Ultra Swank - Retro Adventures

book

Mars Attacks
Written by Baron von Swankenstein in Readable

Mars Attacks

In the middle of the twentieth century, fear and paranoia were ingrained into the subconscious of every American. The 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite had Americans wary of Soviet attack from the skies. And the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 assured the world that Soviet Premier Khrushchev was serious in his threat when he said “We will bury you.” The spectre of mutually assured...

Cult Vegas – The Weirdest! The Wildest! The Swingin’est Town On Earth

The Golden Age of Las Vegas has been over for quite some time. If you don’t count auxiliary members like Shirley MacLaine, Buddy Greco, or Angie Dickinson, the last member of The Rat Pack, Joey Bishop, passed away in 2007. He outlived Frank by 9, Dino by 12, Sammy by 17, and Peter by 23 years. Even the buildings, which are supposed to outlive those...

The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook – Inside The Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men

Paradigm shift. If you could boil down into a phrase what Mad Men is about, it would be “mid-century paradigm shift.” Mad Men explores it on the large scale: Clueless about how to sell coffee to young adults, the men of Sterling Cooper attempted to shoehorn the Port Huron Statement into their ad campaign. They completely missed the point because the cultural paradigm was changing....

When The Mob Ran Vegas
Written by Baron von Swankenstein in Readable

When The Mob Ran Vegas

On September 7, 1963, during a performance at the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Dean Martin joked “Right now, ladies and gentlemen, somewhere backstage, Frank Sinatra is punching a dealer right in the mouth.” Little did Martin know that four years later, Sinatra actually would start a fight with a Sands pit boss over revoked casino credit — only, in the end, it...

Cocktail Nation – The Interviews
Written by Baron von Swankenstein in Readable

Cocktail Nation – The Interviews

Mid-century retro goes by many names — Retro culture; Atomic culture — and it sometimes overlaps with many other subcultures like kustom kulture (i.e. hot rod & rockabilly fans); tiki culture, and even Goth. My preferred term for this subculture is Lounge Revival. To the outside observer, it would seem that the only thing your average Lounge Revivalist is interested in is dressing up in...

Pad – The Guide to Ultra Living
Written by Baron von Swankenstein in Readable

Pad – The Guide to Ultra Living

Thanks to a post-World War II economic and technological boom, the 1950s and early 60s was the golden age for the bachelor lifestyle. With the advent of Playboy magazine, the quintessential guide to urban living, it reached critical mass. Armed with affluence, abundant leisure time, and the sagacity of Saint Hefner, bachelors found themselves with two things: freedom and optimism. The ultimate expression of this...

Monte – King of Atom Age Monster Decals
Written by Baron von Swankenstein in Readable

Monte – King of Atom Age Monster Decals

In America, the 1950s and 60s spawned The Monster Kids. These were kids, mostly pre-adolescent boys, who assembled Aurora model kits of Frankenstein or Dracula after school; read Tales From The Crypt comics with a flashlight under the covers at bed time; and sneaked downstairs on Saturdays to watch the late-night horror movie show on TV with spooky hosts like Zacherle, Chilly Billy, or Ghoulardi....

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