Here's my Friday eat-better rap:
"Just because you can
doesn't mean you should.
Too much food, like
too much information,
inundating calories
like bitz on the
Internetz.
The only thing worth having
in the face of the flood
is the mellow coolness,
the gentle true-ness
of radical moderation.
The perfect is the enemy
of
the
good."
I listened to Hamilton for the first time this morning, and it is so killing.
I love it whenever people spend years honing tools so diligently that they might "seriously play" their way into the cannon. In the process, they usually say something daringly fresh, in language that echoes our earliest cultural ancestors. At the same time, they speak directly to each of us, each of our current experiences.
Antique/new, subtle/bold, grooving/surprising, universal/personal.
Musical theater has it's fans, but I am not one. I always get the feeling that musical theater takes advantage of the "easiest" facets of music, story, and emotion. Disney isn't exactly known for it's subtelty.
On the other hand, the promise of musical theater is the same promise that makes (made?) dramatic performance, potentially, the pinnacle artistic experience. Nearly every aspect of theater/opera lends itself to artistic mastery. A great lighting designer can collaborate with a master composer and a dozen other committed, thinking artist-creator-performers and create a piece of art for the ages (Monteverdi? Wagner? Stravinsky? Puccini? Peter Sellars? Martha Graham? Quentin Tarrantino? ).
When they're new, the resulting art-works take the tools of Now and build work that is meaningful in a larger historical/cultural context. Like Chi-Raq earlier this year, Hamilton makes art with it's own medium.
If you are reading this while in any position other than about-to-fall-asleep, your "core" is firing. These muscles--not so unlike the smooth, always-working muscle of the neighboring digestive tract--are in near-constant chorus as they hold us upright and help us navigate our worlds. The sum of all that activity, in real-time and in response to real and changing stresses, is called posture.
A conversation with a friend recently yielded a similar description, though it was referring to the kind of mental discipline that we see in the more authentic/successful/happy people whom we interact with. These people stand out most because they just seem to make the right social/time-allotment/happiness decisions most of the time. They don't struggle with too much deliberation, but they also weigh options objectively and judiciously. How?
It seemed to us that this everyday wisdom came from a kind of mental discipline. Without clenching, these people are loosely focused on what's important to them, more or less all the time. They consider the impact of their choice, and they choose according to how their next step fits with the larger context lives. But most importantly, they don't commit themselves to the emotional attachments of certain decisions before they have had a chance to think objectively, even for an extra moment or two.
These folks express life-fitness because of their ability to be mentally strong in a simple, low-level, but critical way, all the time. They have great emotional posture.