FRAZIER ON "DUE SOUTH"

The Moutie on the show, "Due South," is an enduring image for me. He is off a Greek urn, is Paul Gross, who plays the part. Where he ends and his character Benny begins..... Frazier begins, is hard to say. I feel, I just know him. I care deeply what happens to him and to the wolf, Diefanbaker. I wish I could spell Diefenbaker. So here goes my riff. What is a riff?

I think it is a blast of jazz music. Goodness, I am off again to journey land. To sweetland, my imagination. On a course I cannot predict. The great Greek poet, Yiannis Ritso puts it like this. We occupy the shoes of the dead; so get used to it. That is why on my vids I have a lot of ads from magazines on shoes. Those receptacles ain't empty. They are occupied, so to say. Get it?

What is called for is travel music and some stories to take us for a while over to the other side, where the flowers bloom all the time. Traditional people occupy the shoes of the progons, the ones come earlier to the earth. The ones now resting in the wings. Waiting and watching how we perform. And so we gotta be good to tell the stories and make the music that elevates us and also them.

Life is ever the recycling of the old into the new and back again. An orderly universe allows that. I do not believe in the nihilism of a Camus or the random hate in the modern worlds of tv and movie. Those are but cruel distortions of reality. Take heart from the poet, Ritso, that the Homeric world is very there, at all times. It is a unified and sensible world that we can all live in, if we wish. The dead instruct and lead us, as they should and the cold town or the big city, Chicago, are, in fact, reasonable places under the surface. It is such a mystery that Frazier uncovers and probes. That tradition comes of the dead. We view the dead father, alive in the program.

It is also fact that nature, trees and weather and rocks teach us how to love and live. Animals too, like a wolf, no names mentioned.

The two forces, tradition and nature, allow this pristine, virginal hero, Frazier, to sanitize a harsh world, a big city and trasform it into an Homeric village, one that specializes in human kindness and true sensibility.

Since the days of Homer, says one of my favorite commentators named Bebe Spanos, an editor of the Greek journal, the Charioteer, the artist has been the wanderer, the outsider, the seer, whose greatest strength has been the ability to express what he or she sees. Spanos goes on to say that the heroic one, the special being, any one we care to mention, specializes in sanity, in making a mad world become sensible and controlled, so that humans can live decent lives.

For me Frazier is Odyseas, the legendary Greek traveler, wending a path over hostile seas. He does Chicago, a vast human assemblage in middle America, having come from the tundra of Canada.

An itinerant priest, a hobo-ish cleric.

A poem of Ritso makes it clear that the living play all day, play at life, then put their shoes by the bed and the dead, come out at night, to occupy the shoes and the next day we get up and occupy those shoes, the shoes of the dead.

His implication is that the shoes give us added strength and wisdom 'cause the dead are with us, not agin' us. How true! The dead accompany us in our daily dreams and lives. They inform and chat. On the tv show, Frazier's father is a constant, a seen companion. He was a Mountie too with the same Spartan values. Ascetic, pure, tough physically able to resist tempting.

So the dead are our constant partners. We discuss things with them. We, the still alive, often the barely alive, represent the ones gone past. You might say we are standins. Obviously, for traditional people like Frazier and me this poses a terrific challenge. We must live up to the expectations of the line that has gone past us. A key word in Greek is "katheikon." We have what is called a responsibility to the people who live through us.

We are the ancestors then if you get my drift, please. The show, "Due South," gives us an added twist by including the animal form as a reminder of the power of nature over our activities. It gives us animals in the form of wolf, birds and other animal shapes that careen across the screen along with the skidding cars, the gun bullets, flying chairs, frantic humans, all in a kind of coordinated yet wild ballet. Humans and animals, together, enact an old tragedy, one that was once put on at Epidaurus in Greece, and in Syracuse, in Italy. Much BC. The themes are always the same. Evil forces are met by good, and good occasionally wins. Old stories come to enthrall us, as they did the theatre-goers of Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy, some few years ago. Stories are our tonic. They put us to bed at night like our mother can. The myths of our lives, and those gone past are the same. There are only so many themes and the old ones are best, or so it appears.

Greek instruction comes of our human and animal ancestors. Of women and birds. Of men and dogs. This is not a matter of anything special. You go to Delphi if you are our poet, George Seferi and view a great eagle soar over the place and know you are being shadowed all the time by the gods and nature, by the oracle and Greek tradition. "Due South," for me is but a continuation of the story; of a heroic figure, one instructed by the ones gone by and by nature.

Frazier goes on the record, to place his story in history. He does a tv show. He is but a thespian, nothing more really. He comes on a set and acts. Makes believe. Only what is accomplished rivals some of the important achievements of the past. We don't see it that way because the delivery system, network tv, is so darnright commercial and vulgar. Let us remember Clitias, the great painter of vases, put images on receptacles for wine and olive oil that traveled over the Meditteranean in a period BC. Yet he is rightly seen as a great artist. His advertisements, his pictures of Clitias ads sold the stuff in the amphoras bearing his message.

Why don't we see the same is true of Gross and the other actors and technical folks who are behind his effort? I think it is just we are a bit short-sighted and overwhelmed by the amount of material that enters our homes and hearts in 1996, the first year we can buy a little dish for the house that will give us a hundred channels for a few hundred dollars.

I guess what I feel is the most common things are the most important and we miss their value because they are common. I hate to belabor a point, but why can't we see that Brillo and its cousin, Dynamo, its nephew, Tide and the rest of the Detergent family are a rainbow of color and beauty that demands attention, poem and quatrain?

Why oh whyo, did I ever leave Ohio? I'm just saying that one day around world war two we left the town and village to come to the big city to work. Metaphorically we left the small town in a place like Ohio and went to the big city, like Chicago. The minute we dare leave a safe harbor and enter the imaginative world of tv show or commercial or song, we are in a land of magic, of dead come alive, of gods who prance and cajole.

When we look imaginatively at a show on tv or at a commercial creation like an ad for a detergent, we too are traveling in the mind, in a way similar to the way the heroic man and woman travels on the Mediterranean Sea or on the land of the North American continent.

Perhaps it is a great Greek world we may go to, that is occupied by the poet, George Seferi among others, He makes the charge, "sometimes we do need fairytales." Seferi wrote many essays on cultural issues and was honest and direct about the power of the supernatural. He says we really can't understand the power of magic in our lives, only life with it with a sense of awe and acceptance. You can't really analyze it, so just recognize it is there and go get a glass of water. That is the case also with the program we call "Due South."

Back to Gross. He is a momentous figure whom we used to find on the screen of a Friday night. I used to say to myself thank god it is Friday. Tgif. Great Gross is at work is all, and has us to applaud and egg him on to higher heights of weekly foolishness.

It is like he is carving his own memorial message on the back of his headstone. Writes an encomium for himself. Something like, "I am good. So what! All people are basically good. They just veer off once in a while." You can write your own one-liner to characterize the hero; one that is better than mine. He comes down on the positive side on the question of good and evil in the human breast.

We have the action of the show. It becomes the permanent record of a culture. Chicago in whatever year it is. We recognize the cars, the dress, the signs of the buildings, the police station, the style of the place. Haggis and friends, the producers, give us their image of the world so we can let loose our imagination to play.

We have at our disposal other examples of instructive universes that teach us things. Like the eerie world of Batman in Gotham city. Or the California culture of the show, "Cybil." God, how I would like to live in Cybil's apartment and get to talk to her sidekick, Maryanne. A whole world. California. Just the sound of the word makes my mouth water. California! Home of all the advanced images our society has to offer. The world of 2000 today. Worlds created by art that are imaginary and real at the same moment. Ones like "Brave New World," that Orwell gave us. Or suburban dramas that Updike rendered so beautifully in his novels. Or those put up by Roseanne or Elizabeth Dole.

I am going off half-cocked again. On a tangent, as Bob of Bob's Discount would say. Bob is a friend who owns and runs a legendary discount establishment in an old city north of Boston over by the pond we affectionately can call the Atlantic. Some times we do need tangents. Minds usually work in a combination of myth and daily reality and since I am prone to hang out at Bob's, I combine the imagination I have with what happens at Bob's Discount up there in the dear North shore.

The visual movement one sees in the program "Due South," is art and encourages us to do art along with it. The actor types move across my screen and tell us stories as ballet persons would.

To analyze kindly what they do, orseem to do, is to celebrate their acts. This is what I do. I am Pindar, another old Greek, doing what is an art form, called hero-worship. Pindar wrote and performed poems that praised the heroic figures of his day. We write poems to heroic figures, men and women, so they will be remembered by the next generations. Praise poems, praise prose, is what we do, like other people do corporation jobs or milk cows or fix cars or work up at Walmart in Bellingham, where I will go today, Sunday, for some vitamin C tablets and just a stroll, to see what they got out for the most important holiday of the year.

You know, kids, Halloween. Forget Christmas, or even the second biggest day of the year, St. Patrick's Day, as it is Halloween I live for. All the goblins and saying "boo," and goin' trick or treat and this year my Jennifer will be old enough to come over my house, dressed up by Laura, my daughter, and she will scare me and we will laugh, my granddaughter and I. How I can't wait for Halloween!

The Greek artist does praise poems, as others do what they do, and this effort at writing on my part, appears to be a praise story for Benny, with whom I identify. A lot. He is so good and I try to be good, too.

A close friend who just passed away a few weeks ago, on September 3, my birthday and her wedding anniversary, once turned to me, at her house, on Walpole Street, in Dover, and said,"you are so good." I was taken aback by the complement, because I didn't think I was that good.

But I do think Frazier is. He is ridiculously good. He remains good in a maltopic universe.

His buddy helps him. A Meditteranean type, Italian, Ray. Who is passionate, out of control, able to get revenge on a bad person fast, to love women and to not get hurt by them. He carries a gun and can't wait to shoot someone. Funny, cynical, hard-nosed. A perfect complement to the sensitive, fuzzy Mountie, his pal. Who never gets mad or even. Whose head is in the clouds. Who always gets screwed by women. Who gets his butt in the line of fire, and suffers for us, like Jesus on a cross. Ray the ethnic hero, is a hardy and veteran survivor of an ugly universe, and Benny is a red angel with wings who flies about, being good and always getting stepped on.

The poor wolf just looks at Benny and shakes his head, that anyone could be that stupid. Sometimes the wolf has to bail him out of deep trouble, like his partner- for- life Ray does.

The Mountie is the symbol of tradition and what is right in a world, gone mad, and he needs all the help he can get. If he didn't have Ray and the wolf, he just would not be alive, and we would have no show and that would not do, would it? No. We need "Due South," like intellectuals need Shakespeare, like Warhol needs Brillo pads to paint, like I need Bob's up in Revere to get off on. We need, need, need.

That is what human is... needing.

Most of all we need stories and that is what "Due South," is, a story. A praise poem of itself, a Pindaric opus, sort-of. Haggis sets up a figure to get knocked down and "Timex," the heroic actor, Benton Frazier, takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Poor Paul. Paul Gross.

Just like the Patriots on Sunday. Who cares if they win or lose? I just want to listen to the coach talk on Monday, plain Bill. Bill Parcells tells us why we lost, and why we are so inept and unrealistic and incompetent. Then he will go on, over the tv, to say there is no hope. Only we have to continue to try and we are gonna get clobbered next week if we don't improve drastically.

Then what happens is we win a few and lose a few and a whole city celebrates the good with the bad, as we suffer the New England, the Boston Patriots, the Parcells kids, on the tv. Just like the Mountie and his battles, we cheer and go "ouch," when we lose, which is often and can't wait 'till next week for the whole thing to be repeated.

"Due South," is art and drama.

Sport and the Patriots is immortal art. Warriors battle, individuals fall, and we do all these praise poems.

Look at any of the vases of Analatos, a decorator of the seventh century, BC, and you see the same moving story. As your eye travels along the contours of the vase. We gotta tell stories and then put them someplace, so they will be remembered. Analatos told his stories on the side of vases.

Let us hope someone saves the episodes of "Due South," as they are already classics, to put up there with Mark Twain and James Fennimore Cooper.

To put in the college archives at the Harvard library, where they care to keep and admire the products of our wonderful country.

Frazier is an innocent. The wolf is an innocent, in a hostile environment. It could be Sydney or Calcutta. It is Chicago, but that doesn't matter. What does, is how innocence will prevail over the horrors of modern, urban society. This monster we have created called the city.

The human who has tradition like the Mountie will always survive. He is informed by his Canadian culture, and by his status as a Mountie, with all the tradition behind this warrior-position. He carries tradition in his head along with the teachings of nature which is as powerful as tradition. In the form of the canine, the wolf.

Sensibility, reason, and a respect for nature as a source of learning, characterize this fellow, Paul Gross, who plays the Mountie to such perfection.

It is a curious thing that nature can survive alongside the mean city created by man to thwart and emasculate nature. But a little crack in the sidewalk will spawn a weed, a green thing that will poke through the pavement.

More locally in my world, the Canada geese, among God's most beautiful birds, will feed the family quietly on route 128 in Boston, while the cars fly by at 70. They are a constant reminder of the power of nature, like the wolf is, on "Due South".

Wildness adapts. Tradition informs. Of the modern society we can say that tradition and nature are always present to tame the human penchant to get out of control. The drama under discussion, "Due South," makes that point abundantly clear, as Frazier and Ray go about their adventures. They fight evil and draw on nature and tradition to get them through. The tradition for Frazier comes of his values and of his occasional sightings of his dead father who comes to life at the funniest times. Nature instructs in the form of animal totems that populate Frazier's world on a regular basis.

Dad's a ghost. He teaches his big son to inhere and survive, so century 21 will be informed.

Now let's get down to the nitty-gritty, as they say. I got to go to Damoulas's to get grated cheese, some English muffins, the big package, and take a stroll around, what is for me, paradise. All those beautiful packages. I have not mustered up the courage yet to go down their detergent aisle. I love detergent bottles, as anyone who knows my work knows, but I feel it would be too traumatic to do the aisle in Damoulas's with the detergents, until I develop some greater amount of self-control. I might lose it all by observing that much beauty in one place at one time.

Any ways here is what I can say about "Due South."

It is about passion, like all good shows are about that. Whether plays on the stage or programs over the tv. The redness of the Mountie symbolizes a discrete passion. One under control because Benny is informed from a great tradition and from a powerful nature.

It is sexual passion. His Redness, Paul Gross, is a rose. The rose symbolizes poetry or poesy as we say, and also human passion. Poetry and sex are the same thing you see. They are both treasured emanations of the spirit. We dare get off on both. Ok? Don't make me say more. I will get too embarrassed, as I claim to be an occasional poet.

Were he but a sex toy of a known nature, we would be happy enough, but he sheds skin and changes gender on us on one show I saw. It is like Ken being Barbie, a thought one can barely imagine. Or Eastwood, Streep. Or Batman, Hillary Clinton.

As in Aristophanian times, some few years before Christ, the figure on the stage makes absurd changes to make us laugh and allow us to see the battle of the so-called sexes. Sex-change is just another device for creating drama. I mean, where would drama be if we didn't pit persons with one genital configuration against the ones with another one? You got this and I got that, and ain't that something! So let's make a big deal out of it, so we will have a story and sell a few tickets. Bub.

He changes sexes on us. Gives us a twist on an old genital drama. He hermaphrodites from man to woman, in an episode, where he dresses up as a woman; and men dance with him. He looks pretty convincing as a woman. Funny. He Clark Kents on us in a phone booth. Then comes back, metamorphosizes into Paul Gross again. He is magnificent in his perambulations.

As a man, he falls for women, and they always seem to hurt him or use him. His sex urge gets him in all sorts of scrapes. As man or as woman we have him strong, durable, loveable, proper, decent, kind, exemplary. He is plain shamanistic and can turn into different persons, almost as will. The man becomes a pretty woman and back to a pretty man in a few flashes. He is etherial in his transformations.

Some deep wisdom, come of tradition, or nature, or something, seems to be in him. He is calm in all circumstance. He loses his sight in one episode and just takes it casually until the thing is solved. He takes sex the same way. He attracts woman and stays the course, as she always hurts him. He takes punishment and remains cool. He is courted as a woman when he is dressesd up and plays the role flawlessly and with panache, like the Japanese men who do kabuki play women's roles, or as the Shakespearean actors did, or the old-time, male Greeks who played the female parts.

Gross knows how to show sex and what it is about, as a man or a woman, and he does it with no fanfare. I think his performance minimizes the difference between men and women. That is the power to be found in his work. It shows we are, at some level, capable of both gender roles, at least on the stage. And it shows how a great actor, Paul Gross, can show the sexual dimension, from the position of the man or the woman.

So Gross plays the sex both of the male and the female variety. In doing so he gives the witnesses, the audience and also the ancestors who are,of course dead, the learning that sex is but a set-up, for comedy and tragedy. He suggests to me that humans are all the same, really, but we maximize the gender thing to have something to talk about. The sex difference is the engine for tragedy in particular, and without it, the play would be tame and uninteresting. If we look beyond gender issues we see Brother Gross is playing another role that is of more importance than the sex role.

He is for me an ascetic, a monastic, even as he is an exemplary proponent of sexual sanity, and careful sensibility.

Alone, alone and alone. He is ever alone. He battles the real human isolation we all face. The sex he gets to engage in is for a very short time. And then he is back in his bed, alone, the wolf at the foot and he blows out this kerosene lantern in his crummy room in a slum of Chicago, for god's sake. He has a box for a dresser. What does he do with his salary as a police officer? Why can't he have a microwave or a real dresser? Instead, he is always whispering to the wolf or his father and not going down to Walmarts to buy something decent to put in the apartment. What is wrong with you, Mr. Paul Gross?

May I be so impertinent to ask you that?

Here, hear what the Nobel Lauriate, Seferi, has to say about aloneness. He says a lot but in his speech to the world on winning the award, he comments on the loneliness of the self-taught, the ones with no living teacher, who get learning from their heads listening to tradition and nature.

He says, poetry, and I add here, performance "instinctively finds new roots in the most unexpected places."

In a tv show on and off the air of a Friday night. On the wasteland they call it. On network tv. Could it be the literate critics and scribes of the society are missing something?

Frazier is always right, a most peculiar sort of hero. Even though he falls for women, he comes out whole. Vulnerable to woman, like me and all men I know. In awe. Helpless before the woman. He barely prevails. She rules. He still survives the encounter and goes on to other heights of adventure after he sexes, gets pummeled, then rests up a bit. Maybe he has a bite to eat to get back some energy.

"South" is the world pure. We see nothing dirty after Gross does his magic. Paul cleans up some city named Chicago with his own detergents, tradition, sex, and nature. He leaves us a cleansed universe at the end of each episode. We can go to bed now. At nine of a Friday, I could turn off the light and go to sleep after "Due South, " and dream nice. This is rather important to me, as I want to be untroubled when I lay me on the bed and prepare to meet another stage in my head where actors will careen against a dream-stage and teach me things. "Due South" reminds me of a Greek scene on a vase or in a play at a big amphitheatre where the outcome is assured. It will be such that I can put it aside and feel it has informed me. It has elevated the spirit in me. Tomorrow is another day, as they say, and today's drama will give me the courage to face it squarely. I can learn from the hero, Gross, how to be when I get up tomorrow. No contradictions, no failure. Just the teachings of tradition and nature on how I may be a decent and kind person, like Frazier.

Seferi puts it this way in a poem. He says that tradition is a great river. That it pushes ahead among herb and greenery, like blood courses the human body. Life is a river, and we can know of it if we use the eyes of men and women who see life by looking "straight ahead without fear in their hearts." Thank you, George, again, and again, you get me off the hook. That is Gross to the tee. He looks straight ahead and I try the same. So what that I fail. At least I try.

Happy, contented, in my Homeric village where people are like Frazier. Funny, decent and won't hurt me. Even that hardest thing of all, sex, does not do him in. He survives woman and remains a nice person. An episodic thing in the program, sex. And then he comes back to solve a crime, save a victim, and sleep in an ascetic's bed with the wolf at his feet.

What a guy!

He is for me an explanation for the modern world, phrased in bits of nostalgia: how people used to be good and nice. Benny is pure, all-ways. In all ways, always. The show is a fairy story. One for our times.

Putting an image of innocence on the stage is always a nice thing to do. That is "Due South," a view of the world as benign and innocent with a heroic figure who can do most anything. Benny recreates the past, the one of the paramilitary group, the Canadian Mountie, when men were honorable and did deeds. Like in the French Foreign Legion, the folks did good deeds because it was the right thing to do.

The humble warrior-king is not ultimately susceptible to anything but right. Not to dollars, or sex, or notice by the world. He just does his life and lets the world go by. We love him for that and gladly get into his life to experience the ride.

He may be woman or man. The gender does not matter. Action is all that counts. In Greek, deeds are all that matters. Not who did them, but the act itself and the concomitant risk involved. In Greek, the word is "erga." The warrior-king is also a warrior-queen. It is but a matter of garment, a flow of a robe. What is underneath is not a man or a woman but a human. Sappho, that instructor from Lesbos, Mytiline, says we need love what we love. She uses the neuter form, not a feminine or masculine one to describe the object of our passions. That covers a range of possibilities.

The homosexual, Constantine Cavafi, the greatest contemporary Greek poet, says the same. That whatever our passion, it's gonna kill us eventually, so we better get used to that fact and sit down a write a poem about when we were young and could do "the in and out," the sex act, with abandon and style. He does not get into the details of genital configurations. Just tells us the sex is a bitch to deal with, but the only ballgame in town ultimately and that as old persons, it is all we have to write poems about.

The homeless saint, is what he is. Our lone Paul. A wandering noble, singing troubador songs so we will marvel. And we do. He sings so pure and pretty, doesn't he? Yet he has no gospel, like St. Mark or some Christian person. He just lives and goes on to the next episode brought to you by this or that product. I don't really know whether I like the show better than the commercials. They are both so good. Like, I love commercials. For their story and their color and I love "Due South" for the same things.

American humans in 1996 search for continuity from song and story. That is normal . And we get it from Frazier who teaches a thing or two. And we get it from the frog that is courting the lady frog on Budweiser ads. From the swishing sexy girl in the Clairol ad who just washed her hair and careens around the room with a man's shirt on and she looks so darned sexy.

And the wonderful Folger ad where the man comes to the door and this apparently reticent lady becomes bold enough to court the man, with the smell of her coffee. She looks proper, but we know underneath, she is so sexy we can't bear to think about it. And of all things, coffee is the bridge to a sexual adventure in someone's apartment. How sex rules our every thought.

And then the show comes back and we have to switch from frog, or girl or coffee couple, back to Frazier and his sex life. All in a few seconds and then people wonder why we are so crazy and confused.

We live in and for stories. Call them commercial or show and it does not matter. Our brains register and love both. The ads and the shows give us human continuity. They indicate how drama always will inform us. That is what tv is for. And boy, how it delivers!

I talk to my own father in the vids I produce for local cable tee vee. He appears in photographs in my vids. Often. In the oddes of places.

Paul Gross talks to his father.

My friend, Mary, who does the music vids, talks to her father in some of her works.

Say "hi" to a spirit.

Some spirits just wanna say hi.

The connect is to the underlying, undying human spirit. The connect comes to tie the dead with the living. That is how a culture goes on, and gets richer. We here in America the Grand, have got Lincoln and John Kennedy. I get to talk to the songwriter, Billy Strayhorn who composed all those pieces for Duke Ellington. We talk personal to some generalized Ma and Pa. The connect gets made and gets to become an art piece like "Due South."

The business has its ethnic and racial twists. If we are African- American, we upgrade aspects of that marvelous culture in a particular fashion.

Korean people do tricks with their thousands of years' old tradition. The tradition may be ethnic or racial, African- American, Korean or Greek, like mine. Or it may be Canadian as it is for Benny. We put it on the stage and update it in the modern idiom. Frazier's values and his energy survive. They adhere to our brains, who watch the show and like it.

I don't know if he will have a baby, so his seed will survive. But the show will. That may be his baby. I don't know. We common people, you and I, need kids to survive us. My latest grandchild, Melanie, crawled and creeped over my living room floor yesterday. She is big. Hadn't seen her since she was just born. And now she is so much fun to watch exploring the world. That is how I will live forever. From my kids and their offspring.

Paul Gross is, perhaps, to be survived by his exploits and his stories. It fits, if we see him as an itinerant troubador, a wandering saint, a heroic figure who is alone. Someone like Mary Van Deusen of Wrentham, MA., will come along to do Pindaric paeons to his name. Paul Gross the actor, Benton Frazier the person, survives.

He has a prayer. He has an art. He has the show. His art, Paul Gross's I mean, is his ticket to heaven, immortality. Over there on the other side. If the art survives and the network doesn't bulk it out, erase it. As great art, we may not forget it.

As great actor we have Paul Gross. As great producer, Paul Haggis. And all the wonderful people who do the show with them and make us so happy.