Coming Soon!

Cathedral City, California

December 21, 2023

     Greetings to my faithful readers--the few, the proud, the indiscriminate.  As you're all well aware, the number of posts to this blog has been diminishing over the years to practically nothing.  I got a shot to the gut when Trump was elected, because his chicanery easily eclipsed the most roguish and absurd political theater I could have imagined up to that point.  It left me without much to say about politics that couldn't already be imagined based on real events.   And the post-Trump administration antics of the nation as a whole and the Republican members of Congress in particular have beggared belief. 

     At this point I was about to say that the Europeans could more easily understand this insane turn toward fascism than we Americans, having been through it not too many decades ago.  And that's true to a great extent.  However, when we look back on U.S. history and the bargain with the devil we made at the very inception of the country to allow the continuation of slavery in order to have a "union" of colonies we could call a country, and then the post-Civil War countenancing of a century or more of apartheid, I don't know that we can claim the moral high ground regarding right-wing craziness, except for the fact that we did help win a war against worldwide fascism.  Now of course we are in the midst of a mass-media spate of false conspiracy theories that easily rivals the anti-Semitic European hysteria that arose between the two World Wars, although one hopes it won't result in millions of people being rounded up and exterminated.  Certainly if the Christian right and the other Trumpian fellow-travelers get their way there will be far less tolerance of many already-marginalized people in the country.

     But all that bad news isn't why I'm writing to you today, folks.  Instead, it is to announce the beginning of a new show I will be putting on YouTube, to be called The Bizarro Gospel Hour, with your host Bishop Pete.  For those of you who knew about my earlier broadcasting antics on public access cable TV, this will look familiar.  The difference is that the new show will be accessible to a worldwide audience through the magic of YouTube.  So look for it over the next few weeks.  Right now I'm waiting for Amazon to deliver my bishop's hat, and after that I'll start recording and posting shows, if I'm able to navigate the editing process and get them streaming.  I'll have the advice of my grandson Jacob, who has his own show on YouTube called The Shed Productions, so I should be okay if I run into any technical glitches. 

     I wanted to get the word out here on the blog so that you, my faithful readers, can see more of yours truly.  You may address me as Your Excellency.  Or not, what the hell.  Whether or not I continue the blog remains to be seen. 

Ozzie

Pentwater, Michigan

September 20, 2023

   

     One of the nice things about modern streaming TV technology is the wide variety of obscure programming available to the curious and intrepid viewer on the Roku platform. We get a few of the ones that cost money, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, but my preferred ones end up being the freebies such as the Roku Channel, YouTube, and Tubi, which is my current favorite. The latter two are laden with commercials, but what the hell, they're no worse that what one has to endure when watching a live sporting event on regular network TV.  And they also feature many old situation comedies, like Leave It To Beaver, The Honeymooners, and The Life of Riley.  They afford me the opportunity to see just what kind of stuff--good, bad, or indifferent--I spent the idle hours of my youth watching.  It's a great way to see what kinds of garbage the media-meisters of yesteryear thought the public wanted to see.   If you're lucky they even include some of the old commercials, often rudimentary by modern standards, but no more or less ridiculous than the ones they have today.

     Lately I've done a deep dive into The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. I realize that when I was watching the show as a kid, I was probably watching some of it as it appeared weekly, and some of the older ones as reruns, since we didn't get a television at our house until about the mid-1950s.  (I  remember sitting by the radio listening to The Lone Ranger before we had TV.)  Right now I'm watching season five of Ozzie and Harriet, which takes place in approximately 1957, in which Ricky Nelson is a high schooler, and David Nelson is attending USC, but living at home. On the horizon, about to break, but not quite yet, is Ricky's blaze into teen idol fame, which was heavily promoted--indeed launched--via the show itself, with Ricky ending each show in front of his band, strumming the guitar and curling his lips to a series of hot charting tunes. Ricky's style was a mix of the sensuality of Elvis and the rockabilly renderings of the Everly Brothers, plus his own clean good looks inherited from his parents and a deft way of conveying the probably imaginary fact that, despite his fame, he was just a lonely teenager looking for a girl to call his own. Not wholly original stuff, I grant you, but very effective at attracting his audience, and all done without the need for him to appear on weekly variety shows in order to keep his chiseled features before the adoring public.

 

     But it's Ozzie Nelson I want to concentrate on here. This guy really fascinates me. On the show he plays a benign, lovable, and occasionally whiny paterfamilias, always getting himself into small scrapes with his braggadocio and low-level hubris, then getting caught up short and having to at least partially admit that he was mistaken, but always being forgiven by his long-suffering wife Harriet and devoted sons David and Ricky. Other TV men of the era played similar kinds of fools, to be sure. Ralph Kramden and Chester A. Riley come immediately to mind. The difference between them and Ozzie, however, is that Oz doesn't bellow or verbally abuse his wife or commit acts of absolute stupidity. He just sort of lets his best-laid plans, or his incorrigible dispensing of fatherly or husbandly wisdom, go slightly sideways, but in the end he owns up to his shortcomings pretty casually and effortlessly. And he's a decent, generous, and tolerant dad to his sons. Meanwhile Harriet provides the gentle sarcasm and wit needed to keep Ozzie in line, and she's usually one or two steps ahead of him all the way. Unlike Alice Kramden, she doesn't get in the last word with her arms folded and a frown on her face, but instead does it with grace and charm and an unfailing smile that makes you wonder what the hell she sees in this bumbling, lazy, goofball husband of hers.

     One thing that separates the show from other situation comedies of the day is that it features all four members of the real Nelson family, and, I've discovered, was filmed in a studio replica of their actual house somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. As I said, it’s Ozzie himself who most fascinates me. So, in an effort to learn more about him, I explored the internet and also took the extraordinary step of buying and reading a used copy of his autobiography, appropriately titled Ozzie, written in the early 1970s, just a few years before his death. Overall, I learned a number of things about Oswald George Nelson, born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1906. Early on, Ozzie took an interest in music, and began playing several instruments, including the ukulele and the saxophone, all very Roaring 20s and collegiate in nature. He began playing at local clubs in north Jersey and New York, and by the time he matriculated at Rutgers in the mid-1920s he was regularly burning the candle at both ends, going to college by day and leading big band gigs until the wee hours, all the while playing football and swimming for the school. Oh, and before that he was an Eagle Scout, attending an international jamboree in England and Europe in the early post-World War One years. After graduating from Rutgers he obtained a law degree, of all things, but decided at that point to go into the music biz full time, playing at high-toned clubs and speakeasies, mostly in Manhattan. Soon after, the band, consisting of him as leader and about a dozen musicians, began a practically endless tour of the east and Midwest that would have put many later rock groups to shame for its nonstop rambling from town to town for months on end. In the meantime Ozzie cut some records, including—get this—the first-ever recording of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” with Ozzie himself doing the vocal in a sort of Rudy Vallee-style croon. And he could carry a tune. That was in 1931, when he was 25 or so, well before greats like Ella Fitzgerald made the song famous, and a generation before Mama Cass of the Mamas and Papas scored with the most successful version of the song. Check out Ozzie’s rendition on YouTube. Or just imagine a young Oz crooning “Say nighty night and kiss me,” backed by soft strings and muted horns.

     A few years after that a young vaudevillian named Harriet Hilliard joined the band as the obligatory “girl singer,” and in due time the two of them married. Harriet, who had been born Peggy Lou Snyder in Des Moines in 1909, was by then a stage veteran and also in demand for Hollywood B movie parts. They spent their time on the road, conquering the nightclubs and hotel ballrooms east of the Mississippi, with Harriet occasionally going to LA to make a movie, until she quit the movie biz, for the most part, to become a wife and mother. Nah, just kidding. Between and after having David in 1936 and Ricky in 1940, she continued to tour with the band and do radio with Ozzie, pretty much full time. The two of them had a regular role on the Red Skelton radio show, singing and leading the band and doing some husband-wife schtick, until Red got drafted in about 1944, and they found themselves pretty much in charge of the show. I note all this to point out to those, like me, who only knew them on TV, that they were already very well known all over the country before The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was ever conceived. In the late 40s it occurred to them, or to someone else in the business, that they should do a show that was about them as a family, so they could include the boys and be with them and more or less exploit the fact that they were this All American post-war family. So began the program, as a regular radio show, written, directed, and produced by none other than Ozzie himself, with some help from his younger brother Don. When radio shows began to give way to TV in the early 50s, Ozzie and Harriet decided to do the show on television, but they didn't stop one and start the other. Oh no. For about two years they did BOTH the radio and TV versions of the show at the same time, with, of course, different writing and production and studios for each. As if this weren't enough, during the summer hiatus (then only 13 weeks off in the summer, with about 39 shows a year being produced), they toured the country in summer stock productions of popular musicals and stage comedies. I mean, damn! And lest you think they neglected the boys with all this work, no, not at all. They traveled with nannies and relatives and attended ball games at Hollywood High and all the shit that model parents are supposed to do. 

     Aside from hyping and presenting a perhaps rosier-than-life picture of the Nelson family, my real purpose in all this has been to tell you how I arrived at the answer to the puzzle that nearly all Ozzie and Harriet viewers have had over the years, namely, what the hell did Ozzie actually do for a living, and why did he always seem to be loafing around the house and taking naps, no matter what day it was? When confronted with this question, Ozzie would generally evade it, and say that he wanted to have the show seem as if it were taking place on the weekend, so that the audience would be able to relate to him and the family better. But this wasn't always the case. The show often took place during the week. So Ozzie would say, if really pressed, that his character was a lawyer. But even this seems far-fetched, because if he was indeed a lawyer, he worked only part time, if that. Many was the afternoon when he'd wander home in the middle of the day, dressed in a sport coat and tie, but not looking anything like a working attorney. Indeed, he had a neighbor, Darby, who was a lawyer, and who dressed the part.    

     Anyway, I think I finally figured out the key to Ozzie's indolence on the show. I believe he was acting out a fantasy--that of a guy who had nothing much to do, and plenty of time in which to do it. Because the reality is that Ozzie Nelson, and for that matter Harriet, were tireless workaholics, probably with barely a moment to spare between acting, writing, producing, rehearsing, performing, promoting, and parenting. They were Energizer bunnies on steroids, day after day and year after year. Their idea of relaxation was what most of us would consider vigorous activity. There are people like that, I know. I'm just not one of them. So if you're creating a fantasy alternative television life for yourself amid all that frenzy, why not have your protagonist just kick back, put his feet up, and relax, occasionally doing a light chore or chatting with his next door neighbor, even if it takes you 12-16 hours a day to create this illusory character? Ozzie did this for 435 episodes over fourteen years, from 1952-66, still a record for the most sitcom episodes ever produced. This guy's life was cut short by cancer at 69, but he lived at least two lifetimes during that span--Eagle Scout, school athlete, law student, band leader, actor, etc. etc. etc. It's exhausting just to think about. So when you watch the show, if you do, just remember that Ozzie Nelson on screen was, as the cowboy said of the Dude in The Big Lebowski, "taking 'er easy for all us sinners."

     I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that.

Restless, But Not So Young

Cathedral City, California 

April 7, 2023

     Several years ago I posted about The Young and the Restless, a soap opera I’d been watching.  Now, after a long hiatus, I’ve begun following it again, though not every day.  

     As is the way with soap operas, the show’s core characters have remained the same, with some additions, but a few of them are being played by different actors.  Adam Newman, the black sheep of the wealthy and powerful Newman family, who was my favorite back when I originally posted about the show, is now portrayed by a different guy, and I can’t quite get used to him.  The wily Tucker McCall, illegitimate son of the late Katherine Chancellor, is also being played by someone else, but I like this new guy better.  And so it goes.  Also, there are a few newer younger characters.  They’re less straight and white than the old timers, but still boringly the same in terms of wealth and privilege.  They trade off positions as CEOs or COOs or CFOs of divisions or subsidiaries of the mega corporations owned by the big families of Genoa City, Wisconsin, where, improbably, all this wealth resides.  Originally the businesses were competing cosmetics companies, but they’ve diversified to include media groups and fashion arms.  It’s humorous to hear these good-looking but clueless actors plan mergers and acquisitions, startup enterprises, and such, knowing that in real life they have very little idea of what they're talking about, and that for the most part neither do their viewers.  But really, why shouldn't people who are about as deep as the Kardashians rule the corporate world?  They might do less damage.

     The mainstays of The Young and the Restless, truth be told, are not young any more.  Eric Braeden, who plays Victor Newman, the ruthless ruler of Newman Enterprises, and easily the most important character in the soap, is 82 years old, but still going strong.  (Those of you who have watched the soap will instantly recognize his photo, above.  But as is the case when hearing about other peoples' grandkids, if you don't watch the show, you won't give a damn.)  Victor Newman's current wife Nikki is played by Melody Thomas Scott, who is 66.  Peter Bergman, who plays Jack Abbot, the head of the rival Jabot company, is 69.  They and their adult children are quite fond of playing musical spouses with one another.  It would be fair to say that they have the sexual memories of barnyard animals. Victor leads the pack, as he should, having been married fourteen times to nine different women.  Jack Abbot is a comparative celibate, with only six or seven marriages to four different women.  Nikki has been married twice to Jack and four times to Victor.  And one woman, Sharon, has been married to Victor and both his sons.  

These folks have grown long in the tooth along with their parts and with the soap itself.  Back when he came into the show in the 1980s, Eric Braeden/Victor Newman was in slick early middle age, with a nice fat porn-star moustache.  The moustache remains, but silver has taken over his still-enviable hairline.  He's a decent- looking guy who has held up well, as has Bergman.  Melody Thomas Scott is rather pretty too, and hanging in there, though she's being held together with corsets and plastic surgery and makeup.  Some of the middle aged women are prone to showing far too much cleavage (or more accurately unsupported gappage), which at this stage is quite a bit lower on their chests than it once was.  But part of the blame for that surely lies with the show’s wardrobe people, not just with the actors themselves.

  The Young and the Restless is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  And like old couples who've been together that long, some of the core characters have grown a little softer and more tolerant of one another, not because they really get along, and not because they don't want things to happen differently, but because they lack the energy or motivation not to get along.  

     As I write this, Phyllis Summers, with the connivance of Jeremy Stark, has faked her own death, and it looks as if she's going to frame Diane Jenkins for the apparent murder.  This is a bit of karmic payback to Diane, who faked her own death some years ago, after which Nikki Newman got the blame, although she was exonerated.  Then, last year, Diane Jenkins reappeared in Genoa City, alive and well, in order to reestablish her relationship with her adult son Kyle, whom she gave birth to after a relationship with Jack Abbott, and also to steal Jack away from Phyllis, which she has successfully done, so far.  Got it?  If not, no problem, since it doesn't really matter.

     Now, there are those who say that soap operas are unrealistic, because of things like absurdly wealthy folks sitting around drinking coffee and scotch and trading corporate responsibilities, and characters faking their own deaths, and people coming out of comas after years, and the fact that the principal actors constantly marry one another, and so on.  But aside from all that superficial silliness, I would submit that soap operas, as a form of story-telling, are closer to reality than movies and episodic prime time television shows, and certainly more so than most novels, short stories, and plays.  Indeed, there are key elements of truth in soaps that are almost entirely missing from other story-telling mediums.  First, soap operas, like real life, don't have a dramatic beginning, middle, and end, in which a story is smoothly moved along to its supposedly logical conclusion by fortuitous or unfortunate events and then tied up, for better or worse.  Instead, they just continue for years until the actors die and others replace them.  They creep, in their petty paces, from day to day, like Macbeth’s proverbial tomorrows.  Secondly, soap operas, like real life, consist of a series of short, fragmented, and often pointless or inconclusive conversations, in which little is accomplished one way or the other.  What action actually occurs usually happens elsewhere and at a snail's pace, or instead randomly and instantaneously.  Often things that seem important at the time turn out to be unimportant, and vice versa.  Rarely does a deus ex machina descend to intervene, and often the good go unrewarded and the bad go unpunished.  All that, I submit, is real life.  And perhaps it is that verisimilitude, rather than the glamor of hotel-dwelling tycoons, that most attracts those viewers who find themselves at home alone in the afternoons, shackled to their quotidian tasks, day in and day out. 

     And the young on both sides of the screen, even when they are no longer young, are still restless.

Okay, Seriously

Cathedral City, California

March 1, 2023

                    Poor me!  A man without a religion, without a decent lie to call my own.                                                                                --Percival Everett, Erasure

     Okay, seriously, this post won't be about politics.  I've ridden that horse so much lately that it needs a rubdown and a rest over at the livery stable.  And very soon I'll be astride the beast again.  So today, for a change, I'll rant about my second most favorite subject, religion.  

     Religion, I hasten to say, isn't always a bad thing, though I've pretty much put it in my own rearview mirror.  There are some benign affirming aspects of religious practice, such as the celebration or observances of various passages through life--births, marriages, deaths, and a few other in-between things.  With their organized approaches to such passages, religions sometimes give us a measure of comfort and a sense of belonging, whether we actually believe the mumbo jumbo in the liturgical background about The One Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; or heaven and hell; or the exacting requirements of Allah or Hashem; or whatever else a religion might have that is designed to keep the faithful on their toes (or their knees), and which is generally a pain in the ass and pretty difficult to comprehend using ordinary human logic.

     But even the things that are out and out weird can serve a purpose, and that purpose is (drumroll, please) to take our minds off the absolutely mundane and terminal nature of human existence.  We function physically pretty much the same as the rest of our fellow-animals, about which we hold no illusions as to their going into an afterlife, and all that, except for a few sappy people who talk about doggie heaven.  For our own species (since we suffer from a seemingly unalterable conviction of uniqueness and a profound sense of our superiority to all other beings), we hold different aspirations, as scientifically untenable as they may be.  By praying five times a day, or by attending worship regularly, or by observing silly dietary restrictions, we sometimes successfully occupy our minds and bodies when we might otherwise be pacing the floor in despair in light of the biological inevitability of the closeout of our existences.  By believing that we are not, as individuals, simply going to cease to be at some point, we can stave off the existential terror and depression that sometimes plague us as a species.  We might be filled with hope for a better land beyond this one, or terror that if we misbehave we'll go to a worse one, but, thanks to most religions, we don't have to be content with the blackout end of everything for all time.

     However, beyond a rather superficial acquaintance with the basic theology of our religions, most of us don't really dwell on the specifics of salvation and eternal life.  Unless--and this is a big unless--we take the whole thing too seriously.  That generally happens when a society or subgroup within a society puts too much emphasis on religion.  In our own country we profess to practice religious neutrality and freedom of worship.  We have no official "state" church, as many countries do.  But by having none, and by insisting on accommodating a multitude of religions on a more or less equal footing, including cults and quackish quasi-religions on the lunatic fringe of even the general lunacy of standard theology and epistemology, our common sense as a nation has subordinated itself to religion rather than what I think was the original plan, namely, to free ourselves from its domination.

     In contrast, the average western European country has a long and strong tradition favoring Christianity, and also one Christian denomination over another.  The United Kingdom has an official religion, the Church of England.  Although it tolerates other religions--Catholicism, Islam, various branches of Protestantism, and so on--as a sovereign nation, it is staunchly in favor of the Anglican church, even putting its clergy on the national payroll and in the government.  Americans might think this to be heavy-handed and prejudicial, but in reality it works very well.  In the U. K. one's default religion is the good old C. of E., and the rights and privileges of that church are available to all without any need to search for them or be convinced of the mystical or theological logic of the church.  The Anglican church is just there, like convenience stores or the post office, in almost every town and village, and if you want it, you can have it, but if you choose to ignore it or go to another church, well, that's okay too.  As a result, none of it really matters much to the average Brit.  And just to reinforce the relative irrelevance of the Church of England, it is not some imam or pope who rules over the church temporal, but rather the good old King himself.  I mean, what religion that takes itself seriously would place a secular hereditary monarch, the latest sinner in a long dynastic line of them, at the pinnacle of its religion, for God's sake?!  Oh, sure, there are the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, ostensibly the highest prelates in the whole outfit, but they are appointed by--guess who--the monarch himself, on the advice of the Parliament.  There's no goofing around trying to figure out who is closest to the Almighty or any of that.

     Other European countries have similar setups.  In the Scandinavian countries Lutheranism is the state religion, at least insofar as the monarch is required by law to be a member.  In the Netherlands it's the Dutch Reformed Church, not an official state church, but one with a history of being the default church and the one that the monarch belongs to.  In all these countries the utter lack of interest in these churches by the citizens, except maybe as places to have funerals or weddings, is profound.  I read some time back that despite the fact that Holland was founded as a staunchly Protestant nation, the most prevalent religious preference in the country is Roman Catholicism (by a plurality, not a majority), simply because most Dutch Protestants don't give a shit about church at all.  Good stuff.  And really, much better than having no official religion, because having no official denomination, or at least a denomination that has traditionally been the preferred one, creates a dangerous vacuum.  In the U.S. that vacuum gets filled by wacky fucksticks and charlatans instead of by benign and feckless vicars and pastors.

     I propose that we adopt the United Church of Christ, or U.C.C., as the state religion here in the U.S.  Some readers might not know anything about the U.C.C.  Let me assure you that it's liberal, safe, tolerant, and above all, unobtrusive.  You want to go, then go.  You want to stay away, then stay away.  You want to take communion, then take it, or not.  You want to attend the Christmas Eve service or the Easter Sunday get together, have at it.  You want to believe in Jesus, great.  You don't, not really a problem.  But it won't chase you around or fill your ears with mealy-mouthed promises of the life everlasting or the gospel of prosperity or try to make you vote for anyone.  Of course, it would like your dollars, but it doesn't demand them, and to be sure, by its relatively progressive stance on social issues it telegraphs its political preferences, but it doesn't try too hard to piss anybody off.  It says it believes in the trinity and the virgin birth and all that other standard Christian stuff, but it doesn't try to shove it down your throat.  And I like the name.  It sounds almost like a labor union.  United Church of Christ, local 1431.  Solidarity forever.  Its denominational polity is pretty laid back, too.  No bishops or other hierarchical know-it-alls to lord it over the faithful, just ministers affiliated with a loosely-knit, democratically-run synod that functions as a guarantor of pension benefits for the clergy, and puts some checks and balances in place in case an individual congregation gets too carried away in some direction or another.  And the congregation gets to hire and fire the preacher.  

     Under my plan, if the U.C.C. became the state religion of the United States, the nation wouldn't have to spend money on it, just support it "morally," so to speak.  Maybe a U.C.C. clergyperson would open sessions of Congress with a religiously neutral and meaningless prayer.  (Truth be told, that already happens, even without a state church.)  But here's where, under my idea, things would take a profitable turn.  The state religion would be the only one that enjoyed tax-exempt status for its property and contributions to it by the public.  Other religions would be free to exist, but they'd have to pay property tax and tax on their incomes just like any other business, and they wouldn't be classified as charitable entities.

     Of course all this would require the repeal of a portion of the First Amendment to the Constitution, but what the hell, it's high time that happened.  And yeah, the Catholics and Baptists would have a shit fit, but fuck 'em.  It's not like we'd be telling them they can't exist, just that they have to hop off the gravy train.  And most importantly, by adopting the U.C.C. as our national religion we'd be telling the rest of the world, as the British and the Scandinavians and others do, that our religion is the foundation of our priorities.  Sure, there'd be a bit of that Jesus on the cross stuff, but we already have to put up with that a lot anyway, and besides, does anybody really believe any of that?  Come on.  The main thing would be that the social and moral stances embraced by the denomination would be our national social and moral stances as a country.   And what are they?  Racial justice, social justice, gender inclusiveness, open and affirming marriage, and so on.  I mean, what more could you ask for?

     Organized religions have always been about politics anyway.  Let's quit pretending that our politics has no religion.  If we believe in gender equality, same-sex marriage, a woman's right to choose, racial justice, aid to the poor, etc., etc., etc., then the U.C.C. is the way to go.  The main thing here, and I know I'm repeating myself, is that NOT having a national religion has proved to be a lot more dangerous and divisive to our nation than having a nice comfortable one would be.

     So let’s quit our national pretense of religious neutrality, which allows fundamentally anti-democratic  and exclusionary retrograde groups like Scientologists, Southern Baptists, Catholics, and Muslims to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religions that actually believe in universal human justice.  It’ll be the next best thing to no religion at all, that higher state that other species appear to have achieved.