Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

honest-broker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 106 posts

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#81

Post by vinceguidry »

kevinventullo wrote: post #78
creer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? It's still normal to have a "blue collar job", isn't it? Not to mention "retail"? Whether or not one is an artist. "Many" people do that and support their family that way. And it's still normal for artists to have a day job. Not just for young ones. I don't think the Philip Glass story is all that different from today's artists'. More retail, less steel mill. if anything, there is more awareness now…

I have no data to back it up, but my instinct is that “today’s artists” are increasingly supported by rich parents or spouses when compared with those of 50 years ago. This is a consequence of wealth concentration and the destruction of the middle class.

Err, for all of history and longer it's been that way.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#82

Post by JKCalhoun »

joe5150 wrote: post #61
JKCalhoun wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Why not indeed? If there is an orchestra's worth of musicians available and an audience there with the taste and curiosity necessary to support avant garde performing arts, anything can happen. It's easier now than ever to put a band together in your college town or even record and release music without ever leaving your bedroom, but beyond that scale you still need a critical mass of creative collaborators all in on…

Yeah, requiring an orchestra does sort of crimp your palette if that is what you do — compose for orchestras.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#83

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

vinceguidry wrote: post #81
kevinventullo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no data to back it up, but my instinct is that “today’s artists” are increasingly supported by rich parents or spouses when compared with those of 50 years ago. This is a consequence of wealth concentration and the destruction of the middle class.

Err, for all of history and longer it's been that way.

Indeed. There was this guy named Vincent Van Gogh, who lived on patronage and odd jobs, all his life.

If he could see the premium his work fetches, now, he’d probably be pissed. Gratified, but also pissed.

He had a rough life.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#84

Post by CalRobert »

TrackerFF wrote: post #6
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…

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.

I did that, and it was horrible. The people were nasty, mean, and intellectually incurious. Conformity was valued over all other traits.

Some places might be better, but this is a dangerous option.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#85

Post by jajko »

neaanopri wrote: post #54
debo_ wrote: post #46

> Just imagine reading Siddhartha or The Glass Bead Game at a steel mill—but that’s Philip Glass for you. I don't know what this means. I worked a lot of "blue collar jobs" in my time, and I'd often see people reading "serious books" on break. It's not uncommon. I read a lot of Hemingway because of recommendations I got from a dude I used to work with cleaning concrete truck drums with jackhammers.

I'd almost say high concept books pair better with blue collar work. I'm mentally exhausted after a day of meetings or programming, but if I'm doing manual labor I end up physically exhausted, not mentally exhausted

An age old wisdom - if you work manually, rest via mental efforts, and vice versa. For most HNers it means do tons of sweat inducing efforts, often, so mind can rest a bit and do some defragmentation, not leaving everything only for sleep.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#86

Post by Der_Einzige »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #17

His experiences are completely alien now and not reproducible today. How is it possible to get any blue collar job at all without extensive training and certifications on your own time and with your own money in that very specific field? How is it possible to not only be able to support your family on 3 working days per week, but to find a boss willing to hire you as a part time worker for what seems like a high wage…

The problem with allowing "too many" people to have "too much" money is that suddenly rich people have to gasp wait in line for things!

I guarantee you that a non zero amount of thought like this is in the hearts of folks making rate cut/hike decisions.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#87

Post by financltravsty »

cossatot wrote: post #52
financltravsty wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Much of O’Keeffe’s work relates to gender in a way that was counter to the zeitgeist of the contemporaneous southwest. Johnson more or less embodied a nascent Delta blues, defining it on wax, then died. It was too early in the codification for there be something to transcend. His career was like 9 months long. McCarthy I don’t know, can’t read because I don’t like the violence. Nonetheless your final point is far mor…

Now this is a good interpretation -- let me have breakfast and I will send a reply.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#88

Post by Der_Einzige »

lr4444lr wrote: post #48
paulpauper wrote: post #33

I don't know why people look down on trust-fund kids. Being born smart ,as this author clearly was- is just another innate advantage, like being born rich. It's that the latter is denigrated. High IQ, or music talent, or sports talent is just as unearned as having rich parents. Yet we're supposed to downplay or feel ashamed of the latter.

Because wealth, unlike those other things, is readily transferable by taxation to level the playing field. I don't necessarily agree it should be, but if we could sap intelligence or other skills from the gifted and spread them around to shore up deficient people, I bet there would be a faction of people supporting this as the moral thing to do: "why should talented musicians meet and mate and produce offspring who k…

This is 100% what Generative AI is doing and I am one of those people who "support this as a moral thing to do".

I would go as far as to claim that it's a moral bad as a creative to put a payway behind any of your work and those who subvert it (i.e. fine-tuning your likeness into a model) are doing ethically good work.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#89

Post by fuzzfactor »

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…

>Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity?

Not the exact same opportunities, but the same type.

The type of opportunities that work like this have never been there for the taking, only for the making.

Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

#90

Post by otterpro »

I think HN readers are missing the point. It's not about the money, or opportunity to (or lack of) make living off a blue collar job today.

Here's what I got from reading this article. No job is beneath me. I once scoffed at an opportunity to work at a supermarket when I was between employment. But looking back, maybe I should have. I believe strongly that everyone should work at least once in their lifetime to work at menial/low-level job. I think working at menial jobs like in retail when I was young helped me a lot, even though I didn't realize it at that moment. By working at minimum wage jobs at restaurant, retail, etc..., I've learned to respect others, no matter what they do for living, like a janitor or truck driver or a fastfood worker.

Also there is something about physical labor and working with your bare hands that makes me feel so alive and fulfilled.Perhaps, I am wired and built to work on physical things. Even as an old guy, since I started fixing physical things like broken toilet, or making physical things, even if it's just assembling Ikea furnitures, or tinkering with hardware, I feel more well and alive compared to when I'd been working as a dev. Maybe that is why some of high-level tech workers leave their high-paying career to work at a farm or become a truck driver.

Post reply on HN