Pass the Brain, Please

The other day, I was watching a pre-prom presentation for high school kids. I have seen a billion of these over the years. Mostly, they resort to showing pictures of mangled cars and decapitated prom queens in order to scare the wits out of the kids -- frighten them into laying off of the sauce before the big night. But this one was different.

Dynamics in Art and in Life

Hi, all. It has been one heck of a week, so, for the first time, I am posting an article I wrote for the online journal When Falls the Coliseum. It is "thicker" than my usual posts on here, but the spirit is the same, with an idea I come back to a lot: art as teacher for life. Hope you like it!

I had been looking forward to seeing David Russell in concert for a long time. In my opinion, he is the finest living classical guitarist. He was to perform at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. It's a pretty big room. It seats about five-hundred and there were people standing in the back, too. People suck up sound, you know. I leaned over to a fellow guitarist and said, "Do you see any microphones?" He furrowed his brow and shook his head. We were worried. We were halfway back in the crowd. This was terrible. Then, David Russell trotted out pleasantly to lively applause and took his seat. He checked his tuning, but the turning of the buttons had the secondary effect of serving as a volume dial for his audience: the crowd slowly went as silent as a snowy pine-forest.

Rise of the Googlenater

The other day, I heard the strangest thing on a radio report. Google had chosen Kansas City, Kansas, for a new fiber-optic thingamajigger set-up that is going to give the city Internet connections that go something like one-hundred times faster than broadband. It got me thinking back to the old days . . . [wobbly memory segue waves on the screen . . .]

Remember (last Friday) when broadband used to be considered fast? Remember how you would have to wait, like, six seconds for a website to appear on your screen? How the heck did we put up with it? So much wasted time. Man, oh, man [falls into a wistful stare].

Honoring Japan

All around the world, we have seen images of Japan's recent disasters. Yet, at the same time, I have heard nothing but reports which confirm the honor and dignity of the Japanese people, despite their unimaginably difficult  circumstances.

One American reporter mentioned that, in all her years of reporting from the sites of disasters, she had never seen a situation in which (despite the desperate need for food and clean water) the vending machines and stores remained un-violated. Another mentioned the stoic courage of the Japanese -- their unfaltering dignity, even as they stood among the ruins of their homes.

The Simple Truth

Harry is a man with a round, shiny face.

He sits across from a co-worker, having morning coffee. He wears a blue tie and a white shirt. "Jim," he says, smoothing his blue tie, his words heavy with meaning and trailing down in chromatic condescension, "Life is simple. Simple. Things are black and white, and everyone complicates everything . . ."

Meanwhile, Harry's wife walks the kids to school. Again, she sees that dad with the two little girls; the handsome father with the dark hair. She sees him every day. Every day, he talks to her and looks her in the eye and they walk back out to the street together, the sound of the children fading away behind them. Every day, they stand on the corner for a half hour, talking. Talking. Every day she wonders what is would be like to have a husband who looks her in the eye. Who talks to her. All day, cleaning or working in the kitchen, she thinks of this man until the slamming of her husband's car door makes her heart sink.