The Producer

In our last post, we spoke about our dissatisfaction with the trend of blind mass-consumption. We placed a large part of the blame for these habits and the resulting dissatisfaction on the consumers themselves, namely citing their lack of self-awareness and forethought as the prime culprits. However, we can also attribute this senseless and less-than-rewarding impulse to the lack of quality products available for consumption in the first place. It’s easier to understand senseless consumption when we take into consideration how much digging one has to do before stumbling upon something truly noteworthy. In turn, their scarcity is understandable once we consider the difficulty of producing quality material. Production takes effort, time, dedication, and usually money. For many producers, it makes financial sense to skimp on quality and instead make something that appeals to the masses. Whether we watch reality TV, shop at Wal-Mart, or eat out at fast food restaurants, we’re all guilty of enjoying sub-par products. Put simply, production is hard, which is why it should be recognized and rewarded when a producer goes above and beyond what is expected.

Diana: Yes, we live in an oversaturated world, but quality is undeniable and when you see a good product, it more than likely rises to the top. Any producer of quality will usually spend the time to develop his/her craft. Talent is Overrated. Or at least that is what I have found in my short experience in college and in the Air Force. The best leaders I have found in the Air Force were hard workers first and foremost and then have some other certain qualities that make them unique and stand out among their peers. And I have noticed that the tone a leader sets will inevitably become the product of his/her time in command. If the higher up is big on drinking, the rest of the group can become susceptible to drinking as well. However, if my supervisor makes it clear that taking care of people and operations come first and fun times come second, I will probably make it my priority to achieve his/her vision.

Elsa: Normally, I’d make my own point here and respond in the second section, but I want to speak to the claim that talent is overrated. While I agree that crediting ONLY talent for good work is a mistake, I don’t think talent itself is entirely irrelevant. “Talent is overrated” is a perfectly appropriate response to make against someone’s stance that talent is all it takes. However, I do think opening with the claim that talent is overrated puts you in a vulnerable position. Of course, this is all contingent upon how we define talent in the first place and whether we consider it a natural capability vs. a refined aptitude. Overall I think it’s a quality that works in conjunction with deliberate practice to create the best possible material.

Diana: I suppose I’m in a little more philosophical mindset, but everything we do is a product of ourselves. Some people just have the opportunity to touch much more of the world than others. Over time everything we think, say, or do is compounded within our own reality and we create the environments we find ourselves in. We are the producers of our lives.

Elsa: In regard to writing, I wanted to talk about some of the hang-ups I’ve encountered lately in hopes that verbalizing them might provide me with the distance necessary to find a solution. If I’m going to subscribe to the idea that producing anything sub-par is irresponsible, then I have to make sure that whatever I put out into the world is going to merit attention. I’ve been trying out a different creation process that clearly is not working; I haven’t a thing to show for myself even though I’ve been working for months. The last process I used successfully involved combining a title, a strong image in the form of a first line, and a motivation to get from that first line to the titular punchline. It resulted in an emotionally engaging text that I was able to unpack later on. These days I’ve been trying a backwards approach. There’s an emotion I’m trying to get down on paper, and I’ve tried to retroactively find the image that most powerfully illustrates said emotion. You would think I would have reverted back to the old formula by now...
Anyway, I like the idea you posit at the end there. Thinking about one’s reality as a compound product of one’s choices and actions allows for a thrilling freedom (or some may think of it as an overwhelming responsibility) to make your reality look like whatever you want it to look like. It leaves no room for externalization of your problems while simultaneously giving you sole credit for the happiness resulting from your actions.

The Consumer

In keeping with the trend of using our last post as a jumping off point for the subsequent one, we found consumerism to be an analogous topic to oversaturation. After all, we are constantly bombarded by advertisements selling us products and services, most of which we arguably don’t need. According to the media that feeds us “information” 24/7, we are consumers first and citizens second. So how did we acquire this mentality and how does it reflect in our behavior?

Diana: Consumerism is such a big part of our culture today. Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, we all see ourselves as consumers. This is a big part of our identity, but it wasn’t always like that. I’m taking a television and culture class, and, as is typical with media classes, we are starting at the beginning of television’s history: the 1940s. Up until that point, society had only known rationing and saving given that the Great Depression and World War II had just happened. It was necessary and seen as a person’s patriotic duty to both save and ration (either for their family to survive or for the nation to win a war). Today, that’s no longer the case. Thanks to executives’ use of television as the perfect medium through which to advertise to the masses, television became a platform from which to sell stuff to people, and the culture was of course affected by it. It became the “norm” to buy. People were shown that they could “buy” their way into the middle class and given that it was the 1950s, who didn’t want to be white, middle class with 2.5 kids? This is the image most people saw on television with shows like “Leave It To Beaver” and “The Donna Reed Show” and it would be hard to argue that viewers were not to a certain degree aspiring to be like the perfect middle class family they saw every day. One of my favorite examples of the seismic shift in how Americans view consumerism is from Mildred Pierce (not the new one with Kate Winslet) when Mildred buys a brand new car for her spoiled daughter and this is looked down upon in the film. It just wasn’t done in 1945. It was seen as overly extravagant for any family to have two cars and particularly excessive for a teenager to have one. Although I personally still wouldn’t do this today with a 16 year old, it’s certainly acceptable now to buy a car for a teenager.

Elsa: I have a long-standing hateful relationship with this word, and it goes all the way back to high school. I worked retail through college, but anyone who worked with me can attest to how much I hated every second of it. Working part-time was manageable, but the first time I worked anywhere near 40 hours in a week, my misery manifested itself in a permanently frustrated facial expression that got me sent home to ‘reset’. You might wonder what about working retail could cause me so much distress and unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a simple and straightforward answer to that. Instead, I’ll provide you with one example of the face-palmingly ridiculous things I encountered that made me sour on the entirety of the retail sales system: The summer between junior and senior year of college, I worked at a high-end specialty/import retail store. They carried all sorts of pretentious merchandise ranging from home décor to gourmet foods and wine, but more on the merchandise some other time. This is only a set-up to give the reader an idea of what the typical customer was like (spoiler alert: it was the kind of person who would drop $400 for a chair because her mother-in-law stopped by unexpectedly. Yeah… I didn’t follow either). I’m not entirely sure if it was a holiday weekend or if this particular lady was just trying to take advantage of the pleasant summer weather, but she walked in asking for help finding items for an outdoor dinner party. Simple enough request, right? Outdoor lights and decorations are in the back right corner, kitchen stuff is all along the left wall. Boom - customer assisted, job done.

“Wait!” she said. “Can you help me find items that are thematically consistent?”

There are several things wrong with this request, but let’s discuss the one that upset me the most. This wasn’t a Party City. The merchandise wasn’t sectioned off by color or by popular children’s cartoon character. Thematically consistent entailed not pairing your rectangular victorian glass plates with your round Madras chargers. That example took me an ungodly amount of time to come up with, which should give you an indication of how difficult it is to fuck up picking out things that match. Pretty much everything in that store matched, is what I’m saying.

“Sure,” I responded. “What theme are you going for, exactly?”

“I don’t really know. Could you help me with that too? Also, I don’t have a list of specific items that I need. I was hoping to come in and get ideas.”

I obviously told her to wait there while I grabbed someone else to hold her hand while she shopped...

Diana: While I don’t have such a long-standing hate for consumerism, it certainly has bothered me for other reasons. Today, consumerism is kind of seen as the “right” thing to do. After 9/11, President Bush said that the best thing we could do was “go shopping.” Consumerism is necessary for capitalism to work and if you’re not a capitalist then you’re obviously some sort of communist. I’m not immune to shopping by any means, but let’s face it, a person who doesn’t shop is seen as kind of “Other” (I thought this was so weird when I first read it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Kartheiser#Personal_life). What we buy defines us. Rappers like to brag about the shit they buy all the time. I would posit that we do the same thing, albeit on a much smaller and less grandiose level. 

Elsa: Agreed. The bottom line is that I personally associate this word with a helpless, aimless sort of person who attempts to “solve” a self-inflicted problem by throwing money at it. Now, is this what all consumers are like? Not by a long shot – the word encompasses any and all people who buy things for personal use. Obviously, I have a huge bias against people standing on the other side of the counter. But harkening back to the aforementioned chair lady for a moment, I found it incredibly frustrating to watch her make a frivolous purchase of a big-ticket item for what I considered to be no good reason. Granted, I was only 19 years old at the time, and it’s possible this is a problem I will someday encounter and fully relate to. Though, I can only hope to avoid all of the terrible life decisions I’d have to make to get me to that point.

Oversaturation

Using last week’s entry as a jumping off point, I decided to explore the implications of oversaturation on my particular reality. I use the word here (in the loosest of terms) simply to mean “too much-ness,” so I ultimately chose overcrowdedness as my topic as it seemed a plausible slant to take on the word.

I  considered Geoff’s comments about passiveness and the value we place on interactions and observed how overcrowdedness in New York City affects our behavior. Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed some trends in our behavior, specifically during the morning and evening commute, and our interactions can pretty much be boiled down to this: our acknowledgement of one another extends to staying out of each other’s way. It’s like everyone is running on autopilot or wearing blinders. They’re so preoccupied with not making eye contact or accidentally grazing someone’s hand that their sole focus becomes to get there (work, school, doctor’s appointment, home, whatever). And this seems unfortunate, because there are a lot of cool things happening all the time, and an unintended consequence of running on autopilot is that you tend to miss out on those things. On the other hand, is it all the stuff going on and the overcrowdedness that are over-stimulating people into autopilot mode? Probably. So I can see the value of turning yourself “off” during the commute thereby guaranteeing you a minimum of 45 minutes of mental peace and quiet, but I think we have to be careful. If you’re wearing blinders and are focused only on getting somewhere or getting something done, there’s a danger of viewing everyday life not as a series of experiences; rather, they become obstacles to our efficiency, and life becomes a list of tasks to be completed and checked off.

I'll close out with an anecdote. I was making my way from Midtown East to NoLita last Friday night after work. David Sedaris was doing a reading/book signing, and I had exactly 30 minutes to get from door to door. So I got off at the Spring Street subway stop and as I walked, I fussed around with my phone - set it to silent, coiled up my headphones - and I walked by what I assumed was a tree. That is until it moved and said in a startlingly baritone voice, "Hello." I looked up and realized it was a man on stilts wearing a very convincing costume. It also didn't hurt that he was standing next to a real tree making him fairly easy to miss, but here's the part that must have looked baffling to onlookers: I jumped, of course, and laughingly said to the man, "Holy shit, you're awesome." I kept walking because the bookstore was just across the street and around the corner, but not ten steps behind me walked another girl. I'm assuming she was also distracted because when the man repeated the process with her, she was startled enough to scream. And I wondered, how can that happen? How can someone be caught off guard by something that happened just a few feet in front of her not ten seconds ago?

~E 

In Search of Expertise

One of the initial hang-ups in starting this blog was our self-proclaimed lack of knowledge on any one subject, which we felt put us at a disadvantage. What could we possibly sustain a dialogue about given how little we know about anything? We got around this by gearing towards discovery and exploration, but we realized something in coming to this conclusion: everyone knows a substantial amount of at least one subject. Thus began our respective searches for an expert, and here’s what we found:

Diana (Harrogate, North Yorkshire): I found about as big of an expert as I am going to find on the NFL draft. He’s watched the draft live every year for the last 12 years of his life. Given our time difference here in the UK, my expert had to take leave to watch the draft live. The draft has been kind of the topic of the last week here on base, but my expert just kind of stood out because he was the one who was the most dedicated to it. Again, he took one of his annual 30 days of military leave off for this! The draft happens over three days starting with the best picks first and then moving on to the rest of the players who are left over. The one that everyone is talking about this year, though it wasn’t exactly surprising, is the release of quarterback Tim Tebow from NY Jets. Tebow was, of course, the star quarterback for the University of Florida, but his skills haven’t exactly transferred into the NFL. So after three years in the NFL, Tebow is not doing great, which is weird considering our own quarterback from UGA, Matt Stafford, is doing fairly well in the NFL.

Elsa (Brooklyn, NY): I found my expert in a roundabout way. At first I tried going up to people and asking them “What are you an expert at?” As it turns out, they had the same reservations we did with calling themselves experts, so I had to approach the issue at a slant. I changed the question to, “About which subject do you love talking and don’t get asked enough?” This yielded much better results. When I asked my roommate Geoff this question, he immediately identified “movies, books, and video games set in post-apocalyptic worlds” as his topic of choice. Per Geoff, the appeal in these stories comes from watching a person get their primal reset button pushed. When commodities are scarce, people’s desire to survive gets tested in a way that you or I could only vaguely imagine. Given the level of passiveness in our day-to-day survival, the contrast in their active effort to stay alive triggers an emotional response. We root for these people; we want them to succeed regardless of how bleak that success actually looks. And the visually bleak aesthetic serves a purpose too. Geoff mentioned the pervasive use of fire-related imagery in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which works most effectively precisely because of the contrasting backdrop. Geoff considers himself an optimist, so the idea that fire served as a stand-in for hope really resonated with him. And in the end, it’s absolutely a visual representation of the internal struggle. 

Diana: I learned about a lot of stuff. Honestly sports is not my thing but like he pointed out it is current affairs. We just had our “boards” for some of our best enlisted people where we grill them over current affairs, leadership situations, and history. One of the categories under current affairs is sports. It was the second thing on there, in fact. The funniest to me was a guy who tried to argue the question and said it was a complete and total lie. I don’t know if you saw the finals for college basketball but there was a guy who broke his leg in the worst way possible. Kevin Ware. The question was “Do you think Kevin Ware’s gruesome injury contributed to his team’s win?” The guy said that team did not win. The room went silent. I laughed. I think I just laugh at too many things that I probably shouldn’t, but anyways, sports are followed by a lot of people. I’ve read that even President Obama is usually flying on AF One with ESPN on in the background instead of some news network. Of course, now it’s an event that ESPN and sports buffs are all over but it wasn’t like that before. It’s been one of those things that has been hyped up by 24/7 tv coverage. They, of course, have scrolls on ESPN but those actually make more sense to me than the ones on CNN but because at least the ones on ESPN tell you the different scores of different sports and teams and such.

Elsa:  I really enjoyed talking to my expert as well. We talked about a couple more of his favorite uses of the trope (Fallout and Mad Max), but what really caught my attention was the idea that desolation can turn transience on its head. For example, I come in contact with a tremendous number of people every day. That’s not to say that we interact, but there are a lot of us moving around past each other trying to go about our day without too much disruption. Now can you imagine how that attitude would change if the number of people dropped so drastically that your interactions totaled, say,  one per week if you’re lucky? A desolate world necessarily implies a higher value on interactions; it implies that the default would not be to take each other for granted. If interactions become scarce and connections hard to come by, each one seems worth more somehow.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to our blog. Our goal here is to delve into a wide range of interests – from sports to media to post-apocalyptic worlds – and discuss them in light of our day-to-day. Join us in our ongoing dialogue as we move from topic to topic, and please be patient while we find our voices and direction. Staying with us will most likely pay off.

Our first official entry goes up tomorrow, so be on the lookout. In the meantime, we leave you with the wise words of one Jack Donaghy: “Never follow a hippie to a second location.”

~D & E