Invisible Themepark

Author: Lee Wallender

Death Pledge: Our Love Affair With Mortgages

Be tipped off to the fact that “mort,” meaning “death,” in French, is part of the word “mortgage.” It’s like the hired killer who just happens to let slip that he’s going to come back and kill you. Mortgage means death pledge.

The reputation of the home mortgage was burnished to a high gloss over much of the 20th century. Advertisements for home mortgage loans invariably featured warm-and-fuzzy icons: family, dogs, children. It’s all golden, beautiful, and heart-swelling. As a financial consumer, there are few acts more virtuous than taking out a home mortgage.

Mortgages are not all bad. Mortgages are applied to things that are generally good: homes. And homeownership helps to create a tighter, more caring community. Mortgages usually carry lower interest rates than do personal property or unsecured loans.

Kenneth A. Snowden is Professor of Economics at UNC Greensboro. In “Mortgage Banking in the United States, 1870–1940,” he delineates the path of the mortgage from farm to home.

Mortgages in the U.S. began in the 1870s on the farm. From 1900 to 1940, the U.S. urban population increased from 40% to 56.5%. In the 1940s, the share of farm-to-home mortgages shifted, so that the majority of mortgages were now applied to the residential market. In other words, the classic home mortgage that we all know.

Yet debt is debt, no matter how you slice it. Zillow’s United States Home Prices & Values page tells us that the average price of a house in the United States is currently $248,857. The average mortgage interest rate is 3.41% (30-year FHA fixed rate).

When you’re finished with that sucker (or when it has finished you off), you will have paid a mind-boggling $148,948 in interest. Interest alone.

June 6, 2020
Paramount Studios, 1970: Let’s Film on the Studio Today

One sub-niche of 1960s and 1970s television is the show that demonstrates the studio backlot for what it is. It’s a fascinating snapshot into the state of the backlot at that moment, with little embellishment.

The Brady Bunch ends up at a mysterious ghost town with a menacing prospector. Tumbleweeds tumble. But it’s patently obvious that it’s the studio backlot. Paramount Stage 5 nearly bordered the Western street. While scripts and planning happened well in advance, it’s tempting to imagine a discussion on the order of: “Hey, let’s film on the street today, kids.” These photos are from the “Mission: Impossible” TV series, Season 6, Episode 2, “Encore.” MI was a heavy user of the Paramount backlot and surrounding areas. This episode shows McFadden Street, the (real) guardhouse just outside of the Western street fence, a gate that I believe fronts (the real) Gower Street, and the Western street itself.

Paramount Studios, Mission: Impossible, Season 6, Episode 2 “Encore”

Facing Van Ness – Paramount Studios, Mission: Impossible, Season 6, Episode 2 “Encore”

Paramount Studios, Mission: Impossible “Encore” Season 6, Episode 2

Paramount Studios, Mission: Impossible “Encore” Season 6, Episode 2

Majestic Studios, Mission: Impossible “Encore” Season 6, Episode 2

June 6, 2020
Haverhill’s and Its Whacked-Out Ads

Haverhill’s: a weird stuff-emporium of the 1960s and 1970s, with goofy ads in big magazines like LIFE.

Let’s start with the name, stylized as: haverhill’s. Why? Because this is post-apex America and it’s time to be humble. Fonts go Helvetica on us and upper-case bows meekly into lower-case. The ad copy, too, no longer is no longer boasting and preening about miracle ingredients in gasoline or hair tonic. Instead, it’s all goofy and loopy and prone to tangents, like this for a simple serrated knife:

In our most compulsive desire to make new friends we decided to give away a whole truckload of MAC THE KNIFE…masterpiece of Vulcan’s art.

And later:

But, alas, our generous impulse was thwarted by one of our superstitious supernumeraries of officiously insisted that giving away a knife is very bad luck…

So forth and so on for a knife. A serrated knife.

Or for an AM-FM radio:

When Fred Spanberger, our Controller, returns from his cost accounting seminar at the Wharton School of Finance, he might just decree a screeching halt to this whole crazy scheme.

For a radio. If you dress it up well enough, people will buy.

At the time, Haverhill’s operated out of the very 1960s-ish address of 582 Washington St., San Francisco.

Now, Haverhill’s is operated out of a house at 16911 Grays Bay Blvd, Wayzata, Minnesota.

April 28, 2020
Fake Americana With a Topping of Grit: 4 Aces Movie Ranch, Palmdale

4 Aces, located in Palmdale, California, is every Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford and B-Minus-film noir from 1949 to 1960 wrapped up into one, big, delightful fake.

The Diner

This is where you take the woman hitchhiking in heels with a suitcase and a shady story about her father, in Chicago, kicking her out of the house, when you know it’s really something about a boyfriend or husband. The boyfriend or husband robbed a bank in Indiana, and the woman has the dough in that Samsonite.

You listen to her story all evening—before you do what you’re about to do with her during the rest of the night. The next morning, she’s dead.

4 Aces Motel

Jan-Peter Flack created a movie ranch that specializes in just one look, one slice of Americana that still seems to be hanging on. It’s Atomic Age America but with the door open and the sand beginning to sift inside and the decay starting to happen.

Even though it looks like a refurbished motel and diner, 4 Aces was apparently built in 1997, from scratch, and was first used for the Lenny Kravitz video for “American Woman.”

4 Aces Motel Room

Another 4 Aces Motel Room

April 27, 2020
Joe Biden, Magnificent Trojan Horse of the Democratic Party

Few Presidential candidates have appeared to be faltering more than Joe Biden. The U.S. Presidential election is seven months away, and Biden’s prospects look dismal. His cognitive abilities have been up for question these last few months, with Biden losing his train of thoughts mid-speech several times.

Biden has long had a reputation for being the drunk-uncle-at-the-picnic type, a “lovable deviant,” according to the Washington Post in relation to The Onion’s portrayal of Biden. The Onion famously portrayed Biden as a freewheeling, unpredictable man of the people in its Diamond Joe series of articles beginning in 2009 when Biden was Vice-President to Obama. Shirtless Biden Washes Trans Am In White House Driveway is the first and the funniest of this series.

To combat accusations that Biden is a bit too touchy-feely, not the man for America, The Onion has been put in the uncomfortable position this spring of keeping the series live on the site while simultaneously walking it back. Writer Joe Garden wrote on VICE that he regretted creating the meme.

Whether the product of a secret master plan or the product of circumstances, Biden might be the vehicle for a different, better-qualified Democrat to assume the office of the President. Call it the Joe Biden Trojan Horse Project?

Michael A.Walsh in the NY Post article “How the Obamas Could Easily Win Eight More Years in the White House” describes the inner workings of this machine with conspiracy-thriller-like detail.

It could go this way. Joe Biden is elected, survives the November-to-January stretch to the inauguration, then quickly abdicates to his Vice-President by dying or stepping down due to health reasons.

Are there provisions in the 25th Amendment to prevent a political party from slipping in their true choice under the Vice-President guise?

What about a President who, desperate to please his or her party, agrees to be killed soon after inauguration?

Or a party that, without agreement or knowledge by the President, kills the President to slip the Vice-President into that position?

April 21, 2020