Quotes of the Day

This is the season when Hollywood pretends to believe it cares about the peer glory, not pure gelt. Oscar night is a time both for winning and sharing —holding a gold-plated doorstop aloft in triumph and thanking the little people while speaking to a billion strangers. But I know what's going through the minds of some Hollywood royalty. When Clint Eastwood mounts the steps tomorrow night to receive the Best Picture Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, what he'll really want to say is: "I'm 74 and I've got two of these things. How long do I have to hang around to win a freakin' Feelie?"

[Note to Editor: If Martin Scorsese should score an upset with The Aviator, please amend that quotation to read: "I'm 62 and I finally won one of these things. But what I really want is..."]

Actually, Scorsese won a Feelie two years ago, when he won the Best Film Documentary award for Il Mio Viaggio in Italia, his 4hr. love letter to postwar Italian cinema. I can still hear (imagine) him saying, "It's the only prize the matters."

And I can hear you, impatient reader, asking what the heck the Feelies are. They are the annual bouquets I bestow to the antique pop culture that has warmed my soul and given an excuse for this column.

In the 28 irregular installments since last year's awards (the column proceeds in fits and stops), That Old Feeling has paid tribute to centennial celebrities (S.J. Perelman, Dr. Seuss, Anna May Wong) and deceased artistes (Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, Alistair Cooke and Arthur Miller, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Britchky, darling Phyllis Jenkins). It has journeyed, metaphorically, to Beatles reunions and comic-book conventions and, literally, to a Bette Midler concert and a Brian Stokes Mitchell cabaret. It's taken you to London for the new theater season and to New York's City Center for musical revivals at Encores! It has cast a critical eye on movie sex (Closer) and political violence (the anti-Bush documentaries).

Ernst Lubitsch, director of many a classy comedy (Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka, Heaven Can Wait used to press his screenwriters to do better. He would look skeptically at a line of dialogue and ask, "Does it ring the bell?" Too little pop culture today hits that Lubitsch chime, or even aspires to. So now we look back in fondness and say another thanks —never, not ever a last one —to the people and events that, over the past year, rang the bell.

1. Best Info Website: South Park Scriptorium

Every word, including a few unintelligible ones (Kenny's) from Trey Parker and Matt Stone's great TV series, whose new season begins March 9. The site has scripts from all the shows, with explanations of the more obscure cultural and sexual references. Plus the Parker-Stone movies. I marvel at the meticulous scholarship of the site, which I mentioned in a column on Jesus movies; some of South Park's best episodes dealt with theological speculation. I hope to pour out my South Park heart in a column this year.

Honorable Mention: Internet Broadway Database

Modeled on the Internet Movie Database, this welcome site has the cast and chief creative crew of nearly every show that has opened on Broadway in the last hundred years. It was of crucial help in my columns on the Encores! revival series, Phyllis Jenkins and Arthur Miller. I wish IBDb listed the songs from musicals, as IMDb often does. And wouldn't it be lovely if there were a sibling site for London theater? A West End website, or WEbsite. Of course, the medium has a much longer pedigree in England. ("William Shakespeare, born 1564, died 1616. Author of...")

2. Best Infotainment: Media Funhouse

"Yyyyyyyyyes, ladies and gents, you're back in the Media Funhouse. Hi, I'm Ed your host. This is the Media Funhouse and we are the cable access show that's proud to bring you everything from high art —to low trash and back again." Ed Grant says this week in and week out, always with a practiced laugh on the "Hi," and always delivers. Ed (who has also contributed pop culture pieces to TIME.com) is a champion spieler and smiling savant with more knowledge of the last 50 years of pop culture than one brain could conceivably contain. For 12 years now, he has offered New York viewers a half-hour potpourri unrivaled for its breadth and curiosity. Where else will you find a clip of Salvador Dali pushing his face through a hole in the "Mona Lisa" on I've Got a Secret, or clips from a Jack E. Leonard 007 spoof called The Fat Spy, or Brando forcing Larry King into a duet on "I Can't Get Started"?

"Speaking at a rate fast enough to sell Micro-Machines," as a 1996 article in Visual Opinion described his verbal shtick, Ed will play a silent clip from a foreign film (often French) as he Uzies data in an inset at the lower left of the screen. He also interviews actors (Peter Ustinov, Audrey Tautou, the unadorned and charmingly frank Carol Lynley) and such directors as Russ Meyer and Francois Ozon. Last month Ed did a tribute to 2004's "deceased artistes" (his phrase, which I occasionally borrow) that had the show's usual grand range: from Dayton Allen (the Steve Allen Show Man in the Street whose catchphrase was "Why not?") to novelist Hubert Selby Jr. (with a reading from The Demon), and from Frank Nastasi (aide de camp to Soupy Sales) to super-spieler Spalding Gray (his porn movie appearance). I eagerly anticipate his tribute to one of TV's master showmen of ennui, Dr. Gene Scott, who died this week.

Media Funhouse runs in the 2 A.M. Friday slot on low-resolution Manhattan Neighborhood Networks, where the night-shift guy doesn't always pay attention. This week's tape was abruptly aborted half-way through, and we were treated to a few minutes of a silent, still-frame corrupted tape. Ed deserves better. I'd give him the nightly half-hour after The Daily Show. Comedy Central doesn't know what to do with it since canceling ...

Honorable Mention: Tough Crowd

Hosted by the endearingly incompetent Colin Quinn (he can't read jokes off a TelePrompter without stumbling into incoherence), this was Crossfire with intentional laughs, or Politically Incorrect if it were held in a high-school lavatory. Nick DiPaolo, Patrice O'Neal, Jim Norton and (our favorite) Greg Giraldo would try to address world politics but pretty quickly devolve into comic riffs on race animosity. I'm not usually a fan of talk shows that become scream shows, but Tough Crowd kept my loyalty. I was sorry that, last November, it was canceled. For political discussion of a more refined order, see Bill Maher's Real Time. In a round last week on Iraq's attempt to create a constitution, guest Robin Williams quipped, "Take ours. We're not using it."

3. Best Documentaries: The Beatles' First U.S. Visit

The fans' frenzy, the media's cynicism and the Fab Four's patience and effervescence are on rare, raw display in the Maysles bothers' cinema-verite feature about that momentous week in February 1964. The world will never again be so young, innocent and friendly. My favorite passage is TIME Cub Reporter Chris Porterfield's corralling of Ringo Starr to ask: "Are you kidding us?"

Honorable Mention: Control Room

Jehane Noujaim's sympathetic look at Al Jazeera, the Arab-language network that proved so nettlesome to Donald Rumsfeld during the March 2003 Iraq invasion. Apparently the channel has made for awkward moments in Qatar, where it is based: Al Jazeera's owner wants to sell it. Or close it down?

4. Best Pop Culture Book: The Seuss the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel

Grown-ups who grew up on Geisel's books in rhyme will be surprised and educated by Charles D. Cohen's splendid compendium of his work as a college wit, a deviser of cunning ad campaigns, a political cartoonist and a writer of the most impish war propaganda. Handsomely designed, and with laffs on every page.

Honorable Mention: The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America

Capitol Records could have had them, so to speak, for a song, but turned down the U.S. distribution rights to "Love Me Do, "Please Please Me" and "She Loves You." The New York Times' Jack Gould, reviewing a Beatles clip on Paar's show, wrote that the sang "a number apparently titled 'With a Love Like That, You Know You Should Be Bad'." These and many other sad hilarities are offered in Bruce Spizer's heavily illustrated mini-history, which packs more lore per cubic paragraph than any other Beatles book I've seen.

Best New Show: Pardon My English

Of course I mean old. This 1933 musical, with songs by George and Ira Gershwin, ran just six weeks on Broadway. That makes it a perfect subject for resuscitation at Encores!, the concert series at New York's City Center. The show's five-performance last March, under musical director Rob Fisher, was another triumph for this invaluable concert series. Fisher, who for 11 years has also shepherded the freshening and refurbishing of the antique scores, has announced his retirement at the end of the season. I can't imagine Encores! without his sorcerer's baton leading the two dozen orchestra members, but I'll show up anyway. I suspect the series will still be one of the best reasons to live in New York.

Honorable Mention: The History Boys

Alan Bennett's comedy about a public school in the early 80s is long (nearly three hours), polemical (a code metes out moral retribution to some of its characters) and enthralling. The modern, utilitarian imperative smacks up against classical, "useless" learning, and guess whose side Bennett is on? Mine! As one of the school staff, told that his standards are out of date, snorts, "Standards are always out-of-date. That's what makes them standards." That could be the motto of this column. I'd love this play even if it weren't the funniest thing I saw last year, except for South Park.

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 Mad’s 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 there’s anything as bizarrely inspiring as the story-telling skills of editors Kurtzman and Al Feldstein in EC’s brief (1950-54), astoundingly fertile Golden Age, it’s 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 Cochran’s Gemstone Publishing and from Plant, at just $2-4 per issue. The entire 24-issue run of, say Kurtzman’s 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? It’s 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; he’s 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?)

TCM’s business model remains a mystery to me — it’s the only non-pay cable channel with no advertising — and I often wonder fretfully when Mayer’s 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, I’m grateful for it. It’s 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 wouldn’t mind joining us. To stroll among a hundred thousand or so other wanderers through the thousands of tall, orange-curtained doorways erected on the Park’s walkways was to feel, like a champagne high, an intense sense of rural community in the midst of the country’s 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 Christo’s gaudy, stately 16-day costuming of the bleakest month in New York’s calendar. As someone who often celebrates the City in this column, yet doesn’t experience nearly enough of it, I’m 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.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss hands out the fourth annual awards for the best in geezer culture