Dino
In his biography of Dean Martin, Mr. Tosches gives a nice segue in the way of a quick and dirty history on the rise of technology leading to mass entertainment.
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On July 18, 1877, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Alva Edison noted on a worksheet that he had discovered the basic mechanism that would enable him “to store up & reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly.” He applied for a patent the following Christmas Eve, and he got it in February 1878. Five days later, the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company came into being.
[...]
Sixteen years after the patent of the phonograph, a man named Fred Ott sneezed in West Orange, New Jersey. Two days later Edison registered for copyright a forty-five-frame paper roll bearing the title Edison Kinetoscope Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894.
In April 1894, three months after Fred Ott’s sneeze, the first kinetoscope parlor opened in what had been a shoe store at 1155 Broadway in New York City. [Thence leading soon to cinema.]
[After a brief note on the founding of the Radio Corporation of America in 1922 and the rapid mass popularity of radios, Tosches makes the cultural critique of mass entertainment.]
America within the span of fifty years had set in motion the wondrous machinery of mob culture. The low had superseded the high. Tin Pan Alley had eclipsed Vienna. The Temptation of St. Anthony had been transformed from a fifteenth-century engraving by Schongauer to a moving picture with tits and everything. “Amos ‘n’ Andy” had easily wrested the airwaves from Rossini and Leoncavallo. Television was by nature from the electric womb such a child of the mob that many regarded it as civilization’s end. Even the word repulsed T. S. Eliot, who in 1942 declared it “ugly” and its welding of Greek and Latin roots a mark of “ill-breeding.” The thing itself, he would warn in 1950, was a “habitual form of entertainment.” … In the country of his birth, they had danced to “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” while he, across the sea, wrote The Waste Land. Like his fellow Missourian Mark Twain, Eliot did not shy away from recording, but his records were nothing to dance to, and no jukebox ever played them. He plied his craft on radio as well, but neither an Amos nor an Andy was he.
[...]
America alone among nations had conceived of her destiny as a dream. The American dream, she called it. Now dreams as well as steel was her industry. Hard-girded reality and flickering lilting fantasy were the inhalation and exhalation of her being. It was her dreamland stars, not her statesmen or poets, through whom she found expression.
Dino Crocetti, an immigrant barber’s son, born under a steel-gray sky, was to be one of those dreamland stars. He would do what no other of them could. Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man. And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.
-- Nick Tosches, “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams”
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<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
On July 18, 1877, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Alva Edison noted on a worksheet that he had discovered the basic mechanism that would enable him “to store up & reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly.” He applied for a patent the following Christmas Eve, and he got it in February 1878. Five days later, the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company came into being.
[...]
Sixteen years after the patent of the phonograph, a man named Fred Ott sneezed in West Orange, New Jersey. Two days later Edison registered for copyright a forty-five-frame paper roll bearing the title Edison Kinetoscope Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894.
In April 1894, three months after Fred Ott’s sneeze, the first kinetoscope parlor opened in what had been a shoe store at 1155 Broadway in New York City. [Thence leading soon to cinema.]
[After a brief note on the founding of the Radio Corporation of America in 1922 and the rapid mass popularity of radios, Tosches makes the cultural critique of mass entertainment.]
America within the span of fifty years had set in motion the wondrous machinery of mob culture. The low had superseded the high. Tin Pan Alley had eclipsed Vienna. The Temptation of St. Anthony had been transformed from a fifteenth-century engraving by Schongauer to a moving picture with tits and everything. “Amos ‘n’ Andy” had easily wrested the airwaves from Rossini and Leoncavallo. Television was by nature from the electric womb such a child of the mob that many regarded it as civilization’s end. Even the word repulsed T. S. Eliot, who in 1942 declared it “ugly” and its welding of Greek and Latin roots a mark of “ill-breeding.” The thing itself, he would warn in 1950, was a “habitual form of entertainment.” … In the country of his birth, they had danced to “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” while he, across the sea, wrote The Waste Land. Like his fellow Missourian Mark Twain, Eliot did not shy away from recording, but his records were nothing to dance to, and no jukebox ever played them. He plied his craft on radio as well, but neither an Amos nor an Andy was he.
[...]
America alone among nations had conceived of her destiny as a dream. The American dream, she called it. Now dreams as well as steel was her industry. Hard-girded reality and flickering lilting fantasy were the inhalation and exhalation of her being. It was her dreamland stars, not her statesmen or poets, through whom she found expression.
Dino Crocetti, an immigrant barber’s son, born under a steel-gray sky, was to be one of those dreamland stars. He would do what no other of them could. Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man. And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.
-- Nick Tosches, “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams”
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