Samoan Characters wearing "Lava-Lavas" in Doonesbury, 1975

There hasn't been much follow-up, blogospherically speaking, from our lost Travel Correspondent, serving on the Navigator's Islands. Jenny Ruth has been writing privately, & I will share some more photos sometime. In the meantime, I've been digging up some of Uncle Duke's adventures as the irresponsible governor of American Samoa from 1970's Doonesbury strips. At one point, Duke procures a football scholarship for a massive Samoan kid, to go to Walden College.

Here is a photo of some of Miss Jenny Ruth's colleagues wearing lava-lavas in church choir. They seem extraordinarily comfortable.

Special Report: The Ages of the Sunday Comics Writers published in the Reno Gazette-Journal

Everytime I come to my parents house, I am struck by how backwards the Sunday Comics page is in the Reno Gazette-Journal. Their line-up has remained almost unchanged since before I could read. I remember that, when Dilbert became popular in the 90s, readers petitioned to have it added. And there was a bizarre debacle around that same time when they tried to drop Doonesbury & readers sent in a flood of angry letters. (Note to Comics editors: never try to drop Doonesbury.) The strips the Gazette-Journal publishes are so old school, the worst example of traditionalism not making way for new talent. Not publishing Get Fuzzy, for instance, must be the equivalent of a public library not carrying Harry Potter. Recently, in research for my new comics projects, I've been reading classic Garfield books on the toilet. I have been told that Garfield - which used to be very stylish & witty, & now one of the most embarrassing things ever published - is now written by a committee & that Davis is on life support. According to Wikipedia, Jim Davis married a second wife in 2000 at age 55 & had three more children, so it seems like at least one part of the old man is still working. I'm afraid he's probably the man responsible for Garfield's sad late era.

What was the point of this? Yes, newspapers, you're an endangered species anyway, you need to stay current with the Sunday funnies! I was also wondering how old some of these comics writers are - & I'm not being ageist, obviously some of the funniest people to have lived have been old as Methuseleh. But when these guys have been pumping out daily comics for so many decades, some of the quality is going to thin. Curling up with a cup of coffee on Sunday with this collection of has-beens leaves you feeling so empty. I decided to look up the ages of every comic strip writer in the Reno Gazette-Journals horrible Sunday Comics section:

Classic Peanuts - He would be 86, & lived for many decades in Santa Rosa! Today they just publish reruns.
Garfield - Jim Davis currently resides in Albany, Indiana, & is 63.
For Better of For Worse - Lynn Johnston lives in Corbeil, Ontario, age 61.
Dilbert - The most recent addition to the RGJ's Sunday Comics. Scott Adams is a vegetarian & will turn 52 years old next month. He lives in Dublin, in Contra Costa County. Dilbert celebrated its 20th Anniversary this year.
Cathy - Cathy Guisewite is 58 & lives in Los Angeles.
Hagar the Horrible - Dik Browne died in 1989 at age 71. His son Chris, aged 55, now draws the especially unfunny Hagar. He lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which Forbes magazine named "#1 Best Small Place For Business And Careers in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009".
The Family Circus - Bil Keane is 86 years old & has lived in Paradise Valley, Arizona, since he began drawing The Family Circus forty-nine years ago.
The Wizard of Id - More like, the Wizard of STUP-Id. Grant Parker & Johnny Hart co-created it in 1964 & both died in 2007 (at ages 86 & 76.) Jeff Parker, Grant's son, took over in 1997 & lives in Front Royal, Virginia. Does anyone know when he was born?
Shoe - Jeff MacNelly died in 2000 at age 52 of Lymphoma. He lived in Flint Hill, Virginia, & later in Key West, which is also home to Ernest Hemingway's six-toed cats. Shoe is currently written by Chris Cassatt, Gary Brookins, & Susie MacNelly, shadowy humorless figures of darkness.
Doonesbury - Garry Trudeau is sixty years old & lives in New York City. He was the first comic strip artist to win a pulitzer prize, in 1975.
Sally Forth - Greg Howard created Sally Forth in 1982 & passed it over to Francesco Marciuliano in 1999. Marciuliano lives in New York City & also writes for the Onion. The Wikipedia does not tell us any of their birthdates, but it does explain that "Sally's name is a play on words - 'to sally forth' means to set out on an adventure." (It occurs to me that this strip was added to the RGJ later in my life also...)
Mother Goose & Grim - Mike Peters is 65 & lives in Dayton, Ohio.
B.C. - Johnny Hart is the same cartoonist from The Wizard of Id, & his daughter Perri Hart & grandson Mason Mastroianni took it over in 2007.
Ziggy - Tom Wilson lives! & is 78 in Montgomery, Ohio! But Ziggy has been drawn for two decades by his son Tom Wilson II (pictured to the right), who lives in Loveland, Ohio.
Dennis the Menace - Hank Ketcham died in 2001 at 81 years old. It is now written by Marcus Hamilton and Ron Ferdinand. The punchline in today's strip is "Her cookies are NAG-FREE."
Blondie - Chic Young created Blondie in 1930, & died in 1976 at age 72. His son Dean Young, age 70, is the current head writer. The head artist since 2002 is John Marshall, who lives in Binghampton, New York.
Prince Valliant - Hal Foster died in 1982 at age 89. He was a Canadian & lived most of his life in Chicago. William Randolph Hearst allowed Foster to retain full ownership of Valliant when he commisioned the strip in 1936. Current writer Mark Schultz, age 53, lives in Northeast Pennsylvania. Current illustrator Gary Gianni is 54 & a life-long Chicagoan. I didn't realize that Prince Valliant has had a continuous narrative since the 1930s. I have never successfully read a whole strip.
Beetle Bailey - Mort Walker is 85 & still does Beetle Bailey with his sons Greg & Brian. His studio in Connecticut employs six of his nine children. I love his website here.
Frank & Ernest - Bob Thaves died in 2006 at age 82. It is currently done by (beginning to recognize a pattern?) his son Tom Thaves.
Marvin - Tom Armstrong created Marvin in 1982, & lives in Florida. Why is it so hard to find out anything about the mysterious Mr Armstrong on the internet??
Born Loser - Art Samsom died in 1990 at age 70. His son, Chip, now writes the strip from a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.

What have we learned! My thesis that these stale comics were drawn by old people was MOSTLY WRONG. More than half of them have been taken over by younger old men, & a full eight of them are done by the original artists' sons or daughters. Who knew that comic strips were such a patriarchal business, each one of these shadows of thier father like a powerless Kim Jong-Il, daily toiling to make America laugh. I wish the best to all of the above mentioned working artists & funnymen. But in the words of Robert Allen Zimmerman (Age 67), "Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall!"

Still in full-swing Palin Mode with thirty hour count-down to the Veep Debate:

I just saw Doonesbury's above strips from last week, which are in a similar vein to my below proposal for a Sarah Palin video-game. (If they're too small, just go HERE & read all six.) Trudeau has a nice conclusion to the strips, with B.D. (the former football playing, war veteran, who used to be gung-ho for Nixon in the '70s) enjoying the cognitive dissonance of what type of roll-model Mrs Palin can aspire to be. His grin is priceless, I haven't seen him this happy since he lost his leg & helmet (it had to be surgically removed.)

Sarah Palin is often mockingly compared to Northern Exposure, but I'm not convinced that Wasilla (a suburb of Anchorage & fourth-largest city) has much in common with David Chase's lovely fictional Cicely, Alaska. Palin's hunky-dority is sometimes reminiscent of the character Shelly Vincoeur, tho - like, calling her husband the "First Dude" is totally something Shelly would do. Anyway, CNN just did some investigation into the claim that the Governor has ever seen Russia from Alaska, one of her oft-repeated credentials for foreign policy experience. She's never been to the place you can see Russia - the tiny town ("at the end of the road" as Tom Bodett would say, or far past it in this case) of Diomede, with only 150 residents, which can always see twenty-four hours into the future, & the various residents in this short clip reminded me much more of a real Cicely:



I apologize to anyone who spent all of last night trying to view this blog, you really should have given up & gone out. It's unhealthy to spend all night trying to load non-responsive blogs. It seems that Blogger has fixed whatever problem it inflicted on many of the Blogosphere's finest. Also, because it was buried a few posts below, I invite you to listen to Hotel Universe's new album 19 & 74, from Grainne's partner in Brooklynood, Nick Szydlowski: Download it an unzippable file HERE!

RELATED UPDATE: The shape-note score has been added to the song TOXICODENDRON below.

And please meet us here at 6pm Western Time for the VP debates.

Apologies: First Weekend in September & Baseball Metaphors

And speaking of processed beverages & community gatherings in the American South (to which many local California singers travel for the many August & September singings), the Santa Cruz Organic (produced in Chico, California) makes the best sweet tea I've ever tasted, & it's saving me from surely wilting on this hot day in Berkeley. I had heard that it was against the law to sell tea in a restaurant in certain counties in the south without also selling Sweet Tea, but looking at Sweet Tea's wikipedia entry, apparently that was just an April Fool's joke. Well, who's laughing now, Georgia House of Representatives? God, I can't handle some of these hot days, tho - I become very inertial.

Which brings us to what's missing. I apologize that politics & live-blogging have immoderately usurped itwaslost.org, but we're taking steps to remedy this. We plan on live-blogging one or two of the debates, & of course not completely ignoring the next two months of this "close" election--; but noticeably missing are the gaps in the narrative from Bulgaria, Morroco & Indonesia, the latest new tunes from my microphone, the completion of several unfinishable epic nonsense poems, every & any words from our traveling ice-climbing correspondent, & reports on this website's progress & ongoing projects. This post should do something about that last category, & I'll report about this post's report in coming days. In the meantime, a few quotes from the convention:

"George W. Bush came into office on third base, & then he stoled second."

-Gov. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio), 26 August 2008,
Democratic National Convention

“I’m sure you remember a girl from Kansas who said there’s no place like home. Well, in John McCain’s version, there’s no place like home & a home & home & home."

-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kansas) 26 August 2008,
Democratic National Convention

And please note the following links:
-Brains' blog about World Soccer & German Literature.
-Pele's travel narration.
-The link to today's Doonesbury strip, in case any of you haven't been following America's national epic.
-Mortified: These are excellent staged readings of people's teenage writings, including teenage poetry, diary entries, plays, movies, & the one I went to in San Francisco was intensely funny.
-Elisa Lopez's arctic travels & beyond.
-Post Secret: anonymous post cards of people's secrets.
-Looks like Sam Amidon will be featured on a compilation cd of hip covers of Sacred Harp songs, you can hear it at this myspace.
-Unfortunately, the excerpt from John Adam's upcoming memoir in the Aug. 25th New Yorker isn't online, but this interview with him is here. I like his genial & nostalgic mockery of the Cage-esque pieces he wrote in his 20's.
-Miss Daisy Press sent me a link to someone who proposed that Michael Palin was as qualified as Sarah Palin to be a "heart-beat" away from the comfy chair & soft cushions: http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2008/09/that-other-pali.html

Good Night, Ringo.

More Quotes: War on Christmas 2007 & some gauzy gleaming that the next generation is being nurtured by better literature

First, there's a new character in Doonesbury whom I'm particularly excited about, introduced today - (click on it to read it, & you can always read today's strip here.)

“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.

-New York Times, 21 December 2007, "Huckabee, Back in Iowa, Brings Christmas Message" by Paul Vitello. What's with Republicans & children's books? Bush claimed his favorite book was the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar, which came out when he was a teenager. And speaking of morality:

In Pullman's world, hope simply does not exist, because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events.

-from the official Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano, calling the film version of Pullman's The Golden Compass "the most anti-Christmas film possible."

Oh my God yes, they are protesting. They are pamphleting. The Catholic League and Focus on the Family and evangelical/fundamentalist Christian blogs from here to Colorado Springs, they are calling on their trembling armies to boycott the film because they believe that Pullman's brilliant books — which, by the way, if I had the power, I would place in the eager and lovely hands of every youngish human on the planet right now, but especially the girls — are not only aggressively anti-Christian, they ultimately describe, as their grand finale, nothing less than the death of God. This is what they say.

And here is the terrific thing: They are absolutely right.

-Mark Morford, "Jesus Loves His Dark Materials," 30 November 2007, San Francisco Chronicle.
At least this time, the Teletubby actually is gay.

If that's the case and Sweeney Todd works, there may be more. There's already talk of Mendes making a film of Sondheim's 1970 show Follies with a script by Aaron Sorkin. Meanwhile, in Hollywood to promote the movie, the composer found himself in conversation with Steven Spielberg. The director talked about wanting to film a musical himself. Sondheim's immediate response? 'Write one - don't take one from the stage.'

-David Benedict, "The singalong-a-slasher", The Gaurdian, 23 December 2007.
From the master himself: don't adapt, write your own.

Doonesbury's Bush-at-Warisms 2007: More settable texts for ambitious composers

Cartoon Review: Doonesbury strips, first week of September 2006

(click on the strip if it's too small to read)

The series of Doonesbury strips from Monday, September 4^th thru Saturday, September 9^th offer a nice commentary on Twenty-First Century battle. Ray, a soldier stationed in Iraq, is stressed that he is late to spend the night on the computer with his wife at home, May. She gives him matronly hell, as if he was just home late from the bar (“You think I like throwing up?”), but of course with added gravitas because his absence could have meant so much worse. As the strips progress, he is caught up in domestic dramas, which are distractions from or as demanding as warfare (“No, clockwise, idiot! You'll break the damn lint filter!”)

It's an unusual approach to discussing Iraq, in our country torn by opinions & false dichotomies. Trudeau can wrap up so many ideas in a format which has to be four frames long, some sort of punchline in the fourth, & dispensed in the slowest serialization any national epic has ever seen. (I was obsessed in college about the issue of America's “National Epic”... In a country with so much great literature, what was our Imperial Equivalent to Homer? How do Salinger or Twain, bards with an American voice, fit into a democratic materialistic American epic mold? A national epic has to be written sometime around the origin of the empire, contain integrated discussions of all the artistic & political issues the empire will face, be written in a poetry to equal no other, & yet be above itself with an aware irony. After college, of course, I read Moby Dick, & that settled the matter. But then what of Doonesbury? Can the American epic really be in novel form, when we would sing to the muses mostly in multimedia? Doonesbury chronicles America during the crucial era, commenting in depth & subtlety on American culture & politics in short daily installments from the sixties thru today, with dozens & dozens of main characters who have grown & continue to evolve. It could also be argued that the past forty years have shaped our empire more than the mid-1800s did... I could conclude that if Melville is our Virgil, than Trudeau is our Ovid.)

Doonesbury, with its “liberal bias”, manages to entertain & touch most Americans with the employment of several central techniques. First, its famous “love of the soldier / hate the war” attitude. Second, is it's remorseless critique of any politician, not just the Bushes. How followers in all demographics of America interpreted the first week of September's comics reveals the complexity of his vision. Larry Beasley from Milwaukee wrote to Trudeau:

Ray's email strips point something out (at least to me). It seems we as a nation are not taking this war seriously. I'm not old enough to remember the WW II rationing system or the mandatory recycling, and the draft ended during my last year in high school. Shame on me for not getting more involved. Considering the hardships soldiering brings with it (some of our troops have to pay for their own armor -- shouldn't it be standard issue for all combat/hazardous duty personnel?), shame on us all. Whatever victory may still be achieved, it will require more than cheerleading and empty expressions of support. God save the Republic.

He interpreted May's attitude as a stark contrast to how we idealize World War Two's civilian dedication & sacrifice. A woman from Temecula, CA, Stacy Swenck, meditated on the historical implications of e-mail versus letters:

Last week's series of strips has caught my attention like no other. I lost my dad, Robert Swenck, to Vietnam in 1971. I was only twelve when my dad died, and a few years ago I finally read the letters (about 100) he sent to my mom before he was killed. I only got to know my dad through those letters since my mom rarely mentioned him after he was killed. I worry that the families of today's soldiers are communicating through ephemeral means, and that there will not be letters left over for the kids to read when they grow up.

And a mother from Tuscan, AZ, Heather Deaver, compared it to her own paranoid experience, which of course can be viewed in contrast to pre-internet wars:

I just wanted to thank you for the recent strip on soldiers emailing from Iraq. My son is a 23-year-old Lance Corporal in the Marine Reserves. He began his first tour last week, when your strip was running. I had to laugh because I was also freaking out if I didn't get an email every day. My son very patiently explained that there are only so many computers, they have to sign up to use them, and they only get 20 minutes and he has a lot of email! Thanks for making me feel not so silly.

Alternately, it contains various thoughts on marital relations, which span peacetime, wartime, & whatever sort of high-tech conflict we're in now. Comic strip authors of the stupid variety often gear their strips to hit a simple chord, like “ha ha, my husband always has the same shit luck when he golfs, too – I'll cut this out & put it on my fridge.” There's really no comparison to what Gary Trudeau is doing.