Is it just me or are business mentors BORING?
So here I am having a coffee at the Tropicana up at the cross (Sydney Australia for the international folk out there), watching Domenic’s videos back and thinking that perhaps, just perhaps I’m a bit too GenY for my own good.
The idea of business mentors makes me start yawning! I imagine a meeting at a cafe with some boring business guy who’s yapping on with business principles, cliches and peppy one-liners. It would be as bland as chewing on the cardboard cup my coffee came in. Domenic Carosa however, the one of of the two of us who’s grown the crazy hundred-million-dollar-business, perhaps has a more valid opinion on this. You see, I managed to learn almost everything I needed to know about running my type of company from running a similar one owned by someone else. Hence when I set up my own show I had a pretty good feel for how it should look, feel and operate. But the business is at a point where we are looking towards becoming a larger company – that’s where my experience ends. This is where my tried and tested business initiative starts to run dry. So then, perhaps it’s time for me to find a mentor or two. It’s either that or learn by making costly and stupid mistakes.
Let’s hope they have some good coffee.
Tennessee Williams’ talents seem to peak in the 1950s and 1960s; his work of the 1970s met with ever icineasrng critical and audience disinterest. Created three years before his death, the 1980 CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL was indicative of his later failures: a large cast, technically complex show that left even hardcore Williams fans yawning in the aisles. August Strindberg (1849-1912) is Sweden’s greatest playwright, and he exerted a powerful influence over such 20th Century dramatists as Eugene O’Neil, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams. Toward the end of his life, Strindberg wrote several dramas that he described as ghost plays plays that abandoned linear narrative for the surreal logic of dreams. It is a notion that Williams uses for much for CLOTHES OF A SUMMER HOTEL, but while Williams was noted for his poetic and often dreamy style, this wholesale dreamscape does not come naturally to him, and the result is both awkward and tiresome. The play itself focuses on the legendary mis-match of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his icineasrngly insane wife Zelda Sayer Fitzgerald. The marriage was disastrous for both. Scott based many of his characters on Zelda; she in turn began to write; and the two began to compete over which had the write to use her life as material. By all accounts Zelda had a unique way with words, but while her writings are riddled with poetic turns of phrase, the gift did not translate into anything that approached sustained narrative. Nonetheless, there has always been an underground notion that Fitzgerald suffocated Zelda’s creativity and that this drove her to madness. The play opens very much in ghost play mode, with Fitzgerald, now near the end of his life and suffering from heart problems, visiting Zelda at her North Carolina sanitarium. The characters find it difficult to articulate themselves, and their difficulties are furthered by a wind that tends to sweep their words away unless they shout. After a point, the play seques into the past to present a largely linear narrative of Zelda’s infamous affair with a French aviator in the 1920s; along the way it also presents, with occasional ghost play embellishments, a few of the more famous individuals in the Fitzgerald social circle, including Gerald and Sara Murphy, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and most notably Ernest Hemmingway. In the process of this narrative, Williams not only presents Zelda’s affair, he refurnishes the rumor that Fitzgerald and Hemmingway were homosexuals who were unable to cope with that fact and who ultimately despised each other because their meetings made them aware of this fact. Toward the end of the play, Williams returns to ghost play mode: the characters are once again seen at the asylum, once again unable to communicate in any meaningful way, and the play itself ends in stalemate without emotional resolution of any kind beyond the certainty that Scott will soon be dead of heart failure and that Zelda will eventually die in a fire that swept through the facility years after Fitzgerald’s death. Although it has a few moments here and there, CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL does not hang together in any overall sense. It is easy to see how Williams was drawn to the subject of the Fitzgeralds he often depicted women driven to the extreme edges of life but he fails to find either factual or artistic truth in his portraits, which are at best superficial. Unless you are determined to read every single thing Williams ever wrote, this is one title you can skip over. GFT, Amazon Reviewer
I Am Going To have to return again whenever my course load lets up – nonetheless I am getting your Rss feed so i could read your internet site offline. Cheers.