"Book 'Em, Leland, Murder One."

Dog was on Hawaii 5-0. 

It was purely a sinecure, like most things on TV, but Duane still blundered wherever he feasibly could.

Pure puppy puffery. There being no show left to promote, he was promoting the nebulous brand of Duane Chapman. Life exists henceforth in stolen chances at advertisements. The prologue, never hereafter the denouement.

Now you should know this: the two lead actors in Hawaii 5-0 are almost identical -- one is just a foot shorter than the other one. One of them is the son of James Caan. I saw him once in Joan's on 3rd Street. Both are lantern-jawed sandy-headed dependable, stand-up meathead heartland homeland good-old-boy shitkickers. This must be confusing for viewers I would think. Still, it seems American viewers have voted with their feet and it has been decided that the people must have plenty of sandy-haired, square-jawed, two-fisted cannon-fodder types. File alongside the ubiquitous feisty hispanic female, the corrupt Irish-American uniform cop, and the dogged African-American law official. 

In his scene, it was highly unrealistic because Dog wrestled the poor perp (nearly wrote "poor poop") to the bonnet of a car. When, in the history of the world, has Dog ever directly attacked a perp? He always has Leland do it, while he stands about paring his nails before donning a delightful pair of lace gloves. Remember when Leland punched the shit out of that guy on a motel forecourt?

"We beat you to it for once! Ah-ha!" Dog beamed at the cops, trying to pretend he was breathing easy inside his whalebone girdle. Coughing away a coronary. As his "chestal thorax" goes into "arrest" and he goes through the "seven stages of denial." He made a peevish little allusion to that tried, trite old routine whereby the cops always ruined a perfectly decent episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter by arresting the quarry before Dog's ingenious, intricate plan reached fruition.

I fast-forwarded over this supremely dull programme looking in vain to see where Dog popped up again, but he didn't. It veered next into a storyline about roller-derby MILFS -- and so on. After this, bedlam. The show seemed to be roving all over the place, in fact, in its frantic search for a plot or a way to stop the viewer walking away in boredom. This must explain the very apogee of desperation: having Dog appear on an episode.

This week the guest is Jimmy Buffet.

"Yelp."

This was from a Yelp review of Da Kine Bail Bonds Company. I don't know whether it is authentic but it sounds it. 

After all wouldn't you shoot some dude in the face if he stole your purple drank... brah...? 

I did not have a good bail bonds exp. with this company. I am not sure if they are only worried about their tv show, and not their customers but this seemed to be the case.
I had to bail my mother out of jail because she shot some dude in the face for stealing her purple drank.
Worst interest rates eva
How bout that one, brah?

"Living It Up At The Cock Fights."

"He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos."

JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses.

I was watching a Dog the Bounty Hunter episode which I knew I'd already seen, which is - as I said yesterday - not far different from giving up altogether and freely, deliberately, frittering away your God-given life. It is not far different, I say, from cocking a pistol into your lower jaw and spinning the barrel playfully then pulling the trigger just to see what might come of it.

Anyway, that happened and this episode involved the team chasing a slippery character who goes by the colourful name of CHESTER CHRISOSTOMOS ("gold-mouthed," I thought, a good and dutiful scholarly "spalpeen" and remembranceful reader of James Joyce), who had retreated to the deepest darkest wilds of Hawaii. He had, in the idiom of his confreres, "dug in."

This man CHESTER GOLD-MOUTHED withdrew from society not - like Thoreau - to be closer to his thoughts and God-in-Nature, but to partake in low gambling and cock-fighting. He found a certain rural transcendental calm in bloodletting and mayhem.

The team busted in on one of his associates out way out in the wilds and the guy had dead chickens all over his yard and was actually wearing a baseball cap that said "COCK FIGHTING". The man goes, "I am not involved in cock-fighting."

They didn't find Chester. He had a way of disappearing into the night.

So on day three or four, Dog announced to the camera his revised methodology: "The plan is the boys are riding the motorcycles down in there, Baby Lisa's parked out at his mother's house and Beth and I are going to be up on the ridge." Then, without a trace of irony, he said: "We learned this tactic from Custer."

Their enterprise was about as successful as Custer's. Baby Lisa abandoned her post to use the toilet and the thing fell apart from there. "We're kind of stuck here," Dog admitted, "so we've got to try to make a possibility out of the impossible."

This seemingly involved them browbeating Chester's girl CARLA to no avail, then blundering aimlessly through the brush. At one point Dog picked up a breeze-block and hurled it into a bush. I thought, "What if Chester Chrisostomos had of been in there? He'd of been killed." The methodology further involved Duane Lee and Leland building plank bridges and falling into quicksand. The A&E website amazingly has the transcript of this episode, which includes this wonderful exchange, which since we have the apparatus I simply must quote liberally from:

00:54:16	Right now we found this freakin' pig farm, we can't find a way to get around it.
00:54:20	There's a big, huge moat.
00:54:22	We got Leland going to go get a plank, and then we're gonna drop it like the military and freakin' attack.
00:54:31	Go, just bounce like a rabbit.
00:54:33	I'm right behind you.
00:54:36	( laughing ) Are you going ?
00:54:44	No way, bro.
00:54:48	Okay, you guys, it's getting dark.
00:54:50	We gotta put this on hold until tomorrow.

As you can plainly see from the transcript, they conclude their "methodology" - as usual - by going home as soon as it gets dark. It's really a pity that they stop at sundown, so they can put the kids to bed. Because as I have established in a previous essay, most criminal enterprise tends to take place after sundown. Maybe this is another tactic cribbed from that master strategist CUSTER.

In the interests of brutal honesty they really ought to show the scenes at home after a day of bounty-hunting, after the Chapmans have "clocked off," and everybody is sitting in the TV room watching TV. Like that scene a few weeks ago where they showed Duane Lee dolefully watching Storage Wars. Gary Boy stuffing his face with too much pasta. They could have ingeniously juxtaposed these scenes of domestic calm with orgiastic, bacchanalian scenes of Chester living it up at the cockfights. Chester with a chicken's head in his mouth, blood around his jaws as he heaves on an ice pipe.

[...]

As I mentioned, I had seen this episode before, but happily I couldn't seem to remember the ending. How they caught the bad guy and such. Usually I remember some sweet peculiarity from the arrest and the corollary Backseat Redemption Scene. This time I couldn't remember any such thing. It became clear why not in the last minute or so, when it turned out that one night, while the Chapmans were innocently dozing watching TV at home, the police burst in on Chester's rural compound and arrested him. It was one of those episodes, where they lost out to the FILTH. The police, it seems, don't play fair. They have an annoying habit of going after criminals even after the sun has gone down.

[...]

I wonder how much they pay per hour for somebody to transcribe the dialogue from an episode. It'd be a lot of fun I expect and you'd certainly improve your written English as you worked.

"The House Always Wins."

Sometimes in your day, in your life, in your soul's reeling arc betwixt the vault and the precipice, you have to simply listen to some good old kkkountry gold on the stereo of your shitkicker flatbed truck. And when you stop, as stop ye must, you have to stroll over to your foeman's front porch, where your foeman lounges in a hammock, and you got to spit a plug of tobacco in your foeman's face and smile as the juice drips down your foeman's chin.

Other times you have to watch an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter that you know that you have seen before, even with the knowing that thy term of natural life on this firmament is perishing by the second.

Why because it's good and it's righteous and it's right and it's goodly and it's kindly and it's not ungood.

This lunchtime I watched an episode where Dog was going after an inveterate gambler, one Kristine Lau, and this provided the premise and the impetus for round after round of gambling metaphors from Dog.

"She's a gambler. So are we. We're gamblers. It's gonna be like chasing ourselves. Because bounty-hunters are gamblers. Every time we take on a bond we make a gamble. Right?"

The camera then shows Leland with his lips parted. You can almost read his mind:

"...? Whaddid he just say? We're gamblers now?"

Nothing daunted, Dog kept the thematic zingers coming. "We're The House. She's the gambler. She's bet she can outrun me. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha."

Now Dog had narrowed his focus. He wasn't going to keep making broad gambling metaphors. He was going to refer to himself and the team henceforth as "The House".

This is not to say he didn't experiment with other, equally confusing figures of speech. At one point, to punctuate a lull in the narrative, he growled "We're here. We're live. This isn't Memorex."

Bad metaphor for the digital age, Duane. You're making yourself look old - obsolete.

Then he resorted to that classic trope of American folk rhetoric, willful exaggeration. Speaking of his quarry's dwindling options, he asked facetiously, "Where they gonna go, the ocean? They gonna rent a submarine to get away from us?"

He was on rare form in this episode. It was, I should note, from maybe six or seven years ago, when the world looked young and hopeful and a bard was inspired to heights inconceivable today.

Dog's methodology had been typically bewildering. In pursuit of Kristine Lau they had decided to be as blatant and cumbersome as possible, effected by blundering raucously into all the illegal gambling dens and asking the staff bluntly "Ya seen her?" while brandishing her mugshot. Amazingly, when this didn't turn up any results, Dog seemed genuinely surprised. He was at a loss as to how it could've not've worked.

As time ran out the bounty-hunting team would go to the car parks of these strip malls where the gambling dens were and saunter around like Union Square protesters, ostensibly scaring off custom. I think the quaint idea was to embarrass her into submission. This didn't seem to be working either, especially because come about ten o'clock at night, when most gamblers are still eating breakfast, the Chapmans got tired and went home.

They were knocking on a gambling den door one evening when they received a call from their own office that Kristine Lau was there and had given herself up. Not one to underplay the moment, Dog still got right flustered and acted like they were in a race against death itself to get back to the office before Kristine Lau changed her mind. He was all animated in the SUV, bouncing up and down on the back seat, one second chiding Beth for her driving then chuckling with glee "The House is gonna win!"

As usual when they got to the office the arrest was totally mundane and everybody calmed down immediately.

Nevertheless, Dog had room for one more gambling metaphor in his summing-up segment: "In a gambling perspective you win, lose or draw. This was a draw."

Here he paused, and I thought he had finally laid his flirtation with the device of The House to rest. No such thing. He grinned his pure kkkountry gold smile and resumed:

"A draw in favour of The House."

"Crime Tips For Junior G-Men"; Or, "The Eye That Sees"

Watching old episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter at lunchtime when my patience for the Monkees in their facetious--sophomoric phase has run out and I cannot make it through Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass---

Watching old episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter because I no longer recall which I have seen and which I haven't, they have turned into one colossal narrative unceasing and unswerving and overwhelming. Since I don't know if I've seen it or not I have to watch it, alway.

Watching old episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter because I have lost all direction in life...

In this episode Dog tries to inveigle some "clew-hunting tips" into the chaotic proceedings, to give his show a vaguely documentary air, like the sort Chester Gould used to put in Dick Tracy Sunday strips --- and they make about as much sense as the Dick Tracy ones.

Dog goes, "The thing to do when looking at a perp's eyes, to get their full measure, is to hold the mugshot upside down so that you can tell which eye stands out more."

Here a pause; no comment from the assembled extended Chapman clan.

"You didn't know that did you?" Dog says to Leland.

You can tell that Leland is thinking, "No, Dad, I didn't 'know' that... for the very good reason that it isn't true."

There is a hush in the room as the whole family looks at Dog, stupidly grinning, and thinks as one: "This guy is strictly full of prime hooey."

Later on in the episode the snow-capped bungler Bobby Brown fucks up in classic form and leads the crew to the wrong address... couldn't read his own wretched scrawl... and so they send Duane Lee to the back door to hover in the garden and they surround the shack and they bombard the tenant, when this poor old run-down flea-bitten revenant lurches to the front door. He looks a lot like the Gravedigger from EC Comics, at the door in slippers and mom jeans and he says to Dog, rather mystically, "I've been wanting to meet you for a long time," as if it had been prophesied by the three wyrd sisters that Dog would come along. To which Dog responds singularly ungraciously, saying "Yeah, well you just have."

Like, yeah you just met me and that just happened and now it is in the past.

The poor guy waves pathetically at Beth then.

______________________________________

Speaking of criminality, I was in the Thing on Manhattan Ave sifting the shelves for Renaissance literature a few months back and I saw a book about Hate Crimes. I misread it and thought it was called I Hate Crime. An excellent sentiment and a worthy title.

"Kibbles 'N 'Bits 'N 'Shit."

"Adversity is the good man's shining time." EDWARD YOUNG.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a standard spiel, used by Dog and his bounty-mad gang, by which they sentimentally justify their chosen avocation.

Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal;'tis no sin for a 

                                             man to labour in his vocation.

Lest onlookers think that Dog is a grubbing, mercenary cur, he always reminds the perp and the public and the "studio audience at home" that if he doesn't collect the bounty, he foregoes the amount and that money is stolen directly from his "children's table."

What exactly is this "children's table"? I have sometimes wondered. Do the little kids - Gary Boy and all his tiny uncles and aunts who are actually younger than he is---

"I'm my own Grandpa"

--- all sit at a miniature table that is overlaid with banknotes and coins? Is this the celebrated "children's table" so often mentioned in these speeches?

(While I am on the subject, I might as well admit that I don't have the least understanding of the basics of bounty-hunting. Why is Dog foregoing the money? Does he put the money up in the first instance? Then how does he actually earn any money? At best he would break even; at worst he would be ruined. Can anybody explain bounty-hunting to me?)

(On reflection, don't bother.)

Anyway, in the episode I watched today Beth muffed up the standard spiel. She went:

"They all think they're tough. But you know what? They're none tougher than me when it means they're gonna take the food off my children's table. Because then the lion comes out!"

[Pause. Beth turns and starts to get into her SUV. Stops. Turns and adresses the camera again.]

"The lioness."

Beth when she was saying this was putting on her so-called "street-Hawaiian" voice. She goes, "Sistah."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was watching an episode of the show recently and they were in a very specific situation, waiting for a perpetrator who was deep in a rural, jungle area of the "Big Island" and they were going to catch him before he fled in the morning. Then some music played and the lyrics were ridiculously apt for their situation. It was like a "nu metal" song that went, more or less:

"I've got to get up early

To escape the shack

To travel through the canebrake

To escape from the bounty hunters

Whose names are Leland and Dog

Youngblood and Beth

Not forgetting Duane Lee"

"They're coming up the back roads in their SUVs

I'm on my moped

I'm an ice addict

Charged with 'paraphernalia possession'

With a history of spousal abuse."

"Bethy In Disguise With Glasses"

Judy in disguise,
Well, what you aiming for,
A circus of horrors, yeah,
Well that's what you are.
You made me a life of ashes,
I guess I'll just take your glasses

On Dog the Bounty Hunter, Dog, Beth and Youngblood are on the "big island" planning a crafty trap. They aim to catch the female perp as she arrives at the airport. Dog goes, "We're going to have Beth sneak up on her in disguise."

You could see the incredulity in Youngblood's eyes. He was patently thinking, "What are you going to do, Dog? Give Beth radical breast reduction surgery before she leaves the house ?" Of course, proper etiquette dictated that he didn't say any such thing; but canny viewers could read the meaning in his facetious smirk.

Then Beth comes in, wearing a straw hat and some sunglasses and goes, "This is my disguise."

She said, "I didn't want to wear something too flamboyant and eye-cathing."

Staring at her colossal "bosom," which is after all Beth's most prominent attribute, Youngblood goes, "With that straw hat on you look like a completely different person!!"

No he didn't actually say that but he should have.

I should write the script for this show.

Of course it isn't scripted I'm just joking with you.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The summarised description for another episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter says:

"Dog hunts a man he knows very little about and does not like."

What else, after all, need you say?