The Beau Hunks is a Dutch musical group that likes to perform American movie music, mainly from the thirties and especially from Laurel and Hardy films. They strive to be "note perfect," meaning that their music is arranged exactly the way it was arranged for its most famous film presentation. This is not always simple because the original sheet music and scores are often unavailable so someone has to listen over and over to the movie and transcribe every note. The results are always worth it. I have all of their CDs and often listen to them as I motor about town.
Here, they recreate Raymond Scott's famous 1937 tune, "Powerhouse," which most folks recall as the tune that always seemed to pop up in a Warner Brothers cartoon when anything mechanical or robotic was occurring. I enjoyed this and I hope you will, as well…
A reader who signs his message Nikola sent me this link to a genuine piece of comic book history — a sketch that artist Harry G. Peter sent Dr. William Moulton Marston to try and settle on a costume for their new character, Wonder Woman. The handwritten notes are interesting as is the way Wonder Woman looks a little sexier here than, I think, she ever looked in the comic. But then the way Peter drew her in the comic all those years, she was about as sexy as Edgar Buchanan. I was always curious why, given all the artists then around who could have produced "good girl art," they went with Peter. Marston had effective creative control of the feature so it must have been a "look" he wanted…but why? Some of those early stories are pretty kinky so he probably had some sort of subtext in mind…and if I could have forced myself to read more than a dozen or so of those comics, I might be able to figure it out.
It's come to this: I have begun lying to pussycats. In particular, I have been lying to several of the feral cats I feed on my back porch. I do not feel good about this but I have found it necessary to lie to them, particularly to the one I've named Max. In the photo above, the cat on the left is called The Stranger Cat and the one on the right is Max.
Max is perpetually hungry. In the morning when I get up and go downstairs, Max is waiting. If I don't immediately open the sliding glass door, he pounds on it with a paw and he howls until I open a can of Friskies cat food (preferably, Mixed Grill) and the opened can and I are outside on the porch. Now, the way he would like his meal served is as follows: I would put one spoonful into the bowl. He would eat it in full, then give me a look and I would put another spoonful of food into the bowl and he would eat it. And then another spoonful and another and another until the can was empty, whereupon I would open another can. In this way, Max would not have to do a thing he hates, which is to eat food that has been in the bowl for more than two minutes and twenty seconds.
Well, I don't have time for that. I can't stand there all morning ladling fresh food into Max's bowl. I have things to do — calls to make, obits to write, Fred Kaplan articles to link to. So I dump the entire can into the dish and go back into the house to make a protein drink or something.
Max eats about a tenth of the can, then stops and yells for fresh food.
I am not about to open another can when he still has nine-tenths of one before him…and here's where the lying comes in. I walk out onto the porch with the empty can and the spoon and I mime like I'm putting more Mixed Grill into the dish…and most of the time, Max is fooled. He thinks he has newly-spooned chow in there and he resumes gobbling it down. Sometimes, I take the dish inside, do nothing to it, then bring it back out and place it before him. He thinks it's fresh food so breakfast continues. Of course, I accompany both fibs by telling him, "Here's more food for you, Max!" But there is no more food. I'm lying. I do this with the other cats, too. They've all learned from Max that if you take two bites and yowl, you get fresh grub.
I always feel guilty about this. I'm confessing to you here to get it off my conscience and also because I don't think Max has an Internet connection. If he does, I'm really screwed.
We told you about this back in this item. On November 19, the Los Angeles-based group Writers Bloc is having another one of their events where someone interesting interviews someone interesting. In this case, it'll be Penn Jillette interviewing Stan and Hunter Freberg. How can that not be terrific? This link will tell you all about Stan and Hunter, a brilliant satirist and his dazzling partner-spouse. She's pretty darn interesting, too.
Anyway, that link will also give you the chance to reserve seats for the event, which will be over at the Writers Guild Theater on Doheny in Beverly Hills. And after the interview, Stan and Hunter will be selling and autographing copies of their great new CD, Songs in the Key of Freberg. (If you can't get there, you can order an unautographed one here. I like it a lot and so will you.) I'll remind you again about this before the 19th but if you're local, mark it on your calendar and reserve your spot.
A new batch of documents that the Pentagon didn't want anyone to see have been released by WikiLeaks. I don't know what to make of them but Fred Kaplan does.
Below we have moments from a recent evening (August 24) at the Writers Guild Theater with Ray Bradbury and Hugh Hefner. The subject was Ray's landmark 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, and there was a screening of the 1966 movie based on said book. Before the film, the two men were interviewed — quite skillfully, it would appear from this clip — by Geoff Boucher, who presides over the Hero Complex blog at the L.A. Times. Geoff ably brought out an important point that many forget about Hefner. Never mind the naked ladies. Playboy, at least in its early days, really was a magazine folks could truly buy for the articles. It contained important pieces, fiction and non-fiction, and ran work that others feared to touch. Running Bradbury's then-controversial book took some nerve but also helped establish Hef as a courageous publisher who would defend the written word as vigorously as he'd fight to be able to market Miss October's chest.
I have, and will probably always have, enormously mixed emotions about Ray Bradbury. When I was about 13, he welcomed some similar-aged friends of mine and me into his office in Beverly Hills for an afternoon of talk about his work, the world, comics and writing. When he understood that I was serious about writing as a career, he invited me back for a one-on-one conversation that was enormously inspirational. He continues to be just that if only because despite his age and afflictions, he still manages to write almost every day. That I rarely agree with what he writes or with any opinion he has formed since around 1993 and that some of what he says or does these days makes me cringe is almost beside the point. Having interviewed him myself in several public appearances, I have seen how riveting and powerful his words can be and watched then as his wheelchair was engulfed by the best kind of autograph-seekers: The ones who have a palpable need to touch and thank an author whose work changed their lives and only for the better.
I probably need to reread Fahrenheit 451. It's been a while…like 30+ years. My sense is that it endures well as a work of compelling fiction but not of prophecy. Perhaps it needs a little add-on chapter where the characters decide it's sorta okay to burn book paper as long as you first digitize what's on it and make it available for downloading. Then again, if ever there was a novel that should be read in book form and not on a Kindle or iPad, it's that one…and just as a reading experience, it's a tremendous and important ride. I was sorry I couldn't make it to this event, which was part of a whole week in Los Angeles that celebrated Bradbury turning 90 but through the miracle that is YouTube, we all get to experience about ten minutes of it…
I've taken to introducing Sergio Aragonés at events as the World's Most Honored Cartoonist. Which he is. He's appearing this Saturday at Book Soup, a fine store up in Hollywood, and there he will be signing copies of his exquisite new book, MAD's Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragonés: Five Decades of His Finest Works. If you're in the L.A. area, you may want to go and buy one. If you're not in L.A. area, Book Soup will sell you a signed copy…but you'd better order fast. Details are over on this page.
I am in receipt of many e-mails wondering how come no tributes on this site for Barbara Billingsley, Tom Bosley or other celebs who've recently gone away. Easy answer: I have nothing to say about these people…or at least nothing that everyone else isn't saying. I kinda got started in the obit business because for a long stretch, whenever a veteran comic book creator passed, if I didn't write about them, no one else did. Too many deaths of people I thought mattered were passing without notice. The duty also intersected with my compulsive anecdote-telling, which was in full display Tuesday evening when I spoke at the Writers Guild. Mention a proper name in my presence and I probably have a story about the person — often but not always a first-person encounter — and it's difficult for me to not share it. My best friends have grown to be tolerant of it and a precious few may even have learned to enjoy it.
But I have no stories about Ms. Billingsley or Mr. Bosley. Never met her. Met him once for about as long as it took to tell him I enjoyed him in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway and wished I could have seen him there in Fiorello. That was it. Nothing else to write about either…and there are plenty of bios and remembrances around by folks more qualified to compose such things. Please don't take it as me not respecting them or their work. Sometimes, you just don't have anything to say worth saying. And sometimes, even I can realize that.
The latest on the war in Afghanistan from, of course, Fred Kaplan. And I think it's amazing how little most Americans care about this. Even Americans who have jobs.
I should warn you that there's brief nudity in this video of the costume competition at the 1972 Westercon, a medium-sized (I suppose) science-fiction convention held that year at the Edgewater Hyatt House in Long Beach, California. At the time, the Edgewater was known primarily as the place Elvis Presley once stayed. Today, it's called the SeaPort Marina Hotel and it's known primarily as the place that used to be the Edgewater Hyatt House, where Elvis Presley once stayed.
I'm posting this mostly because it's a memory for me. My friend Rob Solomon and I drove down to Long Beach on, I believe, the July 4th weekend that year and shared a room at that convention. They still have Westercons, by the way, though it's been a long time since I've been near one or any s-f con, for that matter.
Someone wrote in an article about me a few years ago that I was "active in s-f fandom." Not really…but you didn't have to be to enjoy yourself at one of those gatherings. My whole time there, no one ever tried to discuss science-fiction with me and the one time I tried to attend an s-f related panel that was on the schedule, I found it had been cancelled because no one had shown up. Mostly, it was just a three-day party of folks with common sensibilities. I remember a lot of motel rooms where the tub was filled with ice, beer and for those of us who didn't drink, soft drinks. You just kind of went from room to room and party to party all evening except when we all piled into the grand ballroom for the big costume competition. Rob and I were in about the third row with Shel Dorf, the most prominent founder of the then-new annual comic-con in San Diego.
Without audio and reduced to choppy 8mm, the contest looks pretty shoddy in this video but I remember everyone having a lot of fun. The loudest reaction was because of two ladies who entered the costume competition without costumes. As it was explained to me, a mini-controversy had been erupting at recent s-f con costume contests. There was always someone who'd spent four months on their outfit, then lost to a woman who spent twenty minutes but had her breasts largely exposed. The cry was heard, "How am I supposed to compete with that?" Or maybe "those?" To placate what seemed like justified complaints, someone came up with the idea of adding a new category which they called "Most naked lady." The idea was that the judges could award that, then give the costuming trophies to people who were actually costumed. It was, of course, an open invitation for some woman to show up completely nude…and two that year did.
The cute blonde lady holding the vase called her presentation, "Thor's wife waiting to offer him a drink." The cute brunette lady with the foil cape called hers, "Reflections of love." I actually remember those names. The crowd loved both of them and after the show, when the entrants were all available to pose for photos, there were 11 pictures taken of the other competitors and 17,684 of Thor's wife and Miss Reflections. There was also one of the dumbest arguments I had heard in my life up to that point.
As I recall, the judges had opted to award the special trophy either to both ladies or just to "Reflections of love." This prompted outrage from some folks who felt the award should be taken literally. It was, after all, for Most Naked Lady and the blonde was completely nude, whereas the brunette was wearing sandals and a cape. See the problem? Grown men and women — I'm not sure who they were — were suddenly debating this point…and I guess there was no denying that Thor's wife was, technically, the most naked. Which prompted someone else to ask what would happen in the next costume competition when, as seemed at that moment inevitable, two or more women entered with no sandals, capes or anything of the sort. How could you award "Most naked lady" when several women were equally naked? I never heard how the matter was resolved or even if it ever was. I just recall thinking that some people can find a way to take the fun out of anything, even naked women.
I have another vivid memory of the con that involves no nudity. In fact, it involves the Marx Brothers. I'll tell you about it one of these days. In the meantime, here's a few minutes of that event described above…
Thank Jeff Abraham for sending me a link to this great interview with Buck Henry. Someone could do a great documentary or TV show just by pointing a camera at Buck Henry and having him tell anecdotes for 90 minutes. He's a fascinating man who's worked on a lot of projects, good and bad, and as you'll see if you read the interview, he seems to know which were which.
Here's an excerpt from another one of those messages from someone who's not making much money as a professional writer and wants some advice. I don't claim my advice is worth more than anyone else's but if you want to heed it, I won't stop you. In the following, I've redacted a long list of projects that the author sees as inarguable dreck. I cut it because the discussion really isn't about those works and because a couple were written by friends of mine…
…the thing that gets to me is that I watch TV and I read comics and I see work being bought that is so obviously inferior to what I do. It wouldn't bother me so much if I thought I was being beaten out by better people but some of the shows today like [LONG LIST DELETED] just stun me. My wife is sick of hearing me screaming at the TV set or throwing down some comic I brought home from the shop. I could cope with the rejection if I felt the contest was fair and that the judges didn't have their heads up their butts. How do you think I should deal with this?
By ignoring it. Really. The field in which you and I are working is a flawed meritocracy. It's all about the best work rising to the top…and sometimes, it does. But we've all seen studio heads greenlight the wrong movie, network programmers buy the wrong series, publishers publish the wrong manuscript, etc. That is never going to change and to get mad at it is like getting mad that your favorite baseball player sometimes strikes out.
Actually, I should back up here and note that when you see, for example, a TV show where the writing seems to suck, you are not seeing the writing the writer did. You're seeing his or her work after it has been through a process…perhaps rewritten by others, certainly interpreted by actors and a director, changed or skewed by many hands. It is entirely possible (in some situations, almost probable) that your wonderful script could endure that process and by the time it hit the air, it would be no better than what you're decrying…and some frustrated writer would see it and his wife would hear him yell about how being rejected when that kind of debris was selected. A writer-friend of mine who left us too soon, Bill Rotsler, used to have a saying that came to mind as I typed the above. It was, "Those who think they are the exceptions are wrong."
But even if rotten work is getting bought, don't let that anger you. In fact, don't let anything in this area anger you. Being mad can be one of the best ways to not get hired. There was a writer I used to run into at Guild functions and committee meetings who couldn't utter two contiguous sentences without one of them being about the crappy show he saw last night and how in the name of all that's holy does that garbage get bought when his brilliance goes unbought and unproduced? Having never read one word he's written, I honestly have no idea if he truly was as good as he seemed to think…but I do know that if I were in a position to hire writers, he's about the last guy I'd consider. Who wants to work with a screaming maniac?
There was a time in my past when I used to think of other writers as competition, as if the successes they enjoyed somehow subtracted from what was possible for me. When I stopped thinking that way — stopped caring about how well someone else was doing at all — I got a lot happier as a writer…and, I think, a little better. I have tons of flaws and shortcomings and weaknesses but that was one I was able (I think) to get rid of. It involved a realization that the system isn't "fair" in the way we'd like it to be. The buyers are not going to always select the best writers any more than the voters are always going to select the best candidates. Stop expecting otherwise and just do your best work…because the system doesn't always fail.
Here's a weird one. A year or three ago when GMail was launched, I signed up for a GMail account with my name…and it occurred to me that it might be handy to have a whole bunch of GMail accounts under a mess of names. They were free and I thought I might route my spam to one of them and use another to filter certain messages and reroute them. When I go on all these weird political message boards, I sometimes have to sign up in order to read things and rather than leave my own e-mail address, thereby bringing on waves of penis enlargement ads, I could sign up with one of my GMail addresses. So I got a whole bunch of them and for most, I used the name of obscure comedians and character actors. For instance, one of my favorite film comics was a gent named Charley Chase…so I signed up for charleychase at gmail.com. (I am not typing the name with the "@" sign because that makes it vulnerable to bots and spiders that comb websites looking for e-mail addresses to add to spam mailing lists.)
And then I never got around to using that address for anything. I went a year or three without logging into it and I certainly never sent any e-mail its way, nor did I do anything that would cause anyone else to send e-mail to it. The other day, I logged in and found it was full of messages that had accumulated there over the last few years…messages that sat there, unread and unanswered.
I thought at first it was all spam but on closer examination, very few of them were. They were mostly real messages, some of which described how much the sender had so enjoyed having sex with the addressee. A number were flight itineraries for a woman whose name I did not recognize. There were about a dozen messages from 1-800-flowers.com discussing its repeated and failed attempts to deliver a basket of posies to Charley Chase. I kept wondering, "Why did these people send these messages to this address?" And then I came across one that was the planned shooting schedule for a movie called Party of Feet 2 and asking the recipient to fax or e-mail her "latest test" and that's when I figured it out.
There is a very popular actress who appears in sex films under the name Charley Chase. For some time now, fans and business associates have been writing to her at that address, thinking it's hers. I'm guessing she probably has a GMail account that is that name plus a number or something else…and they've been accidentally leaving off the number or something else. Anyway, I've been getting a lot of her mail and I've been trying to decide what to do about this.
My first thought was to find some way to contact the lady and turn the email address over to her, mail and all. My second thought was not to. After all, she usurped the name of one of my favorite comedians and made it impossible to Google images of him without seeing a lot of photos that would make Larry Flynt blush. But then my third thought was to go back to my first thought. When she started out, she may not have known there was ever a rather popular actor named Charley Chase…and if she does by now, it's too late for her to change her nom de porn. So, no sexual suggestion intended, I'd like to give it to her.
I'm sending messages to her Facebook account and her Twitter account and directing her to this message of explanation. Charley, if you're reading this, I do not want anything from you except to make sure that I'm turning over the account to the lady who actually performs under the name of Charley Chase. That is the only way you have to satisfy me to get it.
I spoke at a Writers Guild meeting last night and ran into my friend, the fine comedy writer Doug Molitor. Which reminded me that I haven't linked to one of Doug's Dozens lately. So here's the latest…
I just set my TiVo to record the Stewart/Colbert rally on Saturday, October 30 on Comedy Central — from 9 AM until Noon on this coast, though I padded my recording by a half an hour, just in case. At the moment, it looks like that's the one time the network is running it that weekend. Listings on my TiVo only extend as far as midday the following Monday so maybe it'll rerun after that…but maybe not. I'm curious if C-Span will be covering it and if so, if their coverage will differ markedly. We shall see.
This article by Timothy Noah, a writer I usually like, thinks they ought to cancel the rally because seeing all those "elitists" out acting hip on the National Mall will just piss off the Tea Party crowd and those that lean in that direction and mobilize them to vote. I think that crowd is already fired-up enough to do that and maybe Stewart and Colbert can fire up the voters who, however direction they lean, aren't out there chewing on their furniture. Then again, maybe all they'll do is just put on a good show. That's reason enough to do it.
