Look Pa, I Learneded Something!

I'm about two-thirds of the way through my final assignment (an 8-10 page paper) of the quarter. It's very late, I'm tired, and I'm might not going to go to bed until this evening, which will be the second time in five days that I go 24 hours without sleep, an occasion to which I am unsued and react poorly. Hopefully, I'll find some time to sleep, and also the vaguely interesting things I have planned for my day will distract me from the desire to collapse.

The thing, though, is that I don't mind. First of all, I've been working my way through a half-gallon of chocolate milk, which is excellent paper-lubrication. Second of all, I'm interested in what I'm writing about. Third and most importantly, I feel like I'm actually learning something in writing this paper. I didn't carefully read the essays I'm writing on the first time around, so I've had to imbibe what seemed relevant and then spin it back out in a manner that was both coherent and pit them against each other. For the first time in at least a year and a half I honestly don't know, two-thirds of the way through, what my conclusion is going to be. I'm going to have to swig some chocolate milk and actually think about it, make up my mind, allow the things I've written to persuade me. This isn't going to redeem the past quarter, but up until tonight the best thing I had to show for the previous ten weeks was the development of high facility at throwing sharp objects into horizontal surfaces, as well as an appreciation for how much easier that is as compared to throwing the same sharp objects into vertical surfaces (though I'm improving at that as well). This is kind of cool. I might be wrong (about what I write in my paper, not my enthusiasm about being interested in it), but I'm just the slightest bit excited about working out my ideas, and I feel a little less jaded.

Also: I've been listening nonstop all night to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness for the first time in a long time. Smashing Pumpkins were my first Favorite Band, and still the ones closest to my heart.

Youth is wasted on the young.

The System Has Become Interactive

Last night I took a break from paper-producing to have dinner with a friend's parents, who subsequently took us to see the Blue Man Group, which they had been quite interested in doing. I was considerably less enthused, but I wasn't about to turn down some free (for me) entertainment. I hadn't been looking forward to the show that much because I tend to be less enthralled than others by physical antics (I was maybe one of three kids in grade school who didn't think the Cirque d'Soleil was cool beyond belief). So, first off, I should say that the show was great, I laughed a lot, it was funny and clever and a good (albeit quite expensive [though, thankfully, not for me]) time. But I had a couple of thoughts relating to the show...

(1) There was a mostly gentle, sometimes more forceful, undercurrent of social commentary to the show. I don't know very much about the Blue Man Group's history, other than what was explained for me in the Playbill, but it appears that they got started putting on Happenings around New York City in the late 80s. I sort of felt like some of the more critical elements of the show seemed like gestures towards the politicized aspect of doing something like a Happening, and maybe half-hearted ones. I feel this way because of the three major segments of the show in this vein, I only thought one was really clever - a voiceover/video presentation about a "nearly invisible network that connects millions of people, a system so vast and complex that no one can estimate its size," etc., etc. That system is...plumbing. (All information in this system, no matter where you are in the system, flows AWAY from your interface terminals. When there is an informational clog, and data starts flowing out of your interface terminals, the system has become...interactive.) What I liked about this was that it had a subtlety to it - you could just take it as funny, without any particular critical content - and it was inventive. The other two such sections of the show were (a) the Blue Men interacting with another voiceover/video presentation about how to be a Rock Star in the modern age (hint: lots of choreography, little talent), and (b) an explication of the nature of the Internet Coffee Shop, where people drink their coffee and communicate with people who aren't there while ignoring the people at the next table (walking home from the show, we passed such a coffee shop, and noted that in fact people were in physical conversation with each other, in defiance of the Blue Men). While both these segments were funny, I found them less satisfying than the plumbing thing because they were both so...obvious in their critical target. No one needs to have it pointed out to them that pop music at the moment is dominated by an emphasis on choreography. The NYTimes can't go two weekends without another item on the prevalence of lip-synching - and yet, as those same items point out, no one much seems to care. If they did, it wouldn't be popular at the moment. No one needs to be informed of the potentially isolationist tendencies of internet use, of the vague ridiculousness in public internet use. The last six to eight years have seen an argument between studies proving or disproving the antisocial influence of wasting hours online. This was the difference between when Seinfeld (as opposed to the slightly different animal that was Seinfeld) is great as opposed to amusing: the difference between revelation and recognition. Telling people things they already know is easy, and might get laughs, but...it's not nearly as satisfying as showing them something they haven't seen before.

(2) I had things to say about audience participation, but this has gotten sort of long and I'm hungry, so I'll post that later (if ever).