Monthly Archives: August 2015

Daniel Larison on the Republican debates. He, like many people, think Carly Fiorina "won" the first debate, the one that is like the points on Whose Line Is It Anyway? He thinks no one "won" the second especially in demonstrating any real grasp of foreign affairs.

I'm writing up a post on Jon Stewart's last Daily Show, which disappointed me in many ways. I don't think I'll have it up here until tomorrow but if the script I'm writing today goes south on me, I may stop working on it 'til tomorrow and finish the blog post today. Hopefully, not.

Last night, I watched the first Republican Debate and the last Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I enjoyed one more than the other.

The "debate" — I think that's the wrong term for that format; joint press conference is more like it — was about what I expected. Today, websites are filled with fact-checking which shows that a lot of untrue things were said. The most annoying thing about the event may be that that doesn't matter; that when we speak of who won and who lost and who helped their campaign, no one loses significant points either for lying or not knowing what's going on in the world. Swagger seems to matter more. Even people whose main complaint about Obama is that they think every single thing he says is a lie don't care much when their guy fails to connect with the truth as long as he seems passionate and outspoken.

I find it hard to imagine any of those ten men inspiring voters for any reason other than they have an "R" after their names on the ballot. A lot of them looked like they'll say anything to get elected. Scott Walker is sure he could get our allies to reimpose sanctions on Iran? No, he can't.

Mike Huckabee complains about Obama unconstitutionally using executive power to accomplish goals but pledges he himself will use executive power to overrule the Supreme Court. Does anyone buy that? And, uh, what happens when the Supreme Court says he can't do that? We'll never know because he's never going to be president.

Trump was Trump. The people who love his "unfiltered" remarks got enough of them to love. I still think his lead is like the similar lead Rudy Giuliani had at this point in the 2008 election. In Trump's case, I get the feeling he'll be in it as long as he can sell himself as the leader and that he'll find some lame excuse to bow out once he starts not being in first place in some primaries. Fox News seems to be trying to sell him today as the Big Loser last night. I don't think he was but he did demonstrate that he doesn't have (or perhaps isn't interested in) real answers to policy questions. And he probably did lose a bit of ground with women voters.

The rest? Ben Carson looked like he'd been prescribing recreational drugs for himself. John Kasich probably helped himself in that no one knew who he was before the debate and now some do. I was impressed with Marco Rubio up to the point where he got more extreme over abortion than most "pro-life" voters and even his own past positions. Ted Cruz has outrage to offer and not much else. Rand Paul looked like a guy who hasn't gotten the memo that his campaign is over.

Chris Christie actually had some decent moments, I thought, but it's too little, too late. The guy needs to cut himself away from the herd somehow and he missed an opportunity to do it. He isn't going to win sounding like everyone else.  Come to think of it, he isn't going to win no matter what he does.

If I had to bet on which one of those people is going to be the nominee, I'd pick Jeb Bush but he sure didn't distinguish himself. When he's complaining about Obama abandoning Iraq, someone needs to ask him about his brother's Status of Forces agreement that pledged the U.S. would get the hell out of Iraq. (Fred Kaplan has a fact-check on many of the foreign policy statements and while we're at it, Politifact is comparing other claims to the record.)

I would guess that this morning most Republicans are about as unenthused about their potential nominees as I am about Hillary Clinton. Last night when the Oval Office seekers were all asked if God wanted them to run, I could only think about that joke: If God wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates.

This optical illusion worked for me for about a seventeenth of a second. Maybe it'll have a more lasting effect on you…

Sez here that Jerry Lewis has donated a batch of his movies to the Library of Congress including a print of The Day the Clown Cried. There is a ten-year embargo before it can be screened…and I guess someone's presuming that by that time, Jerry (age 89) will not be around and therefore will not have to hear reactions to it — or something.

I know people who are obsessed with this unseen movie. Here's a story I told here a few years ago…

One day back when we all had our video on VHS tapes, I was printing up fancy labels for some of my homemade recordings. The labels came on a sheet of twelve and I had eleven to print…so I was going to waste one label on the page. On a whim, I used the last one, printed THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED on it and slapped it on an old cassette I was otherwise going to toss. I put the tape on my shelf of movies, spine out for all the world to see. I just wanted to see if anyone would notice.

No one did until a few months later. A friend came by and was waiting in my video room while I got ready so we could leave for a restaurant where we were meeting others. Suddenly, he saw the tape. He yanked it off the shelf, thrust it at me and yelled, "PUT THIS ON! I must see this movie!" I started to tell him he didn't but he interrupted and shouted, "NOW! I must see this movie NOW!!!"

Imagine if you will that some evil villain has tricked you into drinking a fast-acting poison. Imagine you're getting dizzy and your knees are buckling. Imagine that your only hope is an antidote and that the only clue as to where and what that antidote is is on a videotape. Imagine how you'd act in that situation, then triple the intensity and you have an approximation of how my friend acted at that moment. He was five seconds from knocking me to the floor and jamming the tape into my VCR himself.

I finally explained to him that it was a joke. He didn't believe me and I had to run a little of the tape to show him it was not what the label said. I thought he was going to cry.

I suspect that friend will be lined up at the Library of Congress in ten years. I also suspect he will be disappointed and the film will not be either a cinematic masterpiece or something so inept and offensive that's its joy is in its awfulness. I tried to read the script years ago and it struck me as pretty boring. And while I admit to a certain fascination with Jerry Lewis as a person and a performer, I never thought any of his filmmaking was that wonderful…especially anything made after, say, The Nutty Professor. (I'm not even sure I ever made it all the way through that one and it's supposed to be his masterpiece.)

As I recall, interest in The Day the Clown Cried surfaced during a time when Jerry was on TV and in the news a lot coming across as really, really arrogant. He was belittling female comedians and every current trend in Hollywood and talking like the real King of Comedy and opining how people in show business were just plain better human beings than anyone else. Hair and political candidacy aside, whatever you don't like about Donald Trump today is how Jerry was then viewed by a lot of people.

It therefore became irresistible to think that he had this…this "secret." He had this reportedly stinkeroo movie he had to hide from public view, lest the world see that the guy with an ego the size of the Louisiana Purchase had made the worst, most detestable movie ever made. I think that's why the folks I knew who were eager to see it were so eager to see it: Because they disliked Jerry Lewis so much.

I don't think too many people feel that way about Jerry these days. He seems kind of sad and out of touch, especially since he lost the telethon. Survival has also blessed him with a certain importance. He's a symbol of a kind of performer who is almost extinct these days. Who else is alive from his era who was ever that huge a star? No one.

By the way: In all the articles that have been written about the unavailability of this movie and how Jerry has been keeping it hidden, I don't recall anyone ever mentioning one point: I don't think Jerry owns this movie. I'm not sure anyone does but it was based on a book by author Joan O'Brien. When she sold the rights, it was with the understanding that the film would be based on a screenplay she co-authored but Jerry pitched her script and co-wrote a new one.

Production shut down before the film was completed because the production company ran out of money, and they also never made their final payments to O'Brien. So one good reason Jerry didn't release it was because he couldn't. He seems to have confused this point for a while in interviews by claiming he was finishing a new cut and it would soon be out.

But I think if we know nothing else about Mr. Lewis it's that he announces many things that are never going to happen. Remember all the times the stage musical of The Nutty Professor had a firm opening date on Broadway that no one else seemed to know anything about? At some point, he seems to have decided that he couldn't finish The Day The Clown Cried even if he wanted to…and he no longer wanted to. And I find myself thinking that I don't particularly want to see it.

• Rick Perry realizes he appeared dumb in 2nd tier GOP debate; says from now on, he will try wearing TWO pairs of glasses to appear smarter.

Fred Kaplan (Hi, Fred!) gets to ask President Obama about the Iran deal. You won't be surprised to hear that Obama thinks it's a good deal and that there is no reasonable alternative…but you might be interested in how he explains it.

We will, of course, be watching Jon Stewart's last broadcast tonight. I dunno what's going to transpire except there was a rumor they were asking all his favorite targets, be they politicians or pundits, to either appear or tape something for the show. I assume we'll see a parade of past correspondents with Mr. Colbert in the most prominent position and Stewart will say something heartfelt about the staff and the support from the audience.

We shall see what we shall see. I'm padding the recording time on my Tivo just in case.

One thing to keep in mind: Jon Stewart is not dying. He's not retiring from show business. He'll do something else and it's not utterly impossible that whatever it is will cause many of his fans to say, "Gee, I'm glad he left when he did so he could do this." It doesn't seem likely but it could happen. Trevor Noah could also be a lot better than anyone expects. He will, after all, have almost all of Stewart's support team supporting him: Same producers, same writers, etc. Stewart's Daily Show was not a one-man operation and Noah will be reading a TelePrompter loaded with words from that support team.

There are folks, of course, who are happy Stewart is leaving. I suspect if I were a politician or pundit who he'd caught saying stupid or contradictory things, I'd be uncorking the bubbly. He didn't destroy any of these people — Jim Cramer still has a show — but he sure had to make some of them feel a little embarrassed at what they did for a living.

Hey, Rolling Stone has reposted their 2011 interview with Stewart and it's well worth reading.

Oh — and I was wondering what Comedy Central was going to air in that time slot until Trevor Noah's debut. Well, the next two weeks seem to be reruns of this past week and other recent episodes. Don't know if they're going to keep this going until Noah's first show on September 28 or if they have something else in mind. I hope they have something else in mind…or at least that they'll be running older Jon Stewart episodes that I don't still have in the Recently Deleted folder on my TiVo.

I have a few friends who fear greatly that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. It's not so much that they're afraid he might win as that even if he loses, getting as far as the nomination will cause his brand of politics to become the new norm for at least the G.O.P.

I keep reminding these folks how far we are not just from final balloting but from the first balloting. Trump could ride high for months and then collapse when we get to the Iowa Caucuses. Or he could win Iowa and then collapse. It's happened before.

Nate Silver, who's pretty damn good at predicting this kind of thing, puts Trump's chances of becoming the Republican nominee at 2%. Two percent! I think Cosby's at three or four. And that's just The Donald's chance of being the nominee, not the 45th President of these United States. Here is Mr. Silver explaining why Trump will crash and burn.

Yes, yes…I know the song "Artificial Flowers" is from the 1959 Broadway musical, Tenderloin, which had a book by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and music by Jerry Bock. The same folks had done the acclaimed show Fiorello the previous year and this show, which was about a crusading clergyman trying to clean up a red-light district in Manhattan, had some of the same elements. Bock and Harnick later supplied the tunes for Fiddler on the Roof, The Rothchilds, She Loves Me, The Apple Tree and other shows.

I still think it's an awfully odd choice for Bobby Darin to have performed the way he performed it.

Here's the song performed closer to the way its composers intended. The singer is New York stage performer Ciro Barbaro…

Okay, so I'm imagining a record producer goes to Bobby Darin when he's at the peek of his popularity and says, "Bobby, sweetie! I've got your next big hit right here. Get this…a song about a little orphan girl — a small child who's living in poverty somewhere. She's so poor that in order to eat, she has to slave day and night making paper flowers by hand. And then — get this — she freezes to death! Great, huh? And here's the best part! It's an 'up' tune…really jazzy with a big band sound!"

Immediately, Bobby says, "Great! I can't wait to record it!" And it was a pretty big hit for him…

William Saletan has a very long article over on Slate about GMOs in our food — a topic which interests me greatly but which I don't know enough about to have informed viewpoints. Yes, I know that doesn't stop a lot of people in this world but I occasionally own up to that which I do not know.

Saletan makes many good points. One, which I don't doubt, is that the folks who have championed GMOs and those who want them banned have both used some misleading and perhaps phony data to make their cases. Another, also undoubted by me, is that no evidence can ever exist that will cause some folks to alter their positions on this. Yet another is that just because a food item is free of GMOs, that doesn't mean it's safe and that it can't have other things wrong with it.

Beyond that, I'm kind of confused. Saletan cites many, many instances where contradictory evidence has been introduced into the debate but that, of course, makes me wonder if anyone really knows as much as they think they do. He also convinces me that people who know far more about this kind of thing than I ever will are at odds with each other. That makes me wonder how I, a non-expert and likely to remain one, could ever arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.

Please do not send me your satisfactory conclusions. I already can't process all I've read about this topic. I'm just directing to you an article that tosses out plenty to think about with regards to what we eat.

Oh — and whatever I ultimately might decide, I do think it's wrong to not have GMO food labeled. Even if I ultimately decide it's all safe, I think you have the right to decide it's not and to know what you're getting. I think everything people ingest should be labeled. All cole slaw should have a big sticker on every container that says: "WARNING! CONTAINS COLE SLAW!"

In the early seventies, I was writing a lot of comic books for Gold Key, the company that published the Disney comics and the ones featuring the Warner Brothers characters, plus they also had Woody Woodpecker and The Pink Panther and Scooby Doo and a lot of other famous properties. I wrote for most of the comics produced out of the firm's West Coast office and occasionally did a smidgen of drawing here and there.

Mostly, I'd do a rough sketch for a cover and then one of their experienced artists would redraw it more professionally. The two covers above are examples. They're kind of my drawing but fixed a bit and inked by someone who drew a lot better than I did. (The Pink Panther finished art was by Warren Tufts. If you know who that was, you're very impressed right now.)

I was never as serious about my drawing as I was about my writing, in part because I recognized that whatever ability I had as a writer was greater than whatever ability I had as an artist. Drawing for me was like another interest I had: Magic. I knew a lot about both and I could do both well enough to impress the easily-impressed…but only them. I could be the best cartoonist or magician in any room where nobody else was a cartoonist or a magician. Obviously, as I got more and more into the comic book industry (or after I became a member of the Magic Castle), I was rarely in such rooms.

But during the time I worked for Gold Key, I always seemed to have a girl friend who'd take me to her friends' parties and introduce me around as the guy who wrote and drew the Bugs Bunny comic books. I'd ask her to just say I wrote them and then the following conversation would ensue…

SHE: But you draw Bugs Bunny. You drew Bugs Bunny on the paper tablecloth at the restaurant last week.

ME: Yeah but that's a paper tablecloth. I don't really draw him in the comics.

SHE: Yes, you do. You showed me that issue with the cover you drew.

ME: And I explained to you that all I did was the rough sketch of that cover. Someone else — a real cartoonist — did the finished art.

SHE: Okay but the point is you drew Bugs Bunny on that cover. You showed me the sketch you did. It was a drawing of Bugs Bunny. I don't know why you don't just draw the finished comic books.

ME: Maybe it has something to do with me not being good enough…

SHE: Nonsense! You did that drawing of Bugs Bunny for my niece. She loved it!

ME: She's nine years old.

SHE: And how old are the kids who read those comic books?

ME: Oh, they're much older. They're like…ten or eleven.

SHE: You see what I mean?

And she'd go on introducing me as the guy who wrote and drew the Bugs Bunny comics. Depending on my mood, I might stop arguing the point, especially around people who couldn't grasp the concept that those might be two separate jobs. I'd say, "Yes, yes…I do the pictures. I make up the words in the 'bubbles.'" (Folks who don't know comics always call them "bubbles." Those of us who know better call them "word balloons.")

Or she might say I wrote and drew the Donald Duck comic books or the Goofy comic books. For some reason, any time at a party I was passed off as a Disney artist, someone would ask me if I would do a drawing for them of Donald and Daisy or Mickey and Minnie having sex. No one ever wanted a dirty picture of Porky Pig and Petunia getting it on but there was some repressed sexuality attached to the Disney characters.

I did no such drawings of Disney Ducks for anyone, partly because I had integrity and respect for those characters…and partly because I didn't draw well enough to put them into those poses.

I'm sure I could have been better at drawing — and also at magic — had I practiced and studied a lot more than I did. But as much as I enjoyed those two areas, I enjoyed writing ten — no, make that twenty times as much and I also seemed to have more of a flair for it. I don't think I could ever have gotten good enough at drawing or magic to make even a low-grade income at either, nor did I ever wish for either profession.

The last few years, it has come to my attention that my drawing, which was never great, has gotten a whole lot less great. In fact, it's gotten so bad that I can't do much more than draw Bugs Bunny on paper tablecloths.

It's not just that I'm out of practice. It's that all these years of working on a computer and not using a pen or pencil has caused my manual skills with a writing implement to deteriorate. My lettering used to be good enough that I could design cover logos, do lettering corrections and occasionally even letter a story. Now, I can't and a touch of arthritis has furthered degraded both skills.

Does this bother me? A little but only a little — and the decline of my lettering skills bothers me more than the worsened drawing. Lettering was more useful to me and I was a better letterer than I was an artist.

As I get older, there are lots of things I can't do as well as I once did. I've learned you can't stop that. You have to accept your new limitations and focus on those things you can do as well as you used to. If you're fortunate, there are one or two you now do better than you did then.

You can even rejoice in the fact that less is expected of you in some areas as you get older. I was a terrible dancer when I was young. I'm a terrible dancer now but when you pass the age of 60, people stop expecting anything else. If and when I hit 80, I'll probably be just as terrible a dancer as I was when I was 18 but by then, it'll be kind of impressive.

Stu Shostak has two of my buddies on today. One is Jerry Beck, seen above at left. Jerry may be the wisest and best informed person around these days on the subject of animation and he often appears on Stu's Show to discuss what's new in the theaters, what's coming out on DVD and the general history of cartoons. Today, he'll probably do all three and the historical part will be about the Columbia cartoon studio and the struggles Jerry endured to get that library remastered and released for television and home video. He was aided in that crusade by Stu's other guest, Mike Schlesinger (the guy at right) who was then an exec with the Sony company…but that's not why he's on Stu's Show today. He'll be talking about newly-found, soon-to-be-released film treasures starring that great comedy team, Biffle and Shooster! If you live in the L.A. area, you might want to attend this exciting and upcoming screening of their films.

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond. Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a measly 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three.  How many times do I have to tell you this?

A whole bunch of clips and comments about Jon Stewart over at The New York Times.

Well, I failed to make the cut for the Fox News Republican Debate. I don't know why. I can say nothing constructive as well as any of those guys. I can pander to the nutcase right and do my best to keep alive silly, inflammatory charges that I don't even believe. I can curse out the current administration for doing just what I would have done and then offer no practical alternative.

Just because I'm neither a Republican nor a candidate, they exclude me from their debate? Well, who needs them? Instead, I'll go out to dinner with Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham and the rest of the rejects and we'll talk about how we're going to spin this and everything else that happens to us in this election as a stirring moral victory.

I'm so disgusted by this turn of events that I'm putting up one of my decorative soup can illos and taking the rest of the day off from blogging. I hope you're satisfied, Roger Ailes.