The bastardize the classics because they can't come up with anything nearly as good, and being loathsome hacks, the best they can muster is to despoil it.
I often agree with you but PLEASE stop with the woke, ageist insults. I did not choose to be born when I did. Hundreds of millions of people born during an 18 year period, all over the world, with utterly different circumstances, do not simply have a switch turned on in our heads that goes "this morning I'm going to be a Baby Boomer doing Baby Boomer things to anyone who isn't a Baby Boomer". It's puerile. It's lazy. It's frankly stupid.
The term is a journalistic neologism invented to describe a demographic anomaly. That's it. It is not some sort of bloody conspiracy theory where every single person born between 1946 and 1964 inclusive is on an evil mission to destroy the world! Yet seemingly normal people blame me for ever single thing that is wrong with the world because I was born during that period. It's not funny, it's not clever.
It's like saying every single person who ever lived in the Soviet Union was obviously an evil dictator like Stalin. Yeah even the dissidents he had murdered. And the Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and everyone else Hitler sent to the gas chambers deserved to die because they were obviously all lunatic totalitarians. Well they chose to be born in Germany at that time, didn't they? Obviously their own fault. And while you're at it yes obviously I'm a white supremacist racist Imperialist because my ancestor got set up for a crime he didn't commit at got transported for life to New South Wales in 1790. Yep, guilty as charged.
None of which is NEARLY as bad as being a Baby Boomer. Yep absolutely ALL my fault.
I'm seventy four, prime Boomer, and your complaints about our generation's baleful ways is, I don't doubt, true, but it doesn't apply to me anymore than it does to you. One way to guarantee that I would never go to a high school reunion ( my class is mostly dead these days, anyway ) would be the promise that the musical hits of 1970 would be the evening's soundtrack.
I'm just old enough to have gotten in on the splendor of live theatre done by serious professionals. It hurts a little to read about the trashing of great things.
Interesting piece. I haven't seen the film yet...not sure if I will.
I love Shakespeare - loved reading his plays at school and after my initial drama training did a post-grad year in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Later I met A L Rowse (the great Shakespeare scholar) in the 80s - he had 'modernised' some of the plays (for the Americans, he said!) But it ruined some of the language. Queen Margaret. (Henry VI Pt 3) - she has York bound and at her mercy. She taunts him and says "Thou wouldst be fee'd, I see, to make me sport" - he rewrote this as "You would be paid I see to...." There's a big difference between the sound of fee'd and paid - an actor can do much more with the former, because the EE sound is a higher pitch than AY.
Apologies for getting all technical but that was a huge part of Shakespeare's genius - his use of sound. And I'm sad that many young actors don't want to study his plays - apparently at one drama school they're refusing to do Shakespeare and Shaw - because he gives an actor so much to play.
The bastardize the classics because they can't come up with anything nearly as good, and being loathsome hacks, the best they can muster is to despoil it.
Exactly.
Say it the right way: THEY ARE HACKS. DOWN WITH THEIR TRASH!
The obnoxious few baby boomers who fit certain stereotypes being written about ad nausea are, imo, hardly representative of the majority.
I agree with your view that it's disturbing to have the desire/need to change history and classics.
"to modernize, to make ‘relevant’ and ‘contemporary’."
Yes, and given contemporary cultural norms, it means to 'dumb down.'
I often agree with you but PLEASE stop with the woke, ageist insults. I did not choose to be born when I did. Hundreds of millions of people born during an 18 year period, all over the world, with utterly different circumstances, do not simply have a switch turned on in our heads that goes "this morning I'm going to be a Baby Boomer doing Baby Boomer things to anyone who isn't a Baby Boomer". It's puerile. It's lazy. It's frankly stupid.
The term is a journalistic neologism invented to describe a demographic anomaly. That's it. It is not some sort of bloody conspiracy theory where every single person born between 1946 and 1964 inclusive is on an evil mission to destroy the world! Yet seemingly normal people blame me for ever single thing that is wrong with the world because I was born during that period. It's not funny, it's not clever.
It's like saying every single person who ever lived in the Soviet Union was obviously an evil dictator like Stalin. Yeah even the dissidents he had murdered. And the Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and everyone else Hitler sent to the gas chambers deserved to die because they were obviously all lunatic totalitarians. Well they chose to be born in Germany at that time, didn't they? Obviously their own fault. And while you're at it yes obviously I'm a white supremacist racist Imperialist because my ancestor got set up for a crime he didn't commit at got transported for life to New South Wales in 1790. Yep, guilty as charged.
None of which is NEARLY as bad as being a Baby Boomer. Yep absolutely ALL my fault.
I'm seventy four, prime Boomer, and your complaints about our generation's baleful ways is, I don't doubt, true, but it doesn't apply to me anymore than it does to you. One way to guarantee that I would never go to a high school reunion ( my class is mostly dead these days, anyway ) would be the promise that the musical hits of 1970 would be the evening's soundtrack.
I'm just old enough to have gotten in on the splendor of live theatre done by serious professionals. It hurts a little to read about the trashing of great things.
Interesting piece. I haven't seen the film yet...not sure if I will.
I love Shakespeare - loved reading his plays at school and after my initial drama training did a post-grad year in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Later I met A L Rowse (the great Shakespeare scholar) in the 80s - he had 'modernised' some of the plays (for the Americans, he said!) But it ruined some of the language. Queen Margaret. (Henry VI Pt 3) - she has York bound and at her mercy. She taunts him and says "Thou wouldst be fee'd, I see, to make me sport" - he rewrote this as "You would be paid I see to...." There's a big difference between the sound of fee'd and paid - an actor can do much more with the former, because the EE sound is a higher pitch than AY.
Apologies for getting all technical but that was a huge part of Shakespeare's genius - his use of sound. And I'm sad that many young actors don't want to study his plays - apparently at one drama school they're refusing to do Shakespeare and Shaw - because he gives an actor so much to play.