Monthly Archives: November 2008

Peter Paul & Mary, the sweetest voices of the 1960s folk era

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Although I covered pop music at a time when punk, hardcore, “alternative” rock, rap and hip hop were the coolest sounds, I always had a soft spot for the sweet sugar of pure pop. I once wrote an essay comparing Michael Jackson to Prince, as if Jackson were the Beatles and Prince were the Rolling Stones. In my essay, MJ won out (but this was before MJ got weird).

I was, it’s true, a Beatles fan over the Stones. And a lot of the reason was the vocals, not just the pop brilliance of the Lennon-McCartney and Harrison songs. I loved the Beatles’ harmony. When I listen to Beatles songs, I can hear their voices dancing and meshing with each other; sometimes trading melody for harmony, sometimes taking an aural upfront position, sometimes laying back.

That’s the same quality that turned me on to artists such as Simon & Garfunkel in spite of Paul Simon’s brainy-nerdy lyrics (I was a brainy nerdy kid, after all, so I identified with him). Simon and Art Garfunkel’s voices were a natural fit, and I still love to hear their duet vocals, especially on their earlier, unadorned music. Their solo recordings, even when they’re great records, don’t thrill me as much as the ones they made together.

Peter, Paul and Mary were for me, the pinnacle of the melody/harmony interplay. Like the Beatles, they could sing high or low parts, and the sound was fuller than a duet to have all three filling in gaps. Yes, PP&M were an “artificial” group, the folk version of the Monkees, who were assembled as a hit-making enterprise by their manager to cash in on the urban folk boom of the times. Following the success of the Weavers, the Kingston Trio and others, Albert Grossman’s formula for pop success was to bring together “a tall blonde, a funny guy, and a good looking guy” and watch the cash flow in. That it did.

But they also rose above their commercial crassness and made some fine music for the ages. The trio, Noel Paul Stookey, Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers were earnest lefty-touchy-feely folksingers, a natural progression from the Woody Guthrie balladeer of the Depression era forged with the commercially viable groupthink of the ’50s Weavers (where Pete Seeger made his original mark).

They had a string of hits, including folk songs like “500 Miles,” pop ballads like “Lemon Tree” and protest songs like “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” They popularized the emerging voices of the new generation’s “protest singers” like Bob Dylan (the trio’s take of “Blowin’ in the Wind” is still my favroite of many cover versions and the original). They also sparked the public’s imagination with the silly controversy over “Puff the Magic Dragon” (was it or was it not about smoking pot?), and closed out their hitmaking career with a pair of terrific sunset singles, John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and ” the gospel-infused “Day Is Done.”

They caught the zeitgeist of their times — a spirit of searching and questioning of values, the possibilities of youthful exhuberance, and a lust for life. They still perform to nostalgic crowds, but their golden era was inexorably and permanently affixed to the folk era’s comet.
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Asian American artists’ hidden history (and my claim to almost-fame)

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Asian Americans are finally showing up in American pop culture at large, but Asian American fine artists are still mostly invisible. Only a few have had notable — or rather, noted — careers in the art world.

When I was an art student, I didn’t think much of my heritage. You might say it was my “Banana Period.” As an artist, I didn’t appreciate my ethnicity, even when I was included in a group show of Japanese artists and my painting was bought by a famous playwright (keep reading below).

I simply didn’t identify myself as an Asian American artist. I was simply an artist, and the art I made was informed by my 8th grade art teacher, Julie Maiolo, my high school art teacher, Jay Filson, and all my professors (especially color theorist Mary Buckley), as well as the art history teachers and books I soaked up. Which meant my awareness of art was all Euro-centric.

In all of that art history and theory, what I knew of Asia in art was that calligraphy was beautiful, ink painting was hard but similar in process to watercolor, and that Japanese woodblocks inspired the French Impressionists that I loved so much.

So it’s understandable that I assumed any artist with an Asian name was Asian, not Asian American. For instance, for years I thought the sculptor Isamu Noguchi was Japanese, even though he was born in Los Angeles.

But now, the hidden history of Asian American artists is finally getting a jump start, thanks to two projects.

First is the first extensive exhibition of Asian American artists, “Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970,” curated by the de Young Museum, part of the San Francisco Fine Art Museum (there’s a companion book available). The exhibit opened in October, and runs through late January. Then the work moves to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City near New York.

Second is the publication of “Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970,” by Stanford University Press.
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The first illegal immigrants

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From Los Angeles-based Asian American comedy/improv troupe 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors, via Angry Asian Man, here’s a totally politically incorrect skit about race and immigration, but with the tables turned and European Americans as the FOBs (“fresh off the boat,” for you non-AAPIs).

It’s a Thanksgiving satire that gave me a chuckle, despite its disgusting, inexcusable use of “whiteface,” “redface” and racial stereotypes, the kind of thing I’d write up and rant about on Nikkei View. Well tough nuts, y’all. What’s that cliche — “turnabout is fair play”?

Asians are always told to lighten up and have a sense of humor. Here’s proof that we do:

Feeling squirrely

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I admit it, I’m stooping to lowest-common-denominator tactics. People love animal videos. And I shot one.

Erin began feeding unsalted peanuts in the shell to a squirrel she saw out back, which turned into two squirrels, and then three and now possibly four or five different ones. We recognize “Fatso,” “Runty” and “Rat-tail,” but there are a couple of others, it seems. A couple have become emboldened and come into the yard begging for food, or come along the fence up to Erin when she’s in the front yard. I got into the routine too, and stood with the Flip waiting for one of the squirrels. This one’s Fatso.

I have no reason to post this except I hope you enjoy it. It ain’t Asian, it ain’t baby boomerish, and it ain’t pop culture (well, kinda).

Slinky, a truly classic Baby Boomer toy

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Betty James just passed away. Who’s that, you say?

She’s the woman whose husband invented the Slinky, and the woman who headed the company that manufactured all the wacky variations of Slinky, from Slinky Dogs to Plastic Rainbow Slinkys, for decades. My friend Leland Rucker, with whom I co-authored “The Toy Book” in 1991, just posted his thoughts about the time we were lucky enough to meet her while researching the book.

I vividly remember meeting Betty James. She was appreciative that a couple of aging boomers like us were interested in her company. She was a giant, but unknown to the zillions of kids who grew up with her toy. She gave us brass special edition Slinkys after meeting us. I still have mine on my desk….

The story of the Slinky, which I’ll include below from “The Toy Book”‘s first chapter, is pretty fascinating, because it was discovered by chance, and was a bellwether — the first truly original toy for the nascent generation, because it was first sold in the fall of 1945 in the flush of the post-war holiday season. That’s why it led off the book.

But Betty James was a fascinating story herself. Richard James may have invented the Slinky but Betty made it a generational icon. Around 1960 Richard James left his wife and six children to join a religious cult in Bolivia. He died in 1974. Betty James took over as CEO of James Industries when he left, brought the company out of its debts (her husband had apparently “donated” a lot of profits to the religious group), and then started diversifying the Slinky product line and running the TV commercials that many Boomers can still sing along to.

It’s because of her efforts that to this day, if you say “Slinky” to almost anyone in in the US of almost any age, they’ll hold out there hands, palms up, and wave them up and down to mimic playing with the spring.


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