Monthly Archives: July 2018

Do not infer anything from the time stamp on this posting. I'm having a very good time at Comic-Con International in San Diego and getting enough sleep. Did two panels on Thursday with something like thirteen to go. Saw a lot of friends. I always have a very good time at these.

People who follow this blog keep asking me how my foot is. It's fine. It's the left knee that's giving me a spot of trouble — the knee I didn't have replaced at the end of September of 2015 and then re-replaced just after the following Halloween. That was the right one I had done because it had worn out and I pondered then why just one. After all, I got both knees at the same time and since I've never done much hopping, I'd taken approximately the same number of steps with each one.

Well, the left knee is now the one giving me problems. Still works but not as well as it should and at the con, I find myself sometimes wishing I could take a Lyft from one end of the hall to the other. More seriously, I wish for more places to sit…and I do better walking than standing in one place. I don't know if this knee's going to need the same upgrade. This seems more like an arthritis problem than a meniscus deficiency, and my doctors think surgery is not in the cards for a long while, if ever.

So instead of spending the con standing around talking to people, I'm spending it sitting and talking to people or walking and talking to people…and looking more infirm than I really am when I get up from low chairs. Aside from that, it's Comic-Con, same as it ever was…

One of my favorite places to eat in Los Angeles seems to be going away. For as long as I can remember, Andre's has been the best spot to get a quick, just-made plate of the best 'n' cheapest spaghetti and meat sauce a person could want. The decor isn't much and there's often a line out the door but those of us who love it really love and treasure it.

Just when it will close is a bit fuzzy and there seems to be a slim chance it won't…but some of us are already mourning Andre's and wondering how many more meals there we have left. Probably Answer: Not nearly enough. This is going to be like losing a treasured part of our lives if and when it happens and it's feeling a lot like a "when." Our friends at Eater LA have the whole sad story.

And they can also tell you about the troubles plaguing another local eatery where I've been known to eat pasta. In this case, the complaints of past employees make me not want to eat again at Caffe Roma in Beverly Hills even if it does survive. What is it with Italian restaurants these days?

Keep watching Seth Meyers. Some of the sharpest political humor and commentary we have these days…

• Trump just walked back his walk back of a correction of a clarification of a reversal of a firm position that he held but which he now says was a misquote of something he truly believes except that the crooked press took the part he never said out of context.

• I'm confused. Is Trump denying the Russians interfere with our elections and hinting that he really believes they do or saying that they do interfere and hinting that he really believes they don't? And does he switch off every three hours or every six?

One time in the seventies, I was at his house with, as I recall, the writer Mike Friedrich. Mike (if indeed it was Mike) and I were talking. Harlan was in his office pounding away on some essay — for what, I do not recall. He was wearing only a towel, which was his usual writing uniform in those days. And this doesn't matter much in the era of Microsoft Word but he was working on a manual typewriter — as he did all his life — and producing the cleanest, typo-free copy I ever saw. It was a skill somehow linked to his ability as a writer to choose words with great precision.

So like I said, Mike and I were sitting there talking and we suddenly heard Harlan whoop and shout to no one in particular, "I have just written the greatest fuckin' sentence I have ever written!" He bolted from his chair and began running madly around his house and even out into the street, losing the towel in the process. Like a nine-year-old on a Frosted Flakes high, he was sprinting and dancing and working off a rush of joyous, supercharged energy.

Mike and I looked at each other and one of us said, "That must be some sentence."

So while Harlan danced nude on his front porch, we rushed into his office for a peek at the greatest fuckin' sentence Harlan Ellison had ever written.

You may be crushed to hear that I cannot recall what it was; only that Mike and I agreed it wasn't notably superior to the fuckin' sentence before it or the fuckin' sentence before that or the fuckin' sentence before that or any of the many fuckin' sentences already on that page. It was a fine fuckin' sentence, a good fuckin' sentence, a fuckin' sentence worthy of the name Ellison…

…but not a particularly outstanding fuckin' sentence. An hour or so later when Harlan had completed the piece and he made us both read it, I don't think either Mike or I could even pick out which one it was and I'll lay you even money that Harlan couldn't either. By then, he might even have preferred several other fuckin' sentences in the article.

Next July, I will have been a professional writer for fifty years — or as Harlan would say, fifty fuckin' years. I have written a great many sentences. I wrote two just now for this paragraph. Make that three. I may even have written more sentences than my late friend, Harlan Ellison. Not better ones, certainly, but more.

I have definitely never written one that caused me to run out into the street for a naked victory dance…and since I am presently in a hotel room near the San Diego Convention Center, that is probably a very good thing. Not one sentence has made me do that, although that last one wasn't bad. That day at Harlan's, I think I got a bit of insight as to one thing that made his writing so exceptional.

As a longtime reader of everything he wrote that I could get my paws on, I guess I already knew he wrote with such passion, throwing himself into every noun, verb, adjective and adverb. I just hadn't seen and heard it before. I marveled at that passion, envied it at times and felt reassured that when I felt it on a page of his, it was really and truly there.

When used for good, that passion could be an awesome force and it was one thing…probably the main thing that made his books stand out for me from the work of so many others on the same shelves.

I have one more story I want to post here about Harlan. I'll try and get to it in the next week or so. You may already have guessed what it'll be about.

It's been a while since I shared a video of one of the funniest men I ever saw perform. Here's the late, great George Carl…

Matthew Yglesias explains Trump's lame "walk back" of his Helsinki performance. No one believes he didn't intend to say what he said but it didn't play well for Republicans in Congress so he had to backtrack a bit to make them comfy in their blind support of him.

I'm going to be busy (understandably, I trust) today and probably for the next few days with Comic-Con prep and travel and such. If you are attending, I urge you to download and peruse the PDF of the Comic-Con Quick Guide. Just about everything you need to know is in there.

The guide also announces the dates for the 2019 Comic-Con International. It'll be July 18-21 with a Preview Night on July 17. Same location. Same dealers in the same booths. Higher prices. And your top three choices of hotel rooms are already sold out.

A friend of mine made an interesting comment the other day: "The people who complain Comic-Con is not about comics are all people who don't go to the Eisner Awards." That's true. Even though some movie and TV people are present, the Eisners are only about comic books. Of course, I have friends who complain that the Eisner Awards are never about the right comic books but that's the nature of award shows.

If you're cruising off-site events at Comic-Con, remember my favorite. The Ralphs Market at 1st Avenue and G Street is practically an official annex of the convention — and it's open 24 hours if you're suddenly in desperate need of Pringles at 4 AM.

And lastly for now: I'm told that the Dick's Last Resort restaurant in the Gaslamp District has closed, which has me gravely concerned. Where will the really obnoxious, unfunny people who think they're funny get work? Where will masochists who like a side of abuse with their meals eat? I worry about such things.

Nothing much to say but I direct your attention to an article by San Diego journalist Peter Rowe — and I'll warn you it contains a number of quotes from me. It's kind of an overview of how difficult Comic-Con is to put on every year. The more I learn about how it operates, the more impressed I am with the skill and wisdom of those who make it happen.

The stand-up comedian Guy Marks (1923-1987) had one hit record — this lilting tune in the style of an old radio dance band remote. Long after anyone knew of dance band remotes, Marks was still singing this in his act and occasionally on TV shows. Here he is in a 1978 appearance on the British series, Top of the Pops. The word nobody can make out in the lyric is "shipfitter" although some of the back-up singers in this rendition seem to think it's "shoplifter"…

• Putin promising to help uncover Russian hacking efforts is like O.J. vowing to find the real killers.

• Great joint press conference from Helsinki. I especially liked the part where Trump talked while Putin drank a glass of water.

Steve Bacher writes…

I appreciate your comments on Sacha Baron Cohen's new and old shows and why you don't enjoy them. But I'm curious to know if you feel the same way about segments on The Daily Show or Full Frontal where correspondents are sent to interview a semi-public figure to show them in a bad light, or to question, say, Trump supporters on the street to let them hang themselves on their own words.

Don't some of the same things apply? I'm sure some footage gets discarded on the editing floor for these as well.

Btw, I always hated America's Funniest Home Videos because they were almost all predicated on the notion that it's funny to see someone in pain. Fictional comic characters in pain can certainly be greatly funny (cf. Laurel and Hardy). Real pain inflicted on real people, whether by accident or otherwise, I don't find amusing in the least…even if self-inflicted.

I haven't seen what you describe on Full Frontal…but then I rarely watch that program. Dozens of episodes were accumulating on my TiVo and sitting there unwatched.  I finally dumped them, canceled my Season Pass and decided to give the show another chance one of these days. That day hasn't come yet.

Regarding The Daily Show, my understanding is that they have a pretty firm policy of not misrepresenting themselves, whereas Sacha Baron Cohen has a pretty firm policy of not telling interviewees who he is or what the interview is for. This is apparently why they've been springing a lot of traps on Big Names in the months before the show's debut tonight. Everyone's going to be on the watch for Cohen now. If you want an interview with a prominent right-wing figure, you may have to produce several forms of I.D. to prove you're not Sacha Baron Cohen.

Of course, The Daily Show is edited and if I went before their cameras and came off as a boob on the finished show, I'm sure I'd claim I was victimized by selective editing.  I'd probably be accusing them of being Fake Fake News.  I just don't get the sense that they're as sneaky or as interested in making their subjects look like jackasses.

I rarely laugh at depictions of anyone in pain unless they're so over-the-top outrageous that the joke is not the pain but the exaggeration of it.  Ralph Kramden hitting his thumb with a hammer comes to mind and many scenes in cartoons but not much more…not even a lot of what my favorite comedians, Laurel and Hardy, did.  And yes, I know that may seem odd but that's just not something that amuses me.

Getting back to The Daily Show by the way, I'm currently working my way through a book that is much, much better than I was expecting — The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests. It's much longer and more detailed than you'd think, giving many Rashomon accounts of the same incident and delving deeply into process.  There's also history that was not reported at the time like an incident where Mssr. Stewart and Colbert briefly resigned.  I thought I knew a lot about this show but clearly I did not know as much as I thought.

I bought the book on Kindle and now and then when I find myself waiting somewhere, I open the old iPhone and read a few pages.  That's the only reason I haven't finished it yet.  It's a perfect book for that.  I also like that while it quotes Stewart extensively, it doesn't do so exclusively.  Everyone else on the staff gets their say and often, they are not in perfect alignment with the man who was then their Boss.  It is to Mr. Stewart's credit that he allowed that to happen…and they even went out and got quotes from folks like John McCain, Tucker Carlson and Jim Cramer.

The amazing interview Stewart did with Cramer is well-covered.  In case you don't remember it: Stewart pilloried the CNBC Financial Advisor-Host for giving out lousy advice to his watchers.  In the press and on other shows, Cramer complained that Stewart had misquoted him and mistreated him.  Then Cramer went on The Daily Show, Stewart hauled out video clips and Cramer wound up saying, "Yeah, you were right."

One reason it's taking me so long to get through the book is that I keep stopping to do research.  I stopped to find and watch again the Stewart-Cramer interview, which is still on the Comedy Central website and easily found with four seconds of Googling.  Fascinating, fascinating stuff…and it made me miss that Daily Show even more than I already did.  You can order a copy of the book at this link. I suggest you do.

YouTube star Yousef Erakat was about to give a free concert last night at the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park in Los Angeles.  That's a great outdoor venue in which to enjoy a show but not when someone phones in a bomb threat and the concert has to be canceled and the place evacuated.  I saw the above item on Twitter and had four immediate thoughts…

1. Five thousand dollars?  If I was the guy in charge, I would have figured it was a hoax just based on that.  Why not ask for ten?  Or twenty?  The penalty if you get caught is pretty much the same so why settle for such a low amount?  That is, if you were serious about the bombs and the money.
2. Then again, if I were the guy in charge I probably would have said, "I'm pretty confident there are no bombs but I also can't take the chance," and I would have done the same thing.
3. But what would I do if this happened a lot?  If the same idiot called in before every concert, when would I have stopped canceling the shows and evacuating the theater?  Would it matter if it seemed to be a different idiot calling?  I'm glad I don't have that job.
4. And what the heck are "pope bombs?"  Are they bombs that are infallible?  Bombs with little red shoes on them?  Bombs that wash the feet of peasants while sending mixed signals on contraception?  That couldn't possibly be a typo for "pipe bombs," could it?