The Dreamsville Podcast - Episode 3

A special Halloween podcast.

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Earl Newman Prints

After I posted that poster from The Insomniac in Hermosa beach that was on ebay last week, Dan Geddes commented and hipped me to the fact that the artist of this fine poster was Earl Newman, he's still around and sells beautiful prints of several of the posters that he made for local coffee houses and jazz cellars as well as many other works from his long career. Check out his website to see more.

Beats On TV - Johnny Staccato - The Poets Touch

The beatniks have been coming fast and furious lately. I've watched a number of TV episodes lately where unexpected hipsters turned up. One of the best has to be this episode of Johnny Staccato. The story is about a young poet who hangs around with a couple of tough longshoremen in order to get some inspiration to draw on for his poetry. One night the stevedores kill a man and they decide to hide the poet so he won't talk. At the request of an eccentric publisher of a poetry magazine, Johnny tries to track him down. This leads him to some pretty entertaining looking beatnick hotspots.

"Listen, fink. You got us because you wanted colour for your poems, great! You got the colour, but don't write no poems about us, you understand?"

"It was chilly in Greenwich Village, and most of the beat generation activity was indoors. However, the few that were not allergic to fresh air were on the streets. Behind the beards and the no make-up and in front of the pony-tails were mostly pretty nice kids, right now they believe in abstract art and poetry, zen buddism - faith or folly, Dylan Thomas - success or failure. Was the beat generation really beat or merely deadbeat? Later on they'll believe in shaving, money, women, children and maybe station wagons."

"Perambulation has a thousand songs that one by one pursue, RUNNING, FALLING, VOMITING forth cobras enamored of higher escapes. If you give way, or hedge aside from the direct forthright, like to an entered tide, they all rush by and leave you hindmost."

"One could pass valuable hours, perhaps days doing nothing but hanging by ones earlobes strung by a thin white hot wire burning with ecstasy."

"Up through eternity and back, I myself have often succumbed, knowing not of brown and white saddle shoes or dim high stone portals. Knowing only of Guanahato and the jelly covered invaders gazing idly at the chartreuse swan."

"That dreary line wrecks the whole poem."

"Play it cool, man."

Like...flute, man.

The Insomniac!

Poster for this cool Hermosa Beach coffee house found on ebay

The Dreamsville Podcast Update

Alright, I'm a little tired of waiting for DivShare to fix this issue. So I took some good advice and moved the podcasts over to a podcast server. This is something that I'm paying for now, so I hummed and hawed about it for a while but decided it was the best course. Hobbies cost money right? However, I've added one of those Paypal donation dealies off to the left side there. So if you want to drop a coin in the jar, please feel free. All donations will go first and foremost to pay for the cost of the podcast site. If, by some chance people get really generous, any extra will go into the ebay account which I use to buy records that I will ultimately share here or at one of my other blogs. So that's the long and short of it, enjoy the podcasts, they're over here now.

Odd Man Out - Carol Reed - 1947

So Netflix has started up here in Canada now and I admit, I'm a little excited about it and I'm enjoying the hell out of the month long free trial, even though there isn't much availiable to us Canucks just yet. Apparently Netflix has to secure the rights to show each film in Canada, so more titles appear as time goes on. There's not much on their film noir roster at the moment but I was surprised to come across this beauty that I hadn't seen before. Odd Man Out is noir at its best and a welcome change in location from NYC or LA to Belfast, Northern Ireland makes it that much more interesting. I would have loved to take more screen shots and provided some dialog here, but it's kind of hard using Netflix since it has to buffer every time you jump back or ahead. So here's a couple of shots I yanked from somewhere else of James Mason and his lovely leading lady Maureen Delaney.

There's no trailer that I can find but there are a number of great scenes on youtube. Such as this one.

Aussie Pulps

Inspired by my new friend Koop Kooper, I dug up a pretty cool collection of Aussie pulps here.

Technical Difficulties

I'm sure a good number of you have noticed that the new podcast, and the older podcast, for that matter, haven't been working. In fact many of the album shares and embedable mp3 players are down as well. This seems to be an issue on divshares end. I've contacted them and I've heard back so I'm just waiting for stuff to start working again. Thanks for your patience. My apologies. This couldn't come at a worse time, since the blog was recently mentioned on Koop Koopers Cocktail Nation Radio Show. Go check out his podcasts for the best in vintage and modern lounge, exotica and jazz. Really cool stuff. Thanks Koop.