Audiophilia

This Week:  advances in technology and a friend of a friend.

  And now I will try and write this for the third time.  Google is out to get me tonight.  

So I will be brief.  Damn!  I cut her head off!

I feel the consternation of the art department.  That is an awkward encroachment on a lovely illustration of Betty Draper.  Who else?  The same put-upon slump, the Breck-blond hair.

On the far left, a little message from the future.  The Carven perfume box reminds me of the Courreges dress.  Can't get it out of my head.  What was going on with Courreges in 1959?  If I try and look, I'll lose the page.   The typeface, everything, says mid-1960s.  I have heard of, but have not smelled, Ma Griffe.   But now "the most French fragrance ever . . .vert et blaue."  I am taking this as an ad for Vert et Blau, which I found at The Perfumed Court for $6.00 a smidgen.  According to present-day, reincarnated Carven (which does not sell fragrance), Carvel pioneered couture eue de toillette.

Next we have a symphony in nylon and some nice Vogue blurbage, some of the first this issue.  And we are on page 74!  This is the first time I've looked at a page number.  You get dizzy when you look down.  "Nightdressing -- to present. . .To outdistance a Christmas wrapping in prettiness. . ."  $40 peignoir set.  Might be fun to swan around the house in something like that.  And a cigarette.  And maribou mules.

Illustration by Luciana Roselli.  I can find nothing about her directly, but she seems to have illustrated a children's book called The Princess's Tresses.  Seems apt.  Also found some more fashion illustrations in someone else's blog.  Have decided that the etiquette is this:  since it is a current, tended blog, I'll ask before I publish.  They're really good.  (So, yeah, if I find something that hasn't been updated since 2008, I'll probably just take it.  That is, if it were just abandoned.)  But here is a link to the page devoted to a 1962 Harper's Bazaar.

Now - the piece de resistance:

Just ignore the left page.  Absent minded and lazy - forgot to get the main picture and I'm not going back.  Sanity and laziness so often indistinguishable.

That is one awkward looking console.  And the mural background!  But, that, my young friends, was an iPod.  It was the aurok of iPods.  I'm just going to quote:

Announcing the magnificent Magnavox Concert Grand


. . .unquestionably the finest, most revolutionalr stereophonic high fidelity instrument ever created!


Words alone cannot convey the breath-taking performance of this fabulous electonic achievement by Magnavox. . . You must hear it to believe it.  Nothing like the Concert Grand has ever been created before! . . Imagine yourself surrounded in your own home by living performances of the world's great orchestras and artists . . .The Concert Grand also offers you all the superlative features that electro-acoustical science is capable of creating:  It has tremendous power (100 watts undistorted, 200 watts peak), . . .A revolutionary wireless remote control permits complete operation form anywhere in the house.  It turns the instrument on and off, controls volume, rejects records and changes stations at the touch of a button, automatically selecting every usable FM or AM signal on the air.  Think of the convenience of being in your upstairs bedroom and with the world of musc at your command!

Now, it was decades before we had remote control anything in our house.  I wish I still had the family Kenmore stereo.  Very handsome.  Dark wood, nice details.  What they don't show in the picture is the thing in use:  the lid propped up, reminding you that you shouldn't use it as a credenza, although you always did.  Sounded great, smelled great . . . really.

And here are the parts, up close:

How much did this behemoth cost?  One thousand 1959 dollars.  (About $7,900.00, according to official inflation guide.  How good was it?  Obsolete on delivery.   No tape player!    In looking for a "tech review" in the NYT of past, I found  this from 1957.  Go read it; I'll wait.  "Uh, what about all those records?   Don't worry! We don't have to start over again completely."  Paraphrased - italics verbatim.   In 1958, Magnavox introduced equipment that could play the new stereo records - the earlier piece was about stereo tape, interestingly enough.   In September 1959, Magnavox issued a stock split, partly because of profits on stereo equipment.  Two changes since then:  tech reviews in the New York Times and everywhere else; Magnavox out of the music business.

Let's go to the cinema!

*    A hard-working student from the provinces moves in with his hipster cousin; tragedy ensues.

*    Not my night.  Excellent trailer on Critierion DVD. Not one shred of footage online.  Trailer has all you really need of the film, which is about ten times more boring than necessary.  Just didn't work.  Dull, unpleasant characters, repetitive scenes that go on too long, boring actors - except Jean-Claud Brialy, who would be right at home in hipster Oakland.

*  We know Claude Chabrol from before.  We met him in the October 15, 1959 issue when researching Derek Prouse, author of a fairly entertaining feature on modern Japan.  There wasn't much to find out about Mr. Prouse, except that he wrote the screenplay for The Champagne Murders, directed by Claude Chabrol in 1967.  I had not heard of Claude Chabrol, although I had seen his Madame Bovary.    
And now here he is in his own right.  And I happen to know that People Will Be Talking About him later this month.

*  You would not believe it, but the last scene in the movie is a close-up of a record playing in a stereo console.