Collections

I’ve collected a lot of comics.  I got a lot of them 15 or 20 years ago when I was into Ebay big time.  A lot of them are comic strips, reprinted dailies and Sunday clippings.  I have the reprinted series of Peanuts for a period over 30 years, as well as stuff like Dick Tracy and Popeye and Little Orphan Annie and the theatre-themed On Stage.  I’ve had a lot of reprints of Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side.  My Sunday clipping collection includes stuff like Prince Valiant and Li’l Abner and Terry and the Pirates and The Heart of Juliet Jones and Steve Canyon.

I also have some comic books, though I’m not really into superheroes.  It’s more stuff like Uncle Scrooge and Little Archie and Richie Rich.  I also have some less-known stuff like Howard the Duck and the futuristic Magnus, Robot Fighter.

It isn’t just American stuff.  I have some British comics like The Beano, which would publish annual versions every December.  I have quite a few French-language comics with Tintin and Asterix the Gaul.  And I also have some translated manga from Japan.  Some of it is masterpieces, like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of Wind Valley, about a teenage girl in a future world coping with environmental disaster. (I have a feeling they could turn it into the next Game of Thrones!) I also have Shigeru Mizuki’s four-part Showa series, which combines a history of Japan under Hirohito with his own autobiography.  He lost an arm in World War II, which actually saved his life because he got moved back from the front lines!  After the war, parallel to Japan’s recovery, he became a big comic book artist.

I also have some Mad magazine reprints.  They include a lot of comics, with some really sharp satire.  Like the time they showed 1950s parents lecturing their teenagers, “Young people today, their clothes and their dancing and their language—it’s all too much!” Then they showed the parents back when they were young in the 1920s, wearing raccoon coats and dancing the Charleston and saying “Twenty-three skidoo, small change!” Another time they had children’s definitions, like “An aunt is to give you clothes for your birthday instead of toys,” and “An uncle is to pinch your cheek and you can’t pinch back.” They made fun of singer Bobby Darin a lot, like the time they did a Dick & Jane-style feature on Greek mythology, with him as Narcissus!  And they also did “TV shows we’d like to see,” with a commercial where a guy in doctor costume says “What do doctors take for headache and pain relief?  How should I know, I’m only an actor!” And they did famous quotes in their true context, with Teddy Roosevelt saying “Speak softly a carry a big sticky gooey sundae up to my room!” and John Paul Jones a newlywed saying “I have not yet begun to fight with my wife.”

My photo

I’ve often performed in the chorus of the Toronto City Opera, and this photo was taken by Barbara’s husband (also called James) when we were doing Pietro Mascagni’s 1890 opera Cavalleria Rusticana back in 2010 or so.  I’m a peasant in 19th-century Sicily.

Let me say a bit about Cavalleria Rusticana.  It’s an example of a verismo opera of the late 19th century, more “realistic” than older operas.  The title translates as the sarcastic “rustic chivalry.” To the more sophisticated northern Italians, Sicily looked backward and Arcadian, something like Newfoundland looks to some Torontonians.

The plot is about how Turiddu was in love with Lola but while he was away in the army Lola married Alfio the local hawker, who’s well to do but out of town most of the time.  After coming home Turiddu took up with Santuzza, who ended up with a reputation as the village skank.  But then Lola reignited her torch for Turiddu—remember that her husband is out of town most of the time—and Turiddu dumped Santuzza.  So Santuzza squeals to Alfio about his wife’s infidelity and Alfio insists on a knife fight with Turiddu, who ends up dead.  There’s lots of great music.  

It’s only one act long, so we performed it with Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, another one-act verismo opera about a married couple in a travelling theatre group that performs commedia dell’arte shows, but adultery leads to murder.

I use that photo as my avatar on Twitter, with the handle Captain Snark.

Manners

There’s a webpage, Comics Kingdom, where you can follow all of today’s King Features comic strips and (here’s the part that’s really worth paying for!) several vintage strips from the ‘50s and ‘60s and such, like Rip Kirby and Johnny Hazard and Buz Sawyer.  You can also post comments with each day’s episode, and we sometimes say snarky things.  I wonder how the writers and artists who created those strips would feel about that—I suppose they’d be happy that some people are still reading their work today and care enough to say anything about it.

One of the vintage strips I follow is the soap opera strip The Heart of Juliet Jones.  The latest story is about a young woman who meets a young man and they become grifters conning people out of their money.  In one episode the girl’s father showed up, and when the boy saw him for the first time he said “Who’s the old creep?” In my comment on that episode I quipped “Emily Post he isn’t.”

It reminded me of a real-life incident when Beau Brummel met a guy who was with the plus-sized Prince Regent, and he said to him, “Who’s your fat friend?” (Brummel must have been pretty slender himself, fitting into all those dandy clothes.) But I think he actually did know the Prince and they’d used to be best buddies but now  weren’t getting along, so he was deliberately being rude to him!  So it isn’t really a bona fide entry in the rudeness championship sweepstakes.  What can you do about deliberate rudeness?  In such cases, you can’t very well say “Don’t do that, it’s rude.” If they listened to you that would defeat their whole purpose. It’s like telling a thief, “Don’t steal that, it’s too valuable.”

Another example of deliberate rudeness was on that TV show American Idol.  In one episode Simon Cowell said to some hapless singer “What.  The.  Hell.  Was.  That?” Of course the purpose of such rudeness is to grab the attention of scatterbrained young TV viewers, which is contemptible.  (I’ve never watched that show and only know of that bit because they showed it in a promo, which shows they think this is the kind of thing that will get people to tune in.) Rudeness sometimes, as in that case, takes the form of aggressive rhetorical questions.  When your boss says “How could you be so stupid?” he isn’t really interested in why you were stupid; he’s just getting in your face!

My sister saw the recently-deceased Jean-Luc Godard at the Toronto film festival about 30 years ago introducing his Yugoslavian war-themed Forever Mozart.  She says he was very rude, in that Parisian way. (And the movie disappointed her too.) Funny how the French and the English both have an image as etiquette sticklers, yet they’re also notorious for pointed rudeness!

For my own part, I remember when Frank Zappa appeared on the CBC radio show Cross-Country Checkup attacking censorship in the music industry.  He kept saying things like (sarcastically) “Oh yeah, that’s real intelligent,” and to one school principal he said “You should be fired!” He also insisted that anyone who disagreed with him on this issue was mentally ill…

When someone’s table manners are lacking, it’s one thing to make specific criticisms.  What’s annoying is people who point it out with aggressive gibberish, as my brother occasionally did.  Some people would be well-advised to spend a bit less time judging other people’s manners, and a bit more minding their own.  The actor Maximilian Schell interviewed Marlene Dietrich for the fascinating documentary Marlene, and at one point she said, “You should go home to Mama Schell so she can teach you some manners,” when anyone can see that she was the one being rude!

As for minding my own manners, I generally make an effort to be polite.  When I’m waiting in line for service at a convenience store, I’ll pretend to take an interest in their goods just so it won’t look like I’m cooling my heels.  When a bus driver starts to leave but stops long enough to let me on, I thank him—after all he didn’t have to do that!  Back when I took ballroom dancing lessons at Arthur Murray studios, they had a lot of dance parties, at which I’d make an effort to dance with every woman there, and when I saw a new girl I’d try to dance with her first. (Cynthia, my dance instructor, said I’m a gentleman.) To tell the truth, I wasn’t doing it out of politeness:  I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I liked having a scheme where I set out to dance with every girl!

Some people are rude to everyone, and you have to feel sorry for them, really:  they tend to have few friends.  But what gets to me is the Eddie Haskell types who’ll be perfectly polite to people they see as their equals, and especially to their superiors, but rude to people they see as lower in status.

One example is servants.  Muhammed Ali, the boxer, once said “I don’t trust people who are nice to me but rude to the waiter.  That’s how they’d treat me if I were in that position!” Billy Wilder was a great Hollywood filmmaker, but according to Frank Sinatra’s valet he was rude to servants. (I’ve got the impression that great directors are often “pain in the neck” types…) Being rude to servants, it seems to me, is one of the worst things you can be in this life!  There are stories of New York millionaires who’ll chew out their servants in front of guests—you’d think that even if they don’t care about the servants’ feelings, they’d at least care about making the guests uncomfortable.  But maybe they’re really doing it to impress their guests!  It’s actually pretty easy to make an impression on people if you don’t care what kind of impression you make. (Like when schoolboy Marlon Brando wrote the word “shit” on the blackboard in really big letters with kerosene, then set it on fire…)

Another example is children.  I mentioned Eddie Haskell before:  on Leave It to Beaver he was Wally’s teenage friend who was unctuously polite to grownups but nasty to the Beaver.  And so you’ll sometimes find teenagers being rude to younger kids.  Their attitude is “I’m more mature than you so I don’t have to respect you!” Which is to say, they’re being semi-mature…

I come from southeastern New Brunswick, where the nearest city is Moncton, and I saw a documentary involving Moncton mayor Leonard Jones, who caused controversy with his opposition to official bilingualism, a hot-button issue in a city with many Francophones as well as Anglophones.  It showed this 1968 incident where radical French students from the University of Moncton confronted him at a city council meeting.  He was incredibly rude to them!  I could scarcely believe what I was hearing, and I was thinking “Come on, you’re supposed to be the mayor!” (Later on, New York mayors Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani were often rude to people, yet it was presented as a sort of style.  I hope that style doesn’t catch on…)

I think there was a lot of that in the 1960s.  Many students were demonstrating against things like the Vietnam War in the United States, but the older generation often refused to view them as fellow citizens exercising the free speech that seemingly makes America great. Their attitude was, “You haven’t earned our respect!” On the contrary, some of them preferred to think of them as spoiled children, who needed to have obedience beaten into them.  This naturally culminated in the Hard Hat Riot of 1970, when construction workers busted up an antiwar demonstration on Wall Street, like Berlin Storm Troopers breaking up communist rallies in 1930.  They were outnumbered about five to one, but they had makeshift clubs. Notice that these hard hats didn’t organize a counter-demonstration:  this wasn’t about offering an alternative position, it was about shutting them up!  The union man who organized this hooliganism was later given a post in the Nixon Administration.  Very corrupt.

I guess a lot of rudeness comes from people reacting instantly, without considering what they should say or do.  That’s common with children.  Some kids I knew in school were deliberately rude to me.  It was about raising their status at the expense of mine.  Like when they quote you to make fun of you, and of course they start not with “He said…” but “He goes…” I said the other week that I could forgive being hit, but not being judged.  Well, that was a form of judging!   Or I’d be bicycling down the street and this crowd of kids would see me and jeer me on the spot. (I doubt any of them would have done this alone; they felt the empowerment of numbers!)  For me, it was running a gauntlet.  For them, it was their automatic response.  When you’re automatic with someone, it shows that you don’t respect them enough not to be that way!  And I was expected to ignore it all, of course.  Did that mean that I could be rude to others and expect them to ignore me?  It meant that I, being the sensitive, angry kid, was the “weak link.”

I’ve seen the funny 1950s educational short Manners in School, in which a terrible child actor gets manners lessons from an animated chalk figure with the imaginative name Chalky.  Among other things, kids got taught to say “Yes” instead of “Yeah,” and “No” instead of “Uh-uh.” (The ‘50s was the golden age of micromanagement.) They said in it that if you’re rude other kids won’t want to play with you, but I’m not so sure about that.  Seems to me that it’s the badly-behaved kid who’s popular with his peers, because he’s doing what they’re afraid to do!

An underrated movie

In 1996 I saw Todd Solondz’ art film Welcome to the Dollhouse.  It doesn’t exactly fit into the “underrated” category because some critics praised it, including Ebert and Siskel.  But others disliked it and called it glib.

It’s a grim comedy about a girl in a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey and her difficult life.  Ebert’s review said “Her parents say they love all their children equally.  They’re lying.” Her nickname at junior high is Wiener Dog, and her experience there is as painful as mine was.  The movie is a comedy about the painful experiences some of us go through in our youth.

I met a guy once who’d interviewed a lot of Hollywood people, and he said his hardest interviews were Steve Martin and Todd Solondz.  I imagine Solondz has Asperger’s Syndrome like me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Martin does too. (I think the interviewer was an Aspie too, but that’s another story.) I saw a photo of him once and he looked like a stereotypical geek.  And his movies are definitely geeky!

One critic, in The Globe and Mail, complained that this movie lacks that adult perspective where you can forgive others, and forgive yourself.  To tell the truth, that’s actually what I liked about it.  It’s the strong people who forgive, but I have to admit I’m one of the weak people.  If you knock me down, I can forgive that because it’s just violence.  But if you judge me, I promise, I will judge you too.  If you treat me as “the weak link” and I don’t do my best to make consequences for you, that means I am the weak link!

Compare Welcome to the Dollhouse to The Man in the Moon, a movie with some similarities.  That movie takes a more forgiving approach, but to me that makes it a lesser achievement.  I think of the scene where young Reese Witherspoon unilaterally forgives her father for beating her.  To me this felt like an uneven reconciliation, with the daughter doing all the “work.” I prefer the honestly unforgiving.

There’s one scene where the girl gets a bad grade on something, knows her parents won’t like it, and begs the teacher to improve it a little.  But the teacher is intolerant of grade-grubbing and says “Don’t you have any dignity?” What it’s really about, of course, is that an insecure teacher takes grade-grubbing as a challenge to her authority.  Then the teacher makes her write an essay about the evils of grade-grubbing and recite it in front of the whole class.  As she does so, the teacher keeps saying “Speak up!” but she can’t. (In the movie Clueless there’s a scene where high-schooler Alicia Silverstone tells her lawyer father how she improved a poor grade with some shameless grade-grubbing and he says “What did I tell you, that’s what I want you to be doing!”)

There’s also a scene where she gets in trouble while the  nasty boys who started it escape blame, and her parents get called into school.  She says “I was fighting back,” but her mother just says “Who taught you to fight back?” (She should have answered “Hitler!” This is a Jewish family, remember.)

There’s also a subplot about the older brother having a combo band where he plays a clarinet, giving it an odd klezmer sound!  Another player is thin-skinned and quits the band in a huff, then later he’s asked to come back so they can play at the parents’ wedding anniversary, but he only does so after the brother agrees to pay him $200!  In one sense this guy’s being childish, but in another sense he knew what he could get!

Of course the movie isn’t to everyone’s taste, and there’s quite a bit of stuff you can object to, like when the spoiled younger daughter gets kidnapped (don’t ask) and the  mother’s grief gets shown in a ridiculing way.  This was also the case with Happiness, Solondz’ follow-up and his most popular movie.  Overall, I found it creepy and off-putting.  But it did have some moments of bracing, hilarious honesty that appealed to me.

One is the movie’s opening sequence where the heroine dumps her boyfriend John Lovitz, and he takes it hard.  He asks “Is it another man?” and she answers “No, it’s just you.” (Some women would pretend it was another man just to ease his hurt, but she clearly isn’t smart enough to do that.) Her next boyfriend is a Russian immigrant.  She asks “What did you do in Russia?” and he answers “I was a thief.” There’s a scene where a baseball coach father says to his player son “Don’t fuck this up!” And there’s also this moment when a father comes clean with his son, but it’s too tasteless to talk about here.  See the movie and you’ll know which scene I’m talking about…

Solondz’ movies after Happiness haven’t been as popular. (One of them, Palindromes, got a Salon magazine review with this palindromic headline: “God!  A ‘No sir, prefer prison!’ A dog.”) I must mention that he made a sequel to Happiness titled Life During Wartime, in which all the original movie’s characters are played by different actors!  For example, the John Lovitz character becomes a ghost played by Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-Wee Herman.  I liked the line where a Jewish woman says about herself and her husband, “We voted for Bush and Cheney because it was good for Israel, even though we know they’re both total idiots!” Actually, Jewish-Americans tend to be loyal Democrats…