Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - William M. Gaines

"There are certain Americans, dead or alive, who are regarded as National Treasures: John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Louis Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Joe Louis, Babe Ruth, and of course, Alfred E. Neuman, this fictional face that launched 35 years of Mad Magazine. You might have thought with all the electronic diversions available to kids today, you would think something like Mad would be, if not already dead, then certainly dying. But nope, Mad is alive and kicking. Kicking at everything sacred. Still the brainchild, if that's the right word, of this man: Bill Gaines." Helluva intro by Morley Safer for 60 Minutes in 1987, opening this clip:

Carla Sinclair notes that William Gaines was the son of Max Gaines, a pioneer in the comics industry. Where his father's company, Education Comics, focused on syndicated funnies, as well as stories of science, history, and the Bible, Bill re-branded EC as Entertainment Comics and turned to horror, suspense, and crime fiction. As Sinclair notes, "EC's grisly tales clutched the imaginations of American youth, and comic book sales boomed at an astounding rate. Unfortunately, the media was already worshiping a name-calling, finger-pointing morphine junkie by the name of Joe McCarthy,
who flew into a fanatic rage over these grisly tales."

William pivoted from horror back to funnies, but with a satirical slant, and Mad was born. First as a comic, but then to side-step the Comics Code, Mad became Mad Magazine, giving birth to the satire magazine. Carla credits Gaines' magazine with having a "dramatic impact on American humor [that] influenced bigwigs such as Saturday Night Live, '60s cartoonist Robert Crumb, satirical films like Airplane and Naked Gun, and my own bOING
bOING magazine."

Bill Gaines "left this planet in 1992," and in 2019, Mad was also dead ... mostly. Instead of publishing new issues, it would be a re-issue magazine, with sporadic new content specials, as reported via bOING bOING (the website, not the zine).

Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace

Dr. Betty Alexandra Toole, credited simply as Betty Toole in the Handbook, has written extensively on Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers, as noted in this article on The Well (more on The Well in a later post), and here wrote a brief overview of (one of) the first computer programmers, who saw the promise of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a proto-computer from the early 19th century.

Here's Betty Toole speaking at the University of Oxford's Ada Lovelace Symposium in 2015, 20 years after the publication of HMHb, and more notably, the 200th anniversary of Ada Lovelace's birth. You can find more materials from this symposium at the Internet Archive, which also hosts a digitized copy of Lady Lovelace's 64 page write-up on the Analytical Engine, including the first published computer algorithm. There's also an hour long BBC documentary on the Countess of Computing from 2015 (YouTube copy). These resources weren't available online in 1995, so now you can learn much more about this fascinating computer pioneer from the comfort of wherever you happen to be. And through a computer, of course.

Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - Sun Ra

"Erroneously reported by the straight world as having been born on May 22, 1914, as Herman "Sonny" Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, [Sun] Ra was actually born on Saturn "around 5,000 years ago—give or take a few minutes"—as he was quick to point out." Will Kreth is good enough to present the truth of Su Ra as (stellar) gospel.

Sun Ra made glorious noise, and a LOT of it. Will covers the Arkestra's wailing brass polyphony over a bed of Afro-Latin percussion, call-and-response chants, and his role as an early musician to embrace the Moog synthesizer. But there's also stellar performances of jazz standards, space-age jazz, and avant-garde space funk.

In 1995, finding Sun Ra's music could have been a bit of work. Originally, Ra's music was pressed in limited runs, sometimes 75 copies, other times 150. And sorting out the history of the Arkestra's recordings was complicated by Sun Ra compiling albums from various recording sessions, or delaying releases a few years or more after recording. And many tracks didn't find their way onto official releases until decades later, after archivists tracked down the history of recording sessions.

But now in 2020, we can enjoy the work of those archivists, and platforms like YouTube and Bandcamp, where you can find not only most, if not all, of Sun Ra's recordings, but also with extensive liner notes. I geeked out about Sun Ra's life and extensive recording history a few years back, linking to official audio as much as possible, and much of it available to buy and stream from Bandcamp (see Sun Ra Music and Sun Ra via Strut).

Sun Ra's work to make this world a better place lives on. 

Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - Timothy Leary

Mark Frauenfelder picked Timothy Leary, high priest of the psychedelic counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s, starting with his trip to Cuernavaca, Mexico sixty years ago, when he consumed psychedelic mushrooms for the first time and drastically altered the course of his life.

Six years later, ESP Disk released his first spoke word album (link to Discogs listing of the CD re-issue with track titles, audio embedded above), using one of his most well-known phrases as the title: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. A year after the release of this recording, he wanted to change the phrase to "Drop out. Turn on. Drop in." (audio recording; via Wikipedia), but that first phrase stuck.

Mark also highlighted some of Dr. Leary's bibliography, some of which is available via the Internet Archive, and some of his interest in regeneration and life extension, which only brushes on his late-in-life turn towards futurism. There's also a mention of Leary with stars in his eyes and a computer in his head. Building onto the idea of the human brain being an underutilized biocomputer, his creation of the acronym SMI²LE is a succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space Migration) + I² (intelligence increase) + LE (Life extension).

But the brief article didn't mention his 3rd revision of that lasting phrase, which seems like perfect fit for bringing this happy mutant into the home computer age. During his last decade, Leary proclaimed the "PC is the LSD of the 1990s" and tried to make "turn on, boot up, jack in" a new motto, to suggest joining the cyberdelic counterculture. He died before the dot-com bust and everything that has come after, so he didn't see his techno-utopianism get replaced by tech-bro visionaries who may use counterculture-type language of "disrupting" systems, but end up focusing on ways to profit from their systems that seem a lot like the old ways, but with black boxes "improving" connections between people. 

The Handbook was published before the good doctor departed this earthly realm, on May 31, 1996. Even in his final days, there was discussion of freezing his head. Instead, he was cremated and some of his ashes went space-ward, along with the ashes of 23 others. Also aloft in the world's first space funeral were fragments of Gene Roddenberry, who created the ''Star Trek'' television series; Gerard O'Neill, a space physicist, and scientists and pilots.

Rebooted (again)

This is "Rebooted," a short about a movie monster, made with proper oldschool VFX. I love it.

This is also a post to reboot the Happy Mutant Handbook review/ redo blog, a fan project way too long in the making.

But it's weird, quiet days, and I want to make something, so it's time to reboot this old blog. Come along, let's revisit a book from 1995 in the year 2020!

And if you're wondering what this is all about, check out my first post on this rickety old blog from June 2015.

Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - Theodore Geisel: Seuss I Am!

From porn star politician to mad genius of child-friendly rhyming stories, the second member of the Happy Mutant Hall of Fame, as picked by Mark Frauenfelder, is Theodor "Dr." Seuss Geisel, whose life story is fascinating and lengthy. Except instead of trying to skim over how an illustrator turned ad man came into the world of children's stories, and maybe noting he had made more adult art and drew political cartoons (after drawing propaganda pieces and ads for war bonds), the first third of the piece focused on the Sneetches (text only).

How has Seuss fared in the last 20 years? Since his death in 1991, his fame hasn't faded, and many of the above-linked resources were created in the years since 1995. (Remember, Wikipedia launched in January 2001). There is a lot more to read if you want to dive deeper. Or if you'd prefer, you can skip that and enjoy the animated short of The Sneetches (link to a slightly better quality video, lower quality embedded below).

Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - Cicciolina: The Little Fleshy One

Welcome to the original Happy Mutant Hall of Fame, six short profiles on a few of the world's wonderfully unique individuals. (I say Original because I'll expand this list after getting through reviewing the book.)

The first mutant mini-profile confused me at first. On reflection, I somehow mentally classified the Handbook as something of a kooky fun book for the whole family, and it mostly is. But there is definitely some material you wouldn't discuss with mini-mutants, and the story of the porn star turned politician is probably one of them.

Gareth Branwyn wrote about Ilona Staller, the Hungarian-born Italian porn star who is also her stage name, Cicciolina (which translates as "little cuddly," "little fleshy one," and "little cabbage," according to Branwyn). She got into politics in the late 1970s, and in 1987, she was elected to the Italian parliament and continued to perform in hardcore porn. She offered to have sex with a number of men in need of peace and comfort, including Saddam Hussein (twice) and Osama bin Laden, saying "My breasts have only ever helped people while Bin Laden has killed thousands of innocent victims."

So how has she fared since 1995? Though she wasn't re-elected and hasn't held office since her one term, she continued to be active in politics into her 60s, and was remembered in English language pop media/news in 2013. Otherwise, she's mostly forgotten (or unknown) outside of Italy.

Work safe video: she was the inspiration for Pop Will Eat Itself's unofficial 1990 World Cup anthem, Touched By The Hand Of Cicciolina, as seen below: