Just Revealed! Our New Model

Okay, sure, in the brains of horny consumers you MIGHT find a link between CARS and sex. But MODEMS?

I have previously mentioned the trashy nature of early British computer magazines. This advertisement is from a publication which positioned itself as more respectable than the rest ("Your Spectrum," January 1984), but I guess you can't pick your advertisers. And maybe there IS something sexy about modems that I've never noticed before...it's an acoustic coupler, after all.

Welcome Back!

Things have changed here!

For regular readers of the blog, the first thing you'll notice is that I'm posting under my real name; after years of humming and hawing I have decided to put Muffy St. Bernard to rest, at least temporarily. There are a lot of reasons for this (and I've discussed many of them before) but the upshot is that I can redirect my energies: instead of spending time, energy, and money (not to mention razors) on doing drag, I can focus more on making music instead.

Hence the new title of the blog: "Lemurian Congress." Ten years of "UPhold" were enough, and the name change signifies a somewhat more polished direction. I've been collaborating with other musicians recently and we're doing some great stuff...stay tuned for samples.

Third: less New Yorker articles. For whatever reason I don't find myself reading the back issues at the moment. Hopefully my own original writing will be a suitable replacement.

I hope you'll stick around and that you'll find the blog as interesting and diverse as it always was. So welcome back!

Cleon Throckmorton, Scenic Designer and Reverse Psychologist

While reading the May 31, 1930 issue of The New Yorker I ran across this advertisement, tucked into the corner of page 46. It was so small that I had to zoom in to read it.


What kind of guy relies on such a self-defeating advertisement, which doesn't even mention what he's advertising FOR?

An eccentric fellow with a high degree of name recognition, that's who. In this case it's Cleon Throckmorton, architect, set designer, and bohemian painter of spunky dancing girls. If you really want an eyeful, check out Erica De Mane's photographs of some of his works at Ristorante Volare.

Meanwhile, over at Shorpy you can also find this amazing 1921 photograph of "Throck" at work (go there for a larger version), along with additional information from amateur sleuths in the comments. Apparently that's his wife puffing on a stogie while modeling.

Monday Morning Cartoon

"God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton

The New Yorker panned this book, but it sounded so interesting that I couldn't resist finding a copy: "God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton, published in 1929. As you can see by the tag list for this post, it contains elements of pretty much everything I talk about in this blog.

Barton was a popular '20s cartoonist and caricaturist, and he seemed to be trying to establish himself as a writer before his manic-depression prompted his suicide in 1931. I'm not surprised that he killed himself two years after writing this book. "God's Country" is a bitter thing indeed.

It's a satirical, absurd history of the United States, beginning with Christopher Columbus and ending with a bizarre dystopia in which women have taken over the government, radio advertisers have inadvertently caused widespread looting and domestic terror, and poison gas has destroyed everybody except for eight criminals who -- following the intentions of the pilgrims from the beginning of the book -- set out to wreck everything all over again.

Oooo, it's nasty. Barton has equal loathing for Democrats and Republicans (known in the book as "Uniboodlists" and "Multiboodlists" for reasons I didn't understand), Presidents ("Misters"), businessmen ("Interests"), newspapers (who dictate "Public Opinion"), and the everyday citizens who allow the aforementioned to get away with everything they do, over and over again, throughout the entire history of democracy.

Is there anybody Barton doesn't hate? He appears to have sympathy for Native Americans, he finds few unpleasant things to say about Abraham Lincoln, and he goes out of his way to avoid lampooning African Americans, but for the most part "God's Country" is a relentless, snarky skewering of EVERYBODY. And that means you too, reader. And me.

You can imagine how tedious such a book can be. It's especially tedious to somebody (like me) who doesn't know the finer points of every President -- errr, Mister -- in American history. Barton goes through them all, giving them the names of monarchs ("St. Abraham," "Franklin the Debonaire") to highlight one going theme throughout the book: the American obsession with electing "jus' plain folk" who are -- in actual fact -- part of the social elite who have been carefully groomed to appear otherwise.

This obsession is one element of the book that still holds true today (see Palin, Sarah). Another element is the reliance on FEAR to manipulate public opinion, as formented by business requirements and amplified by the newspapers. We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the disgusting collusion of politics, business, and media is a relatively new phenomenon. "God's Country" will tell you different.

After 250 pages of spot-on satire, Barton comes to women's suffrage and temperance activism. I can only assume that he really, really didn't like women, as the book tips from "cutting satire" to "cruel stereotype" in the space of a few pages, detailing a world where women with "blacksnake whips" run around emasculating everybody and turning them into "ex-males." They conceive arbitrary rules and devise irrational schemes to enforce them, finally bringing about the downfall of the already-tottering country. It's ludicrous and leaves a bad impression, and is probably one of the reasons The New Yorker reviewer panned it.

But there are great moments, especially near the end when everything goes completely off the rails. The businessmen are discovered to have retreated into a secret society with its own language ("Six huh pcent a fi million dollas is thutty million dollas. Fiscal.") and in a mysterious desert pilgrimage they invent golf. This presentation of Big Business as a totally self-interested, self-contained, and illogical cabal is ominous in light of the subsequent financial collapse.

When the new breed of radio announcers start to amuse themselves by shouting demands like "Desire to see a prize fight!" and "Long to see a movie about Arabs!", the book provides an amazing insight into '20s popular culture. It's like reading a Readers Digest Condensed Version of The New Yorker between 1925 and 1929:

[They were] soon being ordered to deodorize, to smear mud on their faces, to hate New York, to play Mah Jong, to do cross-word puzzles, to ask each other questions, to bathe in violet rays, to develop personalities, to practice numerology, to adore the Russians, the negroes and aviators, to eat Eskimo Pie, to throw bits of paper out the window, to have themselves psychoanalyzed, to engage in Marathon contests, to eat liver and to perform a thousand other like obediences.

When "God's Country" is good, it's very, very good, but most of it is the 1920s brand of screwball, sledgehammer burlesque that leaves me exhausted, alternating with some surprisingly dry historical dissection.

More importantly, however, it is a clear expression of the immense disgust that an intelligent, educated, creative, and mentally-tortured man had for all the things he saw in the world around him. If he'd had a more balanced view of human nature then "God's Country" would be an easier book to read, but it never would have been written in the first place.

The Emancipated '80s

Some days, to pass the time, I read back issues of '80s computer magazines. It's a nerdy pursuit but sometimes I run across something interesting.

The North American computer scene was pretty stoic. Lots of horny kids owned computers, but the magazines themselves tried to maintain a certain respectability, writing in a fact-based journalistic style in an attempt inform and edify. "Creative Computing" was downright dry and businesslike in its approach, whereas even the less formal magazines kept their childish shenanigans to a minimum.

Then there was Crash.

Published in England and devoted to the ZX Spectrum, Crash Magazine was a swill of pre-adolescent humour, faux hipness, and over-the-top gore. Add Oliver Frey's strangely homoerotic cover art and you have an untinted window into the minds of repressed British childhood during the middle '80s. It's boring and annoying and repetative, yes, but it's a type of sensationalistic weirdness that I've never been exposed to before.

"Tip pages" were very popular in these magazines. Readers would write in with advice for beating the games, or programming cheats, or maps of the sprawling levels which typified Spectrum games. Crash's tip page was nothing special until -- in 1986 -- the previous tip page compiler stepped aside and he was replaced with...A GIRL!

Hannah Smith's hiring was presented initially as some form of female emancipation: women could be smart and clever and competitive just like men! But some of the spotty readers wrote in to say typical '80s things like "Women should go back to where they belong and stop taking men's jobs," as though being the self-styled "girlie tipster" for Crash Magazine was a high-paying position of executive power.

What's most bizarre, however -- and what, in retrospect, was very typical of the '80s reaction to female empowerment -- was how other readers (and the editors) would simultaneously defend and DEGRADE women. All the male readers said things like "Get out of your chauvinist caves, you idiots! This is the '80s! Hannah Smith is great and she's GORGEOUS! Please give her my PHONE NUMBER!" The female readers said "Just because we're weak and frilly doesn't mean we can't do a man's job!" And the editors...

...well, the editors printed covers like this:


...and they wrote articles about how sweaty she got during aerobics, and they tried to set up a jello-wrestling contest with another female writer...

...all while defending her right to be a member of the team.

I'm not saying that England was particularly sexist at the time -- they had Benny Hill, sure, but they also had Margaret Thatcher. Reading these magazines, I'm remembering that this was how female emancipation was treated by the average person in the mid '80s: "Sure women should have the freedom to do whatever they want...as long as they do it in my pants!" There are still lots of people who have that attitude, surely, but you don't see NEARLY so many of them, and they CERTAINLY don't have a mainstream high-profile forum for their views (not without being viewed as crackpots, at least).

This leads me to Benny Hill. I've been watching his 1982 specials today and comparing them to both his older '60s programs and to today's television shows. They're creepy because Hill had gotten older while his female talent got younger (and more scantily clad), and 95% of the jokes involved Hill and his cronies trying to squeeze some woman's bum...

...but what's weird is that Hill almost always suffers HUMILIATION for this. The women outwit him, or he suffers some sort of punishment for his actions, and we (the viewer) are left respecting THEM and laughing at HIM (while still chuckling at his impotent horny buffoonery).

What's my point? I only have an inkling of one. It seems to me that as sexualized and marginalized as the Hill's Angels and Hannah Smiths were, they DID embody a sort of privilege and power as long as they remained at arm's length. By being intelligent and beautiful they had control of the scripted, imaginary situations they were put in. They were very much the superwomen...fetishized goddesses on pedestals.

When I do drag I'm very aware of this aspect of idealized femininity, so I see the attraction to it, and I also see the benefit of it...

...but it all DOES fall apart when reality enters the picture. The average woman on the street is NOT one of Hill's Angels, and NO women live inside his television scripts. The REAL world is a dangerous place for the desired female, and its one where that element of sexual power tends to wane as the years go by.

So it's certainly good that today's Hannah Smiths are not so routinely dismissed as "girlie tipsters" (though it does seem to me that many women would embrace that type of diminutive for themselves). Things have certainly changed publicly, and that's a good thing.

As for the rest of it, though...gender, sexuality, society, and politics are a terrible stew.

"Attraction" by Muffy St. Bernard

The man with the grey toque leaned against her, using her shoulder to support himself. He could come no closer because there were too many people around the bar.

"I'm attracted to you," he said.

She thanked him for saying so.

"It's strange, this attraction I have, because I'm gay. It's not obvious to anybody. Even my friends don't know! They're back there." He gestured. His friends were at the end of the bar, lounging, staring, interested.

"Would you know that I'm gay if I didn't tell you first?" asked the man.

She said no, she wouldn't have guessed. He pushed his toque down to hide his hair and then he smiled. "I want you to keep this a secret," he said, "just between you and me. Don't tell anybody what I just told you. About me being gay."

She said she wouldn't tell anybody. She promised. There were so many people around that she couldn't uncross her legs without hitting somebody.

The man with the toque kept bumping her shoulder, swayed by the moving crowd, bumping and bumping, but he didn't seem to care. "This is significant for me because I'm not actually attracted to women, I just pretend, I do it all for show...but you're the first woman I've ever been attracted to and I wonder what that means. I wonder if it's important?"

She said she didn't know if it was important or not. He put his hand on the shoulder he'd been bumping.

"Will you make this a special night and sleep with me?"

She said no. She said she was sad that he had to hide his homosexuality from his friends but that she was simply not interested in having sex with him. She said that there was no chance of him ever having sex with her.

He didn't remove his hand. When one of her male friends brought her a drink, the man in the toque said "So that's how it is, is it?" and he scowled bitterly, but he didn't remove his hand.

He was silent for a while, bumping. "It would mean a lot to me, if we could have sex," he said finally. "Since I'm gay and this is significant."

She said no, and he said "Kiss me," and he tried to pull her away from her stool and she sat back again forcibly. "Kiss me please." He pulled her face towards his. "It would be special. My friends are watching." And they were; they were taking pictures with their cel phones.

She pushed him away. He sneered. "I can't believe I told you about my sexuality and you're just rejecting me," he said. "I can't believe I confessed my biggest secret to you, and you're not going to have sex with me. That's awful. It's like you really don't care."

Her male friend intervened, pushed his way in and telling the man to cool it. She finally managed to uncross her legs and she drank her drink behind the barrier of her friend's arm.

The man with the toque stretched across from the other side, hissing. "I can't believe this," he said. "I told you my biggest secret and then you got your boyfriend to attack me. I can't believe you'd do this to me. I can't believe you'd betray me like that."

The Double-SLICE..Double-SIDE..Double-QUICK TOASTER

As of June 15, 1929, Edicraft has discovered how to keep marriages intact!

MR. HORACE SNOOPY PEEK, late of the Prohibition Enforcement Squad has been doing a bit of research.

According to Mr. Peek's charts and graphs, most marriages are wrecked at the breakfast table. "Cold, burned or slow-to-make toast causes young husbands to look up telephone numbers," reads his report. "Only in homes equipped with the Edicraft Speed Automatic Toaster does marriage remain stable."

And can you wonder? Even the most inexperienced of brides can turn out crisp, golden, hot on both sides toast with an Edicraft while making snappy conversation that will keep hubby's morning paper unopened--yes, unnoticed.

Slip two slices of bread in the Edicraft, turn on the switch, and a few moments later you are gently interrupted with two temptingly browned toast nuggets, done to a turn on both sides. No watching, no chance of burning, all you have to do is reach for them in a bored, well-bred manner.

There's no word on how the "inexperienced" brides could keep their husbands distracted for the REST of the day -- toast for dinner? toast in bed? -- but I suppose this was a good start.

PS: If the pages of The New Yorker are any indication, the Edicraft and the Toastmaster were battling for supremacy in 1929. Who will finally win? I'll keep reading, and when I find out I'll let you know.

Lili Elbe

I've always assumed that sex-reassignment surgery was first performed in 1952 -- on Christine Jorgensen -- but this little tidbit in the June 8, 1929 New Yorker got me thinking.

Scientists have changed the sex of birds and insects. They have converted female fleas into male fleas, and funny stunts like that; and they are working around toward doing the same thing with people. We predict an avalanche of plays on this theme next season.

The proposed play isn't worth getting too far into (two men love one woman; man tricks other man to change sex, then falls in love with the transgendered woman) but it made me wonder: what was going on in 1929 to prompt The New Yorker to write about this subject?

As far as I can tell, some scientists in 1929 were having a lot of fun scrambling up chicken embryos, transplanting skin and glands to see what would happen. And what happened, according to M. M. Zawadowsky and E. M. Zubina, was that you could change the secondary sex characteristics of the hapless animal...giving a chicken the plumage of a rooster, for example.

Obviously this has very little to do with sex-reassignment surgery as we know it, and it appears that Christine Jorgensen was the first transsexual to be treated with hormones. But in 1931 the FIRST publically-declared sex change was given to Lili Elbe.

Curiously this had nothing to do with the chicken experiments referenced in the New Yorker article; Elbe's transition was entirely surgical. They actually tried to give her overies and a uterus, and it was complications from the uterus transplant that killed her. The wacky doctors actually thought she could be made fertile, rather than dead.

GQE Drag Show!

Also coming up, also in Guelph, also in March, another wonderful event from Guelph Queer Equality! Here's their promo material:

Guelph Queer Equality is throwing its annual drag show! There will be drag performances and other musical acts, including:

-The all-too-fabulous Muffy St. Bernard, drag queen extraordinaire! She's performed with us before, and now she's back again! Don't miss a chance to see her in action.

-The equally all-too-fabulous Nigel Gough, who wowed the crowd with a scandalously spiritual interpretation of Katy Perry's I Kissed A Girl at last semester's Queer Antics.

-You can also catch the musical stylings of Amy Bronson, folky Lethbridge-native and current temporary Guelphite.
http://www.myspace.com/amybronson

-And you can be witness to the musical stylishness (and also stylings) of the charming Kay Pettigrew, who can lately be found being awesome at venues all over.
http://www.myspace.com/kaypettigrew

Aaaaaand more! Check back here often as the facebook event will be updated with more performers!

If you yourself are a performer who would like to participate or know of one, feel free to contact us at gqe@uoguelph.ca!

Five dollars or pay what you can. Proceeds from the show will be going to support Out on the Shelf and Our Place

Coming Up: Gender Martini Party!

One of the upcoming spate of Guelph shows I'll be performing at, come to the "Gender Martini Party" at Guelph's eBar on Wednesday, March 25. From their advert:

PINCH THIS PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS

GENDER MARTINI
A thrilling performance night celebrating a variety of gender expressions

Join us for an evening of dancing, observing and interacting.

Performances include:

DRAG
We'll make you lick your lips for the gender bending stylings of our local artists, including the delicious Muffy St. Bernard

SPOKEN WORD
Prepare to have your appetite whetted with controversial topics accompanied by hip popping beats

LOCAL DANCERS
You will have your taste buds tantalized with choreographed routines by some KW boys that will leave you shaken AND stirred

BURLESQUE
Finally, quench your thirst with Violet Wand and her sinful troop who will add that twist to your night that you've been craving. You know you love it.

DOORS OPEN AT 9, DJS AND DANCING TIL CLOSE
Including the tasty beats of Junglecat

Proceeds to Out on The Shelf

I performed at the eBar many years ago and it's a WONDERFUL space, though one of us managed to lock the keys in the dressingroom. This time they'll probably make us change behind a table in the corner.

I was asked to provide and name a representative martini, so I gave them the recipe for "The Hopped-Up Dustymuff," basically a dry light vodka martini with a live seal in it.

The Gay-Musician-Love-Dog Disconnect

Today I bought a copy of Erasure's "Hits!" DVD. The word "campy" isn't sufficient to describe it, so I have coined a much more extreme term: "bivouwacky."

Particularly bivouwacky is the video for "Heavenly Action," in which Andy Bell plays a spaceman who runs afoul of a nosferatu-styled villain played by Vince Clark.

I was initially distracted by all the creepy cherubs, but then I twigged to the way the song's lyrics had been realized. "Heavenly Action" was a straight-forward love song, and it was an open secret even then that Bell was gay -- his space-suit ensemble in the video included ruby high heels, for goodness sake -- so it really would have been strange to show him falling in love with a WOMAN.

To get around this they portrayed him falling in love with a DOG.



You just weren't going to see same-sex love on MTV in 1985 -- I suppose bestiality was more acceptable -- so this puts me in mind of OTHER popular love songs written by the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell musicians of the time. Freddie Mercury wrote some eternal love songs ("Love of My Life" etc.) which any sane person assumed were actually about men, but Queen's videos -- as far as I remember -- didn't ever show the objects of his affection (though by the time of the EXTREMELY biviouwacky "I Want To Break Free" he was a John Waters-style, mustachioed hair-hopper pushing a vacuum).

We were too busy looking at Elton John's hair implants to notice his music video partners, you simply couldn't think of Fred Schneider as a sexual human being, and it seemed to me that Jimmy Somerville wrote more about oppression than love. Marc Almond skirted around the issue by simply being sleezy-kinky, though there was a strange disconnect between him being a flaming, somewhat chipmunky homosexual AND a sex symbol for teenage girls at the same time.

So I wonder what Andy Bell and Vince Clark thought about the "dog-lover" concept in "Heavenly Action." Chances are they enjoyed the ridiculousness of it all, but it must have sucked to have a heartfelt love song treated that way.

Corona for Christmas

There's a wee touch of selfishness in your gift of a Corona to HER-- You're probably intending to borrow it now and then yourself! And why not? Corona can be loaned with impunity. Your manly touch can't hurt it anymore than can her own dainty fingers.

Look at the way she's HOLDING it though, as though she had a muscular disease. Is that what having "dainty fingers" meant? Maybe she's thinking "oh no, machine grease all over my nightgown."

I also like the way that he's staring appreciatively at the Corona, not particularly caring about his wife's flimsy clothing. He is basking in the joy of Christmas gadgetry and wives need not apply.

PS: Only seven keys on the top row? Those really WERE simpler times.

An Interesting Facebook Phenomenon

Every once in a while on Facebook I am deluged by "friend requests" from mysterious men. The only friends I have in common with these people are a small group of the sexier drag queens and she males in Kitchener and Toronto. I look at their profiles and see that ALL of their friends are attractive she males in provocative clothing, usually with their legs in the air. There is a definite trend. My own profile picture (of me kissing a hamster) seems slightly out of place.

What's most fascinating, however, is that these men ALWAYS list themselves as "Male, seeking women." I can't help wondering if they are being flattering to the people they're stalking (assigning them an unreserved female gender), or if they're so closeted that they can't even admit they want to have sex with men...even though the only people who will ever see the profile are the very men they're trying to have sex with.

This is actually sort of fun for me. I try to keep my list of Facebook friends small, because I don't view friends either flippantly or as objects to be collected. Usually a friend request is an agony for me, because I'm torn between only accepting "real friends" and not wanting to hurt or reject anybody (or burn any bridges). So I sit there pondering the Accept and Ignore buttons before just giving up and making a new Facebook friend.

These mysterious men with their conflicted desires are the only Facebook friends that I can easily -- even gleefully -- reject with the understanding that they are not IN ANY WAY friends of mine. This is a form of power that humans have been reveling in since sex took on the glittering sheen of weaponry...and like all weapons, it should only be used against those who don't really care about you.

Psycho-Gifts for Christmas!

While the Victorians loved their Freud, the '20s were all about behaviourism and personality tests...everybody was taking quizzes and using behaviour modification to keep their children in line. Skinner hadn't arrived on the scene yet but Watson was very, very popular.

This is the first time I've seen the fad so obviously presented in The New Yorker. It's a Christmas advertisement for Wanamaker's Department Store in the December 8, 1928 issue.

The advertisement claims that Wanamaker's has analyzed the neurotic complexes of "the world and his wife" (!), and that you should purchase Christmas gifts for people based on their own personal complexes.

To start this game we hand you a little book which lists suggestions for gifts under psychological classifications...

Start the game with your friends.

Play the game of choosing psycho-gifts. It is fascinating...

A treasure hunt, indeed, that will give you a greater Christmas thrill than you ever had before.

Forget the fact that behaviourism didn't believe in complexes per se, this could still be fun if they were using the good, old-fashioned, traditional Freudian complexes. Should you buy starchy underwear for the man with castration anxiety, or orthopedic shoes for sufferers of an Oedipus complex?

But no. As you'd expect, the "complexes" as illustrated are actually just a list of vague personality "types," making the astute observation that children only HAVE one type: "Children."

A treasure hunt that will give you a greater thrill? Nope, just another sad gimmick to get you to buy Christmas gifts. But I don't understand why the bellhop has an exposed catheter, let alone why the housewife is admiring cat poop on the brand new rug.

A Very Stinky Lunchour

The last time I quoted a conversation between two prototypical "Stinkies," the transcription was referred to as "a weird sort of poetry." I couldn't have agreed more.

Now I'm happy to present you with an extended transcript of BOTH SIDES of a stinky conversation, including a bonus "Muffy vs. Stinky" moment at the end.

During lunch today at Tim Horton's, the stinkies sat down at the table next to me as I was trying to write on my portable "Alphasmart Neo." The male stinky (Robert) wears suspenders and looks a bit like a turtle. The female's plumage is brighter -- pink shoes and fuzzy baby-blue pantsuit -- but her mental abilities appear far below Robert's...she repeats herself endlessly and always seems to be annoying him.

Their conversation here starts with the two of them sitting down, then the female stinky lurching to her feet and asking:

You want a donut?

No, I don't want a tea donut, ohhh.

One honey dip. You want it?

Nooo.

She buys a box of timbits and puts it on the table, then stands.

You be here for a while? I'm goin' home now.

You don't need that coat.

I'm cold, my back's cold.

Ohhhh.

I don't wanna get cold on my back. I'm goin' home now. You want your coat?

NO I don't want my coat.

Goin' home now. Goin' home now.

She leaves the store. Robert, alone, sits quietly for a while, then he starts leaning toward me and saying "Ma'am? Ma'am? Ma'am?" I ignore him because I know that if I make any sort of response, he'll start talking and he won't leave me alone.

Fortunately he is interrupted by the store's mentally handicapped employee. This is amusing because the employee really likes Robert, but Robert obviously DOES NOT return the sentiment. The employee keeps telling Robert not to eat donuts because they're bad for his health and will give him a belly. The employee won't go away. He thinks Robert is his best friend.

I become aware that even the stinkies have a pecking order and I feel less bad for ignoring him.

Eventually the woman comes back. She talks with Robert for a bit, and soon I start transcribing again.

It won't last that long. Won't last that long. Got a honey dip, another honey cruller, one honey dip. Got that one. He doesn't like that, you know that? Doesn't like honey cruller. He won't eat that cruller.

How do YOU know what he ain't gonna have?

One boston cream that he'll eat tonight. One boston cream that he'll eat tonight. I tole you.

(A moment of blissful silence).

They makin' honey crullers. You think they makin' honey crullers? You think they makin' honey crullers?

HOW DO I KNOW!

Two of them back there. They two of them. You think they makin' honey crullers? You think they makin' honey crullers?

Suddenly Robert leans toward me and starts saying "Ma'am? Ma'am?" again. I ignore him, pretending to be busy. The female stinky asks him what he wants and he says "I wanna know if she gets a SIGNAL on that thing," gesturing at the keyboard. "MA'AM! MA'AM!" The female stinky says "She's busy" and Robert says "I don't care, I'LL GET MY ANSWER. MA'AM! MA'AM! MA'AM!"

He is now literally YELLING at me and the people in the store are looking at us. I glance up at him and he says "Do you get a signal on that thing?" I say "no" and go back to typing.

The female stinky says "That's a guy, not a ma'am." However confused the female stinky seems to be, I suddenly realize that she's the more socially capable one.

Robert is very disgruntled, muttering at an old lady nearby who's been staring at us. The old lady says -- by way of obvious explanation -- "She's busy," and Robert says "He wants to be like that? He wants to be like THAT?" There is some degree of gender confusion going on now. I continue typing as though nothing's happening

Eventually he calms down. I don't dare transcribe any further now that he's got his eyes on me.

An Intimate Glimpse of Four Young New Yorkers Reveals Their Preference for Best Pajamas

I don't usually bother reading the New Yorker advertisements for large department stores, but this one (November 24, 1928) for Best & Co. is fun.

Pajamas are just pajamas in most shops, but at Best's they are works of art! Simple, comfortable, distinctive, and gay as the light-hearted young things who wear them.

Such an "intimate glimpse" of these light-hearted and simple young ladies...err, young things. It doesn't look staged at all! The advertising copy tells us that Miss Marguerite Shea "displays her latest dance step, in colorful broadcloth pajamas with fast-color black braid piping." Meanwhile Miss Virginia Maurice, Miss Marty Simonton, and Miss Katheryn Baltus look on.

What *I* want to know is why they're wearing rubber boots and dancing in what appears to be a dormitory. They're so distinctive and gay, those young flapper-things of the '20s!

Chilton Pen Secrets

One reason I read so much pre-60s material is because I'm curious to see how women are represented and -- when they have the chance -- how they represent themselves.

After putting up with hundreds of 1920s New Yorker advertisements for executive pens, I've finally run across one that's specifically aimed at women. Do you think it takes a different approach from the others? Oh nelly.


It really IS about pens, HONEST.

It's about these new Twice the Ink Chilton Pens done in vanity leathers: natural ostrich, alligator, and lizard skin.

Really, they're the most fetching things...just the "utterly different" sort of pen for that sort of girl who knows how to make her briefest notes fairly leap out of the litter when the Morning Male begins to shuffle his nine o'clock letters...

...But, honestly, that's so modestly moderate that it fairly makes a secret of the proven fact that any lady-size Chilton holds three-to-five times more ink than other lady-size pens. Stop and try one at the better pen-counters.

I'm trying to figure out if these pens are marketed to housewives or secretaries, and whether women back then actually spoke in this goofy, bouncy vernacular. I bet a lot of them did.

Richard Dawson, The Pig

I've rented a collection of "All Star Family Feud" episodes. I'm not exactly sure why I've done this, but I've had a number of revelations while watching it this afternoon.

First, Richard Dawson was a f*cking pig. It might not have seemed that way to the general public at the time -- I certainly don't remember anybody talking about it in the '80s -- but his attitude toward his female guests went beyond "chivalry" or "1984 machismo" into aggressive lechery.

I might dismiss his constant stroking, grabbing, and kissing as "of the time," but the women he's doing it to certainly don't seem to think so; just watch as they shrink from his touch, and watch as he gleefully comes back to do it again and again. It comes across as a form of physical intimidation that you don't see from TV superstars anymore (I hope).

Granted, some of the women seem quite happy with this, but most of them are obviously disgusted. Here's Dawson trying to grab the hand that Maureen McCormick is trying to make discreetly unavailable. She's probably in a tizzy about the cold sores she got from him last week. Christopher Knight, barely sentient, is smiling because of gas.


Second, the country hoe-down atmosphere had always escaped me. Our family watched this show a lot and I never noticed its rural theme: fiddle music, needlepoint set decoration, Dawson's plantation-owner outfit, the entire IDEA of a "family feud." It's only now that I hear the weird way that the announcer says "Family Fyeee-youd!"

An American "yokel show," and by no means the only one...we've had them in Canada as well.

Third, people get nastier as shows go on. It's interesting how the competition -- both between and within teams -- gets less friendly over time. The camera loves to linger on the glares and sneers, and there is something PARTICULARLY scary about a sneering woman who has feathered hair and professionally-applied raccoon eyeliner.

Fourth, the Petticoat Junction people were the coolest. I've never seen Petticoat Junction, but they BY FAR outranked the other teams in terms of personality, graciousness, and intelligence. Since I love "Leave It To Beaver" and at one time enjoyed "The Brady Bunch" this is a hard thing to admit.

Paying the Angles

The August 11, 1928 issue of The New Yorker had an interesting article about Tin Pan Alley songwriters.

Apparently, songwriters bore the responsibility of paying influential people to "plug" their songs. These people -- called "angles" -- tended to be radio singers who were allowed to choose the songs they wanted to perform; if a songwriter offered them thirty to fifty percent of the song's royalties, the radio singers would sing it.

Likewise, a songwriter could end up paying money to additional "angles" such as "jazz-band leaders, makers of phonograph records, movie-house program directors, and the like."

It's interesting that -- according to the article -- the music publishers used to be responsible for paying the angles, at that time usually vaudeville singers. But after theatre managers complained that the vaudeville shows were suffering from substandard material and constant repetition, the music publishers formed the Music Publishers Protective Association and vowed to stop the practice...which is why, by the 1920s, it was up to the writer to do the dirty work.

Compare this to the more modern practice of payola, in which music publishers get back into the game and pay DJs to play their songs.

Incidentally the article concludes by saying there were few successful female songwriters, and that the often-seen name "Mary Earl" was actually "a copyrighted pseudonym belonging to a firm of music publishers and is used on songs written by men."