Resume the Position

We've all been there: stuck upon a heffalump, squinting through an electric toaster, wondering where it all went wrong. Okay, maybe I'm projecting a bit. For all I know, Universal Newsreel legend Mervyn Freeman willingly wedged himself atop that hefty herbivore -- though for the life of me, I can't figure out WHY. Then again...

... I once camped out in the back of a police van overnight in hopes a smash-and-grab artist would have the courtesy to hit the convenience store in the middle of my camera's cross-hairs. He never did, but I made some new cop buddies and even got invited to an autopsy. (Note to Self: Finger sandwiches not right for every event.

... Once I got soclose to an orphaned lion, the damn thing cocked his leg and pissed in my lens and on my face. To make matters worse, the hippie zookeeper lady had just told me it was about to happen! There's a lesson in there, I guess, but I'm not sure what it is. All I do know is I can't so much as watch The Lion King without a bottle of Windex by my side.

... Not only have I waded into the chaos of a fresh crime scene, high-fived my way deep into a Republican fundraiser and openly associated with known news anchors, but I've even manned up and walked a camera into the middle of a coliseum full of American Idol hopefuls. May not sound like much, but have YOU seen how high a cross-dressing Streisand fan can kick?

... If I had a dime for every time I've stuck my glass in the face of some shackled ass-hat, well, I wouldn't be seen scrounging in the floorboard of my news unit for soda money. I only wish all that backpedaling had made lined my pockets with silver, instead of just making me paranoid about gutter curbs and newspaper shooters.

... Long ago, I allowed myself to be locked in the back of a live truck in mid-edit while a reporter drove the damn thing down a mountain. I won't let it happen again. For one, staring at a screen three inches from your face while hurtling backwards at sixty miles per hour is no way to go through life. Secondly, vomit's really hard to wash out of station fleece wear. 

Kinda makes a hippo ride not seem so silly.

Cursed Responders

A monadnock I'm fond of is about to burn and I have yet to get there. This bothers me a bit, as I still feel the need to be On Scene, no matter how I try to hide it. Most photogs do. Unplanned calamities are, after all, our profession's breadfruit. Without them, our little slugs and rundowns would slow to a crawl, no matter how many tap-dancing poodles or weather center wedding proposals we come up with. I, myself, cringe at the sound of scanner traffic. It's that kind of static that interrupts my meals. (I can still taste the steak I never finished the night some guy shot his wife twenty years ago.) I've probably woken up on the phone in the middle of the night more times than I've called my Mother. These days, I'd rather bob for close-ups in the Zumba pool than circle the drain of a drive-by shooting. Still, when a beloved landmark falls victim to stupidity and dizzying visuals begin to spew forth, even this Z-block operative finds himself eyeing the horizon...  

For a moment, anyway.

Snatching Glass

In what sounds like a scene from RoboCop, a cowardly band of marauders snatched a California news crew's fancycam before wheeling away in a couple of luxury sedans. In broad daylight, no less. KPIX photographer Gregg Welk and reporter Anne Makovec were wrapping up a noon live shot outside Oakland Technical High School Wednesday when five, count 'em five, no good hoodlums bum-rushed the duo. Details are sketchy at best, but apparently the furious five grabbed the station's six thousand dollar camera, yanking it sideways in such a fashion that even viewers at home could tell it was just another chaotic day in O Town. To add injury to insult, one of the punks even popped Welk in the mouth before the five of them made off in a Mercedes AND a Lexus.

UNCOOL, on more levels than we here at The Lenslinger Institute can list. But even clowns like us have to shake our heads in disgust at the brazen nature of this latest attack on members of the media non elite. What has this heartless orb come to when a first world news crew can't sleepwalk their way through a nooner without getting assaulted and robbed on live television? I know, I know: it's late 2012 in Alameda County. That don't make it right. Is it a gang initiation? A simple crime of opportunity? Or one more sign that social mores are crumbling under the weight of a generation raised on violence and smitten with instant gratification?

How should I know? I'm just a cameraman. And while it's easy for a proud Carolinian like me to chalk it all up to West Coast excess, I'll be keeping my head (and lens) on a swivel here in the Piedmont. I suggest YOU do the same, whether you sling a lens in Detroit, Durham or Duluth. A societal shift is upon us and it's coarsening our offspring. As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, you ain't got to be in Oakland to get your ass camera-jacked. As for the good folk of KPIX, they'll continue to cover their beat, but not, some sources say, without their very own security guards.

Where's Peter Weller in a tin can when you need him?

Election's Hex

Twisted spinsters, noon live shots, dangling chads! There's A LOT to fear on Election Day! That's why I've cocooned myself in several hazy layers of soft news: pithy distillations of pothole operas and fawning profiles of forlorn clown fish. It's just the kind of well-lit drivel that should keep me the hell away from the polling place. Then again, I could be ripped from the studio's womb before the first precinct chief overdoses on doughnut glaze. If so, I'll try to keep my wits about me as I jostle for oxygen in Democracy's mosh-pit. If I'm lucky, I'll surface before the crush of supplicants makes escape impossible. Loiter too long in the wrong campaign headquarters and you could find yourself running the cameraman equivalent of the Mogadishu Mile. Okay, those creepy people in cardboard hats aren't gonna chase you on foot, but get caught withdrawing cheese straws from a shattered candidates' buffet table and you may be sleeping with the fishes before the first concession speech is lip-synched.

And that's assuming you make it past the geriatric terrorists who keep our nation's polling places safe from any spotlights. Forget the angry gang-banger or unhinged drifter. You're most likely to perish at the hands of a 78 year old woman hopped up on the Magna Carta. That's her in the corner, clockin' your every move through at least two cataracts. She's missing her soaps, her support hose are killing her and somewhere in those pockets is a rusty spoon her beloved Horace carried over the beaches of Normandy. Get too close to that voting booths and she'll gladly use it to carve your heart out. Don't believe me? You won't be the first photog to vanish in the clamor of Election Day - or the last. It's why the closest I get to campaign headquarters is some dusty field behind a Harley-Davidson shop. That's where I found some friends of mine gettin' medieval in  name of prognostication. I don't know accurate it'll turn out to be, but dodging airborne gourds felt safer that eye-gouging some granny from across a crowded cafegymnatorium floor.       


Now go vote for somebody.

Phlegm at Eleven

If viewers could see the Herculean hustle, madcap scramble and damn near panic behind your average local TV newscast, they’d watch in greater numbers. I’m convinced of it. What’s more compelling - that static parking lot live shot or the cross-county death race that made it possible in the first place? What would you rather see - a reporter mouthing sixteen words they’d just memorized or tendrils of smoke coming out of an assignment editor’s ears as they realize no one’s around to cover the flipped-over school bus? What would make you drop the remote - a smoothly executed anchor toss or the sound of an assistant news director speaking in tonguest? I’LL take the meltdown every time and so, I believe, will Sally Joe Housecoat.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think my friends and I are so fascinating that the world will hang on our every loss of bladder control. But I assure you, the little girl noises emitted by a grown man editing under deadline is far more intriguing than any thing the sports goob has to say. And the physical grace of a weatherman gloating over a low pressure system has nothing on a portly photog running desperate circles around a live truck as he searches for the handheld microphone hanging off his belt. Seriously, I’ve watched whole mini-series with less story arc than a pretty reporter arguing with the voices in her earpiece. Then there’s the jittery floor director performing kabuki theater just out of camera range. That shit would be a hit on pay-per-view!

As much as I stand behind the previous two paragraphs, I realize it’s tantamount to treason. Since the very first test pattern appeared in an engineer’s dream, those of us behind the glass have done our damnedest to hide the ugly truth from viewers. Broadcast news is a collaborative effort (and an excellent movie!), a team sport played by unsavory characters with specialized skills and filthy language. Yet what we show viewers is sterilized, contrived and, quite often downright dull. It’s why you can travel this fruity plain and see the same type of glass-eyed mannequins adhering to the same tired tropes - be it Eugene, Oregon or Mobile, Alabama. Originality, it would seem, is simply beyond us. How about we at least practice the kind of transparency we demand from our elected officials.

What’s that? Exposing the great unwashed to the machinations of our craft will destroy television news’ credibility?

THAT live truck has left the lot.

Try This at Home...

Just because I’m nowhere near the coast this weekend doesn’t mean Hurricane Sandy ain’t on my brain. Twice now I’ve caught myself fondling granola bars in the pantry. When it gets dark, I’m gonna go in the garage and blind-roll my poncho. If that goes okay, I’ll probably drive around for awhile with the radio blasting static. Just when I’m about to rip my eyelids off and stuff them in my ears, I’ll stop by that car wash and find an empty bay. My fancycam’s in pretty good shape now, but once I’m done with a certain turbo-hose setting, it’ll spit and whistle like Katrina herself gave it the clap. When the quarters run out, I’ll lash myself to the windshield, bribe a transient to pelt me with rock salt as I attempt a spoken word performance of the Traveling Wilburys’ first album. I figure I can get through ’Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ before any security weasels show up. That’s when I plan to initiate a low-speed chase across three counties - a meandering pursuit in which I’ll scrub up against every available guardrail while calling into local radio shows with fake flash-flooding updates. Chances are that’ll never get old, but if it does, I’m gonna duck into a laundromat and demand they let me sit around in my underwear back by the dirty clothes heap. I don’t want to hurt anybody, but if I’m gonna wind down from simulated hurricane smotherage, I’ll need to knock back a half dozen PBJ’s and three tall boys of the kind of lukewarm beer you find in abandoned gas stations. By then I’ll be pretty tapped, so look for me to wrap things up by man-hauling my provisions to the closest Port-A-Pottie, where I plan to crawl inside and finally get some shut-eye.

Then I’m gonna get up and do it all over again, until that bookie I know calls my cell phone and berates me for not dumpster surfing LIVE(!) the way some putz on his Netflix stream just did.

Maybe then I'll stop feeling so guilty.

So That Others May Vedge...

Knowing what all the knobs do will get you started in this business, but if you're really going to last behind the lens, you must know how to GET BENT! Just ask Jimmy Hall, the self-described 'camera mang' we first met chillin' outside the John Edwards trial. Better yet, leave the man alone 'til he's done up there. Whatever bucket list he's working on, it looks like he's about to check off another box. Why, it's enough to make his Momma nervous, leaning back like that. Not me, though. If I know Jimmy, he's got two green sneakers wrapped around his speaker's spleen. My only concern is how I might have to catch that fancy-cam in the unlikely case he drop it. Then again, if said rig suddenly loses altitude, dude's comin' with it - Wile E. Coyote style. I can only hope to break his fall with a nice soft anvil I ordered from ACME. But enough of my thought bubbles, let's get to our feature!

You now, a smart guy like Jimmy could find a much easier way to make a living. But legal tender isn't ALL this admitted cinephile is  after. It's the lifestyle. Yes, it's tough making the S-word (style) stick when you're aiming it at a  news shooter, but put all thoughts of my cargo jorts aside for a minute and consider where even an entry-level lenslinger might find his (or her) self: Holed up in a cabin with some mountain drifter turned reality show darling, high-stepping backwards with both eyes crossed as the man America loves to hate tries to step on your shoes, living in a van down by the river as police in scuba suits scrape the bottom for hints of where the limo went ... and that's all before lunch! Yup, it's not my tax bracket that lulls me to sleep at night. It's the quiet knowledge that the best views don't always make the news. Instead they roll around in my head for damn near decades.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get some sleep. My chiropractor's kids needs braces and I told him I'd hook him up by riding along with a bunch of bike cops as they crack a stolen moped ring.

THAT should be worth a couple of visits.