Greetings music lovuhs, and welcome to another edition of Manor Music Monday. Or perhaps should I say "tap-tap, tap-tap-tap" since it's National Morse Code Day, too. Send this to likeminded nerds:  ( ... --- ...). It's   the universal Morse code distress signal, dont'cha know. 'Cause we're living in stressful times, aren't we?  It's time to decompress, if only for an evening, and at the Manor's exclusive "Tug Job" bar, vapory and snackery (warm, cheesy cassava bread is served all night!), DJ Li'l Scratch will be playing tunes by a  performer whose career as a big band singer, Broadway, movie and TV star stretched over 50 years. Do you know who it is? If you guessed Fran Warren, you're right. And, yes, you can also add Sexploitation Queen to her resume, since she played the cranky mom in " Toys Are Not For Children ," a beloved 1972 psycho-sexual drama extraordinaire. Fran really did do it all! It was the early 1940s ...

Gen X beauty, the cool, detached, slightly subversive aesthetic embodied by women like Winona Ryder, the real Supermodels (Linda, Christy, Naomi, Kate, Shalom, Helena), Sade Adu, Lisa Bonet, Angelina Jolie, and Uma Thurman, to name a few, is having a quiet but very intentional resurgence, and companies are paying attention. This is the anti-performative face of beauty: matte skin, undone hair, minimal fuss, a kind of emotional distance that reads as power rather than effort. In a market saturated with hyper-curated routines, poreless skin, and influencer maximalism that no one with a life has time for, brands are rediscovering the commercial appeal of restraint.  You’re seeing it in campaigns that lean into healthy, realistic skin,  pared-down makeup, and a return to individuality over algorithmic perfection. It’s not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, though; it’s strategy. Consumers are fatigued by overkill and searches for unrealistic optimization, and Gen X beauty ideals offe...

Credit: Warner Brothers It's April 25th, and you know what that means: Miss Congeniality Day! In the film, which came out 26 (!) years ago, Miss Rhode Island, played by the lovely Heather Burns, described April 25th as her perfect date. "It's not too hot, it's not too cold, all you need is a light jacket!" It is definitely too cold here in my neck of the woods, but hopefully some of you Peckers are enjoying the weather today!

A Summer Tea Party, approx. 1910 Louis Wain

 

I saw "Project Hail Mary" ( in the theater! ) last night and I loved all two and a half hours of it (it's even better than "Cats" )! I've been hearing about how good it is, but I had no idea what it's about (I hadn't seen any ads, probably because my tv's always on MeTv and most of the ads are for term-life insurance), but it isn't a religious film, it's sci-fi, but not drearily dystopian or aliens committing horrors. I can't remember any movie where I've smiled so much all through it. A brief precis: something molecular called astrophages are eating up the energy of the sun, which could lead to our planet's extinction, as well as other stars in our universe, except for one star. A ship has to be sent to that one star that hasn't been affected to figure out why, and to stave off our own destruction. Sounds pretty grim, huh?  Well, it ain't. Ryan Gosling is Dr. Grace, a professor at a middle school for brainiacs, and he...

Credit: Getty Here are Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci and Anne Hathway at the  The Devil Wears Prada 2 premiere last night in NYC. Blunt wore a pearl-encrusted choker paired with a very voluminous Schiaparelli gown. Hathaway went for a rich red Louis Vuitton dress with matching platform heels. Meryl looks to wearing some variation of a Halloween costume I wore in fifth grade and Tucci, well, he's in a suit! What do you think of these lewks, Peckers?

Happy 4/20, music sloots, and welcome to another edition of Manor Music Monday, today with a little puff-puff or a gummy or two. Why? Because it's 4/20, silly, a holiday started in the early 1970s by a bunch of "burn-out" teens at San Rafael High School, the numbers being code for a time, or 4:20pm, when they'd secretly meet to smoke weed by, or all things, a statue of Louis Pasteur.  What does this have to do with music or DJ Li'l Scratch? Absolutely nothing, but then don't expect our furry DJ to make sense today as he's lit like a sparkler. Better still, he'll be busy tonight at "Richard Johnson's," the Manor's after hours club and vape lounge, where you'll hear tunes by a deceptively loony, yet supremely talented jazz songstress. Why look, it's none other than Marion Montgomery. If you live in the UK, you might know of her, since she was an American-born jazz singer who married a Brit and thereafter became a much-beloved f...

What are these problem children up to now? Um…Nothing good so it seems. For those who haven’t paid attention because the “you in danger girl” meme silently distracted you from absorbing this knowledge with cute kittens and puppy algorithms, then I am sorry to be the one to have to drag you out of protective, blissful ignorance. I am sorry. I am.  To put it bluntly, Gen Z wins the most absurd generational trend category in a landslide. Just look at Gen X. Their entire youth was an exercise in survival of the fittest; Darwin’s theory was in full effect.  One friend remembers eating bowls of cereal and pouring milk from cartons with the faces of missing kids with "have seen me" on them. Basically, a latchkey kid is home all alone and decides a bowl of cereal sounds good, but some authority thought that advertising that bad shit happens to kids while kids make a bowl of cereal was an ace idea. Maybe the vulnerable child knew little Timmy before the bad man in the van got him....

Credit: Getty That's it, that's the post! Share what was all the rage when you were a teen in the comments!

Ernest Hemingway, circa 1933 Miguel Covarrubias

 

(as always, please note my exceptionally professional job of obscuring  the license plate number) The year is 1965 and although the James Bond flick "Goldfinger" was released last year it was still #1 at the box-office (and at the end of '65 the follow-up "Thunderball" came out and also made a fortune). Similarly, Petula Clark's "Downtown" was released in 1964 but it also happened to be the first #1 song of 1965. And here is the luminous Ms. Clark singing it on the Dean Martin Show (accompanied by some of the gayest motherfuckin' chorus boys ever): So let's hot-wire a brand-new '65 Mercury Comet and head out--and maybe we'll see you there. We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares (sing with me) 'cause it's OP, things'll be great 'cause it's OP, no finer place for sure, OP, everyone's waiting for yo-o-u! Photo Credit: AK

Credit: The Daily Enquirer Poor Brandi Glanville just can't ever seem to catch a break. First, her husband publicly cheated on her with Falkor. Then she got some mysterious "parasite" in her face that has been causing her issues since 2023. And just this past Easter, she had to go to urgent care to remove garlic from her ear! In the latest episode of her Unfiltered podcast, the 53-year old shared how trying out a home remedy led to her needing to go to the emergency room. She had caught a head cold from her 18-year old son, Jake, and says that her other son, Mason, suggested the idea of sticking garlic in her nose to help clear her sinuses. Well poor Brandi had just gotten her face lasered so she says the garlic was burning her sensitive skin. So the next logical step was to stick the garlic in her ear! "Every time I tried to get it out, it really went down further," the reality star claims. Hey, it happens to the best of us. Now Brandi says that she has "...

Greetings, fellow prostitots, and welcome to another edition of Manor Music Monday, today with a bit of skiddly-doo, bop-bop-a-loo-bob and shoobee-doobee. These words were frequently accompanied by a wink, finger guns and tap dancing leaps, all prime words and moves from the early 1960s - just before jazz at last lost its popular hold to rock, which had been near-to-obliterating it years before. Now the job was done. Finito.  Also lost? Jazz babies, or femme jazz vocalists who were the star attraction at exclusive supper clubs, some of whom even got to cut an album or two. Like the hot-cha singing attraction, Peggy Connelly. And lucky you, tonight at the Manor's "Mack the Cat" nightclub and dinette, DJ Li'l Scratch will be playing Peggy till the early yawning hours.  At one time the wife of "Laugh-In's" Dick Martin, Peggy was a popular model, singer, dancer, and sometime TV and movie actress, in the 1950s and 60s - and a choice escort about to...

I couldn't come up with anything from memory because my radical bohemian anti-corporate weed-smoking hippie adjacent alternative living parents thought watching television subjected us to capitalist propaganda, and a narrow materialistic view of the world that excluded everyone but conformist white heterosexuals. So there are many, many gaps in my television watching career. Not to say I never watched it, but it was mostly PBS, movie rentals, or basic cable. Nothing much has ever changed. I don't think it makes me superior. It just means the pop culture television landscape and I rarely connect. A week ago, I sent an email to my friends and family asking for links to commercials they remember. I received many back with a lot of stories and anecdotes about that time in their lives or how the world was then. These are some from the UK and the US. I couldn't link them all because some people sent me a lot, and then kept sending them. Some weren't in English, and I have no ...

Credit: Getty The University of Massachusetts Lowell recently conducted a poll to see Americans' views on several topics, including public figures. With a net favourability rating of +65, Parton won the crown as America's most beloved public figure. Barack Obama distantly trailed her at +14 points and Taylor Swift was even lower at +3. Now you can only imagine who took the least favourable spots. I'll let you take some guesses.  Congratulations to Dolly! You can access the full poll here !

Hydrangeas (1880s-1900s) Ivan Aivazovsky

 

It's hot and breezy today (the same could be said for that tramp Janine in Home-Ec!) so let's jump in my dad's new LeSabre convertible, go cruisin' and turn on the radio. There's bound to be something good playing. Ooooh, the new Carpenters song is on! So let's relax and have fun--after all, it's sunny, it's 1970 and it's Open Post, darlings! Photo Credit: AK