By Elias Nebula

Sunday, September 29, 2013

"And O Where Is Duane Lee Today On This Day?" Or, "Baby Lyssa Said..."

The gang went down to Alabama, where they pursued a young lady ("Shakeisha") with a bad "rap sheet". They tracked her down and tricked her into coming to a food court car park –– the preferred site for toxic smackdowns.

They caught Shakeisha fairly effortlessly, with the usual excess of hollering and waving of empty bazookas.

As she shoved Shakeisha onto the backseat Beth said, "This isn't as bad as what you think it is."
Shakeisha snuffled, "It look like it, though."
Beth said, "You have two attempted murders on your history."
Shakeisha said, "I'm not that person though."

Strange paradox –– you tried to kill people on two separate occasions but you're not that person by any means. It's true. It could happen to anyone and they're really blameless after all.

Watching this episode I suddenly ("pointlessly") thought, plaintively and possibly for the first time, "Whatever happened to Duane Lee?"

I did rudimentary research (having no patience for anything more) and found an interview with Baby Lyssa, about her new book. It seems there is some bad blood between Baby Lyssa and Beth, and it seems also that Dog takes Beth's side against his children. There was talk of Beth's malefic influence over the internet –– that she reads adverse criticism and takes it personally and vindictively, and that Beth hath a long arm indeed and it is said that her fingernails are even longer than her arm.

I read all this about Beth's long arm and her fingernails and wondered wistfully whether she'd perhaps ever read my humble "feuilletons" on her family and whether [bashful, blushing] she ever wanted to send some redneck faux-bikers round here to duff me up!

In this same interview with Baby Lyssa, she was rightly miffed by an interview lately bruited all over Hollywood town in which Beth had said that Leland, who stayed right adamant with the Chapman traveling circus, and not with his brothers and sisters, because he was following the money (Baby Lyssa said), was the "son that loved Dog the best." (Recalling that well-discussed epithet from the gospels, "The disciple whom Jesus loved.") Apparently Lyssa and Duane Lee laughed quite savagely at this report.

Their laughter hath set them free!


Tuesday, September 10, 2013

"A Mitzvah On Your First-Born." Or, "Sound, Fury, And So On."


"That's a good question. That--the explanation of that whole book is in that. It began with the picture of the little girl's muddy drawers, climbing that tree to look in the parlor window with her brothers that didn't have the courage to climb the tree waiting to see what she saw."
     William Faulkner on the genesis of The Sound and the Fury. From Faulkner in the University.

"Cry baby, Luster said. Aint you shamed. We went through the barn. The stalls were all open. You aint got no spotted pony to ride now, Luster said. The floor was dry and dusty. The roof was falling. The slanting holes were full of spinning yellow. What do you want to go that way, for. You want to get your head knocked off with one of them balls."
      The Sound and the Fury

Notes from a recent episode:––
                                                    thoughts resulting:––

1. Dog, post-bust, saying "God bless" and "Aloha" to the cops as they part ways. He goes too far, and calls one of them "sweetheart".

2. Perp's name was Alfred.  Dog, that old dotard, staggered through the perp's home, hoarsely hollering for him to give himself up; calling him variously "Howard" and "Albert".

3. The team have those huge Rob Liefeld Cable and X-Force-style flame-thrower bazookas that they carry abroad with them, but they can't possibly fire bullets, so what exactly do they fire?

              A: Ping-pong balls.
              A: Hot air.
              A: Cotton candy.

4. This was the episode which introduced a new character, Leland's benighted son DAKOTA, to the cast. Followed the usual hazing that verges on child abuse. Leland sprayed Dakota in the eyes with mace and tazed him. Tackled him hard in the street and gave him "noogies". Then he sat him astride a female masturbation device and forced him to "go ten rounds atop it." I didn't see quite how this was relevant to the successful learning of crime-fighting techniques.

To properly mark the solemn dynastic quality of the episode, Leland gathered everybody on the "Big Island" where he would have them go in pursuit of the son of a man he had arrested seven years earlier.

Dakota had graduated that week and Leland obviously felt the undeniable pull of the years and the miracle of time passing and the cosmic cycles and equinoxes and solstices that mark a man's time on this paltry planet. He was waxing philosophical, reminiscent: "My son's graduating. I'm so proud. He wants to be a bounty hunter. I actually had Dakota in my arms when I walked up my graduation line. So for his graduation present I'm going to buy him his first truck."

I spent about half a minute trying to determine how the one situation in the dim past (the magnificent  babe in arms scene) led ipso facto to his decision in the present to buy Dakota a truck. Then I caught myself, remembered that this was Dog and Beth on the Hunt, and as such had no debt to reason, and dismissed the speculation utterly.

This episode was Faulknerian, and not just from all the dwelling on doomed, collapsing white dynasties hellbent on vicious self-destruction. No, and not just the Myth of the Lost Cause. Faulkner's hand seemed to be directing Leland's gobsmacked awe as he recalled how seven years previous he had hidden in a "little room by the gate" and waited for the old scoundrel to return. It came back to him irresistibly in a stream of consciousness, like Caddy in her muddy drawers watching through the window––

Now Leland was coming for the son of the old rascal. Fatherhood was in the episode –– inheritance –– blood crimes. The sins of the father visited on the head of the first-born.

Absalom, Absalom. Old Colonel Sutpen. A mitzvah on your first-born. The remains of the family, reclusive in the neglected tracts, hidden out in his ruined old mansion –– the bougainvillea, the neglected porch swing, and cetera.


To add spice to the mix, the old man himself was only now out of his seven year "stretch" and he blundered straight into the middle of the arrest.

As Leland was hunkering down in his old hiding place, as if in a divine pocket outside time –– Zachary in the tree ––  ecstatically feeling the onrush of time and empires and dynasties, the smallness of Man and the largeness of God, the old man came onto the set roaring profanities and picking a brawl with Dog. Meanwhile, the old man's girlfriend was sitting in the cab of the pick-up putting on lipstick by the dashboard light!

"So ironic," Dog mused after the anticlimactic arrest. Summing up. "So ironic that this is the second generation that Leland has arrested, he arrested the father years ago, now arrested the son. It's the third generation of bounty hunters. It's ironic that, you know, how the world turns."

It would've been nice to end it there with that universal thought for the day, but hey killed the moment rather by showing a preview of next week's show where Dog brays, "We ain't huntin' alligators. We ain't huntin' boar. We're huntin' a man."

Sunday, August 4, 2013

“Notes From the Backseat: Saws and Sayings of Duane Chapman.”

          One. "Woe Is He": In His Own Words. 

1. “God have mercy –– ‘cause Dog will not.”

2. “I like the babies and the children, but the parents are kind of... [LONG PAUSE] I don’t know... 
     different. During your work everyone lies to you, Grandma lies to you even, so you kind of 
     think everyone’s a liar. It’s a good switch to get with the kids and you’re back into reality and 
     you realise everyone is not a liar and there is kindness and love in the world.”

          [Holden Caulfield? No, Duane Chapman, at his stepdaughter’s school play.]

3. “I’m only five–seven. With the boots I’m five–ten.”

         3a. “White male, five–eight, 175 pounds; big kid.”

4. [Highly emotional –– this after the death of his daughter:]

      “I have many children... and all these sons.”

5. “This turned out to be a quickie, this is a good way to start the day, it’s kind of like Wheaties, the breakfast of champions. Fugitives, the capture of champions. Taco Bell, south of the border; fugitives by order.”

             [Nephew JUSTIN laughs nervously, “uh... huh... ha ha!” at this Dutch Schultz-like rap by his uncle. N.B.,  the arrest was made at Taco Bell.]

           Two. Prayer, Scripture, &c. 

6.  “Lord, thank-you for the day, bless us as we go off full–blast!”


7. “As the Bible says, by their fruits shall ye know them. In this world, by ‘fruits’ we mean     
      record.”

8. “Okay Dear Lord here we go again.”


9. “As I like to say, I’m marrying my common-law wife... [makes sign of the cross]... the 
     Christian way.”

10. On one occasion Dog said “Aloha” when he meant to say “Amen.” 


11. The potential danger on this is high. What if he’s ‘high,’ doesn’t want to go and he’s got a gun? But the closer we get to the guy, the more we turn into kinda like robots on a mission from God.”

          Three. Detective Field Gleanings, Lore and Insight.

12.  I just want to stand in the same area that he [the perp] stands in all the time... Why, I don’t 
       know.”

13. I like it when the plan comes together that you didn’t plan.” 


14. “Let’s look at his trailer and see if he’s got a flag and stuff out. [Pause; laughs.] That’s 
       terrible. If you got a flag you own a gun.”
           [A minute later: “There’s a flag in the yard!”]

15. “I remember the day girls started getting tattoos, me and Youngblood celebrated. Once girls started getting tattoos, they fell right in the category with the guys: easier to find.”

          Four. Dog’s Socio-Cultural Sensitivity.

16. “Walter should be on medication if he doesn’t straighten up... he needs twenty-four hour monitoring. In Hawaii they call it ‘light in the mind’.”


17. Dog and the team were running after one perp who they thought he was their quarry. When 
       they caught up to him they determined –– after some considerable debate –– that he was not     
       “their man”. But still they asked him repeatedly, brandishing the perp’s mugshot, “Do you 
       know him, brah?”
       As if to say, you look like him, so surely you must know him.
       An interesting fallacy, I think you will agree.

           Five. Dog As Seen By Others.

18. “Yeah, Duane has weird instincts.” YOUNGBLOOD


19. “Looks like Dad’s gonna fold like a cheap tent once again.” DUANE LEE.

20.  “You look up the word ‘whipped’ in the dictionary you see a picture of my dad.” LELAND

           Six. Kinfolk

21.  “This is a normal typical day in a Chapman’s life. There’s always drama, excitement, 
       triumph... and Beth."

22. [Dog, being upbraided at length by Beth:] "Beth is tired I think."  


23.  Beth puts on a special accent when she addresses the “natives”: “Seestah...”


24. ANNA (A.K.A. “IRENE”): I haven’t gone into probation. They haven’t said nothin’. I got tired 
       of going. You don’t know why.
       BETH: I spent six months in Jefferson County Jail. Don’t sit here and tell me I don’t know 
       ’cause I do.  

25. “No, I don’t think today’s hunt really... we didn’t get into the secret life of Leland because it’s such a secret life. I mean we’re trying to pull stuff out like, ‘Where were you?’ and all I got was, ‘I was in the bathroom...’”

       [LELAND: I don’t know what he’s talkin’ about. There’s no secret life.”]
  
          Seven. Vacuum Cleaners

26. [To perp on the backseat, after Dog used a vacuum-cleaner-themed ruse to capture him.]

          “I used to sell Kirbys! You’re like, ‘I don’t want to hear that word Kirby again in my life!, 
       right? ‘I’m going to use a Hoover!’”

27.   “It’s fun to fix the vacuum and make it work and watch it pick up the dirt. That sounds 
        stupid, but I like that.”

          Eight. Human Mortality and Frailty.

28.   [To a low-down undernourished perp perv caught in a peepshow booth:––] “You’re addicted to that store. You know, that booth. I had a feeling, though, that you would come back to that place. That was your downfall.”

        Dog’s afterthoughts: “To affect a change right now, physically, that I saw, that didn’t happen 
       this time. When you get that age, forty years old, and you’re breaking the law, something I    
       guess more than Dog the Bounty Hunter picking you up has to traumatize you where you 
       can change your life.”

29. ANNA (A.K.A. “IRENE”): I don’t want to comply. I’m sick of it.
       BETH: Anna, listen, at this age we’re not robbing banks, we’re not killing people, right? 
       Straighten up, the family’s cool. 

"Cookie's Gone to Hilo"

Dog, hard on the trail of a petty glue-sniffing blue-collar criminal. Dog's first port of call is always to harass the perp's parents. He tracked down the suspect's mother, who travels under the name "Cookie," an obese and toothless crone (much like the informant, in fact). She was in tears at the bus depot. When Dog began his legendary interrogation methodology, she soon blurted that she had just come back from jail herself.
"For what?" said Dog, ever so innocently.
"For beating up my girlfriend."
You could see the recoil on Dog's naive face, even under his wraparound sunglasses.

It seems that there is a whole conspiratorial "ring" of morbidly obese toothless bulldaggers in this part of Hilo. They quite naturally and without any obvious design, like elephants trudging to their graveyard, congregate at the bus depot, where they leisurely do meth.

SONNY: There's a lot of hiding places in Hilo.
DOG: You go through here, it's like a different terrain. If you ever wonder what the moon look like, it look like the road to Hilo.

"Viewer's Poll Results." / "Bieber Ain't In It." / "Two Classic Motifs." / "Mace Store Days."

As an interactive feature of the season, A&E experimented with having viewers' polls for the discerning yeoman-farmer-citizen advocate of reality TV. This was one of the questions.

Who ("apart from Dog") would you want on your team?

LELAND           42%
BETH                 29%
BABY LYSSA  17%
DUANE LEE     12%

_______________________________________________________

Dog's words of homespun backseat wisdom, Part 473:

"If you'd been married you would of been okay. You can push around yer legal old lady. You can smash her face in and steal her clothes. Hell you can put on her silk panties and her finest dresses if it suits you. It's a free country and marriage is a wonderful institution my brah."

______________________________________________________

Justin Bieber obviously refused to appear on Dog the Bounty Hunter. He clearly calculated, no doubt correctly, that it was beneath him at the current point of his blazing orbit. In the episode where Dog's daughter or granddaughter or stepdaughter went to see Bieber in concert, Dog (accidentally wrote "Fog") was furiously wheeler-dealing to contrive an onscreen meeting between these two legends of scraping all the hair from the back of their heads to the front. You could almost hear the disembodied Bieber whining to his agent: "Do I have to?"
"No. And hopefully you will never fall so low as to have to."

______________________________________________________

Two Classic Motifs.

1. Even when they force the perp to give himself up through mean coercion they try to act like it is a trap.

2. The "Court Date Mix-Up":

    The PERP: "I thought my court date was on the 23rd."
     LELAND: "It was on the 27th of May.
     PERP:  Oh really? Damn.

     This after a day-long chase.

      The most audacious gambit in the history of jurisprudence was in the episode where a perp took out a restraining order on the judge due to sentence him.

"Mace Store Days."

      Dog: "I need a can of mace. Let's go to the mace store."
      As Chekhov observed, a loaded dueling pistol seen hanging on the wall in Act One must be used most resolutely in  a succeeding Act.
      This episode didn't end with the customary redemption scene, but with Dog growling, "Get this scum away from me!"
       Leland was hailed as the hero of the day, although when first seen he was reeling about an empty lot groaning "I'm blind!"

Dog:  Keeps saying "Aloha" to people in Colorado.


"Low Man on the Totem Pole." B/W "Stray Leaves From a Country Doctor's Desk." B/W "Cat Drug In."

I have a few stray feuilletons of notes going back months, maybe years, that have been sitting around to no useful end lo these many summers. These are they. In one of those seasonal impotent sweeps where I try to diminish the clutter in my life by throwing out a few bits of paper, I am committing these to the "online log" so I can throw away at least one envelope of hazy ideas.

One.


Previously I have written about Dog's, ah, precarious relationship with the gentlemen of law enforcement. Here is a rather apposite testament to that –– fascinating documentary evidence of that strange symbiosis betwixt police and bounty-man.

Recorded from the TV:

"Okay listen here let Uncle Dog talk. Pipe down. Now you know what today is, right? Career day! So that you can decide right now at this age what you want to be when you grow up. Now listen, I met this guy one time, he came to me on Career Day and he said, 'Dog, what do you want to be when you grow up?' and I said, 'I want to be a police officer,' and he said, 'If you have a goal and you strive to be that, some day you will,' and here we stand... not police officers but on the same totem pole as ah police offices.... We're bounty hunters. Go ahead, son."

The cop at the Career Day promptly gave Dog the bum's rush. Dog stands there and gives him the thumbs up. Dog was kissing the cop's ass. He said, "Just tell your cop friends that the guys in black are the good guys." Sickly grin followed. Youngblood was seen smiling even more queasily.

Two.

Dog was duly and appropriately delicate with the LGBT community. "This is a very complex case because Kiki is a man and looks like a woman so 'she' has the strength of a man."
Leland was less diplomatic, forgetting to refer to the transgendered personage with the correct pronoun. Even so his message was a positive one of equality: "That means that if we we see him, we're, you know, we're gonna grab him and take him out just like we would anybody else."

At the end of the bust Dog was broad-minded and philosophical in his summary: "It's a different world today okay and we're all learning to accept things we don't understand. But... everybody's human and, again, the Lord looks on the heart. I learnt a lot about life today."

Three.

"That pitbull drug that tyre in the street. That's over, that says. A maniac dog, ain't it?"   DOG
They were being chased around by a single pitbull named "Pooch" who was tied to a tyre which he "drug" behind him. I never saw Beth move so fast. Leland was scared, doing high kicks to keep his heels away from the dog.


Friday, August 2, 2013

"Dog and Beth Do Not Have Minty Fresh Breath"

In the terrific tradition of giving a single name for a celebrity couple, like "Brangelina" and "Tomkat" &c. &c., by the same marvelous sort of "think tank brainstorming" I thought up a similar sort of name for Dog and Beth.

"DOGBREATH."

Or,

"DOGBETH AND BAD BREATH."

Thursday, August 1, 2013

"Dog Formula Is a Pet Food"/"Confusion Is Not Necessarily Sex."

The new Dog TV show has a different formula, but I've already fathomed out the formula for it and found it to be not-so-great.

In the Guthrie, Oklahoma episode Dog & Beth caught a fugitive up in Colorado. Nice country they have out there. They drove up to his house and arrested him while he was watching cartoons. They always catch life as it happens. The best aspect of this show is the documentary aspect. But it wasn't exactly an exciting bit of sleuthing.

They did the job for a family business down in Oklahoma, as I said. The wife of this family, who had a son of 21 and a daughter of 16, still wore a metal retainer in her mouth. What she really needed was a chin, but you can't get a chin through your dental surgeon. You'd have to go to a plastic surgeon and the cost might well run into the tens of thousands. After all, they'd have to graft the body parts from elsewhere to add it to your chin. Maybe your thigh.

I don't know. This is idle speculation.

That being the case or not, Beth and Dog caught this dangerous man and sent him to the clink without a fuss. So far, boring TV. Then (and: here comes the formula) they drove to Oklahoma to meet the family they'd caught the perp for.

They arrived at the old farmhouse, the old dawdi haus,  at twilight, and it was like a Jimmy Stewart film, all magical and golden and Old American. Everybody shook each others' hands, and the womenfolk pecked each other on the cheeks and exchanged recipes, and the daughter of the house was off out to the prom, so some mildly ribald humour was indulged in at the expense of the father and the boyfriend. Dog grinned a big off-white smile and said he'd put a tracker on the boyfriend's car. "We ain't gonna make it easy for you to fuck this girl on prom night," he laughed lecherously. "We're going to try and ruin your fucking fun! You ain't gonna get to first base without thinking of my leering, salacious face and that's gonna put you right off! I might have put you off sex for life in fact!"

Anyway a terrific time was had by all that evening, and the tears of paralysed elation were soon streaming down everyone's cheeks, and as Dog and Beth turned to leave they chimed that they'd "swing by the office in the morning."

This is the trigger for the next segment of the show.

Dog should have took aside the paterfamilias here and said, in a dark dead baritone, "The nice portion of the show, the gee shucks, Whole Earth catalogue, Allen Ginsberg finger-cymbals mile-high circle-jerk, Hare Krishna, touchy-feely, Kum-By-Yah part of the show, is over as of now.  Tomorrow we'll descend on you like a wall of locusts and Beth will abuse you horribly. She will slit you from tip to taint and use you as a fist puppet. I will be absent-minded and bored and chain-smoking and want to get the filming over. Leland, in his designated role as the 'tech and tactics expert,' will be all 'fingers and thumbs', 'all at sixes and sevens,' a fucking tongue-tied bumbler saying obvious things and things that make no sense and bumping into things and generally fucking up. That dumb bohunk. But most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, Beth is going to be rude as hell to you and your loved ones. She's gonna all but shit on your shoe. She's gonna take a brutal dump in your kitty litter. She's gonna crap in your hatbox. She's gonna tear this dawdi haus down. I'd say I'm sorry about it, but as you'll see tomorrow my chosen solution to this unpleasant state of affairs is to act all absent-minded and remote and moral relativist. So I'll be no help to you. Sorry but the worst part is about to come. The part when, guaranteed, my wife insults your wife and family and my son makes a horse's nether asshole of hisself –– again."

He should have said that but, perhaps understandably, he didn't.

Next day though it went as predicted. Beth tromped into the family dawdi haus with dirty fucking boots on dragging dirt with her tailbone, wiped them on the best linen, and spit her wad of tobacco bang smack in the center of the family portrait over the hearth. She pissed on the toilet seat "because she could."

Then she berated the wife, who made the rookie error of admitting casually to having "stacks" of unfulfilled bonds.

"Stacks? Stacks? What stacks? How much in a stack?" She sounded like Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Beth had at record speed fixed on something to drub the dumb wife for and she wasn't liable to surrender the chance to be high-handed and didactic.

Next she sought to sow discontent betwixt husband and wife. She told the wife that her husband had made a fundamental misjudgment and that he should be denounced in the village square for a witch. Then she goes, "You must carry the day within these four walls. Do you think my husband is anything but a blue-balled cuckold? To enforce your position, you might withhold sex if you have to."

I looked at the chinless wife with an empty thought bubble over her head. That drenched head from her daily application of mid-Eighties hair products, and the retainer athwart her teeth. I looked at her and I thought, "'Withholding sex' isn't going to really turn the screws on the husband. I think the threat of sex might be her best bargaining chip at this point."

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

"Son of My Father."

There was an interesting episode of Beth and Dog on the Big Hunt (or whatever it's called) where they were helping the usual clueless hapless cheftestants, seen wandering around in circles haemorrhaging cash money before the Dog team came in to "fix" them. One guy in this particular clown shoe wearer's gallery distinguished himself as a special olympian par excellence by something he said. He was one of the auxiliary bunglers on a team of clownfish. Still, when he was introduced to Dog, he boldly shook his hand and said with blaring pride, "The name is Guy Cantero Senior, bailbondsman."

Who introduces themselves, who even styles themselves, as "Senior"?
A small man with a large problem it seems!
A man with a son with the same name as him.
In other words, a man with a swaggering ego.

Peewit also had a goatee and a ponytail, was in his late thirties. He looked like he'd just walked out of the comics shop after acquiring a $3000 "statue" of "Neil Gaiman's Angela" ("Michelangelo's David").

Dog said, "Guy, nice to meet you, heard about you." He was paring his nails and spitting a plug of tobacco when he said it, but he said it. Later of course Dog called him simply "your guy," and you could see that Duane's easy, freewheeling forgetting of the guy's name really stung and rankled old Guy Cantero Senior.

He was really miffed!!

He turned to the camera and said, "That especially hurts my feelings because my name is Guy –– Guy Cantero, Senior –– and Dog sort-of semi-forgot it. Well no let's call a spade a spade, he actually a hundred per cent forgot my name! And as it happens I am very defensive and sensitive about my name, you may have noticed that I pointedly add the name "Senior" to it when I say it. And now here comes Dog acting like I'm not a big fucking deal at all, like I'm not worthy of a name, like I've been kidding myself all my life. Aw geez."

The camera was not running at the time.

Dog was in L.A. that week. He turns up at the height of noon in L.A. wearing a full-length trenchcoat. Sweat much? Shrewd thinking bounty-man. I'd love to see the "gag reel" of some of these episodes –– Dog wilting from the heat, collapsing in the street from heat sickness, coughing up his tubercular lungs, grasping madly for his inhaler.


"Moderation Displayed."

I've had a book wedged in a stack of books to "get around to" in my feverish pursuit of cultural advancement –– notes towards my leveling study of antebellum American fiction [facetious expression] –– about Washington Irving, by Edward Wagenknecht, the subtitle of which is "Moderation Displayed."

How, you wonder, could this possibly have anything to do with Dog Chapman?

Well.

Every time I see that book, I instinctively think of Dwayne Chapman's second book, When Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given. Dog likes this title When Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given enough that he sometimes works it into his back-seat pep-talks. Maybe he has remaindered copies he needs to puff some way and this is his best soapbox to pitch it: the back seat.

After all aren't we all selling ourselves in life? On the back seat?

Say the twain one after the other: "Moderation Displayed"; "When Mercy Is Shown..."

The two might have a passing resemblance, but of all the epithets floating freely for our use in this starry sky of a wonderful English language, "moderate" is not one I could ever in good conscience apply to Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Can you imagine him reading that sentence and looking all sad and offended, all droopy and miserable, and turning to Beth and saying, "Not fair! I'm moderate, right Bethy?"
"Darn tootin'! We both are! Fuckin' moderate!"
I mean can you imagine that golden scene that will never ever happen?

"So much for moderation."

Interestingly, in the course of checking the spelling of Edward Wagenknect's surname I happened to see his dates. He lived remarkably from 1900 to 2004! Uncommonly long for any man, let alone a literary man. His lit crit contemporaries were Pattee and Kitteredge, Brooks and Matthieson and Blair and DeVoto. Talk about Rip Van Winkle. A long life well lived.

(Although can a life writing lit crit be called "well lived"?)

Let us say it is so; I can take some solace in that; I still have sixty-four years to get my leveling study of antebellum American fiction [facetious expression] published.

Friday, June 7, 2013

"Entropy."

I am not saying that Dog the Bounty Hunter was ever actually a good television show, but I used to extract a scintilla of amusement, if not actual pleasure, from mindlessly tuning in & dropping out in front of it. Now even that feeble activity is a "diminishing return".

I watched the latest episode, from Norwalk in Los Angeles County, California, and Beth looked old and grumpy and wasted. She looked like a sack of potatoes. She was used-up. She looked like W.H. Auden's ballsack. Her old man, it hardly needs saying, looked like scar tissue on an over-done rump steak. These people been around too long.

"Been on the bum too long."

They will outlive us all.

Firstly, Beth has a lousy attitude. It's unchristian, it's uncharitable, it's plum wrongful.

Must do better.
Doesn't play well with others. 

She's rude, spoiled and unsophisticated. She's not a gal's gal-pal. She sees other women enter the room, and she instantly wants to humiliate them in front of the "male gaze". She is most "women beware women".  In Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet is discussed by Mr. Bingley's sisters, they are unfair to that honorable female. They would however be entirely correct if they were talking about Beth Chapman:

"Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her, "is one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other sex, by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But , in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art."

She is one of those people who they cover up their social awkwardness with a vocal show of authority –– which is to say, she is personally brimming with abrasive obnoxiousness. With her lousy attitude she should ideally work in a comic-book store. If she did that, I predict she'd go far.

Leland, meanwhile, is week-to-week (not to say bumper-to-bumper) being reduced to a glorified door-to-door salesman. He turns up in a cheap suit smelling of bad cologne and inquiring as he opens his suitcase up whether you would like to buy this body armour or that taser or failing these twain perhaps you'd like a gold-leaf-embedded King James Bible or a few stray volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica even?

"Would yeou like to buy a razor strop?"

The first twenty minutes was taken up with dull inventory, Beth inspecting the arsenal of this week's bailbondsmen and pedantically finding fault, then snapping, "Leland, fetch the samples." Leland wakes from his stupor to go out to the big black coach to get the suitcase. He looks like he hates the show.

In another scene Leland was coaching the bailbondsman CHRIS (who "looks like a doofus from Michigan" –– Beth) in how to talk to prostitutes on the phone. He said he was too "shy" and "inexperienced" to do it himself. There followed a tract of innuendo and joshing about who was more  plausible as a "john" to the Korean hooker they were chasing. Sonny was suggested, that useless fat pillock. He was rejected because he would have probably forgotten the plan and tried to fuck the hooker. So they decided on fat CHRIS, who worked at the Norwalk bail bonds shop. He looked like he might pass for a user of whores. A really nice thing to have said about you.

They were doing run-through conversations, role-playing. Leland kept doing the phone sound, quite straight-faced: "Ring ring ring ring ring. You say 'hello'."

FAT CHRIS: "Hello?"
LELAND: "Hello."
FAT CHRIS: "Hello, I'm around right now and I wondered if you and me we could hook up––"
LELAND: "Don't say 'hook up' to a hooker bro!"
FAT CHRIS: "Oh yeah! Uh, ... I was wondering if we could get together joo and me...'"
LELAND: "Okay that's better..."
FAT CHRIS: "What if she asks what I want to do?"
LELAND: "Bro I guarantee she won't bro."
But she did. Chris didn't get flustered, he shot back instantly: "Water sports!"

CLICK. She hung up.

Leland was baffled. "Why'd you say 'Water sports' bro?"
"It was the first thing I thought of––!"
"Funny that!"
"Hey you do it if you're such a nat'ral-born pro at talking to prostitutes!"
"Ah fuggew!"

They ended up tracking the lady-of-the-night to an apartment where she was hiding under some laundry. They pulled her out of the pile of towels and pants and took the flannels and socks off her head and frogrmarched her out into the streets.

Dog's soliloquy to the Korean hooker was a strange one. He said, "Get out. Run to the hills. Bad time a-comin'. Animals migrate [sic] when the water runs out. Your water's dry here. Why don't you make like a leaf and blow away. You won't see twenty-five the way you're going. Specially given the freaks in this State."
That's Michigan and California they've managed to offend in this one episode.

Later, in the SUV together, Dog and Beth found time for some of that patented schoolyard courtship ritual that is their "playful chiding exchanges":

B: Women have more stamina than men.
D: More stamina than––? Where are we talking about here?
B: Everywhere. You know exactly where.
D: Are we talking about––?
B: We are.
D: You think you have more stamina––?
B: I know it.
D: We'll see tonight.

Hideous imagery this exchange unavoidably conjures in our heads. A knock-down drag-out slugfest in their hotel room. Lots of wheezing and panting as these heaving, groaning octogenarians grapple and dully pummel each other around the bedroom. Ostensibly it is a love-match, but all affection, and all pleasure, left the venture in the first half a minute. They've been here five hours since. An exercise in willpower and endurance and sheer gnarled contrariness. A refusal to stay down. A refusal to die.

Much like this show and everybody watching it.

THOMAS RUGGLES PYNCHON.

Friday, May 10, 2013

"Have You Got Good Religion?"



Dog was looking for some no-account scofflaw and as usual he arrived too late to deal with anybody but the usual: some bumbling, halfwit, crooked uncle or father or stepfather or "gramps" (or "a sort of family friend"). The uncle (father) (gramps), naturally, swore that he didn't know where his nephew (or son) (or grandson) was. Dog respectfully called him a liar to his face and blustered deeper into the building. He hollered imperiously those immortal words, "Leland–– check the crawlspaces and under the bed."

By the way, these meth addicts always keep such messy places. You'd think they had no gumption! They should do a show about it. "Flip This Crack Den."

So Nuncy Grampy was playing his apportioned role (i.e., "too stupid to dissemble") ("too stupid even to fool Dog"), and he said, "I swear I don't know where he is. We don't even talk. Bring me a Bible and I'll swear on it."
Dog turned quickly and retorted tartly, "A meaningless remark! Who here can vouch for your good ties with your diocese? Who here can speak for your personal commitment to the Shavvat? Who shall attest to thy Christianly reception of Election and Grace? Who among ye can tell me if ye bathed in the blood of the Lamb? Have you got good religion?"
He then began to croon "Dem Golden Slippers."

No, none of that happened. The man made the remark about the Bible but Dog didn't even bother to respond.

They found the nephew/grandson/son in due course. I'd like to say they did so by canny sleuthmanship and excellent deduction but would you even believe me if I did?

Perp he had a fat estranged wife (of course) and while she sat blubbing to Dog and Beth hubbins was in the building next door frolicking and doing heroin with some nubile young drug addict a quarter his age. Strange how people live. He had his wife in the palm of his hand! He had his cake and he ate it too! I looked at this drug addict in his crack den with naked envy. As Joe Fagin sagely says, "That's Living Alright!"

When Dog burst into his secret crack-den love-nest, the guy was swooning on his feet. Half-dead on his feet he was withal full of junkie bravado. He rolled his eyes and bragged to Dog, "If you hadn't of surprised me like that I was gonna commit suicide by cop!"

Dog gave that all the credibility it deserved. He said, "I'd been knocking on your door for half an hour you nincompoop."

No –– he didn't. But she should of.

He should of said, "Suicide by cop? Brah, you ain't suicidal and I sure ain't no cop!"

I really ought to write some scripts out for this show. It'd be much better if I did.

Just a suggestion to the good people at Country Music Television.

At the end they had the usual Asterix-like banquet scene where they all dress up with the local bounty-hunter dynasties and they go to  Denny's or a Red Lobster or an Olive Garden and they prate platitudes at each other. Cacofonix in a corner tied up. This time somebody remarked plaintively, "What are our grandchildren's future?"



Never mind the essence and substance of the question, I stared at the TV for a few minutes trying to parse the sentence, see if it could conceivably have made sense.

Never mind I missed the answer to the riddle: that our grandchildrens' future "are" bounty-hunting.

This conclusion was almost as chilling as that episode of Parking Wars where the guy who tows illegally parked cars away in his truck went to his infant son's kindergarten and weirdly talked to his pre-school son through the wire fence. At the end of it he turned with a gruesome leer and said to the cameraman, "When he grows up he's gonna be like his old Dad –– a tow-truck car-remover!"

The child visibly blanched.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

"The New Dog (and Pony) Show." Or, "Dogz is Not a Put-On."

Beth and Dog have a new show on the Country Music channel, called Dog and Beth On The Hunt. That's inspired. I only wonder why they didn't call it Dog and Beth Are Bounty Hunters Who Are Married to Each Other and This Is Their Programme in Which They Chase Petty Criminals.

It is sandwiched between episodes of a show called Guntucky. 

I used to say to my wife, "If you ever come in the apartment and I am sitting watching an episode of Psychic Kids, you are hereby granted absolute license to kill me roughly." Seasons passed and I updated this joke to include Sand Masters when that fine show blew onto our screens like a scirocco through the Gobi.

I now say, "If you ever come into the apartment and I am watching Guntucky, please kill me with violent prejudice."

In the "wake of Newtown," I wonder if the Country Music channel will come up with a spin-off called Gunnecticut. It seems like about as good an idea frankly.

Idea for a reality show on the Country Music channel: Kill Your Teacher (Praise Your Preacher) (Sing the Family Hymnal). 

The new Dog show, to return happily to my familiar subject, is rendered conspicuous by the absences of Duane Lee and Baby Lisa, both of whom strayed far from the reservation at the end of the old A&E season. Also Bobby Brown "peeled off" and went wildly AWOL and sued Dog and Beth and A&E. This was off-camera. There's a confusing testimony by him on Youtube though if you're at all interested by this. They should do a reality show about that reality show so we can find out what's actually going on. The Chapman clan do love their Bible-family circle-jerks, their praise-Chrast ring-a-round-a-Rosies, but these people clearly despise each other "off-camera."

That said, I was quite surprised that the spat with Duane Lee was genuine. I had been convinced it was a put-on, a narrative "arc" inserted artificially to drum up some viewership, to try and get some Ryan Seacrest Kardashian points. Apparently it wasn't.

Leland is still on the show, but it's like he's been lobotomized.
(In the voice of GARRY SHANDLING:) Yes, I know what you're saying: "Could you ever even tell if Leland Chapman had been lobotomized?"

This incarnation of the Dog and Beth traveling circus and farmer's museum has the vapid illusion of serving some didactic, pedagogic purpose. They are ostensibly going from state to state advising ailing bailbondsmen on how to pep up their lifestyles and also redeem themselves in the blood of the Lamb. They offer sagacious nuggets of brilliance, like: "You need pepper spray cause what you gonna do if your mace and your tazer fail you?"

Leland said that. He also advised the wearing of gloves because, "You don't want somebody's tooth embedded in your knuckle when you go to punch them in the face."
They went out on a shooting range and Leland basically told them to point their guns at the targets and pull the trigger. "That's correct. Very good."

The sadness and loss felt by Leland was palpable. He told the two trainee bounty-hunter troglodytes, "You go round the back."
The back, the going round of it, that was Duane Lee's old spot, his old routine, and you could see in Leland's sad, wounded eyes the personal pain of losing his brother. He chose the Yankee dollar over loyalty to his brotherman.

He tediously explained the philosophy of sending the man round the back of the house thusly: "We wanna surround the house. So: this is the house..." [Here he traced with his finger a square shape. Then, pointing to the sides of the square...] "We go there, there, there."   

Beth was teaching the new generation of dumb fucking working stiffs too. She said to the stereotypical white-trash/trailer-park glam-rock/cyber-gonk secretary, "You got the bounty-hunter spread-sheet?"
"Nope."
"Gotta get it sistah. Gotta get that spreadsheet brah."

Another time to protractedly demonstrate their resourcefulness they had an interface with a fat bearded guy in spectacles over their computer and he looked up a name and address from his computer database. The trainee bounty-hunters looked on in awe, like the first cavemen to behold a fist hatchet, and Beth simpered smugly and said, "You too can be an ace sleuth like us if you sign up to this guy's list."

The idea is like "Chef Ramsay" coming to a restaurant and pillaging the staff, finding gunk in the freezer and acting like it's still shocking to his superior sensibility. Then the coming up with fatuous solutions.

It's good to see then that the old repartee is still there:

BETH: I'm gonna slap yer.
DOG: Whatever.
BETH: Duane I like. Dog me no likey.

All the old hits, they're back, lovingly revisited for a new "new country" audience.

Incidentally, is the Country Music channel known to be a shit-kicker glue-sniffer redneck ultra-rightist channel? I'm only asking because the tone of this first episode was not in the past tradition of eggshell-walking and fence-building, like when Dog would daub on face-paints to protest the many sufferings of the gay/lesbian/bi/curious/transvestite/transexual community, or when he gingerly went among the African-Americans and blunderingly, urgently attempted to make social reparations for his past gaffes.

In this episode they went fiercely and unrelentingly after the Native Americans with some considerable savagery. I didn't know if I was watching Dog or Hell On Wheels. Is it okay to go after the red man? You naturally wonder if their old A&E editors silently, and wisely, edited out all the awkward and costly Prince Philip-style political blunders the Chapmans made, while the new editors are such corn-pone neo-Nazis they don't bother about it.

Dog's mind seems to be drifting. Never mind that his skin is bright red and his hair bright yellow. I shall say nothing of that except he looks like a traffic light without the green lamp. His mind is almost visibly dwindling, almost as deleteriously as his golden ("bright yellow") locks of hair. Several times he'd be knocking on the door of the perp, gun in hand, banging and hollering and then he'd turn and say, "What's his name again?"
("Who am I? Where am I?")

He was at the door, rocket launcher in hand (I should note that this gigantic Rob Liefeld-esque bazooka only pumps out hot air as far as I'm aware– that or wiffle balls) and a four-year-old child answered the door. Dog bellowed at the child, "Where's MAURICE, you black-skinned crook?"

The perp's actual name was "Marquise Cooper," but Dog would insist on calling him Maurice. "Come out bruddah. Come on Cooper. Come on Maurice."

Later there was a trainee working stiff called LUMUMBA (he actually solved the crime single-handed despite the Chapmans' "help") and Dog insisted on calling him "LUBUMBA" which became "La Bamba."

They were sent to another address and then doubled back to where they were and Dog got confused and hare-brained ("hair-brained") again. "Can you see the house we were just at, Leland?"
("Where am I? Who am I?")

They caught "Maurice" and he wept on Dog's breast and Dog cradled his head and kissed him tenderly above his ear.
"What did  I do, sir?"
"You failed to appear in court."
"NO! IT CAN'T BE TRUE!"
Not having been on television before, Maurice was hellbent on chewing up the scenery with a "bravura debut." His seemed to be a hysterical over-reaction to the bald fact and Dog, always professional, coolly parried it:
"Don't get crazy son. You just missed your court date."

Soon the perp was on the back seat, becalmed and kittenish and on the phone to his fat trash ex-girlfriend. Still chewing scenery but focussed now. When she picked up the phone the camera was there,  and she wanted to be seen on-camera to be taking the initiative and so she shot in first, "I'm done with y'all." Because "Maurice" was on the backseat of Dog and Beth's SUV, he of course was more interested in peaceable solutions and so he crooned some blues about loving her and Chrast and family and flag and the great state of Guntucky too.

They went after another perp on the same show. Quite honestly at any moment I wasn't sure who they were after or why. But they were talking about the aunt of a perp and Dog said, "She's straight, the Auntie?"
His trainee stuffed-shirt goes, "Straightish."
Nice definition of the people on this show.

For this new perp, Dog got all sneaky. He noted, "He's very fast, he's smart, very paranoid so to get close enough to capture him without him noticing us first is going to be the difficult."
So what they did was they all piled into Dog's gigantic black tourbus with his name and a blow-up of his badge on the front, and they "snuck up" on him in that.

Dog refers to the senior bailbondsman, the scatterbrained honcho they're there to assist, as "The Old Man," 'cause he's all red in the face and can't remember shit by now.

These bumbling amateur bounty-hunters they are assisting have to provide on-camera testimonials about how Dog, Beth and Leland are all helping them in finding crime-solving solutions to knotty problems. It's exposition, it's propaganda, it's boring viewing.

I query the point of this episode. So these stiffs had to call in Dog and Beth for this "knotty konundrum"? All they did was ask the perp's "Auntie" and then his fat ex-girlfriend and they sang like canaries and gave him up trussed up like a Christmas goose. Come to that, the guy was driving up and down the one strip in town in a bright red truck with a pair of silver bollocks affixed to the back bumper! Hardly a case for Holmes!

Then again, "The Old Man" (one HANK BAYLESS -- Hank CLUELESS I said) was about as useless as tits on a warthog. He'd say about every stiff, "This guy is a pain in the ass and I have haemorrhoids bunched up like grapes in my asshole." He whined, "He don't wanna get caught." Well who does, bounty man?

Boba Fett you ain't.

Hank Bayless is retiring though. Depressing thought. I paused the DVR and looked at the old defeated codger and thought, "What are you going to do with the rest of your life I wonder, you man?"
Death is depressing. it clearly casts a dreary pall even over life.

Leland broke into the house and said, "We're comin' right for ya now ese brah."
Dog said that the fugitive was "hanging on his coattails."

Dog on the informant: "We don't know his name?"
The trainee-stiff replied, "No, I can't remember his name."
There was a pause and Dog coughed awkwardly and went, "Mmmmm. Okay. Look, next time write his name okay?"

[...]

Then he goes,  "Who we after again?"

I answered the TV at this point, thusly: "I have no idea."