Blunt message: “You’re going broke, You spend more than you make.”

Posted on 10.13.23:

In yesterday’s “Week-Long Ear Bug” riff, I shared the following observation: “Taylor Swift does what she does very well or least very successfully, but Joni Mitchell’s eclectic mode of expression (or a facsimile) just isn’t in her. She’ll never get there. Mitchell’s stuff is alluring, sexy, sophisticated, nectary, lasting — Swift songs are candy.”

In response to which the often annoying Michael DeGregorio wrote that “since Jeff Wells, a noted music critic who is intimately knowledgeable about song writing and lyric writing, has deemed it so it must be so.”

And then the equally annoying Glenn Runciter added this: “It’s not really a surprise that everyone who really values music will hold tight to the music of their youth and decouple from contemporary music when they reach a certain age. It’s not always a ‘get off my lawn’ kind of thing, but go on a music forum and you’ll see this writ large. Zero sum attitudes about music is such a waste of time.”

HE to Runciter: “How DARE you try to characterize my Mitchell-over-Swift preference as a ‘music of my youth’ thing? How fucking rote or lazy or lethargic do you have to be to default to a cliche like that?

“I’ve been listening to (for lack of a better term) crème de la crème music all my life. Most of what’s been recorded or live-performed over the last century is okay, approvable, marginal or negligible — finding the really and truly awesome, aspirational, soul-touching stuff is a needle-in-a-haystack exercise or adventure or both. How many tens of thousands of rock songs and Broadway musical tunes and serious orchestral compositions and live performances and choice recordings (including Chumbawamba, Bernard Herrmann, Django Reinhardt, Devo, The Who, George Gershwin, The Feelies, Patti Smith, Hank Williams, the Troggs, Caribbean island music, the Irish Chieftains, Graham Parsons, Gustav Mahler, Blondie, Television, Stephen Sondheim, Lou Reed, David Johansen, Miklos Rozsa, Godly the Ruler and the great Mose Allison) and movie-score tracks do you have to fucking listen to over the decades to acquire a trustworthy sense of what’s mostly good and what’s mostly crap?

I sat through an hour’s worth of Swift’s concert film last Thursday evening. Her songs aren’t even catchy and are pretty much on the level of Good ‘n’ Plenty; Mitchell’s are pricey and succulent Swiss chocolate. There’s really no debating this.

If you’re living in one of these soulless, pencil-thin glass towers on Central Park South, you are definitely suffering from a serious aesthetic deficiency — a condition some would call the wealthy Shallow Hal syndrome.

In other words, during filming of The Hustler director Robert Rossen developed the hots for female lead Piper Laurie, unaware that she’d been “seeing” critic Joe Morgenstern (aka “JoMo”). Just before filming ended Rossen offered Laurie a significant role (presumably the sensuous, mentally disturbed temptress that Jean Seberg eventually played) in Lilith, but the blood drained from Rossen’s face when Laurie said she was about to marry Morgenstern…gaahhh!

Eight or nine days ago I listened to a newly released version of Joni Mitchell‘s “See You Sometime” from “Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975).”

And it won’t let me go. I’m hearing it over and over…car, shower, writing, walking, shopping. The only way to discharge a pernicious ear bug is to simply tough it out through dozens of listenings….eventually it’ll run out of gas.

This song is not one of Mitchell’s all-time greatest, but I can tell you one thing: There’s no way Taylor Swift will ever write or perform a song anywhere near as gentle, complex, delicate, intimate, poetic and melodically moody as “See You Sometime.”

Swift does what she does very well or least very successfully, but Mitchell’s eclectic mode of expression (or a facsimile) just isn’t in her. She’ll never get there. Mitchell’s stuff is alluring, sexy, sophisticated, nectary, lasting — Swift songs are candy.

Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest has been shorn of explicitness while humming with implication. That’s the basic idea, and either this approach knocks you flat or it doesn’t. It’s a “brilliant” film as far as its austere design allows it to go, but the only thing that really got me was the opening overture — intense “oh, shit” music played over a black background before light invades and the film begins.

In the wake of all those non-convictions, Kevin Spacey has delivered a riveting, commanding performance.

Or, if you prefer, Reality Sandwich.

But they’re obviously called “cringe comedies” for a reason, and for this very reason I’ve never been a fan of the sub-genre. But of all the cringe comedies, the one I admire the most is Elaine May‘s The Heartbreak Kid (’72).

The 2007 Ben Stiller remake missed the mark but May’s original holds up. And this January ’23 tribute piece, voiced by CineMollusk, hits the nail on the head.

Carrying the narrative ball is Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), “possibly the emptiest man on earth” and a guy who discovers with a startling jolt that he can’t stand his new bride (Jennie Berlin) as he watches her eat an overstuffed egg-salad sandwich…”a film with “an irredeemably black heart…a relentless examination of an empty world full of empty people.”