Justin Bieber Blues

I don't really follow Justin Bieber. My daughter has a JB pillow and posters and perfume and her presents come in JB wrapping paper. He is the teen idol of my kids  and I get that. But we are confronted once again how the juggernaut of media has planted other peoples lives in ours. I know now that Justin was busted for drinking and drag racing. I know this because people I see know it and the topic comes up much the way politics floats up.

And it isn't a few people. I have hit this several times with the ensuing discussion something like this: Well he's a good kid I think he will straighten himself out. I think he just made some bad choices. Justin Bieber travails fall off the lips with the same type of concern a parent might have for an errant child. And yet we have this "kid" who is a multimillionaire and who got caught drinking and drag racing in his Lamborghini with a super model. My heart bleeds.

But of course the real question is why is this now a topic of conversation? Certainly the speed of our culture doesn't give us much time to swim through the informational overload and make our choices. Mostly we are now spoon fed from our phones or our televisions whatever the media Gods deem important  and then we find ourselves discussing over dinner weather the Bieber man is going to straighten himself out or will he go down the dark path of sex and drugs and rock and roll.

We furrow our brows and pray the Bieber will drive his Lamborghini sensibly and not drink and drive with his super model date. We should all be so debauched. Pass the ketchup honey.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Lady Ga Ga Stripped of 176 Million Views on Youtube...how pathetic

And so what does this mean? It means that even the ones at the very top are not immune to our national frenzy to get to the top and stay there. Here is a woman rich beyond belief with her allotment of fame more than most humans will ever get and yet she could not stomach the idea that she might fade. She has reportedly released songs for .99 to inflate her Billboard numbers as well. The mere thought she might not remain at the very top of the top drives her to manipulate Social Media. How pathetic.

In a time where our biggest horror is that we will not be immortalized in some way or we will not be noticed even our biggest stars cannot escape the schizophrenia of a culture gone mad. Because mad is the only way to define our overexposure and how we now peer into each others lives in the ever present drive toward commodification. Because exposure we assume equals fame and fame equals money if not only an escape from being one of the many.

And the horror is that we might have a mediocre life. That we might not be one of the Facebook chosen few who vacation in exotic places and dabble with the stars or at the very least are rich enough to upload pictures of our breathless lives. But of course we are doomed before we start as Lady Ga Ga is doomed.

Think  of Sunset Boulevard with Norma Desmond living in her decaying mansion in the twilight of her fallen star. The knowledge she would never be in the light again literally drove her mad. We should take heed and so should Lady Ga Ga.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

That Taunting Screenplay

When the novels start to drag and they seem kind of dinasourial I always fall back onto writing a screenplay. Why not? They are shorter and the form seems more up todate for our twittering short attention span getting every shorter society. Why not write a movie and while I'm at it why don't I win an Oscar? Hey I see those authors coming down the aisle to claim their Oscar. I can do that. Just let me get up there and trundle on down and I even have my speech ready.

I would just like to thank everyone who supported me through my years of struggle, my wife, kids, friends, and I would just like to tell whoever out there who is thinking about being a writer...go for it! And then I would leave the stage after walking the wrong way, corrected by the beautiful woman. I mean there is a lot of precedent here. Fitzgerald and Faulkner wrote for the movies. Do I need better company than that? And you know what...they pay!

So...all I have to do is download a template and start rolling. Yeah. That's what I'll do. Write that screenplay and just pitch away to the powers that be. Now. I need a plot. Hmmm. I know I'll just use my own books. Perfect. Now...now....fade in...yeah, fade in to a... man. Maybe a woman. Ha. No problem....just fade in to something and then fade out. Yeah....maybe I'll do that. Yeah...write a screenplay. Cecil B Demills of the literary world. Sure.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...."The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo's Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." Chicago Sun Times

Art Alone Endures

We were doing the Chicago thing with the train and the kids and the rushing to the water taxi to Michigan Avenue to seeing Marilyn Monroe with her dress blowing up in front of the NBC building and then down to Billy Goats Tavern for some burgers that would kill a Tri Athlete then up and across the river toward Millennium Park to see the Bean. It was  a beautiful August night, one of those nights so rare in Chicago that feels more like Florida in Spring. We had just about reached the park when we heard music.

My wife said it looked like a concert in the park and so we drifted up to the fence and and there was a symphony. And then we heard a voice. It was an opera and the singers voice rose up across the city like a God. We just stopped and listened and all our worries and hurries fell away. We were transfixed by this man singing and the beautiful music. The park was filled as far as the eye could see with people quietly listening on a warm night on the end of summer.

And I looked around and I saw young and old just staring. No one moved. Everyone just listened and they were transfixed. And that is when I thought about our world with it's horrible problems and our cartoon culture and our grotesque politicians and the zealots who have take over our lives and I realized then the only thing that trumped all that was Art. It moved at a different speed and a different level and all these people will pass on, but Art will survive.

And they can't touch it. They can try and ban books. Wash out an opera with Rap or noise or sex or violence or whatever they can come up with, but Art survives. I saw it in the people who didn't speak, didn't move. They were mesmerized like I was. And even my seven year old who could barely see over the fence wanted to just stay and listen. It simply soothed the soul.

And then of course we left and hurried on to catch the water taxi to catch the train to get to our car to get home to go to bed to start all over the next day. But there was that interlude. It only lasted fifteen minutes but the world was in order. All was right. There is an engraved saying in the Fine Arts Theatre of Chicago. "All Passes, Art Alone Endures." Amen.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle

The Bushwhacking of NPR

You should be concerned about this one if you go to movies, plays, the ballet, poetry readings, book readings, galleries, enjoy fine wine, a good book, a symphony on the lawn, Mozart, the Beatles, just about anything to do with culture. Because let's say the bad guys have a point in busting up the unions and cutting every social program they can get their hands on. You could almost say that they are doing some of this out of true fiscal concern or at the very least ideology. But trying to destroy National Public Radio is attacking what is left of culture in this country and every single Sesame Street watching child and Ken Burns devotee should really say enough is enough.

What? We want to cement Sarah Palins bet that America is truly a stupid country? That in fact the lowest common denominator should rule the land? That some short sighted ideologue who was probably the weird guy in the class who entertained Timothy McVeigh fantasies and saw the government as evil but then veered into fame as a better way to satisfy his tortured loner geek soul could now score points by trying to take down the wine drinking cheese crowd by getting an NPR executive to spill  his guts so he could prove what a left leaning organization NPR really is, is really pathetic and a true low point in what American society is capable of producing.

Let's say we get rid of NPR. Let's say we get rid of culture. Let's say the stupid men rule the land. Now what? Without culture you do not have a country. You have no collective national consciousness to balance the insidious vapidity of crass commercialism which rolls along F. Scotts Fitzgerald's definition of cheap entertainment as simply heroin of the soul. Even rabid conservatives  want to go see a fine play or enjoy a night at the symphony after a long day of taking bottles from children and cutting out funding for the education, women, infants, and poor  people. But alas, they cut out culture too and instead of Stravinsky  they are stuck with Die Hard 6.

So this is not about scoring points. NPR is part of America. America needs something elevated to balance the natural crassness of a country founded on the almighty dollar as it's guiding light after paying lip service to liberty and freedom. We need it if only to keep the creeps in the corners and our own hope alive that one day we will get beyond the infancy of  the mega commercial state. We can only hope NPR is still around when the dust settles after the conservative slash and burn orgy of 2011.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

Our cultural heritage--cable television

Vapidity aside...is it just me or has cable become the dumping ground of all that is cheap, shallow, worthless, produced in a nanosecond on a shoestring with a gnats intelligence? Certainly the pay channels are the only refuge now. I was just reading David Foster Wallaces's essay on television written in 1990 and not much has changed. Or has it?

Wallace did not see the advent of reality television. When he wrote his essay there was just a few nascent starts of Married with Children or Cops. A sort of precursor warm up to Survivor and American Idol or Dog the Bounty Hunter. Reality television tells us about ourselves as it reflects back everyday life. No thought. No work for the viewer. The couch potato has become the comatose patient in the mental ward staring blindly at nothing. One thing about reality television is there is no plot and certainly no meaning so we recall it the way you might talk about an accident--did you see that dude forget his song on American Idol?

Forget about the cries of cultural demise--there is no culture here and whats more in cable land no one cares. The real shows have been relegated to pay or the networks that still care about trying to get some ratings through drama--but cable simply shrugs and puts out more American gladiator type of fare or more cooking shows or more fallen stars followed around with camera crews. Ratings are ratings and the good news is that Americans will watch just about anything with sensational lore.

Nothing new under the sun. We have never held high art in high regard. America was formed as a reaction against a wealthy ruling class in Britain. We surfs were being exploited and so we demanded the right to bear arms and to rebel and overthrow the government if need be. A highly educated sliver of an entitled class may appreciate fine art or high literature, but there is nothing in the Declaration of Independence that says we must have culture. We embrace a populist culture that held up the frontiersman and the cowboy and now the bounty hunter and the cop and the fireman and the all American family falling apart on national television. What is more commonplace or populist than watching ourselves?

Bring on YouTube. We did. We do watch ourselves and we enjoy it immensely. If democracy's final evolution is bringing about celebradom for the masses then we are certainly on our way. A movie star or a singing sensation is hatched overnight thanks to the American Idol motif of talent shows with big payoffs. Do we now have ballads sung by young females that sound like every other young female? You betcha. The point is you don't need originality, you merely now have to morph into what was popular and worked before. If everyone could be a Beatle then everyone would--some things are just trickier to pull off.

So when we flip through the diorama of American cable television and find low budget infomercials and televangelist and wrestlers and bounty hunters and talent shows and fallen rock stars playing dad at home then we really have no one to blame but ourselves. We have deemed art to be accessible and reflective only to the point it reflects us back at us while we sit in front of the tube--or there's me! Or that could be me! In that way television has fulfilled it's promise that everyone can be famous if only for a little while. In a little way.
www.billhazelgrove.com

The Ha Ha Culture

We live in the ha ha culture now. Maybe you've noticed all the magazines and newspapers saying ha ha you don't have what these people have. It's literally everywhere. Our culture is based on presenting people with what they don't have. A trip to the grocery store is an odyssey in self evaluation. One only has to stand in the check out line for five minutes to see that the rest of the world is much better off, much better looking, much younger, and of course much more famous. The whole slant of our culture supports this. And who do we blame for the current state of culture degradation? I'd say ourselves.
I think it began with the boomers. They created the original ha ha culture about thirty-five years ago. That began with ha ha we're young and you're not. Remember don't trust anyone over thirty? Well, that started the ball rolling. If you weren't young then you might as well leave the country. The youth culture became the culture. Millions of smug young people sticking their tongues at the older generation until finally they became well, the older generation. Which brings us to the current state of affairs where the young have become the old and the old have become insufferable. Have you ever seen so many articles on aging? Have you ever seen so much ink and television time spent in trying to not say that getting old is really getting old. Well, this is because the boomers who are now well in their fifties have control of the media and we are treated to many articles on prostrates and menopause and real age versus chronological age. There's quite a bit of sneering going on. Why don't these old rockers just hang it up? If they can't be young then can't they just go off and hide somewhere? The ha ha has turned sour maybe even acidic. So they turn to money. At least we have that. The plain fact is the youth culture is strangling the people that started it. They can't be young and even the young can't be young enough anymore. The under thirty fives, the under forty fives, the twenty something becoming the thirty somethings. One group continually asserting their supremacy only to be knocked over by the next. Can anyone be young enough, rich enough, hip enough, cool enough, famous enough for the megalomaniac we now have sitting in the driving seat of this culture? Gang culture seems to be the only thing evil enough to survive the test. Suburban white teenagers listening closely to the rap music of the inner city is only a small indicator of the level of cultural aberration we have reached.
Sounds to me like we have an adolescent culture now. Adolescents are self absorbed and very unsure of themselves. They raise hell and rant and rave to cover up their own insecurities. About the only thing they can say with certainty is, ha, ha, we're young and you're not. Ha ha. Just wait.

The Repackaging of Culture

I watched the movie ET with my son the other day. My thought was, well this will be interesting as I saw the movie twenty years ago. It really wasn't. I think the term classic has come to mean anything that is at least ten years old. When we watch Casa Blanca or Citizen Kane or even Gone With The Wind, there is an epic quality about the story that transcends time. But today we have conveniently done away with any sense of the epic and given over to, can we make money on this again? Certainly the most hilarious version of this repackaging is our rock bands. We now have fifty, sixty year old men jumping around the stage in spandex and singing anthems that are what, twenty, thirty, forty years old. They are termed classic rock bands. The term classic used to mean something would last, would stand the test of time when other ideas, fads, groups had been long forgotten but our current culture defines classic as simply "can we get these old guys back on stage and can we make some money?" One would hope that the rockers might rebel and say, now wait a minute, I'm not sure about this, but of course they like everyone else need the cash. I recall seeing an old interview with the woman who wrote the novel, Peyton Place. The interviewer asked her, do you think your novel will be read fifty years from now? The woman replied, "Oh God no." She knew the difference between literature and entertainment. Ask that same question of someone in the rock band Stix or Kiss or Fleetwood Mac. The reply would surely be, of course they will be listening to us. Again, one merely has to age and then be brought back to be given the definition of a classic. Well, back to ET. So I watched the movie. There were the usual Spielberg tricks. Glowing lights and seventies families in flux with the overwhelmed Mom and precocious children. There was ET. There were the mysterious bad guys. All this was pervaded with a Capra quality that while somewhat refreshing when it came out was simply warmed over milk twenty years later. But here was the thing. The story was simply not that good. The movie was a B movie at best. That is what came to the front twenty years later. It was a classic I suppose, but only in that it was classically mediocre.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com

American Entertainment

I attended a staple of American Entertainment this weekend: the big time sporting event. The game I went to in Chicago was not a good game. Both teams were at the bottom of their standings. The beginning was a study in light and sound. The lights dropped as fireworks went off and earthshaking sound shook the arena. A large bull floated like a dirigible through the pumped out smoky haze. Then the basketball game started and it was quiet enough to hear the squeak of the players tennis shoes. First time out and a bagel, a donut, and a coffee cup raced around on the giant Trinatron. The crowd simply went wild. People screamed uncontrollably for the bagel and the donut that ran neck and neck. Then the game resumed and we were back to the squeaks of the tennis shoes. Another time out and a man came out and began shooting T shirts from a large gun into the crowd. The place went nuts. Then a meter came on the Trinatron for screaming. The crowd exploded as the meter went into the red zone. Play resumed and we were back to the squeaks. Another time and out five people tried to eat twenty four cookies in five minutes. The crowd screamed in contortion as a fat man stuck the final five cookies into his mouth. Play resumed and we heard the dulcet tones of rubber on wood.

I began to watch the players on the Trinatron. It was more exciting. More dynamic. When I looked down at the real players they looked strangely normal, a bunch of grown men trying to shove a ball into small hoops. So I went back to the Trinatron. Another time out and a giant tic tac toe board was set up on the half court. People lost their minds as two boys tried to put the giant X's and O's in on the grid. Play resumed and everyone went to sleep. The game ended after overtime failed to get a rise from the crowd. It didn't really matter who won. We all came to see something extraordinary and we did. Too bad it wasn't basketball, but as Americans we expect more from our movies, sports, television shows, than just the event. We expect what Hemingway said so long ago: "In the end the age was handed the kind &*%# it demanded." I guess that's what we got.

Mount Oprah

You should be on Oprah. Oprah would love your book. Maybe she would and maybe she wouldn't. But as a man with a book out I hear this about every other day. Strange dynamic. Publishing a book so the end result will be an endorsement by a single person. In the age of everyman fame, Oprah is certainly the lottery ticket to the sure milk of immortality if not wealth. But of course one has to get there. I received a call yesterday. Mr. Hazelgrove, we would like to publish your next book. Oh really. I can hear other voices in the background. Yes, this is blankety blank and we want to publish your book. I recognized the vanity press. Well my book has just come out I say and of course the call is terminated. No prospects here. Even self publishing is in a downturn. There is no shame in self publishing. Great writers have done it through time, but the wholesale Juggernaut of instafame is something new. All eyes on the prize we do whatever flips trained seals must to get to the top of the pyramid. I get it. I really do. The man who told Oprah he received food from a long lost lover in a concentration camp got it too. He just made it up. So did James Frey. Can you blame them? Morality says yes, but reality says they are just doing whatever they can to get to the final stop on Mount Rich and Famous. A lot of people talk about the American Dream, but of course the dirty little secret is that we are covetous old sinners who want that final branch, the one that says we are not just a blip on the radar screen of mortality but someone special, someone different, the star that flashes out of the night and we all sit in wonder. But there are only so many seats on that Oprah set, a couch that Tom Cruise destroyed his career on and another seat for Oprah. After that, it is every man and woman for themself.