Some Days Are Better Than Others

Usually when I'm called into work early, it's either because some jackhole shot his wife, rampant flames are redecorating a home or a parking lot is breaking out on I-40. Today however, I had to scramble into the studio because a statuesque blonde was demanding my lens' attention. I know, I know - tough gig. Five days after being eliminated from American Idol, Heather Cox dropped by El Ocho en route to her parents' Jonesville home. I was pleased to see the composed young lady I met in Hollywood last month was still sporting her winning grin and infectious energy. Heather may not be the American Idol, but she's received one hell of a kick-start on an on-camera career. With her looks and personality, I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict unlimited success. As for your friendly neighborhood lenslinger, remind me not to grumble so much the next time my pager goes off.

Flee, Glee and the Rise of G. Lee

Despite a surplus of things on my mind, I come to you with precious little to say. It’s not that I haven’t set the stage: my feet are up, Robert Johnson’s on the CD player and I have so much of the wife’s good coffee on board I can feel the blood changing gears as it races through my veins. Still, the words won’t come. Perhaps it’s the myriad of unrelated issues that are ruling my every thought these days; disconnected incidents that are joining forces to form one mother of a blog-clot. Whatever the reason, I have sat here being taunted by a blinking cursor long enough to break down and just blab. I’ll understand if you bail now, for I can’t promise any reader satisfaction is in sight. However, if you’re really bored, settle back for a moment while I tap my inner Kerouac. But be warned, it may not be pretty.

We’re moving! Me and the fam, that is. It’s a long story, but let’s just say all public schools are not created equal. We’ve known we had to leave the immediate area for quite some time now but couldn’t very well do so until we off-loaded our current domicile. Now that the sign in the yard finally sports a fancy ’SOLD’ crown, Operation Cardboard Box is in full swing. A few weeks from now, I’ll load my every possession into a moving truck (or two) and set a Northeast trajectory. Fifteen or so miles later, I’ll reverse the operation, put things where my wife tells me and try to get used to a longer commute. One bright spot: my new home is less than a mile or so from ‘Owls Roost’, one tri-state killer of a mountain bike trail that will greatly assist me in removing the half-inflated spare tire that now connects my waist to my chest. I told you this would get ugly.

American Idol keeps occupying much of my working life. With three North Carolinians still in the nationwide cheese-off, I’ll continue playing caddy to A.I. correspondent Shannon Smith as she documents every facet of the hopeful vocalists’ former lives. Doing so has had had a weird side effect, however . Every day some burly male co-worker or another will corner me, quiz me on my insider opinion, then sheepishly admit they and their families are now watching the show religiously. I usually let ’em off easy by telling them it’s okay before swearing their less than manly secret is safe with me. Occasionally this backfires when their enthusiasm quadruples and all they want to talk about is Chris Daughtry, Buckie Covington and of course, the adorable Kellie Pickler. I don’t dare tell them I’m just days away from jetting back to Hollywood for a star-studded red carpet event, lest they begin to hyperventilate and lose any last vestige of heterosexuality.

Enough Idol, please! What’s far more important to me is the book I’m trying to write, or to be more exact, the book proposal. I’ll keep most of the particulars to myself, but just know this: 18 months or so of constant blogging is starting to pay off. Powerful and generous figures have contacted your lowly lenslinger and convinced him that an anthology of short stories is indeed a marketable possibility - if only he’ll hammer the work into shape and promise to stop referring to himself in third person. He - sorry - I have started to do just that, though I gotta tell ya - re-writing sucks! I’d much rather pound out my thoughts in a rush of creativity and hit the ever so therapeutic ’Publish’ button, than sit and groom my words for maximum coherency. Still, I’m doing it and can honestly look you in the monitor and say, “It’s going to happen.” That’s a bold statement for an underachieving pessimist like myself.

Speaking of thwarted literary ambitions, I’m doing my best to fulfill them all. A few posts back, I unveiled a fictional character that has lived inside my head for a very long time. Garrett Lee Whitaker, or “G. Lee” as I’ve come to think of him, is an alter ego’s alter ego. Through him, I seek to illustrate the sketchy world of street-level broadcast journalism I love to loathe. By fictionalizing some of my misadventures, I can amalgamate my myriad of experiences in a way that won’t get me in the kind of superheated H20 that beleaguered memoirist James Frey now finds himself in. Look for G. Lee to pop up every now and then to add a little color when the real world goes gray. Otherwise, consider him the main character in a long line of exciting novels I’ll probably never get around to writing.

That’s fair, isn’t it?

Three of a Find

This past Friday was devoid of any sweeping themes, unless you count the inherent schizophrenia of general news...

I kicked off the first of my three brief stops in the Blue Room of the Guilford County Courthouse, loitering by my tripod as representatives from five different architectural firms tried to convince the assembled wonks they should be the ones to build the new County Jail. Despite a number of eyebrow maneuvers on my part, I could not break the poker-face of Sheriff B.J. Barnes - who was either deeply engrossed in the monotone sales pitches, or merely sleeping with fake eyeballs painted on his lids.

A half hour later I found myself shivering by a dilapidated mailbox as a few of Sheriff Barnes' deputies and a dozen other sworn officers paced outside a non-descript home. The assignment desk hadn't been sure just what was going on when they dispatched me, only that a small army of police and firefighters were descending on the unremarkable address. Fifteen minutes on scene, I was none the wiser, but the way the grim faced first responders kept gesturing toward an overgrown path beside the home told me they weren't there to compare badge numbers. But there wasn't much time to investigate, as impatient lunch-buddies were idling in their own news units at a pre-determined locale.

Too bad I never made it to them. Before I could fulfill my culinary rendezvous, higher forces colluded to send me elsewhere. Which is how I wound up standing in my sock feet in the middle of a crowded mosque while a couple of hundred Muslims bowed in deep reverence to Allah. Through my viewfinder, I zoomed in on the turban-wearing speaker who was railing against the local newspaper's choice of cartoon. As the heavily bearded man worked the faithful into a quiet frenzy, I thought about competiing religions, global politics and a the heavily accented call for tolerance. Well, that's not entirely true. I was still pretty much focused on lunch.

Hey, a photog's gotta eat...

Vistas of Demolition

Having lurked in the shadows of an edit bay for the better part of a week, I was delighted today to bathe in the rays of a glorious Piedmont morning. It was no walk in the park. Rather, it was a pleasant enough schlep through the dismantled wastelands of what used to be one mother of a textile plant. I'll get to the details in a minute, but first check out the trippy landscape in the picture to the right. If that doesn't bring to mind a certain Pink Floyd album cover, we must not have traveled in the same rusty Camaro circles back in the day. But with enough with the flashbacks, I'm here to talk hard hats.

I hate 'em. Not the look so much, but the way the strangely perched headgear bumps into the side of the camera when I shoot. It's a trivial enough matter I suppose, but ask any cameraman to list the most impeding shooting garb and the lowly construction helmet ranks right up there with the frozen-stiff winter mitten. Nonetheless, I was more than happy to don the molded chapeau today - if not for the fashion, at least for the access. You see, David Griffin wouldn't let me on the multi-acre remains of the Kannapolis Pillowtex Plant without the damn thing. A real stickler, that guy.

But then again , what would you expect from a man whose family business oversaw the clean-up of the World Trade Center? These cats didn't become a globally-known demolition giant by cutting photogs slack in the safety department. Besides, who'd wanna catch a flying rivet to the forehead on a pretty day like this? Not this camera dork. I gladly made like Barney Rubble to Griffin's Fred Flinstone as the demolition bigwig took time out of his busy schedule to give me a personal tour. Not bad for a guy who could level my house in seven seconds. But Dave (I'm sorry ... Mr. Griffin) would never do that. He knows me far too well from stalking him at the semi-recent Burlington Industries Implosion.

That structure drop was quite impressive but it pales in comparison to the methodical take-down he's staging at this old textile fortress just north of Charlotte. For 18 months he and a crew of 80 tough guys will spend six days a week carefully dismantling six million square feet of former factory floor space. Along the way, they'll recycle 75 percent of what they recover - from hundred year old brick to steel beams to giant maple planks, these guys throw precious little away. My one hour excursion was a videographer's dream: unfettered access, repetitive action, staccato sound. To top things off, Griffin even insisted I keep the hard hat at the end of the tour - a bean pod I'll proudly sport at the next rubble pile, or maybe even around the house, now that my hairline's receding. I figure the kids'll dig it more than the mullet.

The Right to Play Dumb

Shiny station logos provoke a variety of responses from the public at large and most of them I'm more than prepared for. Take the other day for instance: Idol Expert Shannon Smith and I were enjoying the most glamorous of sandwiches in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant when a young man with nothing much to do poked his head into the driver's side window of Unit Four.

"Hey, what'chall think of ole Van der Sloot?", he asked, revealing a mouth that may very well have never hosted a real-life toothbrush.

"Huh?" I asked, not knowing what the hell the man with the scary mouth was talking about.

"Van der Sloot..." he said, looking past me to the pretty news lady sitting in the passenger seat.

"You mean the guy in the Natalee Holloway case?", Shannon asked.

Indeed he did, for when Shannon locked eyes with him, he leaned in even further into my lunch-zone and layed out a rambling theory as to why the jetsetting teenager was clearly innocent of all charges in the salacious Aruban murder case. Throughout his dissertation I never looked up; instead I cradled my four dollar cheeseburger and hoped Mr. Yuck-Mouth simply wouldn't breathe on it too much. Shannon wasn't so lucky, though. Ever the professional, she humored our skeevy inquirer until he finished his nonsensical rant and wandered off to weird out some other hapless lunch-eater.

"Way to hang me out to dry back there," Shannon said a little later. "You got an opinion on EVERYTHING, but when Mr. Stranger Man walks up, you slip into 'dumb photog mode'."

"Aw, c'mon Shan," I said through a guilty grin. "It's not like I was gonna let him drag you out of the car or anything..."

We both chuckled and soon forgot the incident, but Mrs. Smith's insightful accusation stuck with me. For the record, photogs AREN'T dumb - but the viewing public often assumes our intellect pales in comparison to that of our far-better-groomed partners. I, of course, enjoy dispelling this myth on this very webspace, but come at me with an off-the-wall question and I'm gonna play lugnut so fast it'll make your head spin. Is it right? Probably not, but it sure beats spending my lunch-break trapped in a protracted discussion of cable news fodder with someone who has little regard for my time and even less concern for proper dental hygiene. Is that so wrong?

Man in the Box

Normally I use this space to tell you of my day's adventures - surreal episodes of lens-tripping in the great wide open. Lately however, I've spent an awful lot of time sitting in a small box, mumbling incoherently and brooding over timelines. No, I haven't embarked on some ghastly scientific experiment; I'm merely editing American Idol. Not the show, mind you. Somewhere in Hollywood a team of cappuccino swilling Californians are taking care of that. As for me, I'm busy assembling in-depth profiles of the four North Carolinians still vying for the title. Bucky, Heather, Kellie and Chris... I've come to know these hopeful vocalists quite well, and not just because I jetted to Cali a couple of weeks ago for breathless, one-on-one interviews.

Since returning to the Old North State, I've spent most of my time interviewing their friends, families, co-workers - even a mailman or two. From Jonesville to Rockingham to Albemarle to Haw River, I've visited parts of North Carolina I'd only heard about - all in the name of the world's cheesiest talent search. But I'm not complaining - though I'm sure it sounds like I am. No, I did this to myself. I walked in to the suit's corner office and declared myself 'Idol Boy'. A few fellow photogs raised their unkempt eyebrows at my plans, but they may be reconsidering their derision now that I've spent weeks avoiding the never-ending parade of ribbon-cuttings, murder scenes and contentious school board meetings. The only downside...I spend alot of time in The Box.

Okay, so it's a fancy-schmancy non-linear edit suite, but log enough hours in it and it feels like the most torturous of prison yard sweat-boxes. When I'm not staring into the abyss of a blank monitor, I'm whittling down soundbites, scavenging bits and pieces from the show tapes and stretching dissolves until they render just the right tearful response. If none of that made sense to you, don't sweat it, it's merely TV geek talk for editing - that tedious yet highly rewarding process that goes into each and every frame of vapid television you watch. I'll spare you the technical details, but understand this: few things on-screen happen by accident. A two minute profile of a giddy singer contains more (visually) editorial decisions than a three-column newspaper article. Of course, if the viewer at home thinks about the editing, then we as timeline jockeys have failed. (Personally, when that happens to me, I go home and watch my 'Jaws' DVD for slice and dice inspiration.)

So while I filet footage of starry-eyed ingenues, know that this won't last forever. Before either you or I know it, I'll be back out on the general news hunt, zooming in on defendants and grumbling under my breath at the stupidity of it all. So please, bear with me through this difficult time. At least you haven't got it as bad as my fellow photogs, who visibly cringe every time they hear some soaring, overwrought vocals emanating from my booth. 'Turn that crap down!', they hiss as I stare back at them behind droopy eyelids. I try to explain that I've grown impervious to the screeching show tunes, immune to the over-blown vocal emotion on display, invulnerable to the treacly disco hits contained within. So just HOW have I achieved such aural bliss while drowing in syrupy, doe-eyed ditties, you ask? I can explain it all away in two simple words...

Beastie Boys.