Leader of the Laundromat

The Detergents
Originally uploaded by LORAC!

Answer songs were big in the early sixties for musicians trying to ride the coattails of a popular hit--Roger Miller's "King of the Road" had its counterpart "Queen of the House"; Leslie Gore answered her own "It's My Party" with "Judy's Turn to Cry"; and according to this article about answer songs, parodies, and death tunes, The Temptations "My Girl" was a response to Mary Wells' popular "My Guy".

Below is The Detergents' goofy answer to the mega hit Leader of the Pack by the Shangri-Las, entitled "Leader of the Laundromat". (The live performance demonstrates that teenage girls in the sixties would scream at ANY damn thing.) One of the Detergents, Ron Dante, was also the lead singer for the Archies (Bang Shang-a-Lang!), which makes for a pretty impressive resumé indeed.

It Makes No Difference

Why?
Don't need a reason for this. It's pure genius.

The Band performing in the "Last Waltz" - 1978

This Was Your Life ! - On Acid

A cool, well-executed and informative parody of Jack T. Chick that tells the history of LSD.

Via Small Mammal House

Johnny Eck

"Johnny Eck was born 27 August 1911 along with a twin brother named Robert. Johnny was born sans legs and with a truncated spine, resulting in the appearance of his body stopping midway through his torso.
In the mid '20s, Johnny began performing as a single-o (solo sideshow), although his brother traveled with him to emphasize their difference. He worked for years in the entertainment business, and is best known for his role in Tod Browning's Freaks. ( More (including very cute baby photos) )"
- by autochrome at Vintage Photographs

Freedom Land

In the midst of a two week vacation that has incorporated every possible tourist attraction that could possibly appeal to a 9 year old along the East Coast, USA. My skin has developed a strange chlorinated glow from the multitude of water parks visited and I have developed a crack-like affinity for frozen custard and chocolate fudge.

This trek led me back to thoughts of my own youthful daze and trips to places like Freedom Land

"Thirty minutes from Times Square in Baychester in the Bronx!"


I think I blew lunch on the Riverboat

Wikipedia offers details that a young Yuma has long since forgotten.

"Its slogan was "The World's Largest Entertainment Center" (later, "The World's Largest Outdoor Family Entertainment Center").

Freedomland opened on June 19, 1960. It closed at the end of the 1964 season when it failed to make a profit.

Freedomland was conceived by Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood (1922–1992), a young Texan, who had previously worked in the planning, construction and management of Disneyland. Hired by Walt Disney in 1953, Wood was the person who selected the orange grove site in Anaheim, California where Disneyland was eventually built.

Wood became very close to Disney during the next two years, but eventually the two men had a falling out. Reasons for this are unclear, but three theories exist: Wood was embezzling money from the park[citation needed]; Wood was taking too much public credit for Disneyland or Wood betrayed Disney by planning his own amusement parks, effectively stealing Disney's original concept.

By January 1956, Wood had been fired from Disneyland. To this day, The Walt Disney Company refuses to acknowledge any role played by him in the creation of the Magic Kingdom.
Groundbreaking ceremonies for Freedomland took place on August 26, 1959. Disaster struck on March 24, 1960 when six unfinished buildings were demolished by fire and had to be razed.

The area was a swampy one connecting the Hutchinson River and the drainage into Westchester Creek, and was not entirely filled. This led to a profusion of mosquitoes during much of the season.

Moral of the story? Don't piss on Walt Disney......

Memories exist here: Welcome To Freedomland, USA!!

R.I.P., Lou Teicher

Ferrante lives on.

Party Time!

From Skinnergy's The Club Scene - Fort Walton Bch., FL, circa 1970s Flickr.
This is a big stack of pics that I scanned as a single collection. Most are 8"x10", but a few are snapshots. They represent something of a snapshot of the bar and entertainment scene in the Gulf Coast resort town of Fort Walton Bch, FL, circa 1970s. Most are of bands, entertainers and a few strippers.

Happy Birthday!

Men in Women-in-Prison movies

" ... In a scene right at the beginning of the film, socialite Terry Rich (Anitra Ford) walks into a nightclub in which Blossom (Pam Grier) is performing. Terry pauses in front of the stage with her (apparently wealthy and/or influential) boyfriend beside her. Blossom grins at the boyfriend (who stands there looking awkward) and then more emphatically at Terry, who, after a second, gives a half-amused, half-appreciative smile in return, and sways two or three times to the beat. ...


"The Big Bird Cage" (1972) Opening Scene
From: iwasateenageshutdown

... In other words, the power and the sexual charge in the scene comes from two women connecting with each other. This isn't all that unusual in male-oriented entertainment; there's lots of lesbian porn for guys, obviously. What is less familiar, though, is the insistence with which the scene deliberately excludes men — whether it be the boyfriend or, by extension, the male sexploitation viewer. Terry doesn't want to be Blossom; rather she is enjoying being with Blossom. In contrast, my investment in the scene is not just a lust for the protagonists, but a lust to be them; to gain access to a power and knowledge specifically inscribed in female relationships, which is unavailable to men, and thus all the more desired.
This dynamic — of eroticized male exclusion from, and investment in, female relationships — was the defining feature of a handful of women-in-prison films from the 1970s. In these movies, female sisterhood, generally in the face of oppression, is itself fetishized — feminism is turned into a kind of masochistic male wet dream. How this unlikely cathexis occurred, and how it functioned, is the subject of this essay. ..."
Noah Berlatsky, for Bright Lights Film Journal, is having a look at Men in Women-in-Prison.

This week ...

... 4 years ago I started this site. Are there any readers still here from the start? I doubt it. The first months PCL didn't have that many hits. Most came, I think, from email-lists where I was a member and advertised the URL to. They came here and was greeted by this look.
But eventually the crowd grew a little bigger. And now some of them are highly appreciated team members.
PCL LinkDump is a team effort. But I think my initial idea to post about pop culture unveiling the obscure but fantastic parts as well as of course appreciating the more mainstream but good stuff still stands.
PCL is diverse, funny, artsy, childish, stylish, vulgar and utterly sexy.
And we are here to stay for another year.

I hope you have enjoyed the ride so far.

/Z aka mrdantefontana

Cake Wrecks

Don't be fooled by this James Bond number - the others on this site will have you reaching for eyedrops (or a barf bag):

In honor of PCL's fourth. I was hoping to bake a big Cary Grant acid cake but it didn't work out.

Cowboy Time

At the heart of this week’s SwaG! is the heart of a cowboy, riding on the range, free in his assless chaps.

Clicky clicky for further description and access to three hours of pure radio, artsy to fartsy.

Stag Party time!

" ... According to the liner notes, this collection of songs was improvised by rugby players during their showers after games. Soldiers and laborers have also contributed some of the lyrics to these songs. This LP was recorded at a men's party. The liner notes do not mention that it was a stag party, yet I do assume that it was a stag party. The songs are quite memorable. The day before yesterday, I caught myself singing one of these songs in the shower. I won't mention which one it was, as I feel embarassed admitting it. The songs are of a risque nature where lust and um, having relations are emphasized. Okay, they do get very raunchy. ..."

A little while ago A Basement of Curiosities found Stag Party in London Vol. 2 on vinyl and shared it with the rest of the world. Now the world is a better place. A peaceful place full of rugby players singing while showering their dirt off. I can picture it. If I try hard.
Now let's sing along in 'Sweet Violets' (with enhanced lyrisc):
boomp3.com

Note: Raunchy lyrics. Music for grown-ups.

Daphne Oram

" ... Oram was one of the first British composers to produce electronic sound, a pioneer of what became "musique concrete" – music made with sounds recorded on tape, the ancestor of today's electronic music. Her story makes for fascinating reading. She was born in 1925 when Britain was between two world wars. She was extremely bright, and studied music and electronics – unusual at the time not only because electronics was an exciting new industry, but also because it was a man's world. ..."
Daphne Oram: Portrait of an electronic music pioneer, article in Guardian by Robert Worby. (via Up-Tight)
boomp3.com
boomp3.com
Both tracks taken from the 2007 compilation Daphne Oram - Oramics.

Note: More info about Oram can be found at her Wikipedia-entry and at this lengthy article.

Is there a problem?

Through a friend I've learned that there may be some kind of problem accessing this blog when using Explorer. I'm a 100% Firefox user. But I have an old explorer version laying around so I tried it .. and failed. There was some kind of error message telling me I couldn't access that particular url. This also happened to some other blogspot blogs as well.

Is this a problem due to my old and not lately updated explorer version or is it a temporary glitch having something to do with blogger.com?

Any Explorer users out there having this kind of trouble?

/Z aka mrdantefontana

Update: Lee Hartsfeld says he has the same problem. So probably this is some kind of glitch we just have to wait out. As usual.

Or you can just switch to ... Firefox.
You need to read PCL at any time of the day, am I right? Otherwise you may feel sad and ill.

Update II: As Kim Scarborough points out it seems to be sitemeter (the counter) causing the problems.

Update III: Problem seems to fixed. Let's rock!

Esther Williams: Rockin' the Cary Grant Thing

That's my word for today: "Rockin'" - I'm rockin' "rockin'" if you will.....



From the NY Times:

Miss Williams tried therapy, but says she gave up when two successive psychiatrists sat gaga before a movie star. In 1959, her career at a seeming end and her second marriage over, she did try LSD under the direction of Cary Grant's psychiatrist, and had a hallucinatory experience in which she envisioned herself in the body of her older brother Stanton, a child movie actor who had died years earlier as a teen-ager, and whose mantle she realized she had assumed. She begins her book with an account of the trip.

''That was like solving a mystery,'' she says quietly now. ''I realized that my mother and father had not filled in the blanks'' in their lives. She continued: ''And the reason was that it was because it was such a shock to live without that wonderful boy. So I became that boy. Cary told me LSD was like instant psychiatry, and I was sorry the kids got ahold of it and made it a recreational drug, but I think it needed to be clinical for a long time, tested and tested.''

Miss Williams herself was repeatedly tested. She arrived at MGM self-conscious enough about her abilities to demand a clause in her contract stipulating that she could not be forced to appear in a movie for at least nine months.

Seems to me her performances were priming her. Hmmm....

Sew Your Way to Chic

1991 Sewing Pattern Envelope for MC Hammer Pants
Originally uploaded by marcoa84

Pick out your man-made fabric, and in a few hours....it's HAMMER TIME!