Category Archives: To Be Filed

The wife of Robin Williams announced the other day that he was in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease. I suppose to a lot of folks, that made his suicide more understandable. I hope it also didn't also convince some that Depression is only a function of having a debilitating condition. Plenty of people reach that moment of "I can't live any longer" without Parkinson's or anything that might sound like a clear rationale. Plenty of people also, of course, live very decent, sunny lives even with degenerative diseases.

I received a number of messages on all these topics and I thought I'd share a few. The folks who sent them didn't specify if I should include their names or not but I think I'll leave them all off. Here's the first one…

Mark, with all due respect, what you describe as feeling in your blog article is not depression. It's grief. Two completely different things that result from and in completely different brain activities and chemical actions. It seems to me you're trying to use this anecdote as a way to empathize with those suffering from depression and to say, "here's how I deal with what I think depression is like."

Mark, depression is not grief. It's not something that you can "snap out of" by watching a TV show. Grief passes with time, depression is a medical condition that is rarely "cured" without medical intervention. Yes, some people recover from depression spontaneously just as some people with cancer go into unexpected remission. But clinical depression, the kind that's so bad it causes suicidal ideation, cannot be alleviated by "thinking" or "feeling" your way out of. That was the point of "Mike's" e-mail: it's not that you "avoid" depression by compartmentalizing. The very fact that you can compartmentalize means that you don't have depression. If you did, you wouldn't, like Mike, be able to until a medical solution to the chemical imbalance was found.

Actually, your attempts to empathize seem to me to be based on the myth that depression can be "thought" or "felt" away, that with the proper will power, one should be able to "pull oneself out of it." And I hope you agree, Mark, that this is the very worst message that you can give a person in the hell of depression. Depression is a medical condition: it needs to be treated by a doctor, not by platitudes.

I agree, which is why I made clear that I'd never suffered from a real, prolonged depression. I also said, "I do know though that one should not rule out medical advice because a depression may have more to do than you think with the kind of thing a doctor can correct. Or it may not. The point is that if it's beyond your ability to solve, get help. Do not think you've failed if you have to get help. That's what help is there for."

If I didn't make it clear enough that I was not likening my few days of grief to the kind of genuine "down" that consumes people the way one apparently consumed Robin Williams, I'm sorry but this guy seemed to get it. I'm redacting the name of the drug he mentioned because I don't want to publish recommendations for specific drugs here. If you think you need a medication, have a doctor prescribe it. Don't figure out what drug you need from a weblog that also discusses Groucho impersonators and the evils of cole slaw…

Thank you for the story about coping with the loss of your friends. I have been through more extensive, serious therapy than you can imagine about similar problems and I need to be reminded constantly of something my therapists tried to emphasize. That is that even when everything seems bleak in your life and dark, it is usually possible to solve some part of some problem. Remembering that is one of the few reasons I am still here today.

Depression has a lot to do with believing that things are hopeless on every front and that every possible situation will end in the worst possible way. At times in my life, I refused to believe that I could solve any problems and that even when good things happened, they would eventually turn into disasters and negatives. It took [name of drug] to get all of my problem under control but it also helped that I was able to place individual elements on it in context and as you say, proper size and deal with them that way.

Lastly for now, this…

You wrote something that I have in the past discussed extensively with my doctor and his P.A. I have always felt that the root of my depression is that I am not successful and rich and famous. I was looking for doctors to give me a temporary fix for this because I believed that I was caught in a vicious circle. I was depressed because I was not successful and I believed I would be successful if I was not depressed. If I was able to function, I could finish and sell my novel.

I finally connected with a doctor who understood what I wanted but he cautioned me that it might not work out that way. I might overcome the depression and not be able to finish the book or I might finish it and not be able to sell it or I might get a publisher and then see the book not be a hit. As it turned out, even after I got over the black mood, I was not able to finish the book to my satisfaction. I have been able to deal with that. I think it has a lot to do with realizing that success was not a cure-all for depression. I am sad about Robin Williams but it is a good reminder to me that being successful may not solve my problem. I have to deal with it as I am.

I think I've strayed from the comfort areas of this blog so this may be the last post on the topic. All I really wanted to say was that if you're depressed or even just down, try to deal with it as a solvable problem. If it turns out not to be that, get thee to a doctor…and really, any doctor should be able to help you. If all you have is a dentist or a podiatrist, don't be afraid to tell him or her. They may not be able to treat you but they probably know someone who can, maybe even in the same building.

We now return to sillier subjects…

Twenty-two artists — well, 21 plus me — gathered yesterday at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood to sign copies of The Sakai Project, a glorious new book that (a) celebrates the work for our colleague Stan Sakai and (b) raises bucks to assist him with assisting his sadly-ill wife, Sharon. The artists signed the pages they drew to salute Stan and I signed the foreword I wrote.

We were supposed to be there from 4 PM to 6 PM but by six, the line was still very long so we didn't escape until well after seven. We signed an awful lot of copies. If you are thinking you might ever like to own a copy of this book, I would get one now when it's, depending on where you buy it, $35 to $45. I see someone already has a copy we all signed yesterday up on eBay and is asking $200 as a starting bid. I'll bet they get it, if not now then soon.

I will not attempt to list all the artists who were at the signing and are in the above photo. All I know is that they are all very good, they are all very generous with their time and they were all parked so as to block my car in the parking lot. I forgive them for that because they were a part of this wonderful volume.

I don't know how often it happens in other industries but there's a thing that happens often in television. I'll tell you this story and you'll understand the situation I'm talking about…

This occurred back in the seventies. A friend of mine was working on a Saturday morning series for NBC. Season One had aired and the production company was waiting to hear if they'd be picked up for a second season. My friend was especially interested since he had an offer to go work for another studio. If the show was going to get picked up, he wanted to turn the offer down and work on Season Two. If it wasn't, he wanted to grab the other offer while it was still available to him. The problem was that he had to decide now.

He called me for advice: "Do you think we'll get a pick-up?" I honestly didn't know. It felt like one of those things that could go either way and I told him that. "Stall as long as you can," I advised him.

A few days later, I was in a meeting at NBC with Fred Silverman, who was then the guy who decided what they bought and what they cancelled. We were talking about a project I was to be involved with and somehow, my friend's series came up in the conversation. Fred said — and this is darned close to a verbatim quote — "God, that's been a disaster for us. We're going to set our Fall schedule next week and I can't wait to cancel that piece of shit."

So I did what you'd have done. I called my friend that evening and told him about what Fred had said. He thanked me for the inside tip and the next day, he resigned from the studio that did that show and signed on with the other studio.

And a week later when NBC announced their Fall Saturday Morning schedule, the show had been picked up for a second season.

I had information from the best possible source…and it turned out to be wrong. That has happened a few times on this blog when I've had inside info on what was to happen in the TV industry — in late night, especially.

The day I got home from Comic-Con in 2008, a producer I knew took me to a meeting with Phil Griffin, who had just been named president of MSNBC. Also in the meeting was one of the network's correspondents, Chuck Todd. We were there to discuss a proposal to produce some political comedy segments. The idea was to air one or two each day on The Rachel Maddow Show, which was about to debut on MSNBC. A week's segments would then be collected into a show of their own that could rerun many times on the weekend.

The meeting — held poolside at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills — went well enough…or so it seemed. Soon after, it became apparent that the least it would have cost us to make these segments was way more than MSNBC was able or willing to spend…and that was the end of that.

But what I remember from the poolside meeting was that Chuck Todd was introduced to me as "The new host of Meet the Press," which had then been without a regular host since the passing of Tim Russert. The guy in charge of picking Russert's replacement described Mr. Todd, who was sitting right there next to me, that way. Mr. Griffin asked us not to spread that around until it could be formally announced in a week or two.

And in a week or two, they announced that the new permanent host of Meet the Press would be…David Gregory.

I have no idea what happened but I was reminded of that when it was announced recently that Chuck Todd would (at last!) take over as host of Meet the Press. I assume he's thinking, "Finally!"

From 1930: W.C. Fields in his first talking picture is…The Golf Specialist.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas has been indicted on a charge of…well, it's kinda flimsy. Jonathan Chait (no fan of the governor) explains it to us.

The political impact of this indictment is obvious. It changes Perry's chances of being the next Republican nominee for President from one in five thousand to one in ten thousand. Gee, and he'd raised them so much by starting to wear glasses…

As we discussed back here, my partner Sergio Aragonés did an incredible poster for a recent book called Inside MAD. It's an entire panorama of that magazine's history — a magazine for which he has worked, by the way, for fifty years! That's fifty. Five-oh. Half a century. He drew darn near every important person, place or thing that has been seen in MAD since its debut in '52.

MAD expert Doug Gilford has taken it upon himself to annotate this poster. Over on this page, you can find out who or what everyone or everything is in it. Wow.

Veteran comic book artist Stan Goldberg had a stroke three days ago.  Yesterday, he was moved from the hospital into hospice care.

Stan is 82 and had been making a miraculous recovery since he and his wife of 47 years, Pauline, were injured in an automobile crash last year. They amazed everyone by showing up for the National Cartoonists Society gathering last May in San Diego, and Stan was hoping to (but could not) make it to Comic-Con two months later.

Stan was born in 1932 in New York and went to work for Marvel when he was 17, primarily as a colorist. In fact, there were periods at Marvel when Stan either headed the coloring department or was the coloring department. He colored all the early super-hero titles in the sixties. He was the man responsible for Spider-Man's costume having the colors it has. He was the man who made the Hulk green and so on. The artists whose work he colored all thought he was terrific.

He also had a long career drawing, usually in what we think of as the "Archie" style. He occasionally did something more realistic but mainly drew comics like Millie the Model for Marvel, Swing with Scooter for DC and Archie for Archie.  Most of these were unsigned and some that were signed were signed with someone else's name since the Archie company didn't like to find out their artists were drawing that way for competitors.

No one has ever totaled up how many pages Stan drew of Archie and his friends but the total was certainly well into the thousands. That association lasted for 40 years, ending in 2010 and he was startled and puzzled when it did end. For the last decade or so with them, he was not only kept busy but did many of their most prominent works, including the Archie newspaper strip, the much-publicized Archie-Punisher crossover comic and most covers. He told friends that he honestly did not know why they had suddenly decided to dispense with his services.

He stayed busy. He worked on other projects including Simpsons comic books and a nice array of Archie parodies and knock-offs. In 2012, the National Cartoonists Society presented him with its prestigious Gold Key Award, and he and Pauline were active in the group, Parents of Murdered Children, which they joined after the tragic slaying of their daughter Heidi, who was then a college student.

As I mentioned, he is now in hospice care.  His family thinks he would welcome cards and notes sent to…

Stan Goldberg
c/o Calvary Hospital
1740 Eastchester Rd.
Bronx, NY 10461

Please do not attempt to call.  But mail cheered Stan considerably during his long hospital stay from the traffic accident and it could do it again.

He has always been known as one of the most prolific, nicest artists in the comic book business and someone of whom I have been very fond. Everyone is. You'd have had to be a pretty rotten human being not to love Stan Goldberg. He would sit with me for hours at conventions or N.C.S. gatherings telling tales of the early days of Marvel. He was one of the last eyewitnesses to those days and very proud to have been a part of them. This is news that hits hard because he was always a wonderful artist and an even more wonderful person.

Several readers of this site wrote to the Avast company and pointed them to my posting about the problem I was having cancelling my service with them and getting a refund for the portions of it which have never worked. At the same time, at the suggestion of a few of you, I posted a message on the Avast forum on Facebook.

I don't know which of these was responsible but this morning, I received a flurry of e-mails from Avast telling me how to cancel and get money back. Thanks to all of you for your help.

Lewis Black remembers his friend, Robin Williams.

Mr. Black also had some Lewis Black-style anger at Rush Limbaugh for rather typical Rush Limbaugh remarks about Robin. I agree, of course, with the sentiments…but the trouble with them is that that's the level of anger that Lewis Black directs at broken parking meters or silly advertising campaigns.

I have a number of e-mails to get to here about Mr. Williams and about Depression but they'll have to wait until the weekend.

Our friends at the Criterion Collection, who do the classiest DVDs and Blu-rays of classic movies, have given Harold Lloyd's Safety Last the treatment. I'm still waiting for my copy but these folks have never disappointed me. Here's a snippet from one of the special features on this release which you can order here…

Here is why everyone needs health insurance. Kevin Drum cites an article which found that at one hospital, a patient was billed $10,169 for a lipid panel. This is a very simple test that is ordered for most people at one time or another and sometimes the bill is for as little as $10. That's probably about what my insurance actually pays when I get one of those. Why was someone billed for more than ten grand?

The researchers have no idea. No insurance company will pay $10,000 for a lipid panel, of course, so the only point of pricing it this high is to exploit the occasional poor sap with no health insurance who happens to need his cholesterol checked. Welcome to health care in America. Best in the world, baby.

Those who want to nuke Obamacare will argue that the free market will bring costs under control. Well, it never has…and health care is not and can never really be a free market because you can't really go shopping about and getting estimates when your life may be on the line. It's not a free market from the perspective of the health care providers either, because they're legally and morally obligated to treat a lot of people who can't pay or will never pay…so they make up for it by socking it to the guy has (a) a little dough, (b) no insurance and (c) high cholesterol.

If my mother had not had excellent health insurance and was forced to pay full retail for the health care she required her last twenty years, she would have lost her home and all her savings and I might have lost mine…and she still would have had to do without certain treatments that kept her alive.

The New York Times documents that celebrity deaths do not always happen in threes.

I think this is one of those places where people stretch reality to make it fit a myth. Famous people die all the time. Every time two really famous people die within a few days of each other, someone seizes on the next celebrity of any magnitude and says, "That's the third!" But since the time span and the level of celebrity are both undefined, you could make this "rule" work for two celebrities, four celebrities, five celebrities…

And I hear there will be more artists present than just the ones listed here…

Sasha Frere-Jones writes about "Weird Al" Yankovic. I too discovered the weird one on Dr. Demento's radio show long ago and always thought he was really good at what he does. I met Al (briefly) a few years ago and was genuinely impressed with how nice and humble he seemed to be. I think, listening to his music, I always knew he'd be like that.

Ed Kilgore thinks people should stop making an issue of how many days of "vacation" the President of the United States takes. I think I've said that myself on this blog and I think I even said it when Bush was in office. It's not like these guys are ever lying on the beach, miles from a phone and unreachable. The Commander-in-Chief is not necessarily neglecting his duties when he's not in the Oval Office, just as he's not necessarily working when he is there. It's what he does or doesn't do we should criticize, not where he does or doesn't do it.