"What Are You Reading?"

In a previous post, I listed my favorite books of all time in the universe. This is not that post. This is about reading in general and about my favorite question (see above).

When I see someone reading a book on the bus, I have to know what it is. But since I'm shy, it's hard for me to just up and ask a stranger to show me the cover. If it's easy to see, though, and it's a book I love so much I stay up nights berating myself for not having written it, I can't help blurting out, “I love that book!” In Florida and New Jersey, this is not always advisable. People's personal space extends about fifty feet in all directions there. But in Washington, Kansas, and Idaho, people are friendlier. They want to tell you how they like it so far. In Seattle, they might even ask you what you've been reading. (In Boise, they'll tell you how they like it, what else they've read, by that author, how they've been feeling lately, and what hospital they were born in.)

With me, books and pets have one thing in common. If I enter someone's house for the first time and see either a dog or a bookcase, I tend to gravitate toward it and forget to say hello. I'm fascinated by other people's bookshelves. Do they read what I read? If not, do they read anything I might like? If so, will they let me borrow it? If they have both a dog and a bookcase, it's a tough choice, but I'd probably give the dog a quick pat on the head en route to the bookcase.

I treat borrowed books like archaeological artifacts. Once, while an undergraduate at Smith, Sylvia Plath became enraged when a friend who had borrowed a book of hers returned it dog-eared and penciled to death. I feel her pain. I've had people say, when I return a book to them, “Did you even read it?” Not because I read it so fast, but because it still looks like new. If it's a book they really want my opinion on, I almost feel obligated to turn just one page corner a teeny bit and then flatten it back so there's just a faint bit of evidence. (But I won't even do that.) Years ago, I borrowed a book from a friend who wasn't even a friend. She was the friend of a friend. Back then I enjoyed reading in the bathtub. You can imagine how careful I was when I took a book in there. Well, as soon as I climbed into the tub with her book, it slipped from my fingers and went plop under the suds. (Yes, it was a bubble bath. Your point?) I was frantic. I knew wiping it down would do no good, because the pages would still be all wavy and crinkly. So the next day, I went from bookstore to bookstore until I found a copy of the same edition. When I handed it to her and explained what had happened, she said, “Why did you bother? I'm never going to reread that thing.”

I've been a library geek all my life. I used to read fast, so due dates were meaningless because I always returned books with three weeks still left. Late last year, I burned out on reading. I read so fast that it started to feel like a chore. My pending pile of books (right now it numbers around two dozen) started weighing on me, so that I had to put aside even the books I was enjoying to start another. Finally, I couldn't read at all. I was bereft. If I go more than two days between books, I forget to eat and start losing sleep. I told my sister about my situation, and she gave me two words of wisdom that changed my life and made me a new man – “Slow down.” It worked. I've only read four books so far this year, and the latest, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (awesome novel about Indira Gandhi's oppressive rule in the 1970s), has taken me more than a month! When you take that long with a book, the characters begin to seem like family, people you don't have to talk to every day, yet you know they're still there for you.

Sometimes I go through writer binges. This used to happen a lot when I was an undergraduate. No sooner was I enrolled in a lit class than I became consumed by anything and everything I could get my hands on that wasn't assigned. I can't remember the title of one particular lit course, but I remember reading The Pastures of Heaven on the subway and instantly developing a craving for all things Steinbeck. (East of Eden emerged the winner by a mile.) I started Brighton Rock in a hospital and a month or so later had finished every novel Graham Greene wrote (The Heart of the Matter won, The End of the Affair placed).

As a college writing instructor, I made it a personal policy never to assign any one book that was more than 200 or 300 pages long. I knew that my students had other classes that involved other books to read, so why make reading feel like a punishment and books the last thing they'll ever want to see after they graduate? My main impetus for this rule was Thomas Wolfe. I'd taken Mrs. Payton's undergraduate class on Southern Literature, and she assigned Look Homeward, Angel. It was a literary tsunami that swept away all the other little book dinghies we'd been assigned. What broke my heart was the fact that I loved that book! I knew I could never finish it and still pass the course. What was she thinking? I was only able to get back where I left off many months later, and the thrill was gone. I finished it, but I'd lost that spark that propelled me through the first 100 pages.

My sister calls me every Sunday afternoon so we can catch up on the previous week. Without fail, I ask her, “What are you reading?” She always tells me, but she doesn't always ask me the same question. The uninvited answer hangs there in space until I can email her the next day and tell her, relieved to have unburdened myself.

Speaking of my sister, she bought her first Kindle a few years ago, and I was as shocked as if she had told me she'd sewn her toes together. Why would any book lover ever want to buy a Kindle? You can't hold a Kindle up to your nose and inhale the smell of the pages as you riffle through them. You can't use a handsome bookmark to hold your places. You can't pull a Kindle off of a library shelf. Why had she sold her soul to the devil? “I like it,” was her explanation. She wasn't going to stop reading real books altogether. The latest novels by certain writers she admired (such as Grisham and Picoult) would always hold a valued place on the bookshelf in her craft room. It's just more convenient, she said.

Then she upgraded to a Kindle Fire. I didn't want to know how it was different. I didn't want to know anything about it. A few weeks later, a package arrived in my mail. It was her old Kindle. To make a long story short . . . well . . . I kinda . . . I sorta use the Kindle now and again. It will never replace books, trust me. In fact, I'm firmly committed to that pile of 24 books waiting in my kitchen (where the built-in bookshelves happen to be). But I can see the convenience my sister spoke of. A friend of mine flies from Arizona to Washington one week each month on business, and he bought his Kindle for the long flights. Easy to pack, easy to carry. I can't argue with that.

Still, I feel a little bit like a traitor, and I firmly believe books will never become obsolete. After all, if someone is reading a book across the aisle from you, what are you supposed to say? “I read that Kindle last year, it's great”? When the day comes when I can't even judge a book by its cover, that's the day I'll turn in my library card. Oh, wait – those won't be around, either.

Toys, or The Great Let's Make a Deal Massacre

Before there was Wii . . . before there was Nintendo . . . even before there was Pong . . . there was Miss Cookie's Kitchen.

It seemed an unlikely toy for a boy, but who knew from gender roles in 1956 and who cared anyway? It was one of the first toys I owned, and I was crazy about it. Best of all, it was my first Colorforms. Colorforms were, and are, very thin, colorful vinyl shapes you stick on a laminated surface that comes with each kit. In this case, it was interactive because Miss Cookie's kitchen had all these cabinets you could actually open and stick your vinyl pots and pans in. My parents gave me several Colorforms kits over the next few years, usually based on TV characters such as the Flintstones and Huckleberry Hound. Each piece took little imagination (the images were already created for you) and placing them on their chosen backgrounds took even less (each piece had its own spot, clearly defined). The fun for a kid under 12 was simply – well, actually, I'm not sure what the fun was, but I sure had it anyway.

Now I don't want to go on and on about Miss Cookie's Kitchen, but it's as good a place as any to start talking about toys. Like most things, toys have changed tremendously over the past 60 years. Kids today probably have as much fun now as I did then, except they're spending more time alone and probably forget what “outside” means. I could spend paragraph after paragraph recalling the wonderful toys of yore and all of the pleasures they gave my sister and me (Kenner's Give-A-Show Projector, Vac-U-Form, Mr. Machine), but that's boring. Here are some toys that couldn't become obsolete fast enough to suit me.

There was this little car, maybe three times the size of a Matchbox car, that I was supposed to put together, then wind it up and let it careen into a wall. The fun was in putting it together, watching it crash, and then doing it all over again. Well, let's say the car was made up of six pieces (I can't remember exactly). When I aimed it at the wall and let it go, it crashed into twelve pieces. So much for the little car.

Then my parents gave me this rocket ship to build. It had a little space capsule on top just like NASA's Mercury program used. You folded up a little parachute and attached it to the top of the capsule, and when you launched it with the press of a button, the parachute would open in mid-air, and the whole thing would float gently down to earth. In theory. My chute didn't open. The rocket came crashing down onto the street in front of our house, just like the little car. I permanently scrubbed that mission.

Does anyone remember Slip-n-Slide by Wham-O? It was a long sheet of plastic that you laid out on a lawn, then attached it to a garden hose. A sheen of water would spread over the plastic, and you ran toward it, belly-flopped, and slid from one end to the other. It might have been a really great toy, but I'll never know. A friend had one, and I guess there wasn't much water pressure that day. I ran, I leaped, I slid, and I got a red torso that hurt for two days. Wham-O, indeed. (I believe they're still cranking these out. Maybe I should give it another go.)

But of course there were many other toys that didn't crash and burn or cause me bodily harm. By the time I was ten, I had quite a collection. So did my friends Van and Billy, brothers who lived a few blocks away. But you can only play with a toy so many times. After a while, as is the American way, I craved new and better toys. Van and Billy had a bunch of good ones at home, and they liked mine as well. So we decided to swap some toys, but not in a simple trade. We enjoyed watching Let's Make a Deal during our summer vacations, and one of us got the bright idea of playing our own version of it at their house one afternoon when our parents weren't home. So I hauled armfuls of my toys over to their place in three trips, and we let the games begin.

We moved a couch and some living room chairs around so that the couch faced the chairs. Van and Billy got the chairs, and I got the couch. We spread our toys into three piles behind our respective furniture, so that the three chairs represented curtains one, two, and three, and my curtains were represented by the left, center, and right sides of the couch. I think we actually coined the phrase, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” We didn't plan on dying, but we did plan on winning.

Well, it was a short game. I won all the toys.

They didn't pick a single curtain with a toy behind it. My luck was phenomenal. Just in case you think I cheated, understand that at ten years old, we didn't trust the honor system for a second. Once they picked a curtain and lost, one of them got up and looked behind the chair or the couch to verify that the toy was elsewhere. They were good sports, though – they helped me carry all the toys back to my place. It still took three trips, except now there were three of us. (I wasn't a good sport. It never occurred to me to let them keep a few of mine just to keep the friendship going. I was a crumb back then.)

They asked me what I intended to do with three times as many toys as the average kid. Was I really going to play with them all? We brainstormed there in my parents' screened-in back porch. I'd like to say that Van or Billy came up with the solution, but they didn't. It was my bright idea to have a toy sale.

We separated the toys by category – board games, soldiers and cowboys, a few dolls from our youth, politically incorrect rifles and slingshots, marbles. . . . I tore off a mess of paper towels and wrote the prices on them with my father's Magic Marker. Then we went back to their house and returned with a large piece of cardboard, on which I wrote “Big Toy Sale Today!”

Now came the fun part. We spread out in three directions to visit the homes of every boy and girl we knew and told them to come right over to my place. It was big of the brothers to help out since they were the big losers. I promised to give them each fifty cents from my earnings. (Don't laugh – fifty cents to a ten year old in 1964 was a big hairy deal.)

Within an hour, the porch was full of kids, at least a dozen, poring over my wares with their pockets full of change. The soldiers and cowboys and marbles were big sellers among the boys. The girls went for the board games and a few of the marbles. Interestingly, I had to mark down the dolls to get rid of them.

So now it's just after 5:00, and my parents turn the corner onto our block. As they later recalled it, the way awful family memories become pretty funny over the years, my mother said to my father, “What's that?” “Looks like a big sign.” They pulled into the driveway and watched as kids they knew from the neighborhood emerged from the back yard and disappeared around the block carrying toys and games, some of which looked familiar.

The porch was still buzzing with activity when my parents walked through the kitchen and opened the sliding glass door.

“What the hell is this?” my father said.

“It's a toy sale,” I said.

I thought that was a pretty straightforward answer, but they didn't take it well. The kids who were left had to put the toys back, and I returned their money. Then I had to go from house to house and collect every last toy that was sold and give back my hard-earned change. Van and Billy carried their own toys home again, and I spent the evening in my room without the benefit of my mother's homemade meat loaf.

Times have changed. I doubt kids today are swapping video games and cell phones behind their parents' furniture. The new Let's Make a Deal is still fun, but it's nothing like the novelty it was in Monty Hall's day. Colorforms figures don't stick as well as they used to. (I only know this from reading users' comments online. Honest.) If I had it to do over, Van and Billy and I would probably be playing something safe and simple, like Billy's Battleship game.

Oh, yeah – I won that, too.

Concert Days

Twenty years ago, a friend and I (let's call him Osgood) traveled from Seattle to George (yes – George, Washington) to see James Taylor in concert at the Gorge Amphitheater. Although I haven't been to every concert venue in the U.S., the Gorge would be hard to beat for sheer breathtaking beauty. The stage was erected on the east side of the Columbia River, and is angled in such a way that when you're sitting up on the vast, crowded hill that looks down on the performers, the sun sets just behind and to the left of them. That's what the sun was doing when Taylor went into the first refrain of “Shower the People.” He couldn't have asked for better timing.

So Osgood had said when we arrived that he wanted to sit as high up on the hill as we could. I wasn't particular (though I did think it was odd), so we spread our blankets, took two bottles of beer from the cooler, and watched the performance. Taylor probably wanted to be sure that those of us way up in the nosebleed grass knew he wasn't just a small insect, so he did a lot of hopping across the stage as he played. I for one was glad, because he did look kind of like an insect, only now he looked like a grasshopper. So finally I asked Osgood why he'd wanted to sit up so high. Didn't he want to get a closer view? What he said fascinated me. He had no interest in seeing the acts themselves at concerts, he said; he was just there for the music.

This made no sense. He could stay home and listen to the music. Concerts were all about seeing your favorite performers up close and in the flesh, and being bombarded with music so loud your next-door neighbors would have called the police. Concerts cemented a singular experience in your memory forever. You could tell the grandkids you were there when Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure during that Florida concert in '68. My high school girlfriend can say that. (I was in the hospital with mono.) But if Osgood had lived there back then, he couldn't have seen that while listening to a 33 1/3 LP in his living room.

So I like concerts. I haven't seen as many as most of the people I've known, though, because as they became more and more expensive over the years, I couldn't justify the expense. They just weren't a top priority in my life. For instance, Simon and Garfunkel went on a reunion tour that stopped in Seattle when I lived there. It was a dream come true for me – they were my high school idols – but good seats went for $150 apiece. That was extravagant in the 1990s, or it was for me, anyway. I wrestled with my decision for weeks, then decided that if Simon and Garfunkel wanted me to shell out $150, they could come perform in my apartment. I would provide the stools.

In fact, many of the concerts I went to were singular memories. The first one I ever attended I went to with a friend whose mother dropped us off. We must have been around 14, so long ago that I can't remember where we were except that it was somewhere in downtown Miami. The group was Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and the venue looked like the inside of a big airplane hangar. No seats, but it didn't seem like anyone cared. BS&T put on a good show, and sometime during the last half of it, a wild thunderstorm hit the area (actually, it's a given that all Miami thunderstorms are wild, and dangerous as well). They proved to be a truly class act, though, when the show ended and the storm was still raging – they played a 40-minute encore that only ended when the rain subsided and the crowd could make a dry getaway.

My second concert would have been The Doors at Pirate's World, but I had that aforementioned mononucleosis that almost became hepatitis, and my girlfriend (let's not call her anything) went with another guy and that was that. I didn't so much care about her as the fact that I missed a great show.

I could never remember every concert I went to, much less the order, but a few do stand out.

The most fun I had was at the Show Box in Seattle, where my friend (let's call him Dave, since that's his name) and I saw Loudon Wainwright III. It was a pretty stripped-down venue at the time – Wainwright simply walked onstage with his guitar, sans introduction, and started playing. If you've never heard him, you must. He out-Prines John Prine for funny, folksy lyrics, and his songs can be meditative, even melancholy and profound, as well. He sang both kinds of songs that night, and because I was there, I got to know his idiosyncrasies – he would frequently lift one leg up behind him as he sang and then bring it right down again, and his tongue would sometimes leave his mouth more as a tic of some kind than just to wet his lips. It was a show free of pyrotechnics, mosh pits, even a backup band, and it couldn't have been more enjoyable.

The performer I've seen most often is Amy Grant (three times). I know, not exactly edgy, but edgy isn't always my thing. Her shows are mainly aimed at a Christian audience, though as she ventured into pop a few times, her followers became a mixed bag. But they were all believers when it came to music, and I think she has a great voice and writes some powerful lyrics.

The worst concert? I went with someone to the Gorge to see ZZ Top, and they put on a great show. I appreciated them more there than I had on CD. But the first act, oh, my – Ted Nugent. I have no memory of what he sang or what it sounded like. But I do remember him pacing the stage between numbers and shouting “No s***!” over and over. And over. That was it for his onstage patter. Well, there was one moment when he stopped to say a few choice words about Saddam Hussein, I think it was, then turned around and shot an arrow into a giant banner of Hussein's portrait that hung above the stage. (I'll bet most of us had been wondering what that was doing up there.) Maybe that's why I enjoyed ZZ Top so much. They could have been Alpine yodelers and I would have still been relieved. (That's not to take anything away from ZZ Top. They're better than yodelers any day.)

I saw Paul Simon twice, without Artie. First time, he shared the bill with Bob Dylan. They each did their own sets, but in between they sang a couple of duets. You might already suspect this, but it's impossible to sing a duet with Dylan. You're singing the melody as written, and his voice is somewhere else doing other things. Maybe he's just too unique to keep up with. I thought it was a massive understatement when he was introduced as “Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan.” How about, maybe, “Living legend Bob Dylan”? Maybe Simon had something to do with that. Simon was pretty subdued that night anyway and didn't interact with the audience at all. He was much livelier when he returned a few years later with Brian Wilson, joking with the crowd and even flinging water from a bottle at the front row. Wilson, though – what years of drugs and deep depression have done to him are a crying shame. His song intros didn't always make sense. At one point, he told us to look up at the rafters as he sang the next song so we could see angels flying around. He added that he was perfectly serious. I was gullible enough to look. I don't know who made up his band on that tour, but the sounds that came from those speakers was pure Beach Boys. Total time machine.

You might have assumed from the title of this piece, “Concert Days,” that those days are behind me. Well, never say never, I always say, yet the last concert I attended was in the Tacoma Dome in 2000. I swore afterwards that I would never go to another show unless I knew it had the potential to be as powerful for me as that one, and none has.

I'm talking about the Boss – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

I admit I was a diehard fan anyway, but still – three hours, and Bruce never left the stage. The others did briefly sooner or later, but what everyone said about his shows was true – he just went on and on and on, the Energizer rocker. His wife Patti Scialfa wasn't in the band that night due to illness, and that was my only regret. He sang from atop the piano at one point, but that was the only moment when he proved his age – he climbed up instead of leaping up. (But who even noticed?) They played their biggest hits. Bruce sat on a stool and did an acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.” (A seriously inebriated drunk one row down from me kept shouting, “Where were you born, Bruce?” but his voice didn't carry, thank goodness.) I'm so glad I got to see Clarence Clemons, too. The finale consisted of “Born to Run,” “Bobbie Jean,” and “Thunder Road.” I only realized then that we'd all been on our feet the entire three hours, and something about that finish brought tears to my eyes. Maybe it was the role those songs had played throughout my life or maybe just finally being able to see Springsteen sing them in person, whatever – something shook me to my core, and I went home knowing I'd finally been to the mountaintop.

Is there anyone I'd still like to see? Sure – I'd like just once to be in an audience singing “Hey Jude” along with Paul. But I don't even own a calculator capable of computing those ticket prices. I got to see Arlo Guthrie once, Arlo and his grown son, and that was magical, but I never did get to see him in concert with Pete Seeger. I'd pay as much as I could to see them together today (R.I.P., Pete). That's about it for concert wishes.

OK, geezer time. I enjoy seeing concerts on TV (well, when I was watching a lot of TV – see a previous post), but some things I'll never get used to, I guess. Altamont cast the first pall over what a concert could turn into and promptly ended the Woodstock era. More than ever before (Altamont notwithstanding), there seem to be so many violent incidents at concerts these days. Not all, of course – it's not like you have to fear for your life when you attend one – but those things were much rarer when my concert-going was at its peak. I also think that MTV removed much of the mystique of concerts. I was used to seeing my favorite bands not just in person but in some cases for the first time at all when I saw them onstage. Now (or at least when MTV was still in the music biz) bands have to live up to their videos. Maybe the most affecting indication of the passing years is the fact that matches we once held up in solidarity with our musical heroes are cell phones today. Say what you will, but the glow's just not the same.

Feel free to share your own concert memories with me. I'd enjoy that.

Confessions of a Spaz

OK, full confession: I know nothing about sports. Well, not nothing, exactly, but you could never mistake me for a jock. I've never even had jock itch. I'm able to enjoy sports as much as anyone can without knowing exactly what I'm looking at.

It started in first grade, where I majored in tumbling. You remember tumbling class, right? You were graded on how well you could do somersaults on little foam mats. It sounds simple, but I kept tumbling over onto the floor. My somersaults were uncoordinated and I was never able to complete one; I just toppled off in another direction. I quickly changed my major to spelling, which was easier because it didn't involve leaving my seat.

In fifth and sixth grades, boys gathered in the schoolyard for softball. There were two classifications of boys in my school: either you were a pro or you were a spaz. The pros were the cool guys who classified the rest of us. Yes, I was a spaz. Back in those days, there was this medieval torture known as Picking Sides. Two teams were assigned a leader by the coach, and those leaders picked their players. I was a spaz before it was politically incorrect to say so, a spaz even before having to prove it, just because I was short and skinny and wore glasses. So I was chosen last, and the last kid chosen for the other team exchanged anxious glances with me, knowing our fates were sealed.

Sure enough, I was as spazzy as they came. I leaned so far out to swing at the ball that I almost fell forward into the dirt. I didn't just swing too soon – I practically met the ball halfway to the pitcher's mound. “Swings like a girl,” the pros said. In 1964, that was as mortal an offense as telling a guy he had cooties. When I did connect with the ball, I might as well have been wielding a feather duster. Do you know how demoralizing it is to step up to the plate only to have the outfield move in so close that they're behind you? I dreaded recess with all my heart and soul, so much so that I couldn't wait to get back to the classroom for civics. Civics! My hate-hate relationship with team sports had begun.

Then came junior high school, when recess became Phys Ed. and mindless activity became an entry on a report card. My parents were vehemently opposed to my participating, because (1) I wore bifocals and they couldn't afford to replace them, (2) I had no hearing in one ear and I guess they were afraid I would fall down on the other one and go deaf altogether, and (3) they had no more interest in athletics than I did and thought I should spend that hour studying. Well, they got me out of Phys. Ed., but they couldn't get me into the library. I became the official Towel Boy instead, handing out clean towels to the kids coming in off the field so they could dry themselves off after taking a shower. I might have been happy about not playing sports, but I was positively ecstatic over not having to shower with naked guys. All I needed was to be a spaz in a locker room full of pros. (By that time, the monikers had been relegated to the realm of “kid stuff,” but we knew what everyone was thinking.)

I remained Towel Boy for the rest of junior high and all through high school. I should have lettered in Towel Boy and gotten my own sweater with a big “T “on it. But glory was for those guys who actually accomplished real feats and got the girls, feats like tackling, passing, all that guy stuff. All I did finally was come in second in a county-wide essay contest in my senior year. Mrs. Massey, my English teacher, had encouraged me to enter, and I ended up winning a bunch of money and taking a free trip to Washington, D.C., with her. So it was all looked on as this big deal. But really, it was no sweat. All I had to do was write the essay, and I could do that without leaving my seat.

All this background info by way of explaining why I'm so ambivalent about sports. On the one hand, I like watching football on TV, basketball in person, and baseball any way. But part of me has always held back from becoming too knowledgeable. I'm certain that somewhere out there, all those former pros have grown up to be diehard fans who paint their torsos in team colors for the big game, never lose money on the office pool, and hurl obscenities at the Little League umpire when their kids get thrown out at home.

I take pride in not knowing any football positions besides quarterback, receiver, and punter. But I'll bet I enjoy a winning Hail Mary pass just as much as the next guy. In baseball, I don't know a spitball from, well, all those other kinds of ball, and it took me years to figure out exactly what a balk was. But you couldn't tear me away from the Safe when my Seattle Mariners were in town and I had some baseball money set aside. (I'll leave out all the other sports for now because it starts to get embarrassing.)

I guess what I'm saying is, you don't have to be an expert on something to enjoy it like one. I probably enjoyed writing this almost as much as King Felix enjoyed winning one for the M's this afternoon.  Even better, I didn't have to leave my seat.

My Dark TV

I turned off my television just over a month ago. With the exception of two stations – PBS and Turner Classic Movies – it's still off. Here's why.

TV had always been a part of my life. When I was a kid I had the entire weekly TV grid memorized from season to season. I knew what was on when, on which day, for how long, and who was in it. I read TV Guide as if it were a treasure map, even if I had never heard the word “debut” spoken before and thought I was reading “de-butt” before each listed series premiere.

Back then, TV was as important to me as the movies. In fact, some of my most powerful experiences with the tube were movies. It was on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies where I first saw Rear Window and Vertigo and developed a lifelong love of all things Hitchcock. Even today, I can look back on my adult years and say that some of the programming I've seen on TV is as good as anything I paid for in the theater. (Hill Street Blues was better than most cop movies, and I still think Lonesome Dove is one of the great Westerns on small or large screen.) Spielberg has grown to be one of the great Hollywood directors, but I think his first film, Duel, is not just the best made-for-TV movie, but it's as accomplished and as breathtaking as almost anything he's done since. (I say “almost” because I doubt anyone who watched Duel in 1971 could have even remotely foreseen Schindler's List.) Incidentally, as some of you I'm sure know, Duel was released into theaters after its initial TV de-butt. The only other movie I'm aware of to make the transition from TV to a brief theatrical run is Brian's Song. They were both that popular. (If you know of any others, let me know.)

Television has provided me with some annual traditions, too. I've probably watched every Super Bowl game since the Packers beat the Chiefs in 1967. Except for nights when I was teaching, I haven't missed an Academy Awards show since The Graduate lost to In the Heat of the Night in '68 – except once. I decided that I'd become a slave to my TV obsessions and would deliberately miss the Oscars one year just to prove I could. Well, I did miss it, and I was completely miserable the next day. TV 1, Vince 0.

It was also my primary source for news. Walter Cronkite was like a trusted uncle in our home when I was growing up, and later, even with the advent of the Internet, CNN kept me glued to updates on the Gulf War, Columbine, and so much else. Bernard Shaw and Lynne Russell became my new Cronkites.

Then Newtown happened.

Columbine had been rough, shocking, tragic, all those things. But when Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14, 2012, opened fire on those little children, then let the remaining few sweat out their final terrified moments as he stopped to reload – this was something new to me. This was news I couldn't make go away with my remote. This was news penetrating some shield I'd always had between the outside world and my own personal realm. I couldn't even escape it in dreams.

So I protected myself the only way I knew how. I stopped watching news altogether. For four months, I avoided the news channels and even skipped the local news. I didn't read any news coverage on the web or buy a newspaper. (I was especially grateful not to have been privy to the conspiracy rumors floating around during that time that claimed the massacre had never happened.) I didn't miss it, either, which surprised me.

Then, on April 15, 2013, two bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and I just had to know what was going on. I was by that time far enough removed from Newtown to handle coverage of yet another tragedy. It seems odd to consider that it was one crisis that flung me away from the news and another one that brought me back. I don't try to understand it. I was just glad to be a news junkie again. As in years past, I couldn't get enough of it. Politics, the entertainment scene, violent storms on the Weather Channel – if it was big news, I was right there with my remote, glued to every image, every facet of the story.

But then last year, ISIS came along.

Where had these guys come from? How did we go from hearing about Ebola one day to being inundated with global threats and shocking videos the next? It just seemed to get worse and worse as weeks went by. A friend of mine recently said she'd had to stop watching coverage of 911 because networks kept replaying those planes hitting the towers over and over again. I'd said that it hadn't bothered me as much because I thought it was important we not lose sight of or become complacent about what had happened to us. (In fact, I think maybe I needed all that repetitive footage to help jolt me from my state of shock. Even a decade or so later, when I was being flown over the New York City skyline I once knew so well, the sight of a Manhattan without the towers was too surreal for me. I still couldn't grasp it in my heart.)

But I just couldn't take one more of those videos or even news of one. What purpose did they serve other than to give the terrorists the worldwide publicity they wanted? News about them was one thing, but showing clips from their murderous propaganda campaign? Beheading after beheading with no repercussions, no end in sight. Then those 21 Egyptian Christian men lined up on a Libyan beach for a mass beheading. My God, I thought, could it get any worse? Well, yes. That Jordanian pilot who was doused with gasoline and put in a cage, where he was burned alive for the world to see. That did it. I might care about what happened to those captives, but I didn't have to grow more despondent over it day after day. I felt guilty about it, too, as if I'd be selfish to turn my back on all that suffering. How callous could I be? Well, I knew that turning off my TV wasn't going to free them, but I did know that if I did so, I'd be freeing myself.

So I did.

I turned it off without realizing until 24 hours later that I hadn't turned it back on for anything else, either. Feeling bold, I let another few days go by. No Shark Tank. No SNL. Was I nuts? I was afraid I'd begin to experience the void I'd created and go into withdrawal, but instead I actually added something to my life – serenity.

Oh, I already had serenity in the spiritual sense. But it was constantly threatened by all sorts of outside stimuli. TV wasn't the only thing, but it was the most invasive. I'd turn it on in the evening without thinking, and instantly people I didn't know would start bombarding me with imperatives: Buy this! Watch this! Call today! Now no one was yelling. I could buy and watch anything I chose. I didn't have to call anyone. The pressure was off – even though I never did any of those things, it had still felt like a mob yelling outside my window.

I did check every evening to see if Turner Classic Movies had anything worth watching, because I could never give up James Cagney or Myrna Loy. Plus, TCM's movies weren't interrupted by ads, so many at a time that I could imagine forgetting what I was watching to begin with. I could watch a movie without a message at the bottom of the screen telling me what else I had to watch, so that the network was never satisfied. The movies on TCM gave me the entire closing credits instead of scrunching them up into half the screen and cutting off the sound to tell you about something else to watch. Again, nothing was good enough. But, of course, Turner had one more real advantage for me – no news at all.

I also kept PBS around, another commercial-free station. Some programs, such as Charlie Rose, did occasionally touch on news topics, but I quickly realized I didn't even want that. So if I come across Nova or American Masters or Austin City Limits, I'll stop and see if I want to stick around. I usually don't.  Same with TCM.  I like having the option, but I'm rarely using it.

That's because something else was now happening: sitting in front of the TV made me restless, almost frustrated. I started playing more CDs, or the radio, or nothing at all. I found I had more time to write. If old friends called long distance, I relaxed and talked as long as they wanted to instead of getting fidgety after a few minutes. I even slowed down my reading. I used to go through maybe two books per week, though lately I'd been trying not to feel I had to keep up such a hurried pace. But now, without television, I'm still reading the same novel I started a month ago. I've never done that. I feel as though I know the characters intimately, and while I always want to know what happens next, I know they'll still be there when I get around to them. I was discovering just how much time I have in my life and how to savor it.

I don't know how long this will last. Last time it lasted four months. This time, it feels more like a new lifestyle than simply a news moratorium. I still enjoy hearing friends discuss last night's episode of The Blacklist or Survivor. I enjoy their enthusiasms, and I don't feel deprived at all. But I know that there has to be some sort of compromise beyond TCM and PBS. That compromise begins today, in fact.

It's opening day of Major League Baseball. Go Mariners!

The Fall of the House of Ushers

I once worked as a movie theater doorman when I was in high school. This was at the Sunny Isles Twin Theater in North Miami Beach, Florida, back in the late '60s when twin theaters were popular. I paid for my own wardrobe: a red blazer with black pants and a black clip-on bow tie. I tore the customers' tickets at my podium just inside the entrance and then told them where to go, so to speak. “Thank you, to your left.” “Thank you, to your right.” Each day I'd take my 15-minute breaks at the same time. I would put some popcorn in a paper hot dog holder and take it into one of the two auditoriums, where I sat in the back row in case I was needed. I got to see the same movie scenes over and over, so that for the longest time, for instance, I didn't know how Summer of '42 ended, but I could recite the movie theater scene by heart.

Audiences never saw a white screen in those days. We had our protocols, and that was the big one. The screen remained concealed behind red curtains, which only parted once the first preview began. (We didn't have commercials. You stayed home for those.) The ushers controlled the curtains from a panel behind the last row, on the other side of the wall. See, you didn't just walk from the auditorium right out into the lobby. You followed a curving walkway so that the outside noise was well removed, similar to the way upscale multiplexes with their stadium seating are today.

One time, the usher assigned to close the curtains at the end of the movie was busy with a spill, so he asked me to handle it. He must have told the projectionist, because as soon as I took my place at the panel, a wall phone rang next to it, very softly. “You know the cue?” he asked me. I said sure – how hard could it be? Come to think of it, the movie was Summer of '42. I knew the rule about white screens, so I figured I'd push the button just as the credits ended. Well, one by one, each actor appeared beside his or her name, one clip dissolving into the next, when halfway through, the phone rang. “You missed it! You were supposed to close it on the druggist's face! What are you, blind?” I would come to miss that slavish dedication to decorum. The guy was actually yelling, it meant that much to him.

Auditoriums weren't the only things bigger then. The ushers and I had a secret hiding (and make out) spot. We would pass through the curtains at the front of the auditorium and off to the side, under the EXIT sign, enter the short hallway leading to a door to the parking lot, make an immediate left through another door that required a key, climb up a few steps in the dark, and voila – we were behind the screen! Also behind that screen were two enormous black speakers – I mean, 2001-monolith big, or so they seemed. That made our hiding spot especially loud, but we got used to it after half a minute or so. I would tell a third employee to cover for us in case anyone came looking, and one of the female ushers and I would take the key with us and sit down there in the noisy dark, either eating popcorn from our paper holders or else rushing through a few minutes of awkward teenage passion. We all went there sooner or later; it was one of the unspoken compensations for our crummy salaries. If we were by ourselves or with someone of the same sex, there was something else to do, and this was sometimes the best pastime of all – the screen was pocked with thousands of holes for the sound to go through, and we could put our faces right up against it and see through to the other side, with the audience looking right at us. We never considered ourselves voyeurs; it wasn't like we were peeking at a girls' (or boys') shower. This vantage point was especially entertaining when we showed our midnight movies on the weekends. I was behind the screen when a full house comprised of mostly teenagers settled in for Yellow Submarine. Plenty of joints were passed around, and couples had no compunction about displaying some explicit PDAs in the front rows, an activity normally reserved for the very back. More than once, my co-workers and I returned to the lobby pretty much buzzed for what was left of the night.

Twin theaters represented a transition between (1) the original movie palaces and their smaller, single-screen offshoots, and (2) the boxy multiplexes whose developers must have figured, hey, if two screens work, why not 16? I don't remember much kvetching when theaters like the Sunny Isles started popping up. I still sensed the excitement a new movie could bring when it wasn't competing with more than one other movie in the building. I noticed two things about the evening weekend crowds that filled the lobby: they mostly talked about the movie they were about to see and not merely the day's events, and, at 17, I marveled at the venomous looks women gave to other women who didn't seem to notice. It was a full body assessment, too; the glares ran from head to toe. I imagined these women were feeling much envy and self-doubt.  I wondered if this was just a Miami thing. Only in Southern California years later would I see women as well as men take such care about their appearance in public and seem so critical of how others looked.

I went to lots and lots of movies in lots of theaters growing up. I guess you could call the old Rosetta my spiritual home. It wasn't a palace by any means, but it was still awesome to a seven-year-old. Popcorn would never taste as good again, and you held your cup under a spout in front of the soda machine, first for the crushed ice and then for the drink. Sometimes it was just crushed ice; sometimes it was just soda. Sometimes you got both but all over the place. It was a crap shoot.

I saw my first two movies there with my mother. The first one was King of Kings, the Jeffrey Hunter version. I learned that Jesus looked like a surfer and his mother was 40 years old when he was born. She was also 40 when he died. Simon Peter looked even older. It was odd that my mother took me to see this, because she was irreligious.  But she also loved movies.  The other movie was 13 Ghosts, a typical William Castle flick in that it came with a gimmick, in this case Illusion-O, in which audience members were given oversized 3-D glasses, each containing one red filter and one blue. If you wanted to see the ghosts, you looked through red filter, and, if not, the other one. That was an easy choice for me – I spent half the movie happily avoiding any ghosts at all. Then Castle cheated. A comely lass gets up to close her noisy bedroom shutters during a thunderstorm. She's just about to step away from the curtains when out pops – a monster. Not a ghost, but a monster, cobwebbed and grotesque, and there was no lens for avoiding this. It was my first lesson in betrayal. I told my mother I was going out. She assumed I meant the restroom. After a few minutes, she got worried and went to check on me. I wasn't in the restroom. I wasn't in the lobby. I was out on the sidewalk, talking to strangers. Trust became a very big thing with me.

As I got older and started going to movies with friends instead of with Mom, I expanded my horizons and went to theaters I needed buses to reach. I remember the Loews 167^th Street Twin opening to considerable fanfare. The first movie to play there was Goodbye Columbus, and it was playing in both auditoriums, something I only ever saw happen one other time, when the theater booked The Godfather. For the grand opening, though, Richard Benjamin, who played Neil Klugman, had recorded a greeting that was piped in before all five showings that first day. Not before or since have I heard an actor do that. He was funny, too, because he couldn't pronounce “Loew's”; it came out “Low-ees.” Five performances per day was how movies were scheduled, unless they were road show productions, which were closer to three hours with an intermission and could cost as much as $3 instead of the usual $2. The times for most features were 2:00, 4, 6, 8, and 10. Also, you could stay to watch the movie a second time. I watched Columbus on opening day at 2, 4, 6, and 8. Do that often enough and you start turning into the characters.

Miami and Miami Beach had its palaces (the Olympia, the Carib), its theaters just as old but more modest (the Cameo, where movies were followed by the Israeli national anthem, which brought elderly Jewish audiences to their feet), and theaters that would live on in some other incarnation: the Cameo transformed itself into an intimate concert venue, the Sunny Isles turned into a Walgreen's, and, alas, the Rosetta degenerated into the Rex, a porno house. One theater multitasked.  I forget its name, but it was on tony Lincoln Road, and would you believe it featured a live vaudeville act after each showing of the movie? In 1976? I wondered why a revival of The Graduate only ran for an hour, then found out somebody had sliced it up to make room for the comics, jugglers, and the brassy brunette who once interrupted a song to say with great enthusiasm, “What would the world be like if everyone had a song in their heart?” My date turned to me and whispered, “It would be pretty quiet.”

I don't want to be one to lament the old days and kvetch about the new, like the geezer I'm threatening to become, but honestly, the moviegoing experience isn't what it was. How can it be? Movies are so widely accessible through so many avenues now that a person can keep up with the latest releases and never leave the living room. Also, more and more people just don't want to be in a theater these days. THX surround sound, the aforementioned stadium seating, IMAX – in some respects, the moviegoing experience is better than it's been in years. But once you're in there, you have to contend with TV advertisements, behind-the-scene plugs for TV shows, nearly ten minutes' worth of coming attractions, concessions that you would never dream of paying that much for in a supermarket, and maybe the biggest negative of all – the ubiquitous glow of cell phones, which can make you feel like you're sitting at a drive-in surrounded by fireflies. Those cell phones could ring at any moment and ruin the show, whereas at home you have options. But that defeats the purpose when moviegoing has so much to do with community and sharing. Is Spinal Tap really as funny at home as it is in a full house on Saturday night?

I live in Boise, Idaho, these days, where my favorite theater is the Flicks, home to independents, foreign films, and documentaries. No stadium seating, but then again, no commercials, either. Just three previews that begin on time and an audience that understands the etiquette of public places. Oh, sure, sometimes I miss the Rosetta/Rex, with its torn seats and luminous clock beside the screen. If I ever returned to Miami, I might be tempted to ask the cashier if I could walk inside just for old time's sake, not to stay for Genitals Prefer Bonds or whatever they're showing.  Just to take one quick look around and retrace my steps from the entrance to the popcorn counter, from the popcorn counter to the serendipitous Coke machine (or condom dispenser now), and from there to the curtained doorway, beyond which once lived a Technicolor Jesus and a boy too scared to look through the blue filter.

More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Wait Until Dark

Well, here's the most irrelevant post you'll see all year. I didn't set out to become a know-it-all on the subject of Wait Until Dark (Warner Bros., 1967) (and there are many other cinephiles out there who know more about the movie than I do), but that's what happens when you end up seeing a movie at least 75 times over 48 years. It's not a classic shocker, like Psycho, but it has a truly creepy performance by Alan Arkin as the psychopath Harry Roat Jr. (“from Scarsdale”) as well as hair-raising final showdown between Arkin and Audrey Hepburn, a sequence critics have favorably compared to the best of Hitchcock. Carrie tried something similar to this movie's Big Moment about 10 years later, and it caught on with other movies and quickly became a cliché. But WUD was the granddaddy of last-minute shrieks.

I saw the film many times with my girlfriend while it was in its initial run (see? I wasn't the only one), then again every time it returned as part of a double bill, usually paired with Cool Hand Luke (distributors did that with a lot of movies back then). Once it became available on VHS and later on DVD, I showed it to countless friends who'd never seen it, and I watched it alone more times than I can count. There has to be a 12-step program for people like me.

Here's the setup: Audrey Hepburn plays Suzy Hendrix, a blind housewife whose husband Sam (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) returns from a business trip with a doll that a woman in the airport asked him to hold onto. The doll is filled with heroin, and Harry Roat Jr. (Alan Arkin), a particularly malevolent psychopath, wants it.  Today I still think he's the most frightening villain I've seen outside of horror movies, and I'm including Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in Blue Velvet, Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) in Kiss of Death, and so many other great ones.  I guess I'm partial because I more or less know all his lines by heart.

Talman: You want something?
Roat: You, Mr. Talman.  I want you.  And you, too, Sergeant Carlino, I want you, too.  In fact, I want both of you, and I've come here to buy you.

He recruits two other bad guys, Mile Talman (Richard Crenna) and “Sgt.” Carlino (Jack Weston), to help him play out an elaborate charade that will convince Suzy to give them the doll. Let's just say that things don't go as planned, mainly because Suzy is an extremely clever and resourceful woman the three men underestimate.

So here are some random musings on a movie I know way too much about. . . .

This is a bit of trivia I'm especially happy about, because it's a detail that few people (if any) in the history of the planet are likely to know but certain not to care about: The movie takes place in the apartment of a Greenwich Village photographer. The three villains monitor the apartment from their van parked beside a phone booth across the street. The number of the telephone in the booth is 242-4598. In Rear Window 13 years earlier, James Stewart plays a photographer who also lives in the Village. The phone number of the man across the courtyard whom Stewart suspects of murder is 242-5598. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Some critics at the time claimed that Roat's entire charade was unnecessary, but they overlooked the obvious reason for it – the only other occupant in the building that weekend is Gloria, the little girl who lives upstairs. As Roat tells Talman and Carlino just before they go into their act, “There's a little pink kid running around the house – and she wears glasses.” Maybe the critics were ahead of their time: Had this been written today, Roat would have just tortured Suzy and then killed them both.

Gaffe: The bad guys communicate between the apartment (when they're in there with Hepburn) and the van by opening and closing Hepburn's blinds. But at one point, Hepburn tells Talman, whom she trusts, that Roat (in one of two disguises he wore to fool the girl) had played with the blind at one point when it was actually Talman himself. What makes it a gaffe is that Suzy is much too observant to have confused the two, especially since Talman's voice had come from that part of the room.

OK, that might be too nitpicky. Here's a problem that's much more obvious. Roat has murdered Lisa (Samantha Jones), who had brought the doll into the country from Canada to begin with, and who is hanging in a plastic clothing bag in Suzy's bedroom closet. The door is open because Talman left it open when he discovered her. So blind Suzy comes home and bumps into a chair, which she knows perfectly well is in the wrong place. But then she walks through the bedroom and into the closet to grab a scarf without noticing that the closet door is open. Neither Suzy nor Sam would be likely to leave it open when everything else in the apartment is so perfectly situated to accommodate her. It's a detail she would have immediately noticed. Also, Lisa's been in there for a while, so wouldn't Suzy's heightened sense of smell have picked up on it? (I mean, when Suzy walks in, the door's only been open a few minutes.)

The third thing that bothers me is that in that climactic scene, Roat has splashed gasoline all over the apartment, knowing Suzy is deathly afraid of fire. He lights a newspaper and holds it before her face to convince her he's serious. But I kept thinking about that gasoline. Suzy lights an awful lot of matches to keep Roat, whom she's doused in gasoline, at a distance. Wouldn't the place be full of fumes?

OK, and here's another thing: Suzy and Gloria are in Suzy's apartment when Carlino peers in at them through the window. Then he disappears, and we've already been told  he's coming inside to knock on her door. But Suzy and Gloria have this long conversation first, so long that Carlino would have to be blind himself to take that long before knocking. Ever notice that moviemakers like to cheat with time that way? It's like the timers on movie explosives – a bomb might read 1:00 at one moment, then when the camera cuts back to it thirty seconds later, five seconds have passed.  When I was 10 and didn't know there was a reason movies were made this way, the bomb in Fort Knox near the end of Goldfinger drove me nuts.  If that timer had been truly accurate, James bond could have made another sequel before coming back to deactivate it.

In the opening airport scene, when Lisa approaches Sam with the doll, a young Robby Benson walks by in the background tossing a football in the air. Don't blink or you'll miss him. I admit I didn't know this until I read it later, but it's so cool that I had to share it.

Part of what made the casting so effective in 1967 is that Arkin, Crenna, and Weston had been known as comic actors. Arkin got his start in Chicago's Second City and was just coming off of The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming, a cold war comedy that earned him his first Oscar nomination. Crenna became popular playing the goofy high school student in the TV show Our Miss Brooks, starring Eve Arden. Weston was sometimes a heavy, but he'd appeared in 1960's Please Don't Eat the Daisies, a popular domestic comedy later turned into a TV sitcom. Seeing funny men so deadly serious definitely heightened the creep factor.

It reminded me of The Wizard of Oz, where Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, and Jack Haley played Dorothy's friends after having done a lot of a lot of light comedic work. I don't mean that Oz was dramatic, but the trio hadn't been known for doing children's movies, and I remember thinking how witty and sophisticated their lines were (“I hope my strength holds out.” “I hope your tail holds out!”) the first time I saw it. I appreciated how the movie respected me as a kid.  I was too young to realize that they hadn't written the script.

About the stage productions: I actually walked out of one in Seattle during the first intermission. Roat was played by a woman – a heavyset woman with a British accent who wasn't the least bit scary. I couldn't get my brain around this. Then the thought of her leaping out of the bedroom made me remember I needed to be somewhere (anywhere).

Finally, who remembers the gimmick movie theaters used when this movie was first released in 1967? It was a great one, and most theater managers complied with it. During that frightening last scene, Suzy runs from Roat to the one lamp she left on, and he throws his knife at her. She hesitates so she can hear where it hits (hoping it's not her body), then knocks out the light and grabs the knife. At that moment, the screen becomes pitch black and, except for Suzy's matches, remains so for at least a full minute. It's when that light goes out that all the remaining theater lights – particularly the exit lights and those tiny bulbs that illuminate the theater aisles and the aisles seats – go off as well. The audience sits in complete darkness until the movie is over. (I never knew just how much light there was in a theater while a movie was playing.) I can't tell you how effective and unnerving that was. When the memorable Big Moment came, everyone screamed, men and women alike, but I think it was because we all felt so helpless in the dark that the women kept on screaming right up until the end of the scene a couple of minutes later.

When the movie returned in subsequent rereleases and theater managers no longer felt obligated to turn the lights out, people screamed, but only for that moment. (When I played it for friends at home, I would turn off the living room light and freak them out.)

 

(One thing about that scene made quite an impression on me back when I was so impressionable: As I mentioned above, Suzy lights matches in the dark to keep Roat at bay because she's doused him in gasoline. To keep track of where he is, she tells him to pick up her cane and tap it on the floor so she knows where he is. So here you have a blind woman lighting matches in the dark and a sighted man tapping a cane on the floor. At 14, I thought that was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. I think it's still pretty ingenious.)

 

Dumb-as-Dirt Dogs and Creepy Cats

I'm going to assume almost everyone reading this grew up reading comic strips. My sister and I used to lie on the living room carpet on Sunday mornings, propped on our elbows as we read both sections and then exchanged them, our fingertips getting all smudgy. (I was older and read faster, so I usually had to wait, impatiently.) This is just a little jaunt down Memory Lane (or Freeway, if you're as old as I am) to remember what I hope are some of your favorites and also think about some that are more recent. I'm ranking these 16 strips strictly by how much enjoyment they gave me and, in some cases, still do.

Note: Notice there aren't any superheroes, detectives, or career women listed (Superman, Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr, etc.). I've always gone strictly for the laughs.

16. Beetle Bailey (Mort Walker): I enjoyed Beetle, but if I forgot to read it, it wasn't the end of the world.

15. The Wizard of Id (Johnny Hart): Not as funny to me as B.C., Hart's other strip, but always delightful. (“Sire, the peasants are revolting!” “Tell me about it.”)

14. Blondie (Chic Young): I suppose if Dagwood's home life had been better, he wouldn't have spent so much time napping on that couch. Life at the office with Mr. Dithers wasn't much of an improvement, either. I related to him as an eternal underdog. Also, it's been interesting watching Blondie herself grow over the decades into an independent woman.

13. Hi and Lois (Mort Walker & Dik Browne): I enjoyed this family a little more than the Bumsteads. They first appeared in Walker's other strip, Beetle Bailey, then got spun off. One of my favorite comic relationships back then was between baby Trixie and her sunbeam.

12. Dennis the Menace (Hank Ketcham): I liked Dennis because he was even worse than I was. News of a TV version got me really excited, but I thought Jay North was just OK as Dennis, not quite what I imagined. Joseph Kearns, though, was a perfect Mr. Wilson.

11. B.C. (Johnny Hart): I laughed out loud frequently over this one, more than The Wizard of Id. The whole gang – B.C., Peter, Wiley, Clumsy Carp, and the rest – represented a screwy, offbeat wit I couldn't get enough of. In B.C.'s last few years, Hart's Christian faith seeped into many of his characters' exchanges. I'd never seen a strip reflect that. (People will say of a guy, “At least he died doing what he loved.” It was true in Hart's case – he died at his drafting table.)

10. Archie (Bob Montana): Boys in my grade school would get together and talk about Betty and Veronica – who was cuter, who had the fewest cooties, etc. I used to read these strips as a kid and wonder if being a teenager in Riverdale would really be like that, but I grew to realize that they reflected more of an Andy Hardy lifestyle than what teens in the 1960s were going through. Time caught up with the gang, though – last year, in Life with Archie, a separate strip chronicling the adventures of Archie as an adult, the freckled redhead was gunned down while trying to protect a gay friend from an assassin's bullet.

9. Doonesbury (Garry Trudeau): The best of all counterculture strips. The only strip I know of to be relegated to the editorial page by some papers after proving to be too controversial for the comic page. The only one I know to be dropped in some cities when it was treading on issues that were too sensitive (or maybe it was the editors who were too sensitive). The anti-Pogo, as liberal as that strip was conservative (though I think Pogo was funnier). The strip I liked because it was the first time I saw characters say something after the punch line to add an extra zing to the sendoff. So many comic characters do that now.

8. Get Fuzzy (Darby Conley): This one took just a little getting used to before I got on its wavelength. It's about a hapless young guy (Rob Wilco) who lives with what hands-down have to be the world's stupidest dog (Satchel Pooch) and most conniving cat (Bucky Katt). Satchel is sweet just because he's so hopelessly, helplessly dense, and Bucky's machinations are in hilarious contrast with the fact that he's basically just a little furball. My favorite moments are when this little terror is cut down to size, such as when he's making threats while strapped into an infant car seat.

 

7. Bloom County (Berkeley Breathed): Opus, the penguin with the major schnozz, is one of my all-time favorite comic characters. His glass is always half-full, even when he should know better. But what sets Bloom County apart is Bill the Cat, so hilariously repellent in appearance that he is, for a comic feline, refreshingly and historically “uncute.” Gack!

6. MacDoodle Street (Mark Alan Stamaty): I don't know what Stamaty was on when he drew this stuff, but I want some. His urban landscape constitutes the busiest, craziest panels I've ever seen. I was attending college in New York City when I discovered his work in, I think, the Village Voice. It was funny, subversive, and unsuited for mainstream papers first and foremost because his rich detail would be lost in the small spaces comics are cramped into now. In his larger canvases, you could look at the picture for half an hour and still be finding funny things you didn't see before. One of my favorite discoveries – a tiny advertisement in a subway car: “f u cn rd ths, u prbly cnt spl.” (His subsequent strip, Washingtoons, did for (or to) Washington what MacDoodle Street did for New York.)

5. Pearls Before Swine (Stephan Pastis): My current favorite strip. Pastis gave up law to become a cartoonist, and I'm so glad. His adventures of a simply drawn pig (named Pig) and rat (named Rat) are screamingly funny. Pig is naïve and trusting like Satchel Pooch, only moreso, if that's possible. Rat is so dastardly he makes Bucky Katt look like a saint. So often I shake my head and think, “How did he come up with that?” Pearls features some of the worst puns ever to shame the English language, but it knows this, and often in the last panel following a particularly egregious one, Rat will stand on Pastis' desk and tell him, in one form or another, that he really needs to stop it. Two of the reasons I can't get enough of this strip: (1) The crocodiles who live next door are constantly conspiring to eat various neighbors, only – and this seems to be a theme with some of the best comic characters – they're too dumb to live; and (2) Pastis, who was friends with Bil Keane, once had Rat suddenly find himself inside the panels of Family Circus, a much nicer, gentler strip that Pastis completely turned on its head – to Keane's delight, amazingly. You remember those dotted lines that used to follow the Family Circus kids as they traipsed through the neighborhood? When Pig and Goat wonder what's become of Rat, we see him lost in this maze of dotted lines muttering censored expletives.

 

4.  The Far Side (Gary Larson): Larson is the Steven Wright of cartoonists. His ideas are so outrageous, so hilarious, that I often wondered how one mind could come up with so much brilliance. When I just now pulled up some of the strips (or panels – it was always a one-panel joke) so I could find the funniest one and quote it here, I couldn't, because I was laughing at everything. Larson once said that his most controversial cartoon was a panel called “Cow Tools,” which showed a cow standing before a bench with some crudely crafted tools on it. He got so many letters from people, incensed because they couldn't figure out why it was supposed to be funny, that he had to issue an explanation. It's funny, he said, because this is what tools would like if a cow tried to make them. I have to be honest and say I also didn't figure it out, but then I wasn't particularly outraged, either.

3. Pogo (Walt Kelly): In an earlier list of favorite music videos, I ranked “Hurt” (Johnny Cash) third under two I liked more, although I conceded that it was, objectively speaking, probably the best video of all. I'm ranking Pogo third, but I really do think it's unparalleled. Pogo Possum, Albert the Alligator, and all their pals and assorted other characters (Wikipedia lists at least 40) live in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, where they swap tall tales, devise schemes, and allow Kelly to skewer public figures (mostly political) through the gang's perfectly innocent filter. In the same way that Rod Serling used The Twilight Zone to address issues and make statements that a straightforward drama probably couldn't get away with back then, Kelly used Pogo and his friends to skewer headlines and personalities deemed too hot to handle. (Joseph McCarthy was a frequent target.)

2.  Peanuts (Charles Schulz): Could this be the comic strip of the Baby Boomer generation.. I'm thinking yes. Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Sally, Snoopy, and all the rest have been part of the cultural landscape as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure Charlie Brown was the first neurotic character to join the Sunday funnies (hence, Lucy Van Pelt's Psychiatrist Booth, which never did him much good). This is truly iconic stuff-- that booth, Lucy holding the football, Sally's crush on Linus, the kite-eating tree – and kids today must enjoy it almost as much as we did, otherwise who's been watching all those specials every year? Just their parents? But you know, I think Peanuts started compromising its vision when Woodstock came along. Snoopy had always been a loner and a dreamer. His flights of fancy – especially in his aerial battles with the Red Baron – were an essential part of his character. He was a canine Walter Mitty. But then Woodstock came along, and not only did Snoopy have a buddy to play with, but he was a cuddly-wuddly buddy, too, better suited for something as mindless and one-dimensional as those “Love Is” panels. (Oy, “Love Is.”) The good news – he came along too late to ruin A Charlie Brown Christmas.

 

1.  Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson): From 1985 until 1995, I was graced with the presence of Calvin and Hobbes in my newspaper and on my bookshelf. The adventures of Calvin, the incorrigible little dreamer, and Hobbes, the stuffed tiger that came to life in Calvin's imagination when no one else was around, gave me more joy than just about anything else at that time. These two best pals were so funny together, so profound and so deeply bonded, that it was a wonder Watterson could create them and still come up with so many funny ideas (such as the cardboard box Calvin called The Duplicator, in which he cloned himself) and draw such beautiful images (some of his Sunday panels, especially when Calvin is daydreaming at his school desk, were superior to anything else on the page). Watterson's integrity is such that he never wanted his name or characters to be commercialized in any way. So when you see Calvin urinating on the back window of someone's car, it's a crime.

I'd really like to know your favorite comics strips now, so feel free to tell me. Oh, and also, I promise not to make fun if one of them turns out to be the one strip not even therapy has been able to erase from my brain. One day, perhaps. In the meantime, though, sometimes, late at night, I'll still see those faces and wake up screaming.  Damn you, Nancy and Sluggo!
 

 

 

Those things MTV Used to Play in Olden Times

No big intro here. Just my personal picks for the best (and worst) music videos since MTV's inception in 1980. (I took down all my Martha Quinn posters when the network became Reality Central.)

14.  “Sledgehammer” (Peter Gabriel): Some clever stop motion animation brings the song's sly sexual suggestiveness to life. The visuals are catchier than the song.

13.  “Father Figure” (George Michael): Not a big George Michael fan here. But I have to give this video credit for being so darn sexy. Good, atmospheric photography helps. Kudos also to the actress who really makes this work, not Michael with his self-consciously sculpted stubble.

12.  “Cold-Hearted Snake” (Paula Abdul): Speaking of sexy, this witty dance video owes its provocative choreography to Bob Fosse, whose style is clearly an influence. The flustered panel of judges cracks me up every time. This is the Paula Abdul I like to remember.

11.  “Nothing Compares 2 U” (Sinead O'Connor): Just a tight closeup of O'Connor's beautiful face as she sings this gorgeous Prince number. No cuts, no extraneous effects. Just Sinead. (Art Garfunkel did the same thing years later with “So Much in Love,” which I also like.)

10.  “You Can Call Me Al” (Paul Simon): OK, so not a towering artistic achievement, but the sight of Chevy Chase lip-syncing Simon's lyrics while a hangdog Paul sits beside him just makes me smile every time. I also think this is the best performance of Chase's career.

9.  “Time After Time” (Cyndi Lauper): Lauper hit MTV right around the time Madonna did, and I thought she would be the bigger star. The song still gets to me, and the story in the video feels so authentic that I've wondered how much of the story is Lauper's own.

8.  “Waiting on a Friend” (Rolling Stones): One of the Stones' best and sweetest songs, the visuals show Jagger on a city stoop waiting for Keith Richards to show up. The two of them then walk down to a local bar, where they set up for a gig. It's a simple concept and one I don't think can be improved on. The whole thing makes me feel good and recalls my own close friendships.

7.  “Oh Father” (Madonna): Full disclosure: I'm the honorary president of the anti-Madonna Fan Club. Let's just say I'm not one of her ardent admirers. But this is one great-looking video, based on the one Madonna song that should have been more popular. I'm a sucker for black and white photography anyway, and the visuals here are great. One of my all-time favorite images from any video: a string of pearls coming undone and the beads clattering to the ground in slow-motion.

6.  “I'm on Fire” (Bruce Springsteen): Brian DePalma directed this one. The Boss has a great presence here; he should try his hand at a movie, the way Mellencamp and George Strait did (but with better results, I hope). The video tells a story – working-class garage mechanic meets elegant rich woman dropping off her car. Springsteen takes it for a night drive and ends up at the woman's intimidatingly impressive home. He walks up to the door, and there's a closeup of his finger about to ring the doorbell. But he changes his mind and drops the key in her mailbox instead. His smile as he walks away speaks volumes and volumes.

5.  “Tender Love” (Force MDs): I could watch this video forever; in fact, I probably pull it up on YouTube at least once a month. They're an American R&B group that had some success in the '80s, but tragically three of the group's six members have died since then, and within five years of each other. The song is beyond romantic (that piano!), and the video shows the group gathered on a stoop (yes, another one), serenading the beautiful woman who listens from her window a few feet away. The guys look like people you'd like to know, and the lead singer has a particularly engaging smile. With tight harmonies and a few smooth moves, this is the kind of video about which people say, “They don't make 'em like that anymore.” But they do. It's just that back then it wasn't an exception. I'll probably watch it again when I finish this.

4.  “This Woman's Work” (Kate Bush): This is one of my favorite songs ever. Unbelievably powerful. Bush wrote it for the John Hughes movie She's Having a Baby, which is like finding an ounce of pure gold in a Cracker Jacks box. The video brings the premise to life in a way that's so gripping. Even if I didn't like the song, it would be a favorite after seeing this. Bush is beautiful, and the actor playing her husband is perfect for looking so ordinary. Somehow they're convincing as a couple. The final moments are gut-wrenching. (Maxwell also does a fantastic job with this song in a live performance that's also available on YouTube.)

3.  “Hurt” (Johnny Cash): I have no problem with people calling this the best music video ever made. (I just personally like two others more.) Cash was a year or so away from death when he recorded this meditative Nine Inch Nails song, and you can believe it. Cash himself seems to know it, too. He strums and sings in the House of Cash, a real museum dedicated to Cash memorabilia. Everything around him looks dusty and delapidated, and the video is full of archival footage of Cash throughout his lifetime. At one point, his wife June watches from behind him; she too would die before too long. No song ever matched a singer better than this one at the time he recorded it. The video is as haunting as any movie documentary – moreso, in fact.

2.  “The End of the Innocence” (Don Henley): This is one clip I couldn't find on YouTube last time I checked, but you can Google it and it'll come up. Wow, it's such a visually beautiful video; it rivals the best black and white movie cinematography. Henley sings about the passing of time and the disillusionment it brings while small town images underscore the lyric's emotional power. Regrettably, the middle section nearly dates itself with its reference to Ronald Reagan, but it's saved by timeless homefront military images (“Let your hair fall all around” switches from a young woman in a man's embrace at the beginning to a recruit's hair falling in slow motion onto a barber's floor). This was an early project for director David Fincher (“Seven,” “Gone Girl”), whose very good films would never capture the deep longing of this video.

1.  “Beat It” (Michael Jackson): Perfection. Good song, good performance, good narrative, good actors, great moves and great moments. No music video will ever beat it. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

Honorable mentions:

“Thriller” (Michael Jackson): Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better, which is why “Beat It” made my final cut. But the dance moves here are iconic.

“Billie Jean” (Jackson again): My third favorite of his, probably the first one I saw. Love that illuminating sidewalk!

“Wicked Game” (Chris Isaak): Someone please tell today's nearly pornographic grinders and humpers that this is how to sell sexy.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana): The apex of Seattle grunge. You just know from the lighting and set design in the first few frames that this is going to be the pep rally from hell.

“Every Breath You Take” (The Police): Nice minimalist work in black and white. Catchy song, and, hey, it's Sting. Now if only this weren't the stalker national anthem. . . .

“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” (Cyndi Lauper): A great extension of Lauper's own personality, or at least what I know of it. This is infectious stuff and as far as you can get from the angst of “Time After Time.”

“God Only Knows” (for the inauguration of BBC Music): Some of the best performers of the new millennium pay tribute to Brian Wilson's timeless classic. (It's OK, you can watch – Bieber and Miley are nowhere in sight.) This just came out within the past year, and it might be the most visually innovative video in ages, a real delight to watch. There are a few legends here as well, such as Wilson himself, playing a grand piano with a lion on top; Elton John, wearing a suit covered in butterflies; and Stevie Wonder, whose one-line interpretation is like a jolt of adrenaline -- pure Stevie. (He also reappears to contribute a harmonica solo.) You might not have seen this because it's only a few months old, but I think you'd really enjoy it.

“We Are the World” (USA for Africa): Wow, is this a time capsule or what? The singers are a who's-who of '80s superstars, and the whole experience is a time machine that melts away the intervening years.

“Glory Days” (Bruce Springsteen): Just Bruce and the gang rocking in a bar. He and Little Stevie really know how to share a mic, and the late, great Clarence Clemons works the sax like nobody's business. Patti Scialfa, Springsteen's wife, is also here, having a great time with her tambourine. Years later, when I finally saw them in concert (2000, Tacoma Dome, still the best show I've ever seen), I realized how well this video captured everyone's spirit and sheer exuberance.

Best video from the Stone Age:

“Hey Jude” (The Beatles): The Beatles recorded this song in a studio while surrounded by dozens of adoring onlookers. The guys look relaxed and happy, and when they get to the long finale, everyone joins in. I haven't seen this in a while, but I've never forgotten it. One of the few items on my bucket list is to see Paul perform this in concert. I would, too, if the tickets didn't cost more than the national debt.

So Many Videos, So Little Time: the worst videos I've ever seen (listed here as a public service). You knew this was coming.

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” (Bonnie Tyler): Don't get me wrong, I really like the song. But whose idea was it to take the lyrics literally, with Tyler trapped in a repressive boys' school full of kids with creepy “bright eyes”?!

“Funkytown” (Lipps INC.): You haven't truly appreciated the dark side of disco (I know – was there a bright side?) until you've seen the lead singer of Lipps INC. doing the Robot.

“Work It” (Missy Elliott): Face it – this is a song about blow jobs and women who have sex for money. The lyrics are bad enough, but the video features a little girl dancing along with the music, which is just wrong.

“Only” (Nicki Minaj): There are two different Minaj videos for this rap number. One of them sparked such an outrage that I suppose the other one was a way to get people to forget about the first one. That first one takes place in some kind of totalitarian state that looks way too much like the Third Reich, complete with too-close-for-comfort insignias. Minaj's defenders claimed the video wasn't her idea, she just did what she was told. So she's a moron? The second one is more typical for these times. At any rate, I defy you to start either one and get past the first line. If Cole Porter heard this, he'd never stop throwing up.

“Bound 2” (Kanye West): Kanye West rapping as he rides a motorcycle with a topless Kim Kardashian straddling his lap. This is what happens when a celebrity reaches that pinnacle of success where no one dares to say, “This is a really crappy idea.”