Lucian K. Truscott IV has an article up that's an interesting way to look at the Republican Party. I don't agree with all of it but I agree with some of it — mostly in the section I shall excerpt here…
Pundits are fond of saying stuff like, "Republicans used to stand for something." What they're talking about is an imaginary day in an imaginary past when the Republican Party "stood for" low taxes, small government, reducing the deficit and something called a "strong national defense," as if there had ever been a countervailing position by Democrats or anyone else that wanted a weak national defense.
It was all bullshit, the original Big Lie. They didn't stand for "low taxes." They wanted to lower the taxes of one group, wealthy people, while keeping taxes comparatively high on everyone else. They didn't stand for "small government." The size of the government grew in every single Republican administration going back at least to Eisenhower. Richard Nixon created an entirely new department of the national government, the Environmental Protection Agency, where there had been none before. George W. Bush created another, much larger division of government, the Department of Homeland Security, and bequeathed to it a budget in the tens of billions of dollars.
They didn't believe in "cutting the deficit." The deficit has grown by hundreds of billions in every single Republican administration, and under the last one, Donald Trump's administration, it grew by more than $2 trillion. As for a "strong national defense," the budget for the Department of Defense has grown steadily as a percentage of GDP under Republican and Democratic administrations alike without interruption since the end of World War II. We spend more on "national defense" than the rest of the world combined, making it hard to imagine that our national defense could possibly get any stronger no matter which party is in power.
Mr. Truscott loses me a little when he gets to the part about what it was Trump tapped into. But give it a read and see which part, if any, you like.
Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by Ray Brown, one of the greatest bass players in all of jazz. He played a lot for Ella Fitzgerald (married her, too) and worked with everyone who mattered who made his kind of music. This is only the Flintstones theme at the beginning and end but what's in the middle is pretty damned good…
It's Mothers' Day and I don't seem to have a story in mind about my mother than I haven't told before…so here's a story about my mother than I did tell before. It's from Mothers' Day of 2013 on this blog and it's the story about the tuna fish. I'm sure I have other stories about my mother still locked away inside me and one of these days, I'll dig deep and find a few. But today, you get a rerun of the one about the tuna fish…
Folks are writing me to note it's Mother's Day and to ask if that makes me miss my mother who left at least this planet last October. No more than yesterday did or tomorrow will. We were never big on holidays in our family. We kinda went through life as if every day was a holiday. I was just as likely to give my mother a gift on any day as I was on Mother's Day. I was less likely to take her out to dinner on Mother's Day because she hated going to restaurants when they were crowded.
I felt so bad for her the last decade or so as she suffered with endless hospitalizations and diminishing vision that I have trouble missing her from that period. And it was during that period that I got through missing the woman she was before that. I do have one lingering void. Most days between 5 PM and 6 PM, I get that feeling that there was something I was supposed to do and I've forgotten to do it. Then I realize: If I didn't see her that day, I always phoned her between 5 and 6. That's what I keep forgetting to do, now that I can't.
I learned a lot about my mother while cleaning out her house before I sold it. I also learned a few things about me. One of the things she had stashed away in a drawer was a Woody Woodpecker comic book story I wrote and drew with crayola at age 7 — or, as we might put it, 12 years before I was writing the real Woody Woodpecker comic book. I also found my first typewriter — the one she got for me with many books of Blue Chip Stamps. I was about 15 when we picked it up and I pounded away on it until I was about 22. It was a manual with keys so unresponsive that I couldn't touch-type on it. I had to type with my index fingers and space with my thumbs. The ribbon on it still seems to be good but my index fingers aren't.
Neither of my parents ever understood my career but they trusted that I did. That was one of the best things they did for me. Another was that they pretty much let me find my own way in the world. I never got a lecture about "the birds and the bees" — or much of anything else for that matter. My father was too inhibited (I guess you'd say) to deliver a father-son lesson about sex so one day, long after another male parent might have seen his duty and done it, my mother sat me down. She said, "Dad and I were talking about whether you two need to have a discussion about sex and things like that."
I said, "I think I've figured it all out."
She said, "We figured you would." Then she added, "Dad will be very happy when I tell him he doesn't have to do it."
She was a great organizer. Several years there, we volunteered our home as a polling place and my mother supervised the voting and, before voting machines came in, the actual counting-by-hand of the ballots. She also ran programs for my school and did volunteer work for charities, and some election years she'd get involved at the local Democratic Headquarters. But her greatest bit of organizing may have been her management of The Tuna Fish.
We had a neighbor who had a son who worked down in San Pedro for a company that processed tuna and other fish, canning it for restaurant sales. They didn't output small cans of the stuff. They were all huge — about a foot in diameter, six to eight inches high…and unlabelled. That is, there'd be no label on the can. Apparently, at some point on the assembly line, if a can lost its label, anyone who worked there could just take it home…and the son knew which ones were tuna and which weren't. Whenever he went to visit his mother, he'd bring her one even though she didn't like tuna. Is that a son or not? "Here, Mom…here's another ton of that stuff you won't eat!"
So she'd give it to us and my mother would direct the distribution of its contents to seven or eight neighbors. I mean, we liked tuna but you can only have it so often. And there was no point freezing it since more was always on the way.
Artist's Re-creation
My mother would pick a date a few weeks in the future…say, August 3rd. She would then phone each of these selected neighbors and inform them that August 3 would be a Tuna Day; that on that day, Mark would be bringing them a free supply of tuna so don't, for example, serve your family a tuna-noodle casserole the night before. Everyone gratefully marked Tuna Day on their calendars.
Come Tuna Day, it would be my job to open the can. This was not easy as they were too big to fit in my mother's electric can opener so I had to use the manual kind. It took quite some time. Once I finally got the lid off, my mother would spoon tuna into eight or nine plastic containers, including a big one for us, and store them in our refrigerator, which she'd already rearranged so there'd be ample space. Then she would phone each neighbor to ask, "Are you ready for tuna?" This was to prevent me from carrying a container to a house down the block, finding no one home and then having to carry it back. We decided that between the hot sun and the volume of stray cats around, it would not be a good idea for me to leave it on the porch.
If the tuna recipients were there and primed to receive tuna, she'd dispatch me on my appointed rounds…and the neighbors would be very happy. A few insisted on tipping me a buck or two, then they'd take it in and commence making tuna sandwiches, tuna salads, tuna croquettes, tuna casseroles and such. One lady told us she made tuna chow mein…to which I say, "Hey, why not?"
Then one memorable Tuna Day, I got the lid off and the contents looked odd. I thought at first we'd gotten a bad batch and I asked my mother to inspect it. She did, and it took her a minute or two to come to the shocking realization…
It wasn't tuna. It was salmon.
She laughed and I laughed and she began calling the neighbors and telling them, "Mark will be right over but it's not tuna this time. It's salmon." They were all fine with that and they proceeded to make salmon sandwiches, salmon salads, salmon croquettes, salmon casseroles…and that one woman made salmon chow mein, to which I again say, "Hey, why not?"
The following Tuna Day, I opened the can muttering, "I wonder what it'll be this time? Tuna? Salmon? Anchovies? Tennis balls?" I think I'd have preferred tennis balls to anchovies. It turned out to be tuna and when my mother called Mrs. Hollingsworth down the street to tell her tuna was on its way, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, "Oh…don't you have any salmon?"
A lot of public places I visited pre-Pandemic — theaters, restaurants, event centers, etc. — are opening up and I find myself with a small but worth-pondering quandary. Permit me to explain it in five points with a "but" in there…
I want to see these places become profitable again and make up some of the income they lost while we were all isolating, sheltering and Zooming.
And a feeling of normality — that we've weathered the worst of The Pandemic — would be nice. But…
There are still folks out there who haven't been vaccinated and have either convinced themselves via-pseudoscience that they don't need it or that the whole coronavirus thing was always a sham…
…and I did find during my 423 days (so far) of avoiding those public places that I don't need them as much as I once did. I've come to prefer letting Instacart go to Costco for me and doing certain kinds of meetings on Zoom.
And finally, there's this: These places are reopening under strict protocols — masks worn here, no gathering in certain spots, limits on attendance and even how many can use the Men's Room at the same time even though there are urinals aplenty. And a lot of them just plain don't sound like a lot of fun for now. I shall expand upon this…
I just read the list of precautions being taken in a certain movie theater I sometimes patronize. I'd like the place to thrive and I certainly support all necessary safety precautions for both visitors and staff. I even support erring on the side of caution and adopting the more onerous ones, just in case. But after I read that list, I thought, "I don't want to go see a movie there." When I read almost any article about how Las Vegas has changed — what's still closed, all that has had to be altered — I feel I can wait for a lot more normality before going there.
I just read this article about how safe air travel now is and isn't. I would certainly fly if there was a real good reason but I don't think I'll be flying just because I feel like going somewhere for pleasure or enjoyment. Like I used to.
So there's that quandary: I want to support normality and businesses that have been hurting. I just don't really want to go to New York or dine in a restaurant right now. How am I going to handle this? Well, sometimes it helps me to write about something on my blog, then go back a week or so later and re-read what I wrote. It sometimes gives me a clearer view of the situation. I'll let you know if it does this time.
I was a big fan of National Lampoon, a magazine published from 1970 until…well, its last known issue was published in 1998 but the last few years, it bounced around between handlers and it came out every so often and didn't often resemble the National Lampoon. If you subtract those years and the first, rough months when it looked like something done by high school students, you had about twenty years of some of the sharpest humor writing and cartooning ever done in this country. A lot of its contributors went on to be very important in TV, movies, publishing and other lucrative fields.
One of my favorite NatLamp contributors was the fine cartooning person, B.K. Taylor. Loved everything he drew…for that magazine and for other clients. The guy turned up everywhere, even in Jim Henson's employ where he designed a lot of well-known Muppets. And he drew tons of funny advertising. And he drew kids' books. And he wrote for TV. And he worked for Disney. And he just was everywhere. Nice fellow, too.
His work for National Lampoon, including The Appletons and Timberland Tales has now been collected into a very handsome volume from our friends at Fantagraphics. Here is where you can order a copy of I Think He's Crazy. You'll be glad you did.
"Jeepers Creepers" was a hit song of the late thirties and early forties, written by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer — two men who between them, seem to have written more than half of the memorable tunes of that era. It was popularized by Louis Armstrong and later recorded by Sinatra and Tony Bennett and all the biggies. Unlike today when popular music has more of a tendency to stay in its own decade, I recall hearing "Jeepers Creepers" a lot on TV when I was a child of the fifties and sixties. It even popped up in a couple of cartoons.
Here's my favorite one-man quartet, Julien Neel, with the barbershop version of it…
Back in the seventies when I was new to the teevee business, I'd occasionally run into a writer I knew who more or less lived to piss on the achievements of others. He wasn't a bad guy when he wasn't doing this but he was always doing this.
The guy had some sort of insecure competitive streak in him that always had to "top" you; like he'd always ask you what kind of car you were driving. It didn't matter what you said because whatever you said was a boneheaded choice on your part and you should have consulted with him first because if you had, you wouldn't be driving that piece o' crap you bought.
He'd always ask you what you were working on…and you could have told him the best, highest-paying job in the business and he'd tell you he'd turned it down because the money was shit. That kind of person.
Most of you never heard his name because I don't think he ever worked on a successful or respected show. Even as he was telling you that you'd accepted a job that was beneath him, he was working (probably) for a lot less on a show three stations below whatever you were working on. And he was wearing a toupee that Quincy Magoo could have spotted as a shag carpeting remnant from the 99 Cents Only Store.
But he still thought he was topping you. And the odd thing about the fellow was not that he always thought he was "winning" when he wasn't. It was that he was winning "competitions" that he made up and you didn't know or care about.
Back then, a lot of Show Biz revolved around "the trades" — two almost-daily newsletters that everyone in the field subscribed to or at least glanced upon often. They were The Hollywood Reporter and Variety and they still exist as online sites that matter a whole lot less than they did when they were on paper. The guy — the one I'm writing about here — would always ask me if my name had appeared in them yet.
No, it hadn't. I was working but no, my name hadn't appeared in either yet. Neither had his.
Then one day, his did. I don't know what for. I didn't see it. But my phone rang shortly after and I was surprised, first of all, that he'd located my number and secondly that he said, "I've been waiting for your call." From there, it went like this…
ME: Was I supposed to call you?
HIM: You most certainly were.
ME: What, may I ask, was I supposed to call you about?
HIM: If you were any kind of gentleman, you'd have called to congratulate me on getting my name in the trades before you did.
He was miffed when I told him I hadn't noticed his name in the trades and disbelieving when I told him I didn't even look that closely for my name in those papers. Clearly in his head, there existed some sort of primal competition — so obvious that we didn't even have to agree on it — where we were dueling to see which of us could have our names in the trades before the other. It's very easy to win when you make up the contests, especially without telling the other person. He also thought I must be devastated to have lost this battle I'd never known existed.
It's so important to some people to "win," even that way. Success is insufficient without a loser so you can say, "I beat him."
In later years, I heard from others that he'd told them we'd had a contest to see who'd been mentioned first in Variety and/or Hollywood Reporter, him or me, and that I'd lost. And not only had I lost but I'd been such a sore loser that I didn't even call him to admit defeat.
I don't understand this but I am very sure that I won one contest with him that he didn't know about. His obituary has already been in the trades and mine hasn't. I don't think. I haven't checked lately.
In late 1955 when the Broadway show My Fair Lady first went into rehearsal, there were two immediate problems. One was that Julie Andrews, who originated the role of Eliza in the musical, couldn't master an acceptable Cockney accent. She could sing and speak beautifully as Eliza after the character had been coached in linguistics by Henry Higgins…but she spoke too well to be convincing in the early parts where Eliza hadn't yet learned to speak like a lady.
It was so bad that at one point, Rex Harrison — cast as Higgins — refused to rehearse any longer with her. He declared it a waste of time as Ms. Andrews would certainly need to be replaced in the part. Eventually though, she mastered it.
The other immediate problem was that Mr. Harrison, who'd never appeared before in a musical, could not sing with the full orchestra. It terrified him and it also insisted on playing the tunes as per the sheet music, whereas he never sang one of his numbers the same way twice. As with his co-star, he finally got the hang of it and My Fair Lady went on to become a smash hit and one of the most honored stage productions of all time.
In early 1960, Andrews and Harrison agreed to be very good sports and to appear on a CBS TV special and "re-create" scenes from those early rehearsals, telling the world how terrible they were during the show's formative weeks. Thanks to my friend Vince Waldron for letting me know about this…
I understand that in most comics, one artist draws the comic in pencil and then another artist goes over his lines in ink and that second artist is called an "inker." But I sometimes see comics, mostly older ones, where the second artist is credited as an "embellisher" or sometimes a "finisher." What's the difference?
Okay, first thing you need to know is that a lot of credits — especially credits written by Stan Lee or by someone trying to sound like Stan Lee — have used these terms according to no firm definition or set of rules. Stan liked to make things like credit boxes sound interesting so he sometimes phrased things different ways just to be colorful. There are comics that said "Inked by Joe Sinnott" and comics that said "Embellished by Joe Sinnott" where Joe did the exact same thing.
However at times in comics, you have a situation where they decide to have the penciler (the first artist in the assembly line) do a little less of the work and to have the inker (the second) do more. Like, the first guy would do less-finished art with less-detailed backgrounds and the second guy would tighten things up or draw the background or something. When it came time to write the credits, some (I emphasize: some) composers of those credit boxes would use "embellisher" or "finisher" to denote more effort/input by the second artist. And the first artist's credit might be the same or something more ambiguous.
If you treat this kind of thing like there are firm, consistent rules, you're making a mistake.
While we're at it: Someone — in an e-mail I can't find at the moment — asked me a question about credits and you don't need to know the question but the answer would be something like this…
Sometimes in the production of a comic, usually because of a deadline problem, another artist may pop in for a few pages. For example, Frank Giacoia couldn't get Captain America inked by the date they needed it so he (or the editor) had Joe Giella ink a few pages. And that person might or not have been credited. Whether Stan Lee knew about the assist or not, he often did not credit someone who did a few pages.
Also: In the above example, it doesn't mean Frank Giacoia was at fault for not getting the work done. Sometimes, the company piles the work on and makes it impossible. You might have an exchange like this…
EDITOR: Frankie, I need you to ink a Hulk story by next Tuesday.
FRANKIE: I can't do it. I have to finish this Daredevil you gave me.
EDITOR: I'm in a jam here. Can't you get someone to help you?
I sometimes see a post on Facebook or wherever in which someone noticed a style change in the artwork and assumed the artist screwed up and someone else had to come to the rescue. Not always. I, with my extremely-limited skill set, once helped Alfredo Alcala out by inking a lot of backgrounds on a Batman story he inked for DC. Alfredo might just have been the fastest artist who ever worked in the comic book industry but even he couldn't grow an extra drawing hand when he needed one. DC had sent him three full issues to ink and they wanted them all, day after tomorrow.
It was not his fault he needed help…and I was not much. Even I can't look at the finished issue on which I assisted and see a trace of what I did. Alfredo called and asked me to come over and I probably helped him more by bringing dinner along. And of course, I did not receive credit for my inking or for stopping off at Pollo Loco on the way.
Not long ago, many of my friends were fretting about the closure of the Pacific Theatre empire including the ArcLight cinema operation and the Cinerama Dome theater in Hollywood. We told you someone would come along to buy all or parts of it and reopen…and it looks like that's just what's going to happen.
We all know how our lives have changed due to coping with The Pandemic. A few friends and I have lately found ourselves on the topic of which of those changes will stick around after it's All Clear. I've grown to really like firms like Instacart and Grubhub which deliver food and supplies to my door. I won't use them as much but I'll use them more than I did before.
I think a lot more companies will be open to employees working from home. I think you'll see a lot of mask-wearing in public, especially during Flu Season. Most folks won't be as automatic to shake hands. A lot of us have gallons of Hand Sanitizer to use up. Things like that.
I have no opinion about whether Donald Trump should be allowed on Facebook or not. Part of me thinks nobody should be allowed on Facebook, including me. Or maybe just me. It would be a lot of fun to have it to myself.
A lot of people seem to think that Freedom of Speech is the right to say anything you want anywhere via any means you wish to use and to have everyone hear you. The relevant part of the First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…" Nothing in there about Facebook.
And it seems like most of the people now howling that Trump should be on any platform he chooses are also in favor of muzzling the press.
Did you hear about the surgeon who put himself through medical school working at a Five Guys restaurant? He's great in the operating room but before he closes up a patient, he dumps in an extra scoop of fries.
