And I can smell the history on the breeze

[sovay]

I had a successful first visit with my new PCP! There was a slight last-minute snafu over whether it was virtual or in person! She agrees that I am dealing with a lot! Have some links.

1. By an elsenet friend: on Gen X music, Clear Channel, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

2. Courtesy of rushthatspeaks: "How the Moomins became an anti-fascist symbol."

3. Josh O'Connor interviews well and is correct that I had never heard of the cheese-rolling at Cooper's Hill.

4. I tend to like the song no matter what, but this is an especially nice chamber-darkwave take: Emilie Autumn, "The Passenger."

5. I am not an audiobook person, but I might have to listen to Bill Nighy reading the footnotes.

I came home last night and told Autolycus that I had just seen a movie with a heroic black cat. In other news, Hocus Pocus (1993) has been some kind of stone classic New England horror-comedy for the last twenty-eight years and I just found out now. Rush-That-Speaks showed it to me; I am even a hard sell on fiction of real witches at Salem and I loved it. I can see why it confused audiences on release. Its mix of slapstick comedy and gloves-off horror is the sort of thing I would have expected in the early '90's from Joe Dante or Sam Raimi, not live-action Disney, even without the fact that it is also kind of a musical. It really doesn't behave like the coming-of-age teen comedy its modern-day plot initially resembles, when its hero's virgin status is more folklorically than socially significant and his most important relationship is with his younger sister, which does not prevent him from figuring out how to get past a shallow crush to a somewhat battle-forged friendship with a girl his own age. Its witch lore is not only good—this film must have taught an entire generation how to ward with salt—it's nasty in ways where I have to start pointing to Gemma Files or Jeanette Winterson or Warlock (1987) for comparable examples of casual, reliable, historically-reputed malice. I was floored that its exteriors were actually filmed in Salem and Marblehead, but the slant of the roofs was unmistakably New England. I am moderately surprised that I never ran into it at a party in middle school, but I would have remembered the experience: the plot is pretty much a dead heat between things I would have enjoyed recognizing and things I wouldn't have wanted in my head for years. (No one, not even our protagonists wondering what's keeping their parents as dawn approaches, seems to realize how close the entire adult population of Salem came to going the way of The Red Shoes. This movie wouldn't have introduced me to the concept of immortality as a curse, but the thought of being mourned and driven away unrecognized by the parents whom you must outlive is the sort of thing that bothers me even now.) The untestable litmus is not the precise ratio of folklore studies to nightmare fuel, however, but whether I would have imprinted as strongly as all other signs indicate on Doug Jones' Billy Butcherson. The last person I saw with that body language was Ray Bolger's Scarecrow. I had seen little of Sarah Jessica Parker and zero of Kathy Najimy prior to this movie and they should have been genre stalwarts in addition to their other talents; especially the former achieves a remarkable otherworldliness while still being a spider-eating airhead. Between Winifred Sanderson and Rose Hovick, 1993 was some banner year for Bette Midler and those characters should never meet. I can't figure out if this film missed its zeitgeist by ten years in either direction or should just never have been released in summer, but I am delighted it has been celebrated and rediscovered to the point of an upcoming sequel, which neither of us was expecting when we took to IMDb to look up the young actors who weren't Thora Birch. I spent my entire life scrupulously avoiding Salem during the month of October and just had no idea.

Comments

[yhlee]

I'm glad your PCP is listening to you!!

[sovay]

I'm glad your PCP is listening to you!!

Thank you! It makes a change and I am hoping it makes a difference.

[sholio]

1. By an elsenet friend: on Gen X music, Clear Channel, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Ha, so okay, while their premise makes logical sense, I still think there's a large element of Old Man Yells At Cloud in this post, and here's the part that nails why:

But to go back to the original post, it is *totally* fair for Gen Xers to feel like something went terribly wrong. Because if your ideal era is 1991–1994, or even 1991-1997, something DID.

And there's the kicker. For me, at least as far as top-40 radio, the early 90s were a musical wasteland. I was a teen at that time - college freshman in 1995 - and I hated grunge and a lot of what was happening in radio pop/rock at the time. Actually, as a teen, while I also listened to a lot of older rock and pop (Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty and the like) what I was into as far as new music coming out was mostly country. I will die on the hill that early-90s country was really fantastic - there were a lot of new groups, a lot of cross-pollination with other genres, and a lot of really good women artists. It took a hard turn into being dominated by the really conservative element sometime in the late 90s and 9/11 put a stake through its heart, but as far as the early 90s being some kind of pop/alt-rock musical wonderland - yeah, if you liked a certain kind of music, it was, probably. But I didn't; there was some individual bands that I liked (mostly discovered via friends in college, like Meredith Brooks and Indigo Girls, rather than stuff that tended to get heavy play on the radio) but honestly, it wasn't until the mid-00s that I started getting back into pop music as a genre, because a lot more of what was coming out was more to my tastes.

... Okay, and also because of vidders and Youtube, which exposed me to a lot of music I wouldn't have heard of. Still, I can definitively say that for me personally, there definitely was not a seismic sea change in the mid-90s toward musical suckage. I find more new popular music that I like these days than I ever did when I was in my teens and 20s.

The tl;dr is that yes, radio consolidation probably did change the musical landscape, and there is a heavy tendency towards popular music being over-branded and commercialized (which isn't new) but I think this is pretty much a veneer of capitalist critique pasted over what is fundamentally the basic "modern music sucks and music when I was a teen was The Best" argument.

[sovay]

The tl;dr is that yes, radio consolidation probably did change the musical landscape, and there is a heavy tendency towards popular music being over-branded and commercialized (which isn't new) but I think this is pretty much a veneer of capitalist critique pasted over what is fundamentally the basic "modern music sucks and music when I was a teen was The Best" argument.

We may just disagree on this thread: the line you quote is one of the reasons it didn't read like fancy justification to me because it acknowledges that if your ideal musical era was not the alternative rock scene of the early-to-mid-'90's, then the radio consolidation may not have affected your listening experience. (It didn't affect mine because most of the music I was listening to in the '90's was either classical or folk and even when it was contemporary rock or pop, I was encountering it primarily in the form of cassettes, CDs, and music videos. In high school, I listened specifically to Standing Room Only on WERS and sometimes All A Cappella because it was on immediately afterward. Also whatever kind of folk happened to be playing on WUMB.) I was interested in the history of the homogenization of commercial radio and by his comment about the erasure of women from rock airplay. The other factor is that although I don't listen to his show, I encounter him enough on other social media to know that he both listens to and promotes current artists as opposed to being one of the DJs whose playlists are all nostalgia-fests, which I am completely willing to acknowledge is not obvious from that thread. But I would also have disagreed with his OP for completely different reasons, namely that slating all art in every era and ascribing any opinions to the contrary to a nostalgia filter strikes me as one of the definitions of not helping.

[sholio]

I'm fine with agree to disagree! And there were some interesting tidbits in there that I didn't know. I think the specific things I'm bouncing off in his post - okay, let's see if I can explain. Basically, I'm completely on board with the following statements:

- I liked the music when I was a teenager better than I like the music now.
- I liked a category of music as a teen that is very unpopular now and I'm sad that other categories are more popular and here are some factors why my genre lost out to other genres.
- Consolidation of radio stations through the mid-90s into the 2000s made radio playlists more homogenous in various markets and narrowed the range of what was able to get popular in affected genres, and I think this is bad for the diversity of music overall.

I mean, all of this is pretty uncontroversial stuff. What I'm having a profound knee-jerk reaction to - and I admit that this is a me thing - is all of this being rolled together into the general category of "Pop culture when I was a kid was objectively better than pop culture now" because that profoundly has not been my experience, I think is extremely subjective and depends on what you're into.

I may just be misreading him, but I think I would have been completely on board with his thesis if it was framed as "There's a reason why you think popular music sucks now, it's because the genres you loved as a teen have become much less popular due to [interesting reasons why], and this happens to every generation for different reasons." It's the framing of it as something uniquely terrible that happened to Gen X and torpedoed quality music forever that I - speaking as a Gen X'er! - am bouncing off hard.

But obviously YMMV, and no worries about that.

[selkie]

I am super high on inhaler and not doing Englishly great so I will only say having to chase an iffy book around New England is overrated, the Cabot Witch haaaaaaaaated that film, and, of course, “Amuck.”

[sovay]

and, of course, “Amuck.”

Amuck!

[nineweaving]

Cheese-rolling is the sort of thing I know about. Pop culture, not so much. Thank you for the pointers.

Bill Nighy will give good Footnote. He does an excellent asterisk.

I am very glad that your new PCP is a listener. May she do you much good.

Nine

[sovay]

Cheese-rolling is the sort of thing I know about. Pop culture, not so much. Thank you for the pointers.

You're welcome. I feel like I sort of pass through pop culture every now and then, but I try to bring back interesting things.

Bill Nighy will give good Footnote. He does an excellent asterisk.

That's a wonderful image.

I am very glad that your new PCP is a listener. May she do you much good.

Thank you.

*hugs*

[nnozomi]

Courtesy of rushthatspeaks: "How the Moomins became an anti-fascist symbol."
I'm just now reading a collection of Tove Jansson's letters which naturally touches on this among many other things; it's an absolute delight. I had not expected her to write to a friend in 1946 and say in so many words, oh by the way I've fallen in love with a woman.

[sovay]

I had not expected her to write to a friend in 1946 and say in so many words, oh by the way I've fallen in love with a woman.

Nice!

(I have read some of Tove Jansson's non-Moomin fiction, but not her letters. I will bump them up the metaphorical radar.)

[starlady]

If you haven't read Fair Play, her thinly-fictionalized novel of her relationship with her partner, I highly recommend it.

[sovay]

If you haven't read Fair Play, her thinly-fictionalized novel of her relationship with her partner, I highly recommend it.

That is one of her non-Moomin fiction I have not read!

[luzula]

Courtesy of rushthatspeaks: "How the Moomins became an anti-fascist symbol."

I went to an exhibition at the Gothenburg Museum of Art a few years ago that featured her art: besides the Moomin stuff, there was her anti-fascist cartoons and also lots of paintings that were very different from the cartoons. Well worth seeing!

[sovay]

besides the Moomin stuff, there was her anti-fascist cartoons and also lots of paintings that were very different from the cartoons. Well worth seeing!

It sounds it! I miss museums.

Warlock

[lauradi7dw]

While you're admiring nearby scenery, the opening scene in Warlock was filmed at Plimoth Plantation, I'm pretty sure, based on something RIchard E Grant said in his chapter on the film. My guess is that the scenes near the end that were supposed to be Boston really were not.

Re: Warlock

[sovay]

While you're admiring nearby scenery, the opening scene in Warlock was filmed at Plimoth Plantation, I'm pretty sure

I recall it as the one authentic touch in the entire prologue! I believe some of the later shots of Boston really are Boston, but I don't believe the city is put together the way the film thinks it is.

Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) substitutes London for Boston in a way I will probably never cease to find hilarious, although this shot looks enough like the one fragment left over from Scollay Square that I give them points for accidentally trying.

[mrissa]

Thank you for seeing the gloves-off horror part. I keep seeing people referring to Hocus Pocus as a feel-good movie or a good time or whatever, and...that is the movie that introduced me to what people mean when they say "it made my scalp crawl" with horror, in spots. There are some points in that movie that were "climb the back of my chair oh HELL no" horror reaction for me, and the slapstick comedy doesn't mitigate that for me, it sits alongside it or if anything intensifies it.

[selkie]

So part of our parenting journey has been revisiting the media of our childhoods before passing it along for consumption; I was 12 when Hocus Pocus came out and watched it and, eh, I don’t really enjoy film as a medium but did not remember the flesh-crawling implications of many scenes and, long story long, Hocus Pocus joined The Secret Garden (book) in the Whoops, Nope! Bin. Something something kiln, something something book bound in skin…

[lauradi7dw]

If you have time and inclination, I'd be interested to hear the reasoning behind "The Secret Garden." Parental death? The children lying to adults? Christian allegory, to which I was oblivious until someone pointed it out when I was about twenty?

[selkie]

I love Frances Hodgson Burnett in all her schlocky glory, and when I was four or so I read A Little Princess and it would, unvarnishedly, save my life; The Secret Garden was equally formative for Spouse, who had English grandparents who regularly sabbatical'd back to England and essentially reared Spouse. We binned Burnett -- not from the household, just as read-aloud selections -- over the colonialism, classism, and Christian through-narrative, yes. (Parents die and kids lie! We didn't skip Dawn Treader, we skipped Horse and His Boy.)

As an example of our particular kid, they stopped extremely cold on The Dark Is Rising because Hawkin died and, in their eyes, Great-Uncle Merriman Lyon was now, by action and inaction, completely fucking pants, just an irredeemable loser, not worthy of acknowledging further, why are we letting this betraying jackwipe drive the adventure bus??! So... we never quite know, I'm saying.

[lauradi7dw]

At the other end of life, my father was almost 80 when the Lord of the Rings movie came out. He had no personal exposure to Tolkien, but it got a lot of publicity, and he was curious. We rented the video. After watching for a while, he became indignant that this huge burden had been placed on Frodo. "Gandalf should have taken the ring himself." We stopped watching at that point, and he expressed no interest in how things resolved.

[sovay]

Thank you for seeing the gloves-off horror part.

You're welcome. I found it so striking that spatch has had to listen to me talking about it on and off for two days now. The film switches registers for some scenes, but for many more it runs them simultaneously and I agree that the effect is the opposite of defusing. It starts with such a bang of establishing that innocent, sympathetic characters can and will be harmed in this story, there were bombs under basically every table.

[rushthatspeaks]

Yeah, the word I use when I recommend the movie to people is 'hardcore'. For me, it's a feel-good movie because of the horror-- real evil with real stakes plausibly defeated-- but I would never dream of underemphasizing the horror elements, because it's one of the two or three films ever that have literally given me nightmares. And the comedy does intensify it, and I think does so intentionally; I think they're doing that thing Peter Pan does where the coat of whimsy and child-logic means that kids below a certain age have implications go straight over their heads while the adults are quietly whimpering. I say I think so because I've never met someone who saw it young enough not to start the whimpering part, or if I have I don't know about it.

This rewatch caused me to put the film on a list of things I want to study for script reasons, actually, not just because of how they get all the tonal registers to work together and intensify each other, which is impressive, but because it has a prologue which doesn't suck, an almost unparalleled achievement in media to my knowledge. Still trying to figure out how they did that.

[oracne]

Hooray for a PCP that listens!

[sovay]

Hooray for a PCP that listens!

Thank you!

[minoanmiss]

*reads the music subthread and is edified*

Hooray for doctors who use their ears!

And oh, your movie reviews are an absolute treat.

[sovay]

Hooray for doctors who use their ears!

I like it! I could get used to it! I hope to!

And oh, your movie reviews are an absolute treat.

Thank you.

[starlady]

I love Hocus Pocus, it was an instant classic and I rewatch it every year. It's also, as you note, not really softened for kid audiences! I do miss the 90s in that respect.

[sovay]

I love Hocus Pocus, it was an instant classic and I rewatch it every year.

I am glad to hear that. It had the feel of a movie that would hold up as a seasonal tradition.

It's also, as you note, not really softened for kid audiences! I do miss the 90s in that respect.

What other films are you thinking of? I kept thinking this one would have been a hell of a thing to unleash on young audiences no matter when, but it would have made marginally more sense for Disney in the '80's, in the same wave of experiments as Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) or, as much as I hate to admit its existence, The Black Cauldron (1985).

[alexxkay]

I am even a hard sell on fiction of real witches at Salem

Kestrell demands to know if you have seen one of her faves, Horror Hotel (AKA City of the Dead). She also recommends checking out the wikipedia of screenwriter George Baxt.

Also in the category of New England witch media, Kes and I have recently watched a bunch of the Netflix show Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It's Sabrina the Teenaged Witch from Archie Comics, reimagined in a MUCH gothier mode, and turning out to be a lot like early Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Kes noped out about halfway through the run, being tired of teen Sabrina's endless capacity for Very Poor Life Choices.)

I am delighted it has been celebrated and rediscovered

Just over a year ago, during the Halloween-that-wasn't, there was a mockumentary In Search of the Sanderson Sisters. It wasn't actually very *good*, IMO, but it did (eventually) feature a short reunion bit.

[sovay]

Kestrell demands to know if you have seen one of her faves, Horror Hotel (AKA City of the Dead).

Yes, last month as a matter of fact, and I would be shocked if the writers of Hocus Pocus hadn't also. The prologue immediately made me think of it.

She also recommends checking out the wikipedia of screenwriter George Baxt.

I have seen Night of the Eagle (1962), but did not remember his name from it due to the uncredited thing! It looks as though I would enjoy his pulp novels, too.

and turning out to be a lot like early Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Kes noped out about halfway through the run, being tired of teen Sabrina's endless capacity for Very Poor Life Choices.)

I bounced reasonably hard off even early Buffy, but I am glad the show is working for you.

but it did (eventually) feature a short reunion bit.

That's nice!

[thawrecka]

I watched Hocus Pocus on TV in the mid 90s because I was a huge fan of both Sarah Jessica Parker and films about witches, and I remember very much enjoying it. (I still like SJP's work but I've since been distracted by so many other interesting actors, but I was introduced to her by L.A. Story and Honeymoon in Vegas, and I can't say I know if those held up or if they were actually appropriate for a pre-adolescent to watch.)

I can't say it lodged its hooks in me the way a lot of other dark fantasy films for kids of the 80s and 90s did, but it is always fun to rewatch, a solid Halloween holiday cult classic.

[sovay]

I can't say it lodged its hooks in me the way a lot of other dark fantasy films for kids of the 80s and 90s did, but it is always fun to rewatch, a solid Halloween holiday cult classic.

I have no idea how I missed this comment for almost two years, my apologies; what were the other dark fantasy films that really stuck with you?

[thawrecka]

😂 It's been long enough that I'm not sure which films I was thinking of. Probably the classic 'traumatising kids films' with striking imagery like Labyrinth and The Neverending Story and Return to Oz & etc.