TV and Me: Rescues

 TV and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

TV and I had grown up together, and then grown apart.  But television as I knew it continued to contribute to my life, though in more sporadic and selective ways. 

 When the alternative weekly I edited—Newsworks in Washington D.C.—folded in 1976, I returned to Greensburg to chill out and plot my next move.  I was soon offered a job as an editor at the Village Voice in New York, but just before that deal was completed, the Voice was sold and all hiring cancelled.  So I turned to reviving my magazine writing, as well as other writing.

Which in the present context is all to say that I had a lot more time for television. This would not be the first or last period of my life when I needed some rescue provided by books, movies and TV, but it was acute in those years of “inexpensive isolation” (as I later described them), when after a period of uncompensated writing and searching for an agent, an article led to the protracted effort to get a book contract based on it, followed by the research, writing and then re-writing, and all the elation and trauma surrounding the fraught odyssey of its publication and its aftermath—a period that extended through most of the 1980s. I had family and friends and something of a social life, but otherwise the rhythms of my life and identity were disrupted to the point of shapelessness, and I often felt lost and bereft.

 What kind of rescue did TV provide?  It certainly offered the mind-numbing kind in abundance but I valued other, more positive, active and specific contributions, and in this last sections of this series, I want to acknowledge some of them. 

 Some forms are pretty familiar to others: the TV shows or series that create an alternative world to painful aspects of the real one.  So I share with many the need and gratitude for M*A*S*H during the Vietnam war, and The West Wing during the Bush/Cheney years. In a less specific sense, Star Trek served this function for many over the years, and it did so for me.

 Star Trek modeled the soul of a better future, especially in its most globally popular series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94.)  It was personal nourishment and a beacon to future possibilities: not in terms of technology but attitude, generous ethics and community.  

Another series of the early 90s that encompassed new possibilities was Northern Exposure (which in 1990 ran at the same time as its nightmare side, the unforgettable first season of Twin Peaks.)

 Northern Exposure’s witty contributions include taking seriously the Indigenous worldview in today’s society, which was also a concern in fiction by Native and First Peoples authors, as well as a few films, especially surrounding the 500^th anniversary of Columbus in 1992.  There were Jungian notions in Northern Exposure as well, as there were in The Next Generation.  And since by this time I was building a new life in Pittsburgh, and deeply interested in contemporary Native American views and Jungian psychology, these felt like synchronous elements of these dialogues.  But even before this, I responded to common elements in these programs: intelligence and a sense of wonder in the stories, and articulate characters who respected each other.

 Also in the late 80s and early 90s, I found the series Thirtysomething more than just entertaining and generally informative on what my generation was going through.  For much of that time I was employed as a senior writing at an editorial firm with business and government clients, which was my first (and last) experience in that kind of organization.  It turned out I learned more about what I was experiencing from the advertising firm portrayed in Thirtysomething than any other source.

 But other forms of TV rescue were more personal, more linked to my circumstances in a time and a place. This was most acutely true in those late 70s and 80s in Greensburg.  I suspect others have shared these experiences, at different times and places, and with different television. 

 Most of my television viewing continued to be late at night. I still watched talk shows.  The Dick Cavett Show was a valued, even essential oasis while it lasted, but it was ended in 1975.  Tom Snyder’s quixotic Tomorrow Show was still on NBC in the early 80s before it too disappeared.  Watching other talk shows was like attending old rituals, comforting in a way but often empty. However, anything approaching intelligent or even amusing conversation was welcome. 

Paul McCartney brings Johnny a birthday cake

I should however say a few words about Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, which I never watched regularly but saw often enough over the years, especially when Steve Allen and Dick Cavett weren’t on the air, or I would catch some of it tuning in early for David Letterman.  Carson’s Tonight Show opening was highly ritualized, his repeated bits became ritualized and the audience had their parts in them. Eventually his popularity made the show an American ritual.

   For a long while his success puzzled me.  I first watched him on his afternoon show, Who Do You Trust?, and though he was a compelling presence, it was hard to say why: basically he was a skinny guy who seemed to be restraining himself from telling dirty jokes. On the Tonight Show he shamelessly adapted bits and characters that Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs and Jonathan Winters had originated, but he made them his own.  As he relaxed into his silver-haired years, he assumed a mastery over that show and its environment.  Within its ritualized context, he added the human element, especially when he knew his guests. And he could be funny.

 Carson was said to be painfully shy and so socially awkward that he avoided social events.  But he found elements that worked for him, particularly his adaptation of the reaction take that he freely admitted he learned from Jack Benny.  There was however an earnestness about him that appealed to me—the impression that he was a serious person, if not as intellectual as Cavett or Steve Allen.  He also seemed to be without prejudices, and seldom belittled his guests.  He seemed a generous, decent man who knew he was limited, and pushed against his limits, but not too hard.  The audience at home was part of all the ritual, and they saw themselves in Johnny Carson.

But who was going to replace Johnny Carson when he retired, as he said as the 70s ended?  Thanks to my friend Mike Shain, I attended an NBC dinner with all their executive arrayed at the head table, including the head honcho Fred Silverman.  The evening's entertainment was a hot new comedian named David Letterman. I suggested to Michael that this was his audition for the Tonight Show. 

 I turned out to be right, sort of.  Carson didn't retire that time, so Letterman scored a morning talk show and then Late Night with David Letterman on NBC in 1982, following Carson.  It became a sensation.  I watched it every night.  Sure, once again a lot of the bits were familiar from Steve Allen, but Letterman had something extra: insolence.  His Top Ten Lists were some of the funniest writing on TV.  Eventually, Letterman would soften his image for the Late Show on CBS (when he was passed over for the Tonight Show in 1992) and bested Johnny Carson's record for the most late night hosting appearances. 

Magic Johnson on Arsenio Hall Show

 As for other talk shows, they had their moments.  Arsenio Hall had a good run with his (1989-1994), and I watched it now and again for several years.

 I continued to watch movies, of course: on TCM and AMC, and HBO and whatever other premium channels were part of the package, like TMC. What was new were the late night reruns, not locally syndicated but through networks.  So I watched old episodes of Magnum P.I., Kojak and Baretta, shows I hadn’t watched (and didn’t watch) in prime time.  I knew I was scraping the bottom for solace here, and I wasn’t grabbing role models (although the catchphrases “Who loves ya, baby?” “And that’s the name of that tune,” were catchy) but they gave me the quicker rhythms, personality and style that real life wasn’t providing. 

Early in my exile I was devoted to the Lou Grant series starring Ed Asner.  I'd watched the Mary Tyler Moore Show of course--and even happened to be in downtown Minneapolis at the precise moment she was filming new inserts for the introductory montage of the show.  I watched her walk by in her brown trenchcoat.  It was my first time in Minneapolis and it might have been hers as well.  Considered a spinoff, Lou Grant retained some of the humor but was basically a serious series about newspaper reporters and the social issues they confronted in their stories.  This was my neighborhood in a way, and I loved entering their world. Once again, Monday nights at 10 p.m. were sacred.

 At a later point, the cable channel A&E was alternating late night episodes of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett (from Granada TV in the UK) with another UK series, Lovejoy, a comedy/drama about an antique dealer—a “divvy” who can divine the authenticity of an item-- who solves antique-related crimes, often in self-defense.  

A&E was the first to show Lovejoy in the US, while the Sherlock Holmes series premiered on PBS before A&E. I might have seen it on PBS but like the original Star Trek and the aforementioned series, seeing it every night (or several nights a week) gave it a stronger, more consistent presence.  When I was watching these, I was most fascinated with Lovejoy: the rogue and outcast who always finds a way to right a wrong, or at least outfox the more unscrupulous.   

 

Watson (Hardwick) and Holmes (Brett)

I enjoyed the Jeremy Brett series on A&E, but it was seeing these stories uninterrupted on DVD in more recent years that turned me into an addict.  I’ve seen episodes of the first and second seasons literally dozens of times. The writing and production are generally satisfying, the guest actors range from competent to brilliant, regulars like David Burke (series 1) and Edward Hardwick (thereafter) as Watson, and Colin Jeavors as Inspector Lestrade were entertaining, but it is Brett that keeps me coming back. 

His Holmes is magnetic (and occasionally frenetic) as well as nuanced and complex. At times Brett plays him with what Hardwick calls “Edwardian acting,” the high style of early 20^th century theatre, a brilliant notion even historically for the advanced detective of the late 19^th century, for whom deduction was a performance.  Even when I know the story, even the lines and the moves, it’s a joy to revisit Brett’s Sherlock.  I also love the men’s clothes—the long coats, the tweeds with matching caps.  I admired much of the BBC modern times Sherlock series and the CBS modern times Elementary series, but Brett’s original period series wears the best.  

While Brett’s style remains a chief attraction, at the time I gravitated more to Ian McShane as Lovejoy on A&E (though on DVD many Lovejoy episodes are enjoyable but they aren’t as consistent as Brett’s Holmes.) Lovejoy also affected my style by favoring t-shirts with suit jackets (years before Miami Vice changed everything with their ultra-slick ensembles.) Again, this attraction was as much aural (the way they spoke—even their diction) as visual.  These late night forays added some buoyancy to my days.

 I remember two other shows from the UK were introduced on late night television in the US, this time by our PBS station, WQED in Pittsburgh.  Both I believe were on late at night once a week.

 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came into my world unheralded, sneaking in very late on what I remember as Sunday night.  PBS apparently re-edited the original six episodes from the BBC into seven half- hour programs.  I had no idea of the history of this Douglas Adams project in the UK: a novel, a radio series, a stage show and an LP, before this TV series had first aired in England two years before.  The books were yet to come. 

So I was a complete innocent--I didn’t know what would happen.  When the computer Deep Thought was ready to answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, I didn’t know what it would be—I had to wait until the next episode.  There were wonders after wonders.  

The production was a bit clunky but forgivable in such an imaginative romp, as if Star Trek had married Monty Python.  The sets were only slightly above Captain Video level, but that became part of the charm.  The animated interpolations were priceless, and overall, the wit was astonishing and most importantly to me, nourishing. One of the things I needed from these shows was that their effect, their style and worldview would linger for as long as possible, until lost in the morass and vocabulary of everyday life.

 Speaking of Monty Python, their Flying Circus series was introduced on PBS in the 70s, and though I watched episodes when I ran into them, I was for some reason never really a big fan.  They were funny, and they weren’t.

 I was however a fan of a few PBS shows ostensibly for children, mostly for their sly humor.  I caught a few minutes of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood (and later watched a day’s filming and met Mr. Rogers himself) and Sesame Street here and there, but in the early 70s I tuned in as often as I could to The Electric Company (the original one, with Rita Moreno and a young Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader) and later to Mathnet, partly because in both there was usually a layer of subtle but hilarious humor for adults.

  Mathnet was essentially a parody of Dragnet, and once made an elaborate inside joke about Citizen Kane.  The Electric Company included a daily parody of soap operas, “Love of Chair,” in which (as with most soap operas) almost nothing happened.  Each segment ended with the question, “And what about Naomi?” with the quintessential organ sting.   

A few years before A Hitchhiker’s Guide appeared, another BBC series began appearing late at night: the (then) latest incarnation of Doctor Who with the eccentric, enigmatic but magnetic Tom Baker as the Doctor.  It appeared unheralded on the Pittsburgh PBS station WQED.  I was blown away by it---after pretty much memorizing all the episodes of Star Trek made in the 60s, I was hungry for another sci-fi world.  But I don’t remember it as being on for very long.

Peter Davison was the Fifth Doctor.

  It was later that I got the opportunity to saturate myself in the Whovian universe.  Back when WQED was an NET educational channel, it farmed out some instructional programs to its UHF subsidiary WQEX, channel 16.  But as mentioned previously, cable TV gave the UHF channels with a weaker signal a level playing field and new life.  So in the 1980s, WQEX remade itself as the spunky “Sweet Little Sixteen,” with a visibly youthful on air presence, and a slate of offbeat syndicated programs.  Its first and most enduring hit was Doctor Who. QEX promoted it with a Pittsburgh-based Doctor Who convention, and most importantly, ran an episode every day. 

WQEX started with the Tom Baker episodes—seven seasons worth in the late 70s to early 80s.  As everyone must know by now, the Doctor is a Time Lord who travels in a TARDIS disguised as a 1950s London police box. He usually travels with one or more companions, often young women.  Every so often the Doctor “regenerates” and takes on a new appearance and personality so there had actually been three Doctors with different actors before Tom Baker and at that point in the late 1980s, two more after him. 

 

Doctor Who was so popular with the QEX audience that, apart from encouraging the running of a raft of other old BBC shows (some of them dubious) the station acquired the rights to show all the existing episodes from past Doctors, and eventually each new episode as seen in the UK until the series went into hibernation in 1989.

 I don’t know how many other US stations did this but I doubt there were many.  I was probably among the few in the US who had the opportunity to see all surviving episodes of Doctor Who, from its first in November 1963, through the Tom Baker stories and beyond them to the Peter Davison and Colin Baker episodes and eventually the last ones with Sylvester McCoy in 1989.  There was no more Doctor Who after that until  the series was reimagined and restarted in 2005, though religiously keeping continuity. Eventually these "classic" episodes became available to US viewers through the BBC cable and streaming channels.

 At that point my favorite Doctor far and away was Tom Baker (only supplanted—but not entirely—by David Tennant in the new iteration.)  His mixture of whimsy and high intelligence, a kind of Time Lord Lewis Carroll, was a new sort of role model.  I had already identified with the alien Mr. Spock—this was a different way to accommodate my alienation. (All of these protagonists were outsiders of a kind, and I could not help but identify.)  I liked his style, too—a kind of post-60s look, with long coat, floppy hat and very long scarf.  I had them all in the closet, including a very long scarf with better colors than his. As I transitioned my life away to new adventures living and writing in Pittsburgh, his long hair with wild curls was an easy addition (for as long as any of that lasted.)

 

The wit of the Tom Baker Doctor Who was deepened when Douglas Adams wrote for the show and became its script editor for a year--Adams of course was the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide.  Adams was a fascinating writer and talker-- especially on ecological subjects there is no one who could be succinct and dramatic as he could.  He wrote a couple of funny and charming cosmic detective novels, too.  His early death remains a huge loss.

 Much later, another British series important to me was Foyle’s War.  Its format was unique: each episode marked a point and an issue in World War II Britain, wrapped around a complicated crime mystery on the homefront, usually murder. The UK's ITV produced it, and over here PBS featured it in its Mystery! series.

 
 It had a rocky television history in the UK and therefore a sporadic presence in the US but I saw enough of it to more recently obtain the DVD box set and immerse myself in its stories and its world. The conception, execution and historical depth and accuracy as well as the creative weaving of a good mystery by its main writer, Anthony Horowitz, are all breathtaking, as is the addictive performance of Michael Kitchen as police superintendent Christopher Foyle, himself a model of rectitude.  Partly because of the UK’s Official Secrets Act, quite a lot about the behind-the-scenes war effort in England was only revealed in the 21^st century, so a lot of intriguing World War II dramas emerged.        

 My hometown loneliness and alienation were emphasized by the daily ramifications of the fact that almost nobody—and almost nothing on TV—quite shared my sense of humor.  This became acute as the horrifying, depressing, Orwellian 1980s began.  At that point, Saturday Night Live had hit a long dull spot, and Monty Python (which I wasn’t crazy about anyway) was no longer regularly shown.  But suddenly, there was the best of all: SCTV was on the air!

 

SCTV station manager Edith Prickley
(Andrea Martin)

Second City in Chicago was the best-known improv theatre in the US, and they had a Canadian branch in Toronto.  This group began doing a television show in Canada, combining sketches, satires, fake movies, talk shows and other shows plus commercials pretending to be programs of SCTV, a ramshackle station in the town of Melonville.  The cast also played continuing characters, chiefly the people running the stations, and the hosts and stars of the various programs.

 Then in 1981, the NBC music program The Midnight Special suddenly ended production, and the 90 minute post-midnight Friday night slot opened up.  SCTV was an inexpensive alternative, a stopgap that became a cult hit. 

 After midnight was my prime time (and I believe the show was repeated even later, after 2 am) so I became an avid viewer and grateful fan.  On its best nights, all 90 minutes constituted the funniest show on television, and even on uneven nights, there were always hilarious moments.  

There were variations in the cast over the years but the episodes I saw mainly featured John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis. (Harold Ramis, Robin Duke and Martin Short also appeared at different times. Short introduced his defining character, Ed Grimley, on SCTV before he moved to Saturday Night Live.) 

 All these cast members went on to some degree of Hollywood and US television success--Candy made the biggest splash initially, Moranis starred in the “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” series, and most recently Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara won Emmys for their performances in Levy and Son’s series Schitt’s Creek.  In addition to her comic roles, Andrea Martin has been nominated for the Tony Awards’ Best Featured Actor in a Musical a record five times.

Catherine O'Hara as "Lola Heatherton"

 SCTV’s basic target was television itself.  The first years of Saturday Night Live also skewered TV and its commercials ( like Dan Ackroyd demonstrating the Trout-O-Matic and other gems from Ronko) as had Steve Allen and Sid Caesar to some degree, but thanks to its premise, SCTV was really television-centric. They took on every form, including the saccharine sentimentality and circular flattery exhibited in  celebrity talk shows.  The premise of a small town station broadcasting cheap versions of program types exposed their absurdity beneath the glitz. 

Woody and Bob Hope

  In their impressions of the famous and in their delineations of recurring characters (including the hypocrisies evident in their off camera versus on camera personalities) the cast showed amazing skill and attention to detail, as well as an instinct for deeper and uncomfortable layers.  For instance, Dave Thomas did an eerily deadpan, surprisingly normal-sounding and yet perverse Bob Hope, while the chameleon Rick Moranis nailed a sad sack Woody Allen.  Catherine O’Hara’s portrayal of Katherine Hepburn was devilish and affectionate, and who could forget John Candy’s Luciano Pavaroti—or his Julia Child?

 Several running bits became legendary.  Joe Flaherty’s Count Floyd introducing Monster Chiller Horror Theatre was a parody of every late night horror film host, but specifically inspired by “Chilly Billy” Cardille, host of Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theatre, which Pittsburger Flaherty knew well. (Like Cardille, Count Floyd was a moonlighting TV news reporter seen on SCTV, Floyd Robertson, paired with Eugene Levy’s hapless Ed Camenbert.)

  Flaherty further exploited his Pittsburgh roots, for instance by narrating a horror film, Blood Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin PA, providing western Pennsylvania geographical details and interpolated Pittsburgh accents. For the initiated it’s a reminder than indeed one of the classic horror films of modern times, Night of the Living Dead, was shot in Pittsburgh—with Bill Cardille in the cast playing a news reporter.  Later in SCTV’s run, the cast performed a series of horror films starring John Candy, including Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Pancakes, which also lampooned their cheap 3-D effects.      

What turned out to be their most popular and characteristic bit was a parody of a Canadian public access show, The Great While North, in which two rural brothers in stocking caps, Doug and Bob McKenzie (Thomas and Moranis), drank beer from cans while sniping at each other about “today’s topic.”  It was a rage in Canada and enough of a novelty in the US to lead to a feature film, Strange Brew.

 

Polka stars the Schmenge Bros

SCTV later appeared for a year on Cinemax, and could be found in various packages into the 1990s. For those who remember those late night laughs in the dark, it takes only mentioning character names to elicit them again: Guy Caballero, Edith Prickley, Sammy Maudlin, Mrs. Falbo, Bobby Bittman (“How are ya!”), Lola Heatherton (“I want to bear your children!”), Johnny La Rue, Gerry Todd, Mayor Tommy Shanks, the Schmenge Brothers, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok (“Blowed up good! Blowed up real good!”), and of course Tex and Edna’s Organ Emporium (“Come on down...”) 

 

Expanding on television’s trivialities can be enervating in bulk, but much of it still works for me, along with the memory of feeling part of a rowdy, imaginative and wildly fun group, even in the distant isolation of a solitary Friday night.

 Apart from SCTV, the last several aforementioned shows from the beyond the US first appeared on PBS (though SCTV eventually was shown there, too.)  These weren’t the only public television programs that nourished and saved me, even directed me, in those years, from the 70s into the 1990s.  Those shows are featured in the last episode of this series, next time.

You Get What You Give

 

 Democracy prevailed, as President Biden said, but the human prospect is still pretty iffy. But whatever happens, as moments in the virtual Inaugural remind us, humanity did something transcendent. We sing. And we dance. 

 There were no joyous crowds, so apart from speeches, the megastar singing, the fashion and a song of words called a poem, all the joy was virtual, and you had to look for it. But the Inaugural committee provided it. Apart from Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez etc., who were great, a lot of people probably saw the evening program, which to my mind had its moments but was uneven. Maybe it was all the commercials.

 What a lot of people didn’t see was the virtual Parade Across America program in the afternoon, which mostly featured non-celebs demonstrating the energy and grace that’s part of their ongoing lives, whatever else has been going on. Towards the end of it was a two minute plus video, Dance Across America, which featured trained and professional dancers with some amateurs (which means they do it for the love of it, because it is its own reward.) That’s the exhilarating video above.

Also part of that program was a music video, made recently by Gregg Alexander, lead writer and singer of the late 90s band New Radicals. After one hit single, he disbanded it, tired of the business (according to Wikipedia sources) and concentrated on writing for others.

 But that hit was a song called “You Get What You Give,” and it was a Biden family favorite, especially in the hard times during Beau’s fatal illness. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff had it played during 2020 campaign rallies. So Alexander got some musicians together to record a new version, and this video for the virtual Inaugural parade program.

 I missed this song completely when it was new. How could that happen? Not only is it catchy with great lyrics, but the original video for it was shot in a shopping mall. In context, it’s a kind of fight song for teen millennials, caught in the servant sector with no discernible way out.  

 Though the visuals in the new video are uneven, Alexander’s new vocal is more soulful. The song always had heart. And the fight song lyrics still work: “We got the dreamer’s disease.” “You got the the music in you...Don’t give up/you’ve got a reason to live/Can’t forget/We only get what we give.” 

 As a species we’ve trashed the planet and our own potential, and seem intent on doing ourselves in, knowing that’s what we’re doing, but unable to stop ourselves. But we've cultivated another side of us so maybe we’ll squeak through, who knows? Anyway, as long as we’re here I expect we’ll still be singing and dancing. These video suggest that these are the flowers of our civilization. Experience them now.

R.I.P. 2019

My fix on the contemporary world is slowly slipping.  Merely keeping up with headline stories is not enough--it is insufficient and distorting.  So I confess, for example, that apart from the obviously enormous and growing wealth of the few, I have little purchase on economics.

But I do more or less keep up on the fate of the planet from global heating, species extinction and other tragic destruction of the natural world that sustains all life, including ours.  And there the news in 2019 could hardly be worse.  The insane policies of the current US regime are beginning to take a severe toll on the nation's laws and policies, and perhaps most obviously on the world's will to address the climate emergency, as evidenced by the virtual collapse of the recent UN climate summit.

 Lack of US leadership, or even encouragement in the wrong direction, has emboldened the government of Brazil to allow the cynical burning and cutting down of vast areas of the Amazon rainforest, which is not only causing severe degrading of air quality and other problems in the vicinity, but which adds to the load favoring global doom.  Add this to relentless and expanding effects of melting at both poles, and any chance of saving the future seems more and more remote.

All of this is fueled by global social conflict leading to a growing imbalance in the human response to almost everything. The dark side of human nature is in the ascendancy: greed, hate, systematic and reflexive mendacity, willful ignorance and an almost inexplicable cruelty.

So 2019 was not a good year for the world and many people in it, and a potentially catastrophic year for the future.  Except for important reductions in severe poverty, and what now seems like the distant memory of the Obama years, there's little better to say about the entire decade.

As for those prominent people I knew of but did not necessarily know who died in 2019, when looking at the long list of them, I see my own world slipping away as well.  These were people who populated my life in some way, and as I have waning interest in (or access to) a lot of current culture, they are not being replaced.  This is part of getting old, and realizing it is part of dealing with the change.  But it's also true that the world is changing in ways it hasn't changed in generations--the ways we typically get the news, for example.

When I read some of the names, I recall first my experiences with these individuals, however brief.  James Atlas was a writer, editor and publisher I encountered a few times when we were both young men in Cambridge and Boston in the early 1970s, and had friends in common.  Even then he was working on his biography of the American poet Delmore Schwartz that was nominated for the National Book Award, and complained that Schwartz was invading his dreams.  My most extended memory is of an evening when the two of us detached from a larger group to go bar-hopping, and got gloriously drunk together.

I interviewed architect Cesar Pelli in the 1970s, when he was chiefly a designer of shopping malls (including Greengate Mall in Greensburg.)  He was a key voice in my "Malling of America" article for New Times and subsequent book.  His pronouncement on the mall's effect ("Towns disappear!") was an influential eye-opener at that early stage in my research.  He later became a prominent architect indeed of major urban projects in New York City and around the world. I remember him as gracious and thoughtful. (And in these photos, he looks a lot like James Atlas.)

Wofford accepts the Presidential Citizens Medal from
President Obama in 2013

Harris Wofford was Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry when I worked on a project highlighting PA Job Centers in the early 1990s.  Our most extended conversation was during a private dinner, when he talked about brokering candidate John Kennedy's call to the jail where Martin Luther King was incarcerated, which may have won him the election, as well as other tales of serving in the JFK administration. He recommended his book on the subject, Of Kennedy and Kings, as now do I.

I also recall that at one of our Job Center inaugural events, Wofford asked everyone not to use the increasingly common jargon of "servicing" people.  We service machines, but we serve people, he said. This respect for language impressed me, as did his urbane and--yes--Kennedyesque manner. Later he was elected to the US Senate as a prohibitive underdog, the first candidate to demonstrate the political potential of running on expanding health care coverage.

Among the musicians of my time who died in 2019 (including Ginger Baker of Cream and Peter Tork of the Monkees) I remember a more obscure one: Leon Redbone.  I saw him perform at a small club in Cambridge, from the front table reserved for music writers. He wore dark glasses and a broad-brimmed hat, and kept his head down so we hardly saw his face, as he played acoustic guitar and sang one old standard after another in his rich baritone. It was the strangest  performance I'd seen to that point.  Still, I got several of his records, and  I always hear "My Blue Heaven" in his voice.

When I met Tom Ellis in the WBZ television newsroom in Boston in the early 70s, a lot of people didn't know what to make of him.  With matinee idol looks and a sometimes uncertain grasp of words, it seems to some he was a model for Mary Tyler Moore's Ted Baxter.  But his newscasts led the ratings by a lot, and he hung in there, learned his craft, and stayed on the air for the next 30 years or so.  For awhile he kept jumping stations for more lucrative contracts, and everywhere he went became the top news station.  He was the only person in Boston ever to anchor number one news broadcasts at all three network affiliates.  After a stint in the Big Town of New York, he returned to Boston to anchor for another 14 years.  I can't say I got much of an impression of him, except that he was not arrogant or manipulative.  He was genial and hugely enjoyed what he was doing.

Speaking of the future, my research for magazine articles in the 70s on the subject brought me in contact with futurists Wendell Bell and Barbara Marx Hubbard.  Hubbard, as heir to the Marx toy fortune, was a kind of godmother to young futurists, kind and careful and probably rightly suspicious, though in a gentle, tentative way.

Others I never met, I remember in their historical moment.  Writer Dan Jenkins and screenwriter Christopher Knopf were making a big noise (as Anthony Hopkins might put it) in the 1970s.  Actors Anna Karina, Peter Fonda, Sue Lyon, Danny Aiello, Valerie Harper, Rip Torn, Peggy Lipton, Carol Channing, Phyllis Newman, Carol Lynley, Michael J. Pollard, Rene Auberjonois, Rutger Hauer, Bruno Ganz and especially--over some 50 years-- actor Albert Finney populated the collective dreams of my era known as movies and television.

 One of my favorite Finney films was Two for the Road with Audrey Hepburn (1967), directed by Stanley Donen, who also died in 2019. Donen had also directed the 1950s classic musicals On the Town and Singin in the Rain (which I've only learned to appreciate years later), the 1957 comedy Kiss Them For Me with Cary Grant (which I discovered on TV); the 1960s caper films Arabesque and Charade, the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled (all of which I saw first run at theatres).  All of them fondly remembered.

The lovely Julie Adams lit up odd movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon and Francis Joins the WACs, but her long career confirms her acting talent and intelligence.  Franco Zeffirelli caught the 1960s youth spirit with his Romeo and Juliet.  Dusan Makavejev made one of the strangest yet most compelling movies of the 1970s with WR: Mysteries of the Organism. 

I had perhaps as many arguments as agreements with Harold Bloom's work, but I honor his reverence for literature.  Ward Just and Larry Heinemann were among the writers first ruminating on the Vietnam War after it was over. Paul Krassner was a provocative and often funny presence in the 1960s.  Ram Dass was his more spiritual counterpart.

Sander Vanocur with RFK

I read Russell Baker's column in the New York Times, and learned the news of the days from television reporters Jack Perkins, Robert Zelnick, Sylvia Chase and Cokie Roberts.  The on-camera reporting of NBC correspondent Sander Vanocur is forever bound with my memories of momentous events in the 60s, especially Robert Kennedy's assassination.  I'll never forget the look on his face during the all night vigil outside the hospital as he reported that the mysterious first name of the accused assassin Sirhan was...Sirhan.  It was a surreal moment that Kurt Vonnegut might have scripted.

And that's the paradox of mourning these deaths: they are so bound to moments of my past, with no likelihood that there would be such presence in my future.  In a sense I lost them long ago.  Their moment is fixed in time forever, yet their definitive passing still seems to depopulate my world.

So I mourn Joe Bellino, possibly the first football star (for Navy) that I recall by name from my youth, and Bob Friend, the oddly colorless ace pitcher for my beloved 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, whose record for the most innings pitched in a Pirate uniform is unlikely to ever be broken.  (Rex Johnston also died this year--I don't recognize his name, but he has the distinction of having played for both the baseball Pirates and the football Steelers.)

Other once-important names float through my journalism days memories--Harold Prince, Eliot Roberts, Robert Evans, Andre Previn... Their accomplishments are recorded, but some fame is fleeting.  Ross Perot was once one of the most important people in the US--he was the first billionaire who ran for President in 1992 as an independent and might have won if he hadn't dropped out and then reentered the race.  He ran again in 1996, and both times got more votes than nearly any other non-R or D candidate. Though he was a Texan,  my hometown of Greensburg, PA bragged that he'd married a local girl, with the wedding in Greensburg itself.  But his death in 2019 was barely noticed, and his name didn't generally make the "notable deaths" lists.

Lee Radziwill

Time stutters on, following its own strange logic. Princess Lee Radziwill died at the age of 85, twenty-five years after the death of her older sister, Jacqueline Kennedy. And almost exactly 60 years after Buddy Holly was lost in a plane crash, his fellow Cricket Jerry Naylor died in 2019.

May they all rest in peace.  Their work and their memory live on.

So with their passing in 2019, my world inevitably and inexorably got smaller.  These figures in the ground of my life leave me in a world of noisy strangers who can't understand me, or perhaps even see me, the Mad Hatter presiding over a phantom tea party, spouting nonsense.  I am left to live and grow and change--quite happily-- among the fixed stars of the past, and above all in the near and present.

  And what's that up ahead?  The first hour of a new year.

Note: In addition to previous posts here on Ric Ocasek and Jonathan Miller, I've posted on writers who died in 2019 at Books in Heat, and on Star Trek and Doctor Who related deaths at Soul of Star Trek.  

What's New?

What's New?  The inevitable answer is: not very much.

As human beings we're alert to the new: the new threat, the new opportunity, as we have been for thousands of years.  But we have huge enterprises dependent on the illusion of the new, and the news media aren't even the largest.  "New" is the hue and cry of advertising, for instance.

What makes the news is often comparative, a new notch on the scale.  The church shooting with the highest number of casualties is a particularly noxious and ultimately absurd example, a measurement of our failure as a society when none is needed.  But each of the deaths we read about is a real person really dead, leaving behind a hole in families and family members, and in communities.  We bow our heads in mourning and our own common shame.

A different case: Washington Post columnists measure the latest poll: the current US chief executive "has an approval rating demonstrably lower than any previous chief executive at this point in his presidency over seven decades of polling. Fewer than 4 in 10 Americans — 37 percent — say they approve of the way he is handling his job."  Insofar as this is at all meaningful, it's scary on several levels; perhaps the scariest is that it bears no immediate relationship to limiting what this presidency is doing or abetting, like withdrawing from essential international agreements and otherwise risking the future, dismantling healthcare and enabling the imminent threat to totally dismantle the Endangered Species Act.

Other comparatives do seem to leap from differences in degree to differences in kind.  For example, the openness of widespread corruption in the current administration.  On the other hand, the Paradise Papers may "only" be temporary revelations of entrenched practices by the world's wealthiest.

In the larger sense, the passions (for evil and for good) that rule headlines and Internet memes have been described in texts from the beginning of writing, a body of literature all too easily and much too stupidly ignored in the daily astonishment, as well as by self-styled experts who should know better, like the "psychologists" who grab their own headlines with their ill-conceived or perennially known findings.

But on a more historical scale, we can see today's developments in context and as interweaving patterns, instead of headlines so repeatable they could exist as already set type off the shelf, if anybody set type these days.

I am prompted to this thought by the experience this past weekend of finally attacking my old file cabinets.  In them are files of laboriously selected, cut, dated and categorized newspaper clippings and magazine articles, as well as sheets of my own notes and prose on the subject.

Apart from evidence of the jobs I did for the past ten years, the files I went through and largely discarded were mostly from the 1990s and early 2000s.  These bulging folders had subject categories like "income inequality,"  the privatizing of public functions, the heathcare wreckage and various references to political polarization and the onrushing darkness.

There were lots of clippings chronicling the largely forgotten role of Newt Gingrich in representing the kind of politics with which we are now familiar.   There are articles explaining the rise of the new conservatism, the religious Right, and residual racism.  

My own notes were in support of my thesis of a public/private reversal going on, which included sending the unmediated, uncontrolled unconscious outside to work in the public realm.  I collected a lot, and wrote about the enveloping darkness.

Relegating these clippings to the recycling bin is not a rueful recognition of the Internet's transcendence, for retrieving and organizing these clips would still involve serious library time.  (And one set of articles I wish I'd saved are all the paeans to the emerging Internet Utopia by Kevin Kelly and other Wired folk, before international hacker armies, trolls, bots, phishing, viruses, disruptive advertising and widespread identity theft etc. turned the Internet into the Inferno.)  It is rather a recognition that I will not be writing this particular history.

Some of these clippings support another unexpected (or largely unanticipated) consequence of the internet.  In 1995 (which was largely pre-internet) Anthony Lewis wrote a NYTimes column called "An Atomized America."  The idea expressed there and elsewhere, clustering around Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, was that America was becoming a nation of loners.

 In the 1850s the then-journalist Frederick Law Olmstead wrote rapturously about all the associations Americans in cities and towns belonged to, that performed useful services like planting trees, building bridges, creating libraries, starting volunteer civic organizations and debate clubs, as well as engaging in organized recreation such as ball teams and boat clubs, glee clubs and theatricals --all elements helping to build what he called "commonplace civilization."  (All this is from a 1997 New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik.)

Later as a park-builder, Olmstead designed New York's Central Park to accommodate many different kinds of people engaged in many different pursuits. Often they would find themselves playing ball or ice skating or otherwise pursuing recreation in their own group but face to face with people in other groups.  They wouldn't see each other whole, necessarily, but they would see each other, and they had something in common.

This sort of thing still goes on, though it is not so fashionable.  Insofar as Americans are more often bowling alone--and not at a bowling alley but at home on a device--they are less frequently eye to eye.  Though some engage in what seems like overexposure on social media, the medium favors creating a persona, which favors one dimensional interchange, especially in politics.  Atomized becomes polarized.  People become icons and one dimensional stereotypes.  They are their politics.  But you know, actually they aren't.  What they share, what they have in common, gets lost.  And that makes commonplace civilization much more difficult.

These clips in general do support the impression that we are approaching the apotheosis of these patterns, along with other more elongated trends.  But I'm not sure that's new either.