We're only just passing through.
Or, as Paul Simon once sang, "every generation throws a hero up the pop charts."
Not that Mr. Simon was in attendance. I remember when the R&RHOF began, before the building was erected in Cleveland, when all those original acts were crowding for inclusion, the dinners alternated from NYC to L.A., and all those execs arranging their evenings...
Are either dead or out of a job, they just don't go anymore.
So you see an empty cavern of a building, the Barclays Center, not the low-ceilinged juke joint where the music got started, but an emporium made for money, to jack up the grosses, and the women down front rattle their jewelry and the people up in the rafters are unseeable and you wonder what you're doing watching this show.
But it's HBO.
HBO was the Asylum Records of television. Everything on it was good, or at least for a while anyway. Just like David Geffen's new label back in the seventies. But now Geffen's in the South Seas with Oprah and the Boss, Tom Hanks too, wasn't Obama on board? And instead of us all being in it together we're stratified and separate and the only thing linking us together is this music.
Which sounds surprisingly ersatz.
That's right, ELO, or what is known as Jeff Lynne and a bunch of underpaid nobodies, were positively creepy.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE "Eldorado," to this day. But seeing this aged talent with his dyed hair singing "Mr. Blue Sky" made me feel like that had been a hit half an eon ago and deserved to be forgotten, that it wasn't that good to begin with, better not to unearth old gems.
And come on, who doesn't wince when Jann Wenner takes the stage? The man who just sold half of his crown jewel, the pamphlet known as "Rolling Stone," to stay afloat?
But then Joan Baez gets inducted and they show footage of her singing with Bobby Z and you start to tingle and wonder what the hell is going on here.
That's right, music sucks on television. It was cool, way back when, in the era of Ed Sullivan, even "In Concert," because it was so rare, just the chance to see these personages was a thrill. But now with the internet and everybody available seeing your heroes on TV just disappoints. Whatever it is they're selling just doesn't come across.
And then it does.
The coolest cat of the evening was Snoop Dogg, who came across as eloquent and sincere. Illustrating that progress happens and if you're married to the past you're soon to be left behind. Then again, the era Snoop was talking about, the mid-nineties, was twenty-odd years ago and something's gonna come along and replace rap too. Yup, it's gonna happen. Rock and roll is not forever and neither is hip-hop, but music is.
Highlight of the evening?
YES!
Not because they were so good or so together, even enjoyable, but because they sounded so DIFFERENT! A Martian could land on earth and not believe he'd already seen it, he'd stick around trying to digest it. "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" sucked but when they were playing "Roundabout" you remembered what a breakthrough the song was, what pushing the envelope was all about.
That's what our rock stars did before, that's what we're waiting for them to do now.
And come on, if you saw these people on stage, they couldn't do anything else. It's just that in their era, musicians were kings, now they're dopes, fodder for idiots, as opposed to the tech and finance titans, the ones with the real money. The joke is on those dying to get rich where there is no cash. Believe me, it's not in music. But when you saw Geddy Lee playing bass with his heroes on the aforementioned opening cut to "Fragile" you saw a joy that one cannot get from mazuma, that's the power of music, to light you up from the inside.
And can we exorcise Lenny Kravitz from performing anything until he has another hit?
And I burst out laughing when Alicia Keys said she'd never met Tupac. Then why is this second-rate talent on stage, taking up our time?
But Steve Perry was gracious and the new/old Journey sang "Don't Stop Believin'" and suddenly you didn't, stop, that is.
We've moved beyond AM & FM. Moved beyond network television. Moved beyond HBO. Moved beyond wankers like Wenner telling us what to like.
But that does not mean we are not human, we do not have desires, that we don't want to partake.
This overlong show just illustrated there was something in the past, the question became what is coming in the future?
I don't know, but I do know it won't look like anything on stage. The same way "We Are Family" sounds nothing like "Sweet Little Sixteen." It will be birthed by people like Nile Rodgers, following their muse as opposed to the money. It will be art for art's sake, oh well, the gangsta executives will make sure they get paid, and a bit will trickle down to the performers.
We've got YouTube stars and Snapchat and Instagram heroes. Yet we expect musicians to occupy the same place in the firmament. But to think that is wrong. We've got all the time in the world for a great ditty, that's the power of "Don't Stop Believin'," but just because music ruled the baby boomers' world, triumphed on MTV during the heyday of Generation X, that does not mean it's still the same, not at all.
So what I'm saying is I refuse to be nostalgic and say it was all great, give everybody a break and a pass and a leg up, saying they deserve attention.
No, watching this show I know there are some geniuses, like David Letterman, but not Eddie Vedder. It's not that Vedder's a hack, he's just unaware of the limits, never mind being too far inside the box to see its walls. When Letterman showed a pic of his kid smoking you laughed, basked in the irreverence of someone who knows institutions are not to be trusted.
HBO has become an institution.
The R&RHOF has become an institution.
Rock and roll has become an institution.
And institutions are all about self-preservation, they abhor change.
But it's your job to tear them down.
You're part of a vast army pushing the culture forward. Like I said, it doesn't have to be music, but it can be.
And music, when done right, is only secondary to sex.
But just because Robbie Robertson wrote "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" that does not mean he gets to be in the room. Hell, I don't get to be in the room. We've all got to give up and make way for what's new, we've got to stop celebrating what once was and open our eyes and ears to those pushing limits we can't even see.
Like Tupac.
Like Dylan.
Like our heroes of yore.
There will be heroes tomorrow. I'm not even sure of their values. How important cash will be, conception is always key, but I do know when I experience their wares I'll be wowed, titillated and testifying.
I'm waiting...
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Saturday 29 April 2017
Friday 28 April 2017
Fyre Festival
Everybody likes to pile on.
Rather than focus on the big issues, like Trump giving back to the rich, the great unwashed would rather concentrate on the foibles of a long in the tooth rapper and a greedy tech entrepreneur.
Then again, that's the world we now live in, one where everybody believes they can do everything. A failed real estate entrepreneur with multiple bankruptcies under his belt can become President and people with money and fame can become concert promoters.
It's a professional business, a skill, requiring boatloads of money and relationships. To believe you can become a successful concert promoter overnight is to believe you can shoot hoops in your backyard and instantly start for the Warriors.
Come on, we've seen this movie before. Nearly fifty years ago. Acts were ignorant, promoters were greedy and the experience was bad. INDOORS! Every outdoor festival was a financial disaster, sure, socially it showed that zillions of people could get together and celebrate their culture without killing each other, except at Altamont, but it took eons to figure out American festival promotion. Hell, the Woodstock reprises just about put a stake in the paradigm.
But you've got celebrities and athletes testifying as to its worth so it's worthy, right?
WRONG!
That's the seamy underbelly of today's world. Everybody's being paid, no one's being trustworthy. Near-unknowns feature products in YouTube clips and if you've got an audience there are corporations itching to give you money to promote their products and no one does any due diligence, other than to see that they're gonna get paid.
And you've got an ignorant populace that believes you can cut taxes on everybody and have the economy boom and that each and every fan is entitled to a front row seat at sticker price.
And you wonder why disasters like this happen.
Focus first on the attendees. Why in the hell did they pay to go? Looking themselves in the mirror like Stuart Smalley and saying they're hip enough, cool enough and rich enough that they deserve to go on a private island getaway where they can revel in their status. Wrong! You can't buy your way inside, backstage is off limits, you've got to earn that. So when someone says if you just pay enough you're a member of the club, know that the club is not worth joining or you're not getting inside. Yup, buy that platinum McCartney ticket and expect to have a long dinner with Sir Paul. Ask him about his marriages, discuss your children's schooling. He really cares, he really does. Just like Adele and all of the other acts you want to see.
You're just one of a zillion fans, admit it. Either get on the bandwagon early and see them in a club or overpay on StubHub to be thrilled to be inside the building.
So I've got no sympathy for the wankers who bought in to this festival, this is the same Instagram crowd spending all their time illustrating they're better than you and me, forget it.
And then there's the greed of the promoters.
That's right, festivals are one of the few places where promoters can actually make beaucoup bucks. Otherwise all the revenue just goes to the acts. Create an event and you can get rich. But history tells us most events lose money for years. So, only those with deep pockets in the business continue, make the investment. Believe me, without Staples and the 02, AEG would not be launching new festivals, something's got to make up for the loss.
But everybody's greedy, everybody's looking for the easy buck. We keep reading how everybody's getting paid, why can't I? The techies, the influencers, all the empty suits.
So you end up feeling powerful that you can post, but this isn't the media of yore, where only a few outlets could afford ink, it's essentially free to everyone, all you need is an internet connection to complain.
And complain you do. About Fyre Festival, United Airlines, the service at the local emporium. Makes you feel good, that you've got a voice, right?
No, the truth is the techies and the corporations and the politicians are running circles around you, most negative publicity is just a blip on the radar screen, United broke that musician's guitar and then its stock went UP!
So what we've got here is bread and circuses for the masses, while the rich and powerful rape and pillage. And, as per usual, the sea of nobodies would rather take down a celebrity with a name, whom they know, like Ja Rule, than educate themselves and take down someone really powerful, like Robert Mercer, or the whole damn Federalist Society.
Don't know what that is?
Then you don't know why Dubya became President and Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court and if you don't think those things matter, you're not a relative of one of those guys who the state killed after our new Justice tilted the table and said it was o.k.
Actions have consequences. Which is why this Fyre Festival is such a disaster.
But the inability to educate oneself, to wrestle with the big issues, to take a stand, is a much bigger problem.
Just read the front page of the newspaper.
Oh, you don't have to, you get all the news you need on Facebook!
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Rather than focus on the big issues, like Trump giving back to the rich, the great unwashed would rather concentrate on the foibles of a long in the tooth rapper and a greedy tech entrepreneur.
Then again, that's the world we now live in, one where everybody believes they can do everything. A failed real estate entrepreneur with multiple bankruptcies under his belt can become President and people with money and fame can become concert promoters.
It's a professional business, a skill, requiring boatloads of money and relationships. To believe you can become a successful concert promoter overnight is to believe you can shoot hoops in your backyard and instantly start for the Warriors.
Come on, we've seen this movie before. Nearly fifty years ago. Acts were ignorant, promoters were greedy and the experience was bad. INDOORS! Every outdoor festival was a financial disaster, sure, socially it showed that zillions of people could get together and celebrate their culture without killing each other, except at Altamont, but it took eons to figure out American festival promotion. Hell, the Woodstock reprises just about put a stake in the paradigm.
But you've got celebrities and athletes testifying as to its worth so it's worthy, right?
WRONG!
That's the seamy underbelly of today's world. Everybody's being paid, no one's being trustworthy. Near-unknowns feature products in YouTube clips and if you've got an audience there are corporations itching to give you money to promote their products and no one does any due diligence, other than to see that they're gonna get paid.
And you've got an ignorant populace that believes you can cut taxes on everybody and have the economy boom and that each and every fan is entitled to a front row seat at sticker price.
And you wonder why disasters like this happen.
Focus first on the attendees. Why in the hell did they pay to go? Looking themselves in the mirror like Stuart Smalley and saying they're hip enough, cool enough and rich enough that they deserve to go on a private island getaway where they can revel in their status. Wrong! You can't buy your way inside, backstage is off limits, you've got to earn that. So when someone says if you just pay enough you're a member of the club, know that the club is not worth joining or you're not getting inside. Yup, buy that platinum McCartney ticket and expect to have a long dinner with Sir Paul. Ask him about his marriages, discuss your children's schooling. He really cares, he really does. Just like Adele and all of the other acts you want to see.
You're just one of a zillion fans, admit it. Either get on the bandwagon early and see them in a club or overpay on StubHub to be thrilled to be inside the building.
So I've got no sympathy for the wankers who bought in to this festival, this is the same Instagram crowd spending all their time illustrating they're better than you and me, forget it.
And then there's the greed of the promoters.
That's right, festivals are one of the few places where promoters can actually make beaucoup bucks. Otherwise all the revenue just goes to the acts. Create an event and you can get rich. But history tells us most events lose money for years. So, only those with deep pockets in the business continue, make the investment. Believe me, without Staples and the 02, AEG would not be launching new festivals, something's got to make up for the loss.
But everybody's greedy, everybody's looking for the easy buck. We keep reading how everybody's getting paid, why can't I? The techies, the influencers, all the empty suits.
So you end up feeling powerful that you can post, but this isn't the media of yore, where only a few outlets could afford ink, it's essentially free to everyone, all you need is an internet connection to complain.
And complain you do. About Fyre Festival, United Airlines, the service at the local emporium. Makes you feel good, that you've got a voice, right?
No, the truth is the techies and the corporations and the politicians are running circles around you, most negative publicity is just a blip on the radar screen, United broke that musician's guitar and then its stock went UP!
So what we've got here is bread and circuses for the masses, while the rich and powerful rape and pillage. And, as per usual, the sea of nobodies would rather take down a celebrity with a name, whom they know, like Ja Rule, than educate themselves and take down someone really powerful, like Robert Mercer, or the whole damn Federalist Society.
Don't know what that is?
Then you don't know why Dubya became President and Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court and if you don't think those things matter, you're not a relative of one of those guys who the state killed after our new Justice tilted the table and said it was o.k.
Actions have consequences. Which is why this Fyre Festival is such a disaster.
But the inability to educate oneself, to wrestle with the big issues, to take a stand, is a much bigger problem.
Just read the front page of the newspaper.
Oh, you don't have to, you get all the news you need on Facebook!
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Thursday 27 April 2017
Great, Not Good
David Itzkoff: "You tell a story in one of the episodes about seeing a prime performance from Sam Kinison, whose world did not exactly intersect with yours. Did you get something out of that experience?"
Steve Martin: "Oh yeah. You know when someone's killing it. But not always immediately. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks to think about it. You have to go, What did I just see? I say the goal is not to be good - it's to be great. The idea is to have the audience leave, and say, 'You've got to see this.' You have to work backwards from the result."
"Steve Martin on Teaching You (and Himself) How to Be a Comedian": http://nyti.ms/2piSjdA
My favorite story on this subject is told by one Richard Griffiths, manager majordomo, but before that a record exec, a publisher...and an agent.
Richard booked a gig in a basement club for Paul Kossoff's Back Street Crawler, with the opening act being AC/DC.
Only one problem, on the way to the gig, Kossoff perished on the plane. But AC/DC performed anyway. To six people. Who just stood there silently as the band went through its entire act, parading Angus on shoulders throughout the venue, the whole deal. And when the music stopped, the attendees bolted. Richard was crestfallen, but an hour later, the club was overflowing... You see each and every one of those attendees had run out to a pay phone to tell their buds...YOU'VE GOT TO SEE THIS!
And history was made.
And then there's the tale told by Al Kooper, music's own Zelig, who famously produced Lynyrd Skynyrd. The first LP had just come out, "Free Bird" was far from being an FM staple, and Al got a call in Atlanta, where he was living, where the studio was, from Ronnie Van Zant in Jacksonville, saying the band had just written a new song and they wanted to come in and record it right away.
Al said yes, and within the week they did. But the track sat in the vaults for a year.
I asked Al did he know, that the song was gonna be such a giant hit.
And Al told me...IT WAS SWEET HOME ALABAMA!
Greatness is undeniable.
But hard to achieve.
In the era of scarcity little got made and less got promoted. And the barrier to entry was so high, wannabes were excluded. Every town has got a band that didn't quite make it, that sold out every dance, got an indie deal, even made a record. And when you listen to those LPs you're not wowed, thinking the country missed out on genius, but that they weren't quite good enough.
This is hard to tell people, they don't want to hear it.
This is like so much in life. If you're downtrodden and unkempt, chances are the supermodel does not want to date you. If you're broke with no track record, you cannot get five minutes of Lloyd Blankfein's time, never mind Mark Zuckerberg's.
But today people believe they're entitled to it.
Greatness is elusive, hard to achieve, but when you do, you know it.
I had this conversation recently, where a drummer told me nobody knows what's great, nobody knows what's a hit. That's untrue, ask any creator. When you hit it far over the fence, YOU KNOW!
And people want to hear it and own it and spread the word about it.
Hell, I even had this experience myself two days ago. I'm reading all this hogwash about the Twitter numbers, how they're going to disappoint, how the company is on the downswing, and my blood starts to boil. Less because I love Twitter than I hate conventional wisdom, groupthink, no one wants to analyze, say the unspoken, they just want to get along.
And then a synapse fired and I had to run to the computer, I had to weigh in on this.
And I did.
And then all hell broke loose.
I immediately heard from Richard Greenfield, the number one Wall Street analyst:
Subject: I'm only guy with twtr buy rating
Based on everything u basically said
Then, minutes later, far under an hour after I'd hit send, I heard from Jack Dorsey:
Re: Twitter Results
Bob, this is amazing. I'm biased but: you're spot on. Thank you for your work and support. This note is an immensely helpful reminder of what's important for our team.
Thank you.
Jack
Then Ben Thompson, of Stratechery fame, @benthompson, tweeted:
Good @Lefsetz on Twitter pic.twitter.com/qshJVcMIpp
And them my Twitter feed blew up. Four figures worth of retweets, you could watch the window scroll.
And when I woke up Wednesday morning, eager to see Twitter's ultimate financial results, I'm reading the "New York Times" article and as I get to the end, the only analyst quoted, closing the article, is ME!
"Twitter's Business Shrinks, but Investors See a Glimmer of Hope": http://nyti.ms/2qeEKIa
Now let's be clear, I don't have a PR person, I didn't say a word on any social network, didn't implore my friends to spread the word, I did nothing other than HIT SEND!
Of course I have an audience, probably larger than most bands plying the boards, but I've been building that audience for three decades, through multiple formats, I've never given up, and without the internet it would be so hard to reach these people.
But who the hell am I? Just a wanker with no office, no receptionist, no Armani suit, none of the trappings you're supposed to need to play.
All I had was my brain and my experience.
Let's be clear, if I'd been busy promoting myself I never would have had time to do the research to be up on this story. But I don't call it research, I call it FUN! I love to follow the news, figure out what's happening. And people can tell whether you're interested or not, whether you're informed or not.
And I don't think what I wrote about Twitter was the best piece I've ever composed. But it had a truth and a validity and an insight that was unavailable in this whole wide world. That's right, while you're busy making me-too music with the usual suspects what people are really looking for is something different.
And I'd be lying if I told you all of the above didn't make me feel good, really good. But so far not a dime has dropped in my pocket and although my Twitter feed is still rolling, @jack tweeted: "'It's all happening on Twitter.' Thank you @Lefsetz! lefsetz.com/wordpress/2017…", the velocity has decreased, I'm already in the rearview mirror, we live in a what have you done for me lately culture.
Which is why I will keep writing. Not because I want to get ahead, not because I've got a marketing plan, but because I love to wrestle with the issues and nail it.
Do I always get it right, do I always write stuff that cuts like butter?
No, although I never issue crap, I've been doing it too long, have too much experience to fail that way.
And this is not meant as a victory lap but an illustration. If you pay your dues, if you get it right, if you do great work, you don't have to lift another finger, the world will blow you up, because there are very few great things out there and we all want to share them.
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Steve Martin: "Oh yeah. You know when someone's killing it. But not always immediately. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks to think about it. You have to go, What did I just see? I say the goal is not to be good - it's to be great. The idea is to have the audience leave, and say, 'You've got to see this.' You have to work backwards from the result."
"Steve Martin on Teaching You (and Himself) How to Be a Comedian": http://nyti.ms/2piSjdA
My favorite story on this subject is told by one Richard Griffiths, manager majordomo, but before that a record exec, a publisher...and an agent.
Richard booked a gig in a basement club for Paul Kossoff's Back Street Crawler, with the opening act being AC/DC.
Only one problem, on the way to the gig, Kossoff perished on the plane. But AC/DC performed anyway. To six people. Who just stood there silently as the band went through its entire act, parading Angus on shoulders throughout the venue, the whole deal. And when the music stopped, the attendees bolted. Richard was crestfallen, but an hour later, the club was overflowing... You see each and every one of those attendees had run out to a pay phone to tell their buds...YOU'VE GOT TO SEE THIS!
And history was made.
And then there's the tale told by Al Kooper, music's own Zelig, who famously produced Lynyrd Skynyrd. The first LP had just come out, "Free Bird" was far from being an FM staple, and Al got a call in Atlanta, where he was living, where the studio was, from Ronnie Van Zant in Jacksonville, saying the band had just written a new song and they wanted to come in and record it right away.
Al said yes, and within the week they did. But the track sat in the vaults for a year.
I asked Al did he know, that the song was gonna be such a giant hit.
And Al told me...IT WAS SWEET HOME ALABAMA!
Greatness is undeniable.
But hard to achieve.
In the era of scarcity little got made and less got promoted. And the barrier to entry was so high, wannabes were excluded. Every town has got a band that didn't quite make it, that sold out every dance, got an indie deal, even made a record. And when you listen to those LPs you're not wowed, thinking the country missed out on genius, but that they weren't quite good enough.
This is hard to tell people, they don't want to hear it.
This is like so much in life. If you're downtrodden and unkempt, chances are the supermodel does not want to date you. If you're broke with no track record, you cannot get five minutes of Lloyd Blankfein's time, never mind Mark Zuckerberg's.
But today people believe they're entitled to it.
Greatness is elusive, hard to achieve, but when you do, you know it.
I had this conversation recently, where a drummer told me nobody knows what's great, nobody knows what's a hit. That's untrue, ask any creator. When you hit it far over the fence, YOU KNOW!
And people want to hear it and own it and spread the word about it.
Hell, I even had this experience myself two days ago. I'm reading all this hogwash about the Twitter numbers, how they're going to disappoint, how the company is on the downswing, and my blood starts to boil. Less because I love Twitter than I hate conventional wisdom, groupthink, no one wants to analyze, say the unspoken, they just want to get along.
And then a synapse fired and I had to run to the computer, I had to weigh in on this.
And I did.
And then all hell broke loose.
I immediately heard from Richard Greenfield, the number one Wall Street analyst:
Subject: I'm only guy with twtr buy rating
Based on everything u basically said
Then, minutes later, far under an hour after I'd hit send, I heard from Jack Dorsey:
Re: Twitter Results
Bob, this is amazing. I'm biased but: you're spot on. Thank you for your work and support. This note is an immensely helpful reminder of what's important for our team.
Thank you.
Jack
Then Ben Thompson, of Stratechery fame, @benthompson, tweeted:
Good @Lefsetz on Twitter pic.twitter.com/qshJVcMIpp
And them my Twitter feed blew up. Four figures worth of retweets, you could watch the window scroll.
And when I woke up Wednesday morning, eager to see Twitter's ultimate financial results, I'm reading the "New York Times" article and as I get to the end, the only analyst quoted, closing the article, is ME!
"Twitter's Business Shrinks, but Investors See a Glimmer of Hope": http://nyti.ms/2qeEKIa
Now let's be clear, I don't have a PR person, I didn't say a word on any social network, didn't implore my friends to spread the word, I did nothing other than HIT SEND!
Of course I have an audience, probably larger than most bands plying the boards, but I've been building that audience for three decades, through multiple formats, I've never given up, and without the internet it would be so hard to reach these people.
But who the hell am I? Just a wanker with no office, no receptionist, no Armani suit, none of the trappings you're supposed to need to play.
All I had was my brain and my experience.
Let's be clear, if I'd been busy promoting myself I never would have had time to do the research to be up on this story. But I don't call it research, I call it FUN! I love to follow the news, figure out what's happening. And people can tell whether you're interested or not, whether you're informed or not.
And I don't think what I wrote about Twitter was the best piece I've ever composed. But it had a truth and a validity and an insight that was unavailable in this whole wide world. That's right, while you're busy making me-too music with the usual suspects what people are really looking for is something different.
And I'd be lying if I told you all of the above didn't make me feel good, really good. But so far not a dime has dropped in my pocket and although my Twitter feed is still rolling, @jack tweeted: "'It's all happening on Twitter.' Thank you @Lefsetz! lefsetz.com/wordpress/2017…", the velocity has decreased, I'm already in the rearview mirror, we live in a what have you done for me lately culture.
Which is why I will keep writing. Not because I want to get ahead, not because I've got a marketing plan, but because I love to wrestle with the issues and nail it.
Do I always get it right, do I always write stuff that cuts like butter?
No, although I never issue crap, I've been doing it too long, have too much experience to fail that way.
And this is not meant as a victory lap but an illustration. If you pay your dues, if you get it right, if you do great work, you don't have to lift another finger, the world will blow you up, because there are very few great things out there and we all want to share them.
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Jonathan Demme
It's the unexpected that gets you.
Once upon a time, there was a television movie review show known as "Siskel & Ebert," or "At The Movies" or something like that, they kept changing it as they moved from PBS to Disney and gained more fame and you might be snickering saying OF COURSE but I was skiing with an educated 42 year old last week and he had no idea who Don Kirshner was so...
There used to be movie reviewers on TV, can you imagine it? They argued about what was up on screen, something no one even bothers to anymore. We analyze grosses, but what's actually projected is not worth discussion. Hell, if you went to college in the last century one of the enticing departments was film, you started with the French classics and moved your way up through early Warren Beatty stuff like "Mickey One" but now I think people would rather study social networks and prepare for a job than expand their minds and this is all to say that way back when movies meant something different, especially in the seventies, before "Jaws," before "Star Wars," when we could all quote that sandwich scene from "Five Easy Pieces" while at the same time noting the film was flawed but Bob Rafelson's sensibility was genius.
And movies were the national discussion. Not everybody cared about football and baseball was already starting to fade, putting the games on ever later in search of ratings, when you go for the money your image suffers and you ultimately pay a price, never forget it, but there wasn't a soul who wasn't interested in the movies. And despite all the hoopla about "Citizen Kane" and "Gone With The Wind" I'll argue the best film of all time was made in the seventies, "Godfather II," not that "I" was so shabby, but all of this is to say we were hooked on story, hooked on the experience, and the newspapers didn't even publish the box office scores, those were for insiders only.
So one Sunday night I'm watching Siskel & Ebert on tape, I watched nothing in real time, burning out multiple VCRs in the process, it was 1986, and they were talking about this movie "Something Wild." And neither raved, but there was something that was said that intrigued me, so I went to a nearly eleven o'clock show and was wowed.
Now at this time Jonathan Demme was most famous for "Handle With Care," with Paul LeMat and Candy Clark, which critics raved about but no one had seen. Remember when there used to be critics' favorites? Now the critics are irrelevant, disrespecting personages doing it for the access and the perks. We used to be addicted to Pauline Kael, she changed the discourse, now not only are critics irrelevant, they've mostly been canned, and most work cannot even get noticed, even if championed by those in the know.
I'd seen "Handle With Care" and loved the sweetness, but was not moved, and "Melvin and Howard" never lived up to the hype, and yes, Demme did "Stop Making Sense," but we always attribute music documentary success to the act, not the director, and we gave credit to David Byrne for the big suit, ultimately followed up by Pee-wee's big shoes in his "Adventure" movie that broke both Tim Burton and Danny Elfman and the point is those behind the scenes are recognized last, and my motivation to go see "Something Wild" had nothing to do with its director.
And going to the movies was like going on an airplane. Crowded at peak times, empty the rest. You could go and luxuriate alone, get a first class experience for under five bucks. Enjoying the coming attractions when you were still interested in those, not overwhelmed by by movie hype, that was a product of the nineties, when Thursday night television would collapse without studio commercials, and then slid back into your seat to enjoy the main event.
I had no idea where "Something Wild" was going. Now you know the whole flick before you go, even though in most instances you don't, only a couple of times a year at most. The theatre is for old people, really old, the parents of baby boomers who survive, and the youngsters who need to act badly out of the purview of their parents. We've got Jeff Daniels, who was known for the weepie "Terms of Endearment," which would now be a Lifetime movie, you wouldn't even be able to sell it to Netflix, and "The Purple Rose of Cairo," the Woody Allen special effects film. Daniels was a breezy likable, barely three-dimensional guy.
As for Melanie Griffith... I'd seen her debut in "Night Moves" and had been unimpressed, her tour-de-force in "Working Girl" was a few years off, and to be honest I liked her most in API's "Joyride," where the children of the famous went off to Alaska in search of trouble. Some of the best pictures were B flicks. Scorsese with "Boxcar Bertha," and Demme started off there too.
So, when Griffith accosts Daniels outside the restaurant for not paying...
Like Jeff you've got no idea what is happening and where this is going.
She's just messing with him.
We all want a woman to mess with us.
That's what's wrong with popular culture, it's wrong. We hear all about strong men manipulating women when the truth is most men are weak and are manipulated by women. Men are easily led and want to be. Lead a man on an adventure, surprise him, and he'll be yours for life.
So they end up in a hotel room where Griffith ultimately chains Daniels to the bed and that's when you realize we're not in Kansas anymore, that something more sinister is going on, that Griffith is not to be trusted.
That's right, you can lead us along, but you can push us over the edge. Has happened to me. When physical violence is imposed upon one, when you no longer have any control...
Well, ultimately Daniels does not turn out to be who he seems and the two of them go to Griffith's hometown, where she's got the sweetest mother and the baddest ex and all you can do is hold on.
And I'm not talking one of today's roller coaster rides. I'm talking a book, but it's a movie, where you're not sure what is happening but you're damn sure you want to find out, knowing the conclusion is less important than the ride.
And the bottom line is "Something Wild" is flawed. It's two movies in one, light and heavy, but that does not mean when I exited the theatre my jaw had not dropped. I'd tell you I wanted to tell everybody about it but that would be wrong. What I really wanted to do, like in "The Purple Rose of Cairo," was to climb into the screen and meet these people, hang out in this movie, belong.
That's what our art used to be.
Now the music is to dance in the club. Who'd want to sit in with thirty writers and Swedes as they painstakingly construct this crap?
And the movies literally don't star people, but superheroes.
And let's be clear, TV is good, but that old experience of sitting in the vast theatre in the dark, that's gone.
But we were all addicted, and we needed people to feed our habit, like Jonathan Demme.
He waxed and he waned, he won and he lost. "Married to the Mob" did not live up to the hype, turned out Michelle Pfeiffer was beautiful, but could not carry a movie.
But "Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia" were huge successes, deservedly so, but straightforward filmmaking that could have been executed decades before by someone else. All about story, and tension and...
The last Demme flick I loved was "Rachel Getting Married," which stiffed, when did we decide that gross determined quality? Featuring Anne Hathaway this was not a star-driven film so much as an explication of the horrors of being a member of a family, where there's always one outsider/disrupter, who illuminates the fact that you're all related but you have so much trouble getting along, that you're born into this inferno that might consume you if you don't escape.
Should you see it?
Depends what you're looking for. They tell us no one is looking for truth, even though we live it every day, that we all want escape. But what we're really looking for is identification. Like Jeff Daniels in "Something Wild," lying about who he really is but willing to do the right thing when pressed.
And of course there was the documentary work, like Spalding Gray's "Swimming To Cambodia," could a guy like Spaldeen even exist today? We've got liars like Mike Daisey looking to become famous, but Gray was a neurotic iconoclast who developed his own format and got noticed for it, back when that type intrigued us, back before everybody was self-promoting 24/7.
Which is all to say that Jonathan Demme was a product of a different era. When movies were king. When being a studio head was more important than running a bank. When culture oozed out of Hollywood and we were all addicted.
And Demme never took cheap shots, he always tried to test the limits, no matter what he was doing.
But he was not a party of one but a member of a legion, who believed what what was up on screen could not only change our lives, but society.
And the great thing about being an artist is when done right the work lives on, ready to infect others along the way.
But then there are people like me, who can tell you exactly where I saw "Something Wild" on a weekday night and how it changed my sensibility and my life.
That's what art is all about.
Jonathan Demme was an artist.
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Once upon a time, there was a television movie review show known as "Siskel & Ebert," or "At The Movies" or something like that, they kept changing it as they moved from PBS to Disney and gained more fame and you might be snickering saying OF COURSE but I was skiing with an educated 42 year old last week and he had no idea who Don Kirshner was so...
There used to be movie reviewers on TV, can you imagine it? They argued about what was up on screen, something no one even bothers to anymore. We analyze grosses, but what's actually projected is not worth discussion. Hell, if you went to college in the last century one of the enticing departments was film, you started with the French classics and moved your way up through early Warren Beatty stuff like "Mickey One" but now I think people would rather study social networks and prepare for a job than expand their minds and this is all to say that way back when movies meant something different, especially in the seventies, before "Jaws," before "Star Wars," when we could all quote that sandwich scene from "Five Easy Pieces" while at the same time noting the film was flawed but Bob Rafelson's sensibility was genius.
And movies were the national discussion. Not everybody cared about football and baseball was already starting to fade, putting the games on ever later in search of ratings, when you go for the money your image suffers and you ultimately pay a price, never forget it, but there wasn't a soul who wasn't interested in the movies. And despite all the hoopla about "Citizen Kane" and "Gone With The Wind" I'll argue the best film of all time was made in the seventies, "Godfather II," not that "I" was so shabby, but all of this is to say we were hooked on story, hooked on the experience, and the newspapers didn't even publish the box office scores, those were for insiders only.
So one Sunday night I'm watching Siskel & Ebert on tape, I watched nothing in real time, burning out multiple VCRs in the process, it was 1986, and they were talking about this movie "Something Wild." And neither raved, but there was something that was said that intrigued me, so I went to a nearly eleven o'clock show and was wowed.
Now at this time Jonathan Demme was most famous for "Handle With Care," with Paul LeMat and Candy Clark, which critics raved about but no one had seen. Remember when there used to be critics' favorites? Now the critics are irrelevant, disrespecting personages doing it for the access and the perks. We used to be addicted to Pauline Kael, she changed the discourse, now not only are critics irrelevant, they've mostly been canned, and most work cannot even get noticed, even if championed by those in the know.
I'd seen "Handle With Care" and loved the sweetness, but was not moved, and "Melvin and Howard" never lived up to the hype, and yes, Demme did "Stop Making Sense," but we always attribute music documentary success to the act, not the director, and we gave credit to David Byrne for the big suit, ultimately followed up by Pee-wee's big shoes in his "Adventure" movie that broke both Tim Burton and Danny Elfman and the point is those behind the scenes are recognized last, and my motivation to go see "Something Wild" had nothing to do with its director.
And going to the movies was like going on an airplane. Crowded at peak times, empty the rest. You could go and luxuriate alone, get a first class experience for under five bucks. Enjoying the coming attractions when you were still interested in those, not overwhelmed by by movie hype, that was a product of the nineties, when Thursday night television would collapse without studio commercials, and then slid back into your seat to enjoy the main event.
I had no idea where "Something Wild" was going. Now you know the whole flick before you go, even though in most instances you don't, only a couple of times a year at most. The theatre is for old people, really old, the parents of baby boomers who survive, and the youngsters who need to act badly out of the purview of their parents. We've got Jeff Daniels, who was known for the weepie "Terms of Endearment," which would now be a Lifetime movie, you wouldn't even be able to sell it to Netflix, and "The Purple Rose of Cairo," the Woody Allen special effects film. Daniels was a breezy likable, barely three-dimensional guy.
As for Melanie Griffith... I'd seen her debut in "Night Moves" and had been unimpressed, her tour-de-force in "Working Girl" was a few years off, and to be honest I liked her most in API's "Joyride," where the children of the famous went off to Alaska in search of trouble. Some of the best pictures were B flicks. Scorsese with "Boxcar Bertha," and Demme started off there too.
So, when Griffith accosts Daniels outside the restaurant for not paying...
Like Jeff you've got no idea what is happening and where this is going.
She's just messing with him.
We all want a woman to mess with us.
That's what's wrong with popular culture, it's wrong. We hear all about strong men manipulating women when the truth is most men are weak and are manipulated by women. Men are easily led and want to be. Lead a man on an adventure, surprise him, and he'll be yours for life.
So they end up in a hotel room where Griffith ultimately chains Daniels to the bed and that's when you realize we're not in Kansas anymore, that something more sinister is going on, that Griffith is not to be trusted.
That's right, you can lead us along, but you can push us over the edge. Has happened to me. When physical violence is imposed upon one, when you no longer have any control...
Well, ultimately Daniels does not turn out to be who he seems and the two of them go to Griffith's hometown, where she's got the sweetest mother and the baddest ex and all you can do is hold on.
And I'm not talking one of today's roller coaster rides. I'm talking a book, but it's a movie, where you're not sure what is happening but you're damn sure you want to find out, knowing the conclusion is less important than the ride.
And the bottom line is "Something Wild" is flawed. It's two movies in one, light and heavy, but that does not mean when I exited the theatre my jaw had not dropped. I'd tell you I wanted to tell everybody about it but that would be wrong. What I really wanted to do, like in "The Purple Rose of Cairo," was to climb into the screen and meet these people, hang out in this movie, belong.
That's what our art used to be.
Now the music is to dance in the club. Who'd want to sit in with thirty writers and Swedes as they painstakingly construct this crap?
And the movies literally don't star people, but superheroes.
And let's be clear, TV is good, but that old experience of sitting in the vast theatre in the dark, that's gone.
But we were all addicted, and we needed people to feed our habit, like Jonathan Demme.
He waxed and he waned, he won and he lost. "Married to the Mob" did not live up to the hype, turned out Michelle Pfeiffer was beautiful, but could not carry a movie.
But "Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia" were huge successes, deservedly so, but straightforward filmmaking that could have been executed decades before by someone else. All about story, and tension and...
The last Demme flick I loved was "Rachel Getting Married," which stiffed, when did we decide that gross determined quality? Featuring Anne Hathaway this was not a star-driven film so much as an explication of the horrors of being a member of a family, where there's always one outsider/disrupter, who illuminates the fact that you're all related but you have so much trouble getting along, that you're born into this inferno that might consume you if you don't escape.
Should you see it?
Depends what you're looking for. They tell us no one is looking for truth, even though we live it every day, that we all want escape. But what we're really looking for is identification. Like Jeff Daniels in "Something Wild," lying about who he really is but willing to do the right thing when pressed.
And of course there was the documentary work, like Spalding Gray's "Swimming To Cambodia," could a guy like Spaldeen even exist today? We've got liars like Mike Daisey looking to become famous, but Gray was a neurotic iconoclast who developed his own format and got noticed for it, back when that type intrigued us, back before everybody was self-promoting 24/7.
Which is all to say that Jonathan Demme was a product of a different era. When movies were king. When being a studio head was more important than running a bank. When culture oozed out of Hollywood and we were all addicted.
And Demme never took cheap shots, he always tried to test the limits, no matter what he was doing.
But he was not a party of one but a member of a legion, who believed what what was up on screen could not only change our lives, but society.
And the great thing about being an artist is when done right the work lives on, ready to infect others along the way.
But then there are people like me, who can tell you exactly where I saw "Something Wild" on a weekday night and how it changed my sensibility and my life.
That's what art is all about.
Jonathan Demme was an artist.
--
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Tuesday 25 April 2017
Twitter Results
Are being misjudged
Tomorrow the short-messaging social network will reveal its numbers and the analysts will gasp, the pundits will swoon, and everybody will say that Twitter needs to be fixed.
But that's not the truth at all.
By Wall Street standards Twitter's a diving joke. A company that's hit a financial wall with no obvious upside.
By cultural standards it's a juggernaut, far exceeding the impact of Facebook and Snapchat, even Instagram.
How can this be?
You see our nation has gone topsy-turvy, it's all about the money. It's ruined the arts and it's ruining business. If you're not making a ton of dough and increasing the number every quarter you're falling behind, out of the conversation. And yes, an entity needs cash flow to survive, but how much? And isn't impact more important than money, especially when it comes to changing the conversation?
Look at Tesla, anemic by automobile standards, gargantuan regarding impact, it took the electric car off the shelf and put it back into the conversation.
But Tesla's stock is through the roof, for now anyway, defying all realistic fundamentals. Let's focus instead on BMW, which has lost the sales crown to Mercedes-Benz. BMW is a juggernaut of innovation. Do you think we'd see all those features in Hondas and Chevys if it weren't for the bleeding edge developers? Of course not!
Not that automobiles are a perfect analogy, the point being someone has got to lead, someone has to move the conversation forward, and that all happens on Twitter. While Facebook is trying to find out how to stop people killing others on live video, everybody in the news business is addicted to their Twitter feed, they want to know what is happening, right now. And the reporters go there for info and the outlets post their latest findings and unlike Facebook or Google it's not curated by an algorithm but the users themselves. You follow who you want to, and when they prove to be worthless, inane, boring or all three, you mute them and move on.
And it turns out most people have no powers of analysis and they can't figure out how to work anything mildly complicated and they just want to be seen as important, and Twitter fails on all those accounts. For years we heard about people tweeting their every move. If you think this is how Twitter still works, you're probably e-mailing your friends jokes on AOL. Twitter has moved on. The looky-loos have long departed. The self-righteous wannabes tweeting over a hundred thousand times are living in their own tiny silos, in their own echo chambers. That's one of the great things about Twitter, when you see somebody hating on you you can check them out and in almost all cases they have almost no followers and no one sees the hate, so you can relax. This is not the network television of yore, this is one jerk with a megaphone in the middle of the prairie with no impact.
So you've got experts in every field tweeting about their findings, what interests them.
When breaking news occurs a hive emerges with tons of data. Is it sometimes wrong? Of course! But so is mainstream news! And if you can't ferret between the true and false, if you can't adjust on the fly, you don't deserve to be on Twitter, you need remedial reading classes.
And this is where the President makes his pronouncements.
It's all happening on Twitter.
But we've got to listen to the people who ruined this country, the financial sector, hate on the company.
Can it be improved? Sure! Does it need to be a standalone entity? Absolutely not. But one thing's for sure, we need a source for real time news, and so far no one else is coming close to Twitter.
So celebrate the company that is driving the zeitgeist, where all stories get started, where those addicted to news live. Newspapers come second. TV is a comparative joke. And everybody worth their salt in either medium is right there on Twitter, whether it be Rachel Maddow or Margaret Sullivan.
If you don't care, if you don't want to play, that's fine.
The fact that more people would rather revisit high school, post cat videos and doctor images that make them look amazing is irrelevant. It's like looking to the Kardashian sisters to push the cultural envelope as opposed to Gustavo Dudamel.
We want people to make us think. We want to know where it's all going and what it all means.
And there's no better place to do this than on Twitter.
Financial metrics be damned!
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Tomorrow the short-messaging social network will reveal its numbers and the analysts will gasp, the pundits will swoon, and everybody will say that Twitter needs to be fixed.
But that's not the truth at all.
By Wall Street standards Twitter's a diving joke. A company that's hit a financial wall with no obvious upside.
By cultural standards it's a juggernaut, far exceeding the impact of Facebook and Snapchat, even Instagram.
How can this be?
You see our nation has gone topsy-turvy, it's all about the money. It's ruined the arts and it's ruining business. If you're not making a ton of dough and increasing the number every quarter you're falling behind, out of the conversation. And yes, an entity needs cash flow to survive, but how much? And isn't impact more important than money, especially when it comes to changing the conversation?
Look at Tesla, anemic by automobile standards, gargantuan regarding impact, it took the electric car off the shelf and put it back into the conversation.
But Tesla's stock is through the roof, for now anyway, defying all realistic fundamentals. Let's focus instead on BMW, which has lost the sales crown to Mercedes-Benz. BMW is a juggernaut of innovation. Do you think we'd see all those features in Hondas and Chevys if it weren't for the bleeding edge developers? Of course not!
Not that automobiles are a perfect analogy, the point being someone has got to lead, someone has to move the conversation forward, and that all happens on Twitter. While Facebook is trying to find out how to stop people killing others on live video, everybody in the news business is addicted to their Twitter feed, they want to know what is happening, right now. And the reporters go there for info and the outlets post their latest findings and unlike Facebook or Google it's not curated by an algorithm but the users themselves. You follow who you want to, and when they prove to be worthless, inane, boring or all three, you mute them and move on.
And it turns out most people have no powers of analysis and they can't figure out how to work anything mildly complicated and they just want to be seen as important, and Twitter fails on all those accounts. For years we heard about people tweeting their every move. If you think this is how Twitter still works, you're probably e-mailing your friends jokes on AOL. Twitter has moved on. The looky-loos have long departed. The self-righteous wannabes tweeting over a hundred thousand times are living in their own tiny silos, in their own echo chambers. That's one of the great things about Twitter, when you see somebody hating on you you can check them out and in almost all cases they have almost no followers and no one sees the hate, so you can relax. This is not the network television of yore, this is one jerk with a megaphone in the middle of the prairie with no impact.
So you've got experts in every field tweeting about their findings, what interests them.
When breaking news occurs a hive emerges with tons of data. Is it sometimes wrong? Of course! But so is mainstream news! And if you can't ferret between the true and false, if you can't adjust on the fly, you don't deserve to be on Twitter, you need remedial reading classes.
And this is where the President makes his pronouncements.
It's all happening on Twitter.
But we've got to listen to the people who ruined this country, the financial sector, hate on the company.
Can it be improved? Sure! Does it need to be a standalone entity? Absolutely not. But one thing's for sure, we need a source for real time news, and so far no one else is coming close to Twitter.
So celebrate the company that is driving the zeitgeist, where all stories get started, where those addicted to news live. Newspapers come second. TV is a comparative joke. And everybody worth their salt in either medium is right there on Twitter, whether it be Rachel Maddow or Margaret Sullivan.
If you don't care, if you don't want to play, that's fine.
The fact that more people would rather revisit high school, post cat videos and doctor images that make them look amazing is irrelevant. It's like looking to the Kardashian sisters to push the cultural envelope as opposed to Gustavo Dudamel.
We want people to make us think. We want to know where it's all going and what it all means.
And there's no better place to do this than on Twitter.
Financial metrics be damned!
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