Butterball

Remember that commercial from the ‘70s or ‘80s where two pilgrims, one of whom looks like or might even be the first Darrin from Bewitched, appear in a modern-day kitchen as a golden turkey’s slid effortlessly from the oven? Darrin Pilgrim turns to his wife: “Thou never served so juicy a bird.”
Pilgrim Wife: “Thou never brought home a Butterball.”

Can’t find it in the usual sources (10 minutes on YouTube and Google), but that little exchange has been lodged in my head for at least 3 decades. Partly because heads just do that, partly because it applies to so much.

avin a larf

Lesley and I are on a lethal late-summer cocktail of U.K. comedies—Saxondale, Yes, Minister, The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, even a little (forgive me) Father Ted—which is maybe why I stood to attention at this (best if read in interior voice of Alan Partridge):

“Humor is therefore not a rhetorical leavening of one’s message. It is the best evidence of the door to the source being left wide open.”

On the same tack, good to see student of Britain Johnny Clay and his band, The Dimes, traipsing about as redcoats in St. Cupcake.

Poets in Contest

What poetry needs is its own game show. A show staged like a cage match, where two prominent poets face off with their best material. It should open with a Baroque quartet, be hosted by a suave & brainy “cool professor” type with good hair, and include a slinky Vanna White who draws alphabet blocks from a velvet bag to see who goes first. The poets should sit in puffy chairs, wear vivid colors and glasses on neck chains, and look indifferent to the air time. Wait …

The Silent World

We’ve been working to wean the housemate from torpedoes and death at sea with Jacques Cousteau. I remembered his show as gentle and slightly goofy: barechested men in Speedos and colored caps languidly prizing open the secrets of the deep. What I’d forgotten, or never noticed for the sideburns, is the existential melancholy that drives even the sleepiest episodes. Cousteau’s “psychic landscape of the deep” dwarfs every human pretension. Great ships sink, artworks rot, whole civilizations end in “shattered splendor … a somber reminder that we, too, are vulnerable.” The scores (mostly Elmer Berstein’s) are dreamy and various, and the scripts, just a shade away from deep purple, turn seas into “stormy cradles” and darkness to “Stygian gloom” without batting a thesaurus.

The center of each episode is Cousteau’s own narration, delivered in a sort of slurred, aquatic English, where an old saw from Latin or a line from Paul Valéry is more likely to surface than any information about the deep. Cousteau’s brother was a notorious French Fascist, and while Jacques distanced himself from his sibling early and firmly, there’s a kind of anti-humanist fascination with the monumental that must have been a family trait.*

More than any politics, there’s a peculiarly Gallic version of heroics that weaves through the shows. Precise and womanless, but also collective and jokey, the crew pursue their opaque specialties and sub-specialties with lots of shouts and whistles but few visible signs of labor. Ages and body types range yet the tans are all even, and Cousteau, standing gauntly among them, primus inter pares, appears grateful for their warmth against “the chill that invades our wet suits—and our souls.”

Technophilia thrums in the background, but the machines are just whimsical enough—an undersea saucer, a tube that vacuums dust from the ocean floor—to recall the balloons and gleaming roadsters of Cousteau’s purpose-driven compatriot, Babar.

Measured against the whiz-bang science and swooshing graphics of today’s infotainment, it’s hard to believe these arty sleepers ever found funding. You come away from 55 minutes of “man’s brief adventure” and ponder, like Cousteau confronting one of his ruined finds, if “History has made a mistake.”

*Questions about Cousteau’s own alleged anti-Semitism still dog his early career. Is it coincidence that Hitler’s most celebrated director, Leni Riefenstahl, ended her life making undersea films?

Welcome Back

Blew the break learning to play the “Welcome Back, Kotter” theme and reading H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen’s Adventures of a Simpleton. Not your grandma’s Thirty Years' War.

Kotter got a much better song than the show deserved, a not so uncommon phenomenon in T.V.'s silver age. “All in the Family,” “Good Times,” “The Monkees,” “Nanny and the Professor,” “The Jeffersons,” “The Partridge Family,” “Sanford and Son” all glimmered with more luster in the intros than 20 minutes of situation could sustain.

It was that gap between the songs, all compact with bounce and promise, and the leaden plots that followed that sort of hammered me into a poet; I’m still attracted, helplessly and without theory, to situations where form fails to fit function, means all in excess of the ends: a poetry of wastefulness, color, and prodigality, the frame melted down for the sprue.

Secret History of Portland

Forget Lewis and Clark, Mount St. Helens, Neil Goldschmidt, & the forest green Subaru Outback. The history of Portland is inscribed in the shag terry flesh of Bumpity (active 1971-1985), victim of the professionalization of local affiliate educational programming.

File under Poetry of place, Disappearance thereof. Or not.

Not Gonna Take It

Not much worthy of a "T.V." label on the blog lately, but I heard from the other room Twisted Sister's '80s arena-ready headbang manqué, "We're Not Gonna Take It," sung by a perky chorus of women, and had to come in. It's a jingle for the "ladies pill" with the swank '80s name, YAZ, that knocks out fatigue, moodiness, bloating, and moderate acne while preventing in 99 out of 100 cases pregnancy. See? So you're "not gonna take" the old Pill, and you're not gonna take fatigue, moodiness, bloating, and moderate acne when you don't have to. The jingle turns on this pregnant ambiguity, drawing down over the free-floating political discontent implicit in the original a scrim of day-glo sexual empowerment.

All of which prompted the thoughts: Would this ad exec be witty at dinner, or is s/he pure evil? Is s/he a she or a he? And how long am I gonna keep confusing Twisted Sister with Quiet Riot, and hold onto the anger at the latter getting the credit for "Cum On Feel the Noize," which is really Slade's? And will I cry, weakly drunk, when "Merry Xmas Everybody" plays again this year, wishing I were British?

Hair Peace

Though I've only seen clips on Talk Soup, I think I'm a Sanjaya fan. He's helped usher two neologisms into the U.S. lexicon so far—"Fanjaya" and "faux-hawk"—and defies before millions the myth of talent that underwrites the middlebrow notion of the arts. His father is also a classical Indian musician, or so says Sanjaya; just wanting to say that's a plus with me.

I found this poem under the "Sanjaya Fun Facts" section of his fan site. Prosodically it kicks Jewel's heine.

Sanjaya says that he doesn't get embarrassed.
Sanjaya's friends never get surprised by his musical choices.
Sanjaya claims that one of his other talents is Culinary Arts.
Sanjaya's favorite judge is Simon.
Sanjaya's life goal is to become witty.
Sanjaya has had formal singing training.
Sanjaya started to sing once he stopped crying.
Sanjaya can independently raise both corners of his upper lip.
Sanjaya was born with brown hair and brown eyes and he has never changed his hair color.
Sanjaya's favorite female artists are Lauryn Hill and Susan Tedeschi.
Sanjaya's favorite male artists are Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson.
Sanjaya's number for auditioning was 80283.
Sanjaya is 2 years younger then his sister Shyamali Malakar.
Sanjay's hero is Joseph Paul Recchi Sr. (His Grandpa).
Sanjaya is 5 inches taller then his sister.
If Sanjays wins he will thank his family first.
Sanjaya didn't celebrate his audition victory right away so he could console his sister.
If Sanjaya does not win American Idol, he will continue his career in the music business.

Suspect Thoughts

Fred Rodgers is perfection, but I've got my eye on that Mr. McFeely.

Format As Content

We had to get cable to get Internet service here, and since that fateful day all surfing leads to “E!” I almost don’t care what the show is—the format and the pace of editing capture exactly what my mind wants to do these days when it watches TV. NPR does PBS so much better, and the salutary slabs of information you get from the History Channel or A&E biographies I glean instead from newspapers and magazines or, more often now, from Wikipedia, in long, luxurious hyperlink loops. Maybe “E!” represents all that TV has left to do, as a medium, at least for the pre-TiVO/no-HBO set.

My favorite format is the one where a Greek chorus of B-list comedians and entertainment magazine editors dish on Hollywood stars to the accompaniment of what’s basically a Flickr slideshow of stills showing celebrities in the most banal contexts—celebrity stepping out of limo; celebrity accompanied by lover, soon to be sundered with cheap “rip effect”; aerial shot of celebrity home as price pops up with a cash register sound. The shows feel fast, easy, and off-the-cuff—you get the feeling they could knock out a dozen in an afternoon. I like them because they’re quick, and because they fit so snugly into the 10 or 15 minute increments I tend to watch TV in. But I also appreciate how clever they are in foregrounding form over content. What these shows offer is basically an attractive interface to photos and information you could get just about anywhere—in that way they’re more like web browsers than content providers, talking templates.

Unlike “ET” or “Access Hollywood,” which pretend to be glammed up real news and leave the insertion of irony to you, the E! shows draw a lot of their humor from a sort of running meta-commentary on how ridiculous it is that we care about this stuff at all. What saves them from garden-variety pomo irony is that the smart alec commentators are situated on the same food chain, hungry to cross into the spotlight themselves, so the laughs are familial, insidery, almost loving: it's the janitor who sweeps up after the elephant making gentle fun of his charge.

This is a post about the problem of form in poetry.

Simulcast

The local Limbaugh clone up here is Lars Larson, predictably despicable but nothing really special.

I’m hooked though on the TV simulcast of his radio show, not on the show itself so much as those spaces where the radio station’s cut to commercial but the TV camera’s still rolling. You can hear the chirpy pitch for auto insurance or refinancing your home dim in the background, while Lars sort of deflates—headset draped around neck, jaw nervously working as he tries to pump up for the next segment. It’s an utterly uncinematic drama of tense expectancy that mesmerizes me for minutes at a stretch. Once they swoop back from commercial with the spastic intro cart and big radio voice, the spell’s broken, I’m out. But just before, in the low red studio gloom, ‘Lars Larson’ vanished and this podgy envelope left there as its waste, there’s a satisfying sense of melancholy—a feeling of things inappropriately suspended—that’s better than anything else on TV. Transgression, too: you have the feeling you’re not supposed to be seeing him like this, that one medium’s unconscionably cannibalizing the other.

I’d like to get this effect into a poem. A poem that gives the sense you shouldn’t be reading it like this, it’s assembled to do something else, you caught it while it was waiting to be ready.

Autumn in Paris/Total Celebrity

Paris Hilton: celebrity cipher or limit case that reveals fame's basic structure?

Britney's all gospel of work (those abs!); Aguilera the myth of talent (those pipes!); Idol/Top Model drips with American self-actualization (believe in yourself and hold onto your dreams.)

Paris—already rich, effortlessly thin, and free of discernible talent—detaches success from the usual narratives that give it meaning. Celebrity Paris-style exists in its pure state, “total celebrity”, like those pure poetries where syntax gets to be just syntax, grammar grammar, without the usual “justificatory” props that give them social purpose.

There’s something about the Paris phenomenon that mirrors the conditions of success in America 2.0 (a lot like the earlier military/industrial version but with twice the profit for half the people.) Overfilling a role can serve the same function as deconstructing it. Or can it? This is a post about poetry.