Kid Bangham and some iteration of the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Great stuff. Kramer clothes and architectural hairstyle. A short vacation for the singer. Gibsons need not apply.
Holy cow this film is something like 100 years old. Was Edison cranking the handle? I kept expecting Charlie Chaplin to appear.
It starts out with the usual lament. We’re running out of coal, of all things. The only endangered species on display isn’t coal, it’s a man willing to do more than watch football on TV in his basement, and a two-parent family next door. But let’s not quibble. The denizens of ye olde draftopolis are interrogating the cloud people on how they were able to keep ice from forming on the goldfish bowl. The answer, which is not directly mentioned in the video, was asbestos. They covered everything in asbestos.
I’m not an environmentalist, I guess. The word itself contains the word “mentalist.” Now, I can predict the future (it will be worse), but I’m not really a mentalist, or an environmentalist. Environmentalists commute to work on recumbent bicycles and paddle plastic kayaks on the weekends. I commute to work in my socks and have a boat I built entirely from wood in my basement. It’s never been launched.
I simply don’t like wasting things. They don’t have a name for that anymore. I’ve saved more stuff than any ten environmentalists. I’m wary of wonder cures for everyday problems. It’s how you end up with everything in your house, including most of the house itself, made from plastic. It’s how paint and gasoline ended up with copious doses of lead in them. Hell, they used to put mercury into paint to kill spiders who might walk over it.
The video is labeled “Energy conservation in the Home in the 1920s,” but in today’s parlance, conservation just means rationing. This is different. These people are trying to get more bang for the same buck. They didn’t like wasting things, either, or wearing their winter coats to bed in January.
So they insulated the jacket of the furnace, and all the pipes, with asbestos. They got more heat in the right parts of their house for the same amount of money, and the installers all got mesothelioma at no extra charge.
One wonders if in 100 years, an ill-informed internet so-and-so will post a video of the benighted 2020s, and wonder why everyone thought coal was evil, but lithium, cadmium, and a healthy dose of cobalt was peachy.
Well, no one currently knows how to make friends in any setting, public or private, so I guess this pamphlet from the 1940s might be useful again. Or not.
I just sort of scratch my head about how people communicate nowadays. The average American is basically terrified of the telephone. They’ll send pictures of their private parts to people they haven’t met, but answering a ringing phone and talking to a stranger is beyond them. Anybody younger than a Rubik’s cube figures texting is the only way to communicate with other people. See: They Call Me Captain Kirk for an old exposition on the text-mess recipe. But honestly, they’re not very good at texting, either. If they could make themselves understood by typing little messages on a baby corn keyboard, they wouldn’t need emojis, would they?
This booklet from the 1940s is actually quite useful, no matter what the twitterati might say about it. I went looking around to see if there was someone I could credit for digging it up, but all I found were Gen Xers and younger mocking it. They wondered how dumb people had to be to need instructions on how to talk properly on the phone. It escaped every one of them that they are entirely incapable of doing it themselves. I know they can’t talk properly on the phone, without ever talking to them, because I haven’t spoken to anyone who knows how to make themselves understood on the phone for decades. They might be the exception, but I am beset by doubts.
I’m hardly a luddite in this regard. I understand the need for call screening, etc., in the age of robocalls. I don’t answer my phone much, or carry it around, because I don’t want to, not because I can’t. That’s not what I’m talking about. I know how to talk properly on the phone, coming and going, including (especially) in a business setting. I have a business phone number, all digital, that transcribes every voicemail and texts or emails it to me. It’s hilarious to read what people, who talk on the phone for a living, mind you, sound like when transcribed. I received several voicemails from someone at Microsoft about a Bing Ads account I ran for a client of mine. Every time, the transcription read, “This is (so and so), I’m calling about your big ass.” Every time.
It’s also instructive that everyone online mistakes this pamphlet for literally “making friends” using the phone, like some kind of primitive Tinder app. The pamphlet is obviously a training method for receiving and placing calls to businesses. It’s a series of excellent tips on making yourself understood on the phone, and projecting a friendly demeanor in return to someone who has no visual cues to rely on to assess what you’re saying, and how you’re saying it. It puts me in mind of lots of useful informational videos. Things like Coronet films. They have titles like How To Improve Your Personality, How To Be Well Groomed, Dating Do’s and Don’ts, What Is Money? and Everyday Courtesy. Coronet films were made for our parent’s generation, but we’d occasionally get a look at one when my high school teachers were really hung over and wanted to dim the lights and sleep a little.
These are universally mocked by everyone on the internet, but I’ve been to Walmart, and believe me, no one has any personality, no one is groomed at all, never mind well-groomed, and everyday courtesy is scarcer than something to eat at a vegan barbecue. And as far as “What is Money?”, it was appropriate for my parent’s generation because they were poor and they’d never seen money. Walmart shoppers seem to have plenty, comparatively. They just don’t spend any of it on soap or combs or pants without elastic waistbands.
[Hey, Hank christened my new KoFi Buy Me a Coffee tip jar! Many thanks!]
Every video ever made is a requiem mass. You just don’t know it at the time.
I’ve been around the blues block back in the day. I can play at least three of the instruments shown, badly. I know how to carry the ones I can’t play, too. I sang worsely while I played badly. Everything in this video is familiar, but not exactly. I feel like I’m looking at a photocopy sent through the copier over and over.
That’s not a criticism. We all cobble together some form of today out of the bits and pieces of yesterday that catch our eye. The only truly original people in this world are schizophrenics. The rest of us make do with the world as it is, and was. I’m interested in this video because it’s an example of what some young people are finding interesting in the flotsam and jetsam of R&B and blues. I’m modestly intrigued to survey the instruments and amplifiers to see what has snagged their wallets at the music store. For instance, kids are playing Telecasters again, after a long love affair with Stratocasters. My sons played out the other day, and the Heir showed up with a Telecaster for some reason. Synchronicity, I guess. Speaking of synchronicity, Wilhelm Reich lived right down the street from us in Rangeley, Maine, after all.
Wait a minute, my bad. Synchronicity was Dr. Carl Jung and Dr. Gordon Sumner. Wilhelm Reich was the guy who put people, naked, into a sheet-metal-lined box with a tiny window, and told them to stay in there until whatever was troubling them, from being neurotic to having cancer, went away. They were supposed to be cured by their own energy, in a form he called orgone. Hmm, that sounds a lot like a typical music studio. Cramped, mostly windowless, with long stretches of boredom between bouts of inspiration.
So Eddie 9V locks himself in a box with his friends, and cures himself with his own energy. He picks up hints from musicians long gone, but not forgotten. He gets his dress sense from a blow to the head, I guess, or watching any number of movies about the seventies. He’s like a magpie, taking a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and trying to make a nest of music and image for himself to sit in. It’s not bad, is it?
And I ain’t going to lie. If the blonde backup singer sits naked in the orgone accumulator, I’m going to look through the little window, whether I’m wearing a lab coat or not.
[Many thanks to my interfriend Mark M. for sending that one along]
Find Stuff:
Recent Comments