An Old Man Lament

Perhaps it was all the McMurtry I was reading, but during the break, I got sappy about the way things once were. It hit me suddenly when I went to a fondue restaurant at the old cement factory where they filmed the end of Dirty Harry. Yes, the cement factory is a now an incredibly overpriced fondue place. If that wasn't enough, I was at a nearly empty A's game on a Tuesday night and it felt like the A's were going to leave Oakland. I suppose that's been a long time coming - they've been talking about it for years - but still, the notion of it hit me a bit harder this time around. Michael Jackson died, which was just weird. It's not as if I expected more great music from the man, but it just seemed a bit soon, especially considering Robert McNamara also died, a man from a totally different time...

...then there was Public Enemies, a movie dealing with the theme of a man running out of time. And the Misfits, a movie about men who lived past their time. There was Hung, about a man who's time passed him by. It's like all this stuff hit at once. All pointers towards male obsolescence...

...something else annoyed me. My cell phone was acting goofy and I forgot my charger and it turned out it was cheaper to buy a new cell phone than to get a new charger. The guy at the phone store tried to up-sell me to an iphone pointing out how uncomfortable it was to text using a regular phone. I explained patiently I was happy with everything, I just wanted a simple, cheap phone. He was obviously disappointed and started treating me like I was a waste of time. Look, I didn't want to be in the store in the first place, but since your stupid company built a phone that wasn't meant to last and because we live in a world where a phone is cheaper than a phone charger, I'm here. So just give me a goddamn new phone and don't waste both of our time. And the whole thing got me thinking about how it feels like nobody builds things to last anymore. Everything has these short lifespans - computers are supposed to last for about four years. It is the nature of the digital revolution, they say. But for most things, it's an excuse to sell you more stuff. Let's not kid ourselves.

How this manifests itself - I was going through my dads record collections it got me re-thinking about how albums were once made - with a mind towards the entire album. There was a care and construction put into these things that seems lacking in today's art. Maybe I'm romaticizing the past. I'm sure tons of albums were crappy and maybe I'm thinking of only the few standouts.

...and then I got to thinking about Milk winning the best oscar screenplay. It won won as a politically correct statement about gay rights. The Academy didn't have the balls to give Brokeback an Oscar it deserved two years ago because of controversial (gay) subject matter, so in an act of ridiculous self-serving back-patting it gives an unworthy script a best screenplay oscar two years later.

So what we've got is a society that builds things to last only the amount of time it takes to make the sale - makes cell phones to get people to spend the maximum amount they are willing to spend on phones or cell plans vs. giving people a useful, valuable service. We make and celebrate movies to jam folks into theaters and to make politically correct statements, not movies that offer any value or insight into the human experience or movies, in other words, that are made to last. In a great contrast - we have Public Enemies and Transformers. One is a disposable piece of trash which will be - hopefully - laughed at by future generations and one is a rich portrait of an American folk-hero running out of time. And which one "wins" at the box office?

Enough with this long ramble. It is obvious I am out of blogging shape and beginning to talk too long like an old man.