Tuesday, July 27, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful:

1-That I can see

2-That I can hear

3-Warm Water from the shower

4-Clothes that I have

5-Food that I ate

6-My Car working

7-A job to go to

8-My mom

9-My sister

10-My wife

11-My patient coming to see me

12-My house

13-The view of my window in my house

14-My saving

15-My ebooks

16-My wife cooking


Monday, July 26, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for


1-My sight

2-My hearing

3-Warm shower

4-Able to walk

5-Food to eat

6-My mom

7-My Sister

8-My wife

9-Wife cooking

10-My car working

11-A job 

12-Patient coming to see me

13-ebooks

14-Able to see my mom on Sunday

15-Able to fix digital clock

16-My house

17-My Saving

18-My Sleep

Saturday, July 24, 2021

ARTICLE: How MTV stopped playing music — and lost its relevance By Chuck Arnold

As one of the five original VJs who launched MTV into the Moonman stratosphere 40 years ago, on Aug. 1, 1981, Alan Hunter helped put the video-bingeing network on the music map.


But when he trekked down to Daytona Beach, Fla., to cover “the chaos that was spring break” for the first time in 1986, little did he know that it was the beginning of the end for the M — music — in MTV.

“I was the VJ that loved being out of the studio the most, so I was the one they sent to spring break to be a part of the thousands of screaming young guys cracking beers over my head,” Hunter, 64, told The Post.

“And that was kind of the beginning of different kinds of shows that you would see. That was when MTV decided that they couldn’t just be a video jukebox forever. MTV began to train their cameras on the lifestyle of the young folks that were watching MTV.”

‘Nobody’s gonna watch music on TV’

Thirty-five years after that coverage, there is a whole generation of young people who don’t know that MTV ever played music videos. Which helps explain why young pop stars such as Billie Eilish, Harry Styles and Megan Thee Stallion didn’t even bother to show up for the Video Music Awards last year. To them — and many others in the music industry and beyond — MTV simply isn’t relevant as the cultural force it used to be back when Madonna was humping around in a wedding gown to “Like a Virgin” at the 1984 VMAs, when Kurt Cobain was beautifully deconstructing Nirvana on “MTV Unplugged” in 1993, and BeyoncĂ© and Jay-Z went public as a couple on “Total Request Live” in 2002.

We just don’t want our MTV anymore.



“The MTV that people remember from the 1980s was a wonderful thing,” said former MTV producer Michael Alex. But, he added, nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills: “There’s the cultural loss versus [the fact that] MTV was an ongoing business trying to survive. The channel hung on as long as it could [to music].”

________________________________

Many single out “The Real World” — which premiered in 1992 and is largely credited (and sometimes blamed) for jump-starting the reality-television boom — for turning MTV into the “Teen Mom” and “Ridiculousness” universe that it is today. But that movement was already in motion.


“I did this thing called ‘Amuck in America,’ ” said Hunter, who was the last of the original VJs to leave, in 1987. “It was a trip across the country for 30 days doing sort of man-on-the-street comedy, so that was kind of the first of its kind. I drove with a very beautiful model in a Ford Thunderbird and a big RV traveling behind us. It was total MTV ‘Road Rules’ craziness.”

Then there came longer-form specialty music programming such as “Headbangers Ball,” “Yo! MTV Raps” and the alt-rock arbiter “120 Minutes.” And early non-music programs, including the Cindy Crawford-hosted “House of Style,” the game show “Remote Control” and the animated series “Liquid Television” — which spawned “Beavis and Butt-head” — were outliers in an all-video-all-the-time world.

“They felt like they were the exception to the rule. They were these great accent points,” said Alex, who, from 1989 to 2007, was a producer on everything from “The Week in Rock” to “House of Style” before heading up the MTV News digital side. “Early on, those non-music-video shows were sort of inspired by the culture. They felt like they belonged in the space. They were completely not like anything else out there. They were exciting ideas. To be in the halls of MTV and say, ‘Listen, I’ve got some great, cool new idea that kids will love,’ no one’s gonna say, ‘Well, is it about music?’ ”


But when “The Real World” came along, Alex admits that it wasn’t exactly considered “cool” by him and others at MTV. “I was one of those who was not particularly interested in ‘The Real World.’ That was not my bag,” he said of the groundbreaking series, which was inspired by PBS’s “An American Family.” “And I was not the only person who thought that. But there were plenty of other people who said, ‘Well look, kids are intrigued by these people.’ But my disliking it or not being interested in it wasn’t about my thinking, ‘This isn’t music — it doesn’t belong on MTV.’ ”


And since MTV was all about change from the very beginning, there wasn’t stiff resistance internally to the initial influx of non-music programming. “The philosophical struggle didn’t really start to show up until the number of music-video hours were being drastically cut,” said Alex of the mid-’90s shift. “When the video hours started getting cut, when you couldn’t just turn on your television and catch a half-hour of music videos, that was when it started.”

Over time, MTV became known for Pauly Shore and then “Jersey Shore” as much as it used to be known for Michael Jackson and then Janet Jackson. “I would cover the Grammys, and I would go on the red carpet with Snooki,” said former MTV News senior writer and editor Gil Kaufman. “Snooki would be interviewing Katy Perry. Those people kind of became the face of MTV in the same way that [Duran Duran’s] Simon Le Bon or Boy George were the face of MTV at the beginning.”



Although “I don’t think anybody was particularly excited about it,” Kaufman said, “we understood that that’s the direction that things were going and that those decisions were being made in suites that were several floors above us. So you couldn’t turn it around, you know what I mean?”

________________________________

The M that played the biggest factor in MTV’s change in direction was money. “I mean, MTV needed to make money, ultimately, and you can make more money with programming that sponsors can hang their hats on,” said Hunter. “And that was what the ’90s were all about.”

While MTV began in the early days of cable TV, it wasn’t the only game on the remote control by that time. “The cable world exploded in the ’90s,” said Hunter. “MTV had to change because there did become a lot of competition for eyeballs. You couldn’t continue to just peddle the same thing.”


And since blocks of music videos weren’t designed to prevent viewers from channel-surfing, the ratings for them ultimately suffered. “When you’re playing music videos, every two and half or three minutes you’re giving people an opportunity to go change the channel and see what else is on,” said Alex. “I’m gonna be flipping around after every music video if I don’t love the next song.”

Then, of course, the music-video game changed completely for MTV when YouTube launched in 2005. “Once YouTube came to be, it was all over,” said Alex. “YouTube was MTV on steroids — minus the VJs.”


Even beyond the music, though, MTV doesn’t capture the zeitgeist of today’s youth the way it once did. In fact, it’s barely on the radar of the TikTok generation. “I have two teenage kids, and they know that I worked for MTV, but they’ve never seen MTV,” said Kaufman, who, after working at the network for 15-plus years, is now a senior contributing writer at Billboard. “They wouldn’t even know where to look for it.”

Still, Alex believes that MTV could one day come back to relevance — and music: “Of course there’s a way to bring it back to music,” he said. “But what it would be like would probably be very different than what it has been. It may need a refresh, but I think it’s possible.”

But for Hunter — who is now a host on SiriusXM channels ’80s on 8, Classic Rewind and Volume — it’s a wrap: “People nowadays say, ‘Hey, what the hell happened to MTV? Can we get it back?’ To which I say, ‘Why? Why would you want it back?’ You’ve got YouTube and the Internet. You can watch any damn video you want to. You don’t need MTV to tell you what to look at anymore.”

Friday, July 23, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for the following:

1-I can see

2-I can hear

3-Warm Hot water

4-A bed to sleep on

5-Watch 6 million dollar man last night

6-The food I ate

7-My car working

8-A job to do to

9-Adm finally listen to me and got me MA for this morning

10-My green grass outside

11-Nothing is broken in the house

12-My mom

13-My sister

14-My wife

15-Wife cook for me

16-Half a day at work. getting CPR today

17-ebooks and MP3

Thursday, July 22, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for the following:

1-I can see

2-I can hear

3-I have warm water

4-I have food to eat

5-my car working

6-A job that I can go to

7-My mom

8-My sister

9-My wife

10-My health

11-My saving

12-My patients

13-I had a good night sleep

14-ebook and MP3

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for the following:

1-I am able to see

2-I am able to hear

3-The shower I had to today

4-The food I ate today

5-My car and it working

6-The job I have

7-My mom

8-My sister

9-My wife

10-My health

11-My Saving

12-My home

13-I live in USA

14-I live in New York

15-My education

16-ebooks, MP3


Tuesday, July 20, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for

1-I am able to hear

2-I am able to see

3-I have running water

4-I have food to eat

5-I have a running car

6-I have a job 

7-My mother

8-My sister

9-My wife

10-health

11-I live in USA

12-I live New York

13-ebook and MP3

14-I have patient 

15-my wife cook for me


Monday, July 19, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for


1-I am able to hear

2-I am able to see

3-I had a shower

4-I have enough food to eat

5-My car was working

6-I have a job 

7-My mother

8-My sister

9-My wife

10-I was able to see my sister this weekend

11-I had a quiet Sunday and I was able to read my ebooks

12-My health

13-My saving

14-I was able to pay my bills

15-I live in US

16-I live in New York

17-My wife cooked for me

18-I am experience no pain

19-ebooks and MP3

Friday, July 16, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for the following:

1-I can hear

2-I can see

3-Warm water in the shower

4-breakfast

5-My mom

6-My sister

7-My wife

8-My car and it is working

9-Job that I have

10-Patients coming to see me

11-My health

12-My saving

13-My wife cooking for me

14-ebooks and MP3

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for the following:

1-I am able to hear

2-I am able to see

3-Running water

4-food I am able to eat

5-My mom

6-My sister

7-My wife

8-my car and it is working

9-A job that I am able to go

10-Able to pay my bills

11-ebooks, MP3

12-Meals my wife book

13-My health

14-My house

15-My saving

16-My retirement fund

17-I am pain free

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful today:

1-I am able hear

2-I am able to see

3-I had running water

4-food to eat

5-my mom

6-my sister

7-my wife

8-my wife cooking my food

9-my car and it still working

10-a job to do too

11-my patients seeing me

12-my ebooks and MP3

13-my health

14-my saving

15-my survery money

16-my tv


Monday, July 12, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for:

1-my hearing

2-my sight

3-able to take shower

4-the food I ate this day

5-my wife

6-my sister

7-my mom

8-living in the USA

9-Living in NY

10-my car

11-my job

12-my bed

13-my health

14-my saving

15-able to walk

16-free ebooks and MP#


Friday, July 9, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful for the following:

1-my sight

2-my hearing

3-my car

4-I didn't get into a accident today

5-my job

6-my medical assistant

7-my mom

8-my sister

9-my wife

10-my health

11-my saving

12-I was able to put dog sign up for little money

13-download ebook and audiobooks


Thursday, July 8, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 I am grateful today for the following:

1-I can hear normal

2-I can see normal

3-I have a house

4-I have food to eat

5-I have a car to drive to work

6-I have great job

7-I was able to deposit money in the bank

8-The sprinker head I fixed worked

9-The filter under the sink worked

10-My mom

11-My sister

12-My wife

13-Health

14-Saving in the bank

15-download ebooks and magazine

Wednesday, July 7, 2021

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

 Today I am grateful for;

1-my hearing

2-my sight

3-my car

4-my breakfast

5-my house

6-my mom

7-my sister

8-my wife

9-survey money

10-job

11-my meal for the day

12-my health

13-my saving in the bank


I asked 12 men over 60 what they miss most about their 40s and not one of them said their career, their body, or their social life — every single one described a moment so specific and so small that I had to pull over to write them down by Tommy Baker

You know what I miss? The sound of the garage door when she’d get home from her pottery class on Thursday nights.” That’s what Frank told m...

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