I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: FRAZEY FORD-Tiny Desk Concert #73 (August 15, 2010).

Frazey Ford used to be in the Be Good Tanyas.  Here she is touring her debut solo album Obadiah.  She is quite a character, wearing a leopard print outfit.

But her music is really complex and interesting.  On the opener, “Firecracker” she plays the guitar with unusual chord progressions but it’s her voice that is so arresting.  She use atypical phrasings and pronunciations that belie her origins (I could never guess where she was from).  Strangely, I get a kind of Cat Stevens vibe from the way she says words, but also another inexplicable emphasis: the way she pronounces exploding as explohdun.

She talks briefly about her new record while apologizing for having to tune her guitar.  “Lost Together” slower, pretty song.

“If You Gonna Go” is a breakup song which she messes up and then apologizes for, saying she’s nervous and very tired.  And she mocks herself for wearing a ridiculous cheetah outfit.  She says she bought it in London where everyone was dressed like this.  Stephen Thompson chimes in that if it was cooler they’d all be dressed like that.

She asks if they want one more and she ends with “The Gospel Song.”

It’s a really good introduction to an unusual voice.

[READ: September 10, 2015] The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952

After reading the Sunday Peanuts books, I had to go back and start the series from the beginning.  Holy cow, Peanuts started in October 1950 and ran into the 21st century!  That’ amazing.  It’s also amazing to see how different everyone looked back then.  It’s very disconcerting.  The only thing more disconcerting is to immerse yourself in the old comics, start to really appreciate them, and then see a contemporary version and wonder why he changed them so much.

When the strip first started there were just three of them: Good Ol’ Charlie Brown, Shermy and Patty (not Peppermint Patty) and they are all four years old.  Those first comics are really really different–the kids are practically stick figures.  (Although Charlie always had that little wisp of hair).  The kids all have huge heads and tiny bodies and are very minimal in their expressions.  Snoopy is there too and he looks very much like a real dog.  As it turns out I like this version of snoopy better than the current one.  He looks much more like a dog and he acts alike a dog–Schulz gets some great jokes out of doggie behavior.  Things like Snoopy hearing and smelling food and running over to beg started almost from the beginning.  As did they ways that Snoopy interacts and often drives the other characters crazy.

What’s mostly different about the early ones is that the kids are all mean to each other and CB sometimes wins in the verbal sparring.   He’s as much of a buster as the others.  It’s really fun and funny.

But they are also sometimes nice to each other.  Patty walks by CB when he is feeling down and says Hi there handsome and it perks him up.  In fact, in the first few years it seems that the kids are trying to woo each other (in a childlike and very unsexual way).

There are som major milestones as the story progresses.  Charlie gets his zig zag stripe in Dec 1950.  In May 1951 Schroeder is born (it’s hard to believe he has been around for so long!).  At first Schroeder is a little baby (he seems to get angry very easily, and the face Schulz gives him is very funny).  Then soon enough he is introduced to the piano and to Beethoven (and the jokes have been pretty consistent ever since).

In August 1951, there the first instance of “You Blockhead.”  Although it is still not used that much.

In Nov 1951 Violet is holding the ball for Charlie.  She gets afraid so she leaves and the ball falls over–and thus Charlie misses it.  Around this time, the kid’s eyes get a little closer together and a little bigger.  He has also started using his trademark “6” as eyes from time to time.

Schulz tends to reuse punchlines a lot.  Sometimes it gets a little tedious, but then they weren’t meant to be read in a giant block like I’m reading them.  There’s lots of snowman jokes, a ton of croquet jokes (snoopy running through the hoops), and about a thousand jokes about mud pies and the various flavors they might be (most of which are very funny).  And of course, there’s baseball (and rain), kites and can telephones (which seems so amusingly quaint, and yet is probably quite reflective of the time).  There’s lots of jokes about how babies act (which is, of course, funny since Charlie and the gang are not much older but act much older).  They also eat a staggering amount of candy (all kind of jokes–flavor (Charlie hates cocoanut (which he eventually changes to coconut) and so sometimes people order it so they don’t have to share.  There are jokes about sharing, about purchasing (they have a lot of spare change, these kids) and of course, Snoopy begging for and getting a lot of candy.

And I thin my favorite jokes are the ones with Snoopy. Like when he chases birds (and fails) or slips on the ice.  Or when he gets in the way of people watching TV, which is so true.  I especially like when he goes over to investigate the sprinkler only to have it turn on and whack him in the nose (so he hides behind a tree)

In March of 1952 Lucy comes along.  She looks weird because she has whites around her eyes (its the easy way to tell her apart from Violet).  She is a toddler in this early section (3 years old), acting quite babyish and asking babyish questions (she wants Charlie to make her bread and budder sandwiches).  But by June she is more or less the same age as everyone else (although it is pointed out that she is a year younger).

I believe the TV jokes start in 1952.  And Charlie hates the thought of school and then hates school itself once he starts.

Linus comes along in Sept of 1952 and he is precocious from the starts–there some very funny jokes about him either building a perfect house of cards or blowing up a square balloon.  And Lucy is horrible to him from the get go.  There are occasional asides from adults in these scenes, which Schulz says he regrets putting in.

They start calling Lucy a fussbudget (her mom calls her the world’s greatest fussbudget) and I guess I dont really understand that because that doesn’t seem her main personality even then.  She sets records (beating Charlie at checkers all the time), jumping rope, counting things.  I don’t ever really see her as fussy.

The book opens with an introduction by Garrison Keillor which gives a brief biographical sketch of Charles “Sparky” Schulz.  He was a shy, self-conscious kid with bad skin.  he was too light to play football and not tall enough for basketball.  He was the only child of two people who never passed the 3rd grade (although his dad became a successful barber).  Keillor, like Schultz is from St Paul, Minnesota, so there is fondness there (even if Schultz did up and leave for L.A.).  Keillor explains that it’s this midwestern upbringing (and the darkness of Minnesota0 that accounts for Schulz’ rather dark outlook.

He also mentions Schulz’ original strip L’il Folks which appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.  I will have to look for the book Li’l Beginnings, which is all about that strip.

This book also has an afterword which is called “The Life and Times Of Charles M. Schulz” by David Michaels.  Its a good long interview and covers many topics that other people reference when speaking about Schulz.  We learn a lot about “Sparky” Schulz (like how and when and why he got that nickname).  The biggest takeaway for me was just how much he hated the name Peanuts (and how that name came to be applied to his strip)–he still held a grudge about the name some thirty years later and says he never calls his strip Peanuts.  He says he tells people he draws the comic with charlie Brown and Snoopy.

He seemed very conscientious (treating the papers that ran his strip very kindly).  But at the same time he seemed to doubt his success.  He seems remarkably unaware of his amazing success which is either foolish or phony (although he seems to genuine for that).  He was making $30 million/yr by the 90s.  He also seems to not enjoy things very much.  Which makes sense given how negative Charlie Brown is, but it’s a drag in a real person.  I think I wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with him, either.

What’s especially cool is that the afterword includes some early cartoons.  Like when he did single panels for The Saturday Evening Post  The characters look a lot like the very early Peanuts kids–basic sketches.  In one, two kids are sitting at a table and one of them saying “I’m taking it for granted that you’re very anxious to impresses me”).  But there’s some more grown up characters (from when I believe he was drawing for his church bulletin with a couple together and her saying “I wish you wouldn’t always refer to our dates as fellowship.”  Or a boy on the phone saying “I think I’ve made one of the first steps toward unraveling the mysteries of the Old Testament…I’m starting to read it.

This is an amazing introduction to Peanuts, and the book is really wonderfully created.  I can’t wait to travel through time–two years published every year.  I know we have gotten to the 2000s already, so I’ll be enjoying these for months to come.