Heavy

Running to the iTunes of a serendipitous string of shuffled songs one Saturday during my marathon training, I was struck by an insight that at the time I found quite Heavy: I had discovered yet another form of measurement of the passing of time.

It was in my 30s that light bulbs begin to click over my head about why my parents always whined about dated songs, missing friends, and forgotten celebrities. In my 40s, I realized one day that somehow all the war veterans had stumbled into the wrong generations—my comrades, who survived Vietnam, were the age my father’s WWII associates were supposed to be, and all his 40-something cronies had been mis-seated in the WWI vets’ place at the table. By the time I reached my 50s, it occurred to me that I might want to shut up about getting older because it was only going to get worse.

So these days I note the increasing bombardment of indicators mostly in silence. There are lapses. When the names of the four Beatles popped up as a trivia question on Jeopardy—one to which, furthermore, nobody knew the answer—I cried out in audible pain. A teenager who asked for my phone number and then looked at me quizzically, his finger poised over his open cell phone, when I handed him a slip of paper elicited a loud laugh. But mostly I suffer in silence.

Still, every now and then, a new variation slips in, and this is where it got Heavy for me during that Saturday run, the long one of the week. Dionne Warwick was crooning one of my all-time favorites, and it struck me suddenly that she sang of activities and truisms that no longer exist. “LA is a great big freeway, put a hundred down and buy a car…. weeks turn into years, and there you are, pumping gas… they’ve got lots of room in San Jose…” Pumping gas? Room in San Jose? 100 bucks to buy a car? She might as well have been singing about spooning under the harvest moon.

Topical tunes obviously fade, although it’s amazing how sometimes they don’t quite, or at least they go in and out of style, as with the Kinks’ tribute to that ancient energy crisis of the 70s: “I can score you some coke and some grade one grass, but I can’t get a gallon of gas.
… There’s no more left to buy or sell, there’s no more oil left in the well, a gallon of gas can’t be purchased anywhere, for any amount of cash.” The song will be apt again soon enough, I suspect.

Alas, some topics never seem to fade. Warren Zevon’s lyrics will always proclaim, accurately, that it is “time, time, time, for another peaceful war.” And “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” seems apt for all times, though the narrow population of one verse has become antiquated: “Where have all the husbands gone? Gone to soldiers, everyone.” Who picks the flowers, I wonder, now that the young girls fight alongside their husbands and sisters?

You can count on a certain dependable subset of war in select hot spots of the globe, so most of Zevon’s older lyrics still apply—but happily, sometimes even his lyrics become dated, at least regarding one lonely corner of our planet: “The Thompson gunner still wanders through the night… in Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine …” It’s not much, but I grab hope where I find it these days—another symptom of aging, I suppose.

Another Zevon tune from the 70s continues to be, while a bit off on some of the details, still weirdly prescient, in a sick sort of way: “Nuclear arms in the Middle East; Israel is attacking the Iraqis; The Syrians are mad at the Lebanese; And Baghdad does whatever she please; Looks like another threat to world peace for the envoy.”

My run is nearly over and my 54-year-old bones are glad. Bach breaks through the shuffle like a beacon. My mind clears, except to ponder that, having occupied myself with utter nonsense for the past couple of hours, I perhaps have provided empirical data to support my long-held theory that runners are merely recycled Heads. Decades past our pot-imbibing days, when Heavy ideas dissipated along with the smoke, having lived through careers, children, divorce, and bodies that rebel at more and more of the substances we try to put into them, we’re forced to turn inward for our dope—from pot to endorphins.

So the Heavy ideas still come to me—and float away with the clouds over the final mile of the day’s run.

Pardon My Dust review (the uncut version)

(a slightly abbreviated version of this review appeared in the Wichita Eagle on Sunday, September 20; I prefer this one because it includes more info about the actual production, including the set and co-star Keith Boyer's work)

Pardon My Dust review (the uncut version)

By BOB CURTRIGHT Wichita Eagle correspondent
Playwright Annie Welsbacher’s “Pardon My Dust” is a two-person play but a decidedly one-woman show – rather, showcase – because it’s all based on the words and writings of noted tart-tongued author, wit and critic, Dorothy Parker.

Welsbacher cleverly weaves together excerpts from Parker’s poems, plays, essays, theater and book reviews as well as acerbic observations and delicious zingers shared by her famous friends and even more famous enemies to construct a view into Parker’s sophisticated but often dark world. Parker’s cynicism, colored by personal tragedies from suicide attempts to abortion, revolved around her never quite believing she was a good writer, despite her fame.

Parker was part of the famous Algonquin Round Table of writers who ruled New York in the early part of the 20th Century, but she felt overshadowed by such talents as George S. Kaufman, Ring Lardner, Alexander Woollcott and Robert Benchley. The bitter irony is that, of her famous circle, she is the only one in continuous print nearly a century later. She is the survivor and the exemplar.

And playwright Welsbacher’s purpose is to force Parker to confront her own talents and realize her worth as a person, to give her the happy ending she may never have had in real life. Welsbacher does that by ushering Parker into a way station with all of her baggage – including more than a few stuffed dogs representing pets throughout her life – at the moment of her death in 1967 at age 73. “What fresh hell is this?,” Parker (Liz Willis) trumpets upon arrival in what looks like a posh gentleman’s club with dark wood bar and sleek leather chairs.

(The beautiful set design by Dan Williams is particularly brilliant because it is wallpapered with newsprint overlayed with giant Hershfeld caricatures of Parker and the Algonquin circle.)

It’s isn’t hell, she is told by a guide named Janus (Keith Boyer), but it might as well be because she is terrified of being alone. At Janus’ prodding, she roots through her considerable baggage – literally -- to recall and review the bits and pieces of her life. As she does, Janus transforms into half a dozen important figures in her past, from one of her husbands to snotty Woollcott (famous as the inspiration for “The Man Who Came to Dinner”) to her beloved Benchley, the love of her life but never (reportedly) her actual lover, to her dismay. Parker banters, argues, confronts, affronts and ultimately embraces Janus in his various guises so she can find peace with herself. The clever title refers to Parker’s ashes, which were relegated to a lawyer’s file cabinet for years before finally being laid to rest.

Veteran Wichita actress Willis, who approached Welsbacher to write this work for her, is a powerhouse as Parker, sometimes stalking the stage in triumph and sometimes shuffling around in doubt. Willis shows many emotional shades as she pushes beneath Parker’s strident, privileged, quippy surface to reveal the wounded romantic soul underneath.

Boyer, another prolific local actor, is a nimble, versatile presence as Janus who changes personalities (and voices) as easily as slipping on a pair of glasses, hat, smoking jacket or waiter’s apron. Boyer is a strong match for Willis and a generous co-star whose performance beautifully supports rather than competes with the heroine.

Directed by Wichita State’s longtime theater head Dick Welsbacher (the playwright’s father), the show – given its world premiere Wednesday – got off to a sluggish start but quickly picked up pace when Parker started throwing around her famous comments, some of them pretty salty. The play has R-rated language but is literate and sophisticated rather than smutty. While the play is designed as one 80-minute act, there is an unnecessary (to me) blackout pause to divide it into two scenes. Since nothing essentially changes and the setting is timeless, that moment creates a stumble in the mood.

Merle Streep

From the sublime to the ridiculous…. last night, in a motel room in Iowa, I turned on the TV and watched news of Walter Cronkite’s death. I felt moved to write about it, and did. Tonight, in another motel room in Wisconsin, I turned on HBO and witnessed not a death but a life. I watched a weirdly talented display by Merle Streep in possibly the worst production in which she has ever appeared.

It’s a cliché to say that Merle Streep is good; it’s a given, like the fact that trees grow toward the light. It’s a cliché to say she is the best, and it’s hard to keep saying that when she keeps proving it over and over and over again. Her avant garde work of decades past—in, say, a BAM staging of Alice in Wonderland , a performance any of us would be proud to claim—have been only exercises for her, a warm-up. Kramer vs. Kramer would have sealed her place in history, but that was before Sophie’s Choice. I was pretty sure she’d reached her apex in Angels in America—a male orthodox rabbi?! as only one of a fascinating chorus of characters?—but no, I’ve seen an even greater achievement tonight.

I didn’t expect Mama Mia to be particularly good; I watched it because it was free and it was on, and I love Streep and Christine Baranski and Julie Walters and Colin Firth. I thought it might be mediocre, neither good nor bad; the music certainly fits that rough definition. I didn’t expect it, despite the reviews, to be so truly, genuinely, awfully bad.

I most certainly didn’t expect Merle Streep to be so good. To fall on this work with the same frank appetite she might have unleashed on Gertrude or Medea or Hedda Gabler. Her energy made me ashamed of my own existential ennui, my difficulties in engaging in a world that seems so out of whack, at the same time violent and banal, and ultimately so pointless. Who am I to wail at the velocity of modern-day cruelties when Merle Streep is so willing to give her heart to disco-era pop music of no redeeming value whatsoever?

She put her soul into every single moment of that film. Into every line, every moment, every verse in those terrible songs and that dreadful staging and the awful choreography and tired story line and one-dimensional characters. The movie takes place on a Greek island, and somehow, she found ways to bring Greek drama—yes, pity and awe and terror and catharsis—to this meaningless little money machine of a movie.

I’ve seen good actors do bad work, from Hoffman to Olivier. I’ve never begrudged them for it. On the other hand, as a playwright, I’ve experienced the rescue by actors of prose that should have had a good editor—or dustbin. I’ve witnessed the enactment of that old saw about reading the phone book—as in, he’s such a good actor he can make the phone book entertaining. Literally: my father reads the TV listings every Tuesday for a radio station that ministers to the blind. He always frets about making them interesting. They don’t have to be interesting, I assure him, it’s just reference—the reading isn’t interesting either, we just want to know what’s on and when. But he works hard to make it interesting, and he damn well does.

Still, I have never ever seen the kind of energy and diligence that Merle Streep put into Mama Mia, a movie she made at a time in her career when she hardly could have needed the work or the money. I have never seen such humilty and such rigor and such elegant transplendence.

Because that’s the other thing: her hard work wasn’t evident, it wasn’t what you see so often in actors like DeNiro and Cage and Nicholson, where you are painfully aware of how strenuosly they are Acting, you are so bloody aware of it that you can’t watch the damn movie. No, no. Streep was doing her usual invisible thing, where she is simply and organically engaged in the character she is portraying. It was just simply all the more awe-inspiring to see such fine work in a vehicle that by any form of measurement didn’t deserve it.

In a strange way, I have witnessed the work of two masters of their mediums in as many nights. Both spoke the truth, whether through storytelling or journalism, and both were the best at what they did because of that—they sought the truth no matter how much work it took, and they hewed to it like a lifeline, and it repaid them well in good Work.

I am on my way to a workshop about church leadership. I’m leery of all the worship activities in our agenda, because I am not sure I believe in what these activities assume about me, about us as human beings. I became involved in this work as a payment to my mother, a payment I will consider completed at the end of my year as president of my church. I am glad to pay her this respect.

But part of me has been sated by what I have felt and seen in the past 48 hours, just getting to this place for the work to being. Part of me feels as though the workshop—my own personal journey—has already begun.

Walter Cronkite

He was 92, my God it shouldn’t have been a surprise, it happens to us all, even those who ought to have been beyond mortality, who created and maintained standards that defined Art or Social Contract or Mathematical Truth. Gauss, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Budda, Weill, Einstein, Beckett, they died.

But the death of Walter Cronkite, in our modern currency, is tantamount to the end of the universe, and I say that pretty close to literally.

The significance of his place in human history perhaps won’t be understood by the generation that sucks up its “news” via new media, in little MacBites, in-between homework and Twittering. Try to understand what it was like when Gallileo claimed the Earth rotated around the Sun rather than the other way around. That was Cronkite, in both substance and style. Early 20th century print journalism consisted of the same yellow nonsense that now passes for reporting (except that it actually sold papers); late 20th century and early 21st century broadcast performances aren’t even journalism—they are a peculiar form of entertainment that neither informs nor entertains.

Walter Cronkite, more than anyone other than perhaps Edward Murrow, defined television news at a standard it has not upheld before or since. Even the best of print journalism has never achieved the levels he reached in intensity or scope. He defined Vietnam, space, Watergate… but most important: he defined what journalists do. He determined that objectivity was tantamount, and what that meant was that when he did step in, that rare moment when he interjected his perspective—that beautiful acknowlegement of the legitimacy of informed human interpretation that further trajected American journalism forward in the 1960s and1970s by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Normal Mailer, and others who noted that human beings bring, for better or worse, their interpretations to the pinnacles of Truth—he moved mountains by what he said. When Cronkite came forward with his beliefs about Vietnam, LBJ famously noted that he had just lost the American public.

Walter Cronkite changed American history. And he did so not through the strategies of American politics or corporate tactics, but by aligning himself with the truth at all times. His death is an enormous loss to us not just of a human being—which in the end is the worst loss that any of us suffer—but of a way of interpreting and reporting the truth that I believe we all will bear, not just now, but as citizens of America.

Nobody really believes what anybody says anymore. With Cronkite’s death, there is scant reason to do so. With Cronkite’s death, we lay to rest not one person, but an entire wayof examing American life—a viewpoint that makes assumptions of a certain sort of grandeur and honor that I am not sure we can claim anymore. I grieve not only the loss of the man, but also the loss of his blessing on us all as Americans in the great, but still perilously young, experiment in democracy that we all are trying to make happen.

Kalpen Suresh Modi, we will miss ye

Kal Penn is the stage name of Kalpen Suresh Modi, the amiable young actor famous for such silly roles as Kumar in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, who recently left a more serious though equally amiable role in the TV series House to join the public relations team in the Obama administration. Early in his career, he used the name ‘Kal Penn’ on his resume and photos to challenge assertions that an Anglo name offers a leg up. His audition callbacks rose by 50 percent.

Kalpen Modi says of his background (in an online interview, so who knows?), “I've been thinking about [moving into politics] for a while. I love what I do as an actor. But probably from the time I was a kid, I really enjoyed that balance between the arts and public service. I went to a performing arts high school, but I still took a bunch of those dorky political science classes. It's probably because of the value system my grandparents instilled in me. They marched with Gandhi in the Indian independence movement, and that was always in the back of my head. In '06 I started this international studies program at Stanford, where they actually let you do most of the course work online. So it was something I could do while I was acting. And I thought this might be the right time to go off and do something else. The ultimate irony, of course, is that I love being on House. There's not a smarter group of people that I've been surrounded by in television.

Slouching toward New York

I'm here on the prairies of Kansas, yes, but at times, when the season is ripe, I miss New York's bountiful theatre. From Christopher Isherwood's review of Ruined and Scorched: These plays are vital signs that theater artists continue to engage deeply with the intractable problems of the world. And theater's responsibility to bear witness to the mass crimes of humanity may only increase in coming years. Journalism is a more immediate forum, and one in which the exigencies of aesthetics are not as urgent. But it is also imperiled. By comparison the fabulous invalid looks positively robust.

Ego Stroke, Mindless Chatter

Trolling the internet to see if anything by me was actually still posted anywhere (I freelanced for several years and had articles posted on the online versions of various magazines, but it's been a while), I was disappointed to find that, no, the things that came up when I googled my name were the long lists of books for young readers I wrote for several publishers during those freelance years. Some were awful, some were OK, a few I am quite proud of - but the pages of hits were nothing more than lists at bookseller sites. Still, I stumbled on an item by a librarian who specializes in "reluctant readers" - the audience I often wrote for - and was thrilled to find a few kind words for me among others. I take her praise much more seriously than that of book reviewers, because as a librarian who works with these kids, she knows what she's talking about - and because the kids themselves passed the final judgment. Excerpted from this little essay:

...The display of attractive books caught the attention of more than just the remedial students. I soon noticed other students whom I recognized as reluctant readers lingering at the display. Boys, in particular, enjoyed checking out the non-fiction titles, especially any about the U. S. armed forces or their vehicles, such as Attack Helicopters by Bill Sweetman, Attack Submarines by Michael and Gladys Green, or any dealing with animals; Bear Attacks by Patrick Fitzgerald and Vampire Bats by Anne Welsbacher were popular choices....

A small victory, true, but I take them where I find them.

What victories have YOU celebrated lately? I'm so pleased to have received items from friends to post here. Please don't be shy. Send along your essays, letters to editors, or ruminations on art, science, or the prairies. I confess to have drifted rather further into politics than I had intended to do with this blog, but given our past year, how on earth could I NOT have? Besides, depending on your leanings, the dances and leaps of fancy that occupied our airwaves last year could be observed as either science (using spin to shift thinking in frontal lobe brain waves) or art - that low-brow, performance art, strange business you generally see in tiny lofts on either of the northern coasts.

The Tao of iPod, part four (final)

(the final installment in my sermon; see parts one, two, and three below)

When you think about it, the alleged evils of “new contraptions”—or at least, our fears of their dubious evils—began plaguing us long ago. Talkies were supposed to spell the end of live theatre—but got their comeuppance, since today, the movie industry regularly bemoans its own exaggerated demise in the face of home DVD players. Radio, that heralded pastime of yor, ushered in the modern era of propaganda as a political tool. Cameras killed portraiture—and today are major players in museums and the creation of fine art.

Further back: Actors once thrived as traveling “journalists,” going from village to village to deliver the news orally; when printed pages containing the news, the precursors to tabloid newspapers—themselves now in danger of extinction—came into being, they put a whole slew of actors out of business. Anybody notice a shortage of thespians today?

And further: Gutenburg’s press, besides putting all those monks out of business, also made obsolete the concept of mneumonic devices, which might have weakened our ability as a species to memorize. Probably more significantly, the Gutenburg press, because it made possible mass printing, diluted the power of the Church by spreading literacy beyond its high, narrow, isolated walls.

You can go even earlier if you want to. According to some historians, many Greeks absolutely detested the construction of “that new mall”—also known as the Acropolis. And the invention that has really gotten us into trouble over the years was that of fire.

David Tierney even suggests, in his article, that the human brain itself was perhaps our earliest “new gadget”: “The original Information Revolution,” he says, “occurred during the Pleistocene, a decentralized era if there ever was one, when hunter-gatherers on the African savanna developed a powerful new computer: the human brain. [It] evolved to its large size because its information-processing capacity enabled humans to band together and increase their chances of survival.”

We tend to think of computer-like gadgets as the purvey of the young. There’s that joke that centers around the idea of the computer so easy to use that a 10-year-old could manage it, but the elder is stymied because he doesn’t have a 10-year-old in the house. But in my life—and I’m guessing I’m not alone here—my parents discovered and embraced many gadgets long before I did. CT scanners, for instance. MRI machines. Chemotherapy IV monitors. Cunningly designed needles that inject anticoagulants so easily that even a 53-year-old can do it.

For those of use circling ever closer to that generally shared human goal of getting old, I offer a purely pragmatic reason to try to embrace the kids’ new gadgets: They’re here, and they aren’t going anywhere soon. And the kids, at least some of them, seem to understand how they can be used in positive ways. I was in an e-newsletter class recently, and a (younger) classmate there challenged my tired old definition of a “nerd”—that cliched, pasty-skinned adolescent boy chained to his computer monitor, capable of speaking only through a screen or ear device, going days without human contact, much less having any real social skills.

Apparently, as she patiently informed me, there actually are human chat groups, where friends who’ve met online get together in person. They don’t talk about devices or their favorite websites. They talk about life, love, Saturday’s plans—the stuff of eternity. And they never would have met if they hadn’t shared some esoteric hyphenated abbreviated acronymated passion like FaceBook or MySpace or Podcasts or Twitter.

What gadgets like iPods have to offer us, in the end, is—like so much else in the world we inhabit—an entirely subjective matter, based not on what they are, but on who we are.

Whether jogging, running a family, experiencing the companionship and loss of loved ones, or seeking your own spiritual path through life, the gadgets we create along the way are neither evil destroyers nor enlightened saviors. In the final analysis, what matters isn’t the tools you use, but how you as a person choose to embrace, ignore, interpret, or flourish using them.

Letter in USA Today, by Mary Stanik

Another letter by my friend Mary Stanik! Man, this woman is on fire this week!

I'm sure I am one of many people who are gratified that the birth of the California octuplets will be investigated (“Octuplet birth raises questions,” USA Today, Life, Feb. 3). I don't really care who the mother is, and I don't even care what compelled her to bring so many children into the world.

However, I do care that in a nation that is not providing basic health coverage for everyone, where seniors are forced to choose between medicine and food, and where lots of children do not receive necessary treatments and surgeries, someone wasn’t asking questions a lot sooner.

Strange, wacky, and even unethical medical happenings often make for interesting news stories.

We probably cannot change that anytime soon.

But until we can make sure no one in America goes without medical care, we really need to stop wasting medical resources and money.
Mary Stanik

Letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail of Toronto, Canada, from my friend Mary Stanik

re: A rose in any other lapel
MARY STANIK
February 10, 2009
Minneapolis, Minn. -- With regard to the Obama-envy some in Canada may feel about our new President (And The Person We Admire Most - Feb. 9), I hope Canadians won't feel too bad for too long.
It seems like eons since great numbers of people worldwide admired an American president.
Not everyone may have liked or respected Pierre Elliott Trudeau, but it's true that he was not dull. We Americans suffered through decades of presidents with deleted expletives, a poor command of English, and a fondness for interns. On top of it all, some were crashing bores.
So don't worry. If we survived the envy wilderness, so can Canada.
Another rose in a lapel could be just waiting to bloom.

The Tao of iPod, part three

(my sermon continues - parts one and two are below)

Certainly, there are lessons to be taken from the past about the damning potential of gadgets. In a NY Times article, Charles Morris wrote: “The 1870s saw possibly the fastest sustained growth in American history … with the rapid spread of the railroads and the telegraph, new department stores and mail-order catalogs pressured local producers with mass-produced goods, a precursor to the Wal-Mart era. … The productivity shock was comparable to that from the Internet in our own day.”

David Tierney notes about the same era, in another Times article: “As people abandoned farms and small towns, they lost communal bonds; as personal incomes rose, public air and water got dirtier…. Indoor plumbing and washing machines freed women of onerous work, but there was less socializing at wells.”

A technology reporter for a medical Web site noted an array of health hazards littering the short distance between you and your electronic toys. Working at night in front of a lit monitor can screw up your internal clock; other potential hazards are repetitive stress injuries, obesity, permanent hearing loss, accidents from use of gadgets while driving, and even asthma, which might be triggered by some models of laser printers shooting out invisible particles that can lodge deep in the lungs.

And, as very well demonstrated online at storyofstuff.com by Annie Leonard (everybody should watch this disturbing, funny performance), the effect on our planet of the American cycle of consumerism—a broader topic than what I address today—has been and continues to be devastating.

But most of the negatives about technology and new inventions don’t live in isolation. As Tierney notes, “Although new technology is often described as a Faustian bargain, historically it has involved a trade-off not between materialism and spirituality but between individual freedom and social virtue.” He says,

“Technology’s victims have become familiar images in the media: on-line addicts who don’t know their next-door neighbors; workers displaced by machines…; frazzled parents, especially working mothers, too busy to spend time with their children. We contrast these pathetic figures with images of a happier past, … when people still had time to read, contemplate the meaning of life, visit with their relatives and neighbors.

“But when exactly,” he continues “were those halcyon days?… Before the Industrial Revolution, the average person … was short-lived, [and] illiterate…. Women’s lives were consumed with domestic chores and continual pregnancies… … [even] after the Industrial Revolution, … people still didn’t have much time to sit around discussing the classics or communing with nature. In the middle of the 19th century, the typical man in Britain worked more than 60 hours a week, with no annual vacation, from age 10 until he died at about 50.

…“Contrary to popular stereotypes,” he continues, “ … the workweek has been shortening, … [and] parents are spending as much time with their children as they did in the 1960s. These children … are less likely to live with two parents, which may be partly a consequence of technology that has made divorce and single parenthood less of an economic burden: men and women …[today often]… can both support themselves, relying on machines to make clothes, clean house, and do most food preparation. But new technology is hardly the only cause of the traditional family’s decline, and in any case, it’s hard to get too nostalgic for the days when women had no choice but to stay in the kitchen.”

Technology’s potentials reach beyond domestic aid, significant as this is. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, our president—whose status as president exists at least in part because of the electronic devices of this century—describes a tour in its nascent days of the Google offices.

“… a three-dimensional image of the earth rotated on a large flat-panel monitor. ...‘These lights represent all the searches … going on right now,’ an engineer said. ‘Each color is a different language. ... you can see traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.’ The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all … boundaries …—nationality, race, religion, wealth—were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely out of light.”

Obama’s account is a striking illustration, I think, of the hopeful possibilities of a world sewn together in communication and industry, one example of the positive potential of modern electronic gadgets. But he continues: “Then I noticed the broad swaths of darkness as the globe spun on its axis—most of Africa, chunks of South Asia, even some portions of the United States, where the thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.”

Technological devices might offer all people a means to lift themselves up, but more importantly, I think, devices can show us—more graphically than even good oratory can—where our hard work remains in achieving true parity.

The Tao of iPod, Part Two

(my sermon continues here; part one is below)

I like listening to my iPod when I jog. I set it on “shuffle” and it takes me places I didn’t expect to go. Sometimes places I didn’t particularly want to go. I know that Corey programmed those songs onto its soulless, metal-encased trappings of zeros and ones, so the hapless little machine really isn’t some deranged Hal taking control of my brain. But I swear sometimes that iPod has its moods. Out of a selection of more than one thousand tunes, it will decide to play four Warren Zevon songs in a row. Or it will devise a peculiar time-warp around the Beatles, wrapping something from Paul McCarthy’s Wings around a song by John and Yoko and then closing the set with George Harrison singing about All Those Years Ago.

How and why did it skip the group itself, the reason those soloists even had their own songs? And isn’t it lovely that Ringo hasn’t changed a whit after all these years? And why is that? Is it that, lacking the vapid beauty that thrust the other three into the limelight, he was able to live a relatively more normal life and escape the murderous consequences of the rocker lifestyle? Or did his mediocrity as a musician have something to do with it? And what is the meaning of “mediocre” anyway—aren’t all measures of success or beauty completely subjective?

Likewise, there are days when I really don’t want to hear Ani DeFranco spew invective at society or former lovers; what I want is the good wholesome kick of a Kinks song, or the quick wit of Bach, but there instead is Ani DeFranco, spitting away in some nonlinear fashion completely at odds with my feet, and since I’m busy trying not to get hit by an oncoming SUV, I can’t look for the forward button to skip over her. So what happens is, her words disappear, and I notice, for the first time, that she’s done something canny musically right there in that measure, slid in something I think might be hip-hop, forced me to listen to something I have always despised.

Then I am thinking about the mathematics of music, and how I never would have expected that dissonance to work the way it did, and then, suddenly, I am back at my own front steps, my ode to my blood pressure and endorphin needs finished for the day.

In the past hour, I have pondered Art with a capital A, aging, failure, success, Beauty, and death—topics it never would have occurred to me to think about, had I not stuck that piece of cord in my ear.

I remember younger days when I ran along the Mississippi, headphone-free. I noted the leaves decaying into the muddy banks of the river, saw sunlight dappled by half naked branches of birch trees. I contemplated words I had memorized from wisdom traditions, and even now when I recall them, they boomerang me back to particular bridges and bends in the river that guided me back home. I treasure those memories, and I am glad I had my holy moments one-on-one with the planet around me. But just as I love red and green, company and solitude, classical and bluegrass, I am glad for the unpredictable insights that I have found with both silence and my iPod.

The Tao of iPod, part one

(Our UU church is currently lay led, and Sunday was my turn to present a sermon. What follows is the first part of my presentation. If you'd like to read the full piece, let me know and I'll email you a copy. Or we'll see... maybe I'll add the rest of it here, later.)

The Tao of iPod
Annie Welsbacher, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Wichita, January 25, 2009

Gadgets: The downfall of a free society, electric litter paving an inexorable path to our culture’s moral, intellectual, spiritual, and inevitable destruction.

If you are an American living in the 21st century, you likely have fretted over this topic, or some variation on it. You might even have done more than just fret: read stories online, e-mailed, pod-casted, text messaged, twittered, Googled, or pontificated on your cell phone about it—possibly while driving somewhere that you found with the help of Mapquest.

Oh, you worry: Your kids can’t do their homework without at least two electronic doodads playing simultaneously, friends who used to talk to you in person now mass-e-mail you slightly off-color jokes, God knows what sorts of cancerous rays are toasting your brain cells every day.

This isn’t at the top of the list of any sensibly paranoid 21st-century American—far too many other horrific dangers beckon to us daily, from human warfare to the poisonings of our planet’s great life-giving gifts, to the snuffing out of our collective thinking skills that the modern cults passing themselves off as “media” inflict upon us.

But it’s there, lurking below the surface, this vague worry that all these toys can’t possibly be good for us. They’re diluting Art, reducing it to snappy tunes and pyrotechnic tricks; they’re stealing away our reading time, replacing it with the popcorn of TV commercials; they’re sucking us into the capitalist evils of American excess and damning us to live out golden days that will be consumed with the work of disposing of all the junk we accumulated, and that now corrodes in our basements.

But wait. It occurred to me—while jogging along the wildflower-strewn bed of what once supported railroad tracks laid down for a form of transport nobody uses anymore—that I have heard all this before.

I grew up in an academic 1970s household, and remember parties at which people stood around imbibing white wine and martinis, rueing the ruination of our society’s culture. A popular refrain of the day was: “Theatre is Life; Film is Art; Television is Furniture.”

I distinctly remember my father—who, if you press him on it, will acknowledge that he has a PhD, but who in general has little tolerance for anything even mildly effluent of pretention—saying to me that when somebody furrowed an eyebrow at him and uttered that “television is furniture” bit, he liked to smile sweetly and reply, “oh, I’ll watch any old crap”—except he didn’t use the word “crap.” He said this usually shut them up so he could go back to watching Bullwinkle or Hee Haw or the WSU football game with a clear head.

(end part one)

The Color of the Future, by Marj Kyriopoulos

The inauguration of President elect Barack Obama has a personal meaning for me.

I am a single mother (now grandmother) who raised two children in the midst of a recession that followed another unnecessary war—the war in Vietnam. I have been an Obama supporter from the moment he announced his candidacy in Springfield, IL and each day, I see a piece of the change Obama has inspired.

As a child, I grew up in a ‘big, fat, Greek family’ in the middle of Salt Lake City, Utah. The discrimination I experienced growing up Greek gave me a glimpse of what it must be like to grow up in this country as an African American. For me, it was the color of my hair that made me different—not the color of my skin.

In 1997, my son joined the Peace Corps. He was sent to Banikoara, West Africa, where he worked on a reforestation project that continues to this day. He also fell in love with a beautiful young woman, Azarath, who was born in a nearby village. Eventually, they were married. My grandson, James, who is now five years old, was born in West Africa. During long-distance conversations with my son, he remarked that James is “the color of the future.”

That phrase stuck with me. I googled the phrase and discovered a book written by Farai Chideya in 2000, who refers to the "Millennium Generation" of blacks, whites, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, mixed-race persons and others, both native- and foreign-born, who are “…more likely to interact with people of other races and backgrounds than other generations."

The inauguration is not just personal for me. It is personal for my family. James and his mother jumped for joy while watching TV in Minnesota on election night while my son was in Washington DC interviewing for a job. Change is in the air. People see my son and his African wife differently now, my grandson is very aware that he is “brown,” like Barack Obama, and my daughter-in-law is energized and proud to become an American citizen. Her citizenship interview is scheduled for next month.

The inauguration is so personal for my son’s family that they decided to travel to Washington DC by train, just to be near this historical event. James tells all his friends at school that he is going to President Obama’s inauguration. If I could give my grandson a gift he would remember for the rest of his life, it would be a ticket to the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States, a man who is also the “color of the future.”

Cruel Critics

I've written several modest books for children, high-school kids, and "reluctant learners," which is the nomenclature for teenage boys (they are usually boys, apparently) who read at about a fourth-grade level (among topics for that market were monster trucks and predators such as sharks and other fierce animals presumably of special interest to these lads). People get excited when I tell them this, but in truth there's not a lot of art involved in these little projects. My editor contacts me every few years, assigns a topic for a nonfiction book that will be marketed to school libraries, tells me how many chapters and pages and that it has to include a final chapter about what kids can do and other stuff, I research it and go nuts trying to figure out how to cram information - often newsworthy information, meaning it gets old rather fast, much faster than the production time for writing and printing a book - into the formulaic outline I've been given ("no sentences over 13 words, no words of more than 3 syllables," that sort of thing), I write the damn thing and swear never to do this again, and then, a few years later... rinse and repeat. I'm not proud of some of my past efforts, but others, well, I'm glad to have them on a few library shelves.

Every now and then my publisher sends along a review. Most are quite cursory and rarely even mention the writing. So it is with mixed feelings that I share this one, which actually does, albeit mercifully briefly. Ah, well, there's always next time. P.S. Somebody is paying 30 bucks for this book?!

Booklist – December 1, 2008
Earth-Friendly Design.
Welsbacher, Anne (Author)
Oct 2008. 72 p. Lerner, library edition, $30.60. (9780822575641). 745.2.

"This slim title in the Saving Our Living Earth series examines “how we make things, move them, use them, reuse them, and dispose of them affects us all.” Each brief chapter introduces green innovations in categories such as vehicles and community planning. The dry language and short sentences often feel stilted, but the fascinating examples of technology, illustrated with numerous color photos, will draw readers into the facts. Additional text boxes and diagrams on subjects such as “the life cycle of a product” add to the lively layouts. — Gillian Engberg"

... and another, just in

And here's another review, from VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates), "the library magazine serving those who serve young adults." Hmmm. "Too much information"? What was that line to Mozart about his sonata having "too many notes"?

VOYA – December 2008
Saving Our Living Earth. Twenty-First Century/Lerner, 2008. 72p. PLB $30.60. Glossary. Index. Illus. Photos. Biblio. Source Notes. Further Reading.
3Q· 3p· M
Welsbacher, Anne. Earth Friendly Design. 978-0-8225-7564-1.

"This series focuses on green lifestyles and preventing global warming. Presented in glossy full color, the books' short chap¬ters include large photographs and sidebars on every page. They also include glossaries, "going green" tips, how to write to legisla¬tors, and annotated webliographies. Design starts by describing in dire terms the envi¬ronmental reasons why such designs are imperative. Chapters then cover green vehi¬cles, earth-friendly products, green buildings and homes, communities making a differ¬ence, and possible future green designs. Pros and cons are included. The clear and simple writing is packed-sometimes overly so¬with information and concrete examples of companies and organizations implementing green designs. Although the information is useful for illustrative purposes, unfortunately it tends to sound like product placement. Nevertheless the book will make readers think about the life cycle and resource con¬tent of their products, and it will be useful for middle school reports as well as browsing. Other series titles cover energy, waste man¬agement, air quality, and rain forests among other topics.-Rebecca C. Moore."

By the way, "3Q," for quality, means "readable, without serious defects" and "3P," for popularity, means "will appeal with pushing." Ah, well, at least it wasn't a 1P ("No teen will read unless forced to for assignments") or a 1Q ("Hard to understand how it got published, except in relation to its P rating, and not even then sometimes"). Onward and upward with the arts!