High Fidelity
Context: Right now, the entire country is on "shelter-in-place" lockdown due to covid-19. We are 1 week into this, and there is rampant fear, hoarding, etc. A coworker shared this with me: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-A3NY2haqq/ - After recovering from a sense of stunned inspiration, I thought about how it could be that the "spirit" that moved Shakespeare to write this hundreds of years ago is being transmitted through such a performance from Patrick Stewart. This is the opposite of degradation. When a creative work emerges so powerful, there is only one direction it can go - down. Patrick Stewart's delivery, at it's best possible outcome is to simply move the precious cargo along through the slime and muck of vapid instagram posts. I, the listener get to unpack the precious cargo. There is nothing that Patrick Stewart "added" to the original goal of Shakespeare's writing, yet it took him a lifetime to be capable of delivering the contents u...