A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode six — The General

Glen is under the influence of digital vermouth and under the spell of John Castle in our dissection of "The General." Wherein Number Six gets anger-cruised and Kirks a computer, and Colin Gordon "returns" as Number Two from "A.B. & C." — an episode obviously intended to follow this one, but which was broadcast before — apparently having survived his encounter with a tumescent scarlet telephone handset and the unheard but clearly menacing voice on the other end of that line.

One hundred percent entry; one hundred percent pass!

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode five — The Schizoid Man

Number Six comes face-to-immobile-face with the only opponent who can truly make him doubt his resolve: Himself!

It's the The Parent Trap episode. It's "Mirror, Mirror" episode. It's the Double Impact episode. It's the if-I'm-not-me-who-da-hell-am-I-episode. It's the episode that teaches us that fingering an electric socket may on rare occasions be quite necessary, despite what your parents and teachers would have you believe.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode four — Free For All

It's election time in The Village and Number Six is the frontrunner! Eric Portman, this episode's Number Two, greets him thus: "Good morning, good morning! Any complaints?" And of course Six has complaints. He's like Portnoy: famed for his complaints.

Featuring the lovely Rachel Herbert as Number Fifty-Eight, his irrepressibly enthusiastic and enthusiastically unintelligible driver/assistant/etc. Or is she?

This is the episode in which our dearth of a title song with lyrics gets well and truly solved. And in which a voicemail from a listener sparks a discussion of Number Six's... likability.

"A Degree Absolute!"

Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek

Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark

Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark

Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark

Bass by Marcus Newstead

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode three — A. B. & C.

They grow up fast. A Degree Absolute!, my punctuated and punchcard-driven passion project podcast with Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon, is already three episodes old!

We’re reviewing the episodes in the sequence in which they were aired way back in 1967-8 A.D., which is, as we explain, for the most part not the sequence in which they were made. This week’s episode, “A. B. & C.,” was intended to run late in The Prisoner’s first season, and was ultimately broadcast third. It features Peter Bowles telling Patrick McGoohan “I want you,” a classic John McClane-style air-shaft constitutional, some dodgy fisticuffs, the plot of the 2010 Christopher Nolan film Inception, and a milk-drinking Colin Gordon as a Number Two menaced by a tumescent red phone.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Our Favorite Concert Films

The Live in New York City film released in 2001 is drawn primarily from this tour-ending July 2000 Madison Square Garden concert, later released (in audio only) in its entirety through Springsteen’s live archive in 2017.

On Feb. 29, 2020, nine days after I had knee surgery, I bolted my despised immobilizer to my left leg and crutched down the 9:30 Club to see the Drive-By Truckers . I’d seen this beloved band play this beloved venue on many, many prior occasions, including on New Year’s Eve at the end of 2011, but never before with only three working limbs at my disposal. The club reserved a couple of barstools for me so I could keep my leg elevated and I had a fine time, not knowing that a global pandemic would extend what I’d expected would be four to six weeks of post-op confinement to 13 months and counting.

We haven’t been able to go to concerts in a year now. So I was glad when the Pop Culture Happy Hour crew invited me to join my longtime pal Stephen Thompson and my new-time pals Cyrena Touros and LaTesha Harris to talk about some of our favorite concert films. (Music documentaries were excluded from consideration.) While there are a dozen or so such films to which I have returned time and again, the indefensible police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd last year and the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations those tragedies gave rise to made the 20-year-old film documenting the tour where Bruce Springsteen pissed off the NYPD with his then-brand-new song “American Skin (41 Shots)” — inspired by the NYPD killing of unarmed delivery man Amadou Diallo in 1999 — once again sadly timely. So I decided to talk about Live in New York City, the film shot during the final two concerts of Bruuuuuuuuuuce’s 1999-2000 reunion tour with The E Street Band — their first time out on the road together in 11 years — which concludes with that haunting, magnificent song.

The reconstituted E Street Band has now been playing together longer than its original incarnation did (circa 1974-88) but in 1999 it was not at all clear that this reunion would be permanent. Bruce had dismissed the E Street Band several years before I was old enough to be going to rock shows. The reunion was a big deal. I saw five shows on that tour. One of them, for which I begged a ride to Philly from a colleague I barely knew and then paid a scalper $240 for a nosebleed ticket, was finally released in sublime quality through the Springsteen’s live archive last summer. It only took 21 years.

I looked up the proper unit of measurement to describe how much Bruuuuuuuuuuce sweats during the performance captured in Live in New York City. Turns out it’s Wilburys. He loses five Wilburys of fluid during the show.

Thanks as always to ace producers Jessica Reedy and Candce Lim for having me on.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode two — The Chimes of Big Ben

Our abstract-art-and-seafaring-adventure-packed “The Chimes of Big Ben” episode of A Degree Absolute! makes a fine companion on your sunny-day run or walk or bike ride or desperate escape attempt via art-boat!

Number Six attempts to escape The Village with the help of a newcomer named Nadia and a "basically primitive" abstract art project with a hard-to-overlook nautical vibe. He also finds out where The Village is.

Unequivocally.

Indisputably.

Maybe.

Featuring the first of the great Leo McKern's appearances as Number Two!

and now, A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode one — Arrival

Creator/star Patrick McGoohan listens to our 2021 podcast about his TV show on a Zune in this 1967 photo.

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Four years and seven score ago, Pal-For-Life Glen Weldon suggested to me we do a podcast deconstructing The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s short-lived, long-tailed allegorical spy-fi TV series that flummoxed and infuriated viewers with its final episode decades before The Sopranos or LOST or Mad Men would do the same. We are neither of us men of haste. We dragged our heels about doing it for so long that its initial news hook — the 50th anniversary of the series, which ran for 17 episodes in England in 1967-8 and in the U.S. the following summer — came and went, only to be replaced by a far more dire one. We’ve all been more or less confined to our homes for a year and counting.

Like the show’s mysterious title character, Number Six, we are all vexed by circumstance and desperate to escape. Unlike Number Six, we are friendly and personable to people of any and all genders. But you’ll be the judge of that, we hope. You’ve heard Glen & me share the studio on a number of episodes of Pop Culture Happy Hour over the years — I’m still not thrilled that he called me “sconce-jawed” that one time on the Man of Steel episode — but this the is first All-New, All-Different, All-Glen, All-Chris podcast, and its senses-shattering first episode is available right now.

Ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary individuals, I give you… A Degree Absolute!

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "In & Of Itself"

From Isabel Greenberg’s The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (Bond Street Books, 2013)

I was delighted to join my pal Linda Holmes to discuss the just-released-on-Hulu filmed version of illusionist/storyteller/railer-against-the-labeling-of-people Derek DelGaudio’s stage show In & Of Itself, which he performed several hundred times over engagements in Los Angeles and New York circa 2016-2018. You can listen to the episode below. I also recommend Claire McNear’s 2018 profile of DelGaudio in The Ringer.

Naturally, Linda mentioned my onetime employment by the great illusionist Ricky Jay. I wrote about my time in RJ’s employ shortly after he passed away in November 2018.