One for Sorrow

I was talking today about a thing on Pop Culture Happy Hour last week where there was this theory put forth that in order to have cool kids, you ought to not be cool parents. The idea being that cool parents produce dull kids and vice versa, since kids rebel. This is echoed in a Wired piece this week about geeks needing a wider, blander culture to react against or else you don't get creativity.

And I thought a lot of the appeal of these ideas is that it gives you a formula for creativity, a way of ensuring you can be cool, when in fact creativity and talent is often innate, unearned and unfair. Which is not to say that you either get sprinkled with the creativity dust at birth and you’re a prodigy and if you aren't you should just shut up and there's no hope for you and hard work means nothing--could not disagree with that more. I just don't think it's wholly created by your environment, doesn’t always fit in with your personality, at least not in a way that makes it easy. ( So I started thinking about my own tastes in things and whether I got them from my parents. )

Anyone else have relevant experiences in this area?

I feel like I haven't been on lj for years. I have been checking in, but I can off the top of my head think of many posts that I read, wanted to comment on, but didn't get a chance to at the time and they are now lost forever.

One cool thing that I did instead of lj was going to a few exhibits at the Met--one was on paintings called American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915 and the other, which sort of makes a theme, was looking at the photographs of Robert Frank from The Americans. ( They were both really cool-some big images inside. )

For anybody else who's a Sondheim fan, especially fans of Sweeney Todd, I recommend this article by Jamie Johnston.

It points out that the driving force in the play is not love but beauty and I thought it was just great.:-)

In the comments I went off on a tangent specifically about how this related to Toby given the way the movie changes him from a half-wit youth to a gin-soaked child, both of which have different aesthetic appeals for the eye and the ear. Anyway, I recommend the article for ST fans.