I stand corrected

Today, lots of people I told about liking the circus gave me a funny look and responded "Really? Have you not been to the circus for awhile or something?" I had to say yes to that. Apparently, past circuses had tygers and even those massive cage balls with motocross bikes running around them. So yeah, I guess I've missed out on some good shows. Part of what was fun for me was sitting there saying to myself "First row! How 'bout that?" over and over.

One thing this circus had that I bet most don't was the actress who played Jessie in Saved by the Bell doing a juggling-like act with her hat. Here she is in a photo I took (from the front row!). You might have to click on it to tell that it actually is her.

Another fun thing I saw this weekend was the Sk8 exhibit at the art museum. Some of the boards are okay, but what was even better were the three short videos of local skaters doing tricks and what not. Justin and one other dude from school are in them doing some pretty cool tricks--I'd buy a copy if they ever sold it.

Action packed

When our friend Chad called for circus tickets for us all a few weeks ago, he called the moment they went on sale and said "Give me the best seats in the house." I have got to start saying that. I had no idea that people actually said that, and even less that it could actually work, but it did, and I've resolved to start demanding "the best" from people when I have the chance.

Our seats for the circus, as I've hinted, were pretty much the best. Front row, dead center. We were close enough to tell which of the contortionists were sacrificing high school to live with the circus and which ones were old enough to have gone to high school in a one room school house. We were close enough that the one really awesome, old school clown chose Chad to parade around and make fun of him. We could smell the elephants. Well, everybody could probably smell them.

Cynical parent that I am, I was not ready to enjoy the circus as much as I did--I thought it'd either be just kind of cheesy or even a little sad when I saw the poor animals. I loved it though--there were so many people who could do so many pretty cool things, things that are hard to do and require dedication, like juggling lots of objects or making people laugh or bending yourself into funny shapes.

Even more amazing is that you'd see one lady balancing on the head of a pin or something and then twenty minutes later you'd see the same lady out there in a different costume and with a different name training crocodiles. It was, yes, just like the ringleader kept saying, amazing.

You see how cool it is to watch people who know how to do all these cool things, though, and you start to think to yourself "what can I do? I can't do anything." I can drive a car. Wow. I can put a golf ball into a pond. Spectacular.

I'm going to start demanding the best seat in the house, and I'm going to start learning how to do cool things. Thank you for opening my eyes, circus people.

Jeff Mangum is back

I'm going through a pretty intense rediscovery of Neutral Milk Hotel these days. The album In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea, and their other one, On Avery Island, have helped me wash more than a few dishes over the past week. Nice, fuzzy-guitar, psychedelic, indie rock. I wish Jeff Mangum didn't wig out and join the circus because I miss this band. (I really think that's what happened to the guy, literally, though I haven't kept up with his recent whereabouts)

Some of my favorite records I listen to so much that I "memorize' them almost and get to the point where I don't enjoy hearing them much anymore. I still consider them favorite albums, but I don't enjoy listening to them nearly as much as I used to. That's strange. Guided by Voices records are like that for me, and so are some Galaxie 500 things and even some Nick Drake. It's too bad, but at least I'm not like the dorks whose car stereos I hear outside my house--the guys who have been listening to the same Led Zepelin 8-tracks for thirty years. It's good to move on.

Pedro, in a landslide.

Hey has anybody seen this funny movie called Napolean Dynamite? jk, of course you have. I bring it up because I saw a new shirt in the hall at school today that said "Jesus died for Pedro." Because the lettering on all these Pedro shirts look homemade, it was hard to tell if this was something the wearer made or bought somewhere. As a result, I couldn't tell if they were being ironic hipsters, like "look, I'm hip because I'm wearing a post-modern pastiche combining elements of lo pop culture with a contemporary Christian slogan" or if they were wearing it as a clever, sincere expression of their faith.

Either way, it's a funny shirt.

And then also today I walk in on some staff people at school who are talking about a student they think looks exactly like Napolean Dynamite, and I then I hear myself saying to them "no, my neighbor when I grew up was the Napolean Dynamite." Same hair, same glasses, same half-lidded eyes when he talked to you, and, best of all, same running style. Even though he was 18, his mother still drove us around town, to movies, book stores. He didn't like the same comic books I did, but we got along fine.Good guy.

But anyway, it occurred to me that maybe everyone knows someone whom they think looks exactly like NP. And maybe these look-alikes are people that no one ever thought twice about before the movie came out but now they're not only out, but they've got a kind of respect or awe from people who used to ignore them. I hope so. For the real life Napolean Dynamites out there, I hope so.

And no, I'm not one of them.

Murderball!!

Finally saw the above documentary about the hardcore life of wheelchair rugby players. They sure are angry, these guys. They hold grudges, they snap at loved ones, they cry when they lose. Your natural assumption is that they are angry because they are in wheelchairs. I think I came to believe, though, that these just happen to be angry guys who happened to be in wheelchairs.

They’re not all that way, of course, but the movie seems to focus on the ones that are—Joe, the former mvp who “defects” to the Canadian team when he gets cut, lives for wheelchair rugby the way I used to live for IU basketball: even when they’re playing, he’s too stressed out to enjoy himself or be in the moment. At home, he’s a jerk to his kid and comes across as distant to his wife. Out to dinner with her for their anniversary, for example, she makes a toast to them and he toasts back “to the Canadian team.”

I would have liked to see some other things developed more here. As a biker gearhead, I would have loved to hear them talk about the gladiator style chairs they use in the matches; I wonder if they would express similar affection for their rides just like when cyclists talk about their new bikes. There were some other things I missed, too, but I can’t remember them right now.

My favorite scenes were with the former motocross racer who was just learning how to get used to his wheelchair and then learns about murderball. He gets into one of the armored chairs, loaned to him by one of the featured guys, and you see a change come over him. For the first time since he was paralyzed, you can see that he’s not thinking about limitations, but possibilities. It’s actually pretty moving.

I also have to say that wheelchairs didn’t keep these guys from landing some pretty wonderful girlfriends. It’s funny how you don’t feel sorry for any of them at the end of this movie—or at least not as sorry as you think you might. That’s probably the whole point.

this is a test

this is another test.

The early beatals*

I'm 1/4 of the way through this new Beatles biography and for someone who knew only the music, it has been a fun read so far. I tend to think of them as this fully formed force of nature, so it has been interesting to read about the changing balance of power as they formed and grew. I'm thinking, for example, even of the obstacles posed by the relative age differences between Paul and George on one hand and John on the other. I love the thought of the two young ones sneaking into John's art school for furtive smoke breaks and to ogle the art school birds.

What I dig the most maybe is the sheer industry about them as they jumped into rock music. They had no idea what they were doing with these crappy guitars, but they locked themselves into their rooms and pieced it together. They weren't good students, but they were smart and found something they wanted to do and they devoted themselves to it. School should be more about finding what you want to do and doing it and less about finding out what other people want you to do. Most of the fault here lies with the way school is organized in this country, but your occasional student who doesn't seem to have any real interests has to share some blame, too.

Especially beautiful to me in this book is the way that American music feels like a message from another universe when it reaches their ears over late night radio broadcasts. I can relate it to life before the internet: music was a bigger deal for me back before you could download an album by someone within 10 seconds of hearing about them for the first time. Back then, the act of discovering a new band, or finding an album, or even a cd, could be a quest in itself. That quest is gone now, pretty much, and when you can't go on a quest, it's hard to feel like a knight.

* this is how they really spelled their name at first. How crazy is that?

Quote of the day

From a nature show about ocean life on pbs tonight:

"The sea otter wraps itself in kelp so that it doesn't drift away during its morning nap."

If there is a more contented animal on the planet than a sea otter . . . well, there just isn't. Man, where did we go wrong?

Big new releases coming up:

It's not often two of your favorites release an album within a couple of weeks. Chan Marshall seems to get better with every new record and B&S seem to--I dunno what they're doing. Their newer sound isn't the one I fell in love with, but it's still smart. Some people are saying this new one is the best since their second release.

As much as I love seeing Belle & Sebastian live, Cat Power may have been one of my most agonizing live experiences. She wasn't even all that bad--what made it so terrible was her attitude. I remember that after the opening band was done we heard this whining voice coming from this woman seated behind our table: "I don't wanna go up there! I don' wanna go!" she kept moaning to no one in particular. This, it turned out, was Chan Marshall herself. Stage fright, I guess. She sounded okay once she got up there, or actually, no she didn't, but what made it worse was how little pleasure she was getting out of it all. You just felt embarrassed for her.

Still, I'd see her again. She's awesome. Cath thinks I'm crazy for that, but oh well.

Darn you, PBS

I meant to get into the new issue of Granta last night but then Michelle told me about a new series on PBS about the French-Indian War. I had to watch that, of course. That's from back when the cool northeastern indians were still running the wilderness. Mohawk, Iroquois. They had some of the most beautiful material culture, but got wiped out early in comparison to the plains indians.

At the risk of being offensive to several first peoples in a single blog entry, here are my favorite indians:

1. Haida
2. Cree
3. Inuit
4. Ojibwe
5. Mohawk

I'll tell ya, here's something weird about this war. It was a war between England and France. Indians fought on both sides. Guess who loses? The indians. How did they do that? They hedged their bets. They were everywhere, but they still lost. Maybe not immediately, but eventually this is true at least. I mean, today, if you look at a globe or something, you'll see an England and you'll see a France, but there is no "Indiana." Well, there is, but it's not the same thing.

What's sad for me is that I can watch a show like this and be in suspense because . . . I don't know how it ends. How ignorant can I be? Of course, I'm sure that England did okay, but they sure get their heads handed to them a lot in the beginning. When I went to bed, things didn't look good for England, that is. I wonder how it all turns out.

The best part of this show is the actor they pick to play Geo. Washington. They play him up as this bumbling idiot, accidentally starting a war between France and England and then miraculously surviving all these indian slaughters without a scratch. The actor plays it all while wearing a constant expression that says "whew! That was close!"

The show resumes next Wednesday.

A few recent snaps.

J gets tired being in front of the camera all day.

B on ice

Over break, we spent an hour or so at a rink. B did pretty well his first time on the ice--but he was just wearing boots.

It's like train spotting, kind of.

B looking at cars.

Chips.

At the gyros shop, killing time until the botanical gardens opened.

Spring in our steps

Stayed home with a coughing J on Monday but it was so nice we had to go out and scramble on the woodpile in our yard's "back 40." The sun was warm enough that the air brought that damp, fecund spring feeling to our noses. It was almost sweet like a nice tobacco or something, though I don't know much about nice tobacco.

The snow is back today, but that 's okay too. Time goes so quickly when you're older and with kids that all the seasons come to you soon enough and there is no point in looking forward to them or doing anything but enjoying the one you're in. Gee, don't I sound like I'm at peace with the universe?

It just occurred to me that this photo could have come straight out of the video for "I Wanna Be Adored." J could pass for a mini Reni with that cap on.

Freaks Win

Fearless Freaks and I am Trying to Break Your Heart show you the right and the wrong way to make a film about a rock band. Heart is humorless and plodding, assuming that it can be all about the music alone and we'll care. Freaks doesn't make this mistake: the music is there and not there at the same time beause the film-maker-guy lets it be about Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd and how weird and funny and what great people they are. I know the band and the fellas a lot better after watching it--after Heart, I felt like all I learned is that rock n' roll can be boring.

And Wayne Coyne. Jeez. I'm not convinced he has much to do with what makes the music great, but he's, I dunno, he's Wayne Coyne. He has cool hair and I like the suit he wears. His affable, busy-body spirit reminds me so much of various friends I've known through the years. I wish I had that energy. I spent half the movie just scrunching up my face and wondering "what the h*** is that guy thinking?" I mean, how many "rockumentaries" would devote 15 minutes or so to things like the back yard sci-fi movie the band leader is making in his back yard, or to grainy 1970's film of him and his buddies playing football in their tight 70's jeans and KISS haircuts? Not many.

Another interesting comparison to Heart is that in that movie, part of the drama is when they kick out a band member for . . . it's not real clear--talking too much, I think. In Fearless Freaks, the reverse happens: we see Steven Drozd literally in the darkest moments of a heroin addiction and then his bandmates bring him out of it. The message is clear: The Flaming Lips can save your life.

I have to admit that it might be a movie primarily for people who are already fans of the "Flips," but still, it is a nice example of what a rock documentary can be when it treats the people like people and not icons.

Yay

Wow, just snagged tickets to go see Belle & Sebastian with New Pornographers. That's gonna be a pretty swell gig, if I do say so. Saw B&S in Detroit a few years back and it was just one of the best shows I've ever been to--it's all about the fun with them.

Ticketmaster do take a bite, tho. That hurt a little. Information superhighway robbery, that is.

Boots

In the prologue to the new Beatles biography by Bob Spitz, I just read this description of how the lads were dressed on the night of their big first show in Liverpool:

Nor could anyone take his eyes off of the rude cowboy boots with flat chopped heels that each man wore, especially John Lennon's, which were ornate Twin Eagles, emblazoned with birds carved on both the front and the back and outlined with white stitching.

And I realized: these are the boots that are missing from my life. Not necessarily John Lennon's boots, but boots like that. Rude. Black. Flat, chopped heels. With boots like that, I could . . I could do anything.

Broke my heart

Got my first Netflix movie last night, the Wilco documentary I am Trying to Break Your Heart. It's because I had never seen this and couldn't find it around here that helped nudge me into finally getting Netflix, though I'd been close to pulling the trigger lots of times before. Amazingly this plus the Flaming Lips movie Fearless Freaks both got here in one day after being shipped--the shipping envelopes make the movies look like little more than AOL junk mail, and Cath almost threw them out.

So we watched Wilco first and it was a little funny because Cath starts out by saying, "I don't really like Wilco," but then as they played each song, she would say "Oh, but I do like this song." She kept doing this until she remembered that she does in fact like Wilco; she just couldn't remember their sound at first. I hope she doesn't think that me saying this makes her look silly.

The movie ended up being a disappointment. Jeff Tweedy is an amazing song writer and performer, and he seems like a really down to earth fellow with good values and whatever--I love the scene where his little son starts tapping the beat to the song "Heavey Metal Drummer" and he sings along to it--but overall, he's not the most dynamic screen presence and the movie ended up being a little dull. The most interesting personality was Jay Bennett, the guy they kicked out of the band. I guess this is why MTV and other folks always populate their reality shows with idiots.

The music was okay--I liked hearing alternate versions to the album songs, but in almost every case, I preferred the album version to the studio goof-around, knob-twiddling they were doing.

Fearless Freaks looks to be a little more bizarre. I watched the first 10 minutes or so, and Wayne Coyne's drug addled childhood looks like what That 70's Show would have been if it were produced by HBO.

Country Boys

We've been watching the recent PBS documentary Country Boys in my sophomore class the last two days, and my general impression is that most people appreciate it. They like it for different reasons, sure; some people see humor, some are feeling the pathos as they watch Chris's floundering attempts to flee his splintering family and Cody's identity issues. It just kills me every time--I think in a way that Chris's mother is a worse parent than his father is. The dad has an illness, alcoholism; what's the mother's excuse for leaving Chris and his sister behind? She's heartless and selfish.

I can't help but read any movie or book without being affected by what I read last, which in this case is Gatsby, so it got me thinking about the "dreams" these characters carry. In Gatsby, it's all big stuff: houses, women, cars that make up the dream. In Country Boys, their environment has pounded them down so much that their dreams are heart-breakingly small: get out of the trailer, score high enough on the ACT to get into a cinder-block community college. The modesty of these dreams makes me so much more sympathetic to what they're going through.

I wish I could teach a course in documentary film. That would be pretty awesome.

If you dig this film, PBS has a great web site devoted to it. Updates on Chris and his life since the movie, plus lots of other background material.

Smart wombat.

And he can dance, too.

Get your sleep

Cody, one of the subjects of Country Boys

In thinking about the below-mentioned "so much to read, so little time" dilemma, I decided that maybe I could cut down to six hours of sleep a night, so I tried that last night. Unfortunately, instead of reading, I watched the second episode of the Frontline show "Country Boys." This show just knocks me out--it's set in eastern Kentucky, but these kids could be anywhere. They are everywhere. I think I might jettison my hero-quest plan so that I can fit this show into the last couple days of the semester and ask people to look at some of the Gatsby "American Dream" motifs as they appear in it. These kids live in one big Valley of Ashes, for sure.

The other bad thing about my new six-hours-of-sleep plan is that it makes you very tired. Normally, I only need seven hours, so you wouldn't think that one hour makes that much of a difference. Well, it does. When the tiny speakers in my 20 year old plastic clock radio switched on the morning drone of NPR this morning, I was literally still a dead man. Literally. Yes, literally. Literally. Yes. The dead of night it was for me.

I guess I'll go back to the plan where I sleep seven hours. Sometimes, I can't wait to be one of those old folks who only need like four hours of sleep a night. They must get lots done every day, those old people.

First day of skool

Ahh, it's nice to be back in class again--it'd been a few years. Attended the first meeting of a course I'm taking toward a masters in English out at ol' IPFW last night. Oddly, it's in the exact same room that my last course was in, this cell of a room that I could only barely lie down in across the width of it. No windows, neither. There were about forty desks in their and fifteen of us people.

I forget the title of the class, but it's about this so-called "Creative Non-fiction" genre and of course I was one of the first people the prof turned to when she asked "what is creative non-fiction?" Actually, she'd asked if any of us had read any CNF lately so I half raised my hand because with this teacher it is sometimes impossible to tell whether she's asking a rhetorical question or whether she really expects us to give an answer--so I started out giving a 1/4 arm wave to questions and then moved to just answering them to myself, silently, making no motion at all. "Yes," I would think to myself, in response to a question, but sometimes I would also think "no" or "what did she say?"

But when she asked the class if any of us had read any CNF lately, there was a silence, and then another one, so then I volunteered (Joseph, you'll be proud of this one): "I recently read Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker." I had to stop the silence. I didn't even know if this book qualified as "creative non-fiction," but I decided that it is one of those genres where if you aren't sure whether a work fits in it, the answer is "sure, it fits fine."

To me, then, the prof (whom I like very much, if that hasn't come across yet), says "Great! What is it?" so I start telling her all about the book, which doesn't take too long, because it's not about all that much, and then she stops me and says "no, what is creative non-fiction?"

I wanted to punt. I was a student in my own classroom for this moment. I actually said: "I don't know."

How ridiculous. I laughed it off, and then launched into a brief personal definition of the term. I even made especially sure to use the word "lyrical" when describing it because I love to describe things as "lyrical." She liked it. She said "lyrical!!" as though that was the day's secret word. And then she moved on.

Oh, man. What fun. I have to restrain myself, really, because I could easily become the kind of participator that just doesn't shut up in that class. I don't want the people in there to hate me; I just want them to be jealous of my craft.

I'm a little surprised that we are only expected to finish two pieces of writing--seems kind of light, but the reading load is significant. I don't know when I'm going to do it all. I am now 1 1/2 weeks behind in the New Yorker, and I just got the new Beatles biography from Amazon, and I want to read In Cold Blood, and another teacher just told me she was going to loan me Ian McCewan's Saturday, which always makes me feel obliged to read it. It's such a burden to be recommended books sometimes.

I am a sandwich eating genius

My late grandmother taught me that there was only one way to make a peanut and butter jelly sandwich: 55% peanut butter and 55% jelly. She cranked those things out for me as long as she could, even offering to make them about 10-15 times a day when her dementia began to kick in.

I grew some as an individual last year, however, when I attempted the triple decker PB&J. It met with some success, but my fellow teachers at South Side laughed at me. I became too shy to eat it in front of them and had to retreat to my classroom.

In privacy, I continued to experiment. Now, I am not a bad cook, and have developed some kitchen intuition, but even I was not prepared for what I pulled off tonight: my new favorite sandwich. Try it if you dare:

The Grilled Peanut Butter and Misc. Crap Sandwich

1. Butter the bread.
2. Slather on the PButter.
3. Pour honey on it.
4. Sprinkle on some chocolate chips.
5. Add sliced strawberries.
6. and some sliced bananas, too.
7. Grill it a la mode du grilled cheese.

Actually, I got this recipe from a magazine, so I'm not some sandwich-making genius. I am just a sandwich eating genius.

Here is a perfect day for you

This picture from what's happening in some part of Japan is just impossibly beautiful to me right now; I'm missing the snow in a bad way. If this happened here, it'd probably mean school would last until July, but a guy can dream can't he? It looks like a happier version of a flood or tsunami: slowly accumulating, pretty, fun. Think of the igloos I could build.

Musical Interlude

What is it about Scotland? With Boards of Canada, it raises the number of Scottish bands I dig to "a lot." Let's see:

Arab Strap
The Pastels
Mogwai
Travis
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Beta Band
Belle & Sebastian/Isobel Campbell
Camera Obscura
Life Without Buildings

and now Boards of Canada.

For a country with a population that totals, like, in the hundreds, that's quite a lot of good music.

This Boards of Canada record is just killing me right now, though I've never been a huge electronica fan. It has this distant, muffled sound that I just realized reminds of what I hear when I am driving on the highway with the stereo off. It's November, or March, and there is no snow on the Indiana corn fields and your car is filled with that lo-fi noise mixture of wind and whatever. Who'd have thought that a flat landscape could have echoes but that's what it is, leftover sound from all the heavy trucks rolling their tires over the sad highway. It really does sound like landscape music, something you can only hear from far away.

Man, I've had way too much tea this morning.

Thanks, Joseph!

Okay, so the computer still isn't working right, but it was a good excuse to hang out. C likes the idea of that Belle & Sebastian/Stereolab double in early March, so we'll see about that.

Advice

One way not to start a conversation with your wife is to say to her: "I have an idea for a new year's resolution for you."

Even if what you have to say is totally constructive, she will be all defensive about it and won't even listen to your good idea.

On Beauty

Oh, I've got to stop staying up so late. In the morning, when I get up around 5:45 or so, I think "I really need to go to bed by 10 or 10:30." Then that evening, I often don't even pick up my book until 9:30 or so. If I want to get any reading done, I have to stay up til at least 10:30.

Last night, I finished Zadie Smith's latest, On Beauty. I'm pretty impressed/jealous of her talent, this young Brit who has come out of nowhere to write three decent novels that are totally crammed with people and humor and uncomfortable moments.

I may prefer White Teeth at this point, but I'm still digesting On Beauty. I think it was a happy ending, happier than Howard probably should have had. It's also a very visual ending, as though Smith were writing something for the screen: the art history professor used to talking his way through life and art without enjoying it but finally gives some big lecture but choosing, at the last second, at the podium, not to speak at all, but to simply click through his power point presentation, letting the Rembrandt slides speak for themselves. Now that I think about it, it is an improbable end, but still worth a smile. I remember laughing more at White Teeth, I think.

A moment of uncomfortable silence

I think that there has been a message delivered to our morning announcement team to start making the "moment of silence" longer. It used to last just a little bit longer than the time it took students to sit down after saying the Pledge. However, for the four days of this week, they have had time to sit down, stare around the room, and start wondering when the moment of silence is going to end. Some kids sit there with a look on their faces like "when can I start breathing again?" It's as though they can feel it's longer than usual, but they're unwilling to meet each others' eyes because it's supposed to be a serious moment.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, only that it's a noticeable change, and that it's kind of funny to watch.

I wonder if other classes are like this. Maybe not. I have a class of seniors and all of them stand for the Pledge and all of them are quiet for the Moment, though I've never said a word about it--I've never had to. I wonder if classes of freshmen and sophomores behave the same way.

Near hand-dryer breakthrough

For a moment today, I thought that I had discovered a breakthrough in hand drying technique. As I washed my hands this morning in the bathroom down the hall from my classroom, it occurred to me: there are two hand-dryers, and I have two hands. Why not turn both of them on at the same time? That way, each hand would have the benefit of getting the full force of its own hand-dryer.

I tried it immediately, and soon noticed that what this technique does not have is the drying effect given by step #2, "Rub hands gently." As a result, the machines turned off with both of my hands slightly less dry than they would have been had I used a single dryer. A major disappointment.

I guess that's why step #1 isn't "Push button on two dryers if available."

Picture practice

Not a great picture, composition-wise, and the lighting isn't great, but I like June's expression here. It's just a relief to finally have a digital camera that has so little shutter lag that I actually get the picture I'm hoping for when I click the shutter.

New Year

So the snow didn't get lovely until the day before we left to drive back south and once we got south there was no snow waiting for us, and so I am missing the snow right now. It was a nice trip to Michigan, though. Lots of family and some skating and some tubing down ski hills and other things you only do when you have kids. Here is a picture I took during a brief walk with C and Smokey.