About that time I accidentally ended up on TV. Repeatedly!
Video killed the guy with a face for radio’s stardom
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Two, Issue 70
They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine on new technology
And now I understand the problems you can see
I met your children
What did you tell them?
Pictures came and broke your heart
And now we meet in an abandoned studio
We hear the playback and it seems so long ago
And you remember the jingles used to go
In my mind and in my car
We can't rewind we've gone too far
Pictures came and broke your heart
Put the blame on VCR
You are a radio star
Video killed the radio star
The Sunday Reader, March 24, 2024
Wanna make some easy money?
Let’s see:
Am I still a soldier? Yup!
Am I still broke? Absolutely!
Are there still Pentax lenses I don’t own? Way too many!
So OF COURSE I want to go make some easy money!
Ummm…wait one: Any yakuza or such involved in this?
Nope. Strictly legit. All you have to do is stand around and look like a mean American.
That I could do!
And that’s how I ended up on Japanese television.
Now I well know that I have a face for radio. And I’ve always joked that I’ve gotten very little use – none, really – out of my degree in theater. And that’s true, in the sense that I’ve never used whatever skills I possessed to pursue a career in theater or television.
But what’s also true is that I’ve accidentally ended up TV a bunch of times, including a part in a major Japanese miniseries about the occupation of Japan after its World War II defeat at the hands of the United States.
The series was filled with Japanese stars, but they needed American soldiers to wander around looking arrogant. A friend had rounded up my soldier friend for a part, and the show folks asked him if he knew any more Americans who could pass for soldiers.
Indeed he did, since he was stationed on a US Army base in Tokyo. He knew lots of Americans who could pass for soldiers! Because they were soldiers. Including me!
And so I ended up wearing a semi-accurate 1940s uniform, wandering around the tatami mat set in my socks and shooting mean looks at the cast. I thought about pointing out that no arrogant 1940s American soldier would remove their boots at anything less than gunpoint, but decided I’d rather get paid.
And I did. I left with a signed copy of the script and a check big enough to cover another lens. Never caught the show, though, so I’m not sure if I made it to air or ended up on the cutting room floor.
Despite my face for radio, I’ve somehow ended up on television a bunch of times besides that Japanese miniseries. I worked as a TV reporter doing standup field pieces. The 24th Infantry Division had a regular slot on the local NBC affiliate that was filled by our broadcast journalists. (I was a print guy.) When I started regularly going to the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert, the local NBC station would send a camera crew. And I had an advantage over those broadcast journalists: I was there, and they were 3,000 miles away.
And those war games were too photogenic to pass up! Tanks trekking across the desert! So the camera crews shot, and I introduced the action. “This is Specialist Chris Feola reporting LIVE from the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California!”
I did this wearing a steel helmet and a chin strap with a microphone held nose high – the perfect setup for a guy with a face for radio.
I also got to sit on the other side and get interviewed for a Pacific Stars & Stripes mini-documentary on the Far East Network. That’s me at the 4:50 mark being terribly earnest.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Tuesday March 26th - The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup
Thursday March 28th - The PE Vlog: We’re starting a new series on building Large Language Models — AIs — for our own applications. Welcome to Virtual Grad Student! We’re going to set up a Large Language Model to run locally, feed it a clean set of data, then make it available to authors as a virtual writer’s assistant. For example, to pull together a few paragraphs of background on Roman aqueduct architecture. This week we’re diving into h2oGPT to see if it’s a good fit for our Virtual Grad Student.
Friday March 29th - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday March 31st — About that time I accidentally spent all my money on lenses. And tripods. And art. Every month for four years and fourth months... I was a typical soldier; always broke. But I was probably the only soldier ever broke because I’d spent every last dollar on Pentax lenses and woodblock prints…