Filed under: Media | Tags: Balloon-kid, Falcon Heene, Media, Reality TV, Stupid things in the news
So here’s an interesting thought coming out of yesterday’s whole balloon-kid fiasco. And I’m going to keep this short because this story is getting really old really fast.
But I’m interested in the speculation over whether or not this whole thing was a hoax, fomented by the balloon-kid’s statement on Larry King that he didn’t come out of hiding when he heard his parents calling him because they “had said that we did this for a show”. At first I thought that this was just a case of a bad publicity stunt, perpetuated by attention whores of the worst ilk, being accidentally (and hilariously) debunked by a kid saying the darndest thing.
But now I’m starting to wonder about the kid’s grasp of reality. After all, this was not his first time on television, the family having made two appearances on ABC’s reality show Wife Swap. And it poses the question – does a six-year-old child have a firm enough grasp on the difference between TV and reality to know where one stops and the other starts? Especially when, during his formative years, he was at the centre of a spectacle that purposely blurs the lines between the two?
Maybe he just thinks that whenever your personal life receives attention from the outside, it’s for TV? (Which, now that I think about it, is not that far fetched.)
Or is it possible that, having grown up in an environment where the most important part of “reality” is creating a spectacle for the camera, that he behaved in the way that would prolong the spectacle because he thinks that’s just what people do? Maybe his parents didn’t put him up to it at all – maybe he did it “for the show” all by himself.
I sometimes wonder what effects reality shows featuring young kids – Supernanny, Wife Swap, or John and Kate Plus 8, for example – have on those kids and their perception of how the world works. I wonder if the balloon-kid fiasco is going to shed some light on this question. I always figured that reality TV would spell the end of humanity – but this is a wrinkle even I didn’t anticipate.
There is a cultural skirmish taking place between Generation Y and the Baby Boomers. Boomers say Gen Yers are a bunch of lazy, self-entitled brats. Gen Yers say that Boomers… well it’s funny really, Gen Yers don’t really seem to give a shit about the Boomers and are content simply to disappear onto the interwebs when the issue arises.
Either way, there’s a clash of culture and values and one of the places it seems to escalate to actual conflict most often is in the work world.
Managing Gen Yers has proven to be something of a challenge for Baby Boomers and the topic often pops up on forums like Brazen Careerist or Punk Rock HR (sorry, couldn’t find the post I wanted for this link, but trust, me, it comes up in the comments all the time) or in books such as Bruce Tulgan’s Not Everyone Gets a Trophy.
Here’s a promo for a show on PBS that deals with the topic and nicely illustrates some of the complaints that the two groups have about each other.
Ultimately, the Boomers’ position seems to come down to their perception of Gen Y as, well, like I said above, lazy and self-entitled kids with no work ethic who show no gratitude or loyalty to their employer and spend all day engaging in social networking rather than doing their jobs.
These impressions are absurd (if not offensive) for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they’re hopelessly historically blind – weren’t the Baby Boomers the ones who said “Don’t trust anyone over 30!” and called themselves the “Me Generation”? And AS IF nobody ever slacked off at work before Facebook.
But history has another parallel that makes this generation gap far more interesting than a matter of one generation having trouble identifying with “the kids these days”, and I’m just going to come out and say it – Gen Y is fomenting the Marxist revolution.
Think about it this way – Camus sums up the gap between the bourgeois and the proletariat (as perceived by Marxism) as that between one group that uses their influence to maintain a status quo in which they retain the privileged position as owners of the means of production and another that resists said status quo, not because they hope to usurp the privileged position but because they want to return to a state where day-to-day life involves something more fulfilling than turning pieces of yourself into commodities for exchange.
Like the Marxist proletariat, Gen Y expects more from their jobs than a paycheque. They want a degree of fulfillment and all the things they do that annoy Boomers at work – bouncing between jobs to avoid getting bored, having high expectations when it comes to the type of work they’ll be doing, and just tuning out when their expectations aren’t met – are, for better or for worse, strategies for achieving that fulfillment.
Sure, Gen Ys don’t have it all together yet – crying because your boss asks you to do something tedious is silly and short-sighted – but I like to think that if this trend of demanding more from your career continues, we may be witnessing the revolution that Marx was talking about, except without all the messy violence.
Also, I’m not sure what Marx would have thought about iPhones. But whatever. Either way, it’s a bit of a revolution and it will be interesting to see if it catches on or simply falls flat when Generation Z – whatever that is – hits the workforce.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Brazen Careerist, Career, Penelope Trunk, Reaching for the Stars :D
I’m a big fan of Penelope Trunk’s blog - it’s insightful, sometimes racy (which is always fun) and it talks to 20-somethings like they’re thoughtful, intelligent people rather than a generation of spoiled, irresponsible, self-entitled laze-abouts.
Last week, Penelope posted this article about why travel is a waste of time. And I had a really odd reaction to it.
I don’t disagree with it – in fact, I think there’s merit in everything she says, though I personally really enjoy travel and find that you can get a lot out of it.
No, my odd reaction came specifically from item #4 in Trunk’s list, which essentially boils down to the idea that it is far more productive and rewarding to build an every-day life that is so fulfilling, you don’t need to get away from it to find satisfaction, which makes travel kind of pointless.
In a lot of ways, this makes perfect sense. Why only enjoy your life for two weeks out of the year when you could enjoy it year-round with a bit of self-knowledge and a very small dose of enterprise? But here’s where things got interesting for me – my gut reaction to that idea was crippling anxiety.
Then I thought to myself, what the hell? Why on Earth would the thought of self-knowledge and self-fulfilment cause anxiety, of all things? Why would the thought of figuring out what makes me happy, and then doing it, make me want to run screaming from my computer?
And I don’t think it’s just me that has trouble with that idea. I sometimes wonder – moreso after today – whether the 20-something identity crisis is more a product of anxiety than a lack of options. It’s not that we don’t know ourselves – it’s that we’re afraid to admit to ourselves what it is that we really want out of life and that anxiety makes it very difficult to move forward. But none of us has any idea where that anxiety comes from, let alone how to deal with it.
Fortunately, I have a theory – and it’s just one, and very unscientific, so do with it as you will. But here it is nonetheless.
All our lives we’ve been told “if you can dream it, you can do it! 
“
This is a nice thought. But it inspires people to take a very goal-oriented approach to happiness. In other words, it’s a way of thinking in which your only interaction with your potential happiness is to imagine some kind of end result.
Now, having the goal in mind is crucial, even essential, to success. But being so focussed on the goal that you lose sight of the process makes the gap between where you are and where you’re trying to get absolutely enormous. Not just enormous – insurmountable. And since nobody has been saying anything about the process – just about “Dreams!” and “Shooting for the Stars!” and all that nonsense, everybody is completely focussed on the finish line with no idea how to even get to the starting gate.
So this is where the anxiety comes from – we’ve all grown up dreaming about all the things we’re going to do when we grow up and now we’re suddenly in our 20s and in a position where we have to actually do something to make them happen. But nobody really knows what that something is. And that makes the gap between where we are and where we want to be so intimidating that many of us simply don’t bother. Instead, we get an unfulfilling 9-to-5 job and try to fill the gap with toys (sometimes literally, since much of the market for escapism right now is based on nostalgia for when we were kids in the ’80s, e.g., the new Transformers and GI Joe movies). Or alcohol. And we work and hate our lives and take two weeks vacation every year to try to get some fulfilment when what we need most is an honest examination of what we want and a practical look at what it takes to get there. And a serious reduction in this “If you can dream it, you can do it! ” BS.
But I’m still going to travel. The world is neat.
Filed under: Media | Tags: Advice, Career, Comics, Dating, Life, Media, Spider-Man, Wolverine
Really good advice is rare, especially when it comes to figuring out who you are and what you want to do with your life. I can literally count on one hand the number of times I’ve received really good advice on either of these topics.
One of those times, the advice came from the father of a friend of mine, who told me that no matter what you do for a living, there will always be moments of boredom and tedium.
Even the most exciting job in the world has days where you’d rather be doing something else. This is a phenomenally and necessarily sobering idea that has kept me from getting discouraged when I hit those “dip” moments, when the excitement of some pursuit starts to (temporarily) give way to those phases when it just feels like work.
Another time was a bit of insight on rejection from Stephen King’s On Writing, which I’ve mentioned before.
Most recently, I found some great advice in, of all places, an issue of Amazing Spider-Man: Extra!, released this past winter. The advice comes in the form of a story that the character Wolverine tells Spider-Man after the two of them get into a bar fight together.
The story is about dating and the advice is about fighting (I’ll let you make your own pithy observations about that little juxtaposition), but it could just as easily apply to starting a writing career or, indeed, just getting your life together.
The bar fight was a fairly pointless one: Spider-Man and Wolverine weren’t really foiling super-villainy, they were just – as Wolverine puts it – “blowing off steam.” Spider-man, being an eternal worrywart, asks Wolverine why he would take the risk of getting in a fight when there was so little to gain.
Wolverine responds with this story, which an old army officer once told to him:
***
“It’s about a good guy, like you (Spider-Man). He grew up poor, though around people like him. People who dressed a little shabby but good people nonetheless.
But he decided he was meant for somethin’ better. He wasn’t gonna settle for any plain woman like his pops had. He was gonna marry a beauty… nothin’ short of a knockout.
So he stayed away from the neighborhood girls, even though some of ‘em woulda been happy to show ‘im a thing or two. But he waited.
Months of waitin’ turned into years and people started to talk. But he didn’t care. He was waitin’ for his perfect girl. A stunner.
And one day, what do you know, he found her. Everything he’d hoped for. Smooth skin, big eyes…a knockout.
He chased her like his life depended on it, and she must’ve seen something in his enthusiasm, because eventually she relented.
This was it. His big moment. And you know what? He had no idea what to do. He kissed her with a dry mouth, fumbled with things he shouldn’t have, and before he knew it, the whole thing was over.
The beauty, unsatisfied, left him stunned and alone, wishin’ he’d let a few of those plain janes teach him a thing or two.”
***
What a great little analogy. The point – as I see it – is that nobody ever got anywhere by sitting around waiting for conditions to be perfect. Because even if – by some unlikely cosmic convergence – the perfect conditions DO present themselves, if all you’ve done is sit around waiting, you’ll be completely unprepared to capitalize on them when they do.
Progress comes from movement. Whether you’re trying out a new career or trying to get your work in the public eye or even trying to make sense of your dating life, taking risks by starting down a road you can’t necessarily see the end of is a good in itself – because chances are, the experience you gain will far outweigh anything you might have lost by taking it and finding out it was the wrong one.
The only wrong direction is no direction – as long as you’re moving, you’re on the right track.
Thanks for the good advice, Wolverine.
——————————————————————-
Wells, Zeb. “Birthday Boy”. Amazing Spider-Man: Extra! No. 2, March 2009. Published by Marvel Publishing Inc.
This past weekend, while watching a rerun of Boston Legal of all things (judge if you must, but William Shatner just keeps getting more entertaining the older he gets), I had a thought about the difference between art and entertainment.
In the scene that inspired the thought, Denny Crane (Shatner) and Alan Shore (James Spader) discuss the difference between the promise of the future and the joy of the moment. Denny and Alan were talking about love, but I think you can apply the same principle to art/entertainment.
“Art” – as in, “serious” Art – is all about the promise of the future. Someone participates in Art in order to improve themselves by gaining valuable insight or wisdom about themselves, the world, whatever.
In a sense, participating in Art is about sacrificing the present. You’ll never get back the two hours you spend watching Citizen Kane, but ideally, you’ll have learned something about life or about film or about something that makes you just a slightly better person. Those two hours are gone, but they were an investment in your future self.
Watching Transformers, on the other hand, is a whole different experience – it’s fun and it’s loud and there are cool transforming robots and explosions and uplifting lines like (Megatron) “Humans don’t deserve to live!” (Optimus) “They deserve to choose for themselves!”
Now, you likely didn’t learn too much from watching Transformers – chances are, you’re precisely the same person you were at the beginning of the movie as you are at the end. You haven’t gotten any farther ahead in terms of your personal development as a result of watching this movie. But there’s a good chance you had a lot of fun watching it. Your future self is none the richer for your Transformers experience, but your present self sure enjoyed the heck out of it.
With that in mind, it’s not really hard to see why Art gets privileged over Entertainment in intellectual circles – intellectualism, of course, is all about self-improvement, all about sacrificing your present self for a better, future one. But it’s something of a shame when someone can’t put that aside and live in the present for a little while – I think you could even argue that one would be better for it.
Either way, the best examples of Art/Entertainment, I think, are the ones that manage to have one foot in both camps, that manage – as Phillip Sidney would put it – to delight, as well as instruct.
My personal favourite example of late is the movie The Dark Knight. The film is emminently watchable as an action flick, with excitement, suspense and the coolest super-villain since Star Wars. And who can get enough of those adolescent power fantasies? Not I.
At the same time, the film deftly poses questions about the nature of the hero, of violence and its justifications, and, of course, the social roles of chaos and order (one of the most brilliant parts of the film is during Batman’s interrogation of Joker at Gotham PD when Joker starts to talk about the insanity of a system of rules – and actually starts to sound like he’s the only one who’s got things at all figured out).
Because it blends the promise of the future (i.e, an investment in the future self) with the joy of the moment, The Dark Knight can be enjoyed on many levels, allowing it to have a deeper and more lasting impact than a film that focuses on just one or the other.
Perhaps Art vs. Entertainment isn’t so much a dichotomy as a spectrum, but either way I think that the most successful examples of culture and media are the ones that manage to land somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
What about you – what’s your favourite example of art or media that delights as well as enlightens?
Here is one of the reasons I love living in the city. Below is a photo of a poster I found walking home from work one day (I think it was a Thursday). You just don’t see this kind of random, hilarious wisdom in the suburbs on weekdays.
A cat on acid - city wisdom at its best
Wisdom you ask? Sure – thanks to this photo, I am reminded that some things you just can’t judge unless you can experience them from the perspective of the parties involved. That’s wisdom if ever I’ve heard it. Thoughts?
Filed under: Life in Toronto, Media | Tags: Life in Toronto, Music, North by Northeast, NxNE pro-tips
It’s hard to distill the experience of North by Northeast, Day Three into words. It was fun, it was loud and it was a little bit blurry. It included spilled beer, a fair bit of embarassment and a friendly Englishwoman name Cat. I learned never to stand on the seats at Black Bull and Iain learned not to trust me with event calendars – though we all learned that the best way to make friends at an indie music festival is to take your copy of said calendar and discuss it loudly enough that people around you can hear what you are saying (pro-tip #3).
Musically, it seemed to be the night of cover tunes – though covers are somewhat rare at NxNE, at various points, we heard fully legitimate renditions of a Johnny Cash tune, the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” and the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right”, which – astonishingly – the band managed to PULL OFF.
Other highlights included:
- catching a great string of sets at the Black Bull (one of NxNE’s more underrated venues – there usually aren’t crowds here, but the music has been quirky and catchy and exciting for two years running)
- making it in time for an after-hours set at Horseshoe (not at all underrated, but just as consistently good during NxNE)
- and getting a free copy of Three Day Threshold’s newest CD, then getting the whole band to sign it. Every single one of them made a penis joke.
If I can offer any conclusions from Day Three, it would be these: take any chance you get to go see either Three Day Threshold or You Handsome Devil. And if you have the chance to be the only person in front of a stage screaming your head off to the lyrics of “Search and Destroy” while the band screams them back at you, take that too (pro-tip #s 4 and 5, respectively).
But of course, the most important pro-tip of all for NxNE is just go. Get out there. Get into it. You’ll never be sorry. It’s the best weekend of the year.
Filed under: Life in Toronto | Tags: Life in Toronto, Music, North by Northeast, NxNE pro-tips, Really fun stuff
North by Northeast wrapped up on Sunday so, as promised, here’s another set of highlights from the best weekend of the year. This will cover Friday night, which was night two of the three nights we spent peregrinating around Toronto’s best indie rock venues to see the world’s best indie rock bands.
*****
Trucked it out to Mod Club to go see Brody Dalle – failed to gain entrance, despite possession of 5-day wristbands. Have decided (for future reference) that, at NxNE, if you have to take a streetcar to get there, it is not a show worth going to (pro-tip #1).
*****
Saw The Superstitions at Reverb (upstairs – I forget the actual name of the room). They looked like clean-cut kids who’d just arrived from the sock-hop, which is a good metaphor for their show – tight and fun, if a little safe.
*****
Caught the last minute of…something…in the bottom floor of Reverb. Some kind of death metal with only discernible lyrics being “BLOOOOD! BLOOOOD!!!!” Fantastic.
*****
Stopped to talk to marketing street team for Strut brand wine. Entire group of friends I was with had individual photos taken and projected 30-feet tall onto neighbouring building. Discovered that when I do a disco pose, I look silly in photographs. Got free wine out of it, though, so no harm.
*****
Discovered my new favourite TO patio at Hideout. Large-ish, with comfortable (and not mouldy or sketchy) couches. Also spontaneously developed a taste for Amsterdam Blonde. Watched set by Triggerfinger, a bluesy hard-rock band from Belgium. Singer was amusingly creepy, repeatedly reminding audience that “booties are made for shaking”. Almost as hilarious were the drunk scenesters who (mid-set) enthusiastically pestered the bass player with business cards and technical questions about distortion pedals until being escorted away from stage by bouncer.
(Here’s some more from Evil Shananigans on our encounter with Triggerfinger – that’s right, our experience was so awesome that news of it made it all the way to England)
*****
Walked to Queen and Spadina to see who was playing at Horseshoe. Encountered line-up, decided that, at NxNE, if you have to line up to get in, it is not a show worth going to (pro-tip #2). Tried Rivoli – made it through 1/2 a song and walked out. Don’t know how Rivoli manages to attract so many bands that I hate, but it’s the only club I ever walk out of during the festival and I did it three times.
*****
Head to Kensington to check out Supermarket. Made it in time for last two songs by the paint movement, an indie-pop group with a killer sax player. Stayed for Fox Jaws, a dance-rock group from Barrie, who was a personal highlight at last year’s festival largely because of their singer and the almost Shirley Bassey quality to her voice. They did not disappoint. In between sets, my friends and I broke into spontaneous rendition of some song by Boston (I think it was Boston – maybe Europe), garnering strange looks and guffaws from other patrons. Sang louder.
*****
Walked to El Mocambo to catch the downstairs closer, a hardcore band from Montreal called Bionic. Got there in time for last song by The Sadies, kind of a rockabilly band from Toronto. Not bad. Saw Melissa Auf Der Maur on the way back from the bathroom, rudely interrupted her conversation to tell her I liked her show the previous night. She said thanks. I’m not claiming to be cool or anything, but I did talk to Melissa Auf Der Maur. Just saying.
*****
Bionic absolutely destroyed the small crowd assembled – just destroyed them. Also destroyed my new sneakers, but whatever. Were loud, fast and aggressive with blazing licks and absolutely no filters or hang-ups in front of an audience – one of those bands that has fun from the moment they step on stage and like to make sure you’re having fun too (largely by making you feel like a pussy if you’re not having fun). Announced that they were breaking up and that this would be their last show in TO, much to our disappointment. Still, this was a definite highlight. Iain gets big props for forcing us to stay up way past our bedtimes to see them.
*****
Home around 4am after pizza and a cab ride. Vaguely remember heated argument in cab about whether Jaguar XK8s are nice cars or if they are only for “old men”. Someone pulls out a comparison to Astin Martin, which I feel is unfair. It didn’t come to blows, but it was close.
Day Two completed successfully – details on Day Three to come.
