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The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

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Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#21

Post by jordwest »

mmooss wrote: post #11
vatys wrote: post #3

> “I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris or India in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.” Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity? I think now there is such a great…

IME, my impression, is that far more people today are in 'survival' mode - the fight/fligh/freeze response: not trying to create, build, and self-actualize but to survive, and ridiculing - as people in that mode do - art, humanities (and humanitarianism), knowledge, etc. Advocating the value in those things is now transgressive, IME. 'That's all pointless!' they say - and yes it's pointless if your only goal is to su…

In my experience, that attitude for me was due to the devaluing of spirituality and the resulting overemphasis on rationality.

Funny thing is in hindsight, I didn’t realise how much my “rational” attitude was informed by the Protestant work ethic pervading secular society. It’s like we threw away the god part but kept the part where we’re all “sinners” until we prove ourselves worthy through work.

Instead of appreciating the natural beauty in the world as it is, I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world. From that latter, small view, art was difficult to appreciate.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#22

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

vatys wrote: post #3

> “I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris or India in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.” Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity? I think now there is such a great…

It's simply impossible today, in the same way that my dad was able to pay his way through college with summer jobs is also impossible today.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#23

Post by newprint »

I live in Baltimore, home of Philip Glass (as far as I know, he still lives in Baltimore) and a lot of my friends went to a famous Peabody conservatory. Even after graduation, a lot of them either entirely left music or struggling musicians, who have blue collar jobs. I remember going to one the local bars and saw a girl working as bartender(she quite attractive), years before that, I saw her playing cello in one of the concerts.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#24

Post by uhmpire »

gedy wrote: post #5
ilamont wrote: post #4

Many of my cultural heroes were ignored by academia Ignored, or the jobs just weren't there? A department head once told me that she couldn't hire any new tenure-track faculty. Turnover at the school is so rare, and when a position does open up, there are literally hundreds of highly qualified applicants. It's been that way for decades, particularly in the humanities and arts. She noted that among the existing facult…

Yeah, I think a lot of people miss that these jobs opened up when the population was growing much faster due to the baby boom, plus people are living longer. Things have changed since the 1950s-80s.

Changing quickly now as the prior generation sat still collecting rent as long as possible, refusing to evolve themselves, and kept the next generation away from opportunities to evolve.

Teachers who just take public school jobs rather than start local learning programs and nurses who idle in hospitals rather than start some in-home nursing service for their community, academics whose careers stalled due to progress sit there reliving the same old routine blocking newcomers from moving through the pipeline

Whole lot of ossified minds in industry who need to get over coddling some sacrosanct story and identity and move along

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#25

Post by financltravsty »

l33tbro wrote: post #19
financltravsty wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your creativity is a composition of all the novel stimuli you experience. Going out into the sticks, while calming and healing for the soul, is artistic suicide.

Cormac McCarthy? Georgia O'Keeffe? Robert Johnson? Plenty of artists excel beyond the urban fringe.

I'm sorry, but I don't hold them in high regard as artists. They're part of the "western/southern frontier" crowd that encapsulated the zeitgeists of their environments, rather than create something that transcended it. The "frontier" is a notable and interesting subject in itself, but it has only peripheral cultural value to... civilization.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#26

Post by ghufran_syed »

gedy wrote: post #5
ilamont wrote: post #4

Many of my cultural heroes were ignored by academia Ignored, or the jobs just weren't there? A department head once told me that she couldn't hire any new tenure-track faculty. Turnover at the school is so rare, and when a position does open up, there are literally hundreds of highly qualified applicants. It's been that way for decades, particularly in the humanities and arts. She noted that among the existing facult…

Yeah, I think a lot of people miss that these jobs opened up when the population was growing much faster due to the baby boom, plus people are living longer. Things have changed since the 1950s-80s.

but people have more income now - surely working for uber or lyft today is the equivalent of driving a cab then?

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#27

Post by lalalandland »

l33tbro wrote: post #19
financltravsty wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your creativity is a composition of all the novel stimuli you experience. Going out into the sticks, while calming and healing for the soul, is artistic suicide.

Cormac McCarthy? Georgia O'Keeffe? Robert Johnson? Plenty of artists excel beyond the urban fringe.

Orchestral music composition and performance is quite different from painting and writing. When you are dependent on a large amounts of other highly skilled people to create and perform it makes it really hard to live out in nowhere.

These days internet and digital production can ease a lot of the rural isolation. But for many (most?) people it is essential to be in and around the art scene to be able to create and maintain focus and motivation to work on their art. Especially when starting a career it is important to meet and see other artists and art.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#28

Post by JKCalhoun »

joe5150 wrote: post #10
TrackerFF wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you could move out to rural nowhere, where housing costs next to nothing. Find some part time job, and live your life. I'm from a place like that, and a bunch of my old classmates from HS have lived like that their entire adult lives working part time. They work 2-3-4 days a week. Of course, you'll be sacrificing lots of materialistic things, but that's a given.

If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make any living this way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions like The Kitchen don't exist anymore.

> If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass.

I'm not so sure. A lot of art comes out of "affordable areas" — sometimes small college-town ghettos like Athens, Georgia, for example. Why couldn't we get a Philip Glass from Manhattan, Kansas?

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#29

Post by JKCalhoun »

baerrie wrote: post #7
vatys wrote: post #3

> “I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris or India in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.” Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity? I think now there is such a great…

In New York particularly this could maybe work. They have strong blue collar unions so benefits and pay would be actually livable. Plumbing anywhere is pretty viable. Faulkner worked in construction and did a similar thing. I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar

Glass learning plumbing by asking the guys working at the hardware store sounds more like handy-man work, not a union job.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#30

Post by bartonfink »

financltravsty wrote: post #25
l33tbro wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cormac McCarthy? Georgia O'Keeffe? Robert Johnson? Plenty of artists excel beyond the urban fringe.

I'm sorry, but I don't hold them in high regard as artists. They're part of the "western/southern frontier" crowd that encapsulated the zeitgeists of their environments, rather than create something that transcended it. The "frontier" is a notable and interesting subject in itself, but it has only peripheral cultural value to... civilization.

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