Make sure you see the film Man on Wire. (It's currently on demand on the Sundance Channel if you have Comcast cable.) What a great way to start the new year. It's an excellent documentary about the French artist Phillippe Petit and his famous tight-rope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. Fascinating, funny, dramatic. It's a really compelling story and the film is marvelously done. Petit is quite a character, and his enthusiasm tremendously endearing. Cristina made a great observation: there is almost no way that kind of genius could flourish today in our society because right away children like Petit would be diagnosed as ADD and put on medications. (Petit was an overly rambunctious child, was expelled from a number of schools, ran away from home, etc.) Then again, that kind of extreme daring-do does raise interesting questions. At what point should intervention take place? (In the case of Petit, he was very clearly at serious risk of killing himself.) How many risks should we allow our children to take? Are we overprotective? The answer to this last question is, unequivocally, yes, certainly we are, generally speaking, overprotective. Let's conform less and be more creative. Not a bad new year's resolution!
1.02.2010
Vertigo
Make sure you see the film Man on Wire. (It's currently on demand on the Sundance Channel if you have Comcast cable.) What a great way to start the new year. It's an excellent documentary about the French artist Phillippe Petit and his famous tight-rope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. Fascinating, funny, dramatic. It's a really compelling story and the film is marvelously done. Petit is quite a character, and his enthusiasm tremendously endearing. Cristina made a great observation: there is almost no way that kind of genius could flourish today in our society because right away children like Petit would be diagnosed as ADD and put on medications. (Petit was an overly rambunctious child, was expelled from a number of schools, ran away from home, etc.) Then again, that kind of extreme daring-do does raise interesting questions. At what point should intervention take place? (In the case of Petit, he was very clearly at serious risk of killing himself.) How many risks should we allow our children to take? Are we overprotective? The answer to this last question is, unequivocally, yes, certainly we are, generally speaking, overprotective. Let's conform less and be more creative. Not a bad new year's resolution!
