The most enjoyable radio listening, by far, that I do these days is over the Net, playing BBC Radio 2. I first got interested because of Jonathan Ross, who did In Search of Steve Ditko. He does a Saturday show, and it’s so much fun, with such a fantastic range of music. Then I started listening to Steve Wright, because he’s supposed to have Petula Clark on as a guest soon. Again, I found the show to be fun, and I was really taken with the song mix. I have no interest in Rap, but Europop has a sound that I enjoy quite a lot. For example, this was one of the songs on Steve Wright’s program today.
This is “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)” by Spiller, with vocal by Sophie Ellis Bextor. I flip through Boston radio stations a lot, seeing if anything catches my ear, and almost nothing ever does, so it’s not as though I’m completely inattentive. So why is it I find so much on BBC Radio 2 I’ve never heard before that keeps me listening?
Bo Diddley had an original and highly influential sound. The audio player has a couple of his recordings.
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At the moment, none of the Google hosted Blogspot blogs I look at are working. It’s error 502, and that’s a bad gateway. Bad gateway! Bad!
This site is WordPress running on Web host iPower. They moved my site from Phoenix to Burlington, MA, not far from from here, and it’s home of iPower’s merger partner Endurance International. The latency times are a fraction of what they were, but throughput sucks. Often it takes 30-60 seconds after clicking log on, or save, for anything to happen. And FTP upload speed is now 150 KB/sec, compared to the consistent 550 KB/sec it had been (yes, that’s bytes, not bits, per second — I have FiOS!).
So either the line into the data center in Burlington doesn’t have enough capacity, or the server I’m on doesn’t have enough CPU for the sites it’s hosting. Maybe it needs TCP offloading. Whatever the cause, I won’t let this continue, and if I have to switch hosting services to see an improvement that’s what I’ll do.
I have read Monte Schulz’s essay in The Comics Journal, and it’s left me feeling quite relieved. I was one of the admirers of his father who anticipated Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis with a sense of, “now we’ll get the whole story.” And my initial reaction to Monte and his sister Amy’s complaints, which I’d read and heard before buying the book was, “well, of course they’re not going to like it, if it’s airing the family’s dirty laundry.”
When I first skipped through sections of the book, I was stunned by the revelations about Meredith as a wild child, and Sparky’s midlife crisis affair. The more I skimmed, the more it seemed the tone of the entire book was like a tabloid exposé, and I realized I had to stop jumping around and get into a start-to-finish reading.
Mostly what I found was information that seemed to have been well researched, but it was interwoven with a lot of amateur psychoanalysis, almost all of it very negative. I already knew a lot about Charles M. Schulz, and there was nothing of that man in the Michaelis book. Where was the love of cartooning? Why was there no sense of the enjoyment that Sparky had from dipping his pen in India Ink and dragging it across the paper? The fascination associated with creating something so unique and absorbing, with the simplest of tools, was missing. Totally. It’s just not there! The admiration that Michaelis claimed repeatedly to have for Charles Schulz seemed to not be in evidence. I’ll do a bit of amateur analysis myself, and say that I got more of a sense of resentment, if not jealousy.
It was as if Michaelis took delight in revealing something that he thought had completely eluded everybody else’s awareness and understanding of the man. But I already knew Schulz could be “prickly,” and that he had his down moods. My best buddy Dennis Rogers had known one of the Schulz’s former skating instructors, and we knew about the tension between Sparky and Joyce in the final years of their marriage. So we had the “inside scoop,” so to speak, over 25 years ago.
Yet nothing about these insights ever tainted my admiration of Schulz as a man, an artist, and an original creative force. In fact, he was all the more interesting to me. But as hard as I tried to not let David Michaelis taint my appreciation, I’m ashamed to say he managed to do it. He twisted everything around to such a pervasive, if not perversive, extent that as I got close to the end of the book I’d had enough, and I put it down. I eventually went back and skimmed through the rest, concentrating on his telling of Schulz’s death, which is brief.
In his TCJ essay, Monte goes into great detail about his father’s illness and his passing. Monte’s descriptions are instructive, because he provides a tremendous antidote to the hubris of Michaelis writing in an overly intimate style, as if he had been a witness to many of the events in Schulz’s life; when in fact he never met Sparky. The closest he got to knowing Sparky was from talking and corresponding with Monte and other family members, yet he used next to nothing of what Monte had given him. Further, quotes he attributed to Monte were misrepresented and misused, as Monte pointed out in an exchange he and I had on Shokus Internet Radio, and he cites the misquoting again in the essay.
For all of the commentary that Monte has offered to the media, and provided on Cartoon Brew, as well as for this blog, the essay is exactly what he promised it would be. It’s not a collection of what he has already said. It’s a cohesive outpouring of rebuttal against Michaelis’ mischaracterizations and an affirmation of his father’s full qualities, both good and bad.
I have always asked myself about people I admire, “Would I want to know this person? Would I like him or her as a person?” In the case of the Beatles, the answer with Paul has always been yes, and for John a fairly certain no. Last fall I asked myself, “How could I have been so wrong about Charles M. Schulz? According to this he isn’t somebody I would have wanted to know.”
I’m happy to proclaim that I once again feel as I did about Sparky Schulz. Thanks to Monte Schulz, the last vestige of the tainted feeling I had is now gone, and I very much wish I could have known his father. Thanks, Monte.
