Oh me, oh my: LOVE Aunt Jenny's Pie! (and it's made with SPRY!)

 

I just don't know what to say about all of this. I was compelled to post these incredible Norman Rockwell-esque images after seeing them on a Facebook page which features a new vintage recipe book every week. This one was a humdinger, folks! But after about the twentieth image, I get a little sick of looking at "Aunt Jenny" and her eternal bushy-tailed grin and her "bakin' and broilin'" - as if she can't get her brain around an "ing" ending to save her bustling, ever-useful life. This is a character which has been invented, built from the ground up by some Madison Avenue team not unlike the Mad Men crew, with guys in suits sitting around a boardroom table sipping bourbon, smoking Luckies and loudly arguing over who the characters should be in this little domestic drama. "Maybe the husband should be, oh, let's see - Ralph?" "No! Calvin, like Calvin Coolidge." The distant echo of Calvinism and all its prudery is likely not a coincidence. This is Middle America, folks, in the middle of the 20th century. These are good, decent, God-fearin' people, and let's not forget it.

Calvin is such a wag, asking his wife "c'n I lick the spoon?" when she makes her Spry frosting for her Spry cake, praising her chicken (fried in Spry) and her strawberry shortcake (made with Spry) with a rapturous, slightly stoned expression glued on his face, and generally acting just like those menfolk always act, all thumbs in the kitchen, just helpless and needing to be constantly tended to and fed. 

And let's not forget Aunt Jenny's role as matriarch of the community (I left out an INTOLERABLE image of her sewing circle chattering away about frying things in SPRY), "starting brides off right", which means breaking them in to a life of servitude over a hot stove for the next forty years. No wonder young women were so keen to get married.

Then there's Grandpa Briggs up at the Old Soldiers Home ("Old soldiers never die", remember? They just go to live up at the Home) who'll eat any kind of pie so long's it's "aye-pull" (which is the way you KNOW this fictional Aunt Anybody character would pronounce it). And as Aunt Jenny keeps  hammering on about, foods cooked the SPRY way are DIGESTIBLE - in fact, that seems to be one of its main virtues, so that even children and old people can somehow ingest it without becoming violently ill. 

But the really weird thing is this. If you take a good look at the folksy, g-dropping, ever-grinning Jenny, she doesn't really look grandmotherly at all. She's an actress who is probably in her thirties and made up to look "old", which translates to a grey wig, a print housedress and glasses (which in those days automatically spelled "biddy"). This is character-invention in the nature of Irene Ryan as "Granny" on the Beverley Hillbillies, who was maybe 45 when she played the role, and even the Italian Mama on Golden Girls - whatever her name was, I don't want to look it up - who was actually a couple of years younger than that dinosaur Bea Arthur and all the rest of them. (The same Bea Arthur who got pregnant and had an abortion on Maude when she was pushing SIXTY.) And oh yes, the same deal as on Mama's Family, in which Vicki Lawrence played Mama even though she was 15 years younger than Carol Burnett. 

So we have this little well-greased domestic universe (and don't ask how Jenny and Calvin survived their wedding night with so little sexual experience - perhaps that tin of Spry next to their bed tells the whole story). We have the daughter Sylvia, who never really makes an appearance here (I left some of these out, though even at that, they seem to go on and on and ON until you want to smash Calvin in the face with one of those famous "paaahhhhs"), and even two "bachelors" (gay men had to call themselves that in the "good old days"), Ebenezer Todd and Hank Parsons, who frequently hang out together "down by the depot" but never seem to get a decent meal there. Aunt Jenny seems to have adopted these two social strays as a sort of missionary work.

 

And even though this whole thing smacks of a rural setting, it's odd how formally-dressed everyone is, particularly the men. They're wearing white shirts, ties, even suits when they sit at the table, so it's unclear to me what the exact social stratum is in this scenario. These aren't farmers, they aren't blue collar working stiffs, in fact, I have no idea WHAT they do except sit in the kitchen and eat with a fatuous look of joy on their faces.

This whole thing was cooked up, baked up, dreamed up, by Madison Avenue to further the cozy domestic dreams of housewives in the '40s and '50s, to present an ideal setting with a good plain country cook who speaks no nonsense and always welcomes you into her comforting circle. But there was no Aunt Jenny, no Calvin, not even a Grandpa Briggs up at the home or those two poor old sods down by the depot. She didn't actually exist except as a 30-year-old supply model who did glamourless magazine spreads for a living and sold buckets of grease with a promise of domestic Paradise, in which no one fights, no one fucks (well, not much), and everything is soaked in bubbling rivers of SPRY. 

DAMN CAT!!!

A Serious George Gershwin Problem, Volume Two

 

Link to Original Slideshow by Astairical

POST-IT NOTES: I found this rhapsodic (in blue) tribute a few years ago, God knows where, and took a liking to it immediately. I had been trying to chop my way through a 900-page tome on Gershwin's life (90% of it was a minute and detailed dissection of the show tunes he wrote before he became really famous; only one chapter 50 pages long was devoted to "Gershwin the Man".) When I found this, I thought - hey, why not? This fan tribute really gives us the essence of who and what Gershwin was. It's also plain this girl was CRAZY ABOUT THE MAN - mad about the boy - and expressed it in contemporary language that I actually find quite charming. I blew it up here to make the text more readable. I don't know what happened to Astairical after this - haven't been able to find anything on her (at least I THINK it's a her), but this stands as one of the most unusual Gershwin tributes - hell, one of the best tributes ANYWHERE about ANYONE or ANYTHING, period!

As with Dylan, I'm drawn back to Gershwin cyclically, pulled back into his orbit again and again. There were similarities: Gershwin broke all the rules, all the while beguiling his public with a magnetism that is hard to describe. But unlike Dylan, who is still doing amazingly well at age 80, he died horribly of an undiagnosed and agonizing brain tumor at only 38. Because his death on the operating table was so shocking and unexpected, it's possible he did not know he was dead, which can cause a great deal of spiritual disorientation. It's said that his ghost roams freely, and even his brother Ira, who did NOT believe in such things, saw him waving at him from his study shortly after he passed. Ira did not tell anyone about this until he was on his deathbed, afraid people would think he was crazy. But others saw him too: sitting mischievously at a player piano in a town square, hurrying along the street with his head down, his face just visible in a crowd - no, wait a minute, it COULDN'T be.

I myself felt a visitation. I can't prove or disprove this, but it was a gift, so I don't throw it away. Paul Biscop, a former friend and spiritualist medium, had a way of disparaging MY experiences (though his were always bona fide - he had two Masters degrees and a PhD, so anything he said about spiritualism automatically trumped mine, and he often wrote off the experiences I shared with him as "fantasies").

I won't write a lot about how he died, but I had my mojo working on him not long before that: I made a formal request, or spell, or whatever you want to call it, not that he'd die or anything, or even suffer, but that he'd SEE, for once and for all, just how destructive his dismissive behaviour could be, how hurtful to others his pose as a "nice" person who had a very dark heart.  I will admit this involved beads, candles, incense, chanting, and even a little Haitian voodoo. Some of it I had learned in a course I took from Paul called The Anthropology of Religion. 

Within a few months I received a message from his longtime partner, also named Paul, that he had passed. Later I was to find out that he left Paul (a simple soul who seemed far less mature than his actual age) in HUGE debt, a massive amount of money that he could not possibly repay. He was rendered virtually homeless. Some people from the spiritualist church which Paul had founded (then stomped away from, bitterly, when they refused to do everything HIS way) tried hard to raise some money so Paul could at least figure out his next move. But he had a mortgage to pay, along with other debts he had  known nothing about. His memorial was NOT held in the spiritualist church but in the local Masonic hall, and to scrounge some money, Paul's tomes on spiritualism were on sale at a table in the back. 

Paul had dissed my Gershwin connection, the powerful sense I'd somehow - I can't explain it - "felt" him steal into the room, wordlessly, longing to connect with someone who would believe in him and deeply listen. I wrote about this in a blog post I've re-posted several times called Gershwin's Ghost. 

Gershwin won this struggle, and Paul ended up showing his true colours. DID some of that negative energy bounce back at him, after all? All I can say is that a similar situation happened with Lloyd Dykk, with whom I had some really poisonous experiences, and he too dropped in his tracks at age 60, felled by a stroke, just like Paul.

So what's the message here? Nothing, except that dear George still inspires strong feelings, and he DOES hang around because of the unfairness and confusion of his early death, his head cracked open by ignorant surgeons only to find a grapefruit-sized tumor that had been there for years, causing him agonizing pain and ruining his co-ordination so he couldn't even play the piano any more. Right up until his death, his deterioration had been considered a manifestation of "neurosis". He deserved so much more than that. Incredibly, he wrote the exquisite song But Not for Me very shortly before he died - kind of ironic, considering the circumstances:

"They're writing songs of love, but not for me

A lucky star's above, but not for me

With love to lead the way, I've found more clouds of grey

Than any Russian play could guarantee. . ."

Goodbye, George. We haven't forgotten you. I don't want you to wander the world as some sort of musical orphan. Look what happened to your detractor, the man who scoffed at my vision, my tender connection with you. Not that I want to strike anyone dead, but I am NOT particularly sorry that Paul Biscop no longer walks this earth. How you treat people, especially the ones you are supposed to love the most, says everything about you. George loved and was loved mainly for his songs, and for that he was deeply melancholy. But it's that sadness behind the jazziness that still touches us, grabs us, and keeps him alive in our ears and souls and nervous systems, forever.

FOLK ROT: Something is happening, but you don't know what it is

As I chop my way through YET ANOTHER Bob Dylan biography, this time by his longtime cheerleader/groupie/apologist Robert Shelton, the going is thicker and sludgier than last year's oatmeal left crusted in the pot. Still I make my way, relentlessly, because the book helps me go to sleep better than taking a couple of Seroquel, and there's no hangover the next day because I've forgotten what I've read. 

What interests me, aside from the fact that Shelton inserts himself into practically every paragraph (it's written in the first person, so that Shelton is the subject of the book and Dylan merely the object) are the bits and pieces out of the folk archives of those early times, when no one quite knew what to make of the skinny little kid from Minnesota who had a voice like a howling coyote and a fast-slashing wit that slipped unnoticed between the ribs of pundits and critics, creating bafflement, confusion, resentment, and even a degree of fear.

The way these indignant, insulted, obviously threatened stuffed shirts blathered on and on about how Dylan knew nothing and was stomping all over the folk tradition with muddy work boots makes for mighty embarrassing reading today. Which is why this is the most enjoyable part of this lumpy, bumpy, really-not-very-well-written-at-all biography-cum-memoir. Shelton knew Dylan like Dick Cavett knew Groucho and does not let us forget that fact for a moment, which nearly sinks the book in a sea of pretentious tedium. He also commits the most unforgiveable sin for a Dylan purist, or even a casual fan: HE GETS THE TITLE OF HIS MOST ICONIC MOVIE WRONG, spelling it "Don't Look Back" - when the filmmaker purposely left out the apostrophe. It is on every poster, in every review, and in the film itself, which makes you wonder if he even watched it.

But the sycophantic Shelton DOES provide us with, very likely, the last remaining documentation of one of the most stupid-ass periods in folk music history. Nobody else kept any of those shitty old copies of Sing Out! anyway, did they? But like back issues of TV guide piling up in an old boomer's attic, Shelton kept every issue and obsessively quotes from them for the book's entire 573 pages.

So I transcribed some of the juicier bits, which reflect just how CLUELESS these folkie pundits were, how stodgily encrusted their beliefs, and what a freaking strait-jacket they wanted to put Dylan in, probably because he scared the hell out of them:

Since 1950, when the folk audience was small, Sing Out!, under editor Irwin Silber, had laid down the "correct line" on folk song. Trumpeted by these men, the folk aesthetic denounced show business and mass culture, and advocated that Leftist, humanist views always be reflected in folk song. Deviation from belief in "art as a weapon in the social and class struggle" meant a sellout to commercial forces. Small wonder that Dylan's freewheeling exploration was apostasy.

Silber's "Open Letter to Bob Dylan", published in Sing Out! in November 1964, was particularly sharp: "I saw at Newport how you had somehow lost contact with people. . . some of the paraphernalia of fame were getting in your way." Dylan was outraged that Silber was telling him in public how to write and behave. Why didn't he telephone or write a personal letter? Silber was just using him to sell his magazine.

In September 1965, singer Ewan MacColl scourged Dylan again in Sing Out!:
“. . . our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists, working inside disciplines formulated over time. . . the present crop of contemporary American songs has been made by writers who are either unaware or incapable of working inside the disciplines, or are at pains to destroy them. ‘But what of Bobby Dylan?’ scream the outraged teenagers of all ages. . . a youth of mediocre talent. Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel. ‘But the poetry?’ What poetry? The cultivated illiteracy of his topical songs or the embarrassing fourth-grade schoolboy attempts at free verse? The latter reminds me of elderly female schoolteachers clad in Greek tunics rolling hoops across lawns at weekend theatre school. . .”

Izzy Young’s Sing Out! column for November 1965: “Dylan has settled for a liaison with the music trade’s Top-Forty Hit Parade. . . the charts require him to write rock-and-roll and he does. . . Next year, he’ll be writing rhythm and blues songs. . . the Polish polka will make it, and then he’ll write them, too. . .”

Animosity reached its high-water mark in the Sing Out! of January 1966. Tom Paxton lashed out in a column headed “Folk Rot” “. . . it isn’t folk, and if Dylan hadn’t led, fed and bred it, no one would ever have dreamed of confusing it with folk music.” Josh Dunson complained: “There is more protest and guts in one minute of good ‘race music’ than in two hours of folk-rock. . .”

May I say at this point that Josh, Tom, Izzy, Ewan and Irwin are so full of shit they are overflowing, and can in fact "sit on this and rotate" through all eternity. Most of them are dead now anyway, and weren`t particularly alive even while they were walking the planet. Meantime, 80-year-old Dylan lounges on the porch with his dogs on his property in Key West, sipping a glass of Heaven`s Door whiskey and quietly working on the lyrics for his next album.

CODA. Yes, Dylan DID answer his critics. The song is legendary enough that anyone remotely a fan of Dylan will know it. But I want to say it for him again, this time DIRECTLY to "that other Bob", Robert Shelton, and all the hangers-on as well as the detractors who wound up being SO WRONG about the whole thing, and dissed a man who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize while they sat around turning into alcoholic wanna-be/has-beens-who-never-were in some dingy 4th Street bar.

Positively 4th Street

You've got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend
When I was down you just stood there grinnin'
You've got a lotta nerve to say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on the side that's winnin'

You say I let you down, you know it’s not like that
If you're so hurt, why then don't you show it?
You say you've lost your faith, but that's not where it’s at
You have no faith to lose, and you know it

I know the reason that you talked behind my back
I used to be among the crowd you're in with
Do you take me for such a fool, to think I'd make contact
With the one who tries to hide what he don't know to begin with?

You see me on the street, you always act surprised
You say "how are you?", "good luck", but you don't mean it
When you know as well as me, you'd rather see me paralyzed
Why don't you just come out once and scream it

No, I do not feel that good when I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief perhaps I'd rob them
And now I know you're dissatisfied with your position and your place
Don't you understand, it’s not my problem?

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
You'd know what a drag it is to see you

Bob Dylan

 

Arabian horse

"Do You See Colour on Your TV?"

  

"Do you see colour on your TV?" I probably wasn't even watching TV when I heard this, since I was looking down and making mice out of plasticene or cutting up cardboard boxes with a steak knife to make houses for my trolls - but I did finally look up, and on our rinky-dinky standard-issue black and white TV, there was a sort of Hawaiian scene - was it Hawaiian, or something else? Do I really remember palm trees blowing? - and all around it was a sort of frame, and the frame was "strobing" (that word didn't exist back then, so let's say it was flashing weirdly). And the announcer was asking us if we SAW COLOUR on our black and white TV, and I sat and looked at it - I don't even remember if I saw any colour, but if I did it was tiny iridescent bits and pieces - and then I forgot about it, almost. I think I remember saying something to my mother about it, but she was skeptical. 

This would have been on Detroit TV in the mid-to-late 1960s. WJBK, probably, the same channel where I watched Milky the Clown, Captain Jolly, Jingles and Poopdeck Paul.

Then the whole thing got stashed WAY in the back of the cluttered attic of my mind. 

Something twigged the memory, some lone synapse sputtering in the desert of time, and I started thinking about it again. Now, when you're thinking about anything, or trying to net a memory that wisps away from you like dissipating smoke, you can always google it, and nine times out of ten at least SOMETHING comes up. Or it doesn't.

In this case, "do you see colour on your TV"? didn't come up at all, but after a lot more dredging, a couple of things did, or at least obliquely. These are comments left on various science pages in which someone attempts to start a discussion, which doesn't go very far. In some of these comments there is a sort of  dubiousness, a sense of "maybe I dreamed it" or "we all imagine things", which makes the whole thing much more intriguing. 

But the Squirt commercial referenced below is actually a documented thing, which is the closest thing to proof I'm ever going to have that yes, somebody DID once manage to broadcast colour images on black and white TV. I have attempted to recreate the magic of seeing colour where there should be only black and white by using different text colours for each comment. Thrilling, eh?

Anyone remember experimental color images on black & white TV?

Topics: How to make a Black and White television show color

Something happened that reminded me of this tonight, and I think I have finally made sense of something seen as a kid. For some odd reason it just hit me. When I was fairly young and living in the Los Angeles area, there was a test done one night on a local TV channel that was supposed to produce a color picture on the black and white TVs commonly in use. And I can recall seeing some color; I think mostly green.

From time to time I have thought about this and wondered what it was that I saw. In fact at times I have doubted the memory as it didn't make any sense, but I can remember the event very clearly. Tonight it occurred to me what they were probably up to. I bet that they were strobing the white to produce a false color image, as is done with alternating black and white dots on a rotating wheel [I don't recall the name of the effect].

The idea is that each pixel on the screen would be strobed at the frequency required to produce the desired color for that dot. Does this make sense? I'm not sure what the strobe rate is that produces the false color effect, or if this was doable on B&W televisions, but it is the only thing that has even threatened to make any sense here. Is there any other way that one can imagine producing color on a B&W screen?

I believe the imagination can sometimes fill in things like this, causing us to believe we saw something that wasn't exactly there. But I'm not saying that it didn't actually happen either.

I can remember seeing a similar demo in the UK in about 1970 - most likely on the "Tommorow's World" weekly science program. I think they said it was done by modulating the intensity, but I don't remember any more details. It was a test image with a few large areas of different colours (which were very faint), not an attempt to show a "realistic" moving colour image. If you want to experiment, all you need is a PC and some free software that can generate a movie from frame-by-frame images.

I don't know what prompted me to remember this. Crazy.

When I was a kid we lived the Los Angeles area. We had a (POS) Packard Bell black & white TV in the family room (color TVs were new technology and my parents were skeptical).

One day a Sprite commercial came on and the voiceover said something to the effect of "Sprite is so bursting with flavor that you're probably seeing color on your B&W TV!". I remember scrambling over to the TV, and sure enough, there was a static image of a Sprite bottle, and it was kind of in color.

This is apparently an approximation of what some viewers saw, although I only remember seeing a pale green and possibly red.

One of the earliest test broadcasts of this technology was in 1967 or 1968 on KNXT Channel 2 in Los Angeles.

The Squirt Soft Drink Subjective Color Acid Test

On July 25, 1967, television viewers with black-and-white TV sets were startled to see flashes of color on their monochrome screens for about ten seconds during a 60-second soda-pop commercial. A letter to a columnist in the September 14, 1967 Detroit Free Press asked, "Before I see an eye doctor, let me ask Action Line: Is it possible to pick up color TV on a black and white set? I SWEAR I saw a Squirt soft-drink commercial in color. Not pink elephants Green Squirt!" The image was described in the newspaper column as a red, green and blue sign that had flashed on the screen.

A viewer in Chicago told Popular Photography magazine (July 1968), "I saw pink! It knocked me for a loop...the letters S-Q-U-I-R-T looked greenish or light turquoise...and it kept up for maybe 10 seconds." (Meanwhile a viewer in San Francisco claimed he didn't see anything colorful.)

It was the national debut of an experimental television commercial using a special production process that would give the optical illusion of color. The commercial first aired a few months earlier locally on KNXT, the CBS-owned television station in Los Angeles, and viewers there were just as stunned. Squirt and its advertising partner Color-Tel Corporation of Los Angeles, at the time decided to make no prior announcement of this experimental commercial, preferring to see just how viewers would respond. And respond they did. Within hours, thousands of viewers were asking if they really saw what they thought they did, color on their black-and-white TV screens, according to Popular Electronics magazine (October 1968).

ADDENDA! I found more stuff on this weird subject, to my surprise, but it was such a long piece that I only include a few excerpts here. And it does explain why so few people remember this arcane experiment, or if they do, question the veracity of those memories. The color-on-a-black-and-white-TV experiment was extremely brief, due to the fact that it FLOPPED. Had it come along ten years earlier, maybe. Like Segway, which was supposed to revolutionize transportation as we knew it - it didn't. It didn't revolutionize ANYTHING, and just made a few people (such as myself) doubt their own memories or even feel crazy for having them.

There were a few drawbacks. The images were nothing at all like true color TV. It didn't have the intensity or range of colors. As the technology currently stood, the effect could only be used on still images. The "subjective color" could only be seen in about one-fourth of the TV screen area, and, because it relied on flickering light, there was a lot of flickering. It was also found that some people could not perceive the colors at all, yet some people diagnosed as color-blind could see the colors.

Nonetheless, Popular Science, in its August 1968 issue, saw many possibilities for the technology, particularly for special effects. "Color will appear in cartoons, commercials and special presentations. Polka-dots on a clown's suit will be seen as red flashing dots. You'll see the designs and lettering on a cereal box in pulsating green and blue. A girl will plant a kiss on a boy's cheek--and a red lipstick print will appear on your screen."

But there was one giant flaw in that rosy prediction. By 1968, black-and-white TV was well on the way out. The vast majority of programming (outside of old movies and TV shows) were being broadcast in "living" color by then, and while most U.S. households still had black-and-white TV sets (color sets were big, bulky and expensive in those days), more and more homes were purchasing color television sets every year. Had James F. Butterfield perfected the process ten or fifteen years earlier, in the 1950s when 90 percent of television broadcasts were black and white, it might have had more of a serious impact.

.