Dick and the King.

What an auspicious day! For it not only marks the birthdays of benevolent Swedish monarch Dante Fontana and genius American composer Frank Zappa. It is also the 40th anniversary of the day Elvis Presley showed up unannounced at the White House asking to be made a federal drug enforcement agent. He was eventually whisked inside to be introduced President Richard Nixon in one of the more surreal summit meetings between politics and pop culture. The National Archives has an interactive online presentation about the event, filled with plenty of Flash and other modern internet trickery.

Dutch pulp

A beautiful collection of dutch, american, french pulp book covers from Twincollector


via Au Carrefour Etrange

American Dreamer

Alan Vega live in Madrid 1983

Video uploaded by kigonjiro

The 1960 Cavalcade of Tractors and Equipment

What was it that made the U.S. great? Was it the smokes that were a silly millimeter longer, double-stuff Oreos, or was it our unflinching ability to build an economic foundation on the backs of exploited minorities? No, I would argue that our prowess is due to the Power of JINGLES.

I just bought this record of snappy tunes promoting the 1960 line of tractors and farm implements from the Ford Motor Company, and I'll be goddamned if I don't feel like going out and buying me some farm implements. So excuse me while I go out and move some patio furniture to make room for my 1960 vintage Ford reaper thrasher machine. I may be eating ramen noodles through the next decade, but my sacrifice will help buy back my country's dominance, by gum. Listen and be inspired to buy again.

John D. Loudermilk

Aquarium Drunkard has always been a respite for this roots-rock, aging, yet open "chippie". Chippie being defined as one who embraces the best of the hippie values but walks around with a colossal chip on their shoulders.

This recent post highlighting John D. Loudermilk's career is right on given the political and economic discomfort us Yanks are feeling at the moment. The 30's gave us the Great Depression, where folks lined up for soup and apples. The new Depression forces us to stand in line for I-Pods. When will it end?

I gotta believe we are going to hell on a sled...............
Boomp3.com

Does America Have Any Culture?

" ... Here's what happened: I'm teaching a class on twentieth-century popular culture at the University of Leipzig. I don't know why the school asked me to do this, but it did. And it turns out that any seminar on U. S. consumer culture is extremely attractive to every non-American kid majoring in American studies, because ninety-six students signed up for the class in the span of three days. Due to the size of the classroom, I was forced to immediately reduce this number to twenty. I was unsure how to do that fairly, so I decided to give them a competitive online essay test before the first day of class. The question was this: "Who do you consider the most interesting twentieth-century American -- not necessarily the most historically important, but the individual you find most personally compelling?" The responses were well written, habitually understated, and devoid of any pattern whatsoever.
...
Since my arrival in Leipzig, I have continually been reminded about the way many Germans view American culture. They essentially feel it does not exist. One grad student only half jokingly told me that an entire semester of American cultural studies "should probably take about twenty-five minutes." But this, of course, is crazy. Now more than ever, I feel certain that the United States is as good at manufacturing culture as the rest of the world combined, probably because we often do so accidentally. A lack of culture is not our problem. The problem is we've become too effective at distributing that culture -- at the same time, in the same way, and with the same velocity. It all ends up feeling interchangeable, which makes it all marginally irrelevant. As it turns out, my initial question was beyond impossible. There are no interesting twentieth-century Americans. There can't be, because they all are."

Chuck Klosterman (for Esquire) goes to Germany to teach a class. His students teach him a lesson about how the world views us: Does America Have Any Culture? (via Unpop)