Yesterday evening I sat down to watch Jeopardy! and was disappointed to find that ABC was showing Monday Night Football instead. OK, I said, I’ll watch the Australian Open; earlier in the day, the Tennis Channel had informed viewers that coverage on ESPN would start at 7.
ESPN, sadly, was showing Monday Night Football. Must be on ESPN2, I thought, and, changing the channel, found Monday Night Football again. Then I remembered that ESPN’s coverage of the Australian Open – one of the year’s four majors – has been beginning in the evening on ESPN+, which we don’t have a subscription for. It is one of many things that annoy me about the networks.
And I have nothing against football – I watched a bit of it over the weekend – but do we need three channels to cover the same game?
A friend wrote on Facebook yesterday about her dismay on finding a dangling modifier in The New Yorker. It was in the David Sedaris story I wrote about a few weeks ago: “While walking on that first afternoon, a man stopped his truck, introduced himself as Rocky, and asked me what my favorite color was.”
I messaged my friend that I had heard Sedaris read that story, and that he had prefaced it by talking about the magazine’s rigorous fact checker and, at the conclusion, had spoken about his run-ins with the sensitivity reader. Perhaps, I said, they should invest in a line editor with a knowledge of grammar.
Early last month my “40s Junction” channel on Sirius XM was temporarily taken over by “Holiday Traditions.” It seemed a little early to me – I didn’t start listening till after Thanksgiving – but perhaps, I thought, they wanted to make sure they got in all of the great Christmas carols and songs.
A week before Christmas, I now realize they wanted to bombard us with a few select standards: “Jingle Bells,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “Little Drummer Boy,” “Joy to the World.” Even carols I love, like “O Holy Night,” I’m getting a little tired of. I have not heard “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (a beautiful Advent carol), let alone “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
I don’t know why I expected more. The situation is the same on the pop stations. Gordon Lightfoot, according to Sirius, wrote two songs: “Sundown” and “Carefree Highway” (in my opinion, two of his least interesting). OK, sometimes you hear “If You Could Read My Mind,” but never “Approaching Lavender.” With Simon & Garfunkel, you get a handful – “Sounds of Silence” and of course “Mrs. Robinson” ad infinitum – but never “Old Friends” or “April Come She Will.”
In a country, and a time, that’s all about diversity, we get very little of it on the radio. And don’t get me started on television.
Last night I received on my phone the Christmas issue of The Spectator, the annual double issue with a beautifully illustrated cover. My delight at being able to read the magazine during the holidays, which I was never able to do when I received the paper edition, is tempered by my regret at not being able to hold in my hands, and then save in a drawer, the aesthetically pleasing product.
I was disappointed with “A Man on the Inside,” especially after hearing an interview with the award-winning writer. What is it about American shows, especially comedies, that makes them such unsatisfying fantasies? I measure them against the brilliant German comedy “The Last Word,” which also had a slightly absurd premise – a woman is hired as a eulogist by a failing funeral home – but was steeped in the reality of the human condition.
Also, I stopped watching the highly acclaimed “Black Doves” after one episode. It’s not a comedy, but it displays an equally distant relationship to reality.
Friday evening we went to Regal Oakwood in Hollywood to see A Real Pain. Numerous commercials preceded the coming attractions, including the longest car commercial I had ever seen. It began with a woman informing her husband that she was pregnant and ended with her nearly getting run over by a car, on a strangely empty street. Finally, the coming attractions began – that dismaying, de rigueur montage of shootings and crashes – though in the middle of them a commercial was thrown in.
I was in a very bad mood when the movie began. My spirits lifted when the two protagonists arrived in Poland, then they plummeted again as it became clear that this was not a road movie, it was a buddy picture. It’s not about cultural differences, it’s about relationships. Of course it is; who in today's Hollywood would make a movie about the former?