Opening Day

My boyhood friend Cinco Paul and his writing partner Ken Daurio ("Bubble Boy," "Santa Clause 2,") started a blog last week: cincoandken@blogspot.com. It was their emergence online that brought me here from my lonely outpost at LiveJournal, in part as a reason to keep track of Cinco without having to hunt up his e-mail address every time something was up. So it was quite nice to receive a response to the reprinting of my TV.com submission (one of five) regarding the most recent episode of "The West Wing." That post prompted one response, from pal Cinco, wishing me well but adding he'd never seen "The West Wing."

Okay, Cinco. Since you and daughter Alex have apparently been the only two visitors these first few days, since I'm feeling like I opened the Houston cyber version of Babboo's Restaurant in "Seinfeld" (and wasn't Babboo Mr. Ice-Cream-and-Curry in "Bubble Boy"?) allow me to treat you to a musing on a topic we both love: baseball.

Yeah, kidding, Cinc'. Your indifference for baseball was always a disappointment to me, but I accepted it under the doctrine of no disputing taste. You always liked football plenty--even more in recent years, when you discovered Fantasy Football and dragged me in, to the point that when the Houston Texans signed that fellow Jay Putzier as a tight end last month, I not only said, "I know that guy"; I not only said, "I know that guy's stats" (FOOTBALL stats? Sheesh!); I said, "Hey, I remember when someone took Putzier in my online draft, I wondered in the chat room if there was a 'Putziest,' and someone shot me back an 'lol,' which was cool, 'cause I usually get a '?'."

So football, fine.

But come on: Opening Day.

There are two questions people are often asked, to which I have ready-made answers. To the question, "What is your favorite joke?" I tell the one about the Irishman pulled over by the Officer Malloy on his way home from the bar. To the question, "If you could pass any law, what would it be?", I answer, "Opening Day of the baseball season. National holiday."

In any case, as long as I can manage, Opening Day will be MY national holiday, even if (as with this year) the home game in question is a night game, thus necessitating no absence from work. My home team, the Houston Astros, played at 6:05 tonight, but I took off the entire day. All afternoon, in anticipation of my drive out to Minute Maid Park (Enron Field as was), and the raising of the 2005 National League Pennant,
I had one game after another on TV, so many that they blended together like so many bowl games on New Year's Day--entirely appropriate. A few games were fabulous--Mets v. Nats comes to mind, a 3-2 nail-biter with the potential tying run thrown out at the plate--but the sight and sound of the games in my living room, my bedroom, my den, accomplish the same task MTV a few decades ago did in the summer months I was home for college: provide carpeting for the air, something to listen to and only occasionally draw my interest.

Cinco will remember what I'll write next. The complaints about MTV's tiresomeness are at least a decade-and-a-half old, dating from when the dominant fixture on the network stopped being videos and started being "The Real World" and its offspring. The complaints are so old they themselves have become tiresome, and they ignore a certain reality: that MTV's first phase, starting with its debut in 1981, lasted until 1986, when front-line performers stopped doing four or five videos (or, in the case of Billy Joel, seven or eight videos) per album--and in some cases, none at all. The genre itself seemed exhausted. Really, how many white horses could wander through darkened cities? How many mirrors could be shattered? How many second-line celebrities could do cameos, and inspire us not to say, "Hey, that's Joe Piscopo!", but rather, "Hey! We're supposed to say, 'Hey, that's Joe Piscopo!'" ("Keepin' the Faith," anyone?) In desperation, MTV was driven to screen old "Monkees" episodes, and the news that reruns of Davey and the gang had become the most popular part of the MTV viewers' day was deemed not good news at all. The network trying packagin videos in theme shows ("One-Hit Wonders," which allowed us another look at Flock of Seagulls) but really, was in serious danger of becoming yesterday's news.

The network-as-videos enjoyed a partial renaissance in 1989-90, boosted by a cluster of videos by a pair of comebacks (Aerosmith and the B-52s) and a new generation of younger artists (Michael Penn's "No Faith" is perhaps the exemplar). However, an already conscious choice had been made, to move from videos and into programming. Thus the most famous moment in the history of the network (ultimately more memorable than Live Aid) was the moment when Puck was kicked out of the "Real World" San Francisco house--a moment, I believe, that led us to elimination-style reality TV, "Survivor" and its offspring: one Puck, every week!

But never mind that. For a brief few years in the 80s, there was no need to schedule to watch what was on MTV. It was, like radio, simply there to be listened to. You came home, you turned in on, and music came out--much music, at least for someone growing up in Phoenix, that was months ahead of what was played on the local FM stations. The audio portion of the network was deemed so important that celebrities (Phil Collins stands out) were recruited (and, one assumes, paid) to shill for some hook-up that would run the sound of the network through the viewers' stereo amplifiers. You're of a certain age if you remember this catchphrase:

"MTV. Are you listening to it . . . . in stereo?"

Nowadays, it is laughable to think of stereo sound in conjunction with Juanita's drunken blackouts on "Real World: Hawaii." Who on earth would care? MTV has become WE or SciFi or . . . yeah, here's where I stopped.