Years ago, I frequently looked forward to TV. No more. But I was anxious to see the PBS special program on Jack Paar a few weeks ago. Oh, I knew the idea was to persuade older viewers to pony up, but Paar was a complex, entertaining guy and I wanted to know if he was alive or dead. So I watched.
My mistake.
Not only did KNME-TV interrupt every few minutes with its ancient, cliched appeals for money, but the show was mediocre.
And I still don't know if Paar is alive or dead.
I send Channel 5 a few bucks at this time of year, but my heart's not in it.
Public TV's standards keep slipping. If I want to see a once-over-lightly, superficial biography, well, that's why God created A&E. right?
• The young man taking tickets at the Century 14 downtown recently was wheel chair-bound. Very verbal, outgoing fella. Hiring him speaks so well for the Century chain that I will forgive them (this time) for making me sit through 20 minutes of movie trivia, trailers, local ads and slides asking me to appreciate the lack of ads.
• Speaking of business, not long ago I ran into an email problem late on a Sunday. The tech who picked up the phone at Southwest Cyberport stayed late, past office closing, to help me solve it and I wasn’t a bit surprised. Those SWCP folks run a great Internet service provider, efficient yet human.
• I’m always late. Walter Mosely’s "Devil in a Blue Dress" came out in 1990, there was a movie with Denzel Washington in ’95 and I just got around to the book. It's an LA thriller, in the Chandler and Hammett vein. That good. Maybe better, because it's set in Los Angeles' black world, which is new to me.
And I just caught up with "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," John Berendt's 1994 report on events and great characters in Savannah, Georgia. I was transfixed, but the author's postscript was a downer. He said he'd taken "certain story-telling liberties.."
So what was it - a report or a novel?