Everyone knows Woody Allen is an award-winning film maker, brilliant comedian, and lifelong neurotic. He has kept New York therapists in clover for more than 40 years. But if Woody is crazy, he's crazy like a fox.
Allen would have us consider life as a great tragedy filled with countless joys...an endless search for a divinity who isn't talking...a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get it right even though we usually get it wrong.
To Google his many anecdotes and punchlines is a sheer delight. But out of them all, this is one of my favorites: "I'm not a hypochondriac, I'm just an alarmist!" He then adds: "I see change as symbolic of aging and death, so I resist all change in all forms!"
However, if change is alarming, then Woody and the rest of us can expect to be in a state of perpetual alarm. Fifty percent of all the energy that humanity has ever used is being used today. Ninety percent of all the scientists who have ever lived and explored live and explore today. The cumulative body of human knowledge is estimated to have doubled by about 1950, and has been doubling every 10 years ever since. I mean, hold on, because change has changed. It comes faster and more profoundly than at any time in recorded or imagined history....!
Caught up in this tsunami of change, we can either paddle our little boats away as fast as our little Woody alarms can take us. Or, we can head directly into the changes, riding the waves with a carpe diem shout. "Scientific America" recently released their projections for which pending changes are most likely to happen. Here's what they have to offer us paddlers: SYNTHETIC LIFE: Almost certain! CLONING OF A HUMAN: Likely! ASTEROID COLLISION: Unlikely! NUCLEAR EXCHANGE: Unlikely! SELF-AWARE ROBOTS: Likely! POLAR MELTDOWN: Likely!
Oars down...! Now, which way...?
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Having engineered Woody's first album (Live at Mr. Kelly's)I recall a young player's routine that endured throughout his career, as you outlined. I just wonder if he lived the talk?
ReplyDeleteAhh, Jerry, profound question. How many of us really do? Probably just a few. Well, of course, two giants like us are among the exceptions!!!
ReplyDeleteAnd Mr Kelly -- that takes me back. Now it's part of a hot spot restaurant called Gibsons (whose rich rich owners live in our own little Park Ridge counting their nightly loot)