Lightening Up

It always is a source of amazement to me how many people get uptight about Halloween. For most of us, it’s fun, but for some, the idea of calling forth demons or the troubled souls of the departed is sacrilegious. I think just the opposite. For one day a year, we have a license to escape from ourselves.

Actors get to play roles all the time, and some are even paid handsomely for it. Other people are not so inclined or so fortunate – but at this season, they can do it anyway, without fear of judgment. The donning of a costume allows them to don a new personality for a few hours. Is that such a bad thing for children?

Naturally, for me, the Halloween transformation of women is most interesting. They are more experienced at makeup. The ordinarily demure and professional manager or executive sometimes graces us with view of her we’re not used to. I worked with one woman who was a devout Christian during the week – and showed up at the Halloween party in an angel outfit – except it was flesh-colored, and anatomically correct. Oddly, some people have to put on a costume to enter the human race.

I couldn’t go through Halloween without my horror movies. My list of faves has been shared with you in an earlier post on this blog. The challenge is finding a film that really gives you a chill without resorting to sharp tools. The real world is scary enough; most movies are tame by comparison to actual events, no?

So I would ask you Bible-thumpers out there, or thumpers of whatever other book, for whom Halloween causes you grief, lighten up please. It will all be over in a few days. We promise you can have your world back.

PR 101

So it’s the signature effort of your campaign. You’re trying to get everyone’s buy-in -- literally, in this case. And your website fails. What are people going to remember about your product?

It’s very sad that the Obama administration can spend billions on something and then have its rollout botched by what have to be avoidable mistakes. Just to start with, the Obamacare site developer said what screwed things up was that the administration, at the last minute, wanted users to sign up for an account before they could browse the site. Hey, you want people to look at your product – you don’t require them to register or sign in first. Isn’t that a barrier to retail success?

One congresswoman said this week that companies like eBay deal with zillions of customers without problems. Perhaps the administration should have waved a few bucks in front of the site developers for those entities. My running joke is that the powers-that-be should kidnap Edward Snowden, bring him back from Russia, and offer him amnesty if he fixes the Obamacare site.

Obamacare is a noble experiment to fix something that’s really broken: the American healthcare system. Maybe from a technical medical standpoint, it’s the best in the world, but who can argue that doing nothing to fix its delivery was ever an option?

If you stay on this planet long enough, you will see things you thought could never change collapse in a heap. It happened with the auto industry. I have seen it happening in journalism, my old profession. Personally, I think maybe one of the next things to go might be the whole private health insurance industry as we now know it.

But from heaps of rubble rise new ways of doing things. The auto industry is an example, and even in journalism, evolution is taking place. Maybe what needs to go is the employer-based health insurance concept, which, as I understand history, was only a patch so employers could get around wage freezes to attract employees.

Obamacare is a Rube Goldberg system designed to offer a better product to consumers without pissing off the corporations overmuch. With all its limitations, it should be given a real chance to succeed or fail. In the meantime, though, President Obama needs to take a PR class. I think such a thing is available at most community colleges at minimal expense.

Horror Movies I Like

Well, it’s getting to be that time again, when you decide on your favorite Halloween rentals. I prefer the classics, both vintage and recent. These are some of my faves, NOT ranked, BTW, in any kind of order. My only rule for good horror flicks is, scare me, don’t terrorize me or excessively gross me out. Leave the knives, hatchets and chainsaws in the garage. Teeth are OK, though. Some additions this year.

1. THE MUMMY (1932) – My favorite of the great Universal classics.
2. DRACULA (1931) – Lugosi was an actual Rumanian, Authenticity counts.
3. FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
4. THE WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935)
5. THE BLACK CAT (1934) – Lugosi and Karloff, an interior decorator must-see.
6. THE WOLF MAN (1941) -- Lon Chaney Jr.
7. NOSFERATU (1922) – Silent classic

 (The above are almost obligatory) More:

  

8. DRACULA (1979) – Good production, not sure about Langella as the Count..
9. THE OMEN (1976) –The girl’s suicide haunted me for weeks. LOUSY sequels.
10. THE EXORCIST – Get the uncut one with the spider walk.
11. THE EXORCIST III – Surprisingly good sequel, Geo. C. Scott & Ed Flanders.
12. GHOST STORY – Very creepy with wonderful cast.
13. CAT PEOPLE (1982) – Sexy, and the cats are nice, too.
14. THE SHINING (1980) --  Here’s Johnny!
15. SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE – Is it a movie project or for real?
16. THE HUNGER -- Catherine Deneuve a vampire. I’ll stop there.
17. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT – They shoulda had a cell phone with them.
18. THE RITE – I’m the only one who likes this, but it does have Anthony Hopkins.
19. PSYCHO – Showers or baths?
20. ROSEMARY’S BABY – It may give you morning sickness.
21. POLTERGEIST – Talk about homes being underwater!
22. ANGEL HEART – Back when Mickey Rourke was…Mickey Rourke.
23. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS – Join me in a nice chianti, Clarice.
24. THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW – Haiti, zombie HQ
25. THE DESCENT -- For those of you who think caves are fun. They’re not.
26. 30 DAYS OF NIGHT – Why vampires prefer winter.
27. VAN HELSING -- Not great, but I love the flying bat-girls.
28.  QUARANTINE -- w/Jennifer Carpenter. A Blair Witch thing for journalists,

SCI-FI (not exactly horror, but close enough for Halloween)

1.      ALIEN and the folo, ALIENS (not the later two).

2.      THE FLY (Jeff Goldblum version)

3.      INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS – the 1978 remake was shot in SF.

4.      MIMIC – If in NYC, you’ll think twice about ever taking the subway.

5.      THE THING (1982) – Much better than the original (or later) versions.

6.      PITCH BLACK – Before Vin Diesel was a star.

I know I’ve left a lot out, but these should get you started. Feel free to make suggestions!

Welcome to the Pigeonhole

One of the things we humans love to do in varying degrees is label things – especially each other. If your skin is a certain color, it’s assumed that you behave or think a certain way. The same goes for where you live or come from. We've been eagerly pigeonholing since ancient times.

I often joke with friends about astrology, and one reminded me this week that it’s not scientific. I was born near the end of August, and top astrologers can’t agree whether I am a Leo or a Virgo. That makes me a bicuspid, I guess, LOL. But it assumes I have certain personal characteristics. The interesting part is that the sun actually appears to cross more constellations in the universe than astrology gives it credit for, like Cetus the Whale. Including Cetus would really bollox up the works, and all those professional astrologers who have us neatly classified might be out of jobs.

At one time, I did a radio talk show. Of all the heavy and controversial subjects we dealt with, no guest generated more calls than the numerologist, who could tell people what their characteristics were just by knowing their birth date, from which she derived the numbers that influenced their lives. My primary number is 5, she said. I have forgotten what that means.

The Elizabethans had “humors.” You were either sanguine, coleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic, and through such classifications they could tell you what bodily organ governed you, and even why you were healthy or unhealthy, as well as your general temperament.

We have more modern systems, but I wonder how different they really are. An especially popular one is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), developed by a mother-daughter team of psychologists during World War II, mainly to determine what kinds of jobs would be most comfortable for all the women entering the workforce while men were away fighting the war. It was derived from the work of Carl Jung, and it is still in use in the shrink world. One I consulted some years back desperately wanted me to be an INFP, but I took the test a bunch of times, and it became fairly clear I was an ISTJ, although a good friend who knows about these things calls me an INTJ, which I took as kind of a compliment. I’m not going to explain all this -- it would take too long.

Another friend once invited me to lunch at a fancy restaurant. A few minutes into the meal, he shoved a clipboard at me with a multiple-choice MBTI test on it, which I dutifully filled out. He told me he was doing this to all of his friends.

This next comes under the heading of “things I should have said when I had the chance but didn’t think of until later.” I would have said, “Fred, don’t you think it would be nice to simply experience another human being without filtering the encounter through some artificial matrix to give yourself the illusion of control over it?” But I’m glad I didn’t say that. He was, after all, paying for lunch.

I think I have learned, sometimes the hard way,  that human relations are a lot messier than we’d like them to be – and that maybe they’d be deeper and more satisfying if we learned to put up with a little mess now and then, and leave the classifications on the shelf.