The Joke’s on You

As I’ve noted before, I keep tabs on the A Prairie Home Companion website the way that a boy keep tabs on the girl who broke his heart, and a Post to the Host there has gotten me thinking about practical jokes.  Apparently, on a recent show, Garrison Keillor revealed that Buddy Holly hadn’t died in that plane crash on the winter of 1959 and that he was now a minister with the Church of Christ working the lower westside of Manhattan.  One listener, confused, posted to the host and asked for clarification.  Mr Keillor thereupon took the opportunity to expand on his story, and even threw in that Holly now went by the name of the Reverend Charles Holley, with an “e,” which is the way his family spelled his true, nonstage name.  Now, a cursory Google search revealed that the named church, the Manhattan Church of Christ,  was not on W. 12th Street, but rather on on E. 80th Street, and that there was no Charles Holley ministering there.  So, the whole thing is a spoof.

And that’s fine, except that it makes me uncomfortable in the way that almost all practical jokes make me uncomfortable.  There is something fundamentally cruel and heartless about practical jokes.  The basic premise of these attempts at humor is to make one person look like a jerk for the amusement of others.  And while such an activity is certainly legal and Constitutional in the most trivial possible sense of the word, is it, in fact, civil?  Is this a way for a well known radio performer, humorist, and novelist to be acting?  And does this suckering of a listener–and most of his loyal listeners are nothing short of adoring–betray a well hidden contempt for the very people who make him a success?  Doesn’t Mr Keillor make a very nice living from the attentions of people like our unfortunate Thad and other hapless listeners like Carla, who posted a comment begging for clarification?

Personally, I’m not big on playing people for suckers, especially people who (and they are few in number) would look up to me and who would support my projects and celebrate my creativity.  As I was rereading Of Mice and Men over the weekend, I was struck by a passage in which George tells Slim why he stopped playing practical jokes on Lennie.  He says,

Tell you what made me stop that.  One day a bunch of guys was standin’ around up on the Sacramento River.  I was feelin’ pretty smart.  I turns to Lennie and says, “Jump in.”  An’ he jumps.  Couldn’t swim a stroke.  He damn near drowned before we could get him.  An’ he was so damn nice to me for pullin’ him out.  Clean forgot I told him to jump in.  Well, I ain’t done nothin’ like that no more.

That, of course, is a small parable on compassion.  When we see people as suckers, we see them as objects.  We shield ourselves from their humanity so that we can feel a tiny bit superior and so that we can “have a little fun.”  And yet, you can never tell where your “little bit of fun” ends and someone else drowning begins.  It doesn’t hurt to err on the side of compassion, especially when a person occupies a higher, more powerful social position.  And perhaps it is a good trait in an artist to see in his readers and listeners fully formed human beings rather mere suckers.

The Means of Distribution, Part I

Over the last few days, after the broadcast of “Phil’s Deli” and in reaction to a post and comments on Baby Got Books, I’ve started thinking about how works of art get distributed, particularly in regards to books, movies and TV shows, and audio plays.  Each is being affected by the Internet and the digitized life, but none, it seems to me, has caught up with technology yet.  What finally pushed me over the precipice to write this post was getting an email forwarding a link to Michael Moore’s new film, Slacker Uprising.

Moore is trying something different here.  He’s giving his movie away.  (And, just for the record, I’m not endorsing, condemning, exfoliating, or cleansing the film.  I haven’t watched it and haven’t decided whether I will or not.  If you don’t care for Michael Moore, I would suggest that you not watch it and that you don’t bother leaving angry comments on this post.  I’m concerned here with art, society, and technology, not politics.)  He’s not the first show biz figure to try giving some content away; Radiohead got some very nice news coverage doing so, and a couple of others have apparently tried it out.

What is occurring to me is that we are about to see a vast–and quite possibly useful–change in the way that works of art are distributed.  I don’t claim that this is some kind of original insight; I’m just trying to work through this, and this blog has become the medium through which I think through these things.

Let’s start with movies.  Film, as an art form, is all but dead.  Oh, sure, you can see loads of violence, trillions of dollars-worth of special effects, and computer animation out the wazoo, but precious little of it even aspires to art.  The economics of the movie business have gotten to the point where, not only would Citizen Kane not get made today, neither would Stagecoach, On the Waterfront, The Hustler, or Five Easy Pieces.  And yet, there might be hope.

The most public face of this hope is, of course, YouTube.  People are already making short films and releasing them on YouTube or its equivalents and hoping that viral marketing will get them the attention they desire.  And now we’re getting a feature film.  And some TV shows.  People are starting to figure out how you can make money–and show business is, in the end, a business–by doing things online.

This is a major change in the means of distribution.  And being the means of distribution is the whole point of being a movie studio or a TV network.  If someone takes that away from you, your goose is cooked.  Just look at the record companies.  iTunes and iPods and programs like Garage Band and Audacity have made it possible for anyone to produce music and to distribute it without a record company.  Paul Simon discusses this and the evolution of recorded music from the vinyl album to the mp3 in a discussion with Charlie Rose (starting at minute 43:00 of the video).  He indicates that he’s no longer thinking in terms of making another CD, but instead releasing new songs individually and less as groups of songs and more as lone items.

The implication is that the record company is no longer a part of the equation.  The means of distribution have changed.

Phil’s Deli

The Shoestring Radio Theatre has produced and broadcast a production of my radio play, “Phil’s Deli,” to a hungering world, first this past Wednesday on KUSF in San Francisco, and then nationally starting on Friday.  The show will be available for download via Real Player and as an mp3 through this coming Friday, September 26th.  Anyone and everyone is encouraged to download the show.  You won’t be disappointed.  It’s pretty funny.  (If you don’t come across this until after September 26th, just email me at rudyvalue at nextintheseries dot com, and I will supply an mp3.)

And now for the story behind the story.

A few years ago, I had a scheme that involved developing a radio campaign for my then employer, a mid-sized telecommunications carrier.  Well, I developed a sample radio spot with my partner-in-audio, Tom O’Neill, and submitted it to the marketing department.  They declined to use it, and, after a short negotiation, I came away with the right to use the spot as long as we did not use the name of the company.  Fair enough.

I told Tom this, and he sent me a version back almost immediately where he had dubbed himself saying “Phil’s Deli” over the name of the telecommunications company.  I thought it was hysterical.  And I started thinking about how to use it in a script.

What I came up with was a script about pipe dreams and the power of belief.  It is also, I think, a solid example of the craft of writing a sitcom.  It’s farcical and funny.  In the best of all possible worlds, I would probably direct my own version of it, most likely for podcasting.

I really wish I had better understood the future of podcasting when I was trying to develop the radio show.  I’m pretty sure that my concept would do well as podcasts, perhaps would even expand the limits of what people think of as podcasts.  The kind of layering of sound and the establishment of a sense of place would really be enhanced in a podcast.

And maybe it will still work out.  You never know.  I have a bagful of scripts and the desire to pursue it.  What I need is a competent producer.  I write well, I act well, I can do a decent job of directing.  What kills me over-and-over again in show business is my complete lack of talent for producing.  Anybody who has a knack for it, however, is welcome to drop me a line.

The Great American Novel

I stopped in at the Prairie Home Companion website this morning to catch up on Garrison Keillor’s column, The Old Scout, and most of all to see if any new Posts to the Host had been made. Now, it’s funny that I should do any of these things, because I haven’t really listened to A Prairie Home Companion purposely in years. Oh, there was a time. I’m one of those people who found it in the early years, back in the very early ’80s. When I started listening, one of the fictional sponsors of the show was Bob’s Bank (“Save at the Sign of the Sock”). And time went on and the show grew in popularity. Eventually, Garrison became involved with a Danish woman he had gone to high school with and publicly humiliated the woman he had been living with–the show’s producer, Margaret Moos. It seemed to me to be ungentlemanly behavior, so I stopped listening. Besides which, every episode now featured commercials for an album fictionally called “Songs of the Cat” at Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, and while that might have been humorous the first forty or fifty times, the whole concept had begun to wear on my nerves, and every Saturday night not spent listening to the recitation of the locations of Bertha’s Kitty Boutique stores or commercials for the Fearmonger’s Shop was time well spent.

And yet, as with any early love, interest may fade, but it never completely dies. And so I check in each week to see what the good middle and upper middle class folks in the heartland have to say and to see what Garrison is on about in his syndicated column. It helps fill up the week, and you never know what you’re going to come across.

Lately the trend in the Posts to the Host section has been for people to vilify Garrison for one reason or another. One was from a guy who was upset because Garrison used the word “fruitcake” in a Guy Noir sketch, which he took to be a slur against gay men. Of course, this is absurd. The term “fruitcake” refers to crazy people, not gayboys. No, had he been insensitive enough to want to slur gay men, he would have used the term “fruit.” Or Nancy. Or nancyboy. Or swish. Or Mary. Or sissymary. Or many others far too plain spoken and ribald for the typical audience for A Prairie Home Companion.

Another came when Garrison apparently had the nerve to suggest that the Baby Boomer Generation (a group from whose upper echelons he hails) were ever anything other than a collection of Christs-on-Earth. How dare he? Doesn’t he know that we came out of the ’60s (somewhere around 1975) living in a paradise on Earth where all problems were solved? How else could we have gone into the ’80s (somewhere around 1975) without descending into a narcissistic hash of drugs, greed, and meaningless sex? Oh, wait. We did.

And now, this morning, he is being excoriated for not considering The Great Gatsby “The Great American Novel,” and instead preferring something–anything–by Faulkner. Keillor’s response is inspired. It’s in moments like those when I remember why I loved him and his show so damn much all those years ago.

Now, my first question is this: How wealthy do you have to be before this is your concern in life? I mean, I like books and all, but I’m too busy paying bills and trying to survive to be able to spend too many hours building an imaginary hierarchy out of the corpus of American literature based solely on my own prejudices and limitations.

My second question is, why can there only be one Great American Novel? Aren’t there really hundreds? Can all the vast realities of American life be summed up in a single volume? And can that vastness really be summed up in a 40,000 word book about a bootlegger and a bunch of people with too much time on their hands? I’m not trying to dis Fitzgerald, either. The Last Tycoon, his final, unfinished novel, is an extraordinary performance, a great book written by a great writer who was finally in complete control of all of his gifts.

I haven’t read much Faulkner, which is more a sad comment on me than it is on him. I read “The Bear” in my literature book in 7th grade, even though–perhaps especially because–it wasn’t on the syllabus. I’ve also read snippets over the years, and the man was clearly a master. And you really don’t get a Nobel Prize for making sausage. He was a modernist, which is always going to alienate some readers, but I have a tip for them. Read it slow. Read it word-by-word and not sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph or page-by-page. I tried this with Ulysses, and it took over my brain. And I would have sworn before that that it was nothing but pretentious drivel.

Finally, my goal is not to write The Great American Novel, but to write A Decent American Novel, which is probably about all anyone can aspire to. There is not one greatest. I’ve had this thought for years. It started back when everyone was comparing Magic to Bird. Who was greater? And I thought, “What does it matter?” If you were choosing teams on a playground, would you pass up either? It was a meaningless question. And then I thought, you know, there’s a level in any field of endeavor that only a few can perform at, and once someone reaches that level, the whole concept of hierarchy loses its meaning. Deciding which is best is a matter of picking nits and relying more on prejudices than facts. It’s possible to love them all, and much more meaningful and enriching if you do.

Not that I have an opinion on any of this.

What Time Is It, Eccles?

It’s Friday, and I’m feeling lazy, and there are some things that you just want to share with the world. Therefore, here is a snippet from The Goon Show, featuring Spike Milligan as Eccles and Peter Sellers as Bluebottle.

Skip and Don and Pete

The other night, while partaking of wings outside at a local wing shack, I listened to the play-by-play of the Atlanta Braves-Los Angeles Dodgers game as it was piped out of a TV behind me. From the time I first ventured to Atlanta in 1983, the play-by-play team had featured Skip Caray and Pete van Wieren. Don Sutton came along in 1989, and Joe Simpson joined in during the ’90s. None of these were heard during the call of the game the other night.

A couple of years ago, whichever conglomerate owns the Braves now decided that the announcers–with the exception of Joe Simpson–weren’t bland enough, so they overthrew the reigning order and instituted a new regime. Now, my point here is not to denigrate the current crew of announcers. I do not know them well, and they seemed to do a decent job of calling the game. They were brought in to be neutral and inoffensive, two counts on which they succeeded, and actually admirably so. But I missed the old days.

We got in the car to head home, and my wife put the game on the radio, and there were Skip Caray and Pete van Wieren. (Sutton was let go and has wound up working the Nationals games in Washington, which is one of the best reasons I can think of for living in the DC area.) And even though Skip’s voice was no longer what it had been, what had been tame on TV was now lively, and what had been bland was now fun.

There is nothing quite like a good call of a game, and it is getting increasingly difficult to hear one called with personality. I don’t think any team has ever had announcers with more personality, combined, though, than the Braves did with Caray, Sutton, and van Wieren. What a great trio, paired up in different combinations until Sutton and Caray were mysteriously separated earlier in this century. All three were knowledgeable and opinionated and articulate. They were (and are) fun to listen to, and the listener got the sense (false, I’m sure, but reassuring) that they had come to know them as people.

Baseball, of course, has become increasingly corporatized in recent years as salaries and the value of teams have skyrocketed. Unfortunately, one of baseball’s most attractive qualities traditionally has been the individuality that permeated it. Football was always the corporate game, with teams acting in concert. Wackiness and eccentricity were not allowed on the gridiron, but often bloomed on the baseball diamond.

This held true for the players (was there ever a football equivalent to Dizzy Dean?), the owners (Charley Finley, Bill Veeck, Ted Turner), fans, and announcers. The most eccentric basketball player I can think of was Marvin Barnes whose eccentricity involved getting apprehended in airports with firearms. There are no Bob Ueckers or Oil Can Boyds. Despite its basis as a business, baseball was always personal in a way that other sports weren’t. (Except maybe hockey, which is probably one of things I like about it.)

Baseball announcers shouldn’t be encouraged to be bland. Eccentricity, personality, and individuality should be the hallmarks of baseball announcers, not their curse. But this is a problem that we will continue to have while teams are owned by huge corporations, which is going to be the trend from here on out. The number of dollars involved are extraordinary, and the corporate atmosphere is timid and meek. Corporate vice presidents seek the mediocre, because their goal is to avoid controversy, which is something that Skip and Don and Pete were never good at.

I do know one thing, though. Whenever I watch the Braves on TV, I’ll make sure I have the volume low on the TV and the call of the game emanating from the radio.