Reflections On Ice

(Via Ed Cone) Though its hard to fathom on this oddly balmy evening, the Great Ice Storm of Aught-Two was five years ago today. I’ve not the words to express how much it sucked. Neither do I possess total recall of how much ice fell, how long whole towns went without power or how many insipid live shots I personally thrust upon this unplugged populace. What I do remember is a dull throb, an unending ache caused by marathon shifts, unmatched frozen socks and a wife who wanted to strangle me for not being Paul Bunyan. It was not my finest hour. But then again, what would you expect from some joker from the coastal plains? Besides the hallucination that was boot camp, I’d never seen an ice storm do what it do. How was I supposed to know frozen water weighs down tree branches until they snap power lines and erase civilization as we know it? Hell, where I come from the quarter inch of snow that spawns all that mass insanity is pretty much a puddle by noon. Here in the Piedmont, that crap can stick around for days - weeks even! You’d think by age 35, I’d have been better versed on the whims of Mother Nature, but that crazy bitch nearly froze me solid sixty months ago and I ain’t forgot about it yet.

Being a proud Southerner and all, I got no business driving on ice - but since there’s a logo on my soul I didn’t have much choice. No sooner had dawn broke over the frigid moonscape that was my neighborhood did my cell phone begin to overheat. Thus began my indoctrination into the driving arts; a crash-free course in keeping all manners of two-wheel drive news vehicles betwixt the ditches. I’m not saying I could last up North, but after slinging nasties across the tri-county region without breaking any glass, I feel pretty good about my intrinsic skidability - even if I do insist on yahooing like Bo and Luke Duke anytime the back tires lose traction. Man, reporters hate that.

Speaking of reporters, they got it doubly rough during winter weather. After all, they have to appear coiffed and capable during all that team smotherage - whether they’re kicking at the icy sidewalk on cue or trotting out one of those oversized thermometers. All I gotta do is get the two of us to said remote location, find a spot where drooping power lines won’t zap us both, throw juice to the retractable mast, drag all manners of gadgets onto the tundra, plug ’em in, establish a signal, toss some light onto the subject and try not to cough up any bile when the anchors gush all over my partner for toughing it out there on the ice. I knew I should have studied harder in school!

Still, no amount of education will help when the only thing between you and home is extended live coverage from the most blizzard-stricken spot a building full of warm housecats could come up with. Worse yet, my own home was among the power-free; a condition not unnoticed by my lovely bride. When I did drop by the house that first afternoon, I found her tacking up blankets across doorways, shoving logs into the fireplace and cursing yours truly for allowing the children to freeze while I cavorted with my camera God knows where. Glancing out the window, I noted that if the kids were cold it was because frozen slush was getting in their snowsuits as they and their sleds sped downhill. Yeah, we laugh about it now, but I can assure you the passing housecat enjoyed more wifely body warmth that night than your badly shivering lenslinger.

Ya know, I think I’d prefer working a couple of hurricanes to a single ice event. And considering this, that’s saying something.

Hippie McLensquint

I cant remember the last time I dug up a mullet photo for you all to enjoy, but since the humiliation of hockey hair knows no season, it still feels like yesterday. However after viewing the God like follicles of the now cleanly shorn Rick Portier, I felt it was time again to join the big-haired fray. Thus, I submit the above offending frame, suitable for your Monday morning mockery. Laugh all you want; I was free back then. Sure, I don’t remember everything from way back then, but I clearly recall the milieu of said photo-op. It was a chilly spring afternoon in 1990. I’d just gotten off from my nifty new job at the TV station and was kicking back with some fellow slackers at Greenville’s Town Common. Frisbees were in the air, Jane’s Addiction was blaring from someone’s boom box and I was late for an afternoon of downing pitchers at Sub Station Two. I’d yet to leave ny studio gig, hadn’t so much as pointed a news-cam this way or that and wasn’t sure I even wanted to. As for the mullet, it hadn’t reached its full mobile home glory just yet, but I could already pass for a young Dog the Bounty Hunter (minus the pepper spray and racial slurs, of course) Still, for one brief shiny moment in the Emerald City, I was blissfully aware of but a few things. (1): A round of disc golf could cure any ailment. (2): Working in TV would always be a stone-cold blast and (3): This is one bitchin’ haircut that will never go out of style…

Looks like I’m 0 for 3.

In The Mix

Sorry for the lapse of missives, but I been in the mix. In The Mix: that’s el Ocho speak for working with a reporter - a normal enough status for most photogs. But when you’re a wordy burnout with A/V skills and antisocial tendencies, In The Mix ain’t where you want to be. Still, the ratio demanded it, for no sooner had the November book ended than certain rogue news shooters went on something called ‘vacation‘. Before I knew it, I’d been pressed into service; ripped unceremoniously from my soft news foxhole and reassigned to the front. There I slogged through a series of stories deemed worthy of a two-person crew; packages that made loud splashes at the top of their newscasts, only to ripple into oblivion by the second commercial break. A homicidal babysitter, a waffling college coach and a pulled-over van full of illegal aliens; just a few of the kooky cast of newsmakers I put on tee-vee during a weeklong stint I‘ve already mentally erased. But that‘s the secret, right?

Pierce the leathery hide of a streetwise photog and you’ll find a thick layer of insouciance. That ability not to care is accrued over time. Once, I couldn’t abide the sight of fluttering crime tape without widened eyes and a quickened pulse. Now, I can sleepwalk past midnight collisions with little more than unadulterated slumber on my mind. I’m not particularly proud of my cynicism, even if it burnished to a high sheen. How I might act had I chosen a dairy route over deadline slaying I do not know, but something tells me I’d daydream about lighter fare. Instead, my head is full of half-eaten soundbites, deadpan faces with silly microphone flags under their chins and pictures of victims frozen in mid-dissolve. Sure, cops have even darker portfolios, but for the paltry bank I bring down, ther margins of my mental ledger are smudged enough. Melodramatic? Perhaps, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned feeding the beast is to keep moving, lest you get any on you.

Truly, I spent much of last week trying to keep up with the other news brutes out there. Fussy bluster aside, I’ve grown a bit soft in the first year of my forties. Whereas every other photog I know logs serious time behind the wheel of a parked live truck, I cruise around in Unit 4 while sorting through clichés. No wonder my fellow camera-ops scoff when they see me roll up in some single-masted vessel. ’Dude may talk a mean game on-line, but he sure cranks out a lot of fluff, I don’t hear them say. I smile anyway, knowing they’d all talk smack if I covered nothing but clans of amorous cannibals - for wit and spittle is to be expected from anyone with one eye closed and a tiny speaker wedged in their ear. It’s not unlike the outlook of a veteran street cop, who winces at the sound of glass crashing and tries to look the other way. It rarely works, but you kid yourself there’s an end somewhere in sight. Until then, you sift through grim bits of silliness one shift at a time and hope something redeeming will soon wander before your lens.

Just don’t hold your breath.

Schmuck Alert: Johnny Marshmallow

Via Photog's Lounge, word of a Midwest offensive that left a cameraman stunned and bloodied. It happened back in October, when an Oklahoma woman was attacked and killed by a pack of dogs. This of course drew a throng of onlookers to the grisly scene and when the inevitable TV fleet rolled up, friends and family members of the deceased took immediate umbrage. A verbal dispute ensued; family members insisted the news crews leave and were no doubt rebuffed. That's when Johnnie "Marshmallow" Levi Byrd broke out the haymakers, bloodying the nose of photojournalist Bryon Ackerman - before disappearing into the Oklahoma ether. Weeks later, an investigation led to a photo lineup and Ackerman easily fingered the 21 year old punk-ass as the owner of the sucker-punches. Upon questioning, Johnnie Levi Byrd folded like a two-dollar tent, admitting to the fisticuffs. He's now charged with assault and battery...

Responding to fresh tragedy is never easy. Most news crews - not all - know how to do so without needlessly riling up the natives. On the other hand, losing a loved one is horrific enough without a loitering posse of interlopers outside. I can only hope the aforementioned crews employed some modicum of respect, because I'm issuing a low level Schmuck Alert for Johnny Marshmallow here, with the following terse addendum: Sorry about your loved one. You can honor her memory by telling the media what a fine person she was, or simply flip us all off. But assaulting a member of that unfortunate scrum is downright felonious and will do nothing to bring her back. As for the ninja star necklace, we'll let that slide for now - but wailing away on a photog who doesn't want to be there in the first place is just incredibly uncool. Schmuck...

Good for Guapo

By all logic, this latest gig should have made him happy. Greater pay, more authority, a better schedule. But for the blogging-photog known as El-Guapo, that desk inside a Sacramento TV station felt like a tombstone. So he did what a lot of former news shooters do when they try to go legit. He fantasized about the lens. First they were harmless daydreams, but soon fully-engorged phantasms of life behind the viewfinder unraveled our hero. It happened to me. During my two year stint as promo pimp, I too began to hallucinate about slow zooms and fast deadlines. It got so bad I considered finding a twelve step program, but instead I plotted a clandestine return to the world of live trucks and tired logos. Well, El Guapo has done one better: He's gone off and scored himself a sports gig. Now he'll turn longer fare on his beloved athletic events -without the rash of your typical newsroom. Best of all, he'll be doing it all in Hippieville, that capitol of aging slackers that brings out the very best in his rollicking blog. Beats rehab...

Vortex at Eleven

By the time I strolled into the morning assignment meeting, the dry erase board was slathered in untimely demises and the suits were looking to me for something happy. It being Monday I was fresh out of happy, so I offered the one observation I’d formed on the drive in to the station. “Sure is windy!” Looking back, it was clearly a tactical error. Having misjudged the level of editorial desperation in the room, I’d made the rookie mistake of pitching a story I didn’t much want to produce. Okay, so three words isn’t exactly a pitch, but I should have known better than to say that much around a bunch of housecats eager to get back to their chew-toy filled cubicles. I’d barely gotten those four syllables out of my mouth before they were etched in Magic-Marker under my name. Only then did I wisely back out of the room, grateful I hadn‘t burped out something worse, like ‘undertaker fashion’ or ‘colostomy bag‘.

‘Wind, it is’ I thought, gathering my gear together. Not sure where to take my pictures, I loaded up Unit Four and crawled behind the wheel anyway. Merging onto the interstate, I couldn’t help but notice the wind had died down. So I drove. I drove past construction crews and inmate work-gangs, past the usual cast of hardhats I employ for illustrating inclement weather. Trusting Unit Four to find the vortex, I couldn’t help but look to Greensboro’s modest skyline in the distance. There among the slab towers of the Gate City blew a gnarly wind indeed, lusty gusts whipping through corridors of aging concrete. Best of all, a lump of humanity would soon pour from every revolving door in search of lunchtime sustenance. All of which explains why there may have been a lenslinger sighting downtown today. Twas just I, picking pebbles and leaves out of my teeth as the silk-tie set dispensed with the wind-driven opinion.

I’ve whipped up worse.

Logo in Motion

I have seen the future of electronic newsgathering and it's slathered in garish logos. No surprise there, I guess. But eye-bleeding wrap-job aside, this News Utility Vehicle is impressive. Dubbed ElectionLink (ugh!) by Fox New Channel, it's totally tapeless studio,a hefty 750kbps stream for live video- even while in motion. Fox News did just that on Friday, when some nutbag held up in Hilary Clinton's broom closet and demanded she stop wearing pantsuits. The resulting live shot was pedestrian at best, but the implications of such ubiquitous mobility is enough to make your average photog run off the road. Consider:

No more "We have a crew on the way". Soon the station will just punch up the shot of that flustered crew's dashboard cam, showing viewers a side of their station they've haven't seen before: the logomobile in motion ... the cursery, the lostmanship, the mastication!

If the retractable mast does go the way of the dinosaurs and cockpits turn into studios, the news unit's feng shui must evolve as well. No more press pass collections dangling from the rearview to block the shot. No more death metal emanating from your dashboard's every pore. And the fuzz growing on that old 7-ll cup will have to be addressed.

Running around town's hectic, but I got a whole posse of 'togs dying to take that thing to the coast the next time a wind with a nickname blows into town. Think the reporter look silly when's he's being blown across a hurricane's parking lot? Wait 'til we strap him to the roof of this thing.