Well, let's see, one was Keanu complaining about being put on the spot by his girlfriend in line at a club, I think. As I recall, he repeats "Me?" a couple of times incredulously. Another has a similar sense of comic injury from Meg at a bank drive- through, but the details elude me. In each, they tell this little anecdote with a sort of loose camera shooting around them a different angles.....
When I finally started watching MTV, around 85 or so, it was like a cross between a top 40 station (giving one a general idea of what was going on) and an old fashioned FM station, which, in my youth, meant a place more oriented to alternative rock, for a more sophisticated audience. Also, the videos were much more creative. Michael Stipes and David Byrnes were, of course, directing their own for their groups; a lot of interesting animation work was being done, as in Peter Gabriels videos; and there were some masterpieces of short form film, like Grace Jones's "Slave to the Rhythm". The demographics began to take its toll, and by about 89, I could barely stand to have MTV during the day, although occasionally the night programming was tolerable. It was all heavy metal and rap, and inane non- musical programming, during the day.
Still have not caught Tom Green's show, sorry. I did catch the first part of Ken Burn's series on jazz, and was fascinated. I have met Stanley Crouch, and read a lot of his stuff when first published in The New Republic, and I have followed his crusade, in tandem with Wynton Marsalis, to raise the profile of jazz in recent times, in stories in The New York Review of Books and other venues, so I had some idea of the probable orientation beforehand. But the richness of detail was staggering and evocative. |
