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Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Every Dream Job a Heartache
Flying between LAX and SFO during a busy holiday season I was waiting quite a while for my plane, delayed by two hours. To keep myself from going insane I bought the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, the one that looks back at 2007. Little did I realize that true insanity already thrived within these pages! Flipping through the issue before I bought it I saw there were editorials where writers spotlighted trends for the year. I enjoy articles like that so I read those first. I soon discovered these articles didn't contain insights on the entertainment industry as much as they contain insights into the people who work at Entertainment Weekly. What they says is not pretty.
Let's get past the first article of their "Trendspotting" feature. "The Geek was King" in 2007 it declares. Yeah, that same basic article has been written in various publications for the past five years now. Graphic novels are respected, people line-up to see movies about superheroes, video games make lots of moneys, everybody's on the Internet...we get it. What struck me was when the EW writers wrote the autobiographical pieces, which make up most of the articles here. The signs start with the point-counterpoint of Marc Bernardin and Ken Tucker on the merits of DVR. The two articles are basically about having too much TV to watch. It's the first time I see these anxieties erupt from an abundance of modern middle-class spoils.
Those anxieties would come front and center for Whitney Pastorek's highly distressing article "I Officially Became Old." At 32 Pastorek finds herself totally out of the loop of what's popular in popular culture. She writes of how she's appalled by ugly MySpace layouts, the debacle that is the MTV Music Awards and the fact that she needed earplugs at a Panic! at the Disco concert.
Pastorek thinks the problem's with her, that she's an old fogey becuase she prefers the creativity of playing actual guitar to the button-pushing monotony of Guitar Hero. Her perspective confused me. I'm 24 and I'm as out-of-touch as she is, by choice. Everything she listed as being repelled by is pure shit. She shouldn't feel bad about feeling that MTV's programming is "insulting" and "unfathomable." That's exactly what it is. MySpace is an ugly looking website. Guitar Hero, which I have admitted to enjoying on this site, does offer some proof that young people's brains are being trained for carrying out preordained tasks rather than creative thinking. Not to mention the fact that she should wear earplugs at every concert she goes to. That's just being healthy.
I think it's sad that she's letting these idiotic phenomena make her feel bad. Perhaps she shouldn't have faith in youth culture in the first place, calling MTV "my generation's salvation." When Pastorek was my age, circa 1999, the network couldn't get enough of Limp Bizkit and Korn. Some salvation. She's taking all this trash far too seriously, more seriously than those thriving on it. When it comes to reality TV and viral videos most people know how bad it is. The fans of such shit just use it as a chance to gain an empty sense of superiority by seeing the worst modern America has to offer and saying to themselves "better him than me." It's to Pastorek's credit that she does not succumb to such a sentiment although I wonder how much better this alternative is.
A spiritual twin to Pastorek's article is Jeff Jensen's "The Strike Made Me Free." This has a more upbeat feel but there's something pathetic underneath it. Jensen thanks the lack of content due to the WGA strike becuase now he has time to hang out with his kids. He now knows that his daughter has an imaginary friend Star Girl who "can only survive as long as she wishes on a star." I think that's cooler than most TV shows. It's sort of heartwarming. That's what I thought until I asked myself what if we lived in a world where the AMPTP were not completely greedy assholes and actually granted the WGA the changes they wanted. Would Jensen never see his kids except for dinner time? Hell, if the WGA got what they wanted then we would see writers put some energy towards programming for network's websites since now they'd actually see money from it. Then Jensen would be glues to his TV and his computer. In that case it's a victory for family values that writers are getting screwed!
The thing is for me, I would love to have the jobs Pastorek and Jensen have. It's what I'm training myself to do, more or less. I already write about pop culture with my work on Publishers Weekly and the Podthoughts stuff on Maximumfun. To be a regular contributor to a magazine that pays me to watch TV or see movies is my dream job. For Christ's sake on page 57 of this frigging magazine Gary Susman wrote an article about how pies showed up in a few things he's watched this year. For that he probably got paid what a steelworker or coal miner sees in a month at least. But I suppose there's a catch to having such a cushy (and let's be honest, useless) job as pop culture critic. You become crazy catching up with all the garbage that gets thrown your way. Later in the magazine film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum goes down her top ten films of the year. For Zodiac she declares "lack of resolution is one of the defining conditions of our time, leading to symptoms of anxiety and obsession." When Pastorek, Jensen or any of the other people at EW are staring down the vault of horrors their TiVO has stored from them I wonder if they ever feel that way?
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