Googie. I have been following Steph Mineart's tales of being part of a (new) VW Bug inspired, tongue-firmly-in-cheek pilgrimage to Roswell, NM, at Commonplace Book. Firstly, I have learned that the new bugs are referred to by their loving owners as "pods." Better, she kept referring to things, buildings, sites, as "googie." After the third or fourth "googie," I realized that the old fallback of using context clues was not making me very clueful, so I looked it up. I quote from answers.com:
"Googie" describes a futuristic, often outrageous, building style that evolved in the United States during the 1950s. Googie architecture was designed to attract customers. The name "Googie" comes from a famous coffee shop in Los Angeles. Like the shop, Googie buildings often have flashing lights, sharp angles, boomerang and flying saucer shapes, and lots of glass and steel. On the east coast, googie ideas were expressed in the zig zag rooflines of coffee shops.The Googie style is sometimes called called Coffee House Modern, Doo-Wop, Populuxe, and Space Age.
---The article is attributed to Jackie Craven.
Annoying Unrelated Fact: One cannot download Jackson Browne's "The Load Out" with its companion piece, "Stay," from the itunes site. For people who may know the song only from hearing it on the radio, this is the song about packing up from a performance and getting ready for the next road show that completely transforms the familiar lyrics "stay... just a little bit longer..." into something more bittersweet. As several reviewers on the itunes site noted, they had not realized that there were two separate tracks involved; it is always played as one.
But downloading Smashmouth's "I'm a Believer" (hey, it's catchy) suddenly made clear the joke in the Clinton Sopranos spoof: Journey, "Don't Stop Believin';" Clinton: "I'm a Believer," holy crow, I must have been really tired these past few weeks. Ha, ha, okay, now it makes sense why Bill's got his money on Smashmouth. Beautiful that the name of the band gives it a dark side, too: I'll bet there are a few mouths he'd love to smash. And I mean the old-fashioned kind of smashing, punching, not the urban dictionary definition. Hopefully, the writers of the spoof weren't implying the latter either.
Googie, good. Missing "Load Out," bad. Friday, excellent.
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2 comments:
And thank you for teaching me this word, too. It's always nice to have a signifier to match up to a signified.
Re not being able to download "The Load Out" and "Stay" together on one track: If there's a frustration with iTunes, it is that--especially when it's clear while listening that that's how it was performed. But on the radio I've often heard "Stay" played by itself as a de facto single, so there are probably copyright laws that come into play in this instance. But this is even more frustrating when listening to a lot of classical music on iTunes: symphonies are split up not just by their movements but, often, within movements. That is something I just don't understand the need for, especially when I have many CDs of pop music and jazz with lengthy tracks that aren't divided up so. But with iTunes on shuffle, symphonies would get all chopped up.
And thanks for the insightful commentary on the Clinton video. Nicely done.
I didn't know that itunes did that with symphonies and the like. I think I've only uploaded my own cd's to itunes for classical music. I should have been clearer about "Stay" and "The Load Out." itunes doesn't have "Load Out" for sale at all, and apparently many people have downloaded "Stay" expecting that it is the title (on the Jackson Browne album) for what turns out to be two separate songs.
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