Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire
The Simpsons premiered on this day 20 years ago. The first episode, titled "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", was about the family's Christmas being ruined because Homer didn't receive his Christmas bonus. Which is happening a lot this year, unless you work on Wall Street. I see people nodding their heads in recognition. The Simpsons is one of those cultural touchstones that everybody can relate to. Your life is not remotely like theirs, but then again it is. Partly because the program has been running underneath your experiences for the past twenty years, like the commentary track on a DVD. The Simpsons only appear once in A Book of Ages, and only parenthetically, when George Plimpton (age 75) does a guest shot on the program as a corrupt spelling bee judge. Appearances on the cover of Rolling Stone, or on the Tonight Show or in the Doonesbury comic strip are similarly noted in the book.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Lumberjack, Parrot-Fancier, Geographer
Last week 66 year-old former Python and world traveler Michael Palin became the new president of the Royal Geographical Society, one of those clubbish, leather-armchaired institutions that maintains vague associations with the Royals and underwrites expeditions to save tropical butterflies. The RGS supported the expeditions of Edmund Hillary, Charles Darwin, Robert Falcon Scott, Stanley and Livingstone, and Richard Francis Burton, all of whom appear in A Book of Ages. Most of the Society's past presidents were named Viscount This or Earl That. They were Important People with ancestors and large houses in the shires, the sort of people Monty Python liked to lampoon by wearing balaclava helmets and acting inanely brave or bossy.
Michael Palin appears in A Book of Ages only once, in 1969, at age 26, when he and Terry Jones wrote and performed the famous song about a lumberjack with very secure self-esteem. That year they also collaborated on a sketch about a couple who try to order breakfast in a café but are constantly interrupted by Vikings singing about processed meat. The Spam obsessed Vikings later influenced the naming of the junk mail that relentlessly fills our email inboxes. In 66 years, Michael Palin has become an influential person without losing his charm or his ability to act silly.
Michael Palin appears in A Book of Ages only once, in 1969, at age 26, when he and Terry Jones wrote and performed the famous song about a lumberjack with very secure self-esteem. That year they also collaborated on a sketch about a couple who try to order breakfast in a café but are constantly interrupted by Vikings singing about processed meat. The Spam obsessed Vikings later influenced the naming of the junk mail that relentlessly fills our email inboxes. In 66 years, Michael Palin has become an influential person without losing his charm or his ability to act silly.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Patriotic Gore
Gore Vidal first enjoyed the public gaze at age three when he became the first child to fly across the United States in a plane. He's enjoyed attention ever since. A preening, arrogant, articulate, intelligent, entertaining scold. A critic of almost everything Americans do or say or think, but a defender of our rights to be as stupid as we are, which makes him the most valuable kind of American: a troublesome patriot. I like Barbara Ehrenreich's line: "Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots." He and H. L. Mencken serve as bookends to the American sensibility, one left-wing, the other right, both discontented and contemptuous.
Gore Vidal was born on this day in 1925 in, of all places, West Point, New York. His mother was an actress and New York socialite. His father, a former West Point All-American quarterback, was the academy's first aeronautics instructor when Gore was born, and went on to direct FDR's bureau of air commerce in the Department of Commerce. Which is how the toddler wound up in a plane at such a tender age. At age 11 Gore was flying his own airplane in a Pathé newsreel. He fought in World War II and wrote a novel about it. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (provocative title) was daring enough to suggest that homosexuals were as normal as anybody else, which caused the New York Times to ban reviews of his next five novels. He was 22. He wrote the script for Ben Hur, became friends with Tennessee Williams and the Paul Newmans. In 1960 he ran for Congress––and lost. His most celebrated moment may have been his televised scuffle with William F. Buckley Jr. during ABC's coverage of the the 1968 Democratic Convention.
In the 1970s Vidal said this: "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." Thus proving he could be very right and very wrong in one paragraph, but always provocative and intelligent. In spite of everything, he always considered himself a conservative. If conservative means preserving what works, for instance a functioning and fair-minded government to serve public needs, then he probably is one, and so am I. Gore Vidal appears six times in A Book of Ages.
Gore Vidal was born on this day in 1925 in, of all places, West Point, New York. His mother was an actress and New York socialite. His father, a former West Point All-American quarterback, was the academy's first aeronautics instructor when Gore was born, and went on to direct FDR's bureau of air commerce in the Department of Commerce. Which is how the toddler wound up in a plane at such a tender age. At age 11 Gore was flying his own airplane in a Pathé newsreel. He fought in World War II and wrote a novel about it. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (provocative title) was daring enough to suggest that homosexuals were as normal as anybody else, which caused the New York Times to ban reviews of his next five novels. He was 22. He wrote the script for Ben Hur, became friends with Tennessee Williams and the Paul Newmans. In 1960 he ran for Congress––and lost. His most celebrated moment may have been his televised scuffle with William F. Buckley Jr. during ABC's coverage of the the 1968 Democratic Convention.
In the 1970s Vidal said this: "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." Thus proving he could be very right and very wrong in one paragraph, but always provocative and intelligent. In spite of everything, he always considered himself a conservative. If conservative means preserving what works, for instance a functioning and fair-minded government to serve public needs, then he probably is one, and so am I. Gore Vidal appears six times in A Book of Ages.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
A Wild and Crazy Guy
On September 24, 1977 Steve Martin told a live network television audience that he was a “wild and crazy guy." He may have been wearing an arrow through his head. He was 32. Steve Martin appears six times in A Book of Ages.
Monday, August 31, 2009
The Early Career of Martha Stewart
In August 1968 Martha Stewart got her stockbroker’s license and went to work for the firm of Perlberg, Monness, Williams and Sidel. She was 27. She appears five times in A Book of Ages. She was already very self-possessed as a high school student in Nutley, New Jersey in 1959. She went into modeling, then stockbroking, then started a catering business, and you sense she already knew where the business was going. Thirty-four years later she would be on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange, a post she was forced to resign because of the insider trading scandal which landed her in prison. But she hasn't disappeared. There is something unbreakable, if not exactly scuff-proof about the homemaking maven. Smiling, cunning, slightly icy, a perfectionist but also a touch self-ironic, which is what makes her so watchable.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Julia
The new Julia Child movie opens this weekend. The shelves are full of books about her and by her, by people who remember her, and by people who want to be like her or at least want to cook like her. Her kitchen is in the Smithsonian. Her voice is in our heads whenever we cook, although it might be the voice of Dan Ackroyd. No wonder. She is our modern domestic goddess, never mind Martha Stewart and Alice Waters. (All three women have several anecdotes each in A Book of Ages.)
What surprises me is that Nora Ephron didn't think Julia had enough back story for a movie of her own, that she needed to share the screen with a young woman blogging about her recipes. What can you say? Today's TV obsession with chefs and kitchens has more to do with egos and speed and extravagance, with concept, less to do with the down-to-earth creation of good food and eating it. This young wife, played by Amy Adams, promises to cook every recipe from The Art of French Cooking in one year. Hilarity ensues. But which life are we more interested in? Who do we identify with?
That's the point, I guess. Julia works for the spy agency called the O.S.S. during WWII, travels to India and China, marries an urbane diplomat, moves to Paris, enrolls at the Cordon Bleu to learn French cooking (she didn't know how to cook at all until her mid-30s), she writes a cookbook (which her publisher turns down), then goes on public TV and becomes a star. Every life has an arc, and Julia's is interesting and full of surprises. She appears six times in A Book of Ages.
My book is about how famous lives reflect our own, so it's the private, domestic details I find most interesting. Freud and Henry Ford collecting antiques, Steve Martin collecting art, Churchill learning to paint, Jack Kerouac and Edward Elgar learning to drive, Hitler becoming a vegetarian. So I include Julia Child's first meal on her first trip to France––she was 36. The most vivid detail I discovered was the hotplate in her D.C. apartment, where she didn't cook very much or very well.
What surprises me is that Nora Ephron didn't think Julia had enough back story for a movie of her own, that she needed to share the screen with a young woman blogging about her recipes. What can you say? Today's TV obsession with chefs and kitchens has more to do with egos and speed and extravagance, with concept, less to do with the down-to-earth creation of good food and eating it. This young wife, played by Amy Adams, promises to cook every recipe from The Art of French Cooking in one year. Hilarity ensues. But which life are we more interested in? Who do we identify with?
That's the point, I guess. Julia works for the spy agency called the O.S.S. during WWII, travels to India and China, marries an urbane diplomat, moves to Paris, enrolls at the Cordon Bleu to learn French cooking (she didn't know how to cook at all until her mid-30s), she writes a cookbook (which her publisher turns down), then goes on public TV and becomes a star. Every life has an arc, and Julia's is interesting and full of surprises. She appears six times in A Book of Ages.
My book is about how famous lives reflect our own, so it's the private, domestic details I find most interesting. Freud and Henry Ford collecting antiques, Steve Martin collecting art, Churchill learning to paint, Jack Kerouac and Edward Elgar learning to drive, Hitler becoming a vegetarian. So I include Julia Child's first meal on her first trip to France––she was 36. The most vivid detail I discovered was the hotplate in her D.C. apartment, where she didn't cook very much or very well.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Very Early Television
In July 1932, 29 year-old Clare Boothe was having an affair with married Wall Street moneybags Bernard Baruch and was invited over to his place to watch something his friend David Sarnoff called television. Not yet a playwright or married to Henry Luce of Time magazine, Boothe was an editor at Vanity Fair. She appears three times in A Book of Ages. Understudying Mary Pickford on Broadway, letting boyfriend Henry Luce "go all the way", and being nervous as her play "The Women" opens on Broadway in 1936. (Henry Luce appears twice.)
Thursday, July 9, 2009
O. J.
Today is O. J. Simpson's 62nd birthday. Few people appear in so many categories of the popular imagination: star athlete, film actor, pleasant TV pitchman, celebrity, criminal defendant, armed robber, con (in both senses of the word.) Juice appears three times in A Book of Ages: winning the Heisman Trophy at age 21, running through airports for Hertz Rent-a-Car at 29, becoming a widower at 47. I doubt we'll ever drink another glass of orange juice without seeing his smiling face.
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