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Saturday, February 12, 2005 ( 2/12/2005 02:46:00 PM ) Bill S. LIGHT BLOG ACTIVITY COUPLED W./ DENSE FOG – Between spending the weekend TurboTaxing and working on a piece for The Comics Journal, blogging should be light at the Gadabout for the next few days. In general, it feels as if January & February have been more lightweight than usual (not that I'd lay claim to being particularly deep), though, hopefully, some of the distractions that've been interfering with more-than-just-writing in the past two months will soon abate. See you after the weekend. . . # | ( 2/12/2005 02:38:00 PM ) Bill S. "YOU'VE GOT MUD ON YER FACE, YOU BIG DISGRACE!" – This week, after three years of futilely attempting to get the Bloomington Parks And Rec people to develop an official dog park in one of the myriad park spaces, we happily read that sister city Normal one-upped its neighbor by opening one this week in Maxwell Park. (There has long been an unofficial dog park in Bloomington, known as Bark Park, which I wrote about here, but owners let their dogs run free there on threat of a fifty dollar fine.) This morning, we took Ziggy Stardust and Cedar to the New Official Dog Park to see if it met with their approval. The dog arena is a large fenced-in area on the edge of Maxwell Park's Frisbee golf course: it's divided into two sections, one for small dogs and the other for large 'uns. The larger of the two pens is about the size of a dancehall ballroom; the small dog area is about a fourth the size. By the double-gate entrance of both areas are fountains designed for both dog and human, but because it's winter, they're not turned on. Scattered throughout the large dog area are some young trees, though their shade value come spring will probably be minimal. There are no benches for the owners. When we arrive, the park is already occupied by dogs and their owners: about seven large dogs, most lab mixes, are racing around and stealing a large rubber football from each other. One of the goals of dog parks is to offer the animals a place to socialize, teach 'em to behave around other animals. Of our doggy duo, Dusty is the most ready to play with other pups; Cedar can, for inexplicable reasons, get her hackles up when the wrong dog comes a-sniffin'. It doesn't usually lead to anything, but as the owners, it's our responsibility to keep an eye on her. This first day at the park has relatively mild winter temps, but because we had snow earlier in the week, the ground is pretty wet from the melted snowfall. Additionally, right in the middle of the area is a large puddle of mud and water that every dog very quickly discovers. They happily race through it, splashing everything within a two-yard radius; stop to lap the water or occasional tussle in the mud. First time ol' Dusty reaches the mud puddle, he plops! right down into it. He's not the only pup to do this, of course, but since most of the others are shorthaired – and he has a sheepdog mop – the results are more extreme: as he lollops into the back seat, dripping gobs of mud onto the protective blanket, I can't help thinking of the big group fight in McLintock. It takes fifteen minutes to clean him off with a handheld shower and some Itchcraft medicated shampoo. From their general exhaustion on the ride back home, it's obvious that the new dog park receives the Dusty & Cedar Seal of Approval. To us humans, the penned-in area lacks the character of more open parkland, but if this is the best we can do in the city, it's worth it for the opportunity it gives to let the dogs run with their temporary pack. We'll be returning to the dog park, I know, but I also know we'll be waiting for a dryer day to do so. . .  (Photo taken from the original Bark Park back in 2001.) # | Friday, February 11, 2005 ( 2/11/2005 12:26:00 PM ) Bill S. FELINE POKER SHOWDOWN – As Bill readies the coffee and snackstuff for another round of the monthly Unitarian poker group, Savannah checks out the kitcshy fold-out poker tabletop that he bought for $29.95 at Big Lots.  For those of you squinting to recognize the CDs in the background, they are Moody Blues (Becky's) and XTC (Bill's) discs, w./ some Elvis Costello and Kinks discs further back. . . # | Wednesday, February 09, 2005 ( 2/09/2005 01:59:00 PM ) Bill S. "DAD, YOU'RE THE BEST!" – Because Fox's scheduling around the Super Bowl was so wonky that we just left the VCR upstairs recording from 9:00 p.m. on to get The Simpsons and American Dad, we didn't get to view Seth MacFarlane's new animated comedy series until last night. Gotta admit I'm neither over- or underwhelmed. I should note that I've not been a fan of MacFarlane's previous excursion into cartoon satire, Family Guy. Though MacFarlane and his writers are adept at making good rude japes at the expense of pop culture, the majority of these jokes are as weightless as a Scary Movie sequel. I've read some critics (R. Fiore in The Comics Journal, for instance) assert that Guy has a right wing perspective, but those episodes I've watched seemed so un-tethered by anything approaching a consistent PoV that I missed it. And I can usually do a pretty job playin' the paranoid pop culture game. . Still, McFarlane must have taken the charge of conservative bias seriously at some level, since his new series is being billed as a riff on Republican values. Stan Smith (voiced by MacFarlane), the head of the AmDad family, is a large-jawed operative for the CIA, who opens the show singing "Good Morning U.S.A." in a booming Howard Keel-ish baritone. His wife Francine (Wendy Schaal) is tall, blond, slender (unlike Guy's shorter and slightly podgy Lois Griffin) and seemingly unwilling to confront her spouse's denial-driven tunnel vision. When bespectacled wimp son Steve (Scott Grimes) admits he has trouble getting girls to notice him, Stan initially refuses to hear it since he sez he's never had any trouble with the ladies. And when vaguely hippie-esque daughter Hayley (Rachel MacFarlane) mocks her dad's declaration that the country is on "Terror Alert Orange," Stan goes, "You like shaving your armpits, Hayley?" – because that's one of the first privileges terrorists would take away if they had the chance. Perhaps if the line were delivered by someone as steadfastly befuddled as Patrick Warburton in full Tick stride, it'd would be funnier. But as it's played, it fails both as a joke on parental cluelessness and Post-9/11 paranoia. The premiere ep primarily focuses on Stan's attempts to make his son Steve cool by rigging the student body president election at Pearl Bailey High School. Poor Steve has an unrequited crush on an unattainable cheerleader (Carmen Electra) and foolishly believes that the power of student body president will make her yearn for him. But – as any number of sitcoms before have shown us – you can only take this power-is-an-aphrodisiac thing so far. Yeah, tell that to Henry Kissinger. In addition to the human family, the Smiths have an alien named Roger living in the house (the junk food-addicted extraterrestrial sounds like Paul Lynde) plus a lust-filled pet goldfish named Klaus whose skull houses the brain of a German Olympic swimmer. Much like would-be matricidal baby Stewie and sophisticated martini-quaffing dog Brian have on Guy, these more broadly absurd cartoon creations provide the show's few surprising comedy moments and almost make you wish that MacFarlane didn't keep straitjacketing his cartoons in a standard family sitcom format. Perhaps MacFarlane could set Roger, who chafes at being kept in the Smith house, and Klaus on a road trip to Quahog – where they could meet up with Stewie & Brian for a night on the town. I'd set the VCR to see that. . . # | ( 2/09/2005 04:39:00 AM ) Bill S. HEARD ON LAST NIGHT'S NAVY N.C.I.S.: – "What did Ducky [the Medical Examiner played by David McCallum] look like when he was younger?" "Ilya Kuryakin." # | Tuesday, February 08, 2005 ( 2/08/2005 09:22:00 AM ) Bill S. "THIS IS THE HOTTEST JUNE SINCE JULY!" – Soup to Nuts (1930) is one of those flicks better known as a comedy artifact than as an actual movie. The first onscreen appearance of the Three Stooges, it features Moe (credited as "Harry Howard"), Shemp and Curly when they were still part of a larger vaudeville act headed by "nut comic" Ted Healy. The comedy stars Healy as a smart-allecky salesman working for Schmidt's Costume Company, a struggling (this is the Depression, after all) shop in the middle of the big city. Instead of actively selling in the shop, Ted spends most of his days playing checkers at the local firehouse, which is where we meet the boys along with a fourth member of the act, Fred Sanborn, who plays a mincing little guy named Whispering Louie. Sanborn doesn't much interact with anyone but Healy – when the crew dashes off on a fire call, we always see him left behind and then racing after the firetruck – but when it's time for the gang to put on a show for the Firemen's Ball, he's also a part of the proceedings, playing xylophone. Nuts was written by cartoonist Rube Goldberg (who even gives himself a brief cameo in the flick), but he can't have spent a heck of a lotta time working on the plot, which is similar to any number of early movie comedies, including Rain or Shine: there's a business on the verge of bankruptcy, a budding romance 'tween a sweet young thing and a strapping lad with money, beaucoup banter, and a sequence near the finale that gives the vaudevillians in the cast time to show off part of their act, as well as a big concluding crisis. As in Rain, the last act crisis is a big fire, though here it's handled more for comedy than for any real sense of personal peril. Because it's Goldberg, we're also presented with some comically pointless inventions. Turns out that Otto Schmidt (Charles Schmidt), the costume shop owner, is a would-be inventor, so there's a sequence in the film where he shows off several of his creations to the wise-cracking Healy. The most elaborate turns out to be a burglar alarm that utilizes a large boot to kick intruders out the second story window and down a chute like some human-sized version of the game of Mousetrap: this device improbably reappears during the fire sequence where a steady stream of firemen is shown sliding down that chute after climbing into the building through a first floor window. Not sure how that was supposed to really work, but it still made me chuckle. As the movie's lead, Healy isn't as appealing in his second movie role as Joe Cook was in his movie debut. Both leading men could play wise-cracking and devil-may-care, but there's a crueler urban edge to Healy than with Cook. In his original act with the Stooges, it was he who initiated all the slapping, usually after one of the trio delivered a punchline (we see a little of this when the quartet do a part of their act at the Firemen's Ball), and we also see some of this nastiness in his relationship with the perennially gum-chewing blond Queenie (Frances McCoy), who admittedly dishes it back just as roughly to Healy. The two threaten to clobber each other much like the more amiable Stooges would later do in their shorts, though it's a lot more disconcerting for a modern audience to see this interplay between a man-&-woman than it is between three more cartoonly males. As for the Stooges themselves, they're a more amorphous group – without the distinct personalities that they’d develop on their own – who, by and large, look like any other group of movie character actors: their hair, for one, isn't as distinctive as it later would get (kind of strange to see Larry’s fly-away hair look much more manageably combed and curly), while their banter with Healy, often staged on a racing firetruck, is fairly standard jokery. At two points in the movie, the threesome perform some three-part harmony, which you can also imagine 'em doing up on stage. The germ of their act as the Three Stooges can be glimpsed in Nuts, but it's nearly buried within a morass of pointless subplots about Otto Schmidt losing his business and getting a job as a waiter in a German restaurant, the boy/girl romance and its subsequent misunderstandings, as well as a series of comic bits set in the dress shop. The last provides what has to be the movie's most surreally memorable moment: as Healy is attempting to nail an order of military uniforms to a would-be army of revolutionaries (you know, the kind that always just walks into the store off the streets of New York!), a baby in a bonnet played by a young Billy Barty(!) is showing doing back flips in the store onto a balloon. (His mother has come into the shop to buy the little tyke something to wear.) We see the "baby" repeatedly land onto the balloon, and we wait for it to pop at an auspicious moment (which, of course, it finally does), but each time he does his little flip, it looks stranger and stranger. Hours after I finished watching this movie, I still kept visualizing Barty in his baby costume: an oddball image that surpasses anything else in this slight little feature. . . Note: Thanx once again to Aaron Neathery, who now has a blog, for sending me a copy of this and several other hard-to-find 30's comedies. Next up: an Ed Wynn feature entitled Follow the Leader. # | Monday, February 07, 2005 ( 2/07/2005 05:14:00 AM ) Bill S. "JUST TO HAVE SOME COMPANY, TO SHARE A CUP OF TEA WITH ME!" – Last night, in the waning minutes of Super Game between Carnivale and The Simpsons, we switched over to Animal Planet's Super Bowl counter-programming, "The Puppy Bowl." We came into the middle of the two-hour event (which was conveniently rerun on the cable channel throughout the night), so we didn't get to see the credits, but I'd love to know the programming geniuses behind the show: two hours of cute puppies frolicking in a large pen designed to look like a football stadium, complete with puppy level thru-the-bottom-of-the-water bowl cam shots and the chintziest background music this side of the Weather Channel. Can you imagine being the director for this thing? ("Camera four! The little white lab is peeing!") Yeah, that's somp'n to put on the ol' resumé. And you can buy a copy of the DVD for $9.95. . . # | Sunday, February 06, 2005 ( 2/06/2005 06:54:00 AM ) Bill S. WE DUMMIES IN THE AUDIENCE – Well, the debate around Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (a movie that I fully expect to watch on cable since I so infrequently make it to the movie theatre these days) reached the wire news this weekend – it showed up in our local paper, The Daily Pantagraph, on Saturday. Reading the frothings of a former-critic-turned-family-values-hack like Michael Medved, I can't help asking out loud, "Have we grown so dense as an audience that we take any movie protagonist's actions as reflective of an automatic and whole-hearted endorsement of that action by the movie and its makers?" (In which case: how should I take, oh, Travis Bickle?) Whatever happened to the idea that a good story can stimulate discussion among moviegoers after the lights go up? What most annoys me about this whole brouhaha is the presumption among commentators like Medved and Rush Limbaugh that audience members are so accustomed to being spoon-fed everything that we're incapable of reaching any independent conclusion: "Clint Eastwood did it to that sweet Hilary Swank – so it must be the right thing to do in all occasions!" Pfui. UPDATE: Milo George, who has clearly seen the movie, offers his own sardonic take on the controversy. # | |
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