Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Today's Political Thought

Everyone's trying to determine the precise odds of Al Gore becoming a candidate for the White House in '08. They're acting like Gore knows exactly what he's going to do and maybe, if you analyze his every word and also study his manner of dress and his body weight, you can get some clue as to what that plan is.

Why is it so inconceivable that Gore's "plan" is to stay out of it for now, study the situation as it exists in 4-6 months and then decide? I mean, isn't the likely truth that the guy intends to look at the polls and the competition and maybe some personal factors then and see how feasible it is? A lot of things just might change between now and then, and he's got plenty to do and ways to keep his name before the public without becoming an announced candidate.

I'm a big believer in Planning Ahead when it makes sense. It doesn't always. Right this minute, you can decide to have Chinese Food on August 9 but why? You don't know what kind of craving you may be having then...or if you'll find a better restaurant between now and then or if you'll wind up getting invited to a big Chinese dinner on August 8 or a thousand other scenarios which could alter things. I've suffered from not being prepared for certain decisions and not giving them sufficient consideration in advance. But I've also suffered from planning something before I knew all the circumstances of that decision. At the very least, I've wasted a lot of time deciding something...and then everything changed and I had to start deciding all over again.

I have no idea what's on Al Gore's mind. Maybe he is tentatively committed to a certain strategy, but it seems to me that if it were to definitely not run, he'd get that idea off the table more explicitly than he has. Because then, if he decided he did want to run in 2012, he wouldn't be thought of as a guy who lost in 2000 and lost again in '08. I think he's just waiting to see and that all this attempted mind-reading is a case of trying to gin up a news story where there isn't one...at least not yet.

• Posted at 9:50 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

The New York Times once had a deserved reputation for accuracy. That is no longer so. One reason is the flawed Iraq reporting by Judith Miller. Another is the long string of stories written or co-written by a reporter named Jeff Gerth...stories which turned out to be largely untrue. Eric Boehlert goes over some of these.

• Posted at 9:29 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This is a commercial for an animation gallery but it's also four minutes of Mel Blanc telling how he created the voices of the classic Warner Brothers characters.

Well, actually, these are what I call the "talk show" versions of how those voices came to be, as opposed to the actual stories. Mel was a great self-promoter, and I don't mean that at all in a bad way. The man raised his craft to a high level and also a visible one, doing interviews and appearing on television to remind people that actors spoke for cartoon characters. With the possible exception of Jim Backus, Mel was the only "celebrity" known for that job in the forties, fifties and even into the sixties.

During that time, there was little or no scholarship about cartoons...no books wherein one could learn the history of the Warner Brothers studio, for instance, nor was there anyone else on the interview circuit talking about it. The nature of talk shows and interviews causes people who are asked the same questions over and over to develop short, funny responses that they repeat over and over, usually to the delight of interviewers and audiences. When Mel went on with Johnny Carson, what was expected of him was not a precise history of the development of Porky's voice. What was desired was a brief and humorous anecdote...so he developed one about deciding that a pig's grunt might be similar to a human stutter. For years, there was no one around to point out that Mel did not invent the idea of Porky stuttering; that Mel was the second voice of Porky Pig and that the first guy had given him a stuttering voice which Mel started by replicating and eventually making his own. (Porky's first voice was done by a man named Joe Dougherty. He was hired because he was an actual stutterer, meaning that the cartoon's directors and gag men were the ones who decided the pig should have a speech impediment.)

In the late sixties and since, there have been people around who've researched the history of the cartoons, and some of Mel's colleagues from those days also were getting interviewed...so Mel, being a smart guy, didn't push the "talk show" anecdotes in every venue. He recognized when he was in front of an audience that expected the real story and knew the difference, and there are some wonderful interviews around where he goes into great and accurate depth about how he did what he did. This is not one of those interviews but it's entertaining, anyway. Everything Mel did was entertaining...

• Posted at 9:20 AM · LINK

A Party for Mort

Comedy legend Mort Sahl will be honored on June 28 at the Wadsworth Theater in West Los Angeles with a special one-night benefit/tribute, the line-up for which sounds like a veritable Who's Who of comedy. I haven't seen any official list anywhere but the names that have been mentioned include Richard Lewis, Kevin Nealon, Paula Poundstone, Jonathan Winters, George Carlin, Albert Brooks, Shelley Berman, Jay Leno, Bill Maher, David Steinberg, Jack Riley and Robin Williams, along with taped tributes by Woody Allen, Sydney Pollack and Clint Eastwood. I'm guessing Clint will be the funny one.

I also haven't seen any official announcement of where one obtains tickets but I found them for sale on Ticketmaster and they ain't cheap. On the other hand, if most of those people are there, it might well be worth it.

• Posted at 12:53 AM · LINK

me on the radio

Here's the final nag to catch me and my comrade Earl Kress as we guest today on Stu's Show, the star program on Shokus Internet Radio, which is part of the awesome Live365 network of web-based broadcasting. Our genial host Stuart Shostak will be chatting with us about cartoon shows of the sixties, and we'll be taking your phone calls and Stu will ask some lame trivia question which you can call in to answer and win a pretty nice prize. Matter of fact, I might just sneak out during the program so I can call in on my cell phone and win the prize.

And speaking of answering questions! Last time Earl and I were on, we had a Mystery Guest! During the show, we called Doug Young, the veteran cartoon voice actor you know best as the voice of Doggie Daddy on the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon series. We not only called Doug on the program and chatted with him but we made it into a game show: We had our host Stu guess who the Mystery Guest would be. It took him eight questions but he got it.

This afternoon, we put Stuart to the test again! During the show, we will be phoning a great performer from the world of animation voicing...and I'll give you (and Stu) the hint that this person has also distinguished him- or herself in other areas, as well. At the beginning of the show, Earl and I will challenge our host to guess, game show style, who we'll be phoning. Then later on, we'll phone this person for a brief interview.

Who will it be? You'll have to tune in to find out. You can do this by going to this website at 4PM Pacific (7 PM Eastern) and selecting an audio browser. That will enable you to listen to Shokus Internet Radio...something you oughta do every hour of the day, not just when Mark and Earl are on. It's free and there are a lot of weird and wonderful things to be heard on Stuart's station. We'll be on for two hours and I hope you'll log in and listen.

• Posted at 12:50 AM · LINK