"Video Business" magazine closes up shop

As if any further indication was needed that the DVD industry is in a tailspin, I sadly note the death this week of the trade publication Video Business, which much to my delight had kept its original name all these years (hey, the “V” in DVD does stand for “video”). In a weird way, the home-entertainment industry has seen nothing but deaths in the past decade or so — most interestingly, the chain that set out to decimate the mom-and-pop store in the Eighties (the dreaded Blockbuster) has now fallen victim to Netflix, a notion that requires the absolute minimum of activity on the part of its customers (ah, the pure American-ness of not having to actually *do* anything, and yet still be a consumer!)

For full disclosure’s sake, I will note that I have been writing for the magazine for approximately nine years as a freelance reviewer and reporter. But I began reading it when I worked at a video store back in the late 1980s and later on, when I worked at the most famous (and still curiously alive… why?) TV listings weekly, I returned to VB as a reader because we were desperately in need of finding someone, *anyone* who actually was watching the crappy straight-to-video features (Shannon Tweed, Don “the Dragon” Wilson, Jeff Fahey, Shannon Whirry, et al) that we couldn’t evaluate because the cable nets showed ’em but were never going to provide screeners of them.

Video Business has filled that void for thirty years, and yes, these days you can indeed find a stray blogger who will review the same material for free and perhaps even in more depth, but it just ain’t the same, since VB often actually panned the freaking things, and their reviewers (I’m talking a decade before I had any participation in it) seemed to be folks who knew their bad films (and, more importantly of course, their good-bad films). Bloggers generally know their topic backward and forward, but they are a tad cautious to pan things they are getting for free from cordial publicists.

In any case, Video Business issued official word on Wednesday that it ceased publication this week with its current issue, December 4th. As a regular reader of the magazine, I think that it’s a major loss, since I notice several movie-news websites simply tossing up DVD label press releases with no fact-checking or follow-up calls involved. VB has been a reputable source of home-entertainment industry news, even as its happy stories about new horizons in technology were turning to revelations about the ways in which its readership — namely, the local video merchant — were being squeezed out of business by the lazyman juggernaut that is Netflix. I’ve heard that the magazine’s website will go offline, which is a major loss since the magazine covered titles that weren’t being reviewed anywhere else.

As a writer for the publication, I extend a personal thanks to editor and good friend Laurence Lerman, who’s done a terrific job of covering the disparate threads of an industry that’s gone in some very strange directions in only two decades: from a glut of “straight to videos” (with titles like Indecent Deadly Bloody Fatal Illusion), to rather luster-less “DVD premieres” (not ANOTHER Dennis the Menace sequel that no one knows exists?), to crystal-clear BluRay restorations of the same films that have been out umpteen times before. Laurence is a class act who has been one of the best editors I’ve had the pleasure to work with. His sweet tooth for kitsch aside (why do you think we’re friends?), he has exhibited a special talent for juggling both the “high” and the “low” in VB’s movie-review section; this aspect made it a very important read for DVD retailers around the country. And yes, there are still some mom-and-pops bravely weathering the slow, strange death of the home-entertainment industry. They deserve your business right now — get up off your asses and forget the Netflix envelopes and *rent* a movie in person, fer chrissake!

And so I raise a glass in toast to Laurence and the other folks who like myself have toiled in any capacity for Video Business. I can’t imagine future news-sources of info about movie “platforms” (Download Business???) ever being as adventurous, or as worth reading.

Streetwise Pipsqueak: Deceased Artiste Arnold Stang

During my “exchange student” college studies in Paris dozens of light years ago, I remember looking up what was playing in the city in Pariscope, the listings magazine, and seeing that The Man With the Golden Arm was being revived. Only two cast names were included in the write-up: Frank Sinatra and Arnold Stang. For some reason the French copywriter had skipped over Kim Novak, Eleanor Parker, and even the awesomely campy Darren McGavin, to get right to the sidekick to end all sidekicks, the man we knew as… Stang!

Today a very good New York Times obit appeared to pay tribute to the Stang, but major fan-archival work was done by a gent named Kliph Nesteroff in an article found here. Stang moved from medium to medium as a young comic performer: he started work as a kid in radio on “Let’s Pretend” and “The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour,” then moved on to movies, went back to radio working as the sidekick for one of my faves, Henry Morgan. He then shifted over to TV, where he eventually became Berle’s sidekick (he had worked with Uncle Miltie on radio), and then moved between the worlds of TV, movies, and cartoons, where his crazy voice was heard for decades, most particularly on Top Cat.

Stang’s voice will live on and on, and he is probably best known as an actor for having appeared in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Here are some clips of Arnold at his best. The first being the absolute best, him telling off his boss, Milton, on a Berle Xmas episode:



Stang also did the game show circuit. Here he is on the show The Name’s The Same. My fave fun fact about this series, besides the fact that Bob and Ray hosted a half-season in quite a bizarre fashion (sometimes confusing the hell out of the studio audience), is that when Stang quit he was replaced by a very similar personality… Basil Rathbone!



The Man with the Golden Arm was never copyrighted for some bizarre reason, and so it is up on YouTube in its entirety. Here is one posted version of it:



An odd assignment for Arnold: starring with Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall in a country comedy called Second Fiddle to a Steel Guitar (1966):



And here is the man himself, talking about his work on Top Cat:



Two of the strangest films Stang was in are available in their entirety on YT: Hello Down There, a “with-it” comedy that wasn’t so with it, and Hercules in New York, which starred a young, dubbed, and renamed Arnold Schwarzenegger (“Arnold Strong” starred with Arnold Stang).

And to close out with some tip-top visuals and audio, here is an amazing collage of Stang photos assembled by Kliph Nesteroff for his great article on the gent.





For the final bang from Stang, here is my re-upload of some wondrous record collector's posting of his novelty 45, "Where Ya Callin' From, Charlie?" If anyone knows who the original poster was, I will most definitely give them credit:

"Christmas In Jail": Lux and Ivy's Xmas favorites

As I noted in a lengthy post earlier this year, the celebrity death I was the most depressed about in 2009 was that of Lux Interior of the Cramps. This was because Lux and his wife, the ageless and mega-awesome guitarist Ms. Ivy Rorshach, not only created one of the seminal punk/rockabilly/comic-book/horror groups back in the mid-’70s, but because they were rabid musicaholics who introduced myself and their other fans to countless forgotten garage, rockabilly, r&b, and (ah, yes!) novelty acts that we never would’ve discovered otherwise in the Seventies and Eighties.

The Cramps have been ignored when it came to the creation of the “Underground Garage” concept (and I am, by the way, a fan of the UG radio show and live shows). For me and countless others, Lux and Ivy were as important to our discovery of garage music as the Lenny Kaye Nuggets two-record set (in fact, in some cases like mine, we discovered the Cramps first, then Lenny’s great compilation).

Thus I am constantly heartened by the work of a devoted Cramps fan who is known as “Kogar the Swinging Ape” (after the wandering monkey in Rat Pfink a Boo Boo). Kogar has put up 13 collections of “Lux and Ivy’s Favorites” in various places on the Net, always for free and always mind-blowing and thoroughly entertaining (containing music that belongs both on oldies radio and in the UG). He now has put up a collection he says was created by Lux himself and given away with a magazine at one point. It is called “Black Christmas” and can be downloaded at the “WFMU Ichiban” blogspot.

Go get it now at the Ichiban site.

In the meantime, I’ll close off by lamenting the fact that we blogspotters have no idea of each other’s presence unless we go “digging.” I wish the folks running Blogger would create a tighter sense of community, so those of us who dwell in the same swamp of vintage pop-culture obsession could find each other more easily. I discovered that this recent-vintage WFMU blog existed through a bulletin Kogar put on the dreaded (gasp) MySpace, which has forfeited its “go-to site” throne to the comfier-for-old-folks Facebook. I’m glad I found it in any case, and urge ya to partake of yet another slice of Lux’s exquisite taste in heaven-sent rock ’n’ roll.

A "Blast" of a Dark Christmas

It’s hard to pick a conclusive “end” to the film noir cycle, but the brilliantly bleak b&w 1962 hitman saga Blast of Silence has got to be one of the very last fully formed works before the “revisionist” and homage items that showed up in the Seventies. Last year I wrote a lengthy review of the Criterion release of the film , and definitely recommend that you check it out.

One among many reasons it needs to be seen is its NYC location footage, and there is no better example than a segment I called “Noir Christmas” when I uploaded it to YouTube. Sheer masterful scripting and direction by Allen Baron, and kick-ass narration by Lionel Stander.

Croaking Out the Carols: Dylan's Christmas album

At the intersection of genius, calculation, and batshit crazy, there is Bob Dylan. His latest oddball career move — after the “never-ending tour,” the Victoria’s Secret ad, and Masked and Anonymous (not forgetting the years of Xtianity, Renaldo and Clara, the white face-paint and the wacky Nashville Skyline voice) — is the Xmas album Christmas in the Heart. The album gets my vote as funniest CD of the year, and not because of its cutesy, fun, upbeat numbers like “Must Be Santa Claus,” in which Bob channels Mojo Nixon, the Leningrad Cowboys, Gogol Bordello, and just about every polka band in his native state of Minnesota.

The element that does make the album tilt into the humor category is Bob’s croaking of solemn hymns and carols. Plainly put, Bob has smoked his voice away to a froggy, gravelly level that would make a pro wrestler (or a homeless man on a subway platform) proud. In his last few, masterfully written albums, he’s occasionally revealed the sediment at the bottom of his vocal cords, but on the Christmas album, he intentionally goes for note after note he can’t possibly hit (and never could), just to go into full cringe-inducing (or, alternately laugh-inducing) rasp-and-gargle. There are numerous examples of this, but the finest have to be the “I” in “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and pretty much all of his “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

The closest comparison I can provide for this album are the final Sinatra studio recordings, all done in one afternoon for the two Duets albums. Those albums were “stunt” creations, and the one-time perfectionist Frank just ran through his “assignments” until his voice was gone… and they kept recording, and they released the results.

I don’t think Dylan has reached the point where he does everything in a single afternoon, so why sing a bunch of songs with a range that shows the ravages your throat have gone through? Well, there are a number of factors here: the Dylan “brand,” which Bob himself has kept going for years — meaning he has made four to five times the albums of his peer singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, and Randy Newman — but they’ve never once dropped a true stinker like a few of Bob’s Seventies and Eighties LPs; the destruction-of-mythology factor (which I've discussed with my friend and webmaster), in which Bob, like Brando, wants you to know he can still produce solid works of genius, but often chooses not to (or decides to simply deconstruct/destroy something he knows the fans and critics hold dear); and yes, random ridiculousness. A nice country-western Xmas album would’ve been very welcome. Christmas in the Heart is one-third a rouser, and the other two-thirds the willful act of perversity everyone expected it would be.

That said, you can download the album at the Zinhof blog (Rapidshare link is down, but the others aren’t). It’s better if you buy it, since Bob is donating some of the money he earns to charity, but I can well understand if you don’t.