Netflix Official Trailer: https://bit.ly/3LYMR7q

It will make you want to join the foreign service.

Then again, “Law and Order” and “Perry Mason” might make you want to be an attorney, when in truth very few lawyers go to court and most of the time being a lawyer is incredibly boring.

Let me see, on an absolute scale, I’d give “The Diplomat” a solid 8. Meaning I highly recommend it. Not only was I intrigued, it called out to me, I wanted to watch it, I wanted to finish it, it took me away from the everyday world and made life interesting, both in plot and personality.

The star is Felicity, i.e. Keri Russell. Who is now 47, if you can believe that. Her breakthrough was “The Americans,” which I highly recommend bingeing. You can watch from beginning to end, whereas with “The Diplomat” we’re going to have to wait at least a year to find out the result of the cliffhanger. Russell plays against type. As in she is not glamorous. That’s part of the appeal of her personality on the show, she’s all about the work. She doesn’t want to wear dresses, she doesn’t want to wear heels, she seems to care not a whit how her hair looks, she’s the antidote to the endless tsunami of online influencers from the Kardashians on down, who are all about the looks.

You want a job that consumes you. Just like you want a great mattress. After all, both are where you spend most of your time. To do unfulfilling work… Even worse, to be at work and be bored… You can see your life dripping away in front of you.

Furthermore, Felicity/Keri Russell/Kate Wyler does not want the spotlight, she wants the adventure, she wants to make a difference.

As for the Administration… Michael McKean is the president. Funny how this comedian has a new career as a serious actor. But he’s at odds with the secretary of state. This is always the case. You’d like to think these officials have the country’s best interests at heart, but they mostly care about themselves and their careers.

Speaking of careers… Ato Essandoh as Stuart Hayford’s first choice is not the foreign service, but when you lose enough in your primary field of endeavor, you give up, or do you? Essandoh/Hayford, the deputy chief of mission for the U.S. embassy in London, isn’t completely obsequious. He’s got a backbone, but he is constantly weighing whether to exercise it or not.

Just as fascinating is his girlfriend, Ali Ahn/Eidra Park, who works in the CIA. We hear about the CIA, but it’s always portrayed as dark and secret and… Ahn/Park is just doing the job. A career spy, but she can laugh, she’s human, whereas most CIA members are portrayed as automatons.

And then there’s Rufus Sewell, who bears a distinct resemblance to the dearly departed Ray Liotta, but Rufus, who plays Keri’s husband, is English. I didn’t believe it, his accent was so good.

And then there’s the three-dimensional prime minister, Rory Kinnear as Nicol Trowbridge. At first you think he’s a wimp, then you think he’s a hothead, and then you think he may have his finger on the pulse of modern England.

And “The Diplomat” is very modern. Unlike most of the shows from the past few years it doesn’t try to be timeless, Brexit has happened and there is war in Ukraine and…

Somewhere I read “The Diplomat” is a drama with comedy. I wouldn’t say that, it’s definitely a drama. And it all rings true except for one domestic roll in the hay that doesn’t happen in bed and doesn’t involve sex.

I guess “The Diplomat” gives the impression that people have power, in a world where we feel powerless. That you can choose a path and make a difference. And that fame and money are not the highest calling.

However I could never be a diplomat, because it’s a weird combination of kissing ass and exercising the aforementioned backbone. At least in this series.

In regular life, unless you run the organization, you must play politics all the time. You can’t offend anybody or your upward path is stymied. It’s a game. Whereas in “The Diplomat” people will set a pick, stand up to someone else and not candy coat their words.

However, the process of diplomacy is very slow, unlike in this series.

Now I must say that my sister and our shrink both watched one episode and moved on. So maybe not everybody will be enticed by “The Diplomat.”

But I was.

“Mary Turner, pioneering KMET disc jockey who ruled L.A. rock radio, dies at 76”: https://lat.ms/42ybm2b

She e-mailed me a few times, very nicely in fact, which can be a rarity amongst those who have been there and done that. And I never met her, but I know her.

Every L.A. rock fan does, those who were listening to the radio during the heyday of classic rock, after all, she was the Burner, Mary Turner. I just read in the above obit that Peter Wolf gave her that moniker, I thought someone else had thought it up, but the story rings true, because Mary Turner had credibility, as one of the few women working in a man’s world, FM rock radio.

Oh, in New York there was Alison Steele, the Nightbird, on WNEW-FM, she started when the station was the city’s answer to KSAN in San Fran, back when WNEW was still a progressive station, but I moved to L.A. in ’74 and I was confronted with an FM dial much deeper than not only the one in New York, but anywhere else I’ve ever been. There were five rock stations, but Mary Turner worked at #1, the Might Met, KMET, 94.7, I don’t think I can ever forget not only the call letters, but the station number.

This was a different era. This was before Reagan legitimized greed. This was back when you could pay all your bills on minimum wage, and you lived for rock and roll, the music was everything.

It wasn’t like today, where you can miss something, find out after the fact a band you’re into played in town. You see the stations fought to be a show’s partner, and when they were they promoted ad infinitum. All you needed was the radio, it was the tribal drum, it told you everything you needed to know.

All the clichés, this is when they were fresh, like Two-fer Tuesdays, and Rocktober. Yes, someone came up with those and it was an innovation, you looked forward to them. Today classic rock is a calcified format, and KMET no longer exists.

You see KMET never got the memo, or if it did, it ignored it. The music was changing. KROQ was playing Soft Cell and the Human League in Top Forty rotation. The sound was new, and different, and it resonated with the listening audience. KMET eventually picked up these tunes, but it was too late.

KROQ still exists, up the dial at 106.7. But KNX, the soft rock station, 93.1, that’s long gone. As is KWST, the Led Zeppelin station, which played harder rock, at 105.9. And the last classic rock station standing is KLOS, 95.5, which was right next to KMET on the dial, but it was for those who weren’t in the know, it took fewer risks, it was not as hip, you turned to the station when KMET was in commercial, but it was not a regular listen.

Like KMET.

Alison Steele was cooler than we could ever be. But Mary Turner was one of us, who graduated to the airwaves. And in an era wherein it was a joke that the deejays didn’t look like their voices, Mary was blonde and beautiful, she was an L.A. icon, talking to us on the radio, spinning our favorite records.

And she did no shtick, she was neither a Top Forty deejay nor part of a Morning Zoo, she respected the music, which she was knowledgeable about, she was into it as much as we were, it was more than a job, it was a calling.

Eventually, Mary graduated to syndication. And then she married the syndicator, Norm Pattiz, who founded Westwood One. Norm was completely different from Mary, a visionary and a hustler. He called me into his office to offer me a show at PodcastOne, but as Irving would say, it was an eat what you kill deal, and that’s not the kind you want to sign. But as Norm was showing me to my seat in his office, the first thing he told me was that Mary was a big fan. He ultimately said he wasn’t sure about me, but Mary believed in me, and that was enough.

Now Mary was not the only legendary deejay in Los Angeles. But she was at the pinnacle. I just saw her obit on my phone and I was shocked, I went numb, that’s how much of a place she had in the firmament, in my heart and mind and those of the rest of the listeners. There she was, on a regular basis, same slot every day, maybe not on weekends, but you could count on her, she was there for you.

Radio wasn’t an appointment, it was a religion. It wasn’t just records and inane patter, KMET took a stand against paraquat, the scourge of youth society back in the day. You see they were spraying it on marijuana in Mexico, before everyone called it cannabis, when it was still dope, and the strong Mendocino strands were just becoming available. It was us versus them. Little did we know so many of us would become them.

Not everybody. You can see the lifers at the show, at the vinyl record stores, with their scraggly hair and their faded rock t-shirts. They never stopped believing, but they were left behind economically. Turned out the music might save your soul, but it won’t put bread on your table.

And then there are those who weren’t there and now wear motorcycle jackets to the shows and buy all the merch. We can see right through those people. It shows. If you leave early. If you don’t know all the songs.

Going to a show was not a celebration, it was akin to your record collection. The acts toured when they had new albums, which you purchased before the show, memorized and then went to hear live, knowing that most of the songs would never be played in concert again.

Radio, records, shows… That was our culture. Movies too, but not TV, except for maybe SNL. Once upon a time Lorne Michaels wasn’t full of himself, the grand pooh-bah, rather he was trying to bring the youth audience back to TV, late at night, when they were available, with a show that was hip in a way that TV had never previously been. It was beyond funny, the show had an attitude, cultural impact. It was the seventies version of “Laugh-In,” but with credibility. You watched and then you talked about it, ad infinitum. Mr. Mainway? John Belushi as the samurai? They were bigger than today’s musicians, because they were authentic in a way no one is today. Because they knew that money was second to cultural impact, and the way you wove yourself into the fabric of society was by being innovative and true to yourself, they were our heroes.

We had many heroes. And the only ones who were rich were the musicians. Because if you were a successful musician in the seventies, you were as rich as anybody in America. And selling out was anathema.

Mary Turner greased the skids. She turned us on to new music, she accompanied us in our cars, we even played the radio at home.

I can’t detail everything she did because the job of a deejay is to be dependable, there at a finger’s touch, to deliver, to keep you dialed-in, not changing the channel.

That’s who Mary Turner was.

How weird is it that Norm died back in December, and now Mary is gone too. Norm died at 79, Mary at 76. Mary’s listeners think they’re forever, but the Big C rarely loses the battle. And it could hit you when you least expect it.

The era is closing, body by body. The heroes of yore are dropping on a regular basis. They’re gone.

But we remember.

I remember Mary Turner.

Tune in Saturday May 13th, to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/41tMcR3

YouTube: https://bit.ly/42wWwce

I subscribe to this newsletter from Ashley Carman at Bloomberg. It’s entitled “Soundbite,” but mostly it’s about podcasting, which has been in flux recently. Seems that everybody with a big name who’s been given a podcast is having an extremely hard time gaining traction. Turns out being a star is not enough. It’s tougher than ever to build an audience.

But this week’s newsletter was mostly about the music business, streaming. And fraud. You can read it here:

“Why Warner Music Operates a Covert Spotify Remix Account – Artists and labels are quietly releasing multiple versions of their own songs on streaming platforms to box out the unauthorized competition”: https://bloom.bg/3MkCMSD

The headline story is interesting, how the majors have playlists of sped-up songs as a kind of subterfuge, to look cool… There’s more to it, you can read the details.

The other story is about outright fraud. Acts piggy-backing on others’ hits and getting the royalties.

I’ve got to tell you, I can’t say I’m overly moved by fraud. It is disillusioning, that so many are scamsters, that deception is rampant, but fraud has always permeated the recorded music business. That does not mean it shouldn’t be addressed, shouldn’t be stamped out, I’m just saying the issue punches above its weight because after years of turmoil in music distribution it’s been figured out, streaming has won, now it’s all about software, i.e. the music. But creating hit music is much more difficult than addressing distribution problems. Then again, if you create a hit will it become one, if it’s “in the grooves,” will it blow up?

The story about this outright fraud, linked in the above newsletter, is here:

“Music Streaming Has a $2 Billion Fraud Problem That Goes Beyond AI – With user-generated content surging on music services, bogus tracks may now account for 10% of all streams”: https://bloom.bg/3pw2889

(If this link doesn’t work, load the newsletter from the first link and click through from there and it will appear.)

The track being ripped-off in the article was “Hey Kids,” by Molina, who they said was a a Danish-Chilean singer. It was released by the label Tambourhinoceros. Household names, right? The Chilean-Danes are buzzing up the chart, thank god for the independent labels. Huh?

The track was released in 2018. In 2022 it started to get 100,000 streams a day. What was driving the action all these years later?

I DON’T KNOW!

But I was fascinated, so I clicked the embedded video of “Hey Kids” and I was stunned, from the very beginning I was hooked, IT WAS GOOD! Do you know how often I find a track that I get from the beginning, that I want to continue to listen to? ALMOST NEVER! A lot of what is successful is mediocre and pushed down our throats by the machine, which is why you can listen to these playlists of new music and your eyes will roll up into your head. HOW COULD THIS BE?

I mean I instantly knew “Hey Kids” had something. It deserved its success. But why did it take so long, and what made it finally gain traction?

Was the cut blown up by TikTok or vice versa?

So I went to Molina’s TikTok page, filled with user-generated videos: https://bit.ly/42Peg2h The song worked perfectly. Sure, it wasn’t the entire song, but the parts used worked. Furthermore, if you listen to the whole song it’s more than the excerpt, much more! How did these people know to use this song?

And supposedly people are using it on YouTube too and…

Let me be clear, “Hey Kids” is not the usual Spotify Top 50 fare. But that’s very narrow, and that’s not where barriers are broken, where envelopes are pushed. Not that “Hey Kids” is revolutionary, but if you’re listening at home, boy does it resonate.

Maybe not for you. But that’s fine.

BUT HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

P.S. “Hey Kids” has 76,224,123 streams on Spotify

P.P.S. You can sign up for Ashley Carman’s newsletter here: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/soundbite