Monthly Archives: March 2003

I don't know how the war in Iraq is going.  Some of the news is good, some is bad, and an awful lot of it doesn't seem to hold up for very long.

The last few days, we've seen people who recently said the war would end swiftly begin denying they ever said the war would end swiftly.  Military officials are telling reporters that things would be going much better if only civilian officials hadn't overruled the experts.  Even some White House sources are starting to float the idea that George W. was "out of the loop" on some pretty important decisions…so if they turn out wrong, he's not to blame.  (Reagan, Clinton and the previous Bush all had to occasionally resort to the "I didn't know what my administration was doing" defense and amazingly, they all got away with it to some extent.  We won't forgive our leaders for bad decisions, but simply not doing their jobs is okay.)

Now, politicians and military men are notorious for pointing fingers elsewhere, and trying to avoid responsibility for their own decisions and statements — so this could all be a lot of needless ass-covering.  But at best, it's that.  At worst, it's…well, it's pretty bad.

The next week or so, we'll probably see public confidence in this war plunge.  It may not be quantifiable or provable, since some people think it aids the war effort to not express that kind of doubt to pollsters.  But there may well be some measurable dip, which will immediately be blamed on the protestors, not on those generals complaining that Rumsfeld overruled their sage advice.  And long after the battle is over, no matter how it turns out, we'll still be hearing that the "anti-war crowd" — not the people who actually ran the war — are to blame for it lasting as long as it did, and getting that many soldiers killed.

The clever Fred Hembeck has nice things to say about my book, Mad Art, over in his weblog, Fred Sez.  Said book is now in its second printing with a few typos corrected.

Speaking of MAD artists: The magazine's erstwhile editor, Al Feldstein, has a terrific painting up for sale on his website.  It's a re-creation of one of his classic covers for the old EC science-fiction comics, and it's a beaut.  If I had one more empty wall in my house, you wouldn't be reading this plug.

Wasn't this war supposed to be over by now?  Yeah, I know: These things take time.  But it seems to me that even those who are adamant about the rightness of the mission ought to be a little embarrassed about the way it was oversold — with overly-optimistic projections and maybe even some outright fraudulent evidence.  And now we have military leaders leaking the premise that all the disappointments and problems are a result of their key decisions being overruled by Donald Rumsfeld and other civilian officials.  Yow.

I think I'm going to stop watching the news.  I know this thing is going to turn out okay — though I know I'm going to wince when people speak of the total number of American deaths as "acceptable."  Right now, I can't deal with the day-to-day ups and downs.  Besides, I'm really only tuning in to see the latest report of Saddam's demise…or how yesterday's turned out to be premature.  Maybe.

In a move, I hope will do more good than harm, I have rearranged the structure of this website, moving files all around.  The upsides are that this page should load faster and that the whole site will be easier for me to update and maintain.  The downsides all stem from the fact that I had to move a lot of pages around.  If another website linked to a specific page here, that link may no longer work.  (A tip: If you link to an item on one of these "news from me" pages, link to the little word "link" next to the date on the item.  That should never change, even as this page gets updated.)

At the same time, I've also removed a couple more articles because they'll be appearing (in slightly-revised, improved versions) in the forthcoming second volume of my old columns about the comic book industry.  It's named after a new article I just completed for it, and this is not (wholly) a tongue-in-cheek title…

I hope everyone understands that when I review plays here, it's more for my own benefit than yours: A little "diary" to myself so that in the future, I can read back and remember what I saw and what I thought at the time.  These aren't recommendations because in most cases, by the time I see it, it's probably too late for you to get tickets and see it, even if you're local and so inclined.  She Loves Me, which I saw last night, is just such an example.

Which is a shame…for you.  Because it's very good.  This is the Reprise! revival of the 1963 musical based on the play Parfumerie by the Hungarian writer Miklos Laszlo.  It's about a man and a woman who work in a perfume shop and don't get along.  At the same time they're fighting, each has fallen in love with a pen-pal whose identity they don't know…and guess what happens next.  It may sound silly but the story must have something going for it, as it's been adapted into three movies just in this country alone: The Shop Around the Corner, In the Good Old Summertime, and You've Got Mail.  The original production of She Loves Me was only the second Broadway show directed by Harold Prince, and it starred Daniel Massey, Barbara Cook and Jack Cassidy.  It had a book by Joe Masteroff (who would later write Cabaret) and a score by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock (whose next show, Fiddler on the Roof, may be the most-produced theatrical work of the twentieth century).  But none of them fared as well with She Loves Me, which only ran 302 performances and has rarely been revived since.

Which is a shame…for all of us.  It's a fun score with terrific lyrics, and it lends itself to superb musical performances.  In the Reprise! mounting, those are supplied by Scott Waara, Rebecca Luker, Larry Cedar, Kaitlin Hopkins, and several other terrific folks.  Rebecca Luker is the lady I thought was so perfect as Marian the Librarian in the recent Broadway revival of The Music Man.  Gordon Hunt directed, Gerry Sternbach was the musical director, and I'm not going to spend any more time raving about this, because you can't go see it.  Heck, I can't even go back and see it again because it closes tomorrow.  Which is a shame…for me.

One of these days, some guy in the stage crew of the Academy Awards is going to write a best-selling book about all the things that go wrong or almost go wrong.  There are always a few stories that make the rounds of Hollywood soon after the ceremony and this year's seems to be the tale of the Thrown Phone and the Giant Rotating Orb That Wouldn't Rotate.

In the middle of his monologue, Steve Martin told a joke that didn't do well, in part because someone — seemingly in an upper balcony — threw a cell phone onto the stage.  Martin remarked, "Okay, I now understand that having someone throw a phone in the middle of a joke is a bad idea.  Sorry…that was my decision."  This is apparently not what really happened.

You may have noticed, high in the Kodak Theater, a big clunky thing like a chandelier without lights.  This was a design element that was supposed to spin slowly throughout the show.  Everyone referred to it as "the orb."

The orb rotated throughout days of rehearsal.  The orb rotated all day Sunday.  About ten minutes before the ceremony started, the orb suddenly stopped rotating.  Crew members were dispatched to see if they could get it moving again.  They were up in the rafters trying to fix it while Martin was doing his monologue…and one of the men up there dropped his walkie-talkie.

That's what fell onto the stage — and one can only imagine what would have happened if it had hit the host.  Fortunately, it didn't.  And Martin, thinking quickly, decided to act like it was an intentional joke that didn't work, rather than have the audience start worrying about objects dropping on him or on them.  Whatever, it was probably a very smart call.  (A couple of critics took him to task for the apparently failed bit, and I'm told Howard Stern was faulting the director for not having the camera in the right place to see the hurled cell phone.  None of those folks, of course, could have known it was not planned.)

The orb never did start revolving, and this killed a joke that had been written for later in the show.  Martin was going to come out, call everyone's attention to the huge spinning object, then say, "We don't know what that thing is up there but we've developed a theory as to why it's turning like that.  We think it's slowly unscrewing."  This reportedly got a huge laugh from those present at rehearsal but since that thing wasn't rotating, it had to go.

And there you go: A Secret of the Oscars.  See what kind of juicy tidbits you get when you come to this site?

The big news out of Vegas is mostly about rising ticket prices for entertainment.  The new Celine Dion show at Caesars Palace has a top price of $220 a seat.  One suspects the premise here is along the lines of, "Well, some people will pay it, if only to show off.  And then the seats we don't sell at that price, we can give away as comps and people will think, 'Wow, I'm getting a $220 comp!'  Best of all, it will make the overpriced tickets that aren't quite as overpriced seem reasonable."  These would be the seats for $166.50, $143.50, or $102.  Hard to believe they could charge more than a hundred bucks a seat in a town where people grab up funbooks full of coupons for a dollar off the lunch buffet.  But apparently they can.

The Las Vegas Advisor has done its annual survey of show prices and concluded that the average ticket now goes for $45.91.  That's more than five bucks up from just a year ago — though lower than it was in 2000, a year when there was a temporary shortage of cheap shows at cheap hotels.  There are now plenty — not that you'd want to go see them — and they distort the stats a bit.  The average price for a ticket you might want to buy — say, for one of the Cirque Du Soleil shows — can be over a hundred dollars.  Lance Burton's show at the Monte Carlo is $55-60 a seat and it'll run you $65, at least in theory, to see Penn & Teller at the Rio.  The trick is to look for discount coupons.  It's real easy to find a $10 discount ticket for Penn & Teller (there's even one on the Rio website) and when business is slow, the hotel spreads around even better bargains.  There are also some good, low-price afternoon shows (Mac King at Harrah's, Ronn Lucas at the Rio) which weren't included in the Las Vegas Advisor price survey.

I used to marvel at the folks who'd do Vegas armed with every discount coupon book they could find, eating breakfast at an inconvenient hotel at an inconvenient time because they had a coupon for a buck off on the French Toast.  I prided myself that I was too sophisticated to mess with that kind of thing and lectured that if one were to just lose twenty bucks less at the gaming tables (i.e., stop playing five minutes sooner), one could save a lot more money than being a slave to coupons.  But I think, in the future, I'm going to be a bit less quick to disdain their value.  On some transactions, it's getting to be like buying a new car: Only a dummy pays the sticker price.

Nothing I'm reading about the current conflict in Iraq is quite as unsettling as the notion that it's just the first of many engagements; that the long-range goal of the Bush Administration is to rid the world of Muslim fundamentalism.  If that's where we're headed — as theorized in articles like this one by Joshua Micah Marshall — then it's gonna be a long series of bloody battles.

I am also informed by half the film buffs I know that on the Academy Awards, in the montage of Best Actress winners, there was another poorly-chosen bit of footage.  They were supposed to be honoring past-winner Janet Gaynor with a shot from the movie Sunrise — but they picked a clip from that film with Margaret Livingston.  I think they should have just done another cutaway to Martin Scorsese.

By the way: Today on some cable channel — E!, I think — I heard someone talking about the "injustice" of Scorsese never winning an Oscar.  Could we save the word "injustice" for things like a guy sitting on Death Row for ten years for a crime he didn't commit?  Or our country arresting and detaining people for months without actually charging any of them with a crime?  Or a zillion other things more unfair in this world than a highly-honored filmmaker missing out on one honor?  As my Uncle Aaron used to say, "Never feel sorry for anyone who makes more than a million dollars a year."

These may look like scenes from some sort of pin-up calendar but they're actually part images from ticket jackets used by PSA, an airline that criss-crossed western states from 1949 until 1988.  It was the most popular way to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Oakland or Las Vegas — partly because it had so many flights per day but mainly because of its stewardesses.  Back then, Pacific Southwest Airlines had the "best-looking stews" — that's how all my friends put it — and the company was not shy about exploiting that image. There were some who scoffed, saying that the ladies in the ads and on the ticket folders couldn't possibly be real "stewardesses." They had to be professional models. But whenever I flew PSA, I could believe those were real employees posing.

One time in the early seventies, when a bunch of L.A. comic fans decided to go en masse to a convention in Oakland, several insisted that we all had to fly PSA for that reason.  One of them was even collecting ticket jackets.  There were several different designs and both ways, he went through the plane asking passengers for theirs, hoping that one of the servers on our flights would be on one of them so he could get it autographed.  He only got as close as one of the ladies telling him she'd posed for a folder photo but it hadn't been issued yet.  Happily, she agreed to take his address and mail him a signed one once it was released.

Today, it sounds sexist and almost childish…and it must have been humiliating for women who were fully qualified to do the job that they got turned away because they weren't young and pretty enough. Folks were just starting to get sensitive about such things. It might help to remember that this was before the airlines were deregulated.  Fares were the same everywhere so the only way in which a carrier could make the case that you should fly them instead of the other guy was to sell service and smiles.  Above and beyond the fact that PSA had good-looking ladies bringing you peanuts, there was something friendly about the airline.  Everything was colorful and everyone seemed to enjoy their jobs and act really happy to have you on board.  American or United could get you to the same place at the same time for the same fee but they seemed so damned serious about flying the plane.

In the mid-eighties when PSA got caught up in a wave of airline mergers and disappeared into USAir, I felt a certain sense of loss.  The grown-ups had won again.  Today, Southwest Airlines has some of the same spirit, and the new Hooters Airline is reviving the concept of flight attendant as sex symbol.  But I can't shake the feeling that even collectively, they don't equal PSA…and that no airline ever will.

Chris Laborde, a pilot and flight instructor, offers a wonderful website full of PSA history and memorabilia over at www.ilovepsa.com.  If you remember PSA — or have a thing for women wearing short orange-and-pink skirts — fly on over there.

I am about to do some of you an enormous favor, saving you a heap of cash by again recommending Travelaxe.  This is a piece of free software that works as follows:  You download it from here.  You install it on your computer.  Then when you're thinking of going out of town, you call it up and enter your destination and dates.  Travelaxe goes online, searches a dozen or so different travel agents' websites, and presents you with a chart of available hotels and what it will cost to book them through each agency.  You will usually find that you can save hundreds of smackers by booking through one agent instead of another.  I just did a search for a trip I'm thinking of taking.  Travelaxe found me a rate of $479 for three nights via one travel agent.  The same room in the same hotel for the same nights was $929 from another.  That is, as advertised, a heap of cash saved.

A lot of you reading this are planning on attending the Comic-Con International in San Diego from July 17 through 20.  If you are, you should go directly to the con's website and book your room immediately.  Like right this second.  Based on the way it's gone in recent years, they'll be sold out any day now.

As long as rooms are available through the convention, you should book that way.  It should give you the cheapest rate, and it helps the con to get credit for filling San Diego's hotels.  But once rooms are no longer available through them, Travelaxe is your next resource.  It covers many hotels that are not available through the con site.  The current Travelaxe software (2.1) also has a feature that lets you arrange the hotels on its chart based on their distance from an address you enter.  If you select "San Diego" and enter the address of the convention center, which is 111 W. Harbor Drive, you can see exactly how far each hotel is from the action.

Travelaxe — in which I have no financial interest, no matter how it may appear — is completely free and works for more than 465 cities.  It's especially marvelous for finding cheap rooms in Las Vegas.  My last trip there, it led me to a rate at the Orleans significantly cheaper than I could get from the Orleans' website or their phone reservations clerk.  I'm so confident that this will save you serious bucks that I'm going to put my tipping box right under this item.  You will all save so much money that, in gratitude, you'll use the link below to send me a nice gratuity.  (I'll let you know in a week or so if this yields more donations than a picture of Julie Newmar.)

Thsi kind of thing happens to me more often than you'd imagine:  This afternoon, I was dining al fresco at Farmers Market here in L.A. with my good friend, screenwriter Adam Rodman.  We were talking about the O.J. Simpson case (we're right on top of every current issue) and about some of the detectives involved in it.  One of us mentioned Phil Vanatter, who was one of the lead investigators of the matter…

About ninety seconds later, I looked up at a gentleman who was walking past with his wife.  I whispered to Adam, "Take a look at that guy in the flowered shirt.  Is that who I think it is?"

Adam looked and, sure enough, it was who I thought it was: Phil Vanatter.  Probably still carrying that vial of Simpson's blood around with him.

I immediately changed the topic of conversation to Halle Berry and Carmen Electra but without, alas, the same result.

This website has finally won an award.  It just snagged a Squiddy as "Best Focused Web Site."  I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to be focused on, but I do know what the Squiddies are.  Each year, the participants in several of the rec.arts.comics newsgroups vote in a mess of categories for the best writer of comic books, the best artist, the best character, etc.  Each winner receives a Squiddy, which as far as I know consists of nothing more than the right to post that neat little logo on my site.  The awards are more properly called the "Rec.Arts.Comics" Awards, only nobody calls them that.

They call them the Squiddies, a name that derives from a typo.  There used to be a comic book called The Suicide Squad.  Once, when someone in a newsgroup was asking a question about it, he accidentally typed "Suicide Squid" — which, when you think of it, is a much, much better name for a comic book.  This led to a rash of jokes, and to the Suicide Squid becoming the newsgroup mascot and…well, before they play me off, I'd like to thank everyone and to note that we live in fictitious times with fictitious comic books published by fictitious companies run by fictitious editors…

It was nice to see the late Ward Kimball included in the "In Memoriam" montage at this year's Oscars.  It would have been even nicer if he'd had something to do with the animation clip that accompanied his photo.  It was a scene of the hippo and alligator dancing from Fantasia — a scene rather famously animated by Preston Blair, Norm Ferguson and John Lounsbery.  Kimball did work a little on Fantasia (he handled Bacchus in the Pastoral sequence) but how difficult would it have been for the Academy to get a clip of, say, Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio?  Or any of Mr. Kimball's other great works?  Otherwise, it's like honoring a dead artist and showing someone else's paintings.

A fellow named Andrew Leal reminded me of this in an e-mail that also contained a bit of Hanna-Barbera trivia I hadn't known.  Some of us have wondered who did the singing voices of Yogi Bear, Boo Boo and Cindy Bear in the movie, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear.  Andrew has identified Cindy's sing-in as Jackie Ward, whose vocals have been heard on hundreds of TV shows and movies.  She's the lady who dubbed Natalie Wood's rendition of "The Sweetheart Tree" in the movie The Great Race.  She was the female voice in the songs of The Partridge Family.  And she's done lots of other things you can read about in this interview.  Thanks, Andrew!