Tuesday, September 26, 2017

You Have Taken Ithaka Skyriding and Yahoo

Ithaka is only shy less than four thousand reads to put it over a million reads and ordinarily it wouldn't matter about watching for each additional thousand reads when it's happened a thousand times already but it gets exciting now.

Thank you for all that interest and I've said it before so it will get cloying to say it too much but it's appreciated nevertheless.

Zen Yogi:  you may have done that already, Silas

It's a dangerous business, Yogi, but they only need endure about five more days of it.  The campaign has been running since 2012 so it's a blast to see this now.  Back at that time, any idea of hitting a million wasn't an example of Dream Big so much as Dream Impossible so it wasn't considered.  The number of daily reads expanded astoundingly to bring us to this moment.

Zen Yogi:  ain't it a kick

Sure it is, mate.


There has been a great deal on Ithaka about following your passions and far beyond simple (cough) pleasures of the flesh.  Many are writing of their own great interest in such pleasures, typically with an explication of their own adventures in the connubial realm.


There's a different telling of passions from the Lady Tinkerbell since, about forty years ago, her sone was the Boy Who Plays with Dolls.

The Boy was maybe five years old at the time and a press photographer spotted him in a Cambridge park where he was walking around and had some kind of doll festooned around his head.  The origin of that doll was almost certainly the Lady Tinkerbell since she's a talented seamstress and even sewed her own wedding dress.  I regret the fact I don't have a copy of that picture since it was such excellent candid photography.


In the intervening years to present, he learned to be be a playwright and a Broadway director so you know the full story is filled with the idea of Dreaming Big and he did show such a singular determination to achieve this which he continues to the present moment.  For some time, he was teaching at Yale but now he's back on Broadway and he even takes his shows out on the road.  Although the difficulties of all that are likely far greater than we can imagine, the image of touring with a busload of artists and the people who support them is so stone cool.


Where we get immediately to the Passion is in a recent exchange will took place when The Boy had the opportunity to choose between a job which would yield the big bucks but wasn't so much for fulfilling him artistically and another which is maximally fulfilling artistically but doesn't yield so much for jingle jack in his pocket.

Note:  for some, opting for the dollars is the right choice but that's not our focus since our interest is in when it's not the right one.

The Boy's younger brother whom we'll call the Florida Surf God, advocated strongly for taking the money but the Lady Tinkerbell insisted The Boy must follow his passion since only that will reveal goodness without limit.

The melodramatic ending for that would have been if he took the money and then went into a spiraling descent filled with drugs and hookers to finally culminate in his untimely death.

Zen Yogi:  that's not what happened at all, mate ... right ... right?

That's true, Yogi, and the current story would be Olympic class suckage if it had gone that way.  The Boy Who Plays with Dolls is actually doing just fine.

Note:  there's a legendary Surf God in Cincinnati so there's the potential for a name conflict but I can live with it and I'm sure we will manage.


There's a cinematic telling of living with such passion for the art on Broadway but, in that case, it was fueled by drugs so it did meet with the untimely end we expect.  There seemed a loose relationship to the life of Bob Fosse, one of Broadway's most famous stage choreographers, but I'll leave that for the more able reviewers of the Life on Broadway.

The movie is "All That Jazz" starring Roy Scheider and it's a brilliant piece of work which could only have been written by someone with a deep love of Broadway choreography since Scheider's specialty was an immense and recognized talent for such choreography.

You all get it with the cautionary about don't screw with the drugs since a large number of them can suck out your soul with a paper straw.  For some gratuitous Uncleness, I also caution against the Demon Al K. Hall since he's a great one for soul sucking as well and he has a long dark history of doing that.

The sub-theme of an admonition against drugs wasn't such a major direction since the primary focus was on the Passion for dance, from the view of the dancer to that of Scheider for the view from the director.

The movie has been a long-time favorite since it shows the complexities of such a man when in some ways he wasn't such a good one while in others he was an inspirational genius.


Our Passions carry so much confusion in this New Age since they're so often drawn into sex which is fine for your boudoir but really doesn't need much attention.  From Seraphin I hear Millennials have a rousing enthusiasm for sex but, at least with Millennials cohort, they don't have much enthusiasm for writing of it and focus instead on the much deeper Passion for life and the worthwhile telling of its story.  The Boy Who Plays with Dolls may be on the edge of being a Millennial but he does make the cut should Seraphin agree to extend the 60s mantra to never trust anyone over fifty.


In between the Boomers and the Millennials are the Generation Xers.  We're sure Millennials are children of the Boomers so we're not quite sure how Generation X got into the mix but they exist at least on some vague conceptual level.  They don't change anything, tho, since the Millennials are taking the lead while Generation X may have waltzed past it. That aspect needs some type of sociological analysis but the Rockhouse doesn't want to do it since we're betting on the Millennials to make the good things happen.

Zen Yogi:  it's because they finally got old enough to be interesting in conversation

That carries much truth, Yogi, since they're independent adults now and their conversation has become fascinating.  We see many Millennials online who only elicit the thought of how did this person ever escape the cabbage patch but Seraphin's squad is vastly different and they have exceptional interests although they don't get so much attention as those who morosely proclaim the world is going to hell.

With leadership from Seraphin's Millennials, the Rockhouse doesn't believe the world is going anywhere of the kind.  Through all of Ithaka my interest has been finding interesting things and bringing that back to others to show.  Now it comes that Millennials have become the interesting things and I'm most pleased to observe since, wtf, they take all the work out of it for me because now I only need to watch.

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