Monthly Archives: November 2004

How much would you bid for Ringo Starr's stapler? Meryl Streep's? Donald Trump's? How about Florence Henderson's stapler? Well, here's your chance. What are you waiting for?

As predicted here — and I'm not bragging 'cause this was an easy one — the Writers Guild has just overwhelmingly voted to accept the newly-proposed contract. Here are the details of the vote.

I still think this was a crummy contract but I understand why it passed. Very few members spoke up against it and those who did offered no real "Plan B." In a sense, it was like a friend of mine who thinks Bush has completely bungled the Iraq War. The friend voted for him anyway, because he was unconvinced that Kerry had a better — or, at least, markedly different — idea of what to do. I don't like this thinking, either with the presidency or the WGA, but I can certainly understand it.

The Screen Actors Guild is the next major Hollywood union that will have to negotiate a new contract and try to improve DVD revenues. They don't stand much of a chance. What keeps happening in these deals is that Union A settles for no increase but they get some sort of language that suggest that if Union B gets an increase, it will apply to Union A. Then Union A goes to its members and says, to save face and make it sound like a possible gain, "We've locked ourselves into whatever raise they get." But that's not really how it works. What actually happens in this situation is that Union A gets zero and, in the process, locks Union B into the same deal. The Directors Guild settlement undermined the Writers Guild's negotiating position and now the Writers Guild has done the same to the actors.

The good news is that we may have seen the last of the big Hollywood strikes and the bad news is that we may have seen the last of the big Hollywood strikes. I know some people think everyone in show business is overpaid but lately, the weakness of the unions has caused more and more people in the bottom-level jobs to lose ground (and, too often, health insurance) and for that money to go to the folks in the Michael Eisner jobs. At some point, this trend will have to change…but it's going to get worse before it gets better.

We recently wrote here about the Tom and Jerry cartoon series — not the cat-and-mouse but the earlier one about a short guy and a tall guy. We forgot to mention how available their cartoons are if you want to cruise by the cheapo DVD displays at some department stores. I generally find that most of what they put on those cheap videos of public domain material is unwatchable, ninth-generation prints. I once bought a VHS of the p.d. Laurel and Hardy feature, The Flying Deuces, that was so fuzzy, you could barely tell Stan from Ollie. But there are exceptions. Someone went to the trouble of digitizing nine cartoons of the original Tom and Jerry, and they're available on decent-quality DVDs that routinely sell for an entire dollar.  David McLallen found one at a Target store that was put out by Genius Entertainment, whose website is, at this moment, screwed up and not working right. I found a different one at a 99-Cent Only store — a saving of one cent! — which also includes a ten-minute phone card. Even without the phone card, it's a bargain. So if you're like me and you usually bypass cheap video, this is one time you might want to make an exception.

Jonathan Franzen on growing up with Charlie Brown. Not the best piece of this nature that you'll ever read but worth a click.

Somewhere on this page, you'll find a wise and perceptive review of this book.

I've read an awful lot of "Why Bush Won" articles the last few weeks. Democrats are too nice. Democrats are too nasty. Democrats need to be more like Republicans. Democrats need to be more like Democrats. Democrats have to look more to the future. Democrats have to remind America of their past achievements. Democrats need to define "values." Democrats need to forget about "values" and press "solutions." Democrats need to stop listening to people saying what Democrats need to do. Democrats need to — well, you get the concept. In most cases, the advice seems to me to be trying to take an election that may have been lost for a wide range of reasons and distill it down to one quick fix. (Very few seem to even mention the possibility that maybe John Kerry just failed to excite enough people to the point of convincing them to change horses.)

Here's Robert Kuttner with one of the best articles I've read on the topic of "Why Bush Won." There's a lot more that could be said but this piece struck me as casting a wide, reasonable net.

I write a lot about TiVos here because…well, because I have several and think they're the best thing to happen to television since Chuck Barris stopped producing shows. But really what I'm enthused about is Personal Video Recorders, of which the TiVo is but one brand. Here's a site that compares and contrasts several different brands.

The folks over at TV Party — a fine site which you should visit often — have posted video clips of a 1985 interview with the great Jack Kirby. As you'll see, Jack had a tendency to wander in his thoughts when he was being interviewed. You'd ask him about A and he'd reply about B, all the time confusing it with C. Brilliant minds sometimes work that way, and Jack had one of those, along with the skill to put some of what it imagined down on paper. For those of you who never got to meet Jack or hear him speak, this should give you some idea of what he was like…though in private, when he was making less of an effort to be entertaining, he was somewhat more coherent and deeper.

Tom Shales discusses the man in charge of the Federal Communications Commission. [Washington Post, registration perhaps required] The only thing I'd quibble with in this piece is that I'm more bothered by Michael Powell's love of media mergers — the kind that annihilate small, privately-owned stations — than by his slapping fines on broadcasters who air material he considers objectionable. Shales did mention both abuses of power but the fines are one-time incidents and those errant policies can be easily reversed. Undoing the mergers will be a lot more difficult.

Here's Congressman Ron Paul on Federal spending. I don't agree with everything this man believes but I agree with everything in this speech.

Michael Kinsley says that the current mess in Iraq has become a war that many people think is wrong but don't wish to stop. [Washington Post, registration probably required]

I'm a big fan of the shows of Cirque du Soleil, that wonderful mesh of astonishing acrobatics, great costuming, haunting music, expert choreography and incomprehensible storylines. So naturally, I had to go see, as I did last night, the new show by Normand Latourelle, one of the founders of Cirque du Soleil. Cavalia is more or less the same thing, only with horses — 37, to be exact, appearing with a merry band of riders who put them through their paces. There are also acrobats who do impossible physical feats, often with the horses galloping past them, and the whole thing is presently housed out by the Santa Monica Pier in a white, 26,264-square-foot circus big top.

Before I get to the show itself, I want to kvetch about the seats. They're plastic bleachers, the kind where the whole row shakes if the guy nine chairs down from you crosses his legs. Which he probably can't do because anyone taller than Herve Villechaize is going to be darned uncomfy. I'm 6'3" and after we were seated but before the show started, I was seriously considering not staying for it. Two hours in that vise and my legs would have had worse circulation than anything I ever wrote for Eclipse Comics. My friend Carolyn, who often takes better care of me than I do of myself, went and talked to a nice gent who relocated our party of four to the front row, which was somewhat better. Still, I had to wonder how someone taller than me could possibly cope with having his kneecaps resting on his ears.

So much for the seats. Now, did I like the show? No, I did not like the show…though in fairness, a lot of those present (including at least half of my party) liked it very much. I thought the acrobatics, though splendidly executed, were rather pedestrian; nothing I hadn't seen before, including Cirque shows where they were the prelude to more spectacular stuff. The costumes and music failed to thrill me. In fact, there was something about the music that seemed to suck about half the energy out of the tent.

Mostly though, it was the horses…and I like horses. Never rode one, and it's been years since I touched one…but I certainly appreciate the special human-horse "bond" that Cavalia celebrates. What I think I stopped appreciating about ten minutes into the show was Trained Animal acts. The horses trot in precision. They bow. They leap over small hurdles. They dance and walk sideways in lockstep and do all the things they've been trained to do. And as they were doing all those things last evening, I suddenly decided I didn't like Animal Acts just as displays of what an animal can be trained to do. The acts I like create some context and perhaps a little story and personality. The mere fact that a horse can be made to replicate certain actions every night, with matinees on the weekend, is of no more interest than the fact that an alarm clock can be set to go off at a desired time.

I guess I was expecting more of Cavalia. There were some nice moments here and there, and the horses sure were pretty. But at $80-90 a ticket, I won't be going back. Especially to sit in those seats.

When they make a movie of the life of George W. Bush, who should play him? There's only one person.

Got my Podhoretzes confused. I just corrected the previous item to note that I was linking to a piece by John Podhoretz and not his father, Norman Podhoretz. Some days, you can't tell your Podhoretzes without a scorecard. Thanks to Harry Podhoretz McCracken for catching my Podhoretz error.