Imagine if I were an actual kind of columnist, & had to sit down on a regular basis (for some reason, in my mind's eye, I am thinking of sitting down to a typewriter*) & write a regular column for an actual publication. Yes, perhaps this is what this blog is about, but here's something you have suspected said out loud by me: I actually have almost nothing to say.
Except of course I do. For example, here are my last couple of tweets (which you could read as they happen if you follow the show on Twitter):
1) When I first heard,"Good artists make, great artists steal," I thought it meant that good artists compel great artists to commit theft.
That's an awkwardly worded confession about confusing sentence structure crammed into 140 unforgiving characters. Hardly amusing, but I heard someone say that sentence today & it reminded me how confused I was when I first came across the adage. "How in the world," I thought to myself, "do merely good artists somehow force actual great artists to steal? & what kind of stealing? Shoplifting? Bank robbery? Trump-style investment rip-offs?" Then I saw the comma & went, "Ohhh."'
2) These tweets were a two-fer:
One of my pet peeves is when a movie or TV show uses a dreadful but familiar classic rock song at some dramatic moment. It's like, I know Hollywood is controlled by baby boomers but for fuck's sake some really great music has been made in the last fifty years.
This was a result of a pretty decent season finale of the wonderful show Better Things having the mother drive her daughters somewhere while a horrendous old song by Alice Cooper called Only Women Bleed. But it's a song that's been played on the radio pretty much all my life, & Louis CK & Pamela Adlon are just a little older than I am, & they probably haven't listened to any new music since they were in their 20s.
Mainly I felt it was a disservice to make the young female actors learn the words to that overblown attempt at rock & roll social relevance. "The song is often mistakenly presumed to be about menstruation," Wikipedia says. No shit? Why's that? Idiots.
But ultimately none of this matters, because I don't have a hand in doing anything creative in Hollywood but it pains me, as someone who spends a great deal of time listening to new music - & certainly not the sort of music Louis CK & Pamela Adlon listen to on commercial radio with their kids, music they most definitely roll their eyes at - but really great new music that will never find its way onto television shows (or commercial radio). & I wish they knew it.
& don't say, "But Gary, that's a great song." It might be, but I doubt it. It's a familiar song. Just like every fucking familiar song in every fucking movie trailer, even the ones for millenials. It's just depressing how for the most part, no one in any creative sphere seems to think there's been any music worth listening to for the past thirty plus years.
When they do use music, they use disposable commercial pop that will date the movie terribly in the years to come.
That's my opinion anyway. I wish I had a job picking music for movies. I'd be all right at it.
But as a columnist cranking out a daily think-piece? Like with this blog, man, I'd suck at it.
* It's probably because everything I learned about newspapers I learned from the 1950s Superman TV program.
No comments:
Post a Comment