This is the photograph Lillian is looking at in today’s Crankshaft:
Okay, it’s not exactly the same photograph. Today’s version has what appears to be entrance doors where the text appears in the above image. But it’s now obvious where this week’s heavily padded story is going. Lillian is going to notice the name of the bandleader, and connect it to her choir director/former Bedside Manor band director/former Westview High School band director/fascist dictator/World’s Greatest Asshole Harry Dinkle.
It also explains the cryptic, pretentious introduction from Monday’s strip:
We all spent a week wondering what the hell that could possibly mean, in the apparent context of a very old man being forced to move somewhere unpleasant. It means we’re going to explore Dinkle’s daddy issues!
Oh boy. Where to begin?
This is so obvious I’m embarrassed to write it. But one-time Putlizer nominee Tom Batiuk apparently doesn’t know it, so here it is: A very old man awkwardly telling a lifelong friend about “moving to a new place” is a serious topic. It is not a benign piece of information you use to fill space while you get to the more important matter of yet another found photograph of yet another dead person.
I’ve used the word “tonelessness” to describe Tom Batiuk’s writing, and this is another manifestation of it: not knowing what’s important to human beings and what isn’t. This week appeared to be setting up a “move to the retirement home” story. Which can be played for dark humor. But that didn’t happen here either. Nor is Tom Batiuk even remotely capable of this.
It was also unclear why this would have been a bad thing for Eugene. Bedside Manor is a recurring location, and is never depicted negatively. Not even when it should be.
But the uncertain future of a 99-year-old man is irrelevant. Or the reveal is being pushed to the end for some reason that makes sense only to Tom Batiuk. It’s a coin flip whether the story even bothers addressing the matter later on.
The story didn’t even need the tired “found photograph” mechanism, because Eugene’s sad little shoebox also contained this:
That appears to say “Sunrise Over Kilimanjaro by Larry Dinkle.” Lillian could have found this sheet music almost anywhere, recognized the surname, asked Harry about it, and the same story could have progressed from there. This also could have been done in two days, tops. (On a personal note: my first ever blog post complained about Batiuk using days to set up something he could have opened with. It’s filler all the way down.)
I have a lot more thoughts, but let’s take a moment and enjoy what we’ve got here: a genuine Funky Winkerbean Act III-style prestige arc! Have fun in the comments!
Son of Stuck Funky 
How big a jerk is this guy supposed to be if the little tin god in the monkey suit is the more humane one?
Also, if we care where Eugene is living, we’re bullying Batiuk.🙄😐
Lillian could have had the same exact realization just by reading the Wikipedia page for the Wisteria Ballroom. If, y’know, she was capable of using a computer. But, nah, let’s introduce yet another dangling plot thread that Batiuk can dismiss with an “It’s called writing!”™.
We also have the next exciting installments of Match to Flame and Flash Fridays to look at. First, Match to Flame #242…
That’s it. That’s the entire entry. One paragraph. And apparently he forgot that he solved the murder of John Darling Who Was Murdered , like, 30 years ago or whenever (having Plantman be in jail when Jessica Darling Fairgood Daughter Of John Darling Who Was Murdered interviewed him should have been a reminder).
And “so do yourself a favor and ignore me” is just asking to be mocked, really.
Anyway, on to Flash Fridays…
Not that Schulz originated the phrase, but… you ever consider it was a deliberate reference, Tom? Yeah, SOME people reference Peanuts in a context OTHER than pretending their somehow equal to Schulz because they received a letter of complaint. (Heck, in Detective Comics #500, Lein Wein and Walt Simonson did a two-page Batman story based on Snoopy’s story. Really! https://www.cbr.com/len-wein-batman-snoopy-peanuts/ )
Yeah, because Tom would NEVER set up plot details just to work in some bad wordplay or anything.
(The rest is, as usual, just recapping the plot with no attempts at insight or commentary.)
SOME people reference Peanuts in a context OTHER than pretending their somehow equal to Schulz because they received a letter of complaint.
Or because they received a personal letter from Charles Schulz, which he would send to almost anyone who wrote him. Unless you argue that Franklin needs to be in a segregated school. Schulz pointedly said he refused to respond to a letterwriter who said that. Which was one of the most savage combinations of politeness and Fuck You in human history. (Almost all the others came from Mr. Rogers.)
If you were to ask me my opinion, it would be that killing the character was absolutely unnecessary. Batiuk could have easily folded him and his supporting cast back into the parent strip but he just bloody didn’t.
He was in a dispute with the syndicate over the ownership of the strip and its characters, so Batiuk figured he’d kill off the main character so that the syndicate couldn’t continue the strip. Which was, of course, completely moronic, since the syndicate, had they been declared the owners, could have simply hired someone else to take over the strip and just not run Batiuk’s finale. Or have John Darling Who Wasn’t Murdered wake up and say it was a dream, or any one of a number of other options. If, y’know, anyone actually cared about the strip any longer by that point. Which I’m pretty sure they didn’t.
Its moment had passed. Batiuk isn’t aware of this.
Also, it never actually had a moment. Batiuk isn’t aware of that either.
It was completely unnecessary.
The thing about the “if I couldn’t have John Darling, no one could” story is that nobody did want him. He himself said that part of why he decided to end it was because its circulation was dropping along with the artist leaving and the legal battle over ownership of Funky Winkerbean. It’s easy to read between the lines and guess at the reality of the situation: Batiuk had been working three strips simultaneously. The artist for John Darling had left and he didn’t feel like doing another search for a new one (something else he’s outright stated). So you have likely burn out + the legal battle + having to search for a new artist for what’s basically a dying strip so screw it, end it.
I don’t believe for a second the whole thing about him killing off John Darling the Murdered Father of Jessica Darling (Whose Father, John Darling, Was Murdered) simply to stick it to the syndicate so nobody could use him. Nobody wanted John Darling, that was the entire problem. Like usual I’d bet his thought process was simply to do something shocking because he thought it would get people talking and the “I did it as part of this legal battle to showcase my rights over my characters,” deal is some after the fact yarn spinning. We know how much he loves to romanticize the creative process and his career with these kinds of stories so what better way to fluff himself up than by taking his situation and making him out to be on the same level as Jack Kirby and Steve Gerber and all the other comic creators who felt they too had been screwed by the corporate bigwigs?
All of this, and all of the above too,
The fact that the syndicate ran the “John Darling gets shot and dies” strips shows clearly that they thought John Darling was a valueless property which had no reason to continue being produced, and that pursuing any “ownership” claims of it would be pointless. Spending even a dime in lawyer’s fees in asserting that claim would be a dime that would never, ever be recovered in revenue. The strip was hemorrhaging newspapers, and simply wasn’t profitable. For the syndicate OR for Batiuk.
Of course, if anyone was looking at it on a creative level…it was a D+ level strip, maybe with the odd C- installment. On it’s very, very best day, a generous reviewer might call it mediocre. But as Batiuk’s faithful readers know, lack of quality isn’t what gets a strip cancelled.
He’s just NOT capable of realizing that The Man let himself be stuck to.
6/12: Everything has been stolen because women are stupid.
The “Skip tells off Mordor Financial” arc feels like a retelling of Batiuk’s version of what happened to John Darling.
Skip sashayed into the Mordor Financial executive offices and told them off without being denied entry, escorted off the property, arrested, sued, or just told to go away. We’re supposed to believe that a greedy hedge fund company didn’t lift a finger to protect ownership of its own properties, because a smug one-armed fossil lectured them.
Remember when Bill Murray fired Bobcat Goldthwait in Scrooged? That’s exactly what would have happened to Skip. And it’s even easier to do in the age of computers. HR and IT would have deleted his access to everything before he got done monologuing. Corporations love zero-threat, high-urgency incidents like this, because they get to test their crisis management teams in real conditions. “Hello, HR? Skip Rawlings… Code Ten” is exactly how it would have ended.
But we’re supposed to believe the same thing Batiuk wants to us believe about John Darling: that the noble everyman from exurban Cleveland who Does The Thing Correctly cleverly stuck it to the evil hedge corporation, by using the power of writing! Which is only true in the sense that they wrote the evil corporation’s reaction. The obvious explanation in both cases is that the corporation let it happen, for their own reasons. Probably because it saved them the trouble of disposing of it. And even that would have ended after Skip published his Mary Sue fanfiction version of the story as actual news.
Note also that the Buzzfeed/Reddit/AI crap-o-sphere has never latched on to Batiuk’s yarn. It lives for stories of Everyman sticking it to people everybody hates, and doesn’t care much about how dubious or implausible they are. Nor have reputable news sources like DailyCartoonist ever confirmed Batiuk’s version of the story, when it’s their job to follow and report on such things.
Skip Schumacher accidentally gave a more honest retelling of an event from Tom Batiuk’s life than anything Batton Thomas will ever do. Throw that onto the pile of reasons Batton sucks.
Yeah, recounting Batiuk’s tale of John Darling Who Was Murdered should always include the caveat “Batiuk claims”. Apologies for the oversight.
As I’m feeling particularly pedantic, I say that “it was a dark and stormy night” comes from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford.
Bulwer-Lytton is probably best known these days for persuading Charles Dickens (who was no slouch at opening lines himself, based on “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and “Marley was dead, to begin with”) to give Great Expectations a happy ending.
What he would have advised Tom Batiuk to do with Lisa Crawford Moore I shall not begin to guess
I knew that I should have looked closer at that panel with the sheet music. It was too obvious and visible to not be insignificant. Bah! Good catch on that.
Today’s (06/06) strip is another exhibit on what makes Tom so bad at his craft. She was there. She has personally seen the content of the picture. There should be no surprise about anything in it, because she was there.
She should also connect the father and son because despite what comics tell him, a woman’s brain is not an aerodynamic Styrofoam block
I noticed Dinkle name in the photo and thought it was just a bit of a throwaway nod to Harry. I figured, ‘Ah, Dinkle has a relative who is also a band director. Runs in the family” and didn’t think anything else about it because I assumed she had already seen the picture before, plus she was actually there at there at the event. Silly me…
If Eugene is really moving to Bedside Manor, then I’d like to know if he made that call on his own. His facial expressions and comments sort of indicate otherwise, so who decided that it was best for him to move there? A sibling? His children from an unseen wife? And if he has grown children, then that raises so many other questions. But of course, this isn’t his story.
Of course it’s not his story. His stories end with maudlin idiocy about how everyone hates his love.
I see’ve come to another of Batty’s favorite storytelling conventions in setting up a story to be about one character only to have one of the Spotlight Stealing Squad come in to take their proper place as the real central character of the story. Much like Chien and her article existing as set up for a story about Les or Susan and her being abused by Matt is set up for a story about Lisa, Eugene and his move is simply set up for a story about Dinkle. Batty has the characters he wants to see so damn it that’s what we’re all going to see.
Us wanting to see people who don’t interest him is experienced as bullying because autism.
Hey, gang, here’s a purely rhetorical question: Are we ever going to be told who the phantom photographer taking all these random snapshots of Lucy and Eugene cutting a rug was? Clearly it wasn’t Lillian. She was busy sitting at home by herself, silently fuming.
There is a man… with a mop…
Which is another problem: Tom Batiuk created TimeMop; why doesn’t he use him? TimeMop could have pulled Larry Dinkle out of time dimensional nexus vibration mode, or whatever combination of comic book words Batiuk spews to justify it. Batiuk invented TimeMop to justify 50 years’ worth of shitty writing; he can justify all Batiuk’s future shitty writing too!
I thought we were perhaps heading toward Time Mop when the black hole opened up in Crankshaft’s backyard, but thankfully it didn’t go there.
Eh, I think TimeMop would have been a huge improvement over “it was all a dream.”
Perhaps he’s not feeling elegant enough.
Some of the pictures show people with numbers on their backs, so they may have been taken during some kind of dance contest, and the Wisteria had a photographer there for the event. That’s at least plausible.
The better question is: who are the people in the photos? I mean, we’re supposed to assume they’re Eugene and Lucy (presumably), but those are NOT the same people in each photo. Compare the faces (especially the noses) and the relative heights… really, the only commonality is the outfits. So who are these people, and why did Eugene have pictures of them? (And why did they all wear identical outfits?)
(Yes, I’m being a beady-eyed nitpicker. No, I don’t care. Clearly, Dan Davis doesn’t care, either.)
I have another one-upper of a question, GL. I didn’t come up with this one (thanks to Grozar over at GC); why are there musical notes in some of the snapshots? Visible sound effects are a fact of life in comic strips, but these are supposed to be photos of a real-life event. And no, they don’t appear to be cardboard decorations.
A lot of resorts, nightclubs, amusement parks and many other places had photographers taking people’s pictures as mementos. They’d snap your photo and give you a card with their phone number and a photo reference number. You could order a photo then or call later to get one. I think I was in NYC when a photographer walked up and took my picture on the street. A lot of the places (nice nightclubs and restaurants, parks like Cedar Point) had a darkroom and lab worker on the premises so you might get your photo in half an hour.
The photos in this story appear to have been taken by an amateur because of the number of different shots. A pro might take a shot of a couple dancing and then a posed shot (hopefully before they were too sweaty), but the only time you’d take more than that is if Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were the subjects. The photographer would take one shot and if you blinked, TS!
6/7: I don’t know what’s more galling: being expected to notice the name of the band leader, being expected to care or being told something actually important is trivia.
Yeah, it’s like the world’s easiest Hocus Focus. “Can you find six things wrong with this picture?” Buddy, I can find a lot more than that.
What I find most wrong is her blindness to her own cowardly malice and lack of curiosity. It’s not about shivving Lucy or wondering where Eugene is living. She has to ask the angry fascist choirmaster about his dad.
If this goes where I think it’s going – Dinkle’s abusive father forced his son to chase his own dreams, a la Bull Bushka’s father – what would be the goddamn point? He’s in his 80s now!
Dinkle has already pushed his own daughter Halle into band directing. Halle’s old enough to have pushed the next generation of Dinkle-Somethings into it. And, to have had several kids over the years who pursued band in adulthood, and spread Larry Dinkle’s toxic influence even further. Ditto most of that for One-Armed Becky.
So this is going to be another empty, pointless redemption story. Considering the massive scope of Dinkle’s misdeeds, this should be a massive shock, just like Lucy’s mental breakdown shpuld have been to Lilluan.
Dinkle will just do an empty grsture like taking the dead letter to the demolished ballroom, and go on acting the way he always does.
The only thing remaining is seeing how token the gesture is.
You’re probably right. My previous guesses have all been a bust, which is OK because I’m generally a lousy prognosticator anyway.
If Harry’s dad pushed him into band directing (as if band directing is “the family business”), I’ll accept that to a point, but if Harry ends up saying he never really enjoyed being a band director, then I will call BS all day long. Guess we will see…
Isn’t he supposed to hear down to the Ryman Auditorium to join the Opry? This could mean that he wanted to be Tex Ritter.
Harry supposedly legally changed his name to “Harry Dinkle The World’s Greatest Band Director,” right? Instead of causing Harry to realize that his father forced him into band directing, a career Harry loves and is proud of, it would seem more reasonable for Harry, upon finding the photos and sheet music, to be inspired to write a biography of his father.
After all, Harry has spent the last 50 years writing numerous autobiographies of himself and a biography of Claude Barlow, a composer from 400 years ago whom nobody liked in his own time or the present day (except possibly Mason Jarre). He might as well write a biography of his father and pay tribute to the musician who inspired his son to become the world’s greatest band director.
Not only would this set up an other opportunity for book signings, it would also be a good lead-in to Father’s Day, which is two weeks away.
It’s hard to know what impact Becky’s had compared to Dinkle. Her own adopted daughter apparently decided hanging out with the Taliban was preferable to staying in Westview and she may very well have forgotten that her biological son exists. We have no idea if any of the band members she taught decided to spread Dinkleism onto other victim’s like a werewolf’s curse. It seems like the threat of Dinkleism thankfully ends with her. Unless Kayla’s doing things we’re not aware of over at Big Walnut Tech.
Is that picture a still from the movie “They Shoot Dinkles, Don’t They?”
How exciting to finally have a story arc based in classic Crank mythology again, even if it’s clear we’re taking a hard-swerve into Dinkle indulgence again.
As far as the Lucy-shaped elephant in the room, I wonder if Batiuk’s legit forgot that Lillian never came clean to Eugene and just assumed he smoothed over their fatal love triangle as all water under the bridge now. Wouldn’t be too surprising with his track record.
Yeah, I can’t tell if we’re supposed to infer that Lucy/Eugene figured it out, since they were in contact with each other near the end of her life (and Lucy was lucid and verbal at least one). Lillian did her pointless ritual to cleanse her own conscience, so maybe we’re supposed to think the matter is closed? Who knows?
That would mean not passively accepting misery.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
Days 6 and 7 of the In The Name of The Father Storyline
(Lillian looks through the images and sees a man holding a mop and a helmet that suspiciously looks like the one that Donna Klinghorn owns in them)
“I have a question about this photo. Do you like what you see? I’m wearing my flimsiest burlap teddy, and there’s more candid snaps where this came from! Now, then, let’s talk about my choir solo!”
6/8: She wants to ask him something he thinks everyone already kn
Woo hoo! This is shaping up to be the best summer yet. Ol’Rusty is retiring next month and I plan to spend the rest of the summer lounging by the pool. I’ll have the wonderful story of Tommy and Dawnie from Mary Worth, and a prestige arc from Batty to entertain me. Nice!
Lillian, Dinkle, AND Kilimanjaro?!
I hope the story involves Larry H. Dinkle finding a certain box left at the top of Kilimanjaro with pictures and a message from the future.
I think we’re going to find out that Larry Dinkle was not only the band’s director; he was also the innovative first trumpet who had a boogie style that no one else could play. He was widely considered to be the top man at his craft, but then his number came up and he was gone with the draft. He was in the army blowing reveille, and that, my friends, is how he became the boogie-woogie bugle boy of Company B! It’s also why Harry hates brass players.
Will we also find that Lillian and Lucy’s long-lost sister Laverne helped them form a popular ’40s singing group?
Nah, it won’t be that interesting. I’m thinking cancer, it has to be cancer.
It took all last week to notice a photograph with the name “Dinkle” in it. And it’s going take all this week for Harry Dinkle to say the words “yes, that was my father.” And that’s two weeks of a three-week arc. Oh well, at least Batton Thomas is gone until after Father’s Day.
Well, the joke’s on you, BJ6K. Dinkle fessed up on Day Two.
Now, I don’t want to say Tuesday’s reveal is lacking in surprise, but there are as-yet undiscovered Stone Age tribesmen in the Indonesian rain forest who saw this coming.
Oh, well, at least the man this strip is named for gets to look on and stare blankly as the world he thought was made for him and his antics moves on without him.
This sort of thing should be common knowledge because it would be in the real world. Everyone should know that the band leader’s son is a band director and why he became one. For Lizard Woman to only now put two and two together makes her out to be stupid.
Well, that’s faster than I thought. Still, we could have skipped the whole first week, started with Sunday’s strip, then Monday’s strip could have been today’s. It doesn’t matter where Lillian found the photo (or the sheet music, which would have worked just as well).
Though I would remove the text in the middle panel, and let Dinkle’s declaration “he was my father” advance the story. It’s obvious where the story was going; there was no need to do a week’s worth of setup.
@PJ Tom Batiuk’s not trying to make Lillian look stupid. He thinks his audience is that stupid.
6/9: The look on his face suggested that he thought everyone already knew that. It’s like she’d be fooled by Team Rocket.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankshaft
Days 8 and 9 of In The Name of The Father Storyline
(the Ghost of Larry Dinkle shows up and smacks Harry L. Dinkle in the face)
6/10: Explaining who his dad was explains the bombast as he’s ashamed of him for being a regional celebrity.
FUNKSHI NOTE: Dinkle’s text box in Panel 3 meets the “more than 50% of the panel” test to win wager “A2. Will there be a word balloon that is more than half the size of the panel?” The panel is 288 x 284 (approximately; these bozos can’t even draw a straight line.) Dinkle’s word balloon is at least 288 x 142, and part of extends a little below that. I will add this caveat to the rule: “space outside rounded corners counts, if it falls within a rectangular box that captures all or part of the word balloon.”
I’m waiting for Harry to stop talking, pointedly glare at Crankshaft, and ask, “Excuse me. May I help you with something?”
“Territorial”? Is that anything like “local” or “regional”?
More Batiukese, I guess.
It’s like “local” or “regional”, but if anyone tried to muscle in on your territory, you’d have to fight them.
It’s because Ohio was a territory at the time. It didn’t officially become a state until 1953.
No, really: look it up. In 1953, they found that Ohio’s statehood in 803 had some requirements they had to fulfill first, and nobody ever followed up on it. They resolved this in 1953, but declared that Ohio statehood retroactively begin in 1803.
It actually wasn’t Ohio’s fault. As part of accepting a state into the Union, Congress is supposed to approve that state’s Constitution. For whatever reason, they kind of… forgot to do so for Ohio. For their 150th anniversary, a teacher in Ohio asked Congress for a copy of the ratification document. Which, of course, no one could find, or find any record thereof, leading to the realization that Congress hadn’t ever actually done it. Oops! (Seriously, this sounds dumb enough to have been a Batiuk story, but it’s true.)
Swell. Yet another verbose Batiukverse history lesson. Thanks a heap, Lillian. As if I needed another reason to hate you.
Yeah, I’ve got a feeling Wednesday’s strip is going to be at least 70% word balloon, as Dinkle tells his father’s needlessly detailed backstory.
It could be worse, I suppose. Batty could be doing the backstory on Lillian.
Loathsome Lil: When I was a little girl, the boys put my pigtails in ink wells.
The Readers: 😝😩
(Why are the text edit tools, like bold and italics so inconsistent? Sometimes they load. Sometimes they don’t. Do I need to perform some kind of ritual like sacrifice a chicken before I post?)
It’s a complicated system where you have to make sacrifices in harmony with the Mayan calendar, and then guess.
For some reason I’m thinking of a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. story called “The Foster Portfolio,” about the son of a jazz musician who honors his father’s memory in an unlikely (and unexpected) way.
Then again, I am currently reading Duff McKagan’s It’s So Easy (and Other Lies) and those who are welcomed to the jungle are probably also welcomed to the monkey house.
I’m also thinking of Dick Tracy: that strip has a minor character named Themesong, who derived her name from knowing the theme song of every big band.
Much later, Themesong would go into music herself and have a hit with a song called “Do the Tracy.”
This may be like doing the Bluto in the closing song to “Animal House,” but I refuse to do the Crankshaft on a raft, or on a giraffe, or in exchange for band candy graft…
Duff “‘Rose” McCagan my be the first reference I’ve ever gotten from you. I love reading them anyway, though.
Yeah, I am the kind of guy who starts talking about Rebecca West and Henrik Ibsen when someone mentions that they’re reading a book called Balkan Ghosts.
David Geffen is the Free Man in Paris, and Duff McKagan is the man who named a brand of beer in “The Simpsons.”
If you’d like to make some suggestions for a Beginner’s Guide to Exploring McKagan’s Music, I’d be very grateful. Until I began the book, my first thoughts with Guns N’ Roses were of Regina Spektor’s allusion to “November Rain” in “On the Radio” and a daydream Peter Fox had in which he met some of the band.
Keep your Claude Barlow on the down-low, Dinkle!
I don’t know much about Duff McCagan beyond his role in Guns ‘N’ Roses, and that losing him was one of many bad moves that band made.
One thing I remember: when I saw the Use Your Illusion tour, they let him sing lead vocals on a song. It wasn’t a GNR song; it was some two-minute interstitial thing I didn’t even recognize. Since Duff would later release a solo album, I’m guessing the band was just giving him a little face time for one of his own songs.
Wasn’t that you I spotted at midnight movies doing “The Time Warp”?
Most likely, if the pelvic thrusts were making me look embarrassing as well as driving me insane!
Ann Miller would not have to eat her heart out.
Match to Flame 243 is up! Now, at last, you can THRILL to the story of the creation of Mason(e) Jarr(e)!
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Batiuk thought up the name Mason Jarr! He wondered if he’d be able to remember it! And then…
(….tension builds…)
…he WROTE IT DOWN!
It’s an emotional roller coaster of a story, all right, assuming that the rollercoaster is closed for repairs and you just sit there at the bottom and don’t move.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: This anecdote is currently scheduled as a story Batton Thomas will tell Skip over a two-week period in October 2035.
Actually, Batiuk will change things up, so that Batton will tell skip how he added an egocentric movie star named Tupper Ware to the cast of “Three O’Clock High.”
But there was the distinct possibility that he would forget that INCREDIBLY AMAZING name, and the character would be lost to the world forever. And what an absolute shame that would have been. Truly a tragedy that would have been.
Absolutely! Because we all know (well, those of us who closely observe WRITING know) that the sole step in creating a character is coming up with an awesome name! After that, your work is done … except for watching those royalty cheques come in!
RE: 6/11 ‘”‘Shaft:
Hey, look, everybody! For the first time since May 31, ED SPEAKS!!! Of course, what he says makes no sense. There’s no mystery here. Dinkle pere and his orchestra made records, and Dinkle fils has copies in a storage unit. Harry’s clearly not into Big Band music; his tastes run toward marching band, choir, and the works of Claude Barlow. And this large gumwad of nothingness is going to be stretched out for at least two more days, plus maybe a sideways Sunday panel?
Wow, even Dinkle doesn’t give a shit about this story. How disinterested do you have to be in your own father to keep his records in a storage locker, as if they were tax records?
You think Dinkle would digitize and remaster them? Heck no! The proper way to listen to them is to use a record player. Batty sure loves his old junk.
As someone on Comics Curmudgeon pointed out, those records are probably unusable by now, unless Dinkle’s “storage locker” is a special environment designed for long-term media preservation.
Side note: I have a framed certificate from the American Power Boat Association, dated 1964, for an extremely narrow official record that my father set once. His name is the same as mine, so it’s a neat keepsake. He died in 2006, so I keep it with photos and other memories of him. I would NEVER put it in an “storage locker.”
It feels like Dinkle is showing his contempt for his father, the same way Les Moore shows his contempt for everything: by pouting, and making you guess what he’s mad about.
Oddly enough, despite Harry’s fascination with Claude Barlow, he seems to consider his music awful.
“Claude Barlow began to lose his hearing late in life. In fact when he composed his last symphony he was totally deaf. A fact usually envied by most people who hear it!”
“Claude Barlow’s ability with the violin was unmatched. In his hands, the violin surpassed the rack as an instrument of torture!”
“Tremors were sent through the music world recently by the discovery of Claude Barlow’s long-lost opera, Heckle and Jeckle! Music critics have for years lived with the fear that more of his music would be found!”
To be fair, originally That Was The Joke, and as a throwaway gag it works okay. TB just seems to forget what the joke was, in favour of the nostalgia(?) value of Hey Remember That Thing You Liked. Or awkwardly blending the two.
“My father’s orchestra was at the bottom, playing regional ballrooms.”
“Did he have a recording contract?”
“Of course he did!”
Eh, there were it was possible to make your own recordings, no recording contract required. They may not have been as ubiquitous as cassette recorders would become, but the idea that the Larry Dinkle Orchestra was recorded on some kind of media (for simplicity’s sake, we’ll say “vinyl”, although I’m not sure how many of those non-professional recordings would be put on a disc made of actual vinyl) isn’t implausible.
Whether they’d still be listenable after several decades is a different story, but if Dinkle can somehow preserve entire turkeys in his freezer for 30 years, he clearly has access to some degree of TimeMop™ technology.
Somebody made the argument that Larry Dinkle could have gone to some kind of “record your own voice” studio. But a whole orchestra/big band wouldn’t fit in it. (I’ve used one: I co-sang an awful version of “You’ve Got That Loving Feeling” with high school buddies at my state fair around 1986.) So it remains to be seen how this is going to be reconciled.
AV archivist here. They indeed out not have been on vinyl. Home and semi-professional disc cutters were definitely something even a low-end band might have had access to. I collect these when I find them and band concerts and piano recitals are really common. As are songs recorded off the radio and of course people just messing around with the machine. Where was I? Oh yes – though they are colloquially called “acetates” they were actually cut on lacquer-coated aluminum discs (during WWII, glass or paper discs.) You could get really good sound out of them if you knew what you were doing, but they don’t hold up to repeated play. Bad storage conditions can cause the lacquer coating to crack and flake off, destroying the recorded.
Do you have any wax recordings? I’m kind of intrigued by the variety of materials used to record sound.
6/11: Oh, garoo. Batty going gaga over old records and the music his dad listened to.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
Days 10 and 11 of In The Name of The Father
Let me guess, the songs that Larry Dinkle played are gonna be either great or awful to the point that Claude Barlow’s music sounds like a masterpiece in comparison
Why the did Dinkle bring Crankshaft to his storage locker? Hell, why did he bring Lillian? He clearly doesn’t want to talk about his father, why can’t he just tell them to fuck off? Oh, right, because Batiuk wants them there for the big reveal.
Good to know, thank you. I’m sticking with my “recording contract” explanation, because that’s how this world works.
That was supposed to be in response to Jeff M.
If so, we’re probably getting more My Mom Threw My Comics Out nonsense like we got Friday.
6/13: Harry: “My dad liked film noir because I don’t understand what it actually is.”
It’s a line that is somehow completely clumsily delivered, inessential, and ignorant all at once. A trifecta of trash. “Here’s some lingering remains from my father’s musical career, which he was able to do for decades and kept us housed, clothed, and fed. But he totally didn’t ‘win’, you know.”
I forget, was there ever a word coined here for this? I verified “glurge” in writing this post, and the word refers to overly sentimental and sappy trash. Lines and thoughts like this message today (06/13) are very common in Batiuk’s work and has been identified many times as such, but it’s not “glurge” as it appears to be defined. The line also very clearly exists just to try to elicit emotional response from the reader to nod reverently at the Cruel Cold Uncaring Hand of The Universe That Crushes The Common Man, but thankfully it seems that few if anyone has espoused that reaction from it, based on today’s commentary here and elsewhere.
it’s more like “attempted glurge.” In this very story, Batiuk set up a glurgy story about Eugene having to move somewhere, then cut away from it to do this instead. He got the glurge wrong.
Oh, yeah. The Tragic Tragedy Of The Uncaring World Crushing A Love He’s Too Stupid And Gutless To Declare. We should be watching something that ends with a street sweeper sluicing his ashes down a storm drain, not jabbering about how ashamed Harry is of his dad.
It speaks to an issue that I’ve noticed that too many Americans (and to a lesser extent, Canadians) have: the inability to be proud of the work they do. Most people would envy his dad. As a Yank, his pointless, ruinous striving makes sense to him.
Batiuk did have Becky and John see a screening of “Sunset Blvd.” at the Valentine, but I have a feeling that if you asked him what the movies “High Sierra,” “Colorado Territory” and “I Died a Thousand Times” have in common he wouldn’t know.
It’d be pointless to explain that they’re derived from the same book because the characters’ names are different in each retelling. It’s like how he’d smile his smug, self-satisfied smile of being a know-nothing know-it-all because Yul Brinner is not Toshiro Mifune.
The Larry Dinkle Orchestra was the poor man’s Happy Kline and the Mirth Makers.
Unfortunately, Dinkle doesn’t also own a local restaurant like Fernwood’s Bun ‘n Run (Both “Crankshaft” and “Fernwood 2Night” are set in Ohio. Coincidence?). Also, the bandleader’s name was Happy “Kyne.”
I often make minor mistakes due to carelessness and/or laziness. I believe that’s called “writing.”
Oh, wow! It’s a reunion of sorts. Doghouse Reilly (Minneapolis), corresponding with J.J. O’Malley, who used to go by Doghouse Reilly (Philadelphia). Salute!
I’m tall but I meant to be.
In Raymond Chandler’s Big Sleep, Carmen Sternwood meets Philip Marlowe as Doghouse Reilly, and says that he’s tall.
Marlowe apologizes for it.
In Howard Hawks’s movie, Carmen Sternwood tells Humphrey Bogart’s Marlowe/Reilly that he’s not very tall,
Marlowe says he tried to be.
DR, are you nearer to Chandler’s Marlowe or to Hawks’s?
Dinkle thought Joel Cairo was the hero in The Maltese Falcon.
No, I think he’d give that honor to Wilmer.
There are too many crippled newsies out there trying to take away our guns.
I would have said Floyd Thursby but we never saw him … dead OR alive.
Is it just me, or does “In the Name of the Father” sound like some Grade-Z Dan Brown knockoff thriller staring Mason Jarr that would drop on Peacock only three days after being released in theaters?
In the Name of the Father is the exact same title as a film which was nominated for 7 Oscars including Best Picture, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson. So I’d say it sounds like it was supposed to be a prestigious film, not an almost-direct-to-streaming film.
I remember that, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist it the Funkverse. Lewis was too busy fulfilling contractural obligations playing Barry Allen in yet another Flash movie to take the role.
At this point, all characters in Crankshaft are author self-inserts … including off-stage sad-sack Larry Dinkle, who is always out on the road (always attending book signings), in order to try to grab that elusive brass ring (grab that elusive Pulitzer / movie adaptation / one single moment of unironic recognition for his work from ANYONE).
Nestle in, dear readers, for the epic story of how an old man, never before mentioned, had a middling musical career playing regional clubs and then died.
Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
Days 12 and 13 of In The Name of The Father
(Dinkle bows his head in shame, for he knows that his father was much more successful as a musician than he will ever be)
6/14: Realizing that the right tools aren’t enough appears to be beyond a Batiuk protagonist.