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Actionable Offenses: Happy Father’s Day! This morning I had an early flight from Dallas to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and as luck would have it, a summer storm rolled through, delaying my flight by more that two hours. I finally made it out of town without incident until I reached the Pennsylvania Turnpike where I turned left instead of right. This caused me to wind up in the middle of the U.S. Open at Oakmont. I ate dinner with my oldest daughter Kelly, her husband Kurt and granddaughter Madison on Friday night and today had calls from Megan, my youngest daughter, and from James, my son. James is training in Ft. Dix, New Jersey for his re-deployment to Iraq in September. I also had FDP (Father’s Day Presents) from Joyce. Jim Morrison would have been envious because of the Lizard Theme. What I did not get, and thank heavens I did not, was Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s. Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s is a CD full of… well, just as the title suggests. I was driving on Saturday listening to NPR’s Saturday Edition. There was a filler story about a whale that was found to have a harpoon tip embedded in its blubber. The harpoon tip was of a type not used in over 115 years! The estimate of the whale was 130 years old. This story was a segway into the story about lewd recordings from the 1890’s. Producer David Giovannoni and writer Patrick Feaster talked about the project with Brian Itsky. They explained that neighborhood bars would have these recording and patrons would pluck down a nickel in the phonographs. The recordings are extremely rare because of the zealot Anthony Comstock (1844 -1915). He is responsible for the Comstock Law that banned obscenity. The actors reading the script, the bar patrons, the bar owner, and bartenders were all subject to arrest if these recordings were found in the establishment. This made me wonder about some of the places Holmes frequented when he was on a case. The recordings were certainly shock-jock worthy. One of the interesting points made my Mr. Feaster, who is a Folklorist at Indiana University, was the fact that even if these recordings had not surfaced their existence would have been predicted. According to Mr. Feaster pornography is the first in the pipeline when a new media arrives. There are plenty of examples in early photographs and cinema. Pornography was also the first to use VHS, Betamax, and DVD’s. I suppose we have the dear literary agent for keeping all of the Sacred Writings rated PG. To hear the NPR program, go to: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11131880 Happy Collecting!! |
