In recent weeks, I have been spending time on YouTube discovering some of the 1930s era Polish recordings that people have been kind enough to upload. Until the Internet came along, access to such recordings was all but impossible for the average person here in the United States.
Here is one of the vintage Polish recordings that I discovered and fell for immediately. It is called "Nadine" and is performed by Polish film star Aleksander Zabczynski with a really charming and peppy band in the background. While this recording was made in 1934, it still retains a certain "Roaring '20s" spirit that, by then, had all but disappeared from American popular music. The evening I discovered this, I must have played it back a dozen or so times.
I had never heard of Zabczynski before I discovered this clip. But you can learn more about him by going to the clip's page on the YouTube website and look for the "About This Video" section on the top right hand portion and click on the "more" link to show the details. The story of his life and career is actually rather sad. Five years after this grand and happy recording was made, as was the case for so many Europeans and certainly for all Poles, Zabczynski's world was suddenly transformed into a living hell at the hands of not just one but two of history's most brutal and murderous totalitarian regimes. For Poland, the nightmare of totalitarian rule would last for a full half century.
The good news is that Poland has regained its freedom and people around the world can now access and enjoy wonderful recordings such as this that, even in the 1930s, were virtually unknown here in the United States.
While I do feature a limited number of European recordings on Radio Dismuke your best source of for exploring vintage European recordings from the 1920s - 1940s is Weimar Rundfunk. The easiest way to tune in is though the station's tune-in page on the Live365.com website.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
1923 Time Travel Shopping Trip
One of the occasional features of this blog will be time travel "shopping trips" in which we will compare prices from the "Golden Era" with those of comparable items today. Of course, in order to make any such comparison meaningful, it will be necessary for us to adjust for currency inflation.
One of the aspects of today's world that I very much do value and appreciate is the fact that prices, on average, tend to be significantly lower - and, at the same time, we also earn a lot more money than our grandparents did. Sure, there is a lot that is nasty, ugly and utterly empty about today's music and popular culture and it is sometimes awfully tempting to want to step into a time machine and go back. Nevertheless, speaking strictly in terms of our material standard of living, it is we, not our grandparents, who are fortunate enough to live in a "Golden Era."
Looking at prices in old advertisements can be deceptive. At first glance, it looks like everything was much less expensive because the dollar values quoted are so much lower than the prices of today. But, in reality, it is not that prices have gone up so much as the fact that value of our currency has gone down - as these vintage "shopping trips" will demonstrate.
Ignoring short-term events such as wars and economic downturns, over the long run, prices of most items we buy have fallen while wages have steadily increased. One major reason for this is that technological advances result in more economical methods of making things. Technology also makes it possible for workers to be more productive. A man operating a backhoe can dig up more dirt in a few hours than ten men with shovels could in an entire day - and this makes it possible for today's backhoe operator to earn more money with less effort than his great grandfather could earn doing the same work with a shovel.
The tool I will be using to adjust prices for inflation is this nifty Cost of Living Calculator from the American Institute For Economic Research. This calculator lets you pick any year between 1913 and 2007 and tells you what a given dollar amount in one year was worth in another. If you have access to vintage advertisements, you can use this calculator to make your own vintage shopping trips.
For today's shopping trip our time machine will take us back to the year 1923. According to the calculator, $1 in 1923 had about the same purchasing power as $12.12 in today's money.
But before we step into our time machine, if we are going to go shopping, it helps to have some money in our pockets. And, as we all know, money doesn't just appear in one's pocket by magic. For most people, it is necessary to have a job and a paycheck first. So it is also important to know how much people were paid back in 1923.
Unfortunately, there is no similar calculator to compare wages. But I did find a website that quotes the 1920 census as showing that, in the year 1920, the average annual wage in the United States was about $1,500. Plug that into the Cost of Living Calculator and that ends up being roughly $18,180 in today's currency. By contrast, according to this chart by the Social Security Administration, the average wage in the United States in 2006 was $38,651.
In other words, the average wage in the United States in 1920 was only 47 percent of what it was in 2006. So when we go on our shopping trip and convert 1923 prices into today's money, imagine that you are paying those prices while bringing in 53 percent less money per year than you currently do. Also, keep in mind that, in 1920, married women usually stayed home to take care of the house and kids. So not only were the wages significantly lower, two income households were nowhere near as common as they are today.
Our time machine drops us off on a cold winter day at a modest but respectable middle class home somewhere in America. The mid-winter sales circular from Montgomery Ward is sitting on a table offering sale prices on all sorts of items. But we must hurry and decide what we are going to buy - the special prices end on February 28, 1923.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the big Chicago mail order houses Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck were, for all intents and purposes, the Wal-marts of their day. Just as small town merchants today complain that they are unable to sell as low as Wal-mart, 100 years ago similar merchants complained about how "unfair" it was that Montgomery Ward and Sears were siphoning off all their customers by offering prices that were sometimes even less than what the merchants themselves had to pay for similar items. But during the period this catalog was current, the world was beginning to change for the big mail order houses. The advent of the automobile and better roads made it easier for rural families to make more frequent shopping trips into town. A new company, J.C. Penny, started opening stores in towns all across the country offering low prices without the wait and shipping charges associated with mail order. By the end of the decade, Montgomery Ward and Sears were both busy opening hundreds of retail stores of their own.
Here is an in-house Montgomery Ward brand electric vacuum cleaner. It does not have any fancy attachments - what you see in the drawing is what you get.
If you pay for it in cash and have standard city electricity, you can buy it on sale for $29.95. (An extra dollar will get you a model that has a 32 volt motor for homes where farm lighting plants made by Powerlite or Delco are in use). In today's money the vacuum will cost you $363.08. If you don't have or want to spend all that money at once, Wards will let you put down $5 and pay it off for $5 more every month. In today's money, that works out to $60.61 per month.
Today, you can easily pay over $363 for a high end vacuum cleaner. But a Montgomery Ward store brand model of anything was hardly a high end product and it did not have any of the special features higher priced modern vacuums do. I have no way of knowing or comparing specs such as suction power, durability, etc. But a quick look at the Wal-mart and Target websites shows several models of vacuum cleaners made by Hoover and Eureka in the $75 - $150 range that I would guess are just as good, if not better, than the 1923 Monkey Ward model.
If paying a couple of hundred dollars extra for a product such as a vacuum cleaner which will, presumably, last you a number of years does not seem all that harsh, keep in mind that, for this shopping trip, your annual income is the 1920 national average of $18,180 in today's money - and prices of other things you will need to buy are also higher.
Unfortunately, unless you live in town, chances are that, here in 1923, an electric vacuum cleaner will be useless to you as electrification has yet to make its way to most rural areas. So here is a vacuum cleaner that does not require electricity. The ad says: "the suction force is produced by a revolving fan propelled by the rubber tired wheels." This model set you back $14.98 or $181.60 in today's money.
To find a comparable product for sale today I suspect one would have to go to a third world country. Here in the USA, even the most isolated farms have had electricity since at least the 1950s.
Here is a special price on auto batteries - again with with Ward's in-house store brand. The ad claims that one can save between $6.50 and $15 ($78.80 - $181.84 in today's money) by buying your battery at Wards instead of a service station.
If you drive a Model T Ford, you can buy a battery for the $11.75 price displayed in red type at the top of the ad. That's $142.44 in today's money. Batteries for other makes of cars cost more - up to $17.75 for Dodge and Maxwell cars. That's $215.18 in today's money. And all batteries are guaranteed for whopping 18 months - unless you drive a Model T Ford, in which case the guarantee is only for 12 months.
I just made a quick visit to the website for Auto Zone and pulled up the price for a battery for the vehicle I drive. Two low-end batteries listed with 48 month warranties did not have price information available. A battery with a 72 month warranty costs $54.99. My guess is if one were to go to Wal-mart, the price would be even less, especially if one were to drop down to a 48 month warranty.
Batteries are one product where prices have fallen significantly while storage capacity and length of service has, at the same time, vastly improved. On future time travel shopping trips we will take a look at just how expensive it was for rural households to operate their battery-powered radio sets in the late 1920s and 1930s.
Here in 1923, every penny counts. And since married women usually stay at home, they have the time to save money by making their own clothes.
For $4 down - $48.49 in today's money - one can buy this Damascus Vibrating Shuttle sewing machine on a $4 monthly installment plan until it is paid off at a price of $29.95 or $363.08 in today's money. If you are able to pay in cash, the price is only $27.95 or $338.83 in today's money. The machine is manually powered by the large pedal at the bottom.
I know next to nothing about sewing machines, so I am not not the best person to compare features. Wal-mart's website offers a machine at $39.87 and another one at $56.70 and I suspect that both are capable doing of everything that the vintage Wards machine was able to. For $179 Wal-mart offers a machine that is advertised as being "computerized" - whatever that means.
True, today's sewing machines are rather bland looking and don't come with the attractive cabinet made of "genuine quarter sawed veneered oak." But since they are electrically powered and do not need a huge pulley system, they can be easily stored away out of view when they are not in use instead of taking up space that could be used for some other piece of furniture.
Here is a machine to wash the clothes made by the sewing machine. It is called the Cyclone Vacuum Washer and is strictly mechanical. It claims that your clothes will last twice as long as they are not rubbed. Instead, "this machine washes by suction, one of the most efficient methods of washing ever discovered. The vacuum cups plunge down into the water and at the same time rotate forcing hot suds through every fiber of the cloth. This loosens the particles of dirt. Then, when the cups are withdrawn, a suction is created which draws the dirt right out of the clothes. "
Oh, yes - it is necessary to manually heat up and add the water to the machine before you use it. I am not sure if the rinsing is done in a separate tub or not. To operate the machine, you will need to stand besides it and move the handle back and forth until your clothes are clean. And afterwards you will need to manually run the clothes one at a time through a wringer.
This washer sells for $13.95 or $169.11 in today's money. I couldn't find a modern washer online for $169 - though I'll bet one can buy a used one for less than that. BestBuy.com has washers starting at $269 and all you have to do is load the clothes and soap and come back later. The water is added and drained automatically and the machine does all the work.
One of the aspects of today's world that I very much do value and appreciate is the fact that prices, on average, tend to be significantly lower - and, at the same time, we also earn a lot more money than our grandparents did. Sure, there is a lot that is nasty, ugly and utterly empty about today's music and popular culture and it is sometimes awfully tempting to want to step into a time machine and go back. Nevertheless, speaking strictly in terms of our material standard of living, it is we, not our grandparents, who are fortunate enough to live in a "Golden Era."
Looking at prices in old advertisements can be deceptive. At first glance, it looks like everything was much less expensive because the dollar values quoted are so much lower than the prices of today. But, in reality, it is not that prices have gone up so much as the fact that value of our currency has gone down - as these vintage "shopping trips" will demonstrate.
Ignoring short-term events such as wars and economic downturns, over the long run, prices of most items we buy have fallen while wages have steadily increased. One major reason for this is that technological advances result in more economical methods of making things. Technology also makes it possible for workers to be more productive. A man operating a backhoe can dig up more dirt in a few hours than ten men with shovels could in an entire day - and this makes it possible for today's backhoe operator to earn more money with less effort than his great grandfather could earn doing the same work with a shovel.
The tool I will be using to adjust prices for inflation is this nifty Cost of Living Calculator from the American Institute For Economic Research. This calculator lets you pick any year between 1913 and 2007 and tells you what a given dollar amount in one year was worth in another. If you have access to vintage advertisements, you can use this calculator to make your own vintage shopping trips.
For today's shopping trip our time machine will take us back to the year 1923. According to the calculator, $1 in 1923 had about the same purchasing power as $12.12 in today's money.
But before we step into our time machine, if we are going to go shopping, it helps to have some money in our pockets. And, as we all know, money doesn't just appear in one's pocket by magic. For most people, it is necessary to have a job and a paycheck first. So it is also important to know how much people were paid back in 1923.
Unfortunately, there is no similar calculator to compare wages. But I did find a website that quotes the 1920 census as showing that, in the year 1920, the average annual wage in the United States was about $1,500. Plug that into the Cost of Living Calculator and that ends up being roughly $18,180 in today's currency. By contrast, according to this chart by the Social Security Administration, the average wage in the United States in 2006 was $38,651.
In other words, the average wage in the United States in 1920 was only 47 percent of what it was in 2006. So when we go on our shopping trip and convert 1923 prices into today's money, imagine that you are paying those prices while bringing in 53 percent less money per year than you currently do. Also, keep in mind that, in 1920, married women usually stayed home to take care of the house and kids. So not only were the wages significantly lower, two income households were nowhere near as common as they are today.
Time Travel Shopping Trip
Our time machine drops us off on a cold winter day at a modest but respectable middle class home somewhere in America. The mid-winter sales circular from Montgomery Ward is sitting on a table offering sale prices on all sorts of items. But we must hurry and decide what we are going to buy - the special prices end on February 28, 1923.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the big Chicago mail order houses Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck were, for all intents and purposes, the Wal-marts of their day. Just as small town merchants today complain that they are unable to sell as low as Wal-mart, 100 years ago similar merchants complained about how "unfair" it was that Montgomery Ward and Sears were siphoning off all their customers by offering prices that were sometimes even less than what the merchants themselves had to pay for similar items. But during the period this catalog was current, the world was beginning to change for the big mail order houses. The advent of the automobile and better roads made it easier for rural families to make more frequent shopping trips into town. A new company, J.C. Penny, started opening stores in towns all across the country offering low prices without the wait and shipping charges associated with mail order. By the end of the decade, Montgomery Ward and Sears were both busy opening hundreds of retail stores of their own.
Here is an in-house Montgomery Ward brand electric vacuum cleaner. It does not have any fancy attachments - what you see in the drawing is what you get.
If you pay for it in cash and have standard city electricity, you can buy it on sale for $29.95. (An extra dollar will get you a model that has a 32 volt motor for homes where farm lighting plants made by Powerlite or Delco are in use). In today's money the vacuum will cost you $363.08. If you don't have or want to spend all that money at once, Wards will let you put down $5 and pay it off for $5 more every month. In today's money, that works out to $60.61 per month.
Today, you can easily pay over $363 for a high end vacuum cleaner. But a Montgomery Ward store brand model of anything was hardly a high end product and it did not have any of the special features higher priced modern vacuums do. I have no way of knowing or comparing specs such as suction power, durability, etc. But a quick look at the Wal-mart and Target websites shows several models of vacuum cleaners made by Hoover and Eureka in the $75 - $150 range that I would guess are just as good, if not better, than the 1923 Monkey Ward model.
If paying a couple of hundred dollars extra for a product such as a vacuum cleaner which will, presumably, last you a number of years does not seem all that harsh, keep in mind that, for this shopping trip, your annual income is the 1920 national average of $18,180 in today's money - and prices of other things you will need to buy are also higher.
Unfortunately, unless you live in town, chances are that, here in 1923, an electric vacuum cleaner will be useless to you as electrification has yet to make its way to most rural areas. So here is a vacuum cleaner that does not require electricity. The ad says: "the suction force is produced by a revolving fan propelled by the rubber tired wheels." This model set you back $14.98 or $181.60 in today's money.
To find a comparable product for sale today I suspect one would have to go to a third world country. Here in the USA, even the most isolated farms have had electricity since at least the 1950s.
If you drive a Model T Ford, you can buy a battery for the $11.75 price displayed in red type at the top of the ad. That's $142.44 in today's money. Batteries for other makes of cars cost more - up to $17.75 for Dodge and Maxwell cars. That's $215.18 in today's money. And all batteries are guaranteed for whopping 18 months - unless you drive a Model T Ford, in which case the guarantee is only for 12 months.
I just made a quick visit to the website for Auto Zone and pulled up the price for a battery for the vehicle I drive. Two low-end batteries listed with 48 month warranties did not have price information available. A battery with a 72 month warranty costs $54.99. My guess is if one were to go to Wal-mart, the price would be even less, especially if one were to drop down to a 48 month warranty.
Batteries are one product where prices have fallen significantly while storage capacity and length of service has, at the same time, vastly improved. On future time travel shopping trips we will take a look at just how expensive it was for rural households to operate their battery-powered radio sets in the late 1920s and 1930s.
Here in 1923, every penny counts. And since married women usually stay at home, they have the time to save money by making their own clothes.
For $4 down - $48.49 in today's money - one can buy this Damascus Vibrating Shuttle sewing machine on a $4 monthly installment plan until it is paid off at a price of $29.95 or $363.08 in today's money. If you are able to pay in cash, the price is only $27.95 or $338.83 in today's money. The machine is manually powered by the large pedal at the bottom.
I know next to nothing about sewing machines, so I am not not the best person to compare features. Wal-mart's website offers a machine at $39.87 and another one at $56.70 and I suspect that both are capable doing of everything that the vintage Wards machine was able to. For $179 Wal-mart offers a machine that is advertised as being "computerized" - whatever that means.
True, today's sewing machines are rather bland looking and don't come with the attractive cabinet made of "genuine quarter sawed veneered oak." But since they are electrically powered and do not need a huge pulley system, they can be easily stored away out of view when they are not in use instead of taking up space that could be used for some other piece of furniture.
Here is a machine to wash the clothes made by the sewing machine. It is called the Cyclone Vacuum Washer and is strictly mechanical. It claims that your clothes will last twice as long as they are not rubbed. Instead, "this machine washes by suction, one of the most efficient methods of washing ever discovered. The vacuum cups plunge down into the water and at the same time rotate forcing hot suds through every fiber of the cloth. This loosens the particles of dirt. Then, when the cups are withdrawn, a suction is created which draws the dirt right out of the clothes. "
Oh, yes - it is necessary to manually heat up and add the water to the machine before you use it. I am not sure if the rinsing is done in a separate tub or not. To operate the machine, you will need to stand besides it and move the handle back and forth until your clothes are clean. And afterwards you will need to manually run the clothes one at a time through a wringer.
This washer sells for $13.95 or $169.11 in today's money. I couldn't find a modern washer online for $169 - though I'll bet one can buy a used one for less than that. BestBuy.com has washers starting at $269 and all you have to do is load the clothes and soap and come back later. The water is added and drained automatically and the machine does all the work.
This tea kettle caught my attention because I recently purchased a kettle at Target for about $9. The $1.89 price tag in 1923 works out to $22.91 in today's money.
My cheapo $9 Target teapot is stainless steel whereas the 1923 Monkey Ward cheapo teapot is only made out of aluminum. I did see some other tea kettles in Target approaching $20 but the primary difference between them and the one I bought was the higher priced ones tended to be more attractively designed. All of them, however, had a 2 quart capacity whereas smallest Montgomery Ward kettle listed was 5 quarts and they even offered one that was 8 quart.
I don't think I have ever seen a 5 quart, let alone an 8 quart, tea kettle for sale. I guess back then housewives needed two gallon kettles in order to heat up enough water for their manual Cyclone Vacuum Washers.
Unfortunately, the size difference makes a price comparison between modern kettles difficult. Today, however, the only the cheapest low end tea kettles are all aluminum.
At last, we finally find a product that appears to be a bargain even when compared with today's prices. The $1.69 for a 5 foot ladder works out to $20.49 in today's money. The $1.98 for a 6 foot ladder works out to $24. That strikes me as being a pretty low price for a step ladder. Home Depot's website offers a 6 foot fiberglass step ladder for $39.
Not everything was more expensive back then. The price of a house, for example, was significantly less than what it is today even after adjusting for inflation. This is true despite the advent of labor saving devices and low cost materials that are standard in modern construction. On the other hand, it was a lot more difficult to buy a house. Mortgages were usually issued only if a person had 40 or 50 percent equity in the house and the duration of the average mortgage was much shorter than today's standard 30 years. The advent of cheap and easy credit and long-term mortgages has made it possible for a larger pool of potential buyers to bid prices up.
Work requiring manual labor or skills that are not easy or possible to replace by technology usually cost less in the 1920s. One of the challenges in restoring certain vintage buildings is the high price one has to pay for the skilled craftsmen that are necessary in order to do the job right. In the early 1900s such craftsmen were plentiful and they were often low paid European immigrants from families who had handed the craft down from father to son for generations. Today, such craftsmen are very expensive as their numbers are few. In order to hire them, one has to be competitive with the pay scales of all of the other professions they could potentially work in.
Looking at old photographs and listening to vintage records, I have often envied those who were able to experience the pre-World War II decades first hand. But the reality is that the average person today enjoys conveniences and a level of material prosperity that our grandparents, even during the boom years of the 1920s, couldn't have even imagined.
The focus of Radio Dismuke and this blog is to celebrate those aspects of the 1920s and 1930s that I think were vastly better and which, to various degrees, have disappeared from our popular culture. It is easy for enthusiasts of the early 1900s to acquire a highly romanticized view of the period and overlook certain aspects of it that were not so great compared with our own era. Since we have no choice but to live in the age into which we are born, I think it is important to recognize the aspects of modern life which are worthy of appreciation and admiration so that we can consciously enjoy them rather than taking them for granted.
I am occasionally asked, if such a choice were possible, whether I would prefer to live back then or to stay in the present. My answer is neither. I am greedy: I want a future that combines the best of both eras. In order to get there, however, it is necessary for our culture to rediscover the many wonderful things from previous eras which have been largely forgotten or lost. One of the purposes of Radio Dismuke is to help contribute to that necessary process of rediscovery.
My cheapo $9 Target teapot is stainless steel whereas the 1923 Monkey Ward cheapo teapot is only made out of aluminum. I did see some other tea kettles in Target approaching $20 but the primary difference between them and the one I bought was the higher priced ones tended to be more attractively designed. All of them, however, had a 2 quart capacity whereas smallest Montgomery Ward kettle listed was 5 quarts and they even offered one that was 8 quart.
I don't think I have ever seen a 5 quart, let alone an 8 quart, tea kettle for sale. I guess back then housewives needed two gallon kettles in order to heat up enough water for their manual Cyclone Vacuum Washers.
Unfortunately, the size difference makes a price comparison between modern kettles difficult. Today, however, the only the cheapest low end tea kettles are all aluminum.
At last, we finally find a product that appears to be a bargain even when compared with today's prices. The $1.69 for a 5 foot ladder works out to $20.49 in today's money. The $1.98 for a 6 foot ladder works out to $24. That strikes me as being a pretty low price for a step ladder. Home Depot's website offers a 6 foot fiberglass step ladder for $39.
Not everything was more expensive back then. The price of a house, for example, was significantly less than what it is today even after adjusting for inflation. This is true despite the advent of labor saving devices and low cost materials that are standard in modern construction. On the other hand, it was a lot more difficult to buy a house. Mortgages were usually issued only if a person had 40 or 50 percent equity in the house and the duration of the average mortgage was much shorter than today's standard 30 years. The advent of cheap and easy credit and long-term mortgages has made it possible for a larger pool of potential buyers to bid prices up.
Work requiring manual labor or skills that are not easy or possible to replace by technology usually cost less in the 1920s. One of the challenges in restoring certain vintage buildings is the high price one has to pay for the skilled craftsmen that are necessary in order to do the job right. In the early 1900s such craftsmen were plentiful and they were often low paid European immigrants from families who had handed the craft down from father to son for generations. Today, such craftsmen are very expensive as their numbers are few. In order to hire them, one has to be competitive with the pay scales of all of the other professions they could potentially work in.
Looking at old photographs and listening to vintage records, I have often envied those who were able to experience the pre-World War II decades first hand. But the reality is that the average person today enjoys conveniences and a level of material prosperity that our grandparents, even during the boom years of the 1920s, couldn't have even imagined.
The focus of Radio Dismuke and this blog is to celebrate those aspects of the 1920s and 1930s that I think were vastly better and which, to various degrees, have disappeared from our popular culture. It is easy for enthusiasts of the early 1900s to acquire a highly romanticized view of the period and overlook certain aspects of it that were not so great compared with our own era. Since we have no choice but to live in the age into which we are born, I think it is important to recognize the aspects of modern life which are worthy of appreciation and admiration so that we can consciously enjoy them rather than taking them for granted.
I am occasionally asked, if such a choice were possible, whether I would prefer to live back then or to stay in the present. My answer is neither. I am greedy: I want a future that combines the best of both eras. In order to get there, however, it is necessary for our culture to rediscover the many wonderful things from previous eras which have been largely forgotten or lost. One of the purposes of Radio Dismuke is to help contribute to that necessary process of rediscovery.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Three Ian House Websites
One of the the regular features of this blog will be reviews of various websites that I think might be of interest to Radio Dismuke listeners and other early 1900s enthusiasts. As the reviews appear, I will add the sites to the new "Reviewed Websites" links section on the right hand column of the blog.
Those who are regulars at my Message Board will already be familiar with Ian House. He is by far the most prolific participant and the board would not be the same without his wit and his passion for the early 1900s decades.
I have corresponded with Ian for about 6 years and, in 2006, I finally got to meet him when he visited Texas during a cross country move. Last summer I met up with Ian and regular Radio Dismuke contributor Eddie The Collector in Tulsa, Oklahoma for a few days to see a 50 year old Plymouth unearthed from a time capsule and to visit the many impressive vintage buildings in that city that still survive as reminder of its incredible wealth during the 1920s oil boom.
In addition to being an interesting fellow, Ian is a talented web designer and is responsible for three web sites that I think will be of definite interest to early 1900s enthusiasts.
Those who are regulars at my Message Board will already be familiar with Ian House. He is by far the most prolific participant and the board would not be the same without his wit and his passion for the early 1900s decades.
I have corresponded with Ian for about 6 years and, in 2006, I finally got to meet him when he visited Texas during a cross country move. Last summer I met up with Ian and regular Radio Dismuke contributor Eddie The Collector in Tulsa, Oklahoma for a few days to see a 50 year old Plymouth unearthed from a time capsule and to visit the many impressive vintage buildings in that city that still survive as reminder of its incredible wealth during the 1920s oil boom.
In addition to being an interesting fellow, Ian is a talented web designer and is responsible for three web sites that I think will be of definite interest to early 1900s enthusiasts.
The American Package Museum
www.PackageMusum.com
According to the website's mission statement, the purpose of the Package Museum is to "preserve and display specimens of American package design from the early decades of the 20th Century."
The "museum" in the website's name is highly appropriate, I think, as one of the things the site does is provide a glimpse at some of the possibilities that could be open to real life brick and mortar museums in an online age.
When you access the website and get past the opening page, click on "Index" for a list of items in the museum's collection. Follow the links and you will see a photo of each item. So far so good - if you are a fan of the early 1900s, you will probably enjoy looking at the artwork on the packaging of various products that were commonplace at the time.
On some of the items in the collection, however, you will see a link to a 3-D view. (If you are on a dial-up connection, you will find 3-D views frustratingly slow and would probably be better off viewing the standard photos and bookmarking the page for viewing when you eventually upgrade your connection.) If you are on a high speed connection, the 3-D items are very interesting. With your mouse, you can "pick up" the items, spin them around and view them from any angle.
I think a great many museums with vastly greater resources than Ian has at his disposal would do well to take notes.
One of the limitations museums and archives face is a lack of space to be able to put all of the items in their collections on permanent display. As a result, a great deal of our cultural and artistic heritage that is held by museums and a vast amount of information that is stored in archives ends up being effectively warehoused and out of sight to all but museum employees and a handful of researchers who have the time to dig through them and the credentials to be allowed access.
Another limitation faced by any museum is the fact that its geographical location necessarily limits access. A fascinating exhibit by a museum on the other side of he continent or halfway around the world is of little use to those who lack the time and money to travel to it.
Online exhibits can go far in addressing both limitations.
Clearly some of the items currently warehoused by museums are easier to place online than others. For example, photographs and paper documents are very easy to digitize for online viewing. And there are some institutions that have put forth great efforts in that area. Yet, oddly enough, there are still a lot of museums, libraries and archives with important collections of historical photographs and paper documents that have shown little, if any, initiative towards making them available online. I have yet to understand why as, in the grand scheme of things, putting content online is relatively affordable. Operating a scanner is not a difficult skill to teach and is work well suited for volunteers and low-paid interns. Most museums already have at least some sort of web presence and, therefore, presumably a webmaster.
Not only would online exhibits help widen the reach and promote the mission of such institutions, I suspect that they could generate revenue via ad sales and, in the case of photos, from sales of quality prints of the low resolution images that are sufficient for online display.
How many times have you seen news stories about important discoveries turning up among items that have been warehoused away and forgotten about for decades in a museum or archive? Placing such content online - and in the case of written documents, making the contents searchable - could result in who knows what sort of new discoveries by virtue of the larger number of eyes and minds looking at it and integrating the information with other knowledge, perhaps acquired online from similar institutions with digitized collections.
Of course, there are a lot of other things on display in museums that are more problematic in terms of making them available online. For example, artworks such as statues, archaeological specimins, fossils and rocks, etc. are all three dimensional and best appreciated in person. And it is in this area that Ian's Package Museum illustrates how such items can, in fact, be displayed online.
Seeing things online is certainly not the same as viewing them in person. But it sure beats not seeing them at all. And in the case of some items, a three dimensional online exhibit actually has certain advantages. For example, a real museum holding an exhibit of vintage product packaging would never allow visitors to handle such items and inspect the various angles not easily visible in their display case. Vintage packages are way too fragile and would end up destroyed. It is far easier to view the artwork and text on all six sides of the Gillette razor blades box in Ian's virtual museum than it is likely to be when looking at the real thing in a brick and mortar museum.
Imagine if Ian's "museum" had the resources to significantly expand its collection and the staff to put it online. There are plenty of real museums out there that have wonderful and extensive collections in various areas and vast resources at their disposal. A Google search for "3-D museum" turns up a handful of other attempts in this direction, most notably this one by the UC Davis Geology Department. But it is pretty clear that the larger and better known museums have not jumped on the bandwagon - which I find a bit surprising given that the software to produce such content has been available for several years now and web storage costs and bandwidth prices these days have become very inexpensive.
Most regular Radio Dismuke listeners and fans of 1920s and 1930s popular music fans are already familiar with at least some of Lee Morse's recordings.
As a result of his enthusiasm for her recordings and his subsequent research, Ian has become, without a doubt, the world's foremost living authority and biographer on Lee Morse.
Lee Morse had a vocal style that was highly unusual and unique even during the peak of her popularity. Her deep voice, along with the name "Lee," led her to be sometimes billed on records as "Miss Lee Morse" just so that there would be no confusion. And sometimes, in the middle of a song, she would break out into a yodel - her answer to the scat singing popular with certain other jazz vocalists of the period.
Ian has been researching Morse's life and career for several years now and has even met with some of her surviving relatives.
Morse's career went into a slow decline starting in 1930 when excessive drinking resulted in her being fired and replaced by Ruth Etting as the lead in the Broadway production Simple Simon. It was in that role that Etting introduced the hit song "Ten Cents A Dance" that she is best remembered for.
In the mid-1930s Morse contracted a very severe case of strep throat and was told that her singing career was over. She then moved to Texas for a stay with relatives. Her voice, however, recovered and she was soon performing at various nightspots, hotels and on radio broadcasts here in Fort Worth and in nearby Dallas. For a few years, she and her common law husband Bob Downey called the Fort Worth area home.
When Ian made his visit to Texas in 2006, I accompanied him as he visited Palo Pinto, Texas where Morse's ancestors were prominent pioneer settlers and as he researched the archives at the local library for information about her time in the area.
Ian's website is a tribute to Morse's life and career and features a biographical time line, a photo gallery and a "media room" where you can view three early 1930s musical short film features she appeared in.
Also check out the "Her Songbook" section of the site where you can listen to audio streams of most of her 78 rpm recordings - all from Ian's personal collection. Some of these records from Ian's collection were used in the 2-CD set issued in 2005 by the Jasmine label called Lee Morse: Echoes of a Songbird which can be purchased at Amazon.com
and elsewhere. For the CD reissue, the records were processed through very expensive and top of the line CEDAR audio restoration equipment. If you enjoy the recordings on Ian's site, you will definitely want to get the CD - which he also did the graphics and liner notes for - as the sound quality is significantly better.
Ian also maintains a Lee Morse profile on myspace.com which, like all of his online endeavors, is very attractive and well done. It is definitely worth a "friends request" from early 1900s enthusiasts on myspace.
Ian also has a commercial website which sells reproduction tin signs of nostalgic advertisements, trademarks and products. He has 674 different signs to choose from.
Similar reproduction signs are not too difficult to find at various retail shops in tourist trap towns, at flea markets and online. However, it is rare to find as many choices in one place. Nor does one usually find them for as low a price as Ian is offering them for - $8.99 each with free shipping within the USA if you purchase more 8 or more.
I have a similar reproduction tin sign which I purchased a few years ago for $12 at a large second-hand and close out bookstore chain here in Texas where everything is usually significantly discounted. At the time, I thought the $12 they were asking was cheap. So what Ian is offering them for is definitely a good price. His signs are an attractive and inexpensive option for someone wishing to add a retro feel to a casual room in one's house or business. The fact that such signs do not need to be framed makes them even more of a bargain.
www.PackageMusum.com
According to the website's mission statement, the purpose of the Package Museum is to "preserve and display specimens of American package design from the early decades of the 20th Century."
The "museum" in the website's name is highly appropriate, I think, as one of the things the site does is provide a glimpse at some of the possibilities that could be open to real life brick and mortar museums in an online age.
When you access the website and get past the opening page, click on "Index" for a list of items in the museum's collection. Follow the links and you will see a photo of each item. So far so good - if you are a fan of the early 1900s, you will probably enjoy looking at the artwork on the packaging of various products that were commonplace at the time.
On some of the items in the collection, however, you will see a link to a 3-D view. (If you are on a dial-up connection, you will find 3-D views frustratingly slow and would probably be better off viewing the standard photos and bookmarking the page for viewing when you eventually upgrade your connection.) If you are on a high speed connection, the 3-D items are very interesting. With your mouse, you can "pick up" the items, spin them around and view them from any angle.
I think a great many museums with vastly greater resources than Ian has at his disposal would do well to take notes.
One of the limitations museums and archives face is a lack of space to be able to put all of the items in their collections on permanent display. As a result, a great deal of our cultural and artistic heritage that is held by museums and a vast amount of information that is stored in archives ends up being effectively warehoused and out of sight to all but museum employees and a handful of researchers who have the time to dig through them and the credentials to be allowed access.
Another limitation faced by any museum is the fact that its geographical location necessarily limits access. A fascinating exhibit by a museum on the other side of he continent or halfway around the world is of little use to those who lack the time and money to travel to it.
Online exhibits can go far in addressing both limitations.
Clearly some of the items currently warehoused by museums are easier to place online than others. For example, photographs and paper documents are very easy to digitize for online viewing. And there are some institutions that have put forth great efforts in that area. Yet, oddly enough, there are still a lot of museums, libraries and archives with important collections of historical photographs and paper documents that have shown little, if any, initiative towards making them available online. I have yet to understand why as, in the grand scheme of things, putting content online is relatively affordable. Operating a scanner is not a difficult skill to teach and is work well suited for volunteers and low-paid interns. Most museums already have at least some sort of web presence and, therefore, presumably a webmaster.
Not only would online exhibits help widen the reach and promote the mission of such institutions, I suspect that they could generate revenue via ad sales and, in the case of photos, from sales of quality prints of the low resolution images that are sufficient for online display.
How many times have you seen news stories about important discoveries turning up among items that have been warehoused away and forgotten about for decades in a museum or archive? Placing such content online - and in the case of written documents, making the contents searchable - could result in who knows what sort of new discoveries by virtue of the larger number of eyes and minds looking at it and integrating the information with other knowledge, perhaps acquired online from similar institutions with digitized collections.
Of course, there are a lot of other things on display in museums that are more problematic in terms of making them available online. For example, artworks such as statues, archaeological specimins, fossils and rocks, etc. are all three dimensional and best appreciated in person. And it is in this area that Ian's Package Museum illustrates how such items can, in fact, be displayed online.
Seeing things online is certainly not the same as viewing them in person. But it sure beats not seeing them at all. And in the case of some items, a three dimensional online exhibit actually has certain advantages. For example, a real museum holding an exhibit of vintage product packaging would never allow visitors to handle such items and inspect the various angles not easily visible in their display case. Vintage packages are way too fragile and would end up destroyed. It is far easier to view the artwork and text on all six sides of the Gillette razor blades box in Ian's virtual museum than it is likely to be when looking at the real thing in a brick and mortar museum.
Imagine if Ian's "museum" had the resources to significantly expand its collection and the staff to put it online. There are plenty of real museums out there that have wonderful and extensive collections in various areas and vast resources at their disposal. A Google search for "3-D museum" turns up a handful of other attempts in this direction, most notably this one by the UC Davis Geology Department. But it is pretty clear that the larger and better known museums have not jumped on the bandwagon - which I find a bit surprising given that the software to produce such content has been available for several years now and web storage costs and bandwidth prices these days have become very inexpensive.
Lee Morse - Echoes of a Songbird
www.LeeMorse.com
www.LeeMorse.com
Most regular Radio Dismuke listeners and fans of 1920s and 1930s popular music fans are already familiar with at least some of Lee Morse's recordings.As a result of his enthusiasm for her recordings and his subsequent research, Ian has become, without a doubt, the world's foremost living authority and biographer on Lee Morse.
Lee Morse had a vocal style that was highly unusual and unique even during the peak of her popularity. Her deep voice, along with the name "Lee," led her to be sometimes billed on records as "Miss Lee Morse" just so that there would be no confusion. And sometimes, in the middle of a song, she would break out into a yodel - her answer to the scat singing popular with certain other jazz vocalists of the period.
Ian has been researching Morse's life and career for several years now and has even met with some of her surviving relatives.
Morse's career went into a slow decline starting in 1930 when excessive drinking resulted in her being fired and replaced by Ruth Etting as the lead in the Broadway production Simple Simon. It was in that role that Etting introduced the hit song "Ten Cents A Dance" that she is best remembered for.
In the mid-1930s Morse contracted a very severe case of strep throat and was told that her singing career was over. She then moved to Texas for a stay with relatives. Her voice, however, recovered and she was soon performing at various nightspots, hotels and on radio broadcasts here in Fort Worth and in nearby Dallas. For a few years, she and her common law husband Bob Downey called the Fort Worth area home.
When Ian made his visit to Texas in 2006, I accompanied him as he visited Palo Pinto, Texas where Morse's ancestors were prominent pioneer settlers and as he researched the archives at the local library for information about her time in the area.
Ian's website is a tribute to Morse's life and career and features a biographical time line, a photo gallery and a "media room" where you can view three early 1930s musical short film features she appeared in.
Also check out the "Her Songbook" section of the site where you can listen to audio streams of most of her 78 rpm recordings - all from Ian's personal collection. Some of these records from Ian's collection were used in the 2-CD set issued in 2005 by the Jasmine label called Lee Morse: Echoes of a Songbird which can be purchased at Amazon.com
and elsewhere. For the CD reissue, the records were processed through very expensive and top of the line CEDAR audio restoration equipment. If you enjoy the recordings on Ian's site, you will definitely want to get the CD - which he also did the graphics and liner notes for - as the sound quality is significantly better.Ian also maintains a Lee Morse profile on myspace.com which, like all of his online endeavors, is very attractive and well done. It is definitely worth a "friends request" from early 1900s enthusiasts on myspace.
Ian also has a commercial website which sells reproduction tin signs of nostalgic advertisements, trademarks and products. He has 674 different signs to choose from.
Similar reproduction signs are not too difficult to find at various retail shops in tourist trap towns, at flea markets and online. However, it is rare to find as many choices in one place. Nor does one usually find them for as low a price as Ian is offering them for - $8.99 each with free shipping within the USA if you purchase more 8 or more.
I have a similar reproduction tin sign which I purchased a few years ago for $12 at a large second-hand and close out bookstore chain here in Texas where everything is usually significantly discounted. At the time, I thought the $12 they were asking was cheap. So what Ian is offering them for is definitely a good price. His signs are an attractive and inexpensive option for someone wishing to add a retro feel to a casual room in one's house or business. The fact that such signs do not need to be framed makes them even more of a bargain.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
1933 Philco Winamp Skin
Ever wish you could listen to Radio Dismuke and other vintage programs such as old time radio comedies, dramas and adventure programs through one of those really cool vintage radios? Via this thread on The Fedora Lounge I learned of a Winamp skin based on a 1933 Philco cathedral radio that allows one to at least pretend one is doing so in a virtual sort of way.Winamp is the mp3 player program that I usually use when listening to Internet radio streams (though I use other programs for managing and organizing mp3 files, burning to CD, etc. ) so I decided to give it a try.
I have installed other Winamp skins before and have always ended up going back the default skin the program comes with. The default skin may not be very attractive, but at least I can easily find all of the various features that I need - and Winamp does have quite a number of nice features.
Happily, I was able easily locate most of the commonly used features on the Philco skin - and after a few minutes, I figured out that by right clicking on the mouse I was able to access those functions that are not visible on the skin.
My only major complaint is that, while there is an area provided for the the track and title information to scroll across, it is too small for the text to be legible. This is not a huge problem for me because, even on the default skin where the text is easily visible, I find the fact that it scrolls to be a bit of a pain as one has to wait a few seconds for all of the information to scroll by. Instead, when I am using the default skin, I always open the Playlist Editor window which provides the track information in an instantly readable list. The Philco skin also has a Playlist Editor window which is easy to read and appears as a separate wooden cabinet. The skin's equalizer feature also appears as a separate wooden cabinet - and its attractiveness rivals that of the main radio portion.
I have never been able to install Winamp skins according to the directions provided on the Winamp website. Supposedly when you download and run the skin, Winamp is supposed to automatically start with the new skin installed. That does not work for me. What I do instead is simply download the skin directly to the "Skins" folder inside the Winamp program folder on my hard drive which is located at: C:\Program Files\Winamp. Then all one has to do is open up Winamp, right click on the player and select "Skins" from the menu. The name of the downloaded skin should appear and, as soon as one selects it, the skin is installed. To change back, simply right click, select "Skins" and select one of the two default skins "classic" or "modern."
Whoever put the Philco skin together did a great job in making it very attractive. But I can't say that having an attractive Winamp skin is all that much of a big deal for me personally as I usually keep the player minimized when I am listening. My primary concern is that I can easily view track information when I hear a song I especially like and that I have no problems getting the player's various functions to to work. But judging by the number Winamp skins available, a lot of people enjoy them and this is certainly a appropriately themed one for those who listen to vintage music and old time radio through their computers.
There is another vintage radio skin mentioned in the Fedora Lounge thread based on the 1936 Zenith Stratosphere that not strike me as being quite as attractive and which I did not try out. And if you are not into retro radios or find them to be a bit out of place on a computer screen, there are certainly plenty of other Winamp skins for you to choose from based on a wide variety of themes and styles.
Personal AM Radio Transmitters And A Word Of Caution
I am, by the way, a huge fan of vintage radios and have multiple sets in every room of my house and several more in storage that I do not have room to display. Some still work while others do not. Whether they work or not does not make a whole lot of difference for me as the only thing they will pick up when they do work is modern radio stations - and there is no music on those that I am even remotely interested in. I have the radios around mostly because I love how they look.
There are personal AM radio transmitters available that will transmit programing from a computer or any other audio source to AM radios throughout one's house without violating any FCC frequency interference laws. Because some of my vintage radios do work, I thought it would be fun to get one and use it to transmit vintage music from my computer. And that would certainly be a far more authentic experience than a retro themed Winamp skin.
The least expensive transmitters are available in kit form. I purchased such a kit but, despite being careful, my attempt to assemble it was unsuccessful. After that, I sprang for a pre-assembled model. Unfortunately, what the advertisement for it failed to mention was that it is necessary to have an antenna in order for the thing to achieve even a minimal amount of range. The little makeshift antenna that I threw together with old wire was barely able to transmit halfway across the room. I have subsequently found instructions on how to build a decent antenna. But that would put me back in the position of having a do-it-yourself electronics project - which is not the sort of thing I enjoy and is more likely to result in frustration instead of success. All I wanted when I purchased the pre-assembled model was something that I could take out of the box, plug in and have it work.
There are additional transmitters on the market and I have read about vintage radio collectors having success in using them. My suggestion, however, for those who are not into electronics projects is to ask about included antennas and their range before you fork over any money.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Ernst Lubitsch Film Collecton On DVD
My friend and regular Radio Dismuke contributor Matt From College Station informs me that the Criterion Collection has just reissued a 4 DVD box set of early 1930s Ernst Lubitsch movie musicals. Included in the set are The Love Parade (1929), The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), One Hour With You (1932) and Monte Carlo (1930).
Based on the handful I have seen so far, I highly recommend Lubitsch films. Two that are not part of this collection Ninotchka (1939) and the silent The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (1927) rank among the best films I have seen.
Until this box set, as with so many vintage films from the period, the only way that most people wishing to see the films could do so was through bootleg copies that are sometimes made available in various Internet venues by collectors and film enthusiasts - and quite often such bootlegs are blurry after several generations of VHS copying and recopying. This is not only an opportunity for these films to find a wider audience, it will enable fans to obtain high quality, restored copies.
Of the four films in the box set, I have have seen and can comment on One Hour With You and The Smiling Lieutenant. I highly recommend both - even to modern audiences who are not necessarily into the 1930s scene. As part of the recommendation, I should point out that I am often very hesitant to recommend movie musicals from this period to those who are not already hard-core fans of the era. Beyond the primitive production qualities of the early talkie musicals, very often the plots - or what barely passes for a plot - are trite and tedious. Even I have been known to grow impatient and fast forward to the song and dance scenes knowing full well that I am not missing out on much. A great many of the musicals and comedies of that era simply do not age well.
This is not the case with either One Hour With You or The Smiling Lieutenant. Both films are refreshingly charming yet sophisticated. And both have a wonderful, light-hearted benevolence that has long since completely disappeared from our popular culture. They are like a window to a very different world that has sadly been lost. And, unlike a lot of movie musicals from the period, they have storylines that are actually engaging and that you do not feel like you have seen a thousand times before. Nor is the music the typical fare found in the Jazz Age Hollywood revues that dominated the genre (not that there is anything wrong with such music - I am a big fan): both feature elegant and lush scores by Viennese operetta composer Oscar Straus.
Both films - especially The Smiling Lieutenant - are also very pre-Code and contain scenes and situations that simply would not have been allowed by the Hollywood censors had they been made a few years later. Films from this period were pretty much locked away after they had their run in theaters and were forgotten about. When television came on the scene in the late 1940s, there was a sudden need by stations for content to fill out their broadcast day - and for this they turned to the dusty old film vaults of the Hollywood studios. Television is what ended up being the salvation of a great many 1930s films which existed on highly unstable celluloid film and would otherwise have simply deteriorated had reprints not been made as a result of their new-found broadcast viability. Unfortunately, on occasion, certain scenes from pre-Code films were considered to be too suggestive or shocking for presentation on 1950s era television - and some scenes from One Hour With You ended up being edited out for that reason. Matt tells me, however, that the cut scenes have been added back in the new Criterion release.
The Smiling Lieutenant, on the other hand, was not rereleased for television audiences as there was simply no way of editing out the fact that Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert's characters were living together and - well, doing the sort of stuff that young unmarried men and women who live together do. Paramount actually wanted to rerelease the film in theaters in 1936 but was unable to get it past the Production Code Administration which insisted on no less than 27 edits. As a result, the film was presumed to be lost for many decades until a copy turned up in a European vault sometime in the 1970s.
Of the two, I think that One Hour With You, which features Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald, is the best one for modern audiences to start with. Despite its vintage and the fact that there is a tendency for comedy not to age well, the film is still very witty and, as I have already mentioned, incredibly charming.
The Smiling Lieutenant, staring Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert, is also a very nice film - but for me it is special because it is movie adaptation of my all-time favorite operetta, Oscar Straus's A Waltz Dream (Ein Walzertraum) which dates back to 1908. The music from the operetta is incredibly beautiful and is featured throughout the film.
The film collection is available at Amazon.com The list price is $69.99 - but if you follow the "other sellers" link, you can get for as little as $44. Not only is that a decent price for four films, unlike releases of modern mass market films, Criterion releases are issued in limited quantities and, once they are sold out, used copies frequently go for full price or more. For that reason, if you are interested, you will probably want to order quickly before it is no longer easily available.
I did find two excerpts of One Hour With You on YouTube. The first clip is from early in the movie and features a very pretty Oscar Straus tune.
The second clip features the film's title song. Unlike the music rest of the music in the movie, this is not an Oscar Straus song but rather a Leo Robin/Richard Whiting composition. I very much enjoy this scene - though to fully appreciate it and the wonderful expressions on the characters' faces it is necessary to be familiar with the storyline. The band visible in the scene, by the way, is Jimmie Grier's orchestra which was, at the time, performing in the famed Cocoanut Grove at the recently destroyed Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Donald Novis performs the initial vocal in the clip and he later recorded the same song with the Grier orchestra on 78 rpm for Victor - a recording which turned up decades later in another great film, Paper Moon.
Based on the handful I have seen so far, I highly recommend Lubitsch films. Two that are not part of this collection Ninotchka (1939) and the silent The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (1927) rank among the best films I have seen.
Until this box set, as with so many vintage films from the period, the only way that most people wishing to see the films could do so was through bootleg copies that are sometimes made available in various Internet venues by collectors and film enthusiasts - and quite often such bootlegs are blurry after several generations of VHS copying and recopying. This is not only an opportunity for these films to find a wider audience, it will enable fans to obtain high quality, restored copies.
Of the four films in the box set, I have have seen and can comment on One Hour With You and The Smiling Lieutenant. I highly recommend both - even to modern audiences who are not necessarily into the 1930s scene. As part of the recommendation, I should point out that I am often very hesitant to recommend movie musicals from this period to those who are not already hard-core fans of the era. Beyond the primitive production qualities of the early talkie musicals, very often the plots - or what barely passes for a plot - are trite and tedious. Even I have been known to grow impatient and fast forward to the song and dance scenes knowing full well that I am not missing out on much. A great many of the musicals and comedies of that era simply do not age well.
This is not the case with either One Hour With You or The Smiling Lieutenant. Both films are refreshingly charming yet sophisticated. And both have a wonderful, light-hearted benevolence that has long since completely disappeared from our popular culture. They are like a window to a very different world that has sadly been lost. And, unlike a lot of movie musicals from the period, they have storylines that are actually engaging and that you do not feel like you have seen a thousand times before. Nor is the music the typical fare found in the Jazz Age Hollywood revues that dominated the genre (not that there is anything wrong with such music - I am a big fan): both feature elegant and lush scores by Viennese operetta composer Oscar Straus.
Both films - especially The Smiling Lieutenant - are also very pre-Code and contain scenes and situations that simply would not have been allowed by the Hollywood censors had they been made a few years later. Films from this period were pretty much locked away after they had their run in theaters and were forgotten about. When television came on the scene in the late 1940s, there was a sudden need by stations for content to fill out their broadcast day - and for this they turned to the dusty old film vaults of the Hollywood studios. Television is what ended up being the salvation of a great many 1930s films which existed on highly unstable celluloid film and would otherwise have simply deteriorated had reprints not been made as a result of their new-found broadcast viability. Unfortunately, on occasion, certain scenes from pre-Code films were considered to be too suggestive or shocking for presentation on 1950s era television - and some scenes from One Hour With You ended up being edited out for that reason. Matt tells me, however, that the cut scenes have been added back in the new Criterion release.
The Smiling Lieutenant, on the other hand, was not rereleased for television audiences as there was simply no way of editing out the fact that Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert's characters were living together and - well, doing the sort of stuff that young unmarried men and women who live together do. Paramount actually wanted to rerelease the film in theaters in 1936 but was unable to get it past the Production Code Administration which insisted on no less than 27 edits. As a result, the film was presumed to be lost for many decades until a copy turned up in a European vault sometime in the 1970s.
Of the two, I think that One Hour With You, which features Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald, is the best one for modern audiences to start with. Despite its vintage and the fact that there is a tendency for comedy not to age well, the film is still very witty and, as I have already mentioned, incredibly charming.
The Smiling Lieutenant, staring Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert, is also a very nice film - but for me it is special because it is movie adaptation of my all-time favorite operetta, Oscar Straus's A Waltz Dream (Ein Walzertraum) which dates back to 1908. The music from the operetta is incredibly beautiful and is featured throughout the film.
The film collection is available at Amazon.com
The list price is $69.99 - but if you follow the "other sellers" link, you can get for as little as $44. Not only is that a decent price for four films, unlike releases of modern mass market films, Criterion releases are issued in limited quantities and, once they are sold out, used copies frequently go for full price or more. For that reason, if you are interested, you will probably want to order quickly before it is no longer easily available.I did find two excerpts of One Hour With You on YouTube. The first clip is from early in the movie and features a very pretty Oscar Straus tune.
The second clip features the film's title song. Unlike the music rest of the music in the movie, this is not an Oscar Straus song but rather a Leo Robin/Richard Whiting composition. I very much enjoy this scene - though to fully appreciate it and the wonderful expressions on the characters' faces it is necessary to be familiar with the storyline. The band visible in the scene, by the way, is Jimmie Grier's orchestra which was, at the time, performing in the famed Cocoanut Grove at the recently destroyed Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Donald Novis performs the initial vocal in the clip and he later recorded the same song with the Grier orchestra on 78 rpm for Victor - a recording which turned up decades later in another great film, Paper Moon.
Friday, February 15, 2008
The Nicholas Brothers
One of the places where the rebirth of interest in 1920s and 1930s popular culture is taking place is YouTube. Recommendations of YouTube clips will certainly be part of future blog postings. The problem is where to start. There are so many great clips available, I could spend hours posting recommendations - and it would be more than anyone would likely have time to watch.
I can't think of a better place to start than the Nicholas Brothers, a tap dancing act in the 1930s and 1940s that I have become a huge fan of. You can read more about them at: http://www.nicholasbrothers.com/index.htm
Here they are in 1936 appearing in a short feature film The Black Network
I can't think of a better place to start than the Nicholas Brothers, a tap dancing act in the 1930s and 1940s that I have become a huge fan of. You can read more about them at: http://www.nicholasbrothers.com/index.htm
"Lucky Number"
Here they are in 1936 appearing in a short feature film The Black Network
"Jumpin' Jive"
Here they are in 1942 from the film Stormy Weather. The clip starts out with a vocal performance by Cab Calloway backed by his band. The Nicholas Brothers appear about 1 minute 35 seconds into the clip - and their performance here is simply amazing.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
I'm Back!
Or, rather, this blog is back. I have decided to revive it with a somewhat broader focus. I will not have a set posting schedule - but the blog will be updated much more frequently than it was when it was previously active.
There were several reasons why I stopped posting here last summer. One was simply a matter of time management. Writing the sort of articles I that I was putting up is time consuming - and between a full time job, the time I already spend digitalizing recordings and keeping the radio station running plus the ordinary chores and tasks that everyone has to deal with, I was already pretty stretched thin to begin with. Yes, one can fight city hall. The problem is doing so requires time.
The sort of postings that I plan to put up here in the future will usually not be as time consuming to write.
Another reason I stopped posting is there has been precious little news to report regarding the Internet radio royalty situation since my last posting. The negotiations that were mentioned in that posting are supposedly still in progress. But since they are held behind closed doors and I am way too small a player to be in on them, I and many other webcasters have been pretty much in the dark about what is going on. This, of course, makes it very difficult for the operator of any Internet radio station to plan for the future or, in the case of stations that are significantly larger than mine, to attract investors. Undoubtedly this is one of the motives the RIAA has for dragging this on for so long.
This posting from the founder of SomaFM is the closest thing I have found to a recent update on the royalty situation. Keep in mind that the negotiations with the RIAA's SoundExchange are not a single set of negotiations with all webcasters but rather a series of separate negotiations with "small" webcasters, "large" webcasters, "non-commercial" webcasters, etc. One of the networks Radio Dismuke is carried on, Live 365, is considered a "large" webcaster based on its revenues despite the fact that it is home to some of the smallest Internet radio stations. The other network my station is carried on is LoudCity which is considered a "small" webcaster. So any "deal" that might come along for one may not be valid for the other.
Finally, a major reason why I stopped posting is simply because I can only focus on evil and irrational people so long before it really starts to get to me. What the Luddites at the RIAA have been trying to do in order to kill off Internet radio and replace it with an online carbon copy of AM/FM radio type programing as part of their desperate attempt to protect their antiquated and obsolete business model from emerging competition makes my blood boil. That, along with the possibility that the Internet radio station I had put so much effort and devotion into building and which has brought new visibility to a mostly forgotten genre of music that I passionately love was going to be forced to shut down, brought things to the point where my frustration over the situation and my hatred towards the RIAA Luddites was starting to dominate my life and my thinking. For the sake of my overall outlook on life and my happiness, it become very important for me to instead focus my thoughts and energies on the thing that I value and the things which are within my ability to change for the better rather than on desperate and scared Luddites whom I despise, have zero influence over and who would be impervious to any argument that I might make no matter how logical, valid and eloquently stated. Let's just say I needed to take a vacation away from the subject for a while. The lack of any significant news or progress about the royalty situation resulted in that vacation being much longer than I anticipated.
The good news is that, during the time since my last posting, I have had the pleasure of watching the RIAA's world continue to crash down around them and at a rate much faster than I had anticipated. Even the heads of some of the RIAA labels and a former RIAA executive have pretty much openly admitted that they realize their old game will soon be up and that their shortsightedness and their fear and hostility towards new technologies is largely to blame. Happily, I think that such realizations on their part are too little too late to save them. The labels are still talking about how they are seeking new business models. That is something they should have done ten years ago. If they haven't figured it out now - well, they are in deep doo doo. Indeed, there is talk that the RIAA itself may not exist for very much longer.
A number of things I predicted in my earlier postings with regard to the eventual downfall of the recording industry have actually started to happen - and I will most likely, at some point, put up a few "I told you so" type postings which will provide the details.
There were several reasons why I stopped posting here last summer. One was simply a matter of time management. Writing the sort of articles I that I was putting up is time consuming - and between a full time job, the time I already spend digitalizing recordings and keeping the radio station running plus the ordinary chores and tasks that everyone has to deal with, I was already pretty stretched thin to begin with. Yes, one can fight city hall. The problem is doing so requires time.
The sort of postings that I plan to put up here in the future will usually not be as time consuming to write.
Another reason I stopped posting is there has been precious little news to report regarding the Internet radio royalty situation since my last posting. The negotiations that were mentioned in that posting are supposedly still in progress. But since they are held behind closed doors and I am way too small a player to be in on them, I and many other webcasters have been pretty much in the dark about what is going on. This, of course, makes it very difficult for the operator of any Internet radio station to plan for the future or, in the case of stations that are significantly larger than mine, to attract investors. Undoubtedly this is one of the motives the RIAA has for dragging this on for so long.
This posting from the founder of SomaFM is the closest thing I have found to a recent update on the royalty situation. Keep in mind that the negotiations with the RIAA's SoundExchange are not a single set of negotiations with all webcasters but rather a series of separate negotiations with "small" webcasters, "large" webcasters, "non-commercial" webcasters, etc. One of the networks Radio Dismuke is carried on, Live 365, is considered a "large" webcaster based on its revenues despite the fact that it is home to some of the smallest Internet radio stations. The other network my station is carried on is LoudCity which is considered a "small" webcaster. So any "deal" that might come along for one may not be valid for the other.
Finally, a major reason why I stopped posting is simply because I can only focus on evil and irrational people so long before it really starts to get to me. What the Luddites at the RIAA have been trying to do in order to kill off Internet radio and replace it with an online carbon copy of AM/FM radio type programing as part of their desperate attempt to protect their antiquated and obsolete business model from emerging competition makes my blood boil. That, along with the possibility that the Internet radio station I had put so much effort and devotion into building and which has brought new visibility to a mostly forgotten genre of music that I passionately love was going to be forced to shut down, brought things to the point where my frustration over the situation and my hatred towards the RIAA Luddites was starting to dominate my life and my thinking. For the sake of my overall outlook on life and my happiness, it become very important for me to instead focus my thoughts and energies on the thing that I value and the things which are within my ability to change for the better rather than on desperate and scared Luddites whom I despise, have zero influence over and who would be impervious to any argument that I might make no matter how logical, valid and eloquently stated. Let's just say I needed to take a vacation away from the subject for a while. The lack of any significant news or progress about the royalty situation resulted in that vacation being much longer than I anticipated.
The good news is that, during the time since my last posting, I have had the pleasure of watching the RIAA's world continue to crash down around them and at a rate much faster than I had anticipated. Even the heads of some of the RIAA labels and a former RIAA executive have pretty much openly admitted that they realize their old game will soon be up and that their shortsightedness and their fear and hostility towards new technologies is largely to blame. Happily, I think that such realizations on their part are too little too late to save them. The labels are still talking about how they are seeking new business models. That is something they should have done ten years ago. If they haven't figured it out now - well, they are in deep doo doo. Indeed, there is talk that the RIAA itself may not exist for very much longer.
A number of things I predicted in my earlier postings with regard to the eventual downfall of the recording industry have actually started to happen - and I will most likely, at some point, put up a few "I told you so" type postings which will provide the details.
This Blog And The Future
I will continue, of course, to post updates about the Internet radio royalty situation as such information becomes available. I will also have commentary about the demise of the old RIAA dominated recording industry and all of the wonderful new technologies and new media venues which are replacing it and providing us with a new world of musical choice and diversity which would have been unimaginable a decade or so ago. I will also provide news about Radio Dismuke in terms of upcoming programing and its progress in exposing the popular music of the 1920s and 1930s to new audiences.
But beyond that, I will post about a wide variety of subjects that interest me and would likely be of interest to many in the Radio Dismuke audience. I will comment about vintage music, vintage films and other aspects of the popular culture of the early 1900s decades. I will provide information and recommendations about new CD reissues and contemporary bands which perform vintage music.
I live in the modern world - what other option do I have? There are some aspects of the modern world - mostly as a result of technological and scientific advances - that I appreciate and value a great deal. But I intensely dislike much of today's popular culture and aesthetics - and to the degree it is possible for me to do so, I simply choose not to participate. Ever since I discovered it as a child, I have been fascinated by the popular culture of the early decades of the 20th century. That is the world that has always inspired me and which I seek to incorporate into my daily life. Thanks to the ability of today's technology to serve niche tastes and to bring together communities of people with highly specialized shared interests, it is increasingly possible to do just that.
Thanks to technology, we have more opportunities than ever of being able to pick and choose between the best that today has to offer and the best that previous decades had to offer. Sure, all of us are impacted by and have little escape from modern trends in areas such as politics and the overall economy. But we certainly no longer live in a world where our entertainment options are largely limited by whatever the elite gatekeepers at the Big Three television networks, the Hollywood movie studios, the RIAA labels and major market FM radio program directors think will appeal to the largest and lowest common denominator. Our access to information about subjects that we are interested in is no longer limited to whatever our local libraries and book stores choose to stock and by the very high cost of publishing and distributing such information in paper formats.
We live in a world where none other than the mighty NBC television network is scratching its head trying to figure out how to stop the loss of its audience not to other networks or cable but to YouTube clips posted by tens of thousands of unknown nobodies. Some of those clips that are draining away NBC's audiences include musical excerpts from previously forgotten films of the 1920s and 1930s. Who would ever have thought that 1920s and 1930s film clips could compete with and jeopardize the audience for prime time network television? On their own they don't - the audience for such film clips is minuscule compared with that of even a single small town NBC affiliate. But when one combines that niche along with all other countless niches that YouTube is able to appeal to - well, NBC along with the rest of the mass media finds itself bleeding to death as a result of thousands of tiny pin pricks.
The mass media culture we grew up with is rapidly dying and will be replaced by a vast mosaic of countless niche subcultures that each of us will get to pick and choose from in terms of the art, music and ideas we choose to partake in and in terms of the people we choose to associate with. Niches, of course, have always existed. But in a mass media dominated culture the number and viability of such niches is severely limited because of the difficulty and expense involved in making people aware that they even exist. In a mass media dominated culture, everything tends to get pushed towards the widest - which frequently means the lowest - common denominator.
In the niche dominated world of the future, I strongly believe things will tend to get pushed in the opposite direction. High quality content that was previously not available because its appeal was too narrow will suddenly become viable. And people no longer will have to "settle" for content simply because it was the merely best that was available among the limited options they had to choose from. People will instead seek out something better - however it is they define "better."
The greater availability and access to high quality content will, in and of itself, expose more people to it and, in the process, raise their standards and expectations.
A mass media culture, in its appeal to the widest common denominator, leads to the formation of institutionalized consensus and orthodoxies making it difficult for controversial and innovative "outsiders" to get a hearing. In a niche dominated world, it is much easier for such innovators to find themselves a core audience to support their initial efforts and which they can build on. Sure, it is also possible for pretentious fools to put their hat into the ring as well - anyone these days regardless as to whether or not they have any talent can inexpensively produce their own CD and promote it on myspace or cdbaby.com or start a blog. But such efforts will never spread beyond the handful of people who somehow stumble across it. On the other hand, works by those who do have talent and do have something to say that is worthwhile will spread by word of mouth to an increasingly wider audience - and on the Internet, word of mouth can travel very rapidly.
Today's technology makes this trend towards quality possible in ways far beyond the stuff we read and listen to online. I was well into my adulthood before I personally knew anyone who shared my interest in '20s and '30s music and old 78 rpm records. This was before the Internet came along. Today, I know several such people here in Texas that I regularly communicate and/or visit with and I have corresponded with countless more in other parts of the world. I would not likely have known any of these people had it not been for the Internet.
I am fascinated with how very new technology is helping to bring back and reanimate interest in "old fashioned" music from an era that was almost forgotten about. After spending years of not knowing anyone who shared my passion for the early 1900s, it has been absolutely amazing for me to watch a growing subculture of people with similar interests spring up out of nowhere on myspace and in other Internet venues. These are certainly among the things that I will be writing about here.
I am a person who lives in the early 21st century but whose heart is, in many ways, in an early 20th century world that ended long before I was born - and I constantly strive to seek out and enjoy the very best aspects of both. That is the perspective from which this blog will be written and which will be its new focus.
I will continue, of course, to post updates about the Internet radio royalty situation as such information becomes available. I will also have commentary about the demise of the old RIAA dominated recording industry and all of the wonderful new technologies and new media venues which are replacing it and providing us with a new world of musical choice and diversity which would have been unimaginable a decade or so ago. I will also provide news about Radio Dismuke in terms of upcoming programing and its progress in exposing the popular music of the 1920s and 1930s to new audiences.
But beyond that, I will post about a wide variety of subjects that interest me and would likely be of interest to many in the Radio Dismuke audience. I will comment about vintage music, vintage films and other aspects of the popular culture of the early 1900s decades. I will provide information and recommendations about new CD reissues and contemporary bands which perform vintage music.
A Blog About The Old And The New
I live in the modern world - what other option do I have? There are some aspects of the modern world - mostly as a result of technological and scientific advances - that I appreciate and value a great deal. But I intensely dislike much of today's popular culture and aesthetics - and to the degree it is possible for me to do so, I simply choose not to participate. Ever since I discovered it as a child, I have been fascinated by the popular culture of the early decades of the 20th century. That is the world that has always inspired me and which I seek to incorporate into my daily life. Thanks to the ability of today's technology to serve niche tastes and to bring together communities of people with highly specialized shared interests, it is increasingly possible to do just that.
Thanks to technology, we have more opportunities than ever of being able to pick and choose between the best that today has to offer and the best that previous decades had to offer. Sure, all of us are impacted by and have little escape from modern trends in areas such as politics and the overall economy. But we certainly no longer live in a world where our entertainment options are largely limited by whatever the elite gatekeepers at the Big Three television networks, the Hollywood movie studios, the RIAA labels and major market FM radio program directors think will appeal to the largest and lowest common denominator. Our access to information about subjects that we are interested in is no longer limited to whatever our local libraries and book stores choose to stock and by the very high cost of publishing and distributing such information in paper formats.
We live in a world where none other than the mighty NBC television network is scratching its head trying to figure out how to stop the loss of its audience not to other networks or cable but to YouTube clips posted by tens of thousands of unknown nobodies. Some of those clips that are draining away NBC's audiences include musical excerpts from previously forgotten films of the 1920s and 1930s. Who would ever have thought that 1920s and 1930s film clips could compete with and jeopardize the audience for prime time network television? On their own they don't - the audience for such film clips is minuscule compared with that of even a single small town NBC affiliate. But when one combines that niche along with all other countless niches that YouTube is able to appeal to - well, NBC along with the rest of the mass media finds itself bleeding to death as a result of thousands of tiny pin pricks.
The mass media culture we grew up with is rapidly dying and will be replaced by a vast mosaic of countless niche subcultures that each of us will get to pick and choose from in terms of the art, music and ideas we choose to partake in and in terms of the people we choose to associate with. Niches, of course, have always existed. But in a mass media dominated culture the number and viability of such niches is severely limited because of the difficulty and expense involved in making people aware that they even exist. In a mass media dominated culture, everything tends to get pushed towards the widest - which frequently means the lowest - common denominator.
In the niche dominated world of the future, I strongly believe things will tend to get pushed in the opposite direction. High quality content that was previously not available because its appeal was too narrow will suddenly become viable. And people no longer will have to "settle" for content simply because it was the merely best that was available among the limited options they had to choose from. People will instead seek out something better - however it is they define "better."
The greater availability and access to high quality content will, in and of itself, expose more people to it and, in the process, raise their standards and expectations.
A mass media culture, in its appeal to the widest common denominator, leads to the formation of institutionalized consensus and orthodoxies making it difficult for controversial and innovative "outsiders" to get a hearing. In a niche dominated world, it is much easier for such innovators to find themselves a core audience to support their initial efforts and which they can build on. Sure, it is also possible for pretentious fools to put their hat into the ring as well - anyone these days regardless as to whether or not they have any talent can inexpensively produce their own CD and promote it on myspace or cdbaby.com or start a blog. But such efforts will never spread beyond the handful of people who somehow stumble across it. On the other hand, works by those who do have talent and do have something to say that is worthwhile will spread by word of mouth to an increasingly wider audience - and on the Internet, word of mouth can travel very rapidly.
Today's technology makes this trend towards quality possible in ways far beyond the stuff we read and listen to online. I was well into my adulthood before I personally knew anyone who shared my interest in '20s and '30s music and old 78 rpm records. This was before the Internet came along. Today, I know several such people here in Texas that I regularly communicate and/or visit with and I have corresponded with countless more in other parts of the world. I would not likely have known any of these people had it not been for the Internet.
I am fascinated with how very new technology is helping to bring back and reanimate interest in "old fashioned" music from an era that was almost forgotten about. After spending years of not knowing anyone who shared my passion for the early 1900s, it has been absolutely amazing for me to watch a growing subculture of people with similar interests spring up out of nowhere on myspace and in other Internet venues. These are certainly among the things that I will be writing about here.
I am a person who lives in the early 21st century but whose heart is, in many ways, in an early 20th century world that ended long before I was born - and I constantly strive to seek out and enjoy the very best aspects of both. That is the perspective from which this blog will be written and which will be its new focus.
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