GOOGLE DOODLE CELEBRATES BANH MI

WE CALL IT A SUBMARINE SANDWICH

Bánh mì - Wikipedia
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‎History · ‎Ingredients of sandwich · ‎Varieties · ‎Notable vendors

Bánh mì or banh mi is the Vietnamese word for bread. In Vietnamese cuisine, it also refers to a type of baguette which is often split lengthwise and filled with various savory ingredients as a sandwich and served as a meal. Plain banh mi is also eaten as a staple food. Wikipedia

Main ingredients: Vietnamese baguette (also bánh mì)

Place of origin: Vietnam

Alternative names: Vietnamese sandwich

Invented: 1950s

Celebrating Banh Mi

Today’s Doodle celebrates the savory and satisfying Vietnamese street-food sandwich known as bánh mì, a smorgasbord of flavors that represents a true melting pot of cultures and ingredients alike. On this day in 2011, bánh mì was admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Some accounts posit bánh mì’s humble beginnings in the late 1950s street stalls of Saigon’s noisy alleys, but an official origin story is yet to be verified. What is universally accepted about bánh mi’s history: its French inspiration, the staple baguette sandwich.

A traditional bánh mì consists of crispy and airy bread packed with a meat of choice (such as pork pâté, giò lụa, Vietnamese cold cuts, or meatballs), sweet, crunchy veggies and herbs (pickled radishes, carrots, and cilantro), a spread of mayonnaise or margarine, and savory soy sauce, finally topped with chili sauce or peppers. Voilà! By replacing European flavors with Vietnamese ingredients, a tangy and sweet while simultaneously spicy and salty takeaway food was born.

In current times, one can find countless spin-offs of the sandwich in street stands, markets, and restaurants across the world, from New York, to Seoul, to Saigon. Koreans often enjoy bánh mì’s stuffed with their signature bulgogi (barbeque beef) and kimchi. In the U.S., many popular recipes have traded the baguette with a brioche bun to create a miniaturized version: bánh mì sliders.

No matter the variation, you can relish the taste of cultures coming together!

The Origin of Hoagies, Grinders, Subs, Heroes, and Spuckies

Sub, hoagie, hero, grinder, spuckie, po' boy, wedge: here's why you call the footlong (or longer) sandwich whatever you do

BY SAM DEAN

ILLUSTRATION BY ERIK S. PETERSON

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/the-origin-of-hoagies-grinders-subs-heroes-and-spuckies

We all know the origin story of sandwiches: the 18th-century Earl of Sandwich, a wise man named John, started asking his staff to serve him meat bookended with bread to make for quick meals. Rumors persist that he did this to facilitate all-day gambling sessions, but his modern-day ancestors insist he was just a busy guy.

But for Super Bowl weekend, we don't just care about plain old sandwiches. We want foot-long (or six-foot-long) meat- and cheese-stuffed flavor bombs, those super-sandwiches we call "subs." Or "hoagies," or "grinders," or "po' boys," or "spuckies," or, if you're from Yonkers, "wedges." It's just one genre of sandwich, really, so why all the names, and where did they come from?

Well, back before big brands and big chains steamrolled "local color" into variations on beige, there was room for every American city to come up with its own name for a full-loaf sandwich filled with cold cuts, and most areas with large Italian immigrant populations did just that. While some of the names' origins are pretty basic, myths have swarmed to these sandwiches like flies on honey--so here, in no particular order, are the facts and fictions of our favorite sandwich's names:


Sub: An abbreviation of "submarine sandwich," subs are called "subs" because they look like submarines. Simple as that.

But the best myth puts the ground zero of subbery in New London, CT, around World War II. The city (well, technically the town of Groton, across the river from the city proper) is home to the Navy's primary submarine base and a large shipbuilding yard, both of which were understandably bustling during the war. According to this story, the big sandwich itself was invented by an Italian shopkeeper named Benedetto Capaldo in New London, but was originally known as a "grinder." Once the sub yard started ordering 500 sandwiches a day from Capaldo to feed its workers, the sandwich became irrevocably associated with submersible boats.

A nice story, but the OED's first printed record of "submarine sandwich" dates to a January 1940 phone book for Wilmington, DE, where a restaurant was advertising "submarine sandwiches to take out." Seeing as how we didn't mobilize for WWII until two years later, that pretty much torpedoes the New London legend.

Grinder: You're most likely to find one of these in New England, though the more common "sub" has taken over most of the terrain. "Grinder" shares some flimsy nautical roots with the sub--some claim that it was named for "grinders," Italian-American slang for dockworkers (who were often sanding and grinding rusty hulls to repaint them)--but the more widely attested origin is about the sandiwch itself. Subs, with their Italian bread and piles of fixings, were harder to chew through than your typical ham and cheese on white bread. That toothsomeness got translated into "grinder," since that's what your teeth had to do to get through a bite.

A note for nitpickers: at certain points in New England grinder history, grinders have been hot, while subs stayed cold, but that's come and gone over the decades.

Hero: Native to New York, the hero has two main origin stories. First, there's the logical speculation that it's a warped pronunciation of "gyro," the Greek sandwich with spit-roasted meat. But the term is attested back to the late '40s, and Greek gyros only made a splash in American food culture in the '60s, and even that began in Chicago. And maybe more importantly, all of these sandwiches are essentially Italian creations. The odds that a New Yorker in the '40s would mistake a Greek establishment for an Italian one are approximately nil. The real hero's journey began with the wonderfully named Clementine Paddleworth, who probably coined the word in a food column for the New York Herald Tribune in 1936, since the sandwich was so large "you had to be a hero to eat it." Since the NYHT went belly-up in 1966, there aren't any searchable archives online, but an enterprising food historian out there could go check out Rutgers University's microfilm archive to pin this one down for good. Barry Popik, on OED contributor and general food word expert, traces the word back to a 1937 Lexicon of Trade Jargon published by the WPA, which describes "hero" as "armored car guards jargon" for a big sandwich. That throws a little doubt on the Paddleworth Hypothesis, since it's unlikely a bunch of armored car guards would just pick up words from the paper willy-nilly, but the underlying "gotta be a hero to eat it" is still a strong contender.


Hoagie: This is the home-grown Philadelphia term for the big Italian sandwich, and has picked up not one but four explanations for its origin. The first two, strangely mirroring the "sub" story, start at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The Yard was located on a chunk of land once known as Hog Island, so the workers there were accordingly called "hoggies." This was an early spelling of the local sandwich, and the story goes that the many Italian immigrant Navy Yard workers ate enough of them to get the thing named after themselves. Alternately, "hoagie" is said to come from "Hogan," in two different ways. First, it was a common Irish name, and became a nickname for the Irish immigrant Navy Yard workers, so like with "hoggie," they supposedly named it after themselves. Or, another story goes, a mug named Hogan asked a coworker who was always chowing down on delicious Italian sandwiches if he could start getting the lucky guy's wife to make an extra for him every day, and the name somehow stuck.

But considering that the Hog Island Navy Yard shut down in the '20s, and "hoagies" didn't start making the rounds in print until the '40s, that's fairly unlikely. I'll admit, it's weird that hoagies, subs, and grinders would all have apocryphal stories related to dockworkers, but the dates really don't line up on this one.

Instead, the real origin is more likely to go back to a jazz musician turned sandwich shop owner named Al De Palma. In the late '20s, he saw some fellow hepcats eating a sub, and commented to himself that you "had to be a hog" to eat a sandwich that big. So when he opened a sub shop during the Depression, he started calling his big sandwiches "hoggies," and eventually opened chains across the city. As for why "hoggie" turned to "hoagie," the best explanation out there is probably the Philadelphia accent itself. Ever heard those guys talk?


Po' Boys: The only strong contender for the true name of the sandwich outside of the Eastern Seaboard comes from New Orleans, where the sandwich goes by "po' boy," "po-boy," or the original, "poor boy." The best story about this name happens to be true, and it starts with a streetcar strike. In the summer of 1929, 1,100 New Orleans streetcar conductors and motormen went on strike, largely with the support of the city--when strikebreakers were sent in to bust picket lines and scab on the trolleys, a crowd of 10,000 New Orleanians gathered downtown to cheer on strikers as they burned the first scab-operated streetcar.

Two brothers named Bennie and Clovis Martin, Cajun Louisianians who used to work on the streetcars, sent a letter of support to the union pledging free meals to union members and their support "till hell freezes over." They followed through on their promise, giving out large sandwiches to any strikers that came by their shop, commenting to each other "here comes another poor boy" whenever one walked through the door. To maximize the food load, they worked with an Italian baker, John Gendusa, to come up with a rectangular sandwich loaf more efficient than the tapering baguette. As with the hoagie, the name then spread through the city as the Martins expanded their restaurant and stuck.

Etc.: Regional sandwich name microclimates abound, though the dominance of Subway is slowly grinding away at local specialties. In Southie (in Boston), you can order a "
spuckie" at the spa, short for spucadella, the name of an Italian roll. In Wisconsin, they go by "
garibaldis," named after a menu item at a local Italian restaurant (presumably named in honor of the hero of Italian unification). And there are plenty of shape names, like "
blimpie" (named after the Hoboken-based chain), "
torpedo," "
zeppelin" (found in Pennsylvania), and "
bomber" (near buffalo). And in parts of the upper Midwest, people call big sandwiches "
Dagwoods," after the famously hungry comic book character.

But the weirdest-sounding of all has to be "
wedge," which is only familiar to natives of Westchester County, NY, and Fairfield County, CT, the two counties directly north of New York City. Some sources group it in with the shape-names, based on a diagonal cut in the middle of the sandwich, or a wedge cut out of the top half to make more room for fillings, but the real story's probably the simplest on this list: "wedge" is just short for "sandwich," and comes from a Yonkers deli whose Italian owner got tired of saying the whole word.

In the end, it doesn't really matter what you call them, as long as you end up with a big sandwich in front of you (like one of these from our Ultimate Super Bowl Party Menu)--it's hard to say much of anything when you've got serious munching to do.

RELATED:
Some Americans Call Sandwiches Dagwoods
Having a Sandwich with the Earl of Sandwich

“Wild in the Streets” as Prescient Sociopolitical Satire

Do you really want a man in his sixties running the country?

Neal Umphred
May 16, 2019 ·
https://medium.com/tell-it-like-it-was/wild-in-the-streets-as-prescient-sociopolitical-satire-730a2fa7d561

Max Frost doing a benefit concert in the 1968 American International Pictures’

 movie Wild in the Streets. (Photo: personal collection)


JACK WEINBERG DEFINED THE SIXTIES: In November 1964, he did an interview for The San Francisco Chronicle about the Free Speech Movement. According to Weinberg, the reporter was making him angry with his line of inquiry: “It seemed to me his questions were implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by Communists or some other sinister group. I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.”

The phrase “We don’t trust anybody over 30” was an overnight sensation. (In modern parlance, it went viral.)

That was 1964 and there is a good chance that he knew exactly the kind of effect that it would have on young people around the country (although he denies it). He might not have had a clue that it would also have an effect on non-political movers and shakers in Hollywood with a bent for sociopolitical satire. At least one movie seems to have used those six words as the basis for its plot — Wild in the Streets.


Black humor is a sub-genre of comedy in which laughter arises from cynicism.

This article is a follow-up to “The Return Of Max Frost & The Troopers” (2014) and looks at American International Pictures’ Wild in the Streets. For this article, I pulled a DVD from the library and watched it for the first time in more than twenty years.

I review the sociopolitical aspects of the script forty years later and ask a few questions. I found some real accuracy and some possible prescience along with a lot of nonsense.

The plot revolves around a hip, young, flippant pop star being elected President of the United States and turning the country’s political and social conventions on their head. The movie’s script was based on the short story “The Day It All Happened, Baby!” by Robert Thom, originally published in the December 1966 issue of Esquire magazine. Thom expanded the story to a movie script.

Robert Thom eventually expanded his movie script into a novel version of Wild in the Streets, which was published as a tie-in with the movie as a paperback original. This is the US edition from Pyramid Books. (Photo: personal collection)
A b-movie as sociopolitical satire

When I picked up Wild in the Streets from the library, I assumed that my reaction would be one of dismissal: it was just another B-movie with an absurd plot intended to get teenagers to part with their allowances.

My actual reaction was different: I was impressed by the basic intelligence of the script and its politically and socially savvy observations and its humor, which ranged from sophomoric to ironic to dark.

Sure, it’s a B-movie, so the acting of star Christopher Jones as Max Frost (formerly Max Flatow) and his acolytes/band members is less than stellar, and Shelley Winters as Max’s mother Mrs. Flatow is so over-the-top as to be beyond caricature. But they are ably supported by co-star Hal Holbrook and the rest of the cast, notably veterans Ed Begley, Millie Perkins, and Kevin Coughlin.

Wild in the Streets attracted several cameo appearances by such non-actor celebrities as entertainment columnist Army Archerd, attorney Melvin Belli, author Pamela Mason, and journalist Walter Winchell. Record industry mover-and-shaker Dick Clark plays a radio broadcaster.


The movie featured guest appearances by Dick Clark, Billy Mumy, Bobby Sherman, Peter Tork, and Barry Williams.

There were also some fresh faces making early appearances: the teenaged Max was played by Barry Williams years before anyone had conceived of The Brady Bunch. An uncredited Bobby Sherman plays a journalist who briefly interviews President Frost. Bill Mumy appears as an unidentified child.

Monkee Peter Tork is part of a crowd scene when he bumps up against Shelley Winters at a stage entrance as the onlookers chant, “We want Max!” And the film marked the screen début of Richard Pryor.

The UK edition from Sphere Books has a different cover, which I find much more effective than the Pyramid book form the US. (Photo: personal collection)

A b-movie with an absurd plot

Here is an outline of the movie’s plot:

A. Enormously popular rock star Max Frost is approached by Senator Johnny Fergus, who attempts to enlist him in getting the youth vote to support his Presidential bid.

B. Frost agrees to support Fergus if the Senator will get a bill passed to lower the voting age to 14.

C. The bill is passed and Frost turns the tables on Fergus and runs for President himself and is subsequently elected by the newly enfranchised voters.

D. President Frost enacts a series of laws that penalize those over the age of 35 and turns the country into a youth-oriented, somewhat “liberal” utopia.

E. Mayhem does not ensue.

That’s the movie in a nutshell. Casting and directing and production aside, it was the politics of the film that caught my attention forty-six years later. (Believe it or not, Wild in the Streets was nominated for an Academy Award for Film Editing but lost to the Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt.)

Ralph Steadman’s brutal caricature of Nixon, a politician considered unelectable at the time that Wild in the Streets was being made in 1967. Little did we know what the immediate future had in store for us. (Image: Ralph Steadman Art Collection)
Firing on demonstrators was unthinkable!

Wild in the Streets was somewhat prescient in 1968 in foreseeing that certain political and social movements would continue and even escalate. (Not an impossible act of foreseeing then.) For example, a peek into the near future is the big demonstration that occurs in Washington with a crowd of more than 3,000,000! In 1968, no political demonstration had reached much more than 100,000.

This would change with the Moratorium March on Washington on November 15, 1969, that drew more than 500,000 people to protest President Nixon’s bombing of Southeast Asia.

(Any oldsters reading this article whose consciousness and memory survived the era might recall that Tricky Dick had been elected in 1968 because he hinted at a “secret plan” to end the war. This plan included bombing Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.)


Let the old world make believe it’s blind and deaf and dumb, but nothing can change the shape of things to come.

At the movie’s fictional demonstration, a television newsman notes the building intensity in the crowd and in the police and guardsmen: “The military and police are helpless unless directed to fire on the crowd — and that seems unthinkable.”

Now, cops beating black civil rights demonstrators in the South was nothing new in 1967–1968. But cops firing into a crowd of mostly white people was unheard of!

That would change: on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire in concert and on orders on student demonstrators at an anti-war rally on the campus grounds of Kent State University. Four were murdered — but that’s another story.

(Wild in the Streets was produced well in advance of the police riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 28, 1968. There, police officers were witnessed, photographed, and filmed beating demonstrators, observers, and even members of the media!)


Rising up angry in the sky

After the newsman makes his “unthinkable” statement, individual police officers open fire with their handguns, killing several people. In a somewhat jarring juxtaposition, this scene of murder at the hands of those hired to “serve and protect” is followed by the movie’s musical high point, Max performing “Shape of Things to Come” with the following lyrics:

There’s a new sun rising up angry in the sky.
and there’s a new voice saying, “We’re not afraid to die!”
Let the old world make believe it’s blind and deaf and dumb,
but nothing can change the shape of things to come.

There are changes lying ahead in every road
and there are new thoughts ready and waiting to explode.
When tomorrow is today, the bells may toll for some,
but nothing can change the shape of things to come.

The future’s coming in now, sweet and strong.
Ain’t no one gonna hold it back for long.
There are new dreams crowding out old realities.
There’s revolution sweeping in like a fresh new breeze.
Let the old world make believe it’s blind and deaf and dumb,
but nothing can change the shape of things to come.

Jim Fitzpatrick’s portrait of Che Guevara from 1968 became one of the biggest selling posters of the era. (Image: Jim Fitzpatrick website)

We chose Che over James Dean

Throughout the movie, those teens that experience emancipation from their parents and their social strictures all act alike — like James Dean wannabes. And while posters of the ’50s teen idol appear on the walls of at least one kid’s room, few ‘militant’ teens in the US with any sense of militancy in the ’60s were enthralled by Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause image or any other such icon from the previous decade. You were far more likely to find posters of Che Guevara on the walls of politically hip kids.

Surprisingly — and I say that even fifty years after the movie was made — Senator Fergus drunkenly exclaims, “We pour napalm on our own men!” That is not so astounding a statement today: we also sprayed our own troops with Agent Orange and used experimental, mind-warping drugs on them. But it was all but sacrilege to say such a thing in 1968!

Certainly, no member of the military, the government, or the media acknowledged these horrors.

“Nixon would sure look dumb with long hair. Reagan would look worse!”

By the late ’60s, the counterculture was divided: one portion turned increasingly militant through its awareness of the real politics of America. The other all but turned its back on politics, real or otherwise, believing it a futile field in which to make any meaningful change. They adopted Timothy Leary’s slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” (Leary’s statement was a kind of call-to-arms, not the turn to the apathy that has prevailed in younger Americans ever since they were given the right to vote in 1972.)

One of Max’s underlings states that “We could raid the FBI,” a claim that was absurd in 1968 but is now a part of our recent past. Had personal computers existed then as they do now, hacking the secrets of the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc., would have probably been an ongoing occurrence.

Max’s Mom (Shelley Winters) toking up with a small water pipe in her hippie gear. (Photo: personal collection)

Turn on and tune in against your will

President Frost decides to dose the water supply of DC with LSD. When the acid-dosed Senate convenes, the behavior of the tripping Senators looks remarkably like the behavior of men just back from a 6-martini lunch. The movie’s attempt at giving the viewer an idea of the psychedelic effects being experienced is to simply put a monochromatic wash of color over the film. It is among the least convincing moments of psychedelia ever put to film, even for a B-movie. But you get the point.

Continually wanting to enjoy the good graces (and other benefits more tangible) of her son’s success, Max’s mother embraces the new generation, donning appropriate hippie garb, at least as Hollywood saw it. When we first see Shelley Winters in her ‘earth mother’ persona, I thought she looked like a Halloween costume manufacturer’s idea of a Mama Cass outfit!

She also undergoes LSD therapy!

It’s absurd and funny and scary and pathetic.

In France, the movie was given a new title: Les Troupes de la Colere (“The Troops of Anger”). The movie also was promoted with a very different image on the posters, playing up the music angle with a red, white, and blue guitar with the “power fist” at the top of the neck. (Image: Film Art Gallery)

A longhaired Rep*blican candidate

In one of the movie’s sillier uses of irony, Max Frost is pursued by the Rep*blican Party to run for President! Despite the distaste that he and his mates have for the GOP, they accept, if only because it cuts through the necessity of starting a political party from scratch.

While discussing the party, one band member remarks, “Nixon would sure look dumb with long hair. Ronald Reagan would look worse.”

This is both funny and another display of foresight: few took California Governor Reagan seriously as presidential timber in 1968. Even many Rep*blicans considered him a rightwing extremist at the time.

(I was just becoming politically aware in 1968. I was a junior in high school, turning 17 that year, and considering the possibility of being drafted even as a college student if the war got any crazier. I remember left-of-center comrades praying that the Rep*blicans were loony enough to nominate Reagan, as he was almost certainly unelectable in 1968. They believed that if he moved on his extremist positions in the ’60s, he would precipitate the revolution so many believed was coming eventually.


“Do you really want a man in his sixties running the country?”

Ten years later, the GOP had moved so far to the right that Reagan could be touted as a moderate, a candidate who could bridge the growing chasm between hardline conservatives and everyone else. Still a reactionary, the older Reagan was more inclined to use his Libertarian-leaning philosophies to assist the wealthy elite economically rather than punish the working class opposition politically.)

In a line that probably sums up the spirit of the movie better than any other, Max asks rhetorically, “Do you really want a man in his 60s running the country?”

While this was probably intended merely as satire, it is not a wholly unfounded question: few in American politics dare question the acceptance of age as indicative of responsibility and awareness. This despite the incompetent and despicable performances of many elected officials over the age of 50 throughout our history.

Once it is announced that Max Frost will be running as the Rep*blican candidate for President, his mother transitions from Earth Mother to Moral Majority Mother. In fact, Shelley Winters’ affectations and vocal mannerisms combined with her new apparel call to mind Margaret Thatcher, then waiting in the wings to take command of the British government and instigate a reign of austerity that nearly wrecked England’s economy.

Not to miss out on a chance to sell a few records, Tower issued two albums titled Wild in the Streets. The album on top is the original soundtrack album features Davie Allan & the Arrows under various guises. The album below is Davie Allan playing new guitar licks to tracks recorded for the soundtrack album. (Photos: personal collection)

Echoes of MLK and RFK

In his first State of the Union address, President Frost is not as satirical as it probably seemed in 1968. That is until he announces his plan for Americans over the age of 30, which is when the humor darkens deeply.

By now, his former political mentor Senator Fergus realizes the monster that he has created and draws a gun on the Senate floor in a feeble attempt to assassinate the new Executive.

Here we get an echo of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. These were both recent events and fresh wounds to moviegoers in late 1968 and early ’69 when the film was making the rounds of theaters and drive-ins.

When the President’s new plans are put into motion, citizens over the age of 35 are placed into “rehabilitation camps,” a term carefully coined to avoid using the Nazi’s concentration camps for Jews and other undesirables and the American relocation camps for Japanese origin during WWII.

In a subtly funny scene, the initial inmates are seen being shipped to Camp Paradise (ho ho) in what looks like a giant Volkswagen bus, the quintessential hippie vehicle!

The inmates are force-fed LSD on what I would assume to be a regular basis, just as any patient in a facility for the mentally ill is placed on a regular regimen of psychotropic drugs today. They are stripped of the clothing that marks their personality and forced to wear a unisex robe, depriving them of a smidgen of individuality and self-respect.

Scenes of the inhabitants of Camp Paradise in their park environment have the old folk singing childlike ditties and dancing ring-around-the-rosy. I assume this was a mockery of the often silly play that hippies were seen playing in Golden Gate Park, often while tripping. (These scenes would not be out of place as a depiction of the Eloi in George Pal’s movie version of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Made in 1960, this was one of the best-produced and realized science fiction movies of the pre-Space Odyssey era.)

More dark humor: in the movie, Hawaii is the only state not to support Max in the election. Consequently, the island populace is punished by being given a “lethal overdose of STP.” Those Hawaiians who survive are left in a non-functioning state that I could easily associate with the term acid casualties, then being bandied about by trippers and non-trippers alike.

(STP was an extraordinarily powerful hallucinogen that provided a very short but a very intense trip. It caused many bummers and never caught on with the Leary Generation. Plus the concept of permanent brain damage due to LSD was disproven decades ago. But permanent emotional damage to those who were already emotionally fragile is another story.)


Extreme left as extreme right

In another of the film’s accurate sociopolitical observations on behavior, the young Americans that assume political power behave just like every other group with the same power! This includes a black-garbed (think ‘Nazi SS’) secret police for rounding up stray over 35-year old citizens who are simply trying to live outside the law and the restrictions of the dominant social beliefs and ethics of the mass culture (think ‘hippies’).

When this goon squad arrests Max’s mother, she attempts to resist arrest by claiming to be young. The squad leader then assails her with the best double-entendre of the movie: “You are the biggest mother of them all!”

In a later scene, Max drops off a young girl for babysitting and the child is dressed in black, calling forth memories of the Hitler Youth movement of the 1920s (der Hitlerjugend).

The Frost administration does have some redeeming features and positive goals, including the return of all troops stationed around the world, thus ending US imperialism, and feeding the hungry of the world with excess American grain, a plan that has been bandied about in real life for decades with little success. (Even if it does undercut the principles of American cutthroat capitalism.)


Political satire or black humor?

Referring back to this title and its reference to political and social satire and black comedy, let’s ask some questions:

Does Wild in the Streets work as satire? Yes, absolutely! While some of it was sophomoric even in 1968 and is even more dated in 2017, some satiric aspects of it have taken on whole new meanings in the years since its release.

Is Wild in the Streets a black comedy? The definition of a black comedy (or dark comedy) is “a comic work that employs black humor, which is humor that makes light of the otherwise serious subject. The term black humor was coined by Surrealist majordomo and theoretician André Breton in 1935 to designate a sub-genre of comedy and satire in which laughter arises from cynicism and skepticism, often relying on topics such as death.” Wild In The Streets certainly has elements of black humor and therefore aspects of a black comedy.

This is a poster for the 1980 presidential election between incumbent Jimmy Carter and former California Governor Ronald Reagan. The small inset photo quotes Ronny Raygun’s famous quip about peaceful protestors, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” (Photo: personal collection)

Marx Brothers brand Molotov cocktails!

To bring this article to a conclusion, I am turning to another external source and the opinions of another critic, Charles A. Cassidy Jr in Video Hound’s Groovy Movies — Far-Out Films Of The Psychedelic Era (page 310):

“Viewers may be put off by the ambiguous conclusion, but American International Pictures put this package together with an adroit mixture of dark humor, good music performed by the principals, and the deft use of docudrama footage of ’60s demonstrations and marches on Washington. Campy psychedelia, the downfall of so many groovy movies, is saved for the concert scenes.

The real money shots here are the lampoons of both youth culture and ageism, flung around like Marx Brothers Molotov cocktails. The hip script by Robert Thom persuasively directs the don’t-trust-anyone-over-thirty argument at Fergus, Mrs. Flatow, and other gray-haired, starched, war-stirring, and scotch-swilling Establishment figures, but he doesn’t let the youth movement off easily either.”

Videohound’s Groovy Movies: Far-Out Films of the Psychedelic Era by Irv Slifkin is a fun read with lots of interesting recommendations to movies most of us have never heard of! Slifkin gets to cover a lot of genres because the publishers rather loosely interpret the “Psychedelic Era” as being just about anything from the ’60s. (Photo: personal collection)

Reassessing reality after fifty years

Given the gutting of the American public education system by Rep*blican Congresses over the past thirty-plus years and the growing apathy by those who graduate from that system (voting by Americans ages 18–30 is negligible), maybe we Sixties Survivors need to reassess consensual reality after fifty years.

I posted a complementary part to this article there. “Paying Attention to Conservative Thought in Film, Music, Literature, and Other Lowlife Pursuits” deals with a review of the movie Wild in the Streets that appeared on a conservative website that I stumbled over during my research for the main article above. Should this be of interest, click on over and give it a read.

This article originally appeared on the Rather Rare Records site as “On Wild in the Streets as Political and Social Satire” on May 16, 2017. I eliminated more than a thousand words from that piece and added a few new illustrations.

Maybe we need to modify Weinberg’s exhortation, “We don’t trust anyone under 30!”

(Photo: personal collection)

FEATURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page is Max Frost (Christopher Jones) on stage with members of his band Sally LeRoi (Diane Varsi) on keyboards and Billy Cage (Kevin Coughlin) on bass. They are doing a benefit concert for candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook). This photo is an 8 x 10-inch black and white publicity still handed out for promotional purposes in 1968.
Postscript

At no time in the movie Wild in the Streets is Max’s band referred to as the Troopers. In fact, Sidewalk/Tower Records used the name Max Frost & the Troopers on tracks recorded and released on earlier soundtrack albums! There never was a group with that name and the tracks credited to them—including the entire album Shapes of Things to Come—feature an assortment of musicians, including Davie Allan. (Maybe.)


___________________________________________________________________

Thanks for reading! Below are links to a pair of articles that are essential to knowing what the Tell It Like It Was publication here on Medium is all about — mostly rock & roll music of the ’50s and ’60s.

Introduction to “Tell It Like It Was”

Excitations and good vibrations about the music of the ’60s

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Introduction to “The Toppermost of the Poppermost”

All about all of the articles about all of the #1 records of the ‘60s

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WRITTEN BY
Neal Umphred
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Mystical Virgo and pragmatic liberal likes long walks alone in the rain at night with an umbrella and flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig.

WILD IN THE STREETS 1968

FULL MOVIE
   

 TRAILER
 

SOUNDTRACK

Michael Dare

In this first ever "Rock the Vote," Christopher Jones sings about lowering the voting age to 14. His master plan? Becoming president then herding everyone over 21 into concentration camps to be fed LSD for the rest of their lives. Good idea. Yeah, that's Richard Pryor on drums.

Wild in the Streets

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Wild in the Streets is a 1968 film directed by Barry Shear and starring Christopher Jones, Hal Holbrook, and Shelley Winters. Based on a 1966 Esquire short story "The Day It All Happened, Baby!" by Robert Thom, it was distributed by American International Pictures. The film, described as both "ludicrous" and "cautionary", was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing and became a cult classic of the 1960s counterculture.

ON DVD

Are You Over 35? ‘Wild in the Streets’ Should Scare You

Diane Varsi and Christopher Jones in “Wild in the Streets” (1968), directed by Barry Shear.Credit...Olive Films

By J. Hoberman
Sept. 30, 2016
A scurrilous political satire, “Wild in the Streets” opened in the spring of 1968 and played more or less continuously in drive-ins and grindhouse theaters throughout that convulsive election year.
Opposition to the Vietnam War was reaching its height and, in the wake of the catastrophic Democratic convention in Chicago, Fortune magazine estimated that a million young Americans identified with Students for a Democratic Society and other manifestations of the “New Left.”
“Wild in the Streets,” directed by Barry Shear from a script by Robert Thom (elaborating on his Esquire article “The Day It All Happened, Baby”) reflected, even as it satirized, a fearful fascination with the Kids. The movie industry calculated that more than half of its audience was under 25; in its own way, “Wild in the Streets” parodies Hollywood’s bemused efforts to reach younger viewers.

Max Frost, a 22-year-old rock musician (Christopher Jones, star of the short-lived TV series “The Legend of Jesse James”), dupes a pandering, 37-year-old senator (Hal Holbrook, hair combed over his forehead in the style of Robert Kennedy’s) into supporting an amendment that would lower the voting age to 14. Benefiting from this newly enfranchised electorate, as well as a bit of LSD in the drinking water, Max himself takes power, putting everyone over 35 in New Age re-education camps.

The perpetually smirking Mr. Jones offers an amusing impersonation of James Dean doing Hitler. But the movie’s high point is a scene where Diane Varsi, playing the most zonked member of Max’s entourage (which includes a young Richard Pryor), addresses Congress as if from the stage of the Fillmore. Wearing a bicorn hat and lazily shaking her tambourine, she giggles that “America’s greatest contribution has been to teach the world that getting old is such a drag.”

Although the movie’s pop-star-run-amok premise is similar to that of the British filmmaker Peter Watkins’s more sober “Privilege,” released in the United States during the summer of 1967, Mr. Thom might well have been inspired by the Doors singer Jim Morrison, who for several years had been performing “When the Music’s Over” with its cri de coeur ending: “We want the world and we want it… Nah-ow-OW!!!”

“Wild in the Streets” would surely have been better scored by the Doors, but the film’s songs, mainly written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and performed by a studio band complete with a sound like Strawberry Alarm Clock, are not bad. (“The Shape of Things to Come” by the fake band Max Frost and the Troopers actually went to No. 22 in September 1968.) The reviews were also surprisingly good. Renata Adler, in The Times, called the movie “by far the best American film of the year so far,” and compared it, not altogether humorously, to “The Battle of Algiers.”

In its cartoonish way, “Wild in the Streets” prophesied Yippie threats, student uprisings, China’s Red Guards and the Kent State massacre. Amid one crisis, Max’s devoted, smothering mother (Shelley Winters) declares her faith that her son must have “a very good reason for paralyzing the country,” anticipating the moment when the mother of the student leader Mark Rudd, a prominent figure in the occupation of Columbia University, fondly described him to Time magazine as “my son, the revolutionary.”

“Wild in the Streets” may be an artifact of 1968, but its image of generational megalomania provides an ominous footnote to the current presidential election, which could be the last to be waged by two baby boomers.
WILD IN THE STREETS

WILD IN THE STREETS (1968)
Cast
Shelley Winters as Mrs. Flatow
Christopher Jones as Max Frost
Diane Varsi as Salley Leroy
Hal Holbrook as Sen. Fergus
Ed Begley as Sen. Allbright
Richard Pryor as Stanley X.
Directed by
Barry Shear
From a screenplay by
Robert Thorn
Comedy
94 minutes

Roger Ebert May 20, 1968
Once you've experienced a concert by a group like the Beatles or the Doors, the fascist potential of pop music becomes inescapable. There is a primitive force in these mass demonstrations that breaks down individualism and creates a joyous mob.

I keep thinking of the scene in "A Hard Day's Night" when the little blond girl, her voice lost in the screams of the crowds, shouts "Paul, Paul!" while tears stream down her face. The performer's role is to be the focus of this emotion. His values instantly become the values of his admirers (as when Jim Morrison of the Doors beckons his crowds to storm the platform).

The connection between politics and the worship of pop idols is fascinating. When Paul Newman was stumping for Sen. Eugene McCarthy in Wisconsin, it was hard to say whether his audiences cared about politics at all. They were drawn by the Newman mystique. But can the appeal work the other way?

Two recent movies have explored this idea. One was a good film, Peter Watkins' "Privilege." One is pretty bad, Barry Shear's "Wild in the Streets." Of the two, I'm afraid "Wild in the Streets" is more effective because it has a greater understanding of its audience.

Watkins was making a self-conscious message film for serious audiences. His pop idol was manipulated by political pros, who understood the mass media and created their hero with classic fascist techniques. Because it was an "art film," it probably reached the wrong audience.

"Wild in the Streets," on the other hand, is aimed squarely at the younger teenage audience that buys records and listens to the Top 40 stations. This audience can believe, if only temporarily, in the greatness of a performer. They can sense what John Lennon was getting at (although he phrased it unfortunately) when he said the Beatles were more famous than Christ.

For this audience, "Wild in the Streets" needs no serious political comment and no real understanding of how pop music and the mass media work together. It's a silly film, but it does communicate in the simplest, most direct terms.

Its hero is a singer named Max Frost (Christopher Jones, who looks as if he possibly could be a pop idol). It treats the press and Congress in broad, stereotyped terms (the elder statesman is Ed Begley, typecast once again). Instead of being realistic, as "Privilege" was, it goes whole hog. The under 30 generation takes over, and those over 30 are herded into concentration camps to bemoan their mistake: growing up.

Wild in the Streets

An often chilling political science fiction drama, with comedy, the production considers the takeover of American government by the preponderant younger population. Good writing and direction enhance the impact of a diversified cast headed by Shelley Winters.

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Shelley Winters Christopher Jones Diane Varsi Ed Begley Hal Halbrook Millie Perkins

An often chilling political science fiction drama, with comedy, the production considers the takeover of American government by the preponderant younger population. Good writing and direction enhance the impact of a diversified cast headed by Shelley Winters.

Christopher Jones plays a rock ‘n’ roll hero who, as a result of a request from would-be US Senator Hal Holbrook, exceeds the bounds of electioneering help by mobilizing teenagers into legalized voters.

Winters plays his sleazy, selfish mother, whose purported emasculation of dad Bert Freed years before cued Jones’ running away from home.

Holbrook projects perfectly the bright young politico who exploits the young crowd, only to be turned on by those whose help he seeks.

Actual footage from real-life demonstrations was shot for pic, some of it matched quite well with internal drama. What comes off as a partial documentary flavor makes for a good artistic complement to the not-so-fictional hypothesis, the logical result of an over-accent on youth.

1968: Nomination: Best Editing

PRODUCTION: American International. Director Barry Shear; Producer Burt Topper; Screenplay Robert Thom; Camera Richard Moore; Editor Fred Feitshans, Eve Newman; Music Les Baxter

CREW: (Color) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1968. Running time: 96 MIN.

WITH: Shelley Winters Christopher Jones Diane Varsi Ed Begley Hal Halbrook Millie Perkins

LSD Concentration Camps in the 1968 film "Wild in the Streets"

Following the Yippie protests of 1967, *Wild in the Streets* took Jerry Rubin's slogan "don't trust anyone over thirty" to an absurdist, dystopian extreme.
 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063808/
 Based on a short story by Christian-redemption author Robert Thom, the plot points of this exploitation film read like a checklist of 60s political panic buttons. 
 Max Frost, the spoiled child of upper-middle class parents, defies his erratic mother by becoming a psychedelics chemist and mad bomber. Years after trashing the family home and dynamiting the car, Max mysteriously resurfaces as a millionaire businessman & hippie rock star. 
With his band of free-loving (and implicitly homosexual/pedophillic) prodigies, he successfully scams congress into lowering majority age to 14.
 To pull this off he spikes the Capitol's water supply with LSD. Constitutional age restrictions now a thing of the past, Max uses his charisma and Beatles-scale fame to win the presidency. 
 This montage of clips represents the apotheosis of President Max's political dream. At his direction the militant youth of the nation take revenge on the elderly generation that once oppressed them. 
Max's own mother is hauled away as he looks on. Political allies and foes alike are swept up in the mass arrests and turned into grinning, tripped-out zombies. 
 Hawaiians, who dared defy the groovy dictator, suffer the worst fate of all...

Do you need to change and wash your clothes after visiting the grocery store?

‘The coronavirus would likely survive better on artificial fibers such as polyester than on cotton’
 March 24, 2020 By  Meera Jagannathan

U.S. public-health experts and policymakers have urged social distancing to reduce the spread of coronavirus. John Moore/Getty Images

As some folks on social media fret about whether they need to wash or change their clothes to avoid catching COVID-19, infectious-disease experts say you generally don’t need to do so more often than usual — and some even warn that a preoccupation with laundry could come at the cost of taking more important measures like washing your hands.

Still, there are some best practices to follow when you haul dirty clothes to the laundromat.

“The average person should not worry about their clothing,” Sarah Fortune, a professor and chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told MarketWatch in an email. “If you are a health-care provider and potentially subject to a high density of virus, the answer is different. But for most of us, it is all about our hands and face.”


‘If you are a health-care provider and potentially subject to a high density of virus, the answer is different. But for most of us, it is all about our hands and face.’— Sarah Fortune, a professor and chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health

COVID-19 is believed to spread primarily from person to person, between people who are within about six feet of each other and through droplets from a sick person’s cough or sneeze, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. U.S. public-health experts and policy makers have urged social distancing to reduce the disease’s spread.


People can possibly contract COVID-19 by touching an infected object or surface “and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes,” but scientists don’t believe this is the main mode of transmission, the CDC says.

A study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was detectable for up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel, up to 24 hours on cardboard, up to four hours on copper, and up to three hours in aerosols.


While not much is known about how this particular virus interacts with clothing and fabric, “coronaviruses in general last a lot longer on a solid, nonporous surface compared to porous fabrics,” Juan Dumois, a pediatric infectious-diseases physician at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., told MarketWatch. He suggested they would survive better on “artificial fibers” such as polyester than on cotton.

Medical professionals should take extra precautions

Change clothes after being in a crowded area in which people have touched your clothes, said Robert Amler, the dean of New York Medical College’s School of Health Sciences and Practice and a former chief medical officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After being in a public space in which others haven’t brushed up against you, “washing the clothes afterwards is a precaution, but may not be quite as necessary,” he said.

“But it’s still common sense to keep them laundered and clean, and where you have smooth-surface clothing like leather or vinyl, it makes sense to wipe them off if you’ve been in public spaces for extended periods of time,” he added. “These are make-sense recommendations and not scientifically based.”

Harvard Medical School experts advise that caregivers for COVID-19 patients wash laundry thoroughly, removing and washing “clothes or bedding that have blood, stool, or body fluids on them” immediately, and wear disposable gloves to touch the soiled items.

The COVID-19 disease had infected at least 46,450 people in the U.S. by Tuesday morning and killed at least 593, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. Worldwide, there were 387,382 confirmed cases and 16,767 deaths; 101,987 people had recovered as of Tuesday morning.

What you do (and don't) need to worry about with your clothes

Gabriela Andujar Vazquez, an infectious-disease physician at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said that the average person didn’t necessarily need to wash their clothes more often than usual after visiting the grocery store.

“It’s perfectly safe for you to go back home with your regular clothes and just do what you have been doing pre-COVID,” she said.


‘Sneeze particles with virus are going to last a lot longer on a desktop or countertop than on somebody’s clothing.’— Juan Dumois, a pediatric infectious-diseases physician at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital

In fact, it would be more important to wash your hands after touching clothes that somebody coughed on, she said. “Wash your clothes as you usually do,” she said. “Just make sure that you wash your hands.”

Dumois agreed. “Sneeze particles with virus are going to last a lot longer on a desktop or countertop than on somebody’s clothing.”

Faheem Younus, the chief of infectious diseases at the University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Health, urged focusing on measures that will yield the biggest return on investment, like staying home when sick, steering clear of sick people, keeping hands clean, avoiding handshakes, and maintaining distance from others.

“Those are the realities that we should be focusing on rather than changing clothes,” he said. “Our biggest bang for buck is social distancing from humans [and] washing our hands … but at the same time, not worrying about surfaces to a point where it paralyzes us.”

After all, while Younus said he empathizes with people’s concerns, “this is going to be our life for the next few months” — and it might be difficult to sustain additional precautionary measures for an extended period of time.

“I think the same people who want to change their clothes and take a shower now — in three weeks, they’ll be shaking hands and they won’t be able to maintain basic hand hygiene. That’s my worry,” he said. “That’s exactly what the virus wants.”
If you do choose to launder your clothes more often...

“Hot water is better than cold,” Dumois said, as coronaviruses tend to be sensitive to higher temperatures. “The heat of a dryer also helps kill coronaviruses,” he added. The soap and water you usually use in your washing machine should be sufficient, said Andujar Vazquez.

And if you’re washing your clothes at a laundromat, be sure to go at a time when it’s not crowded and practice proper hand hygiene.

“Just assume that most of the surfaces in the laundromat are contaminated with somebody’s viruses: the counter tops, the buttons on the machine, the handles to open and close the machine, the buttons on any change machine, the handle on the door to the laundromat to get in and out,” Dumois said. “Do not touch your face until you’ve had a chance to clean your hands.”