Clip My Coupon
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television CLIP MY COUPON BY MARVIN KITMAN Ihaven't been appearing regularly in these pages over the past few years (pedants would say I haven't been appearing at all). So I think I owe...
...I don't mean to boast, but in a mere two decades I moved beyond literacy...
...For all 12 of you special New Leader readers who missed me and need a Kitman fix, here is my coupon for you: Bonus Gift-Givinng Offer: Order now and get a second copy at half off the regular price...
...The book I wrote was about sex, violence, drugs, and rock'n'-roll...
...Bill Moyers:" Saying good things about Marvin Kitman, I feel like the Czar praising the Bolsheviks...
...Then smaller ears, like corn kernels...
...Yes, the man who used to play with the Izzie Gillespie Band...
...There has been a rumor that I ran off to Hollywood and was sitting around my swimming pool writing sitcoms and funny speeches for Brandon Tartik off...
...I told the sordid but true story of what seeing all the sex and violence on television did to one man...
...You'd wake up every night screaming...
...Next comes enlarged eyeballs (the size of cantaloupes, Fred Allen predicted, to go with brains the size of peas...
...My spelling suffered...
...When I realized that I was amachine, I understood why the sum of my life was being stored as bits and snatches of television on cassettes in my mind...
...The safest way for a government to hide its nuclear bomb secrets would be to publish them in a Random House book...
...I took a sabbatical to write what was to be a seminal work in American cultural history, titled I Am A VCR (Random House, $17.95, 377 pp...
...Can you sit through an entire movie without commercials...
...But I remembered a lot of things I never dreamed possible...
...And the good news is that we are having an" Everything Must Go Basement Sale...
...My comprehension of numbers declined...
...I've been reading War and Peace since 1967...
...I tried to get the publisher to do something radical, like advertise...
...Now I had gone to circular reasoning, or TV reasoning...
...So long as he leaves me alone, so long as he is cutting up somebody else, I have no objection...
...As you know, publishers usually burn extra copies of their cultural treasures...
...David Brinkley:" Marvinis...
...Norman Mailer wrote a whole book called Advertisements for Myself...
...Youmaynothaveheardofthemajor event of the 1989 literary season, because the publisher decided to keep it secret...
...I put that in at my kids' suggestion to help sales...
...Before coming to The New Leader, I thought in a linear fashion: I moved from idea A to idea ? in a straight line...
...Can you imagine actually getting paid to watch TV...
...We sell as many as two or three books a month...
...It gives you an open mind...
...Lying there in East Hampton, I realized that in the 20 years on the job my brain had mutated...
...I was a truly audiovisual person...
...It was not simply that I cared who shot J.R., or whether a great actress like Joan Collins should have posed nude in Playboy...
...Just buy the book...
...John Cleese:" Marvin is the most enchanting creature in the cosmos (bar two, both of whose names I am not prepared to reveal...
...We are all half-sleeping giants who are going to explode, or implode, from watching the tube...
...Little did I know that it would change my whole life...
...It can't hurt...
...Fortunately, I have managed to locate a supply of the rare volume...
...And I want to give my patient, faithful NL readers a chance to join the movement...
...That was flattering...
...Try to envision remembering the plots of Growing Pains or Who's the Boss...
...The New Leader's rates were too high, apparently...
...We are what we see on TV, as Descartes might have said if he had the foresight to imagine the invention of TV...
...In other words, it was autobiographical...
...So now you have a chance to take one of these poor, homeless hardbounds into your library—and to save my marriage as well as a cultural treasure...
...It also told the exciting story of how TV manages to take a trashy novel and, by spending a mere $ 10 million, tum it into a trashy miniseries: the Judith Krantz saga...
...This was a defense mechanism...
...heresponded...
...If you asked me to spell" relief," I answered R-O-L-A-I-D-S...
...The way I thought had changed...
...It is the slowest growing cult in literary history...
...Christopher Isherwood had written, "I am a camera...
...The reason I'm telling you all of this now is that I Am A VCR did not sell as well as it should have...
...My cache of I Am A VCR is safe in my cellar...
...I don't want to alarm anybody, but have you considered that you may also have mutated from watching TV in the closet, as used to be done in the 1970s, and afterward out in the open...
...But I am a VCR...
...But I digress...
...Read this book...
...Anyway, I'm out of space...
...I now have the largest collection oil Am A VCR in northern New Jersey...
...and Jane Austen...
...Should Rona Barrett be declared legally inane...
...Money-Back Guarantee: If you're not completely satisfied with the book, simply return it for a full refund...
...it'scheaper to destroy books than to have them occupy expensive warehouse space...
...One ad would bring Sy Newhouse to his knees financially...
...For example, I used to read a lot, but soon I was only doing that during commercials...
...I knew the words of the Crazy Eddie and Fred the Furrier commercials, plus arcane facts from The Odd Couple, M*A *S*H, and Saturday Night Live ("Francisco Franco is what...
...It was the book that literally tens of Americans interested in a mix of cultural dissonance had been waiting for...
...We want someone who doesn't know anything," he said...
...not too smart, but smart enough for what he does...
...Did Lassie take cocaine...
...I don't care if Kitman does think I'm wonderful, brilliant and handsome...
...As I lay on the beach in East Hampton one day, the hot sun bringing the vegetable oil in my brain to a boil, I gained some fresh insights...
...The honorarium reached the middle high two figures, an offer I couldn't refuse...
...Or worse, that my column stopped because I suddenly started watching TV...
...It was about sex and violence and drugs...
...It told of my crusades to bring back jiggly, and it included my analyses of other great issues of our time: What ever happened to Moldavia in Dynasty...
...Some people have total memory—or, as Oscar Levant said," total recoil...
...Here is what some objective observers have said about it...
...Rubbish, absolute rubbish...
...And my head was full of what we laughingly used to call trivia...
...So I think I owe you an explanation...
...Nevertheless, a cult following has developed around the book...
...I sometimes found myself wondering what time the seven o'clock news went on...
...I'm going to put the country's interest above mine and say: Turn off the tube and read this book...
...And they call it fun...
...I'monlyaTV critic...
...Basically, my treatise revealed what happened to one of the finest minds in Western civilization after 20 years of exposure to television...
...Scratch rock-'n'-roll...
...The truth is I went off to write a book about my career as a TV critic, which was launched in 1967 when Mike Kolatch asked me to fill the NL's "On Television" slot...
...I soon found myself leading what I called a life of crime both here and at Newsday, where in 19691 started a daily television column...
...But it's steady, relentless...
...How else can you explain the need to nosh so of ten while watching TV...
...Anybody could do that...
...I could name all five of Charlie's Angels...
...Tony Randall:" Like Enobarbus, I'll praise anyman who praises me...
...In short, mine was a book for every literate TV viewer...
...I even tended to think in slow motion, or super slo-mo, a technique invented by an obscure camera store janitor-musician in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles named Super Schlomo...
...I'm no authority on science...
...Just as your kidneys have shrunk, your stomach has grown...
...Twenty years later, in 1987,1 decided to mend my ways...
...She's the only writer whose every word ever written has been made into a TV series...
...he's one of the most insightful social observers we have today—and he's funny, too...
...I had become the living personification of MTV, as I explained in my book...
...My wife has made it clear that it's either the books or me...
...Just add $8.95 (plus$3.00 for postage and handling) for the wittiest commentary you could ever give anyone...
...The depth of my qualifications made him double the honorarium...
...Truth is, he is more than a television critic...
...In publishing the book, I was ahead of my time, by five minutes...
...But don't take my word that I Am A VCR is wonderful...
...She can't get to the washing machine...
...I don't even have a TV set," I explained further...
...I found myself thinking in terms of sequential bits, scenes rather than stories or chapters or paragraphs, none more than 90 seconds long...
...Eat your hearts out Charlotte and Emily Bront...
...Please support him by buying this dreadful book...
...He also may be my father...
...As a video recorder, I had my first identity crisis: Was I a JVC or a Panasonic...
...What do I know...
...Heck, I thought a chromosome was Zenith's new TV tube...
...I was the modern day Peter Finch inNetwork crying" Wake up...
...Why, I know some people who do it for nothing...
...I think every writer should be able to write one coupon to his true audience...
...You can't tell what his talent is...
...My once steel-trap mind became a steel sieve...
...I know nothing about TV," I explained in declining the honor...
...You know your kidneys, biologically speaking, are not the same...
...I had total forgetfulness...
...Here were the adventures of an intellectual falling in love with Krystle Carrington, and the dangers of having Tom Brokaw turn his back on you at the 21 Club, even though you had said of him, "He's the Vicki Lawrence of the news business...
...My delearning curve was remarkable...
...But why go on...
...Yet who is to say that everyone will not be a VCR...
...My dream has been to write a coupon...
...And what happened to me was happening to you ! The book was a warning...
...What makes you think we want you to watch TV...
...I was amazed, too, by my concern about who really shot J.R...
Vol. 73 • December 1990 • No. 16
