Mummy Maze

If you know anyone who enjoys mazes, here's my Halloween version. 

It's based on the Universal version of The Mummy starring Boris Karloff.  The goal is to enter and exit the inner chamber of the pyramid without Imhotep breaking your concentration.

Have fun!

My Movie Trivia Quiz

1.    Which film wasn't directed by Alfred Hitchcock?

     

       a. The Birds

       b. Rear Window

       c. Dressed to Kill

       d. Notorious
       e. Psycho

2.    What was the first feature-length "talkie."

       a. It Happened One Night
       b. The Phantom of the Opera
       c. Top Hat
       d. The Jazz Singer
       e. The Wizard of Oz

3.    Which film wasn't directed by Quentin Tarantino

       a. Pulp Fiction
       b. Reservoir Dogs
       c. Jackie Brown
       d. Kill Bill 2
       e. The Matrix

4.    In Citizen Kane, the title character was in what business?

       a. railroad
       b.newspaper
       c. steel
       d. oil
       e. wine

5.    In what state was the hotel in The Shining located?

       a. New York
       b. Colorado
       c. Idaho
       d. Maine
       e. Oregon

6.    Which pair of co-stars were in Singin' in the Rain?

       a. Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire
       b. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
       c. Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor
       d. Malcom McDowell and Cyd Charisse
       e. Judy Garland and Ray Bolger

7.    In Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, where did the hijacked plane land?

       a. Alaska
       b. Brazil
       c. Turkey
       d. Shangri La
       e. The Lost City

8.    In Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, Robert De Niro was a

       a. taxi driver
       b. hit man
       c. bullfighter
       d. boxer
       e. writer

9.    What novel was the inspiration for Apocalypse Now?

       a. For Whom the Bell Tolls
       b. Heart of Darkness
       c. The Magic Mountain
       d. Moby Dick
       e. The Quiet American

10.  What well-known director played a scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

        a. Francois Truffaut
        b. Wes Craven
        c. Brian De Palma
        d. Orson Welles
        e. Ridley Scott

Answers:

1.   c
2.   d
3.   e
4.   b
5.   b
6.   c
7.   d
8.   d
9.   b
10. a

Classic Horror Trivia Quiz

It's October and our thoughts turn to horror movies.  If you like the old horror movies, I hope you'll enjoy this trivia quiz I've created.

1.  Which of the following movies did not have an appearance by Count Dracula?

     a. Horror of Dracula
     b. The Return of Dracula
     c. House of Frankenstein
     d. Brides of Dracula
     e. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

2.  In The Son of Dracula, Lon Chaney played the title role.  What name did he use in the movie?

     a. Count Dracula
     b. Baron Meinster
     c. Dr. Seward
     d. Count Alucard
     e. Mr. Browning

3.  Of the following actors, who never played Dracula?

     a. Francis Lederer
     b. Basil Rathbone
     c. Jack Palance
     d. Frank Langella
     e. John Carradine

4.  In early Universal movies such as Dracula and the Mummy, what musical score was used for the opening credits?

      a. The Magic Flute Overture by Mozart
      b. Cemetery Gates by Pantera
      c. Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky
      d. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
      e. Die Moritat von Mackie Messer by Brecht and Weill

5.  The original Night of the Living Dead was filmed near what city?

     a. Newark
     b. Pittsburgh
     c. Los Angeles
     d. Detroit
     e. Toronto

6.  What do Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and TV's Gunsmoke have in common?

     a. James Arness had a small role in the Abbott and Costello movie
     b. Bud Abbott appeared on an episode of Gunsmoke
     c. Lou Costello appeared on an episode of Gunsmoke
     d. They both had the same writers
     e. The same actor played Sam the Bartender and the Frankenstein Monster

7.  Who played the werewolf in I Was a Teenage Werewolf?

     a. James Dean
     b. Sal Mineo
     c. Michael Landon
     d. Bobby Darin
     e. David Peel

8.  What was the first movie in which Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff performed together?

     a. The Mummy
     b. Isle of the Dead
     c.The Black Cat
     d. Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman
     e. Son of Frankenstein

9.  In The Wolfman which actor played the werewolf who attacked Lon Chaney and caused him to become a werewolf?

     a. Ralph Bellamy
     b. Bela Lugosi
     c. Lionel Atwill
     d. David Manners
     e. Edward Van Sloan

10.   In The Tingler, what drug does Vincent Price's character take?

      a. cocaine
      b. morphine
      c. digitalis
      d. phenobarbitol
      e. lsd

11. In Dracula, Prince of Darkness, how is Dracula destroyed?

       a. a wooden stake
       b. a silver bullett
       c. water
       d. sunlight
       e. impaled by a cross

Answers:

  1.   d
  2.   d
  3.   b
  4.   c 
  5.   b
  6.   e
  7.   c
  8.   c
  9.   b
10.   e
11.   c

Kirkwood Part 3

Kirkwood began its life as a suburb of Atlanta and was incorporated in 1892. In the early 1920's it was annexed into the city of Atlanta.  An early tour book described it as an “area of beautiful suburban villas.”  Of course, that was written at a time when Kirkwood was considered suburban and not intown.

We moved from Kirkwood when I completed elementary school.  In those days there were no middle schools in Atlanta.  Completion of elementary school was at the end of 7th grade and high school started with the 8th grade. 

There were a combination of reasons we moved then.  My mother had a growing business teaching piano and she wanted a bigger house with a private entrance for her students.  The high school I would have attended was several miles from our house (Kirkwood Elementary was about four blocks from the house and was an easy walk).  And there was an unscrupulous real estate practice then called "blockbusting."  If people were considering moving from Kirkwood, this accelerated the process.  It instilled fears of rapidly declining real estate values and was unfair to both white and black families who lost money to the real estate companies.

Kirkwood did have some difficult years, but since the 1990's it's had a revitalization, as have many older Atlanta neighborhoods.  My old school is now home to many people who've purchased lofts there.  The school was built in 1910 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. 

 It's strange to see these interior photos of living spaces there and wonder which classroom this was (3rd grade, 4th grade...?).

And the public library I used is now a private residence, as well.  It was on the adjacent corner from the school and that made it easy to check out books there after school.  Here's a link to a website set up by the men who've remodeled the library and live there.  Also, on their site they have the video of  the HGTV show that featured their home.

http://www.kirkwoodlibrary.com/Library/Home.html

The library building is just across the street from a public park.  The park had a ball field where I played many softball games.

It's very nostalgic writing about this, but I have great memories.

DragonCon Part 2

Here's my follow-up on DragonCon 2010.  I've uploaded some photos taken today.  I walked around the lobbies of the Hyatt Regency and the Marriott Marquis.  I took some photos there, as well as on Peachtree Street.

As you can see from some of these photos, it was a dangerous place to be.  Menacing figures kept approaching me. 

Everything didn't look dangerous.  Here are some other people I saw.

I took just a few photos, but there are some other blogs with more photos uploaded.  If you're curious, I've put a couple of links here.

http://www.josephdickerson.com/2010/09/05/photos-dragoncon-2010/

http://comicbookcatacombs.blogspot.com/2010/09/dragoncon-2010-photo-report.html

Also, I read that Atlanta is now in the record books as having the largest assembled group of costumed Trekkies.  That happened on Saturday and it eclipsed a record set just last month in Las Vegas at the Star Trek convention.

DragonCon

Every year a large convention (con) is held in Atlanta on Labor Day weekend. The event is DragonCon.  DragonCon was first held in 1987 and has grown to an attendance of 35,000 fans.

It's a combination of sci-fi, fantasy, comic books, anime, costumes and more.  I haven't attended recently but I remember that the shows I attended some years ago were fun.

My interest in the show derived from a love of comic book and pop art.  Also, I've been a sci-fi fan for as long as I can remember.  As a little kid, I was hypnotized by the old Flash Gordon serials that had rockets that backfired.

At one DragonCon I remember going to a Q&A with some of the actors and writers from Star Trek, the Next Generation.  In particular, I remember that Marina Sirtis was there.  At another event (almost 20 years ago) I met a comic book dealer from Charleston, SC and when he heard about some of the books I had, he made a special trip back to Atlanta a few weeks later and visited me.  He had his eye on my issue of Green Lantern # 1.  So, he left with a few of my old Silver Age comic books.

Recently, PBA 30 has produced a documentary based on footage from last year's show.  It's been replayed a few times and I think they plan on distributing it in the next few months to other PBS stations around the country.  Here's a portion of it.

Ed Ruscha

I've been interested in art since I was about 5 or 6 years old and sat in front of the TV watching Jon Gnagy's drawing lessons. Also, I was drawn to the bright and colorful images of comic books (I learned as much about reading from them as I did from Dick and Jane). Later, in the world of fine art, the style that became Pop Art used images that were appropriated from comic books and commercial art. So, it followed that I would have had a keen interest in that style.

In particular, the work of Ed Ruscha appealed to me. The Standard Gas Station painting shown here included advertising signage and a dramatic perspective. It was the kind of image that was familiar to everyone as subject matter but in this simplified form without any surrounding buildings, it became an interesting image. He's done several versions of this painting, many of which are pictured online.



The gas station was a natural for him to use as subject matter. He's expressed his affinity for the road and traveling on highways. He was born in 1937 and grew up in Oklahoma. When he was about 20 years old, he read Jack Kerouac's On the Road and that influenced him a lot. Even before reading that book, he had hitch-hiked from Oklahoma to Florida when he was 14.

When he was in his early twenties he drove to California and settled in Los Angeles. He became a student at what would become the California Institute of the Arts. The images of Los Angeles and sourthern California became a source of material for him. Other images he's used in his painting are from the American West, where he did a lot of his traveling when he was young.

In addition to painting he was also interested in photograhy. In 1966 he put together a book of photographs called Every Building on the Sunset Strip (and that's what it was). He pre-dated Google Street View by about 40 years.

Many of his paintings incorporate a word (or words) in them. There's a kind of deadpan humor in the combination of words and images, but the meaning is ambiguous. I've included a few of these here.

Here's a short clip from a British TV show that was covering his 50 years of painting retrospective show at Hayward Gallery in London (50 years of painting!).

And here' a segment from a talk he gave at the show.