Vintage style: just walking down the street

Everyday chic in the '20s and '30s.

Come ride in my teal automobile

Though any color would do,

I would much prefer a green-blue.

Sexual Etiquette, Lesson 1: How to Kiss

                       WRONG WAY (WARNING!)

                        RIGHT WAY (PROCEED!)

"Do you inhale?": Vintage cigarette advertisements

Here is another of my gif /slidehows of old ads. I've wanted to do one of cigarette ads for a while now, but once I started researching, I was inundated. There are just thousands of these things out there. I found whole sites devoted to them. They had all been neatly archived according to date and type. The fascination with these things continues, so full of jaunty lies.

Cigarettes were so normalized, so much a part of culture. They were associated with sophistication (long gloves and cigarette holder), rugged masculinity ("Come to where the flavour is!"), femininity (a bride throwing a bouquet after stubbing out her Lucky), and certain psychological benefits - lifting you up or calming you down, depending on which direction you needed to be levelled. And of course, there was smoking as social ritual, a harmless and fun form of recreation.

These ads exhort you to "be happy - go Lucky!" They depict adorable babies posing questions to their Moms and Dads about their smoking habits. Doctors exhort their patients to smoke Camels, because that's what THEY smoke. More than one ad asks "do you inhale?" Women are bursting with athletic health and glee, never getting fat because they smoke rather than eat.

Did all this shit work? I mean, did people actually buy them because of this propaganda?

Must have. Took a long, long time for the public to catch on. Mad Men was actually about the tobacco boondoggle and its eventual defeat, though the show then had to go on to other things (like foreign cars that wouldn't start, thus defeating carbon monoxide suicide attempts).

I saw a documentary about all this - hair-raising, it was, because by the end of it, it turned out Big Tobacco was doing better than ever, shipping their lethal substance overseas to the Third World where smoking makes the horrors of life just bearable. This is where you see pictures of three-year-old kids smoking.

Let's look at a few of these things in detail.

Babies abound in these things, and it's puzzling. Of course they're cute, but are the ads somehow, obliquely, telling women that it's OK to smoke while they're pregnant? They DID tell women that. Also that it was OK to smoke around them. Everyone did anyway. But I find this association especially creepy because it makes no logical sense.

One of the more chilling Lucky Strike slogans was "Smoke a Lucky to feel your LEVEL best!" This usually depicted a widely grinning young woman - in this case getting married and throwing her bouquet.  But it's the fine print that makes my stomach drop: "Luckies' fine tobacco picks you up when you're low. . . calms you down when you're tense - puts you on the Lucky level." Level seems to be the operative term here, the desirable thing. Cigarettes are being used as a drug to regulate mood. Did it work? Look at the explosion of antidepressant use today. Maybe we should bring back the Leveller?

No. No! Not one. NOT ONE SINGLE CASE OF THROAT IRRITATION due to smoking CAMELS! Now I know why we're asked not to use all-caps on the internet because it makes you seem to be shouting. In this case, an official-looking man in a white coat, presumably a doctor, is displaying case studies of people who have gone and smoked their brains out for months, and STILL do not display ONE SINGLE CASE of throat irritation. "Start your own 30-Day Camel MILDNESS Test Today!" Mildness is a term you see in a lot of these ads, along with flavour. To me, sucking smoke into my lungs via my mouth and tongue just wouldn't taste very good. But I may be wrong. I can see why it might put you off food, which in these ads is considered a good thing.

Let me just transcribe the text below the photo: "A really mild, flavorful smoke that enters your mouth pleasantly cool and filtered. Embassy's extra length of fine, mellow tobaccos provides extra enjoyment plus an extra margin of protection. Try Embassy! Inhale to your heart's content!"

This is completely chilling in light of what we now know about the value of filters in protecting people from cancer. They did absolutely doodlysquat, but for decades the public was told over and over again that they filtered out "tar" and other unwanted things. This was an obvious attempt to assuage public anxiety about all those silly things the Surgeon General had been telling them, that their lungs would rot and they would end their days coughing up blood in a cancer ward.

This is another aspect of the cigarette ad: gorgeousness. Some of these are just so beautiful to look at! How could anything so sophisticated and artful be bad for you? But soft! What lie through yonder advertisement breaks? Could it be - more reassuring text?

DO YOU INHALE? Luckies "makes no bones" about this vital question. "Keep that under your hat," said the cigarette trade when first we raised the question - "Do you inhale?"

But silence is golden only when it's unwise to speak. Let others explain their striking avoidance of this subject. Lucky Strike makes its position crystal clear. . . for certainly, inhaling is most important to every smoker.

For everybody inhales - whether they realize it or not. . . every smoker breathes in some part of the smoke he or she draws out of a cigarette.

Do you inhale? Lucky Strike "makes no bones" about this vital question, because certain impurities concealed in even the finest, mildest tobacco are removed by Luckies' famous purifying process. Luckies created that process. Only Luckies have it!  "It's toasted"

"Toasted" seems to imply that the tobacco has somehow been purified of carcinogens (a word that might not even have been coined back then). Someone in the tobacco industry waved a magic wand over it, rendering it harmless. Surely the good folks at Lucky Strike, the LSMFT people ("Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco") would know best, and would never do anything to harm the public. But those ads seem to bespeak certain nameless jitters among the general population, not to mention the tobacco industry itself.

Was it the fact that 90% of heavy smokers were pulling a Humphrey Bogart or an Edward R. Murrow in their final days and gasping their last in the cancer ward? Did no one put the pieces together? But if they tried to, Lucky reassured them: pish-tosh! WE don't mind discussing the matter even though everyone else is being needlessly coy about it. WE are honest about the fact that smokers inhale. But our product is so magically-produced, with shamans sitting out in the tobacco fields moaning incantations over it day and night, that those delicate throat membranes surely won't start to ulcerate, bleed, fester, bubble, blister and turn black.

A FRANK DISCUSSION AT LAST

on a subject that has long been "taboo"

"Let sleeping dogs lie!" So said the cigarette trade when first we raised the subject of inhaling. But dodging an important issue is not Lucky Strike's policy!

Do you inhale? That question is vitally important. . . for every smoker inhales - knowingly or unknowingly. Every smoker breathes in some part of the smoke he or she draws out of a cigarette! And the delicate membranes of your throat demand that your smoke be pure, clean - free of certain impurities!

No wonder Lucky Strike dares to raise this vital question! For Luckies bring you the protection you want - because Luckies' famous purifying process removes certain impurities concealed in every tobacco leaf. Luckies created that process. Only Luckies have it! 

So, whether you inhale knowingly or unknowingly, safeguard those delicate membranes!

"It's toasted"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author page!

Creepy, creepy stuff

I just realized that throughout my adult life, I kept trying to forget about "Sonovox", the miraculous sound phenomenon of the 1940s. Until just now, I didn't know exactly how it was done, maybe because I didn't want to think about it at all.

But now I just found out. 

Here is what it said on a music site dedicated to sound aberrations: "You could make just about any musical instrument 'talk' with Sonovox.  The sound of the instrument was fed into two small speakers placed on the sides of the throat. Those sounds were transmitted to the larynx, so that they came out of the throat almost as if they were produced there." Thus if you shoved speakers blasting the sound of a clarinet against your larynx and mouthed the words "scoobie doo", you'd have a "scoobie-doo-saying" clarinet. The miracle of the ages.

I don't know why this didn't seem to bother people then, but the Sonovox produced the most ungodly spectral whining sound.  Really, it's impossible to describe, except to say that it is not quite like anything else you've heard, or would want to hear again. The only thing it remotely resembles is the robotic vocal effect of autotune. Most of the instruments don't sound like themselves at all. They just sound weird.

I've been here before, I know I have. I've suffered from Rusty poisoning. This was the recording I was required to listen to ad nauseam as a child, so that I could be indoctrinated into the Joys of Classical Music. I listened to it again recently (for old recordings never die - they just keep getting reissued), and it was, if anything, worse than I remembered. This recording was probably the first widely-known use of the Sonovox, and it became a sensation. Or at least, it wouldn't go away. The different instruments whined and gulped and sounded like bees trapped in a bottle. Most of what they said to Rusty was unintelligible, in spite of the slow robotic way they said it.

I don't know why the people who invented this didn't realize, or perhaps care, that their invention was incredibly creepy and that they would be scaring little children and making it impossible for them to sleep. (Or was it that Civil Defense "this is only a test" thing on TV?)

But to find out that others had used or abused Sonovox - or their listeners - was quite a revelation to me, a painful one, because then I sort of had to listen to some of it. It gave me flashbacks. 

This must have been some kind of fad. People must have gee-whizzed over it. There is a talking guitar on YouTube that is so bad, I won't subject you to it here (except for the silent gif above), but people loved it back then. They loved it so much that they completely dropped it a few years later. Disney used Sonovox as the voice of Casey Junior, the circus train in Dumbo, but he only says "all aboard" in a not-too-obnoxious way. 

All the same, trains aren't supposed to talk.

(Rusty outtakes)

Rusty: the REAL story!

Don't Mess with Mr. In-Between: Bob Dylan's very first performance

OK, I finally won this battle, the battle to find an excerpt I remembered from one of the many biographies of Bob Dylan. Dylan was maybe my first hero/crush, and as a teenager I worshipped him. Images from his songs still pop into my head, and I marvel at them and realize I will never write anything that good ("Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule. . ."). 

I had this excerpt in mind from a book called Down the Highway by somebody-or-other Sounes. I don't remember if I reviewed it or not during my endless career as a literary critic (during which I covered about 350 titles for the Montreal Gazette, Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun, and various lit mags), or bought it. At that point I wasn't buying many books because an online mag I was writing for was presenting me with truckloads of books they didn't want. After a while I didn't want them either, so I became a sort of storage depot. But this Dylan book, I can't find it anywhere, not in my shelves of review copies (which I have always kept segregated in chronological order, probably because at the time they were the only identity I had as a writer and I was afraid of disappearing), or anywhere in my own collection, though I did find THREE other Dylan bios: the first one written by Anthoony Scaduto, a spiral-bound galley proof called Behind the Shades, and Chronicles, Dylan's first attempt at a memoir.

But soft! What's this? All I had to google was Bob Dylan Accentuate the Positive, and lo! This came up. I am sure it is in the public domain cuzzadafact that it was sitting there on the internet, just a-sittin' there saying "take me".

So I found it: the record of Bob Dylan's very first musical performance. As a child, he seems to have been unusually self-possessed. His parents seem loving, even devoted. One would expect horrible abuse, alcoholism, etc., but there was none of that. Perhaps that's why he's still around, tough as an old dandelion root.

The central hillside district of Duluth was predominantly Jewish and Polish, with a synagogue at the end of the road. There was a general store, a European bakery, the Loiselle liquor store, and a Sears Roebuck at the bottom of the hill. The weather was determined by Lake Superior, so vast and deep it remained icy cold throughout the year. Even in mid-summer, Duluth could be shrouded in frigid fog. There was a fresh ocean smell and the cry of seagulls. Ships approaching the landmark Ariel Bridge sounded their horns and a horn on the bridge blasted in reply. These were the sights and sounds Bob grew up with as the Second World War raged to its end.

    In 1946, a year after the war ended, Bob enrolled at the Nettleton elementary school two blocks from his home. The same year he gave his singing debut at a family party. Children were encouraged to perform for the entertainment of the adults. When it was his turn, four-year-old Bob stamped his foot for attention. "If everybody in this room will keep quiet," he said. "I will sing for my grandmother. I'm going to sing `Some Sunday Morning.'" It was such a success the audience demanded an encore. Bob obliged with "Accentuate the Positive." These were popular tunes on the radio at the time. "Our phone never stopped ringing with people congratulating me," said the proud Beatty.

    Not long after, Bob had a second opportunity to perform, at the wedding of Beatty's sister, Irene. The relatives wanted Bob to sing again. Bob was reluctant, even when an uncle offered him money, but Abe persuaded him. Once again he prefaced his performance by telling the excited relatives, "If it's quiet, I will sing." It was another great success. Everybody cheered and clapped and one of Bob's uncles pressed money into his hand. With instinctive showmanship, Bob turned to his mother and said, "Mummy, I'm going to give the money back." It brought the house down. "People would laugh with delight at heating him sing. He was, I would say, a very lovable, a very unusual child," Abe remembered. "I think we were the only ones who would not agree that he was going to be a very famous person some day ... When he sang `Accentuate the Positive' the way other children his age sang `Mary Had a Little Lamb' people said he was brilliant." As Beatty said, it was amazing her son was not spoiled by so much attention.

The highly improbable Oscar Levant

I said I wouldn't write about Oscar Levant again. No, I said I probably wouldn't write about Oscar Levant again. And here I am writing about Oscar Levant. Again.

I keep noodling around YouTube, as is my fashion, and finding more and more. His classical playing is nothing short of amazing, with a dexterity and fierceness that rivals any other concert pianist of his day. He generates excitement, playing just a hair's breadth ahead of the beat in a way that conveys urgency. The piece gallops along like a racehorse.

Some of the YouTube clips are simply bizarre, like that late-night talk show he hosted that lasted half an hour, minus commercials. I don' t think the network trusted him to go any longer. Most of what he said was a sort of stream-of-consciousness, completely unpredictable and even indecipherable.  On shows like Steve Allen, the quips were self-deprecating, fast and funny, but he had a weird flat delivery, almost appeared to be reading them off a card. Without Allen to prompt him, I doubt if he would have remembered any of it.

I wonder what he was really like. I wonder if you could talk to him. I want to trade mental hospital stories with him, just to see what he says. I want to know what drove him, what it was like growing up, being Oscar Levant as a boy.

A weird thing keeps happening. I like to fool around and adulterate photos (hmm, that sounded funny for a minute), which are all in the public domain so don't get on my case about it. Levant lived in the era of black and white, and the photos, while stylish, often aren't very gratifying. You can try to reverse the image into a negative, and play around with exposure and contrast, and that's about it. But pictures of Oscar - they do this strange thing.

A while ago I posted twelve variations on a small, very dark shot of him playing the piano in a concert hall. I don't know what happened, but as I played around with them, color began to explode out of the darkness. They somehow came out painterly, Chagalls and Van Goghs and even a few dark, treacly Old Masters. Some looked like Christmas lights, some were aqua and yellow and pink, and - hell, this just wasn't possible!

 

 

Levant had a gangster look about him, those double-breasted pinstriped suits and the cigarette dangling from the Edward G. Robinson-esque lips. I don't know where it came from, because I don't think he was tough: as W. C. Fields used to say, "I can lick my weight in wildflowers."

This shot, cropped out of a larger one like most of his photos (Levant was the eternal sidekick, never quite a full-fledged star) is more subdued, grainy like a remembered dream, but it produced some nice evening purples and dull gold highlights. Like Levant, it has its own strange kind of beauty, on the shadow side of the street.

Micro-phonies!

I don't think I've laughed like this in years. Guess I have a primitive sense of humour.