beyond the roots of lounge

Broadway World reports that Liza Minnelli's Peabody and Emmy award-winning camp fest, Liza With A "Z", will be reaired on Showtime for the first time since its original and only broadcast on NBC in 1972. You may not recall that Liza, daughter of icon Judy (with a "G") Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, was a huge triple-threat star in the shadow of her mother before her, prior to Liza's stays in rehab and second career as a beard for the likes of Peter Allen and David Gest. Nowadays we assume the "Z" could stand for Zoloft, but Liza, a Tony winner at 19, had just starred in Cabaret back in '72, when she was at the peak of her powers and apex of her career. She could do a lot more than fall down on cue in those days, so prepare to set your TiVos on stun.

In other few-degrees-of-separation from the Rat Pack news, Jerry Lewis will receive this year's Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Lewis was a lounge, film and TV legend even before (some would argue, despite) his Labor Day telethon, held each year since 1966 to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy, a disease that was not (no matter what Lenny Bruce said) actually caused by Lewis.

If the L.A. Times has declared end times for the hipster, we say it's high time to revisit the language of the perpetually groovy. Learn it, live it and speak it using the proper Received Pronunciation at the BBC World Service's Retro English, which covers the 70s through the 90s. (Ah, the 90s: how long ago, how quaint.) The classic guide to classic hepcat-speak is the 1959 Del Close comedy album How To Speak Hip. (Or here, as seen in the seminal trash-culture classic The Catalog of Cool.) Like, there are without a doubt a bunch of jazzbo vocab hot spots and zoot suiter-lingo lexicons scattered throughout the cyberverse, but we'll just have to anachronistically catch those on the flip-flop, good buddies.

We see that experts people who are paid for their opinions are starting to agree with a long-held tenet of ours here at Beyond The Roots of Lounge: most of today's stars, especially the "men," are forgettable, interchangeable cyphers created by a Svengali class that thinks (or has "research" to "prove") that young people won't watch or listen to any work made by humans who are more than 5 years older than themselves. Occasionally, this strategy works. In general, we're calling bulls**t on your theory, moguls.

Grown-up men are Lounge, helium-voiced pop tartlets and the kits of boy-parts they lurve are incredibly Not Lounge.

Frank, Dino, Sammy--and the original King of All Media, Bing: real men. Tom Jones: he-male. Tony Christie, Tony Bennett: guys' guys. Isaac Hayes and Barry White want to show you their etchings , not their Pokemon collection--and even Smokey Robinson's falsetto sounds like it's coming out of a guy who can legally buy you a drink afterwards. To the chubby-chasers of his day, Jackie Gleason was a hottie.

Humphrey Bogart is the quintessential interesting-looking-yet-not-pretty movie star; the keepers of his brand have enough confidence in Bogie's manhood to allow him to posthumously endorse his own line of home furnishings. Elvis, mama's boy though he may have been, was still all-man. Rock Hudson may have been as queer as the proverbial Raymond Burr, but on-screen, he gave off plenty of studly man-vibes. (What he was transmitting to the cats with the sensitive gadar--we'll take that up another time.)

Virtually any pre-80s leading man--even the Troy Donahues and James Darrens of the classic movie world--they were grown-up men, not vacant young lads with identical haircuts and waxy, nondescript torsos that are about as exciting as a Ken doll.
(Dwayne Hickman, TV's Dobie Gillis--at 25 he was a boy, his role the prototype for all of contemporary media's incomprehensibly similar pretty boys.)

Sometime in the early 80s, the research departments came in and the gut instincts went out. Keep putting out the product well-stocked with mannequins, entertainment industry--just don't pout like a boy-band because your public prefers to roll its own culture.

Singers, actors, singer-actor-dancers:
when they shave every day, they can give us a call.

Released by San Francisco's Other Cinema, The 70s Dimension is a two-part compilation of ephemeral 70s commercials, stock and industrial footage. Part one presents the material raw, to show the unsuspecting viewer "what the 70s really looked like" (you poor, deluded youngsters); part two is the commentary-as-remix. We haven't been this excited about a sweet 70s product since the demise of Jello 1-2-3. [World-wide circulation of this item with no attribution to us coming in 3...2...1...--Ed.]

While we're on the subject, check out Habitat '67, a modular housing development that is still mod as hell. Habitat, constructed for Expo '67, was the prefab brain child of architect and overachiever Moshe Safdie--just 26 years old when his undergrad thesis project was built in Montreal as the symbol of a World's Fair.

The project is emblematic both of the 60s utopian ideal and of its aftermath: designed to demonstrate affordable modular housing on an urban scale, Habitat '67 is now a luxury habitat for the shareholders in its co-op association. Tours are also available.

We don't recall that the King ever portrayed an architect in any of his films movies. Can you imagine Elvis in a musical version of The Fountainhead? [Not unless he was flying or driving. However, we understand that Elvis was a voracious reader who may well have had a copy of Atlas Shrugged on his nightstand, right between The Prophet and the PDR. --Ed.]

Now might be an appropriate time to embrace the motto "peace through understanding" and marvel at some swanky Lounge-era World's Fair tribute sites. Official international expositions can run for a year only; that's one of several reasons why the 1964-65 New York World's Fair was considered "unofficial."

These Space Age corporate mass-marketing gatherings obviously made a huge impact on those who were fortunate enough to attend, and the continuing interest in the history of World's Fairs, their exhibits and memorabilia truly transcends nostalgia. (Although there seems to be quite a bit of cross-over between World's Fair fans and Disney enthusiasts, not surprising since an international exposition is basically a temporary theme park.)

Internationalists and marketers may have more efficient means of getting their messages across today, yet World's Fairs still fascinate--and they are still being held. There's one going on right now in Japan, with others scheduled for Spain in 2008 and China in 2010.

From an interview in no less a newspaper of record than the Asbury Park Press, TV's Batman reflects on his continued involvement with the franchise:

Q: Are you enjoying doing the voice of the Commissioner on the animated series "The Batman"?
A: Sure, sure. Just send the checks.

Its hierarchy is made up entirely of basses and tenors whose elaborate formal attire includes big hats and pointy shoes, and who are copious consumers of incense and sweet red wine. No, no--not the chorus of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. Of course we're talking about the Catholic Church, purveyors of the breathtakingly non-p.c., yet sweetly retro artifact Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, a series of comic books distributed to parochial school students between 1946 and 1972, during the height of the Cold War and the Golden Age of Lounge. And don't let the wings fool you: even a bunch of blasphemers such as we can tell that the guy in the colorful jumpsuit is Satan.

We've long had the National Lampoon on our Lounge agenda (because every bachelor of a certain age had a subscription, in part so that there would be something on the coffee table in the john other than Playboy or Penthouse for the ladies to leaf through while sir they freshened up their libations). How timely of the New York Times to help fill in the blanks about the current, somewhat pathetic status of the NatLamp brand, now used mainly to sell spring break excursion packages and bad movies rather than the wit and wisdom of this generation's Michael O'Donoghues and Bruce McCalls. Biggest news: the owners are in the process of digitizing every issue. (They can stop at 1979.) Can one of those DVD retrospectives be far behind?

At the Cooper-Hewitt Natoinal Design Museum, design your own mod room incorporating iconic furniture, objects and wallcoverings from either the Arts & Crafts or Modern period. It's great fun, though each period is limited to its own set of resources--so no putting that Martin Brothers vase in the same room with the Eames lounge chair, even if they would look fabulous together...

Hint: it starts with an "R." AdWeek's AdFreak is freaking out because apparently the Larry Tates of the world now have polling data that suggests the Marlboro Man is an endangered species. Others have a more enlightened view:

A Retrosexual doesn't worry about living to be 90. It's not how long you live, but how well. If you're 90 years old and still smoking cigars and drinking, I salute you.

This sceptered isle...this blessed plot...this Earth, this realm...man, these people have way too much time on their hands...

Nobody does Web nostalgia quite like the British. It could be the aristo blood, cut with alcohol, still coursing through their veins. Or simply that they have several millennia worth of civilization to document, celebrate and obsess over. The British are a nostalgic people, and the monarchy proves it.

Raising a train spotting obsession with minutia to an art form, anoraks with varying interests document their pop cultural detritus with a stunning degree of completism.

Pages highlighting television network i.d. slides and continuity announcements are part of larger sites that chronicle virtually every aspect of broadcasting history in the U.K. as seen and collected by the viewers and fans. The site for radio obsessives is even called Anorak Nation.

Sterling Times celebrates "Uncool Britannia" with a site dedicated to "Englishness and Patriotism" and incorporating horses. (Clearly this is a branch of the Village Green Preservation Society that Ray Davies tried to warn us about.) The Brit obsession with nostalgia isn't limited to amateurs. The upscale grocery chain Waitrose devotes a section of its site to food nostalgia.

It is the opinion of the Editors that nostalgia for its own sake is neither wild, cool nor swinging. Nostalgia is a weed-like industry that purposely inhibits the growth of contemporary culture; if everything is retro, nothing about retro is very interesting. Nostalgia for its own sake is conservative, safe--and it is Not Lounge. However, humans will always have a deep-seated need to reminisce about the past and look at its "cool stuff." So no matter how bad the present day may look to you now, somebody will be remembering it fondly in approximately 7 to 10 years. (5 years minutes or less, if they are a VH1 viewer.)

It's officially okay to be a person of informed and discriminating taste in crap, according to curator David Pagel in the Los Angeles Times:

Pop and connoisseurship are no longer opposed. Sophistication is not limited to highbrow cultivation but encompasses enthusiasms that cut across classes, arising wherever passion has room to pursue its own ends, on its own terms.

The Lounge revival came and went between then and then, so the exemplars of "easy listening" collected for the original 1996 album that bears this title aren't exactly the same ones heard on Virgin's 2004 This Is Easy compilation.

At least a third of the 52 tracks from the original This Is Easy were replaced for the 2004 edition. For example, the newer version swaps the Sergio Mendes' cover of "Chelsea Morning" for his "Mais Que Nada," and substitutes Billy J. Kramer's "Trains & Boats & Planes" for Jack Jones' "Wives and Lovers." Burt Bacharach is still all over this thing, but B.J. Thomas' soundtrack smash "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," is out, and Cilla Black's original U.K. hit version of "Alfie" is in. (Issac Hayes' iconic take on "The Look of Love" is present and accounted for on both editions.) Also held over from round one are such gems as "Avenues and Alleyways" (the theme from Robert Vaughn's ITC series The Protectors), Noel Harrison's aggressively deadpan reading of "The Windmills of Your Mind," instro-classic "The Riviera Affair," and Honeybus' exquisite baroque-schlock "I Can't Let Maggie Go."

It doesn't matter at all whether the changes were made strictly because licenses expired and could not be renewed at a favorable rate, or because the producers thought they would extend the brand with examples of the genre that had become more familiar to Gens X & Y in the interim, like the Mike Flowers Pops version of Oasis' "Wonderwall," Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin's "Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus" or Quincy Jones' "Soul Bossa Nova" (as heard to such great effect in the Austin Powers franchise).

If the changes to this edition mean that This Is Easy no longer evokes quite the same ambered fantasy of the Swinging Sixties and Synthetic Seventies as the original--it comes close enough for its target demo, many of whom are too young to have been conceived to this music. Even in this altered state, This Is Easy still gives about the best value-for-money of any major label cash-in from the 90s Lounge revival. (Its only real challenger is the Rhino Cocktail Mix series.) Whichever version you can get your hands on, if your collection includes but one jet-set camp compilation classic, let This Is Easy be that one.

Radar | Vanity Fair

One outs Deep Throat, the other gives it. Radar is simply the best new magazine in any category. It is very Lounge. It is delightfully shallow, in all the right ways.

Tina Brown's VF was Lounge; while we deeply appreciate the political coverage, Graydon Carter's VF is Not Lounge and would have to get back to its Brown-era core mix of Tales of Old Hollywood, Minor European Royalty and Big-Time Business Corruption before it bellied back up to our bar. The country may need the political coverage way too much to wish for that right now, so we'll just rely on Radar when we want a little light pinging reading. (No wonder Gawker couldn't shut-the-hell-up about the advance copies of Radar for months before Radar finally came out onto newstands.)

ETA: Radar, R.I.P.

The atmosphere reeks of clove cigarettes, everyone is in their most basic black and the proprietor offers you some Friendly Morbidity. You're in a part of town you've never heard about before, right near the intersection of Goth and Retro, outside the Dead Lounge. There's somebody at the bar who wants to buy you a drink if you'll look at their prized collection of cemetery photographs. How can you walk by without going in?

Kate Pierson of the B-52s (those pioneers of Lounge-appreciation) owns her own très-retro boutique hospitality cabins in the Woodstock, NY area: Kate's Lazy Meadow Motel. With fab-50s eat-in/drink-in kitchens and knotty-pine "rustic" decor as well as all the contemporary amenities, this motel's not just mod, it's also modern. Perfect for all of your Hudson Valley house hunting and antiquing needs; the Lazy Meadow may be run by a Kate, but it's no Shady Rest.

Coming soon from Chronicle Books, a new monograph (scholarly art book all about him) on the work of JoSH AGle, SHAG--who is the Swankiest Illustrator on Earth. He practically defines the 21st Century version of the postwar aesthetic; if you're into it, any one of his pictures probably looks like a really great place to live. SHAG's early-Space Age dream world is sublimely fluorescent, organic and angular at the same time--and, if you buy an original acrylic painting or a gallery-quality lithograph, pricey. So get two copies of the new book: one to cherish and the other to...well, you know, use in a little home improvement project, or something.