Just so you don't think I've gone too soft-hearted about this whole Holiday season...

(Courtesy of the ever-startling Deven Green; if you've not yet been Welcomed to Her Home, well.. you're in for an experience.)

Another fine consumer product in the people's paradise. Estée Lauderovna, now available in all the fashionable new hues for 1975 - dun, dung, dim, dank, and mauve.

This unnerving slice of '70s life in the USSR is either a particularly hapless commercial for portable TVs or a harrowing glimpse into one family's unhealthy interpersonal dynamic.  You be the judge.

Fly the friendly skies, Comrade!

Now you know what an Abba song created and delivered without one scintilla of charisma might have sounded like.

Ladies and gents - the Moranbong Band!

Herewith a little slice of Socialist-Realist extravaganza, Nasser-style.  Filmed in the late '50s, at the height of Egypt's attempt to create a Pan-Arab union, this remarkable number is El Watan El Akbar (The Great Homeland).  It features not only the composer, Mohamed Abdel Wahab, as the apparently only moderately enthusiastic conductor, but a range of the Arabic world's greatest stars, including Abdelhalim Hafiz (the Frank Sinatra of the Nile) and - the first female vocalist - the remarkable Sabah, who is still very much among us at an age rumored to be anything from 89 to 101.  Together, they present a regional pantheon, backed up during their solos by Ethnic Dancers of Many Lands.

In Arabic, this kind of patriotic pageant is called an "operetta," something that, if you are new to the region, can lead to false expectations when attending a state occasion, given the light years that separate them from something like The Merry Widow.

As a whole, this piece reminds me somehow of the finale of There's No Business Like Show Business as reinterpreted by Madame Mao. It's a reminder, perhaps, that there is not as much distance between the anything-to-entertain sensibility of Busby Berkeley and the aesthetics, such as they are, of authoritarianism as would entirely please either side...

The pop culture of a vanished society arouses a peculiarly confused kind of nostalgia, one for a time and place we never knew, and that we would likely have found almost as bizarre when it was fresh and new as we do now, when it is "out-of-date, démodé."  When, as here, the Other has adopted for its own something from our own backyard, that feeling becomes particularly intense.  I think this may be my favorite Leiber and Stoller cover this side of "Nuits d'Espagne," Dalida's take on "Spanish Harlem."  I don't speak Russian, but it would appear that in the process of translation, poor ol' Charlie Brown has become his sister Polly.

Things I'd rather not think about based on this video:  Soviet cosmetology; Eastern bloc synthetic fabrics (those suits look to be made of something only slightly more pliable than industrial insulation); and why, with the exception of the occasional half-hearted weak smile (and the entirely off-putting dance break at 1:12), all four performers give the impression they are grudgingly carrying out a duty imposed on them by an unjust world.  Perhaps they were.

The quartet, I've learned, was called Accord.  The group had wide popularity from the '50s well into the '80s.  If this 1969 snippet has only whetted your appetite, you can experience a very special long form medley here.  Filmed in 1975, and for reasons far from clear, it confines our dynamic foursome to a bouncing Lada sedan for its whole 20-plus minutes.  Enjoy.

This may not look like much of a scandalous photo, but it is.  Ignore the sloppy ankle socks and the egregious shoes: this is a picture of high - and dangerous - fashion.

The lady on the left was known by many names.  She was born Li Shumeng, in girlhood called herself Li Yunhe, became a well-known actress in Shanghai as Lan Ping ("Blue Apple," which seems a rather Dada touch), and finally emerged on the world stage under two names:  Jiang Qing, Madame Mao Tse-Tung.

She spent the first several decades of her time as the wife of China's leader in near obscurity, but that ended in the mid-sixties, when she took direction, to the extent it had any, of the wave of anarchy that engulfed the country and became known as the Cultural Revolution.  For Jiang Qing, it started with culture in a very specific way, as she took control of the country's performing arts, replacing China's wild diversity of traditional and modern plays, operas, dance works, and films with a small number of enormously formulaic "model revolutionary operas," kitschy epics that mashed together Soviet ballet, Chinese traditional styles, silent-film emoting, and heaping doses of leaden rhetoric (we saw a snippet of one last August, you may recall).

In 1967, Jiang Qing first turned her attention to fashion, in this case fashion-as-weapon, using a faux pas by her rival (a woman called Wang Guangmei, wife of Mao's second-in-command) to destroy her and to establish herself as China's de facto tastemaker.  On a 1963 state visit to Indonesia, Wang Guangmei had the poor judgment to put aside the drab military fatigues that dominated Chinese public life in those days, appearing instead in a silk dress of old-fashioned cut and a string of pearls.  For her fashion daring she paid dearly.  As the tide of the Cultural Revolution crested, Jiang Qing made an example of her in front of a million-person demonstration, dragging her out in a grotesque parody of her supposed finery (including ropes of ping-pong balls from which dangled insulting placards) and decrying her bourgeois decadence.  Wang spent more than a decade in prison - a high price for a night out on the town.

As the years passed, Madame Mao remained, to an extent, preoccupied with style.  What to wear in revolutionary Beijing was a vexing question, and after so many years of essentially unisex green pantsuits, it may be that she had become bored.  In 1972, she met with a Western journalist wearing a tailored shirtwaist dress of a design that recalled the 1950s, when for a few years a Soviet-inspired frock called a bulaji had been considered acceptable (it's basically what Jiang Qing's companion on the right is wearing).

Within two years, as the onetime Shanghai leading lady plotted to follow her husband as top leader of the Chinese revolution, she spared time to consider what the women of her country might wear as a distaff version of the ubiquitous Mao suit, a kind of National Costume with Revolutionary Conscience.  Her interest appears to have arisen in part about concern about her own image as a 1974 state visit by the glamorous Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos approached.  What in due course appeared is, more or less, the outfit in which we see her above, which has become known to history as the Jiang Qing Dress.  It takes the basic form of the bulaji, but adds elements of traditional Chinese fashion, especially the V-neckline with its inner band in constrasting white and the longer, fuller skirt, which in some examples is finely pleated.  One can only imagine what Chinese women, after twenty years of trousers and jackets, made of the spreading skirts and narrow bodices of this new, semi-mandatory fad. 

Whatever their thoughts, however, the reign of the Jiang Qing Dress was brief, for within two years, Mao was dead and his widow jailed, one of the Gang of Four accused of trying to sabotage his legacy and subvert his legitimate successors.  On the few occasions when Jiang Qing was seen in public between her downfall and her death fifteen years later, she eschewed her eponymous costume for a sober trouser suit.  Perhaps, having been burned by fashion just as once she had torched her rival, she decided it was safer to go smart casual.  Just as well, for however chic Lan Ping may have been in '30s films, you have to admit that in a baggy aqua shirtwaist, she's no prize.

Today, with China a major player in the world and a comparatively open country (even if it did block the New York Times for its domestic readers today), it's amazing to think how little we knew about the place just a few decades ago, what a paucity of information leaked out to the West.  For a long time, the Jiang Qing dress was more or less a myth, dismissed as just another of the wild calumnies directed against Madame Mao by her enemies, who called her "the White-Boned Demon" and accused her of trying to become a new empress, on the model of several who took power over the centuries in pre-revolutionary China.  The posters and cartoons that accompanied her fall often showed her in some version of the Dress, as if it stood for all her evil just as Wang Guangmei's pearls had represented her revolutionary backsliding.  What goes around, comes around, in politics and fashion alike.

An Australian scholar called Antonia Finnane has written a fascinating essay on the Dress and its social and political implications.  As for me, my favorite take on Madame Mao comes in the form of opera, the very format that she sought to mold her in her image just as she did her countrywomen.  John Adams's brilliant Nixon in China features Jianq Qing as a terrifying harridan who intimidates poor Pat Nixon and finally takes center stage to declare, in thrilling coloratura, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung/ ...When I appear the people hang... upon my words."  Sadly, at least in the pictures from productions that I've seen, the Dress doesn't appear.

When the Eastern Bloc takes on the exotic Near East... well, this is what happens, and frankly it's not pretty.  It's "I Will Wait for You," the big harem number from a 1968 TajikFilms picture called The White Grand Piano, which is, from what I can glean, the story of a Moscow lady musicologist's search for a mysterious white piano in scenic Dushanbe.

How this fits into that is anybody's guess.  Filmed at a cost of what must have been dozens of rubles for the costumes alone (and apparently during the Great Soviet Tulle Shortage of '68, given the miserly amount allotted to each dancer), it is if nothing else an object lesson in why one shouldn't wear black pumps with swimwear.  The singer is one Miss Aida Vedishcheva, who fares only slightly better than the rest of the troupe, costumewise, but is otherwise game, although not terribly convincing as an Oriental Temptress.  The whole thing seems to be having an oddly dyspeptic effect on the spectators at 1:50, perhaps a result of the oppressive stolidity of the oddless sleeveless band combined with the visible ennui of the dancers.

If you haven't had enough of this little glimpse into an alternate universe, you might want to check out the same picture's "Song of Dushanbe," Miss Vedishcheva's scenic hommage to the splendors of the Tajik capital, featuring a surprising number of goats and some of the world's most depressing shop windows. 

This week's SSCE is a full-on dose of Cultural Revolution Realness, right down to the dancing Red Stars that open the number.  I've long been fascinated by the oddness of 60s Chinese pop-agit-culture, something that's trying so hard to be totally new and totally Chinese, but which succeeds only in being an awkward fusion of traditional Chinese performance, Soviet Russian ballet, and what would seem to be the fading memories of Hollywood spectacles as preserved in the less-than-reliable mind of the formidable Madame Mao, a lady whose career as second-tier Shanghai leading lady Lan Ping paradoxically colored the entire arc of Chinese culture in the second half of the last century.

In any case, if you've ever wondered what Agnes de Mille might have made of a factory workers' picnic (other than the one in Carousel, of course), here's your chance.

After that, I'm confused, eager to purchase whatever it was that was on offer, and - most shamefully - a little turned on.

For your (dubious) listening pleasure, Jacek "The Polish Bobby Vinton" (is that redundant?) Lech brings you his 1966 hit "Bądź dziewczyną moich marzeń" ("Be the girl of my dreams") .

It's notable mostly for the appearance on backup of a rarely seen legend: yes, here we have not only Thing One and Thing Two, but their lesser-known sister, Thing Three. If this is what they could come up with for primetime TV, imagine what the girls in the steno pool were wearing. Snazzy frock on the slightly-too-enthusiastic hostess, though, you have to admit...

Before you get too stuck in the holiday groove of bitching and moaning about having to find the perfect gift - hell, any gift - for everybody from your mother to the mailman, stop and count your blessings.

The consumer society may have its drawbacks, but you could be in Novosibirsk in 1978. Which do you think Aunt Lyudmila will like better - the 5-watt bedside lamp, the space heater crafted from a tin pieplate, or the desktop fan that doubles as an amputation device?

I don't know what's going on here; I'm not sure I want to. I just want to encourage all of you to fall helplessly into this little slice of 80s heaven à la Russe. I'm finding it hard to believe that it's not some kind of Toni Basil-choreographed parody, but it's evidently the real thing.

The terrifying girl singer (who reminds me of Janis Ian on acid) aside, all involved look rather sheepish, as well they might. Still, it must have a seemed a breath of fresh air at the time, don't you think?

Da, da, my darlinks - it's the return of our favorite Soviet teens! Amazingly, in this shot, they've scared up enough casual outfits that no one's sharing, but I think that groaning buffet tells us all we need to know about entertaining à la Khrushchev.

One couple might be dancing to the micro-hi fi, but I think Boris is actually measuring Svetlana for a blouse. Why Mamushka is dressing like a retrograde bourgeois French maid I can't fathom, but Ludmila appears to have had just about enough of it and is preparing to denounce her halfway 'til Tuesday.

Those crazy Moscow teens are back at it! It's another kicky Eastern-bloc Saturday night, complete with hi-tech hi-fi and orange-flavored beverages. We know it's a different party than the one we looked in on earlier this month, because Ludmila and Svetlana have exchanged their identical skirts for matching sweaters. Together, they're saving up so that next year they can buy cardigans and have matching twin-sets.

The pantsuits; the not-quite-matching (to be kind) granny dresses; and oh, my God, the hairdos, male or female. Only the fact that none of the girls are Andrea Martin convinces me that this isn't really a lost SCTV skit.

I don't know what will strike you as scariest, but my vote is either with the sub-Bjorn male lead at 1:25 or the Catskilliscious zombie keyboardist at 2:12. Any Russophils out there who can shed any light at all on this true time capsule of terrible?

(And, no, I'm not proud that I stole the headline from a Youtube commenter - but really, could I resist?)

At first glance, only a few things tip one off that this hip little get-together is in fact an Eastern-bloc jamboree - the clashing patterns of carpet and drapes, for example, and the rather sad fashion note struck by Ludmila and Svetlana in the front there wearing the same skirt. I suppose the rather Pleistocene hi-fi is a giveaway, too.

More perplexing, though, is the question of just why these fun-loving youngsters seem to vary in age from 32 to 50.