the rix mix

Labels: Atlantic City, boardwalks, culture, jersey shore, postcard

We knew The Beatles were coming months before they arrived here.  I was suspicious. I liked rock & roll.   I liked many kinds of music. I didn't have a great cultural or emotional investment in rock & roll.  Those early Beatles singles & the LPs Meet the Beatles & Beatles Second were enjoyable, but they didn't bowl me over.   The Beatles' music seemed too slight to support the madness.  & then there was the marketing: authorized merchandise, Beatles wigs, lunchboxes, dolls, pinup magazines etc. etc. aimed at 10-12 year old girl demographic. Manager Brian Epstein wanted his band innocent enough that parents would buy the crap Beatles merchandise for  the little girls. What happened in high school was a bit different. I was 15, a sophomore.  The 14 & 15 & 16 year old girls I knew who fell in love with one or another of the Beatles did so with self-aware & barely disguised lust. All Epstein needed to sell them were the records & record jackets & some glossy photos of the boys. Their photos were in all the magazines.

My favorite single of 1963 was  Candy Girl b/w Marlena,  by The Four Seasons.  two sided hit bigger in Philly & Atlantic City than NYC.  I had been impressed by some of the songs, vocal harmonies,  on Surfer Girl album.  I thought the Beach Boys & Seasons could cover each other's songs. My favorite LP of '63 was either a movie soundtrack or Stan Kenton's Adventures in Jazz." I was fond of Martha & the Vandellas.

Some kids in my high school detested  The Beatles. There was a serious Fifties hangover   teen culture in my h.s.,  plus leftovers of the folkie hootnanny, which continued to move songs into the top 40, neither of which I much appreciated. The Fifties influence had become parody. The Beatles broke over those like a tidal wave.  That's why I liked The Beatles. As a little kid immersed in the malt shop world of Archie Comics &  Ozzie & Harriet, I had envied teen culture of the mid-Fifties because it had Elvis, plus doo wop & Buddy Holly.  Elvis was a transformer. I must confess to also liking Bob Denver's gentle teen beatnik Maynard G Krebs from Dobie Gillis.     But Elvis meant almost nothing to us in 1964, beatniks were disappearing, there were vestiges of doo wop in the top 40 but lacking the purity & ethereal qualities  of the music that had enchanted me in grammar school. Occasionally a decent song popped out an Elvis Movie. The Beatles were our Elvis. I recognized that much & embraced the change. Soon enough more  music flowed from England, like The Animals' great "House of the Rising Sun." Had to put up with Gerry & Pacemakers & Freddy & The Dreamers &  other forms of mindless profiteering inspired by The Beatles.  Bobby Vee compared to Buddy Holly. The first Beatles LP I bought was the soundtrack to A Hard day's Night with the George Martin instrumentals.

The Beatles in California smoking pot with with who?


At the end of 1964, The Beatles released Beatles '65,  an LP I loved,  initiating a period of about two years when The Beatles recorded & released the finest series of now classic records ever from a band or artist, from "No Reply" & "I Feel Fine"  to "Help!" & "Paperback Writer," "Drive My Car," "Rain,"  "And Your Bird Can Sing" all the way through Rubber Soul & Revolver.  Beatles 65 made me a real fan \of the band.  It was when rock & roll became rock.  Even the lp cover pix were cool, with the umbrellas. The speed of The Beatles' musical evolution, while under  the incredible pressure  of  needing to produce more "hits,"  touring,  & making two movies, was proof of their genius. Because of The Beatles,  The Four Seasons  made better records, The Beach Boys made wonderful records. The Beatles inspired the creation of The Byrds,  making folk music palatable & hip.   & The Beatles turned Bob Dylan from a rock dabbler into the greatest white American rocker since Elvis.  The Stones would be along as soon as they finished urinating on the gas station attendant, or so the story went.  The Stones or maybe their fan club passed out buttons that said, "Let's Lock Loins."  It became getting more & more difficult for the profiteers to keep a handle on the teenybopper market. Ultimately it lead to the The Monkees. & even they became too uppity. But that was a long way ahead.

At the end of August 1964 I missed my one chance to see The Beatles live. Wasn't a sure thing, but it was a chance.  Another story.
I don't paint a clearly enough picture of the the "Kairos" of the cultural moment, the "right time", a "coming together" (a German theology termI learned three years later in a college religion class), which included John Coltrane; movies A Fistful of Dollars, Pink Panther, Goldfinger, Dr. Strangelove, The Masque of the Red Death; Cassius Clay Vs. Sonny Liston; debut of Terry Riley's "in C" (not released on LP until 1968); the 1965 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City; plus my dad's only political campaign, won against the Johnson landslide.

Labels: culture, growing up, music, Roselle Park, TV

At my age, my indignation counts for little.  But if you create a culture of hopelessness, comprised of boredom & emotional numbness, expressing the belief that change is impossible in a society split into economic & political extremes; sexist, violent, mocking of self & of the consumers of mere "product" (willing participants), you will raise up demonic powers to fill the moral vacuum. You did not create the vacuum, but you dance around it, daring it to suck you in & destroy you. It will, eventually. An enraged, despairing populace will use democracy to do it & in the process vote its freedoms out of existence, leaving the worst exploiters, the invisible ones, the truly guilty, untouched. Yes, that was Miley Cyrus & her collaborators on the VMA show.

Labels: bully pulpit. war more war, culture, in the news

By Peter Guralnick. Second book in  massive two volume biography of Elvis. The first, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, took the story up to Elvis' induction into the Army. This one goes the rest of the way.

 But for a few well-made movies & the '68/'69 comeback, this book is so bummer I read it as fast as I could. For all the careful research, the message is  pretty much "what you saw is what you got." From the time El came home from the Army (where he became permanently hooked on pills) there wasn't a prayer of getting through to him, not a chance he would become the kind of "serious" actor he fantasized. Everyone in his insular life was an enabler, including Colonel Parker, banished if they weren't.

He was incapable of sustained intimacy - not just sexual intimacy. Most of the Memphis Mafia were thugs. When the one thing that could keep him focused & creative became unimportant, his music, he was doomed.

I used to blame the Colonel for driving Elvis through those mid-Seventies tours & Vegas engagements when he was a bloated, sick addict & his fans - until the very last year - were such indiscriminate consumers of his increasingly ugly performances that Elvis felt as much contempt for them as he did for himself. But without the income both he & Parker really would have gone broke, realizing his father, Vernon's, worst fears. Elvis went, quite literally, insane. He was incapable of making sound, rational decisions. By 1975 a  judge may well have concurred & allowed his family to force him into rehab. Which of course they wouldn't do because Elvis was supporting hundreds of people & handing out cars, houses, jewelry & bags of money on any whim. The relatives & hangers-on lined up with their hands out. RCA had numerous opportunities to sue Elvis for delivering bad product or no product at all, Nowhere in the book does Guralnick say RCA was losing money on him. The profits kept on coming.  Elvis earned $60 million in 2011.

Perhaps the only thing that could have changed the outcome would have been a bust of him & his entourage for the massive amounts of drugs (including cocaine) & firearms they carried around on tour, across state borders. But he was Elvis Presley, not The Rolling Stones. Every cop at every stop was hoping for a new Cadillac. It is pointless to be discriminating about Elvis now. Love him or leave him be.

Guralnick is the kind of writer who doesn't analyze his subject, ot tell us  what Elvis is thinking, or imagine conversations, all part of Nick Tosches' style.

Labels: culture, Elvis Presley, music, what I'm reading

The annual St. Cecelia Church Fair, more commonly remembered  & promoted as the Iselin Fair, was held  in July on a large lot in Woodbridge NJ.  It was very popular. An incredible number of attractions were packed  into the space.  In addition to the carnival rides there was a midway with games of chance,  two  crowded beer tents (one favored by Harley bikers), a simplified roulette wheel where you could gamble & win real money.  Food was the centerpiece,  a line of open tents arranged down the middle of the fairground with the usual burgers & hot dogs, ribs, deep-fried pizza,     seafood, & other stuff I don't remember. Live entertainment. In the 90's  I stopped by on my way home from working at the Pearl Arts Supply store on Saturday night, bought some 50/50 chances (the pot was huge), & stayed until the grand drawing closing the fair.

Enrollment at St. Cecelia's School declined, probably along with the number of parishioners   available & willing  to organize & staff  the fair. The demographics of the area became so heavily Indian that it's now famous for Indian restaurants, bakeries, sari shops, & an India Day Parade. The school was finally closed, ending  a local tradition that had existed for  seven  decades.

There are still good fairs in Jersey - some large county fairs, numerous smaller fairs  sponsored by churches & volunteer fire depts., a big state fair up in Sussex County  with livestock displays, pig races,  pie contests & massive traffic jams on two lane roads leading to it. St. Cecelia was the best one in my part of the state.

Video from Gary Perry.

Labels: boardwalks, culture, New Jersey, video

Frankie & Annette. No last names needed.

The first Beach Party movie was released in 1963, just as  I was entering full teenhood. There were plenty of good songs on the radio in 1963, but even I knew what passed for teen culture was generally bogus, product created by adults for teen consumption. The rock & roll Revolution of the mid-Fifties had been suppressed, the crazy rockers tamed or banished to country music & the Black radio stations. The Beach Party movies had little connection to the teen culture I was becoming  part of at the time, except that they happened to be part of teen culture merely by existing & being shown in local theaters.  They were staples of late night weekend TV for decades afterward. Frankie & Annette were hardly Southern California surfer types (they were "greasers," although we didn't use that term*),  were musically irrelevant (as was Elvis, for that matter), We laughed at Annette's frozen doos & obsession  with protecting her "virtue," but she was never an object of scorn. Everyone loved Annette. We'd all been fans of the Mickey Mouse Club. The movies themselves were harmless, funny - Harvey Lembeck's biker outlaw character Eric Von Zipper was great, & they were  filled with Hollywood's best jiggly go go dancers.

By the summer of '64 everything had changed, with the assassination of JFK & the arrival of The Beatles & the Brits.  The change was so great that something like a generation gap opened up between my sister & I, & she was only two years older, Class of '64.  But the beach party movies & the various spinoffs & imitations went on until 1967.

In 1987 Frankie & Annette reunited in a  funny parody of their old movies, Back to the Beach.   According to Frankie, Annette was showing early symptoms of multiple sclerosis, but he didn't know she had the disease & she may not have known it yet. She announced she had it in 1992, to counter rumors she was an alcoholic.

It might seem that Annette's immense talent  was underused. But she herself chose not to become an "adult" performer. She could have made sitcoms & dozens of made-for-TV movies  &  had a great Vegas & nightclub career for sure - definitely in tandem with Frankie Avalon, who still works Atlantic City. She just dabbled -  specials with Frankie, guest appearances on Love, American Style  & Fantasy Island. Apparently Annette really was Annette, not someone playing a character named Annette. I'm sure she ate Skippy Peanut Butter, & sold a lot of it.

Annette Funicello, died of complications from m.s., age 70.



*In my school the guys favored leather jackets, high roll collars, tight Italian cut pants & leather jackets, styled haircuts,  in contrast to the "collegiate" madras shirts & khaki  pants & "dry" look hair cuts that came in with the Beach Boys. They  were often called "hoods," an inaccurate, disparaging term, since most were just regular guys & we mixed quite freely in sports & socially, some of them were good  musicians I later played with in garage bands. 

Labels: culture, growing up, movies, music, obituary

Why has Jodie Foster's rambling speech the other night generated so much controversy?  My immediate impression was that she had had a couple of cocktails & was having some fun with the audience. Do we really care if she's "out" out?

Has any star  ever led a truly secret life in "Hollywood"?  Is it ever a stretch for gay or lesbian actor to play a straight character?  Well, maybe Paul Lynde, who didn't try, even in Bye Bye Birdie. One of my favorite TV raconteurs,  the late, great Charles Nelson Reilly (also a genuine theater person, largely unnoticed by all except other actors & theater people), told hilarious stories on the Tonight Show about being gay in Hollywood without actually saying he was gay, & with less of Paul Lynde's bitch queen act.

Reilly astonished me one night long ago when he came on The Tonight Show to promote The Belle of Amherst, a wonderful one woman show he directed with Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson (& 14 other characters). Of course, he & Johnny didn't dwell on that subject for very long.

Labels: culture, sex, TV

Labels: culture, TV, video

The older I get, the more annoying nostalgia becomes. People express nostalgia for every freakin' thing that isn't around anymore. Crappy songs. Ugly hairstyles. Uncomfortable clothing.  They're feeling sentiment for an era when they were younger. What's nostalgic about a rotary dial phone? Not for the era, but for the machine itself? Sure, they're cool-looking. It's a classic, functional design.  I thought the introduction of touch tone was great. I remember the hassle of dialing long distance. If you dialed too fast your finger slipped out. If you dialed too aggressively you pulled the phone off the desk & it fell on the floor. The phone company was a monopoly. You rented phones from your division of Bell Telephone  or a small regional company that somehow escaped Ma Bell's  grasping tentacles.  Every extension phone was counted & charged for. I don't miss dial tone phones.

Labels: culture, growing up

Labels: art, culture, sex with a Republican, THE election

America 1930












America 2012

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, culture, media madness, religion, THE election

Labels: culture, growing up, New Jersey, postcard

Couldn't resist linking to this classy, attractive couple attending the Elizabeth NJ High School prom. Photo was in the middle of a gallery of 50.

BTW, I do not like the trend toward jacketless tuxes. When you wear only a vest, you look like you should be carrying around trays of appetizers. 

Once, miraculously, a tux rental store actually did the alterations they said would do. Before attending the wedding I asked my date if I resembled the little man on top of the wedding cake. She said I did. I said, "Then I'm perfect."

Labels: culture, education, Elizabeth NJ, Mahalo, photograph

Funny, Carrie's Bar & Grill  just posted this video, & I posted same one a  few weeks ago for a friend's birthday.
The TV show is in Idaho (1958), only two couples know what to do when they pass through the line. In my town, where American Bandstand ruled, no teenage couple would join the stroll line unless they had some little dance step - or a whole routine - worked out.

Labels: culture, music, TV, video

If you said, "Plus-sized Indonesian woman meets soft butter," I'd say, "Oh yeah, I can definitely get with that scene." I wouldn't be expecting this scene:

Labels: art, culture, video

A guy I was pretty good friends with in high school made a good living for awhile  working for the radio side of Dick Clark Productions, before moving on to other profitable radio jobs.  The last time we got together, lunch in a Jersey diner, we had almost nothing to say to each other. I respected his career in commercial radio at the mic & then  in management & consulting, as he did my alternative radio experience, but there was little connection between the two, even musical. We both went away disappointed, I think.

Dick Clark became a success in his twenties with American Bandstand,  lived a long time. & was already a kind of living legend in the 1970's. He cultivated the image, no one really minded. When my older sister was 11, 12,   she went directly home from school every day to watch American Bandstand from Philadelphia on a black & white TV. It was broadcast live. She knew all the most "popular" kids on the show by name. They were celebrities. She was typical of Bandstand's audience; not-quite-teenage girls who bought records with their allowances. Dick Clark was a famous man. He genuinely liked teenagers. Never talked down, never lectured or moralized on Bandstand. (although he authored a book on dealing with the difficulties of teenagedom, when teenagers were still perceived as young adults, maybe adolescent versions of Dick himself. By the time I was a teenager we considered ourselves a separate species.).

Dick Clark sold a lot of Clearasil in his day. 

I don't think Dick Clark had any special commitment to rock & roll. The impression he always gave me was that he didn't particularly care what comprised the Top 20 or Top 40 provided he was somehow making a buck off it.  If he was making a buck, it was "rock & roll." His advancement of it was more a matter of timing than personal taste.

Dick great gift was as  a creator of no-budget, pure profit TV.  Take hit records, construct teen shows around them. Take  "bloopers" from regular TV shows,  turn them into a weekly TV show . Solicit funny home videos, build a program around them. Invent "awards," invite celebrities to dress up, show up & collect them. Appropriate New Year's Eve in Times Square, sit there like he thought up & organized the whole falling globe thing, pre-tape a New Year's Eve "party" to fill the time between ten pm & midnight.  Dick didn't create "content," he invented formats, contexts.  He did executive produce some peculiar movies, including Psych-Out, about hippies & starring Jack Nicholson as "Stoney." Dick Clark was all-American.

Labels: culture, music, obituary

Dave Roskos, poet, publisher, editor, event & reading series organizer, saves everything, which now makes him a historian & archivist of Jersey's "alternative" poetry scenes, particularly New Brunswick. There was traffic between the alternative venues & 'zines & the "establishment" poetry scenes around the NJ State Arts Council when it funded individual poetry fellowships (very few 'zine poets received grants), The Dodge Poetry Festival, The Poets-in-the Schools program, & some college-based scenes. There were also middle-ground reading series like Barron Arts Center in Woodbridge (in the '80s & '90s a complete social scene that extended post-reading to the Director's home or a local bar. It's where I met Dave Roskos) , Barnes & Noble stores, etc.  More poets from the alternative poetry scene participated in establishment activities than establishment poets (most of them college & school teachers) ventured into the punky bars of New Brunswick. Only a few were truly successful  straddling both; it took a good deal of effort.
Top-billing usually meant you went on last. Most poets coveted this. When top-billed, I often requested to open the reading. Organizers generally didn't mind.  I  am not a demonstrative performer & I preferred not following a theatrical poet. In any case, I was always anxious & I found it difficult to listen to & enjoy the poets preceding me. I didn't want to second-guess my poem selection & fight urges to change it based on what other poets were reading & the reception they were getting.

The Court Tavern reading was the only time I read with David Cope, a Michigan poet,  one of my oldest friends & literary allies. It was a thrill for me, & Dave remembers having a great time in the packed, smoky downstairs room at The Court.  Dave loves New Jersey. We took Dave to Asbury Park at its blasted nadir & he loved it, saw right into it.   Dave & I, though very different, touch at some  crucial points in the how & why of poetry that make our poems go well together. Michael Pingarron was a gifted Latino poet who survived a terrible accident that nearly killed him, had to regain his power of  speech, went on to finish college,  became a schoolteacher in Newark, & died when he tripped walking his dog outside his apt building, concussing his head on a curb. A great loss.

Labels: about writing, culture, New Jersey, poem

Ravi guilty on all counts in webcam spying trial


NEW BRUNSWICK — The deal was on the table months ago.


Plead guilty, prosecutors told Dharun Ravi, and you likely won’t go to prison.

Ravi, charged in a first-of-its-kind prosecution linking invasion of privacy to a hate crime, rebuffed the offer, opting to take his chances with a jury.

Today, in a New Brunswick courtroom filled to overflow, the 20-year-old Plainsboro man learned the consequence of his choice as a jury forewoman spoke his fate.

Guilty.

Guilty of invading the privacy of his Rutgers University roommate, Tyler Clementi, by using a webcam to remotely spy on an intimate tryst between Clementi and an older man. Three days after that encounter in September 2010, the distraught teen leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge, catapulting the case into the national spotlight.

Guilty of witness tampering, hindering apprehension and tampering with evidence.

Most significant, guilty of bias intimidation, a second-degree felony indicating Ravi targeted Clementi because he was gay and knew his actions would hurt him.

In a precedent-setting verdict that legal experts and advocates say draws a firm line against bullying and harassment in a wired world, the jury convicted Ravi of 15 counts that could land him in prison for a decade. He also faces the possibility of deportation to his native India, from which he legally emigrated as a child.
***
In December, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office offered him a plea bargain including probation, 600 hours of community service and an offer to help avoid deportation, but Ravi, rejected it. His attorney said he rejected it because he is innocent.

He either received  bad legal advice or, my guess,  he got good legal advice & didn't take it. He should have taken the plea bargain. I would have said, "Kid, you don't seem to understand, but they're going to try to make you the LAST teenager in Jersey who pulls a nasty stunt like this. You alone are Tyler Clementi's justice. He'll have buildings named after him, concert halls.  Your own justice, whatever you imagine that to be,  doesn't figure into this at all.  You are the message. You can be that message working in a homeless shelter or hospice & become a nobody, or  be that message in a packed courtroom, Dharun Somebody,  &  go to jail,  where saying you're heterosexual is an old joke, & from jail  you'll be transferred to the  I.C.E. detainment center next to the airport."

Labels: culture, in the news, New Jersey, Rutgers

Thinking of the late Peter Bergman & Firesign Theater.  Firesign  Theater's best albums were popular with college potheads from 1968 to 1973. Multi-layered & cyclical,  you never quite got to the bottom of them. The world of Monty Python was absurd. The world of Firesign Theater was absurd & sinister. There was a darkness  & paranoia in Firesign's comedy, a response to Vietnam, Johnson & Nixon, assassinations, domestic surveillance of the youth countercultures by the federal government.  Firesign Theater introduced me to an intriguing historical concept:  The only explanation for the way things were was that The United States of America must have lost World War Two. Meaning the American people; along with  the British people, the Russian people, the German people & the Japanese people.  We Americans thought we were fighting for the Four Freedoms as well as the right to organize unions & collectively bargain.

So who won? President Eisenhower put a name to the winners: The Military-Industrial Complex, a loose global consortium  of corporations &  various government defense & security agencies that  controls every major government in the world.  Individual crazies want to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth & bomb Iran back to the  Bronze Age, but these end game war scenarios are dangerous & unprofitable. The long war with no clear winner is the ideal now.

The other thing was how easy it was to create visual images in the minds of radio listeners, using the cheesiest effects. If you play a recording of ocean surf & seagulls in the background & say you're broadcasting from the Jersey shore, everyone knows it's a fake, but they'll see beach & gulls anyway. Listeners have no reason to resist seeing it. I'd test it on myself. & since few listeners have ever seen the DJ/host, changing your voice changes whatever image they have of you. I had a very authentic sounding gravel voiced guy from Bayonne I brought on from time to time. His name was Gregory Ginzouac. Using sound to fool with visual images kept me interested in radio during weeks when I really felt like smoking a joint, kicking back & playing Neil Young for three hours & to hell with "free form."

Labels: culture, obituary, WFMU

One of the most famous cruise ships of the modern era, the former Pacific Princess, is heading to the scrapyard, according to Italy's La Repubblica.


The news outlet says the 40-year-old vessel, recognizable to millions of Americans as the "Love Boat" of 1970s television, has been sold to a Turkish demolition company for just over 2.5 million euro -- about $3.3 million at current exchange rates.

The ship is tiny by today's standards. & contemporary, informal "free style" cruises on giant cruise ships don't encourage the busy-body, gossipy relationship situations that were the staple of plots on The Love Boat - there were three stories in every show.  Also, you're no longer expected to pack evening clothes to attend the final night Captain's Gala Dinner/dance. Or maybe you are, but hardly anyone thinks that's cool anymore & actually goes. One of the few reasons I wanted to be wealthy was so I could own a tux & have occasions to wear it. (On The Love Boat, formal attire was worn in the ship nightclub.)

But The Love Boat was sort of the era's Dancing With the Stars, a place where fading movie & TV stars & other assorted  celebrities gathered for paychecks - definitely easier than DWTS. The Love Boat signed up these guest stars literally  by the hundreds for cruises on The Pacific Princess  (although only the two TV movie pilots were actually filmed on cruise ships). So many stars (check out this one intro, Elke Sommer is a totally hot 40 year old), so much love, the disco beat & trumpet intro to the cool theme song that pulled everyone into the  living room to see  the guest star mug shots inside the porthole, & Ted Lange mixing tropical cocktails as "Your Bartender." I'm bereft.

Labels: culture, TV, video