Monthly Archives: May 2010

An interview with Lorne Michaels.

Don't miss this one! Tomorrow (Wednesday) on Stu's Show, host Stu Shostak welcomes four of the greatest voices in all of animation — Alan Young, June Foray, Gregg Berger and Bob Bergen. That's right: Scrooge McDuck, Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Grimlok and Porky Pig, together again (and they say) for the first time.

You know Alan Young from shows like Mister Ed but you might not also know of his extensive career Scrooging and Smurfing and acting in front of microphones. And of course you know June Foray, the first lady of cartoon voicing…the voice of not only Rocky but also Natasha, Nell Fenwick, Granny (owner of Tweety) and so many more.

Gregg Berger and Bob Bergen are of a newer era. Gregg, I work with every week on The Garfield Show, for which he supplies the sounds of Odie and the voices of many supporting players. He's also been heard on G.I. Joe, Transformers, Spider-Man, Men in Black and…well, it's a long list. Bob is the new voice of Porky, and sometimes of Tweety and other Blanc-begun superstars, plus you've heard him in around two-thirds of all the animated features made in the last decade and shows like Fraggle Rock and Lunatics. A great crop o' guests.

What you want to do is listen live tomorrow at 4PM Pacific, which is 7PM on East Coast and other times in other zones. You can probably figure out when it's hearable where you are…but they do it live from Chatsworth, California for two hours beginning at 4:00. Go to the website for Shokus Internet Radio, click where they tell you to click and then those four grand voices will come streaming out of those pitiful speakers you have on your computer. The show repeats in the same slot throughout the week but you want to listen live so you can hear it as it happens. You can even phone in and ask a question. Like the man (me) said: Don't miss this one!

Fred Kaplan tells us what the White House figures to do about Afghanistan. I don't really understand it. I'm just glad Fred does.

The Comics Journal has posted the full (I believe) text of Gary Groth's 1994 interview with Frank Frazetta. Well worth reading if you haven't. Well worth reading again if you have.

I agree with Matt Taibbi. This new talk of suspending Miranda rights for terrorist suspects is ridiculous. It's not going to make it any more efficient to interrogate these guys (though it might make it more difficult to convict them) and it's only being discussed because some people have a bogus notion of what it means to "get tough" with the bad guys. The Obama Administration is trying to pacify those who will never be pacified…and the whole thing's going to blowback and harm everyone. I'd like to hear if anyone who actually has to interrograte suspected bombers thinks that "Mirandizing" someone is in any way an obstacle to getting the job done.

There's a reason Newsweek magazine is up for sale and it isn't just that magazine sales everywhere have plunged over the last decade or three. It's that Newsweek, which once represented a high standard in journalism, has reached the stage where they'll publish darn near anything. A recent example is this silly piece by Ramin Setoodah that argues — ineffectively, I might add — that while straight actors generally have no trouble playing gay, the opposite is…

Well, I'm not sure if Setoodah's claim is that it never works (which is what the headline on the piece says) or that "it's rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse," which is what the article itself says. Either way, he makes a pretty lame case for his position by hanging it largely on Sean Hayes' performance in the new Broadway revival of Promises, Promises. He says the critics ignored how "wooden and insincere" the gay guy was playing straight. Well, maybe they ignored it…or maybe they just plain disagreed. The show itself got tepid reviews but Hayes was widely-praised and has recently been nominated for every possible acting award including the Tony.

Hayes' co-star in the show, Kristin Chenoweth, promptly hopped to his defense with a scathing, spot-on rebuttal…and good for her. So what if we know Hayes isn't, in real life, likely to lust after a lady the way he lusts after Ms. Chenoweth on stage? If Mr. Setoodah thinks most people have a problem with that, someone oughta tell him, "No, you have a problem with that." Indeed, his whole piece reflects an unhealthy interest in strangers' sexuality.

Some people have way too much concern over what kind of person others opt to sleep with. Years ago at a comic convention in Detroit, I was answering questions about working in Hollywood and one questioner caused me to do one of those bad, Benny Hill double-takes. He asked, innocent in tone, "How can you work with all those homosexuals in the business?" My answer, once I got my bearings, was that my co-workers' sexuality mattered so little that I didn't really even know how many people around me were gay. Some folks, obviously, advertise it in the way they talk or act. With others, you're aware of it because they casually make reference to their mates. When you hear certain names or pronouns, you think, "Oh, he's gay," and it impacts your life about as much as if you found out a co-worker was Canadian or he came from a large family. It's just something you didn't know about them before, probably because you didn't care. Among the many things wrong with laws like "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" and Prop 8 out here is that they make a legal issue out of sexual identity…and unless someone's signing up for a dating service, that's unnecessary.

If an actor is unconvincing in a role, he or she is unconvincing. I've seen plenty of films and plays where the leading man didn't really seem to have the proper passion for the leading lady but that wasn't because the leading man was gay. Often, it's because he's not a very good actor…and that's what's wrong there. Come to think of it, it's also possible for a heterosexual leading man to not have any romantic interest in his heterosexual leading lady or for a straight guy to not know how to properly woo a lady. If you're out in the audience and you can't get your mind off what the Enquirer says about the love life of the folks on the stage or screen, that's unfortunate…for you.

Woody Allen just read that new book about Warren Beatty.

Yes, I know many sources are saying that the great fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta has passed away…and it may be true. Given his poor health lately, it would certainly not be surprising. But we have certain loose standards here about how "verified" this kind of report has to be before we proclaim it, and this one hasn't yet met those standards. Stay tuned.

If you suddenly need to fly anywhere tomorrow or Wednesday, go to JetBlue and see what their rate is. They're having a ridiculous sale with coast-to-coast fares for $10.

To quote WikiPedia, which as we all know is never wrong about anything, "A foreword is a (usually short) piece of writing often found at the beginning of a book or other piece of literature, before the introduction; this may or may not be written by the primary author of the work."

That's the word for an intro: Foreword. Not "Forward." Not "Foreward." Foreword. I have composed tons of them and if I title the manuscript page with that word, I always spell it correctly. You'd be amazed at the number of times I receive the printed book and discover I've written a foreward or a forward…and once, I'd even written a forword.

I have nothing more to say on this topic but I felt I had to say this. You can probably guess why.

Yesterday afternoon, I went to Costco for lunch and had a nice feast of Costco dim sum. That's what I call the copious free samples you can get there, wandering from aisle to aisle, taking little noshes from ladies in hairnets. The teriyaki chicken bites were so good, I doubled around for seconds, hoping the hairnet lady wouldn't recognize me and yell, "Hey, one to a customer, sport!" I could eat very well at Costco for free if I could just figure how to get out of that place without spending $300 on a lifetime supply of baking soda.

Then I replenished my car — thirsty from the long shlep to and from Riverside — with Costco gas…and got to thinking. We used to buy gas in this country based, at least in part, on the premise that one brand was better than another. I had the idea, and I'm not sure where I got it, that my old Buick Skylark ran well with Shell or 76, not so well with Chevron or Texaco. To this day, I'll sometimes bypass Chevron for Shell…and I don't even have that car anymore, nor any reason to suspect my current auto cares.

Of course, that preference is only exercised when the two brands are close to the same price. I'm wondering what percentage of Americans take anything else into account except price and maybe which station is easiest to get in and out of. A distant third might be the business practices of the company. I forget which outrage it was — the Valdez spill, maybe — but I stopped buying Exxon a long time ago. I've only purchased Exxon gas once since then. It was a time when I was in a strange and desolate area, the needle was hovering around "E" and the Exxon station looked like the only option for miles. So I bought there but I still felt like I was reneging on a sacred vow.

Oil companies used to advertise heavily that their brand was better for your car…their gas had certain additives that let it run cleaner, longer, happier. They still do a little of that advertising but my sense now is that some don't advertise much, and those that do put the main emphasis on saying, not exactly in these words, that their company isn't destroying the planet quite as rapidly as others. BP, it always seemed to me, sold nothing much beyond the same gas and the notion that they were somehow greener than their competition. (The station near me used to actually give away flower seeds.) I would imagine that a lot of the money they'll wind up spending on the clean-up of the Gulf Coast will be diverted into an attempted clean-up of their reputation.

As I was pumping my vehicle full of Costco gas, I realized I had no idea what kind of gas it was, where it comes from, how good it might be for my car. Since I don't think Costco owns any oil wells, they must buy it from other companies…probably whoever will give them the best deal that month. It could be Exxon for all I know but I prefer to think it's just Costco gas. It's cheap and that's all that really matters.

My father would have loved Costco gas. In fact, he would have just plain loved Costco. He was a very generous man. If I asked for something, I got it. This was, of course, because I was prudent enough to never ask for anything he couldn't afford…but the point is that he didn't balk. "My son wants it? Fine." That was the attitude. Same deal if my mother wanted anything. But beyond that, he was very frugal, sometimes illogically so. I guess that was the case with a lot of folks who grew up in the Great Depression (the last one) and never in their later lives got near any standard of affluence.

I'm recalling when gas was around 29.9. This was in the sixties. 29.9 was a common price but out in Venice, about a seven mile drive from our house, there was a station that was always a penny cheaper. If gas was 29.9 down the street from us, it was 28.9 at this one place in Venice. My father used to drive out there — make a special trip — just to fill the tank on his old Oldsmobile Cutlass.

I guess I thought I was helping when I pointed out how silly this was. The car held 20 gallons…and of course, he didn't wait 'til it was bone dry to fill up. He went when it was down to about a quarter-full, so the most he could save was around fifteen cents. From that, you had to subtract the cost of the gasoline consumed by driving out to Venice and back. I figured it out once and he was getting 13-15 miles to the gallon so deduct a penny. He was spending about ninety minutes, the length of the journey, to save fourteen cents. If you factored in wear and tear on the car, maybe twelve.

My father was not paid well at his job but his time was worth a lot more than eight cents per hour. Heck, he paid a kid down the block two bucks an hour to mow our lawn. But he could somehow not get over the idea that it was worth 90 minutes of his life to drive to the station in Venice. He kept telling me that if he paid 29.9, he was being played for a sucker.

I learned many things from my father, mostly having to do with common decency and compassion and honesty and avoiding pointless angers and tensions. And then there were those lessons I learned by observing him and making up my own mind to not follow some example. His kind of False Economy was one of the these. There are expenditures I don't make because I'd feel like a sucker but they're for a lot more than fourteen cents…or even the present-day equivalent adjusted for inflation. As a freelance writer for (now) going on 41 years, I've learned to value my time as well as my money. I feel like I'm doing right by both when I go to Costco…getting good prices but also stocking-up on supplies so as to save myself frequent trips to the market.

As I said, my father would have loved the chain. Similar stores were around when he passed away and I don't know why he never went to one. Come to think of it, I don't know why I'm writing about my father on Mother's Day…or why Costco made me think of him when I was there, in part, to buy crates of things my mother needs. Maybe it was because he was always buying her what she needed and now I have that responsibility. In any event, remind me on Father's Day to write about my mother. Just to balance things out.

Fred Kaplan, who gets plugged on this site even more often than Frank Ferrante, tells us lots of things I didn't know about the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. Apparently, Barack Obama is telling the world a lot of things they didn't know about it. Somehow, as I read this, I kept thinking of Dr. Strangelove explaining that the whole point of having a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret…