Moeller Television Festival XVI- The greetings
Another Moeller-fest has come and gone and I'll just say that we broke a few windows. It's traditional to post the two greetings that Aaron and I write for the festival's program. Here they are a day after the fact. If you couldn't make it, you were missed.-
A Western Union telegram
sent from Chris Moeller to his brother, Aaron, prior to the world's first
television festival in 2002:
YUR IDEA IS GENIUS
STOP SO IMPRESSED STOP WITH YUR BRILLIANCE REFLECTED IN COLLEGE TV
CRITICISM CLASS AND NATURAL FLAIR 4 PARTIES COMBINED WITH MY 2ND BANANA
ABILITIES AND SKILLS CHANGING REMOTE CONTROL BATTERIES THEY WILL NEVER FORGET
THIS EVENT STOP PLY THEM WITH ALCOHOL FOOD PENS BLANK COMMENT CARDS THEY
WONT WANT TO LEAVE STOP PLUS ONLY WEIRDOS USE THIS NEW INTERNET THING AND
PEOPLE STILL HAVE AMAZING ATTENTION SPANS STOP
An email sent from Chris
Moeller to his brother, Aaron, a few weeks ago:
Boy,
I was right all those years ago stop. your idea was definitely genius
stop. I think we have a great lineup this year comma, but remember to
keep reminding people I have a book coming out colon: a collection
of scripts for a Taxi remake set in an Uber garage stop. We've kept this
thing going from its earliest days where everything was on home videotape
comma, thru the era of DVDs comma, thru a year with every episode culled from 8
tracks comma, the year we acted out an entire Perfect Strangers episode comma,
parentheses (you were right you should have been Balky closed parentheses) thru
the streaming age and beyond stop. Let's keep plying them with alcohol and
other sedative laden foods comma, they won't want the great television to ever
stop stop.
Aaron Moeller
---
Micah Finley has to take four different
metro Philadelphia buses to get to school each day. The 17-year-old travels
from the Glenwood neighborhood, an area on the city’s near north side
identifiable by the block upon block of boarded-up rowhouses and storefronts, to
the all-boys, college preparatory Haverford School, located 10 miles west of
the city center. He can usually get a ride home at night from the sister of one
of his classmates.
Micah’s mother Trudy works three jobs,
all three for little more than minimum wage. Since Micah’s father died in Vietnam
(in 2014), it’s just the two of them now inside this tiny flat on Percy Street.
So when Micah returns from Haverford each afternoon, he’s alone for several
hours . Back in Trudy’s day, Micah would have been called a latchkey kid, but
today, a lot of the traditional door locks have been replaced by those hotel
room swipe cards, or they can probably unlock the door with a Smartphone app or
some Star Wars shit like that. Often times there’s also a four-person film crew
at the house led by a Drexel University grad student with an NEA grant that has
shot over 250 hours of footage of Micah’s life.
Trudy’s meager income would not go far
in paying for Micah’s tuition at the Haverford School, an academic institution
that sees fit to list the entire list of its headmasters throughout history on
its Wikipedia page. Tuition and fees for a high school student runs annually to
more than $38,000. Instead, a wealthy elderly patron and Haverford alum pays
Micah’s way. Micah, you see, has a talent that Haverford desires—one that the world desires. Micah plays table tennis.
He plays it well. Very well. He’s
really quite good at it.
During the summer, on playgrounds throughout
Philadelphia’s so-called “badlands,” young boys with no other way off these drug-infested
streets play table tennis. There are no Asians around to voice an objection
when Micah and his friends refer to the game, in their politically-incorrect street
patois, as “ping pong.” Talent scouts from suburban private schools, and even
some colleges, stand along the chain link fences on the playground and watch
the paddlers compete in high-intensity pick-up table matches. These informal
public showcases draw large crowds of observers, and for the players, are often
as much about impressing the neighborhood girls—or the neighborhood boys, if
the player is homosexual, as about securing a future for themselves away from
this economically-impoverished community.
Micah doesn’t have time to do much else
besides play table tennis. Haverford provides him with a private tutor for his
studies, but his time at school is spent mostly inside one of the academy’s three gymnasiums devoted to table
tennis. The “Fords” of Haverford Prep are hoping to ride Micah’s Seemiller grip
and rapid reflexes to a win over their arch-rivals at Episcopal Academy this
spring, and ultimately, to the Pennsylvania State Table Tennis Championship at
Bethlehem. His time after school, likewise, is spent leaning over the lopsided tables
with the make-shift nets in these Glenwood parks. Here he polishes his game. At
home, he practices his backhand chop by throwing the salt and pepper shakers
into the air and striking them as hard as he can into the kitchen backsplash
tile. He masturbates every two hours to strengthen the tendons of his flexor
muscles. He dreams about his future whether he’s asleep or awake. He rehearses
his victory smile in the bathroom mirror, his arms outstretched in triumph.
The Summer Olympic Games of 2020
beckon just beyond that horizon.
Chris Moeller
Co-founder, Moeller Television Festival
posted by CM @ 3:43 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home