In honor of the official opening of The Muppets — and I’m thrilled to see it’s already getting rave reviews — I thought it might be appropriate to put up a little something to help remember what got them (and us) here.
Here’s the opening three and a half minutes of 1979′s The Muppet Movie. And I gotta admit, it chokes me up every time.
Posted in Jim Henson, movies, Muppets, works in progress
Tagged Jim Henson, Muppets, Rainbow Connection, The Muppet Movie
Speaking of workspaces . . .
I opened my e-mail this morning to find a photograph (seen below) from my pal Marron, with whom I shared an office in my first years on Capitol Hill in the early 1990s. She and I (and usually two, sometimes three, others) worked in this office in the U.S. Senate Dirksen Building — a building that had all the charm of a 1960s-era high school — from 1990 until about 1995. It was here that we first learned that airplanes were on their way to the Middle East for the opening volleys of first Iraq war, where she and I answered phones over Columbus Day weekend during the infamous Clarence Thomas hearings, and where we generally worked long into the night when the Senate was in session. Marron and I could also get into quite a bit of trouble together; we took great delight in pranking our fellow staffers, and each other. (Marron once crashed our office phone system by forwarding every phone in the office to my direct line.)
Anyway, if you think from watching television or movies that the life of a Hill staffer is glamorous, and that we all work at enormous oak desks in offices lined with gigantic bookshelves crammed with leather-bound books and framed prints of the Founding Fathers on the wall, well . . . not so much. Here’s me in my workspace in 1991 or so, as photographed by Marron from her desk across from me (you can see her own inbox in the foreground):
(Click on it if you want to embiggen it and enjoy me in all my twentysomething glory.)
Yeah, that’s me with a head full of hair. Shut up. Given the way I’m dressed, the Senate was likely in an extended recess, when we didn’t have to wear our usual suits and could come in a bit more casually dressed.
Sitting on the desk in front of me is one of those gigantic old IBM desktop computers. Back in the early 1990s, the only people in our office who had desktops were the low folks on the totem pole — and that’s because we were using them to draft responses to constituent mail, which we could then save onto an inner-office network, where anyone with a desktop could pull them up. And let me tell you, we worked those things hard, responding to about 10,000 pieces of mail each month. (And as Marron reminded me in her e-mail accompanying this photo, it wasn’t too long after this picture was taken that my computer monitor actually caught fire.)
All other office business — including a rudimentary e-mail system — was carried out on computers we called The DeeGees — old green-screened Data General computers, hooked into a central system that made it possible to share files and send messages. Mine was on the desk’s return, just behind the clunky IBM. (If you think your computer currently takes up too much space on your desk, try having two.)
The bookshelf to the left in the photo was my filing system — and you can see that, even then, I was still a black binder kinda guy. There was an old dot-matrix printer in the space just behind the bookshelf, where our assistant press secretary would print out wire stories once each day, making a loud zzzt zzzt zzt! for about 30 minutes.
The television you see — which we used to monitor the Senate floor — wasn’t mine or Marron’s; it belonged to another staffer we all called Joe T, who had one of the two desks next to the window. And on the wall? Not Founding Fathers, but Georgia O’Keeffe prints (the one behind my desk was a painting of the Taos Pueblo) and framed photos of New Mexico scenery. And it looks like I also had a small promo poster for Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta taped to the wall just above my DeeGee.
Finally, it appears there’s a pile of papers on the desk in front of me. Some things never change. Apart from the hair, of course.
Posted in a bit of history, Institutional Memories, The More Things Change..., work spaces
Tagged workspaces
It’s probably due to the upcoming premiere of the brand spanking new movie The Muppets (coming to a theater near you on November 23), but over the past few days I’ve been asked more and more, “How’s the book coming?”
The short answer: really well. I recently finished writing extensively about The Muppet Show, which puts me about two-thirds of the way through. But there’s still a lot more to go — that Jim Henson was a busy and productive guy — and as I make the turn into the final third of the book, my desk is officially a mess. And to respond to some of the other questions I’ve received, here’s what my workspace presently looks like:
Whatta mess.
It’s a bit blurry — I took it with my phone — so let me guide you around. On the wall behind my chair is the gigantic white board I use to draw up the timeline for the chapter I’m working on, along with any random notes (at the moment, there’s a scribbled address for the long-gone Muppet Stuff store in New York City).
On top of the desk (which is actually just two old tables pushed together, with a filing cabinet shoved into the open corner) is an assortment of black binders (filled with transcripts of interviews, notes, and newspaper articles) along with several journals and scattered Post-It notes. You might also see the corner of Christopher Finch’s fantastic Jim Henson: The Works peeking out, as well as Caroll Spinney’s The Wisdom of Big Bird. And that piece of red striped paper is actually part of my Bible for this project: a well-thumbed and marked-up photocopy of Jim’s Red Book, generously provided by the Henson family.
What else? On top of the filing cabinet in the lower left hand corner are all four volumes of an 1862 edition of The Life and Letters of Washington Irving—still a fellow close to my heart—and because I believe you should always have your subject looking over your shoulder as you write, the mantlepiece behind me (yeah, it’s a real working fireplace) sports a framed photo of Jim Henson lounging across a set of theater seats with his arm draped around Kermit.*
What’s next? During the last week of November, I’ll be interviewing not one, not two, not even four, but five more Really Neat People, and I’m producing chapters regularly, which keeps my editor happy. And while I try to spend most of my days sitting right there in that leather chair you see above, I have to admit I’ll be spending several hours out of it next Wednesday. I’ll be at The Muppets, you know.
Thanks, everyone, for their questions and enthusiasm!
* Just for fun, see if you can also spot a 1960s-era Batmobile and the Mach 5 among the mess, as well as a Jim Henson action figure, strumming a banjo.
See that kindly face over there? You’ve probably seen his name and work a thousand times in your life, but you likely don’t know the face. That’s Bil Keane, who brought the single-panel comic Family Circus to your local newspaper pretty much every day since 1960. Keane died earlier this week at age 89, and you can read all about him in The Washington Post obituary right here.
While I was never a hard-core Family Circus fan in the way I was absolutely devoted to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Keane’s strip was one of those that my entire family read. In particular, we loved the paperback book collections. Visiting our cousins in Kansas usually meant getting an armful of new Family Circus paperbacks to take along on the car ride — and when we got there, we would ransack our cousins’ own collection, trading paperbacks back and forth until, between us, we’d read them all. They were a quick and easy read, drawn in Keane’s accessible style, with punchlines that even a seven-year-old could understand. I liked the sequences featuring the ghosts “Not Me!” and “Ida Know!” (our Mom would take those jokes and run with them, in fact) while my brother loved the panels that followed characters with a dotted line as they made their way to school, a garage sale, or around the back yard.
People often criticized Keane’s cartoon for being too dated, and too lost in an idealized past or family structure. For that reason, it was an easy target for satire — but no one laughed harder at the parodies of the strip than Keane himself. Keane, in fact, was much funnier than he let on in his strip; he would apparently knock ‘em dead each year as the host of the National Cartoonists Society’s annual banquet. But his own inherent sweetness was the real strength behind Family Circus—and Keane also made it look way too easy. “[A]llow me to point out the obvious,” said Dilbert‘s Scott Adams. “If other cartoonists could make a family-oriented comic that was as popular as ‘Family Circus,’ they would have done it.”
No one did — and likely no one will ever do it as well as Bil Keane.
Posted in bil keane, comic strips, Family Circus, r.i.p.
Tagged Bil Keane, Family Circus
It’s fall, the publishing industry is back in full swing, and that means there are plenty of great new books to choose from. Let’s see. . .
Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the book launch for American Emperor: Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson’s America
The book currently sitting on my nightstand is Walter Issacson’s biography Steve Jobs
Coming up next week is the long-awaited And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
I’m anxious to get my mitts on this one as well, though I’ll admit to having some inside information: namely, I know how hard Shields worked not only on the book itself, but on getting Vonnegut to allow him to write the story in the first place. You can read that story and more over on Shields’ way-cool blog Writing Kurt Vonnegut, where you’ll learn all about his adventures as Vonnegut’s biographer — as well as beer, kids’ TV, and writing in general. Go. Now.
Over the past decade or so, I’ve largely given up fiction—but I’m still a sucker for Stephen King (yeah, guh head, make the face!) and I’ve gotta admit to being psyched for his newest, the massive, 960-page 11/22/63: A Novel
And finally, I just read this afternoon that the fourth — but not yet final! — book in Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson comes out next May.
What are you looking forward to reading this fall? You don’t have to post it here, just talk amongst yuhselves.
Posted in books, Charles J. Shields, David O. Stewart, Robert Caro, Stephen King, Steve Jobs
Tagged Aaron Burr, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Caro, Stephen King, Steve Jobs
