Soupy Shuffle: GANGNAM STYLE!

I'm not the first one to point out that legendary entertainer Soupy Sales originated the Gangnam Style of dance. He left out the horse-riding arm movements for the most part, but the legs are the same. Like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, he rode freehand, which is much more dangerous and daring. 

There was something likeable about Soupy. I remember having lunch in the den and Soupy admonishing me to eat the crusts on my sandwiches "because they're just as good as the rest of the bread". He was in Detroit at the time, so I must've been about five. Soupy was also infamous for asking kids to mail "all those little pieces of paper" from their parents' wallets to his address. He netted tens of thousands before being reprimanded with a suppressed chuckle. (Let's not get into the naked girl who appeared at the door during a sketch on live TV.)

So why would I even want to look back on my for-the-most-part-wretched-and -miserable childhood? There were a few bright moments, but the one person I really loved and related to went crazy and died.  I don't relive my childhood now: I reboot it through the sunny freedom of frolicking with my grandkids. I don' t know what might have happened to me without them, but I suspect I would not have made it through 2005.

It's VULVA, not "Volvo"!

In finding an illustration for today's strange topic, I had to pick from a bunch of different Edsel ads. One was much more esthetically pleasing than this one and showed the car sweeping through a pair of opening gates, with harp glissandos and announcers saying if you had an Edsel, you were showing the world "you've arrived!" The only reason I didn't use it is that it was transferred from film stock that had gone bad, all pink and bleary like a particularly nasty eye infection.

Lots of these things have arrived in auto graveyards, but some people are refurbishing them and putting them in car shows. The fact that it is quite possibly the most hideous automobile ever made does not deter them. In fact it seems to lend them a certain exotic charm.

Having a 1958 Edsel in perfect condition is kind of like having a set of Nazi medals that look "like new". Like, who'd want to?

People have posed various theories about the Edsel, why the intensive and supposedly foolproof ad campaign fell so flat. Was the timing wrong for a new luxury car? Was it too pricey for the typical-average-American-family-of-the-'50s-who-wanted-a-new-car-every-2-years-but-couldn't-always-afford-it-because-Mom-spent-too-much-on-her-effing-manicures? Did it, like the infamous Jaguar, refuse to start?

No, it was just butt-ugly and that's all there is to say about it. Looking at it now sets my teeth on edge: it has a face on it like a robot from Hell.

It looks hostile. It looks aggressive. It looks like some good ol' boy fired up on corn squeezin's and toting a slingshot and a bag o'rocks.

YICK.

The more I watched this video, which I picked for the elegant chrome-laden, turquoise-and-white decor that sums up the '50s, the more I realized it wasn't an Edsel ad at all, but some guy driving his vintage Edsel with some other guy filming it. The other guy's rear-view mirror just kept showing and the cars in the other lanes were too recent. But I don't want to change it cuz the other ads all run about 8 1/2 minutes and feature Bing Crosby, and I couldn't stand that, I'd have a seizure on the spot. It's bad enough even thinking about these automotive nightmares.

This is the kind-of-a-thing that caused Stephen King to write that, you know, that BOOK, and inspired nightmarish TV shows like My Mother the Car.

The name Edsel has come to be synonymous with failure on a great and embarrassing level. But there's so much ugly on it, let's call it Synonymous with Shit-awful, old, chromy, boxy, monster-faced Car-Ideas that whoever thought of it should have shoved so far down their throat it would come out the other side. Or something like that.

Coda. I hate research more than I hate worms, but I had to include this tasty snippet from Wiki:

The Edsel is best remembered for its trademark "horsecollar" or toilet seat grille, which was quite distinct from other cars of the period. According to a popular joke at the time, the Edsel "resembled an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon".^[11] Some have speculated that the car failed to sell because its grille resembled a vulva.^[12]

The Edsel's front-end ensemble as it eventually appeared bore little resemblance, if any, to the original concept. Roy Brown, the original chief designer on the Edsel project, had envisioned a slender, almost delicate opening in the center. Engineers, fearing engine cooling problems, vetoed the intended design, which led to the now-infamous "horsecollar."

(Hey! That's vulva to you, mister!)

A fairy tale from hell

There once was an ugly duckling

With feathers all stubby and brown 

And the other birds said in so many 

words 

Get out of town

Get out, get out, get out of town 

And  she went with a quack and a waddle 

and a quack 

In a flurry of eiderdown 

That poor little ugly duckling 

Went wandering far and near 

But at every place they said to her face 

Now get out, get out, get out of here 

And she went with a quack and a waddle 

and a quack 

And a very unhappy tear 

All through the wintertime she hid herself
away

Ashamed to show her face, afraid of what 

others might say 

All through the winter in her lonely 

clump of wheat 

Till a flock of swans spied her there and 

very soon agreed 

You’re a very fine swan indeed! 

A swan? Me a swan? Ah, go on! 

And they said yes, you’re a swan!

Take a look at yourself in the lake and 

you’ll see 

And she looked, and she saw, and she said 

I am a swan! Wheeeeeeee! 

I’m not such an ugly duckling 

No feathers all stubby and brown 

For in fact these birds in so many words said 

I'm. . . 

The best in town, 

the best, the best 

The best in town 

Not a quack, not a quack, not a waddle or 

a quack 

But a glide and a whistle and a snowy white 

back 

And a head so noble and high 

Say who’s an ugly duckling? 

Not I! 

Not I! 

Not I! 

The Family of. . . what??

I recently rediscovered this battered old book in my collection and was looking forward to seeing the photos again for the first time in 25 years. It's billed as "the greatest photographic exhibition of all time - 503 pictures from 68 countries - created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art (Prologue by Carl Sandburg)".

My copy is dated 1955, a softcover in poor shape, the pages badly browned. The paper is of shockingly bad quality, thin shiny magazine stuff you never see any more, almost designed to fall apart or at least turn sepia within a couple of years.

I remember ooh-ing and ahh-ing over this collection and thinking, how significant! But that's the trouble with this book. Pretentiousness and import hang heavily over it. It's very much a product of left-leaning '50s sentiments, the zeitgeist of the black-and-white Eisenhower era and the liberal resistence that went with it.

In the introduction, Carl Sandburg waxes oh-so-Sandburgian: "Peoople! flung wide and far, born into toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among lovers, eaters, drinkers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers. Here are ironworkers, bridgemen, musicians, sandhogs. . . " - but you get the idea. Presumably, they don't all live in Chicago.

There is a little photo of a smiling piper that appears every other page or so: "Follow me! I'm the piper!", etc. The pages are grouped in a way that somehow embarrasses me. It starts with a James Joyce quote about sex ("and his heart was going like mad/and yes I said yes I will Yes.") On the facing page is a volcano with lava running down, and a picture of an embracing couple lying on a picnic blanket.

Then it goes on to pregnant women, one prominently holding a cigarette, then BIRTH, a newborn baby being held upside-down by one leg by the doctor. And on and on. It's as if Norman Rockwell had been told to "spice it up".

There are lots of cornball quotes, such as: "Sing, sweetness, to the last palpitation of the evening and the breeze." "With all beings and all things we shall be as relatives." "And the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play" (a Cecil B. DeMille/Ten Commandments sort-of-thang). One can almost hear the schmaltzy Aaron Copland score in the background.

It's hard to put my finger on just why all this is so offputting. Joy: OK, let's show a whole lot of people smiling (mostly men of the soil with bad teeth, with a few society types thrown in to show the vast diversity of "people!") Sorrow: let's get out the war pictures, and the old black man crying in the rocking chair. I guess their intentions were good, but I could find only one picture I really liked this time, a monk kneeling in the middle of an empty street in Colombia.

The book ends with a stunning display of eight couples, most of them "ethnic" (meaning old and weatherbeaten), and under each photo is the caption, "We two form a multitude" (eight times already!). There are some ominous warnings about nuclear war and even a little picture of Einstein standing over a messy desk looking puzzled ("hmmmmm, vere did I put zat zandwich?"). There's also a brief nod to the UN, reminding us how lefty-liberal this whole enterprise is, and probably seen as downright pinko by the House Unamerican Committee. Maybe that's why it's been out of print for so long.

Ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong. . .

I'm really sorry about this, but some evil seed in me made me post it.

This is what kids' TV was like in the '50s. I have dim memories of Miss Frances, but mostly I remember my older brother making horrible, hilarious fun of her.

She speaks in a dragging voice, repeats everything ad nauseam, and generally acts as if she's facing an audience of drooling subhumans. When I showed a bit of this to my 6-year-old granddaughter (no doubt the target audience back then, though it probably went up to age 10 or 11), her jaw went slack and her eyes glazed over. She looked at me doubtfully and asked, "Was this a real show?"

It does resemble satire, does it not? She must repeat the instructions for her fantastically difficult sandwich 5 or 6 times. "Bread, peanut butter, and. . . what was the other one? You can't remember?" I think this was originally a PBS show. Or something. It makes Captain Kangaroo look like he was shot out of a cannon.

I've seen the sort of thing Caitlin watches: Disney productions such as The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (male duos being inexplicably popular, along with females with special powers: hey, let's give the girls some good role models! Except that they're always princesses). They're snappy, every line a joke, incredibly fast-moving and full of silly, pie-in-the-face gags. They also feature washed-up character actors like John Schuck (the butt of every joke in the show I saw yesterday). There is an invisible line between Tree House (a Canadian preschool channel featuring Max and Ruby, Toopy and Binoo, and Dora the Explorer) and Disney Channel fare, but once you've crossed it, you'll never turn back.

Well, in MY day we did things differently. Until the advent of snappy shows such as Roger Ramjet, Bullwinkle, Underdog, Linus the Lionhearted, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Superchicken, we watched Captain Kangaroo, a show almost as primitive as Miss Frances' lunatic asylum fare. At least there were other characters involved: Mr. Moose; Bunny Rabbit; Grandfather (the clock, who only woke from his slumber if you said, "One, two, three. . . Grandfather!"), and the ubiquitous Mr. Green Jeans. There were little skits, usually ending with a thousand ping-pong balls falling on the Captain, and also little -what were they, anyway? Vignettes? If I could find a video, I'd post it, but most of these shows went out live and disappeared forever.

There'd be a pre-recorded song, with a disembodied pair of hands doing actions, or trains made of construction paper being dragged across a backdrop of green felt. One of them was about Four Little Taxis: "a yellow one, a green one, a blue one, a purple one!" One by one, the cardboard taxis drove away, until there were "no little taxis sitting on the curb. . . no yellow one, no green one. . ." It was heart-wrenching. But then the narrator would lift us out of our despair: "But wait! The taxis are coming back!" That's about as traumatic as the show got.

I only remember fragments, with fuzzy acres of oblivion in between. Binnie, the Magic Bunny. A song about Dallas (obviously, before the Kennedy assassination): "Big D, little-a, double-l-a/Big D, little-a, double-l-a". These soul-deadening little productions were enlivened by Tom Terrific and his pal, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog: cartoons made of line drawings that moved with all the sophistication of a flip-book.

And the crafts! We loved to make fun of the Captain's nasal, Brookly-esque accent as he talked about "cahhhd-bwwoaaaad" and making pumpkins out of paper that was "aaaaah-raaaahnge". He used paper fasteners on everything, especially things that were supposed to twirl around. We couldn't even find paper fasteners. They're lame metal things that sort of spread out, and they certainly don't allow for twirling. But sometimes we found a big "cahhhd-bwwoaaaad" box in the garage and began to cut windows in it with a steak knife, usually with disastrous results.

OK, so what did all this do to aid the developlent of the average kid-brain in that era? Not much. When the smart-ass cartoons of the mid-to-late '60s came along, they were more than welcome. Beany and Cecil always operated on two levels (like most kids' movies do today), and there were references only the adults would get. Supposedly. When we recently saw a show with a Chinese prince in it, I said, "Hey, maybe that's Prince Chow Mein." Caitlin laughed uproariously, immediately getting a joke that would have sailed over my head in l963. (As a matter of fact, I stole it from Beany and Cecil.)

Kids don't get to choose their entertainment. Some bigwig moguls up at Disney sit around a table, and maybe have focus groups/guinea pigs testing it all out. Is it "better", "worse", or just different? It's fast. Fast-fast-fast, and all sort of run together, so you won't notice there's no story.

Girls are reaching puberty when they're still in the Jolly Jumper these days, and no one knows why. If they weigh 200 pounds, it's genetic and nothing to do with the fact that they live exclusively on sugar and fat (but the Twinkies are fortified with Vitamin C). If they're exposed to Lady Gaga flashing her crotch every 2 seconds, it has no effect. If their parents are so preoccupied with hanging on to their second-rate, fading careers that the kids spend 11 hours a day sexting each other and planning to commit suicide on Skype, hey, that's just life in 2010.

If they're being raised by the TV, well, hey, wasn't I raised by the TV too? I think that explains everything.

*****************************************************

POSTSCRIPT. With my usual ferretlike curiosity, I dug up many more Miss Frances clips, incuding a whole episode in which she takes off her watch to fingerpaint. At the end of these sessions, she'd tell the kiddies to drag their mothers in to listen to her lecture on proper parenting (mothering, back then), while they ran outside to play. This one stressed the need for the children to "rest". They played so hard, Miss Frances claimed, that when they came back in the house, they just played some more and wore themselves right out!

We won't get into the fact that, with rare exceptions, kids weren't fat then because they were outside running their little legs off. In fact, the need to REST seems totally foreign today. "Make sure that the children lie down for a little while on the davenport," she said.

DAVENPORT?? What the hell is that? I had to look it up. I used to think "chesterfield" was out of date.

"AND. . they are mild"

In case you've been wondering where I've been over the past few days (for I am sure my hordes of readers will be worried about me), I've been trying to pull myself out of a funk of non-writing, based not so much on the work itself as the miserable process of trying to get it noticed.

So I'll do something else for a change! Something besides ordering Minnie Mouse panties (size 4 - they're not for me) or out-of-print books or cheap DVD sets on-line.

Ah. Cheap DVD sets. This takes me to an orgy I allowed myself to indulge in yesterday, with deep regret later: I think I watched about a billion ads on a 3 DVD set called 1001 Classic Commercials (and I haven't even looked at Disc 3).

These weren't as fascinating as I'd hoped. I love old ads - maybe it's the reason I watch Mad Men with such fervor (that, and Don Draper's magnificent body, often depicted half-nude). The reason being, this was a very sloppily-compiled set. Ads were slapped on the discs with very little care for the quality. Ironically, the '50s ads were often in pristine condition, in the kind of crisp black-and-white I enjoy in old movies.

The ads from the mid- to late '60s were atrocious, barely discernible in the blur of neon orange. You have to wonder what happens to color film over the years, if it rots or melts or what. I skipped over these very quickly. They never should have been included.

Ads are a-spose-ta tell us everything about a culture at any particular moment. Aren't they? Women all seemed to want to look like Donna Reed, her blonde puffed helmet hard enough to repel schrapnel. One hair spray ad claimed that "your hair will still feel like hair", as if that were an aberration. Men's hair products were simply disgusting, rendering a decent head of hair into a slick of oily black sludge full of comb-tracks. Supposedly, women loved this: "they'll love to run their fingers through your hair!" Eeeiiiicccccchhhhhhhhk-k-k-k.

I didn't realize before how obsessed these early ads were with proper meals, nutrition through the warped lens of the 1950s. The words "wholesome" and "nutritious" popped up everywhere. Vitamins were mentioned constantly. There were modern-day wonders like canned zucchini (hmm, what's a zucchini?) and Tropi-Kai Mixed Hawaiian Fruits (? Probably another variation on fruit cocktail. Mmmmmm, those gaudy red maraschino cherries.)

"Eat well. . . but wisely," the authoratative male voice-over advises us. Right. Jell-o was nutritious, apparently, as was every kind of sugary cereal (all made in Battle Creek, Michigan - oh, how I remember sending away those box tops for a plastic fire engine!). This strange guy, a nutritionist called Euell Gibbon, told us that all sorts of bizarre things were edible (holding a cat-tail in his hand), then said he loved Grape Nuts. Did no one else see the irony?

No one knew how to pronounce "protein": it was "PRO-tee-an" (a term no doubt conflated - remember that term, boys and girls? - with "protean"). This was a whole different shoe size. What sort of yearning was lurking under the glossy surface? You judge.

Then came the creme de la creme of astonishing advertising: the cigarette commercial. All these had very catchy jingles, and mostly depicted young people running along beaches with dogs. "Kent. . . satisfies best," "Come all the way up to Kool", "Winston tastes good like a (bop-bop) cigarette should." This one has become infamous on the 'net because of a cartoon ad of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble smoking in the back yard while their wives slave away at the yard work. At the end of the show Fred lights Wilma's cigarette while he sings the jingle wildly off-key, and she takes a luxurious drag. The shot of Bedrock at night while the credits roll is overwhelmed by a giant sign that says "WINSTON". Can't hurt the little buggers, can it?

Camels brag that they send hundreds of thousands of FREE cigarettes to veteran's hospitals every year. Hospitals. Where most of the men lie dying of cancer? Denial was rife in the ads, constantly mentioning how mild and easy on the throat these sticks of dynamite were. Some were even recommended by doctors. A particularly tough and virile man (and most of the men were tough and virile, no pansy-ass fags here) claimed, "It's a treat, not a treatment."

Anyway, the cigarette ads put me in a stupor after a while, so I had to dwell on something else: the odd popping up of celebs, some of whom were not yet famous. Gene Wilder (his nebbishy voice unmistakeable) did two voice-overs, one for Alka-Selzer ("Ah! The blahs!"). Alan Arbus, the psychiatrist on M*A*S*H showed up. I swear I heard Mel Blanc's voice more than once (the Frito Bandito?).

The brilliant Buster Keaton, a man who worked constantly until his death at nearly 70, did a perilous pratfall backwards off a platform, making us wonder how he ever survived.

Jack Gilford did his charming thing ("When it comes to Crackerjack, some kids never grow up"). A very drunk Arthur Godfrey did a Lipton's Chicken Soup ad as part of his show (for in the past, hosts had to do the ads). "The chicken is there. You might not see it, but it's there."

After a while the whole thing was a blur of impressions, some of which I remembered from my childhood: "Gaylord, when you pull his leash he walkety-walkety-walks with you (arf, arf!)". "Mystery Date". Lucy and Desi, looking at each other fondly and smoking. Sugar Bear sounding like Dean Martin. A toy called the Great Garloo, some sort of remote-control robot on a long cord. And oh, Chatty Cathy. The doll from hell!

You can't see the angst and despair. But it's there.