The Vintage Reader

Dogs like us

Now I'm watching Marty on what is apparently "wallflowers night" on TCM. Marty is so well-written that I find new stuff to quote every five minutes or so, such as:

Marty's cousin Tommy: Well, there's the Stardust Ballroom, that's kind of a big dance hall. Every Saturday night it's loaded with girls. It's a nice place to go. Pay 77 cents... well, it used to be 77 cents, prob'ly a dollar and a half now. You go in there, and you ask some girl to dance with you. It's a nice, respectable... listen, that's where I met Virginia. You tell Marty, Aunt Teresa, you tell him to go to the Stardust Ballroom, it's loaded with tomatahs.
Marty's mother: The Stardusta Ballrooma... loaded with tomatahs.
Tommy: Right.

Okay. About the Stardust Ballroom. What a depressing-looking place. Not any worse than a modern club, I suppose, and certainly the music is a lot better. Although you did have to actually know how to dance, which could be a problem these days. It is indeed loaded with tomatahs. But even the tackiest tomatah isn't as poorly dressed as some of the Wellesley girls at the wedding in the movie I watched last night.

You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.

Why, oh why, didn't I see this movie in high school? I not only knew all the lyrics to "At Seventeen," I transposed it to a different key to make it easier to play on the guitar and arranged the instrumental interlude too. Not to mention "I Am A Rock." I could quote large chunks of The Rainmaker. I was the queen of wallflower quotes. But I never saw Marty until a few months ago.

Oh boy, here comes the world's weirdest courtship speech:

Marty: You see, you're not such a dog as you think you are.

Just what every girl wants to hear.

Marty: So there you are, so I guess I'm not such a dog as I think I am.
Clara: No, you're a very nice guy. I don't know why some girl hasn't grabbed you up long ago.
Marty: I don't know either. I think I'm a very nice guy. I also think I'm a pretty smart guy, in my own way. You know how I figure, two people get married and they're going to live together for forty or fifty years, so it's gotta be more than whether they're just good-lookin' or not. Now you tell me you think you're not so good-lookin', well, my father was a real ugly man, but my mother adored him. She told me how she used to get so miserable sometimes, like everybody, you know? And she says my father always tried to understand. I used to see them sometimes when I was a kid, sittin' in the livin' room, talkin' and talkin', and I used to adore my old man, because he was always so kind. That's one of the most beautiful things I have in my life, the way my father and mother were. And my father was a real ugly man. So it doesn't matter if you look like a gorilla. See, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are.

They just don't write romantic stuff like that anymore!

I'm really tired, but there's one scene I just must transcribe. A few more minutes. Aha, here it is:

Woman at bar: She told me, at the risk of her life...
Other woman at bar: ...she was always a little thin in the hips...
First woman: Well, she told me that the doctor told her if she had any more babies, she'd do it at the risk of her life. When she told me that she already had six. Every time I saw her she was either going to the hospital or coming from it. She was hatching 'em out like eggs.
Second woman: That husband of hers is a skinny little fella, isn't he?
First woman: Well, I bumped into her on the street, and she was as big as a barrel.
Second woman: No!
First woman: I said to her, 'Maeve! Maeve, for heaven's sake, didn't you tell me that if you had another one it'd kill you?'
Second woman: And her husband's a little bit of a man, isn't he?
First woman: Well, last week on Tuesday, she gave birth to her baby in St. Elizabeth's hospital. Fine, healthy boy. Nine pounds!
Second woman: Oh, that's fine! So the doctor was wrong, wasn't he?
First woman: Oh, no, she died. Right there in the hospital.
Second woman: Ah, that's a sad story. And her husband's that little fella, works in [??].
First woman: That's the one.
Second woman: That's a sad story.

Score!

Okay, so I'm watching Now, Voyager on TCM and was fairly proud of myself for recognizing Paul Henreid, but come on--lots of people recognize the guy who played Victor Laszlo. Not that many people would also recognize Virginia Weidler. Ha! Unless they remember her fabulous rendition of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" from The Philadelphia Story, anyway.

Damn, I wish I could make money off stuff like this.

Good to know?

I'm watching Mona Lisa Smile, which takes place in the 50s, and Julia Roberts just used the phrase "good to know." I am itching to find out whether that really is, as I suspect, an anachronism, but I checked the Dictionary of American Slang back in to the library this week. Drat.

(Oh, and BTW, don't bother renting this movie. It's slow, boring, and predictable. I rented it primarily for the costumes, but they're not great either.)

No way to win friends and influence people

When I was young (and sometimes not even so young), my mother's favorite thing to say when I was misbehaving was "That's no way to win friends and influence people!" That phrase has been in my head a lot this week for various reasons, so I decided to pull out my old copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Norman Vincent Peale, and find out what is a way to win friends and influence people. Some excerpts:

THE BIG SECRET OF DEALING WITH PEOPLE

There is only one way under high Heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

Peale goes on to say that the big thing that everyone wants is to feel important. In fact, he says, "It is this desire which lures many boys into becoming gangsters and gunmen. 'The average young criminal of today,' says E. P. Mulrooney, former Police Commissioner of New York, 'is filled with ego, and his first request after arrest is for those lurid newspapers that make him out a hero. The disagreeable prospect of taking a 'hot squat' in the electric chair seems remote, so long as he can gloat over his likeness sharing space with pictures of Babe Ruth, LaGuardia, Einstein, Lindbergh, Toscanini, or Roosevelt.'"

SIX WAYS TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE YOU
(I'm just going to list them here; each one is a chapter, but he sums them up at the end)

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Smile.
3. Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in the English language. [I wonder: is that where people picked up that annoying technique of saying your name in every sentence? I get really sick of that.]
4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5. Talk in terms of the other man's interests.
6. Make the other person feel important--and do it sincerely.

This does have a nice refreshing feel to it, doesn't it? Everywhere you go everyone's always talking about themselves. I do it too, of course. I'm doing it right now! Oh well.

IN A NUTSHELL: TWELVE WAYS OF WINNING PEOPLE TO YOUR WAY OF THINKING

1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
2. Show respect for the other man's opinions. Never tell a man he is wrong.
3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
4. Begin in a friendly way.
5. Get the other person saying "yes, yes" immediately.
6. Let the other man do a great deal of the talking.
7. Let the other man feel that the idea is his.
8. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
9. Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires.
10. Appeal to the nobler motives.
11. Dramatize your ideas.
12. Throw down a challenge.

That's all for today; I need to go clean the house. Tomorrow: Nine Ways to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment.

It's Phantasmagoric

Aha! Here it is: The Phantasmagoria.

UPDATE: I've now watched this about 10 times and it keeps getting better. I just noticed the pattern of the bricks on the ground is the pattern of the bricks at Bell's. If there was just an "I got my hickey on the HIMALAYA!" bumper sticker...

Fun. Secret fun.

Great retro stuff at Secret Fun Spot. I'm still looking for that Phantasmagoria animation, but even without it, I'd know this guy grew up in Tulsa because I clicked on "Star Wars Fakes" and found... most of the toy aisle of Skagg's at 51st and Harvard, circa 1977-78. It's all there. The Space Sword. The little wind-up robot with the blue plastic dome that looked just like R2D2. The Loki action figure (although to be fair, Space Academy was not a Star Wars fake). If somewhere on the site he had glow-in-the-dark ghost finger puppets and water games, I'd know for sure.

Vintage TV

Just now, on a whim, I did a Google search on the phrase "I will tune in to All Night Live." And I found what I was looking for: Uncle Ed Muscari.

In the early days of basic cable, you used to get local stations from other places in the country (as distinguished from cable networks, if there are any VR readers under 35). Every night during the summer of 1981 I stayed up late, drank some kind of citrusy Kool-Aid and ate pretzels, played solitaire on the floor of my mother's living room, and watched Uncle Ed.

First, you took the pledge:

I promise every night at eleven
I will tune in to All Night Live.
A faithful viewer I will always be
I ain't handin' you no jive.

And then: WKRP (back before the music was replaced), followed by Twilight Zone. At some point I remember that Topper showed, and then there was a movie.

I miss that kind of cable. Hell, I miss that kind of television. Local programming, cheap sets, hosts with strange little routines...

And hey, since it's Friday night and I'm watching Star Trek (well, DS9), I'm also reminded of the Plenty Scary Movie (for a real treat, be sure to watch the video of the trailer... courtesy of Uncle Zeb!). Every Friday night, fourth grade through, oh, about seventh, when I started going to Skate World on Friday nights, I would stay up and watch Trek (TOS: that's The Original Series, for non-Trek types) at 10:30, then the Plenty Scary Movie at 11:30. It was even more fun if a friend was spending the night.

At some point the Plenty Scary Movie went away. I was in high school by then, playing in the marching band every Friday night in the fall, going to Rocky Horror during the rest of the year (that's right: my friends and I went every week. Every. Week. It wasn't on television, it wasn't even on tape. You learned the lines by spending three bucks to see it at the theater every weekend at the midnight movie, not from a book or a web site or in some kind of stupid Pop-Up Video knockoff).

It took me years to notice that there was no more Plenty Scary Movie. It was the same with local channels on cable; they were just gone one day, and I didn't notice until I had to buy 200 channels to get five worth watching.

And BTW, if in some strange and interesting universe the blogosphere and the afterlife intersect, I hope that my friend John can read this and know that growing up would have been pretty damn boring without him to introduce me to Rocky Horror, Gilda Live, Evita, OKon, Dr. Who, Twin Peaks, Cooper and Paulette, Monty Python, Douglas Adams, the Bandiemobile, Divine, Bob's Pig Shop, and Hot Spots of Oklahoma--and a lot of other similar stuff that keeps coming back to me. If only I could hit rewind, I'd go back a couple of weeks and tell him myself.

I gotcher retro outlet covers.

Looking for retro-looking, modern (but not necessarily up to code in your area) electrical supplies and lighting? Try Rejuvenation.

[NOTE (1/30/05): I've now corrected the URL.]

Dorm life

Here's a circa 1955 rulebook for life in the women's dorm at the University [of? Now it's "at" but it might have been "of" then] Buffalo. From the great new student life site from the University archives at UB.

Mysteries for summer

Get some ideas here: A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection

Sunday school

Here's a parable for you: The War Prayer

Courtesy of Mark Twain and The Dream Palaces, by way of The Gutless Pacificist.

Catching up

I've been lax in posting here recently. In looking at my referrer logs, I notice that a lot of people are searching on Genevieve Antoine D'ariaux, probably because there's a new book in the chick lit genre that's built around Elegance. I haven't read it yet, and I'm not going to link to it unless I do. I may not; I have a deep and abiding hatred of chick lit, but I do realize that there's a lot of potentially good writing by women that gets packaged as chick lit because that's what's selling right now. But anyway, since it's Saturday morning and I'm not really doing anything, I thought I'd find some good stuff from Elegance to post here.

FOLKLORE
Oh, how great is the temptation to buy a gondolier's hat in Venice or a cowboy's in Texas, the skirt of a Flamenco dancer in Seville, or the apron of a peasant in the Austrian Tyrol! A friendly word of advice: Control yourself. First of all, you will make yourself ridiculous in the eyes of the native population (which is not really so serious since you do not even know them); but afterward, if you insist on bringing these picturesque articles back home with you and if you do not immediately make a present of them to a child under ten years old, you will make yourself ridiculous in your own eyes, a much more uncomfortable situation. [There's much, much more about making placemats out of saris, and some rather condescending remarks about how "exotic ladies are a thousand times more alluring when dressed in their own native garb." Generally I try not to impose today's sensibilities on yesterday's writers, but I have a feeling Genevieve would have sounded kind of insensitive and snobbish even in her own time.]

You know what? I can't blog Genevieve anymore, now that someone else has used her as a literary prop. This isn't to say that I don't think that a character who tries to make herself over according to Genevieve isn't a great idea, and one I tried myself, in 1984. But now it feels like I'm copying, as though I were writing spam poetry or something.

I'm not going to delete all that typing I just did, though.

So let me get this straight...

The secret to bookselling success is a pretty cover, not much depth--or many words, either--and appeal to old people.

Sigh.