Awed by Daughtry

When I first predicted local boy Chris Daughtry was about to go GLOBAL, I only half believed it. Sure, the dude had blistering pipes, a brooding presence and a shaved head for the ages, but GLOBAL? Stark hyperbole. Now however, three short years after he met Shannon Smith and I for a pre-Idol interview, he seems to have done just that. This is not a news flash, I know - but every once in a while I have to rub my eyes and ask myself, “Did that really happen?”. Did a Honda dealership employee really sidestep the suck-fest that is American Idol, crank out a jillion selling debut CD and become a household name? The answer, my friend ain’t blowin’ in the wind. When Brad Pitt introduces you and your eponymous combo as the biggest rock and roll band of last year, you've come seriously close to having arrived.

I just wish I’d been more keen on the uptake. By the time Chris belted out a Joe Cocker tune in that Greensboro parking lot, I'd pointed my camera at hundreds of nutbags claiming to be the next American Idol. "Damn,"this dude can wail," I thought. "Wonder where he got those wraparound shades?" Had I known then that not only would he survive the Idol audition, but go on to becoem a Rock Star with a capitol R, I’d have hit him up for a job as his personal videographer. Instead, I covered his meteoric rise through the Idol sweat shop process and enjoyed our little chats. No doubt the guy had recordable pipes, but would a turbo-throat and simmering presence cut through the Idol schmaltz and secure him a place in the pop music pantheon? Apparently so. Twice now I’ve turned off my vacuum cleaner to see him take the number one spot on VH1’s Top Twenty Video Countdown. Make that happen enough and you've earned your place in pop culture. Not bad for a guy who used to keep track of other people's oil changes.

These days, Daughtry's CD is still selling well. It damn sure grew on me and I hate me some damn Nickelback. Regardless of what this photog think's, Chris's freshman platter ensures he’ll never have to write up another service order on a 1993 Accord with dirty ashtrays. He’ll be touring the world, when he’s not layin' low in his palatial home a scant dozen miles from my own humble abode. For all I know he watches my stories on the local news, when he's not trippin the glove with Bon Jovi. Me, I’m still shooting ribbon-cuttings, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I get a kick out of his career. No, I don’t want to BE him. I can’t carry a tune in a pre-approved container and I’d look pretty silly in one of those knit skull caps, but I’d damn sure like his Rolodex. As for Daughtry’s future, it’s still uncertain. His next CD will reportedly be harder-edged, something I’d probably like more than his largely female fan base. Whatever he puts out however, I’ll be listening, for it’s not everyday you help launch some cat into the stratosphere.

Not legally, anyway.

Showbots at Dawn

Though it sucks the breath from my lungs to verbalize it, I figure I got twenty years or so left in this business. But I’m beginning to think the business may not have twenty years left in it. Sure, they’ll always be some form of corporate media; most folk are too lazy to go get it for themselves, no how many blithering Twitters and hopped-up blogs claim otherwise. But TV News as we know it today? It won’t survive the next two decades. Hell, it might not be recognizable twenty four months from now. Don’t believe me? Pick up on Line 4. It’s Katie Couric. She’s got fantastic gams, a 16 million dollar paycheck and damn few viewers to show for it. My bride was right: she should have stuck to the morning shift where at least she could hang out with the artist formerly known as Al Roker.

Now word comes down that her employer CBS - the house that Edward R. Murrow built - is collapsing onto itself. In the past couple of weeks, they lopped off top talent from both sides of the screen in a n affiliate blood-letting heretofore unseen in the Fourth Estate. Now words comes down that the empire once known as the Tiffany Network is considering farming out some of its newsgathering operation to Chicken Noodle News. It may sound like so much inside baseball to those outside the biz, but just know what was deemed unthinkable just a year ago is quickly coming to pass. So how will that affect your not so humble lenslinger? I’m glad you didn’t ask…

‘Cause I don’t really know. Despite what the pungent hippies at Guilford College scream when I roll up on campus in a live truck draped in F-words, local affiliates and their networks are vastly different entities. Yeah, I work for a FOX station, but I’ve yet to see Bill O Reilly cruise through my newsroom. If he did, I’d pick up that loofah that he dropped and maybe ask for a snapshot- for he and I are not long fro this world. TV News, for all its gloss and foibles, is about to morph into a new form of communication. Whether it will rid itself of all that vaudeville or simply find a new platform to pedal its shtick is still unknown. The only thing you can be sure of is the newscast of tomorrow wont look like Today, or World News Tonight or any of that pablum that passes for modern broadcasting.

I just wish I was more upset. Don’t get me wrong; I hate it for all those cross-town colleagues who’ve gotten the axe and my crusty photog heart goes out for all those who are about to. But dammit, it’s long overdue. We in TV have chortled, hyped and adored ourselves into oblivion. What used to pass for the voice of God now sounds like so much sorority house blather. Bloated and gloating, there’s not been an industry so ripe for revolution since Kodak dismissed digital cameras as just some passing fad. Just what new form TV News will take isn’t even privy to those above my pay grade (which makes up just about everyone). But believe me when I tell you this: For the first time EVER, it is safer to be a lowly photog who likes to multitask than a toothy news bunny who only knows how to twinkle on cue…

Until the robots arrive, anyway.

Countdown to Vegas

It’s Monday night and, besides plowing through Neil Young’s exhaustive biography, I ain’t doin’ a whole lot. But in six short days, all signs of stagnation will evaporate as The Mighty Weave and I touch down in sunny Las Vegas. No, we’re not going to count cards under the tutelage of Kevin Spacey (based on a great book, by the way); we’re gonna rip the lid off NAB! What’s that you say? Only the world’s largest electronic media show - an annual gathering of more than 100 thousand broadcasters that overtake the neon blight of the Vegas strip every April. It’s been twenty four months since Team Slinger tripped the showroom floor and with the jet lag from that red eye finally wearing off, it’s high time to do it again. This year however it won’t just be us country bumpkins on the prowl, for the one and only Rick Portier of Turd Polisher infamy is bringing his sequined jumpsuit along for more than a little photog karaoke. If that weren’t enough, we’ll be rubbing sore shoulders with our lenslinging brethren at the Harley-Davidson café as the lovely and gracious Kevin Johnson leads us all in quiet reflection at the B-Roll Bash. So what’s in it for you? Eh…perhaps we’ll shoot a few videos, take some pictures, gather analysis or just up-chuck on a cactus. Either way, we’ll do our best to represent, all while keeping our fifteen collective readers in mind. No promises, though! After all, what happens in Vegas ... quickly becomes a tired cliché. Just sayin’.

Rotgut Theater

"I have never served a drop of alcohol IN MY LIFE!” the old woman said with conviction.

I would have believed her too, had she not been surrounded by liquor bottles, shot glasses and plastic milk jugs full of homemade hooch. No sooner had the lady made her strange claim than a red light began flashing in the corner of my viewfinder. DAMN! Two minutes into my first ‘shot house’ bust and my camera batteries were dropping like flies. Shifting my weight, I pulled the camera away from my face, balanced it on the fanny pack strap slicing into my waist and traded one dead brick for a slightly newer one. As I did, deputies of every stripe squeezed past. By the time I re-shouldered my lens, a leathery old man in bib overalls began arguing with the interlopers trying to handcuff him, at which point they took him to the floor. Suddenly a giant ALE filled my tiny screen, as a behemoth in a windbreaker joined in on the dog pile. Shoved backward, I came to rest on a pool table, the petrified cue-balls scattering and clattering as I reached behind me to avoid falling. Contortionism aside, I squinted and grinned as the cops all but hogtied the inebriated senior. THIS, is what I’d come for.

It was early 1991 and I was in heaven. Actually, it was rural Jones County, North Carolina. A few hours after sunset I’d met a rabble of good ole boys in unmarked Crown Vics at the county line as they plotted the evening’s takedown. The target: a jacked-up shack smack-dab in the middle of Jones County's skeeviest trailer court. According to my new friends, the rundown structure was a den of sin, a gathering place known to all as a good place to purchase a snort of moonshine or a shot of illegally re-sold liquor. Truthbetold, I couldn’t give less of a shit what went down inside there. If the state wanted to spend resources making the county safe for self-respecting alcoholics, have at it. I was just a 23 year old photog high on police access. If the guys with the high and tight haircuts wanted to bum-rush Barney the Dinosaur, it was fine by me - as long as they didn’t block my shot on the way in.

The television show COPS cast a long shadow over my entry into newsgathering. Every Saturday night, a sofa bound nation leaned into their sets and chortled on cue as some shirtless buffoon protested his innocence before getting cuffed and stuffed. I was among those hanging on every televised arrest and so were my bosses. Though they never really said it, the landmark reality show and it’s cinema verite influenced the way we covered the local cop-shops. Suddenly, police agencies were granting the media all-access passes to drug round-ups, property seizures and the like - all in hopes they’d be seen striking heroic poses on the evening news. Young, dumb and with something to prove, I happily obliged. ‘Justice? Eff Justice,’ -- I thought. I wanted to ride shotgun in police department squad cars follow cops up crack-house stairways, and do cameraman pirouettes around the mad, the bad and the otherwise shackled. For longer than I care to admit, I got my wish.

So you can imagine my glee when a deputy buddy asked if I wanted to tag along on a shot house raid. I ran my fingers through my feathered hair and said “Damn skippy!” -- though at the time I didn’t really know what a shot house was. When it was explained to me I merely nodded, though surely it couldn’t be like my cop buddies described. It was. After rendezvousing with the authorities a block away, we descended on the aforementioned shack with lights, lens and logos blazing. Following the fuzz as they burst through the door, I all but guffawed at what I saw. The interior of the one-room shack looked like a scene out of Roadhouse. A few crusty customers slumped at the bar, one hillbilly bent over the felt in mid trick shot, the matronly old woman behind the bar - all froze in repose as The Man came crashing through. I was but a gnat in on the action, but the ensuing maneuvers added to my street degree and really spiced up the weekend news. I can still hear the sound of the liquid hitting pay dirt as a beefy deputy emptied jug after jug of rotgut on the driveway outside. So too can I recall the exuberance of my heavily armed hosts as they unmade everybody’s day.

But more than anything else, I remember the old barmaid’s claim; her wrinkled face and every inflection burned into my mind’s eye the moment it passed through my camera’s lens. I don’t know why some soundbites echo, but I’m betting anyone who’s slung a lens for more than a week carries around a few audio snippets they’d probably like to erase. Now if only I could remember all my computer passwords as easily...

Heffalumps and Noozles

Crikey, look at the SIZE of that thing! No, not my big melon head; the heffalump grazing in the distance. He’s (she‘s?) just one of the new pachyderms you’ll find chewing the scenery at the North Carolina Zoo. Ten years ago I began making regular safaris to Randolph County‘s crown jewel, where friend of the show Rod Hackney would lead me and my lens through a living menagerie riddled by third graders. Back then we’d shoot four separate pieces in a single day and I’d leave the park totally spent and smelling of elderberries. These days The Zoo Filez is produced out of house and the only time I get down there is to shoot the occasional yak and pony show. Such was the case today, when zoo peeps unveiled the Watani Grasslands Reserve, an $8.5 million dollar overhaul of their venerable elephant and rhino exhibit. Expansive and interactive, the Watani Grasslands afford visitors a new look at the zoo’s marquee creatures - sometimes from as close as forty feet away. That’s within flying dung distance! Trust me, you do not want to be in the sights of these slow-moving sharpshooters when they’re feeling pissy. They can do things with a prehensile tusk that Major League pitchers can only dream of. Don’t worry though; they mainly just target hippies in PETA t-shirts…

Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go Photoshop more hair over my bald spot. No wonder the baboons were looking at me funny...

They Killed Kenny!

Okay, so they only tased him. Still, you gotta give it up for El Ocho photojournalist Kenny Cravens, who willingly submitted to a Forsyth County zapping today - all in the name of local television. Not only did he take it like a man, but the photog known as Bluedog did so without the first curse - or any of the melodrama I've seen from other volunteer shock-ees. The resulting footage is the kind of G-Rated Torture Porn you won't find at your local Cineplex. Funny thing is, Kenny wasn't even on my list of 'Co-Workers I'd Like To See Probed With an Electro-Shock Weapon'. Yeah, I got a list. Like YOU don't. Pfft...

Confessions of a Lot Lizard

"'Scuse me Sir, you independent?"

The man said nothing, just lifted a bushy eyebrow and walked on past. I didn’t take it personal. I was already honing in on the gentleman behind him, a squat fellow in a too-tight poncho. Waiting until he walk into earshot, I faked an earnest grin.

“Hey there, you truckin’ for yourself?”

Poncho cocked his hooded head to the side as he passed, his cowboy boots skimming the sidewalk’s tidal pools.

“Weirdo.”

I turned as if struck, but fired no retort at the truckers backside. ‘Hmph‘, I thought - turning back to catch my reflection in the Visitor’s Center glass doors. There I stood, a scruffy stranger in a green overcoat, standing in the rain by the Rest Stop’s bathroom shack. Nothing weird about that. At least my fancycam was dry; I’d parked it on its tripod just under the shack’s eave, the gutter’s steady waterfall missing it by a good foot and a half. Trouble was I had to walk away from it to catch the steady straggle of truck drivers as they left their idling big rigs for a chance to piss standing up. In the distance, a man and woman trudged toward me, he cupping a cigarette in the rain, she holding the world’s largest Rusty Wallace thermos.

“How ya doin’ folks, ya’ll wouldn’t be independent truckers, would ya?”

“Don’t look at him, Lurlene,” the man said as smoke drifted from beneath the mangled bib of his waterlogged hat. Lurlene obliged, her knuckles whitening around the thermos as she prepared to bludgeon the pervert in the raincoat. I wisely froze - my head only turning to make sure Smokey wasn’t going to double back and go all Walker - Texas Ranger on me. Instead he put his arm around Lurlene’s shoulder and headed for the snack room shack, glancing over his shoulder ay me before turning to satiate his sweet and salty needs.

I could only look back and smile weakly, knowing the trucking couple would have to walk right past me again to get back to their rumbling semi. Taking off my glasses, I grabbed my shirttail with the other hand and for the fifteenth time that morning tried to dry my heavily corrective lenses. It didn’t work, but as I rubbed them in soggy cotton, I traveled back in time. Ninety minutes earlier, I’d been fat, dry and pensive - my eyes darting between the box of Krispy Kremes on the conference room table and the dry-erase board that held my fate of the day.

“Truckers say they’re going on strike tomorrow.” the assistant news director said as he dismantled his own sprinkled donut. “Don’t you have some independent trucker buddies down in Denton?”

“Yup,” I replied with confidence - though with a half dozen reporters crammed in the room and a pegboard bursting with live truck keys, I would have agreed on any solo assignment, shy of a spot proctology exam. Little did I know then my trucker buddies would be out trucking, or that the local truck stop owner was still mad at the station for slights real or imagined. Thus, I was forced to troll the interstate rest stops in hopes of finding owner operators who were feeling verbose. On a Monday morning. In the rain.

Giving my glasses one last swipe, I placed them on my nose and profiled the driver climbing down from a bright red Peterbilt. What I wouldn’t give for a talking hair-do right now, I thought. - someone pretty enough to attract the truckers’ attention in a way that a goateed loner with not a stitch of logowear on could not. To my dismay however, not even an intern was available when I finally gave up on phone tag and hit the highway. Now, wet, hungry and increasingly irritated, I wanted only for my Monday to end. Or at least get started. Back at the station, good folks were already crafting promos touting the latest from local truckers about to go on strike. With that in mind, I scanned every feature of the approaching trucker, noting his Metallica t-shirt and budding mullet

“What up Lars? Gotta second to tell your local station how much trucking sucks?”

He did. As did others. Twenty minutes later, I stashed my soggy gear I new Unit Four and fled the rest stop, without a single contusion, phone number or venereal disease to show for it. What more can one ask of a Monday?