"Doggone!" Or, "Lying Doggo."

On the recent episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter there has been a subdued air pervading the show. Dog has been whipped; even neutered. He skulks around with his tail figuratively between his legs rather like some base, kicked cur.

In truth he has been kicked by the good people of the civil rights bureau. They condemned him and had him banished from the airwaves and then eventually there was some sort of a pow-wow (or-- "bow-wow"!) in which Dog – by the infinite charm he has – completely converted his worst most adamant gnarliest scoundreliest critic to the cause. This civil rights man emerged from the discussion saying that he insisted Dog be returned to the airwaves on every channel at an all-new time and that African-Americans everywhere, as a gesture of solidarity, must tune in.

Still the Dog was subdued. In this vacuum of bravado, somebody must step up to fill the gulping void and that somebody is Beth, Dog’s bumptious wife. As of watching four episodes I declare this show should be renamed Beth, and Her Litter of Mewling Kittens.

Beth is a good character. Never an episode passes by without my wife remarking with disgust on Beth’s considerable bosom and yet even so P____ likes her. In the recent round of bounty-hunting and (if it can be called this) detective work, Beth was always the one to lead the group, to rally them and to come up with new clews.

In a recent episode, part of a three or four part cycle, they were in “hot pursuit” (albeit with regular periods when they withdrew to the ranch to fag out on the couch) of a – what else? – Mexican drug-lord and fraudster.
Marco, his name.
Dog was depicted being thoroughly cowed by even the dumpiest fat donut cops. Ever since he got in trouble for the racist tirade he has been skulking around like a spanked spaniel, scared to say boo to a goose. He daren’t say a rash thing.

"He never said a mumblin' word."

So here he is walking tippy toes on eggshells and not doing a blame bit of good. Meanwhile his sons, Duane Lee and Leland, are lovable blunderers through life.
I like to watch Leland "explain" the detective process, his armory and so forth, in the voice of an excited six-year-old; faltering, watching his tongue, but in a different way from loudmouth Dog. With Leland it's like he is trying to conquer a stammer. At one point they were being tough guys tracking down a teenage girl wearing only a towel in the underbrush with infra-red heat-sensitive tracers on their guns and they were slipping and sliding around getting nowhere.
When they eventually caught the girl (days later and in a gas station, after Beth tracked her down), Leland was eager to ask her where she had been hiding when he was hunting around in the bushes. It was like they had been playing hide and seek. (It turned out she had been hidden back at the complex, among the laundry - mere yards from Dog and his puzzled pound.)
Duane Lee and Leland habitually overslept while they were in “hot pursuit” of the fiendish Marco, and they constantly had to catch up with Dog and Beth on the highway, congregating at gas stations.

All the bounty crew really did, in the event, was to keep going round the house of Marco's father and cousin ("Zorro") every few days, where they would lounge, eat crackers, and harass and upbraid the father. Tony was his name and he could only loosely be termed a humanoid. He was an absolutely inveterate liar. He would say anything to avoid trouble. He was a flat-out dissembler. It was a strategy he had plumped for in dealing with life. Did you ever know the type? A quivering quailing coward. A low despicable quisling. Sometimes, when the difficult questions came too thick and fast, and he couldn’t come up with a “plausible lie” on the spot, Tony would pretend to have a “panic attack.” Leland was out in the stairwell whispering to the camera: “He did this last time. It’s an act.” What was not an act was when, in the midst of a heated conversation with Beth, Tony’s teeth flew out of his mouth. It was hilarious. Later, Bobby Brown remarked: “He was so frightened his teeth flew out!,” and the lads sniggered and Beth – showing the tiniest trace of a sense of humour – smiled indulgently.

Bobby Brown wasn’t so smart himself though. This is the guy – who must be sixty-five if he’s a day – who trolls around semi-conscious after the bounty-hunting family picking up dropped scraps of fried chicken. (The other guy with the braided pigtail - Tim - seems to have vanished.) Anyway, at a key moment, when the bounty-hunters in the apartment were busting the fake-ID-using, heroin-abusing gang, Bobby was outside, in the carpark, supposedly watching the rear window of the apartment for any signs of escape. Instead he got into a “conversation” with a guy who was deaf.
This deaf cowboy had just rolled up in his car and Bobby assailed him. When he deduced that his suspect was deaf Bobby's face lit up and he ended up so engrossed in writing little notes for the deaf-mute that he totally missed the perp being lowered out of the window in her towel. It was like a scene from "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters."
Meanwhile Dog was such a meathead that he let the accomplice just walk out of there. He just said “Aloha, braw” and let him stroll along. Beth was exasperated with the men.
Can you blame her?

I don't know to this day why they didn't just wait outside Tony's place, "lying doggo" you might say, simply waiting for Marco to visit his dad. It seems the obvious solution. But I suppose their must be the appearance of work being done or the show wouldn't exist. Anyway they didn't. Marco is still out "there" ("here") ("the planet Earth") somewhere and Dog made a public service announcement at the end of the show asking for any information regarding his whereabouts.
I was excited - wanted to help the gang - to be a part of the show. Unfortunately I have no idea where Marco is.
He is not in Greenpoint.

Anecdotes of The Crack Shots

Dear Subscriber,

DID IT EVER OCCUR TO YOU EVEN CASUALLY THAT "DOG" IS "GOD" BACKWARDS???!

In his morning pep talk Dog began with this:--

"We know he [to wit, the perp] smokes the-- what is the brand, Bobby?"

BOBBY BROWN: Bronco.

"--Bronco. And that is the cheap-- the cheap cigarettes."

Dog says this like he is suddenly going to change his whole methodology, he is now going to don his deerstalker cap and take out his pipe and magnifying glass and refer to LELAND henceforth as "Watson."

I go to my wife, "Whaddiz thizss, Sherlock Holmes?" and she guffawed appreciatively.

I note this only because she laughs at my cracks so rarely that when it happens it really is worthy of note.

(Can you imagine a more pathetic life; an inveterate wiseacre married to the Bride of Frankenstein?

I'M DIGRESSING---- )

It was amusing because seldom ever does Dog resort to classic detective motifs. I'd complained last week that Dog seemed compromised - "whipped like the cur he is" was my phrase I believe. I called him a puppy - a kitten even - but now he is back to his mackinest rip-roaring half-horse half-canine best. He is eating flaming cigarettes; he is telling Beth to clam up and shut down; he swears like the living incarnation of the Deevil. Leland punched the fucking blood out of a motel proprietor on his own forecourt in the latest episode and I rewound eagerly, hungrily to watch the actual physical violence again.

Leland is a tightly wound spring waiting to explode.

Did I mention that he is my favourite character?

Although I also like Duane Lee cause he don't do a thing and he don't give a hoot.

There was a great scene at the end where they were fishing and Dog goes, "Duane Lee won't bet on a rematch, cause he never bets when it aint' a sure thing."

I thought: "Like me."

Anyway, in the end they did track the villain down purely by following a trail of cigarette butts. This was a personal victory for Dog, because it vanquished his enemies and critics who say that he is all pompodour and no cranium. People laugh at Dog and say that his elaborate Marie Antoinette beehive is all designed to cover up the vast and empty tundra at the rear of his pate, but I say these people are irreverent irrelevant haterz.

On Dog the Bounty Hunter you get to see a level of living seldom seen on teevee. The low-lying crack fuck crook tumbleweed living in cracks and creeks and seams-- and motels. Dog goes, "Sometimes you go to these motels and this is what happens."

Beth said, "There's a lot of these kind of hotel rooms. Scary environment. There's all these windows, all these doors. People hanging everywhere."

I thought of the Poe story, "The Man of the Crowd," written when urban environments - as we know them today (oppressive, sinister, overwhelming, alienating) - sifted into the popular mythology. Then I thought of that scene in Kurosawa's Stray Dog when Toshiro Mifune is chasing down the man who stole his pisstol through black market postwar Tokyo.

I'm comparing Dog the Bounty Hunter to Poe and Kurosawa - yes.

What of it.

"My tale is done; there runs a mouse; whosoever catches it, may make himself a big fur cap out of it."

Om Shantih Aloha (Steal This Buddha)

The enigma in the face of Baby Lyssa.

I just watched the episode where Dog and his bounty-phrenzied kin rescued two stolen Buddhas and Dog said at the end, "I believe God will smile down on us tonight for saving the Buddha."

Some remarkable claim.

He'd already made some comments earlier conflating Buddhism and Christianity - he wanted to bend the theological facts so that his God presided over the Buddha. Dog went, "one time I saw some Buddhist monks outside their temple, praying, and they said -- We are praying for Jesus who is called Christ the son of God. Ommmmm shantih. Aloha." He didn't want to be working to redeem some pagan deities, is what it was, so he had to somehow warp the legends so that God and Buddha were shall we say partners in the celestial operation called LIFE.

Two crackheads had stolen some Buddhas from outside a Thai restaurant in Hawaii and the always-bushy-tailed Leland Chapman called in his family to get them back. I think the rest of the family is now residing in Colorado, so they all flew out there - with their black SUVs - at what cost? All to recover two measly Buddhas? I bought a Buddha's head in Norwich for 99p.

They ended up capturing and interrogating the two crackheads and they both "snitched" on each other. Nobody knew what to believe, but Beth predictably took the side of the girlfriend. I really couldn't say who was to blame in all this. Even the sage Buddha would be hard-pressed to resolve it!

When they got back the Buddhas they set them back in front of the Thai restaurant and Beth doted on the one Buddha - Gautama in his fat jolly Santa Claus aspect. She patted him on the tummy and said "Awww! Just to see that smile makes it all worth the trouble!"

I guess she wasn't impressed by the more ... let us say... severe, wise aspect of the Buddha, represented in the other statue. She simply couldn't relate to him.

I guess she hadn't been recently to the Rubin Museum on 17th Street at Seventh Avenue, where there are all sorts of aspects of the Buddha ranging from the silly playful ones to the wrathful and all-destroying ones.

Hers was the Buddha of Allen Ginsberg I fear.

I guess she hadn't seen the excellent Lone Wolf and Cub movie (with Tomisaburu Wakayama as Ogami Itto) when there are ninja assassins hidden inside Buddha statues in a shrine, and Ogami Itto slices the Buddha in twain. In White Heaven in Hell he kills the Buddhist monk by swimming underneath the boat and murdering him from beneath!

I guess she never saw that.

Also, isn't it the essence of Zen to say: "Steal this Buddha!"?

By this logic, those two crackheads were advanced students high along the path of Zen towards that perfect and desirable state of "wu-hsin" ("no-mind").

If you meet the Buddha on the road, bust him.

David Allan Coe = G.G. Allin = Dog the Bounty Hunter

You may be familiar with that dizzying anxiety and attendant disorientation experienced by readers of Wolverine comics when they meet yet another Weapon X feral assassin who somehow resembles our hero in some regard or other. Marvel Comics never tires of coming up with new modified mutant pseudo-lycanthropes for the company coffers. It's confusing and yet we are drawn in irresistibly.

Three additions to the list might be David Allan Coe, G.G. Allin and Dog the Bounty Hunter. Were these three split from one atom? Did they each, in turn, jump "fully formed" from the head of Anubis? Were they each concoted in test-tubes at a secret location in the frozen wastes of the Yukon?

G.G. Allin's debt to David Allan Coe is established, it's a known fact. G.G. even recorded the song "Outlaw Scumfuck" which is a clever rewrite of Coe's "Longhaired Redneck."

Everybody knows that I'm a scumbag...

Who however has made the mysterious connection beteen Coe and Dog? Who ever has broken the code? (NB, Coe + Dog = Code Og). They look the same - or sim ilar - even on the page:

C - O - E

D - O - G

C directly precedes D; E almost directly precedes G were it not for the pesky letter F; but even such disparities are built-in to complex cryptography.

The two men both have early "stretches" in the "federal penitentiary" from which they draw inspiration to this day and about which they cultivate a mythos, while never being too exact about the actual events. Coe, it is said, was in the Ohio "pen" and killed a man who demanded oral sex from him (or, as Wikipedia has it, "anal sex"). Dog, or Duane, we are told, was jailed for killing a man. Can you really imagine that he could crush a fellow human's larynx with his thumb? I don't see it myself.

Both men also choose to wear their hair eccentrically, even into old age. They braid and twist their hair into corn cobs. Dog loves to back-comb his fringe into a pompadour and imagine he is still living in the 1950s. David meanwhile loves to grow his hair long and imagine he is a Confederate soldier riding into town looking for vengeance against the Union.

Hooray for the Union!

I just watched an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter where Dog gave an inspirational speech from a stage in Chicago. I was waiting for him to start to sing - it seemed the logical thing to do under the circumstances. I wanted him to begin- - - -

Country deejays knows that I'm an outlaw,

They'd never come to see me in this dive;

Where bikers stare at cowboys

Who are laughin' at the hippies,

Who are prayin they'll get out of here alive.

The loudmouth in the corners gettin' to me

Talkin 'bout my earrings and my hair.

I guess he ain't read the signs that say I've been to prison,

But someone ought to warn him

Before I knock him off his chair.

'Cause my long hair just can't cover up my redneck.

I've won every fight I've ever fought.

And I don't need some turkey telling me that I ain't country.

Sayin' I ain't worth the damned 'ol ticket that he bought.

No dice. Not that Dog is above profanity - for all his Judaeo-Christian-New Age schmaltz he loves to swear broadly with the lads. Is swearing even anti-Christian? I don't know.

Both characters appeal to similar audiences, although David Allan Coe is actually beloved by hipsters (I have found this out in my travels) whereas Dog is not.

Will the two ever get together on a bailbondsman bounty-hunting adventure? You can imagine it - they would be wrestling Mexicans to the ground, their hair flying everywhere. Then David Allan Coe would dust himself off (like that scene in The Good the Bad and the Ugly when the man shouts "Hooray for Dixie!" and the Union soldiers brush the dust off their Union uniforms).

They should do a TV special.