The people who saved the Embassy Theatre from oblivion in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s never solidified a plan for revitalizing the adjacent Indiana Hotel and they may not have had any solid interest in solidifying a plan.

“The founding fathers, like Bob Goldstine – they didn’t really want the hotel,” said the Embassy’s marketing director, Barb Richards, “They were focused on the theater.”

The seven-story hotel, which once catered to traveling businessmen, closed in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s.

It had 250 tiny rooms and there have been at least 250 casual proposals across four decades for what to do with it.

Now, the Indiana Hotel is no more.

It has been transformed into something that would surely please the late Goldstine and his partners in reclamation.

The four remaining, undeveloped floors of the dilapidated hotel are gone and in their place are a grand ballroom and a number of things the theater has been badly in need of, including classrooms, conference rooms, rehearsal rooms, a copy room, a break room and proper office space.

The former offices have been turned into a lounge, a new suite of dressing rooms has been added in the basement and there’s a rooftop terrace overlooking the city.

None of this was easily achieved. Because the Embassy is a historically protected landmark, Weigand Construction couldn’t knock out any walls as it might otherwise have been inclined to do.

Debris had to be carried out in wheelbarrows, and steel beams had to be brought in through windows and maneuvered down long, narrow corridors.

And the theater could not close, said executive director Kelly Updike. The renovations had to be accomplished without disrupting business.

Final cost of the project is $10 million, she said, $8.2 million of which has been raised.

One of the wonders of the grand two-story ballroom, apart from its photogenic staircase, is that it has been made to look like it was created at the same time as the rest of the theater, circa 1926.

“That’s a high compliment,” said the Embassy’s executive director, Kelly Updike. “Moake Park Group is the architect. They are thrilled when people say that, that it looks like it’s always been here.”

The process to create the textured walls required nine laborious coats, she said.

The need for the ballroom went beyond the merely decorative. Before this expansion, one in four people who wanted to rent a portion of the Embassy for a private event had to be turned away because of space or logistical constraints, Updike said.

Now the Embassy will be better able to earn its keep. Updike said this expanded roster of private events should net the Embassy between $100,000 to $150,000 a year. The ballroom is already booked through February 2017, she said. The new rentable spaces will help ensure that the Embassy will never again need to be “saved.”

For the most part, the rooftop terrace will be available for use by people who rent the ballroom.

But there will be a series of Wednesday night summer concerts on the terrace, crowdfunded by Arts United’s Amplify Art!

They start May 25.

“There will be music up here and a portable bar,” Updike said. “People will maybe pay a small cover fee and they’ll be able to come up here and sit.”

There’s really nothing else quite like the rooftop terrace in downtown Fort Wayne and Updike thinks it is spurring some competition.

“I think other people who are building things are saying, ‘Hey, maybe we should do something like that with our rooftop.’”

Two permanent bars were added to the theater lobby via a one-story expansion into an alleyway, she said.

“We owned half of the vacated alley and the parks department owned the other half,” Updike said. “We had to obtain that from them.”

The mobile bars that the Embassy used to use meant that inventory and equipment constantly had to be shifted around.

“It’s nice to have a home for things,” Updike said.

There are new homes for a lot of things in the theater and this has meant that the staff has had to devise new migratory patterns, so to speak. They have had to come up with new workflow paths.

Efforts at the end the last decade to link the new Courtyard By Marriott with the Embassy and the Grand Wayne Center accelerated movement on Indiana Hotel rehabilitation.

The Courtyard’s requirement of a covered walkway to the Indiana Hotel launched other refurbishment plans. If no agreement on the walkway had been reached, the entire Harrison Square project might have collapsed.

For years, Updike said, people looked up and saw four floors of perpetually dark windows. Everyone knew something needed to be done.

In the ‘90s, many of the people who’d helped save the Embassy thought it should almost be a museum, reserved for high culture and closed to the public many more nights than not.

But people have come to understand, Updike said, that the Embassy needs to be a living, breathing thing.

If future generations are going to care about, and care for, the Embassy, they will need to experience it in visceral ways.

Richards said she believes the Embassy’s saviors would approve of what it has become.

“We’ve taken every single inch of this hotel and made it into something that benefits the Embassy Theatre Foundation,” she said.

The Internet is a good place to find memes in which Abraham Lincoln expounds on such hot, 19th century topics as radical Islam, welfare cheats and the McRib sandwich.

Because Lincoln knew he wouldn’t be around to Google himself, he entreated future Lincoln scholars to forgo study of his presidency in favor of debunking misquotes.

Unlike Lincoln, comedian Steven Wright is around to Google himself. And while he probably won’t ever engage in any active debunking, he is sometimes perturbed by what he finds.

Wright performs in Skokie and St. Charles, Illinois, on April 8 and 9, respectively.

Wright started performing comedy about two decades before the Internet reached full flower and yet his snappy word puzzles and delayed-fuse musings seem uniquely suited to compilation and celebration on the Web.

The problem with this is the cavalier way that many of the compilers match the quotes with the quoted.

In a phone interview, Wright said fully 50 percent of the jokes attributed to him on many of these lists are not his.

And some of them are pretty bad.

“The Internet is like the Wild West,” he said. “There’s no rules. My analogy for this is: Imagine that you broke into a bookstore — when there were bookstores — and you went over to ‘Oliver Twist’ and you ripped out Chapter 8 and put your own chapter in there. Then someone buys ‘Oliver Twist’ and they’re reading it and, all of a sudden, Oliver Twist goes to Miami and starts building houses. Maybe the person reading that book wouldn’t know Dickens hadn’t put that in there. But several crimes would have been committed.”

Perhaps Dickens should have had the foresight to entreat future Dickens scholars to forgo study of his legacy in favor of debunking the notion that Oliver Twist ever worked as a residential building contractor in South Florida.

Wright is only marginally bothered by this phenomenon because he is only marginally connected to the Internet.

He has an iPhone into which he types notes but he says he’s always relieved to go back to the pads of unlined paper he used to use before handheld technology became unavoidable.

Considering what a comedic phenomenon Wright was in the 1980s and what an indelible impression he has left on stand-up, his resume is surprisingly thin.

Since first taking the “Tonight Show” stage in 1982, Wright has released two comedy albums and three comedy specials. He won an Academy Award for a short film in 1989.

Occasionally, he will pop up briefly in a movie or on a TV show, but bit parts such as these are almost always favors he does for someone.

This is all by design.

It may come as a surprise to most people that to learn Wright has constructed for himself the ideal life for a creative person. He is also a musician and visual artist, and a full stand-up schedule gives him the freedom to do what he wants when he wants, for the most part.

Each discipline satisfies him in a different way.

“Comedy has to make absolute sense,” he said, “no matter how weird it is. You can’t just say ‘Fifteen midgets are running down a hill.’ An abstract painting has none of that. If you feel like putting this line here for no reason — there’s no rules at all. You just go on complete emotion. And then music is kind of in-between.”

In the ’80s, someone who knew Wright observed that he was the sort of person who was perfectly happy sitting on a bare mattress with a notebook and a glass of water.

That may have been and may still be true. But Wright said he discovered that he couldn’t just sit in a room and write jokes.

He had to walk around. With a pad of paper, of course.

“When I first started,” he said, “I would sit down and try to write like that. For about 6 to 8 months, I would actually just try to sit and write jokes. And then my mind started to think, ‘What if I didn’t sit down anymore?’ So I would just be wandering around the city or wherever I was and my mind would see something and then I would write it down. My subconscious became an observer for jokes.”

Wright said he never goes out looking for jokes. It is almost as if jokes come looking for him.

“If I went to a museum, there might be a joke there,” he said. “But I didn’t go to a museum to look for a joke.”

The many notebooks he has accrued over the years are repositories of everything: jokes, of course, but also philosophical musings, drawings, lyrics and ideas for screenplays.

Writing things down sanctifies them in a sense.

“There’s just something about: You thought about something and you don’t want it to just float out there,” Wright said. “Thoughts to me are precious. They’re worthy of being written down. Thoughts that aren’t even jokes. Jokes are worthy of being written down too. But also thoughts about life. I’m always writing (expletive) down.”

Of course, the jokes are what butters the bread, so to speak.

Wright said he does an 80-minute show and delivers an average of five jokes per minute.

“So, what is that? I forgot math. I used to know what eight times five was. It is, like, 40 something?”

It comes out to 400 jokes. Five jokes a minute seems like an overly generous estimate, but it is probably true that Wright goes through more material in a show than any other comic.

Given that Wright is constantly trying out new material and cycling out old material, and given that so little of that material has been and is being recorded for posterity, a fan really has to see him live if he or she wants to keep up with his career.

A fan should also download episodes of “Horace and Pete.”

Wright plays a barfly in Louis C.K.’s acclaimed web series.

Four years ago, native Bostonian Wright decided to move to New York to “get a fix on the city.” A friend introduced him to Louis C.K. and the two hit it off. Eventually, Louis C.K. hired Wright as a consultant on his FX series, “Louis.”

Wright’s role on the show was to be there when Louis C.K. wanted to bounce ideas off someone who could bounce back something worthy.

“He’s such a brilliant guy,” Wright said. “It’s like he has a band and he let me sit in with the band.”

Wright said he is in awe of Louis C.K.’s talents.

“I was thinking that only Woody Allen does everything that he does,” he said, “and then I thought, ‘No.’ He writes all the stuff, he directs all the stuff, he acts in all the stuff and then he does stand-up too. He’s like Woody Allen and George Carlin. There’s no one who’s ever done both of those things. Nobody. Not one person.”

Wright said Louis C.K. inspires him but he’s not sure yet what form that inspiration will take.

For the time being, Wright will continue to be creative for creativity’s sake.

“There was a famous artist,” he said. “I can’t remember who he is. He’s a current guy. He said that people ask him, ‘When did you start drawing?’ and he says to them, ‘When did you stop?’ Because everyone drew and painted. Everybody does it naturally. And then they get to a point where lots of people don’t do that anymore. It wears off.

“You should do stuff for no reason,” Wright said. “Just for the hell of it. Just for the fun of creating.”

A few months ago, we had a well-reviewed movie that a lot of the franchise’s most devoted fans were trying to convince everyone was terrible (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) and now we have a poorly reviewed film that a lot of the franchise’s most devoted fans are trying to convince everyone is good (“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”).

I didn’t side with the fans in the first instance, but I am going to go ahead and side with them in the second.

“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” is far from the best entry in the seemingly ceaseless cinematic superhero sweepstakes, but it’s not the disaster that many critics seem to want to gloat over.

The aspect of the film that fans dreaded the most turns out to be one of the best things about it: Ben Affleck’s portrayal Bruce Wayne aka Batman aka Bruce Wayne.

Affleck will never be half the actor Christian Bale is, but this Dark Knight suits his talents. He’s a roguish, impulsive, horny wreck.

He’s usually the most interesting thing on screen, unless he’s sharing the screen with Gal Godot.

Jesse Eisenberg’s interpretation of Lex Luthor has been called the worst thus far, but I think that dubious distinction should be reserved for Kevin Spacey in “Superman Returns.”

Spacey’s casting was hailed from all quarters and yet his performance is neither fish nor fowl. Spacey (aided and abetted by a confusing screenplay) never seemed to get a handle on how he wanted to play the character, so he settled for mailing in a lukewarm Kevin Spacey impersonation – hitting a lot of generic Kevin Spacey notes.

There are undeniably some cringeworthy aspects of Eisenberg’s performance, but at least he went all in.

I think really good actors sometimes flirt with bad acting as a way of accessing the best acting. It’s sort of like how some really good poetry flirts with being bad poetry. There are thin lines separating these seeming extremes, in other words.

The best Luthor to date is still Michael Rosenbaum’s from the “Smallville” TV series, in my opinion.

“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” is choppily plotted – a result, I suspect, of screenwriters knowing what scenes needed to be in the film but never figuring out how convincingly to connect all of them.

The same problem, incidentally, plagued the better reviewed “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” For all of his aptitude with quippage, Joss Whedon also seemed to have a lot of trouble connecting that sequel’s dots.

People who don’t read comic books don’t understand how comic book movies are constructed. The screenwriter treats the 50- to 80-year history of a particular title as a buffet from which he can spoon a drib of this and a drab of that. He might take something from the Vietnam era and the Reagan era and the WWII era.

He might take something from a video game, an animated series or a Happy Meal box.

The result often strikes the true comic book fan as a little hodgepodgey.

The literary equivalent of this would if a screenwriter borrowed material from Mark Twain, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and created a movie that should probably be called “The Adventures of Huckleberry Karamazov in the House of Seven Gables at Sunnybrook Farm.”

It wouldn’t be called that but it should.

Look, I am no babe in the woods where live action superheroes are concerned. As a writer who gets paid by the word, I certainly understand the impulse to want to pack 10 pounds of s*** in a five-pound bag. When I was a kid, Nick Fury was played by David Hasselhoff, J. Jonah Jameson was played by Larry Tate and Captain America was played by Gristle McThornBody (aka Reb Brown). I have a strong constitution, is what I’m saying.

So, the highlight reel nature of these films barely registers on me anymore.

My biggest issue with “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” is identical to my biggest issue with its predecessor, “Man of Steel” – director Zack Snyder’s one-dimensional view of Superman.

In Snyder’s world, humans regard Superman in one of two ways, both bad: They either venerate him as a god or vilify him as a god.

Where’s the scrappy newspaper delivery kid who shouts, “Nice job, Superman! Keep up the good work,” before tossing his next rolled-up copy of the Daily Planet?

As controversial messiahs go, Snyder’s Superman almost out-suffers Jesus Christ. He walks around with this perpetually queasy look on his face. Does kryptonite cause diarrhea? Because Snyder’s Superman always looks to me like he’s searching for the nearest bathroom.

Snyder may have given us the first Superman in the history of moving pictures who is slightly more concerned with his own problems than he is with the problems of others. He’s the sort of superhero who seems to spend a lot of supertime supergazing into his supernavel.

So depressed is he that he can barely work up the motivation to differentiate his alter ego, Clark Kent, from his true omnipotent self.

Cavill’s strategy for disguising Superman as Clark Kent is to put on glasses. That’s it.

Now, think back to Christopher Reeve, who underwent a complete physical and dispositional transformation whenever he swapped one persona for the other.

Snyder hates that people keep bringing up Richard Donner’s “Superman” films and I think it’s because he really doesn’t understand what made them great.

Well, they were fun, for one thing. There are a lot of adjectives that can be used to describe “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” but fun ain’t one of them.

In Snyder’s universe, Superman and Lois Lane get exactly as much pleasure out of their romance as two people in a medieval torture room got out of being chained next to each other on a wall.

Snyder’s view of romance in his films is similar to that of many 14-year-old girls. It consists of two people occupying various poorly lit spaces while always seeming to be on the verge of tears.

I watch Lois and Clark’s dour scenes together and I think, “Do these two ever flirt? Does Clark ever put his super-briefs on his head to make her laugh? Does she ever give him s*** for leaving the cap off the toothpaste? Does he ever slap her butt (gingerly, to be sure) as she walks past him in a hallway?”

In Donner’s films, the template for the relationship between these two came from the screwball comedies, in which couples fought in electrifying ways, engaged in witty banter, used exquisitely wrought double entendres and exchanged flammable glances.

Where did Snyder get his ideas about romance? Stephenie Meyer? Nicholas Sparks?

I pity most of the actors who occupy Snyder’s Metropolis because they have nothing to do but look various shades of miserable.

Snyder’s Superman is a superbly muscled dud and it’s not really Cavill’s fault. He has proved in other roles that he is capable of a lighter tough. Snyder has tied his hands. And his feet. It’s hard to hit a home run when you’re not allowed to run the bases.

Snyder has a vision for these superhero films and his vision is that it sucks to be a superhero. As long as Snyder is in charge of DC’s cinematic universe, that vision will govern these films.

The fact that Snyder rejected TV’s Flash, Grant Gustin, for the role of big screen Flash because of the series’ occasionally flippant tone tells you everything you need to know.

The guy he ended up picking looks like one of the stars of “Bill and Ted’s Emo Adventure.”

Tim Burton’s first “Batman” movie was seen as an antidote to, and corrective of, the campy ‘60s TV series.

I suspect that some day someone will make a campy DC film designed to undo Snyder’s dreariness.

Anyway, back to things I liked about the film: The fight scene referenced in the title is a success, not because of the choreography, but because of how the actors play it.

Cavill’s Superman and Affleck’s Dark Knight come to many new realizations about themselves while beating each other up and both actors play those emotions well.

And everything about Gal Gadot’s involvement in this film is fantastic, except for the fact that she’s not in enough scenes.

The climatic monster, with the face of the Toxic Avenger and the sexless body of Stretch Armstrong, is a bewilderingly bad special effect in this day and age. But he serves as an acceptable deus ex machina, setting up an ending that is really less a conclusion for this film than a preface for the next.

All in all, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” is a passable entertainment. It’s not one that most people are going to want to watch again and again.

Warner Bros. has a long way to go, however, before it knows as much as Disney does about making these sorts of films.

 

Music has never made Chuck Prophet rich. There have been times in his life when it didn’t even make him solvent.

But it has made him happy. Sort of.

Prophet performs at the B-Side on March 26.

Chuck Prophet has never “played the geetar on the MTV” and he has never been a guest judge on “American Idol.” And while it is indisputable that “chuck” and “prophet” are both household words, the name Chuck Prophet is not.

What Prophet has consistently done for three decades is write and perform beautiful, intricate and challenging rock music.

It is fitting that Prophet’s email signature reads, “As soon as you realize it’s all insane, it all makes sense,” because he never seems to stop trying to make sense of things.

His career goal is nothing less than redemption.

“I tell myself that if I can make a classic, a real classic for the ages,” he said in a phone interview, “it’s going to make sense of my life; make up for all the evil shit I’ve done. That’s probably a lie.”

Music is hard to talk about if you do it right, Prophet said. The reason most conversations about music turn to paydays, attendance figures and other tabulations is because music is ephemeral, he said.

“They don’t like to talk about things that are ephemeral,” he said.

One of the questions Prophet said he hears most from fans is, “Why aren’t you more famous?”

It strikes this journalist as the king of all backhanded compliments, but Prophet’s answer is that “success came in many forms” in his career.

“I mean, it took all kinds of different shapes,” he said.

When Prophet played in bands in middle and high school, his biggest goal was to “have enough music to play a 20 or 30 minute set.”

“Getting a gig at a club was a huge deal to us at the time,” he said.

Later, when Prophet joined the band Green on Red, success for him had morphed into something equally modest.

“The thing that most impressed me about them was that they had a rental van and a gas card,” he said, laughing. “At the time, that was really bourgeois.”

Green on Red recorded for Mercury Records for much of its existence and Prophet said the label never interfered with the music the band wanted to make.

When he talks about it now, Prophet sounds like he can’t understand why the label didn’t get more involved.

“I don’t know why we got signed,” he said. “It’s hard for me even figure out how we got a record deal.”

The band performed a reunion show in London in 2006, Prophet said, and Jim Bogios sat in for the late Alex McNicol on drums.

“We were taking a cab back to the hotel after the first rehearsal and he was looking at me and he said, ‘How did you guys get a record deal?’” Prophet recalled, laughing.

Prophet didn’t even think of himself as a songwriter early on.

“We were just making up songs,” he said. “Later, I became more aware of “Oh, Jimmy Webb. He’s the guy who wrote all these great songs.’”

Prophet said he hesitates to cite any personal icon because he’s “had so much inspiration along the way, if I mention one person like Jimmy Webb, I’ll leave out 100.”

He is willing, however, to assert that all roads lead to Bob Dylan.

Prophet’s perfectionism as a composer and as an audio engineer is well illustrated by a Dylan anecdote.

He said he was hanging out with a friend recently who records world music and the friend wondered aloud, “What’s the point of doing another take of a song or another revision? No one’s going to be able to tell.”

“He kind of had these absolutes,” Prophet said, “and it was funny because it bothered me.”

The next morning, Prophet said, he read an article stating that “there was gonna be a 40-page draft of the song ‘Dignity’ from the ‘Oh Mercy’ sessions that didn’t make the album.”

“Oh that’s my kind of guy,” he recalled thinking. “That’s why Dylan is my guy.”

Prophet said he is never happier than when he is “wrestling some idea to the ground and getting a verse to have a nice straight line through it in plain language.”

“That’s the kind of the buzz I am chasing,” he said.

Prophet said he thinks in terms of albums, not individual songs.

While writing, he said, he always stands back and thinks, “Is there a record here? Am I tapping into something I never tapped into before, musically or thematically?”

When this reporter pointed out that thinking “in album terms” is an endangered mindset these days, Prophet responded, “I don’t care. That’s the other thing about success. People say, ‘Isn’t it a shame nobody buys albums anymore?’ I don’t make records for other people. I don’t care. I don’t want to be successful.”

Prophet said he continues to strive because he feels like everything is just out of reach.

“Sometimes you go past things and sometimes you fall short,” he said. “But anytime you’re engaged in just trying to get the beast to behave, that’s inspiration.”

Tours are like vacations for Prophet, he said, because it means he can stop obsessing about albums. Except that he never really stops obsessing.

Asked if he ever plays “woulda, coulda, shoulda” after an album is released, Prophet said, “Of course I do.”

“When you play it live, it’s still living and breathing,” he said. “You’ll be playing the songs in Scranton, Pennsylvania in a half-filled bar on a Wednesday night and you’re like, ‘Oh god. If we’d only played it like this when we cut the record.’”

Prophet said he sometimes takes songs out of rotation because he is so disappointed with some aspect of the composing and recording process.

After enough time goes by, he adds the songs back in because he can’t remember what was bugging him about them in the first place.

Prophet’s unceasing quest to make sense of things even extends to interactions with fans.

He said it sometimes seems as if they hate him.

“You’re on tour and they see you play and they don’t really like you,” he said. “They’re sort of like, ‘Oh, I used to be in a band. It’s really hard. You’re really brave.’”

“And I’m like, ‘Really? Does this look hard?” Prophet said. “‘I’m driving around, staying in decent hotels. I’m playing music with my friends. I don’t get it. Does this look hard to you? You should see what my dad did for a living. Now that was hard.’”

Prophet chalks these sorts of conversations up to people just “trying to make sense of their own lives.”

Fans ask for advice about breaking into the music business, but Prophet said he has never really been in the music business per se.

“I don’t have a manager that’s connected in any way,” he said. “I have a wonderful relationship with Yep Rock records and that relationship is: If I can make records, we’ll put them out together.’

“What I am doing here, really, is running a mom and pop business,” Prophet said.

 

Dubbed the greatest gladiator match in history by people who probably don’t know all that much about gladiators, “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” is certain to be the biggest summer blockbuster since “Batman v. Superman: Afterparty of Justice” and “Batman v. Superman: Last Call of Justice.”

Since this movie was announced, the internet has been awash in rumor, insinuation, baseless speculation and a staggering amount of mostly unrelated pornography.

Based on a dystopian graphic novel about an old, ugly and weary Batman who battles a corrupt Superman, “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” concerns a younger, hotter but still pretty weary Batman who battles a rather sulky Superman.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Ben Affleck plays Batman, a cave-dwelling superhero who lives under lots of rock.

Reports that Affleck rewrote some of his scenes in his trailer while dressed as Batman were greeted with surprise by some pundits. They didn’t say who else they expected him to be dressed as.

The role of Superman will be assayed by Henry Cavill, an actor so chiseled, muscular and ramrod-straight that he could play a statue of Superman and may already have.

The character of Superman has changed a lot since 1938. Seventy years ago, people were happy if he did nothing more than leap tall buildings in a single bound and fight a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way. These days, people are harder to please. They expect Superman to accomplish the nearly impossible task of never smiling.

Gone are the spandex costumes of old. These days, Batman’s outfit looks like it’s made from the skin of the snake known as the black mamba and Superman’s outfit looks like it’s made from the skin of the snake known as the LGBT pride mamba.

While it is true that Superman is a Kryptonian immigrant, at least he has the courtesy to choose a job that no native-born American in his right mind would want in 2016: daily newspaper reporter.

As the movie opens, the public is spilt on its view of the Kryptonian. Half of the world sees him as a god, and the other half sees him as merely a Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world and cleanses us from all unrighteousness.

While for many, he is still an emblem of hope, a growing number of people consider him to be a more divisive sort of emblem, perhaps something like the most hated Boy Scout merit badge of all: “Excellence in Bugling.”

What we have come to understand from the trailers is that Batman bears some sort of grudge against Superman. This grudge is strong enough, apparently, to compel him to become a so-called “bat vigilante,” named for that breed of bat that is known for vendettas.

The relationship between Batman and Superman is contentious from the start, as is evidenced by a scene in which the latter contemptuously rips off the mask worn by the former and Batman replies, “And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for this meddling Kryptonian.”

Batman knows it will be tough to beat Superman, so he constructs a battle suit equipped with every weapon he can think of. Unfortunately, it doesn’t occur to him until it’s too late that Superman is strangely susceptible to Joel Schumacher’s bat-nipples.

In this incarnation of the Batman mythos, Alfred is the Wayne family’s bodyguard, not its butler. After Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered, Alfred probably wishes he’d been hired to polish the silver instead.

Batman and Superman aren’t the only superheroes slated to appear in the film. Word has it that Wonder Woman and Aquaman will be on hand (and on fin) as well.

Producers have confirmed that the movie’s version of Wonder Woman is a demigod who runs around demiclad.

She’ll be hundreds of years old at the start of the film, which means she’s aging remarkably well, but not as well as Susan Sarandon.

In one scene, a disguised Wonder Woman goes undercover at the villainous Lex Luthor’s headquarters but risks discovery after she writes an unbelievable fake name on a LexCorp name tag: Miss Tessmacher.

The casting of Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor didn’t sit well with some fans but that won’t stop them from wanting to put a “Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor” action figure in a home display case next to their “Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg” action figure.

At some point in the film, Luthor apparently creates a monster to battle the aforementioned superheroes.

Glimpses of this monster in the trailers have raised all sorts of questions. Is this the DC Comics character known as Doomsday? Does Lex Luthor use genetic material from a dead Kryptonian to create this craggy, cement-colored brute or does he use something else, like crags and cement?

Is this creature related to the Abomination from “The Incredible Hulk” or a cave troll from “Lord of the Rings”? Or is that just lazy CGI?

All questions will be answered on March 25.

Of one thing moviegoers can be certain: “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” will be no lighthearted romp. To preserve the film’s sober tone, director Zack Snyder instructed the actors to confine themselves to a venerable acting style that Lee Strasberg dubbed, “Frowny Face.”

Producers have promised the public that they’ve eliminated the one aspect of Christopher Reeve’s “Superman” films that spoiled them for everyone: the humor.

“Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” is one of 30 superhero films that are slated for release over the next decade, which is news that surely causes most people to ask, “Why is that number so low?”

“Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” is the second of many comic book films that will comprise the DC Cinematic Universe, patterned after the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Other forthcoming cinematic universes include: The Cereal Spokescharacter Cinematic Universe, The Teddy Ruxpin Cinematic Universe, the Big Mouth Billy Bass Cinematic Universe and the Scrubbing Bubbles Cinematic Universe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the age of 65, Jay Leno is driving himself like a pack mule of comedy: performing 210 to 250 dates a year in venues across the country.

Unlike Kanye West, apparently, Leno doesn’t need the money, so it is difficult for any non-famous codger who is still a long way from making his first million to imagine why Leno is still toiling so much and so hard.

“I’m a great believer in low self-esteem,” he said in a phone interview. “And, you know, all the people with high self-esteem are actors and criminals. If you think you’re the smartest person in room, you stop growing.

“I’ll tell you,” Leno said, “there were only 4,000 geniuses in recorded history and in Hollywood there seems to be thousands of them.”

Leno will perform March 3 at the Embassy Theatre.

There are a lot of entertainers who probably like to hear themselves described as “the hardest working man in show business,” but Leno has earned that title year after year.

This stems, he said, from having been diagnosed as dyslexic as a child.

“My mother always told me, ‘You’re going to have to work twice as hard as other kids to get the same thing’ and that always worked for me,” he said. “‘You mean I have to put in eight hours to your four? OK.’”

As a stand-up comic, Leno has never been accused of reinventing the form. From the moment he first got up on stage, there were always more innovative comics around.

Unlike some of those other guys, however, Leno has always been dependably funny. He is a joke surgeon – he loves analyzing jokes based on audience reaction and retooling them for future shows.

Leno is not the sort of guy who should stir controversy but he did on two notable occasions during his career.

The first time was when NBC bestowed “The Tonight Show” upon him in 1992. Many people, including prior host Johnny Carson, had favored having “Late Night’s” David Letterman take over as emcee. Letterman subsequently bolted for CBS and some people grumbled that Leno had somehow stolen the prestigious gig.

For NBC execs, the final choice may have come down to differing dispositions.

“I’m not going to say anything negative about Dave,” he said. “But I come from the Dale Carnegie, look-em-in-the-eye, shake-their-hand school. My dad was a salesman.

“I like people,” Leno said. “I have no problem going to affiliates. I visited almost every NBC affiliate in the country personally and then I read an article that said, “Leno cheated. He went to every NBC affiliate.’”

Leno said he didn’t do anything he wouldn’t naturally have done.

“I mean, you don’t have to go to every affiliate,” he said. “If you volunteer to do it, you know what it is? You make friends and that’s what happened. The affiliates voted on who they wanted.”

Former G.E. chairman Jack Welch used to tell people that “We chose the guy who is the least pain in the ass,’” Leno recalled.

“You know anything about Dave’s personality?” he asked. “I have no problem meeting executives, and Dave’s a prickly guy. He’s a good guy and whatnot, but the suits really couldn’t talk to Dave. They had to talk through his people.

“I was someone – I don’t have an agent. I don’t have a manager,” Leno said. “I was like, ‘What do you need, guys? What do we need to do to make the show number one? Let’s do that. Let’s work harder.’”

A sort of feud played out between the men over the ensuing decades, but Letterman seemed to be the only one making public reference to it.

Prior to Carson leaving “The Tonight Show,” the comics had been admirers of each other. Leno said Letterman’s focus on stage was wordplay and his focus was performance and they each marveled at the other’s unique strengths.

“Some of the favorite times in my career were doing the Letterman show,” Leno said. “Because I would always get a meatball sandwich and I would stand in the hall and I would wait for Dave to come down to make-up and then I’d come around the corner (Leno makes sloppy eating sounds).

“And he would go, ‘How can you eat that (expletive) sandwich? You’re going on in five minutes,’” Leno said. “I would push the sandwich in his face and he’d say, ‘Get that thing away from me!’”

Leno said he’d always try to come up with some interesting phrase for Letterman to wryly mull over while the men were on the couch and behind the desk, respectively.

“For Dave the funny part was on the way to the joke,” he said. “It was never the joke.”

There are no hard feelings between the men now that they have both retired from their shows, Leno said.

“Comics have a bond,” he said. “Only other comics truly understand what you do for a living.

“And when it comes down to talk show hosts, the group is even smaller. There’s really only a dozen people who really understand what these things are all about and how they work and how much effort you have to put in to get a little reward,” Leno said.

One of those dozen people, presumably, is Conan O’Brien, who was a participant in Leno’s second major controversy.

In 2009, O’Brien was given “The Tonight Show” and Leno was moved into a 10 p.m. slot.

Both shows were ratings disappointments and after some ham-handed non-fixes by NBC, O’Brien left the network and Leno was re-installed as the host of “The Tonight Show.”

Many accused Leno of usurping “The Tonight Show” from its rightful heir, but he said that every decision was made by the network.

“They told (O’Brien) what they wanted to do and he left and they said, ‘Do you want show back’ and I said, ‘Sure’,” Leno recalled. “If that makes me the bad guy then I guess that’s what it is.

“I certainly made other people the butt of the joke in my monologues,” he said. “You can’t all of sudden start crying sour grapes when it turns on you every once in a while. That’s all right. That’s fine. Ultimately, it’s a business.”

Nobody wants to see rich people arguing, Leno said.

Asked if giving up the show was like losing a limb, Leno laughed.

“Not at all,” he said. “There’s an old saying. Don’t fall in love with a hooker. OK? It’s not going to work out. I’ve been married for 36 years. I have the same friends I had in high school. The same wife. In certain instances, I have the same car.

“I enjoy observing show business,” Leno said. “I enjoy talking with Charlie Sheen. But I don’t want to be Charlie Sheen. I always found him amusing, interesting and funny. But I don’t want to be him. I don’t want to live that life.”

The real trick, he said, is “to make show business money and lead a normal life.”

Leno said a guy in that lofty, 11:30 p.m. position has to know when it’s time to leave.

“When you’re 40 and talking to the 26-year-old supermodel, it’s sexy. When you’re 65, you’re the old guy,” he said. “At this stage of my life, I shouldn’t have to know all of Kanye West’s music.”

These days, Leno (who said he owns 140 cars and 117 motorcycles) hosts a much lower profile show for vehicle aficionados on CNBC called “Jay Leno’s Garage.”

Leno is able to convince big celebrities to visit by assuring them that the only questions he plans to ask are about cars, motorcycles and planes.

“They’re comfortable talking about their hobby without having to worry about me saying, ‘Your last film bombed. Why do you think that is?’”

Leno said he enjoys returning to “The Tonight Show” in the role no different from any other comic trying to prove himself.

“I’m going on again Thursday,” he said. “And I’m going on as a stand-up comedian. I’m not going on as some old legend who used to do the show. I’m going on as a comedian. You will rise and fall based on jokes that you tell.”

His plan to keep touring as long as he is able isn’t about proving something. It’s about enjoying himself.

“It’s great fun to write jones and tell them for a living,” Leno said. “It gives you a great deal of satisfaction. People laugh. I don’t think of it as work. It’s really fun for me. I truly enjoy it. I’m not one of those people who vomits before they go on stage because they’re so nervous.”

When Gregg Bender, longtime Journal Gazette illustrator and frontman of his eponymous band, was a teenager growing up in Berne, he and his friend John Ludy performed original music in the style of the West Coast rock revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s – a revolution that involved infusions of country and folk music.

“He’d write five songs a day,” Bender said. “When I got together with him, we were like ‘Why can’t we make it? Why can’t be one of those people?’”

This may be an especially plaintive question to ask in tiny Berne, which is known more for Swiss homages than rock revolts.

But long odds didn’t stop the young men from getting into a car and driving to L.A. The year was 1974 and they had $200 to their name.

“The first day we got there, we drove around the city twice and said, ‘What are we doing?’” Bender said.

They checked into a fleabag motel and started offering to perform at restaurants in exchange for meals.

Fortune soon smiled on them. A well-to-do family in the dining room one night asked them if they’d like to provide entertainment at a party they were hosting.

“It was in Santa Monica,” Bender said. “A really nice house. He was a lawyer. She was a writer and also a professor at UCLA. They had four kids.”

After the party, the couple made a proposal that may seem exceptionally generous and credulous in these paranoid and cynical times, but might have been fairly typical in Southern California seven years after the Summer of Love.

They asked the guys if they wanted to move in.

“We were Midwestern youngsters,” Bender said. “We were like, ‘Oh no. We can’t do that.’ Three days later, we were knocking on the door.”

One day after Bender and Ludy had moved in, the family went on vacation and left them alone in the house.

Many great things began happening for them.

The family had connections in the music business and hooked the men up with composer Patrick Williams, who went on to score several dozen of the biggest films and TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s, including “Breaking Away,” “Columbo,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Streets of San Francisco.”

Williams liked their music and offered them free studio time.

“It was $100 an hour,” Bender said. “And the Stones had been in there. Vanilla Fudge.”

They recorded a demo tape and took it to Leon Russell’s Shelter Records where they received further kudos and blocks of free studio time.

That resultant accumulation of recordings was subsequently well received by Jackson Brown’s manager.

And while it did nothing to further their career, babysitting for former “Gilligan’s Island” star Dawn Wells — who lived down the beach from where Bender and Ludy were luxuriously bivouacked — provided the men with a brush-with-greatness tale that still impresses today.

But establishing a national musical career requires much exigency and many falling dominoes and the men began to lose faith before too long.

Six months after they’d arrived in Los Angeles, they returned to Berne.

“I mean, we were 19 years old,” Bender explained.

The men eventually went their separate ways.

Bender’s newspaper career took him to Kendallville; Jackson, Tennessee; South Bend; Little Rock, Arkansas; Jackson (again) and, finally, Fort Wayne.

It was during his stint at the Kendallville News-Sun in the early 1980s that he hooked with an old college buddy named Tracy Warner.

Bender became a fixture at, and sometime host of, the open mike nights at Munchie Emporium and it was during this period that he learned Warner played saxophone.

The two formed an atypical guitar/saxophone duo for a time.

In all the towns where he has lived, Bender has always tried to find places to play his guitar and sing.

He seems to get an almost daredevil thrill from entertaining.

“Not everyone is geared for that sort of thing,” he said. “But, for me, stepping out in front of people and playing is almost like putting yourself out there in a sporting event. You practice and practice and have one shot to be the best you can. If you are a perfectionist, second place is not an option. But the rules of the game are: You’re not going to do your best every time.”

About two years after he started working at the Journal Gazette in 2003, he started performing solo again in Fort Wayne and with Warner.

He had no grander plan than that.

But sometimes grander plans are thrust upon us.

In 2006, Bender started attending, then participating in, open band nights at the North Star Bar and Grill.

He ran into a former high school friend of his named Jim Childers and the pair repaired to Bender’s house for a jam session.

“And I said, ‘If we’re going to do this and make it sound pretty good, we might as well go out and play,’” Bender recalled. “I dragged him out to open mike night and it went over really well.”

The twosome began to accrue additional musicians: Drummer Mike Andrews, who Bender said owes his lead style of playing to Jimi Hendrix’s percussionist, Mitch Mitchell; bassist Dave West, who Bender said has mastered a bewildering array of songs and genres in his decades of performing in Fort Wayne; and Warner, of course.

Before too long, the Gregg Bender Band was born.

A mere three years after forming, the Gregg Bender Band performs almost weekly in numerous regional venues and has been featured on Julia Meek’s public radio music showcase “Meet the Music” at least four times.

The Gregg Bender Band is strictly a cover band, but Bender said they try to choose deep cuts that probably can’t be heard anywhere else in town.

Bender’s ultimate goal with the band “is to be mentioned in the same breath along with some of the other top-notch bands in this city.”

Bender said this unexpected later-life success is much more fun than any of the triumphs of his callow youth because “these guys are my friends and we get to share this experience together.

“I had never really played in a band before,” he said, “although I knew of others where fights developed and everyone parted ways. We’re older now and don’t have that baggage anymore. There are no aspirations of being big. We just want to play the best we can and let the other stuff roll off. There is really no pressure except the pressure we put on ourselves to play to the best of our abilities.”

Bender said Ludy, now a retired teacher living in Fremont, might come down in March to participate in a recording session.

But any resulting CD would serve posterity, not fuel ambition.

“This is a vanity project,” he said. “We have no illusions. We can hand it out at shows.”

 

 

 

 

When Musiq Soulchild (birth name: Taalib Johnson) was growing up making music in Philadelphia, his aspirations did not feature a major record label.

“I wasn’t even planning to sign a deal,” he said in a phone interview. “I was planning on just recording records – pressing up CDs and selling them myself. That was pretty much the plan.

“I’d heard a lot of stories about artists going through what they were going through with record labels,” Soulchild said. “I mean – I didn’t really know anything from anything. But I was thinking about my music not being respected and appreciated and having to compromise my integrity in order to make a dollar.”

But Def Jam President Kevin Liles, who’d fallen hard for Soulchild’s demos, proved very persuasive.

“I guess everybody around me was doing their best to make me feel comfortable,” he says.

Soulchild said he wasn’t in a position to turn down a blessing like that.

“I had nothing to my name,” he said. “I was homeless, essentially – depending on the kindness of strangers.”

The result was that Soulchild made a big splash in 2000 with his first single, “Just Friends (Sunny)” and with a debut album, “Aijuswanaseing (I Just Want to Sing).”

He was hailed by some as heir to a possibly endangered tradition of sweet soul balladeering and, by extension, as a presumed protector of that tradition.

Musiq Soulchild performs Feb. 12 at the Embassy Theatre

Soulchild released three subsequent albums in the “Aijuswanaseing” vein. They were all well received and lucrative but Soulchild began to feel restless.

“Everybody’s point of reference for me became this crooner or love man or romantic guy,” he said in a phone interview. “And that never fit me. That’s not even my personality.”

Indeed, it was Soulchild’s diversity that made his musical reputation in Philly. He could beat-box, freestyle, scat sing and perform credible street corner doo-wop.

In a 2000 profile in the Philadelphia Daily News, a 22-year-old Soulchild expressed a fear of being pigeonholed.

“The world is my focus,” he said. “It’s not just the ghetto. It’s not just the suburbs. It’s not just soul or hip-hop music. It’s not just pop, blues or jazz. The whole world is my focus.”

Soulchild’s desire to experiment with his hits in concert rather than mimic them hasn’t sat well with some fans.

“People expect a typical R&B show,” he said. “And I do the singles – do the hits – but I like to try different iterations. I may rock out on one and do a jazz version of another and a straight out remake of something. And people get this look on their faces sometimes. Because it doesn’t sound like it did on the radio.”

The debut of Soulchild’s rap alter ego named The Husel in 2014 also met with a lot of pushback.

Soulchild said he welcomes criticism. He listens to what sounds relevant to him and casts the rest aside.

It wasn’t always that way. He said it used to upset him more when he learned that someone wasn’t pleased with something he’d done.

Based on a preponderance of the anecdotal evidence, it might be safe to conclude that sudden fame isn’t so much a mixed blessing as it is a mixed curse. In the early days of Soulchild’s career, people used to tell him how well he was handling everything. But he said he really wasn’t handling everything well at all.

“I wasn’t really ready or prepared,” he said. “I wasn’t accustomed to that amount of attention. When you don’t have much going on in your life, nobody really cares. You have to beg for attention. Suddenly it was coming at me in a way I’d never experienced.”

He said it was really difficult at first for him to handle people recognizing him and coming up to him on the street.

“My shoulders would get tight,” he said. “Because people don’t walk up on you like in Philly.”

Soulchild wasn’t much of a drinker then, but people started buying him free drinks and it became a problem, he said. He’s been sober for a while now.

These days, Soulchild said he’s committed to “refocusing people’s expectation about who I am and what I have to offer.”

He is gratified to be so widely identified as an R&B artist, but he hopes to become known as more “R&B adjacent.”

To that end, Soulchild is launching his own record label called Soulstar Music Company. It will be a venue where his various personas can play, including one that no one has heard yet: Purple Wondaluv.

Asked what sort of music Purple Wondaluv makes, Soulchild gave an expected response: New Age.

“The sound comes from an idea I had,” he said. “‘What would it sound like if you sort of mashed together Bob Marley and Sade?’”

Soulchild said he intends the music to be calming and relaxing.

“With Purple Wondaluv, I don’t plan on making love songs or songs about romance,” he said. “The songs will be about general compassion. Not only for other people, but also for yourself.

He likens Purple Wondaluv songs to self-help books. Soulchild wants to use Purple Wondaluv to convey to listeners what he has learned about coping with some of the more difficult aspects of life.

“Without being self-righteous about it,” he said. “My idea is, ‘Here’s how I felt and here’s how it helped me and maybe it will help you if you go through it.’”

All future feats and forays will be kept separate from each other, Soulchild said. The only persona audiences should expect to see at a Musiq Soulchild show is Musiq Soulchild.

Soulchild said he isn’t afraid to fail.

“Being an artist is about learning to walk in your artistic confidence,” he said. “I may not know anything. I may not always know what I am doing. But I will always know what I am capable of.”

 

 

 

The Isle of Man, a possession of the British crown, is not widely known for its bluesmen.

Most Americans know so little about this tiny, self-governing, water-encompassed country in the Irish Sea that they couldn’t even begin to surmise what might be giving its residents the blues.

But one Isle of Man axman who has made headlines in the states is here to report that the Isle of Man has a vibrant and varied music scene.

And it owes it all to herring.

“The fascinating thing about the Isle of Man is that it’s slap bang down in the middle of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales,” said Davy Knowles in a phone interview.

“Back in the day, there was huge fishing – herring fishing. So you’d get boats from all of those countries and other places coming to the Isle of Man, fishing around the waters and stopping in the Isle of Man.”

They’d all bring their songs. And Manx musicians (Manx being the name of the language and native people of the Isle of Man) would learn those songs and appropriate those songs and tweak those songs, he said.

So “there are a lot of great musicians” on the Isle of Man performing traditional Celtic music, blues and rock, Knowles said.

Knowles will play a mix of all three when he performs at C2G Music Hall on February 13.

But it wasn’t a Manx musician that inspired Knowles to take up the guitar.

It was Mark Knopfler.

Knowles’ dad had an expansive record collection and Knowles was poleaxed by the Dire Straits hit, “The Sultans of Swing.”

“My dad played me that tune when I was 10 years old,” he said. “I was totally hooked. (Knopfler’s guitar work is) just so melodic. You could sing every one of his solos.”

Later, his sister introduced him to the Irish bluesman Rory Gallagher and Knowles was brought closer to what would become his style of play.

“I really connected to him a lot because I could hear a lot of Celtic in his playing,” he said. “It was really cool to see this quite exotic American music being played by an Irishman and coming out slightly mid-Atlantic.

“The aggression of Rory’s playing really grabbed me,” Knowles said. “Between Rory Gallagher and Mark Knopfler is where I’d like to be.”

Knowles started gigging when he was 14, toured England when he was 15 and formed a band at 16 with some schoolmates called Back Door Slam.

The short-lived group played the SXSW Festival and toured the states twice before disbanding in 2009.

Knowles said his first U.S. tour was “astounding.”

“Just totally a dream come true,” he said. “Up to that point, we’d just been playing pubs, mainly on the Isle of Man. It was a hell of a big jump. It was quite daunting to go from playing in pubs to actually touring the United States. There were a lot of learning curves. I think that’s what ultimately shortened the life of that band.”

Knowles found himself opening for such guitar gods as Jeff Beck, Joe Satriani and Buddy Guy, which was both thrilling and nerve-wracking.

“Totally terrifying, yeah,” he said. “There’s part of you that’s a fan and is totally blown away. Everything seems very surreal. But there’s also that degree of, ‘Well, this is my job and I’d best get on with it.’ Practicality kicks in. It’s only after the fact that you think, ‘(Expletive). How lucky I am?’

“You try absorb as much as you can,” Knowles said. “They’ve been around a long time and are at the top of their craft and their game. They’re total inspirations and you’d be foolish not sit and take notes every night.”

Sharing a stage with legends is one thing. Collaborating with them is quite another.

A friend of Knowles who lived in Nashville shared his music with another musician and that was how Knowles came to be on the receiving end of a call one day from Peter Frampton.

“I got a phone call from him and he said, “Hey, I’ve been listening to your stuff and I like it a lot. We should get together,’” Knowles recalled. “And I’m thinking it’s a big practical joke.”

Eventually, tour breaks coincided and the men met up.

“We just hit it off,” Knowles said, “He’s such a lovely bloke. We just wrote and worked really well together.”

Because they’d co-written so many songs, Knowles asked Frampton to produce his next album.

“He was into the idea, thank God,” he said. “It all kind of fell into place quite nicely. What a joy he was to work with. A lovely, lovely man.”

These days, Knowles is based in Chicago, the home of the blues (or one of them).

He lives with his girlfriend who he met at one of his Windy City shows.

“I’d been on the radio and her folks dragged her down there,” he said. “She didn’t particularly want to go.”

One sad fact about contemporary Chicago is that its days as a blues mecca are long past.

Knowles said the blues scene is made up of “a very, very, very few elder statesmen – people like Luther ‘Guitar’ Johnson, Jimmy Burns and Buddy Guy. But there are very, very few people who are doing it with integrity, with a kind of old-fashioned spirit behind it.”

A lot of the blues that gets played in Chicago, he said, is equivalent to music performed by a rock cover band or tribute act: designed for undiscerning tourists.

And few African-American residents patronize the music, Knowles said.

“It is a very, very strange thing,” he said. “Not that I’m one to talk in any kind of way. But the audience is mostly white people – white, middle-aged people. Which is fine. If you like music, then (liking music is) the only thing that should be involved.

“But this is very much a black music adopted by other people,” Knowles said. “It’s kind of sad to see that not a lot of that is being embraced.”

Before the Internet robbed records and CDs of their profit-earning potential, success in the music business was easier to define but harder to achieve.

Of course, it’s never been easy to be a bluesman.

For Knowles, success “just means carrying on doing it.”

“I don’t want to be big pop star,” he said. “I just want to get better and better and keep enjoying it and be able to tour.”

There are certainly some unsavory conditions in the music business, Knowles said.

“But it’s no good complaining or grumbling about it,” he said. “I don’t know what the old days were like. I wasn’t there. This is the only time period I will know. I’ve got to make the most of it. There is a place for musicians rather than people who just want to be on the charts.”

 

 

 

 

Area attorney, musician, art gallery owner and author Mark Paul Smith said he wrote the first draft of his latest book, “Honey and Leonard,” in the mid-90s while he was struggling with addiction.

It was, he recalled, “written in a hazed frenzy.”

After 15 years of sobriety, Smith “dug the manuscript out of a drawer” and said he could “feel addiction dripping off the page.”

“It was a shocker,” he said. “It was like, ‘Whoa, I thought I was fine back then.’”

Smith said drugs and alcohol are a kind of “rocket fuel” that can provide “some inspiration.”

“Some good stuff came out of the bad stuff,” he said. “But in the end, if you keep drinking, you’ll kill yourself like Hemingway.”

Smith doesn’t miss those days at all.

“In fact, guess what?” he said. “This’ll shock ya. Life’s more fun without it. Who knew? I could have saved a million bucks.”

Smith said he had to get knocked off his high horse and end up down on his knees.

“And by ‘down on my knees,’” he said, “I mean I had to accept a higher power in my life. I’m not saying it’s Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha. I don’t know what it is. I just know it’s not me.”

“Honey and Leonard,” which can be purchased via Amazon.com and at the Castle Gallery (owned by Smith and his wife, Jody Hemphill Smith) is about an elderly couple that goes on the lam and becomes an international cause célèbre in the process.

Among the many aims of the book is banishment from common English usage of the word “elderly,” he said.

“The book says you can be vibrant and vital well into your ‘70s and ‘80s,” he said. “In fact, you can be in love! You don’t have to be just elderly. I think elderly should go the way of the word retarded. Don’t use it anymore. It’s not nice anymore.”

The Honey of the title struggles to make what she thinks she knows about love fit her current circumstances, Smith said. She thinks loving Leonard might cure him of Alzheimer’s. She wonders if she can continue to love Leonard as Alzheimer’s progresses. And she ponders what the ravages of age mean for her own lovability.

What she realizes (and this goes back to revelations Smith has had in his own life) is that it’s “more important to love than to be loved,” he said.

“You can have a stadium full of people love you and it you won’t do one bit of good if you can’t love at least one of them back,” Smith said.

There was a time in his own life when Smith sought the love of stadiums full of people. After a stint as a newspaper reporter in the ‘70s, Smith went off to seek fame and fortune as part of a rock band called Wyler.

Smith describes Wyler as “a seven-man band touring the southern United States and working steady during the disco era.”

The band found especially enthusiastic audiences on the Bayou south of New Orleans, he said.

“The band got to the point where we met with (Bob) Dylan’s manager,” Smith said. “He was going to sign us and I realized, ‘I don’t understand any of this.’ So I went to law school so I could negotiate own rock and roll contracts, none of which were forthcoming.”

Smith’s father was a lawyer who taught his young son cross-examination at the breakfast table.

“He’d say, ‘Who were you out with last night? How many sisters does he have? What’s their number? I’ll call them. What time did you get in? Really? Because your mother and I were up then.’”

Smith said that everything he did for the first 30-or-so years of his adult life was dedicated to “changing the world.”

“I tried to change the world as a hippie protester,” he said. “I tried to change the world as a journalist. I tried to change the world through rock and roll. And, finally, I tried to change the world through law. I’m sad to report that the world has changed me. I have not changed the world.

“For everybody who is out there now trying to change the world,” Smith said, “I’ve tried it from every angle and, as far as can tell, it ain’t changing.”

The only thing you can change, Smith said, is yourself.

“That’s kind of what ‘Honey and Leonard’ is about,” he said. “How to change yourself. Here’s the deal. Life is a spiritual obstacle course. It’s designed to see if you can get over yourself. That’s the whole game.”

We are all destined, perhaps, to believe at one or more points in our lives that we are at the center of the universe, Smith said.

“That is a trap we are all in,” he said. “And one way out of the trap is to love somebody more than you love yourself.”

Smith, who describes writing a book as “the most fun you can have with your pants on,” is already hard at work on his next tome.

It’s called “Rock and Roll Voodoo.”

“It’s about my band in New Orleans and on the Bayou,” he said. “I’m about 70 pages into it and I’m having a ball.”

Smith describes it as a roman à clef.

“That is fact disguised as fiction,” he said. “Because, lord knows, this protagonist is doing stuff I would never dream of doing.”

Smith eschews the “violence porn” that infects so much entertainment these days and encourages authors to write about real life.

“It’s not always pretty,” he said. “It’s not always thrilling. It’s long stretches of boredom punctuated by sheer terror. But that’s life.”