The View From The Dumpster May Be the Clearest

My husband and I were watching one of our favorite movies the other night, Rear Window, when one of the characters made a really interesting remark. She was Stella, the traveling nurse who pays regular therapeutic visits to “Jeff” Jeffries for his broken leg. She told him that she had predicted the stock market crash of 1929, and that it was easy to do so. But not because she was an economic wiz. One of the Vice Presidents of GM was a patient of hers, and he was having kidney trouble. “When General Motors has to go to the bathroom 10 times a day,” she said, “the whole country's ready to let go.”

Her remark made me remember my experiences working for Borders Books & Music, at a superstore in Phoenix. No one was running to the bathroom 10 times a day (okay – sometimes I was), but something else really revealing was going on. I did a lot of work in the stock room, receiving, sorting, and stickering product to be shelved. I also helped to throw away our gigantic pile of trash every day. Eventually I realized that more paper was going into that dumpster than was going out the front door as purchased books.

This was mind blowing. I tried to imagine businesses all over the country, throwing away all that stuff. I think if all of us could really see how much of it there is on a daily basis, we would decide something had to be done about it. Why? Because that's energy we're throwing away. That's cellulose, which could be converted back into fuel, or fertilizer, or heat, and we're paying people to ship it around the country and then throw it in dumpsters. In our case, it was tons of cardboard: boxes and display materials. We re-used a small portion of those boxes to ship returns to our distributor (more about that later), but most of them went straight into the garbage. One of our line employees tried to suggest that we could get paid for the cardboard by a recycler who specialized in pick-ups from businesses. Our District Manager dismissed his suggestion, and when he went over her head to suggest it to the Regional Manager, he was warned that if he did that again he'd be fired. Yes, it's not considered kosher to go over the head of a superior. But our company used to have a system in place where line employees could make suggestions to the Brass upstairs – but they never accepted any of those suggestions, and eventually that system went away.

Eventually our company did, too.

Before the crash, I watched an interesting progression take place. In the early, halcyon days we got gigantic shipments of books, magazines, movies, and music. We sold a lot of that stuff, but so much of it was coming in, a lot of it never made it to the shelves. We didn't have an efficient system for getting those books and CDs on carts and then on the floor (let alone in the proper alphabetical order in the right section). So when I trained as a sales clerk, the rule was that if a customer came in looking for an item, there were seven places you had to check before giving up and admitting defeat (Can I order that for you, Ma'am?) – the sorting bins were one of those places.

Returns were also a challenge – we had a list of items we were supposed to return every month. When we looked for that stuff, we often found it in those bins. In the beginning, it was stuff that didn't sell very well (sometimes because it never made it to the floor) and we returned it so we could get stuff that did sell well. By the end, we were using those returns to finance our new stock purchases (instead of profit from sales). We would return stuff one month, and order the same stuff for the next. It was beyond bizarre.

What it amounts to is that we used to sell more paper than we threw away. We also used to sell more paper than what we shipped back to the distributor. After 9/11/2001, the trend slowed, and then reversed. But lest you think I'm blaming terrorists for the demise of Borders, let me point out one other ugly trend, the one driven by customers: returns at the register.

In an ideal situation, customer returns are rare. You sell a good product, they find it useful, they keep it. When I first began to work at Borders, the return rate at the register was actually kind of high already. A lot of it was driven by fraud (people would pull items off the shelf and claim they were returning them so they could use the credit to buy other items). Our return policy was ridiculously lenient, and it didn't take long for termites to settle in. But they weren't the only culprits, and in the end they weren't even the majority of abusers. The majority were people engaged in what I call Theft Of Services. These were folks who bought books, read them, then returned them when they were finished. These folks thought nothing was wrong with that, because the store could sell the book, so where was the harm? The harm is that they returned the physical book, but they stole the content. When the product is a book, the physical copy is not the full extent of the product, it's just the delivery system. The content is really the product. That's why people can sell ebooks.

So that's one of the major reasons that the ratio between the paper going out the door as sold product and the paper being shipped back or tossed into the dumpster got out of whack; paper started to come back to us from another direction. Eventually, the number of people coming to the register with returns went from 1 in 10 people to about 5 in 10.

By that time, the economy had really tanked. A lot of folks were returning those books because they couldn't pay their bills. But did they do the honest thing and simply go to the library? Nope. And because they didn't go to the library, they caused initial sales at our stores to seem higher than they really were. Executives at our company focused on those sales figures and mostly ignored return rates.

These same executives stepped up their merchandising campaigns. They paid Robert Sabuda, the wonderful designer of pop-up books, to design pop-up style Christmas decorations for all the stores, paid to have them constructed and shipped to the stores – then ordered us to throw them all in the trash once the season was over. Chastened by criticism from investors over this fiasco, they responded by paying one of their colleagues in their own headquarters to design the decorations for next year. His designs were so creepy, we were actually grateful to throw them in the dumpsters after Christmas.

You might think some of that waste is necessary – after all, sometimes you have to spend money to make money. That's what merchandising is, and in stores you see it manifested as signs advertising the products. Every month they sent us big packages of signage to put up in the store. And it seemed like just about every other month they e-mailed the managers and told them to throw out all that signage instead of putting it up, because it was the wrong color. That was about $60,000 that went into the trash for no good reason. They could have just mailed us the money and told us to throw it away.

So to paraphrase Stella, if more paper is going into the dumpsters than is being sold to customers, something's wrong. Most businesses manage by numbers these days, but those numbers can be interpreted different ways. They can be massaged. Our financial meltdowns in 1929 and 2008 prove that. So if you're thinking of investing in a company that deals in physical products, you may want to check their dumpsters. They may tell a tale that will make you change your mind.

The nifty illustrations for this post were done by my husband, artist/writer Ernest Hogan.

The Great Wickenburg Escape

When Ernie and I don't get to go out and hike on a regular basis, we get kind of peaked. There is a world of wonder out there, and we're stuck inside with our eyeballs glued to computer screens, typing our little hearts out and staring at facebook. In the best of all possible worlds, this would not be the case. We would be traveling around the Southwest, taking pictures, shooting amateur videos, and writing about our travels. We would be living inside an Airstream trailer and posting regular reports on a blog about Weird and Wonderful Travels On The Cheap. Some day, maybe this will come true. But right now, it's all about the day job and the bills. So we try to take day trips.

Ernie posted a report about our most recent trip to Wickenburg, The Hassayampa River Preserve, and the Vulture Mountains. He summed up the trip pretty well, so I will only add some photos with a bit of commentary.

The visitor's center for Hassayampa River Preserve is a charming, refurbished historic building that was a ranch and stage-coach stop back in the day. Its courtyard was swarming with butterflies and hummingbirds.

The caterpillar-sized thingees in this web were wriggling, ever so slowly.

One of these days I'll create a site called Em's Happy Trails, and this photo will be on it.

The Hassayampa is an underground river – much of the time the water stays underground. But in some places, it bubbles to the surface, and in the preserve it forms a large pond (much loved by frogs, birds, and bugs).

These are raccoon prints.

These are prints from the ring-tailed cat.

Datura has a seriously cool seed pod.

This wonderful spider actually constructed a pot-shaped house for herself, then wove her web outward from the entrance. She let us know that the only sort of visitors she likes are the edible kind.

This is one of the few places in the basin-and-range provence of Arizona where you will find a tree with fungus.

Remember those recent pictures of Mars that proved water activity? This is another example of that sort of -well, sorting. Rivers move rocks and silt, and sort them by size. Fast-running water can move larger stones; silt will be the last thing to settle out as the current slows. A deposit of rocks that are more rounded and are about the same size traveled a long distance from their source. Rocks that have sharper edges and are a variety of sizes are still fairly close to their source.

It took me three tries to get this shot of a vermilion flycatcher – a first for me.

I've always wanted one of these Ocotillo fences.

Look, we found Mecca! That's our truck parked out front.

When we saw this guy from behind, I thought he was homeless.

A Jack '0' Lantern saguaro near Vulture Mountains.

This deposit of volcanic stuff is decaying into Tahiti beach sand.

Ocotillos are indicator plants -- evidence of underground water.  They also like limestone (maybe because limestone tends to have damp, underground caves eaten into it).

This guy lost most of his arms. He's got serious gnarlitude.

These butterflies were imitating flowers.

By the way, you may be happy to know that apparently Doctor and Mrs. Doom have adopted a stretch of Highway 60.  Just look for the sign as you drive along.

It was a fabulous trip, but it made us long for more. So watch this space . . .

The Queen And The Falcon

Originally, I was going to do this post about The Maltese Falcon, which deserves a spot on anybody's Best Movies List. And for the record, The Maltese Falcon really is on my list. But since I'm limiting myself to ten (in no particular order), I have to admit that I like Humphrey Bogart better in The African Queen. And it's not just because Charlie Allnut is a nicer guy. In a weird sort of way, my choice between the two movies (and the two characters) is like the difference between the dangerous kind of guy and the good guy. You're attracted to the dangerous guy, but in the end it's the good guy you end up marrying.

Both movies have well-written stories and engaging plots. ButThe African Queen has one other bonus: Katherine Hepburn. While the Maltese Falcon is about one guy, Sam Spade, and his search for the truth, The African Queen is about two very different people whose lives intertwine so successfully, they're able to achieve the impossible (or at least the improbable).

Charlie Allnut is a tugboat captain, an independent guy whose love of freedom has taken him to Africa, a place most Americans will never see. The political climate there is dangerous, so he has to be both smart and courageous to pursue that freedom. But he's also a down to-earth-guy, and when he meets Rose Sayer, he feels that they belong to different classes.

And he's right. She is the sister of a missionary, and her goal is to help people find God. It's a goal that blows up right in her face, leaving her with ashes, but Charlie rescues her in more ways than one. Rose feels she has lost everything, but as she and Charlie get into that boat and go crashing down the river rapids into an uncertain future, she makes an observation that is my favorite quote from the whole movie: “I never dreamed any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!” She loves that trip down the rapids. She begins to develop an interest in the boat itself – and in the man who owns it.

Katherine Hepburn wrote a wonderful diary about the making of the movie, The Making Of The African Queen. They filmed in Africa, and there were some issues with the water which Humphrey Bogart and John Huston seemed to have neatly avoided by spiking that water with a little whisky. The African Queen is an essential John Huston movie. Like the cast and crew, the characters are tested by hardships. How they rise to those challenges defines their character.

The most charming moment in the film happens the morning after Charlie and Rose have obviously been intimate with each other (a moment handled with great sensitivity and discretion), and she says to him, “Dear – what is your first name?” This romance binds them together, but isn't the strongest thing doing so. That would be their mission, which is to blow up a German warship that has moored in the lake at the end of the tributary in which they are struggling. They may be going through Hell, but it's not High Water they're battling, it's low water, which threatens to strand the boat. But they refuse to give up, even when things look hopeless.

With equal parts humor and tragedy, their struggle is engrossing. The resolution of their story is both gratifying and believable. No superheroes save the day, no wizards throw magic bolts of lightning at each other. Instead, two people refuse to give up – and they triumph. That's why The African Queen makes the top ten, with no reservations whatsoever.

Hal 9000 Was Not the First Computer Heavy In Movie History

Most people who write a best movies list that includes a movie with Katherine Hepburn choose something other than Desk Set. They may prefer Pat & Mike or Adam's Rib, titles that are much better known. Almost certainly, they would name The African Queen, which deserves to be honored.

In fact, The African Queen will be the subject of my next blog entry. And of all the romantic comedies that Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together, Desk Set is my favorite – for one simple reason. It's a science fiction movie.

No, it doesn't have ray guns, space ships, or aliens. But it satisfies one of the most basic criterions of a science fiction plot: it's about how technology changes the lives of people who use it. In this case, it's about a civilian application for an early computer, the EMERAC (probably based on the UNIVAC and the ENIAC). Spencer Tracy plays the efficiency expert who is adapting the computer for a business interface, and Katherine Hepburn is the head of the reference department at a New York Magazine that will try to integrate the big computer into their operations. Since the computer processes questions and is supposed to come up with instant answers, the reference staff is understandably nervous about their jobs.

This is one of the main conflicts in the story. The employees in the reference department are all female, and you get a glimpse into the lives of an earlier generation of working women. The wonderful Joan Blondell is Peg Costello – who, like the other gals in her department, is single, independent, and older than people probably expected a working woman to be in those days – old enough to be married, in other words. They have to be ingenious to make ends meet, but you get the feeling that none of them have met a man for whom they would be able or willing to give up their independence – except, possibly for Hepburn's character, Bunny Watson. She does have a fella she's serious about: Mike Cutler, played by Gig Young. But he keeps putting her off until his career takes off, something it always seems to be on the verge of doing. By the time the computer shows up, he's starting to take her for granted.

That's the other conflict in the story. Because Tracy's character, Richard Sumner, is quite charmed by her. He's fascinated by the way the women perform their jobs, especially by the way their memories work. He notices that Bunny uses association as a memory tool. And he enjoys the quick, witty responses she comes up with when they talk. I suspect he also notices her trim figure and dazzling smile, but he is so unassuming and courteous, this is more of a conclusion than an observation.

Bunny tries very hard not to like Richard – after all, he's programming the electronic monster that will make her obsolete. But something between them just seems to click, and pretty soon the luke-warm boyfriend begins to notice that he's got competition. Suddenly he's not so inclined to take her for granted. But will he rally in time?

If you're familiar with the pattern in Hepburn-Tracy movies, you already know the answer to that question. But the characters are so likable, you just can't help getting caught up in their lives. And in the meantime, the big computer is looming over everybody's job, until the day when it generates a bunch of pink slips for the reference department. Neither love nor computerization goes smoothly for anyone in this film.

But in the end, you cheer for both. Desk Set is not a grand film that forever changed the art form. But it is an irresistible snapshot of a particular time and place, a moment of change in American business and American romance. I watch it at least once every year, so I can take a brief vacation to that time and place. That's why it goes on my list of the best.      

Shadows Of A Lost World

Many people would put a movie by Akira Kurosawa on the list of top ten films, and that choice would be justified. There are quite a few Japanese filmmakers who have earned a place on that sort of list. But for me, the first movie that always comes to mind when I think of great Japanese films is the horror classic, Kwaidan, directed by Masaki Kobayashi.

Based on the ghost stories collected by Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan is spooky, gorgeous, and fascinating. It takes its inspiration from classic Japanese illustrations of ghost stories. The last time I watched it I realized something amazing – this lavish production was filmed entirely inside a studio. This includes a segment depicting sea battles.

The first segment, “Black Hair,” is not my favorite, but I like it more every time I see it. I think it depicts the true experience of a haunting, which is always more psychological in nature. A samurai is sick of poverty, so he abandons his wife and marries the vain daughter of a wealthy nobleman. His fortunes immediately improve, but he can't forget the wife he so callously abandoned. Eventually this obsession with the past wrecks his new life, and he goes home again to salvage his old life. But what is waiting there for him? I love the gorgeous, moody sets in this one. I especially like the character of the spoiled new wife. She isn't likable, but she's very interesting.

The second story, “The Snow Maiden,” has a lot in common with European fairy tales. A man witnesses a fey creature killing another man. She almost kills him too, but she falls in love with him and can't bring herself to kill him. Instead, she makes him promise never to tell anyone what he's seen. The actress who plays this creature manages to make her really scary, just with her body movements and facial expressions. I think she takes her cues from classical Japanese theater – at times her expressions are mask-like. The same actress manages to look warm and kind when the fey creature imitates a human woman so she can marry the man. The outcome of this union also mirrors European folk tales – I won't reveal it here. I love how this segment uses stage techniques for its special effects.

My favorite segment is the third, “Hoichi The Earless,” and I suspect that's the case for most viewers. It has spectacular battle scenes, and the way they're narrated is particularly brilliant. Hoichi, a blind monk, is a very talented balladeer, and he knows the story of the Dan-no-ura battle from beginning to end. As he performs this ballad, the scenes are enacted. The camera alternates from live-action segments (entirely filmed inside the studio, though they're sea battles) to painted panels depicting the battle. You could consider this the most kick-butt segment of the movie. But I like it for more oddball reasons. To me, the ghosts in this segment aren't just shadows of that battle and that ruined clan, they depict a lost age. The remarkable formality of their lives, the protocol dictating their day-to-day existence, is marvelous and awe-inspiring – and lends credence to Shakespeare's assertion that all the world is a stage.

An interesting detail from the battle is a scene in which a woman leaps into the sea with the young emperor rather than risk capture by their enemies. This woman is steely in her resolve, a stark contrast to the weeping young woman who quickly follows them into death. It took me a few viewings to realize that the stern woman who orders her followers into the sea must be the dowager empress – the boy's grandmother, rather than his mother (the mother must be the weeping woman). As the mother of the deceased emperor, she would have had absolute authority until the boy came of age. Because of that battle, the boy never gets the chance, so she takes him into the sea to save honor, which she prizes above all else. Under the circumstances, I can't blame her.

After that amazing third sequence, the final story, “In A Cup Of Tea,” is a bit of a let-down. I think the purpose of that sort of story in a book is to bring the readers back down to earth and end on a humorous note. But in the movie, I often find myself running out of patience with it before it's over. It probably should have been placed at the beginning instead of the end.

Despite that minor flaw, Kwaidan still rises to the top. It will always fascinate and chill me. It will always be on my list of top ten movies.

Truly Haunted

In this age of ghost movies that rely on “boo” tactics and images of people being thrown around rooms, a very important fact has been mostly forgotten: a good ghost story is not about the ghost. It's about the people being haunted by the ghost. If it's done well, the audience will eventually realize that the ghost is not the only thing haunting those people – possibly not even the most frightening thing.

The Haunting is the best example of that kind of ghost story. The book (The Haunting Of Hill House), by Shirley Jackson, is one of my favorite novels – and the original movie, filmed in 1963 and directed by Robert Wise, is one of the few adaptations that actually does justice to the source material. In fifty years, very few movies have been made that can rival it in spookiness. And the wonderful thing about it is that no high-tech special effects were used – it was all great location, good acting, lighting, choice of film stock, camera angels, sound effects and music, and on one occasion a broom handle applied to an old-fashioned, moulded door. You never see a ghost.

So how can a movie that never shows a ghost be spooky? It starts with a good story and some troubled characters. The premise in the beginning is that some places are just bad. Maybe they started out that way, maybe someone made them that way, or maybe it was a combination of the two. Somehow a sediment of despair, sorrow, and fear has accumulated there, and it affects everyone who visits. The focal point of this wrongness is Hill House, a place built by an extremely authoritarian man whose version of Christianity makes the Puritans look like a bunch of free-love hippies. He wasn't content just to build an imposing pile of a house – he has to make sure that the place is a maze, both mentally and physically, where people are lost and eventually trapped. The angles are deliberately off by a few degrees; doors will silently swing shut if you've left them open.

The real setting of Hill House was a hotel in England, a beautiful place that is made sinister by lighting, special film stock, camera angles, etc. You get a glimpse of how nice the place really is when you look at the scenes done in the breakfast room and the music room. Turn the lights down and focus on some of the details of that house that would seem charming and quaint in the daylight, and suddenly you see faces among the leaf patterns on the wall and doorknobs that look like they're watching you.

Add the right characters to this setting, and things just have to happen. Professor Markway (Richard Johnson) is the perfect guy to get the ball rolling. He's a scientist to the core, looking for observable phenomena that can be recorded and analyzed. He believes that what seems to be supernatural is really natural-but-misunderstood. His wife (played by Lois Maxwell) does not agree – she is not only skeptical, but aggressively so, and very annoyed with him for embarrassing her in the upper-class circles in which she runs. Luke (Russ Tamblyn) is a spoiled rich kid who is simply hoping that he can make a profit on the old pile once he inherits it. Theo (Claire Bloom) is able to sense the thoughts and feelings of others, an ability that has often made her unhappy. And then there's Eleanor.

Unfortunately for Eleanor (Julie Harris), she has something in common with one of the ghosts of Hill House. This similarity makes her especially vulnerable to the house. On top of that, she's a sheltered woman who was never able to spread her wings until this odd trip in which she gets to belong to the team of investigators. She falls in love, and the love can't be fulfilled.

I've always thought that this team of characters could have carried a TV series for at least a couple of seasons, if it were well-written. TV executives would probably balk at the cost of special effects for such a show, but that's the irony – CGI ruins ghost stories. The old-fashioned, clever, and inexpensive effects of this movie are the best sort of effects to use for story lines that rely on the psychology of the characters – and the psychology of the audience. When you watch The Haunting you believe you've seen things that were actually never shown.

That's true movie-making genius. And that's why The Haunting makes my top ten list.   

Cosmic Dad And His Robot

In my previous Best Movie blog entries, I've mentioned scenes that I believe to be the heart of those films, the essential expression of their nature. In La Belle et La Bete, it's the scene where Belle and the Beast walk together in the garden for the first time. In Bad Day At Black Rock, it's the scene where Macreedy delivers a karate chop to Trimble, proving that one-armed war veterans should not be underestimated by small-town thugs.

In The Day The Earth Stood Still, it's the scene where Klaatu signals Gort with the flashlight, then enters his spaceship, while Bernard Herrmann's incomparable score plays in the background (a segment called Nocturne/The Flashlight/The Robot/Space Control). With no dialog, it manages to convey a supreme sense of wonder as we're invited into that alien ship to glimpse the Unfathomable.

Like Rear Window, The Day The Earth Stood Still has no wasted scenes, every frame counts. The difference is that the score forThe Day The Earth Stood Still is an integral part of the movie – it's essential to help tell the story. Movies like this are one of the reasons music videos eventually became so popular – images and sounds, when combined, are powerful storytellers.

In a way, it's surprising this movie ever got made. It's based on a classic science fiction story, “Farewell To The Master,” (Harry Bates, 1940) which has a very different plot. Only the basic premise of an alien visitation remains the same, and the fact that there's a robot. These are nerdy elements, and in those days they were usually relegated to the realm of the B movie. YetThe Day The Earth Stood Still was made by an A-list director, Robert Wise – which is why it also earned an A-list composer for the score, and an excellent cast and script (Edmund H. North).

Many people have seen a parallel to the storyline of the film and the Jesus parable, with Klaatu as the Messiah. At one point, he is killed and resurrected. But though Klaatu is ethical and wise beyond Human standards, his message is not one of joy and peace. Basically he's on Earth to tell us, Look, you're a bunch of destructive yahoos. If you're so petty and foolish that you have to keep killing each other, that's your business. But if you bring your conflicts out into space, we'll blast you into oblivion. The choice is yours.

He doesn't deliver that ultimatum until the very end of the movie – up until that point, most of the humans he encounters spend their time proving that his lack of faith in us is utterly justified. People react fearfully, and the government fails to approach Klaatu with diplomacy (they opt for the Scorched Earth approach). A few of the people he meets manage to win him over. You never get the impression that he hates us, just that he's disappointed that we can't grow up and get a clue. Heck, I'm disappointed by that, too. Being a member of the Human Race is like having a cousin who's a great guy – unless he's drinking.

Both Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal give their characters extraordinary depth. They come from a time when “The Theater” included plays acted on stage. In the early days of Hollywood, casting directors recruited heavily from a stable of extremely well- trained and talented character actors from that earlier tradition. This is one of the things that puts the Day The Earth Stood Still in a category above many of the Science fiction B films of that era (fun and imaginative though they could be).

The special effects are fairly minimal – just some minor animation when Gort disintegrates guns and tanks (also a soldier or two when the going gets tough). Everything else is camera angle, lighting, great editing, perfect music. I'll take these old-fashioned psychological effects over CGI any day.

Beyond the fact that it's a great Science Fiction movie,The Day The Earth Stood Still has a personal dimension for me. The first time I saw it, I was about eight years old, and my father didn't live with us. He and my mother had divorced a few years before, but I didn't know that. He served in the air force, and the Viet Nam war was still going on. I knew my father was deployed there, so I assumed he wasn't home because he was fighting in that war. I was only half right.

In the movie, Klaatu befriends a boy. His behavior toward that boy is fatherly, and I've always sensed a bit of romance between Klaatu and Patricia Neal's character. When I saw Klaatu get into his ship at the end of the movie and fly away, leaving the woman and her boy behind, it broke my heart. It still does, every time I see it.

That's why this movie makes the A list – and my list of greatest movies ever.