patronised

I am not feeling at all well today (not covid, I finally checked it) and so watched bits of crappy tv etc - yes - a day off really, when it comes down to it. I watched this program that's like a weird special by Fred Armisen, who in the main I've always liked, talking about drums and drumming. It's mainly a stand-up show I guess, and his guests are (ugh) all drummers, which at least means that he doesn't have to explain the various bits of the drums - he's talking to equals, after a fashion, and anyone watching who doesn't know about drums, gets it from context. Up to a point yeah great, that works, it's a bit of a vanity concept but good. But (and bear in mind that I only watched the first ten minutes if that) he is just awkwardly sniping at the wrong people all the time. 

He plays a track he says is jazz, I don't recognise the track, and asks the audience to put their hand up at the moment they think 'this is jazz', which I guess means, the moment at which you start being aware of the form rather than the content. Well, of course, fuck that because when someone says 'I'm going to play you an example of jazz, tell me when you start thinking of it as jazz', that's all you think about straight away. Also, the snatch of music barely gets under way - no time to even really imagine what it is or what it means. (Also btw recognising/developing conscious awareness of a categorisation of music you're listening to is not a sign that it's no good. 'I'm going to play you a track, tell me when you think, "this is reggae"'). 

He makes a joke, the scummiest piece of shit self-centred Americancentric joke imaginable, where he hypothesises going to some concert in another country (he throws out that it might be Italy) and thousands of people are there to see someone he has never heard of, and he wants to tell them that they are excited to see a nobody. That is the joke - that people he has never heard of are no good. I mean FFS. I know I'm sick and I've been to the dentist and been told that I have to have a molar replaced, but that is not funny - it wouldn't be funny even if the point of the story is how stupid the person telling the story is. I have to say that is one form of humour I will never get - where other people know about something the humorist has no knowledge of, and so they are dumb. 

I am not a drummer's arsehole, as I've said many times before, even if I did have a dream last night that Guy Blackman asked me to join a band with him, Mick Harvey and Steve Miller (presumably I was playing drums, though Mick Harvey is an excellent, excellent drummer). But I have filled that role in bands before. To the degree I was the drummer it was because no-one else wanted to be, not because I had innate skill. Anyway I won't go on about that. Fred Armisen is a good drummer. But this show is just pissy and sour.

So another middle aged man I liked, Bob Odenkirk. I am half an hour into Lucky Hank. Fuck me. Now, obviously a big part of this program is that the university in question is a middle-of-nowhere, no-particular-value university without any status or resources. I don't work at one of those. Also, it's the USA (again), not a quality place like Australia. It's a literature school, too, and it would seem that it allows parents to come on campus and complain about the staff. But the shizzle about tenure and the pretensions of academe, Hank always being always about to write his second novel, the prattling and gossip and ultrasensitivity of the various overly fragile members of staff, ugh, fuck, I don't know how anyone could agree to be in a garbagey piece of crap like this. It's locked in a yan-and-yin of cliche circling old-hat-on-an-old-hat. It's a satire of tertiary education which makes absolutely no reference to the realities of tertiary education, but to some kind of 1960s sitcom versions of boffins and ratbags and hypersensitive kids. Gah!