Happy birthday, Jim Stafford

Jim Stafford, comedian and songwriter, is 68 today.









Happy birthday, Jim!

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Outed! Salt Lake City named "Gayest City" by The Advocate

John Amaechi was the first NBA player to come out as gay. He played for the Utah Jazz from 2001 to 2003, and in his book, Man In the Middle, described Salt Lake City as "the hippest, gayest place east of San Francisco."


Having read Amaechi's remarks in 2007, I wasn't too surprised that five years later the Advocate magazine listed Salt Lake City as "America's Gayest City." You can read about it in this article, Salt Lake City 'Gayest' City in America.

Many of us who live in Utah have the same stereotypes outsiders have of the state. Utah is full of pious Mormons who don't drink (no liquor, not even coffee or tea), don't smoke, don't curse and don't fornicate. The truth is that Utah, while 57% LDS in population, has lots of different types of folks, with lots of different lifestyles.


Okay, so here's my lifestyle: boring, non-LDS straight guy in his mid-sixties. I know virtually nothing of the side of my hometown described by Amaechi or The Advocate. As more gay people have come out it's been a continuing education process, not just for me, but for society in general.

Something I've known about this area is that it's considered a problem when young gay men go on Mormon missions and don't come back with the idea of getting married and starting a family. Although many returned missionaries do just that, it's still a stereotype. The truth is many gay people go on missions, then come back and face a dilemma. They can continue to live a lie or come out and be stigmatized by their community. I don't know how many articles I've read in the last few years about the lives of gay people in the LDS religion, and how old prejudices are used against them.

Speaking of old prejudices, in this 1952 magazine, Gays are "made, not born." "Homos are tragic cases, [and] should be treated as such." No wonder no one wanted to come out in that dark and unenlightened era.




Some years ago I read an article about advertising and gays. In the article an example was given of a New York Toyota dealership's ad showing two men talking to a salesman about a car. What wasn't apparent to the larger population was what gay people recognized immediately, and the dealership found gay couples increased their business. Why would any business turn away customers, especially customers with disposable income?

These 1940's ads seem gay to me, by accident or design.

From Life, April 23, 1945:

Life, November 17, 1947:


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Happy birthday, Donald Fagen

Donald Fagen is 64 today.









Happy birthday!

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Simple Magic Tricks

Amaze and amuse, astound and confuse.

These are some (very) simple magic tricks which can be easily learned. Wow your friends at a party or at work!

Now practice, practice, practice!




















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The Flying Saucer crashes and burns

I don't have much tolerance for bad movies (unlike some movie lovers, who relish low budgets and cheesy acting), but worse than bad is boring. The Flying Saucer, released in 1950, is both.

The movie is chiefly known as being the first feature film about the subject of flying saucers, which had been much in the news since first being reported by pilot Kenneth Arnold in June, 1947. Since that time there have been theories on the origins of the flying disks, which include U.S. or foreign secret weapons, Nazi-created craft, and spaceships from another planet. Within those basic theories are many sub-theories, which can include just about anything true believers care to imprint on the whole phenomenon.

Over 60 years since The Flying Saucer was released no one is really any closer to solving the mystery. To my satisfaction, that is. I know there are many people who can tell you “exactly” what a UFO is, since they have it all worked out in their heads.

The Flying Saucer begins with the image of a screaming old woman, who quickly moves off camera and is never seen again. This is an omen for what we're about to see, a scream of frustration at the story and the acting. Mikel Conrad, who is not Michael Conrad of Hill Street Blues fame, is the writer, director and star. So blame him.

Chain smoker/playboy Mike Trent (Conrad) is sent to Alaska with lovely CIA agent Vee Langley (Pat Garrison). Her name is probably a joke: “Vee” could stand for Virginia: Virginia Langley being Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA. Ho-ho. They're looking for Russian spies and a flying saucer capable of dropping atom bombs on American cities. Mike and Vee go to a cabin in the woods, near Juno, where some Russians operate some fishing boats. Mike asks the suspicious-looking cabin caretaker, Hans, if he's “seen any Russian spies lately.” Ho-ho again. Hans is himself a spy.

A romance (yawn) develops between Mike and Vee; Mike goes from bar to bar in Juno looking for information. He gets drunk. He fights. Vee gets menaced by a bear and asks Hans (who had been stalking her with a rifle to kill her and decided it would be better to let the bear do the dirty work) if bears are dangerous. Yes, Vee, and they shit in the woods, too.

The movie has long stretches of stock footage of the Alaskan wilderness. I'm not sure if Mikel Conrad decided to just use a bunch of footage because he thought the scenery was so pretty, or hoped no one would notice he was padding a 20-minute story into 90 minutes. I had to use the fast forward button to get past the Alaskan travelog.

Another weakness (besides the acting, writing and direction) is that the flying saucer itself is shown only a couple of times in flight. It went by so fast I couldn't lock on any of the images to get a screen capture. We're talking a couple of seconds at the most. Later in the movie we're shown the “real” flying saucer, a crudely constructed prop with a cockpit.

I hope I'm not spoiling anything by telling you the flying saucer of the story was a man-made device, not from outer space. The DVD package shamelessly uses a tag line, “Have we visitors from outer space?” The dull-witted characters in the movie never mention outer space. The CIA assumes the flying saucer is from Russia, the Russians know it isn't, and want it.

The DVD is part of the Wade Williams collection. Some people think Williams is a huckster who has claimed public domain movies as his own. I have mixed feelings about this.On the one hand he's made many B-movies available (a paranoid classic like Invaders From Mars, for instance), but on the other hand he's released movies that should have been buried years ago. I don't think the world would have been deprived of anything had prints of The Flying Saucer disappeared, or barring that, never released on DVD 60 years later. I would have had a couple hours of my life back, for sure.

Despite that I at least got a kick out of this card from the movie's trailer. You know if True magazine says flying saucers are real, they must be real.


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Happy birthday, Michael Stipe and Patty Loveless

Patty Loveless is 55 today.

Michael Stipe of R.E.M. is 52 today.  Happy birthday to both of you.

Life looks at advertising

After my recent posting of Bad Ads and Christmas advertising, I found this five-page spread in the January 2, 1950 issue of Life, giving a look at the ads of an era old even to Life readers of 62 years ago.

All images Copyright © 2012 Time-Life, Inc.





They mention pretty girls being used to sell, which is nothing new, since they were used in every issue by Life advertisers. In many issues Life may have had as many advertising pin-ups as most girly magazines had cheesecake photos.

Norman Mingo's Mennen ads stood out for their beauties. A few years later Mingo got another kind of fame by creating the painted portrait of Alfred E. Neuman for Mad, and contributed some of the greatest covers ever of that magazine.

Even GE got in on the act, selling light bulbs with a World War II-era cutey.

Starlets, in this case Virginia ("hold the") Mayo, were great for pushing products.

Esquire Socks used a sort of sexy double-entendre in their ads, which equated men's socks to a man's sex appeal. Personally, I've never seen any female get excited by guy's socks, but it worked in advertising.


DuPont got a whole lot of mileage selling their product, nylon, which has many uses, with pictures of nylon stockings on pretty girls. I personally feel there is much more sex appeal to a pair of nylons on shapely female legs than socks on sweaty masculine feet.

Will you still love them tomorrow?

Happy New Year, everybody.

My son sent me an MP3 of Amy Winehouse's version of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow." This is a classic song by the Brill Building geniuses, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, originally recorded by the Shirelles in 1960. It made the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Songs. It was banned by some radio stations because it was "sexually charged," but what I hear in the song is a girl plaintively asking a sweet-talking guy she likes, if she sleeps with him tonight how's he going to feel about her in the morning? I find the live version of the Shirelles singing it in 1964 to be a bit uptempo for the theme expressed in the song.





Of the four versions I've included here, I find Lorrie Morgan's the closest to how I think the song should be expressed, and that even includes the version by the song's co-writer, Carole King.



This is actually a different version than the one my son sent me, included on Winehouse's posthumous album, Lioness. The version from the album is very dramatic, with a military-sounding drum tattoo throughout the song, which I think is an odd choice by the producer. Amy Winehouse will probably be remembered, like Janis Joplin, for a short playlist in a short life. The cynical old adage is, "Death was a good career move," and for some artists it creates a mystique or aura around their memory.



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Bad ads

I've been cleaning off my desk. The postcard which arrived from AARP, the American Association for Retired Persons, touting a supplemental medical policy for those of us about to enter the Medicare jungle, triggered a response in me.

WTF?

It took a while before I realized what it meant is that oftentimes the best medical policy is...errrr....hiding...errrr....is a mouse in your walls. OK, so maybe I don't quite get it, and I've been looking at advertising all my life. I studied advertising decades ago. The idea is to make an association in someone's mind with the product, make him want to go right out and buy it. This is a funny, eye-catching picture, but it doesn't make me think of meeting my needs with supplemental insurance.

Make sure you click on it to enlarge it.

Going through some old issues of The New Yorker magazine, I noticed these odd advertisements from two 1959 issues.

The first, for Hanes, is totally screwball. A man about to shoot himself because his wife wants nylon stockings from Hanes? Jeez, pal, no need to over-react. They're available in fine department stores everywhere.

The second is this ad for the 1959 Ford Thunderbird. It's not the full-size car with the affluent, happy waving couples, it's the tiny car with the adult man and woman waving back. It startled me when I saw they were not children.

The ads all fail for various reasons, yet in their way make me look twice or more at each of them. Maybe that's enough for the people selling the products.

The ads shown below for patent medicines, from an 1888 issue of Golden Argosy magazine, are all good examples of why the United States government eventually passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, and began policing ads touting quackery.

I especially like the first ad and its vivid descriptions of complaints: "Are you hawking and spitting all or part of the time? Are you nervous, irritable and gloomy? Do you have evil forebodings? Do your bowels become costive?" Just send to Prof. Hart, in New York, and get "one bottle of medicine FREE."


Hood's Sarsparilla will cure Scrofula, which covers a list of "'humors,' which fastening upon the lungs, causes consumption [tuberculosis] and death." I wouldn't want scrofula, so send me that sarsparilla. "100 doses One Dollar." Catchy slogan.

Compare Hood's to Piso's Cure for Consumption, which is a cough syrup. It doesn't list the ingredients, but it's probably narcotic/opium-based. As a matter of fact, so is Prof. Hart's "one bottle of medicine FREE."

Finally, a Cure for the Deaf! Man, I need this right now. Either that or my wife needs a megaphone, or mike and amplifier to speak through so I can understand her.



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The Outfit

The Outfit, the 1973 movie starring Robert Duvall, Karen Black and Joe Don Baker, was taken--at least in part--from the novel of the same name by Richard Stark. Stark was a pseudonym of Donald Westlake, whose crime novels (The Hot Rock, etc.) are noted for their humor. Stark was a name aptly chosen by Westlake, because there isn't much humor in the deadly serious series of crime novels (of which The Outfit was number three) starring the heist man, Parker.

In the movie Duvall is named Macklin. Why they changed the name I don't know. That's the way of Hollywood, though, as well as aping a successful formula. I believe The Outfit was made on the coat-tails of The Getaway, a similarly themed story, released the preceding year and starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. That successful movie was filmed from a Jim Thompson novel.

Karen Black is Macklin's girlfriend, Bett Harrow, who makes me wonder why women end up with bad guys like Macklin. The whole movie is one robbery after another, with violent retribution against a criminal gang who had stolen from Macklin. She's in constant danger not only from the people he is up against, but he treats her bad, even slapping her around at one point. Like a woman with Stockholm Syndrome she stays with the psychopath, and pays the ultimate price.

The Outfit has several recognizable character actors, but mainly in cameos. Elisha Cook Jr. and Archie Moore are two. Marie Windsor, with Black in the above screen capture, has a brief scene. Richard Jaeckel has a short but juicy part, as does Sheree North, as Jaeckel's slutty sister-in-law. North provides the one sex scene when she attempts to seduce Cody, played by Baker. She comes out onto the porch in a translucent top and we get a little peek at her nipples. I wonder if that thrilled anybody in 1973?

There's a brief scene with actor Henry Jones, whose familiar face and voice were everywhere in the 1960s and '70s, both in television and the movies.

Robert Ryan's days as a leading man were behind him. He played the head of the Outfit, and also received a fitting end.

As I mentioned, Macklin and Cody are bad guys, but heroes to the audience, rooting for them to get the even badder guys, the members of the organized crime gang. Macklin and Cody even kill two highway patrolmen, as well as several other people in one memorable scene. At the end of the movie [SPOILER ALERT!] they drive off in a stolen ambulance, laughing. As Cody puts it, "Sometimes the good guys win!" Yep, good guys who are also sociopathic, conscienceless killers and woman beaters, but hey, nobody's perfect, eh?

It's been almost 40 years since The Outfit was made, and several of the actors are now deceased. Ryan died in 1973, Sheree North in 2005. Richard Jaeckel died in 1997 at age 70. Marie Windsor died in 2000, Henry Jones the year before, in 1999. Elisha Cook Jr. died at the advanced age of 91 in 1995. Another of the character actors in the movie was Felice Orlandi, who died in 2003 at age 78. Orlandi might not be remembered by name, but by his handsome face. He was also in 1955's Killer's Kiss, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and in the Steve McQueen classic, Bullitt, in 1967. The lead actors in the movie are still living, but getting up there in age. Robert Duvall was born in 1931, Karen Black in '39, and Joe Don Baker in '36.

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