Who's Next

Out here by the ocean my watch tells me it’s 75 degrees Fahrenheit. In what passes for summer in the Bay Area, that’s hot. If you go inland just over the hill, it is 15 or so degrees hotter. Just in time for the midterm election, where the Democrats need all the help they can get. Climate change, death of democracy, get out the base, the Beatles win an Emmy. That last one is for Audio AI, where a hidden microphone and stolen moments from Beatle jamming reveal what we’ve known for some time, that the Beatles are breaking up.

Last night Tina and I watched a movie on Prime called Licorice Pizza. It takes place in 1973, in Encino, California. The themes are 40 cents-a-gallon gas lines, with various subplots about a 15 year old coming to age in a relationship of sorts with a twenty-something, also matriculating without a clear sense of who she is or wants to be. The age disparity is played up for all it’s worth, but it’s not a spoiler to reveal the reality is not what it appears to be. It’s a small movie, with walk-ons by famous Hollywood types, and the emotional notes the screenplay hits are welcome in this time of Trump, grift, and intransigent loss of faith. Still don’t know what the title refers to, but glad the thing got made.

What really stands out for me is the network this confection lives on, Amazon Prime. I rarely go there for nourishment, relying instead on the dynamic of Netflix and everybody else to sustain the season shift from the last wave of originals to the next one. As Netflix’s bones get clicked clean of acceptable content, we’re forced into the second line of originals not dropped en masse but rather a week at a time. The key players are Apple TV+, maybe HBO Max, and the fast-encroaching wave of ad-based lower cost versions of all the Disney Plus’s and such. By the end of what the rest of us call summer, streaming will have replaced broadcast and cable with this new thing that looks like 1950 television. Creative shortages will force the main players down to 3 or 4 channels, with bundling supplemented by sports, neutered news, and game shows.

CNN is surviving its acquisition via reality czar David Zaslav by canceling journalism analysts and neo-progressive reporters. The basic idea is promoted by Trump, who welcomes the network just as Fox starts to distance themselves. NBC dangles the possibility of canceling the 10PM last hour of primetime, even as they promote an all night 3 hour block of connecting Law and Orders. MSNBC is turning its dwindling star hosts over to the Rachel Maddow model, which is one night a week plus big special coverage of hearings and DOJ search squads.

And then the world changes as the Queen of England passes from the scene. Somehow her state of grace transcends the details of the times she lived in. I’m not a royalist, but in favor of the details of family, the slow march across the decades of this most impersonal turn of the century. As McCartney improv’d, she’s a pretty nice girl but she doesn’t have a lot to say. God bless the Queen.

---