The television stations where I worked - part one.
KXMC TV - Minot, North Dakota
I worked for a while on the weekends to help my wife. (She was what they call a one man band - shooting and reporting and editing.) This is where I fell in love with the business.
WBBH/WZVN - Fort Myers, Florida
Kristin got a job at the nearby Fox affilliate and we moved down to FLA in 1999. I ended up getting a job at the competiting station - technically, the competiting stations. Waterman Broadcasting had what's known as an LMA - a local management agreement. The two stations shared resources: equipment, staff, management, They did have seperate newscasts and seperate on-air personalities. As a photog, you had make sure that you had both station shirts with you, as you could never predict with whom you'd be shooting.
WFTX - Cape Coral, Florida
With Kristin already working there, it was only a matter of time before I jumped over. I wanted to be with my wife. Eventually, a position opened up and it also got me off weekends.
When I gave my two week notice at Waterman Broadcasting, they asked me to leave the building that day. I guess they were worried I'd give secrets to the enemy. It kind of made me feel like a criminal. What really sucked is that I ended up leaving behind my raw tape of an interview with Regis Philbin. (It took me a while to get past that.)
Fox 4 was where I learned to shoot and edit. There were lots of talented folks who gave me tips and hints, but who also let me run wild. Of particular influence was the great Mark Current, a great editor and a fellow lover of 70's music. Mark was the first guy who made me feel like I could actually do this business. It's been ages since I've heard from Mark - I'd love to track him down.
I've written before about the great times I had in SW Florida. It was one of those times when the stars align and everything works out perfect.
KXJB - Fargo, North Dakota
However, we missed family. Kristin wanted to get closer to home. We discovered a posting on-line and I sent a tape to Fargo, North Dakota. Both Kristin and I got jobs.
In 2001 we moved to Fargo's sister city of Moorhead, Minnesota. I got a job as the chief of photography at CBS 4.
It was like entering a time wrap. The facilities were old, the gear suspect, and the stories slow and featurey - dull compared the fast paced doom and disaster of SWFL. It took a while to get used to. I wasn't experienced enough to know what to do with the limited equipmemt. There was no frame-field setting that made my feature stories look like film. There was no digital format to smoothly slow mo. No mixing board to screw with the sound.
It was like learning all over again.
But I learned to work with what I had. And, after a while, I fell in love with the people the same way I had in Florida.
There were so many different cats in Fargo.
Bruce Asbury - the veteran, hippy dippy noon weather guy with the outrageous sense of humor. Bruce would often whip off his toupee like Rip Taylor. He even did it from time to time in his stories. His regular feature - a travelogue piece called "Trip on A Tankful", was about different people and places in The Red River Valley area.
During the long car rides covering these stories, Bruce and I yakked for hours about baseball and historical events. Bruce was older than I was - I often joked that he was so old he remembered walking out of the Primordial Mist - so he had a larger specturm of reference. I loved hearing about Frank Sinatra and Hank Greenberg and where he was Kennedy was shot. (Or was that when Lincoln was shot?)
Bruce reminded me of a less effeminate Paul Lynnde. He had catch-phrases like "Oh Man" and "Unbelievable".
Norm Bell - former football player and fellow photographer. A very nice man and the only African-American man I know who likes Steely Dan and Jellyfish. (This is because I don't know many African Americans.) He was very kind to my kids and he had a great sense of humor. He was often threatened with being on the receiving end of my hugs!
Wade Iverson - Wade is one of those guys that you swear you've met hundreds of time before. A sweet fellow who was always there was a cigarrette and a joke. Wade and I would get going doing different voices: most popular was one based a street-light repair man we saw often working in the nearby Target parking lot. We never named the Latin-voiced character who constantly bitched at his co-worker "Carlos".
Seth Oeltjebruns - Seth was a good kid with a great sense of humor. He really got into shooting and did a nice job. He too was great with my kids and a good friend.
There were so many good people in Fargo TV. But unfortunately, the marketplace doesn't always dicate things are going to stay good. In 2003, KXJB was taken into an LMA with the local NBC station. When the stations merged, I was going to lose my Chief's title to guy with a wealth of talent and a twenty years experience. (However, I likely wouldn't have lost my job as we were so woefully underpaid at KXJB that I probably was looking at a raise to be just a staff photog at the new company.)
However, Adam had been just born, and Kristin wasn't working. Soon enough, we'd be paying a fortunate in day care if Kristin ever wanted to work. So I decided to feel out the job market around the country. (Besides my teenage ego was rubbed the wrong way with the prospect of being demoted.)
I managed to stumble upon a job oppurtunity in Greensboro, North Carolina where I could basically double my income while working Monday to Friday 9-6! The cost of lving was cheap, the equipment was great, I'd have my own vehicle - albeit a Ford conversion Live truck with a micrwave dish on top - and I got to work with my single favorite human being in the news business ever.
But that's part two!
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Ten albums I admit I bought ...
... and my rational attempts to explain why!!
Many times, I have reached into the barrell that is rock'n'roll, and pulled out a royal turd. These are ten of the most turdish.
-----------------------------------------------------------
10. Let's Get It Started - MC Hammer
Everybody bought Hammer Don't Hurt 'em: the summer of 1990, you couldn't go ten minutes worth out hearing "U Can't Touch This.".
It took a true dork to go searching for Hammer's back catalog. Yes, this is MC Hammer's debut album, purchased mid-stream in my rap phase that began with the Beastise Boys Paul's Boutique album and ended some time after finally wearing out House of Pain's "Jump Around".
I remember nothing about Let's Get It Started - only that I sold it to a used record shop in 1993.
I'm not sure how it lasted 3 years.
-----------------------------------------------------------
9. Gonna Make You Sweat - C & C Music Factory
I signed up for the Columbia Tape & Record club in 1991. Admid Bat out of Hell and No More Tears, I ordered this dance floor favorite, purchased so that I could match Jason Baker move for move on "Things that Make You Go Hmmm ..."
Yes, I rap danced. (Basically the "Running Man".) For those who went to Watts On Main in Moose Jaw in 1991, I could be seen on the dance floor with Baker and Toby Torkelson (his real name) competitively "danicng". (Along with whatever girl I could desperately enough convience to witness said debacle.)
I think this is why I didn't date much for two years.
In order to keep up on my "moves", I practised while working weekends at the YWCA. Hiding down in the basement, underneath the swimming pool, I developed my foot work to C.C. Peniston's "Finally".
-----------------------------------------------------------
8. Don't Be Cruel - Bobby Brown
This was no accident. Grade 11, I purchased this tape a second time weeks after breaking the first one in my questionable ghettoblaster.
Ironically, the first tape lasted about as long the girlfriend it was bought to impress.
After Dana Roney broke up with me, I got drunk for the first time. (Two hours later, I got sick from being drunk for the first time.)
Bobby Brown's ranting rap during the title track somewhat encapsulated my female frustrations: Hey yo' Kimmy - what's up with this attitude? I thought I was bein' real good to you. I treat you sweet, take you out at night- but you never say thanks girl, that ain't right! I bought you diamonds, even gave you pearls. I took you for a cruise all around the world. I treat you high post, but you play me close. If I want to drink up, you won't even toast!!
I guess I wanted to drink up ... and Dana Roney wouldn't even toast! (After "drinking up", "cleaning up" the reminents of the microwave pizza I had eaten was a whole 'nother story.)
-----------------------------------------------------------
7. The Dune Soundtrack - Toto
Sometimes ... you're still a kid. This was one of my first tapes, bought around the time I had Girls With Guns by Tommy Shaw and the full Duran Duran discography.
I thought Dune would be the next Star Wars. I remember acting out the Sting/Kyle MacLachlan knife-fight scene in my bedroom. "I will bend like a reed in the wind.".
Looking back now, I'm shocked at just frickin' creepy the movie was.
Particularily the fat, gay, boil-ridden Baron Harkonnen. The soundtrack's only highlight included the Baron's freaky dialogue: "The Duke ... will die before these eyes. And they'll know ... they'll know ..that it is I, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who encompasses his doom! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!".
-----------------------------------------------------------
6. *Music for the People - Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch
"Vibrations good like Sunkist ... made wanna know who done this?!"
Nuff said.
-----------------------------------------------------------
5. Ceral Killer - Green Jelly
I had no excuse. I was an adult.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNYi6W3v0io
-----------------------------------------------------------
4. Pickin' on Nashville - The Kentucky Headhunters
Country? I have no bloody clue why I chose this particular album. The forsenic musicologist in me theorizes I must have thought they sounded like .38 Special. Or maybe it had something to do with a purchase at the time of the Allman Brothers greatest hits.
Oh yeah, and because I had recently bought my own pair of cowboy boots! I think a picked a pair that made me look like a hooker.
-----------------------------------------------------------
3. Anti-Christ Superstar - Marilyn Mason
"The Beautiful People" was catchy. Not catchy in a "Jessie's Girl" kind of way. More like a heavy metal Gary Glitter playing with the Vienna Boys Choir at the Nuremberg Rally. (Gary Glitter, the phrase "playing with", and the Vienna Boys Choir all together in one sentence?)
Over ten years later, I swear I hear the melody of George Thoroghgood's "One Burboun, One Scotch and One Beer" buried somewhere in the mix!
-----------------------------------------------------------
2. No More Games (The Remix Album) - New Kids on the Block
There's a phrase - I don't think it's biblical - that basically says Be careful of laying down with swine, because you don't know you'll pick up.
Not that I'm suggesting that she was pig-like in any way, but when I methaphorically (not sexually) laid down with Robin Kirkness, my Grade 12 & post-high school girlfriend - I picked up something far nastier than anything you could imagine: I started to tolerate the New Kids on the Block.
Secretly, I purchased the controversial No More Games after watching a concert film Robyn had. I kept it hidden in my tape collection like it was a stack of expesnive and shameful German pornography.
The remix versions of their hits added something I've never heard before, and their step-by-step program to love and courtship was particularily inspiring.
Step one: We can have lots of fun.
Step two: There so much we can do.
Step three: It's just you and me
Step four: I can give you more.
Step five: Don't you know the time has arrived.
-----------------------------------------------------------
1. C.M.B - Color Me Badd
Many times, I have reached into the barrell that is rock'n'roll, and pulled out a royal turd. These are ten of the most turdish.
-----------------------------------------------------------
10. Let's Get It Started - MC Hammer
Everybody bought Hammer Don't Hurt 'em: the summer of 1990, you couldn't go ten minutes worth out hearing "U Can't Touch This.".
It took a true dork to go searching for Hammer's back catalog. Yes, this is MC Hammer's debut album, purchased mid-stream in my rap phase that began with the Beastise Boys Paul's Boutique album and ended some time after finally wearing out House of Pain's "Jump Around".
I remember nothing about Let's Get It Started - only that I sold it to a used record shop in 1993.
I'm not sure how it lasted 3 years.
-----------------------------------------------------------
9. Gonna Make You Sweat - C & C Music Factory
I signed up for the Columbia Tape & Record club in 1991. Admid Bat out of Hell and No More Tears, I ordered this dance floor favorite, purchased so that I could match Jason Baker move for move on "Things that Make You Go Hmmm ..."
Yes, I rap danced. (Basically the "Running Man".) For those who went to Watts On Main in Moose Jaw in 1991, I could be seen on the dance floor with Baker and Toby Torkelson (his real name) competitively "danicng". (Along with whatever girl I could desperately enough convience to witness said debacle.)
I think this is why I didn't date much for two years.
In order to keep up on my "moves", I practised while working weekends at the YWCA. Hiding down in the basement, underneath the swimming pool, I developed my foot work to C.C. Peniston's "Finally".
-----------------------------------------------------------
8. Don't Be Cruel - Bobby Brown
This was no accident. Grade 11, I purchased this tape a second time weeks after breaking the first one in my questionable ghettoblaster.
Ironically, the first tape lasted about as long the girlfriend it was bought to impress.
After Dana Roney broke up with me, I got drunk for the first time. (Two hours later, I got sick from being drunk for the first time.)
Bobby Brown's ranting rap during the title track somewhat encapsulated my female frustrations: Hey yo' Kimmy - what's up with this attitude? I thought I was bein' real good to you. I treat you sweet, take you out at night- but you never say thanks girl, that ain't right! I bought you diamonds, even gave you pearls. I took you for a cruise all around the world. I treat you high post, but you play me close. If I want to drink up, you won't even toast!!
I guess I wanted to drink up ... and Dana Roney wouldn't even toast! (After "drinking up", "cleaning up" the reminents of the microwave pizza I had eaten was a whole 'nother story.)
-----------------------------------------------------------
7. The Dune Soundtrack - Toto
Sometimes ... you're still a kid. This was one of my first tapes, bought around the time I had Girls With Guns by Tommy Shaw and the full Duran Duran discography.
I thought Dune would be the next Star Wars. I remember acting out the Sting/Kyle MacLachlan knife-fight scene in my bedroom. "I will bend like a reed in the wind.".
Looking back now, I'm shocked at just frickin' creepy the movie was.
Particularily the fat, gay, boil-ridden Baron Harkonnen. The soundtrack's only highlight included the Baron's freaky dialogue: "The Duke ... will die before these eyes. And they'll know ... they'll know ..that it is I, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who encompasses his doom! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!".
-----------------------------------------------------------
6. *Music for the People - Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch
"Vibrations good like Sunkist ... made wanna know who done this?!"
Nuff said.
-----------------------------------------------------------
5. Ceral Killer - Green Jelly
I had no excuse. I was an adult.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNYi6W3v0io
-----------------------------------------------------------
4. Pickin' on Nashville - The Kentucky Headhunters
Country? I have no bloody clue why I chose this particular album. The forsenic musicologist in me theorizes I must have thought they sounded like .38 Special. Or maybe it had something to do with a purchase at the time of the Allman Brothers greatest hits.
Oh yeah, and because I had recently bought my own pair of cowboy boots! I think a picked a pair that made me look like a hooker.
-----------------------------------------------------------
3. Anti-Christ Superstar - Marilyn Mason
"The Beautiful People" was catchy. Not catchy in a "Jessie's Girl" kind of way. More like a heavy metal Gary Glitter playing with the Vienna Boys Choir at the Nuremberg Rally. (Gary Glitter, the phrase "playing with", and the Vienna Boys Choir all together in one sentence?)
Over ten years later, I swear I hear the melody of George Thoroghgood's "One Burboun, One Scotch and One Beer" buried somewhere in the mix!
-----------------------------------------------------------
2. No More Games (The Remix Album) - New Kids on the Block
There's a phrase - I don't think it's biblical - that basically says Be careful of laying down with swine, because you don't know you'll pick up.
Not that I'm suggesting that she was pig-like in any way, but when I methaphorically (not sexually) laid down with Robin Kirkness, my Grade 12 & post-high school girlfriend - I picked up something far nastier than anything you could imagine: I started to tolerate the New Kids on the Block.
Secretly, I purchased the controversial No More Games after watching a concert film Robyn had. I kept it hidden in my tape collection like it was a stack of expesnive and shameful German pornography.
The remix versions of their hits added something I've never heard before, and their step-by-step program to love and courtship was particularily inspiring.
Step one: We can have lots of fun.
Step two: There so much we can do.
Step three: It's just you and me
Step four: I can give you more.
Step five: Don't you know the time has arrived.
-----------------------------------------------------------
1. C.M.B - Color Me Badd
"All 4 Love" was gay but catchy. "I Wanna Sex You Up" was just plain gay. So how was I got dead with this tape? Was I gay*?
(*Asterisk alert - my defintion of the word "gay" has nothing to do with sexual orientation. "Gay" to be means "lame". If you are homosexual, I will refer to you as a homosexual. However, if you are lame - you are gay!)
No, I bought this "gay" music to fit in with the guys. Not that they were homosexual guys. At least, I don't think they were homosexual. Not that I would have cared.
These guys were in my Business Admin classes. Jockular guys who considered music like Color Me Badd as "chick-getting-music". Kevin Calladine, Jason Watson, Jason Schiedner and a fellow who I can only know remember as "Goots" - were my friends for the first year and a half of business adminstration classes at SIAST Palliser campus in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
"Chick-getting" music was important - you went to the bars and you tried to get the girls to dance with you on the fast songs .
My skinny ass failed miserably.
I remember reaching my limit about the time that Nirvana started to hit its' peak. The rest of the guys thought Nirvana was "gay": literally homosexual music made by homosexual men made for other homsexual men. They wondered how you could get chicks with all that howling and ugly guitars. You couldn't dance to this, could you? That's what music was for!
I took a look at the cassettes on Kevin's wall - filled with artists like Dino, Expose, Alanis (three years before Jagged Little Pill), Snap, Paula Abdul and Technotronic - and decided we had different opnions on the sexual orientation of our music collections.
It was then that I decided I was only going to be happy if I was myself. No more rap dancing. No more Color Me Badd or Mr. Lee's "Get Busy". No more trying to be the failed ladies man that I was. Back came the Cheap Trick and the Kiss and the Alice Cooper and the comedy.
And soon enough, no more business administration.
I always look back on this time period as my mid-life mid-life crisis. The music I chose was just like the fifty year old man getting a hair piece and a fancy sports car. I was no dancer and certainly no stud.
I laugh when I hear these songs again. (I love YouTube!) They remind me of me back then - plastic, fake, and ridiculous - and funny as hell!
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