South Carolina Guv Mark Sanford invoked the biblical story of David to explain why he would not resign after getting caught in an ongoing tete-a-tete with an Argentinain woman. Jon Stewart had a little something to say about that.

Here is another of this blog’s infrequent forays into the world of early music reocordings. While visiting Sioux Falls this past weekend, I made a detour into a new (to me) thrift store calls Y’s Buys (it’s run by the YMCA). The place was huge. A bit overpriced, but ten times better than the measly Saver’s that’s further down 41st.

They had a small selection of 78rpm records, which at $1.99 apiece were ridiculously overpriced. I managed to find two interesting ones that weren’t broken (I mourn the death-by-neglect of “The Hipster’s Boogie”). I would never have paid their price if they hadn’t been a pair of labels that I’ve never seen before, and will unlikely come across again soon.

Herschel Gold Seal immediately intrigued me with its obviously Jewish moniker and local Northwestern Phonograph Supply Co name. Usually, these indicate a very small record company with a limited catalog and primarily long-forgotten regional artists. The hard part about researching such labels is that today there is almost no surviving information about them. To my surprise, my initial research lasted only five minutes before I hit pay dirt.

A few years ago, science journalist and musical history buff Kurt Gegenhuber began a quest to discover the musicians who played “The Moonshiner’s Dance, Part 1″, featured in the legendary Anthology of American Folk Music. That record was also a Herschel Gold Seal release, and it led Gegenhuber on a sprawling historical journey through the Twin Cities’ early 20th-Century Jewish culture, a journey he recounts in his terrific article Music, Moonshine, and Mahjong. It turns out that Herschel Gold Seal was a house label maintained by Gennett Records for Harry Bernstein’s chain of Minneapolis/St Paul record stores in the late ’20s and early ’30s. The relationship probably originated with the fact that Harry Bernstein’s was a former Starr Piano distributor, and Starr Piano was Gennett’s parent company (the recording division changed its name from Starr to Gennett in 1917).

Gennett Records is a sprawling story in itself. They seemed to specialize in leasing their vast library of recordings to many smaller record labels. Adding to the confusion, they changed their name to Champion in 1930 but continued releasing some of the same recordings previously released on Gennett. I have found side A of this record, “Meadow-Lark” by the Royal Troubadors, on three different labels under as many band names, all apparently the same recording. This particular record, BTW, is a relabel of Gennett 3388, issued around 1927.

Side A: Meadow-Lark, by the Royal Troubadors. Recorded 10/04/1926. This side has heavy surface damage. I did the best I could to minimize the noise. It’s listenable, but not great.

Side B: Sunday, by Harry Pollack and His Club Maurice Diamonds. Recorded 10/01/1926. Again, listenable, but the quality was pretty bad to begin with, and you can do only so much with a disk that’s had its dynamic range ground down to nothing by multiple passes with a steel needle.

As a rule, I hate polka, but I was delighted to find this disk. WNAX is well-known to anyone who grew up in South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, or western Minnesota or Iowa. An unusually powerful station for a relatively small community–in the ’40s it claimed to have the country’s tallest transmitting tower–WNAX was one of the most popular stations in the predominantly rural upper midwest. The rest of the country better recognizes its most famous musical prodigy, Lawrence Welk, whose decade-long stint as leader of the WNAX house band took him from struggling road musician to household name.

After the Welk era, WNAX housed many acts, mostly specializing in the polka-style music the heaviliy-Germanic upper-plains population enjoyed. One of the longest-lived of these groups was the WNAX Bohemian Band. The Bohemian Band could be heard every weeknight at 6:15, and played under the sponsorship of Minneapolis-based Grain Belt Beer. (The “Grainbelt Polka” song featured on this record is surely a thinly-veiled advertisement for their sponsor.)

The WNAX Bohemian Band. L-R: Billy Dean, Homer Schmidt (a veteran of Lawrence Welk’s ensemble), Bill Tonyan (still alive and performing!), Keith Eide, Rex Hays, Lynn Edwards, Eddie Texel, and Fred Burgi.

I left the noise level higher in these two recordings, because the dynamic range was so unusually well-preserved in these little-played sides that I didn’t want to sacrifice it. They’re still pretty good quality. The A side and B side are a guess, as the record has no catalog number. I went by the sequence of their recording matrix numbers.

Side A: Marenka Polka

Side B: Grainbelt Polka

Nowdays, playground equipment has to be all “safe”.

One half of a 1926 stereograph.

The June issue of ETCetera is out, and I encourage anyone who has not already done so to sign up for a subscription. It’s great stuff, and each issue only gets better. Not only does this issue have a revealing look at several gorgeous makes of Spanish typewriters that you’ve probably never even heard of, one of yours truly’s typers is featured in another section. And as always, there are tons of other informative and entertaining features. Who would have thought so much typewriter goodness could be crammed into 16 full-color pages?

Typewriter: Julieta, a 1956 Underwood De Luxe Quiet Tab

Oh, the perils of eBay. Not long ago, I fell to the tempation of a rather scarce specimen, a Deutsche Remington. (A little background: the Deutsche Remington is really a Torpedo. Remington partially owned Torpedo Buromaschinenwerke, and so in the European market some Torpedos were marketed as the Deutsche Remington. Remington had a habit of slapping different names on the same machine, possibly to obscure the actual numbers being manufactured. So far as I’m aware, this particular machine is one of the only ones to have turned up in the United States.)

We’ve all heard the tragedies of typewriters being destroyed in the mail. I’ve received postally-damaged typers myself a few times, though nothing too severe. I’ve even had a couple of what I call “miracle typewriters” that somehow arrived in perfect condition despite shockingly irresponsible packaging. Well, this one takes the cake. And oh, yeah, I got burned big-time.

Here is what the machine looked like before the seller shipped it:

(You like the barrel full of crushed Diet Rite cans? Classy, huh?)

And here’s what it looked like when I got it:

It was crammed into an undersized box, upside down, with no packing material. The seller obviously didn’t give a damn whether it arrived undamaged. It arrived with the right end of the carriage sticking out of a hole in the box. In one way, the typer being wedged in so tightly was a blessing because it likely saved the carriage from being ripped from the chassis. The aluminum front frame, however, is mangled. The space bar has been pushed in and shoved to the side. The shift key levers, which rest in guides attached to the frame, are bent.

I can probably reshape the frame into a semblance of its original self, and repair the mechanical damage, but it will never be the same. I’m afraid this may end up being a display-only typer.

That’s the way it is with eBay. Yous takes you chances.

Update: I’ve done the best I can with it for the time being and spiffed it up a bit. A brief writeup is now available on Machines of Loving Grace.

Eternal Image specializes in what I guess one could paradoxically call lifestyle funerary products. If you’re a baseball fan, they have urn and casket designs reflecting the logos and colors of almost every major league team. There are Vatican Library and Precious Moments caskets and urns. And then there is the showstopper shown above: the “photon torpedo” casket that is part of the Star Trek collection. (There is also a fairly nifty United Federation of Planets urn if you chose to have the funeral home set their phasers for “disintegrate”.)

So what inspired this company? I’ll let them tell you in their own words:

[CEO Clint] Mytych challenged himself to find an industry where branding – and licensing – had little or no impact to date. After months of research, Mytych hit upon what may be licensing’s last frontier – the funeral industry. Together with his partners, Nick Popravsky and Donna Shatter, Mytych crafted a business plan to bring top licenses to the funeral business. Then he set out to acquire the rights to key licenses. Almost every company EI approached immediately saw the opportunity.

Their compassion to complete the lives of the dearly departed just brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?

The more earthly-minded might want to consider a Trappist casket, handcrafted by Iowa monks out of wood harvested from their own 1,200-acre forest. They’re the only source I’m aware of for old-style “shaped” caskets. Their handling of children’s caskets is especially touching.

For the very earthiest is the ultimate in “green” burial: being thrown unembalmed into a grave, sans casket.

I’ve always been partial to my grandfather’s preferred funeral: “Wrap me in a sheet and toss me in the ditch down by the railroad tracks.”

In response to a reader’s request, here is a general outline of how I go about photographing my typewriters. By observing a few easy guidelines, I believe that anyone can achieve similar results. I don’t have any fancy equipment; my studio is the top of my basement clothes dryer, and my camera is a Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot.

First, you need a typewriter. If you do not have a typewriter, I’m sorry, but you have more problems than I can help you with.

1. Make your typewriter look good. I don’t mean just cleaning it, although that should be done as well. Wiping down the machine with a light coat of Pledge or Old English will give it a nice shine. To eliminate background distractions and make your typewriter the focus of attention, place your typewriter on a plain white surface, like posterboard. As it turns out, this is helpful for the last step.

2. Photograph your typewriter under the best possible conditions. You should have good, bright light. I can’t emphasize enough how important good lighting is to good photographs. Either shoot outside on a sunny day or underneath a soft, white indoor light. (I shoot mine underneath daylight-replicating fluorescent lights made for reptile enclosures, available at most pet stores.) A regular, bare light bulb is both too yellow and too harsh. Avoid using camera flash. Use a tripod or some other stable surface combined with a remote release or self-timer to eliminate shake. Close down the aperture as small as it will go for the sharpest detail. Don’t worry about long exposure times; you have a tripod.

3. Adjust your photo’s colors. Ideally, you set your camera’s white balance before you took the photo, but you can rarely avoid having to do some color-correction. I use Photoshop, but most of these adjustments can be done in almost any photo editing software.

Set your white point based on the background posterboard. I prefer to use Curves over Levels because unlike Levels, Curves doesn’t destroy pixel data.

Bring out the machine’s details by lightening the shadows. About 10% works for me most of the time. Too much lightening of shadows or darkening of highlights can make your photo look like one of those crappy HDR jobs, and you don’t want that–unless you like crappy HDR jobs, in which case see my comment about not having a typewriter.

Even lighting with sunlight or using indoor lighting filters will result in a little yellow cast. Go into Color Balance and adjust the sliders until the blacks look closer to true black. Deep black reflects highlights as blue, so I shift the colors closer to the blue spectrum.

Sharpen the picture just a bit.

This isn’t absolutely everything I do in post, but these basic steps ought to be enough for anyone to take great-looking typewriter photos.