In the interest of occasionally presenting viewpoints with which I don't agree — something few blogs do, let's note — here's an article by Fred Barnes making the case that the presidency of George W. Bush has been a rousing success. I don't think it's much of a case, and I think some of the "achievements" Barnes lists are deeds for which Bush and/or his staffers ought to go to prison, but there you are.
Monthly Archives: January 2009
Checking Out
When I was a kid, I sometimes went with my Aunt Dot when she did her marketing. This pretty much consisted of pushing the cart and playing the following game, which I could never win. Every time she noted a price increase on something, even if it was only up a penny, I'd have to guess how much the product cost back when she was my age. One time, I think I asked her, "Gee, did they even have money then?"
We'd go to a Safeway about three blocks from her home…and the first thing she'd do was to select something to eat while shopping — a bag of cookies or chips or dried fruit or something. She'd tear the bag open, stuff it in the "baby" seat of the shopping cart, then nibble as she shopped, offering snacks also to me and even to other shoppers she happened to talk with.
That always made me uncomfortable. I had the idea that you're supposed to pay for the food at the market before you open it and eat it. When I mentioned this to my Aunt Dot — a very sweet, nice lady, by the way — she'd dismiss my concerns. Everyone does it, she said, even though I never saw anyone else do it. And she was going to pay for the item along with all her other purchases, as of course she did.
I assumed at first that since she was a grown-up, she must know what she was talking about…always a very bad assumption on my part. I think I was around ten when I began to realize that wasn't always the case; that older didn't mean smarter and neither did being my aunt. One day in the Safeway, a young lady who worked there approached Aunt Dot and asked her very politely to not begin gorging herself on the Triscuits until after they'd been purchased at the check-out counter. With a touch of startled indignance, Aunt Dot replied that she was going to pay for it.
The clerk had a gracious undertone of "Please don't make trouble for me, lady" as she said, "I'm sure you are…but some people don't. Every day, we find opened, half-consumed packages around the store and the boss gets upset with us. You put us in an awkward position because we can't tell who's going to pay and who isn't. If the boss sees you, you're not going to get yelled at. I am."
It was as much how she said it as what she said. Aunt Dot, like I said, was a terribly nice lady and she hadn't realized she'd been making possible trouble for someone. She never did it again and I've never done it. Even if I'm famished, I wait 'til I've paid for an item to dive into it.
I'm telling this story because lately, I've started seeing this a lot in markets…people opening packages, munching on chips or swigging beverages for which they've yet to pay. Is this now becoming customary? Do stores now expect it or tolerate it? This may be a mental block I can/should get over.
Go Read It!
The alphabet for Jack Kirby fans.
Today's Video Link
As a follow-up to yesterday's Video Link: On October 23, 1984, Paul McCartney appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson again…and this time, Johnny Carson was actually there. Paul was out promoting his then-recent film, Give My Regards to Broad Street.
One of the first things you'll see Carson ask him is about a little mystery. The night the Beatles made their first, historic appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Ed thanked a number of folks for making it possible, including Johnny Carson. Johnny never knew what that was all about and you'll see him ask Paul, who doesn't have a clue. I believe a prevailing theory among Beatles historians is that Mr. Sullivan was confused, as he tended to be; that he'd meant to thank Jack Paar and had mixed up the names of the previous host of The Tonight Show and the new one.
As for why Ed would have wanted to thank Jack Paar: Here's an excerpt from this article in which Mr. Paar talked about his days on television…
Mr. Paar reminded the audience that, legend to the contrary, it was he, not Ed Sullivan, who first showed the Beatles in action to an American television audience. In January 1964, five weeks before Mr. Sullivan introduced the Beatles live, viewers of the Jack Paar Show saw a film of the Beatles sending a teen-age English audience into shrieking, delirious orbit just by shaking their hair and chorusing "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
The segment was shown in full again last Thursday. "In my seven years on NBC, I never, ever had a rock 'n' roll act," Mr. Paar commented. "I was interested in the Beatles as a psychological and sociological phenomenon." He added that his was the only television show to which no one under 21 was admitted because "kids tend to take over the audience."
I offer that as a point of information not only as to why Ed might have thanked Paar, but also as to why Jack Paar didn't remain on TV after the mid-sixties. Around the same time he did that interview, I saw him give a little lecture and he was very charming and very witty but he also seemed shocked and angry that anything had changed in the world or show business since 1961.
So here's John and Paul. The audio isn't very good on this but you should be able to make everything out. If you don't want to sit through the whole thing, you still might be interested in the last few minutes when, after teasing the audience, Mr. McCartney finally takes up the guitar and sings a little. The video is in three parts and in the unlikely event that I've configured things properly, they should play one after the other in the browser below. Thanks again to Shelly Goldstein…
Recommended Reading
Frank Rich on the national apathy about some of the more sordid scandals of the Bush administration. A lot of us apparently don't care if billions of our tax dollars just wound up in someone's pocket.
Recommended Reading
Dick Cavett on the art of the insult. I always liked the famous line attributed to George S. Kaufman from back when he was a drama critic. A playwright who disliked Kaufman had a new play opening and was obligated to invite G.S.K. to Opening Night. He sent two tickets with a note that said, "You can bring a friend if you have one." Kaufman sent back the tix with a polite note that he was busy that evening but "I shall attend the second performance if there is one."
Go Read It!
Here's a portrait of Jeff Sotzing, who is the guy in charge of the video legacy of Johnny Carson…or as Sotzing calls him, "Uncle John." Thanks for the link, Jeff Abraham.
Candid Ricardos
In the spirit of the Laurel and Hardy clip I linked to the other day: Someone snuck a 16mm camera in to a filming of the I Love Lucy show and got a few amazing seconds of color (!) footage. They have the whole story and video links over at this posting on the TV Series Finale site. If you're a fan of old TV shows, you could spend a lot of your life on that site.
Today's Video Link
Talk about rare Tonight Show clips. Shelly Goldstein sent me this link to maybe the rarest one of all.
On May 14, 1968, Paul McCartney and John Lennon held a press conference in New York to announce the formation of their new company, Apple. Later that same day, they then did two TV interviews — one on a local educational program and the other on The Tonight Show. As (bad) luck would have it, it was on a night that Johnny Carson was off and his program was being hosted by Joe Garagiola. Mr. Garagiola was a good sportscaster and a fine game show personality but he proved that night to be woefully deficient in the art of interviewing Beatles. Among other problems, he seemed to think they were still the four mop-tops who'd made such a hit on The Ed Sullivan Show and was unaware they'd evolved and gone on to other, less flighty things.
Prior to their appearance, John and Paul did a brief pre-interview with Jim McCawley, who was then a Talent Coordinator for The Tonight Show. That interview, McCawley always told people, went quite well. In fact, it went too well. At the close of it, he was stunned when John and Paul said to him, "We want you to interview us on the show." McCawley had to convince them that this was not possible; that the Tonight Show didn't bring on staff members to displace the host, even a guest host.
On the air with the guest host, John and Paul both seemed a little high and their dislike for Garagiola became increasingly obvious. Another guest, Tallulah Bankhead, threw in a few questions and she wasn't much help. Here's a transcript of the entire conversation. During the commercial breaks, Garagiola was counselled to pay a little more attention to McCawley's notes from the pre-interview but he kept departing from them and it all made for an evening of great discomfort.
Most of tapes of The Tonight Show from that era were lost and the first ones to go were those with guest hosts. (The episodes with Johnny were kept around for a few years for possible rerunning before erasure.) As a result, there is no decent video of the Lennon-McCartney appearance. However, one ardent Beatles fan pointed a silent 8mm movie camera at the screen and got a Zapruder-like record of a few minutes of the event. Another recorded the audio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder…and the two sources have been married together to create the fuzzy, hard-to-see image that is linked below. It's less than two hundred seconds long and it's bad video but it's all we've got.
Tomorrow, I'll bring you a later appearance that Paul (alone) made on The Tonight Show, thankfully with Mr. Carson. In the meantime, here's John, Paul and Joe…
Boys' Club
Let's imagine it's 1938 and if you're a male, let's imagine you're female. Let us imagine you have considerable artistic ability and you think it might be put to good use working for Mr. Walt Disney on his animated features as, say, an animator. So let us imagine you inquire of Disney Studios, asking about possible job openings. And you know what would have happened? You would have received this form letter in response.
[UPDATE: Thanks to a reader who didn't give his name, I have now upgraded the link to a better quality image.]
Recommended Reading
Fred Kaplan likes Barack Obama's Pentagon hires.
Magic Kingdom Kameo
Today's Video Link
Here's a goodie…footage of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy you've never seen before. Okay, so it's just a few seconds but we'll take what we can get.
In the forties, Stan and Ollie occasionally went on tour, playing to packed audiences in theaters and arenas across the country and in England. Usually, they were part of a musical revue and would perform a few routines, especially one called "The Driver's License Sketch." In this short film, you see a few seconds of that. The gent who plays the person interviewing Laurel for his driver's license is James C. Morton, who was in a lot of Laurel and Hardy films, usually playing a policeman.
This was shot at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee where they performed between October 11, 1940 and October 16. They did four shows a day and the theater management later announced that every seat was sold for every performance. Can't do much better than that.
The dance troupe you'll see was called The Danny Dare Girls. The show also included a classical dance team, the Fredricos, and the girl singer at the end is Maxine Conrad.
A gentleman named Robert Wilson, who lives in Milwaukee, has the film which was shot by his father. I think it's great that he shared it with the world. It runs less than two minutes but it's a treasure…
P.S.
Forgot to mention: While I'm in San Francisco for Wondercon, I'll be teaching another class in the artistry and commerce of Animation Voice Acting at the Voice One workshop. It's March 2 at 10 AM. I did one of these last year while I was in that fair city and I guess it went over well enough to do another.
Recommended Reading
Joe Conason takes on folks who are claiming Al Franken "stole" his Senate seat in Minnesota and challenges them to put up or shut up. I've gotten quite a few copies of a chain e-mail that insists that the whole process was gamed by a solidly-Democratic election board. And of course, that's a flat-out lie.