This pretty much sums up my world of visuals, music, movies...there are a few doozies of perfection...and this is up there at the top of the list...let's have a hand for...
Thursday, October 6, 2011
The Crawling Hand Mow Mow!
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
HOWL!!!
The Howl Triple Feature!!!
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| AWAO! Rare mexican Wolfman poster |
AWAO!
Johnny Eager
AWWWWWWWAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
ABSOLUTELY MY FAVORITE CHILDHOOD TV THING EVER.
If you grew up in the New York area & were a second generation "Monster Kid", you know the insane 70's Chiller Theater show opening...i obsessed on this for decades till the internet & YouTube appeared & i finally got to see this over & over again...i can just watch this 20 odd seconds forever...
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Bad-TV Beat: Playboy, Pan Am & the Fake Sixties
Like most folks, I kinda try to keep up with the culture. And, being a Sixties-raised oldster now, I had to tune in to Pan Am and (the already cancelled) Playboy Club, just to see how the decade would be portrayed.
This week I read an L.A. Times piece celebrating two MTV programming clods for their bold new shows, all being promoted under the network’s new slogan “Life Amplified.” Watching Playboy and Pan Am, and knowing Mad Men, I realized how right-on that line is. TV’s main riff isn’t accuracy, but embellishment, a high-gloss exaggeration polish applied to whatever subject is at hand. In the case of era-specific TV shows, the intent isn’t dramatic. It’s simply expedient: to get us to recognize the pre-screened, dolled-up signage that we’ve been taught spells “SIXTIES”; bouffants + skinny ties = Early Sixties; straight hair + tie dye= Late Sixties. A genetically modified culture crop, these Sixties look and taste like we think they should, whether they’re real or not.
So The Playboy Club, set in 1961, has Les Gore belting out 1963’s “It’s My Party” to all the bunnies and Don Draper clones. Do you really think the young-adult crowd swishing cubes in that joint would’ve given a chit to see a high-school hitmaker sing rock & roll to them? Hardly. But then I thought, ‘Hey, the club’s in Chicago. And so was Gore’s label, Mercury, so maybe’…Were Zola Taylor’s Platters warming them up in the lounge? Was Vee-Jay’s Wade Flemons valet-parking? Perhaps. But what about last week, when Bunny Mother Laura Benanti roused the club with her boob-rubbing, crypto-girl-group arrangement of the Chords’ “Sh- Boom”? Phony, yes, but it telegraphed “pre-Beatles era,” which on TV conflates everything from Sun rockabilly to the Sunrays into one big mash-up.
[http://www.nbc.com/the-playboy-club/video/looks-that-could-kill/1356307]
Gore’s club gig was but another example of a driving conceit of period TV producers. Since rock & roll/pop was the era’s big bang, we’re shown that back then everybody, all the time, consumed it all day and all of the night. So Playboy Club has the off-duty Bunnies dancing (in their lingerie) to “The Locomotion” in their rabbit hutch. It’s virtually the same scene that routinely appeared on the Eighties series Crime Story. Dennis Farina’s genial Detective Frank Torello couldn’t stop tossing twist parties at his Googied-up pad, he and his 30- and 40-something squad members and their high-heeled spouses forever squashing the carpet to Joey Dee’s latest. (This show was also Chicago-set: Was there something in the air?)
http://www.amuseline.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/crime.jpg
Twister Torello: “You should see…my little sis.”
This amplification of reality also works in reverse. As much as they need to put us in our place chronologically with visual cues, TV creators need to click the empathy tab to show us that, despite the quaint Jet-Age customs, folk then were really just like us. Hence the conversations on Pan Am where the cutesy stews of ’62 earnestly discuss their ambitions much the same as the solipsistic members of a reality-show focus group—or utter lines, as they did last week while resting poolside on a stopover, like “We’re not in Kansas anymore!” (That sentence, not known to exist in nature, is rivaled only by the deadpan “Let’s do this” that precedes every guns-drawn takedown scene on TV or film.)
As someone once said, you gotta love it. And I kinda do.
Horror Movie Hosts
I try to live like it's Halloween all year 'round and nothing quite says Halloween (all year round!) like yer old Horror Movie Hosts.
They have been wondrous & many, but THESE are the ones that warped ME at a young age:
CLEVELAND/AKRON/CANTON, OH
(All from the Ghoulardi family tree in some way)
Hoolihan & Big Chuck
The Ghoul
Son Of Ghoul (Late 90's promo - I watched him in the 80's)
Both Big Chuck & The Ghoul (Ron Sweed) worked with the daddy
of all Northeast Ohio Horror Hosts - Ghoulardi (Ernie Anderson).
Heed the Call Of The Wighat, Group, and stay tuned for more!
Sunday, October 2, 2011
WFMU Silent Fundraising
Help a sister out and make a tax-deductible pledge to WFMU's Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban during our Shock & Awetober silent fundraiser. There's a special spot for you in Hillbilly Hades (Texas Bill Strength) if you tell 'em Ichiban sent you. Thanks!!!
Two More Things About Jim Reeves
(1) This didn't really fit into my previous piece, but I didn't want to abandon it: Reeves was and remains a HUGE star in certain other countries, including Great Britain, Germany and Norway, but especially so in South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. If I may quote from Wikipedia:
"Robert Svoboda, in his trilogy on aghora and the Aghori Vimalananda, mentions that Vimalananda considered Reeves a gandharva, i.e. in Indian tradition, a heavenly musician, who had been born on Earth. He had Svoboda play Reeves' "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at his cremation."
(I'd like to note that this was entirely unsolicited, unlike Stephen Seagal's promotion to "reincarnated lama" status. I don't anticipate that any such honors will be bestowed on Trace Adkins or Lady Antebellum any time soon.)
A year or two ago, I was playing a Roger Miller album at work when a young South Asian woman walked up to the counter and asked if it was Jim Reeves. In talking to her, I learned that while she wasn't that knowledgeable about Reeves, that her parents and other family members were big fans, and that her aunt had gone to the Jim Reeves Museum while on vacation in America. Back home in either Pakistan or Sri Lanka (I forget which), this was seen as a big enough deal that she was asked to write an article for the local newspaper about her experience.
(2) On a more personal note, my grandfather was not a major music fan (he didn't own more than a dozen records and a handful of 8-tracks), but his two favorite singers were Jim Reeves and Jimmy Rodgers. He had spent some time as a hobo in the 1930s, and as a result, this was his favorite song by either of them:
I still prefer my grandfather's off-key rendering of it, but Jim does it pretty well, too.
Mrs. Jim Reeves
A couple of years ago, my buddy Robert got me this pocket date book off of eBay as a Christmas present, because of the Hatch Show Print logo. The only writing in it (other than what appear to be some notes made while doing a crossword puzzle) was the two-page spread seen below.
Examining this, I realized that it seemed to have some connection to country legend Jim Reeves; my initial assumption was that it had belonged to Jim's manager or some other close
associate, who was making notes toward figuring out what to give Jim and Mrs. Reeves for Christmas a half-century ago. A subsequent perusal of one of my vast collection of postcards would lead me to a different conclusion.
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| Mary Reeves (1929-1999) |
After Reeves' death in 1964, his wife Mary dedicated most of the rest of her life to preserving Jim's legacy , both by releasing a great many overdubbed posthumous recordings, Norman Petty-style (some perfectly good, others notably less so--- also like Petty's Buddy Holly products), and by operating a Jim Reeves Museum in Nashville for over 20 years. At some point during that period of time, the souvenir shop sold postcards of the widow Reeves, one autographed specimen of which was in my possession.
Comparing her signature to the notebook, I concluded that the book had been hers, and that the "Mrs. Reeves" in the book was in fact her mother-in-law!
Judge for yourself... it's not an absolutely perfect match, but the 20-plus year gap between the two documents, added to the different nature of a signature and scribbled notes would explain that adequately in my view.
So that's the story of my "Holy Relic", as I currently understand it. Regrettably,if this actually was Mary's, it was likely released into the world when her second husband sold off all of her property and all rights to Jim's recordings and name when she went into a rest home. Her obituary has the sad details.
Here's Mary in happier times:
And here's the man himself:
(written by his old buddy Roger Miller)
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| James Travis Reeves (August 20th 1923- July 31st 1964) |
Postscript: For any Hatch Show Print fans here in the Athens, GA area, American Letter press: The Art of Hatch Show Print is in town at the Georgia Museum of Art until November 26th.
Ichiban Means Number 1!
Ichiban means #1! from Greg Harrison on Vimeo.
Thanks to Greg Harrison for this Awesome Ichiban spot!!!
Look for it in-between shows on Network Awesome.
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