Category: Media

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Uneducated Comedians

I have a theory that a college education is not an asset to a comedian.  Some comedians, including Woody Allen, ridicule pretty well all education.   Their teachers were stupid.  They were smarter than their teachers.  Schools suppressed their creativity and imagination.  Most of what they learned is irrelevant to their lives.

They are right that the education system needs to be improved but I wonder what they think would be a good alternative.  I suppose, better teachers.   Hollywood loves movies about inspirational teachers who are attacked and repressed by soul-less repressive authority figures.  If the movie is based on a true story, I guarantee you that the enemy of the inspirational teacher is fiction– audiences need a villain.

The comedian– in today’s comedy– thrives on the “arrested thought” (my term).

If you make a joke that is subtle or complex, you risk a dud in front of a live audience which may not ever get it.

George Carlin, bless his soul, regularly does take this chance. But he is exceptional. And I am disturbed by the fact that he is now widely honored, even revered. I’ll bet he worries about it too.  When the establishment falls over itself to hand you awards (Kennedy Centre honors), you have obviously become part of … the establishment.

For example, it’s funnier to mock abstract art if you don’t quite process the real thing. If you don’t get into the question of shape or color or visualization or composition, or how hard it is to actually create an abstract painting (try it, if you don’t believe me). If you process it that far, it’s not funny anymore. It’s plausible that there might be something to abstract art–and that the criteria for judging it might be different than, say, for figurative art– and that is the joke’s death. It’s funnier to describe a painting as a bunch of splatters and lines and say, “I’m supposed to be amazed by this?” The young high-school educated working class males in the audience respond enthusiastically because they don’t get it either and they hate feeling stupid.

Louis C. K., a comedian I like very much, recently appeared on David Letterman to mock the Common Core. I’m not sure about Common Core. I haven’t studied it carefully. It may well be a very significant, important, and effective reform. But Louis C. K., with his high school diploma gets to describe Common Core math as “Bill has three goldfish. He buys two more. How many dogs live in London.” London, of course. There is something, to the working-class male, foreign about this Common Core. Elitist. Fucking Common Core. Hilarious. Drink up.

Where is the joke? The joke is half of fourth graders in the U.S. can’t read a thermometer accurately. The joke is that American adults rank in the bottom 20% in math skills among 20 developed nations. The joke is that A&W’s 1/3 pound burger bombed in the U.S. because most customers thought it was smaller than the quarter-pounder at McDonald’s. The joke is that Americans are the worst at math in the entire world and Louis C. K. yuks it up because any attempt to improve math scores involves challenging, intellectually demanding effort, and you can’t seriously expect an American man to give a shit about anything other than beer, football, and large breasts. And if you think otherwise, it’s because you’re an elitist snob who thinks he’s better than us.

The joke should have been, Louis C. K. makes an appointment to see the teacher but can’t find the room for the meeting because it has more than two digits in the number.

Mitch Hedberg died on April Fools Day, 2005. That’s why it took so long for people to realize he was really dead. That’s no joke.

Bob Hope was actually pretty witty and funny and charming. I never liked him because for me, growing up in the 1960’s, he was the quintessential establishment comedian: he used writers and cue cards instead of creating and memorizing his own material; and he was white, safe, homogenized, and a classic Republican Chicken Hawk: a passionate supporter of the Viet Nam War who– of course!– never got within a hundred miles of actually serving in a war, though I’m sure he felt very brave doing comedy at a military base somewhere near the location of actual warfare.

Also like a classic Republican, Hope carried on several affairs while married, including a long-term one with actress Marilyn Maxwell. Why is this so inevitable?

When Hope was honoured by Queen Elizabeth with an honorary knighthood, he quipped, “I’m speechless. 70 years of ad lib material and I’m speechless”. Well, no. Seventy years of cue cards, Mr. Hope. But an interesting line. I’m quite sure he doesn’t mind most of fans believing that he writes his own quips or thinks of them on the fly.

Great comedy really is a mark of genius, and the best comedians around today like Louis C. K., Stephen Wright, Doug Stanhope and others might be among the smartest people in the entertainment business.

That doesn’t make them the smartest people.  Just from that select group.  But the sad trend among comedians to ridicule education at every opportunity sounds to me like musicians dumping on music critics.  Did you forget why a lot of people started listening to your music and bought your albums?  Because they read a review somewhere.

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CBC in the Afternoon

I’m becoming less and less interested in CBC in the afternoon.

The other day, the hostess, Gill Deacon, was talking about the up-coming 3D version of Peanuts, and describing how she can’t wait to see Lucy pull the football back when Charley Brown tries to kick it.

She wants the movie to be the one she already saw? She can’t wait to laugh again at an old, old joke? She is excited about the idea that the producers of this movie will not be able to come up with a new idea but will have to repeat an old one?

I’ll bet she actually tunes in to see reruns of “Happy Days” and gets wet just thinking about Fonzie going “EEEHHEHHHH!”. Again. And again. And again. And again. And do it again, Fonzie, it was so funny. Please? Do it again. “Eeeehhhh!”. Oh! (Hysterical giggles).

So this woman wants to go to those parties where your Uncle George tells you the exact same story for the 30th time. So she wants to go see the Eagles on tour doing the same hits they first performed in 1979. And Carol Burnett do her mugging, and Tim Conway, and Jerry Lewis and Red Skeleton.

There was a time when I would listen to CBC on my way home from work and, often, quickly look up the name of an interesting artist they had played and get more of his or her music to listen to.  I have not done that in years because the CBC in the afternoon no longer plays anything worth hearing again.

Gill Deacon is popular among many of my friends.  I’m baffled.  I don’t know if any of them ever try to imagine what a really good radio hostess would sound like.  She would not sound like Gill Deacon, who cannot complete a single complex sentence without false starts.  She is inarticulate and trite, often sounding like a college sophomore on her first date.

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Character Assassination: Joyce Maynard Betrays J.D. Salinger

While watching Miley Cyrus’ pornographic performance on the 2013 MTV awards, I thought about an article I’d read hours earlier, about a new biography of J. D. Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno, and about Joyce Maynard who tried to sell letters Salinger had written her when she was 18 and he was 53, which resulted in her moving in with him for a year. Maynard was vilified by some for trying to sell the letters to pay for her childrens’ tuition costs. Peter Norton, he of the famous Norton Utilities (well, famous back in the days of DOS), purchased the letters and gave them back to Salinger, displaying more class than anybody else involved in this celebrity dust-up, including Salinger.

The deal is usually this: you want to sell your book / movie / record by appearing in magazines and on talk shows, you give up your right to privacy. I’m not sure why that is a “deal” but it is. If you seek publicity for personal gain, you don’t seem to have the right to complain if someone tries to take pictures of you topless at a private beach. Or if people camp out in front of your door and photograph you every time you go out to dinner or to get groceries or pick up your child at school. Why is that a deal? Because the “moderates” of the media monster have decided that that is reasonable. The subject celebrity supposedly agrees to this exchange, tacitly, when they agree to some other specified act of publicity.  No– it’s because you seek publicity in order to sell your movie, your book, your recordings, so it’s hypocritical to complain about your privacy being invaded when you have clearly offered it in exchange for money or fame or power.

J. D. Salinger famously became a recluse. He had a taste of fame, didn’t like it, and stopped publishing, and retreated to a very private cabin on a 90 acre property in Cornish, New Hampshire. He built a separate house for his family. He had work to do, even if he wasn’t publishing.  He accepted that he would not sell as many books if he maintained his privacy, and most of the media respected that tacit arrangement.

Jonathan Franzen famously refused to appear on Oprah for the same reason.  Then he changed his mind– at the behest of his publishers– and did appear on Oprah knowing full well the consequences of a deal with the devil: the tabloid fame that follows.

The essential duplicity of Maynard’s action is the decision to expose, for public consumption, very private sexual acts. The obvious question is why. The obvious answer– from a publicist’s point of view– is to tell the truth, or the help other people, or to have closure, or to work through her depression. The real reason, without the slightest doubt, is to evoke sympathy, make money, whether through book sales, the auction of the letters, or personal appearances, and exploit the fame of the person you are exposing.

You may choose to believe Maynard’s rationalizations: I do not. I think it’s bullshit. It is exactly what it looks like and there is never any doubt about what it looks like: you took a very private relationship and splattered it all over the place knowing full well what kind of mincemeat most of the media will make of it by the time they’re through. You behaved a certain way while with Salinger– you kissed him back, embraced him, undressed for him, whatever, consented to intimacy without giving him the slightest indication that you would eventually use that information to sell yourself, to be noticed, to get press, to sell more books, to present yourself as some kind of victim.

It’s Goldman on Lennon, Hersh on Kennedy, Kelly on Sinatra: it’s all the same. And nobody is absolved by saying, oh, they should have known that would happen. If you can’t take the heat…

There is nothing shockingly new about the whole thing: it just throws the issue into sharper relief than usual. I remember Dylan shredding a reporter who asked him if he was a “spokesman” for his generation. No. Are you the spokesman for your generation? You actually felt bad for the reporter, but Dylan learned as well: you can’t win that kind of exchange over the long run, no matter how smart or quick you are.

You are never going to go camp out in someone else’s driveway and go through their garbage.

Some of the writers who defended Joyce Maynard for telling all and selling Salinger’s letters to her remark on how Salinger saw her picture and then contacted her by letter and eventually met her, invited her to live with him for nine months, and then dumped her.

They insist Salinger obviously noticed how beautiful she was.

Hardcover Looking back;: A chronicle of growing up old in the sixties Book

With all due respect, looking at the same picture, I think it more likely he was attracted to her mind.

Maynard was raked by some other commentators for having breast implants, then removing them, and writing about the entire experience in Vanity Fair. If Maynard wants you to believe that Salinger was attracted to her because of her looks– I’m not sure she does– and that there was something wrong with that, why the implants?

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Dan Rather’s Big Lie

After 50 years, I remain fascinated by a single incident related to the Kennedy Assassination. And I really believe that you may find it as fascinating as I do no matter what you believe about the Kennedy Assassination. Actually, I don’t think that’s true at all, but I don’t care. You should be fascinated by it– it makes no sense. And it makes all the sense in the world.

It was known almost immediately that someone had shot a film of the assassination. In fact, there were several films, but there was only film that captured the essential event in glorious colour, with sharpness, and reasonable proximity: that is the film, of course, shot by clothing merchant, Abraham Zapruder, who was standing on a kind of pagoda with the assistance of his assistant, Marilyn Sitzman. A reporter chatted with Zapruder after the assassination. If you are into conspiracies– and who can resist– you will note that the reporter offered to put Zapruder in contact with a Secret Service Agent, who, we would have assumed, would have loved to have a beautiful, clear, colourful, cinematic souvenir of them all standing on the follow-up car staring at the assassination event.

The Secret Service accompanied Zapruder to a local television station and then to Eastman Kodak’s local processing plant, and then to another processing plant, the Jamieson Film Company, to have some copies made. The Secret Service had a look at this film. And then Richard Stolley, an editor from Life Magazine, amazingly arrived to negotiate with Zapruder for exclusive rights to the film and all prints from the film, for about $150,000. Richard Stolley worked for a man named C. D. Jackson at Time-Life.

C.D. Jackson was a close friend of the CIA, and helped establish the Bilderberg Group. You couldn’t make this shit up. Yes, this guy who had obtained custody of the most compelling evidence of a conspiracy in the Kennedy Assassination worked with the CIA.

We now know it didn’t work, but, if you were the suspicious sort, what this looks like is the conspirators jumping in to make sure that nobody ever sees the evidence that might disprove that Oswald and Oswald alone killed Kennedy, from the 6th Floor the Texas Book Depository, from behind.

I say it did not work. Or it worked better than in their wildest dreams.

Zapruder had a nightmare about people paying to see his film in Times Square. He didn’t mind the paying part. But I guess his nightmare included people being repelled about the idea of him selling frame 313, in which Kennedy’s head explodes. So a condition of sale was that frame 313 could not be shown. He kept his money.

Life Magazine eventually published very poor quality prints taken from the film, but that was all the American public would see of the film for a long, long, long time.

Understandably, there was considerable curiosity about the film. Once it became clear that a “commission” of sterile old fat white men was going to pin the whole thing on a “lone nut” no matter what the evidence was (I’m not sure why they even bothered to hold hearings or examine anything: they disregarded any evidence that opened any doors), there was even more curiosity. One of the central tenets of the Warren Commission’s findings was that all of the shots came from behind, from Oswald’s “sniper’s nest”. But some witnesses and conspiracy theorists didn’t believe Oswald could have fired all of the shots. Some people in Dealey Plaza thought the shots came from the grassy knoll. There was some discussion even at Parkland Hospital about an “entry” wound in the neck, and about the head snapping backwards, and even about an entry wound in the forehead.

In the midst this hot and heavy discussion rode CBS reporter Dan Rather to the rescue. The public was told that, as little children, as tiny, irresponsible, wee little children, they could not be trusted to view the best evidence of who killed their president, but Dan Rather would assume this burden for us, almost like Jesus going on the cross. And so Dan Rather watched the film very, very carefully– this was by far, the biggest news story of the decade, after all, so he wouldn’t want to miss a detail– and then, instead of staying to try to outbid Life Magazine for the film, he ran as fast as he could back to the local CBS affiliate so he could breathlessly report to the American public that the film, indeed, showed Kennedy’s head going violently forward with the impact of the third shot. “Forward and to the right”.

“forward and to the right”

I am still astonished at this. Kennedy’s head, of course, jerked violently backwards, to the left. It’s the most obvious thing about the third shot: backwards and to the left. As if Kennedy might have been shot from the front.

I leave aside the complicated argument that a shot from the rear could have produced that motion.  It is possible, but complicated.

So, Dan Rather, with a chance to be at the center of the biggest news story of the decade, lies to millions of people. Why?

Was it a mistake? Could it be that Dan Rather, for all his fame and all of his promotion and self-promotion, and self-aggrandizement, and posturing, was a complete idiot who couldn’t tell left from right, up from down, or in from out? Could it be that he could not, fifteen minutes later, remember which direction Kennedy’s head was going in when his skull was blown open by a rifle shot, after viewing the most shocking, important 22 second film clip in history?

Did Dan Rather know that the assassination was to be pinned on a lone gunman shooting from above and behind and that all conspiracies were to be excluded? It seems unlikely: Rather saw the film on the day of the assassination. On the other hand, everyone knew, by then, that the suspect had worked in the Texas Book Depository, and I’m sure Rather’s instincts were that the American public needed to be reassured that there was no conspiracy regardless of whether or not there had actually been one. Oswald was in custody. He knew the outlines of the conspiracy. He certainly could have been aware of which conspiracy would be the preferred conspiracy.

But perhaps Dan was already prepared, emotionally and intellectually, to play his role in American politics and culture over the next forty years, that of a superficially liberal journalist, of slight but discernibly progressive inclinations, but fundamentally establishment in orientation and interests. This is someone who might eventually think that Nixon should be impeached, but only after he has observed that all political parties do dirty tricks. This is someone who would become opposed to the Viet Nam war only after every other credible authority has long before switched sides, and then he would try to make it sound like he was being courageous. Rather would observe that peaceniks are naïve, because, after all, real enemies will really resist all our attempts to take all their oil.

It was this kind of faux liberalism that led the New York Times to endorse the Iraq war at the time the Bush Administration was hustling it.

About the Camera

The Camera: a Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 414 PD

1960 Bell and Howell Camera DUO Power Zoom Zoomatic its the image 1

Dan, do you wish that, fifty years later, people would just leave it alone? Sorry. You don’t deserve that kind of forgetfulness.

About Mrs. Kennedy

There is another surprise. Rather — accurately, for a change– described, in his first recorded account of the film, how Mrs. Kennedy had tried to get out of the car in the middle of the assassination. The next day, the day after the assassination, CBS decided to have Rather broadcast his experience of the film live again (Rather was being groomed after all). But, they told him, leave out the part about Mrs. Kennedy. It was considered indecorous. America, they said (according to Dan) was not “ready” to absorb the image of the first lady trying not to get shot.

In fact, I still believe Mrs. Kennedy was trying to retrieve part of John Kennedy’s skull, which had been blown off and was slipping down the back of the limo. It was later recovered by a bystander and “returned” to the Secret Service (and flown up to Bethesda to be reunited with the body.)

I am astonished, but then not astonished, at how casually the establishment decides for Americans what they should or should not know. Just astonished. The omission of important information about what happened is bad, bad journalism, dishonest and irresponsible. And it is these same people, these same institutions who turn pale and almost feint when the idea of getting your news through the internet is raised…. unmediated!! You must be mad!

My Theories on Conspiracies

The Magic Bullet

 

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Charlton Heston’s Naked Butt

I was watching “Planet of the Apes” on PBS the other night and there was that famous shot of Charlton Heston being presented to the ape officials for disposal, naked, from behind.

I have seen this movie at least three times, on television. I have never before seen Charlton Heston’s naked buttocks blurred out. But here it was, on PBS, the “enlightened” network, blurred out, just like Stewy’s naked butt on “Family Guy”.

What the hell? Has PBS joined the hoards of frigid hysterical puritans who have decided that the moral life of the nation is threatened by the back view of a man’s naked buttocks? In a country that enjoys dismemberment, explosions, bikinis, gratuitous sex and violence, and Fox News? Spare us.

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The Boston Marathon Bombing

In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, Fox TV pulled an episode of “The Family Guy” off the internet. The episode in question depicted Peter trying to win the Boston Marathon by running over competitors with a car. Carnage ensued, to comic effect. In the same episode, Peter is shown dialing a number on a cell phone given to him by a shady new friend. When he dials a number, we hear an explosion. He tries again and this time an explosion and screams are heard.

Some mischievous pranksters out there– you devils!– spliced the two segments closer together than they were in the actual episode to suggest that … actually, nobody knows what they were suggesting, though there is talk about conspiracies and clairvoyance and other nonsense. Yes, there are people who believe that the Boston Marathon Bombing was a hoax perpetrated by the U.S. government to try to abridge our civil liberties and take away our guns. I’m not making this up.

What I am interested in is the question: how long until we can go back to “enjoying” the comedy of runners getting killed and bombs going off? The question is, why did we ever enjoy it, and why should we all be so delicate and sensitive about it now?

This kind of carnage goes on every day in Syria and Iraq and it never bothered us before to have a good chuckle about Peter’s violent shenanigans. And just days before the Marathon bombing, the American government made a profound statement: no amount of carnage is sufficient to justify the slightest inconvenience for any lunatic who wants to by a semi-automatic rifle with 50 shot magazine.

The political hypocrisy is bad enough, but Seth MacFarlane’s condemnation of the mash-ups (placing the two clips closer together to imply that the bomb was at the Boston Marathon) is a little nauseating. MacFarlane’s bread and butter is vulgarity, shock, and jokes about bodily functions, and it seems manifestly evident that questions of good taste never entered his mind before– ever– except as an imaginary line he could routinely cross over for pure shock value. But he sees which way the wind is blowing on this one and is careful to distance himself from his own bad taste for the moment.

And really… couldn’t they find something in South Park that was even more offensive?

We don’t hate violence. We love it. On the same day as Newtown and the same day as Columbine and the same day as Boston, you could scan any movie listing for any Cineplex in the country and find people paying extravagantly to see glorious full-color high-resolution loving depictions of humans slaughtering humans with guns, bombs, knives, and forks, with ropes and stakes and fangs, and swords and arrows and spears, and grenades and razor blades and stilettos. We LOVE violence more than anything except, perhaps, bikinis and beer.

When we are attacked, as in Boston, we act as if it is the violence directed towards other human beings that we are appalled at, because we are good people who would never intentionally harm anyone else, because to admit that we don’t really mind the violence when it’s done to somebody else reveals too much of our inner selves. We are shocked and outraged and monumentally indignant, really, because our tribe took a hit. We call it “justice” but what we really want is revenge. We say we want to prevent it from happening again when what we really want is for it to happen to them.

Without a doubt, a lot of people are appalled at violence in general, and when there is a catastrophe like Newtown or Boston, they prevail on public discourse because it is momentarily transparent that what we enjoy in the theatre and in our video games is exactly what it is: appalling. The perpetrators at least have an excuse: they have a cause.

The rest of us are just being entertained.

Afterthought

Even some gun proponents agree that there should be some effort made to keep the guns out of the hands of lunatics. But not really. Any rational definition of lunacy would have to include generals like Curtis LeMay, Vice-Presidents like Dick Cheney, and Senators like Ted Cruz who espouse ridiculous and preposterous theories about government and guns and violence and taxes and civic responsibility and the nature of the world — yes, yes, yes: if only we could keep weapons out of the hands of lunatics.

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The “Harbinger”

That past sorrows and joys have merged into an elegance that permeates her presence, that “something in the air” that indicates class and courage and composure. Though she now rigorously guards her privacy, her free spirit surfaces easily, and her thoughts come crystal clear. A figure of her time, our history, Lee is her own harbinger for an iconic future. Ours, and hers. (From Nicky Haslam, Ny Times Blogs 2013-02-07)

And there you have the answer to the question, how do you flatteringly describe the narcissistic and pointless life of a true celebrity?  Nauseous yet?

Those words were written in reference to Lee Bouvier Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister by five years. (As admired as Jackie Kennedy was, she too was nothing more than a celebrity. If you think that inviting well-known, if serious, poets and singers to the White House or being a book editor later in life means you actually had a real life, think again: a book editor is exactly what you do if you really aren’t up the far more lugubrious task of writing. It’s not like, say, building houses with Jimmy Carter. )

What is a “celebrity”? In the real world, useless people wither and die because they are incapable of producing anything of value in order to sustain an affluent lifestyle. A celebrity is simply someone who gets the lifestyle anyway.

You get why Sofia Coppola, who made “Marie Antoinette” with Kirsten Dunst, (and a better movie, “Lost in Translation”) would be interested in her. “Marie Antoinette” did for the title subject what that paragraph above tries to do for Lee Radziwill: recast the life of a sheltered, uninteresting, unaccomplished but affluent woman into something more dramatic and significant. Next, of course, we find out why these women are victims, in a way, so we can empathize with them, so something will mitigate that feeling of privilege. So we can say they have “overcome” something, like not being born rich.

She tried. Yes, she tried to actually produce something of value and when you can’t really produce anything of value– she couldn’t– but you want to create the illusion of it, you become an actress, or, god help us, a model. She tried acting. She appeared in at least two plays. Both attempts elicited scathing reviews and she gave it up.

She was a hanger-on, with the by then artistically impotent Truman Capote, on the Rolling Stones 1972 tour, for which I don’t think she even earned a mention in Keith Richards’ “Life”. She has received France’s Légion d’honneur which astonishes me. That sounds so meaty and substantial. I’ll have to wiki that one day to find out what exactly it means. Remember– France thinks Jerry Lewis is a brilliant comedian.

The most astounding comment is the reference to a portrait of Radziwill “at the height of her astonishing beauty”.  Have a look.  I could almost let anything else by Haslam pass but it is one thing to ask us to tolerate celebrities coasting among us, parasitical (almost always acquiring wealth through inheritance or marriage), intrusive, boring, but to then insist that we recognize them as beautiful as well goes far beyond the pale. There’s her picture to the right, her coarse face, the ridiculous hair and earrings, and that vacuous sedentary expression in fervent acknowledgement of the wisdom of keeping your mouth shut if you don’t have anything particularly interesting to say.

Unless, of course, you are a “harbinger”.

Here’s an excruciating passage from Haslam’s interview:

“Were you always aware of your beauty?”
“From the word go,” she answers simply and honestly. “But no one else was, then…”

The transmutation of Radziwill’s coarse, rather weird face– Jackie Kennedy had a bit of the same odd arrangement of eyes – nose – mouth– into this “astonishing” beauty is worth a book. How we manufacture illusions.

Given Radziwill’s life and connections and wealth, any face with all of the core elements in it would eventually elicit this “astonishing” tag from a celebrity interviewer some day. Because that is precisely how you describe a woman who is really quite homely if she is rich and famous and a celebrity and obviously not beautiful at all and you have been absolutely dying to meet her and make a big point of describing how she seemed to like you. And then you use her first name. With the money you will have the teeth and the make-up and what passes for hair style, and clothing. Usually the breasts. But no amount of money can fix the flaws in the arrangement of that face. They eyes are too wide set, the nose too long, the forehead like a plateau. And that awful, awful dress.

In 1974 she and Jackie published “One Special Summer,” a memoir of their European trip, written originally as a gift to their parents.

But really, this is so good. So beautiful. This is so amazing! You should publish this! People would love to read about your life. I must insist on sending a copy to my friend over at Harper-Collins… He’s a tough editor. I’m sure he’ll give his real opinion. Let’s see what he thinks. Let’s not tell him who wrote it. No– no! That would be cruel.

And so it goes. Oh my goodness– we were astonished at the demand for our book. Who would have thought it? But after all, I have such good taste. It would surprise no one to know that I can do a bit of it myself.

As for “harbinger for an iconic future”, I don’t even know what Ms. Nicky intended with this preposterous line. I can’t figure it out. How can a future be “iconic”? Does she mean our future will be full of icons? And that Lee Radziwill will astonish young people in the future with her good looks and her savoir faire? Will they want to hear stories of her hanging around the Rolling Stones in 1972 and meeting many interesting people, like, oh Truman Capote, Joe Namath, and Olivia Newton-John?

Afterthoughts

Is Eva Peron one of these? Not entirely– she was so deeply — and disastrously– involved in the politics of Argentina that she might be more accurately regarded as a dictator rather than a celebrity. She did things– bad things, generally– but she did actually do things.

Though… now that I think about it… isn’t what happened in Argentina under the Perons precisely the kind of thing that happens when you give a celebrity real power? Things go bad. Offences to vanity become treason. The government not only insists that you obey them, but that you also love them.

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Amanda Cox Seeks a “Package”

What ABC could and did offer, instead, was an hour in prime time; teases of the interview on “World News”, the newly first -place morning show “Good Morning America”, “nightline,” and ABC’s local TV and radio affiliates.  Within the industry this is called the “package”. NY Times, February 12, 2013

The real package is, of course, Amanda Knox, who will enthrall millions of Americans on April 30 on ABC “News”. This is not news. It’s not journalism. It is the nauseous give and take of exploitation and titillation and scandal marketing. It is the news division committing incest with the entertainment division. The business of this entire process is not information or enlightenment or insight but how to disguise voyeurism as respectable information intercourse. We are all going to do the dance because we are happy to pretend to be appalled or sympathetic or curious or informed while   experiencing the thrill of dirty sex with a sexually vibrant young woman whose room-mate was murdered.

Amanda has a book to sell.

There is no personal experience so tragic or distasteful that the media are not willing to profit from it, nor women like Amanda Knox. But it will be packaged carefully. There will be some higher purpose given for the book, so readers won’t feel like they are expressing a prurient curiosity when picking it up at the bookstore. Let’s see– it’s a cautionary tale for young American women because she just doesn’t want anyone else to go through the ordeal she went through. Or a diatribe against the pernicious Italian justice system. Or let’s go with the Oprahfied version: “I just felt that it was time to tell MY story. There will be something about honoring the memory of her room-mate. There will be talk about who will play her in the movie. HBO or Hollywood? Can she sing? If yes, there’s always dinner theatre.

I do have a feeling she will eventually marry her body guard and go off somewhere and hide. She’s not made for this. The money is too tempting, but she’s not made for this and she may not handle it well.

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Oscars 2013

Jennifer Lawrence at the Oscars: was this a put on?

I think it was. And I think she will get away with it because she is young and bit dorky and funny. But it could not be helped: she has slimmed down, after complaining, last year, about how Hollywood wants everyone to look anorexic. Yes, they do, and you do. Whether she becomes even more successful depends on lot on how she chooses her next films. She could be the next Sally Field. Or she could be the next Sally Field.

Or the next Amy Adams, who must have the worst luck of any actress in Hollywood: she is one of a handful of really interesting actors around, but hasn’t yet found the break-out role that will define her career.

Poor Anne Hathaway: I doubt she’ll ever again, for sheer artistic interest, match the moment in “Brokeback Mountain” where she told Ennis, on the phone, what had happened to Jack, and made it beautifully ambiguous: did she know what was really up or not?

It’s pretty clear she did know– but it was wonderfully done.

No one gave a better performance in any film this year than Amy Adams did in “Junebug”.  I know for a fact you have never seen it: do so, now.

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Mumford and Sons

Roll away your stone,
I’ll roll away mine
Together we can see what we will find
Don’t leave me alone at this time
For I’m afraid of what I will discover inside
‘Cause you told me that
I wouldn’t find a home
Within the fragile substance of my soul
And I have filled this void with things unreal
And all the while my character it steals
Darkness is a harsh term, don’t you think?
And yet it dominates the things I see
It seems that all my bridges have been burned
But you say, “That’s exactly how this grace thing works”
It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart
But the welcome I receive with every start

I’ve tried and tried but I just can’t bring myself to love “Mumford and Sons”. A lot of people who know my taste in music have recommended them to me and suggested that they are not like most pop bands: they are serious. Their music has substance. They have energy and passion.

The lyrics of “Roll Away Your Stone” (above) give you a pretty good idea of what they’re up to. I think I like what they’re trying to do– inject some substance into popular acoustic based folk-rock– but it always sounds to me a little too self-consciously artsy and definitely pretentious. “I’m afraid of what I’ll discover inside” isn’t very startling, really, and isn’t a very compelling evocation of self-searching or grief or guilt or anything. “Fragile substance of my soul”? “While my character it steals”? As the lines follow each other, they go nowhere. As the images succeed each other in your head you should realize that they don’t have any connection to each other. When exactly did this character-stealing happen? What were you doing at the time? Who were you thinking of? The answer is, “a song”, “a song”, and “a song”.

The answers, in a great song, is something like “one night after I kicked Rosie out my apartment”, “masturbating”, “Lisa”. Or something like “but her reply came from Anchorage”.

There is nothing in the lyrics of “Roll Away Your Stone” that suggests any particular real experience or feeling– just something that sounds like a serious consideration of something that sounds like seriousness.

Oddly– and I mean that– it’s fairly typical of their lyrics. Something that starts off with a generalized image of soulfulness but never really connects to any real idea.

It’s empty in the valley of your heart
The son it rises slowly as you walk
Away from all the fears and all the faults you left behind

And “you forgave and I won’t forget”… what? What did she forgive? What did he do that was forgiven? What was forgotten? I don’t think they think it matters– I think they feel that the idea of forgiveness just floating out there is enough to move you. It doesn’t move me. It invites you to put your own experiences into that generalized statement but that makes it a weak song.  You can get the same idea on poster from “Successories”.

Everything I’ve heard from them is weak in the same way. Vague and unspecific and generalized and rather antiseptic and platitudinous. Compare it to:

Did I disappoint you?
Leave a bad taste in your mouth?  (U2)

The “bad taste in your mouth” is visceral and tart. Or:

I was down at the New Amsterdam
Starin’ at this yellow-haired girl
Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation
With a black-haired flamenco dancer (Counting Crows)

Specific place– the New Amsterdam–, specific girl– with yellow hair– and then you can go somewhere, the singer’s desperation for girls and success, his urge to throw himself at something and hope it sticks. Or…

There’s a note underneath your front door
That I wrote twenty years ago
Yellow paper and a faded picture
And a secret in an envelope

If Mumford and Sons rewrote the song, it would sound like this:

All your notes are under my doors
All my past thoughts expressed in words
I can hardly remember anything
Except my darkest secrets

So which is more evocative? More powerful? Is there any doubt? The Civil Wars song intrigued me immediately: what was the secret? Why couldn’t he give the message in person? What’s happened 20 years ago?  You don’t need the answers to those questions to be drawn in to the sense of regret, missed opportunities, and sorrow.

And just to rub my nose in it, Mumford and Sons puts out a video of themselves performing at the Red Rock amphitheater in Colorado and the audience is just jumping! Just jumping! Waving their arms and mouthing the words and just so consummately  rapt, in that choreographed fake “look at us whip the crowd into a frenzy” production style that I find more than a little distasteful.

You wonder where they are going with this. What’s the principle at work here– the crowd in a frenzy, interspersed with cuts of the band jumping and gyrating and demonstrating “passion” don’t you know, with the swooping camera work that is almost a sign of desperation: there is nothing on the stage that is interesting enough to obviate the need to make that camera move, to compel you to admit that there is something interesting here. This swooping camera! Why, a static camera just cannot capture the adoration of this bulging crowd of acolytes! Wait– there’s music.

Who’s more interesting than Mumford and Sons:

Bon Ivor
Dandy Warhols
Arcade Fire
Civil Wars
Ryan Adams
Brian Jonestown Massacre

Who’s less interesting:

Taylor Swift
Lady Gaga
Beyonce

Who is Similarly Lyrically Stunted

Tragically Hip