The Toy Drum (Summer 1953)

Few people remember that I began my musical career as a percussionist.  In fact, even I had forgotten this fact until just recently.

I was reminded of this when I had a pile of old family home movies converted to video.  These date from the late 40s, when my father must have purchased a 16mm camera, to the early 60s, when - given my absence in the action - I must have been old enough to be entrusted with the role of cameraman.

If these videos prove anything, it's that I am descended from a long line of cinematographically challenged ancestors.  Exposure is random and framing is laughable.  There are countless shots of people without heads.  Also occasionally heads without bodies.  No sound of course.  Lots of classic home-movie embarrassed movement.

Here's a photo of one of thsee film reels and the box it came in - this one is labeled only "Summer 1953".    It says Kodachrome Daylight Type Double 8mm Magazine - which held a whopping 25 feet of film.

The transferred video has 3 minutes and 48 seconds of nostalgic action.  I appear the most often - making me the nearly 2-year old star.  Well, I was cute, wasn't I?  There are also shots of my parents, my Grandmother and Great Aunt Kate, my uncles Ben and Carl and Carl's wife, my Aunt Esther.  (I had two Aunt Esthers.  How many did you have?)

Fear not, brave Mixed Meters reader.  I am not posting the entire video for you to endure.  I have excerpted a few scenes.  The first is an unusually high quality shot of  me with my parents outside their apartment in Sioux City Iowa.   Here's a still.

(The brick apartment building and the wooden one behind it are still visible in Google maps.  Pan the street view shot to the left and you can see my eventual high school - complete with stone turrets - up the slight hill.)

The other shots in this following video show me with what was apparently my first musical instrument - a cute little toy drum and cymbal combo supported by a neck strap.  And I appear to be having a great time banging away at it.  Yes, I was the center of attention when I was hitting that drum.  Ah, lost youth.  Cute and talented!

In the last scene you'll notice a huge drop in video quality.  It was very underexposed, almost solid black.  I adjusted it as best I could because I wanted to include the final frame of the film - my father, looking plaintively at the camera and covering his ear with his hand, as if to say "Take the drum away from the boy, please."   Or maybe he was unhappy being pigeonholed in conversation by my Uncle Carl, whose suit-coated wrist can just barely be seen.

Oh.  I also added some music and titles to the video in a futile attempt to enhance the home movie experience.  You should prepare yourself in coming blog posts for more blasts like this one from my early history and even pre-history.

Here's an early MM post about my Mother and Ronald Reagan - and her last pack of cigarettes.
Here's an MM post called My Mother, My Worm.
Music in Sioux City, Iowa?  Here's a post called Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa (there's a picture of me and my Dad)
You could also read Forty Years in California - there's another pic of me with my Father.

The Bald Soprano

I was a junior in high school when I discovered absurdity. I understood absurdity immediately because it reflected my life so perfectly.  Absurdity kicked me down the road of being a creative artsy type and it continues to have a strong pull on me to this day.  Thanks, absurdity, old buddy.

My first encounter with absurdity took the form of The Bald Soprano, the play by Eugene Ionesco, presented as a particularly arresting picture book.  Today, I guess we'd call it a graphic novel.  Here's the cover:

That's Ionesco himself substituting both tragically and comically for the O's in his name.  The full cast can be seen as well, left to right: Mrs. Martin, Mr. Smith, Mary the maid, the Fire Chief, Mrs. Smith and Mr. Martin.  The whole book is rendered in black and white.  Each couple's lines are rendered in a different type face, the women in italic.  Pictures, stark high contrast black and white, show who is speaking and give a sense of the action.  Here's the back cover:

I'm pretty sure I liked this play before I even opened the book the first time.  Here's the text of the cover:

ionesco THE BALD SOPRANO followed by an unpublished scene.  Translated by Donald M. Allen.  Typographical interpretations by Massin and photographic interpretations by Henry Cohen.  Based on the Niccolas Bataille Paris production. Grove Press, Inc.  New York

I found The Bald Soprano in the library - I don't remember now whether that would have been my high school library or the public library.  A couple of years later, in college, when I had an extra ten bucks, I ordered my own copy which I still have today.  When it arrived I signed and dated it: October 3, 1970.  This play, in this particular format, became one of my artistic touchstones.  Eventually I saw a live performance - which disappointed me greatly.

The scene is a middle-class English interior.  The plot is pretty simple, I guess.  Mr. and Mrs. Smith tell some stories.  Mr. and Mrs. Martin arrive and reintroduce themselves to each other.  The Smiths and Martins tell more stories, occasionally interrupted by the Maid and the Fireman who, unsurprisingly, tell stories.  Everything devolves into a screaming frenzy.  And then it ends by beginning again at the beginning - except that the Martins and Smiths have switched places.

Nothing makes any real sense, of course.  The lines make sense in only the smallest bits.  Responses have tenuous relationship to what has preceded.  I guess that's what makes it Theater of the Absurd.  It's definitely that aspect which seemed to me to correspond exactly with what passed for conversation in my family - although for completely different reasons.  My family came to its absurd interactions through a combo of age disparity, English as second language and hardness of hearing.  None of that has anything to do with Ionesco.  The resulting effects, however, were strikingly similar in my mind.

Here's a sample from the awkward conversation as the two couples are settling down for their social evening together:

Mr. Smith: Hm. [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: Hm, hm. [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: Hm, hm, hm. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: Hm, hm, hm, hm. [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: Oh, but definitely. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: We all have colds. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: Nevertheless, it's not chilly. [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: There's no draft. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: Oh no, fortunately. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.  [Silence]
Mr. Martin: Don't you feel well? [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: No, he's wet his pants [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: Oh, sir, at your age, you shouldn't. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: The heart is ageless [Silence]
Mr. Martin: That's true. [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: So they say. [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: They also say the opposite. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: The truth lies somewhere between the two. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: That's true. [Silence]

In the book each of those lines gets two facing pages.  All the space represents the long silences.  The particular line "The truth lies somewhere between the two." has given me comfort many times in many different situations over the 45 years since I first read it.

Here's a pair of pages showing the (much more lively) responses to Mrs. Martin's story about seeing a man on the street who had bent over to tie his shoe:

Notice that "fantastic" is divided up among three actors.  (Click on any picture for enlargements.)   Later in the play:

Mrs. Martin: Thanks to you, we have passed a truly Cartesian quarter of an hour.
Fire Chief: [moving towards the door, then stopping]: Speaking of that - the bald soprano? [General silence, embarrassment]
Mrs. Smith: She always wears her hair in the same style.

One more page for good measure.  Here the Fire Chief is encouraged to tell a story The Dog and the Cow - which I actually set to music sometime during my college years.  (That, along with the only other song I ever wrote, has since been lost.)

So why am I dragging this subject up now - beyond the need for basic blog padding, of course.  There's a story about that:

Leslie and I were having dinner in a local restaurant last month, one of those new-style buffets with the old-style trick of showing you the desserts while you're standing in line still hungry.  We didn't have much to talk about.  At the next table was a family - mother, father, grandmother and three tweens, two with smart phones.  They had a lot to talk about, most of which didn't seem too important.  There was an amusing lack of communication and several crises concerning the food.  Leslie and I found ourselves watching them as carefully as we could without being obvious.  They might have been somewhat embarrassed had they been able to watch themselves.  Maybe not.  On our way home, Leslie and I discussed various unresolved questions (like which parent was the child of the grandmother and the color of the mother's panties).  I was reminded of my encounter with The Bald Soprano and I explained to Leslie why this literature was important to me.  When I got home I re-read it for the first time in a very long time.  It felt good to experience The Bald Soprano again.  It brought back a lot of memories, although you can be very certain that none of them involved my mother letting anyone in a restaurant see the color of her panties.

---

Used copies of The Bald Soprano are available on Amazon.

The Future From A Car Commercial

Last night I came across the nine-minute 1956 movie Design for Dreaming.  This particular bit of Fifties Futurism is a big-budget General Motors industrial musical - an almost-modern ballet with lots of costume changes danced to almost-modern music with sung rhymed couplets.

Girls don't go to motoramas, 

dressed in a pair of pink pajamas!

The Cars of the Future are the real stars, of course.  The movie ends with the "fabulous turbine-powered Firebird 2" which is "designed for the electronic highway of the future."

Firebird 2 to the control tower.

We are about to take off on the Highway of Tomorrow.
Stand by.

Tomorrow, tomorrow. 

Our dreams will come true.

Together, together.

We'll make the world new.

The Kitchen of the Future from Frigidaire, a subsidiary of GM, also makes an appearance.  That's where the lady of the house will bake a cake, decorate it and even put candles on top, all quite unattended.  The kitchen does this inside of some sort of glass dome and then phones her when the cake is ready.

Aside from any marketing or corporate branding aspects, this movie struck me as a great example of how we saw the future during the fifties.  And the future was good, all filled with gleaming chrome.  Here, watch the future for yourself:

I immediately associated this advertisement with a current one for a different automobile with a different view about the future, a much darker outlook.  Elaborate music, dance and poetry, gleaming chrome, formal costumes are all missing. Instead we have a car in a dark tunnel accompanied by a sober, threatening male voice listing the evils of the future as predicted by competing automobiles.

Here's his text. It's kind of free verse:

Hands-free driving.

Cars that park themselves.

An unmanned car

Driven by a search engine company.

We've seen that movie.

It ends with robots

Harvesting our bodiess for energy.

(motor sounds)

This is the all new 2011 Dodge Charger.

Leader of the human resistance.

Apparently, in 2011, Fear of the Future can sell cars.  As cars become more and more computerized it looks like the "electronic highway of the future" from Design for Dreaming might just happen.  But if that future is frightening, you can forestall it by purchasing a noisy, muscle car - one that wouldn't have looked or sounded out of place on the highways of the nineteen fifties.

---

The tunnel in this (and many other) television commercials is Second Street in downtown Los Angeles.  Here's a shot from the end of the commercial showing the car driving out of the tunnel.  I've added the same shot from Google Street View.  Google, of course, is the search engine company developing a "self-driving" car.  In spite of what the Dodge ad says, the Google car isn't yet "unmanned".

---

Here's an ad from the August 1964 Readers Digest (page 200). I xeroxed this myself sometime after the Three Mile Island Accident in 1979 and saved it ever since because it touts cheap electricity from atomic power.  The picture shows a well-manicured woman holding the household control device of the future and therefore it fits into this post quite well.

She's monitoring her baby in the crib via the "Video Scan".  The other rotary knobs are marked "R/C Clean", "Lawn Care", "Disposal", "Floor Care", "Food Prep."  (Click the picture for enlargement.)

 

 Here's the text in a format Mrs. Google's robot can read.

easy does it

someday you may be able to run your all-electric home by fingertip control

Whatever electrical wonders come your way in the future, there'll be plenty of low-priced electricity to help you enjoy them.

America's more than 300 investor-owned electric light and power companies are seeing to that right now.  For example, they are investing about a billion dollars to develop atomic power as another source of cheap electricity.

And they have more than 1800 other research and development projects in progress or recently completed.  All are pointed toward keeping you and all Americans amply supplied with dependable, low-priced electric service, now and in the wonderful new world of your electric future.

Investor-Owned Electric Light and Power Companies

People you can depend on to power America's porgress

Sponsors' names on request through this magazine.

Here's a collection of articles about how the 50s viewed the future, from a blog called Paleofuture.

Fifties Tags: Design for Dreaming. . . motoramas. . . Dodge Charger. . . the future. . . household automation

In which I remember the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959

I would have been eight years old in 1959, fifty years ago. The government announced that year, just before Thanksgiving, that some cranberries should not be eaten because of possible contamination. Here's the November 9, 1959, press release:

The Food and Drug Administration today urged that no further sales be made of cranberries and cranberry products produced in Washington and Oregon in 1958 and 1959 because of their possible contamination by a chemical weed killer, aminotriazole, which causes cancer in the thyroids of rats when it is contained in their diet, until the cranberry industry has submitted a workable plan to separate the contaminated berries from those that are not contaminated.

As a result of this announcement a nationwide panic ensued.

I, a highly impressionable and not-too-savvy-about-matters-of-food-borne-news-inflamed-misinformation eight-year-old living far from Oregon or Washington, resolved never to eat cranberries again. It was years, decades even, before I could securely eat any cranberry product. Even now, every Thanksgiving as the dish of red goo gets served, my childhood fears return: those little red round berries could kill me. I've learned to keep my mouth shut about it.

Of course, since then, I've even discovered that I like cranberries - including cranberry bagels (which ought to be an affront to nature, but aren't).

I was reminded of this little shading of my personality by a front page of the Los Angeles Mirror (an evening newspaper) from November 11, 1959, reproduced in a recent LA Times blog post about policemen damaging an LA restaurant because of a typographical error. The massive headline is pure scandal rag. But those pesky contaminated cranberries are front and center a few inches down.


A little research into the subject reveals that this event was an early example of food panic. The genre has gotten rather more sophisticated since then.

If you go to the Times blog you can enlarge the newspaper page enough to read the other stories. But here's the text of the cranberry story to help Mrs. Google run up my hit counter.

Go Ahead and Eat, Say Cranberry Expert

Claims Even Tainted Crop Safe

WAREHAM, Mass., Nov. 11 (AP) - The scientist who presides over the world's leading cranberry agricultural experiment station said today he can see no reason why people should not eat cranberries now and during the holiday season.

Dr. Chester E. Cross of the University of Massachusetts directs the Massachusetts agricultural experiment station to which agricultural scientists of the world come to learn about cranberry growing.

[Sidebar: For tasty cranberry substitutes, see story, Page 19.]

This station is largely responsible for the Massachusetts cranberry production, which this year totals 595,000 barrels or half the world crop.

Dr. Cross points out that weed-spraying has been questioned only in a small fraction of the nation's crop in two Pacific Coast states.

He said he would eat a helping of even the suspected West Coast cranberries with no more concern than he would feel over smoking a cigarette.

He chided Welfare Secretary Arthur S. Flemming for stating Monday that improper use of the weed killer aminotriazole had contaminated portions of the Oregon-Washington crop.

Timing Blasted

He said that Flemming's statement at this pre-Thanksgiving time is damaging to the entire industry and that information upon which it was based was "miserable and meager".

In nearby Hattson (?) the National Cranberry Assn. said that all suspected West Coast cranberries already have been segregated from the market.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government sent 100 inspectors and 60 chemists to all parts of the country to test cranberries for possible contamination.

Few Contaminated

Only limited quantities of berries from Oregon and Washington have been found to be contaminated, the government says. But it is making safety checks on cranberries from all producing areas.

Ambrose E. Stevens, executive vice president of Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., said in New York that Flem- (turn to Page 19, Column 4)

The National Cranberry Association is now known as Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., and apparently it survived the 1959 panic thanks to a government subsidy on unsold cranberries. They now sell nearly $1.5 Billion dollars worth of cranberries per year. An early version of "Too big to fail"? Read more than you want to know about the cranberry business here.

Scare Tags: Cranberry Scare. . . 1959. . . contaminated food

Stop Needless Noise - Help America Keep Calm

I found these pictures reblogged on This Isn't Happiness. See if you can identify their common theme.



These pictures can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here or there. These links might help you find the original source blogs. Some of the pictures will enlarge if you click them. Ah ha.



Vinyl Tags: vinyl. . . records. . . photographs

Herbert Hoover Jr. Worked Here

Here's a picture I took in October 2002 from the Hill Street Pasadena Starbucks looking east.


Not long afterwards this lovely building was torn down and replaced by a Tommy's Burgers. For those not from around these parts, Tommy's is an oft-imitated Southern California chili-smothered hamburger institution. My fave!

Here's another picture, taken from the same general direction, which appeared in the March 2006 pages of Mixed Meters.


It's dangerous for me to live too close to such marvelous chili-smothered burgers. I've limited myself to one Tommy's trip per year - usually around my birthday. And so it was this year.

As I left Tommy's to walk home I noticed a brick plinth in an otherwise empty cement planter in the outdoor courtyard and smoking section..


On top of this pedestal I discovered a brass plaque. I don't believe it was there last year. It certainly has been installed since Tommy's arose in Pasadena. You can see a satellite view in Google Maps here and the column is visible in the Google Street View here.


Click the picture to read the plaque yourself. Google's robo-trolls can't read it unless I type it in:

On This Site
170 N. Hill Ave., Pasadena
HERBERT HOOVER, JR.,
Son of the 31st President
of the U.S.A.,
Operated Consolidated
Electrodynamics
Corporation.
He made a discovery
which led to the use of
Mass Spectrometers
in soil analysis for the
oil industry; Circa 1937.

This struck me as strange. Apparently, seventy or so years ago the son of a president ran a company at this spot. That's where he made some unmentioned discovery which enabled the oil industry to analyze dirt in a way so important that it deserves a brass plaque. Heaven only knows how dreary and difficult our lives would be now without this ... er, thing - whatever it is.

I resolved to do some Internet research to slake my curiosity. Here's some basic info about Herbert Hoover Jr.

The best resource about the first son of the 31st President is the Time Magazine archive. Herbert Junior was Time Magazine's cover boy on July 14, 1930. This was during his Dad's only term in the White House.


This paragraph from July 10, 1939, Time is close to a biographical sketch:

It was natural for Herbert Jr., a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School and since then a radio engineer, to get into seismographic oil prospecting, not only because his father has prospected off & on all his life (and still does), but because the sound technique leans heavily on radio principles. Herbert Jr., at 35, is a prospector in a big way, employing 200 men in five laboratories. He lives with his wife and three children in a secluded whitewashed brick house behind Pasadena, rides and plays a little tennis, but has little time for social doings and no time for country clubs. Most of the time he works. Unlike Jimmy Roosevelt, son of another U. S. President, who lives only 20 miles away, Herbert Hoover Jr., has no interest whatever in politics.

He figures heavily in this July 14, 1930, Time article about aeronautical radio.

Wikipedia has this article about Consolidated Electrodynamics Corporation (although the name was different when Herbert Hoover Jr. owned it). It says CEC was bought up and eventually went out of business. However this company in Covina says different. Wikipedia has a copy of the patent diagram for a mass spectrometer. Possibly it employs the discovery on the brass plaque.

Later in life, H.H., Jr. became UnderSecretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. This paragraph shows him over 50 years ago dealing with an international situation that has not been solved even today.

Demanded, in the face of two previous turndowns, that Syria cooperate to allow repair of the Iraq Petroleum Co.'s pipeline cut by saboteurs during the Egyptian hostilities. Declared Under Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr.: "Unless work begins immediately . . . the oil situation will be aggravated, which means in human terms cold and hunger not only in Europe but in Asia and South America." (from Time Magazine, 1956)

And this quote compares our hero unfavorably to his successor.

After the often grating brusqueness of Herbert Hoover Jr., his predecessor as Under Secretary, Herter's unflagging courtesy and willingness to listen boosted departmental morale. (from Time Magazine, 1959)

If anyone knows a story behind how this magnificent mysterious brass memorial came to be outside of a fast food joint, please leave a comment.

Here's a picture of the Hoover family: President Herb and Mrs. Hoover and their sons Herb Jr. (with his wife) and Allen.

Here you can buy a Herbert Hoover Jr. Hoodie.

Here, for $1000, you can buy a 1956 Washington Redskins souvenir Christmas booklet autographed by Under Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr. and Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

Richard Nixon comes up a lot on Mixed Meters.

Junior Tags: Herbert Hoover Junior. . . mass spectrometer. . . brass plaque. . . Pasadena CA. . . Tommy's Burgers

In which David's Ranting is Imaginary

I listened to the first part of a (low energy, almost intimate) conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman, recorded in 1967 at WBAI in New York. (Please imagine my rant about changes in non-commercial radio.)
I discovered this program via Nonpop.
Also available at Ubuweb

Near the end of part one Cage reflects that Arnold Schoenberg seemed more interested in teaching than in composing. And I thought "Yep, that's the problem with modern music today in a nutshell." (Please imagine my rant about how music should be listened to, not thought about.) (Also imagine my "do as I say, not as I do" rant.)

Here's an article about music in the early fifties - about the time I was an infant. The article is technical and ends with a comparison of recordings of Cage's Music of Changes, if you care. But I found it a fascinating overview of the mass of new musical ideas - and the interactions between composers. (I wonder if I'd enjoy reading letters between John Cage & Pierre Boulez.)

I enthusiastically studied this music in college and grad school. Today I wouldn't cross the street to hear it. But I'm in awe of the vast outpouring of radical invention.

These things must have been regarded by "sane, rational 1950's music lovers" as lunatic ravings and pure noise. What would I have thought had I been an adult back then? More importantly what lunatic rantings and ravings of today am I overlooking? (Imagine my rant about where the new ideas in new music have disappeared to.)

Here are previous posts in Mixed-Meters regarding John Cage:
4'33" performed by an orchestra
ICA plays Atlas Eclipticalis
ASLAP
"John Cage" radio at Pandora

The picture above is Bob Denver (you know, "Gilligan") - watch a video of him "singing" in the beach. (Yep. IN the beach.) (actually his performance is more like sprechstimme.) (You're right, it has nothing to do with John Cage)

Bob's beach-movie video is from WFMU Beware the Blog. Other good recent videos there include Monkey Chant and someone playing slide guitar with a spoon held in his teeth. You can find 'em if you look.

If you want to hear some 1950's music I actually enjoy listening to these days, try WFMU's show - Fools Paradise. Go figure.

(P.S. - still busy with work. Five-day Forecast: less than one new post per week.)

Music Video

In which David enjoys vintage absurd humor

Consider Man On The Street interviews.

Often used as filler in TV news. Fake ones are staples of misleading commercials. (My favorite line "They're giving it away free? It must be good.")

But how about interviewing unsuspecting people and presenting them with absurd situations? If you think that might be funny you should know about Coyle and Sharpe.

That would be James P. Coyle (in front) and Mal Sharpe (the other one). They were radio comedians in San Francisco during the sixties (not evil assistants to President Nixon as the picture might suggest).

Click here for The Official Coyle & Sharpe Webpage - you'll find audio and video. It's more amusing and droll than this blog.

Media

In which David Plugs a Song About Hearing 2 Radio Stations at Once

I've talked about how I listen to NPR (with a Tango radio playing simultaneously).

I heard a 2-minute novelty song on WFMU today which refers to listening to two radio stations simultaneously.

It's called Jazz versus Rock & Roll (yeah, that's the title) by Woody Byrd. I'm guessing it's a product of the 50's. It's on Jaro records.

The singer tells how he and his girlfriend disagree on music - he's all-jazz and she's all-rock. Little snippets in the music illustrate. Their conflict escalates until both are always blasting their own stations. You can hear this in the tune. (It's only slightly Cageian.)

As in any good song, the conflict is resolved at the end. I won't say how. My Grandmother would have approved.

Go to Todd-o-phonic Todd's archive page at WFMU , play the show from October 22, 2005. Jazz vs. Rock & Roll starts at 29 minutes and 35 seconds.

Music Reviews

In which David plugs Ham Hocks and Cornbread

No, not food. Hamhocks and Cornbread is a set of 4 compact discs published by JSP Records with 118 R&B tracks from the late forties through the early fifties, about the time I was busy being born.

Think Honkers and Shouters. Saxophones and Boogie Beats. Up Tempo and High Energy. Seems to be one track per artist. Not many household names. Great Stuff. I'm hooked.

I bought mine at Overstock.com for about $20. My second 4-disc set from the period - I recommend the other one too - The Big Horn (The History of Honkin' & Screamin' Saxophone) on Proper Records. There are lots more sets like these that I have my eye on.

And if you need an intro to this style I suggest Fools Paradise on WFMU. (It's a radio show on Saturday afternoons, easy to hear on the net & it's archived - listen anytime.)


Music Reviews
Media