In LA

“Move and I’ll make you breathe funny,” he said, his leathery mouth all stretched out at the corners. The gun looked pretty comfortable in his little black paw. “I’d be pleased to teach you how to blow red bubbles out of your shirt,” he went on. “It’s a little trick I learned last week. I can dish it out as well as take it.”

Nobody dishes it out like Raymond Chandler, but Jonathan Lethem landed a few solid lines in his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, which I read on the aeroplane a few days ago.

A still of Her Royal Highness Teri Garr¹ from the fantastic film Young Frankenstein

There’s a question that often pops up when people are trying to suss out another person’s interests, ideals, knowledge of history, etc. Something along the lines of “Who are the five world figures, living or dead, with whom you’d most like to sit down and have a conversation over a tray of spam musubi?” I swear every answer to that question I’ve heard from a well-meaning white person includes Nelson Mandela and/or Ghandi. I mean no disrespect to either of those esteemed gentlemen, but with one refreshingly candid interview Teri Garr has knocked them both off of my list.²

An excerpt related to Young Frankenstein:

…it was like when the teacher says to stop laughing, and all you can do is laugh more. Mel would say, “Can we do another take with no laughing?” And we’d say, “We’ll try.” We would laugh at everything. Marty Feldman–God, was he funny. When I went to see the show in New York, I went backstage, and I said, “You’re all doomed.” Because everyone is dead from that movie! Well, not everyone. But Madeline, and Peter Boyle, and Marty. And myself, I have one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel.

She’s recently written an autobiography, entitled Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood³. I plan to check it out.

Technorati Tags: acting, entertainment, film, hollywood, Teri Garr

1. She has multiple sclerosis, and has said she now hates the letters M and S, “and I certainly took the Ms. off the front of my name. I now go as your Royal Highness Teri Garr.” [↩]
2. Honestly, what question have those two figures not already been asked while they shared spam musubi with Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, Jesus, and Floyd from accounting? [↩]
3. Apparently she wanted to title the book “Does This Wheelchair Make Me Look Fat?” but was dissuaded by the publisher. [↩]

Photo credit: Me, 1995. Shot during an interview for The Daily of the University of Washington. Horizontal lines courtesy of the craptastic original Nikon Coolscan negative scanner. Those were the days; Film, crappy scanners, web pages emblazoned with low-res GIF files, good times.

He impressed me at the time as a cranky old man and a bit of a luddite, the latter a surprise. The forward-thinking man who could conceive a novel in which characters and story shuffle through space and time with abandon did not take to the new online world. This at a time when a techno-utopian vision, such as that expressed in then two-year-old Wired Magazine, were stoking the imaginations and aspirations of us geeky liberal arts majors who were soon to staff the coming wave of online startups. Kurt didn’t feel the internet was all that, and thought buying products online was a completely inferior experience to walking to the local store and interacting with the sales clerk. In hindsight I could substitute “humanist” for both “cranky” and “luddite” in the topic sentence of this paragraph and spin the statement in a different and equally true direction about his prescience (or I could just substitute for “luddite” and leave “cranky” be; Crankiness can be charming and such an accusation could be seen as complimentary). There’s truth to the idea that us net-connected folk spend too much time poking at keyboards and looking at increasingly large monitors, but on the other hand, I’d bet he made at least a few online purchases in his latter years.

Luckily I was not conducting the interview, as I would likely have spent the session trying to convince him of the merits of the wonderful world wide intarwebnet (wwww) and would have missed the opportunity to shoot one of my favorite portraits. It’s too bad I’m 5500 miles away from the negative or I’d post a few frames at better quality.

There’s a video of Kurt Vonnegut’s 2005 appearance on The Daily Show available for view on onegoodmove.org. It’s nice to see that he kept his wicked sense of humor so late in the game, though it pains me to see that he speaks a lot more slowly in that video than he did 10 years previously in his interview with The Daily. It’s tough to see such clearcut evidence of the toll that the aging process takes on people.

So long Kurt and thanks for all the books.

I’m a little disappointed with the New Yorker animated cartoons.

It’s a good idea from a business perspective, twitchily animating short print cartoons and then sticking an ad on the end can’t be a terribly expensive process but could bring in decent revenue.

But after watching a couple of cartoons and not laughing or even smiling, I realized that for me, much of the fun of the New Yorker cartoons (and all other one-panel comics) is that I can scan my attention across them in whatever way and at whatever speed I want and the dialogues and images work together in an organic fashion. These animated versions are very directed, the camera pans across and zooms in on important details to bludgeon the viewer with bits of the drawing that only seem funny to me when I read the cartoon at my own speed in a random-access fashion.

You can see one of the New Yorker Animated Cartoons here.

I’m easily annoyed by musical choices, so I also take issue with the annoying “jazzy” upright bass plucking that opens each cartoon. It’s so smooth and “sophisticated” and makes me imagine an old psychoanalyst dude (albedo 0.60) sitting back in a chaise lounge with a meerschaum pipe watching “expletive-free comedy at the improv in front of a bare brick wall” on A&E. It’s not that it says all the wrong things –it’s probably perfect for their intended audience, it just happens to irritate me, and will continue to do so at least until I slip well out of the 18-34 age bracket. Take some risks with the animation and music, people!

They should get Mr. Odd Todd to try his hand at animating a few of these. Actually, they should have a different internet animator score and animate a different New Yorker cartoon each week, that would be interesting. Cutting the opening credits and opening music down to a glitchy single second would also be a worthwhile move. Credits should not be 20% the length of the total animation.

Speaking of The New Yorker. They have a cartoon caption contest that is pretty amusing (and I’ve entered a couple of times). Radosh.net in response created “The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest“, which asks visitors to come up with the worst possible caption (just not funny, or missing the point) for a given New Yorker cartoon. Pretty brilliant idea. Here’s the winner from the first, Oct 31, 2005 contest:

“There is a man pinned under this truck who requires immediate medical assistance. Someone please call for an ambulance. Please, before it’s too late.” —Pareene

Kudos to the New Yorker for not crushing the anti-caption contest like a little bug. Looks like there’ve been 91 contests so far without one cease-and-desist letter.