It's My Fault; I Broke the World

Let's supply some context, shall we?

There are those things that, when we are young, we swear we will never do. Or was that just me?
Well, no, I remember being in 5th or 6th grade and there being some kind of conversation about smoking and how bad it is for people... Just to be clear, this was not health class or anything like that. It wasn't a class lesson. It was a conversation that involved our teacher and was, maybe, initiated by a question from a student? Look, it was a long time ago, and I don't really remember how that happened, but I do remember basically every kid in the class swearing how they would never smoke. Ever. And I never have; who knows about the rest.
[And, hey, smoking is just a very hard line for me. Like being a Republican. If you want to kill yourself slowly, you're free to go about doing that, but leave me out of it.]

Most of those kinds of things I swore off were more personal kinds of decisions. Like deciding, when I was somewhere around the age of five, that I was never going to drink. Let's just say it had to do with my step-dad and his drinking behavior and leave it at that.
Of course, then, the idea of drinking being one of the three mortal sins was strongly reinforced by my Bible Belt upbringing. Drinking, dancing, and smoking, the three things that would send you to Hell faster than a greased pig on a water slide.

Then there were the gross things. Things like avocado. Broccoli, which had such a horrible smell when it was being cooked, being cooked meaning being boiled. And sushi.
Sushi.
I mean, it's raw. Raw fish. I was raised to be against pretty much anything raw except fruit. And lettuce. Iceberg lettuce. Maybe tomatoes. All the other vegetables got boiled.
Not to mention the fact that sushi had other things in it, frequently, like avocado.
And eel. Which I have no good reason to be against, especially considering that I'm very interested in trying snake.
Sushi was like the epitome of all gross foods to me. If there was one thing I was never going to eat, it was sushi.

I started eating broccoli when I was in my 20s.
If you do things to it other than boiling it, it's pretty good and doesn't smell nearly as bad.
I came to an intellectual understanding that drinking wasn't a sin while I was a teenager but, still, I looked around at the way other teenagers acted when alcohol was involved and still decided it wasn't for me. I was pretty firm in that decision until some time in my late 30s when I finally tried a bit of wine. Then there was the post on Facebook I made a few years ago about how I had gone to Trader Joe's to pick up some things and only come out with a six-pack of beer. My friends from when I was a youngster just about lost it.

Which brings us back to avocado. One of the barriers to avocado had always been guacamole. I'd tried guacamole, but it was always bland and rather tasteless and the mushy consistency was kind of off-putting. I didn't understand why anyone would eat the stuff. I'm not sure what took so long but, finally, my wife said, "I bet I can make some guacamole you'd like," and then she went on to do that. Now, I'm guacamole make supreme. And I like avocado.

I still find it weird.

But! But!
None of this is sushi. Because... sushi... raw! fish!

Unfortunately, I have to admit that my introduction to sushi came through Guy Fieri. Look, he used to just be this local Santa Rosa guy who had some restaurants, one of which is a place called Tex Wasabi that is a weird kind of sushi bar. My wife took me because she thought I might like it because, guess what, a lot of the sushi is... fried. I grew up in the South, at that point, it's just fried fish. At any rate, it opened the door to, yes, even sushi. Not that it was my favorite or anything, but I was willing to eat it every now and then.
Regular sushi. We've never been back to Tex Wasabi.

All of which brings us up to how I broke the world.

About a year and a half ago, we tried this new sushi place in town, Yireh Sushi, and it is fucking amazing. Yes, "fucking" is required in that sentence to convey the extent of the amazingness of this place. It's one of our favorite places, now, and we often get sushi from there for the car when we're going to the opera. It's so amazing, in fact, that that's what I chose to have for my birthday dinner (which was last week as you may have noticed if you've been around this week seeing the Alcatraz pictures I posted). Sushi. Raw fucking fish. Some of which had avocado in it. And I had a beer to go with it.

My brain is still processing this data because it doesn't really make any sense, but I'm sure this is proof that the world is broken and it's probably somehow my fault.

So there you go...

The Problem of Criticism

My oldest son has been in a production this month of the play Stage Door (there was a movie adapted from the play that I was going to link you to, but, after looking at the movie specifics, I'm not doing that, because the plot of the movie is almost unrecognizable when compared to the plot of the play). It's just a small part, because he has the lead in their other production, Look Homeward, Angel, to be performed next year. To put it mildly, things have been busy, lately, our weekends packed with events, not the least of which have been shuttling our kids all over the place.

Before we went to the play, we asked my son about it, trying to figure out the best time to go and how much priority to give the play for his, basically, three minute performance. He completely downplayed it to the point where I kind of thought we should just skip it, because we were going to have to go on a school night, which was going to mean being out way past bedtime for the kids, since the play didn't even start until 7:00, and it was two and a half hours long. See, our son said Stage Door really wasn't very good. It wasn't about anything, and he really didn't like it.

No, he didn't try out for a play he didn't like. He didn't try out for it at all. They asked him to do the part because they were running short of guys, so he acquiesced.

We did try to get more out of him, but, basically, all we got was that it's about a bunch of girls living in a boarding house in New York trying to make it on Broadway. And that is what's about. But that's not a plot, and, as far as my son was concerned, it didn't have one. I have to say, I was ready to skip this one after hearing him talk about it. Oh, and it was being billed as a comedy, and my son couldn't figure out why, because he didn't think it was funny. Oh, there were a few places with laughs, but, you know, not a comedy. Not that he knew what it was.

But my wife wanted to go anyway, and I get that. We do want to support the program he's in even if it's just for three minutes of him on stage.

I'm so glad we went, because, well, he was just completely wrong about that play. It was great! And it was, actually, about something: the struggle to hold onto your dreams in the face of repeated rejection, something you writers out there ought to be familiar with. There were several story lines, but, really, all of them dealt with that same subject. It was good, and it was funny, although it did contain tragedy. Still, definitely a comedy since it has a happy ending.

So how could my son be so wrong about it? What was the problem with his criticism? Well, it's the source: he's a 16-year-old boy that just didn't "get" what the play is about. He had no context for understanding the struggles the young women were going through, so, to him, the play wasn't about anything more than a bunch of girls living in a house together. Later, maybe, once he's been out in the world a bit, he'll be able to understand. But not now.

The whole situation got me to thinking, though, again, about criticism and reviews and all of that stuff and how important it is to remember the source of the criticism (criticism here being used as the objective measure of merits and faults of a work). It reinforces my belief that negative reviews are just as necessary as possible ones, because we should all be looking at the source of any review or criticism. Does the review just bash a work without giving any reasons? Does it unashamedly praise the work without any given reasons? Neither of those things are helpful. Unless the source of the critique tells why s/he liked or didn't like a work, it's fairly unhelpful. Unless you have a feeling of why the source likes or doesn't like particular types of things, it isn't helpful.

All of that to say that the first thing I should have done when my son was telling me how much he doesn't like Stage Door was to consider the source. I know what he likes. He likes nerdy, geek stuff. ThinkGeek is his favorite non-place in the world. If it had been a play about aliens girls in a boarding house, he would have loved it. But it wasn't that, and it dealt with subject matter that he's not equipped to understand, yet, so he didn't like it. What I should have done was seek a better source of information.

That's always the problem with criticism. The source of it. In that respect, there's more of a responsibility on the reader to find what s/he feels is a reliable source. "What does this person like?" "Does this person give reasons for what s/he likes?" Because, you know, if you know what kind of things a reviewer likes, you can decide that you should check something out even based on a bad review.

And here's a good example:
The recent trashing of Guy Fieri's restaurant by the New York Times (and other New York food reviewers) resulted in a packed house for Fieri as people flooded the place to see if the food really could be as bad as the reviewer said. Here's a better response to all of that than I can give, never having eaten there. It's a good example, though, of taking into account the source of the review.

I wish all of you could go see Stage Door, but they ended their run this past weekend, even if you did live close enough to go see it. As the play teaches, hold onto your dreams. And, as I'm saying, remember the source of criticism. Weigh it as much as you would the material being reviewed. Positive or negative.

[Oh, and don't forget to drop by A Beer for the Shower and vote for my party! Thanks so much!]