This Valley is my Hollywood | Hacker News Reader

This Valley is my Hollywood

31fps.com

20 pointsdcurtis11 comments

Good article on the whole.

One fallacy though:

These are the guys that looked impossible in the face and knocked it out in the first round.

They knocked it out in the 50th round, but you didn't hear about the other 49 rounds.

Also, seriously... leave the concert just to meet some guy? Don't idolise people. As the old buddhist saying goes: If perchance you meet the Buddha wandering on a mountain path, kill him.

The author unfortunately has his priorities all wrong...

Well the Radiohead concert kind of blew anyways, it was way oversold and I was 500 feet back. And some guy was standing right in front of me so I couldn't see. So that made the decision a lot easier.

Love your buddhist saying :D

I have a rule about this: If it's a band that everybody has heard of, their concerts are no longer worth attending.

As much as I enjoy Radiohead, it would never cross my mind to go to their concert. Best show I've ever seen was the Flaming Lips about ten years ago, maybe longer, in a crappy concert hall in Houston called The Abyss (held about 900 people, but only about 400 were at that show...I paid $12 to get in and thought it was a bit steep). But, even though I have exceedingly fond memories of that show, I would not go see the Lips perform today. It'd just be a letdown.

I saw the Lips 3 years ago and had a blast, one of the best shows I've ever been to. There's an art to entertaining a small crowd, and one to entertaining a large one. My guess is that the Flaming Lips are masters at both.

It is good to study the "old masters" and to learn the lessons of the successful, but I don't think cults of personality or "celebrity" of the successful is putting the emphasis where it belongs.

I am reminded of the poem by Matsuo Bashou -

古人の跡を求めず、

古人の求めたるの所を求めよ。

kojin no ato wo motomezu,

kojin no motometaru no tokoro wo motome yo

Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the wise;

seek what they sought.

+1 for Hiragana, Romanji, and English comprehensiveness.

that's probably a better translation than the one i was familiar with / alluding to: "Do not try to imitate the old masters. Seek what they sought." also, I agree with the above. points for comprehensiveness!

The poem is a fragment from a larger epistle... there are probably a dozen accurate translations of it, all different. I went with this one because I like the way it reads in English.

Disclaimer: My Japanese proficiency is pretty limited. I studied it for a couple of years and have a passable accent, but mostly I just know enough to get myself in trouble :)

I'm reminded of a woman's description of what it was like to live in LA. She said it was like "being an ember in this big, blazing bonfire."

Speaking of Hollywood, the term there for people who behave like this is 'starfucker'.

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