Newsweak (cq) has a web-only interview with Gore Vidal, one of the last remaining great American writers of that generation.

How fitting that the only other survivor is his arch nemesis, Norman Mailer. (Philip Roth, who is still doing astonishing work and having a remarkable late-career revival, was born in the following decade.)

I know that Vidal would like to be remembered as a great writer. But he isn’t one. An entertaining figure? Certainly. An entertaining writer? Sure. It’s hard to remember why I read so many of his novels, once upon a time, except they were so much fun. But “great”? I don’t think so.

“Creation” is the novel he says he wants to be remembered by, and that is the one I intend to reread. I remember it as being epic, and although I don’t trust Vidal’s opinions (as when he came down on Aaron Burr’s side) I’d like to relive his origin of so much of our philosophy. Even if I don’t agree with the characterizations.

This seven-minute clip seems to be from a documentary I haven’t seen (yet).

Vonnegut’s mordant humor is well-served by his wry reading voice.

I really miss this guy.

Yes, TODAY is the deadline for early registration for the San Diego Comic Con. (After this, the prices keep going up.)

And if you haven’t already booked a hotel room — fuggedaboutit.

I’m producing this festival, put on by the graduate writing program I teach for at USC, and featuring four very very good new plays by playwrights in the program.

It’s at 8PM on May 1st and 2nd at East West Players’ David Henry Hwang Theatre in the beautiful Little Tokyo district downtown, and admission is free. And you’re invited to join us. (And if you’re a reader of this blog, please come up and say hi. When I don’t look like I’m frantically producing. And if you’re not a reader of this blog, how are you reading this?)

Click here for information on the plays.

Click here to make a reservation.

Hope to see you there for a great night of free theatre.

One person I never thought would be the new Imus is this guy: sauve singer Bryan Ferry. I have been a Ferry (and Roxy Music) fan for almost 30 years, since picking up cassettes of both his solo album “The Bride Stripped Bare” and a Roxy Music compilation album from a discount bin at Woolworth’s. I listened to them endlessly and without further investigation — it was a couple of years before I discovered that the same man was behind both.

Ferry is in hot water for praising the “beauty” of Nazi imagery. I understand what he meant — he wasn’t praising evil, but recognizing the potential attraction of its fashion — but it does come off like admiring the sleek flowing lines in a KKK robe. Ferry sounds abjectly mortified. Here’s the story, and his apology. Thanks to Paul Crist for sending this link.

For years I have joked to friends that I’ve been trying to get my plays protested — if only angry villagers would show up and condemn me, then I could hit it big. Lately I’m not so sure.

Several people today have emailed me with links to the plays of Cho Seung Hui, the student behind the Virginia Tech massacre. Click here if you’d like to read them yourself.

They don’t tell us much beyond this: Mr. Cho was a very bad playwright. Really bad. The dialogue is forced and expositional, the staging doesn’t work, and characters such as the stepfather are set up as paper tigers for other characters to express their viewpoints. In fact, the only thing I like is the stepfather character’s name, Richard McBeef, but then only for a play in the style of Alfred Jarry.

Here’s the statement that these plays do not — repeat, do not — make: that because these are dark, troubled plays, Cho was clearly a dark, troubled person, someone who was going to be a murderer. No. These are dark, troubled plays that happen to be by someone who turned out to be a dark, troubled person who happened to turn out to be a murderer.

It always troubles me when people confuse the unattractive character in a play with its creator. Just because you’ve written racists, pederasts, murderers, and even Republicans into your play doesn’t mean you are one. It means that you are writing about them. Ian Fleming was in no way James Bond, Edgar Rice Burroughs was not raised by apes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe did not have an uncle named Tom.

These things may seem obvious to most of us reading this. Yet all across the net tonight people are reading the plays of Cho Seung Hui and deciding that someone “should have known.” If Cho gave other signs of mental distress, that’s one thing. But the writing in these plays tells us only that he had no future as a playwright.

Except — and here’s an irony — I guarantee that some enterprising director or producer somewhere is right now printing out those plays and getting ready to produce them. Remember, you read it here first.

“Horse and cow chiropractor.”

At first I thought she was kidding.

Nope.

It must be hell getting them on the adjustment table.  And collecting the inevitable insurance co-pay.

Yesterday there was a shooting spree at Virginia Tech. I don’t need to link to it — you’ve already heard about it. And been depressed by it. And today the polarized camps of “take away the guns” vs. “I have a right to bear arms” are once again all over the internet, still locked into their positions.

My position is somewhere in the middle. (But then, that’s where I think most sensible positions on most things are — somewhere between the polarized positions.) I was raised by gun owners and gun users and was one myself and I don’t recall any of us ever shooting anyone. Not for fun or sport, not out of dementia. In most ways, though, we were (and are) responsible people, so we also didn’t run a meth lab or produce child pornography in the basement or plunder savings and loans and bill the government for our reckless greed. I realize that not everyone can make these claims, and that laws exist to protect us from the irresponsible people, not the responsible people.

I don’t have much to add with regard to the gun “debate” — as much as there is a true debate — except this:

1. I don’t trust people who make their living being in either camp. That’s their butter in what is a guns and butter debate.
2. No matter what anyone in the bluest areas of the country think, no one is going to be able to round up all the guns in this country. There are dozens of millions of them. We’d better find better ways to live with them, and we would do better to limit the extremely crazy varieties (like automatic weapons that would leave nothing of Bambi’s mother behind to cook).

A couple of years ago Reason magazine ran a debate — a true debate — on this issue. Here’s a link.

Alannis Morissette, take note, because this is an actual example of irony:

After all my complaints the other day about Quickbooks’ tech (un) help line, for the past few days Quickbooks and Quickbooks-related products have been the chief sponsored links on this site.

This makes me wonder if I railed against lynching whether or not the KKK would place ads here.

Remember this commercial from the 1960’s? I do. Take a minute — and it is one minute — to watch it, then return here.

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Okay. You’re back.

To some of us, this commercial is about, well, Crackerjack. (Which I used to enjoy at the midget car races with my father in Atlantic City Convention Hall when I was a boy.) To me at some point this also became about comic acting; Jack Gilford’s pantomime here reminds me of the silent era, which makes me think of Buster Keaton — ironic because Keaton’s face was frozen, while Gilford is mugging.

This morning my two youngest children, ages 8 and 4, ran over to watch this commercial on my laptop screen. To them, this entire commercial is about the missing parents of the two children in the commercial.

“Where’s their parents?” asked one.

“Maybe they’re dead,” said the other.

Viewed from this perspective, the commercial does seem oddly deathlike. These kids get one last treat from a friendly, helpful envoy (akin to Charon, ferryman of the dead, who assists one on one’s final journey). Liberated and with prize in hand, the children run down the pier, not an adult in sight — in fact, no one else in sight — and as the camera descends on them enjoying their final moments, we see them ascend into the clouds.

To most viewers of the time, this commercial was about candy-coated popcorn that even the helpful candy man can’t get unstuck from his teeth. (You’ll note Gilford’s elaborate mouth action.) To my kids, it’s a cautionary tale of children abandoned to their own fates on an isolated boardwalk, far from the watchful eyes of parents.