Sunday, July 2, 2017

There Will Be No "Golden Age" Of Audio Drama, You'll Never Get It From A Zenith

Simels, here and at Duncan's Daycare for Doddering Duffers, accused me of "going on about the golden age of radio" last night.   Well, as everything I posted yesterday came from the late 1970s (you'd think that the title, "Afro-Western" would have been a clue, only he's clueless) and 1996 (the two episodes of The Mystery Project),  as always, Simps is a simpleton.

I seldom post anything from what is called "the golden age of radio" because  either the recordings I can find are too degraded, as in that Arch Oboler play he wrote for Peter Lorre * I mentioned a while ago, or too retrograde in their treatment of Women, Black People, Latinos, Jews, LGBT People, etc. as was not uncommon in the so-called "golden age of radio".  And a lot of the stuff from that period is not especially good, that's something I said last winter in about the only mention of said "golden age" I've ever made.

"A while back someone asked me why I hardly ever post stuff from the "golden age of radio".  No reason except a lot of what people post from that period isn't very good.  They really churned it out."

The one and only other time I posted the phrase "golden age of radio" was the very first time I posted one of them as Saturday Night Radio Drama when I said:

"The past few years I've come to really love audio drama, what used to be called radio drama back when radio aspired to be something other than a way to make money and spread propaganda.  I don't mean the "golden age of radio" stuff, though some of that was pretty good, or at least listenable."

I am not doing this as an exercise in nostalgia, I don't post anything based on that kind of stuff that keeps the pop music .... um.... "journalism" scam going and pop singers repeating their moldy oldies into their dotage.  Really, I think someday Mick and his old Stones are going to do the "Oxygen Tank Tour" as they'll all have to have one to get on stage.  The critics will declare it groovy.

I only post things if they're good or at least interesting.  And, as can be seen from what I post, most of that doesn't go into that "golden age" slot.

Simps and the Simpletons were only interesting in so far as they show what happens when people wallow in nostalgia and pat phrases and just a slightly different set of bromides than the ones George F. Babbitt was given.  Their discourse is something to be seen through, not something that carries any important revelation of reality.  It's an example of how pseudo-liberalism isn't qualitatively that different from its alleged opposite,** which, if presented theatrically, would probably need an Arch Oboler to mess with your set expectations, conventionalized categorizations and collection of pat phrases to do.   It wouldn't be in a movie, it wouldn't be on TV or, these days, on American radio.  It would be done as an audio-play or a skit.  The golden age of that wasn't when Arch Oboler, Norman Corwin and Orson Welles were working in radio.  I don't think any golden age of that has happened and the delivery system for that being decentralized, there won't ever be one.   You won't ever read about it in nostalgia pieces and magazines.  How many times have you ever heard them talking about Arch Oboler other than that silly "Chicken Heart" piece which isn't especially interesting compared with "An Exercise in Horror", linked to above.

*  If you listen to it it's worth it to either wait out the long degraded part of the recording or to skip it because this play is a good example of how Oboler could use your expectations to make a point.  I wonder if Peter Lorre ever wished he could go back to being a regular actor instead of playing a Hollywood type-cast creepy guy like the one spoofed in the play.   I'll bet he sometimes wished that he'd never been in "M".

**  Real liberalism is it's direct opposite because it is qualitatively different from both libertarian liberalism and degenerate conservatism.  There are evangelicals I trust more than I do the libertarian left.

21 comments:

  1. You posted a show starring Parley Baer, and you clearly have no idea who he was and what he did that was so important during the -- yes, you guessed it -- Golden Age of Network Radio.

    You can go look him up now and pretend post that you already knew that stuff, but you won't be fooling anybody.

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    1. Oh, now you're doing your Great Simpini mentalist act. Give it up, Simps, anything you do in that line ends up with people noticing you're mental. A stupid person such a yourself can't know what a smarter person thinks because they're not capable of it. That's sort of a corollary to the proposition you prove every day, that you're an idiot.

      I'd say his was more the supporting role.

      Simps, leave it to an idiot like you to figure there would be something wrong with looking up something you don't know so you can then know it. And pretending that isn't the basis of what the rubes at Booby Blue believe to be your erudition. It was one of the first thing that gave me doubts about the place, how many of them fell for your act.

      Delete
  2. "I am not doing this as an exercise in nostalgia,"

    Says the guy who just posted old stuff by Bob and Ray and Dinah Washington.

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    1. The teeny bopper music you specialize in is nostalgic crap, Bob and Ray and Dinah Washington produced art, it is for all time.

      You produce shit. What sticks is cleaned off and flushed away by people who don't want to stink. They're not too particular in that way at Duncan's.

      Delete
  3. "How many times have you ever heard them talking about Arch Oboler other than that silly "Chicken Heart" piece "

    Interestingly enough, you hick nitwit, there was a big discussion of one of Oboler's movies at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015.



    https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1491

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    1. Oh, and I'm sure you knew all about that without recourse to google.

      Once is a possible answer to the question "how many times" it's the second lowest number that can be an answer, just ahead of "zero".

      So Simps, you going to claim to have run into Edward Albee at MOMA at that event? Did you ask him if he's heard from William Flannagan lately?

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    2. Bill Flanagan -- one m. I thought you were Irish, Sparkles.

      Delete
    3. So..... You're saying he was Bill Flamagan? Or do you mean Flanagam? Or Flaagan?

      What a tireless little meter maid of orthography you are. Like Hilty Kramer, only less writing involved.

      That Wm. Shaksper guy would have driven you nuts, he didn't even spell his own name twice the same way.

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    4. You've got to come up with some new lines. Once again, as you have said in some of the only true things to ever come out of you, words failed you.

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    5. So according to you, looking things up is good, except when it's how to spell people's names correctly. Got it.

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    6. I wonder what a look at your archive or Duncan's would show by way of misspelling. I've noticed misspellings and typos at Duncan's, I never thought it was evidence of anything except that he doesn't have an editor either.

      You're the one who thought it was some kind of faux pas to look up what someone doesn't know so they can do that thing which you never do, LEARN.

      I'm indifferent to spelling. Considering the greatest writing in the English language mostly dates from the pre-standardized spelling era and many of those afterwards have many "misspellings" in their manuscript, maybe it's a good indication that standardized spelling leads to decadence. The regime of you metermaids of spelling propriety is the elevation of a Swiftian absurdity of the Big-Endian/Little-Endian type. Or, something you're probably more familiar with, Ann Landers' war over the real right way to put toilet paper in a wall mounted holder. See also: my previous comment as that last issue applies to your product.

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    7. "You're the one who thought it was
      some kind of faux pas to look up what someone doesn't know so they can
      do that thing which you never do, LEARN."

      So -- just to recap and give you the benefit of the doubt -- it's cool to look up shit you don't know, except when it involves spelling people's names -- like Kamala Harris or Curly from the Three Stooges -- correctly.

      Got it!

      Delete
    8. "You're the one who thought it was some kind of faux pas to look up what someone doesn't know so they can do that thing which you never do, LEARN."

      No, I'm the one who knows you're lying when you pretend to have known stuff before you looked it up.

      Big difference, you dissembling sack of shit.

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    9. About the only thing you could get is the clap. And I don't mean applause.

      I think you just admitted that, as always, you got nuttin'.

      I suspect in maters of mind power, youre a Little-Endian but that generally you're a Big-Endian. And your little end is up your big end.

      Delete
  4. Oh fuck off, you perishing snob. The Beatles Stones et al are just as important to popular music in the second half of the 20th century as Dinah Washington.

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    1. Oh, yeah, everyone knows that only an elite audience ever went for Dinah Washington and Bob and Ray. It's like you said the other day about those other snobs, Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin...

      "The Beatles Stones". You know, up to this time I'd been able to resist thinking about the Beatles stones, clearly they've been on your mind.

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    1. TC: [said without expression, offhandedly] Um -hum. I see.

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  6. And the voices in your head begin singing the backwards b-side to Napoleon XIV's "They're Coming to Take Me Away."

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    1. How utterly uninteresting.

      Back to your Great Simpini act, huh? I think your brain has overheated from the turban.

      Delete