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Cletus does CERN

November 5, 2013
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cletus spuckler and wife

There is little science on the Science Channel, almost no history on the History Channel, nothing to discover on Discover, and you will look long and hard to find any art on the Arts and Entertainment network.

And if you learn anything from The Learning Channel, it is that America’s intellectual level has dropped from the sky like a disabled alien spacecraft, to crash and burn in a desert of mindlessness.

The History Channel, for instance, now specializes in (as explained on Wikipedia): “mythical creatures, monsters, UFOs, aliens, truck drivers, alligator hunters, pawn stores, antique and collectible ‘pickers,’ car restoring, religions, disaster scenarios, and apocalyptic ‘after man’ scenarios,” to say nothing about credulous explorations of the writings of Nostradamus. ancient aliens

Each of these channels began with virtuous motives, and for their early years, created or acquired genuine documentaries for TV viewers, but as they have come to seek ratings over virtue, each has bitten the bait, and now gives us “reality” programming, sensationalist pseudoscience, and celebrities, celebrities, celebrities.

The prime offender of this last are the cooking and food channels, which at one time gave us instruction on cooking and food, but now concentrate on celebrity chefs, some even with studio audiences to applaud and ooh. Julia Child actually taught us something. david pogue

And it isn’t just that Bravo or A&E have given us the bait-and-switch, but that even once laudable programming on PBS has been dumbed down to provide more “entertainment” and less hard information. Their once-proud flagship program NOVA has become a showcase for the high-jinx of such “info-comics” as David Pogue, “Destroyer of Brain Cells.”

It is as if no one believes that actual history or science or art can hold its own in a world of Gypsy housewives of LA married to lumberjacks who look for gold in Alaska and find Nazi ghosts piloting flying saucers from the future, as predicted by Nostradamus.

(Note to Discovery: I now have a copyright on that idea, in case you decide to make such a series.)

I have no complaints with science writers who make complex and often mathematically dense material comprehensible for laymen, such as myself. That is what NOVA used to do: It was aimed at intelligent non-scientists, people with an interest but without the background and training; it now seems aimed at Cletus Spuckler and his family of slack-jawed yokels from The Simpsons.

Is it any wonder that American students fail so badly in math and science, or that a scary percentage of American voters don’t believe in basic scientific principles, and that a major political party carries on a non-too-disguised war on science? We believe in ghosts, UFOs, and ESP, but not in evolution, global warming or environmental degradation. One scratches one’s head.

At least PBS still maintains a veneer of science or history in their documentaries, the commercial cable channels have given up completely. It is all hokum shot through night-vision goggles looking for trumped up ghosts, or teams of competing slackers moaning and groaning about how hard it is to beat the deadline making spangles for their dresses or how to turn squid beaks into desserts for the panel of judges. TLC

How is America not embarrassed to show its face in the world for presenting Toddlers and Tiaras, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, I Eat 33,000 Calories A Day, Potty Power, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, Starter Wives Confidential, Trading Spouses, Wedding Dress Wars, or Big Hair Alaska? And those are just from Discovery.

The History Channel (now, of course, rebranded as History, keeping the only part of their name that doesn’t describe anything true about itself) has offered: Ancient Aliens, Ancients Behaving Badly, Angels and Demons: Decoded, Ax Men, The Bible Code: Predicting Armegeddon, Big Shrimpin’, Cajun Pawn Stars, Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked, God, Guns and Automobiles, Hairy Bikers, Ice Road Truckers, Shark Wranglers, Swamp People, and, of course, UFO Hunters. Pawn Stars photographed by Blair Bunting

Its highest-rated show, Pawn Stars, exemplifies one of the unpleasant trends in this new field of television.  So many “reality” shows (I can’t help but put quotes around the word “reality,” since the word is so horribly misused in this application) rely on having a bully at its center, whether it was Simon Cowell on American Idol or here, with “Old Man” Richard Harrison, a truly repulsive ignorant blusterer lording it over his clan like a cartoon patriarch, an uneducated know-it-all, with little sense of curiosity — there is no glow in his ball-bearing eyes, just the dull, yellowish glare of a sluggish dragon guarding its horde.

So much of TV is either aimed at or about the unwashed, uneducated and superstitious, as if all of America lived in a trailer park and had only half its teeth. It’s the Jerry-Springerization of America, and it cannot bode well for our future.

So, the rest of us find ourselves either leaving TV altogether, or braving the ridicule of our friends and family, tuning in to C-Span 2 on the weekends to watch Book TV. It’s the last bastion of a medium that used to bring us Omnibus, Young People’s Concerts and BBC nature programs.

 

Et tu, Ozzie

June 14, 2013
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img0151A

I want to acknowledge a debt. It comes as a bit of an ugly confession. And it comes wrenchingly from my throat: I write a great deal about books and poetry. I spout Roman history a little too glibly and am apt to swoon glowingly about Homer’s Iliad.

But I must acknowledge that the high tone of fine art and literature is only a patina. I have been most hewn and polished not by literary sources, but by television. It is the same for most people under the age of 65.

Television is not often enough considered when we talk about intellectual development; it actually hurts to put the words ”intellectual” and ”television” in the same sentence — and I just did it twice. I’m a masochist.

But it is true. My first introduction to classical music was on the Bugs Bunny cartoons I watched on the box. First introduction to jazz from the added soundtrack to the silent Terrytoons I saw on Junior Frolics, an afternoon kiddie show on New Jersey’s Channel 13, hosted by “Uncle” Fred Sayles. Those silent-era animations, with their added jazz scores influenced my youth in a way that Aeschylus would never be able to.

farmer alfalfa

My first theater came in the form of sitcoms; first sculpture was the Rodin Thinker that Dobie Gillis sat under to question why he could never make time with Thalia Menninger.

dobiegillis

Oh, there were a few ”highbrow” things on the tube: Sometimes we watched Omnibus with Alistair Cook or the Young People’s Concerts with Leonard Bernstein.

Nevertheless, the effect of such educational shows was as a single tiny green pea to the overwhelming harvest of corn that poured out of the box.

Bonanza, Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Ozzie and Harriet, Dave Garroway’s meaty palm held forward to the screen as he intoned the word, ”Peace.”

I learned about animals from Ivan Sanderson and, later, Marlin Perkins. I learned about Eastern Europe from Boris Badinov. It all twirled around in a great pop-culture spin cycle.

It’s frightening to think how much American history was gathered from watching Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp or Guy Madison as Wild Bill Hickok.

It is all still there, like petroleum under the covering layers of rock. If I dig deep enough, the Tacitus recedes and Sky King comes back to the fore.

But it isn’t mere nostalgia that I mean to invoke, but rather a change that has come about as television has come of age.

What distinguishes the generation that came after mine — those called ”X” to my ”boomer” — is the quotes that have now been put around everything that appears on the screen.

Television was new to us. We approached it naively. What we saw on its glowing front we took to be an image of the real world. Those that came after us were enormously more sophisticated about what they saw. Television was for them clearly an ironic ”parallel universe,” which they somehow lived in, used for their cultural reference point, but never took seriously.

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was not exactly the world I inhabited, but it bore a close enough resemblance to it that I could read it as ”real.” Ozzie really was married to Harriet.

By the time The Brady Bunch came on, it so deviated from the reality of its viewers that the only way to enjoy it was as an in-joke.

victory at sea

My generation learned about World War II from Victory at Sea; the following generation learned from Hogan’s Heroes.

There are many a plus and beaucoup minuses to both sides of the generational equation. It is usually better to be sophisticated than naive. I’m mortified that I ever thought that Gene Autry really was a cowboy.

But the downside for the later generation is the disconnect they make between life and art. For them, culture is a web of references they get, the way you either get or don’t get Stephen Colbert. If you suggest to them that art might somehow mirror their daily existence and confront the questions that arise outside the TV world, they look at you like you just suggested Larry the Cable Guy should be the next James Bond.

If we have all become much more knowing about the apparatus of media, we are also in danger of drowning in that world in a kind of cultural schizophrenia, and forgetting that the world that counts is found outside prime time.

Bad hair, bad TV

March 11, 2013
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Drama recon - Neanderthals had big faces and big teeth.

There is a seemingly endless assembly line on basic cable TV that produces documentaries about prehistoric humans. We have most of them on DVD: My wife is a sucker for anything on cave men. (If she had her druthers, she’d be one. She loves to imagine herself living in a “state of nature.” “Humans went bad as soon as they invented agriculture,” she says.)

But she also has a complaint, which she repeats with every viewing and reviewing: “Why do they always show cavemen with such unkempt hair?”

She contends, and I believe rightly, that even prehistoric humans took a concern for their appearance, or at the very least, for keeping their hair out of their joint of meat.

But whether it’s “The Rise of Man,” or “Walking with Cavemen,” or “Journey to 10,000 BC,” the people — whether actors in cave drag or computer animation — have such bad personal hygiene they look like soot-faced refugees from some Hollywood cinematic apocalypse.

homosapiensdvd box

It’s a question, even if you just think about other animals. Where do you see anything else in the animal world like that? Ever seen a cat with anything but a sleek coat? Mice, marmots, horses, terriers, squirrels, deer, otters, goats or tapirs. Not a hobo among them. Even chimpanzees, our closest living relative, has reasonably regular hair.

Why, then, should our cave brothers suffer the eternal bad hair day?

One makes the distinction between the fur of animals, which reaches a determined length and then stops growing — hence remaining groomed and neat — and human hair, which keeps growing and eventually becomes unruly. But since we have no fossil records for hair on early hominins, we don’t know exactly when longer head hair entered the genetic signature of the genus Homo. Perhaps Australopithicenes  had “fur” rather than hair. Perhaps even Neanderthals had neat hair. We don’t know. We don’t know for Homo habilis or Homo erectus, either. We only know for sure that Homo sapiens has continuously growing head hair, and hence, the possibility of bad hair days.

So, where did television art directors get the idea for disheveled anthropoids? Perhaps from contemporary peoples we call primitive?

There are two problems with that idea.  We should not assume that surviving neolithic people have not also evolved culturally and therefore, as different from those prehistoric ancestors as we are — just along very different lines of development.

So, taking the Mek of New Guinea or the Yanomami of the Amazon as representative of what cave men looked like or how they behaved, is nothing but supposition.

And the second issue is that even there, coiffure is a significant part of the culture. The Yanomami have very distinctive haircuts.

yanomami man

And consider North American Indians. The squashblossom hairdos of unmarried Hopi women, or the care with which Wolf Robe — a Cheyenne man from the 1909 photograph — braids and wraps his hair in otter fur.

Hop squashblossom hairstyle and Wolf Robe

Hop squashblossom hairstyle and Wolf Robe

Hair has had such a significant role in myth and superstition, that if we draw from surviving neolithic cultures for our model, we should probably assume that prehistoric peoples did some pretty inventive things with their hair. Just letting it hang out there, ragged and dirty, is likely not one of them.

If current paleoanthropology and archeology tell us anything, it is that primitive peoples were less primitive than we used to think. Toolmaking goes back at least to the Australopithicenes, so does fire.

Seeing European cave paintings, Picasso remarked that “we have invented nothing.”

Altamira

Each new archeological find moves dates back further, and we learn that early people were far more advanced and sophisticated than we had previously thought.

Take Gobekle Tepe in Turkey, some 9,000 years ago, and not that far removed from the cave paintings, and you see a centralized cultural life, sophisticated three-dimensional sculpture and a road system leading from scattered villages to the central religious site. These people lived in rooms.

gobekletepe carving

So, where did this trope come from? Blame the Victorians, I say. (I like to blame them for anything I can.) In the popular 19th century version of evolution, each adaptation was a step on a ladder of progress, ever better and more perfect. Modern humans (and especially modern English industrial humans) were the pinnacle of creation, the end target of the process. They are the people who gave us the concept of “primitive.” They gave us the first bestial images of what the early humans must have looked like.

victorian neanderthal

They projected their racial fears into the cave men they imagined. And just as bigots tend to see the “other” as dirty and slow, whether that is applied to the Irish, the Italians, Jews or Africans, so, they imagined their ancient forebears to be of the “lower order.”

I wait to see a Discovery Channel documentary on those who painted such wonderful paintings on the cave walls of Europe as just as smart and sophisticated as us, using all that is at hand to make their lives as graceful and comfortable as they could. They were no dummies.