Friday! July 03. Something’s different. What?
An amazing day, now that I look back; started in the early AM, with a video shoot at the paper, then a Presentation on the Top Secret Thing Phase One Mark II, then a column, then the sudden decision at 2 o’clock that my work here is done, and a nap might be in order. Pow: out. Up: vacation begins.
Got up to get out, fetched 3 girls from the summer day-camp on the other side of town. I asked one of the counselors if my daughter could have a new water bottle with the camp logo, since she’d dropped hers and it had shattered. She said yes – in fact, they were all breaking, and had to be replaced. “We switched to a different kind of plastic because the parents worried that the other plastic gave you cancer,” she said. “But they all broke.”
Wanted to say “yes, we were having a white-lead gargling contest last night, and the bottles leaked everywhere.”
After I dropped off the other kids Natalie and I went to Target to get supplies for the Fourth. Evil SWINE and DESPOILERS OF SUMMER: they put up the school supplies before the Fourth. GAH. Summer has been shoved off to a few aisles like last year’s fashions. No one likes this. No one wants this. No one will be banging on the door a minute after closing time tomorrow to demand admittance because they need a plastic pencil box now. You cannot sell fireworks, watermelons, backpacks and pencils in the same store in July; they should repel one another and be hurled to all four corners of the store. Well, we’ll never try that again. Someone call the Pentagon and tell them we’ve discovered a new elemental force that could possibly be weaponized. Honest to God, Natalie’s face was drained of color when she saw the displays. Noooooo!
If I’d had a bottle of lemonade in my hand I would have walked around like Max Von Sydow, sprinkling consecrated liquid to sear the demon. I cast you out! Begone, erasers asleep in your plastic blisters! Away, spiral-bound notebooks emblazoned with licensed tween idols! The power of July compels you! The power of July compels you!
Today was the first trip she’s decided she will push the cart. She’s progressed from sitting in the cart to pushing it. Happens much quicker than you expect. I still remember coming out of Target in the rain, seeing her giggle in the seat under her new Hello Kitty umbrella. One of those memories where you not only hear Time’s Winged Chariot, but feel the hoof hit you in the back of the head.
Some updates prompted by comments in the, er, comments:
1. I never did get around to admitting which song I like, but shouldn’t. I think that’s how I phrased the subject, trying to distinguish it from the Guilty Pleasure genre, but that’s a distinction without a difference. Perhaps it’s the difficulty of explaining why I shouldn’t like a song. If it sounds good, it is good. Right? If you like it, then you like it, and shouldn’t feel embarrassed, unless it’s Bloodrock or Bob Marley’s cover of “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini.” Sometimes you rebel against songs because they sum up an era you enjoyed as a youth but came to dislike because A) you saw it more clearly, B) you had a subsequent era that was better, and C) it was the seventies. I’ve been watching some of this:
Price is Right shows. They have a horrible fascination, because they bring back 1973 with such full undiluted power I’m right back in summer break in Fargo, sitting in the kitchen, whiling away a hot morning with a show that not only consists entirely of commercials, but breaks for in-show commercials before it breaks for commercial breaks. I mean, it’s genius. The things you forget. The cars:
The housewives (they all gave their professions as housewives in this episode, and did so with a certain hesitance):
They cut away from that shot right away. She was nervous and uncertain, and TOTALLY BLEW the showcase; the other contestant was all sunny cheer, and everyone wanted her to win.
She did. If you doubt me, well, there’s an episode recap on the web. Of course there’s an episode recap of a 1973 Price is Right show. What makes you think there wouldn’t be?
And of course the models, the two leggy hand-wavers who smiled on behalf of everything from baking soda to new cars. Watching the show, I am reminded why it held my interest as a young lad. Janice Pennington:
Says Wikipedia:
“In 1974, Pennington married famed mountain climber Fritz Stammberger, who went missing in 1975 in a restricted area along the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union. She later married writer Carlos de Abreu in 1984 after Fritz was legally declared dead. In 1992, Pennington discovered that Fritz helped organize CIA bases among those borders and died fighting with the Afghans against the USSR.”
It gets better:
“In 1994, Pennington and de Abreu wrote Husband, Lover, Spy, an account of Janice’s search for her first husband. Pennington admitted that after he went missing, she would return to her Price Is Right dressing room in tears when a contestant played the Cliff Hangers pricing game. In that game, a mountain climber caricature climbs up, then falls off, of a cliff when a contestant loses the game – the ‘yodeling’ climb music turning into a loud crash when the climber goes over the cliff.”
She’s 66 now. (Link goes to her MySpace page; GIS may result in NSFW pictures from her Playboy stint.) By the way, do you see some Scarlett Johansson here? I do.
And then there was Anitra Ford. Hamina hamina hrr stampa stampa:
She was exotic in ‘73. That’s such a ‘73 look, too. The nose, the hair, the teeth, the perfect accumulation of personal details. Betty to Janice’s Veronica. But I’ve always been a sucker for the Bettys. She’s on Myspace as well. One of her friends, God bless her, is Gene Rayburn. Who is dead. Ten years now.
So maybe the song I like is a game show theme, and I shouldn’t like them because I wasted too much time watching those stupid shows.
Then again: the other day I was driving home from work; a police car sped past, shot over to the curb, and an officer ran out, gun drawn. Another officer was behind a tree, gun drawn. At that very minute the radio was playing a song I thought was SO TRAGIC when I was a kid: “Indiana Wants Me (But I Can’t Go Back There.) As I drove by and snapped a shot, I heard the part that always gave us chills when we listened to the sad, sad song: “This is the police. Come out with your hands up. You are completely surrounded.”
But that’s not the song. It’s not an ELO song, because over the years I’ve come to admire Jeff Lynne, a lot – he did create a unique sound.
It might be “The Hustle.” This song was everything I stood against. Those battles are over.
I’m not sure. Ask me tomorrow.
As for Jack Kirby: Mike in the comments wondered why I was picking on Kirby in Comic Sins. Well, the whole point of Comic Sins is to read too much into the covers – freeze them and overstudy them, just for fun. Aside from all that, I have nothing but awe and thanks for Jack Kirby, and if someone gave me a pencil and said “here, you do better” the only proper response would be to plunge it into my eyeballs. Kirby defined the look of heroism when I was a kid. There were only a few I idolized: Kirby, Steranko, Eisner, and Ditko. Jack was the best. But I suspect he might have wondered why a gunslinger wears a bulls-eye on his chest, then gone ahead to do the best he could.
And now to finish “In Like Flint,” one of those rare movies that manages to be a parody and a straight-ahead example of the best things it parodies, mostly thanks to Coburn. As I twittered last night while watching it, I’d love to see a straight 60s-spy movie done a la “Mad Men,” without the Austin Powers mugging and shagadelic groovyness. You’d have to trim away the pop-art sensibility that makes “Flint” amusing but date, but it might be damned cool. Of all the Bond movies I’d like to see remade, “You Only Live Twice” would be top of the list – partly because it was my first, but mainly because you can’t get any more supervillainous than a rocket base in a volcano with a retractable roof. I still wonder how SPECTRE dealt with the loss of that asset. It’s not as if they could write it off. There’s a downside to being an international extralegal criminal organization, you know.
Later today: First Day Covers – should have been yesterday’s update; sue me – and of course 100 Mysteries. The Strib column on fireworks can be found here. Real actual direct link! Yesterday’s NewsBreak video with my little vid on fireworks can be found here. Mistakes I remember making: screwed up the word “ramp,”and lost my place while reading the weather off the prompter. Have a larf at my expense.
There. That should make up for yesterday, no?
NO? Well, we’ll see you on the Fourth, then.
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[...] Lileks reporting in The Bleat on the consequences of the anti-BPA campaigns, litigation, legislation, hysteria: Got up to get [...]
The Barker’s Beauties you’ve got are just before my time. These are my ladies:
http://www.curtalliaume.com/priceisright1.jpg
Holly Hallstrom. Now there’s Hamina hamina hrr stampa stampa for you.
As for Drew’s blog, I’m not surprised that they haven’t changed The Clock Game controller since 1972. It seems like everything on that set dates from the Ford Administration, at the latest.
Thanks swschrad for the Flickr links. If I recall, most of those mikes were pretty sturdy, so Gene Rayburn could have used it as a weapon as well.
Looks like the owner is also a Pittsburgher. (If the references to the Crawford Grill and the vintage Jazz scene weren’t enough, the Stanley Cup photos were a dead giveaway.)