The past six weeks it has been bizarre so often seeing Johnstown, PA in the news as a major campaign stop for the Democratic primary campaigns. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and for all I know Ralph Nader, have all made several stops. Until now, Johnstown was most famous for the Johnstown floods (all three of them) and for giving us Spider-Man’s co-creator, Steve Ditko.

In my family, it’s been most famous for giving us my mother.

Whenever we would visit on family trips when I was a kid, we would take in the same two Johnstown attractions: the highwater mark on City Hall downtown, which calibrated the effects of the three floods, and the inclined plane, which to me seemed slower than a nasal drip. One thing that always impressed me was the distinct local accent. Her Johnstown heritage is the reason that my mother pronounces “tire,” “tower,” and “tar” identically — “tarrrr,” like a pirate. Johnstonians also call soda “pawp” and at some point manufactured “yins” as a contraction of “you-uns.” I am not making this up. These unfortunate locutions provided fodder for my father, who told people he’d “rescued her from the hillbillies.”

I call my mother every weekend and never tarrrrr of hearing about her “wushin’ dishes” and “arrrrn’n’ clothes.” On Saturday I was unsurprised to hear that she was cooking sauerkraut and pork, although I was surprised to hear her say that she’d burnt the fish she was cooking separately. She blamed me for distracting her. Mom is 83 and that’s probably the first fish she ever burned, and I’m sure she ate it anyway. Those Depression kids are thrifty. I should have asked her how it’s felt seeing Johnstown in the news so frequently again — at my last count, about 19 people still lived in Johnstown, so the competition for votes must be fierce indeed. This will give me something new to ask her about when I visit the first week in June. And maybe by then, the Democrats will even have chosen a presidential candidate.

Pop quiz. See if you can identify what’s factually wrong with this story from the Los Angeles Times:

It used to always be the premium of the premiums. Now the cable pack’s catching up.
By Mary McNamara, Times Television Critic
April 19, 2008
REVOLUTION is a frightening, heady and often fatal business, but it’s what happens afterward that matters most. No one knows this better than the folks at HBO. “John Adams,” which comes to a close Sunday night, has devoted seven beautifully shot hours to defying the often overly patriotic legends of our past with a toothache-and-all portrait of a man who helped define modern democracy, albeit grumbling every step of the way.

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term. “I know now what it is like to be disliked,” he says to Adams, his perpetually disliked vice president.

I’ll bet you got it.

As most of us learned in grade school — or as one could have learned even by watching the “John Adams” miniseries this piece touches on — Washington served TWO terms, not one.

This is something evidently unknown not only to the Times Television Critic, but also to the copy desk of what claims to be one of the nation’s most important newspapers.

I recently told a friend that I’ve felt so sorry for Times employees that I’ve stopped picking on the paper. Despite its misspelling Allen Ginsberg’s name on the front page when he died. Despite the routine errors of both commission and omission. The paper has been shedding longtime employees left and right — including some friends of mine — and I do love reading the daily newspaper, so this is the cri de couer of a wounded lover. But by God, if you can’t even get right that the Founder, the “indispensable man” of American history, served EIGHT years and NOT FOUR, then perhaps you shouldn’t be publishing a newspaper.

(With all apologies to friends still writing for the paper.)

A friend recently directed me to this video, and I’m glad he did. It’s 19 minutes well-spent. In it, Sir Ken Robinson addresses the TED Conference on the topic of learning — what it has meant in the past, and why the current system isn’t built for the future. In some ways, what he’s calling for sounds like a new entrepreneurial approach. (And by that, I don’t mean privatized education; I mean consumer-based.)

I can personally relate to this as someone who was a victim of a hidebound school system every inch of the way until college — which surprisingly offered me choices I’d never realized one could have, even though I’d always felt I should have had them.

Today my nine-year-old saw the Barack Obama bobblehead figure on my desk and said, “I don’t want Barack Obama to win any more.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because he belongs to a church that hates America.”

See? Kids do learn things in school.

In general, I don’t care too much about film directors — I’m more interested in theatre and literature, and the auteurs I follow are writers as well as directors: Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Paul Schrader… and Werner Herzog, who is in a class by himself.

As I’ve remarked before, Herzog’s films are simultaneously wonderful and bad. He always seems to miss precisely the shot he needs to convey the story. In fact, entire scenes seem to go missing, with plot threads dangling in the wind. At the same time, every single one of his films is loaded with individual moments so startling, so compelling and odd, that it will never leave you. In “Aguirre, Wrath of God,” one of those moments is the little raft that gets caught in a pool of turbulence, eventually drowning part of the expedition. (Which, in typical Herzog form, almost actually happened to a member or two of the cast.) In “Fitzcarraldo,” it’s Klaus Kinski’s character awakening to find that the riverboat he’s on is careening toward a waterfall. In “Grizzly Man,” it’s the shot of the supremely naive Timothy Treadwell swimming serenely with one of his bear brethren and then seeing that bear swing about to take a swipe at him in an awful premonition of Treadwell’s ultimate fate. These films, plus “Rescue Dawn,” “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” “Where the Green Ants Dream,” “My Best Fiend,” and several Herzog short subjects have given me hours of delight (mixed with frustration over the errant storytelling.

But who knows what delights await me in this boxed set, pictured above, which arrived just today, new and unopened and for about forty bucks? (Thank you, eBay.)  The set includes  “The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser,” “Even Dwarfs Started Small,” “Fata Morgana,” “Lessons Of Darkness,” “Heart Of Glass,” “Strozsek,” and “And Little Dieter Needs To Fly.” I imagine many hours of enjoyable late-night viewing by myself.

Why by myself? Except for two close friends whose schedules rarely match with my own, and a third friend who lives on the East Coast, I can’t think of anyone who’d like to come watch these. (And I’m not even sure that two of those three would enjoy these. In fact, sometimes I’m not sure I “enjoy” Herzog’s films — I’m just compelled by them.)

A story I’d like to share. Several months ago, “Where the Green Ants Dream” arrived at my house, courtesy of Netflix. My wife and I were both home that night (a rarity), and as we lay in bed, she wondered aloud what had come from Netflix. Now usually, Valorie rips open my Netflix envelope, reads the sleeve, shakes her head and sighs and slips the disk back into the envelope. At least, that’s what our son Lex reports. I’ve offered to set up her own queue of things she’d like to see, but she’s not interested, so the queue is entirely my own and it’s not generally things found at your local cineplex four months ago. My tastes range from obscure documentaries to obsessive narratives courtesy of German directors. This time, though, she thought why not, and agreed to watch “Where the Green Ants Dream.” In this film, a mining company is blowing up whole landscapes of the Australian outback — at least until a group of Aborigines set up camp expressly to block further dynamiting. From there, not much happens, except an old woman pulls up a lawn chair and waits patiently for her dog to emerge, said dog having entered the system of artificial caves. Much later, either the dog returns or Herzog simply forgets about it — I can’t remember which. We start watching this film at about a quarter after midnight, in bed, both of us wondering what if anything is going to happen. Finally, Valorie sits up and announces that she’s going to do the laundry. At 1 a.m. And she did. After watching half the movie and already being in bed.

To me, this episode speaks volumes about why I’ll be enjoying the Herzog oeuvre alone.

In that selfsame issue of Reason, Ronald Bailey debunks yet again the myth that the U.S. was founded by observant and proselytizing Christians. He also reminds us just how recent and faddish evangelism is — and how it may be a fad that is ending.

Let’s hope so. Because in today’s news there was little I found quite as distressing as this piece, which shows Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama trying to out-God each other in Pennsylvania (an event that no doubt made Benjamin Franklin’s gout flare up in the great hereafter).  I don’t care which is more godly (given the history of things done in the names of so many disagreeing and disagreeable gods). I care which has a better sense of how to help us here on Earth.

Comic-book artist Peter Bagge covered the now long-ago New Hampshire primary for Reason magazine. Here’s what he learned. (Especially about Ron Paul.)

Today I got a Google alert that Lee Wochner had died.

That caught my attention, so I clicked on the link.

Here’s what I learned:

Leland R. “Lee” Wochner
DECATUR – Leland R. “Lee” Wochner, 80, Decatur, retired from Caterpillar Inc., died Tuesday (April 8, 2008). Services: 10 a.m. Saturday, Brintlinger and Earl Funeral Homes, Decatur. Visitation: 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, with 8 p.m. Masonic services. Burial: Salem Cemetery. Memorials: Decatur Masonic Temple Building Restoration Fund or Macon County Animal Control and Care Center.
Published in the Decatur Herald & Review on 4/11/2008.

You can understand my relief in seeing that I wasn’t the dead person. (Although, like Mark Twain, I was curious to see what people would have said.)

In one of the many wondrous examples of the fascinating adventures one can lead through the internet, I actually “met” (virtually) Leland R. Wochner about 10 years ago. Someone emailed me something thinking that I was he, which led me back to him. I remember him as rather crochety, but I also recall being impressed with his just getting started on the internet at age 70. Ten years ago, that was noteworthy.

My full first name, by the way, is Lee. Not Leland, or Leon, or Leeward, or any of those. My mother chose the name because she had three children before me all of whom got a nickname: Raymond became “Raymie” or “Ray,” Michael became “Mikey” or “Mike” (although we family members all still call him Michael), and Lorene got tagged with “Lorie.” So my mother looked for a name she didn’t think would result in a nickname, and here I am with it. And it worked.

Given the rarity of the combination of my first and last names — “Lee” not sounding terribly, well, German, and therefore an unusual choice — it was surprising indeed (and, as Freud would note, disappointing) finding someone else with the same name. I’m just glad I’m not dead as well.

I guess the April Fool’s joke was on me: Shortly after I posted a few things on April 1st, something took down this blog, corrupted a posting, and left us with a blank white page. A big thank-you to my business partner, Amy Kramer, for reloading the database prior to April 1st.

If you’re just tuning in now, here’s a quick recap of what transpired in those blog postings, now forever lost to the sands of time:

While at the state Democratic Convention, I did get to hear Bill Clinton give a speech that utterly convinced me I should vote for… him if it were possible. He certainly has a command of the issues, and plenty of good-sounding ideas of what to do about them. I did wonder what this has to do with his wife (translation: nothing), and I did wonder, um, just why he didn’t roll out these solutions when he was president. Oh, that’s right: He was too busy dicking around with, to name one thing, impeachment, which stemmed from his lying under oath. While I certainly preferred Bill to the current occupant of the White House — and, to keep noting it for posterity, at least one can say that Bill Clinton actually got elected and didn’t steal the presidency — I wish I could remember all the great achievements for which he will be remembered. (There was one: balancing the budget. That was a good one. That was also with a Republican Congress.) Even though ordinarily Bill Clinton could talk the varnish off prized antiques, no one was buying the thrust of his argument: “I can solve everything — so you should vote for my wife. I vouch for her.” As I said to a client that week, “You hire me for my skills. If I get hit by a bus, would you hire my wife?” Because, let us note, Hillary Clinton has precisely zero of her husband’s skills. And not a whole lot of others instead.

I blogged about a short play I wrote while at the convention. I saw something on MSNBC, went in to my hotel room bathroom to wash my face, looked in the mirror and then heard myself thinking, “But what happened after that…?” And there was the play. I went back to my laptop and wrote it and emailed it out and now it’s going to be produced his summer. More about that soon.

I also wrote what I’m sure at the time seemed like funny postings about forthcoming vacation trips to, oh, Mars and other places. It was April 1st, after all. Now it’s a week later and it doesn’t seem funny and I wonder if it was something I linked to that took down the blog.

Since then, I’ve been caught up in producing the 2008 USC MPW One-Act Play Festival, which previews tomorrow night and then runs Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at a beautiful mid-sized theatre in the Little Tokyo area of downtown Los Angeles. Here’s some info about it. (And there’s a link for tickets at the bottom of the page; Wednesday is sold out, but Tuesday has a few seats left.)

And that about brings us back to… now.

It’s good to be back.

My family and I are up in the mountains in a rented log cabin at an elevation of 6000 feet. We have no cellphone access — but there is WiFi somewhere around here, because I’m using it.

“Log cabin” doesn’t really do this justice. It’s a beautiful two-story house (that happens to be made out of logs), with a commanding view on all sides of… trees. Luckily, I like trees. We are also directly abutting a trailhead with hiking trail and thunderous stream. And although it’s about 50 degrees at the moment (perhaps warmer), there are large patches of snow on the ground. I take it to mean that there was a lot of snow here until very recently.

I’ll take some photos and may put one or two up. If we run into a bear, which we’ve been warned about, and you don’t later see a photo here, you’ll know what happened.