Quiz and a couple of movies

Last night my wife and I went to a fundraising quiz at one of the local taverns.   Nice and warm inside, but a bit of a shock to come outside and find a skiff of snow on the ground.  There'd been snow forecast, but nine times out of ten it doesn't arrive.  Anyway, it wasn't anything much and we drove home without incident.  This morning there was a bit more snow on the ground, but still not enough to stop my intrepid wife from driving part of the way to work and then walking the rest.  


I haven't been to many quiz nights like this: it was a combination of quiz questions (the winning team got a prize, of course) and endless raffles, and another thing where you got a celebrity name (I was Pavarotti) and if you're name was called you went up and got a prize.  They had prizes galore - obviously firms are happy to donate to these sorts of things, though they must get called on constantly for support.  


Pubs are noisy places, with the televisions going up on the TV mounts on the walls, and the filling of glasses at the bar, and the general chatter (including from those who aren't participating in the quiz night), and the restaurant area making its usual sorts of noises. 


We did quite well, all up, though we didn't get placed.  We needed to do better than our top score in a section, which was only eight.  I think we got down to five points in another section.  The sports questions were the worst, but a bunch of answers beginning with S restored our confidence.  And it turned out we had a 'rabid royalist' in our group (according to her friend) so she helped with the section on the monarchy.  


On Monday night my wife and I caught up on the film, Precious.  She'd been wanting to see it for some time, and certainly it was worth seeing, if only for the performances alone. Gabourey Sidibe is a revelation in the lead role, and Mo'Nique, who's apparently tended to play comic roles in the past, is a nightmare as the abusive and self-centred mother.  Mariah Carey also eschews her star presence and appears in a few scenes as the social worker.  Great film, though it was sometimes difficult to pick up on what the younger actors were saying because of their individual 'dialects.'  


We went to see the movie version of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, the other day, too.  Delightful movie, though I think it takes some liberties with the storyline as well as casting Kristin Scott Thomas as the PR person - this was a male character in the original.  However, Thomas does a great job with it, scary as hell, and plainly awful as a person.   The book's telling of the story through diary entries, emails and other notes is lost to a great extent - although Skype replaces some of the communications, and there are emails written at various points, with the text running over the screen.  I think the movie also changes the 'love story' between the two main characters.  It's several years since I read it, but I noted on this blog at the time "the romance aspect is quietly handled, and there’s no shattering of marriages or sudden changes of direction for the characters," something that isn't quite like the movie, where the two main characters obviously go off into the sunset with each other at the end, leaving the uppity wife and the returned soldier on the sidelines.   I'll have to check the book out again sometime and see how it deals with this.  


However the movie stands on its own feet quite comfortably, and retains at least one of the most delightfully funny lines from the book.  Fred, the main character, has had a bit of an argument with his so-superior wife, who always expects everything to be on her terms.  “The rest of the evening was a bit of a frost, but when we went to bed, I think Mary must have felt a little guilty about the way she had changed her plans. Suffice to say, my new Marks & Spencer pyjamas were not required for the early part of the night. A relatively rare event in our marriage of late. Afterwards Mary said, ‘There now, darling, that should keep you going for a bit.’” (Page 30)


Ewan McGregor is great in the main role.  He fits it like a glove, and of course, rolls his accent around the lines with great enjoyment.  McGregor has sometimes seemed out of 'fit' with his film roles, such as the young Obi Wan Kenobi, or in Moulin Rouge or in a sci-fi the name of which I can't remember at present.  But here everything works, and it's a joy to see. 

Sport overwhelms the Arts

Okay, can anyone tell me why the Otago Daily Times - and no doubt they're not the only paper like this in the country - allows room for three or four pages of sport news every day, and now puts out a new supplement on Fridays, which consists entirely of sport, and takes up another 16 pages!

Can anyone tell me why a quarter of the television 'news' each night consists of sport - and why there are often other sport-focused items in the rest of the news as well? Does sport get no other time/space on television? Nope, it takes over Saturdays to a great extent, and, if there's a really important game on, or the Olympics, or the Commonwealth Games, or the Rugby World Cup, it will get full time on these occasions as well. And all this without mentioning Sky Sport, which goes on day and night into eternity.

This would be fine if sport was the only recreation human beings indulged in, but it ain't!

My rant (which isn't by any means a new one) was boosted again by the fact that the play I'm currently in [Shadowlands] received no review in the ODT. The photo of the cast that the ODT's own photographer came out to take was bundled off into a little corner in the once-weekly Arts section (all two pages of it compared to the more than thirty or so pages sports gets each week) - and was so small no one could be distinguished in it. And the 'report' in the Star midweek paper was nothing but text. Again the photo that had been taken specially failed to appear.

It's enough to make me go out and punch someone, but then I'd probably wind up requiring a Medical Injury Lawyer and I can't afford that at the moment, not now that I'm a retired person (have I mentioned that previously? I have?)

And if you think I'm being aggressive, check out this video of the writer Harlen Ellison going full bore complaining about the way writers are regarded as not needing to be paid for their work...in fact, what he's saying applies to all artists.



All we ask for is a little acknowledgement...

Creating Creativity

Earlier in the month, Tony Schwartz, on the Conversation (one of the Harvard Business blogs) wrote a piece  called Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation.

It's geared towards those running a business, primarily, but I thought it might be interesting to consider how a loan wolf artist like myself might use the 'secrets.'

The first secret is 'Meet people's needs.'   Well, that's something I have no problem doing: if my inner man says, in the middle of writing something, I'm hungry, I send him off to the kitchen (which is conveniently placed a couple of metres away from my computer).   He can make as many cups of tea or coffee as he likes in a day - or finish off that fruitcake someone obligingly gave me...him.   If my inner man has unmet needs, I know about them pretty quickly, as you can imagine.   I can't always settle them immediately, (especially if the fruitcake was finished the day before) but I do my best.

The second secret (how can these be secrets if he's telling us them?) is 'Teach creativity systematically.'   According to Schwartz there are five well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking: insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, and verification.   I read the blog post the link in the previous sentence takes you to (it's very irritatingly bringing up some oddball codes on my browser) and I don't particularly disagree with these steps.   Although when she (someone called simply, Maria) says, "The first stage of the creative process is finding or formulating a problem. The tricky part about this stage is that it requires creativity in itself," I kinda feel that there's a bit of a catch 22 in there somewhere.   However, these stages are worth considering - once I've dealth with one of my inner man's unmet needs.

The third secret is to nurture passion.   I have to be excited about what I'm creating.  Don't give me some mundane work to do; my inner many won't stand it.  He'll hive off to the kitchen again.

This ties in with the fourth secret: make the work matter.  There's no point giving me a job writing about cashmere mittens for women if I don't have some excitement about aforesaid cashmere mittens - or about women, if it comes to that.   But if you can get my creative juices going when it comes to cashmere and mittens and women (and not necessarily in that order), you're on the way.

Provide the time.  This is the penultimate secret (another secret Mr Schwartz doesn't mention is include slightly more obscure words in your blog posts).   I try to give my creative person all the time in the world.   What does he do with it?  Fritters it away on Twitter or Facebook or writing blog posts of an inane nature, or checking his emails every few seconds, or playing another round of Scrabble online or seeing if anyone's paid him for anything in the last week/day/hour/second.   I can be a slightly tetchy boss at times.

Finally we have: Value Renewal.  Mr Schwartz says that human beings are not like computers; they can't be left on day and night flicking meaningless screen savers across their faces.   Human beings need to expend energy and then relax.  Expend and relax.  In the relax stage they recover their creative juices and get ready for another hack at the problem in question.   And at the same time, miraculously, while they're whiling away time making the fourteenth cup of tea/coffee, or playing 'fetch' with the puppy, or checking out the Guardian sports videos, all sorts of remarkable creative breakthroughs are taking place.   When that cup of coffee is drunk, or the puppy worn out, or the videos have proved to be not as exciting as the Guardian made them out to be, then you'll find that the brain is just itching to go, full of new insights, ideas, stuff you can use.  Or not.


Sometimes this creative incubation stage just doesn't get itself going quite as quickly as you'd like, and a whole day, or week or more can be whittled away while the incubation is going on.   However, you can fool the brain by working on some other totally unrelated project in the meantime, and give it a double job to do: incubate on project one and project two simultaneously. 

The brain may happily mix these up - and according to all creative writers this is a good thing.   Just make sure that at the end of the day that project 1 winds up with creative solutions to itself and not to project 2.  Unless your boss also thinks that's a good thing.  

Photo by velo_city on Flickr.com

Taking music toooo seriously

One of my Facebook friends (yes, I do have a couple) pointed me to a blog post on arts versus sports, by Bill Harley. It's a tongue-in-cheek look at why more people go to sports events than to artistic ones, and makes some good points, though I'm not sure I can agree entirely with the following:
[athletes] are not trying to make the audience feel anything (and the arts is about the communication of feeling and ideas). All they’re trying to do is succeed. And we watch and feel ourselves. While the game (or agon in the Classical sense – from which we get the agony of defeat!) doesn’t matter – the striving is real. We sense their tension and anticipation and despair and joy. And we feel it, too. And all those other people feeling a similar thing encourage it in us. We are, after all, a group animal. Suddenly, we care.

I think that while the athletes may not be trying to make us feel anything, they'd be very disappointed if we didn't feel emotion. The big difference, (well, one big difference) between the arts and sports is that at sports it's the expected norm for the audience to let it all hang out. Sports arenas are very relaxed. You can chat and joke, you can shout and scream, you can insult and abuse and praise (and the players will ignore you anyway). The thing is, there's no need for politeness. With the arts, politeness is the norm - at least these days. When did you last go to a concert of some ancient or modern piece and shout your enthusiasm during the concert? When did you last make ribald jokes about the players? When did you get up and abuse the players or the composer for the appalling piece of trash they'd produced?

Bet you've never done it. Yet, in the past, audiences were nowhere near so polite. They would talk during concerts and operas, and the upper class went more to be seen than to listen. There's a description in The Count of Monte Cristo, as I recall, in which the attendance at an opera consists mostly of interplay between the members of the audience. The performers barely get a look in.

And audiences would cheerfully boo something they disliked or stamp their feet; in fact, if they disliked it enough, they'd have a go at the players: throwing things was just one form of abuse. In the early 20th century, various composers suffered the insults of the audience: Stravinsky (whom we now revere) being just one such.

There's been a great divorce between the way we behave at concerts now, and the way audiences used to. In fact, people get frowned on for clapping between movements of a concerto or symphony, even though their enthusiasm for the playing may have caused them to do so. We force audiences to hold back now, rather than thoroughly enjoy.

Harley says: I’m not saying this never happens in arts – it’s what performers are always working towards – when a group of musicians reach some kind of communion that raises their performance to another level, or an acting troupe presents something in a way they’ve never quite done before, the audience senses and is deeply moved. But it’s harder to reach it, and there’s a critical aspect of our minds that must be dealt with and overcome.

I don't think it's harder to reach it; it's just that we're really not allowed to show our real emotions when we're attending a concert. It happens at the movies far more readily, funnily enough; I've often been reduced to tears during a movie, and sometimes during a play. We get the chance at both the movies and plays to laugh - quite heartily at times. Occasionally a piece of music will cause us to laugh; but we're still fairly polite about it, as though we know the composer didn't really intend us to feel good humoured about what he'd written. Hoffnung broke through the politeness barrier, as did Anna Russell and Victor Borge. All three of these artists took music seriously, but knew it didn't have to be taken seriously.

I don't recommend a return to the old days where audiences treated musicians with a kind of contempt. I like to be able to hear the music clearly if I've paid the usual exorbitant amount to go in the first place; but equally I'd like to be able to feel more relaxed at concerts, along the lines of the way I can be relaxed at a sports event. Okay, I promise not to throw beer cans, I won't shout loud swear words, I won't have an argument with my neighbour (not that these are things I typically indulge in at sports), but it would be good to be able to get up and walk around, go for something to eat if I get a little bored, wave to someone I know. I can't see it happening in my lifetime, but it's not that long ago in the lifetime of the human race that people did just such things at concerts or operas. So maybe there's hope.

Quoting?

I was reading Management Matters at work today, and came across a paragraph by Kevin Vincent, CEO, in his editorial at the front of the mag.

He said, "Ruth Le Pla is quoted in in the magazine, "NZ Business" as saying:

What do HP, Sports Illustrated, Burger King Corp and the Wikipedia Foundation have in common?

Vincent apparently continues to quote her by saying: They all started off in times of depression surviving the 1929/30 period, the tail end of the 53/54 hard times and the more recent post 9/11 difficulty. Many other very successful companies can alos be added to that list including Hyatt Groupa and Fed Ex."

This would give the impression that all these companies have been around since the late 1920s, and anyone would his head screwed on would realise this is nonsense: Wikipedia sticks out like a sore thumb from the list for a start.

The reality is that Hewlett Packard began in 1935, Sports Illustrated as we know it now didn't turn up till 1954 and neither did Burger King; and of course, Wikipedia began in 2001. Fed Ex dates from 1998; the Hyatt Group (Corporation) from 1957.

When you go back to Le Pla's original article, you find she says the following:

They all started off in times of recession [not depression]. Collectively they span the Great Depression which kicked off with the Black Tuesday Wall Street crash of October 1929, the tail end of the hard times in 1953-54, and the more recent post-9/11 recession in the US.

We could add to that list companies as diverse as giant international hotel chain Hyatt Corp, research hub LexisNexis, FedEx Corp and MTV Networks.

Slightly different. Still not as clear as it might be - the 'collectively they span' is a bit difficult to get in focus - but obviously not quite what Vincent is saying, and certainly not what he 'quotes.'

franchises

Ever been tempted to go for one of those retail franchises, where you buy into a company and set up your own version of it locally? KFC and McDonald's are of course, prime examples, but I was interested to see what else I could take up a franchise on if I were of a mind.
The Physicians' Weight Loss program, for starters, or Return a Pet. I could become a Cartridge Depot, or offer a Space Walk to kids on their birthdays and other fun times. How about setting up a Flip Flop Shop? Good grief. How many customers would I need to make money out of selling nothing but flip flops?
Sports Clips is a men's and boys' haircutting franchise, where the them is sports. Embroidme speaks for itself. Interestingly enough, that's the name of a shop here in town, which, as far as I'm aware, isn't a franchise.
What about Speaking Roses, where you print a message on the flower? Doesn't that rather defeat the purpose?
The list goes on and on (and probably on, if the truth be told). My suspicion is that the only person making real money out of all this is the one who came up with the idea in the first place. Having at least ten percent of your income going straight out the door to the franchise owner always seemed to me to be a bit of a non-starter. Okay, you get the 'name' and backing, and the 'look' of the franchise. But regrettably, you still have to do all the hard work.