Sunday, August 14, 2011

Cavalleria Rusticana as you've never heard it before

This was another instance of coming in the back door: I was trying to find the name of one of those old penny-arcade flip machines where you put in a penny or a nickel and turned a crank and looked in a little window and a big revolving thingammy with photos attached to it flipped around and provided a crude kind of motion picture. These were peep-show things that often showed mildly dirty movies, all of 30 seconds long. I couldn't find the name of it, so couldn't really get any information or see any YouTube clips on it. At some point, having gone through zoetrope and a bunch of other names I can't remember because they were so weird, gizmatrons and walbergerscopes and stuff, the name mutoscope popped out.

A funny thing to call it, but that's what it was. The few existing functional mutoscopes are pretty pathetic to look at, the photos all rotten at the edges like the underside of a mushroom. Women dance around with scanty clothing on, a man touches a woman's leg, two women get into bed and tickle each other, etc. Hot stuff. Ministers and arbiters of morals thundered against them:

Public response

In 1899, The Times printed a letter inveighing against "vicious demoralising picture shows in the penny-in-the-slot machines. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the corruption of the young that comes from exhibiting under a strong light, nude female figures represented as living and moving, going into and out of baths, sitting as artists' models etc. Similar exhibitions took place at Rhyl in the men's lavatory, but, owing to public denunciation, they have been stopped."

A collector's site describes the contents of one such reel, "Birth of the Pearl" which "pictures a nude woman rising from a seashell and standing." The site notes "this reel has some damage to a whole chunk of photos. They are all in a section where there was full frontal nudity and the cards are quite worn off."

Pretty hot stuff, eh? But then I started to think about a movie I saw eons ago (EONS, EONS!: see former post) called Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson. I had a thing for Joel Grey then, and he looked plain sexy in this, with a full beard that was obviously real. He looked downright Biblical in it, and I lusted. Anyway, at some point one of BB's girl friends trucks a sort of musical contraption into the Wild West show. It was a big ornate wooden cabinet with a revolving metal disc in it, and it played this unearthly music. It took me a while to track these down, too: they turned out to be just music boxes, except with exotic names like 27 Inch Regina (which, come to think of it, sounds vaguely obscene). I think they produce a sound from another time, lyrical and sweet, reminiscent of antique merry-go-rounds and Victorian parlours with tweeting canaries. The tuning is actually pretty good on these two, and the pieces complex.

I don't know who made these, or how, but it must have been quite an art. I LOVE the clatters and bangs at the start and finish, reminding us that these are, after all, hunks of tin. A marvel of design and musicianship. The way the notes decay or die off is sweet and bell-like, making the notes float into each other in a way I find enchanting.

And again

1888 - Oldest surviving film: Roundhay Garden Scene

The First Movie

Eon? . . .eon?. . . eh?

OK, this is really a weird one (as if my other posts aren't - ). I've been collecting oddities to write about, but it was such a ragbag that nothing came together. (Why does no one talk about having "nerves" any more? Why is it always a fancy diagnosis like cyclothymia or post-traumatic stress? Why don't we have lumbago, quinsy, grippe - and how can diseases just disappear like that)?

But it didn't gell, or jell, or turn to jell-o or whatever else it's supposed to do. Except for one thing.

The word luncheon.

What's the deal with luncheon? We don't have a breakfast-eon, a bruncheon, or a dinnereon. What is the -eon supposed to mean? It seems to imply a get-together to have lunch, usually kind of a fancy one. So is that what the suffix -eon means?

Uh, that depends.

I had to go on a Wik-tionary somewhere to get a list of words ending in -eon: and they are plentiful. But finding common ground is difficult.

One that popped into mind was puncheon. I remember the long narrative poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning which, when the Piper began to play, exhorted the rats to "munch on, crunch on, take your luncheon":

"And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out 'Oh, rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!'
And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce and inch before me,
Just as methought it said 'Come, bore me!'
- I found the Weser rolling o'er me."

I "took" this poem in about Grade 3, and mostly didn't understand the more lumpy vocabulary, which of course was never explained. This poem was meant to be read aloud in one long blurt. I see now that it was nuncheon, not luncheon which was used to rhyme with it. But what the hell is a nuncheon?

I always assumed a puncheon was a sort of barrel that had sugar in it, but it isn't, it's just a long piece of wood or some sort of tool for engraving (a "punch"). But Browning got away with it, I suppose, through poetic license.

I had to look up nuncheon because it was just too weird.

nuncheon 1353, "slight refreshment," originally taken in the afternoon, from none "noon" (see noon) + shench (from O.E. scenc) "draught, cup."

Oh yeah, so nuncheon is taken from "cup". My ass it is. And what the hell is a shench? Was there a fourth member of The Three Stooges?

I might as well make my own dictionary of eon-suffixed words, and I will, right now, before I've even had my coffee.

There's eon, the granddaddy of them all, and we won't bother with what that means. I like truncheon, which sounds pretty violent, and trudgeon, which surely is somehow related to bludgeon except that you walk on the person. Dudgeon is a good one, used with "high" and meaning someone leaving in that well-known vehicle, a huff.

Neil Dudgeon, born Doncaster, South Yorkshire,

I was mostly interested in words that might somehow relate to luncheon, that is, the suffix eon added to a known word to somehow extend it, formalize it, attach it to fund-raising for various diseases. There's a nickelodeon, an extinct term for dirty movies of the early 1900s that lasted a couple of seconds (see example, above, 2-second original plus extended version). Nickel plus odeon. The word was resurrected for a children's TV network. But that doesn't quite solve it, because we still have the problem of odeon.

Od. Eon. I don't get it, do you?

So let's go on to pantheon. You have your panth, meaning you juth-t can't get your breath, or miniature panthers getting together for a luncheon (or nuncheon). From there it gets weird, and I have to say I don't know exactly what it means, and I'll be damned if I'll look it up so early in the morning. For now we'll just say it means a whole lot of stuff, the entire pantheon of whatever.

Does anyone know what a widgeon is? Is it sort of like a widget? Is it some strange sort of pigeon, maybe a widowed pigeon? A pigeon dressed in black (going to a fundraiser)?

Chirugeon. A kind of dinosaur, maybe. Chirugasaurus Rex.

Gudgeon sounds like a wad of hard old gum you find stuck under your desk. Ewwwwwwww.

Ieon. Come on, now.

Mezereon must be something archaelogical, some sort of terazzo plaza for sacrificing young goats or children or something. Or else something awful from another planet, like kryptonite.

Pereon is part of a woman's body.

Surgeon is hard to take apart. Sur being, what, above in French? Surge means something quite else. But there's that eon part, like a gathering together. Psychosurgeon, cryosurgeon, supersurgeon, plastic surgeon, all of them give me the willies.

Odeon. Did I get to that one? Isn't that some big old place, one of those old theatres the town council is forever threatening to tear down to put up condos? We still have Cineplex Odeon, as if the theatre association still hangs on by a thread.

But it still means coming together, doesn't it? Even for a really short movie, and a nice bite of something for your nuncheon.