Dear Friend of Frank,

I was on television yesterday, not once but twice. In the morning I was interviewed by an eighth-grader at Westland Middle School in Bethesda MD, and in the evening I read from TO LOVE MERCY at an event in a Baltimore coffee shop, the Koba Cafe, sponsored by www.AuthorsBookshop.com, one of the many fine vendors where you can still buy a copy of TO LOVE MERCY for the old Amazon price of $11.66 (cover price $14.95). Autographed yet.

If you’d known about it, you could have watched the AuthorsBookshop.com event live in real time because it was streamed onto the Web. (God, can you believe what I just wrote? In 1990, that sentence would have been gibberish. If I’d uttered it, they’d have taken me away.)

The fact that you didn’t know about it is no matter though, because it has been posted in all its glory at www.BookBurn.com/video for your video enjoyment. Why not log on right now, assuming you have an hour to spare. Or you can cut that to about 15 minutes by skipping the foreplay and just watching my reading, which starts about 30% of the way in. But …

… the foreplay is fun, and not entirely because of the great music that begins the event (see below). In the opening few seconds of the video, I discover the event is being webcast (webcasted?) and call Carol on my cell phone — another thing I’d've been unlikely to do in 1990. My lawyer Steve Paley, the earliest of early adopters, had a proto-cell-phone around that time. It was so big and heavy he had to lug it around in a gadget bag.

‘Hey!’ I said to Carol on the cell phone. ‘This is live! Go watch it!’ She dutifully logged on while I stood in front of the camera and made an ass of myself for a few seconds. This has been recorded for posterity and all time. I invite you to watch it right now at www.BookBurn.com/video.

It turned out to be a lovely event, not least because of the music that preceded and ended it, three songs by the extremely talented Safai (sp?) Grochowski and her sister Shelley (sp?). Safai’s husband Brad is the genius behind AuthorsBookshop.com and the guy who cooked up this event in the first place.

The school session won’t even be broadcast or webcast, but it will be shown intra-school just before the Westland Book Fair, when it will stimulate the sale of dozens of copies of TO LOVE MERCY. In my dreams.

Both these events were very low-tech — camcorders on tripods, no lights. Real TV involves so much heavy stuff, it takes two or three trips just to lug it from the car to a field shoot. I know, because lately I’ve been doing these back-breaking shleps myself. I’ve been co-producing a TV show for the Friends of the Library, to be aired on community access TV some day if we ever get it “in the can”. This has required me to obtain certification as both a field producer and a studio producer, and learn more than a bit about TV. Two things I’ve learned:

– It’s bad to clown in front of the camera the way I did last night. Even if you’re nervous, don’t let it show.
– It’s good to be relaxed, engaging, natural and enthusiastic, qualities that are difficult to gin up if you’re feeling nervous, and who isn’t nervous unless they’re  on TV all the time?

I took on this TV project to help the Friends, of which I am vice president. But I also took it on because it looked like an easy entree to something three-dimensional and cool after an uncool lifetime in two dimensions as a writer, editor and publisher.

Well, here’s what I’ve discovered. Anything “cool” about TV has resulted from painstaking pre-planning. Because of the gear and cost and manpower, “real” TV lacks the spontaneity possible when one writes. Even on the simplest field shoot you must arrange for someone to run the camera; in the studio, multiply that to no fewer than 7 or 8 behind-the-scenes people. Afterward, you must spend hours with another technical person, an editor, assembling your footage into a coherent 30-minute show. If you think those “reality” shows are actual reality, think again.

Another thing that ought to have occurred to me about TV is that, by the time I finally got around to it, it’s no longer cool. Well, video is cool, but TV as we knew it in the days of Uncle Miltie is going the way of the buggy whip. Even cable is a yawn. These days, even middle-schoolers produce TV shows, and it’s about as easy to obtain a camcorder as it was to buy a Kodak Brownie when I was a kid.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. As is obvious, my blog output has declined lately to near zero. I’ve been busy finishing TO WALK HUMBLY, one of hopefully two sequels to TO LOVE MERCY. It’s the early to mid ’50s and Steve and Sass have re-encountered one another at Hyde Park High School. Stay tuned.