Negativland: Our Favorite Things

It looks like my audio host has quit working.  I found out last night at midnight, when it wouldn't play the bit I picked out for today.  Sigh.  I dunno.  It really seems like things just glitch a lot more.  I need to look at this whole thing, anyway.  I want to keep doing weekly posts, but the current arrangement is just kind of creaking along.  Nothing new is being worked up.  It's times like this that I'm inspired by those greater than I.

Dan Travanty or Noam Pitlik?

Welcome again to the site that regularly considers Hollywood's enduring mysteries:  

 

Who IS that guy?

Our discussion this week covers a question that's been unresolved for over 60 years: who plays the police detective in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"?  

 

As Variety magazine might put it, "Classic Comic Cameos Clinch Chaos!"  Over 100 mostly comic actors dropped in to play bit parts, including a good helping of those who toiled in supporting roles in TV and movies at the time (1963).  

 

Artwork by Jack Davis

 

But for all the detail about the cast, one name is missing.  Who is the detective in the hat? 

 

Looking over the cast: there's a Dick Cherney as "Detective".  (And try to search for THIS guy.  You won't be able to get past the know-it-all computer insisting you want to know about "Dick Cheney".  They're actually getting dumber.  There is apparently no way to search the internet for "Dick Cherney", with only the name.  Try it yourself if you think I'm kidding.) 

 

I finally found a picture,  of "Dick Cherney, Mad Mad", from an appearance on "Star Trek":

 

Must have been another detective.  Although this actor has an interesting resume, with appearances on popular TV shows, playing even more obscure background characters.  Apparently in the same "silent bystander" category as Tony Regan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are no other unidentified "detective" actors.  Our man might be listed as a "spectator"- there's a couple dozen of them- but I think it's unlikely.  I'm going to say the actor isn't listed.

 

Let's consider whether it's one of these two men: 

I think I've seen an online post discussing one or the other in this role; can't find it now.  In fact, "Mad Mad Pitlik", "Mad Mad Travanti", even "Mad Mad Travanty" (his stage name in 1963) turn up zero info linking either one to this film.  Perhaps the question's never seriously been asked.  

 

It's made a little easier due to the fact that Noam Pitlik once wore his hat the same way.

 

"The Fortune Cookie"

 

We also have Daniel J. Travanti in a hat- which doesn't add anything.

 

"Lost in Space: Collision of Planets"

 

Hmm...how about the ears?  

 

A                                                B                                        C

Do we have any samples of Travanti's ears from that period?  Well, actually yes, his second professional appearance (according to IMDB) was a "Route 66" episode from 1964:

 

Look at that.  No lobe.  Uh-huh!

Ok, first of all, we have to consider it may be neither of them.  Maybe people will write in like an old Dear Abby column- "That's my Uncle Spif!"  I dunno.

 

But in my opinion, there's enough there to think it's probably Noam Pitlik.  

- earlobes (Travanti hasn't got one).

- their hairlines match...do we have one of Travanti's hairline?  Take off that hat!  (Raise your right hand!...)

I can't believe how much these guys look alike.  This is a toughie.  But we have to go with the ear.  They just don't match.  Pitlik's is closer.  (Yes, I know he has two.)  And he's got a bony forehead.  

The closest we can get is that the detective in Mad Mad World is most likely played by Noam Pitlik, or his twin.  Especially when you consider his career, much more of an Old TV Guy than Mr Travanti (about 3 jobs/year in TV and movies for 37 years, plus directing).  In this film, laboring in the full anonymity that usually falls over the efforts of these hard-working folks, turning up who knows where.

 

Bonobo- Cirrus

Well, no podcast yet.  I tried it and broke my headphones.  The tyranny of circumstance.  I don't know what's going to happen on this site.  

The Goon Show

I'm going to change the way this blog is run, and start doing half-hour podcasts every Sunday morning.  It's going to be like a weekly radio program.  

 

Back when I had a radio show, it ran from the middle of the night to dawn.  I'd always give over the last 30 minutes to the Goon Show, a living comic strip that ran on the BBC, 70 or so years ago.  Peter Sellers was one of them, Spike Milligan wrote most of it, a Welsh heldentenor named Harry Seacombe was dragged in somehow-- there they are on the left, Spike, Peter, Mr Greenslade, and Harry.  This week's program is from Feb 15, 1955, "The Sinking of Westminster Pier".

 

I think we'll start readings next week. 

July 4 test post

 The Abe Lincoln Malfunction at the Hall of Presidents.

 Hey, it works!  Our first video file!  Yay!  Happy Fourth of July, everybody!

John Oswald: A Case of Death

This might be the best Spoken Word cutup ever.  It sounds like something from Finnegan's Wake.

Play (9:21)

Rush Limbaugh: I'm a Nazi

I wish I knew who really made this track.  It was some Radio Morning Show, and they had to listen to enough of his voice to put this together, and make it rhyme, and swing!  The other thing about this piece- all that was originally spewed by Limbaugh himself.  Insulting people he disagreed with was his whole concept.  It was kind of like Bizarro Muzak.

Play 

Thinking

 

(That sure is a big dictionary page.) Remember what I was saying last week?  "Old time radio mashup site."  

"Thinking" is a good title for this week.  It's from "The Dental Clinic of the Air", performed on a musical saw by Sam or Stan.  The program is in a collection of Old Time Radio one-shots, on the Internet Archive.  At least it used to be.  I found it just now on a new site called "Radio Echoes".

Thinking.  What do I really want to do, here?  Still want to put up something brand new and weird every week.  Not giving that up yet.  At least weird, if not new.  Perhaps more OTR.

Play (1:42)

D-Day, with the Kingsmen

(...Maybe I should just turn this into an Old-Time Radio Mashup site.)  

 

Oh, hey, folks.  I have to say, as an experiment, this site may be reaching the end of a phase.  My intent remains to have a kind of open audio lab, with new bits tossed out every week.  But I already know, the ratio is about 20-30 hours of fooling around to 5 minutes of completed bit.  Which I've been expecting to do, eventually. 

 

But we're not anywhere near that.  It'll be a couple of years in October, since I started posting again.  Let's see if I can set up a more resilient process for the whole thing over the next three months.  If not, I might try something else for art.

 

**

 

The King's Men  

 

 

(not the band that sang "Louie Louie") were an a cappella quartet of the last century, emerging from the rich ferment of Vaudeville.  They were possibly considered a more "hep" version of Barbershop Quartet music, but that entire genre was supposed to sound corny, so they could never quite escape being associated with the moldiest of figs.  And sometimes, they sounded downright eerie.

For example, as we remember D-Day this week, June 6, 1944, the beginning of the liberation of Europe-- that evening, America tried to carry on as normal, but everyone was too nervous about whether it would succeed.  Fibber McGee and Molly substituted their regular comedy program for half an hour of patriotic music broken by news bulletins-- one of which, unfortunately, ran into the beginning of The King's Men singing Fred Waring's Army Hymn: a rare song,  a rarer rendition, missing the beginning but with enough to make one realize how differently this country went to war, in those days.

 

Til next time

-Ye Olde Farte 

 

Electoral Collage 2024

 

It's been a couple years.  Are we used to it yet?  Maybe not.

Play (3:13)

FDR (& Fala), Antifa

We fought a war to defeat world fascism.  I guess you could call the president of that day an "anti-fascist".  He talked about it sometimes.  If he were to discuss it today, it might go something like this... 

 

play (4:10)

Smokin'

From the Bandcamp collections.

 

Smokin' (0:49) 

Elmer Davis on the News

 

 

This week's installment of Old Time Radio Ventriloquism captures the voice of Elmer Davis, attempting to craft a new understanding of The News.

play (2:23) 

 

What is "eye-watering" supposed to mean?

I have never heard this expression until recently, and now it's in the headines a couple times a week.  "Eye-Watering Budget Projections", "Eye-Watering Scale of Scandal".  Eyes water for a lot of things- sad, happy, onions.  Aren't there better words people are already using, like "shocking"?  

It sounds like AI made it up.  Some weird concatenation of "mouth-watering", and the same body-function reaction to shock that's in so many other expressions.  But AI doesn't appreciate (or even know about) the emotional context that would cause an eye to water.  Can it ever?   

The Bizarre Subcontext of "Wally's Haircomb"

I'll get right to the main topic: there's a Leave It To Beaver episode where Wally starts combing his hair like his mom.  

 

It's not explicit- in fact, they gloss over the whole thing with the idea that Wally's hair is done up like a dumb teenager, in the "jellyroll" style, swept up on the sides, and piled on top of the head in an inverted "U".

 

Coincidentally, his mom, June, also wears her hair swept up on the sides and kind of piled on top.  

 

Hmm.  Are they trying to make a point, here?  Well, we can certainly try.

The point of the episode (I think) is how embarrassed June and Ward are, for Wally, on his account, as he happily goes through life with hair like his mom a very strange haircut.  (The accompanying juke box jive whenever Wally's hair heaves into sight is a nice touch.  Maybe it's a fragrant pomade.)

 

 

 

It might be that they're concerned about how Wally's doing high-hair like an amateur; the "fallen cake" effect on top looks like June's 'do with clippers run through the middle.  

 

But even if it weren't soaked with 30-weight, the question remains:  why would their eldest son want hair like his mother?  Is it the smell of the pomade?

 

 

Ask Your Doctor

MAD Magazine, and don't you dare forget it!

From the late 90s.  But things haven't changed much.

 

Ask Your Doctor (5:09)

1941 in Review

Josephine Baker

This week's feature appears to be a fragment that fell out of the film can that contained last week's feature.  

 

1941 in Review (1:52) 

 

Not sure what to do about these short old-time-radio cutups.  Maybe I should just dump them on the Internet Archive like my hero, Mr. F. Le Mur. 

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Stupid

 

Wherein Dr Watson quacks like a duck.

 

Play (5:55) 

Ken Nordine

 

I've got this strange idea for a story.

It's about this guy, a regular guy, like everybody else.  Except his words were too big for his head.  And it made him nervous.  (It would make you nervous, wouldn't it?)  And he tried everything to make his words smaller, so they'd fit into his brain.

He tried whistling.  He tried selling picture-window ant colonies, and Bury-It-Yourself time capsules.  He tried writing poetry about jazz.  But nothing worked.

Until one day, when he heard about this strange way of doing radio.   It seems that if you take the heebie-jeebie of Radio and mix it with the fribble-frabble of Jazz, you end up with something that takes on a life of its own.  And words tossed into this mix of dreams and electricity become huge electromagnetic waves rolling across the landscape.  Even the words which, up to that moment, had no other place to go.

So the man tried it- this "special radio".  He took the words out of his head and sent them off on their own.  And they did grow.  They started wearing double-breasted suits, and appearing in small clubs across the country, complete with a 3-piece combo (featuring cello).  There they'd take control of the stage and go on scatting wild ideas into the early dawn, with all the kool Katz and kittens caught up in the eternal now, simply snapping their fingers and saying, "Yes!...Yes!...Yes!"

Ken's birthday is April 13, 1920. And ya know what?  The Internet Archive has him covered!

I'm stunned.  "An Introduction to Stereophonic Sound"?  Thought I'd never see this outside a thrift store.  And here's the "Colors" album.  And, it looks like, all the Word Jazz albums.  More poetry, with Ringo Starr singing?  Wait a minute-

Wow.   I don't even know where some of this stuff comes from!  Here's a Taster's Choice ad...reading "The Conqueror Worm" by Poe (hope I remember to post that, next Halloween)..."Sounds in Space" ...a 1966 ad for "Top Eliminator Dragstrip Set"; I already knew Ken narrated those "ding" filmstrips we saw in grade school.  But ads, too, and for cool toys!  No wonder he sounded so familiar when I first heard Word Jazz in the 70's.  (Ok, they don't have the ads, or the filmstrip soundtrack, which we posted last year.)

This is amazing.  Thank you once again, mighty Internet Archive.  You are the mother of 10,000 things. 

 

Fun with Dental Mannequins

 

The Previous War

Apparently, I never posted these.  Do you think 24 years is long enough to wait?  

 

Iraqitanic (12:15)

 

Bring Em On (4:39)

 

(It seems like I've been on a War Binge recently.  Actually, I'm just cleaning out my archive, until, if and when the new things are done.)

War Concerto, first movement, by Wilhelm Zinc

 

 

Ah yes, Zinc's Magnum Opus.  Notice how carefully he weaves the musical threads of uncertainty and purpose, a mighty nation pulled up out of its own satiated ennui to embrace the task before it, and...oh, never mind.  It's actually from old "Victory at Sea" episodes.  

 

 Play (2:16)

 

 

 

 

 

Ike Pressed the Button

 

I didn't set out to make a current events bit this week.  If you're hearing any resonances with that, maybe it's just picking up what's in the air.  

Play (1:58) 

 

Random Rerun: MacArthur vs the Flying Saucers

Hello folks.  No new audio this week.  Things are still pretty disrupted around here, and the creative sunshine didn't make it to the petri dish.  So here's a plug for Bandcamp- three(?) volumes of Cutupsound, listening is free.  This week's offering:

Play (4:44)

Perhaps a fitting finale, for our efforts here.  Hope not.

Rommel Uber Dubbing

 Hooray, weekly posts again!  We were caught off-guard by the recent disaster. so I moved our monthly non-audio post to the first Sunday (because it's quicker to write).  

This week we look at the phenomenon of double-translation: the 2012 film Rommel, translated from German into Spanish, then re-translated by a computer into English.  Join us, won't you?

(Double-translations seem to be a promising source of Dada cutups.  Definitely want to keep exploring this...)

Still kicking

Three weeks without a post.  The internet router blew out and no one besides myself was interested in fixing it (including the ISP).  My apologies to everyone who thought they could reliably find strange and original audio here.  I'm not stopping until they pry the keyboard from my stiff, dead fingers.  But I can't guarantee it will happen.  Just like I can't guarantee I'll wake up alive every morning.  

So, with that jolly thought, let's get back to it.  Come by next Sunday and I'll post something, if I can.  

William S Burroughs birthday

 

This year's piece is a setting for excerpts from Roosevelt After Inauguration, (a reading which is considerably excerpted by the author) with other pieces collected from Ubuweb.  

 

WSB 2026 (4:26) 

 

 

 

 

The Elmer Davis News

This is an example of more or less "by rote" cut and paste, conducted on an WW2-era radio broadcast.  A five-minute commentary was chopped up into beginnings of sentences, ends, and neither beginning nor end.  The pieces were re-connected in random order, according to a "beginning-middle-end" arrangement.  (A couple minutes of content was lost because one of the sections ran out of pieces, which stopped the matching process.)  Minimal editing.

 

William S Burroughs did a lot of cutup like this, except with newspapers and scissors.  We'll be doing something for his birthday next week,  so this seemed at least like a kind of warm up.

 

 

Edit, 01.27: Elmer Davis V2, now with soothing white noise (3:18)

 

 

"Watch out for that cashy soap arop!": Examples of Doubletalk

The professional voice-people who were drawn to Radio in its early days (ten years before the Talkies)  took a lot of pride in their elocution.  

 

And the demands of the new medium were for perfection.  Little wonder, then, that silliness, the antidote to too much control, quickly sprang up in the form of Bad Announcing.  

Bloopers are part of this kind of fun.  So is doubletalk: obliterating meaning with a string of word-like noises.  Which is not exactly the same as babbling. 

Doubletalk started appearing in movies and cartoons in the late nineteen-thirties. Jackie Gleason in All Through the Night, 1941:

 

 "I said the karastan on the tagabue is a very serious problem- to say nothing of the lara sang fay!"

Good doubletalk should contain articulated word-like sounds, if not actual words.  This is more difficult than muttering gutterals, like Fred Flintstone cursing-- it needs to sound coherent, while remaining gibberish.  

 

That's probably why another rule is, mix it with actual words.  The listener should be kept wondering as long as possible, is this person unintelligible or actually scrambled, in an almost Dada kind of way.  The illusion of veracity counts a lot with language, whether it's understandable or not.

 

I've assembled a few examples.   

 

The first is from a 1941 Jack Benny radio program.  Notice how Lefty weaves normal words with word-like sounds.

 

 

"Fightin' a guy inside a faucet."  You have to wonder where that came from.  Maybe this dialog is developed from some kind of Deliberate Misperception method (as used in James Thurber's "The Day the Dam Broke", "The Admiral on the Bicycle" and others), where the mis-heard phrase is fed back as dialog, unaltered. 

 

Our next example is from the cartoon,  "Fifth-Column Mouse"  (1943):

I should probably mention, the words here are no more than my attempt to cast coherence over the whole thing.  Who knows if they even had a script?  

 

Although it seems pretty necessary; in a way, it's following the same cognitive mechanics as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, which hijacks the usual verb-adjective-noun structures of language to make what sense it can.  There's enough real words in there to mean...something.  If you can pull them out.  

 

It's no coincidence that most of our examples are from Warner Brothers cartoons.  This is a radio phenomenon, and Warners was closer to Radio than any other studio.  All their voice people worked in it, and the cartoons were an incessant source of catch-phrases and general show-biz lingo, as in our next example, "The Penguin Parade" (1938).

 

 

So then, they bring him back for more announcing.

 

Here's my theory: all three of these examples- the Fighter, the Mouse, and the Penguin- are done by one man.  No idea who.  I think it was this one guy in radio, who had the routine all worked out- compiling them from more coherent phrases, and writing these things.  And going on the radio with them.    

 

There might be at least one more cartoon with the same character.  The most obvious way forward would be an examination of Tex Avery's 1930s output at Warners.  Maybe more to say on this later.