January 2009 - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

TV Age

I have loved television for decades. I’m unapologetic about it. I don’t watch “only PBS and the History Channel” either. I like commercial, sometimes trashy TV. I can still tell you the nights certain programs were on forty years ago. I have books about the Dick van Dyke Show, The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Colombo, Taxi, and JEOPARDY!, plus several general texts.

But a couple things have happened in the last couple years that seems to have lessened the allure of the tube. One was the writers’ strike. Ironically, I supported the writers on their position regarding the strike. But my TV mojo just got lost, just as it did for baseball after the 1994 strike, when it took about three years to get it back.

The other event took place in early December. I had recorded a number of television shows on my DVR that I had not had a chance to see. I was two weeks behind on the dramas (all on ABC). The comedies (all on NBC) were even further back; I had seen no 30 Rock, and the The Office and Earl were likewise five or six weeks behind, at least. The were a couple news programs, about three weeks of JEOPARDY! plus shows for Lydia to watch. The power in our house went out only for an hour on a Saturday night during an ice storm. But when the power surged back, it fried the DVR.

What I discovered is that I could watch the dramas on abc.com, and over a week or two, I caught up. Thank goodness for the Advent season, when those shows are either preempted or repeated. But going to find all of those comedies, presumably on hulu.com felt like…work. So, it’s likely I’ll just catch a couple December reruns and move forward with the new programs, though I have caught some Office webisodes.

My friend Fred and I once had this conversation about TV shows. Generally speaking, he doesn’t give up on a show. Once he starts it, he generally finishes the run, with rare exceptions. I am a bit more willing to cut my losses; American Idol and 24 are just two shows I watched then decided that wasn’t enjoying them enough, but I am sympathetic to his POV, and don’t abandon easily.

Still, I imagine that once the shows I’m watching now go off the air, I may not necessarily pick up new ones. (Yes, I said that last year, and I picked up Life on Mars, but at least that was a one-to-one replacement for Men in Trees.)

One of my shows, Boston Legal, is already gone. (BTW, what’s with those folks writing to TV Guide complaining how liberal the show is? One was shocked, SHOCKED that they made fun of Sarah Palin. Why didn’t they just CHANGE THE CHANNEL? Or wait a week or two, when the show was kaput?)

Two more shows, Pushing Daisies and Dirty Sexy Money will soon be swimming with the fishes. This will leave Brothers and Sisters, Grey’s Anatomy (stop with the dead lover sex, FCOL!) and the aforementioned Life on Mars, plus the last season of Scrubs on ABC – starts tonight!, and the Thursday comedies on NBC. Once they go off the air, I may be down to news programs, JEOPARDY!, and in season, some sports events.

That is, unless Lauren Graham gets another series. Oh, and can somebody tell me when GSN starts rerunning the JEOPARDY! episodes from November 2008?

This is not to say I don’t enjoy what I am viewing. I recommend that you watch at least the beginning of last week’s Bill Moyers Journal, where he celebrates “The Onion”; my favorite headline, “Housing Crisis Vindicates Guy Who Still Lives With Parents”. He also notes that today’s economic and militaristic crises were foretold in the 1933 Marx Brothers classic, “Duck Soup”:
MRS. TEASDALE: Gentleman, I’ve already loaned Freedonia more than half the fortune my husband left me. I consider that money lost and now you’re asking for another 20 million dollars.
Also on the show: John Lithgow on poetry and Arthur Miller.

I watched the Kennedy Center Honors and there is usually one transcendent moment. This is the one for me:
LINK
After which, you may wonder Who is Bettye LaVette? And why is this video NOT on CBS?

So, I’ll be curious just what, if anything, will pique my interest in five years. I took Mad Men season 1 from the library last week, but it has only a two-day window, and I ended up seeing none of it. I can imagine to decide to catch this season of The Office or 30 Rock on DVD, perhaps skipping over the episodes I happen to catch on air. What is clear, though, is with online access, DVD and the DVR, TV viewing has most certainly changed for me.

One more thing. The loss of the DVR meant I was watching my little portable b&w TV more often (I could have rewired the cable to the TV directly, but that would have been, you know, work to do and then undo. So I’ve opted order one of those coupons so I can get a discount on buying one of those over-the-air converters, just at a point when the digital TV subsidy program is running out of money. I ordered my coupon a couple weeks ago online, but apparently, they are to arrive via passenger pigeon.
***
Postal Service lifts curtain on 2009 stamps, which will feature early, black-and-white TV shows: “Lucy and Ethel lose their struggle with a chocolate assembly line. Joe Friday demands “just the facts” with a penetrating gaze. A secret word brings Groucho a visit from a duck.”
“Folks who grew up as television came of age will delight in a 20-stamp set included in the Postal Service’s plans for 2009 recalling early memories of the medium.” This I will buy.
“Most of the commemorative stamps are priced at 42 cents, the current first-class rate. However, a rate increase is scheduled in May and the size will depend on the consumer price index.”
“The Early TV Memories stamp set is scheduled for release Aug. 11 in Los Angeles.”

ROG

Last year’s blog

I think it was Gordon Dymowski – or was it Shecky Greene? – who first informed me of a meme where you randomly select a line from your blog – one post per month for the past year – and then post the lines (and links) publicly. So let’s review what’s happened on the blog over the past month, and please enjoy this small sampling of the blog.

(Not only did I steal the idea from Gordon, I stole the entire paragraph above, save for two words.)

January: Anthony makes the correct theological point that Christmas is not over. And he is still right.

February: A look at the women–some celebrated, some forgotten–who influenced the lives of the Fab Four and were often the muses behind some of the Beatles’ greatest songs. No, I didn’t buy Patti Boyd’s book.

March: We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact. – Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) Philosophy at no charge.

April: I ended up picking Joan Baez, who my father admired as far back as 1959, when he brought home the oddly-named The Best of Joan Baez; and John Mellencamp, probably in part because of the love Tosy had given him after his recent induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Tunes!

May: If you were to tell me I’d be blogging for nearly 1100 straight days 1200 days ago, I’d say you were nuts. And add another 240 to that.

June: OK, so there are one hundred things that annoy me. But I really, really had to work at it.

July: I noticed that one child of about eight whacked her head on a wooden crossbeam of the slide/climbing contraption. Did you ever wince in pain when someone else gets hurt? I do.

August: Who does Obama pick to be his Vice-Presidential running mate? How did I do? Oh, and a mention of Sarah Palin BEFORE the GOP convention; just sayin’.

September: I am certain life’s questions can be answered by sleeping on hard things and chanting. As though you had any doubt.

October: With the Mets eliminated, I still need to come up with a priority list of teams to root for. And I came up with them?!

November: Finally, I wrote: “To quote Sylvester Stewart: ‘Different strokes for different folks And so on, and so on and scooby-dooby-doo.'” Quoting Sly Stone is almost always appropriate.

December: Listening to boring debates about how “they” have taken the Christ out of Christmas. Didn’t hear it as much this year, or maybe I was in the wrong places.

My Musical Obsessions

For a time, I was pretty obsessed with the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside”; I blame the French. Actually, I blame my friend Deborah who lives in France. She turned me onto the Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams version of the song that appeared in the 1949 film Neptune’s Daughter. Subsequently, I learned that Red Skelton and Betty Garrett reprise the song in the same film.

The Montleban-Williams version was recorded, but it was not the first one released. That honor went to Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark, one day before Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer, and BOTH of those recordings charted on the same day.

One of the best versions was done by Louis Armstrong with Velma Middleton. The story of the Satchmo version can be seen here.

What reminded me of all this was a version of the song on Coverville by Zooey Deschanel & Leon Redbone from the Elf soundtrack.

Also on the Coverville Annual Holiday Cover Show was Mele Kalikimaka/Waters Of Babylon by The Priestess & The Fool. The first song, of course, is the classic Hawaiian-sounding song by Bing Crosby with the Andrews Sisters. The second, though, is a song by Don McLean, the “American Pie” guy, originally called Babylon.

LINK.

Initially, I thought: “what a bizarre segue!” Babylon is based on Psalm 137, scripture most pastors I’ve known dreaded preaching about, as it’s depressing as hell. BTW, Psalm 137 is also the source of Rivers of Babylon by the Melodians from The Harder They Come soundtrack.

But the I began rethinking my objection to Babylon. Though it’s not very “Christmasy”, one of the earliest events after the birth of Jesus in Matthew 1 and 2 was the slaughter of the innocents, ordered by King Herod in Matthew 2:16-18, not unlike the events around Moses’ birth. Maybe the musical segue is not so strange after all.

The great thing about blogs is that it lets me obsess, then ideally, release it.

ROG

The Year in Review: Politics, Sports

2008 was only the second time in ten attempts I’ve voted for a successful Presidential candidate – any guesses to the other time?

I also voted for Obama in the New York state primary. My, that was SO long ago, back in early February. Like many people, I suffered from election fatigue. So silliness such as the Barack the Magic Negro song kerfluffle, played on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, doesn’t even register.

But here’s a terrible thought: perhaps the Republicans were (gulp) right in in their winner-take-all primaries. In the same vein, I have also finally figured out what’s so very RIGHT with the Electoral College. People say, correctly, that it’s undemocratic. EXACTLY! It wasn’t designed to be democratic, it was meant to be definitive. Obama won with about a 53-47% vote. BUT he also won with a landslide ELECTORAL vote. The results of the election were not in question. And the system works most of the time. OK, not in 2000. Or 1888. Or 1876. Or 1824. But most of the time.

Imagine a close election, say 1968. Nixon and Humphrey were virtually tied in the popular vote. But Nixon’s Electoral College victory codified the race. Let’s say there were no Electoral College. There would have been canvassing of votes all over the country. Or even 2000, where the canvassing was limited to Florida.

There’s some merit, though, in doing what Maine and Nebraska have done; allocate electoral votes by Congressional district, with two votes going to the winner statewide. This would put more conservative parts of “blue” states and more liberal parts of “red” states in play, and that we in upstate New York would be barraged with the same campaign of ads that the folks in Ohio and Florida get. Wait, I said there was merit to this? Well, for the local media bottom line, for sure.

Caroline Kennedy for Senate? Don’t much care. Whoever is elected would have to run in both 2010 AND 2012. But she’s getting killed in the “vetting” process. There’s also the more parochial issue that upstaters in New York want an upstate Senator, since there hasn’t been one since Charles Goodall finished the term of Bobby Kennedy. An AP story this week suggested that some “caretaker” take the seat now, someone with no desire to run in 2010, like Bill Clinton, or Mario Cuomo, or Eliot Spitzer. OK, not Eliot Spitzer; seeing if you were paying attention. But Governor David Paterson does not want a caretaker candidate; he wants whoever he appoints in 2009 to be on the ballot in 2010, possibly, one could speculate, to enhance his own chances for being elected governor in hios own right.

I’ve been pretty obsessed with the Constitution this year. Do you know which Amendment took 203 years to be passed?

BASEBALL

Congrats to the Phillies and the ~~Devil~~ Rays. What a difference a season, and a name change, makes.

I started reading a Bob Costas book from 2000, which I seemed to have misplaced. Regardless, the points he made helped me realize that interleague play, as it’s currently constructed, is fatally flawed. Where in the NFL, all the teams in a division play common opponents (the NFL East playing the AFC North in 2008, e.g.), Major League Baseball has this romanticized notion of Yankees-Mets, White Sox-Cubs, etc. Nice, but When getting into the playoffs is determined by this, it’s not particularly workable. Let’s say the White Sox had a weak team, and the Yankees a strong one. This is advantageous to the Cubs and problematic for the Mets.

Also, how is it that the AL West has only four teams, while the NL Central has six? This is competitively unfair. Short of expanding MLB to 32 (four 4-team divisions in each league a la the NFL) or contracting two teams to 28 (two 7-team divisions, maybe with two wild cards, in each league), I don’t know how to make the system more equitable.

I’m also distressed that the Yankees can afford to get two front-line pitchers in the offseason (LHP CC Sabathia’s seven-year contract; RHP A.J. Burnett’s five-year contract). They are playing by the rules; it’s the rules that have to be fixed, with a greater amount of profit-sharing than the “luxury tax” has created. (Oh, and why isn’t the Mark Teixeira deal showing up on the MLB transaction list?

Will Francisco Rodriguez (K-Rod) be the end of late-season collapses for the Mets?

FOOTBALL
There’s a bowl game today at noon on ESPN2 that I never even heard of, the International Bowl, played in Toronto, ON CANADA, but I have a rooting interest: the Buffalo Bulks, which had been a terrible team, but won some incredible games down the stretch this season. Not only is it an upstate team, it’s a SUNY school (as is U Albany and SUC New Paltz, my alma maters), the school declined its only other chance to go to a bowl game 50 years ago.

On the pro level – Go, Big Blue! (That’s the defending Super Bowl champs, the New York Giants, to the uninitiated.)

ROG

The Year In Review: Mixed Media

As pop culture goes, my participation in same was pretty dismal. But I’m going to plod on and describe the highlights.

COMICS
Last month, the Comic Reporter asked its readers to “Name Five Memorable Comics-Related Things About 2008 (A Book You Read, An Experience You Had, An Event That Made You Take Notice — Anything That Would Help You In The Future Recall This Year.” I failed to participate there, but I will here.

1a. Fred Hembeck’s book came out, and I’m mentioned in the thank yous; I like seeing my name in print, what can I say? This also meant that I actually went to more comic-related shows (three) than I have in a while. At two of them, I saw Fred.
1b. At one of those shows, someone actually asked ME to sign some FantaCo Chronicles I worked on 25 years ago. What an ego boost!
1c. I also saw my friend Rocco Nigro, and re-met the inestimable Alan David Doane, who was probably an annoying teenager last I had seen him, rather than the charmer he is now.

2. Someone put out a Wikipedia page for FantaCo, a place I worked for 8.5 years, this summer. Frankly, the page was awful, riddled with errors and omissions. Fortunately, the guy contacted me, and it became the mission of mine and of my old buddy Steve Bissette to rectify the record; the thing is not perfect, but it’s a WHOLE lot better. The incident also gave me a chance to get in contact with former FantaCo owner Tom Skulan for the first time in nearly a decade.

3. Reading Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier. It explained a lot about Jack’s motivation the times I dealt with him on the phone in the early 1980s.

4. The deaths of Steve Gerber in 2008, who unbeknowst to him helped inspire this blog, and of Raoul Vezina, 25 years ago.

5. Freddie and Me by Mike Dawson, which, among other things, made me want to listen to more of the music of the group Queen.

MUSIC
I got maybe a dozen 2008 albums all year, by Lindsay Buckingham, Elvis Costello, Randy Newman, REM, She and Him, Brian Wilson, Lizz Wright, a couple others plus the MOJO take on the Beatles’ white album. I liked them all at some level, but the even snarlkier than usual Newman album “stuck” the most. More old fogey music I received for Christmas and haven’t heard enough to judge: Paul McCartney, James Taylor and Johhny Cash. The latter is a 40th anniversary double CD/DVD box set of his Folsom Prison concerts; just on a quick listen, I’m happy to hear the Carl Perkins and Statler Brothers tunes for the first time.

MOVIES
A paltry number of 2008 pics so far: Iron Man (my favorite), Young@Heart, Man on Wire, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and Synecdoche, New York. Three of them, IM, MoW and VCB made the Top 10 list at the WSJ along with WALL-E, Slumdog Millionaire and a bunch of other films I will try to see.
Yes, I did see some 2007 films in 2008 and I will undoubtedly see some 2008 films in 2009. Still, five is worse than the seven I saw last year, and catching up on video just doesn’t seem to happen, not that it’s entirely comparable anyway.

TELEVISION

Oh, heck, TV deserves its own posting. Thanks to technology, it’s about the only thing I have even a modicum of a chance to (barely) keep up with.

ROG