I'm convinced that at least once a week at the corporate offices of Trader Joe's, someone consults a computer, takes note of the items I like and purchase there and then immediately discontinues those items.
We haven't had baby pandas on this blog for a while but I can fix that. The Beauval Zoo in France has seven-month-old twins named Yuandudu and Huanlili. Let's see how they're doing…
If you logged into this site in the last hour or so, you may have seen strange things happening with its design. That was me trying to fix some software problems caused by the fact that I constructed this site a long, long time ago. If you've been working on a P.C. for a while, you probably have some program that worked like a dream under Windows 95 but doesn't work at all under Windows whatever-number-we're-on-now. Well, that's kinda what I'm experiencing.
I just spent some time talking with a very smart/helpful Tech Support gent at WPEngine, which hosts this site, and then I did some research and came to the conclusion that (a) I probably need a whole new construction and (b) I've got at least six months to get it built and installed before further tech advances make this one totally dysfunctional and unfixable. I'm also thinking (c) I have neither the time nor the knowledge to build the new one myself. So I'm going to start figuring out where to turn for that.
In the meantime, more strange things may happen here. Please forgive them. And if you tune in here some day and find unbridled praise for Donald Trump, Bill Cosby and cole slaw, that's when you'll know things are really broken here.
Happy 101 to the jocular Mr. Allan Jaffee, born March 13, 1921. Al started cartooning in 1942. He did his first job for MAD magazine in 1955 and he did his last job for MAD magazine in 2019. He also did a lot of work not for MAD, including vast quantities of comic books for Timely (now Marvel) Publications, the syndicated newspaper strip Tall Tales, and tons of advertising work and gag cartoons and book covers and I can't even begin to list it all. He's sticking around to prove once and for all, that not all the good die young. Some of them make it into their second century on this planet.
As some of you know, a wonderful lady named Carolyn Kelly was a huge part of my life for about twenty years…until 2017 when cancer took her away from me and all who loved her. She is still part of my life in some senses. Carolyn was lovely in every way in which a person can be lovely and in many ways that belonged only to her.
I inherited her belongings — crates of 'em, many housed in a Public Storage locker and unseen even by her for decades. A lot of what was in there was the work or possessions of her father, who was one of the best cartoonists who ever lived. Five years after her passing, I am still going through those crates, finding treasures of artistic or historical value. Everything of note will be shared in some way with the world, though it may take a while.
I also inherited her computer, which I gave to her in the first place, and I've been going through it when I have time, looking for materials relevant to the Pogo books which I now co-edit, reprinting her father's magnum opus. The other day, in a ZIP file I'd never opened, I came across a little essay that Carolyn wrote in 2002. The date on the file is 9/14/02, two weeks after the event she wrote about…a visit that three of us (Carolyn, my mother and Yours Truly) took to the home of my partner in Groo, Sergio Aragonés and his partner in life, Charlene.
I had never seen this before and I have no idea if Carolyn wrote it for any particular purpose. It may just be something she sent to a few close friends…I don't know. But I thought it was splendid and charming and I thought I would share it here with all of you. I have changed nothing about it except to fix one typo and insert the photo, which I took that day…
Sunday afternoon, the 1st of September, Mark and I are driving through the So. California heat wave up to Ojai, as Sergio has invited us up — he is making paella, it's very important to him that his dear friend Mark be his guest, and Sergio making paella is such an wonderfully rich bounteous aesthetic and rare event that it is not to be missed. Maybe a once-in-a-lifetime spectacular for us. So we are going.
It is still way over 100 degrees at 4:30 PM. We find the house in a winding lane, deeply shaded by live oak and redwoods. It's a shock to step out of the car — 72 degrees inside, 108 outside — but it's also amazingly pleasant! The air feels rare, dry, balmy.
Charlene greets us from the front of the house — she must have been awaiting our arrival. She leads us through the cool dark house, and we hear the desperate pleas of dogs who have been imprisoned to keep them from rampaging through the party.
We go out into the back, down a wide stone path alongside a winding many-leveled turquoise swimming pool that's edged with boulders, banks lined with overhanging succulents, cactus, blooming shrubs in huge terra cotta pots, hanging baskets of flowers and vines, low spreading plants — everything lush, rich, almost tropical. A grotto.
Now we are below the pool, where the rest of the company of ten is gathered around a large heavy old pine table under the broad overhanging roof of the shady outdoor kitchen with its great stone fireplace. The air softly carries smells of wood smoke, sage, olive oil and garlic.
Sergio, bare-chested, dressed in red swim-shorts, is the lovingly meticulous chef, and the paella is being cooked in a huge (nearly 3' wide) special paella pan that Sergio brought on his lap on the plane from Spain many years ago. It is stirred with the beautiful long-handled utensils that Sergio's mother used, and the wood fire beneath the pan is carefully tended in the way, Sergio tells us, he used to tend his mother's paella cooking fires as a child. He does everything with graceful competence.
The huge fireplace is made of gray boulders, a cow's skull hanging decoratively on the tall chimney. Before the comfortable guests is the shady man-made grotto, complete with waterfall that splashes into the swimming pool from a little cliff. Behind the kitchen, along the vine-draped fence at the property's edge, the bare ground is set with smooth-washed river stones. We look out over the fence at a vast panorama of rolling hills scattered with ancient walnut groves and live oaks, all backed with a mountain range, golden and lavender with the late afternoon sun and shadow. Charlene points out to us how her own profile is magically repeated in the forms of the distant ridge of the mountains.
On the table there are dozens of colorful Spanish and Mexican pottery bowls — all beautiful and all different — holding the paella ingredients waiting to be added to the pan, there are thick glass pitchers of sangria and margueritas, there are dishes of olives, platters of cheeses, plates of tomatoes and basil, baskets of breads, bowls of cucumber salad, garlic mayonnaise, salsa, dishes of salt, plates of grapes — all piled before us. The table isn't set — it is heaped. We sit around it on roughly-cut Mexican pine chairs in the remarkable dry air.
Photo by me.
And there is Sergio, laughing, jumping into the shady turquoise pool to cool off between bouts of attentive stirring at the fire — Mark informs us that this is the old custom of Rinsing the Chef — and there are the guests, delighted by silliness from Sergio and Mark, there are the bright-eyed and hopeful dogs, following every motion, there is Charlene Ryan, Sergio's beautiful freckled Irish-faced wife, who was an actress and dancer on Broadway and in many films, nearly six feet tall, blond, you may have seen her. In the twilight, Charlene lights torches along the pool's edge, and the flame casts warm light on her skin. And finally there is the paella itself, rose shrimp, golden rice, tawny chicken, pale artichokes, jade and coral green-lipped mussels — saffron, olives, fava beans, garlic, peppers — beautiful, exotic, smoky, delicious.
It is 108 degrees, but no one really minds — the air is lovely and the company is completely devoted to the relaxed but passionate enjoyment of the perfect balance of host and guest, of generosity, of bounty, of friendship and and of sensuous delights.
That's the entire piece but I've found (and am still finding) other little writings and drawings and artifacts that Carolyn left me. I'll share some more in the future. That's why I labelled this "Part 1."
Here from The Ed Sullivan Show is a number from the original production of My Fair Lady. Note the simple staging. If this show debuted today, the dancers would be doing moves that put Simone Biles to shame and all the men would lift all the women into the air — or vice-versa.
At the time, critics and audiences alike hailed this show as maybe the best musical ever presented on Broadway. Everything had to be jazzed up a bit for the recent revival…but here, with Julie Andrews and a great song, it just works so well…
We know how you feel about Bill Cosby, how do you feel about the recent accusations of abuse leveled at Jerry Lewis by several women who have came forward?
Longtime followers of this blog have seen me express a certain fascination about Jerry Lewis without thinking (a) he was that great a comedian or (b) that great a human being. I witnessed him being nasty to a lot of people…even somewhat to me when I first met him when I was seven years old.
I have no admissible evidence that he did what those women said he did but I sure don't have a hard time believing it. I think, like Cosby, he was a man who was capable of doing very, very good things but also very, very bad things…and the good things do not redeem him for the bad things or excuse them or anything of the sort.
At the core of the #metoo movement is the outrage that men of great wealth and power can get away with a lot of shit because…well, because they have great wealth and power. And because a lot of people around them benefit from that association so when they see impropriety, they look the other way and make like Sgt. Schultz on Hogan's Heroes muttering, "Nothing…I see nothing…" One of the more shocking reminders in that Cosby documentary was that even when the press was filled with women accusing Cosby of rape, NBC was still courting the man for a new sitcom.
So if you're asking me if I think the allegations against Lewis are true, my answer is "Yeah, probably." If I were on a jury, I might not vote to convict without a little more proof but I'm not on a jury. And if you're asking me if I can enjoy Jerry Lewis movies in light of these revelations, my answer is that I wasn't particularly enjoying Jerry Lewis movies before so this doesn't change much. What's changed is that my low opinion of the man has gotten lower. A few years ago on this blog, I wrote…
Look, I'll give him the "raised a ton of money" thing. The telethons were a Guilty Pleasure for so many of us. Other televised fund-raisers attract donations by offering genuine entertainment amidst the appeals for dough. Jerry offered ego excesses, self-pity, tirades against his critics, excessive praise of his friends — no wonder this guy loves Trump — and his oft-voiced worldview that people in Show Business are just plain better human beings than people who aren't in Show Business. Still, he did raise a lot of cash from those lesser human beings who aren't in Show Business and it did a lot of good.
But the other stuff….I'm sorry. "Oh, that's just Jerry being Jerry" doesn't work for me on any level. If Harry next door beats his wife and kicks his dog, you don't just say "Oh, that's just Harry being Harry." Jerry, like Trump, is proof that if you get famous enough, some people will let you get away with anything.
I wasn't particularly thinking of Lewis as an abuser of women when I wrote that. I was thinking of him being an abuser of a different kind. But it still fits.
Searching my hard disk the other day for an old file, I came across my download of a video from many years ago. I haven't seen this in a long time and I found myself enjoying it as much as I did way back when. Since there's still a copy of it on YouTube, I thought I'd embed it here in case you'd enjoy it as much as I did, then and now. It's a cleverly-illustrated version of William Shatner's classic recording of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" — the one that made The Beatles all say, "Damn! Why didn't we do it that way?"
I continue not to look at most of the news out of Ukraine, not because I don't care but because I can't do a damn thing to change it, whereas I can get a script finished. But I did peek at this article by Fred Kaplan about how he sees this whole thing ending. Many scenarios are possible. None of them are pleasant.
Over at the site for Multiversity Comics, Drew Bradley has a short article about how Groo the Wanderer went from being an independent comic book not sold on newsstands to being a Marvel comic sold on newsstands. This was back at a time when that was a severe handicap to the sales of any comic book to only be in the Direct Market ("D.M."), which is no longer the case. Anyway, Mr. Bradley writes…
Over the next few years, Pacific found itself in progressively deeper financial trouble. Their struggles were known through the industry, opening the door for other publishers to woo their talent. Marvel's response to the rapid growth of the DM was to create their Epic Comics imprint, which was an effort to combine independent publisher flexibility with the benefits of big publisher infrastructure.
With the promise of newsstand sales, Epic editor Archie Goodwin persuaded Aragonés to move Groo away from Pacific. This was the first time a DM-exclusive property moved to the newsstands, a rare reversal of the prevailing practice at the time. Groo remained with Marvel for ten years and 120 issues.
That's close but not exact. What persuaded us to leave Pacific was the near-certainty that Pacific wouldn't be able to publish Groo (or anything else) for very much longer. It was not that we wanted to leave Pacific. It was that Pacific was leaving us…and everyone.
And the main person who persuaded us that Marvel was the place to go was not Archie Goodwin. It was a wonderful lady named Carol Kalish, who was Direct Sales Manager and Vice President of New Product Development at Marvel Comics from 1981 to 1991. Carol was very instrumental in developing that new means of distributing comic books when the old method was dying out. She was a true lover of comics and one of the smartest people I knew in the business. Here's what she looked like…
Photo by Jackie Estrada
And here's how the move came about. I was friends with Carol but even better friends with her life-partner, artist Richard Howell. One evening when Richard and I were on the phone together — me out here, the two of them back in New Jersey — I asked him to put Carol on the line for a minute. I told her Pacific Comics was not long for this world. She agreed and said, "I want to find a way to get Groo to Marvel." And she did.
I don't want to suggest that Archie Goodwin had nothing to do with it. Archie was a guy we and everyone trusted and he had a lot to do with making us feel welcome, as did Jim Shooter, who was then editor-in-chief (I think that was his title) back then. But Carol deserves the most credit for engineering that peaceful transfer of power.
Archie was the first in a very long list of people in the comic book industry to have the dubious title of being editor of Groo. At Pacific Comics and with one issue we did with Eclipse, no one had that title. I'm not kidding. Sergio and I just produced the comic book, sent it in and said, "Here…send this to the printer" and they did. Someone might give it an unnecessary proofread on their end and/or do mechanical work to prep it for the printer but no one was the editor of Groo.
Gary Grossmann, who is the Official Historian of Groo (a much coveted honor) informs me that there have been 25 different people listed in the credits of Groo comics credits with a title containing some form of the word, "editor." These titles include editor, associate editor, assistant editor, editor-in-chief, editorial director, consulting editor, and executive editor. Amazingly, a few of these people are still in the industry. (And also according to Gary: When the fourth issue of the next four-issue Groo mini-series comes out later this year, it will be the 200th Groo publication — 196 regular comics, 2 specials, and 2 graphic novels. So that'll be eight issues for each person with "editor" in their job title.)
Archie once told me he never read an issue of Groo until it was on its way to the printer or perhaps already printed. When you serve your stint as editor of Groo — and don't worry, we'll get around to everyone eventually — just do what Archie did.
Getting back to Carol: She was an amazing individual. One night when she was in L.A. on business, we had dinner and then I asked her a small favor. Within walking distance of my home, there was a small, floundering comic book store that I occasionally visited. The fellow who'd opened it was a devout lover of comics and he'd sunk every cent he had into this place and was on the verge of losing every cent he had. Just loving comics does not mean you have the skills and knowledge necessary to sell them.
I asked Carol if we could stop by his store to perhaps give him a little advice. She instantly agreed and we were there for well over an hour with her explaining to him how to sell comics. The lesson was not how to sell the comics of her employer, Marvel, but how to sell all comics…and she even touched on why he should not sell only Marvels. If the fellow had followed all her advice, I'll bet he'd have made a go of the place. As it was, he applied about a third of what she taught him and his sales went up somewhat…and then he had a heart attack and died. His wife sold the shop and the laundromat next door expanded into what had been his space.
But the point was she took the time. She always took the time…and we didn't know it but she didn't have that much left. A few years later, she died from a pulmonary embolism. She was 36 and some of us are still getting over that shock. Helping Groo survive the demise of Pacific was one of her minor accomplishments but mentioning it here gives me a chance to tell you about her super-heroics and I didn't want to pass up that opportunity.
I wish someone would the revive the 1986 musical Smile, which had a book and lyrics by Howard Ashman and a score by Marvin Hamlisch. The show was based on the 1975 movie of the same name written by Jerry Belson and while that all sounds like a nice package, the Broadway production had a pretty short run — 11 previews and 48 performances.
I never saw it but I know a few folks who did and they thought it deserved more success than it had. Apparently, it might have run longer but it ran into money problems, owing in part to a pretty large cast. That's probably one reason it hasn't been revived much — too many actors to pay…a fate that has befallen a number of shows. For the same reason, Li'l Abner is rarely revived in any situation where the cast has to be paid.
But a number of the songs in Smile have endured. Here's one that turns up in a lot of cabaret acts, sung here by Lilla Crawford. It's usually sung by women over the age of twenty but it has a special poignancy when performed by someone the age Ms. Crawford was in this video…
Many people on my TV and a few on my phone seem incapable lately of forming sentences without mentioning the soaring price of gasoline. Of course it's bad. And of course we'll pay it because we have no choice.
And of course it has something to do with the fact that we're kinda/sorta/almost in a war — two wars, actually. Just as the War Against COVID seems to be winding down, we now have that thing going on in Ukraine that you may have heard about. Prices always go up when we're in a war.
They often go up when we're not in a war, too. As Eric Boehlert points out in this article, sometimes prices go up because the companies that supply our necessities just plain decide to raise 'em so they can make more money. One of the more obvious examples of that is in Las Vegas where the prices of just about everything — food, shows, hotel rooms, probably hookers too — have soared. And since people seem to have no problem paying those prices, they'll soar some more. Why charge ten bucks for a pizza when people will pay twenty?
I think that's the cause of rising prices way more often than we admit. We too often blame the government, especially when that means we can blame people we'd personally like to see voted out of office. That's the semi-political part of this comment but the main point is the reason so many businesses are raising so many prices: Because they can.
