The Eternal Struggle

Interviews from the Heart

A couple of years ago I got a call from a Washington Post reporter, asking for an interview. She’d seen some comment I made online about owning a product called TV-B-Gone, a keychain remote that can turn off almost any television, and was writing a story about the device. The interview didn’t go well. I mentioned using the remote at an Applebee’s, and becoming concerned that the waiters who kept turning the TV sets back on would find me out.

 The reporter would ask, “And were you nervous? Was your heart racing?” When I would dismiss this, saying getting busted with the TV B Gone would be no big deal, she would try again. “And were you nervous doing this? Was your heart racing?” Three times she tried this. I knew by the end of the conversation that, since I refused to say that my heart was racing, my quotes would never make the story (I never looked for it).

Recently, I’ve been listening to podcasts of 60 Minutes broadcasts. I hadn’t sampled the show since the mid-90s or thereabouts (when I was working on a caricature of Morley Safer – no internet for me in those days). 60 Minutes was a favorite show when I was a kid, maybe 5th and 6th grade, and if these recent episodes accurately reflect the quality of the program back then, I can see why. 60 Minutes is written on a 5th grade level – simplistic, sensational and emotionally manipulative.

Not that this was any great discovery. I knew these news magazine shows had always been junk, and any old Mike Wallace interviews I’ve run across of Youtube in recent years show clearly that he and his cohorts were TV personalities, first and foremost, not journalists (I think we can blame the TV format itself for that, but that’s a rant for another time). Still, listening to the past ten or twelve weeks worth of shows, I can’t help thinking the 60 Minutes episodes I enjoyed as a kid HAD to be more intelligent than this crap. My memory is notoriously unreliable, prone to nostalgic longings, but I feel pretty certain what I’m hearing now is a downgrade from anything Harry Reasoner presented.

But here’s what killing me. In every single Leslie Stahl report – every single one – Leslie asks the person she’s interviewing if their heart was racing. Was your heart racing when you heard the judges’ verdict? Was your heart racing when Timmy came out of the coma? Was their heart racing when you realized you’d discovered the missing genetic link that could cure tendonitis in elephants? It’s like a verbal tick for Leslie. “Oh my gosh, was your heart racing?” Sure, they all agree. My heart was racing. Chances are good their interviews would never have made it to air if they didn’t confess their racing hearts. And all the 60 Minutes newsgabbers have some variation of this. “What was going through your mind?” Steve Croft will demand. “You must have been terrified.”

Yes, you MUST have been terrified…if you ever hope to get on the tay vay. Are these guys doing news interviews or casting for Hamlet? It seems a certain measure of quotable angst is required for every news story, even for that lowly WP reporter grinding out D-24 fluff about remote controls. This kind of blatant emotionalism makes my blood boil. In fact, you might even say…

Nah, I wouldn’t say that. Not even for Leslie Stahl.

Buzz Stop

In the seventh grade there was a bus stop right outside my house, but I never hung out there. Every morning I snubbed the pale, bookish, grade-grubbing children loitering at the closest stop and walked several blocks to wait for the bus with a much seedier crew of juvenile losers – MY people. Despite the best efforts to designate bus stops according to geographic equality, classism has a way of overriding convenience in the social sphere of middle school.

Life's Sideshow

(Click to biggen.)

Midlife Ophiuchus

Insofar as I gave a damn about astrology, I was pretty satisfied with my designation as a Sagittarius, the sign of the lazy, philosophical dreamer who writes poems between naps. The Sagittarius follows his own interests, pursuing higher education to suit his whims, seeking a “big picture” understanding of the world (all the better to dismiss your petty concerns as major bringdowns with the potential to harsh one’s mellow). He craves creative adventure and independence, avoids commitment and lives like a badass motorcycle rebel jonsin’ for kicks.

Hell yeah.

I See Myself Reflected in the Fanboy Stranger

There in the convenience store, he unashamedly purchased the largest soda and the largest bag of cookies.  He flaunted the resulting waistline, wrapped in a t-shirt that trumpeted his love of kiddie krap. He had my beard, my nerdy reading glasses, and if I'm not careful, my gut.  I thought my own geeky indulgences for sugar and Spidey were well-hidden in my public guise.  But the Fanboy Stranger revealed the truth: they recognize us by our shoes. 

More Thrdgll Propaganda

Now available in paperback and hardcover: The Infinite League and Other Pedestrians. Check it out here.

Still Only 25 Cents

"Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness: money is not an infantile wish." – Sigmund Freud


In the early Seventies, I saw a photograph of Hagar the Horrible cartoonist Dik Browne in Parade Magazine. I knew who Dik Browne was because, even at this young age, I was completely absorbed in the world of comics and determined that cartooning was going to be my future occupation. Browne was photographed at his drawing board, as all cartoonists are, grinding out another series of comic strip panels (or at least pretending to) while beaming at the camera. This already looked like the Good Life to me, sitting on your butt, drawing cartoon junk all day, but there was one detail in the photo that really convinced me that this guy had hit the lotto. Browne had a can of soda by his table.

Halloweak

After several decades of consistent failure, I have to conclude that I suck at Halloween. It’s embarrassing. I mean, I pride myself on being a creative type, moderately well-versed in geek culture, and I’m certainly a fan of the holiday and all its paraphernalia. But I’ve never been able to make a worthwhile contribution to the festivities. Even as a kid I usually made a last-minute scramble to throw some reasonable facsimile of a costume together, just enough to qualify for candy collection. Maybe that was the problem – I got the candy anyway. I was rewarded for minimal effort, even though I felt instinctively that I should be trying harder.

The Halloween marketplace certainly made minimal effort easy. In the early years, I’d just snatch one of the Ben Cooper boxed costumes off the shelf at Edward’s department store and that was it. Slip into the plastic poncho (usually sporting the name of the character you’ve selected in neon, traffic-resistant colors), strap on the irritating face mask and you’re ready to roll. But even then I noticed a disparity between the majority of these costume options and the theme of the holiday itself. What did Minnie Mouse and Spider-Man have to do with Halloween? Shouldn’t your Fonzie mask at least include a hatchet in the head to fit the general ambiance of the Witching Hour? It never made sense to me.

But my attempts to go gruesome were pretty half-assed, too. I discovered I could add green food coloring to my mother’s foundation makeup and get a decent Frankenstein shade. I’d slap that on my face, sometimes with some black around the eyes, and then…well, that’s about as far as it went. “Green-Faced Dude.” It resulted in candy, so I kept that up for a couple of years.

But eventually I began getting interested in movie monsters and the makeup techniques of guys like Jack Pierce and Rick Baker and wanted to try something more elaborate (in keeping with my advancing maturity). I bought a fancy kit to make a werewolf face and it turned out to be fairly impressive. The mask was a thin, white, rubber face piece that was pasted over the nose and forehead, with a snarling werewolf snout built into the mold. Your real chin was exposed, so you could talk and growl realistically. The whole face-and-mask combo would be covered in several shades of brown makeup. A little brown on the hands, add a flannel shirt, and viola – man-wolf on the prowl. It looked great.

The trouble was that my neighborhood pals felt they had outgrown Halloween by then, or at least became more interested in the hedonistic vandalism of the holiday than the dress-up part. So I was on my own. And whether or not your costume rocks, it’s no fun to trick or treat by yourself. I had a repeat of that scenario the following year in my even more elaborate Phantom of the Opera getup, feeling the same loneliness that drove the original Phantom into the sewers of Paris. I was getting to the age where Halloween parties should have been preferable to door-to-door begging. Unfortunately, in my neighborhood, a “party” of any sort usually meant smoking a bowl in someone’s garage, not apple bobbing among orange streamers and crepe paper bats. My final Halloween costume consisted of a Superman shirt and full-head Yoda mask, both of which just happened to be lying around in my room. I was just happy no one could tell it was me.

There were a few Halloween party invites in later years. I either resurrected the Green-Faced Dude or ignored it altogether in favor of my preferred Halloween activity, staying home with the lights off (to deter trick or treaters) and watching Karloff and Lugosi movies. Meanwhile, many of my contemporaries continued to get into costume each year – not only at Halloween, but at comic book conventions and Star wars premieres and the like. Through my past failures, I eventually realized I had no taste for getting dolled up in character. After all, those makeup men I admired applied their designs to OTHER people, leaving the potential embarrassment all over the actor’s well-compensated head, while they remained human.

Over the years I’ve known a few people who’ve been employed at theme parks, dressing up like Scooby and Goofy to entertain kids. My first thought on hearing about these gigs was always, “hot and sweaty and humiliating.” What could be the appeal? Invariably, they’d tell me they enjoyed getting “lost in a character,” forgetting themselves and letting the ego dissolve into cartoon stupidity. And this must be the core difference between them and me. Being myself has always been too much of an eternal chore without the added pressure of temporarily becoming Spongebob. Halloween is not a holiday for the self-absorbed.

Unless of course Ben Cooper comes out with an “Ashley Holt” costume just for me.

The Dysfunctional Hulk

Loitering in my local Barnes-a- Million, I was thumbing through a Marvel Masterworks book, a hardback reprint of early comic books with horrific digital color. Coming across the section featuring Fantastic Four #25, I had one of those electric jolts of repressed memory that I imagine are becoming more common in this age of repackaged nostalgia. I realized that this issue had been the very first time I had seen the Incredible Hulk.

The Infinite Cosmos

It’s surprising to me now that I even found the idea of LSD appealing. I’ve always been a self-control freak and I was already having major anxiety issues with pot by the time I was in high school. I should’ve been able to predict that acid wasn’t the drug for me, but it took quite a number of pulse pounding, panic-riddled freak-outs to convince me I wanted to stay lucid.

The big mistake was dropping the acid at night, which everyone does in keeping with proper “party” hours. You lose a whole night’s sleep in addition to putting yourself through a chemical drenched meltdown that takes all hours to clear up. The end of my acid ritual in those days was always the same. I’d cocoon myself on the couch with the tv on, trying to create a mundane environment to come down in, keeping myself glued to the tube and resisting the urge to run around in circles.

Quoting Thomas

Bedbug Evolution

My latest Bedbug dream image. I don't know who this guy was, but he started chasing me with those axes when I trespassed on his property. He only let me go when I promised to buy him a CD by K.C. and the Sunshine Band.

Just for kicks, I've posted the sketch stages, from teeny thumbnail scribble to anal-retentive finish. Consider this a cautionary example.

Just for the hell of it, here's Stephen Hawking reading the "Cups" story below.

http://thrdgll.tripod.com/slurpee.mp3

Runneth Over with Cups

Long ago – they tell me it was 1973 – the 7-11 convenience store chain released a series of Slurpee cups with images of DC Comics super heroes printed on them: http://www.glassnews.com/images/dcchecklist.gif. These were cheap, plastic cups in which the neon-colored concoction of syrup and crushed ice was dispensed. Usually, the cups featured a never-ending parade of sports stars, which held no interest to an avid indoorsman like me, who spent most of his free time coloring or playing with bugs. Having developed a growing interest in the cartoon likes of Superman and his cape-wearing ilk, I was very excited that this form of merchandising was taking a break from the Aarons and Clementes to serve up a few men in tights. Draw your own Freudian conclusions.

Two-Toned Memoir

Color version of a black and white classic. Not an easy task eliminating all that crosshatching on the original. (Click for bigness.)

The Drag

Jack Webb didn’t invent television, but he understood the form from the beginning better than anyone. Granted, Dragnet had already been a radio hit and much of television’s format had been borrowed from commercial radio. But Webb understood that, despite the added appeal of visuals, television retained the intimacy of radio. Unlike the Cinemascope majesty of theatrical motion pictures, popular television depended on establishing a quiet, personal relationship with the viewer. It was about telling smaller, economic stories, with small casts and limited locales, inviting viewers to spend time with familiar characters in familiar environments, almost as if spilling gossip about the neighbors over the backyard fence.

He understood that television could not be complex. The format was rigid; sponsor’s commercials had to appear in exactly the right spot, interrupting the story on the same beat each week. Worse, a complete story had wrap itself up in only 30 minutes, hardly time to gum up the works with ambiguous character development or multi-faceted issues. Television only had time for the simplest of ideologies, and anything too oblique was likely to upset the consumer confidence so necessary for TV’s bottom line. Television’s morality worked best in black and white. Two genres were ideal for the rigid new medium; the Western and the cop show.

It was perfect. A cop’s job is to solve crimes. All you needed to understand the premise of Dragnet was Joe Friday’s weekly opening monologue, where he explained, “I’m a cop.” A new crime each week, borrowed from the actual police files of the LAPD, plugged smoothly into the conflict/commercial/resolution formula of TV. And one thing Jack Webb had mastered was formula. He was the Henry Ford of television, applying no-frills, factory production methods to the art of the TV series. Dragnet opened and closed with the same voiceovers in every episode. Joe Friday’s story narration, written to mimic the reading of a dry police report, never strayed from its journal entry style (“Tuesday, April 19. It was hot in Los Angeles. We were on a routine stakeout on West 17th Street. The boss is Captain Brown. My partner is Bill Gannon. My name’s Friday.”). One imagines Dragnet scripts were pre-printed with a fill-in-the-blank format.

Stock shots often filled a good 25% of any given episode. Friday and Gannon (and Frank Smith before him) wore the same suits invariably, so the stock shots of the two men entering police headquarters or driving down Ventura Blvd. would always match. Sets were so spare as to often simply be one blank wall representing the interior of an apartment or business. If the scriptwriter (often Webb himself under a number of pseudonyms) were feeling apologetic, he might have a character explain the lack of furniture with, “We just moved in yesterday…and right away someone robs the place!”

To cut down on costly rehearsal time, Webb had his actors read from Teleprompters, further enhancing the minimal, monotone delivery that Dragnet was famous for. He kept a stable of actors close by to avoid unnecessary casting calls. The same handful of Dragnet regulars appear in a wide variety of roles. Virginia Gregg might appear as a con artist one week and a con artist’s victim the next. Many actors who appeared on Dragnet in the ‘50s returned to the series for its color episodes in the late ‘60s. But beyond Friday and Gannon, there is little consistency in the cast. Art Balinger might play Captain Didion in one episode and Captain Brown two weeks later. Webb knew you wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care if you did. The important thing was to get it done quickly and cheaply and get it on the air.

Close-ups helped. In the early days, Webb recognized that TV screens were small, and close-ups of faces or simple objects had the best chance of registering on a blurry little Philco. But it also cut down on costly backdrops. Some Dragnet episodes seem to consist entirely of nodding heads in close-up, batting dry, Teleprompted dialogue back and forth. When the series returned for its color run, some early episodes sported surprisingly lavish sets. But you can see when Webb becomes budget conscious again and returns to the blank walls, empty rooms and perpetual close-ups.

And this factory production, this penny-pinching art direction, is part of the show’s eternal charm. It is simple and formulaic to the point of insanity. But its simplicity is both visual and philosophical, particularly in the color episodes. Dragnet of the 1950s, despite its bizarre allegiance to the mundane, has a certain noir coolness on occasion. Webb knew the cinematic value of low-angled shots and sinister shadows, though they rarely came into play in stories about stolen purses or lost dogs. Joe Friday, though strictly a by-the-book man of the badge, seemed to inhabit the same LA that kicked Philip Marlowe in the gut. Though he never said it, Friday’s tough street lingo suggested he had a passing familiarity with hard drinks and loose women (Webb’s other hit radio character, the jazz jamming Pete Kelly, left nothing to doubt about his connections to the seedy underbelly of the big city).

But, by the late ‘60s, any subtle hint that Joe Friday was anything but the very embodiment of wholesome, Republican law and order went out the window. And it’s here, in the turbulent world of war protests and generation gaps, that the severe simplicity of the Dragnet Method fully flowers. No longer is the show simply a gritty drama about unwashed ex-cons knocking over liquor stores, Dragnet in the 1960’s becomes a propaganda vehicle for the LAPD, a “scared straight” PSA extolling the virtues of The Establishment to a viewership confused by the counterculture. Hippies, drug-addicted kids, LSD gurus, protesters and thinly-disguised Black Panthers are now the primary villains.

In addition to his awkward one-liners (“Unless you’re growing, sit down!”), Joe Friday is now prone to lectures. College professors and their confused students appear as empty-headed straw men, pitching Joe softballs about the harmlessness of marijuana, then sheepishly gazing at their feet when the wise Policeman’s superior logic knocks them out of the park. There are no two truths allowed on Dragnet. The public, whether flower children, crime victims, reporters, parents or simply concerned citizens are Wrong. Dangerously, stupidly wrong. Explaining basic concepts about social justice becomes Joe Friday’s full time job. It’s a wonder he finds the time to solve any crime with all the lecturing he’s now forced to do, straightening out citizens of all stripes about good parenting, police brutality and, especially, the danger of drugs.

Apparently, for an aging Jack Webb, it was no longer enough to gossip over the fence about criminals and their nefarious deeds. Formulaic simplicity wasn’t just a method of producing TV shows on the cheap; it was the founding principle that would clear up any confusion about morality from the freaks and the dropouts. Those close-ups and spare sets weren’t just frugality, they were meant to eliminate any confusing details, to keep us focused on a clear, simple message. The cop show was perfect for TV drama, but it was also the perfect educational film for America’s values. If there were any doubt about who was espousing a wrongheaded view of reality, that person appeared at the end of the program, looking shameful against a dull, gray wall, while a disembodied voice delivered their punishment. You are invited to wag a finger at the screen in judgment.

Did Webb merely bring the necessary simplicity of television to its obvious conclusion? Or was he a man who wanted to remake reality, to remove all the unessential details from his man-made reflection of the world until his personal Truth was revealed? Dragnet is hilarious, its simplicity of form and ideology so extreme as to be taken seriously only by the most brutally numbskulled. But Webb has the last laugh. Dragnet’s world is so streamlined as to be almost perfect. If we could change anything about it now, if we tried to impose any form of complexity into its near Randian cohesion, we would instantly ruin it. An episode of Dragnet where Joe Friday experiments with LSD, discovers police corruption that goes unpunished or faces an intellectual opponent he cannot match could never be shoehorned in without rendering the rest of the series null and void. Dragnet constructs a formula for reality that is unquestionable. Something that can only happen on television.

Meet the new blog...

Happily, I have given the old Tripod blog the proverbial heave-ho in favor of this newfangled blogger dealie the young people seem to like. The old blog is still up, for the time being, and you can view those posts here:

http://thrdgll.tripod.com/internal/

Bigger, better musing and/or Thrdgll AV material yet to come. Just testing the new system for the moment.