http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview All about the world inside our heads, and outside Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:03:10 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 2006-2007 pbreview@pseudobook.com (The Pseudobook Review) pbreview@pseudobook.com (The Pseudobook Review) 1440 http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/powered_by_podpress.jpg http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview 144 144 All about the world inside our heads, and outside The Pseudobook Review The Pseudobook Review pbreview@pseudobook.com no no http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2010/03/4-thirty-second-reviews-before-march-31st-gives-way-to-april-fools-day/ http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2010/03/4-thirty-second-reviews-before-march-31st-gives-way-to-april-fools-day/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:00:38 +0000 Bruce Edwards http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/?p=463 http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2010/03/4-thirty-second-reviews-before-march-31st-gives-way-to-april-fools-day/feed/ 4 http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2008/04/youre-not-a-good-man-charlie-brown/ http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2008/04/youre-not-a-good-man-charlie-brown/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:18:19 +0000 Bruce Edwards http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/?p=240 http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2008/04/youre-not-a-good-man-charlie-brown/feed/ 2 http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2007/11/route-66-season-1-vol-1/ http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2007/11/route-66-season-1-vol-1/#comments Sat, 24 Nov 2007 17:43:58 +0000 Bruce Edwards http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/?p=199 http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2007/11/route-66-season-1-vol-1/feed/ 3 0:02:10 Once upon a time in 1960, an era for TV which FCC Chairman Newton Minnow famously declared to be “a vast wasteland,” America weekly, avidly, watched a whole hour in glorious black-and-white depicting two guys riding around the U. S. in a two-seater[...] Once upon a time in 1960, an era for TV which FCC Chairman Newton Minnow famously declared to be “a vast wasteland,” America weekly, avidly, watched a whole hour in glorious black-and-white depicting two guys riding around the U. S. in a two-seater Corvette. Viewers’ passion for the adventures of this anthology show’s winsome duo lasted four seasons, even enduring a mysteriously abrupt cast change midway through the third season. The car was iconic, and so were the actors. The show was called Route 66. With the release of the first fifteen episodes of season one of Route 66, now everyone can discover or relive the initial, vicarious thrill of TV’s revelation that America was becoming a mobile society, set free by the construction of interstates, the availability of cheap gas, and the strange allure of “the other America,” the one outside studio soundstages and single camera vantage points. Has any network TV series since married so successfully and effortlessly the romance of the road with the prospect of life-changing adventure just around the corner–all captured against uncommon on-locale vistas of America’s little-seen western heartlands and coastal shorelines? And indeed the direction of their Corvette was always Westward or Southward. No u-turns. Unfolding America We forget how provincial and place-bound the typical American’s life was in the middle of the 20th Century. Except for soldiers, diplomats, news correspondents, movie and sports stars, who traveled overseas or overland more than 75 miles from home? Newsreels still found prominence in movie theatres so people could witness what America landscapes looked like for themselves, what “non-local” Americans did, thought, revered; and America’s unique dialects, not mine or yours but somebody else’s, could finally be tapped for stories and storytelling and regional differences could be celebrated as true differences and not melted into the gigantic pot of generic Americana. Route 66 brought these qualities to TV’s original road trip, albeit with the misleading title. Misleading? Because hardly any of the four years worth of episodes were actually spent on the Mother Road itself. The mystique earned from naming it “Route 66” alone drew viewers, and adroitly captured the wanderlust of American youth with its growing fascination with cars as something other than mere transportation. (As Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes says in her 1952 novel, Wise Blood, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”) There seems to me no doubt that this brilliant, high concept show made possible the veritable discovery of the surf culture of SoCal and thus paved the way for the music of the Beach Boys (themselves ingenious cultural barometers); before their Corvette sped into town, who knew these people existed? Cast Starring 20-somethings Martin Milner and George Maharis, whom the teen magazines of the day casually referred to as “heartthrobs” (though much later it was revealed that Maharis was a closeted gay actor), Route 66’s protagonists represented the restless souls of the children of those who had fought in two or more world conflicts whom we now call babyboomers. The new breed of youth, most of whom had not been to war and were not college graduates or perhaps even college material (only the rich or idle went to college, and never to learn how to make a living), were still wondering how to be Americans in peacetime, when staying put or anywhere close was not an inevitable answer. These vagabonds–Todd (Milner) a listless, clean-cut, Yale graduate, the intellectual “discovering himself,” and his unlikely companion, Buz (Maharis), a boisterous, often belligerent street kid from Hell’s Kitchen, NYC, the increasingly sophisticated brute “recovering himself”–proved one could leave home and survive through wit, verve, and cunning. And a few fisticuffs. Drifting as Occupation Neither had jobs; jobs found them, as they made their way across the map, their exploi[...] TV pbreview@pseudobook.com no no http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2007/07/the-best-of-hootenanny/ http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2007/07/the-best-of-hootenanny/#comments Thu, 19 Jul 2007 05:23:21 +0000 Bruce Edwards http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/?p=115 http://www.pseudobook.com/thepseudobookreview/2007/07/the-best-of-hootenanny/feed/ 8