Monday 4/1/19
People should really stop remaking The Twilight Zone. Jordan Peele is bad at art. People will laugh at how poorly Get Out has aged in ten years if anyone watches it then. Not scary, not funny. Pandering news cycle "love me love me" smooch. Walked three miles. Climbed the Monument five times. Got a, "Let the young and fit pass" today as husband and wife stepped aside. Will take it. Listened to Curtis Fuller's The Opener. I like the trombone. He is one of my favorite trombonists. Plays well with Hank Mobley. Asked Mosaic about writing an essay for their upcoming Hank Mobley set. They said no. Someone already did the notes. They have notes that are a rundown of the sessions for each release. I wanted to do an essay positing Mobley as a tenor giant alongside Rollins and Coltrane and Lester Young. (Same idea was sent to The New Yorker.) He's not discussed this way. He should be. Why isn't he? I shared my ideas as to why that was. You need people to think creatively and with vision. Being open to possibilities. Not, "this is how we've done it, this is who we've used, order 'em up!" Wrote the second chapter of Meatheads Say the Craziest Things. Here's what you do: Thirty or so short chapters. Short book. Funniest book. 85-100 pages. Straight up humor. But with topicality. Not mean-spirited. How about a visionary for that? Sell a few hundred thousands copies. Maybe more. I do a nice meathead voice, too. Listened to Motley Crue's debut at the Starbucks while reading Eliot's "The Waste Land." Which I may be writing on. Don't know yet. Saw The Dirt. Not very good. Not the worst thing I've seen. You can watch it. Thought it was well acted, surprisingly. That guy from Saturday Night Live is good in it and I detest him. Paddleton is well acted, but it's not very good. Would have been more dramatically interesting if the Ray Romano character drank the drink. There is no reason for the film to be called Paddleton. It wasn't earned. It was just some random game. They tried to force it into being this potent metaphor without having established it as anything. Entire premise is ridiculous. There are not two socially polished, reasonably looking people who are that utterly isolated that they only talk to each other. They also had no way to end the film. Dead give away when you see someone use that device where someone else shows up--usually someone younger--to take someone else's place after that person has left or died. "The cycle of life starts anew!" Bollocks. Graham Greene was able to do it in The Power and the Glory, though. I knew someone once who used the phrase, "the exception that fucks the rule." That's not true. Again, it's that fake deep shit. "Look, what a potent metaphor!" Nah. You just don't have anything else. You don't have an end. You barely had a story. Started a new essay on Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa.
Comments