Showing posts with label smoking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label smoking. Show all posts
Friday, July 24, 2015
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Orgasmic advertising
Ahhhhhh. . . such flavour. Such an ecstasy of sensual pleasure. TV advertising was new then, and the mad men of Madison Ave. were exploring the potential of the moving image. No longer did they have to limit themselves to glossy still pictures.
Back then, it was all good. Nothing was "bad for you". Later in the decade came the ads, tinged with a little desperation, describing how "mild" the cigarettes were, how easy on the throat, even claiming that doctors recommended certain brands. Which they probably did.
I don't know what this creep is selling, but I wish he'd go away. I think it's a lead-in to an ad presented by the host of a very early TV show, perhaps from the late 1940s. TV ws remarkable then. I even found a show where two men stood in front of enormous microphones and read off of sheafs of paper.
Incomprehensible that these cops would break up a couple for innocently kissing on a bench, then hand them cancer-inducing tubes of tobacco. More socially-acceptable, I guess. Put a smile in your smoking! And note the flamboyant way everyone seems to blow out their smoke. Why?
This woman cleans her breath and guards her teeth by rubbing her finger on them. And I love that MISSING MISSING MISSING part.
Garrrrr-dollllll.
A woman facially masturbating with a cake of soap.
The Cancer Ballet. Can you hear the coughing, can you see the black lungs and congested hearts? Obviously, they couldn't.
YES THE TASTE IS GREAT: TAREYTON
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Charisma to burn
I would have to call these two my favorites from Old Hollywood. They acted the stuffings out of a part while keeping it real. And they were gorgeous: the camera ate them up.
Both of them smoked too much, but Bogie fell far sooner, in an awful sort of way, consumed. He kept smoking even after contracting fatal throat cancer. Perhaps it was a "what the hell, it's coming anyway" thing. Somehow Bette was tougher, but cancer devoured her too, eventually, until she was an unrecognizable wraith.
Our heroes flare briefly. It's always brief, when you think about it. Each of us climbs only a tiny segment of the wall (just like Harold and his fake aerial sets in Safety Last). It's hard to put any of it together. I once had the thought that if you kept going back and back, and back and back and back, through the thousands and mega-thousands and millions and billions of ancestors that spread out exponentially behind you, you would eventually reach the first cell of life that winked on out of nothingness.
We all go back to the primordial ooze. There goes the neighborhood.
Order The Glass Character from:
Thistledown Press
Amazon.com
Chapters/Indigo.ca
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Sex and cigarettes
How is it that when certain movies come on TV, you drop what you're doing and watch them even if you don't like them very much? Or, at least, when said movies are seriously flawed.
This happens with Now, Voyager - EVERY time. Though I know it's nothing more than a semi-intelligent soaper with pretensions of a Heroic Journey (circa 1942), there's just something about Miz Charlotte and her travail (tra-Vale?) that sucks me in every time.
Speaking of suck. From the beginning of this thing, even before Charlotte Vale the sad little rich girl metamorphoses into Charlotte Vale the sad little rich WOMAN (having been screwed in the tropics by Gerry, the biggest asshole to come down the turnpike since Jimmy Cagney shoved the grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face), there is smoking. Lots and lots of smoking. Charlotte the repressed spinster smokes in her room, and it's a wonder she doesn't set the whole place on fire by being so secretive with her butts.
Suck, suck, suck. Just picture all those cancer cells forming deep down in the lungs. Yet in that era, sex and seduction were all intertwined with cigarettes. In this movie, smoking is more ritualized than in any other I can think of. Gerry (a carnivorous bastard happily juggling two women, neither of which can actually have him) has a charming habit of shoving two cigarettes in his face, lighting them both in a great livid explosion, then handing one of them to Charlotte like she's being granted her last wish before being executed.
Ah, those smoldering looks. He can afford to smolder because he has no goddamn responsibilities whatsoever. This is one of several things that bother the hell out me about this movie - that, and the way he is portrayed as some sort of saint when he's really just busy cattin' around from woman to woman and blowing lots of smoke. The other thing that sets my teeth on edge is that daughter of his, Tina, a whiny, clingy sort of lamprey whom Charlotte fastens on to as a DEVICE (no less) to force Gerry to stay in her life and not chase the next piece of tail that comes down the turnpike.
Ahhhh! Gerry in that tent or wherever-the-fuck they are! Out somewhere. Anyway, they're all bundled up talking (smoking, too, I think) and there's this big fire in the fireplace, and then the fire burns down real low and the camera pans back to them and it looks like she's wearing his pajamas. This means they must have had sex. Charlotte keeps referring to it over and over again in the most coy manner possible, i. e. telling her fiance (whom she rejects, maybe because he's too nice or doesn't smoke enough) that she "must sound depraved", which she does. But when you think about it, screwing around with a married man IS a form of moral turpitude and can't really be defended, even if Charlotte takes on the noble, selfless role of Tina's quasi-mother to save Gerry's family/keep him on the string.
But ya gotta wonder. . . are these guys smokin', or tokin'?
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Jon Hamm, the Kent-Smoking Man
I think we may have walked this way before. But it's time to walk it again. This is the Kent Man, with the gleaming skyscrapers of Madison Avenue towering above him. Though the ad copy refers to "scientists and educators", my first thought was, "Like fuck! He's an ad man."
The ad is circa sometime in the early '60s, when medical experts were beginning to grumble about the negative health effects of smoking. Imagine the panicked discussions in boardrooms across the nation! "How are we going to put a positive spin on this so people think it's GOOD for them to smoke?" One astonishing television ad from the era had a bellicose man with a cigarette in his mouth proclaiming, "I want a treat, not a treatment."
Unfortunately, his "treat" all too often DID lead to a "treatment", usually received too late.
The ad guy puffing away on his Kent ("For the best combina-tion of fil-ter and good taste/Kent satisfies best!" went the cheery little jingle) looks so startlingly like Don Draper of Mad Men, it's downright eerie. I wondered if I could get Don's head into the Kent ad, and was almost successful.
Of course it's never perfect. Head shape and angle, skin color, all that stuff, will never match up exactly.
Besides, in the ad the guy is looking up, squinting actually, in a cool Madison Avenue sort of way.
Kind of like this? Looks a bit like Rod Serling on a bad day. One eye looks more or less OK (these are the Kent Man's eyes, by the way) but the other one, well. . . It would have been best to have that eye in shadow, but I don't have those kind of skills.
Here Don stares into nothingness in his typical God-how-misunderstood-I-am-because-I-was-poorly-mothered-if-in-fact-I-was-ever-mothered-at-all expression. I guess he stares at the sidewalk when he lights up.
DEFINITELY not mothered. At all. Ever.
Plus it looks like he's going to throw up.
Plus it looks like he's going to throw up.
This is my personal favorite. His hands have suddenly turned into brown oven mitts, but never mind.
At least he looks happy.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Best role models for kids in the '60s
http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Oscar Levant: The Lost Interview
Hello, Oscar. Nice to meet you. You know, I almost said
“Hell, Oscar.”
(laughs) It would
have been more appropriate. Come right in to my den of thieves.
Thieves?
I steal material all the time, everybody thinks it’s mine. It’s all in the delivery.
I steal material all the time, everybody thinks it’s mine. It’s all in the delivery.
You mean a “special delivery”.
Aha, a smart-ass
kid! We oughta get along just great.
Drives me? I have a chauffeur, but it’s a “he”, not an “it”.
Drives me, it’s
probably just the will to get up in the morning.
Is that hard for you?
Don’t pry.
Don’t pry.
OK, I won’t. Sorry. I want to know what. . . I hate to say
“inspires” you.
Thank you.
Let me rephrase the question. Did you choose music, or did it choose you?
Do you need to ask?
Would you have done anything else?
I probably would
have done practically anything else. The rule in our house was absolute perfection. One
wrong note was a source of shame. It drove me absolutely crazy. See, now you
have your answer!
As to why you went crazy?
I might have been
crazy from the beginning.
So in what way did you depart from absolute perfection?
In just about every
way. I hated my teachers. I hated my father. I hated my piano.
I have to tell you a story. Nobody in our family had any
talent whatsoever on the keyboard, even though a few of them are professional
musicians. When my brother was practicing, he kept trying to leave the room but
my mother would stick her head in and say, “You have to practice for half an
hour!” At one point he slammed the lid down and opened the front door and
yelled at the top of his voice, “I HATE THE PIANO!”
I love piano
stories. I hated the piano too. Or I hated what it did to me.
Did you never feel you’d mastered it?
No performance is
ever as perfect as the one that exists in your mind.
That’s profound.
No it isn’t, I
forgot my Demerol this morning.
Oh, so that’s supposed to be funny?
It gets big laughs.
So when did you decide to. . .
To be a sellout?
That’s what they say about Levant . That he’s a sellout, that he sold out to Hollywood and cheap fame as a movie sidekick who
plays cornball classical music between production numbers.
Are you?
A sellout? Oh sure. But I make a lot better money. And
it’s a way to stay out of the concert hall. It’s the ninth circle of Hell up
there. (lights another cigarette)
But you’re so good. I mean, you’re –
Let’s get on with
the Gershwin stuff, shall we? I know it’s coming.
OK, the Gershwin stuff. May I ask what he was really like?
Nothing like that
limp-wristed Robert Alda who played him in the film. Had to dub all his playing for him.
Oh, THAT film! The one where you played yourself. What was
it like to play yourself?
Let’s not get
obscene here.
I don’t mean play “with” yourself. I mean – portray yourself in the film.
I’d say it was a
snap, but I don’t think I ever really figured out my character.
But you kept the coffee-and-cigarettes mode.
Sweetheart, that’s
the only mode I have.
Is it your “shtik”?
Jesus, where do you
get these words? What makes you think I’m Jewish?
It was the way you hugged Steve Allen on his show.
(Laughs again) So
did these guys send over somebody they
think can stay ahead of me, or what?
No one can stay ahead of you.
Better for them.
Listen, if I hugged Steve Allen any way at all they’d say I was a faggot. I was
friends with Gershwin, and he was supposed to be a faggot, so that made ME a
faggot by association.
I get the feeling you’re not a faggot.
Not lately. I think
I’ve forgotten how, due to lack of practice. I have a lovely wife, I mean it sincerely, June, she’s just
terrific, we busted up last week. No, seriously, I don’t think I’d be alive
without her and I don’t know how she puts up with me.
Loves me, as in popular song? Or loves me, as in, she loves him one minute and hates him the next? That would be my wife.
Do you ever stop joking? Do you ever get truly, deeply
serious about things?
You mean, do I ever
explore the darkest recesses of my tortured psyche?
Something like that.
Yeah, all the time.
At the piano?
Why would I damage
my piano like that?
At the psychiatrist’s office? I saw him on your TV show the
other day. That’s an innovative idea, to invite your analyst to come on your
show.
He’s the only one I
could get on such short notice. Adlai Stevenson bailed out on me at the last
minute.
What do you say to your psychiatrist?
HELP!. . . HELP!
Does he help?
I’m not sure there
is such a thing as help, I mean on this plane of existence. I think you are who
you are. It might be worse if I didn’t go.
Do you run in little circles inside your head?
What sort of
question is that?
If you mean, am I a
manic-depressive, of course. That’s the only diagnosis they could come up with
that was frightening enough.
What are the highs like?
I don’t even know
I’m on a high until I come down and realize that I’ve been babbling and
swinging from chandeliers for weeks. Usually turns out I’ve offended a lot
of people.
It sure smells like cigarettes in here.
The place is one
big ashtray.
Are you hooked?
(Gazes at interviewer, lights another cigarette)
(Gazes at interviewer, lights another cigarette)
Would you play something for me right now?
The Humoresque?
Which one?
Dvorak. Am I pronouncing that right?
No. Do you know
there are words to that piece?
I didn’t! Why don’t you sing them?
Right now?
Right now.
(He sits at the piano, fidgeting and taking 2 or 3
minutes to get settled.)
Like a bike but so
much cuter
Is my tiny
two-wheeled scooter,
And I ride it
‘round and ‘round each day.
Though it has no
engine on it,
Once I place my
feet upon it
Merrily I’m on my
way.
When I grow older
I may be bolder
And I’ll think of
aeroplanes
And auto-mo-biles.
. .
But right now when I’m outside
I’m satisfied to
guide and ride
My tiny little
scooter
With two wheels!
Oh, that’s lovely!
So are you, sweetheart. Come back any time. (Coughs, drapes arms around interviewer in Jewish embrace)
So are you, sweetheart. Come back any time. (Coughs, drapes arms around interviewer in Jewish embrace)
END
Sunday, March 25, 2012
MAD MEN RETURNS (a tribute to the most beautiful man on earth)
Who’s the advertisin' genius that's happenin' in Manhattan town
Tearin' up the chicks with the message that he lays down
Tearin' up the chicks with the message that he lays down
Who is the coolest guy that turns us all on
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Draper (Don)
Chicks are makin' reservations for his lovin' so fine
Screamin' and a-faintin', he has got 'em all waitin' in line
Who is the cat whose lovin’ just goes on and on
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Draper (Don!)
Chicks are makin' reservations for his lovin' so fine
Screamin' and faintin', he has got 'em all waitin' in line
Who is the coolest guy (he turns me on)
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Hamm: that’s Jon
Chicks are makin' reservations for his lovin' so fine
Screamin' and faintin', he's got 'em all waitin' in line
Who is the coolest guy that is what am
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)
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