Summer of The Sign-Off

That first breeze of late August was a reminder of something I was for the first time in my life genuinely anticipating: The new school year.  In 1979, I'd be entering Junior High School, and based on a tour my sixth-grade class was treated to months before, I was more than ready for this.  It looked like the academic proscenium was finally stepping up to my sophisticated standards.  In a post-war-era-founded schoolhouse a block away from the grammar one of the same vintage, genuine interiors that would render no Norman Rockwell portrait all that impressive, I saw the image of upperclassman maturity.  Hallway lockers, individual desks, a front lobby with a pay phone and men's and women's restrooms. Not "girls" and "boys", mind you.  This place meant business.  It was my kind of scene.  For a kid of eleven, I was just as much an alien from Ork amongst my peers.  I wanted to hang with the grownups.  Those people knew how to have a good conversation.

Good conversation was the most significant, and maybe the healthiest part of my diet when I was growing up.  I was surrounded by it constantly and at times encouraged to engage in it.  My mother always had an opinion and the need to express it.  And she wasn't afraid to secretly share with her son her acerbic disdain for interpersonal environments unconducive.  If the family was getting together at her niece's place or my aunt's on a Sunday afternoon, she'd try and toss out a thought about some article she just read in the Times magazine. It would fall flat in a room of resigned visitors, met only with the roar of the NFL crowd on the Trinitron.  She would look at me with that sinister glow and whisper to me....."they don't read books..."

Those were family Sundays.  The other kind were ones spent with her friends, far away from the Great Neck suburbs.  The Village.  Mercer Street.  In some ways, the geographic was all you needed to know.

It was in a fantasically expensive one-bedroom that my mom's ex-husband lived.  I never knew this man during their marriage, which existed and expired well before my arrival on Earth.  I was the product of something less lasting, a relationship my mom shared with a younger man around the time of her separation.  The mid-1960s was no time for this kind of personal liberation. Popular media would not sympathetically endorse that kind of departure beyond a potboiler like Kazan's The Arrangment, which meant that if you're going to have that kind of relationship acceptably, it had better contain Mia Farrow.  During a borough traffic jam, I was almost born in the cab on the way home from the divorce.

Needless to say, the stranger and I never met.  I'd grow up hearing affectionate things about him, but he was little more than something akin to Alan Ladd in Shane..  He and my mom, reportedly on very tacit terms parted ways.  He was never heard from or sought by my mother again.

In stark contrast, her most prized compatriots remained the people to whom she gravitated and, for better or worse, spent her life around in her late twenties and early thirties.  They were the comics, the fellow entertainers of the New York club circuits, those who would pave the way for the age of Catch A Rising Star and Dangerfield's.  She married one and hung with the rest, their friends, their brethren, and stayed on 'til their show-biz pipe-dream sleigh rides fast faded.  

Rather than waiting around for her husband to free-fall, she commandeered him into an adult education curriculum, a G.E.D, a teaching degree, and a job in the public school system.  She worked and ghost-wrote his assignments. He went on years later to score one of the highest-paying gigs the Board would allow.  He'd ultimately reside in a mod-furnished suite off Eighth Street.  My mom and I would visit frequently from our one-roomer in Rego Park. While she subsided off heart-attack disability and the child support he'd long and respectfully agreed to pay, she never stopped hating him for their marriage.  She loved the guy.

A relationship design such as this is not, as many will reflect in hindsight, unique.  My mother remained hurt most by no one other than herself, but was not in the process averse to cultivating a grudge that would distance her from the one man with whom she was only really compatible.  Ditto for him.  They had a conventional marriage wrecked by impotence on his part and alcoholism on hers.  Where the marriage failed, their intellectual relationship flourished, and was the strongest co-dependency on record.

There was a lot of intellectualism in the air all over the place in the 1970s, to be accurate about it.  Throughout the latter part of the decade, I grew up in the din of all this brain traffic.  I may have been way too young at ten or eleven to grasp the subject matter of all the academic stuff these two, and for that matter much of the well-educated world was going on about at the time, but it might explain why, at an age slightly past theirs back then, I now mull through the used bookstores like a stray animal­­­­, voracious for vintage publications, those luscious treats of almost any sociopolitical subject matter that say home to me.  For some reason, in an indifferent world such as ours, nothing seems to feel better than some hardcover David Halberstam or Kenneth Tynan from 1977 on the E train at day's end.

To be in the presence of my mom and her ex- over the course of a weekend spent at their flat was one of fascinating Rennaisance.  Those two would start the conversation when we arrived, and on they went practically all night.  Discourse was their intercourse, and no one left undersexed. Towards evening, it would take on the form of argument.  They'd raise their voices.  I'd be tucked in bed in the master bedroom at some point, listening like a visitor to a David Susskind panel.  The two kept in fine form, raging their distinct viewpoints.  At some point, they'd unfold the couch, go to their respective sides and peacefully crash 'til well into daylight.   Ultimately, we'd all be up, break our fast with some bagels and cream cheese from the high-price deli on the corner ("the gonniff", he'd growl..), and amidst a later stroll down Eighth and a tour through Brentanoes, the  talk-a-thon continued.  Y'know, for some people, it's skiing, for some, it's stock car races.  For me..?  This was my kind of weekend. They decorated my late 1970s.   Skip the symposiums and events.  The best discourse was the kind you knew how to make at home.

Where does a dog go when his master dies..?  How does his heart and mind deal with the whole thing..?  Does he get angry, the way people do..?  Does he growl outward and turn it inward..?  When this middle-aged ex of hers turned ill and died, my mother was the stray dog.  

It might not have been so starkly alienating, beyond what became a challenged question over the beneficiary in the man's will.  He had a brief subsequent marriage after the divorce.  This led to significant will-based plot twists, and suddenly the long friendship between my mother and her ex's sibling immediately turned to war.  It was an all-Jewish version of The Little Foxes.  While I knew it all for just what it was, it wasn't really about the legalities.  It was about the betrayal.

Not only did I hold no active animosity toward the offenders.  I honestly never expected anything from them.  Of course I was eleven, I was never married, and I never lived with the social or legal expectation of the rewards of enduring such prior wreckage.  But very truthfully.?  This particular bomb that exploded at the reading of the will, nearing the finally incoherent, fatally ill man's passing, somehow stunned me none.  

The greatest wound my mother bore was not in fact the absence of posthumous bounty, promised or not.  It was the stark disappearance of that intimate partner, the one who gave her everything she deeply craved day and night: Shared intellect.  For long as she continued to live, I would never see her fitfully matched again with any such human.  But it did teach me about the greatest kind of intimacy;  The intellectual kind.  For all the talk about sex and relationships out there, intellectual eroticism on the full time scale is a jackpot a lonely dweller will spend his or her life wishing for.  They don't make medical treatments for that, and when they do, I'll be inclined to run the other way.

The summer of '79 was the time of our Six Day War.  It was in that spring that my mother faced the betrayal of "her people", the ones we knew and liked the best and spent time with the most, the man who became more ill and aged by the day, who everyone congregated in imperative concern of, over coffee, talk, dinners, book and movie discussion and the reflexive hard laughter they all needed.  Now it was all gone, and replaced with return phone calls from attorneys.

With us in possession of little cash that summer, my aunt and uncle, a man falling ill himself, took us in for a few weeks at their newly leased condo house in Miami.  If this place didn't look like the set of an Aaron Spelling nighttime series, nothing did.  It was exquisite.  The sale of that Bayside house couldn't have gone that badly.  It was from that remote end my mom got word over the phone that the case was lost.  Our final net result was zero.  It didn't even take six days.  Fixing her anger upon the sibling opponent, she talked to her eleven-year-old son about the possibility of his residing in Florida with his aunt and uncle permanently, while she tracked him down and committed murder.  Somebody, I thought, was watching too many Movies Of The Week.

No one murdered anybody.  We came home to our little dusty-floored Queens abode, and spent our days doing laundry, maybe browsing at Queens Center, a good few trips to the Social Security office in Jackson Heights to square a few things that evidently couldn't be squared, amidst the wild-multicolored and coordinated sets of luxury cars and young fellows' suits along the avenues.  Not too many guys paraded around in athletic gear and flannel shirts back then.  They still dressed to go out.  Maroon was the color of one's car and sport jacket.  The print shirts glowed like gardens.

It was on no uncertain terms, a vacation.  I indulged permissively and affordably in something I just wouldn't be able to do in the school year: The TV I never got to see.  Stuff well after midnight.  I was basically that cat that only wants to see what's in the hallway closet, while no one understands why he's so fascinated with it. The Marcus Welby M.D. re-runs I'd never care for by day were stuff I got turned onto at 2am, amidst a dial of old movies, nightclub and electronics-store commercials, bad public service announcements and The Joe Franklin Show.   It was a carnival of it's own accord.  You didn't need cable, or rock videos.  There was something commanding about local television very late in the pre-dawn hours.  It was somehow more intimate, more humanizing.  It spoke to the alienation of the soul.  

Somewhere past 2am, at least one or two of the few stations that hadn't yet signed off would offer a serving of News Headlines.  Nothing fancy, just some branded logos and that familiar announcer, known for only a few words by day, now intoning the stories of the day.  It was interesting to hear these guys speak at length.   When the station signed off for the night a short time later, that very announcer would, for half a sentence, get personal with the viewer.  He'd say, "on behalf of the entire staff....have a good day..".  How about that.  A human being.

More than a few times, I'd be gazing at the final moments of whatever was on the Channel 2 Late Show at 5:45 in the morning as the sun met the summer horizon.  I'd already caught the rare Channel 5 re-run of The Jack Benny Program and heard Tom Gregory put us all to bed with their newscast and sign-off, complete with that "Feeling Good" public service announcment about physical fitness, scored by that all-too-familiar Chuck Mangione hit.  It played underneath a twelve-year old kid reading a teleprompter message about staying in shape.  As an overweight adolescent looking forward to his next malted at Carvel, all I could dig was the score.  

When life in that Junior High began, all hopes of distingushed collegiate-style life were instantly dashed.  I'd be introduced promptly to a life of threats in hallways, locker rooms, cafeteria lines, on school grounds and off, and a self image I never thought could corrode further.  If Channel 5 hadn't rolled out that nightly hour of M*A*S*H and All In The Family that fall, I swear I'd have killed myself.  You just don't forget a summer that good.

Noah F.

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Take Too Seriously

Lots of new common phrases have made their way into the vernacular over the decades, but only one has truly begun to concern me.  Growing up, I'd hear terms like "vis-a-vis", "part and parcel", "so forth", and all the other little condiments that made active discussion what it was.   But then a new one got introduced and became our conversational anthem. It's the phrase "at the end of the day".

If you really think about what that signifies, it bears a decaying despondence. It refers to "all that matters when it's all said and done".  But it's an illustration of something more futile.

"The end of the day" is when we generally take stock of what's most and immediately significant or important in front of us.  Metaphorically, it implies a consideration of the significance of the day's matters at hand, and whether or not each truly bears the need for primary fear, concern, or anger.  Or does it not matter..? Perhaps it's not important at all, and in the reality of life isn't worthy of one's mental absorption.   It's certainly important and necessary to take that kind of inventory at the end of one's day, and truly most of us at the end of most days will. But the common employment of the phrase "at the end of the day" has somehow exacerbated that need to simplify our every moment, and race at 9am to that lights-out finish line.

The ability to sort out immediacy from irrational fear or emotion is critical. No one's without that need.  But need we minimize or negate our desire or passion for any kind of analysis with it..?  I've often found the "end of the day" phrase as one too often used as kind of like a fire extinguisher upon any mental analytic outbreak even slightly too intellectual.

Can you imagine the likes of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, or for that matter any of the figures made famous in those collegiate studies of the Greek Classics, those eternal rounds of translated analytic converstion delving into life's most insolvable philosophies, promptly ending a talk by saying, "look.....at the end of the day...", in the effort to clear one's cluttered mind and think about just going home and eating dinner..?  As I recall, some of those historically depicted discussions in those translations reportedly took place at dinners held at one's home.  I was about eighteen when I read one of them in Freshman Classics.  I wanted to know what menu they sat down to and when.  Apparently, they never did.  They just talked all night. No reference at all was made to the cuisine.  And you wonder why those Mediterranean folks kept so trim.  They dined on discourse.

It seems fewer and fewer are able to do that now.  Yes, there's occasions, venues, social events, parties, that allow folks to congregate and chat at length about their favorite topics, curiosities, the Arts, and such.  I've been known in my time to hold court with some such conversations with like spirits.  But too many times have I politely led myself back to the reminder that this is merely discussion.  No passion for literally any stagnant topic is enough to warrant the need for two people to interrupt a productive day or evening by simply standing and acknowledging a point of sorts. In other words, there is little to be gained from the rather less-than-nutritive guilty pleasure of discussion for discussion's sake.  Will the discussion partner with whom you share that impromptu discourse be truly seduced by the brilliance of the way in which you articulate your pedestrian point..?  Why need you do so...?  What hollow egos are being fed by this fairly indulgent social act, and need we really, as better minded adults, feed into it..?  What greater intellectual hunger is truly being satiated with an analysis of Paul Newman's acting genius in the 1960s, or Trump or Hunter Biden's criminal guilt in the last four years, than that achieved with a silent personal round with an X-Box game, headset and joystick for an hour and a half..?  If anything, intensive gaming of sorts is a better and more rewarding exercise in analytic thinking and active response.  It's the kind of useful analytic sharpening we could all use, as opposed to a useless pile of chatter designed to treat us to our own glorious, unheard voices in this overheard world.

The self-consciousness we are nowadays so fast likely to accrue in social settings disrupted by attention deficits, technological distractions, and an egocentric culture have not however detracted us from our mission of making our voices desperately heard over the din.  Podcasts are the remedy.

What an invention.  Not only are they incredibly simple to acquire and distribute for public display in today's tech environment, but there's no reason not to afford creating and having one, no matter what you've got to say.  

When I was fourteen years old, I listened to the radio.  TV was of course a huge part of my life in the 1970s and 80s of my adolescence, but radio played a part in my intimate world.  As a teen, I gravitated toward lots of eclectic music shows on the FM dial, but I grew up in a household with elders who were some of the greatest roasters of valueless conversational passion.  My uncle, a life long accountant and his occasionally employed sister, an old-school liberalist political science addict, would fight violently, like a couple of NHL opponents, over their socio-political differences, Watergate, Vietnam, the Israeli conflict, to points of near physical debilitation.  As a child, it unnerved me, and filled me with some of the greatest respect and awe of the ability to speak one's mind.   And when these intellects needed a break from voicing off, they went silent and listened to others do so, on the radio.  In the suburbs of Queens, the grownups bedside radios all purred the discussionary voices of AM's WMCA, Sterling, Grant, McCourt, Nebel. and others.  As a seven-year-old insomniac in my extended family's home, I'd step out of bed at 2AM and tiptoe through the outer hallway, the night tied together by the unison sound of Long John and wife Candy Jones chattering the night away on those clock radios.  What on dear Earth could be of discussive importance at two-o-clock in the morning, I wondered...?  Something, obviously.  There were people just as awake at that moment as I was, ready to talk and listen.

As an adolescent, I began leafing through Radio Shack sale flyers, glancing at the recording microphone selection.  I'd give thought to how I would conduct my talk radio monologue and delivery when I had the forum.  From childhood, I always had a little voice tape recorder of some sort, to get all the little verbal bits and sketches out of my system.  But with one of these formal pro microphones and desk stand, I could be a real, serious Dick Cavett, and try myself out as a broadcaster with something to say, or more significantly, a handsome way of saying it.

We were generally without much disposable dough when I was an impressionable teen.  I once expressed to my usually indulgent mom my interest in acquiring one of these pricey microphones.  She said, rather impatiently, "....Have you something interesting you wanted to say on it..??"  Clearly this kind of response wasn't even in character for her.  She was known to support my intellectual interests.  But I got her at a bad moment. And her rather disspiriting observation brought me suddenly to take stock of the unnecessity of this sudden interest of mine.

Fact is, I had enough gadgetry in my possession at that time anyway to invent my own little radio-show monologue, and didn't need some expensive, hot looking acoutrement, which I could have won for a birthday gift at some point anyway.  The point was, if I really wanted to flaunt my voice, no absence of any added gadget needed to stop me.  It was then and there, at age fourteen, well on the reflective spot that I realized something.

I didn't really have anything worthy to speak at length about.   It didn't mean that I wasn't able to.  Truth is, my mom, who shot me down about that Radio Shack microphone craving, spent my entire upbringing drilling me about the critical importance of being able to verbally express myself in crystallized form at any and every given moment.  On this matter, I was Gomer Pyle to her Sergeant Carter.  Regardless of anything, it's that Olympic training I to this day cherish.  Even if my school-age peers wanted to do nothing but mutter, mumble and leer and jeer at this dweeby nerd who wanted to discuss movies and the new prime-time TV season, I found myself much more at home from age ten and forward in the company of like adults, who could hold their own in such enjoyable conversation in visits and get togethers.  My mom knew enough of those to keep me in good company.

Family members of our own didn't always match those types of personalities.  In our own confines, my mom was not afraid to point out the inabilities of some of our family's own growup cast members to well express themselves in discussion, and how poor they came across in social environments.   Somehow, that didn't stop these grownup young men and women, late-twentysomethings in the fashion-heavy 1970s world, from being out, about, and socially successful.  How'd they do it if they couldn't rock the room with conversation, I wondered at age eleven.  What got them through...?  Something other than the ability to charm someone with their intellectual brilliance, I guess.  What else was there..??

Never until the day she left the Earth would my mother run out of points and observations to make in any intellectual conversation she could join or generate.  She was an inveterate reader, having cultivated an apartment-sized library of books that had it's start in the late 1940s.  Walls of political readers, anthologies, fiction, classics and English and foreign literature.  Professionally she held secretarial and a couple of administrative assistant roles in her life.  Never a corporate advancement in her life's resume.  But put her in a room on the Upper East Side  with a cocktail party and no one could miss her.  Like any animal, she knew how to gravitate to her habitat.

As troubled and withdrawn as I was during my somewhat ambivalent years of higher academics and Liberal Arts, even I wasn't without the need or fearlessness to indulge in some intellectual discourse.  Even at my quietest times, in our most desolate confines, my mother and I were each other's best discussion partners.  We were oft known to stay up literally until 6am, sleeplessly, after watching an old Bogart film on the late show, deconstructing the cinematic sciences of it's brilliance.  

I leaped into my twenties, finally upright with a job and a little (very little, but cozy) batchelor pad to reside in, ready to sparkle at length in conversations with all kinds of acquaintences, professional and more.  I honed my wit and presentational skill to become the valued team player known to my employers and colleagues.  I was not unpleased with myself.

But it was in my mother's final days, even during her advanced illness when the only thing that could ease her immediate burden was an afternoon of companionship, and our lengthy indulgence of a conversation about some literature or film, that one very uncomfortable reality became too evident:

It's all just words.

These verbal and hieroglyphic equations mean little more than the pleasure of their articulation.  Beyond the need to state one's desire for food or need to go to the bathroom, words, the meaning, and the so-called art of sharing remains pure, unnecessary decoration, a celebration of one's egocentric voice.

For that matter, it's the root of all that radio I'd hear all my life.  TV talk, too. An agenda and purpose sits behind all of it, mostly financial.  We may, as intellectual creatures bear the neurological impulse that craves the sound and sight of conversation.  But is it not simply, as Marshall McLuhan defined, the medium that holds the sole message..?

I stood amongst some friends after one of those group support community talk meetings years ago, when they did me some good.  We were in one of our little shoot-the-breeze chatter circles, and a friend of mine and I got into a passionate little exchange about some old John Cassavettes film with both loved.  We were topping each other with great recollections and observations about the movie, and suddenly, there, amidst the dark, cool night in that parking lot, I was abruptly chilled to a halt in my fire-of-bullets conversation.  I was hit with that meteoric reality that is the obsolesence of mere talk. We were nothing but two civilians in our quiet, unimportant, unnoticed lives, sharing a moment of unified, almost addictive passion, that would climax and fade in the next moment.  And leave each of us to the grey of our common existence.  Somehow, that loomed larger than any manufacturable moment possible.

If it weren'f for the thrill of conversation however, there'd likely be no such thing as social gathering.  Saloons and bars would be nothing but the desolate places haunted by Steve Buscemi in Trees Lounge.  But they're not.  Our culture would not have it, thankfully.  People like myself, who bear no passion or awareness of sports, or for that matter political fervor are at a vast disadvantage in our advanced culture. There is no such thing in our society as a two block radius without a sports bar, where men and maybe some women will likely talk and argue the night away in speculation and analysis of the current state of gaming affairs.  Those people are focusing on matters that exist in real time, and bear a shared relevance throughout the world.   It's levels of greater philisophical venture that are pointless, migraine inducing and demeaning to the matters that are imperative to the fast setting sun and darkness ascending as the day invariably and rapidly ends:  Dinner, TV on the couch, and bedtime.  If anything else is more important in this world, the resounding message is abundantly clear:  It's this world you don't belong in.  

In a world too loud, too shared, too aggravated and too podcasted, there's just one recourse.  Shut up, eat your supper, send the wife and kids into the living room to watch TV, wash the dishes, clean up the kitchen and see them off to bed. That's what the Bible calls for.  We don't need to discuss it.  It's already been written. Keep your mind to yourself.  It'll still be there tomorrow.

Noah F.

Styrofoam Anniversary

You don't hear anyone referencing the Golden Age of anything anymore.  That's because for many years, nothing's lasted long enough to have had one. 

Whether it's styles, trends, cultural movements, businesses, stores down the block, technologies, gadgets, design or music, no actual period is identifiable anymore.  And what's more, no one seems to be interested in classifying one.

Most folks are inclined, at a certain age, to acknowledge the continuum of their lives by the decades, as in "My twenties were all about finishing school, my thirties were about my career, my forties were about building my business..", etc..   That's the most immediate, visceral form of life measurement, for many.

The ancient Judaic tribes bore no permanent geographic home.  Their recorded history existed largely on the basis of time, unlike more land-founded cultures.  For many whose lives have been mostly nomadic, time provides the main dividing structure as well.   I haven't lived in that many different locations in my own lifetime, but I could sure tell you about my life in the 1970s, or my life in the 1980s.

By the 1990s, well into my late twenties, things had become just a little more settled for me, and I could indulge for the first time in my life properly, in a quiet appreciation of the arts and history.  But typical to my nature, I did not embrace or even care to acknowledge the contemporary media culture surrounding me at the time.  I preferred to honor a recollection and study of those prior eras in which I grew up.  

Decades later, with the harvest of scanned artifacts and genuine video television scraps resurrected on YouTube, the ability to revisit those prior times is richer and more capable than ever.  And there's more than a few trillion of us middle-agers ready to indulge.  But it's not so much dewy-eyed nostalgia (which it certainly to some extent is) as it is a strong identifiability.

Nostalgia is a very intimate, internal, personal engagement.  Almost no one, sometimes not even your most intimate partner can share it.  A spouse often talks of how his or her better half will spend a portion of their time quietly poring over their old keepsake periodicals or books, or photo collections at times, because it nourishes their soul, lifts their spirits, or at least keeps them above sea level.  Those are often the healthiest moments one can have in this world.  With all the rage over the ills of social media, let's not overlook one of it's greatest gifts, the harvest of nostalgia.

Cheers to the administrators of those yesteryear Facebook groups, culling and posting those photos of our boroughs and neighborhoods from 1969.  Let's hear it for those constantly scanning and posting pages of the New York Post and TV Guide from the 1970s.  We need this face time connection with a past we can recognize.  Much in the way those Alzeimer's victims in that experiment years ago came to cogent life when placed in a replica of their childhood culture, a mock layout of a 1930s Coney Island candy store soda shop, our electronic-addled brains in this confused culture of today are grounded and re-balanced by the occasional swig of the past that we remember best.

We can remember it, because it was there.  From age nine until my late teens, the stationery store I frequented, with it's toy section in the back and paperback potboiler rack in the front window was precisely that.  The grocery store and hardware store were foundations as well.  I think the corner pharmacy was founded back in the time of the Marx Brothers, and long outlived them.  When I was a boy of just nine, I was already discovering the adored majesty of what everyone was hailing as the "Golden Age".  The TV show Happy Days fascinated me, while all my peers were busy chasing Star Wars.  I wanted to know what was on our block full of stores fifty years ago, when the town was founded.  I was raptured by those different times and eras.   Everybody was listening to KISS and the Bee Gees.  I was listening to what those artists grew up on:  Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly.  For this small kid, it was hardly nostalgia.  It was instead, a rich appreciation of an oft-discarded history.  Nowadays we honor it with the term "retro".  Back then it was still largely dishonored for being "old".  Only the really hip and underground were getting it.  In all my mop-top, overweight, pre-adolescent, nerd-based splendor, I guess I was one of those.

In 1971, a very curious movement began within the angry, unrested, protesting, irreverent, adult-disrespecting youth of America.  They became literally tired of all the war, inside and out, and discovered their nostalgic love and passion for the era of forced simplicity, in which they first grew up.  They somehow began to recognize the sheer beauty of Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody singing about the alphabet, and the importance of "please" and "thank you".  So much so that the retired Bob Smith was shocked when a team of young people in 1970 located him and pleaded that he return to public appearance with Howdy, which he did to standing-room-only University halls.   The nostalgia craze was on.  And it may have saved America.

A large conjecture now is that the one of the biggest hazards to our youth culture today is that they are without that cultural compass.  There is no significant "era" anymore, and hasn't been since before the millenium.  In today's unrest, what is the unified cultural Stonehenge upon which the newest Alphabet generations can relate..?  To many in the socio-global dispute game of today, this may seem irrelevant at best, but to read such works as How The Left Lost Teen Spirit by Danny Goldberg, it becomes crystallizingly evident that a personal sense of cultural nostalgia to which one can heavily relate on a shared basis is the beginning of common language, allowing us to communicate effectively once more.

More and more, you'll encounter intelligent young people on a quest to embrace those mysterious 1980s or 1970s.  Maybe the sixties, through artifact literature and news footage.  There are conversely plenty who eschew those in history goggles, insisting it's all about "the future", and not about living in the past.

If that's true however, we would not have museums, Renaissance or even Modern Art, music history, history of the Ancient Greek cultures, or for that matter, books about history.  And a concerted movement toward preserving it correctly.  We've got a good many hundred years to go before we can accept someone recalling Gary Cooper saying "here's lookin' at you, kid" in Gaslight.

Noah F.

From High Atop The Mountain They Preach...

To this day, I still hear the term “Life Expert” dropped all over the place. Them. They continue to seem well versed in all kinds of principles inapplicable to our lives. They must be doing their job.

Their suggestions and implorations certainly aren’t bad ones. How comfortable would you be at one of these “Life Seminars” if a high-paid byline health-&-lifestyle expert stepped up to the podium and advocated for staying up late, pastrami sandwiches at 3am and OTC pain relievers every day..? That probably wouldn’t go over too well at one of those Wellness Festival agendas.

The reason however that such festivals, seminars and symposiums continue to commence at high admission price quite so successfully is that our U.S. world is populated generally by a people under the influence of stress factors that drive them into the more convenient and generally poisonous lifestyle habits that make these divine life-enchanting retreats quite so seductive for a day or maybe an hour or two. If you can’t necessarily live it or live by it, just hearing about it for an hour might make you feel a little better, or at least a little more virtuous.

Not a single one of these outspoken experts, big or small, will actually in their own words articulate the concrete fact that for many, the kinds of daily life practices they espouse are just plain unattainable. It sure would be phenomenal if we could all arbitrarily upright our lives in such way that we could eat no more after 6pm, get into bed at 9:55pm, sleep restfully until 6am, and rise fully rested and energetic to begin a brand new sunlit day. At the threshold of middle age, as a functioning, well-ordered creature of modern society, I have in my life yet to meet and know anyone who has thus far in their life attained this daily cycle.

Bottom line is, I therefore remain incapable of fully believing anyone who insists that they have. I’m not attacking their character. They might be fine human beings. Look, we all have to live some kind of lie in order to survive. The idea is that you just shouldn’t be hurting anyone in the process of doing so.

These Health-&-Lifestyle experts that make their living more or less by stepping out and reminding us to shut off the electronics and shut our eyes by 10pm, shut our mouths and our fridge by 6pm, and wake at 6AM must all be living together permanently in some kind of encampment. I wouldn’t mind joining them sometimes. Apparently others wouldn’t either, because that’s how these vacation retreats are organized, for sky-high prices. People whose lives and careers force them into late-night, sleepless and poorly-fed life cycles will pour their annually-saved five-figure vacation fund into a four-day, three night dreamscape at some Southwestern compound, an exquisite ranch setting with superb lavender-scented, organic-cotton-sheeted accommodations, for four days of quiet meditation, gazing, prayer that apparently can only commence in such setting, and a culinary departure from anything gluten or processed, strictly organic and plant-based. How good would a microwaved burrito from 7-Eleven taste in an atmosphere like this..? Certainly not at these prices.

When you listen to some of these high-atop-the-mountain practitioners with their divine halo preach their desperate plea that we all must shut off the smart phones, ditch the carbohydrates, the dairy, the gluten, the processed products, the plastic, the additives, the chemicals, the LED lights, the electronics, and basically each and every component of that which feeds our lives, our livelihood, our rent and the roofs over our heads, it’s not hard to lose respect for them at an accelerating rate. The only next unavoidable step is the discovery that they themselves are not immune to these forces in their intimate lives.

Many of them of course would not, to look at them, appear to be so adversely affected by the poisons that wear down us pedestrian humans so destructively. They seem to visibly have the gift of eternal youth and energy. I didn’t have the kind of youth, health and physique some of these middle-agers have when I was fifteen in the 1980s. Though I’m fortunate to have achieved just a smidge of better physiology now with more mindful practices, the secret of these Health Industry Rock Stars remains a dark-crystal mystery.

Far as I can tell, these celebrities, authors, speakers, TV-talking-head figures all need to co-exist on the same planet that we do. When we all had to mask up for COVID, so did they. How are they so immune to the life traps that force all us minions into such poisonous lives that send us into the holy submission of high-priced health-lecture weekends over which they proudly preside..?

Perhaps one very relevant question that might generate in our entrepreneur-startup culture is, “Why can’t I become one of them..?” “What do I need to learn in order to attain their expertise..?”

The messages these experts seem to collectively espouse tends to gravitate to the same basic tenets: No intake of products artificial. Organic, natural food at all times. Alkaline water as beverage at all times. (None of that tap stuff..) In bed and lights out by 9:59pm. Sleep in place until 6:00am, thoroughly rested, energized and ready to embrace a glorious new day along with the rising sun. Every single day of your life.

That doesn’t really seem too intensely complex to embrace or articulate to others. A retreat weekend or two of this stuff and you could probably figure out how to write your own book, set up your own lecture tour, and become your own outspoken, reformed life expert. If you live by The Rules.

A friend of mine in the PR business had an encounter, actually more than one over time, with a few of these touring Health and Better Life Experts. One of them was a woman of forty who kept herself looking twenty with the use of an endless cocktail of skin and hair products, along with the threatened practice of indefinite fasting. Except for black coffee, and plenty of it. It was a speaking and TV-tour. No one asked her what resided in those little prescription vials in the quaint purse that would not at any time leave her side, but despite it’s apparent presence, no one wanted to. The fact that this woman was doing all this to fulfill the wellness dreams and hopes of so many was validation enough. The friend in question was of course prohibited from disclosing any identities, but was not beyond covertly sharing the fact that this type of noted profile was not limited to just one figure of the sort. Actually, she admitted with trusted candor, it typified all of them.

Yes, it’s quite ugly of this author to break such a trusted confidence, but you see, I’m something of a health and lifestyle coach myself. I’m not one to preach arbitrary structures unattainable in the functional world in which we need to exist, but I am one to acknowledge the fact that it’s wonderful to be able to live with freedom, in a world that permits us to make our own choices, correct them at will when we can, enjoy the dreamability of the life scenarios espoused by these fantasy health-makers, and try and get some rest after we get home from work at 1:30am, eat our take-out supper, watch some True Blood on Netflix and roll into bed at 4:30am for two or three hours, until we have to wake up to go to work. The gurus have their job. We have ours. If anything, ours are easier. We're allowed to be who we are.

"Put on 'The Odd Couple'......"

Part of public grammar school, undeniably, is a certain amount of indoctrination.  Just in case you don’t have parents at home to drill these foundations into you, teachers very pronouncedly reference certain lifestyle structures that are certainly good ones, like having dinner with one’s family at night, proper diet and bedtime habits, etc.  But there’s one lifestyle reference that came up more than often, which in our home, for some reasons, we never did. We never all sat around the TV in the evening and watched the news together, and discussed it in the process.

It's not as though there was ever any lack of educational lecture and analysis in our home, of the international political and economic scene of the time, which couldn’t be afforded enough public classroom focus due to lessons on King Tut.  And at home, I was equipped personally with one of the most articulate and knowledgeable teachers possible.  No license or degree, but boy, could she teach. My mother, by middle age, had no matriculated college background to speak of, but after a life of various secretarial jobs, in between reading every printed word in the bookstores, devouring English Literature, and absorbing every political journal of the 1950s and 60s as a statistician knows numbers, her eloquent and passionate grasp of Israel’s plight could not for one moment be doubted.  I was her sole pupil.

Seemed like we’d be prime candidates for a team screening of some Evening News at 7PM, or maybe the local stuff at 6.  If I could actively tune in to watch the network evening news, with a proper knowledge of how to do so, then perhaps I’d feel a little more justified in watching television altogether.  It wouldn’t be the guilty pleasure so many of those TV Guide columnists at the time would seek to defend. But our home and it’s matriarch did not aspire to such banality.  It was a conscious decision.

My mother bore no respect for the commercial television news presentations of our time. She looked upon those ad-filled, star-studded blocks as the ultimate bastardization of what once was, in the time of Edward R. Murrow, the Great White Hope.

At some point, when those recurring classroom drops about parent-child news viewing and “family discussion” finally got to me, I asked my mom……”Why don’t we actually watch the news…?”

Somehow, in our home anyway, the thought of making a point to sit in front of the TV and watch a nightly newscast of any sort was akin to dining on salt and pepper as a main course.  News was not a focal point of tune-in viewing.  It was just “on” all the time, ubiquitously.  If your TV was on non-stop, as our Magnavox black-&-white portable was in our little 1978 abode, TV news just sort of wallpapered the room in one way or another, with mid-day news briefs, updates and the like.  Long before things like CNN. From the time I was three, raised at first in my uncle’s home, I already knew who all the big flagship-station news anchors were:  Jim Jensen, Walter Cronkite, Roger Grimsby, John Chancellor.  Invariably, a portion of the evening newscasts were always purring out of the TV at or after dinnertime. No one was necessarily riveted to it, but the car and soda jingles were fun to sing along to before Animal World came on.

Those iconic impresarios, the dapper “stars” of the Evening News, were the undeniable décor of our lives.  But how much of these showcases truly served up any kind of genuine recommended nutritional value..?  And that was my erudite mother’s pseudo-intellectual exception taken with the nightly news on the dial.  My inquest was met with a dissertation that expressed favor of print news, such as The New York Times, over such eye candy as ABC World News Tonight.

Where’s the inquisitive study on these pocket-sized stories we’re pelted with..? How do we objectively identify figures associated with a story without employing some perfunctory sense of pre-emptive bias..?  Is there a generalized slant relative to anything other than a need to shut up and get the commercials on..?

It was in the 1980s when my high school journalism class was visited by a guest speaker, a local television newscast producer.  He was asked by a pupil what forces the decision on stories chosen, citing the story just the night before of a young girl shot to death in Harlem, which two competing newscasts featured in ten second reads.  This fellow’s presentation did not.  The producer went on to explain the applied science of “disposable stories”, relied upon for the purpose of filling that spare ten broadcast seconds.  A good many of those ten-second tragedy reports are unsurprisingly dropped at broadcast time, in order to clear the headline story: The President arrived in the city today, to eat barbecued ribs at an event, and discuss the missile budget.

And the sports..! Don’t forget the sports. For all my mother cared, the obsession with sports reporting in a male-dominated sports obsessed culture (it certainly was then..) did not belong in a respectable newscast.  Was she wrong..?

In the 1960s, pressure was put upon CBS News Director Fred Friendly to have a sponsored Heywood Hale Broun sports commentary segment installed at the end of each night’s Walter Cronkite CBS Evening News.  Broun was uniquely prolific as a sports analyst.  But, as Friendly held, as it was, there was just barely enough time on any night to read and present every relevant piece of national news  For reasons not entirely unrelated in principle, Friendly departed the network a couple of years later.

My mother did not rely upon television newscasts, or “news shows” in order to stay informed.  If some story was breaking, TV is where we saw and heard about it.  But then, my mom would follow it in The New York Times, as well as the in-depth documentary and discussion offerings of public television.  To her, a commercial television newscast was an improper travesty in too many ways.  And it was for this fundamental reason, that the evening news time periods that have long defined post-war video-culture Americana served as alarms In our home, reminding us to switch the dial promptly, to a channel serving up something of genuine viewing value, an independent station presenting movies or favorite old TV show re-runs.  No ritual is more recollective to my childhood than the nightly call from the kitchen upon the peal of that “Coming up next on Eyewitness News..” tease after The ABC Friday Night Movie, to “…put on The Odd Couple..!”, over on Channel 11, perhaps New York's highest rated TV presentation in that time slot back then.

And it was in those pre-adolescent, indulgent times, that along with the jumbo bowl of Heavenly Hash ice cream on Friday and Saturday nights, the extra cookies I knew I’d soon need to give up if I wanted to lose that critical hemisphere waistline once and for all, it was that aversion to those formally dressed, formally produced, formally spoken, mature and often demure presentations that left me in some state of irresponsible, indulgent guilt:  Am I some ignorant news slacker..?

Taking the focus off the self-destructive self for just one moment, let’s ask some better questions.  Why for the last sixty years have so many off-network series in re-sale, many less than initially successful in prime time, made such lucrative hay for independent television stations, who have long used them on a nightly “strip” basis to directly counterprogram the news broadcasts on the network-affiliated stations..? Is there in fact a significant, and in many cases, highly educated audience craving alternative to the news we all “should” be watching nightly ..?

Meanwhile, just how deeply integral are those local and network television news structures..?  It was the late, great Fred Friendly and his industry contemporaries that came out of the influence of radio news in the War Era, when a news presentation, report or commentary, focused on the story, the matter, the purpose.  A story’s headline coverage had nothing to do with whether or not the sunset in the next few minutes will destroy the story because it won’t hit the reporter’s coiffed hair on camera just so.  There was no “star system”, no six-part lifestyle reports, no meaty opportunities for team network reporters politically vying to get that mostly disposable report of theirs from the Honduras, the reporter in his slick beige military duds, hair blowing like a Calvin Klein ad, the piece placed just seconds away from a break beginning with….a Calvin Klein ad..!

It's conclusively possible that a half hour of The Odd Couple, The Honeymooners, or even The Benny Hill Show would offer just as much insight into the globe’s collective challenges as something akin to an ego-covered pageant that slaps one’s intelligence in the face.

And nearly fifty years after the cultivation of the "news slacker", we've got something much more contemporary and chic, en route to it's Golden Anniversary:  The "news junkie".  The exponential harvest of electronic news-presentation platforms over nearly the last fifty years has reformulated that substance long known as "news" into literally a highly, and in some ways toxic, addictive substance.  Its properties take on nearly an entirely separative function in the content's embrace of the neurocortex.  The viewer is transformed almost into William Hurt's portrayal of the experimental figure in Altered States.  Ironically, that very paranormal tale was penned by Paddy Chayefsky, the visionary who brought us that bizarre scarefest in 1976 called Network.  

It's possible that Network itself has not yet seen it's fiction become straight reality, if for no other reason, too many people still remember the movie.  But in the forty-plus years since it's premiere, we've come close enough to the goal posts.  

I won't soon forget that afternoon in 1980 at the bus stop with my mom.  I was all of eleven, living in one of those cable-deprived homes, relegated to simply reading the listings of all those curious pay-TV treats in the following week's TV Guide, which I scored us at the newsstand.  The centerfold was a handsome, glossy, 24-hour breakdown of program listings for the all-new Cable News Network.  Much of it by half-hour flaunted "News Headlines".  By 3AM of any day, I had to wonder.......how much developing news is there going to be from one half-hour to the next.   I'd heard of little ten-minute newscasts from the announcer before a TV station signed off after the late movie, but wouldn't these people quickly run out of presentable news...? What's the plan...??  I talked about this with my fairly unimpressed mom.

Her prophetic, and moderately sardonic observation:  "I guess they'll have to invent some news of their own..."  

Long before Daniel Boorstin coined the term "pseudo-event" of course, the practice itself could date back to biblical times.  As wise people have told me, the world existed before we got here.  The immense harvesting of "news networks" and "news services" cannot subist solely on that one elusive, natural source.  Man has to step in and manufacture some.  It's just part of the business that's good for business that's good for America.

If it’s saints one is looking for in broadcast journalism, the on-camera pontiffs themselves, the former Cronkites, the Chancellors, Reasoners, Smiths, and their integral disciples don’t really hold water. They have daily jobs. They work for people who work for people, who will claim, in all conceivable honesty to work for The People.  The viewer.  They who voluntarily view.  It’s an endless chase of the proverbial tail.

And the question of integrity in commercial broadcast news gathering and presentation is anything but new.  Again, contributors to The Bible in their time just might have been able to tell you a few industry stories. And none of this is to in any way negate or dismiss the masterwork of those who have brought us the most distinguished coverages in the last seventy years of the assassinations, shuttle explosions, storm disasters, and each and every broadcast employee who put their adrenal impulses aside to keep us informed on 9-11.

It is, sadly and ironically, such disaster that ends up redeeming an aerobic biosphere that feeds off its own money-generating capacity in order to survive and exist.

Ron Powers probably thought he was blowing a significant lid off the industry when his literary creation, a study titled The Newscasters hit the stationary store pulp racks in the late 1970s. By then of course, the video epidemic was common knowledge. Powers' book was basically an excoriation of the Age Of Ron Burgundy upon us.  How did local Station Managers and News Directors deal with the critics’ charge upon this reality…?  Astute businessmen that they were, many held, quite valiantly, that they were providing their core audience with just what they wanted to see at the end of the day. Viewers knew what they wanted too.  If you can make the veggies yummy enough, people won’t pass them up for the pudding. From a culinary standpoint, news was good when it was delicious.  In a world of expanding local news afternoons, days and evenings, no one can pass up a smorgasboard.

Ever wonder if those once-guilty treats can now be appreciated decades later, in a semi-historical context..?  In recent years, all those journalistically substandard half-hours benevolently uploaded on line by like spirits, absorbed with history and nostalgia of times past, have allowed this disciple, pining for the simplicity of youth eras prior, to take an invaluable ride.  A thirty-minute excursion, commercials, continuity and all can resurrect one’s fascination and desire to go back to that innocent, news-switching youth just briefly. A different time. A different place.  The one we know best. Can an old relic find precious antique value..?  I’ll let you know when I’m done with it for the first time.

Noah F.

a

A Guided Life....

In what at one time prior I would have anticipated greater fanfare, a small on-line blurb I recently scrolled past reminded us that a cornerstone fixture of my formidable youth, and no less than a significant piece of American cultural furniture long gone, has struck the esteemed age of seventy.

There were no specially-crafted collector's editions in the magazine section of CVS or any other stores published to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the national launch of TV Guide.  Sad as it might appear, the defining reality is that the very medium in the form that the publication once nursed is also, for all intent and purpose, no longer.

Yes, there is today something called television.  You can plug it in, and turn it on, and even without any kind of subscription service attached, you might get a requisite batch of channels watchable.  But the mediascape today is so narrowcast and scattered that finding your way through it on any short notice is the equivalent of what a curious crystal set owner like young Bill Paley in the early 1900's, "DX"-ing his way across the dial may have done.   

The last print material digest-form issue of TV Guide would arrive in 2005.  And by that time traditional TV was all over but for the magazine's farewell.  While it would continue as a standard-sized tabloid newsstand item, it's purpose, and for a good many, its identity, was no longer.

What made this long top-selling publication the consumer magnet that it was..?

It served a distinct purpose, for one.  An East-Coast newspaper publisher in 1946 recognized what was going to happen with this thing called television, that wasn't going away.  He figured that in short time there would be enough activity on that dial to warrant a constant offering of convenient and accurate daily listings, better than a daily paper could provide.  So to supplement the new medium fan-zine called TeleVision Guide, which he'd just acquired, a news-print insert of the week's local listings would be added.  If it took off, bureaus could open in other cities to provide the same locality to the nationally-released fan-zine.   It worked..! Go figure..!  The inner text of those daily listings would become visual icon to a nation over the decades.

Much as the medium's style, form and content would see radical revision over the years of the Guide's run, so did the magazine's format see it's cosmetic revisions.  The type-setting of the listings would become smaller, more concise and uniform in description, sleeker by the decade.    

My family's home, the one in which I first began to grow up, was a TV Guide home.  My aunt bought it every week from the checkout rack at Waldbaums.  If I didn't see it on top of her Ethan Allen coffee table all the time, I might have doubted I was home.  It was in the early 1970s that my eyes, aged five, six, seven, began to recognize the glowing box in the living room, and the offerings I liked.  The Guide was somehow an inseparable supplement.  Even if I wasn't yet reading it.

In time, though, I was.  I was one of those egg-headed, nerd-cliche early readers.  Parents love and celebrate those kinds of kids.  Other kids usually sneer and threaten them.  When I wasn't being sneered at and threatened, or buried in homework, I was perusing the Guide.   

While my relationship with TV Guide began largely with the quest for a command over the forecast of any important movies I longed to catch, the listings alone were an exotic voyage.  Not only did they include the full VHF assortment (all six channels!) and various UHF's you couldn't see (I certainly couldn't with those old UHF twister dials), but also present were inverse-colored channel designations for those in the nearest broadcast state, in our case, Connecticut.  While reportedly, some in the far reaches of New York, New Jersey or Long Island could in fact pick these stations up on their TV, no such offering existed in the deep of Queens.  This meant that if A Hard Day's Night starring The Beatles was on Channel 8 at four in the afternoon, all you could do was lament not being able to finally see it.  But the presence of all that throughout the weekly Guide made it all the more an experience.  Much like some claim to equate reading picturesque tales of abroad with actual travel, to me TV Guide did the very same.   At age nine I would wonder just what it was like to have what was my usual I Love Lucy re-run at 7pm in my life at 4pm, the way Channel 3 viewers did in Harford.  While to many that may seem insignificant, for those whose lives held TV and it's schedule as their compass, this was life's identifiable shape.

It was in the early 1970s that the magazine would probably reach it's peak of sophisticated distinction.  That was the decade that saw a tidal wave of the urbane population expressing outward snobbery toward the proclaimed "Idiot Box".  In reality, it was little more than what was later the rock-loving crowd loudly disrespecting Disco.  To be accurate, the ubiquitious joke on the whole thing resided in the fact that most of these TV-attacking snobs somehow always knew what was happening on The Young And The Restless, or who was on the Cavett show the other night.  If they were questioned about this mysterious knowledge, there was always a ready excuse, such as, "I was at my sister's house....she's always got the damn thing on..."

TV Guide however, knew of this denial in the dichotomy.  To capture what was a more intelligent population, the magazine devoted most of its article and editorial space to the debate and critique of the medium, by some pretty austere writers like Richard Doan, Edith Efron, and weekly review sections by Cleveland Amory and Judith Crist.  No one was going to show more unbiased critique of The Box than TV Guide.  And what could be more honest than doing so in a booklet full of TV listings..?  In the same way that Norman Lear's All In The Family found its wild popularity in the audience's ability to see itself in a full-length mirror, TV Guide was America's way of justifying a guilty pleasure that would help us realize wasn't quite so guilty.  Could a magazine serving up original writings by such occasional contributors as Arnold Toynbee or Isaac Asimov, and original cover artwork by Al Hirschfeld possibly be in advocacy of anything bad..?

It was during that historic Vietnam War-Watergate period, a time when my folks paid a little more attention to offerings like The New York Times Magazine and the Saturday Review, that TV Guide was probably something of a literary contender.  In more recent years, as my charcoal temples have lightened, I've come to absorb more and more the subject articles amidst my cultivated library of 1970s TV Guide editions.  It wasn't just for movie hunting. 

The deep dive into those editions and their articulate scriptures allow this former child to live vicariously in a time fifty years prior, perhaps among the adults, Back To The Future-style.  In the 1970s, times weren't good.  Everyone was hit by inflation, crime and uitility strikes in a way still unknown to many today.  My folks were raised by those who survived The Great Depression.  And to leaf through a TV Guide replete with listings for ABA Basketball, Star Trek re-runs and Cannon at 9pm, just as my uncle watched it each week, I'm made aware of what kept our republic quite so grounded and unified in it's most precarious time:  Television.

Perhaps though,  the greatest gift one could glean from one or more vintage editions would have to be that of personal nostalgia.  If fond memories and TV were a common connection in your life, there's a good chance that the TV Guide from your particular city on that particular date remains one of your prized possesions.  I've one or more such Guides, and for those like myself, there is no more comforting, warmer blanket in an oft-tepid world.  If an unforgettably miserable night in your childhood is one for which you maintain that evening's TV Guide, you just might take comfort in perusing those listings now, with the greater awareness that a night is just a night, with a Tony Orlando & Dawn hour you looked at while worrying about something else.  Much like the sun, moon or weather each day, so there was television.   TV Guide reminded us of that.

I've nurtured my nostalgia through more than one publication, like editions of Archie Comics, MAD Magazine, and preserved vintage electronics store catalogs.  TV Guide however was like a homing device.  The very listings at 11pm for "News" on all local channels was kind of a visual equilibrium.  If I wasn't in bed asleep by that hour back then, I knew something was very wrong.

When the mediascape widened just enough with no point of return to anything minimal, the makers of the magazine keenly knew when to hang it up.  From age eleven I can recall the alienated beginnings of Pay-TV listings making their way prominently into the Guide.  Just one more inclusion I could only read about but not see.  Twenty-five years later, the so-called Box would be an anarchy of over several hundred channels, more that even Fred Silverman may have predicted decades back.  No weekly journal could conceivably document all of it.  The era of TV Guide was well over.

But what makes the second-hand bookstore such a draw in the world..? Surely one could find nearly any literature relevant or necessary over the web today.  The reason is that demand for the material, in a nutritionally dense virtual world.  To pick up that published work bearing a pub date of 1978 is, almost regardless of content, a voyage to another time, a parallel universe.  So it is and more with the preserved back issues of TV Guide.

My childhood fascination with the pop cultures that preceded me were aided and tour-guided certainly enough by my earliest discovery of the Guide's beginnings.  I must have been eleven years old when the world around me was absorbed with Star Wars.  School was all about King Tut and the New World Explorations.  I couldn't get into any of it.   I was busy reading and watching any documentaries out there on the Golden Age of Television, and it's earliest 1950s beginnings.   There was actually a lot of that stuff floating around back then, and I lapped up as much as I could.  And whatever the shows and books didn't present, there was the genuine article:  Rare editions of TV Guide.   To me, they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. None of my folks would ever come to understand of course why this eleven year old was buried in an old 1959 TV Guide he bought for six bucks at Mike's Comic Hut.  But I did.

To peruse that journal was to visit the very world David Halberstam would later write about in The Fifties.  It was an artifact of a time we would never see again.   Decades later, into the next century, the shape of the medium itself, and the population TV Guide long serviced would be an element of the society we'd never quite see again.  For a good many of us, the young curmudgeons unimpressed by the new personal technologies and trends, our compass remains on those previously printed grounds.   And we're not ashamed to admit it.

Much like anything else it ripped unapologetically, the creators of Seinfeld at some point took comic aim at TV Guide collectors.  What those creators chose not to acknowledge was that there were even, during the height of the show's wild fame, a good many contemporary people that did not know what Seinfeld was.  But if you were a Seinfeld enthusiast, you probably recall observing its Thursday night listing in TV Guide.  

It's those of us by whom our best memories are measured by the Guide's inner listings over the decades that are loyal friends to the Facebook pages administrated by those benevolant original-page scanners, those who provide that nostalgic comfort to like souls and the historically-inclined.  With similar types devoted to the uploading of obscure and valuable old TV broadcasts on line, it's not so impossible to suddenly match a found TV Guide excerpt with an actual hour of that stuff.  One just might be able, for a few moments, to live virtually, in a world once purely material.  

The Saturday Review, it ain't.

Amidst all the other published fact-filled journeys of our life's once-iconic structures, there is unquestionably more than ample space on the bookshelves and order sites for a studied history of TV Guide, it's founding, it's sales growth throughout late 1900s economy-decimated America, and it's slow and polite decline.  But in spite of my life's notable craving for such non-fiction literary adventures, I've somehow no appetite for that when it comes to the Guide.  Rather, I'm more than content to adopt my intimate recollections of those inner pages as my very own.  No need for advanced analysis or deeper observation.  To some extent, it's art.  And if you have to explain or define art, as Groucho Marx proclaimed in Horse Feathers, "....I'm finishing this ride with the duck".

I remember the first time I caught that film as a small boy, with my mom on a Sunday afternoon.  I still recall it fondly from time to time.  I just happen to own that TV Guide.

Noah F.

When Dying Was Hard...

 

An older gentleman, a kindly neighbor of mine whom I'll encounter frequently, confounds me.  He is a fellow taller and somewhat stouter than my humble frame.  He is endowed with a diaphragm that sends his voice blocks further than mine. He's also notable for a tendency for something I've long been incapable of.  He can laugh his ass off at length.

There are a good many who at worst may find such a trait just slightly annoying.  At some point in time, I might have myself.  But in fact I don't, really.  I've come to look upon this wise fellow with great awe. If anything, any annoyance on my part is generated by a genuine envy.  I see this man double over in giggles at the slightest, most foolish little joke, and I don't see a man well beyond my middle years.  I see the eleven-year old boy I was in this same province over forty years ago.

Not since my pre-adolescent years can I recall such a steady run of predictable non-stop laughter.  As a child, perhaps through to my late teens, I can well recall occasions of heavy laughter.  My home and family were the source of plenty of well-meant laughter and humor, when things weren't occasionally miserable.  You know, the usual domestic anthropological environment.  I was a pretty good childhood giggler.  My mother was known to crack up riotously, amidst her depressive cascades.   She held fast to the concept of laughter and humor not as some frivolous enjoyment, but as a desperate life force.  She knew it's value, and never took it for granted.

I was too small to understand such science, but I sure knew how to laugh when a laugh came my way.  And I needed it.  Daily life as a child was not a welcome environment.  I was much the quiet, scorned outcast, the Charlie Brown no one wanted in their circle.  I never really made the effort to relate to the interests of the other kids, since they weren't about to show me too much respect, anyway.  They were all absorbed with sports, Star Wars, and KISS.  I was way more content with old Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan albums, Golden Age Of Television anthologies and the hand-creation of designed model Rock-Ola jukeboxes out of old cardboard boxes.  Not bad for a ten-year old.  It beat the isolation of a world I couldn't live within too well.

This didn't make the pending transition to middle school any easier.  Particularly in view of the self-generated letdown I'd faced.   I'd been taken on a tour the year prior to see where my classmates and I were headed.  I saw the workings of a very mature looking interior.  Individual old-style desks, wooden floors, something akin very much to a Rockwell portrait.  I'd envisioned a way more sophisticated proscenium, much like an episode of Happy Days.  I wanted an argyle sweater.  Never mind the fact that this was the vulgar late 1970s.  My own world was the one I chose to live in.

Trouble is, that biosphere didn't do too well within the world we had.  Shortly after my arrival into the seventh grade, I was introduced to something more closely resembling Scared Straight.  I didn't know if I'd make it in this place.  It was during this ominous time that I found myself in the frequent company of an odd classmate named Alan.  We may have bore some kind of physical resemblance, though I was certainly a visible Felix to his haphazard Oscar.  I sported an unmanageable head of Beatlemania hair, while his was a scurry rats' nest.   He marched around in what looked like more than one layer of slept-in polo shirts, and rather than a trendy knap sack, he carried his notebook and papers all scrumpled in a flimsy convenience-store plastic bag.  There was something oddly comical about him. The only thing that made it less odd and more comical was Alan's personality.  It was a public confirmation on his part that his appearance and persona was to be simply laughed at and not questioned.  For a boy of twelve, just a few months older than I, this kid had a bizarre sophistication in his grasp of humor.  Probably not unlike an entertainer such as Robin Williams at a young age, this kid had serious comedy chops. He'd adopted the character of TV's notorious Archie Bunker as his own, and in an almost Hal Holbrook-like fashion, brought the character to life on the spot, bursting not only into well-known phrases from All In The Family, but projecting his own thoughts and reactions into the character in classic theatrical improv fashion.  I found Alan stunning, in a way none of our peers did.  I also found him outrageously hilarious.

I'd grown up on All In The Family myself, and thrived on it's humor.  Now I was an exclusive audience to an odd kid who sought me out.  We'd first gotten to know one another through simply a series of odd encounters, as often happens in school.  In short time though, two friendless kids shared an unspoken alliance.

In short, the attraction to Alan was laughter.  The kid's brilliance cracked me the hell up no matter what day or time it was.   I could be heading into a fatal math test and double over in stitches from his exquisite Bunker-esque outbursts. He absorbed the character the way Dick Van Dyke was known to absorb Stan Laurel.  It was on any level fascinating. 

Each morning Alan would expect me over in our corner of the schoolyard.  I'd have it no other way.  Our meetings to start the day were critical.  For the first time in my life, weekday mornings were something to look forward to.  I didn't know if I'd ever have this kind of blessed existence ever again.  So I wasn't about to take it for granted now.  

Our shared iconoclasm amidst a mostly square student body bore no intimidation on me, certainly.  As Peg on a later episode of Married With Children explained it to Marcy with regard to sex, "When Peggy Bundy is getting it regularly, we go with the flow.."  That was generally me with this.  

And there was just one reason:  The hard laughter never stopped.  I never forced a laugh.  Not once.  I stifled too many.  There was indeed an entire school year during which I basked in the guiltiest pleasure of genuine, uncontrollable laughter nearly every minute.

Not surprisingly, it had to end.  One day, after an unwelcome encounter with some terrorist bullies, a frustrated Alan took to excoriating me for my lack of aggressive defense.  I could easily have accused him of the same, but his whole form of semi-theatrical dialectics prevented any kind of conversation.  It was then, eight months into our friendly association that I began to recognize a few troublesome things about Alan.

I'd already met his mother, who would come to retrieve him after school.  A fairly young woman, she appeared well older, and worn.  She bore a personality almost louder and theatrically more comical than her son's. But not quite as funny as slightly dubious.  I didn't know too much about mental health at age twelve, but I knew something wasn't quite right about these folks.

My instincts were not wrong.  Yet this boy remained functional enough to attend public school.  Until he wasn't quite up to it.  Turned out, he would transfer after that year to some sort of privatized school for challenged youngsters.  I was told little about it in depth, but it was clearly a behavioral issue.

The prior spring, Alan abruptly decided I was the ineffective enemy to his resolve to turn vigilante of sorts.  At his initiation, we parted ways at term's end.  After a mostly lonely summer, betrayed and frustrated, I was met in the fall by a very different looking Alan.  He took the liberty of approaching me with kind of an impatient arrogance.  He said he wanted to introduce me to a friend of his.  That friend in the schoolyard was Isaac, the leader of the bully team that threatened us months before. Alan had decided to join up with the ruling party.  Fortunately, he was unable to take himself quite so seriously.  After his unceremonious transfer out of our school shortly thereafter, he phoned me and insisted we get together on a Saturday.  His just-as-riotous mom joined us and would escort us on a voyage through Chinatown and lower Manhattan, amidst some of the Big Apple's deepest seeds of the year 1980. It was not as bizarre as it was drop-dead hysterical.  Between their exchanges and those I shared with Alan, I fell behind in our march, crippled with laughter.   The precious gift was back in my life, albeit once a week.  On tour.

My mom never flinched at my desire for these frequent outings. In fact, she knew how critical they were.  She somehow knew, after meeting Alan's mom that where a higher intelligence lived, visible traits were not so much something to be fearful of.  And there wasn't.  We roamed all over the city in it's worst time, and made out unscathed.  A time indeed.  I'd get home on a Saturday evening still wracked with laughter over lines I couldn't even remember.  I'd share the ones I could with my Mom, who roared with me.

It didn't stay that way.  The shelf life was predictably limited.  Alan was always kind of a wit, but the dark side of him took over. Within a couple of years he would become just more aggressive, sometimes violent.  We've all read stories of how a semi-psychotic Sid Caesar once shook his young writer Mel Brooks outside a high-rise window.  It's not so funny when you're the comedian's punching bag.  That's what I became.

In my teens, my mother implored me to disassociate with him.  I wasn't about to, and frankly neither was Alan. Our relationship become only more co-dependent despite the violence.  But when the humor began to fade and an dangerous menacing took over, our late teens saw the parting of the ways for good.  I had bigger problems around that time and didn't care.  Apparently neither did he.

The only setback would remain the one I did not really take note of at the time.  That laughter fountain was gone from my life.  I was ushered into a quieter, more reserved existence, and perhaps a more solemn one.  It would for various reasons border on depression at times, but I also grew into an expansion of thought.  Nothing unusual for a nineteen-year old.

Going forward, I'd make new and valuable friends, and there were certainly some pockets of laughter on occasion.  But nothing as powerful as I'd known with Alan.  Not before and never since.  I never would know what became of Alan, nor would I ever bear any interest.  

It was maybe twenty years ago.  I'd sought out therapy for the first time in a misguided quest to combat a genuine first-time encounter with a clinical depression, something I never thought my brilliantly witty, comic mind would ever allow.  As I walked home from my ambivalent session, I passed a curiously familiar figure, an elderly looking woman whose expression I insisted I knew from somewhere.  Blocks past, I realized who that garbage-clutching vagrant was.  It was Alan's mother.  Of all the things I chose to forcefully block from my mind that afternoon in an effort to consciously and therapeutically act "as if", that was one of them.

And to this day, in the remains of what was once the best, limited time of my life to date, amidst every blessing I maintain to this day, I can only remain in gazing awe of that elder man, and those men and women like him, who can do so effortlessly that which I've yet to learn.  I knew not of it's value until long after it was gone.  If I can't get it back, maybe I'll be blessed enough to be with those who help me fondly remember when it was there.

N.F