"John Bruno Again."

The finest, funniest, highest times of our lives spent alongside the Market Warriors, we realised with some shock, were those spent cruising about on the back of the buggy with JOHN BRUNO.

How often does JOHN say of an old dilapidated toy car or airship or G.I. Joe or wind-up deep-sea diver that he "had that exact one when he was a kid"?  You start to wonder if, within his dirt-poor Brooklyn tenement community, JOHN was that child who had every toy that ever came onto the market.

Sometimes watching the show you have to ask why they gave JOHN the epithet "The Professor." The question is irresistible and must be asked aloud, "Professor of what?"

Professor of losing the game every week?

Such titles are almost as useless as a Doctorate in American Studies!

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NPR on Bloomberg funding projects in other cities. "He is literally getting down into their garbage cans."
Is that strictly true?

"Miller Gaffney Threatened By Gunman at Minnesota Fair."

This week's Market Warriors came from an antiques fair in Oronoco, Minnesota.

Mark Walberg, our disembodied omniscient narrator is like "Knowledge" in the Everyman play, who verily says

Everyman, I will go with thee

and be thy guide,

In thy most need to go

by thy side, 

Mark Walberg, who goes with us and is our guide, noted that there had been a "Gold Rush" in Oronoco Minnesota once, but there hadn't been a heck of a truckload of gold. The rush without the gold. 

His comments on that score foreshadowed the way the episode went, because there wasn't much to be got at the Ornoco Antiques Fair either. Things were so dire that Bene won the competition this week with some costume trinkets and more fool's gold. 

Kevin Bruneau was reduced to riding on the back of John Bruno's invalid car scouting for the lowest chintz.

John Bruno spent most of the episode ruminating back and forth about whether to buy a toy frogman from the Sixties. This was less like television and more like a trip through my own interminable internal monologue. 

Should I buy the Norm Show DVD box set at Academy Records on 18th Street.
Should I buy the hardback Larry Hama G.I. Joe volumes when I already have the paperbacks.

Should I sell those Comics Journal Special Editions.
Should I sell at Strand or Popfuzz or Unnameable or PS Bookshop.
Maybe PBS would like to give me my own show.

These Minnesotans were most vicious to Miller Gaffney in particular. 

Maybe she did swan around a bit like Scarlett O'Hara this week, not overly interested in oiling the wheels and greasing the palms and kissing the babies and sugaring her bartering among these hinterland vulgarians. 
Maybe she didn't want to get spittle on her taffeta dress. 

She breezed into one tent with a thirty dollar bangle and said, "Wouldn't yeou, ah say Wouldn't yeou, gimme this for twenny?"

"Don't reckon I would nor," came the peevish grunt from a part-man, part-alligator, mostly squirrel object, hacking on cue into a spittoon.

"Yeou won't give me it for twenny-teau?"

"Naw," came the mean unfriendly response from the catamount, who had plainly refused to go "on camera" and would deliver his lines "without representation or taxation".

"Yeou shure?"

Miller was confused. How shall bartering endure if these backwater graspers won't bite and play ball?

"What part of Naw don't you understand?" growled the off-camera sprig of iceberg lettuce.

("What part of bartering doan't yeou unnerstand?" should have been the comeback.)

Poor Miller not only gave up the attempt at bartering, she actually reached meekly into her purse and drew out the thirty dollars. I never saw the like. The taming of the shrew.

Another participant in the fayre acted even weirder with Miller and, following the recent horrible events of Newtown Connecticut, not to mention Superstorm Sandy, with quite menacing overtones. 

As the show began, we seemed to enter midway through a tart exchange between Miller and a gentleman brandishing a BB gun. 

This only days after PBS's frankly depressing series of shows on "gun control" (laughable turn of phrase!) in these United States in which it was revealed fairly conclusively that the United States is positively alive (pardon the inapt figure) with twenty-two calibre cockblockers who haven't got a lick of gulchur or book-larning but they do know their "Second Amendment Rights" and all they want to do is shoot guns for "entertainment" and they will go to actual Civil War to defend their right to this "entertainment." 

These gun-show knuckle-draggers, these county-fudge mouth breathers, these rocky-road glue-sniffers, these fucking taxidermy enthusiasts. 

Miller was exchanging remarks with such a man in a CHICAGO tracksuit top with his face blurred out. This signified to the audience that he had not signed the "release form" for his "image" to be shown on TV, which usually tells the savvy viewer that this character is going to come across badly as a character. Indeed, this man did.

One cannot judge very generously a man who threatens on television to shoot a lady in the eyes.

He spat back to Miller, "I'll shoot yore eye out!"

He was like the eye-gougers in old South-West almanacks of the Jacksonian day. Except that even Sut Lovingood, even Simon Suggs, wouldn't gouge aout the eyes of a lady. 

He was all snaggle-toothed misogyny and weird misdirected Freudian energies. 

I say candidly that he had misread his Oedipus Rex and should go back to school.

Miller replied with superior and airy gaiety, "Aow, leook aout. Ah knew somebody who got shot in the bottom once." 

While Miller is too sweet to get down to low skirmishing with such back-water country-churn bottom-feeders, the tool got schooled by Mark Walberg in the voiceover. 

"In all seriousness, you should keep the barrel pointed either up in the air or down at the ground," Mark said as the camera showed the CHICAGO moron dully fiddling with the gun, barrel tipped up and veering around, always pointed (though not aimed) at head height. 

A portrait of America in 2013. 

It was redolent of the local news, when they show you some grainy, phrenzied ruckus at a gas station cash booth, and a blurry image leaps over the counter and rifles through the register, or when a neighbourhood rapist is shown lurking in a stairwell on CCTV, and the anchorwoman requests plaintively that if we recognise them would we please telephone the police force? 

We chuckle to see it, we say aloud, "Who could recognise that blur?," but then presumably if you knew somebody well you'd recognise them even in the blurred state. 

It's entirely probable that even this unmemorable fist-hatchet is recognised by family and friends in his CHICAGO tracksuit top. 

Perhaps he even bragged to his hare-lipped kinfolk, "Ah threatened to blind a woman with a gun on television today! Yew–all set the DVR y'hear!"

"Flabbergasted Into Madness: Market Warriors Again."

John Bruno is known as "The Professor" on Market Warriors.

If by that they mean that he's got tenure and they can't kick him off the program, although they'd like to, then it makes sense.

If they call him it on account of his encyclopaedic knowledge of the arts antiquarian then I'll boldly say it: the epithet is an inapt misnomer.

This venerable codger has fudged many an episode by now, throwing good money after bad. It's like he's so sick of casting pearls before swine, cannily paying high for tasteful products at one state fair only to have therm bought for next to nothing by uncomprehending heathens in another state, that he has elected to deliberately buy inferior dross so that he won't get disenchanted any further.

After all, men of fragile sensitivity can only stand so much crass vulgarity in the face of their refined tastes before they crack and become cynical and thwarted and warped and bitter. Who can blame JOHN for going "off the reservation"? He has been flabbergasted into real madness.

Mark Walberg (the Antiques Roadshow presenter, not the film actor who interestingly insisted that he could have single-handedly fought off the Al-Qaeda terrorists who caused the 9-11 attacks if only he had "been on that plane") seems to blame him. He loves to make fun of John Bruno. He takes a certain vicious sneering delight in it.

Now John Bruno has taken to riding around in an invalid buggy. When did he start this strange habit? Is this how he managed to avoid being culled by the PBS politicos? "You can't kick me off the show," he trilled, all defiance. "I'm too diverse. I have an invalid buggy."

John is close to botching this loophole though.  There have been scenes captured on camera when he is standing up in his buggy peering around. It's like he's using the buggy as a way to get better elevation rather than as a mode of perambulation. Other times, he is clearly visible wheeling the buggy along like it was a scooter, pushing it along with one leg. Impatient with its pedestrian pace.

It's like when people claim for compensation because they were "hurt" and rendered unable to work because of their injuries and he firm being sued hires a private dick to photograph the person acting all able-bodied. Almost invariably at a gas pump. Except John Bruno is going around acting able-bodied on national TV.

In one episode John Bruno was bargaining with a seller. This is his real forte, actually. He might preface the barter with the words, "Shall we begin to dance?" He has a really beautiful way of being shockingly cheap.

Well, this seller wasn't budging beyond a certain point, and none of the BRUNO CHARM would change it. John was trying to make a virtue of the fact that although he would pay a derisive low price, it would be in "cash". "That's cash you can take straight home."
His nemesis responded coolly, "Cash doesn't matter to me."
"I hear ya," John says, turning off the charm and losing interest fast.
The guy deadpanned, "I'll take a company check..."
"Right," John said, totally uninterested now.

The best part of this exchange was the seller's expression as he said it. Wily, canny, equal to BRUNO'S TRICKS. I took a photo of it from the TV using my wife's phone, to publish it here for you to see.

Unfortunately, her phone crashed at the airport and all her photos were lost. I don't mind about all those pictures of family and friends lost forever, but she also lost my picture of the flea market guy bargaining with John Bruno and that's a real shame.

Another occasion. John Bruno said, "We got punked."
Miller Gaffney retorted, "We didn't get punked."
That's all the notes I have here.
[Looking over the piece of paper with the original joke on it. Checking there isn't anything written on the other side.]
Without context that line doesn't have much... resonance...

And that is the end of this rash of Market Warriors notes.

"Come back real soon y'hear."

"Righteous Chagrin of the Market Warriors." Or, "Miller Gaffney Is Unimpressed."

Of all the colourless range of emotions visible everywhere on the many-headed Hydra that is the TEE-VEE, the one perhaps least often evidenced is that of chagrin. This is too refined, too classical, too ubi sunt a feeling for the age.

Shall we see Bruce Jenner or Kim Kardashian look back in sorrowful chagrin before "our" cameras any time soon? Shall we see that ruefulness, that bitter yet intelligent regret pass across the faces of the conniving characters on Gallery Girls? No, chagrin, neo-classical regret and ruefulness are antithetical to the usual crop of reality-teevee shows, whether they are documentary in intent or competitive. Even when the characters on The Amazing Race lose out on the million dollars, when they are cheated and betrayed and humiliated at a "detour",  they do not show chagrin. They froth and they seethe and rally their online offensives.

I saw some rare chagrin once on an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter, when Dog was mourning, in Biblical tones, the loss of several of his children: "I have fathered lo these my many children under mine loins, and God said it was right good and I have had to me in my times all these sons, and verily God took me down a notch or several."

Dog is a bit like a nineteenth-century rural minister, or even a Colonial type for whom the loss of six or seven of your children is simply the norm. That said, Dog's chagrin was sentimental in root, and it inevitably tipped over into broad bathos almost as quickly as it materialised.

An intellectual chagrin, however, of the type expressed by the last cultured denizens of a ransacked culture, I rarely see. This is funny, because the present culture is pretty ransacked! However, on last night's episode of Market Warriors, there was a beautiful and quite stunning record of the culture in tatters and of a modest yet elevated coterie among the ruins, staring gloomily and in awe at the shards about them.

"These my fragments which I have shored against my ruin..."

Market Warriors is a superior (in both senses) reality show along the lines of Storage Wars. You will note the passing resemblance in the titles even. However while Storage Wars in its title and its outlook emphasises the wars themselves, the crude bellicosity, the skirmishing and the cutthroat machinating, the whirr of the axe, the musick of the cudgel, Market Warriors places a more humanistic emphasis on the Warriors themselves -- the mortal participants. It is not a paean to the slavering and unsophisticated god of War.

Perhaps that's cock and bull. Rather, Market Warriors is on Channel Thirteen, and so naturally has a more refined air and tenor. As my mother-in-law said when I naively asked her if she watches Storage Wars, "My dear man, I watch Antiques Roadshow. Pass me my snuffbox for I fain would lie doon." It is the difference between the Jacksonian log cabin and the hard cider culture and the precious, patrician, John Harvard book-larnt culture of John Quincy Adams.

Market Warriors is cut from the same artisanal yeoman-philosopher calico that fashioned the U.S. version of the Antiques Roadshow and so naturally accommodates and indulges the genteel sensiibilities and sensitivities of those patricians who prefer that show. It also features [Antiques Roadshow compere] Mark Walberg as the disembodied voice narrating the goings-on, and in this capacity he gets off some real zingers. I mean hoo boy. His sarcasm, as a disembodied voice, is remarkable to behold. It's as though because he is not visible he can be more cutting and droll than he would be if visible in the throng of an antiques show.

I should note, for foreign readers, that the Mark Walberg I refer to is not the similar-soundingly-named Hollywood film star and former purveyor of white rap Wahlberg, but another man of, incredibly, virtually the same name.

How can such things be?
You'll believe a man can fly.

Mark Walberg nearly made the leap from Channel Thirteen to prime-time teevee ("the very eye of history") a few years back in a show based on the connect of members of the public confessing tawdry secrets on live TV to the horror and bemusement of their loved ones. It was a miserable sight to see him crudely whoring for the prime-time greenback. Walberg had betrayed the cause of intellectual television in pursuit of the Hollywood dollar. It was like seeing Thomas Jefferson splayed out in a low bawdy-house. It backfired on him quite badly and the show was cancelled even in these savage times for being too much the inhumane Grand Guignol. Walberg returned, chastised and  reformed to the Antiques Roadshow. Yet the disembodied Walberg we hear on Market Warriors happily retains some of that tart, barbed, annihilating negative energy that characterised him on his axed cage-match-hell-show.

To return to my first subject, which was that delicate emotion seen so rarely on teevee (since it involves reflection and regret and quiet sadness and after all intelligence and remorse and humility), chagrin. On Market Warriors the same four characters go around an antique show or flea market or a bazaar and they have a set time and a set "purse" to acquire objects from the fayre. These, the distinguished objects eventually chosen according to the application of the contestants' superior experience and their celebrated breeding, are then auctioned off in another State. The profit, or the loss, is counted up and the winners derived from this totting-up.

Every episode I have seen of this show involves the contestants making massive losses. They pay too much in the first antique shop or flea market and then at the auction (in Cleveland, or Cincinnatti, or Madison Wisconsin) their refined tastes are as unto so many pearls before swine as the ignorant pigs of these rural towns bid mere pennies for they know not what. These grubbers are the likes of Mark on Baggage Battles or that swaggering, crafty scrounger Dave on Storage Wars.  They are the profiters from chaos. They are the riverboatmen on the Styx. They shall prevail as the old men with delicate manners go down, swept under. 

It's a real barbarians-at-the-gate scenario, and it was pronounced this week. They bought in Old Mass and they sold in Ohio. They did right poorly. The four contestants are seen in the attached images with this very weblog so you can behold that what I say is proper and true. I laughed to see them. There was nothing for them to say; they had complained on previous episodes about the crassness and the obliviousness of the auction attendees. There was no point in repeating themselves. All they could do now was to sit with these unfeigned expressions of despair and wait for Death to come  -- as it will.

I never saw such expressions on television before. They are so pure and unadulterated! The soul is still alive and well and can be seen in the faces of these well-named warriors.

I can't help but love and sympathise with these faces. I spend much of my day with the same expression on my face, and not just when I am trying to sell off some books or CDs or comic books and getting precious little for them from, say, the buyers at Strand. The misery of the Market Warriors wasn't just that they had lost – the money, after all, wasn't even theirs – nor was it even at the repeated public loss of face they have undergone in the course of this well-meaning program. Their horror and chagrin is, finally, at the decline of a civilization entire.

______________________________________________________________________

One funny thing on a recent episode of Market Warriors, which I have to recall, came when one character, the so-called "Professor" John Bruno, was walking through an antiques fair and he saw a dealer with a long white beard looking at him with a face full of sad entreaty. Bruno said, "Hey guy," or some hippy halloo to him. The dealer responded with amazing wistfulness, "John... it's me..."

John Bruno looked closer at the man and recognised, through the cruel masque of reduced circumstances and that rude veil of hoary aging, an old and well-loved old bondsman. He said, in unfeigned shock and horror and yet tenderness too I believe, yes I believe there was tenderness in it, "My God... how long's it been..." or words like those.

Again, as above, here were real human exchanges and emotions usually too raw and vivid for the television to see or allow us to see. At the sheer candour of the showing of the raw human nerve system, I laughed out loud again in delight and horror and regret.