I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.
Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.
Suburban parents nowadays worry obsessively about their kids catching something. Some parents even carry around little packages of sanitary wipes, so that they can sterilize surfaces in advance of their progeny. As if an American kid is going to catch Ebola at a birthday party.
This obsession with a germ-free childhood is a recent invention. GenXers grew up in an environment in which germ theory was understood, but not always given much consideration.
It was not uncommon in the 1970s to see kids passing around and drinking from the same bottle of soda. Maybe someone wiped the mouth of the bottle clean before they handed it to you…but probably not. Nor could you easily object. To express too much fastidiousness about the casual exchange of bodily fluids would have been regarded as fussy, especially among boys.
The childhood tradition of becoming “blood brothers” was mostly obsolete by the 1970s, but it happened. In that era before AIDS, no one worried about mixing blood, either.
We were sometimes told to “wash our hands”, but that carried its own dangers. School restrooms were unhygienic by today’s standards. They were often equipped with creaky cloth towel cabinets, in which the same towel roll was recycled again and again. (Twenty-first-century versions of the cloth roll towel cabinet are reasonably sanitary, I am told. But the ones you would typically find in a public school restroom in 1978? Not so much.)
Was this lax approach to juvenile hygiene a good thing, or a bad thing? Arguably the proof is in the pudding. The majority of us made it to adulthood without expiring from any communicable diseases. I am now in my mid-50s, and I rarely get a cold. So I suppose there is something to be said for naturally acquired immunity.
When I was a kid in the mid-1970s, my dad used to sing this song from the radio. The refrain went:
“Sundown, you’d better take care
If I find you’ve been creepin’ round my back stair.”
This was Gordon Lightfoot’s hit song, “Sundown”, of course. In the year the song climbed the charts, 1974, I was but six years old. I therefore didn’t grasp its meaning. But the song still brings back memories of that time.
And now that I’m old enough to understand “Sundown”, I find it an unusual take on the familiar romantic love triangle: that of the cuckolded male.
Fast-forward to 1986. My high school English teacher, wanting to demonstrate how stories could be told in poems and song lyrics, played “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” for us on one of the AV department’s record players. Yet another of Gordon Lightfoot’s songs.
I immediately connected with this song, even though I was unaware of the historical reference behind it. My teacher told our class about the November 1975 shipwreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior. That gave the song even more weight. It was a work of imagination and art…but also something real.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was released in 1976, to commemorate the shipwreck of the previous year. It remains one of my favorite songs from a musical era that I was too young to appreciate as it was taking place.
Last November marked the 47th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This got me thinking about the song, and about Gordon Lightfoot. According to Google, Lightfoot was still touring in his eighties.
But all tours, and all lives, must come to an end. Gordon Lightfoot passed away on May 1, of natural causes.
While Lightfoot and his music were a little before my time, I always appreciated his work. There are few songs quite as haunting and memorable as “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. And whenever I hear “Sundown”, I always hear my dad singing along with the radio in the mid-1970s.
A brilliant musician, and an artistic life well-lived. Gordon Lightfoot, 84, RIP.
Former politician and talk show host Jerry Springer has died.
Most people know Springer for his gonzo talk show work on national television. Decades before that, he was a well-known figure in Cincinnati politics and local broadcasting.
Springer spoke at my Cincinnati-area high school in 1985. At this time, the biggest skeleton in Springer’s closet was a 1974 scandal in which Springer, then a Cincinnati City Council member, paid a sex worker with a personal check. Springer resigned from city council in a certain degree of disgrace.
Several of my male classmates couldn’t resist calling out, “Where’s the check”? while Springer was speaking at our school in 1985. Springer, a good sport, laughed off their taunts and moved on.
Jerry Springer was never one to be impeded by other people’s opinions of him. I recognized that in 1985.
After the Jerry Springer talk show debuted in 1991, I tuned in a few times. In all honesty, the show was never for me. But I didn’t watch much network television of any kind during the early 1990s. I was too busy, and my life too disjointed.
I’ll always remember the local, Cincinnati version of Jerry Springer, anyway. The speaker at my high school who wasn’t about to be deterred by an embarrassing incident from his past, or others’ ungracious insistence on calling attention to it.
Perhaps there is a lesson for all of us here. One can go far, despite being hampered by very human flaws and a less than perfect track record. The trick is to shrug off the crowd’s disdain, and keep moving forward.
I don’t understand the things that people hype nowadays. Or the things they spend good money on. Maybe I’m out of touch. And maybe the rest of the world has gone crazy.
This tale begins with Ebanie Bridges, a 36-year-old professional boxer.
Now, before you ask, I have nothing against female boxers, or female athletes in general. Not that I’m a spectator of them, mind you. But then, I don’t watch men’s sports, either. (Hint: if you’re watching more athletics than you’re participating in, you’re probably in danger of becoming a couch potato.)
The aforementioned Ebanie Bridges was recently paid £250,000 just to start an OnlyFans account. That’s a lot of money, sure. But given the number of men plunking down cash on that autoporning site in recent years, why not?
For a mere $12 per month, the desperate, sex-starved male can now view shots of Ms. Bridges in lingerie, overflowing with tattoos and cleavage. Hoo-hah. Grab your willies, guys, your computer mouses, and your credit cards.
But that’s not all. It gets even worse. According to an article in The Sun, Bridges regularly receives “odd requests from ‘paypigs’” who askher for “gnarly things, such as her dirty socks and bathwater.”
The sad part: I have no doubt that men really are requesting such items, and paying good money for them.
I’ve read those reports of testosterone declining. The average 20-year-old man is much less manly than his grandfather was at 40, or even 50. But have millions of red-blooded men now been reduced to…OnlyFans paypigs? Apparently so.
For most of my life, I didn’t consider myself an “alpha male” in the traditional sense of that word. But such yardsticks are relative. So many men have now lowered the bar to such a degree, that even I have reached alpha male status by default.
Those pathetic shells of men who comprise the subscriber base of OnlyFans…they who plunk down their cash not for sex, even, but for onanistic pleasures on a computer screen.
While giving a speech at a National Rifle Association event in Indianapolis a few days ago, Mike Pence was booed as he took the microphone. A very awkward moment, to be sure.
The 2024 Republican hopeful and former VPOTUS is now scrambling to carry out damage control, as one might expect. But his case is likely hopeless. As a Republican candidate for president, it’s hard to do worse than that.
In these hyper-partisan times, politicians get booed, harassed, and hounded all the time, of course. But Mike Pence was not driven from the grounds of an American university by shaggy, leftwing student hooligans with weight and hygiene issues. He was not harried by climate change fanatics or frothing pro-abortion fetishists screeching “My body, my choice!” Mike Pence was booed at the podium of an NRA event not only in his home state, but in the state where he used to be the Republican governor.
Mike Pence would likely be a long shot even if our political environment were, well…saner. He has a notable charisma problem, and that’s been a major handicap for any national candidate since the advent of televised debates.
Commercial television has been around since the late 1940s. Political debates, though, did not become a televised phenomenon until 1960, when Kennedy debated Nixon. Prior to their televised debate, Nixon was ahead in the polls. But Nixon’s sweaty, awkward, twitchy performance gave the youthful, relaxed, and photogenic Kennedy a solid advantage. We might say that JFK was our first president to be elected by television.
Mike Pence’s first obstacle, then, is that he can’t run for president in 1920 or 1948, when the charisma of a national candidate was much less of a factor.
Pence’s more immediate handicap, though, is that he is a moderate, at a moment in time when the most activist voters of both parties prefer extremist whackos. For evidence of this trend, I need mention only two names: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
What will the general election of 2024 bring? If the current electorate gets what it deserves, we’ll face another stark choice between the bumbling incompetence of Joe Biden (with all his loony, far-left camp followers coming along for the ride), and the temperamental volatility of Donald Trump.
We’ll see. But one thing is for certain, where the next U.S. presidential election is concerned: Mike Pence will not be anywhere near the podium on Inauguration Day 2025. He will not last long in the Republican nomination race of 2024, either.
One of the nostalgia-based Twitter feeds I follow recently posed the question: “Who was your celebrity crush when you woke up on your 13th birthday? I’ll start.”
The Twitter feed’s author then posted a vintage poster of Christie Brinkley from the early 1980s. If you’re of a certain age, you’ve no doubt seen this one before: Brinkley clad in a one-piece blue swimsuit, her facial expression maddeningly sultry, her blowing hair accentuating her in all her early twentysomething feminine glory.
Who was your celebrity crush when you woke up on your 13th birthday? I’ll start: pic.twitter.com/xcGa7g48lP
This got me thinking about the whole concept of celebrity crushes, why some people get them, and why I have always been more or less immune to them.
Not that I’m above tilting at romantic windmills. When I was a freshman in high school, I developed an aching crush on a senior girl at my school who was also a popular cheerleader. Talk about hopeless causes.
And it actually got worse from there. From my adolescence through my early adulthood, I subscribed to the Groucho Marx school of romance. Marx, you might recall, once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” There was a time in my life when my interest in a member of the opposite sex burned in inverse proportion to her interest in me, or lack thereof. (Fortunately, I have learned to put that one behind me.)
But I have always confined my interests to people who were physically present within my immediate environs, and at least theoretically attainable. I never fixated on anyone whom I knew only from television, movies, magazines, the radio, or the Internet. What would be the point of getting worked up about someone who lives on the other side of the country, or the other side of the world?
I have, at times, become briefly infatuated by the combination of an actress/character. I am part of the generation that grew up watching the Brady Bunch in rerun syndication. I suppose I would be lying if I denied that I had a pre-sexual, boyhood crush on Jan and Marcia Brady, played by Eve Plumb and Maureen McCormick. But even then, I recognized that these characters were contrivances, not real life. To romanticize them overly much was delusional.
Maureen McCormick as Marcia Brady, circa 1970
Later on, in my teenage years, I found myself drawn to Diane Franklin’s innocent, doomed Patricia Montelli in Amityville II: The Possession (1982). But I also saw Franklin portray a manipulative schemer in The Last American Virgin, which came out the same year.
I will admit that Molly Ringwald’s interpretation of Jewel in Fresh Horses (1988) stirred a little mini-crush in me for the 105 minutes of that film. By that time, though, I had already seen Ringwald in a variety of roles. The illusion ended as soon as the closing credits rolled.
Celebrity crushes seem to cross lines of both gender and generation. Consider those film clips from the 1950s, which show young women of the Eisenhower era going absolutely nuts over Elvis. When I was in grade school, a conspicuous number of women in my class maintained fantasy relationships with Shaun Cassidy and Scott Baio. Perhaps your twenty-something daughter once had a thing for…what was his name…Justin Beaver?
In more recent years, I’ve read stories about Taylor Swift’s stalkers, and the lengths to which they will go in order to get a few minutes of facetime with the constantly hyped and too-omnipresent singer. In their throes of futile devotion, they send her both love letters and death threats. One broke into Swift’s New York City apartment twice in one year. Police found the man sleeping in her bed, like a demented Goldilocks.
I would have no interest in meeting Swift, let alone turning her into a quest of some kind. I’m baffled by the legions of male and female Taylor Swift fans who self-identify as “Swifties”.
But Rolling Stone identifies the typical Taylor Swift devotee as “Millennial, suburban, and white.” I’m a Gen Xer. The oldest Millennials were born when I was in high school. I’m about 15 to 25 years older than the typical Taylor Swift fan.
And indeed, most of Taylor Swift’s overly ardent male fans seem to be Millennials, too. Come to think of it, I have never heard a man of my generation make so much as a wistful remark about Ms. Swift.
There is, however, an online legion of men my age who hold long-simmering crushes on Diane Franklin. This seems to come up every time the actress (who is amazingly humble and good-natured for a “Hollywood person”) sits for an interview.
You need only peruse some of the 1980s- and horror-themed podcasts on YouTube to get a grasp of this. Every middle-age male podcaster who interviews Diane Franklin seems incapable of not telling her that he had a teenage crush on her back in the 80s. As if she hadn’t already guessed that.
She always smiles unflappably, and waits for her interviewer to move on. All of them eventually do, but sometimes after belaboring the point a bit too long.
Franklin was, indeed, one of the crush-worthy young female stars of the 1980s, starring not just in the aforementioned Amityville II and The Last American Virgin, but also in Better Off Dead (1985). She even had a role in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). No, I never had a crush on her; but I do remember her as an actress.
About two years ago, I decided to become more active than usual on Twitter. I looked around for various 80s pop culture-related Twitter accounts to follow, and this inevitably led me to Diane Franklin, who has a presence on the platform.
Franklin has a mid-sized account, of about 10K followers. I skimmed through her most recent tweets, and I noticed that she was interacting with some of her followers.
“Oh, what the heck?” I thought.
I followed Diane Franklin and sent her a tweet. She tweeted back. I tweeted back. And so on.
Then it struck me. Diane Franklin and I were actually having a conversation (though it was doubtless more enthusiastic on my end). If only that 14-year-old version of myself, circa 1982, could have seen this!
She may have glanced at my Twitter profile. I look my age, and my tweets would have revealed me as someone old enough to have seen her 1980s oeuvre when all those movies appeared for the first time in the cinemas.
Then I paused, and considered what I was doing. I suddenly realized that I was in imminent danger of becoming one of THEM: one of those now middle-age, formerly teenage Gen X males who still carry quixotic torches for Diane Franklin.
“Oh, no! This is weird!” I shouted. “This is creepy. I’m not going to do this!…Or at least: I’m not going to do it anymore.”
I quietly deleted all my tweets addressed to Franklin, and then I unfollowed her. I’m sure she barely noticed my disappearance. She probably didn’t notice at all.
I’ll never approach Diane Franklin on Twitter again, needless to say, nor any other female celebrity. That was a one-time lapse. (I’m not much for social media, anyway.)
I still have fond memories of Diane Franklin’s films, of course. I still appreciate her acting skills and good public graces.
But I have this rule: “No celebrity crushes.” I’m not going within even a hundred miles of such make-believe and self-delusional territory, not even for a celebrity who was gracious enough to communicate with me, and not even within the make-believe world of Twitter.
Today I scratched another town off my Indiana bucket list: Madison, located in the southernmost portion of the Hoosier State, along the Ohio River in Jefferson County.
Madison is located less than two hours from the east side of Cincinnati, so the drive was not arduous. I went with my dad, who is a native Hoosier from southern Indiana. He had many anecdotes about how much the area had changed since the 1960s. Since I was not born until 1968 myself, I will have to take his word for it.
The charm of Madison, though, is that much of the town’s original 19th century architecture has been preserved. Throughout Madison’s central historic district, you’ll find baroque Victorian mansions and narrow brick row houses that will make you think you’ve just dropped back into the 1800s.
The firehouse was built before the Civil War.
And speaking of the Civil War, there is a Civil War monument near the courthouse that includes a cannonball that was fired into Vicksburg, Mississippi by Union troops in 1863.
While there are many of the usual chain restaurants in the strip outside (and above) the town, Madison residents seem to be doing their best to preserve and patronize locally own businesses.
I didn’t see a Starbucks, but I did see an independently owned coffee shop with a healthy crowd inside, for example. I also saw an independently owned shoe store on Main Street, as well as a musical instruments store. Amazon hasn’t killed all independent retail, it seems.
Overall, Madison is a pleasant enough town, but I’m not sure if I could live there. It’s at least an hour’s drive from any of the surrounding major cities (Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis). I’m a product of urban sprawl, I suppose, and I’m rather dependent on the amenities that such sprawl provides. There was not much urban sprawl in Madison.
Once again, though, a nice place place to visit. As always, I hope you enjoy the photos.
-ET
And finally, if you’re in the mood to read some fiction set in Indiana, I’ll take this opportunity to point you toward my crime novel, VENETIAN SPRINGS, and my historical supernatural fiction series, THE ROCKLAND HORROR. Both of these stories are set in (slightly altered) versions of southern Indiana.
The period between the two world wars was the golden age of the pulp fiction magazines. This was a time before television, or (of course) the Internet. Entertainment options were limited. (Heck, they barely had radio in those days.) Many people therefore turned to magazines that specialized in quickly written and fast-paced stories of romance, western adventure, crime, science fiction, or horror.
What happened to pulp fiction? The pulp magazines weren’t the victims of television, as is commonly thought. They were the casualties, rather, of the cheaply printed paperback. Modern paperback books were first introduced in 1935, but they really caught on during and shortly after World War II. The paperback completely changed the publishing and bookselling landscape, much as Amazon would about sixty years later.
Some of the original pulp content is still with us, of course. Horror fans who adore H.P. Lovecraft may not know that favorites like “At the Mountains of Madness”, “Dagon” —and most other Lovecraft stories—were originally published in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine founded in 1922. (Note: Weird Tales technically still exists, though its format has undergone some modifications; the magazine has a site on the Internet.)
I’ve read and reread Lovecraft’s oeuvreas much as I care to. So when I was recently in a mood to do some reading off the beaten path, I decided to indulge in a bit of vintage pulp crime fiction.
Or actually, quite a lot of vintage pulp crime fiction. The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps contains forty-seven stories and two complete novels. Writers represented in this collection include well-known names like Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) and Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). There are also plenty of stories by writers who are long forgotten.
I’m a longtime fan of pulp TV, in fact. During the 1980s, I regularly tuned in to action television shows like The A-Team, Knight Rider, Airwolf, and the original MacGyver. These shows were all escapist television, with plots that roared out of the gate like a 1981 DeLorean or a 1987 Toyota Supra.
My favorite was The A-Team. An episode of The A-Team kept you on the edge of your seat. Each episode ended with a blazing gunfight, in which no one was usually killed or seriously injured. The A-Team made absolutely no attempt to provide any sort of messaging on social, political, or philosophical issues. The other aforementioned 80s-era pulp TV shows were done in a similar vein.
Most of these shows did not age well. For nostalgia’s sake, I recently tuned in to a few old episodes of The A-Team and the original MacGyver. In the MacGyver episode, the eponymous hero found himself in the Soviet Union, where everyone conveniently spoke English. The Russians even spoke English with each other. I managed to sit through about twenty minutes of this. Life is too short.
The same might be said of the stories in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. You can detect the literary and storytelling skills at work; but you can also tell that you’re reading fiction produced in a different era, when expectations were very different. My 1980s pulp TV shows did not have to compete with Netflix. The writers whose work is collected in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps did not have to compete with Michael Connelly or Lee Child.
The stories in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps are interesting as artifacts of the pulp era, in the same way that a Ford Model T is an interesting artifact of automobile technology in the 1920s. But as entertainment for present-day audiences? Keep in mind that some of these stories are more than eighty years old. You had might as well ask me if I would like to use a Model T for my daily commuting needs.
I suspect that this massive tome (more than one thousand pages in print) is so massive for a reason. The editors knew that the phrase “your mileage may vary” would be very applicable here.
What about their usefulness for writers? Those of us who write fiction are always thinking of a story in market analysis terms, after all.
I wouldn’t recommend that any twenty-first century writer try to imitate the style of these stories, exactly. At least a quarter of these tales contain plot holes that you could drive a Model T through; and almost all of them contain hackneyed dialogue. (“He’s on the square!” “The place looked swell.”)
And oh, the eyebrows that will be raised among the finger-wagging social justice crowd. While these stories aren’t intentionally sexist, they are the product of a different time, when ideas about men and women were different. They overflow with gendered terminology that would make any writer the target of an online pitchfork mob today (“honey,” “doll”, “sugar”, “dame”, etc.).
The female characters in these crime stories are mostly props. But then, so are most of the men. These stories are all about plot, plot, plot.
And that is where this book may be instructive for writers who have found themselves too immersed in navel-gazing literary fiction. The writer who suspects he is spending too much time on flowery descriptions and internal monologue may learn something valuable here: how to get to the point, or to the plot. The pulp-era writers were certainly good at that, despite their other shortcomings.
I made a trip to Columbus, Indiana last week. Columbus is a nice town to the south of Indianapolis.
Indiana is seldom exciting, but it’s a friendly place with some captivating scenery (by Midwestern standards, at least). And there is some very nice scenery, indeed, in Columbus.
Below is the Robert N. Stewart Bridge, on 2nd street. I took the photo below from the bank of the Flatrock River.
And here’s a view of the Flatrock River itself, facing away from the bridge.
I almost slipped on the concrete boat ramp while taking these shots, which would have placed me in the Flatrock River, and not just beside it. So I hope you enjoy the photos.
