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For the last three months, I idly wondered why salon.com bothered to have not one but THREE of their entertainment writers spend nearly every day shrieking like a parrot on angeldust at what a brain-eating inanity Big Brother was. Now I know why: check out the CBS logo at the middle-right of Salon's politics page. Awfully naive of me to expect an online rag with a David Horowitz column AND a sleazy-ass sex section to have a shred of dignity, I guess. Silly moi. Seperated at birth? Madonna and JonBenét Ramsey. So Eddie won. Go Long Island. I was actually rooting for Curtis, but Eddie's fine, an essentially decent character I s'pose. In fact, since I started watching, the hour after Karen left, I thought every cast member was a fairly good soul. Even Jamie. What is all this crap I hear about the cast being boring? Believe me, if the cast was composed of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Camille Paglia, Ann Landers, Crispin Glover, Venus Williams, Richard Rorty, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Connie Chung, Stephin Merritt and Rick Lazio...it'd probably still be "boring." Did the world learn NOTHING from An American Family? (Does anybody even remember that show, a mini-series that, while overstuffed with an onscreen divorce and an out-loud-and-proud family member, was called dreadfully boring in its time?) Folks, nobody is prime-time TV material 24/7, no matter how many inane challenges or discussion topics you throw at them, and to expect otherwise is foolhardy. Actually, while the TV show had more cringeworthy moments than no series since that stupid-ass slavery comedy on UPN whose name I blissfully can't remember, I liked watching the webfeeds a lot. I never found the *the cast* boring: each casual stare and stray comment added up to a discernable story, with heroes, villians and a goal. Yeah, the pace with which the story unfolded was glacial, but I have a high tolerance for what other people find boring and repetitious. Even without cough syrup. From gist.com: "The [The New York] Times reports that CBS is looking to gain greater hands-on control of casting and daily production of the series, among other issues, because the network believes Endemol [BB's production company] misunderstood U.S. television and culture." No fucking shit, pal. Endemol wanted SEX! and COMPETITION! and TOPICAL SUBJECTS!; what they got instead was the good old-fashioned American values of pragmatism, compromise and rebellion against those in power. God bless the U.S. of fuckin' A. According to Ted Casablanca of E!: "...the crew of the ratings-challenged show is so disgusted with the saps inhabiting that house (which resembles a latter-day Romper Room) that 'they scream at the monitors in the control room,' says a source who has access to the production facilities in Studio City, California." Good. The clueless fuckers deserved all the irritation they got. The Heavenly Jukebox I developed a nasty cold last week, so I've spent most of the last week absolutely high on cough syrup. I stare at my monitor, watching Josh make an ass out of himself in the waning days of Big Brother USA, watching my boyfriend update his blog, watching people download e-fucking-normous La Monte Young MP3s from my computer via Napster, and I maintain a lovely, affectless feeling throughout it all. Sleep is disturbingly deep, complex dreams come to me even during short naps. And music. The music I choose to listen to is a flurry of minutely differentiated sounds that linger and blot the soundscape like thick watercolors on crumpled paper. Really arty, repetitious or impressionistic shit like Krautrock sounds so fucking good right now, absolutely ecstatic. "Sonnenschein" is electric flowers sprouting from the Autobahn; "Snow Falls" is exactly that. So good. As the horns kick in "Happy Trails," it suddenly occurs to me that Jim O'Rourke should produce Madonna's inevitable shift towards the non-dance section of the record store. Actually, since I'm going to work tomorrow, I'm off the cough syrup now. A little bit of exaggeration there. Since I'm pretty drug-free, I have few really juicy music-drug anecdotes to relate, except the time I played Sgt. Pepper on the Walkman when I was having my tooth pulled. Actually, that's not really a very interesting story, either -- the whole thing was over, from the application of the "Mickey Mouse Mask" to extraction of the tooth, before side one was half-way-through, though it felt like hours. And I had to play it ear-splittingly loud in order to hear anything at all. "Lucy in the Sky" was especially nice, I remember. I object to the writer's lazy equation of John Simon's rudeness with the actions of the Third Reich, but this story on salon.com fascinates. At a press junket for his adaptation of "Krapp's Last Tape," "dyspeptic" film critic John Simon asked director Atom Egoyan: "'I have seen at least 12 productions of this play, all more touching than yours. Was this deliberate or just incompetence on your part?'" What could Atom Egoyan say to that? He could crack wise, he could ironically (or non-ironically) accept his incompetence, state exactly why such a question is irrelevant and unfair, or he could just change the subject, which is precisely what he did. In every case, though, he'd be evading the issue, which is "why does John Simon not like my movie?" -- a question whose answer is really John Simon's burden, not Atom Egoyan's. What's depressing is that I know how this will be spinned. People will be horrified. John Simon will not aplogize, nor will he be expected to. The people who answer for him, namely those who publish his work in the National Review and New York magazine, will defend his actions, citing the need for a truly critical voice in Hollywood amidst a sea of complacent fawning, indeed, playing up his "maverick" qualities as suggestive of a state of grace rather than senility or assholedom. I suspect that in this incident we can find the bullying bluster that makes the average person distrust critics in general. But John Simon is really an exception. Most critics, whether they review music, the theater, art or rock & roll maintain a fairly unexciting, straightforward persona of strict, dispassionate objectivity. And it's true that for all his reviewing quirks, John Simon is one of the few remaining "serious" film critics that reach something resembling a mass audience. Yet the notoriousness of his quirks make him the exception that proves the rule: I suspect people only read him nowadays because his irascible contrariness makes good copy rather than good sense. I find it impossible to just let go and write something. I am incapable of writing a paragraph in a linear fashion, I cannot simply type a string of sentences at will. But I am trying tonight, because I just wanted to write something within the limited allotment of time I have between work and apartment searching and my commute. I was trying for a nice, flowing paragraph, done with a bare minimum of editing, and yet I have already junked the lead sentence in the paragraph, because having two sentences in a row with colons strikes me as inelegant, and then changed "I can't write" to "I am incapable of writing." I cannot leave well enough alone. I start off writing clots of thoughts, ideas and images that have been bothering me all day, and once I start linking these sentencettes together, they slowly coalesce into something bigger. The mind always wanders. I never now just what I am trying to say. e work involved is time-consuming and the feedback I get is never enough. I do it to torture myself, I think. It blows my mind that somebody like James Lileks can write something beyond the merely coherent and into the realm of the pretty darned good, and do it at length every single day. It is not enough to say, "oh, well, he does all that for a living." I mean, he had to be blessed with the gift of effortless writing skills before he got the job, right? Well, enough of my nattering and excuses about my relative silence. What have I been up to? Oh, don't you want to know! Apartment hunting. Work. Using Napster to collect MP3s of every single damned thing Guided By Voices has released, just for the hell of it. I saw Charlemagne Palestine playing the piano that roared last week. I picked up Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and promptly lost my copy on the LIRR. Oh, and I've been getting to know this really swell guy. He knows who he is, blush blush. Ah, forget it. Time for sleep. Ha. You'll see nothing here yet -- I'm just going to put this placemarking bit of text so I can post something later and make it appear like I actually posted something here today. In truth I just got back from a Charlemagne Palestine concert -- his first in NYC for twenty years and haven't written a damn thing yet. But I will, in time. I have no desire to see Cameron Crowe's homage to himself, but check out the TV ads, and the subtle, undoubtedly unintentional irony of their use of the Raspberries' marvellous "Go All The Way." The song's meant to establish the film's seventies setting, but at the time, the Raspberries were considered a shameless sixties retread, a throwback to "the halcyon days of clean rock, 1965 and '66," as lead singer Eric Carmen puts it in the liner notes the Raspberries anthology I've got. A similar, if even richer irony is when Cheap Trick covers Big Star's "In The Street" for That Seventies Show. And just wait 'til the shameless mid-nineties nostalgia-mongering rolls around, and we'll get coming-of-age stories about kids in doomed dot-com start-ups, soundtracked by Oasis or Guided By Voices. One reason I might see the film (if I was near a theater and had nothing else to do) would be to see Philip Seymour Hoffman play Lester Bangs! I mean, is that not perfect? Because I've had no time to do actual content, it's... The Heavenly Jukebox 1. Wilbert Harrison, "Let's Work Together" |
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