Cocktail Nation – The Interviews

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Cocktail Nation

The Interviews

Nov 30th 2011 by Baron von Swankenstein

Readable 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 old clothes and drinking himself silly in a bar that has seen better days. And while Jeff “Beachbum” Berry’s popular cocktail books would reinforce that idea, in truth not every lush is a Lounge Revivalist. (And not every Lounge Revivalist is a lush.) No, regardless of their chosen flourishes — ( continue reading... )

The Cocktail Nation - Queens Of Vintage

Episode 266    May 12th 2013

This week we talk to the publisher of an online magazine called Queens Of Vintage, her name is Lena Weber and recently she interviewed me in her kings of vintage portion of the website so I thought we should have her on to talk vintage culture and the English scene. Plus the best exotica and lounge music from across the globe.

Readable 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 was the bachelor pad. More than just a place to dwell, the bachelor pad was a place to work, play, and truly live. It was a micro-world outfitted and dressed in whatever manner Playboy and ( continue reading... )


Readable 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. ( read more... )

Airport

Apr 12th 2011 by Jesse Kowalski

Film The first of its kind, Airport set the standard for the disaster films of the 1970s. Films such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), and my favorite – Rollercoaster (1977) collected A-list, B-list, and C-list movie stars and put them into some pretty crummy situations. But their pain is our pleasure; the films grossed a ton of money – Airport made over ( read more... )

Readable “When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.” – Richard Stark, first line from The Hunter On one side of a coin is James Bond, a suave secret agent with a license to kill. A connoisseur of many things, Bond enjoys fine food, fine women, and martinis shaken not stirred. A champion for Queen and ( read more... )

Readable In the 1959 premiere episode of The Twilght Zone, Earl Holliman explores a town completely deserted. After helping himself to some ice cream from the drug store soda fountain, he encounters wire spinner racks full of paperbacks, one of which is filled entirely with copies of the ominously titled “The Last Man on Earth.” In the age of the electronic book, wire book racks (as ( read more... )