Monthly Archives: September 2006

Here are the first two paragraphs from Frank Rich's weekend column for The New York Times…

Rarely has a television network presented a more perfectly matched double feature. President Bush's 9/11 address on Monday night interrupted ABC's Path to 9/11 so seamlessly that a single network disclaimer served them both: For dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression.

No kidding: The Path to 9/11 was false from the opening scene, when it put Mohamed Atta both in the wrong airport (Boston instead of Portland, Me.) and on the wrong airline (American instead of USAirways). It took Mr. Bush but a few paragraphs to warm up to his first fictionalization for dramatic purposes: his renewed pledge that we would not distinguish between the terrorists and those who harbor or support them. Only days earlier, the White House sat idly by while our ally Pakistan surrendered to Islamic militants in its northwest frontier, signing a truce and releasing Al Qaeda prisoners. Not only will Pakistan continue to harbor terrorists, Osama bin Laden probably among them, but it will do so without a peep from Mr. Bush.

The entire column can be read here if you're a subscriber to TimesSelect. If not, you're either out of luck or you'll have to find one of the many websites that repost Rich's columns in full.

As you may have heard, a woman committed suicide the other day after a blistering interview with Court TV host Nancy Grace. The few times I've watched Grace, I've found her whole act pretty tasteless. She seems to operate off the premise that a person who's under suspicion of a crime is probably guilty and once they're arrested, you can remove that bothersome "probably" qualifier and get on with the sentencing.

Even worse to me is this notion that if your life is touched by crime, the only appropriate response is pure, uncontained rage. For some, that may well be the proper course but there are those forms of anger that are self-destructive and which serve to extend the damage. There are also some people who simply can't handle the anger. I'm thinking now of one acquaintance of mine who, years ago, was a crime victim. The harm done to him by the criminal was nothing compared to the harm my friend proceeded to do to himself, hungering for some kind of revenge that became increasingly unattainable. In fact, it was almost like he was consciously enlarging his victimhood until it became so large that no one could ever take it away from him.

In the case of the lady quizzed by Nancy Grace, the news clips I've seen suggest that she was almost attacking Melinda Duckett for not playing her prescribed role on a TV cable news crime investigation. It's all pretty disturbing and I think I agree with most of what Dahlia Lithwick wrote about it.

Ezra Klein says some wise things about the governor's race here in California.

A lot of e-mails this morning from Jack Kirby fans taking wild and informed guesses as to who inked the Orion figure on the cover of New Gods #1. The first five to get it right were (in order of time stamps on their messages), Joe Frank, Giles Lindley, Kurt Mitchell, Mark Daniel and Patrick Shaugnessy.

The correct answer is Don Heck but there's a little more to the story than that. I have to write my next column for The Jack Kirby Collector this weekend and I'll recount it all in there. I figure anyone who cares about this stuff has a subscription to that fine publication.

DC Comics has announced that they will soon issue The New Gods Omnibus, a series of volumes that will reprint in full, Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" series from the early seventies plus the additional material Jack did in 1984 — an extra story plus his grand finale graphic novel, The Hunger Dogs. I hope to have more information on this project after some firmer decisions are made…but I wanted to mention it's coming, which pleases me greatly. When the core books (The New Gods, Forever People and Mister Miracle) were cancelled in their second year, Jack was very depressed. He knew the work had value and felt there was a market for it if it was released properly. What mitigated his upset was that he knew, even if no one else believed it at the time, that those issues would be reprinted and re-reprinted and re-re-reprinted, etc., over and over, remaining in print long past most other comics of their day. I just wish he could have been around to see it happen for real.

Several people have written to ask me what I think of a petition that is now circulating in some Internet circles. It asks DC to expend the cash and effort necessary to restore, to the extent humanly possible, the original Superman and Jimmy Olsen drawings that Jack did for the Jimmy Olsen comic (some portions of which will figure into the Omnibus) and the first issue of Forever People. My opinion, along with an overview of what I believe happened there, can be found in this article.

Hey, I've written dozens and dozens of articles about Jack and done loads of interviews…but as I posted the above cover to New Gods #1, it dawned on me that I've never explained — because no one ever asked me — what happened there. Jack did the cover without the odd textured pattern in the background. That was added by the DC Production Department when they fiddled with his design. I'll write up the whole story for a future column in The Jack Kirby Collector

Now that I think of it: I'd wager most Kirby scholars don't even know who inked the drawing of Orion on that cover…and I've just decided we're going to have a contest with no prize whatsoever. First person to send me the correct answer will win…nothing. I'll mention your name here but that's it. And to give you a bit of help, here's a hint: It wasn't Vince Colletta, it wasn't Frank Giacoia, it wasn't Mike Royer, it wasn't Jack himself and it wasn't rainbow sugar nonpareils. It was someone who did no other work on Jack's DC books…and that's all I'm going to tell you now. Good night.

We seem to have solved half the mystery — alas, the easier half — of what to call my favorite cookie. About a hundred of you have written in, including a half-dozen folks from Australia where the little colored balls (excuse me, coloured) are known as "Hundreds & Thousands." Others suggested they were called "sprinkles," "dragees" or even "round jimmies."

But the consensus seems to be — and many of you sent links to pages that sell them under this name — "rainbow sugar nonpareils." Some sources hyphenate the last word and some spell it, "nonpariel."

Okay, that's what the decorations are called. Now, what are the cookies called?

I have about a dozen answers, no one of which was given by very many people. So I'm leaning towards the theory that no one is widely accepted. I'll wait a few days to see if anyone convinces me otherwise and then I'll post some of what I've learned.

Here's an example of why we love Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. It's the bit they did on Wednesday's program about news channels using question marks in their on-screen lower-thirds…

Take a moment and read this weblog post by Kevin Drum. It offers some evidence that conservation laws in California are succeeding in making us less energy-dependent without in any way harming the economy. The case isn't utterly conclusive but it's encouraging.

I'm probably way too interested in trying to "blog" (There's got to be a better verb for this than that) from interesting places. We're coming to you at this moment from the world famous Farmers Market in Los Angeles, a touristy assemblage of stores, eateries and markets that I've only been visiting since I was around three. Back then, the strict "moral" sensibilities of the Gilmore Family (They own the place) were reportedly what prevented it from selling alcohol or Playboy or even being open on Sundays. But time moves inexorably in a liberal direction and you could almost tell when some elder Gilmore passed away and the rest of the family had the chance to increase profits by easing up on another taboo. One year, they started opening on Sundays but only during the pre-Christmas shopping season. The world did not end and before long, it was every Sunday. At some point, beer and wine and men's magazines quietly appeared…and now there are a couple of full bars and the newsstands carry Hustler.

But not everything's changed. Magee's still carves a great corned beef sandwich, Patsy's Pizza still serves great spaghetti and meat sauce and Bob's Doughnuts can still sell you the best apple fritter in town. This last is a reasonable assumption by someone who no longer eats much sugar. But sometimes, you can look at an apple fritter and you know. You just know.

I'm typing this on a portable keyboard connected to my iPAQ Pocket PC. The Wi-Fi hotspots here are quite unforgiving and sporadic. I couldn't connect on the south side of the Market, near where the Starbucks is supposed to have the best access and couldn't connect for long on the west side. Then I moved over here to a table near the Pampas Grill, fiddled with my settings and — Voila! — I'm in!

The Pampas Grill is a Brazilian churrasco. Skewers of garlicky chicken legs and huge slabs of rare beef rotate over a fire and whisper to you as you walk past. Between paragraphs here, I'm chewing on a thin slice of Alcatra, which is a cut of beef that is somehow different from Picanha, another cut from the same cow. It all tastes the same to me…all great. In an odd way, writing this helps my digestion. Since my surgery, I'm supposed to take longer between bites so the rhythm of writing while I dine agrees with me. It's like blog / eat / blog / eat / blog…

Getting back to how the Market has changed and not changed in half a century: All around are stalls that sell lovely things to eat…but this is not exactly a food court. For one thing, there are no real chains here…no Sbarro's, no Panda Express, no Wendy's, etc. They're almost all one-of-a-kind operations, usually of the mom-and-pop variety. Some have been here as long as I've been around and they're all pretty good. Oh, every now and then, one of the stalls takes a serious nosedive in quality, usually as the result of new management. Because Farmers Market gets so much tourist trade, the lousy eateries have sometimes been able to hang in there and stay in business longer than they deserve. The locals learn to steer clear of certain businesses but the tourists don't know any better.

Eventually though, a rep for serving lousy food will catch up with the bad places and they'll go away, always to be replaced by something wonderful. For years, there was a terrible Japanese stand called Tokyo House where they served a dish I'd swear was Teriyaki Styrofoam. The Pampas Grill is now where Tokyo House used to be. Over on the west side of the market, there was a little seafood broiler where no one ate more than once. Now residing in that retail space is The Gumbo Pot. I don't know from Cajun food but a lot of prominent food mavens say it serves the best creole jambalaya beignets (or whatever that stuff is) in town.

Okay, my lunch is gone and there are people with full trays hovering about, hoping I am soon to vacate this table. It's time I did. Stay tuned for more Farmers Market Blogging the next time I have the opportunity to get over here. Might be a week or so with my schedule.

A great animator and an old friend of mine, Berny Wolf, has just passed away at the age of 95. Berny had a long career in cartoons that included stints with Paramount, Max Fleischer, Ub Iwerks, Disney, Tex Avery and Hanna-Barbera. Historian Mark Kausler lays out the broad strokes of Berny's animating years in this piece over at Cartoon Brew and I don't think it's even close to complete. I seem to recall Berny telling me, for instance, that he worked for Van Beuren and (briefly) for Paul Terry. It would probably take less time to list the great cartoon studios where Berny never worked.

His credits are, of course, amazing. Just having animated on Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo puts you up there in a rarefied strata of cartoon history. But you'll notice Mark's quick bio jumps from the fifties to the eighties and I can fill in a few of the missing years there. For instance, Bern worked closely with Walt Disney designing attractions for Disneyland, most notably some of the first walkaround character costumes. Through a series of companies he set up, Berny made those and produced industrial cartoons and educational materials for a wide array of clients.

In the seventies, his firm was called Animedia and it was located over on Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake, doing art services — some, animation-related, some not. Among many other projects, he produced hundreds of employee training films for the Toyota company and also handled all the graphics and design work for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. When I edited and wrote Tarzan comic books back then, I did so through Berny's company. I also worked with him on some cartoon mascots for the Olympics, some educational materials involving the Woodsy Owl character, and a couple of animated commercials. He couldn't find anyone else to storyboard one of the commercials before the deadline so, though admittedly rusty, he sat down and drew it himself. It showed he still had it. Even though he'd been away from the drawing board for years, he was still a terrific cartoonist.

He proved it again a decade later when he folded Animedia and went back to animation where (he said) he was happier in every way except financial. Along with the shows Kausler mentions, Berny produced a series for Hanna-Barbera called The Paw-Paws. In the nineties, when he himself was in his eighties, he did some directing work on Garfield and Friends and other shows for Film Roman.

We had a brief e-mail correspondence a few years back and then he suddenly stopped writing. Soon after, his website disappeared and I heard no more from him. The last message he wrote me said he was "…working on some drawings and limited-edition cels." I hope he got some of them done for he really was a great artist. He told me more than once that he'd always regretted he couldn't make the same kind of living as a cartoonist that he made when he produced those training films for Toyota.

Here's a classic cartoon Berny worked on in 1933, when he was a mere lad of 22. In fact, you'll even see his name in the opening credits. It's "The Old Man of the Mountain," one of the Betty Boop cartoons made at the Max Fleischer Studios that utilized the skills of the great Cab Calloway. As you watch it, please think of Berny Wolf…a helluva talent and a true gentleman.

I mentioned someplace here — I forget where — that my taste for sugar and all things sweet has declined since my big weight loss. (And by the way, for those of you who have money riding on this: I am within ounces — ounces! — of being 100 pounds below my highest-ever weight.) Recently, I told you that I'd tried a few of my favorite cookies and found the sensation pleasing but nowhere near as wonderful as it once was.

This prompted several of you to write and ask, "So what is your favorite kind of cookie, Mark?" Well, one of you asked but I decided to seize the opportunity to, at long last, discuss something substantive on this weblog. Above is a photo I just took of an example of my favorite cookie. I have been eating these — not continually, despite what my need for Gastric Bypass Surgery might indicate — since I was about four years old. And you know something? I have no idea what they're called. I've never known.

They're sold in practically every delicatessen in the galaxy. The above specimen — which met its happy demise only seconds after the above photo was taken — was purchased at Canter's Delicatessen on Fairfax and maybe even baked there. For more than fifty years — half a freaking century — I've been buying these all over, mainly by pointing into a display case and saying, "The ones with the colored balls on top." There must be a better name for them than that…and yes, I've tried asking the employees of the various delicatessens. No one has ever given me a genuine answer. They usually say something like, "Oh, those are the ones with the colored balls on them."

Big help, lady. Tell me something I don't already know.

Once, in a deli that didn't look like it did any baking, I asked the woman who waited on me (who turned out to be the owner) if they made them on the premises. She said no. I said, "Great. Now, when you order them from your supplier, what is it you order? What is the name you give them that results in them delivering those cookies to you?" I was excited because I thought I was on the verge of a breakthrough…a revelation for the ages…the best-kept secret of one or more centuries…

She said, "I don't know…I ask them to send more of those cookies with the colored balls on top."

I'm not even sure what the colored balls are called. They aren't "jimmies." Those are long, not round. Some people seem to call the colored balls "nonpareils" or, in this case, "rainbow nonpareils." However, "nonpareil" is also the name of a cookie that is usually chocolate with white balls all over it so I'm guessing that isn't a popular name for the colored balls themselves. I've seen the colored balls sold in the cake decorating section of the market as "rainbow sprinkles" or "confetti" or even just "cake decorations," the last of these suggesting that even the people making them didn't know what to call them. But I've also seen all those terms applied to pastry adornments of other shapes and sizes.

There must be a word that denotes just the round variety. And there must be a name that you could use if you wanted to call a baker and tell him to whip up a batch of cookies like the one in the picture above. Someone…please…tell me what it is and don't toy with me. Not about this. If you write me that it's "the cookies with the colored balls on top," so help me, I'm going to add you to my Spam list and bounce all your e-mails from now on.

Today, we discuss what I think is one of the most gloriously illogical scenes ever in movie history. It's from the 1931 Marx Brothers movie, Monkey Business. Watch it and then let's unpack what happens in it…

Let us review. The boys are stowaways on an ocean liner. They have no passports so they can't get off the ship. Zeppo gets hold of the passport of the great French entertainer Maurice Chevalier and somehow knows that the bearer of it can prove it's his by singing one of Chevalier's songs. Well, that's an obvious assumption now, isn't it? I mean, how else would the customs guys verify that the holder of a passport was indeed that person? They'd expect him to perform his big hit tune, right? So to get off the boat, all four Marxes are going to have to pretend to be someone they're not.

This is not quite ridiculous enough so let's make it worse: Since they have only the one passport, they'll all pretend to be the same person. Not only that but they're all going to pretend to be a well-known celebrity that none of them resembles in any way.

The Italian guy's going to tell them he's Maurice Chevalier. And after that doesn't work, the rude guy with the mustache and no French accent whatsoever is going to tell them he's Maurice Chevalier. Even the guy who doesn't talk is going to claim to be Maurice Chevalier…and he's really got a surefire plan. First, he'll bolster his chances of getting through by throwing around all the papers on the Customs Agents' table like a maniac. That will surely make the officials more likely to believe he's Maurice Chevalier. Then he'll mime to a record, assuming they won't notice the phonograph under his coat, nor wonder about the sudden appearance of musical accompaniment from nowhere. And then to really convince them, he'll mess up all their papers again and rubber stamp the customs agent's bald head. If that doesn't prove he's Maurice Chevalier, nothing will.

(And that's really the point of the whole scene: Nothing will. Harpo's chances of getting through aren't all that much worse than what Zeppo tried, which was to actually impersonate Maurice Chevalier.)

It's the perfect summary of what was wonderful about the Marxes. After spending the first half of the movie doing everything possible to avoid the security personnel on the liner, not one of the four brothers pauses to wonder if it's a good idea to go up to the ship's police and all claim to be someone that none of them could possibly be. Even after the plan has completely failed three times, Harpo doesn't hesitate to try it…and I think it yields one of the most beautiful, wonderful scenes anyone ever put into a movie. Because you can go through life doing things the logical way or you can do them the illogical way. Should you decide to do something the illogical way, the way that is almost certain not to work, you might as well make it all as illogical as humanly possible. If that isn't the best advice in the world then my name isn't Maurice Chevalier.

Jonathan Alter offers an alternative history to 9/11.

I received a number of e-mails this morn from serial buffs who take me to task for suggesting that thirty chapters of Superman serial is anything less than thirty glorious viewing experiences…assuming one has the good sense to watch but one per day. Okay, fine, whatever. They're right that this material wasn't meant to be watched all at once. That's one of the problems of DVD sets.

I also wouldn't suggest watching the three films on the new Laurel and Hardy set back-to-back. As noted here, Stan and Ollie made six films for Twentieth-Century Fox in the forties after leaving their home at the Hal Roach Studios. Some are better than others and all have moments that remind you how brilliant they could be…but when I think of their great movies, none of these come to mind.

A-Haunting We Will Go, despite its title, contains no ghosts or haunting. It has a silly gangster plot and a showy guest role by the famous magician, Dante. There's nothing really wrong with it except that there's nothing really right with it. The Dancing Masters doesn't make a lot of sense and Stan was getting a little old to be parading around in a ballerina costume. The Bullfighters is, I think, the worst movie they ever made. It's actually the only Laurel and Hardy movie in which they're the villains and it has a contrived plot and an ugly, inane end gag. In it, Stan is mistaken for a world famous matador and forced to parade about in stock footage, wearing a matador suit.

Laurel and Hardy fans may argue over my ranking of best-to-worst but few would insist this is the kind of work that made Stan and Ollie perhaps the most beloved screen comedians of all time. Nevertheless, I have ordered this new DVD. Why? Because even weak Laurel and Hardy is better than no Laurel and Hardy. In addition, the DVD set also has commentary tracks by Randy Skretvedt and Scott MacGillivray, two learned scholars of The Boys, plus there are bonus featurettes and trailers and other goodies. If you'd like to order one, here's a link to get it from Amazon. And while you're clicking that mouse of yours, here's a link to get the earlier set with the other three Fox films.

Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy also made two very weak films for M.G.M. in the forties — Air Raid Wardens and Nothing But Trouble. These are due out in November on a low-priced DVD you can order here. Again, weak Laurel and Hardy is better than no Laurel and Hardy…but these movies make it a wee bit harder to believe that statement.

The best Laurel and Hardy work is only slowly making it to DVD with releases like this one that came out last April. More have been rumored but nothing's been announced yet. What we're really waiting for is something deluxe and complete like the set that came out in 2004 in Great Britain, which is unfortunately unplayable on most U.S. DVD machines. Here's a link to the Amazon UK page where you can see what they got over there. It sent American Laurel and Hardy fans into spasms of Brit envy…and out to buy region-free DVD players.

This article in The New Republic says that our military has been mismanaged, both in terms of manpower and equipment, to the point where it's unable to do its job properly. When neo-cons say that we need to send more troops into Iraq or send troops into some other sinkhole of a country, someone oughta ask them just which "more troops" they have in mind.