Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Ernie On MySpace; "Mad Writer" Meets Edie Adams

Good morning folks (its almost afternoon actually, but to my tired middle aged body it feels like a hangover at 6am). I have several good things to tell you about today so let's get started.

First I want to address the frequency of the posts to this blog. I have three blogs (the other two are GEOMOP and Jazz Guitar Corner) and have found that its impossible given time constraints to write in each one every single day. So, I've put them on a weekly rotation. This blog will now be published to on Wednesdays, usually by the late morning or early afternoon. You can always look at the upper left corner of the blog to see when the next post will be. The exception here is because there is a contributor other than myself (Ben Model) there's a possibility that posts may show up on other days. Please feel free to check at anytime. You can be guaranteed, however, that there will at least be a weekly post. If for some reason I can't post on a particular Wednesday this will be notated in the upper left corner of the blog along with the next publish date.

I have a few MySpace pages and started to notice that many famous artists, jazz musicians, comics, etc. have tribute pages (most people know what MySpace is. If you don't, you can click the link to find out). While I was able to find someone using the MySpace addresses "Ernie Kovacs" and "The Nairobi Trio" I found they haven't logged in in almost a year, so the pages have nothing to do with Ernie accept for the fact that the avatars are pictures of him or the trio. Ernie deserves his own page on MySpace, so I went and created one. The address is http://www.myspace.com/kovacsland. I got the name from the title of one of Ernie's early TV shows titled "Ernie In Kovacsland." If I remember correctly the announcer Bill Wendell (David Letterman's announcer for years) used to say at the beginning "And now its time for "Ernie In Kovacsland," a fifteen minute program. It only seems long." Love it.

I started searching MySpace for Kovacs fans and sending out friend requests manually, something I will continue to do today. At first the page had maybe 7 friends, 5 of whom consisted of other pages I run and a couple of my comedian friends pages. As of right now, about 24 hours later, we have 125 "adds" out of the 200 or so I've sent so far. So the response has been overwhelming and I thank everyone who has added the Ernie page. People have posted great comments about how much they love Ernie Kovacs and have sent very nice messages. If you have a MySpace page and are reading this, I hope you will visit Ernie's page and put in a friend request. One person told me he was gratified to accept an "add" (MySpace parlance for adding a friend to your page) from Ernie as opposed to the usual requests from "Porn Whores." This made me laugh out loud, as MySpace is notoriously used by spammers who want to get traffic to porn sites. When used correctly, however, it is a great marketing tool and I certainly hope it will help to make the public more aware of Ernie's genius.

One MySpace friend, "MadWriter," sent me a reminiscence of an encounter with Edie Adams that I'd like to share with you:

I have been an Ernie Kovacs fan since the late 1970s when PBS was running The Best of Ernie Kovacs every Tuesday night. I have all the tapes and a poorly copied documentary hosted by John Barbour, and one hosted by Shecky Greene.

When I was working at Radio Shack in Studio City, California, a rather fed-up customer was pushed off onto me because no other sales associate wanted to deal with her. She wanted to return a portable DVD player. No biggie. I listened to her spout off about the inferior quality of the player and the troubles she had. Again, nothing to complain about. I gave her the return and put it back on her credit card.

As I looking at the card, I was shocked to read "EDITH ADAMS, EDIAD PRODUCTIONS." At which point I turned from helpful sales associate to babbling moron praising her for the work she had done to bring Ernie Kovacs to the world. And like an idiot, I forgot to praise her for her own works in music and acting. (I'm STILL kicking myself over that!)

Anyway, I love your site!!!

Thanks for the great story, "MadWriter."

One thing I plan to do everytime this blog is updated is look for articles posted to blogger in the last week which in some way mention or are about Ernie so you can go have a look. Here's a list of what I found today:

Changes In The Glass tells of an interesting "Ernie Kovacs Mashup"

Widescreen Mentions One Of Ernie's Famous Quotes About Television

The Second Rendition Likes Ernie's Famous Quote Also

Ernie Makes Forelle's Filosphy's List Of The Top 50 TV Shows List

Thanks for stopping by folks. Its been real!

2 comments:

Peter said...

Thanks for posting a comment on my blog! I agree with you - I think Ernie would have loved youtube. Actually I think the internet video medium is just starting to take off, but we haven't seen its full potential yet. A bit like early television, no?

Al Quagliata said...

Peter, that is a great point.

Back in the mid 80s-early 90s I was involved in comedy projects that would air on Public Access TV. Due to the guerilla nature of that medium these things came out as quite Kovacsian. We were very influenced by Ernie and things like SNL, Uncle Floyd, SCTV, which were all Ernie influenced as well.

Our director once called Public Access "the early television of the 90s" which I thought was a great quote. The internet is the same thing although unlike public access which requires the delivery of tapes to A LOT of outlets for you to get exposure, the internet gets to millions instantly and the quality of the equipment people can own today is much better than anything we had "access" in the studios we used.

Although, I'm not convinced that some of the talent is all that great. There is a lot of self-serving, useless, "look at me I'm funny" crap. Its not enough to just produce things to show everyone; you have to have an esthetic also. Ernie had that in great amounts.

Ernie would have been even more of a genius if he'd had the internet to use. He would have loved it.

Thanks for a thoughtful comment and post.