Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 3

There's quite a lot of drama in this one:


"Of all of the strange rooms full of wicker," scowling turtleneck man thinks. But what will happen next? What does Madras Blazer Woman have hidden behind her big lapel? A gun? Or a squirt bulb to shoot water out of that big flower?

We'll never be able to know - Marshalls was bought out by Macy's last year. It's like when a television show is cancelled right after a big cliffhanger.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 1

I have a feeling we're going to be looking at a lot of clothes this time through. But such clothes!


What other decade would someone go to a fancy dress party in a pair of "tunic top pyjamas?"

But enough of that. I think that if all I am going to do in this segment is wheel out another outfit and say "Whoooo! Old fashion! People used to want to wear that!" it is going to get old fast.

So I'm going to take a moment looking at the Lord and Taylor logo. I grew up in a part of America that did not have Lord and Taylor as a mall anchor, so I didn't have a chance to see the logo evolve. If you go to the Lord and Taylor website, you can see the same logo, now much more stylized. Here, it just looks like someone sat down with a fountain pen and scribbled it out. It seems more sincere that way.

By request! Honest!

Great moments in concert videography

The Violent Femmes try to make the cameraman sing along, 1984

Oh, this old plot again.

"Lt. Torolf Magnusson and his team of Navy SEALs have gone back in time to eleventh-century Norselands on a search-and-destroy mission, but when they find they've landed in the middle of a sanctuary-filled with women-well, hoo-yah! Their plans are put on hold, much to the distress of Hilda, the head of the sanctuary. At first resistant to Torolf's pursuits, she soon succumbs to his passionate advances. But with victory in sight for Torolf, Hilda must face the fact that their love may not survive the test of time."

Defeat zombies with your magical psychedelic pants

An actual Levi's ad from the 70's

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for these meddling kids and their enormous mope.

Thank you to my kind readers for all the examples of television detectives who are enormous mopes!

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - The streets of where I'm from are paved with hearts instead of gold

Spender - "Homecoming" - January 8, 1991

There always seems to be a need for shows about the police to constantly be re-inventing the genre. It seems that every few years a new show comes out that promises to finally show the truth and grit of the lives of the world of crime (We have reached the point where, with Life on Mars, one of the unspoken tropes is that the show is so gritty that it is no longer legal for the Police to engage in the gritty truthfulness that you are about to see.)

As we will see as I go back and forth in televisual history, the ground that is being broken might not be as significant as it seems at the time.

The ground that seems to be broken in this first episode of Spender falls into two categories:

1. A confirmation of the existence of Newcastle
2. Of all the variations of quirky detective/policeman personalities, it is harder and harder to create a personality that is at once recognisable, but yet new and interesting. After all the quirky, hard boiled, and however many variations of straight arrows the genre can manage, in Detective Spender we have a new type - an enormous mope.

First, a bit about Newcastle.

I grew up in a depressed industrial city that is located in what well-paid political consultants tend to refer to as "America's Heartland." Because of this, a lot of this episode's "So, you've come back for a visit, eh?" tone really hit home with me. The Newcastle here has that same feel - that mixture of "We're just as good as that la-di-da metropolis that you've left us for, we have everything that you want, you just never bothered to find out" and the "We're better than that la-di-da metropolis that you've left us for, because we don't have all that stuff that they have -- It means we're more honest and real." I also know what it is like to go back and look up old friends - you see that passing of time more clearly when you've been away.

I suppose I'm doing more to talk about the second point - Why is Spender such an enormous mope? I do get it. Here in my la-di-da metropolis I have become skilled at playing the "naive milk-drinking Midwesterner" card. It's a good trick. (I enjoy making up completely nonsensical regional slang just to watch the reaction.) I imagine that, in London, he came to use his "well, I'm from the North and we do things like this" as a tool, rather than as a detriment. So tossing him back into Newcastle takes away that edge.

So anyway, as much as I understand it, I do not understand the plot. Such as:

1. The initial incident that sends him to Newcastle is so obviously an equipment failure that nobody could possibly find fault with him.
2. He is reluctant to have his children stay with him, as he is going to be working on police work, thus making them vulnerable. They know who he is, and he hasn't been to Newcastle for a while, so they must have come to London and stayed with him while he was a policeman.
   
3. His method of purposely screwing up is to tip off the mob boss that he is meant to help bring down that he (the mob boss) is about to be arrested. The mob boss declares that he will have revenge on Spender for saving his neck.
4. Meanwhile, the police chief that Spender screwed up for to get himself fired keeps him on.

One of the things about first episodes is that they are more set up than sense. There are a lot of balls in the air here. I'm curious to see how they all come down.

Listening to the World - Afghanistan (revisited)

When I had a look at Afghanistan radio, I mentioned that I had signed up to Arman FM's mailing list, so I could find out how they are doing. They, or their hired spam-bots, sent me this link to their live feed.

I will say again that I do not speak the language, so I am not certain what is going on, but it sounds to me like they are holding a contest where the callers have to sing a pop song from memory. If the caller doesn't sing the song correctly in time, then time-bomb sound effects start to go off.

Considering what I referred to before as Afghanistan's "infrastructure problems," I have to say that this is the most guts I have ever seen from a pop radio format.

I also note from the link that the Afghans are raising money amongst themselves to give to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Boy, does that make me feel proud to be an American.

I despair for a moment. Then I recover.

It seems that I will continue my lifelong streak of celebrating the annual Eurovision song contest by waiting until a few weeks after it is over and then saying "Oh, I completely missed Eurovision again."

I think that the only reason I am fascinated with Eurovision is the fact that I live in a country where I am able to let Eurovision pass by utterly unnoticed.

In any event, I discover today that Eurovision finals will be May 12th, and on that day I will be away from the internet. Luckily, I can go to this page at the BBC and have a look at the contenders.

I am particularly non-plussed by the UK entry, which is a camp little ditty called "Flying the Flag" to be preformed by a group called "Scooch." Take a moment now to soak in some of the lyrics, and remember: This is a songwriting contest.

Flying high in Amsterdam
Why don’t you catch us if you can
Now we’re cruising in the sky
And we’re singing it for you

Ba-ba-da, Ba-ba-da, Ba-da-da-ba, ba-da
Some salted nuts sir?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Ba-ba-da, Ba-ba-da, Ba-da-da-ba, ba-da

We’re flying the flag all over the world
Flying the flag for you
Would you like a complimentary drink with your meal sir?
We’re flying the flag all over the world
Flying the flag for you…

Anna Williams

The other evening, I was happily plowing my way through an overview of British History, when I came across a brief chapter on Samuel Johnson. Towards the end of the chapter, we learn that after the death of his wife, Johnson filled his house with what seemed like a happy bunch of misfits including "blind, ill-tempered poet, Anna Williams."

What a way to go down in history, I thought.

Anna Williams (1706-1783) is, so far as I've found, out of print. There seems to have been one collection of her work put out during her lifetime, Miscellanies, published in 1766.

I was able to rustle up a copy today over lunch and had a quick peruse. At first glance, much of it seems worthy of having been left to the side of the canon, but this one struck me as interesting, at first simply due to the subject matter, but also the sentiment behind it.

On the DEATH of STEPHEN GREY, F. R. S.
The Author of The Present Doctrine of ELECTRICITY

Long hast thou born the burthen of the day,
Thy task is ended, venerable Grey!
No more shall Art thy dext'rous hand require
To break the sleep of elemental fire;
To rouse the pow'rs that actuate Nature's frame,
The momentaneous shock, th'electrick flame,
The flame which first, weak pupil of thy lore,
I saw, condemn'd, alas! to see no more.

Now, hoary Sage, pursue thy happy flight,
With swifter motion haste to purer light,

Where Bacon waits with Newton and with Boyle
To hail thy genius, and applaud thy toil;
Where intuition breaks through time and space,
And mocks experiment's successive race;
Sees tardy Science toil at Nature's laws,
And wonders how th'effect obscures the cause.

Yet not to deep research or happy guess
Is ow'd the life of hope, the death of peace.
Unblest the man whom philosophick rage
Shall tempt to lose the Christian in the Sage;
Not Art but Goodness pour'd the sacred ray
That cheer'd the parting hour of humble Grey.

Listening to the World - Åland

I'll start by noting that as I understand it, an "A" with a circle over it is different from a normal "A" and comes at the end of the alphabet. But I don't alphabetize things in Wikipedia, so off we go.

Åland is a group of islands between Sweden and Finland. It seems to be one of those territories that has been bounced back and forth as nations conquer each other and now finds itself in a strange semi-autonomous limbo. Currently it is an independent protectorate of Finland even though the inhabitants, as far as I can tell, tend to self-identify as Swedish.

Anyway, most of their radio fare seems to be Swedish, which makes sense, as they are reasonably close to Stockholm. I'll get to Sweden eventually.

The one radio station that I could find with a web feed is this one. It seems to be mostly talk. The day that I spent listening I got an opportunity to listen to an interview with Torsten Sommarström (unless he was the interviewer). The person being interviewed seemed to be an older gent, and he was talking about San Francisco. The discussion was interspersed with the occasional polka, so that was sort of nice.

Åland, meanwhile, looks like an excessively cool place. I come to realize that I am a sucker for groups of islands that I've never heard of before.

intermittently asked questions

Traffic to my small plot of the internet has been increasing steadily for the past few months so I thought I'd lay out the info.

Is Xenius Jones your real name?

No. I explain more in this post.

How do you pronounce Xenius?

That's a good question! I've been thinking "Zenius," but I suppose that Keeler was thinking of "Genius."

I don't understand the name of your blog, what does it mean?
I drop that info twice, here and here.

Why do you need three blogs?

This is my main blog. I decided to have a separate blog for Doctor Who because I thought that I would be able to make posts without having to explain to non-Doctor Who literate readers what I was talking about. Ants in Your Plants of 1941 was set up when Blogger was migrating to Beta and I was afraid that I was going to be shut out of my primary blog. I'm keeping it for things like the 1912 project that can take advantage of the multiple labels.

This sentence makes no sense. What does it mean?

I frequently write in fits and starts, coming back to a post after a few days and picking up a sentence from where I left off. This means that occasionally something that I write will go haywire. If you see something like that, please let me know.

This entire post makes no sense. What does it mean?

Sometimes I like to use obscure references to make obscure jokes. If a post doesn't make sense, please let me know.

How do I let you know?

You can add a comment or shoot me a line at x*e*n*i*u*s*j*o*n*e*s(at)g*m*a*i*l[dot]c*o*m.

What's with all these different projects?

The short answer is this is how I keep myself thinking of something to write about. I have no deadline for any of them, I'm just chugging along at my own speed.

Can you explain what they all are?

I've set up a seperate post to do that here.

The things I get up to

The Comic Strip Project

I will watch every episode of The Comic Strip Presents in order and comment. I'm done with everything but the extras - the dvd was gouged by one of my machines.

The 1912 Project

I scan and post the ephemera from my Great-Grandfather's trip to Europe. This is on my secondary blog, Ants in Your Plants of 1941.

Buying the New Yorker

The first go through (Buying the New Yorker 2006) was my idea to find the answer to the question, "If I were to buy absolutely everything advertised in this issue of The New Yorker, how much would it cost?" Now I am using the same format to look at every ad in the issues that came out every decade prior to my first issue. It isn't as complex as it seems.

Lyricblogging

I take a song and put up a post of commentary for each line of lyrics. I've only managed to do this once. It's hard to find a song that will hold up.

Reading Hitchcock

I read the source material for every film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Listening to the World

I listen to an internet radio station from every country on the planet Earth. (Of course, if you can find others I'll happily listen to them too.)

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives

I watch and comment on British action television. Luckily, I have no set agenda for this one.

O.K. I'm going to comment. Sort of.

One of the things that I didn't comment on in the last post was the fact that there are now ten feature films based on the Pokemon franchise.

I, being an inquisitive sort of goof, decided that I needed to figure out if there were different plots for the various films or if they all followed some sort of formula.

My researches brought me to the Wikipedia entry for the first film which has the following moderator flag:

This article or section contains a plot summary that is overly long.

I am no longer worried about the differences between the ten movies.

Offered without comment

Sarah Brightman is singing the theme song to the soon-to-be-released tenth Pokemon film. You can hear a snippet of it in the newly released trailer for the film, which is currently hosted exclusively on Brightman's official Japanese website.

Last year's model

I somehow found my way to this archive of photographs from Nico's pre-Velvet Underground modeling days.

I am particularly amused and delighted by this:

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering... Um, Well

In some circles, "The Eye of Argon" is legendary for its compensation of enthusiasm for skill.

All knowledge of measuring time had escaped Grignr. When a person is deprived of the sun, moon, and stars, he looses all conception of time as he had previously understood it. It seemed as if years had passed if time were being measured by terms of misery and mental anguish, yet he estimated that his stay had only been a few days in length. He has slept three times and had been fed five times since his awakening in the crypt. However, when the actions of the body are restricted its needs are also affected. The need for nourishmnet and slumber are directly proportional to the functions the body has performed, meaning that when free and active Grignr may become hungry every six hours and witness the desire for sleep every fifteen hours, whereas in his present condition he may encounter the need for food every ten hours, and the want for rest every twenty hours. All methods he had before depended upon were extinct in the dismal pit. Hence, he may have been imprisoned for ten minutes or ten years, he did not know, resulting in a disheartened emotion deep within his being.

Go read the whole thing. It is astonishing.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - Interior Front Cover

Here we are with the first ad for the January 19th, 1976 issue, and we are leaping into the proper atmosphere already.I will presume that Quantum! has gone out of business. Interestingly, 1411 Broadway is the Albuquerque address of a company called UniRac (They make PV Mounting Structures). UniRac's brand new CEO was once the Vice President of a California-based computer company named Quantum.

In any event. These are some outfits. It took a bit of scrutiny to be certain that the golfer wasn't wearing a hard-hat. It's a pity that it isn't - that would be a good look.

Buying the New Yorker 1986 - Back Cover

And it's a damn good thing they forgot the coffee. If everyone in the passenger section had a piping hot Styrofoam cup of joe when the plane pulled a maneuver like that, it would be ugly.

On to the historical:

The National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia, founded in 1927 , is an independent Non-for-profit organization for the collective of over 560.000 coffee growers of Colombia. Within Colombia, the Federation provides a network of agricultural expertise and quality control to insure the highest standards for Colombian Coffee. Around the world, Federation offices work with appropriate trade and media channels within each country to promote the consumption of Colombian Coffee.

I pulled that quote from juanvaldez.com

Here is the page on juanvaldez.com that you can go to to see television ads that are contemporaneous to this print ad.

And on to 1976!

And so "so it goes" goes.

I wake to news of the death of Kurt Vonnegut.

I have been half dreading this event for some time as I have long anticipated my annoyance at the inevitable overuse of the phrase "So it goes" in his obituaries.

Buying the New Yorker 1986 - Interior Back Cover

For all the Marianne Moore car naming story fans out there: "Toronado" is a made up word.

Buying the New Yorker 1986 - page 88

I was all prepared to presume that this little newsletter was long gone, but I kept finding old articles like this one in the New York Times that mentions Passport:

In existence for 18 years, Passport is for the sophisticated, experienced traveler who cares more about comfort and cultural attractions than expense. Each month subscribers get the eight-page Passport newsletter plus an ''extra'' - sometimes a two- to-four-page special report called Visa; sometimes a booklet such as the recent one on 132 unusual museums in Europe.

Passport's publisher, Moris T. Hoversten, believes in brevity and frankness, whether laudatory or critical. For example, a Visa report in March on a new Caribbean resort said: ''We recently spent four days there. Glad to leave in spite of the fact that it's one of the most beautiful settings in the Caribbean. Several other people also glad to leave. Felt they were being gouged and treated like second-class citizens.''

Moris T. Hoversten began to sound like an interesting fellow, so I kept digging to see what I could find. And look! I ended up finding the magazine!

I tried to dig around and find a good cranky snotty review to quote, but it costs $89 to log in. Toss in another ten bucks and you get the actual magazine sent to your house and everything!

"Striped and Baggy." That pretty much sums up my entire wardrobe in 1986. One of the reasons that it has taken me so long to get this post up is that, God is my witness, I swear that I saw this exact ad in a recent issue of The New Yorker. The fact that I have not been able to find it proves to me that I have now been doing this long enough to have gone insane.

And I think HWW LTD has gone out of business. Pretty hard for them to be putting ads out if they are out of business.... Unless that's what they want me to think!

Questers had a website for a while, now you can buy their domain for as low as $14.99. Rainbow Falls is probably still there: the thing is I don't know which one Questers was going to take you to. There's one in Tennessee, one in Hawaii, one in Ontario, one in Washington State, and I could probably find ten more if I wanted to spend another half hour or so looking for them. Perhaps they had found 32 places named Rainbow Falls and only did tours to them. That would be confusing, but sort of fun.

And love that font in the header by the way.

Occasionally, in moments of frustration, my parents would explore the possibility of taking advantage of some form of boarding school. I suspect that The Tasis Schools were not on their radar, as they were in the market for something more inexpensive and needlessly punitive. I am particularly struck by the fact that here we see them advertising the day school option for the younger enrollees. In order to take advantage of this, one would have to live nearby (or hire someone to live nearby) so that young Schmedley can go off to day school. Many of the schools seem to have gone by the wayside, leaving only schools in England, Switzerland and Puerto Rico. I tried to come up with some droll statement about the third location, but nothing that I can come up with can hit the right target.

I have to say that I find these last two ads completely adorable. The one for Ponte Vedra Beach looks like it came straight out of the fifties. Ponte Vedra is interesting historically in that during World War Two, it is the site that a German submarine successfully landed and unloaded a team of spy saboteurs. These spies split up across America to wreak havoc, but didn't get terribly far as their leader, thinking better of this whole wheeze, went off to the FBI and ratted the whole bunch out.

They also have golf and tennis.

"Books-on-File." "Since 1958." Write them a letter with a title of a book that you're looking for and they'll write you back with information about how hard it might be for them to find it. I have a bad feeling about this.

Listening to the World - Akrotiri and Dhekelia

Wikipedia says:

Akrotiri and Dhekelia are two areas on the island of Cyprus that comprise the Sovereign Base Areas Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom. The bases were retained by the UK following the transition of Cyprus' status from a colony in the British Empire to an independent Commonwealth republic within the Commonwealth of Nations. The United Kingdom retained the bases arising from the strategic location of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea.

The upshot is: no independent radio from this entity, it's all British Military rebroadcast hubs and signals from Cyprus.

Rats.

Great moments in web-based book marketing

If you haven't seen this site, for Miranda July's new book (US UK), I urge you to have a look right now.

Listening to the World - Afghanistan

The next stop on my tour is Afghanistan. Afghanistan's radio industry seems to be bounding back from what I will refer to as "infrastructure problems."

Much of the radio that I've found from there seems to be sponsored by either the BBC or Voice of America. I think that's cheating, so I kept poking about.

I was then able to find a number of stations that were religious or news-related. Finally I was able to come across a couple of music stations.

The first, Radio A.F.G., seemed to be precisely what I was looking for: a live stream that seemed to be working and music. There were a few breaks and the occasional bit of what sounded like comedy skits, but predominantly music. The music, to my ears, seems to mirror what I've experienced with the rest of Afghan culture (which is barely enough to have a decent opinion, so bear with me) -- by virtue of its location it seems to me to be a mixture of Indian, Muslim, and Russian influences, manifesting in that order. Different enough from Indian music to make me notice differences, (the instrumentation, for example), but a couple of hours in I was up for a curry run. I spent about three days total on this station and only heard one track that I could consider a cultural interloper: Zamfir's "The Lonely Shepherd" of all things.

On closer examination, Radio A.F.G. doesn't meet my criteria, however. It looks like it is web based, and the dj's aren't actually physically in Afghanistan. (There are two from Canada, one from the US, one from Denmark, and another from "Hollandistan" - there is a slot open, if you speak Pashto, this might be your big break!).

So continuing to search, I was able to find Arman FM, which broadcasts a signal to Jalalabad, Kabul, Mazar, Herat and Kandahar. Unfortunately, there is no live feed. There are a few mp3s, but the number of dead pages and my inability to find anything that is dated more recently than 2005 makes me a trifle concerned. So I have just signed onto their mailing list.

The Utter Truth of the Worldwide Mad Deadly Gangster Computer God

Long ago, I was active in cassette tape trading circles. One of the more amazing tapes that I received was a tape of what sounded like the writings of a completely insane person read by what sounded like a professional newsreader with library music playing in the background.

I had no idea what the hell this tape was - the person who sent it to me has no idea either, it had been copied and sent so many times. As the years passed, I came to learn that these ramblings of Mr. Francis E. Dec, that were recorded by a disk jockey named Boyd Britton. There are a few places on the web where the curious might find these audio files, but I am delighted to see this page: an amazing cornucopia of info on the late Mr. Dec, with the original audio files, the rants transcribed and illustrated, more rants that were not part of the underground tape and an awful lot of biographical info.

As the content of the rants is a bit on the extreme side, the link is to the opening disclaimer so you can get the full effect of the site. When you get in, head straight to the "rants" section, click on "Rant #3: 'Worldwide Open Secret,'" and as you listen to the sound file imagine what it was like to get that via a cassette tape labelled "Listen to this" that was mailed to you by a complete stranger.

I'm not sure, but I think the music in the background to this particular one is from the soundtrack to Goldfinger, by the way.

Happy Easter!

Because nothing says "Easter" like a crucified duck on a bendy straw.

The first sign of spring

It seems to be the time of year when people who work in their gardens start to worry about potential ant infestations.

Greetings Gardeners! I have no information for you! Good luck with your search!

With grim death gargling at you from every corner.

Enjoy a great scene from one of my favorite films:

I begin the month with an empty threat

This morning NPR greeted me with an attempt at an audio data graph.

The data that they were trying to represent was the relative spending of the various Democratic Presidential Candidates. The method of representation was this: for every million dollars that a candidate raised, they played a second (with corresponding fractions) of the chorus of "Staying Alive" by the Bee Gees.

As I woke up listening to this, it suddenly occurred to me that if I stopped giving money to Public Radio pledge drives, I could afford a subscription to a satellite radio service.

Happy April Fools Day!

I am now spreading disinformation on the internet!

Enjoy!

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Whose side are you on, anyway?

One of the things that can sometimes really throw me when I'm watching film or television from the UK is realizing that I've presumed that the wrong character is driving the car.

It's something that only happens occasionally (which makes sense as there has to be a prolonged scene of two adults sitting in the front of a car.)

I think it is really interesting the way (at least my) brain works in these situations. I've driven a fair amount in England, and have had few problems - I find it's much harder to be a front seat passenger. But the thing is -- as I think about it now, I realize that my brain has taken all my memories of driving there and reworked them so that I am now remembering driving on the right side of the road while sitting on the left side of the car.

Weird.