Memo to Self: Don't Quit Your Job

After freelancing for 15 months and seeing my unemployment run out, I found a full-time job. Thanks to Governor Paterson, if I had still been looking I would now be eligible for another 13 weeks of benefits. See the graphic for an important adviso from the NY State Dept. of Labor.

AMERICAN IN PARIS

My daughter is taking a semester in France. She's a French major so this isn't a dilettante on holiday. She's got spunk, a lot more than me, and I like spunk. I was talking to my brother-in-law about his electric bill and his kids turning on the air conditioner too much. I offered to trade my cell phone bill with international roaming for his electric bill. Yup, it costs more to pay a cell phone bill that to run a house.

CLASSIC CONAN

Best joke I've heard in a while, from Conan O'Brien:

John McCain invited his grandchildren to visit him for Father's Day. Unfortunately they couldn't make it. They were all busy visiting their grandchildren.

BIG BROTHER

I love my family but I lose a lot of respect for their judgment when they all watch Big Brother.

THE HARMONSITS on DVD (1997)

One night I was watching that odd show, Classic Arts Showcase, on late night cable. A performance by the Comedian Harmonists, a highly popular German singing group from the 1920s and '30s was shown performing "Happy Days Are Here Again" in German and also in English It led me to this great movie about the group. The beauty of song is juxtaposed against the rising Nazi regime, who eventually destroy the group because half the members are Jewish. The harmonies are sublime and I recommend this movie on every level, especially if you love 20th century music such as The Four Lads, the Beach Boys, or the Manhattan Transfer. I especially enjoyed their trip to America, where artful camera shots placed them in Central Park, the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty. Note: The Algonquin Hotel is shown under the Brooklyn Bridge and that's a minor quibble.

FREE STUFF

My new company has great benefits, free bagels every week, summer hours, after work mixers, a good retirement plan, nice people. Have I been so used and abused in other jobs so much that when I stumble into a good thing I don't trust it? I blame seeing The Twilight Zone, "How to Serve Man" for this subconscious dread.

Hey-Ohhhhh! 1000 AWESOME POINTS TO JIMMY KIMMEL

In the words of Ben Folds, it sucks to get old. When he heard Ed McMahon was broke, Kimmel offered him a new/old job, TV pitchman. Ed needs the money. How did Ed end up broke? There's a Who's Who of old guys in showbiz take young wives and their lives and afterlives take a turn for the worse.

Ed told Larry King, "I want to speak for the million people [in America] who now have foreclosure signs on their houses...If you spend more money than you make, you know what happens," he said. "A couple of divorces thrown in, a few things like that." Ed's wife said "Over the years, it's a combination of maybe Ed working so hard and not looking at proper management. We didn't keep our eye on the ball. We made mistakes. It's been tough but somehow our marriage is strong."

My analysis: Cagney was very ill and fell under the thrall of a women who exploited him and made him do a TV movie when he couldn't even talk. Astaire married a women who, after he died, sold his image to sell a vacuum cleaner. Kelly danced to heaven and his young wife had him cremated before his children could see the body. TMZ reports this new Mrs. McMahon spends a lot of money and could this be why Ed had to overextend himself, to pay her bills? I wish Johnny were here to help him out.

What's Nu?

Dear Blog:

A lot has happened this past month. I finally found a full-time job after almost 15 months of part-time and freelance. This is a solid company and has been in business for over 500 years, no kidding. I just want to put in 15 good ones and retire, no desire to reinvent the wheel or get ahead.

Before I started the new job, I took a trip to Gouverneur, NY to visit my friend and his wife on their sheep farm.

Cathedral of Hay

Each time I go I try a new farm job. Last time up there I was spreading manure, this time I was working the chain saw cutting logs. It’s a whole other world there and I have to get myself to the farm more often.

How to Shear Sheep


We lost our turtle Speedy this month.

I cried for the first time since my mother-in-law died. Speedy was brought home by my wife in 1993 at the approximate age of two. When he was palm-sized, my wife did most of the care but in recent years as he grew to Whopper proportions, he was all mine. He had a health crisis three Super Bowls ago and I pulled him through it with the vet’s advice of vitamins and extra clean water. In the last two months he seemed to have gained a lot of weight and in the last week the tank seemed cleaner. I’m thinking he had some kind of intestinal failure.

Speedy, I want to tell you about an English TV show called Red Dwarf. Lister, the last surviving member of the human race awakens from suspended animation on an interstellar ship, all alone. To help prevent him from going crazy, the ship’s computer creates a holographic companion for him, Rimmer. Even though Rimmer is an annoying prig, he does his job and eventually becomes mates with Lister.

Speedy, when I was underemployed twice in the last few years, you were there for me, giving me something to do. Now that my kids are young adults, I don’t get the satisfaction and fun of caring for anybody who totally depends on me, but you gave me that. There was this lady who watered the plants at Applause Books and she told me about her cat. I told her about my turtle and she reacted that of course having turtle was not like having a cat. I disagreed.

MINI-REVIEW: THE SAVAGES on DVD

I just saw THE SAVAGES. Let me start by saying that I've met Phil Bosco, who played the father, and I'm a fan of his since THREEPENNY OPERA back in the day. Laura Linney is as good as Meryl Streep without the fluttery eyes and accent. PS Hoffman was chaneling my oldest brother, permanently pissed but getting it done. I thought there would be more laughs based on the DVD cover. That little exercise LL does cracked me up, like Elaine from SEINFELD. She also jogs in the last scene and has jogged in other movies. This may be a clause in her contract.

SAVAGES portrayed one of the most common but least portrayed relationships in film, brother/sister, and for that alone deserves credit, in addition to taking on a topic that’s not box office, caring for an elderly parent.

GREEDY LITTLE PIGGY: THE STIMULUS REBATE; BATTLESTAR GALACTICA; I Want MY DTV: Part 2

GREEDY LITTLE PIGGY: THE STIMULUS REBATE

I thought we were getting $1200 dollars as MFJ tax filers, but it turns out we’re getting $600 due to our low tax liability in 2007 (thank you, tuition tax benefits and underemployment).

Wow! Six hundred semolians! What to spend it on? Here’s my wish list:

1. HD Radio

2. Big screen TV

3. Giant turtle tank

4. New bed

5. Travel

6. Retire some credit card debt.

Six it is.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

The hilarious appearance of the cast of BSG in costume earlier this year, doing the usually tiresome Top Ten List on Letterman: "Top Ten Reasons to Watch the New Season of 'Battlestar Galactica,'" made me realize I was missing something. I then started watching the last few episodes of season 3 and the beginning of the fourth and final season. Simultaneously I have been catching up via Netflix and Blockbuster from the beginning of the series, creating my own mega-flashback. One sign that it’s a great show--I know what’s going to happen in most cases but it doesn’t ruin anything, just like seeing Romeo and Juliet.

What makes BSG different from other SF shows is that good characters do terrible things, not because they are under the sway of an alien life form, but because humans and human-aspiring cybernetic beings (Cylons) who look just like us sometimes do terrible things. Some of the plots look like they were ripped from the headlines Law and Order style per the mid-years of this decade, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some self-examination of torture, rigged elections, abortion, the use of military force, religion, and the wisdom of listening to voices in your head without physical evidence is a good thing. “All will be revealed” the commercials tell us and I can’t wait. The idea of doing a prequel series after this one ends sounds like the worst idea since AfterMASH, but so did a reimagining of the original Battlestar Galactica.

I Want MY DTV: Part 2

I took my digital-to-analog converter box to my mother in Gravesend and my sister in Sheepshead Bay and while the report is better that the results in my building (see http://1onthetown.blogspot.com/2008/04/free-ebook-beautiful-children-by.html)

the reception was not perfect, even with roof antennas in Gravesend and Sheepshead. For example, while were able to get channels 11.1 and 11.2 in Gravesend, we could not receive either in Sheepshead. Gravesend received a blocky channel 2.1 but Sheepshead received 2.1 without incident.

They can make announcements and advertise and send notices in the mail but one thing is for sure: there will be a lot of people in February 2009 who will think their TVs are broken.

Reader Mail

Q: Do you write about everything thing you see?

A: No I don't. For instance, I recently saw my niece in a middle school production of ANNIE. She played Molly, the lead orphan after Annie. She was great and will make a great Annie in the future if she chooses. This was an authorized production edited for school kids and they actually call the show ANNIE, Jr. The TV production of ANNIE (not the movie) was one of the best things ever on TV.

Q: What about movies?

A: Mrs. 1Ott and I recently saw BABY MAMA starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. It’s a piece of fluff with flashes of humor, not as funny as Tina’s 30 ROCK but better than SNL. The last episode of of 30 ROCK was very funny, with Jack (Alec Baldwin) trying to get himself fired from his government job. When I see Tina with a sole writing credit on a 30 ROCK ep, I’m amazed. She was hired to act in BABY MAMA, and some interviewers are confused by that, thinking she wrote it also (it was written and directed by former SNL scribe Michael McCullers). Tina humbly claims to have only four moves as an actress but that’s 2-3 more than most.

Q: What are you reading?

A: I’m reading but having a hard time finishing BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN by Charles Bock. There’s not much of a connected story among the multiple lead characters, but the descriptive language gives you a good feel for the losers in Las Vegas. I’m only half way through it so I’m hoping it will pick up.

Q: Do you still root for the Mets?

A: Ha! Yes, I had flirted with going to the Phils for a year after the existential meltdown of the 2007 Mets (losing a 7 game lead with 17 games to go), like a Catholic trying out the Lutheran Church, but the Mets are like that cowboy buddy movie--I can’t quit you.

Q: What’s on your iPod?

A: I don’t have an iPod but as I’ve written about before, I have an old Rio, the grandfather of the iPod. Lately I’ve been debating myself whether it’s legal to record a stream (not a downloaded file per se, but a stream of data that you would need to record off your system mixer) and whether that is covered in the same way as the courts ruled on VHS taping. We used to tape off the air back in the day with tape decks and FM radios and it seems like the same thing to me. I've been listening to George Jones, Glen Campbell, Charlie Pride.

Q: You still listen to the radio. Why?

A: I like radio. I miss deejays like Ted Brown and William B. Williams. I’m hoping that someone takes an FM HD channel and runs standards like the old WNEW. That would make me run to buy an HD radio. Although, if they continue to offer Internet streamng, HD may be moot. In the meantime, I listen to High Standards on XM73 and hope that the upcoming merger doesn’t affect XM73.

Q: Still running?

A: Yup. The other day I felt something in my left hip that I never felt before. Each new ache makes you feel more alive I tell myself.

Q. How are the kids?

A: Two are coming home from college this week so I guess it's my favorite time of the year.

The New York Radio Message Board (NYRMB)

Do you listen to the radio? So do I. There’s a place online where people who love radio can talk about the industry in New York. The New York Radio Message Board (NYRMB) has been a unique institution since 1998, a place where professionals and fans chat, debate, and in many cases catch the eye of decision makers looking for ideas.

To be allowed to post on the NYRMB you have to send an email to the moderator, Allan Sniffen, who issues your password. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the board is that the moderator asks each poster in this mostly male board to use his real name. Most follow this rule and it leads to a higher level of civil discourse that any other board I have seen. Not much flaming goes on. Allan has been known to bounce people from the board for going off-topic.

Many professionals sign on and it’s a treat to hear the opinions of well-known radio personalities in an informal setting. For example, I’ve seen posts from Johnny Donavan, Big Jay Sorensen, Jay Diamond, and Cubby Bryant.

The range of topics this past week included the new Arbitron ratings, baseball on the radio, Opie and Anthony, and the move of WNYC’s studios. My own postings on the board have been about Imus, Whoopi, Boomer and Carton, Bob & Ray, and wherever I think I might have some fact to add to the discussion. I recently started a thread after a visit to my sister’s house to look after her cats. She uses a roof antenna and as I sat on the couch and channel surfed I checked out a topic that shows up on the board, Pulse 87, an FM station is actually VHF Channel 6. I heard the FM signal but was surprised to find that they were broadcasting a video loop of Texas wildlife. This generated some interest on the board as seen in this thread. Just spend 10 minutes on the NYRMB and you’ll learn something new.

· VHF Channel 6 (home of Pulse 87 FM) running wildlife video - Brian Black 19:20:40 04/22/08 (6)

• Re: VHF Channel 6 (home of Pulse 87 FM) running wildlife video - Robert Casey 20:14:30 04/22/08 (2)
• Re: Re: VHF Channel 6 (home of Pulse 87 FM) running wildlife video - MikeN 23:20:14 04/22/08 (0)
• Re: Re: VHF Channel 6 (home of Pulse 87 FM) running wildlife video - Brian Black 20:24:46 04/22/08 (0)
• Re: VHF Channel 6 (home of Pulse 87 FM) running wildlife video - Greg Tallman 19:53:56 04/22/08 (2)
• Re: Re: VHF Channel 6 (home of Pulse 87 FM) running wildlife video - MikeN 23:18:22 04/22/08 (0)
• Re: Re: VHF Channel 6 (home of Pulse 87 FM) running wildlife video - Tony Santiago 20:06:39 04/22/08 (0)

Posted by Brian Black on April 22, 2008 at 19:20:40:

I'm seeing scenes of Texas wildlife and hearing hot dance rhythms on VHF Channel 6 tonight. Could Pulse 87 be testing in order to begin using the video carrier?

John Adams on HBO

JOHN ADAMS flew under my showbiz radar until last month when I saw it advertised on a bus shelter. This looks like a good movie, I said to myself, one that I would pay to see instead of waiting for the rental. I was surprised to read in the ad that it was to be a miniseries for HBO. I had canceled HBO years ago after Chris Rock left his talk/sketch show and my kids were staying up later than me. Some of their late night programming is very raunchy.

Paul Giamatti stars as John Adams with Laura Linney as his wife, Abigail, David Morse as Washington, Stephen Dillane as Jefferson, Tom Wilkinson as Franklin, and Danny Huston as cousin Sam Adams. The nine-hour series cuts to the chase, the Boston Massacre (1770), so we lose the first 35 years of Adams life. I read the source material, David McCullough’s biography (which is enjoying a revival in paperback and well worth the effort to get through) and was surprised at first that, with nine hours, the producers chose to ignore the young Adams’ life that the author covered in great detail. But the choice to portray young America instead of young Adams is a good one as the period of American history from 1770-1800 is so interesting that it deserves the time devoted to it.

For most people, the presidency would be the peak experience of a life but for Adams, we see through Giamatti’s Emmy-worthy performance, a man living with the dread while he’s in office that history will not treat his term (1797-1801) as our second president kindly due to his nuanced stand between the perennial global rivals, England and France. We also see the very tender lifelong love story between John and Abigail, as history knows from their famous correspondence. The final episode also portrays another famous correspondence, the one beween between Jefferson and Adams. Both men became too old to travel in their post-presidencies and would write long thoughtful letters to each other about everything: their past achievements, the new republic, their places in history.

The best episodes are Part 3, in which Adams travels by sea and takes part in a battle against the Brits as he and his young son (future president John Quincy Adams) journey to France to get support for the new revolution; and Part 4, where John and Abigail are reunited and we see the events leading to the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the Revolutionary War.

Outstanding work is done by David Morse as Washington, who is played with a Mona Lisa grin on his face, or is it his bad teeth bothering him? Stephen Dillane as Jefferson is so good that I hope someone will think of him to play Jefferson again in his own miniseries. He’s the great enigma of American history, claiming all men are created equal but owning slaves. Many long shots of the Adams’ house show a white man working in the field, making a subtle point that Adams never owned slaves.

If you don’t have HBO, get it for this or rent it when the DVD comes out. You’ll be glad you did.

Free Ebook: Beautiful Children by Charles Bock; I Want my DTV

Free Ebook: Beautiful Children by Charles Bock

Beautiful Children by Charles Bock: how do you make a profit by giving 15,000 ebooks away? The Feb 2008 issue of Wired had an article about this new/old business model. You make up the loss in free advertising or in other products tied in to the freebie. For example, Wired reported that King Gillette sold the razors at deep discount and made it up on the sale of blades.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Well, Bill Gates told Homer you don’t rich by writing checks, as he busted up Homer’s Internet business. Ironically, Homer didn’t even own a computer. But the new/old paradigm of giving the product away has been a hallmark of the online experience. We take for granted free software (QuickTime, DivX, etc.) and that Adobe will always give away the pdf Reader, but what if they charged for it? Would the market respond and come up with another free reader? What if Adobe made pdf files proprietary? There was a rumor in the ’90s that Microsoft would buy Adobe and fears that we’d have to pay them every time we wanted to distill a pdf.

Tip of the Day: If you ever do read a book in Adobe Reader, here’s how I make a bookmark. I create a shortcut to the file, leave it on the desktop, and rename the shortcut with the number of the page where I left off.

I Want MY DTV

I finally got my $40 gummint coupon toward the purchase of a digital-to-analog converter for my old television. Come February 2009, these old war horses will need the converter box to pull in and convert the digital signal. As a member of the coop board, I have to recommend whether or not we should spend the money to upgrade the roof antenna and my test was very discouraging. I tried pulling in a signal many ways, using:

• The roof antenna
• The “turn your wiring into a giant antenna” device
• An amplified indoor or fire escape antenna
• A screw in my alarm system
  

Believe or not, wedging the tip of the coax into the screw gave me the best signal strength. However, the only channels I could get were 5.1, 5.2 (simulcast of Channel 9) 25.1, 25.2 (traffic camera channel), and a low power religious station on digital channel 3.1. It’s going to be weird to see channel 3 in New York if they stay on the air. I am recommending to the board to make the investment to upgrade the system and pull in these signals, which for the most part are from the old UHF band which was always hard to tune in. (Although I read that some channels after February 2009, such as Channel 13, may move back to the their old signal on the VHF band).

One of the knocks against digital is the all-or-nothing feature of receiving the transmission: no more ghosts. Another knock is how hard it is to get a signal in a fringe area. I’m on the second floor of the southern end of a six-story building and that’s certainly a reason why I’m not getting much of a signal. I can’t help but recall that the old analog VHF TV signal could penetrate thick walls but UHF cannot. Many people who are ignoring this conversion and who don’t have satellite or cable are in for a shock come February 2009. There may be a mad dash to Radio Shack or Cablevision or Dish.

Blockbuster vs. Netflix

I was going to write about the ongoing JOHN ADAMS miniseries on HBO but decided to put that off and jot down a few thoughts on Blockbuster vs. Netflix.

I’m a latecomer to the Peabody Award­–winning series on the SciFi Channel, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. The show is in its fourth and final season. I watched the last few episodes of the previous season last week and I’m familiar with the series plot just by keeping up with show biz news in general. After seeing the Season 4 premiere, I went to Blockbuster to catch up and get Season 1 Disc 1. I watched it on the laptop with headphones. Great audio and video production values and probably the best acting ensemble in science fiction television with veteran thesps like Edward James Olmos (Cmdr. Adama) bringing up the perfs of the less experienced crew members.

I went back to Blockbuster, which last week had the complete series on DVD, to get Season 1 Disc 2. The single copy they had was out. Usually I delay gratification, but I went home and signed up for Netflix and put BSG Season 1, Discs 2-5 on my queue, plus CURB YOUR ENTHUSUASM Season 6.

Netflix has also come up with a new killer app, as if having what Blockbuster stores don’t carry isn’t enough. Now you can download a subset of their selections on your computer via streaming, with no waiting for the entire film to load or clog up your hard drive. I tried it out and the program crashed when I tried to go full-screen on RED DWARF 8. I had just loaded the viewer so perhaps a reboot will fix this problem.

Blockbuster has its own Netflix-like mail service, which they started a little too late to catch up with the competition. I don’t know if the Netflix streaming service will increase their selection in the future but streaming gives them an awesome advantage over Blockbuster.

I recalled banking online with Citibank in the early ‘90s, dialing via modem in terminal mode, accessing their computer with a 212 number, lightning fast response for the most part. As the years went on, Citibank never lost their lead in sophistication over the other banks’ online services. Ironically, the service was faster on text only, 28.8K modems than on any modern graphic-laden browser. It was a sad day when they discontinued Direct Access. The program fit on a single floppy.

Blockbuster has been closing stores and for awhile it looked like they were putting most of their effort into starting up the mail service. Unless they make a strong response to Netflix’s streaming service, I don’t see how they will survive. If they do intend to keep the stores going, they should keep more than one copy of hot TV shows in stores, or find a way to check what’s popular and triage a few more copies in there. About half of the three seasons of GALACTICA was out. Like my old boss Mr. Ron Gettinger used to say when I ran the toy department in a small Woolworth’s, “Don’t ever run out of the Batmobile.”

Live Video Exclusives: The Giants' Victory Parade, St. Patrick's Day, Mom's Birthday

GIANTS VICTORY PARADE 2008

Somehow the Giants' Victory Parade of 2008 took away some, but not all, of the stink of the Mets' "7, 17" collapse of 2007. I'm not even a Giant fan but as a Jet fan I was pulling for the Giants. This is a New York thing. The negative corollary is that a Met fan cannot root for the Yankees in the World Series.

At the column hed is a still pic and below is some live video shot from the corner of Broadway at Liberty. Sounds like a title for an M-G-M Navy musical. The still looks like a scene out of Mecca. On the sidewalks of lower Broadway, the Canyon of Heroes, are some very impressive names of people and groups for whom the city has held ticker tape parades. Lindbergh, Churchill, MacArthur, de Gaulle, the Apollo 8 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. And Sammy Sosa. I wonder what the hell was going through Giuliani's sports-happy mind when he suggested this one? Hey Mayor Mike, is it too late to scrape the memorial plaque off the lower Broadway sidewalk?


ST. PATRICK"S DAY PARADE

The weather's been rotten in March but the skies cleared for St. Patrick's Day. I stood at 60th Street and environs facing Central Park in the late afternoon and noted that security was tight as usual. When you can't walk more than a few blocks without taking a detour down a side street, it helps control the crowd. The still pic is a salute to my friend Kerry and my brother Brendan.

The vid is "Anchors Aweigh" on bagpipes, although you're forgiven if you mistook it for a bagful of cats being run over. I like the bagpipes like I like reggae--too much of a good thing is bad for you.





MOM'S 89th

Finally, we celebrated Mom's 89th birthday this month. Like Old Man River, she just keeps rolling along. Her secret to longevity is that she has something to do everyday. Don't call Mom alert. It's an insult. Yeah, she may have ("may have" I say) slowed down an eighth of a step but if you talked to her on the phone today you'd hire her tomorrow to work a full five and a half day work week, like she used to do for Domino Sugar down on the waterfront back in the day. (Mom on left, Sis on right.)



ADAMS PREVIEW

I signed on to HBO for the month so I could see the Adams miniseries. This went under the radar for me as I first heard of it recently from an ad on a bus shelter. I read the McCullough bio on which this is based and from what I've seen so far, HBO has done the near impossible--show life as it was, be historically accurate, and entertain the hell out of you. More on this next month.

Off-Broadway: ADD1NG MACH1NE

I’m not sure that you’d have to be a middle-aged man who’s been laid off at least once to get the first part of Add1ng Mach1ne, which opened last month at the Minetta Lane Theatre, but it helps. The last time I was laid off, the home office sent an officer of the firm to do it, apparently a legal nicety when a couple of people are getting canned at the same tine. The boss (the guy who hired me) was nowhere in sight. It seems to me that the guy who hired me should have been the one to show me the door, and that’s what happens in the musical Add1ng Mach1ne, based on a play by Elmer Rice.

In the 1920s, Mr. Zero (Joel Hatch) is let go (’20s-talk for laid off) by the boss. Zero had been expecting a promotion from the position of hand-tally man to the front office after 25 years of service. The daily morning nag from his wife (the opening number “Something to Be Proud Of”), plus the revelation that an adding machine was taking his job, drives Zero to a murderous rage. He kills his boss and lands on Death Row on the way to Heaven, an afterlife that’s not what he expects or even wants.

Minor criticism: I had a problem with the accents of Mr. Zero and Mrs. Zero (Cyrilla Bear). Was it working-class American or Cockney? Mr. Zero maintains his accent when he sings but Mrs. Zero lapses into operatic pronunciation and sounds less of a nagging shrew.

There’s a very clever bit of staging in Scene 1, where we are looking down at the couple in bed. The bed is standing on its bottom and I wondered how they kept the covers looking natural but not falling down so to speak.

Elmer Rice wrote a scathing play about capitalism’s bosses but he’s not too crazy about the workers either. Jason Loewth and Joshua Schmidt’s libretto, with Schmidt’s often discordant music, evokes the rollicking 1920s with the dark mood of the1930s (the real 1930s, not the movie version). There’s welcome comic relief in the role of Daisy (Amy Warren), whose unrequited love for Mr. Zero is given flight in the gentle ballad “I’d Rather Watch You.”

Since most of the show is sung, if you don’t like musicals I wouldn’t recommend Add1ng Mach1ne. If you do want to spend a very fast 90 minutes at an entertaining expressionistic musical that could be a harbinger of the bleak times ahead (as Rice’s play was in 1923?), if this week’s Bailey Savings and Loan–like run on Bear Stearns is any indication, then go. This was a bargain at $28 (TDF tickets).

1 On the Town is back on the town. My employment prospects have picked up in the last few weeks and I hope to once again offer the reader reviews of the best in bargain theater. The downside is that the more I work the less time and energy I have to go out. Ah sweet mystery of life.

Justice League: The New Frontier on DVD

Justice League: The New Frontier is a PG-13 direct-to-DVD animation from the DC Comics universe, from a story by Darwyn Cooke. Based on a six-part comic book, it takes place in the 1950s, before any of these heroes were updated or killed or became evil and then good again. You know it’s not for kids when we see Superman (Kyle MacLachlan) come upon a scene in Southeast Asia. His old friend Wonder Woman (Lucy Lawless) is celebrating with a roomful of local women with guns. Wha’ happened? asks the big Boy Scout. These women were raped and left in cages by their brutalizers, she explains. I just disarmed the men, left their guns in a clearing, and liberated the women from their cages. What happened next was up to the women. Superman is horrified and Wonder Woman tells him, hit the road spaceman. She’s even a smidge taller than Superman, letting you know who’s boss here.

Full disclosure: I am a big fan of the Flash (first two versions) and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan of course) and was thrilled to see their prominent roles in this movie. Flash rescues his reporter/girl friend (what it is with superheroes and beautiful reporters?) from Mr. Freeze in ring-a-ding-ding Las Vegas and Green Lantern’s origin is retold. Unlike most origins, GL’s is simple and unchanging: man finds dying alien in desert, receives his power ring, and his job. The ring actually seeks out Hal, bravest person on Earth, to take the place of Abin Sur, who had been the Green Lantern for our sector of the galaxy. Any more on this would be TMI for people who don’t follow comics and too trivial for those who do.

Batman kicks butt bigtime and transitions from the original creepy-cowled maniac of the 1940s to the friendlier-cowled, ward-watching superhero of the 1950s. J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, is revealed to be an accidental visitor to Earth, trying to blend in but without the advantage of growing up with the Kents. Aquaman even shows up in the last scene but why spoil it? Needless to say, the scene takes place on the beach.

The Justice League is a club for superheroes. Writer Darwyn Cooke borrowed a concept from Paul Levitz, that in the 1950s, Sen. Joe McCarthy hounded the masked vigilantes of the League into the shadows, except for Wonder Woman and Superman (they signed loyalty oaths). For Batman it’s business as usual and he keeps up the franchise working underground from the Batcave. The analogy of this plot to real life is the blame put on comic books by politicians for juvenile delinquency. Most of the major superhero titles, except Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, went under.

The DVD extras contains a fascinating history of the Justice League. I was stunned to hear the unmistakable voice of Stan Lee (from the might Marvel universe) on this documentary. Then we see Stan, who reveals that the Fantastic Four was cooked up on the golf course when Marvel’s president asked Lee and Jack Kirby to come up with something to compete with DC’s Justice League.

Oh yeah, the plot: the League reunites to fight a living island of dinos and monsters.

While the ending is never in doubt, it’s a fun ride to get there. I like this movie a lot and look forward to more in the series. One of the extras was a preview of Batman: Gotham Knight, an anime-style direct-to-DVD. Promotion is calling it a bridge between the previous and upcoming live-action Bat flicks. I call it a must-see DVD.

Black History Month: PETTIGREW FOR PRESIDENT

When I was 6 years old we used to get a Catholic publication for children called TREASURE CHEST. It was a comic book and contained stories with moral teachings worked in with history and general informaton, not necessarily religious doctrine. In January of 1964 they began a six-month series on the presidential electoral process. Titled Pettigrew for President, the story is so forgotten that I only got 87 Google hits on it, although I have a feeling that might change soon. The hook was to follow the candidacy of one man in his quest for the presidency in the near-future (although far away to a kid) year of 1976. They never mention the political party. We learned about the primary system, raising money for the campaign, and traveling around the country looking for support. There are even dirty tricks from his opponents trying to tarnish his military record.

Somewhere in the series we realized something was up. They never showed the candidate's face and we only saw him in long shots. Word balloons would cover his face when we got close. At first we thought they didn’t want to confuse us with any similarity to an image of a real person, but eventually we began to speculate. Here’s where my memory gets hazy but I think there were hints from some characters that they didn’t like him for personal reasons. Eventually, in the very last pages of the series we see Governor Pettigrew, war hero and family man, get the nomination of his party. The big reveal? He’s African-American, or as they put it in the story in 1964, Negro.

We came to admire this man and even root for him. Any racial prejudice we might have had was given a hard knock, and it encouraged a young mind to think about people based on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. This is the kind of practical morality that was associated with the Catholic Church in 1964.

And now Obama, the real-life Tim Pettigrew. The pundits are shocked how well he’s doing with white men. H-m-m. These pundits go to the same schools and are hired by the fathers and mothers of friends who also went to those same schools. They don’t ride the subway or go to public school meetings for their kids. They live in lily-white suburbs and when they say Hi every day to their doorman, they make believe that it shows how open their hearts are. They pretend to know what I think by assuming I’m too racist to even consider voting for an African-American. I wonder if the fault is not in me or the stars but in themselves.

We’ve tried the stupidest kid in the class, now let’s try the smartest. I know Carter was smart, but the president can’t be talking about malaises and driving the market in the toilet. Give this guy a shot.

Personal note: my two sons are now registered for the draft and I don’t want any part of a 100 years war with Big John.

Black History Month: HOTEL RWANDA

So far during our Black History Month celebration we've looked at the 1940s and '50s and the career of baseball's Larry Doby, the '60s and '70s with deejay and community leader Petey Greene. Today we jump to 1994 and pay tribute to Paul Rusesabagina. He was the subject of the movie HOTEL RWANDA (2004) and portrayed by Don Cheadle (Cheadle and Rusesabagina are pictured). Rusesabagina, using the resources of the hotel that he managed, saved over 1200 Tutsi refugees from the machete-wielding Hutu rebels, proving that one man can make a difference.

Historical background vs. the movie: the claim is made in HOTEL RWANDA that the Belgians (former colonial rulers) set the Hutu against the Tutsi by favoring the lighter-skinned Tutsi with jobs and educational advantages. The Hutu (of whom the non-political Rusesabagina was a member) exacted a terrible revenge in the form of ethnic cleansing or as it should be called, mass murder. 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days.

Research reveals that the two ethnic groups were rivals before the Belgians arrived in 1916, but the Belgians made things worse by their policy of favoring the Tutsi. When they left in 1962, the Hutu majority took over the government and scapegoated the Tutsi for most problems of the country. The movie especially emphasizes the hatred of the Tutsi for collaborating with the colonizers. The assassination of the president, a Hutu, sparked the Hutu rebellion.

In HOTEL RWANDA, Paul Rusesabagina has the savoir faire and survival instincts of Rick from CASABLANCA. Paul is used to doing favors for the powerful and seemed to be an unlikely savior. Early on in the movie he and his family peer through their front gate and see a Tutsi neighbor beaten and taken away. He tells his wife there’s nothing anyone can do. At great risk to his life he makes a decision (at his wife’s urging) not to turn refugees away from his hotel, first under the tenuous protection of the blue helmeted U.N troops and then the ominous oversight of the General Bizimungu. He concocts a fable for his “protector,” General Bizimungu, to be mindful of the Americans and their spy satellites; they will be used to show evidence against him in war crime trials. It’s the one bit of comic relief in the movie. Amazingly, General Bizimungu, indicted in 2002, is still on trial which began in September 2005. The charges are genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

There’s a point where refugees are being allowed to leave and Paul and his family (his wife is Tutsi) are getting ready to get on a transport under U.N. protection to leave the country. As the truck is getting ready to leave, he tells his wife that he can’t go with them, that he can’t leave the rest of the people behind in the hotel. The transport is driven back by rebels due to a tip from a hotel worker, and the family is reunited. Eventually, international pressure and the return of control by the military over the machetes leads to a lessening of violence and the family does make it to a refugee camp to leave the country. Paul Rusesabagina received the thanks of many people at the camp in 1994 and when the movie came out in 2004, the thanks of the world.

Black History Month: PRIDE AGAINST PREJUDICE: THE LARRY DOBY STORY

This informational Budd Greenspan 2007 documentary should be on the C-B-S network, not just the Y-E-S cable channel under the “Yogi and a Movie” banner. The story of the second black player (and first in the American League) in the modern era of major league baseball, Larry Doby is not a household name, but then again in Internet time kids today think LeBron invented the dunk. Twinned in history, Doby is inevitably compared to outspoken Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers and comes up very well.

Interviews with former teammates such as Al Rosen and Bob Feller are mixed with comments by contemporaries Ralph Kiner, Don Newcombe, and friends and family of this quiet Cleveland Indian who made the move from the Negro Leagues to the American League and became an All-Star Hall of Famer. Doby himself appears in a few segments.

The humiliation of not being able to get a cab and having to walk in uniform to the whites only clubhouse in segregated Washington, DC is just one of the many injustices that you can’t be reminded of enough times. It reminded me of my father’s story of riding the bus in DC in the ’50s and laughing that all the white folk stood in the front while there were plenty of empty seats in the back. Local black families took in the ballplayers who were not allowed to stay in the hotel with the rest of the team.

A great moment in the film is when the Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Braves to take a 3-1 lead in the 1948 World Series. Steve Gromek pitched and got the win backed by a Larry Doby home run. The picture of a black man and a white man (see top of post) hugging was revolutionary in 1948 and Gromek took heat from it from his friends. Gromek's voice is heard commenting that it was nothing, just something that teammates do when they win.

One flaw in this film is showing that Doby retires in 1959 but then skips 10 years to Bowie Kuhn as the commissioner of baseball looking to advance blacks to the commisssioner’s office and to team management. What did Doby do from 1959-69? The “Yogi and a Movie” bumpers had additional info about Doby, such as Doby playing in Japan in the early '60s after his MLB days, and I would have liked to heard more about this episode in Doby’s life.

The first half of the movie is a social history of the era hanging its hat on Doby as one of many brave men who fought for the U.S in WW II but were denied basic rights after the war. There’s a great poster showing a man in military uniform in position to go into battle juxtaposed with the same man in the same position in a baseball uniform.

One fact I learned or forgot that I knew is why the Dixiecrats and Strom Thurmond left the Democratic party in '48. I only recalled that they did it, not precisely why they did it. Truman and the party had an extensive plank on civil rights presented at the '48 convention. For some reason, all I could recall was that the Dixiecrats hated Truman for one reason or another. There's a good audio of a speech by Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis at the convention.

Ira Berkow’s NY Times 1997 column on Doby was key to getting people to remember Doby and why he should be in the Hall of Fame, not only for his skills but for what he had to overcome. When he was elected in 1998 it was long overdue, like civil rights itself.

The number of African-Americans in baseball has declined dramatically for many reasons. Baseball has suffered from foreign players taking American jobs but no one likes to talk about it. Hard for a kid to want to emulate someone who doesn't live here or speak the language. I guess it's like comic books; the world of sports isn't for kids any more. I’m old enough to have seen the first blacks who played for teams (Elston Howard--Yanks, Pumpsie Green--Red Sox, Ernie Banks--Cubs) in the later part of their careers and the way it's going, 2008's class could be the last. We could use a couple dozen Jackie Robinsons and Larry Dobys to take away the odor of the steroid cheaters, but heroes like this only come along once in a generation, if at all.

Black History Month: TALK TO ME on DVD

I was first was impressed by Don Cheadle playing a lawyer on the CBS-TV drama PICKET FENCES. He was featured in BOOGIE NIGHTS and his career got another big boost playing Sammy Davis, Jr. in THE RAT PACK cable movie. Artistic triumph came in HOTEL RWANDA and he hit multiplex mega-consciousness in the OCEAN’S 11 series.

Personal recollections of other great Cheadle moments include two television appearances: a very funny MADtv sketch where he plays a couples therapist and a crazy duet with Adam Sandler when Sandler guest hosted for an ailing David Letterman.

One Cheadle performance that deserved to be seen by a wider audience in 2007 (now out on DVD) is TALK TO ME, a biopic about Petey Greene, an AM-radio star in Washington, D.C. who for a moment in history transcended show business and calmed a racially explosive capital.

Petey Greene is an ex-con who got his start on a microphone spinning his grandmother’s 45s over the prison P.A. He talks his way into a deejay job at a failing AM station in the early ‘60s. The program director, Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is the brother of one of his fellow convicts. They first meet in prison and Dewey says look me up when you get out, which no one thinks will be soon. Greene gets out unexpectedly early and shows up looking for a job.

Chiwetel Ejiofor steals this movie deftly playing the unexpected twists that his character takes. Dewey starts out as his boss and becomes mentor, friend, and agent. This is as much the Dewey Hughes story as it is Petey Greene’s. For a film with an African-American theme you’ll be surprised to find that an underlying theme is the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson as we see Dewey watching Johnny. Carson is his idol, not only professionally but personally.

The central event of the movie is the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Dewey’s presence on the air that night and a free public concert the next day by James Brown, with Dewey as emcee, is credited with helping to bring order to the besieged city.

Martin Sheen, as the station owner, has a great scene after Dewey’s radio show ends that you’ll have to see on the DVD extras. He’s interpreting the horrible events at the end of that long day and for some reason we only see the beginning and end of a moving monologue about meeting MLK back in the day. Perhaps the director felt it took away from the impact of the Dewey’s scene.

Cheadle plays Petey as a human being with flaws and there’s no attempt to excuse his drinking, infidelity, or letting people down. There’s no Rocky-type ending as his career peaks on television in Washington. He doesn’t want what his agent wants: national fame. He speaks the truth about corrupt politicians, sexual mores, and the bad things that people in his own community did, except that this was the first time anyone ever heard it on the radio. In one of the DVD extras, a reflective Cedric the Entertainer (deejay “Nighthawk” Bob Terry) ruminates on the state of expression today and notes that people were more free to speak back in the 1970s. Sad but true and maybe TALK TO ME will remind people of their freedom to speak and act.

90s Flashback: The Dana Carvey Show (1996)

The word “outrageous” is overused but The Dana Carvey Show (1996) truly was just that. Carvey’s sketch ensemble was tasteless and funny and even today seems too edgy for broadcast. You catch episodes 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 on a new website called hulu.com.

Carvey does many of his old familiar characters such as Ross Perot, Paul McCartney, and Regis Philbin. He keeps it up to the minute by playing the Unabomber on an MTV dance show (the unknown Selma Blair can be spotted as an MTV hottie) and Kato Kaelin in an OJ Simpson sketch. Simpson is selling a video tape telling us how he committed the murder of his wife, exactly like the book he was hawking in 2007. Series regular Stephen Colbert does a spot-on Geraldo Rivera grilling Kaelin and Simpson.

Colbert is the breakout performer in this series and the following year he joined THE DAILY SHOW with another Carvey cast member, Steve Carell. Colbert has been in character so long on Comedy Central that after seeing Carvey’s show, it’s clear his talents as a mimic at that time were very sharp and now regrettably unused, unless you count playing “Stephen Colbert” as Bill O’Reilly. One episode of Carvey has him doing a very accurate Gregory Peck at the Academy Awards and another an eerie Oliver Stone.

I’ve watched four of the episodes and have not yet seen the infamous WIZARD OF OZ parody, featuring a song called, “If I Only Had an A%%.” This was still 1996 and the level of tastlessness on TV hadn’t reached where we are today, but it was building. If Carvey did a show like this today, it might have a shot as the threshold for bad taste is much higher, although half-hour sketch comedy shows rarely succeed (HALF THE GEORGE KIRBY COMEDY HOUR, PAT PAULSEN’S HALF A COMEDY HOUR).

Other stuff on hulu.com: I watched the first TODAY show from 1952 on hulu.com and found it fascinating. Host Dave Garroway leads us through the wonders of live video remotes (which they explained are just like the audio remotes we were used to on the radio) and a wall that featured the major newspapers of the country flown in just for the show! I was surprised to see a news crawl at the bottom of the screen, thinking that was a more modern innovation. Great stuff.

I find hulu.com good for shows that I forget or can’t watch, for instance 30 ROCK, CONAN, and THE SIMPSONS.

There are several old/new pairings on hulu.com, such the two BATTLESTARs, the two KOJAKs, and the two WHAT’S HAPPENINGs.

They have MCHALE’S NAVY, of which I’m not a big fan, and I may write to hulu.com to see if they can get F TROOP, of which I am a big fan. Many of the shows hulu runs are not complete seasons, which I think may be designed to protect DVD sales. There are commercial breaks of no longer than 30 seconds duration and they are unobtrusive compared to the 4-5 minute breaks on broadcast TV. Enjoy!

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

In the first pages of the Introduction to Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, author Neal Gabler confronts head-on and convincingly debunks the rumor that Disney was frozen cryogenically from the neck up. The half-dozen end notes attached to this one story show how the book is well-researched: about 20 percent of the volume consists of end notes, many from personal interviews and research in the Disney archives.

Disney wanted to be an animator and Gabler answers a question that puzzled me as a child watching the 1960s NBC TV show: just what did Uncle Walt do? Interestingly, Gabler reports that people in his own company asked the same question. A modern comparison I thought of was Bill Gates, who started out as a code jockey but eventually became the guiding force and first principle that moved everything that the company did.

Money is the subtext of the Disney story. In debt on and off for most of the early years of the company, plowing whatever profits he made back into the firm, Disney jumps the shark when the company becomes wildly successful and art takes a back seat. The dedication to pushing the artists and staff to excel in producing SNOW WHITE and DUMBO for example in the early years, is lost after World War II. The studio becomes an arm of the federal government in producing training and propaganda films and after the war, in a chapter called “Adrift,” Gabler describes how Disney finally succumbs to his partner/brother Roy (and to his creditors) to spend less money on animation and show bigger profits. CINDERELLA and related merchandising (a field that Disney invented) becomes a hit that saves the company from going under in 1950.

From this point on, any of the love and camaraderie that went into making animation is gone and Walt is focused on one goal: to make money to finance Disneyworld. Regarding the declining quality of the cartoons, he told his masseuse, “what the hell. It’s going to help build Disneyworld, kid.”

For a bio of a man who made many comedy cartoons, I was expecting a little more humor in the book, which might mean that comedy is a serious business. If you’ve sat through Charlie Rose with Steve Martin, deconstructing the art of funny, you’ll know what I mean. About the only funny passage in the book is not from a scene in a short or movie, but from animator Ward Kimball. In describing Disney’s attitude toward women, Kimball said, “He didn’t trust women or cats. Almost of his villains were either women or cats.”

Disney creates Mickey Mouse in the 1920s as an edgy bad boy who evolves into a suburban home owner with a dog. Disney also evolves as someone who is hailed as a folk artist in the beginning of his career and vilified as the personification of bland. Gabler is a good reporter and gives you enough information to make your own conclusion.

Regardless of how one feels about the art of Disney (I think the Warner and Fleischer Bros. were funnier) you will come away with a new admiration for Disney’s position as an artist of commerce. He used ABC’s money in the 1950s to produce a TV show (a virtual weekly infomercial) that financed Disneyworld. Then years later, Disney (the company) buys ABC. Corporate synergy doesn’t contribute much to art, but the birth of it as described by Gabler makes an interesting read.

Vintage Books paper back, 2007. Originally published by Knopf, 2006.

JUNO

TOOTSE (1982) was the first major movie I saw featuring a single woman who had a child out of wedlock, presented as a matter of fact, no biggie. The baby isn’t even part of the plot. The situation mirrored the real life of Jessica Lange who played that role in TOOTSOE. Flash forward to the 21^st century and unwed motherhood has hit the zeitgeist (see http://1onthetown.blogspot.com/2007/10/knocked-up-on-dvd-unrated-and.html, http://1onthetown.blogspot.com/2007/11/slam-by-nick-hornby-or-bamboozled.html, et al.).

The latest entry in the series is JUNO, starring Ellen Page as Juno, a 16-year-old who decides to have her baby but give it up for adoption. Also starring are Michael Cera as the Dad, J.K. Simmons as her father, and Allison Janney as the good stepmother. Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner are the rich couple who want to adopt Juno’s baby.

Juno has a wicked sense of humor that she inherited from Dad. I can’t say enough about J. K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson from the SPIDERMAN trilogy), who is perfect as Mac MacGuff, military veteran turned HVAC repairman, who can tell Juno with a squint that she’s an idiot but he loves her. He’s the rock of the movie.

There’s a subversive flashback shown with voiceover of a sex ed instructor using a banana to teach the boys and girls how to put on a condom. I call it subversive because it illustrates how schools taught sex but not love. JUNO fills in that missing lesson, a primer on how love is the answer, at least when it comes to bringing a life into the world. A rocking soundtrack helps too.

DVD Review: POPEYE 1933­–1938

Don’t be fooled by any overnight cable versions, ‘80s VHS public domain slap-togethers, or YouTube streams. This collection of POPEYE is the one for which fans have salivated for a long time. Full disclosure: I love Popeye and would excuse any minor flaws but this nearly seven-hour package is perfect and what the DVD player was made for: pristine prints of classic toons.

The four-disc set contains:

• sixty Popeye cartoons, many with commentary
• eight Popumentaries
• 16 silent cartoons starring Krazy Kat, Mutt and Jeff, and others from the dawn of animation

Disc 1 opens with Popeye the Sailor’s 1933 film debut, a cartoon eponymously titled but presented under the banner of another Fleisher Bros. cartoon star, Betty Boop. Popeye was already a popular King Features comic strip character, created by E. C. Segar, and the one-eyed* sailor’s first appearance in the movies is heralded in the first scene. Newspapers (remember them?) come rushing off the presses and a close-up of one paper reveals the headline:

POPEYE A MOVIE STAR
The Sailor with a “Sock” accepts Movie Contract

A “photograph” of Popeye on board a ship magically comes to life and instantly we get the first of several trademarks and recurring themes in the series: the “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man” song, the “toot-toot” of his pipe, and the fluidly circular motion of his arms and hips as he swaggers along. Gags 1 and 2: he smashes an anchor and turns it into hooks, then pulverizes a ship’s clock and the pieces reassemble into over a dozen little clocks. “So keep good behavior that’s your one lifesaver,” he sings. About two minutes in we meet girl friend Olive Oyl at the dock and learn that she can take care of herself against a masher, one of Popeye’s shipmates heading for shore leave. Interestingly they include barnyard animals in sailor suits. These non-human characters in human jobs disappear in later cartoons. Then Bluto, Popeye’s rival for Miss Oyl, makes a play for Olive. She fights him to a draw to the tune of “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” (the tune is used again in another Popeye cartoon in this set, “Beware of Barnacle Bill”). When Popeye shows up he just pushes Bluto aside and takes Olive to the carnival. Bluto is angry and you can tell from the raging battleship on his bare chest that he’s plotting revenge. For all the action described so far, and I left out some, we haven’t even hit the three minute mark.

We have a long shot of the carnival to the tune of “The Band Played On.” There’s an unbelievable amount of movement in this scene: a tunnel of love that pours people out and up into a spinning Ferris wheel, which drops patrons in two directions: onto a floating-in-air/ rotating merry-go-round and into the cars of a moving roller coaster. Here come the laughs: Bluto brutalizing the peacock ticket taker followed by Popeye eschewing the hammer to test his strength and using his fist to hit the block, which rings the bell so hard that it flies 93 million miles to give the sun a black eye.

A near-topless pre–Hayes Code Betty Boop does the Yaaka Hula and Popeye jumps on stage with her and busts a move as he dances (looks like rotoscope), grabbing the Bearded Lady’s beard and making a hula skirt out of it. A kidnapping and attempted murder-by-locomotive of Olive by Bluto is thwarted by our hero, aided by a can of spinach.

I’m in Disc 2 now and every night I watch one or two cartoons with one of my sons. He’s an aspiring voice artist and theater major. He’s learning a lot from Popeye, Olive, Bluto and the genius of the Fleisher’s Bros. and Segar’s greatest and long-missed creation. The Popumentaries are great too, especially the one on the men (and 1 woman!) who voiced Popeye.

__________

*One-eyed or just permanently squinty? I’m not sure.

Three-Hour Philly Phormat Phlush on WPHT-AM

Sid Mark was on the big talker WPHT-AM in Philly live on New Year’s Eve last night and rebroadcast today from noon to three (not available as a stream) playing Sinatra et al. He does local and syndicated weekend Sinatra shows in Philly. [When I was courting my wife in the early ‘80s we loved Sid’s syndicated Sinatra show, Saturday nights on WYNY-FM. Sunday nights WYNY ran the Dr. Ruth sex advice show and the rest of the week was MOR. No narrowcasting back then.] During that period I remember Mark Simone and Jonathan Schwartz on WNEW-AM having fun at Sid’s expense, claiming that “there’s this guy on another station” that just lets the Sinatra albums track without offering any special insight to the music. They joked about Sid calling his show the “official” Sinatra show. Twenty-five years later Sid is still going strong on AM radio with a signal that anyone would love to have. Although I get some static from the speaker and from my wife (who doesn’t enjoy radio static), it was great to hear Tony, Lena, Lou Rawls in glorious AM mono from Philadelphia.