from the local paper on my 13th birthday...

Stumbled across this after the work database went down tonight (at its scheduled time to do so)...The Nashua Telegraph wasn't a great paper, but it was available for my folks' perusal at breakfast, which The Boston Globe might not be, and the Manchester Union-Leader was beserkly right-wing (as rabidly so as any daily in the U.S. at the time), even as they were mildly left-leaning...somewhat to the left of the Globe, much less the Telegraph. The Loeb paper was out of the question. I note that in the summer of 1977, I would've been catching either the CBS sitcom repeats or, at least as likely, what WENH, the New Hapmshire PBS station, was pumping out on that Saturday night: The International Animation Festival at 8p, Wodehouse Playhouse at 8:30p, The Goodies at 9p (I might well've opted for All in the Family's repeat, as I was rather less a fan of The Goodies), Python at 9:30p. I don't remember catching Casqe d'Or on what Channel 11 labeled PBS Theater that night, though I was a loyal viewer of the film package. (And I haven't thought of Once Upon a Classic nor Piccadilly Circus, both PBS offers, for dogs' years...)
 
Interesting to see how much more programming aimed at minority communities was in evidence even on the commercial stations in Boston at the time than one might see now, even if it was mostly low-budget discussion programming in fringe time-periods, on the weekend...but, then, WHDH had lost a license to broadcast only a few years before in a challenge, and I suspect the corporate interests in the Hub were making damned sure they covered at least a few bases to keep it from happening to them as well...

Nashua Telegraph 1977-08-06 Page-16

NewspaperARCHIVE

TV notes: some of what I've seen of the "new season"

666 Park Avenue A series which wouldn't exist if not for American Horror Story, and while not as pretentious nor quite as silly as AHS, and with a slightly better sense of humor about itself, it's still basically The Devil's Advocate come again, judging by the pilot, and it's a damned shame the most prominent "interracial" couple (played by Vanessa Williams and Terry O'Quinn) in US primetime are rather high up in Hell's hierarchy (this last, of course, is not an indictment of this series so much as all the others).  Another sad bit involves anorectic-looking Rachael Taylor, as the spunky architect-heroine, who, having an expensive gown thrust upon her by Williams's seductress, wears the garment on a double-date to the opera (another sure sign of eevul, attending opera), and the garment, meant to accentuate curves, can't find any on Taylor. (The promo photo at left rather demonstrates all this.)

Dexter Two episodes into this season, it's mostly interesting to see Jennifer Carpenter and Michael Hall  playing off one another to such a great degree, given their actual life status as a divorced couple (thanks to Patti Abbott for the fact-checking), as the series details the stepsiblings' treating with her discovery of Dexter's murderous activities.

The Good Wife The scripts and even the guest casting remain solid (in the second episode, at least two of supporting roles are filled by people at "two degrees of separation" from me, which means I've been working on the periphery of television too long, perhaps).

Copper The (chronologically) second series on this list to owe its existence essentially to Deadwood, as well as having an interesting commissioning station (as the first US dramatic series ordered up by BBC America) and co-creator (Tom Fontana, he of St. Elsewhere and Homicide along with some subsequent work which is solid if not scaling the same heights, such as prison-drama Oz).  Gangs of New York might've made the pitch a bit easier, in this anti-glamorous account of Civil War Irish-American NYC cops, and such friends and acquaintances they have as an African-American doctor and a variety of prostitutes and aristocrats and tradespeople; I'm amused by the literary references these knockabout, but not ignorant, folks are given to make (such as to Cheshire cats and "Ours is not to reason why..."), which I suspect the scripters take great care in vetting for date-probability.

Hell on Wheels AMC's stepchild of Deadwood, a season older than Copper, is an anti-glamorous account of transcontinental railway construction, in the years just after the Civil War, with all the ethnic and class tensions (and ex-Rebels v. Yanks) you could reasonably ask for (but not far enough west to involve Chinese immigrant workers, so far).  You just don't get enough sinister Swedes (who are actually Norwegian, iirc) in US drama...or Scandinavians at all.

XIII, along with being a stepchild of the Bourne films, is the kind of slam-bang "action" drama with a mildly sfnal premise that used to populate the originally syndicated hour slots in the early 1990s on US tv (Xena, Relic Hunter, etc.), and as such it's not bad, if a bit dragged out, as the Bourne analog tries to recover his memory and plumb the conspiracy which "created" him, and Aisha Tyler as an eventually rogue FBI agent (hello, among other things, 24) attempts to help him. A Canadian series imported south by the Reelz Channel.

Bomb Girls is another Reelz Canadian import, a well-cast, slightly soapy account of the US women doing World War 2 factory work, and the tensions and potential liberation (of various sorts) that this brings them. I've seen only the second episode so far.

Call the Midwife is interesting in part as the first "standalone" drama series (as opposed to being tucked into the Masterpiece anthology, the sole survivor in this regard outside of sporadic half-hour one-time-only presentations and the rare Great Performances episode) PBS has offered since American Family a decade back (the one about an extended Mexican-American family starring Edward James Olmos, Constance Marie and Raquel Welch, not An American Family the television verite series from the early '70s), and also in its attempt at a clear-eyed look at the post-WW2 London slums and the young nurse-midwives, and their nun mentors, who attempt to aid at least the pregnant women they work with there, under often-shockingly bad conditions. I've seen only the pilot of this one, so far, which has an intentional disruption of tone, to get across the quality of the lives portrayed, but feels just a bit pat, if game, so far.

Sons of Anarchy I've managed actually not to catch a whole new episode so far (FX loads the On-Demand episodes as heavily with ads as they do the cablecast episodes), to see how thoroughly the too-cod-Shakespearean references would continue...but a series I enjoy nonetheless, even if the supposed alternative nature of what the motorcycle club the SOA was meant to be, as opposed to a small-time crime syndicate that it is, remains elusive. One of the best series on the FX channel, which has an impressive slate, with one or two exceptions...one could wish that Fox/FBC, its broadcast cousin, had nearly as much to boast about.

More to come:

Children's Hospital
Comedy Bang Bang
Cybergeddon
Vegas
MeTV and RetroTV finally cleared by Verizon in the Philadelphia area
Newschat series
HBO Go

Friday's Forgotten Books, etc.: Passions of My Youth

Two "forgotten" books:

Alex McNeil: Total Television (Penguin; 4th Edition, 1996)
Len Lyons: 101 Best Jazz Albums (Morrow; 1980)

Alex McNeil's Total Television was one of the two major guides to US television programming offered by the large commercial publishers in the 1980s and '90s...the other is The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, put together by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh. The Brooks/Marsh is better for specific dates for regularly-scheduled programming, but rather foolishly completely ignores PBS and other public-broadcasting programming, even while trying to include as much commercial syndication programming as possible (and in later editions, cable shows). The McNeil, while often providing shorter entries and certainly less cast information per most series (it'a nearly a toss-up, however, on soap operas), not only includes the public broadcasting series but also does its best to cover other "dayparts" and the national programming made available in them. It's also better-written and slightly less bumptious. The name of the PBS dramatic anthology series Visions evaded my attempts at recalling it for years before I came across its entry here...and it's a real pity that while the competitor has continued to roll out, it's been more than a decade since McNeil's book has been updated.

Len Lyon's 101 was a book I was already arguing with as soon as I picked it up, as part of the my introductory quartet for the Quality Paperback Club (rip, I believe). Lyons, a jazz critic of some reknown but not quite as widely-hailed as, say, Nat Hentoff or Leonard Feather, did not shy awawy from expressing his opinions, as befits putting together a Best-Of guide, but also seemed to be arguing with himself to remarkable degree, including fusion albums despite not seeming to respect fusion all that much (particularly when he got to his Chuck Mangione selection), and seeming to resent the need to include anything at all by the Brubeck Quarter or, to a lesser extent, the Modern Jazz Quartet, when more space could be devoted to the Miles Davis catalog. (He doesn't rank the albums, but Kind of Blue is clearly given pride of place...along with the Gil Evans Orchestra album Porgy and Bess and Bitches Brew, among others.) Given that he also wishes to highlight the Jazz at Massey Hall concert album (often dubbed the "greatest jazz concert ever" with only a moderate amount of stretching, given the performance by the much-plagued quintet of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Charles Mingus and Bud Powell) and other milestones from people ranging from Scott Joplin to Return to Forever, with unsurprising major bowing to the Ellington Orchestra, it's a wonder he doesn't step on himself even more in his attempts to be both comprehensive and true to his own taste (and also to try, as best he could, to restrict himself to only those LPs, in this 1980 book, still in print, or back in print). The book introduced me to Toahiko Akiyoshi and Betty Carter, and that might be enough to allow me to forgive the lack of respct for Messrs. Brubeck and Lewis.

Music:

Fairport Convention: Fairport Convention (Polydor 1968)
The Zombies: Zombie Heaven (Big Beat; recorded 1964-69)

So, I was a young jazz fan, and classical and blues and folk fan, keeping my ears open while going through my folks' rather diverse set of records and what I could find at the libraries I frequented, only occasionally going so far as to buy a cheap record (first single: the Brownsville Station's intentionally goofy, proto-pop-punk "Smokin' in the Boys' Room"/"Barefootin'"; first album might just've been the Pickwick Beach Boys anthology, like most Pickwick's cheaply assembled and pressed on barely-stiffened garbage bags, Surfer Girl--other candidates included cutouts of the Count Basie Orchestra's Chairman of the Board and an Audio-Fidelity recording of a no-name orchestra's reading of Pictures at an Exhibition, the Ravel orchestration of course, with a couple of short pieces by Mussourgsky appended without citation [the mark of an attentive label!]).

But I was most passionate about the jazz...even when finally returning to rock by the end of the 1970s, after mostly just hearing what everyone heard in an ambient way, I was drawn both to rawness of the punkish edge and to what I saw as the best employment of jazz influences (along with the vocal harmonies and minor keys of folk-rock). The Byrds satisfied in nearly every way, not least in the jazzy improvisation of much of the Fifth Dimension album ("Eight Miles High," "I See You," and all); the Animals, driven initially by Alan Price's piano and organ work, could thrillingly dig in; and then there were these two slightly geekish bands from Britain, one dead before its time (and having it's biggest hit two years after dissolving), the other producing one of its best albums before losing half the band in the first set of tragedies to befall it, and continuing in some form even today...though it never recovered enough from the loss of Richard Thompson to his brilliant duo/solo career.

More than with any of their subsequent albums, jazz informs the playing on Fairport Convention, even when covering Dylan ("Jack of Diamonds") or evoking him and the San Francisco scene (the brilliant "Don't Worry Ma, It's Only Witchcraft"); covering two Joni Mitchell songs (before she released her own versions, apparently) did nothing to discourage that, as well as showcasing the vocals of the underrated Judy Dyble (Sandy Denny, the doomed vocalist of the next iteration of Fairport, is often rated much more kindly...but she has a rather different approach, Denny's voice more a Spanish guitar to Dyble's autoharp, one of the instruments Dyble plays here).

While the Zombies also did nearly everything you could ask of them, and had a odd name to boot. Private (or, in the UK, public) school kids who never made any pretense of any sort of deprivation, not that they rubbed it in either, the quintet grew up in public with impressive choral chops and another brilliant keyboardist in Rod Argent, and in the three years and change that they recorded only had three big international hits, one of them released against their better (and correct) judgment ("Tell Her No" is one of their weakest recordings). That they packed it in before they were barely in their twenties is reflected in certain qualities of many of their lyrics, some from the perspective of the wounded adolescent ("She's Not There"), others still youngish but given over to bonhomie ("Friends of Mine"). They might have overreached in trying to cover Aretha Franklin (though "Soulville" is game) or Little Richard ("Rip It Up" also fun to hear), but when in their wheelhouse, as with "Remember You" or "This Will Be Our Year" or their recording of "Summertime"...devastating. "Beechwood Park" and "Smokey Day" are two of the most beautiful rock songs yet recorded, "I'll Call You Mine" and "She's Coming Home" among the most exuberant. And they can be damned funny, as well, as when they repurposed "Just Out of Reach" for a commercial for the film Bunny Lake is Missing, entitled in this version "Come on Time" (for the film), among others. "She's Not There" and "Time of the Season" deserve every sale they've made over the decades...a real pity that the band Argent, and such other later projects as the quasi-reunion tours, haven't ever able to touch the work they did in the mid-'60s.

Television:

I've just started watching/listening to Hulu.com's offer of the tv adaptation of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, but so far, so good...(more about youthful passion than a youthful passion of mine, of course). And I like the utterly unforgotten, brand new Community, NBC's sitcom with a fine cast and some solid promise.

As always, check Patti Abbott's blog for more "Forgotten Books" for this week.