cheese it, the cops!

it is i! the great ack-toor!

i finally buckled under the boredom and started watching the netflix house of cards. now don't get me wrong - or, what the hell, get me wrong. that said, or left forever unsaid, i think one of the worst developments in the world of film and television is the persona of the virtuoso actor, and i have really more or less hated kevin spacey, philip seymour hoffman, and meryl streep, for example. here is the problem: their super amazing extremely self-conscious virtuosity is incompatible with the fictional contexts into which it is deployed. you go see streep play abraham lincoln or sea biscuit, and what you actually watch is streep-the-great-ack-toor: whoa the accent! the elocution! or whatever. really, people are all like "i'd pay to see daniel day lewis play a household appliance", and i feel that they often have. so, when you go see philip seymour hoffman play a bookcase or whatever it may be, you'll be all: 'i really thought he was actually a bookcase!' what that means is the opposite of what it says: you watched the extreme simulatedness of the extreme simulation and got off on that, not the script, for example. on the other hand, spacey merely irritates me, and i did get irritated with house of cards. i am still trying to figure out the accent - allaeged to be a georgia drawl - which sounds like a mix of cajun and afrikaans. oh hell i got caught up, though, and honestly, robin wright, whom i've been admiring since santa barbara circa 1987, can be on my television any time or all the time. 

i certainly have enjoyed the various slams of the spider-man musical. for one thing, it finally dawned on someone that however admirable bono might be as a humanitarian, or however monumental his sunglasses, the music is incessant, pretentious, trivial, and profoundly tiresome. it's funny because once rolling stone or whomever anoints someone, all the rock critics fall into line, as i found out to my cost in 1984 when i tried to slam springsteen's born in the usa for rolling stone's sub-mag record. really go back and listen to that song again, though the album has some moments: it reminded me too much of my own chronic pounding headaches for me actually to endorse it wholeheartedly. anyway, in music criticism there's always a consensus. but confront theater critics with the same thing and they see it from a different angle or don't feel the same pressure.