People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated. Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.
Archive for the ‘entertainment’ Category.
I was a phenomenon of rather far-fetched notability when I was thirteen: a pubescent white boy residing in a middling suburb of a fair-to-middling city in the South in the early 1950s whose ardently embraced role model, hero and highest god was the ever-laughing black musician and performer Louis Armstrong, the self-taught (musically and every other way) son of a prostitute plying the night-side of New Orleans, the greatest musical improviser since Beethoven, the most important figure in American music in the 20th century (rivaled probably only by Stravinsky in the world), a cultural revolutionary, a marijuana devotee and laxative-consumer extraordinaire. So what did I know, right? Well I knew this: What I loved about Satchmo as a young teen, and I do mean loved, I later confirmed to be the sine qua non of the greatest art man produces—-the joyous making of something new, brilliant and affecting from the nondescript raw materials of everyday existence. Pops’ bucket didn’t have a hole in it.
I wonder how many realize that the way we view reality is governed by the technical and logistical demands of television coverage, with even greater distortion effected by a truncated presentation format and by story-juggling editors keeping an eye on the ratings. Any event that can’t be shoehorned into this Procrustean mould—such as, oh let me see, the 7 year-long, 200- billion-dollar Savings and Loan scandals (“We could never figure out how to do the graphics”)—simply stays beneath the water gathering force and fury until one day it blasts to the surface like the Great White Whale, swamping the little Pequot and sending its crazed and visionary captain to the bottom.
Al Gore is to politics as Paulie Shore is to movies and as Anna Nicole Smith is to television—surreal nonentities who inspire the kind of whickering laughter we produce when we can’t believe our eyes.
“Deer in the headlights” scarcely does justice to the paralyzed expressions of the cable-news anchors (hired because they’re dynamite babes if they’re females, and “personable” if they’re men) when they attempt to interview guests who know their stuff: “What do you think is you-know going to happen, Major, if the prime minister premier or is it president whatever doesn’t go along you-know with the stuff our guys are saying? What’s your take on it-this, Major? Are we going to put our boots on the ground er ah in the sand so to speak?”
Let’s form a Society for the Prevention of Slandering Propaganda (or SPSP). Propaganda is arguably the most maligned, misunderstood and undervalued communications tool in the media workshop. The art consists merely in presenting an idea (in politics, public relations, indoctrination) or commercial product (in advertising and sales) so beguilingly that the beholder wants to have it for his own. When bad people propagandize, the consequences are evil; but when good people propagandize, everybody gains something of value. Now after this corrective nudge, do you still turn your nose up at the idea of suasion? Well ask yourself this: The last time you met a beautiful woman you wanted to see again, did you tell her the absolute truth about how far you went in school, the grades you made therein, how much salary you earn, your exploits backpacking in the Andes, your bungee-jump record, and your marital status? And if she gave you a date, did you choose your clothing with extra special care and get the car washed before you picked her up? Did you try to make a better impression than you ordinarily make? You were practicing propaganda, weren’t you, you little devil?
Hollywood, Cradle of the Gold-Plated Castrato: A semi-tropical desert become a verdant fantasy park despite the absence of actual weather through the beguiling sorcery of agricultural irrigation. The altar of tasteless excess on which the carcass of Integrity has long since blanched in the sun. A hyperbolic monument of strident vibrating neon to all the cheap souls exterminated by the treacheries of art commerce. Accurate to the smallest detail, faithful only to the spirit of rapine. The town where no means, “Offer me some more money,” and yes means, “But I get to fuck you first.” Where people walk backwards in order to see the knives coming. Where egos drift serenely across the empyrean like dirigibles. Where slack-jawed women enthrall themselves from the looking-glass above the bed while their hairy-backed producers seek to elude their own perfidy by stuffing their entire bodies into the crevice of the Rotting Goddess. Where chicken-liver shakes its booty at Giorgio, and Rolls takes a dump on Mercedes. Where “opportunity missed” means a body is still on its feet. Where the values in the screenplays are guessed at by the self-mutilated eunuchs who not only can’t get their values up anymore, but can’t remember how it ever felt to have values. Where minimal self-respect requires the bloody abolition of all the other sleazoids doing business in this town. And where the Nine Muses alighted from the train in 1939 to get a feel for the place, but within the hour reentered the train and departed, never to grace these inhospitable precincts again.
At a minimum, 90% of the people who call themselves “film critics” are nothing more than journeyman reviewers, likely to praise one movie and dispraise another for the same set of reasons; that’s if they’re not just flacks. Reviewers tell us why they like or don’t like a movie, but the title of critic should be reserved for those who explicate what they perceive as working or going wrong in a film as measured against the filmmaker’s intentions, in terms of technical methodology, narrative art, imagery and the actors’ performances (as distinct from their picturesqueness). The actual function of reviewers is to help potential audience members decide if they want to see a movie, so the personal orientation is not at all out of place. I only object to them when they overreach as far as their job descriptions are concerned. Tell it like it is, brother. If I can’t trust you to be honest about yourself, why would I listen to anything you have to say about a film?
The Baby Boomers were our first generation to wreck a whole ethos because of perceived parental overkill. First they were required to work for their allowance at the abusive rate of half an hour a week. Later on they had to do some homework. They were even forced to come downstairs and intermingle with the family on Thanksgiving. What with the TV and stereo blasting away in perpetuity, the message just didn’t get through that after adolescence they would be expected to take the reins and fund their own existence. Ultimately their folks refused to buy a Stingray for them on the occasion of their extrusion from high school, and that broke the camel’s back. They hit the road in high dudgeon, only to discover that Dad kept the allowance coming anyway. For the first time in their lives, the Babes were faced with making strategic decisions. They opted to spend their money purchasing 80% of the world’s drug supply. Everything after that was a psychedelic pisshaze with vagrant bouts of sexual activity and sloganeering attended by wine, incense and fingernails-on-the-blackboard music until they woke up in college, still siphoning their parents’ bucks yet acknowledging that the old farts had steered them right all along: the better the grades they made, the more money they would earn to finance their ongoing self-indulgence crusade. Additionally they were pleased to learn that they had Changed the World, a source of immense pride and distinction which they duly acknowledged by still wearing their hair long, growing mutton chops and ‘staches, and not wearing anything special to class. Viva la revolucion.
At least we are consistent. The same American public that thinks Justin Guarini’s losing the American Idol competition is a “tragedy” thinks AI is a “great work of art” and Adam Sandler is “funny as hell”.
Today the world adores the nose-thumbing slut Madonna. It used to adore the exuberant sex-toy Marilyn Monroe along with the sultry teen sex-toy Brigitte Bardot and the stylish hot mama Rita Hayworth. Before that the world adored the sophisticated worldly woman Myrna Loy. And still earlier it adored the virginal waif Mary Pickford. Such is the “popular history” of the world since the beginning of the last century.
Transcript of Hollywood Story Conference: Armani Suit: “Has anybody read this thing?” T-Shirt Saying “Burritoville: “Bad third act.” Levis and $1000 Sports Jacket: “Weak arc.” Armani Suit: “Fix it.” Levis and $1,000 Sports Jacket: “I’ll have tuna fish on rye.”
The tagline of a series of fast-food commercials running now should be adopted as America’s motto, because it epitomizes the end-result of forty years of the unrestricted self-indulgence that began in the late ‘60s with the valiant admonition, If it feels good do it (till it hurts). It was seriously believed that what was needed by the most pampered generation in the country’s history—a generation that had already long-since placed its pleasure and comfort ahead of everything else— was even more pleasure. Not unpredictably, pleasure-seeking as the object of behavior soon devolved into simple appetite-satiation, but it took more than a quarter century for the socio-cultural consequences fully to manifest themselves. The ego’s descent into abject self-absorption and the consequent lack of consideration for others has ultimately metamorphosed into the universal, violent, infantile and gut-wrenching incivility we endure today. The tagline of the commercials goes: Don’t bother me, I’m eating.
Some people speak so many bad lines they’ve learned from hearing movie clichés that they ought to make popcorn and sell tickets to their personal lives.
With reference to psychology, this is the way “compensatory behavior” works: A vice-president of television programming spends his morning reviewing pilots of the situation comedies he has ordered for next season; at lunch he confers with the sommelier for almost forty minutes on his choice of wine, drawing compliments from the wine-master on the excellence of his French.
Humor is often cruel, as in, “Canada is America Lite.” But cruel humor is often merciful, as in, “He’s so dumb the new ‘smart’ virus rejected him.” Then again, some cruel humor just sucks horribly, as in George Carlin.
Overheard at the Video Store:
Clerk: “You might want to make another selection, sir. This one hasn’t got a romance, and you have to put up with subtitles. What is it? Kagemusha? Frankly I can’t remember the last time anybody checked it out.”
Customer: “Tell me something, kid. What is it exactly that qualifies you to be a critic?”
Clerk: “Hey I’ve spent forty or fifty hours a week in this store, with hundreds of movies all around me, every week for the last three years.”
Customer: “Is that so? Well I’ve looked at my face in the bathroom mirror every day for the last fifty-seven years, but does that make me a plastic surgeon?”
Sylvester Stallone completed a sentence without destroying it one day and everybody stood up and clapped.
Mickey Rourke has never failed to blow an opportunity completely out of the water.
Melanie Griffith was asked how she cooked pancakes and she said, “You mean those bready flat things you pour the sweet thick stuff on that gets on your hands?”
