Think About It: CAREER CHOICE SPECIAL

Artist unspecified

Special thanks to PA for sharing this cartoon.

Much appreciated as always!

 

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Mobile dating went mainstream about five years ago; by 2012 it was overtaking online dating.  In February, one study reported there were nearly 100 million people –– perhaps 50 million on Tinder alone — using their phones as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club, where they might find a sex partner as easily as they’d find a cheap flight to Florida.  'It’s like ordering Seamless,' says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service.  'But you’re ordering a person.'
      The comparison to online shopping seems an apt one.  Dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex.  The innovation of Tinder was the swipe — the flick of a finger on a picture, no more elaborate profiles necessary and no more fear of rejection; users only know whether they’ve been approved, never when they’ve been discarded.  OkCupid soon adopted the function.  Hinge, which allows for more information about a match’s circle of friends through Facebook, and Happn, which enables GPS tracking to show whether matches have recently 'crossed paths,' use it too.  It’s telling that swiping has been jocularly incorporated into advertisements for various products, a nod to the notion that, online, the act of choosing consumer brands and sex partners has become interchangeable.

'Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse' [Vanity Fair,  6 August 2015]


 

Use the link below to read the full article by North American journalist NANCY JO SALES:

 

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating

 

 

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The Write Advice 085: DAVID HARE

I have respect for any artist who wants to drag art closer to reality, and whose inspiration is the wealth of the external universe.
      There are, after all, only three disciplines to which human beings can go for help in understanding their own predicaments: to art, to science and to religion.  There is so much to know, and we have such short lives in order to learn, that I cannot understand any writer who, at some level, does not value curiosity over opinion, nor seek enlightenment over self-expression.  What else will persuade the sated consumers that fiction can offer them something which the melodrama of football or the lassitude of magazines cannot?
      It is precisely because there are so many stories being told that audiences need to be refreshed.  Why fabulate?  Because if we do not, everyone else will.  We must fabulate because we all, as spectators, need to be reminded that the lowest levels of fabulation, as much as in half-baked novels as on half-baked television, do not tell us very much about reality, or about ourselves.
      Bad and conventional story-telling serves only to dull us. Such story-telling reduces the world.  How much more desperately, then, we need our sense of wonder restored.
      And let me be clear: not only do I look to leave the theatre or the television set knowing more, but most especially I hope to know more about now.  A lifetime's experience of story-telling has convinced me that nothing is harder in the arts than to be contemporary.  It may be true that we are breeding generations who will prefer to watch the security cameras in department stores rather than go to the Royal Shakespeare Company.  But it is interesting to note that, in television, the fly-on-the-wall documentary which three years ago was all the rage is now more or less extinct, while Eastenders and Casualty ride on regardless.  The makers of these rightly admired and formidable programs know something which the low-level documentarists did not: that the editing and organisation of reality is a genuine skill. 
      In response to the ubiquity of the real, we need not to abandon fiction, but, on the contrary, to make that fiction more original, more distinctive.  The enemy of art is not reality, but formula.

Interview [The Sydney Morning Herald,18 October 2004]



Use the link below to read an interview with British playwright DAVID HARE about his controversial 2015 memoir The Blue Touch Paper:

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/playwrights/david-hare-interview-sense-of-guilt-drove-my-life-for-so-long/

 

 

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Words for the Music 007: RICKIE LEE JONES

RICKIE LEE JONES
c 1979

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS IN 1963

RICKIE LEE JONES

from the 1979 Warner Bros LP 

Rickie Lee Jones

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS IN 1963

 

The most as you'll ever go
Is back where you used to know
If grown-ups could laugh this slow
Where as you watch the hour snow
Years may go by

Years may go by

So hold on to your special friend
Here, you'll need something to keep her in

Now you stay inside of this foolish grin
Though any day your secrets end
Then again
Years may go by

And years may go by

You saved your own special friend
'Cuz here you need something to hide her in
And you stay inside of that foolish grin
When everyday now secrets end
And then again
Years may go by

And years may go by

Years may go by

  Years may go by…  

Words and music © 1979 Rickie Lee Jones

Some singers have the ability to transport the listener to a unique time and place the moment they open their mouths.  On paper, a song like On Saturday Afternoons in 1963 looks like a brief wisp of a thing, a few throwaway lines that, while poetic, hardly qualify as earth-shattering.  But the magic happens when Rickie Lee Jones sings those words in her own haunting and inimitable way, against a musical background that is at once wistful and resigned, defining and celebrating childhood even as it appears to be lamenting the inevitable passing of it.

I defy anyone with an open heart to listen to this song and not feel profoundly moved by it.  It proves why the greats are great and why certain albums become classics while others languish, ignored and forgotten, in perpetual obscurity.  There's no trickery here, no trendiness, no hiding behind hype or effects or overly slick arrangements.  Just honest raw emotion, delivered by one human being to other human beings in a way that's both truly affecting and instantly comprehensible.

And all in a pithy, self-contained work of art that lasts less than three minutes.

Sit back and marvel, as I often have and still do, at the sheer unadorned beauty of it.


 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American singer/songwriter RICKIE LEE JONES:

 

 

http://www.rickieleejones.com/

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

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Last updated 5 April 2021