Monthly Archives: June 2006

Michael Kinsley on the Central Intelligence Agency…the group that no one seems to like much anymore.

Lunch in elementary school could be traumatic. In junior high and high school, it was no problem: I brown-bagged it, bringing in a paper sack into which my mother had inserted either a meat loaf sandwich or a tuna sandwich or a peanut-butter-and-strawberry-jelly sandwich (something of the sort) and a little baggie containing three Nabisco Chocolate Chip Cookies. Today, they call them Chips Ahoy but back then, they were just Nabisco Chocolate Chip Cookies. I'd eat, toss the bag and that would be it.

Not so easy back at Westwood Elementary. Back there, if you didn't have a cool lunch box…well, forget it. You might as well paint a big sign on your butt that read "Mock me unmercifully." I don't recall if a bagged lunch suggested you were poor or low-class or boring or just why it was such a social faux pas. All I remember is that whenever my old lunch box had to be retired, I had to get the new one before the next school day. I didn't dare go to class with my eats in a sack.

Lunch boxes had to be replaced with alarming frequency. (So did our Student Teachers.) On our schoolgrounds, both got battered about a lot — enough that I'm amazed any lunch pails from that period still exist, let alone in "collectible" condition. But what was really vulnerable about them was the thermos bottles. Today, I'm told, they're like the black box on an airplane. Back then…drop one and it was history. Heck, just nudge one and it was goner. You'd shake it, hear the inner lining rattle about like broken glass and then pitch it into a trash can. So what did you do if the thermos in your Porky's Lunch Wagon lunch box (I had one) busted? Well, you didn't replace it with a generic thermos; not unless you wanted snide remarks from your fellow pupils. Instead, you had to get your parents to buy you a new lunch box with matching milk container.

This was how it was in first through third grades while I was at Westwood. In fourth grade, they began having someone sell milk at lunchtime — a little carton for a nickel, sold from a cart behind the cafeteria building that they'd been building since I was in Kindergarten. This simplified the process since you no longer needed a thermos at all. This not only spared you replacing the whole lunch box every few weeks, it enabled all our mothers to pack more into our lunch kits. Mine took to adding in fruit and small packets of Laura Scudder's Potato Chips. I think each packet held about four chips.

Then in fifth grade, they finally got the cafeteria building up and running. I'll write about that wrenching experience in the second part of this post, maybe later today, maybe tomorrow.

If you didn't see last night's episode of The Colbert Report, you missed seeing Mr. Colbert make a Georgia Congressman look like…well, let's just say that if you were running against this man, an interview like this would be your fondest fantasy. The video's a bit fuzzy and it starts a bit slow but stay with this one until the end.

Nathan Newman, in a weblog post, raises an interesting question. Thanks to this morn's Supreme Court decision, it's now Kosher for police to enter your home without knocking or announcing their presence. But there are also laws in some states that say that if an unknown person comes crashing through your door, you have the right to shoot first and ask questions later. So of course, one of these days, someone's going to shoot a cop and offer the latter law as a defense. This strikes me as a set of laws that can't help but clash…and often.

And the Supreme Court decision strikes me as one of the many times Justices who say we should look to the "original intent" of the Constitution and interpret it as per the mindset of the Founding Fathers, have ignored that because it wouldn't have led them to where their present-day guts wanted to go.

I feel almost dirty writing something here about Ann Coulter. It strikes me that all her invective and "controversial remarks" have but one purpose: The financial enrichment of Ann Coulter. There are people out there who hate Liberals and will shell out good money (or tune in talk radio) to enjoy them bashed and attacked…and I don't think most of them even care if the attacks are fair or the facts are accurate. They just want to see "the enemy" slapped around. A similar marketplace is growing with regard to beating up on George W. Bush but it hasn't yet proven to be as lucrative. Judging by the polls, it may still get there.

The section of Coulter's new book that's making headlines and getting her on highly-rated TV shows is her attack on a small group of 9/11 widows whose main sin seems to be that they made commercials for John Kerry. (Has anyone asked her if she'd object to 9/11 widows making commercials for Bush-Cheney?) The premise here is that Democrats — or maybe it's Liberals she's singling out — trot out "victims" to make their cases and then argue that victims are sacred and that the opposition isn't somehow allowed to respond to them.

Seems to me that, first of all, Ann Coulter has no problem responding to victims. So if there's a problem there, her gripe is with folks on her side who allow that to intimdate them. Or maybe they don't respond because some of them think that you lose more than you gain when you attack someone like a 9/11 widow or a mother whose son died in Iraq. Certainly, we see a lot of right-wingers this week who think Coulter's doing more harm than good to their cause. It also seems to me that the unseemly action for a woman whose husband died in the 9/11 tragedies would be to just take the settlement money and go shopping, rather than to try and change the system or demand investigations.

It especially seems to me that George W. Bush and those who support him have done a darn good job of wrapping themselves in victims and other sacred heroes. Bush does it every time he invokes 9/11 in response to some criticism or gets himself photographed with grieving families or surrounded by uniformed firefighters. His supporters do that every time someone faults Bush or Rumsfeld and the rejoinder is, "You're attacking our troops." Same trick: Instead of debating issues, you hide between someone who's considered inviolable. If I thought Ann Coulter was out to get everyone on both sides to knock that off, she'd be my new hero…but I don't. I think she just wants to stir hatreds to sell books.

Last night, Jay Leno had Coulter on, paired with George Carlin for what NBC press releases promised would be mano a mano combat. But that was a false promise because Carlin, even if he thinks Coulter is utterly wrongheaded, is not about to fault someone too much for saying things that some find offensive. He kind of makes his living doing that, after all. Leno offered a feeble challenge to her views but since she's good at this kind of thing and since her supporters packed The Tonight Show audience to cheer her, she came off as a superstar, at least to the kind of viewer likely to ever buy her book. I suppose Jay and his producers thought it was worth it because of the ratings they'd get with the great Carlin-Coulter Slap-Off…but they didn't even get that. The numbers for last night were about average for a Wednesday, maybe even a few tenths of a point off. I'd like to think it's because America, like me, is already bored with this bogus controversy.

There are a lot of "impersonator" plays around these days. I guess it started before Hal Holbrook did his Mark Twain show and before James Whitmore was out there bringing back Will Rogers…but those two spawned a lot of imitations done by imitators of other famous folks.

I guess the format is irresistible. First off, you can usually do these shows with a cast of one, or perhaps a cast of one plus a few musicians. You don't need sets or a lot of costumes. And you start with a lot of great material because you pick one of the famous dead people who left behind writing and monologues and songs, plus there's also the subject's biography which will probably yield some good anecdotes. Plus, you have that Big Star Name. People won't go to An Evening With Ira Lipsitz but they might turn out for An Evening With Someone Famous (as portrayed by Ira Lipsitz).

Some of the ones I've seen have been very, very good (Frank Ferrante as Groucho, for instance). And even the worst of them (I won't name names) had a fair amount of entertainment value, even if it derived from the person being imitated, not from the imitator.

I won't pass judgment on the show being promoted in today's clip, which runs around four minutes, since I haven't seen the whole thing. But I will say it's rather an odd choice of Famous Person to replicate…

Earl Kress has an additional bit of info on the Mel Blanc American Express commercial linked to in the previous item.

A quick one today. It's Mel Blanc's commercial for the American Express card.

Mel told me that it got him more recognition (in terms of people knowing who he was visually) than everything else in his career combined. He also said that it made it impossible for him to use any credit card anywhere without people making remarks. If he used his American Express card, they said something about it — "So this is the famous Mel Blanc American Express card!" And if he used a Visa or MasterCard, of course, they said, "What's wrong? You leave home without it?" But he was very happy he'd done the spot. Here 'tis…

I thought last Sunday night's Tony Awards ceremony was rather unremarkable. The lack of a central host gave the proceedings an impersonal feel and while nothing particularly awkward or uncomfortable occurred, nothing all that memorable did, either. I sure didn't get the feeling that most of the live audience in the hall cared that much who won so one can imagine how hard they were sweating out the results in Idaho. It seemed to me that Jersey Boys probably sold a lot of tickets with the number they presented on the telecast and that no other show did anything that would send audiences stampeding to the box office or even the TKTS booth.

But the broadcast did okay in the numbers. Ratings were up a bit, a fact that may stem from the fact that (a) unlike many years past, the show was not up against some blockbuster competition and (b) the total number of awards shows on the networks has declined, thereby making each one that remains a bit more special. And Broadway is probably happy that unlike most past years, the Tony Awards have not been followed — so far — by a sudden rash of shows announcing that they're closing. So maybe the ceremony does have a place on network television after all…a view that was hotly contested just a few years ago.

The Silent Movie Theater is getting new ownership and a new policy that will include talkies. This article tells all about the changes.

As explained in this piece I wrote some time ago, the venerable film palace was an important part of my teen years. Still, I'm past the point of being outraged over any changes made to it. I have a certain skepticism about anyone ever being able to make a go of it so I feel they should try whatever they think might make it viable. It's in a bad location (no parking) and it's small and now that most classic films are available on DVD, I'm not sure there's much of a market for showing old movies. Still, I like the idea that the institution John Hampton erected is still there, still showing great films, so I wish the new owners well. I'm sorry that I just don't seem to get there often, even though I could practically walk to the theater.

I was disappointed with Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman. That's the new documentary about You-Know-Who that debuted this evening on the A&E Network. It pretty much drives home the fact that to the folks who now control the property — and who obviously controlled the documentary to the extent of making its latter segments an infomercial for current TV and movie projects — the comic books are an incidental sidebar in the character's history. Every TV, movie and radio appearance was mentioned but the comics got a surface treatment, barely epidermis-deep. Although a few writers like Mark Waid and Elliott Maggin were interviewed about the character's history, I don't think anyone after Jerry Siegel was mentioned as having written 60+ years of Superman comic books and the artists didn't fare any better. No mention of Curt Swan or Wayne Boring or Al Plastino or any of them.

For that matter, as the history was recounted, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had the vision, did the first stories and were thereafter unworthy of further mention. What became of them? We heard a lot more about the fate of the men who portrayed Superman on screen than we did about the men who created him. Of course, some of this was because of current litigation and long-time corporate embarrassment…but I suspect most of it was because Time-Warner is pushing the Smallville series and the new Superman Returns movie. The other stuff can be mentioned for historical context but only as it sets up the current product as the culmination of all that has gone before.

I also thought the documentary ginned up a lot of vague, unconvincing reasons for Superman's enduring popularity. The explanations seemed flimsy and forced. I know some of the people interviewed have deeper, personal affections for the character. It would have been nice to hear more along those lines and less from the producers of the current movie…which, if we are to believe the documentary, already has people flocking to it even though it has yet to open.

And this may just be a personal prejudice of mine from having seen too many of these. There seems to be a law among documentarians that if your subject spans the sixties and seventies, you must include news footage of the J.F.K. assassination, Vietnam protests and Nixon's resignation. Not only that but you must draw some sort of line, however forced, between those events and your story. In this case, the throughline seems to be that the murder of Kennedy caused the mass disillusionment of a generation and led to things like race riots and war protests…and this, in turn, made Superman — as a defender of the status quo — seem irrelevant. I think both premises are questionable or, at best, gross oversimplifications.

Finally, I think Kevin Spacey may be the best actor working today. Isn't it amazing that as a narrator, he's monotonous and unable to sound the least bit interested in the topic at hand?

Maybe I shouldn't carp because these specials are usually even farther off the mark. But so much work went into this one that, I dunno, I somehow was expecting something with a bit more substance. As it was, I guess it was a nice collection of clips…especially from films and TV shows that Warner Home Video has coming out.

Gilbert Gottfried reports from the floor of the 2006 E3 videogame convention.

The Vallely Archives, a weblog devoted to the work of illustrator Henry E. Vallely, recently found an example of how Bob Kane (or his ghost of the moment) had swiped a memorable panel in the first issue of Batman from Vallely's work. Shocking? Maybe…especially now that they've found another example.

Did I ever mention here that after a slow start, I've warmed to The Colbert Report? Never miss an episode. It and The Daily Show form the strongest back-to-back comedy bloc I've ever seen on television. In fact, I find myself reading the news now and sometimes thinking, "Boy, what Colbert's going to do with that." He oughta have a field day with this story.

John Derbyshire, who has been one of the leading Conservative pundits of the last few years, feels that everyone who supported the War in Iraq ought to start apologizing.