Can story be sustainable?
messsy will drop every two weeks—that’s sustainable for me
I couldn’t help it — I binged the first half of the last season of Ozark in a weekend.
How quickly have you binged the latest season of your fave show?
Was it 6 episodes or 8 or 10? Did you watch it in less than a day?
Imagine about 100 people working on each hour of that show for about a week. This doesn’t include writers, directors, producers, post production, who work longer on script, casting, logistics and editing—just actors and production crew.
A shoot day is 12 hours minimum, but usually more for most crew and sometimes more for everyone. For an episodic one-hour, conservatively, we are talking more than 1200 human hours to shoot one episode of your favorite series. If we add in prep and post, this increases exponentially.
I find myself wondering: Is this healthy? Not just, is it healthy for me, but is it healthy for us, collectively? Is it sustainable to consume content at this rate?
And if story is so incredibly and unforgivingly labor-intensive, who is getting to tell these stories?
To work in film and television, it’s a requirement to work a minimum of 12 hours/day, 5 days a week. It’s often more like 15 hours a day, 6 days/week. I have worked many 100-hour weeks.
With a 60-hour base week, many people are organically excluded from this kind of work. Like single parents. Almost every disabled person. Older folks. Anyone without a safety net to rely on during fallow work seasons.
That means that our cultural collective consciousness is being constructed by a very limited subset of our identities. The process itself excludes multple points of view.
How does this affect the stories we tell?
How does story intersect privilege and access?
Can telling our stories correct for deficiencies in these?
Upcycling Gaughin
I’ve never been about Gaughin. I have no idea why I chose to do an Art Hum paper about Ia Orana Maria. I stood at the Met studying this tropical version of a Madonna and child painting with its classical theme and circular composition for hours and hours trying to figure out what was intersting about it.
A lot of words that now come to mind when viewing Gaughin were not yet in my toolbox…
So how refreshing is it to see the work of Yuki Kihara that is part of this year’s Venice Biennale? (Even if it’s not in person and just online.)
In the exhibit Paradise Camp, Kihara “upcycles” Gaughin’s works. Kihara is a Pacific indigenous artist. She is from the Samoan Faʻafafine community of folks who are assigned male and express female. There’s a great interview with the artist in Sleek magazine.
When I look at the work of Yuki Kihara, I feel the sense of coming full circle with these paintings. Not so much upcycling as repair.
Sexy cannolo
Some of my earliest memories are of going with my grandparents to Little Italy in NYC. There’d always be a stop at Ferrara’s and always a cannoli!
This BBC Travel article about the origins of the favorite dessert of Sicilians is fascinating and offers a glimpse of the cultural overlays that permeate the island.
I’ve been enjoying hearing from folks. Please do leave comments or message me!
Got Damn!
Hi Beth! What a thoughtful email offering, thank you! It’s been sooo long! Hope you are well and thriving, and still writing/reading your wonderful poetry. Much love and happy holidays! XxO