So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 11) When it's okay to read the comments

This is coming to you late because I took a time-management detour this evening and recorded a two-hour podcast where my pals and I drafted our ideal Saturday Night Live ensembles. When it's live, you'll hear me wail in genuine agony over someone snaking Maya Rudolph before I could add her to my lineup. ANYWAY. Tonight's newsletter is filled with light reading for our poor, pre-weekend brains.

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My bedtime reading selections generally involve cookbooks for reasons I went into here, but another perk of propping open a lovely volume of dessert recipes is that a book usually comes without Internet commenters blatting on about how they didn't follow directions in a recipe, it failed, and therefore the directions they refused to follow are flawed. This piece from the Toast perfectly captures those commenters. Scroll down to read the lovely people who added their own interpretations in the Toast's comments; it's a much-needed dose of laughter and proof that very occasionally, comments actually do add something to the experience of reading online.

So what? We've now reached a point in the interaction between text and reader where comedy tropes are emerging. Some are excellent mirrors into everyday life.

Who cares? Anyone who has ever rolled their eyes as someone's posted comment on the Internet.

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Vulture generally kills it on the pop culture nostalgia beat -- Dave Holmes alone is a miracle of hilarious yet incisive criticism with his "Somewhere in Time" series examining top 40 hits of yesteryear -- and this week, they're looking at what they say is the last big year for network TV: the 1994-1995 season. You can wallow in the exhaustive coverage of Friends, Party of Five and E.R., and try to comprehend living in an America that was not yet aware it was supposed to think of George Clooney at all, much less as an Oscar-winning A-lister who has opinions on important things.

Or, if you suspect that we've actually hit Peak Nostalgia for the 1990s in a way that completely misses some of the longer-lasting or more influential cultural players (ain't nobody pulling together a weeklong package on the DIY/indie movement, or on how terrified people were of the Ices Cube and T, or the ascendancy of New Country and its effective sidelining of activist and blue-collar country & western music), ANYWAY, if you're really over seeing Jennifer Aniston try out the Mona Lisa-by-way-of-Melrose smile she's had pasted on her face ever since, head on over to this Flavorwire piece arguing that we should be getting nostalgic for something else from the 1990s.

So what? It's good to have pushback against narratives as they form in the popular imagination. Just as not everyone went to Woodstock -- even though it's strongly associated with young adults in the late 1960s -- so too can people say, "I'm sure someone was watching Friends, but you know, I lost interest after Ross and Rachel went on a break."

Who cares? It's not a well-argued piece (it's more like a headline and a writer going "Holy carp! Now I have to deliver! Ummmm..."), and that's why you should read it: You'll be thinking of better arguments for ignoring Friends. And shouldn't good pop culture crit make you want to engage with it?

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One final read that is vital, lovely and important comes from someone who last toured in the 1990s, Tracey Thorn of Everything But The Girl. She writes of the impact of seeing Kate Bush's performance last week; you may recall that performance was Bush's first live concert in 35 years. You may also recall that pop music critics and journalists basically lost their minds with joy over the whole shebang.

The real point to the piece is in the final two paragraphs, which I will reproduce for you below:

So if we still ask, where has she been all these years and why has she not done this before, my answer would be that I think she has been living the life that made this show possible. Writing the songs on which it all hangs, dreaming these wild and vivid dreams, loving her son. My point about some of those singers I mentioned earlier, who retreated from the stage, is that often they chose their life over their art, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, which can nonetheless be portrayed as a form of neurosis.

Kate Bush may have been semi-absent from our lives all these years, but it looks to me like she has been fully present in her own. And though we all fret about our work/life balance, in truth, it takes a lot of life to make work this good.

This reminds me of the way Anne Helen Peterson summed up Angelina Jolie's allure recently in Buzzfeed:

Her savvy, then, stems from the same thing that makes us write better as we grow older or think more expansively after traveling abroad, the thing that happens when you realize your relative insignificance, or have to make difficult decisions, or experience pain, or witness suffering. It’s the sort of skill that can’t be taught, and that’s the reason Jolie doesn’t need a publicist: Everything she says and does in public is guided by her myriad, textured, educating experiences of the world.

So many celebrities embarrass or otherwise scandalize themselves because their sphere of operation is so limited and privileged: It’s hard to not be angry about the paparazzi when they compose the boundaries of your existence; it’s easy to come off as superficial when appearance is the only thing on your mind.

But it’s both telling and instructive that the best person at the contemporary publicity game is also the one most invested in a life outside of Hollywood. And that, more than any beauty or acting tip, is what not only all celebrities, but anyone interested in making themselves into a compelling person of worth and note, should learn from Angelina Jolie.

So what? Both pieces I linked make the point that in order to be great at your chosen vocation (or, if you're not lucky enough to have a vocation or calling, your job), you have to have been a fully engaged participant in your own life, and to have made living a good life a priority on par with having a good job.

Who cares? Anyone who needs a push to start asking themselves how to craft a value system and a life that aren't dependent on the current definitions of "normal" economic activity or success.