MAD Magazine at the Rockwell Museum

 

 

 

What Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine

Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA

Through October 27, 2024

 

MAD Magazine was an important part of my youth. Editors and cartoonists such as Bill Gaines, Al Jaffee, Dave Berg, Jack Davis,  Mort Drucker, Al Feldstein, Harvey Kurtzman, and Don Martin were as familiar to me as baseball lineups. Many were Jewish, which is about as much as I knew about Judaism in my Protestant Pennsylvania hometown. You might also note that the names are male, which also meant a lot when it came to my personal battle against mainstream values. A new exhibition, The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine now on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum brought back a lot of those memories. 

 

 

 

MAD was founded by Kurtzman and Gaines in 1952. By today’s standards much of its satire was pretty tame, but it filled a major humor magazine gap after older publications such as Ballyhoo, College Humor, Jester, Judge, and Puck disappeared. By 1952, the humor publication landscape was pretty barren. MAD was generally the publication of choice in the 1950s-60s-early 70s until it was bumped from its perch by the far-edgier National Lampoon. MAD peaked with over 2 million readers/subscribers in 1972. It’s still around–it was bought by Warner 1972–but its circulation has fallen to around 140,000. 

 

 

One could call MAD a needed corrective to 1950s conformity and the Cold War, a bellwether of the 60s counterculture, and by the 1980s, an antique searching for reinvention. The Rockwell exhibit surprised me with more recent MAD material that can be pretty biting once you get past lame filler. But, then again, a lot of it always was pretty lame, which is why vets of the 1960s gravitated to National Lampoon in the first place (before it too grew saccharine and disappeared). 

 

 

 

For all its virtues and shortcomings, there’s little denying the influence of MAD. Perhaps only Mickey Mouse rivals MAD’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman (get it?) in fame for a fictional character. There’s scarcely a comedian or cartoonist that didn’t draw inspiration from MAD: Stephen Colbert, R. J. Crumb, Terry Gilliam, Matt Groening, Art Spiegelman, Jon Stewart…. Not to mention that some very sharp minds wrote for it, including Stan Freberg, Ernie Kovacs, and two of my all-time favorites, Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding.

 

A small disappointment: I missed seeing Jaffee’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” Who can resist snark like: Q: “Are you asleep?” A: “No, I’m dead–leave the flowers and get out!” Like that one? How about: Q to man with a fish is his bucket: “Catch that?” A: “No, I talked him into giving himself up.” Or to a man on a beach: Q: “Been swimming?” A: “No–I just walked over from Europe.”

 

Here is a sampling from the Rockwell show.

 

 

 

 

Mother's Day Cards from Disappointing Children

Satire of Pulp Magazines

Did MAD anticipate quidditch? 

Jaffee meets Rube Goldberg!  

    

Card Playing Dogs Updated! 

Recent work: The Birth of Treason

Rob Weir

Table for Two: Mixed Servings

 

 

 

Table for Two (2024)

By Amor Towles

Penguin Random House, 452 pages

★★★

 

In 2011, Julian Barnes won the 2011 Booker prize for The Sense of an Ending. I will return to that metaphor in my take on Table for Two, a collection of short stories by Amor Towles.

 

Towles is a wonderful novel writer who takes us deep into the psyches of his protagonists and immerses them in their time period. Can he do the same with short stories? Yes and no.

 

The first part of the assemblage is “New York,” six tales that begin or end in the Big Apple. “The Line” takes us to the Soviet Union shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution. It, World War One, and domestic and foreign opposition to the new Bolshevik government devastated Russia. Urban residents had to adapt to long lines for necessities such as bread, vegetables, and cooking oil. Enter the ironically named Pushkin, who cheerfully stands in lines, holds the places of others, and queues for them. It's an uplifting tale of a man who gets what he needs by not wanting it.

 

This is followed by “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,” the saga of a nebbish man easily advantage of. He ultimately gets a job at a bookstore that carries some antiquarian titles where Timothy's singular talent emerges: He's excellent at imitating other people's signatures. You can anticipate where that will go, but probably not how it gets there.

 

The remaining four stories are decent, but not necessarily the most relatable unless you’re a highbrow or high-powered New Yorker. A meddling daughter in “I Will Survive” is browbeaten into investigating her stepfather. He says he's playing squash each Sunday but has a surprisingly different activity in mind. “The Bootlegger” is a lesson on hubris focusing on an upwardly mobile man new to high culture but full enough of himself to be offended by an elderly gentleman illegally taping performances at Carnegie Hall.

 

Two more problematic stories are the “Di Domenico Fragment,” involving a mysterious group seeking to reassemble an Annunciation painting from the namesake Italian artist piece by piece. A New Yorker has a relative who has a fragment and smells opportunity. It contains my favorite line from the novel: “No one is born pompous. To obtain the state requires a certain amount of planning and effort.” I’m not sure how many readers will care about the setup, plus everything ends with a sigh rather than a flash.

 

The same lack of a strong sense of an ending also plagues “Hasta Luego.” It seems too improbable to be believable and too histrionic to make readers suspend belief. The plot centers on snowstorm, a cancelled flight, and a happy-go-lucky stranded traveler who cheers up the disgruntled, but is hiding a deeper problem than a day's delay.

 

The second part of the book, “Los Angeles,” takes a 180° turn. It’s one novella-length story, “Eve in Hollywood,” is a pot boiler mystery of voyeurism, blackmail, extortion, scandal, and murder in 1939 Hollywood. Olivia de Havilland is an absent-but-pivotal character who has just finished making “Gone with the Wind.” We are taken inside MGM and served large doses of petulant creatives, abusive producers, enormous egos, and double crossers. We meet Evelyn “Eve” Ross, Ms. de Havilland’s protectoress, and ex-detective Charlie Granger. They are trying to recoup nude photos and negatives of de Havilland snapped without her knowledge. Who took them, who is trying to acquire them for nefarious purposes, and where are they? Towles mixes fictional and composite personalities with icons such as de Havilland, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, David O Selznick, and Irving Thalberg, though the last is anachronistic as he died in 1936.  There is an additional cast of unsavory characters, some forced into sleazy activity and some with darker motives. There are strong currents to wade to keep track of the white hats and the black ones, but it’s a diverting story with a surprise/reprise ending that’s sharper than others in the collection.

 

I liked Table for Two, but I didn't love it. In my view, the short story genre is not Towles’ best. I appreciate that not every idea can become a full-length novel, but I found myself looking for universalizing dilemmas and themes. One-note stories–about ¼ of Table for Two–call attention to being fiction whose note fails to reverberate. Call it a tray of comestibles, some delicious and some disappointing. Somehow, my mixed metaphor seems appropriate.

 

Rob Weir

Bear: Releasing Today

 

 

 

Bear (2024)

By Julia Phillips

Hogarth, 304 pages.

★★★★

 

“Snow-White and Rose-Red” is a German folk tale that’s not the same story as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” though it does involve a dwarf. Also a ferocious bear and two young girls. I mention this because author Julia Phillips draws upon it for her page-turning modern tale set on San Juan Island in Washington State.

 

Hold the dwarf, but Bear is likewise about a bruin, two sisters, and a single mother. From there, Phillips allows her imagination to roam to construct an alternative narrative. Sisters Elena and Sam have been so close for so long that it’s as if they share a brain stem. As they edge toward their thirties they discuss leaving the island, but not things that matter more. San Juan is a major tourist area–especially for spotting orcas–but with a permanent population of under 8,000 there are not a lot of opportunities for locals. The location reminded me of the contrast between coastal Maine and its interior. That is, the wealth is in the hands of summer residents and visitors to the coast whilst those providing services live further away and close to the margin.

 

Elena and Sam tend to their dying mother, her illness probably linked to chemicals she ingested at work. You can imagine how hard it is to hold such a household together. Elena is a bartender/waitress at a golf club and Sam on the ferry that is the only way on and off the island. Sam depends a lot on tips, as she works for a food vendor, not the state. (Read no benefits, low wages.) Elena is calm and organized, whereas Sam is restless, a loner, and so bored that she routinely has sex with a guy in which she’s only marginally interested.  

 

In one trip across the strait Sam spots an amazing phenomenon: a bear swimming beside the boat. That’s weird because there are no bears on any of the more than 170 islands in the San Juan archipelago. She’s pretty sure it’s a carnivorous grizzly, which would be more unusual still, as Washington has very few brown bears. When the bear is seen again outside their house, Madeline, a state wildlife official, assures Elena and Sam the animal is almost certainly a lost black bear. Her advice is the standard response: avoid the bear, secure all garbage, and don’t feed it as a fed bear is ultimately a dead bear.

 

Madeline is wrong; it is a grizzly. Sam is terrified, but when Elena views it, she sees the glories of nature. Nor is she frightened by it; in her magical thinking, the bear is beautiful and a good luck talisman. Sam insists that Elena get rides to her job, advice routinely ignored as she enjoys walking in the woods. She’s not just fascinated with the bear, she’s obsessed by it. 

 

Bear is a metaphor for numerous things, including the secrets Elena and Sam keep from one another, the gap between the masks they wear and internal clashing aspirations, and the anguish of forging independent personalities. On a deeper level it’s a tale of freedom, civilization and wildness, and what we really see versus what we wish to see. Who is trapped? What boundaries should be obeyed and which ones ignored? What is the price of escape?

 

I zipped through this book in two sittings. Much of that is due to Phillips’ sparkling prose and her sense of knowing when to make the plot scurry and when to allow it to graze. It further engrosses if you allow yourself to embrace mythopoetic storytelling and remind yourself that even adapted folk tales have morals. In my view, those readers who have complained about its ending forget that Bear is a fantasy that relies on character types. There is no “real” Elena, Sam, or bear. But who among us has never felt trapped or had to wrestle with the dilemma of whether to embrace or flee?

 

Rob Weir

The Cliffs: New Novel from J. Courtney Sullivan

 

 

 

The Cliffs (2024)

By J. Courtney Sullivan

Alfred A. Knopf, 384 pages.

★★★

 

Novelists and editors routinely remind readers that the work before our eyes is a work of fiction in which locations, situations, and people are imaginary. But if you know southern Maine you will recognize in a nanosecond that the place J. Courtney Sullivan calls Awadapquit  is Ogunquit with a small splatter of York thrown in. (Sullivan credits a history of Ogunquit in her afterward.)

 

The Cliffs is Sullivan's sprawling tale of secrets, lies, self-deception, tragedy, and redemption in a small coastal village. (Ogunquit has 1,500 residents.) Although most of the story takes place in 2005 and again in 2015-17, the roots of recent trauma grew from seedlings planted in the Colonial era. The modern day protagonist is Jane Flanagan, who grew up in Maine, couldn't wait to escape, went away to college, and landed at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. Jane loves archives and her boss Melissa values Jane. Melissa even introduces Jane to David, a wounded divorcee who eventually marries her. If only Jane didn't love booze more than she loves her work or her husband!

 

Various circumstances, including her mother's death, lead Jane back to Awadapquit, where her sister Holly still resides. Holly is Jane's opposite–content to be a blue-collar  gal, non-intellectual, and a collector close to the edge of becoming a hoarder. She is as comfortable with chaos as Jane is obsessed with being fastidious and pragmatic. Jane plans to go back to the city as soon as she and Holly sort through their mother’s effects and sell the house that belonged to her beloved grandmother before her mother moved in. Jane is, however, glad to be near her closest friend Allison who runs an Awadapquit inn with her husband Chris. With two children as well as high-season visitors, Allison is also at home with chaos.

 

As you might imagine, any novel whose protagonist wants to leave ASAP is a setup for circumstances that don't allow that to happen. It is these that both drive and occasionally bog down Sullivan's novel. Among the complications are Paul and Genevieve. They are the kind of people that long-time coastal residents love to hate. They are filthy rich, haughty, high questionable taste, and are unaware of local customs, but they dump lots of money into the local economy. That too is a mixed blessing; it brings opportunity but also leads to soaring home prices. They purchase a rundown but once-grand property on a promontory with a spectacular ocean view. It just happens to be a purplish Victorian where Jane and Ellison used to hang out in high school when it was a boarded up wreck. It is said that it once belonged to a seafaring man responsible for white settlement in Awadapquit.

 

In architectural theories of Mies van der Rohe, “less is more.” I'm not a fan of austere modern architecture and like a bit of flash and gingerbread, but some readers are likely to find The Cliffs overstuffed. It is to Sullivan's credit that she expertly connects most of the dots, but allow me to be unorthodox in this review and bullet-point some of the ingredients that go into her novel.

 

·      Several generations of Genevieve-like insensitivity to those with diminished resources

·      The Wabanaki peoples who settled long before the English

·      A mysterious cemetery with a stone burying a single initial

·      Real and metaphorical ghosts

·      A modern medium

·      The Shakers

·      The U.S. Civil War

·      Spiritualism

·      A lake that isn't a lake

 

All of this is in addition to alcoholism, various tales of marital strain, a crooked antiquities dealer, unexpected children, job loss, the internal truth behind romantic exteriors, dementia patients, reinvention, and taking small steps to correct inherited harm. The Cliffs is, at heart, a deep dive into shifting from arrogance to humility and from fast-track living to dialed back contentment.

 

Again, though, The Cliffs takes a circuitous route to get there. I liked the novel, but I also wondered if Sullivan could have pared her novel to arrive by the main road rather than so many unpaved ones. It would not surprise me if some readers get lost and never arrive at the destination. Less isn’t more, but more can be too much.

 

Rob Weir

 

France: The Halves Don't Fit

 

 

 

France (2021)

Directed by Bruno Dumont

ARP Sélection, 134 minutes, Unrated

In French with subtitles

★★

 

France is French, but the title references its main character France de Meurs (Léa Seydoux), a TV “journalist.” I put journalist inside quote marks for a reason. If you’ve seen network news lately you know that anchors as often celebrities rather than serious reporters.

 

France de Meurs is a huge celebrity idol. She’s knock-me-over gorgeous, capable of holding her own in weighty political discussions–she even gets the better of Emmanuel Macron–asks hard questions, and provides dramatic footage for her viewers. I suppose I could be acidic and say we know she’s not a real TV journalist because she asks hard questions, but it’s the footage about which we should be cynical. France is often the center of the action, as we see her helmeted and running past explosions with gunfire whizzing past in the background. Or we see her in North Africa interviewing Tuareg fighters and in a boat with refugees. Because we see behind the scenes–de Meurs shadowed by her persistent assistant Lou (Blanche Gardin)–we know that most of the broadcast is staged and as phony as a histrionic supermarket tabloid headline.

 

France is part Network (1976) and part Wag the Dog (1997). If only director Bruno Dumont had stayed the course, France could have been a decent update of those two classic black comedies. You’ve probably read past reviews in which I’ve spoken of the inherent difficulties of mixing satire with drama. It can be and has been done successfully, but France crumbles like a week-old croissant when it wants us to turn serious.  

 

We observe that France is a workaholic whose job has made her rich. She, her author husband Fred (Benjamin Biolay), and their son Joseph (Jojo) live in a fancy well-appointed home, but they could be the poster children for the bored bourgeoisie. The marriage is loveless, Jojo is more a fixture than a son, and many of their friends exist largely to worship France. Thus, when France absent-mindedly knocks over a motorbike rider in Paris traffic, she snaps under the toxicity of her situation.

 

If this turning point had been less cartoonish, the drama part of the film would have been more compelling. Instead, France turns Florence Nightingale-meets-Andrew Carnegie. She visits Baptiste (Jewed Zemmar), the young man she injured, in the hospital and his home. His wounds aren’t serious and his starstruck parents assure de Meurs all is well. Yet, when France discovers Baptiste was largely supporting his immigrant mother and unemployed father, she turns Florence Nightingale-meets-Andrew Carnegie and lavishes money and gifts upon them. She also announces she’s done with TV when French scandal sheets come down on her. Good deed, a revelation, or just a guilty conscience?

Bruno and the script writers veer toward farce. France returns to TV, is caught in a different scandal, heads off to a Bavarian sanitorium in the dead of winter to clear her head, meets Charles Castro (Emmanuelle Arioli), and gets punked in still another scandal. Only then does some moral reasoning kick in–just in time for tragedy, a soul-shaking interview, and an embrace of fate. Is this drama or melodrama hiding behind a cynical veil? You can decide, but either way we have two halves of one movie that are the equivalent of a befuddled carpenter trying to force-fit unmatched ends.

 

Léa Seydoux, whom you might have seen in Blue is the Warmest Color, is a good choice for the sort of blonde beauty that Fox News would hire, a look-at-me face who you stare at rather than analyze her words. Seydoux is, however, a bit stiff when she moves and I can’t tell whether that’s her or the way she was directed. Though she’s in a supporting role, Blanche Gardin, a French actress/comedienne, is ultimately more convincing in her role. She has two dots on her nose and tilts her head to express moods through them. She’s also excellent at shifting between being worshipful, manipulative, and playing CYA. The rest of the cast has presence without gravitas.

 

You’d have to watch to get what I mean about Gardin. Is it worth it? I’m tempted to tell you to dust off Network and Wag the Dog to see what France could have been. If not, just know that France isn’t as good as it looks.

 

Rob Weir

The Lost Boy of Chionia: Adrift in 1960s Italy

 

 

 The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia (2024)

By Juliet Grames

Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages

★★★★

 

If you've ever gone on a college J.Y.A. program, joined the Peace Corps, stationed overseas, or were a Fulbright scholar, at some point you were probably jarred to awareness that not everyone sees the world the same way you do. Ironically, sometimes it hits hardest for those seeking to connect to their roots, as in the case of an Italian-American in Italy. Imagine how much harder it might have been in 1960.

 

Francesca “Franca” Loftfield comes from an Italian American family of professionals. She's a Barnard grad who pursued a PhD at Oxford and Venice. She even married an Italian guy and moved to Rome. Franca had been in country long enough to be fluent in Italian and know the proverbial lay of the land.

 

Ahh! But Rome isn't the same as Calabria, and it's especially not like a remote village and the Aspromonte region. The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia takes us to a village that's a time warp in which the present and future take a back seat to the past. It's literally beyond where the road ends; a flood washed away the bridge that crosses the Amendola River and a waterfall. To get there, the bus stops at Bova, you walk for three hours, cross a plank over the river, and enter a world of tradition.

 

This is to be Franca's home for the next two years. She has walked away from her marriage and signed on with Child Rescue, a charity that plans to set up a nursery school in Santa Chionia. Her only other charge is to stick to Child Rescue’s mission. Officially, Mayor Stelitano, Father Pantaleone Bianco, and most area residents are enthusiastic. “Officially” every villager is a “Christian,” there are no Mafioso in the area, and everyone is a goatherder. Yet, Franca's warned never to walk alone at night, no one would dream of calling the carabinieri, there are clearly some rich locals, and everyone warns her that nothing will ever get done. Nonetheless, everyone has agendas that are outside of Child Rescue’s purview.

 

To her face they call Franca maestra (teacher), but that's not what they say behind her back. Her cranky landlord Cicca doesn't want her to turn on the electricity–a single light bulb–and the local diet consists of lots of lentils, borage, and spiky plants. The postal service is slow and the phone lines are always “out.” It doesn’t help that Franca pokes her nose into things that upset the locals–like the fate of a missing boy or noticing  that everyone seems to be related, perhaps too much so! They also harbor secrets and speak Griko, an Italian dialect mixed with Greek, which takes getting used to.  

 

Grames opens her novel with an epigraph: “The deepest despair that can take hold of a society is the fear that living honestly is futile.” It is, in many ways, the crux of the novel. Troubles bubble up regularly, but more attention is spent on tradition, resignation and rehashing old mysteries than in moving forward like a plucky American would do. Yet Franca can't resist being drawn into investigating the fate of locals said to have emigrated decades ago, the identity of a skeleton discovered in the foundation of the post office during a 1950s flood, an old photograph, local elections–whose results she fails to see are predetermined–domestic turmoil, legends, and the possibility that the village might be abandoned. Not to mention her own libido. Except for the latter, she's trapped between rules and customs.

 

Grames gives us a tale of culture clash, deception, mysteries faux and real, dishonesty, naivete, regret, and a young woman out of her depth. There is, though, some redemption amidst the deeper despair and futility. The Lost Boy requires concentration as there are few shortcuts to direct readers. Grames also often leaves it to readers to translate Griko and Italian terms and sometimes uses English vocabulary in nonstandard ways. Personally I appreciated her approach as it had the effect of encouraging close reading to keep tabs on who is playing whom and why. I did find it somewhat perplexing that Franca feels overly clueless and the novel’s villain is too easy to discern. Nonetheless, The Lost Boy of Chionia is a reminder that crossing either a washed-out bridge or cultural gaps requires going beyond preconceived expectations.

 

Rob Weir

 

Suddenly Last Summer: Does It Resonate?

 

 

 

Suddenly Last Summer (1959)

Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz

Columbia Pictures, 114 minutes, Not-rated.

★★★

 

More than a dozen Tennessee Williams plays have been made into movies, including Suddenly Last Summer in 1959. It had the advantages of being directed by the talented Joseph Mankiewicz, a screenplay penned by Gore Vidal, and the incomparable Katherine Hepburn in its cast. She was more than up to task of a Williams drama but by then, her star was eclipsing and that of Elizabeth Taylor was ascendant. She would win a Golden Globe for Suddenly Last Summer, not Hepburn.

 

The film also stars Mercedes McCambridge and Montgomery Clift, which made it well-acted and well-crafted all around. The open question is how well it holds up and on that score the answer is decidedly mixed. It largely depends on how you feel about the now-outmoded psychiatric precepts upon which it rests.

 

It is something of a pas de deux between Vi(olet) Venable (Hepburn) and her niece Cathy Holly (Taylor). Cathy is a troubled but reluctant patient in a private Catholic hospital. She suffers from trauma resulting from the death of her cousin Sebastian while they were traveling together. Call it a European vacation gone horribly wrong. Cathy adored Sebastian, but her aunt Vi blames her for failing to protect her son Sebastian. From what? Ahh, there’s the rub.

 

Cathy exhibits severe behavioral issues. She is cynical, babbles, and is prone to angry outbursts. Her mother Grace (McCambridge) insists that Cathy is just a sensitive poet type, but for 1937 New Orleans–the post-vacation setting for Williams’ play–that’s partially code for meaning she’s unorthodox, obscene, seductive, and oversexed. But does this make her dangerous? Vi thinks so and encourages Dr. John Cukrowicz (Clift) to lobotomize Cathy for her own good. He can tell that she has sublimized a deep shock, but insists that Cathy first be treated by talk therapy. The wild card is that Vi promises hospital director Dr. Lawrence Hockstader (Albert Dekker) she will fund a new wing, but only if Dr. Cukrowicz removes the “hideous story” from Cathy’s brain.

 

Hideous story? Holy Sigmund Freud, Batman! Without revealing too much, sex plays a role in the “hideous story,” but are we still talking about Cathy? Vi insists her son “saw the face of God” before he died and the more Dr. Cukrowicz talks with Vi, the more we wonder whose sanity is most in question. So too does Cukrowicz, who thinks that buried pain has made both women reality-challenged. Two stories will surface and, in my opinion, reviewers missed the possibility that they might be the same story remembered in radically different ways.

 

Suddenly Last Summer was billed as a mystery thriller by some, and Gothic noir by others. My vote goes to the latter. In a particularly creepy moment bathed in shadows, d desperation, then resignation, Cathy is certain that a lobotomy is imminent. Imagine her caged anguish. Tennessee Williams often placed characters in trapped mental spaces. Some observers claim these paralleled Williams’ conflicted Catholic worldview and his mystical and moral qualms. This won’t make any sense unless you watch the film, but there’s a side story involving cannibalism could be symbolic and imaginary, not literal. And, yes, there is indeed quite a lot that’s cloaked in Freudian garb, raiment that often unsettles contemporary views of sexuality.

 

It's almost guaranteed that certain ethnic aspects of Suddenly Last Summer will seem past their sell-by date. Sebastian’s fate takes place on the fictional island of  Cabeza de Lobo. It looks like a Caribbean location, but it was filmed in the Balearic islands of Spain. They do not come off well. Ethnocentrism? Exoticism? Projected primitivism? A commentary on repressed colonialism?

 

Strangely, the film was criticized in its day for stretching Williams’ one-act play with needless filler to bring it to movie length. Today it feels like there’s too much going on! Alas, it ends rather meekly and abruptly, as if there was no convincing way to complete it. Yet, Hepburn and Taylor? Is that worth a peek? Of course.

 

Rob Weir