My mother missed outliving Henry Kissinger by just eighteen days. She would have liked to see him go.
“The poor man can’t concentrate for more than an hour. YOU gave him four.”
The title quote comes from Amadeus, when Mozart protests to Salieri that his new opera, The Marriage of Figaro, has closed after just nine performances. The opera’s fate, according to the film, was doomed when Emperor Joseph II of Austria yawned during the fourth act.
Demands upon audiences have been a concern of artists for…well, pretty much forever, I suppose. When an orchestra puts, say, Mahler’s Third or Bruckner’s Eighth on the program, those symphonies take up the entire evening’s work. Do the performances include intermission? I honestly don’t know.
I’m thinking about this after reading Mark Evanier’s post about the new Martin Scorsese movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, which has a running time of 206 minutes: almost three and a half hours. The question is simply: Should movies like this have an intermission?
I remember having an intermission during a three-hour movie a handful of times in my life. I recall one during Gandhi, way back when, and during Dances With Wolves. In both cases, neither film was made with an intermission in mind, so the projection simply stopped around halfway through and a theater employee called out, “Intermission!” In each case, the stoppage was artificial and might have even hurt the story: Gandhi‘s came right after the harrowing sequence of the massacre at Amritsar, and the Dances one came right before the buffalo hunt. Neither film really suffered, exactly, but a much better experience came with My Fair Lady, which we saw a few years ago via Fathom Events. There was an intermission there, too, but the movie was made to end on a full stop before the intermission (it’s an adaptation of a Broadway show, after all), so the story reaches a satisfying point, goes to intermission, and then gets the ball rolling again once the intermission is over.
Mr. Evanier says the following:
In other words, my options are to experience it exactly the way Martin Scorsese would like it to be seen or to see it (1) the way its director wants it seen or (2) missing one or more chunks of the movie — including possibly key, important scenes — entirely or (3) seeing it on a smaller screen without the same undivided attention we muster in a movie theater but not in our dens and inserting pauses anywhere I, not Mr. Scorsese, would like. And let’s not forget (4) don’t see it at all.
Option #1 gives him close to total control of how I see his film. Option #3 gives him absolutely none. I don’t think Option #2 would please him. If he thinks an intermission would distract from my enjoyment of his film, how would he like the fact that my bladder or I pick a random time to miss fifteen minutes of it? And distract other audience members in the process of exiting and re-entering?
That seems to me a pretty accurate summation. He’s actually responding to an earlier article in Salon in which a writer specifically argues against intermissions:
One common argument in the pro-intermission column is that three-hour movies simply require breaks because people need breaks from long movies. I find that argument to be flimsy at best because why even go see a long movie in a theater if you already know you will need a break from it? If you know a film that long is being shown at a theater, maybe you should wait until the film is released on streaming so you can watch it in chunks. Is it normal to want to get up after sitting for a few hours? Absolutely, but does that mean you should go to a three-hour-long Scorsese film? I vote nah. Sometimes it’s easier to pick your battles instead of fighting to change a well-oiled machine that seems to be working for most moviegoers.
I may not be the biggest fanatic of three-hour-long movies, but I go to see them in the theater because I want that immersive moviegoing experience. I watched “Killers of the Flower Moon” this past Sunday and, yes, I did become tired after the second hour of the film. Yes, I did close my eyes for a short break to collect myself. But that’s OK, because it’s a long movie. Nobody is denying that. Let’s be real, I did it for “Oppenheimer,” too. But does that mean I need an intermission for a break to get a snack or go to the bathroom? Honestly, no. I never felt the need to get up out of my chair and take myself out of the insanely intense and heightened atmosphere that Scorsese masterfully crafted in this film.
If we are discussing the moviegoing experience entirely, some say that intermission will only increase the audience’s positive experiences at theaters. Intermissions will further prepare the audience to be more engaged in the film. To that, I argue that it will actually do the opposite — it has the potential to be detrimental to the moviegoing experience. Firstly, wouldn’t an intermission just make a three-hour moving-watching experience even longer? Secondly, filmmakers are against it because it may have the potential to alter their artistic vision for their films. To me, an intermission would interrupt the rhythm and flow of a perfect film like “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Directors, like Scorsese, have specific visions for how a film should be seen and if they don’t want intermissions we have to respect their artistic vision, because maybe they know what they’re talking about.
The Salon article is, I submit, deeply weird, in a lot of ways. The idea that an intermission is “detrimental to the moviegoing experience” just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Seeing My Fair Lady on the big screen was a revelatory experience for me, almost an exercise in pure joy. How was it lessened by having an intermission, especially since the film was made with an intermission in mind? For that matter, how were the other films I saw with intermissions artificially shoe-horned into the experience by the theater lessened? They weren’t.
You know what does detract from the experience? All that squirming as one realizes one might need to go relieve oneself. All that wondering: “Can I make it to the end of this?” That’s an actual breaking of the “immersive experience” of moviegoing, not to mention the actual act of finally getting up and going to the rest room. The rhythm and flow of a “perfect film” is interrupted anyway, so why not just build it in?
For that matter, are we seriously maintaining that Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest cinematic storytellers in history, can’t structure his films to accommodate these simple needs? Especially when just about every other art form out there does? No Wagner opera is played without break. You can pause a movie at home at will. In a follow-up post, Mr. Evanier posts a comment by a correspondent:
As you are well aware, it is the rare stage production that does not have an intermission. I have never been to a professional performance that didn’t have one and in my amateur acting career, appeared in only one show that was done without an intermission — and that one was only about 75 minutes long. If stage directors and playwrights can keep the audience’s attention enough to have them come back from a 15 or 20 minute break, I fail to see why their cinematic counterparts cannot do the same.
Sports have half-times (even baseball has the seventh-inning stretch).
What the hell makes movies so special that they must be consumed in one singular and unbroken sitting? Seriously, literally no other art form or past-time makes this demand. What’s so sacredly immersive about seeing a movie that doesn’t apply to watching a television program, or attending a classical music concert or opera, or watching Shakespeare in the Park?
Further, why are movies the one art form where we put such primacy on “how it is meant to be seen”? That ship has pretty much sailed, right? Let’s be honest here: artists don’t really get any say at all in how we experience their work. If they did, the only way to hear Wagner’s Parsifal would be to go to Bayreuth. If they did, Shakespeare would only be done in a theater on the Thames. Am I going against the artist’s intent when I listen to music on recording as opposed to a live performance? How about if I read a novel on a Kindle by an author who died in 1952?
The artistic vision in a movie is what’s on the screen. Nothing more, and nothing less. How far does this go? Does Scorsese get to tell us not to see his movies in modern theaters with reclining seats?
These objections may sound extreme, but really, I do not get for the life of me why the moviegoing experience is so sacred, especially now that our living rooms are getting better and better at presenting movies. No, I don’t have a full size 32-feet-by-18-feet screen, but what of it? One of the best movies I’ve watched in the last year is Hugo, by none other than Martin Scorsese. Am I to believe that my experience watching it was so much the worse because I didn’t see it in a theater but in my own home? And when I hit the ‘pause’ button at home, am I really disrespecting the artistic intention of the filmmaker?
Anyway, yes, I feel that long movies should have intermissions, and moreover, that they should be constructed to put the intermission in a good place, story-wise. If they don’t want to do that, fine…but then I’m almost certainly not sitting through a movie that long at the theater again. For me, biology tends to trump artistic vision. Movies are an art, yes, and they are a wonderful art. But they are not an art that demands a unique degree of unbroken immersion in the experience, any more than one must read The Brothers Karamazov in one sitting to get the full Dostoevsky experience.
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On Festivals and the Dating Thereof
NOTE: I’ve had this in drafts for-EVER (I started this post in August 2022!), and I think it’s now time to go ahead and finish it, because it’s that time of year again. Not the time of year indicated in the opening paragraph, obviously: if that paragraph were written today, it would go like this: “It’s early November, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain that it’s not Christmas yet, wait until Black Friday at the absolute earliest, so on and so forth.” But the rest of the post stands.
(Image credit: “Father Time”.)
It’s late August, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain about the arrival of Pumpkin Spice items in the stores and elsewhere.
First of all, there’s the usual proviso: Let People Like Things! No, your summer isn’t any shorter because the Pumpkin Spice stuff is showing up. No, you’re not being forced into cold nights or flannel shirts or raking the leaves (by the way, raking leaves is dumb and you should stop doing it) or going back to school any earlier. Just relax. The clock is not actually affected by the arrival of the Pumpkin Spice stuff.
But on the other hand…I get it, to an extent. It’s all driven by Big Retail’s cost-control and inventory-management strategies. That’s the only reason all the seasonal stuff always shows up freakishly early and seems to be gone when the actual season is in full swing. Big Retail’s problem is that it wants to sell the popular seasonal stuff to the people that love it, but retail doesn’t want to get stuck with leftover stuff if they make too much of it after the season is over. Thus you have the inherent absurdity of seasonal merchandise hitting the market well before the actual season starts, and then–and this is the part that pisses me off–disappearing from the market before the actual season has even ended.
I guarantee you this, folks: for the most part, Pumpkin Spice stuff will have completely disappeared sometime in the first half of November at the latest, except for whatever hanger-on items exist because they just didn’t fly off the shelves as planned. So when Thanksgiving Week rolls around and you’re actually thinking, “Wow, I am really in the mood for a pumpkin spice item right now,” you will be out of luck. Because the Christmas stuff, with the eggnog and the mint flavorings, will have touched down.
And that will keep on going! Because you’ll try to hit the store up to buy some last-minute Christmas candy, maybe on December 23, and you’ll be out of luck, because the stores will have sold it all down and put out the stuff for that noted holiday for which everybody on earth is known for shopping for way in advance, Valentine’s Day.
That’s just how retail thinks, and yes, it’s deeply annoying. It’s the exact same mindset that leads to the absurdity of it being really hard to find a nice winter coat in February or a new swim suit in late July.
Another dirty secret of all this is that for a lot of specifically seasonal merchandise, stores can’t even re-order. They get one giant shipment of it all at once, and then they work through it until it’s gone. If you’ve noticed that the Halloween candy is already showing up at stores? And you’re thinking, “Geez, we’re still more than two weeks from Labor Day!”? Well, that stuff arrived at the stores almost a month ago. Yup.
Businesses can claim this is all about “market forces” and it’s just what the market wants, but that’s a lot of special pleading; what’s really at work is the desire to sell what one might while also not being stuck with what one can’t. And I don’t know what the solution to that is, but that is the problem you need to solve if you want the Christmas stuff to at least not be on display until November 15 and the Pumpkin Spice stuff to sit in reserve until September. What it all boils down to, as always in our Capitalist society, is profit. And it has been determined that this is the road to maximizing profit.
As I’m thinking of this, though, I remember my earlier thoughts from about thinking of the year less in terms of being punctuated by holidays and more like being a series of festivals, not unlike the old church calendar. I’m not much of a liturgical person, but I do think the church calendar from the Middle Ages did represent a relationship with time that might have been in ways more healthy than the one we have going on now. We seem to approach holidays grudgingly, don’t we? We make sure to limit our holidays to one day, and then the day after, it’s time to put it all away and get back to work. Holidays in America are occasional interruptions in the real important thing: working and ensuring profit for somebody (almost always not ourselves). Our approach to holidays, all of them, is of a piece with our approach to time off from work in general. We take less vacation time than anybody else on Earth, and when we do take vacation, we get back to work to an overflowing inbox that makes the mere act of taking earned vacation feel like something that merits a punishment.
And all of that is baked into our general societal distrust of pleasure and leisure, which is a bigger topic than I’m going to solve right here…but I do like the idea of framing our calendar into a series of festivals. Here’s how I would break it all down:
September 15 through November 1: Autumn Harvest. This is the Pumpkin Spice period. Flannels, earth tones, pumpkin, big pots of chili, falling leaves. Also Halloween! I know that lots of people, including some dear friends of mine, would straight-up make this entire Festival Halloween, but not everyone is into the spooky/supernatural scene as strongly. It would definitely have a strong presence, though.
November 1 through The Night Before Thanksgiving: Winter Gathering. I call it this because this is usually when a lot of us start loading up on things we expect to need soon: food for Thanksgiving, or heating pellets, or whatever. It’s colder, but not actually winter yet.
Thanksgiving through January 2: Winter Lights. I dunno, I might come back and change the name of this…I thought about just calling it “Christmas” and making that into a whole Festival, because that’s how I see it, but that’s not especially inclusive, is it? A whole lot of religions have winter celebrations, and it would be nice if our societal calendar was maybe a bit less centered on the trappings of Christendom.
January 3 through February 15: Winter Meditation. This is when winter gets quieter, more reflective. But not always! This period includes Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl, so…yeah. Generally, though, this period can be for refocusing, thinking things through, and just plain living.
February 16 through March 17: Spring training. Because there’s a sense that things are starting to shift a bit once the pitchers and catchers report!
March 18 through April 30: Reawakening. Obviously this includes the Vernal Equinox and Easter. In most places in this country this is when Spring really takes place. (Not in my neck of the woods, sadly…spring in Buffalo is generally awful, but we’ll see what our old friend Climate Change does for that….)
May 1 through June 20: Beltane. Yes, I’m co-opting an ancient Celtic festival name for this period. By this point spring is well underway, baseball games actually count toward the standings, and hockey and basketball are starting to work toward their respective championships.
June 21 through July 31: High Summer. Yup, this is summer proper. Grilling, campfires, trips to the beach, yada yada yada. It’s also generally my personal least favorite time of year, after spring (again, this is just because of the nature of where I live), but I do acknowledge that I’m liking it more with each passing year, as my body does that thing that most peoples’ do as the years accumulate: feeling cooler every year. I wonder why this happens….
August 1 through September 14: Golden Summer. There’s a term in photography: Golden hour, which indicates roughly the hour right after sunrise and the hour right before sunset, when the sun’s angle in the sky is low and thus the light is less harsh and, well, more golden. This is the hour when the day tends to be its most beautiful, just in terms of the light that’s in the air. And yes, it’s a magical time for taking photos. Well, I think that this particular stretch of time is when summer is its most beautiful. By this point it’s still warm and bright, but the summer days feel less like a thirteen-hour bath in hot blazing sunlight. This is the time of cooling and fireflies in the woods and the campfires blazing under actually darkening skies.
And that brings us back to Autumn Harvest.
Nothing here suggests the replacement or abandonment of specific holidays, mind you! But I really do tend to see the calendar as a grouping of “times of year” than of specific dates, and I even go a bit broader than what I outline here: In my life, I tend to see “Golden Summer” and “Autumn Harvest” as not-entirely-distinct periods that begin with the Erie County Fair and last up to, and even beyond, our annual trip to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes in late September or early October. And I really do mentally file all of November and all of December and the first few days of January into one big “Christmastime” season. I just don’t see why every holiday has to be its own unique and separate atomic entity whose celebration is a complete in-and-of-itself kind of thing.
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Why write bad reviews?
Roger asked me an interesting question via email:
When is an appropriate time to write a negative review?
This was in response to a comment I left on his post in which he talked about “reaction videos”, which he’s not a huge fan of but which I actually enjoy greatly. Here’s an excerpt of what he says:
I embrace the IDEA of the videos more than the OH-MY-GOD-THAT’S-INCREDIBLE reactions. After seeing a few in a row, I find them exhausting. To be sure, I’m not the target demographic.
This Reddit post speaks to this. “There’s some psychology behind why some of us enjoy watching people react to hearing music for the first time- music that viewers know to be great. We like having more information than the people we watch, whether that’s in movies, tv, etc…
“My problem is that most reaction videos I’ve seen are positive 100% of the time. It takes away some from the enjoyment and the feeling of authenticity when the youtuber is superlative with every song, maybe because they don’t want to lose viewers who love that song.” Yeah, it’s just too much for me. Too hyper, and often too hyperbolic.
And here’s part of my comment:
I don’t watch many reaction videos for time reasons, but I tend to love them precisely because of their positivity. On today’s Internet–and honestly, on just about ANY iteration of the Internet pretty much ever–negativity is generally the rule rather than the exception, with the only real difference being how vicious the negativity is. If these folks are truly reacting positively to certain things, I’m fine with it. I also suspect that many of them aren’t reacting positively to everything, but rather they are only showing the videos of them reacting positively. I understand that impulse; it’s much the same reason why I almost never review something badly on my blog or elsewhere.
Actually, that is my entire comment. Why excerpt myself? Sheesh!
Anyway, the question led us to discussing bad reviews, when they’re appropriate to write, and so on. Roger noted his own negative experience at a recent concert he attended, and it got me thinking about why I avoid writing bad reviews.
Well, I generally don’t write bad reviews for a number of reasons, so let’s run through them! These are in no particular order.
1. I avoid writing bad reviews because I can avoid writing bad reviews.
I’m not a professional, or even an amateur, critic; I have no real obligation to review anything that I don’t want to review, and usually I’m much more motivated to write a positive piece about something I loved than a negative one about something I didn’t. Now, I wasn’t always this way, and if you really want to, you can find a lot more negativity from me probably in the ancient archives of this site, or if you really want, you can track down my Usenet postings, though I have no idea how you’d go about doing that. But why do I mostly choose not to write bad reviews? Well:
2. Writing bad reviews doesn’t make me feel good.
There are some critics, pro and amateur and self-appointed, who obviously get a visceral thrill out of being negative. And yes, there are times when negativity helps produce some good writing! But generally, I don’t get a good feeling from having ripped some work, no matter what it is, to shreds. And I am a firm believer in “Do what makes you feel good and don’t do what doesn’t.” If you’re a pro or if you can write negatively without feeling bad about it, fine! I’m not in either of those camps, though.
Now, reading bad reviews by professionals is something I’ll enjoy doing, sometimes especially if they’re negatively reviewing something I think is terrific. It’s fun to challenge my own thoughts or analyze theirs, sometimes. And sometimes the bad reviews are a delight, such as those by Roger Ebert, who really had a special way with movies he didn’t like. But there are other critics out there whose negative reviews have a mean and sadistic feel to them; those critics I tend to ignore completely. (John Simon is a good example here.)
3. There are enough people writing negative reviews in the world already.
Sometimes the chorus really doesn’t need another voice.
4. Bad reviews require you to know your shit.
Yes, all reviews require this, but it seems to me that bed reviews require it more, if you want to be taken seriously. You have to know the history of the genre of the thing you’re reviewing, you have to know what context it is aimed for, you have to know what the artist is trying to achieve, and so on. It’s not enough to be able to artfully say that a thing is bad; you have to be able to describe and illustrate why the thing is bad. Again, if you want to be taken seriously in your positive writings you have to do this stuff too, but it’s easier to be motivated to really plumb the depths of why I love a thing than why I do not. In terms of James Bond movies: I would be much happier to prattle on for an hour about why I love On Her Majesty’s Secret Service than to talk for sixty seconds about why I dislike Live and Let Die.
5. If I don’t like something, I don’t finish it. And fairness dictates that I don’t review something without having experienced all of it.
This is mainly about books and music. If a book or an album or a classical work or whatever isn’t doing it for me, I put it away and don’t write about it. I think it’s wildly unfair to assign a star rating on Goodreads to a book I didn’t finish, which is why I don’t do that. Many folks over there would disagree with me on this; I know quite a few who rank “DNF” books (Did Not Finish) with one star, which then gets added into that book’s rating average. I have a real problem with assigning a rating of any kind to a book I did not finish (or an album I stopped listening to, or a movie I turned off, or whatever). What I might do is note why I put something aside, if there is a specific reason (I once started a graphic novel that opened with a dog being killed, and that was it for me), but more often than not, I can’t put my finger on something specific that turned me off and it’s more of a “mood” thing.
And that’s not even taking into account the fact that many books that have become beloved to me over the years were books I laid aside the first time I tried reading them. Bad reviews feel “permanent” in a way that I don’t like.
So, back to Roger’s question: How do I decide to actually write a bad review? It comes down to completeness and conviction, I guess. If I grapple with an entire work or something and I don’t like it and I’m pretty sure of why, then yes, I might very well give my thoughts. If it’s something I’m known to generally know well and have opinions of, then the chances might go up…say, a new Star Wars or James Bond movie comes out that I end up disliking. Or I may attend a concert that doesn’t work for me…or a particularly favorite author has a book that I think is a clunker. But honestly, these days? More often than not I might just note “This didn’t do it for me,” and move on.
I’m currently working on a book of essays about Star Wars, much of which is culled from the many years’ worth of posts I’ve written on this site and its predecessor. But I’m about to run into a problem when I have to write about The Rise of Skywalker…which is a movie I seriously disliked. The problem? I never wrote about it here. A Star Wars movie that so frustrated me that I never blogged about it. So I’m going to have to watch the damned thing again and come up with new thoughts…
…but…
…what if I end up liking it?
(I won’t.)
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Stealing on a Sunday? Seems suspicious.
I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I’m going to do one now, just because. So there!
1. What is your favorite book?
Fiction, author no longer alive: The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien.
Fiction, author still with us: The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay.
Non-fiction, author no longer alive: Cosmos, Carl Sagan.
Non-fiction, author still alive: These Truths, Jill LePore.
2. Are you afraid of the dark?
Not particularly, but I don’t like pitch black. I need some light.
3. Are you mean?
I hope not, but I know I have it in me to be so, at times.
4. Is cheating ever OK?
Not sure what we mean by “cheating”. Marital cheating? Likely not…though my wife’s grandmother, when she was a widow, had a close friendship with a man whose wife was still alive, but deep into Alzheimer’s, to the point she couldn’t even recognize the nice old man who visited her frequently. Was that wrong? I have a hard time saying it was.
Cheating academically? Again, mostly bad…but even there I can see some wiggle room. I had a math teacher in high school who delighted in assigning problems 1-50 every night for homework. To this day I don’t really feel bad about occasionally getting the answers to numbers 34-50 from a classmate.
Incidentally, I saw this video making the social media rounds this week, for what reason I can’t imagine, but I remember my reaction when it first went viral and thinking about how that particular professor was going about things one hundred percent incorrectly, and how laughable his bluster was. (The video embed seems to be futzed on my earlier post, I’ll see if I can fix it.)
5. Can you keep white shoes white?
I don’t even put myself in position of trying. With all the hiking I do, and the nature of my day job? Nope.
6. Are you currently bored?
Right this second? Nope! I’m doing this quiz! I am also thinking about going downstairs to fetch a quick salty snack, but I have made no decisions yet at this time.
7. Would you change your name?
At this point, nope. I’ve come this far, I might as well see it all through.
Mass transit
8. Do you like the subway?
I love the subway, and light rail, and commuter rail, and long-distance passenger rail. Rail-based public transportation is a wonderful thing and I don’t understand places that don’t have it. Our centering of the individual automobile in our country’s transportation policy over the last, oh, 70 years or so is one of the worst decisions we’ve ever made.
9. Who’s the last person you had a deep conversation with?
Probably The Wife.
10. Dumbest lie you’ve ever told?
I don’t recall specifics, but I’m sure it’s some BS I tried deploying to get myself out of chores when I was a kid.
11. Do you sleep with your door open or closed?
Open, so the cats can come and go. The dogs aren’t a problem; Hobbes sleeps crated and Carla sleeps with The Daughter.
12. Favorite month?
October. No contest. (But the runners-up are the other months ending in “-ber”, followed by February. And while everyone else worships at the altar of July, for summer months I find August to be the bee’s knees.
Yes, I used “bee’s knees” unironically.
13. Dark, milk, or white chocolate?
Dark, White, and Milk, in that order. White can be touchy–when it’s not great, it’s really not great. Milk is perfectly nice and usually more consistent, but it’s still never my preference.
14. Tea or coffee?
Coffee more often than tea, but I do love tea! In fact, my personal “Tea Season” is coming very shortly. Weirdly, I can drink hot coffee year-round, but hot tea is not a thing for me until autumn arrives. I’m not big into iced tea.
15. Night or day?
No preference! Both have their strengths and I am glad of each. That said, I’m glad that even though we’re still on DST, the realities of Earth’s progression of the seasons has moved nightfall back to a point where I can feel the refreshing nature of the new darkness. Late June and most of July do a number on my circadian rhythms; I am simply not built for full light at 10pm.
Looks like that’s all!
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Presented without comment
“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life!” –Letterkenny
The other day I was having a conversation with a manager at work:
SHE: I have a passion for [activity that can actually be really lucrative], and I’m really good at it!
ME: Really?
SHE: Yes!
[She shows me photos of her work in said activity, and DAMN, she IS really good at it.]
ME: Wow, you could make really good money doing that instead of this!
SHE: Yeah, well, if I do it every day, I’d end up hating it.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
When exactly did we internalize the notion that what we love and what we do shouldn’t necessarily be the same thing? I know that sometimes “I want to” can suffer from too much “I have to”, but…it really does seem to me that we’ve gone way to far in normalizing a disconnect between what we do for a living and what we do while living.
Just something I’ve been kicking around a bit.
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Serves them right for not being musical.
I have just watched tonight’s episode of Jeopardy! and looked on in horror as all three contestants combined to go 0-5 on a category about classical music works.
Yes, I’d have gone 5-5 had I been there.
One was a Daily Double: something like “Rachmaninoff wrote his ‘Rhapsody on a Theme’ of this violin virtuoso”. Our champion guessed Stradivarius, while I an inwardly screaming, “PAGANINI!!!”
Alas.
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Random unrelated thoughts that are actually quite related
First thought: I’m getting really tired of the prevailing response to news of just about any garden-variety street crime being a roll of the eyes, followed by, “See? Bail reform!”
Second thought: Americans are very, very, very bad at seeing how societal problems tie into one another. Every issue is treated as a distinct problem to solve, which ultimately ends up meaning that none of them really get solved.
Third thought: You’d think more people would realize that maybe a country that incarcerates more people per capita (and in sheer numbers) than any other country on earth should start looking for different solutions to crime.
That is all.
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Striking
I’m generally of the view that ownership, or management, or capital, or whatever should almost never be listened to or taken seriously during times of labor strife, and that in such times you should listen to the striking workers. Not working is always the last choice, for obvious reasons, and when it gets to that point, things are generally well and truly bad.
Writer Mark Evanier has been one of my go-to sources for the ongoing Writers Strike in America’s teevee and film industry. This post is a good example of why:
This includes putting up with the most maddening part of it: Hearing some guy who gets paid a zillion dollars a week tell us that the business is hurting and there’s simply no money to give to us. When I hear this — and we always hear this — I always think, “Your only responsibility is to make as much money as possible for your company. If it’s doing that badly, shouldn’t you be fired?”
While we’re toughing it out, it would help to think about preparing for the next one. If we take a terrible deal this time, the next one will come sooner and be a whole lot worse.
If the last few years haven’t driven home the degree to which labor is getting short-changed their share of the spoils from record profits, I don’t know what kind of economy will.