The Comic Book Kid

I feel like I’m rediscovering all kinds of hidden gems as I go through my immediate family’s old photos. And now there’s this. I swear if I had remembered this picture existed three years ago, it would be somewhere on the cover of my book Deus ex Comica: The Rebirth of a Comic Book Fan! I had completely forgotten that my mom had made this for me. And, embarrassingly, I have no idea where it might be today. (Sorry, Mom.) But, man, how awesome is this?!

Christmas morning, 1984. I’m 14 years old and deep into comic reading and collecting. I didn’t ask for this, but I remember my mom doing a lot of this kind of chicken scratch embroidery. (We had a table runner made of the same brown gingham at the time.) Mom had left a loop at the top, and Dad got me a dowel rod to slip through to hang it in my room, where it resided for quite a few years after this.

When Tracy and I cleaned and purged in our basement last summer, this was not among my stuff. Think this might call for an excursion into my parents’ basement and my childhood closet to see if it can be located, and then I can properly pass the mantle of “The Comic Book Kid” on to my kiddo.

“There’s Just a Hole Where the Pilots Usually Sit!”

So, after Airport, the kiddo and I decided it was worthwhile to continue on through the franchise. Airport 1975, released in the fall of 1974, stars Charlton Heston (and his eyebrows), with George Kennedy reprising his role as Joe Patroni. Where Patroni was the chief mechanic in the original, he’s now been promoted to Vice President of Operations for Columbia Airlines. Naturally, Heston’s Alan Murdock, Columbia’s Chief Flight Instructor, is involved with Karen Black’s Nancy Pryor, the head stewardess on the imperilled flight.

There was some groovy dialog, but no knocked up stewardesses or cheating husbands in this one. In fact, whereas in the first movie the people in danger didn’t necessarily have strong connections with the folks on the ground trying to save them, in this installment not only is Murdock’s lover on the flight, but so is Patroni’s wife (played by Webster’s mom – Susan Clark!) and son (not played by Emmanuel Lewis, I’m sorry to report).

Amping up the tension is Linda Blair in her first post-Exorcist role, on board as a child in need of a kidney transplant. Thankfully, she is soothed by Helen Reddy’s singing nun character, Sister Ruth.

The pop culture cavalcade continues with Erik Estrada as the doomed flight engineer, Myrna Loy as an alcoholic passenger continually hit on by Sid Caesar’s nervous chatterbox. Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller, and Conrad Janis play three buddies on the transcontinental flight. In an excellent meta role, Gloria Swanson plays herself, and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who my generation knows as Remington Steel leading lady Stephanie Zimbalist’s real-life dad and lead character Remington Steel’s on-screen dad, plays the one surviving flight crew member.

Columbia Airlines flight 409 takes off from Washington Dulles International Airport, headed for Los Angeles. The west coast is “socked in” so the flight is rerouted to Salt Lake City International Airport. Simultaneously, a businessman takes off in a private Beechcraft from New Mexico headed for Boise, Idaho, but is also routed to Salt Lake. After both planes are stacked into their approach patters over Utah, the businessman suffers a heart attack and crashes into the cockpit of the Bowing 747. Tragedy ensues.

There are problems with the autopilot, and the obvious dearth of qualified pilots on board the commercial flight leads Murdock and Patroni to take the company jet to Salt Lake, where they hope to somehow find a way to help the crippled craft safely to the ground. After enduring plenty of sexist banter from the flight crew before the disaster, Pryor capably assumes control of the plane with very few woman-in-peril moments, and those clearly serve to ratchet up the tension.

At one point, a TV news crew shows up at the Salt Lake airfield with the widow of the businessman. Similar to the social commentary of the noise pollution subplot in the first movie, this brief aside clearly takes aim at the sensationalization of news but isn’t long enough to gain any traction.

Ultimately, Murdock and Patroni enlist the help of a nearby air base and attempt an in-flight transfer of a pilot from an Air Force helicopter into the flight deck through the gaping hole. Like the “oh, shit” moment when the passenger detonates his bomb in the lavatory of the plane in the first movie, the kiddo and I had the same reaction during the Air Force pilot’s attempt to board flight 409 in this movie.

Ultimately, the plane is safely landed, the inflatable emergency exit slides are deployed, everyone makes it off the plane, and an ambulance is waiting to rush Linda Blair to the hospital for her kidney (apparently they found a replacement kidney in Utah, since the one she was scheduled to receive was in Los Angeles). On the other side of the plane, Pryor and her pilot hero are able walk off the plane and onto a waiting mobile ramp stairs, preserving their dignity.

Although I’d never seen Airport or Airport 1975 prior to this past weekend, I love the movie Airplane. I haven’t seen it in years, but I can quote it ad nauseam. And now, having seen these two disaster classics, the parody’s reference points are all the more amusing.

After watching the second installment in the Airport franchise, the kiddo declared he knows what the calamity will be in Airport ’77: “Since the first movie had a hole blown in the rear of the plane, and this one had a hole blown in the cockpit, I bet in the next movie there’s a hole blown in the middle of the plane!” We’ll see. I’m just happy that when he finally gets around to watching Airplane, he’s going to get so much more out of it than I did for the first 30 years.

“Hold On, We’re Goin’ for Broke!”

I watched the 1970 classic Airport for the first time this weekend. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the granddaddy of all disaster movies, but think I got my money’s worth. The movie is over 40 years old, so reader beware... spoiler-iffic details to follow.

Taking place over a single night, Burt Lancaster’s Mel Bakersfeld is the manager of Lincoln International Airport outside of Chicago, trying to keep the airport open and functioning during a paralyzing snowstorm. He’s also in a loveless marriage and clearly taken with Trans Global Airlines’ PR agent, Jean Seberg’s Tanya Livingston.

Bakersfeld’s brother-in-law is Dean Martin’s TGA pilot Vern Demerest. Demerest is cheating on his wife (Bakersfeld’s sister) with head stewardess Gwen, played by a luminous Jacqueline Bisset. We find out Gwen is pregnant with Demerest’s child, and there is talk of how to deal with the situation, including adoption versus abortion – a pretty dicey topic in the pre-Roe v. Wade years.

So not only are the two main characters cheating on their wives – one in his heart and one literally – both end up with their mistresses in the final moments of the film’s happy ending. The portrayal of Bakersfeld's wife justifies his ending up with Tanya, but you can’t help but feel bad for his sister. Demerest is cheating on her and leaves her for his pregnant girlfriend. That's just cold.

My ten-year-old son watched the movie with me. The abortion talk was subtle enough that it went over his head, but he was astounded that the two men ended up with different women at the end of the movie. Mel’s wife complains throughout that he’s married to his job and doesn’t make time for her (but it was pretty ridiculous for her to bitch about it on this particular night when there was an obvious environmental calamity and a terrorist threat on one of the flights that, as airport manager, he has to deal with). At the end of the movie, however, when Mel declines to deal with a new problem that’s come up at the airport and literally drives off into the sunrise with Tanya, the kiddo turned to me and said, “Why didn’t he do that with his wife? They’d probably still be together!”

There are a couple of passengers on the flight with Demerest and Gwen, originating at Lincoln International and heading to Rome, Italy, that play key roles in the film. Helen Hayes won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of elderly stowaway Ada Quonsett, and Van Heflin played bomber D.O. Guerrero. There was some nice comic relief with Hayes’ character, and a melodramatic-but-story-propelling turn by Heflin.

The all-star cast was awesome, and extended to the ever-reliable George Kennedy (the only actor to reprise his role through all four of the Airport movies), Maureen Stapleton as Guerrero’s wife (whose performance is actually more deserving of the Supporting Actress Oscar nod than Hayes’ turn), Barbara Hale as Mel’s sister and Vern’s wife, a young Gary Collins as the second officer on the disaster plagued flight, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them uncredited appearances by Marion Ross and Christopher Lloyd.

Not only does the flick overflow with recognizable actors, it has an overabundance of story crammed in there! Along with the snowstorm, bomb threat, and romantic plot points, there are subplots involving picketers, airport noise pollution (while it may have provided some social commentary on the times, it falls flat), and a plane stuck in the snow on the airfield's longest runway.

Crazy to think that Airport started the disaster film craze of the ’70s. It was two hours and 16 minutes of slow burn story evolution that can easily veer into camp, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it... so much so that I've already moved on to the first sequel!

Just Shy of a Train Wreck

Ryan Adams
25 January 2012: Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square, Cleveland, Ohio

Back in the early 2000s, Tracy and I used to go to Borders after dinner-and-a-movie date nights. We’d wander through the books and CDs, often finding new music to thrill us. It was on one of those late night excursions that I discovered Ryan Adams. The cover of Gold caught my eye, which led me to a listening station, which led me to buying the disc on the strength of the first two tracks alone – “New York, New York” and “Firecracker”.

Fast forward a decade, and Adams’ prolific output is as challenging as his personality is reported to be. Of the 13 albums he’s released, Gold is still my favorite, but I like Heartbreaker, Love Is Hell, Cardinology (with his backing band the Cardinals), and his new album Ashes & Fire all quite a bit. I’ve wanted to see Adams live for years, but he always seemed to be just off my radar enough that I would miss a ticket sale or sometimes the fact that he was in town altogether.

I was telling my friend Kristin about the Black Keys show coming up in March, and she mentioned the Ryan Adams show she’d picked up tickets for. I immediately went to see about getting tickets and realized the show was sold out. Kristin then told me her husband wasn’t all that interested in going to the show and offered the extra ticket to me. I wasn’t going to pass that opportunity up – especially since I knew Kristin had seen Adams with the Cardinals on an earlier tour and raved about the show.

After some preshow drinks and noshing across the street, we headed into the Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square. I can’t remember the last time I was in the Ohio, and I had certainly forgotten how tiny the venue is. Holding an even thousand seats, it’s the second smallest house in the district. A former Loew’s movie theatre, the Ohio retained that quality during Adams’ intimate show. It was as though everyone was afraid to talk. It seemed mostly born out of respect for Adams and his music, but it lent a bizarre quality to the night. It was pin-drop quiet during songs. (I even heard someone “shushed” by another concertgoer at one point!) The atmosphere reminded me a lot of seeing Cowboy Junkies at the Phantasy Nightclub back in the ’80s, or Jake Shimabukuro at The Stage Door a few years back.

The upside to the atmosphere was seeing how Adams dazzles alone on stage, capably backing himself on piano or acoustic guitar and harmonica. His voice was strong and his personality even more so. The banter between performer and fan was sometimes awkward, but the blame for that lay entire at the feet of the audience. Not quite heckling, but clearly as restless as Adams in an ADHD sort of way, there were moments when it felt like the show might go completely off the rails. That fine line elevated the night, highlighting the reworked catalogue of hits into even darker territory, balanced and softened by Adams’ humble and playful acknowledgements of just how low-key the set list was, and humorous improvisations of songs about cats, an epic a cappella drum solo, and a tune about Danzig and hookers.

The song selection was bookended by “Oh My Sweet Carolina” and “Come Pick Me Up”, both off of Adams’ Heartbreaker debut. In between, there were plenty of highlights in the two-hour, nearly two-dozen song set. Reworking Gold’s “The Rescue Blues”, “Sylvia Plath”, and “New York, New York” on piano was stunning. The title track and “Dirty Rain” off of last year’s Ashes & Fire were just as memorable as his cover of Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and the always amazing “English Girls Approximately”, both off of Love Is Hell.

Short on time and up against an apparent noise ordinance curfew, Adams asked the audience to play along with a faux encore exit a few minutes after 11, and closed the curtain on a wildly entertaining night.

A Mid-’60s Smoker’s Haven

I remember pipes and pipe racks and ashtrays around the house throughout my childhood. I can still see the vacuum-sealed tobacco canister on the floor by the loveseat and remember my fascination with the uniquely designed mechanism to pop the lid open. There was the rubber change-purse-meets-woopie-cushion styled tobacco pouch on the end table. But more than anything else, I remember the smell of L.L. Bean cherry pipe tobacco. It was the smell of my dad and his clothes. It was the smell of the family room. It was the smell of home.

From sometime around 1964 or ’65, I found this amazing photo of my dad taken at Smokers’ Haven, a specialty tobacconist in Columbus, Ohio. My dad picked up the pipe smoking habit while attending Ohio State University, and continued to smoke until the mid-’90s. He would stop in at Smokers' Haven after he’d left Columbus and moved back to Northeast Ohio – sometimes even making special trips down just to visit the shop.

Smoking sucks. I know that. (And I don’t believe my dad’s pipe smoking had any influence on my eight-year, pack-a-day cigarette smoking habit back in the day.) I remember my sister doing a project for school, maybe in middle school, where she tried to get my dad to quit smoking. She didn’t succeed, and I don’t know why my dad ultimately kicked the habit. I do know that when he did quit he sold his pipe collection and used the money to buy my mom a tennis bracelet. It was years, however, before my mom found out that was where he got the money to buy it for her.

Archiving the Past

One of my projects for this year is to rescue all my family’s photos, organize them, and scan them into the computer. I say “rescue” because back in the ’80s my parents put our photos into those magnetic photo albums... you know, the kind with the subtly tacky pages that, combined with the static of the plastic overlays, kept your photos in place on the page. Of course, what we didn’t know then is just how damaging those pages are to photo paper. My mom and dad had five large albums with photos arranged primarily in chronological order, beginning with their wedding shower in 1962 and carrying through the mid-’80s. I was able to successfully save all but three of the photos. There was one page that just wouldn’t give up the goods. All the other photos were extracted over the course of a week with varying degrees of success – the most common violation being some portion of the backing paper staying with the album page. They are, however, in good enough condition to be saved and, certainly, to be scanned.

It was a trip for me to just see each and every photo as I liberated them from their albums. The nostalgia factor amped up considerably and nudged my creative juices into overdrive as well. I suspect over the course of the coming months, there will be more than one or two blog entries inspired by the memories evoked or weird associations with the images as I work through the long process of scanning each photo, making any corrections to it in the photo software, and organizing both the digital files and the physical photos for long-term archiving.

I’m fortunate to still have both of my parents around and geographically close for all the obvious reasons, including helping me identify people and places and dates in all these photos. Once I get through this Besenyodi nuclear family era, I will probably ask my parents for the photos that never made it into albums -- those of previous generations and those of the family after my sister and I moved on and made them empty nesters.

The Science of the Seventies

In the mid-’70s, there were a lot of things wrong in America. There was an oil crisis. Nixon had disgraced the highest office in the land and resigned. And with the end of the Vietnam War, one of the biggest problems our returning GI’s faced was how to “get it all together.” Thankfully, if they were reading comic books, these guys knew the Cleveland Institute of Electronics, Inc. was there to give them the break they needed.

After earning their FCC license from CIE, servicemen were able to sit around dressed in nice suits sharing drinks with pretty blondes, and were so flush with cash they had to keep the extra dough right out on the table in front of them. Now that’s livin’, man.