{"id":5922,"date":"2024-11-01T18:48:36","date_gmt":"2024-11-02T01:48:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5922"},"modified":"2024-11-01T18:48:36","modified_gmt":"2024-11-02T01:48:36","slug":"los-angeles-review-of-books-jeremy-braddock-firesign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5922","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Review of Books: Jeremy Braddock, Firesign"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1000\" height=\"1500\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Jeremy-Braddock-Firesign.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5923\" style=\"width:450px\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Jeremy-Braddock-Firesign.jpg 1000w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Jeremy-Braddock-Firesign-768x1152.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><\/center><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a 1994 episode of <em>Rugrats<\/em>, the cartoon series\u2019 one-year-old protagonist Tommy Pickles insists on taking off his clothes and not putting them back on. He soon convinces his twin playmates Phil and Lil DeVille to do the same, just before they\u2019re picked up by their mother Betty, a stocky, voluble woman never seen without her athletic headband and Venus glyph sweatshirt. Scandalized at this scene of infant nudism, Betty explodes at Tommy\u2019s mother: \u201cI don\u2019t know what kind of baby commune you\u2019re trying to run here, but it\u2019s time to face facts. The sixties are over, and we lost!\u201d This line went over my head when I first watched the episode, as it must also have done for the rest of the show\u2019s elementary school\u2013age viewership, but it haunted me nevertheless, hinting offhandedly at a period of bitter, possibly violent sociopolitical turmoil not so very far in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yet I daresay I had a more vivid sense of what \u201cthe sixties\u201d were about than most members of the generation yet to be labeled millennials, and for a reason not entirely unrelated to <em>Rugrats<\/em>. Even before that show premiered, I was a fan of Philip Proctor, who voiced Phil and Lil\u2019s ineffectual stay-at-home father Howard DeVille. A stage actor who had also played countless one-off television parts, Proctor was then best known as a member of the Firesign Theatre, a four-man comedy troupe that had, from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, put out a series of record albums densely layered with elaborate sonic production and laced with topical, esoteric, and absurd countercultural humor. Or so Proctor was known, at least, to a certain turned-on segment of the baby boomer generation to which my father belonged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Read the whole thing <a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/theres-a-seeker-born-every-minute\/\">at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a 1994 episode of Rugrats, the cartoon series\u2019 one-year-old protagonist Tommy Pickles insists on taking off his clothes and not putting them back on. He soon convinces his twin playmates Phil and Lil DeVille to do the same, just before they\u2019re picked up by their mother Betty, a stocky, voluble woman never seen without [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5922"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5925,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5922\/revisions\/5925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}