Written by guuzbourg

French girls, singing. No, sighing. Making me sigh. Ah.

This article has 8 comments

  1. reader

    PPPS, forgot to mention my personal favourite, the Arches, the iconic symbol of the Fair ( near the Pacific Science Centre ) , completely unchanged & unaltered from the Fair days ( designed by ? Yamasaki ? correct name ? , later to design the WTC in NYC ) & forgot to mention the decorative International Fountain, which certainly has been altered & regraded subsequently.

    The ye-ye music & era were class & quality in their own right & have subsequently inspired many great tributes, eg, Mareva Galanter & her ‘ faux ‘ scopitones, Gigi Gaston ( hysterical ) , &, of course, the wonderful, delightful Vanessa Contenay-Quinones, whom I accidentally neglected to praise yesterday.

    That’s all ( I promise ) . Thanks again to ‘ marksl ‘ for the lead & to this wonderful, marvellous site, which presents the best of the new & evokes the best of the past. Over & out. Thank you.

    –reader

  2. reader

    I realise that I’m very, very, very late to this conversation ( business took me away for a month ) , but, with the blog managers’ indulgence, I must thank ‘ marksl ‘ for pointing me to the Bell – System YouTube promo film, for I was at the world’s fair in Seattle with my parents. I recall the Food Court & the cotton candy & the futuristic push-button phones with no Q or Z ( which initially were too expensive to take off ) ; the monorail ; the Space Needle. We had Jack Kennedy as pres ; we were going to the Moon, Alice ! ( Honeymooners reference ) ; then we were going to settle in space, the Moon ; Mars was next ; we were taught at school that, by 1980 , nearly every household would have a rocket for long-distance travel & houses would have to be re-designed to include a launch-pad where the garages had been ! ; 4-day work-weeks.

    Instead, we got Vietnam, the war-criminal Johnson as pres, the OPEC oil embargoes, the awful Carter & the Carter Depression, Iran hostages, — we don’t even have our own space shuttle & manned rocket programme in the US anymore. I want my retro-future back, please.

    PS, looked for my parents & me but no luck. My mother wore green & had a sort of a pill-box hat. They both were very tall.

    PPS, don’t think that was Kathy Garver. ‘Family Affair’ wasn’t till 1966. Also, her bio at IMDB makes no ref to this. ( but perhaps uncredited ? )

    –reader

  3. Gary Willis

    Absolutely rubbish video but a great pop song.

  4. marksl

    Vanessa C-Q’s video clip teaser for her 2012 album, referred to by SteveInTheEast, is in a box at top right on screen at
    http://www.vanessaandtheos.com/Vanessa_ContenayQuinones

    This can be opened up. It uses parts of a 14-min film (sponsored by Bell Systems) of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, which shows two excited teenagers of the rock-and-roll era discovering the show. The original film is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKVEQzTkqt8

    An on-line comment to that Youtube film says that they are Eddie Haskell and Cissy Davis. These are the fictional names of Ken Osmond, teenage actor in ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and Kathy Garver, actress in ‘Family Affair’, both US shows of the day.

    Another homage paid to the yé-yé era of 50 years ago by V C-Q. Can SteveInSoCal confirm what Vanessa may not herself know ?

  5. SteveInTheEast

    Check out the album teaser clip also here on the FS site for more of an idea of this album’s direction. That lovely dreamy pop sound of the first album is still very much in evidence in songs like Rainbows After Rain, Any Given Monday, Calling Yesterday Back, 24 Heur Juillet and Debile Matin (played by Jarvis Cocker on his BBC6 Music show last week) so far not, one swallow does not a summer make…

  6. SteveinSoCal

    First time I played this clip I was in full agreement with Sky. But having listened to it a couple more times my foot has decided that it’s a bit of a grower, albeit it’s a quirky, bubble-gum pop sort of grower along the lines of “Allez Pop”. Still, I’m expecting a little more of Vanessa C-O to be honest.

  7. Sky

    Compared to her earlier stuff, this one falls a bit flat, I think. Wrong advisors?