Month: October 2007

Happiness Isn’t…

The word “depressed” is in three out of four panels in today’s Peanuts strip reprint. That’s it! Schulz was happy one quarter of the time.

Peanuts Reprint

Here is a clip from the upcoming American Masters program about Charles Schulz. As hoped, Schulz’s great lost love, Donna Wold, makes an appearance.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/OCT07/SchulzPBS.flv 400 300]
My best buddy, and fellow Schulz fan, D.F. Rogers has these interesting comments to make on the subject of Schulz the man…

That lovable cartoonist, Good Ol’ “Sparky” Schulz…warm and witty. Let’s see what he has to say to Mike Barrier. [Link to interview] The portrait of the man as a REAL person, prickly with strong opinions, but stated in a very normal speaking tone with that distinctive Minnesota accent. I was so fascinated by the prickly things he said, that I just had to cut them out to highlight them, OUT OF CONTEXT. It’s like taking all of the scenes of the mad, drunk, crazy George Bailey [in It’s A Wonderful Life] and putting them together. These are things that he really said, so I wonder what the new Bio says that can be anymore prickly than this — other than sensational things?

No; it’s not the time, it’s the anxiety and the guilt feelings that they give to you. Time is no problem with me. I actually don’t even work very long hours. I start here at 9, and usually I go home at 4 o’clock. That’s not bad. Five days a week; I don’t work at night, or on the weekends. So it’s not a matter of time, it’s just a matter of the energy, I guess, plus the fact that it’s not a job which depends strictly on the amount of hours you put in. It depends on what you can think of. The never-ending burden of having to do something day after day after day, and it never lets up.

No, I’m never swamped by that kind of distraction. The only kind of distractions that bother me are the continual requests for special drawings for my grandfather who’s retiring, or the priest in our church who is retiring and who uses your cartoon, or so-and-so’s birthday’s coming up, or so-and-so is sick in hospital, and auctions—we get auction requests every day. Some are fine, and some are not; if they write “Dear Celebrity,” and it’s a form letter, we throw it away. I cannot understand anybody wanting a favor from somebody and not only not even—most of the time not spelling your name right, but not even using your name at all. But we try to do the best we can with all of these things. Those are the things that bother me the most.
Continue reading Happiness Isn’t…

Beatless Ringo?

Geoff Emerick - Here, There and EverywhereI’m in the middle of reading the autobiography (written with help) of recording engineer and producer Geoff Emerick — Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of THE BEATLES. This is an excellent, excellent book, a great read, and it’s enormously, vastly better than George Martin’s All You Need Is Ears.

Emerick’s vivid accounts of the Beatles’ recording sessions make a perfect companion to the superb — but highly technical — reference text, RTB Book — Recording the Beatles, by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew. He tells many stories that others have told in ways that were either exaggerated, off-the-mark, or incomplete. For example, Emerick has the best account I’ve read of why Ringo was pulled after the first take of “Love Me Do.”

Ringo was having difficulty maintaining a steady beat, and Paul was starting to get annoyed with him. George Martin did his best to prop them up over this talkback mic, but in his private conversations with Norman [Smith], he criticized the unsteady drumming.

Another interesting moment was when Emerick met Brian Epstein for the first time.

Friendly though he was, Brian struck me as a bit odd. He was a quiet man, obviously upper class. He didn’t come to many sessions, but he was always very polite to me when he did; however, I always got the impression that the Beatles didn’t like having him around.

Despite Epstein’s importance to the success of The Beatles, they felt the recording studio was their domain, and Epstein didn’t belong there. Also, Epstein was gay, and from what I’ve read elsewhere, at that time The Beatles weren’t comfortable with his lifestyle.

Emerick loves to describe the various recording tricks that were employed to give The Beatles’ records their distinctive sound. And unlike the RTB book, his explanations aren’t technical. In the spirit of audio experimentation, I recommend checking out a link on the WFMU blog, where the entire Beatles album catalog has been compressed into one hour. You may find yourself getting bored quickly with that, so I suggest listening to the time-compressed songs that have been slowed down. EMI/Capitol may not appreciate these mashed-up recordings, but they’re exactly the sort of playing around that The Beatles loved to do in the studio.

The Charles Schulziest

Peanuts ReprintThe New York Times says the family of the late Charles Schulz is unhappy with a new biography of the cartoonist. It apparently characterizes Sparky as having been a depressed woman chaser. It also delves into his unhappy first marriage. Looking at the Peanuts strip that was reprinted just this past Sunday (click to enlarge), one can easily see how Schulz may have expressed his marital unhappiness as sibling unhappiness. It will be interesting to see how Schulz is portrayed in The American Masters program about him at the end of the month.

Dented President

I’m so disappointed in the Democrats for failing to do real damage to Bush since taking both houses of Congress last November. I’m falling into a numb resignation that we’re stuck waiting for noon on January 20, 2009. But there are still some things I’m hearing that get me going. For example:

  1. We can’t leave Iraq because it would result in utter chaos.

    This implies that if the Iraqis aren’t already worse off than before we invaded — and they are — Bush should admit they will be after we leave. I believe the blame game should be played, because it’s the right way to start heading back to sanity in the deliberation and formation of public policy, especially foreign policy.

  2. The Democrats have to offer more of an alternative than simply “leave Iraq.”

    This is obviously just a GOP tactic for shifting the blame to the Democrats. “Leave” is a perfect valid position, and it happens to be my opinion. It’s going to happen anyway after Bush has left office, so why wait?

  3. Progress is being made.

    No it isn’t. Except perhaps in Anbar Province, and that has nothing to do with what the U.S. has done, and the same approach won’t work in Baghdad. If the job can’t be done in 4.5 years, I say it can’t be done. And if the wrong strategy was taken before now, then Bush and Cheney are incompetent, and they should quit. Rumsfeld being gone isn’t enough.

  4. Iran is providing bomb materials and expertise.

    I’ll give the Dick Cheney response. So what? What’s your point? Of course Iran is helping the Shiites. I’ll tell you what the point is in bringing this up again and again, along with the nuclear threat issue. They want to start a shooting war with Iran. Of course they do. Well, guess what? If Iran is the real problem that’s too damn bad for Bush and Cheney, because they cried wolf over the wrong place at the wrong time, and it isn’t going to work again.

  5. Al Qaida is causing much of the unrest

    6. Uh, wait a second. I thought Iran is the problem. Iran is aligned with the Shiites. Al Qaida is aligned with the Sunnis, except for the Sunnis who are pushing back. So who’s really the enemy? Or is it really a civil war? Bush is completely incapable of articulating any coherent understanding of the situation there, let alone formulate a policy that has any chance of dealing with it.

One more point is about something that Bush’s people are so far reluctant to say too loudly and too often, so the pundits in their pockets say it for them, and that’s the control of oil. We don’t want to let the oil fall into the hands of those who would not only refuse to sell it to us, but would sell it to our enemies. The problem with that assertion is, it means admitting that oil was the real reason for invading Iraq. And lying to the American people, and using false intelligence to start a war is, I would hope, a high crime and an impeachable offense.