I was surprised to read recently that not only has Archie Comics introduced a gay character into the feature, but that Archie is now married and his teacher Mrs. Grundy had died of cancer. The idea, says an Archie Comics artist, is to make comic book classics “more contemporary and relevant,” always a smart idea these hip days.
It seems subversively un-American to suggest that the Academy Awards have almost outlived themselves, become superfluous and are even a bit of a drag. The original purpose was mainly to provide a forum for hosts like Bob Hope, Johnny Carson and Billy Crystal to zing the nominees and Hollywood, for the film industry to prime the post-holiday box office pump, and for the actors to congratulate themselves for their gift to mankind.
Everyone has weighed in on all the reasons newspapers are dying, but nobody has quite hit on the root cause. Intrepid reporter that I am, I decided to go to the source to find out why newspapers are dying. The answer, I’m almost ashamed to report, is newspapers.
My girlfriend Jane just learned of my actual age–wheedled it out of me, actually–after I had carefully spent nearly six months dodging the nasty subject.
The great forgotten, underrated humorist Frank Sullivan created a character named Mr. Arbuthnot, a “cliche expert” who reappeared many times over Sullivan’s long career, usually in The New Yorker. Sullivan has been dead since 1976, but I ran into his alter ego recently, who is still alive and well and bursting with dog-eared vogue lingo.
Tom Wolfe labeled the 1970s the “Me Decade,” but Tom was a tad early. The `70s seem a prim, modest decade compared to our current ego-on-steroids decade. We appear to be knee-deep in the Me Century, in which every man is, if not yet king, an expert, a singer, a writer, an artist, possibly soon a self-appointed doctor or lawyer.
