Hey, Robert!

"Here come 'ol flat top..."

“Hey Robert, if you’re so aggravated and disappointed by non-fiction dramatic writing these days, why don’t you do it yourself…
…you constant curmudgeon you!”

I’m working at it, and its really tough. That’s no excuse, just the reality of it, but the point is I am trying to lose the infection we’ve caught and I am desperately doing what I can to get back to the artistic ladder we climbed forty years ago and then abandoned so as to pursue “derivative art”.

That cancer was created…well really not totally created it was expanded upon…by network television in the late fifties and then exploded during the sixties.

“The Munsters” caused “The Addams Family”, “Bewitched”, caused “I Dream of Jeannie”…and so on, and so on.

And then the films got heavily involved and then the final nail in the creative coffin…music.

The writers pitch in every boardroom of every corporate entertainment business…

“something something meets something something…”

The “something” being a wildly popular song, movie, or television show, and it is then combined with another “something” and the lazy writer in desperate need of a paycheck goes to a would-be producer who is not in the market to take risks on new creations…and thus we get the “derivative”.

And we now have derivatives of derivatives of derivatives because it has been going on now, full force, for fifty years.

Please don’t mistake John Lennon using a riff from Chuck Berry’s “you can’t catch me” in his masterpiece, “Come Together”. Other than that riff there is absolutely nothing in that Beatles classic that sounds like any other song…ever.

And yet, we have Beyonce glorified as “an artist” when in fact her music is but regurgitation with slight variances…also “borrowed” from every dance beat song that has also been copied since 1990.

And sadly, almost every acclaimed film as well infected with formulaic derivatives, as was confirmed last night watching “The Martian”…ho…hum.

I guess my biggest disappointment in true creativity…ever…was “Mad Men”.

Matthew Weiner, the creator teased me with what amounted to chewing gum representing itself as a seven course top chef dinner. Like “Violet” in the original; “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”, I chewed furiously, having near euphoria as each amazing morsel crossed my cerebral pallet, only to discover…it was just gum.

The character “Don Draper” seemed to be on a magical mystery tour headed for redemption, discovery of something beyond the banality of advertising. Every single episode gave stark and artistically cunning clues that he was on an amazing journey of discovery that life is about more than selling things and selling himself. And in the end we discover we were on nothing but a carousel, ending up where we began…

…advertising…only now…”new and improved”.

And so many bought into this and thought it to be a great ending to a great story that my disappointment carried beyond the series. So cynical have we become that we now know there is no “truth”, no redemption, no furthering of the human condition. We seem, as a culture or cultures to have conceded we are indeed on nothing but a huge carousel.

So, I refuse to believe it!

Yet, I am infected as much as anyone. My problem is I know it and I don’t like it.

I saw every single solitary direct copy…literal plagiarism… in almost every meaningful scene in “The Martian”; from the prototypical obligatory purposefully “non-conformist” “Sheldon-like” hipster nerd to the crusty white guy cynic, to the balancing of just enough “diversity” to make up for the fact that a white guy was the hero…to the obvious “Cast Away” meets “Gravity”. And though the cinematography created a framework of unique artistry…it was the same ol, same ol.

Sorry.

Somewhere, someplace, sometime, exists the new Picasso, the new Dickinson, the new Lennon, or Dylan.

Somewhere, someone will break free of the cancer, the merry-go-round we have been on for over a generation now.

Where is creative popular art?

Where?

Dear Lord, I shall try my best to do something about it. Find me a cure. Please.