Read Beat (...and repeat)

We had another busy year on Read Beat in 2023--more than 50 interviews, almost one per week. Your host is Steve Tarter, a retired newspaper reporter living in Peoria, Illinois. 
I try to find issues that might prove interesting to a general audience. A lot of books get published each year and you hear about the most popular ones on a lot of fronts.
Here we try to find the ones you may not hear so much about but are no less important.
I want to thank all the folks I've had the pleasure to interview over the past three years as well as all the listeners who've tuned in.
We'll try to keep things interesting in 2024.

Media folks have been taking questions about the magazine industry to "Mr. Magazine" for decades. Samir Husni, 70, now retired after more than 30 years as a professor at the University of Mississippi, is still the oracle when it comes to magazines with his Mr. Magazine blog (https://mrmagazine.me/).
"It's the world of bookazine these days," said Husni, referring to the single-issue publications that turn up at checkout counters across America on subjects from Amazon to Zorro.
In 2023 at least 1,000 bookazine titles hit the marketplace, he said. In addition to filling ballparks, Taylor Swift led in the number of bookazines published this year. "Jesus ran second," he told Steve Tarter.
The bookazine concept succeeds with consumers despite a high cover price (that now ranges between $14 and $15), said Husni. "It's just one issue so there's no long commitment. If you're interested in going on a cruise, you'll pay $15 for a copy of 'Cruises on the Cheap,'" he said.
"The age of the mass magazines is gone," said Husni, who recently donated his vast collection of magazines (five storage units worth) to his alma mater, the University of Missouri.
While Samir remains a supporter of the great magazines of the 20th century, citing Life, Reader's Digest, TV Guide, and National Geographic, he's not ready to shovel dirt on the printed page. "As long as we have human beings, we'll have print," he said.

J.P. Telotte has been writing about film since 1985. As the man who introduced film studies to Georgia Tech University, Telotte, now professor emeritus at the Georgia school, has produced Selling Science Fiction Cinema, a study of the effort to market sci-fi films in the 1950s and 1960s.
His book focuses on a period when science fiction first exploded on the screen. 
In this postwar period both the film industry and its traditional audience were undergoing sea changes.
Telotte notes the presence of television was at first a concern of Hollywood then later used as a marketing tool to help promote films like Godzilla (1954) and The Blob (1958).
While television could help spread the word about a film, it could also be restrictive in some ways, said Telotte. Advertising for a film like The War of the Worlds (1953) was refused by several television stations because, it was claimed, the film’s images of an atomic bomb explosion and a Martian heat ray incinerating people might alarm children in the TV audience.
The problem boiled down to figuring out how best to define science fiction, Telotte told Steve Tarter. Hollywood producers, in efforts to draw people into the theater, were wary of sending out the wrong signals to the general public.
The Thing from Another World (1951), for example, the film that featured an alien that ran amuck on a North Pole military base, was not advertised specifically as a science fiction film. Its initial marketing  avoided the term “science fiction” with early reports describing it as a “mystery,” an “exploitation” film, or even a “pseudo-scientific melodrama.”

Most of us are familiar with Nancy, the comic strip penned for decades by Ernie Bushmiller, but what about the new Nancy now produced by Olivia Jaimes?
That's the focus of Jeff Karnicky's new book, "The New Nancy."
Bushmiller died in 1982 but Nancy has been sustained by the syndicate that owns the rights to the character and she just keeps going.
Despite fears--with newspapers in decline--that the daily comic has become an endangered species, a new digital reordering is underway, says Karnicky.
Those of us accustomed to perusing the funny pages to find Beetle Bailey, Blondie or Peanuts lament some of the changes that have come about but Karnicky, an English professor at Drake University, sheds light on the new age of the funnies, sharing some of the pros and cons of web comics.
It's a new ballgame for comic artists, said Karnicky. While a fortunate few (Bushmiller, Charles Schulz, Mort Walker and others) made a good living producing daily comics, the internet is a different master, he said.
"Comic creation has become part of the gig economy and can rarely be seen as the lucrative career it sometimes was in the 20th century," said Karnicky.
But there's still a world of comics about, he said. Sites like Gocomics.com are alive with comic strips, old and new. There are always new features and fresh characters that may not be in your daily paper--if you have a daily paper at all, that is.
Karnecky dissects some of these changes, providing background on how Jaimes approaches the challenge of keeping a cartoon character (originated in the 1930s) alive and relevant.

Taking over Nancy in 2026 is cartoonist Caroline Cash.

Route 66 still stands as a symbol of the road west, the open highway representing independence and mobility, two values that Americans consider part of their heritage. Yet Nat King Cole’s 1946 hit song, “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” stands more than a celebration of the open road. It’s a reminder that the road wasn’t open to everyone

Nat King Cole, himself, wouldn’t have been able to stay at most of the motels on Route 66 when that song was released.

African Americans taking vacations along Route 66 not only couldn’t stay at many of the motor inns the route helped popularize but weren’t always welcome at restaurants along the way. In many cases, bathrooms were off limits. There was also the problem of “sundown towns,” — communities that excluded blacks after the sun went down.

The Green Book was devised in 1936 by Victor Hugo Green, a New York postman, to provide a list of places that African Americans could visit without fear of retribution.
The guides were published annually until 1966.

Alvin Hall talked about Route 66 in an interview on Read Beat regarding his book, Driving the Green Book.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guide book for African Americans published between 1936 and 1967. The publication served as a guide to finding businesses that were welcoming to black Americans, including hotels and restaurants, during an era when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against nonwhites was widespread.

That description comes from New York’s Museum of Arts & Design in its presentation of Sanctuary, an exhibit based on the Green Book the museum featured in 2018 by artist Derrick Adams. Adams was the first person to be interviewed by Alvin Hall on the road trip that served as the basis for his book, Driving the Green Book.

Victor Hugo Green, a Harlem postal worker, conceived the guide to avoid what he called “aggravations” for black Americans who traveled, noted Hall. Along with Janee Woods Weber, Hall visited 12 U.S. cities from Detroit to New Orleans in a whirlwind 12-day tour, interviewing individuals with stories to tell about travels made with family and friends who traveled when the Green Book provided vital information. The podcasts from that trip help underscore the guide's importance  and the dangers faced en route.   https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/driving-the-green-book/id1519839250 

Hall, who produced a documentary on the Green Book for BBC in 2016, said the initial reaction for many when first hearing about the guide is surprise. “Many people have expressed the fact that they just didn’t know about it,” said Hall, who told Steve Tarter that he found it interesting that the BBC program that played to a global audience—all over the world--except in the United States.

More became aware of the guide after a film called The Green Book made the rounds in 2018, but that movie, highlighting the 1962 tour of African American pianist Don Shirley, “had virtually nothing to do with the actual Green Book,” said Hall.

Among those interviewed by Hall was Noelle Trent, now the CEO and president of the Museum of African American History in Boston, who recounted that even recent family trips started at 5 a.m. in the morning, a holdover from the past.

Five in the morning was that magical hour for many black families when they set out to travel, said Hall, noting that food for the trip was often laid out the night before. Along with facing the problem of obtaining food and services on the trip, “You wanted to get on the road early to reach your destination before dark. The last thing you wanted was to land in a sundown town late at night,” he said.

Sundown towns—communities that prohibited African Americans after the sun went down, Hall explained, were actually more common in the northern United States than in the South.

The Green Book stands as an example of black ingenuity, he said. Finding ways to seek safe harbor in a country where doors were often closed with real danger present was an act of resistance but it was also an act of resilience, said Hall. “It's a story of people who did not become embittered or seek vengeance. We knew we had to make a way through this.” 

Of all the general-interest magazines that held sway for decades before bowing out in the mid-20th century, Look is the one that’s often forgotten, said Peter Yarrow, whose book on the magazine points out that the publication had 35 million readers at its peak.

Unlike Life, Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post, the other major magazines of the day, Look tends to be overlooked, he told Steve Tarter.

“Look—which has slipped from national memory—had an extraordinary influence on mid-20th century America,” said Yarrow, noting that the magazine was published from 1935 to 1971 before closing. While a bit on "the schlocky side" at first, by the late 1940s, Look had grown into a powerful force with pictures and stories that both informed and entertained Americans, he said.

While Life continues to resurface at the supermarket counter with special editions on topics from the Beatles to the sinking of the Titanic, Look remains lost in the past. Unlike Life, Look has also never been digitized, said Yarrow, at work on a documentary of the magazine at present.

The loss of national magazines that were often optimistic about solving some of the social problems of the day has proved to be a major loss for the country, he said. “Instead of Look’s thoughtful, public-spirited journalism, we now live in a maelstrom of countless, small-audience, online, broadcast and print media,” said Yarrow, who points to an underappreciated past.

“The mid-20th century was a golden age (featuring) an increasingly prosperous middle class, a government that actually got things done and a reasonably well-informed citizenry,” he said.

Look took strong stands on civil rights and was one of the first national publications to profile gay Americans, said Yarrow. While Norman Rockwell is famous for the many covers he produced for the Post, it’s often forgotten that he also did some 30 paintings for Look, including the famous 1964 work that depicted Ruby Bridges, an African American grade schooler being escorted by federal marshals to a New Orleans school ordered to integrate, he said.

Film director Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look for six years, starting when he was just 16, said Yarrow.

Magazines like Life (which ended regular publication a year after Look) had millions of subscribers up until the day they folded but weren't able to hold advertisers who moved to television in the 1960s, said Yarrow, pointing to an increase in postal rates and competition from special-interest magazines as helping bring the curtain down on the country's general-interest magazine era. 

Additional information on Yarrow’s documentary project is available at https://andrewlyarrow.com/the-life-of-look-the-film.

Peoria native Anthony Suau won awards for his photography while taking pictures for big-city dailies like the Chicago Sun-Times and Denver Post. His photographs have appeared in Life, National Geographic and Paris Match.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for his images of the famine in Ethiopia in 1984 while in 1996 he received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for coverage of the war in Chechnya.
Now the 67-year-old Suau has his first full-length movie out, a film called Organic Rising. Suau said that what started out as a 10 to 15-minute short turned into a 10-year project.
“After living in Europe for 20 years, I moved back to the states in 2007 and got interested in organic agriculture,” he said.
That interest quickly turned to passion.
“I’m very inspired by the amazing farmers who farm organically,” said Suau who crossed the country gathering information and shooting pictures for the film including doing interviews here in central Illinois.
Suau hopes his film can revive the fight against business interests that have sought to suppress the organic movement, he said. Suau cited the impact of lawsuits filed against “60 Minutes” and “Oprah” when those programs raised concerns over chemicals like glyphosate and atrazine in the nation’s food and water.
“Seed companies basically shut down the press,” said Suau, who credited Clare Howard, a former journalist with the Peoria Journal Star, with inspiring him to focus on problems caused by the use of atrazine as a weed killer.
Suau cited Howard’s work in exposing an aggressive multi-million dollar campaign conducted by the Syngenta Co. to protect profits made from the sale of atrazine, a chemical which research indicates can run off fields and contaminate water supplies.
“Organic Rising” also includes footage shot on a non-organic farm near Galesburg. “In order to learn about all elements of the organic sector, you have to learn about conventional agriculture at the same time,” said Suau.
Along with interviews with farmers, Suau includes comments from scientists like Charles Benbrook and Tyrone Hayes. “A day of reckoning is coming for the United States,” said Benbrook regarding the use of pesticides.
The good news is that organic agriculture has been embraced by the public, said Suau. “Organic agriculture today represents a $35 billion business. It’s moving,” he said.“ The film can be viewed at www.organicrisingfilm.com/the-film.

Advertising has been part of the American scene since the beginning. Jennifer Black, in her new book, "Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America," points to ads at the time of the American Revolution by "a growing contingent of Americans who expressed their classed identities through the goods they purchased."
But things really got going in the 1800s as the American commercial marketplace began as a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knockoffs and outright frauds thrived.
As early as the 1830s, printers and manufacturers started working on ways to advertise goods.
By 1870, visual elements, design and entertainment efforts had ushered in the advertising age that we still live in today.
As Black explained to Steve Tarter, the development of lithography, the printing of images, spurred an interest in art and nature in the public but it also presented a whole new world for advertisers.
Black details the rise and fall of trade cards that carried an advertiser's brand along with a pretty picture.
Advertising continued to develop into the 20th century. Black pointed to brand images that have stood the test of time such as the Quaker man for Quaker oats, initially established in the 1870s. But there were also ad mascots that didn't last such as the bug-eyed Josh Slinger, who served as the "spokesman" for Hires root beer  from 1914 to 1918.

 

Being labeled “the Czar of Noir” isn’t anything new for Eddie Muller. The San Francisco-based author and TCM film host has been writing and talking about film noir for more than 25 years.

His 1998 release, “Dark City: the Lost World of Film Noir,” was just selected as one of the top 100 movie books by the Hollywood Reporter (the book will soon be rereleased from TCM). Muller has produced an entire noir library including “Dark City Dames” (look for a revised edition next year), a book on noir posters and several original novels but this year he’s pushed noir limits even further, publishing the “Noir Bar,” a book of mixed drink recipes and the films that inspired them (Eddie’s first professional job was as a bartender) and, most recently a children’s book, “Kid Noir: Kitty Feral and the Case of the Marshmallow Monkey” (with Jessica Schmidt and Forrest Burdett).

Film noir, that genre made up of those gritty black-and-white crime films mostly from the 40s and 50s, has no better proponent than Muller who not only introduces viewers to films on TCM’s “Noir Alley” ( Saturdays at midnight) but organizes and hosts film festivals all over the country—both for TCM and his own film-restoring foundation —to keep classic noir films in front of the public. Next summer, Muller hosts a film noir fest in Paris, au fait.

What was Muller’s first noir? What old movie led him to a life of crime (movies)? “It was probably ‘Big Heat’ but ‘Thieves’ Highway’ makes a better story,” he told Steve Tarter. “(‘Highway’) could be called agri-noir because it’s about a man who goes to the open San Francisco farmers’ market to avenge his father who he believes was done in by a conniving fruit peddler (played by Lee J. Cobb). There are also a lot of scenes of San Francisco with buildings that are no longer there,” he said.

While he hosts film noir fests from Seattle to Detroit throughout the year—including the granddaddy of them all, the 21st annual Film Noir Foundation festival set for Oakland in January—Muller says he never tires of all the hoopla or the genre, itself. “I’m an enthusiast before anything else,” he said.

So are there still any old chestnuts to pull out of the film noir fire we haven’t seen? Muller said studio releases have been largely tapped but he’s still on the lookout for those independent films released (but not owned) by Hollywood studios back in the day that may have disappeared. There are also films overseas that need to be added to a film noir fancier’s collection, he said. Muller said he's been turned on to some great ones from Argentina.

“Crime shows are a great unifier. I think Americans broaden their horizons with crime fiction such as the present interest in Scandinavian mysteries,” said Muller.

Expressing concern over dangers presented by Artificial Intelligence, Muller said the issue comes down to basic plagiarism. “There’s no way to stop it. Everything today gets on the internet and that’s where AI finds its material." 

Muller recognized AI as a problem that looms larger in the future. "By its very nature, it keeps improving. It’s very much an existential crisis,” he said.

The hope is that AI won’t progress to the point that a revamped version of “Big Sleep” might be released that actually makes sense of that film’s convoluted plot. 

Meanwhile Muller prepares for the annual TCM Classic Cruise this November. If they wind up shorthanded, the czar can always help out at the bar. Here is Eddie’s recipe for the Last Word, a popular Prohibition-era cocktail revived by Murray Stenson at the Zig Zag Café in Seattle: 

(Coupe glass chilled/ Shaker, strained): ¾ ounce gin; ¾ ounce green Chartreuse; ¾ ounce Luxardo Maraschino liqueur; ¾ lime juice, freshly squeezed; Garnish: Luxardo Maraschino cherry.