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.
Sunday, August 4, 2013
"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.
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."
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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