Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for September 18, 2011

I must agree. Nothing beats a good car chase.

Closwe your eyes and go to sleep, Alice.

I do not find car chases to be satisfying, either dramatically or as soporifics (though they do tend to work better as the latter).

I usually skip right to the Hush Hush Sneakaway Lullaby myself.

Give Alice a good car chase, with a couple of explosions thrown in to make things interesting!

Memo to Mrs. Otterloop: don’t let Alice read “Heart of the City” anymore. She’s getting ideas. ;)

In the river? In the best car chase ever, they all end up in the bay. San Francisco Bay. And no, it’s not Bullitt.

What’s Up Doc? That’s the best car chase ever IMHO.

Did you paste and cut this to EVERY comic? Please, I get your point, but enough already! If I want spam, I’ll open a can of it. Sheesh!

The only car chases that interest me are the ones that end at the airport, where the guy has to charm or bully his way through ticketing and security because he’s made a TERRIBLE mistake and if she gets on that plane to take that job on the other coast she’ll end up marrying the WRONG GUY (Baxter) and everyone will be miserable FOREVER. But that’s the Romantic in me.

I want to do a movie (called “The Scene at the Airport”) where the entire two hours (minus the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes) is a desperate dash to the airport to catch her before she gets on that plane, filmed in real-time.

I think there have been four commendable car chases in American cinema: Bullitt, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, and the original Vanishing Point.

“Blah blah blah blah America can only lay claim to originating two art forms … Jazz and Comics! Blah blah blah…”

I wish people would stop pairing comics and jazz. I hate jazz. Besides, why is jazz considered an “Art Form” in itself and not just a subset of music? Why not include Rock and Roll? We invented that, too (and then the British improved our invention, and then we adopted their improvements and took it further, and so on and so forth…). Why not Rap? The trope “America originated only comics and jazz” has been floating around since the Twenties, when both were in a heydey, partly because of Gilbert Seldes’ book “The Seven Lively Arts.” A lot has happened since 1924.

Could we lay claim to the Situation Comedy as an American invention? Recurring characters week after week, little self-enclosed 30 minute narratives, each arising from the same figures responding to a different “situation”?

Besides, nothing arises in a vacuum. Before comic strips, words and pictures had been paired for centuries, as stand-alones (single panel cartoons) and sequential scenarios. Magazines had been doing them (here and in Europe), and even newspapers (ditto), although (like with the sitcom) the regularly-appearing feature using the same characters in different situations arose here first.

Hate to disenchant you fritzoid, but the “situation comedy” existed long before television.

Blues was one of the contributing influences to Rock and Roll, as it was to jazz. The Blues itself was a melding of many influences, not only from Ireland but from African sources. Jazz as we know today it bears little resemblance to jazz as it existed in the 20’s or 30’s, when the term was coined, and before improvisation became central. As I said, nothing arises from a vacuum.

As far as “situational comedy” goes, yes, I can imagine its roots can be traced back to commedia dell’ arte if not earlier, but the Situational Comedy, the “Sit-Com”, as one of the most widespread forms of popular entertainment in the world today, is an American invention. It has at least as much validity as an “Art Form” as jazz or comics.

(And Eldo, I won’t apologize for my dislike of jazz, any more than I will apologize for my dislike of broccoli. For those who like it, go right ahead and listen to it, don’t let me stop you. But if you try to convince me that I OUGHT to like it, or that I just havn’t heard the RIGHT jazz, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it. De gustibus non disputandum est.)

Night-Gaunt, assuming your “It was called RADIO” was in reference to the sitcom question, where were the first serialized, recurrent RADIO comedies produced? From wikipedia – “The sitcom format was born on January 12, 1926 with the initial broadcast of ‘Sam ’n’ Henry’ on WGN in Chicago. The 15-minute daily program was revamped in 1928, moved to another station, renamed ‘Amos ’n’ Andy’, and became one of the most successful sitcoms from this period.”

The sitcom, like comics, can be said to have been developed from a combination of wide-raging sources, and in common with Rock and Roll or jazz or Blues claiming that it was “invented” at one particular time or another can only really be done in retrospect. The first person (or people) who did the thing weren’t really aware that they were “inventing” anything at all, and the second person (or people) may not have been aware that they were following after someone else. It’s like speciation in evolutionary biology; at point “A” we know a thing didn’t exist as a distinct and separate “thing”, and at point “C” we know that it decidedly did exist, but exactly where we should set point “B” is difficult to reconstruct.

We got our kids to sleep by putting on Beatles and othe oldies rock. It had fairly good success.

Eldo, my bias against jazz has two elements I can account for (and perhaps more that I CAN’T identify).

1) I’m not interested in music that has no lyrics; and 2) I’m not interested in improvisation.

When you go back to when the term “jazz” was coined, the songs still for the most part had lyrics, and for the most part still followed the music as it was written on the sheets. Cole Porter wrote "Jazz, as it was defined in the 20’s. But what had initially been “hey, let’s show what the saxophonist can do”, a “featured solo” within what was otherwise a structured music/lyrical combination, turned into “forget about the words, let’s just see how good our instrumentalists are,” it loses me. There’s nothing I can sink my teeth into. My favorite instrument is the human voice, but neither do I have any love for “scat”; it’s SIMPLY using the voice as an instrument, and carries no content.(Lest you feel that I’m TOTALLY text-oriented, I also have no use for poetry; it’s when you COMBINE poetry with melody that you have a “song”, and that’s what I like.)

I don’t even like songs that are in a language other than English. If I don’t know what the singer is singing about, how can I relate?

I simply hate hate HATE jazz, and at my worst I can’t believe that ANYBODY really likes it. They only PRETEND to like it because because they don’t want to admit that they’re too old to listen to Rock and Roll, but not sophisticated enough to listen to Classical.

There’s an old joke: What’s the difference between Blues and Jazz? Blues is a guy playing three chords to an audience of a hundred. Jazz is a guy playing a hundred chords to an audience of three.

Fun bunch of comments. I watch movies for the same reason I read toons – to be amused! At my age I hate violence (especially gratutious) and really like animations even more than in my youth, but only those that are well done with involvement by real people (and a decent plot). I detest the “Toy Story” type and like Frizoid, I like what I like and will never change. The older I get, the more I enjoy “saying my piece”.

And to music, I enjoy some of the old jazz, but also the big band era when I was a kid and early rock. I loved to show off too (when a teen) doing “interpretive dance” to Jezabel and singing (to my vocal coach’s dismay) the Kiss of Fire.

sallymargaret, I also said that I don’t like songs where the lyrics aren’t in English. I don’t speak Orthodox, so the appeal would likely be lost on me. :-)

such great color and art

This strip was not far from the complicated routine I got my poor parents to perform at bedtime when I was young. Brilliant!