jazz, and cocktails, and Picasso

     There's a saying, "No one is indispensable" -- but that's not true, some people, you lose them and there's no one else who can take their place, there's an empty space where they used to be.

     Since Chris Matthews of Hardball left the airwaves, I get home from work and have nothing to watch.  God, I miss him.  No one else can do what he does.  Or maybe they could, but they haven't been hired.


     I always used to watch him on You Tube.  Someone, somewhere, would upload the show, most evenings if we were lucky....  I've tried some other shows, but -- complaining about the news is not the same as reporting the news -- and adding useful commentary and perspective.


     Similar to films and books -- complaining about them is not the same as reviewing them.

     Recently I watched a show on Amazon Prime.  I thought the music they used in it was so great!  My gosh, every song was just terrific.  Some of them I knew, some I didn't -- they were all -- excellent, excellent, excellent.  Wonderful to hear.



     So I looked on Internet and read some reviews of the show, thinking I would read something scintillating about the music used in the film.  As it turns out, each writer/critic used their article to -- figure out something to "pick on," and then -- Type That.

     The number of reviews that even mentioned the music -- was Zero.


     That is hard for me to understand.


          American Playboy:  The Hugh Hefner Story is the title.  It is an Amazon Original Series, it came out in 2017.  One season; 10 episodes.



     It is a lively, fascinating history.  Hefner started Playboy magazine in 1953.  The series begins in that time period and advances chronologically through the '60s and '70s, etc.  

The songs you hear a few bars of, throughout the film, correspond to the era being shown or discussed -- for example you don't hear '80s arena rock playing during events that happened in 1957....  
     The song "Stagger Lee" is in there, somewhere, just the beginning part...

     (I was standing -- on the corner,
When I heard my bulldog bark
He was barkin' at the two men who were gamblin'
In the dark...)

     I've never read Playboy, with the exception of an interview they had with John Lennon.  A film-school student in Boston had it, and I borrowed it from her, to see what was on John Lennon's mind.


     In the Amazon series, Hugh Hefner says when he started Playboy, he was doing it because there was no magazine out there that answered to his taste.  

He said magazines for men were mostly about hunting and fishing and sports.  (A narrator even adds that, in the '50s, magazines -- and even reading itself -- were kind of seen as being women's activities.)  [?]




     Hefner said he wanted a magazine for men that had "pin-up girls," and discussed "jazz, and cocktails, and Picasso" -- art and culture and "beautiful girls."  Since there wasn't such a magazine, he had to create it himself.

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