The day after Christmas, my wife and I attended a hockey game at the Jobing.com Arena. This state-of-the-art facility stands adjacent to something called the “Westgate City Center.” On what was once a quiet corner in Glendale is now erected this new mall “concept:” a pre-fab fake “town,” surrounded by lots of freshly bulldozed, freeway-accessible real estate: “Shop Here – Dine Here – Live Here – ONLY HERE!” “LIVE WHERE YOU LIVE!” I’m sure there are several of these sorts of places in your town as well.

This “multi-use destination” is mostly comprised of restaurants as big as city blocks. The “food,” served up in different shapes and “flavors,” is your typical modern corn and soybean based cuisine. What these places offer is not so much “nutrition,” as a Disney-fied, sports-bar kind of “atmosphere” designed to simultaneously stimulate and dull the senses.

As we stood huddled beneath five-story-high images of Carlos Santana and Mel Gibson, we watched a teenage fake-rock band supply the soundtrack to house-sized video displays broadcasting ads for local casinos and upcoming “tribute “concerts. At one point, an ugly long-haired dude in a shiny shirt came on the screen. He sat on a brand new leather couch, moving his lips inaudibly. Above his luminous head appeared this grave message: “$998.”

Spaces like the Westgate City Center make Phoenix’s older box malls look like palaces of subtlety and restraint. But the kids that milled around the grounds that night seemed just as enthusiastic about their current shopping arrangements as our grandparents’ generation must have been. And as these old photos from “Arizona Highways” clearly show, nothing evokes “civic pride” like a new retail innovation. These photos leave little room for debate on the matter, taken as they are from an article entitled “Phoenix – City Of Shopping Centers.”

Most of the businesses in these pictures are long gone, but if you look closely, you might recognize something of what remains.



When I was growing up, nobody could explain my grandfather’s job to me. Even when I was an adult, my mom couldn’t really tell me what he did for a living. I knew he was a Shriner, because I saw his hats. I knew he liked to collect restaurant menus, because I saw the blog posts. Beyond that, all I ever knew was he had an office downtown. Last month, I finally learned the truth.

Turns out, my grandmother was a regular fangirl when it came to her husband. From the 1930s right up through the mid-sixties, she kept a huge scrapbook about my grandfather, tirelessly collecting hundreds of photos and newspaper clippings documenting the ups and downs of his career. And while my grandfather was no Frank Sinatra or Mikey Mantle, he was quite a superstar in his own right.

The story begins shortly after my grandparents’ marriage and finds my grandfather working for a liberal newspaper in Syracuse, Nebraska. In 1936, the Otoe County Democrats elected him the youngest party chairman in the nation.

In short order, he was formally swept into the local bureaucracy, first as Assistant County Clerk, then as a trucking inspector for the Nebraska Railway Commission. Thanks to his ties to the newspaper business, or maybe just due to his basic inherent interestingness, my grandfather collected boatloads of ink throughout his career. He gathered tribute every time he climbed the ladder, garnering praise and support from peers and politicians. Along the way, he signed off on major issues of the day, and contributed “humorous” human-interest filler that would be considered inappropriate today.

Alas, despite Nebraska’s deep roots of progressive populism (or maybe because of it), the state couldn’t sustain a consistent majority for FDR. In the spring of 1940, my grandfather managed the Democratic candidate in a special election to fill the vacancy left by the death of a sitting senator. The Republicans campaigned against the New Deal and won by a landslide. Later that year, after Nebraska awarded its electoral votes to Wendell Wilkie, my grandfather found himself out of power and planning his return to the private sector. He soon relocated to Minneapolis, reinvented himself as a successful businessman, immersed himself in the Chamber of Commerce, and continued to generate column inches in the local newspapers.

Around this time, his media visibility expanded and took an unexpected turn. During the war, my grandfather began appearing as a model for print advertisements. (An earlier accident kept him out of the service.) Significantly, the roles he adopted charted both his own trajectory and the country’s — out of the Depression and the war, and into the boom of the late Forties and early Fifties. The earliest of these ads portray him as an overall-clad working class hero putting his back into the war effort. Later, he’s an upwardly mobile everyman in a hurry to claim his slice of postwar prosperity. Finally, he’s a successful self-made man, living the model suburban dream.

After the war, my grandfather owned several successful businesses before he finally moved out west and joined CIT Corporation (yes, the very same CIT that’s been struggling for its life lately). As the vice president in charge of the Phoenix office, he doled out financing for many of the construction companies that built the modern Arizona. Here, he finally becomes recognizable to me as the man who became my grandfather — the guy with the carving utensils, serving up the holiday meals with a gruff efficiency and a policy of zero tolerance for tom-foolery at the dinner table. While these later years tend to strike me as anticlimactic, this period certainly brought him his greatest rewards. Like so many of the men of his generation who saw his country through the crises of the day, he was glad to take his place in line when it was time to reap the rewards he deserved.

And yet, my grandfather lived long enough to watch his country become unrecognizable to him. He saw the Democratic party fall apart during the Sixties, prey to both its own hubris and events beyond its control. Unable to corral its own disparate elements, the party splintered. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Eventually my grandfather switched sympathies. But if he found any real satisfaction in the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he never said anything to me about it.

In the end, extreme age and deteriorating health telescoped his life into a series of restless nights and passing days. I got to know him a little better once I got older, and he always impressed me as a serious, savvy son-of-a-gun. To hear him tell it, he never knew a fool that he suffered gladly. As his photos clearly show, he was a good-old-boy to the core, even as a young man — a true big fish in a small pond. And though I might not have believed it when I was younger, nowadays I can’t help but see a little bit of him staring back at me in the mirror. I’m glad I finally found out what he did for a living.

These days, the songwriting/production team of Chris Arnold, David Martin and Geoff Morrow is probably best known for giving us Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You,” and for bubblegum singles like Edison Lighthouse’s “It’s Up To You Petula” and Domino’s “Have You Had A Little Happiness Lately” (featuring Tony Burrows). They also wrote for Elvis (“This Is The Story,” “A Little Bit Of Green,” “Change Of Habit”). The trio released a few singles under their own names, but their only full-length album was 1970′s “Don’t You Know Butterscotch.”

I’ve been looking for this record for over a decade. I actually held it in my hands once, but I didn’t know what I had, balked at the price (probably under ten dollars) and foolishly let it go. Since then, I’ve never seen it for sale for anything less than 40 bucks, and only from obscure overseas dealers. But my most recent online search finally hit pay dirt. And I’m happy to say, the wait was worth it.

“Don’t You Know Butterscotch” is a kind of bridge from Petula to Barry, coming off almost like an early Bread album. The kiddie pop tracks released as singles are all here (“Don’t You Know,” “Surprise Surprise,” “Things I Do For You”), but it’s the “adult contemporary” cuts (“Us,” “Bye For Now,” “Cows”) that really balance out the program and add a depth never found on your average bubblegum album.

I found this album via Demonoid, so you can get it that way if you want. The torrent file includes the full album in the FLAC format, all the sheet music included in the original release, and a generous selection of singles. Or, you can just grab all tracks as MP3s, plus the album art:


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Like so many guys my age, I made my first connection with male sexual identity in the back of mass-market magazines like “True Detective” and “Man’s Adventure.” Naturally, I was drawn to the so-called “adult” content in these tiny sidebar ads, but what strikes me now is how juvenile they are, and how devoid of any actual females. They almost seem to suggest that pictures, films or stories about women are much better than the real thing.

When I got older, I began to experience the “skin trade” up close. I remember visiting my first downtown adult theater when I was eighteen or nineteen. This place was different from the “peep show” places that offered curtained smut loops for a quarter. This was an real “theater” that showed full-length films. It shared a strip of commercial property with a pawn shop, a liquor store and an anonymous storage facility. It had no lobby or backstage — just a screen and a low platform at one end of a small room and a 16mm film projector at the other end.

I have no memory of the films I saw that day. What I do remember was how after the first movie, a woman came out on the stage. To a soundtrack of the current disco hits, she removed her clothing, lay down on her back and and spread her legs. She lay there for a few minutes, then got up and left.

This was a surprise. The theater had not advertised live entertainment. A few minutes into the next film, I noticed someone coming towards me down the aisle. Before I could make out the figure clearly, I heard a woman’s voice. “Can you give me some money for my dance?”

I quickly fished out whatever was in my pocket and gave her what she wanted. She rubbed the bills against her chest, moaned a little, and slid the money into a pocket. Then she moved on to the next patron. I watched the movie for a little while longer, but I knew I’d have to leave soon. I didn’t have enough cash left for any more tips.

Up until that day, I had always assumed the “adult entertainment” business to be entirely one-sided and exploitative. It now occurred to me that the woman had actually derived some pleasure from the transaction, albeit second-hand, and not of a perverse nor prurient nature. It was the pleasure she got from keeping a roof over her head and providing food for her family. As I drove home, my guilt feelings in no way assuaged by the insight, I wondered which one of us had gotten the better end of the deal.



I haven’t been to Chicago in over a dozen years, but I still have my memories. Unfortunately, most of them involve trying driving around the club trying to find safe legal parking for two vans and a trailer. So the next best thing for me are these postcards from my grandfather’s collection, some of which date back a hundred years, to the 1893 World’s Exposition.

Aside from the postcards, the closest I’ve been to Chicago recently has been through a book and DVD by “This American Life” host Ira Glass and illustrator Chris Ware, “Lost Buildings.” The DVD tells the story of a kid who’s love for the work of architect Louis Sullivan led him into the orbit of photographer Richard Nickel. Forty years ago, Nickel traced an ever-shrinking circuit, documenting the progress of urban renewal as it consigned more and more of Sullivan’s buildings to the wrecking ball. Increasingly frustrated by the loss of these historic monuments, Nickel finally met his end inside the old Chicago Stock Exchange building. Seems he’d been trying to rescue an ornate specimen of staircase railing from demolition when the floor above him collapsed.

No doubt, many of the older subjects of these postcards are long gone as well, and the ones remaining are not long for this world. Who knows? One day, I might actually get back to Chicago, create a circuit of my own, and find out.

I’ve loved Jack Cole’s work ever since I first saw it — probably in an old DC Special or Super Spectacular from back in the seventies. Or perhaps it was in the books by Jules Feiffer or Les Daniels. I’ve been happily binging on Plastic Man, thanks to 8 volumes devoted to the stretchy supersleuth in the hardbound DC Archive Editions series. But the endless variation on the same theme — elastic though it is — tends to get monotonous after a while. Which is why it’s been great to see so much space devoted lately to Cole’s horror and crime work over at these fine comic book blogs:

Pappy’s Golden Age Comics

The Horrors Of It All

Those Fabuleous Fifties

Now that we’re in the Golden Age of Golden Age Comics Reprints, Cole’s work isn’t nearly as hard to see. But in the old days, we had to rely on poor quality reproductions in black and white reprint ‘zines, like Ron Goulart’s “Comics: The Golden Age,” which is where this story come from. I scanned it back in the early days of my introduction to the internet. I had just gotten a scanner — an HP unit the size of a small truck that cost me a thousand dollars — and I was enamored of Usenet. My “Mantoka” scans are a part of my fledgling efforts to joint that community.

My original scans look laughable nowadays, optimized as they were for the old low-baud dial-up days of the early 90s, and the low-rez monitors of the day. The latticework of compression artifacts looks like the spidery skin of a dry corpse. Happily, seeing as I apparently throw out nothing, I can still actually put my hands of the box containing the magazine this story appeared in. It’s okay — I should be able to walk upright in a couple of weeks once the muscles in my back have a chance to heal. Meanwhile, enjoy these fresh new scans of this great example of Jack Cole’s formative work, originally published in “Funny Pages” #34 (Jan. 1940).

Update: Now you can ignore my black and whites altogether, and enjoy this story in color over at Cole’s Comics!

God bless America’s secularized public school system for teaching generations of students the proper habits of good citizenship, public safety and personal hygiene. But don’t count out the scores of church schools who had their heavy hands in the game as well. Sure, they had a lock on the materials devoted strictly to religious instruction, but devotional institutions of learning also showed an interest in seeing that their students’ time on earth was as long and trouble-free as possible. And though classroom filmstrips might be more likely to, say, celebrate the studious habits of a young Abe Lincoln, they didn’t shy away from a good old traffic safety fear fest either.

Cathedral Filmstrips’ “Bicycle Safety” is kind of like a “Mechanized Death” for the Saturday morning cartoons crowd. Not gory by any means, but definitely designed for extreme impact — in a Saturday morning cartoons kind of way. The art itself is entirely in the style of the classic matinée short. The harassed citizens pop their eyes and flap their tongues comically. The foolish children show their agony with stars, corkscrews and tweety birds. But the underlying message remains grim: those deviating from cycling best practices face grievous injury, possible death and certain ridicule.

I wish I could you who’s responsible for the wonderful drawings in this filmstrip, but I fear that’s something best left to the experts over at the ASIFI Animation Archive. Though I’ve enjoyed that site for years, I was reminded of it once again after the recent demise of Will Elder. But thought I came for the Elder, I stayed for the Fearless Fosdick.

I’ll buy just about any album with Michael Lloyd’s name on it. I first grew to love his work via his productions for the Osmond family and other 70s teen idols like Leif Garrett and Shawn Cassidy. But his credits appear on dozens and dozens of album from the period. Like other great producers of the 70s, such as Dennis Potter, Freddy Perrin and Lamont Dozier, even his least distinguished work is worth a gamble at the local thrift store (where the greatest gamble of course is not price, but that unbearable stop at the checkout counter).

Mr. Lloyd’s pre-70s work is actually considered collectible. As a teenage wunderkind, he produced bands like October Country (whose “My Girlfriend Is A Witch” was later covered by the Cattanooga Cats) and Fire Escape, and released a cult classic by his own band, The Smoke. Later, barely out of his teens, he ran the MGM A&R department for Mike Curb. But he stakes a true claim to history as a member of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Along with having has got to be one of the worst-ever names for a group, the WCPAEB left behind a fascinating legend, which is described in loving detail over at RockMuse.com.

Naturally, it’s Lloyd’s exploitation efforts that attract the strongest resonance here at Bostworld. His series of “songbook” albums by “The Rubber Band” (featuring The Smoke’s guitarist Stan Ayeroff and drummer Steve Baim) and other wholly fabricated studio entities offer all that tasty Lloyd studio ear candy without the annoying burden of having to absorb a real band or acclimate to their all-new material. It’s also comforting to hear the work of such artists as Cream, Creedence, the Doors, the Beatles, Rolling Stones and of course Jimi Hendrix, properly defanged in a low-budget, middle-of-the-road milieu.

Which of course brings us to our featured album. Comprised of a scant eight numbers, “Hendrix Songbook” clocks in at well under a half hour. The arrangements add a horn section, keyboards and the occasional orchestral instrument to a hard rock three-piece rhythm section. The trio rocks out serviceably, and at the end they jam (on the appropriately named “Rubber Jam”). That leaves only seven short Hendrix numbers. And since “The Wind Cries Mary” and “All Along The Watchtower” are both exclusively orchestral, only five tracks that actually bring the Hendrix. But those remaining five, including “Little Miss Lover” and “Fire” are completely reasonable, while “Manic Depression” is entirely awesome.


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Classroom Filmstrips have been a staple of kitch fans since time immemorial (that’s about four decades, in Kitsch Years), yet the Web still lacks a truly marvellous repository of the things. (Note: You can go here, but they are mostly films.) Collectors are apparently afraid to let them out of their little plastic tubes for fear they’ll crumble in the air. Others would rather compile them onto equally crumbly paper and weigh in on the matter with their own two cents. I found a few promotional items, like this Esther Williams swimming pool endorsement, and some from Ford Motor Corporation. But the only school related material I found relates to the sub-genre of anti-drug propaganda. But I’ve found little that relates to such all-important topics as personal hygene, public safety, good citizenship and religious instruction.

Thusly, I couldn’t resist a box of Sunday school filmstrips during a recent antique store outing. I also couldn’t resist scanning a couple of them, adding the included soundtrack records, and combining the whole mess into a couple nifty QuickTimes files — just the thing for an upload to YouTube. The colors have faded and dust has burned permanently into the images, but the somber message for our little ones is as clear as on the day these filmstrips were manufactured. After weighing the pros and cons of simulating the film-roll experience, I ultimately ruled it out. It would have been too much trouble. (That is to say, I forgot about that built-in transition effect until i was too late.)

Today’s lesson is the intriguing story of the little cloud who gave his life to help humanity. Not only is it a terrific primer for helping kids visualize fluffy Casper-like supernatural beings floating overhead affecting our lives, it also introduces children to the concept of self-sacrifice (very important in a society that relies upon a standing military), the value of prayer in an agrarian economy, and the scientific role of cloud sadness in the production of rain.

Note: This strip seems to predate the use of a “beep” for an aural cue. Instead, it uses an organ arpeggio which, since it has six tones instead of one, is six times longer!

Turns out, a lot of what’s on the tape has already passed into legend. The recordings of Casey Casem, Buddy Rich, Orson Welles and other celebrities abusing their subordinates have moved from underground legend status to their rightful place in history. I’ve removed those portions in order to concentrate on the recordings from KDIL itself, the parts that remain cherished only by those who actually remember the station. KDIL’s own site offers lots of audio, but only a small percentage appears to be from its heyday in the seventies. Most of the programs archived on the site sound like a recent attempt to rekindle the old magic. But I did manage to find another page by a fan who offers a few air checks of his own.

Details about the history of the station are sketchy. KDIL.com sheds no light on the subject, offering only a large collection of excerpts from its in-house publication, a xeroxed collage-zine called KDIL Blues Licks. I did find an article about the station’s origins reprinted from an old pamphlet purporting to be a manual on pirate radio operation. I also found a story devoted to the KDIL legend on the Phoenix New Times web site. In the article, the author recounts verbatim some of the same routines found on my cassette.

Not everything on the cassette is KDIL-generated. The NBC parody can be found elsewhere on the net, though unfortunately not in a version with any better fidelity than my own. Other items are the kind of bottom-feeding show-biz dross beloved by all collectors of oddball recordings. (Who could resist an ad for Coppertone suntan lotion featuring Manson Family victim Sharon Tate?) But most of the selections feature KDIL staffers harassing other radio stations, offering illicit drugs for sale and encouraging listeners to “off the pigs.” All in all, the tape offers the kind of local nostalgia so meaningless to people not raised in Phoenix but which seems to have increasingly become our stock in trade here at Bostworld.

What the hell: it’s only eighteen minutes long. If you don’t like it, there’s always next time.

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