Monthly Archives: February 2004

Had a great evening down at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach hearing Lewis Black yell about the weather, Janet Jackson's breast, health fads, soy milk, those idiots in Washington, air travel, homeland security and other things worth yelling about. Some of you know Mr. Black from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart where he holds forth every Wednesday with humorous commentaries (like this one). He is also one of the sharpest (if angriest) stand-up comedians working today and I highly recommend prolonged exposure. You can find out where he's playing over at his website and if he's not coming to your neck of the woods, keep your eye on HBO. He's taping a special for them at the end of February which will air God-knows-when. I have been to a lot of comedy clubs in my day and seen most of the all-time greats who've been performing in the last thirty years. Black ranks up there with the best of them.

Here's an interview with Ray Bradbury on the subject of Mars. You can read the print version or click on the audio link and listen. Or do both.

Mark Katz on writing jokes for Bill Clinton's speeches.

A friend of mine who asks that I describe him as "loosely a member of the Washington Press Corps" asks also that I post his prediction: That the Democratic ticket will be John Kerry and Max Cleland. If he's right, remember you heard it here first. If he's not, hell, I didn't think that.

You know what we need? More stories about gay penguins. Thank God that Burgess Meredith didn't live to see this.

Just found out that longtime Vegas comedian Bernie Allen died in mid-January at age 87. The man born Bernard Kleinberg had an amazing life. He was wounded in World War II, about three minutes after he first set foot in the field of battle. Back home in the states, he became a funny diner owner, but one who longed to perform. Once, on a bet from a customer, he went down and crashed the annual telethon that Jerry Lewis (and then-partner Dean Martin) were doing for Muscular Dystrophy. He actually got on the air, made a little speech, then went back and collected on the wager.

Later, after the diner went out of business, he became a funny cab driver. It was while plying this trade in New York that he was "discovered" by Rocky Graziano. He picked up the former prize fighter outside the Stage Deli one night and amused him so much that Graziano, who was becoming a kind of show biz entrepreneur, took him under his wing. Graziano changed Bernie's name and helped him develop an act and start getting booked in clubs. Before long, Bernie Allen became a favorite in night clubs, first in New York and then (at the recommendation of a Mr. Sinatra) in Vegas, though he never forgot his roots as a gate-crasher. He became notorious for showing up at events to which he was not invited and barging in, often as his German general character.

His German character got him a brief film role which he bragged about for the rest of his life. In The Producers, he was the auditioning Hitler who tried to sing "The Little Wooden Boy." Later, he had roles in a number of movies and TV shows, usually playing either a mobster or a Vegas comedian. He played the latter in a quick scene in Raging Bull.

Shortly after filming his role in The Producers, Allen gave up show business for a time and became a private detective. In 1972, after the team of Marty Allen and Steve Rossi broke up, Rossi offered him a partnership. Bernie chucked the detective biz and toured for several years in an act billed as "the real Allen and Rossi." By the time it broke up, he had moved permanently to Vegas and he thereafter became a fixture as a solo act, playing every casino in town, usually in the lounge but also opening for stars and appearing in revues. For the next three decades, Bernie was always playing somewhere in town…even, the last few years, doing "stand-up" from a wheelchair. Whenever I saw him, he always managed to make me laugh.

Almost every day of my life in the last ten years, someone has asked me a question about Jack Kirby. And every day of those ten years, something I see or something that happens in my world causes me to think about Jack and to recall something I was privileged to hear him say. Often, it has nothing to do with comic books, the medium in which he was a declared master. Jack's mind was forever exploding in different directions, few of them predictable and not all immediately understandable. He was unable to drive a car because he could never focus on going in one direction, and conversations with Kirby often went much the same way. He would say something to you that didn't make immediate sense but you'd smile and nod, because Jack was a lovely man and he spoke to everyone, including some gross inferiors, as an equal, and with a great sense of openness and force. In hindsight, some of us came to realize that the bizarre associations and fragments of thought were all coherent and usually brilliant, as well. It just, you know, could take a while to put the pieces in order such that you could see the picture.

What I'm getting at is that today, ten years since he left us, he is still an active, positive force in many lives. Things he said that once seemed overdone are now demonstrably true. Things that seemed true then seem truer today. Time has proven how much of a lead Jack had on mere reality.

I find myself missing Jack while at the same time feeling he is around. His concepts still form the bedrock of so much popular fiction and again, it isn't just limited to comic books. Important authors, artists and filmmakers in a wide array of forms acknowledge his influence, and many of the characters he created or co-created are forever a part of American culture. It's hard to think of a guy like that as dead. Very hard.

At the taping for last night's Late Show With David Letterman, a demonstration went wrong and a snowboarder was injured, apparently not seriously. Nevertheless, the taping was halted and that episode was not completed. If you'd like to know what it was like for those in the studio audience, an attendee posted this message to the Letterman newsgroup. (I hope that link works. Linking to newsgroup messages is an inexact science.)

I mentioned computer viruses earlier. We all have to have a good anti-virus program installed to scan for them (I use Norton) but we also want to keep an eye out for Spyware. These are programs or little files that websites put on our computers in order to find out things about those who surf their sites. Usually, the info they collect is pretty harmless but (1) it's none of their business anyway, (2) sometimes it isn't harmless and (3) Spyware on your computer can reduce its performance level. So we want to keep our computers free of this stuff. The three leading programs that detect and delete Spyware seem to be…

• Ad-Aware – They have a free version and a pay version, and the former will probably be enough for most folks.
• Spybot Search & Destroy – Free but they request donations.
• Pest Patrol – You can download a copy for free that will scan your system and find Spyware. But you have to pay $40 for the version that will remove the intruders it locates.

Now, you're probably wondering which of these you should use. If you want to be truly Spyware-free, the answer is "all of them." I update and run all three about once a week and each finds something the others didn't. In some cases, that's because one program finds out about a given piece of Spyware before the others do. In other cases, the folks behind these detectors simply disagree on how much info a cookie has to gather before they declare it Spyware. I recommend you try at least one…and make sure you update it before each use.

Former president Jimmy Carter is publishing a weblog of his travels.

If you get the MyDoom com computer virus (or any of around 36 of the most popular viruses currently making the rounds), your system can probably be saved by the free Avert Stinger program offered by the McAfee people. It's no substitute for real virus protection but if you catch something, this utility should be able to remove it. Here's the link.

And here's Michael Kinsley's latest column, which is about how Democrats seem to be fumbling about to find the candidate who is least likely to appeal to Democrats. Well, that's not it exactly. Read it and you'll understand.

We're all about to get quite weary of hashing and rehashing the issue of gay marriage. It probably is not, like guns and abortion and where to get the best pizza, one of those ceaseless arguments. That is, it has a resolution but right now, none of those arguing it in the public arena are looking for a solution or compromise; they want to keep it going until they win in full. Many are also eager to use it as a tool to win some election and/or unseat some incumbent.

There actually is a quickie solution, though almost no one will go for it. Last July, Michael Kinsley offered this concept that would work great if everyone really wanted to hurry and put the issue behind us. But among those who argue such things in legislatures and the press, no one really does. It's too tempting a battleground to, on the one hand, argue for less government intervention into bedrooms and the other, fight against what some see as a perilous decline of the family unit. There are also, of course, homosexuals and homophobes and never the twain shall meet.

I think gay marriage is inevitable in this country and like certain past issues of civil rights, its opponents will come to be ashamed of what may now seem to them as a principled stance. But I also think it's going to take a while. We're still at the stage when most candidates (and I include both Bush and Kerry in this) look like their carefully-worded positions come out of focus groups and polling, not their respective hearts. There are votes to be harvested so we have to listen to what I consider a bogus argument that gay marriage somehow undermines straight marriage. It certainly doesn't speak well for straight marriage that it can be harmed if the two guys down the street, who are already committed to one another, add an extra level of stability to that commitment and get a better insurance plan.

Amidst all the debate, public opinion will swing back and forth. At some point, the pendulum will swing far enough in favor of gay marriage that it will become the law of the land in most states…and nothing catastrophic will occur. Straight marriages will not suffer irreparable damage. God will not smite us all or send locusts to devour our crops. A lot of people who are currently in the middle on the issue but leaning against gay rights will realize it's not that big a deal if we acknowledge what already exists and give those folks a little more dignity and a few less legal obstacles to happiness. Suddenly, all those leaners will lean the other way and that will take all the steam out of the "anti" side, and we can move on to some other silly battle that also needn't be fought.

That's how I think it will end, but it's going to take a while, especially if the drive to amend the Constitution picks up enough momentum. Right now, there are too many people incensed on the issue, if only because they see it as a symbol of many things they don't like in this world. And there are too many parties who think they can manipulate those incensed people for political advantage. Some of us will be sick of the arguments before the year is out, some before the month is out. I figure I'm good for about another ten days of it. Two weeks, tops.

Scott Shaw! makes no claim to being an unbiased reviewer of the new book by his pal, Floyd Norman. But he comes to all the same conclusions that I came to when I reviewed the same book by my pal, Floyd Norman.

An author-publisher named Clifford Meth is involved in a campaign to convince Marvel Comics, either out of decency or to avoid rotten publicity, to pay royalties to artist Dave Cockrum. Dave and writer Len Wein revamped the old, cancelled X-Men property into the new, wildly profitable X-Men franchise. Now, Dave is ill and unable to work and this article details how Meth and artist Neal Adams are disagreeing on some aspects of the situation — though both agree Dave should receive large checks. (So do I. If I can't get quite as militant about this as they are, it's because I've been through this with too many creators who were in a comparable or worse situation. I may just have exhausted my passion for such crusades.)

The article makes some solid points but when it references Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, it gets some facts wrong. One is the spelling of "Shuster." Search the Internet for comic websites that pay tribute to the creators of Superman and you'll find an amazing array with one or both names misspelled. Then, Siegel and Shuster did not approach National Periodicals with Superman. They submitted it to a syndicate operation that had a division that also printed comic books. That division showed it to DC Comics (it was not yet National Periodicals) and DC approached Jerry and Joe. This may seem like a minor distinction but in the current legal battle over Superman's copyright, this little detail matters a lot.

Also: The settlement Siegel and Shuster received on their Superboy lawsuit was not huge, even for that period, and it is just plain wrong to say that "neither Siegel nor Shuster were able to get work in the industry again." They both had plenty of work in the years that followed. Siegel wrote at one time or another for almost every comic company that was in business, including a return to DC where he authored some wonderful Superman stories between 1959 and 1965. Shuster got art jobs as long as his eyesight held up, which was sadly not for long. I think what happened to both those men was horrible but they certainly got work in the industry after the lawsuit was settled in '48.

Meth's recounting of Neal Adams' crusade to establish credits and a pension for Siegel and Shuster is correct but incomplete. Neal did wonderful, heroic things but so did other folks. Jerry Robinson, for example, was heavily involved in the final negotiations. (I don't mean to take anything away from Neal. Just trying to set the record straight.)

As for Dave Cockrum's situation…Dave's a helluva great guy and a tremendous talent. His contributions to the X-Men have led to zillions of dollars in toy sales alone, without even getting into comic book sales and movies and DVDs and other sources of income based on his designs. I am skeptical that Marvel will create the precedent of cutting him in, but I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.