Quotes of the Day

Three years ago next week, I began this column, with the intent of focusing a gilded rear-view mirror on classic pop culture. And one of my favorite excuses for a story is to celebrate somebody's 100th birthday.

I've blown out all those candles for deceased artistes Marlene Dietrich, Richard Rodgers, Ogden Nash, Cornell Woolrich, S.J. Perelman and Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel. Two more honorees, Leni Riefenstahl and Bob Hope, were still alive when they got reached triple digits, though they have since ceded to mortality. I used to unearth these milestones only when I'd hear of some media cross-promotion — a tributary rivulet of books, CDs or DVDs — which often meant playing hectic catch-up. Now I go to the Internet Movie Database at the start of a year and see whose centenaries are imminent. (Click on the birth year of any celeb, and you will find IMDb's chronological list of every showbiz figure born that year. Another helpful service of the movie website I rely on most avidly.)

When my own esteemed webitors, Josh Macht and Mark Coatney, noticed that this column was nearing the century mark, they suggested I give the same treatment to That Old Feeling (TOF to insiders). Hmm... celebrate myself? Orate dewily on my night job? Reiterate the sacred precepts of cultural anachronism? I'm not sure, guys. Twist my arm some more!

OK, mission accomplished. Here we go, folks. Into the navel, endlessly gazing.

STATS

Compulsive list-keeping is the orderliness of the disorderly. I'm absent-minded; I lose videocassettes, books, film notes, my house keys and, occasionally, my mind. But I am a walking repository of baseball and box office statistics (my patron saints: Bill James and Art Murphy). I can name every winner of the Best Picture Oscar, reflexively — it's in my muscle or flab memory — from 1928 to the early 90s, at which point short-term memory loss kicks in. Thus it's no surprise, though it probably is a pity, that I have kept a running tab on the subjects and, bizarrely, the word counts of this series.

The bloody figures: 378,154 words in the first 99 columns, for an average of 3,820 words per story. The shortest piece was the first, an introduction to the scope and aims of the enterprise. That came in under 2,000 words. The pieces averaged about 2,500 words for the first few months, then just grew like Pinocchio's nose. The longest column was on a dozen films made from Woolrich novels and stories. That one (it was the second of two Woolrich pieces — I do get carried away) ran more than 7,600, and I fear that, somewhere off in cyberspace, it's still running.

This monstrous tally doesn't include another 80,000 words, more or less, for other TIME.com stories that don't quite fit the requirements of TOF: Oscar predictions and wrapups, reports on Cannes Film Festival prize-winners, some baseball ruminations and a few expansions of pieces (like this week's essay on Ben Affleck) that have run in the magazine.

That's a lot of, I don't know, verbiage, or verbal spillage — more than Stephen King could write in a whole month. Immediately I have to thank my Time.commissars for their indulgence, not to mention the wondrous application of giga-bandwidth, or whatever it is that allows all the TOF columns, and other, much more valuable material, to be found on this site long after it was published. I may be a cultural fogie, but I embrace the new technology.

My Microsoft Outlook engine is not so capacious; messages disappear after 28 days. Otherwise, I would surely have kept track of the e-mail I've received — most gratefully received — commenting on my stories. You should know that TIME writers rarely see the readers' comments on their magazine stories; letters go to the Letters Department, except for those addressed specifically to the writer. At TIME.com, you need merely click on a writer's byline to pick a fight or fling a bouquet. I get the message.

Well, not always. Some topics don't make readers hit the byline button. I've written a dozen or so columns on Broadway musicals without getting a single e-mail. (Which won't stop me from doing a Frank Loesser tribute one of these weeks.) Sometimes, though, I get bundles. The record-holder for TOF is the series I wrote last summer on Bollywood films. That spurred 150-200 e-mails, most of them long, knowledgeable and helpful to a passionate amateur in a huge field.

Other pieces I've written for TIME.com have generated larger, more heated responses. My comments on Halle Berry's Oscar speech cued a couple hundred angry, anguished, articulate e-mails that I answered, directly and indirectly, in four subsequent TOFs. A column suggesting that Cal Ripken's 16-year playing streak didn't entitle him to hero status stoked another couple hundred comments, most of them dismissive. Last month's piece on the liberal media's contempt for Mel Gibson and his Jesus movie provoked a heavenly host of e-mails — more than 400 in the first three days — from people who, glory be, agreed with me. I try to answer every e-mail, but was overwhelmed, in both senses, by the Mel-strom in response to that story.

Keep 'em coming, pro or con, people. And thanks to all who have sent in suggestions and corrections.

REMEMBER WHEN

This column grew out of two kinds of stories I've written for "the real magazine" — for TIME not-com. (In addition, that is, to all the movie reviews, celebrity profiles and arrant forays into the world of sport, science and, last week, the criminal underworld). One is a tribute to long-dead actors or musicians, usually tagged to a reissue or revaluation of their work.

In the 90s I wrote pieces for TIME on silent stars Buster Keaton and Douglas Fairbanks (when their films appeared in handsome video collections), on Dorothy Dandridge (a new biography), on the comedy band leader Spike Jones (a double-CD set, with liner notes by Thomas Pynchon). One year, a splendid season of every Samuel Beckett play cued a longish essay; the next, the packaging of musical shorts from the 30s and 40s. And there was the week when all the grownups were on vacation and I assigned myself a page on a Hawaiian steel-guitar virtuoso of the 1920s. For goodness' sake, why? Because I liked him!

One summer a couple of decades ago, my distinguished colleague Richard Schickel bemoaned the lot of a film critic assigned to write about the seasonal pack of muscle-bound action pictures. "It's not that they're bad movies," he said. "It's that they're the same bad movie." Our job, essentially, was to make cutting witticisms — to distinguish not between apples and oranges but between rotten apples and rottener.

In truth, critics don't mind parading their rage or contempt now and then; and one nagging secret of the trade is that there are many more synonyms for awful than there are for terrific. (I shudder when a critic describes a movie he saw two days before as "unforgettable." And if I read "riveting" one more time as an adjective of praise, I'm going to get out my riveter and hunt the critic down.) In larger truth, we live in an age of contempt. Like a talk-show host or a Presidential candidate, a critic of the popular arts can't go wrong handing out lumps of coal and mockery. (Or, for that matter, lumps of Colin Mochrie.) But there's good stuff out there. And as I age, grow decades past the youth in which every critic thinks he's discovering the Pythagorean Theory with each new movie or song, I find that a lot of the best stuff is Back There. Back When.

Much of it, I confess, is back when I was a kid — when pop exploded into rock 'n roll, when giant movie bugs and pods offered metaphors for Atomic Age anxiety, when 10-cent comic books and 25-cent paperbacks carried transcendently lurid pulp fiction. But quality isn't a monopoly of the 50s, as my columns on songwriters of the 20s, radio shows of the 30s, thriller writers of the 40s, love-rock musicals of the 60s, ABBA and "Ab Fab," Hong Kong horror films and Bollywood weepies, cigarettes and casinos and "The Singing Detective" try to show. There's so much out there, back there. And that just makes sense. Now is an instant. Then is everything else.

And sometimes, Now demands to be compared to Then. So when a new Broadway musical of old Burt Bacharach songs opens on the eve of the composer's 75th birthday, that's a That Old Feeling story. A Halle Berry citation of pioneer black actresses, a movie patterned on old Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies, a U.S. invasion of Iraq that seems inspired by Rambo's exploits than T.E. Laurence's, a film on the splatter of the Christ — all are natural pegs for this column.

DEAD MEN TALKING

The other kind of TIME story that spurred this column is the obituaries I am occasionally asked to write. In the past year I contributed obits of perhaps 20 notables, including Gregory Peck, Katharine Hepburn, Johnny Cash, Alan Bates, Sun Records' Sam Phillips and, for the magazine's international divisions, Hong Kong diva Anita Mui and Bollywood earth mother Leela Chitnis. The pieces ranged in length from 40 words (for TIME's Milestone page) to 4,000 (for the Cash cover story, which sold about 440,000 newsstand copies, a lot for us). Some of these elegies, like the crash Cash cover, are cobbled on the fly, but many are written in advance. Far in advance.

In the early 80s, TIME's managing editor, Ray Cave, urged the appropriate writers to devote weeks when they had no pressing assignments to preparing obits of people we intended to spend a page on. (Many newspapers and magazines do the same, to offset hysteria when a star's death is disclosed hours before closing time. One Saturday afternoon I had three hours to research and write a page on the novelist Ralph Ellison.) Spurred by Ray's initiative, and my own interest in summing up great lives, I dutifully compiled tributes to eight or ten worthies, including Laurence Olivier, Greta Garbo, Kate Hepburn. Some of these folks had been famously ailing. Yet they refused to die. I came to suspect that my obit-writing guaranteed these eminences something like eternal life. Hepburn, flinty and defiant to the end, outlived my original obit by 15 years.

As I say, TIME accumulated a small morgue of these send-offs, written and laid out and virtually ready to run. One of these came in handy toward the end of a busy work week just before Christmas 1983, when our editors were alerted that the surrealist painter Joan Miro had died. (A big name almost always dies around Christmas.) Fortunately, a Miro obit had been written some years before by Bobby Baker, since deceased. An editor gave the piece a suitable freshening and sent it off. At the very end of the week, a resourceful soul at the copy desk called that week's top editor, Chris Porterfield, to say that Miro hadn't died, he was only ailing. Just in time, Chris pulled the piece. He later noted that we were dangerously close to making journalistic history: an obit of a living person by a dead one.

Then Miro did die, on Christmas day. Turns out we could've scooped the world.

For me, the pleasure of considering a significant life became a habit I was determined to extend on this website — either in longer obits (of Chuck Jones, Al Hirschfeld, Leslie Cheung, Jack Paar) or in logorrheically wishing a happy birthday to Les Paul (on his 85th) or to Marilyn Monroe and Jean Shepherd (on what would have been, respectively, their 75th and 80th.) Sometimes I nostalgicized famous magazines (Mad, Playboy) on their 50th anniversaries, a favorite TV news show ("CBS Sunday Morning") on its 25th.

Often I am one of hundreds of writers noting these events. In a few sad instances I can offer the reflections of acquaintanceship with the deceased — Chuck, a friend of nearly 25 years, and Leslie, a suicide at 46 (the poor melodramatic dear). Mostly I hope to find expressions of the impact popular artists have had on us, and on me as a consumer of manufactured dreams. I juggle my shocked or melancholic reaction to the news of their passing with the sweet challenge of bringing, in words, the dead back to life.

99 COLUMNS APPEAR ON THE WEB...

...and in my first one I announced "the rise of a new generation of culture consumers: one that has instant access that the glories of the past. The sprawl of video and web technology puts almost anything you want at your fingertips or on your cassette shelf." Already that observation is antique; it has been outdated by Napster and iPod, TiVo and digital TV. Just now I'm in Toronto, savoring CineFranco, Marcelle Lean's annual festival of French-language films. But back home in Manhattan, my TiVo knock-off gizmo ($7 a month) is recording "South Park," "Martha Stewart Living," "Media Funhouse" and Garbo's German version of "Anna Christie" from four different channels. I couldn't have done that three years ago.

And three years fairly zips by. There are so many subjects still be be considered: Lenny Bruce, Pete Seeger, Alistair Cooke, Garrison Keillor, the EC horror comics line, to name a few coming up soon. And I have old promises to keep. In the first column I offered this preview of coming attractions: "I want to write about a 'new' collection of Tin Pan Alley lyrics, a 'new' 10-CD set of Mildred Bailey sides, a 'new' package of silent short comedies that Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton made back when Woodrow Wilson was President." Well, I reviewed the pop-lyrics book, and the Arbuckle-Keaton package, but I didn't get to Mildred Bailey — not then, and not last year, which was her centenary. Two outta three ain't good. It was my firm intention to fold Bailey into this column. Now she will have to wait a bit longer, because she deserves a whole column to herself and because, dammit, I'm going to bring this 100th column in under 3,000 words.

In other ways, especially in pop culture, three years is a long time. Many of my early rock 'n roll idols flourished for a brief, brilliant moment. Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, all had two years, tops, at the top of the game they did so much to shape. The comedy heroes of my youth — Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, Harvey Kurtzman, Lenny Bruce — produced their great work in their 20s or 30s. (Holly, Kovacs and Bruce get excuse slips for dying young.) Do the most intense talents wear themselves out by creating such heat? Is there a chemical formula that divides the number of years allotted to a pop icon by the amount of energy generated? Or do I overrate these guys because they came along at the time when I needed them? I can't answer that question. I can simply say that, to an extent, I am now what they showed me then.

WHAT ABOUT BOB?

Certainly public personalities with a lower emotional density wear better, stick around longer, perhaps because we're not constantly made aware of their presence. They have a subtle, lingering effect, not cathartic but calming. Only when they go away do we notice the end of a stream of white noise, the hole where the wallpaper was.

That notion smacked me with its poignancy this week when I read of the canning of Bob Edwards, host for 24 years and four months of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." Howard Stern and Don Imus got all the drive-time buzz, but, with 13 million listeners, Edwards was the voice of the top-rated show on radio.

And a soothing voice it is. Instead of annoying you awake with racist, sexist chatter, as Stern and Imus do — or pushing sensational headlines with strident vocal editorializing, as many of the all-news stations do — Edwards reports on a violent, miserable world in tones so gently modulated that they seem to say: It's not that bad. Catch another few minutes of shut-eye. (Besides, in a little while the whole two-hour show will be rebroadcast.) NPR's afternoon anchors, on the homeward-bound "All Things Considered," have a schoolmarmish severity that breeds apocalyptic concern. Edwards, no matter what dire bulletin he is reading, is comforting, reassuring. He's the lullaby anchorman. And now NPR is putting him to sleep.

What is Bob Edwards' connection with the concerns of this column? Well, he's over 50, and I like his work. Or rather, now that I'm forced to think of it, I appreciate what I always took for granted. More important, Edwards' demotion from anchor to "senior corespondent" (and hasn't "The Daily Show" made that designation too risible to be handed out in real news organizations?) relates to the raging subtext of this ostensibly celebratory column. Beneath the warm words about classic pop culture is a continuing, Stygian rant against planned obsolescence — against the prevailing idea that something good automatically becomes tiresome with repetition and must eventually be phased out.

I'll keep cooing, and railing, as long as they let me, and you read me.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss still has it