This is another post for folks who live in Los Angeles but it may apply elsewhere...
Have any of you folks taken the bus anywhere lately?
You remember the bus...that thing that took you to school before you had a car? The long vehicle you rode with other people on it? If you don't know what I'm talking about, rent the first Speed movie from Netflix. It's an extremely realistic depiction of how it is on an actual Los Angeles bus.
Seriously: Up until late last year and not counting free shuttles, I hadn't been on a bus for over thirty years. I didn't even know what it cost to ride a bus in this town (answer: $1.25) and if it had occurred to me to take one somewhere, I didn't know which bus to get on to go anywhere I might want to go.
But lately, I've bused it a few times, usually when I had to go somewhere where the parking was impossible. Also, I had a little minor surgery a few weeks ago...nothing critical, nothing important. But it was one of those procedures where they don't want you to drive home, which means I couldn't drive there. So I took a bus there and had someone pick me up afterward. The trip there was a lot easier than I would have imagined. (And the same bus goes past the place where I take my car for servicing. When I've had to leave it there, I've taken a cab home, then taken a cab back. The bus will be so much simpler, to say nothing of cheaper.)
Los Angeles also has these things called Dash buses, which cost 25 cents to ride. If I need to go over to Cedars-Sinai Hospital — and I occasionally do — I can walk one block from my home to where the Dash will pick me up and take me where I need to be in not much more time than it would take me to drive over and find a place to park. That's not even getting into what you spend to park at Cedars-Sinai if you drive there. It's about the same per-hour cost as being a patient at Cedars-Sinai but the amount isn't covered by Blue Cross.
What has made this revolutionary new mode of transportation possible for me is that I discovered the MTA website. I guess most transit systems across the country have something like this but I was unaware of them. They have a form where you enter the two locations between which you need to travel and their database tells you how to get from one place to another and on which bus(es). I entered a number of places where I sometimes go and realized that with some of them, a bus might be easier than taking my car, hassling with traffic, finding a parking place and paying for that parking. (It was twelve bucks the last time I parked in the medical building where my doctor is located. There's a bus that goes right there.) It's also environmentally better and while I'm not doing it for that reason, when I do take the bus I intend to say it's because of that.
If it's been a long time since you've taken a bus anywhere, you might want to take a look and see if it's easier than you think. It can also be fun. On the way in for that minor medical procedure, I got to talking with a lady who was wearing a jacket with the logo of the Rio Hotel in Vegas. She said she'd just gotten back from that town and I asked her how she did at the tables. She said, "Let me put it this way. Before the trip, I used to drive to work in a Mercury Marquis." I laughed all the way into surgery.
The lovely lady at left is Judy Jetson, daughter of George and Jane. We all love Judy Jetson. The lovely lady at right is Janet Waldo, voice of Judy Jetson. We all love Janet Waldo, too. For reasons that Ponce DeLeon could perhaps explain but I can't, Ms. Waldo has been performing in front of a microphone since the days of radio comedy programs and still manages to sound like a teen-age girl and look not that much older than one. The only way I've been able to fathom how this works involves cloning and robotics so I won't try.
Nonetheless, she's been doing voice work — for cartoons and elsewhere — for some time. In addition to playing Judy, she was also Penelope Pitstop, Granny Sweet, Alice in that Hanna-Barbera special I keep writing here about, and many others.
Janet won't remember this but she was a voice on one of the first cartoon specials I ever wrote. The show had a director who was not overwhelmed with either tact or skill, and the way the recording session went for a time was roughly as follows. Janet would read a line and it would be perfect. The director would tell her was way off base and he would then read the line the way he thought it should be done, which was all wrong. Janet would then read the line again, trying to do it the director's way but still managing somehow to do it right. The director would then scold her and say rude things and try to get her to do it his way. Janet would then do the line properly and he would get even madder at her and more insulting.
This went on until one of the other actors in the show — a leprechaun named Howard Morris — left his microphone, walked into the booth and said something to the effect of, "That woman knows what she's doing and you don't and if you don't knock it off, I'm going to knock several of your teeth out." Then he returned to his mike and thereafter, the director was much nicer to Janet and she was allowed to do the lines the way she wanted, which was exactly the way I, as author, wanted them.
It was a nice moment. On The Jetsons, Howie performed the role of a character named Jet Screamer, with whom Judy Jetson was very much in love. I always liked to think of our little recording session drama as a case of Jet defending Judy's honor.
Janet is, as I say, wonderful...and you can hear what I'm sure will be a wonderful interview with her, tomorrow on Stu's Show, which is live on Shokus Internet Radio from 4 PM to 6 PM, West Coast Time, or 7 PM to 9 PM, East Coast Time. Go to the station's site, pick an audio browser and you're in! I'll be listening.
We have here another one of those "best" lists where one entity — in this case, one person, it would seem — lists the best ten best or the fifty best or the hundred best in some category. I think we always take these things too seriously if they don't correspond to our own tastes but they can be fun.
This list is for The 51 Best Magazines Of All Time, as selected by Graydon Carter, who has been the editor of Vanity Fair for 15 years and apparently only thinks his own publication should place at #31, which is interesting. He selects Esquire during the Harold Hayes years as #1, The New Yorker as #2 and Life as #3.
Those aren't bad picks, I suppose. I was surprised to see — which is not to say I'd argue — his placing of Mad Magazine at #6. And what really surprised me was that he restricts his choice to "Post comic book, before the death of founder William Gaines (1955–1992)" and writes...
Mad was the skeptical wise guy. Ever ready to pounce on the illogical, hypocritical, self-serious and ludicrous, it was also essentially celebratory: to accurately parody something, you ultimately have to love it. Mad transposed onto the printed page the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers and Looney Tunes, parodying comics, radio serials, movies, advertising, and the entire range of American pop culture. Nowadays, it's part of the oxygen we breathe; and Mel Brooks, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons would be unthinkable without it.
I think I'd debate much of that, starting with the claim that you have to love something to parody it. Mad loved tobacco companies? Misleading advertising? Lying politicians? I think it's usually the opposite. To parody something successfully, you must have some grasp of what's really wrong with it and the yearning to expose that. You can love something and still do that but I've interviewed almost every major Mad contributor from the years Carter praises. I sure got the impression they were most successful when trampling something they felt deserved trampling.
I would also quarrel with his choice of years. I don't see what part of his explanation doesn't apply to the comic book issues but unlike a lot of folks, I'm a big fan of the issues after it moved out of the comic book format and for many years thereafter. I just don't think the passing of Gaines was the end of a particularly good period. Mad seemed to me (and to many of those who worked on it) to be in considerable decline in the years before Bill died. Nothing against the man himself, but he'd have been the first to admit he got too set in his ways, too proprietary about keeping the magazine the same month to month. Some felt his passing may even have given the editors an opportunity to shake things up and clear out deadwood. In any case, I think it's now better than it's been in years.
Of course, you could argue the whole premise of comparing Mad to Sports Illustrated and National Geographic at all, and suggest that Spy (which Carter co-founded) is a bit high in the rankings. But it ain't a bad list. Have a peek.
The first one's short so let's make today a double feature. Here's a mysterious sixteen seconds of antique film. It's silent color footage shot on the set of the Marx Brothers movie, Animal Crackers, which as we all know was made in glorious black-and-white. Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Margaret Dumont are in it. I don't see Zeppo but then who ever noticed Zeppo? Harpo for some reason is out of costume — in a robe and without his wig. I have no idea why this was shot. I'm guessing it's home movie footage from a rehearsal, which is why Harpo didn't care how he was dressed in it. In any case, I can't recall seeing any other color film of the Marxes...so have a look. And look fast because it's short.
Turning to more important matters, how about a piano-playing cat? Here's Nora the piano-playing cat. Okay, so she doesn't play as well as Van Cliburn or even Mark Russell. So what? It's a cat, for crying out loud. And anyway, I've heard and tipped lounge performers who were worse than this...
February 28, 2007
