Yeah And So What Now?

Instead of Christmas Cards

2010-12-25T19:20:00.000-05:00

I wish I had a good reason for not writing Christmas cards. Instead, I have excuses: The end of the semester is a very stressful time, and a few years ago we decided that cards are one thing we could forgo to try to keep some balance.

We do give the money we would spend on cards to charity - honest, we do - but again, that's an excuse, not a reason. Lots of other people with more stress, less time, and less money give more to charity AND write Christmas cards.

That's lousy, I know, especially because we enjoy getting cards from friends and family. And this year, there was one that I found to be particularly meaningful. So, now, in lieu of sending you a card, I'm sending you the letter SOMEONE ELSE wrote as his Christmas card. I hope that you find the letter as meaningful as I did, so that by the time you reach the end of it, you'll have forgiven my shortcomings.

A close friend of mine walked into my classroom and tentatively asked me to edit the letter he was sending this year. I offered only the tiniest edits, shared my enthusiasm, and asked him if I could share his essay with my friends. He said sure.

I've read many meaningful Christmas essays, but this one captures my feelings like few others. I hope you find in it what I did. It is by my close friend Tim Leet.

Merry Christmas, friends.

Stefan

It’s cold outside. Eight honest degrees and even colder with the wind. The snow on my unshoveled driveway crunches under my car tires, and the string of Christmas lights that came loose from my gutter in yesterday’s storm swing sloppily in the wind. Judge me neighbors, if you must, but fixing the lights and clearing the drive will have to wait. It’s too cold and crunchy outside.

Inside, it’s a different story. The walls are strong against the wind and every room is warm. Three feet to my right and through a double-paned window is the gusting, crunching cold. Yet, I sit and write this letter in a t-shirt. To my left I can find food behind every cabinet door in the kitchen, and the coffee in my mug is luxurious. It’s all some kind of miracle, isn’t it? What have I done to deserve such comforts? My daughters and wife sleep soundly upstairs, untouched by the cold and oblivious to the suburban embarrassment of my sloppy lights and unshoveled drive. I have replayed the film many times but find nothing in my life’s story that warrants these gifts.

A friend once told me that we cannot accept a gift that we could not give. I have pondered this nugget for years. When I look right and face the deadly cold through my window and then turn left and contemplate the abundance and warmth of my kitchen, I am humbled by the extravagant gift of my daily life. I can barely accept it. What Grace has placed me on this side of the window?

Christmas is a time of extravagance. We give gifts and sing old, familiar songs loudly. We decorate our homes beyond all good sense. We bake with real butter. Why all this excess at Christmas? Cynics will talk about economics and skeptics of how shared rituals bind societies together. Fine. Boring, but fine. I will cast my lot with the happy folks who embrace the extravagance of Christmas as the only sensible response to the extravagant gift of our lives.

You are entitled to your own thoughts concerning certain events said to have occurred in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. Might I modestly suggest that, at the very least, it is the story of a most extravagant gift?

So bring on the mechanized reindeer and inflatable yard decorations. Festoon your home with lights, bulbs, and plastic figurines. Find a quiet place and ponder the big questions. Christmas is a magical holiday bursting with contradictions I choose not to resist. I can, with no sense of irony, reflect on the Mystery of this season while locating just the right place to hang my dogs’ Christmas stockings. Don’t resist absurdities like these. We live by the grace of extravagant gifts we cannot comprehend.

Eventually, I will shovel my driveway and return the lights to their proper place. Order shall be restored, but it can wait for a warmer day. In the meantime, I will continue to ponder the mysteries of the season from the warm side of my window. Christmas unites the spiritually profound and the profoundly ridiculous. Come to think of it, so do we.

Merry Christmas!

My Marathon, Part One: This Is Not The Day That I'll Die

2010-10-25T23:18:00.009-04:00

Course Map for the 2010 Columbus Marathon

It was the toughest thing I’ve ever done.

Granted, I’ve not had a tough life, so that’s not saying so much. But it was hard, harder than I expected, and I had to dig deeper than I knew I could. And that, I think, is what changes you. That part, glimpsing a capacity that you didn’t know you had, that is what drives people to do this crazy-ass, unnatural, unhealthy, stupid, amazing thing.

It was the Heathers’ fault, actually. I didn’t know this at the time. Shortly after running the half marathon, my first, which was hard and exhilarating and euphoric for me, I was at a bar with a number of friends. Sean and I were talking to two Heathers, both runners, both attractive, and Sean, a running partner and, apparently, show off, said “I hope no one recommends we do the full, ‘cause I might go for it.”

“Sean,” I said. “Let’s do the full.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I think so. Yeah.”

Five months later, I met another running partner – my unofficial coach – Tim, outside Sean’s house. The sun wasn’t up yet. It was 6:00 am on an October Sunday, chilly. Tim called me over to his car. “Listen to this.” I got in. He was playing Rush, and, with no fear of clichés on such a nervous and vital morning, we listened to “Marathon.” And he and I laughed and joked and enjoyed that damn song so much, and then we went inside, and we took turns doing what nervous guys do when they’ve been hydrating for a week, and then we pinned on our numbers, loaded into Tim’s car, and headed downtown.

The “Tips for First Time Marathoners” website had warned us about the nerves:

Whether you're a newbie or a seasoned veteran, making even the smallest decisions like what to eat and what to wear will feel like life changing moments during race week.

Should I take my duffle or leave it? Wallet and keys in Tim’s car, or in the bag? Take the gloves? It’s chilly. We all stood on the pre-dawn street-lit sidewalk, taking minutes to decide, to undecide, to decide again, the smallest things, taking forever but rushing, because man-oh-man, I had to pee again.

We started to walk the few blocks to Broad and High, the far end of the starting line.

We found a huge crowd and a million porta-potties, the far ones with the short lines. We stretched, we joked, acting like middle-schoolers.

Eventually we were in our starting corral, in a sea of people. Tim and I were in the last chute, having not registered with a previous marathon time. Sean was smart enough to register with his half-marathon time – you could do that? - and was up in chute number two, where he was meeting a friend.

Tim and me at the starting line.

Text message, 7:15 AM, from me to Brelle: I have my phone (it will be hard to text in crowds, though.) I love you.

Tim and I waited nervously, excited, joking, chatting with Jason from Atlanta, drinking in the festival. The nerves gave me tunnel vision, but I calmed my breathing and made it a point to look around, to enjoy the moment. The sun wasn’t breaking the horizon yet, but the sky was going from black to a rich blue. It was chilly in shorts, but the shared excitement, the loud chatter, the sense of community felt important and fun. Someone took our picture with my phone. The Danger Brothers were loud and were really good and were playing “Born to Run” to no one’s surprise. They were playing on a stage right at the starting line, pretty far away, actually, up near Third. Corral number four, where we were, was way down by the Palace.

I looked behind us.

“Tim,” I said. “Look behind us.”

Behind us was a scattering of fifteen or twenty runners. We were at the very back of the very last batch.

“Oh wow. We’re really at the back, aren’t we?”

Just before the start.

Fireworks. No shit? That was cool. Fireworks off of a rooftop, and the sun painted the first traces of gold into the sky, and way up there by the stage, people started moving forward. Eventually, so did we, a slow walk with a huge crowd. I mooed. Someone had to.

So, here we went. I hugged Tim, thanked him, wished him luck, and he did the same, and soon we were moving toward the start line. Watch your step, as piles of shedded layers were strewn and piled in the street.

“Okay,” Tim said. “I’ll see you. Good luck.”

“Congratulations.”

“You too.”

While running, just after the start, with thumb.

Tim is a faster and stronger runner than I am, but months before, in my first real race, the Cap City Half Marathon, I paced with him for the first few miles. This time, he disappeared off to the right and into the crowd. I glanced over and couldn’t find him, and there I was, just me and 14,999 of my closest friends.

I started the mental strategies I had learned from my training book, the kumbaya shit that my more cynical, pre-training self would have scoffed at. “This is the best run of my life,” I told myself. And with the crowds and the music, the Columbus just-enough skyline, the rising sun, the chill in the air, it was easy to believe. “This is the best damn run of my life.”

Except.

My legs felt weird. A little tight, a little less ready than I had expected. I had stretched while waiting – maybe not enough? Something was funky. Oh well. They would warm up. Forget about it: My concentration was needed for the complex dodging and weaving needed to move ahead from the very back of the pack. Would that narrow gap between those runners narrow before I got there? Were those two ladies walking together, or just near each other? Can I get around that guy without stepping on the curb?

Every hundred yards or so there was a different live band, plugged into a chugging generator, playing a gig at 7:30 am on a Sunday morning. Rock, blues, folk, pop. Most of them were really good, they could really play. I heard some exciting funk/soul coming up ahead. And then there was a big enough gap in front of me that I could finally set a pace.

I took a minute, paid attention to how I was running. “This feels good,” I thought. I was aiming for around ten minute miles for the first half, slower than my training pace, but I’d only trained as high as twenty-two miles, never twenty-six, and they say the last six miles are the second half of a marathon. Okay. I felt like I was running about a ten minute mile. Perfect. But, as I had been getting stronger the last few weeks of training, I was used to being surprised. I would look at my Forerunner on my wrist and every time would see that I was actually running faster than I had thought. So if this felt like what a ten used to feel like, I predicted I was running a 9:45 pace or so. I should maybe slow down a bit. Keep it at ten. It’s a long run.

I glanced at my Forerunner.

10:15.

Huh?

Something wasn’t quite right. These weren’t my legs.

This was mile two.

Okay. Don’t let that get into your head. “This is my best run ever.”

Then, still on Broad Street, still the chill and autumn sunrise, I felt the first sign of sharpness in the top of my right foot. Already? I looked at my wrist. Mile 2.23. A new low.

The injury.

During training, I had injured my foot, enough that I had to walk and then bail sixteen miles into an eighteen miler, enough that smart people told me it was a stress fracture and I shouldn’t run, enough for x-rays and MRI’s and a cortisone shot. When my doctor asked me how much I wanted to run this race, I asked him if I could mess up my foot for life, he said no. I said I wanted to run, that is was my last chance to run a marathon.

It wasn’t a fracture, it was inflammation in my meta-whosis-toe-joint thing. Plans were made, try these pills, get new shoes, train like this, if not, I'll give you these other pills, keep me posted. I rested and completed a twenty-two mile trainer. W00t! Then, days later, I failed a nine mile run at mile eight – the pain was sharp and brutal; I hobbled toward home looking like James Caan in Misery. I called my kid and made him drive to pick me up, his first night-driving, all alone, all illegal like.

I had finished the twenty-two mile trainer after a long rest. So I rested my foot. For two weeks before the marathon, I didn’t taper my training – I stopped. Cold turkey. Like a cold turkey that doesn’t run. Thus, I suppose, the bad legs on marathon day. But, I had hoped, a good foot.

Mile two. Foot pain. Earliest yet.

MRI of evil foot.

Okay. Now what? To pill or not to pill.

Rule number one: Never do anything new during the race.

But if didn’t take anything, I would risk my foot getting worse and having to quit.

Take the pill.

I had been prescribed one Celebrex a day. But for the long trainer, I had taken one pill the night before and another in the morning, so I did the same on marathon day, with another in my pocket just in case.

Three fourteen-hour-lasting, 200 miligram Celebrex for one run?

Yeah.

I reached into my pocket.

Gone.

I emptied one pocket to the other - my Gu, my phone - and checked again.

Gone.

In my head: “Oh, fu. . .” Pause. “This is the best race ever.”

I pulled out some last resort bright orange generic ibuprofen I had thrown in my pocket just in case. This was a just in type of case. I downed three at the next water stop.

They went to my stomach, did a little dance to the soul / funk band, and started messing with me.

Could be a long morning.

For the next several miles I ignored the foot, the legs, the gut, and worked on my head. I meditated, trying to concentrate on my breath, my breath only, being aware of the setting and the feeling, but breathing.

It was getting warm. I pulled off my long sleeve T. People just toss them, the clothes get donated to charities. That’s cool. Considering that, I had grabbed my oldest long sleeve T.

It was old. Really old. The graphics were completely rubbed off.

Me after the 22. And the shirt.

Old old shirt.

I sure had had it a long time. Got it the first time an old band I was in played the arts festival.

I’d hate to pitch this shirt.

I tied it around my waist, counting on some friends who said they’d be cheering in Bexley. I’m a cheap-ass bastard.

I found a groove. I fixed my mood. My stomach settled. The foot pain didn’t seem to be getting worse, was just there. I was enjoying the morning, enjoying the sites, the people, even the run. Especially the run.

“Stefan! Go Stefan”

I turned to my right. There was Amy, a more than a co-worker, a damn cool lady whom I admire a lot, waving like mad, smiling like hell, so damn happy to see me, and me, so damn happy to see her. “Amy! Hey!”

“Way to go, Stefan!”

That cheering stuff? It works.

Past St. Charles – cool rock band there – and the Conservatory – cool, odd folkies. I was on my own at this point, in a crowd but internal, working on my head game, looking for the turn, wanting to keep to the inside. Left turn into Bexley. A slim chance the family might be here; I kept an eye out just in case. Brelle had mentioned maybe Parkview. “Really?” I said. “That’s mile four, pretty early in the morning to get the kids up and everything.” She agreed. Now here I was, scanning every face, just in case.

Pretty run – pretty means a lot to me on a run. On a stretch of Parkview my foot reminded me that it was a problem. I tried to stick to the center of the street, where there’s less grade, as if that would take some stress off the foot. Plus, in case the family was on one side or the other, from the center I could get there. It was hard to keep the center – it was crowded. A lot of weaving through people on this narrower street. It was then that I realized that all that weaving meant lots of passing. I looked behind me, which felt like an amateur move, but, well, not many folks on the road were more amateur than me. There were a lot of people back there, a big crowd going way back past my line of sight. Having started at the back of the last corral, I realized I had passed them all. My pace wasn’t great, but I wasn’t embarrassing myself. That was cool. I felt good.

Maryland to Drexel. Bexley is beautiful, really: huge, verdant trees. The grand old houses that I so often resented through a car window I now enjoyed, perhaps because so many of their occupants were lining the street to cheer for strangers.

And then a call: “Stefan!” And there were Beth and her daughter, my student, Meredith. Good good friends. Beth had been a training partner for the Cap City half.

“Hey, guys!”

“Woo!” or “Good job,” I think, or some such.

I veered toward them, clawing at the knot at my waist. Beth reached up and I tossed her my shirt.

“Sorry!” I yelled as I passed. I ran backward for a bit to face them. “Thank you so much for being here!” They yelled encouragement. And it worked.

I was encouraged and excited and happy to see them. But what a dick, I thought. They come out here to cheer, I throw sweaty laundry at them. Eagerly – like, as soon as I saw them, I started clawing at the knot. “Oh thank God you’re here! My old shirt! My old shirt!”

Dick.

At the mile five water station I ate my first Gu, a carb and caffeine packet you squirt into your mouth while running. There’s a nice endorphin rush that follows. I was getting more extroverted, starting to chat, to thank cops, to encourage runners. “Nice pace,” to one runner who passed me.

“I need to sprint once in a while to get the circulation going in my knees,” he said. That was new to me.

I had to pee. I had had to pee since Bexley, and here I was on Nelson Road. I had passed a lot of porta-johns, each batch more tempting, but lines were long and the clock was ticking. I saw a woman run out of the woods from a dirt path up to the railroad tracks. That’s the place. Should I run up there? Yeah, I should, right? Think quick. Take my chances, hope for, what, no lines? And then I was past it.

Damn. I should have peed there.

Up there. In those shrubs, just off the road. There’s a guy peeing there. Just past that. . . just passed that cop? Okay. Cop doesn’t care. Stop hoping for something better. Don’t miss this opportunity.

I ran off the road, through the wet grass – “Socks, don’t get wet. Socks, don’t get wet.” – and realized I was heading directly toward the peeing man. Awkward. I veered six feet to the left. He took off, I started. Glory. By the time I was done, there were ten of us lined up facing the shrubs. “Thank God for the Y chromosome!” I yelled. They concurred, and I rejoined the race.

Very cool percussion from a high school band. At the corner of Nelson and Franklin Park, there was a huge inflatable arch over the road that said START, as if we’d only been warming up so far. That could have been discouraging. I still don’t know why it was there.

Other than a water station just passed the START sign, I have zero memories of running down Franklin Park. I know I did – I’m looking at the map. But it is a complete and utter blank.

A young lady with a group on the side of the road, cheering generic: “Good job!” “Go runners!” Just as I ran by she ran out of material and yelled, to no one, “Hello!”

“Hello!” I yelled back. “How ARE you?”

Exagerated: “I am FINE! How are YOU?”

“I am fine! Thanks for asking!”

“Okay! Have a nice day!”

“You too!”

Best cheer ever.

Mile eight. The foot pain was getting pretty sharp pretty fast, and I was nervous. On my long training run, the pain started at mile six – two miles earlier than usual -- but eventually plateaued. This time it seemed it would keep getting worse.

Just past the bridge a guy was playing an acoustic guitar and singing “American Pie.”

“This’ll be the day that I die,” he sang. “This’ll be the day that I die.”

“This is not the day that I will die!” I yelled. Approval from other runners, and we chanted.

“This is not the day that I will die!”

Stuff About Stuff About the Brain

2010-04-27T10:38:00.010-04:00

When teaching an SAT prep class recently, I went on frequent tangents about metacognition, or thinking about thinking. On the last day, I decided to give the students a list of some my sources. Before I knew it, I had filled a chalkboard - from memory - and I realized for the first time how interested in this topic I really am.

I offered to email them the list, and since I typed it up I'll share it here as well. I'd be interested in your thoughts and recommendations.

These are some of the things I have read, listened to, watched, am reading, or intend to read related to the mind, brain, and metacognition. Some are great, some are good, some are only peripherally on the topic. My strongest recommendations are marked with a (!) because I found them particularly interesting, powerful, or fun.

TED Talks (20 minute videos for streaming or download)

Sir Ken Robinson:How Schools Kill Creativity (!)

Dan Gilbert: Why Are We Happy? (!) and Our Mistaken Expectations

Jill Bolte Taylor: My Stroke of Insight (!) (The talk is great. The book is okay with some great moments.)

Blog:

The Frontal Cortex by Jonah Lehrer

Podcast:

Radiolab
especially episodes "Stochasticity," (!) "Choice," and "Morality" (!) (podcasts also available for free at the iTunes store.)

Books:

The Happiness Hypothesis (!) by Jonathan Haidt and the related website.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (interesting and sort of a classic, but takes some big leaps)

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (same. Still, interesting.)

NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman [especially, but not only, chapter 1, (!)] Or, like me, you could start with this interview.

Mindset by Carol Dweck. I haven't read this yet. I've seen her speak, and I've read a lot about her research, especially NurtureShock chapter 1. This research has a significant impact on my approach to teaching. And raising kids. And living.

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. I'm reading this right now and enjoying it. There is a lot of overlap with the other books, blogs, and podcasts listed here.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer (based on recommendations and reputation. I haven't read this yet.)

Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown. Derren Brown is the British David Blaine, but with less flash, more brains, and lots of skepticism. The book is fun and is filled with tips for using your brain. I freaked my kids out by using one of his techniques to remember a list of 50 random words, in order, for days. For fun, check out some of his videos on YouTube (!). Brown is an entertainer, not a scientist or journalist, and admits that some of what is does is "showmanship." Still, the way he manipulates people by knowing how brains work is fascinating, even if he does maybe cheat a little.

Joan Benoit Samuelson

2010-02-11T22:46:00.002-05:00

As part of an amazing lecture series, this lady came to our school today:

I went last night to hear her speak, and heard her again today when she addressed the students.

As part of her introduction, the Head of School said something I had heard him say once before, when Cal Ripkin was speaking at our school. Quoting a remark by his own headmaster when he was a sophomore, he said "If you have the chance to see someone who is the best in the world at what they do, you go."

I'm hyper-critical of speakers, and she had some habits that normally bother me. But I found myself inspired in spite of myself. She told an amazing story - her life and career - she got some laughs, and she gave the "marathon = life" metaphor real relevance and depth. She said lots of good things, but one thing in particular stuck with me. She said it in the evening lecture, not to the students. I wish she had repeated it. It has the flavor of an old nugget, but I don't think I'd heard it before - or, at least, she put it in a context that made me listen.

She was talking about goals, short-term, intermediate, and "pie in the sky" goals. And she described "pie in the sky goals" this way: What would you do if you weren't afraid of failing?

Well, I thought about that. And I came home and started a new project.

Also, I'm training to run a half-marathon in May. Still talking my knees into that one.

So, here's to speakers who make an impact.

Patton Oswalt on Teaching

2010-02-03T22:34:00.008-05:00

This post has profanity in it. But not mine.

I came across Patton Oswalt's blog today - not sure why. He's a comedian and actor; he was in The Fan, which I didn't see, and he was the voice of the rat in Ratatouille, which I did see but can't spell without looking up. He wrote a New Years post on phrases he hates, phrases that are not invited to 2010. It's called "These Phrases Are Not Invited To 2010." One of the phrases he is not inviting is "Those who can't, teach."

I've read a million saccharine posts and viral emails about how wonderful and inspiring we teachers are. They're not condescending at all! We love that! Here's one of them. I've seen it many times, most recently sitting on the lunch table during Faculty Appreciation Day. Skim it:

The dinner guests were sitting around the table discussing life. One man, a CEO, decided to explain the problem with education.

He argued: "What's a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?"

He reminded the other dinner guests that it's true what they say about teachers: "Those who can...do. Those who can't...teach."

To corroborate, he said to another guest: "You're a teacher, Susan," he said. "Be honest. What do you make?"

Susan, who had a reputation of honesty and frankness, replied, "You want to know what I make?"

"I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could."

“I make kids believe in themselves when no one else will.”

"I make a C+ feel like a Congressional Medal of Honor and an A- feel like a slap in the face if the student did not do his or her very best."

"I make parents tremble in fear when I call home"

"You want to know what I make?

"I make kids wonder."

"I make them question."

"I make them criticize."

"I make them apologize and mean it."

"I make them write."

"I make them read, read, read."

"I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, and definitely beautiful over and over and over again, until they will never misspell either one of those words again."

"I make them show all their work in math and hide it all on their final drafts in English."

"I make them understand that if you have a dream, then follow it...and if someone ever tries to judge you by what you make or what you do, you pay them no attention."

"You want to know what I make?!"

"I make a difference."

"What about you?"

You tell him, Susan!

Of course, if they had left the camera running, the story would end with the CEO's response: "120 million dollars a year."

(Susan should also make them learn the rules for quotation marks.)

But here's a response to the "Those who can't, teach" saw that rings true with me. Oswalt captures the truth of it in a way that I hadn't heard before. Here:

"Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can't, Teach"

Bullshit.

Yes, there are shitty teachers. There are unimaginative, by-rote educators who take no joy in their profession. Maybe they went in full of idealism and energy and got beaten down. Maybe they never had it. Yes, they exist. But the bulk of teachers -- at least, the ones I've encountered in my life -- teach because they are truly passionate about a subject, concept or discipline. They don't take any pleasure in the amassing of property or finance. I know that must sound like low-grade insanity, especially these days. They want to keep kicking open new rooms and dusting off windows in their minds and souls. They get a truly endorphic lift from delving deeper and deeper into something -- an author, an epoch, a science -- within which they perceive a teasing glimmer of the infinite.

And since there's only so much someone can read about a subject or person or book or piece of music, they create new strategies for revelation. One of the surest is to see the thing they love through untrained, unbiased eyes. In other words, students. Semester after semester, year after year, sometimes generation after generation, they watch how the changing world warps, diminishes, or builds up this thing they've become obsessed with.

People who toss this phrase off were probably shitty students, and were too dull to spot the passion in the eyes of their quality teachers. These were the assholes I encountered at college, who "studied for the test", and bragged about how, "I'm never gonna read another fucking book or listen to this faggy-ass music ever again..." and became lawyers who can't spell and who nod their heads to the same five Bon Jovi songs over their buffalo wings at Bennigan's.

I love that. Here's my favorite part, other than that whole Bon Jovi, Bennigan's cheap shot:

They get a truly endorphic lift from delving deeper and deeper into something -- an author, an epoch, a science -- within which they perceive a teasing glimmer of the infinite.

You tell 'em, Rat-chef man. Now take that last royalty check and buy your high school theater teacher a Mercedes.

Acting is Hard

2010-02-02T22:02:00.005-05:00

It's, like, really hard.

If I return to directing, this will be a good thing for me to know .

For my first audition, I prepped. I worked on the monologue, tried different approaches, played around. And I think I did pretty well. I did, actually. I got called back, right?

But the call-backs were different. In the scenes I was called back for, I only had a couple of lines to make an impression. I worked them out a little, made some choices.

After about an hour of waiting during other characters' call-backs, we (all of the Mr. Gilmers, Bob Ewells, Scouts, and Jems) were called into a room where the director and the already-cast Atticus and Judge were sitting. And we went through the scenes.

In my many years as a director, I took for granted that I should be able to ask a new actor for a certain approach, and they, you know, should do it. Eventually. I understood why they didn't do it right away. But I never really got it. But, it turns out, it's hard. Acting, I mean.

Really, it is.

All that TV you watch, all those movies, and you have your opinions about who can act and who can't, but really you secretly think they're just moving around and talking, right? I thought I knew better, but I didn't. Since my audition, I've been amazed at how good real actors are. And I haven't been watching Meryl Streep or Deniro movies. I've been watching Arrested Development and Modern Family. Actually, I watched the same episode of Arrested Development four times in a row, and even the lamest actor (I'm not naming names, David Cross) amazed me.

(Why did I watch the same episode of Arrested Development four times in a row? Because I write self-indulgent lesson plans, that's why.)

As I watched the other Mr. Gilmers do the scenes, in a couple of cases I thought "Oh, I'm better than that," but, really, I'm probably not. I realized sitting there that it wasn't just about having a particular approach or trying to look natural, although neither of those are a cake walk. Those are the base-line minimums, even in a little community show like this one. [Just about] all of the actors had that. The hard part is doing all that and being interesting, even with - especially with - a character who doesn't do all that much.

I had my approach to the character. In the scene, Gilmer, the prosecuting attorney, is questioning young, naive Mayella Ewell, the victim. Since he was on her side, and she was shaken, I let him be nice to her, but condescending. It makes sense, from an English-teacher analysis point of view, which, duh, is the wrong point-of-view to use, because it isn't dramatic.

Which makes it sound like if only I had chosen a different approach. . . But I don't think so. Cuz you know what? Acting is hard.

Talking to my wife on the way home, I said "If I were the director. . . hello? Are you there? Hello?. . . Is this my phone or yours?. . . Can you hear me? I can't hear you. Hello?. . . Oh, hi. If I were directing, I would cast two of the other guys in this role before I would cast me." And she said nice things, but, really, what could she say? She wasn't there. And, well, I'm not much of an actor, but I am a good director. So nyah.

And he did. The director, I mean. Cast one of those guys. If I could, I would tell him that he made the right choice. Cuz he did.

Did it sting a little? I think so. It's hard to tell. The very minute - nay, second ("nay"? See what even a little theater does?) that I read the disappointing email, a teacher came into my classroom and told me some unrelated, emotionally loaded news that had me angry for the rest of the day. I had a hard time sorting out whether I was over-reacting to her news because of the casting, or if it was the other way around. Either way, it wasn't the worst day, but it wasn't the best, either.

But okay: I was bumming a little. The thing about being called-back is it makes you want it.

Will I audition again? Maybe. It would be harder next time, because now I know how easy and fast it is to slide from "doing it for the audition" to "I want this part." And now I know how hard it is to say the lines, and know when to move, and figure out what the hell to do with your arms.

My daughter got an audition notice in the mail today. She's going to try out. I admire her courage.

There are adult parts, too.

Challening My Inner Anti-Atticus

2010-01-30T20:03:00.015-05:00

[Note: So I wrote some of this at home and some away from wireless and some was cut and pasted from another blog, and now I can't seem to get all the fonts looking the same and all purty-like. Sorry. Deal.]

Wrote this last night:

I auditioned for a play tonight.

That's not like me. Here's how not like me that is: Last time I auditioned for a play, Bobby Ewing was on his deathbed. David Lee Roth was the lead singer of Van Halen. Girls were wearing rugby shirts and leggings. Klaus von Kiltzing had not yet won the Nobel prize for his discovery of the quantization of electrical resistance.

That means that I was sitting in a backstage room of the Riffe theaters tonight, surrounded by people who looked like they knew what they were doing more than I did. I was filling out a form. And on the form, when it asked for previous roles played, and at what theater, I had to write the name of my high school. I am forty-three year old balding man leaning on my high school credentials.

Let me be clear that I don't anticipate a role in this play. Maybe - maybe - oddly tall townsperson number 3. Truly, I was in it for the audition. I was in it for the fear and nervousness, the newness of it.

Continued writing this afternoon:

The stars were aligned. I have been thinking a lot about my middle-aged brain, how much it benefits from new and novel experiences. I’ve been thinking about my creative life, and how isn’t it is of late.

Then, one Facebook evening, Artie Isaac posted an audition call. Artie is a board member of Available Light Theater. More importantly, he’s a guy who decided in mid-life that damn it, he loved acting in high school, so he started staging shows so that he could get back on stage. And on Facebook, he posted this audition call. It hits all the right notes for my “what the hell” chorus:

The following comes from here

Your Invitation to Act

I'm on a mission.

I'm looking for people who want to try doing what I'm doing. I am acting on stage as a way to raise money for a worthy not-for-profit theatre company.

Why I'm Doing It It's for a lot of reasons. Mainly, I enjoy it.

But that's too self-serving to admit. So here's my public reason...

This not-for-profit theatre company — let's just call it "Available Light" — has a do-gooder attitude about serving everyone in the community, without regard to anyone's ability to pay for fancy theatre tickets. So all their shows offer tickets at the awkward price of Pay What You Want.

The shows I am in, however, are designed to generate funds for the otherwise risky Pay What You Want offer. So — for these shows only — we charge a minimum price ($15) and swoon whenever anyone pays more than that.

Selling Out
We call these shows "sell outs." We mean that in both senses of the word:

Economically, we seek to sell out at the box office. So far, we've sold approximately 3,000 tickets to the shows wherein I have tripped dangerously close to "acting." We actually sold out twice during the most recent run.
Artistically, we recognize that we are (somewhat) selling out by choosing plays that are more popular than the more challenging and original fare of Available Light's regular season. It's not a real soul-sucking artistic sell out: we manage to find plays that are deeply meaningful and satisfying. They're just popular — is that so wrong?

Who I'm Looking For
I seek:

1. People who want to try acting. The ideal candidate has not been on stage as an actor in many years — or ever. This person feels like a ham, but canned and ready to come off the shelf.
2. People who seek a self-actualizing experience. This might feel (in the ideal candidate) like a gnawing hunger for a new creative risk and — hey! — maybe acting is the right risk.
3. People who want to be immersed in a worthy text. The next show is To Kill A Mockingbird, arguably the best novel ever written. There is no better way to read a book — than to read it with friends learning how to act the book.
4. People who are willing to work on this. The ideal candidate will come to rehearsals, ready to work. Some roles are smaller than others. For those who want dip a toe in the water: townspeople. For those who want to jump in: there are lines to be memorized.
5. People who are willing to audition with Ian Short. (See details below.) At the audition, the ideal candidate will have some natural presence and will respond to direction — and be a person that Ian can see filling one of the roles. You don't have to be a pro. Amateurs encouraged and trained!

6. People who have a large social network. The ideal candidate will attract a couple hundred people to buy tickets. Perhaps those so-called friends just want to see what the heck is [Louie] doing. That's OK. These are fundraisers, so selling of tickets is important.

Can you think of this person? If so, let me know.

Even if this person is you.

So last night I found myself sitting in a small room with a bunch of strangers (and one loved one, who would perhaps prefer my discretion about that part of the story.) I probably wouldn’t have been there for any other play; as an English teacher, I’ve had a long association with To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, my oldest son’s name would be Atticus if a woman much smarter than me hadn’t pointed out the length of our last name. It would have been quite the gangly moniker; even the most restrained teacher would have a hard time not rolling her eyes when taking attendance. But I love To Kill a Mockingbird. I imagine when Harper Lee dies I’ll have another essay to write.

Not that I felt I had a shot at Atticus. First of all, Artie stages shows so he can be in them, so the Atticus role was filled, I was sure. Plus, frankly, I didn’t think I had much of a shot at all. An open call for what is basically a community theater show, but with a highly respected theater company – I figured every between-jobs actor and up-and-coming theater student would show up. People who’ve been working at acting. Really, I was in it for the audition.

So I found a monologue on-line, something appropriate to my age and the tone of the show. It was a near miss. (Isben? Seriously?) And I spent some time prepping it; certainly not memorizing, but finding beats and marking it up in the way I’ve taught students over the years. And I got pretty nervous, especially on the drive downtown. Nervous is a lousy feeling, but I remembered that being nervous was a big reason I was doing this, fighting brain calcification and all. But the nervousness faded – mostly – when I walked into the room. I made it a point to be friendly, I concentrated on the loved one, and I had the pleasant if somewhat awkward distraction of an old friend in the room, a former rival, of sorts. He was there with his son.

“So, are you auditioning?” I asked.

“No. No no no.” He gestured to his boy.

“Oh, you should.”

“To be in a show? With what time?” he asked, grinning.

“Well, what? You’re going to drive him to practices anyway, right? You’ll just be sitting in the car.”

Small talk, and I found a seat. A couple minutes later he got up and signed the sheet. We grinned, I made some joke, he joked back. I felt kinda good about that.

I got called into the room, I did my monologue. I ended up having a really good time with it. It felt good. I didn’t embarrass myself, and that was gratifying. They said they’d email the callback list that evening. I wished them luck and told them I looked forward to the show, either way it worked out.

Then I went home and stayed up late watching Brazil with my kid. Love that movie. But I got mad at him for constantly checking his text messages – “Look, if we’re going spend time together, spend the time here, okay?” – a common anti-iPod and cell phone refrain for me. But after scolding him I realized it meant I couldn’t check my email either, which sort of messed me up. Cuz, okay, I was in it for the audition – really, I was. But it would be nice to be called back, you know?

And, surprise surprise, today I’m still in the game. I’m back in that room today, right now, with a larger group of strangers, and one old friend-slash-rival, (and, sigh, no loved one) all of us mumbling over stapled pages we’ve been handed to prepare. I’ve been called back for Mr. Gilmer, defense attorney. That’d be fun. As far as stage time and number of lines, that would be more fun that this other part I’ve been thinking about today. But you know what would be awesome?

Boo Radley.

Iconic character. Only one line.

Reading the lines for Mr. Gilmer, it was fun to imagine: the anti-Atticus. But Boo Radley? That sure would make these conversations more fun at school:

“Hey. I’m in a play. To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“Really? What part?”

See?

So, as I sit here, here’s the score, honest and for true:

“Mr. Gilmer.” Seriously? Awesome. Wow. Thanks.

“Boo Radley.” Oh, great. Awesome. Much less stressful, far fewer rehearsals, great name part. (and then it occurs to me that I’m probably way to old for that part.)

“We’re sorry, maybe next time.” Oh, thank god. I really have no idea how I would have found the time to do a show.

So, s’all good. I’m really here for the audition. I can feel my frontal cortex de-calcifying as I sit here.

Chinese "Catcher"

2010-01-29T09:27:00.003-05:00

Here are the covers of German and Chinese editions of Catcher that I mentioned in my last post. The Chinese one is particularly bizarre.

Reading Salinger

2010-01-28T21:07:00.011-05:00

When my seventh period seniors were in their seats and settled, I started talking.

“I’ve got something I want to talk about. This is maybe not the best group for me to do this with; members of this class tend to be a bit skeptical about emotional kinds of topics" – well, they did, and they knew it – “but this is important to me, and it’s important to me to do it right now."

An uncomfortable silence filled the room, the stillness kids have when things get heavy. They thought they were in trouble, and I didn’t correct the impression. If wondering if they were being scolded would keep the cynics along for the ride, that was fine. Good, even.

I said, “When I was in teacher school, one of my professors said that when dealing with topics you feel strongly about you should ask yourself a question: Am I doing this to serve my students’ needs, or my own?’ The implication is that if what you are saying is not for your students, you shouldn't be saying it. I agree with that advice, generally, and though I don’t always succeed, I try to hold to it. That said, I’m going to talk about something, and it’s going to be for me, not for you. It’s self-indulgent, and I apologize. I hope it’s of value to you, but I’m doing this for me. I want to be able to look back at this day and remember that I stopped what I was doing and took some time.”

The class had no idea what I was talking about, but they could see that I was emotional. A couple of them nodded support even though they didn’t know what was going on. I paused to regain my composure. And then I told them a version of this story.

I have wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember, but I’m not quite sure when I decided I wanted to teach English. I’m pretty sure it was in the seventh grade. My career choice had a lot to do with Ed Zettler, especially something he did on the last day of school.

That year I was a new kid – returning kid, actually – in a strict Catholic school. It was tough year for me, but I loved English. I liked Mr. Zettler a lot, and he liked me; his class was a sanctuary. On the last day of school, he was cleaning out his room. Some kids surrounded him, angling for the junky treasure he was tossing out. But then he called me over and handed me a book, saying, “You should read this.” It was Catcher in the Rye.

That book had a big impact on me, as it does to many people, and one of the big things it taught me is that you don’t have to understand a book to love it. The summer of my seventh grade year, I didn’t understand Catcher in the Rye. But I loved it – and this was before I knew that loving Catcher in the Rye was some sort cultural statement. It’s a cliché to fall in love with the first sentence of Catcher, but it wasn’t a cliché to me, so I did.

I loved Holden. I loved his voice. I was transfixed by his unrequited love for Jane Gallagher. I loved that the book had just enough naughtiness to make me feel I was getting away with something. But all along I knew there was more to the book than I was getting. When I realized it was a classic, I wanted to be taught the book, at school, in a class, with a teacher. (I loved Holden, but I wasn’t him.) I was eager to get to high school, where I assumed it would be studied. When I got there, I was eager to get to American Literature, where I knew it was studied. By the time I got to my junior year, I had read the book a couple more times.

I was thrilled to be in Sr. Margaret’s class – she was (and is, I’m sure) a wonderful teacher, and she, like Ed Zettler, has had an influence on my career. But she was also the English teacher at Bishop Watterson who did not teach Catcher in the Rye.

As soon as I got to college, I scoured the course catalog for a lit class that listed Catcher. I found Intro to American Literature. Good course; smart, funny instructor. When it came time to cover the novel – for only one day, according to the syllabus – I said to the instructor before class, “So it’s Catcher today, right?”

And she said. “Oh, yeah. I guess. I hate that book.”

We spent fifteen minutes on it.

Eventually, of course, I got to read it in a school with a class, but I was the teacher. I taught it for years at two different school. I read books about it, I read Salinger’s other works. I designed a senior elective for kids who love it. And though I've not taught that course or American Literature for a number of years, I still have my favorite interpretations (It not a sad ending! He’s not in an insane asylum! “Caul” is significant, tied to his hunting cap! And to Allie’s hair! So Mr. Antollini patting Holden's head isn't creepy! It's Holden's apotheosis!) I don’t know if I taught it well; I imagine I was a bit over-enthused and didactic.

Through the years I've read about J.D. Salinger, all of the eccentricities, the tawdry rumors, which are probably lies and probably true, too. I used Salinger's quirks and reclusiveness to capture students’ imaginations. Regrettably, I even expressed half-kidding glee that Salinger would most likely die soon. When he dies, I said, if the reports are true that he never stopped writing, then there may be a vault filled with Salinger's works waiting to be read by the likes of us.

The Catcher in the Rye, the actual, physical book, is an artifact in my life. A section of my bookshelf is dedicated to different editions of the novel. (To me, the real Catcher is the maroon one with yellow typeface.) When I travel to different countries, which I’ve done only twice, I buy editions in different languages. In China, that wasn't easy. When copies of Catcher are left in halls and lockers at the end of each school year, I grab a couple. When I have guests who’ve never read it, I give them one.

That story - my history with The Catcher in the Rye - is the story I told my seventh period class today. I was unprepared for how hard it was; I choked up a couple times, especially at the wishing-Salinger-dead part. I was embarrassed by the whole scene. I imagined how I must have looked and thought about how I react to zealous fans of pretty much anything; I see them as unsophisticated and a little pathetic.

I abandoned my plan to read the class a Salinger story; I wouldn’t get through it.

By eighth period, I had regained my composure. Again, I told the class how much Salinger and Catcher means to me. This time I was less embarrassed and less embarrassing. I read them one of my favorite stories, “The Laughing Man.”

I’d like to say they were transfixed, but "respectful" would be more accurate. Even "patient." I’d like to say they loved the story, but I’m not sure they understood it, and my explanations fell flat. The reading, as I admitted, was for me more than for them. I want to know, tomorrow, a year, five years from now, that on the day J.D. Salinger died, I took note. I told my students what he meant to me, and I read them one of his stories.

Pictures from my old cell phone

2010-01-26T22:07:00.006-05:00

I got a new cell phone, not for Christmas, but around Christmas. And I had to figure out what to do with all of the pictures on my old cell phone. So now they are all just sitting there on iPhoto.

So I'm toying with this idea of writing about all of them. A lot of them are gone, into the ether, I don't know where. But 180 pictures survived the move, all taken with a very cheap cell phone, none very good. Some to capture moments, others to help me remember a salsa I like. What if I try to write about each and every one of them? That, it seems, would be the most boring slide show ever.

So let's do it!

Entry number one.

This was, what, two years ago? Not this past summer. The one before. We don't do waterparks often - we must have had a coupon. I remember I took this picture specifically for use as the display on the screen inside my phone. Does it get much cheesier than concrete rivers and giant human flushing machines? We hadn't been to Zoombezi Bay before, and at least one of us - the mom one - was not very excited. But then, taking a break from crazy slides, sitting in a lounge chair as the kids played in the giant wave pool, drinking a seven-dollar, lime-flavored Bud Light, even she embraced the cheese, and we had to admit, we were having a damn good time.

Entry number two!

My son, circa a-few-years-ago. Cute. I can't imagine calling him cute anymore. But this is cute. I have no recollection of taking this picture.

Number three!

Ah, Larry's. I took this picture as a keepsake on Larry's last night. Larry's was an OSU campus institution, and while I was by no means a regular, I had some fond memories. When I was in high school, Larry's was rumored to be a gay-bar, back when that was still taboo. The rumor was started by the regulars in order to keep the frat-types away, and it worked. Larry's was a dark, Tom Waits-y type of bearded grad student and old-guy bar. Dark wood, peanuts, cheap glasses, philosophy rather than phallises on the bathroom walls. You imagined that the group of flannel wearing guys in the corner were planning the revolution. I first went to Larry's when I was in high school; an older, artsier friend invited some of us to his poetry reading - poetry readings happened at Larry's. That was probably one of the first times I had ever been in a bar. I still remember parts of the poetry, actually, and certainly Kip's reaction when I made an observation about one of his poems that he thought nailed it. Kip's poetry was actually pretty good, I recall, but a lot of the other stuff was far enough over our young heads as to seem completely non-sensical; for weeks after, Tom Ferkany would pass me notes in choir class with his own versions of meaningless poetry: "Tree bags, help!" and "Tuesday, up in the sky." I still remember them.

Poetry aside, though, something else that night made an even bigger impression: Larry's didn't card.

So I used to go to Larry's once in a while through high school and college, and even a few times since. It was the only bar where you could drink and not look crazy grading papers. It was a great bar, actually, had a lot of character and charm.

The night I took that picture, I was out with a couple of teacher friends, and we remembered the story in The Dispatch about it being Larry's last night, and we headed over. We were a bit out of place then, more buttoned down than I had been years before, less bohemian than most others there. I wish I had fit in better at Larry's, and I wish Larry's had fit in better, too. The city is worse off without it.

Imagine

2010-01-20T12:36:00.000-05:00

What if I blogged again? Then what would happen?

Summer so far

2009-07-18T14:51:00.007-04:00

It's been a Peter Gabriel, Lolita, freezer-pop, Elmore Leonard, Six Million Dollar Man, Dennis LeHane, Van Halen, Farnesworth Invention, Little Debbie Swiss Cakes, pizza-on-the-grill, stray cat, Rent at Columbus Children Theater kind of summer so far. A bit on each:

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.

United Breaks Guitars

2009-07-13T19:23:00.005-04:00

There is nothing more terrifying for a guitar player than knowing that you have to travel on an airplane with your guitar ... and check it with the other baggage.

Thanks Dave Carroll! This says it all with a great song and great video!

Creepy Doll Place

2009-06-23T19:25:00.007-04:00

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.

My First Love

2009-05-30T07:47:00.002-04:00

Before there was my lovely wife, before there was Tina Fey, before there was even Sandy Todd (in Mrs. Clapham's kindergarten class, 1970). . .

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.)

Lark, Nightingale, Bangin'

2009-05-05T13:24:00.001-04:00

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."

Wolf and Pig Animation

2009-04-15T14:51:00.001-04:00

Seen this yet? Cuz it's awesome.

Practice, Practice, Practice

2009-03-29T12:35:00.004-04:00

Ok, I know I know. It's been months since I've posted on the blog and I'm not even sure if I'm still welcome. I know I'm not a good blogger and most of the time I'm not even a willing blogger. I'm still trying to figure out what all the fuss is about with this blogging / tweeting / facebooking / spacelooking / flogging / clogging stuff . To that point though, I still visit the site fairly regularly as I look forward to hearing about Dead Lennie. You've been pretty lax there my good friend Lennie (on the creative side), although my sense is it's been "one of those years" - to say the least.

I'm blogging today for a little accountability. I started the Berklee online Masters Guitar program in the early fall and as of this week I'm about to finish my second class and move on to class #3. I've had an in depth dive into guitar scales & chords, and am about to move to Blues. It's a good time to take an assessment of what and how I've done, and see if I shouldn't steer myself a little bit in another direction.

Now that I have been through two classes I can honestly say that my concern about whether it would be worth it has been smashed to pieces. I worried that it wouldn't be comprehensive and challenging enough. If anything, it's been the opposite. The only limitation on how much I get from the course is my willingness to put in the time and effort. Both classes so far have enough material to keep me busy and challenged for years. I've found that I have to focus on the aspects that are most relevant to me and hopefully revisit the additional material on my own in the future. Great great stuff. My effort has been very good and I've worked hard to get nothing but A's on all assignments. All in all, I am energized by being able to really LEARN the instrument the way I should have years ago as I insisted that playing songs was all I really needed. I am excited for future courses and excited to keep this learning wheel spinning. Education is a wonderful thing!

Now for the negative. I've spent so much time on these courses, theory and skills, that I've put off just playing. I haven't gigged since Sept. Haven't been practicing songs and repetoire almost at all. Zero songwriting. You get the idea. I think therein lies the gut-check for the upcoming months. I need to balance out my practice and get back to songs & playing gigs and the creative and fun side of guitar. My worry is, the only way to do that is practice, practice, practice. Not sure I can commit to much more and not sure if I should. Although I sure would like to. Hmm. Do my best? Suck it up? Don't worry, be happy? Wherever you go there you are? Other thoughts?

Lennie. I think about you often. Hows the creative stuff? You're not letting life get too much in the way are you? Your audience wants more..........

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T20:50:00.006-05:00

This was a good day. As this blog is a bit of an electronic journal, more personal than public, I though it might be good place to record my experience of it.

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.

Fox News: We're unpresidented!

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."

― Gabriel Winant (salon.com)

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.

What I've Consumed Lately, A Post Too Long To Read

2008-12-21T10:45:00.006-05:00

They have been dark days of late, and I am once again amazed at big the little things can be.

I assumed my funk, my blues, my down was the result of the big things. Problems in my personal life. Stresses at work. Especially, perhaps, an existential crisis due to shifts in my spiritual life.

I've never been accused of under-thinking things

Turns out I wasn’t sad because of those problems. They were problems because I was S.A.D.

And then the school counselor, whom I don’t know well, but I want to cuz she’s so cool, shows up in my classroom. She said “Here, try this. You’ve looked like you could use it,” cuz counselors notice these things. And she put a light on my desk.

Look, I’m a skeptic, too. About just about everything. But I admit that I had been wondering if my blues were seasonal, and I had heard about light therapy and wondered about it. A buddy walked in, saw me sitting in front of the light, and said “Oh, come on. You have crystals in your pocket, too?”

But I gotta tell ya. I turned on this blazingly bright light for a half hour while I checked email or graded in the morning, and, well, I felt just like this:

Let’s acknowledge that it could be psychosomatic. Okay. I’m alright with that. But it’s not. But it could be. But it’s not. But who cares?

Let’s also acknowledge that the person who gave it to me thinks it works. Which means she literally took her happy off of her desk and put it onto mine. Which is really nice.

So, in all of this time, have I done any writing? No. Well, lots of writing for work – comments on each kid, lots of college recs. But no creative writing.

Well, wait. I wrote a college recommendation for a kid who is the best reader and writer I’ve ever taught, who is getting a C in my English class. So that took some creativity, I suppose.

So the answer to the “And so now what now?” has, for too long, been nothing much. I've not been a creator. Even my time on the piano has been about learning other people's songs. Which I've enjoyed, a lot, but still.

However, I’ve continued to be a big consumer of pop culture, so I thought I’d do a run down of some stuff I’ve read or watched in the long time since I’ve written. This is going to look like a lot of stuff, but remember: it’s been a long time, and I don’t watch sports.

Okay. Here’s stuff I’ve consumed of late:

The Odyssey: Impressed? You ought to be. Well, actually I just taught it again. I love this thing, and as stuffy and unmanageable as you might think it is, you should know that my students love it, too. Cool thing:, I took my son out to lunch at a new Greek restaurant I heard was great. And, it being just after his exam, we got into an argument about The Odyssey. Then we realized we were in a Greek joint arguing about The Odyssey. And that felt kinda cool.

Oedipus Rex: Taught it, love it. But when teaching two different classes, I keep calling Odysseus and Oedipus by each other’s names

That led to Minority Report, which I show after teaching Oedipus Rex. We talk about how the ancient Greeks saw fate as, well, fate: inevitable, unchangeable, and you are a hero if you face it with dignity and courage. Whereas in American culture, you’re a hero if you change fate. Also, it is a really cool movie. I had forgotten how much I love Spielberg. When Tom Cruise's watch ticks toward zero - Will he kill him, as prophesied? Will he not? – it was more fun to watch the students than the movie. They were rapt.

Artificial Intelligence: A.I.: So Minority Report put me in a Spielberg mood, so I tried to watch A.I. with my kids, but my son got too creeped out by it, and I decided that it was too creepy for my daughter. I love this film. It is a beautiful mess the likes of which you should expect if Spielberg (“Life is good, we can control our lives, a positive view saves the day, more happy endings than a Craig’s List massage parlor” [even to the holocaust, see Shindler’s List]) takes over a project started by Stanley Kubrick (“the universe is a bitch, we’re all evil deep inside, we’re doomed by eye liner and bowler hats, or nuclear bombs ridden like rodeo horses, or Nicholson with an ax”) The reactions A.I. causes are so complex and contradictory it’s almost hard to sit through.

I realized that the movie never made sense to me because I thought of the ending as being about aliens, not evolved mechas. I’m an idiot.

Note about me being obsessive. I bought this movie on eBay on a whim. When it came, it was full screen. So I bought it again. You want the full screen version? Really? Shame on you.

Wall*E: How amazing is Pixar? This movie is brilliant, and proves that clever can also be powerful and poignant and fun. We just watched this on DVD, but when we saw it in the theater it got me on a serious Charlie Chaplin kick. Have you ever watched Chaplin?

Modern Times still feels modern, and, though funny and slap-sticky, is also satirical, with an edge that holds up more than I expected. I expected to enjoy it in that I-forgive-old-movies-for-being-kind-of-boring-and-cheesy sort of way, but I didn’t have to. Chaplin movies really hold up. And if The Kid doesn’t touch you, you’re an asshole.

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. I’m a huge fan. Of the author. But not of this book. Eh.

Wanted I grabbed this comic book from the library and read the whole thing, constantly amazed at how stupid it is, and how hard it works too be bad-ass and shocking, only to come across as trying too hard. This book is embarrassing. So of course I immediately rented the movie

Wanted, which is dumb but not nearly as dumb as the book, and is a blast to watch. Fantastic if crazy derivative stunts and effects, and I think this might have been the first time I’ve seen Angelina Jolie on film. She’s really cool. I didn't expect that. I thought she was only hot. She comes across as really smart and charming (and those other things too, yes.) Also, this movie contains the most ridiculous conceit ever, announced in dulcet tones by Morgan Freeman: “The Loom of Fate.”

Infinite Jest I had never read any David Foster Wallace, and when he committed suicide, I was moved by the many obits in the press. So I read a bunch of his journalism, and then dove into his masterpiece. Well, I didn’t dive exactly. I'm still wading in, slowly. But I felt over-due for a literary challenge. I love the book, when I’m able to really concentrate, but my progress through this cinder-block of a novel was stalled by a quote-of-the-day in an email at work:
"Here's something else no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do… Read anything, as long as you can't wait to pick it up again.
— Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt (2006)

I don’t quite agree with the “nothing good” part, but I'm still taking a break from the challenge and am reading

When You Are Engulfed By Flames by David Sedaris instead. Fun, thoughtful, with some laugh-out-louds, but his self-absorption gets a bit tedious.

Speaking of self-absorption, I should be clear that I don’t think you are still reading this. But I’m enjoying recording my opinions for myself.

Okay. Other things I’ve consumed in the past days or weeks or months:

Obama’s victory. It’s all been said, but I felt it too, big time. It hit me when I was walking my dog , waiting for the official 270 at 11:00. It just hit me, hard. It was good.

30 Rock: I often forget how great this show is, and then I watch an episode on hulu on a whim, and I try to remember other shows that make me laugh so much.

Quantum of Solace: I don’t get it. Why is everyone bashing this film? It’s not as good as Casino Royale, sure. But for a Bond film, it’s good, right? People remember Bond movies as better than they really are, sort of like the first seasons of Saturday Night Live. Goldfinger? Sure, it’s fun. But go watch it again. Then watch Quantum of Solace. It’s cool and fun, if a little bloated. And smarter than it looks. Nice touch with the oil-coated homage to the Connery classic, too.

A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All: I enjoyed this at the time, but weird out weighed funny. This was almost as surreal as the old Peewee’s Playhouse, but you expect Peewee to be that bizarre.

Tropic Thunder: I'm not entirely fond of how much I loved this film. Hilarious, and Robert Downey Jr.; is there anyone more fun (and impressive) to watch on film these days? I was half way through the movie before I recognized Tom Cruise.

Derren Brown. This guy, who I’ve only seen online, rocks my world (and distracts me from grading exams. And challenges what I believe. And has me studying NLP.) You can’t get his DVDs on this side of the pond. Watch one and see if you can stop.

Frankenstein: The old original. Frickin’ blast.

Young Frankenstein: Funnier than I remembered. And without that old-comedy sag at the end.

Man on Wire: The effect of this documentary is this: even though the guy who walked on a high wire between the Twin Towers is there, in the documentary, in 2008, talking about his exploit in 1974, when you watch the old footage you still think he might not survive. The movie doesn’t exploit the sadness of the missing towers, but the film gains beauty from 9/11 anyway.

West Wing: I loved this show and stopped watching shortly after Aaron Sorkin left, cuz it fell so far so fast, but I’m watching season five now because of this, and while it ain't Sorkin, I am enjoying it.

All Star Batman and Robin by Frank Miller is a comic for fans of the genre only, and only the fans willing to forgive super-hero comics at their most misogynistic. I’m not sure I’m there. And Batman should never laugh like the Joker or say “God damn.” But the guest appearances by the JLA are fun.

Slaughterhouse 5: Taught this again for the first time in years. Loved it even more than I remembered, in large part because of the quality of my students' discussions. And, this time, I think understood the novel in a whole new way. I realized that Vonnegut probably doesn’t agree with the lessons he has Billy Pilgrim come to learn.

The Day The Earth Stood Still: I won’t take the kids to see the new one (horrible reviews, but my daughter really wants to see it) until they watch the old one. Really great movie, in a I-forgive-old-movies-for-being-kind-of-boring-and-cheesy sort of way.

Bolt. Took the family to this one. It’s okay. Opening chase scene is great because it steals apologetically from Pixar’s The Incredibles. The rest of the movie is fun, but mostly points out how impressive Pixar’s consistent excellence really is.

Boy in the Stripped Pajamas: My son and I saw this as a preview for free, and our night out was great. Hooray for the non-megaplex; we need to go to the Drexel much more often. At first the film made me uncomfortable; it depicts the fashion and zeitgeist of my parents' childhood, but with English accents. but the performances are fantastic and the movie really powerful. It is as good as the holocaust as a young adult film can be - which is actually very, very good. The point of view of a young boy who doesn't understand what is happening is moving and tragic and sad; you feel sorry for the son of a monster - and the monster, his father who runs a concentration camp, is uncomfortably honest in making him human. The last fifteen minutes are amazing and powerful on a number of levels.

That's a downer to end on. How about this one:

Robot Chicken: Star Wars I had never seen Robot Chicken, because I am old. But I threw this on my iPod a long time ago and forgot about it, and stumbled upon it yesterday. I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but it's hilarious. Here are some clips (not embeddable).

Writing this was a fun and oddly relaxing way to kick off Winter break. If you read the whole thing: why?

Two Very Different Superhero Trailers

2008-11-18T17:38:00.003-05:00

Two completely different superhero movies. One, "no duh." The other, "what the?"

Both very cool.

No duh:

What the?:

Shaking Edward Bristol's Foundations

2008-11-09T08:53:00.004-05:00

I just came across high praise for Tater Tots of Love.

The blogger who wrote seems to be an avant-garde performer in Bristol. Look at his blog.

That a traditional high school show hit him so hard seemed to surprise him as much as his blog post surprised me:

The highlight of my Edinburgh Fringe as an audience member was undoubtedly Tater Tots of Love, this is an American high school musical. Trust me I was as shocked as you might be to hear this.

Essentailly the experience shook me to the foundations of my artistic practice: you don't need experimentation and the attendant obscurity, what you need is show tunes, big smiles and the ability to hit the high notes. Even better the whole things was probably the best response to Faust that I've seen.

I have included an audio sample of the finale for your enjoyment.

Thanks to the lovely Chloë Courtney for sending me the link.

For more info check

http://www.tatertotsoflove.com/index.html

Summerhood

2008-10-21T15:47:00.003-04:00

Doesn't this movie look great?

When it becomes the next out-of-nowhere indie hit like Little Miss Sunshine or Juno, remember you saw it here first.

http://www.summerhood.com/Trailer_Site/Trailer_1___.html

Woody as Joker, and College Rec For Anthony David D.

2008-10-16T16:16:00.006-04:00

Check this out:

I've had very little time for creative pursuits during this hectic first quarter and three-offspring soccer season. A couple things here and there, though, including work on a recording for my daughter and her best friend of a song they wrote together. This to make up for not letting her go to Kings Island with friends, because her mother and I are united in unreasonable meanness.

Another school has requested a perusal script for the musical I wrote. Fingers crossed.

The band is moving along despite membership shake ups.

I've done no writing of my own.

I did, however, get the chance to revisit a piece I wrote four years ago that I was always a wee bit pleased with.

A former student stopped by my room to ask me to write a college recommendation. College recommendations are par for the course in this job, but rarely am I asked to write one for a student who graduated four years ago. This kid, who I always liked very much, left college to go on a "find myself" expedition that landed him in China teaching English. How cool is that? But now he's ready to go back to school, and needs a college rec to do it.

But how am I supposed to write him a rec? I haven't know him for four years.

Apparently there is a program at Columbia exclusively for students who have been out of school for two years or more. They are looking for non-traditional students (they certainly have found one in this kid). So they know that the academic recs they get might be from relationships that ended years ago.

I was comfortable with the idea when I realized that he didn't want me to write a new rec. he wanted me to send the one I wrote years ago.

College recs are tricky, but don't often call for much creativity other than finding ways to be honest about shortcomings that make students look good. But this kid, an unusual student whose strengths might not be apparent on his transcript, was applying to Kenyon, which I felt was a good match, and a school for which I could take some risks in my writing. So I took a big risk and wrote an unconventional letter that I think really captured the kid.

This letter was passed around in the Kenyon admissions office, ended up being published in a journal for college admissions counselors, and was remembered and cited by the president of the college when she spoke here some years ago. Toot-toot goes my own horn, small though it may be.

In the four years since I wrote the lettr I've grown uncomfortable with how much of a presence I am in the letter. Still, it did the job then, and I hope it does the job for him again, and I include it here because I like it, and he was, and I hope still is, such a creative kid.

I got his permission, and I changed his name.

TEACHER RECOMMENDATION FOR ANTHONY DAVID D.
WRITTEN BY DEAD LENNIE
TEACHER OF ENGLISH AND THEATER

This is a college recommendation I wrote for Anthony David D. when he was my student in 2004. He has asked me to send this letter as a snapshot of who he was in high school. It was a pleasure to see him again, and it is a pleasure to share this letter.

For what it is worth, Anthony David’s recent emails to me suggest that the former struggles with grammar noted below are now a thing of the past. And his recent life suggests that those things about him I most admired have only grown more inspiring.

When Anthony David asked me to write this letter, I was thrilled. I am a huge fan of this kid, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to introduce him to your school.

Now I’m starting my fourth attempt at this letter. Turns out, Anthony David is not an easy kid to capture on paper, especially in something as formal as the Recommendation Letter, capital “R” capital “L.” Anthony David is generally an informal kid. He’s also a kid that perceptive teachers gush about – usually at lunch, informally. My formal attempts at capturing him have fallen short. But if you and I were out to lunch – someplace casual – Max and Erma’s, maybe - these are some of the things I’d say about Anthony David D. between sips of tortilla soup and nibbles of my BLT:

“You should have seen him in the fall play. I mean, what was I thinking when I cast this show? This play, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) – do you know this show? This show depends on speed. It’s hilarious, and Anthony David is hilarious. But the whole last, I dunno, half hour depends on speed. They race through Hamlet three times, each time faster than the last – and the last time BACKWARDS. So what do I do? I cast an ADD kid with processing issues – issues with speed, in other words – in the lead role. I mean, what was I thinking?

“But I took the leap, and Anthony David flew. You should have seen him. He was brilliant. Brilliant. The audience will never know how hard he worked to do what he did on that stage. They only know that it was an unforgettable, hilarious, sidesplitting performance by one of the funniest kids that stage has ever seen. You should have seen it. It was amazing. And the part where he improvises, alone on stage, talking directly to the audience? Some folks were laughing so hard they couldn't breathe. I was one of them, and I had seen it a million times.

“Really. You should have been there.”

Pause. Slurp some soup. Sprinkle some salt.

“He’s always been like that, though. He’s always been surprising. Once, his, ummm, his sophomore year, I think. He took my theater class. He’s a fan of Shakespeare, so he was going to do Romeo’s speech in the tomb, when Romeo thinks that Juliet is dead. Well, we knew the theater was unavailable, so I figured we’d just do the scene in my classroom. But Anthony David realized that the cubbies in the hallway look sort of tomb-like. So he opts to do his scene in the hallway.

“Okay. So he disappears for a while, and then when we all go out there, he’s dressed up, and he has these teddy bears – like a dozen teddy bears – all over the hallway, on the floor, in the cubbies. There are all these teddy bears. The Capulet tomb, see? ‘Oh no,” I’m thinking. ‘He’s going to play this for laughs. He’s going to go for a cheap joke. He’s going to butcher Shakespeare and he’s going to sink his grade.’

“But he didn’t.” Quick bite of my BLT. Wipe my chin. “Traffic is stopping in the hall at this point, and Anthony David launches into the speech. ‘Let me peruse this face,’ he says, kneeling over a light brown bear. ‘Mercutio’s kinsman, noble County Paris!’ and so on, until he goes to another bear, this one Juliet. People are gathering throughout the speech, each approaching with a giggle but then falling silent. Then, at last: ‘Thus with a kiss . . . I . . . die.’

Silence. No laughs. Then, applause. Cheers. He nailed it. Kneeling in a school hallway with a teddy bear in his arms, he gave everyone a mid-afternoon glimpse of the power of Shakespeare. It was brilliant. He made it look easy. This kid. I tell you.

“Pass the salt.”

You do.

“Thanks. You know, he was a pretty tough student. I had him freshman year, and it was rocky. He has some learning differences – grammar will always be tough for him, for instance, but the bigger problem was just his organization. He never got things in on time. But I have him now, again, as a senior, and he’s amazing. Very organized, and things get done. But there’s a bigger issue. Somewhere along the line he gained confidence, and now? He’s got this drive, this hunger. He can’t get enough information. I think he’s read more about Hamlet than I have.

“He gave a presentation in class about sources for Oedipus and Antigone explaining this controversial theory he found. His presentation ends up lasting two days. It was amazing. He is passionate about learning. He was inspired.

“One night, we were driving back to school from a play I took some kids to see, and I started asking Anthony David all these questions about his home life. I’ve known this kid for years through plays and classes, but I didn’t know too much about his life. So I ask. I knew his parents were separated, and I suspected they were pretty uninvolved with his school life. I didn’t realize how uninvolved they really were. They’re good people, but Anthony David was pretty much on his own – for meals, even, most of the time, as far back as middle school. So I asked him straight out, there, in the van. I asked, 'So, this growth you’ve had. I mean, you had some struggles, with organization, with getting the job done. Now you’re this great student. You’ve had a transformation. You did that on your own? All on your own?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Pretty much.’”

Now, at Max and Erma’s, I shove my food aside. I wipe my mouth, and I lean toward you. I’m looking right in your eyes.

“This kid. This Anthony David D. He’s smart – moments of brilliance even. He’s passionate. He’s a hard worker. Grammar? Not his thing. He’ll always have to work at the technical side of writing. But his ideas have substance and depth and subtlety. His leadership injects the entire school with fun, but keeps us talking about what’s important. His spirit – he’s got more school spirit than anyone here. This kid – he’s why teachers get out of bed in the morning. He’s inspiring to inspire. He’s done amazing things. He’s going to do amazing things. He should do them at your school.”

So that’s what I would say if we were out to lunch.

You’ll get the check, right?

Remembering Brian Casey

2008-09-18T21:54:00.004-04:00

This is a post I wrote for the memorial blog Remembering Brian Casey:

Years ago Brian and I collaborated on a project to stage a swing musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare provided the book, and I had the concept and the resources – I direct theater at a high school – but I lacked the knowledge of the music of the period. I also needed a big band. And an arranger.

I called the right guy.

For about a year Brian and I met at Stauf’s countless times to put the show together. We laughed a lot. Brian had a sharp understanding of the play, and seemed to know a period song to suit every mood and thought in the show.

Brian and I worked for almost a year on our show A Midsummer Night’s Swing, or It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Dream, but, as always, the final weeks of rehearsals were rushed, and many of the arrangements that were performed were never finished on paper, including his original piece for the show, “Titania’s Lullaby.” It was beautiful, and I hate to think it’s gone.

The show was a big success, and working on it forged a friendship between Brian and me that stayed strong despite rarely seeing each other. I was surprised and thrilled, years later, when Brian dropped out of nowhere and onto my front porch for a birthday I had years later; we had no friends in common, really, and it had been ages since we’d talked. Brian knew that he wouldn’t know anyone there, but he came, alone, and was funny and sincere and fantastic. He had a great time. Seeing him was the highlight of the night for me.

I got a call from Brian a couple of months ago. Whenever we talked we talked a lot; it seemed that despite years between conversations, we had never really lost touch. Brian had an idea for a play and was looking for a playwright to help edit, or maybe to collaborate – I wasn’t sure which. I was excited about the chance to work with him again. His idea was to splice Waiting for Godot and Peanuts. Of course.

Honestly, I didn’t get it at first, but he was so excited I jumped in with him. After re-reading Godot and reading lots of Charles Schultz, it made sense. Alas, I lacked follow-through. I thought there would be time later. Nothing came of it, as far as I know.

(I’d be interested if Brian discussed this idea with any readers of this blog, and whether he ever pursued it. I’d love to know more about what he had in mind or had come up with.)

Last week I was considering what show to choose when or if I return to directing theater. I decided the show to do would be our version of Midsummer. I thought about how I needed to give Brian a call.

Pace, And The Book Of Air and Shadows Reconsidered

2008-09-12T15:31:00.004-04:00

A complete lack of balance has thrown me off kilter, and I’ve been zombie-esque walking the halls. I’ve over-reacted to meaningless but seemingly distressing news from far away, and haven’t paused enough to appreciate truly sad news here at home. I enjoyed but didn’t fully engage in a nice family wedding. I haven’t exercised in a week, and, in a rush at a gig, ate not one but two walking tacos, Fritos snack bags topped with taco meat and cheese. I’ve been running around, racing rats, and lost a bit of myself in the process. No signs of the pace letting up, but the coping skills are kicking in.

Roderick gave me an assignment that is now way past due, a song about my time in Oregon to be written and posted here. I think about it every day, but I’m not exaggerating about the pace of everyday life lately, so I need to extend the due date more than a bit. But it will happen.

Tying up a loose end:

Someone hit this site Googling for discussion questions for the novel The Book of Air and Shadows. When I saw that, I was reminded of the less than flattering write up I did here about the book. Well, I finished the book, quite some time ago, and I have to say that it really redeemed itself in my eyes. Turns out, much of what I complained about was, I think, deliberate; one major theme of the book is how we allow the familiar patterns in popular fiction to effect our expectations of the world. So he used those patterns to made that point. It’s actually a topic I’m fascinated by. Once class I teach is basically on that point. So I’m embarrassed that I wrote critically of the book, when really I was just falling for the very point the author was making. Cool.

That’s an interesting topic for me: to what degree is author intent relevant? I tell my students that it really doesn’t matter what the author means to do. What matters is what he or she does. But I don’t quite buy into that. Here’s a weird “for instance.”

A while ago, the now-defunct band The Darkness was getting a lot of press as being very influenced by Queen. I like Queen, so I listened to The Darkness’ only album at the time. I thought it was ridiculous and over-blown and awful, full of bombast, like Queen, but without the sense of irony or fun.

Then, later, I saw their second album, and I realized that they were in on the joke – that the bombast and absurdity was the whole point. This became clear to me when I saw the title of their second album: “One Way Ticket To Hell. . . and Back.” Now, I love ‘em.

See? Author’s intent.

Here are some passages from The Book of Air and Shadows that I want to hang on to:

Someone once said. . . that stupidity was a character defense and had little to do with intelligence, one reason the so-called best and brightest got us into Vietnam and why people who are smart enough to accumulate huge piles of wealth persist in doing things that get them major jail time. Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens, as, reportedly, my maternal grandmother used to say, quoting Schiller: against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.

Paul’s theory is that our civilization is collapsing into a dark age and that the advancing edges of this are visible in urban ghettos. He says dark ages are all about forgetting civilization and its arts and also the increasing reluctance of the ruling classes to pay for civic life. This sealed the fate of Rom, he claims. He doesn’t think that the ghetto needs uplift, however, but rather that when the crash comes, the poor will survive better than their masters. They need less, he says, and the are more charitable, and the don’t have to unlearn as much. This s was shy Jesus preferred them. Yes, quite crazy; but when I observe the perfect helplessness of my fellow citizens of the middle class and higher, our utter dependence on electricity, cheap gas, and the physical service of unseen millions, our reluctance to pay our fair share, our absurd gated enclaves, our “good buildings,” and our incompetence at any task other than the manipulation of symbols, I often think he has a point.

In fact, I recovered from my hysteria fairly rapidly, one of the advantages of being as shallow as a dish.

Well, you know, there is really nothing like Shakespeare, even performed by children. . . .[R]emarkably, when the golden lines begin to flow from their lips the are able for a moment to leave the shut hell of teenaged narcissism and inhabit a broader, richer universe.

I did not see or seek out Amalie, although I was aware of her presence in the house, like a rumor of war.

And here is where a character really sums up the point:

“Mishkin seemed remarkable interested, fascinated in fact, with. . . whether movies really determined our sense of how to behave, and more than that, our sense of what was real.
“Surly not,” Mishkin objected. “Surely it’s the other way around – filmmakers take popular ideas and embody them in films.”
“No, the movies come first. For example, no one ever had a fast-draw face-to-face shoot-out on the dusty Main Street in a western town. It never happened, ever. A screenwriter invented it for dramatic effect. It’s the classic American trope, redemption through violence, and it comes through the movies. There were very few handguns in the real old west. They were expensive and heavy and no one but an idiot would wear then in a side holster. On a horse? When you wanted to kill someone in the Old West, you waited for your chance and shot him in the back, usually with a shotgun. Now we have a zillion handguns because the movies taught us that a handgun is something a real man has to have, and people really kill each other like fictional western gunslingers. And it’s not just thugs. Movies shape everyone’s reality, to the extent that it’s shaped by human action – foreign policy, business, sexual relationships, family dynamics, the whole nine yards. It used to be the Bible but now it’s movies. Why is there stalking? Because we know that the guy should persist and make a fool of himself until the girl admits that she loves him. We’ve all seen it. Why is there date rape? Because the asshole is waiting for the moment when resistance turns to passion. He's seen Nicole and Reese do it fifty times. We make these little decisions, day by day, and we end up with a world. This one, like it or not.”

On Gigs and Green Monsters

2008-08-20T11:37:00.006-04:00

There is much to write about concerning our recent trip to Oregon, and most of it should have already been written on the family blog, but for limited time and kids hogging the laptop. But two things invite rumination here, and there are quite unrelated.

The one that had the most impact was a gig, a playing out, a me- and- Roderick- and- friend- of- Roderick- sitting- on- a- public- sidewalk- with- guitars- and- digital- piano- making- music- for- several- hours- under- shifting- sky- for- a- growing- and- appreciative- audience. That was a great experience that forced me to dust off some muscles I haven’t used in quite a while. When folks would stroll by, stop for a bit, and end up looking for a table and ordering drinks or a meal, it was gratifying. Granted, it was a lot harder to find the chords by ear than it was several nights earlier, in the more casual setting of Roderick’s kitchen. Still, playing with Roderick and Chris was a joy, even the goofs, and playing some solo stuff became more and more fun as the evening (and a bit of liquid courage) developed. It was fun, a small gig that meant a lot because I would be unlikely to do something like that on my own. Maybe now I’m a bit more likely to do so.

The second thing to think about was motivated by a small book I bought at my new favorite bookstore.

In Portland, we stopped by Powell’s Books in Portland and spent two hours there. It was fantastic, and there is something nice to be said about a friendship between families when most of the nine folks involved consider hours at a massive bookseller to be a wonderful use of vacation time.

Flashback: Just one day before leaving for this trip, I had a twilight idea. That’s my wife’s term: the twilight area between sleep and awake, when you’re still in a bit of a dream-state, and you find yourself caught in a story or situation you find compelling, but you’re awake enough to direct the action a bit.

I was in that state, with a story about a character I never thought I cared about in a medium that I never really considered writing in.

It’s a character that is owned by someone else, a character very well established and who is making a lot of folks rich, so there’s little chance that his story would be entrusted to me.

It is also a character that I know only a little about, comparatively.

All of this is a dilemma, yes?

Also, I’m getting a backlog of ideas, with little work to show for it. This is creative quicksand, and I’d best grab a branch soon.

So at the great big bookstore, I looked a bit at the history of this character, with more research waiting for me on the reserve shelf at the library when I return home. The thought is that I might write a story for this character, but I need to know more about his mythology. One thing I found is that someone else already plumbed some of the ideas I was going to use with this character. Another good reason to abandon ship, but I’m intrigued by my idea and am not ready to bail just yet.

I found a book by Alan Moore, the author of Watchmen, called Writing for Comics. And now, days later, on the plane on the way home, I just read it. I found the Afterward, written fifteen years later than the original essays, to be encouraging and inspiring, reminding me, in different language, of a phrase I often say to my students and my kids, too often forgetting to listen to it myself:

Leap and the net will appear.

Maybe I’ll write the story as an exercise. Maybe my lack of enthusiasm for writing stems from the assumption that having had success with a musical, I have to write another musical.

Maybe I should write a script for a comic book.

Maybe I’ll figure out a way to get the enormous publisher who owns the character to solicit a highly non-traditional story idea about one of it’s benchmark characters from an inexperienced, unheard-of writer who has paid no dues.

Uh huh. Right.

Maybe I’ll abandon snobbish judgment and write it as a piece of fan fiction, a huge cultish world I’ve heard of but never visited and know nothing about, including not knowing if fan fiction of this type even exists.

In the Afterward, Moore quotes Shaky Kane, whom I’ve never heard of, with a line I’m considering posting in my classroom:

“Don’t be cool. Like everything.”

We’ve started our descent, so the laptop must go away.

Tater Tots: First Review

2008-08-20T11:32:00.002-04:00

I just received a review of Lunch Lady: Tater Tots of Love from the director of the production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe:

"Pass the sick bag - its another High School Musical", was my first thought, when kids with air-brushed good looks burst into song in the school lunch hall; but rather than saccharine dross, this new musical has a sinister side. Socially awkward, yet hardly lacking in the looks department, Anthony David falls for perfect and popular Clarissa and receives unlikely assistance from the dinner staff, so far soooo utterly predictable. Only, get this, Clarissa's perfection came at a price: she made a Faustian pact with the school's demonic Dean. The songs were mostly good, although a few of the chorus numbers could have done with a little more volume and diction. A school musical that for a refreshing change doesn't sell its soul for vomit-inducing cheesiness.

Also, Too

2008-08-04T01:06:00.004-04:00

Yeah, so it wasn't Bobby McFerrin in the airport, but some other dread-locked, linen shirt wearing, cool-looking black guy. Just a little bit of research revealed that Bobby is in France.

Still, not seeing him yesterday did get me thinking about him. Tomorrow perhaps I will walk the beach and return to his music. It's been a long time.

Bobby McFerrin has had a big impact on me. His album Medicine Music is profoundly beautiful. It's influence on me is made partially clear by a song I wrote sixteen years ago. Wow. Sixteen years ago. That's like it was written by a whole different person.

I was in an a cappella group at the time.

The credit that appears on the media player will be for Everlasting Happiness, because that's the name I chose when creating the site on GarageBand.com. But the performance is actually by Throat Culture, circa 1992. This recording is from the album A Cappella Head.

Also, Too

Arrival at the Pacific Coast

2008-08-03T01:29:00.002-04:00

It’s almost too ideal, this moment here, sitting by a fire in a lovely quaint living room, over-sized windows to a sunset on the Pacific, wife with great new haircut doing crosswords over there. Roderick’s wife sitting doing Sudoku puzzles, quietly saying song titles to keep the music going as Roderick just there picks tastefully at a cool, black, graphite acoustic guitar. (A graphite guitar? Da hell?)

“Mr. Lucky,” she requests.

Roderick’s wife does not yet have a blog name. Misty she shall henceforth be.

I write two blogs, which is excessive, yes. One is about my family, and this one is about my creative pursuits and related or not so related topics. It seems this trip may not fit neatly into either category.

What to do? This is clearly a family trip. But there is also a keyboard set up just over there, a barbecue / jam session is scheduled, and a gig with Roderick, a friend of his, and me forthcoming. There is more than a little talk about creativity and music and all of that.

“I Will.”

We woke at 4:00 AM to catch an early flight, stopped a moment in Minneapolis, where I’m pretty darned certain I bumped into Bobby McFerrin, who has had a pretty profound effect on me in a whole lot of ways, but I wasn’t sure enough it was him to say anything. I don’t want to be the white guy who is wrong when he says to the black dread-locked guy "Aren't you BobbyMcFerrin?"

“Blackbird.”

We arrived in Portland at 11:00 AM West Coast Time. Our family had an elaborate scheme planned, based on an old, too-hard-to-explain inside joke. So we walked out of the gate with each member of our family wearing a fake mustache. We walked around the corner, and there they were, Roderick, Misty and their two boys, all wearing fake mustaches.

“Crazy Love.”

A terrific meal at Moe’s – believe it, I had never had clam chowder before. This was a very good place to start. I had a cup of clam chowder as an appetizer, then crab stuffedavocado, then a cup of clam chowder for dessert. So I'm not sure what the marionberry cobbler was if the chowder was dessert. I was just surprised that the crack smoking mayor of D.C. could bake so well.

A long walk on the beach to wait for check-in time, and then to the house from which I'm typing just this moment.

“Why Georgia Why.”

I’ve never been to the west coast, and am struck by the different character here. I’ve only been here half of one overcast day, but it seems to me that this end of the county has it all over the other end. I've always loved the ocean, both of them, but while I'm way over here, out of earshot, let's be honest. The Atlantic coast is great, but it just tries too hard. The Pacific just has it the whole beach thing down. Itdoesn ’t try to be a bad ass with how hot it can get, it knows the classy impact of a big land mass here and there, maybe some rocks to break up the sand. You wanna bring a beer or twenty-four down here with you buds, maybe have a fire? 'scool. The Pacific knows you’ll take good care of things; you’re responsible, good folk, after all, and it trusts you. And your dogs. Dogs are cool.

“These Days.”

So, we got here. Beautiful house. We settled in, kids shot pool and tried to fly a broken kite for a while. I had a big self-indulgent run on the beach, and now here we are.

“You’ve Got A Friend”

Lunch Lady Run Through

2008-07-25T10:12:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I was invited to a run through of Lunch Lady at the school that is taking it to the Fringe Festival. Great great fun.

I was invited to take notes, as well, and while the show isn't mine as much as it is theirs, it was great to get my grubby little hands on it again. I wrote 5 pages of notes, most of them for very small suggestions, things like:

ADD – give it a beat before the laughter – you’re anticipating. Jordan – unstrap your shoe. Dean Dean – excellent authority. Nice villainy. Stephen – concentrate on final consonants. Jah Jah Jah: awesome.

But occasionally I would indulge in little notes to myself, like

Boom – Go! Can’t let that energy fizzle. Damn! My fault. I gave you no transition. Who wrote this crap?!

And this one, which me coming up for air and realizing both how wonderful and how surreal it is to see stuff from my imagination up on stage:

At this point, I saw the forest, and was pretty moved thinking about you doing this show.

They were very responsive to my suggestions, which, I was careful to tell them, were only suggestions - it is their show now, and any changes I suggest should be decided between them and their director.

After I gave notes, I asked if they had any questions, and it was like a dream. You know that fantasy about being interviewed by Johnny Carson (if you're old like me) or, now, Terry Gross, or, if you're Jimmy Rabbitte in The Commitments, Terry Wogan? I got to do that. "How long did it take you to write it?" "Are you writing anything else?" "Any ideas for a sequel?" It's a rarefied experience, one I was privileged to have. Also, it was a frickin' blast.

But is doesn't take long to get weary of talking about oneself - even if that one is me - and that was that.

They are doing a "send off" performance on August 1st, which is the day before we leave for Roderickville, but I'm going anyway. It's free, and it's at 7:30 at their school. If you're local and you'd like to go, let me know.

Editin' and Giggin'

2008-07-22T12:31:00.009-04:00

Lunch Lady: Tater Tots of Love, the musical I wrote, will be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in a couple of weeks. I spent the last couple of days doing some final requested edits on the accompaniment tracks, adding pick-ups to songs that start with no cue (tough on a singer if the music is prerecorded.) I tried adding pick-ups by recording a simple piano note, but that sounded bad because it is a different piano than the studio grand used to record the tracks in the first place. So what I had to do was find little piano fills in the existing tracks, cut them out, copy them, remove other instruments, tack them to the front of the music, and cross-fade for extra buttery smoothness. It was a tedious process, but an interesting challenge.

So I've not played out, solo, in a long long time. I've worked up a handful of songs in case the opportunity presents itself, but I've not sought the opportunities. (I'm not including the Yipee Jesus band I'm in. I'm talking solo piano/vox.) The whole family is traveling across many states to visit Roderick and clan very soon, and he's lined up a gig for us and some folks he knows. Yoikes, but yippee, too.

Then he sends me a list of songs they know, and it's, like, this endless, enormous spreadsheet. Double yoikes. No fair, Roderick! You guys are for real! Little casual gig my butt.

Looking forward to it, though.

Checking in:

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Mostly I've been practicing piano.

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Bought junk on ebay, mostly for my kids. Actually, mostly for daughter, cuz I am bribing her to clean her room and do her summer reading: Pride and Prejudice DVD for $1.25 (that's 50 cents per vice, plus 25 cents for Keira Knightly.) (Although I think my daughter's interest in the film leans a bit more toward the guy who plays Darcy. She, daughter, is of a certain charming pre-teen age.) Jailhouse Rock for daughter (Whodathunk an 11-year-old could dig Elvis in 2008?), a Jailhouse Rock poster, and, for me, two movies I really like though they are generally considered to be awful: Daredevil, the directors cut (see previous post. $1.04!) and A.I. (99 cents!). I love A.I. I tend to like big beautiful messes by brilliant directors. Julie Taymor's Titus comes to mind as well.

Hmmm . . . have to check that one out on eBay.

Stuff that helped:
Time. It's summer, and I have time to play the piano. The other night, I had the house to myself for the first time in forever. I figured I would play the piano for about fifteen minutes, and then check email, and then clean the kitchen. So I played for a little while, and then checked email, and suddenly everyone was home again. The fifteen minutes at the piano was actually three hours. LOVE THAT!

Stuff that hindered:
eBay is frickin' FUN, baby.

Current project:
Learning tunes for the Roderick gig.

Next project:
Stalled on BIG PROJECT and BIG IDEA, despite encouraging emails from several readers. Will return, perhaps as leaves change.

Guitar?:
Diddley. As in squat, not Bo.

What I should be reading these days:
Nothin'. Can't only read what's good for you. I'm committed to junk for a while. After the current book (see below), I want to read a good stack of comics.

Oh, crap. But I also what to read stuff highly recommended by friends, including Free Play, for my creative self, and A Brief History of Everything, for my philosophical self, and The Universe Next Door for my arguing - about - the - nature - of - existence - with - a - friend - with - whom - I - disagree - a - lot - and - he - keeps - referring - to - this - book - so - I - need - to - read - it - to - keep - up self.

What I'm actually reading these days:
Summer is a time for reading for fun. I'm halfway through The Book of Air and Shadows, and it isn't nearly as good as the first few chapters were. It's lost it's sense of humor, and the main character is misogynistic (and incredibly strong!), so we've waded into stereotypical territory. It's basically a thriller mystery in the genre of DaVinci Code, with more witty twists (in plot and structure) and much better writing.

Today I recommend:
This, but I don't know why. It came to me via a reader.

The Dark Knight. Superheros. And Me

2008-07-19T22:52:00.015-04:00

Yeah, I loved it. Of course I loved it.

And yes, of course I saw it at midnight on opening, um, morning. And pretty much all I've wanted to do since is see it again.

When I got home, at 3:00 am, I spent hours online reading every review, story, and interview about it. And most of them were really good, although one of my favorite reviewers really hated it. The one who most closely hit the marks I would hit is my hometown reviewer, Frank Gabrenya. But Peter Travers nails it too, though he's crazy thinking that Aaron Eckhart stole the show. This one belongs to the Heath Ledger's Joker.

See? See what a huge superhero geek I am?

Let me tell you what a geek I am. After buying tickets to the midnight screening, I felt like I used to feel when I was a little kid the night before going to Cedar Point. I was so excited, even I knew what a dork I was being.

Okay, yes. This is great movie, comic book hero or not. But the truth is, I just love comic book hero movies, even the bad ones. I'm the guy who liked Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand. I enjoyed Ghost Rider and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I even had a blast at the films that are so bad that they had to reboot the franchise to recover, namely Batman and Robin and Hulk (sans "Incredible.")

In fact, I own them all on DVD. Worse, I watch them. Watched Daredevil just now with the kids.

I know I go a bit too far with this. Not TOO too far. I always feel a little sad for the guys who dress in costume at movies. I have my limits, some pointless: I avoid wearing my Superman watch when wearing a superhero t-shirt. I don't have any kind of superhero bumper stickers, but I do have a super-s on this laptop, and Superman floor mats in my car.

Just before the final Harry Potter book came out - yeah, I love them, but I'm off topic for a minute - a friend who really loves them expressed his crazy enthusiasm by shyly asking "Do you sometimes feel lucky to be alive during the time that Harry Potter is being written?" And I knew what he meant. No other generation will get to read those books first, like no one will ever be able to see Hamlet without knowing the ending. And I caught myself wondering the same thing: Do I feel lucky being around for the great superhero renaissance of the early 21st century?

Nope. I don't feel lucky.

It's not luck, because it's not a coincidence. We, the folks my age, had been targeted as kids by TV shows like The Incredible Hulk and Shazam! and Spider-man and even those Captain America TV movies that made no sense (a silent motorcycle? Why?) I remember watching every single one of them, and loving them all.

Okay. So we hit college, had disposable income of our own, and the market granted our wish. Suddenly, comics were huge: lots of mainstream coverage, and comic book shops on every corner. Frank Miller and Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman came along and wrote well enough to give comics actual credibility (though the new word "graphic novel" always seemed like to desperate an attempt to be taken seriously.)

So now we're all in our thirties and forties, and a lot of us have money to spend on movies, and others of us are the decision makers in Hollywood, and here we are. It's bonanza time for superhero geeks, especially this summer.

In college I was on the bandwagon, spending embarrassing amounts of money on comics under the justification, widely held at the time, that I was investing. Yeah. Talk about escapism.

Back then, when I was reading a comic - or the stack of comics they held for me at Central City Comics every week - I disappeared. I completely forgot everything else that was going on. It was a similar feeling - not quite the same, but similar - to the feeling I would get as a kid, when me and other neighborhood nerds would pretend to be superheros in the back yard. There is a word for the vividness that children experience when imagining - I read about it recently, but I can't remember the term. There is much less a boundary between the real word and young kid's imagination. When children are in an imaginary world, they are really there in a way that we old farts can't, well, imagine. I can still vividly picture some of the adventures I had as a superhero. I was usually Spider-man, but one mission still stands out as if I was really there. I was Iron Man, and I gripped the top of a small picnic table that was in fact a small electric car like the ones in The Incredibles. Mine was speeding through tunnels toward the villain's underground lair while I held on for dear life.

Iron Man? Really?

Anyway, the brain grows, or, actually, shrinks, or at least culls, and the distinction between imagination and reality becomes clearer and clearer as we age, which is a drag. But in college, I could still get a taste of the loss of time and distraction when reading comic books. Now I re-live that with the movies, even the bad ones. But especially the good ones.

So, according to me, what are the good ones? I think a recent story in The Dispatch gets the top ten about right, though it went to press before The Dark Knight came out. I would put Iron Man at number one (two, now, post Dark Knight). The panel includes the animated Mask of the Phantasm, which isn't real memorable to me, and Spider-man 2 deserves a higher spot. I was pleased they included The Incredibles; it was on my unofficial top ten too. But if they are going to include superheros created just for the movies (not just those originating in comic books) then they should include The Matrix as well. Yes, it is a superhero story, damn it. You've got super powers, secret identities, saving the world, all the major tropes.

See? Geek!

One of the these days I'll post my list of favorite comic books here, as requested by a reader and friend who is looking to read the good ones. But I'm pretty clear on what my number one comic book will be, though Dark Knight Returns and Sandman will in the running.

So what happens when one of my all time favorite comics becomes a big-budget film? A hint at the answer arrived in the theater just minutes before Dark Knight.

I'll tell you what happens. Dorkgasm. It's geek-topia:

Back To School

2008-07-09T20:46:00.005-04:00

Speaking of BIG projects my dear friend Lennie - dead as you are. This weekend I took a rather big plunge myself. Not into a project really, but rather, a (rather) large commitment to learning guitar and moving forward. After thinking about it for quite a few months, I just signed up for the first of what will be 8 online classes with the Berkley School of Music to pursue their Guitar Masters Certificate Program. I'm going to try out the first class and first semester and see if I like it (and if it's going to give me the type of learnings that I would like) and then take it from there. I'm pretty excited about it actually. The first class is one I desperately need and have been unhappy with my ability to teach myself. This program will allow me to work on it wherever I am and within my ever changing schedule. Cool.

Also, just booked a very important gig in August - the 16th to be exact - so Dead Lennie - get ready! We're going to have good fun. I'm going to send you some song ideas so we can think about doing some stuff together. Start your practicing oh stone faced one!

The Book of Air and Shadows

2008-07-09T14:47:00.003-04:00

There is nothing like a canceled dentist appointment - canceled by them! - to make a few free hours feel like a gift. And these couple of hours, while I wait to collect my offspring from various sweaty, over-programed activities, are spent with the book I chose, The Book of Air and Shadows.

Laura Miller is a book critic of a magazine I like, Salon.com, and she happened to be the subject of an interview on summer reading as I was driving to the library. She recommended the new novel by Michael Gruber, but she mentioned his previous novel in passing, and used the name "Shakespeare" in it's description. I'm a fan of Shakespeare, so I grabbed it.

A bit disappointed at first, if only because it looms large and pompous in size and cover, as does the author in his photo.

But I'll be damned if I'm not having a blast with this thing. It is funny and smart and mysterious. It's a PostIt note kind of book, a habit I developed with The Braindead Megaphone and Space Vulture, sticking PostIts at lines I like. So now a quick break to bask in good writing and log a few of the memorable lines just from this past hour of reading:

"It was dated 1602, right after Hamlet was registered and a year earlier than the First Quarto, raising interesting questions: were the differences mere transcription errors or did they mean that the author had changed his play after it was performed? It was the sort of thing that generates multiple orgasms among the learned." "The Mishkin genes do not work and play will with others. They either dominate totally or leave the field in a huff. Thus I look exactly like my dad, the Jewish refrigerator carton, while my brother and sister are blondie rails, recruiting posters for the Hitlerjugend."

". . .[E]ven after I was offstage and even after we'd done our three performances in the orange-juice-smelling auditorium, I still felt inhabited by Telegin, and this was wonderful to me, that a made-up person created by a man long dead could in a sense displace my own personality." ". . .I would say that Shakespeare's famous powers of invention do not show well in the matter of plots. All but two of the plays are ripped off, sometimes blatantly, from prior sources; and it was a good thin for him they didn't have copyright in those days. We go to hear his plays for the language, just as we go to opera for the music; plot is secondary in both, trivial really, but - and contemporaries picked this up as well - there is no one like him for seizing something out of life and putting it on the stage."

Death of Sloth

2008-07-07T17:22:00.003-04:00

Last week I fell into the bad summer habit of staying up late watching movies and sleeping in too late, which killed creative output.

Sort of.

But two really good things did happen.

First, the BIG PROJECT has begun. When I first started this blog, the general goal was that by logging my creativity, I'd create more. The more specific plan was that it would spur me to work on the BIG PROJECT. But I didn't.

Then, in a spurt of frustration at my increasing sloth, I sat and worked on THE BIG PROJECT. So it has begun. More or less. Although, that was a couple of days ago.

I don't want to say too much about THE BIG PROJECT except that, well, I haven't written a musical in a while, and though it is somewhat weird to be a guy who writes musicals as a hobby, that's what I'm about to do.

But.

I got together with a friend for coffee and what I now call "the 'bou," and we got to talking about my projects, and I mentioned THE BIG PROJECT, which I had started, but then I also told him about THE BIG IDEA I HAD A LONG TIME AGO FOR A MUSICAL. And I found myself getting a lot more excited about THE BIG IDEA than about THE BIG PROJECT.

So now I'm thinking, maybe I should work on THE BIG IDEA?

There is a problem with THE BIG IDEA, though, which is that, um, it might sorta kinda be illegal. That's why it's been on the back burner.

But it might not! So research will commence. Research on copywright law. Also, research on copyright spelling.

But this week was death to sloth, as this week I started teaching, in a not-at-all creative sort of way, in that it's a class that somebody else had the idea for, but then he dropped out, so I'm covering, just for the money, and it's a study skills class, which is pretty damn not-creative-at-all, but that's okay, cuz I am really interested in how the brain works, but then I find out the kids - ready? the fifteen students range in age from rising fourth grade to rising ninth grade. Which means I'm teaching third graders and seventh graders. At the same time. Study skills.

But here's the question: Will the death of sloth and the onset of work generate more or less creative product? Stay tuned.

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Well, I did start work on THE BIG PROJECT. Wrote the first draft of the opening number.

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Have you ever washed your windows with Windex Outdoor? Spraying second story widows with a hose:It's pretty fun.

Stuff that helped:
I don't usually get ideas while exercising, but frustration at laziness caused forcing myself to get off of my butt and go for run caused some ideas for changes to THE BIG PROJECT that broke the block I'd hit before even starting.

Stuff that hindered:
Coming back from New Orleans exhausted gave me an excuse to sleep in. That became a habit.

Current project:
THE BIG PROJECT. Or THE BIG POSSIBLY ILLEGAL IDEA.

Next project:
The above, reversed.

Guitar?:
Nope. I did work on it enough before the trip that I've found myself missing it, which is good. This may be one of those "The blog reminded me to work on it" sort of evenings.

What I should be reading these days:
Having just read a big "should read," A Farewell To Arms, followed by some fun read, Ex Machina, both of which I'd like to write about, maybe next time, I'm in a sweet spot of summer of aligning my should reads with my wanna reads. I'm between books, but tonight I pick up either The Book of Air and Shadows or True Enough, which are crazy different, so we'll see.
What I should be reading is a book that Roderick not only loaned me, but bought and had shipped to me. I'm saving that for later in the summer, though.

What I'm actually reading these days:
I like comic books, particularly superhero comic books, and I often read comics between books I'm reading. It's my palette cleanser, if you will. My sorbet. This summer I've enjoyed bad comics and one pretty good one (though when I say "pretty good," I'm quick to forgive the flaws that seem inherent in the medium.)

Today I recommend:
If you live in my neighborhood, I recommend taking the trash out tonight.

Our Town

2008-06-28T09:30:00.002-04:00

Yo, Roderick! Welcome!

Roderick is a close friend, though not geographically, and he too works to add creativity to his life, mostly with his accoustic guitar, which he plays beautifully.

Last night the whole family went to see a production of Our Town. When high school theater directors get together, Our Town is shorthand for the kind of dated, safe, predictable theater that high schools are expected to do by overly cautious administrators. The directors notes made note of this, but also explained that the play is a classic for a reason, and, like all classics, is worth revisiting once in a while.

And the show is nice. I think it is a bit more subversive than folks usually realize, but it is more than a little precious, and it isn't subtle about hitting you over the head with the big-message stick. Still, if it doesn't move you at least a little, you might be dead.

What was interesting about this production is how it came about.

This production got started by a local advertising executive, Artie, who played The Narrator in Our Town when he was in college in, um, 77? I don't know. A while ago. Anyway, that meant a lot to him, and he was commenting to a friend, a playwright in New York whom I also know, that he hoped to play the role again in community theater someday.

Well, the playwright, who has inspired me as well, told Artie that that isn't how theater happens. If Artie wants theater to happen, he needs to make it happen.

So Artie did. He found a theater company to produce it, he hired a director, he found a school with a theater, he sent out word, held auditions, and put on a show.

It was pretty good. Very well directed, and the tech was excellent. Some of the actors were really good, some less so - but that was hardly the point. What was neat was that the cast was populated by people a lot like the folks of Grover's Corners itself, doing the show for the very motives that the show itself is about.

The best part was that in the lobby were little packages of candy that Artie's mom made for everyone. It drove the whole "live for the moment" message home.

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Ouch. I've really fell out of the groove here. Haven't done much of anything. I had a couple of moments of silliness working out a piano-ballad arrangment of Earth Wind and Fire's "Fantasy."

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Tried to fix the sliding glass door and made it worse.

Stuff that helped:
Our Town. Graceland, believe it or not.

Stuff that hindered:
Travel.

Current project:
Oof. I need to face the fact that I'm putting off the big project for far too long.

Next project:
Yeah. Same.

Guitar?:
Actually, a little bit of this before I left for the trip. I'm up to "Love Me Tender" in the teach-yourself-guitar book.

What I should be reading these days:
Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. A history teacher and I are designing a new course called The American Story, and I'm trying to fill in gaps.

What I'm actually reading these days:
I am reading A Farewell to Arms. But also some comic books.

Today I recommend:
This video blows my mind and inspires me and moves. It's about twenty minutes long. What happens when a left-brained neuro-scientist has a stroke and discovers her right brain? Powerful stuff.

Cure for the Common Music Slump

2008-06-25T14:04:00.004-04:00

Gig It!

Recently I found myself in another music slump in which I almost didn't feel like even picking up the guitar. I find those times pretty scary. Could I actually have lost interest in the one thing that I've always loved? Scary thought. Even though I've been through them before and even though I knew the best way out of it, I didn't feel like taking the medicine to cure it. It took a friend of mine to push me into joining him for a gig that soon after, I found myself looking forward to practicing again because I had the self imposed motivation of playing publicly. There's nothing like the thought of not being prepared and peeing down your leg in front of a bunch of onlookers to jolt you into action. Soon after, you realize you're not just practicing to avoid embarrassment, but you're having fun again doing what you love.

While it seems almost sacrilege to put deadlines on what is supposed to be a right-brain-driven-purely-creative process, the fact is, at least for me anyway, some kind of a deadline works wonders. Writing a song for some body's birthday, getting ready for a gig, writing a play that needs to be ready for the next school year (sound familiar Dead Lennie?!), etc. works to get the creative juices flowing. I guess it's not unlike forcing yourself to write in a blog regularly to hold yourself accountable.

So my advice (to myself) when getting in a slump is...........gig it!

Be Back Next Week

2008-06-14T08:18:00.002-04:00

I've fallen out of the rhythm, but I'll be back next week. I'm going to New Orleans. If I can update, I'll do it here, but internet access is doubtful.

Roderick? Now's the time, babe.

Paradise

2008-06-04T23:44:00.003-04:00

Despite the intentions of this blog, I've not created any new material since I started it.

There was one failed attempt at a new song, and a new recording of an old song, but nothing new.

Then it occurred to me that other than psalms for church, I haven't written any new material in quite a while.

So I resolved to write, record, and post a song in one evening. And though I've stretched the parameters of the evening into the wee morning, I think I've succeeded.

I wandered to the piano at around three o'clock with no ideas. I fiddled for awhile, lyrics came along, and I ended up with this.

Paradise

Space Vulture Vs. The Braindead Megaphone

2008-06-01T15:16:00.004-04:00

Recently I promised myself a return to the excitement and fun of reading when I was kid by finding a cheesy sci-fi novel and swallowing it whole.

And there, on the shelf of new arrivals at the library, I saw Space Vulture. It looks like a sci-fi novel from the fifties - by design. It is a new novel that tries to capture the spirit of. . .well, right there on the cover it promises that I will "have a thrilling adventure that would have been serialized in Planet Stories."

Well, I never read Planet Stories, nor had I heard of it. On a family trip, holed up in sleeping bags and soda pop and comic books in the back of a big yellow Buick station wagon on the way to a beach, I did once have a copy of Amazing Stories, which felt conspiratorial, due to one story about a horny robot and another accompanied by a pencil drawing of a topless woman whose proportions, while never actually found in nature, regularly filled the pages of 1970's sci-fi adventure magazines, which I usually never read.

Anyway.

Then I noticed that one of Space Vultures' authors is an archbishop. I had to give it a chance.

And guess what!

It is one of the worst books I have ever read. And while one could argue that that is meant to be part of the charm, due to the authors' attempt to capture the nostalgia of the magazines they loved as kids, it seems to me that they aren't fully in on their own joke. The endless irrelevant exposition, the heavy handed characterization, the instantaneous and unmotivated epiphanies, the obvious moralization. And the prose. Uff-da, as my Norwegian friend would say.

Meanwhile, passages from George Saunders The Braindead Megaphone continue to resonate.

So here's a game. Identify the following passages as being from Space Vulture, The Braindead Megaphone, or, for fun, the Wikkipedia entry on the rock band Styx. Send or post your results, and you could win a sandwich or a $1000.00 shopping spree.

Ready? Okay!

1. Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it?

2. In the outer regions of civilization, laws carried as much weight as anything in outer space. Zero.

3. There is, in other words, a cost to dopey communication, even if that dopey communication is innocently intended. And the cost of dopey communication is directly proportional to the omnipresence of the message.

4. The room’s security-sealed door irised open. “Been quite awhile, Gil,” said a deep, imposing voice that Gil recognized instantly.
Gil faced his captor, the legendary Galactic Marshal Captain Victor Corsaire. “Not long enough,” snarled Gil.

5. Our venture in Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionally, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect. A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture.

6. “You can’t buy justice.”
“Sure I can. I do it all the time.”
“Not with me. You never have, you never will.”

7. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do.

8. Bob had been killed a year ago in a hovercraft accident. He had been Cali’s soul mate, and she missed him terribly. Her only comfort came from her firm belief that he had gone to a better place.

9. But more than fear, our new braindeadedness has to do, I think, with commerce: the shift that has taken place within our major news organizations toward the corporate model, and away from the public-interest model. The necessity of profit is now assumed for our mass-media activities. This assumption has been shorn of all moral baggage: it is just something sophisticated people concede, so that other, more vital, discussions of “content” can begin.

10. “No gratitude necessary, ma’am. Only doing my job. Protecting good folks like you and yours from the menace of evildoers.” Uttered by a lesser man, this proclamation would have come off as arrogant or boastful or pompous. Coming from Victor Corsaire, it rang true, a plain and simple statement of fact.

11. We have met the enemy and he is us, yes, yes, but the fact that we have recognized ourselves as the enemy indicates we still have the ability to rise up and whip our own ass, so to speak: keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself. Turn that Megaphone down, and insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible.

12. In the bright sunlight his almond-shaped green eyes looked black. Slanted, hooded, and unreadable beneath his silky lashes, they hinted at the soul of a demon in their sinister depths. It was his eyes, always his eyes, that his many victims saw in their nightmares.

13. [T]he process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and, most importantly of all, tells us what we really think. But this process takes time, and immersion in prior models of beautiful compression.

14. “. . .I’m a slaver. I deal in human trade. I am going to sell you as chattel.”
“How dare you? That violates basic human dignity. You horrible, evil man!”

15. Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.

16. Physical labor was such an aggravation. How did people stand it in the old days, before robots?

17. There’s something sacred about reading a book like Slaughterhouse Five, even if nothing changes but what’s going on inside our minds. We leave such a book restored, if only briefly, to a proper relation with the truth, reminded of what is what, temporarily undeluded, our better nature set back on its feet.

18. When he left home, Corsaire had joined the military. Those were the final days of what history books called the Millennium War, an almost unending battle for control of vast reaches of empty sky. It was an era when a soldier’s life span was measured in days, even hours. On the galactic battlefield there had been no place, no time for long-term romantic relationships.

19. If, at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we would, paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive – if only for a few seconds more – the possibility of transformation.

20. After a frantic last-minute search, the band brought on singer, songwriter, and guitarist Tommy Shaw as Curulewski's replacement.

21. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom of the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: He, I didn’t do it. It looks at inequality and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don’t come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope for the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the tom part back up the river where it belongs.

22. The band was accused by a California religious group and later the P.M.R.C of backmasking Satanic messages in their anti-cocaine anthem, "Snowblind."

22. This is us. This is who we are. This is the PRKA [People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction]. To those who would oppose us, I would simply say: We are many. We are worldwide. We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail.
Join us. Resistance is futile.

23. Meanwhile, James Young collaborated with Jan Hammer and recorded his own solo album, City Slicker.

Good luck!

Mail

2008-05-29T12:53:00.004-04:00

Two letters of note:

In response to this post about finding free time for creative pursuits, the friend who first raised this issue responded:

Angry? Nah. Tired ? Yes! Envious ? Maybe a little. I enjoy creative stuff. I'm just too worn out to do much about it. Of course I could make big changes in my lifestyle-but I think I'm where God wants me to be-so I thank Him for people like you who have some sanity and time to make music and jokes for people like me to read, listen to and enjoy. I've finally come to realize that I don't have a "normal"-maybe "usual is a better term-life style, but I have to yet to learn how to be totally thankful for what I have, instead of comparing my life to others, and noting where mine lacks. Yes, Dead Lennie, this blog thing really does make one think doesn't it ?
From: "the friend who gave you permission to publish my e-mail."

And a note from the artist whose painting inspired the song and post Ring. Nobody's Home.

Great to hear from you!

Wow. I can't tell you how strange this is. I was thinking about that exchange- and the song- literally within the last two weeks. I think about it often- I was really moved and flattered by the song, and, indeed, have kept that old Maxell tape with me through my various and numerous moves around the country. It is an old tape- so your timing is great! It really was those amazing, unique exchanges at [The School] that made my experience there so special. I don't think alums (like me) communicate that back nearly enough.

I was a studio art major at Williams, and have kept up drawing and painting along the way. After college I lived in New York for a bit, then Boston, then came out here for grad school in business. I am now done with school and my wife and I stuck around in San Francisco. I work up in Napa for a wine company in "innovations", which means launching new brands. It is pretty creative and keeps my appetite for creativity... well, at least partially satisfied... Working on that.

Anyway, thank you so much for passing that along. It was a great way to reconnect with that experience, the painting, and great to hear from you. And I love that song!

I hope you continue writing songs. It meant a lot as a student to see teachers like you and Mr. [M] who were passionate about the arts, and gave me a lot to look up to...

I hope this finds you well, and I will be sure to swing by next time I am in town.

Thanks again,

[P]

So It Goes

2008-05-29T12:16:00.004-04:00

Sorry, Kurt!

How any list of sock-off-knocking books could completely neglect Mr. Vonnegut is beyond me. Of course Slaughter-house 5 should be there (and, interestingly, it gets a worthy tribute in The Braindead Megaphone). But the ones I really remember loving are the ones that were not so well received by the literary pundits, Galapagos and Timequake.

As an apology to the late Mr. Vonnegut (so it goes), here's a post I wrote on the day he died, which includes this song I wrote with my good friend Chris some years ago. That's Chris on guitar, playing a cool hook he came up with:

So It Goes

Chris came over late one evening to record, and we couldn't find a guitar pick. That weird guitar sound comes from playing with a dime.

Read This: The Braindead Megaphone

2008-05-27T22:31:00.006-04:00

It's been a long time since a book made my brain-goo jiggle like this one has.

I started reading The Braindead Megaphone this weekend. It jumped to the top of my reading cue for two reasons:

It's by George Saunders, a really weird, brilliant, widely acclaimed short story writer. I've used his story "The Falls" in my classes for years, often for no good reason except that I like it and it baffles the kids (but usually for better reasons than that.) I've waded just a bit into his short story collections, but nothing really hit me like "The Falls."

Then, reason number two, George Saunders shows up on a podcast of "To the Best of Our Knowledge," (you can hear it at the link) reading an essay that gets it right. So I got the book, and he keeps getting it right, and he's smart and funny and bizarre (and maybe a little too bizarre sometimes - a couple of the essays in the middle fell flat for me).

This book captures my opinions about anti-intellectualism and immigration and the importance of language and the role of story and Kurt Vonnegut and lots of other things better than I could. I keep wanting to Xerox his essays and hand them to specific people: "Here. This guy wrote what I think about that."

There are lots of books I like. But this one really gets me jazzed up. This one goes on the short list along with (ready?)

Catcher in the Rye (no points for originality there)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Life of Pi
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the whole damn series, but mostly the first three.)
Blink

The Happiness Hypothesis
That book I read with the cover drawing of a rat in an excercise wheel on the front in the back of the Buick when my parents were driving us to the beach that I lost in my first move and I'll never see again because I don't know anything about it pardon my misplaced modifiers.
Zoo Story
Sandman (all of them)
I Am The Cheese. And The Chocolate War. And After the First Death.
Straight Man
lots of things by Tom Perrotta, but mostly maybe Bad Haircut, or The Wishbones, or Election
Watchmen
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (but no more classics; that's cheating)
I Know This Much is True (I had forgotten how much I liked that one, but it's looking down at me from a bookshelf right now, and it wishes to be included.)
Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City, but that was a while ago. College, I think? Just after.
A Prayer for Owen Meany
The Road

Not so short list. There are more. Those were off the top of my head, except for Wally Lamb, who crashed. I reached pretty far back there. I remember getting I Am The Cheese from a friend at my sleepover birthday party somewhere around age nine. I read The Road this winter, and The Happiness Hypothesis last fall.

Is it harder for you to get really excited about books like you used to? I was missing that the past few days. I was wandering around the library and I came across the sci-fi paperback rack. I haven't read sci-fi, like real spaceships and robots sci-fi, since, I dunno, middle school? So I went to that rack, and I was viscerally reminded of that feeling I got from the library when reading still felt kind of new, how exciting it was to grab some paperback novel with exagerated heroes (Oh my God! Doc Savage! I used to love Doc Savage! I forgot all about Doc Savage!) for no reason, how exhilerating that was. Now, older, I feel like time is short, and everything I read has to be worth it. I'm going to put Brothers Karamazov aside - it's a winter book, seems to me. I'm going to finish this Saunders book, and then I'm going to read some really genre-y science fiction and see if it is still that fun.

Anyway, that list has a bunch of books that excited me at one point or another. And, now, The Braindead Megaphone is doing that.

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Allowed myself to get distracted by iMovie, and edited this short clip of my daughter fencing.

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Graded grammar quizzes.

Stuff that helped:
There is no more exciting and fertile time for teachers than the last week of school when summer seems like it will be endless and perfect. Then, at breakfast on the first day off, the kids lose it at breakfast and you realize what you're really in for. But this week is that last week before, and everything is possible.

Stuff that hindered:
Of course, you also have to grade the finals. And finish quarter grades. And get the curriculum map updated. And. . .there is no more rushed, tedious time for a teacher than the last week of school.

Current project:
Nothing feels pressing right now. I do need to finish a film I started for next year's freshmen. I think I may put off the big huge project I planned to start this week. I need more research first. It feels good to have finished "Ring."

Next project:
Oh. Yeah. Well, next big project, referenced above. I'm being a little hush-hush still.

Guitar?:
Yes! I sat with some beginner's book for a while this week. I rule on "Two String Rock"! It feels silly and fun to feel a sense of accomplishment at such an elementary level.

What I should be reading these days:
Final exams.

What I'm actually reading these days:
Duh. Did you read the post?

Today I recommend:
Duh again. Read the post.

Ring. Nobody's Home.

2008-05-21T11:50:00.007-04:00

In 1997 I attended the senior art show at the school where I teach and saw a painting I liked. Unlike most of the work, which was labled "NFS," this one was labeled "POR," or "Price on Request."

So I made a request. I asked the artist if he would be interested in a barter - his painting for a song I would write, based on the painting. He was interested.

He wasn't a student I knew very well, but through our brief exchanges and his many art works I had gained a fondness and respect for him. I was getting his painting for a song, and wanted to make sure I wasn't taking advantage. He assured me I wasn't. I also wanted to learn about him. There are two things I remember from that conversation: that he said "I'm just ordinary," and that he was a fan of Ben Folds Five.

So I sat down and tried to write something Ben Foldsy. I hit a chord (Cm11) hard and often, because that seemed Ben Foldsy to me. The first lyric of the song was a response to the artist's claim that he was ordinary.

The rest of the song made me realize why I was drawn to the painting in the first place. I had been hurt by a friend, a betrayal of sorts, and was desperate not to talk to him, whereas I suspected he wanted to talk. Every time the phone rang, I had a mini-panic attack (I wasn't adjusting well) and I wouldn't answer the phone. This was before caller i.d., at least in my house.

In the painting, the perspective shifts. Someone is moving closer to the phone between the first and second panel. Someone who isn't answering the phone. And I imagined why the person might do that.

And I wrote "Ring. Nobody's Home."

Oh and one more thing. . .

2008-05-16T15:59:00.003-04:00

I just ate chocolate covered bacon.

It's even better than it sounds.

A Good Week

2008-05-16T15:02:00.004-04:00

All in all, a very good week, creatively speaking.

After writing, and thus realizing, that I’ve not done a thing on “Ring. Nobody’s Home,” I went home an did some real work on it. The tone of the song shifted substantially.

I have a really good piano sound module, and on my first pass of this song, weeks ago, the one with the messed up drum track, I used it to record via MIDI. It’s always perfectly in tune, it is easy to record, and, when I have to, it's easy to fix, tweak, extend, change the volume of, shorten, cut, add, or completely change any note I play. Music! It all feels like cheating, but I’m self-conscious about my playing, and it’s a nice safety net. It's addicting and dangerous.

I pretty much have to use it. The upright piano we have – well, I love it, but the sound is very particular, and pianos are hard to mic, especially if, like me, you don't really know what you're doing. Plus, my mics are good for casual use, but for piano, not so much.

I was pretty inspired when I read Here, There, and Everywhere about the way the Beatles recorded. It was such a great mix of spontaneity and meticulousness. They did what they could with what they had. So I decided what the heck. And "Ring" was lacking something. I hoped the feel of a real, mediocre piano might be just the thing.

So I threw up the mics and recorded real piano.

And I had to do it quick. Didn’t have much time to bang loudly after hours. (The other advantage to the MIDI piano is that it can all happen in earphones.)

I’m pleased with the result. There are few bad notes here and there, timing is off in a few places, and the piano sound is flawed, but it’s flawed with personality. (I do wish I hadn’t said “Maybe in a few months” when the piano tuner checked in last week.)

Still have to record the vocals, which is always intimidating – and hard to find time. Can’t have the kids running around thumping and screaming, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to do that. I’ve got some grandiose vocal ideas for the middle section, but we’ll see.

Also this week, a good gig with what I affectionately call the "Yea Jesus!" band. We played a showcase for a kind of rally that we’ve not done often, and it looks like it could become a regular thing. We usually play at church, so it was nice to play music for a good solid half hour before breaking for the talks and the prayer and all. Then we did lots of softer stuff, which is when we shine. It really is a good band; our history together paid off the other night.

But the highlight this week was preparing my daughter for an audition for the talent show at school. My wife helped her think of songs she’d like to sing, but Daughter eventually picked an Alison Krauss song we’ve enjoyed together for years: “Stay.” It was my job to record all of the tracks for her to sing to. In one night. Um, honey? That’s a lot of work.

So I got to work.

But then I just asked her: What if I just play it? You, know. Live. On piano. And you know what? She liked the idea God love her. She’s just pre-teen enough.

She has a lovely, soft, pretty voice, and practicing with her was a highlight of my week. Understand, we are not the Von Trapps. We don’t sing together as a family. This started as awkward for both of us. But I was pleased at how my 11 year-old daughter was able to keep the melody through my inconsistent little improvised key-hammerings, so I thought what the heck, I’ll throw in some harmonies. And it sounded so nice and it was such a sweet moment that I had to hide my eyes for a minute.

And today then the teacher was sick and didn’t show, so the audition is Monday.

Still.

All in all, a good week.

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Working out a less-is-more piano arrangement of the acoustic guitar based “Stay” to accompany my daughter.

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Forgetting when senior grades were due, and grading waaay too many projects in one day.

Stuff that helped:
The article I linked to in the previous post encouraged me to use real piano. That was good.

Stuff that hindered:
Hard to record on live mics with people in the house.

Current project:
“Ring. Nobody’s Home.” “Stay.” Film for school.

Next project:
Never got together about the Godot project. Meeting with director to discuss Tater Tots notes. Got an intriguing letter out of the blue from a nascent film-maker about collaborating on a script. Dunno bout dat one yet.

Guitar?:
Not diddily. In the meantime, my six-year-old now plucks out both “Smoke on the Water” and “Iron Man.”

What I should be reading these days:
I’ve been too pooped to actually dive head first into Karamazov. Inertia has set it.

What I'm actually reading these days:
Nudge, but I think I’ll drop it soon. Interesting, but dry. Too dry for May.

Today I recommend:
I’m very pooped and a bit witless today, and the entry suffers for it. But I saw this video via Dave Hill, at it makes up for lameness:

A Letter to the Cast and Crew of Tater Tots

2008-05-12T17:11:00.004-04:00

Went to see the Lunch Lady: Tater Tots of Love this weekend. This is the third time I've seen it, the second that I've not directed, and the first that I wasn't playing keyboards.

Here's a letter I wrote to the cast and crew:

Dear Larry, Cast, Crew, and Staff of Lunch Lady: Tater Tots of Love,

ANTHONY DAVID: I’m giving you my heart. I’m giving you my soul.

With extreme upward inflection
AUDIENCE: Awwwwww.

Yours was the third production of this show. With dress rehearsals, tech, and multiple performances for each, I’ve sat through my fair share of the bizarre, ridiculous, and somehow touching events that happen at that mundane but supernatural high school. But Saturday night was the very first time I got to sit back and just watch. I sat there with my family, no keyboard in front of me, trying to be inconspicuous, and I watched the show.

I had a great time. Congratulations. And thank you.

The experience of watching characters of my imagination come to life is a nerve-wracking, exhilarating, rewarding experience that I never once stopped enjoying. It was a terrific gift that you gave to me. Most of the time, words on pages stay there. But these got up and walked around, emoted, empathized, yelled and sighed and screamed and inhaled and laughed (malevolently, even), and had sets and props and costumes and lights and all the things that they always wanted.

You gave them your heart. You gave them your soul.

There are so many little moments I’d like to point out, but I fear neglecting the many by mentioning the few. I was watching closely, with eyes wide open. My daughter said she spent most of the show sneaking peeks at me, enjoying my reactions.

How weird it must feel to wrap a show knowing that you’ll return to it soon, for an even bigger adventure. I regret that I can’t join you in Scotland. And I regret not knowing you better. It’s a touchy thing to me, figuring out how close or far away to be – and I blew it with this one. How did that time slip by so fast? But I accept Larry’s invitation to be around when you start rehearsals in July, if only for selfish reasons. You seem like such a fun, dedicated group, and I’m missing out by not being around. Plus, these characters you’re creating on stage? I like them. I didn’t realize until Saturday night how much I miss them.

I hope you are enjoying this Monday-after, with jokes in the halls, congratulations from teachers and peers, and that weird “and now what” feeling when you realize you don’t have rehearsal. But mostly I hope that you are satisfied with a job very well done. My relationship with this play is a unique one, and I admire and appreciate your stewardship.

Thanks,
S

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
I've started putting together a film for incoming freshmen.

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Cleaned our room. Some.

Stuff that helped:
Seeing the show made me want to write again.

Stuff that hindered:
May is incredibly busy. There's been no time.

Current project:
The film, and "Ring. Nobody Home," which has gone untouched for a week now.

Next project:
Current projects feel like next projects.

Guitar?:
Nope.

What I should be reading these days:
Student essays.

What I'm actually reading these days:
Karamazov

Today I recommend:
This article in the Times points out lots of what I get wrong when recording.

New Habits

2008-05-06T18:30:00.004-04:00

I'm beat and I need to go home. Quick update: a trip to Chicago this weekend was interesting for the conference I attended but a bust for experiencing the city, due to delayed flights on both ends. Today was a huge success, as a I turned my classroom into a gallery space to exhibit senior projects on identity, mostly films.

The letter writer of the last post wrote a response, but I can't post it now because email is down. Next time.

Progress continues on a new recording of a ten-year-old song.

An article in today's Times touches on many of my interests, with implications for my creative and professional lives. It's called Can You Become a Creature Of New Habits?

Quick ones, now. No thinking:
The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Lots of work on the new song. And the exhibition at school today.

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Getting too worked up about little things at home.

Stuff that helped:
Fiddling with recording, and doing pretty well.

Stuff that hindered:
Six hours in airports for a five hour conference.

Current project:
"Ring. Nobody's Home."

Next project:
When will I start the new play? Dunno

Guitar?:
Okay. Okay. I get it. Soon.

What I should be reading these days:
The Brothers Karamazov

What I'm actually reading these days:
The Brother's Karamazov. Yup. But only to page 22. Magazines, mostly.

Today I recommend:
I loved Iron Man, which is a surprise to no one who knows me.

Finding the time

2008-04-30T16:12:00.007-04:00

From an email, copied with permission:

. . . I don't get how you possibly have time to do a blog, send little videos to your brother, write songs, watch TV, read books, do lesson plans and teach school. I'm thinking maybe you don't sleep. Anyway, I enjoyed it (the blog) even if I don't get all the creative stuff on it. It got me to thinking, that since every waking hour (except about 5 a week) are already booked for me, maybe I could be more creative if I wrote a blog instead of sleeping. Then I realized I'd just be a bigger witch than I already am if I got less sleep than I do now-so I tossed that idea right out the window and went back to reading more week old e-mails that I should have answered before now. You just keep up the good creative work, and I'll just keep cleaning toilets-or dishes or laundry, or floors-or grocery shopping, or soccer coaching, etc etc etc

My secret is mediocrity. The trick to doing lots of things, I've found, is to not do any of them well.

I'm glad you enjoy the blog. I don't spend much time on it. The video took about 20 minutes, but allowing my brother to one-up me is simply not an option. The other stuff is crammed into my day here and there. For instance, I finally finished reading Waiting for Godot, but I read most of it in the car while waiting for the kids to come out of religious ed (after doing some shopping). I usually write the blog entries at my desk after my school day, when I feel I can't grade another paper and Eldest isn't yet out of track practice. And I'm finally recording music again, but that (usually) starts when the family day is done. They settle down with some TV and I slip away to work on music. It's my toy-train set.

I don't play golf or bowl or watch sports. My kids are old enough to require less time, though I still make it to track meets, read Curious George, or throw a ball now and then. I have a tremendously supportive wife, and we've both made a point of carving out time for each other's creative pursuits. I could be a better dad. I could be a better husband.

But your letter struck a chord because, well, I do feel guilty. Last night I spent a couple of hours working on the drum track for a song I'm recording. Hours. On the drum track. But I enjoyed myself so much that my German/Catholic Pleasure Inhibitor was activated. Someone had to be mad about it: my wife, or my mom, or God, or Captain Karma; someone. Three or four times I came out to collect permission for wasting time. My wife was curled on the couch with Youngest watching Dancing with the Stars, Daughter was cocooned in her room with a book or her guinea pig, and Eldest was working on homework. I probably should have done bedtime - it is well past my turn - but my wife kept saying she didn't mind (because I kept asking), and whatever work I could have been doing for school or for the house will get done another time. I got up early to take the trash out.

I've been stressed, I've felt trapped, and I'll feel stressed and trapped again. Oddly, actively pursuing this stuff has taken time, not given it, but it seems to have brought some balance. The things that worry me still worry me, but they dominate my thinking less. That sounds all Zen-guru-y, but I'm feeling all Zen-guru-y, like I've figured something out for a change. Any second someone will walk in the door with a big problem, or an even bigger problem than that, and all of this could go poof. Someday I'll read this and be embarrassed by my naivety. Probably tomorrow.

Remember, also, that after, what, fifteen years, I'm not directing a play this year. While it seems that should be about extra time - that's two and half hours a day I've gained - it doesn't feel like I've gained much time. Work expands to fill the available time. Generally, I'm here at school anyway. What I have gained is the chance to catch my breath, the ability to focus on teaching, and quite bit of reflection. That doesn't happen a lot, and I'm trying to take advantage of it while I can.

Your letter, though I'm sure was written in fun, seems a little angry, and, judging from the length of this response, really got me thinking. You have faced problems the likes of which I haven't. I suspect that that is a big reason that you are always so remarkable and supportive. I wouldn't wish your troubles on anyone, nor would you, I know. But you still always have a smile and a nice word - always. You certainly have your hands full, and you always juggle with grace.

I bet most people would benefit from actively keeping track of that which they most want to do.

Prizes and Peanuts

2008-04-29T13:44:00.005-04:00

The seniors pulled their annual prank at school yesterday. Among other things (a lobby filled with balloons, the dean’s whole office moved to the library), they stuck hundreds of plastic forks in the quad.

“The quad” refers to a lawn, not a person. That’s not even funny, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

Now, a matching game! Three white male forty-something teachers are looking at the school quadrangle, filled with forks, sharing their first reactions. Match the teacher to his reaction.

The teachers:

Teacher A: Computer Science teacher. Christian.. Tall; slender. Pisces

Teacher B: Physics and Ethics. Theologically Trained Existentialist. Slender. Capricorn.

Teacher C: English. Ambiguous Catholic. Tall; slender. Somewhat dashing. Sagittarius.

“What was your first reaction to the forks on the quad?”

1: “It makes me think of Arlington National Cemetery.”

2: “You think maybe the seniors are saying ‘Fork you’?”

3: “I dunno. Plastic ware?”

Tie-breaker: Write your response to the scene.

The winner gets a coffee mug and sandwich. Judges decision is final. Void where prohibited by law. Actual responses not expected, because, seriously, who reads this? But if anyone actually does, the prizes will be awarded for real.

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
I finally finished the drum track for a song I’m recording.

The least creative thing I've done sine the last entry:
Mulched. Well, spread mulch. Spreaded?

Stuff that helped:
One of my students performed with her classical trio at school. Amazing. Surprisingly, it was the modern piece that most struck me, even though I often don’t understand contemporary classical. If Keith Emerson wrote the Planet of the Apes soundtrack for clarinet, cello, and piano, it might have sounded like this. This is what they did, recorded elsewhere. Remember, these are high school kids.

Stuff that hindered:
Those are high school kids. Damn it.

Current project:
That song I’m recording. It’s called “Ring. Nobody Home.” I’ll post it soon.

Next project:
It’s not for my project, but I finished reading Godot so that I can advise a friend on his project.

Guitar?:
Someday.

What I want to be reading these days:
I never much liked Peanuts. I get mad at how beloved it is and how funny it isn’t, and yet I can’t not read it. I can skip Apartment 3D or Prince Valiant, but Peanuts looks like it should be funny. I root for it every time, and I am always disappointed. But I can’t stop. Sunday morning is a time for hope.

Then, Charles Schultz died, and, okay, sorry he died, but now I resent his comic even more. Now an actual dead guy is being not funny, which is to be expected (Sorry, Bernie), but he is keeping new talent off of the comics pages, which is not. There’s no room for Pearls Before Swine in our Sunday comics? C’mon!

That biography of Charles Schultz came out last year, and the reviews were all, wow, the creator of Snoopy was depressed and kind of jerk! I was, like, “No way!” Only in a really sarcastic way that’s hard to type.

But, for reasons consistent with the point of this blog but not yet to be disclosed, I’m currently reading Peanuts: A Golden Celebration.

You know what? It’s pretty good. It’s. . .it’s. . . ahem. It’s funny. There. I said it. And it’s kind of smart. I really like the early, 1950s stuff. Charlie Brown was actually a lot more like Calvin, and there was wit and attitude, not just depressive sentimentality, rolled eyes, sighs, and bizarre Sopwith Camel surrealism. We’ve turned a real corner, here, me and Chuck. But I’m going to stop reading the collection before I get too far into the seventies.

I’m still on page 4 of The Brothers Karamazov.

What I'm actually reading these days:
Peanuts: A Golden Celebration. I just said that. Pay attention.

I recommend:
Ending weekend yard work at 5:00.

On Not Writing A Blog

2008-04-25T16:05:00.006-04:00

Here's a good point someone wrote to me. It gave me pause:

If you wanna get better at writing plays - write plays - don't write about writing plays.

If you do this, all you're gonna do is get better at writing blogs.

Yes. This is true. Damn it. And it raises the question: What is the point of this, aside from the pathetic narcissism?

I don't really have an answer to that.

I used to blog a lot about my kids. Family and close friends like to hear about what's going on, and my wife started a blog but then stopped, and I had fun writing it. I still do once in a while. I should do more, because when I knew that I was blogging, I found myself being a better dad. At first, that too could be seen as pathetically narcissistic - I'm a better dad so that I can write about being a better dad. But that's not how it worked. What happened was, because I had a forum, even with only, like, four readers, I would constantly be on the look-out for material. I would pay more attention, and thus find more to enjoy and to love about my kids.

Wow. I really ought to blog about my kids more. Cuz they're really driving me nuts lately.

Anyway, I thought that I could use that idea to motivate me to work creatively. And it worked, sort of. I'm looking to create stuff to put here. I could do the same with a journal, but I've never been a journal-er. So I'm going to stick with this for as long as it feels like a motive more than a distraction.

So, where's that song then?

Good question. It's done. But I'm pretty sure I'll never post it, for reasons to be explained later.

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
I finished writing and recording that new song. Turns out, sketches are a bad idea.

The least creative thing I've done sine the last entry:
Wrote a grant proposal.

Stuff that helped:
Andy, who taught me how to get the drum track working over the phone.

Stuff that hindered:
Trying to write like a writer I'm not.

Current project:
I'm going to write new material for this blog if it kills me.

Next project:
Reading Waiting for Godot. I've put it off long enough that it's gone from being "reading" to being "a project."

Guitar?:
Nope.

What I want to be reading these days:
Still The Brothers Karamazov

What I'm actually reading these days:
Supposedly, The Brothers Karamazov. But really I watched 30 Rock and an episode of Battlestar Galactica last night. It felt good.

I recommend:
Dave Hill's blog, especially this entry

It works! Almost.

2008-04-23T15:38:00.003-04:00

The blog worked.

I decided to write a song last night to post here, to see what I could write and record quickly in the interest of this project. So the blog worked, in it's way.

But instead of writing, I doodled some ideas on the piano, started to record it, and couldn't figure out how to get the drum track to record. I ended up spending two hours, and staying up late, trying to figure out how to do what should be the most basic thing in home recording. I'm a MIDItard.

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Tried to write a song. Also, came up with a 1950's style one liner. Only 70% of the people I said it to actually got it, and an even smaller number thought it was funny at all, but one person really laughed hard:

When they started up the very first train, I wonder if anyone said 'That sounds like a tornado.'

Do you get that? Let's move on.

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Spent two hours trying to record a MIDI VST drum machine instead of moving on and writing the damn song.

Stuff that helped:
A snipet of a Lucinda Williams song on the radio made me want to write something really simple and honest, the opposite of the excesses of "Everlasting Happiness."

Stuff that hindered:
Frickin' Groove Agent drum machine. Lost that "really simple" part pretty quick.

Current project:
I'm going to write that song. Damn it.

Next project:
I want to work on that collaboration I mentioned, or at least discuss it with the owner of the idea. But I need to read Godot first.

Guitar?:
Nope.

What I want to be reading these days:
Still Waiting for Godot. Also, as part of a post mini-mid-life-crisis attempt to read great books, The Brothers Karamazov. Seriously.

What I'm actually reading these days:
Over Cheerios this morning: Matt Taibi's undercover report on the Christian Right in the new Rolling Stone. Last night I read four pages of Karamazov. You know what? I think it might be kinda funny.

NOTE: I am the first person ever who has put off reading Waiting for Godot by reading The Brothers Karamazov. You must be very impressed. The fact that I knew I would be reporting this had no effect whatsoever.

I recommend:

First Entry

2008-04-22T09:02:00.003-04:00

So, what is this?

This is an attempt to spur my creative impulses. By journaling my process and progress, I hope that I'll be spurred to work on the stuff I want to work on rather than just the stuff I have to work on. Also, I'll keep tabs on what's going on with current or past projects.

If I invited you here, it's because you've encouraged me to write, or sing, or perform, or something, either with something you said or something you did or someone you are. Thinking that you're looking over my shoulder will keep me working on stuff. I'll try to put content on here regularly - the goal is everyday - so check back often, and always feel free to comment.

I've included a song to get started. It's something I recorded a while ago.

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Started this blog.

The least creative thing I've done sine the last entry:
Shaved the back of my neck.

Stuff that helped:
Yesterday, I got the Talking Heads "Little Creatures" from the library, and played "And She Was" loudly in my car. It's been forever since I've heard that song. Also, an art show at school; great art by kids I maybe wouldn't expect if from. Also, spring.

Stuff that hindered:
I've got to grade those papers, damn it. And write those progress reports. Damn it.

Last project:
Editing, mixing, and mastering performance tracks for a new production of my musical. I'll be involved with rehearsals when they are a bit further along.

Current project:
None. None! But wait. Big idea is brewing.

Next project:
I'm going to meet with a former collaborator who wants input from a playwright (me!) about an idea he has. This is cool. He is cool.

Guitar?:
Brought it up from the basement. Tried a chord. Gave up for now.

What I want to be reading these days:
"Waiting for Godot"

What I actually read recently:
Sunday comics. I was worried about Sherman.

I recommend:
Bent Objects

Here's that song. Hope you enjoy it.

Everlasting Happiness