"Storage Wars Again."

The new season of Storage Wars has been a bit peculiar so far. As Randy Jackson used to say (at every opportunity), it's been a bit "pitchy". This season Dave Hester (who I had expended some energy in rehabilitating) has not endeared himself to the "studio viewing audience at home" with his high bids for boring but valuable "white goods". Who cares if you get a dishwasher cheap, Dave? It ain't great TV. One week he bought about thirty vending machines - and was brimming with delight. Strange to report this excitement and delirium did not transfer infectiously and irresistibly to the viewing audience at home. 

I have had occasion to discuss Storage Wars with outside-world (i.e., "non-television character") people when the conversation has reached such a nadir that I am forced to say, just to stave off sleep, "Hey have you seen that show Storage Wars?" When I do lisp these thrice-doomed words out loud to the table, the chattering classes of New York routinely say something that would never occur to me; they say "Oh yeah I've seen that show. It's fixed." 

I fail to see what the point would be of fixing a show like Storage Wars. I think that rather this allegation is a case of "post-punk" ennui; of "media-savvy" kill-joys being overly, even ostentatiously, jaded. I very tediously respond to their allegations by patiently listing instances where there was nothing valuable in a locker ("When there was nothing to gain from rigs or calumny"), or when the characters ("contestants") ("real people") are hopelessly misguided in the pursuit of riches and rarities ("Fool's gold is ofttimes all they mine, milord"); but only a few sentences into my earnest testimony I notice with some sad surprise (and yet a corollary reflex of horrible familiarity) that I have become the despised bore at the table ––  again –– and I pull about me my customary mantle of enigmatic introspection for the rest of the evening.

This season has also had a rush of nondescripts jockeying to become regular, featured characters on the show (which, nota bene, if it were "scripted" and fixed would be an impossibility). Like the fat bloke with the skateboard/skronk goatee. You know, Herne Bay c. 1993. Swallowed squirrel is the look. He bustles like a navvy about the forecourt and painstakingly essays to crane into shot but he is almost invariably edited out every time and his interior existence remains unknown to us the viewing audience. 

Because the premise of Storage Wars is simply that in the state of California unpaid lockers are auctioned off, it seems that anybody can turn up at one of those auctions and potentially appear on TV. It is not a "closed set". Obviously this differentiates Storage Wars from Big Brother or American Idol. And lo this season the regulars have been shown, more and more frequently, grumbling about the people who have been coming to the auctions and grandstanding and pratfalling to be on TV, bidding high rubles for rubbish just so they can be seen on TV bidding against Dave or Barry. 

Worse case of this was yesterday's episode with this slimy, morally burnt-out interloper called "Mark Balelo" who turned up at the Hollywood auction and proceeded to bid astronomic, inordinate amounts for every locker. He pushed the prices up unnecessarily for the lowest specks of dross. (Would he care, I wonder, to bid on a pile of issues of Punisher 2099 comics I have?) He swaggered and pouted and planted himself on the spot squarely, impertinently, arms folded, feet apart and then duly and right brazenly played pocket billiards in front of the womenfolk, with his wad of cash between his teeth (and his cellphone, of course, tucked under his chin). He sucked the pleasure (not to mention the carbon dioxide) out of the whole enterprise. He added nothing more to the show either - he has the personality and the face of a squashed rat-turd. But what he has, it seems in droves, is cash - which abundance he loves to advertise. 

Is this "charismatic" and "fun" parvenu Tea Party fridge magnet going to bid against all the regular characters every week, pushing everything up and outside the bounds of reason so that nobody even bothers attending the auctions anymore, and the show ends in fizzling piffling disrepute and acrimony? And if they try and bar him from attending the auctions, will he launch a "civil suit" against the television company and Dan Dotson the auctioneer, and take it "all the way to the Supreme Court"? 

Where will it all end - the Hague?!

HADES?!

"Death Valley Woolgathering."

"Fall Poem"

Isn't the "style icon" every Fall
Diane Keaton in Annie Hall?

__________________________________

"Charles Manson Musings"

I was watching recent clips of Charlie Manson in the dock, up to his usual cabaret. This time I was thinking, "Looks like he's had some work done."

Then later I thought, "Manson looks bad. He's looking run-down. Not his usual perky self. He must have a lot of stress in his life."

I stopped midway through this train of thought and caught myself. I went, "What stress? One thing you can't accuse Charles Manson of is keeping things bottled up."

These are my thoughts for to-day. If you tuned in wondering what I am up to these days, THIS IS THE SUM OF IT.

"Compleat Cobblers."

I have stopped watching Dog the Bounty Hunter because I think that I have seen every episode several times. Nothing more depressing than sitting through episodes trying to recall whether you have seen them or not. Waiting for a dim light of doomed recognition to bleerily alight at the bottom of your weary medulla oblongata. Waiting for a stray quip from Beth that "rings a vague bell," or a memorable facial tic, a harelip or a squint, something unique and familiar about the perp.

Now, in the absence of a regular stream of Parking Wars episodes, I have elected to watch River Monsters to slake my appetite for cable reality guff. It naturally doesn't feature the same high-grade repartee as Dog the Bounty Hunter, but on the positive side it does have gigantic freshwater fish.

The gist of this show is the same as Dog anyway: hunt down a perp, wherefore 95% of the show is wholly devoid of direction, necessarily devoted to building up the putative "thrill of the chase". When the perpetrator (here the "fish") is finally identified, located and caught, there is that same familiar sense of hollow anti-climax and the corollary pang of intense self-loathing felt by the viewer. However on River Monsters, for better or for worse, the presenter does not take the giant fish onto the back seat of an SUV, offer it a cigarette, and try to turn it to Jesus and redemption.

In today's episode, the English extreme-stunt-fisherman presenter ("EESFP" - his name escapes me and I can't be bothered to look it up) was hunting down a monster killer fish described in Esquimaux legends. He was in Alaska. In other programs this would of course have been cue for a volley of jokes about Sarah Palin but River Monsters is not that show. It never will be. If you want Sarah Palin jokes switch to Letterman.

After much exposition and shrill shilly-shallying and interviewing less-than-credible "witnesses" the EESFP set himself to trying to catch a common or garden sockeye salmon. When he finally hooked one, a baby bear came over and stole it from him. It really happened. The camera crew were so vexxed by this baby bear stealing their salmon that they reported him to the authorities.

I couldn't work out the relevance of the capture of this salmon to the larger narrative. It was not properly explained. They were trying to ascertain whether there was a "viable food source" for the Mystery Monster Fish I think, but I would have thought the obvious presence of the salmon alone was sufficient to conclude that there was a food source.

With no "useful data" extracted from the sockeye salmon the EESFP next went up in a small plane where he interviewed a female anthropologist who told him in detail about a giant monster fish she had seen from the air last year. Wonder why didn't they use her testimony in the first place. Without the capering on the riverbank amongst our ursine cousins.

From this "expert testimony" our intrepid guide quickly asserted that the fish was - must be - a "Massive White Sturgeon". The rapidity and ease with which he arrived at this diagnosis just from the female anthropologist's scanty and bored testimony was suspicious to my critical and cynical eyes and ears. Then he said, with equal blitheness, "Well I could spend forty or fifty years trying to catch a sturgeon on this body of water but you and I in televisionland don't have forty or fifty years to spare so I am going to go down to Oregon waters, there to catch a sturgeon." To anticipate his viewers' obvious disappointment, he insisted "I am still catching the same fish, just in completely different waters several thousand miles away. This is not, I repeat not, a cop-out."

He went over to Oregon where there are literally scads of sturgeon idly bopping along the sea-floor just waiting to be hooked up. He caught one in about five seconds and it was about three foot long. We all mistook it for a sprat. It swam away as soon as he tried to grab it by the jaw so he fished for another one and made a mighty production of it when he caught this one, which was I think eight foot long. Still, the one in Alaska was meant to be twenty foot long so I felt cheated some more. By ooh let's see twelve feet of fish flesh.

Then he reaches into this micro-sturgeon's mouth and says, "Look the sturgeon has no teeth, just these telescopic gums." He demonstrated this by pulling the sturgeon's gums this way and that for a while, just to demonstrate the toothlessness of the fish. The poor sturgeon just took it with Christianly good grace. He "never said a mumblin' word." This did not seem to strengthen our presenter's position from where I was sitting. This diminutive, pacific, toothless wonder was our threatening Monster Esquimaux Killer?

The conclusion was, nevertheless, that this fish "or one like it" was the same monster up in Alaska and that it had capsized all those Esquimaux kayaks not by ruthless biting (since teeth had it none) but by its mysterious habit of leaping out of the water and knocking Esquimaux out of their canoes. This eccentric trick, incidentally, "has never been explained. Maybe it is motivated by panic."

Maybe.

This is some "fish story" indeed! This wasn't even the tale of "the one that got away" - this was the tale of "the much smaller version of the one several thousand miles away which even that one's identification was only deduced by the idlest speculation. And which it got away."


"VENATOR"

Poem Inspired By The "Sleepy Eyes of Death" Series.

Observation:

It is now considered de rigeur
Among the au fait ronin
To disparage the bushido
While wholly upholding it.

[Interior query:

Can you knock a man unconscious
By punching him in the stomach?]

"Funny Eyes of Death."

"The sky... the sea... and the Musou-Masamune blade." RAIZA ICHIKAWA

I was watching The Sleepy Eyes of Death 1: The Chinese Jade, and in the fiftieth minute the master of karate Chen Sun (the excellent Tomisaburo Wakayama - the Japanese Lino Ventura) says to his arch-opponent, the ronin Nemuri Kyoshiro (Raizo Ichikawa), who he has a "hard-on" to battle, "Shall we fight?"

To which Raizo replies, "Not now. Let's end this rude interruption." They then fight off a cadre of inconsequential samurai.

I meanwhile misread the subtitles for a moment, and thought that Raizo had made a genuinely subversive and liberating comment: "Not now. Let's wait til the end of the film."