Ghost of a Life
Balloon Man Bill Morrison’s Perfect World
“It’s a marvelously gloriously great
ghost of a life.” Bill Morrison
Somewhere in some recondite and under-explored wavelength
of your television transmission (free cable), there’s a show with Promethean
potential and diabolic disregard for the rules of entertainment that verges on
Nietzschean hubris in aspiring to a new plateau of aesthetics, one that
is verily “beyond good and mediocrity.” Is Bill “Balloonman” Morrison good at
what he does? Resoundingly, and beyond any question, yes. He is a master at
what he does. But what is it that he does? This is a question I would venture
that even Mr. Morrison could not, or at least would not, answer (at least not
intelligibly).
When Mr. Morrison faces the camera, his eyes do not seek
refuge in self-justifying internal reassurance. He is a man beyond shame, and
whatever it is he is doing, like Mitchum acting, he makes damn sure never to
get caught doing it. Often inspired by his own free-associative virtuosity, but
just as often not, he seems to care not a wit either way, and remains
unflinching in his incoherence. But Mr. Morrison is also inspiring, most of all
in his willingness to play the Ape of Thoth so consummately, and with so little
regard for his own apishness. By such brazen nonchalance, Mr. Morrison at times
transcends the self-imposed role of monkey and dimly, dimly, begins to resemble
a god. A TV god, for sure, the deity of a petty domain, which is free cable
after all, and not even a national network; but his confinement to so lowly a
circle of US media hell reflects less upon Mr. Morrison’s talents—which appear
to be prodigious beyond even his own (or especially his own) capacity to
comprehend or fully harness—than it does upon a paltriness intrinsic to the
medium itself. Mr. Morrison has opted to remain a very large fish, possibly
even a shark, in a tiny pond.
Put bluntly, Mr. Morrison is the David Letterman for a
brave new world that will never (we pray) come into being. For in such a world,
one that Mr. Morrison’s demented armchair ravings obscurely and extremely
indirectly herald—a world perfect in its total embracing of all
imperfections—there would be no talk show hosts, no TV dinners, no TV at
all, and so no Bill Morrison persona. Life would be far too interesting and
bizarre to require such dubious means for killing time.
To be fair to him, Mr. Morrison’s solipsism is at times
wearisome, to the viewer as much as it is (evidently) to Mr. Morrison himself.
The “show,” if he’ll allow me to refer to it as such, would certainly benefit
from a little structure, some kind of framework in which the host’s
freewheeling poetry of molecular irrelevance and impotent grandeur would be
able to come more fully into its own. Perhaps he should invite guests to
inflict with his almost superhuman poise and irrationalism, the occasional
straight man for him to loose his tongue upon? In a word, this man’s talents—it
may even be a kind of genius, though it’s hard to say for sure—may never come
fully to bloom (as both the man and the medium so sorely deserve) until they
find the right soil—necessary context—in which to do so.
It’s too bad that Mr. Morrison’s giftedness is
inseparable—even maybe contingent on—his obscurity. Neither Letterman nor Leno,
nor any self-respecting high priest of the television airwaves, is ever going
to have Mr. Morrison on their show. For obvious reasons. The moment Dave
or Jay lets Bill on their show, it will
be painfully plain to everyone watching that their ilk have been superseded, by
a new and unstoppable mutant strain. Mr. Morrison may never be the talk
show host he deserves to be, but if so that’s because, at heart, he is no host
but a virus. The moment mainstream TV allowed him through its doors of
perception and into the sleeping mind of the masses, it would spell the end of
mainstream TV.
Until that time, Bill Morrison will remain perhaps what he
most aspires to be: a marvelously, gloriously great ghost of a guy.
See Bill’s Response to this
Piece