Oh, I don’t care. I mean I do, but summer lassitude has struck with full force, and I’ll be switched if I can manufacture enthusiasm for anything. That’s not good: tomorrow contains one hour-long podcast (with Pat Sajak), two short interviews, one webcast interview, one radio interview, one column, and of course the blogging, and of course the blog-specific video. Also have to pick up daughter from summer camp – oh, and get her birthday presents in the evening. What I really want to do is just sit in the backyard and read books.
Hah!
Hah to all that. Not damn bloody likely. Too much to do. Anyway, this is an explanation for the once-a-week rote Bleat, so I’d best get to the updates so I can finish the one tiny allotment of entertainment I have queued up: finishing an episode of “Life on Mars.” The British version. It’s gritty, to use the obvious word, and since it reminds the viewer of the general economic and stylistic horrors of the 70s, I like it. The mean cops, the crappy cars, the rotten-mustard color schemes, the sense of decay and decline – it’s not the 70s I knew, growing up in the happy world of Fargo, but it reminds of Kojakland, which the TV insisted could be found in any big city. Neglected infrastructure, turtlenecks, cruel cops, the general belief that something nasty was afoot in the land, and a decent society was more or less out of our grasp for the foreseeable future. It was obvious from all these shows – and from the news – that the utopian ideas of the 60s had quickly curdled, how the worst sorts naturally concluded that the old rules were dead, how it’s easy to say a new era has begun but rather difficult to actually build it. “All you need is love” may be the most fatuous presumption ever proposed. It only works if there’s someone who says “all I need s a hammer ” and someone who says “all I need is a plow.”
I can see why the show was popular: as horrible as it looks, there still must be some nostalgia for an era not yet constrained by all the shibboleths of the modern era. It took for granted certain freedoms, and didn’t consider them freedoms at all. See also, “Mad Men.” In the lizard brain of the Western man there’s a silent, sulking wish he could have a drink at the office without anyone suggesting he needed to go to rehab. Not me; not a daytime tippler. The idea that your boss would pull out the Office Bottle from the bottom drawer and splash a finger or two in a glass would seem absurd. You’d wonder about him. If you accepted a glass, you’d think: oh dear me I am enabling his problem. And you might be right. But the attraction of the idea of a time when it was normal – that I get. “Life on Mars,” to British audiences, must have seemed a bit like “Mad Men” – equal mixtures of tut-tut and regret.
You know what I remember about the mid-to-late 70s? People had given up hope. It was just all downhill from here.
Don’t get that now. Not yet.
Anyway, links: ads from the 30s, here.
And now, Out of Context Ad Challenge! What are they selling?
See you at tumblr – where it’s 1972 day! – and PopCrush – don’t miss the noon video, pls. Someone said in the comments I was TOO THIN and should eat a sammich. Whatever. I’ll gain again someday. For now it’s skinny time.
I like skinny time. See you around.
Pass it along, if you wish
44 Responses to Kojakland. Also Out-of-Context Ad Challenge
Host with the Most
Out of Context Challenge: Lax… nah, too easy. Bonding for your Gentleman’s Gentleman- so you can be sure he doesn’t cheat at craps.
A new, sturdier style of shirts. Clearly Ol’ Saran Shirt needs to get with the times, or he’ll lose the transparent shirt on his back.
Awesome…I”m glad you’re watching the brit version of LOM. You’ll have to report on if you agree that it’s better than the American. I never even could finish the last few eps of the American version…had to hear secondhand how it ended.
Regarding Life On Mars and sequel Ashes To Ashes, I don’t think there was any ‘tut tut’ involved at all for audiences on this side of the pond. We pretty much just looked at the character of Gene Hunt and decided that here was the kind of lawman that we could do with having back around for a few years, just to feel that there was some sort of tangible, fist-centric payback for lawbreakers.
Anyway, the gentleman in the Ad Challenge is very much the prototype punk – studded belt hanging off, what looks like a mohawk, bondage top.
…it reminds the viewer of the general economic and stylistic horrors of the 70s, I like it. The mean cops, the crappy cars, the rotten-mustard color schemes, the sense of decay and decline – it’s not the 70s I knew, growing up in the happy world of Fargo, but it reminds of Kojakland, which the TV insisted could be found in any big city. Neglected infrastructure, turtlenecks, cruel cops, the general belief that something nasty was afoot in the land, and a decent society was more or less out of our grasp for the foreseeable future….
Kojakland? Welcome to Youngstown, Ohio, or Cleveland, or Pittsburgh. Come for the layoffs from the steel mills, stay for the mob influence and deferred maintenance.
As for the ad, it’s for Vegas, Baby!TM Do you live in a casino-free state? Are you forced to satiate your gaming compulsion with own domestic servants, uncouth men of lower breeding who use loaded dice and laugh at your losses behind your back? Here in Vegas, Baby!TM the scrupulously honest Nevada State Gaming Commission prevents loaded dice and other crooked practices. And no one will laugh at you at home, because what happens here stays here.
_@_v – a craps game going next to the white metal cabinet? couldn’t possibly be code for… nahhh!
Seems to be a craps game, yes, but a strip craps game, which I’ve never heard of and should raise the spam filters.
Why not buy a deck of cards and save the wear on your knees?
Bob
As for “what are they selling”? Who knows. Looks like an icebox in the background, so the guy who escaped from an Esquire cartoon is playing craps with the butler in the kitchen. Aside from the disturbing transparent undershirt, the most puzzling item in the picture is the pair of baby shoes, which along with money, shirt, upper plate, etc., seem to be among the butler’s winnings (and he isn’t even kneeling to shoot). What is this guy doing with baby shoes? Just look at him.
The rest of the paragraph after Fargo describes my growing up in the 1970s — in New Jersey & New York, in the shadow of NYC. The decay from the city cast a shadow at least 100 miles long.
What are they selling? Maybe honest dice? But who cares, what the H E double hockey sticks is the guy wearing or was wearing? A see-through wife-beater or was it a transparent striped undershirt? And what is that around his neck? Wouldn’t that be the first thing to go?
Insurance. “Because you can’t count on luck in life.”
“All You Need Is Love” is easily The Beatles most misunderstood song. John is most emphatically not saying “love makes all things possible.” Rather, he spends most of the song delineating the limits of possibility: there are certain things you simply cannot do, cannot know, cannot make. But those things are to some extent optional; the one thing you absolutely need is love.
James of course is right: while love may be necessary, it is not in and of itself sufficient. But there is nothing in the song to gainsay that.
Is he betting his mustache on this roll? Looks like he’s already forfeited his beard, which the butler has conveniently tucked behind his ear. Perhaps they’re selling something called “Simpkins’, since that’s so predominant in the headline? Little bottles of hooch with easy-open tops, stored in the GE liquor cabinet behind them.
Re: the Packard ads, here I’ve been thinking all along that selling ‘a lifestyle’ has been a fairly modern technique in advertising. Yet there’s hardly a mention of the car’s attributes in these ads, it’s all pure glorious American dream.
John is most emphatically not saying
“John”? Friend of yours, was he?
Have to side with Raf: Insurance of some kind. Sort of a “Why would you gamble?” set up. And a good question–why would a rich plutocrat gamble with the help? What’s he going to win from them? Indentured servitude? But he could lose all kinds of things.
That, or laxatives.
Just saw Pat Sajak do the opening video at Mount Vernon — not everyone can pull of serious and silly simultaneously, but he does it, and in a tricorn hat to boot.
Lordy, DC is HOT. W/O A/C this place would be a ghost town in the summer. As it is, it’s filled with scarlet hued ghosts wanly marching up and down the Mall.
They tell me my great-grandfather always bought a new Packard every year. You’ve got to understand, this guy was *cheap*. A Norwegian immigrant whose fingerprints were stamped into every nickle he spent, who worked from dawn to sundown and beyond. But he always found money to have a new Packard. Of course it helped that he had a friend who was a dealer.
I remember the hopelessness of the ’70s too. I recall saying to a friend, “We’re the first generation in America who’ll never be able to own a home.” Ha! We owned homes, all right. Couldn’t keep ‘em, but we had ‘em for a while.
Orson Oil Wells is playing Simpkins for the tutu that matches his top.
As a kid, I visited London in the 70′s. I was there in 1977–the height of punk, yet saw nothing to betray that culture (I was ten, so I probably would have noticed). I guess it wouldn’t have been an underground, counter-culture if I had noticed.
I think the 70′s was a time of flux for that country–lot’s of immigration to a place that was used to being isolated.
I remember I had purple converse knock-offs, which I wore with a purple turtle-neck and purple pants. Oh, yes, I was stylin’ back then.
“What are they selling?” Denture adhesive.
@rbj: You and I were in the same place/same time. The stretch of 42nd Street between 8th Avenue and Broadway was the most horrifying, smelly, run-down, and dangerous place you could imagine. Hookers, drug dealers, stepping over guys who were sleeping on the street, porn houses and shops. Disgusting and vile. And ditto the sense of hopelessness.
Now, that block is bright and busy, filled with tourists, clean and safe. Thank you, Mayor Giuliani!
And as to the ad: I don’t care what they’re selling. I just want Mr. Gottrox to put a shirt on!
@Gene Dillenburg:
James of course is right: while love may be necessary, it is not in and of itself sufficient. But there is nothing in the song to gainsay that.
Hmm. I think the song says exactly what it appears to say, and what nearly everyone has always understood it to be saying.
Having described the limits of human potential — the only positive statements in the verses allow that people can “learn how to play the game” and “learn how to be you in time,” whatever the hell that means — the singer declares that, “All you need is love.”
So everything in category N, containing “All the things you need,” is also part of category L, containing only “Love.” Necessary (need) and sufficient (all) are both covered.
I actually do believe that is how it was intended. Fatuous if taken as Lennon’s own sentiment, pandering and cynical if not. But not, I would say, ambiguous.
@Gardenstater
Oh yes. Even in the early 1980s, when I first went into Manhattan on my own, via the train, you’d step outside of the gorgeous Union Station into a cesspool. It was then that I learned how to walk briskly and confidently so I wouldn’t get mugged — and that was during daytime. But hey, if NY can bounce back from those depths, so can our country today.
And is that an ice box in the background? It isn’t a chest of drawers or a night-table.
The Ad?
The ToolBox.
A men-only gambling parlor and speakeasy. Where everyone is happy and ghey. They just can’t bring themselves to be honest about it.
And James is correct about the 70s. No hope, dirty, and broken. I think Star Wars was the first sparkle of a looming change, at least in spirit. But even that was tinged with the dirty look of Tatooine. Late 70s Space Chic.
ad: Wilf Properties. Just think, man, you are financing a football stadium!
I turned 12 in 1970 and was 21 when the ’70s ended, so maybe that’s why those years were “green grass and high tides forever” for me. The optimism of youth let me float over Kent State, Bloody Sunday, the Munich Olympics, the oil embargo, Watergate, busing, the fall of Saigon, Idi Amin, disco, and Bucky f*&#ing Dent just off the top of my head. Yeah, there was the usual bit of teenage angst along the line, but the picture of me on the Esplanade in Boston on July 4, 1976 sums it up pretty well: big smile. There have been a few wrong turns along the way since, but mostly its just gotten better.
“I’ve been walking in Central Park Singing after dark People think I’m crazy”
“baby needs a new pair of shoes” is a common expression for people tossing dice (at least in literature/cartoon/movies etc).
No clue what they are selling.
Snake-eyes for Colonel Blimp?
And yes, please give that man a shirt. Or at least a bra.
I never watched Kojack, pass my bed time. The one that always means bad fashion and tough cops to me is “French Connection”. Even the Frenchmen dress slovenly.
What’s love got to do with it
It’s obviously laxatives. Why?? He’s playing CRAPS!! Get it?? Oh whatever.
I’m going to have to guess it’s for the icebox in the background. While he lost everything, he won’t lose all of his food, thanks to Frigidaire’s Sta-Kool technology.
ad: this could also be the first US ad ever for the Red Star Glorious People’s Revolutionary Army Lead and Melamine Cooperative. put the boojie capitalist pig in his place, Yankee! use glorious Revolutionary Lead in your dice! we control the high mountain smelters for ever, dependable supplier.
Yes, wouldn’t it be nice if Congress went home for three months or so every year? Used to be that way. Gave the rest of us a chance to breathe without new laws pelting us every week
Curse you, Willis Carrier!
Luck? Got to be Lucky Strikes.
Out of Context Ad: Sebastian Snake Eyes and the butler, Ben Dover, are shootin’ dice for a nice
cold six-pack of North Star in the new vortex
bottles, which is in the Norge in the background.
The fellow on the left has made an unusal fashion choice, pairing a see-thru negligee with black dress pants. He seems to be cursing the loss of his favorite pair of dainty Cinderella shoes to Simpkins, who has just slipped them on. Simpkins plans to tell the missus about her husband’s dirty little secret, but first he wants to walk about in the shoes for awhile to try to understand his boss’s fondness for such pointy little things. The boss doesn’t know any of that however; he’s just upset at losing his expensive shoes. This ad must be for a new Cinderella shoe store, now more affordable than ever, and they even wrap your purchases in a plain brown bag so the wife doesn’t know.
I’d love to hear how that guy pronounces “Simpkins” with his teeth on the floor.
@Jersey Amy: I wondered about those shoes. the butler, methinks, has something going on the side. and needed to shake the boss down for the community health center. Gotham Civic Health… give today, and help us keep the private exam rooms.
All you need is love.
All you need is LUCK.
Maybe it’s PSA condemning gambling?
Did they even have PSA’s in those days?
If “Love is all you need” as the song says, then we could just send Carol Channing to clean up the Gulf Coast.
Ah, Packard Cars. I grew up with Packards. The last one we owned was a 1949 dark gray battlewagon of immense dignity and rock-solid construction. I still miss that car, even though we sometimes had to smack the left front bumper with a marshmallow hammer to unstick a solenoid.
What I want to know is: who are the artists who painted those pictures? Flagg? Parish? Realism with hints of fantasy. Beautiful colors, composition perfect. Some of the best painters of the 20th century never hung in art museums: they’re in the back of Vogue or Saturday Evening Post or Colliers.
So far Santa’s lost the miniature sleigh, the eight tiny reindeer, his suit coat, and the beard to Simpkins’ loaded dice.
Next he’ll probably ante up the elves. Or the missus.
Craps is a hell of a drug.
It’s an ad for the precursor to Spanx. Like the victims in Art Frahm’s paintings, the elastic back then wasn’t up to snuff, and also that weird silky see-thru material giving us all an eyeful of his paunch and moobs.
The 70s were dark, scary, and depressing in the gritty, urban movies of the time and were scary for folks in the Rust Belt and the Northeast inner city but they weren’t that bad in the greater Sun Belt. In the South there was a remarkable easing of racial tensions and an acceptance of the new way and the economy was growing most of the decade.
I had one trip to NYC during the worst of it all and was shocked by just how bad some things had deteriorated. The roads had potholes that would have shamed the poorest county in Mississippi and the burned out Bronx warzone was an eyeopener.
Like Uncle Joe, the 70s were actually fairly optimistic for me. Maybe it was just youth.
Bridey –
It appears that we are interpreting the song the same way, and are in disagreement over whether our interpretation is the standard one. I would argue not.
When James quotes the song title, he uses it to mean “love makes all things possible.” I believe this is how most people understand the song. And, as James points out, this is incorrect: love makes a poor substitute for a hammer, a plow, etc.
But “love makes all things possible” is a serious misreading of the text. As you note, John (that’s the singer’s name) describes the limits of human potential. Well, if love made all things possible, then there would be no such limits, would there? So, that interpretation is unsupported.
In fact, human existence is so limited that John allows only three things as possible. You can’t do anything at all, except a) “learn how to play the game” (live within the limits); b) “learn how to be you in time” (develop your talents and skills, flower as an individual, that kind of stuff); and c) be “where you were meant to be” (embrace your individuality and go where it leads you). Fortunately, those three things are “easy” to accomplish, requiring only one ingredient.
Fatuous? Yes; we do not expect penetrating insight from 27-year-old musicians. Ambiguous? Not in the least. Widely misunderstood? Oh, definitely yes.