There's Sometimes a Buggy

Dave and Elise conclude their discussion of the extant two-thirds of the Seaguy Saga - in dialogue with written pieces by John Pistelli, Andrew Hickey, Jog, and Mathew Amylon at Sequart. 

Get on the rides!!!!!

Of possible interest:

Vintage Dave blog post on the series.

Intro Song:

"Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)" - Cowboy Junkies

You can always write us at [email protected], or contact us through our Facebook Page or our Twitter accounts @milescoverdale and @rhodaAF709 

We're on all of the podcast delivery services, including iTunes, TuneIn radio and Stitcher, so please rate/review us there, if you can!

Finally, as suggested by listener Jay, here's an Amazon link to Dave's time travel novel, Hypocritic Days (published by Insomniac Press), which is set in the pulp magazine and film worlds of the early 1930s. Please do let us know if you check it out.

Original Another Kind of Distance artwork by Lee McClure

Accidents Will Happen (1938) represents kind of a milestone in the young Gipper's career - his first chance to play a non-radio announcer/reporter. In classic Warners "ripped-from-the-headlines" style, the film tackles an Insurance Fraudster Scare that generated more than 400 New York Times headlines during the late 1930s.  Our panel discerns the lineaments of the future politician's crowd pleasing persona in the figure of Eric Gregg, intrepid accident claims detective, who is both the ultimate naif and the ultimate sharpie. Nothing gets by him! Except the fact this his wife hates his good corporate soldier/"I'll get a raise next year" act so much that she is willing to get creative about punishing him for failing to hold up his end of the patriarchal bargain. 

During the 1940s, Reagan's unique Shark Scout qualities will serve him well in Popular Front leftist narratives like Juke Girl, and they will be turned to more sinister account during the 1980s we all hate so much, but here you'd be hard-pressed to ascribe any coherent politics to his actions. On the other hand, the film does make a brief detour into hard-edged class politics in its sensitive depiction of Red Time Hero Clinton Rosemond's plight. We also get a healthy dose of proto-feminist ire, thanks to Sheila Bromley's strong portrayal of a woman who probably makes the right choice between a life of domestic listlessness and a responsible position within a thriving criminal enterprise. 

All this and Joan Blondell's sister, too! All in 60 minutes.    

Now is a time for choosing. Choose RED TIME FOR BONZO!

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Intro Theme:

"Driving Reagan" by Gareth Hedges

Elise and Dave are back for round two of the Wetsuited Wonder's adventures in hypersensory slumberland. It's a rough ride, as Morrison and Cameron Stewart make you believe a duplicitous readymade best pal can make you cry; introduce a whole new generation of colourfully callow caperers; and toss the notion of externally imposed gender to the bulls. Join us!  

Intro Song:

"Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)" - Cowboy Junkies

You can always write us at [email protected], or contact us through our Facebook Page or our Twitter accounts @milescoverdale and @rhodaAF709 

We're on all of the podcast delivery services, including iTunes, TuneIn radio and Stitcher, so please rate/review us there, if you can!

Finally, as suggested by listener Jay, here's an Amazon link to Dave's time travel novel, Hypocritic Days (published by Insomniac Press), which is set in the pulp magazine and film worlds of the early 1930s. Please do let us know if you check it out.

Original Another Kind of Distance artwork by Lee McClure

Join Ronald Reagan behind enemy lines in a North Korean prison camp so terrifyingly coercive, even the U.S. Military did not want the public to see it! Filmed with the full cooperation of the Pentagon, the Cold War brass revoked their imprimatur after viewing the final product. You might say this one was declared off-Nimitz, if you were a certain kind of HELLCATS OF THE NAVY-centric punster. 

PRISONER OF WAR actually dares to put a viable socialist critique of the new U.S. World Order in the mouths of its cartoonish villains, demonstrating just how ideologically blinkered North American audiences were (and are). As Rita Hayworth states in the immortal STRAWBERRY BLONDE: "I refuse to listen to advanced ideas!" 

Now is a time for choosing. Choose RED TIME FOR BONZO!

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Your hosts round out their coverage of Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart's Seaguy Volume 1 by circling back into Dave's blogospheric past (in the excellent company of Rose, Steven, David, Sean, and Patrick).  

Intro Song:

"Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)" - Cowboy Junkies

You can always write us at [email protected], or contact us through our Facebook Page or our Twitter accounts @milescoverdale and @rhodaAF709 

We're on all of the podcast delivery services, including iTunes, TuneIn radio and Stitcher, so please rate/review us there, if you can!

Finally, as suggested by listener Jay, here's an Amazon link to Dave's time travel novel, Hypocritic Days (published by Insomniac Press), which is set in the pulp magazine and film worlds of the early 1930s. Please do let us know if you check it out.

Original Another Kind of Distance artwork by Lee McClure

Episode 5A: Sergeant Murphy (1938)

Bryan Foy's B-movie unit at Warner Brothers churned out some of the best bottom-of-the-bill features of the late 1930s, but B. Reeves Eason's "Horseratio Alger" tale Sergeant Murphy is kind of a nag. Nevertheless, this seldom seen army/racing/equine buddy film is a crucial item in the Gipper's filmography, as it demonstrates the studio's continuing commitment to the coltish actor as a leading player (it's his second starring vehicle, following closely on the hooves of Love is on the Air).  

The film may not be any great shakes as a piece of entertainment, but it made a fine conversation piece for your hosts, who zero in on Reagan's unexpected espousal of post-structuralist/critical race theory in a key scene, marvel at the U.S. military's laughingstock/rump status in those pre-World War II/World Police days, and consider the evolution of Dutch's persona more broadly (this was his first chance to play a non-announcer/reporter character). 

The supporting cast is mostly composed of nonentities, with the significant exceptions of Donald Crisp (a crucial Warner player of the era) and love interest (?) Mary Maguire (whose life took a bizarre turn the following year when she married British Union of Fascists scumball Lord Robert Gordon-Canning).

Also! This episode was recorded in June 2018, not long after the dismal Conservative Party triumph in this year's Ontario Election, eliciting about 25 minutes' worth of spleen venting at the top of the show and prompting Dave to call for the unilateral abolition of suburbia. 

Now is a time for choosing. Choose RED TIME FOR BONZO!

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When you live, when you die, here comes a podcast on Seaguy!

Intro Song:

"Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)" - Cowboy Junkies

You can always write us at [email protected], or contact us through our Facebook Page or our Twitter accounts @milescoverdale and @rhodaAF709 

We're on all of the podcast delivery services, including iTunes, TuneIn radio and Stitcher, so please rate/review us there, if you can!

Finally, as suggested by listener Jay, here's an Amazon link to Dave's time travel novel, Hypocritic Days (published by Insomniac Press), which is set in the pulp magazine and film worlds of the early 1930s. Please do let us know if you check it out.

Original Another Kind of Distance artwork by Lee McClure

**Subscribe/rate/download RED TIME FOR BONZO via the show's dedicated feed, here. **

Our second Reagan/Dwan collaboration is far inferior to Tennessee's Partner, despite some fine directorial touches and characteristically brilliant open air cinematography from John Alton, but it does furnish your hosts with a textbook example of colonialist hermeneutics in action. On the surface, Cattle Queen of Montana may come across as a "progressive" film, with its anti-bigotry rhetoric and championing of Colorados' "good" (i.e. assimilationist) faction of the Blackfoot tribe; however, as with all ideological narratives, the film is working overtime to head off any genuinely liberatory ideas at the conceptual pass, not unlike the current Trudeau government of Canada or the mainstream leaders of today's Democratic Party. 

The gang is grateful that the Gipper's filmography provided this one opportunity to discuss the amazing Barbara Stanwyck, perhaps the finest actor of the studio age - and a person whose politics were almost certainly more despicable than Reagan's own. Of course, since she never became commander in chief of anything outside of the Big Valley, she hurt many fewer people during the latter part of the 20th century. 

Toward the end of the podcast, we discuss some #MeToo developments in the Canadian literary community that were breaking at the time of the recording (May 2018), delve into the harrowing life experiences of co-star Lance Fuller, and bring back Penny Singleton (from Swing Your Lady) in order to reassure ourselves that not all studio age Hollywood actors were fascists.      

Now is a time for choosing. Choose RED TIME FOR BONZO!

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Follow Gareth on Twitter at @helenreddymades

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Intro Theme:

"Driving Reagan" by Gareth Hedges

In our final episode on The Filth, we cover issue #13 and then circle back in an effort to gain a tentative foothold on Morrison's masterful meta-matter-mound. Among the topics of discussion: man and cat tales, the political valences and silences of the text, and a lengthy, semi-lucid interrogation of the story's deployment of gendered concepts. We'd like to thank John Pistelli, David Allison, Kelly Kanayama, and Sean Dillon for furnishing us with some excellent essays to bask our brains in. Also: abandon all hope of not hearing references to Lynch, Orwell, Marx, Derrida, and Paglia, ye who press play on this audio file.

Thanks for listening, everyone - next stop, Seaguy!   

Intro Song:

The Cramps - "Garbageman"

You can always write us at [email protected], or contact us through our Facebook Page or our Twitter accounts @milescoverdale and @rhodaAF709 

We're on all of the podcast delivery services, including iTunes, TuneIn radio and Stitcher, so please rate/review us there, if you can!

Finally, as suggested by listener Jay, here's an Amazon link to Dave's time travel novel, Hypocritic Days (published by Insomniac Press), which is set in the pulp magazine and film worlds of the early 1930s. Please do let us know if you check it out.

Original Another Kind of Distance artwork by Lee McClure

When proletarian Warner Brothers hightails it to the Ozarks, things can only go two ways: toward tragedy or rough mockery. Swing Your Lady offers a touch of the former (thanks primarily to genuine chemistry between unlikely screen lovers Louise Fazenda and Nat Pendleton), and a whole mess of the latter. There's not much Gipper in this one, but what there is, is choice - by now he's got his sharpie media character persona so well honed that he runs rings around wrestling promoters Humphrey Bogart, Frank McHugh, and Allen Jenkins (none of whom, it must be owned, is playing at the brighter edge of their respective character ranges).

The film offers wonderful opportunities for your hosts to digress upon such weighty matters as "Ozark face" minstrelsy; the eruption of "hillbilly" music upon the popular scene during the 1930s; the strange careers and love lives of The Weaver Brothers & Elviry; a lengthy disquisition upon the unique properties of "The Old Apple Tree" (a tragi-comic lynching ballad); a potted history of American wrestling (on and off the big screen), with a special focus on hirsute suitor Daniel Boone Savage; and an ode to future Blondie star Penny Singleton's sick terpsichore. 

Along the way, you'll hear all of the features you've come to know and love, including AFI Film Catalog Subject Tags, Would You Bang Reagan?, and a date with Norbert "I Love Actresses!" Lusk (whose critical wisdom puts the callow carping of the Medved Brothers and Bosley Crowther to shame.) 

Outro Music:

"The Old Apple Tree" - performed by Artie Shaw & His Rhythm Makers (1938)

Now is a time for choosing. Choose RED TIME FOR BONZO!

Follow us at:

Facebook

Follow Romy on Twitter at @rahrahtempleton

Follow Gareth on Twitter at @helenreddymades

Follow David on Twitter at @milescoverdale

Intro Theme:

"Driving Reagan" by Gareth Hedges