The Washington Post article placing a world class violinist at the entrance to a Metro station and seeing if anyone noticed certainly sounds annoying, but also totally brilliant. That there's some darn fine gimmick writing. After all, if you want to write a crotchety essay on how the world moves too damn fast and music is too damn loud and nobody listens to classical anymore and cell phones are ugly, you've got, to paraphrase Lionel Trilling, an irritable mental gesture masquerading as an article idea. If you want to place a famed violinist at a subway stop and see if anyone notices, however, you've got a scene, color, a gimmick. And, since you've already stacked the deck by putting your civilized human bait at a Metro stop, where we've all been conditioned to ignore the music and have to get wherever we're going anyway, your essay can write itself. So annoying as the piece sounds, my hat's off to the writer. The force is strong in that one.
Update: From the article's description of Joshua Bell, the violinist:
Bell's a heartthrob. Tall and handsome, he's got a Donny Osmond-like dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott.
"Hott?" I thought that was an intentional online misspelling meant to seem funny. Will the Washington Post start referring to "the internets," or information on the interweb, now?
Update the Second: This, however, is some really annoying writing:
In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.[...]
It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels...Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost.
Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.
Oh, shut up.
