Author Archives: Tom Crippen

Why newsmagazines love the word “ironic”

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WHEN NBC hired Ben Silverman in May 2007, he was the hottest executive in the television business, the man who had a hand in bringing reality shows and “The Office” to America. He also happened to be taking a job he had dreamed about as a junior high schooler hooked on television: the top programmer position at NBC.

That’s the lead for a New York Times profile headlined “NBC Hired a Hit Maker. It’s Still Waiting.” The reason for the headline is that, after his hire by NBC, Mr. Silverman has gone from being hot to proving sort of a dud.

Incredibly, I did a word search to see if the article mentioned Fred Silverman. Not so incredibly, there was no such mention. But, 29 years before the hiring of Ben Silverman, NBC hired Fred Silverman as its president. Fred Silverman was hot because of his success as president of ABC; then, at NBC, he unleashed a string of duds, and in 1981 he got kicked out. (He did some good stuff too, as Wikipedia points out, though at the time I think Brandon Tartikoff got all the credit for Cheers and Hill Street Blues.)
The parallels are amazing. Silverman … Silverman. Hot, hired by NBC, not hot … Hot, hired by NBC, not hot. And the two hirings are almost exactly 30 years apart! The only flaw is that Silverman 1’s hotness derived from the kind of show critics describe as “pablum” (Charlie’s Angels, Laverne and Shirley), whereas Silverman 2’s hot period includes The Office, your prestige sort of comedy, alongside genuine crap vehicles like The Biggest Loser. 

The other drawback, of course, is that the parallels add up to a king-size “so what.” But there they are and there’s no denying they’re kind of goofy. A decent newsmagazine could stick the word “ironic” in there and get itself a nice paragraph. 

Again with the Sullivan

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He does a feature called “The View From Your Window” where readers send in pictures of what they see outside their homes. This time, Montreal.  That’s my town and I don’t even recognize the view. I believe the steepled building behind the trees is one of our many churches, but which and where? They are now mainly used as parking garages and Buddhist temples because of the Quiet Revolution.

Doonesbury’s Alex and Leo: Sweet or What?

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UPDATE 3:  Going by comments, people who read this post may think that by Garry Trudeau’s “track record” I mean some pattern he has involving brain-damaged characters. Well, no. The track record business refers to the point raised in the post’s first paragraph, namely that I think Trudeau often takes the easy way out when he involves his characters in difficult matters. Examples would include Joanie Caucus’s longshot transition from housewife to congressional legal counsel (and wife of Rick Redfern) in the 1970s, and the triumphant arrival in the dumped Mike Doonesbury’s life of a young, beautiful and brilliant second wife in the 1980s. 
This is Update 3 because I thought of a couple more trivial updates first and stuck them at the end of the post.
And now let us return to our starting point: Alex and Leo … sweet or what?
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I guess it could be both. I still have a weakness for Doonesbury, though the strip is decades past its great days. Now comic geeks take notice of it only to roll their eyes, or such is my impression. Garry Trudeau has something of the feel of an Aaron Sorkin or Frank Rich: he does what he does smoothly, but you (okay, I) feel that he leaves out a lot when playing moral arbiter or heartfelt human chronicler.  He had the same faults in the old days, but his virtues were a lot stronger then, by which I mean that he was really, really funny.

Now Alex, Mike Doonesbury’s little girl, is romancing Leo, a boy who got blown up in the Iraq war. Leo is fighting back from very grave handicaps, chiefly aphasia.  Alex has her dad’s face and her dad is not good-looking; neither is she. Would Trudeau have assigned her to a victim of brain damage if she were pretty? Well, maybe, I don’t know. I’m inclined to doubt it because of Trudeau’s track record and because I haven’t seen any strips addressing why the two like each other. Aside from being a couple of nice kids, they don’t have much in common.
Caveat: I read Doonesbury on most days but not all days, so my data set is limited.  
UPDATE:  Ah yes, now about Alex being “cute.” And if that link is outdated, just find the Doonesbury strip for May 16.
UPDATE 2:  Yep, the link is outdated. Still, the one today (May 17) is pretty good: Roland Hedley Burton and his tweets.

Golden Age Gallery: Freakout Thursday

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On Tuesday I posted some covers of women doing violent stuff. Here’s another installment of cover scans, one you can call either “Odd Stuff of the Golden Age” or “Tom: His Many Moods.” The covers here are all from comics that have sold for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. They’re big on the collectors market, and not because they involve famous characters or huge name artists. People want these comics just because the comics look so weird. 

The issues in question sold little when they came out, then spent decades in obscurity while fandom evolved and Carl Barks and the Legion of Superheroes and Little Lulu and so many others received well-deserved attention. Not until the early 1990s did anyone become aware that most of these comics had ever been around. That was when the visionary Ernst “Ernie” Gerber published The Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books, a collection of 21,000 (or so) color photographs of comic book covers. By his account, he had spent almost $900,000 on tracking down various comic book collections, photographing their covers, and producing the book. Let me note that his wife of the time, Mary, has a joint byline with him and that Comics: Between the Panels says she “helped sort the slides and cull the 22,000 cover photographs that made Gerber’s final cut.” (The 22,000 figure conflicts with the number given on the Photo-Journal‘s cover, at least as the cover is reproduced in Between the Panels. As you may have guessed, all the information in this post is from Panels’ entry on the Photo-Journal. If you have never read Panels, and if you like U.S. mainstream comics, you should check it out. It’s a great read and full of information.)
Readers of the Photo-Journal saw photos of Action 1 and  Haunt of Fear 12 and so on, but they also saw thousands of covers of comic books they had never heard of. A few of these comics were so strange, so extreme, so absurd that collectors everywhere decided to buy them. The collectors did so, then spent a decade and a half selling the comics and buying them again until prices for the books climbed to more or less daffy levels. 
Okay, now a few covers; just three this time out, because I want to keep these posts going a long time. No, I don’t know why the right edges are shaved off here; they’re fine when I preview the post, and you can imagine how happy I am about this little snag. (UPDATE:  Noah set me straight. You can change the html so that the pictures’ width fits the blog’s column width.)
I made a joke up top about my many moods, so the first cover is called “Me and My Life”:
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That’s Criminals on the Run, published by Curtis in 1947. The cover is drawn by L. B. Cole, who churned out countless crime, adventure, sci-fi, and horror covers. Just about everything really. Very often he did beautiful work; very often he was absurd, especially when people got involved in his scenes. A fish in the face. 
I was writing about my hangover and attendant frustrations. So here’s Mr. Mystery 11, published by Aragon in 1953, cover by Bernard Baily.
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Finally, a tribute to my good humor of recent days:
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That’s Atomic War! 1, published by Ace in 1952. Don’t know who drew the cover.

Best explanation I’ve ever heard

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“At the meeting I was attempting to explain that unlike Sen. Schumer, I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on ‘The Andy Griffith Show.’  I made the mistake of referring to Sen. Schumer as ‘that Jew’ and I should not have put it that way as this took away from what I was trying to say.” 


That’s state Sen. Kim Hendren, R-Ark, telling an Arkansas political blog (the Tolbert Report) why it was that he referred to U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as “that Jew.” Apparently, when discussing adherence to your fine values, it is highly relevant to note that a person who disagrees with you is Jewish.

I like it that Sen. Hendren speaks frankly of the downside to slurring someone’s religion: it creates inconvenience for the person who does the slurring.

(Via Yglesias this time, not Sullivan!)

Unusual

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As I understand it, a hangover is supposed to last a day at most. Mine has started its third day, and I have learned why I do not normally drink hard alcohol.  Like Bertie Wooster, I’m evolving various metaphors to express the hangover experience. A favorite: my skull is made out of crepe paper; the contents have turned to egg yolk; if I move my jaw while speaking, some of the yolk may escape thru the vent just over my ear.

My condition contributed to an unpleasant moment at the Second Cup. The place is lovely in the morning, lovely and quiet. But if one person speaks loudly, their voice is inescapable. This morning the person who spoke loudly was one of the girls on the cafe’s staff.  Normally she is uncommunicative and busy cleaning. But lately she’s changed gears, and it turns out she has a voice like an auto collision with words set to it. To try another line, if a car alarm could say, “I mean, what is that?” it would sound just like this girl. 
After a couple of hours, I shuffled over, excused myself, and intruded in her conversation. I tried the diplomatic approach: “Because of the acoustics here, your voice kind of bounces around.” Her, after a moment’s thought: “Okay! I’ll turn up the music.” To be fair, I don’t think she was being stupid, just rude in a quick-witted way. I shuffled off again, and from that moment she was quiet. Not that a lot of moments were left, since her shift was almost over. I had waited a long while, subjectively the equivalent of years.
Now I’m at a different Second Cup, more crowded and in some ways noisier, but the noise is ambient instead of being focused, and it doesn’t talk, just grinds coffee. But the yolk is still sloshing about, and I miss my old Second Cup. I’m going to try the old place again and if necessary ask one of the other kids on staff to act as go-between so that a settlement can be reached with the noisy girl. Because, make no mistake, the kids are still great. 
UPDATE:   The hangover symptoms I describe are “the worst,” according to the boy who was sweeping the hallway outside the bathroom at my fallback 2nd Cup. He confirmed that a hangover lasting three days is highly unusual, not to say unheard of, and suggested that I might be suffering an allergic reaction to hard alcohol. The allergy would explain a lot, including my uncharacteristic good sense in staying away from hard alcohol for most of my life.
UPDATE  2:  10:30 pm, Montreal time. Coming here to the Cafe Depot, I found Ganesh and Pariabas, two young fellows in my building, hanging out on the front steps with Kevin, another young fellow but not normally one of their buddies. Ten minutes of discussion on the origins of my hangover, why I had drunk so much, funny things said by various parties while drunk, what I should do to avoid hangovers (water), and how Pari had drunk half a bottle of scotch for three weeks without any side-effects because it was during a leisurely vacation somewhere and he had been in a good frame of mind.  I move on with the gratifying sense of having been the center of attention. Maybe that’s why my hangover sticks around; on the other hand, sitting down here I found that I lowered myself into place like an old man with vertebrae that might pop their strings and scatter on the floor; so the effects are real and they linger.
A cheerful note: my favorite barista is behind the counter; usually she works the day shift. She’s a pretty, dark-eyed, good-natured girl with a boyfriend who loves Watchmen. She likes it too, but the book is really his obsession, not hers; I guess that’s suitable, seeing as how he’s the guy. They read it because of the movie, which they both liked a lot. I take this as a testament to Alan Moore: in however distorted a form, his story breaks thru to a new audience. I was going to say “gets thru to a new generation,” but Roger Ebert and (God, again) Andrew Sullivan both liked the movie too.
UPDATE 3:  Now into day four. All that’s left is an ache over my right eyebrow, and I’m starting to think that’s because of the overstuffed chair I use at my fallback 2nd Cup. 
UPDATE 4:  My hangover was officially gone as of yesterday morning, when a Cafe Depot barista (not my favorite) remarked that I was singing. A four-day hangover — not bad!