"She had always known that in making certain choices one committed oneself to a sequence of actions - which inevitably meant a switch from being master of one's fate to being its slave - but she had hoped that she could decide when to make that switch, instead of having it forced upon her."
Paul Griner
Collectors: A Novel
"Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples."
George Burns
1896 - 1996
The Frustrated CFO's Comment: At this point, the best my generation can do is to look for humor in our situation.
Joe Caputo (Litchfield Penitentiary's Assistant to the Warden): The fish stinks from the head. And I'm not the head! I am actually down by the gills somewhere. So, once I call the police and US Marshals; and the DOC investigators start sniffing around, it's going to look a lot worse for the 'Director of Human Activity' here at Litchfield!
Danny Pearson (MCC appointed Director of Human Activity): Whoa!
Caputo:(ironically) Whoa!
Pearson: Whoa!
Caputo: Whoa!
Pearson: Whoa! Yeah...
Caputo: Whoa, whoa, whoa! Yeah!
Pearson: Slow down! Why do we have to involve all those people?
Caputo: We have an escaped convict!!!
Pearson: Let's just go get her back!
Caputo: Who?
Pearson: You and me. Where did they take her?
Caputo: The bus station in Utica.
Pearson: Let's just get into a car. We'll go get her, bring her back. Yeah! Nobody has to know.
Caputo: So, you're saying, the two of us should go and apprehend an escaped convict? This is not The Fucking Bloodhound Gang! Okay?
Pearson: Well, I don't know what to do! I honestly don't know what the fuck to do! Do you know how I got this job? My Dad is one of the SVP's at MCC.
Caputo: (smirks and nods his head in full comprehension and disgust)
Pearson: Yeah... This is going to be worse than when I got kicked out of Ohio University... I have no idea what I'm doing..
Caputo: Fine. I'll go. On my own.
The Frustrated CFO's Comment:Most shows experience some sort of a slump in the third season - the story exhausts itself, the characters become too familiar, writers run out of surprising ideas. Not this show, though! This 3rd season! It's so good, some critics and viewers rate it higher than the fist two! There is so much excellent, nuanced stuff! And this Caputo guy, who got promoted by the producers into a main character - I painfully relate to his plight of never-ending bad decisions. There are always insults added to his injuries: not only that he gets a new boss, but it's somebody's useless offspring on top of it. You just know, there is no happy ending for Caputo - he'll never get out of prison.
The Frustrated CFO's Preface:
"Art is dead," declares Amy Poehler's hilariously delirious Art Dealer character in Old Navy commercial. (No, I'm not quoting the Old Navy ad.)
"Culture is dead," I acknowledged the other day, heart aching.
"Except for TV," I got in reply.
Yes, TV (and here I include all of its forms - commercial broadcast, basic and premium cable/satellite, as well as streaming media) is the last place where NEW cultural achievements of quality still occur. With their installment-based capital risks and an ability to get out of ventures at any time, television productions can afford to cater to narrower slivers of potential viewing audience and undertake some seriously daring creative leaps. The extended storytelling real estate is also a plus. As a result, TV has been attracting great writers, famous directors, and an array of first-class actors for the sake of producing great (some even better than great) entertainment of superior cultural value (in comparison to the slush all other contemporary arts and entertainments churn up).
However, there is a problem: The creators are in a permanent face-off with the collective mind of hundreds of thousands viewers fused together through the numerous social network outlets. In isolation, average members of the TV audience can be kept engaged, surprised, and wondering by watching the lives of their beloved characters unfold at a regular pace; but as a multi-headed guessing and predicting monster they need more, much more. It's harder to keep the interconnected viewing machine hooked without sacrificing the storytelling quality; and by upping the ante, many shows (not all, of course - see my collage for reference) are running the danger of either pushing themselves into a treacherous territory of nonsensical and forgettable ridiculousness or of running completely out of steam.
And it's not just me who sees the potentially suffocating aftermath of this trend. Now, the quote (finally):
"The newest, hottest TV-storytelling model is all about fan service, and it throws so much plot at viewers that the result sometimes recalls that old video game of the firefighter rushing up and down a sidewalk, catching falling babies in a basket."
Matt Zoller Seitz for New York Magazine
May 18 - May 31, 2015
"Data creation is exploding. With all the selfies and useless files people refuse to delete on the Cloud - 92% of the world's data was created in the last two years alone. At the current rate, the world's data storage capiacity will be overtaken by next Spring. It will be nothing short of a catastrophe: data shortages, data rationing, data black markets... Datageddon!"
Gavin Belson, founder & CEO of Hooli, Inc.
(Silicon Valley, co-created by Mike Judge, episode 2.1)
The Frustrated CFO's commentary: For years now, the genius that lives in my home has been responding to all innovations of information technology with the same mantra: "As long as the servers can bear it." I humbly concur. And it is reassuring that exactly the same sentiments are finally being verbalized through a pop-culture medium, such as HBO. It is especially awesome and scary that this confirmation of the imminent future comes courtesy of the prophetic marvel Mike Judge - the one third of, what I call, the Trinity of the Eye-Opening Truth (Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Mike Judge). It's scary because the man possesses Cassandra's foresight: In 2006 when the incredible cult classic Idiocracy came out, it was written off by distributors as a campy sci-fi; eight years later people started creating lists of Mike Judge's predictions that already came true: on birth rates, on advertising, on entertainment, on language, on political process, etc. Not everyone is as fortunate as I am to have a warning oracle at home. Hence, they should pay attention to Mr. Judge and his collaborators.
"Sarcasm is usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded."
F. M. Dostoyevsky
The Frustrated CFO Comment: As screwed up the world already was in the 19th century, it still retained some idealism, innocence, and purity of thought that is almost entirely destroyed in our post-post-modernist times. According to Fyodor Mikhailovich, then sarcasm was the last resort of a decent intellectual who couldn't take it anymore. Nowadays, practically everyone everywhere speak in sarcastic formulas. And maybe it is because people use sarcasm as a defense mechanism to shield their vulnerability, but I am more inclined to agree with one trustworthy social critic I personally know: She says that the pervasive sarcasm has replaced the last traces of genuineness the humanity kept shedding for the last 150 years. At this point, everything is so fake, sarcasm is the only manner of communication we are capable of employing. And that's why so frequently we have to reconfirm, "I meant what I said," especially if we are expressing something rare: gratitude, modesty, humility, appreciation.
The Frustrated CFO's Preface:
Seriously, guys, this just happened, like, 20 minutes ago (I had to scramble to make the picture). Quoted verbatim from an email sent by the CEO of an internationally-mixed company:
"Dear all,
In honor of Chinese New Year, the Year of Goat/Sheep/Lamb, we will have a Chinese lunch together to celebrate on Friday."
"Our modern life is such an unholy mix of voyeurism and exhibitionism. People are perpetually broadcasting their internal and external selves."
Stella Gibson
The Fall
Season 2, episode 4
Created, written,
and directed by
Allan Cubitt
The Frustrated CFO commentary:
When I heard these words spoken with a bitter sigh by Gillian Anderson I felt fortunate to have experienced once more the cultural sensation Alan Bennett described as the hand of an unknown but like-minded friend reaching out to you from far away. For confirmation, check out this post on social networking I wrote back in November 2013. You don't even have to bother yourself with all 1000+ words - just read the fourth paragraph.
I've never met you, Allan Cubitt, but you are my friend.
The Frustrated CFO's Preface:
Do you remember how in Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia (1993) Denzel Washington's character, an attorney Joe Miller, has the same request for everyone he is questioning: "Explain it to me like I am a four-year-old" (this is not the central quote of this post, by the way)? The phrase is used in a sarcastic, almost mocking, tone. Joe Miller implies that the subject matter is simple and obvious to everyone as is, but he wants to hear your version of it. Basically, it is an equivalent of "humor me" and it is a setup: you either going to admit his version of the truth or lie.
But the reality is that whatever it is you claim to know you actually should be able to break down into a comprehensive format digestible by, if not a four-year-old, but at the very least any layman. And if you cannot... here is the quote:
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
Albert Einstein