Dipped in Steel

And though they were sad, they acted quickly
And sealed his glorious head to preserve it for all time
His dead mouth slowly opened
It would be frozen, sealed, dipped in steel
Screaming thy last scream
Or breathing thy last breath
Or laughing his last, endless, infinite laugh

    “Dipped in Steel,” Flaming Lips

The new Flaming Lips concept album “King’s Mouth,” featuring narration by former Clash guitarist Mick Jones, is receiving four-star reviews.  It tells of a benevolent king who sacrifices his life to save his city from an approaching avalanche; in gratitude subjects remove his head, dip it in steel, parade it through the streets, and preserve it as a monument to his feat. “Mouth of the King” opens with these lyrics:

Even in death, the king seemed to be still alive
Into his giant mouth, come on, climb inside
And see the stars, the storms, the swirls
And other worlds that are still there in his head
Still there in his mind

I’ve been a fan of Wayne Cole and the Flaming Lips ever since their 1993 hit “She Don’t Use Jelly.” My favorite Lips song is “Waitin’ for a Superman” on “The Soft Bulletin” (1999).  A close second is “Do You Realize?” from “Yoshemi Battles the Pink Robots” (2002), which like “King’s Mouth” deals with fate and death, grief and veneration.  Marianne and Missy Brush saw the Lips in Chicago and reported that the concert was awesome.

 Richard M. Dorson

In a section of “Land of the Millrats: Urban Folklore in Indiana’s Calumet Region” titled “A Piece of the Heat” folklorist Richard M. Dorson recounts a body of persistent legends concerning workers falling into the heat.  At a temperature over 2800 degrees victims instantly burn to a crisp and become one with the 150-plus tons of molten steel. One Old Timer claimed to spot a dead man’s steel-toed work boots surface momentarily before dissolving.  Another described the smell as resembling roast pork. Some claim that workers have jumped in to commit suicide. One tale claims the image of the victim’s face appeared briefly over the kettle. Since it’s impractical, even illegal, to bury 150 tons of steel on land or in the lake, the heat is processed same as any other, the impurity negligible. In one story, a 150-pound ingot was delivered to the funeral home for burial in the man’s coffin.

 Gabriel Fraire

In Gabriel Fraire’s novel “Mill Rats” (2012), a rookie working the night shift atop a five-story high coke oven made a misstep with tragic consequences, which a veteran helplessly witnessed as the hapless steelworker lost a leg to the heat.  Fraire sets the scene:

  The fire explodes ten feet in the air.  Although Haysus is less than two feet from the flame, he doesn’t flinch.  The heat appears to wrinkle the face shield of his asbestos hood.  The asbestos suit he wears over his work clothes only keeps him from catching on fire. It does nothing to relieve the heat.

  He moves to the next oven lid, knocks it with a seven-foot long steel pole, grabs the handle off the lid with the hook on the pole’s end, and pulls the lid off, causing another fire explosion to shoot high in the air.

  On the night shift they work in teams on a row of lids.  Each man is responsible for three of the six in a row.  It takes all his strength to make it through the eight-hour shift.

A shocking “Game of Thrones” scene occurred when Dany’s weaselly brother Viserys Targaryen attempted to be crowned king.  Dany’s husband Drogo poured molten gold onto his head.

I interviewed IU Northwest graduate Martha Azcona for the IU Bicentennial Project, along with son Adam, who received an undergraduate degree at Bloomington, then took CIS (Computer Information Systems) courses on the Gary campus, and presently works for the med school.  Martha’s family hailed from Mercedes, Texas, near the Rio Grande border and were migratory workers until hearing about the availability of good-paying mill jobs in the Calumet Region after World War II. Her father Willie wanted no part of the mills and worked for Jewish grocers. Martha went to several Gary schools, including Froebel, prior to entering Horace Mann. When Willie abandoned the family for another woman, his boss, who had lost several family members in the Holocaust, warned that he’d be let go unless he reconsidered.  When Willie refused, eldest daughter Martha and her mother became seasonal farm workers to make ends meet.  She ultimately decided to attend IUN intent on becoming a nurse. 

Martha Azcona’s favorite professors were Bill May in Biology (who praised her note-taking) and Gary Martin from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (a great storyteller). While subbing at a Lake Ridge elementary school, she found the environment so rewarding that she earned a degree in General Studies and enjoyed a successful career as a Title I Teacher for the Calumet Township School District. Son Adam recalled: “I have fond memories of my sister and I doing our homework in the Hawthorn Hall hallways as my Mother watched us from the classroom while my Father worked shift work at Inland Steel when we were younger.”  Martha and her three children lived on Carolina Street in Glen Park.  Adam frequently sneaked out late at night to go skateboarding. His favorite haunt was Burns Funeral Home and later IU Northwest’s library courtyard with its slopes, steps, and railings to test one’s skill.

Nick Castellanos and Thurman Munson

As the baseball trade deadline approached, the Cubs acquired outfielder Nick Castellanos from Detroit.  He requested No. 6. as his son just turned six and Tiger Hall of Famer Al Kaline (my favorite player while living in a Detroit suburb) mentored him early in his career.  Unlike most Cubs, Castellanos rarely fans and sprays the ball to all fields. During a needed victory over Milwaukee, in the course of which Castellanos hit the ball hard every at-bat, TV announcers Len Kasper and Jim Deshaies traded anecdotes about Seventies Yankee legend Thurman Munson, who died while attempting to land his Cessna Citation exactly 40 years ago.  After urging the Yankees sign free agent Reggie “Mr. October” Jackson, the hard-nosed catcher came to despise the flamboyant slugger Once the team was forced to take a commercial flight; Munson played loud music on a boom box and threatened to punch a passenger who complained if he didn’t get out of his face.  When a coach asked him to reduce the volume, Musson snarled, “I didn’t know you were music coach, too.”  After the Sporting Newsreported that rival Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk had more assists than him, Munson deliberately dropped a half-dozen strikeout pitches, then threw to first in order to eclipse Fisk.

having read the final “Licks of Love” selection, “Rabbit Remembered,” several times, I looked for compelling passages I might have overlooked.  Author John Updike places the small Pennsylvania city of Brewer south of Philadelphia in the Lehigh Valley rust belt area where Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton (my birthplace) are located.  A generation ago, Updike wrote, Brewer was “a fast, crummy town, a town run by gangsters and crooked cops and the enforcers for the steel and coal and textile companies, a town where children could buy numbers slips from the cigar stores and so-called cathouses filled the half-streets around the railroad station [during a time] when the vast old hosiery mills were still mills and not discount clothing outlets.”  The industrialists’ heirs were now living on “the wealth of honest material industry, its machinery sold south, its employees long dismissed and dead of lead and toxic relaxants.”

Roy Angstrom, 14, Rabbit’s grandson, emailed crude jokes to his father Nelson in the aftermath of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, which focused on White House sexual peccadilloes. One such wisecrack went: “President Clinton was visiting Oklahoma City after the May 3rd tornado and a man whose house was demolished put up a sign: HEY BILL HOWS THIS FOR A BLOW JOB.”Roy thought, “After this Lewinsky business, even kindergarten kids know about blow jobs.”

Ronnie, Rabbit’s former rival, now married to his widow, has an aging gay son still hopeful of dancing in a Broadway production and meanwhile working as a ticket agency salsman.  At a 1999 Thanksgiving dinner he raves over, “The Vagina Monologues, claiming, “It’s about us and our bodies. All of us.  Men, women, and in-between.”  I recall going to an IUN production of “The Vagina Monologues,” whose cast included Tanice Foltz, describing getting in touch with her vagina. One indignant secretary walked out as a cast member told of seeing her clitoris for the first time in a mirror and saying, “Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy, that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.”

Jean Edward Smith’s “FDR,” an upcoming book club selection, weighs in at 855 pages. I’m quite familiar with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life and presidency, so hope to find a few new nuggets. One, for instance, compares FDR’s close relationship with mother Sara to Douglas MacArthur and his mother Mary Pinkney Hardy MacArthur, nicknamed “Pinky.”  Both moved into hotel suites near their sons attended college, Roosevelt at Harvard and MacArthur at West Point.  At the 1912 Democratic convention, FDR supported Governor Woodrow Wilson, who secured the nomination thanks to former standard bearer William Jennings Bryan, who, wrote Smith in a reference to Macbeth,“hovered over the convention like Banquo’s ghost.”