I love that clip! First of all, I love Tom Petty, and I think this clip helps explain how he was able to continue to make great music for 40 years.
“He would feed the well with only this really, really good information, and take all the rest away. He didn’t really take a lot of noise and negativity into his diet.”
Adria Petty, talking about her father Tom
[Semi-sidebar: The Broken Record podcast is great if you’re a music fan. You’ll find interviews with established artists like Bruce Springsteen and Santana, and up-and-coming artists like S.G. Goodman and Deep Sea Diver. If you’re a Tom Petty fan, you’ll love the episode with Adria, as well as the interviews with Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench. Check it out.]
Even if you’re not an aspiring rock star, there’s a lot to learn from TP on how to “eat clean” for your mind, your heart and your soul. It’s way too easy to binge on empty calories… endlessly snacking (or doomscrolling) on tweets, spending hours at the all-you-can-eat Facebook buffet, sucking down pop culture listicles, stuffing yourself with “reality” TV, bellying up to the 24/7 news bar. There are countless temptations that can consume endless hours of your time on earth, and they mostly just weigh you down with “noise and negativity” as Adria put it.
Instead, take a cue from Tom Petty, and read a good book, watch a classic movie or a documentary, listen to some great music.
40 years ago, the movie Stripes started shooting in Louisville, Kentucky. And my buddy Walter was in it – he shot a scene with Bill Murray.
Walt’s scene is one of the first ones in the movie – he and another kid get in Bill Murray’s cab, then run away without paying the fare when they reach their destination.
White pants were “in” back in 1980!
A TV station is Louisville published some archival footage of the 1980 news story about the movie production. Wally’s interviewed in this clip:
You’d think that brush with stardom would be enough for one person. But no, that’s not how Walter rolls. You see, when Wally was just a wee lad, his parents were close friends with another family that had a son a year or two older than Walter. Kid’s name was Tom. Tom Cruise. I hear he turned out to be quite the party boy in high school.
Walter has a picture of him and Tom Cruise together, from Wally’s 6th birthday party.
Walter also was a high school football star in Louisville. And he’s been an attorney, a teacher, a football coach, and a border patrol agent. He’s packed a lot of action into his 56 years.
Ol’ Willie Shakes is right, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”… but in my next life, I want Walter’s agent.
Alex Trebek passed away Sunday. We all know him as the longtime host of Jeopardy. But we old timers also remember him as the host of The Wizard of Odds and High Rollers.
Comedians have been parodying him for decades.
I’ll admit, I took some shots at him… to me, he sometimes came across as pompous or condescending. I thought “heck, it’s easy to be a know-it-all when you have all the answers written down in front of you.”
But I do think he softened up over time. And think about this: every show was different, and featured more than 60 clues, across all sorts of categories. Alex really had to know his stuff – and he used his voice and diction more than any other host in game show history. Every word of every clue mattered.
Pat Sajak can phone it in on Wheel of Fortune, because every show is rather rote. If you’ve hosted one Wheel, you’ve hosted ’em all. In fact, that show could arguably go on without a host. But Alex Trebek had to know the categories, the clues, the pronunciation, he had to do math on the fly for daily double wagers… he made it seem easy, but there was a lot of prep work involved.
Yes, I’m a 55-year-old man who still loves reading comic strips. And I’m not ashamed of that at all. (Mainly because I don’t read the crappy strips like Marmaduke. I have more discerning tastes.)
This Modern World, a weekly political comic strip by Tom Tomorrow (a.k.a. Dan Perkins), is consistently funny and thought-provoking — a tough combo to pull off.
I used to read This Modern World in the local alternative weekly until budget cuts caused the paper to drop it. Now I subscribe to Sparky’s List, Tom Tomorrow’s subscription-based weekly email that includes the weekly strip as well as some notes about the work and other musings on life. It’s $10 for six months – a bargain at twice the price. If you don’t care to spare the ten spot, you can check out each week’s strip Mondays on the Daily Kos or Tuesdays on The Nib.
Make fun of me all you want for reading the funny papers. I don’t care, I’m still gonna read ’em. You may think it’s a waste of time, but I sure don’t.
It’s been several weeks since Carl Reiner passed away, but I recently read a brief blurb in Parade Magazine (of all places!) by comedian Judy Gold that highlighted something I’d never really considered before: the fact that he wrote a part in The Dick Van Dyke Show for a female writer on the fictional TV show within the show.
Just one more reason to love — and respect — this titan of comedy.
(The full Judy Gold feature is here. She has a new book out called Yes I Can Say That and also makes several other reading recos.)
I don’t watch much TV (even during lockdown), but I’ve enjoyed the heck out of Schitt’s Creek, which recently wrapped up its sixth and final season. It’s a comedy about a family that goes from fabulously rich to terribly poor overnight, and is forced to leave their pampered lifestyle behind and move to a rundown hotel in a tiny town that the patriarch of the family bought as a joke.
(Netflix promo photo)
The mom and dad are played by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy. ‘Nuff said. They’ve been cracking me up since their SCTV days, and of course they were great in the Christopher Guest mockumentaries (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind).
Separately, they are great character actors… together, they are pure comedy gold!
The actors who portray the family (O’Hara, Levy, his real-life son Daniel and Annie Murphy) all were nominated for Emmys this year.
The show was a slow burn, and Catherine O’Hara thinks that contributed to its success:
We got to build the show and develop the characters without worrying about expectations, from anyone. We got to make the show the best we could make it. CBC did a great job of building an audience in Canada and then Pop TV picked it up and it wasn’t a big audience but it was a nice, loyal audience, and then Netflix brought it out to the rest of the world. There’s so many projects that get a ton of attention right at the beginning, maybe before they’re even quite ready for it, and then it’s kind of downhill attention-wise from there. We’re so lucky to do the show we wanted and, apparently, leaving people wanting more.
Catherine O’Hara’s character, Moira Rose, has developed quite the fan following. This excellent Yahoo article describes her as the “the self-dramatizing, language-massaging, ultimately touching mother.”
Moira is hilarious (her ‘wall of wigs’ alone is worth the price of admission) but there’s plenty of heart underneath all the character’s histrionics.
O’Hara, who is 66, is also talks about her own late-career recognition, and I think it’s sound advice for anyone in the 50+ age bracket:
I’m happy to be a late bloomer, I always have been in my life and I’m grateful for it. You have to have a bit of patience in life or just don’t have any big expectations, just carry along and do the best you can and maybe someone will notice, maybe they won’t but if you enjoy the work itself, then that’s enough of a gift.
From the same Hollywood reporter article
Do your best. Be patient. Don’t worry about what others think of you. Enjoy the journey. I’ll drink to that!
Brian Maley on Sports is life: “I love Gibson’s quote, especially the words directed at phonies who only accepted him based on his ability to throw…” Oct 5, 18:04
Damian on Peddling Paddling: “I have an inflatable paddleboard, it’s worked out fine on our summer vacations.” Aug 25, 22:23
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