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Plastic-free aisle debuts in Amsterdam
Related core topics: Can & end making, Sustainability
Related topics: can, environment, News, packaging, plastic, supermarket
Related regions: europe, Netherlands, uk
The world's first plastic-free aisle has been unveiled at an Amsterdam supermarket.
The brainchild of international environmental campaign group A Plastic Planet, the aisle will sit within a completely new metro-sized pilot store of the Dutch supermarket chain Ekoplaza.
Over 700 plastic-free products will be included in the pilot including: meat, rice, sauces, dairy, chocolate, cereals, yogurt, snacks, fresh fruit and vegetables.
Ekoplaza will roll out the aisle across its 74 branches across the Netherlands by the end of this year. The second store with a plastic-free aisle is expected to be in The Hague with the opening set for June this year.
It will be a testbed for new compostable bio-materials as well as traditional materials such as glass, metal and cardboard.
The launch comes a month after British prime minister Theresa May announced her backing for plastic-free aisles in her first major speech on the environment.
A Populus poll revealed last year that more than nine-in-ten Britons back the introduction of a plastic-free aisle in supermarkets, and campaigners hope that UK supermarkets will soon follow Ekoplaza's lead.
Goods within the aisle will all bear the plastic-free mark, a new label introduced by A Plastic Planet to help shoppers quickly identify products that are completely free from plastic packaging.
A Plastic Planet co-founder Sian Sutherland, said: "The introduction of the world's first plastic-free Aisle represents a landmark moment for the global fight against plastic pollution.
"For decades shoppers have been sold the lie that we can't live without plastic in food and drink. A plastic-free aisle dispels all that. Finally we can see a future where the public have a choice about whether to buy plastic or plastic-free. Right now we have no choice.
"There is absolutely no logic in wrapping something as fleeting as food in something as indestructible as plastic. Plastic food and drink packaging remains useful for a matter of days yet remains a destructive presence on the earth for centuries afterwards.
"Europe's biggest supermarkets must follow Ekoplaza's lead and introduce a plastic-free aisle at the earliest opportunity to help turn off the plastic tap."
Erik Does, Ekoplaza chief executive, added: "Plastic-free aisles are an important stepping stone to a brighter future for food and drink.
"We know that our customers are sick to death of products laden in layer after layer of thick plastic packaging. Plastic-free aisles are a really innovative way of testing the compostable biomaterials that offer a more environmentally friendly alternative to plastic packaging."
APEAL welcomes Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation


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ajcrou East Africa Gallabat - El Wak 8 July 2020 | 0
The village of Gallabat is one of the border posts between Sudan and Ethiopia, and controls one of the main roads in the region (with the village of Metemma on the other side of the border). On 4 July 1940, a column under the command of General Pietro Gazzara occupies the various British forts on the border. The Gallabat – Metemma sector is then entrusted to Tenente Colonnello Castagnuola with the 25th, 27th and 77th Colonial Battalion, as well as several Banda formations (irregular troops often from Eritrea or Italian Somaliland). In order to facilitate the future offensive to the north, and to test the relatively inexperienced troops, Major-General William Platt decided to organize a limited offensive to retake Fort Gallabat and, depending on the situation, push towards Metemma. The operation is entrusted to the command of Brigadier William Slim placed at the head of the 10th Indian Infantry Brigade, just arrived in Sudan. He has also, for this purpose, eight armored Matilda of the 6th Royal Tank Regiment. The air component is formed by Vickers Wallesley No.47 of (RAF) Squadron and nine Gloster Gladiator of No.1 (SAAF) Squadron and K Flight.
The attack began at 05h30 when the British artillery opened fire towards Gallabat, taking the Italian garrison completely by surprise. At the same time, six Vickers Wellesley of No.47 (RAF) Squadron took off between 02h55 and 03h18, under the command of Flight Lieutenant Graham R. Magill. If the K7733 crashes at takeoff, although with no consequence to the crew, the other five bombers arrive at the target around 05h00 to bomb the fort and the radio station. They are followed by several Vickers Vincent of No.430 (RAF) Flight. Two Hawker Hardy No.237 (Rhodesia) Squadron are also above between 04h55 and 08h35, to cooperate with ground troops.
Things seem to start well for the British and at 08h00 the first elements engage the Italian troops for the control of Fort Gallabat. Despite several Italian counterattacks, the fort quickly falls into the hands of the opponents, and Brigadier William Slim is already starting to consider a movement towards Metemma. However, the events are about to switch, at least initially, on the air.
In order to cover the troop's progress against the potential Italian bombers, three Gloster Gladiators of K Flight take off : Lieutenant Flight Kenneth H. Savage (L7614), Pilot Officer Jack Hamlyn (L7612) and Henry B. Kirk (K7969). While patrolling east of Metemma, they are totally surprised by a formation of six Fiat CR.42s of 412a Squadriglia CT under the command of Capitano Antonio Raffi. British pilots do not have time to react. Lieutenant Flight Kenneth H. Savage is killed, while Pilot Officer Henry B. Kirk must evacuate his aircraft. If the Pilot Officer Jack Hamyln manages to escape, injured at his foot, he is quickly forced to a crashed-landing with his Gloster Gladiator L7612. From his first fight, the K Flight is now reduced to one aircraft (K7977). The victories are claimed, on the Italian side, by the Capitano Antonio Raffi, Tenente Niso Provinciali and Sergente Pietro Morlotti.
Shortly after, the Italians spot another isolated fighter. This is Major Schalk van Schalkwyk of No.1 (SAAF) Squadron in charge of a reconnaissance flight. He is immediately engaged in combat. Immediately at Heston's advanced airfield, Captain Brian J.L. Boyle was ordered to take off to assist him. He arrives just in time to see his squadron leader attempt to parachute, the clothes on fire. Severely burned, Major Schalk von Schalkwyk will die the next day despite medical care by the Italians. Now isolated with the Italian fighters, Captain Brian J.L. Boyle has no choice but to try to escape. He finally managed to put his Gloster Gladiator (N5852) severely damaged in friendly lines. Injured, he is evacuated to the hospital of Wadi Seidna. He will receive the DFC on 7 January 1941. The two victories are claimed, respectively, by Capitano Antonio Raffi and Sottotenente Fiorindo Rosmino.
Logbook of Captain Brian J.L. Boyle. Collection : SAAF Museum, via Tinus le Roux.
If Indian troops are able to capture the fort, the loss of air cover allows the Italians to bring into some Caproni Ca.133 who are able to harass the troops on the ground.
To try to turn the situation around, four Gloster Gladiators of No.1 (SAAF) Squadron take off around 13h20 to patrol over Gallabat. They are joined by the latest aircraft of K Flight, the K7977 piloted by Flying Officer Jack M. Hayward. They intercept a Caproni Ca.133 formation, two of which are claimed destroyed by Lieutenant Andrew Duncan and John L. Hewitson (N5824).
They are, however, once again surprised by Fiat CR.42 of 412a Squadriglia CT. The K Flight continues is bad luck and Flying Officer Jack Mr. Hayward is quickly shot and killed. The South Africans are doing better because Lieutenant Johan J. Coetzer and Robin Pare, assisted by the other two pilots, are able to claim two Italian fighters. In practice, 412a Squadriglia CT only reports a damaged aircraft during the day. Tenente Mario Visintini claims a victory during the clash.
n any case, the day ends very badly for the British and South Africans that has lost six Gloster Gladiators, loss three pilots and three others wounded. K Flight is literally decimated, while No.1 (SAAF) Squadron no longer has an officer with a rank higher than Lieutenant. As a result, Air Commodore Leonard H. Slatter is ordered to come quickly to take control.
Air Commodore Leonard H. Slatter, C.O. of No.203 (RAF) Group, Soudan. Collection : Imperial War Museum.
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Richard Seymour
Richard Seymour is a socialist writer and columnist and runs the blog Lenin's Tomb. He is the author of The Liberal Defense of Murder (Verso, 2008), and The Meaning of David Cameron (Zero Books, 2010). He has contributed to Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left , (NYU Press, 2008) and The Ashgate Research Companion to Political Violence (Ashgate, forthcoming). His articles have appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman, Radical Philosophy and Historical Materialism. Originally from Northern Ireland, he now resides in London, where he is studying for a PhD at the London School of Economics.
Salvage LIVE: Capitalism & the Apocalypse with Mike Davis
Join Salvage and Haymarket Books for a discussion about Capitalism & the Apocalypse with writer and activist Mike Davis.
By Haymarket Books / April 15 2022
View all related posts
American Insurgents
by Richard Seymour


Farmstead is a Certified Passive House designed by Boston-based ZeroEnergy Design.
PERFORMANCE. The air-tight, super insulated house is certified under the Passive House (PHIUS+ Certified), and Energy Star programs. It features R-60 above-grade walls, R-87 roof, R-36 basement walls, an R-75 basement slab, and air leakage of only 0.49ACH50Pa. The highly-insulative, triple-paned windows also play a role in passive heating due to their high solar heat gain coefficients. The active heating is provided by a wood burning stove, and electric radiant floors in the bathrooms. A solar hot water system provides domestic hot water. The home consumes an average of 275kWh of electricity each month which means that !3.5kW solar electric system would make the house net zero electricity.
CONSTRUCTION. After building the super insulated foundation on site, the home's walls were constructed inside a factory where it was protected from the elements and yielded very low levels of construction waste. The prefabricated structure was then trucked to the site, lifted by crane, and quickly assembled weather tight, which minimized the interior's exposure to the elements and mitigated the risk of water damage and mold growth.


Thinking about tradition/2. How is it produced and with what authenticity, what form of authoritativeness does it use and what maturation of freedom does it make available? This is the fundamental question that is offered to a reason that has abandoned the stereotypes of the Enlightenment.
The opposition of tradition to progress, in moderate or radical terms, continues to be seen, rhetorically, as a characteristic feature of Western modernity. Until yesterday, the mere fact of adjudging this opposition a mere intellectually rough and ideological prejudiced schema was sufficient to be officially placed within the cultural (and political) field of traditionalism. 'Traditionalism' defined a polarisation of attachment to tradition which the dominant culture likened to an authoritarian orientation that was hostile to freedom and resistant to the idea of progress (at least at an ethical-political level). Whatever the case, the idea that the progress of civilisation, of knowledge and of freedom coincided with the overcoming of tradition was broadly established, beginning with modernity, as an a priori of common understanding. Today such is not the case. This is not necessarily good news if we take into account the fact that the evolution of this schema of opposition, which is undoubtedly simplistic, has at least two variables, which in their turn are not without problems. Certainly, however, the diminishment of that opposition, and the revision of the prejudice that led it (which was abstract compared to the reason and the history of the human), has taken many steps forward.
First of all, we should focus in on the retrieval of the irreducible plurality of cultures. The impulse of the historical, anthropological and social sciences developed a special sensitivity towards the differences of traditions in the plural. Attention was first developed in relation to non-Western cultures, significantly changing the meaning of the concept of 'civilisation'. This shift, as is known, provided topics for a broad critical reflection on the 'Eurocentric' perspective of our (indeed) traditional conception of culture. There sprang from this, however, a curious effect which is rather paradoxical. The absoluteness of the notion of 'progress', connected with the Western scale of values, was subjected to criticism. Its claim to place itself at the summit of the criteria of civilisation, and of the forms of actuation of the humanistic ideal, appeared ideological and dogmatic. That is to say, in the current jargon, unfounded. But at the same time, the hierarchical prejudice in favour of Western culture was represented as a characteristic feature of this critical approach. The relativisation of one's own Western (and Christian) culture was produced within the context of the recognition of the equal dignity and respectability of other cultural (and religious) traditions in their specific diversity. But this approach was always the effect of an internal evolution within Western (and Christian) culture. It is this culture, in fact, which sees such a recognition, the roots of which lie in the terrain of Enlightenment rationality and Christian universalism (even thought the exact contribution of these two derivations is still a matter of discussion), as a general principle of the progress of human civilisation. The development of this incontestably ethical model, which recognises that the various traditions have an equal dignity of meaning, was applied, so to speak, to itself. A significant plurality of cultures was, indeed, perceived within the synchronic horizon of the same historical world. This fact today is macroscopically evident, not least because the bestowal of value on cultural pluralism has increased this recognition, multiplying the application of the totalising concept of 'culture' (and in an equivalent way of 'tradition') to diversities at the level of politics, regions, social class, and opinion. Whatever the case – according to this interpretation – an analogous differentiation can also be seen in the most ancient epochs of our history.
A second paradox followed which was equally unforeseen. The radical critique of tradition, which sees tradition as the dogmatic inheritance of despotic and one-way knowledge, affected the tradition itself of Enlightenment thinking. Its claimed infallibility in terms of the approach to meaning, indeed, demonstrated with an abundance of proof its tragic ingenuousness (Horkheimer and Adorno). The elaboration of this critique ended up by producing a rehabilitation of traditions of meaning against the univocal character of a logos separated from transmission and initiation into the human, which is thought to be rational and progressive, specifically because of this abstractness. Contemporary reason has in this way addressed itself to developing its function of recognising and appreciating (albeit in a purely critical way) of traditions which in a historical sense articulate its possible meaning.
The irreplaceable role of tradition, understood as availability of the direction of meaning, cannot be substituted by the self-foundation of reason. Indeed, in this transmission of truth and justice of the human which ethically motivates the elaboration of reason, a tradition of meaning has a fundamental role in offering the conditions that make the use of reason humanly trustworthy. The question of a tradition of meaning – how it is formed and with what authenticity, what form of authoritativeness it employs and what maturation of freedom it makes available, in which ways it contributes to the formation of a human identity, and which resources it offers for the circulation and sharing of inter-human identity – becomes, in this way, objectively fundamental. Its abstractness exposes reason to separation from concrete subjectivity. And its accentuation of rational subjectivity, as an a priori of the ascertainment of truth and justice founded on itself, exposes its concrete realisation to its separation from the concreteness of the shared human: with the tendency to see it as an obstacle to be surmounted (or removed). In the worst cases, as violent totalitarianism. In the less evident cases, as bureaucracy that forces an an-affective and aesthetic logos.
The evidence and the proof of the articulations of meaning are to be found, indeed, by this specific path: in the testimonial (affective, reliable and evaluative) concreteness of the transmission of sharable meaning. The ratio is an instrument for the critical elaboration of their human access, of its personal appropriation and its inter-human sharing. A tradition must in itself be prepared for argument, just as the rational logos must be receptive to testimony. In this way, the human is constructed; and in this way it conserves what, in its transmission, can be received solely as a gift.
There thus emerges a perspective on the transmission and sharing of the quality of being human – its stewardship and its development – where tradition and reason are not enemies but allies. Naturally, this alliance should be constantly implemented and kept alive. It watches over tradition which believes that it conserves its own authenticity by simply expelling human reason from its own domain. But this alliance also involves a commitment to containing the purported absoluteness of an abstract and separate reason that is indifferent to any tradition of meaning in which the human is constructed. The question raised by the sharing of this dual critical attention, in favour of the shared human, strives to be resolved theoretically, it seems to me, in two prevalent directions. The first is that of the hermeneutic elaboration of languages. In substance one is dealing with an unceasing experiencing of the translation of the claim to truth and justice, articulated in the various languages of traditions, in order to make appreciable the recognition of a 'shared horizon' of meaning. The second is that of the dialectical deconstruction of every claimed absoluteness of the concepts of the same reason in order to illuminate the character of choice and decision between many possibilities of meaning, from which spring the meanings that are taken on as being definitive.
This dual perspective certainly represents a step forward as regards the prejudice of the incommunicability of traditions and the abstract absoluteness of reason. In both cases there remains open, however, a space for an infinite oscillation: not only of the truth and the justice of meanings but also of human meaning as such, which can and must be sharable. It is specifically, indeed, to this that the transmission of the human as such is addressed. And it is this, lastly, that is the source of the human legitimation of every exercise of critical reason. Intelligence is critical, by definition, only in view of the reliability of thought, exchanged and experienced words. This subject reopens (Seligman) the question of the nexus between tradition, reason and the authoritativeness of meanings. This provocation may appear, in turn, a paradox. And yet if one wants to walk down to the utmost the path of criticism of the self-referential closure of tradition and reason, it is necessary to recognise the radical limit of the idea of the 'self-foundation' of the human Self, understood as the absolute origin and criterion of the words and actions that transmit the truth and justice of meaning in relation to which humans makes their choices and direct their lives.
Religion, for everyone, bears within it the mystery of this sacredness of origins and destinations: which is corrupted, for everyone, at the very moment at which it is resolved in self-construction. At that point there is no longer tradition, that is to say the generation and growth of the living, but only a replication of the identical, in its immanent sterility. And there is no longer a reason that makes truth and justice accessible to thought that is grateful for the testimony that anticipates its promise and trust, which are otherwise inaccessible, with generation itself, but only prevarication of the Self, which conserves itself solely by eliminating the other. The affective, ethical and rational implications of this conservation should certainly be unceasingly explored and investigated within the horizon of a productive alliance between the traditions of religion and the reason of humans. To censor them, to remove them or even to try to dissolve them is certainly not – with every proven historical verisimilitude – the way by which to assure dialogue and avoid prevarication. Tradition should be understood as testimony to revelation not as its replacement: in this lie – together – its authoritativeness and its limit. And therefore, its rational dignity as well: in the reference to the principle of a truth for everyone, not simply a truth of one person. Reason, in its turn, should be understood as intelligence of truth, which transcends it, and not as a master of truth that disposes of it. In listening and in recognition lies its justice, and not in its coherence with itself and in the experiments of its dominion.
Monotheism of the Self is certainly the worst that we have known. God, in fact, is agape: the original generation of the Logos and life according to the Spirit. The Logos does not derive authoritativeness from self-construction but specifically from the disposition of God to the exercise and redemption of agape. In religion, first of all. And thus in every form of exercise of intelligence and transmission of the human, which generates life and makes it live.


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Q: Will a purely inductive load damage my function generator? Will an inductive load damage my function generator? Will the circuit I'm designing damage my function generator shown below.

I'm using this function generator which has an output impedance of 50 ohms: https://www.gsi-protek.com/9205a9205c

A: It should be just fine.
Your function generator will look like a low source impedance 400mV p-p source (like an op-amp output but beefier) with a 50 ohm resistor in series, so the complete circuit is not purely inductive (not that it's a problem).
The inductor has an impedance of \$2 \pi f L\$ for a sine wave or about 7.5 ohms.
Any decent commercial function generator should not be damaged by even shorting the output or connecting it to arbitrary impedances, and these levels are pretty benign. 4mA peak into even a short circuit is nothing to be concerned about. Don't try a 100uF capacitor charged to 300VDC though.  Your function generator can supply 100mA peak into a 50 ohm load.

A: 120uH is similar to that of a tweeter with ~8 Ohms @10kHz.
The manual specs indicate 20Vp no load and 5Vp into 50 Ohms max or 0.5W.
So 100mVp is SAFE.
Since 8 Ohms reflects more signal from a 50 Ohms source , it appears to attenuate 8/58 or 14% rather than 50% of the no load signal for a matched impedance. Thus 86% of the no load signal is dissipated which has a ratio of 86/14=6.1.

With 10Vp from the gen, no load, it will be it's max rated value at 5Vp into 50Ohm load for 0.5W dissipated in both gen and load or 1W total but only 14% in VAR to your reactive load, your max output power should be 140mWp or 1.02Vp (max) into 8 Ohms at 10kHz.

But then as f drops your max voltage to load must drop a bit due to the impedance ratio.

The DCR of the coil may be in the mOhm range and therefore DC is critical to be included as well in your calculations.

If this is relevant to your situation, update your question and include waveshape.

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During Easter weekend of 2018 (Friday 30 March 2018 - Sunday 1 April 2018), Makoura College celebrated 50 years of teaching and learning. It was an amazing opportunity for people to catch up with old friends, teachers and colleagues from their time at Makoura.
We very much hope you will be able to join us for our school's 50th anniversary reunion celebration during Easter weekend 30th March - 1st April 2018.
Over the half century since those first Makora College classes of 1968, the school has been a focal point of challenge and inspiration for hundreds of the younger and older people connected with it.
Many thanks to the Makoura Reunion Committee for their planning and preparation. We look forward to a nostalgic weekend of reeling in the years.
11.00am - 4.00pm - Tour of the school, sports and cultural events, and memorabilia will be available during the day.
10.00am -12.30pm - Morning tea and farewells. Planting of a memorial tree.
Reunion Photographer Beau Elton captured images from the weekend including the pōwhiri, mix and mingle, Saturday day events, Saturday night events and Sunday morning.
Here's the link to Beau's online albums.
In addition, a large number of photos have been supplied by former Makoura student Patrick Naera.


Help! Plurk has Kidnapped Me!
This darned Plurk has taken over my life.
Not just my real life, which — phbtt, anyway.
Worse, it's taken over my internet life.
I've neglected Ravelry, KnitPurr, Facebook, etc., etc.
oops, got to go, there's a Plurk I have to answer!
I've taken the first step towards following a dream.
with photos of the babies.
Monsoom – One Beautiful Scarf!
I just discovered a gorgeous lace pattern, Monsoom.
Here is Julia's blog, Aalerusen.
Thank you for such a pretty pattern.
Sunshine Cleaning is a good movie in a lot of ways.
Amy Adams and Emily Blunt were perfect.
Perfectly cast, and dressed precisely like girls that age.
Alan Arkin was okay too.
The guy who played Winston (one-armed janitorial guy) was great.
Lynn, the woman whom Emily Blunt stalked was also great.
The crime scene premise was cute and, if you get past the gross aspects, kind of interesting.
I was intrigued by the specialized equipment, training, etc.
The tragedy at the core of the girls' lives was also well done.
It explains their pain and their attraction to cleaning up death.
The waitress/pie/clues thing was well done too.
Nora (Emily Blunt) was a well-developed character.
Haven't you known people like her? I have.
The ambiguous relationship between Nora and Lynn was well done.
Rose (Amy Adams) was adorable as always.
Nice leaving the inevitable Rose/Winston romance unstated.
1. Oscar clearly had some Big Problems, which were never explained or addressed. Oscar was turning eight years old? His weird cluelessness is ridiculous without a DSM label. What's his problem? Didn't your kids know not to ask amputees about missing limbs by the age of, say, 4? Didn't they know enough not to lick everything after hearing a dumb ghost story?
I don't know, he just annoyed me.
2. The melding of comic and tragic was, to say the least, disconcerting at times.
3. What is Rose's backstory?
WHY didn't she ever marry? WHERE/WHO is Oscar's dad?
Is her low self-esteem entirely caused by her mom's suicide?
Something is wrong with my liver.
that some dumb enzymes are too high.
And, I can't even drown my worry with wine.
2. Deep relaxation meditation visualization.
4. Faith in my body's healing powers.


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The Thompson-Pendragon Controversy-Part Two
According to Robert Weinberg and his co-editors (or Mr. Weinberg alone), C. Hall Thompson's stories in Weird Tales were among the first Cthulhu stories "written by an author who was not personally invited to join the fun by Lovecraft." According to editor Charles M. Collins, Thompson was "catapulted to fame" after his work appeared in Weird Tales, with "Spawn of the Green Abyss" receiving "tremendous acclamation" and "hailed as out Lovecrafting the old master himself." All of that appears to have been too much for August Derleth, who pressured Weird Tales to quit publishing Thompson's Lovecraftian stories. This in effect seems to have silenced the younger author, who spent the remainder of his career writing Westerns and crime/detective stories. Thompson may have his revenge, though. His four stories have been reprinted again and again, and if he was indeed the author behind the Arthur Pendragon stories, then he has also been hailed as the creator of two of the best Cthulhu stories of the post-Lovecraft era. These, too, have been reprinted, most recently in Acolytes of Cthulhu (2014). Derleth's byline is missing from that book by the way.
But was Thompson Pendragon? No one knows and no one may ever know. A user named Druidic on the website Thomas Ligotti Online seems to think so, though, and the more I look into the controversy, the more I think things fit. Still, the evidence is circumstantial only. I haven't found anything conclusive.
In going about all of this, I first looked at C. Hall Thompson's stories in Weird Tales. Here is what I found . . .
Thompson's four stories were:
"Spawn of the Green Abyss" (Cover story, Nov. 1946)
"The Will of Claude Ashur" (July 1947)
"The Pale Criminal" (Sept. 1947)
"Clay" (May 1948)
Of these, only "The Will of Claude Ashur" touches directly on what is now called the Cthulhu Mythos. (That's Derleth's term. I'm not sure that we should use it, but it's too late to do anything about it now.) The others are Lovecraftian to one degree or another, but they could easily take place in a non-Cthulhian universe.
Three of the four are set in the northeastern United States. Only "The Pale Criminal" takes place beyond American shores, in Germany. Of the three stories set here in this country (I write from the cold, snowy Midwest), two are based in New Jersey with side trips to other places. One, "Clay," takes place in Lovecraft's beloved New England. If you're writing while under the influence of Lovecraft, I can see setting your stories in New England. That was his country. But to set your stories in New Jersey seems a little odd to me--unless New Jersey forms a part of your own region, one that you might wish to mythologize in the same way that Lovecraft mythologized New England. Well, C. Hall Thompson was born in Philadelphia and lived in Pennsylvania--like New Jersey, a Mid-Atlantic state--for all or most of his life. (1, 2) In contrast, Arthur Porges, another candidate for the Pendragon title, was from the Chicago area and lived, I think, in California for a good many years.
All four of Thompson's stories have Lovecraftian elements, but they also have conventional gothic elements. There are locked rooms, locked chests, secret books, and hidden manuscripts. There are also ancient curses, forbidden rites and lore, twin or switched identities, cases of possession and malign influence cast by supernatural forces, all of which culminate in ghastly deaths or unfortunate fates visited upon the main characters. As in so many gothic stories--maybe all gothic stories--much of the action in Thompson's work takes place in lonely and forbidding houses. In "Spawn of the Green Abyss," it's called Heath House, located close to a town "sprawled on a forlorn peninsula off New Jersey's northeastern coast." (3) In "The Will of Claude Ashur," the house is Inneswich Priory, not a priory at all but a private home, also located in New Jersey. In "The Pale Criminal," the house is a castle called Zengerstein, which looms on the edge of the Black Forest. (4) Finally, the action in "Clay" takes place at Wickford House, an asylum for the insane located somewhere in northern New England. There is in fact a lot of insanity or presumed insanity in Thompson's weird fiction, but--younger by more than a generation than H.P. Lovecraft--Thompson had a different angle on mental illness, one that would have been in vogue in postwar America.
(1) On the other hand, if you're from Pennsylvania and want to mythologize a place, why wouldn't you choose your own place to mythologize?
(2) I wouldn't rule out that Thompson served in the military during or right after World War II. His first known published story was "The Shanghaied Ruby" in the Winter 1945-1946 issue of Fight Stories. That would have been just right for a man separating or soon to separate from the military.
(3) That sounds like Sandy Hook to me, but I'm no Easterner. There are beaches at Sandy Hook, and I wonder if it was a tourist spot for Philadelphians in Thompson's day. There are also military installations at Sandy Hook. Could Thompson have been stationed there?
(4) Or could Thompson, if he was in the military, have been stationed in postwar Germany? Maybe not, as "The Pale Criminal" seems an imitation of a story by Poe and not based on anything from real life.
Copyright 2019 Terence E. Hanley
Posted by Terence E. Hanley at 6:00 AM No comments:
Labels: August Derleth, C. Hall Thompson, H.P. Lovecraft
The Thompson-Pendragon Controversy-Part One
Charles John Thompson (1923-1991), who published under the pen name C. Hall Thompson, contributed four stories to Weird Tales in 1946-1948. Despite his small output in the field of weird fiction, Thompson wasn't an unknown writer nor a flash in the pan, for he authored dozens more stories, mostly Westerns, and a few novels, also Westerns, over the course of his twenty-plus years as a professional writer. Born in the same month in which the first issue of Weird Tales came out, Thompson was only forty-six years old in 1969, the year in which his last known work of fiction was published. (It was one-half of an Ace Double Western.) Oddly enough, that was the same age at which H.P. Lovecraft stopped writing . . . except that Lovecraft stopped writing on account of a premature case of death. Thompson may have kept on writing--he had to have done something during the last twenty-two years of his life--but for now at least, this is all we have.
Thompson's four stories for Weird Tales are Lovecraftian in one way or another. The story is that they were too Lovecraftian for August Derleth's tastes. An extremely prolific author, the publisher of Arkham House books, and the self-appointed defender of the Lovecraftian faith, Derleth is supposed to have threatened Thompson with legal action if he did not desist from writing in the manner of his master. Thompson's last story for Weird Tales, entitled simply "Clay," appeared in the May 1948 issue of the magazine and he was heard from no more in those pages.
At least one reader who has posted on the Internet has suggested that Thompson was the man behind two stories, published under the pseudonym Arthur Pendragon, in Fantastic Stories of Imagination in 1964-1965. The stories, "The Dunstable Horror" (Apr. 1964) and "The Crib of Hell" (May 1965), are pastiches of Lovecraft. They are considered good pastiches, but they are nonetheless pastiches. Darrell Schweitzer, who knows a thing or two about Weird Tales, has suggested science fiction and fantasy author Arthur Porges as the man behind the Pendragon mask. There is circumstantial evidence in favor of both suggestions but nothing definite. We may never know Pendragon's real identity.
I have looked into the Thompson-Pendragon controversy a little more and have read Thompson's four weird tales. One thing I wanted to find out about is the story that August Derleth threatened C. Hall Thompson if he did not quit with the Yog-Sothothery. This story has been repeated on the Internet without citation and attribution, as all things are in this medium. Well, I just happened to find a telling of that story in print. From the introduction to "The Will of Claude Ashur" in Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenburg (1988):
C. Hall Thompson's 1947 story, "The Will of Claude Ashur"--with its appropriation of Lovecraftian names and more than casual nod to the plot of "The Thing on the Doorstep"--stands as one of the first stories of this kind [i.e., one of "H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories"] written by an author who was not personally invited to join the fun by Lovecraft. Thompson wrote three other stories for the magazine in the same vein until Lovecraft's publishers asked him to stop. (p. 488)
That quote led me to Mr. Weinberg's earlier history of the magazine, The Weird Tales Story (1977) and this quote:
November 1946 brought forth the "Spawn of the Green Abyss" [sic] by C. Thompson Hall. A direct pastiche of Lovecraft in both style and content, the story was similar to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." However, "Spawn" was well written and entertainingly told. Thompson did several other Lovecraft pastiches until Derleth made Weird Tales stop from publishing them. Derleth maintained a stranglehold on all Lovecraftian ideas, though it was doubtful that he had any legal right to do so. (p. 46)
The way I understand it, Derleth had no legal right to do so. At this late date, I think we can say that he was more or less a jerk about it. Anyway, Robert Weinberg owned the Weird Tales property when he wrote those words. I think we have to assume that he knew whereof he spoke. I think we should also point out that Derleth was competing with Thompson for space in Weird Tales during the late 1940s, not only under his own name but also under his pseudonym Stephen Grendon. We might call his position biased. After all, one more Thompson tale in the magazine could have meant one less Derleth tale. Like I said, jerk.
In 1963, Avon Books issued a collection of weird tales called Fright, later Harvest of Fear. In his introduction, the editor, Charles M. Collins, wrote:
C. Hall Thompson catapulted to fame when his "The Will of Claude Ashur" and "Spawn of the Green Abyss" were published in Weird Tales magazine. The latter, received with tremendous acclamation, was hailed as out Lovecrafting the old master himself. His "Clay," in the Lovecraft tradition, is a minor masterpiece which should generate much enthusiasm among his many admirers. (1975 edition, p. 12)
So if Derleth was really that peeved with Thompson, maybe it was out of jealousy. In any case, those are pretty encouraging words from Collins the editor. If you were C. Hall Thompson, you might have thought pretty well of yourself and that maybe you should take advantage of the situation while you could. Now consider the timing: Fright was published in 1963. Just four months into the following year, Fantastic issued a never-before published Lovecraft pastiche, "The Dunstable Horror" by Arthur Pendragon. Was it an old story dusted off for publication in 1964? Or was a new story, composed and submitted to Cele Goldsmith in short order following the publication of Fright? Whatever might have happened, if Pendragon was Thompson, the timing seems right. Now let's see how Pendragon's stories might match up with Thompson's.
Original text copyright 2019 Terence E. Hanley
Who Was Arthur Pendragon?
The other day I wrote about C. Hall Thompson, who contributed Lovecraftian pastiches to Weird Tales in the 1940s. I also wrote that there is at least one person who speculates that Thompson was the man behind two stories by a pseudonymous author dubbed Arthur Pendragon, published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination in 1964-1965. I say pseudonymous, but I don't think anyone can say for sure that Pendragon wasn't his real name. It just seems really unlikely that it was. His (or her) two stories in Fantastic were "The Dunstable Horror" from April 1964 and "The Crib of Hell" from May 1965. The story goes that in the 1940s August Derleth threatened C. Hall Thompson with legal action if Thompson didn't stop writing Lovecraftian tales. I don't know the source of the claim of Derleth's threatened action against Thompson, but it doesn't sound out of character for him.
The suggestion that Thompson was Pendragon comes from the website Thomas Ligotti Online. It is made by a user named Druidic (I think). You can read the entire short thread by clicking here. Druidic's evidence isn't strong, but sometimes a gut feeling can get you somewhere. Another user--I guess he's called Ancient History--points out that both of Pendragon's stories were reprinted in Acolytes of Cthulhu, from 2001. "In the introduction," writes Ancient History, "editor Robert M. Price says that Darrell Schweitzer suggests this is a pseudonym for Arthur Porges." Here is the evidence for that claim, straight from the source, Robert M. Price's introduction to the book:
As the learned Darrell Schweitzer points out, Pendragon's secret identity was most likely Arthur Porges, who wrote for the magazine under his own (noticeably similar) name during the same period. Sounds good to me.
In other words, there isn't any good evidence one way or another. There is of course circumstantial evidence that C. Hall Thompson was our man. After having written pulp stories--mostly Westerns but also a few weird tales and crime/detective stories--in the 1940s and '50s, Thompson may have gone looking for other markets in the early 1960s. Could he have dusted off a couple of old Lovecraftian pastiches and submitted them to Cele Goldsmith, editor of Fantastic, either under a pseudonym or insisting on a pseudonym so as to avoid any trouble with Derleth? Maybe so. Ms. Goldsmith and Derleth would seem to have been connected in one way or another. Whether distantly or closely, I can't say, but maybe she would have understood the problem--and looked right past it because of her endless need for new material. Or maybe Derleth's ire against other Lovecraftian authors of the late 1940s had died down by the early 1960s. The circle of Lovecraftian authors, editors, artists, and fans could not have been very big in any case. Artist Lee Brown Coye was working for both Cele Goldsmith and August Derleth during the early 1960s. He in fact illustrated "The Dunstable Horror." Maybe that's connection enough. Nevertheless, Cele Goldsmith bought and published two Lovecraftian stories from a now unknown author, despite any objection Derleth might have had.
There is also circumstantial evidence that Arthur Porges was Arthur Pendragon. The first name and both initials match, and it was a pretty common practice for writers of science fiction and fantasy to write under more than one byline, especially for different kinds of stories. One possible weakness in this argument is this question: Did Porges write other Lovecraftian pastiches? Is he known to have been a fan or reader of Lovecraft's work? If he wasn't, then it's harder to believe that he wrote what some consider to be among the better Lovecraftian tales from after Lovecraft's death. Witness the inclusion of both of Pendragon's stories in Acolytes of Cthulhu and Mr. Price's comment in his introduction that Pendragon's "reputation is narrower than it ought to be." None of that is a problem, of course, when it comes to C. Hall Thompson. He had written Lovecraftian stories before and there isn't any reason to think that he couldn't have done it again in the 1960s, alternatively, that he had been sitting on those stories since the 1940s and got them into print when the opportunity presented itself.
So who was Arthur Porges? Well, he was the son of James and Clara (Kurzin) Porges, two Jewish-Russian immigrants who came to the United States as young children in the period 1888-1890, spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, and lived in the Chicago area for most of their lives. James Porges was born Israel Podgursky but changed his surname to match that of a relative in Chicago. Arthur was the second youngest of James and Clara Porges' four sons. His older brother Irwin (1909-1998), a college professor and musician, wrote Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (1975). (Burroughs was also a Chicagoan.) The youngest of the Porges boys, Walter Porges (1918-1979), was a teacher of history in Connecticut and at Pierce College in Los Angeles. It seems as though at least three out of the four ended up in California.
Arthur Porges was born in 1915, served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and taught college-level mathematics. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, his first published story was "The Rats," which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in December 1951. He published dozens more stories until his death in 2006 at age ninety. In looking over their titles, I don't see any that jumps out as a possible Lovecraftian tale, but you never know. I'm not sure that it matters anyway, for the question of who Arthur Pendragon really was will remain until someone finds a telltale typescript or letter or some other piece of evidence among the papers of a deceased author or editor.
By the way, Arthur Porges was born on August 20, 1915, H.P. Lovecraft's twenty-fifth birthday.
Arthur Porges had the cover story, "The Shadowsmith," in the September 1960 issue of Fantastic Science Fiction Stories. The cover artist was John Duillo (1928-2003), later the other Conan artist for Lancer Books.
Arthur Porges' older brother, Irwin Porges, was also a writer and the author of the book Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (1975). He and Arthur also collaborated on a story called "A Touch of Sun" for Fantastic, published in the issue of April 1959. The cover artist here is unknown.
Both Irwin and Arthur Porges were of an age to have grown up reading Burroughs' stories. Irwin Porges reached the Golden Age of Science Fiction (which is twelve) in 1921, Arthur in 1927. Burroughs must have captured their imaginations. But what about H.P. Lovecraft? Would they have had the same reaction to his work, assuming they read it? It's impossible to say. But maybe generations matter when it comes to these things. C. Hall Thompson was younger than the Porges brothers by a decade or more. Born in 1923, he would have lived his formative years in a time when Weird Tales and H.P. Lovecraft (as well as Amazing Stories and other science fiction pulps) were at their peak. Could Lovecraft have been his Burroughs? Again, it's impossible to say.
Both C. Hall Thompson and Arthur Porges have been proposed as the true identity of the (presumably) pseudonymous author Arthur Pendragon. Pendragon has two genre-fiction credits. First came "The Dunstable Horror" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination, in April 1964. The illustrations were by Lee Brown Coye, his last work for the magazine. For the next several years, Coye did illustrations for August Derleth's Arkham House. Like Derleth's 1945 pastiche The Lurker at the Treshold, "The Dunstable Horror" is set in rural New England. Also like Derleth's novel, there is an element of the plot that involves an American Indian of unusual power. If C. Hall Thompson was Arthur Pendragon, and if he wrote "The Dunstable Horror" in the 1940s, he or his editor may have felt that his story was uncomfortably close to The Lurker at the Threshold. (Lovecraft's village of Dunwich makes its appearance in Derleth's book, too.) Maybe he didn't want to risk a lawsuit. On the other hand, maybe Thompson--if he was Pendragon and if Derleth had made legal threats against him in the 1940s--couldn't pass up the chance to stick his finger in Derleth's eye after so many years and so submitted his tale to Fantastic. But that's all a lot of speculation. The mystery remains.
Posted by Terence E. Hanley at 6:00 AM 3 comments:
Labels: August Derleth, C. Hall Thompson, H.P. Lovecraft, Jewish Authors, Lee Brown Coye, Who Was . . . ?
C. Hall Thompson (1923-1991)
Né Charles John Thompson
Born March 17, 1923, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died February 11, 1991, presumably in Pennsylvania
C. Hall Thompson's name came up the other day while I was writing about Viking stories. He didn't write any Viking stories that I know of, but he did write a few Northerns--the Alaskan and Canadian type, not the Viking type--and several Westerns. He also wrote four stories for Weird Tales. While looking into his life and career, I came across an interesting bit of speculation put forth on the Internet. I'll get to that in a minute.
C. Hall Thompson and Weird Tales made their debut in the same month, March 1923. He was born on St. Patrick's Day and was christened almost three months later, on June 10, 1923, at Tabor Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. His baptismal name was Charles John Thompson. The Charles part came from his father. Before he was even out of high school, Thompson, a budding author, had adopted a pseudonym: from at least 1942 until the closing out of his career, he called himself C. Hall Thompson. The Hall part came from his mother, Helen Hall Thompson.
Thompson graduated from South Philadelphia High School for Boys in June 1942. He would have been a year older than his classmates, but I don't have an explanation for his delayed graduation. Even then he was a writer, for Thompson penned the review of his graduating class, calling it "Southern for Service." He may have been the Charles J. Thompson who, as a student at Vare Junior High School in Philadelphia, won second prize (junior group) and the grand sum of $3 for his entry in the National Peace Poster Contest in March 1938. Despite his efforts, war came to Europe a year and a half later. Although Thompson was of an age to serve when America went to war, I don't know that he did. However, he filled out a draft card in 1942 while residing in Philadelphia.
Thompson appears to have lived in Philadelphia and nearby places in Pennsylvania for all or most of his life, but I know almost nothing about him, and neither does anybody else as far as I can tell. Like I said, he had four stories in Weird Tales:
"Spawn of the Green Abyss" (Nov. 1946)
All have been reprinted again and again and a couple have even been translated and published in European editions.
Thompson's popularity as a teller of weird tales can be attributed in part to his authorship of some of the first Cthulhu Mythos stories told after the death of H.P. Lovecraft--told, that is, by someone other than members of Lovecraft's circle. (Lovecraft died two days before Thompson's fourteenth birthday.) There is a story on the Internet that August Derleth threatened Thompson with legal action if he did not cease writing tales set in a Lovecraftian universe. That story arrives without citation or attribution, but it would seem to go along with Derleth's reputation. (The more I read about him in regards to Lovecraft, the less I like him: Derleth seems to have been a man who loved something so much that he thought it was his.) Chased away from Weird Tales or not, Thompson sold nearly four dozen stories to Adventure, Argosy, Dime Western Stories, Frontier Stories, North-West Romances, 10 Story Western Magazine, and other titles, mostly Westerns, over the next six years. He also broke into the slicks with stories in Collier's and Esquire.
Thompson's magazine stories were published between 1945 and 1954 when their author was in his twenties and early thirties. Then, in the same year that Weird Tales came to an end, Thompson's magazine credits seem to have dried up. Pulps in general were dying off by the early 1950s, but Westerns were still strong, in paperback, at the movie theater, and on TV. Thompson had a few Westerns published in the 1950s: A Gun for Billy Reo in 1955, Under the Badge in 1957, and Montana! in 1959. Ace Double Editions issued Thompson's Western novel The Killing of Hallie James in 1969. Thompson is also supposed to have written stories for Sunday newspaper sections.
There is speculation online that C. Hall Thompson was the pseudonymous author of "The Dunstable Horror" (Apr. 1964) and "The Crib of Hell" (May 1965), both in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. (That thread appears on the website Thomas Ligotti Online, here.) Not very long ago (in geologic terms) I was working on some research to do with Lee Brown Coye. As it turns out, Coye illustrated "The Dunstable Horror," a serviceable pastiche of Lovecraft (and far superior to Derleth's own novel The Lurker at the Threshold, from 1945). This was Coye's final work for Fantastic. By 1964 he had already begun working for Derleth and Derleth's Arkham House. Coye had previously illustrated "The Will of Claude Ashur" and "Clay" by Thompson in Weird Tales. If Pendragon was indeed a pseudonym of C. Hall Thompson, then Coye would already have been familiar with his work.
In the summer of 1951, Thompson married Italian-born Isabella Elda Pirritano (1924-2009), a recent graduate of Temple University who had studied secondary education. She was also a choral singer. I don't know anything about their lives nor their long years together after 1969. Charles J. Thompson died on February 11, 1991, and was buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. His wife survived him by nearly two decades and was laid to rest beside him in 2009.
C. Hall Thompson's Stories in Weird Tales
None except to read Thompson's stories.
C. Hall Thompson's first story for Weird Tales, "Spawn of the Green Abyss," from November 1946, was also his first and only cover story. The cover artist was the unfindable Boris Dolgov. His technique was unusual for a pulp cover, as it appears to be a pencil drawing tinted with watercolors.
Lee Brown Coye illustrated Thompson's next story for "The Unique Magazine," "The Will of Claude Ashur," from July 1947. This was also the first issue in which Coye's "Weirdisms" feature began in Weird Tales and the first in which the Damp Man, created by Allison V. Harding, appeared. Despite the eventual popularity of the Damp Man stories, Thompson had the lead story in that July 1947 issue.
I don't know whether "The Crib of Hell" by Arthur Pendragon was the cover story in the May 1965 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, but I wanted to show the cover because I have detected a swipe, unfortunately made by an otherwise great and very admirable artist, Gray Morrow. You can see for yourself how oddly divided this image is. The part on the right is likely original. The part on the left, executed in an entirely different technique, is obviously a swipe. See the two images below. There is at least one person, by the way, who has speculated that Thompson and Pendragon were the same person. More on that in the next posting.
At the left is Jack Thurston's cover for Satan's Disciples by Robert Goldston (1962), and at the right is another artist's swipe done for the summer 1974 issue of Weird Tales. Who knows where the late Mr. Thurston's artwork will show up next? Update (Jan. 22, 2019): I have been thinking about this image, and it occurs to me that all of the artists who created versions of it may have been guilty of swiping it from an original source, Jack Thurston included. But what would the original source have been?
Text and captions copyright 2019 Terence E. Hanley
Posted by Terence E. Hanley at 6:00 AM 1 comment:
Labels: August Derleth, Authors, Boris Dolgov, C. Hall Thompson, H.P. Lovecraft, Jack L. Thurston, Lee Brown Coye
Vikings have captured our imaginations in a way that no other people in history have done. Maybe we have ancestral memories of their falling upon us without warning, taking what they wanted and burning the rest. If you had lived during their heyday, Vikings could never have been far from your thoughts. They would always have been there, creeping along the edges of your imagination and your fears, and it would have been equally so for your grandparents before you and your grandchildren after you. There may have been Huns and Goths, Mongols and Turks, Persians and Saracens, stalking along the borderlands of European civilization, but none can compare now in our imaginations to the Vikings.
In thinking about the Viking-fantasy story, it occurs to me now that there are three types. First is the type in which Vikings are the encountered. We see them from the outside, from the perspective of perhaps a more civilized observer. I haven't yet read "A Yank at Valhalla" by Edmond Hamilton (Startling Stories, Jan. 1941), but I suspect that this is an example of the first type. Next is the type in which Vikings are the encounterers. (Blogger doesn't like that word.) In this type, we see things from the perspective of the Vikings themselves, very often in their encounters--historically accurate or not--with American Indians. I have a book, Prince Valiant in the New World by Harold Foster (Nostalgia Press, 1976), that tells such a tale. (Beowulf, in which Grendel and his mother are the encountered, is also of this type, I think.) The third type is the story of the Vikings as a people, their ways of life among themselves and in their own world and culture. If fantasy and science fiction are ultimately stories of encounter, then it's hard, it seems to me, for this third type to fall within those genres, unless the monsters, gods, witches, and undead encountered are a part of Norse mythology and folklore itself and not something from the outside.
My friend Hlafbrot has pointed out that Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard (1891) has a place on the list of Viking literature. I have never read this book, but it's listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, indicating that it's a genre work and not one of conventional or mainstream literature. In fact, if Eric Brighteyes was the first or one of the first modern Viking stories, then maybe it was also the beginning of the Viking-fantasy in our popular culture. Pulp magazines arrived on the scene just five years after Eric Brighteyes was published. I can't say when the first Viking story appeared in a pulp magazine. I also can't say what the first Viking story in Weird Tales might have been. Writers and readers of "The Unique Magazine" seem to have been far more interested in tales of the Orient and the tropics. (1) Robert E. Howard is supposed to have written a lot of Viking stories or quasi-Viking stories. The one that comes to mind, "The Frost Giant's Daughter," never made it into Weird Tales.
After writing about Vikings the other day, I cast about for a book to read and came quickly enough to a novel by one of my favorite authors for children. It's called Viking Adventure, and it's by Clyde Robert Bulla (1914-2007). Like so many Viking stories, this one is about an encounter with American Indians before Columbus. And like so many of the late Mr. Bulla's books, it is told in what I hear as a melancholy voice. Although his books are for children, Clyde Robert Bulla knew what it is to be a child, to suffer pain and loss, loneliness and yearning, to feel small and out of place, to feel like running and hiding, to dream and to have one's dreams thwarted or unfulfilled. If a good book is one that resounds within you even after you have finished reading it, then Viking Adventure is a good book, better, I would hazard, than myriads of supposedly serious and ambitious novels written for adults.
(1) If Viking stories are Northerns, stories of the tropics are Southerns, and those of the Orient are Easterns, then there was far more emphasis on Southerns and Easterns in the pulps than there was on Northerns. Or if people wrote and read stories of the Far North, they were about the North Woods, about the taiga and the tundra, Alaska, the Yukon, and the Arctic, all set in the present of the pulp-fiction era or in the recent past. There was even a pulp magazine called North-West Stories.
Prince Valiant in the New World (1976) is Prince Valiant Book 6, part of a series of storybooks adapted from the comic strip by Hal Foster and published by Nostalgia Press of New York City. Here is the encounter depicted again and again in popular culture: the Viking meets the American Indian in a time before Columbus.
Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard, originally published in 1891, was reprinted again and again during the twentieth century. Here is the cover of the Zebra paperback edition of 1978. The identity of the cover artist is unknown. The furious action (and the depiction of the hero's anatomy) may be under the influence of Frank Frazetta, but the technique is purely 1970s, like that of Michael William Kaluta, Berni Wrightson, or Jeffrey Jones. Update: I hear from bthom1 that the cover artist is Esteban Maroto. Thanks bthom1.
Zebra reprinted Eric Brighteyes in 1982 with different cover art, but the artist is again unknown.
In 1979, Zebra Books issued a sequel, Eric Brighteyes: A Witch's Welcome, penned by Sigfriour Skaldaspillir, better known as Mildred Downey Broxon. The cover artist was Ken Barr, but the mountain in the background wasn't his . . .
For he swiped it from Frank Frazetta's cover for Conan of Cimmeria, in which the quasi-Viking story "The Frost Giant's Daughter" appeared. Though offered to Weird Tales, "The Frost Giant's Daughter" was refused by its editor, Farnsworth Wright, and went instead to the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan. Frazetta's illustration of the story is justly famous.
In 1963, Thomas Y. Crowell Company of New York published Viking Adventure by Clyde Robert Bulla. Here's the cover of the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club version, with illustrations by Douglas Gorsline. Viking Adventure is the story of a boy named Sigurd who goes on an adventure far from home, to Wineland, our America, inhabited only by what we now call Indians. It is a moving story of growth and loss, and I recommend it.
There were Westerns in the pulps, but there were also Northerns, if you want to call them that, but Northerns are not about Vikings. Instead, they're about what Bob and Doug McKenzie call the Great White North. In the pulp magazine North-West Stories (later North-West Romances), these two genres lived side by side. Here is an example of the cover, from the Winter issue of 1950, showing a sort-of Betty Hutton lookalike with her parka conveniently undone and her sweater conveniently tight. This was the 1950s after all, the era of the sweater girl. Anyway, if this were a Weird Tales cover, it would fall into the category of "Woman and Wolf" (click here). The title story in fact is called "The Wolf-Woman of Chandindu," by C. Hall Thompson, who also, as chance would have it, contributed to Weird Tales. More evidence that all things form circles.
Labels: Frank Frazetta, Robert E. Howard, Vikings
Tales of Viking Fantasy
A month ago I wrote about Vikings and other medieval subjects on the cover of Weird Tales, and out of that I received a couple of comments from readers about Viking fantasy stories. That got me thinking that there may be a missed sub-sub-genre of fantasy and science fiction dealing with those men and women of the north, with their winged and horned helmets, long, braided hair, conical breastplates, and raiments of hide and fur. So here is a first shot at stories of Vikings and Norsemen, with some also of Saxons, Geats, Goths, and other early northern Europeans thrown into the mix. These are stories with fantastic, supernatural, weird, or science-fictional elements. That leaves out a lot of good Viking stories to be sure, but you've got to draw a line somewhere. I welcome additions to this list. If you send them, I will add them.
Beowulf by an unknown author (date of composition unknown)--Beowulf is the granddaddy of Northern fantasy in English, and although it's really the story of Geatish men, I think I have to include it here. To leave it out would be a bumbling kind of oversight. Beowulf has been an inspiration to myriads of writers, including, in the twentieth century, J.R.R. Tolkien and Michael Uslan, better known as the executive producer of the Batman movies.
Unidentified stories by Ralph Milne Farley (Argosy, 1930s)--A commenter on my earlier article mentioned these stories, but I don't know any titles.
The Lost Vikings by Jack Bechdolt (1931)--A lost lands/lost race novel set in Alaska.
Prince Valiant by Hal Foster (1937)--A Sunday comic strip in which the title character, a Norseman, goes on adventures, some fantastical or supernatural, all over the globe, as the subtitle reads, "In the Days of King Arthur." Adapted to film in 1954.
"King of the World's Edge" by H. Warner Munn (Weird Tales, Sept.-Dec. 1939)--A four-part serial by a correspondent and friend of H.P. Lovecraft, "King of the World's Edge" is a story of Romans and Saxons in pre-Columbian America, authored by an enthusiast of history and archaeology, including the idea that Vikings came to America during the Middle Ages and left behind evidence of their visit.
"A Yank at Valhalla" by Edmond Hamilton (Startling Stories, Jan. 1941)--Reprinted as The Monsters of Juntenheim (1950).
"Flight into Destiny" by Verne Chute (Weird Tales, Mar. 1943)
The Lost Ones by Ian Cameron (1961)--Reprinted as Island at the Top of the World (1974) and adapted to film as The Island at the Top of the World (1974).
Journey into Mystery (Aug. 1962)--Marvel Comics' version of Thor as a superhero (and future member of the Avengers) first appeared in Journey into Mystery in August 1962. Since then, he has been in countless comic books and now a series of movies made by Marvel Studios.
Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in AD 922 by Michael Crichton (1976)--Reprinted as The 13th Warrior in 1999 and adapted to film that year under the same title.
The Norseman (1978)--A movie starring Lee Majors, Cornel Wilde, and Mel Ferrer.
DC's version of Beowulf starred in his own title in the 1970s. The stories were written by Michael Uslan and drawn by Ricardo Villamonte. Here is the cover of the first issue, from May 1975.
Prince Valiant of comic strip fame is a Norseman. Here he is on the cover of Dell Four Color #900, from 1958. The interiors were drawn by Bob Fuji, but I'm not sure that he was the cover artist here.
Startling Stories, January 1941, with a cover story, "A Yank at Valhalla," by Edmond Hamilton and cover art by Earle Bergey.
"A Yank at Valhalla" was reprinted in 1950 as The Monsters of Juntonheim in a British edition. The identity of the cover artist is unknown.
Weird Tales, March 1943. The cover story is "Flight into Destiny" by Verne Chute. The cover art is by Edgar Franklin Wittmack.
In 1974, Walt Disney Pictures released an adaptation of The Lost Ones by Ian Cameron. Here is the movie tie-in edition of Cameron's book, retitled to match the movie.
Vikings in America were and still are a popular theme in popular culture. (Prince Valiant came to America, too.) In 1978, American International Pictures released The Norseman, with Lee Majors in the lead role as a Viking in the New World. I think The Norseman made a clunking sound, but I remember that my younger brother saw it at the movie theater with his friends. Note the similarity of the movie poster to one of Frank Frazetta's Conan covers for Lancer. If you have never seen Hal Foster's original Prince Valiant, you know that Frazetta took a great deal from Foster. Who can blame him? And so this Frazetta-like poster closes a circle.
Labels: Comic Books, Vikings
Friends of Thanos
While I was away over the holidays, we watched Avengers: Infinity War on Netflix. We had seen it at the movie theater months before, but we wanted to see it again as the release of the sequel approaches. (Avengers: Endgame will be out in April.) Even though we knew what was coming, it was still shocking and sad to witness half of the team crumble into dust and blow away. (Bill and Ted were right after all: All we are is dust in the wind.) I can't wait to see Thanos get his comeuppance in the next movie. We all have our theories about how that will happen, but I think we'll all be proved wrong. (I think Ant-Man will play a strong role, but we'll see.)
A day or two after we watched the movie, my nephew told me that there was some kind of controversy involving Thanos and the description of Avengers: Infinity War on Netflix. I resolved to find out more once things calmed down after the holiday. I have read about the controversy now, but I still don't really understand what the big deal is. It leads back to something that I wrote about months ago, though, in an article called "Summer Movie Miscellany" (here). In that article I made a kind of prediction. As it turns out, I was right, but then it doesn't take a genius to be right about these things.
The recent controversy has to do with this description of Avengers: Infinity War posted on Netflix:
Superheroes amass to stop intergalactic sociopath Thanos from acquiring a full set of Infinity Stones and wiping out half of all life in the universe.
That's not exactly informative. The uninitiated might ask, What the heck is an Infinity Stone? But if you have to ask, you probably shouldn't watch Avengers: Infinity War until you have seen a couple of dozen other Marvel movies first. Anyway, a bunch of people who don't have anything else to do objected to the characterization of Thanos as a sociopath. The objections seem to fall into two categories. First is that the use of the word sociopath is incorrect or inaccurate. Second and more troubling is that Thanos is not a sociopath because what he's trying to do--kill off half of the life in the universe--is actually a good thing. I'll take these objections one at a time.
The first objection is easy enough to deal with. First, the term sociopath is informal and imprecise. It isn't a diagnosis. People use it more or less how they please. It doesn't mean very much to say that Thanos or anybody else is a sociopath. Second, Thanos is not a real person. He exists only as drawings on paper or as a bunch of electrons. How can you get worked up over something so inconsequential as that? As William Shatner (or the evil Captain Kirk from Episode 37) might say: "Get a life! For cryin' out loud, it's just a movie." How can anyone possibly have enough time or interest to start some kind of wacky campaign to get a television blurb changed? I mean, how old are you people? What have you done with yourselves? Move out of your parents' basement and grow the hell up!
The second objection, that Thanos is actually a good guy and is trying to do something good and necessary in the universe, is far more serious and scary. But then we live in a world full of serious and scary things, one of which is the nihilistic, anti-human thinking of countless millions of people--people who hate themselves and because of it hate everyone else, past, present, and future, God included. They are the kind of people who made the twentieth a century of horrors and promise to make the twenty-first a proper sequel of greater, though more subtle, horrifying things.
As I wrote before, if you believe that humanity should be reduced or diminished, you are, like Thanos, a monster and a villain. Get that into your head: You are a monster. There is no get out of jail free card for you if you believe, like him, that the process should be equally and randomly applied. You are a monster. And I hope--we all should hope--that you never have even the remotest access to power (1, 2)
(1) Although in a democracy, even monsters have power. In fact, democracies are just as likely as any form of government (or even more likely) to give rise to monsters, as a democracy inevitably results in a rapid race to the bottom, and monstrousness resides in every one of us at the basest of levels.
(2) By the way, has anyone noticed the similarities in motivation between Thanos and Kodos the Executioner from the Star Trek episode "The Conscience of the King"? The difference is, I guess, that there is nothing to prick the conscience of Thanos.
Labels: Comic Books, Star Trek, What Is the Monster of the Twenty-First Century?
After receiving a request from a reader, I have added a page to this blog called "Read Weird Tales." Click on the item on the right or here for a link. This new page includes links to websites on which you can read whole issues of Weird Tales in digital facsimile format. If anyone knows of similar websites, even if they include only one issue, please let me know, and I may add it to the list.
Posted by Terence E. Hanley at 12:50 PM 2 comments:
Labels: Requests
The Shadow Over Aquaman
I'm back again after the holidays and eighteen sleep-deprived days at home. Two days into the new year we saw Aquaman at a mostly deserted movie theater. That's what happens in the middle of a holiday week in small-town Indiana. We stayed for the last of the credits and when we walked out of the theater into the darkened hallways of the multiplex we saw only the manager, who was sweeping up.
Like I said, I was sleep-deprived. I have to admit that I almost dozed off three times during Aquaman. But even if I hadn't already been sleepy, I might have felt the same way, for Aquaman is too long and, for at least an hour, too slow-moving to hold a person's interest very well. The players are Jason Momoa as Aquabro, Willem Dafoe as Mr. Miyagi, and Nicole Kidman as the Aquamom. They are supported by Dolph Lundgren as a guy whose pink hair flows and swirls like he's in a VO5 commercial and Randall Park as Conspiracy Brother, among others. Every one of them also takes a turn playing the role of Basil Exposition, and every five or ten minutes during the movie someone stops the proceedings to tell you a little story about something you don't really care about or understand. I actually groaned at one point because of it. This is no way to tell a story. In fact, one of the first things you learn in storytelling is to show it, not tell it. Even my thirteen-year-old nephew said that the movie is "cringy" in places. It's not a good sign when a kid calls your superhero movie "cringy," but that's a good word to describe the dialogue in Aquaman, which includes a little gem in which someone or other says that he plans to become "the Ocean Master." If he were in Machu Picchu or San Francisco or some similar place, I suppose he would want to become the Stair Master.
Near the beginning of Aquaman there is a little still life shown in the interior of the lighthouse keeper's home. One of the elements in this tableau is a paperback version of The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft. I'm not the first to comment on the Lovecraftian elements in Aquaman. Others have already gone there, including more than a few who just have to tell you again that Lovecraft was a horrible racist. And did we mention that Lovecraft was a horrible racist? There can be no doubt that H.P. Lovecraft wrote again and again about race and the mixing of races, as well as about the degeneration, decay, and dissolution of individual human beings and their familial or tribal lines. There is just that in "The Dunwich Horror," a tale of a kind of demigod named Wilbur Whateley, first published in Weird Tales in April 1929. The same theme appears again in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," published posthumously in the same magazine in April 1942. It seems to me, though, that Lovecraft could have been writing about himself when he told tales about mixing and degeneration or decay, for his father was a common traveling salesman and eventual syphilitic while his mother was the daughter of a prominent and well-established New England family. (Even she ended up in the bughouse.) I sense that the author himself felt the creeping of tainted blood in his semi-blue veins as he lived out his life in a decaying home among decaying fortunes. In any case, Aquaman is also a tale of the mixing of races. The results here are positive, though, in that the title character is not degenerate but emergent. However, there is a degenerate race of men in Aquaman, and I couldn't help but see them as the Deep Ones from "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Finally there is a deep-sea leviathan like Cthulhu, befriended by Aquabro and voiced by Julie Andrews of all people. Mary Poppins returns indeed.
I haven't yet seen a DC movie as good as the least good of the Marvel Studios movies, but then I haven't seen them all yet, from either studio. I can say, though, that the DC movies lack a kind of warmth and humanity that prevails more or less in the Marvel movies. They're also slow, talky, and lacking in humor. (1) I'm not sure why that is. Marvel doesn't have a lock on good screenwriters and directors. DC ought to be able to come up with something comparable. But they don't. As I have said before, DC ought to hire Marvel Studios to make their movies for them. Anyway, we saw previews for M. Night Shyamalan's new movie Glass on Wednesday night last week. If you have to see a new superhero movie this month, see that one instead of Aquaman. You can also look forward to Captain Marvel in March and Avengers: Endgame in April. Both are from Marvel Studios. Sorry, DC.
(1) The DC movies also miss out on the essence of the original comic book characters. For example, in Superman Returns, from 2006, Superman becomes Superstalker, a brooding creep who spies on Lois Lane as only a super-powered guy from Krypton can. In that and other Superman movies, the original and essential love triangle of Clark Kent-Lois Lane-Superman is banished to the Phantom Zone and Superman is made to be in love with Lois Lane. That's not how it works, people, and if you knew better, maybe moviegoers would like your product. Beyond that--and speaking of racism and racial stereotypes--the makers of DC movies are guilty of what I think is a pretty egregious perpetuation of a stereotype of Jewish men as cowards, weaklings, and nebbishes in the character of the Flash, from Justice League (2017). If they had had a black Flash like Stepin Fetchit or an Asian Flash like Long Duk Dong, viewers and critics would have howled, and rightly so. But this is the twenty-first century and one of the few permissible stereotypes left is one or more of the Jewish people. I guess that's to be expected when one of our major political parties is so outwardly and unabashedly antisemitic. And it ain't the Republicans.
H.P. Lovecraft had only one cover story in Weird Tales but in order to get it he had to go to Canada and then only after he had died. The story was "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and it appeared in the May 1942 issue of the Canadian edition of the magazine. The artist was cartoonist and illustrator Edmond Good.
Text and caption copyright 2019 Terence E. Hanley
Labels: Comic Books, H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales in Canada


text:
Last Updated: Sunday, 5 March 2006, 02:21 GMT
Why MI5 monitored singer Ewan MacColl
By Dominic Casciani
BBC News at the National Archives
Folk singer, activist...
International award-winning folk singer, militant rambler and agit-prop playwright, he certainly was. But did Ewan MacColl, the father of the late singer Kirsty MacColl pose a threat to the nation?
MI5, the security service, clearly thought so, as secret files reveal spies kept tabs on the entertainer during the 1930s and 40s.
The files reveal that MI5 and the police monitored his theatre work, BBC performances and general political activity.
When he deserted the Army in the middle of World War II, they launched a fruitless search for the working-class folk hero - but strangely they never took action when he re-launched his career following VE Day.
Ewan MacColl was born James Miller, in Salford, Manchester, and changed his name after WWII. In his teenage years he became heavily involved in socialist organisations and working-class movements.
... and a man with his picture in an MI5 file
The singer, who died in 1989, remains best known for penning The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, most famously sung by Roberta Flack, for which he won a Grammy in the 1970s.
But very much earlier in his career, the actor, playwright and songwriter used his talents to promote his political beliefs and quickly became a working-class folk hero around the Manchester area.
Two of his early successes were Dirty Old Town, about industrial Salford, and the Manchester Rambler, a song which celebrated the 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout, a move which eventually contributed to the opening of private land to the public.
And it was around this time that MI5 began keeping a watch.
'Exceptional ability'
According to files released to the National Archives, MI5 began inquiring closely into his activities, gathering reports of his stage shows and asking police in Manchester to regularly report back.
Joan Littlewood: First wife considered subversive
One report returned to the spymasters in London remarked that while MacColl had "exceptional ability as a singer and musical organiser", he was very clearly "a communist with very extreme views" who needed "special attention".
In the run-up to war, MacColl, along with his first wife Joan Littlewood, was contributing to BBC radio programmes while also drawing crowds to political plays at venues across north-west England.
Despite no evidence at all that he was in the pay of Moscow, MI5 began leaning on the BBC.
While the BBC reassured security services that there was "no opportunity" for communist propaganda in broadcasts, one brave programme controller dryly remarked that any attempt to blacklist the singer would probably end up in the Manchester Guardian.
MacColl's biggest clash with the authorities came over a highly controversial play he staged in 1940 along with Littlewood.
BROWNED OFF
The colonel kicks the major and the major has a go,
He kicks the poor old captain who then kicks the nco,
And as the kicks get harder the poor private you can see,
Gets kicked to ruddy hell to save democracy
Written shortly before desertion from the Army
The play, Last Edition, was supposedly a "living newspaper", describing the events of the past decade through the eyes of a socialist.
According to the records, the then Chief Constable of Hyde personally telegrammed Major-General Vernon Kell, the founding director-general of MI5, to alert him to this "thinly veiled communist propaganda". MacColl appeared to be calling for violent revolution.
Major-General Kell was clearly not best pleased. His deputy quickly telegrammed local councils in the North West and urged them to refuse performance licences.
This put in train a series of events which led to MacColl and Littlewood being fined and bound over - effectively banning their theatre work.
When the singer enlisted in the Army in 1940, the files show that MI5 asked his superiors to keep him under special observation "in order to see whether he is trying to carry on propaganda".
One report described his general and military conduct as "good", that his manner to officers was correct and at times almost "ingratiating".
Most importantly he appeared not to be spouting propaganda, beyond reading out reports from the Daily Worker. In fact, MI5 learned, MacColl was enjoying entertaining his fellow troops in the concert party.
MacColl had penned Browned Off, a satirical song which depicted the miserable life of a soldier biding time for war.
But the authorities missed the significance: Within weeks MacColl had deserted.
Why he went remains a mystery - MacColl was clearly a romantic with a strong political conviction, but biographers have also suggested that he was simply scared stiff of fighting.
Despite concerted efforts by the police to track him down, he was not seen again until after the war. But why he was never charged remains a mystery not covered in the files.
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nion Township voters will be asked Tuesday should the Township Board adopt an ordinance to create a planning commission pursuant to the Michigan Planning Enabling Act of 2008.
The question is being put to voters in light of the debate over wind turbines in northwest Branch County.
DTE Energy site manager Jeff Haines told the Branch County Board of Commissioners earlier in July they were in the early stages in Union, Sherwood, Matteson and Batavia Townships of developing a wind turbine project.
Proposed wind turbines have been strongly opposed by a local group called Concerned Citizens of Branch County.
Right now, any decisions on zoning ordinances to govern the impact of wind turbines lies with the various township boards.


text:
David Soldier
A Soldier's Story (24'41")
David Soldier & Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut acted/narrated and wrote the story and lyrics for two CDs composed by Dave Soldier and conducted by Richard Auldon Clark: Ice-9 Ballads based the lyrics in Cat's Cradle, and A Soldier's Story, a radio opera about Eddie Slovik, the only American to be shot for cowardice since the Civil War.
Kurt was a proud secular humanist and typical responses to his passing seem out of place: we are gratified that he worked with us.
Pertinently, A Soldier's Story, in which he plays the lead acting role, addresses the human folly of war... and though a radio opera, has been turned down for (free) premiere or broadcast by every single radio show we sent it to ... we have posted it so that you can freely download and distribute it on mp3.
-- Dave Soldier
The People's Choice Music
1. The Most Wanted Song
A musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably "liked" by 72 ± 12% of listeners
2. The Most Unwanted Song
Fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population will enjoy this
Purchase this CD at Mulatta Records.
With the collaboration of composer Dave Soldier, Komar & Melamid's Most Wanted Painting project was extended into the realm of music. A poll, written by Dave Soldier, was conducted on Dia's web site in Spring 1996. Approximately 500 visitor's took the survey. Dave Solder and Nina Mankin used the survey results to write music and lyrics for the Most Wanted and Most Unwanted songs.
Notes by the Composer
This survey confirms the hypothesis that today's popular music indeed provides an accurate estimate of the wishes of the vox populi. The most favored ensemble, determined from a rating by participants of their favorite instruments in combination, comprises a moderately sized group (three to ten instruments) consisting of guitar, piano, saxophone, bass, drums, violin, cello, synthesizer, with low male and female vocals singing in rock/r&b style. The favorite lyrics narrate a love story, and the favorite listening circumstance is at home. The only feature in lyric subjects that occurs in both most wanted and unwanted categories is "intellectual stimulation." Most participants desire music of moderate duration (approximately 5 minutes), moderate pitch range, moderate tempo, and moderate to loud volume, and display a profound dislike of the alternatives. If the survey provides an accurate analysis of these factors for the population, and assuming that the preference for each factor follows a Gaussian (i.e. bell-curve) distribution, the combination of these qualities, even to the point of sensory overload and stylistic discohesion, will result in a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably "liked" by 72 plus or minus 12% (standard deviation; Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic) of listeners.
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.
Art for the people-
Your pal, Dave Soldier
Composed by Dave Soldier
Lyrics by Nina Mankin
Executive Producer: Charles Simonyi
Produced by Jane Bausman
Recorded by Rory Young at Big House Studios and Acme Recording Studio
Featuring Vernon Reid On Guitar
The Most Wanted Song:
Female vocal: Ada Dyer
Male vocal: Ronnie Gent
Guitar: Vernon Reid
Saxophone: Andy Snitzer
Cello: Lisa Haney
Keyboards/violin/drums: Dave Soldier
Additional drums: Rory Young
Bass drum: Komar & Melamid
The Most Unwanted Song:
Soprano: Dina Emerson
Speaking vocal: Nina Mankin
Children: Emma Ensign, Kate Polsky, Max Polsky
Piccolo/flute: Elissa Kleeman
Harmonica: Wade Schuman
Bagpipe: David Watson
Accordion: Yuri Lemeshev
Harp: Margerie Fitts
Organ: Mary Bopp
Banjo: Dave Soldier
Tuba: David Grego
Percussion: Christine Bard
Conductor: Norman Yamada
Dave Soldier played violin in Western swing bands and guitar in rhythm and blues groups, including Bo Diddley, and studied composition with Roscoe Mitchell before moving to New York City in the early 80's, where he studied composing privately with Otto Luening. He founded the seminal punk chamber group the Soldier String Quartet (1985), and punk Delta blues band the Kropotkins (1992), the first orchestra for animals, the Thai Elephant Orchestra (Lampang, 2000), the Andalusian dance band The Spinozas (2004), and Da Hiphop Raskalz, in which 5-10 year olds in East Harlem write and play their own compositions (2004).
In addition to the repertoire for the above perorming groups, Soldier's compositions include The People's Choice Music: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Songs, following poll results of likes and dislikes of the American population, in collaboration with the Russian expatriate artists Komar & Melamid; collaborations with Kurt Vonnegut; repertoire for musically na•ve children or performed on specially designed instruments by songbirds and pygmy chimpanzees; various song cycles/oratorios/operas; arrangements for many pop groups including John Cale, David Byrne, and Guided by Voices, and TV and film soundtracks, including I Shot Andy Warhol and Sesame Street. Soldier's Symphony #1 was recently recorded by the Thai Elephant Orchestra.
Visit Dave Soldier's homepage for more information


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text:
Borene Law Firm, P. A.
Publications/FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions About Consular Processing for Nonimmigrant Visas (Temporary Visas)
By Scott M. Borene*
1. What types of documents and evidence are required as part of the nonimmigrant visa application?
The specific documents required will vary depending on the type of visa application and the procedures at a given U.S. consulate abroad. Some of the commonly required documents are Form DS-156 (the standard nonimmigrant visa application form), a valid passport, a photograph of the applicant to be used in making the visa, an application fee, a machine-readable visa fee, and any supporting documentation that establishes the applicant's eligibility for the nonimmigrant visa classification sought. In some circumstances evidence of prior approval by the USCIS of a related petition or application will also be required.
2. Where should someone submit a nonimmigrant visa application?
Generally, an individual can apply for a nonimmigrant visa at any visa-issuing U.S. consulate abroad – it need not be located in that person's home country. However, if an individual was previously issued a nonimmigrant visa and remained in the U.S. beyond the authorized period of stay, he or she must apply for all subsequent nonimmigrant visas at the U.S. consulate in his or her home country.
3. How long does it take to get a nonimmigrant visa after submission of the application?
The processing times vary among consulates. Recently, processing times have ranged from one day to more than three months depending upon multiple case factors. Because of additional consular security measures in effect since September 11, 2001, it is becoming increasingly rare to receive the nonimmigrant visa the same day. Most individuals are required to schedule an appointment so that the consular officer may ask questions about the application. It is best to check with the individual consulate to determine the current processing times for nonimmigrant visa applications at that location. At some consulates, interview appointments are not available until several months in the future. Consular websites often have useful information about local visa procedures.
4. Does a person need to get a new visa every time he or she leaves the U.S. and wants to reenter?
It depends on whether the nonimmigrant visa was issued for one entry or multiple entries and the validity period of the nonimmigrant visa. The validity period of nonimmigrant visas varies depending on the visa classification and the applicant's nationality. It is important to note that the validity period of a nonimmigrant visa in a passport often differs from the validity period of authorized stay in the U.S. granted by the Department of Homeland Security on Form I-94. The validity period of the visa only relates to the time during which an individual may use that visa to apply for re-admission to the U.S. (e.g. to board an airplane bound for the U.S.).
5. If a person changes employers after admission to the U.S., is the nonimmigrant visa on which the person entered still valid?
If the individual was in an H, L, O or P nonimmigrant category, the visa remains valid as long as the individual remains in that same nonimmigrant status and has a currently valid H, L, O or P petition from their current employer.
6. How does one renew a nonimmigrant visa?
An individual must usually apply to renew a nonimmigrant visa in person at a U.S. consulate in his or her home country or country of last residence. In some cases, a person in the U.S. may be permitted to apply for a visa at a U.S. consulate in Canada or Mexico or a third country instead of their home country.
7. Can a person reapply for a nonimmigrant visa after the original application was denied?
Yes, however, if the initial application was denied because the applicant failed to prove nonimmigrant intent, some consulates may require that person to wait for some period of time (up to 6 months in some cases) before he or she can apply for a nonimmigrant visa again. If a nonimmigrant visa application is going to be denied on substantive grounds, the consular officer should give the applicant an opportunity to provide additional evidence before the final decision is made. Visa denials can sometimes be overcome upon further review. A person who has been refused a U.S. visa for any reason is wise to seek advice from an experienced immigration lawyer before reapplying for a visa.
*Scott M. Borene is the Founder and Managing Attorney of Borene Law Firm, P. A. The immigration lawyers now with Borene Law Firm have more than 70 years of combined professional experience helping clients with U.S. and global visa and immigration projects. Scott Borene was selected by other lawyers as 2018 Lawyer of the Year in Immigration Law as noted by The Best Lawyers in America and Minnesota Monthly magazine. He has been repeatedly recognized as one of the Top 20 Lawyers in the World "most highly regarded by other lawyers" in corporate immigration law. He is listed in the Best Lawyers in America and acknowledged as an Immigration Law Super Lawyer. He is often called upon to act as an "expert's expert" to advise other experienced immigration lawyers on complex immigration matters. Scott Borene is a past Director and a past Member of the Board of Governors of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), the world's largest professional organization of immigration lawyers. In 2002, he was the founder and Conference Chair of AILA's Global Immigration Summit in New York City, the world's largest conference of global immigration lawyers. He has written many articles on immigration law and is a frequently invited expert speaker on immigration topics at AILA National Conferences and other major national and international legal conferences. He is the Editor-in-Chief of many leading professional reference books for immigration lawyers including The Global Immigration Guide: A Country-by-Country Survey and The Global Immigration Guide: Crossing Borders for Business, AILA's most comprehensive books on Global Immigration. He served as Editor-in-Chief of Immigration Options for Academics and Researchers (2005), AILA's leading Expert Occupational Handbook on immigration issues in higher education. He is the author of Dr. Yes – Some Practical Strategies for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Immigrant Visa Cases of Health Care Professionals. Scott Borene attended Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a National Merit Scholar. After graduation from Harvard, he attended William Mitchell Law School in Minnesota. Scott Borene has more than 30 years of experience helping employers obtain work visas for key international talent. Scott Borene can be reached at sborene@borene.com.
©2018 Borene Law Firm, P. A. 3950 IDS Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55402 612.321.0082
U.S. & Global Immigration Group
3950 IDS Center
Copyright © 2020 Borene Law Firm, P. A.


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