Notes from Chef Gonzo's Brother

"

Not sure if you saw the picture of the driveway… after about 25 years of having dirt on the driveway I am in the process (which the rain is not helping) of cementing it over.  So I have had to do a lot of digging and pickaxing and… well… shit ass labor that my already screwed up back was not fond of.  Well… after a nice farmer sunburn (yay, arms and neck are still pink!) I made a really interesting discovery.  The back panel of an action figure’s torso.  I would like to say this: No matter how much of Kentucky’s finest I have swallowed in the past my deductive skills are still as sharp as Billy Zane in a Purple unitard.  That’s right.  I’m as good as The Phantom!

And so I bring you a picture of the action figure I found, in the dirt, broken, faded and almost lost forever.  Like the show it was from.

Have fun on the long winding trip down memory lane.  I picked up a hitchhiker… he made me want to watch the Battle For Endor and The Caravan of Courage in a double feature…  I killed him by making him choke on an old ET windup toy that had a red belly.

Then I washed the toy.

"

That was from my brother, and the discussion of the driveway and us losing our toys in the dirt has been a topic before, especially with our erstwhile next door neighbor. I myself, had a similarly themed post back in 2009, and here's a similarly reminiscent passage that mirrors his hitchhiker talk below the picture:

"

After clicking on the link for a picture of the toy, I remembered. It all fell into place. A memory of waiting for a double pie at Little Caesar's Pizza with my Captain Power action figure claiming a back counter, rappelling down an invisible rope, and then blasting the (unseen) badguys came rushing up to the front of my neo-cortex, and my Sunday afternoon with no television to watch the Yankees clinch, the Giants rout the Bucs, or the Jets womp the Titans, was totally complete with a stroll down memory lane.

"

I Forgot "Golden Tee"

In my expanded discussion on the birth, death, and phoenix like rebirth of an experience, I forgot to mention the world's most profitable arcade game, and the proverbial exception the proves the rule.

The golfing game Golden Tee has, like Big Game Hunter, carved a nice niche out in bars, similar to the Megatouch consoles. Simulations of what you can't really do in the city, I guess...

Golden Tee, though, was made in America, not Japan, and has enjoyed a decade of success, earning over $2 billion around the world during that time.

That's a lot of quarters.

The Birth, Death, and Re-Birth of the Arcade

The arcade experience can be divided up into three distinct things that will better help explain the birth, death, and phoenix-like rebirth of the video game arcade: (1) venue; (2) hardware; (3) content.

The venue was a place that housed the hardware, or games themselves, and the content was the style of game play. Just in case that wasn't obvious.

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, realized that games that people pump quarters into could be a sound business model. The first quarter-eating game Atari brought to the market was lamely called "Computer Space". It was a ripoff of an older game called Space War, but they seemed to replace the wrong word when they named their game. It was a flop, but mainly because people couldn't really get into the controls. A certain level of  hand-eye coordination that today we take for granted hadn't yet developed.

Ironically, the game "Asteroid", much better known today, came out just a few years later, after the explosion of "Pong" and "Space Command" and was a success; it had the exact same controls as Computer Space: accelerate, fire, rotate left, rotate right. By the time Asteroid hit the arcades, folks understood.

Once the popularity of the games finally took off, the gamers just needed a place to go to play. This is the birth of the arcade as we know it: a dark and dimly lit place where kids spent hours and dollars hunched over games and a weird guy patrolled with a crotch mounted quarter dispenser.

The games, housed in those large plastic cabinets, had a very specific style of game play: they were programmed to kill you. Bushnell and Atari knew where the threshold was for profitability, and they programmed the games as such to make them profitable. What does that mean? Games that offer just a burst of excitement; games that are easy to learn but nearly impossible to master; games that keep you coming back for more.

Venue, hardware, and content set and ready to make millionaires out of some people.

Atari and the millions came later, though, with the home gaming console. Fairchild Semiconductor released their Channel F Video Entertainment System, the first real home video game console. Seeing this as the future of the gaming market, a console you put interchangeable game cartridges into (how revolutionary), Atari jumped into the fray, and a year after the Channel F, the Atari 2600 was unleashed on the world.

The Atari 2600 has gone down in history as one of the most important consoles ever. It (1) made people think video games in your house was a viable activity; and (2) it almost destroyed the entire market for video games in America. Both the creator and nearly the destroyer. It's complicated, baby.

Why mention this in a post about arcades? Well, because it's all connected.

The arcade was for a long time under scrutiny from unhappy parents who didn't want their kids going to some dark sweaty place and spending money hunched over a plastic cabinet. That doesn't seem like it makes men out of those young pimply boys. That's another misconception, that boys were the only arcade gamers. Both Centipede and Pac-Man were very hot commodities with the ladies, not to mention the most popular arcade booth ever: Ms. Pac-Man.

In any case, the Atari 2600 began to sap some of the arcade's business. After Warner, who was brought it as a financial backer of Atari, forced out Nolan Bushnell, then shit all over Atari's game programmers, they left and formed Activision, and took the title of "Fastest Growing Company in the US" away from Atari. What hadn't yet been realized by the honchos at Atari was that video game design is more an art-form than simple computer programming. There are plenty of creative decisions that are needed to be made during the course of game design, and even at that early juncture, there was an obvious difference good game design and poor game design.

When Activision became so profitable, other companies decided to jump in the mix and make cartridges for the 2600. What happened? There was a flood of shitty games for the Atari, so much so that you couldn't distinguish the good games (the few from Activision like "Pitfall") from the awful crap that saturated the market.

It got so bad that two awful missteps, the wretched port of Pac-Man (the bringing of the arcade classic to the home console)(considered one of the two or three worst games ever) and the even worse ET game (considered the worst game ever by many lists) pretty much destroyed then entire market.. Atari literally buried thousands of the ET cartridges in the desert. Check online for reviews and gameplay if you're really interested in seeing for yourself. I recommend it if you like video games and history.

Those two games, coupled with the total saturation of garbage cartridges, spelled the collapse of the market, which in 1983 happened. The home console market was dead, and the arcade was fading as well.

At the height there were maybe 10,000 arcades open throughout the country, but they started closing in the early '80s, and then more steadily after '83.

It took some shrewd business decisions and partnerships, but by 1986 Nintendo hit the Christmas shelves, and by Christmas '87 Nintendo was everywhere.

Arcades were still around, but on the wane, when the "The Legend of Zelda" was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Compare the game play of an arcade game and the first Zelda: one is built on short bursts of excitement and designed to kill you fast, while the other has no clock, makes it necessary to simply explore a world, lets you save your progress, and has no score.

Once home gaming became this sophisticated the arcade experience really started to look antiquated.

The venue was changing to a living room or bedroom, the hardware was now a tiny console you could put different games into, and the content, or style of gaming, was radically different.

The last throws of life was seen in the cartoony Street Fighter 2 and it's more realistic rival, Mortal Kombat.

The legacy of Street Fighter 2, you could say, came from it's six button and joy-stick control setup. That game allowed players to do special moves with specific combinations of stick-directions and button strokes. Mortal Kombat also had this feature, and it can be argued that this complexity of button control helped usher in a world where very complicated controllers and game styles became the norm of what today we call hard-core gaming.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the 1983 collapse hadn't effected either the home gaming or arcade market.

Really, at the heart of this business model you have venues, hardware, and content.

Japan began to look at which arcade experiences were successful there and how they might fare in the States. One of the first import games of the rebirth era was Dance Dance Revolution. This is a rhythm game where a player uses their feet and body  as the controller, jumping up and down on a controller pad.

Like Mortal Kombat a decade before, it began to garner a crowd. People loved to watch someone who was really good at it. Here was a gaming experience you couldn't have at home (until the home pad was made available, but the idea is sound). That's come to define one of the three main directions in which the arcade experience has gone: things you can't do in your living room.

Nowadays there are games you literally climb into that whip you around while simulating a flight mission. There's even a house-of-horror type game where you're using a light-blasting automatic weapon protecting yourself from marauding zombies. It's like lazer-tag, a haunted house, and those mirror-rooms combined.

That's the main direction of the hardware aspect of the rebirth of the arcade.

Besides places like Dave and Busters, Kitchen Den and Bar, and Chuck E. Cheese's, a separate direction for the venue evolution of arcade games are bars with the ubiquitous Megatouch consoles.

(Chuck E. Cheese's incidentally was founded by Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, as a relatively safe place for your kids to play arcade games--a venture from which he made more money than Atari due to his early ousting.)

At the end of many, many a bar in this country's watering holes sits a coin-operated television touch screen that has pre-loaded hundreds of puzzles and games. We've all seen them, right? This may seem a strange inheritor of the title arcade game, but these consoles number about 100 million, which is as many Pac-Man cabinets there were at that game's apex. Megatouch games only trail Ms. Pac-Man for the top arcade gaming apparatus in history.

Now in the realm of content, that fast-paced style of game play that was left by the way-side as gamers went for the Zelda and Final Fantasy style of role playing and exploration games, has seen a resurgence as well. People who made franchises like Halo and Gears of War and Call of Duty very profitable entities have become on occasion tired of such long adventures. Those games take on the order of 30 to 40 hours to complete, and sometimes you just want a quick burst of action.

Besides hand held devices like the Sony PSP or the Nintendo DS, both of which offer fast paced style games, possibly the best example of this new/old style of game is Geometry Wars. The game is beautiful, all action all the time, easy to learn but hard to master, over quickly, and, for the first time in maybe fifteen years, the score is beginning to matter again.

The full circle.

There are a few things that I, while not a gamer per se, respect and admire about the industry, and represent a few things I'd like to touch on later: the fact that the industry generates nearly three-times as much revenue as the NFL; that casual gaming is so pervasive that I had to convince someone that yes, Angry Birds is a video game; that hard-core gaming has become so involved as to bring about MMO games (Massive Multiplayer Online--the top banana being World of Warcraft)--online worlds where people spend more time than they're regular ones...

...I don't know. Anything that has such a wide array of related objects of human observation--casual gamers playing on their phone or getting grandma to play Wii bowling, versus the hard core gamers spending fifty, sixty, maybe even seventy hours a week using an avatar to run around a virtual world with friends they've never met in person--has got to be worth observing and reported about.

That shit is almost past pop-culture. It affects people and commerce in staggering numbers.

Before the Superdome

After "Kamp Krusty", the next episode was also a holdover from the third season, the Streetcar sendup "A Streetcar Named Marge". The story arch was easy: Marge as Blanche and Homer as Stanley. Homer in this episode in particular is an incredibly big asshole, far worse than we normally see.

Certainly on occasion he is neglectful and selfish, and definitely crude, but an outright asshole? Not like in this particular episode. There were two sight gags that I loved as well. The first I mention happens near the end, when Homer is watching the show, before he becomes engrossed in the drama, he has torn his playbill in the exact same way as Leland, played by Joseph Cotten in Citizen Kane, does when bored at Dorothy's performance.

The second sight gag is smaller and closer to the intimacies of a household. Homer's on the couch watching television, and Bart and Lisa are also there. They're each on their backs with their feet facing each other, and they're playfully horsing around with their touching feet. It's so natural and small and fleeting and honest.

The Streetcar... payoff is what you expect: Homer figures out he needs to appreciate Marge more and be less of an jerkass.

While Marge is off at the rehearsals the Jon Lovitz-voiced director has her leave Maggie at the Ayn Rand-inspired daycare run by his sister. "We do not rely on pacifier crutches," the Jon Lovitz-voiced daycare owner lady tells Marge. The final scene in the day care, after the Great Escape homage, is lifted from The Birds. That eerie echoing of the pacifiers really nails the ethereal terror of Hitchcock's classic.

A Streetcar Named Desire isn't my favorite William's play, but it is important. The name of this post is based on a line from the musical in the episode. Apparently the producers of the Simpsons couldn't get the rights to do the actual play, so they needed to make it a musical, and in the opening number the major set piece is the Superdome, and at the end of the number, it spins around to reveal their other set-piece, a period look at a Quarter neighborhood. The song itself has some very clever lines and word play, so much so that the fine folks who live in New Orleans got very upset. Bart is seen writing an apology of sorts on the chalkboard in the opening credits of the next episode.

The Big Easy is described as being full of "tacky, overpriced souvenir stores" as well as being "stinking, rotten, vomiting, vile." There were another eight similar adjectives used. In my visits, I can say that those twelve adjectives aren't entirely inaccurate, at least in the French Quarter. In the Quarter it regularly smells like urine and vomit. It just does. It adds to the mystique, the character.

It's still a great town, a historic city with a pulsating feel, even with the strange football arena polluting up the skyline.

Dispatch from the Abyss: OC Fashion Show

If LA is a wasteland, then Orange County is the abyss.

While living in New York, we sampled a wide variety of cultural fruits. Some were more to our liking--Beowulf rock opera of course was a favorite, but Madame Butterfly? Or interpretive dance? Not so much.

Like the Yankee's championship parade or Bourbon Street for Halloween, I can mark a fashion show off the list of cultural fruits, and with the knowledge that that first time would be good for a last time.


Somehow your old pal here, Chef Gonzo, with a little help, convinced the lady handing out lanyard badges (estimated price: $65)(the show was sold out) that he, er, I, was a new internet publicist and should be on the list.

The lady checking names had a hard time finding "Gonzo, Chef", but the other lady just said to skip it, and a third lady handed me a badge. I walked through the throng of women in line, trying to get badges.

Inside I looked around, letting the loud bass thumping through the near empty and mood lit hall reverberate in my skull.

The blue and pink lighting seem to fit. People started to show up, and by people I mean I began to notice a certain overwhelming percentage of the a specific persuasion of people.

This event was the IIDA (International Interior Design Association) Fashion Show and Contest, where (interior) design firms are assigned decades, then let run rampant at a pile of fabric. The idea is the pile of fabric should be used to design an outfit or two from the particular decade.

The firm that had the 70s used one gentleman who knew could rock the stilts.

That was one of the men. There were very few of us. The event was very well attended--about 650 people, 600 were ladies. Maybe ten of us gentleman were straight, and I doubt more than three were single.

Here's a shot of most of the field.

Here's a shot from up above, showing off the crowd and bright light from above.

Not an event that strikes my cultural fancy, but, for the hungry out in the abyss, you could do far, far worse.

An Abandoned Mule Tannery

That's the setting for the background of our first little shared fever dream exploration going on here, an abandoned mule tannery. That a tannery that only tanned the hides of mules would even exist is a good enough joke, since there may have been plenty of mule tanneries throughout time but now it seems a little dated...that's the point here, that's why it would be abandoned. Being dated. That's what we tell ourselves.

But here was an abandoned mule tannery, and a television clown personality was allowed to develop it (meagerly at best) into a dream destination to the hoards of children who lapped up everything this clown produced.

Kamp Krusty is the shoddily put together destination of which I speak, and it is both the name and highlight of the first episode of the fourth season of The Simpsons. Our exploration begins here.

The closest thing to an organized camp I ever went to (that I remember as such) was an afternoon science program at a local planetarium/nature center on Auburn Blvd somewhere.

Here, in the cartoon, is the place that typical kids want to typically go to. The show has on occasion used the end of school/beginning of summer premise for other season openers (or closer in the case of "Summer of 4'2""), but this one has the first Bart day-dreaming the school's destruction. The blank look in his eye in the opening minutes as he, wearing a Rambo-like bandanna, pulls a machine gun from his desk is as classic as it is alarming: mindlessly destructive or limited animation ability?

That blind look is seen again with Homer later on, when he's mowing the lawn. He mows over a toy, the hose, and a roller skate, all the while his eyes are at half-mast. This kills me every time. This is when Bart has brought his grades to his dad, his grades that he's forged in an effort to get to go to Kamp Krusty, as per the deal with the parents.

This scene is important because we have Homer, while being negligent and irresponsible, is not the incredibly stupid character we get in later episodes. Bart brings him the forged grades, all D-'s turned, poorly, into A+'s, and Homer doesn't buy it. He calls his son out for being greedy and not thinking too much of his old man, as it were, but he still decides to let Bart go to the camp, therefore imparting no lesson upon his boy, but getting him out of his own hair for the summer, a selfish act that many American parents can relate to.

Indeed, the parents erupt into champagne toasts and cheers as the leaving bus is finally out of view. The adult humor of the show is soon revealed, as Homer climbs into the shower with Marge after the kids are away. Can you imagine another prime-time television show having the two leading parents sharing a shower in 1992? Also, how many kids would have understood what the acronym means when the bully Kearney, a counselor, tells the kids, "If you don't like your cabin, T.S."

Even a cruel line like "Tell your mom her cookies sucked," again from Kearney, this time after he's eaten all the cookies Marge has sent Bart and Lisa, seems ahead of its time.

What you don't need is someone like me telling you The Simpsons was ahead of its time, but after watching episodes again I see things that explain so much, that show why the show was considered dangerous by conservative wonks and breathtakingly brilliant by intellectual asses like myself. Lisa is trying to ferret out her secret letter of pleas to be rescued, the urgency is filmed with a tense eye. She sneaks the letter to a mustachioed man on horseback. He doesn't leave until she, looking over her shoulder, passes him a flask. Again, this was on prime-time television.

One of my favorite scenes as a kid was when the ringleader is revealed to be Bart, and Homer's belly droops and he loses his newly grown extra two hairs. Don't be the boy, don't be the boy, don't be the boy indeed.

Krusty shows up to the camp and convinces all the kids to give up their occupation, and in exchange, Krusty takes them all to Tijuana. He fucking takes them all to TJ. Prime time television. In 1992.

A quick splash of photographs from their trip show off some of their adventures: Krusty passed out drunk in the street; attending a cockfight; getting tattooed...

I'm not sure this little experiment will work, the whole premise of these posts. Do people want the jokes explained? Is that all I'm really doing? Am I the only person entertained by this kind of tripe?

Who knows...

I'll try again sometime soon...

It was so shiny!

And then I woke up.Was I in China?

Damn it. Sometimes things turn out weird. Like our strange fake mosques filled with lenses.

From this wasteland, I learned about the abyss. After captaining in the abyss for a time, you see the shiny parts are less shiny than the people there tell themselves it is.

At least there was some truth seen speeding by like a fleeting memory, a moment plucked from a cloud, a life's bundle contained in a loud trip to get up and put the milk back in the fridge.

Exhibit A: 120 Episodes

In the five years spanning September 24th, 1992 and September 21st, 1997, there were 120 examples of a fever dream all Americans were having. We learned about ourselves and our country's culture, and that collective fever dream has become part of our identity.

The original purpose of this entire blog was to explore each one of those dreams, every single one of the 120. That will happen, but as they do, a wider examination of this wasteland in which Chef Gonzo finds himself will be taking place. 

I've lived previously in Brooklyn, a separate entity while simultaneously a member of the City of New York. In New York you finally realize that true loneliness can only really happen when you're surrounded by people. Now that Los Angeles--the idea of LA, not literally the city itself--is where I find myself, I think it's fitting that a place where so many people are employed in the creation of artistic endeavors can truly house the cultural wasteland that also exists in the shadows...well, "fitting" may not be the correct word. Think about a coin. In New York one side is being constantly surrounded by people, while the other side is the capacity for deep loneliness. In Los Angeles there's a different coin: artists of all kinds are making a living, probably more artists than at any other time or any other place in the history of the world, but the flipside is that there is a vast cultural wasteland being produced at  the same time, and pop is a driving force. 

Well, we'll see. It's a working hypothesis. Like a journey to find the American dream in a white Caddie going to Vegas. New York isn't all mid-town high-rises, there's also Broad Channel. While Los Angeles-the-idea has beaches, there's also a ton of blight.

Right. So, back to Exhibit A.

9/24/1992 saw the Season 4 premier of The Simpsons, America's hottest new show, and 9/21/1997 saw the Season 9 premier. In between we were given 22 episodes from Seasons 4 and 5, 25 episodes from Seasons 6, 7, and 8, and the 1 episode from Season 9. 22 + 22 + 25 + 25 + 25 + 1 = 120.

The reasons for these specific episodes need further explanation.

The third season marked the end of the production at the Klasky-Csupo animation studio, and the fourth season began their in-house operation at Film Roman, where production is still carried out today. Klasky-Csupo don't really get the recognition that they probably deserve, seeing as how it was their design decisions that gave the Simpsons their trademark skin color (yellow) and Marge's hair (blue). They went on to produce classics like Rugrats and Duckman, but the reasons for Fox changing companies is the meat of a different sandwich.

While the first two episodes of the fourth season of the Simpsons were holdovers from the previous season, they have a flair that fits in well with my agenda, so that worked out well. America in September of 1992 and America in September of 1997 were different and similar in ways that were explained through the interspersed 120 episodes. It's my contention that those 120 episodes are the ones that constitute the heart of what makes people love The Simpsons today, and they are the ones that made the show grow from wonderful heart-felt show with true emotion to transcendental cultural icon.

The first three season established that a show with biting wit and satire could also be full of heart, that animation could be smarter and better and more true than anything else on television. From the fourth season on, we see how they can build on that solid foundation.

The fourth season started, on that late September day, with "Kamp Krusty". A classic considered by many to be among the show's greatest episodes, it delved into parenting, being a kid, the nature of recreation, and mindless shillery.

The ninth season began with one of my favorite episodes, "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson". When it first aired I was in the dorms, watching it with my new pals the day before college started (classes anyway) and I remember being transfixed by a thing, a piece of art that was lots of yellow and moved, and made me laugh until tears ran from my bloodshot eyes. After having lived in Brooklyn for three and a half years I gained a whole new level of love for the episode (and, for that matter, Futurama, a show with more of  a New York sensibility than the producers would want to admit).

Each season has its moments that fans can identify with and remember as warmly as anything short of their own children. Season 4 has the purported "Greatest Simpsons Episode Ever"; season 5 has Bobo and Stampy; season 6 has the Stonecutters and the threat of invading koalas; season 7 has the Hellfish and a big fat dynamo; season 8 has the Beer Baron and Grimey...I could go on and on.

I've read that some people cut-off the greatness of the show at the ninth season. After that, they say, the show relied too heavily on wacky shit, guest star cameos, and various pop-culture references and got away from the character driven story. I don't totally agree with them, but I see their point. I didn't just pick the New York episode because I like the round 120 number (but I do)(that number was kind of a surprise for me).

I love the episode, certainly. The very next week the episode that aired was called "The Principal and the Pauper". In the episode we learn that Skinner, or at least the guy who runs the school under the name Skinner, is actually a former ne'er do well named Armin Tamzarian. This angered many fans and voice talent alike. The show's writers have said that they felt like the show was their creative play-pen, and wanted to shake it up a little. I don't fault them for it, but I do think that episode marks a specific end of an era. Because I don't include more episodes in the 120, I lose "Lisa the Skeptic", one of my favorites, but we still get "Lisa the Iconoclast".

So that's it. LA and The Simpsons...a vast collective fever dream we're all having...

The Meaning of Popular Culture

I once rode in a truck driven by a Maltese double of myself. We used to think he was Sicilian, but we were wrong.

Anyway, we were in trying to find everybody. We thought they'd be up at the cave at Pirate's Cove, but that had been the last weekend.

Or a month before.

But, as it was, we were laughing too hard to keep our eyes open, and had to pull over on the steep downside of the small and broken street.

The Maltese and Irishman in the cab of that truck that late afternoon were about as little effected by pop culture as anybody could be. We were not connected to anything generally "pop", or, should we say, arts and entertainment generally regarded as popular. We were, accurately enough, connected to a bong maybe, a pack of cigarettes and sack of psilocybin also likely to be found in random pockets.

One thing, though, that we may not have ever considered "pop culture" but that an argument to the contrary could be made was a cornerstone of our existence at the time: we scheduled the evening's events around it.

I write of The Simpsons, something we considered literature at the very least.

I'm going to be writing about episodes of the show in this forum. That, and other memories and random experiences I've had that randomly connect to pop culture.