more squirrel shit

A syndicated column from Win Fanning, '"Colorful" Saturdays Ahead for the Kiddies', in this instance taken from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 22 April, 1965 p. 51:  

It's just one more example of how children take things on at face value without knowing (or needing to know) the derivation/references. I somehow came to understand somewhere along the way, that is probably in my teens, that Morocco Mole was based on Peter Lorre, (although I completely reject the weird wikipedia claim that Morocco has a 'thick Middle Eastern accent' - whatever that is - I think he speaks the careful English of a German speaking Austro-Hungarian Jew forced to relocate to Hollywood in the 1930s!) (in fact, I'll probably change that later, I think it's idiotic). 

As one more good example of early induction into simulacra I am fairly sure I had no freakin' idea what a fez was even seeing the one on Morocco Mole's head, probably not helped by the way it didn't even sit on his head but balanced precariously on one of his head-points. Every time I have seen a fez on anyone or anymole since that time my consciousness has unravelled a series of memories from this fez on this individual. The shitful animation which means that the tassel is as motionless as the fez itself made it even harder to understand what made up its component parts.

I also never really 'got' the Secret Squirrel/James Bond connection (other newspaper reports said SS was based on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a program I don't recall watching) although obviously part of his appeal without understanding the satirical (? or playful) basis was the gadgets he had at his disposal. (Another newspaper article from 1965 suggests Secret Squirrel is a merely a 'spoof' of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. spoof Get Smart but I think this is going too far) ('Trends in Fall TV Emerging' Brattleboro Reformer 14 August 1965 p. 13). 

Truthfully if Hanna-Barbera characters/cartoons of the 1960s have any appeal (and they don't have that much to me, though you'd have to recognise they've meant a lot to many over time) it is in firstly the character design, and secondly the silliness of names like 'Yellow Pinkie', which, Win Fanning is right, I never understood until I read it just this morning. But names like 'Goldfinger' become sort of ubiquitous and you don't think 'huh, old mate has a golden finger' (later: ok I was wrong even about that apparently, he just likes gold) you just sort of accept the portmanteau, don't you. If it was Yellowpinkie it might be a little more obvious. 

Oops I just disappeared down a wikipedia rabbit hole there of derivation of Auric Goldfinger's name and the possibility that he was named after Ernö Goldfinger another Hungarian who Ian Fleming (btw, did Fleming have any redeeming qualities) probably didn't like. Geez Louise the story of E. Goldfinger suing Fleming over the villain Goldfinger is hilarious, inc. Fleming's suggestion that the character be renamed Goldprick... I didn't even realise that Goldfinger was a not uncommon or at least recognised (well, wikipedia says 'typically German-Jewish') name... 

Interestingly (never start a sentence with 'interestingly', I will always tell everyone, ever, like my opinion matters) the original debut of Secret Squirrel was as part of a little Saturday morning package with Atom Ant (originally misunderstood by the press as 'Adam Ant' lol) and a show called The First Look, which sounds like a kind of proto-Sesame Street but without any, you know, good things. 

‘Here, the scheme is to use song and dance to beguile youngsters into painless learning.

‘Producer Robert L. Bendick says the series will direct audience attention to 18 areas of knowledge, from prehistoric animals and the United Nations to mythology and jazz.’*

I looked for this on youtube but no dice.

What's really amazing about Secret Squirrel - oh, apart from the fact that he gets about in a car with 'SS' written on it and is consistently referred to as 'SS', only twenty years after the fall of the Third Reich - is that there were only 26 episodes made of the original show, and then 13 more of a revival series about thirty years later (which, incidentally, wikipedia says many think is funnier than the original, like that'd be hard). So let's be generous and lump it all in together: there are basically 39 episodes, assuming they're 7-8 minutes long, I can't be bothered doing the maths (OK, five hours) that's a fifty plus year legacy based on five hours of cartoons (I admit that is more than I thought it would be) where the obviousness of the scripts are matched by the primitive economy of the animation, and repeats, repeats, repeats, repeats up the wazoo. The voice actors are of course the real stars and Mel Blanc and Paul Frees must have really felt like they were doing a great job making tons of money for others (although also, in the mid-60s I am sure even though syndication/repeats were already a thing, no-one could have predicted the longevity of this shit). (I use the word 'shit' with affection/contempt, but the contempt is at least as much for those of us who accepted-absorbed this stuff as it is for those of them who made it). I think I need to know more about Paul Frees, just as I needed to know more about Andrew Sachs until his book took six months to arrive and I had stopped needing to know by the time it got here. 

I'm probably being too hard on everyone involved, I just feel a bit cheated, I was lazy and I could have been learning the violin but instead I was watching cartoons I didn't really enjoy and blaming the world for being boring when what I didn't yet realise was only boring people get bored. 

*Clay Gowran ‘Mouse to Lead Parade of Fall Moppet Shows’, Chicago Tribune 11 July 1965 p. 10. Don't ask me why I'm using both footnotes and in-text references, it's just because I can. 

i am the cliche

I seem to recall that my first blog entry on Lorraine Crescent was about coffee, probably about my attempts to give up coffee which was an obsession of sorts in the first decade of the twenty-first century (why? Partly I think because someone had told me that coffee increased one's desire for carbs, and I wanted to lose weight without doing anything icky like exercising; also, living with an addict as I was, I wanted to prove that I could get by without any addiction to anything, and that was my one addiction) (and is). But I bet it wasn't long before my blog entry on cats. Also, dogs. So, coffee and pets, coffee and pets, and pop music, these are the things that move me. Oh, and shitty old television. It's sick, and worse, it's a sickness so many people of my generation/class have, maybe less so my gender but there's plenty of men who have this. Just not as many as nice middle class ladies. 

Coffee entered my life with my first girlfriend, Rachel. I was 15. She drank coffee, I am guessing probably instant, a lot, and so did I therefore. Her family also ate a lot of chinese cabbage, they relished it, but only one of those things have stayed with me (now I think about it, maybe I should try chinese cabbage again, just to see if it evokes anything e.g. the first time I ever saw/heard Duran Duran on Countdown, doing 'Planet Earth'). Coffee has been with me pretty much ever since and probably always will be, though I did successfully give it up for a couple of months some time - I forget when, it's been a long life, but I think I switched to decaf for a time either late 90s or early 00s, but of course like heroin you crave the rush. 

Pets were always there it's silly to even discuss. I have had times in my life with no pets, it's true, but seriously, why would you.

Pop music was always there, but I specifically remember a long drive with a family my family were close friend with, where they as a family sang 'Let it Be' in the car (now, obviously, that could have happened last year or ten years after 'Let it Be' came out, and if I was five I wouldn't have known whether 'Let it Be' was released in 1970 or 1850, but it was almost definitely before 1972, because we moved away from Kew at the beginning of '73 and I wouldn't have gone on a long drive with that family after that time). So that marks for me an early memory, my earliest memory, of contemporary pop music. By the mid-70s I was actually Beatles obsessed, when at school the divisions were clear: Beatles vs Abba. I switched to, or accommodated, Abba in 1976, via two sources: visiting my father in hospital I think when he was having a back operation, and seeing 'Mama Mia' on tv (extra interest because 'mama mia' was a thing kids - Italian kids? - said at school that was exotic enough to almost be swearing) but I was still not ready to be swept up in anything, but then a schoolfriend, John, described 'Fernando' to me on a school excursion, as being about the Swedish-Mexican war, and that made it stick in my mind. He also raved about it and I guess his taste had currency for me. However, I also vaguely remember mentioning it to him again a few months (a few days? who knows) later and he was entirely uninterested. I might be extrapolating false memories with that last bit. So by 1976 it was Abba vs Bay City Rollers, although some girls were still uncertain whether they were aligned with BCR or 'horses'. After the Abba thing crashed (1977?) I went into abeyance with pop music interest until around 1980 when I became heavily engaged. Rachel broke up with me and I had been saving money to buy her a nice impressive birthday present, so since I didn't have to do that anymore, I bought myself some albums (I already had the first Pretenders and B-52s albums, and I added The Undertones' Hypnotised, which I'd read about in the NME, the first Dexy's Midnight Runners album, Devo's Freedom of Choice and John Foxx's Metamatic: I actually still own copies of all of these). 

Bad TV was always good. If I am grateful to my parents for anything it is the way they encouraged me, leading by example, to regard mass media as always potentially idiotic, venal, etc. I recall at a very young age my father explaining to me that Reg Ansett misled the Australian public/government by claiming that if he was allowed his own television channel, he would produce high-quality local content, which of course he never did. I don't remember my father saying that Ansett had pals in high places who probably didn't care either way what happened, although if he had that might have gone over my head. I recall (as I have probably bored you in years past on this blog) holding uncritical attitudes to cartoons,* though on reflection, maybe having cartoons like Road Runner, or Secret Squirrel, was a chance to have something that was mine, and where my parents' hypercritical attitude didn't matter. Ditto Adventure Island. But at the same time, we would happily ridicule all stupid, obvious, mainstream television but in some instances also enjoy it because we could ridicule it. So, my sarcastic, unproductive, casual arsehole attitude was cultivated from an early age through my parents' own responses cultivated I suppose in the case of my mother, from her parents' highbrow attitude to popular culture and in the case of my father, his university arts degree removing him from his parents' lower middle class attitudes. It shocked me, as I got older and saw other people's lives, how uncritically they accepted mass media, though for all that, I am aware that my own response of trusting nothing mediated by (for instance) commercial television was/is as much a learned reaction. I wasn't taught to think critically, I was taught to always find a way to be critical. I had to unlearn that and enjoy (to pluck something from my brain's offering up of an immediate example, without thinking hard about it) 'Into the Heat' by The Angels, without wondering about who the fucking Angels thought they were or were trying to be or who they thought they were appealing to or what Doc Neeson's theatricality was supposed to indicate. I realise that's a weird example, it's just the first example I thought of, and so I went with it on the assumption that that would be more 'pure'. To problematise this, I guess we all liked older things better in our family on the understanding/assumption that artisans were more involved in the old days, and skill was more prevalent, there was some kind of talent recognition mechanism, whereas the 'present' (eg the 1970s) was more about trickery and faddishness - though if I had challenged my father, for instance, on this assumption I am pretty sure he would have happily reeled off 20 names of actors, artists, writers who were as shit as anything currently popular, and as popular in their day if not more so.  

Hence, by the way, the character of Elyse in Persiflage, who has an uncritical, base, positive response to a tv sitcom which she is too naive to even understand and on which she imprints other emotional ideals, but from which she filters through everything else in her waking life. Sorry to bring it back to my silly graphic novel but of course that's what that shit's about. I'm fascinated by the reality behind fiction/drama/play-acting and I'm fascinated by popular culture tropes and what they really 'mean' to an audience. I am also of course fascinated by the perceived background or underpinning or context to music, or to celebrity. 

To go back to Abba: they fascinated us as 12 year olds at Auburn South Primary. Two girls and two boys in our class (one of the girls was an absolute crush of mine at the time, and I was not alone) were allowed to use the classroom during lunch time to workshop a play they were formulating about the lives of Abba members. I think in hindsight probably more likely they were learning how to kiss, but what do I know (one of the boys later told me and other boys he had fucked the girl I had a crush on, which I accepted uncritically. The story went like this: 'she came to my house with her parents for a party, and I said do you want to come up to my room and she said yeah, and we fucked'. About twenty years later I thought - hey wait a minute - that actually is really, really unlikely, not least because I'm pretty sure the girl in question only had a mother not a father but also for class reasons - those people would never socialise, ever). Another Abba story, from a girl in I'm guessing grade 6: 'Abba all went into a sauna together naked, and the boys went out to roll in the snow and the girls locked them out of the sauna, naked'. This is actually much more likely than the local fucking story, but still that it was told at all shows how exotic and exciting Abba's lives were to us, as we modelled our understanding of what it was to be physically perfect and sexually active super-white adults. Boy were they a cultural manifestation as Australia got over White Australia. They were with us at exactly the same time as the first Vietnamese refugees started to be accepted (or not) as Australians. 

I don't know how to end this but it's not like I'm writing for The Monthly or something** so I don't have to have a neat ending, I can just end. 

*Also comics, which were however a very different beast to me, as different as novels are from films - of course. 

** They wouldn't have me