Yikes It's December Already
Sorry I've been away. I've been meaning to write about a few things along the way but life has a way of just making you do other stuff than just blog.
Through the 24months of this Pandemic so far, I've been re-mixing and re-mastering stuff. I'll have a new album of songs coming out in March next year. It's all brand new songs - nothing from the dim dark past or back catalog of stuff. But I've also been going back in time and I've gone through the stuff I did over on iCompositions between 2012 and 2014. It's like 50 tracks I'm sorting through as I do other projects so I've been stupid-busy.
I Got Asked About Hillary Rodham Clinton
I think HRC must have some book coming out because she's started to surface in the media a bit more. She made some post about the speech she would have given if she had won the Presidency. Look, I get it. It was an awful moment not just for her, but for America and the free world. The Donald Trump Presidency was like a populist enema that collectively gave us the shits non-stop for 4years, culminating in the storming of the US Capitol. The shit, so to speak, has been running long and hard. So believe me as somebody who would have preferred not to go through that said shit that a HRC Presidency would have been much more preferable to the shit-fight we went through.
Be that as it may I think HRC in 2016 might have been the worst candidate the Dems might have settled upon - orthodoxy or not. I know, that in the end Bernie Sanders is just too weird for the Democratic power brokers and that it really felt like it was her turn. And yet she proceeded to lose the Rust belt to DJT, and that was that. There was an inherent problem in sticking a candidate up whose husband effectively sold out the Rust Belt with NAFTA. She couldn't very well get up there and disown and lambast Bill Clinton's Presidency, could she? And in any other election where the Republicans put up a candidate like a Bob Dole or a John McCain, maybe Hillary might have slid by that issue; but of course she was up against a populist monster who managed to successfully mine that exact resentment against 'the elites' - which undeniably, of whom she was one.
So all in all HRC had to be a case of the right candidate, wrong election.
The question I got asked was whether I thought HRC was right. Of course she was right. But if the question concerned whether it had to be her to save the day in November 2016, we now know that was not the case. And again, I'm not saying this as a Bernie Sander supporter - I'm saying, of all the candidates in all the Democratic Party machine apparatus, they had to insist on HRC as the candidate in the exact election she was the worst candidate to win back the Rust Belt. She was right about America, but she was wrong about the legitimacy of her candidacy. However, I don't think she'll ever wrap her head around that. Because if she did, she sure as hell won't be coming out with some book now.
Comic Book Movies
I've decided I'm okay with comic book movies. I know Martin Scorsese spoke up against the And then it was Ridley Scott. And then eventually it was Jane Campion who offered up the critique that she just hates them. Okay, if we had any pride as film makers, it would rankle that that such toy fiction - as finely tuned and amazingly honed as they are - would blow away what serious adults are trying to do in fiction. Then it occurred to me we're still talking movies. Movies are populist. If the crowd loves it, then there's probably something in that. As it is, the corporate entertainment machine is trying to make Star Wars films to make lots of money and none of those recent ones have exactly won over the crowds. So whether it's SciFi or comic book movies or serious drama, there's a certain level at which good, is good. And maybe even that kind of bland ordinary unassuming good, is good enough for the crowd.
The thing that tipped me off to this conversion in my head wasn't Jane Campion telling us how she "just hates them" and me wincing when I read that. It's the fact that I enjoy them in spite of my general blasé contempt for comic book movies. I know it's only comic book stuff where Spider-Man swings from buildings and stops the bad guy. But if I'm being honest - on a visceral level - I'm probably going to enjoy that spectacle much more than 'The Irishman' or 'The Last Duel' or 'The Power of the Dog'. I can guarantee you that these serious movies don't and won't hit an emotional high mark that Spider-Man likely will. And maybe that makes me really anti-intellectual. But if I'm the anti-intellectual for liking Spider-Man over what Marty, Ridley and Jane have got on offer, I would like to posit that maybe they're just pseudo-intellectuals. After all, as Hitchcock put it so eloquently, "it's only the movies!"
Yes, for fuck's sake.
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