This is one minute from the first episode of The Chris Rock Show on HBO, which was aired some time ago. There's a joke at the end that is oddly prophetic. Take a look.
For the last year or three, I've been in the process of transferring my videotapes to DVD. In my lifetime, I've moved from 3/4" U-Matic tapes to Beta and then to VHS. Then for a time, I bought movies on Laserdisc and taped off the TV to VHS. Now, the 500+ Laserdiscs sit on shelves, as untouched as the 1000+ record albums in the other room. I buy movies on DVD and when there's something on TV that I want, it goes onto the TiVo...and if it's something I want to keep, I burn it to a DVD.
I know not what new formats await me in the future...but a lot of my tapes are rotting and many contain material that will never be available commercially. So I decided I'd better copy them over to DVD and every now and then, I run a few. I started with the 3/4" tapes, most of which contained shows I'd written. This went faster than I thought it would due to some fortuitous timing. I'd transferred every show I'd worked on except Garfield and Friends, which I saved for the end. The day I was going to start transferring the 121 half hours of that program, I got the call that the producers had closed a deal to put the series out on DVD. I should have been happiest that I was going to get some money out of that. Instead, the only thing I could think was, "Great...now I don't have to do those shows."
Once the 3/4" tapes were done, I went on to Beta. I'm almost finished with them and am about to get started on the VHS cassettes. There are so many of them that by the time I'm done, it'll be time to start converting all my DVDs to some other new format.
Most of the tapes are labelled but some aren't and that's where the fun begins. I shove an unlabelled tape into a machine, punch "play" and then I sit there, trying to figure out why I recorded whatever I see on it. Once in a while, I decide there was no reason; that the tape is unlabelled because I (or some friend) recorded the wrong channel or the right one at the wrong time, and there's absolutely nothing on the cassette that I could possibly care about. But often, it's something I want...and sometimes, it's something I really want. I just found some old Tony Awards broadcasts from the early nineties, some tapes of panels from comic book conventions and old episodes of Late Night from the Letterman era and from Conan's first year. I have Leno's first few Tonight Shows (which he reportedly doesn't have and doesn't want) and a lot of odd news specials from the eighties.
Some I'll transfer, some I won't. But the big decision is what to do with the tapes themselves. Throw them out? Put them in storage? I made a decision that if the tape held something that was out on DVD, I'd toss the tape. If it held something that wasn't out on DVD and it was something I really wanted, I'd transfer the program and put the tape in storage. If it wasn't out on DVD and was something I might want to watch one more time, I'd keep it around until I could do that, then dump the tape.
That made sense in theory but it's rough in practice. I'm throwing away hundreds of tapes. I'm getting rid of tapes I never watched and that doesn't feel good. One time shortly after I got my satellite dish, a station I received ran a holiday weekend marathon — every episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, in sequence. I taped all 158 of them — twelve to a cassette, even though it meant fourteen tape changes and timing my life and sleeping all weekend so I could be at the machine at the precise station break to make the swap. Monday morning, I was so proud: I had every episode of my favorite situation comedy!
Little did I know I'd never get around to watching those tapes because the shows would always be running on some channel I received. Or at least they were, up until the time I could purchase them all on DVD. I can't think of a single reason to keep the VHS tapes around but I put so much effort into recording them that it's hard to just dump them in the garbage.
The tapes could, of course, be used as blanks...and I have about fifty VHS cassettes that have always been blank. I also have no need for blank VHS cassettes. I don't think I've recorded anything on VHS for more than three years. For that matter, I wonder if I even need the four VHS machines I have stashed in the garage, right next to the three Betamaxes and my extra Laserdisc player. (I also have a camcorder that takes full-size VHS cassettes.)
Eventually, of course, everything will get tossed out or moved forever to the world of Public Storage. That includes DVDs I'm buying today because home video is not a permanent thing. As I've written elsewhere, it's all a slimy plot to see how many times they can get me to buy Goldfinger. You'd think I'd be used to it by now but I'm not. In fact, I still have the 4 minute 8mm silent Castle Films edition of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein that I owned when I was ten. I don't have a projector to play it on and I can always run my DVD of the whole movie with sound. The 8mm version is of minimal value and I can't think of a single reason to keep it around.
Still, I keep it and all my other old 8mm treasures there in my front hall closet. Because you never know when you might need something like that.
TV Land is having a Marlo Thomas Film Festival for the next month or two, not only on the air but also on its website. This weekend on the channel, they're running what they consider the best episodes of That Girl, and you can also watch them uncut on the site for the next month or so. I've found that these shows don't hold up as well as some others but your mileage may vary. Here's what should be a direct link to the first episode. They also have some of the special features that are on the new That Girl DVD.
I'm even less impressed with Free To Be...You And Me, the award-winning 1974 special that Ms. Thomas produced and starred in, and which can also be watched over at the TV Land site. I agree with its message — that women should feel free to aspire to any job a male can do short of sperm donor — but the presentation of that self-evident truth struck me as pandering and overkill. Perhaps it needed to be said in such an obvious, overwrought manner but you'd like to think otherwise.
While you're over at the TV Land site, check out some of the clips from other shows they have up. But especially check out the one you can reach by clicking this link. It should take you to three and a half minutes of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding on The Flip Wilson Show. Nobody funnier. (Bob and Ray, I mean. There were plenty of people funnier than Flip Wilson.)
One of the best things for me about the Mid-Ohio Con last week was seeing my friend, Herb Trimpe...though not for a long enough time. Most of you who know comics know Herb for his Marvel work in the late sixties and seventies, especially a fine stint drawing The Incredible Hulk. That all ended for Herb in 1996 when the folks then in power at the company decided his artwork was old-fashioned...or maybe it was just that the readers don't want to buy comics drawn by someone over a certain age that Herb was over. Whatever the thinking, he was out...and he bravely took his story to the pages of The New York Times with this article.
Herb has been doing other things since then, mostly of an educational nature. After 9/11 though, he found another activity that I find fascinating. He spent eight months working at and around Ground Zero in New York as a chaplain, helping people to cope with the death and destruction that had abruptly entered their lives that horrible day. To hear him tell it, it was a depressing, life-changing experience in some ways but highly inspirational in another.
He authored a book about his experiences. Herb tells me he made almost no money off the book but is glad he wrote it, just to record his feelings and observations about this job of mercy. For me, it was can't-put-it-down reading and I'd like to suggest you pick up a copy. You can snag one at Amazon via this link. If you're doing Christmas shopping over there, toss one in your cart for yourself...not because the guy used to draw great comics but because he had an important experience, and the passion and skill to share it with us.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol are two of the more prominent neo-cons who urged the Bush administration into the course we've been staying in Iraq. The bi-partisan Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group has been, in effect, charged with figuring out a way to get us out of the mess that guys like Kagan and Kristol got us into.
In this new article, the two neo-con superstars argue that the Baker-Hamilton recommendations are (a) nothing new and (b) not likely to change what Bush does. Sadly, I think they may be right on both counts.
The one thing the Iraq Study Group does accomplish, however, is that it changes the nature of the national debate. For right or wrong, good or ill, the notion that the war is "winnable" (whatever that means) and that we should just keep on keeping on has become a fading minority viewpoint. Not many people are saying it and of those who are, the majority seem to be doing so out of blind stubbornness, more so than any conviction that the sacrifice will prove worth it. Getting out in the least damaging way is now the bipartisan consensus...even if all those bipartisans don't seem to have any idea how to make it happen.
I'm not sure if you'd call Jerome Murat a mime or a "performance artist" or just what. All I know about him is that this clip from some French television show features the man performing a fascinating and skillful act. It runs a little over eight minutes and it's quite stunning. Matter of fact, here's a link to a larger screen version of it for those of you with a fast 'net connection. If not, just watch the version below. It starts a little slow but give it time. It's worth it.
So, uh, where's this O.J. Simpson book? And the specials? Why aren't the specials making the rounds of the Internet already?
They were taped and ready to air. There must be a few copies floating around. The book should be even more available. Supposedly, several hundred thousand copies were printed. Someone must have one.
When it was announced that Rupert Murdoch was calling off the specials and pulping the books, everyone thought they'd surface somewhere within a matter of days. What's the deal?
That's the trouble with bootleggers. You just can't count on them.
This is the second of at least three plugs for my appearance this coming Thursday on Shokus Internet Radio. I'd really like to get as many of you to listen as I can, not because it's me but because I've become enthused about Stu Shostak's new radio network. I want to see it thrive and succeed and grow to the point where he can get better guests than me on there.
I'll be on Stu's Show, which airs live on December 7 from 7 PM to 9 PM on the East Coast and from 4 PM to 6 PM on the West Coast. We'll be taking phone calls and I'll be telling Show Biz stories (some slanderous) and I don't know what else will happen. Tune in and find out as I do. I may even try to blog here live while I'm on the air there.
Here's how you listen to Shokus Internet Radio. You go to this page and select one of the audio browsers. It should connect in just a few seconds and then you can do what I do, which is to minimize that window on your screen and do other stuff on your computer as you listen. I find it a pleasant way to work.
Shokus Internet Radio is available to you 24/7. You can listen right this moment if you like. Much of the broadcast day, he runs old radio shows or what some might call "nostalgia music." The show I'm on will repeat many times throughout the week (here's the schedule) but try and listen when it's live if you can. I want to see if we can get a couple hundred people all listening at once. If we can, it will beat the ratings of a show I once wrote for NBC that not only got a zero rating but everyone at the network thought it was a typo because they didn't know they were broadcasting the show. Maybe Stuart will ask me about that one and I'll tell that story.
I don't agree with Christopher Hitchens on a lot of topics but every so often, he hits one out of the park. Here he is writing about the use of what we timidly call the "n" word, and the attempts to make it verboten.
December 5, 2006
