New Year’s Eve & the Aesthetics of Trying Too Hard
New Year’s Eve is the most overrated of holidays. Nothing squelches a potential good time faster than the sense that one is obligated to have a good time, which is what New Year’s Eve feels like. This is an example of a more general phenomenon, which could be called Trying Too Hard, or TTH.
TTH can be fatal to the success of many otherwise worthwhile projects, and although I don’t have the inclination at the moment to develop a general theory of TTH, I’d like to throw out a few illustrative examples:
Finnegans Wake
Born To Run (song, not the album)
Weddings
The Super Bowl
Compare Eric Clapton’s version of Little Wing to Jimi Hendrix’s.
Etc.