The website of Jonathan Bogart, writer and cartoonist.
Scene Four: Just Me And My Radio
Johnny Mercer & The Pied Pipers “On The Atchison, Topeka, And The Santa Fe”
(Harry Warren, Johnny Mercer)
Capitol 195 • 1945
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Los Angeles California, 1942.
I’m joining the digital information revolution of 2007 and opening a Tumblr account, apparently in the belief that I will update it more frequently than this thing.
Scene Three: It Ain’t No Town And It Ain’t No City
The country looms large in the American imagination, even as what “the country” means differs from region to region, from time to time, and from mythology to mythology.
Scene Two: Gone With The Draft
Well, it’s sitting here, sprawled out over the first half and change of the decade, demanding recognition, the Supreme Fact of the 1940s way beyond popular culture or music or even America herself — its cold, brutal reality turning everything in the cultural sphere into so many seltzer bubbles, fizzing briefly into nothingness.
Act I: Hollywood And Vine
Scene One: The Greatest Cast Of Honest Joes, Thieves, Murderers, And Cutthroats In Radio History
Command Performance “Dick Tracy In B-Flat”
(Meredith Willson, et al.)
Armed Forces Radio Service H-18.162 • 1945
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We begin here, very nearly at the midpoint of the decade, at the high water tide of the war (Original Airdate: February 15 1945) with a record that isn’t a record, not by most lights, but we’re feeling expansive.