America the Reality Show

At some point during the summer, one of my friends asked me to blog for her while she went on vacation.  Apparently she is a paid 'tweeter' or commentator in various livestreams and publications for television, and apparently it is lucrative enough to allow her to have a holiday.  The catch? I had to binge-watch several shows so I could quip with credibility.

So the first assignment, and my 'audition', was The Bachelorette... regular network, fairly appalling, required reviewing a previous season of The Bachelor to get the backstory on the heroine who had been pretty well re-styled and made-over during the year, was admittedly all-American nice and gorgeous in a high-maintenance way, but likable.  I couldn't help inserting opinions on the pretty good-sized pool of racial diversity even though most of America knew she'd never cross-breed.  But what we were not prepared for was her choice of sub-par intellect, not to mention his bigoted, homophobic and misogynistic tendencies.  Is this the New America, the one that makes Kanye do the Presidential dance? My comments were disallowed.  Politics nixed.  Lovelier thoughts, my friend encouraged-- Keep it light... The only positive I could come up with was about her not-quite-as-attractive real-life (presumably) sister who was truly wife-worthy, loving and supportive, but this was not valid currency.

Next task: I binge-watched two entire seasons of Real Housewives of New York.  At least I could GPS locations... and one of my girlfriends had actually worked on some charity with Carole Radziwill... so I focused in on her.  At first she seemed relatively intelligent and independent-- dating a young chef, leading a life... but I watched her morph from a respectable, carefree woman into a botoxed, desperate fashion-hag-- a true mean-girl whose trajectory took her from top to bottom of the lady-heap.  Her clothing became ridiculous, her snide comments bitter and nasty, her constant style changes rivaled the Kardashians.  What could she have been thinking?  The reality show kiss-of-death for some who seem to compete with the kind of fierceness that eclipses character.  I sided with Bethenny-the-bitch whose real life tragedies won her the sympathy vote, and Carole fell both from grace and cast.  Good riddance... still no payment for all my television efforts, and an inability to separate Carole from my own real-life-nasty sister.

Oh, the fame-whores and phonies, the no-talent celebrities, the ass-kissing extras and free publicity opportunities.  Who are these women?  No one I would want to hang out with, except maybe Luanne-the-convict-version whose cabaret performance was entertaining in a horrific kind of way.  Some of my best friends have been in prison, rehab, various institutions...  almost relatable... but for the most part,  an entire mockery of my New York.  About as real as cartoon-Disneyworld, but not quite Thanksgiving float-worthy... Needless to say, my comments were undervalued.

But I'd been summer-bitten by the TV reality-bug.. and poor as I am, there were few evening options to distract me from the heat besides gigs.  I moved onto My 600-pound Life which is truly reality-worthy and eye-opening.  We in New York City rarely see this sector of population who are compensating for deep emotional wounds with food and essentially no more bloated than our local urban billionaires, just more honest.  Personally, I cannot fathom how they pay for all these meals; I can hardly afford restaurant or prepared food.  What I do know is the sin of gluttony seems far less heinous than the wanton greed of the 21st century corporate culture.  These people wear their weakness;  the Wall Streeters have personal trainers and plastic surgeons to keep them lean and mean while their investments balloon in 1200-ton portfolios.

Maybe the real reality show now is America... the Celebrity-Apprentice Presidential Candidate himself, with Kanye this week migrating from the Kardashian set to the Oval Office stage... flubbed his lines and embarrassed his audience but no apologies from the Trumpsters.  Protocol, ethics, intelligence, logic, respect-- all bets are off, all clarity is blurred and justice itself is on mock-trial.  Journalists and quipsters are hyper-provoked... pundits are ubiquitous and political cartoonists  hemorraghing material.  Endless dialogue and competitive commentary-- verbal bullying and misstatements are considerably more common than truth; little is unscripted except the pathetic presidential tweets...  and let's face it-- the viewer population is way more familiar with Bravo 'anti-stars' than political candidates.

In the end, I failed miserably as a TV tweeter... earned not even subway fare for all my viewing efforts, and feel a bit slimed, as though I skinny-dipped in contaminated surf.  If rap is the new poetry, 60 is the new 40, American politics is surely the new comedy... and I'm not sure where I belong.  It's like I'm looking at a chessboard with Monopoly game pieces.   Things are rigged and backward and ruined and even the weather for all our technology is less predictable than ever.   Everyone is a follower and no one is a clear leader.  I am betting that more people trick or treat than vote; however we celebrate Halloween, there seems nothing more horrifying than the Apprentice-president in the White House and his ghoulish team of clown-hearts with their golf-bags of tricks.
There are real tragedies, real victims of real disasters, real catastrophes and suffering.  Not reality shows but world events... not television entertainment but life.  May the better man, for God's sake, win.

The See of Faces

My doorman yesterday complained that Hip hop is dead.  He is not even 30-- a former gang-member and South Bronx graffiti tagger-- hooked into the pulse of this culture.  I informed him that he is in the very beginning phases of becoming a cranky-old-man in New York-- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  We both agreed-- he with his 10 years of artistic perspective, me with my 40-something-- there is a negative progressive pattern here-- like things are born, seem maybe edgy for a minute-- the sharp cry of a wet newborn-- and then they get swaddled-- muted-- begin to blend into our smoggy web.  The imitators and false inventors steal ideas, re-mix… become soon vapid and diluted in the sea of pretenders where art and originality are sadly drowning in the sewage-laced tide.

Walking through the city in this sweltering August weather-- everyone with their plastic bottles and iced lattes, showing off all their tattoos... people taking selfies in the heat... like some kind of tropical paradox… an urban jungle-hell.   I can't help thinking-- things seem to matter less in this oppressive atmosphere… not just the obvious things like clothing-- but ideas and substance.  I feel dumbed down and less passionate-- in a way, maybe less sad.  It's easier to mourn in the fall, in the winter.  Everything seems overlit and even tears, except for cranky sweaty babies in strollers, seem to evaporate before they are born.

For some reason today I'm reminded of that Saramago book-- where everyone in a city is suddenly stricken with white-blindness… searching for water, food-- compassion-- in a kind of living sightless hell.  Where would we be, without the 'see' of faces… with our iPhones and our instant images?  Someone complimented me yesterday on my writing.   I did not reply that it is my public attempt to try to make some kind of artistic and personal sense of what I am able to see, because I begin to suspect-- with everyone absorbed in their phone, that there is an epidemic of reality-blindness

Essentially I am disappointed, like my doorman, in core content-- even in the media spinners-- they err and misspell, they gloss over and misinterpret, they write with their thumbs and think with someone else's ideas.  Music is so plentiful and cheap… a sea of white rice-- of disconnected words and endlessly recycled notes and ideas… of 500 million beat combinations or notes on Jay-Z-blue screens that will be processed in nano-second installments while people are reading the news, breaking up with their girlfriend, checking the score and weather, pre-ordering their smoothie, reserving an uber to some random place which is over-designed and soul-less but where the food is excellent.

In this urban world of 9 thousand TV channels and an internet where every page offers you 1000 options and distractions--  where people experience museums and concerts via their phones, after the fact-- where everything is shared, inhaled and posted-- we seem have lost the art of description.  We are so over-dependent on visuals now-- the number of photos on the web has increased like a hyper expanded universe of infinite space… we no longer have the skill to digest and interpret, express our opinions and passions with art and words and music the way a great chef has to simmer a sauce for hours-- it's all too quick and easy.  

I read a biography of one of my Ab-ex painting heroes… yes, it was great to have some of the anecdotes and details I hadn't known… but there were so many typos and mistakes in the text… I began to doubt everything.  Even the address of her studio-- 2 different buildings on one street?  I need to know-- to go there and dream.   Only one of them with walls that held the great minds and talents of New York in the 1950's-- where floors were covered with paint  spatters and scuffs… where artists had paced, jazz musicians had vented, cigarettes had been stubbed out, bottles had been thrown, glasses smashed, bodies had ground themselves in passionate episodes-- where canvases had been stretched and transformed into museum content.  But which one was it?  It reminds me of the stories I hear every day of people who slept with Elvis, played with David Bowie, traded needles with Lou Reed… documentaries of interviews and hearsay… talking heads reaching into some kind of past with selfish hands and plucking feathers and treasures they turn into lucrative souvenirs.  And who is here to contradict, to witness, to contest their accuracy?

Maybe I'm sick of hearing everyone's version of someone else.  Art has become kind of a Selfie-- like those cardboard portraits of people in Times Square-- you get your picture taken with Beyonce and suddenly there you are, the two of you-- as though this really was a memory.  People insert their input into something pre-existing… pre-recorded-- a remixed album with their own picture on the cover? Like one of those Mad Magazines from the 1960's with the crazy image of Alfred E Newman on the US dollar or Kanye West photo-shopped onto Mt. Rushmore.  Who can tell the truth now? And who knows the truth?  You do, actually.  I do.  But how can we approach art without the message because we don't know where its truth is? We don't have time, or patience to find it-- or does it matter?  People take the cake out of the oven before it's even baked… and in fact the batter is from an instant mix and it tastes sad and artificial.

I spent years trying to find a lost love in someone else's face… and realized at last that the soul of him is all that's left and I must try to honor that-- to write lyrics about him and try to conjure the sense of him, and the kind of songs he would have written had he lived.    In Brooklyn people remember when Marilyn and Arthur Miller briefly walked the streets in love, had their first moments of passion… she the larger-than-life movie star, he the intellectual playwright with the cool Jewish heart of guilt.  An unlikely couple in a world where everyone wanted to touch her, see her, be her-- and then even her husband fell for another woman-- moved on.  Where was this building?  I want to know.  I want to know definitively where Grace Hartigan's first studio was.  It matters.  Not a google-image or to take a selfie in front of it; I want to see it.  I want to describe it somehow… to absorb its memories and sorrows and ghosts-- to listen to its story.

Recently I've become interested in the Rescued Film Project.  A photographer takes old rolls of undeveloped film and puts them through a difficult and tedious process to not just develop them, but to scan them and enhance them with digital technology so we can see images from even damaged negatives.  Most of these are old.  Some rolls are from World War II.    Most of the people are gone now; the children would be old people-- streetscapes are nearly unrecognizable.  They are inherently nostalgic and sad.. but somehow we trust these images; we are moved by them.  They tell a truth which cannot be manipulated or changed or  photo-shopped.  Somehow this past feels like part of us in a way that so much of the present moment does not.  We can't identify the people but somehow we sense their story, and we sense the invisible photographer.

My mother's old photo album is only maybe 40 pages.  There are under 100 photographs and I know most of them by heart.  When my son was small I didn't have money to develop much film.  I don't have as many photographs as my friends do-- certainly I have fewer than an average American family takes these days on an average vacation.  But I never forgot to look.  I remember, I cherish the moments; each one is like a musical passage in the symphony of my son's childhood-- deliberate and meaningful and memorable.

In some cultures there are 100 words for snow, maybe 50 words for the smell of wood-- I want to know these things, to understand something.  I have learned that I can only try to find my own truth, to wade through the 'See' of faces and find my own familiar footholds among the embellished and re-processed people, the invented stories and misinterpretations… to try to wrap my brain around the incontrovertible fact that even this meteor shower we might be able to witness--- if conditions are right, because with all our photoshopping we can do nothing about the actual weather or cloud coverage-- think about this--- this is already a nearly 1000 year old episode we are just finally able to see.  It puts things into perspective.

My doorman will continue to prefer his vintage Hip-hop-- the way music sounded to him when he began to sense some meaning in life-- the way he connected.  Was it better then?  He is sure that it was. I have to say I think I agree.     I read about things like singularity, I hear digitally produced music,  admire the incredible capacity and speed of iPhones and technology, and I still prefer the varied texture and slow vulnerability of the analogue and hand-held.  I have yet to take a selfie.  I have yet to pinpoint my place in the culture of the present, with the mega-quantities of data and where a modern version of art is generated and disseminated in quantity.  I guess I am not ready for the future.  Like the astronomers with their very advanced telescopes and devices, the metaphorical lesson of the Perseids-- we have come all this way to get a clarified view and everything we see clearly is the past.

Behind the Times

Early morning I listened to this sociological philosopher commenting on internet culture--- our habits, our lifestyle.  It used to be, via any Industrial Revolution, that the usefulness of technology was to relieve humans of the burden of constant work, to free us so that we could have the time to create, self-educate, invent-- and enhance our connection with the world around us.  Currently, people are ‘working’ more hours than ever—technology and web activity literally eat leisure time and blur boundaries between work and play.  It used to be considered rude not to look into the face of someone with whom you have a serious conversation: it was part of the process of face-to-face communication which had a place in the hierarchy of exchange.  Now, nearly everyone has their face perpetually in their mobile device—emailing, texting, image-capturing and posting, facebooking, comparing, researching... connecting, disconnecting...and it is not just socially but on-the-job acceptable behaviour.

I watched people on Sunday browsing an art auction--- they data-search each painting and judge its quality based on comparable values.  They pass on, they do not look; like a carefully built resume, there is so much competition, and so little time--- everything and everyone is now a kind of advertisement, a 'deal'.  It used to be, we received a telephone call--- it was a rather obvious event for anyone present--- they even left the room, to give the speaker privacy.  Your husband could call from anywhere and lie—no caller ID… just an opaque mysterious plastic that sat in its own corner, attached to a wall, and had the power to change your life with one ring. 

Last night a guitarist friend emailed me a plea from some fan who had apparently been to 60 of his shows, now has his own band, has played for 25 years, is even receiving some kind of award--- and wants to come ‘sit in’ with the guitarist's band.  It would be ‘meaningful’.  Does it matter that the guy is an absolute clueless internet-educated musician who feels entitled to play with Cream because he memorized the tab versions of all their songs?  But wasn’t it the current Metallica bassist who came from a tribute band and had played note for note each of their albums for years?  Does anyone know the difference?  Does anyone decipher ‘I read it on the internet’ from actual truth, actual history as it was lived by some old World War II vet whose version has undoubtedly been diluted or distorted as well?  How many versions--real or photoshopped-- of ‘me and Elvis’ or ‘me and the Beatles’ do we see now on the internet?  How many combinations of romantically involved people, celebrity bikini romps,  public displays of violence, black eyes, smashed cars, emergency room entrances and exits… whatever?

You can literally have the world in your phone now…you can get the accurate population to the minute of Auckland, or see if your make-up is smeared on facetime, without anyone knowing what you are doing. You can, as one of our mayoral candidates has shown, be sending photos of your penis and obscene messages while you are in meetings, running for office, or having dinner with your lovely wife who for the life of me I cannot fathom why persists in humiliating her lovely self by appearing with this creep of a version of husband.  Is that the message?  She is smart and dignified and lives with a mistake so we all should follow suit?  I don’t get it.

I’ve always, on the other hand, been a Spitzer-ite.  So what if he’s narcissistic and obnoxious?  He’s smart enough to know that any woman you consort with is going to cause a scandal in your life, so why not keep it purely business—no pregnancies, no blackmail, no policy leaks, no expensive dinners without happy bedtime endings, no trips to Harry Winston or whining--- just in and out.  Why was it all so newsworthy… because every heterosexual middle aged man was salivating?  And because Wall Street was trembling?  Steve Cohen is an innocent baby compared to the crimes being perpetrated by JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and our own fed.  Like disqualifying an athlete for an allergy pill—making it front page news when half the MLB is PED’d out of their minds and original bodies. 

100,000 now dead in the Syrian violence--- catastrophes all over the world… I can understand the fairytale appeal of the Royal baby--- but all this Drake vs. Chris Brown, Kanye and Kim (not easy to find a baby-Daddy with the right initial and a huge penis),  and goddamn Anthony Weiner all over it like rancid icing.  He needs to be—the ultimate punishment in this culture—‘ignored’. 

Back to music.  I’m not a huge Clapton fan, but admittedly Eric has paid some dues.  Still… I watched an amazing video of a Count Basie performance…man, these guys could play.  Every single one of them—with technique and style and precision and swing—and originality.  Do more than 800 people know all of their names? Did the guitarist get 600,000 for just one instrument at auction while he still has 400 at home and unlimited freebies?  These guys scarcely paid the basic bills.   Then the 60’s came, and there was for a brief moment some correlation between quality and success—even in jazz.  Now that concept is nearly extinct. 

But at least Eric Clapton doesn’t have to call up some asshole on craigslist and explain to him that his $300 guitar is not worth $800 because it has a badass bridge and heavy strings. In fact, because he is an asshole, it is worth maybe $270, but because yours needs a fret job that costs more than replacement, you need this and you need it now, and you may have to pay $350 which means no groceries, and he is comparing it on his iphone to all 30 which have come up on ebay in just the past 9 hours and none of them have actually sold except maybe one which was vintage—a prototype in beautiful wood, and untouched by human hands for 40 years… but he is an asshole—a Weiner, and you are without a mobile device and without the will to even speak to this guy who now says---‘okay. $400 if I can sit in with your band’ and you are absolutely going to walk out that door no matter how much you need this guitar for tomorrow.  

In the end it’s not about politics it’s about music and where does that leave the undead, impoverished, IT-deficient, IQ-endowed minority-even-in-my-own-home?  Without a working guitar while at any given moment about 766,000 are listed on ebay.  Another million or so on craigslist.  Another cool million in vaults and storage of billionaires (the good ones), another million smashed and burned on and offstage (the real ‘Guitar Heros’), another billion being misused and misplayed by assholes, and a few thousand singing in the hands of real players who do not look at a mobile device and really play at the same time.  Or write worthwhile music, and not the cut and paste kind we mostly hear these days.

I wish I could rest my case, but tonight I’m a trainwreck—yes, a terrible and inappropriate analogy today for which I apologize, but sometimes you crash and burn by failing to reach even the minimum speed limit.