What was especially unfortunate (rather insidious really) about this moment was that the broadcast model of television distribution created a situation of artificial scarcity. It was not a proper competitive environment like we enjoy today. It truly was monopolistic, even if the snake did have three heads. Only a few huge corporations could afford the infrastructure for these national networks. Airspace was limited. Thus to make room for the new, the old had to be cast aside. As I happen to love all those new shows CBS introduced, I am glad they were brought into being. But how much better it would have been if the older shows could have been retained at the same time, because I also love those. TV variety, heir to vaudeville, was effectively killed dead by this historical moment, and that’s to be regretted.
[…]
But during the second half of the decade things changed. I have a good sense of when all the good shows started going wrong, but have had a harder time on figuring out why they did. As near as I can tell in most cases, the stars of the shows became too big for their britches. They won awards, they were on the covers of all the magazines, they got huge salary increases, and then they started getting creative control over their shows. I’m still somewhat at a loss as to why the actors’ mass madness took the same form all across the board, this humorless didacticism, the need to be “dramatic.” But it could be simply that there is a very funny elephant in the room. Because when I find myself asking the question, “Is it possible that actors are egotistical? Self-indulgent? Consumed with self-importance? Megalomaniacs?” Well, there’s your answer. Those qualifiers practically form part of the textbook definition of the word “actor”. They want to be taken seriously. And so, across the board, most of the stars of these shows started either transforming their characters into Christ-like saviors, or turning their programs into pulpits.
Also perhaps to a certain extent these new situation comedies attracted a different kind of star. The new breed were not the Buddy Ebsen/Lucille Ball/Jackie Gleason/Red Skelton type vaudeville clowns. Most of the new stars were college educated, had gone to drama school, been in improv and other theatre and sketch troupes, and appeared in lots of legit theatre. They didn’t just know who Shaw and Ibsen were, they had performed in such serious drama. They scorned old school comedy as “corny”; they were much more concerned with what they called “truth”. I remember reading interviews with Alan Alda in which he complained about episodes from the first season of M*A*S*H that had more farcical plots (e.g. “Tuttle” or the one where Frank Burns gets gold fever.) Fans happen to love these episodes; Alda however tends to favor dramatic episodes from the later years, but we’ll return to that.
Trav S.D., “The Insufferables, or Sanctimony in the Seventies: How Hollywood Helped Make Liberalism Unpopular”, Travalanche, 2018-03-12.
December 6, 2020
QotD: Mid-70s TV
October 31, 2020
Modern Halloween costumes show us how wealthy we have become
Richard Lorenc looks back at the “costumes” for Halloween from the 1970s and 1980s to help illustrate how much our general economic picture has improved since those dark days:
While my husband and I were recently struggling to figure out our costumes for this Halloween (and we still don’t have any idea), he pulled up some old commercials on YouTube. The off-the-shelf options that trick or treaters had were, in a word, pitiful.
Basically, costume makers thought it was ok to make a front-only plastic mask (in any color, really) of a character and top it off with a plastic smock featuring an illustration of said character with either its name or the name of the show or movie it comes from. There was no attempt to dress in the character’s actual attire. If you wanted that, you’d either have to know a professional costumer or cobble together something from your closet.
Take a look for yourself at just how costume-poor we used to be:
Obviously, every costume is an opportunity to generate interest in a brand or franchise, and slapping on a logo is an easy way to get a name out there, but these costumes truly heralded a dark time for Halloween. Some may even argue that it demonstrated crass consumerism at its worst, with cynical companies taking the easiest route to grabbing a couple of bucks from desperate parents.
The truth of the tragedy of terrible old Halloween costumes has to do with a simple idea: specialization.
[…]
The next time you compare our screen-accurate store-bought costumes of Darth Vader and Mr. Incredible to those of yesteryear, remember that we enjoy them today not because previous generations didn’t care for accurate costuming, but because growing trade across the globe has generated so much wealth for each of us that we can now demand things we may have only imagined previously.
I only realized as I got ready to schedule this post that it was an article I’d blogged a couple of years back, but the point of the story is still relevant even in our pandemic-wracked economy of 2020.
October 26, 2020
Kathy Shaidle tells the story of Hamilton’s 1970s cult children’s TV show
I still have fond memories of CHCH TV’s Hilarious House of Frightenstein and Kathy Shaidle clearly does too:
The Hilarious House of Frightenstein was produced in 1971 by our one and only TV station, CHCH. This hour-long, 130-episode kids’ show combined the mid-century sensibility of Famous Monsters of Filmland with the then-hip look and sound of psychedelia: kaleidoscopic “special effects” plus Top 40 hits spun by “The Wolfman,” an affectionate rip-off of legendary DJ Wolfman Jack.
The show’s “plot” concerned a banished count’s attempts to revive his comatose monster, Brucie, but that was just a flimsy excuse to mount a fast-paced series of corny sketches, semi-serious “educational” segments, and — years before The Simpsons and Pixar — “over the kids’ heads” jokes aimed at adults who might find themselves awake at dawn, or earlier.
The part that always puzzled me as a kid was that a local southern Ontario low-budget TV show for kids had international movie star Vincent Price in it. Kathy explains how it happened:
Older and “uncool” (despite receiving the imprimatur of another rising Hollywood director, Roger Corman), Price was out of fashion.
At the same time, CHCH had a limited budget, but wanted and needed some star power for their single camera kid’s show.
Who better to host this “monster mash” than Vincent Price, still one of the all-time great horror-movie icons?
Frightenstein‘s producer tracked down Price, who agreed to work for $3000 a day, one quarter of his usual per-diem appearance rate.
He loved children, he explained simply. And the gig sounded like fun.
CHCH checked their tiny budget. They could only afford Price for four days, tops.
Four days it would have to be.
Everyone signed on the dotted line.
I’ve heard the story of what happened next from different sources, and it never ceases to warm my heart:
Price arrived at the modest TV studio, got into makeup and costume and was handed reams of doggerel poems about some crazy characters he’d never heard of before.
He’d read each piece once, put his head down, then look up at the camera’s red light and utter his lines perfectly in one take.
Next!
New makeup, new costume, same perfect delivery, hour after hour.
Finally, it was time for a break. The weary yet exhilarated crew turned off the cameras and lights.
Then they looked around and realized that Vincent Price had disappeared.
Oh well, they said to each other, what do you expect? He’s a big star and all. Plus he’s, like, 60 years old, so he probably went for a nap…
The studio door opened a few minutes later.
It was Vincent Price and a cab driver, hauling “two-fours” of beer from the nearby Brewer’s Retail.
He handed cold stubbies out to the cast and crew and regaled them with tales of old Hollywood, his days working with Karloff and Peter Lorre and Gene Tierney and Cecil B. DeMille and all the other greats he’d known.
August 31, 2020
Michelle Remembers, the seminal Satanic Panic book
Jen Gerson discusses the first modern Satanic Panic and the book about the “recovered” childhood memories of a British Columbia woman in the 1970s:
QAnon may sound like something that could only have birthed in the darker corners of the internet. But QAnon predates president Donald Trump and even the internet itself; It’s just the latest iteration of a moral panic that swept the highest levels of Western society only a generation ago. One of the most polarizing and divisive social movements in modern history; it destroyed families, turned communities against one another, and sent numerous innocent men and women to prison.
And it all started in Victoria, BC.
It was known as the Satanic Panic; a conspiracy theory that convinced millions of well meaning and rational people that a secret cabal of Satanists had infiltrated the highest echelons of society in order to sexually molest children. The Satanists were accused of sacrificing animals and using women as “breeders” to create an endless supply of dead babies for use in their gory, bloody-fuelled rituals and orgies.
It destroyed lives and ripped apart families. Reports of ritualistic child abuse were reported across the English speaking-world. Almost all of them were eventually found to have been partially, or wholly fabricated, but not before dozens of innocent people were falsely accused, and sentenced to years and even decades in prison.
Born of a genuine historical injustice — society’s neglect of childhood sexual abuse — this was a panic that saw some of the world’s smartest minds taken in by accusations, that, at their root, were as preposterous as any raised during medieval European witch hunts. It was legitimized by a professional class, captivated law enforcement and proved itself a lucrative grift for fraudsters and attention seekers. Worse, as the conspiracy grew under its own weight and influence, the hysteria inspired real and horrific crimes — usually by disturbed teenagers who claimed they were sacrificing humans to Satan.
This is a case study of how badly off the rails we can go when we allow our best intentions and passions to overwhelm us.
The story begins in 1980, with the publication of a book called Michelle Remembers. It detailed the fantastic claims of Michelle Proby, who recounted several months of gory and sadistic ritualistic abuse at the hands of a cabal of Satanists when she was a child in 1950s Victoria. The memories, she alleged, were repressed for decades, until she sought help from psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. Under a state of hypnosis, Proby began to uncover a horrifying tale of murder, torture, abduction, and molestation. She claimed to have been taken from her willing family and groomed to take part in a ritual to call the devil — one in which she witnessed the murder of children, was forced to eat human remains, covered in dead baby parts, and locked in a cage with snakes.
An explosive bestseller. Michelle Remembers would become the folkloric template for countless other claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse ostensibly uncovered during therapy during the 80s and 90s.
August 21, 2020
Virtuesplaining Blazing Saddles
Paul du Quenoy says that Mel Brooks is cancelled after all:
It seems like only yesterday that HBO Max, the financially troubled American cable television network’s new film streaming service, signalled its virtue by removing Gone With The Wind from viewing so that the classic film could be properly “contextualised” as what presenter and University of Chicago film professor Jacqueline Stewart calls “a prime text for examining expressions of white supremacy in popular culture”. She believes this is useful for the “re-education” of audiences who might otherwise stray into thoughtcrime.
Mel Brooks’s smash hit 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles, which seems to have been added to HBO Max since the Gone With The Wind dust up and is known for its liberal use of the feared and loathed “n-word”, arrived with a similarly patronising disclaimer already installed. In a three-minute introduction that apparently cannot be skipped over, Stewart is there again, this time to inform viewers that “racist language and attitudes pervade the film”, while instructing them that “those attitudes are espoused by characters who are portrayed here as explicitly small-minded, ignorant bigots … The real, and much more enlightened, perspective is provided by the main characters played by Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder”.
Thanks, Aunt Jacqueline. If you have not seen Blazing Saddles – and if you are under the age of forty there is an excellent chance some prudish authority figure sanitised it out of your cosseted millennial existence – it stands as one of the greatest, and the certainly the funniest, anti-racist films of all time. Based on a story by Andrew Bergman, Brooks conceived it as a scathing send-up of racism and the hypocrisy that still enabled it after the great civil rights victories of the 1960s. Brooks’s idiom was a parody of the classic Western, by then an exhausted genre that had, among other flaws, become inanely predictable and was much criticised for leaving out minorities. A landmark of American film, Blazing Saddles was selected in 2006 for inclusion in the US National Film Registry, which recognises “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films” worthy of preservation.
Drenched in hilarity – and by my count using the “n-word” 17 times in its 93-minute run – the plot involves a conspiracy by an avaricious U.S. state attorney general who wants to drive white settlers off land he needs to complete a profitable railroad project. After having outlaws wreak mayhem on the townspeople, he recommends that the governor appoint a black sheriff to restore law and order, cynically assuming that their racism will cause them to reject the new lawman and give up. Despite a rough initial reception, the sheriff outwits attempts to get rid of him and, with the help of a washed up but sympathetic alcoholic gunslinger, leads the townspeople to victory, winning their love and respect before moving on to other brave deeds.
While HBO no longer wants to risk having its paying customers think for themselves (and what stale corporate outfit uneasily transitioning to a crowded new market wouldn’t?), it could rightly be said that anyone dumb enough to miss the film’s message might be a recent product of Anglo-American higher education. I do not mean this at all facetiously. Decaying and run by a self-important clerisy whose demands to be taken seriously only become shriller as it declines in reach and vitality – and from which any participant can be dismissed for even the slightest speech or behavioural infraction – academia naturally discourages humour. Jokes, which can almost always cause some kind of offence, are simply too risky to be told or laughed at, even in private. Finding the wrong thing funny can invite career-hobbling accusations that one has demeaned a student or colleague and thereby made them feel unacceptably “uncomfortable” or even physically “unsafe”. Perceived flippancy bruises sanctified “professional seriousness” in a way tantamount to sacrilege. The only tolerated exceptions are a kind of solemn irony that offers comfort in coping with academia’s increasing irrelevance and a resigned gallows humor about its ever more limited prospects.
August 19, 2020
QotD: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
But it is an infestation of leftist biases, and is often grossly unprofessional. For decades, despite being almost entirely funded by Canadian taxpayers, it was the principal house organ of the Quebec separatist movement, to the point that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, shortly before the 1980 Quebec independence referendum, threatened to shut the French network down; when asked what he would replace it with, he responded with his customary vivacity of wit: “Still pictures of Chinese and Japanese vases, at least they have some cultural value.” It is compulsively misanthropic and nasty, and almost always takes a snide leftist view of everything, including foreign affairs. Brexiters were cavemen, U.S. President Donald Trump is a racist, sexist crook and moron, and it is racism and xenophobia to assert that the coronavirus originated in China. Can’t we have better and more original insights than this?
Conrad Black, “Canada needs a much better CBC”, New English Review, 2020-05-02.
June 30, 2020
“The Squadrons Are Coming” – HMS Ark Royal aviation operations
Aircraft Games Movies
Published 1 Jul 2010In the Western Approaches, Ark Royal welcomes her air group back aboard, with the occasional hairy approach for newly qualified aviators.
This appears to be footage from episode 3 of Sailor, a BBC television series from 1976 about life aboard HMS Ark Royal.
The Wikipedia entry for HMS Ark Royal (R09) begins:
HMS Ark Royal (R09) was an Audacious-class aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy and, when she was decommissioned in 1979, was the Royal Navy’s last remaining conventional catapult and arrested-landing aircraft carrier. She was the first aircraft carrier to be equipped with angled flight deck at its commissioning; her sister ship, HMS Eagle, was the Royal Navy’s first angle-decked aircraft carrier after modification in 1954. Ark Royal was the only non-United States vessel to operate the McDonnell Douglas Phantom at sea.
[…]
While Ark Royal‘s career spanned 24 years from the time of her commissioning (her name was a household word), she spent as much time in refit; repair and reserve and modernisation as in commissioned service (12 years). It required a lot of effort from her engineers to keep her serviceable between yard periods. Ark Royal had been poorly preserved during its lengthy construction from 1942 to 1955, and much of its machinery was obsolete by its completion, including its dated DC electrics, supplemented later by some AC systems, resulting in a ship which experienced regular defects and mechanical failure. Eagle was a more reliable and well-built ship, and spent far more time at sea than her sister. The scrapping of Ark Royal in 1980, two years after Eagle, marked the end of conventional fixed-wing aircraft operations aboard Royal Navy carriers. She had borne so many innovations, yet her replacement was not equipped with any of these. There was some discussion about preserving her as a museum ship, and some private funds were raised; the MOD would not sanction these efforts.
June 9, 2020
It was scientifically inevitable for the Communists to win the Cold War – as foretold in the prophecies
Sarah Hoyt on the “script” that progressives operated under during the Cold War and almost unchanged in detail to the present day, too:
Krushchev, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders review the Revolution parade in Red Square, 1962.
LIFE magazine photo by Stan Wayman.
… the Cold War had two sides: the USSR and our elites, who had been corrupted and taken over for a long time thanks to the communist agents who had long-marched through our media, our entertainment and our bureaucracy.
Heinlein claimed the Democrats had been taken over by communists, secretly, by the 40s. I have no reason to doubt him. I’m sure most of the bureaucracy and governments in Europe had been taken over that way also.
Even so called conservatives assumed communism would eventually win, because according to the numbers coming out of the USSR and the reporters visiting the USSR — anyone know where Duranty is buried? there should be a line to piss on his grave — they were just so much more efficient. Scientific governance, you know? And anyway, technology was going to be so advanced that most humans would be unemployable, and by the way, there were more and more humans every year, so it was impossible to have all these bourgeois luxuries. So communism, efficient, compassionate, communism was the future, the only way.
The realists who saw it was the only way were willing to do anything to bring it about. Because the people who weren’t as intelligent/well informed would otherwise destroy the world and bring about unimaginable catastrophe.
“Conservatives” were merely those who wanted communism to arrive slower and be a little less violent. Communism with a human face. Socialism on the way to communism. Easing us into our role as cogs in the machinery of the future — where there was no room for personal frills or really emotions — with gentle pneumatic shocks, instead of with the excesses of the Russian and Soviet revolution.
All of this btw is based on three glaring fallacies (phaluscies, since you have to be a dickhead to believe them particularly now.)
1- People are a drain not an asset. They are also a sort of robot incapable of changing behavior in response to changing circumstances.
2- Wealth can’t grow, nor can the carrying capacity of the Earth improve. So since humans can’t respond to reduced infant mortality by having fewer children, the only way to feed everyone is to reduce everyone’s rations. Forever.
3- It is possible for “the best”, properly educated people to be utterly selfless and to administer everyone’s wealth equally and for the common good. They will not revel in power, nor will they avail themselves of any excess. Because, they are absolutely moral and all seeing.
Note the left is still running this script. And some on the right too (Hello, Pierre Delecto!) not to mention all of Europe, left and right. Also note #1 conflicts with the left idea that they can bring about a future in which humans change to be all selfless, etc. But that’s actually complicated and tied in to their myths, which honestly are a Christian heresy, complete with paradise lost.
I know when they started out, the USSR thought it could “engineer” a new human. Homo Sovieticus. But I don’t know enough of Soviet myth to know what underlay that. Maybe it was a behaviorist thing and they thought humans could be trained into being completely selfless automatons. I know by the time I was reading communist theorists (no, I didn’t buy their arguments, but I was required to read them, given when and where I grew up) in the seventies, the philosophy had fallen prey to the agitprop notion that people in madhouses in the US were political prisoners just as in the USSR. (BTW this is part of what underlay the closing of the madhouses.) And that was part of a push in the seventies, as the malfeasance of USSR was starting to be glaring, amid escaped dissidents and escaping information. The push was to “prove” that both systems were equally bad. (The left is still flogging that dead equine, too. So Cubans and Venezuelans are starving? So how many people die of anomie and not being loved enough under capitalism? REEEEE.) So, since Soviets put dissidents in mad houses, so did we. But that necessitated that people who widdled on themselves and/or thought they were a lampshade with a set of dishes thrown in be completely sane “political dissidents”. The only way to do this was to attribute anything communists don’t like to “insanity brought about by capitalism.” This led to crazier byways of thought. For instance, it led to the idea of the pre-historic, pre-agriculture paradise, where everyone was equal, there was no poverty, need, greed, or the heartbreak of psoriasis. A sub-branch of the church believed women were in charge and everyone worshiped the mother goddess. And some of these “scientific, atheist socialists” also believe the goddess actually exists, though G-d doesn’t.
David Friedman had a different formulation for the utopian world many progressives wish for the rest of us:
In the ideal socialist state power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill.
June 5, 2020
Australia’s 1975 constitutional crisis back in the news
Colby Cosh outlines the events of 1975, where the Governer-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, used his reserve powers to dismiss the government of Gough Whitlam and call for a fresh federal election in which Whitlam’s party was soundly defeated. In taking this action, Sir John corresponded with Queen Elizabeth and after his retirement deposited those documents with the National Archives. The bulk of his papers were made available to researchers after the statutary 30 year delay, but the letters involving Her Majesty were withheld for 60 years. An Australian historian has now successfully challenged the National Archives in Federal Court:
National Archives of Australia in Parkes, Australian Capital Territory.
Photo by Bidgee via Wikimedia Commons.
The confrontation at Yarralumla, and the various narrative twists and turns leading up to it, are a major event in Australian constitutional history. Which brings us to Jenny Hocking, a left-leaning historian who is a top specialist on the 1975 crisis.
Hocking knew that Kerr, after his retirement, had deposited copies of his correspondence with the Queen in Australia’s National Archives. Hocking made good professional use of Kerr’s formal papers, made available to the public in 2005 under the 30-year rule that covers Australian state papers. But Kerr had, with the agreement of the Archives, made separate arrangements for his letters to and from the Queen — the so-called “(Buckingham) Palace letters”.
[…]
The National Archives, trying to stand by its bargain with Kerr as a donor, successfully argued that while papers generated or received by “the official establishment of the Governor-General” would clearly be ordinary public records under Australian law, the letters that Hocking wanted to see didn’t involve “the official establishment,” but merely Kerr himself as … well, just a guy. The Federal Court found that the Palace letters therefore had the legal status of one of Sir John’s grocery bills, or sex diaries, or anything else that he would be perfectly entitled to stick in a locked box for 50 years.
(Or to burn in private. Which was an option he had, but rejected, explaining explicitly that he wanted future historians to have access to the material. But not for them to have it so soon that it might surprise or embarrass the Queen during her own lifetime.)
What happened last week was that the case reached Australia’s top court and Hocking won a smashing victory. Kerr’s correspondence with the Queen is known to have contained discussions of the Australian constitutional situation, and in view of that, the High Court said, the Federal Court’s distinction between Commonwealth records and personal correspondence must be regarded as a bogus artifice. The concepts aren’t mutually exclusive.
The Archives also asserted that queen-viceroy letters attract a higher level of secrecy “by convention” in all the Queen’s realms, but they couldn’t produce evidence that such a convention exists. Hocking’s costs must be covered by the Archives, and as far as the letters go, the ball is in their court legally. They could still use a “national security” exemption to withhold some of the material, and the freedom with which this magic formula is used by archival gatekeepers is notorious. But it may soon be possible for Australians to read the final chapter of the cataclysmic Kerr-Whitlam story.
April 11, 2020
QotD: Zhou Enlai’s famous “too early to say” comment on the French Revolution
So says a retired American diplomat, Charles W. (Chas) Freeman Jr., who was present when Zhou made the comment during President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.
Freeman, who was Nixon’s interpreter during the historic, weeklong trip, made the disclosure last week during a panel discussion in Washington about On China, the latest book by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
The discussion was moderated by Richard McGregor, a journalist and China expert who wrote about Freeman’s comments for the Financial Times of London.
In an interview yesterday, Freeman elaborated on his recollection about Zhou’s comment, the conventional interpretation of which is frequently offered as evidence of China’s sage, patient, and far-sighted ways. Foreign Policy magazine, for example, referred last month to that interpretation, saying the comment was “a cautionary warning of the perils of judgments made in real time.”
The Washington Post‘s recent review of Kissinger’s book likewise referred to the conventional understanding of Zhou’s remark.
Freeman described Zhou’s misconstrued comment as “one of those convenient misunderstandings that never gets corrected.”
He said Zhou’s remark probably was made over lunch or dinner, during a discussion about revolutions that had succeeded and failed. They included, Freeman said, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, both of which the Soviet Union crushed.
He said it was clear from the context and content of Zhou’s comment that in saying it was “too early to say” the Chinese leader was speaking about the events in France in May 1968, not the years of upheaval that began in 1789.
Freeman acknowledged that the conventional interpretation makes for a better story but added that it was “absolutely clear” from the context of the discussion that Zhou was speaking about 1968.
W. Joseph Campbell, “‘Too early to say’: Zhou was speaking about 1968, not 1789”, Media Myth Alert, 2011-06-14.
March 8, 2020
Britain’s Post-WWII Naval Decline
Sal Viscuso
Published 1 Dec 2013Max Hastings describes the declining British post-WWII role in global affairs.
February 11, 2020
Leaving the Left – Part 9: PJ O’Rourke
Economics in the Media
Published 18 Aug 2016“When I got my first paycheck I found that I netted $82.27 after federal income tax, state income tax, city income tax, Social Security, union dues, and pension fund contribution. I was a communist. I had protested for communism. I had rioted for communism. Then I got a capitalist job and found out we had communism already.”
– The Baby Boom, PJ O’RourkeParliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
Full Interview with Peter Robinson
https://youtu.be/keJYIkxbieg
January 25, 2020
QotD: The post-oil-crisis evolution of modern cars
The computer changed everything. Not only in engine tuning and performance, but in design and modeling.
I had an example of a classic late Dark Ages car, an ’84 Trans Am with the LG4 305c.i. Rochester Quadrabog motor. A hunnert and fifty horsepower and nearly every engine function powered by enough dry-rotting vacuum tubing to reach to the moon and back…
Only a few years later and exotic computer-designed and controlled long-runner port fuel injection systems were common on domestic performance cars and HP numbers were on the right side of 200 for the first time in a decade.
It was coming out of an awful time. Like a friend wrote: When he went into seminary you could buy a Mustang with a nearly 400bhp engine option. When he left seminary, the Mustang was a Pinto.
Being a car enthusiast in America in the latter half of the 70s/first half of the ’80s was like being a dirt farmer in Fifth Century Britain, marveling at the weed-grown roads and disused aqueducts left by a race of giants and building your pig shed with stones looted from a burned library.
Tamara Keel, “Cars of the future from the past…”, View From The Porch, 2017-12-26.
December 27, 2019
Imagine John Lennon as a huge hypocrite
As Mark Steyn pointed out, it isn’t hard to do:
In his Christmas sermon five years ago, the Bishop of Shrewsbury described John Lennon’s ghastly dirge “Imagine” as “heart-chilling”. Here’s what I had to say about it, and about secularism and a common culture, in the Christmas issue of The Spectator a decade earlier:
At my daughter’s school this year, the holiday concert concluded with John Lennon’s “Imagine”. The school had thoughtfully printed the lyric on the program, and the teacher, inviting the parents to sing along, declared the number summed up what we were all “praying” for. Indeed. The droning vamp began, and John’s anthem for cotton-candy nihilists rent the air:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today …Ah, that’s the message of the season, isn’t it? Back in the Sixties, John opined that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ, which was a wee bit controversial in those unenlightened times but which appears to be no more than a prosaic statement of fact as far as the music department’s priorities are concerned. These days, “Imagine” has achieved the status of secular hymn, no doubt because of its inclusive message:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too …Hey, happy holidays!
You may say he’s a dreamer, but he’s not. A couple of years ago, it emerged that Lennon was a very generous contributor not just to organizations that support and fund the IRA, but to the IRA itself. He could certainly imagine there’s no countries, nothing to kill or die for and no religion, too, but until that blessed day he was quite happy to support a religiously discriminatory organization that blows up grannies at shopping centres in order to get out of one country and join another. How heartening to know that, though he grew rich peddling illusory pap to the masses, he didn’t fall for it himself.
“Imagine” didn’t go over wild with the parents, who mumbled along unenthusiastically. To be honest, I’d prefer John and Yoko’s peacenik dirge, “(Happy Xmas) War Is Over”, though that might be a little premature and anyway that song suffers from the disadvantage of mentioning Xmas. On the radio you can hear “Frosty” and “Rudolph” and James Taylor’s new post-9/11 version of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, but anyone with young children finds themselves exposed to a strange alternative repertoire of unseasonal favourites. My friend Tammy emerged from her daughter’s kindergarten concert in a rage: not just no Christmas carols, but no “Jingle Bells”. The only song she recognized was Lionel Bart’s spectacular melisma pile-up from Oliver!, “Whe-e-e-e-ere Is Love?”, which is not designed to be sung en masse. “They sounded like they were dying,” she fumed, before going off to beard the school board, who explained that “Jingle Bells” had been given the heave-ho on the grounds that it might be insensitive to those of a non-jingly persuasion.
December 23, 2019
Repost – Kate Bush – Christmas Special 1979 (Private Remaster)
Published on 5 Oct 2013
I know there’s a good few copies of this out on YouTube, but here it is, again! The other copies were either split up into individual tracks, the best complete one (from BBC Four’s rebroadcast in 2009) had the wrong aspect ratio, which annoyed the hell out of me! So, here this is…
Video and audio have been tidied up very slightly, not much was needed!
Kate Bush – Christmas Special
Tracklist:
(Intro) 00:00
Violin 00:29
(Gymnopédie No.1 – composed by Erik Satie) 03:44
Symphony In Blue 04:44
Them Heavy People 08:20
(Intro for Peter Gabriel) 12:52
Here Comes The Flood (Peter Gabriel) 13:22
Ran Tan Waltz 17:02
December Will Be Magic Again 19:43
The Wedding List 23:35
Another Day (with Peter Gabriel) 28:05
Egypt 31:41
The Man With The Child In His Eyes 36:21
Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbreak 39:24“I was recently asked about this BBC TV special and I thought I’d share my comments here. Kate: Kate Bush Christmas Special is a stage performance by Kate Bush with her special guest Peter Gabriel. Though most of the songs are not holiday ones, they come from Bush’s first three albums (Never for Ever her third album would be released in 1980 after this 1979 TV special was taped). The performances include costumes, choreographed dances and a wind machine, creating an eclectic music TV special to say the least.
This is one of the programs that makes my research quite difficult — because it calls itself a Christmas Special yet it contains only one performance of a Christmas song “December Will Be Magic Again” (a song that wouldn’t be released as a single by Bush until the following year, in 1980). TV programming that calls itself a Christmas Special and yet contains little to no Christmas entertainment is actually quite common — especially on the BBC.
Between the end of November and the end of December each year, there is quite a bit of special programming on television. Remember Elvis’ 1968 Comeback Special — it aired in December that year and includes only one holiday song, a performance of “Blue Christmas.” Is it considered a Christmas special? No, not really. And so, despite its title, the lack of holiday programming in Kate Bush’s 1979 TV special means it shouldn’t be considered a Christmas special either. But the Kate Bush Christmas Special is certainly worth watching!”
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link.
