Goin' Camping.

I'm an atheist, and a fairly grumpy one. It is either despite of this or because of it or both that I spend a remarkable amount of time listening to "Family Radio", broadcast to my area via 94.7 FM, WFME out of Newark, New Jersey. (In my defense, I'm almost always doing something else at the time - often cooking, eating and washing dishes.) Family Radio is the international broadcasting empire of one Mr. Harold Camping (the toothy fellow immediately above). Camping is the president of Family Stations Inc. and a self-appointed Biblical teacher. In some ways he's an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher, but he's still one of a kind, a genuine character and even iconoclast amidst the dime-a-dozen hucksters in the broadcast evangelism field. You may be thinking that I sound oddly fond of him. You would not be entirely wrong, although he is a vile toad when all is said and done. To be strictly accurate, I have little patience for most of what the station offers (particularly not their agonizing, cornball music). But Camping is perversely mesmerizing.

I mainly hear him on his flagship call-in show, "Open Forum," which airs from 8:00-10:00 p.m. Monday-Friday, at least in my area. Camping simply takes calls from listeners and has discussions, or often debates, with them about matters Biblical and Christian, in his typically unadorned, show-biz-allergic style. The first time I stumbled across him years ago while flipping around the dial, I was instantly grabbed by his voice. It's an almost alarming bass that sounds like it rises up out out of the bone marrow in his legs. He could sound avuncular if he made half an effort. But he often settles for a creepily near-monotone delivery and the enunciation of an obsessive-compulsive grammar teacher. There's a slight gurgle in his throat (he's very old, you know) that just enhances it. Sometimes I think I could listen to him just read the labels off cans of spackling paste all evening, although this would deprive us of the lovely crinkling of his Bible's onion-skin pages in the background.

I noted his style before his content, which at first listen seemed pretty routine for an evangelical crank. Even more than usual for radio personalities, he takes a ritualized approach to his show. He emcees with a little collection of stock phrases that not only stay precisely the same down to the least syllable, but that he usually pronounces with a robotic sameness of emphasis and intonation. "Thank you for calling and sharing, and shall we take our next call, pleeease? WELcome to Open Forum." He ends each show with, "May the Lord richly bless you. Goodnight [with rising intonation on the last syllable]."

Both of these quotations are a little misleading, though. They make him sound nice. One of the remarkable things that struck me right away was how short and snappy he can be even with callers who seem to agree with him, let alone those who don't. You're guaranteed to hear, many times over the course of the two hours, Camping's exasperated "Excuse me, excuse me!", rumbled at someone who's stubborn enough to try to contradict him, or even keep talking when he wants to. It's tough to blame him, though, given the callers he gets. Whatever his intellectual shortcomings, Camping is clearly an educated and articulate man (he makes much of his knowledge of ancient languages). I can hardly imagine that he fails to notice the caliber of listener that is always reaching out to talk to him. I keep waiting for callers who don't conform to my lazy liberal college boy's stereotype of the evangelical unwashed, but they're few and far between. On the other end of the line will usually be a mouth-breathing mumbler, often evincing considerable confusion about, say, the fact that the Bible was written in now-obscure foreign tongues, or about basic technical aspects of radio. Questions tend to "If I'm sleeping with my cousin but we're not married, is it a sin for her to divorce her husband and marry me?" or "If the mullet is the hairstyle of the gods, did Jesus have short hair on front and the sides and long hair in the back?" (I'm actually not making up that second one - this was just the other night. I wrote it down right away. To be strictly fair, I have some suspicion that this guy was pulling Camping's leg, not that our host would have noticed. My suspicion is increased by the fact that I came up with this book when I googled the phrase.)

I'm not sure how Camping manages not to doubt his own teachings in the light of the audience they evidently attract. It's partly for this reason that I also harbor a slight suspicion that Camping is pulling everyone's leg and is simply making a career of fleecing the rubes. But I'd bet against it. Who knows how these minds work?

On that note, I will continue in my next post with an analysis of Camping's fascinating but not-as-bizarre-as-one-would-like-to-think theology. Start bating your breath now.

Call any vegetable

For months now, the labels on the broccoli packaged at my local grocery store have been missing the first letter and the last two. All of my broccoli is named "ROCCO."

Played out

I just finished a brief gig as a play reader/evaluator for the Sundance Theatre Lab, reading and, yes, evaluating just a handful of the 700 or so plays that were submitted this year.

I hereby make the following resolutions:

-I will never write a play about 9/11 or the "war on terror."

-I will never write a play about the aimlessness and self-doubt of Gen X slackers.

-I will never write a play about how people today - especially Gen X slackers - are too obsessed with and/or influenced by TV and other mass media.

-I will never write a play featuring fantasy scenes where characters step inside TV shows or movies.

-I will never write a play where a narrator tells the audience the lesson of the play before it's even started. (Shakespeare got away with it, but he was him.)

-I will never say that anything I've written is "controversial" before it's even been published, performed or read.

-I will not mock anyone else's writing on this blog again unless I've started writing my own stuff again.

NYC Moments, No. 2

I could be wrong, but I swore that when I was riding home on the subway last night, I glimpsed a young girl looking at her reflection in the shiny metal of the wall, making eyes and blowing kisses at herself.

She was cute.

Superstar.

If I started a punk band, I'd call it Urethra Franklin.

Reasons Why I Moved to New York, No. 5,047

Last night, I was walking in the East Village, looking for hookers and blow, although those are harder to find there than they were a few decades ago. I hear tell. Anyway, on 2nd Ave., just below St. Marks Place, I walked past this sleek, hip-looking little restaurant that serves "soul food with a Chinese twist," called... yes... YES... "Hip Hop Chow"! [GOOGLE DISCLAIMER: I did not remember the name; I had to google it.]

I glanced in the window and there was an old-school-looking kung fu movie playing on a flatscreen at the back. Now, I like me the kung fu [UNDERSTATEMENT DISCLAIMER: The foregoing was an understatement], so I paused, thinking to do so only momentarily. But then I saw the half-frog/half-crocodile-looking monster with red eyes played by the guy in the rubber suit. He was jumping at some people and trying to bite them. He shot spiny things out of his mouth that stuck to the heroine's face. He hopped around and at one point there was a guy in a red cape hopping along behind him, in perfectly choreographed unison.


Finally, even my native reticence with unknown fellow prowlers of the urban jungle could keep me in check no longer. I entered this establishment and was approached by an eager and fresh-faced young server (that is not him to the left).

"Table for one?" he asked.

"Actually, I know this makes me a pain in the ass," I said, "but I just want to know what that movie is."

"That one?" he said, glancing back at it. "That's SHAOLIN DRUNKARD." (Although there was not a hyperlink in it when he said it. That would be fun if you could do that, wouldn't it?)

"SHAOLIN DRUNKARD," I said, musingly. Of course.

There shall be a review posted in this space in the near future.

The menu looked pretty tasty, too.

(Thanks to Kung Fu Cult Cinema for the pic.)

Pay phone culture

I've been watching the slow death of the public pay phone in New York City since I moved here ten years ago. I'm not sure if I've ever really thought about this before, but I noticed it again tonight. The type of people and conversations I notice has changed. The cell phone was already taking over even a decade ago, but pay phones were still much more of a social leveler. People of (almost) all creeds, colors and classes had to put their fingers and their ears on the greasy receivers if they needed to make a call on the street.

Maybe I'm overgeneralizing here, but now, a startling percentage of the pay phone talk I hear has an edge of desperation and is about money - money owed to the caller or, more often, by the caller. Pleas for just another week to pay a bill, demands for badly needed money to be repaid - from people who've apparently hit such a bad spot they can't even afford the $50 monthly bills on their cell phones anymore.

There must have been even more of these calls back then, in sheer numbers. But I notice them more now, pay phone conversations having become relatively rare.

I don't really have anything profound to add to that. There it is.