SUDDENLY will return in 2025
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
Hi, Rabia here. I have Long COVID and am struggling. I need time to process things and figure out how to best use my energy. Podcasting is good for me but very energy consuming, and I need to work out how I'm going to manage this condition. So Season 3 will end here for now and we will pick back up at some stage in 2025. In the meantime, enjoy this episode of Rocky Fortune. Wear an N95, run an air purifier, avoid crowds, do whatever you can to avoid both contracting and spreading this virus. I dig you the most xx contact: suddenlypod at gmail dot com
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54: The Man with the Golden Arm (with Spike Vincent)
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
Melbourne's Medically Supervised Injecting Room (MSIR) in North Richmond opened in 2018. This was the result of a years-long grassroots campaign led by the local community, fed up with constant overdoses in the streets. The MSIR operates on principles of harm reduction which simply work and urgently need to be applied throughout the world. The stigma around drug use, and the criminalising of drug users, must end - and that begins with us. In 1955, Frank Sinatra made a historically significant contribution to the destigmatisation of drug use on film in Otto Preminger's The Man with the...
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53: Wake Up and Live, Part 5 - Giardina on Winchell
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
In the final (?) part of our Wake Up and Live saga, Henry returns to the show to share his thoughts on Walter Winchell's legacy through the lens of the gossip landscape of 2024. Sources for this episode: * John Mosedale - The Men Who Invented Broadway (1981) * Neal Gabler - Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (1994) * Snopes article on * Better Offline podcast hosted by Ed Zitron, * Rehash podcast, * Sullivan's Travels (1941) * Fresh Air (1999) * The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) * Scandal (1950) * Winchell (1998) * "" Henry Giardina, Hey Alma, 18 August...
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BONUS: The "Is Elvis Alive?" Conspiracy Theory + "The Elvis Files" (1991) (with Justin Gausman)
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
For the last few months, Justin and Rabia have been co-hosting TCBCast After Dark, a deep dive into the seamy underbelly of the Elvis conspiracy world available only on the TCBCast Patreon feed. As they approached Part 6 of an exhaustive investigation into the truth behind the grifters who perpetuated the false "Is Elvis Alive?" conspiracy throughout the 1980s, and reached the infamous 1991 Bill Bixby TV special The Elvis Files, they decided to bring in Felix for a fresh perspective on the whole thing. Here, exclusive to SUDDENLY, is a 45-minute introduction in which Felix is caught up...
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52: Wake Up and Live, Part 4 - The Secret
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
This week, we continue to act as if it were impossible to fail in part four of our exhaustive deep dive into Wake Up and Live. Picking up the story from the end of World War II, we look at the legacy of Dorothea Brande's book and the essentially identical self-help scam that generations of grifters have perpetuated on the world ever since. Wasn't this podcast meant to be about Frank Sinatra? Selected sources and references: Picture Search Video @ 139 Swan St, Richmond (IG: @) Teen Wolf (animated TV series) (1986) Stone Bros. (2009) The MousePack - Mickey and Friends Singing Classic Standards...
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51: Wake Up and Live, Part 3 - Dancing in the Dark
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
The history books forgot about the 1944 radio adaptation of Wake Up and Live, a bizarre and disastrous production in which a fascist self-help book adapted into a comedy movie about duelling radio shows is adapted back into a radio show in which several other radio shows exist within the world of this radio show, and characters with real people playing themselves are altered back into fictional characters again. And THIS was Sinatra's second ever acting role of any kind, fresh off the back of the similary convoluted film Higher and Higher. On top of that, this was also the first time...
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50: Wake Up and Live, Part 2 - Machine Men
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
Please note that the accompanying graphic for this episode has not been chosen lightly and is intended in the spirit of historical education, criticism and artistic commentary. In part 2 of our investigation into the saga of Wake Up and Live, we look at the original 1936 self-help book by Dorothea Brande, the toxic ideas that the book perpetuates and the author's ties to fascism and Nazism. To understand why fascism became popular in the United States during the 1930s is also to understand why Wake Up and Live became a bestseller. This week we take a close look at both, from the...
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49: Wake Up and Live, Part 1 - Mic Fright
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
This week we begin a three-part investigation into Wake Up and Live. What is it? Good question. It's a 1930s self-help book, a musical in which a real-life journalist/radio host plays himself, and later, a radio drama adapted from the film. All these things interrelate in a way that's confusing to make sense of in 2024. Just beneath the surface of Wake Up and Live lies an elaborate and shocking story we'll fully detail over the next three weeks. Sinatra won't enter the story until Part 3. What the hell is all of this? You're about to find out. contact: suddenlypod at gmail dot com...
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48: Post Time
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
***SPOILERS AHEAD - LISTEN TO EPISODE 47 FIRST*** It is now post time. Selected resources and links mentioned this week: * Follow on Instagram * video essay by Johnny Law & Order * TCBCast After Dark, Rabia's new side project with Justin Gausman, which you can hear by subscribing to the . * Art Cohn - The Joker is Wild (1955) * Chris Heath - Feel: Robbie Williams (2004) * Joe E. Lewis - "" (1948) * Joe E. Lewis - (1961) * Son of the Mask (2005) * Heckler (Jamie Kennedy, 2006) * * Episode of What's My Line with Joe E. Lewis, website: suddenlypod.gay contact:...
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47: The Joker is Wild
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
What if someone slashed Sinatra's vocal cords at the height of his powers? Would he still be able to cut it in showbiz off his charm alone? Could he get into comedy instead of music? More importantly, what would be left of the man without his act? Of all the fictional characters Sinatra portrayed in his early years of dramatic film roles, "Joe E. Lewis" was among the most iconic. This week, we're watching 1957's The Joker is Wild, in which the Lewis persona was presented over a timeline spanning more than 30 years from the early days of vaudeville to the post-war period - with all of this...
info_outlineOn January 19th, 1945, hundreds of Sinatra-haters violently descended on a small group of young fans who had come to see STEP LIVELY (1944) at the Empire Theatre in Sydney, Australia. The angry mob jeered and assaulted members of the Sinatra Club, bitterly deriding them as “swooners." Police broke things up, but the haters stayed to boo throughout the screening then stalk fans through the streets as they headed home. This terrifying incident was the result of months of anti-Sinatra resentment boiling over in Australian society. In response, photographer Ivan Ives decided to give the Sinatra Club a chance, and set out - in a series of remarkably beautiful candid shots, only recently unearthed - to show the world who they really were.
Meanwhile, the Step Lively brawl had sparked a national controversy that culminated in a near-riot of thousands in Melbourne four months later. And by 1947, ‘Sinatra clubs’ had become a national phenomenon that seemed to bring the best and worst out of the nation’s youth - everything from tranquil listening parties and camping trips to gang violence, a vengeful home invasion and even an illegal attempt to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Through it all, there was the Voice; for these kids, Sinatra was their whole world.
These surreal events were all but completely forgotten with time and have never been reported on since they occurred. Until now.
Photo gallery for this episode: https://archive.org/details/sinatra-kids-gallery
Special thanks to Trove, the National Library of Australia, the Mitchell Library, and the State Library of New South Wales, courtesy of ACP Magazines Ltd.
Sinatra Club members included: Shirley Gormley, Tess Rix, Audrey Gurd, Leslie "Digger" Williamson or Les Williamson, Terry Ryan, Arthur Stevens, Beryl Atherton, Mari Dryden, Marion McKenzie and Shirley Ryan - and in Melbourne, Oliver Gilpin and Norm Kirkwood.
Since the recording of this episode, we've learned that there was no "Edward J. Dorogokleepetz"; his actual name was Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz. J.P. Robinson has written an extensive article on him here: https://flashbak.com/the-teenager-who-egged-frank-sinatra-and-the-bobby-sox-riot-new-york-city-1944-433028/
If you can shed any more light on any of this, we'd love to hear from you.
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