With our eighth episode a number of components clicked into place, so much so that I like to think the first season of ROX truly begins here. The previous seven episodes were just a warm-up. We were dislocated and restless. I had broken up with my girlfriend; J and I had moved in together to an upstairs apartment at 521 N. Washington, an old, tall house covered with sky-blue vinyl siding. Thus, this was our first show that wasn't shot in J's basement at 711 E. Cottage Grove. We didn't know where to shoot the show, and so we ended up shooting all over the place. (J: “That's what she said!”) We shot segments in the attic of our new apartment, and in the kitchen, and in the bathroom, even on the roof — just about everywhere.
The term “family values” was getting a lot of play in the media in the summer of 1992, after Dan Quayle made his famous Murphy Brown speech. John Byers, a local firebrand who worked at the public access television station in Bloomington where ROX first aired, suggested that we do a show on this theme. And we did. This was the first episode we shot in the attic of our new digs, 521 N. Washington. It was a little hot up there in August, but we would return to the attic for about five more shows in the fall. MF ran the camera for us. I think she was still staying with us at that time. There are a few elements of this show that are not properly credited. The breast pump video was dumpstered by Mr. G. The “Family Values Explained” dialog, which may appear to be spontaneous, was actually a reading from Matt Groening's Life in Hell comic strip.
Exactly what's going on in the “Personal Hygiene Episode” (ROX #10) may not be readily evident to the casual viewer. Clearly, we're visiting our friend Mr. G in the hospital. We called him Camera Operator A at the time, and indeed he shoots this entire episode — from his hospital bed. But why is he hospitalized? We never explain this, though Mr. G makes an attempt: “I crashed on my bicycle, and now I'm paralyzed from the chest down.” He's laughing while he says this, which might lead viewers to conclude that he's joking. That's an entirely reasonable conclusion, given that everyone seems to be having a jolly good time. Surely the mood would be a bit grim if our friend had really suffered such a traumatic injury. And yet that's exactly what happened. Mr. G was riding his bicycle on a trail in the woods. He took a bad tumble and severed his spinal cord. He was paralyzed, with little hope of regaining control over the lower half of his body, and he'd been in the hospital for a week or two by the time we made this show. The episode title was Mr. G's idea. In fact, I'm fairly certain that it was Mr. G's idea to make this show in the first place. We were amazed at Mr. G's high spirits, and we thought he must be in denial. But in retrospect, and upon repeated viewings, I've come to realize that making this TV show was a part of the healing process. This was one way for Mr. G to re-assert his identity in the face of major trauma. Because even after all that, Mr. G is still Mr. G. This episode shows that he's still the same good-humored, cantankerous, contrary guy that he was before the accident. This experience taught me something about the redemptive power of art.
The Have Fun Club, of which we were proud members, had organized a “Festival of Fools” for this day. But in truth that organization consisted of little more than the printing of a flyer and a trip to Big Lots for supplies. We had no idea if anyone would show up for the event. Probably not. Luck was on our side, however. By a fortuitous coincidence, the three-day Anarchist Picnic was reaching its climax on that same day. A contingent of freaks arrived from that event and turned our parade into a raging success. It was also lucky in another way. Local videographer Eric White got wind of the event and turned up with camera in hand. I cut his footage together with the stuff I shot, the first of numerous collaborations and the beginning of a friendship that persists to this day. Eric also met Rachel Whang at the parade, the beginning of a relationship that was documented sixty-seven episodes later in ROX #78.
Those cool mirrored shades J's wearing in our “Peace & Justice Special” were actually my prescription sunglasses. Since my eyesight is considerably worse than his, J was totally blind with them on. He was probably on some sort of drug that dilated his pupils. I recall that I had to shoot the interview at the Peace & Justice Center twice because there was no audio on the first attempt. Our visit to the neighbor's house yielded further evidence that people were actually watching the show: We got recognized by a complete stranger for the first time, and we actually caught it on tape.
The entirety of “J&B Unmasked” was taped at 521 North Washington. You can't tell, though, because we cleverly tacked up one of my black bedsheets in the background, to give a suitably spooky Hallowe'en ambiance to the proceedings. J makes reference to an article in the Herald-Times that mentions us. I'm not sure what this might have been. According to my files, the first article mentioning our show appeared in February of 1993 — three and a half months after “Unmasked.” J also mentions that a fan gave him the leather jacket he's wearing. That was just a joke. I think that was my leather jacket, which I got in Sweden. It was pretty filthy. I used to joke that a biker had been killed in it. But it never quite fit properly on my long, long arms.
This may be the least memorable episode in the ROX canon, simply becuz there is so little to distinguish it. It is, as the title implies, not special. We were just getting in the groove of producing programs with themes, and we had made a number of “specials” recently, such as the “Family Values Special” and the “Peace & Justice Special.” We had been planning a special about brewing beer in your own home, but alas, our plans ran afoul of our own stupidity. Indeed, the unquestionable highlight of this program is the clip of J attempting to ride his motorcycle and videotape at the same time. He was not successful, and that was the last footage the camera ever recorded. So the “Not Special Episode” was recorded with a camera from Bloomington's community access television station. Sadly, this camera also had problems, and there is a noticeable problem with the video control track throughout the episode. If we had known about that ahead of time, we probably would have called this the “Technical Difficulties Special.” This episode marks the first appearance of Bitch Booth. It also marks the last appearance of Bitch Booth.
We shot ROX #15, “Congrats to Clinton,” a week before the actual election. We didn't know for sure that he would win, and in fact we interviewed a guest who was sure that Bush the Elder would be victorious. But we knew that the show would not be televised until just after the election, so we spoke boldly, as if we knew what had happened. Of course, we were right, and our Republican guest was wrong. And for the next few months we were happy. Yes, I voted for Clinton in 1992. I even took a video camera into the voting booth with me and recorded myself pushing the button. Have you ever seen someone actually voting on TV? Incidentally, the NWA soundtrack I laid down on top of this video generated almost as many irate calls to the station as any of our more notorious escapades. I had never considered myself a big booster for the Democratic Party. In fact, I voted for Lenora Fulani in 1988. But I guess we got fooled by the Clinton campaign. We believed the hype. As I said, we were happy for the next few months. Bush the Elder was on the way out, and a Democrat was coming into the Oval Office for the first time in my adult life. Just after his inauguration, when Clinton said gays should be allowed in the military, I felt vindicated. I had voted for the right man! Here, surely, was man of conviction, who would stand up for what's right. How silly that sounds now. It was only a matter of days before Clinton caved on the issue of gays in the military, and we got our insipid “don't ask don't tell” policy that stood until Obama finally took corrective action. Over the coming weeks and months, I would gradually lose all respect for Clinton, long before his sexual escapades with Monica Lewinsky came to light. Frankly, I don't care about the man's sex life. It was things like NAFTA that really tore it for me. I came to regret ever voting for Clinton, and in 1996 I wrote in Ralph Nader instead.
: I quit my job as a telemarketer in November of 1992 so I would have more time for sex and drugs. This was the inspiration for ROX #16, which we called “Out of Work, Out of Mind.” I had been working part-time at DialAmerica Marketing for two years. This was a job which I frankly hated, but it was relatively easy for me. I quit with hopes of getting work as a production assistant at the community access televsision station where I was spending a lot of time working on a certain TV show. That didn't happen. In fact, I hardly looked for a job at all. I was too busy having fun. When I ran out of money in January of '93, I went back to DialAmerica and they gave me my job back. All told, I worked there for seven years, off and on. Without this part-time source of income, I would never have been able to devote so much energy to ROX. But I didn't know any of this when we shot ROX #16. I was more concerned with getting J to improve the quality of his drinks, which were sucking pretty badly. To that end, I checked a recipe book out of the library, from which tome the three orange-flavored drinks in this episode are drawn. J spilled liquor on it, naturally. But the drinks were quite good. There's little rancor here. We did not dwell on the miasma of misery that is the telemarketing industry. That seems amazing to me in retrospect. I suppose we were not as bitter then as we are now. Years later, word of this particular episode got back to my branch manager. He called me into his office and asked what it was all about. I told him quite honestly that there was nothing critical of DialAmerica in the show, and he was satisfied with that. Also of note in this episode are a lot of firsts: Our first real fan letter. The first edition of “J&B's Video Erotica.” And the very first appearence of TBlack, here credited simply as T.
This episode is not the finest in the J&B on the Rox series. In fact, it could be the most embarrassing. Oh, there are a few moments of clever repartee, a little bit of Bloomington contextualization that reminds us of the place and time in which the episode was made. But there are shortcomings galore herein. Conceptually, the show is lacking. It's basically just us hosts sitting in our new attic, yammering about what we're thankful for.
The chill of the impending Indiana winter drove us out of the attic. We performed our hosting duties for ROX #19, “Cold Weather Tips,” in our apartment proper, where we would remain for the rest of our first season. I hate and fear cold weather. This show was a coping mechanism for me.
Back in the day, we didn't really like mixed drinks. It was just a routine, a concept for our little TV show. When the cameras were off, we preferred beer, if we drank at all. But, being naive kids, we didn't really know jack about beer, or anything else for that matter. So we invited our friend Russ to school us and our viewers in an episode dedicated entirely to beer. (Just a few weeks before, we'd been set to do a show about homebrewing with Russ, but J dropped the camera from his motorcycle on the way...) You have to give Russ credit. He did his best. He suffered through our tomfoolery with considerable grace, and made a game effort to explain the finer points of our favorite beverage. Besides the pathetically bad lighting up there in the attic, this show is marred by some sort of rolling horizontal glitch in the video. The weird transitions in this program seem sort of random at first — video games and noise — but then they turn into scenes from the bowling alley. You might think this was a clever juxtaposition on my part. After all, what goes better with beer than bowling? However, I assure you that this was a complete coincidence. The transitional material was entirely random. It was simply what we had on hand, the stuff we'd videotaped that week. You can't really tell, but I was so stoned at the end of this episode that I felt ill. Don't do drugs, kids; it's not worth it.
“J&B's Holiday-Type Festivity,” was conceived as a present for my cousin John Edwards. I had drawn John's name in my family's Christmas lottery. But I didn't really know what to get him. I didn't really know him that well, as he lived on the other side of the country. So we hosted a Christmas party, made a TV show out of it, and I sent him a tape as a gift. I'm not sure what John thought of the show. I refer to him a couple of times in the course of this show as a “long-haired hippie freak.” That was probably not the best choice of words. Cousin John did have long hair at the time, but I really don't know him well enough to say whether or not he is now, or ever has been, at any time, a “hippie freak.” But as far as I'm concerned, “hippie freak” is actually a compliment, not an insult. Also of note in this episode: After six months of more or less blatantly begging our viewers for a bottle of J&B Scotch, we actually got three bottles for Christmas that year!
We decided to celebrate “Our 21st Birthday” with our first retrospective. This is mostly a clip show, featuring excerpts from the first 20 episodes. You could call them highlights, except that that would imply some kind of excellence or standard of quality. Perhaps it would be better to call them lowlights. We did wrap it all up in a new package, though, with hosting segments to introduce the clips. I'm nearly naked at the beginning because I just got out of the shower. I think it's odd that there are no clips from a quarter of the episodes we'd already produced. ROX #19, ROX #17, ROX #16 and ROX #12 are conspicuous by their absence. Maybe we realized how badly they sucked. But I can't understand how we omitted ROX #11, “A Festival of Fools,” which was surely one of the coolest things we'd caught on tape. Who ran camera for this show? No specific credit is given. Whoever it was, he or she was very quiet. Usually our camera operators end up in the show themselves.
ROX #22 was a rather unremarkable episode. We had a bunch of male friends over for a “Boyz Nite In” of drinking, bullshitting and ball-scratching. Eventually we cajoled them into moving a couch up into our attic for us. Ho hum. But there was one short segment that would draw far more attention than the surrounding show. It was just 25 seconds long, but the controversy would last for months. We had begun to feature a weekly segment called “J&B's Video Erotica,” little snippets of video that usually weren't very erotic at all but had some sexual connection. For “Boyz Nite In” we showed a close-up of a fig. (The fig clip came from “Pots, Pans & Pot,” another show on our public access channel, which was about to engender its own share of controversy. But that's another story.) No, the fig segment did not get us into trouble. It was our introduction to the fig that attracted the attention of the station director. We thought that “J&B's Video Erotica” needed a special title sequence. So J & I dropped our drawers and wrote our initials on our dicks. Then we stood up close to the camera and superimposed the rest of the title. So the ultimate effect was to see “J&B's Video Erotica” with the letters “J” and “B” written on the heads of two flaccid phalluses. Oh, did I mention that we were flaccid? You didn't think we were aroused, did you? Sorry, it wasn't a sex game. We're just a couple of straight guys who happen to be comfortable with our bodies. (Hell, I'm so comfortable with my body that I got arrested for running across campus naked. But that, too, is another story.) We thought it was funny. But Michael White, director of our public access television channel, thought it was a violation of station policy and probably the law. We did wrap it all up in a new package, though, with hosting segments to introduce the clips. I'm nearly naked at the beginning because I just got out of the shower. I think it's odd that there are no clips from a qu
It may seem hard to believe, but we actually did a good deal of planning and preparation for the earliest episodes of ROX. We brainstormed topics to discuss on the show, mapping out the flow of ideas that would carry us from beginning to end. We did research to get statistics and quotes. A trip to the library was usually in order, at the very least. This was before the web had become a ubiquitous, remember. But as our first season went on, the rigors of our weekly production schedule began to catch up with us, and we were finding it harder to prepare for each epsiode. We simply couldn't find the time. From week to week, we were planning a bit less and winging it bit more. Come “Sunday Morning,” our 23rd episode, we were completely unprepared. So here was our first show that was (almost) entirely improvised. We really had no more idea in our heads than the title implies. It was Sunday, and we had friends over for breakfast. J cooked up some of his very special home fries; the secret ingredient is hinted at obliquely in the show. (Perhaps it's just me, but I think the entire episode has a slightly psychedelic flavor.) We made the program up as we went along. What happened, happened. In retrospect, the finished product may not be a stunning artistic achievement, but for us, it was another minor revelation in just how much could be improvised out of so little. TBlack's monologue on cheese puffs still stands out in my mind as an achievement. By simple editing, I gave his observations a deliberate, dramatic edge that uncut footage would have lacked. I think that it was as much of a revelation for T as it was for me.
ROX #23 may have been largely improvised, but ROX #24 was the only show in the whole series that was entirely scripted. For the most part, we don't use scripts at all. If it sounds like we're just making this up as we go along, that's becuz we are. But for “A Badly Dubbed Foreign Film,” we came up with a different concept. While J and I sat in front of the camera, TBlack and Eric White sat behind the camera and read our lines for us. We tried to mouth along to the words. Of course we were way, way off. Our lips didn't match the words at all. This made it appear as if we were in a badly dubbed foreign film. Thus, the title. I wrote the script, so J had absolutely no idea what was coming next. This entire episode was shot in one evening at Mr. G's apartment. Mr. G also worked the camera. In fact, he's presented here as Camera Operator A. We didn't call him Mr. G until he started teaching. The lighting is uniformly atrocious throughout. Eric brought some clip-on incandescent lights, but nevertheless the whole program is dim, grainy and yellow — exactly the effect we were going for. Even though we never left the apartment, we did feature three short “foreign films” to break up the monotony. (I use scare quotes because these films were neither foreign nor, technically, films — Two were shot on video.)
Much of this episode is concerned with the defrosting of our freezer. This reflects a minor revelation, expanding upon the epiphanies of ROX #23: We realized that the mundane minutiæ of our quotidian lives could serve as subject matter for our television show. And at the same time, making a TV show transformed these otherwise banal tasks into more festive endeavors. In other words, art could make life interesting. At least it made things more interesting to us! But judging by the steadily increasing amount of viewer mail we were receiving, it was interesting to others too. I think it was around this time that I began to feel like I was on television all the time, whether the camera was rolling or not. That sounds frightening, but it was actually a euphoric sensation. Speaking of euphoric sensations, J makes a cryptic comment midway through this show: “Everyday now for the past three weeks, I've had this same kind of sandwich... For all those who know me well, you know that this really means a lot to me; and when I say three weeks in a row now, you know what I mean.” This opaque statement becomes a little clearer if you know our secret lingo. Back in the day we used “sandwich” as a code word when arranging drug deals on the phone. And I think that gives a good indication of where our heads were at then.
My notes indicate that ROX #26, “J&B Get Sick,” was originally 43 minutes long, back when it was first aired in February of '93. I did a re-edit and chopped it down to 26 minutes at some later date. Thus the re-edited version is 61% of its original length. But why? Was I just bored? Was I trapped in the editing booth with nothing else to occupy me? Why this particular episode, anyhow? (I can think of others that were more deserving.) And what was in those 17 minutes that got cut? I just don't know. I can't remember. Damn. But it is hard to imagine what the pace of this episode must have been like before the reduction. Note that the re-edit was not performed from the original source tapes. Apparently I just cut the new version together from the old VHS master, losing another generation in the process. This accounts for the exceedingly grainy video. This episode documents the beginnings of a deluge of mail which we received regarding the censorship issue, yet we don't make it entirely clear what people were writing about. They were referring to ROX #22, “Boyz Nite In,” which was held back from public view for several weeks while it was being reviewed for content.
The title of ROX #27 is a reference to that icon of pop culture, Andy Warhol. Unfortunately, we got it wrong. The famous quote is, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” We inadventently reduced that to a mere “Fifteen Seconds of Fame.” Yet, somehow, that seems appropriate to the ever-accelerating pace of life in the information age. I think Andy would have approved.
ROX #28 is my nominee for Most Embarrassing Episode. Yet the reason is not abundantly clear unless you pay really close attention. The show itself is not notably worse than any of the other crap we've produced. But we called this “The Great Midwestern Watershed” because we were beginning our plan for expansion. Starting with this episode, ROX would no longer be a local show. Instead, it was now to be a regional program, seen on public access stations throughout the Midwest. I was confident enough in this plan that I can be heard to boast, “This is the first time that J&B on the ROX, the program that you're watching now, is being seen all across the Midwest, as opposed to just in Bloomington, Indiana.” The embarrassing part is that it didn't happen. Distribution is a bitch, man! Frankly, we were too busy making our weekly show on a shoestring to commit the necessary resources to getting our program out to all those stations. But at the time of the “Watershed” we were full of confidence in our own abilities. What paltry waifs are mortals such as we! Eventually, of course, we did get ROX out of the local market, onto cable access in Indianapolis and then onto approximately 65 cities via FreeSpeech TV, not to mention the whole damn world via internet and satellite. But that was years later. Nevertheless, from this point on, we began producing our shows with an eye to a larger audience. So this program was a watershed of sorts, after all.
The title of this episode still cracks me up. “Our Drinking Problem.” We'd made enough of these shows now that we were making fun of our own image. In-jokes are always the best. The joke here, of course, is that our real drinking problem was not liquor but coffee. Midway through the episode, J opens a packet from Tom Flynn that makes reference to “that stunt at the mall.” Oops, J decides it's not wise to discuss that on the air. But I suppose that now it can be revealed. Back in 1992, we attended several meetings of a group called the Have Fun Club, as did Tom Flynn. Among the activities discussed by these neo-Situationists was the idea of staging a faux disaster at the local shopping mall. Imagine people in lab coats or biohazard suits with wildly clicking Geiger counters and you begin to get the idea. This was years before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I'm sure you could be arrested for even thinking about such a stunt today. In any event, we never staged the event. There's another in-joke buried at the very end of this bloated monster of a show. I'd observed that J's favorite coffee mug had a number of codes written on the bottom by the artist who made it, presumably serial numbers or glazes or something technical. I copied these codes onto the bottom of my mass-manufactured mug. I don't know what J made of this, but I thought it was hilarious.
ROX first ventured forth from the city limits of Bloomington in ROX #30. That's when J roadtripped down to Lexington, Kentucky, to visit his brother Alan, a.k.a. Anal, who also paid us a visit in Bloomington. That's why we called the show “Funky Young Siblings of the Midwestern Hemisphere.” In this episode, amidst tattooing and head-shaving, J agonizes at length about what it means to drink “responsibly.” These musings were prompted by a stern reproach from our mutually beloved anthropology professor, Dr. Martha “Bonnie” Kendall. Our public image as degenerate drunkards had crystallized by this point, and we were feeling a little defensive. I didn't go to Lexington with J. Instead, Xy and I visited one of the local quarries. I believe this was the first of Xy's tour guide segments. She was actually working as a tour guide at the HT at the time, so it seemed like a natural. She and I had an amorous encounter there amongst the limestone pits, which we also videotaped. That did not make it on television, however. So you see, we did have some sense of modesty after all.
Somewhere in the middle of “A Toast to Poverty,” the program takes a random detour from the ostensible topic, wandering through a slightly off-kilter Easter Sunday party before eventually finding its way back to the serious matter of poverty. It seems random and bizarre, and it transforms the show from a diatribe about social inequities into a celebration of life. You may wonder where I found the inspiration for this bold editing decision. The truth is that it was a strategy born of desperation. Midway through editing this show, I misplaced one of the tapes. We were on a tight production schedule, so I grabbed the nearest interesting stuff I could find and put it in the program, even though it didn't make any sense. By the time my next scheduled edit session rolled around, I had found the missing tape, so I was able to get the program back on track, and it seemed to me that the weird shift of focus was more of a strength than a weakness. Add some weird effects and references to LSD, and the whole thing started to seem downright psychedelic. The Indiana Film and Video Society seemed to like it too. “A Toast to Poverty” won both Best of Show and Best of Category awards in the 1993 Indiana Film and Video Competition.
I have to wonder what was going through my mind, or through the minds of any of the ROX crew, when we made this episode. I recall clearly the concept for this show: It was to be the announcement, from me to my parents, of my engagement to Xy. And in fact, that's what we did. We made this show, then Xy and I drove out to my parents' house one day and showed it to them. It was the first episode of ROX they'd ever seen, and the first they'd heard of our impending marriage. My parents are not the most liberal people in the world. Some might call them downright conservative. (In reality, they're not very political at all.) So why would I think this was a good way to communicate with them? The mere fact that J says “fuck” a couple of times, and I didn't edit it out, speaks volumes about my weird relationship with my parents at that time. And then there's the moment when Xy says, “I'm very religious, and I like to masturbate frequently.” That captures Xy's character perfectly, of course, the imp of the perverse urging her to say the most inappropriate thing possible — a trait she shared with J, incidentally. But the video for this segment is blocked out with a graphic that says “Self-censored for our own protection.” There's a story behind that. In the original video, Xy rubbed her crotch quite graphically when she referenced masturbation. We were actually on our way to see my parents when we thought better of this particular segment and decided it might be too much for their tender sensibilities. I stopped into Bloomington's community access television station and took advantage of a vacant editing station to replace the video with the “Self-censored” graphic while Xy waited. Then we piled back into the car and headed to my parents' house. I must have known that this show would offend them. And I think it's safe to say that it did. They never watched ROX again, even though they would hear plenty about it in the media over the course of the next two ye
The first episode of ROX was taped on June 1st, 1992, in the basement of 711 East Cottage Grove in Bloomington, Indiana. ROX first appeared on television just over one month later, on July 7th, 1992, on Bloomington's community access television station. We had a party to celebrate, over at our friend Wyatt's house. He was the only person we know who had cable! J and I sold tickets for it, to cover the cost of the drinks, which we made and served to our audience of 14 or so as the program aired. It was a synchronized performance, and we had to hustle to pull it off. Didn't even get a chance to watch the show ourselves.
This episode begins with a correction of sorts. How appropriate, that the first episode of ROX contained an error. How strange, that we would bother correcting it. Were we thinking that people were checking us against the AP style manual and the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Bartender's Black Book? Apparently so. Self-fascination has never been in short supply whenever B and I took stage in front of a vid-cam lens. This episode of ROX was one of the last pre-planned episodes in the entire series. Not pre-planned in the sense that it was scripted, exactly. Rather, we tried to follow an outline of discussion topics which I, J, sketched out in advance. However, it's still pretty much improvised. That's my excuse for the line in which I make reference to looking like a “fuckin' fairy.” It was a mistake, an eggregious error resulting from failed irony. Back then, I had this conceit — or this fault of character, if that's your preferred interpretation — whereby I occasionally made statements that were in direct opposition to political correctness. I myself knew these were not statements that were well-advised. That's why I made them. Trouble was, as a modern-day viewing of this episode demonstrates, those ironic statements did not necessarily come across as ironic. What else is noteworthy here? Well, Ed the Meat Poet makes a guest appearance, sort of. I promise a debate of the merits of Batman in the next episode — a promise which I fail to keep. There is an abundance of demographic information comparing Bloomington, New York City, and the Yukon, which was likely inaccurate at the time, and is in any event completely useless and irrelevant today. And there's Conception Corner, in which we manage to spew actual sperm on television. All in all, this episode is only worth watching for the improvised poem between myself and B, somewhere later in the episode after we're already quite drunk. Fortunately, that brief sequence is one of the shining moments of R
As is the case with several of these earliest episodes, this one packs plenty of portent for the future of ROX. We can only ponder in wonder the humble beginnings of the “potable” theme in ROX, as discovered here. “I thought you were mispronouncing something,” I say when B asks me if I know the word 'potable.' I meant it back then: I didn't know the word. Ironically, I would later come to be known as the potable guy. Frat-boys would stop me at the bar, say something about drinking or alcohol, and inevitably conclude their blabber with some variation on the phrase: “it's potable!” This word, so new to me back in the early 90s, will hover over my head til my dying day. Not that I mind. It's better than words like “pervert” or “sex-offender.” There is other foreshadowing to future themes here. B makes reference to being “a slave to the bean” — a topic we explore in-depth two years later in ROX #74, “Slaves to the Bean.” And Kellie says something so eerily appropriate it should probably be struck from the record: “You guys could become very famous talk-show hosts (or) end up doing this until you're like 80.” Needless to say, we're on the end-up-doing-it-til-you're-like-80 track.
This is surely, or at least hopefully, the worst episode in the entire series of J&B on the Rox. It is worth watching only so that you can feel better about yourself: That you know deep in your heart that you could do better, even if you were drunk. One of the primary culprits in this travesty of videography was the fact that we attempted to tech-up, using lavalier mics instead of the camera's built-in mic. Trouble was, we kept forgetting to pin those mics on our chests, leading to long segments of video that did not make the cut due to technical difficulties. What was left is technically okay, at least by the standards of that time given our resources. But content-wise, it's astonishingly empty. This episode does boast an array of guests, which is a good thing. It boasts an array of topics, which in this case is a bad thing, since we barely brush the surface of the topics we confront. All in all, this was an episode that suffered from poor planning, poor execution, and poor coping when things went sour. Viewers who had happened on all of the episodes up til this one perhaps gained some hope from my line late in the show: “Almost anything can happen — look what happened with Jesus.” Still, this is a god-awful mess. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
This fifth episode of the series starts out embarrassing, and turns eventually to shit. The result was, for this young series, a surprising eruption of controversy that may have had more to do with the long-term sustenance of the series than anyone else ever realized. Looking back on this episode these years later, I am most immediately shocked and embarrassed by my clothing — those horrid pinstripe shorts, that inexcusable purple shirt. Egads. Fortunately, other embarrassments divert the focus. Unfortunately, many of those embarrassments are, once again, personal. Some are funny, at least to me: my response when Editor B asks me to use the word 'assiduous' in a sentence, for example. Some are just painful: see my reading from the play, “Rum & Coke.” And then there is Copraphagia Corner. Here we attempted to show a picture that my roommate downloaded from the Indiana University vax server, which depicted a woman shitting directly into a man's mouth. Somehow, we innocently (naively? stupidly?) didn't think there'd be a problem showing this. But there was, and at the last minute Editor B had to go to the station and black out the segment. He also ran an on-screen notice, stating that the censorship was by order of the Monroe County Public Library. Later, we would run into other censorship problems which were much closer to the grey line that separates free speech from indecency. Here we were way, way over the line. Of course, if you look around the Web, you can easily find an abundance of free pics that are much more detailed and graphic than the crappy, black-and-white printout of a crappy scanned image that we waved around in front of a camera those years ago.
Kris, aka MKM, was my girlfriend for about two years, from the summer of '90 to the summer of '92. That's when she headed off to grad school in Tucson. She was going to establish herself there, and I was going to follow along in January. It didn't work out that way. In early June, shortly after the premiere of ROX #1, we had a talk. She was planning to write me a “Dear John” letter once she got out to the Southwest. She felt we were incompatible. I was stunned. We were still on amicable terms, though, and I think that's evident in our farewell tribute, ROX #6. At the time of the taping, we didn't know what the future held for us. I edited this show on the same day she left. In the end, we decided to stay apart. We communicate infrequently, and count each other as friends, but I think we both agree that the separation was for the best. Indeed, it occurs to me that if I had moved to Tucson, this television series would have aborted midway through the first season. J&B would never have gone on to fame and fortune, and I would almost certainly not be writing this now. Astute viewers will note that J says ROX #6 is a farewell “in two ways,” but he never explains: He was getting ready to move out of 711 East Cottage Grove, and we thought this would be the last show shot there. But we were wrong.
We hadn't planned on doing another show in the basement of 711 E. Cottage Grove. J's lease was almost up, and we were set to move into our new apartment in a week or so. But then Mike showed up, passing through Bloomington again after a couple of years in Eastern Europe. He brought some amazingly weird self-made musical instruments with him, and it just seemed like an opportunity that was too good to miss. So, on a sweltering August night, we cranked out one last episode in the basement. But what a strange episode it was, completely unlike anything else in the ROX series. Mike was doing a lot of stuff with feedback at the time, both audio and video. The swirling pattern used as a transitional motif throughout this episode is from his video, “Squared Circle.” It may look like some sort of computer-generated fractal, but it's actually feedback, created by pointing the camera at the screen and feeding the signal back into itself. In editing this show, I followed Mike's example and emulated his aesthetic. I made two dubs of the orignal source videotape and mixed them together, then took the mix tape and remixed it with one of the dubs, and so on. The show starts out normal but gets progressively weirder and more highly processed as it goes on. Incidentally, this was the first episode of ROX which was explicitly titled. (I invented titles for the first six after the fact.) But I got the episode number wrong; the show bills itself as #8 but it was actually the seventh show.