Sometimes I forget how weird the culture of the Seventies was...

...and then things like this bring it all back.

Why don't bands ever break up any more?

[Update!  I was preparing this rant last week, but never got around to publishing it--but now, one of the biggies has given up the ghost.  Maybe this will inspire the others to pack it in!]

I remember when I was young and there were a bunch of old geezer bands from the sixties and seventies that kept staying together and touring and putting out horrible new albums, etc--the main offender was the Rolling Stones with their awful eighties records, but then there were lesser bands like the Moody Blues and their godawful "In Your Wildest Dreams" song and (Jefferson) Starship with the singular "We Built This City".

At the time, I never realized that the contemporary hipster bands of the eighties would decide to stay together to milk their aging fan base forever, too.  The appropriate behavior for a group would be to put out one good debut album, and follow it up with 1 to 4 albums of lesser quality and then break up as a way of arresting their decline.

Here are a few of the main offenders:

U2 (together 35 years!  First single released 31 years ago)

Adam Clayton always looked awful, didn't he?

R.E.M. (together 31 years)

The mopey look that influenced countless jangle pop band photos in the 80s

Sonic Youth (still peddling their hipster cred after 30 years)

Hey, it's that guy from Stranger than Paradise!

Did you forget they ever looked like that, after all these years?  What ancient bands do you wish would just stop?

I have but one question:  Why isn't Obama doing something about this?  I am so disappointed in him!

Dept. of Not Trying Hard Enough

I haven't seen one picture where the young guy has his
collar buttoned--surely he doesn't show up
to work this way? Oh, wait--he's a rebel!

There's a new-ish BBC drama called "The Hour" now airing on TV in the US.  It's their attempt to get in on the Mad Men retro-vibe (we're also going to get the US efforts "Pan Am" and "The Playboy Club" this fall--I give them about six weeks).  I'm the perfect audience for something set in that time period, since I know a lot about it and find it endlessly fascinating, but I'm also the worst audience for a present-day writer, production designer, actors, etc., since I can get very distracted spotting all the anachronisms.

I tried to give this one a chance last week, but it lost me about five minutes in.

Here's a description of the show's premise:

A spy thriller needs a spine as stiff as James Bond's martini to nickname a character Moneypenny. BBC America's retro-hip “The Hour” — which airs at 10 p.m. Wednesdays — certainly has the nerve, and occasionally even the punch to back it up.

Set in a BBC newsroom in 1956 — more excuse than necessary to doll itself up like a “Mad Men” theme party — “The Hour” doesn't improve on its obvious inspirations.

It deserves points, however, for knowing how to pick them: A show-within-the-show is called “The Man Who Knew,” as if adding “Too Much” would be exactly that.

The show is a tasty cocktail of “Front Page” repartee, soap opera romance, murder mystery and Cold War intrigue, all set to a score that sounds like Henry Mancini warming up for “The Pink Panther.”

The six-part series stars Ben Whishaw as Freddie Lyon, a talented, hotheaded BBC writer working alongside his beautiful, ambitious producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai).

He calls her Moneypenny, after the flirtatious secretary in the Bond films. She calls him James, and together they dream of Important Journalism. 

There's a big stinking anachronism right there--and one that apparently gets repeated frequently--the Freddie/Bel James/Moneypenny nickname thing is super el-wrongo.  While Ian Fleming had been writing the 007 books since 1953 (3 or 4 of them published by 1956), the whole Miss Moneypenny routine isn't in them--it started in the first film, Dr. No, in 1962. (It also seems like a cheap shortcut to spelling out the relationship these two characters have with each other.)  It may sound over-picky, but to me it indicates that the writer wasn't that interested in dipping her toes too deeply into any real research, and the whole thing is going to be a kind of glib pseudo-historical cartoon--like a 1970s TV-movie about the forties, with guys with blow-dried hair.  

I initially (way back in 1997) watched Mad Men with this jaundiced eye, but found that they rarely let these kinds of boners (no, I mean it like this) get by, and then I got really caught up in the show, because it's good, and Matthew Weiner and company are actually trying.  Historical accuracy has traditionally not been a hallmark of movies and TV (and every other medium of fiction), but there seems to be a trend toward making an effort in that regard.

The trick with writing historical fiction is really caring about getting into the time period (and the way people interacted and spoke to each other--it's not only about trivial details).  If you're not interested in doing the work, you should stick to things you've actually experienced.

Cheesy historical smoldering

Apparently everybody was deadly serious and very sexy at all times back then...

Rockin' Out in the Napoleonic Wars

Last night I started watching the first movie in the Sharpe TV series of the 1990s.  It stars Sean (Boromir) Bean as a lower-class soldier in the British Army who gets a field promotion to Lieutenant while the Duke of Wellington is battling with Napoleon's armies in Europe.  It was enjoyable, and I think somewhat historically accurate, but there's one choice the producers made that rankles for me.

10 minutes of my life in Microsoft Paint produced this

 Part of the soundtrack includes a rockin' mainstream 90s electric guitar, which sounds so anachronistic that it almost takes me all the way out of the circa 1809 setting.  I've heard guitar on period films before (I'm thinking of Ennio Morricone's scores for sixties Spaghetti Westerns) and not been bothered by it, but in this case, it really doesn't work for me.

This is social conditioning based on 40+ years of watching movies, where everything is artificial, but there are conventions which are usually obeyed.  And it's not as bad as anachronisms in dialogue, or hair, or clothing, etc.  It's more of an aesthetic choice.  It wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't hate hearing the sound of 80s-90s mainstream music!

Despite that, I liked it (the episode, that is)!

The internet, 15 years ago

The other day, I was telling Beebo about how Google managed to kill every other  search engine when it came along in 1998, due to its competence in working, something which had been sorely lacking in the previous engines. The story below is illustrative of what a different world it was back then:

Browser Deals Push Netscape Stock Up 7.8%

TECH WATCH

April 01, 1996|

From Times Staff and Wire Reports

Netscape Communications Corp. shares rose 7.8% Friday amid expectations that agreements with five Internet search companies will boost the software maker's revenue. Netscape shares rose $3 to $41.50 on Nasdaq after trading as high as $42.50.

Netscape, maker of the most popular Internet browser software, agreed to feature Excite Inc., Infoseek Corp., Lycos Inc., the McKinley Group Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. on its browser and World Wide Web page.

The five companies, which make software that helps people choose sites they like on the Internet global computer network, are expected to pay as much as $5 million each, for a total of $25 million, to Netscape, industry executives said.

News of the agreements, concluded March 20, began to trickle out early last week. "Perhaps people are just beginning to realize now what this means for us," Netscape spokesman Jennifer O'Mahony said in explaining the stock gain.

Yahoo!, Excite, Infoseek and McKinley [what is this?] each said they agreed to pay $5 million for a one-year agreement with Netscape. Lycos officials declined to comment.

Of course, Netscape (as Netscape) is no more.  It's odd that a search engine would need to pay a browser for prominent placement -- but the rules were different then.  Nobody knew (pre-Google) how to find anything on the internet.  Hence the brief period of books being published telling you what websites were hot.  Now that would seem really pointless and temporal.

The Hidden Horrors of the Seattle Underground

Kolchak!

Last week, I managed to find a copy of the out-of-print DVD The Night Stalker/The Night Strangler, two early-70s TV movies starring Darrin McGavin as intrepid investigative reporter Carl Kolchak.  These were both ABC Movie(s) of the Week, and the first one was the highest-rated TV movie of its time (hence the sequel). Stalker has Kolchak on the trail of a vampire in Las Vegas, but the second one is more interesting to me, because he's after a sort of undead being that lives in the Seattle Underground and is killing young women in Pioneer Square!  It's pretty rare to get to see a horror movie set in the city where you live (though in Seattle we have another good one -- The Ring).

Here are some of the local details and mistakes I liked best about it:

J.Pflug!

• The first victim of the strangler is waiting at "St. James" street at 3 am for a bus to her home in the "Shoreline Park" neighborhood, after she finishes her gig at a strip club in Pioneer Square.  In reality, it would be James street (or 3rd Ave, really) and the Shoreline neighborhood.  Also, good luck catching a bus at 3 am in Seattle.  And I'm not sure why she would live so far from her job--why not get a place that isn't 12 miles away?
• Another dancer at the club, (played by Jo Ann Pflug), is a student at the UW (a scene is filmed in the Red Square!), and lives on a houseboat, like every fictional person who lives in Seattle.  She takes a motorboat to get to her classes--I guess walking or ride a bike along the Burke-Gilman trail is too mundane.
• There's a scene a bar where all the Seattle journalists are alleged to hang out.  This is a fictional device, but it was fun to speculate what this could be--the bar at Vito's, or Victor's 610, or (more dive-ily) Bernard's on Seneca, a place that seems to reek of 1972.
• The founder of the Seattle Underground tour, Bill Speidel, makes an appearance in a scene filmed in a Pioneer Square bar call the Blue Banjo, which was a real place (I had to google it during the movie to find out).  Later it was called Doc Maynard's (and now seems to be closed, except as a starting point for the Underground tour).
• There seems to be some filming in the real Seattle Underground....
• ...But the final scene takes place in an entirely fictional and huge fantasy version of the Undergound, with tall buildings and a working wrought-iron elevator.  I learned from Wikipedia that it's the interior of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles.  It's kind of steam-punk (if you will), and it's the way you wish the Underground would be, if you've ever taken the tour.

I highly recommend The Night Strangler to anyone who likes goofy horror movies and has lived in Seattle.  Good luck finding it!

Yep, I still hate him

VH1 TV Shows | Music Videos | Celebrity Photos | News & Gossip

Green-o

Isn't this a lovely tie?  It's a mid-sixties Brooks Brothers green paisley number just under 3 inches in width.  I've been on a paisley kick lately, so I've been picking them up cheap on Ebay.  Green is one of the most elusive tie colors, which makes this one extra-interesting.  I haven't bid on this one, since it's above my target price (which is around ten bucks).  For some reason, the seller has categorized it as "1950 50S Rockabilly Skinny", which is not accurate.

Visually, it speaks to me of an era where a guy would naturally wear a tie on ordinary occasions, but wants to show that he's a hip dude, so it's an unusually-colored groovy pattern.  This same guy might also be sporting some modest sideburns to show that he's not uptight (even if he is).  It's a perfect moment in time--attuned to cultural changes, but not fully given in to the slobby excess of the seventies.

Office Humor

I made this cartoon for Beebo last winter while she was still at her old job.  Her department was moving to a shiny new building where the peons were all going to get worse offices, while los big-shots got better ones.  Normally, I am weary of Star Wars references, but sometimes you just have to go there!

Foulard's Ideal Evening of TV

Why can't we have shows about middle-aged guys in suits on TV anymore?

Boring Postcards from My Hometown (and one interesting one)

The monkey ship at the zoo! I remember there being alligators swimming around in the water under the monkeys, but I think I must have made it up, because who wants to take the chance of seeing a little monkey get eaten by an alligator?

Snob Toys of My Youth

As a vaguely Anglophilic and pretentious child, I was drawn to the upscale imported toys I'd see behind the glass case of the toy store in the town where I grew up. Here are some of the ones I found appealing:

Corgi cars. These were a natural, since they licensed retro sixties favorites James Bond, Batman, and the Saint (among others that I didn't have). The Bond and Batman stuff is still around, and very well-known, but I also had (and later lost) these:

The Saint's (aka Roger Moore's) Volvo P1800:

On the show, he doesn't have his famous logo painted on the hood

A Land Rover from Daktari, a show I never saw:

Note 'Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion'

There were also various other non-licensed things, like a London taxi, etc.

More later!

Dead Technology

I stumbled across a couple of boxes of these:

at work this morning (I just scanned this one). I had a brief, unconscious sensation of making a great find--in the mid-eighties to mid-nineties, having a 'brick' of high-quality cassettes felt like a real treat to me. However, I sidewalked my dual-cassette deck years ago, and now I don't even burn as many CDs as I used to in the mid-2000s. Most records I bring to work travel via a 4GB memory stick, and music I play at home originates from my PC and gets sent through the air to my stereo.

However, this is not a nostalgia post! I like getting and listening to music now more than ever*, thanks to the ease of downloading interesting old out-of-print vinyl from creative bloggers. I'm not one of those people who's 'killing the music industry' by getting the new [insert name of popular artist here] album for free. I've just bypassed the commercial aspect of obtaining music by getting the kind of music I like (which other people don't) from other people who like it even more than me.

*This is not to say that I don't miss 'record stores' from the time when they were viable, especially in the pre-internet commerce era. I do! But as my tastes got more obscure and stores dwindled and reduced their depth of stock, I stopped getting much out of them.

I TEACH YOU HOW TO LIVE

(these last three posts are all ads from RAYMER'S LATEST OFFICIAL MAP OF SEATTLE "Seaport of Success" WASHINGTON (1913), which I found on Google books. Beebo and I have just moved into an ancient (by Seattle standards) apartment, built in 1905. These are some things I found while doing a little internet research...

p.s. No scrub children!

A Snack or a Meal

I found this photo online while looking for pics for a prospective blog post on my favorite (defunct) vintage clothes stores. This, however, is a tiny old-school diner that was down Beacon Street from where I used to live (and work) in Brookline, Mass. It exemplifies the sleepy, boring quality of that neighborhood, where I lived in my early 20s. It was funny living there, since I (and my friends) wanted to go out and do fun things all the time, but were surrounded by the most middle-aged, bourgeois surroundings possible. Heh heh! Now that I'm middle-aged and bourgeois, I live in a much more lively and happening neighborhood. What up with that?

Guess who has a new autobiography?

Looks fascinating. Are you going to read it?

The Sophisticated World of Barbie and Ken

A song from Barbie in her pre-Malibu days. This Barbie sounds like she went to Bryn Mawr, got a job at Knopf, and then got engaged to Ken, a promising young lawyer at a respectable Manhattan firm. They lived in a charmingly ramshackle apartment in the village for the first year of their marriage. Then they moved to Greenwich and Barbie quit her job to raise their two children. Sadly, Barbie and Ken got divorced in the mid-seventies. Barbie explored EST for a while, and Ken grew a beard and moved to Los Angeles with his former secretary.

"Hurry up, Babs, or we'll miss Mulligan's first set!"

The don't do TV like this anymore!

Who knew...?

...That J. Peterman was still in business? I thought they'd gone under 10 years ago or so. Same old catalogue descriptions, too:

Hemingway's Cap.

He probably bought his in a gas station on
the road to Ketchum, next to the cash register, among the beef jerky wrapped in cellophane. Or maybe in a tackle shop in Key West.

I had to go to some trouble to have this one made for you and me but it had to be done. The long bill, longer than I, at least, ever saw before, makes sense.

The visor: deerskin; soft and glareless and unaffected by repeated rain squalls. The color: same as strong scalding espresso, lemon peel on the side, somewhere in the mountains in the north of Italy.

Ten-ounce cotton-duck canvas. 6 brass grommets for ventilation. Elastic at back to keep this treasure from blowing off your head and into the trees.

Hemingway's Cap (N^o. 1537). Sizes: M, L, XL. Price: $39.

(He probably got change from a five when he bought the original.)

[this is not a paid ad--I'm just saving you the trouble of clicking on the link]