If wanting to live in a world where aliens from another planet — one where heating and ventilation contractors fashion all the spacesuits — are welcome to come and cavort with women they’re manifestly not in the least bit interested in — including women who appear to have a sack of dead mice where the back of their upper arm is supposed to be — all the while playing roller-rink music through some sort of transmogrifier that only gendarmes and german shepherds can hear is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.
And to think we settled for the Beatles when The Tornadoes were available. Pshaw and harrumph!
[Editor’s Note: First run in 2006. I’m always amazed when anything interesting is still around on the Intertunnel when I go back to it later. Any interesting YouTube video disappears before your bookmark cools off. Slideshow is still fully operational, though; enjoy!]
{Author’s Note: I’ve been writing this dreck for almost four years? Egad. And there is no editor}
Well, that’s not fair, really — at least around here in New England. I’m a little out of the circuit, and have been for a while; but if memory serves, the lounge in the chinese restaurant in these parts have really good Country and Western cover bands in them. There aren’t any lounge singers that look like 150 pounds of ground chuck in a 100 pound satin sack in there. And maybe it’s not fair to the people in the photos, either; maybe they’re more fun than a picnic for people with delirium tremens would be for the ants. And even though some of them seem to have attended too many picnics for their spandex, we really have no idea who any of them are. Maybe they were swell.
I don’t remember where I first saw these photos, but they lead back to something called Sharpeworld, a place where someone definitely has an eye for the obscure and odd. And if this isn’t obscure, and odd, I don’t know what is.
These photographs were found in the trash and rescued from oblivion; the oblivion that time will bestow even on entertainment much more popular than the people on the photographs. These people seem to be equipped with a sort of instant oblivion, like they’re black holes for charisma. They’re the lounge entertainment version of Men in Black: In a flash, you’ve forgotten you’ve seen them, and even forgotten what you yourself were doing when you saw them. Some have faces that can stop a clock, all of them make the clock run backwards.
It’s a wonderful array of the people who were playing at the wedding of your distant cousin — you remember, you got food poisoning from the chicken and shells; the comedian hired for the Rotary Club Medal of Achievement dinner you missed because you had the flu; the combo on the deck (in the rain) at the golf tournament banquet from that course under the high tension power lines — where you got poison ivy; and the stripper that wouldn’t take any of her clothes off from that lounge your college buddies from upstate took you to as a hoot. You may have been too drunk to fully appreciate them, or maybe the acts were too drunk, who knows? Anyway, everybody draws a blank here.
It’s not the photographer’s fault. The pictures were taken by James J. Kriegsmann, who by all accounts was no slouch. I went looking for Kriegsmann, and was astonished by what I saw.
He died in 1994. He was born and educated in Vienna, Austria, and in 1929 came to New York and started photographing celebrities.
And what celebrities! Michael Ochs Archives has a wonderful set of some of Kriegsmann’s work, and the people in them are astounding. Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt (rowr) Cab Calloway, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis — dozens and dozens of the most famous acts in the world, decade after decade.
I imagine that Kriegsmann’s notoriety among the glitterati brought the lumpen people to his doorstep, thinking that if they plunked down the cash, some of the leftover celebrity might still be in the lens. And so Kriegsmann worked, and worked hard, and made the same attempt to portray these subjects as sympathetically as he could. It boggles the mind what they must have looked like when they walked in his door.
The proprietor of Sharpeworld put these on Flickr hoping that someone would remember something about these folks. It’s a fool’s errand, I’m afraid. Would you remember who was singing O Sole Mio in the Terminal Lounge in 1979 in Trenton when you went in to get out of the rain for five minutes to use the pay phone?
Though we laugh, the camera was kind — in that it captured them as they wished to be, and maybe as they were, at least for one or two brief shining moments: Somebody.
It’s a subscription site, but don’t worry, if you’re like me, you would stop reading after that first sentence anyway. That is supposed to be a NEWS item on a NEWS site. I know if you go to real school they tell you to write everything in the overwrought style of the novel you wish you were writing, but out here in the real world where we’re interested in getting real information in a hurry, we’ve got no patience for this style of writing. And it’s a particularly trite style of boilerplate about drinking coffee, isn’t it? Trite squared.
It doesn’t matter what analysis follows the plea for registration, because it’s bound to be wrong. “Analysis” in these matters is like an intellectual boat adrift on a sea of sensations, looking for any dock to bump against. The same opinion fits all situations. Bush did it, or Obama did it; take your pick.
If you don’t have a memory based on your brain stem instead of the bigger, damper part, you’ll remember that the scare chart above is absolutely nothing compared to 1977. In 1977, the price of coffee went from $0.50 a pound to $3.50 a pound. That is not a typo. The coffee in my kitchen right now costs about $3.50 a pound, thirty two years later. I had a job in 1977, and it would have taken me an hour and fifteen minutes to make enough money to buy that pound of coffee then. And I was supporting myself and putting myself through school on that wage.
I’ve talked to academics about the seventies, people who were living right down the street and a world away from me in Boston, and they all tell me what a blast they were having then. If you’re well north of forty maybe you were partying at the disco or something. Rich people often have fun in the ruins of civilizations. Others not so much.
I could find some ax I’d like to grind and blame expensive coffee on it. I could blame the weather or global warming or global cooling caused by global warming or Hugo Chavez or greedy coffee barons or FARC or bad mojo or fiat currency or whatever floats your boat in the “Illuminati are spoiling my summer” sweepstakes you find in any blog comments section. But I’m going to say something more disquieting instead.
There’s no rhyme or reason to it. There’s a general breakdown in almost every formerly functioning economic and social process I can think of. The intellectual and economic version of delirium tremens rules the day. Bizarre things, with even bizarrer explanations offered for them will happen every damn day for quite a while. And by “explanations,” I mean unreasoning blame — a headwind which does not shift but comes from all points on the compass.
It’s the seventies again, baby. You wished it on yourself, but now we’re all going to get it, good and hard. Been there, done that, got the straightjacket. Trust me, you’re not going to like it.
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