One Other Influence
Recently, I was asked about influences, music, authors, material that shaped my work.
Let’s take a step back in time — I was marginally associated with a specialist motorcycle repair shop at the time, Quality Cycles in Dallas.
One Other Influence
Each morning, most mornings, some mornings? I’d roll into the shop, park at the empty gas station next door, backing the van up so motorcycles could be loaded in the back with no ramp required, and toying with various machines. Built a race bike. Got in trouble. Fell off a motorcycle. None of this is news.
What I did recall, a formative piece of what, and how, I work? There was a Dallas movie critic, well-known for scholarship, erudite, educated, and brilliant with words. Thoughtful pieces about meaningful art, limited release films, now so-called art-house films? With interpretations, explications, insightful, and most important? Deep. Meaningful. Steeped in language and literature.
Something happened, and he started, as an amusement, writing under the pen name, Joe Bob Briggs, with a weekly column dedicated to schlockiest of horror films. The last format I saw Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In movies in a real newspaper? It was full page, three-column and the first two-thirds of the article would be about whatever was going in his mythical world.
Pastiche, comedy, satire, or black humor, I’m not sure, and I don’t recall.
Maybe a decade later, I was exercising my own chops by reviewing movies because it paid a paltry fee, it was pure opinion, and I could write anything I wanted. The one movie I botched completely, was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (III), I think. I tried to write like Joe Bob, and it didn’t work. Plus: I was really repulsed by the film. Just horror, and some with no redeeming value. Not my genre. Not usually, there is Shakespeare’s Titus, got to hand it to him.
Joe Bob Briggs went on to become a big thing, the male equivalent of Elvira, maybe. Similar, if not the same, but that’s not the ‘include’ for me. It was those early columns, before getting canned by the one major outlet, which then launched a whole new career as occasionally offensive, dryly sexist, and narrow-minded in form, if not real life.
I can recall reading some of his books, but the part that I liked the most, the biggest influence would be those early columns in the paper. That was an influence, I just pieced together.
One Other Influence
I am unsure, thinking back, what to call it. Clearly it was satiric, but also inventive in way I’d never seen before. More along the lines of Mark Twain and Will Rodgers than anything else. But slick little jabs at everything. No cow was too sacred, which, if I recall, and I don’t, got him canned, and opened him up to the alt-syndicates. But like so much of what I love and hold dear, some of this just doesn’t translate well outside of Texas.
Jonathan Swift. Alexander Pope. Don’t recall the connection.
The column appeared in a newspaper, either Dallas Morning News or the (now defunct) Dallas Times Herald, I can’t recall. Got bounced — the first example of cancel culture?
It was throw-away tabloid entertainment. Serialized. Brings back another memory, Tales of the City — similar but very different.
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