I love television. I was watching the last episode of SNL (I know, I know it’s old news. It was back in June sometime, before summer break but whatever, I only watch TV on Hulu and I am behind on everything. Most of the TV I watch is actually on a computer or a DVD. That isn’t even the point behind this anyway, so get off my back! Fuck!) and I thought about those days when I was in middle school and high school spending what seems like one weekend out of every four grounded and playing Scrabble with my mother until she let me win while we watched SNL (and then whatever crap we could find on after). It was my dream at one time to be on SNL. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I sucked at improv and that maybe SNL was out of my reach. That was when I started to set my eyes on sitcoms.
If SNL filled my grounded weekends, sit-coms filled every other night. Instead of doing homework I would just say it was already done so I could join in on the television shows that we watched as a family from 8-10pm. Of course this was back before reality television ruined our sacred airways with talentless pompous idiots that don’t deserve fame or fortune, but that also is not the point of this. What was I saying? Oh, sitcoms… I think if I had stuck with acting that is where I would have wound up eventually. It’s a mix of theater and TV and would have suited my skills well. Where am I going with this? Damn, I’m unfocused this Sunday morning.
Somehow I was trying to lead this into the affect that television has had on my life and outlook and how it continues to shape me and my aspirations. The point of it all was going to be that I now must go to New Orleans because this show I’m watching, Treme, has renewed my interest in the blues. Of course, there is a transition missing in there. I’m not sure how I would have brought it to the nighttime dramas from the sitcoms. Those things tend to just work themselves out as they come up. Lets just skip to New Orleans and the blues though: I may be six years or so late. Back when I was studying the blues, in early 2006/late 2005 would have been perfect timing but better late than never.
It isn’t that the show implanted the idea of going to New Orleans. I have always wanted to go to New Orleans but the reasons have changed and the show has definitely shaped that for me. I used to want to go to New Orleans for drinking and tits. Treme has made me want to go to New Orleans for drinking and music, kind of the same reason that I love Charleston, SC but probably much more grand. The way New Orleans is depicted in the show makes me think of the twenties and if there is any time period in the last century that I could see myself living in, it is the twenties. I could have been a fedora wearing Tommy-gun toting gangster with deadly aim from a running board who drank whiskey on the rocks and danced the Charleston with my flapper girlfriends, (that’s right plural) in speakeasies while the jazz drove the jubilation well into the morning hours. And I know, there is definitely a difference between blues I stated earlier and jazz . I would’t dare use them interchangeably. I am not much of a jazz man but I may have been back then and besides I wanted to use the word jubilant and that went better with jazz. Fuck, you’re critical this morning. I’m going to sleep.
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