Nice weekend
May. 28th, 2007 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proggrrlHope everyone is enjoying the long weekend here in the states...
My mom, bro & I went on a short roadtrip up to our old stomping grounds in Putnam County (NY State) for a few days.
Also, for reasons I probably do not have to get into here on LJ with my fannish peoples: this editorial in last week's ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY fills me with joy. Not only does it echo both my own suspicions, and the recent statements by TV showrunners Ron Moore and Josh Schwartz - it's just great to see it printed for posterity in a major magazine.
My mom, bro & I went on a short roadtrip up to our old stomping grounds in Putnam County (NY State) for a few days.
Highlights of the trip included...a picnic lunch at the County Park, reliving old memories of long summer days of swimming in the local lake, fishing in the watering hole, pushing the big swingset as far as it would go, water balloon fights on the lawn, endless sky and endless summer, woodsy hiking behind the lake and finding your way back to your beach blanket covered in sand, grasstains, and rockclimbing bruises. Ahhhhhhhh.
We had a beautiful drive from the Carmel reservoir system along route 301, over to Cold Spring and Beacon. Both are charming little towns with Metro North train stations - and a surprising amount of good restaurants!
After an overnight in yucky but convenient Newburgh (which allowed for several crossings over the Newburgh Bridge and the lovely site of the Hudson River unfolding below us), we had a great Art Day yesterday. First stop after brunch was the DIA Foundation, which is massive and worth it just to see their awesomely huge space (a former box making factory), stroll the gardens, and wander inside their permanently-installed Richard Serra sculptures. This is what it's like to be inside one of Serra's massive works. Also they have a ton of Louise Bourgeois early works in their permanent collection. Sorry I wasn't allowed to photograph anywhere inside this museum. A shame.
We made a beeline to the Storm King Art Center afterwards, once we realized it was only 20 minutes away by car. This is an incredible place that I have been pining to see again for several years. A few pictures before the rains started:
They have an impressive temporary exhibit of - funny coincidence - Louise Bourgeouis that is up till Fall 07 as well. What a paradise!
We had a beautiful drive from the Carmel reservoir system along route 301, over to Cold Spring and Beacon. Both are charming little towns with Metro North train stations - and a surprising amount of good restaurants!
After an overnight in yucky but convenient Newburgh (which allowed for several crossings over the Newburgh Bridge and the lovely site of the Hudson River unfolding below us), we had a great Art Day yesterday. First stop after brunch was the DIA Foundation, which is massive and worth it just to see their awesomely huge space (a former box making factory), stroll the gardens, and wander inside their permanently-installed Richard Serra sculptures. This is what it's like to be inside one of Serra's massive works. Also they have a ton of Louise Bourgeois early works in their permanent collection. Sorry I wasn't allowed to photograph anywhere inside this museum. A shame.
We made a beeline to the Storm King Art Center afterwards, once we realized it was only 20 minutes away by car. This is an incredible place that I have been pining to see again for several years. A few pictures before the rains started:
They have an impressive temporary exhibit of - funny coincidence - Louise Bourgeouis that is up till Fall 07 as well. What a paradise!
Also, for reasons I probably do not have to get into here on LJ with my fannish peoples: this editorial in last week's ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY fills me with joy. Not only does it echo both my own suspicions, and the recent statements by TV showrunners Ron Moore and Josh Schwartz - it's just great to see it printed for posterity in a major magazine.
I wanted to quote the best bits under the cut.
...Late May is a roller-coastery time in pop culture. In TV, the season has just wrapped; we are near the end of The Sopranos and The Shield and in the middle of Lost and at the beginning of Heroes and Friday Night Lights and The Tudors and, depending upon our tastes, following any number of dark, complicated, challenging, years-long story arcs, assessing and arguing about them every week. It's a good moment.
Meanwhile, here's the movie slate in which the studios invested something like $750 million this month: part 3 of a movie based on a comic book. Part 3 of a movie based on a children's book. And part 3 of a movie based on a Disneyland ride.
Not much of a contest, is it?
[snip...]
This is where ''We're just giving the people what they want'' comes in. It's the defiant lie told by those who want to pretend that their failures of ambition are your fault — that because ''the people'' eat what they're fed, they must like it.
[snip...]
Don't you hate being referred to as ''the people'' — as if you were a big mass of grazing cows being herded from one multiplex pasture to the next every week? You don't hear it in TV anymore, because networks know that we've become a niche nation, and we're going to stay that way. We don't all like the same shows; we don't all want to like the same shows. When the most popular (and most people-powered) TV series is American Idol, and three-quarters of households are happily watching something else every time it's on, talk of ''the people'' as a unified entity becomes pointless. (It's even pointless on Idol itself: Remember when ''the people'' decided that they liked Taylor Hicks better than Chris Daughtry, and then months later, when their CDs came out, decided they were only kidding?)
It turns out that not caring about ''the people'' is liberating. It frees you to care about your people — the 2 or 5 or 10 million who are passionate about Friday Night Lights or Rescue Me or The Wire or Battlestar Galactica or The Office, who will stay with your show for as long as it's good, whose enthusiasms and high standards and judgments may even help, indirectly, to make it better.
[snip...]
The people who finance big movies are still pretending they're doing it for everyone, but the only segment of ''everyone'' they're willing to spend enormous sums of money wooing are 15-to-24-year-old males and little kids (and whomever they drag along). The true translation of ''We're giving the people what they want'' is ''We're making the only kind of movies we know how to sell, and we're selling them to the only demographics we know how to sell to.'' Everyone else is treated as a minority or special-interest group — including women, who get one or two mid-budget films tossed at them per summer (usually the extent of studio thinking about that half of the population is ''Um...is Angelina Jolie available?''), and ''old people'' (in Hollywood, that means all Americans 35 and over), who are brushed off until well after Labor Day.
This is a rather shocking attack on the concept of "mainstream entertainment" to see in a mainstream entertainment magazine. TV seems to be leading the charge in this area, which makes sense given its NICHE nature. Now if Hollywood films, indie films, and all those lovely films we lump together as "foreign films" can somehow get involved with this type of distribution, WE FANS ARE GONNA BE IN BUSINESS.
It's coming folks. Fandom, and especially us very-in-touch types here on LJ, will most definitely hear about it as soon as it arrives. I can feel it!
...Late May is a roller-coastery time in pop culture. In TV, the season has just wrapped; we are near the end of The Sopranos and The Shield and in the middle of Lost and at the beginning of Heroes and Friday Night Lights and The Tudors and, depending upon our tastes, following any number of dark, complicated, challenging, years-long story arcs, assessing and arguing about them every week. It's a good moment.
Meanwhile, here's the movie slate in which the studios invested something like $750 million this month: part 3 of a movie based on a comic book. Part 3 of a movie based on a children's book. And part 3 of a movie based on a Disneyland ride.
Not much of a contest, is it?
[snip...]
This is where ''We're just giving the people what they want'' comes in. It's the defiant lie told by those who want to pretend that their failures of ambition are your fault — that because ''the people'' eat what they're fed, they must like it.
[snip...]
Don't you hate being referred to as ''the people'' — as if you were a big mass of grazing cows being herded from one multiplex pasture to the next every week? You don't hear it in TV anymore, because networks know that we've become a niche nation, and we're going to stay that way. We don't all like the same shows; we don't all want to like the same shows. When the most popular (and most people-powered) TV series is American Idol, and three-quarters of households are happily watching something else every time it's on, talk of ''the people'' as a unified entity becomes pointless. (It's even pointless on Idol itself: Remember when ''the people'' decided that they liked Taylor Hicks better than Chris Daughtry, and then months later, when their CDs came out, decided they were only kidding?)
It turns out that not caring about ''the people'' is liberating. It frees you to care about your people — the 2 or 5 or 10 million who are passionate about Friday Night Lights or Rescue Me or The Wire or Battlestar Galactica or The Office, who will stay with your show for as long as it's good, whose enthusiasms and high standards and judgments may even help, indirectly, to make it better.
[snip...]
The people who finance big movies are still pretending they're doing it for everyone, but the only segment of ''everyone'' they're willing to spend enormous sums of money wooing are 15-to-24-year-old males and little kids (and whomever they drag along). The true translation of ''We're giving the people what they want'' is ''We're making the only kind of movies we know how to sell, and we're selling them to the only demographics we know how to sell to.'' Everyone else is treated as a minority or special-interest group — including women, who get one or two mid-budget films tossed at them per summer (usually the extent of studio thinking about that half of the population is ''Um...is Angelina Jolie available?''), and ''old people'' (in Hollywood, that means all Americans 35 and over), who are brushed off until well after Labor Day.
This is a rather shocking attack on the concept of "mainstream entertainment" to see in a mainstream entertainment magazine. TV seems to be leading the charge in this area, which makes sense given its NICHE nature. Now if Hollywood films, indie films, and all those lovely films we lump together as "foreign films" can somehow get involved with this type of distribution, WE FANS ARE GONNA BE IN BUSINESS.
It's coming folks. Fandom, and especially us very-in-touch types here on LJ, will most definitely hear about it as soon as it arrives. I can feel it!
