The
King and Queen of Cable Access Televisionby Cleve Hattersley
The
King and Queen of Cable Access Television
by Cleve Hattersley
It would seem that, with all the options of modern TV watching, including a zillion channels, high-tech sound equipment and, most importantly, remote control, a guy like me (a big tater who never met a couch he didn't like) would be your basic pig-in-shit. After all, amongst those trillion channels, we have things like A & E and The Learning Channel, and the remote gives us the ability to transgress all the crap thrown at us by all the other networks. Yeah, you'd think I could be happy with all these options - so much to see, so much power in one finger - but I'm not. I'm still bored and disgusted with television, at least fifty percent of the time. Television, that wondrous viewing box developed in the 20's and 30's to be man's greatest learning and communications tool, has become nothing more than a soap box for products, personalities, pompous press corps and (in the case of daytime talk shows) peccadillos. What happened to real television? Where can we still find TV, as it was meant to be - raw, real, experimental?
The answer: cable access. No shit. As a seasomed channel-surfer, one whose fingers fly blindfolded over a remote control, I can tell you, unequivocally, access is where the action is. In fact, I contend cable access channels are the only true representatives of what television was intended to be - a place from which basic human beings could talk with, or to, others of similar ilk. And, though one can find a few quality networks out there, like the aforementioned A & E and TLC, no channel represents the communities in which we live more thoroughly than cable access. Access is the one place, outside of school, in which one can learn the skills of broadcasting, while actually doing it. In Austin, a lot of people know this, and a large group of erstwhile movie makers, sitcom and video directors, talk show host and Billy Graham wannabes take advantage of all this virtually free cable access time.
Austin, with four available access channels, has such an active TV community, we even have access stars, like Dave Prewitt, whose 'CapZeyeZ' show on Channel 10 has won a Billboard Magazine award for local music programming. Channel 10 also brings us the charming couple from Zendik, apparently a religion for ferrets, and Channel 11, or the 'church channel,' has the wall-eyed cult priestess with the hypnotic voice (I wouldn't buy a gun from this broad). Oh, yeah, I'm sure Persian TV has its stars, too - probably the ones burning the American flag.
But for the sheer air time and exposure, the undisputed
I
first met Kevin Booth about eight years ago, when I was managing Steamboat,
and he was in a band called 'Year
Zero.' At that time, 'Year Zero' was one of the more happening bands -
musically anyway - playing at the 'Boat'. Though they never developed a large
Austin fan base, Chrysalis Records thought enough of the band to sign and
record them. Apparently, they didn't think highly enough of them to actually
promote the record, so nothing much came of the effort, except, that is, this
one crazy little video of a song called 'Roy's In Orbit.
'This video was one of the first truly cool locally-produced clips I'd ever
seen, and, to this day, both the song and the video remain in my all-time
top-ten. My top-ten audio list is not to be taken lightly, either - six of them
are my own songs. Actually, since I have only two videos of myself (both from Austin
City Limits), my vid list is quite a bit shorter. It's a top-five,
but 'Year Zero'' is still on it. When 'Year Zero' totalled out,
Kevin did not, instead forming Sacred
Cow Productions and reuniting with a childhood friend of his
to make a series of comedy and, music videos. All of these could have gone
unnoticed too, had his friend not been the late Bill
Hicks, in my mind the greatest stand-up comic of our time, and
in a class with Bruce, Pryor and Beltzer. Booth's work with
Hicks, starting with early masterpieces like 'Sane
Man' and 'Ninja
Bachelor Party,' and continuing with numerous
live performance and concept videos and tapes, has almost overshadowed all of
his other work. In fact, with Bill's tragic and early demise, Kevin has become
the keeper of the Hicks flame, at least in the minds of many fans. That's a
lotta pressure for a guy who simply wants to play music, make films and put the
two together - even more for one who essentially hates comedy clubs.
Kevin
Booth and Bill Hicks first became buds as high schoolers at Stratford
High School, in Houston, a school that has also produced such notables as Clint
Black, super-model Kelly Enberg and footballer /
weasel-faced ESPN announcer Craig James. Though both were cut-ups
of the highest magnitude, their passion was their music - they were in a band
together, called 'Stress.' Thev
played together long enough to have a bass drum head logoed, but, when Bill
followed comic friend, Dwight
Slade, into stand-up, and Kevin enrolled in UTs electrical
engineering department, 'Stress' relaxed itself away. Booth dutifully tried to
throw himself into first, the electrical shit, then computer programming, but
ultimately fell short of graduation, when 'Year Zero' had their mini-run of
success. By then, he'd realized the only thing that made him happy was making
sounds and pictures. Kevin's one of those guys who never goes anywhere without a
camera (possibly his Chinon, formerly owned by Michael
Moore, of 'Roger and Me' fame)-there's no
such thing as a non-Kodak moment.
Visually,
absolutely everything seems to interest him. Appropriately, very few sounds go
unexplored in a Kevin Booth video, either. Between his 'Zero' days and the
present, Kevin has put together an impressive portfolio of local videos,
including several for the 'Coffee Sergeants' and dozens of others
for folks like John Hug, Pam Mayo, and the 'Pillgrimms.'
A good number of his clips are of himself, in his most recent band, 'Electric
Ladies Man' (with David Johndrow and Jimmy
Doluisio), or as a solo artist. Of course, Booth also continued his work
with Hicks, making both videos and records, up until Bill's death. In addition
to all this, since 1993, Booth has been working on an underwater documentary
feature, called 'Sea
Man,' which may or may not include those electrifying scenes
of his dog swimming underwater. Naturally, I'm familiar with virtually all of
these films, since Kevin has been an official access producer for what seems
like generations. His list of credits is so long, he can literally fill whole
blocks of programming - which he occasionally does - with his unique vision and
twisted tunes. Were it not for the work of a precious few other completely
obsessed vid-nuts, especially Tara Veneruso, Booth would dominate cable access
the way Warnmo rules Austin poetry, or the way Steve Wertheimer
owns classic cool, at the Continental Club.
Obviously, at least to us access heads, Tara Veneruso is not going to let that happen, for, in the world of channels 15 and 16, her presence is equal to, if not greater than, Booth's. This "Queen of Channel 15" (I guess that makes Moser the queen mother), a paid producer for AMN, is probably the only single person whose work gets as much air time as "King" Kevin's. When she's not checking the action, or putting her editing fingerprints all over the Armadillo Reunion tapes, she's interviewing someone at the most happening event of the week or airing one of her music videos. Her big advantage over Booth is she's actually seen much more than he. In Kevin's video world, it's often hard to decipher which person on the screen is him. In Tara's world, her presence on the screen is inescapable, which is good - not many people want to flee from Tara's princess-good looks, pearly smile or infectious ebullience. I became aware of Tara Veneruso when she was looking for people who knew Janis Joplin, to interview for her film, 'Jam's Joplin Slept Here.' I think she called me to inquire about Lou Ann Barton, but I convinced her to film me, as I had known the bitch (sorry, but she was famous for her bitchery). I was immediately impressed with Tara's abilities, first because she let me choose my own comfort zone for the interview (the basketball court at Northwest Park), then because of the skill she displayed in handling a real weenie like me. I wound up being spliced into the film quite generously, and it became a prize winner (a Silver at the Houston International Film Festival). I'm sure my sterling performance had plenty to do with this.
Veneruso, 23, spent her early youth in Albuquerque, Dallas and Houston, before arriving in Austin at the age of nine. This early arrival in the City of Cool allowed her to shed the baggage of throe bad cities and grow up in a fairly hip environment. She adapted extremely well to the climate, actually making her first film that year. After "pathetic" grades in high school forced her to start college at UT, she prophesied she'd be accepted into the prestigious New York University Film School within the following two years. To this end, she made a film, on VHS, at the Cactus Cafe, called 'Business Man By Day - Banjo Player By Night. ' No one was surprised when she was accepted at NYU immediately. She seems to have a way of making good things happen to herself. The balance of her prophesy, by the way, has her becoming very famous. Dare we doubt this? Maybe it's because she knows how to turn failure to her advantage. For example, she began 'Janis Joplin' when she came all the way down from New York to get work on Clint Eastwood's 'A Perfect World,' only to be shut out from the project. When she tried to appeal directly to Eastwood, his only comment was, "You have on elf shoes." At any rate, she played off her anger at this rejection by gathering help from people like Gavin Lance and Casey Monahan to start the 'Janis' project. Maybe, if Clint could see the results, he'd realize elves are extremely wiley and cunning creatures. The lesson here: Don't piss Tara off - it only makes her better. One sure way to tick her off would be to slam 'The Muppet Movie. Unadvisable - it's her all-time fave. Don't threaten her with a low budget, either. Veneruso's talent for making films with zero capital is nearly legendary, already. She once challenged her fellow students at NYU that she could make as good a movie for a hundred bucks as they could for the five-to-ten grand they normally spent. She not only succeeded - her marks on the project actually surpassed most of the pricier projects.
"TRUST ME, ACCESS
PROGRAMMING
WILL BE A HUGE PROBLEM WHEN
THEY BRING IN THE CENSORSHIP CHIP"
Her first 'Retarded Elf video, which placed fifth in that year's video category of the Chronicle Awards, cost a whopping fifty bucks. She's also done remarkably good and inexpensive work for lan Moore and 'Spoon. For twenty grand, she and her cinematographer Jackson Saunders, could probably do a credible remake of Waterworld. At least the money would make it to the screen. I think the reason I've chosen Kevin and Tara as the "King and Queen of Cable Access' lies in their individual abilities to use what they have to the fullest. For each, access television has offered the opportunity to gain exposure in the community, while giving them both the time and facilities to hone then craft. Other than Prewitt and Zendik (and maybe Jason, with 'Rawtime'), nobody else has taken this kind of advantage. Okay, the wall-eyed cult priestess uses her time well, too, but her audience is pretty much limited to religious pinheads and carded zealots. Both monarchs have large dreams of moving beyond access, and I have no doubt they will. Veneruso, who's "about nine thousand dollars shy" of her needed budget, has plans to shoot a full-length feature about a woman dealing with sibling incest, called 'The Sky Is Falling.' Booth, who's had to endure six months of legal wrangling with the Hicks family, is negotiating with Rykodisc Records to release Bill's last recordings, 'Arizona Bay' and 'Rant in E-Minor,' which he controls. Both projects will happen, mostly because of Kevin's and Tara's ability and perseverance, but also because, well... I say they will. Each intends to maintain producer's status with cable access, maybe as a failsafe against dreams not coming true, and they're both still fairly passionate about the system. Neither displayed reticence to talk about improvements needed within the system, each one expressing frustration with one aspect or other of cable access. One major irritant is the emergence of bureaucracy at ACTV and AMN. Why does this not surprise me? The norm is that, whenever two or more humans try to operate a scheme set up by an arm of government, bureaucracy must soon follow. I consider bureaucracy to be a disease - call it the 'Much-hosing By Proxy Syndrome' - and Kevin and Tara concur.
This
is not to say either member of my royal family is interested in assuming command
of Austin access. 
Running
a network, any network, is tiresome work at best, and neither Booth nor Veneruso
is willing to subtract enough time from his/her art to deal with such
unrelenting tedium. Too bad, because they both have more than enough energy and
snap to handle the gig. I see what they mean, though. If the community does not,
in fact, maintain control of cable access, leaving it, instead, to individual
fiefdoms and big city government (remember, Austin is growing, folks), what's
the point? Tara and Kevin are artists, not-business people - putting them
in charge of a bureaucracy would be akin to giving a mailman a semi-automatic. I
wouldn't want to get that postal, either. The scene is only going to get more
complicated with the introduction of the V-chip. Firstly, what effect is the
chip going to have on cable access? I contend, with the way things are currently
run, it'll turn into a 'Much-More-Hosing By Proxy' reality. Each and every
addenda of rules applied to existing bureaucracy creates more restraint and
fewer opportunities for creativity. Trust me, access programming will be a huge
problem, when they bring in the censorship chip. Okay, so I'm with the majority,
in that I'm not keen to watch a gay guy practicing safe sex on his lover's bum
tunnel, but I still say cable access should be for everyone in the community -
no exceptions. Kevin and Tara heartily support this, though I'm not sure how
they each feel about ass sex.
Booth sees a system wherein Channel 10 is left totally free for just about anything (from weddings to real estate showings), Channel 11 stays with religion, Channel 15 (the Austin Music Network) programs twenty-four hours a day, and Channel 16 becomes a bastion for actual creative programming, like a real network. Tara agrees, as do I, but none of us could come up with a viable method for making this happen. Any changes in the cable system will depend on the level of community involvement. The greater the commitment, the better the programming. For example, the various university arts departments in the area could provide talent and programming, and, maybe the state, which meddles mightily in both the film and music industries, could come up with grant monies, for talent development programs. It should be easy for the state to see the value of taking some of the millions it takes from, say, the movie industry and applying it to TV workshops and the like. But what do I know? I'm just a big tater. I do know more people need to be involved - ones who can replace folks like Tara Veneruso and Kevin Booth, when they move on in their careers. Cable access needs its stars, and it needs to be taken seriously. As the telecommunications industry marches into the next century, Austin, with its already incredible talent pool and a mandate continuing the evolution of community television, could end up carrying the flag, at the head of the column. Tara would make a helluva majorette, too.
Meanwhile,
should the bureaucrats at ACTV or AMN need a quality programming director, I
nominate myself, the Fred Silverman of
love-seat couches. Give me Channel 16, and I'll turn it into a wildly
successful, totally free-spirited and uninhibited love-test of creativity. We'll
have everything from music to comedy to tragedy, including repulsive talk shows,
and, in the world of 'Clevie TV,' there will be no limits. I'll
give the gays their time slots, as long as their safe-sex programming doesn't
occur anywhere near dinner-time. I'll even allow for country music programming.
GAAK!
Until then, join me as I salute this generation of royalty. Hail to thee, great King Kevin and good Queen Tara. May your reign be long and productive, and your future happy and successful. However - watch your backs. King Cleve (actually, I prefer Emperor) has his sights on your thrones.
Kevin's new band "Back Stabbing Playground" performs Sundays at Steamboat on 6the Street, and will play on Dave Prewitt's Cap-Eyze show (Access Channel 10, midnight, Saturday June 29th). Local poet Trae Painter joins Kevin and the theme of the show is that "if you don't come to the gig, they'll talk about you all night long." Kevin believes this will insure a good turn-out. Some of Kevin's video productions are now available at I Luv Video, and as of June 10th, and the Bill Hicks records are a 'done deal.' Look for a Fall release on Rykodisc. Write Kevin at: Sacred Cow Productions, PO Box 26231, Austin, TX 76755.
CLEVE HATTERSLEY IS A FREELANCE WRITER AND A REGULAR GORILLA JOURNALIST RETIRING HIS "PET SHARKS; CLEVE DOGGEDLY RECONS FOR BIGGER GAME & IS CURRENTLY WRAPPING UP A PUBLISHING DEAL WITH ST. MARTIN'S PRESS.
Watch music videos directed by Kevin Booth