Want to know what one-time Saturday Night Live star Tim Kazurinsky is up to these days? My pal Bruce Reznick sent me this link to an article about his current whereabouts. I always thought Kazurinsky was the funniest thing on SNL during a few years when not much was and I'm glad to see he's doing well. I also think that the idea of him and George Wendt doing The Odd Couple is great casting. Wish I could have seen that.
Monthly Archives: February 2012
Old L.A. Restaurants: C. C. Brown
I'm always suspicious of restaurants that claim to have invented some item that you now find on menus everywhere. In Philadelphia, there are at least three places that will swear to you the Philly steak sandwich was first served on their premises, and there are two in L.A. alone (Phillipe's and Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet) that insist they originated the French Dip.
Legend has it that the hot fudge sundae was the creation of one Clarence Clifton Brown, serving patrons a dish of ice cream with a little apply-it-yourself flask of molten chocolate. This supposedly occurred in his parlor in downtown L.A. in 1906. In 1929, his son Cliff moved the business to 7007 Hollywood Boulevard, just down the street from Grauman's Chinese Theater. There it stood for decades, serving sundaes to celebrities and to tourists who came by to watch the celebrities eat sundaes. Its lush interior — mahogany booths with pink leather seats — was seen in several movies including Minnie and Moscowitz.
I went there the first time as a kid in the mid-sixties and the sundae was delicious but a bit of a disappointment. From all I'd heard about it in advance, I was expecting something that would put your basic Baskin-Robbins sundae to shame…and the one at C.C. Brown's was only marginally better. Which is not to say it was anything but delicious. I just imagined the world's greatest hot fudge sundae, as I'd long heard it was, would do something more than just taste good.
The establishment on Hollywood Boulevard finally closed in 1996, its final days marked by a stampede of patrons who acted like they might never taste a decent hot fudge sundae again. The company seems to still exist, franchising the name and selling fudge and yogurt and (I think) ice cream, as well. In many a restaurant, you can still find the assertion that they're serving a C.C. Brown hot fudge sundae indistinguishable from the original…but I'll bet most of those places microwave the fudge.
Today's Bonus Video Link
I don't usually embed Daily Show videos here because the Comedy Central codes are kinda screwy but this one's too good. Jon Stewart is right. Most of this talk about religious persecution in America (the part that isn't just about scaring people into voting against Obama) is about religious folks who are upset that everything isn't done their way…
More on John Severin
Our friends at The Comics Journal have posted Gary Groth's long 1999 interview with John Severin. Well worth a read.
Near the end, Gary asked Severin about a story for DC called "Spoilers" written by Jerry DeFuccio and Severin says he has no memory of it. This may be because he didn't do it for DC. A few years earlier, DeFuccio — who was then an Associate Editor for MAD — was trying to put together a magazine for a new publisher. It would have been almost identical to Warren's old Blazing Combat — war tales drawn by a lot of the same people, only edited and written by DeFuccio. Jerry commissioned a couple of stories for it, paying the artists out of his own pocket. Then the project fell apart and he recouped his investment by selling the finished material to DC for its war books. "Spoilers" was one of those stories.
They're Coming For Me!
The last few years, my dining habits have changed. Some of this is no doubt due to my big weight loss in 2006 following Gastric Bypass Surgery. Some of it, I suspect, is for other reasons, one of which is that some of the things I used to eat are simply not as good as they used to be. Whatever the reason, I have lost all of my interest in dessert-type foods or in anything sweet (including fruit and fruit juice) and also in most fast food.
As a native Angeleno, I'm supposed to think In-N-Out makes the best burger anywhere but I don't. If you do, fine. No point in us arguing. I just didn't like the last few I had so I decided to give up going to them. I have gushed extensively about the Five Guys chain in large part because it's just about the only fast food out there nowaday that appeals to me at all.
When I commenced gushing here, the nearest Five Guys to my home was more than two thousand miles away so there wasn't much chance of binge eating there. Now, they're popping up all over California. A Five Guys opens today not far from where I live. In fact, though I wasn't present for this monumental event, it was supposed to have opened about twenty minutes ago. I'll probably give them a week or so to practice on others before I venture by.
It's across the street from a market I patronize and one block from where I get the scripts copied for The Garfield Show. My friends assume I'm doing cartwheels to have one kinda in my neighborhood. Not really. In a way, that makes them too available.
The smaller Five Guys burger, which is more than enough for me and sometimes goes unfinished, represents 480 calories. Add in my usual toppings and we're at around 520.
Their regular order of fries — and there's no point in going to Five Guys if you don't eat the fries — is 620. Now, it's voluminous enough for about 93 people but I never eat an entire order. I don't think I even eat half an order. Since I don't like potato skin on my fries and sometimes have digestive problems with it, I toss those out. (Actually, last time I offered them to a couple at the next table who were splitting a small burger and appeared to not be able to afford one apiece or fries. I made two people very happy.)
If one eats just the internal fries — the skinless ones — I figure it's a third to a half of a full order. But then again, I don't know how Five Guys can calculate the size of an order since the employee just dumps fries into the paper bag with your burger. For the sake of discussion, let's say I'm getting 380 calories there. Add in zero more from my usual bottle of water and my Five Guys meal is running 900 calories, half of them from fat. This is all apart from the free peanuts I consume on the premises.
Even if that's my only substantive meal of my day, that's too much…so the new Five Guys in my area is way too close. That is, if I drive. If I walk there, we're looking at around three miles round-trip and the exercise will cancel out some (not all) of those calories. So then it will not be way too close. Only too close.
Before, I only got near one about every six or eight weeks. Now, I'll often be in the vicinity of that Five Guys, plus there are others about to open in areas where I often wander — one in Westwood Village, another out in Studio City near Coldwater and Ventura. At the rate they're expanding, I expect to find one in my garage by Christmas. I have pretty good will power about this kind of thing…but boy, they sure aren't making it easy.
Recommended Reading
Andrew Sullivan thinks all this talk about contraception is causing the extreme right-wing to place themselves precisely where Barack Obama wants them. Maybe so. I do think that trying to restrict birth control is a political loser. It may not be in the Bill of Rights but for most people in this country, the right to control when they have sex, and whether it's for recreation or procreation, is as sacred as anything covered by the First Amendment and maybe even the Second.
But then I think this whole "war on religion" thing is a bogus, ginned-up controversy to try and drum up votes against Obama. He's apparently also trying to take everyone's guns away even though he hasn't actually done anything to make that happen.
John Severin, R.I.P.
John Severin, hailed as one of comics' great illustrators, has left us at the age of 90. He was much admired for his work on war and western comics, to which he brought a serious sense of authenticity and research. And he was also known for his work in humor. For years, he was the star artist of Cracked magazine and sixty years ago, his work appeared in the first issue of MAD.
Severin began drawing at such an early age that he was having work published by age ten. He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York where he became friends with many comic book superstars of the future including Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Al Jaffee and Al Feldstein. He would later share a studio with some of those men and work with Kurtzman and Feldstein at EC Comics. (Severin not only drew for EC but was also an editor there for a while.) For a time, he and Elder were a team with Severin penciling and Elder inking. Their first professional assignment, which predated EC, appears to have been a story in a 1948 issue of Headline Comics, published by Prize. The job was given to them by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.
Most of Severin's work through the fifties was for Prize, EC and for Timely/Atlas, which is now known as Marvel. In the sixties, he worked mainly for Marvel (on Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, among other features), for Warren Publishing and for Cracked. Later, he worked for DC, Dark Horse and many other companies. Often, he was cast in the role of inker where he usually overpowered the pencilers, outputting finished work that at first glance looked like pure John Severin. It also always looked very, very good. Among his happiest jobs were the few (too few, he felt) times when he was engaged to ink pencil art done by his sister, Marie. Marie followed her older brother into the comic book industry, colored his work and the work of others at EC, then became a valuable member of the Marvel art staff. (Marie is currently recovering from a stroke.)
I had the pleasure — and that it was — to interview John privately at the one Comic-Con International he attended and to also see one of my comic book scripts illustrated by him. I wish there had been more of both. I'd been warned before our conversation that he was a serious man who had strident, right-wing political opinions but we got along great even when the conversation veered unexpectedly into a discussion of Vietnam. He did not particularly enjoy the convention experience so he was rarely seen at them. That was a shame if not for him then for the legions of fans, including many professionals. All would have liked the chance to tell him how inspiring his artwork was. Even Jack Kirby used to say that when he had to research some historical costume or weapon for a story, it was just as good to use a John Severin drawing as it was to find a photo of the real thing. They don't make 'em like that anymore.
My Tweets for 2012-02-14
Fast Food Fix
According to this article, the Arby's Roast Beef Sandwich chain is planning a complete makeover of the company with a new logo, a new restaurant design and a new menu. I wonder if they've considered adding roast beef to the concept.
Today's Video Link
This may come in handy. And it also works with fat relatives…
Recommended Reading
Someone named Kemstone has written a piece about Barack Obama that is well worth your time.
The Delicate Delinquent
Hey, remember that evening with Jerry Lewis last week that I told you about here? Well, Jerry's interviewer Leonard Maltin tells us what it was like from his vantage point. Leonard is being diplomatic when he suggests that Jerry tends to wander off topics.
Go Read It!
Drew McWeeny went to the movies and wasn't wild about the person sitting next to him.
Old L.A. Restaurants: Woody's Smorgasburger
It was sad when they turned the last outpost of Woody's Smorgasburger, down on Sepulveda just South of LAX, into an International House of Pancakes. Lo, how the mighty have fallen. In the sixties, there were Woody's all over California, including a wonderful one in Westwood Village, a block or three from U.C.L.A., where I could often be found between (and once in a while, even during) classes.
Woody's was the first chain I know of where you could get a hamburger and then carry it over to a little self-service counter stocked with ketchup, mustard, onions, pickles, salsa, barbecue sauce, etc., and do whatever you wanted to it. Today, there are chains aplenty that offer this but at the time, it was something rather special.
Woody's burgers were pretty darn good too, with a nice barbecue flavor…and every Woody's also had a "make your own sundae" bar: You could get an empty dish at the counter, fill it full of soft-serve vanilla ice cream, then slather it in a diverse selection of syrups and sprinkles and crushed nuts and such. My old comic club buddies and I would practically have a contest to see how much sundae we could get in one dish, building structurally-unsafe vertical arrays, then trying to walk them back to the table and devour the top stories before it all collapsed like a Jenga tower in an earthquake.
One of the guys once asked if he was allowed to put the toppings from the sundae bar on his burger or vice-versa. When they told him yes, he began speculating on what hot fudge or whipped cream would do to a hamburger, and whether the maraschino cherries would blend with the mustard or if he should leave the mustard off. Each visit to Woody's, he'd say, "Next time, I'm going to try it," but he never worked up the courage. Or wanted to spoil a good smorgasburger.
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and fifty in a series…
