All Television Is Local

It’s embarrassing being from Buffalo.

I realized this tonight while watching the local commercials on our Time Warner cable channel.

Now, I’m sure there are many small markets across the country where the paucity of money to be made drives commercial production values to within a halogen lamp and a slab of foamboard of YouTube’s.  But I don’t have to watch them.  All I see from my dander-coated 15″ screen on the city’s upper east side is the jarring contrast of million-dollar movie trailers and local shoestring-budget car commercials.

The Cadillacs of Buffalo TV commercials have to be those for the law firms.  It’s not hard to see who is making the dough around here.  But even these comparatively slick productions bear the smudges of a rusting city.  For instance, the commercials of local law firm Cellino and Barnes are technically passable.  The skin tones are good: the men don’t appear underwater, or full of rancid shellfish.  The locations are safe: a breezy field, an impressive, oak-paneled law office.  Even the graphics show appropriate (and uncommon) restraint, choosing dissolves and clear fonts over slide-ins and the “Animals Doing Yoga” letter set.  But just like you can’t put 11 losers on the field in Rich Stadium and call them a real football team, you can’t put Cellino & Barnes on a commercial set and call them actors. Barnes, tall and bald, at least appears human in the last few commercials.  As probably only he and I have noticed, his acting has improved over the years.  His partner Cellino, however–a squat, unpleasant-looking, dark-haired man–appears visibly uncomfortable on camera.  He is always looking in the wrong direction, somewhere off-camera, stretching his mouth into the sort of grin usually only performed for dentists.  As Barnes takes up his part of the stilted dialogue, Cellino pivots his head robotically, and stares at his partner, the same leer locked on his face, his eyes now inexplicably gone black with rage.  The whole effect is like watching two slightly drugged dishwashers in tailored suits taking turns trying to hypnotize you into taking off your pants.  I just hope their clients get better performances out of them in court.

More typical of the local airwaves are the commercials produced (if that is the word) by Airport Plaza Jewelers.  You call them low-budget, I call them  indie-chic.  Forget everything you knew about the green screen.  It is OK to use in every shot.  They relish in their low-budgetness, using mannequin parts and a rubber chicken, and any prop you could reasonably expect to find for free within a half-mile of your house.

As fun as these commercials are, they remind me of the sobering reality of things around here.  Even our TV stars are ramshackle.  The bruises on our city’s collective ego are hard to see in bars and pizza joints (that is why we go to them), but they show up just fine under even the cheapest television lights.  National television has reduced Buffalo to a few cliches:  blizzards, chicken wings, and urban decay.  TV has made us a joke, undermined us, chewed us up and spit us out.

Now we are returning the favor.

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Only a small fraction of Buffalo businesses account for all our local commercials.  Again, probably this is a typical situation, but it leaves one with the impression that only seven guys in the whole depressed area are actually making any money (an impression supported by our ranking as the 4th poorest city in the nation).  And even none of these success stories seem to be able to rally the requisite capital for a two-camera shoot.

There is something suspect about a commercial in blue-collar Buffalo, the “first city of the mid-west.”  It seems vain.  Just open your shop, and if it’s on Elmwood, maybe we’ll come. Provided there is a place to tie up our dogs.

The Parable of the President and the Banker

If a dog has not been properly secured by its owner, and that dog bites a stranger, the owner is to blame.  No sense in blaming the dog.  Verily I say unto you, the dog is a dog.

The Early Bird

Gets the worm.  But the early worm gets the bird.  It’s not about early or late.  The question is, are you a bird or a worm?

Flash reality: Dr. George Vid Tomashevich

When I arrived at Buffalo State College for the first time in January of 1994, I didn’t know what to expect from higher education.  I pictured professors in old-fashioned suits, with matching old-fashioned bowties, speaking in English accents about the zeniths of the human intellect, ranging over the riches of antiquity, Shakespeare, and Thomas Mann in lectures that were high-minded, free-wheeling, and letter-perfect.

And somehow, that is just what I got.

Dr. George Vid Tomashevich — who exhibited all these fine and unlikely qualities — was my first college professor.  He passed away this week at his home, far away from Buffalo, in California, at the age of 82.  Dr. Tomashevich was a Serb, born in Yugoslavia, who acquired the Queen’s English and half a dozen other languages, graduated in Chicago among a historic class, and taught cultural anthropology at Buffalo State from 1968 until 1995.

That first semester as I scoured the course directory, the title of his class caught my eye. “ANT 382: Religion, Myth, and Magic.”  Although I was an English major, I registered for the upper-level Anthropology class without hesitation.  Wisdom is wisdom, I thought.  And besides, college is about experimentation (I also, inexplicably, took a Dance Appreciation class that semester; I picked classes like people watch cable.)

The class lived up to its (to me) provocative title. Psychology and history, religion and science, all were equally dear and familiar to Dr. Tomashevich, and in his lectures the learned gentleman moved among the disciplines with ease, using each to deepen, not discredit, the others.  In his lessons he presented a vision of a whole, unsplintered humanity.  There was no feminism, no Marxism, no post-colonialism, and certainly no deconstruction.  Only one gifted mind’s synthesis of every noble idea to which it had ever been drawn.  He took the term “anthropology” — the study of man — literally, with no further quibbling on the matter.  Dr. Tomashevich was “multidisciplinary” before it was a buzzword.  In spite of this, he was tarred as “old-fashioned” by some colleagues.  It is not unfair to say the criticism stuck in his craw.  In the semester’s last few classes, he began to detour from his lectures to rail against those who, he claimed, were pressuring him to retire. One evening an observer sat in on the class, a plump young lady with a notepad.

On another, happier evening Dr. Tomashevich, the old Serbian gentleman, extemporaneously conjugated Hungarian verbs to amaze my Hungarian girlfriend during our coffee break, a good-natured sparkle in his eye.  The following week during the same break he pulled me aside, and complimented me on the “charming young lady” I had brought to class.

I started teaching this semester at Buffalo State — a class in my native discipline of English.  The sky is big and dark early, as it was during those first weeks of 1994.  My class happens to be in the same building as Dr. Tomashevich’s night class, so tonight I clambered down the steel steps to his old room on the first floor.  It’s almost 6 p.m.; the room is locked and dark.  Although there is no one in the hall, the still-fragrant cardboard remains of a pizza party are piled on top of a nearby garbage can.  I peer through the narrow window on the door.  In the gloom, I can see the desks are new, in a new, seemingly arbitrary configuration.  I remember him gingerly transplanting his yellowing transparencies on and off of the overhead projector as he patiently meted out to us the perfected fruits of a lifetime spent learning and comparing, thinking and researching.  Tonight the only light in the room is from the Dell PC that sits on a cart, a confusion of cables erupting from its side, the Buffalo State logo sailing across its monitor from corner to corner.

The rehab facility on Genesee Road was a little huddle of buildings. A 2-story dormitory was connected by sidewalks to a chapel and a parking lot. The visitation took place in the chapel. It was a modern structure; cheaply built, whimsical, non-denominational, anticipating its inevitable re-adaptation in the whirl of modern commerce.   Stained glass windows with abstract patterns instead of specific scenes glowed in slats among the white walls and heavy dark carpet. Our group was led in along the wooden wheelchair ramp, which folded back on itself several times, like the line for a roller coaster.  You were waiting inside, absorbed in your hidden relationships, playing foosball, gossiping. I watched through the doors to the nave. I scoured the notices and flyers on the community corkboard for a glimpse into your secret life. One xerox advertised an accupuncture activity, with a diagram of the body’s chakra flow.

When we come in the front door of the house, there is coffee on. I will learn later (among the many things that I will learn later) that this is a tactic consciously employed by home-sellers to play on the sense organs of potential buyers.   The lady of the house receives us: a grand dame, smartly dressed, regally wrinkled, her bulldog a tiny jester whose nails click the hardwood floor near her feet. She tells us, smoking, that she is glad we like the toille in the kitchen, it was almost $2,000. We ask if we can smoke. Our agents smirk at each other.

The meetings were held in any space they could get chairs and a coffee maker into, at any time of day. One night we drove out across the long flat fields of upper Niagara county, south of the great escarpment, and onto the Indian reservation for a meeting around a campfire, moving into the nearby pavilion when the mosquitoes became too much. Another time we were in a re-purposed church in the Falls early on a spring morning, back door open, black girls in bright dresses laughing on a swing set outside, big flies bouncing heavily up the cracked walls. In Cheektowaga a gymnasium and bingo hall held a larger meeting, 50-60 folks, where in addition to coffee, canned pop and cold pizza were sold.  We were all ranged about long cafeteria tables, folded uncomfortably into painted metal folding chairs. It was winter for that one.

The new house has a milkbox, which has been sealed shut with paint. An unused oil tank sheds fumes from a dark corner of the basement. The upper floor’s two bedrooms have been converted into a single “in-law” apartment, and already houses a tenant. We meet.  She gives me her 30 days’ notice, and pays her rent early, in cash.

(Is the real world in here? I wonder. With all this talk of responsibility, and love?)

You are always busy in the new garden. Where I see a great confusion of vegetation, you see perennials, and weeds, and things that need classified. You see what needs trimmed, mulched, fertilized, or dragged into the sun. You see edges that need straightening, and flowers that need “dead-headed.” You have hoses, and bags of soil, and seeds, and watering pals. you arrange pots, and stands; ceramic turtles, trowels, clippers, and solar lights. I read in the shade.

I dreamed last night that you were back. I remember the confusion at explaining it all to my mother; ticking off the logistics of your coming home; whose bed we would use; how the driveway would be shared; but I don’t remember if I was happy.

Maybe we solve some mysteries too soon.

Reasons not to pack it in

Because these are these words exactly,
and nothing else;
Because each new word is a new flag in a new country,
that we must abandon immediately, or die;
Because my heart mingles with night airs,
and communes in silent joy with the white spray of stars;
Because the way out is truly the way in;
Because the wisdom of a trillion unrecorded lives
is awake inside me, and will speak;
Because the sky has portals enough;
Because the afterlife is loaded with darkness,
but light is only one kind of tangibility;
Because no fact nor whim nor apprehension is
without its own little life, its own holy vector;
Because the mystic accent is what is required here, and
will be required again, and will not be required;
Because songs must end, but a miracle is a timeless commodity;
Because the crows of time have grown fat on our breadcrumbs;
Because we are capable of throwing hoops around “Time” and “Nature,”
and of framing the shifting mists;
Because the workaday world melts into the long night of prayers;
Because we must push and pull at a thing
in order to discover its true shape;
Because prophecy is, happily, inevitable;
Because everything at our feet may be fashioned into a conveyance;
Because those are ropes, hanging from the stars;
Because our sorrows are as seasons in the mountains;
Because reverence is the better part of reverie;
Because my poem wanders to find its theme.

I’m sorry

I thought you were someone else.

Morning scene from a motel parking lot

Husband and wife pushed and pulled the battered silver cart across the parking lot.

Every hill, every crack on the asphalt, seemed too much for the ancient device, as its faded bottles of cleaning solutions rattled together in protest. The cart’s saucer-wheels dug in against each new direction. The couple brayed flat-sounding instructions to each other in their language: it could not be told if the words were angry or loving or what. Maybe they were neither: just communicating the essence of what had to be done to gain the next incline, or to traverse the next precipice.

In spite of the difficulty, they dealt tenderly with the old cart, treating it like a stubborn family nag, pleading and threatening. For somewhere among the tiny soaps and toilet ribbons, the stale coffee packets and Dixie cups, dwelt the most precious thing they had.

A Little Bit Left Over

I am just a simple man, you wouldn’t call me well-to-do
I got enough for me and mine, we can always make it through.
And no matter how hard things get I always try to…

Leave a little bit left over (over) – at the end of the month.
Maybe get a pair of sneakers, maybe have a nice lunch.

Got a keep an eye on things: keep your money in your shoe.
From Park Ave. to Washington, they all got their sights on you.
And you know they won’t be satisfied while you…

Still have a little bit left over (over) – at the end of the month.
They won’t get a wink of sleep, now, ’til your money’s all used up.

Maybe I’ll take a walk – just listen to my thoughts
They used to be my closest friends.
But there’s no way to go
Real life just moves to slow
And we already know how it’s gonna end.

The water bill is drowning me – the gas bill burned me, too.
The armies of the money-changing madmen have broke through
Might be a year before I manage to…

Have a little bit left over (over) – at the end of the month.
They won’t get a wink of sleep, now, ’til your money’s all used up.

Fun-Ful Fire Slide – 1917 ad

The American City By Arthur Hastings Grant, Harold Sinley Buttenheim