9:46 p.m. - 2007-01-01
The Strangest Thing I've Ever Seen on Television
Television. Electronic babysitter or vast wasteland? Cultural leveler or idiot box? It's all of these things and so much more. At its very best TV will confront one with images of such a bizzare, other-worldly nature that the hapless viewer momentarily questions one's very sanity. I remember one such experience years ago. I was idly flipping through the channels at around two in the morning on a Saturday night when I came across the opening montage for a program called "Homeboys in Outer Space". It had the look and feel of one of those ultra-cheap Krofft shows from the seventies. Except, instead of pufnstufs or dyna-girls, this program featured, as promised in the title, homeboys in outer space. A classic fish-out-of-water sitcom, the premise of the show involved two B-boys flying around in a spaceship and coming across all manner of zany alien life-forms. The homeboys always counted on their street-sharpened razor wits to get them out of the tough jams, and lazer-gun violence was rare. I watched it a few of times and found it mildly amusing. But the opening montage: that carried the greatest impact for me. The only image I remember vividly was of the two protagonists (one of whom sported the cylindrical hairstyle popularized in the nineties by films such as "Booty Call" and "Booty Call Two: Electric Booty") riding in some sort of space toboggan, against a Horkheimeresque star backdrop, totally uncovered and exposed to the vacuum of space, no breathing apparatus in sight. It was sort of reminiscent of the opening montage for "Land of the Lost", in fact, except with outer space instead of a stream and a space toboggan instead of a raft.
When I came across it, I thought I had lost my mind, and seriously entertained the possibility that it was a hallucination.
"Homeboys in Outer Space?" I thought. It just seemed too strange for even television itself. Even too weird for a TV parody, although it looked a lot like an SCTV sketch. And yet here I was, watching it, with my own two eyes. And no, it wasn't a hallucination. Somebody had found the funding for "Homeboys in Outer Space", hired writers, actors, and a crew, booked a studio, produced the episodes, sold them to a syndicator or whatever, and here it was on TV, being watched by no doubt tens of people besides myself. I hadn't lost my mind. A whole big group of people had endeavored to produce this thing. For years, "Homeboys in Outer Space" stood out for me as a kind of touchstone, the weirdest thing I had ever seen on TV. Until today.
Earlier today (New Year's Day. Happy New Year!) I was laying on the couch recovering from the New Year's Eve gig (see my post from a year ago. It was exactly the same.), flipping through the channels, when I came across the basic cable ARTS channel. I don't know if it's called ARTS, but the "ARTS" logo is often emblazoned across the screen. It features lots of fragments of classical music paired with some sort of visual treatment, usually video of trees and sunsets and shit to highlight the pastoral beauty of Beethoven's Sixth. Today when I came across the ARTS channel, it featured Brendel playing "Pictures at an Exhibition" accompanied by some cool, spooky prints of houses and animals and stuff that were being spinned around and manipulated to give the effect of a very primitive and slow moving animation. It seemed to involve technology from the nineteenth century and went well with the music, even though it had nothing to do with the visuals the music was actually based on.
After the Mussorgsky ended, the strangest thing I've ever seen on television came on. The title credit told me that we'd be hearing the Larghetto from the Prokoffieff Classical Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Dutoit conducting, Some Guy directing the visuals.
So okay, there's this guy sitting by himself, reading a book and sipping champagne. Only he's not sitting on a couch or a wooden crate the way you and I read and drink champagne, no, he's sitting at a futuristic, mirrored desk, apparently located at the far wall in an otherworldly beauty salon. But with a proscenium at the other end, with a big flashy opera house just beyond the proscenium. At first I think the guy is a stand-in for Prokoffieff, but then, prompted by the opening titles, I think he looks like Dutoit, the conductor, sitting there musing while his invisible orchestra plays the Larghetto with none of his help. But why is he sitting in a big abandoned hair salon?
AH, but the hair salon ISN'T abandoned at all! For here comes Mozart...on ICE SKATES! Yes, we're not only in a hair salon/opera house/conductor's champange lounge. We're in a hair salon/opera house/conductor's champagne studio ON ICE! You can tell it's Mozart. First, he's wearing a powdered wig and is short. Second, he has on the period eighteenth century garb, but ornamented with "MOZART" enblazoned across his back in mirrors.
Okay, so mirrors, including all the hair salon mirrors, are beginning to play a big role in this backward-looking psychodrama/fever dream. Maybe it has to do with how Prokoffieff is looking, mirror-like, into the past by composing in the archaic classical style, maybe the director is showing us how artists hold their art up to its own mirror by looking to the past and...WAIT, no time to explain now, because here comes Handel, with his own mirrored-out finery, while champagne spectator continues to take in the spectacle with wry bemusement and Mozart continues his capering. Is that a score of the piece Dutoit's reading? Is this whole tableau inspired by his interpretation of of the piece? And what's with the skating? Is it because the orchestra is from Montreal?
BUT WAIT, who's this third competitor? Now we have three mirrored, wigged, ruffled guys skating in the hair salon/opera house while Dutoit looks on approvingly. (I'm now completely sure the champagne guy is Dutoit, not a stand-in for Prokoffieff, since Prokoffieff was too busy fleeing KGB guys to take in very many Composers On Ice shows.) I assume the third composer is Haydn, but I'm not a hundred percent, since I can never make out what his back mirror says. The three are skating about, toward what end I can't tell. They're not playing hockey and the hair salon chairs aren't being utilized at all and there's also a notable absence of triple lutzes.
So by now we're a couple minutes into the larghetto, we've seen some competent if not spectacular skating and established that Dutoit likes his fancy drinks, it's all very entertaining, and yet it seems like there could be more going OH WAIT, LOOK, IT'S a hot chick on ice skates wearing some sort of wood nymph costume. I'll bet she's a muse. Yes, the attractive ice-skating lady scantily clad in suede is probably a muse. Dutoit seems pleased with her. The three composer/skaters, not so much. For with striking efficiency, the muse lady wrangles the three bewigged skate-abouts into a row and hustles them out of the rink/beauty parlor/concert hall/conductor's lounge and toward...where? The past, where they belong? Back into the grave, where their antics will no longer distract Dutoit from his contractual conducting duties? Or are they late for the next stop on their "Monsters of Menuets on Ice" tour? Whatever, Dutoit seems, again, pleased. Then it ends.
But not for me. Not for me. Just as with "Homeboys in Outer Space", I'll be scratching my head, racking my brain, and parsing its meaning for some time to come. So take heed, Gentle Reader, and do not trod into the morass of television lightly, for it contains things which the gods have contrived to drive you to the very edge of madness.
Still, it's easier than reading books.
