Barks and TV

[Donald D. Ault]

Regarding the comments about Barks and TV, especially the following:

rodney-selfhelpbikeco at juno.com

>I have however heard, from actual interviews with Barks that he rarely (if
ever) >watched television, preferring instead to read (yes, you can keep up
with news events >by picking up the daily newspaper.  I do it all of the
time!).  Considering that he had >little interest in television, it
certainly wasn't a priority, and I don't find it hard to >believe that he
waited as long as possible before buying a TV set (I assume this is >spoken
of in the interview book).
.

Even though I recently completed editing and publishing the Barks interview
book, there was so much information that I had to cut out, it's difficult to
remember what was included and what wasn't, but I don't believe this issue
came up in the book (note below that I did find one reference), so I thought
I should indicate my memory of the situation.

I know that by the time Carl had been doing the oil paintings for a while
(after 1971), he sometimes seemed irked when I arrived to visit and
immediately wanted to see his latest work. He was often engrossed in
watching some sports event on TV--football, baseball, golf, etc.--but he'd
sort of grumpily get up and show me what was going on in his studio
upstairs. Then he'd go back to watching whatever he'd been watching on TV.
After this happened a couple of times I waited for him to invite me up to
the studio at his convenience. Around 1975 he was able to get a free (or
almost free) cable feed from LA with many stations (although he didn't pay
for all the stations, he didn't illegally access them either; for some
reason they were just available there in Goleta, and he took advantage of
having them, primarily to watch sports). I recall he said in a phone
conversation we had late in 1997, just before the really bad phase of the
lawsuits involving his managers emerged, that he was tired of talking about
depressing things and switched the subject to the University of
Florida/Florida State football rivalry--a game that was soon coming up on TV
("those guys really hate each other, don't they?"). I think TV sports was a
great diversion for him then as it had always been. During my final visit
with him in 2000, we often sat around watching golf on TV, and he was
complaining because he felt they were spending too much time focusing on the
older players, when he wanted to see more of how Tiger Woods was doing.

I just remembered PROBABLY the only reference to TV news in the interview
book (from a 1999 interview):

"I get mad like everybody else at the stupid things people are doing in
different parts of the world, but what could I do about it? I couldn't hire
an army to go over there and kick somebody's butt. Just have to watch TV and
hope we'll get some better news someday." (page 214)

Donald Ault
Professor of English
University of Florida
ault at ufl.edu
http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/~donault/