“Have you seen how many Disney channels there are?”

The Disney channel is now 6 Disney channels. And even so, we are rare among our peers, we have discovered, because Veronica actually has cable tv. Most of the kids her age are DVD-only households, with memberships to Netflix or some such.

There is no shortage of stuff to watch. So why can’t I find anything I like?

It’s not just TV, either. I have the impression that music, movies and books are all in a malaise. My favorite literary podcaster, Michael Silverblatt, expressed a dissatisfaction in current books coming out.

What is happening? There is an avalanche of new content vying for our attention every second. At the same time, there is everything from the past still available.

We need a butler, a curator, to sift through it all and give us what matches our personal taste exactly. Why doesn’t this exist?

But I don’t trust just anyone to advise me. The one who is to select for me, for me only, is probably not trustworthy. Probably he’d be in the pocket of the promoters. I know this racket.

Who could I trust? Some people seem to trust the movie theaters to serve up something close to what they are going to like. They do seem to have a certain sameness to what they provide. Music? The radio stations, with their formats give us a consist product.

So where can I go for something different? There is the catalog that has been around forever–the classics

But the something new. That is what I’m looking for.

I remember a friend, a beautiful Russian Westside girl I used to work with. She bemoaned the lack of smart men. She probably meant rich men. But she wanted them smart for sure: “Tell me something I don’t know!” she complained.

Right. Show me something I don’t know about yet.  The web is laid out like a map for everyone right? Except, it’s a long long way to get from here to there. How do I find the new?

I can. But it takes so much work. Which is why I would like a curator. I want someone to do it for me.

The one place I’ve seen that does curation is job sites. I encountered a site that—for a fee—will serve up exactly the high-paying job I am looking for.

Except I can go find those jobs on my own. It just takes time, and skill I suppose. . Since,I am going to make money if I go find a better job it makes sense to pay for a curator to help.

I need someone to help me find new music, books and stuff to watch. But I don’t think I’m really ready to pay for it. Probably because I’m especially not willing to pay for what it would actually cost to get a good one.

But then again, they say that with enough data, they can find the patterns that predict what I like. But I’d like to think that art is the unpredictable, the thing that doesn’t fit the pattern.

When everything is equally accessible, everything is equally inaccessible. I suppose I have to rely on the new bit of art to be so very different that it shines out of the crowd somehow. and I have to make sure to keep looking.