Cheers

In September we will have reached the 25th anniversary of the seminal television sitcom Cheers. It is the Silver Anniversary, and for Gen X types like myself, the silver celebration is starting to match the unwelcomed silver strands in our once lustrous hairlines. Cheers, of course, was a phenomenal piece of episodic art; that said, every sitcom that ever was celebrates some anniversary of sort with each passing year (season), so what was so special about Cheers to warrant such belated admiration?

I’ll start with originality.

In 1978, the documentary Scared Straight hit the airwaves. It was a precursor of the much maligned, equally ridiculed and praised sub genre of viewing culture that would come to be known as “reality”. Of course, the realism in this program was limited; the unspoken truth between viewer and participant was that no matter how harrowing the “reality” onscreen might have been, these kids were in no real danger from the barbs and threatening diatribe of the inmates. One false move and production would have folded like the proverbial cheap suit.

In 1992, a station that used to play music videos introduced a force known as The Real World. It was to be Candid Camera 24/7, as stereotypes of every race, gender and heritage were thrown together in a three million dollar loft in Manhattan (real?) and left to fend for themselves on camera. A girl happened to be from the south, so she was cast as the ignorant prototype of naivity. A guy happened to be African American and outspoken, so he was, of course, militant. Then there was Eric Nies, who was a model with six ridges in his stomach and was portrayed as a narcisist who played to the camera (though this might have been his own doing).

In 1983, wedged loosely in between these two programs, was Cheers. Now, Cheers was a scripted, live-in-front-of-a-studio-audience program, undoubtedly. It had its cliches and lazy writing and made-for-TV situations, but the argument can be made: Cheers was reality programming.

Before Sam Malone first introduced the couch residing lexicon to his misogynistic ways, Americans were fed a bunch of lies. Every family, according to the creators of Leave It To Beaver, were as wholesome as depicted. Imagine the horror felt by the 99% who were not! The biggest problem an American could have possibly faced was a dasterdly tarantula, a la The Brady Bunch. Johnny Bravo ruined the narrative for all of us normies, void of a sunshiney day!

Cheers was almost canceled, a potential thievery that can only spur contemplation of other groundbreaking shows that never saw the air (as such campy, hidden debauchery shows as The Love Boat were flourishing). But it stuck around because it had shades of truth. In television, shades of anything are as good as it gets. It had Sam Malone, the one time Boston Red Sox pitcher, a hero struck down by the very real issue of alcoholism (though his post baseball career choice was a head scratcher). Diane Chambers, the pseudo- intellectual who, though she and everyone else knew she belonged to a greater existence, was trapped in a lower middle class realm. Woody Boyd, the awestruck farmboy determined to make it in the big city, common sense and likelihood be damned. Carla, the fertile, eternal barmaid, a loser in love and life, yet too offended by her surroundings to wave a white flag. Frasier Crane, the cerbral excavator who drowned his sorrows with tonic and gin while presumably guiding others away from such self medication. Cliff Clavin, the blue collared know it all who knew not enough to stop pigeonholing himself as a caicature. Norm, the self deprecating, heavy set everyman, a C student in life but a saloon valedictorian (with a reserved seat and a catchphrase as brilliantly unoriginal as his name). There was even Paul. Who’s Paul? Exactly. You know him. He was in every episode. But he was just…there. There are ten Paul’s in every bar in America.

This is where the reality set in.

None of these characters were a newspaper columnist. No one was jumping sharks in water skis and a leather coat. Levity was key; it got as serious as beating Gary, a rival barkeep, in a prank war. Every conflict, victory or happening occurred within the four corners of the bar. And for a shockingly large segment of America, this is and always has been true. For every corner dive, with a sassy bartender and bacteria cesspool communal pretzel bowl, there is a story like Cheers. It might not be a mirror, but it exists. The hole in the wall where you ingest commercial beer like its oxygen, the owner, its Sam Malone, probably had another goal in life. He or she never dreamed their pub was “it”. Undoubtedly, there is a Diane Chambers working there, a bright bulb in a dim bunch that could, should, be doing something greater in life, but alas, there she is, her Contemporary Art degree withering away, her Masters in English useless to an audience seeking less Shakespeare and more shaken martinis. There is a Woody Boyd, born of another town, seeking the sleek city life that (ironically) TV promised him should he move away from Farmville. Cliff Clavin might wear a FedEx suit or a factory man’s boots, but he can tell you nine backstories to a three minute long Jouney song. Carla goes without saying, you recognize her strained face as she unceremoniously hands you a draft; your local Frasier wears a sport coat that doesn’t quite fit in with the décor, likely the driver of the car that doesn’t quite fit in with the parking lot. Norm is, well, Norm. He is the most easily transferred character on the show. Except perhaps Paul, who exists in every bar. Have you ever “known” someone at the watering hole for so long that…it would be embarrassing to admit you don’t know his name?

The saving grace of Cheers was that when they resorted to gimmick (Kevin McHale, Dick Cavett, Alex Trebek), it was still grounded in realism-you felt that these celeb types COULD have accidentally stumbled into the Boston bar. Famous people have to drink somewhere. And the antics? No Hollywood liberty, they exist in every drinkers lounge in the country. Who doesn’t know the bartender’s drama? Who doesn’t know who the owner is sleeping with? Who doesn’t know every painfully dull and anticlimatic detail of every “regular” on the stool? A bar is a family, at a price (money, liver). It has never been anything but, and when Cheers debuted a quarter of a century ago, we saw our reflection in our off-orange mug of suds. The cocktails have changed; the things we bitch about have changed. Through the genocide of brain cells the drinking public has blamed, since Cheers began, Reagan for their problems. Since then the blame has fallen on Reagan again, Bush Sr., Clinton twice, Bush Jr. twice, and now Obama. In that duration, rivalries have developed with competing bars. Romance, under the influence of closing time Chardonnay and bushels of Budweiser, have certainly blossomed between potential Sam Malone’s and aspiring Diane Chambers’ (maybe even a few Rebecca Howe’s, though being a purist I nary mention her name). Some random saloon has a Carla who hates that bar’s Cliff, and some form of Norm laughs at it while that venue’s Woody has no idea what is happening. And the many Paul’s are undoubtedly thinking or saying something, though no one cares.

Cheers was a place where “Everybody knows your name”, and across the lower 48 (and the other 2) there is a Cheers and everybody knows everybody’s name. I salute the 25th, because it was real, it was honest, and like these bar stools that help us forget, there was no glitz or glam-only barley, hops and malts. But Cheers, like the barflies before it, never dies. Like Atticus Finch it surpasses time, because time is only a set of numbers. Last Call is an imaginary, incomprehensible endgame, like Judgment Day and our own individual demise. It very well may come, but until it does…

Another round for the gang.

The Underwood Typewriter

Recently I stumbled across a photo on a social media site. The image was of a home telephone, not the old rotary dial, but the art deco style with bulky neon buttons; cutting edge stuff for 1987. The poster of this photo was a 20 year old girl and the caption read: “I must have one of these antique phones.”

I died a little bit inside, my silent weeping an ode to the hourglass of life’s refusal to pause.

As I type on a magical electronic square that transmits my thoughts to the world in a nanosecond, I cannot help but imagine how fast the rotations must be as generations of writers are undoubtedly rolling over in their clichéd graves. The mere notion that the current mode of crafting the next great American novel requires a battery would surely not sit well with the Hemingway’s of the world. Though tragically hip in the same fashion that vinyl is still the preferred medium of sound to die-hards, the typewriter has effectively met its demise in writer heaven. But once upon a time, a word technician was required to be a mechanic. Mistakes came with no backspace button and spell check was a tattered dictionary next to a glass of Scotch. The stroke of a key was followed by a triumphant clack, as ink met paper in a beautiful crash.

The Underwood Typewriter was the glorious vehicle that drove the words from the recess of the mind to their physical enshrinement.

Upton Sinclair, who TIME Magazine called “A man with every gift except humor and silence”, wrote his culture shifting The Jungle on an Underwood. William Faulkner employed his trusty metal companion as he was shaping the Southern Literature movement; following him on an Underwood (as well as the genre) was To Kill a Mockingbird scribe Harper Lee ( who incidentally included a character named "Mr. Underwood"  who is known to type on a typewriter all day long). And the brash, lovable “Laureate of American lowlife” Charles Bukowski was well known to fire away on his Underwood Standard when not preoccupied with his cats or bottles of vino.

  “The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. 'I'll just set in my room,' he says. 'F**k 'em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry.”- Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs, the enigmatic Beat wordsmith, was known as a repeat pawn customer, going through a myriad of typewriters to support his lifestyle. The preceding excerpt from his seminal Naked Lunch was written on a borrowed Underwood from fellow Beat iconoclast Jack Kerouac. Kerouac used his Underwood Portable to pen a little piece known as On The Road. 

From Douglas Fairbanks to John F. Kennedy, the New York based Underwood Typewriter Company has, for over 100 years, manufactured the strictly utilitarian machines that compute the emotional narrative of our lives. In modern times the contraption has emerged as poetic as the prose it fabricates. Though painful to use the term, for the generations that are not impassioned towards the nostalgic, Underwood has had its share of cameos in pop culture. Film buffs might recognize Leo DiCaprio’s character in Catch Me If You Can as he forged counterfeit checks on a classic Underwood. An Underwood typewriter is used by the main character in the 2001 musical film Moulin Rouge. On the small screen, the clever character in the television show Murder, She Wrote began her writing career using an Underwood Typewriter; on Parks and Recreation, eternally old school man’s man Ron Swanson finds and restores an Underwood No.5. The legendary brand has even appeared in the mind numbing realm of gaming, as Underwood is integral to the plot of a video game entitled BioShock.

But at its heart, Underwood belongs to an era where only the finest Literary Fiction was worthy of our attention. And to many purists, this is the perfect climax. In a saturated world where hormonal teenaged vampires outsell Dickens, perhaps the prestige of an Underwood Typewriter should only be paired to literature of merit. To envision the iconic device being used to produce grocery aisle romance camp is more excruciating than watching the aforementioned Alexander Graham Bell masterpiece become relegated to a curious relic.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it best. And he wrote it on an Underwood.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

 –The Great Gatsby

Stickball

Basketball is widely regarded as the premier sport in urban scrawls and metropolis’ everywhere for reasons that make much sense-a hoop (home made or playground issued), a ball that bounces, and a few willing bodies are the only prerequisites. Before Dr. Naismith invented round ball, generations of street athletes took the field/concrete pavement of New York City with their own brand of inventive sport.

Long the backdrop for 1950’s period flicks and DeNiro movies, stickball has been as much a part of the Big Apple as Lady Liberty and the Disney-fied Times Square tourist traps. Picture baseball-with some slight adjustments. The bat was a simple broom handle, simultaneously rendering the neighborhood hardware store a sporting goods enterprise. The bases took form in manholes, fire hydrants, and perhaps a Nathan’s hot dog cart, the last one dependant upon the vendor’s temperament. Forget the rawhide baseball, a simple tennis ball or rubber ball would suffice-spaldeen, high bouncer, whatever was around. The rules were…regional. Depending upon the alley or road traffic, homeruns were marked by landmarks, and balls and strikes were judged on a chalk outline, typically on the ground in front of the batter or a wall (if lucky to find one) behind him. 

Also contingent upon extenuating circumstances was the style of play. Fungo was entirely up to the batter, who would simply toss the ball and take a whack. Broken windows or rooftops were generally considered to have left the park. More traditionally the pitcher would stand 40 to 50 feet away and toss a one bounce pitch, leaving the batter and his hand/eye coordination the deciding factor as to whether he would wallow in World Series shame like Bill Buckner, or Fall Classic fame like Kirk Gibson.

Beyond the stats was the now lost art of neighborhood unity and family tradition. Stickball did not care whether the player was a shoe shine boy or the borough bigwig with the shiny Lincoln Town Car, as anyone could be a hero. The game was an heirloom that fathers, sons and daughters could share together on a pleasant summer night while the sounds of the city took over the air and the hot asphalt and local pizzeria merged to emit a surprisingly pleasant aroma. The lasting image of the game is its legacy of what America was and could be, an era when everyone banded together to make the best of the situation they were in. The aspiration of many to play baseball, or at least a version of it, regardless of venue or equipment, resulted in a successful strike against the odds, and symbolically showcased American ingenuity.

Beyond the sentiment and nostalgia, any game that can be interrupted by a booming voice proclaiming “Car!” is pretty cool to me.

The Writer - Bret Easton Ellis

“They had made a movie about us”- Imperial Bedrooms

American literature is a curious thing.

There are the stalwarts that have become a brand, the mechanized typing machines that could (and do) turn a boatload of drivel into a New York Times bestseller. There are the grocery store checkout lane pushers, scribers of campy romance novellas with bare chested Fabio’s painted on the cover. There are those few unapologetic, unabashed gutter heroes, like the inimitable Charles Bukowski.

There are the teen vampire exploiters. The Hemingway’s. The cliché dealers who are published and the unknown game changers that lie haplessly at the bottom of slush piles.

It is unclear where Bret Easton Ellis fits in. But somewhere in between the Don DeLillo’s and Chuck Palahniuk’s, he has left quite the impact. And the pages keep on turning.

Easton Ellis was a mere 21 years of age when his seminal Less Than Zero shook the publishing world. Dubbed then as a “Brat Pack” author, the voice of his generation, the shockingly frank and nihilistic reality of disaffected youth with too much money and not enough something has been considered to be the exposé of the 1980’s greed culture. It was an era the California born Easton Ellis contributed to, amongst the wealth and moral decay of Los Angeles. Hollywood wasted little time optioning the book for cinema, though they liberally concealed the true seedy underbelly of their own back yard, a criminal offense to purists. The book turned Easton Ellis into a lightning rod of controversy and subjected him to attacks from numerous groups for his supposed misogynistic themes. The attention, from either side, validated him. The void of socially relevant novels at the time was filled with the ramblings of dangerous melancholy.

A cult was born.

The marriage of Tinseltown and the written word continued withAmerican Psycho and it's disturbingly lovable serial killer/Whitney Houston junkie, Patrick Bateman. Satirical and dark and obscene to the readers of commercial books that were traditionally entrenched in safety and shiny endings, this work cemented Easton Ellis as the premier mind behind a hellacious (and addictive) literary vision; violence, absurdity, and a dim worldview.

Glamorama. Lunar Park. The Informers. Imperial Bedrooms.

The lived-through-the chaos, memoir styling of Easton Ellis has created a niche for the author. Drugs, death, pornography. Despair, torment, an eclipse blocking the happy sunset. In a strange shot of irony, he may as well be considered a screenwriter; his work tends to find its way on film anyway. Cosmically, his too-dark-for Hollywood tales are an object of desire for industry types, while maintaining an edge and an underground credibility with his loyal flock. This malleability, this shifty accoutrement to his essence, the ability to slide back and forth between mediums and devotees is a portrait of his work. He is, to many, equal parts brilliant, disgusting, and an outcast (with keys to the clubhouse).

A social media maestro, Bret Easton Ellis has created a stir recently through that eternally necessary device known as Twitter. Inklings of a continuation of American Psycho have turned into literary fervor. Ideas and what-ifs between Easton Ellis and his hungry readers have been exchanged through this medium with gusto, leaving the author as an accessible brand without denting his myth. The salacious possibilities of a middle aged Patrick Bateman quenching his murderous thirst has heads buzzing.

We can just envision the yuppie-tastic sadism now. They’ll likely make a film about it.

And as we are prone to do in any Easton Ellis project, we will immerse ourselves into the recesses of our darkest guilty pleasures.

Disappear here.

Gordon Gekko

 “The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I've still got a lot to teach you.”

 It is the 25th anniversary of the seminal, iconic film Wall Street, and it would appear in our current state that we have learned little. Poor decisions from the actual Financial District have spiraled into scandal and contributed to economic struggles throughout the nation. Still, America loves to hate, and never was there a bitter love affair with a fictional character than in Oliver Stone’s 1987 masterpiece, Wall Street. Traditionally, fictional characters gain esteem in literary form only; for reasons indefinable, it is simply a classier move to celebrate or lambast figures from the written word; Grendel from Beowulf is a villain we love to read about over and over, generation to generation. Then there is Atticus Finch, the classic hero in a white suit, who we also salivate over in print.

And then there is Gordon Gekko. An area as grey as his temples.

At first glance, the Michael Douglas character is a microcosm of 80’s greed-he is known foremost for stating that “Greed is good”. Gekko, with his bulky mobile phone and mortgage busting suspenders, is the mascot of a shameful era. With his slicked back coif and cigar smoking alpha male pose, he was big bad wolf that college finance professors warned us about and the dark dirty secret that these students aspired to be. Gordon Gekko was excess before it was cool, the P Diddy jetsetter before “bling” and “swag” hit our vernacular. But in reality Gekko was never an avatar for the times-the times aspired to become Gekko. Life imitating art.

Based on corporate raiders and Manhattan predators like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, Gekko has been labeled as the devil incarnate, as well as the offspring of what we all would be-if we could. Ruthless, callous and forgiving, he was the prototype of success in the 1980’s. A throat stepper with no regard, Gordon Gekko was a forefather of a dangerous school of thought-world domination, in designer clothing. And though he was created as a warning of what not to be, film goers embraced him emphatically. Just like an innocent girl forced to choose between a Boy Scout or the bad boy, or a conflicted man weighing the angel on one shoulder and a hellish serpent on the other; the dark side always looks a little juicier.

Gekko’s stats: A City College of New York grad, he garnered his wealth in the 1970s buying real estate. Corporate raiding followed, naturally, along with insider trading (“The most valuable commodity I know of is information”). Private Lear jets. A wife and numerous mistresses of the supermodel ilk. Italian tailors, bulletproof limos, gold plated business cards and literal gold plates to eat caviar from. His fall from grace came at the hands of Bud Fox, ironically a Charlie Sheen performance based upon morals and ethics, but at the end of his run Gekko remained king. In the sequel, he mirrored his rags- to- riches to rags-to even grosser- riches tale in a matter of months. According to AFI, he was the #24 villain of all time, though no research has been done amongst Business and Finance majors since 1988. According to Forbes Magazine, he is the fourth wealthiest fictional character of all time, an asterisk since his wealth is a reflection of the true bank accounts of real world counterparts-Gekko was not a Shah or a Prince, merely a self made man.

 Enron has fallen. Bernie Madoff has become the figurehead of society’s downfall. The American dollar is a punchline and without a bailout, GM would be SOL. The people behind the scenes of these occurrences are public enemy #1, dastardly heels whose names are met with disdain and words not suitable for church. But the man who these people are a fraction of, a man immortalized on screen and in culture, the narcissistic, enigmatic and downright heinous Gordon Gekko…he kind of gets a pass. Maybe it’s because he is (debatably) fiction. Perhaps it’s because he was Hollywood handsome while the true citizens of market ruin match their ugly exploits with equally unappealing aesthetics.

Likely, it’s because whether we like it or not, Gordon Gekko is that nagging little voice inside us all, hovering on the cusp of capitalism and morality. In public we label his kind an outrage, but in our private moments, should the opportunity arise to be him…well, that’s an answer only we know as individuals.

 “Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another.” –Gordon Gekko