Class of 2010

Patti Smith
RF
Wears a New York (NL) hat.

There's a story in Legs McNeil's indispensible Please Kill Me where some punk icon is talking about Patty Smith and says something to the effect of "you couldn't tell, because she always wore masculine clothing and baggy shirts, but Patty had really big tits" which stuck with me, for some reason. I guess because it's such a contradictory story about a woman who looks kind of like Susan Sontag and carries herself like a dude, and I like to imagine that Patti would laugh about it.

In any case, Patti Smith is a bad bitch.






William Murderface
SS/3B
Wears a Kansas City hat.

William Murderface is the bassist for Dethklok, fictional band featured in Adult Swim's "Metalocalypse". This show is, unsurprisingly, popular among the young, stoned and unemployable. Murderface has one of those Lou Holtz lisps, is really violent and pisses in inappropriate locations. If you don't think that description can sustain one of the main characters in a cartoon sitcom over 26 (and counting) episodes, you've never seen Adult Swim.


Ben Matlock
SP
Wears a Washington hat.

Andy Griffith is all grown up, and now he's got a law degree and is asleep on the couch in front of "Wheel of Fortune" by 8:00 every night! Despite running for 24 seasons, from 1972 to 1995, and spawning the hit catch-phrase "That's my monkey!", centerpiece of Steve Garvey's successful 1988 Presidential bid, "Matlock" is still probably best-known as the series that spun off hit television show "Jake and the Fatman".


Lily Munster
SP
Wears a Washington hat.

The Munsters seems like the classic example of pitch-as-premise (they're living in suburbia, but they're monsters!) As far as I can tell (and I've never watched this stupid show, so I could be wrong) they pretty much go through all the sitcom motions: weird new jobs, long-lost cousins, double-entendre misunderstandings. Yvonne DeCarlo also played Moses' chaste cipher of a wife in The Ten Commandments - alongside uber-hams like Chuck Heston, Anne Baxter and Yul Brenner, the character she played might as well have been played by a two-by-four with a smiley face painted on it.

Class of 2009

Dilsey Gibson
SP
Wears a St. Louis hat.

This is, of course, a relatively easy bio to write - Dilsey Gibson is the Mammy character from William Faulkner's best-known work, The Sound and the Fury. You can write your own Aunt Jemima joke here (Aunt Jemima herself actually has a pretty colorful history, no pun intended. Look her up some time). The Compson family is privileged, Southern and white, is (naturally) full of retards and fuck-ups, and Dilsey is the black servant who takes care of and observes them.

I learn more from some bios than others. Doing the bio for, say, Duff Man doesn't require a lot of research, but sometimes I don't know a lot about the subject and I try to read enough to give a reasonably rounded portrayal. I've never read Faulkner - I knew him as that guy who wrote all those stories about a fictional Mississippi county (Yoknapatawpha). He grew up during, and wrote about, the post-Reconstruction, pre-civil rights era South, so naturally his books have been studied extensively in terms of their racial politics. There is anecdotal evidence
that suggests he actually had a servant when he was little who he called Mammy, so it's hard to fault him for what might be a less than full portrayal of a central black character. His own view of the civil rights movement (he died in 1962) is difficult to pin down, but near as I can tell it went something like this: full civil rights for blacks is a morally unimpeachable position, but practically speaking it is better for blacks to be slowly or partially integrated into white society, rather than fully and all at once. That seems kind of stupid really, but I would wager that many ostensibly liberal white Southerners felt that way. Faulkner obviously had a lot of affection for Dilsey Gibson, even if it was impossible for him to draw her as a fully three-dimensional character. His writing captures a time, and a place, in American history, and I would guess that he will remain an author that can be enjoyed more than just ironically (yeah, I'm looking at you Harriet Beecher Stowe).