The Fragility of Memory
As I've written before, one of my favorite bands is Moxy Früvous. I saw them six times. Three of those were "show of the year" type gigs, although I was much younger and was more easily impressed, so that's a bit suspect. Regardless, those gigs are indelibly printed on my memory. If you could hook a printer up to my brain I could generate tons of really great still photos from those shows.
The recent scandal about Früvous singer turned CBC broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi is painful to absorb. With the information released far, the most charitable defense that can be made is that he's really, really poor at communicating with sexual partners, and even that pretty much requires you to disbelieve so many people as to be wildly implausible.
I'm not naive. It's been a long, long time since I had some innate expectation that celebrities would behave morally just because they were in the spotlight. And at some level, I don't care. Jian never owed me a thing other than to put on a good show when I bought the tickets for those six shows, which was delivered. I've enjoyed many books by Orson Scott Card and Led Zeppelin is ok by me. Basically, I've accepted that really horrible people can create really amazing things, and I'll decide on a case-by-case basis if the negative things about the creator outweigh the positive things created, and that mostly only when spending money or otherwise showing support is an issue.
It's not like I've spent any money on Früvous fandom any time in the last decade, so I don't have to worry about that decision here. Still, I'll mourn that all those great memories are now permanently tainted because he couldn't be bothered to treat other people they way they deserve to be treated. Thus fall the idols of our youth.
The recent scandal about Früvous singer turned CBC broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi is painful to absorb. With the information released far, the most charitable defense that can be made is that he's really, really poor at communicating with sexual partners, and even that pretty much requires you to disbelieve so many people as to be wildly implausible.
I'm not naive. It's been a long, long time since I had some innate expectation that celebrities would behave morally just because they were in the spotlight. And at some level, I don't care. Jian never owed me a thing other than to put on a good show when I bought the tickets for those six shows, which was delivered. I've enjoyed many books by Orson Scott Card and Led Zeppelin is ok by me. Basically, I've accepted that really horrible people can create really amazing things, and I'll decide on a case-by-case basis if the negative things about the creator outweigh the positive things created, and that mostly only when spending money or otherwise showing support is an issue.
It's not like I've spent any money on Früvous fandom any time in the last decade, so I don't have to worry about that decision here. Still, I'll mourn that all those great memories are now permanently tainted because he couldn't be bothered to treat other people they way they deserve to be treated. Thus fall the idols of our youth.