Your silicon strategy's in free fall

Thursday music corner: Echoing the sunny-synth tunefulness of mid-‘70s Genesis, Welsh indie rocker Gruff Rhys offers this double-necked-guitar-sporting single from his new album Seeking New Gods, which was released on Friday. Formerly of Super Furry Animals, Neon Neon and Boom Bip, and now of solo fame, Rhys is known as a figurehead of the ‘Cool Cymru’ movement. Diolch yn fawr!

Gruff Rhys – Loan Your Loneliness (2021)

Super Moon

The best I could manage with a tripod mount, 140mm lens and remote shutter action via a mobile app. The clear night in Karori also enabled a rare meteor sighting just as the Moon approached its eclipse around 11.15pm last night.

 

Living in dystopia is losing all its charm

Thursday music corner: A self-explanatory, vaccine-positive and super-quick pastiche of the Ramones’ 1978 classic I Wanna Be Sedated, delivered by US anti-folk singer-songwriter and comic-book artist Jeffrey Lewis (b.1975).

Jeffrey Lewis – I Wanna Be Vaccinated (2021)

Corporate censorship in early US television advertising

For the most part [...] the old radio system ruled TV through the mid-fifties, which also meant a continuation of program practices so successful in radio: programming was aimed toward the lowest common denominator; sponsors combed through scripts to delete what they considered to be offending words or characterizations; controversy, either in deal­ing with serious social issues or simply in using black actors, was frowned upon. The latter policy was conducted particularly with an eye toward appeasing Southern stations.

Sponsors paid particular attention to anything they thought would boost the competition.

This often went to ridiculous extremes. Westinghouse at first refused to allow 'Studio One' to broadcast an adaptation of Kipling's 'The Light That Failed,' believing that the show would reflect badly on their bulbs. As Worthington Miner pointed out in his memoirs, West­inghouse became so wound up over the light-bulb issue that it completely overlooked its sponsorship of a homosexual love story!

Chevrolet wouldn't allow a pioneer on one of its shows to 'ford' a river, and Ford wouldn't allow a shot of the New York skyline on a program it sponsored because the Chrys­ler building was shown. Chrysler wouldn't allow Abraham Lincoln's name to be mentioned on a CBS show about the Civil War, while Mars Candy Company objected to a script in which a little girl was given a dollar to buy ice cream and cookies.

On the 'Camel News Caravan,' in an interview with 'Lucky' Luciano, only the mob­ster's first name, Charles, could be used, so viewers would not confuse it with an ad for Lucky Strikes. The word 'lucky' seemed to pose a particular problem for American Tobacco's competitors. Scriptwriters regularly combed through thesaurus to dredge up synonyms like 'fortunate' or 'providential' whenever the forbidden 'L word' popped up. How bad could it get? This bad: even the word 'American' was proscribed on one show.

- Jeff Kisseloff, The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961, 2013, quoted in DelanceyPlace.com

It's not my conscience that hates to be untrue

Thursday music corner: Falling just outside the UK top 40, Tempted was Squeeze’s 10th UK single. It appeared on their 1981 album East Side Story. At the suggestion of the album’s co-producer, Elvis Costello, the song that was written by the band’s Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook was instead sung by the band’s new keyboardist Paul Carrack (the replacement for the departed Jools Holland). The blue-eyed soul of Tempted became the band’s first (minor) US hit. It has been covered numerous times, including by Sting, OK Go, Richard Thompson, Joe Cocker, Rita Coolidge and Jenny Morris. After his time with Squeeze Carrack went on to co-lead Mike & the Mechanics.

Squeeze – Tempted (1981)

Lois Weber's new feminine screen type

Returning from a trip to Europe in 1922, [director Lois Weber] announced her plan to create a new feminine 'screen type' to counter the flappers and vamps who clouded Hollywood's imagination - 'cute little dolls dressed up in clothes that they do not know how to wear'. In contrast, Weber proposed the 'womanly woman' who possessed 'brains and character', and was, above all, 'able to act'. She had been inspired, she said, by European actresses, women whose primary attributes were not beauty or glamour, but depth of personality and range of dramatic talent. This effort is evident in three of Weber's later films, The Marriage Clause, Sensation Seekers and The Angel of Broadway, each of which features a remarkably reflexive meditation on the industry's glamour culture and a leading female role designed to challenge conventional female types. Even as these films helped revive her reputation, Weber spoke publicly about the difficulties she faced as a woman directing in Hollywood and the increased control exercised by studios now run like corporations. If her early publicity had promoted the unique opportunities available to women in the fledgling movie business, by the end of her career, Weber was becoming known as Hollywood's 'only' female film maker, a distinction that celebrated her achievements even as it marginalised them. Weber became the exception that proved the rule. For a filmmaker so renowned and distinguished in early Hollywood, Weber is remarkably unknown.

- Shelley Stamp, 'Lois Weber', in Fifty Hollywood Directors, Abingdon, 2015, p.50

Looking for Lord Lucan

They've drained the lake in the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary (Zealandia), perhaps for the first time since it was built in the 1870s, with a view to eradicating non-native fish. Hoping there'll be interesting finds from the lake floor after all those years.

  

A stranger's light comes on slowly, a stranger's heart is out of home

Thursday music corner: Featuring the woozy, torch-song vocals of the beautiful Hope Sandoval, MTV staple Fade Into You was this Californian band from the psychedelic Paisley Underground movement’s most prominent song, reaching no.3 on the US Billboard Modern Rock chart in 1994. At the time, the Los Angeles Times called the song’s parent album, So Tonight That I Might See, "far more narcotic and hypnotic than anything the whole techno-trance universe has digitally blipped up to date."

Mazzy Star – Fade Into You (1993)

See also:

Music: Joan Armatrading - Love & Affection, 11 January 2018

Music: Brigitte Bardot - Harley Davidson, 13 November 2015

Music: Bill Wyman - Je Suis Un Rock Star, 11 December 2013