Horace, Pete, and an Amy Sedaris Cameo

My wife and I finished the rather bizarre Louie C.K. ten act televised play Horace and Pete last night, and while it has comic moments and plenty of fantastic topical debates and cameos among the bar-folk, it is mainly a tragedy about the inevitability of change: Horace and Pete's is a family bar that has been owned and operated in Brooklyn for a one hundred years, and there has always been a Horace and a Pete behind the bar . . . Louie C.K. is Horace the VIII and Steve Buscemi is his brother Pete, and while they try to keep things intact and preserve the traditions of the bar (they only serve Budweiser and straight liquor, and you pay based on your patronage, loyal customers pay one price-- on nothing at all-- while hipsters drinking "ironically" pay a higher price for drinks) there is no avoiding gentrification, technology, progress, and craft beer; this story really struck a chord with me, the school year and soccer season are about to start, and while I'm a veteran teacher and coach and I should know exactly how things work, that's not the case-- once again, everything is new and changed and different . . . there's a new platform to register all the soccer players and it's driving everyone a bit crazy; we're having a technology day at school on Friday, probably to introduce yet another lesson plan/grading/attendance/standards platform (and I've just figured out Evernote and Google docs!) and my classes have all "evolved," Creative writing is a quarter long instead of a half year, and my College Composition class has transformed into the Rutgers Expos class-- and while I think good writing is still good writing and I think good coaching is still good coaching, I'm not totally sure . . . maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years and none of it is any good at all, it's just the accretion of tradition . . . if you think about it too much, then you might descend into madness, like Pete does, and that's not an easy road, so I'm going to try to adapt as best I can, hang on to what i think is good, and blithely discard the rest (it will be nice to have all my travel players' birth certificates confirmed digitally, once all the parents figure out how to upload them, so sometimes progress is good in the long run).

2 comments:

Lecky said...

The scene with Laurie Metcalf in Horace and Pete - as good a combination of writing and acting I've ever seen.

Dave said...

that was some monologue. it went so long i thought i was losing my grip on reality.

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