Saturday, July 18, 2009
Summer so far
Peter Gabriel isn't the coolest with the critics or the Wilco, Weezer, or Stones crowds, but I've been a fan since waaay back. Summer tends to be a time to look back rather than forward, and I'm following up last year's "Every Rush album in order" summer with a Peter Gabriel summer, though not in order, cuz I don't have them all yet. Highlights: Security, the one I first fell in love with, so I was, what, a sophomore? I thought I was younger. That always happens. Anyway, still love that album. Peter Gabriel 1 is much better than I expected, 2, I thought, is kind of weak, 3 is great fun, and immediately brings me back to mowing my parent's lawn listening to the cassette on my Sony Walkman. Next up are his Genesis-era albums, which I never listened to. Love his newer stuff. Have been playing In Your Eyes and Washing the Water on the piano.
I've been wanting to read Elmore Leonard for a while, and now I am. 'sokay. I'm reading Pagan Babies. No I'm not. I'm blogging. So I'm not very drawn to it. But the characters are fun. Doesn't live up to what I've heard about him. Maybe I grabbed the wrong one, but it's the one the library had.
I finally read Lolita, which I thought would be a funny choice to read on a trip to an educator's conference, and it was. Odd glances on the plane. Amazing novel, and it put me through things no novel has before. Much creepier than I expected - even hard to read at some points. I almost didn't get to part two after the last sentence of part one. Amazing voice, and I didn't expect it to be so funny. Then I watched both movies. Kubrick's is great - Shelly Winters is fantastic and James Mason is great, but I'm becoming increasingly okay with my annoyance at Kubric. The 1997 Adrienne Lynne version is very good and captures the tone of the novel well.
Freezer pops are summer. But whichever brand made yellow "Pina Colada" is not the brand for me. I eat, like, forty freezer pops a day.
Talk about looking back. I've got two pirated Six Million Dollar Man DVDS - the pilot and the bigfoot episodes. Youngest-son really liked it, and the rest of us had a blast, so I wanted more. But they haven't been released in the US.
So I bought the second season from Amazon.do.uk, and figured out how to hack my DVD player to be region free. Came in the mail yesterday. Haven't watched them yet. Excited, though.
At the beach I was looking for a pulpy but good mystery-thriller sort of thing, and I remembered reading that Dennis LeHane is one of the best, and I know he wrote for The Wire, and he wrote Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, which got great reviews, so I bought a used copy of Shutter Island, and spent the week laughing at it and sharing with my wife one implausible cliche after another. Then I came home, went to a movie, and saw this on my popcorn box:
I sent that picture to my wife, who also said "No way!" Then, just now, I find out it's being directed by Martin Scorsese. So maybe I'm an idiot.
Van Halen, Roth-style. Still awesome. At the library, I found a CD of Van Halen covers done by bluegrass bands. Extra awesome.
Farnsworth Invention, a great play by Aaron Sorkin. I saw it at the Alley Theater in Houston. Loved it.
Little Debbie Swiss Cakes do not allow me to sleep whenever they are in the house. They are never in the house for long.
We bought a new grill. It has defined our summer meals, including pizza on the grill, because I married oddly. But it was delicious, except for the one that caught on fire and almost burned our house down.
My daughter has fallen in love with a stray cat that has been coming around.
Took my oldest to see Rent at Columbus Childrens Theater. It was quite good. Having never seen the show before, he loved it.
A bit of summer so far. Now I'm just chewing up a rainy Saturday afternoon.
Monday, July 13, 2009
United Breaks Guitars
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Creepy Doll Place
Interstate 30 East goes into Holden Beach, where our family has been going for years, my wife's family for years before that. And right before the scenery shifts from North Carolina rural to non-commercial beachy, there's a curve in the road. And right before the curve in the road, there is a weird, over-cluttered lot we've always called the Creepy Doll Place.
From the street, it looks like a setting from a cheap 80's horror movie, a place where the non-supervised vacationing teenagers go on a dare, where someone in a hockey mask teaches them the ultimate moral lesson about their debauchery the night before.
You miss Creepy Doll Place if you don't know it's coming, because you're either on your way to your vacation, on your way back home, or on your way to or from Wal Mart.
Creepy Doll Place became a punchline. And every year we'd say we'd stop to see it, and every year there was less time on vacation than we expected, and every year the mystery grew.
My brother joined us at the beach with his family this year, and he joked with us about the Creepy Doll Place. When his few days at the beach ran out without us having gone to see it, the dare was on. My brother's expectation was not just that I visit the Creepy Doll Place, but that I prove it.
Creepy Doll Place from Stefan Farrenkopf on Vimeo.
For less ironic but more professional information about Mary Paulsen, including a video about her latest project, click here.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
My First Love
There was Jaime.
And somewhere in my heart, Jaime will always be.
There is true beauty in this world.
(Correction: Steve first reunited with Jaime in 1975. So technically, Sandy Todd was my first love. I mean no disrespect to Sandy. I will always cherish times she let me chase her around the story carpet, or the glimpse of her belly-button as she hung upside down on the swingset. But Sandy was not bionic. Nor was she Sainde. Bionics and exotic spelling loom large in the memory.)
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Lark, Nightingale, Bangin'
So maybe I shouldn't have put my 9th grade students in this position.
On their test over Romeo and Juliet, they had to identify a series of quotations. One of them takes place the morning after their wedding night. So how do 9th graders refer to how the young lovers had spent the night? On a test?
Here's the quote:
"Wilt though be gone? It is not yet near day. / It was the nightingale and not the lark. / That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear."
Here are the first portions of their answers:
"Romeo and Juliet just were married and are celebrating in Juliet's bed."
"Juliet says this to Romeo the after their marriage when Romeo has to leave because it is morning."
"After Juliet and Romeo have their night together."
"This quote is said by Juliet when Romeo is leaving in the morning."
"Juliet says this when she and Romeo wake up in Juliet's bed after he spent the night and Juliet doesn't want it to be morning because if it is he has to leave."
"Spoken to Romeo in Juliet's room before he leaves for Mantua."
"Juliet is talking to Romeo and not wanting Romeo to leave after spending the night together."
"This is Juliet speaking to Romeo. They were laying in bed and they heard a bird."
and this kid:
"Juliet says this after Romeo snuck into her room and they had sex."
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Practice, Practice, Practice
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Inauguration Day
Most of the school gathered in the gymnasium to watch the inauguration as projected on the walls. I arrived while Aretha Franklin was singing, and immediately found myself moved to tears by the images of the huge crowd on the mall. The images were so reminiscent of another crowd on the same real estate, facing the other direction, listening to the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Since the election, countless pundits and commentators have mentioned that no one on the Mall during King's most famous speech could have predicted that this day - a black president - would come so soon. Turns out, one person did:
We sat in a darkened gym, and the history of the moment did not seem lost on the kids - and the presence of the kids strengthened the sense of history for me.
I have always loved the melody of "Simple Gifts," and found John Williams arrangement to be powerful and moving, an appropriate mix of traditional and contemporary, comforting and challenging. Best moment: Yo Yo Ma's smile when he had the melody. Wish I could find a picture of that to put here.
The flub in the oath will go down in history. All I could think was that the right-wing zealots would have a field day with it. I didn't realize at the time that the flub was John Roberts' more than Obama's. Still, one Fox commentator has already speculated that the flub means that Obama isn't really president. I like to see that argument go to the Supreme Court, just to see how John Robert's would rule on it.
On Fox News, Chris Wallace just speculated that President Obama might still legally be regular ol' Barack Obama, because his botched oath doesn't count.
Wallace was referring to the one slip in today's otherwise flawless ceremonies, which came at the most important moment: Chief Justice John Roberts said and President Obama repeated back to him: "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will execute the office of President of the United States faithfully." The oath's actual line (which is in the Constitution) goes, "I [Barack Hussein Obama] do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States."
You can see the video of the oath here:
Over on Fox, Wallace predicted this will go to the courts. Though, presumably, if it makes it to the Supreme Court, John Roberts will rule that he administered a legitimate oath. (Besides, the mistake was Roberts' fault anyway, not that any of this is actually the least bit significant.)
Though I'd ordinarily guess that even this is too silly to take off on the paranoid far-right, these days, who can be sure? As a friend of mine joked, "Maybe the real reason he botched the oath is that he rehearsed it in Arabic."
Reviews seem mixed on Obama's speech. I thought is was tough at a time when toughness is appropriate. I loved that it called us all to task. It could have soared more, but the power was in the moment, the setting, the history, and perhaps expectations are too high. Was there a "nothing to fear" phrase, a "ask not what" moment? Maybe not. But there was a call to return and depend on our highest ideals, and for a "new era of responsibility."
The 1st grade didn't watch the inauguration in the gym, so after we were dismissed I went to look for my youngest son. I was excited and moved about the possibilities of this country, and I wanted to give him a big hug. And I was powerfully reminded of another time that I walked through the lower school halls desperate to give a young son a hug. Seven years ago, on 9/11, I sought out my family members to mark the moment. It was odd that such a different feeling would have such familiarity.
Later in the day, when a senior class came in, one student asked if we could discuss the inaugural poem. Teachable moment. Quick Google search, quick trip to the copier, and within three minutes each kid had a copy of the poem. The kids didn't like it, though they liked it better when it was sitting in front of them. Much was said about it, but the cool revelation, I thought, was that the poem seemed an attempt to echo Walt Whitman, who loved and admired his president, Abraham Lincoln. Like Obama swearing on Lincoln's Bible, this seemed another nice tribute to the progress this country has made, and where much of it started.