#52
in COUNTERCLOCK
In this third season episode of The Muppet Show, guest star, James Coco, attempts to help Kermit make the show bigger and better. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, the opening number features Kermit with the youngest (main) character, his little nephew, Robin. The two relations, big and small, reminded me of me and my younger brother. About halfway through Coco’s episode, the two return in yet another sketch where they dream about snakes. By episode’s end, for the closing number, James performs Randy Newman’s song, “Short People.” This sealed the deal that I would write a bit about when I was more short sighted.
I was always obsessed with the television. It’s strange, I feel like I’ve watched technology grow along side me, and my dreams of working for TV never really synced up with where the industry was going... and timing is everything. After the landmark television of the 70s, the 80s more creative endeavors were pushed onto new cable networks. Now, everything is online. But with SO MUCH content streaming, the chances of someone having watched the same thing I have are even slimmer than they were before. I met someone fairly recently who wants to teach media literacy to students. I thought this an amazing subject, however this damn country's education system still struggles to teach literacy, never mind cultural literacy.
People are born into lives they never asked for. I wanted to teach my brother what I knew. Any good piece of television or film I saw, I always wondered who in my family would enjoy it and get something from it, and I would then often push it on whoever, hoping to unite and sync up our minds. I remember trying hard to get my brother to watch things I thought were good, and my feelings would get hurt if he made fun of it or didn’t stay in front of the television with his eyes glued to the set like mine were. Watching shows with other people often makes me think about perspective based on experience.
Everybody seemed to know I was queer before I did, and that really bothered me being ostracized like that. I fought myself a lot over it. When I came of age, I had to escape my family life in order to discover myself, and I moved from the east coast to the west coast for university. There was a part of me that felt guilty for leaving my brother behind, but I had to do it to follow my pipe dream working in 'the dream factory.' One of the ways my brother kept in contact with me through all the distance between us was to send quotes of movies, or clips of shows, or animated gifs to my cell phone (once texts became normalized). Despite being different types of people, we share chips in our brains from the same media we experienced together as children. I have read that all children seek the attention and affection of their parents, and if one sibling turns out to be good at one thing, the other, unless encouraged to compete, will find something else to garner a response from their folks. Naturally, envy and competition is created between siblings. My brother’s virtual reality, to this day, is in video games, and mine is in TV series. With time, we learnt we have similar tastes in music, but this narrative poem stops at a new shift in what i viewed levels to be.
I recently discovered a cartoon from the same time of our 80s Saturday Morning cartoons called Ulysses 31. I can’t recall if it was one of those early ones that aired in the states, my memory that far back is not the strongest, but I discovered it the same time I was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Just like Joyce did, I am incorporating allusions into my work. I’ve had to get used to other people not understanding the references I am constantly making in real time, and in my writing. Nobody understands each other because we all come from very different experiences, and these occurrences define us. People say I’m asking too much of my readers, but I don’t think so— references smeferences— it doesn’t matter at all to understanding the idea of two people sharing a screen in separation. However, there is a sketch in this episode where James Coco plays a fortune teller, and I think our fortunes were being told at a young age based off what the changing screens told us. A ghost appears in this episode who sings “Danny Boy,” a song set to a traditional ancient Irish song, which connects to Joyce, and to my brother’s love of Ghostbusters.
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