Is about challenging preconceptions, surprising us, delivering the unexpected.

I just got finished watching John Oliver. The funniest part was the MSNBC newscaster who kept quoting rap lyrics to make his point, making himself look ridiculous in the process. And then there was a long expose on corporate taxes, which I actually am very familiar with, devouring three newspapers a day and surfing stories online in between. Nothing makes me angrier than ignorance, which is plentiful, every day I hear people speak inanities and untruths with soulful conviction, and if I bother to correct them, which I’ve learned not to, they get all puffed up and say I’m the problem and I’m wrong which is why I’ve ceased doing this. America is all about getting along, especially amongst millennials, and then someone jumps the track, delivers the unexpected, and you’re wowed.

Now let’s be clear, this is not about more cheese on your nachos, more explosions in your movie, no, creativity is an intellectual thing, it speaks to your brain, not your wallet, and when it resonates…you’re thrilled.

This was the essence of the sixties, this is why the right wing excoriates that decade, because of the decision by young people to question norms and authorities and wow the audience, in the arts, in clothing, in expression… Believe me, you didn’t swear in public like they did in the sixties previously, there was no such thing as free love, although the birth control pill helped, remember tie-dye? It wasn’t about fashion, so much as self-expression, letting your freak flag fly, which no one does anymore unless they’re trying to gain followers on Instagram.

But this creativity was evidenced most in art. It was about pushing limits. Look at album covers, which started as commercial art and ended up an art form unto themselves. But even more were the records…there was a constant testing of the limits, whether it be Frank Zappa with the first double album and then the “Sgt. Pepper” parody “We’re Only In It For The Money,” or the Doors’ “The End.” And it was in movies and theatre, how about the nude scene in “Hair”? Never underestimate the power of shock, can you say “I Am Curious (Yellow)”?

And just when the John Oliver show was winding down, when it looked like it was over, the host starts talking about this Russel Crowe divorce auction, and its overpriced, irrelevant items.

But it wasn’t a joke. Actually, it was. After making fun of the items for sale, after lambasting the person who purchased a jock strap for seven thousand dollars, Oliver revealed it was HIM!

The show bought so much crap, to deliver to the sole remaining Blockbuster store in Alaska.

This is not Jimmy Fallon trying to create viral material, this is a bunch of hooligans trying to freak out and crack up their audience. This is why you used to go to the live show, FOR THE UNEXPECTED! When it was clear who the stars were, not the people in the audience, and you had to have talent to stand on stage.

It was kind of like tech in the last twenty years, we were addicted to the creative explosion of the sixties. There were books, like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” when you read the liner notes for Dead albums and saw the publishing company was Ice Nine, you were clued in. There was Richard Brautigan’s “Trout Fishing In America,” there was even “Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice.”

And sure everybody wanted to make money, but there were no billionaires, and you could make it on minimum wage. Science was putting men on the moon, but art was keeping us fulfilled.

Back when the building blocks were taught in school, before home schooling was invented, when we were all in it together trying to find our way.

It’s these creative moments that make life worth living. But they’re hard to make and have been superseded by a focus on cash. I’ll never forget Fee Waybill running around the Roxy with his chainsaw humming during the “Rock and Roll Hospital” number, which never made it to a Tubes album, but the experience was just that indelible.

And it’s funny how comedians are testing limits, when way back when George Carlin had to can his act and reinvent it to truly succeed, comedy was not a leader in the days of yore.

I’m waiting, surprise me.

Alaska’s Blockbusters

There was no review in the newspaper.

I now track TV shows like I used to track record albums. I research and find out when they’re going to be released. “Bosch” launched yesterday on Amazon Prime, but you wouldn’t know it unless you’re a fan, and you should be.

As I always say, distribution is king. If “Bosch” were on Showtime, it would be the talk of the town. It’s not an HBO show, there’s no deeper meaning, it’s plot-driven only, but oh-the-cinematography! You watch and fall in love with a city you already live in. It’s got the film noir look we haven’t seen on the big screen since “L.A. Confidential,” back when movies were America’s foremost art form, when we tracked them and went to them.

But now…

If the newspapers want to survive they’ve got to get with the times. I’m turning the pages of the NYT seeing reviews of films I’ll never go to see, that I won’t remember when they ultimately hit the flat screen, meanwhile, television drives the culture. This disconnect between and art and commerce, art and publicity, is unfathomable to me, kind of like the new ESPN app…if you’re not going to give everybody everything, don’t play. You can’t bunt in a world of home runs, and you must be willing to cannibalize your legacy business to protect your future.

So “Bosch” is a cop show. And I’m addicted, even though I’ve never read a single Michael Connelly book. Actually, I’m off genre tomes. Too often there’s a twist at the end that is wholly unsatisfying. But the truth is America lives for story, and those who deliver it succeed.

The star is Titus Welliver. Whom I did not know. Now you’re gonna tell me he was on “Lost” and “Sons of Anarchy” but I never watched those, I don’t watch much TV, still don’t, but health problems got me searching and I love escaping into the story, there’s a way filmed entertainment (digital video) allows you let go of your troubles and releases you into a new world that is wholly satisfying. This is what I loved about going to the movies. You sat there during “Chinatown” and were engrossed in a fictional story that became real for two hours. In a world with too many distractions, this is incredibly fulfilling.

And at first you don’t get Titus. I guess we’re used to more suave cops, spies, people larger than life. But as the series progresses you can’t imagine anybody else in the role. He comes across as a loner. A man of principles without being too self-righteous.

As for his ex-wife…

She blows like the wind. We know people like this, who are pulled by their desires. And in the new season when she’s playing poker at night and looks haggard, she looks real, and I’m all for truth in my viewing.

I remember Amy Aquino as Melanie Griffith’s secretary in “Working Girl,” a tiny role. She’s great here, as a lesbian lieutenant with an edge yet a heart.

And there are people of color.

It looks like L.A.

And it’s not shot on the uppity westside, nor the transient Hollywood, but downtown. Angels Flight, the Bradbury Building.

Everything’s kind of yellow, kind of twilight, deep in meaning, you’re drawn in.

Now the TV shows that get publicity unfold over months, the HBO syndrome. But that’s unsatisfying. It’d be like having “Sgt. Pepper” dripped track by track whereas when it was released you sat at home, alone, and played it over and over again until it revealed itself and you knew it by heart.

I feel like we’re the only people watching “Bosch,” but that makes the experience even more satisfying. We can own it, and spread the word as we enter the world. Seemingly everybody’s got Amazon Prime, do they know this series is on?

I doubt it.

I made a mistake at Rite-Aid. I bought three ESCs instead of three WRWs.

“What are you talking about?”

I could be the last person on earth still wearing hard contact lenses. I know, I know, I should have gotten with the program and had my eyes done, gone under the knife, but the problem there, in addition to possibly less than perfect results, is that if you’re aged, you still need reading glasses, so what’s the point? Oh, that’s right, you could only have one eye done and then if you’re nearsighted, like I am, it would all work, as a matter of fact you can get one contact for distance and one for reading and supposedly your brain adjusts, but my doctor said if you read a lot, don’t, and I’m reading all day.

And speaking of quality, the truth is hard contacts give you much better vision than soft. But most people are pussies and cannot handle the pain. Whereas we He-Men of the Universe, inoculated back in the sixties, are used to having boulders in our eyes and can tolerate anything, hell, I wore two right lenses for two years, you see I was going to an exam and it was way early and I put one contact on top of the other and lost one in the extraction process and didn’t know which was which and I had to order one via mail, being far from Connecticut in the wilderness of Vermont, and I guessed wrong. And when I asked the ophthalmologist to check the two years later, he said it was impossible, that I’d know, but I didn’t, and I was right.

And the truth is no one really wears hard contacts anymore, you wear GAS PERMEABLES, which are a true breakthrough, because then your eye doesn’t conform as much to the lens itself, you see air passes through and I can see great but…

I’ve got this thing in one eye, it only happens in one eye, where there’s some kind of allergy that clouds the lens. And the traditional solution, now known as Boston, even though way back when I was addicted to the pink bottles of Barnes-Hind, just isn’t strong enough to clean the lenses, or in this case lens, because, as I just stated, it only occurs in one eye.

This is when my genius doctor put me on Lobob, which I used to laugh at in the aisle of the drugstore, whenever I’d see it, which was rare. Lobob had amateurish packaging, it looked like it was cooked up in someone’s garage, but now they’ve got state of the art design, never underestimate logos and artwork, they make a difference, can you say STEVE JOBS?, and Lobob Optimum works great, because it’s so damn STRONG!

I know you don’t care, but if you do, you can take a peek at their page here:

Lobob

And if you do, you’ll find there are three necessary packages, CDS for soaking, WRW for wetting and rewetting, and the hot sauce of contact lens solutions, ESC, the EXTRA STRENGTH CLEANER! You’re only supposed to use it once a week, but with my allergy I need to use it every day, and it solves the problem, but a little dab’ll do ya, and like I said, I made a mistake, I thought I was picking up WRW, which one goes through regularly, and I bought three packages of ESC, and one lasts nearly a year.

Now I could have returned them, if I still had the receipt, but come on, my time is worth something so I didn’t and then last night I decided to do the calculation, whether my bottles were gonna expire before I used them.

So I looked for the expiration date and saw it was 2020!

Not like the TV show, not like Barbara Walters, but as in twenty years after the millennium, HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Talk to a boomer and you’ll find that he or she was always calculating what age they’d be in the year 2000. But we’re past that. And we haven’t decided how to label the new era ever since.

Now, occasionally, people talk about 2000-2009 as the aughts, but during the period almost no one did.

And now that the teens are almost over, I’ve still never ever heard a single person refer to this decade as such, even though when I was growing up we referred to the period from 1910-1919 as the teens. Are we waiting for the twenties, as in ROARING?

Meanwhile, time keeps marching on.

So I’m sitting on a couch on Easter Sunday and we’re trading customs stories. And the dentist tells us he was busted twenty five years ago, and I realized that was 1993! That seems like YESTERDAY! But it’s twenty five years ago.

I remember the teenager, the high school student who lived with her mother across the walkway from my sister on Dorothy Street when I first moved to L.A., she was 16, oh-so-young. But thinking about it now, I realize today she’s 59!!! Eeegads! The teen stars of the eighties, they’re entering menopause. Meanwhile, they keep making new people. They’re just shoving the rest of us down the moving sidewalk of life, until we fall off the end.

And we don’t believe it, but we’re confronted with it. Reach 65 and you feel like you want to retire, because everybody else is, and the game of life is now so much less interesting, you’ve figured it out, realize nothing’s gonna last so you might as well have a good time, assuming you’ve got your health and some cash, which not that many have, at least not both.

So some take social security early. I’m never gonna do that, I don’t want to outlive my money, some friends of my parents did this, they ended up with a reverse mortgage, depending upon their kids, it’s ugly. So do you live for today or live for tomorrow? Do you spend or save?

Meanwhile, no one is stopping the train to ask these questions. The institutions just keep rolling on. Don’t we need a committee to get us all to agree to call this decade the teens? Then again, we couldn’t get everybody to agree to the metric system, which is quite a fail. You’re in a foreign country looking at the speedometer, freaking out, and then you realize it’s in kilometers. As for Celsius, go to Canada enough and you learn you double it and add thirty two, but in a nation where people can’t even name their Representative I doubt they can fathom that, and in the era of calculators no one can do math in their head anyway.

My inbox is filling up with people who don’t like Three Days Grace’s “The Mountain.” I DON’T CARE! THAT WAS NOT WHY I WROTE ABOUT IT! I was making a business point, but these writers are too invested in their own opinions to see the forest for the trees, it’s why despite believing they know everything they’re never gonna triumph in this business, most will be fans dying for backstage access as they boast to their friends with their so-called info no one cares about.

Welcome to the modern era, where those over thirty still think they’re living in the old. Hell, they think people really want to listen to vinyl, NO, IT’S A FETISH! Come on, you’re listening to albums recorded digitally reproduced analog? What next, an electric car that runs on gas? This is why I deplore the educational system, preparing people for careers, they don’t know how to THINK!

Like my piece delineating Zuckerberg’s triumphant performance in the Senate. Hell, the stock went up, but you hate him and his company so much you can’t put that aside and evaluate his appearance. Better yet, you didn’t even watch, you relied on the scuttlebutt, and he or she without information loses in the end. Want to win, pay attention, read. You think you’re winning by posting to social media, spreading your inanity, but the truth is one capture of the zeitgeist based on hard work will send you to the top of the chart.

If the chart means anything anymore.

Are you getting this?

Every week “Billboard” publishes a chart that blends sales and streams and the somnambulant press puppets it as if it counted. No, it only matters if someone listens. Did you check the decline of sales? Through the floor my friend. And sales don’t necessarily indicate demand. As I write this, Elton John’s “Revamp” is #11 on iTunes. Wow, it looks like a success. But then we go to Spotify and find out only two songs have broken a million plays, when there are tracks from albums not even on the iTunes chart that have a huge multiple of this. Hell, the hitmakers of today don’t even RELEASE albums! But you’re invested in them, despite TV series eclipsing movies. What did Marshall McLuhan say, THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE? So rappers are playing with the form, putting out mixtapes, and the oldsters decrying Spotify are playing by the same old rules, to their detriment. That’s right, streaming is where the money is. Do you want to go broke? Are you a Civil War re-enactor too?

My point was we live in a cacophonous society where only the Spotify Top 50 gets traction and everything else is forgotten. That despite triumphing in its own little niche, there’s no way to cross over. Which is way different from the seventies when AOR tracks crossed over to Top Forty and the MTV era when if a video got airplay the act was huge and if it didn’t it was toast, when Top 40 followed MTV’s lead and killed AOR.

So you think you’re winning by decrying “The Mountain.” You’d rather promote your own little video with only three digits of views, with streams on Spotify less than 1000, where they don’t even show them. Don’t you get it, THE JOKE IS ON YOU! The game is rigged, you can’t triumph even if you’re any good, and you’re not!

The audience can’t find you.

That was my point. How do we make the audience aware of genres other than hip-hop/rap? This is the big question.

But you’re caught down in the weeds so busy judging not realizing that pastime is passe. In a limited universe it was cool to put down what others were listening to, but now with an almost unlimited amount of music no one is paying attention to your judgments, they’ve got no time and are liking what they like and they’d like new stuff, but they just can’t find it.

Because the major labels are brain dead. They just want to follow the trends. But it’s never been this bad, there’s never been only ONE trend!

And they want it all and they want it now. And the fastest way there is via radio, an ancient exposure medium if there ever was one. Radio in an on demand world is like joining a record club and waiting for mail delivery. Oh, that’s right, the record clubs CRASHED! Time moves on, the future comes.

And the future won’t look like today. Other genres will make inroads. First and foremost if there’s innovation, envelope pushing.

But think how big the music business would be if other genres got traction. Forget recording revenue, think about the ticket sales at live shows. We’re leaving so much money on the table it’s not funny. So many people hate the Spotify Top 50, but they don’t know where to go to find something else.

Once again, the industry is punting on this, which means someone external will fill the vacuum, and everybody will hate them in the process. Smart people participate in change. But you’d rather bitch that your personal favorite is not a hit. HOW COULD IT BE?

That’s my point here. How do we elevate something else?

But you feel superior, sitting at home believing Bob Lefsetz’s taste sucks.

I don’t care what you think.

AND NEITHER DOES ANYBODY ELSE!