Emile Barrios

Like Diogenes in search of an honest man, I wander sometimes through my on-screen channel guide trying to find something to watch. Scrolling through all those choices, I’ve become fascinated by the titles of TV shows in this microscopic-attention-span era – particularly the use of the words “Extreme” and “Wars”.

On any given day you can find Cupcake Wars, Food Wars, Storage Wars, Whale Wars, Border Wars, and my favorite, Monster Bug Wars!. (Producer: “I’ve got a great idea for a show. It’s called ‘Monster Bug Wars’.” Network Executive: “I love it! But wait. It’s missing something. I know! An exclamation point in the title! Nobody’s done that!” Producer: “Brilliant!”)

Yep, this is definitely Extreme Couponing

If none of those suit your fancy, you can spend your time watching Extreme Makeover, Extreme Universe, Extreme Actionsports (no golf or fishing, I guess), Extreme Frontiers, and, of course, Extreme Couponing, a show about people who obsessively clip coupons and, at the climax of each episode, are filmed checking out at grocery stores buying hundreds of dollars of merchandise for a few cents. What these people do with 85 TV dinners and 115 bottles of Tide is not discussed.

Maybe the real question here is why I’m wasting my time looking at the on-screen guide in the first place, but leaving that aside all this Extreme and War stuff got me thinking about attention spans and how our lives have to be filled up now with constant input. Seemingly everywhere and at all times, and the more conflict the better.

Transistor radio: It even gets AM!

Now, I’m sure part of the problem here is that I am well outside the demographic advertisers care about. So all these TV shows that are about “real people” being put into “real situations” where they argue and compete with each other are designed for a younger generation – a generation that likes their iPods, iPhones, texting, etc. Nothing wrong with that. My generation had the telephone (connected by wire!), the transistor radio and the Walkman.

What frustrates me is that so many public spaces are now designed around the idea that what people want is constant stimulation at loud volume – you know, something you can hear through your iPod headphones while you’re texting.

A few days ago my wife and I went to a restaurant called Luna Grill in San Diego. Kind of a quick-service casual Mediterranean kebob place. While we were sitting there eating, we were treated to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” and other hard-rock tunes at a volume loud enough that we had to raise our voices to talk to each other across the table. Unsurprisingly, no one else in this restaurant seemed to notice. They just yelled.

Luna Grill being a chain restaurant, I’m sure the audio environment was designed by experts. That wasn’t a CD of “Back in Black” some employee had brought from home – it was music carefully chosen, paid for and piped in for the purpose of pleasing Luna Grill’s customers. So we finish eating, and as we’re walking to the parking lot (the restaurant is in a strip mall) grumbling, I realize that there is ambient music being played on an outside sound system – as if people can’t even bear going to their cars in silence.

Silence is a wonderful thing. It allows you to pause, reflect, listen to your own thoughts, experience the place you’re in in the most natural way. I wonder sometimes if people are losing the concept of what silence is.

Silence is not the complete absence of sound. It is the sound the world makes when nobody is trying to get your attention. I love that kind of silence. On a rural farm listening to the wind in the trees, or standing on Riverside Drive in New York City listening to the incredible metropolitan rush. But in order to experience silence, you first have to know it’s there. I think we are conditioned to fear silence, to avoid it, to have so much stimulation handy that silence is impossible. Especially in public spaces.

John Cage

The experimental composer John Cage wrote a famous piece called 4′ 33″, which has no notes. In other words, it consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. What the audience is supposed to listen to during the performance is the natural sound of the space where the performance is taking place: rustling of clothes, coughing, the air conditioning, crickets chirping outside. Cage’s point is to reveal to the audience what is going on around them while they’re too busy to pay attention. Thanks, John.

iPods, smartphones, ambient music, and (for heaven’s sake) even “Extreme Couponing” have their place in our world. They are here because people want them and they serve a purpose (bread and circuses, some would say). It’s just too bad for old fogies like me that silence has lost its place among them.

Kurt Vonnegut

Obscure Reference du Jour: In Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron”, a future America has mandated that everyone be absolutely equal in every way. A bureaucrat called the Handicapper General is in charge of leveling the playing field. Beautiful people have to wear masks, athletes have to carry weights, and smart people must wear headsets that play loud sounds at regular intervals to interrupt their thoughts.

Never serve bad coffee to a man with a badge

Today I saw this compilation of coffee commercials from the late 1950s-early 1960s, in which husbands confront their wives about making terrible coffee. The parts where the “problem” is solved by changing to Folger’s or Maxwell House or whatever are omitted – all we get to see is the crisis.

I love watching old TV spots (and looking at old print ads) because they offer such a concise glimpse of an imagined time and place that is long gone. Not real life, but an idealized version of life designed to connect actual people with products: This is who you are, these are the problems you have, this is what you need to buy in order to fix them.

The “long gone” part refers only to the time that the ads were produced. Advertising is still doing this exact job today – reflecting back to us an idealized vision of who we are that is within reach. All we have to do is buy the product.

I wonder if Don Draper was at this concept meeting.

In these coffee commercials, the men work hard while their wives stay home and keep house. “Don’t I at least deserve a decent cup of coffee?” they seem to say. The wives, of course, are ashamed by their failure.  If I can’t solve the coffee problem, am I deluding myself about the laundry and the vacuuming?

No worries, though. Happiness lies in simply making a better coffee choice at the supermarket. Your problem, dear lady, was that you didn’t realize that only Folger’s coffee tastes good. All the others are formulated to taste like…well…the look on your husband’s face should tell you.

All of this has taken exactly sixty seconds. Problem, solution, program of action. Now we return to “Bonanza” or “The Man from U.N.C.L.E”, where people are shooting each other.

Today we have CGI and special effects and every car commercial seems to feature the latest model skidding across the screen (what’s up with that anyway? Do people buy cars now based on how well they skid?). Back in the day it was mostly actors being filmed on sets. Analog, I guess.

I like retromercials (a term coined by Nick at Nite) because now, 50 years later, they are so easy to deconstruct. They are simplistic, straightforward, and easy to figure out. We’re all much more sophisticated consumers of advertising messages these days – so advertisers have to work much harder to get your attention before you zap or change the channel. Next time you watch TV, look at how some TV spots these days will go on for ten or fifteen seconds without a hint at what’s being advertised. Ads for Corona beer are one example. You get an idyllic shot of the beach, with the logo and tag line coming on maybe in the last five seconds.

Irony Dept.: Apparently this guy died of lung cancer.

I remember as a kid seeing all kinds of cigarette ads on TV. (A wonderful book called Advertising in America says that no product and medium were ever so perfectly matched as cigarettes and television). These ads generally featured rugged guys (like the Marlboro Man) enjoying a smoke out on the prairie, or a more regular guy who complained to another guy about how his cigarettes “had no flavor”. Try my brand, the other guy said. Wow! These taste great! I’ll get some! Problem, solution, program of action.

Back then I asked my father, who was a smoker, what the difference was. Did some cigarettes really taste better than others? They all taste the same, he said. And I thought, how can they say that on TV if it isn’t true? I would like to say that that boy grew up to be the kind of ad man who never told a lie, but any cursory look at my reel would tell another story.

(By the way, for all you youngsters, cigarette ads were banned from television on January 1, 1971. Virginia Slims cigarettes bought network time at 11:59:30 on December 31, 1970 for one last ad.)

You can find a ton of these retromercials on YouTube. Just enter “Old TV Commercials” into the Search field. Watch not just for how funny and dated they look, but also for how they do their job – how they try to make you believe that you have the problem their product solves. Look at how people are dressed, the sets behind them. What do these things say about who these people are? Then watch the commercials on TV now and you’ll see how modern advertisers, while much more sophisticated, are doing exactly the same thing.

Obscure Reference Du Jour: I wish I had a picture of this, but I don’t. In 1987 I worked for one of the first ad agencies on the West Coast that served the embryonic hi-tech industry. One of our first clients was a guy who had written a software product that interfaced between MS-DOS word processing programs and dot-matrix printers (state of the art at the time).

Anyway, this guy (one of your classic programmer types that didn’t get out much) came in with an ad he had done himself. He complained, “It’s just not working and I don’t understand what’s wrong.” The ad featured an illustration of a guy in a suit holding flowers and a heart-shaped box of candy, looking longingly at a dot-matrix printer. The headline: How To Get Your Printer to Put Out.

Yow.

And finally, there’s my tag line idea for a mental hospital: People Committed to Committed People.

Facebook has been doing this thing lately called “You know you grew up in _____ if you…”, encouraging groups to form around old hometowns, institutions, etc. and share memories. I found myself in a group devoted to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and after reading some of the things people posted I realized I had a unique opportunity to confirm the existence of an odd television program I remember watching almost every day – but which no one else I knew could recall seeing.

The show was called “Time, Tunes and Cartoons”, and it was on every weekday from 6:30 to 7:00 a.m. in the early 1960s. A local show, of course, in an era when there were only two TV stations in town and people said things like “Let’s see what’s on the other channel.”

Star of the show.

The format of “TT&C” was very simple: old cartoons (Mickey Mouse shorts from the 1930s, for example) with the sound turned off, accompanied by a very small and constantly repeating lineup of what they used to call “easy listening” music. I particularly remember the song “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”, the idea of which was incomprehensible to a kid in elementary school (no sense of metaphor). I can still hear the song in my head.

Between the cartoons, there would be a closeup of a clock and several weather-related dials (temperature, humidity, etc.) rotating past a studio camera. Time. Tunes. Cartoons. I don’t remember any commercials, but there must have been some.

I never thought about naked ladies during the show. Honest.

In this age of TV shows that are prepackaged, sliced and diced a hundred ways to reach a target audience, TT&C seems quaint and charming to me. I imagine the show was invented by a couple of grizzled studio technicians who had to be at work at that hour but were nursing hangovers. They used whatever program materials were at hand to keep themselves awake until the coffee was brewed. Quietly. Very quietly.

The show was on every morning in my house as my siblings and I made our sleepy way to the breakfast table. I considered the meaning of “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” a hundred times while crunching toast and drinking orange juice.

Yet I seemed to be the only one who remembered. Just last year, I asked a friend of mine who works at the station that aired TT&C if anyone around there could remember it. He said he talked to some technicians who were around back in the day, and they didn’t have a clue. So I began to doubt myself. Maybe this was something I cobbled together from random pieces of other shows I watched at that time. (On the other hand, you wouldn’t think a show like TT&C would draw a huge audience in the first place, right? And wouldn’t these be the same technicians who were nursing hangovers?)

Social media would be the final arbiter of my memory (is there anything it can’t do?). So I posted my TT&C recollections on Facebook, and sure enough, within a few minutes several people had confirmed that they too were devotees of the show. Vindication!

But victory was bittersweet, because once I confirmed the existence of TT&C I really, really wanted to watch it again. An impossible dream, because not in the farthest and deepest reaches of the Internet, Netflix, or the archives of WAFB-TV does one single episode still exist. No videotape in those days, and the idea of preserving such an ephemeral show would never have occurred to anyone anyway.

Note that the Chief is not wearing scuba gear.

No, the best I can hope for is that someday someone at WAFB will break open the door to a long-disused closet, find those Mickey Mouse cartoons, that scratched copy of “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” and those dusty analog dials and try for a re-creation.

Believe me, on that day I will have the toast and orange juice ready.

Tune in at 5:00 a.m.

Obscure Reference(s) Du Jour: When I think about favorite TV from my childhood, two very different shows come to mind. Around the same time TT&C was on the air I was completely addicted to “Sea Hunt” with Lloyd Bridges as a scuba-diving adventurer. I must have really annoyed the adults in my life talking about this show, because I remember once my Aunt Flavia told me that a special new episode would be on at 5:00 the following morning, so I should go to bed right then and rest up. Of course, I was there the next morning wondering why all I could see was that test pattern with the Indian chief.

Tom Chapin

A few years later as a teenager, I became a fan of “Make a Wish”, a kind of trippy new-age kids show with folksinger Tom Chapin (brother of the late Harry Chapin). Demographically I was right in the wheelhouse of this show, which was all about young people exploring the possibilities of life and paying attention to the things you dreamed of doing. The show came on late Sunday mornings, and I remember wanting our family to rush home from church so we wouldn’t miss it. One of the first times I can remember thinking that something on TV was addressing itself directly to me.

She knows what you're up to.

We all have guilty pleasures, I suppose, and I don’t mind telling you that one of mine is the comic strip Mary Worth. I read it every day in my local paper, which, being the dinosaur I am, I have delivered in its print form directly to my doorstep.

If you’re unfamiliar with this comic, it features “serious” story lines that unfold slowly (make that very slowly) over the course of about sixteen weeks. Mary has  been around in various forms for seventy years or so.

I’m a storyteller by nature, and I am endlessly fascinated by the structure and delivery of narratives. What makes characters believable? How do you keep the reader interested? How do you keep the story on track so the reader can follow it to the end? What makes a good story in the first place?

What appeals to me about Mary Worth is how regularly and completely it violates the rules of good storytelling. Unlike most daily strips, Mary is not meant to be funny. But it is.

Note the clenched Fist of Death

Take, for example, the story line that’s just wrapped up. A nurse (who presumably had to go through a lot of training and school to get where she is), makes up her mind to have a relationship with a doctor, despite his being overtly hostile to her advances. At her wits’ end, she, of course, seeks the counsel of Mary. She reveals to Mary that the reason she is stalking the doc is that she really doesn’t like being a nurse (say what?!). In turn, Mary suggests she try some other line of work – like sales. Wow! What a great idea! she says, and before you know it she has renounced her stalker ways and gotten another job.

Now, while you’re considering how lame this story is (and believe me, there isn’t any more to it), just think: sixteen weeks. That’s how long it took the strip to get through a story I described fully in five sentences. That’s pretty much how all the stories work: Someone has a seemingly-complicated problem, Mary meddles, and an astonishingly unbelievable resolution ensues.

The famous graveyard scene from "Carmen".

Which is not to say that the thing doesn’t hold your interest. It does – for all the wrong reasons. Starting with the aforementioned Plan-9-From-Outer-Spaceian brand of unimaginative plotting. I read the strip thinking I must be missing something – that an actual plot is going to be breaking out any minute to reward my patience. As Carmen sings in Bizet’s opera, “Perhaps never. Perhaps tomorrow. But not today, that’s for sure!”

(Wait, did I just mention Plan 9 From Outer Space and Carmen in the same paragraph? Gotta check my meds…)

The true fun of MW, though, is in its details – the backgrounds, the awkward positioning of the characters in the frame (an MW specialty), the strange gestures the characters make. It’s as if the creators are seeking to disguise their sense of humor by overlaying it with tedium and boredom. But, as Plan 9 so effectively demonstrates, unintentional humor succeeds best when it is…well…unintentional.

I am not alone in in my fascination with Mary. There are several blogs devoted to the strip, and a number of parodies, including this one in which live actors recreate the spine-bending character positioning and mind-numbing dialogue from several weeks of the strip. It is a measure of how big a fan I am that I have watched this video over twenty times and it never fails to crack me up.

Aldo Kelrast: Anagrammatic threat.

But my favorite place in all the world of Worth is The Comics Curmudgeon, written by the wonderfully snarky Josh Fruhlinger. Josh’s unerring eye can spot hilarity hidden deep in the most snooze-inducing Mary Worth frames. Granted, Josh covers a lot of other comic strips as well – but nobody’s perfect.

Speaking of stalkers, the most famous recent Mary Worth plotline is the one involving a guy who stalked Mary herself. His ominous-sounding name was Aldo Kelrast (“kelrast” = anagram for “stalker”), and his unwelcome advances (no doubt caused by his uncanny resemblance to Captain Kangaroo) were finally thwarted when, in a drunken stupor, he drove his car off a cliff. Now that’s entertainment.

The good Captain.

Not-So-Obscure Reference Du Jour: Oh, the wonders of Captain Kangaroo. He was one of the touchstones of my childhood. One of the things I liked about the days I was ill and had to stay home from school was that I got to watch his show, which came on around 9 a.m. Long before Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Green Jeans, Mr. Moose and the gang were presenting ideas, animals and object lessons in a way that had never been done before. At the beginning of each show, his theme music would play, and he would come through a door with a set of big keys in his hand. At the exact moment he put those keys on their wall hook, the theme music would stop. This fascinated me. How does he do that? I asked my mother. She didn’t know.

A couple of days ago I watched the film “Network” again. It’s one of my favorites because I first saw it in a theatre back in 1976, just as my own career in television was beginning.

The amazing Peter Finch as Howard Beale

This, of course, is the film where Howard Beale, an anchorman who is having a mental breakdown, tells his audience to get up, go to the window, stick their heads out and yell “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Rather than fire him, the network’s greedy new management decides to exploit his mental illness and christens him the “Mad Prophet of the Airwaves”. It’s a big success.

Fast forward to today, where in Florida Casey Anthony has just been acquitted of murdering her toddler daughter. Do you think she is guilty? That her acquittal is an OJ-esque miscarriage of justice? A lot of people do, thanks to the non-stop coverage of Ms. Anthony’s trial on a cable network called HLN. “HLN” stands for “Headline News”, and it used to be a 24-hour news channel that delivered 48 30-minute news/sports/weather programs per day. I used to work there.

Nancy Grace. Plus ca change....

Nancy Grace, a crusading TV host famous for her in-your-face coverage of sensational trials, virtually took over HLN’s schedule covering this trial. Quickly abandoning the “innocent until proved guilty” standard that (hopefully) was being practiced in the courtroom, Ms. Grace made up her mind early on that Casey Anthony, whom she nicknamed “Tot Mom”, was guilty, guilty, guilty. From the early stages of the trial, she ranted this opinion on her show, and brought on lawyers who also ranted it. Like Howard Beale’s newscast, the ratings soared. So the executives at HLN went “wall-to-wall”, as they say. All the other programs on HLN suddenly became about Tot Mom. With other hosts, lawyers and “experts” ranting about Tot Mom’s guilt. The ratings soared again. Predictably, other media outlets jumped on the bandwagon. Thus the “guilty” mindset spread.

The acquittal of Tot Mom earlier this week only served to ratchet up HLN’s rantings. “Justice for Caylee”, the graphic reads, with a split screen of an “expert” decrying the verdict on one side and video of Caylee happily playing on the other.

Tot Mom. Not “The” Tot Mom. Simply Tot Mom. Two one-syllable words. Two hard consonants in one word followed by two soft consonants in the other. Easy to say. Easy to remember. And easy to fill up with whatever meaning can be put into them by a network who understands the power of repeating and repeating a given message.

Think about “Just Do It.” Three one-syllable words. Hard consonants on both ends. Soft consonant in the middle. Easy to say. Easy to remember. And just about everyone knows the company to which it refers.

Same idea. Same objective. Selling the product. HLN needed a marketing campaign to increase its abysmal ratings – and thus the amount it could charge its advertisers. Nancy Grace and her producers gave them Tot Mom. Like the executives in “Network” they were banking on our collective need for schadenfraude – to take comfort in the misery of others. Ms. Grace brilliantly added to this her absolute certainty that Tot Mom was guilty before the jury spoke. It was a no-lose situtation for her and HLN. Guilty and it was “See? You and I were right all along.” Innocent and it was “Can you believe this miscarriage of justice? We have to DO something!” Either way, the story would go on and HLN would continue to rake it in. Programming as commercial.

In “Network”, Howard Beale eventually starts talking about the death of individualism in America. We are being reduced to a set of wants and needs to be exploited by soulless international corporations, he says. Bummer! The ratings start to slide. In response to this, the network executives arrange to have him shot and killed on the air by a radical domestic terrorist group as the kickoff episode to their new reality show. Problem solved.

Before that, however, William Holden (an old-school newsman who’s fired for protesting the Beale thing) says this to Faye Dunaway (one of the ruthless execs with whom he’s been having an affair):

“You are television incarnate…indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer.”

Memo to Nancy Grace re Tot Mom: Just Do It.

Mokie-Coke: Just Drink It.

Obscure Reference Du Jour: One of my favorite sci-fi novels is “The Merchants’ War” by Frederik Pohl. In it, ruthless ad executives from Earth try to gain control over a colony on Venus that has so far been “ad-free”. One of Earth’s best-selling products is Mokie-Coke, a highly addictive soft drink. One sip and you’re done (what the book calls a “Campbellian” reaction – an homage to the pioneering SF writer John W. Campbell). The product is sold with warning labels and there are flashing lights and bells required on all store displays, yet thanks to effective advertising, millions of people become hopelessly addicted – all to the benefit of, well, you know.

I was on the phone recently with Apple Tech Support (buy an iPad 2 and you’ll get to know them too!), and as I was talking to the young man trying unsuccessfully to solve my problem, I mentioned that the “startup sound” which Mac computers make is very similar to the big finishing note of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”.

"We hope you will enjoy the show..."

“Never heard of it,” was his reply. I realized, of course, that this person probably was born two decades after the Summer of Love (1967, if you’re keeping score at home), and thus he had never had the pleasure of listening to “Sgt. Pepper’s” from beginning to end.

His loss.

Many years ago (no doubt around the time our plucky tech support guy’s parents had a gleam in their eyes), Cee Cee and I lived in Coronado, California, where she had grown up. At the time I was a dedicated runner, and I had laid out a four-mile course along the streets of that lovely town.

Coronado, aka The Crown City

When I ran this course, I would place my Sony Walkman cassette player (!) in my fanny pack(!) and listen to music I had recorded from my vinyl LP collection (!).

At some point I discovered that “Sgt. Pepper’s” lasted almost exactly as long as my four mile run. It quickly became my music accompaniment of choice. I would start out hearing the introduction and “With a Little Help From My Friends”, feel myself warming up with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, hit my stride with “She’s Leaving Home”. The end of the run was a four block straight shot, and I got very good at sprinting to “A Day in the Life” and finishing just as that magnificent end note came crashing into my ears.

For me – born with a physical disability, and running with an orthotic in my shoe – every time I finished that run was a victory over the voice in my head that told me physical things like running were impossible. It was as if that loud orgasmic note blew out the voice, like they use explosions to blow out oil well fires. All that remained were me and my endorphins, and I remember many nights (I liked to run after work) walking around the block catching my breath, looking at the evening stars and relishing the rare moment in which I felt at home in my own body.

Maybe that’s why I associated the Apple startup sound with that end note. They are both at heart E chords and anyone can make a sound out of an E chord. But I like to think it’s a sneaky reference the folks at Apple use to connect us Boomers back to what was going on in that amazing summer  – and what “Sgt. Pepper’s” meant. And, coincidentally, what it meant to me.

Forty years from now, that tech support guy will blog about the summer of 2011 and the cultural importance of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry to his generation. So be it. But I’ll bet people will still be listening to “Sgt. Pepper’s” – and discovering its wonders.

I listened yesterday. They are all still there.

Brautigan

Obligatory Obscure Summer of Love Reference: Richard Brautigan lived in and wrote about San Francisco and the Summer of Love. In his story “A Long Time Ago People Decided to Live in America”,  he writes about meeting on the street a beautiful dirty barefoot “hippie girl” named Willow Woman who has just arrived in San Francisco with nothing and is on her way to the Haight-Ashbury. The ever-horny Brautigan (this is, after all, the Summer of Love) wants to make a pass at her. He warns her away from there: “It’s a terrible place,” he says (and by late summer ’67 heroin had taken over and it was).

Willow Woman says she will go anyway and just as Brautigan is about to make his pass, she asks him for money. In that moment, he feels such pity for what he is sure will happen to this poor clueless girl that he gives her a dollar, the sexual opportunity lost. He watches her fade into the distance, like the ideal of the Summer of Love itself.

If you have a compromised immune system, one of the things you must be concerned about is catching a virus, like the ones that cause the common cold. With the body at a disadvantage in fighting these viruses, infections can linger and go into strange places. I’ve been struggling the past few weeks with an inflammation in my shoulders, hips and knees – the ongoing result of a cold virus I caught in early May.

The Human Rhinovirus

Conventional wisdom is clear on this point – to reduce your chances of catching something, wash your hands often. This, of course, is because bugs are easily attached to your hands, then get inside when you touch your face. It’s amazing when you become aware of just how often your hands touch your face – try it sometime.

So I have become a frequent hand-washer and hand sanitizer. I’m much more aware of simple things like shaking hands or opening a door – and I try as hard as I can not to touch my face. Small bottles of hand sanitizer have sprung up all over the places I frequent (joining the eye drops and reading glasses that already are there). Is it possible that your sense of touch can be changed by this kind of awareness? When I find myself in a situation where there’s someone with a cold, or just in a large group of people (at the weekly AA meetings I attend, for example), I get this kind of cold sensation in my hands, and I think: where is the nearest sink and soap dispenser?

Oh yeah...

Naturally (if your brain is wired like mine), you start to become a kind of soap connoisseur (a saponiphile?). I tend to like those wall-mounted things that dispense fully-formed suds (much less work), and look coldly upon the store-bought bottles of Soft Soap that teeter precariously on those little sink indentations designed to hold a bar of soap (talk about your outmoded technology).

I don’t think I’m on the way to a Howard-Hughesian germophobia (though I suppose one easily can be both a germophobe and a saponiphile at the same time). But it’s interesting to me how the realities of a chronic illness can change you in so many ways. Some are easy to accept (hand sanitizer), some are more difficult (gaining 50 lbs.).

Michaelangelo's masterpiece "God Telling Adam to Wash His Hands Before Eating the Forbidden Fruit"

All this talk of hand-washing reminds me of a saying that was common in my house as a kid: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” The vision of Heaven going around at that time was indeed very, very clean. God, with His white beard and white robes, standing on a huge expanse of pure white clouds. No dirt under those fingernails. And I guess if everything is perfect in Heaven your hands stay clean and a new white robe just appears whenever you need it – without the need for soap or a sink or a washing machine. Eating ribs must be a very different experience up there.

I read this morning that Apple has – in its own Apple-tastic way – killed its popular Final Cut and Final Cut Express programs in favor of a new app that (surprise!) doesn’t have the functionality of the old stuff, but costs more.

They must be reading from the Mircosoft playbook.

When I was doing PR, I got the idea of teaching myself to use FC Express as a way of getting into the video production business. Funny how the bar is now so low to do that kind of work. Back in the 80s when I was producing TV spots and industrial films, studios were huge and very expensive – $250 an hour, I recall.

JS in happier days.

Irrelevant aside: Once during my ad man days in Baton Rouge, I arranged to have a bunch of radio public service announcement dubs made at the then-new Jimmy Swaggart Ministries media production center – at the time the finest in the southeast. I was given a tour of this palatial facility, and I was amazed at the equipment and studio space. Much, much nicer than what I was used to. At the end, I was taken to the main studio, where a couple of guys were editing one of Jimmy Swaggart’s TV programs. Overcome by the all the bells-and-whistles I saw, I involuntarily exclaimed “Jesus Christ!”. They were not amused.

Where was I? Oh yes, learning FC Express. So anyway I bought the software and a book and before you know it I was producing rudimentary videos, which my clients loved because they were so, well, cheap. Since I could write, shoot, edit and voice the things myself, it was profitable for me at the same time.

If you’ve ever done this kind of video editing, you know that the interface involves a timeline on which you insert video clips one after another, applying effects, adjusting the audio, etc. You can shorten, lengthen, replace, remove and even play things backward if you like. What this gives you is a powerful sense of control, of being completely in charge of the world which you are editing. That’s one of the things I enjoyed about it. Of course it’s only a video, so that sense of control is only an illusion.

You have a bright future in television, young man.

When I was a producer of TV news programs, this illusion of control was very reassuring to me. Even while my actual life was spinning into chaos, I took comfort in the fact that, twice a day, I packaged an entire world’s worth of news, sports and weather into a tidy 30-minute package, complete with commercials. And I put it on the air – live.

What I took less comfort in was that every time my show finished, it was gone, and I had to leave the studio and go back into the real world. In tropical Louisiana, the studio was heavily air-conditioned, so when I stepped outside the thick humid air really slapped me in the face. There has to be a metaphor in there somewhere.

Steve Goodman

Obscure Reference du Jour: The late Steve Goodman, a wonderful folk-singer from the 60s and 70s, wrote a song called If Your Life Was On Videotape:

If your life was on videotape
Wouldn’t everything be all right.
If your head hurt the morning after
You could always roll it back to late last night.

Check out his work.

Over the weekend we had dinner with some friends of ours who have political views that are, well, quite different than mine. I’ll say at the outset that I am a lifelong Democrat who is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. My views have been formed by a lifetime of participation in our political system. I studied the system in college. I covered politics as a journalist. I made TV commercials for various political campaigns.

Well, at least they're wearing suits...

And I enjoyed it. Watching the ebb and flow of one party gaining power, then gradually losing favor and giving way to the other party. I found it fascinating, and it gave me a tremendous faith in how our democracy works – in effect, our country is so strong that no one can screw it up.

At dinner some political subject came up, and a lively discussion ensued among our dinner partners and Cee Cee. I was mostly silent, because I was becoming completely enraged by what was being discussed (the particulars really don’t matter, as you’ll see).

This isn’t the first time. In fact, I find myself getting angry just about anytime I read something, hear something or talk to someone about current political issues. I really used to like the give-and-take of talking politics with someone who had the opposite view. Now it seems I can’t do that anymore.

For me, anger is a mask for fear. So the question is: What am I afraid of? I think the answer is that I no longer understand how the system operates. That scares me. The other scary thing is the powerlessness – a sense that there is nothing I can do to influence or change the terrible mess we are in.

Here’s what I mean: My enjoyment at talking politics stemmed from the basic idea that all of us were a part of the system, that there was room for everyone and their ideas, and that, though our opinions may differ, we respected one another.

Now that’s gone, and the idea seems as outmoded as the vacuum tube.

The Vacuum Tube: Once relevant.

Today, it’s all about power. Getting it, holding on to it, and trying to convince the electorate that you are by-God entitled to it and the other side should shut the hell up and submit. Say and do whatever it takes – lie, misinform and count on the fact that most people won’t see through the obfuscation (and a lot of people don’t). Take no prisoners.  My point of view is correct because I can yell louder than you. Not only do I have to win, you have to lose.

And look at where we are as a result.

I don’t recognize that system. I fail at being a part of it because I don’t have the killer instinct it seems to require (this is also why I never did well working in corporate environments). It scares me to see what our political discourse has devolved into. It scares me to feel so powerless. So I get angry.

Like so many things a middle-aged person experiences, I can only conclude that I now fall outside the target demographic for politics. So the best place for me is outside the system. Don’t get me wrong – I still intend to vote in every election (as I have done since 1973). But as for watching and listening and arguing my point – and especially when it comes to the crap that spews out of TV, radio and the Internet – I’m out. Someone else will have to take the job of being right and making the other guy wrong.

I never, ever thought I would say something like this. From my days as a cub reporter, I was proud to play a part in how America worked. I still have faith that our system is so strong that no man or no party (read that: either party) can screw it up permanently. But man, how that faith is being challenged now.

The Bard

Yesterday we were having lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, and I noticed that our server – an attractive blonde in her early 20s – had something tattooed on her arm. It was the phrase “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”, written in beautiful script from her wrist to her biceps. (Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1, in case you’re interested. And yes, I had to look it up.)

I talked in a previous post about tattoos and self-expression, but this isn’t about that. Seeing this tattoo made me think of how we can take in certain words or phrases (or even entire books) and make them permanently part of our being, our psyche. Like our server’s tattoo, they are always there to help us remember who we are and how we see the world.

Consider this sentence: “My life was the best omelette you could make with a chain saw.” That’s from Thomas McGuane’s novel Panama, and for me it perfectly represents the chaotic drug-and-alcohol infused time I spent in my 20s. I can’t think of one without thinking of the other.

Or this: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The Great Gatsby, of course. One of my genuine Achilles’ heels always has been dwelling on mistakes I made in the past  – especially during that chainsaw-omelette phase. Every time I read Gatsby that line gets me.

Aunt Flavia (not learning her lines).

I remember my very first attempt at creative writing. I was six years old, and I wrote a play about my Aunt Flavia coming to our house. (Coincidentally, Aunt Flavia was on her way to our house when I started writing.) Act I went something like this:

Me:  Hello Aunt Flavia, how do you do?

Aunt Flavia:  I am fine.

Me:  Won’t you sit down?

AF:  Yes, thank you.

Unfortunately, when Aunt Flavia arrived she wanted to talk to my mother and wasn’t very interested in participating in my play (actors can be so fickle!). But I can still see my words scrawled on the coarse page of an elementary-school writing tablet. Poor Aunt Flavia passed away 40 years later unaware of my literary tribute.

RC getting his scowl on.

When I think of the writers who have influenced me the most, Raymond Chandler is at the top of the heap. His directness, his economy of words, and his astonishing ability to turn a phrase have always mesmerized me. Here he is at the beginning of the story Trouble is My Business:

Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made  suit. Her eyes were shiny black shoe-buttons, her cheeks were soft as suet and about the same color. She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon’s tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as an umbrella. She said, “I need a man.”

Ray Bradbury (tempering the bitterness of life with a wonderful sweetness), Richard Ford (amazingly rich, almost real-time detail), Richard Brautigan (poetic imagery), Flannery O’Connor (plain words masking gothic sin and punishment), Michael Chabon (imagining a complete world within the novel). These are my literary tattoos.

Writing is all about creating something that will stick in the mind of the reader, communicate some meaning, become a part of that reader. Even if that reader is only yourself. A few years back I set out to write a story about a dangerous drifter who comes to La Jolla. Sitting there looking at a blank screen, this came to me:

If you ever decide to visit La Jolla, you should try to arrive right at dusk. Stand on the grass in Ellen Browning Scripps Park on Coast Boulevard below Prospect Place and watch the sunset overlooking the cove. If you’ve chosen the day wisely, the air will be of that precise temperature that makes your skin tingle just slightly and invites you to inhale its refreshing saltiness again and again. Let yourself be hypnotized by the continuous rushing crash of the waves. Then, when the sun has gone far below the horizon and the sky above your head is a deep and irrevocable blue-black, turn away from the ocean and watch the warm glow of the hotel windows and storefronts grow brighter as the day disappears. The moment of trading one light for another. That is La Jolla at its most beautiful.

When my confidence as a writer falters, this passage is like a talisman to me. If I can write something like that….