Friends, Volunteers, inadvertent classmen, lend me your eyes: I come to bury the entertainment industry, not to praise it. If the veritable Timbuktu of misinformed verbiage which sporadically spews from the AP wire and my own fingertips is any proof, we as the news media have been doing you a great disservice and should be ashamed.
This is no reflection on the Beacon as a part or whole, but the entirety of collected American and foreign letters as a whole. After all, for every great media outlet, mercurial author, tuned in musician or inspired artist, there are at least 10 quasi-celebrities for whom coverage rolls in waves because their meager contributions draw advertisers, whereas those true artistes wilt in obscurity and blah blah blah.
Look, I’ve been lazy as a figurehead and apologize. OK, elephant’s out of the room. What do you, the reader, want to hear from this beat? What triggers the arts and culture centers in your brain? What poison would you pick?
After recent, well-documented Netflix binges, excursions to blogospheric abyss and irregular sleep patterns, I have returned with renewed fervor and an indomitable ethic to provide you with whatever might take your mind away from the hellacious maelstrom that is post-undergrad life and the world as we know it. Trust me, I’m there already, and the prognosis is grim.
For several months recently the responsibilities entrusted to me have seemed somewhat hopeless. Really, you should see my inbox — so many requests for coverage of events that you will never see because bands fear to tread the red clay of this heathen state, or alerts for every time some flavor of the nanosecond DJ remixes to Top 5,000 single with a press release that takes longer to read with all of its manifold plaudits and accolades for this already-forgotten release than it takes to process the song. Just did that for Jacques Lu Cont’s mix of Mike Snow’s “Paddling Out.” You’re welcome.
The limitations of a voice in the media these days seem limitless if television is to be believed — after all, how else could Perez Hilton have a career? The unfortunate reality of that paradigm is, once again, we celebrate and reward vapid mediocrity of fools as per their allowance by the First Amendment, and you know what, more power to them. But that makes the desire to provide something above that precipitous cut somewhat like providing performance enhancement pharmaceuticals to a morbidly obese narcoleptic. Layman’s terms — you cannot push a breaking wave backwards, and sometimes standing up in its wake is the best achievement you could expect. Let it roll past and go drink a beer under the umbrella. After all, you’re standing on the beach, right?
As in Neville Shute’s “On the Beach,” and Neil Young’s classic album of the same name. As in you are a survivor of Western culture’s demise. What are you going to do with your position in this brave new world? Probably scrounge up a satellite dish, a solar-powered generator and a pirated DIRECTV subscription.
It’s your life, live it how you like. Give me some ideas and I’ll write about the culture you value. Who knows, maybe you’ll teach me something.
— Jake Lane is a graduate in creative writing. He can be reached at [email protected].
