[…] you can’t please everybody.
Even when I ran the club, I understood this. A lot of customers came to the club. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and decided to come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten people didn’t like the club. Realizing this lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to do that, I had to make my philosophy absolutely clear, and patiently maintain that philosophy no matter what. This is what I learned from running a business.
The Running Novelist, Haruki Murakami, New Yorker (060208)
Out came Sister Y, looking beautiful in the way someone will when she has just, against all sense, done exactly what she most wanted to.
Hypocrites, George Saunders
Bonus: Schjeldahl is forever!!
I remember my first encounter, in Germany, in 1992, with Koons’s famous “Puppy,” the forty-three-foot-high Scottie dog enveloped in living flowers. As I was judiciously taking descriptive and analytical notes, a bus arrived bearing a group of severely disabled children in wheelchairs. They went wild with delight. Abruptly feeling absurd, I shut my notebook and took instruction from the kids’ unequivocal verdict.
[…]
If you manage not to enjoy the lustrous pooch, I don’t understand you. But if you’re afflicted by an attendant feeling of intellectual free fall, in a vacuum of identifiable emotion, we can talk. Koons is hugely significant—grandly engaging themes of childhood, wealth, sex, and (as with an aqualung cast in bronze) death—while finally signifying precious little. That’s my nightmare: an intimation that intelligence is obsolete in a world where things are either blazingly obvious or pitch dark.
Funhouse, Peter Schjeldahl
