As I’ve been married for FIVE BILLION YEARS, and have never used this thing people call “dating apps,” which sounds like an appetizer made from dates and possibly wrapped in bacon, I am unfamiliar with the Tinders and the Matches and the Bumblebees and such.
What I do know is that this new ad for Match is brilliant.
Here, watch it, then we’ll talk smack.
Okay, that’s perfect, right? The actors, the meet-cute scene, the montage. ALL OF IT.
What’s especially great to me is Ryan Reynolds was involved, and whatever he touches is inevitably funny, along with Taylor Swift letting him use Love Story, her best song, always will be, and no, I have ignored most of her pop songs and actually like the country stuff better, and the new indie piano album, understated, under-rated.
Taylor, you keep innovating instead of pumping out the same songs and albums for 40 years. No, I am not looking at you, AC/DC.
Okay, these dudes have a point.
Also: I would listen to the entire DOG ON THE ROAD parody album. Make it happen. Send me the link and I will send you monies to Australia via horses, dolphins, and finally drop bears wearing cute little ’80s fanny packs, Chris-Pine style, and yes, you want to see the full footage instead of three seconds of a teaser, here you go.
Note: I hope you are all surviving 2020, and I wish you all the best during the last few weeks of the Worst Year Ever–and my promise to you is that 2021 will be far, far better.
Some artists never change. They find their groove, or a niche that PAYS THE BILLS, and ride that pony until it falls over and dies of exhaustion ten miles west of the nearest gas station.
This can be a Good Thing, with certain bands and singers having a signature sound and the ability to produce album after album of consistent music. And it can be a Horrible Thing, with countless one-hit wonders still touring county fairs when they should be collecting a pension.
The opposite strategy is high risk, high reward. If you’re cranking out No. 1 hits, and making 8.4 bazillion dollars on tour, why change a thing?
There are bands and singers who’ve used constant change as a strategy, like Madonna hiring a hot new producer and taking on their style. Not a true evolution, that.
An opposite approach seems to work better. Mega-producer Rick Rubin is famous for long walks on the beach and philosophical talks, and he doesn’t have a signature sound that he stamps on artists. The man has produced everybody from the Beastie Boys to AC/DC to the Dixie Chicks (the list is ginormous). Rubin is more of a coach and mentor, somebody who lets musicians question themselves, stretch out, and grow into something different.
Which is why we’re talking about Taylor Swift and her new album, FOLKLORE.
Is she adopting a style, like Madonna putting on a British accent, or embracing something truly new?
Check out this single, CARDIGAN, and we’ll talk smack.
Whether you’re a giant fan (what are they called, Swifties? I HAVE NO IDEA) or a sneering hater, you have to admit this is good.
Different, refreshing, unexpected.
Taylor’s original evolution, from country to pop, was not a surprise. Every artist alive tries to move from a specialized niche to the biggest possible stage.
Personally, I am not a country fan, but I loved her early stuff. The lyrics told stories and the music was infectious. LOVE STORY and YOU BELONG WITH ME are perfect and timeless.
Didn’t like her pop albums as much, though when she slowed down, there were some good burners. OUT OF STYLE is great.
What she’s doing here is stripped down indie music. Instead of a wall of sound, we get stretches of silence.
I’m impressed. There wasn’t any hype train before she dropped FOLKLORE, and it really feels like she spent a few months in quarantine plinking on her piano and writing lyrics for this.
VERDICT
A happy surprise. Well done, Taylor the Swift — give us more like this. Or go visit Rick Rubin at his beach house and go wild with a metal album next.
I come here to praise Taylor Swift, not to bury her CGI zombie corpse.
Though I’m neither superfan nor hater, I have to say she did some great music videos early in her career. YOU BELONG TO ME is excellent. BACK TO DECEMBER is pretty good.
This music video is a step backward, an expensive mess that shows T-Swift has fully evolved from a Scrappy Young Talent Who Just Hit It Big all the way to a Establishment Megastar With More Mansions Than She Can Remember.
Yes, the production values are great. Fans will watch the heck out of this just for the spectacle.
HOWEVER: It doesn’t make you feel anything.
At all.
And that’s the acid test for a music video.
Do you laugh?
Do you feel joy, or anger?
Do you cry?
That’s because whether you intend to or not, every song tells a story. A music video is supposed to help tell that story.
Songs don’t give you a lot of words to do the job. It takes discipline and talent to do it right.
The Dixie Chicks can spend 200 words to tell a full story that makes you full of sorrow (TRAVELING SOLDIER) or righteously angry (GOODBYE, EARL).
Taylor can do this, too. She has the talent to tell a story and make you feel. One of her first big hits did this perfectly. It’s even in the title.
Here’s where this new video goes wrong, despite all the money spent–reportedly, $12 million in diamonds was used for that bath scene.
What story is she telling, and how does it make us feel?
In her best songs and videos, Taylor’s telling a story about somebody else, somebody we can all relate to, and that makes us feel for the protag. YOU BELONG TO ME is about a high school girl, something of a loser, with a crush on a neighbor boy. People get that. Whether you’re male or female, we’ve all been through awkward years in junior high or high school. It’s easy to feel for the girl she’s singing about, and to root for that underdog. You want her to get the boy and it’s a great moment when they both show up to the dance together.
In this video, Taylor’s clearly talking about herself, and the point of the song is to strike back at perceived rivals.
It’s hard for non-billionaires to feel sympathy for celebrities with hurt feelings. No matter how good the song is (and it’s not that good compared to her best) and how much they spent making this video, you can’t force people to feel sorry for a young, pretty woman who makes more money in a week than most people will make in their lifetime.
What are the stakes?
Just like books and movies, songs can have low stakes or high stakes, personal stakes and public stakes.
They can be about whether love rules the day or love forever lost. War or peace, injustice or redemption.
The stakes here are extremely low. Oh, Taylor is so upset (at Katy Perry or whoever, I honestly don’t care and neither should you) that she crashed a car that costs more than your house while a a cheetah served as her copilot. With her car trashed, will she be unable to get to work in the morning and lose her job? Does it matter in the slightest? No. She may have to tell her staff to gas up the Ferrari, or the Bentley, or one of however many dozen cars she owns. People will clean up the mess while she goes off and trashes one of her jets and rounds up an army of cloned robots or whatever to assault the compound of P-Diddy or whoever she’s mad at this week.
Basically, I can’t make myself care, and yes, I tried. Really hard.
What’s the impact of the song and video?
The best songs and music videos stick with you. AMERICAN PIE was about an entire era, and half the fun was trying to decipher the lyrics. Even if you didn’t get every line, you got the message about how America was changing. It sticks with you.
EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE is about love turning into obsession, and the video is stark black-and-white. I wouldn’t change a thing.
When I first heard LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO on the radio, I swore it was Britney Spears.
Not kidding. Feels like mid-stage Britney, after she’d made it big, and started doing over-the-top stuff like this:
Verdict: Sure, the production values and budget is sky high, but the entertainment value is meh and the feels generated are zero. 10/10 would not watch again.
If the old Taylor Swift is dead, and the new T-Swift is busy being obsessed with her hurt feelings and celebrity beefs, let’s resurrect the old Taylor Swift–the one focused on songs that aren’t about her. I’d happily listen and watch that singer.
(The title makes sense, since the story turns on an actual notebook.)
by Nicholas Sparks
Chapter One: Miracles
Who am I? And how,I wonder, will this story end?
The sun has come up and I am sitting by a window that is foggy with the breath of a life gone by. (Melodramatic and clunky.) I’m a sight this morning: two shirts, heavy pants, a scarf wrapped twice around my neck and tucked into a thick sweater knitted by my daughter thirty birthdays ago. The thermostat in my room is set as high as it will go, and a smaller space heater sits directly behind me, clicking and groaning and spewing hot air like a fairytale dragon — and still my body shivers with a cold that will never go away, a cold that has been eighty years in the making. Eighty years. , I think sometimes, and dDespite my own acceptance of my age, it still amazes me that I haven’t been warm since George Bush was president. I wonder if this iIs this how it is for everyone my age?
My life? It isn’t easy to explain. It has Not been the rip-roaring spectacular I fancied it would be, but neither have I burrowed around with the gophers. I suppose it has most resembled a blue-chip stock:
(end of page 1)
THE NOTEBOOK by Nicholas Sparks. A book that belongs next to Hemingway. A movie that should have won many, many more Oscars, yes? Nicholas Sparks was ROBBED.
Notes from the Red Pen of Doom
The biggest problem isn’t the line editing, though it’s clunky. While clearly first-person P.O.V., he keeps inserting needless attributions like “I wonder” and “I think.” Here’s the monster problem: 90 percent of page one is spent telling the reader — repeatedly — that the first-person narrator is (a) 80 years old and (b) seriously obsessed with talking about how cold it is.
Space on page one is precious. It’s for raising narrative questions that won’t be answered for 400 pages. Compelling questions.
Life or death. Together or alone. Freedom or slavery.
I can imagine a story where being 80 years old and cold is the problem. Maybe a doctor is headed to a remote Alaskan village when his snowmobile breaks down. He’s the only doctor within 200 miles, the only hope for a mother who’s in the middle of a labor gone wrong. Now you’ve got public stakes and private stakes. If he doesn’t strap on snowshoes and get past hungry wolves and polar bears, he’ll die, and the mom in labor might die, and her baby might die — and they’ll be no doctor out in the bush for a lot of people.
So: a cold old man becoming warm can matter a lot in a story.
Not in this story. On this page one, it’s boring.
Having an 80-year-old hero can make this hard. Go back to the first line: “And, I wonder, how will this story end?” Not a lot of suspense there. It’s hard having high stakes when the protag is already looking back on his life, as if it’s already over.
This is why most novels and movies feature younger protags. The more you have to lose, the higher the stakes.
It’s why you have movies like INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, not INDIANA JONES AND THE CONTENTIOUS BINGO GAME.
You certainly can have great stories with older heroes. They just have to DO something.
Anthony Hopkins did a great job with Hannibal Lecter, an active and charming killer. Old, yes, but he didn’t act like Sparks’ old man. There is no book called HANNIBAL LECTER AND THE SPACE HEATER.
So, back to THE NOTEBOOK: the beginning should set up the ending. Does the climax hinge on whether our 80-year-old hero puts on another ugly Christmas sweater and finally stops kvetching about being cold? No.
It’s about whether or not he’s alone or together. Whether his wife remembers him or not.
So the first line is on track. Almost. Not “Who am I?” but “Who are you?” And that question should come out of the mouth of the wife.
Or, if Sparks wanted some misdirection, have that question come from somebody else. But since the end is about togetherness, about love and romance and faithfulness, the first chapter should be full of loneliness. Not cold. Not sweaters and scarves and space heaters.
Talk about how friends move, how coworkers get different jobs, kids grow up and stop calling. Spend the first page on loneliness, if you want the ending to be about togetherness.
Had I not read the back cover, and didn’t know the climax of this story, reading page one would not motivate me to read more.
If the narrator complains a lot, and doesn’t think his own life is exciting, why the hell would I keep reading about him? I will now praise the One Known as the Spork: the ending of this book, as a plot, isn’t bad. Page one doesn’t do it justice.
Verdict: Take out the Nine and shoot it full of holes, then burn whatever’s left and start over with a fresh sheet of paper.
The Red Pen of Doom 