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Tuesday, October 28, 2003 |
Rats 
Today I spent the morning being photographed for an upcoming piece in a local magazine. Normally this isn’t my idea of fun but I consider my time there well spent because the photographer there was so informative.
More specifically, he taught me a lot about rats that I didn’t know. It turns out that he has, for some time now, had rats for pets and thinks they’re great. In fact, he had three rats in a cage in his office, and brought a couple of them down for my inspection. These weren’t those big, fierce looking rats that you associate with hanging around garbage cans; they were only about three inches long, and beautifully groomed. Moreover, they seemed intelligent and affectionate. He gave me one to hold and in no time, it was crawling affectionately over my chest, burrowing into the crevasses of my shirt and licking my hand playfully.
His owner told me that they’re smart enough to respond when they hear their names called and, unlike other rodents, seem to play with you rather than on you. I also read some literature in his office that dispelled some misconceptions about them that most people have. It turns out, for example, that they’re much cleaner than is generally appreciated. It just goes to show you that just about any creature can be a friend to humankind with the right upbringing.
12:33:02 PM
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Friday, October 24, 2003 |
What Do You Know I appeared as a guest (via the telephone) on Michael Feldman’s show, “What do you know,” a PBS comedy –quiz program. I’d appeared on Feldman’s show live in Cleveland once and really dig it. Feldman is a top-notch standup comedian and also quite knowledgeable and humane. I was told that our segment came off very well by listeners and I certainly was happy with it. He remembered a lot about me from previous appearance, and also about my wife and kid, Danielle, and asked questions about all of us. It was nice that he took an interest in Joyce and Danielle. I also liked the fact that he kept our conversation so loose and open, not trying to dominate and leaving me room to get some laughs. MC’s like Feldman are rare and I love working with them. It’s a shame that quest appearances on that show are spread so far apart. I’ve been on twice in about six years and that’s a lot. I’d be on every week if I could.
10:27:03 AM
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Monday, October 20, 2003 |
Mars Needs Women  "
Mars Needs Women” announces the title of the DVD we’ve rented. Our ceiling fan is again out-performing most air conditioners as July melts on. In a week, we’ll start frequenting airports again, to promote “American Splendor.” For now, no one wants to travel much further than the kitchen refrigerator, which is stocked with frozen juice bars. I chew the sticks when I’m finished. Danielle and Harvey don’t.
The angry red planet first tries to vacuum up a few well-dressed women from somewhere in North America, but Martian technology fails. We see some jerky stop-action, but the ladies seem to be evaporating en route. This may be because the Mars men are led by Tommy Kirk. I remember him tap dancing with Annette Funicello in some Disney flick. His are some low tech aliens who arrive in scuba suits and elf boots, carrying Ray-o-Vac flashlights.
Tommy’s Martians will fail in their attempt to bring back fertile wombs for their dying world. Not even the sexy space geneticist and DNA expert who falls in love with Tommy during his 24 hours on Earth will make it into the Mars bound saucer as it flees an angry U.S. general and his relentless team of defending forces. I’m not sure we’ll fare much better when we make our first appearance at the San Diego Comic Con. Most comics fans crave genre fiction, action adventure. No one in our movie wears spandex and actor Paul Giamatti, while 25 years younger than Harvey, who he plays, is always the first to point out that he’s less muscle bound than my hero. The real reason we’re going is the Hobbit hook-up. If she’s lucky, Danielle will get to meet some people her own short size.
12:17:42 PM
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Friday, October 17, 2003 |
Car Repairs
Oh, I never did tell you what happened to my car, a ’93 Geo. I left the story off when the car had to have seven brake lines repaired and the garage couldn’t come up with the parts, which the owner said he couldn’t find in Cleveland. So I had to leave my car with him and rent a car, for almost $200 a week. Into the second week I kept calling the garage owner, a good guy and very competent, about when the parts were coming. He’d always tell me that the distributor told him they were already en route via UPS, but the next day they didn’t show up. So I was just about to leave on a promotional tour, feeling I’d never get the car back, when the garage owner calls me and tells me the parts have come in and the car’s been repaired. Man despite the fact that I would have to lay out $1400 for the brake job and rent-a-car I was overjoyed. Something worked.
When I got to the garage the owner told me that two of the parts he’d gotten from the distributor had been the wrong ones, but he’d been able to scramble around and get the right ones. I’m telling you, a good, reliable garage mechanic is one of the most important people in our lives.
12:05:53 PM
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Friday, October 10, 2003 |
Cat Scan
I've had cancer twice, and today I go to my HMO, Kaiser, to get blood tests and a cat scan to see if I'm still in remission. This morning I got up early to get some stuff mailed at the post office, so I could get to Kaiser by 9:00 AM. I got there at 8:57, actually, but there were still about a dozen people ahead of me. That made me kind of nervous, because I knew I'd have to go home by 10:00 AM to get a Fed Ex delivery that had been sent to me. I hate to miss deliveries because it's such a hassle getting them back. Sometimes you have to go to Fed Ex headquarters out in the sticks. I got home about ten minutes before the Fed Ex lady showed up with the package.
But then I had to go back to Kaiser at 2:00 PM to get the cat scan. I'm not suppose to eat or drink anything for four hours prior to taking the cat scan, but at 10:25 AM I took a bite out of a plum before remembering the no eating and throwing the rest of the plum away. So I'm thinking, "oh, no! I ate something three hours and thirty-five minutes before the cat scan, will that screw things up?" To be on the safe side I called the radiology department at Kaiser, and they told me I was OK, that I didn't have to postpone the cat scan twenty-five minutes, so I really wouldn't have eaten for four hours.
O.K., now it's 3:30 PM. I'm back from having my cat scan. It was all right. The technician had a tough time finding a vein she could use. She also asked me a lot of personal questions, which I welcome, it makes time go faster, and told me my foster kid was lucky to have me as a guardian. I don't know if she is, but it was nice to hear that anyway.
9:57:22 AM
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Tuesday, October 07, 2003 |
My Brother
My kid brother, he’s actually fifty seven, gave me a phone call from Indiana a couple of days ago, like he does almost every week, to see how I was doing. He’s been checking up on me regularly since 1990, when I was first diagnosed with cancer, and he gave me a large, belated wedding present to cover some of my expenses. Prior to that we’d had almost no contact in decades.
I was six years older than him, and ran with a different crowd. I liked sports, he didn’t, I was extroverted to the point of obnoxiousness, he was quiet. We didn’t have a whole lot in common.
Well, we were both into music. I was a jazz critic, very concerned with the avant-garde. My brother’s passion was classical trumpet playing, but what he was interested in doing was becoming as good a player technically as possible. He didn’t play publicly, just took lessons with the best teachers he could and practiced assiduously.
Why he chose to stick with me over the past several years, when I’ve been so sick and troubled, I don’t know. But I’m so thankful that he has. As I said, we talk on the phone almost weekly about family, trumpet playing, whatever we can think of. He’s been closer to me than friends I’ve had for years. I guess he believes in the concept of families sticking together, to combat prejudice as they had to do in Jewish Poland, where my parents are from. At one time I thought that was an outdated custom in America. Now I’m so grateful to him for helping me keep afloat.
4:50:43 PM
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Thursday, October 02, 2003 |
NYU Speech
I was in New York to give a speech to NYU students and others at the NYU student center. Lately, I’ve been trying to boost my income by making speeches at various colleges and universities, most of which will be scheduled this spring. (Anybody need a speaker –let me know.) Anyway, I really enjoy talking to college students. Generally they’re enthusiastic and knowledgeable. I led off by talking about why I valued the comic art form so highly, then talked about how the American Splendor movie came about. The rest of the evening was Q&A. The room was filled with students who asked me. Intelligent questions and were very courteous. By way of showing my appreciation I stated until I’d answered all the question, signed all the autographs and gotten my picture taken as often as people wanted.
4:44:06 PM
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Monday, September 29, 2003 |
Dancing The Red Sea parted during last night’s total eclipse, as the intergalactic sentinels, who have been studying our planet, finally made it to the United Nations and announced that they were taking us in hand and turning all our weapons of mass destruction into solar powered food synthesizers. That’s the sort of miracle it takes to get Harvey up and out to a concert or club and, Lo! The three of us went dancing last night.
Harvey loves music, lives music, plays music and reviews CDs nearly every single day. That sort of super saturation isn’t what keeps him away from live performances. He’s got allergies and asthma that rule out closed in, smoky venues. Even though he’s retired from the VA, he’s still on working stiff hours: in bed at 9:00 and up around 5 AM. He doesn’t drink, hates drunks. Not exactly pub-crawling material.
Harvey likes an Austin based band, Brave Combo (URL here) and stays in touch with bandleader Carl Finch. The last time BC played Cleveland, we might have made it out the door if Harvey had not been flattened by a second go ‘round with lymphoma. He’s been doing OK lately. And the Beachland Ballroom (URL here) is a comfortable, all ages place run by a friend, Cindy Barber. It used to be a Croatian dance hall. Murals of musicians and dancers in ethnic dress still grace the wall. We could bring Danielle.
I remember the three of us dancing with the crowd at an outdoor zydeco concert in our neighborhood park about five years ago. I specifically remember Danielle doubled over with laughter at the sight of her recently acquired guardians in motion because we looked, to her, “like a parakeet on her perch and a gasping fish out of water.” Harvey is not an easy partner to follow. If he ever took lessons, it was from the Zero Mostel school of crazy old Jewish guys who shut their eyes and flail.
We didn’t do so badly last night. Harvey stayed out until 1 AM. Danielle seems to have accepted our wobbling ways or else we’ve improved. Her ruling, expressed with the merest tinge of adolescent exasperation, was “You guys did OK. If you were actually embarrassing me, I would have told you at the time. And left you.”
10:53:49 AM
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Friday, September 26, 2003 |
Getting Old I was looking at some videotape shot of me at the Cannes Film Festival last May and, I'll tell you, I'm not only getting old, but looking like I'm getting old. There are all these turkey wrinkles in my neck and I'm practically bald. On top of that my memory fails me sometimes these days. I'm not too happy about the fact that I've got nowhere to go but downhill physically, but there's nothing to do but accept it and try to take care of myself so I don't slip too fast. But I've got this cousin who's in worse shape than me that way. She's almost eighty now, and she 's got some kind of dementia. When I came back from California recently I had eighteen messages on my telephone answering machine. Close to half of them were from her, asking me to give her a call because she felt lonely and isolated. Each call indicated she wasn't sure whether she made similar previous calls to me. She'd say things like, "I can't remember whether I put a message like this on your machine or not." When I did get home I called her right away and she was confused. She'd keep on asking me where she could see "American Splendor," and I would tell her when it opened in Cleveland and she would go to mark the date on her calendar only to find she'd marked it previously. She keeps on repeating things over and over, not remembering that she'd said them before.
She says that she wants me to call her because talking to me makes her feel good. Believe me, I feel good that I can make at least one person a bit happier. I've known her all my life and she's been close to me. I'll call her every day from now on and hope it makes her feel a little better. Starting today.
11:38:01 AM
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Monday, September 22, 2003 |
Luggage
We’re going on the road for the next two weeks. I’m a fast, efficient packer. Harvey’s anxious and obsessive. We used to go to bed, packed and ready to go. In the middle of the night I would wake up and find that Harvey had unpacked everything and spread it all over the floor. He had to make sure something or other was really included in one of the bags. The rustling and grumping noises that got me up were the sounds of him failing to fit everything back together, into the suitcases.
He’s more relaxed these days, or so I thought. He panicked at the LAX luggage carousel on our last trip. The suitcase he tried to swing up and off the rolling belt wouldn’t budge. Neither would Harvey, who held it in a half tackle, pulled along with his legs hanging off. As he rode around, half lying on the bag, he began to mow down bystanders with his feet.
Women shrieked, fearing their children were in danger. (The kids were bent over double, laughing.) “How rude!” “So dangerous!” “Who IS that man?” It took a while for me to break through the melee and grab his belt. He was riding the wrong generic black bag with wheels.
Among Danielle’s toys I found 6 identical baby dolls dressed in pink pajamas and Christmas bows, stamped with some fast food logo. They once filled out a plastic bag of Sailor Moon characters found at a yard sale. I’ve put a noose around each of the idiot children’s neck and am tying them to our suitcases. Will they help Harvey identify our bags as we touch down in San Francisco? Stay tuned. Or come on down to the airport and watch the Olympics.
10:49:24 AM
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Friday, September 19, 2003 |
Sleep
My favorite activity right now is sleeping. It’s been like that for some time now. I’m putting all this pressure on myself to get freelance writing jobs and also to use the lap top computer my wife got for me. I’m suc ha klutz that I may take five to ten times longer than the average technophobe to learn it, but I’m working on it every day. I go after the writing gigs because after the movie has come and gone, I’ll still need writing jobs to support myself.
So I get up at seven o’clock and on Mondays I cut the grass with my ancient push mower. If I let it grow more than a week it gets too high to cut with that mower. Then I go back into the house and get busy. I’m working on articles and comic book stories that I’ve hustled up. Or I’m on the phone trying to scare up more, hustling my publicity agents to not only set up newspaper and magazine articles about me, but to see if the newspapers and magazines have an interest in me writing something for them which I would, naturally, get paid for. I may not always work at a frantic pace, but I feel frantic all the time.
Around six o’clock, a little of the edge gets taken off my nervousness by fatigue. The sleepier I get the better I like it. I could go to bed at 7:30 or 8:00 every night, but my wife doesn’t like that so I stay awake for a while longer. When I do go to bed and sleep, blissful sleep overcomes me as I become anxiety free.
10:12:40 AM
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Tuesday, September 16, 2003 |
Reviews
No matter how many excellent reviews of “American Splendor” have been written; no matter how many prizes (Sundance, Cannes and others) it’s won, I still worry about it doing well commercially. So much seems to hinge on that. If my writing can be sold through a movie, maybe people will start buying it directly in book form,
More editors will hire me and the financial uncertainty of my old age will be reduced. So I’m really concerned about how “American Splendor” is received over the next several weeks. Highbrow critics have really liked it at festivals and special showings, but what will the others think? What will the general public think? We’ll all find out in a month or so. If my work doesn’t start selling better in some way or another my last years are going to be spent bugging editors of arts and entertainment weeklies if I can write $25 record reviews for them. I’ll be an old man, scrambling for nickels and dimes.
10:47:34 AM
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Friday, September 12, 2003 |
Checkup
I’ve had cancer twice now, so I was a little apprehensive about going in to see my oncologist last Friday at 1:40 for a checkup, but I wasn’t as shook up as I used to be. I’m kind of old now and I’ve had a shot at trying to do what I wanted to do in life. Any time I live past now is a bonus.
So my appointment was at 1:40, but that morning I had to do interviews in this office with local media people about the “American Splendor” movie. That took a couple of hours and it was noon when I got home. I started writing a record review I had to get done over the weekend, and really got into it. When I looked up I saw it was 1:40. So, wow, I had almost forgotten about my appointment. I tore down there and was only 15 minutes late. They were running behind anyway, so it didn’t matter. Well, I checked out OK; I’m still in remission. So for a while now I’ll probably be worrying about cancer on the back burner. Until the next checkup rolls around.
9:14:42 AM
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Monday, September 08, 2003 |
London Now I’m in London, but so far, I’ve only had to do one day of intensive publicity and it doesn’t look like anything else is coming up. There was a nice “American Splendor” for people in the industry the other night with a cordial and friendly Q&A session that followed.
I’ve had a brief look around the city and it certainly impresses me on my first visit to it. It’s busy and crowded but seems to be a bit easier to get around than New York. We went to Henry VIII’s castle yesterday and had a very nice time. The diplays were nicely set up and they even had some actors performing period piece playlets. On another occasion I hope to be able to take in more of London’s historical sites and museums. This time we only managed to catch a couple of theatrical productions which my wife and daughter were keen to see.
Tomorrow, if all goes well, we’ll be in Cambridge to visit a friend of Joyce’s. I’ll be leaving for the states before Joyce and Danielle, because I have a TV appearance to make in New York, and then it’s back to Cleveland where we get back to the domestic routine again. I must say I miss my hometown. I’ve been on the road for most of July and all of August and would like to sleep in my own bed again and get Danielle started in her new education routine which includes part home schooling and part public high school.
10:04:22 AM
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