Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>On Sat, 8 Feb 2003, Reed Tryte wrote:
>
>> I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess
>> Dennis Perrin and I are the only ones in the
>> room who are aware of Andy Breckman's fine album,
>> "Don't Get Killed."
>
>Nope. I own it and love it.
How did you find out about it? I was sure I'd be right about that, because Dennis is the first person I've heard mention Andy Breckman since a friend of mine in college loaned me his album.
In return I loaned him some other comedy arcana, the three issues of the magazine "Army Man." If I remember correctly, Andy Breckman had a few cartoons in Army Man. One was captioned "Proud Dad" and showed a father carrying his infant son as a plane crashed in the background; the son is saying "Pane Rash!" and the pleased-looking father responds "That's right! Plane Crash!"
Army Man was put together by George Meyer, one of the main writers for the Simpsons, and is mentioned in a profile of Meyer in the New Yorker. (Online at http://www.snpp.com/other/interviews/meyer00.html) Does Dennis or anyone have an opinion of that article and Meyer? I thought this paragraph was interesting, politically speaking:
"He hates advertising, which he views as a global force of destruction. ("I hate it because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then it leaves the debris of that process out there in the culture. An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.") This antipathy has made Meyer a connoisseur of brazen marketing; he is especially interested in examples of ad copy in which the word-to-falsehood ratio approaches one. He once showed me a magazine advertisement for a butter substitute called Country Crock. "It's not from the country; there is no crock," he said. "Two words, two lies.""
But what's weird is the author of the article fails to ask the obvious question, which is: how does Meyer feel about becoming so rich ("so much money that continuing to work has become essentially optional," says the article) by working in commercial television? It seems a little unseemly and/or schizo to do that yet publicly complain about advertising.
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