MADness Takes Its Toll

There are other, more important things going on in the world, but I'm going to talk about the demise of MAD Magazine.

And yeah, it's a demise. Death. Pushing up daises. Cue the Choir Celestial. It is an ex-Magazine. As the news hit and people reacted badly, the spin control engaged - it wasn't QUITE dead. It would do some reprint stuff. And a yearly annual. And the reprints would be in the direct sale trade, and the chain bookstores - those that are left.

Look. LIFE Magazine died in 1972 as a weekly magazine, but it still shows up at the grocery check-outs with special issues on the latest film or some ancient anniversary. But LIFE is dead. Ditto MAD.

And I've taken the news with the stoicism of a hearing of the passing of some old friend from high school that you haven't talked to in three decades. As a kid, MAD magazine was a staple in the tree fort in the backyard, and the smell of the slightly moldy, aging paper stock stays with me to this day. And we got the paperbacks that reprinted stuff from the fifties and early sixties as well. Nostalgia is strong, but not strong enough to continue support over the years.

MAD defined for me what New York was like, along with its native New Yorkers. It was hip, sophisticated, cynical, urban, multi-cultural. It was sarcastic and sardonic. It was smart and infantile at the same time. It was definitely left of center (though it out time to lash liberal hypocrisies as well as conservative ones) and any commercial. It was educated. I knew a lot more about Broadway musicals and current films from the Mad satires. And the music parodies, mostly written by Frank Jacobs.Those I can still remember better than the last book I read.

A favorite Broadway parody - "My Fair Ad-Man", with Cary Grant trying to turn a beatnik Frank Sinatra into a proper grey-flannel suit. A favorite song - "Hello, Deli".( Hello, Deli. This is Joe, Deli, Will you please send up a hot corned beef on rye).

And the talent. Names to conjure with like Mort Drucker, Jack Davis, Dave Berg, and Don Martin (When naming Asura for GW, I always recommended their names sound like Don Martin's sound affects). Sergio Aragonnes and his marginals. Al Jaffee and his fold-ins Even the tags at the top of the page held a chuckle.There was a lot of depth going on in the page, a lot of stuff all happening at once. It was really, really good.

And yeah, I know that the magazine had fallen on the hard times of not being sufficiently profitable for its corporate overhead. Bill Gaines ran it his way until he passed, and since there it has been a slow cascade of corporate decisions, each made while looking over its corporate shoulder to see if THIS would be the one that killed it. Folding it into the greater Warner Brothers empire, cutting pay rates, reduced shipping schedules, moving the whole furshlugginer operation to California. And now the zombie-like demise where the Brand survives but everyone who made it a brand is gone. Feasting off the corpse.

But as I said,. I haven't read it in decades. I can't remember the last thing I read in the magazine, the last issue I bought. I moved on to other things, as one does. I picked up a lot of National Lampoons in college (dead in 1998 (after five years of sporadic publication), and SPY magazine therefore (Also dead in 1998), and suppose my current fling with the New Yorker is that most recent engagement with the New York State of mind, of an era when Manhattan was the hub of the publishing universe, with all the intelligentsia swarming around it. And MAD was its court jester.

Farewell MAD. Farewell, Alfred E. Neuman. Farewell, those bits and bobs and punchlines that people of my age can quote and discover others get the joke. It's been real.

More later,

Book: H.P.G.Wodecraft

Scream for Jeeves: A Parody by D.H.Cannon, Illustrated by J.C.Eckhardt, Wodecraft Press, 1994

Provenance: Brain Thomsen, head of the book department at TSR back in the day, lent me a copy of this in the mid-90s. I enjoyed it a great deal, and after I returned it, I kept my eyes out for a copy. Never found one. It was one of these small press, single printings, and never saw it again (apparently, there is a Kindle reprint, because of course there is). In any event my colleague Sacnoth turned up with a copy he was giving away. He had gotten it from a colleague who was cleaning up his library, and my good old chum Sacky had gotten a spare. And because I was the first to speak up, I got the copy (beating out Stan! for it).

Review: So how does it stand up after 20 years? OK. This was put together back in the age when mash-ups (as the kids are calling them nowadays) were pretty much the domain of fandom. The book itself is a series of well-known Lovecraft tails retold with Bertie Wooster as the protagonist. And they are surprisingly good, in that way that cheese and fish are not supposed to go together, but sometimes they are delish.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote a particular style of story: florid in style and nihlistic in outlook, his protagonists rarely survived their brush with the unflinching, uncaring, overpowering mythos. P.G. Wodehouse wrote another particular style of story - light, comedic, well-mannered and veddy, veddy British. Wodehouse's best-known protagonist was Bertrand ("Bertie") Wilberforce Wooster, a well-meaning specimen of the upper class who regularly gets himself in a mess and who is saved regularly by his valet, Jeeves. So how do these worlds collide?

Not badly at all. The world is Lovecraft's, but the viewpoint is Wodehouse's. And in the three stories, Bertie just misses the worst of the eldritch horrors that inhabit the Lovecraftian universe, usually through the efforts of Jeeves, but just as often through his own thick-headed nature. So he remains blithely ignorant of much of the proceedings, as well as their dire, cosmic content.

There are three stories in the volume, plus an essay. Knowledge of the Cthulian canon is an aid, since they are based on three of Lovecraft's tales.  "The Rats in the Walls" transfers into "Rats, Cats, and Bertie Wooster". "Cool Air"  becomes "Something Feotid". And "The Rummy Affair of Young Charlie" should be a Wodehousterized "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" but instead takes the protagonist of that tale and drops him into the plot of "The Music of Erich Zann", with a dash of Sherlock Holmes from "The Last Bow". References to Faulty Towers, Arthur Machen, and other Lovecraftian tales also abound, so that if you are an invested fan of an these, you will find the Easter eggs abounding. All the tales are illustrated in a 1920s style by J.C.Eckhard which both the flavor of Lovecraft and of Wodehouse and would be suitable for either Weird Tales or Milady's Boudoir.

Lastly in the volume is an essay seeking to tie together Lovecraft, Wodehouse, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which is a hit and miss affair. Cannon can line up two of his subjects on any point he seeks to make, but the third always seems to be a tough fit. The great connection that I see, years later, is that the three authors have enjoyed a posthumous life through their creations, particularly in the gaming field. Lovecraft's creations thrive on the gaming shelves including a Holmesian adventure in the early Cthulhu by Gaslight set. Holmes himself lives on through a variety of remakes, reinventions, adaptations, lost stories, further adventures. And I have have created characters who bring the Code of the Woosters to the Realms (Giogi Wyvernspur and Tertius Wands) as well as placed a facsimile of the Drones Club in a Baker Street RPG. The inventions of these three creators continue to inspire, and the nature of the worlds they present are ripe fields for future creation.

More later,

Meanwhile, in the early 1600s

Still buried, but that's no reason you guys should suffer. Here, have a rendition of "Who's on First" done in the Shakespearean fashion. It is written by Jay Leibowitz and David Foubert and directed by Jason King Jones. The video breaks up a bit at the end, but the sound is still good.


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Make 'Em Laugh - 15 Things

So we talked about 15 influential games, and 15 things which influenced my games. And then one of co-workers mentioned 15 things that influenced her sense of humor. And I thought about it considerably longer than 15 minutes, and come up with the following list of 15 things that influenced my strange sense of humor:

The Dick Van Dyke Show: I am not alone with this - about half the scriptwriters in Hollywood were sold on the idea that this was how comedy was written, and in a broader sense, how corporate creatives lived in the world. You worked with people you liked. You made jokes. Your bosses were mildly insane. You were married to Mary Tyler Moore. When everything is working well, this is the TV show I am living in.

M*A*S*H: The TV show, not the movie. The show was in endless syndication even when I was in college, and represents the TV show I am living in when things are not going so good. I and my design colleges have talked about "Meatball Design" and "Editorial Triage" like we were honestly subjected to attacks by Five O'Clock Charlie.

George Carlin: Representing the stand-ups, George was another college addiction, with his album Class Clown. I was too young for Lenny Bruce, which is Carlin's predecessor, but Carlin's love of language roped me in. Plus, ANYONE can do his "Hippy-Dippy Weather Man, with the Hippy-Dippy Weather, Man" routine. He got old and more pointed but I still love his stuff.

Tom Lehrer: Of course this is obvious, from other entries in this blog, but he gets the nod from the album/musician comics and the political comics, edging out Alan Sherman. "Pollution" was the first one I remember hearing, but his stuff is just a cool now as it was in the 60s (though now it sometimes requires footnotes to explain what we thought was so troubling back there).

Doctor Demento: Wind up your radios! I got to hear a lot of Tom Lehrer and others thanks to the good doctor, broadcasting on Friday or Saturday or Sunday nights on the Pittsburgh radio. That and Pirate games (with Nellie King and Bob Prince) were reasons to have a radio.

Monty Python: Back to college, where the Pythons were a regular feature of late-night PBS out of the Chicago stations. It was, for many people, the first introduction of what Britain was supposed to be like.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Edges out A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To the Forum only by the fact that I saw it first. The first time I saw it, at the old South Hills Village theater, I didn't know most of the cast, but I knew they were funny. Only later did I get the idea that this was a collection of the comedic talent of the age. Others have tried to replicate it - Cannonball Run, Rat Race, but none have succeeded.

Woody Allen: From the movie people, he just edges out Mel Brooks. Yeah, there was standup before, but What's Up, Tiger Lilly, Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Love and Death and Sleeper were a run of seriously funny films.

P.G.Wodehouse: Does this surprise anyone? I mean, does this surprise anyone who encountered Giogi Wyvernspur and Tertius Wands, who were cut, if not of the same cloth, of at least cloth two bolts down? Before the entire Stephen Frye and Hugh Laurie presentation on BBC, I read a lot of the adventures of Bertie and Jeeves. And it was genre as high art form - there was a single plot with continual variations.

The Odd Couple: The TV show, the movie, and the play that predated both of them. You can see the eroding effect of other media on the characters as you make the progression between them. Still, though the combination is classic (Two and a Half Men really should be sending a piece of the action to Neil Simon), Klugman and Randal are the best Oscar and Felix. Oh, and like Monty Python instructed about Great Britain, so did the TV show instruct about New York City.

Blackadder: Back to the Brits, with this funny, erudite, and literate bit of fun, which unleashed Rowan Atkinson on the rest of the West. The second and third seasons are the best, when Blackadder gets to devour the dictionary and spit out the best parts.

Warner Brother Cartoons: I know way too much about stars of the 30s and 40s from watching these as a kid on TV. They were on TV because they were cheap, and if the kids didn't get the references to Bogart and WC Fields, who cared? I think my interest in that era (and black and white films) comes out of those old cartoons.

Marx Brothers: And speaking of old movies, the Brothers Marx were the gold standard of the era. Yeah, they were creatures of vaudeville, and Groucho's character was an evolution of the stock figure "The German Teacher", but still it was classic comedy, and they get the nod for that era.

MAD Magazine: Another view into New York City, it showed you could go after both political and economic issues. By claiming Madison Avenue as one of its early targets, it had a lot more depth than any of its imitators, and infused an entire generation with good-natured cynicism about the consumer marketplace.


Firesign Theater: Another group that reached me by a comedy album, they were more head-oriented than Cheech and Chong, and that's saying a lot. Their most coherent production, and the one I would send you to first, was "The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye," which was on the album How Can You Be Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which had the album cover of the cast (duplicated) in front of a poster saying All Hail Marx and Lenin (with Groucho and John Lennon) shown below.

And you wonder while I am such a strange individual.

More later.

The Fourth

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

And a polite rebuttal, via Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (and Slog)



Darn this fairness doctrine. More later,

Nerdcore

John "That PC Guy" Hodgman at the Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner.

More later,

The Punishment Fits the Crime

So Pierce Watters, a fine gentleman who works for Paizo Publishing, writes reviews for Kobold Quarterly, and teaches Tai Chi, gifted me recently with a CD of The Mikado. The Mikado is one of Gilbert and Sullivan's most popular comic operas, and this particular recording was from the Bell Telephone Hour version of the 60s, starring Groucho Marx as Ko-Ko the Tailor-turned-Lord-High-Executioner.

I've been listening to it over the course of the week on my commutes, and now cannot get it out of my head. Bad enough the songs of Misters G & S are infectious, throwing that bit of Groucho into the middle of it is enough the drive one mad.

In general recap,it is a general madcap G&S - Minstrel Nanki-poo loves maiden Yum-Yum, who is supposed to marry her guardian, Ko-Ko, who in turn was appointed Lord High Executioner by the town of Titipu because he was himself the next to be executed (and he would not be able to execute any until he had lopped his own head off, a novel solution to capital punishment). But the ruling Mikado notices the lack of death in the town, and demands an execution. Nanki-poo, bereft from Yum-Yum, decides to kill himself, but Ko-Ko makes a deal with the Minstrel - Nanki-poo can marry Yum-Yum if at the end of the month he agrees to be executed. But it turns out the Nanki-poo is the Mikado's son, on the run from his father's own whimsical justice. And then things get wacky.

The end result is a rather sunny musical in which all the characters sing about death. No one dies, mind you, but there are all sorts of threats of death, suicide, and punishment. It is practically bouncy in its morbidity, and only after it is all said and done do you realize that no one perishes, and the worst punishment doled out is marriage.

The Bell Telephone presentation is an adaption, which means that content was edited for time and to fit the venue. Some minor characters disappear, the town's own complicity in the various shams is minimized, and Katisha (who is the closest thing to the "heavy" in the plot, though you would think Ko-Ko, who is initially keeping the lovers apart, should be) loses her initial appearance before the end of the first act. As a result, some of already intricate and dodgy logic is handwaved away entirely.

One reason that the role of Ko-Ko does not require as much vocal ability, and can be played by someone with good stagecraft but not an operatic voice. I've seen a version with Eric Idle in the role, and one that shows up on local cable fairly regularly starred local radio talk-show host Dave Ross. That allows more "stunt" casting as opposed to the talent casting, which actually helps is trying to untangle the plot.

And Groucho works adroitly, with enough of his "You Bet Your Life" persona, and in Ko-Ko's courting of Katisha (which provides part of the resolution of the pretty mess everyone is in) evokes his earlier romances in film with Margaret Dumond (in particular in "There is beauty in the bellow of the blast"). And Groucho is eminently listenable to, as he hurtles through the Gilbert's libretto.

But, as a kid with too much Halloween candy, I have overindulged, and now I've got a little list trapped in my head, and it is keeping me up at all hours.

More later,

Missed Phone Messages

Apparently, this is all my fault.

Remember last week, when I rolled that kayak (um, three times)? Well, I had my cell phone in my shirt pocket, and it shorted out from immersion in Lake Washington. And once I dried it out (household tip – Hair dryer on low and patience), I didn’t check for messages.

Turns out I had three of them. Here’s the first – Wednesday, 9 AM:

Hey, Jeff, this is, um, John McCain. Running for president, you know? And the boys and I were talking and they really like some of the things you’ve written – Manual of the Planes and all that. Visionary stuff. And I was thinking, well, we were thinking, that this was the fresh outlook that we’re looking for in the Republican Party. So, if you’re interested, you might want to join the ticket and become my vice president.

So get back to me when you have a chance. Ciao!

Second Message – Wednesday, 11 AM

Jeff, John again. I haven’t heard from you. Look, is it the D&D thing? I know we’ve been talking smack about that pro-Obama D&D crowd, but if you want, I can fire the guy saying that. Bang, he's gone. No, really, he creeps me out. And the base will understand. They’ll take whatever we give them. I can dig up Saddam’s body and make it my running mate and FOX will declare that it’s a game-changing, mavericky decision.

OK, that came out wrong. I don’t mean to compare you to a dead dictator. The point is, we can do whatever we want. Our party has screwed up the Federal Government for eight years and now we're running as reformers, and no one even blinks. I think we have good synergy, you and me. I really want you consider this and get back to me, soonest.

Really like your stuff. Hope to hear from you. B’bye.

Third Message – Wednesday, 1 PM.

Fine. You don’t want the (deleted) job. At least you’d have the (deleted) to tell me to my (deleted) face. I don’t need you. I don’t need ANY of you (unintelligible) . No, I haven’t been drinking. I’m just hurt. I THOUGHT you’d care about your country, but I can see you’re just like the others.

Hate you. Hate your (deleted) books. I’m going to go find somebody who will answer my calls. Is that an Alaska phone book? Throw it over here. (mutters) I'll show you all.

Oh, and don’t bother to call back. Bozo.

What can I say? I could have spared the nation all this.

More later,

Secret Tape

So I've got a secret illegal tape that's fallen into my hands, from a couple months back, after Super Tuesday. After careful consideration and vetting, I've decided to share it with everyone, since it couldn't possibly do any damage at this late date.

Male Voice: Hello?
Female Voice: Barr? It's Hill.
Male Voice: Hilary? You know what time it is?
Female Voice: Three AM. I knew you'd be up. Look, we should talk.
Male Voice: Sure, what's up?
Female Voice: I'm doing the numbers, and I can't catch you.
Male Voice: Yeah, we figure the same thing. There ARE the super-delegates - they could make a difference ...
Female Voice: Yeah right, like they're going to go against the will of the people. We aren't Republicans, you know.
Male Voice: True. So you've been looking at the numbers...
Female Voice: And I can't catch you. I mean, if these were winner-take-all ...
Male Voice: ... unfortunately, we aren't Republicans.
Female Voice: You got it. So I'm going to drop out. Give you a clear field.
(Pause)
Female Voice: Did you hear me, Barr? I think I'm going to ...
Male Voice: I heard you. I just wish you wouldn't.
Female Voice: I'm surprised to hear you say that. It's been bitter the past few weeks. The party needs to heal.
Male Voice: The party has plenty of time to heal. Here's the thing - the news is going hot and heavy about you and me, right?
Female Voice: Yeah.
Male Voice: And what are they saying about John?
Female Voice: Not a lot. But as soon as he lines up all his ducks in a row ...
Male Voice: That's just it, without media attention, he can't get anything going.
Female Voice: (Pause) Because we're sucking all the air out of the room fighting each other.
Male Voice: Uh-huh. Not only that, we're making the room bigger as more and more people come in on your side, or my side. And even if some of them walk afterwards - there will be a few, and it will be heavily covered - there will be more people engaged than there would be if either of us had a clear run.
Female Voice: We're making the pie bigger.
Male Voice: Right. And if the 24/7 news cycle WASN'T nattering on about you and me, what WOULD they be talking about.
Female Voice: The usual, probably. Misquotes...
Male Voice: ...Bowling scores...
Both Voices: Flag Pins! (Both Laugh)
Female Voice: You realize what you're asking here? Its going to rocky for you, if we go forward. And for me as well.
Male Voice: If we wanted to be liked, we would not be in politics.
Female Voice: True that. Ok, I'm in, but let me warn you about the press.
Male Voice: I'm cool with them.
Female Voice: Not you. Michele. If they can't nail you on anything, they will go after her.
Male Voice: Speaking from experience?
Female Voice: God yes. Before the election, Bill was this big likable lug, dumb as a post, and I was Angela Landsbury, secretly controlling him.
Male Voice: Why does it always come down to The Manchurian Candidate?
Female Voice: (Laughs) I don't know. OK. I'm staying in. This will give me a chance to be more of shot-and-a-beer candidate, anyway. That'll make people's heads spin.
Male Voice: Cool. Glad to be running against you.
Female Voice: And Barr, the deal still on?
Male Voice: Supreme Court Justice Bubba? You bet. Of course, they'll just say you're secretly controlling him.
Female Voice: (laughs) I wish. See you on the campaign trail.
Male Voice: You too. And thanks.
END CONVERSATION

More later,

Escape from Mt. Lebanon!

This video, from Blog-Lebo, from the new Mt. Lebanon-based blog Suburbia Calling, made me smile, but then, blowing up the front of the Galeria (the closest thing we have to a landmark in my old neighborhood) was kinda cool.

Also, here is the Civil War, in four minutes. Hypnotizing.

More later,

Jesus Has A Blog

Ganked from the Stranger (better resolution, but (often) NSFW):


The sound you hear is the entire Internet jumping the shark.

(Actually, from his blog the Big Guy sounds like the Geico Caveman, only whinier)

More later,