These are from last month and I found them while raiding the files, but they could have been taken today.
I just read today that bird flu is expected to hit the west coast this summer, starting from Alaska and working its way down. And I’m still freaked out about SARS. Try to just think about this instead.
I don’t even want to mention the name of this restaurant cause it’s one of those ‘best kept secret’ kind of places and I don’t want to be denied a table when it gets too popular. Okay, it was Round Table Pizza and it was about as depressing and bureacratic as dining can get, but the pizza was strangely digustingly delicious. But Jenny brought back some pudding from the salad bar that was gray and had mystery chunks in it.
[sung to the tune of Queen's 'Somebody to Love']:
Oh Lord
Somebody - somebody
Can anybody find me somebody to win this eBay auction for me?
Oh, man, I missed gay skate last night at Oaks Park!!! And in my mind, it totally went down like this.
Hey, that’s my grandpa! All these are screen captures from my grandparent’s home movies. I think this is roughly late 1950’s New Orleans, but I could be wrong about the date.
I love this expression: “…Disaster-porn glimpses of the Lower Ninth Ward…” from today’s Gumbopages.
My heart stopped beating when I saw this massive photograph of Amanda Woodward stashed away at Keith’s house.
I love how this picture is the logical modern art conclusion to the question, ‘What happens when you mix Chuck Close with Aaron Spelling?’ Plus, he wrote the line written across her face and saved this masterpiece (already framed!) from being thrown away.
Then there’s this masterpiece of outsider art: 12 poster-sized pieces of paper with thousands of drawings of the same woman’s face. Found at a garage sale, nothing is known about the artist. But you can pretty easily infer either autism or drug addiction played a large role in their life.
Then, the masterpiece: this photo album originated from an un-named source who worked at a fotomat for years and made a copy of whatever weird snapshot caught her eye. And it’s not all embarrassing nudity. There’s spectacularly bad outfits, disturbing funerals, scary people posing with machine guns and parties gone terribly, terribly wrong. There’s a lesson to be learned in all this, which I think was well-explored in the film ‘One Hour Photo’.
Keith saved this from the dumpster as well and then brilliantly edited the order of the shots. In comparison, I feel like everything I own is garbage.
I forgot how funny Welcome to Blog is. Check out his 50 Things Every Portlander Must Do, which was pretty dead on in some respects.
Any place kind of nautically-themed with an anthropomorphic animal on its sign is usually something I’ll want to check out.
All these containers, that ran the length of the bar, were full of little pieces of paper called ‘pull tabs’, which is one of the strangest forms of gambling ever. You pay 25 cents to two dollars at chance of winning some cash by ripping open a sealed piece of paper that tells who whether you’ve won or not. No real skill goes into it.
Here’s a close up. Jeremy did a couple ‘for laughs’, then got seriously hooked when he won $50. His hands were trembling. I was trembling with jealousy. Then I noticed that everybody in the place was sitting at the bar with dozens of pull tabs in front of them.
I think the secret to winning was having the nice bartender rub your dollar for luck.
If this was a postcard, the caption should read, ‘Having a BLAST in Seattle!’ Jeremy and I actually did have a blast in Seattle, thanks to Keith, who was a wonderful host. I take back all the bad things I said about that town. There’s actually tons of cool stuff up there. But I have to parcel all these thoughts and photos out over the next few days, cause I have nothing else to talk about…
First off, kudos to the people at the PBS affiliate in New Orleans who made the commercials documentary. It was a long time coming. But also… you left out the best parts!!!! I’m not going to start a witch hunt about how they left out spots for Popeyes, Levitz, Tastee Donuts, etc. I feel like this documentary was lacking my audio commentary track. So in the interest of self indulgence, here goes:
“Put this man to work!” This spot opens with that terrifying green monster (see below) and a voice over that it’s coming to eat your house. Then it’s swiftly followed by a guilt trip about how this 68 year old man, who should clearly be retired, but is condemned to walk the suburban streets of Meterie with his gray poodle, can’t make any money in the sleazy business of aluminum siding.
This housewife’s not having it… and he’s only trying to help.
The Arthur Miller vibe really comes home, when even the man’s poodle attacks him after not making the sale.
Usually by this point, in the thousands of times I saw this ad on pre-cable TV, my emotions were so spent I could never absorb the sales pitch.
Aahh, McKenzie’s, offering some of the worst pastries in the world. Always dry and very strange looking.
See?
Like a lot of ads for food, the McKenzie’s commercials always had someone rapturously eating the product…
… but you can see in this frame that one telling moment of the performance, where the actress is totally faking any pleasure.
The background song in the Seafood City ads is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. It’s more infectiously memorable that the opening notes of ‘Sanford and Son’ or the riff in ‘Funky Town’.
Al Scramuzza, owner of Seafood City and star of all their commercials, also wrote the music. What a genius.
The Special Man in the midst of letting them have it. These ads were pretty self-consciously insane. The basic premise is that poor black people come into this furniture store and complain about not being able to afford sectionals and bedroom sets. So the white owner would play good cop/bad cop and tell them to see ‘the special man’ who invariably and in a perfect deep monotone would say, ‘let em have it.’
There was a lot of other action going on as well, like this guy, who would shout and shake at the camera.
For a while, I think this was a lot of people in New Orleans favorite thing on TV.
Here’s post-Katrina Frankie and Johnny furniture, stolen from the Quintron website (sorry!).
I have nothing to say about the K&B drugstores or the Time Saver convenience marts, except they’ve been gone for a long time now and I miss them. They are tied in with the very first memories I have of going shopping.
How all dads dressed/looked in New Orleans in the 80s…
How I wanted to look in the 80s.
For all the fucked up children from New Orleans, we give you… stills from your local tv commercials from the 70s thru 90s.
Explanations, apologies and lots more pictures tomorrow. Or if you have the dvd from WYES, you can skip the middle man and just watch the commercials yourself, which appeared in a documentary about local advertising in New Orleans.
I was chatting/fighting with my friend Keith on Yahoo Instant Messenger last night about the merits of ‘Walk the Line’. And he mentioned Reese Witherspoon and it appeared as a hyper link in the chat. And I was like, ‘Uh… I know who she is…” and felt kind of embarrassed for both of us. And he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, since it wasn’t happening on his mac. And then I started typing random other ‘big’ names like ‘Michael Jackson’ (linked) and ‘Madonna’ (not linked). And I hate to be one of those dorks that likes to mention Big Brother, but thinking that an application was tracking and assisting celebrity name dropping just made me feel depressed.
