The Portable Promised Land Page 17
That disengagement from the illusion of reality, along with the slew of channels offered by cable satellites and dishes and the power of the remote control device, have completely redesigned the dynamic of modern television. With a few hundred channels at his disposal, Joe Remote splays out on his couch like a king, demanding constant wish fulfillment, slicing through the dial, his flipping fueled by the certainty that with all those channels from which to choose there must be something good on. He chases that elusive and mythical Good Show, relentlessly flip-ping until some image catches his eye. As long as the televised image transmits an amount of stimulation great enough to tamp down his curiousity about what’s happening on one of the other 999 channels he’s paying for, then he’ll stay there. But one moment of boredom and he’s taking his business elsewhere. The success of channels such as MTV, VH-1, BET, and The Box, built largely around music-video programming, shows that Joe Remote (or at least his kids, little Jack and Jill Remote) can be controlled by channels based on eye-popping short-form narratives. These channels change their programming every three to four minutes, creating a set of visuals that shift rapidly, so a bright future is always promised. While the dinosaurish big networks shed their skin every thirty or sixty minutes, these fleet videodromes are putting the remote in the hands of the channel and flipping the station for the viewer, thus sending an implicit message that audiences understand: if you don’t like what’s on now, hang on for a moment. It’ll change.
Joe Remote understands that programming is simply a vehicle to put him in contact with advertising. In response to his understanding of that fact, advertising has become exponentially more interesting in an effort to hold onto him. Thus the television commercial has become an American institution, often more interesting than the television program, a minimovie with well-loved stars or recognizable recurring charismatic characters, special effects, popular songs, and gripping narratives resolved within a minute or a half minute, all constructed to fit right into the entirely addictive, hypnotic experience of television watching.
With program-creation an arduous and time-consuming prospect whose end result is slowly, but surely, losing its hold on the viewer, with actors an ever annoying and troublesome group, and with the programmification of the commercial racing the artform to new aesthetic zeniths, the time is ripe for a television channel with programming based solely around the television commercial.
II. STRATEGIC RATIONALE
(WHY THIS CHANNEL MAKES SENSE)
The Commercial Channel will be a nationally distributed twenty-four-hour basic cable network exhibiting television commercials old and new, produced here and abroad. Our commercials will be the most hip, the best produced, the best remembered, the most culturally relevant. This will not be Appointment Television, but Quicksand Television, the sort of programming no one sets out to watch, but as they flip through the channels and land on something engaging, perhaps some old commercial they remember fondly, or some star they love, they stop a moment to watch. Then, another commercial they like follows. Then another. Before they know it they’ve spent hours watching commercials. This cavalcade of historic figures and cornucopia of treasured memories is a seamless pipeline into the consumer’s head. Smart viewers will respect the Commercial Channel for not creating some half-baked program whose ultimate goal is to lure them into watching commercials. We’ll be the only channel on the dial giving it to them straight, the most honest network in the world, telling viewers: We want you to watch our commercials!
III. PROGRAMMING STRATEGY
(HOW EXACTLY WE’RE GONNA SUCK THEM IN)
6 a.m. to 9 a.m.: Most viewers in this time slot are between twelve and twenty years old, thus a “Young Dreamer” block — animated commercials and those featuring giants of sports such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.
9 a.m. to 12 p.m.: Women eighteen to thirty-four now control sets with a two-to-one margin over men of the same demo. Thus an “Old Friends” block — the Maytag repairman, Frank Perdue, Mr. Whipple of “Don’t squeeze the Charmin” fame, Smokey the Bear, Crime Dog McGruff, the fast-talking FedEx man.
12 p.m. to 3 p.m.: Soaps dominate women, kids not home from school. Thus, an “Oldies” block — commercials from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
3 p.m. to 4 p.m.: Males ages twelve to twenty-four have returned from school. Thus, a “Young Studs” block — spots featuring Cindy Crawford and other supermodels.
4 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Males ages eighteen to thirty-four control the sets. Thus, a “Big Dogs” block — Jordan, Tiger, Seinfeld for American Express, the entire Bud Bowl series.
8 p.m. to 10 p.m.: The largest broadcast audience is watching TV. The best quality programming goes here — Clio Award winners and the highest-quality and / or best-loved commercials from all the other blocks.
10 p.m. to 11 p.m.: Networks often roll out their best programming here, thus another “Young Studs” block.
11 p.m. to 12 a.m.: For those not interested in the local news, an “Over There” block, featuring commercials from Great Britain, France, Japan, and other nations.
12 a.m. to 2 a.m.: Mostly men ages eighteen to thirty-four watching. Yet another “Young Studs” block.
Plus: Each day there will be a spotlighted commercial, something from the history of television that is imminently eye-catching. This commercial [Mean Joe Greene, Apple Computer’s Big Brother, Mikey for Life, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”] will run once an hour, regardless of the programming block.
IV. POTENTIAL PROBLEMS
(HOW WE’LL MAKE MONEY)
The Commercial Channel will have no major production studio and no hosts. The programming is already made and can be acquired for nothing. The cost of doing business will be extremely low. For far less than the cost of just one major network program, the Commercial Channel, a long-term ongoing enterprise, can be launched and maintained.
How will we make money? We’re not yet certain. We may be able to charge advertisers to air modern commercials, though they may protest that a slew of other commercials are running on the channel for free so why should they have to pay? This is a good point. We anticipate, though, that once there are lots of people watching the channel, then there’ll be ways of using that base to make money. We hope.
V. BIO
(WHO WE ARE)
The Commercial Channel is the brainchild of Jack Lucid. Mr. Lucid graduated from Harvard University with dual graduate degrees in business and philosophy. He speaks five languages and, at this time, owns and operates thirty-three television sets. He was recruited from Harvard by MTV to be a senior programming director and worked there for two years, unsuccessfully pitching an hour of commercials and a reality-based program featuring a single person stranded on a deserted island. Mr. Lucid suffered a small nervous breakdown after the success of “Survivor.” He spent just eighteen months at the George B. and Dr. Meika T. Kinkaid Center for Racialized Psychopathology at Zeitgeist University. He has been out of the Kink Center for a full six months.
[Narrator’s postscript: After a few months of shopping this proposal, Mr. Lucid found a consortium of investors who gave him $6.66 million in seed money. The leader of that group was a small man Mr. Lucid met only once and who bore a bizarrely close resemblance to George Burns. The Commercial Channel was an immediate runaway success.]
FALCON MALONE CAN FLY NO MO
Bougie Brown wanted to knock but his hand wouldn’t obey. He was standing at a door he’d spent years finding, a knock away from solving his favorite mystery. Again he commanded his hand to rap on the door. Instead, it wrote in his reporter’s notepad. “A nondescript brown door with a rickety, chipped gold handle about to fall off. But a door, no matter how beautiful or ugly, whether up on Park Avenue or down here in the projects of Brooklyn, lives and dies solely on what’s behind it.” He knew it was dreck. Anything to postpone knocking. It had been almost fifteen years since Bougie Brown had sat at his computer, trying to make sense of the sudden and mysterious end of the most electric co
llege basketball career anyone had ever seen. Fifteen years since he’d typed, “Falcon Malone will fly no more.” Now, with only a door separating he and Falcon, part of him was dying to know why Falcon had stopped flying and part of him was afraid of the answer.
Luther “Falcon” Malone was a six-foot-one skin ’n’ bones pipsqueak who could leap out of the gym. He’d be dribbling somewhere around the three-point line, thirty-some feet away from the basket, when he would leave his feet with Peter Pan ease, glide through the air like a hoop Fred Astaire, and slam-rock that orange pill home. He averaged only thirty points a game for Soul City’s Negritude University, but what made his thirty shine above and beyond all other points scored on a given night was this: Falcon couldn’t score a quiet basket if he tried. His jump shot was below average, so he scored on dunks, alley-oops, and finger-rolls alone, slicing through air patrolled by men twice his size. He was a minihelicopter slaloming through a field of Sequoias, his sneakers passing by men’s necks on his way to the basket, his beautiful sneakers, the Jordan XXI, the all-silver shoe with the inch-by-inch video screen on the side that showed an endless loop of spectacular Jordan dunks. He scored effortlessly, relentlessly, and embarrassingly, with an athletic outlandishness, an aesthetic bodaciousness, a downright rudeness that suggested the five men in those other uniforms weren’t even there. If a game was close, Negritude had the edge because Falcon would soar up for one of those spirit-snapping dunks and remind the other team that someone unstoppable was over there. The scoreboard registered just two points, but Falcon’s presence said Y’all can give up now.
That was exactly the message sent to the mighty University of North Carolina Tar Heels during Falcon’s sophomore year at Negritude, when the teams met in the NCAA championship game. It was a hot night in Tucson and the air in the dome was thin and gravity was weak. With just under two minutes left, Falcon had scored forty-two of the Runaway Slaves’ ninety-two points, putting them just two ahead of the boys in sky blue, when he caught a pass at the top of the key and began a drive to the hoop that ended up an unforgettable moment in college sports. Falcon found a seam in the swarming zone defense and took off, ball in his right, eyes wide as he flew. The UNC boys had a proud basketball tradition to live up to and a coal-black, seven-foot-three, 330-pound center, Chauncey “The Cloud-Kisser” McClanahan, who’d played the entire season with his mouth open and his tongue hanging. The Cloud-Kisser stepped into little Falcon’s path. You could see him thinking That boy’ll have ta run me over fore he dunk agin.
But the mountain with legs would not stop Falcon. He stuck out his left foot and put the toe of the sole of his Jordan on the Cloud-Kisser’s tongue, pushed off, hurdled his head, coasted, then wham-bammed the ball into the hole. There’s a famous photograph of the big fella standing there, watching the ball fall to the ground, a conspicuous speck of dirt on his hangdog tongue. After that, like air from a punctured tire, the soul just sssssed from the whole team.
After Falcon led Negritude to their second consecutive national title, he surprised no one by announcing he would forgo his senior year and turn pro. But on the morning of the NBA draft, as the big time salivated over its chance to absorb the young supernova into its constellation, word came from a team-mate: Falcon had retired from basketball, effective immediately, end of story. Everyone’s favorite skywalker was gone.
In the years that followed Bougie went from a young, single, undistinguished sportswriter fresh out of journalism school to a bearded veteran with a wife and twins at Chapin. Most forgot about Falcon. It’s likely you don’t even remember him. But Bougie couldn’t forget. He’d be moving through traffic in his Volvo, or sipping his second martini at the Yale Club, or having sex with his wife, when Falcon would pimp-strut into his mind. What happened to you? Bougie would say. Where are you? Why’d you quit at the doorstep of multimillionaire-hood? The ending just didn’t make sense. A piece was missing and it rankled him, a thorn in the side of his mind. Other men obsess about the grassy knoll, Area 51, or the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa. Bougie fixated on Falcon. Did you lose interest in basketball? Did someone threaten your life? Did you fear success? Nothing completed the puzzle. The wife had ordered him to give up his beloved job at the sports desk for a very lucrative and very dry post at a financial mag. She was separating him from his true love, but what could he do? The twins had to eat and she had to cart them around in a Rover. It was late in the fourth quarter for Bougie and he had to know: what happened to Falcon Malone?
For months Bougie bummed around the city’s basketball meccas — West Fourth Street in the Village, Rucker Park up in Harlem, Soul in the Hole in Brooklyn — trying to tap into the ghetto-basketball grapevine. He heard, See, what happened was he was kidnapped by NASA for experiments in moon-jumping....Yo that nigga knew the NBA would eat him alive so he snuck off to the Italian league....He decided to become a rapper, he fell under the spell of H, he had magic sneakers and lost them in a bet and was forced to quit. I saw it.... One day he was pickin quarters off the top of the backboard one by one when, a freak accident, his thumb got caught on the rim and was ripped off....He found God.... One day he jumped too high and grabbed onto a cloud and pulled hisself on up to Heaven. Then, one day, a speed-chess player, a wrinkled little purple-black old man named Raisinhead Jinkins, whispered to Bougie as he castled kingside, “Yo, reporterboy, take the D train to DeKalb and check out the Fort Greene Projects. They say Ol’ Falcon live up in there.”
In Fort Greene Bougie wandered by bodegas with loud, hot salsa spilling out onto the street and large, gorgeous murals commemorating beloved murdered drug dealers until he found a park with hills and fields and all sorts of trees, majestic Elms and Oaks and Maples that twisted and stretched like giant modern dancers with one massive leg and twelve arms reaching thirty, forty feet in the air. At the far end of the park he found a basketball court with smooth green asphalt and netless rims and just across the street, the Fort Greene Projects.
On the ballcourt two teenage boys were playing one-on-one in front of a motley flock that framed the entire court and roared like a Roman Empire audience watching a Christian battle a lion. The crowd’s rabid energy and the boys’ tense faces told the game’s import. This wasn’t mere sport.
One of the boys had long, sinewy arms and an Afro larger than the ball, the other was caramel-colored with the stop-start moves of a jitterbug. Sneakerwise, both had Porsches on their feet: Afroboy had the purple-and-gold Nike Air Anti-Gravitys with the laces up the heel, Jitterbug the yellow-on-silver Nike Air Viceroys with titanium coating. Both were sweat-drenched, exhausted into slow motion, and nervous as hell, their faces taut, hands tentative, eyes wide and serious. They battled for position, dove for every loose ball, warred over every inch. Bougie watched as they scored a few tough baskets, worked out a pair of hotly disputed calls, and talked a lot of trash until Afroboy swished a long baseline jumper and yelled out, “Point game!” The crowd said, “ Aaaaawww shit!” At the free-throw line he checked the ball, dribbled fast — the staccato rhythm telling the speed of his heart — then moved to his right. Jitterbug raced to the spot where Afroboy would soon be, but Afroboy flipped the ball behind his back to his left side, leaving Jitterbug out of position. Afroboy flowed with the bouncing rock. The crowd gasped as he moved through the lane, a full foot ahead of the defender, took off into the air, stretched his left hand toward the basket, and gently layed the ball onto the backboard. It bounded off the big metal square and zipped right through the rim.
The crowd swarmed Afroboy. An instant party went on around him. Jitterbug slumped on the side, alone. He knelt and unlaced one Air Viceroy, then the other. The effort pained him. Someone came and took the shoes and brought them to Afroboy. He raised them high like two trophies. The shoeless Jitterbug walked off gingerly, eyes fixed on the ground. Bougie told the happy winner he was a pro scout, gave him twenty dollars, and got directions to Falcon’s door.
He stood in front of Falcon’s door trying to knock for half an hour, but just
could not bring himself to do it. After a while the hallway quieted and he noted a faint sound from inside the door. To hear it he had to put his ear an inch from the portal and hold his breath. It was cheering at a low volume, as if a few thousand people were inside, quietly screaming at the top of their lungs. The happy din went on for a few moments, then stopped. There was the garbled turkey-wails of rewinding, then silence. He heard an anticipatory Ha!, then more roaring. The crowd inside began a chant: Fal-con! Fal-con! — louder each time — FAL-CON! FAL-CON! The turkey-wail rewinding soon followed and the cheering recommenced. My God. Is this how he spends his days? He had to knock. He would find the courage, somehow, in just one more minute. Then a door on the other end of the hallway opened.
Out stepped a man with a single moving eye, the other side a gaping socket. The pupil focused on Bougie, his ear pressed against Falcon’s door. Two more men emerged behind him, their faces twisted like gargoyles. They stared at Bougie. One of them snarled, “Yo Gotham, who that by Falcon door?” Nervousness slithered up Bougie’s spine.
Bougie thought, I’m just a journalist here for an interview. If I explain myself they’ll understand. But he ran. He sprinted to the staircase, leapt from the top stair, overjumped, and crashed smack into the corner. His ankle screamed. The gargoyles were at the top of the stairs. Bougie hurled his tape recorder at them like Johnny Bench throwing out a runner stealing second. Somehow, it connected with a gargoyle’s knee. He fell to the ground. Bougie bolted off, sprinting scared, taking stairs three and four at a clip, blurring by corner after corner, the grunting and rumbling behind him like a thundercloud inside the project stairway hotstepping after him. He reached the end of the stairs and a new hallway. There was a staircase on the far end and, on his left, a few feet away, a door, slightly open. The thundercloud was seconds behind him. Should he break for the staircase? Bougie saw himself running in the courtyard in front of the projects, a quarterback’s nightmare — padless and blockerless and scrambling alone in an endless backfield, tracked by a trio of bloodthirsty Lawrence Taylors. In the vision he was caught over by the swing sets and sacked mercilessly, the three sadists landing on top of him in one brutal gang tackle, crushing him into dust. The thunder closed in on him. He had to move. He ducked inside the door, slammed it shut, and flipped a pair of locks as if he’d escaped into his own home.