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Watch This Space

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I had a cup of coffee this afternoon with a friend of mine – a very nice man who just got back from Los Angeles and a visit with Jayne Meadows. He knows a lot of grateful, gracious, formerly famous people who are invariably thrilled to have someone a) remember them, b) pay attention and c) ask questions.

Why yes, I’d be delighted to tell you more about me. Pull up a chair.

Later today I’ll head down to St. Olaf with another good friend to talk to some of the students who work at the campus station, KSTO, about creating radio. Another walk around the block for a couple of old dogs. I’m looking forward to it, though I’m not sure my style of radio has much appeal to the online generation. So much of everything (music, humor, companionship) is available through the Internet, it’s hard to talk about a sound-only medium without seeming, well, quaint. In fact, our little presentation and Q & A will be streamed live on video here.

Go figure.

I plan to encourage the group to make full use of the possibilities of the medium by embracing its limitations. Take the absence of a visual as a challenge to activate the imaginations of listeners. How? I can only go over some of the things that worked for me, but who cares about that? The next generation will have to take a fresh approach if radio is to survive this latest assassination attempt by a brassier, flashier, but inferior technology.

Jayne Meadows was a star but not a legend. More “B” list than “A”. What does that mean? She once won the Susan B. Anthony Award for portraying women in positive roles. You can’t get to be a big star doing principled stuff like that. But it does leave you with a set of memories you can always enjoy talking about.

A local college invites you to be a visiting expert.

What are you going to talk about?

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Baboons in the News

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This story from South Africa was just so charming, I couldn’t resist. A baboon breaks into the car of a guy whose job it is to follow around the baboons to make sure they don’t mess with people and break into their cars.

I, too, have been this effective in some of the jobs I’ve held.

The Daily Mail’s story says the baboon monitor is “flinching out of the way” of the thief, although the caption could just have easily said “The baboon, tired of being watched, decked the nosy monitor with a brisk right hook as he made off with the prize.”

We know that the baboon took the man’s bag out of the back seat and made off with it. We have no clue what was in the bag, but obviously it was something irresistible. Only Blevins knows. Or is this Rhonda? Or some other member of baboon society we have not yet met? Clearly, there is an untold tale here. Perhaps through bits and pieces of imagined detail drawn from our vast reserves of baboon knowledge, we can divine the true story.

Tell it.

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Ask Dr. Babooner

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Dear Dr. Babooner,

I’m running for President of the United States because I think I’m a pretty good person. I have a lot of radical ideas that make perfect sense to me, so I figured my passion and certainty would be enough to get me elected if people would only give me a fair chance. But as soon as I got started with my campaign I discovered that I had to hire a bunch of other people to do the things I didn’t have time to do. And believe me, that’s a lot of things! Running for President is a lot more involved than raising 852 foster children, which I’ve done and which I thought was the busiest kind of work a person could have. Surprise!

And just like children of all kinds, the campaign workers have started to snipe at each other and call each other names and say that they got pushed and their foot was stepped on and somebody took their favorite hat and somebody else said out loud at school that they smelled like poop and now their life is as good as over and they’re going to have to run away!

When selfish children start to pick on each other like this, some people automatically blame the mom, saying she’s a lousy parent. That last part could be true, but even the best possible mom can wind up with whiney, petulant children. It doesn’t automatically mean she’s bad – only that she chose to get deeply involved with people whose brains are still developing.

Now some of my critics are saying I shouldn’t be President because my campaign workers are fighting. I find that really, really frustrating and I want to speak out because I know the whole story of what goes on behind the scenes. And what I want to say to those critics is that if you can’t something better than a few squabbling children as your reason why I should never be President, you aren’t trying hard enough.

But of course I can’t really say that, since it would be self-defeating.

So Dr. Babooner, do I keep quiet and take a mild bit of heat, or do I lash out at my tormentors and take the blazing inferno?

Sincerely, Mrs. B.

I told Mrs. B that she’s complaining about the wrong thing. Negative attention is still attention, and if the alternative to making things worse is being forgotten, you have to go ahead and make things worse. Even a casual, oblique, half-sympathetic reference to you as part of a clubby little blog written by a clueless dolt might be worth a vote or two, and you really can’t afford to throw any of those away.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?

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Casual Observer

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Today is the birthday in 1904 of Moss Hart, a New York playwright and a theater guy who worked with some of the biggest names on Broadway (Irving Berlin, George S. Kaufman) and won a Pulitzer for “You Can’t Take It With You.”

You would have to include him in your list of 1940’s New York sophisticates (he married Kitty Carlisle, famous for being on the TV game show “To Tell The Truth”) even though Hart grew up far from the bright lights of Broadway. His first visit to Times Square happened when he was 12 years old and he did it on the sly, running an errand for the owner of the music store where he worked, purposely NOT asking his mother for permission to go, as he was told to do.

The family struggled to make ends meet, but somehow there was always money for his eccentric Aunt Kate to go to the theater. It may have been allowed because she brought some of the glamour of Broadway back into the house. In his autobiography, “Act One”, Hart says the family was “grateful for this small patch of lunatic brightness in the unending drabness of those years.”

“My mother and I always waited up for her return, and then she would re-create the entire evening for us. She was a wonderful reporter. She had a fine eye for irrelevant detail and a good critical sense of acting values. Her passion for the theater did not include being overwhelmed by it, nor was she a blind idolater of stars. She always sat in the gallery, of course, but she always got to the theater early enough to stand in the lobby and watch the audience go in – in order, as she expressed it, to get all there was to get! She must have been a strange figure indeed, standing in the lobby, her eyes darting about, “getting” everything there was to get, her conversation, if she spoke to anyone, a mixture of Clyde Fitch and Thomas Hardy; her own clothes a parody of the fashionable ladies going into the theater. But little indeed did escape her and she regaled us with all of it, from the audience arriving to the footlights dimming, and then the story of the play itself. She would smooth out the program on the kitchen table, and there we would sit, sometimes until two o’clock in the morning, reliving the play …”

I admire anyone who can be such a keen observer and instant – playback storyteller. It’s not unusual to hear someone say that they enjoy people watching, but it is one thing to have a great eye for detail, quite another to have clear recall, and still another to be able to act it out coherently. Aunt Kate may have been aided in her dramatic re-creations by a touch of insanity, but regardless, she is a major character in the Moss Hart story. Her obsession with the stage may be responsible for the creation of some lasting works from the pen of her fascinated nephew.

Are you a people watcher? And do you remember anything you see?

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A Little Pep Talk

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This came in late last night from Spin Williams, visionary and permanent chair of The Meeting That Never Ends – a rolling idea development and dealmaking workshop.

Here at the Meeting That Never Ends, we were delighted to hear that Asian Carp have probably made it into the Twin Cities area. That is a wonderful thing for a city to have – immigrants! And while their mysterious rituals (they leap out of the water!) and puzzling ways (they never stop eating!) may seem strange to you, it is that very sort of thing that gives a moribund culture an injection of vitality that can keep it fresh and alive. So, congratulations!

I'm An Achiever!

Complainers and isolationists will tell you that the new carp are dangerous because they upend the environment by multiplying faster, eating all the food and crowding out fish that were already in the river. In the business world, we call that “competition”! If those long-time fish are getting complacent about reproducing and have lost the “edge” necessary to fight for food, perhaps they deserve to be overwhelmed! Nobody guarantees you the right to be a big fish in a small stream forever! Somebody’s always gonna come along and knock you off your pedestal if you don’t stay sharp!

Rather than try more ineffective efforts to stop the A.C.’s, we at TMTNE decided this is a great time for Mississippi River watchers in the Twin Cities to do some outreach to those beleaguered local fish. Offer some training and personal coaching. A motivational speech or two could work wonders. Tell them to get off their scaly butts and start going fin-to-gill with these showy, airborne newcomers!

There are all sorts of opportunities to do this work, especially with the prevalence of catch-and-release fishing. It turns out that Twin Citians are already logging a lot of “face time” with our denizens of the deep in that moment after the fish is caught and before it’s tossed back in. Why not add a step and make it Catch-EMPOWER-and-Release? It should be second nature to all Minnesotans. Whenever we take a native fish out of the river, we should give it the support and encouragement it needs to get back in there and fight for resources. Remember – anyone on land OR underwater can up their game, given the right kind of kick in the tail!

I have a feeling if anyone could write a motivational talk that would work on a bluegill, it would be Spin Williams.

When have you been moved by a speech?

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Team Effort

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According to various stories making the rounds in the early going yesterday, the latest despot-snuffing news had many authors and an assortment of modus operandi.

It was Obama with a robot in the pantry.
It was insurgents with a handgun in the hall.
It was a Frenchman with a missile from a gantry.
It was a bomber who was very, very small!

It was his butler with dagger and a bludgeon.
It was his driver with a penknife and a spoon.
He was frowned upon to death by a curmudgeon.
He was hoisted by his heels under the moon.

He was forced to read the text of all his speeches.
Every word had been tattooed upon his arms.
He was thrown into a pool alive with leeches.
He was stuffed with cantaloupe from Jensen Farms.

They were trying very hard to apprehend him.
They expected him to have a day in court.
‘Twas a pity, then, to prematurely end him.
Time ran out, as it so often does, in sport.

I have not played “Clue” in many years, but I always thought heavy candlesticks should be registered.

What’s your favorite board game?

The Baboon Congress

Guilty Pleasures

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Today our guest post comes from Steve.

The difficulty of talking about guilty pleasures is that people have such different notions of the concept.

Many women will purr and confess that a chocolate delight from Just Truffles is their guilty pleasure. I’m sorry; that is not a guilty pleasure! That’s an indulgence . . . and a particularly aristocratic one. People who try to pass that off as a guilty pleasure are suggesting that even when they succumb to a sybaritic craving they have exquisite taste.

Nor is it a guilty pleasure when your two-year old daughter expresses her adoration for “macky cheese,” painting her face and torso with what comes out of those boxes, including powdered ersatz cheese in a shocking shade of orange. She can’t have a guilty pleasure because she just doesn’t have informed taste.

No, a guilty pleasure is something that you know is schlock, and yet you find it irresistible. It is some kind of compelling treat we are ashamed of enjoying. Some remarkably cultured women are suckers for bodice-ripper romance novels. A liberal who enjoys “Gone With the Wind”—with all that Southern claptrap and racial stereotyping—is slumming in ways that reek of a guilty pleasure. And there are so many more: Karen Carpenter’s music, gossip shows on TV, vampire novels and any Hostess or Little Debbie pastry treat.

I have several authentic guilty pleasures. The one I can talk about (with some blushing) is the TV reality show, Survivor. I’m currently following the twenty-third season of it, and I have scarcely missed an episode from those earlier twenty-two years.

Don’t lecture me about how awful that show is. I know, I know! I’m the guy who has watched over 200 episodes! All that stuff about the “tribes” is painfully cornball. The jungle music is gauche. The shows are heavily edited to control audience responses, so you can’t trust your eyes. When Jeff Probst reads the Tribal Council votes, the order of the votes has been carefully arranged for dramatic effect. Most contestants are immature peacocks. The shows are as phony as an email from a Nigerian prince.

And yet I watch. Every week. Why do I watch? Three reasons.

First, Survivor episodes are mostly unscripted. So much TV is stale and predictable that I thrill to something that has a touch of real life to it, even if “reality” is as hokey as it is here.

Second, the challenges are almost irresistible watching. Under the pressure of challenges, cool contenders sometimes melt down and habitual losers occasionally find grit that nobody would have guessed was in them. Challenges that feature an ability to deal with pain often produce the most unlikely heroes. As silly as the Survivor game is, it showcases people performing under stress, and that always has the potential to be interesting.

Finally, while it is not ethical to conduct many kinds of experiments with human beings as subjects, that happens on every episode of Survivor. The show is like a fiendish laboratory where people are put under cruel pressure and tested weekly, with results that are as instructive as they are unpredictable.

The single salient lesson I draw from all those silly shows I’ve watched is that most of us are our own worst enemies. Over and over, contestants fail in the game because they cannot escape their essential personalities. The bossy woman proud of being a leader offends everyone and gets voted out. The accomplished liar gets tangled up in his stories. The guy who sees himself as a “warrior” in tune with his own primal energy becomes an object of derision. The calendar model with implants assumes her looks will reward her, but she inspires seething hatred among other women and is given the bum’s rush.

In the exit interview, contestants always claim to be proud of the way they played the game, never mind that they just lost. What they say is, “I had to be true to myself.” They apparently don’t see that they have stuck with their usual strategy for dealing with the others, even when that wasn’t working for them. Those who do well in the game usually are able to pick and choose the way they interact with others. So the game isn’t entirely silly. I think it instructs me every week about effective and dysfunctional ways of pursuing one’s life goals. But still, it is a guilty pleasure!

Do you have a guilty pleasure?

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Go Big Or Go Home

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An elaborate text came in from the North Woods. Here’s an approximate translation from the original Ursus Textish.

Bart - The Bear Who Found a Cell Phone

Hey, Bart here.

I’ve been hearing that people are doing a victory dance over some guy shooting a great big bear not far from the Twin Cities. There’s lots of “gollees” and “gawrshes” about the bear’s height and weight – almost 650 pounds and taller than 7 feet.

True. Fella was unusually big. But he wasn’t a freak, he was a forecast.

We bears have been watching you, and can see that we’ve fallen behind in a some pretty important contests. All the wild animals have. Yup. You’re winning the temperature contest and calling the shots in the air quality contest (though we just won a small victory). And you’ve been getting bigger physically while we’ve stayed kinda the same.

All that stuff you’ve been saying about how “massive” and “enormous” and “gargantuan” this poor dead bear is – well I’ve got uncomfortable news.

We bears have been saying the same thing about you for years – ever since we woods-dwellers noticed that you two-legged comfort-junkies were having trouble squeezing through the doors of your Winnebagos. It was in the mid-90’s when word got out that an average human wouldn’t fit in a normal sized tent anymore. Talk about making a bear’s job easier! You being bigger meant it was easier to spot you from far away, simpler to hear you coming through the underbrush, and a lot less taxing to chase you down. And surprisingly, the more you ate, the more food you left scattered in your wake.

Here’s a joke we bears tell each other:
Question: How do you find a hunter when he’s downwind?
Answer: Follow the Doritos!

But then it hit us – with an average male bear weighing in at 250 pounds and an average American male human at 190 pounds, it wouldn’t be long before we’d have to run from YOU! Especially if we stumbled across you when you were feeling obsessive about your cubs! (I hear there’s a bunch of Cubs in Chicago who will never grow up!)

Anyway, let this be a notice to you. Black bears are on the move, size-wise. With our habitat shrinking and yours getting bigger, we realize that someday we’re going to stand toe-to-toe. When that day comes, you’d better hope we’re not standing ON your toes, because our only chance for survival is to get bigger, hairier, smellier, and nastier. If humans are gonna respect something, first they gotta learn to fear it.

Moose are disappearing and the bears are bulking up to get ready for a confrontation around our homes and yours. Come December, we’re going to skip the hibernating and launch our own series of protests – Occupy Tool Shed, Occupy Bird Feeder, Occupy Camp Ground, Occupy That Paranoid Place Inside Your Head That Never Ever Sleeps.

There’s a bear in the woods. And he’s HUGE!

Your pal,
Bart

I thanked Bart for giving me a good chill in the lead-up to Halloween. But I don’t think we’re really headed for a showdown with the bears, do you?

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Almost Real Recollections

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Yesterday’s multi-dimensional discussion of Viewmaster reels reminded me that my late brother had an urge for collecting some unusual things. For some reason, he was compelled to accumulate recordings of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” with celebrity narrators. At the time of his death, he had obtained about a dozen different copies. I know he had versions that featured Peter Ustinov, David Bowie, Jonathan Winters, and in parody form, Weird Al Yankovic.

He also collected stereo cameras.

This is the sort of device that was used to take the Viewmaster photos. Two lenses, set about eye-width apart, would record separate, oh-so-slightly different images. On a Viewmaster reel, these images would be placed opposite each other on the wheel to feed each eyeball the necessary part of the scene. We didn’t have the raw materials to make Viewmaster reels, so my brother used a handheld viewer that could only display one 3-D image at a time.

A couple of his cameras are Realists. I love the sound of that – it makes it seem like the machines have a philosophy. Rather than click, the shutter heaves a deep sigh.

We had great ambitions of building a huge stereo photography library – something to prove to future generations that we, too, had depth as well as color. A friend even picked up a perfect little portable stereo slide filing cabinet at a garage sale – complete with some other family’s memories of Colorado, New Orleans, Michigan and Northern Minnesota. We meant to fill up the drawers with our own adventures. Alas, time won that race. But the cameras remain, accumulating a thick layer of dust.

I could show you exactly how thick the dust is, if you would just peer into this viewfinder …

What makes a sane person collect things?

The Baboon Congress

Circular Tourism

76 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Clyde.

“A penny saved is a penny earned” is a frequent litany in the kitchen.

Which would perhaps irritate the three children, except the mother also says it every time she adds another penny to the broken teapot sitting high in a glass-fronted cabinet.
If it is a war-time lead penny, still in common circulation at the time, she says, “A lead penny is still a penny earned.”

The collection of pennies is closely watched until they have 105 of them. The expenditure of that $1.05 is carefully planned by the children, a project they complete in collaboration.

One hundred and five pennies buys three sets of View Master reels. A set can be one, two, or three reels, but a pack of three is preferred. They can be purchased at either drug store or the dime store, which is never called by its real name, The Ben Franklin.

As the pennies mount, which takes a few weeks, they study their options. None has any interest in the cartoons or the other things so obviously aimed at children. They only want historic sites, geographic wonders, or world or national travel sites. When tourism becomes an “industry” in northern Minnesota, reels for Duluth and the North Shore start to appear in the selections, which confuses them. How can the Aerial Lift Bridge or Split Rock Lighthouse, which are so familiar and near, rank with the Eiffel Tower?

Over the years they collect and regularly view London, Paris, Rome, New York City, San Francisco, the Rhine, Yellowstone, The Grand Canyon, the buildings and monuments of Washington D.C., Carlsbad Caverns, Mammoth Cave, Niagara Falls, Dawson City, Plymouth, Mt. Vernon, the time of the mastadons, the Everglades, Angel Falls, the Field Museum, the Louvre, and on and on until they become living-room-braided-rug-world-travelers.
The excitement of planning the next purchase is as great, or maybe greater, than viewing the reels themselves.

The appeal is not only in the magic of the stereoptic effect, but also in how the small black viewer pressed to your eyes shuts out the here-and-now and takes you away for as long as your index finger holds out pulling down the lever to spin the reel.
A penny saved is a travel adventure earned.

If you had a magic View Master, what seven pictures from anytime and place would it show?