Smithsonian.com

Seventy years ago in a Halloween episode of the Mercury Theatre on the Air, Orson Welles whipped millions of Americans into a martian-crazed panic with his radio play adaptation of H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. You know the story. Those who tuned in late missed the disclaimer that the program was pure fantasy. A typical evening of musical programming was suddenly interrupted by “eyewitness news reporting” describing a Martian invasion that was wreaking devastation in Grovers Mill, New Jersey (about 22 miles from Trenton). From there the Martians began decimating the denizens of New York with heat rays and poisonous black smoke. Please hold your snide remarks. Think people of that bygone era were gullible? Don’t forget with war on the horizon in Europe, fears of invasion and mass destruction were keeping those folks up at night. War of the Worlds played on those apprehensions with gleeful abandon.

This, said Orson Welles, was the “Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet. . .jumping out of a bush and saying ‘Boo!’ So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight: that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian, it’s Halloween.”

Hunker down with your favorite Halloween candy and hear what all the fuss was about by listening to the original radio broadcast.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)
(Audio courtesy of Archive.org)

Seventy years ago in a Halloween episode of the Mercury Theatre on the Air, Orson Welles whipped millions of Americans into a martian-crazed panic with his radio play adaptation of H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. You know the story. Those who tuned in late missed the disclaimer that the program was pure fantasy. A typical evening of musical programming was suddenly interrupted by “eyewitness news reporting” describing a Martian invasion that was wreaking devastation in Grovers Mill, New Jersey (about 22 miles from Trenton). From there the Martians began decimating the denizens of New York with heat rays and poisonous black smoke. Please hold your snide remarks. Think people of that bygone era were gullible? Don’t forget with war on the horizon in Europe, fears of invasion and mass destruction were keeping those folks up at night. War of the Worlds played on those apprehensions with gleeful abandon.

This, said Orson Welles, was the “Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet. . .jumping out of a bush and saying ‘Boo!’ So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight: that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian, it’s Halloween.”

Hunker down with your favorite Halloween candy and hear what all the fuss was about by listening to the original radio broadcast.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)
(Audio courtesy of Archive.org)

Scrambling to get a costume together? Let the portraits at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery inspire you.

Pocahontas: Disney’s version of the Powhatan Indian woman’s story depicts her wearing a tasseled, leather dress. But that costume was done by thousands of little girls around the movie’s mid-90s release. Pocahontas was converted to Christianity, baptized as Rebecca and married the English settler John Rolfe. So try pulling off Rebecca Rolfe (see portrait above). It might take some explaining. But don’t most last-minute costumes?

Charlie Chaplin: Really the only hard-to-find piece to a good Charlie Chaplin get-up is the black bowler hat. So email your neighbors from work today to start the search for one. (You may as well ask them if they have a cane too.) The rest is easy. For the guys, chances are you haven’t had the foresight to grow facial hair, but a makeshift toothbrush moustache can be fashioned out of paper and tape. Then, just wear a tight coat, tie, a vest and oversized trousers and shoes.

Marilyn Monroe: Halloween is known for bringing out the scantily clad, no matter how cold it may be outside. All it takes to dress up as Marilyn is a white halter dress, a strategically placed beauty mark and maybe a blonde wig.

Abraham Lincoln: Every Marilyn Monroe needs her Mr. President, and of the forty-two presidents gracing the museum’s walls, good ‘ole Abe, with his trademark top hat, is one of the most instantly recognizable. Pair the black hat with a suit, and refresh yourself with the Gettysburg Address. It would be tragic if you couldn’t get past “Four score and seven years ago.” The costume is quite apropos as we head into the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.

Joe Louis: To be the boxing great, or really any boxer for that matter, all you need is some boxing gloves (puffy mittens could work in a pinch), silky athletic shorts and sneakers. I highly recommend wearing a nude-colored sweat suit underneath the shorts though. You can make the added layer less dopey by drawing in some muscle definition.

Uncle Sam: Like Chaplin and Lincoln, Uncle Sam is an easy hat and suit combination. This time the top hat is white (remember, you can always create a hat from poster paper) with a blue band and white stars. The suit is blue, and the bow tie is red. It’s okay to bypass the white whiskers. People will recognize you without them. Just point a lot. It’s not rude – just in character – when you’re Uncle Sam.

Let’s hear your ideas!

With Halloween on the horizon, I had to check out the “Vampires on Film” lecture, courtesy of the Smithsonian Resident Associate Program. The speaker was movie maven and scholar Max Alvarez. It was a well-attended, three-hour tour of horror flicks that make for—more often than not—painfully bad cinema. Yet, after kicking off his lecture by decorating his podium with several heads of garlic, Alvarez lent a gravitas to these movies, elevating them from mere midnight movie schlock to a study in cultural currency—meaning that vampire stories change and evolve with new images and metaphors for each generation viewing them.

In Western culture, tales of vampirism begin in the plague-addled Europe of the middle ages where newly buried bodies were exhumed and those considered not sufficiently decomposed were desecrated—by way of beheading or a good ol’ stake through the heart—for fear that the undead would spread disease among the living. (Trick or Treat?)

What’s worse is that some persons were prematurely interred—hence, their “as yet not-dead bodies” were in fabulous condition—and they ultimately met excruciatingly violent ends. Hands-down, this was the scariest part of the lecture.

By the late 1800s vampire stories are seen in print and theatrical incarnations (such as the 1828 opera Der Vampyr and the 1872 novella Carmilla). But it is Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula that sets the gold standard for the genre and captures the imaginations of people across the globe. Like its folkloric antecedents, Dracula is a sign of the times, dealing with issues of sex (which was strictly repressed in Victorian society), xenophobia and, in lieu of plague, syphilis, the dreaded STI du jour.

It is Stoker’s vision of the vampire that first makes it to the silver screen, the earliest surviving adaptation being F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, but the one that set the world on fire was Tod Browning’s 1931 film Dracula—starring Bela Lugosi—and kicks off a craze. Like its literary inspiration, Dracula and its string of cinematic spinoffs dealt with those things that you generally don’t bring up in polite conversation—namely human sexuality—and titillated audiences.

After a hiatus in the 40s and 50s, the genre was rekindled in the 60s. With sex becoming less taboo, vampire movies had to start exploring new frontiers. Of note is the 1973 film Blood for Dracula wherein the Count is exposed to impure blood and becomes gravely ill, as if the film were anticipating the AIDS epidemic that would sweep the world in the 1980s. Indeed, as a character in cinema, the vampire was evolving from a one-dimensional villain into a multifaceted character that could even be seen working for the forces of good (such as in Blade or Underworld).

While the genre has lost much of the subtlety and gothic trappings of the classic horror films, vampires endure as fodder for high octane action flicks, jam-packed with as much violence and gore as an R rating can withstand. However, they can also be seen in more playful fare as well. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer anyone?)

What’s your favorite vampire film? What interesting things do you see happening within the genre that keeps it from going six feet under? Do you have high hopes for the upcoming film adaptation of the best-selling novel, Twilight? And why do you think we infrequently see vampire stories frequently told by way of animation?

Image from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)

So I was wrong last month when I bet that the winner of the Cooper-Hewitt’s People’s Design Award would be a sustainable product. With green being the new black, I was sure that an LEED-certified building, or a plug-in car, or an organic clothing company would garner the most votes. I never imagined it would be something so utilitarian as a hearing aid. But, I must say, this sure is one sweet looking hearing aid.

There were 276 other nominees for best design, which included bikes, boats, magazines, furniture, buildings. Now, what does that tell you about the demographics of the voters? Maybe I should have taken a cue from last year’s winner—a plain old shoe, albeit one whose maker donates a pair to a child in need with every purchase.

Research shows that people who are hard of hearing wait up to eight years before investing in a hearing aid out of fear that it will be considered a disability or weakness. Wearers often hate clunky, dull-colored hearing aids. But the Zon hearing aid, designed by the Los Angeles-based industrial design firm Stuart Karten Design, comes in six colors to match its wearer’s hair and skin tone and slips almost invisibly behind the ear. Zon hearing aids cost about $2,000, and some folks made some snarky remarks about the cost in the comments box. Hearing aids can cost upwards of $3,000 and get this, they are rarely covered by insurance.

Maybe we should begin saving for in our hearing aids now. With baby boomers and their kids spending more and more hours of the day plugged into brain-blasting earphones—and now with a People’s Design Award hailing the chic aids—it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

(Photo by Mark Lafavor, courtesy of Stuart Karten Design)

We keep a supply of cigars at the ready here the Around the Mall Blog, knowing just about any day another bundle of joy might arrive at the National Zoo. And just when we thought we were headed into the long, cold months when births tend to fall off, along comes this female. She’s an Eld’s deer, an endangered subspecies from Southeast Asia that is nearing extinction in the wild with fewer than 2,000 remaining. The babe was born last week and the mother, “Eve,” is doing well. The pair will be rejoining the zoo’s herd of 14 females within a few months.

Rajasthani folk dance jangles with contradictions. On the one side, it is wildly raucous, with musicians and dancers tearing up the desert sand with improvised rhythms. On the other, it’s profoundly religious, with dancers and musicians vying to express the stories of Hindu Gods.

Or maybe this isn’t a contradiction at all.

The curators at the Freer and Sackler galleries have put together “Garden and Cosmos,” an exhibition of 60 paintings from the royal courts at Jodhpur, in Rajasthan, a once-vast kingdom on the edges of India’s Thar desert. Legends about Rajasthan run deep: the area gave birth to the gypsy tribes that later scandalized the European establishment.

The exhibit organizers invited members of the Kalapriya dance company and the Rupayan music group to perform at the exhibit’s opening festival this past weekend. Like the subjects in the ancient paintings, the Rajasthani dancers made merry abandon, whirling, twirling, and having a great time. But like the subjects in the paintings, they remained devout.

Visit “Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur,“ October 11, 2008–January 4, 2009, at the
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Silent films were never really silent. There was always a musician in the theater to heighten the theatrical experience by way of plunking out a tune on piano or making a mighty Wurlitzer roar and fill an auditorium with an awesome, electric vibe. Nowadays, however, in the age of talking pictures and canned soundtracks, opportunities to experience silent movies in this manner are painfully few and far between. I was in high school when I saw my first silent movie with a live band—it was Nosferatu at the Byrd Theater with the Ululating Mummies in the orchestra pit and I still have my fluorescent orange ticket stub—and ever since I get ridiculously excited when another similar movie going opportunity presents itself.

Suffice it to say when I heard about the Devil’s Music Ensemble lending their groove to the 1929 kung-fu, film Red Heroine at the Freer Gallery, I was stoked. I was surprised that the auditorium wasn’t packed to the brim—apparently the film is difficult to see outside of China and is the only surviving installment of a thirteen-part serial, so this really was a rare experience.

I adored the Devil’s Music Ensemble’s score for the film, and watching them perform was great entertainment in and of itself. There was Tim Nylander on drums, Brendon Wood on electric guitar and Jonah Rapino who was juggling two violins and a synthesizer—it was impressive. Blending the sounds of an erhu (you know, that two-stringed Asian violin) with the electric instruments created a sound that seemed traditional and perfectly appropriate to a film of that vintage, yet modern, moody and exciting.

If you missed these guys at the Freer, fear not, they’re touring the East Coast throughout the fall and can be seen performing alongside Red Heroine as well as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (starring John Barrymore, Drew’s granddaddy) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (an early psychological thriller that is essentially the blueprint for the quirky visual flourishes you see in any given Tim Burton movie). You can check out their tour dates on their website.

If you enjoy the Devil’s Music Ensemble’s work, try to track down a copy of the Giorgio Moroder (Flashdance, Cat People) treatment of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis released in 1984. Yes, the film has since been restored and reconstructed beyond our wildest expectations (and reunited with its original orchestral score), but at the time, it made silent film palatable to the MTV generation. It also had film purists the world over breaking out torches and pitchforks. However, if the work of Moroder and the Devil’s Music Ensemble saves the silents from being the stuff of college film history courses and attracts a newer, younger audience, aren’t they doing more good than harm? That’s not a rhetorical question—let’s discuss in the comments area below!

Also, be sure to check out Glenn Erickson’s DVD Savant site for DVD reviews and great golden nuggets of movie history. (We hid a link to him in our posting, but wanted to give him a forthright shout-out.)