Category Archives: Muddled Musings

All Hail the Dancing Damned

buy disulfiram 500 I can remember five dreams in my life. Two were pleasant, two were unpleasant, and I can’t figure out the fifth after eight years of analyzing.

The best one, though, atones for any nightmare.

I had it when I was in Washington, DC, my last stint as a crime writer. After my stint in Detroit as a crime writer. A friend once suggested the dream was borne of reporting on street existence for so long. I dismissed it, but perhaps she was correct.

In the dream, I am walking through a familiar-yet-alien block in a downtown city. People are bumping, brushing, bustling past one another. No one apologizes for the collisions.

Amidst the chaos, I see a black man dancing in the middle of the street, keeping tune with a song only he can hear. Full dance moves. Impressive. Certain. No partner, no care who sees. Older, with hair as gray as uncertainty. homeless man

A woman sees the street waltz, and shakes her head in disgust. “That’s awful,” she mutters. “He shouldn’t be dancing in the street.” She has a Southern accent, though I don’t know why. Perhaps because so many bible thumpers below the Mason-Dixon still consider joy a sin.

Then, I hear a man’s voice in response, though I never see his face. “He’s not dancing,” the voice says. “He’s running from heaven.”

I always puzzled over who it was I pictured dancing. Now I’m thinking it may have been Derrick T. Tuggle.

Tuggle was a part-time security guard who was to appear in The Black Keys’ video Lonely Boy. He thought he had won the lottery by scoring a brief scene in the three-minute movie, shot outside a rundown motel in California. The concept: Tuggle would play the hotel manager, accept the room key from the musical duo and hand it to a group of nubile female dancers, who would provide a sexual undertone to the video.

But as the crew prepared to shoot, the director noticed Tuggle, listening to the song, bobbing his head to the beat and dancing ever so slightly as he stood on his mark. The director was intrigued. He asked Tuggle if he could dance on camera and cue.

“Sure,” Tuggle said. “I can dance. Everyone can dance!”

Tuggle asked for an hour to memorize the lyrics. He thought of dancers who made an impression: John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever  fever and Pulp Fiction fiction; Carlton Banks’ moves on The Fresh of Bel-Air.

He mentally choreographed a dance to accompany the lyrics.

Then the cameras rolled. And in one take, all other dancers were sent home. Within a week of the video’s release, 250,000 people watched on YouTube. Today, it has more than 44 million views.

There’s nothing to the video, really. It’s one, uninterrupted shot as Tuggle plays disco mime outside the motel office. It’s a cinematographic nightmare, as the camera catches sunlight dappling a receding hairline. There’s even a goof at the 30-second mark (check out the office window).

But the director made the canny call to embrace imperfection. There’s something hypnotic to its simplicity. And enthralling, as Tuggle becomes a modern-day Tony Manero, a real-life Vincent Vega, a contemporary Carlton. Watch as his sleeves unroll in the frenzy.

Tuggle doesn’t seem to care. He seems the type perfectly comfortable dancing in the middle of the street, critics and tongue-cluckers be damned.

Keep running from heaven, Mr. Tuggle. And thank you for the sinful joy.

Today

 

Today was like any other.

I woke up…queasy. Why is the night such a goddamned beast? I swear to god, I don’t remember the last time I went to bed when it was dark and awakened to sunlight. It’s been 15 years, I believe, since nausea has allowed five straight hours of sleep.

Finally ambulatory, about 9:40 a.m. (not bad),  I trudged to the kitchen, gave Teddy his meds, fed the dogs and ushered them into the backyard.

I wrote a little, selected a lesson plan for the next class. I surfed Netflix for a bit, found a documentary, and by movie’s end it was time to medicate and feed the dogs dinner.

B

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As I set the food down, hit the Mellow Mix on the stereo and settled to inthe backyard lawn chair — always facing west — I began to recall the day. The way days should be recalled:

I woke up…again!

I gave the medicine Teddy needs to live a life free of disease, epilepsy. I gave them a dinner they routinely scarf so quickly I feel like a sous chef (they love a good Snausage chaser). They depend on me. For food, a roof, a scratch. And all they ask in  rental fee is that I let them love me, unconditionally, uninhibitedly and publicly. How many souls can lay such claim?

I wrote today. I taught today. Those things matter. I am a zealot for both. Somehow, I have been permitted to chase those loves, court those passions, my entire adult life. How many souls can lay such claim?

I watched an amazing film called The Camden 28, about a raft of Vietnam War protesters, including a Catholic priest, arrested for breaking into and trashing a local draft office. They destroyed hundreds of files so the military wouldn’t know which kids were left to send to Southeast Asia. When the feds realized the PR nightmare of jailing a priest for opposing Vietnam, they reduced all felony charges to a single misdemeanor. Not one protester took the deal. They believed that a jury would acquit them, simply because the war was wrong. And the jury did. To the last, accused and peer chose to do the right thing, even if it weren’t the legal thing. How many souls can lay such claim?

As I watched the day prepare to punch its time card, as Cat Stevens’ Don’t Be Shy began its trickling piano, as the dogs, bellies full, stretched out on a patio toasted by a sun as warm and regular as a heartbeat, I realized:

Jesus.

Today was like no other.

A Farewell to Don, Walter, Omar, and All Those Against the Grain

 

Ask me my favorite television show, and I’ll blurt out “Breaking Bad!” before you can get to “…of all-time.”

But I have to concede. Mad Men, which begins its final arc Sunday, may be TV’s greatest drama.

The difficulty is in separating the two, favorite from greatest. Our inclination is to defend our passions as quantifiable, as if to validate an opinion. My father’s favorite basketball player was Larry Bird, as is mine. I remember dad spending, literally, hours explaining why Bird was the greatest of all-time: the best passer, the most versatile, toughest and hardest working employee of the NBA.

But I’ve come to acknowledge that Bird’s (and my) former arch nemesis, Magic Johnson, as the better player. More head-to-head victories, more championships, more influential in the game we know today. Even taking a learned path in life.birdnmagic But that’s okay. I’ve quit trying to argue my love as something empirical. What’s wrong with conceding a fanaticism — for a show, a drawing, a person, a poached egg — followed just as openly by a confession that what we love most may be flawed, human, non-sensical, perhaps even broken. Does that diminish a devotion? Surrender a defense?

So in deference to Walter White: You are my antiheroes of antiheroes. I am your Jesse. I sizzle the glass with you.

Yet, Don Draper and Mad Men could be the greatest feat in television history.

Consider other dramas regarded legendary: Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, ER, Law & Order, The West Wing, 24. All, as do 90% of today’s television dramas, subsist on crime, law (including making) or medicine. It makes sense. Those are exciting worlds, full of irresistibly low-hanging dramatic fruit.

Now imagine the pitch that Matt Weiner must have made to AMC for Mad Men. “It’s a show set a half century ago, in a New York ad agency. We’ll get into specific ad strategy — for Kodak, Lucky Strike, Playtex, Utz potato chips, Sno Ball and Ocean Spray, along with (literally) 76 other real-name clients.” Oh, and it’s a no-name cast, with no crime, law or medicine for subject matter.

That it would earn network approval and an eight-year following is about as miraculous as landing Conrad Hilton’s trust (which Don did, briefly). And much ink and megabyte will be spent praising the show for its look and fashion (all deserved) as well its now-known stars (deserving as well).

But let’s recognize its sheer artistry for a moment, if not first. Consider the ad pitch for the folks at Kodak, in season 1, episode 13, for an episode called The Wheel, a what-if with Draper as pitchman for the carousel projector.

 

Lady Lazarus, from season 5, episode 8, is as dark and artistic as the Sylvia Plath poem that inspired it, just with a kick ass Beatles finale. (Sorry about the Spanish subtitles; it appears to be the only video of it on the World Wide Intertubes.)

And that’s what makes the show understatedly deft, that straddle between detail and tedium. Sure, it’s stylish and a bit too beautiful. But throughout you’ll see artistic touches — and outright show-long homages — that no show but The Simpsons would dare broach, from Dante’s Inferno to Stanley Kubrik to author Philip Roth. In fact, Don Draper is simply a rendition of the protagonist in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, about an impossibly handsome Lothario who can’t fill his cavernous soul with his conquests. (And wouldn’t that be a kick finale, if the entire show were a flashback as Don spills his guts to a shrink?)

The show also differed in its treatment of time. Normally, shows dread time like Dracula at sunrise. Look at 24, a season created out of one day. M*A*S*H lasted longer than the Korean War. Breaking Bad pretended six years was two; The Simpsons has been on a quarter century, and Maggie is still an infant not yet talking.

Mad Men, on the other hand, bounded through the 60’s as if were tripping acid. Smack into MLK’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, Nixon, the Vietnam War, the counterculture movement. If most dramas focus on a singular, familiar place — a bar, a coffee shop sofa, a triage unit— Mad Men concerned itself with an era, often brutal. That’s unheard of for an industry whose limited view on time usually includes a future with a zombie apocalypse.

The show had its failings. Like the 60’s literature that littered i story lines, Mad Men can’t help but paint most women as mothering, smothering or emasculating. And no entertainment has glamorized smoking this much since Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns.

But in bidding farewell to the womanizing, alcoholic Don Draper, we also wave to a vanishing TV breed: the antihero. Perhaps reflecting the mood of a nation already somber by real-life events, execs seem to favor the lantern-jawed heroes of late, particularly when they don spandex. Tony Soprano, Dexter, Mr. White, Omar Little Omar_little(you’ve really got to see him in The Wire) all salute you from television’s cloud circuit, where antiheroes appear headed.

I know you’re a doomed drunk, Don. And Mad Men’s outer-shell shiny emphasis on advertising was really an inner reflection of how we see ourselves. Or, more importantly, want to see ourselves.

Still, through your Old Fashion-addled, oversexed, orphaned logic, you have come upon something profound. That, at our best, we are all antiheroes: flawed, flailing, but fighting nonetheless. And that’s worth another round. Cheers.