Brooke: A Touch of Greatness

I watched this documentary this afternoon, it was amazing to me:

It was one of those things that really makes me think I need to teach–or at least be very thoughtful and particular about the education of my own children. I think I will end up teaching, in some way. Because it is so important. The end of the documentary made me tear up.

You can watch it on Netflix in the “watch instantly” section. It’s only 50 minutes. I highly suggest it.

Scott: Show and Tell: The Stand-Up of Jared Parker

Here’s some stand-up material from one of my favorite comedians.

-I was watching a movie the other day and some guy wound up raising an orphan that someone left on his doorstep and it got me wondering: what is the rule about that? Are you automatically obligated to raise the baby? Can you just pass it off onto someone else’s doorstep? Can you just leave food out for it until it is big enough to crawl away? (I don’t know how I would end that one).
-I honestly don’t get what the big deal is about organic food. If you ask an organic chicken farmer what makes their chicken organic they would say “well, we don’t give it medicine or
anything that would prevent it from getting diseases.” That doesn’t impress me.
-When people ask me about sports teams I like to pretend like I think they are asking me about the animal. “What do you think about the grizzlies this season.” “I think that their numbers will continue to decrease unless something is done about human encroachment on their habitats.
-I was reading the bible the other day and was reading about that time that King Solomon solved the problem with the two ladies fighting over a baby by saying they would cut the baby in half and give each of them half and then the real mom said that she would rather have the other lady raise it and I realized something: that one lady would have been content to have half a baby.
-I want to train a hawk to catch footballs and ruin NFL games.
-Do you know who is really good at charades? People who speak sign language. Do you know the best way to cheat at charades? Pepper spray.

Scott: Show and Tell: Tom Waits

I recently stumbled on one of the most interesting artists I have ever encountered.  Tom Waits is a writer, actor, and first and foremost, a singer/songwriter.  Fans of the film “Mystery Men” will recognize him as Dr. A Heller who provides the super heroes with nonlethal weapons.

He is almost sixty years old and has been releasing albums since the early 70s.  A lot of his early stuff might fall under the category of Blues but his latest album “Real Gone” which came out in 2006 can only be described as experimental.  I think it’s very interesting that he has been able to stay so fresh for so long.

His voice is perhaps the strangest I have ever heard, capable of going earthquake-inducingly low and sometimes achieving a blues-meets-heavy-metal quality.  When he performs he uses expressionistic movements (I don’t think you can call it “dance”) in which he throws glitter into the air.  In the song “Chocolate Jesus” he pulls out a loudspeaker and “sings” through it into the microphone.  His precussion often involves nails and various other clanking instruments.

He won an Academy Award for making the soundtrack for Fight Club (whatever that entails), and he has won several Grammys.

Brooke: Lightning Out of Heaven

This is one of my favorite things I have read in the last year. Ever.

And I kept on meaning to share it:

http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=10924

Scott: Green Grass

Green Grass

by Tom Waits

Lay your head where my heart used to be
Hold the earth above me
Lay down in the green grass
Remember when you loved me

Come closer don’t be shy
Stand beneath a rainy sky
The moon is over the rise
Think of me as a train goes by

Clear the thistles and brambles
Whistle ‘Didn’t He Ramble’
Now there’s a bubble of me
And it’s floating in thee

Stand in the shade of me
Things are now made of me
The weather vane will say…
It smells like rain today

God took the stars and he tossed ‘em
Can’t tell the birds from the blossoms
You’ll never be free of me
He’ll make a tree from me

Don’t say good bye to me
Describe the sky to me
And if the sky falls, mark my words
We’ll catch mocking birds

Lay your head where my heart used to be
Hold the earth above me
Lay down in the green grass
Remember when you loved me

Note: Yes this is a song. I don’t think I will ever appreciate “normal” poetry as much as song lyrics. It may be simplistic but I really like a good rhyme scheme. When two well-placed words not only illuminate each other but also sound similar, it leaves a serendipitous flavor in my soul. Like the truth of the idea has been encoded in the English language for centuries and is now being discovered.

Scott: Late Show and Tell: This is the life I want to live!

Sufjan Stevens was born in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up in the chilly upper reaches of the Lower Peninsula. A self-taught musician, the young Sufjan pounded out elaborate Mozartian sonatas on a toy Casio, and by college became proficient on the oboe, recorder, banjo, guitar, vibraphone, bass, drums, piano, and other instruments too numerous to mention. Somewhere along the line he also started to sing, though at the time his friends didn’t encourage it. He bought a 4-track tape cassette recorder and painstakingly composed 90-minute concept albums for The Nine Planets, The 12 Apostles, and The Four Humors. He read William Blake, William Wordsworth, and William Faulkner. At that time, in college, the world loomed large and daunting, and Sufjan’s music came to sound like a medieval woodwind ensemble waving swords and torches at the twelve-headed dragon of death. During his last semester in college, Sufjan pruned, picked, and assembled a selection of these songs to produce the inaugural release “A Sun Came” on Asthmatic Kitty Records, a home label Sufjan initiated with his step-dad Lowell. A thousand copies were manufactured and shipped to a dark, dank closet somewhere in the vacuous black hole of the universe, where they shifted and snored in their sleep for several years to come.

Sufjan then moved to New York City and lived bohemian style, with three other college graduates, in the unfashionable financial district, commuting by bike to The New School for Social Research, where he was enrolled in the masters program for writers. There he met Jhumpa Lahiri, harassed Philip Gourevitch on the telephone, and tried unsuccessfully to complete an epic collection of stories and sketches about backwoods Midwestern kinsmen—Christian Fundamentalists, Amway salesmen, crystal healers— all set in a small rural town in Michigan. Hmmmm. No one seemed very interested. Sufjan went back to the 4-track, tired of “words, words, words,” and set out to complete his most ambitious project to date: a collection of programmatic, symphonic songs for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. There were no lyrics, but more than a few cymbal swells, flourishes on the oboe, and ambient organ drones, all accompanied by computer-generated techno beats, and digital noise. The result was enterprising, but not quite flattering. He sent a few copies to press, which fell on confused ears. “…A hyper-modified Atari battling a souped-up Colecovision in a chess match/battle royal,” one writer noted. Feeling inspired, Sufjan dropped off a copy at New York’s favored record store, Other Music, only to find it in the used section, reduced price, two weeks later. Sufjan took this as a compliment. His label did not. Write songs, his step-dad insisted. Write something with words and melodies.

Sufjan went back to the books, mainly his own unwritten one. Taking bits and scraps of unfinished stories (character sketches, plot lines, penciled diagrams) Sufjan began to arrange his misshapen fiction into the bold mechanics of song, making friends with line breaks, meter, and rhyme scheme. These things led to melody, odd time signature, and a litany of jingle jangles on the drum kit, which had been taken out of storage once and for all. Here and there, on weekend trips, in quiet gasps of free time, Sufjan carried around his 8-track, recording songs in people’s homes, in cinderblock basements, in barn houses and rehearsal rooms. The vibraphone in Massachusetts, the electric organ in New Jersey, his sister’s husband’s grand piano, upstate Michigan. Word by word, note by note, everything came together like one great cosmic shuffle, the Big Bang. The result was a lushly orchestrated road trip through the backwoods of The Great Lake State, from motor-city to the winter beaches of Lake Superior. Now this is more like it! his step-dad said. This sounds pretty good! They decided to release it to the public, to act like a real record label. They found a distributor, a publicist, a booking agent, a make-up artist, a mime. Things were looking good. People lent an eager ear. The critics lowered their knives and their critical brow. Other Music put it in New Releases, top shelf! Europeans weren’t offended! Sufjan began to feel gallant and bold and confident about this great place called Planet Earth. This is just the beginning! he proclaimed over loudspeakers. This is just the tip of the iceberg! Galvanized by tourist brochures, road atlas maps, and the spirit of Walt Whitman, Sufjan began to intimate at other songs for other states, the American Dream, the national anthem, the continental rigmarole, the Delaware shuffle, Florida flamenco, California swing, all dramatized in song, the great epic symphony, in 50 movements, in 50 years! Lord help us!

Once the clang and clamor of patriotism subsided, Sufjan’s musical inquiry fell fast on the Land of Lincoln, stirred, perhaps, by sentimental recollections of his rebellious young adulthood on Clark Street in Chicago, Wrigleyville, the beachfront parks, the homeless kids with their pets, the abandoned school house, where he slept on a desk. During the winter of 2004, Sufjan spent four months in isolation, reading books and biographies, memorizing the unfashionable poems of Carl Sandburg, laughing and shuddering through Saul Bellow’s novels. He uncovered police blogs and books on tape. He solicited correspondence from old friends, Illinoisans once lost or estranged; he studied travel guides; he quizzed chat rooms; he made stuff up. All research, he decided, begins with your imagination and with your intuition, relying heavily on the convictions of the heart. During those long winter hand-clapping, piano-playing, drum-rolling months, Sufjan’s heart began to expand, leaving its fist-shaped mark on a series of songs that not so much pay homage to the Prairie State, but rack and rend its characters through potato farms, steel factories, street fairs, marching parades, convoluted rivers, and centuries past and present. The result was something bold, flashy, and ripe with advertisement, like the Goodyear blimp, but not without Sufjan’s tender rendering of the imagination. When all was said and done, Sufjan felt irrevocable changes taking place within his body, like a second puberty. His shoulders broadened, his mind quickened, his heart began to beat with quiet, patient thumps in a rhythm as fluid and faithful as the Chicago River.

And so on and so forth.

Sufjan’s other interests include graphic design, painting, running, knitting, crocheting, weaving, quilting, cleaning, photography, haircutting, and dry wall installation. He collects stamps and wheat pennies. He cooks legendary omelets and can whip up a sushi feast at the drop of a sake glass. In high school he played second string guard on a district champion basketball team and created his own language, now spoken by only two other people. His brother Marzuki is a nationally recognized marathon runner, elite status. His sister Djohariah has the most complicated, most whimsical, most monumental laugh in all of mankind.

Brooke: Show and Tell

I really like this Christmas Greeting by E.B. White:

From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions in many places. Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who can’t eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time. Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities! Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes don’t fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists! Greetings to wives who can’t find their glasses and to poets who can’t find their rhymes! Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight. Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word “How” (as though they knew!). Greetings to people with a ringing in their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep, and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths! Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to people who can’t stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too, the boarders in boarding hoses on 25 December, the duennas in Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got nothing in the mail. Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; merry Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction! Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think–plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners whose conduct is unworthy of their car! Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; joy to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers to soldiers and guardsmen on land and sea and in the air–the young men doing the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such, Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the Secretaries-designate, the President-elect; Merry Christmas to our new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management! Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas to all who think they are in love but aren’t sure! Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers who can’t think of a moral, gagmen who can’t think of a joke. Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon! And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters! Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!

Show and Tell!

Aaaah! I forgot about Show and Tell! I was having a splendid time at the University of Utah Student Film Festival.

Anyway, I hope it’s not too late. Here’s an amazing short story I found.

In February I went to see the Gossip and Young People with a friend of mine named Steve, who had just gotten out of rehab, and who was wrestling with the soft, quasi-religious rhetoric of AA in order to control a very real and threatening addiction to alcohol that had made a hard friend of him in the past. He was nervous and reserved on the ride out to the club, wholly unlike the person I knew before, who spent his nights at rock shows, perpetually wasted, hooting and heckling between every song, making out with random people, breakdancing. I was relieved, at first, by his change in demeanor; I prefer to enjoy my rock with as little peripheral, unpredictable activity as possible, and Old Steve made this impossible.We got to the show just as Young People were starting up, playing to a nearly empty club. Their latest record, War Prayers, is a collection of tense, semi-spastic hymns, as if performed by Patsy Cline, Thurston Moore, and the ghost of a Baptist preacher. Live, the songs took on a new urgency. Steve was impressed. When the first song ended, he shouted, “I like Young People! Bring the Rock!” again and again, pumping his fist like a trucker. The words sailed haltingly and erratically from his mouth—there was something forced in his delivery, like something synthetic and angular was lodged deep in his throat. He seemed interested in discovering whether he could still act up without being wasted, and, finding that he couldn’t, at least not with the same offhanded fluidity, he became frustrated and sad. He looked like he’d lost his arms, or the ability to smell. A couple people turned around, giving him a look. I felt the old conflict rising up in me. I wanted to defend his enthusiasm, the tireless work he did for rock, but I also wanted to hide behind the soundboard until the end of the show, or maybe the end of the decade. I mean, the rest of us had come to dutifully endure the show in respectful silence, arms crossed over our chests or thrust into the pockets of our thrifted coats. Even in the darkness of the club, there were limits.At the end of their set, Young People vocalist Katie Eastburn announced that it was Gossip singer Beth Ditto’s birthday, and that we should all wish her well when they took the stage. Steve and I went down the street to a Dunkin’ Donuts to wait for the Gossip.We sat for a long time. Steve seemed distracted and fidgety. He kept staring at the brightly lit menu panel that hung behind the registers, working something out inside his head.

“We have to get Beth something for her birthday,” he said, finally. “We need to get her a muffin.”

“No, I said, “Let’s not get her a muffin.”

“Yes,” he said. “We are going to get her a muffin. We’re going to find a candle and stick it in the muffin, and we’re going to give it to her for her birthday.”

I didn’t think it was a good idea. This was someone we didn’t know, and what kind of gift is a muffin, anyway? I talked him down, but he was determined. He started fishing through his pockets for a makeshift present, but all he had was a Connecticut quarter and his AA meeting schedule. Again, I was relieved. I get anxious during ATM transactions, so the thought of having to confront the singer of an amazing band with a pocket-warmed cigarette lighter or a pack of gum or a sobriety token was pretty crippling. Then Steve saw the 7-11 across the street. “Can I borrow five dollars?” he asked.

“Don’t do this,” I said.

“Just give me the money,” he said. “You owe me anyway for that mix CD I haven’t made for you yet.”

I gave him the money and he went across the street, returning five minutes later with a birthday card and a four-color click pen. “Check it out, I already got the cashier to sign it,” he said, sliding the card across the table. The front had a picture of a startled twelve-point buck emerging from a stand of trees, and across the top it said “Birthday Wishes for Father,” but Steve had crossed out “Father” and written “Beth” in the margin. Inside was an inspirational poem for ” Father Beth.” And, sure enough, in wild, green letters, Vikesh, the 7-11 clerk, had written, “To Beth—Many happy returns to you on this special day.”

“What is this?” I said.

“We’re going to take this into the club and get everyone to sign the card, and then we’re going to give it to Beth.”

“No, you are going to go into the club and get everyone to sign it.”

“Don’t be a wuss,” he said. “Put on your sissy parka and let’s do this.”

When we got back to the club it was packed. Before I had a chance to convince him that it was a bad, bad idea, Steve was already petitioning a group of lesbians. “Hey, it’s Beth’s birthday,” he said, suggesting a casual familiarity with the band. One of them asked who Beth was. He issued a brief sigh and explained that she was, like, the singer for the Gossip? As if, how could this person not even know that?

I shadowed him for a while like a waiter in training at Applebee’s, but I eventually backed off. I wasn’t really adding any value, after all, and there was an open space behind a heavy column next to the bar, where I could lean safely and inconspicuously.

Steve disappeared into the crowd, and I didn’t see him again until the Gossip came on stage. From across the club, I could hear him start to holler like a backwoods moonshine peddler chasing off trespassers. I stood on tip-toes and saw his hand, like a shark’s fin slicing through the water’s surface, gripping the card above everybody’s heads as he struggled toward the stage. He surged to the front and handed the card to Beth, who became, in turn, confused, surprised, and speechless with appreciation. The crowd, a good deal of whom had signed the card, was shouting and caterwauling like the apes from 2001. Beth stammered a thank-you (what do you say to a roomful of strangers who have just handed you a demented birthday card?), and the band started in with “Fire/Sign” off their Movement LP, a thimble-sized masterpiece of gritty white soul with a title that, as far as I can tell, is meant to describe what happens to the hairs on the back of your neck when you hear Ditto’s searing, boundlessly emotive voice for the first time. Everything that followed was a furious, sweaty blur. I’m sure the show would have been great even without the birthday card—the Gossip doesn’t need any help stirring up a room—but Steve’s impulsive, fledgling concept, his attempt to prove to himself that he hadn’t, in recovery, destroyed the very faculty that had made life worth it before, made us all feel like we’d done something important and pure, even if all we did was stand by and watch. We felt like we’d knowingly come to the show to celebrate Beth’s birthday, like we’d carefully orchestrated the whole night, calling each other weeks in advance to make sure everything would work out the way we’d planned. But it wasn’t planned—it was just a pattern that formed in Steve’s head, a fleeting opportunity he seized before it disappeared down the hole where we dump our squandered ideas. And its execution provoked, in real time, that sweet, triumphant, chest-bursting joy that any great song generates inside us.

Today is the first day we will be implementing Show and Tell Wednesdays!

We wanted to keep the blog project active on ALL weekdays, so Wednesday is now the day in which we will have little “show and tell” sessions. Instead of posting original creative works, we will post links to, or excerpts from things we have read, seen, or heard recently that are of particular interest.

As my first contribution to Show and Tell Wednesdays I will post a link to a very interesting and thought-provoking short story I read recently called The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt

The author took her ideas from a quote by William James:

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which…utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

PS–How do you like the awesome header graphic I created for Show and Tell Wednesdays?