Graffitti

"I have a Vespa." "That's almost a motorcycle!"--American Graffitti

When I was at York University, they were digging up the ground for a new building and exhumed a huge tree stump that was still solid.  Someone got the idea of mounting the stump on a podium, and someone else wrote on it, "This is not art"!

I lived in Glasgow, Scotland, for a year three decades ago.  Some people took to writing "Al Jolson" as graffitti in places.  I guess it was vaguely racist.

I remember seeing a wall where someone had written "Clapton is God," and someone added a word to make it "Clapton is Godawful"!

And I remember one school where someone wrote on the outer wall "Mr. _____ is a faggot" and it was also stated in more explicit terms.  I didn't like that teacher myself, and I understood why they did it.

In college, I had a desk on which someone had written, "Washington owned slaves and blew dope and they won't admit it"!

Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair, set in wartime Britain, describes this graffitti: "To all sluts and their pimps, a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea"!

Skunks

The word "skunks"reminds me of something in the comic strip Blondie.  When they showed Blondie waking up Dagwood in the middle of the night he'd be making the snoring sound "S-K-N-X!" Like in The Amazing Spider-Man when he'd get an unexpected sucker punch and go "UNNH!"

There was also the Warner Brothers cartoon character Pepe Le Pew, a skunk parody of Charles Boyer who'd spend whole cartoons in romantic pursuit of a cat who'd got a white strip down her back, so he thought she was a skunk too!  When you think about it, it was pretty kinky...

Loudon Wainwright did that song that went "Dead skunk in the middle of the road, and he's stinking to high heaven!" (Ever see a dead porcupine on the road?) So sue me, I like sick songs.

Another sick song I like is the Clancy Brothers' "You're Always Welcome at Our House," written by the great Shel Silverstein.

Most romantic kiss

Ever see David Lynch's Blue Velvet?  Laura Dern has a good role as a teenage "nice girl." She has a great scene talking about the robins coming down.

There's another great scene where she and Kyle McLachlan are slow-dancing at a party and kiss.  The camera shows them in closeup, with him on the left and her on the right, then smoothly dissolves into a shot with her on the left and him on the right. (Or maybe it's the other way around, but you get the point.) The visual subtext is of the two of them becoming one --very romantic!

I also remember a kiss in the operetta movie Love Me Tonight.  Jeanette McDonald is a princess and Maurice Chevalier is a tailor taking her measurements, so she's in her underwear.  And they end up kissing, of course.  This was before Hollywood's 1934 Production Code, so movies were often saucier back then!

And there's that scene in Lady and the Tramp where the dogs are eating spaghetti and end up kissing!

The least romantic kiss would be in Dangerous Liaisons, where John Malkovich says to Uma Thurman, "You didn't give me a kiss.  I gave you a kiss."

Overrated media

I've always considered Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful to be greatly overrated.  The whole concept--a father in a concentration camp keeps telling his kid that it's all fake--was stupid and shameless.  It's the sort of movie where the Nazis decide to have a children's party at the camp so Benigni can have a scene with a Nazi kid.  Never mind that in real life this is the last place, short of the battle zone, that Nazis would have taken their children for merriment!

People talk about how great The Mary Tyler Moore Show was, and a lot of it was great.  But the show's last season was really dismal! Rhoda and Phyllis had gone off to their own spinoffs, which hurt the show's balance, and the writers had clearly run out of ideas.

Consider the Teddy Awards episode.  The show would run an episode every season about the local TV awards show, and a running joke was that Murray the writer was always being nominated but never winning.  For the last season's episode, Lou got a hot tip that Murray was finally going to win, and... Murray lost again! Funny, huh?

And in the second-last episode they had Mary and Lou going out on a date!  Though the show's ratings were still adequate, you can see why they decided to cancel it anyway.

Sidewalk cafes

Sidewalk cafes don't particularly interest me.  I remember them in the Gene Kelly musical An American in Paris.  But sidewalks I am interested in. 

In my hometown of Sackville, N.B., they painted a line along the edge of one street, and that was the sidewalk!  If you look at the current blocks on Toronto sidewalks, one in a while you'll see one that was laid in 1967, with the Centennial logo!

There's a funny 1930s Warner Brothers musical, Footlight Parade, with some great off-camera dialogue.  Miss Rich is a glamorous woman who's been distracting impresario James Cagney, but eventually his secretary Joan Blondell kicks her out, saying: "As long as they have sidewalks, you've got a job!" (At another point she says, "I've already met miss Bi--I mean, miss Rich!") This was before they introduced the 1934 Production Code and cracked down on that sort of thing.

Contradictory phrases

Some expressions are oxymorons.  Like "Progressive Conservative" and "jumbo shrimp" and "military intelligence" and "the professional left" and "surgical strike" and "a new classic."

But one oxymoron that particularly bugs me is "left-liberal." The expression "the conservative right" is redundant, yet "the liberal left" is a contradiction in terms--liberalism and the left are definitely two different things. "Left-liberal" is the sort of expression you hear from American pundits at places like CNN who want to cast liberals as the "left" in themselves, and won't admit there are people to the left of them.

Another expression that bugs me is the noun "the center-left," which Tony Blair used to use.  It's one thing to use "center-left" as an adjective:  of course there are some people who are between the center and the left.  But as a noun?  We mostly understand what the "left" is, and what the "center" is.  Yet "the center-left" is a vague concept, with the focus on the hyphen.  You might as well call it "the non-right."

Those are a couple of my pet peeves.

What's your greatest achievement?

"One life is only important in how it affects other lives"--Jackie Robinson

Well, I did earn a Ph.D. in history twenty years ago, but I've never taken much pride in it. (I was lucky to pass!) I felt like in the movie Easy Rider when Dennis Hopper said "We did it!" but Peter Fonda said "We blew it."

As odd as it may sound, I'd say my greatest achievement has been making friends.  I suppose most people have made friends off and on, to some extent, since childhood, so it doesn't seem so big to them.  But I've had Asperger's Syndrome for a long time, and I never used to be good at making friends.

I really got serious about meeting people and making friends in my forties.  The website meetup.com has been a great help to me toward that end. (Some say that the Internet is turning people into cocooners, but this is a case where it's actually promoted real-life social activities!)

I suppose I'm going against the Aspie stereotype of having no friends.  I've made a long-term effort to change, and it can be done, at least in my case.

I must say that this memoir group is good for making friends.  When people get together and recite stories from their lives, they're bound to become friendly!  Thanks to all of you, especially Selia our organizer.

If I could meet one living person...

If I could meet one living person, I'd choose Cullen Murphy.  Who he?  He's an essayist who writes for Vanity Fair and used to edit The Atlantic, but what particularly interests me is that he's an authority on old comic strips.  His father, John Cullen Murphy, was a comic strip artist who drew Big Ben Bolt, about a white boxing champion, back when the idea wasn't laughable.  Later he took over Prince Valiant from Hal Foster and drew it for a good thirty years, with Cullen doing the writing.

Cullen recently published Cartoon County, a biography of his father which talked a lot about his and others' cartoon work. (A whole lot of comic-strip artists lived in the same county in Connecticut!) I read it recently and greatly enjoyed it.  You could say that his family reversed the cliche--it's supposed to be the father who's the highbrow magazine editor and the son who becomes a popular cartoonist!

If I met Cullen Murphy, we could certainly talk a lot about comic strips. (When I was eleven or twelve, comic-strip detective Rip Kirby seemed the coolest guy in the world to me!) But I'd also mention the sketches and letters his father sent home while serving in the Pacific in World War II, a few of which were reproduced in Cartoon County.  I'd encourage him to turn them into a whole book in themselves!

There's an episode of Prince Valiant where Val was making a rocking horse for his son Galan, but being a busy knight he never got around to finishing it, and now Galan's old enough for a real horse! (Did something like this actually happen in his family? Knowing how time-consuming drawing a comic strip is, I could believe it.)

And I'd also mention a dream of mine:  that the three American daily newspapers distributed nationwide--The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today--will someday start carrying comic strips!  Not the regular syndicated ones but original strips of their own.  I can dream, can't I?

What does Canada mean to me?

We aren't American--well, duh!

There's a Norse legend that the birds had a contest to see who could fly highest.  The Eagle expected to win, but the Wren hitched a ride on his shoulder, and when the Eagle had flown as high as he could the Wren hopped a couple more inches, and won the contest!  The way I look at it, Canada is the wren.

I don't really care for the beaver as a symbol of  Canada --I prefer the moose!

I must say I'm glad I was born into a Canadian family.  A few weeks ago my retired father had pneumonia and spent several days in the hospital. Imagine how much a hospital stay can cost if you live in the United States!

I suppose that it's the fate of Canadians to be constantly comparing themselves to Americans, who never compare themselves to us. Canadians still have a bit of the colonial mentality that Americans lost long ago--you can see it in our use of the word "world-class." It isn't really the Canadian way to take pride in your nation the way Americans do, and paradoxically that's something I'm proud of.