ROX

The first episode of ROX was taped on June 1st, 1992, in the basement of 711 East Cottage Grove in Bloomington, Indiana. ROX first appeared on television just over one month later, on July 7th, 1992, on Bloomington's community access television station. We had a party to celebrate, over at our friend Wyatt's house. He was the only person we know who had cable! J and I sold tickets for it, to cover the cost of the drinks, which we made and served to our audience of 14 or so as the program aired. It was a synchronized performance, and we had to hustle to pull it off. Didn't even get a chance to watch the show ourselves.

This episode begins with a correction of sorts. How appropriate, that the first episode of ROX contained an error. How strange, that we would bother correcting it. Were we thinking that people were checking us against the AP style manual and the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Bartender's Black Book? Apparently so. Self-fascination has never been in short supply whenever B and I took stage in front of a vid-cam lens. This episode of ROX was one of the last pre-planned episodes in the entire series. Not pre-planned in the sense that it was scripted, exactly. Rather, we tried to follow an outline of discussion topics which I, J, sketched out in advance. However, it's still pretty much improvised. That's my excuse for the line in which I make reference to looking like a “fuckin' fairy.” It was a mistake, an eggregious error resulting from failed irony. Back then, I had this conceit — or this fault of character, if that's your preferred interpretation — whereby I occasionally made statements that were in direct opposition to political correctness. I myself knew these were not statements that were well-advised. That's why I made them. Trouble was, as a modern-day viewing of this episode demonstrates, those ironic statements did not necessarily come across as ironic. What else is noteworthy here? Well, Ed the Meat Poet makes a guest appearance, sort of. I promise a debate of the merits of Batman in the next episode — a promise which I fail to keep. There is an abundance of demographic information comparing Bloomington, New York City, and the Yukon, which was likely inaccurate at the time, and is in any event completely useless and irrelevant today. And there's Conception Corner, in which we manage to spew actual sperm on television. All in all, this episode is only worth watching for the improvised poem between myself and B, somewhere later in the episode after we're already quite drunk. Fortunately, that brief sequence is one of the shining moments of R

As is the case with several of these earliest episodes, this one packs plenty of portent for the future of ROX. We can only ponder in wonder the humble beginnings of the “potable” theme in ROX, as discovered here. “I thought you were mispronouncing something,” I say when B asks me if I know the word 'potable.' I meant it back then: I didn't know the word. Ironically, I would later come to be known as the potable guy. Frat-boys would stop me at the bar, say something about drinking or alcohol, and inevitably conclude their blabber with some variation on the phrase: “it's potable!” This word, so new to me back in the early 90s, will hover over my head til my dying day. Not that I mind. It's better than words like “pervert” or “sex-offender.” There is other foreshadowing to future themes here. B makes reference to being “a slave to the bean” — a topic we explore in-depth two years later in ROX #74, “Slaves to the Bean.” And Kellie says something so eerily appropriate it should probably be struck from the record: “You guys could become very famous talk-show hosts (or) end up doing this until you're like 80.” Needless to say, we're on the end-up-doing-it-til-you're-like-80 track.

This is surely, or at least hopefully, the worst episode in the entire series of J&B on the Rox. It is worth watching only so that you can feel better about yourself: That you know deep in your heart that you could do better, even if you were drunk. One of the primary culprits in this travesty of videography was the fact that we attempted to tech-up, using lavalier mics instead of the camera's built-in mic. Trouble was, we kept forgetting to pin those mics on our chests, leading to long segments of video that did not make the cut due to technical difficulties. What was left is technically okay, at least by the standards of that time given our resources. But content-wise, it's astonishingly empty. This episode does boast an array of guests, which is a good thing. It boasts an array of topics, which in this case is a bad thing, since we barely brush the surface of the topics we confront. All in all, this was an episode that suffered from poor planning, poor execution, and poor coping when things went sour. Viewers who had happened on all of the episodes up til this one perhaps gained some hope from my line late in the show: “Almost anything can happen — look what happened with Jesus.” Still, this is a god-awful mess. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

This fifth episode of the series starts out embarrassing, and turns eventually to shit. The result was, for this young series, a surprising eruption of controversy that may have had more to do with the long-term sustenance of the series than anyone else ever realized. Looking back on this episode these years later, I am most immediately shocked and embarrassed by my clothing — those horrid pinstripe shorts, that inexcusable purple shirt. Egads. Fortunately, other embarrassments divert the focus. Unfortunately, many of those embarrassments are, once again, personal. Some are funny, at least to me: my response when Editor B asks me to use the word 'assiduous' in a sentence, for example. Some are just painful: see my reading from the play, “Rum & Coke.” And then there is Copraphagia Corner. Here we attempted to show a picture that my roommate downloaded from the Indiana University vax server, which depicted a woman shitting directly into a man's mouth. Somehow, we innocently (naively? stupidly?) didn't think there'd be a problem showing this. But there was, and at the last minute Editor B had to go to the station and black out the segment. He also ran an on-screen notice, stating that the censorship was by order of the Monroe County Public Library. Later, we would run into other censorship problems which were much closer to the grey line that separates free speech from indecency. Here we were way, way over the line. Of course, if you look around the Web, you can easily find an abundance of free pics that are much more detailed and graphic than the crappy, black-and-white printout of a crappy scanned image that we waved around in front of a camera those years ago.

Kris, aka MKM, was my girlfriend for about two years, from the summer of '90 to the summer of '92. That's when she headed off to grad school in Tucson. She was going to establish herself there, and I was going to follow along in January. It didn't work out that way. In early June, shortly after the premiere of ROX #1, we had a talk. She was planning to write me a “Dear John” letter once she got out to the Southwest. She felt we were incompatible. I was stunned. We were still on amicable terms, though, and I think that's evident in our farewell tribute, ROX #6. At the time of the taping, we didn't know what the future held for us. I edited this show on the same day she left. In the end, we decided to stay apart. We communicate infrequently, and count each other as friends, but I think we both agree that the separation was for the best. Indeed, it occurs to me that if I had moved to Tucson, this television series would have aborted midway through the first season. J&B would never have gone on to fame and fortune, and I would almost certainly not be writing this now. Astute viewers will note that J says ROX #6 is a farewell “in two ways,” but he never explains: He was getting ready to move out of 711 East Cottage Grove, and we thought this would be the last show shot there. But we were wrong.

We hadn't planned on doing another show in the basement of 711 E. Cottage Grove. J's lease was almost up, and we were set to move into our new apartment in a week or so. But then Mike showed up, passing through Bloomington again after a couple of years in Eastern Europe. He brought some amazingly weird self-made musical instruments with him, and it just seemed like an opportunity that was too good to miss. So, on a sweltering August night, we cranked out one last episode in the basement. But what a strange episode it was, completely unlike anything else in the ROX series. Mike was doing a lot of stuff with feedback at the time, both audio and video. The swirling pattern used as a transitional motif throughout this episode is from his video, “Squared Circle.” It may look like some sort of computer-generated fractal, but it's actually feedback, created by pointing the camera at the screen and feeding the signal back into itself. In editing this show, I followed Mike's example and emulated his aesthetic. I made two dubs of the orignal source videotape and mixed them together, then took the mix tape and remixed it with one of the dubs, and so on. The show starts out normal but gets progressively weirder and more highly processed as it goes on. Incidentally, this was the first episode of ROX which was explicitly titled. (I invented titles for the first six after the fact.) But I got the episode number wrong; the show bills itself as #8 but it was actually the seventh show.