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.

not a future hobby

I'm still thinking about ice skating a lot and about how I'd like to find a pair of used skates and get better and stuff. I also, of course, have been wishing that I could dance a little like Gene Kelley, or at least know the basic steps. I realized today, however, that I do not have any desire to get into ice dancing. I just want to be clear on that point. No ice dancing.

I was thinking how cool it would be if a bunch of people got together and swept off the rivers downtown so that people could skate on them. Think how fast you could get going and how cool it would be to zip through town. They've got to be frozen, right? I mean, they're maybe six inches deep this time of year, right? And they move in geological time, they're so slow. That could work, I think.

That reminds me of the news story a couple weeks ago about the guy who flew a plane under the Columbia Street bridge. I wonder what happened with that, if anything. Skating on the rivers sounds safer than that.

I keep thinking of watching tv in Belgium in this crackpot little hotel where a little dog, a terrier, sat right on top of our table, watching us as Brian and I ate from a plate of cold cuts. The owner saw the dog, or rather I think thought that we were annoyed by him though we weren't, and yelled at him: "Sammy!!" in this odd accent and the dog jumped down. Anyway, on tv there they had race coverage from this little town where there were speed skaters flying along, yes, rivers that ran through the town. Hundreds of people lined the banks cheering them on. That could happen here.