Yeah, Trump won by his definition of "winning." Even when he loses by any real-world definition, he wins by his. I think this guy's on his way down, down, down…but he's like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail with his arms and legs both lopped off but still claiming victory. Trump has a lot of courtrooms ahead of him.
As we know, seven Republicans defied the wrath of party loyalists and voted to convict. Some of their statements are interesting and they're quoted in this article over at The American Conservative by Rod Dreher.
A smart journalist I know named Abraham Riesman has written a probably-controversial book about Stan Lee and it's being released this weekend. It's called True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee and you can order a copy here.
Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the book and answered a number of the author's questions but I haven't seen a copy of it and have no idea what I'm quoted as saying in it. I may not for a while. I'm waiting, as I often do with books for which I supply some help, to see if they send me a free copy. You might be surprised how often they don't. I certainly am.
I have however read this excerpt which is about the Stan Lee Media company, a firm for which I briefly worked. I've also read this article which summarizes what the book says about Stan's problems with his daughter and certain business associates, especially in his last years. I did not have the good sense to stay away from Stan Lee Media but I was smart enough to stay away from Stan's last years.
Anyway, stop writing to ask me if you should be a true believer in True Believer. I haven't read it yet.
As I've said on countless occasions, I have had an enormous range of mixed feelings about Stan Lee since I first met him in person in 1970. I almost felt like I knew him even before that from reading those comics. Not all of these feelings were/are positive. Some are but a few are sadly quite negative. And yes, I am still working on my huge book about Jack Kirby and no, I don't know when I'll be done with it.
But my conclusion is that the comics we know to be created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, not necessarily as 50-50 efforts and certainly not with Jack supplying only the visuals. I think Jack did a lot more than Stan — at least on the pages — and until fairly recently, got a lot less credit; likewise, Stan and Steve Ditko, Stan and Don Heck, Stan and Bill Everett, etc. The disparity in financial reward was even greater.
But that doesn't mean Stan did nothing or did nothing well. I have witnessed way too many Stan/Jack debates in my life and I think all are dead wrong if they lead to the conclusion that either contributed zero. This view has occasionally made me feel unwelcome on Stan Lee forums and in Jack Kirby chat groups. And just as I reject that notion, I reject the argument that neither would have amounted to anything post-1961 without the other. They were two men of extraordinary skills…just not the same skills.
A lot of folks don't want to hear about the battles and the quarrels and the screwings. They just want to enjoy the body of work…and I sometimes wish I could stop there. Instead, I think I'll stop here…for now.
As I assume you just might have expected and heard, a majority of senators just voted to convict Donald Trump. The vote was 57-43 with several Republicans voting that way either because they're very brave, very safe in their seats or very not running for re-election. Alas, it takes 67 votes to…well, you know how this works. Jon Stewart posted…
This impeachment highlights a fundamental tenet of our legal system. All Americans, regardless of status, are entitled to a speedy trial by a jury of your cowardly partisan sycophants and henchmen.
You have to wonder what's on the minds of those cowardly partisan sycophants and henchmen. I'm going to guess that ten or more figured they had two bad choices and they picked the one they thought would do them less immediate damage.
They might be right about that in the short run. But Trump is facing a lot of legal actions, both civil and criminal, which probably won't do his reputation much good. Wonder how many of those who voted to acquit today will try to hide behind, "I never thought he was a good man but I did think it was wrong to vote to convict anyone in an impeachment trial after he left office."
And here from 1968 is another one of those Kraft Music Hall shows with a cleansed-for-television Friars' Roast, this time of Johnny Carson. The dais includes Steve Allen, Dick Cavett, Groucho Marx, Ed McMahon, Don Rickles, Ed Sullivan, Flip Wilson, roastmaster Alan King and the then-mayor of New York, John Lindsay. Someone please explain to me the deal with Groucho's hair…
My man Fred Kaplan explains to us about the nuclear "football" that's supposed to accompany the President of the United States anywhere and everywhere he goes…and how the January 6th "insurrectionists" at the Capitol might have come close to getting their mitts on one. I dunno what they could have done with it if they had but that's not something that should be found out the hard way.
And William Saletan tries to figure out what Trump was calling for that day if, as his lawyers insist, he wasn't calling for them to do what they did.
The guy with the microphone above is Charlie Hill, a comedian I used to see often when I was hanging around The Comedy Store. He was pretty funny, fairly successful and well-liked by his fellow up-'n'-coming comics. I remember a comedian who was none of those things dismissing him as a "gimmick comic," Charlie's supposed gimmick being that he was "the first Native stand-up comedian," though back then we said "Indian" instead of "native."
I'm not sure where in Charlie's development I first saw him but as I recall, about 70% of his act was about the way his people had been treated in real life and on the screen. The other 30% was on topics anyone could hit and I guess that was to prove he could talk about something else. Either way, I thought he was pretty good.
He and comedians of like ancestry are the subject of a new book by my pal Kliph Nesteroff, who writes great books and articles about the profession of standing in front of paying customers and making them laugh. A few days ago, Kliph came by and dropped off a copy of We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans in Comedy, and that's an Amazon link via which you can secure a copy.
To be honest, I haven't finished it yet but I'm liking everything so far and I've liked everything else I've read by Kliph. You can read a nice excerpt of it here at the Esquire website. It'll make you want to read the whole thing.
I only watched about ten minutes of the House Managers yesterday making the case against Donald Trump. I'll balance it today by only watching about ten minutes of his defense. Overall, my view of the whole thing is the same as that of pundit Kevin Drum…
Republicans don't want to convict a president of their own party, but they also don't want to force their members to cast a vote implicitly approving of insurrection. So they groped around for some kind of technicality that would eliminate their dilemma and came up with the out-of-office dodge. This allows them to vote to acquit but to claim it was solely because of their deep commitment to constitutional norms.
One of the reasons Richard Nixon resigned when he did was to spare members of his party in the House and Senate from having to cast votes about his guilt or innocence. They knew that if they voted with him, they'd lose half their base and if they voted against him, they'd lose the other half. You can't get re-elected if you lose half your base.
Democrats have forced them to vote on Trump and almost all will vote to acquit. But they'll profess it's not because they thought he was guilty or innocent. In a way, I almost have more respect for the ones who'll make it clear they're not voting to convict because they love and support the guy.
In the twenty years I was with my late, lovely friend Carolyn, we probably went to see the great jazz pianist Chick Corea perform ten times. We saw him in the biggest possible venues (The Hollywood Bowl) and we saw him in medium-sized jazz clubs (The Catalina Bar and Grill) and we saw him in some real tiny places, the names of which I do not recall. The tiny places intrigued me and I wondered why a guy who'd recorded 90 albums and won 23 Grammy Awards would appear in such venues.
But wherever he was, we went to see him. He was Carolyn's favorite musician.
As it turned out, Carolyn's favorite restaurant was a favorite restaurant of her favorite musician so we ran into him a couple of times. He was gracious, charming and he even remembered us (well, her) from one time to the next. In one encounter, I asked him about the difference between playing huge venues — I think we'd just seen him at Royce Hall up at U.C.L.A. — and the places where his combo practically outnumbered the audience. He said, "Hey, I just play anywhere they'll let me."
But then he added, because he knew that wasn't an answer, "I think when I play before a big crowd, I feel more pressure to give them the kind of show they came expecting to hear…and when I play a small place, I feel I can be more experimental." He was pleased when we both told him that we liked him in either arena but a bit more in the small places. The thing we liked about him was that he was always experimental. He never did what he (or anyone) had done before. We'll miss him and so will music.
As we hinted here yesterday, this year's WonderCon in Anaheim has been officially canceled…or to be more correct, it will be a two-day online event, as opposed to a three-day in-person event. I assume no one is startled at this announcement. There will be online video programming and I'll be doing at least two videos for it.
As for Comic-Con, which is staged by the same folks and which is scheduled for July 22-25, there is no official word, nor are we likely to see one soon. Speaking only for myself and with no inside info, I doubt the con will happen except in the virtual sense. Cases of COVID-19 are dropping in many areas but no one can say how long that trend will continue or what surges may erupt.
More to the point, no one can say when and how it might become possible to stage an in-person Comic-Con. There are literally hundreds of things that have to happen for it to be possible, above and beyond the arrest of the virus. As of today, 856 homeless folks are currently housed in the San Diego Convention Center. How long might it be before those people can be properly relocated and the convention center is turned back into the convention center?
How many hotels and nearby restaurants are fully functional? What about security personnel? There's a long, long list of such issues. One thing I have learned about working closely with Comic-Con for many years now is how unbelievably complicated it is to put one of these things on. The people who do it are so good at what they do that they make it seem simple, like someone just says "Let's put on a show" and hundreds of elements all fall magically into place. Doesn't happen that way.
I've received inquiries about guesting at a few smaller conventions later this year. I doubt most (if any) of them will happen…or if they do, that they'll happen with me there. I'd love to be wrong about this but I don't think I am.
Yesterday, I linked up to a video of a 1970 TV roast of Mr. Jack Benny. It aired originally as an episode of an NBC anthology series called The Kraft Music Hall but the version I embedded had had some edits and redubs done to excise all the Kraft plugs. My longtime e-mail buddy Harry McCracken sent me a link to an online version of the same special as it originally aired. That's the great announcer Ed Herlihy speaking for Kraft.
Posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 11:59 PM
Way back in this message in 2001 — my, I've been blogging a long time — I wrote about a televised "roast" of Jack Benny that was done on NBC for the Kraft Music Hall TV program. I guessed it was from 1970 and it turns out, I was right. It aired January 21 of that year.
The show featured Johnny Carson as Roastmaster, Mr. Benny as Roastee and the Roasters were Milton Berle, George Burns, Dennis Day, Phil Harris, Alan King and Ed Sullivan. And if you click on the above link, you can read a story I told about how while Mr. Carson was in one part of Rockefeller Center taping this special, comedian David Steinberg was filling in as host of a Tonight Show being taped at the same time. During a break, Berle, Benny and Carson ran down and did genuine surprise walk-on appearances on that show.
A few years ago, before my pal Paul Harris retired from the Talk Radio business, he had David Steinberg on a show and he read him my blog post and asked if it had really happened. Mr. Steinberg was startled that anyone remembered it. It was a very memorable moment in his career but the videotape of that Tonight Show is long lost and it was pretty much forgotten…though not by him.
Anyway, this post is not about that. It's about that Friars Club special. That tape is not lost, though I believe it has received a makeover. Some company did some re-editing and took out all mention of the Kraft Music Hall and Kraft products and here it is. How often do you get to see a lineup like that on one show?
Posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 11:55 AM
Kind of half-watching The Impeachment Trial today. I know it's history. I also know it'll be available for watching forever on the web. I also know how it will end. What I don't know is how Donald Trump — who is not new at the science of retaining attorneys — could wind up with a team that would infuriate him and also most of his supporters in Congress and most pro-Trump pundits.
There are, as even lawyers would agree, lawyers out there who'll take any case, defend anyone for fame or money or (even better) both. Yeah, I know the lawyers Trump first engaged to make his defense retreated but you'd think hundreds of others would stampede for the position. You're almost guaranteed to win the case no matter what you do and you'd be a superstar to wealthy right-wingers. How'd Trump wind up with the guys he wound up with?
One of America's biggest comic conventions, WonderCon, is still officially scheduled to convene at the Anaheim Convention Center on March 26. That's 43 days from today.
No badges have been sold or offered. No dealers have purchased exhibitor space. No hotel reservations have been made. No guests have been announced. So…uh, what do we think will happen?
Here's another Zoomified version of "When I See an Elephant Fly" from Dumbo, this time performed by men who work in the Dapper Dans groups at Disney theme parks…
