Write up from Loose Change magazine from April of 1978. Click on through for a larger, more legible image.

Recently was reading a review of Jack Kerouac’s unedited On the Road scroll, published for the first time in ‘07, and came across this excerpt, “On the sidewalk characters swarmed. Everybody was looking at everybody else. It was the end of the continent no more land. Somebody had tipped America like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we’ll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it’s been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all of this.”
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Juicy Fruit.

The Kerouac quote immediately reminded me of Ken Kesey’s reference in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest… Chief trying to reason with McMurphy in regards to his relations with Nurse Ratched, how it might keep him out of shock therapy, and his reply(page 250): “I tried to talk him into playing along with her so’s to get out of the treatments, but he just laughed and told me Hell, all they was doin’ was chargin’ his battery for him, free for nothing. ‘When I get out of here the first woman that takes on ol’ Red McMurphy the ten-thousand watt psychopath, she’s gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars! No I ain’t scared of their little battery charger.’”
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Then there’s ulillillia – the video game stunt man. Probably most well known
for his series of youtube videos.
Dude wrote a book recently, and though I haven’t read it yet, did come across this clipping:

“Act 6: Answers revealed
Scene 15: A sense-proof barrier
May 29, 1999 at 9:17 UTC – 1 hour, 42 minutes remaining

Throughout this, Knuckles draws a main-event waveform once every two seconds and doesn’t move from his spot. They reach 31.8 dB for the amplitude slowly increasing linearly (by the number) and the scale is extends to 35 at the edge of the page at the start. The time is based on that at the end of the time lapse.”
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Buddy of mine by the name of Mr. Handler put me onto Haruki Murakami’s Pinball, 1973

There is precious little you can gain from a pinball machine. Only some lights that convert to a score count. On the other hand, there is a great deal to lose. All the coppers you’d ever need to erect statues of every president in history (provided, of course, you thought well enough to erect a statue of Richard M. Nixon), not to mention a lot of valuable and nonreturnable time.

Have a nice game.

Fun stuff, for sure.
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Found on the cover of some random novel from 1962:

Only review I’ve found of the book, “Stan O’Dair’s Shame Sluts, showing a subtle appreciation for the female form about equal to that of a 3rd grader.”

Have the sense that the cover’s as good as this one’s gonna get.
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Always on the lookout for more instances of this particular piece of Americana cropping up in written pop-culture, images of one of our favorite past times as it occurs in the wilds of the writer’s imagination.

There’s got to be more out there, right?
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Update via RGP posters Johnny O and Don C

Johnny O says, “Here is one which one web site claims to have been an inspiration for The Who’s Pinball Wizard”

Don C adds, “From what I remember about Tommy, the pinball references were all after thoughts by Pete. He was trying to sell the concept and threw the pinball stuff in because he knew the manager was in to it. He always called Pinball Wizard a throw away song, and tied the concept together by adding a few subtle pinball references in a couple of other tunes. The liner notes on the remastered CD talks about it in detail.”

Johnny O, “I’ve heard/read the same. The guy that wrote the book is considered one of the legendary rock journalists so there could be a connection from book to manager to song. It might become apparent from reading the book.”

Author of Arfur Nik Cohn’s wikipedia page says, “When reviewing a rough mix of The Who’s rock opera Tommy, he told the group members that the album was less than spectacular. Knowing that Cohn was a fan of pinball, Pete Townshend suggested that the album’s deaf, dumb, and blind title character could also be an exceptional pinball player. Cohn’s opinion of the album immediately improved, and Townshend subsequently wrote “Pinball Wizard” to be added to the album.”

Awesome tidbit.
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Add on in the comments, please!

Perhaps Hollywood’s first ever rock musical, star-studded and shot in 1974 with a budget of $5mil, based on the Who’s 1969 concept album. Just look at this list of players:

-The four founding members of the Who: Roger Daltrey(vocals) as Tommy, John Entwistle(bass) himself, Keith Moon(drums) as Uncle Ernie, and Pete Townshend(guitar) himself. Townshend not only wrote the story which he and director Ken Russell(Oscar-winning Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), Altered States (1980)) adapted for the silver screen, but also scored the film and oversaw production of the picture’s soundtrack release. The soundtrack reached as high as #2 on the US Billboard charts and #21 in the UK.

Other notables include:
-5x Golden Globe winner Ann-Margret as Nora Walker-Hobbs
-Elton John as the reigning Champ
-Tina Turner as the Acid Queen
-Eric Clapton as the Preacher
-Jack Nicholson as the Specialist
-Oliver Reed as Frank Hobbs, Robert Powell as Captain Walker, Arthur Brown as the Priest, Ben Aris as Reverend Simpson, and Paul Nicholas as Cousin Kevin

And of course, this classic scene from the movie directly inspired the game which Bally released in September of 1975:

This rather extensive piece ran in Billboard Magazine’s 1943 Summer Special, a full four years before the advent of the electromechanical flipper:

Pinball is a modern game developed from an ancient idea known for many years as bagatelle. The word pinball was probably first coined by a Kentucky circuit court and used in Kentucky newspapers; it was first used in an unabridged dictionary in 1940.

It is easy, of course, to imagine the gradual development of bowling and pitch-in-the-hole marble games from these humble beginnings, but history itself leaves a gap in the development of bagatelle…

Fill in the juicy gaps for yourself – read the Billboard Magazine article in its entirety via the Google books archive. Really is quite an exhaustive study.

Nearly twenty years later, still profoundly affected by his experience at Showbiz Pizza, small-town disc-jockey Chris Thrash sought out Fechter and purchased a Rock-afire band of his own. Some clever programming on Chris’ part, and the band was once again performing for millions, this time on YouTube.

The Rock-afire Explosion movie reveals how Chris came to revive this fallen 80’s gem, explores his and a number of other fan’s obsessions with the animatronic band, and chronicles the rise and fall of Showbiz Pizza and what was once a 20 million dollar per-year venture for inventor Aaron Fechter. More than this, the film is a look at the importance of nostalgia, ever-changing media culture, and the eternal quest to stay young.

DVD and much more info available on the Rock-afire Explosion’s official site!

“It’s said that less than one in five businesses started today will be around in five years’ time—which puts this story into perspective. Hōshi Ryokan is a hotel and spa in Komatsu, Japan. It has been owned and run by the same family for 46 generations so far, and its famous hot springs have been refreshing and revitalizing its patrons for no less than 1291 years. Founded by a Buddhist disciple whose master had the springs’ location delivered to him in a dream, Hōshi is the world’s oldest hotel and also the world’s oldest continuously-operating business.”

Read the rest of the story at BusinessWeek.

More here.

Photos taken on the spot by yours truly, background info from Wikipedia:

The Scopitone is a type of jukebox featuring a 16 mm film component. It was a forerunner of music video. The Italian Cinebox/Colorama and Color-Sonics were competing, lesser-known technologies of the time.

Based on technology developed during World War II, color 16 mm film clips with a magnetic soundtrack were designed to be shown in a specially designed jukebox. The first Scopitones were made in France, among them Serge Gainsbourg’s Le poinçonneur des Lilas (filmed in 1958 in the Porte des Lilas Métro station), Johnny Hallyday’s “Noir c’est noir” (a cover of Los Bravos’ “Black Is Black”) and the “Hully Gully” showing a dance around the edge of a French swimming pool.

Scopitones spread to West Germany, where the Kessler Sisters burst out of twin steamer trunks to sing “Quando Quando” on the dim screen that surmounted the jukebox. Scopitone went on to appear in bars in England. By 1964, approximately 500 machines were installed in the USA, according to Time magazine.

Several well-known acts of the 1960s appear in Scopitone films, ranging from The Exciters (“Tell Him”) to Procol Harum (“A Whiter Shade of Pale”). In one Scopitone recording, Dionne Warwick lay on a white shag rug with an offstage fan urging her to sing “Walk on By”. Another had Nancy Sinatra and a troupe of go-go girls shimmy to “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”. Inspired by burlesque, blonde bombshell Joi Lansing performed “Web of Love” and “The Silencer”, and Julie London sang “Daddy” against a backdrop of strippers. The artifice of such scenes led Susan Sontag to identify Scopitone films as “part of the canon of Camp” in her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”.

By the end of the 1960s, the popularity of the Scopitone had faded. The last film for a Scopitone was made at the end of 1978. However, in 2006 the French singer Mareva Galanter released several videos which mimic the Scopitone style. Galenta’s album Ukuyéyé features several songs in the Frecch Yé-yé style. She also recently hosted a weekly French television program called “Do you do you Scopitone” on the Paris Première channel.

Barely four years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler was calling for a theory of evolution for machines. Since then, a few hardy souls have attempted to oblige him, but none has quite hit the mark. Their reasoning, very much à la Darwin, is that any given technology has many designers with different ideas – which produces many variations. Of these variations, some are selected for their superior performance and pass on their small differences to future designs. The steady accumulation of such differences gives rise to novel technologies and the result is evolution.

The history of technology is not one of more-or-less independent discoveries, but an evolutionary story of related devices, methods, and capturings of phenomena. In the time of the earliest humans, we picked up phenomena lying around on nature’s floor. Certain fibres possess strength and flexibility? Binding materials. Friction creates heat? Fire. Fire allows the smelting of metals? Metal tools. Combinations of braided fibres and metal cutting-heads make axes. Combinations of levers, ropes and toothed gears make possible grain milling, irrigation and building construction.

In more modern times, chemical and electrical phenomena yield myriads of technological elements, and combinations of these have given us industrial chemistry, the telephone, radio, the computer and the internet. In just a few millennia, with repeated capturings and repeated combinations, the few have become many and the simple have become complex. We have progressed from grinding stones to iPhones.

So what would a theory of evolution for technology look like?

Read the whole article, Evolution 2.0: On the origin of technologies, @ NewScientist.com

via psychological illusionist Derren Brown’s crew blog. Which is well worth checking out for robust commentary & conversation on all things perceived, if you’re into that sort of scene.