Last week, despite another looming winter storm, Jason Klamm was able to make the drive up from Detroit to join me and a great little audience in conversation about his new book We’re Not Worthy: How ’90s Sketch TV Changed the Face of Comedy (available in Mt. Pleasant at Sleepy Dog Books and online here from 1984 productions). Here’s the recording of the full discussion, with some audience questions.
Two of my favorite highlights include when (1) it occurred to me, as I was sounding it out, that shows like The State were my punk rock before I discovered actual punk rock, and (2) Jason revealed how he almost got a role in the Weird Al biopic (and the person who replaced him).
Thank you again to Barb Sanford, Andrea Graham, and everybody at the Veterans Memorial Library for making this happen, and thank you to everybody who braved the weather and made it by.
Happy Monday! Here’s a friendly reminder for this event I’m very excited to host tomorrow evening in Mt. Pleasant. It starts at 6pm and is free. 301 S. University Avenue.
I hope this Thursday going into Halloweekend is treating you well, wherever you are.
If you happen to be in Central Michigan or thereabouts, come and see me and Lisa tonight at Summit Smokehouse in Mt. Pleasant, where we’ll be producing and hosting a spirited evening of Horror Movie Trivia. It begins at 7pm.
Wherever you are, there is a brilliantly researched and presented article by Mike McQuade about the Marx Brothers’ performing history in Brooklyn in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Their embedding format required that I post/press it separately at the prior entry, so go ahead and scroll down, or just look at the full article in the original context here, because trying to use anything on the internet for actual learning is increasingly more frightening than almost any horror movie.
Full slide show below During the early decades of the 20th century the fledgling recording, motion picture and radio broadcast industries were poised to rival and eventually surpass vaudeville, America’s primary form of popular entertainment. Many vaudeville attractions faded into oblivion. Several acts, however, endured through vaudeville’s waning years. Such was the case with The Marx […]
Haricot Vert Films recently released this short documentary about Tropea’s Custom Barber’s a long-standing Cleveland Park barbershop. It’s positioned as a story about an old Italian-American guy who happened to cut the hair of numerous DC punk legends back in the 1980’s, but it quickly expands into a multigenerational story about lasting bonds in a storied community and a heartfelt portrait of a changing city. In early 1996 (25 years prior to this documentary’s release), Scott Bowles snapshotted the decline of traditional barbershops in the Washington Post, which is also worth a read if you have access.
Postcards from Irving Vol. 4 is out now, and in color!
Those with subscriptions should have yours by this weekend, and if you’d like one, please drop me a line via email or mail (PO Box 1309, Mount Pleasant, MI 48804). More info is here. Here’s the masthead and index of this quarter’s issue:
THE SUPPLEMENTS
The Hialeah Park (1970s-1990s?) Club House (?), which is mentioned in Volume 4’s ‘July All Year Round’ installment. It included one photo; here is the rest of the set. All contextual information can be found in the printed version.
I will also present this with absolutely no context. I promise it will make sense if you read Postcards from Irving Vol. 4, though. Incentives!
Thank you to the Honors students who came tonight for my special PDP lecture on how Minstrelsy/Blackface are Baked into American Popular Culture, several of whom braving the poorly-numbered hallways of the Dow Scienceplex for the first time. A special thank you to my colleague Ben Heumann, too, who came to check it out because, as he put it, “this is why we have a University” – exposing our brains to a diversity of research topics. Also, our conversation with students afterward inspired me to record a few thoughts before they disappeared. I figured that I would share them as a companion piece to the lecture, in case anybody is interested. If you are reading this and would like to see the recording, please reach out.
First of all, I thanked my colleague Bryan Whitledge from the Clarke Archive, who contributed some references to Minstrel shows at CMU in the 1920s and 1950s(!) that added a crucial local connection to the lecture, such as this image from the 1924 Chippewa yearbook:
Second, I referenced the Australian comedian Aamer Rahman in passing, but I should have given him a more explicit tribute in influencing critical ideas about hip-hop and white privilege when these posts circulated nine years ago. One thing I mentioned when posting a slide featuring Vanilla Ice, Elvis Presley, Iggy Azalea, Eminem, and Yung Gravy was that I wished I could have split the lecture up into two class periods to invite a deeper discussion. Rahman was hardly as diplomatic with his words about Iggy Azalea at the height of her “Fancy” chart success, and I’m grateful his thoughts are still easily accessible.
Third, one student commented that she appreciated that someone who teaches classes in Geography and Environmental Studies would deliver a lecture on such a differing topic. I was grateful for her saying that, but the deeper I plunge, the more I find in common between Minstrelsy/Popular Culture, environmental justice, gender studies, and other topics. When racist caricatures get “baked in” to pop culture, we run the risk of forgetting their context just because the ingredients aren’t distinct anymore. We fail to address the racist origins of (way more) American Popular Culture (than we want to admit) for similar reasons that we fail to address racist/classist reasons of why and where toxic waste is buried. A refusal to openly address feelings is a hallmark of toxic masculinity. I wish I had thought of this for my concluding statement, but will definitely include it whenever I present on this subject again.
Fourth, I told those in attendance that it originated as a unit in my Popular Culture class at Tennessee and I was eager to dust it off, but I didn’t say how I wound up preoccupied with the Minstrel show as an academic focus.
The preamble is that when I was in undergrad, at least one “blackface incident” happened every year somewhere in the campus community. The public response was typically a tepid “well that guy was dumb, but he’ll get his what-for and let’s move past it.” This was a decade before Justin Simien satirized the phenomenon in Dear White People (2014), and so many of my cohort had no idea about the history behind blackface and what specifically made it offensive. There’s also a much larger conversation about segregation, and how the neoliberal University reinforces it, somewhere in there.
In the mid-2010’s, once I began doing archival research into old/extinct theaters Ben Irving played, I noticed an increasing prevalence of these collar-pulling photos. The more I learned about Jewish entertainers like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and George Burns (the latter of whom remained extremely relevant until his death in 1996 at age 100), the less I could avoid learning about minstrelsy. I would inevitably turn a page in some book about Eddie Cantor, and YIKES I DIDN’T NEED TO SEE THAT. Similarly, in a recent lecture about the film industry’s transition to sound, some students googled The Jazz Singer and recoiled at a variety of images of Jolson in blackface. To omit minstrelsy from the discussion about vaudeville, particularly from any focus on the rise of Jewish performers, would be irresponsible at best and ignorant at worst. To not confront that reality and ask difficult questions about how far we’ve come (or not) in discussing race would be similarly irresponsible of me as a teacher.
Finally, in updating my lecture for Thursday, I completely overlooked one highly contentious pop culture icon in embedded minstrelsy that landed in my lap courtesy of the riotous Nathan Rabin (who also happens to be Jewish) in his fantastic collection The Joy of Trash (self-published 2022):
As the millennium ended, [George] Lucas was still drawing inspirations from old movies, rather than an outside world that seemed to scare him. It’s not surprising, therefore, that his first film as a director in over two decades traffics extensively in antiquated racist stereotypes.
There is no such thing as benign racism. By its very nature, racism is malignant. But there are gradations of racism. There’s the harsh, brutal racism of Nazis, the KKK, and the Alt-Right. There’s also a softer version that angrily insists that a moderate amount of racism and bigotry is not only acceptable but necessary for society to function.
White people love soft racism because it replaces an honest, deeply challenging, and unflattering narrative of institutionalized anti-black racism with a dishonest, but more flattering, fantasy of endless Caucasian benevolence.
pp 166-167
To quote Trav S.D.’s blog disclaimer whenever his research unearths an image of a white actor in blackface: “Caucasians-in-Blackface is NEVER okay. It was bad then, and it’s bad now. We occasionally show images depicting the practice, or refer to it in our writing, because it is necessary to tell the story of American show business, which like the history of humanity, is a mix of good and bad.”
[To wit: someone, somewhere in the USA is probably lobbying some school board to prevent their kid from being taught about this because white people’s feelings or something.]
Somewhere, buried deep within my summer to-do list, is a low-priority item to re-tally my Blur collection. The collection includes all physical items of audio and video (still haven’t pulled the trigger on that elusive laserdisc) as well as promotional items and reading materials focused on the band. I’m already eagerly awaiting a stateside release announcement of Graham Coxon’s forthcoming autobiography, so I can put it next to Alex James’ first book. Also, this reminds me that I need to get my hands on Alex James’ second book (the one about cheese).
On a recent trip to Ohio, I stopped into one of my favorite massive independent (there really should be no other kind, and before long there likely won’t) bookstores and discovered the On Track series by Burning Shed publishing. To my shock, Blur were one of the first artists included. Essex musician Matt Bishop took on the enviable unenviable task of writing about every song Blur have ever released and likely some they haven’t.
The first comprehensive song-story book I ever owned was Niall Stokes’ U2 compendium, which Thunder’s Mouth Press released in the interim between Zooropa and Pop. At the time, I didn’t know I would ever write about music and place (ostensibly) for a living, but needless to say, it was inspirational. Every song does have a story behind it – an ethos would no doubt inspire Continuum to start the 33 1/3 series in 2003. Even the most obscure B-sides and demo tracks may have more interesting stories than the biggest hit. When I first read Into the Heart, I had a rudimentary understanding (at best) of what B-sides even were.
Bishop’s book on Blur has been enjoyable thus far. My lack of musical theory background does hinder it at moments where the musician-author gets fanboyish and technical over Graham Coxon’s chords and swerves, but I have nothing but love and respect for anyone willing to take on a task as unforgiving and headache-inducing as writing comprehensively about every single one of a superstar band’s recordings. And that’s coming from ME.
What I love most about going through Bishop’s vignettes has been how it’s given me a new lease on just why I like accumulating Blur materials. I never sprang for the 21 box, as I already owned most of the albums and, being in grad school, I couldn’t justify the expense on CD’s. A decade later, YouTube’s rampant monetization has made an endless rabbit hole of obscure recordings available at the push of a button. That being said, it’s overwhelming when you have literally anything better to do with your time, especially away from a keyboard or off of your phone. I still feel like I’ve heard less than half of Blur’s recordings, and I’ve been a fan for over 25 years. I’m fine with that, though, because I’m learning new things on almost every page of Matt Bishop’s book. As much as a handful of my favorite bands are less known, I love being a Blur super-fan, because there are always more recordings and more material out there to discover. I can’t even imagine what Beatles completists must go through.
Take, for example, an alternate, rocked out version of “Far Out,” which was, for at least a decade, available only via the 1999 “No Distance Left to Run” DVD-single (oh right…they made those, didn’t they?) and file sharing piracy. I knew that “Far Out” was recorded late in the Parklife sessions and remains the only Blur album track on which Alex James sang lead, but I didn’t realize they recorded any other version of it. The 1994 release was a cool aside but hardly an album highlight. The 1999 alternate version release is something else entirely. As off-kilter as this can be at times, I still love it:
Bishop also goes into details about the Parklife recording sessions based off of Steven Street’s camcorder footage, which disappeared from YouTube after being posted many years ago. Fortunately, somebody downloaded the footage from STreet’s website and re-uploaded it to YouTube, so I will embed it here. As I say about any streaming audio or video, enjoy it until it disappears again.
Like a lot of academics who prize their reading (for fun) time, I have a habit of starting approximately three books in the process of finishing one. This is generally because I spend a lot of time in bookstores, and I can’t help that publishers have been loading shelves of late with enticing new non-fiction with enticing new covers. The University of Nebraska Press did masterfully to release a burst of dormant endorphins in the recesses of my Gen-Y brain with the cover to Brad Balukjian’s mid-2010’s travelogue, The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife. The artwork mimics the 1986 Topps baseball card packs to a T, and the book’s descriptor immediately clicked as something almost directly curated to my interests. The author’s bio on the back cover also revealed a kindred spirit: a history lecturer who owns a VCR. Also, I just saw that this book found a publisher after 38 rejections, so, more relatability right there.
From TheSixFifty.com
Regarding the book itself, I am of several minds. To be fair to Balukjian, there is an ember of jealousy in me that he got to be the one to both have this adventure and splatter his personality all over these pages. I did wince at moments, remembering my own experiences being shut down or ignored by potentially pivotal interview subjects. His persistence and fearlessness in engaging even distant relatives of certain players is hard not to admire. He also responsibly acknowledges some ethical dekes on his part, including lying about wanting to buy a rich-person golf-munity home in Southwestern Florida on the chance of running into the notoriously elusive Carlton Fisk at the clubhouse. One of my favorite moments in the whole book (perhaps showing my hand as a researcher forced to operate under late capitalism) came at the end of that sequence, when Balukjian’s fib gets him a free fine-dining lunch. I’m sure there were some embarrassing moments of explaining his presence somewhere (or being escorted out) that he may have omitted, but the candidness of Brad’s research methods were highly relatable and educational, as much as they would likely not stand up to IRB scrutiny.
I have been critical in the past about the insufferable Gen-Y/Millennial propensity to find an audience for their premature memoirs by using some pop-cultural Trojan Horse. Two that spring to mind are the documentary Dear Mr. Watterson and Jack of All Trades. The former uses Calvin and Hobbes to tell Joel Schroeder’s story, and the latter focuses on the same subject matter as Balukjian, albeit more tragically, insufferably, and self-effacingly on part of Stuart Eisenstein. Neither are essential, but I’d still recommend both if you’re anywhere near my demographic.
A positive spin on this came at various moments when Brad reached into his long-term battle with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which usually thickened the narrative and helped contextualize his level of dedication to an array of subjects. Also, OCD is an over-used catch-all term by people who really don’t understand much about it. I was unfortunately in that group until reading an old acquaintance’s zine about his adult life with the illness, ceasing outright to use the term casually. I would imagine this book would do the same for a reader with a similarly myopic understanding.
I won’t deny that Balukjian could have kept some of his personal tangents to himself, but I acknowledge it would be hypocritical of me as a someone who encourages writers to “put their personality into their writing.” A generation of Americans who don’t remember life before Reality TV have been conditioned to expect some type of highly personal juice (e.g. mental health and/or sex confessionals) woven into a project’s greater DNA. The publisher may have had a hand in nudging Balukjian to include those asides, and I may be in the minority to say so, but whenever he diverted from the lives of his baseball cards, I couldn’t avoid getting distracted.
Whether or not the personal expose superstructure is your thing, I’m not going to throw stones at Balukjian. It’s easy to criticize an abstraction (millennial memoirs-in-disguise) when you ignore a couple of wider, sadder realities. Nostalgia is certainly a helluva drug (as reflected in my usage of a nearly-two decade old Chappelle’s Show reference), and it’s nothing that ’80s babies can claim. Shit; one of the first pop songs most of us remember learning the lyrics to was “Kokomo,” a song that effectively sound-tracked the Baby Boomers’ descent into, to quote Todd in the Shadows, “sad, paunchy middle age.” It also put Mike Love into the driver’s seat of Beach Boys, Incorporated , whose brand for the past three decades has been reminding old people about how great their adolescence was and trying to get young people on board.
One thing I wish Balukjian had expanded was asking that inevitable question of what happened to baseball cards. At least twice he gives cursory nods to a cocktail of overproduction, the rise of the internet, and a declining interest in Major League Baseball (that 1994 strike was a real kick in the teeth, and not just because it inspired Fox to give Joe Rogan his first sitcom job). He includes one glimpse of a more critical discussion in the epilogue, when former Topps factory employees mention “outsourcing” before changing the subject. The Jack of All Trades documentary approached the question more centrally, including an amazingly thoughtful interview with Jose Canseco about how much trading card manufacturers steered the resale market in the pre-internet age. None of Balukjian’s subjects here, both the wonderfully hospitable and enthusiastic (e.g. Jaime Cocanower, Garry Templeton, Randy Ready) and the less so (e.g. walking brand/enigma Carlton Fisk, the embattled Doc Gooden, and notorious asshole Vince Coleman) had much to say about trading cards. Many of them were still involved in baseball coaching and player development, some lamented the game having changed in broad terms, but none really offered any further insights into just how and why things changed so much in the ’90s (the decade most of them retired).
As Sports Illustrated reported recently, Major League Baseball is inching their way toward drastic adaptations which may be necessary to ensure the Great American Pastime isn’t some hollow shell of itself by its “200th birthday” in 2039. Granted, the 1839 birthdate and Abner Doubleday mythology were cooked up by the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939 to help breathe life back into baseball following a prolonged identity crisis on the heels of the Great Depression. Again, millennials aren’t the first generation preyed upon with a nostalgia-laced breadcrumb trail.
Then again, crazier things have happened. There are still boomers in horse-blinds who assume nobody under 60 listens to music on vinyl anymore. Nobody can predict the future, especially not Brad Balukjian, who has no problem stirring up a fun cocktail of pasts here: his OCD-affected personal and professional life, the sordid (and wholesome) trials and tribulations of more than a dozen different people who were lucky enough to earn Major League paychecks in 1986, and all the places around the country where those lives intersected or didn’t. I never really appreciated this about baseball cards during their peak and glut in the early ’90s, but thinking on books and documentaries on this era, adult me appreciates how card packs were a great equalizer. Every player, no matter how hot-shit they thought they were (or how valuable Beckett decided their card was), was given the same amount of space as Don Carman or Rance Mulliniks. I was not expecting to emerge from this book with a lifelong respect for Garry Templeton, who I’m not sure if I had thought about in 30 years, but here we are. Therein lies the magic of oral histories and the reminder that everybody has a story to tell.
Check out Brad Balukjian’s Instagram for a catalog of photos from his road trip that weren’t included in the book. Just scroll back for a bit.
I hope you all had a great April. Mine was incredibly busy with a lot of projects in the pipeline. Hopefully I’ll have a few new announcements soon.
For now, enjoy this flyer I found in an old Spain folder this afternoon. I don’t remember the occasion, but I have reason to believe that somebody from CGT handed it to me in Madrid 18 years ago today.
Sonic Geography 