jordan peterson (with legs crossed too tightly): what women fail to understand is… every time Lucy pulls that football away. that takes a toll. that takes a psychological toll on Charlie Brown.
israeli activists demand a ceasefire and netanyahu’s resignation outside the military headquarters in tel aviv.
on saturday 28th october, crowds gathered both in tel aviv and outside prime minister benjamin netanyahu’s home in caesarea, calling for an end to the attacks on gaza.
Translating the Hebrew signs I see:
Ceasefire! Bring back the hostages now!
Bibi for the hostages (as in a trade-off)
Human life before everything (and then in English “ceasefire”)
The right wing in power won’t bring any safety
I wish I knew what the Arabic said.
The Arabic says “Freedom for the hostages.”
(Note: I think مختطفين literally translates to ‘kidnapped’ because there is another word I was taught for hostage- رهينة [pl. رهائن]. But contextually it’s pretty clearly about hostages so that is how I translated it.)
Unpopular theatre opinion: intermissions are bad and I wish we could just have a 2.5 hour performance uninterrupted, like people manage perfectly well at movie theaters. It always just kills my emotional immersion. Set changes and costume changes valid, but the art form could adapt in other ways. Or making the intermission experience somehow also part of the performance? Just something more interesting and intentional than dumping people out into the lobby to buy m&ms.
I do like intermissions myself, with all the getting to chat with my companions about the show and releasing excitement and leg stretching and restroom breaks and all of that, but there are probably a fair number of musicals that don’t need to conform to the 2 act + intermission format and might be better off without it.
I can’t imagine Les Mis or Wicked without one (although Les Mis is abnormally long anyhow) given the sheer power and finality of Defying Gravity and One Day More, but I think many shows with subtler Act I finales could be done continuously without anyone batting an eye.
I also do think intermissions can be quite helpful in emphasizing time skips between the two acts, but shows without a time skip between the two acts could work well continuously.
And for what it’s worth I have seen a handful of people argue that movies (at least the long ones) should have intermissions, but that is a whole other discussion.
the ACTORS need the break 😭😭 movies don’t have intermissions because they aren’t being performed live. theater is highly physical and even if it isn’t like a high energy show they’re still under blinding lights for hours and sweating to death. they need a break to breathe lmao
If you enjoy labor rights & union mandated breaks: yes, that ALWAYS INCLUDES ARTISTS. This should be obvious for live performance art.
What’s wild is this feels like a spillover convo from kino/film buff social media.
Cinematically, the death of the intermission is largely due to the shift to both digital film formats, and to gapless reel to reel tech, coinciding with film length increases in the latter 20th century and onward (becoming increasingly popular beyond the old limited realms of religious/historical epic or theater adaptation). Which is why now, people have been pushed into recognizing the logistics of, “gee, actually, now that the limit is me, I DO need to pee more than I need to prioritize keeping the ‘sanctity of art’ on a pedestal” + post-pandemic-onset, people recognizing how uncomfortable it actually is to spend hours in one spot vs. watching films from home (to say nothing of disability access or continued pandemic precautions).
And this is one of those convos that’s largely trending because Killers of the Flower Moon (which is at the moment a financial floppington flopiana for probably somewhat related reasons!) is a painful 3hrs 26min long with no potty breaks, and relentlessly depressing material. For those of us who grew up in the VHS dinosaur stone age, if you ever knew anybody with a box set of Ben Hur, which was about 6 VHSes long, a shelf full of videos, this is 6 minutes less than that— aka, 14 minutes less than The Ten Commandments, aka, about a half hour less than the absolutely brain numbing runtime of Gone With the Wind. It is five minutes LONGER than the excellent but sometimes interminable feeling Fiddler On the Roof. It is a full hour longer than Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which somehow feels longer than Fiddler. And that’s before you add on preview trailers.
So, of course, “film bros” are arguing adding a break in would be a “slippery slope to censorship” & artistic bastardization if you just ALLOW theaters or studios to make cuts in film or split showings (the studios do, in fact, already do this; producers & studios have more of a say in edits than directors & certainly more than actors do), and telling people to “just toughen up & learn to hold it” like 4 hours is not HALF OF A LEGAL WORK DAY & like people want to be unable to pee on their free time, recreationally. And of course, my fave, the most egregious— and boy, do I wish I was lying and this was NOT something I’ve already seen repeatedly on X, née Twitter: “the Osage have been through so much, you can sit through a movie for 3 hours.” (??!)
Babes. I gotta tell y'all. UTIs and pelvic floor strain are not the Osage Nation agenda. And my family very specifically did not catch hell during the Reign of Terror for my bladder to be under a Scorcese dictatorship.
Anyway, TL;DR: people need to stop obsessing over treating performers and audiences like they’re entitled to others’ bodies to be automatons for their entertainment or artistic satisfaction & validation, and in the words of the great CW television network,
