On Cloud Nine

Tammy was 17 and both a sweetheart and a diva. Biggie was quite a bit younger and the friendliest cat I ever met. And in the span of the last 3 months, they both had to be put down, and the homestead is not the same. Ever since her brother Max died (another amazing kitty), Tammy would sleep every night on my pillow. Biggie could have his belly rubbed for hours, and would intrude incessantly if he saw you working in the garden. Her spirit was strong but her kidneys gradually failed her. The tumor in his lung came out of nowhere and in a matter of weeks had overwhelmed him. She doesn’t lecture me anymore if I stay up too late. He no longer appears out the backdoor, waiting to be fed. And I miss them both terribly.

With cats on the brain (but no longer on my lap), I found this postcard and ran down a few older feline stamps to pair up with the recent Garfield issue:

Krazy Kat (Scott #3000e)
Sylvester & Tweety (Scott #3204)
The Lion King (Scott #3867)

Plus, the cat from Bright Eyes, a postal strip of cartoon animal stamps (Scott #3232). I could’ve also included the Cat in the Hat stamp from the Celebrate the Century series, but the Seuss creation never really looked or felt like much of a cat to begin with.

I suppose I’ll add more cats to the postcard (as well as my home) at some point, when the time is right. But for now, RIP to two truly irreplaceable kitties.

Quilt by Association

While most of the time, the stamps I use for these covers apply to the movie posters in question for obvious reasons (a film’s star) or tangential (a location or subject matter), sometimes, I choose them for purely visual reasons alone.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend postal issue presented itself with an interesting opportunity because, while having nothing to do with film, the beauty of the quilts themselves I knew I could pair with some of the one-sheets in my collection—in this particular case, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Tati, 1953) and Darling (Schlesinger, 1965).  I think the results are interesting and striking.

These two particular stamps are Scott # 4092 & 4097 respectively.

Plastics

Toy Story 3 is a triumph.

I, for one, had my reservations.  While I feel the original is about as good as animated films get, I’m one of those people out there who didn’t actually care for the second film very much.  Pixar has prided itself as a brand known for original thinking, but Toy Story 2 seemed larded with the easy type of meta-humor (Star Wars reference? Check; Star Trek reference? Check; etc.) which dates quickly and pulls me out of the film.  The movie has one show-stopper—the heartbreaking “When She Loved Me” flashback song—and plenty of funny energy, but the pervasive resorting to topical gags seemed more in the spirit of Family Guy (and that is not a compliment).

But Toy Story 3 plumbs emotional depths I wasn’t expecting, especially exploring the darker recesses of rejection, resentment, and petty tyrannies that resonate far beyond the playground politics of childhood.  Plus, the film has the courage of its convictions, taking us to the brink of a truly apocalyptic ending that is both terrifying and profoundly moving, while also providing us with one of the best deus ex machinas in recent memory, earning its stripes and never, ever feeling like a cheat.

But the one thing to which I’ve never been able to relate in these films is the emotional attachment Andy has to his toys.  They are not only springboards for his imagination; they are also his Friends, virtual proxies for a social life.  We see through the series the extent to which he personalizes that connection, having his toys as constant companions in his childhood, and caring about their fate practically into adulthood.

I guess that’s what I don’t get.  My toys were just my toys.  They weren’t confidantes, or buddies, or security blankets.  I didn’t invest them with larger personalities, didn’t attach emotional significance to them.  Did anyone?  I honestly don’t know.  I didn’t have a bad childhood by a long shot, but I did have a fairly isolated one.  I didn’t have many friends, rarely went to other people’s houses or got invited places, so I honestly don’t have a frame of reference on what other kids or families did.  My Dad was loving but logical.  An engineer, so empirical.  I never believed in Santa, never had a fantasy life indulged or a creative streak nurtured.

When my mom moved up to the Bay Area, selling the house we grew up in and Dad died in, she had an estate sale, which included all the stuff in my room, from my childhood.  Walking down memory lane that one last time, poring through artifacts, was fascinating but rarely sentimental.  Growing up, for me, was about ostracization, frustrated opportunities, and a singular awareness of how alone I was in the world.  

That’s why movies that are fueled by nostalgia, like Stand By Me or American Graffiti, do very little for me.  Because when it comes to that period of my life, I never look back with fondness or warmth.  It was just passing time until my Life could really start.  And maybe, in that sense, I’m not unusual either.  I just don’t know.

So for me, the first Toy Story (Lasseter, 1995) remains the best, because it doesn’t obsess about that relationship the way the other two films do.  That film is about self-actualization, coming to terms with who or what you are, on your own and in the community to which you’re tied.  It’s that sense of community that carries through all three films and serves as the vital backbone to the series (helped by a marvelous cast). 

As for the estate sale, I did sort through all my toys.  I don’t have any children (and likely never will), but I have two nephews, and I passed on a number of my old toys to them—not because I felt the toys deserved to be played with, but because I thought Josh and Caleb might get a lot of mileage out of them.  That’s the relationship I understand.

OK, maybe a few of the Star Wars action figures I kept.  As collectibles, you know.

Gene Autry (Scott # 4449)was part of the Cowboys of the Silver Screen series, while the flying spacemen (Scott # 2473) was part of a science fiction issue.  Yoda (Scott # 4205) was its own release, separate from the Star Wars issue earlier the same year, which included Boba Fett (Scott # 4143j)

Cinema Centenary

I don’t read Russian but the dates suggest that this is commemorating Vera Kholodnaya (1893-1919), whose film work predates the better known silent cinema sparked by the Revolution starting in the early 1920's. I've never seen any of her pictures, but she was a stage actress who had some crossover success in films before her death.

But I got this envelope because of the very neat postmark with the motion picture camera and the length of film, a pretty unusual illustration to run across. I'm assuming this is commemorating the centenary of cinema, though the date illustrated here (1893) is a little earlier than most citations.


Sarah Bernhardt was probably the most famous actress in the world at the turn-of-the-century, and she had a few celebrated motion pictures, too--mostly recreations of her stage successes. This French stamp was issued in 1945 (Scott #B191) and nicely complements the illustration of Bernhardt on the card. The postmark is from 1949 so isn't a First-Day-of-Issue, but a regular postmark. Both items were choice finds at Westpex.

Orchestral Maneuvers

Fantasia celebrates its 70th anniversary this year and still remains a hot mess of a movie. Back in 1940, there was no “animation”; there were just cartoons, so as a testament to Walt Disney’s ambition in merging cartoons with high culture, it still gets plenty of appreciation in this corner. And some of the pieces remain quite striking, particularly Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and Ponchielli’s deadpan ballet parody “Dance of the Hours”. This latter piece shows that Walt didn’t take the enterprise too seriously—that he could create images that were playful as well as nightmarish, with Mickey's Dukas number being an effective hybrid of both.

But the rest is a mixed bag. “Ave Maria” is lovely and reverent, but changes the original Schubert to the point of distraction. "The Nutcracker" is fun but slight, while the exercise in abstraction for the Bach remains rudimentary. And the bad remains bad, with the garishness of Beethoven’s "Pastorale" sequence trivializing the epic beauty of the symphony itself.

Probably the most daring piece is the most recent classical selection, too: "The Rite of Spring". This is the most interpretive of the pieces, taking the chaotic vigor of the Stravinsky and translating it to prehistoric times. It’s an inspired choice, and while it necessarily neuters the raw sexuality implicit in the number, it still works great as drama and animation. However, the primeval world only reminds me of an ever more audacious dinosaur dance—"Bolero" in Allegro non Troppo (Bozzetto, 1976), a largely farcical Italian spoof of Fantasia using the same conceit of an animated orchestral program. But while Disney's dinosaurs are faithful to a certain realism, Bozzetto’s version is a highly stylized fable, showing how an alien coke bottle ignites the spark of Life that, like the Ravel, builds and builds and builds into a grand march of evolution and survival of the fittest that is clever, funny, and haunting all at once. I’d easily take it over Fantasia in its entirety.


We’ve seen the 5 Mickey releases before (including a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" stamp itself) with the matching First Day of Issue postmarks. And the American Filmmaking series should be very familiar by now, too (Fantasia did indeed win 2 special Academy Awards at the time). The challenge was to find as many related stamps as possible and incorporate them into the body of the card. In chronological order, the seven additional stamps listed are

Walt Disney (Scott #1355)
The Age of Reptiles (Scott #1390)
Music Instruments (Scott #1614 & 1813)
Igor Stravinsky (Scott #1845)
Leopold Stokowski (Scott #3158)
Ballet (Scott #3237)

With 6 separate postmarks (all in sequential years) and 13 stamps total, this remains the most complicated single postcard within my collection.

The Heart of Our World

I mentioned in a previous post that I rarely find postcards at stamp conventions or philatelic dealers like the ones I create: film posters with a stamp and First Day of Issue postmark that has a related subject or theme.  But this card holds as an unusual exception is the oldest variation of that type in my entire collection.

I haven't seen this Griffith film from 1918, though it has some of his regular players, including Lillian Gish and her sister Dorothy, Adolph Lestina, Robert Harron, Kate Bruce and even Erich von Stroheim (they made 10 films together).   He is the first film director to get a US postage stamp (if you don't count Walt Disney, who was far better known as producer and entertainment mogul) and justly seen as the grandfather of American cinema, with The Birth of a Nation (1915) one of the most influential and infamous movies ever made.

But now, his legacy is split into two branches that intertwine like a caduceus--that of artist and propagandist, capable of sweeping narratives and delicate emotions that reveal universal truths in the human condition, but sometimes at the service of the most hateful (and sadly effective) historical revisionism and worldviews.  Some of his films are relatively neutral politically, and often reveal him to be an epic sentimentalist as well as an expert storyteller.  But he is also the antecedent of the Soviet revolution propaganda movies--which were far more sophisticated in technique--and of the films of Leni Riefenstahl, which were far more insidious in their agenda.

I am named after my father, who in turn was named after his grandfather Sterling Smith, a private in the 26th regiment, 3rd East Tennessee Volunteer Infantry in the Confederate army.  We are fairly young as a nation, but still rich with memory.  Our history informs each of us, but what we choose to do with our lives and our sense of purpose or expression is up to us alone.  So Griffith inspired many, persuaded many, and his creative gifts are still with us to bear witness to, as is the terrible shadow that looms over that body of work. 

The Griffith stamp is Scott #1555 and was released on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1875.  Although I don't do it for contemporary issues, for cinema-related stamps released before I started the hobby, I usually do collect a cache like the one pictured.

Point Ache

Congrats to Kathryn Bigelow for being the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar. Though highly-praised in some circles, I find Point Break, which she made back in 1991, is a joyless absurdity, with laughable performances across the board. I think Swayze and Reeves get a bad rap sometimes, but here they’re hopeless, fighting tooth and nail to see who can be less convincing—a renegade FBI agent or a craptastic hippie surfing guru. Bigelow has chops and has managed to create some flawed but engaging films from questionable material (Near Dark, Strange Days). But Point Break is epic loads of d-u-m-b. Here’s hoping, post-Hurt Locker (an undeniably terrific film) that she isn’t relegated to grade-B material anymore, even if she notches a failure or two on her belt (like many Oscar-winning male counterparts have).

Point Break doesn’t take place in Hawaii, but I used the statehood stamp because of the surfing motif.