Fun with Hot Organs

On Tuesday's Menu: Italian Cheese

Let's Hear It for Martin Böttcher

Weekends Were Made for Ponchos and Pork

The Perfect Song to Sing in Your Black and White Pant Suit

Hold out for the sax solo. It's mighty cool.

On the Set - The Holiday Special

Tonight on the Fabric Channel: Ultrasuede, the Revolution That Fashion Cotton Forgot

The ads were ubiquitous that season -- from Bridget Loves Bernie to The Waltons to Police Woman you would hear that familiar line: "Imagine...storm clouds are looming, and you step out on the street in your suede blazer without caution, without concern."

At a press conference during Fashion Week, Halston and Bill Blass named it "The fabric that will be a bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries...and likely to the 22nd and 23rd."

A 70-foot billboard in Times Square of a beaming Lena Horn featured her in an ankle length suede trench coat in a downpour as she gallantly threw her broken umbrella into the dustbin. Looming above her blazed the fabric's iconic motto: "Suede without Fear!"

ULTRASUEDE. The fabric with as much providence and provenance as an opera window on a Mark IV Givenchy designer edition. When Halston launched his JCPenney line, Jean Luc Godard was working on a film about him called Suede Ultimante and his Studio Fifty-4 meals at JCP, the snack bars at the proletariat department store featured tiny mirror balls in the children's Pleasure Island meals until they were warranted as being a choking hazard.

The evolution of Ultrasuede in the late 20th century is perhaps the least documented and most fascinating chapter in its still emerging history. After being dismissed by the early 1990s as a relic of the flashy, hedonistic synthetic era, a Uruguayan agronomist discovered a way to produce it organically through hybrid silk worm-alpaca fauns which produced a fleece that had all of the properties of Ultrasuede. Though not quite as rain repellent as its synthetic forefather, it was even more wrinkle resistant and did not melt or explode when ironed.

Sadly, Halston did not live to see this innovation. Regardless, it is proof that fabric does not die but evolves.

Sepia Saturday: Abandoned

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I worked for a couple of small town and suburban newspapers. At some point I will trudge through old photos and articles. I enjoyed interviewing local eccentrics and recall being in a tiny, poorly ventilated dark room as I processed film and made prints. "Surely a day will come when all of this can be done...without these wretched chemicals I mused." I don't miss the chemicals but sometimes I miss those images slowly emerging in a pool of developer under a 25 watt red light.

Much as I loved the people photos, my favorites were those of abandoned places and buildings such as these two. I don't know anything about the stories behind who lived here once or why these places were abandoned. The fact that they are a mystery is probably why they most appealed to me then and now.

A Reason to Put Up with Life's Many Agonies

Canyon Dreams

Have you ever been curious why some old thought or experience keeps coming back to you for no apparent reason, and then you step into a music or book store and there is an embodiment of it? That happened to me tonight after a week or so of Laurel Canyon coming into conversations several times for no apparent reason after not thinking of the place for years, and then tonight I walked into Dog Eared Books and came across the book Canyon of Dreams. It embodies the amber hued southern California music and film world of the late 1960s and early 1970s that held a fascination to me when I was a pre-teen. How fitting that I'll be back down there in a couple of weeks.

I'm especially pleased to see multiple references to Mama Cass' house which served as the Gertrude Stein salon of the era. There are a lot of references to the long forgotten Nurit Wilde who seems to embody the era more than even the better known of the era. While I am pleased that there is a fair amount of reference to Tim Buckley, I was saddened that Juddee Sill is not mentioned once.

One of my favorite references to that era was k.d. lang's Invincible Summer, an under-rated album that makes my least favorite season seem almost appealing.

And this site has some good history of the canyon.

Liberation Road Detour

It's often been said that some of television's greatest offerings never actually made it to the small screen. Never has this been more true than it was with the loss of 1971's Liberation Road.

By the early 1970s, Nancy Kulp had greatly tired of her role as "Miss Jane" on The Beverly Hillbillies and longed to leave this lucrative gig. Kulp and Irene Ryan both signed on for the show because, as strict Dadaists, they felt the scripts offered the type of in-your-face nihilistic abrasiveness that was an offense to the class system. Ryan dated Tristan Tzara in the 1920s when they met a young Hungarian named Grevtin Hausheuerblach whom they renamed Zza Zza Gabor and launched her on her 80+ year as a deconstructionist performance artist. Ryan was able to inject a dose of Dadaism in most episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, as exhibited in this clip where she demonstrates both her strict adherence to the surreal and her previously unrealized potential as a seductive chanteuse.

As that series was winding down, Kulp and Odetta were approached to shoot a pilot and the first five episodes of Liberation Road. Building on the cultural shifts afoot in films like Easy Rider and Diary of a Mad Housewife, the series was billed as a mix of Kerouac's On the Road and The Waltons with a feminist twist.

Kulp and Odetta's "friendship" was an open secret in Hollywood for years, and Kulp had helped Odetta get her occasional acting gigs on series such as Have Gun Will Travel but longed for the opportunity to work together.

The basic premise of the series was that Kulp was a traditional Chicago housewife during the Great Depression who flees an abusive marriage with her two children and teams up with Odetta, a roving troubadour. They set out on Route 66 and meet a series of challenges and social ills ranging from racism, labor abuse and sexism. Each episode was liberally laced with original Odetta tunes, and she usually closed with The Internationale or other anthems.
Though Kulp's high visibility lured ABC to green light the pilot, they soon objected to most of the scripts, which included many collaborators including Sam Shepherd and Susan Sontag. First they complained that it was inappropriate to have children raised by two women, but Kulp pointed out that the Clampetts on The Beverly Hillbillies were an even less traditional family.

Tensions were high on the set as last minute changes to the script were ignored by Kulp and Odetta. By the time they had wrapped episode three and the pilot was about to air, ABC got cold feet after getting a call from the Nixon White House, and the whole series was scrapped. Whereabouts of tapes of those three episodes and the two hour pilot is still unknown. However, rumors have been buzzing over on TMZ that an extant copy recently surfaced in the Czech Republic and will be released by the Criterion Collection in 2013.
Kulp exited show biz for a while after this sour experience, entering politics with an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. House in Pennsylvania in 1984. Buddy Ebson famously campaigned against her, stemming from a long-standing tension between the two dating back to a party Kulp hosted in 1968 where he mistook Odetta for the maid and kept asking her for more crab dip.

In the late 1980s, Kulp had moderate success with her yoga and meditation tapes called Now and Zen aimed at post-50 women seeking fitness and serenity. Poorly marketed initially, the tapes were later hawked on the Home Shopping Network as Sweatin' to the Oldies with Miss Jane much to Kulp's horror. After Kulp's death in 1990, Odetta never fully recovered from the loss.

My Kanye Moment

I just wanna say Samantha Sang made one of the best videos of all time. Special thanks to Gavin Elster for pointing me towards this classic.

It's Sing Along Time

Are you curious or confused?

Sittin' Around, Hangin' Out, Doin' Our Thang

The Then Blooming Junk Thief

Can you see why in 1971 my parents said "We're not terribly surprised," when I shared certain news with them around the time that I was obsessed by the movie The Boyfriend and acquired the soundtrack and all the related clippings of reviews and related articles. Perhaps because I went around the house singing a paraphrased version of the title tunes lyrics (I'm wild about/Just simply can't do without/That certain thing called the boyfriend) was a bit of a give away. Does the fact that 38 years later I still have this trove of treasures/junk (I am a Junk Thief) say anything as well?

Of course, if I hadn't, you would not have the privilege of reading this May 4, 1971, Look magazine article about the new and improved Twiggy. At the time I remember being particularly struck by the fact that her "boyfriend" Justin bought $100 shoes which my parents thought was appalling. (When was the last time that I bought shoes that cost only $100?)

We aim to inform and promote culture here at Junk Thief.

(P.S. Click on the Look magazine clipping jpegs to read them more easily.)

What We're Hearing on Our iPod

Actually it's great Stax era soul. I love the hit "Don't Mistake My Kindness for Weakness". Sage advice.

Answers to Questions Youth Must Understand

Last night I watched Zabriskie Point for about the twelfth time. I catch it every three to four years, and it seems a little less pretentious to me each time. It played an important part in my formative years, like something peaked at through a key hole since my parents would not respond to my demands that they take me to see it. (My amazingly hip grandmother, who took me to see The Boys in the Band the same year, would not cave in on this one.)

One afternoon in 1969, I came home from middle school to find the above copy of Look magazine with the image of Mark Frechette on the right answered a question that hadn't been all that mysterious to me anyway. It certainly cleared up any doubt about why I had no interest in going to the honor society banquet with Darla in my civics class.

Frechette is not exactly a one hit wonder since he did two other movies afterwards, albeit in Italy. As far as I know, he's the only guy to star in a movie and then be put in jail for holding up a bank to garner funds for a commune. He died in prison at 27 when 150 pound barbells he was lifting choked him to death. Someday I will have to track down the documentary on his life, Death Valley Superstar.

Two years later, I moved on from my obsession with Mark Frechette to Mark Spitz. (It's fittingly ironic that the below clip is from the same episode of the Dick Cavett Show that I posted a couple of weeks ago.)

Tip of the Day

Now I Know What Nothing Means, But I Keep On Playing

Other good ones:

"I've got a hand full of aces, but I don't know what the game is."

"If I wanted to read my mail, I wouldn't have moved."

Did You Learn This in Banana School Too?