Archive for the 'Trash' Category

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Things I Should Throw Out: Clippings From The Eighties

Published on July 1, 2008 in Trash. 13 Comments Tags: , , .

Thanks to the share-isphere, the best time for your fans to catch up with you is once you’ve died. It’s not like everything you’ve ever released isn’t already available for free several times over, but once you die, everything gets consolidated and much easier to find. Last year it was James Brown; the year before, it was Buck Owens. Right now, it’s George Carlin’s turn.

Thinking about George Carlin for the past week or so has kind of pissed me off. I can still remember how delighted I was to discover him back in 1972 (which, by the way, was inversely proportional to how disgusted my step-father was to discover him). But that seems like only yesterday, and now, just like George I’m getting damn old. And I’m also just about as charmed by the current state of affairs as he was. So, as liberating as his long-haired counter-culture material was to a twelve-year-old boy 35 years ago, the enlightened bitterness of the take-no-prisoners routines from the end of his life end up resonating with me even more.

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Blue-Eyed Soul By The California Poppy Pickers

Published on April 8, 2008 in Trash. 3 Comments Tags: , .

If you’re lucky, and you haunt your local dollar bins long enough, you’ll still find albums on the Alshire label. But the best ones are getting harder and harder to find. You’ll still come across the odd 101 Strings album, provided it doesn’t have hot models in skimpy sixties getups on the cover — most of those were snapped up and shipped overseas long ago. But you’ll almost never find records by the Animated Egg, Doctor Marigold’s Prescription or John Bunyan’s Progressive Pilgrims. You also won’t find too many albums by the subject of this week’s featured fetish, the California Poppy Pickers.

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Wurzburg 1945-1955

Published on March 4, 2008 in Trash. 4 Comments Tags: , .

I had the recent pleasure of spending a cross-country plane ride with “The New Kings of Nonfiction,” a collection edited by “This American Life” host, Ira Glass. As usual, despite the book’s focus on “the new,” it was the old I was most drawn to — specifically, an article on World War II by Lee Sandlin. Though this article was new to me, “Losing The War” is already being hailed as a classic. You can read the whole thing on Lee’s web site.

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1975: And The Changes To Come

Published on February 12, 2008 in Trash. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Nowadays, it’s pretty much over. We’re all slowly coming awake to the realization that we’ve squandered vast tracts of our future for an illusory past, our intellectual capital for a culture that’s lost its memory, our once-noble ambitions for a population hooked on cheap thrills, our emotional strength for a brittle autophobia. Boxed in by increasingly limited options and driven to near madness by denial and distraction, the population casts about uselessly, desperate to ignore the darkness at the periphery. Eruptions occur with increasing frequency, stressing the structure at all strata, applying constant pressure on the facade, laying more and more bare the true face of what’s in store for us. The smart ones are just trying to keep still while they wait for the other shoe to drop — best to not stir up the dust any more than necessary.

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Postcard Collection: Greetings From Phoenix

Published on August 21, 2007 in Obligations, Obsessions, Trash and Treasure. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

I first discovered Michael Monti’s “100 South Mill Avenue” blog after he dropped some praise on my scans of an old menu from his family’s La Casa Vieja restaurant. “As a restaurateur and history buff,” He wrote, “I can assure you that these will be appreciated as a goldmine of nostalgia and useful information about trends in dining and pricing.” Sentiments after my own heart. Michael writes from the vantage point of both a restaurant entrepreneur and a steward of Phoenix’s cultural history. His family happens to do business in one of the area’s most cherished landmarks.

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Things I Should Throw Out: The TV King On A Soapbox

Published on July 24, 2007 in Obligations and Trash. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Tucson merchant Jack “The Color TV King” Fitzgerald carved out a name for himself back in the mid-70s with a series of distinctive late-night television commercials. Standing among a pile of teevee sets and packing crates, he would harangue the viewer with a pitch that always began with a simple, effective, “Hi folks…” You could easily pick up Tucson stations in Phoenix back then, so even my friends and I knew his spiel.

In the fall of 1976, my pal Jack Knetzger sent me this article from Tucson, where he was attending the University Of Arizona. It’s clear from Jack’s enthusiastic circling that what mattered most to him was Fitzgerald’s square family values, his kitschy old school “American Dream” work ethic, and above all, the trappings of his Catholic upbringing (something both Jacks had in common). No doubt the life sized dead Jesus in the living room was the real deal clincher.

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Stamp Collection Part Four: U.S., Britain & Miscellaneous

Published on June 5, 2007 in Trash. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Our stamp series has been so wildly popular among Bostworld readers that I couldn’t resist doing one final episode. This time we bring you two empires, one on the wax and one on the wane, along with some of the smaller satellites pulled along in their wake. While the British Empire both celebrates and defends the trappings of their noble traditions, the United States focuses on the task at hand. Somewhere along the way, amidst the ground shaking footfalls of the superpowers, the smaller nation states engender some growing pains of their own. I wonder: how many readers remember the days of Siam, French Equitorial Africa and the Philippine Islands of the United States of America. I thought so.

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