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6. Best (Only) Grown-up News Gatherer: CBS Sunday Morning
The 90-min. news magazine show, for which the word genial could have been coined, pads into its 27th year with its robe-and-slippers style intact. Its mixture of current-affairs, arts and life-style features, delivered in an amiably judicious tone absent from most TV news, continues to make CBS-SM must-watch TV in our house. But what happened to the show's resident crank, TV and movie critic John Leonard? He couldn't have got too old; host Charles Osgood is a bow-tied 72.
Honorable Mention: Bob Edwards
This should be obvious: talk radio is a medium of voices. Voices are the faces of radio, their personalities, their sex appeal, their omnipotence. Edward R. Murrow could have been as brilliant a reporter-writer, but without that distinctive sound, of a flinty Midwestern deity, he would not have become a radio star. Voices matter. Some suggest cheerful authority, some hectoring aggression. That's one reason that, though Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have the same political agenda, Rush gives great radio and Hannity is a hack.
If it were up to me, Bob Edwards would be the voice of airport announcements, the State of the Union address and the end of the world. His delivery lends a sensible and soothing air to the direst directive. The sonorous voice of NPR's Morning Edition was dumped a few months shy of his 25th anniversary. Nice timing, Public Radio. The suits didn't change the name to "Mourning Edition," as they should have; they replaced Edwards with anchors who have no discerning personality —interchangeable and, I have to call them, faceless. I eulogized Edwards' departure in my 100th column. Now he's on XM, the satellite radio network, to which I plan to subscribe as soon as I soon as I get a car radio. Which will be as soon as I get a car. My first.
7. Best Comic Book Tribute: Tales of Terror: The EC Companion
In a column on horror comic books of the 50s and another on Mads founding editor Harvey Kurtzman, I paid my dues to the graphic literature that, a half-century ago, nurtured and warped me. Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt and Mad were published by Bill Gaines EC house. And if theres anything as bizarrely inspiring as the story-telling skills of editors Kurtzman and Al Feldstein in ECs brief (1950-54), astoundingly fertile Golden Age, its the devotion of Fred Von Bernewitz, Bhob Stewart, John Benson and other 50s kids who have kept their scholarly love of EC mint-fresh. Tales of Terror, essentially a catalog of every story, every EC comic-book issue, is a perfect point of departure for those of you asking yourselves, Is he kidding? I am not. All kidding aside, this stuff is worth the fealty of a new generation of impressionable lads.
Honorable Mention: Russ Cochran and Bud Plant
Tales of Terror is the history book; now, where are the artifacts? You can spend hundreds of dollars on an online auction site for a few original issues of EC comics, or you can buy handsome reproductions of them, made in the 80s and early 90s, from Cochrans Gemstone Publishing and from Plant, at just $2-4 per issue. The entire 24-issue run of, say Kurtzmans wonderful war comic (actually, anti-war comic) Two-Fisted Tales will set you back only $60. There are also hardbound multiple copies, but what beats holding a 32-page comic book in anticipation of a ripping yarn? Its like being 10 again, with a universe of lurid adventure in your grasp.
8. Best Gatekeeper: Turner Classic Movies
Roger Mayer hardly needs my accolades; hes getting an Oscar this weekend for a half-century of preserving films, among other good deeds. But he and his team at TCM have done a magnificent job sustaining and showcasing the American film heritage, at least those in the MGM and Warner Bros. vaults that Ted Turner bought and bequeathed to Time Warner when we lured him into our fold. Airing 10 to 15 feature films a day, often with helpful intros by Robert Osborne, and supplementing this rich diet with appropriate documentaries, occasionally by my colleague Richard Schickel, the station sets a standard I wish others would follow. (The Fox Movie network is nice, but where can we see 30s-through-60s films from the Paramount, Columbia and Universal treasure chests?)
TCMs business model remains a mystery to me — its the only non-pay cable channel with no advertising — and I often wonder fretfully when Mayers bosses (and mine) at Time Warner will start interrupting the movies every 15 mins. with five mins. of commercials, as another once-grand movie network, AMC, has ruinously done over the past few years. But as long as TCM lasts, Im grateful for it. Its a benison I never take for granted, and, to my mind, the greatest cultural service of the company I work for.
Honorable Mention: The Gates
I leave to TIME critic Richard Lacayo the question of whether Christo and Jean-Claude, that globe-trotting and -wrapping couple, make art. But their Central Park installation The Gates, coming down after this weekend, is a gift of the highest social order to all New Yorkers and those who wouldnt mind joining us. To stroll among a hundred thousand or so other wanderers through the thousands of tall, orange-curtained doorways erected on the Parks walkways was to feel, like a champagne high, an intense sense of rural community in the midst of the countrys densest urban setting.
Central Park denizens — joggers, cyclists, skateboarders and speed-skaters — swerved through masses of slowly ambling visitors from around the world; I must have heard a score of languages during my couple of hours there. Ducks waddled on the icy surface of the Boathouse lake, as a Japanese bride and groom stood, smiling and precarious, on a bank of snow. Five-year-olds played Tag around the Gates stanchions. At the east edge of the Park, a huge orange strip, turbaning the top floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, grandly mimicked Christos gaudy, stately 16-day costuming of the bleakest month in New Yorks calendar. As someone who often celebrates the City in this column, yet doesnt experience nearly enough of it, Im grateful to have had a reason to spend a Sunday in the Park engaged in the atavistic ecstasies of a brisk nature-walk and an invaluable people-watch.
9. Best New Face: Natalia Tena
It is a critic's duty to see out young talent, especially when they give new life to old culture. It is a critic's privilege to fall in love, though only for an evening, with a performer who comes on stage and displays beauty, craft, personality, dazzle. So I gave my heart to Natalia Tena, the teenage star of Gone to Earth, produced by the Shared Experience company in London last spring. Her character, Hazel Woodus, is the kind of sprite, both earthly and otherworldly, that Audrey Hepburn incarnated in Ondine on Broadway and Green Mansions. I wouldn't burden any young actress with comparisons to the divine Audrey, so I'll just say I was mesmerized by Tena's beauty, her intensity, her gift for finding both the feral and the ethereal in Hazel's doomed sanctity. And less this sound like too much of a mash note, I'll add that my wife Mary thought Tena was terrific as well.
Honorable Mention: The Silvestri Sisters
Three children —Allie Silvestri, 9, and her sisters Diana, 7, and Catherine, 4 —performed, with expertise and brio, "We're in the Money," a Harry Warren-Al Dubin song written in 1933, before either of their their maternal grandparents was born. This command performance, given last July for Mary, their mother Beth and me, was a reminder that classic pop culture never dies, it just finds new interpreters. Not since the Andrews Sisters has a femme trio demonstrated such showbiz savoir-faire. I believe the Silvestri trio inherited some of their theatrical gifts from their grandmother, Pat Thompson Corliss, who as a college girl starred in an early U.S. production of Eugene Ionesco's absurdist sitcom, The Bald Soprano. A happy birthday, Pat, and a healthy year!
10. Biggest Batch of e-Mail: Holy Hypocricies
More the 400 messages, most of them highly complimentary, followed my TIME.com column on the outrage of the Left over Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. To me, tsimmes was ignorant: media solons like Christopher Hitchens and Andy Rooney condemning a film they hadn't seen; Hitchens actually urged a boycott! I'm a blue-state pinko (which has also agitated some readers), so my correspondents were essentially complimenting me for turning on my own. Still, it was nice to get the warning "Your mailbox is over its limit" from a batch of love mail.
Honorable Mention: Esperanto
In a remark about young people not liking old tunes, I thought I was making a jocular aside: that "the Great American Song Book might as well be in Esperanto —a language not worth knowing." Who knew there were so many speakers, readers, devotees of this invented tongue, created to be the world's language? Now I do, because dozens of Esperantonians wrote to me. I acceded to the flood and put a clarification in the next column.
THANKING THE LITTLE PEOPLE
Perelman, a professional curmudgeon, had a heart that could be touched by fan mail: "You are happily surprised to find yourself appreciated at what you thought might be your most obtuse level." Seconded. Perelman, who died before the world went online, would marvel, as I do, at the intelligence and commitment of TIME.com readers. Speaking as a commuter from the Gutenberg Era, I know this: Write a story in TIME magazine, and you'll get mail for a week or two. Write a column for TIME.com. and, because of links, Google and the website's archive, the correspondence stretches over years.
There are no little people to thank, because in cyberspace, we're all the same size. Thank you, then, to Robin Astaire, Fred's widow, who wrote me about a column I wrote in June 2002; to Bette Midler's #1 fan in Cincinnati (March 04); to questioners about an Ogden Nash poem (August 02); to those who've written to share their enthusiasm for Perelman (February 04), Jean Shepherd (July 01) and Brian Stokes Mitchell. Light years from now I may receive a communication from another galaxy, complaining that my column on E.T. (March 02) was astrophysically incorrect.
By the grace of my kindly editors, Josh Macht and my prime facilitator Mark Coatney, I've produced more than 100,000 words a year for this column. (We should hit a half million this spring.) The law of averages and the residue of my own sloppiness mean that some of these words will be wrong. Fortunately, I have readers to correct me. I'm grateful to readers who pointed out that Johnny Carson was raised in Norfolk, Nebraska, not Lincoln (we'll make a fix in that column), and to those who congratulated me for mentioning that Carson, who died of emphysema, smoked too much. (Confession: I read and answered some of those e-mails while I was smoking.) I'm grandly tolerant of my rabid critics in the BollyWHAT.com chat room, who became a bit less hostile to me after I touted Indian films on a Nightline report last month.
I tell you things; you set me straight. Life is a continuing education. For another year —at least until the next Feelies —let's keep learning together.