More local TV adventures

Seen so far on Channel 3:

Saturday afternoon: Firebrand preacher thundering the Good News (I assume) in Portuguese to muttering audience; I've seen this guy or someone like him work his magic at the church at the corner of Beech St and Mass Ave, when I've walked past it at night.

Saturday primetime: Video loop of text community bulletins, set to static-filled audio of a rock music station.

Sunday early afternoon: The bulletins again, except set to audio of a sports call-in show.

So I guess I won't have any problems vying for a timeslot.

OK, because I am backwards boy, I just now asked Google for a schedule, and see that it reads a little like a parody of a community-access TV schedule, with titles like "Bitchin' about the Movies" and "Atheist Viewpoint" interlaced with repeated showings of "SCAT Loop Tape". Also lots of religious shows, shows in Portuguese, and religious shows in Portuguese. (Somerville has a significant Brazilian community, if you're wondering.) I've set up my TiVo to record a variety of the English-language shows this week; looking forward to seeing the result.

(Link-filled schedule of repeating series also available. Presence of "F'N Card Night" noted; curious to see what that's about. I don't expect a huge amount of conflict with my ideas.)

(Also, it's hard to TiVo these shows, since TiVo thinks that Channel 3 broadcasts only one daily, 24-hour-long show titled "Local Origination", requiring me to painstakingly punch in manual times for all the programs. This is an error-prone activity since I don't know how long most of them are. So of course I wonder whether the TiVo people are interested in community TV stations' schedules, and if so, the format and channel through which they receive them. Now that I'm a member of the station, it might be a fun volunteer project. I'll look for some relevant email address to start this. Cool!)

You know what the music means.

Saw Jon Katz with colorwheel this afternoon at Jimmy Tingle's in Davis Square (where he'll continue to perform for the next three Sundays). An enjoyable but strange show, a semi-improvised mix of stand-up, multimedia performance, and biographical monologue. (Though more like biographical Socratic dialogue, since he brought a sidekick.) The most prevalent topics were his personal histories with both Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist -- which everyone associates him with -- and MS -- which, I'm guessing, few associate him with; I didn't know before tonight that he was diagnosed with it a couple of years after the show started. His sense of humor is as dark and self-effacing in person as you might imagine from watching him on TV, and he made it all work.

Joining Katz on-stage was Tom Snyder, the producer of Dr. Katz and related shows, the inventor of "Squigglevision", and not the guy I thought he was. That is, for the last ten years I had seen Snyder's name in the end credits of all these cartoons and had no reason not to think that he was the late-night talk show host named Tom Snyder; I had just assumed (though I never watched his show) that the fellow had a love for quirky animation and invested in it. But nope; totally different guy. This Snyder is a local boy, a teacher and computer programmer who published educational software tools in the 1980s and came up with his trademark not-quite-animated animation style on the side. He invited Katz to help him make a demo reel with it after seeing him do stand-up in a movie. Gutsy, cold-calling a guy you saw in a Hollywood film and asking if he wants to come over and help with a project... and having it work! I'll have to remember that one...

Katz occasionally launched into a dialogue with the recorded voices of "Ben" and "Laura" from Dr. Katz (over a prop telephone and intercom, respectively), and at one point a patient came to visit in person -- Bill Braudis, the old show's sole staff writer and now a local resident and writer for O'Grady, one of the more recent Snyder shows. (He sat against a projected backdrop of a squiggly couch, which I appreciated.) His session with the doc was mostly a medley of his own old bits from the show. (On his father quitting smoking: "He tried that alternative therapy, with all the needles, whaddayacall... oh yeah, heroin.") It was a little weird when he mentioned he'd been with his wife for 12 years and you knew that as originally aired the line was something like "two years". The ensuing jokes about his ex-gfs surely seemed a little less irrelevant at the time. Though they were still funny either way.

Though they had a script, the show had a real making-it-up-as-they-went feel, assisted by the... unpolished production values. The lighting would fluctuate uncertainly and was often poorly aimed (lots of spotlights that cut off halfway up faces), while the multimedia stuff frequently slipped out of sync with whatever the guys were talking about. (I think that Snyder himself was actually trying to control that portion of things with a laptop propped behind his piano, but I'm not certain.) But somehow this increased the charm of the whole, homey mess. If they were trying to put on any airs of organization within their material in the first place, it would have been a different matter.