“Whispers Gettin' Louder...”

“Callin' you out your name...”

I found myself strolling amongst the gathered Netroots throng Friday night along the 6th Street “fun zone” stretch of Downtown Austin, post-a few parties for some of the blogs. There were burnt orange credentials a' swingin' from the necks of reveling progressives from one side of the street to another, but alas—nary an upper-floor water balloon spatter on the ground to be found. “Sigh!”

What could be found was clusters of folks pointedly hashing out this issue and that one. Every once in a while you'd catch a blast of conversation from a group—“But the shit about FISA was...”, or “You don't bring a knife to a gunfight—and when you publicly finance against the right, that's what you're doing!”

I came across some Netroots folks near an open window at Maggie Mae's discussing Jesse Jackson's “microphone malfunction” on Fox, hearing one say “Still, you've gotta feel bad for Jesse...I mean, you know what this makes him look like?

And as if on cue, a Black woman walking by the pub—a local with a crew of fellow revelers and more than likely not a Netroots-er caught the same snip of conversation I did, and she simply blurted out a quick and vicious little epitaph to that empathetic statement.

“Oh, fuck Jesse!”, she spat without missing a stride.

How deeply the knife cuts when wielded so brutally.

It got me to thinking about Jesse in a holistic sense—what he means, what he meant, and what he'll be remembered as. And the results of my pondering are not pretty at all.

I missed the initial showing of the Fox news video and only read Jackson's words. That was for a couple of days. Then, I saw the video and I actually winced on viewing it. What got to me was the bitchy, hater-ific whispering from him and the whole junior high-school way he came across on-camera. For someone supposedly so adept at public discourse and handling himself in the gaze of the media's eye, I was stunned at his unprofessionalism there. I've worked in TV for over 15 years. I've stood before multi-camera set-ups with dangling booms and lavalierres, and the first rule of thumb here is “when in front...punt”. It doesn't matter if you think the cameras and mics are off, or even if you think you KNOW they're off—you ain't in the control room, and you don't know what's going on in there. Someone can ALWAYS hear you, and there's always a chance that something is recording you. Jesse's little “Mean Girls” moment was of course captured forever—that little tilt and hissed remarks to the Smithers-esque clown to his left was embarrassing, and severely damaging to what was left of a frittered-away credibility. Now, in full disclosure, I have over the years been in social settings with Reverend Jackson. Moments where everyone let their hair down, and knowing that, there is a certain expectation of privacy therein. Ratting that shit out is pretty damned foul. But to sit there on a “hot” (meaning fully mic'ed and camera-ed) Fox News soundstage—A FOX FUCKING NEWS SOUNDSTAGE?—and bitch and moan about a...well, let's face it...a rival and and heir—was just dumb. Dumb in the thinking that anything a progressive would say at that place would ever be off-the-record, and doubly dumb in that it revealed something I think many of us thought, but didn't have verification of.

Namely, that there's a LOT of hateration and holleration up in Jesse's dance-er-ree since Obama's run.

And while I respect Jesse like nobody's business for all he's done for folks over the years—his being the burr in Reagan's saddle back in the day, and his ultimately superhuman-humanity towards the downtrodden in society, I also realize he's a somewhat vain man (many up-front leaders are) with a bit of a sense of possessiveness about his place in the firmament in the Civil Rights “sky”.

This kind of self-aggrandizement is nothing new for Black folks of prominence in America—generational tectonic shifts always seem to leave those who came before feeling “dissed”, or “not-properly thanked / acknowledged”. Jesse's mid-eighties presidential runs (One of which I worked on) were landmark events. Turning points in American political history. I still remember the issue of Newsweek with a presidential portrait pose of him on the cover, with the screaming 120 point copy below the pic reading “JESSE?”, playing out an equal mixture of shock, fear, and awe.

But, it was the eighties—a time when a nascent campaign like his could still be easily stifled by the old-school skullduggery of the Atwater-era. There was no internet or alternate media sources for him to use to bypass the spin and smears, and paid-for denigration of his chances. No alternate path to exploit to energize folks with a direct message. And, as proven by his ill-timed, and ill-mindedly infamous “Hymietown” remarks, the man also had an amazing propensity for sometimes saying way too much, too often around those who were too much against him.

He became easy to lampoon, (again, no secondary outlet available for him to control the message.) and worse, he would even aid in people's eventually dismissing him by lampooning himself with sometimes funny, but ultimately prestige diminishing appearances on SNL and the like.

He became a TV pundit fixture and an entire generation has come to know him as that, and NOT the young, idealistic guy who knelt there as MLK's life bled out into his hands on a Memphis balcony. For the easy, steady money one craves in middle age, Jesse sadly opted for a highly metastatic (I don't think he knew how bad it would be) case of irrelevancy.

As the years have worn on, and his place in the activist front lines was superceded by the earnest, but even more flawed Rev. Al Sharpton, I think Jesse became comfortable in his “Old lion who can still occasionally let loose a fearsome roar” status as paterfamila to all things Black and political.

But as is always the case—when MLK's generation supplanted the staid Roy Wilkins era of Civil Rights warriors, or when Stokeley Carmichael's more militant folk, stepped up (and sometimes ON the heels and toes of) and walked right by King's now deemed staid generation of activists, or when a young Charlie Rangel snatched a congressional district and a lifetime's worth of power from an older, established giant like Adam Clayton Powell Jr., THERE IS ALWAYS A BITTERNESS FROM THE PREVIOUS LEADERS WHO ARE SUPERCEDED.

It's simple human nature—and Obama's blistering ascent to pinnacles Jesse can only dream of, while not needing him for much of anything publicly, and clearly very little pre-run consultation privately has got to rankle him. It's a long, LONG time since that Newsweek cover for Jesse. In the last six months I've seen Obama on the cover of GQ, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Time, Newsweek, The Economist and every damn magazine outside of “OK!”. He was a “fringe” candidate up until ONE primary—Iowa—and from then on, he was the tone-setting major player, impossible to relegate to the background or dismiss like Jesse eventually was. Obama was Jesse 2.0. No beta, and a skip over a 1.0 version of the “Black Candidate Software” update. The “bugs” as they were, were worked out between the releases of “JesseWare” and “iObama”. And I seriously doubt Jesse likes being described in that way, but the truth is the truth. The other problem is that Jesse doesn't seem to realize that that IS the truth, and there's a palpable anger there in him over the way people consider his legacy like some ancient version of Windows we all thought was “the shiznit” back in the day, but laugh about in terms of usefulness now.

Add in Jesse's own self-inflicted wounds post-Hymietown that have so damaged him, like his funniness with Operation: PUSH money in later years, (not giving him a pass on this, but when a “movement” is how you pay the bills and live, stuff always has a chance to get financially dicey down the road a piece) and worst of all, his unfortunate out-of-wedlock fathering of a child outside of his marriage. The ironic thing about this is that Jackson himself spent years challenging Black fathers to step up, much the way Obama did. (Bill Cosby's a different story—he's been a known cockhound for decades, and his bitching about poor Black folks' excesses is as much a “bourgie” class issue as it is a dodge for his own creepy behaviors. He's tired of his rich White buddies in high places asking him 'what's the problem with poor Black folks?', and instead of noting his part in 'pulling the ladder up' and walking away, he'd rather rag his dusky lessers as lazy laggards who are prone to destructive excesses. 'Cause only the fully evolved among us offer up un-asked for Ny-Quil-adas to comely and unsuspecting female visitors. Ugh.) Jesse's credibility on those matters has been so tarnished to where it's cost him a considerable amount of his status in “The Black Community”—especially with women...of whom many now perceive him as a “dog”.

Then, here comes Barack Obama. Younger. Without the baggage. Not over-exposed. A high-end orator as well, AND actually elected to public office at least twice—something Jesse, for all his time and gravitas could never do. Playing the media better, faster and stronger. And worst of all for Jesse, Obama has also emerged as a pulpit arbiter—in fact, the pulpit arbiter heir apparent to Jesse's position there. Folks saw that when Obama was broaching this self-same touchy parenting issue to thunderous applause before Black churches (and even in some sniffy media circles)—like at his breakthrough Birmingham Sunday speech earlier this year. A torch was passed...and Jesse was the last one to know about it. His ego was probably bruised when he found out about it—the hard way...

“Two decades ago, my father ran for president, calling on South Carolina and the nation to 'keep hope alive.' Today, Barack Obama has taken up the torch," (Jesse) Jackson Jr. says in the ad, which will air on 36 gospel and R&B radio stations across the state.

Ouch. Papa J's clearly not ready to cede a bit of the stage, but the spotlight sadly has already swung past him a ways.

It's a status dance Black America's leaders have done since time immemorial. I don't actually Blame Jesse. I feel bad for him. And I'm certain HE feels bad too—not just about his alleged damage to the nominee (alleged because ironically enough, Jesse's screw-ups have so damaged him that a diss from him on Obama potentially makes Obama look better in many folks' eyes), but also the public playing out of his little petty bit of turf-marking via verbal pissing.

And then I go back to that woman sashaying down 6th Street with her friends. Unbidden. Unprompted. Call and response.

“I feel bad for Jesse.”

“Oh, Fuck Jesse!”

The parties went on in the streets that night.

I saw a plastic cup on the ground. Dented. Filmy. A trickle of suds running from its mouth.

And kicked to the curb.

Alas and alack.

There's more...

Television For Dummies

This Graphic Is NOT Photoshoped...And That Is A Goddamned Shame.

It was around twenty-four years ago when I found I could no longer read “Ebony” magazine. This was not a small change in my African American life as cold-turkeying so ubiquitous a cultural signifier as “Ebony” was not something I did lightly. Every barber shop I patronized, every doctor's office I waited in, and relative's home I found myself sitting before a coffee table at had a small stack of “Black America's 'Life' Magazine” sitting there asking to be read.

What did it for me? It was a half-assed music review published in their “arts and culture” section. The subject? A Duke Ellington compilation wherein the “author” exposed himself as a sad. blithering idiot. The piece in its dealing with Ellington tried to seem oh-so-Jazz-literate with anecdotal mentions of other Jazzmenof note, and the name of the legendary Charles Mingus was tossed into the review. I say tossed in because it was as if it was a funky undergarment tossed from across a room into a hamper-full of soiled clothes. Mingus...was described in the piece...as a giant of the trombone. A giant of the Goddamned trombone? Jazz' inarguable master of the bass gets twisted as a trombone wizard! I thought I was hallucinating. How in the holy hell could America's pre-eminent Black magazine get a fact like that wrong?

Imagine Rolling Stone screwing up and dubbing Led Zepellin's Jimmy Page in an article as Rock's “giant of the accordion”, or The Who's Keith Moon as a “cowbell colossus” (No one needs that much cowbell...). You'd ultimately lose faith in any journal that would make so grievous, and so cyanotically stupid an error. I stopped reading Ebony right after they let the Mingus gaffe get through. If I couldn't trust them on basic history, I damn sure couldn't trust them on anything else—be the something as trifling as the veracity of their “Top 25 Bachelorettes” credentials, or whether Freddie Jackson's 1.1 million dollar rec room had a rear-projection or a plasma screen TV in it—much less anything of historical import. They had jumped the shark—badly—and landed square in Jabberjaw's mouth with that careless piece of “journalism”. I never looked back.

Flash forward to April of 2008, and a major broadcast news network runs a story, a mocking report ridiculing a party's inability to get a hand on historical source material for a story when they themselves—Fox News—goof so badly covering said story that it goes beyond a mere “Bed Shit” and moves to being the dreaded and awe-inspiring “Duplex Shit”, where the poop is so toxically stupid that it eats through the bedding, the boxspring and then the floor to the floor below.

Via Digby and Crooks & Liars:

Turns out the Rhodes Scholars over at “Fox and Friends” think Abraham Lincoln debated Frederick Douglass in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Of course it was Stephen Douglas. Something tells me Frederick would have had a tough time winning a Senate seat back then. Just a thought.

------------------------------------------

“Rather than spending time mocking their intern, Clayton might have recognized that was Frederick Douglass, the 19th-century African abolitionist leader who certainly wasn’t running for any Senate seat.”

The graphic atop this post is from Dan Abram's “Verdict” show's covering his competition's stupidity. The C&L link has the actual brain-atrophying video as proof.

Here is a picture of the man who Lincoln actually debated—the considerably-less “melanated” Illinois politician Stephen A. Douglas.

Now, in an alternate universe where logic and common sense carry weight, Fox's rank ass-hattery in reporting on a key event in American political history would turn them into a laughingstock for the ages, and drive listeners away out of sheer embarrassment at being identified as viewers. But this isn't that universe, folks, and the network's viewer base—and I don't care who this offends in my saying it—breathes, eats, and sweats stupid 24/7-365.

So the next time someone...anyone tries to fob off that three-lettered conglomeration of half-wits and drooling water-heads as anything resembling a news organization, you make sure to point 'em to this site's, Digby's or C&L's links on this story. Odds are the fool will mutter something defensive like, “Well...didn't Frederick Douglass want to debate Lincoln, too? Huh?” But say it anyway. And say it to every person who ever mentions FOX, positively or negatively. It's as emblematic of what their place is all about as Bill O'Reilly's “falafel” and should be hung around their neck just as roughly and with as much derision.

And we shall dub them henceforth, “The Anti-History Channel”.

I mean, who signs off on shit over there at water-on-the-brain central? Not just high-falutin' historical background stuff, but simple, common things you'd...I dunno, accidentally absorb in between snores in first-period history or civics class?

It doesn't matter really though, does it? The “News” appellation after the word “Fox” is just there for shits and giggles, isn't it? Like the prefix “Dr.” in front of ol' glory-gobbling Phil's name, right? It's a joke. A silly, billion dollar-billing, policy-shaping, media megalopolis of a joke.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Much like the following graphics depicting additional possible Fox News research department/fact-check screw-ups. If they can fuck up Lincoln-Douglas, it wouldn't surprise me for a second that they could screw up these historical touchpoints.

Historical touchpoints. like..

...say, the prosecution, conviction and subsequent execution of alleged cold-war espionagers Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. One could easily see the brilliantines over there smirking and winging it on that well-known, easy-to-research story—and making a gaffe like this:



Scoff if you will. This is who you're dealing with. Duh. Drool.

Hey, they could do a breathless election-juicing follow-up on The Axis of Evil. How could they screw that up?

Ask a stupid question...



I should really stop this. Irony is dead, and one of these'll actually happen. Then Lord Cthulhu will descend from the heavens and crush the earth in his sinewy tentacles just to put the universe back in order...or something like that.

And to stop them from ever “reporting” on something as seminal to American history as the Revolutionary War's famed “Battle of Bunker Hill”.



“We Distort. You Deride.”

There's more...

Go Danica Go!

Danica Patrick Wins Indy Japan 300

I remember three years ago watching Danica lead the Indy 500.

So proud of her.

For three years, the pressure built and built.

The New York Times

Sunday in Motegi, Japan, [...] Patrick, now 26, became the first woman to win an Indy car race. She defeated the two-time Indy 500 winner Hélio Castroneves by nearly six seconds in the Indy Japan 300.

“I feel way too young to be giving life advice, but this is a great platform to have,” Patrick said Sunday night in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where she had landed after a virtually sleepless flight from Japan. “This reaches outside racing. This is about finding something you love to do, and following through with it.”

There was a time when Patrick could not have competed in Sunday’s race. A few years before Janet Guthrie, an aerospace engineer and road racer, became the first woman to qualify for the Indy 500 in 1977, women were not allowed in the press box, the garage area or the pits.

As Guthrie wrote in “Life at Full Throttle,” an account of her career in racing, women were dismissed as lacking the strength, endurance and emotional stability to compete against men. Even a driver with Guthrie’s credentials as a road racer was seen as dangerous.

“A woman might be a reporter, a photographer, a timer/scorer, she might own the race car — but she couldn’t get near it at any time for any reason,” Guthrie wrote. “A woman on the track itself was unthinkable.”

On Sunday, Guthrie showed little surprise at Patrick’s victory.

“Anybody who didn’t think she had a chance of winning just hasn’t been paying attention,” Guthrie, 70, said in a telephone interview from her home in Aspen, Colo. “She’s been in the hunt for a long time. It was just a matter of time, as far as I’m concerned.”

An IndyCar Series official said in 2006 that Patrick’s merchandise outsold that of any other driver, 10 to 1. The series said that the name Danica jumped to No. 352 from No. 610 on the list of most popular baby names from 2005 to 2006.

Castroneves had enough fuel to finish the race without making a pit stop, but he had to conserve what little he had. Patrick, who lost the 2005 Indy 500 because she had to stretch her fuel supply, took the lead with two laps left on Sunday and won easily.

“In recognition of Danica’s talents, she did a good job,” Castroneves said in a postrace news conference. “She passed me fair and square. I didn’t have enough fuel, even if I wanted to, to fight with her.”

By the sacred ovaries of Penélopê, wa-fracking-hoo!

Congratulations to Danica and Team Andretti.

There's more...

Feelin' Kinda Sketchy

We Loves The Sketches! We Loves The Sketches!


Jesse's post downpage a piece on IFC's listing and ranking of the “50 Funniest Sketches Ever” hit close to home for me. I've spent the better part of twenty years writing (and performing) sketch comedy for television, the stage and radio. I've been fortunate enough to get to work with some genuinely talented people who ply the trade— like Richard Pryor consigliere Paul Mooney (although he may not have appreciated working with me...but that's a story for another time), Robert Townsend, and an estimable television comedy mentor from NBC's classic “Laugh-In”.

It's a craft I've come to love and respect. I first fell in love with the idea of sketch comedy writing when I was a child and saw the syndicated reruns of “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, and lusted for a job (and a wife) like Rob Petrie's. The second act of the love affair was watching on TV one late night as a pre-teen an old PBS compilation called “Ten From Your Show Of Shows”. It was a revelation. Seeing that run of vintage Sid Caesar / Imogene Coca / Carl Reiner / Howard Morris classics left me speechless in awe—and gut-busting laughter. The timing, the physicality, the perfectly-placed ad-libs (which I managed to catch at that tender age) just left me reeling.

I wanted to do that.

And in short order, “NBC's Saturday Night” and Canada's comedic monster “SCTV” would come down the pike, stoking my inner gag-meister further, along with a newfound appreciation for the high-production value camp and craziness of “The Carol Burnett Show's” set pieces. I was hooked. My brothers and I made up madcap stuff and performed it at home. I fell in with a like-minded clutch of comedy-crazed lunatics in high school and we came up with (I still think, hilarious) sketches every damned day in the lunchroom. (My high-school friend Frank L.'s “The Dr. Zaius Show”, a Johnny Carson-esque talk show hosted by the bombastic simian who would intellectually berate his guests and then have them strung up in nets still makes me laugh when I think about it thirty years later. Plus Frank's dead-on impersonation of Maurice Evans' pompous ape forced to deal with ignorant humans four nights a week with an equally ape-hating sidekicky Paul Lynde—yours truly—just had a surreal quality to it. His Zaius' hilarious viciousness towards “guest” Barry Manilow is something you just had to see...)

We carried that comedic penchant to college and wrote sketches there too. Did a revue in senior year and a couple of years later we were on radio. Nabbed the TV gigs shortly thereafter and the rest is my little gang's own mini-history. But the one thing that never died for us, and me in particular is an absolute LOVE for quality sketch comedy.

In the years hence, I still run with much of that original pack. And the intervening years have refined our eyes and ears to what IS great sketch comedy. The IFC list is decent, boasting about a dozen of the true classics, but it misses the mark with some glaring exclusions (How in God's name do you leave off things like SCTV's “Polynesiantown” and The Godfather”, Your Show of Shows “This Is Your Story” as noted by a commenter downpage in comments, and Saturday Night's creepy “Mr. Death” as portrayed by Christopher Lee, as well as its first generation of short films from Albert Brooks to Tom Schiller's “Java Junkie” and the darkly ironic “Don't Look Back In Anger”) and some if you'll pardon the word, “sketchy” inclusions of pieces that while funny, are not classics.

Thus, this post. It's based on a discussion I've been having for months with myself and a circle of talented writer friends. It's a list of a baker's dozen of what I think are some of the absolute “best” of the genre. What constitutes a “great” sketch? An inspired idea that the entire acting ensemble “buys” totally. Generosity in performance—where everyone gives and takes in the piece giving room to their fellow performer to “breathe” comedically while catching their individual moment to shine. Strong, meaty characters—not gimmicks that the talent can “live in” and have a history built into their inception. Room for absurdity. And I define absurdity as the twisted, natural offshoot of reality. You ramp up the progression of events, instead of going from 1 to 10, go from 1 to 400, with just enough stops in between to maintain a hint of familiarity with reality. Crazy skipping back and forth is just “wackiness” which is cheap and easy. (Of course, if the sketch's premise begins in “high-concept” form—say a “50“ on the scale, humor can be mined from going backwards to normalacy, and then back up past the “50” and beyond.)

A willingness to go for the surreal, a firm grasp on pop culture, a strong, friendly acting ensemble (the original “Not Ready For Prime Time Players” bonded for many weeks before an actual rehearsal ever took place, soaking up each other's timing and personalities), a blending of disparate elements into a gut-busting comedic whole (i.e. SCTV's “Godfather”). Brevity? Not necessarily. If it's good enough to just run, you let it (“Godfather” again and Chappelle's “Rick James”), but shorter bits require a deft hand at the paintbrush knowing when to lift it from the canvas. I'm reminded of an old Simpsons bit where Krusty the Clown is on an episode of SNL and is bombing terribly in a sketch with audible groans from the audience. Krusty looks at the camera and wearily sighs, “It goes on like this for sixteen more minutes”.

But what does it for me is—does it make me laugh? Not just now, but years down the road? Is it timeless? Does it go beyond mere gross-out and “shock” (which too much of modern sketch work does) and hit me high and low, smart and silly? Do the performers go for it and not focus on vanity? Lose themselves in the funny and this sweep me up in the wave? The following list of my personal favorites do all of that and then some. Here then, is my “Holy Grail” of sketch comedy.

1.) Your Show Of Shows “This Is Your Story”—April 1953

This piece is in my mind, the gold standard of TV sketch comedy. Click on the link above to see it in two parts on YouTube and you will catch the amazing Sid Caesar at the height of his considerable comedic powers, along with a pitch-perfect Carl Reiner and a comedically infectious Howard Morris, who is a laugh catalyst in this spoof on “This Is Your Life”—and a catalyst for the initially, riotously uncooperative Caesar's Al Duncey to take this partly written, but mostly improvised rip on game shows, privacy and familial wackiness to the laugh stratosphere. This landmark piece (lensed in New York) broke the comedic “fourth wall”, as it begins amidst the audience with Caesar seated there as an unwitting member who is chosen by the host (Reiner). The privacy-craving “citizen” Caesar portrays battles Reiner and a bevy of ushers and theatre securityand I mean really battles them, across rows of audience seats, down an aisle, onto and off the stage and then is basically dragged kicking and screaming into the limelight. I saw this when I was 10 years old and it floored me then. 34 years later, it still kills me, and maybe even moreso. You have to see it to believe it—particularly Howie Morris' bawling turn as an overcome “Uncle Goopy”. Add in the impeccable timing, perfect camera takes and the stellar written bits (the show featured a young Neil Simon, Mel Brooks and Larry Gelbart in the writer's room) and you have the “Babe Ruth” of TV sketch comedy—the early giant whose legend still stands up.

2.) NBC Saturday Night's “Racist Word Association”—December 1975

Jesse features this one in his post below and in it you have a divine confluence of humor perfection. It's edgy, brief (clocking in at a mere 2;27), minimalist and graced with the presence of one of the century's comic geniuses—Richard Pryor, bringing his beyond-the-box-of-wires-and-tubes gifts to television and nearly exploding it with his chameleonic performance. He goes from a dull-witted hump of a guy to a hilarious, thermonuclear ball of rage in no time flat, and he does this opposite an uncharacteristically generous Chevy Chase, who plays straight man to Bud Abbott perfection. His needling, wheedling HR guy is emblematic of a head-gaming corporate bureaucracy and lights Pryor's fuse with deft precision. Pryor's extra bit of business—like his about-to-snap facial twitch after Chase has gone too far—is priceless. I doubt if an impending murder on television has ever been funnier. This one was written by Pryor's fellow comedian and nuts-and-bolts comedy technical wizard Paul Mooney—and not one of the NBC Saturday Night regular scribes—specially brought in by Richard to spike the night's bits with a more “Pryor-ian” authenticity. It was comedy perfection—three minutes, no props, no effects, no tricks, just a great script and great performers working it to a “T”. Pryor's appearance on the show itself was a cause celebré. He was undoubtedly the comic king of the day, having won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album two consecutive years (he would run it to three) but his stylistic volatility and “blue” work unprecedently led NBC to run the show that night on a five second delay—lest the “uncontrollable”, curse spouting Negro let fly with a naughty. He didn't. Al he did was give the first season its first breakout episode with three classic skits—this one, “The Exorcist” and his face off with Belushi in “Samurai Hotel.” I don't think you could do the “Word Association” piece on TV today. Never mind the charged content—the way Chase and Pryor give themselves over to the locomotive-like drive of the material is just unseen today. Un-seen.

3.) SCTV Network 90's “The Godfather”—December 1981

Here you have a magnum opus of TV sketch-dom. As much as I loved the original cast of SNL, the gang at SCTV (which followed it here in NY at 1 a.m.) might have actually been the more talented ensemble, and this extended “through-line” piece (it ran as a multi-segment interspersed with other bits during the episode) is simultaneously indulgent, smart, ruthless, dead-on impersonation and performance-wise, surreal and freakishly absurd all at once. It's rooted in the fictional SCTV network's “boss” Guy Caballero's acting as a television version of Coppola's “Godfather” on his daughter Connie's wedding day and being absent from SCTV headquarters that day. From the opening scene of the brilliant Eugene Levy (so wasted today on what he performs in) as an eerily dead-on Floyd the Barber from “The Andy Griffith Show's” requesting a favor from “Don Caballero” (to “break Opie's arm” for breaking his barber pole), expertly mimicking the original Godfather's opening, this one is an all-time great. Levy switches roles as Floyd leaves Caballero and becomes James Caan's constantly, fidgeting and punching “Sonny”, and from there—it. Is. On. They spoof the coming craze of “Pay TV” (Cable), The Today Show, CBS Sports, ABC's then penchant for “Jiggle TV”, the gangster-like aspects of network television, and do so while running out a dazzling array of characterizations—the aforementioned Levy two, John Candy's “Johnny Pavarotti” and Jimmy The Greek, the gifted Catherine O'Hara's scary Jane Pauley, Levy as Gene Shalit, Rick Moranis as Brent Musburger and Michael Corleone (Guy's son “Michael Caballero” ), and Dave Thomas' uproarious turns as Turk Ugazzo and Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen. This link takes you to what may be the sketch's wildest moments, spoofing the Duvall/Hollywood Producer segment in “The Godfather”. It's been chopped up a bit, but from this and the clip at the top, you get an idea of how this one hit at all levels. They got the look right, the feel right and the whole Godfather vibe right, and then they pumped it so full of laughs that it's a comedy explosion of rare quality. SNL could NEVER do a bit as long as this one and somehow keep it this funny. And the SCTV gang would do a lot of these. “Polynesiantown”, The Towering Inferno” just to name a couple of examples. Genius. Sheer genius.

4.) Monty Python's Flying Circus “Argument Clinic”—November 1972

This is one of the most perfectly-crafted pieces of sketch comedy ever done. It is in the upper pantheon of word-play humor alongside Abbott & Costello's “Who's On First”. It's sly, manipulative, wickedly smart and like the Pryor/Chase bit, under three minutes in length, involves but two characters, a desk and a verbal confrontation. Like the Pryor one, it also made IFC's list thank goodness. But John Cleese and Michael Palin play this bad boy to comic-timing perfection. It begins with an absurd premise (starting at a “50” instead of a “1”) and manages to take off from there, sucking you into the characters' mind-gaming of one another. Who will crack? Who cares? It's too much fun seeing these two verbally fence with one another as they mix intellectualism with silliness and walk you out the other side with stitches in your gut from laughter. Again, you have to be generous, quick and have a sensibility of knowing where to allow a breath for laughs for one like this to work. And bluntly, these two are two of the living legends at doing this. There aren't many.

5.) Monty Python's Flying Circus “International Philosophy”—December 1972

Here's another Python bit and...well, Steve and I used to laugh our asses off at this one in e-mail exchanges. Above and beyond our love for this piece, it is probably the smartest, and funniest sports spoof ever lensed. You don't have to be a soccer fan to dig this one, as it again does what the Python crew does best, seamlessly mix high and low, smart and silly into an uproarious concoction. The wedding of all these classic thinkers and philosophers—German vs. Greek—with a high-stakes soccer match where instead of kicking the ball about the pitch—they haughtily ruminate in full costume as a breathless announcer sells it in typical all-the-marbles fashion is a classic bit of comic contradiction. And in that high-stakes commentary comes these exchanges:

ANNOUNCER: Nietzsche receives a yellow card after claiming that "Confucius has no free will."; Confucius says "Name go in book".

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Socrates scored the only goal of the match in the 89th minute, a diving header from a cross from Archimedes (who gets the idea of using the football first after shouting out "Eureka!"). The Germans dispute the call;

ANNOUNCER: "Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx [with apt materialism] is claiming it was offside."

If you “get” philosophy and know whose views are whose in terms of the “players on the pitch”, the piece is hilarious. And even if you don't get the philosophy, the spoofing of these dueling belief systems as competitive sport is still amazingly funny. The silliness of the on-field behavior contrasted with the announcer's never for a second giving up the ghost as far as this thing being a “real” soccer match is just a gem of juxtaposition comedy and surrealism gone to a brilliant, absurdist peak. From the moment the announcer says, “And they're off!”—and the players are decidedly not “off” as you'd expect them, you will not. Stop. Laughing.

6.) Chappelle's Show's “Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories: Rick James”—February 2004

This one made IFC's list too. You've probably seen and heard bits from it a hundred times...but it's a stone winner, and it belongs because it is jaw-achingly funny. Now, this one I have some behind-the-scenes info on, as I had an in-law working on set as well as a good friend. What makes this “sketch” a classic is that it really is a perfect storm of things coming together and simply “killing” humor-wise. From the start, it's a wonderful bit of story-telling from the piece's anchor, Charlie Murphy (Eddie's brother). Some people just know how to spin a tale and Charlie's a Goddamned griot on this one. But the little secret is that Charlie routinely spun these classic tales off-set as a way to kill time and entertain his co-horts. He cracked up so many folks with his tales (including Chappelle) that the star rightly figured that they were being wasted on the cast and crew and said, “Let's shoot a couple of these.” They shot Charlie telling his story in documentary style to get the details down, then shot Rick for his side of the story, and then shot Dave and the cast doing the “enactments” if you will. There was very little written. It was mainly improv-ed off a rough outline of what would go on in a scene. A LOT of improv to be precise. A massive amount of footage was shot of Chappelle—who was in effect living as James during the spaced-over-several-days shoot. He was in total Rick “mode” during this time and a couple of those shoot days went well into the wee hours—three to four a.m. easily as he riffed off Charlie's story details. The piece was intended to be a regular-length sketch—a component within a 22-minute show, but they shot so much great stuff, along with the Charlie Murphy and Rick James interviews, the decision was made to just devote damn near the whole episode to the bit. It was a masterwork of post-production—the editing of the disparate elements was brilliant. But it's Chappelle's getting inside of and reflecting Rick's inner “crazy” and raging egomania and Charlie's hilarious narrative that is the backbone of this sketch's success, Chappelle plays Rick as what he was—a coke-addicted, inferiority-complexed, enfant terriblé with NO boundaries whatsoever. Pair that with Charlie's insane stories, which when you watch the sketch are not really refuted by Rick at all, so you're on the edge of your seat wondering and laughing at how much of this is hyperbole and how much is simple reportage and you get a great sketch. The absurd becomes real, and the real becomes absurd. Belief is totally suspended and once you've got that, anything goes—as it did when one was around Rick. You're along for the whole lunatic ride. One of the best ever.

7.) SCTV Network 90's “Maudlin's Eleven”—April 1982

Unfortunately, there's no web video of this one, so to see it you'll have to buy the DVD compilation SCTV Volume Three. In fact, if you're a TV sketch comedy fan, you should really own a couple of these disc sets because these sets are the video record of the masterpiece that was SCTV. You just won't see a better combo of writing, performance, production values and a willingness to just “go for it” than their stuff. Much as I love the original NBC Saturday Night sketches with that first cast, time has not been as kind to that material as I would have thought. You can see the drugginess in some of the performers, as well as the ego issues showing through. Some of the nihilism I found so coolly subversive back then reads a lot more needlessly mean now. SCTV didn't have those issues as the players weren't forced into the grinding “star machine” that the “Not Ready For Prime Time Players” were, and as they sort of worked in the cocoon of Toronto as opposed to NY or L.A. the creators were able to just create in workshop without the worry of media center distractions. SCTV is Comedy 101 for true “heads”.

This particular sketch is one of the best examples of what SCTV did better than just about everybody else. They skewered Hollywood, television itself and pop culture with this, the single best spoof of “The Rat Pack” and caper movies ever done. SCTV's underlying premise was always that you were looking in on the inner workings of a cheesy TV network and how media cultivates, panders to and packages their “stars”. “Maudlin's Eleven” was merely the ultimate example of that ethos. It featured a “Murderer's Row” of SCTV's pre-packaged, wannabe-cool talent in an awful network produced movie of the week. (within the show itself) Starting with the obsequious, toadying talk show host Sammy Maudlin (The hilarious Joe Flaherty character based on the mid-70's Sammy Davis Jr and his fawning talk show of the time) in the Sinatra role, the nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying “legendary comedian” Bobby Bittman (played to teeth-grinding perfection by Eugene Levy) indulgently and perfectly over-acting the cool Dean Martin part, with Rick Moranis, John Candy and Dave Thomas filling out the rest of the loser-ific second-line talent the “network” crammed into this D-level caper flick, they ape and rip that sort of tinsel-town packaging of popular movies. The fact that their characters are already third-tier “stars”, their low-grade heist (a wad of money from Danny Thomas' dressing room!) and its invariably going bad in the most pathetic ways possible makes it that much funnier. These are losers who don't think or even know that they're losers running a dumb scam they think will send 'em to the big time, which even if it worked, wouldn't. So when it fails, you laugh at their delusional idiocy twice as hard. Mix in a bit of witty ripping on the oiliness of some aspects of early 60's television and you've got a multi-leveled sketch classic. For this one though, it helps to have watched a bit of SCTV to familiarize yourself with the players playing “the players”. You won't be sorry. Trust me.

8.) NBC Saturday Night's “Miles Cowperthwaite—January 1979

Alas, another one not yet on video or on YouTube or anywhere on the internets (Get Season 4 of Saturday Night out on DVD already,“Dr. Evil”), but this particular piece is one of the rare matings of comedy giants that doesn't cancel one another out—The “Not Ready For Prime Time Players” meets Monty Python (in their ace laugh-getter and guest host Michael Palin)—and actually kills beyond belief. A super-spoof of a “lost” Charles Dickens series of tales, “Miles Cowperthwaite” is set in a dreary, sickly Dickensian England, and we follow Palin's Miles through his travails as a young butler/valet to a horridly enfeebled, aged master of the house as played by a laugh-out-loud nasty Dan Ackroyd. His character has all manner of weird old world ailments. Prone to spastic fits where he convulses and grabs anyone within a few feet of him “invading their personal space”, he also has a disgusting problem with saliva. He grossly over-produces it, forcing him to wear an odd metal frame about his head on which a “drool cup” is attached to catch his excess saliva. Palin's job? To help Ackroyd's character around the house and empty his full drool cups left about the manor into a “drool bucket” he must carry around. The mix of the dour, Dickensian style with the unnerving physical comedy (seeing a seizure-struck, fur-swaddled Ackroyd spazzing about and grabbing the naive Palin character while sloshing his own drool, and the huge pail of drool that Palin's collected while feebly wailing “Drool Bucket!” has to be seen to be believed.) amps that Python-esque technique of melding the smart and ridiculous to the Nth degree thanks to the extra SNL twist from their troupe's own madcap performances. Never has Dickens been better spoofed. Ugly Victorian maladies like consumption are made hilarious in this one as well as good old British pluck in the face of way-overweening awfulness. It's smart, and gross, and so true to the source material that you'll wish it actually existed. It was an SNL “Godfather” kind of sketch in that when Palin came back four months later he did a follow-up second part that like “The Godfather Part II” may have even surpassed this one in its inspired lunacy. It revels in that British awfulness that's supposed to make you feel bad for the characters, but instead leaves you anxious to see what new, deathly distress will befall them. PLEASE GET THIS ONE ON VIDEO SOON!

9. The Carol Burnett Show's Gone With The Wind—November 1976

And sometimes, you get lucky and have four big-name comedy wizards on one show, and in one sketch. The Carol Burnett Show boasted its namesake star, the number two TV comedienne behind Lucille Ball and just in front of SCTV's Catherine O'Hara. Plus the infectiously funny Tim Conway, a “reactive” master and king of slapstick smarm in Harvey Korman, and the chameleonic, swiss watch-timed Vicki Lawrence. This ensemble is the only big-name variety show bunch to ever rival Caesar's formidable posse of Coca, Louis Nye, Reiner, Morris and Nanette Fabray. Week in and out Burnett's band of merry-makers hit the mark with brilliant one-act play-lets (“Eunice, Mama & Ed”), crazy slapstick (“Mr. Tudball & Mrs. Wiggins”), and of course their campy, wild movie parodies. This one of “Gone With The Wind” is a Cliff's Notes run-through-an-insane-asylum rip on the cinema classic. Burnett's vain, childish “Starlett” is a hammy, self-indulgent wonder, dominating every frame with her outsize goofiness and bluster. Korman's slick jerk “Rat” Butler is played with equal parts Clark Gable and Pepe LéPew silliness. Conway's “Bashley” is a classic sublime Conway dolt (His explanation about the “Camptown Racetrack” is totally deadpan, and yet you hang on every word laughing). But Vicki Lawrence's “Cissy” (Prissy) takes the madcap cake. It's all crazed vocal and wild gesture. No blackface. Just a genuinely nutty turn on what could have been an offensive characteriztion. You put all of this together (with a guest starring Dinah Shore playing a dim “Melody”.) with one of the highest-grade sketch scripts EVER written in Hollywood and you end up with a camp sketch legend.

Some of the great lines?

(Starlett descending the grand staircase at “Terra” addresses two adoring suitors, and then stops at the last one for the payoff)

BILLY JOE: Remember me, Miss Starlett?

STARLETT: Oooooh, Billy Joe my goodness! I thought you jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge!

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(Starlett coming down the steps again to greet a post-war “Rat Butler”, wearing a hastily thrown together “dress” made from the curtains—with the rod still running through it across her shoulders like a milk-maid's pail-holders)

RAT: That-that gown is gorgeous!

(Waits a long beat as the audience takes in the hideous dress)

STARLETT: Thank you. I saw it in the window and...I just couldn't resist it.

It's like that through and through, line after line. A sumptuous, candy-colored, camp spectacle. I don't think Hollywood ever had four funnier people doing sketch work on one show, and those four for as good as they were and all the good stuff they did, never surpassed this.

10.) The Kids In The Hall's “Chicken Lady's Blind Date”—October 1990 or “Chicken Lady At The Strip Show”—January 1991

These sketches are what I like to think of as proto-cringe humor. The craze we see nowadays (and badly done, mind you) of discomfiting, creepy laughs traces back to this disturbing character of Mark McKinney's from Kids In The Hall. The Chicken Lady, a repellent, over-sexed result of a farmer's breeding with a hen is a human/poultry hybrid train wreck you cannot not look at. In the original “Blind Date” sketch (the character is a carryover of a punch-line from a sketch dealing with freaks) we are introduced to the lonely, sex-obsessed character who has managed to get a date to come to her apartment, sight unseen, and what a sight she is! The six-foot-plus McKinney plays her as an amazonian, white haired, beak-nosed and partially feathered walking sideshow—with an edge of innocence and sensitivity that manages to come through her freakish repellence. She's a bundle of spastic chicken tics, squawks and dim bird intellect who only wants to be loved, loved, loved! And hard. Ick. She's the dark, twisted fraternal twin of Sesame Street's child-like Big Bird, except she's not in the nurturing environment of that loving street— Chicken Lady's in the real world, and it freaks her out just as much as she's freaked out by it. McKinney plays the character with a sense of a back story you can clearly see but is so awful you don't want to. And she is so damned eager to please that...well, she'll do just about anything to show her love for a potential suitor, as Dave Foley, her chance-giving would-be paramour in the “Blind Date” horribly finds out.

CHICKEN LADY: God, you must be thirsty. Can I get you a beer or would you like to just drink out of the toilet?

MAX: A beer.

CHICKEN LADY: Okay. Suit yourself. Hey, would you like to sign my yearbook?

MAX: Oh, no thank you.

CHICKEN LADY: High school was hell for me.

MAX: Oh, really?

CHICKEN LADY: All the other kids teased me.

MAX: Wow, imagine that.

CHICKEN LADY: If you want to stay in my good books, don't call me a birdbrain. If you want to stay in my good books, which you do. Gravel and grubs, gravel and grubs, I love to eat my gravel and grubs.

(Chicken Lady drops down a tray with two plates. She sits and eats a worm off of hers.)

CHICKEN LADY: Oh, I made you an omelet on account of I figured you might not like bugs.

MAX: Oh, thank you.

CHICKEN LADY: Go ahead. Tuck in.

MAX: Oh, good. (Starts to eat)

CHICKEN LADY: Course it's good, cause they're fresh. Straight out of my body and onto your plate.

MAX: (Screams and runs out of the apartment) Ahhhh!! Oh my god!

I gag and laugh every time I see that bit. It's simultaneously mortifying and hilarious, sad, macabre, and jaw-droppingly funny. McKinney IS A CHICKEN LADY in these bits and you have to see how he sells this thing character-wise. it's an amazing sketch character, as creepy and nearly as vulgar as Monty Python's disgusting “Mr. Creosote” except that you actually kind of feel for her. Until she violates again, as she does in the bizarre follow-up “Strip Club” sketch where her carnal desires are too much for the other patrons, the emcee and the unfortunate object of her desire, the red-maned “Rooster Boy”, whose gyrations cause Chicken Lady to have a literally explosive orgasm that sends feathers into the air, sets off alarms and concusses everyone in sight. McKinney's stuttering, seismic build to “climax” is funny in its own right, but the payoff proves that “the bang is definitely worth the buck”. It's one of sketch history's best “WTF?” moments ever. Click above and watch it and see. (And Kevin Thompson's combative “Bearded Lady” who pals with “Chicken Lady” just piles the laughable grotesquery that much higher.) What is it about these frighteningly funny Canadians?

Those are the LowerManhattanite “Ten”. I could give you a classic twenty, but these are the ten main ones that come to mind. There's a few great ones from “In Living Color”, as well as Ben Stiller's unforgettable “Skank” the puppet, not to mention maybe seven or eight other classic “SNL” bits and I think even more from my all-time favorite SCTV (“Polynesiantown” “Oh That Rusty!”, “The Days Of The Week”). But I can't list 'em all.

With that, the honorable mentions go to SCTV's Martin Short in “Jerry Lewis, Live On the Sunset Strip—Directed by Martin Scorcese”(!) capturing the bitter, post-Dino solo years like no one else ever has or will.

And leave us not forget Catherine O'Hara and Andrea Martin's killer“PMS” short which they wrote and debuted on a David Letterman Anniversary Special. It's a rarity, but I remember it from when it ran and it left me crying with laughter. Something tells me you'll sully an LCD screen or two watching it also. Just try not to.

Then there are these four sublimely brilliant “Eunice, Mama and Ed” Sketches, plus one magnificent batch of cast-rupturing Tim Conway outtakes.

And finally, another divine comedic confluence of giants—SNL meets SCTV—Bill Murray guest hosts an episode of SCTV and literally wrecks shop as an aging Joe DiMaggio running a San Francisco seafood restaurant in this swing-from-the-heels bit. Bill plays the “I'm-still-a-star, dammit” DiMaggio to a “T” and is aided mightily by Eugene Levy and Martin Short. Put your batting helmet on...this one's a home run—as are all the ones listed above. Kick back and laugh a little, and feel free to toss your faves into comments.



“Scampi! SCAMPI!”

There's more...

Reflections On “4/4 Time”

Image Is NOT Everything.



“Dream”-sick is what a lot of folks get around this time of year.

And maybe a little bit “Promised Land”-paralyzed.

I am effectively “How-Long”-ed out, and my brain fairly aches from desperate, clutchy tales of “I Marched With Him...” and “ I Met Him When...”.

This is the time when lazy news directors scuffle for an angle and invariably blow the dust and spider webbing off that old theme tucked in its usual spot—fourth row, fourth book—and bid their newsreaders and...“personalities” to dimly ask if a “dream has been realized” or what one man would think of today had institutionalized American racism not cut him down like some southern tree on which nooses had hung not terribly long before.

It is “4/4 Time”. Ironically enough, the time signature for “marching” music, but also signifying a certain time of year—4/4 as in April 4th. The date and month when America badly for the most part—notes the passing...oh, passing sounds so damned pass-ive, let's call it exactly what it was...the violent assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Those in a position to inform and educate on grand levels seem to invariably fail at doing so when it comes to handling the message and legacy of what Martin Luther King was about in deed. For years I thought this was done out of an inability to grasp his message and actions. That was equal parts cop-out and myopia on my part. I guess I didn't want to see and when it was visible—couldn't see. I didn't realize until many years of frustration and denial that the cathode ray and transisitor stitched, wall-hung homilies were fully intentional attempts to sand away the skin-catching rough edges of what Dr. Martin Luther King was all about in the time that he lived. Television station I.D.'s, the brief “packages” the network news runs, and the space-filling PSAs packing the unsold ad time in the early morning and late night gaps. The obligatory shot of King, hand outstretched over a teeming sea of people. Cut to the head-on shot of Dr. King speaking into the mic—with a bevy of white-hatted supporters at his side nodding affirmatively.

“I have a dream!” goes the public service ad.

“I have a dream!” blares the tepid news show “package”.

“I have a dream!” The Sunday paper toss-in reads as it wafts out when you open for the sales circular.

“Dream“-sick is what a lot of folks get around this time of year.

The reduction—and a reduction is exactly what it is—of Martin Luther King to mere kum-ba-ya-singing “dreamer” status is one of the more insidious bits of spin by a thought-sedating media.

Dreamers sleep. Do-ers walk the earth impacting it with every stride and deed. Dreamers don't take knives to the gut from progress-fearing xenophobes bent on stopping a man actively re-weaving a country's social fabric. Dreamers don't get the FBI stalking their every move and setting out to destroy them with scurrilous innuendo and family-wrecking blackmail.

Dreamers...don't take fatal sniper bullets in the neck for leading a growing multitude of Americans in a battle for fairness, equality and justice.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was NOT a dreamer. He was a do-er.

But you'd never know that from the obfuscations and gossamer shrouding his decidedly radical doings have been tangled up in that you saw on your television the last few days. You saw the usual tripe, but this year—the 40th anniversary of his being shot down like some beats to be feared, there was an additional angle injected into the mix. The politics of a presidential election—one steeped in all the ironies one could muster in dealing with this day as the would-be next presidents all spoke publicly on the anniversary and its meaning.

In a rainy, dreary Memphis this past April 4th...

You had a White female Democratic candidate—Senator Hillary Clinton, who grew up a “Goldwater Girl” but would find herself in adulthood fighting for many of the things Dr. King espoused—better education for all, equal access to health care, and many elements of his civil rights program. Her husband a former Commander-in-Chief himself, would be lionized by some (in a hopeful bit of over-projection) as “The First Black President”, and these two people—him first during his two terms, and now her during her run for the job desperately fighting for that Black vote. And when that vote did not come in the proportion hoped for, they would lapse into clumsy over-reaching and destructive, and in the minds of too many to ignore, borderline race-based (as opposed to rac-ist) under-cutting to rectify “the problem”. The Friday Memphis photo op was as necessary as it was sincere and maybe moreso based on the dilemma her campaign finds itself tangled up in. You go where the heartstrings when plucked hard, resonate the loudest.

And you had a conservative Republican candidate, a Vietnam veteran whose stated public policies fly in the face of everything Martin Luther King stood for standing in that rain trying to fix a racism-busted past when it came to things “King”. King's life was forcefully ended just as he came out hard against the war that Sen. John McCain still lionizes and slurs the Vietnamese over. “Gooks” he calls them proudly. That poisonous and still inexplicable war is a badge of honor for McCain as it remains a moral blight for a plurality of Americans in general. And McCain still unblinkingly snuggles up to the racists and dividers who giddily hated Dr. King and all he stood for while professing him to be a bucking “Maverick” who doesn't kow-tow to their bigoted ways. The same “Maverick” who tucked close to the bosom of Ronald Reagan, a man who proudly spent time “McCarthyizing” King with communist epithets. The same “Maverick” who unabashedly voted AGAINST a Martin Luther King holiday.

But in Indiana, the American mid-west's hub of Ku Klux Klan operations we saw perhaps the most viscerally pointed image of all.

A Black man, Barack Obama—who most improbably is the leading Democratic candidate for the presidency, and in many polls the leading candidate to ascend to the office of President of the United States. Forty years to the day of Dr. King's assassination this candidate...who is only now being taken 100% seriously as the person who would be, is being likened to the late Dr. King. A disturbingly unfair comparison that diminishes both men on their merits—cheaply filtering the multi-disciplined and many-triumphed King down to a “great speaker” who drew crowds, and senselessly uplifting Obama to King's impossibly stratospheric level in terms of social actual impact based on the most superficial considerations of those doing the media's short-hand boosterism. But nonetheless, this candidate again—some forty years after Dr. King's assassination for daring to push for equality now finds himself on the verge of a loud, but incremental move towards the America King pushed so hard to get to, and so many of us still hesitate thinking to be possible.

That's right. Still hesitate thinking to be possible. In the two score years since that bloody day, in spite of what progress has come, a deep well of trepidation remains. It's a pavlovian response. Not a proper response. But one burned into the circuit board of our psyches still in a new century thanks to the cause-and-effect training from the previous one. Where final vote be damned, the possibility of something potentially unheard of occurring, the emotion of pride is mixed with equal parts of palpitations.

Obama didn't go to Memphis to speak. Quite honestly, Im glad he didn't. There are those for whom the pilgrimage on that day can be a photo-op and whether it works for them or not, read “4/4 Time” Memphis differently at a gut level than those who live that day while toting a different set of baggage about. Baggage experienced. Baggage handed down like some heirloom you don't want but cannot not accept and you tote it along till you forget it's there dangling off your shoulder. Until you do think of it, that is. You feel its leaden weight and its hard dig into your body and soul. I've unpacked abit of it publicly several times before...

When I was around five years old, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. I remember the day. I was home on a half-day from school and I can recall the TV bulletin, then a frantic rush around the house by my mom to a radio, and then a breakneck flipping between different radio and TV stations and the phone then ringing off the hook seemingly every 20 seconds. I remember my mama ashen faced, sometimes sobbing into the phone, other times consoling someone on the end of the line and then sometimes silent, shaking her head with her hand over her mouth, just going “Mmmmmmmmhhhh-Mmmmmmh” into the receiver.

Just then, I heard what sounded like a lunatic shouting in the courtyard.

“F*ck this sh*t!”

“F*ck this sh*t!”

“F*CK THIS SH*T!”

It wasn’t the usual screaming freak from the area—Mr. Douglass, who’d caterwaul over a stray CreamSicle wrapper on his stoop. This was fresh crazy, a new voice just out of the incubator of wild sh*t a’ goin’ down in the world outside.

Mere minutes later, my mom had my siblings and I prepped for an odd, unexpected early evening nap. As she hustled my brothers and sister off to bed, I paused by the hall window of our fifth floor walkup on W. 115th St. in Harlem. I always looked out that window, daydreaming, watching the sun play off the terra-cotta building tops and occasionally pushing a stray baby shoe or box of tissues off the ledge, just to hear the distant “poonch!” as it landed five floors down. Next thing I knew, I was swept up into my mom’s arms, given half a cup of warm milk and then off to the land of nod.

I awoke a couple of hours later, supremely groggy and stumbled to the kitchen where the door was closed and all I could hear was my mom’s slippers “pap, pap, pap” across the linoleum as my father exasperatedly sighed “Baby…please stop pacing.” I walked back to my window perch, to look out on my little stretch of the world and the view was a horror. Plumes of smoke as far as the eye could see from buildings galore, flames licking here and there, Five-O's sirens swirling from every direction, People throwing sh*t off rooftops and howling in pain. The comfortable little spot I liked to look out on the world from was now a twisted crazy thing unrecognizable from mere hours before. What the f*ck had happened?

It's a bottomless satchel for me though. Full of memories and images.

I remember killing time in Memphis one weekend about 10 years ago, goofing 'round at Graceland, making my pilgrimage to the abandoned lot that was wherer Stax Records stood on West McLemore—and then...I went to the National Civil Rights Museum which incorporates the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was killed. I wandered through the displays, feeling the hair go up on my neck. There was an actual lunch counter from a diner where you saw sit-in folks viciously beaten down the old newsreels.

There was a “Freedom Riders” bus—with it's back end—charred and blown out like an exploding cigar from being bombed by racists in the mid-60's.

And most disturbingly, was a yellowed Ku Klux Klan robe and hat displayed under glass on a wall. I remember getting a tension headache that spread from the base of my neck, and into the base of my skull from my muscles binding up while looking at it. My forearms hurt from clenching my fists. And then, at my left was a little White girl—about 8 or 9 years old, looking up at the evil, patina-ed hate-frock. I wondered who she was with, and then her dad appeared, a sandy-haired fella in a plaid shirt.

And she plaintively asked him, looking up at the robe as he neared her left shoulder “What is that daddy?”

I didn't hear him go “Uh..uh...”,

I could feel it. Almost with him. That question from his daughter linked us invisibly, five feet apart. The air caught in his throat, and I could feel it catch as the answers swirled in his head, formed en masse, rushed to his throat and log-jammed there. From the corner of my eye, I could see him blinking—trying to sift through the pile of answers—none of 'em that wouldn't lead down a path of a day's worth of questions about race that in spite of his good intentions in being there at that museum, he was not ready to answer. I walked away—figuring if I gave him some space and wasn't there as a living check and balance to his answer, he'd find enough gumption to say what had to be said. I ran into him later in the gift shop, His wife had his daughter off to the side, and he actually said to me “That was uncomfortable.”

“I'm sure it was.”, I replied.

“I mean...what do you say to a kid about that?”, he wondered aloud.

“S'gotta be the truth. There's a way to say it to a kid.”

“How?” he almost pleaded.

“That's for you to figure out. It's not just about her. it's about you, too.

He turned and walked away muttering under his breath, “Ah...mygodmygodmygodmygodmygod...” as he trailed off.

There was more to that day. Unexpected and jarring things. Wandering upstairs from the exhibit I came cross a tableau that leadened my feet and sank my heart. Behind a plexiglass barrier was the opened hotel room—#306—that Dr. Martin Luther King stayed in on 4/4/68. The very room behind that infamous balcony everybody pointed from as a mortally wounded King lay sprawled at their feet. There was a neat bed, and an old TV Guide nearby with some strewn papers here and there. I remember seeing a set of cufflinks and a pack of cigarettes. A plate some food had been eaten from and a small container of milk or juice. And of course, that window looking outward, onto the balcony towards for him, that day...infinity.

I found myself later in the motel's parking lot downstairs where vintage cars from '68 sat parked in a time-locked open-air diorama of sorts. A local woman pointed for me—pointing is something one seems to do on impulse when at the Lorraine—to a short brick wall in the distance, a scattering of small trees and a boarded up building where Ray supposedly shot King from. Eyes darting from sniper's nest to target area. Imagining the crack of the Remington 30.06 caliber rifle. The distance a short one, a couple of hundred feet perhaps. And blinking back the image of the fallen King and the pointing co-horts. That room, in those odd 60's pastels—seafoam and beiges. The last place he willingly lay.

It would be days before my mood would brighten after being there.

And it pained me on this past Friday seeing how people took advantage of that day to paint it s something entirely other than what it was. You would think from the gauzy language and safe visuals and sanitized memories conjured that King had simply laid down that day and fell asleep, expiring quietly as he rested.

This was violence. Terrorism in fact. And no matter how many of those gauzy words, safe visuals and sanitized memories foisted upon us, the truth of the matter is that King's assassination was not the collective weepfest the historical re-imaginers would have you conveniently believe. This nation was so racially polarized that this man who never raised a hand to anyone during his protests saw not a few million twisted Americans accept his murder with a smile on their faces and if not a song in their hearts, barely a care in the world—as described via Keith Olbermann on Countdown on March 18th:

“My grandfather, a fire fighter. Put himself in danger to save people, didn't care who they were. His parents were immigrants to this country and they came to New York in the late 1800's theyre so naive they told him 'Don't touch a Black person, the color will come off on your hands'. And one night I was nine years old my parents were out to dinner he was babysitting me, television's on and you know the middle of Hawaii 50 or Ironside or whatever the show was, on comes the news bulletion from Memphis: Martin Luther King Assassinated. And my grandfather who was a good man says 'Why did they interrupt my show to tell me about some n-word getting shot'.”

It was a time when King was still referred to publicly as “Martin Luther Coon” by elected officials.

When Ronald Reagan when asked about the factors leading up to King's death said: (It's a) “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”

He was no mere dewy-eyed “dreamer” of a better day. He was an increasingly hard-nosed opponent of injustice in America—a trench-fighter for equality who faced some of the most vicious opposition to his quest for equality for all not in the deep south that is so easy to pillory, but in the northern, supposedly civilized environs of Illinois—Cicero, Illinois to be specific, where he found himself having to step back southward to regroup in the face of caustic, blatant bigotry. Bullets fired overhead as he marched through catcall and epithet-filled streets. But again...it was more than his stance against racism that began to set the die against his living for long. It was his holistic position against injustice—nationally and internationally that helped hasten his end.

It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years —his last years—are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?
It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights”—including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.

“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 –– a year to the day before he was murdered —King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”

You haven't heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 - and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

That is the “4/4 Time” Dr. King lived in. On April 4th of 1967 he delivered that infamous “Beyond Vietnam” speech. One year later to the day—April 4th 1968 is when he fell before a sniper's bullet.

And on the day that The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died, he spent some of it working on a sermon to be delivered the following Sunday. I didn't see it amongst the effects in Room 306, but that sermon was not the treacly stuff we are led to believe King spoke of exclusively.

That sermon—little discussed by those who would spin a wan hagiography of what this country was about at that time—was brusquely titled, “Why America May Go to Hell.”

“Why America May Go to Hell.” Take that for what it's worth, folks.

That rough sentiment was on the man's mind the day a boiling over of racism wrested him from this mortal coil. Yes, people loved him.

And perhaps, just as many people hated him.

Not just then, but for the many years afterward.

Reagan bought North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms' loud and oft-shouted view that King was not just a noisy racial agitator, but had strong Communist leanings. Reagan barely finished signing the bill when he was asked whether he thought there was any merit to Helms' Communist charge against King. The Gipper couldn't resist the sly aside, “We'll know in about thirty-five years.” Reagan referred to the voluminous FBI surveillance tapes on King that a court had ordered sealed until 2027.

And then there's the dangerously flawed Senator John Sidney McCain, who stood there stiffly last Friday amidst a sea of umbrellas and tried to simultaneously pander to those with a conscience about America's racial insensitivity and lie away his refusal to support a national holiday for Dr. King. as he said, “long ago”.

“We can be slow as well to give greatness its due, a mistake I made myself long ago when I voted against a federal holiday in memory of Dr. King,” McCain said. “I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona. We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans. But he knew as well that in the long term, confidence in the reasonability and good heart of America is always well placed.“

McCain has said that he knew little of King and the civil rights struggle because he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi and received only sporadic news during his five and a half years’ confinement. But his captors told him and his fellow POW’s when King was assassinated.

----------------------------------

McCain voted against the creation of a holiday honoring King in 1983, a vote which was supported by a large number of Republicans. McCain claimed this week that he was largely unaware on the importance of King's work at the time, due to his Vietnam-era service overseas. Speaking on Thursday to reporters, he explained that his conversion occurred around 1990:

“I voted in my...first year in Congress against it and then I began to learn and I studied and people talked to me. And I not only supported it but I fought very hard in my home state of Arizona for recognition against a governor who was of my own party."

But McCain's voting record since 1990 doesn't support this explanation. In addition to voting to oppose a state holiday in 1987 (which he later supported) and a federal holiday in 1989, McCain voted in 1994 to cut funding for the commission that promoted King's holiday.

The “I wasn't aware / I was young and uninformed” excuse not only does not wash, but doesn't even wet.

I was five years old in 1968. John McCain...was a 32-year-old man. I would imagine he'd heard quite a bit about Dr. King before his imprisonment while still if not stateside, at least free as a great many American soldiers did. And in the years post his release—a decade in fact—one would think he'd maybe, possibly heard a positive thing or two about the Nobel-Prized man. Especially as McCain was then a federal legislator in Congress. That “neophyte” first year in Congress for McCain was when he was all of forty-six years old.

That vote was as much a youthful indiscretion as was Rep. Henry Hyde's “teen” wanderlust at age 41.

I remember John McCain's opposition to the King holiday quite well, it was mocked by Public Enemy in their song “By The Time I Get To Arizona”. I protested and did my small part in participating in the tourism boycott of the state of Arizona (my then-job required me to travel there—I chose not to).

All of that made the crypto-segregationist Senator's lame posturing this past “4/4 Time” that much tougher to digest...while pretty much being par for the superficial course.

“4/4 Time” is a time for those in trouble to pander. Those who have not, or can not to pretend that they will or can. It is a time for those in the media who have in their historical archives their own dismissals and vicious words against Martin Luther King Jr. to pretend to have been bastions of fairness while bleaching away the vividness of the reverend's opposition to injustice.

It becomes a time for spin and re-casting.

Turn a do-er to a dreamer. Warrior to wimp. Table-upsetter to mere talker.

How should Dr. King have been remembered that day?

Why not for what he actually was? A person who physically put himself in harm's way so that justice would eventually prevail.

As a leader who dared to grow before our very eyes. Learning, changing, and maturing as the world opened itself up to him and showed its ways to him—unprettily in many instances.

As a true multi-issue warrior against the evils of the power structure, in spite of the gross contorting of his struggle into a single-issue one.

As someone who DID things and not just some “Zelig”-esque human backdrop that the disingenuous politically “CGI” themselves into for effect.

Not as a flawless “god” to be seen in the shimmering view of a cheap 3-D roadside souvenir you'd hang on a wall in simple-minded reverence.

But as a human being—with flaws and gifts—who without argument, gave far, far more than he got and in so doing along with others, qualitatively bettered America.

So spare me this vapor-tangible talk of “Dreams” and “Mountain-tops“ and “Promised Lands” as his legacy.

I see a person who went to jail for equality. Who took a knife in the gut for freedom. Who was spied on and plotted against for forcing justice. Who was turned on by the government and media for leading on peace. And eventually killed for moving a country of 250 million people towards all of that change.

Killed, okay? Murdered.

Not for dreaming. But doing. An awful lot more than just marching...in “4/4 Time”.

There's more...

I-95 South: The Village

Pearls. Canapés. Botox and Bold Type—The “Heathers” and “Harveys” RULE!

(INSTALLMENT TWO OF A TWO PART SERIES—THE NY / D.C. POWER PLAY)

“Daddy...what's a Tidal Basin?”

That was the question I asked my father in the Autumn of the year that Richard Nixon mixed his last pitcher of Manhattans and flew away like some ungainly, wounded duck .

Why would an eleven-year-old kid ask his father a question like that?

Because the big news story at the time was all about the powerful Congressman Wilbur Mills' getting busted by the D.C. Police one night near Washington's Tidal Basin with a bodacious stripper alliteratively, and perfectly named Fanne Foxe. Who I might add, jumped into this mythical “Tidal Basin” to escape Five-O's clutches after a scuffle with a drunken Mills in his limousine.

The married Mills's getting caught out there so publicly was just another ugly incident in a scandal-rocked D.C. that year, but I just had to know—to quench my dirt-detail curiosity—just what the hell a Tidal Basin actually was.

“Well...I assume it's got something to do with the water in the area or something, but I'm not sure. You know what?” Daddy said, “Let's find out.”

With that, he called his friend Leon who lived in D.C. and worked for the city, and asked him. “Hey Lee—I know this is a weird question, but _____ wants to know...you know about the whatchacallit--the Tidal Basin down there? Yeah, uh...what is it exactly? Uh-huh. Uh-huh! Hmmmm. Hey, I'm a' let you tell the boy himself. Here son, talk to your Uncle Leon.”

And Leon just broke it down. “There's a river down here, the Potomac--”

“The one they say George Washington threw a silver dollar across.”, I replied.

“Yeah.”, Leon replied. “Right. Whatever they say. Anyway, the Tidal Basin's like a ...little dam that controls the water level down here, 'cause we got parts of the city above sea level and some parts that's below it. And when the tide changes, you know...goes up and down? The Tidal Basin helps keep things in check. That's why they built it. Okay? You got it, little man?”

“Yes sir”.

“Okay.” Leon replied. “Now put your Daddy back on.”

I did, and I heard Leon ask my father why I wanted to know about the Tidal Basin. My father told him. “He just wanted to know what the place was where Wilbur Mills got jammed up.” Daddy waited a beat and followed up with a chuckle, “What the hell was he doing in the Goddamn Tidal Basin in the first place?”

I heard Leon, as clear as a bell on the other end of the line loudly laugh out the words “Fucking up. That's what.”

I bring this up because it highlights something about what Washington D.C. has LONG been about. In my pre-teen and much of my teen years, the little place its connected denizens reverently consider “The Village”, was little more than a writhing, Medusa-head of poisonous scandals. And me, a geeky, news-obsessed kid from Harlem was not alone in my dee