In Memoriam: Maurice Sendak 1928-2012

Children's book writer and illustrator. Little Bear (illus.) Where the Wild Things Are. In the Night Kitchen.

"I don't believe that there's a demarcation. 'Oh, you mustn't tell them [children] that. You mustn't tell them that.' You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it's true. If it's true, you tell them."

"Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters, sometimes very hastily, but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother, and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."

"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"

Graphic Grandeur (Usual Gang of Idiots Edition)

60 years ago this coming autumn, a new publication was unleashed upon a newly prosperous, culturally compliant, and therefore wholly unsuspecting American public:

Art by Harvey Kurtzman

 Of course, the kids went for it.

It's not like Mad was the first humorous comic book. Archie was supposed to be funny, and often was. And the funny animal comics, like the kind featuring Walt Disney characters, were meant to be likewise. If they weren't, they'd be called serious dramatic animal comics. But what set Mad apart from other funny comics,  as amusing as those other comics may be, is the latter was put out by adults, and those adults were essentially talking down to the kids. Mad, however, was put out by kids who were essentially talking down to the adults.

Well, no, that's not right. Mad was put out by adults, too. Except that these adults were sharing a joke with kids at the expense of other adults.

Originally, the joke was merely on those adults who put out the other comics. Including the adults who worked at EC, Mad's publisher. For instance, the very first cover by founding editor Harvey Kurtzman was a takeoff of horror comics, EC's notorious specialty. Inside Mad, in addition to horror, were parodies of the science fiction, crime, and western genres. Eventually, Mad went from spoofing the various types of comics to the actual, copyrighted comics themselves, which I'm sure kept lawyers for all concerned very busy. Superman ("Superduperman"), Batman and Robin ("Batboy and Rubin"), Flash Gordon ("Flesh Garden") and Little Orphan Annie ("Little Orphan Melvin") all came under the Mad microscope. It even made fun of funny comics like Archie ("Starchie") and the kind with Walt Disney characters ("Mickey Rodent"). Mad presented a world where one superhero defeats another superhero by goading him to punch himself silly, another superhero sucks the blood out of his teenage sidekick, an astronaut has a run-in with anthropomorphic air, a thug threatens to draw dots on a little girl's blank eyeballs, a high school principal admonishes two female students for the marks they leave as he chases them about the office, and a funny animal takes a naked man on a leash for a walk. All this a good ten years before the widespread availability of hallucinogenic drugs.

The comics were eventually collected in a paperback, where this fellow made his first appearance:

 Art by Will Elder and Jack Davis

                                                                         
That is, his first appearance with Mad. In fact, the kid with the grin had appeared in various advertisements since the late 19th century, often with such tag lines as "Me Worry?" and "What--Me Worry?" By the time he came under artist Will Elder's brush in 1954, he was safely in the public domain (though you can bet the corporate colossus which currently owns Mad has made damn sure he's now out of the public domain. Which reminds me: Images are owned and © by the respective holders & are presented here for educational purposes within the “fair use” terms of US Code: Title 17, Sec. 107. Whew! Almost forgot.)

A few months later, the kid with the grin appeared on the comic book proper, nestled idiotically in-between Josef Stalin and Marlyn Monroe:

 Art by, um, I guess this is what's referred to as "clip art."

Yes, that's the actual cover. In the early days, Mad occasionally liked to play hide-and-seek at the comic book rack.

Partly to bypass the newly instituted Comics Code, and partly to satisfy founding editor Harvey Kurtzman's growing satiric ambitions, Mad was transformed from a comic book into a magazine in mid-1955 (albeit a magazine with drawings of people talking to each other in word balloons):

Art by Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman

The extremely important message? "Please buy this magazine."

By this time, Mad had move beyond parodying comics to film, TV, literature, poetry, music, sports, politics, history, science, sociology, and, above all, advertising. Really, the entire passing parade, with tips on how to avoid getting trampled. Now, I said earlier that part of Mad's appeal was that it didn't talk down to kids. The magazine version now gave you a much more expansive view as to who were the kids and who were the adults. For it made clear that no matter your age, how often you were married, how many your children, how many your wrinkles and liver spots, or how long your stay in the nursing home, the advertisers, merchandisers, politicians, educators, religious leaders, media moguls, titans of industry, movers and shakers,  the high and the mighty, the beautiful people, and the powers that be, would keep on talking down to you,  would keep on insulting your intelligence, would keep on regarding you as a child, right up until the day you die. Not a pleasant thought, to be sure, but at least through Mad you could talk right back down to them.

You might have noticed that the kid with the grin is, at first glance, seemingly absent from the above cover. He appeared quite a bit on the inside, though, usually as an extra in crowd scenes. With a change of editors in 1956--Al Feldstein replacing Harvey Kurtzman, who left to pursue other parodistic possibilities (most notably, "Little Annie Fanny" for Playboy)--the kid with the grin, by now called Alfred E. Neuman, was promoted to a more prominent spot on the front cover:

Art by Norman Mingo  

May his grin remain forever gap-toothed.

They Don't Always Have More Fun

(originally posted  2/21/2009)

Both my two sisters and my brother had blond hair when they were kids.

My one sister is still blond, but both the other sister and  brother are now brunettes.

I, on the other hand, came out of the womb a brunette, and have remained a brunette for most of my life.

Lately, though, I've found that my hair is getting lighter, the reverse situation of my two sisters and my brother. Ironic, huh?

Well, that's enough blogging for today.

I think I'll stop by the drugstore and pick up some Grecian Formula.

Photo Finish

I'm debuting a new, recurring feature, folks. Hope you like it.

Hollywood, 1953


I was originally going to label this photograph "The Golden Age of Hollywood", but that would have been a bit misleading, for in 1953, that Golden Age was threatened with imminent extinction. Five years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled the major studios to be in violation of federal antitrust laws, and they were soon forced to sell their theater chains, thus depriving them of a reliable source of income. Trustbusting is usually a good thing, and probably would have been all right in this instance, except that it came at the worst possible time for the studios. The advent of television meant that a moving image was no longer something you had to pay to see in a theater, but one that could now be viewed scot free in the comfort of your own home. People increasingly did, depriving the studios of further income.

Despite all this turmoil, the man in the center of the photo, Humphrey Bogart, was doing all right. Still a major star, he had recently finished work on The Caine Mutiny , where he played the ball-busting, and ball-twiddling, Captain Queeg. His last great iconic performance, he would soon be nominated for an Oscar, though he would lose to the man who, a few years earlier, had lost to him, Marlon Brando. Could Bogart have stayed a major star all the way into the 1960s? We'll never know. See that cigarette in his hand? Kind of fits his tough guy image, huh? In three years he'd be dead of throat cancer.

Let's move on to Bogart's missus, the woman on the left, Lauren Bacall. Now nearing 90, she's often seen as one of the last living links to that Golden Age. After a strong start, however, her movie career basically sputtered. The strong start being the two movies she made with her future husband, To Have or Have Not and The Big Sleep. Though the inexperienced young thespian was more posing than acting in these films (she had started out as a model, after all) the camera nevertheless loved her, and she became a huge star before she really had a chance to hone her craft. A little later she also appeared with Bogie in Key Largo, another big hit. Then the sputtering began. She reportedly began turning down scripts she found of little interest, and the studios then started losing interest in her. Oh, there were a few critically acclaimed films like Young Man With a Horn, and she was on the verge of another big hit, How to Marry a Millionaire, when this photo was taken, at that movie's very premiere, in fact. However, the devil was in the credits. Though she arguably played the main character, she was billed third behind the other two stars, the first billed of whom is to the right of Bogart. Now, none of this is a reflection on Bacall's acting, which greatly improved as her film career declined, and would improve further still when, a few years after her husband's death, she moved back to New York and became a mainstay of the Broadway stage.

Finally, we come to the woman on the right, Marilyn Monroe. Of the three pictured, the 1950s belonged mostly to her. Like Bacall, she had been a model. But whereas Bacall had appeared on the cover of Vogue, Monroe's modeling had been limited to the kinds of pictures you might find posted in an army barracks. Turns out this was just what the movies needed. The studios battled the onslaught of television in many ways--Technicolor, CinemaScope, 3D--before finally settling on sex. True, they couldn't show all that much more than on TV, as the onerous production code was still in effect. Nevertheless, you sure the hell weren't going to see Lucy Ricardo standing over a subway grate while a passing train blows up her skirt. I happen to think Monroe was much more than her considerable sex appeal, but the Hollywood brass didn't necessarily feel that way. Fortunately, she did. Once she was a big enough star, bigger than Bacall had been, she began feeling her oats and started demanding more challenging roles. And got them, for with the rise of the talent agency, the iron-clad studio contract had quickly become a thing of the past.

And so, though this photo at first glance may be evocative of a more romantic, more glamorous era, what you're actually looking at is a Hollywood in transition. Not that transition is unique to Hollywood. Ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age, most places in most times have been in some state of transition or other. Arguably, a lot of great things have come out of that Industrial Age. The electric light. The telephone. The automobile. The personal computer. Near the top of the list I would put the development of photography. It allows us to occasionally take a break from transition and marvel at what has transpired.

Catharsis

I was sitting in ninth grade study hall all those years ago, when I eavesdropped on the following conversation:

"I cried last night," said the girl.

"Oh, yeah?" the boy replied. "Why?"

"Love Story was on TV."

"It sucked that much, huh?"

"Ha ha, smarty. No, I cried because the girl died at the end."

"The girl didn't really die. The director said 'That's a wrap' or something, the actress jumped out of the hospital bed, got her paycheck, and went home."

"Oh, you are so funny."

"Aw, c'mon, it's just a movie!"

"Yeah, but it can happen in real life, too!"

"Then that's when you should cry."

"Yeah, but I like crying a lot whole better when it's only a movie."

In Memoriam: Whitney Houston 1963-2012

Singer. "Saving All My Love For You." "All at Once" "How Will I Know." "Greatest Love of All" "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)." "Didn't We Almost Have It All." "I Will Always Love You." "I'm Every Woman." "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)." "My Love is Your Love." And, for all you red-blooded Americans and/or NFL fans out there, who could ever forget this?

"What Whitney's style came down to was selling the melody and selling it hard, and selling your voice along with it--showing that you had the ability to take the chorus all the way to the moon...Whitney had the power to do that, whereas a lot of other singers don't, and have embarrassed themselves trying to."

--Music journalist JD Considine

"[Houston] possesses one of her generation’s most powerful gospel-trained voices, but she eschews many of the churchier mannerisms of her forerunners. She uses ornamental gospel phrasing only sparingly, and instead of projecting an earthy, tearful vulnerability, communicates cool self-assurance and strength, building pop ballads to majestic, sustained peaks of intensity."

--The New York Times.

"The biggest devil is me. I’m either my best friend or my worst enemy."

--Whitney Houston

(If you want some idea of the influence this woman has had on pop music, watch American Idol sometimes. Her style dominates. As for the drugs, hey, I'm honoring the singer, not the addict. It's not like she charged admission to watch her shoot up--KJ)

Pop-Up Quiz

(Originally posted on 1/23/2009)

Recently, I was at a Joseph Heller web site, deeply immersed in a discussion of Milo Minderbinder's place in literary history, when I suddenly noticed something in the lower right hand corner of the screen. It wasn't part of the site since it had nothing to do with Catch 22. Here's what it said:

TEST YOUR IQ

CLICK HERE

I thought to myself, hey, it'd be kinda cool to know my IQ, so I clicked .

Ever since I clicked, a box has popped up on the screen every ten seconds asking me to, variously, try a new anti-wrinkle cream, take advice on how to pass a civil service exam, give a gold-plated pendent to that very special person, join a health club, try liposuction, dine at a new Chinese restaurant in a city I never heard of, take pills that will cleanse my body of impurities, buy a Humvee, rent a condo on the shores of Lake Huron, and buy a mousetrap that glows in the dark.

I think I flunked the test.