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06.28.01
Thursday

After my close encounter of the television kind last night, I had a more contemplative television experience today at the Museum of Television and Radio after work. In a classical church-like building on 52nd Street, a couple blocks from Rockefeller Center, the museum resides in posh comfort, with lush carpets, sleek black chairs, and digital video screens. In addition to a gallery (currently displaying doodles of Jim Henson), the museum mostly consists of screening rooms, constantly showing selections plucked from the vast library, and a computer room where you can search and queue up programs to watch at private consoles with headphones.

I began in one of the screening rooms, which was rolling a reel of TV commercials from the 50s through the 80s. This was like watching culture evolve in fast forward. What strikes you about the nascent days of TV ads, the 50s, is the complexity – a spot for Comet is a brief chemistry lesson – paired with the plastic-smiled ridiculousness: a chorus coos, “She likes people/People like her/People who like people use Dial!” (Huh?) There are the anachronisms, too: An ad recommends “cool, refreshing” Kool cigarettes, which are “clean as fresh air.” Through the 60s and 70s the ads get more movie-like, with odd mini-skits and even a knight on a white horse – the Ajax Rider – who gallops down the street jousting people doing their gardening, and in what looks to be a very painful jolt, they are zapped into cleanliness.  Among the more elaborate: a line of showgirls choreographs a whole spot in front of a three-story neon sign, for a product I can’t remember the name of (so much for that tactic). 

I went up to the library search room to hunt around the place’s holdings, and found four to queue up: “The CBS News with Walter Cronkite” from 1962, the 1982 debut of “The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather,” the best of Saturday Night Live 1979, and, appropriate given Carol O’Connor’s passing this week, the pilot of “All in the Family.”

I began with Cronkite, who, in contrast to today’s slick throne rooms for anchor desks, was perched unceremoniously at a wooden desk to the side of the CBS newsroom. The newscast consisted almost entirely of Cronkite and his crew of reporters reading reports into the camera, their heads bobbing down to check their place every couple of lines. So when Cronkite threw it to Roger Mudd in Washington, there was Mudd in front of a blank wall, reading what happened that day. Of course, when you consider today’s alternative, which is mostly just showing politicians waving before getting into limos while the voiceover says how poorly they’re doing in the polls, you wonder how much progress has been made. 

By Rather’s time, it had been spiffed up a bit, but it was still rudimentary. Rather, looking boyish, sitting stiffly and staring blankly into the camera while delivering his terse transitions, went against what I had read about him at the time – that he was seen as too much of a hard-nosed reporter to fill in for “Uncle Walter.” Here, he actually seemed slightly more friendly, though without the imperial authority with which Cronkite reigned supreme.

An awkward transition to “All in the Family,” which I don’t think I’d ever seen before. What a fascinating cultural artifact. Within the first two minutes, a black character asks Rob Reiner’s character, Mike, “So what’s new on campus with all you angry white social Democrats?” I mean, can you imagine hearing that on a sit-com today? 

Minutes later, dinner inevitably disintegrates into more political crossfire. Indefatigably patient Edith implores to cantankerous Archie, “Why do you fight it? The world’s changing.”  Archie howls at Mike, "I didn’t think you’d wind up in college learning how to be a subversive!” 

Mike: “I just think we should make sure black and Mexican Americans get their share of the American dream!” Gloria swoons at this exclamation, but Archie replies, “Let them get out there and hustle for it like I did.” Mike asks in disbelief, “You think they have fair shot?” “More,” Archie barks back, “They’ve got more. I didn’t have a million people marching and protesting to get me my job.” With impeccable timing, Edith observes, “No, your uncle got it for you.” I erupted, to my embarrassment in the silent screening room.

Suddenly I longed for television to be that good, that timely and relevant, again. Since then, the sit-com has been pacified by the proper Cosby Show, sentimentalized by the inane Full House, reduced to manly yuks with Home Improvement, and gone farther into the bedroom than we ever cared to go with Sex and the City, to the point where now Archie and Mike’s raw back-and-forth is outdated. Perhaps such exchanges were rivaled on Seinfeld, but witty as they were, they were still smothered in the empty nihilism of the show – politics were not a subject for passion. The major modern equivalent of public discourse truly being the material for prime time is The West Wing, with its wonk-friendly breakdown of census sampling and the like, but here the end result is airbrushed heroes that fit the soaring soundtrack, not ribald hilarity. 

Where have you gone, Archie Bunker? 

06.27.01
Wednesday

Bought my ticket for the NBA Draft at Madison Square Garden and trekked to the back of the line, which stretched a half mile, around the corner down 34th Street, before they let anyone in.  The draft was actually at the MSG theater, since the Garden itself was housing a Depeche Mode concert (are they still around?) 

In the smaller theater, everyone had a decent view of the stage and the TNT set in front of it. So it was the first time I got to see Charles Barkley, his bald brown head signaling his presence from far away, as he was one of the TNT analysts along with former coach Rick Pitino.

The TNT show, with its audio pumped to speakers for the benefit of the audience, opened with a roundtable on the pertinent issue of the night: high schoolers going pro. Analyst Kenny Smith wasted no time jumping in: “People say they should go to college to get a good job. Isn’t the NBA a pretty good job?” But Barkley and Pitino lectured the players as though they weren’t a few dozen yards away, saying they weren’t ready, they would take a while to develop, they should go to college. The audience had applauded Smith, but it more heartily cheered Duke graduate Shane Battier when he said in a live interview, “It may sound archaic, but I actually enjoyed my time in college.”

The first pick was who the pregame experts had predicted: high schooler Kwame Brown, who, when he rose and extended his 6’11” frame, looked like a skylift rising to repair phone wires. He was handed a black Washington Wizards cap and smothered commissioner David Stern, tiny by comparison, in an awkward hug. He strode up the side of the theater, closer to where I was sitting, getting sporadic cheers from the nearest sections of the crowd, and made his way to the radio desks for interviews. 

Team president Michael Jordan was put on a live satellite feed from D.C. to brag about his pick (though later reports would say he was trying to trade it up to a half hour before the draft started). It led to a memorable exchange with his friend and rumored future teammate, Barkley, and the crowd roared at the two’s taunts. Barkley: “I may not be interested [in playing for you] until you up the ante.” Jordan: “I just got a great player. I don’t need another one.” And so on, back and forth. By the time of the second pick, Stern took the podium saying, “I’d like to interrupt the Charles and Michael show…”

Later, the crowd, inexplicably (though with apparently unused energy since the hometown Knicks didn’t have a first round pick for them to boo) resoundingly booed analyst Peter Vescey when he said the Knicks didn’t have the salary cap room to bring in star free agent Chris Webber. Vescey seemed apologetic in the face of the response, which quickly turned to the chant, “Vescey sucks!” Said Stern later at the mike: “I’ve done 18 of these and this is the most intense crowd I’ve ever seen.”

When it was Battier’s turn to take to the stage and stride up to the radio set (rather late for such an accomplished college player, going at pick number six) I muscled my way through the fans and jostling security guards in the aisle and found myself about to be run over by the mammoth Battier himself. He looked tall and skinny in his long “camel-colored” suit (as it would be described in the papers – almost all the top picks wore this color), and as his hands were accepting the high fives of fans in the seats, I reached up and meekly slapped his right palm. Being born at the Duke medical center, a few three-pointers away from fabled Cameron Indoor Stadium, it was something of a religious experience.

06.26.01
Tuesday

Woke up early to travel down to Wall Street in the Financial District. What surprised me was how narrow the streets were and how imposing the buildings crowding them, obstructing the early morning sun. Wall Street is only wide enough for one car to pass at some points. It’s an allusion to the street’s pre-car history, which is extensive; in fact, the street is an original northern border of the city, back when it bumped up against country dwellings, an impossible thought in Manhattan today. Speaking of that era, I was pleased to have no trouble locating the old Federal Hall, with its stone steps and pillars, the site of George Washington’s inauguration (New York was the nation’s capital for one year). It was unmistakable thanks to a larger-than-life dark brown statue of our first president in his inaugural pose, hand outstretched on an imaginary Bible, oddly plunked down on the steps where he famously stood. 

Diagonal to that landmark is another one, scrunched in among all the buildings, framed by ribbon-thin cross streets: the mecca of mammon, a gala of greed, the New York Stock Exchange. I was hoping to get a look from the observation area inside, but there was a long line and I had to get to work. I’ll get there soon. (But without a wad of dollar bills – one of my favorite stories in the Abbie Hoffman biography I read this semester was when he dropped one dollar bills, confetti-like, from the observation area onto the floor and watched the traders dive for them, crawling around like pigs at a trough. Soon after, the Stock Exchange glassed off the observation area!)

After work I walked down Seventh Avenue to Madison Square Garden to see if I could buy tickets for tomorrow night’s NBA Draft. Turns out they’ll only go on sale tomorrow. On the way out I surveyed the crowd waiting to get in for the WWF event that night – more swear words on T-shirts per capita than most anywhere else. 

So I was feeling mighty condescending as I walked back up Seventh – I’m not going to pro wrestling, I scoffed, I’m going to the theater! (Sniff.) Problem was, what is 42nd Street, if not also a Vegas-style, sexually simplistic, sequin- and showgirl-lined, plot-deprived display of acrobatics? Granted, there’s actually some art and elegance to 42nd Street, and unlike the creatine creatures of wrestling, tap-dancing takes exquisite dexterity and laborious grace. 

Put simply, 42nd Street was absolutely dazzling. It would be hard to find another show with such visual volume, one that paints the stage as fully as this one, with its tap-dancing showgirls decked out in bursts of color, their legs churning like blenders as they grin (or is it grimace?) with the giddiness of show business. On the two numbers when the entire ensemble wears glittering gold and silver outfits and they crank up the brightest lights they have, it hurts the eyes, even as (or therefore?) it pleases. The 30s-era setting, decorated by mobsters, train stations and other pre-war throwbacks transports you back to the heyday of this king of cities – or at least when it was fighting to have a heyday to drown out the Depression. 

So there is no other show to so fill me with the glamorous realization that I am in New York City: this quintessential Broadway musical, the show whose reflexive name means New York. And yet, it is painfully obvious that this is a gilded stage, portraying a gilded age. The glitz is so shallow, the happy faces so plastic, the dialogue so obligatory, the seduction so artless and the romance so soul-less that the show feels plains-flat when not inflated by the dazzle. It is thus the forerunner to practically every Disney movie ever made, in which genuine, complex emotion is amputated, thinned, or relegated to a peripheral prop. Somehow, passion – like the star in the story who goes from spotlight to wheelchair – is crippled and rendered unable to perform. (The show is self-satirizing, though few seem to notice, when the star of the show-within-the-show belts out, “Who needs a plot? You just want to see dames!”

And thus 42nd Street is so American, the ultimate American show. It exists solely to celebrate itself.  It stubbornly thumbs its nose at the Depression: only in America would people, in capitalism’s darkest hour, look to capital as salvation (“We’re in the money!”). In Vegas-like gaudiness, erudite-lite, it wishes the roaring 20s will go on forever, refusing to accept reality when the 30s crash the party. Meanwhile, it manages to be as vapid as the song directed to the dancing line: “Keep Young and Beautiful.” 

Dazzling? Yes. Meaningful? No.

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