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ABOUTBlack Lamb was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Published monthly. (more) FREE SAMPLE COPYClick here to receive a free sample issue via U.S. mail. There is absolutely no obligation. SUBSCRIBESupport this independently published journal of fine essays. Annual subscriptions are $15 in the USA, $25 in Canada, $30 in the UK, or $35 elsewhere (all prices in US $). Click here to subscribe online via paypal or send a check to Black Lamb, 1759 View Drive, San Leandro CA 94577. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for the 'All Television Issue' CategoryI love LarryMarch 1st, 2006 BY CATE GARRISON One of the best things about moving back to the city from the High Desert is the happy rediscovery of old friends… and even more, the reconnection with old chums from television. Perhaps for the same political reasons as those which drove our rustic video store to deem Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 unsuitable viewing material and refuse to stock or order it, or our one and only fitness center to show only Fox News on the supra-treadmill monitors, our country cable company would not stoop to offering us, inter alia, the Comedy Channel (no South Park, no Daily Show) or BBC America (no Mile High, no Bad Girls, no Coupling, no Monty Python or Black Adder reruns). It’s a nice little irony therefore that, while in order to avoid such soul-destroying homespun activities as card games, knitting, and singing around the piano, our evenings over the mountain were of necessity devoted to the Goggle Box, however limited, we are now tempted to stay home more than ever, despite being surrounded by restaurants, bars, cinemas, and pleasure domes of every kind, stately or otherwise.
Posted by: The Editors The boob tubeMarch 1st, 2006 BY CERVINE KAUFFMAN My opinion of the boob tube is that it is a pernicious invention and one that humanity would do better without. Like most American children, I watched my share of TV. As a child, I read almost constantly, but I also watched cartoons every day after school. There were other programs that I watched, at least one every night, and I remember seeing episodes of the cartoons, and the evening, programs, sometimes two and three times. When I think of the waste of time, I cringe. When I was little, I didn’t think much of TV as a waste of time because it was fun. I also didn’t resent being told to buy things every five minutes. The only time that commercials bothered me was when they interrupted the flow of The Wizard of Oz or the Peanuts specials. It was only later, after I’d been weaned from the tube for
Posted by: The Editors Degraded acousticsMarch 1st, 2006 BY ANDREW DARREL The composer Wolf, it is said, was always changing apartments. Supposedly he never stayed more than three months in any one place, not until the syphilis began to make itself felt and he had to be locked up. His reasons for moving included all the usual ones: not being able to pay the rent, hating the landlord, hating the There was a time once when I started to worry that I might be behaving too much like Wolf, and that it might be for the same fundamental reason — that I too was bonkers. When I last lived in Rome, in the Eighties, in less than three years I moved flats five times, in a city where many people live in a single flat all their lives. I’ve scratched my head but the only other person I can think of here who has lived in more than two apartments is Anna Maria’s dreadful brother, who isn’t mad maybe but is extremely nasty. I don’t worry about the question now, though. The anxiety passed when I moved on to another country, and found other things to worry about.
Posted by: The Editors My brilliant TV careerMarch 1st, 2006 BY WILLIAM BOGERT As even the most cloistered among you must be aware, there is a good deal of money to made in television. Alas, not very much of has come my way. Don’t misunderstand me; I made a decent living for years, and it’s been a very long time since I had to anything else but act. But there were only two years that my wife and I managed to combine for an income into six figures, and there are now any number of television people who make it easily into seven, and eight. These people are regulars on a TV series. I am the most experienced actor I know of who has never attained that exalted status.
Posted by: The Editors I was a teenage killerMarch 1st, 2006
Television was not welcomed by my mother and stepfather in the mid-Fifties. They were radio people, used to the old dramas and comedies of the late Thirties and the war years. They believed that a family should sit down together each evening at the table for supper, no matter what demonic moths were nibbling on the family fabric, and as members of the “Greatest Generation,” they trusted lashings of booze during the cocktail hour before dinner, wine during it, and the soothing rhythms and harmonies of the big bands, playing quietly on my stepfather’s new and expensive hi-fi system, to establish a modicum of tranquility and permit what my mother, always half-sarcastically, referred to as “Gracious Living.”
Posted by: The Editors Thug in the cornerMarch 1st, 2006
For me, the television is an instrument of torture. Or no, it is the torturer himself, good at his job, with a cupboardful of trusty gadgets and a wide repertoire of techniques, from the unbearable, steady drip of water on the skull to the galvanizing agony of the electrode, to the continuous blistering pain of repeatedly lacerated flesh: a natural, bringing to his work a relish, and a touch of imagination, that put him in a class of his own. I have been a favorite victim of his for a long time now. He lives in my house, of course, so I cannot get away from him. Let me tell you how much I hate him!
Posted by: The Editors Reality avoidanceMarch 1st, 2006 BY DEAN SUESS Everyone in prison does time in his own way. Depending on the anesthesia of choice, we can work out pseudo-time reduction programs, which we jokingly call “half-time.” It’s tongue-in-cheek, a parody of this state’s occasional offers to grant legitimate half-time reductions for specific criminal classes: dopers and meth lab contractors, for example. Some inmates are doped up on prescription medications, some on smuggled drugs. Some sleep half or more than half their time away. But by far the preferred half-time, or half-life, is watching television. Actually, “watching” is too active a verb to describe the non-engagement of brain synapse required by sitting in front of a television. We have a cable contract at this prison, which provides over fifty channels of mind-numbing dreck. I haven’t had a television in my cell in quite some time, and I don’t miss it one bit. It’s entirely too irritating. Not to mention, most fights between cellies are over the television.
Posted by: The Editors Perpetuum mobileMarch 1st, 2006 BY STEPHEN STARBUCK It can’t be true. But we seem to be the only family that, when the baby arrived, instead of killing the television, went out and corralled a wide screen behemoth instead. A massive rectangular box enclosing a 42-inch (measured on the diagonal) screen hunches ponderously on its new built-in cabinet, with its own accent lighting above it in its very own freshly remodeled alcove or, should I say, grotto. See, we These things happen when an obscure relation mentions you in passing, in their will. I suppose the tidy lump of inheritance could’ve been the bedrock of a college trust for imminent Ada Rae, but, well, you know. We like TV. Like Winston Smith liked you-know-whom at the end. I have since vowed to help her develop, as soon as practicable, a cross-over dribble or killer spike or acey serve, something worthy of a scholarship. I mean, a parent’s job includes keeping the future in focus and all.
Posted by: The Editors Tyranny and the boxMarch 1st, 2006 BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS The other day I watched the film Good Night and Good Luck. In the opening scene Edward R. Murrow, the famous World War II correspondent and television journalist, stands at a podium to accept an award from his peers. The film then flashes back a few years to the time of the McCarthy hearings, and Murrow’s current affairs program exposing McCarthy, or more to the point, where he allowed McCarthy to expose himself. At the time CBS was under commercial and political pressure to toe the sponsors’ line. The film is about a brief few years, a simpler time when truth seekers had a voice within a new medium, and when the forces that nourished and opposed them at the same time were easier to distinguish. But at the beginning of the film, at the podium accepting his award, Murrow laments the rot that has set in already. I am astounded, as he is speaking in 1958, soon after the beginning of the television age.
Posted by: The Editors My TV and meMarch 1st, 2006 BY BUD GARDNER I’ve had a fascination with TV about as far back as I can remember. As a young child in the late Forties, I first saw those tiny flickering human figures in small, usually round, glowing picture tubes in bulky wooden furniture pieces in appliance stores, arousing a curiosity and excitement that has never much abated over all these years. Despite endless yearning and pleading from my brothers and me, my folks were hardasses; we didn’t actually get our own TV set until 1954, so until I was about eleven, what TV my younger brothers and I got to see was mooched off neighbors and friends.
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