"Smokey, the Bandit and That Damned Dog."

I was watching Smokey and the Bandit for reasons unclear to all. I'd put myself through Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy –– nine hours of unrelenting hilarity –– just before. This was me relaxing a bit. That is, I thought: "I suppose I better fucking watch it. I bought it two years ago in Amoeba." It seems I like to punish myself with bad films. I'm now steeling myself to watch Tod Browning's Freaks –– a film that everybody feels they ought to watch, but nobody does. Tod Browning's Freaks is like champagne –– everybody claims to like it but nobody wants to actually have any. I've had it for probably close to ten years, sitting there accusingly, defying me to watch it.

This is why I end up binge-watching whole seasons of Million Dollar Listing New York instead of watching serious world cinema.

I was watching Smokey and the Bandit, which features Jackie Gleason as Buford T. Justice, the racist Southron cop who pursues Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed across numerous Trumps States without any clear reason. It has something to do with Sally Field... I think...?

When Jackie Gleason's credit came on, I went, "Jackie Gleason, wasn't he... uh..."
"Yup," goes my wife. "The kid in the Charlie Chaplin film."
"Wow," I went. I was silent for a moment.
Then I said, "That was Jackie Coogan."
My wife was irritated in a very specific way but she couldn't fight the facts, even in this "post-truth" age. Trump may be in the White House, but Jackie Gleason and Jackie Coogan are still not the same person.

However, Duane Chapman and Jackie Gleason might be the same person.
Say if you pinned Dog down and strapped him to a gurney and then proceeded to cut off his fucking yellow hair against his will in a sort of bathetic burlesque of the story of Samson in the Bible -- if you cut off his hair and then mollified him by dressing him up as a cop (the one thing he has always wanted to be but never can!), you'd have Jackie Gleason in the celebrated role of Buford T. Justice.

Look:––

It's like Dog and Leland I swear. Although these guys are obviously superior at the art of criminology.

(It's true –– Burt Reynolds drives flat-out like a nutcase in his Pontiac Trans-Am and these two manage to keep up at every turn in a police car with the roof shaved off, doors missing  and no fucking engine, propelling it along with their feet like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.)

Also you would have to somehow force Dog to avoid the tanning bed –– perhaps by keeping him strapped to the gurney for several weeks so that he gradually fades to his "natural" colour –– whatever that is. Dog seems to have a similar model sunbed to "The President", but Dog cranks it up even higher so he emerges from it no not orange but bright fucking red.

One last thing. I mentioned to M.K. Price that I was watching this film and he said, "I prefer Cannonball Run."
I said, "You can like both. It's allowed."

"A New Bride for Dog Chapman."

Poor old Beth is dead and gone. I do not say "ding dong".

I honestly didn't say "ding dong". 
I didn't I didn't I didn't. 

On those occasions in society when people ask me my opinion on the sad subject, and as a sort of expert on Dog Chapman it happens a lot, I remark that if Dog had given up his ten packs a day habit she might still be among us. I don't say this to grind the metaphorical cigarette into an open wound for Duane Chapman Senior. I say it more as a cautionary tale for smokers everywhere.

It's gonna gitcha. It always does. 

Let us instead think of positive, better energies, as Dog has done. I read that he was back on the "hunt" soon enough after Beth's passing, nothing daunted, and that he was blundering about with honorable second son, Leland, when Leland tried a move he probably shouldn't have, a move he maybe hadn't made since the original show was dropped. Leland slipped a disc in multiple locations and was put "out of commission" for doing something he wouldn't have thought twice about in his kung-fu younger days of the Oughties.

It's gonna gitcha. It always does. 

Let me try this again. To matters more positive. To energies eternal! Let us find a new bride for Dog. He isn't apt to do well as a widower. It ain't his way. He must have a woman to his side and his hearth. He must have somebody close at hand to inhale all his second-hand smoke. He needs a woman to serve the role of a sort of hoover, which is funny since he was formerly a vacuum cleaner salesman. He didn't sell Hoovers, of course, he sold Kirbys.

The other day I was listening by chance to an old Fall track and I sheepishly recalled my crush on Brix Smith. A crush may I point out that is a recent revisionist alteration of my original attitude –– a silly, late-blooming crush, and all the worst for it. But dude she's hot in the "Hit the North" video, you ever see that?

Let us say aloud what everybody used to say in the late 1980s: "How'd Mark E. Smith do it?" It's like Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane. English rock musicians getting away with brazen mass murder. There must be some mysterious hypnotism that is pulled off by the touring English indie band abroad.

In a moment of awful moral weakness I googled pictures of Brix Smith and boy was I surprised when pictures came up that seemed to be of Beth Chapman.

Is it Beth?

Someone should gently and generously forward this image to Dog Chapman and say, "Behold, Dog, regard it: Beth lives!" 

It'd be good for Brix too because Mark E. Smith is now dead as well. I am aware that she actually divorced Mark E. Smith a long time ago, but she subsequently knocked about with one of the most universally-agreed-upon-proponents-of-assholery and damtomfoolery in the English-speaking world, I won't stoop so low as to utter his name, so she presumably hasn't been doing so well since Mark E. and she split. She'd be knocked out by ex-vacuum salesman Dog Chapman.

Both Dog and the late Mark E. had a certain knackered cadaverous quality. Mark E. was after all turning into a cross between Alex Higgins and Stephen "Hawkins" Hawking, while Dog has the corpse of a goose atop his bright-red pate. Also, Mark E. used to work on the docks and I think I mentioned that Dog used to sell vacuum cleaners. Kirbys. They both worked with their hands. 

I feel like Cupid or one of those matchmakers. Can this thing be done? And if it can, might I possibly receive a commission, some remuneration shall we say, for initiating it? 

GIZZA A JOB [sic].

"Derelict TV."

1. "Goober Rownowsky" on a Youtube message board referred to Dog and Beth as "an old crack addict and his fat tag along woman." Were Dog's lawyers alerted. Beth: "Okay he may be an old crack addict, I don't know, but I am not fat. And I don't tag along."

2. Dog's technique in this one episode cannot be credited.  He said, "Hi, it's Dog. Will you come talk to me? Are these wild goats? That's a herd of wild goats. How's it. So I'm gonna show you a picture of this chronic guy that comes back here. That tries to hide here."

His auditor had no shirt but it was okay, he had a neck brace to maintain his dignity.

3. Think of some of the dumb shows we watched that went absolutely nowhere. Moonshots to the good loam. Even so, their wider significance.

Dog is about the dumb bailbondsmen that come for you and have power over you when you fail at life itself.

Storage Wars is about stocking up too much against Heaven and then losing it to cheap, canny fools.

Market Warriors is about the decline in cultural discernment. Ubi sunt...

4. Misread "Direct TV" as "Derelict TV".

"Dog Yawps the Body Electric."

On a recent episode (August 2015) Dog was so angry he kept applying the epithet  "bitch" to the wife of the defendant, just to vent his aching spleen. He was so angry he was bending the rules of the English language (–– again).

"That's it. Aiding and abetting. She's under bitch arrest."

"Bitch" is now an adjective.
"Clothes-line" is a verb. 

Later he was so elated in the SUV that he transcended mere langue et parole. He emitted a sort of native cry, a joyful noise unto the Lord:––

"HOKKKKKAAAA  HEYYYYY!"

The dumb cracker bondsman he was working with that day didn't know how to deal with Dog's wild barbaric yawp from the earth soil and so he went, awkwardly, "Uh yeah. Sure. Yeehaw."

Idea for a film. Duane Chapman as Walt Whitman.

("Also featuring Fabian Ironside as William Ellery Channing the Younger.")

"Bran New Teeth."

How about this new theme music: Is that Dog singing it himself?

[Comic IRISHMAN voice:] "Is it himself, so it is?"

I suspect they couldn't afford Ozzy any more or maybe Ozzy amazingly decided that he didn't want any further association with Dog and Beth –– that they were lowering the level of his artistic profile. I smell the intervening hand of Sharon in it. Ozzy had slummed it among the lower classes too long and Sharon issued a diktat that he was no longer to associate with such reality TV types.

On this week's episode we saw an obese male bailbondsman of around sixty–odd who, he was always sat down while all the action went on around him. Sitting in a flat cap ominously cradling a pair of crutches.

(I got in a fight in Greenpoint, Brooklyn once over a pair of crutches.
I made a fast joke at the expense of the wrong man.
A neighbourhood lunatic.
Actually his wife.
I said, "What you going to do, come at me with your wife's set of crutches?"
Then he did just that.)

The big man observes life gnomically through his cellphone viewfinder. He sits on his broad duff, clutches his crutches and photographs the wide world with his phone, like a hoarder of dull images. Like a non-participant in the hard world.

His two dumb unter–flunkies lined up to be tazered by Dog and Beth so that they could learn how it felt to be tazered. They queued up to be shot with a machine-gun so they could know how it felt to die.

In fact the male of the species, with the harelip, the cauliflower ear and the broken button nose, actually asked to be tazered.
He was.
He stood there, lumpen, shovel-faced, unhindered by the volts of electricity roaring through him. That big tough ugly son-of-a-bitch of a mountain of a man with a cleft lip and a heart of gold. He withstood the voltage. He endured.

Speaking of harelips, Dog the Bounty Hunter's had his teeth capped and now he looks rather like a hare himself. You find you want to feed him carrots, pumpkin seeds, an iceberg lettuce and some dandelions. You wonder where he's hidden his nuts for the winter season.

Anyway, the obese guy naturally took a picture of this tazer scene with his cellphone and he simpered, "I'm proud. It's like watching your kids go to the prom."

He then amended this:

"Not together obviously."

"That would be incest."

"Incest is illegal in most States."

"Not only that it is disgusting."

"Although interestingly the dim distant origins of the taboo have nothing to do with social morality or indeed genetics, it's all to do with bridal dowries in ancient primitive cultures."

(A lot of this wide-ranging rumination was not featured in the show.)

Then Dog woke up from one of his reveries (or, "patented vertical snoozefests") and elected to essay a florid remark of his own. As the tazered twosome, shrovetide pancake face and cloven my palate and his goodwife, prepared to go out on a "jump", Dog waxed sagacious. He said "It's like teaching your kid to drive, and then finally she gets in the wheel."

He actually said that blooper thing, "Gets in the wheel."

I turned to my wife and said, "That is, she literally crawls inside a wheel."

I furthermore said, "Does nobody care that the English language is rapidly becoming forfeit through teevee like this? That rambling piffle is now king of the Earth? That the finer works of the beautiful old men are crucified daily on TV for the amusement of the mean, vicious rabble?"

My wife swatted that away and just said, "Dog's had a deep tan."

Uh –– yeah. He looks like a bright red beaver in a lime green wig.

I said, "Yeah well he's had something done to his teeth too."

The obese guy sat there meanwhile, hugging his crutches contentedly to his flabby chest and being enigmatic and jaded like a bigshot, seen-it-all man-of-the-world. He didn't apparently take umbrage that Dog had essentially stolen his allegorical figure, about kids going to a prom. He was broad-minded like that.

They had a lead on one Dalten [sic] Casto [sic], a guy who looked a lot like Leland's wayward son Dakota. In fact I sat there with a pen and paper with my tongue peeping out of the corner of my mouth trying to work out if his name was in fact an anagram of Dakota's and it was Dakota in disguise.  It wasn't. The bail people said, "This one I think will be a fun one for Leland. The guy works at a paintball place."

As if to say, while tossing Leland a yoyo, "Leland has the mind of an unremarkable eight-year-old. He'll love this one."

("This one I think will be a fun one for Leland. The guy works at a teddy bear factory.")
("Leland will like this one. We're going to play with Legos.")
("Leland is never happier than when schmeared up to his eyeballs in fluorescent goo.")

"Short Arm of the Law."

Dog was going down to Alabama to help an old lady who looked like the late Bill Burroughs in drag, if Burroughs had had a stroke. Down to good old Baldwin County.

Her bailbondsman business had been suspended by one of those willful, autocratic, contrarian frontier circuit judges you used to read about in the Spirit of the Times in the 1830s. She couldn't resume her trade until she had apprehended a client who had skipped town & headed, it was said, to Oakland, California.

Dog phoned her up from his tourbus to get the details.
She relayed him the skinny. "Ah believe the rascal hays absconded to that ere Californy," she said.
"Uh huh ma'am. We're on our way to Alabama now so we'll see you in a few days."
"Naow: yew all did hear me say he had absconded to Californy, didn't you."
"Yes ma'am. We're heading to Alabama now."

Dog did some keen sleuth work –– he phoned up a bounty hunter in California named "Topo" (yes, same name as the sentient octopus sidekick in Silver Age numbers of Aquaman) and asked him to catch the guy. Dog preferred to go to Alabama.
He turned up at the stroke lady's place of domicile and said, "You got any jumps we can do."
"Yeou do realize ah'm not allowed to practice out of here don't you?"
"Uh huh ma'am."
"Ah cain't help but wonder wha you didn't go to Californy lahk ah mentioned–––"
"Uh ma'am we like it here just fine in Alabama. Got any jumps?"

They had a couple of jumps, just petty pilferers. Low-grade scum-bait. The mugshots they showed of the "defendants" were obviously still–shots of them taken on the backseat of Dog's SUV, so we knew from the outset that this was going to be a successful bust. They plundered the future to illustrate the past, creating incidentally a paradox and a wormhole in the fabric of the space-time continuum. It sort of ruined the narrative tension not to mention the very substance of reality.

Beth did one of her gnomic trade questions.
"Can I tell you, when two girls get picked up together for shoplifting what do you think that is?" she asked the bailbondswoman secretary.
It was a riddle worthy of the Sphinx.
"...That it's a group ...?" the woman asked, groping, confused, looking plaintively at the camera for a hint.
Breaking the first rule of reality TV.
"That's a drug habit," said Beth all tough and as though it was one of Jefferson's truths that we hold to be self-evident.
The woman, in response, simply shook her head. At Beth –– at drugs –– at the wide world in its dismal decline –– it was not clear.

It was Melville's "NO! in thunder."
Carlyle's Everlasting No.

Elsewhere on the show Dog phoned up a possible number for the suspect.
A woman answered it.
"Who's this?" Dog growled. Unorthodox play.
"Who's this?" came the not–unreasonable rejoinder.
"Ralph G." was Dog's quicksilver response.
"Ralph G.?" goes the voice.
"Whatever," Dog said, and hung up.
He returned to his cohorts and said with ironclad confidence, "That's her."
How did he deduce it.
He just sort of knows.
Guy's a mental savant.
Guy's telekinetic.

That's as maybe but he's had something done, something awful, something dental done.
To his teeth.
He looks like a confounded rabbit.
Even when he shuts his mouth you can see his buck teeth are creating a bulge in his upper lip and they are visible even when he is trying his best to shut his mouth. It lends him a new, awful earnestness. He had his new teeth made too big or I don't know what all happened, result is he looks like a damn red-faced rodent with bright green hair!

"Clothes Line Is Now a Verb (Confusion Is Sex)."

On “Music City Mayhem” (originally aired 30 Aout 2014),  

J.P. Henderson said to the camera, “It’s all about boots on the ground, as they say in the Marines.” 

This guy is a tough guy. 
Never been in the Marines.

This guy he was never even in the cub scouts.
Still, one of those small-town tough guys.

Hunter Chambers was acting all tough too. “Been doing this job four months now,” he said, eyes seven-eighths shut. 

“Yes okay, technically I’m a temp.”

Ha. Fresh from the killing fields of data entry. 

On this episode, set in Tennessee, ANDY, the scion of a Nashville bailbondsmen empire, elected to join Dog and his crowd as they went running and howling after a fleeing fugitive. 
He would come to regret that decision. 

The fugitive, somebody said, his father had once fed a boy to some hogs.

Doesn’t everybody do that in the South though.
At some point in their lives.

Dog made a crack about that but I missed it because there was a guy outside our window with a leafblower.

Another fugitive had his son buried in his back garden. 

“Where did you last see somebody buried in a back garden liken that?,” the Cumberland County boys asked Dog with a sort of civic pride. 

“Samoa,” Dog grunted back, instinctively, mysteriously. 

Like Chinatown. 

They were talking reverently about “Mountain Folk” and their unique folkways. 

Apparently these secretive and remote people don’t have electricity or rudimentary running water but they are all avid users of Facebook.

(The other day as we were driving down one of the shittier miles of Hollywood Boulevard I said to my wife, "Facebook and Starbucks are now victims of their own success. They are now colonized almost exclusively by bummers and rounders and scoundrels. It is the eternal pedigree of success to plunge into infamy."

I became carried away and I quoted Whitman:

"Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?... 
I also say it is good to fail . . . Vivas to those who have failed...")

One character at least gave himself up to the police rather than be taken by Dog. I think this is a way that canny criminals exact an unpleasant metafictional, extratextual revenge on Dog: they sabotage the whole narrative structure of the episode. They "break down the fourth wall" as readers of Deadpool comics never tire of saying. After all the thrill of the chase there is a prosaic addendum where the actual details of the arrest can only be described lamely, retrospectively from a remote location. 

Premature ejaculation is our lot. 

Beth took one of her signature dislikes to this one bounty man, a Southron clownfish with a high flutey voice, a bright red face and copper-coloured hair. 

She kept cussing his driving. 

She had acquired a pronounced disdain for this man. At one point she said, “Whoever’s in the car in front can’t drive.”

It was obvious she knew who was driving, but the next shot, of the driver's seat in the next car, bore it out: the redfaced guy.

In the midst of the incomprehensible kerfuffle that ensued, the melee that always accompanies an actual arrest situation on the show, somebody could be heard hollering with terrific seriousness, “Man down!” 

It was like the Mekong Delta. 

Dog’s people heard the words Man down! and went feral. They were like Wolverine when he loses his last vestiges of his noble humanity (that is, every week): bloodthirsty for payback, vowing to "escalate" matters and tazer the fugitive. 

Then it turned out that the "man" who was "down", Andy the Tennessee bailbondsman, had run splat into a barbed-wire fence and it had knocked him down and winded him. 

“He just got clothes-lined by that barb-wire!” somebody said. 

Is clothes-line really a verb now?

That’s one way of putting it I suppose.

Another is that he "clothes-lined" himself.

He ran headlong into a barbed-wire fence!