What’s Next? Can We Move On Please?
Tom Thornton looks like Harry Potter. My guess is he curates that image. I think the young Mr. Thornton has worked diligently learning the finer points of video production. His YouTube video: NYC to LA BY TRAIN… is excellent. Mr. Thornton’s editing skill must surely be antecedent to a focused study of his craft.
Tom and his companion (GF?) are most likely over twenty-one. But if I were asked to serve them a beer, I would ask for proof of age. They are young. Herein lies my inquiry. The Frank Sinatra music Tom surely paid a premium price to license in his video worked well to set the mood. As my seventy-one year old ears were listening to Frank’s New York, New York, I was thinking that back in the sixties, my peers and I considered Sinatra a vestige of the nineteen forties.
I like Tom’s video composition of sixties nostalgia carefully woven into his journey. Mr Thornton’s trip begins in my hometown Brooklyn, NY where from the boardwalk in Coney Island he points to Jamaica Bay and, with flair, calls it the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody’s perfect.
When I was fifteen years old I attended a performance by The Loving Spoonful in The Cafe Wha, a location Tom briefly features. I am surprised to learn the place still exists. From the Greenwich Village street in front of The Cafe Wha and other old sixties landmarks, the young content creator mentions Bob Dylan and Kerouac. In Chicago, Tom presents a shot of a sign marking the beginning of Route 66, later closing out his journey at the western end of the storied nineteen-forties roadway in San Francisco. Tom has a beer in a San Francisco bar where Kerouac and Dylan once imbibed as well. I’ll bet they proofed him.
The quality of Tom’s video is very good; his editing skills are excellent. The aspect of Tom’s content that I found most impressive was the creator’s willingness to tell a story with minimal dialog and reference to himself. He and his companion are a subtle presence. While the couple do engage the audience — we know they like dogs, cats, each other and vegetarian food — they do not bludgeon viewers with narrative about themselves. They are not the story; they are in it.
I would like Mr Tom Thornton to apply his creative skills to art representing the present.
I loved Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On The Road when I was a teenager. While the dominance of World War II era cultural influence was still omnipresent in 57 when he wrote On The Road, Kerouac captured the spirit of the times to come. When my peers and I read Kerouac in the mid sixties, we were enthralled. The author had expressed something fundamental to a changing culture early, an artist’s gift few posses.
Two years ago I began reading On The Road again, only to find it boring. The story’s naive idolization of irresponsible living was not very interesting to my adult way of thinking. I went to Wikipedia to learn of Kerouac’s fate. He died at forty-seven from alcohol abuse.
Dylan’s poetic predictions made him a beatnik hero. Bob then dumped the booing old fools for an electric guitar and The Band. He became one of few artists to make the shift from acoustic folk music of the early sixties to what became a cultural and artistic influence so powerful, talented folks like Thornton are invoking its spirit still today.
What, pray tell, is our current zeitgeist?
YouTube creator Lost LeBlanc whom I like, creates videos using around $30,000.00 worth of drones, cameras, lenses and editing software. He finds upscale locations to shoot, accompanied by a cute female companion wearing a butt floss bikini in beach shots. LeBlanc has at least one paid assistant and as many as a half dozen other sycophants tagging along on his shoots.
Wearing a knit stocking cap to protect him from a harsh Estonian winter, Benjamin from Bald and Bankrupt points his cheap, three year old Sony camera at abandoned Soviet era buildings. In a video posted on a one week old channel he created for short videos, Benjamin describes using a bed pan to take a dump during his COVID recovery in Serbia.
One week subsequent to his latest posting, Lost LeBlanc’s slick, expensive production received 156,000 views. Benjamin’s got nearly twice that in forty-eight hours on his clip about defecating in front of cute Serbian nurses.
I do not wish to knock LeBlanc. As I said, I like him. But Bald and Bankrupt Benjamin clearly has charm and an ability to entertain folks in ways that are not easy to define or measure. I believe Benjamin’s attractiveness is rooted in authenticity.
Frank Sinatra tapped into a cultural need during World War II. My mother loved him. If you asked my combat veteran father about Frank, you would have heard a complaint about draft dodging. Whatever it was that Frank had, by the time I was listening to The Who, and other Woodstock luminaries, artists were expressing much different sentiments than Frank’s.
Smiling as I watched Bald and Bankrupt last night it, occurred to me Benjamin’s pop culture metaphors are getting a little long in the tooth as well. He named his attending Serbian nurses The Spice Girls. My daughter, now fifty, was a Spice Girls fan.
I want to see what a talented content creator like Tom Thornton can produce that expresses whatever it is that is going on for his generation. My parents had World War II. The hippie generation had The Vietnam War, The Civil Rights movement, second wave feminism, race riots, moon landings. Damn, it was a hell of a time. It is no wonder The Woodstock Music and Arts Fair launched a movement.
If you ask me, I would say there is a prominent upheaval influencing world culture today, no?
So Tom, you have the technical savoir faire necessary to compete with Lost Le Blank. Your subtlety has big value too. Can you combine LeBlank and Benjamin? Please tell us what is going on down there in your demographic. Be authentic. The last time you Brits rewrote the cultural game plan, we got The Beatles.
