beyond the roots of lounge

Or 70, or 100. Annotated excerpts from the Los Angeles Times through the 20th century--articles, ads, photos, long-forgotten features at The Daily Mirror blog are on our must-read-without-fail RSS list.

Yes, because in our considered opinion, a blog featuring material drawn almost exclusively from the morgue of the LA Times (Mirror, etc.) is the best section on the entire LA Times website. After all, isn't the LA Times really the Chicago Tribune, with a side order of Daily Variety and a soupçon of Sunset Magazine?

Apparently the original brief was a blog about vintage crime stories, but Black Dahlia enthusiast and LAT copy editor Larry Harnisch decided at some point that the stuff originally published near (or stored in the same file cabinet as) the crime stories was just as interesting. It's a time machine: it's 1908 and somebody is being lynched; a really posh hat is marked down to $3.95 or over 80 of today's dollars. It's 1938, dateline Berlin; great local history feature called "Nuestro Pueblo" and Harnish Googles the present-day view for us. It's 1958: Dodgers baseball, Lana Turner, ads like the one above.

Wow...Carmen Dragon, father of Daryl--of The Captain and Tennille--Dick Clark and...Rod McKuen? A Lounge trifecta. Image respectfully borrowed from The Daily Mirror, and long may we gaze upon our past in its reflection.

Coinciding eerily with the recent passings of Isaac Hayes and Jerry Wexler, the excellent 2003 documentary Tom Dowd and the Language of Music is now playing on IFC. Dowd recorded and produced most of Atlantic Records' huge stable of iconic jazz, r&b, soul and rock acts during a career in music that started in the late 1940s and continued right up until his death in 2002. A preview:

One is a Stuben crystal owl from the early 70s, as pictured in The Complete New Yorker; the other is the classic duck decoy that fun-loving preppie book dealer Bunny Tomerlin uses in her link to this site. [No chartreuse needlepoint belt with little pink cocktail glasses?--Ed.] It's the ad content and the products as seen in The Complete New Yorker that make it such a compelling time capsule of retro social history, East Coast WASP division--the Mad Men milieu minus the plot and character development.

We can hardly make it through a J.D. Salinger short story or an epic 40,000 word article on the history of grain in TCNY without becoming hopelessly sidetracked in a fruitless online search for some long-discontinued product (hell, product category) or an extinct manufacturer of swanky, cool or high-end goods (or any U.S. textile mill)--because whatever "they" are, you name it, they ain't makin' 'em like that anymore. We discovered Bunny, connoisseur of prep, via Brandland USA, a site devoted to the forgotten goods, failed products and dead brands that frequently render that great American pastime that you may know as "shopping" such a frustrating exercise in futility for some of us. You know who we are: we eschew all bed sheets with a "hand" like jersey, flannel or "sateen," so when you see us in the linens department of Bed, Bath and Beyond, our fists clenched and pointed to the heavens, no Chinese or Indian textiles manufacturer is safe from the sound of our wrath. "Percale!" is our cry. "Per-CALE!!!"

(Hey, a guy who worked with Trey Parker for many years knew a thing or two about bad taste.) As we mentioned previously, Isaac Hayes (1942-2008) was the winner of the 1972 Oscar for Best Original Song--and the first African-American to win an Academy Award in any category other than acting. Tom O'Neil of the LA Times has the story of how "Shaft" prevailed that year over works by the likes of Johnny Mercer, Henry Mancini and newcomer Marvin Hamlisch.

If you have not yet seen the outstanding documentary Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story (which premiered just over a year ago on PBS), check out this officially-sanctioned preview:

This just in: new profile of Sid and Marty at the LA Times.

It's pretty clear these days that any idiot can write a song [Raises hand.--Ed.], because now any idiot can also share their work with us (or have it "shared"), resulting in a massive surplus of musical product and a pronounced paying-customer deficit. The whole enterprise has been spoiled, literally, for choice.

So congratulations to the genius at the NYT who made killing the mystery--in this case, of songwriting--the avowed purpose of an arts column. (An arts column that resides, for perhaps a business-related reason, in the opinion section.) Songwriting, yes: there's a curtain that needs pulling back, a public service right up there with a behind-the-scenes series covering meetings of the Times editorial board.

Like most "writing," the solo songwriting process is a big head trip, and it should stay that way; what happens when the antenna is up isn't all that interesting per se unless it happens to be unfolding in the head above your shoulders. Besides which, words and music are just the raw material. It's what arrangers do with, or to, a tune after it escapes the originating head that makes the magic happen, down by the corner of the ridiculous and the sublime where the sign has been modified to read "stop snitching!"

Read all about it, if you must. Listening to multiple versions of the same song is our idea of much more instructive fun. Like, say, Isaac Hayes' "Theme from Shaft "--the Academy Award-winning title song from the 1971 film that launched blaxploitation. (You will find a way to hear numerous versions of "Shaft" and a lot more going on at one of our new favorite sites, Ultra Swank.)

Above, two giants of the ridiculous/sublime paradigm, both perfectly capable of arranging their own work: self-proclaimed "greatest songwriter" of the 80s and major-sevenths fan Paddy McAloon duets with Jimmy Webb (on Webb's "Highwayman"). The writer of many of the most glorious (and a few of the most gloriously cringeworthy) works in the 60s pop canon, Webb has already lifted the hood on his approach in his own book (hey, he wasn't a millionaire at 21 by accident), and we probably won't be seeing the reclusive McAloon revealing his "process" in the Times anytime soon--because a guy who can croon "hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque" with conviction clearly knows how to keep the lid on as tight as it should be.

In 1961 when you turn on the car, does the radio come on? Can we find that out?

From the NY Times Magazine, a profile of tightly wound Executive Producer Matthew Weiner, the hand that rocks the Xerox 914 on Mad Men. He cares, deeply, about whether or not it's the right period typewriter (car, book, hair color, line of dialogue), even though that's not all the series is really about. Along with behind-the-scenes details about the guy who obsesses about the details, the piece also includes the perspectives of some of the real ad geniuses who created memorable campaigns of the 60s and 70s, after they parted the WASP curtain so strikingly depicted on the Peabody Award-winning period drama.

Follow all the latest Mad Men gossip from two obsessed sisters at Basket of Kisses. (Above, from an ad for Ford, The New Yorker, issue dated Feb. 3, 1962.)

Those who remember the 70s, and viewers of the CBS drama Swingtown, in which the Pete Campbell generation of Mad Men and their Obama-cohort kids confront the in-your-face sexual mores of the decade. But is it a Swingtown and a miss? [Imagine if impressionable Peggy had moved herself to Chicago's North Shore and settled down there with some nice guy circa 1962...and 14 years later, she finds herself right across the street from another Joan.--Ed.]

What's not to like? Well, unlike Mad Men, which usually busts out one emotionally telling licensed pop song to play out each episode's end credits (ala The Sopranos), Swingtown's overbearing soundtrack is literally stuffed with so many period tunes (and period-ish, Fleetwood Mac, we're looking at you) that some bulk licensing deal is no doubt in play.

Despite the much-hyped soundtrack involvement of the much-hyped Liz Phair, we heard one non-licensed cue in the entire pilot. Perhaps they blew the whole music budget on episode one, so that Phair and her crack team of actual composers will make their presence heard in however many future episodes are allowed to air before the series is unceremoniously pulled due to ratings that sink lower (and faster) than the proverbial pearl in Prell.

Above, for your viewing..."pleasure," this New Yorker ad from 1973 with enough appropriately hideous "text" (look! it's a Dutch college professor in the world's ugliest tux!) and creepy subtext (and what's he doing with that little Italian girl?) to kill a summer session of AP U.S. History.

Here's Mutato's musica in the best recommendation for Martini on-the-rocks since the days of Burt and Angie:

The time of "Howl" and "On the Road" was also the time of "Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely" and the original "Ocean's Eleven," and although by many measures a taste for the product of North Beach is incompatible with a taste for the product of Las Vegas, the Beat Movement writers and the Rat Pack entertainers were shapers of a similar sensibility.

--The New Yorker, October 1, 2007

Even the casual reader can not have failed to note that by its very existence, this site contends that "Beat" and "Vegas" are not only compatible, they are two sides of the same coin.

That idea was originally supposed to lead you to YouTube clips parts one through four of SCTV's "Maudlin's Eleven." Best Rat Pack Parody, Ever--and as the original uploader says said, better than the original. And right now, you can't watch it online.

Which leads us to our next point. By their continued pointless scouring of thar Interwebs for every last unauthorized clip and snippet, the entertainment industrial complex is shooting itself in the foot. Well, strike that--they've long since shot off both feet, now they're gnawing at their own legs.

You do not punish your audience for their promotion of your product. You capitalize on it. Let's just use SCTV as an example (there are several legitimate clearance issues with that program that you can read about elsewhere if you're really interested, but we'll leave those aside for a moment). When you the rightsholder see that users want to post their old VHS home-recorded snippets of your thirty-year-old TV show on the Web, you should see that as an opportunity to serve ads for your DVD retrospective product (if you're bright enough to have one out there) right on that page, directly to the people who might be interested in buying that product from you. This is win-win: casual user is exposed to your property, connoisseur becomes aware that a legit product is available, collector buys that product immediately right from the "buy it now" link in your ad. It's not "stealing," people--it's marketing, and that's how you need to do it in this here Internet age. The people are telling you what they're interested in having access to. Open up your vaults and let the $un shine in.

Also, Big Media, while we have your attention: this subscription model you think will magically wind the clock back to the days of hookers-and-blow is never going to work. You need to do compulsory license deals with the cable companies and the telcos, the folks who already have their hands in your audience's pocket each month. For a variety of reasons, we the people do not wish to engage with every rights-holder on Earth through a series of separate continuous subscription fees so that we can rent your works. We want to buy high-quality and legit copies of the products we wish to own, at a reasonable (read, cheap) price. And to get us to do that, you have to let us use your stuff...to promote your stuff. A few minutes of low-res Flash video or an uncrippled MP3 on the Web is no real threat to the legit product. It is a promotion of the legit product. Your audiences want to help you promote your products. Make more legit products available (simultaneously, in every territory) and then please get the hell out of your users' way, so that the real Internet marketing revolution can finally begin.

Hey, Lola Heatherton's got your terms of service right here, punks...find "Maudlin's Eleven" "somewhere" and watch it; we'll keep looking too.

On Mad Men, we rant because we love, at blogcritics.org.

Many online comments about this series nitpick this or that detail of the costumes or props or express genuine outrage at the characters' "excessive" drinking and smoking — so many, on so many different sites, that a segment of the audience seems in danger of fact-checking itself right out of a very good story indeed. Like a certain WWN stalwart, some of these viewers seem mad, "pig-biting mad" about Mad Men. We're not going to let their anger get in the way of our good time.

We are toasting the memory of songwriter-producer and authentic American character Lee Hazlewood (1929-2007) with some "Summer Wine," as seen on Swedish TV. (Update--see Nancy Sinatra's Nancy & Lee photos at The Sinatra Family Forum.)

In honor of the continuing Mad Men goodness, here's a classic Mad Men-era ad from one of the medium's masters, satarist Stan Freberg--ironically, one of the least-Mad ad men of them all: he had scruples and did not shill for the makers of alcohol or tobacco, two of the hardest-working props in the Mad Men universe.

Broadcaster, model railroad enthusiast and philosopher Tom Snyder has passed away at age 71.

My God plays 18 holes every day,
and he loves martinis and beautiful women.

--The Late Late Show, February 27, 1996

Broadcasting, the Web and now the world are all a bit more boring without him.

We can't summon up a great deal of moral outrage at the news that U.S. shuttle astronauts have allegedly reported for launch while under the influence of an as-yet-unspecified amount of alcohol. (How schnockered were these brave souls, really? Were they a little blurry from the night before, or were they actually too drunk to float straight?) Does the shuttle crew really "fly" the vehicle at launch--isn't mission control running that show from the comfort and safety of their consoles, while the astronauts are the ones strapped to giant tanks of flaming rocket fuel, hoping their lives aren't cut short by a stray piece of styrofoam or a faulty rubber gasket? No, we're not going to begrudge our modern-day Magellans a little (or even a big) taste of liquid courage before they report for that duty, and neither should their bosses at NASA. Nursing a hangover in zero-G while they negotiate the intricacies of the on-board toilet should certainly be punishment enough.

The ad men of AMC's Mad Men smoke, drink and wench their way through astute social commentary on the early 60s. (The more things change, the less things really change.) The costumes and production design are also astute, almost enough so to make us consider coming back as Mad Men in our next lives, too.