Best Magazine Reads: Beetle Bailey and Connecticut's "Cartoon County"

I've visited Fairfield, Connecticut before because some of my wife’s cousins live there. What I didn’t know about the outer New York City suburb is that it had been home to an inordinate number of famous daily-newspaper cartoonists.

Mort Walker (pictured to the right) is perhaps the most famous of the crew detailed in a fantastic article in the September issue of Vanity Fair. I rank his Beetle Bailey as one of my favorite dailies, up there with Archie, Garfield, Peanuts, and, actually, several other strips emanating from Cartoon County, including Hagar the Horrible, Blondie, Popeye, The Family Circus, and Hi and Lois. The place also has ties to Superman, Tarzan, Prince Valiant, and many others. It’s really pretty phenomenal.

The cartoonists lived different lives than the working men (and the cartoonists seem to have been all men) who headed into the city each day. They sat at home in their offices that smelled of sharpened pencils, tobacco, and whiskey, were pretty domesticated by their families, and only went into the city on Wednesdays to show off their latest works to various publishers and editors. Then sometimes they would go to gatherings with the other cartoonists to drink lots of Manhattans. And they played quite a bit of golf and took lots of naps. Pretty nice work if you can get it. Maybe that’s why “cartoonist” was always on my short list of potential professions!

The author, son of the Prince Valiant cartoon, notes that Cartoon County was a quirk in time. Cartoonists were rock stars, creating the most-read portions of the newspapers, up until the early 60s, when Hearst killed what the group considered its Mount Olympus, the New York Journal-American. Then later Wall Street further killed Fairfield County as an affordable place where cartoonists could live comfortably.

Even I remember a time when the newspaper would clunk down near the front door. I would run out to get it and grab the funny pages, and maybe sometimes the sports section, and throw the rest of it down wherever. At that point, I was a remnant of an earlier age, when just about every kid (and adult) couldn’t miss the cartoons each and every day, with the special, fuller, mostly-color Sunday editions being the highlight of each week.

Battle of the Sexes tries to reach the dramatic level of real tennis

Tennis has been one of my lifelong passions.

But there have been few tennis movies that have come close to matching the drama of McEnroe vs. Borg or Nadal vs. Federer or, heck, even Gustavo Kuerten vs. Sergi Bruguera.



I mean, how can you match the beauty and story of the likes of the above short on Guga's first French Open win or those of my other favorite men's players of all time (ranked):

10. Andy Roddick
09. Roger Federer
08. Pete Sampras
07. Bjorn Borg
06. Arthur Ashe
05. Rafael Nadal
04. Andre Agassi
03. Jimmy Conners
02. Gustavo Kuerten
01. John McEnroe

This week, Hollywood nearly reached the higher plane of actual tennis, when we caught Battle of the Sexes at E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C. As an interesting side note, we happened into free tickets because the Secret Service wanted to move us along in line so we wouldn't disturb the entrance of Mike Pence and Josh Brolin attending the premiere of Only the Brave.

I have to admit that Billie Jean King always got on my nerves, but when she was playing, I was far too young to understand the cultural significance of her off-court actions. She never seemed to be that exciting when I watched her play against the likes of Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.

But I was too young to have known about the match between King and Bobby Riggs, played in the movie with lovable squirm-ability by the incapable-of-not-being-funny Steve Carell. And Emma Stone made me forget any of my biases against King, as she plays her with determined vulnerability.

This movie, like Hidden Figures and other recent historical dramas, should be enjoyable for just about anyone, whether you're interested in the actual subject matter or not.

For me, it's an added bonus that I have that tennis obsession. Now if only I could find the time to get back out on the court to win a few more competitive championships in TennisDC.

4 out of 5 stars

Geek Love, a great premise, started the wave of Carny fiction

For a literature major, my book reading has taken a backseat recently due to all the magazines I'm currently subscribed to and, of course, all the time I spend tossing the football and baseball with Jackson and doing "play with me" time with Zoey.

That said, I recently made it through a relatively gargantuan modern fiction classic (from 1989) by Katherine Dunn, which took her many years to write while living in Portland.

Geek Love, a National Book Award finalist, was a trailblazer at the time and set the course for all kinds of freak-show entertainment that has followed, from Rob Zombie's filmography to the Jim Rose Circus to American Horror Story to Stephen King's It.

The premise is the best thing about the book: A man and woman (Al and Crystal Lil Binewski) run a circus that has fallen on hard times. In order to take them to the top, they agree that Lil will start taking drugs in order to deform a whole slate of babies they plan to produce. That way they'll have the best freak show (or call it "geek" show) in the land.

The plan works, and they have Arty the Aqua Boy, Siamese twins Elly and Iphy, telekinetic Chick, and the story's narrator Olympia, a hunchback albino dwarf. Arty is the leader and Oly assists him. She actually tells the story from two points in time, when they are all children and just getting started to bring in the crowds and much later in her life, when she reflects on all her family being gone and watches over her daughter Miranda, who has a tail and doesn't know who her mother is, and certainly doesn't know she is the product of incest.

The whole thing is fascinating, but it drags on far too long. There is way too much descriptive language and Geek Love is easily a quarter-too-long. But a great premise takes it far, and it luckily played a major role in starting a horrifying genre that is tough to get enough of, at least for me.

4 out of 5 stars

And check out this great feature from WIRED about the cult of Geek Love lovers.

Best Magazine Reads: 10 nuggets from Rolling Stone's profile of the EPA's evil Scott Pruitt

There is a lot of incompetence in Donal Trumpland these days, but perhaps nobody should boil the blood of voters more than his EPA appointee.

Rolling Stone's Jeff Goodell profiled all his flat-out wicked deeds in Scott Pruitt's Crimes Against Nature, in its August 10 issue. It seems people wouldn't have to be classified as liberals or environmentalists to be terrified of this person's disregard for the EPA's core mission of "protecting human health and the environment," which has nothing to do with supposedly boosting the economy.

Here are 10 interesting nuggets from the article:

1. Pruitt claimed the U.S. pulled out of the Paris global climate accord because it's a plot by European nations to stifle our economy. That doesn't account for the fact that you can count which nations of the world aren't a part of it on far fewer than the fingers on one hand.
2. He claims that 50,000 coal-mining jobs have been created by the Trump Administration, even though only about 1,000 have been created in 2017, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Coal is dying and renewables are the future, creating jobs 12 times faster than dirty coal, but oil executives give a lot of money to corrupt politicians. Why portions of the public can't see that or can't be bothered to care continues to boggle my mind.
3. He hasn't met with any environment groups yet. Big oil executives are the only meetings he ever takes.
4. Very few, almost none, of the high-level EPA staffers have ever spoken to Pruitt or even gotten an email from him.
5. After taking $62,000 from the poultry industry in his run for Oklahoma attorney general, he won and dropped a lawsuit against several major chicken producers for dumping their waste into the Illinois River. His opponent took no money from the industry and lost badly. I sense a theme here: it's "go figure."
6. We often hear about his lawsuits against the EPA as attorney general. It's true, he filed 14 of them, including attempts to promote mercury pollution because "it doesn't pose public-health hazards" and promote more air pollution in national parks. Fun guy! Now you can basically be assured he's taking these similar kinds of stealth campaigns to a national, completely terrifying, level.
7. Pruitt views fossil fuels not as the remains of dead plants and animals  but as "God's gift to mankind. Let's use them to power the world."
8. One thing he's focused on at the EPA is removing climate data and scientific information from its website.
9. The good news is, as Jimmy Kimmel says, "Put simply, Scott Pruitt is a piece of shit," and his lack of loyalty from anyone within EPA extends outside of the agency, even to Republicans and major climate deniers who think he doesn't have the wits to get any of their priorities, good or bad, accomplished.
10. And back to the bad news, Pruitt is hoping to dismantle enough of the Earth as quickly as possible before he likely jumps the EPA ship in time to run for governor of Oklahoma in 2018 or for climate-boogeyman Jim Inhofe's Senate seat in 2020. 

Note to self, don't move to Oklahoma. And also maybe consider moving to Canada, where climate change won't be as harsh and as soon as it's set to be here at home.

Sharknado makes us ask if we're even still afraid of sharks

I recently spent a lazy rainy day at the Lake of Ozarks skipping out on a boat ride in exchange for a triple header of Shark Week movies on the Syfy Channel, the only one of which whose name I remember was Trailer Park Shark.



I guess it just goes to show that I, like many others, will watch anything that includes great whites. There's no telling whether that hillbilly jam was better or worse than the grand dame of the new breed of shark movies, 2013's Sharknado.

I finally got around to seeing that alleged classic last night and, despite an obvious decrease in brain cells reported in my head today, the movie is an indelible must-watch for fans of the 90s classic TV show Beverly Hills 90210. Ian Ziering, aka Steve Sanders in Bev 9er, finally found the one role he was always meant to play, as Fin, the surfer dude whose beach bar is destroyed by waves of sharks. He then goes about crossing Los Angeles to drop bombs on tornados and vanquish the flying sharks with his chainsaw.

Really, does any more need to be said?

3 out of 5 stars. Now I have, what, four more Sharknado movies to catch up on?

Moonlight was indeed important, but was it really worthy of so many awards?

Moonlight, which won the best-film Academy Award for 2016, has beautiful cinematography and tells the culturally important story of what it might be like growing up unsure of your sexuality in a neighborhood hardened by bullies and drugs.

It's the story of Little, who grows up in Miami for years before he realizes he's gay. He gets chased, gets beat up, and has rocks thrown at him. His mother is a pathetic and mean addict. He has no role models until a drug dealer and his girlfriend (played by Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monae) take him in when he needs it most.

The performances are superior. Ali won best supporting actor. And the three actors who play Little as he gets older are also compelling. Part of his struggle to find himself includes three nicknames: Little as a kid, then Chiron when he's older, and finally Black.

Despite Ali's character being a drug dealer, he provides the father figure Little needs and, most importantly, the sage advice to find himself and to be ok with himself if he is truly gay.

We learn that Ali's character, named Juan, has died at some point and Little grows up to continue being unsure of how to be intimate with other people and specifically other men. He becomes a very masculine drug dealer in Atlanta before coming back, in the final scene, to visit his lifelong friend Kevin.

I really like this story. But even if Ali's character had served his point (and that point was probably served even harder by Little having to lose yet another one of the only positive models in his life), I would have liked Ali to get a little more screen time to truly deserve his best supporting actor nod. 

I also couldn't get over how slow the film often moved. Largely because of that, I'm a little unsure how it could have a 98 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and been praised so heavily by Academy voters (other than 2016 perhaps being a bit of a down year for movies). 

4 out of 5 stars

How did they get the idea for Amazon's Red Oaks?

Throughout the first two seasons of Red Oaks, on Amazon Prime, I was sure that the only inspiration could've been the classic Caddyshack.

But as this interview with one of the show's co-creators makes clear, it was actually his time spent working at several New Jersey country clubs that proved the impetus.

It's a great show and Amazon has renewed it for a final third season. Bittersweet because it's nice to have it for a third season but not nice to only have it for one more season.

Craig Roberts plays the protagonist David, who is working for the summer as an assistant tennis pro at a country club. He is adorably likable and gives viewers reason to return each episode. He's also a British actor, which I didn't know until after watching all of the first two seasons.


Every story line is great and so are all the characters.

Jennifer Grey is a blast from her Patrick Swayze-matched 80s past along with Richard Kind as David's sympathetic and pretty sad parents.

Ennis Esmer hilariously plays the lead tennis pro Nash and is the older, arrested-development stud who hangs out with kids that we all seemed to know at one time.

Josh Meyers is similar as Barry, but is a painfully self-absorbed Miami Vice type.

Oliver Cooper's Wheeler and Alexandra Turshen's Misty have one of my favorite storylines as the odd couple.

Then there's the whole rich Getty family, not terribly likable but also fascinating as a way to see how the other half lives: Paul Reiser, Gina Gershon, and the Ally Sheedy-like Alexandra Socha.

I gave it 4 out of 5 stars after season 1, but I'm upping that to 5 out of 5 stars after season 2.

How does The Babadook compare to my favorite horror movies of all time?

Many rankings of the best horror films have 2014's The Babadook, which I finally just saw, as one of the best ever. While I don't rank it anywhere near my personal top 10 within the genre, it does feel like there haven't been many scare-fests in recent years that match its levels of psychological thrill.

Its a tale of a woman who lost her husband in a car crash as he drove her to the hospital to have their baby. Seven years later, she takes care of "the boy" (which you don't want to call him) but secretly can't stand him. Lack of sleep, misbehavior at school and on the playground, and social pressures from girlfriends leads to a psychological and murderous mind bend for the mom. And all it takes is a strange child's book character to set off a terrifying, but only mildly bloody, chain of events.

The Babadook doesn't match the horror movies that made the list of my 90 favorite movies of all time, which included:

• Psycho at #1
• Jaws at #3
• Halloween at #40
• A Clockwork Orange at #43
• Friday the 13th at #50
• The Shining at #55
• Silence of the Lambs at #76
• No Country for Old Men at #78
• The Amityville Horror at #84
• Donnie Darko at #85

I think other ones not in my top 90 that might fall in ahead of The Babadook include:

• Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn
• Suspiria
• Phantasm II
• 28 Days Later
• The Blair Witch Project
• Poltergeist
• The Exorcist
• "Hillbilly horror classics" Wrong Turn, Hills Have Eyes, and Wolf Creek, and
• The ever-underrated Rob Zombie's terrifying House of 1,000 Corpses and its follow-up The Devil's Rejects.

For more ideas of what to watch, check out the great horror choices on this list.

And next I must see this year's Get Out, which Rotten Tomatoes jaw-droppingly rates as the top horror flick of all time.

Talking about the future of mobility on Tech Pulse TV

I was recently on this Tech Pulse TV show about "the future of mobility."

I believe it aired on Verizon and Comcast channels in Washington D.C. and Boston.

It's a good conversation with Darnell Grisby of the American Public Transportation Association, Russell Brooks of Transportation for America, and Barry Einsig of Cisco about topics such as:

• Technology shaping transportation
• The future of mobility
• Transportation platforms
• Bikesharing
• Carsharing, and
• The sharing economy.

Great News and Transparent aren't perfect, but they're worth watching

I've still got shows like The Wire and Game of Thrones to watch. And I'm only in season two of both Breaking Bad and The Sopranos.

But somehow, somehow, I just finished the latest seasons of Transparent and Great News. Both shows have their flaws, but they also have enough to keep me coming back.

Great News just completed its first season and it's returning as part of NBC's Thursday night "Must-See TV" lineup.

The money trifecta is Briga Heelan (who was excellent as the actress girlfriend in Netflix's Love and has serious comic watchability), Andrea Martin (of the famed SCTV comedy troupe and perfectly playing the neurotically wacky New Jersey mother of Heelan), and John Michael Higgins (from Christopher Guest's Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration, and here well-cast as a stereotypical newsman).

As with 95 percent of network TV these days, there's a same-y case of over-production sheen with Great News. That hurts its quest for genuineness. Think about The Office. It had a very different feel, production-wise, at the time than most other network sitcoms. Why do they all have such patented style and formatting?

Transparent doesn't have that same problem. It definitely feels different than anything else before. Although, in reality, it's probably not that far off from a prime-time soap melodrama.

Jeffrey Tambor, like in Arrested Development and with his bit roles in Three's Company and The Hangover movies, is just so darn good. The rest of the cast is, frankly, about as annoying as the cast of Girls got to be over time. That said, they're not supposed to be likable, so they get somewhat of a pass.

Not all the storylines work, but the paths they take are never predictable. And that's probably the secret formula causing me to be caught up and ready to watch season four in real time.

Great News: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Transparent: 4 out of 5 stars