So, the other day on Facebook, I posted this: "One of the many strange, frustrating tendencies that seem to have emerged among the last two years' worth of WSU students that I'd never experienced before them: when I assign a presentation or some other project that requires them to read the Course Calendar and choose a day and reading to present on, often at least 50% of the class will email me and just ask me to pick a day for them."
One of the comments I got almost immediately was from a former student, who said "I'm interested to know what you think motivates it? I don't think it's laziness, maybe indecisiveness?" My response, of course, was to devote way too much thought to answering his question and then write way too much about it in my blog...
My first semester at WSU, before I started teaching, I was required to take a seminar which was meant to serve as teacher training, among other things. The professor who taught this Methodology of Composition seminar talked a lot about how we should be kind and considerate and understanding toward our students, but that we should try to be aware of and should avoid encouraging what he called "the customer-service model of education." Basically, his argument was that an ever-increasing number of students come into college perceiving the entire college experience as, essentially, a monetary transaction: they give the university money, the university gives them a degree in return, and they then use that degree to make yet more money working somewhere else. College, for these students, was (we were told) merely one link in a chain of investments, and as such these students would be inclined to see you, as their English 101 instructor, as a small cog in the degree vending machine. If you reinforced this inclination by being too considerate of their needs (moreso than a supervisor or professor might be, more like how a waitress or customer service representative might be), then you ran the risk of them approaching their education (or at least your class as a small part of it) with a "the customer is always right" attitude and an expectation that you would reciprocate.
At the time, eight years ago, there seemed to me to be an obvious response to this: these students were clearly misunderstanding The Point of College, and there was no way I was going to approach teaching my courses as if I was trying to earn a tip from my "customers." At the time, eight years ago, I was sure that I was right, that college was really A Lofty Pursuit of Knowledge and Betterment and these potential students were wrong. Now, I'm not so sure anymore.
It turns out, a lot of students really only do come to college to get a degree so that they can get a particular job. They could care less about liberal arts requirements, on-campus cultural events, visiting speakers, foreign film festivals, and everything else. When I request that they "expand upon" a point in the third paragraph of their paper, they aren't interested in reading up any further on Michael Pollan's research on nutrition and culture for the mere sake of learning more; they want to know exactly how many more sentences they have to add in order to make sure that their GPA gets the boost it needs from my class.
Sure, I like the idea that I can be that Hollywood-movie-style teacher that is just so damn good at his job and so inspiring that he can turn this type of student into a wide-eyed academic that reads Joyce in his/her spare time, and cries when they hear Blake recited aloud, but there's a reason that that type of thing happens in movies: because it's an idealized view of real life. Well, that's not entirely true: very occasionally, something like this does happen to a student of mine, but when it does, it's just as much because of them and their interests, needs, personality, etc. as it is because of some Dead Poets Society vibe I might or might not be throwing off through my teaching. Some students are still open to the idea of college as a privilege to be taken advantage of and appreciated, as a place of potential growth where you can do and learn amazing things for four years because you're very very lucky to be living in a very particular place at a very particular time and with enough money in your pocket. It does seem to me that over the last eight years the number of these students have massively decreased, though, to be replaced by a lot of people who are just here to get their piece of paper and get out.
Do the members of the latter group treat me like a waiter or a customer service representative? Do they do things like emailing me and demanding that I pick their presentation date for them? Yeah, pretty frequently, but I'm sure that I exacerbate the problem by planning classes in which I make students responsible for their own successes and failures and require them to actually act like adults even when they're only (gasp!) 17.
But, I guess the reason that I'm writing all this is really because in thinking about the reasons why students might insist that I pick a presentation date for them, I'm realizing that I sympathize with them more than I expected to. Who can blame students for thinking about jobs before Aristotelian debates and slam poetry in our current economic climate? Who can blame students for feeling like a number (and responding in kind) when they attend a university with 30,000 students and the only teacher who actually knows their name for the entire four years is their English 101 teacher? And though I'm loathe to admit it, in my case at least, their English 101 teacher is currently teaching 166 students, and doing a job that takes at minimum 60 hours a week to complete in the most slapdash way possible while only getting paid for 27 of those hours, which means I'm often not exactly free to take the time and make the effort to make any of those individual students feel like I've done more than blasted through their papers at the last minute before collapsing into bed four hours before I have to teach again. I find that I'm coming to believe that the customer-service-mentality kids haven't decided to treat the university system like a Starbucks because they're all assholes who should know better. They've decided to treat the university system like a Starbucks because that's how the university system presents itself nowadays, probably because administrators and other higher-ups in universities make a hell of a lot more money that way than if they portray their schools as elite hidey-holes for people who like to not get paid that much to think all day long.
I'd have to say, then, that my bet would be that the kids demanding that I pick their presentation date for them aren't being lazy, or stupid, or purposely obtuse; rather, they just interpret any stutter, any uncertainty, any confusion in the running of the machinery of (in this case) Humanities 101 as an obvious failure on my part to give them the tools to smoothly navigate the diploma vending machine. I wouldn't doubt that the possibility that choosing a particular topic for their presentation, based on what they might be interested in or what they might be intrigued to learn more about never occurred to them; again, not because they're idiots, but because that's not what they're here for. Which sucks, because on a personal level, that is what I'm here for. But, when I look at the situation in high ed more generally, can I really blame them for prizing the product over the process?
Jan 10, 2013
Got No Sun-Time When She's Gone: Some Thoughts on Higher Education, Time Management, and The Descent Into Madness
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| This. This is what should be on my car. |
I got into education (and, specifically, English Literature) for all the usual humanity-y, hippie-y reasons, but also because I've always found the clock-in, clock-out, 9-to-5-job life horrifically crushing and depressing, and I liked the idea that a teacher/professor was able to make their own hours, to a degree. Now as anyone who works in higher ed knows, "make their own hours" usually ends up translating to "works 70 hours a week and gets paid for half of that." Seriously, most weeks I work somewhere between 55-70 hours (and sometimes well more than that!) and I get paid for 27.5 hours of that. The rest is work that isn't required, but that you're expected to do (by your department, your advisors, colleagues, and/or the field at large, depending on who you are, what you do, and where you work). The result is, by the standards of the workaday world (who likes to pick on people who "make their own hours" as people who don't actually work all that hard), I work full weeks and somewhere between 15-30 hours of overtime per week, just to make about $18,000 a year. Oh, and last summer I worked at least 40 hours a week every week but two, which I took off for my only vacation of the year, and I got paid for five weeks of that summer work, total.
This post isn't a complaint, though...or at least, if it is, the complaint is implicit in what I actually want to talk about. Seriously, the entire higher education system is absurdly fucked up and deserves a lot of serious critique and reform in a lot of areas including the way adjuncts and instructors are treated at most universities, but that's a rant for another day (maybe tomorrow?).
I love my job. I'm happy to do it. So happy, in fact, that I'll accept $18,000 a year to work for 3000 hours (that equates to a little under 66% of minimum wage, in case you were wondering). But so will a lot of other people, which is why I have absolutely no job security and my entire future goes up in the air every 8 months or so. I love my job so much that it's beginning to occur to me (thanks, in part to reading some of this blog over the last few days) that I could probably stand to love it a little less.
I'm a hard worker; Protestant work ethic and Midwest blue-collar and all that. When it comes to teaching and researching, I daresay that I'm a good worker. And yet, after eight years, my job continues to ask more and more of me, and I find that I can't afford to always say "yes" anymore. There are too many other things to do, too many other facets of life to experience, and, frankly, I really don't think anyone at my current job is going to care and nobody interviewing me for future jobs is going to notice if I only work, say, 45-50 hours of my 27.5 hour weeks from now on. I don't want to let my students or my colleagues down, but I suspect I've only ever avoided that by letting my friends, family, and myself down instead, by not making time for anything else but melting into an exhausted puddle in front of a stupid TV show at 10pm, after wrapping up my workday that started at 7am...for the fifth or sixth day in a row.
I talked about this issue with Lindsey a few nights ago and she suggested that I stop taking on so many projects, stop saying "yes" to everything. It was a good suggestion, but I've never been a "yes" man, really. I've turned down a lot of projects in the last six or so years, and never once have I regretted it, despite the fact that many of those projects went on to be quite successful. Generally if I take extra classes or grading jobs, it's not, honestly, out of the goodness of my heart, but because I need the money to get by. When someone offers me a place in a new project, or any other new responsibility, I find myself immediately weighing it against what I already have to do, and against what little free, "me" time I have. Sometimes the project is worth the sacrifice, sometimes not, but I've never felt compelled to accept something just to beef up my CV or pad my cover letter. If it's not something I can actually throw myself into and honestly care about (for whatever reason), then I don't bother.
I don't think my problem is that I take on too much. Rather, I think that I belabor what I do take on, often past the point of usefulness. The downside of all that touchy-feely, make-your-own-hours stuff that makes academia so great is the lack of concrete feedback on the work you're doing. How much class preparation is necessary? How many hours a night should you spend making lecture notes? How long should you spend commenting on student papers? These things, at some point, need to be broken down into a machinistic process, or else they get out of control. I once knew an MA student who spent an hour commenting on each of her students' papers. She had fifty students, and they each wrote six papers that semester. That's 300 hours in fifteen weeks just spent on grading. She was also teaching two classes and taking three graduate seminars. She wasn't especially off her rocker (any more than any of us are), she just couldn't bring herself to invest less than that in her students, and there's no mechanism in place (officially or unofficially) to tell someone when to stop grading, when to stop planning...you do it all by feel, and when something doesn't work out, it's all too easy to assume it's because you didn't work hard (read: long) enough.
After eight years of teaching, I have a fairly good handle on how hard to work on my classes. Sure, my students (some of them, anyway) deserve a lot of effort, and I'm willing to give that to them. But, as I've come to realize, they also deserve the energy and attentiveness that comes from being an instructor who's functioning on more than three hours of sleep, who is especially excited to talk about the reading on, say, Ed Abbey today because he just spent the weekend in the mountains, backpacking and reading Desert Solitaire. It's really not just Work Really Hard, but rather Work Hard combined with a bit of Don't Be Insane.
I have a lot more trouble, though, with the research/professionalization end of the spectrum. Last year I applied for nearly 100 jobs (out of fear of ending up unemployed the day after graduation). These are academic jobs, mind you, that require, generally, a whole portfolio's worth of documents to be mailed. Not only did this almost break me financially, I almost didn't finish my dissertation on time as a result. This year, I'm sending out far less (around 40 or 50), but the downside is that I'm much less likely to actually get interviews. Similarly, from about 2007 to 2010, I regularly sent out articles for potential publication (usually around three a year) and tried to attend 4 conferences a year, at least. Since then, the dissertation and the ensuing job search and increased class load has made that more or less impossible...but if I had the time I'd probably still be at it. There are so many avenues in this job where a "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" approach works that it's hard to not just adopt that attitude. The more article proposals I send out, the better chance I have of getting published. The more job applications I send out, the more likely it is that I'll get hired. The more conferences I attend, the more likely I'll be to be seen as a member of "the conversation." The problem is, there are no real rules on how many of these things, how much, you really should or can do beyond your own common sense. And when you begin to be driven by a fear of pending unemployment, when you can't afford clothes that aren't used and your girlfriend can't pay for her asthma medication, common sense starts to fly out the window.
All that said, I'm taking another stab at the whole damn thing. This semester, I teach three classes, back-to-back-to-back, until noon on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For the rest of the day, until 6:30pm at the absolute latest, I will be preparing for the next class period and doing other teaching-related work. Tuesdays and Thursdays, during normal work hours (9-6 or 10-7) I will be doing research-related work. If there is any overflow, I'll be dealing with it for a few hours on Saturday, but otherwise, I'm going to try to take weekends off. I am going to live like a human being, and, if my career refuses to allow me to do that, well, then I'll just find a new one. I want to do this for the rest of my life, but I don't want it to be the rest of my life.
Jan 8, 2013
Review (sort of): A few more thoughts on The Hobbit
So since the first time I saw The Hobbit, I've seen it a thousand more times. Well, no, not really, but I have seen it two more times. The first time Lindsey and I saw was here in Pullman, in good ol' 2D. I liked it a lot (though I had various reservations that I detailed in the linked post above), and I understood that just like any good piece of media/work of art it would probably reveal a lot more nuance and detail with further viewings. Fortunately, just a few days after our first viewing, we were headed up to the Spokane area for Christmas, and so we were able to catch the film again at the Spokane AMC 20, first in 3D HFR and then in 3D IMAX.
First thing's first: the 3D HFR is amazing and anyone who thinks otherwise (except for people who literally get motion-sick watching it, I suppose) is crazy. Sure, everything looks a little sped-up and like watching the BBC for a few minutes, but after that I found that I stopped noticing and just really got immersed in the story and the much-more-beautiful visuals. I imagine if you just sit in the theater and think "Is this 48fps thing shitty or not?" for the entire film, 48fps might rub you the wrong way, but if that's your primary concern, you probably don't belong in a movie theater in the first place. Sure, it was weird until I got used to it (again, this took about five minutes), but watching the 24fps IMAX version a few days later was weird and seemed slow and washed-out-looking for a few minutes until I got used to it. I certainly don't brood over how lame 24fps is now as a result. Or DO I?!
Anyway, the big difference with 48fps is the reduction in motion blur. This is incredibly, incredibly important (according to my own eyes, at least) for today's movies because it improves two things: 1) CGI effects and 2) 3D. For example, I was amazed at how much clearer the huge, sprawling action scenes featuring the goblins were to follow in the 48fps version. Pretty much every effect in the film looked less like an effect than something that was actually happening. In 48fps, the Goblin King moves realistically. So do the trolls. It's creepy, but not in an Uncanny Valley sort of way. It's creepy because the pretend things look real. And it's awesome. Someone, in another review I read, likened seeing The Hobbit in 48fps to seeing color TV for the first time after using black-and-white sets for years. That's definitely how I felt walking out of the movie afterward. Sure, 48fps is technically "unnecessary," but the bias against it is really obviously just habit talking, and that's never good. I could definitely see it not adding that much to, say, a non-CGI character drama, technically speaking. But after having seen something on the order of hundreds of CG-powered films over the last decade or so, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that 48fps would have made all of those films look less cheesy, fake, etc. It really allows CG effects to shine through in higher detail, and it's just awesome. Same thing with regard to 3D: with the eye more able to follow less motion-blurred action, 3D becomes a joy instead of a chore. It doesn't seem like a gimmick in The Hobbit, because the effects in The Hobbit don't look like a gimmick. So yeah. 3D HFR was amazing, and I hope that at some point in the future I'll be able to look back and remember what it was like to see a 48fps movie before everything was shot in 48fps.
The IMAX showing was cool, but it wasn't a full, reclining-seat, screen-above-you IMAX, just a really big screen. The theater had really awesome surround sound, and the big, curved screen seemed to add a little more depth to the 3D (which served to make the film look just a little more like an actual three dimensional stage play or something instead of a movie where something occasionally pops out at you). 3D HFR was much better, though, in my opinion.
In terms of the film itself, I found that by the end of the third viewing, I was seriously considering The Hobbit as a contender for the best of the four so-far-released Peter Jackson Middle Earth films. I still doubt that the trilogy as a whole is going to stand up as well as the original LotR film trilogy (because the source material is weaker and the success of the later installments are going to depend more heavily on Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's appendices, which has so far been strong but not strong enough to carry a film). But, this is just a damn fun and at times highly affecting movie to watch (at least if you're a Tolkien fan).
In 48fps, a lot of the ridiculous action scenes were a lot easier to follow and thus it was much easier to see that there was a logical (if not entirely plausible, still) flow to their movement. After three viewings, I really came to appreciate how things like Radagast's inclusion and Azog as the primary antagonist actually served to make the story more cohesive. Reading The Hobbit (which I did twice recently), I was surprised to rediscover how random every chapter (each of which are almost separate episodes loosely connected to one another) seemed; unless of course you know the backstory. Working under the assumption that much of the film's audience wouldn't know this backstory (and how many critics that have panned the film really obviously don't even know the book, despite critiquing the film's status as an adaptation?), Jackson and crew integrated a lot of that backstory nicely, making a story that functions satisfyingly on its own and as part of a larger tale, neither of which are things that the original book does that well (and I write that as a huge Tolkien and Hobbit fan).
Upon more viewings, my nitpicks regarding the stone giants, Mario Bros. platforming and such faded into the background as the many positive aspects of the film came to the fore. And really, how reasonable is it to pick on this film for Jackson's occasional action-scene excesses while holding up Return of the King as Best Picture material despite Legolas's Mumakil antics and some of the other more absurd things that happen in that film? Even after seeing the film three times, hearing Ian Holm recite the opening lines of the book, seeing Bilbo decide to spare Gollum before leaping over him to join his friends, and seeing Thorin embrace Bilbo at the end (to applause from around the theater, in one instance) all brought a tear to my eye (again). It's a great movie. It's even better in HFR. Can't wait for the Extended Edition DVD that I'm sure is coming.
First thing's first: the 3D HFR is amazing and anyone who thinks otherwise (except for people who literally get motion-sick watching it, I suppose) is crazy. Sure, everything looks a little sped-up and like watching the BBC for a few minutes, but after that I found that I stopped noticing and just really got immersed in the story and the much-more-beautiful visuals. I imagine if you just sit in the theater and think "Is this 48fps thing shitty or not?" for the entire film, 48fps might rub you the wrong way, but if that's your primary concern, you probably don't belong in a movie theater in the first place. Sure, it was weird until I got used to it (again, this took about five minutes), but watching the 24fps IMAX version a few days later was weird and seemed slow and washed-out-looking for a few minutes until I got used to it. I certainly don't brood over how lame 24fps is now as a result. Or DO I?!
Anyway, the big difference with 48fps is the reduction in motion blur. This is incredibly, incredibly important (according to my own eyes, at least) for today's movies because it improves two things: 1) CGI effects and 2) 3D. For example, I was amazed at how much clearer the huge, sprawling action scenes featuring the goblins were to follow in the 48fps version. Pretty much every effect in the film looked less like an effect than something that was actually happening. In 48fps, the Goblin King moves realistically. So do the trolls. It's creepy, but not in an Uncanny Valley sort of way. It's creepy because the pretend things look real. And it's awesome. Someone, in another review I read, likened seeing The Hobbit in 48fps to seeing color TV for the first time after using black-and-white sets for years. That's definitely how I felt walking out of the movie afterward. Sure, 48fps is technically "unnecessary," but the bias against it is really obviously just habit talking, and that's never good. I could definitely see it not adding that much to, say, a non-CGI character drama, technically speaking. But after having seen something on the order of hundreds of CG-powered films over the last decade or so, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that 48fps would have made all of those films look less cheesy, fake, etc. It really allows CG effects to shine through in higher detail, and it's just awesome. Same thing with regard to 3D: with the eye more able to follow less motion-blurred action, 3D becomes a joy instead of a chore. It doesn't seem like a gimmick in The Hobbit, because the effects in The Hobbit don't look like a gimmick. So yeah. 3D HFR was amazing, and I hope that at some point in the future I'll be able to look back and remember what it was like to see a 48fps movie before everything was shot in 48fps.
The IMAX showing was cool, but it wasn't a full, reclining-seat, screen-above-you IMAX, just a really big screen. The theater had really awesome surround sound, and the big, curved screen seemed to add a little more depth to the 3D (which served to make the film look just a little more like an actual three dimensional stage play or something instead of a movie where something occasionally pops out at you). 3D HFR was much better, though, in my opinion.
In terms of the film itself, I found that by the end of the third viewing, I was seriously considering The Hobbit as a contender for the best of the four so-far-released Peter Jackson Middle Earth films. I still doubt that the trilogy as a whole is going to stand up as well as the original LotR film trilogy (because the source material is weaker and the success of the later installments are going to depend more heavily on Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's appendices, which has so far been strong but not strong enough to carry a film). But, this is just a damn fun and at times highly affecting movie to watch (at least if you're a Tolkien fan).
In 48fps, a lot of the ridiculous action scenes were a lot easier to follow and thus it was much easier to see that there was a logical (if not entirely plausible, still) flow to their movement. After three viewings, I really came to appreciate how things like Radagast's inclusion and Azog as the primary antagonist actually served to make the story more cohesive. Reading The Hobbit (which I did twice recently), I was surprised to rediscover how random every chapter (each of which are almost separate episodes loosely connected to one another) seemed; unless of course you know the backstory. Working under the assumption that much of the film's audience wouldn't know this backstory (and how many critics that have panned the film really obviously don't even know the book, despite critiquing the film's status as an adaptation?), Jackson and crew integrated a lot of that backstory nicely, making a story that functions satisfyingly on its own and as part of a larger tale, neither of which are things that the original book does that well (and I write that as a huge Tolkien and Hobbit fan).
Upon more viewings, my nitpicks regarding the stone giants, Mario Bros. platforming and such faded into the background as the many positive aspects of the film came to the fore. And really, how reasonable is it to pick on this film for Jackson's occasional action-scene excesses while holding up Return of the King as Best Picture material despite Legolas's Mumakil antics and some of the other more absurd things that happen in that film? Even after seeing the film three times, hearing Ian Holm recite the opening lines of the book, seeing Bilbo decide to spare Gollum before leaping over him to join his friends, and seeing Thorin embrace Bilbo at the end (to applause from around the theater, in one instance) all brought a tear to my eye (again). It's a great movie. It's even better in HFR. Can't wait for the Extended Edition DVD that I'm sure is coming.
Jan 2, 2013
Review: Phish MSG NYE (webcast)
Motivated by the teeth-grinding frustration of missing Phish's stand at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium this summer due to a work-related scheduling snafu (I had the tickets in my hand and everything), I had originally intended to just blow a bunch of the money I've managed to save over the last few years and go see the band at Madison Square Garden over New Year's to make myself feel better. It's long been a dream of mine to see the band in New York, playing their signature NYE run, and this year I was finally in a position to (maybe) realize that dream. Unfortunately, tickets were much harder to come by than I had imagined, and I couldn't actually afford to buy a plane ticket, reserve a hotel for four days, and pay StubHub prices for four nights' worth of shows. My backup-backup plan, then, was to watch all four shows at my house through the LivePhish webcast. However, Lindsey and I had much more fun in Montana over Christmas than we imagined we would, and as a result we didn't get back to Pullman (or anywhere with internet for that matter) until late on the 30th. Therefore, my backup-backup-backup plan became to download the first three nights of the run after the fact and watch only the NYE show through the webcast. It was the next best thing to being there even though it very obviously wasn't being there.
I've watched a few Phish webcasts before, and this one was of even higher audio/video quality than the ones I'd seen before. Streaming it over my computer while running the video through my 36-inch TV and running the audio through my fancy turntable-sound-setup was pretty much analogous to watching a concert DVD. Plus, it was oddly weird and fun to be able to pick up my guitar and jam along with Trey as he played in real time on the other side of the country. Weird. The only thing that really bugged me about the webcast was the price. For $20, I feel like I should get to keep the stream after I've watched it. Hell, that's well over the cost of most DVDs today, and yet you watch the show and then that's it...poof, it's gone. I feel like they should either drop the webcast price a bit ($10 or $15) dollars in the future, or keep it where it is or raise it slightly ($20-$25) and let you download an .mp4 version afterward or maybe at least give you a complimentary version of the show's .mp3 recording or something. I paid way less than $20 to see The Hobbit in 3D on an Imax screen in a huge theater (and the two experiences were nearly equal in length, if you're considering the price point from a quantitative rather than qualitative angle). $20 just seems like a lot. On the other hand, had I purchased all four shows (for the marked-down bulk price of $58) it wouldn't have seemed like a rip-off...after all, that's about the price of a ticket for one show, to be able to watch four shows in the comfort of your home. It was nice to be able to get up whenever I wanted to go to a bathroom with no line, to be able to go make a sandwich during setbreak and not worry about paying $10 for a cookie and losing my place at the rail in the process...
Anyway, the show.
The show itself was, it seemed to me, a fitting close to 2012, the best year thus far of 3.0 (and, of course, the only year of 3.0 in which I failed to see a single show). I was hoping to see some monster jams, especially after what I'd heard of 12/28 and 12/30, but I wasn't really surprised that they didn't materialize. NYE is a three-set monster every year, but it's always more a celebration, a party, than a deconstruction of song or an abstract ambient meltdown. It's the one Phish show of the year that's entirely about fun, and not much else. And in that regard, it lived up to its own hype. It was a very fun show from front to back, featuring a lot of good song selections, some great antics, a few genuinely touching moments, and, yes, a few solid jams (though those who demand that their jams have to run over 20+ minutes to be worth anything will disagree, I'm sure).
The show opened with a cover of Ricky Nelson's "Garden Party," a song I wasn't familiar with, but fit so well with the Phish sound that as it started I thought maybe it was a new original. The lyrics were appropriate, referencing the (Madison Square) Garden party and featuring some unsubtle digs at the band's desire to keep playing what they want to play regardless of what overanalyzing bloggers might think of 3.0. It was the semi-playful "fuck you" to their detractors that Phish has always excelled at, and it was a good song to boot.
The first set was, predictably, largely song-based, and though I was happy to hear "Roses Are Free," nothing interesting happened for the first bit aside from some extra-clever Trey soloing in "Sample." Then the "Mike's" hit and things started to get good-weird. "Mike's" proper stayed within the usual boundaries, though Trey brought a little extra to the guitar-heavy jam, but it was the unexpected segue into "Walk Away" that really got things going. It's one of my favorite currently-popular Phish covers and it was neat to have it pop up in such an unexpected place.
I was a bit disappointed when, just as things seemed to be taking off, "Walk Away" fizzled out, leaving Mike's Groove incomplete (at least momentarily). Fortunately, the "Weekapaug" that came out of this rare mid-Mike's break in the action was quite possibly the highlight of the night, and more evidence that we don't necessarily need 20+ minute versions of songs to get some fascinating improvisation.
This version goes places in eight minutes that a lot of versions don't in three times that much time.
A messy "Character Zero" followed to end the first set, and then we were on to the second set, where the only real spaciness of the night would occur. Things started off excitedly (for me) with "Birds of a Feather" and the hope that its being placed in the first slot of the second set meant we might see a monster version. The band ended up settling on a pretty rote reading of the song, though, and then launched, unceremoniously, into "Ghost," their go-to NYE jam.
This "Ghost" was nothing stratospheric by any means (see the '10 NYE "Ghost" for an example of what I'm talking about), and on its own, it's just an average-good jam, but paired with the "Piper" that followed, it works as a single piece of music that's right up there with some of the band's better work this year.
I like the "Weekapaug" better because it's a little weirder; nothing really happens in the "Ghost" > "Piper" that hasn't been done before, but it hangs together really well and the minute or two of blissed-out ambiance that bridges the two pieces are easily the best part of the night, taken alone.
"Piper" ran right into "Light" which continued into "2001." Really, it's easy to imagine a "Ghost" > "Piper" > "Light" > "2001" set that runs for 90 minutes all by itself, isn't it? That isn't what happened here, but a guy can dream. Anyway, that second half of this segue-fest was a great time, even if "Light" was a much more straightforward reading than most of its other '12 takes.
The segue into "The Horse" was pretty unexpected and well-done, and it's always a treat to hear a decently-played "Silent in the Morning."
The third set was big on antics, of course, featuring "Kung" and then an actual "runaway golf cart marathon" that took place during "Chalkdust Torture" and "Tweezer Reprise." As usual (for me at least), it was hard to really understand what the point of the NYE gag was until after the fact; at the time it just looked like a lot of people on stage dancing and being goofy while the band desperately tried to play their instruments as ping pong balls rained down on them from the ceiling (Fishman was especially hilarious in this regard). There were no real musical high points in the third set, but again, that's sort of to be expected. The antics highlights for me were (for sure) the covers of "Fly Like an Eagle" and "Iron Man," and the acapella version of "Lawn Boy" was a unique (and thematically appropriate) way to end the third set.
Anyway, as I said, this was a fun show. Likely more fun to watch than it will be to relisten to a few months or years from now. There are a few legit musical highlights, but mostly it was just a fitting send off to 2012 featuring a lot of goofiness and solidly played, fun, danceable songs.
While I wait for my next chance to catch up with the band (likely in June, I hope), I'll be listening to and doing short reviews of as many of 3.0's shows as possible. I already gave 3/6/09 a relisten the other day and will have my (much briefer) thoughts on it up shortly. I've never really listened to much of '09 and '10 except for the shows I attended, so I'm excited to dig up the gems that I'm sure exist inside these often-maligned touring years (really, the 3/6/09 "Tweezer" is the fucking shit, and should probably be recognized as such).
I've watched a few Phish webcasts before, and this one was of even higher audio/video quality than the ones I'd seen before. Streaming it over my computer while running the video through my 36-inch TV and running the audio through my fancy turntable-sound-setup was pretty much analogous to watching a concert DVD. Plus, it was oddly weird and fun to be able to pick up my guitar and jam along with Trey as he played in real time on the other side of the country. Weird. The only thing that really bugged me about the webcast was the price. For $20, I feel like I should get to keep the stream after I've watched it. Hell, that's well over the cost of most DVDs today, and yet you watch the show and then that's it...poof, it's gone. I feel like they should either drop the webcast price a bit ($10 or $15) dollars in the future, or keep it where it is or raise it slightly ($20-$25) and let you download an .mp4 version afterward or maybe at least give you a complimentary version of the show's .mp3 recording or something. I paid way less than $20 to see The Hobbit in 3D on an Imax screen in a huge theater (and the two experiences were nearly equal in length, if you're considering the price point from a quantitative rather than qualitative angle). $20 just seems like a lot. On the other hand, had I purchased all four shows (for the marked-down bulk price of $58) it wouldn't have seemed like a rip-off...after all, that's about the price of a ticket for one show, to be able to watch four shows in the comfort of your home. It was nice to be able to get up whenever I wanted to go to a bathroom with no line, to be able to go make a sandwich during setbreak and not worry about paying $10 for a cookie and losing my place at the rail in the process...
Anyway, the show.
The show itself was, it seemed to me, a fitting close to 2012, the best year thus far of 3.0 (and, of course, the only year of 3.0 in which I failed to see a single show). I was hoping to see some monster jams, especially after what I'd heard of 12/28 and 12/30, but I wasn't really surprised that they didn't materialize. NYE is a three-set monster every year, but it's always more a celebration, a party, than a deconstruction of song or an abstract ambient meltdown. It's the one Phish show of the year that's entirely about fun, and not much else. And in that regard, it lived up to its own hype. It was a very fun show from front to back, featuring a lot of good song selections, some great antics, a few genuinely touching moments, and, yes, a few solid jams (though those who demand that their jams have to run over 20+ minutes to be worth anything will disagree, I'm sure).
The show opened with a cover of Ricky Nelson's "Garden Party," a song I wasn't familiar with, but fit so well with the Phish sound that as it started I thought maybe it was a new original. The lyrics were appropriate, referencing the (Madison Square) Garden party and featuring some unsubtle digs at the band's desire to keep playing what they want to play regardless of what overanalyzing bloggers might think of 3.0. It was the semi-playful "fuck you" to their detractors that Phish has always excelled at, and it was a good song to boot.
The first set was, predictably, largely song-based, and though I was happy to hear "Roses Are Free," nothing interesting happened for the first bit aside from some extra-clever Trey soloing in "Sample." Then the "Mike's" hit and things started to get good-weird. "Mike's" proper stayed within the usual boundaries, though Trey brought a little extra to the guitar-heavy jam, but it was the unexpected segue into "Walk Away" that really got things going. It's one of my favorite currently-popular Phish covers and it was neat to have it pop up in such an unexpected place.
A messy "Character Zero" followed to end the first set, and then we were on to the second set, where the only real spaciness of the night would occur. Things started off excitedly (for me) with "Birds of a Feather" and the hope that its being placed in the first slot of the second set meant we might see a monster version. The band ended up settling on a pretty rote reading of the song, though, and then launched, unceremoniously, into "Ghost," their go-to NYE jam.
This "Ghost" was nothing stratospheric by any means (see the '10 NYE "Ghost" for an example of what I'm talking about), and on its own, it's just an average-good jam, but paired with the "Piper" that followed, it works as a single piece of music that's right up there with some of the band's better work this year.
"Piper" ran right into "Light" which continued into "2001." Really, it's easy to imagine a "Ghost" > "Piper" > "Light" > "2001" set that runs for 90 minutes all by itself, isn't it? That isn't what happened here, but a guy can dream. Anyway, that second half of this segue-fest was a great time, even if "Light" was a much more straightforward reading than most of its other '12 takes.
The third set was big on antics, of course, featuring "Kung" and then an actual "runaway golf cart marathon" that took place during "Chalkdust Torture" and "Tweezer Reprise." As usual (for me at least), it was hard to really understand what the point of the NYE gag was until after the fact; at the time it just looked like a lot of people on stage dancing and being goofy while the band desperately tried to play their instruments as ping pong balls rained down on them from the ceiling (Fishman was especially hilarious in this regard). There were no real musical high points in the third set, but again, that's sort of to be expected. The antics highlights for me were (for sure) the covers of "Fly Like an Eagle" and "Iron Man," and the acapella version of "Lawn Boy" was a unique (and thematically appropriate) way to end the third set.
Anyway, as I said, this was a fun show. Likely more fun to watch than it will be to relisten to a few months or years from now. There are a few legit musical highlights, but mostly it was just a fitting send off to 2012 featuring a lot of goofiness and solidly played, fun, danceable songs.
While I wait for my next chance to catch up with the band (likely in June, I hope), I'll be listening to and doing short reviews of as many of 3.0's shows as possible. I already gave 3/6/09 a relisten the other day and will have my (much briefer) thoughts on it up shortly. I've never really listened to much of '09 and '10 except for the shows I attended, so I'm excited to dig up the gems that I'm sure exist inside these often-maligned touring years (really, the 3/6/09 "Tweezer" is the fucking shit, and should probably be recognized as such).
Dec 18, 2012
REVIEW #1: The Hobbit
So, I plan to see The Hobbit a few more times (including in fancy-shmancy 48fps 3D), but I saw it last night in standard 2D and wanted to get some thoughts down on the first viewing before I saw it again (sorry, non-Phish people). I'll do this in bullet-pointy fashion, so as to encourage myself to get back to lesson planning for my spring courses ASAP:
- My overall response is "I loved it, it was great, and I want to see it millions of times."
- I also feel, though (and have always felt), that LotR is a much more interesting and better story (based on my preferences) and while the Hobbit book will always have a warm, fuzzy spot in my heart, I know that I'll never quite like the film adaptation as much as I liked the LotR film adaptations, simply because the base story isn't as interesting to me. It's like being asked to choose between adaptations of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet; you might make the best R+J adaptation ever, but on some level it's never going to match the quality of an average-great adaptation of Hamlet, because there's just not as much to work with.
- The casting, especially Martin Freeman as Bilbo, was pretty much flawless. Do they give Academy Awards for casting? I hope so.
- Richard Armitage as Thorin was just as good as the internet said he was going to be.
- The Hobbit book presents a slightly (but importantly) different Gandalf than the LotR books do. I was glad to see Ian McKellan (and, I'm sure, everyone else on the film crew who contributed to his performance) showing an awareness of this in the movie. It's the same old Gandalf, but also different enough in the ways that matter that it doesn't seem like McKellan is just taking a victory lap with the character (not that I ever imagined he would).
- I felt like many of the dwarves were each distinct entities in the film (which is something that Tolkien didn't even achieve in the book), and I have a feeling that the ones who weren't fleshed-out in this film will be in the following films.
- There were a lot more diversions from the book than I expected. Mostly, this was actually great. The framing at the beginning of the whole story as being told to Frodo by Bilbo right before Bilbo's birthday party was a great touch (including the amazing introduction of pre-invasion Erebor!), and a lot of the smaller gestures to the larger story of the coming War of the Ring (White Council, Necromancer) were great. Radagast was a nice inclusion, even if he was a bit overly goofy (I saw his added rabbit-chase scene referred to in one review as "a Benny Hill chase scene" and I can't disagree).
- Much of the added material did come from Tolkein's appendices or was just a logical extension of the shorter, less visual Hobbit book, but when Jackson and crew went beyond that, it resulted in the only parts of the movie I actively didn't like. The added warg/goblin battle (before finding the cave) seemed oddly out of place and strangely paced (and I thought this before realizing that it was, in fact, an added scene not taken from Tolkien's material). The subplot with Azog also rubbed me the wrong way since it essentially rewrote an important character directly against how he is described in the original appendices. I appreciate the need for a primary antagonist to make the film a bit more accessible to non-nerds, but couldn't it at least have been Bolg, Azog's son (who actually shows up later in the book) that followed Thorin, maybe holding a grudge for the fact that Thorin's sort-of relative Dain killed his dad in the past? It just seemed silly to include Azog when he was supposed to be dead, and made it hard to not see him as a bland, Big Boss character. Thorin's story already has enough pathos as it is, we didn't really need a Megatron-orc for him to fight against.
- Less of a bummer, but still a slight annoyance: the preponderance of scenes in which dwarves, hobbits, and other characters swung around on platforms above precipitous drops and/or fell hundreds of feet while bouncing off of sharp rocks, all without being hurt. I understand that the action scenes needed to be a bit expanded based on how Tolkein described them (or didn't, really) in the book, but did they all have to be turned in levels from Super Mario Bros.? The stone giant battle, for example, was visually awesome, but I was really jerked out of the immersion of the scene by the ridiculous-ass bullshit the dwarves and Bilbo had to go through (again, not in the book!) to survive.
- Overall, though, I felt like all the added material (except for action bits that were just added to make everything more action-y and, by extension, cheesier) was meant to tie these films more firmly to the LotR trilogy, and that was actually really effective. If things continue as they are, I could see all six eventual films working much more cohesively as a whole than the original books do, which would be a Neat Thing. The movies seem less to be about adapting a faithful version of The Hobbit and more about serving as the first half of a six-part story about the War of the Ring. And I don't really think that that's a bad thing.
- On the other hand, a lot of the big scenes were done almost completely as-is from the book, which was great. There seemed to be a sense that there were some things that couldn't be altered, such as the long, slow introduction to the beginning of Bilbo's quest (which was not too long, despite what trigger-happy movies critics seem to think...have they even ever read the book?), the trolls, Riddles in the Dark, etc.
- The music was great. Listening to the soundtrack again tonight. That's all.
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