What money can't buy
May. 3rd, 2007 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsKids develop odd tastes as they grow up, and one of Kouryou-chan's was, for a brief while, the Red Robin restaurant chain. (Yamaraashi-chan, in contrast, is fond of hibachi-style Japanese food.) The food's okay there in an American "family restaurant chain" sort of way, although the place is loud and tries to hard to appeal to manly men, but it's tolerable.
There are photographs on the walls of the place, kitschy appeals to history, famous photos from Life magazine like Einstein with his tongue hanging out or John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed. There are two there that I suppose I should be familiar with but which I found fascinating the last time I saw them.
The first is J.R. Eyerman's famous at the movies photograph from 1952. What intrigues me about this picture is that everyone is wearing a tie and jacket or an evening gown. I can't imagine people getting dressed up this way for such an experience, especially when the presentation is insensate: the movie doesn't care how you're dressed. If it were a play or a concert, perhaps your mode of dress would be important, but not a movie.
The other, equally interesting photograph (I can't find a copy on-line, sorry) shows Clark Gable behind the wheel of his car in 1940, when he was at the top of his career in the old studio-star system Hollywood. As I looked at the photo I became more impressed by what Gable didn't have than what he did: he didn't have a radio, an automatic transmission, a breakaway steering wheel. This man could have had damn near anything he wanted, but he didn't know to want some of the things we now have, and even if he wanted them, they wouldn't have been available to him.
Both of these things prick at the writer in me: what kinds of events create dress codes? What wants do we have at each setting of our day (the work computer, the personal computer, the car, the kitchen, the bus, the bathroom, the family room, the television set) that we can't have? Are there any we can think of that we've never wanted before, but now make sense in context?
There are photographs on the walls of the place, kitschy appeals to history, famous photos from Life magazine like Einstein with his tongue hanging out or John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed. There are two there that I suppose I should be familiar with but which I found fascinating the last time I saw them.
The first is J.R. Eyerman's famous at the movies photograph from 1952. What intrigues me about this picture is that everyone is wearing a tie and jacket or an evening gown. I can't imagine people getting dressed up this way for such an experience, especially when the presentation is insensate: the movie doesn't care how you're dressed. If it were a play or a concert, perhaps your mode of dress would be important, but not a movie.
The other, equally interesting photograph (I can't find a copy on-line, sorry) shows Clark Gable behind the wheel of his car in 1940, when he was at the top of his career in the old studio-star system Hollywood. As I looked at the photo I became more impressed by what Gable didn't have than what he did: he didn't have a radio, an automatic transmission, a breakaway steering wheel. This man could have had damn near anything he wanted, but he didn't know to want some of the things we now have, and even if he wanted them, they wouldn't have been available to him.
Both of these things prick at the writer in me: what kinds of events create dress codes? What wants do we have at each setting of our day (the work computer, the personal computer, the car, the kitchen, the bus, the bathroom, the family room, the television set) that we can't have? Are there any we can think of that we've never wanted before, but now make sense in context?
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-03 09:52 pm (UTC)Or compare the risks of death through pregnancy and childbirth (both to the mother and child) nowadays with the risks, say, 119 years ago when my great grandfather was born.
It seems to me that reducing the risks - and the poverty, despite its relative opulence to what "poverty" would have meant only a few decades ago - are the biggest thing the human race can do to make the world a more worthwhile place to live in.