Memories of Peter Falk

Inside Television 560
Publication Date7-2-11
By: Hubert O’Hearn

Under normal circumstances, what with the publication date running smack dab in the middle of the Canada Day long weekend, I’d be adding to my on-again off-again inductions to the list of Canadians You Need to Know. But darn it all, Peter Falk went and died this week and an actor of his stature cannot be left unmourned.

The short, scruffy, one-eyed Italian shared something with Bogart - a presence that surpassed the material. When you thought of the movie or the television show, you remembered it through what Peter Falk did. As an example, if you say The Princess Bride to me, I think of the narration. Even if the material was rotten (Murder by Death was one of the few Neil Simon flops, and believe me it was a flop worthy of Ric Flair) Falk still made it watchable.

It’s the great unteachable quality, as everyone from Elia Kazan to Lee Strasberg to casting director Michael Shurtleff to your high school teacher casting the umpteenth production of Grease knows. There are certain people you as an audience just plain enjoy watching on stage or screen and it has nothing to do with looks, voice or intelligence. It helps if you have looks, voice and intelligence - certainly the latter makes life easier on everyone concerned - but these are not prerequisites.

But, just like walking through your back gate to discover a unicorn grazing on your petunias, what we are going to discuss is rather obvious: Columbo. One of my fondest memories of early adolescence was when Johnny Carson would have Peter Falk on as a guest the week before the newest Columbo would air on the NBC Sunday Night Mystery Movie. (That, by the way, was a Murderer’s Row - pun intended - of mystery series: featuring Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife.) There were three guests on the old Tonight Show that I would be allowed to stay up and watch on school nights: Don Rickles, Bob Hope and Peter Falk. Well, and Mort Sahl too, but I digress.

The Columbos always had a twist, a trick, a way of seeing to them. For instance, one murderer was quite literally undone by the way a shoe was tied. If you tie someone’s else’s shoe, the loops will be the opposite of how you would tie it if the shoe was on your own foot. Falk would lay these little puzzles out for Carson and the ever-curious  Johnny would play along.

Ya gotta love a guy who loves a good dog...

I loved it. For my money there have been three television detectives that deserve the Mount Rushmore treatment. Many are good, but three are great. One is Columbo. Two is David Suchet as Hercule Poirot. And three is the late John Thaw as Inspector Morse. Funny thing: I can’t remember a single punch-out or a slowed-down bullet filmed in CGI among them. Surely a coincidence? Not at all - they used their brains driven by their unique and quirky personalities.

We’ll never again get to see and hear the little man in the raincoat turn around, push a curl off his forehead with a right hand holding the stub of a cigar and say, ‘Oh, one more thing.’ I will miss that. And to use my usual sign-off originated by frequent Columbo guest star and occasional director Patrick McGoohan...Be seeing you.

Passion and the Artist

Passion and the Artist:
a meditation

by: Hubert O’Hearn
June 24, 2011


Alright, so I’m a YouTube junkie. I admit it. I enjoy it. It’s an addiction that won’t kill you. I’m of the mindset that there are two senses, or sense receptacles that are like Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine in that they can take you to an exact moment in time and open the grey steel file drawer of memory that contains everything you felt at that moment and allow you to re-live it like uncapping a bottle of fine parfum. The senses fill and the mind expands and for a moment you are not Here but rather There. In other words, the world’s cheapest vacation.

When it works - when the inner time travel truly opens the doors of memory and perception, you can walk through that past day while simultaneously see it through the eyes of the time that you are actually living - Now and Then. At once. It’s a shifting of perspectives. I see then as it would be now; I see now as the outcome of then.

I just experienced that kind of moment. I was drifting through old Fleetwood Mac videos. There’s a degree of regret associated with that. Big Mac was so, well, Big that they were under-appreciated. No matter how many millions of records the White Album and Rumors sold, Fleetwood Mac never had the ‘coolness factor’. I should know. I was there. My primetime was their primetime. Coolness required a certain risk of discovery - an undiscovered country - an easter egg hunt culminating in a cry of, “Look what I found!”

Of course, time teaches us that no one really discovers anything, or at least you and I don’t. The quirkiest bands in history - I’m thinking of a band you’ve never heard of called BeBop Deluxe - first ‘discovered’ themselves obviously, then an agent, then a road manager, then a publicist, then a label, then a producer, then an engineer and Christ knows how many studio stan musicians, cover artists, record store hucksters and radio payola providers there were before you (or me)  in your (or my) dorm pulled off the shrink wrap, put the nedle on the record and yelled down the hall, ‘Look what I found!’

Yeah. Sure you did. You’re the guy who discovered that Wednesday follows Tuesday. Atta wayta go.

Fleetwood Mac never had that moment - or if it did, it was before Bob Welch left the band and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks signed on. Within months - months! - of the White Album’s release they dominated the Top 40 like no one had since The Beatles and no one has since, except for Michael Jackson for a few months in the mid-80s.

Naturally, they were hated. After everyone - and again, I was there - had loved every single’s first 15 plays the moaning started. Because Big Mac was everywhere, it was crowding out airplay for all the little engine that could BeBop Deluxe bands. It was the equivalent of a musical eclipse that left all the rest lacking in sunlight. ‘I’m sorry, your photosynthesis is on back order.’

And so it became and so it was that the self-proclaimed Smart Set ignored Fleetwood Mac. Everything immensely popular must face the backlash - which, it occurs to me now, is the curse unleashed on Barack Obama’s presidency. ‘You’re gig’, the Smart Set says, ‘We must find the flaws; for in the flaws there is TheTruth.’

Years go by. And I find myself in 2011 watching a video from 1975 of Fleetwood Mac performing Rhiannon in some cheap-ass bar or small hockey arena in Maryland. And it - yes! - it blows me away. I hear the band as though for the first time. I appreciate Mick Fleetwood’s drumming as though for the first time; similarly Lindsey Buckingham on guitar etc. etc.

This gets me to thinking, seeing the Then in terms of the Now. I find an answer to a question that has troubled me. You see....by profession I am a book reviewer. It’s a very nice job. I get new books for free, read them and express my opinion in a thousand words or less.

But.

I don’t file, post, or email negative reviews. I’m not big on wasting people’s time. Heck, I’m, not big on wasting MY time., Still, were I so moved I could positively (or negatively) lacerate no end of authors who send me books that are, in a word, complete crap.

This issue has troubled me. Every tine I read a horrible novel I question my own standards. ‘Why is this thing terrible whereas the last book was great?’ What in hell ARE the standards anyway?

I gratefully received my answer in that long-ago recorded Fleetwood Mac video. I watched Stevie Nicks sing and the rest play to Rhiannon and by the end I thought, “how did they do the next song after all that?” Seemingly and logically, every ounce of energy in the band should have been expended.

But that’s the point, the rub, the nut of it all. Fleetwood Mac became this gigantic force because it’s members, well,  cared. The next song didn’t matter. What mattered was what they were doing now. They played each note with - yes! - passion.

That is what separates the great books from the weedy majority. The great books are a mix of skill, and passion and writing for the Audience of One. (Truly, every good book is a conversation) The rest....well, they try their best to get it right. In trying so hard to get the grammar right, they lose sight of the passion that first informed their original insight.

So if there is a lesson amongst all this, it IS this: care, be passionate, love your creation. In terms of what others’ think? Who cares! You are in complete control of only one thing......you.

The Last American Hero is Rory McIlroy! Yes!

The Last American Hero is Rory McIlroy! Yes!

Inside Television 559
Publication Date: 6-24-11
By: Hubert O’Hearn

It would have been in the March 1965 issue of Esquire, when that magazine was the home to the best journalism written in America, that some young writer named Tom Wolfe made a serious splash on the national scene. His article was a long profile about a stock car driver from Appalachia running under the title: ‘The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson! Yes!’

I was seven at the time, and I’d never seen anything like it. Several multiples of seven later, I still have never seen anything like that story, which is frankly sad. Personalized journalism runs in long cycles - from the Lincoln Steffens/Upton Sinclair generation to nobody - to Wolfe, Gay Talese and Hunter Thompson to nobody - and now it’s re-emerging again (thank God) thanks to bloggers, the Huffington Post and papers like The Guardian. No one else though has had Tom Wolfe’s style. Perhaps it is just too unique to him, no matter how many ellipses, sound effects and exclamation marks crackling like Fourth of July sparklers one scatters across the paragraphs. But I digress.

Tom Wolfe...the scary part is, he was about
to mow the lawn when this was taken

Both the subtext and the selling point of Wolfe’s story was that an America in recovery from the JFK assassination and risking being swamped by the wave of cultural change that would flip the mores of the 60s like a 45 record that had Doris Day on one side and Sunshine of Your Love on the other - that America was looking with lonely eyes for something simple and understandable that it could embrace and understand.

Which leads, perhaps not naturally but it leads, to last week’s U.S. Open at Congressional. I’m not in the habit of writing about recently completed sports competitions, except to apologize for misleading betting tips. But I was watching Rory McIlroy’s absolute crushing of the record book (it was like McIlroy was the second guy to have ever played golf, and the first guy had sucked) while at the same time emailing back and forth to Scott Murray of The Guardian who was live-blogging the event.

Scott and I had done this before - at The Masters in April - when young Rory had collapsed quite literally in tears on the back nine on Sunday afternoon. We’d been horror-struck then; we were awe-struck now. It wasn’t even so much the golf - it was the gallery and the instant iconography that were wonders to behold.

American sports audiences and the media which feed them tend to the jingoistic. It was on this same Congressional golf course in 1997 that heckling crowds had unglued the Scotsman Colin Montgomerie to the point that he blew perhaps his best chance at a major championship. Fourteen years later, I think that almost any in the gallery would have offered a pen for the 22 year old Northern Irishman to sign his immigration papers. NBC’s Jimmy Roberts and the rest of the crew described the curly-haired kid with the sweet putting stroke in near-Biblical terms. There was a saviour amongst us! Hallelujah and pass the Titleists!

As I wrote Scott at the time, it figured. Who was there on the sports scene to take America’s mind off two wars, an empire in decline, an economy in worse decline, a clown car of Republican presidential candidates, et al ad infinitum? All the other sporting pretenders had failed. America loved Brett Favre until he turned into just another horn dog, and similarly Ben Roethlisberger. Kobe Bryant is an arrogant, sullen star and LeBron James makes Kobe look like Mr. Rogers. No one cares about baseball or tennis anymore and Tiger was … well we know what Tiger was.

I don’t know whether to feel happy for young McIlroy or be frightened for him. He’s on the wave now, like Laird Hamilton 60 feet in the air on that big curve that wants to take you closer to the sky but if you slip it will drive you into the rocks below. But for one Sunday afternoon, you could believe in something good again.

Be seeing you.

Monsters Conquer the World!: Lady Gaga

Monsters Conquer the World!: Lady Gaga

Inside Television 558
Publication Date: 6-17-11
By: Hubert O’Hearn

It may seem that I’m arriving late to the party that is Lady Gaga, but really I’ve just been waiting for the appropriate television-related angle to serve as an invitation. Last Saturday it arrived in the form of The Monster Ball Concert on HBO. Verdict? It was the best concert I have ever seen, either live or on tape. Easily the best.

Bear in mind that I go back a ways with this music stuff. I vividly remember The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan show in 1964 that turned empty barber shops into busy record stores almost overnight; much as I still remember in a more dreamy fashion Stevie Nicks singing a song about ‘an old Welsh witch’ named Rhiannon on The Midnight Special in 1976. In the years since there have been rock, blues and jazz shows seen from living room chairs, festival lawns and peering through the sweet and happy blue haze rising from the audience at Maple Leaf Gardens. All memorable in their own way.

Stevie Nicks ... because it's my web page
and I love Stevie Nicks

Lady Gaga gets it, or should I say It? Let me explain. I was sent an indie novel/memoir the other week called 33 Days written by a guy named Bill See, about his rock band’s first road tour back in 1986. 33 Days should become a huge book in a year or so because Bill See gets It.

‘It’ is the truth of live music and the need to play. Pushing yourself out of the basement and onto a stage is born of both an escape from whatever private hells there are lurking and snapping in the basement corners or in the kitchen upstairs; as well as a need for the love that might await from an audience. Love me - I will play for you. Love me - because I need you. Love me - and I will love you back.

That is Lady Gaga in a nutshell. It’s not about the meat dress, penis shoes or sparklers flaring out of the crotch. Sinatra was wearing all those on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour in 1935, but that was on radio so who knew? (Just wanted to see if you’re paying attention.)

But those are just the attention-grabbers. The late poet and mentor to Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton came to Queen’s University for a week when I was a student there around 1980 or so. He told us that if we wanted to be poets and make a living out of it we should put a sandwich board over our heads and stomp up and down the street blowing a trumpet. Draw a crowd, get noticed, then let the art show its worth. Gaga lacks the trumpet so instead she plays the strumpet. Same difference.

She is not ‘a Madonna rip-off’ as some would have it any more than Madonna was a Carmen Miranda rip-off. If an actor plays the Harlequin role in a commedia, is he ripping off the previous actors who played the part or is he just putting on the costume the role calls for? The answer is obvious.

Lady Gaga works incredibly hard during her concert, proudly and profanely saying that she wasn’t doing any damn lip synching. Her voice is strong, her song-writing catchy, and while she is not a great dancer she is smart enough to cover her moves with great dancers around her.

But beneath the spectacle, the light that forms the shadow, is the It. The very end of the HBO show, behind the credits, is Gaga warming up with her back-up singers on Born This Way. Cynicism is my best defence in this world, but if the joy and love and passion I heard in a voice, stripped-down in a room is fake...well then Lady Gaga is the greatest hypnotist of all time.

Music is not about the notes. That’s for American Idol, X Factor, The Voice etc. etc. etc. Music is about the artist. Gaga reminds us of that. And the reward for the true artist is that the audience willingly lets them conquer the world.

Be seeing you.

- passion - anger - love

The AFTRA - JP Morgan Chase Lawsuit Explained

Inside Television 557

Publication Date: 6-10-11

By: Hubert O’Hearn





If this story was less complicated, it could serve as a perfect parable for the financial crises that continue to erupt around the globe following the near-Krakatoa explosion on 2008. This is a story about actors, a lawsuit and the structural errors of the American banking system.



The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) is the performers’ union representing some 80,000 actors, voiceover artists, recording artists and stunt persons. So you have included in that number everyone from Jennifer Lopez to Jon Bon Jovi to the guy who falls put of the building in a Jason Statham picture. Some names you know - most you never will.



Dues range from $63.90 per month, just to keep your card alive, to slightly over .73 % of earnings US per year if you’re really raking in the dough at over $100,000 per year. So that may not sound onerous, although I do remind the reader that at the lower end of the golfer Lee Trevino’s dictate that a pressure putt is one to win or lose a $5 bet when you have $2 in your pocket.



Besides negotiating day rates and worker safety with producers, what AFTRA does with the dues is build a pension fund - a bit of security for old age. As of November 2010, the AFTRA defined benefit pension fund had an asset value of slightly more than $1.7 billion. To give the reader something to compare this with, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (the majority owner of perennial loser and cash cow the Toronto Maple Leafs) has a total membership of some 173,000, roughly double that of AFTRA, and net assets of $107C billion, or 62 times the value of the AFTRA fund. Go Leafs go.



Put simply, were the total net assets of each to be divvied up in a pension sell-off, each AFTRA member would get $21,250. Each Ontario Teacher would get $618,500. Kids, this is why your parents tell you to get an education instead of going into acting.



AFTRA is currently involved in a lawsuit against J.P. Morgan Chase, one of the largest banks in the U.S. with whom the union placed $500 million of pension assets in 2007. At the end of 2007, the AFTRA fund had slightly over $2 billion in assets and was able to fund its benefits. At present, it is under-funded by approximately $600 million. What went wrong?



One can argue that the AFTRA administrators should have known better. Go buy hockey teams instead of trusting an investment bank; but wait, isn’t that counter-intuitive? Does the bank not have the responsibility to act in the best interests of its client? Well, you might like to think that, but you would be so wrong.



The bank serves many masters, but none more so than its owners - the stockholders who like their yummy quarterly dividends. It was that motivation that led J.P. Morgan Chase to invest that $500 million into Sigma, a repo fund. Unfortunately, I have to over-simplify here. A repo fund essentially works as follows. I am a bank. I will form an arm’s length company which I will sell a bunch of assets to on the promise that I will buy them back at a fixed price. The arm’s length company will make money by issuing bonds based on the bunch of assets sold to it. Every transaction reaps transaction fees, reaping profits.



In a reasonable world, say that of a well-regulated mutual fund, the bank would be expected to make some money for its work. Let’s say the bank gets 5% for its trouble. That $500 million under those terms would earn it $25 million and the bank would be expected to invest the money to make that money bank and more for AFTRA. Instead, because of a series of transactions and loans propping up the original dubious assets, J.P. Morgan Chase made - wait for it - $1.9 billion in fees for itself.



There are two sad parts to all this. First, this same bank under a different name then did virtually the same thing in the 1920s. Supposedly the practice was legislated out of existence in 1933 as part of teh New Deal reforms following the Pecota Commission (see the fine book: The Hellhound of Wall Street). Supposedly. And sadder yet: many poor men and women who followed the rules and tried to live a dream now wonder what the hell becomes of them?



Be seeing you.