Dollar Tree on Burnet Road (Austin, TX)

Just on a whim... decided to stop at Dollar Tree discount store about a mile from my house. Normally I look down my nose at such establishments. But what the hell, why not go to a store I can actually afford!

So I start cruising the aisles. I wanted some Lifesaver type breath mints. Found Certs, 3 packs for $1.00. That's a great thing, everything costs one dollar. It's kind of like you died and went to heaven where you can afford items, and the store manager doesn't want you to feel bad. Great for people who can't do math. It's all the same price-- one dollar! And even if you don't need or want most of the items, nice that somebody has priced things to take the pain out of shopping.

I checked the store thoroughly. You could paint your house with the paintbrushes, tape, buckets and brooms, rollers, etc available there. But I'm not painting my house. Food, tupperware, toys, organize a party. Impressive inventory and really the stuff is not that inferior-- maybe just a little out of step. Kind of like you're shopping in 1973.

But on the way out I found kids' trading cards-- NFL football, NBA basketball and Major League Baseball. And the basketball even had an album with every team and their player personnel. Okay, so the album was 2014-15 and most of the stickers for sale were 2013-14. I went ahead and got it. I'm gonna learn who is playing in the NBA and this album and stickers are going be my visual aid.

Checked out and got some AAA batteries so my grandson can complete this model car kit. Good time shopping and I'll probably go back.

TV Guide 2/6/60-- Globalism Begins

Richard Boone, star of Have Gun, Will Travel, appears on the cover of the February 6, 1960 issue of TV Guide but the words on the cover implore readers to "Name Your Favorite Stars and Shows." The cover also directs reader to page 5 of the pint-sized magazine-- for accessing the TV Guide Awards Nominating Ballot. Turn to page 5, and there are 7 categories--

1) Favorite half-hour series
2) Favorite one-hour-or-longer series
3) Best single dramatic program
4) Best single musical or variety program
5) Best news or information program
6) Most popular male personality
7) Most popular female personality

Readers are asked to cut along the dotted line and mail their choices to a TV Guide post office box in Philadelphia.

And so began the electronic age where the audience participates in a very active way in the creative process. Today things are easier; we can text our votes for winners on American Idol.

Read Marshall McLuhan, the media philosopher, to sate any curiosity about the notion of electronic media as participatory. And watch yourself studying the contents of your cellphone and pressing the buttons for confirmation of McLuhan's insights.

The magazine's first article, "Lions Can't Lose and They Hate Lucy," appears just after the nominations ballot and highlights the international flavor of television. Saudi Arabia had a major problem with I Love Lucy as the strong-willed Lucille Ball was perceived by the Saudis, perhaps correctly, as dominating husband Desi Arnaz. I Love Lucy was forbidden in Saudi Arabia.

The article mentions several other nations. The Japanese were comfortable with post-WW II shows like Air Power, Navy Log depicting the Japanese defeat in World War II but a Japanese sponsor didn't like nature shows showing a lion being shot, reason being the Japanese sponsor "Dr. Lion's Tooth Paste" preferred not to see the lion defeated in any form or fashion. Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator rejected Gunsmoke for the Cuban audience, as the dictator feared the show's gun play might encourage a revolution. And American television companies rejected Spain's currency, the peseta, as payment for television product. They wanted dollars.  The more things change...

Richard Boone had praise for directors of series Westerns, including a guy named Gene Rodenberry, though cowboy shows were considered inferior to the high art dramatic shows of the time, including Playhouse 90. Here's Boone's comment:

"There's a kind of snobbery," says Boone, "in live TV that carries with it the implication of pure art. Why? I don't know. All I know is that as far as I'm concerned Have Gun is better produced, better written and better directed than-- that thing."

Seems to me, Boone won that argument. Live TV dramas leave something to be desired and have largely fallen by the wayside.

Jack Paar's show was going strong every evening at 11:00 PM airtime in Austin, Texas. Jack's guests that week included Phyllis Dyller, Charley Weaver, and "singer Florence Henderson of the Today  show." Steve Allen had a program on the schedule for Monday night, 9:00 PM, showing the Tonight Show host had already shifted from Steve Allen to Jack Paar.

And ABC's Friday night Boxing featured Emile Griffith in a welterweight bout against Gaspar Ortega from Tijuana, Mexico. "This is the TV debut of Griffith, 1958 National Golden Gloves champion." A little more than a year later Emile Griffith fought and killed Benny "Kid" Paret in a controversial match that led to the cancellation of the ABC's boxing program.

Boxing popularity on television has fallen off since those early days of the medium, mainly become a niche sport, and McLuhan explained that a hot war, like Vietnam, does not work well with a cool medium like television. We participate, interact intimately with the TV flow of electrons. Such intimacy makes war, and possibly a boxing match, too hot for handling by our central nervous system.

The Beverly Hillibillies... memory lane

Watched several episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies in preparation for a talk at my Toastmasters club. Wow-- quite enjoyable! Nicely written by producer Paul Henning. The actors are so solid, never going over the top even though they're doing farce. And you gotta check out how peaceful Southern California looks back in 1963. Have to admit I got a kick out of Ms. Hathaway, the nerdy assistant to the greedy banker Mr. Drysdale. Ms. Hathaway was played by Nancy Kulp. Just looked at her bio. She moved to Hollywood to work in a publicity department and got discovered by George Cukor! He told her to move in front of the cameras. Her nickname was Slim, appropriately enough. Her character was always pining after Jethro, played by Max Baer Jr.. who felt that getting typecast as Jethro ruined his career for future roles. Not sure Max would have achieved Al Pacino-style greatness. With the death of Donna Douglas, Max Baer is the last surviving cast member.

After her acting career wound down, Nancy Kulp ran for public office in Pennsylvania. Here's an interesting development. She got dissed by Buddy Ebsen, her fellow cast member, during the election. Here's what the Inter-web had to say:

"In 1984, she ran as a Democrat for Pennsylvania's Ninth Congressional District, but lost to Republican incumbent "Bud Shuster". She blamed her The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) co-star Buddy Ebsen for her defeat, because Ebsen taped a radio ad in support of Shuster, and deemed her "too liberal". She did not speak to Ebsen for several years afterward, but eventually made peace with him."

So old Jed, the mountaineer who "barely kept his family fed," managed to keep Ms. Hathaway from getting elected.  That made me pissed at the guy, but now I like Nancy Kulp even more. And as for Jethro.... well, you gotta love Jethro.

--> Y'all come back now, y'hear?.

Reality TV-- sometimes a powerhouse

Scripted TV drama does very little for me. Feels limited, and kinda hokey. You know the scripting routine.  A bunch of writers and jaded executives try to drum up a plot line with "high stakes"-- often involving guns and/or the end of the world. Reality TV, on the other hand, has a fresh team of writers-- the performers themselves. The result is you can get a more nuanced view of life from reality TV and it gets more popular by the day.

I caught two reality shows last night that I don't know that well-- a Kardashian segment called "Kourtney and Khloe Do the Hamptons," or something to that effect, and "Nellyville," a new BET show profiling the rap singer and some of his youthful inner circle.

The show featuring Nelly and what looked to be two teenage sons and a teenage niece had a nice appeal. All the kids had a gangly, sincere quality that stands apart from child actors. One boy struggled with a football injury, possibly career-ending. Nelly asked the kid if he had a Plan B, should football not work out. The young guy came up with "I could be a football analyst," as a career option and Nelly challenged him to offer some football commentary right on the spot. The kid admitted he had nothing to day. At least he amused by his own lack of commentating chops. The youngster smiled and, have to admit, Nelly had done a nifty piece of instant parenting. Later in the show, the youngster tossed a football with his older brother tossed on the sands on a LA beach. They counseled each other-- a nice exchange-- and the brother even thanked his older sibling!

The niece, a 18 year old girl with aspirations to be a model, wanted badly to participate in a twerking class with a more mature woman, seemed to be Nelly's significant. Nelly had sternly warned not to allow the 18 year old to twerk. It didn't work and they had but a great scene in twerking class where the youngster could not help herself. She twisted, turned and moved around until she finally worked her way into the action. And she's a great dancer.

The entire crew of kids and pater familias visited the set of "Real Husbands of Hollywood," another BET show, featuring Nelly, Kevin Hart and Nick Cannon. The show's co-producer showed the kids around and got some nice laughs comparing his fitness level and physique to the show's stars. The kids seemed happy to have a more educated view of the world of TV and we viewers got a similar feeling of contentment from the time spent in the company of Nelly and family.

Maybe I'll skip a discussion of the Kardashians-- and stick with "Nellyville" as a prime example of the positive side of reality TV.

Poor in Mississippi

I grew up in New York and attended high school in the middle class suburbs of Long Island. However, I've lived in Austin, Texas for over forty years. I recall being astounded the first time I saw the tiny white wood-frame houses skirting downtown Houston when I visited there in the Seventies. The houses were referred to as "shotgun shacks"-- nicknamed that way because a single blast from a shotgun would kill all the occupants. The warm Southern climate made shoddy houses workable, though hardly acceptable for human habitation. The rows of houses had a Civil War feel, reminiscent of slave housing or perhaps homes at the level predicted for tenant farmers. My neighborhood in Austin, believe it or not, still shows signs of the shoddy housing. A few shacks dot the area even as the property values push $500,000 for some of the town homes, condos and solidly built McMansions.

A few nights ago I had a conversation with a friend who grew up in Mississippi. I'll give him the fictional name of Del. He speaks in deliberate, somewhat syrupy cadences at a pace slow enough to drive a New Yorker to finishing his sentences. But I always love hearing his recollections of a childhood growing up poor in Biloxi, Mississippi. He has told me his mother worked at a Shrimp Factory. I immediately thought of Forrest Gump. This story is real though. Sometimes his mother left  for work at the factory with absolutely no food in the pantry. Del, as only a little tike, sought her out at the job one day because he was hungry. But Del went into a bit more detail with this telling and I found myself amazed at his story.

Del's mother was initially housed in a "shotgun house, provided by the company." The company was the Shrimp Factory. Eventually their family bought their own house, still a shotgun house but their own this time an apparently a step up from living on property owned by the company. They had no sheet rock and the walls and would hunt around for cardboard to provide some insulation for the colder times of year. He doesn't recall his mother ever having a wedding ring. She did have 8 children with her husband, four boys and four girls. Del had a job working in a store as a 13 year old and got a job at the store for his 11 year old brother. They used some of their earnings to buy furniture for the house. The four girls occupied a single room. They even took in a runaway girl which, I guess, added another occupant to the room. Each corner of the room had a piece of rope hanging from its sides and served as a clothes closet for each of the girls.

I asked about his father. The father worked for a timber company and one time a pile of logs fell down and put him out of commission for an entire year. The family owned 95 acres of land and moved into the city. The sold the land for less than $1.00 an acre! Del said moving into town was likely a mistake. They may have subsisted better on the land. Biloxi and the Shrimp Factory offered wages and an alternative to subsistence farming.

Del joined the Air Force in 1963 and got some training. He did find himself back in Biloxi working is stores and driving delivery trucks before moving on to Texas. Del could tell I enjoyed hearing about a world so foreign and exotic and drifted slightly in tone. He told me that there were good times and "we didn't know we were poor because everybody was poor." He said "there were good times and bad times and the house was filled with laughter with my mother." There was a gossip about the sister's boyfriends. But the laughter died down as the years passed and his mother grew older. I liked the simplicity of Del's observation and its connection to all homes, rich and poor. People make the laughter happen and relationships make us rich in those moments, but with the passage of time all these things fade to oblivion. Del said he had no bed for his entire childhood. "I slept on on the floor, probably until the age of twenty-two."

Incredulous, I asked "On the floor?"

"Well, on a palette on the floor."

So different than my existence on Long Island.

There it is-- a conversation between a relocated Yankee and a Southern man.

Frank Gifford: Last of the Great White Running Backs

Frank Gifford was a hero of mythological proportions in the late 1950s. Frank played running back for the New York Giants. New York has a way of creating legends, mythologizing sports stars and gilding them with Greek-godlike attributes. Frank fit the bill. He had the looks. Frank ran gracefully as a running back as the New York Giants football team, the tam that found its identity in hallowed Yankee Stadium. As a ten year old kid I liked the guy, number 16 on his uniform, and he embodied the traits we liked in our Fifties heroes-- modesty, hard work and a nose for victory. Frank outlines his exploits and the hard scrabble early days of the New York football team in The Glory Game, his 2008 book about the NFL championship game of 1958.

He never deviates from his modest temperament across the pages of The Glory Game. Gifford, ever the ambassador of goodwill demonstrates equal affection for his teammates guys like Sam Huff and Charlie Conerly and for the Baltimore Colts, the opponents, a team that included Johnny Unitas, Gino Marchetti and Raymond Berry.

Gifford cannot claim to be the last of the great white running backs-- that was my term. Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung achieved great running statistics for the Green Bay Packers in the 1961 season, after Gifford's glory years had passed. And Jim Brown symbolized the future of football. Jim Brown anticipated the arrival of the great African-American running back. Jim Brown, Lenny Moore and Bobby Mitchell, the early black stars, jump out from the cold, hard statistics on rushing yards as the future of pro football. The sport had to accommodate the unquestioned superiority of the African-American running back, for sports by definition are a level playing field.

But Gifford had a certain aura. He as a King of New York in the 1950s-1960s and beyond. He straddled the electronic era, the era of television and football's emergence as the TV sport par excellence. He announced the games on Monday Night Football, poised between Don Meredith and Howard Cosell, the Texas hick and the New York prick. Both guys were funny and they needed the gentler spirit of Frank Gifford to class up the joint.

Gifford got in trouble with sex scandal, a tabloid affair with buxom Suzen Johnson in 1997. His Monday Night Football days were numbered. Frank partook of the electronic landscape for gossip long before TMZ made it an art form. And even that hotel room setup adds to the luster. Suzen did a Playboy spread and you had to sympathize with Frank's fall to temptation.  Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank's wife and a powerful figure in daytime TV, struggled to keep the marriage to Frank going despite the massive media circus and the marriage continues to the present day. Frank is now 83 years old.

But Frank should not be forgotten. The son of an oilfield worker, Gifford did not have the grades to get accepted to USC. He eventually made it there. His strong delivery as a TV announcer proves he had no lack of intelligence. Frank was a King of New York, pals with Toots Shor make that a natural fact. Gifford had all the right stuff, really proved himself a natural for the Big Apple spotlight. His book, The Glory Game, continues in the vein of grace and modesty. He acknowledges David Halberstram would have been the man to capture the 1958 NFL championship game and all of the sociological implications-- the integration of American life through television and the rise of Frank's favorite sport. Halberstram died in a car accident while pursuing the subject of football's rise from the 1958 championship game. But Frank's version makes a damn fine book, smooth and effortless as a crafty running back cutting through the line.

McLuhan-- All of the Candidates are Asleep (part 1) 1968

Saturday Evening Post          (August 10, 1968)    p. 34-36

Marshall McLuhan discusses the effects of television on politics and explains why the current candidates are irrelevant.

All of the Candidates are Asleep

By: Marshall McLuhan

“Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes.” (Luke 19:42)

An election is a period of programmed violence, because it is a quest for new images of national identity. The present elections is a “tragic” one, because the American sense of identity has been in jeopardy from new technology for some time. Every new technology creates a new sensory environment that rearranges the images we make of ourselves. To discover and to elect representatives in a period of deep personal uncertainty is to be involved in a struggle for images, not a struggle for goals.

A tragic hero has no goal. He has to find out who he is when the foundations of his world have fled. His “irrational violence” is a probing of the unknown. Like our own TV generation, he cannot “fit in” to a world that has changed radically. His tragic agon, or struggle, is a process of making, not matching. He cannot “represent” people until he has invented or discovered them anew.

The Vietnam war has taught Americans that they cannot have a hot war in a cool, or involved, age. When electric immediacy has got everybody involved in everybody, mechanized violence is no more tolerable than mechanized education or mechanized politics or mechanized charity.

The ballot box is a “hot box” that is hard to cool in an election year. An old-fashioned hot campaign is hard to accommodate to a TV public engaged in the “first world war fought on American soil.”

All wars are world wars, under electric conditions. TV brings them into our homes, and some American parents have seen their own sons killed on TV news programs. Seeing them on TV, moreover, we experience all sons as our own.

From all the present candidates for the Presidency, the TV viewer gets the impression that it would be possible to have an intelligent conversation with any one of them under conditions of privacy and solitude, during which that candidate could be allowed to learn some of the central events in the contemporary world.

The simple fact is that no such possibility of intelligent conversation exists. If any one of them were to become aware of the actual dynamics of the 20^th century, he would at once dissociate himself from political lie. The compliance and submission needed in “practical politics,” or for any cooperation with any political machine excluded the possibility of any serious character appearing on the scene.

Now that Bob Kennedy has left the scene it is easier to see how much bigger he was than the mere candidate role he undertook to perform. His many hidden dimensions appeared less on the rostrum than in his spontaneous excursions into the ghettos and in his easy rapport with the surging generosity of young hearts. He strove to do good by stealth and blushed to find it fame. It was this (reluctant hero) quality that gave integrity and power to his TV image.

None of the candidates understands TV, either in its effect on him or on society.  If Canada’s Pierre Trudeau is a great TV image in politics, it is because he is indifferent to political power. Anyone who looks as if he wants to be elected had best stay off TV. TV demands sophistication—that is, multi-level perception. It is a depth medium, an X-ray form that penetrates the viewer.

Sen. Eugene McCarthy could have come out of any Hollywood casting bureau as a small-town philosopher. His yokel quality provides a very pleasing feeling of TV involvement, which gives him a nice, modest rapport with the young.

TV, of course, has transformed the primaries from regional popularity contests into national mage-making shows. Radio and jet travel, like press coverage, still count on the candidate’s have a special slogan, a special issue, that identifies him. TV has ended that. The press can only tag along to comment on what happened on TV.

But, in a deep sense, TV bypasses the ballot box as a means of creating political “representatives.” TV is not concerned with views or interests or issues. It is a maker and finder of images that ride over all points of view and over all age-groups as well. The TV image ends all national and party politics.

Why should TV demand sophistication and insouciance? Simply because it is a depth medium for which earnestness is fatal. Depth requires perception on many levels and, therefore, an absence of single purpose or direction. An all-at-once world, fashioned by electric information, demands a candidate full of puns and unexpected nuances. Such a man is one who knows so much about the contemporary interface of all cultures that he cannot possibly be deluded into any earnest regard for any one of them. The new changes are not moral but technological.

The question is whether we are to “go to bed” and “take our slumber” for the next four years with Humphrey’s “platform of happiness” and bubbly ebullience, or with Nixon’s “serene certainty” to “jog along” with Senator McCarthy, or to fix our gaze on loner Reagan. This question has all the immediacy and involvement of the choice between listening for four years to the same theme songs. Are we to endure four years of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles (Humphrey), I Love You Truly (Nixon), Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms (McCarthy) or As Time Goes By (Reagan)?

In merely media terms, a Negro in the White House would have the most soothing and cooling effect on both national and international politics. Negroes make enormously better color-TV images than whites, because the contour of this image does not depend upon light and shade.

In media terms, a glance at presidential candidates, past and present, reveals that “running for office” only became possible when transportation reached a high degree of development. Until the telegraph and the railway, the office had to chase after the candidate. He sat home, writing letters to the local press. Slogans were basic. Cartoons and photography began to play a large political function even before railways made it possible for candidate to enter the age of caboose and whistle-stop oratory.

The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP. The world in Joyce’s phrase, “went Jung and easily Freudened.” Magazines featured “The Yellow Peril,” while matrons played mah-jongg. Spengler announced the end of the West. Youth politics appeared (Cf. The Doom of Youth by P. Windham Lewis). Peter Pan and the child cult loomed along with “permissiveness” in psychology. Negro jazz became a new world idiom.