Bruce the Blog

Wall Street. Sixth Avenue. Easy Street. Main Street. Which one doesn’t fit?

Hmmm. Let’s see.

Wall Street is where investment banking treasury mints like Goldman Sachs of Moolah deem it a hardship when, as it just announced, its impoverished workers will just have to make do with only half-million-dollar annual bonuses. Oops. There goes the country club membership, Cougar Plum, at least the backup country club membership when we’re in West Palm. How will we break it to the kiddies when they’re back from their study abroad program at the Etoile d’ Bratwurst in Fleur de Lis?

Sixth Avenue is where wiseacre mediocre media monkeys dispense tens of millions of dollars to middling TV personalities who actually refuse job offers and whose appeal to begin and end with is 90% time and place and booking agent and production values, and 10% personality.  

As a talk show host, Leno is a world-class stand-up comic. As a talk show host, O’Brien is a world-class comedy writer. They both embody The Peter Principle of performing talent, which is to keep rising past your skill set’s glass ceiling until cracks appear in your smooth facade, much as when a TV actor releases an album to cash in on his or her celebrity in the hopes the gullible audience won’t notice they don’t have much of a voice.

But don’t mind me, because I don’t fully get Will Ferrell either. He’s parlayed extremely broad humor and a recyclable shtick of familiar frat-house shenanigans into a blockbuster film career. Only in Hollywood.

Have you ever seen Craig Ferguson on CBS at 11:30. Have you ever been able to stomach him for more than 30 seconds? If you have, I’d like your recipe for Pepto Bismol, because it must work wonders. This guy mugs so shamelessly, broadly and relentlessly, if he were a blogger, he would be me, but probably would have enough sense not to admit it. If success on these amnesia-lovers’ plugathons were dependent on more than a 10% personality quotient, Ferguson would have been canceled before his opening show’s opening monologue.

Craig the Fungus, Conan the Barber and Jay-Won’t-Lay-Low are the avatars of 1960s broadcasting executive Paul Klein’s watershed theory of audience indiscretion that posited couch potatoes slouch towards their LOP as much as their lap: that is, we channel surf like boob-tube zombies until we alight on the Least Objectionable Program. Although I always found him to be more a MOP.

Easy Street is where all the above dwell.

Main Street is where they pave their way to stardom and riches and neuroses when the first falters and the second stagnates because the first falters and the latter sends them into a downward spiral of unproductive maturation.

Main Street is where some of us don’t get the fascination with the people who live on Easy Street. That includes me, by the way. I don’t get my own, albeit dwindling, fascination, with people in “The Show Business.”

Modernity has brainwashed us into seeing that locution as awkward, yet it’s wholly in keeping with how we still converse about every other business, isn’t it?

We don’t go around talking about “auto industry” but about “the auto industry.” We refer to “the banking business,” not “banking business.” Although we do say “consumer electonics” rather than “the consumer electronics.”

In yesteryear, the show business was no business archetypically ambitious immigrants wanted their children to mess with, a la seminal talking motion picture The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, which was autobiographical.

Today, people will sell their souls to be rich and famous the Hollywood Way. Or, as in Conan O’Brien’s case, the show business bossman will sell his soul to give his employee a windfall so there are no hard feelings after the employee has upped and told the bossman to go shove his offer of a high-profile TV show five nights a week.

It’s times like this I thank my lucky stars that someone like Conan O’Brien likes little old me so much he wants to entertain me a half-hour earlier, and was even willing to lower himself by accepting tens of millions of dollars to free himself up to practice his craft somewhere that would pay him even more than that to have his way.

What did we do to deserve this? I shudder to think.

Last weekend, I took in two documentaries. That expression ironically used to mean the opposite of today’s context. Taking in a movie meant going OUT to a theater. It was figurative. Now it’s literal. We take movies into our home, either fed to us by a digital pipe or from a storefront or, for the growing legion of Netflixers, taken in from the mailbox.

There was an unexpected link between the two non-fiction films I witnessed, really an oblique inflection point, as it were.

First, I viewed “Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollack,” an absorbing, stimulating, leisurely look at the foremost — certainly most celebrated at least — architect of our time. His off-kilter perspective is what informs the eye-catching profiles and postures of his eccentric structures, epitomized by Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, both of which receive lingering attention and admiration in Pollack’s loving canvas of his longtime boon buddy.

Inevitably, there are those — or one, at least, in this depiction — who fairly luxuriate in their contrarian cove. That would be Hal Foster, an academic martinet by way of Princeton University whose cavils about Gehry are thoroughly unconvincing. He even allows that he feels somebody has to take an unapproving point of view, yet his expression of thought lacks clarity; it is, in fact, downright muddy and borders on circumlocution. He gropes for reasons to dislike Gehry’s work, at one point dripping disdain for what he sees as a “brand.” As if establishing such indelible credentials is to be bemoaned. Professor Foster’s brand of criticism is flaccid and mediocre.

I was able to put my finger on what bothered me about his arch negativity toward Gehry’s artistry when I turned to the second documentary in my vestpocket film festival. It is an episode in PBS’s Independent Lens series, “Subtitles Not Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos,” profiling a pair of Hungarian emigres who escaped the Eastern European country’s 1956 revolution to work their way into legendary and beloved Hollywood cinematographers whose visions easily can be considered “brands.” From Laszlo Kovacs’s Easy Rider to Vilmos Szigmond’s Oscar-winning work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, they left indelible signatures on celluloid.

I had the pleasure of interviewing the late Laszlo Kovacs on stage at a digital media convention in Burbank, California,several years ago, and he was fully engaging and full of great anecdotes. In fact, I recall during the run-through realizing I’d have my hands full keeping us both on schedule and squeezing in all my questions. He was as irrepressible a storyteller on stage as much as he was on film.

During the segment on Close Encounters, famed film composer John Williams credits Szigmond’s inspired use of light to depict the alien spaceship alighting outside a home with making the audience feel “we don’t need to be fearful of what we don’t know.”

That remark took me back to Professor Foster’s rather bumptious efforts to ground Gehry into gruel. He doesn’t understand the architect’s unprecedented, iconoclastic style, therefore he doesn’t like it, therefore it cannot possibly be good.

In the sense of John Williams’s words, Foster fears what Gehry does for he doesn’t get where it comes from and believes it deconstructs all that is artful and affirming about architecture. His craven inability to embrace that which he doesn’t understand might even be deemed a highly artistic form of bigotry, but bigotry all the same.

Then again, what does that make me for not wanting to accept Professor Foster’s unacceptance of Frank Gehry’s over-the-top, outsize sensibility that pushes the classical borders of architecture into outer space? Call me Bruce the Bigot. It will take its place of honor among many other names I’ve been called. I can deal.