Is this one good enough?

13/09/2015Dusty 1 Comment

This is how it feels to be an artist.

There’s never enough time. Everything you have to do takes you away from where you should be: working, sleeping, bathing, cleaning, eating, exercising, relaxing, dressing, smiling. It always has: you started too late in life, you didn’t work hard enough, you spent all those years in math class, working at Carvel Ice Cream, hanging out with friends. So much time wasted: and wouldn’t a real artist have spent that time making art? You know those artists you read about who ignore food and sleep and companionship when they’re working? Those are artists. You’re not an artist.

When there is time to spend on art, you spend it the wrong way doing the wrong things. Everything’s the wrong thing: you have too many ideas, and no idea which idea is the right idea. There’s supposed to be a click in your head when the right idea comes and settles into its place in your brain, and then the art will just flow out of you like milk and honey. But there’s no click. So you just pick something, something that seems interesting, maybe the most recent idea, because it’s often exciting when it’s new. Then as soon as you pick an idea and start working on it, something clicks in your brain, and you realize: this is the wrong idea. That other idea would be better, that old idea, the one you’ve had enough time to think about and really develop. What were you thinking, working on a just-born idea like that? So you change, and work on the other idea. It’s not the right idea either. But you know better than to change again, because you tried that thing once, working like that artist you read about who kept nineteen different projects going at the same time, gamboling about his studio adding a dash of color here, a touch of spice there, probably singing operatic arias and feeding the birds from his hand, like Cinderella, as he did so. But that never works for you. You have to do one thing at a time. So you keep working on this idea. Even though it’s the wrong idea. Because you need to do art, and if you don’t use the time you decided on and set aside for it, the time you clawed away from work and from sleep, you’re not an artist.

So you work. And it’s lovely. The world falls away: you don’t feel thirst or hunger, none of the needling of need, and your thoughts, blessedly, turn off. There is a glorious silence. Heaven forbid you have somewhere else to be and a time to depart, because you’ll miss it. Then again, if you don’t have a reason to stop, you may surrender all the light of the day, all the peace of the night, to your work. You arise from your working space with pins, needles, cricks, stiffenings, aches; now you’re hungry, now you’re thirsty. Now you’re an artist.

And it is to be hoped that you finished what you were working on. Because coming back to it after a stop, it never feels quite right. Time away from it gives you time to think about how wrong this idea is, and how it’s not coming out the way it’s supposed to come out (like milk and honey, it’s supposed to flow like milk and honey, to fall magically from your unconscious to your hand to the paper), and how you can’t quite make it feel the way it felt in your head when it was just an idea, and looking at it now you can’t remember what you were going to do next, and now you realize that you did that thing wrong — what were you thinking? That is terrible. You’re not an artist.

It’s only right when it’s finished. When something’s finished — and long finished, not ink-still-wet finished — then you sometimes look back at it and think, “Damn. That is good.” And then you think, “How the hell did I do that?” But right then, it doesn’t matter how: you did do that. That was you. That makes it all worthwhile. Because you’re an artist.

Except nobody else sees it. Nobody else cares about it. You send your work away to the people who buy and sell art, and they never even look at it, because they’re not concerned with art, they’re concerned with buying and selling. And you and your art won’t make them any money. You read of famous artists who were rejected over and over, twenty times, thirty times, before they were accepted, and they say “Never give up! Ignore rejection!” So you keep trying — twenty times, thirty, fifty. A hundred. Maybe you’re not as good as you thought you were. Maybe you’re not an artist.

But never mind: it’s art. It’s right there, and you made it, and it’s good art, you think. So you ignore the chorus of twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred small voices in your head that say, “No, that’s not what we want. That’s no good. You’re doing it wrong.” It helps now if you have loved ones who support you; they can drown out those voices. Mostly. Though their voices come with one other, a little one, dry and creaky and quiet like Jiminy Cricket and the Cryptkeeper rolled into one, and this voice says, “They’re only saying that because they love you.” But it’s only one voice. It’s easy to ignore. For a time.

But never mind: it’s art. It’s right there, and you made it, and it’s good art, you think. Maybe you just have to do something a little different. Maybe that other idea would be better. This one doesn’t feel right. That’s why it was rejected. It’s no problem, adding this piece to your collection of finished and unpublished pieces; someday they will write books about these, have displays in museums and galleries of your early work. This will be known, someday. It’s art, and you think it’s good. You’re an artist.

You do it again, and again, and again: lose yourself, finish a piece; let some time go by so you can see your work instead of seeing only a collaboration of flaws you couldn’t fix. No: this one’s good (“No good,” shout the fifty, the hundred.). And now you have a new plan: you’ll put it on the Internet. The hell with those fifty businessmen, those hundred empty suits, those Philistine fat cats; you’ll take your work in front of an audience yourself, take your message straight to the people, no middlemen. This is the digital age: you don’t need some corporate shill passing judgment on your work; all you need is a blog. You’re an artist.

You start a blog, maybe an online shop. You post your work. You wait.

One Like. Thanks, Mom.

Hey — now there are two Likes! Oh — never mind. It’s a spam bot.

Where are all those people? The ones who told you they loved your work? Who said you were great and talented? Who said they’d buy your work if it was published?

They’re buying other things. T-shirts and new shoes. SUVs. Vacations. Coffee. Beer. Concert tickets.

Not art.

Nobody buys art.

You try not to count the years. Sometimes you look at what you’ve done and you’re proud, you think, “Look at that. That’s a legacy.” Sometimes you look at the same work and you think, “How much time have I spent on this?” How much of my life have I given to this?” You think, “This isn’t right. I can’t be doing this right. Maybe I shouldn’t do this at all. I’m not an artist.”

But what else can you do? What are you, if you’re not an artist?

You think about why you became an artist. Obviously not for the money, you laugh — though it would have been nice to have made a lot of money. Or even some. Enough to buy something you could point to and say, “I paid for that with my art.” You can’t do that with a cup of coffee or an extra donut.

So why did you become an artist? Was it wrong? Has it all been a mistake? Is that why nobody buys your work? Why you’re only up to twelve followers on your blog, even though you have one hundred, two hundred, five hundred friends on Facebook? Share your art, get six Likes; share that kitten video, though, or that status about losing weight. Hell, asking for support in your choice to be an artist gets you a bigger response than your actual art does.

Now you feel a little bitter. A little mad at the world. We don’t live in a time or a place that values art. We should: art brings beauty and truth into our lives in a way we can abide, with just enough joy, just enough mercy to allow it to settle to our souls and become a part of us, making us larger, fuller, more whole. All the memes on the internet can’t match one genuine piece of art — which is why so many of those same memes are built on stolen art.

Yeah: that happens to you. Someone takes your idea, or takes the whole thing, your work, your art, and sells it themselves. You find out; you’re pissed; you look into the law — there’s nothing you can do. It’s the digital age, and nobody buys art. Everybody steals it. The laws protect those who make enough money to buy the laws.

You get a little more bitter.

Your art gets angrier. Sadder. It’s not as good, any more. People certainly aren’t going to buy it now, now that you’re ranting at them.

Now you face it. The end. You’ve tried long enough, done everything you could, you’ve done your best.

Do you give up? Surrender to the inevitable? There are too many good artists out there, and not enough people who buy art; the supply exceeds the demand. You’re just not good enough. Or is it lucky enough? Are you better than those who are making money doing what you do? Is there a secret to their success which you don’t know? You read the blogs of people who tell you they can give you the secret to making a living as an artist, but here’s the secret: you have to convince people that you know the secret to making a living as an artist, and then you get them to buy that secret — which is that you have to convince people that you know the secret to making a living as an artist, and then get them to buy that secret. Art is no longer a scene; now it’s a scheme.

So what do you do?

Do you give up?

If you give up, you’re not an artist, and you never were: everybody says that artists never give up, that artists are compelled to make art, that that compulsion is the only reason to be an artist: because you have no choice.

But it’s artists who sell art who say that. Just like the ones who say “Never give up! Ignore rejection!” are the ones who eventually got past the rejection to acceptance.

Not you. Maybe not yet: but maybe not ever.

So do you give up?

Are you an artist?

Caveat

24/08/2015Dusty Leave a comment

*world's

Caveat Emptor, they say. Let the buyer beware.

I want to add a caveat: Caveat Magister. Let the teacher beware.

There are a lot of problems and difficulties, even hazards, in being a teacher; someday I’ll write about all of them, and why people should — or, more likely, why you should not — go into teaching. But right now, I want to focus on only one problem. It’s tempting to say it’s the worst or the most serious, but it may not be; what it is, though, is the source of a great number of difficulties that teachers face, on a great number of fronts.

It is this: very few people understand what we do.

Please don’t add a new misunderstanding: I am not complaining “Nobody unnerSTANDS me!”; I am not feeling a black, absinthe-scented drizzle of angst slipping icily down my spine; I am not currently pouting. (All right, I’m pouting a little. But it’s because I’m hungry and yet I have to wait for my lunch to cook. Where the hell is my Star Trek replicator? Or maybe those instant food-pills they had on the Jetsons? Hell, right now I’d take the fat-making shakes from Wall-E.) The issue is not that being misunderstood makes us sad. The issue is that being misunderstood, because of the way we are misunderstood, means that our job, the task of teaching, becomes impossible, if one means to do it in any meaningful way.

The issue is this: at some point in the past fifty years (I’m looking at you, 1980’s) this country decided that all that mattered in life was income. Now, we are a democracy and a capitalist society, which means that we have always focused on money as motive: because in a free society, anyone can improve their lot in life; and in a capitalist society, one rises through wealth. Put these together, and you have a country where cash is the key to the kingdom, and here we are: in a world where we teach our children that they can be anything they want to be — and what they want to be, we tell them, is rich. But looking at our social institutions, particularly education, one sees the pervasive and controlling belief that education was good for people: good for the mind, good for the soul; not just good for the wallet. People used to fight for education; now they just fight it. College cost less, and taught more; K-12 schooling was more difficult, more challenging, more effective, more reasonable. Teachers were more respected, seen as experts, because what they offered was valuable in a larger, holistic sense — the way that religious leaders are respected, the way that doctors and law enforcement and firefighters are respected, because they offer something more than a simple exchange of goods and services for money: they give something that means something. Teachers used to be seen that way, I would argue. It is possible I am wearing rose-colored glasses.

But we certainly don’t think that way now. The predominant (though not the only) view of school is as a means to one very specific end. The progression goes like this: elementary school gets you ready for high school; high school gets you ready for college; college gets you a job. The goal is the job. We have a somewhat broader view of that end, because we want our children to have a job that is satisfying, and valuable, in addition to financially rewarding; but the crux of the biscuit is the number of zeroes in front of the decimal point at the end of the year.

My students think this, universally and uncritically. Whenever I ask them, “Why are you here?”, which I do with some regularity (Because I am fascinated by this and terrified, too), they joke that they’re here because they are forced to be (They’re not joking.). But then the serious answer, the one they think I want to hear and the one they parrot with eerily similar language, year after year, is this one. High school gets you ready for college, college gets you a job. They even have a similar cutoff of the pragmatic value of education: they all tell me that you learn skills and knowledge that are directly applicable and necessary in life until around 8th grade; then, once you know all the math and literacy you will need to get through your day, it’s all about the college-job-paycheck.

They think this because their parents think this. Their parents want them to do well, but mainly, they want them to be made ready for college, and to get into a good college, because a good college means you get a good job — a mediocre college means you get a mediocre job. Or at least, a good college means a better job.

And because the parents think this — or perhaps this is the reason the parents think this — the administration and the political system behind schools all think this. Our success is determined by our graduation rate, and inasmuch as we can follow it, the rate at which our students go on to successful (meaning well-paid) careers.

These aren’t bad goals, of course. The job you do matters, both to you and to society; and in this society, money talks. I do this job because I get paid to do it, and though there are times when I wish I could leave it, I don’t because I don’t know what I would do that I would enjoy more and get paid as much. And college was a prerequisite for doing this job. I even agree that most people get by on what they learned before 9th grade. That’s why they have so many problems spelling text messages. (Please note the meme above.)

But there’s a problem when you focus on the financial side to the exclusion of all else. When money is the only thing that talks. We see that in our national politics these days, when the wealthy get elected to represent the interests of the wealthy, and the rest of us just shuffle along behind hoping we don’t get trampled on by the sudden changes in direction. The problem in the predominance of money in education is this: when we keep our eyes on that particular prize, we blind ourselves to all else.

When elementary school is only intended to prepare one for high school, then all that matters is promotion through the grades. Parents pressure administrators, administrators pressure teachers, and students who aren’t ready get promoted, when twenty years ago, they would have been held back until they learned what they needed to learn — back when the goal was education and improvement, a goal that takes some people longer than others. Parents don’t care now if their kid is learning everything; they care if their kid gets promoted. Because elementary school isn’t what matters: high school matters. Because high school gets you into college and college gets you a good job, and nowhere in that equation does a child need to master the multiplication table. If a kid has trouble with math, well, he’ll go into a career that doesn’t need math. He’ll be a lawyer. He likes to argue. Besides, his brother is good at math. Can’t read, but he’s good at math. That one’s going to be an engineer. Probably with computers. Computers magically make something a good job, did you know? Yes: that’s why we have to have computers in school, now. Because kids need to learn the skills that are necessary in today’s economy. That’s why they’re in school.

So the children are promoted to high school. Now it’s time to get serious. Serious about grades, that is. Because the purpose of high school is to get into a good college, and so all that matters is the GPA. Sure, sure, they need to learn how to do the things they’ll do in college — and that’s the magical argument, by the way, which we all use, including me: they need to read this book because it’s the sort of thing they will do in college — but really, the focus is the grades. We trust the grades to tell us that the child is progressing properly, learning what he needs to succeed: the grades are all we need to worry about. And the same thing for the administration and the politicians, except you can replace “grades” with “test scores.”

I’ve never taught at the college level, but I have no doubt it is the same thing there: the second a child is accepted to a school, he is expected to know what his career after graduation will be — preferably down to the exact position he wants and the exact company where he wants that position, but at the least, a field of endeavor and a job class. And I am sure that everyone grumbles about the classes they are forced to take but don’t need for their career, just like they did in high school, just like they do in elementary school about the stuff they won’t need in high school or college, like learning cursive. And I am sure this myopic view of college as nothing but a series of hoops to jump through until you make lots of money has all the same deleterious effects as it does in K-12.

And what are those, exactly? What are the problems with focusing on promotion — grades — career? Only this: you learn what you set out to learn, gain what you intend to gain, from everything in life. And if all you mean to gain from school is getting out of school — then that’s all you get. I know: that’s what I got from high school. All I wanted was to be left alone. So I was left alone. It was college where I found that learning could expand my mind and make me into a person I liked more with every new thing I learned. College made me who I am. High school didn’t even make me ready for college, because I didn’t try to make it do that for me. I had friends who went to the same high school I did, who went on to far more intellectually challenging college experiences than mine, and into more — well, maybe not “challenging,” but I think probably more cognitively difficult careers than mine, and I’m sure that our high school prepared them better than it did me. Because they went there trying to do that. They focused on learning, and they learned. Garbage in, garbage out: and so with nothing.

There are other problems. The focus on promotion — grades — career moves resources and support into those areas, and not into others. If we need our students to learn more math in order to increase promotion rates, then we will focus on math, and drop art and music. Because after all, they don’t need art and music to succeed in high school or in college or in their careers. If students are having trouble in high school English, then we don’t add classes or more teachers to reduce class size: we dumb down the curriculum, restrict it to basic skill drilling. It doesn’t matter if they learn less, because as long as the curriculum focuses on easily mastered skills, they will inevitably get good grades, and that means they will get into college and we win. And thus we have Common Core, where the focus is on easily mastered skills, and which has been and continues to be pushed onto teachers so that students can get good grades and good test scores, and our graduation rates go up and our college attendance rates go up. Sure, our college graduation rates suffer; but that doesn’t matter to us here at the high school level, just as high school failure based on students coming in with below-grade reading skills doesn’t matter to the elementary schools that focused on promoting students no matter what the cost, because that is the only thing that matters to the administrators, because it is the only thing that matters to the parents, because all that matters in life is a good job with a big paycheck.

It’s not true. Of course future failure bothers teachers, but we have little control over this. I am, for the first time in sixteen years, teaching Common Core this year. Because that is what my administration told me to do, and because I now work in a school that has no tenure — because teacher’s unions are essentially non-existent in this Republican-controlled Right-to-Work state (A state of affairs that exists largely because teachers are not respected like they used to be, because all we do is give kids good grades and get them ready for college so they can get a good job, and then, when the child does eventually fail, because the entire system is broken, teachers make a handy scapegoat. And if it doesn’t sit right with your conscience to talk about teachers like they are all incompetent pinko hellspawn, because you remember your own teachers being good to you, well, you can always blame the teachers’ unions.) — and therefore I have to do what I am told if I want to continue earning a living. And so because my school focuses on grades and test scores and graduation and college acceptance to the exclusion of all else, I am told to teach a canned curriculum that focuses on improving basic skills in order to improve grades and test scores and graduation rates and college acceptance. And I do it.

And here’s what gets lost: novels. There aren’t any in my Common Core curriculum. Because the focus is on easily mastered skills, and because the tests that create the test scores do not require the completion of any full-length texts, just comprehension of short passages. Unless I change the curriculum in some way, I will not teach any full-length novels to my classes this year. No Shakespeare plays, except in excerpts. These students will not have the patience or the perseverance to finish anything that can’t be finished in one setting. I hope that they will learn it somewhere else, because they won’t learn it from me. But I know they won’t. (One quick note: I am allowed to change the curriculum. They will by god read To Kill a Mockingbird. And all of one Shakespeare play. But if I wasn’t the age that I am, with the experience that I have, and the curmudgeonly attitude, I wouldn’t change that curriculum. So what happens when a kid who wasn’t raised reading novels takes my place?)

Here’s what gets lost: our culture. I know it seems like America doesn’t have any beyond Disney and organized sports and bacon, but we do: we have Mark Twain and John Steinbeck and Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost and Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou and Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. People in this country read To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye and The Call of the Wild. Our schools have always taught those works, and that gives us something important, along with all of the wonderful gifts that come from making literature like that a part of you: it gives us something in common. It’s books like these, learned in school, for no other reason than because they are worth learning, that make us who we are and that keep us as human as we are, because they are the ones that teach us it’s a sin to kill something that doesn’t do any harm to us, and that we should stand on the edge of the cliff and catch those kids running through the rye, and that every life counts, even a dog’s. And I’m only focusing on the literature because it’s what I know, but you could do the same thing with art, with Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock and Frederick Sackrider Remington (No — I’m not making up that middle name.); you could easily do the same thing with music, or with film.

None of these things are part of the promotion — grades — career path. All of them are our culture. And if we don’t teach any of these things in school — and we don’t, because they don’t relate to our one overriding purpose for education — then we’ll have no culture left except for organized sports and bacon. And perpetual war, of course.

Toni and I just watched The Wolf of Wall Street last night. It’s about a guy who cared about nothing but money, and did whatever it took to get as much of it as possible, and then went about living the most worthless, hollow excuse for a human life I can think of outside of serial killers and the Inquisition. And the movie focused on that, for three hours, in excruciating detail. I have never seen that many scenes with hookers in my life. It’s a true story, based on an autobiography of the same name; the reviews online of the book (which I will not be reading myself) make the guy sound just as he was portrayed in the movie: as a guy who would lie and cheat and steal as much as he had to just to get more money to put on the pile, so that he could spend it on drugs and prostitutes and midget-throwing parties at work. (Not making that up, by the way.) Who would not regret anything in his life, because, in my opinion, he lacked sufficient humanity to know regret. All he knew was money. All he cared about was money. Now, because the movie was made by Martin Scorsese, it was not actually a celebratory movie: it was an expose of the emptiness of this kind of existence. And I have never felt happier about my life and my choices than I felt while I was watching this epic debauch. I am so proud of myself and everyone who helped me to become what I am — my parents, my wife, my teachers, my culture — that I care about things other than money, that I see money only as a means of survival and not of any source of self-worth or identity definition. I am so happy to be me instead of that shit-heel who called himself “Wolf.” I hope that was Scorsese’s intent, because if so, it was a masterful piece of work that was completely successful.

But I couldn’t help but think: if my students watched this movie, they would want to be this guy. Because he made money. And if I asked them, the next day, why they were in school, they would tell me “Because I want to be like the Wolf of Wall Street.” (I’ve heard similar sentiments in the past, but using Hugh Hefner as an example, or Bill Gates.) And that scares the hell out of me.

Caveat Populus. Let all of us beware.

Rental Insanity

13/08/2015Dusty Leave a comment

You know what’s insane?

Renting a home. It makes no sense at all. The basic concept of the capitalist exchange doesn’t work, here, because you’re not exchanging money for goods or services: the tenant does not own the home, and the landlord is not doing anything for the tenant. Yes yes of course, the landlord is selling the right to live on his property; but he’s not really selling it, because there are stipulations. (And how does one sell the right to live, anyway? I swear I read something once about inalienable, or some such.) Stipulations are only possible when ownership is not exchanged: a landlord telling a tenant he can’t have a dog is like someone selling you a car and saying, “But you’re not allowed to use Reverse. You can only drive forward.” That would make sense if someone was borrowing your car (and you had a pathological fear of moving backwards, or of mirrors, or of the letter R), because you still own it, and you can tell the borrower how to drive it. But that isn’t analogous to renting a home, either: because borrowing is done on a single-use basis, and only with people who know and trust the owner. I have lived in many homes whose owners I have never met, not even seen or in some cases known their names. Nobody would lend things like that. You’re giving someone a valuable thing (Because if it isn’t valuable enough to give back, then it isn’t borrowing — as we all remember from that guy in school who used to ask to “borrow” a sheet of paper every class, and who used to get crap for that verb. “Sure, Tad-Biff — you gonna give it back when you’re done?”) with the expectation that you will get it back after it has been used — generally used once. The borrower reads the book and gives it back; watches the movie and gives it back; makes punch and serves it in the bowl and then gives the bowl back. Unless you’re Ned Flanders and you’re giving your stuff to Homer Simpson, that is. But that just proves my point, because the Simpsons is a satire of modern life, with Homer as the man who does not ever abide by the social contract.

What does it say about landlords when their basic transaction makes them like Homer Simpson?

The real divergence, though, is in the money: if you let someone borrow your car, that person should certainly be responsible for the gas they use and any damage they do; but what kind of full-bore jackass would you be if you charged money just for the simple use, on top?

“Sure, you can use my car while yours is in the shop. Cost you $20 a day.”

You’d be a landlord kind of jackass.

Of course I’m oversimplifying in some ways. There are plenty of businesses that lend use-without-ownership of something valuable in exchange for money — cars, power tools, DVDs, electronics, furniture, even money; but a home isn’t a thing you “use.” Living somewhere is not using the home; we don’t say “Last year I used outside of Denver, but now I use in Colorado Springs.” It’s much more than that. A home is the place where we live: a home is where we spends time with our family; a home holds and protects all of our possessions, which shape and define our time, and therefore our lives, in all the spaces our families don’t. A home becomes a touchstone for almost everything — it’s where people find us, where they send things to us, where they bring us when we’re too drunk to get there ourselves. A home defines a person, in many ways, because it allows you to do the thing that defines you — you can’t be a gearhead without a garage, or a cook without a kitchen, or a gardener without a garden. You also can’t survive at all without shelter or safety or sleep, all of which become extremely difficult to acquire without a home — and therefore a home makes you human. Home is where the heart is, where life is.

How can I live in a place that doesn’t belong to me?

The answer is, I can’t; that’s why the laws defend the resident, the tenant, and even the squatter much more than the owner. Possession is nine-tenths, and our society recognizes that — though that last tenth, in the hands of the 1%, means that our government has done quite a lot to protect the landlord, too. But in essence, we know, deep down, that the person who lives in a place has some right to it, has some claim of ownership on it. It’s just too bad that we don’t actually live according to what we know to be right.

All right, enough: let’s pretend the basic concept is sound, and discuss the jagged little pieces of insanity that come with renting a home. First, landlords lie. The photos online do not in any way resemble the actual property; at best, they choose the one flattering angle and then stand on the garbage can in order to crop out the broken fence, the tumbleweeds, and the rusty nails and shattered beer-bottle glass spread across the yard like tinsel on the world’s worst Christmas tree. Why do they try to change the way the house looks in the pictures? Do they think we’re not going to see the place when we show up to look at the inside, or to rent it, or to take possession? Are they going to stand directly in our line of sight, holding up an enlarged copy of the photo from Craig’s List, saying, “Here, see? Here’s the house, you can see it right here. NO! Don’t turn your head. Close your eyes for a second and I’ll show you the other rooms, one at a time.” Or do they think that we’ll show up, see the reality, and think, “Well, it sure looked better in the pictures. Maybe this is just an off-day. Maybe the light is bad here. I’m sure once I’ve given the landlord money, it’ll look like it did online!”

Maybe landlords just do a lot of internet dating, and got into the habit of using fake pictures and hoping the other person doesn’t bolt when they see the truth.

Now, Toni and I have in fact rented two different properties from a distance, once when we moved to Oregon and then again when we came to Tucson; but for the second one, we had a local connection, a good friend of mine from high school who lives in Tucson, who went around and scouted out our prospects for us. This means that out of the times that we have rented a house, there is exactly one time that deceptive photos online would have taken us in. So then why?

It’s not just the photos, either. “Single-family home” in the ad becomes “Broken-down dirt-crusted center unit in a triplex” when you drive by. “Fenced yard?” Sure, if you think the row of old bent croquet wickets lining the dirt patch qualifies. “Great neighborhood” if you intend to get jumped into the local Crips — is it called a lodge? A chapter? Crips Country Clubhouse? Anyway. “Off-Street Parking” means you can park on the sidewalk between the dumpsters and the rats’ nests. “Cooling system” means you can open the windows and hope for a breeze. We all know the buzz words: “cute” and “quaint” and “cozy” all mean “small;” “character” means “old,” as does “traditional;” “easy maintenance” means “it’s already broken.” Sometimes things just vanish: the included washer and dryer, the recessed lighting, the covered patio “great for entertaining.” And in every case, I wonder: did they think we wouldn’t notice? It’s one thing if you sell a kid a toy in a cardboard box, and it’s only when he gets it home that he discovers that his new G.I. Joe Attack Helicopter doesn’t actually fly by itself — thanks for that emotional scar, Hasbro — but this is a home. The customer is going to live in it, for a very long time. They will notice that the front door is missing, and they will say something about it to the person who still legally owns the home.

But let’s say you find a place. The ad looks great, you drive by and the neighborhood seems acceptable — you know, drug deals happen in a BMW instead of a burnt-out Toyota shell, the graffiti is aesthetic, the local hoarders keep their piles inside instead of in the yard — the place has what you need. So you call: Sorry, that was rented seven years ago last July. Yeah, I need to remember to take down that Craig’s List post.

A moment about Craig’s List: all websites have their problems; some don’t filter well, some have too many ads or not enough information, some don’t have a good map or the photos are too small; but Craig’s List is special. Only there can a month-old listing be automatically renewed and then get labeled as “Posted six hours ago.” Only there can one person list the same property seventy-nine times, so that your search for a place turns up just that one freaking condo. Only there can people post an email address as their sole contact information, and then fail to return any and all correspondence. I’m glad that Craig’s List exists, because I prefer renting from individuals rather than property management companies with their own professional, polished websites; but I really wish someone could keep some individuals from using it.

But as I said, all websites have their problems. No pictures is one. That’s just absurd. Am I supposed to fall in love with the place based on your turgid prose? What is this, the nineteenth century? At least show me an etching. Another problem is failing to give particularly vital information — like the cooling system, here in Tucson. I don’t mean to be single-minded in my housing criteria, but you better believe I want to know about the air conditioning when the summer days regularly reach 110. (Side note: why the hell do all these houses have no air conditioning? Are you aware you live in the desert? And that extreme heat is uncomfortable? What is this, the nineteenth century? Shall I just sweat into my waistcoat and then bathe after a fortnight?) Another problem is when they don’t give the address unless and until you contact them and listen to a spiel about the place. It’s the same thing as the lies: you can say what you want, but I’m still going to drive by, and then insist on seeing the inside, before I give you a dime.

That brings me to a new problem we encountered on this search, but not in the past. There is a company here in Tucson that has two businesses related to rentals: they manage some properties, and they also offer a listing service — meaning they will sift through the dozens of websites and find listings that match your criteria and then send them to you, for a $60 fee for three months of emails. Fine and good. I don’t want to use the service, but I can see the value of it, particularly for very busy people, or those with the time and inclination to look for that one perfect needle in the haystack. The issue I have with them is that their listings, the properties they actually manage, are used as bait: they set the rents low, post listings on all of the regular sites, and conceal the addresses, offering their phone number for more information. Then you call and ask about that one place you saw online, and what do you get? A sales pitch for their listing service, which you need to sign up for before they will tell you a single thing about that one place you called for. Most annoying business model since the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

And by the way: did someone say rent? Did someone say the rent is too damn high?

I can’t go into numbers, because they vary too widely from place to place, but the fact is, the amounts we are expected to pay for housing are just absurd.

A recent report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) at Harvard, puts some numbers on just how bad this problem is: About half of all renters in the U.S. are using more than 30 percent of their income to cover housing costs, and about 25 percent have rent that exceeds 50 percent of their monthly pay.

from The Atlantic

How some of these people can stand to demand this much money for the broken-down shacks they offer is beyond me. I am extremely happy that we have moved to a place where there is enough inventory, and enough vacancy, to enable us to find a place for a decent price — which occurred partly because it was empty long enough for the landlord to bring the rent down — but sadly, the state where we live is one of the worst for paying teachers, so even with reasonable rents, the rent is still too large a piece of our income. But I know I am saying nothing that people don’t already know, and already bewail. Allow me just to point out that in Jonathan Swift’s famous essay A Modest Proposal, the one about eating Irish babies, the villains he names specifically are the landlords who take every penny that the poor Irish could earn or beg, leaving them no choice but to starve:

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.

Source

The rent has always been too damn high. Always.

Let me move on to something that not everybody will know about: renting with pets. The first problem is that this cuts your choices in half, if not by two-thirds — although (and this is even more annoying than the number of landlords who won’t allow pets) several of those just don’t have it listed as an option, but if you call them, they don’t mind pets at all. Jerks. The second problem is the types of pets that are allowed: cats OK, but not dogs. Dogs OK, but not cats. Dogs and cats OK, but not over 25 pounds. I had a landlady turn us down once when I told her I had an iguana in a terrarium. The biggest problem, though, is that owning pets seems to be seen as a license for landlords to demand stuff: additional clauses in the agreement. Pet deposits. Pet rent. I mean, pet rent? Are you assuming that my pet has an income, and therefore you deserve a piece of it? Let me tell you: he doesn’t. Nobody pays him to be cute. He gives it away for free. Which is what makes him a better person than you. Let me also note that this whole scheme is bunk: would you charge me different rent based on the number of people living in the place? What if I had two jobs — would I pay two rents? The whole thing is ridiculous. An additional pet deposit on top of the security deposit presumes not only that my pet will do damage to the home, but also that said pet damage will be on top of the damage that I will do to the home, which will consume the entire security deposit. Same thing with additional pet clauses in the agreement: can’t you just leave it at “Don’t mess the place up?” Do we need to describe the ways I am not to mess the place up? Thank you for your trust. Here is all of my money.

All of it, and not just for rent. I’ve seen places that want first and last and a security deposit and a cleaning deposit and a deposit for each pet. A new one this search was a place that actually said the deposit was non-refundable. So does that mean they’re just going to keep it when you move out? Not surprising, that happens more often than not, but to just say it like that takes a lot of brass. Then they want fees: application fees, up to $80 per adult (And again: why do you need both of us? If I can pay the rent with my income, aren’t we done talking?). Just to apply for the opportunity to give you all the rest of my money. They want a credit check, a background check, proof of income (which must be three times the monthly rent), proof of employment, rental history going back five years, references from your last landlord and from three trustworthy individuals who know your character. It’s insane.

Look. I just want a house. Not a big house. It doesn’t have to be brand new, and it doesn’t have to be in perfect condition, and it doesn’t need to have nine bathrooms and a spa and all chrome-and-platinum appliances. I just want a place where my family can sleep at night, and then get up in the morning and go about our day. A place where I can write, and my wife can paint, and our dog can play with his Wubba. Somewhere that has rooms that fit our furniture, with enough space left to walk around and between things. Somewhere I can put my books on shelves, instead of in plastic tubs in the storage shed in the backyard. A cute place would be nice, but I’ll take a place with potential. Somewhere we can feel safe. Somewhere to live.

Is that too much to ask?

Who Goes There?

30/07/201530/07/2015Dusty Leave a comment

I am an atheist: start from there. There is no God, no higher power, no consciousness directing the universe. Everything that happens, happens because of random chance, multiplied by time. The essential symbol of my worldview is the Big Bang: everything that exists came from an explosion.

So then how do things make sense?

How does an explosion create a stable planet, in a stable solar system, at the Goldilocks distance from the sun, with liquid water and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere? With a tilted axis and an oversized moon allowing for seasons and tides? How does an explosion, nothing more than energy added to matter, create life? How does that life continue to exist long enough for evolution to take place, which eventually leads to – me? How can I be sitting in my air-conditioned living room, next to my dog (who is lying on his back waiting for tum rubs [He gets a good skritch every time I pause. Like now.]), typing these words in English on my laptop computer, drinking coffee with half-and-half and stevia and and cinnamon-flavored honey – because of an explosion?

People of faith see the answer to these questions clearly: the answer is God. We are surrounded by miracles, and there is no clearer evidence of the existence of a benevolent creator. People have been reaching that same conclusion independently for tens of thousands of years, all the way back to the people who were buried with Earth Mother figurines, and those who raised Stonehenge or made the heads on Easter Island. We look at the amazing world we live in, and we assume it had to come from someone or something divine.

But there is no God: that is the starting assumption. So then how?

I hear people say, “Let go, and let God.” I mock it, because I find the idea of surrendering free will, of one’s own free will, inconceivable. I hate being told what to do. I hate trusting someone else to figure things out for me. If I could, I would grow my own food, fix my own car, whittle my own furniture. I have been struggling recently because in the upcoming school year, I have been instructed to use a pre-determined curriculum, one detailed and prescribed down to two-minute intervals, scripted and designed and carefully laid out in every way. Oh, I’ve been told that I can, and should, adapt it to my own preferences; but my preference is to chuck the entire thing out of a moving car, preferably into the midst of a brawl between switchblade-wielding badgers. I don’t want to teach what someone else tells me to to teach. I have never liked that, and I have never done it: other than some small things here and there, an idea for a lesson, a single handout, I have never followed anyone else’s plan for a class (Except for one: I taught David Schmor’s Speech class, pretty much start to finish; his assignments, his lectures, his grading methods. But that says more about how well David designs a class than it does about my predilections. We’ll call it the exception that proves the rule.). Whenever problems arise in my life, I handle them, either by myself or with my wife by my side: two of us against the world. I don’t like the idea of relying on anyone else: certainly not on God, whom I don’t believe in and wouldn’t trust if I did.

But how can I do that? How can I create everything I do as a teacher out of my own head? I was a terrible high school student – skipped or slept through many of my classes, never did the work, passed because of a good memory and a love of reading, and with the mercy of more than one teacher. I didn’t learn anything in my teacher-preparation program, except from the time I spent student teaching – which I largely did on my own; that is to say, I got advice and feedback from my master teachers, but I designed the lessons, I taught the material, I graded the work. I read pedagogical textbooks with an eye so jaundiced it’s nearly blind; whenever I take any teacher training workshop, I either don’t pay attention or I don’t do what I’m told. So how on Earth am I a good high school teacher? Where did that come from?

It’s nearly the same thing when I write. I have never really studied writing, other than as literature I have read; I’ve never had a writing mentor. I don’t edit: the first draft is pretty much the final draft. I don’t think much about what I’m writing in advance; I plan out my novels pretty extensively, but my blogs? I just pick a theme, think of an opening, and go. When I hit the last sentence, I post it On top of that, I’m generally pretty damned lazy, and unfocused: I am one of those people who pick up new hobbies and put them down again right away, because I’d rather be playing video games. How did I get to be a good writer? Where did this ability come from? Not from my parents, who are both intelligent but non-creative. I have writers in my family tree, but are creativity and writing acumen really genetic?

The miracles that surround us aren’t just natural: this morning as I stood in my shower, hot water streaming over me, sluicing away the shampoo and soap, looking at the tile walls, glass window, wood and brick house, electric lights, municipal water supply and sewers, I thought about: how could people possibly create all this? Particularly what has been added to our world, in terms of capability, of convenience, of complexity, all in the last century? A hundred years ago, if I had the running water (Never happen on a teacher’s salary then – but would I have been a teacher 100 years ago?), it wouldn’t have been hot, and I wouldn’t have had the electric lights, the coffeemaker, the refrigerator (Maybe an icebox), the computer, the dog adopted from the animal shelter. Just 100 years ago. My grandparents were there. How have human beings been capable of creating all of this? Did we have guidance? Divine inspiration? Can we create because we were made in the image of a creator? And if not (Not, indeed), how?

When one of the millions of the faithful “lets go and lets God –” what happens? Who goes there? Things don’t stop happening, and the lives of those who put their faith in God do not fall apart in a spectacular collapse; things often work out just fine. It’s like someone’s guiding them, making things work out. So if it isn’t God (And it isn’t. Spoiler alert: this writing is not leading to my spontaneous conversion.), then who is steering the ship? Starting from my basic assumption of atheism, of a universe without a creator; who or what makes things work out for the best?

My wife and I have adopted two dogs from shelters, one in California and the second here in Tucson. Both of our dogs have been absolutely lovely: very smart, very loving, almost no trouble to train and care for. In neither case could we possibly have predicted, when we chose them and brought them home, that those dogs could have been the sweet, wonderful companions they both proved to be. And we frequently ask ourselves: How did we get so lucky?

I’ve been reading The Watchmen, and one of my favorite moments in the book is when Dr. Manhattan, a man-turned-divine being who is trying to decide if he should save corrupt and fallible humanity, tells his former (and very human) sweetheart that he longs to see a thermodynamic miracle: an event so unlikely that is is effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously turning into gold. He says that he has realized, in talking to her, that he is in the presence of one such event: her. The chances of her parents coming together to make a child; of one particular sperm out of hundreds of millions uniting with one specific egg; of that zygote’s survival to become a child; of her upbringing and life experience turning her into the woman she is, and of her meeting and loving (and being loved by) Dr. Manhattan, a blue-skinned superbeing who can see neutrinos – that’s a miracle. Every human being is a miracle, Manhattan says; and he decides he will save humanity because of that.

I’ve used a similar example with my students. I met my wife Toni at Cabrillo Community College in Santa Cruz, California. She worked in the bookstore for her workstudy, and I had a job one semester taking ID photos, in the cafeteria upstairs from the bookstore. The IDs were $8, and so I always had to get change; I went down to the bookstore to get it. That’s how we met.

But look at the probabilities involved. Toni didn’t go to college right out of high school; like me, her academic transcript was spotty at best. She chose to enter the world of employment, where she did quite well for several years. She decided to leave a perfectly acceptable middle-class lifestyle, one that would have satisfied millions of Americans, and go back to school to study art. She decided to start her education at the community college; she decided to go full-time, and leave her job, which is how she ended up working in the bookstore. If she had gone to school earlier, or later, or if she’d kept her full-time job or gone to work in the registrar’s office instead of the bookstore, we’d never have met. Me, I wanted to go to UCSC because I wanted to study creative writing, and because my father, who worked at Stanford at the time, had a friend who taught physics at UCSC, who told my father, who told me, that they had a good creative writing program. He showed me the town on one visit, and so I decided to go there. But my grades were terrible, and so I couldn’t get in to UCSC. But rather than choose one of the thousands of other schools – rather than stay in Massachusetts, where I grew up – rather than join the Peace Corps or start a grunge-rock garage band, I decided to go to the community college in Santa Cruz, 3,000 miles away from the place where I lived, with no better recommendation for the university I had decided on than the word of my dad’s friend, for two years before transferring to UCSC. Except then my Cabrillo counselor screwed up, and my general ed. program turned into three years, instead of two.

I met Toni during that third year.

How did this absurd chain of events (And it goes farther: I had just ended a relationship about a month before meeting her. What if I hadn’t? Our first conversation ever featured me acting like an idiot, mumbling and stumbling through every sentence; what if she hadn’t wanted to speak to me again? What if, what if, what if?) come to pass, and lead eventually to my finding the love of my life, my soulmate? It’s no wonder people decide that fate is real, or karma, or God. What other explanation makes sense?

When people pray, and then hear the voice of God tell them the answer, what voice is that? Something tells them what to do, where to go, how to act; something gives them the solution to their problems, the inspiration they need to create something new and revolutionary, or the comfort to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. If it’s not God, then what is it?

It’s not God. That I’m sure of. So you know what I’ve decided it is? What is responsible for humanity’s incredible accomplishments, and our unbelievable resilience, and adaptability? The reason we can handle anything put before us? The force that makes our world full of wonders, that brings long chains of coincidences into some kind of order?

It’s us. We do these things ourselves. Because we’re fucking awesome.

How can I teach well, without any resources other than my own brain? Because I’m just that good. How do I write well? Because I’m a genius, and because I read the writing of other geniuses, and I pay attention. I am standing on the shoulders of giants, but they are tall because they stand on others’ shoulders – not because God raised them up. Human beings made the miracles, not the other way around.

How did Toni and I get to be the couple we are? The actual meeting had some dumb luck to it, but mostly, we made it happen because we wanted to. She chose to speak to me, and then she chose to speak to me again; eventually, I broke through my awkward shell, and she saw how awesome I am.

How did we get awesome dogs? Because dogs are awesome, and we treat them well and appreciate them for what they are.

How can people handle whatever terrible trials that life throws at us? By being absolutely incredible, strong and determined and intelligent and resilient.

We are incredible. We can do anything. There is no God: we need no God. We are enough, and more. We are.

So the next time your life seems about to overwhelm and drown, remember: remember what humans have done, remember what humans can do. You can do it. You’re human. You’re awesome.

No better way to close this than with the collaborative work of several of my all-time favorite creative humans.

Halo Dog

13/07/2015Dusty Leave a comment

I want to call him St. Fetch. I love how you can see the question in his eyes: “You wanna play ball?”

Toni DeBiasi

Pen with color wash.

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Good Movie? Pssh. Let’s Watch Sharknado!

02/07/2015Dusty Leave a comment

You’ve seen Jaws, right? We’ve all seen Jaws. Jaws is a brilliant movie. It is a classic of cinematic art. Jaws has built lasting artifacts in our psyches: the theme song (duh-dun . . . duh-dun . . . Unfortunately impossible to render phonetically and keep the air of menace. Just picture a shark circling around your ankles. And not that nice Bruce from Finding Nemo.), the idea that great white sharks are a terrible danger to humans (There were 106 great white shark attacks between 1916 and 2011, only 13 of them ending in fatality. In 1996, 11,000 people were injured by buckets.), the movie’s most famous lines — “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” and “Smile, you son of a bitch!” and “This was no boating accident.” Jaws has done what art should do: it has made an impact. Thrown into the pond of our collective consciousness, there have been ripples that have spread across the entire surface, and they are still echoing.

You know what else Jaws created? Sharknado.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of bad movies. I enjoy them: I used to have video tapes of Chopping Mall and Return to Horror High; Summer School with Mark Harmon and The Principal with Jim Belushi. I’ve seen eight action movies starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, and all of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comedies, including Red Sonja. I’ve sat through six Police Academy movies, four Hellraiser movies, and nine Friday the 13th movies. I’ve seen Superman IV, Highlander II, and Leonard Part 6. Howard the Duck. Showgirls. Battlefield Earth. Thanks to Mystery Science Theater 3000, I’ve seen Manos: The Hands of Fate and The Robot Versus The Aztec Mummy and Gorgo. I’ve seen Roadhouse. Several times. Red Dawn, too.

I like to play Six Degrees of Separation not to Kevin Bacon, but to Red Dawn. It’s not hard: the movie starred Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey, Harry Dean Stanton, and Powers Boothe, and was directed by John Milius, who wrote Apocalypse Now. The horror. So Jaws starred Richard Dreyfuss, who was in Stakeout with Emilio Estevez, who is Charlie Sheen’s brother and has been in several movies with him, including Men At Work, Young Guns, and The Outsiders. Charlie Sheen played Matt Eckert in Red Dawn. Three degrees.

So my point is, I didn’t just watch Sharknado. I loved it. I haven’t laughed that much since Big Trouble in Little China.

Sharknado is everything a bad movie should be. The writer, the impossibly named Thunder Levin (Who also wrote Mutant Vampire Zombies from the ‘Hood, which starred C. Thomas Howell — who was also in Red Dawn.), knew it, and that’s why the tag line of the movie is “Enough said.” He knew he had something brilliant, something timeless. Something that should be cherished.

Because this might be the worst movie ever made.

The premise is: global warming (clearly identified as the villain during the expository TV Newscast scenes explaining the strange events happening in LA) has caused an unprecedented number of sharks to come closer than ever before to the LA coastline, followed immediately by the first hurricane to strike California (Fun fact: this is marginally plausible! The reason no hurricane has struck California full-bore is the cold water along the coast, so if climate change increases the surface temperature of the water . . . watch out for flying sharks.). The storm causes waterspouts, which lift up uncountable sharks and then move over land, flinging airborne sharks all over the place. Whenever the sharks fly by or land on someone, they bite, tearing off limbs, heads, faces, you name it.

Yeah, that’s right. Waterspouts moving over land and not dissipating (until they are blown up by the heroes!). Flying sharks, tumbling through air (and therefore strangling), and they still bite anything human they come into contact with. At one point a shark bites through the roof of a car. How did it open its jaws wide enough to sink its teeth into a flat metal surface in a perfect ellipse of pointy doom? Why did it tear out the section of roof, spit it to the side and then try to eat the humans inside, when it should have been busily dying of oxygen deprivation? BECAUSE SHARKNADO!

The movie has one of the weirdest opening sequences I know. You know in Godzilla, and Jurassic Park, they show the monster wreaking some havoc and some innocent person on a beach or a fishing boat getting stomped and eaten? Right: in this one it’s a fishing boat harvesting shark fins. Just to make us wonder if maybe we deserve what’s about to happen. The seedy criminal captain is bargaining with an Asian man who wants to buy the cargo of shark fins — but he doesn’t want to pay full price! There is a bizarre confrontation involving guns on both sides and a storm the ship sails into; it ends when flying sharks tear off the captain’s face, one piece at a time.

This is Sharknado.

We move ashore, where we meet our hero, Fin Shepard, a divorced father of two (Forgive that — errr — spoiler, but I didn’t want anyone who hasn’t seen the film yet to be as blindsided by Fin’s status as a middle-aged divorced father as was his shotgun-toting, worst-fake-scar-outside-of-a-six-year-old’s-Frankenstein-Halloween-costume-having, exploitative-bikini-wearing barmaid Nova Clarke. Her reaction to the news that her boss and vague awkward crush has an ex-wife and two kids, “WHAT?!?! You have a SON, TOO?!?” was more extreme than her reaction to the flying people-biting sharks, the which she tends to just kill without any reaction, emotion, or facial expression, finishing with her own patented quip: “I REALLY hate sharks!”). Fin surfs, and so is in the water when the still ocean-bound sharks attack innocent civilians at the beginning of the movie; he rescues his Aussie buddy Baz by using his surfboard to vigorously poke the shark that nearly bit Baz’s leg off, an injury that disappears almost as soon as it happens (Because, y’know, he got it bandaged. Hey, if Rambo can seal a gunshot wound through his kidney with gunpowder and a burning twig [Rambo III? Yeah, I’ve seen that. Oh: and Sylvester Stallone was in Demolition Man with Wesley Snipes, who was in Major League with Charlie Sheen.] and then slaughter an entire camp full of Commies, then Baz can handle the Sharknado even with a game leg.), even though everyone else who gets even sideswiped by a shark loses whole limbs in mere instants. Fin also owns a crappy bar right at the end of a pier, the which is first invaded by sharks (Not to worry — Nova doesn’t even blink before she kills the first shark to crash through the window and land on the floor snapping at passersby. She stabs it with a pool cue.) and then washed away by the hurricane. He then drives his friends up into the hills to rescue his ex-wife and children (BAZ: “They’re like a thousand miles inland!” FIN: “They’re 6.6 miles inland, and it’s not far enough. Not for this storm.”), stopping along the way to rescue drivers standing zombie-like on an on-ramp, a school bus full of children, and then finally all of the students at his son’s flight school, before helping to end the Sharknado. What a dad. What a hero.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ian Ziering. From Beverly Hills, 90210 straight to Sharknado, with a brief stop at Melrose Place in between (And not a whole lot else.). The funny thing is, he was the best actor in the movie, and I’m including John Heard, a genuinely good actor who made me very sad by playing George, the lovable lush with the barstool, whose alcoholism and creeping on the ingenue are redeemed when he dies to save a trapped dog from the tidal wave of sharks, by smashing the car’s window with his padded barstool (He killed a shark with the barstool earlier.). Dog’s a golden retriever, of course, because Hollywood’s racist — pit bulls only get to play servants and villains. Though I need to know how the dog’s owner, one of the people who senselessly park and get out of their cars on an LA freeway on-ramp during a hurricane, managed to lock both her dog and her keys in her car, necessitating George’s barstool-rescue.

I can’t tell you how bad the acting is. And the script. And the continuity. The sharks are either really bad CGI or stock footage, as is the weather; the best part is that since the film was made in LA, there is no bad weather when the camera is on the heroes; then we look behind them, and the world-ending global-warming-produced hurricane is chucking sharks at them in between thunderclaps. Then back to Ian/Fin, who is dry and standing in sunlight. Remarkable. The weather pauses whenever they have need of a pensive moment — to mourn the loss of George, for instance, or to wonder, as the characters do on several occasions, about the absurdity of their own situation (“Man. Unbelievable!” Ian/Fin mutters as he drives away from the shark-infested on-ramp. All you can do is nod.) — and then returns when it’s time to get sharky again. Floods dry up instantly; when Ian/Fin rappels from a bridge down to the roof of the school bus to save all those kids — even though all he does is hand them the rope, whereupon Baz, the unsung hero with the nearly-severed leg, hauls them all the way up to the bridge with the help of a single block-and-tackle attached to the bumper of Ian/Fin’s SUV — the bus is nearly inundated by water, with sharks swimming all around it; except the water recedes as soon as Ian hits the bus, falls off the roof and swings around like a doofus for a moment before he opens the emergency door on the back.

When we visit the palatial home of Fin/Ian’s ex-wife — played by the hard-plastic-shelled Tara Reid, and I refer both to her post-operative body composition and to her acting — the sharks invade on a wave of water through the windows, flooding the house to a depth of three or four feet, enabling both the shark-ingestion of Tara’s shmuck of a boyfriend (Clearing the way for our heroes’ reconciliation — I can’t wait to see if they’ll get back together!) and a knock-down drag-out brawl with a shark whom Fin/Ian and Baz fight off with a bookcase. But then they escape through the front door — and the front yard is dry. I don’t mean mostly dry, it’s dry. “How can the house be flooded?” we ask; and then the house bursts in an explosion of water and sharks, giving us the answer — clearly it was built atop a shark geyser (Covering a massive lake of burning hot death-juice, known at Old Faithful as magma, and in Sharknado as the script.). This must explain the completely absurd observation by Nova, who looks out at the flooded LA cityscape and says, “It’s like Old Faithful!” Which, though I have never been there in person, I cannot think in any way resembles a hurricane-flooded major metropolis, with or without flying sharks. My assumption is that she is clairvoyant, and while she may be staring at LA in that moment, in her all-seeing mind’s eye, she is gazing on the collapsing house that flooded in a dry field. Like Old Faithful. With sharks.

There are several shooting scenes — including when Baz puts a scuba tank into a shark’s mouth and Fin shoots it, blowing the shark into smithereens (But he never says “Smile, you son of a bitch,” so clearly, this wasn’t stolen from Jaws. Yeah. And Vanilla Ice wrote the tune for “Ice, Ice, Baby.”). Nova — played by a woman who clearly has never even handled a shotgun, let alone done any actual acting — blasts a shark five times in the head, opening funnel-like holes in its skin, kind of like when the super-terminator in Terminator 2, played by Robert Patrick (Who was also in Striptease with Demi Moore, who was in Ghost with Patrick Swayze — who played Jed Eckert in Red Dawn) gets shot by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator (Also in the first Terminator? Michael Biehn. He was in Navy Seals with Charlie Sheen. Three degrees.) and yet keeps running; this shark dies, flooding the entire pool-sized living room with enough blood to turn the water a murky deep red color (Baz makes a menstruation joke! “Looks like it’s that time of the month!” Pure hilarity!). When the shark bites through the roof of the SUV, Nova shoots that one in the face, and one shot is enough to launch the shark off the car’s roof, flipping it in the air before it crashes to the ground with half of its face torn off. She must have used the big shells that time. My favorite, though, was when Ian/Fin is protecting his son, Matt, while Matt and Nova fly a helicopter into the storm so they can blow up the sharknado; there are half a dozen sharks flying at the helicopter, and Ian/Fin draws his pistol, closes one steely eye, and fires off exactly one shot per shark, each of them falling out of the sky instantly with each pull of the trigger. If a cartoon dog popped up with the sharks in his paws, it would have been Duck Hunt.

All right, let’s get to the climax. So the sharknados (Sharknadoes? What’s the plural here?) — are swirling around downtown LA. Ian/Fin has rescued his ventriloquist dummy of a wife, and the pouty angsty ball of helplessness that is his daughter, and they have arrived at the flight school where his son Matt is a student. They decide they can’t just run and leave LA to the mercy of the flying sharks (And the devastating tornados and the hurricane, I guess — but really, the scary part is the sharks, am I right?); they have to do something. So they have an idea: there’s a helicopter there, and since the instructor was sucked up when the sharknado passed over the flight school, the only one who can possibly fly it is Matt. So they go to a nearby warehouse filled with various tools and hardware implements (I had A-Team flashbacks at this point) and get strapped up: Fin/Ian gets himself a chainsaw — and hands to his wife a hedge trimmer. An electric hedge trimmer. Baz, Matt, and Nova make bombs out of propane canisters. The plan is for Matt and Nova — who have a moment of just sublimely bad acting while they are building bombs and Matt asks about Nova’s weird fake scar, which is on the side of her thigh and looks kind of like she was clawed by a tiger with the shakes, four or five parallel ridges that could not ever have been made by a shark’s teeth; Nova explains how her grandfather took her fishing and they went overboard and everyone but her got eaten by sharks (She actually echoes Quinn’s WWII shark story from Jaws, saying, “Six men went into the water that day. I was the only one who came out.” I really wanted her to break into “Farewell and adieu, ye sweet Spanish ladies.” And maybe grow a scraggly beard.), and then she ends with a heartfelt, “That’s why I hate sharks.” Matt responds, “I think I hate sharks now, too!” — Matt and Nova will fly over the sharknados and drop their propane bombs into them. Because a tornado is the result of warm air crashing against cold air, Matt tells us (with all the sophistication of someone who saw it on Weather Wiz Kids one Saturday morning), and if an explosion could change the balance, the tornado might dissipate!

I don’t mean to lose my willing suspension of disbelief here, but — a flight student. Is going to fly a helicopter. Into a hurricane. Above a tornado. And drop a bomb made of a can of propane, a smoke alarm, and a roadside flare all duct-taped together, which can’t weigh more than five pounds, total. And this thing is going to explode, and — blow up the tornado, essentially.

Sure, okay.

They do it, and they kill two of the sharknados. But there are three sharknados, and they run out of bombs. And then the sharks from the third sharknado hit them, and one grabs onto the skid. And in trying to dislodge it, Nova falls out of the helicopter, and is grabbed, in midair — not by that shark, but by another one flying by at just the opportune moment. How sad! There was a romance brewing there! (A word about that: the woman starts off as the love interest for Ian/Fin, but she gets scraped off on his son before the ending, once the ex-wife has finished her bitchy sniping at the younger, hotter woman, so that Fin/Ian can reconcile with his ex-wife, proving that absence and flying sharks both make the heart grow fonder. And that Stephenie Meyer is not the only writer to use “Well you can date my child instead of me!” as the deus ex machina to end a love triangle. People are so frigging creepy.) Sharks crash into the helicopter, which comes down to a crash landing nearby where Fin/Ian and wife and daughter are hiding in a retirement community (Because he already saved kids and dogs; now he just needs to rescue old people. Which he does. From a shark that lands in their swimming pool. Why were they swimming during a sharknado-producing hurricane, you ask? Because the weather is just fine where they are. Apparently the stock footage of the storm hadn’t caught up to them yet.). They lost Baz to sharks at the flight school/warehouse, so now it is up to Fin to drive the oversized Hummer they picked up after their SUV was eaten, and which Baz has filled with explosives, in a re-creation of the climactic scene of Twister: he drives the Hummer straight at the last remaining Sharknado, lights the fuse on the bomb, and then leaps out of the truck (which appears to be going about 80 mph, so he has to roll an extra time in order to come to a stop unharmed) and lets it jump off of a ramp (At the end of a highway switchback that appears to lead absolutely nowhere. In downtown LA. Or maybe we’re in the hills outside of LA. It’s not really clear.) into the Sharknado, where it explodes and saves the day.

But that’s not the end.

Because the sharks that were airborne, are now falling from the sky. It’s raining sharks. Ian/Fin jumps up from the concrete, and — without even an attempt at continuity — he is suddenly running down an alley towards his family, his daughter yelling “Daddy!” as she runs toward him while he’s waving her away, yelling, “Get outta there!” Because she doesn’t see the shark falling behind her: coming right at her. And in a series of jump-cuts worthy of Army of Darkness, Ian/Fin shoves his daughter out of the way of the flying shark, starts up his chainsaw, runs forward with the Gritted Teeth of Fury, and leaps up into the shark’s mouth.

The shark falls. Our hero is dead, giving his life to save his daughter.

But wait — the shark’s belly moves. A sound is heard. And then — a miracle! The end of the chainsaw bursts out of the shark! The blade comes down, a large slit is made, and from out of that beast’s belly (Sliced-open shark belly really looks a lot like foam rubber. Who knew?) is born our hero, blood soaked and screaming incoherently.

Then he reaches back into the shark, and pulls out Nova.

That’s right. Matt performs CPR, she spits out water — water? I guess she was drowning inside the shark’s stomach. Or maybe she got a mouthful from the storm when she was screaming, “WHY WON’T YOU DIE?!?” at the shark on the helicopter skid. Anyhoo — and they embrace. And, in one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of an actress who cannot bear to do what the sript calls for, Tara Reid wipes the blood off of Ian/Fin’s mouth and they have a kiss, after which her look of disgust is impossible to miss.

And appropriate, considering the movie that preceded it.

Why have I told you all of this? Why dedicate this much time and this many words to a movie that was all the ironic rage two years ago (and which has spawned two sequels, the upcoming installment entitled Sharknado Oh Hell No) but is now just something really awful that the Scify Channel made once?

Because this is what movies are supposed to be. It was fun to watch. I was entertained. Sure, I wasn’t entertained in the way they wanted me to be; the filmmakers weren’t clever enough to make this thing truly ironic in the tradition of the Evil Dead franchise; they wanted me to relate to the characters and sympathize with them, and to imagine how terrible it would be if there were sharks raining down on my family, and all I had was a chainsaw and gritted teeth. And I couldn’t do that, because I was too busy laughing. So it didn’t do what the filmmakers intended it to — but it did live up to its purpose. At a workshop I attended last week, on teaching AP Literature, there was a moment when the instructor declared unequivocally that “No novel has a message. The purpose of literature is to entertain. Great novels give insight into the human condition — but the author’s goal is entertainment.”

Jaws is a great movie. It gives insight into the human condition; I can relate both to Sheriff Brody, who is swamped in bureaucracy and ignored by his superiors despite being right, and to Hooper, the scientist with a passion that everyone else thinks is crazy. And who is invited in as the expert, and then they don’t listen to him either, and his angry sarcastic rants at the idiots who won’t listen could just as easily have come out of my mouth. The movie asks about the dangers we face when the natural world, which we don’t understand, is ignored in favor of capitalism and profits and maintaining appearances; I consider that a very real issue, one that we should spend more time thinking about. And at the same time, Jaws is entirely entertaining: from the first swimmer getting pulled down, to that eminently satisfying concluding explosion, Jaws is fun to watch.

So is Sharknado.

And only one of those movies has a scene with a chainsaw.

Oh: and John Heard, who plays George of the Barstool? He was in My Fellow Americans. With Richard Dreyfuss. Jaws to Sharknado in just two degrees. The circle of life is complete.

Here. Have a chainsaw.

Mama!

09/06/2015Dusty Leave a comment

(This was a Facebook quiz that caught my attention. It was a little tough explaining all of the questions to our children, but this is what they came up with.)

WITHOUT ANY prompting, ask your child these questions and write down EXACTLY what they say. It is a great way to find out what they really think. When you re-post put your Child’s age.
These are the answers for all of my kids:

Dunkie the Cockatiel (5),

Neo the Tortoise (2),

and Sammy the Dog (1.5)

(That’s his Wubba there, in his paws.)

1. What is something mom always says to you?
Dunkie: Stop that!
Neo: Where are you?
Sammy: I love you.

2. What makes mom happy?
D: Dunkie! And drawing lines on paper. WHICH SHE WON’T LET ME CHEW UP!
N: Peace and harmony.
S: Cuddles and when I kiss her nose.

3. What makes mom sad?
D: Dunkie. And when she can’t draw lines on paper. Or when I chew them up.
N: The suffering in the world.
S: I don’t know, but when she’s sad I bring her my Wubba-toy and we play and she laughs and then she’s not sad any more.

4. How does your mom make you laugh?
D: She snorts when she laughs.
N: She smiles when she sees me, and I smile with her.
S: When she plays with me and Wubba.

5. What was your mom like as a child?
D: Dunkie-less. So, sad.
N: The child is echoed in the adult. She is kind, and she is beautiful. She is present in the moment.
S: Mama was a child?

6. How old is your mom?
D: She has gray headfeathers.
N: Old enough to be wise.
S: Mama-old.

7. How tall is your mom?
D: Tall enough to perch on and be really high!
N: She fills the sky.
S: Mama-tall.

8. What is her favorite thing to do?
D: Whistle with Dunkie!
N: Be at peace with her family.
S: Cuddle. And play Wubba.

9. What does your mom do when you’re not around?
D: Draw lines on paper.
N: If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
S: Oh, I’m always around.

10. If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for?
D: Dunkie! Or drawing lines on paper.
N: She is loved. It is enough.
S: Best Mama ever.

11. What is your mom really good at?
D: Skritching under my headfeathers like I like.
N: Worrying.
S: Tum rubs. And she makes Daddy laugh a lot.

12. What is your mom not very good at?
D: DOING WHAT I WANT, WHEN I WANT HER TO DO IT! Goddamnit . . .
N: Not worrying.
S: Mama’s good at everything.

13. What does your mom do for a job?
D: Draws lines on paper.
N: Takes care of others.
S: What’s a job?

14.What is your mom’s favorite food?
D: Bread. And green stuff. She doesn’t like my nibbles.
N: What she grows.
S: The stuff she shares with me. Usually cheese.

15.What makes you proud of your mom?
D: WHEN SHE DOES WHAT I WANT, WHEN I WANT IT!
N: That she has a kind soul.
S: She’s Mama.

16. If your mom were a character, who would she be?
D: A beautiful bird. LIKE DUNKIE!
N: If you imagine how another imagines you, who is then created?
S: Ummm . . . Mama.

17. What do you and your mom do together?
D: Whistle!
N: Enjoy the world around us.
S: Wubba.

18. How are you and your mom the same?
D: We both snort when we laugh.
N: We are living souls. We are more alike than we are different.
S: We love to nap and play Wubba. And eat cheese. And go walkies.

19. How are you and your mom different?
D: She doesn’t do what I want, and I don’t do what she — oh wait. That’s the same.
N: I have a shell. She needs a shell.
S: She likes baths.

20. How do you know your mom loves you?
D: WHEN SHE DOES WHAT I WANT! And when she whistles my song. And skritches under my headfeathers like I like.
N: She loves all things. It is her burden and her gift.
S: She brought me home from dog-jail, and she doesn’t make me live on the street like my last person did. She takes care of me.

21. What does your mom like most about your dad?
D: He does what she wants.
N: He is her other half.
S: He’s Daddy! He plays Wubba good. And he likes cheese. And naps. And cuddles.

22. Where is your mom’s favorite place to go?
D: I don’t know. Somewhere I CAN’T SEE HER!
N: Out into the world, and then back into herself.
S: Walkies!

23. How old was your Mom when you were born?
D: I DON’T CARE! GIVE ME SKRITCHY! AND NIBBLES! DO IT NOW!
N: What did your face look like before your grandparents were born?
S: I don’t know. Was Mama around then? I didn’t see her until she came to the dog-jail to get me. OH I KNOW! She was Mama-old minus me. Right, Daddy?

The Right Opinion

04/06/2015Dusty Leave a comment

There’s something I’m tired of hearing.

I get it all the time. Mostly because my interactions with other human beings take place almost exclusively in the classroom, where I talk to teenagers, or on the internet, where I talk to people on the internet. And as we all know, these are, far and away, the two most annoying groups of people on the planet. (Yes, I’m aware the second group includes me. Seeing as I’ve spent my entire life after the age of two in schools, in one way or another, I think I’m an honorary member of the first group, too. Of course I know I’m annoying. That’s beside the point.) And this is one of the most annoying things that people say. It’s annoying because it is an attempt to end discussion and debate, to validate the worst garbage that comes out of people’s brains: the thoughtlessness, the prejudice, the spite, the hate, the idiocy, the vapidity and superficiality — all of it. And I’m tired of it. So, by the power vested in me by my love of both thought and communication, and the energy and time vested by me in both of these aspects of human existence; by the authority I have gained through fifteen years of teaching, by the resentment and impatience that has built in me all that time and which has granted me the sheer gall to presume to say something like this, I hereby declare and assert:

Nobody has the right to an opinion.

That’s what people say that I’m tired of hearing. They say it in several different ways: Everyone has the right to their own opinion. That’s just what I think. We just have a difference of opinions, and we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’m entitled to my opinion.

That last one is the worst. That last one is the one that got me thinking about this subject for this blog. Because it says it all, doesn’t it? Entitled. I’m entitled to my opinion. Apart from the political baggage that has been strapped onto that word through the labeling of certain parts of the social safety net as “entitlements,” which apparently require “entitlement reform,” the word “entitled” contradicts itself. It means that you inherently deserve something, that it is yours by natural right; but when we call someone entitled, what we mean is that they don’t at all deserve the thing they claim, that they have it through underhanded means, or without justification — often because it was given to them without effort. That they didn’t earn what they feel “entitled” to.

And I’m thinking now that people aren’t entitled to have the opinions they claim to have.

I think you have to earn the right to have an opinion.

Not to voice it; once you have it, you have the freedom of speech and of the press, and you can shout your opinions from the rooftops — even if those opinions are offensive or unpatriotic or even inflammatory. You can post it on Facebook and you can whisper it to yourself in a movie theater and you can march around the streets wearing it on a sandwich board and you can even hold a parade declaring that you hold this opinion. Have at it, feel free; I would never stop you. In fact, I will applaud you.

But first you have to earn that opinion.

People need to earn their opinions because, first, people hold a lot of really stupid opinions. They think climate change is not real; they think the universe was created in six days about 6,000 years ago; they think that white people are better than all other people. They think that Will Ferrell is funny, they think that Jon Stewart is not, they think that Taylor Swift shouldn’t be forcibly removed from popular culture and never allowed to return. They think that 9/11 was an inside job and that Barack Obama is coming for their guns and that the worst thing the government has done in the last ten years is Benghazi. All of these opinions (Okay, forget about the middle three, there; those are examples of what we really mean when we say “That’s just my opinion,” which is personal preferences. But seriously: removed entirely from popular culture. I don’t mind her existing, but I don’t ever want to hear from her or see her again.) are not only held contrary to fact, but are held contrary to facts or despite facts that are patently obvious and really beyond contestation. And the excuse we allow people is the belief that everyone has the right to their own opinion. This is the justification for absurdities like insisting that schools teach Creationism alongside Darwinian evolution: because, we say, some people believe one thing and some people believe another thing, and both people have the right to their opinions, and we have to respect both opinions.

I can’t believe that people are too dumb to understand the evidence. I can’t believe that the truth is so hard to understand, or so hard to accept, that people are incapable of understanding and accepting it. Because some people do, and there’s nothing that makes those people inherently better than the people who do not. They are capable of accepting the truth: they just don’t. And the reason, I think, is that people don’t think about their opinions. They don’t look for evidence, and they don’t consider all sides of the issue. Why? Because they don’t have to. Because they already have their opinion, and they have the right to their opinion. And that’s why they believe stupid things. I don’t think that people are actually incapable of thought, even though they — oh, who am I kidding? Not “they.” We. — even though we act like it a lot of the time; but we don’t think when we believe we don’t have to, just as we don’t work when we don’t have to, and we don’t wear pants when we don’t have to. The idea that we have the right to our opinion simply because it is our opinion, the belief that everyone has this inherent, unalienable, natural right, and that it is sacrosanct — this is why these opinions still exist and why they are allowed to plague and annoy, and even to harm us.

No more. From now on, everyone, everywhere, has to earn their opinions.

And here’s how you do that: you have to think about your opinions. You have to consider all of the available evidence you have access to (On a sliding scale: the stronger the opinion, and the more important, the more evidence you must consider. We can hold tentative opinions when we don’t have all the facts yet, or when the subject isn’t all that important. Like whether cheesecake is a pie or a cake. Or if Star Trek was socially progressive for having the first interracial kiss on TV, or regressive for — every other kiss involving Captain Kirk. But those opinions must be tentative: held lightly, offered only with reservations.), and you have to listen to the opinions of those who think differently, and you have to think about whether those people might, in fact, be right. And when they are right, you have to adjust your opinion accordingly. You don’t have to change your opinion entirely; it is your opinion — but you have to include an exception, or a caveat, or an alternative. In other words, your opinion must be rational, and it must be open to change. You have to work on your opinions, and make them the very best opinions you could possibly have. Then — and only then –can you take pride in holding those opinions.

The other reason why people should earn their opinions is because the idea that we don’t, the idea that my opinion is as good as your opinion simply because it is my opinion, is used ever and always to end debate and discussion. I believe that discussion is necessary: discussion, communication, is how we gain — everything good, really. Collaboration and cooperation are necessary for society, and society is necessary to maintain both the species and the culture we have created. Communication creates empathy and understanding, which allows for acceptance and peace and harmony. Speaking your mind allows you to shape and solidify what you think; I often start these essays with little more than a single idea, and the rest only appears as I write it (I know: you can tell. Sorry about that.). Communication makes us better people, and happier people, and safer people — and therefore, I would argue, we should have some right to communicate, both the right to speak and the right to hear others speak to us.

Yes, I would argue. I argue a lot; that’s the way that I am annoying, both in the classroom and on the internet. People often don’t want to argue with me, and I can accept that; not everyone likes to struggle and fight. No problem. But even if we aren’t going to argue, we should at least discuss: we should share our ideas, our evidence, our thought process. This is how we learn and grow, this is how we gain respect for each other, and for our opinions: through communication, through conversation. I don’t have to argue, I don’t need to be right, to win or lose — but I do want to understand, and I do want to be understood. I need that. Yet too many of my discussions end the same way: the other person says, “Well, that’s just my opinion, and I’m entitled to that opinion. You’re entitled to yours.”

This sounds like a validation, but it isn’t. It’s the opposite: it’s a put-down. This is telling me that you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t want to share your thought with me: that I’m not worth the effort. This is blocking communication, and therefore also blocking understanding. This is imposing silence on me, not only depriving me of understanding your position, but also stopping me from making my position understood. You don’t have the right to do that, and if the way you do that is the statement, “That’s just my opinion, and I’m entitled to my opinion,” then you don’t have the right to that opinion. In fact, you’re not entitled to any opinion.

You have to earn your opinions.

That’s my opinion. Anyone care to discuss?

Serving the Battle-God

29/05/201513/02/2018Dusty Leave a comment

There’s a poem that I have taught for years, a piece by the American author, journalist, and poet Stephen Crane. I’m reminded of it every time Memorial Day or Veterans’ Day rolls around; every time my Facebook feed is filled with “God Bless the Military” statements and sentiments. Here it is.

“Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind”

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom—
A field where a thousand corpses lie.

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Swift, blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

I love this poem. Not only has it helped to clarify my own feelings about the military, but it has served as an incredibly useful teaching tool over the years. It’s become one of my favorite lessons, the one I look forward to and plan around. Even though it is probably the saddest thing I teach, both for subject matter, and because, no matter how well I teach it, whether my students understand it as I do or not — it doesn’t change the U.S. military. I can’t kill the Battle-God.

I lead my students through this first as though it were sincere: we skip the second and fourth stanzas, and I gloss over the specifics of the imagery; we focus on the apparent speaker, and who that person might be. It seems, based on the speaker’s attempts to comfort the surviving relatives — first sweetheart, then child, then mother — of soldiers killed in battle, that the speaker would be a military spokesman, the guy who writes the letter home or delivers the telegram that says “We regret to inform you . . .” I get my students to make a list of the kinds of things this familiar figure would say: Your loved one was very brave. He was a patriot, he was a hero. He died for a greater good, fighting for his country. He didn’t suffer. On the surface, it all seems to fit, and they get it quickly.

Then we go back and look more carefully at the images. In the first stanza, the lover throws wild hands toward the sky, and the affrighted steed runs on alone. So the man was shot while riding a horse into battle. But for me, the steed running on is a telling detail: I would think the horse, terrified by the sights and sounds and smells of the battle, and by the sudden violent loss of his rider, would run away from the fighting. But if the steed runs on — that implies it was already going that way. So perhaps this man was shot in the back while fleeing, perhaps even by his own side, killed as a deserter. I ask the students: doesn’t it seem strange that a military man would describe this scene so specifically to that dead man’s sweetheart — and then afterwards tell her not to cry, because war, which killed her terrified (and cowardly) lover, is kind?

Maybe I’m reading too much into that one. But look at the third stanza. Look at the details in the description of the father dying — see how painful and pathetic it is? And realize that this is, apparently, being described to that dead man’s child. His young child, because it is a “babe.” (I often think of the scene with Christopher Walken and the gold watch in Pulp Fiction, one of the most horrifyingly amusing scenes I know of in any movie.) I mime this for my students: I crouch down with my hands on my knees, and bounce as I say, in that cheerful sing-song we use to ask little kids if they want to see Santa Claus or ride the pony: “Okay, little boy, let me tell you about your daddy: he was shot in the chest, fell on his face in the mud, and died choking on his own blood!” Then I stand up and say, in an aggressively sarcastic tone, “Oh — and don’t cry. Because war is kind.” It’s effective.

After I take them through the fifth stanza, which I think of as ironically juxtaposing the humble, unimportant mother (whose heart is but a button) with the bright, splendid shroud of the son (I like connecting this to the American flag we drape over soldiers’ coffins, though Crane probably just meant the actual white winding sheet. There’s another one, too: the yellow trenches the dying man chokes in in the third stanza really should be a reference to the use of mustard gas in World War I — but Stephen Crane died in 1900, so, nope. Possibly a reference to yellow fever, since he did cover the Spanish-American War, where more soldiers died of disease than from bullets and bombs.) — a pair of images that lionizes the dead man and devalues the living, sorrowing mother — I have them look at the second and fourth stanzas, where the speaker changes and the tone changes. These stanzas, with their references to drums and glory and swift, blazing regimental flags, seem much more like the words of a pro-military warmonger, at first. I point out for them the irony in the comparison between the little souls, pointless (“The unexplained glory flies above them,” either the American flag, or the idea of gloriously dying in war, or both), valueless (“These men were born to drill and die,” and nothing else), and the line “Great is the Battle-God.” I ask them who the Battle-God is; though I have to get them past the idea that it is Ares — there is always at least one who is very proud to know this fact — since that is more symbolic than I need it to be. I ask them who is made great by battle — and who, in truth, is made greater when the losses in that battle are greater. Who rules over a kingdom of a thousand corpses? The answer I want is: the generals. The presidents. The ones who send the little souls to die, and are made famous by their ability to order men killed. I ask them how on Earth it can be said that slaughter is virtuous and killing excellent — and I help them recognize that there is really only one place in our world where it is possible to be an excellent killer, and it is a virtue to wipe out swaths of people as if they were lambs being slaughtered; that one place is, of course, war.

Yup. War is kind.

This poem, all in all, strikes me as a criticism of the military: not the soldiers, though they are certainly seen as fools or children who die for no good reason; and not the officers who would bring the sad news home to the survivors, if they are sincere in their desire to comfort — that’s the point of the list of common statements these people would use: there is no way that anyone would actually talk to a family member the way the speaker in this poem does, as he says quite the opposite of what we would expect: your lover is a coward; your father died in incredible pain; your son only matters because he died, and you don’t matter at all. But if those people, those officers, are knowingly lying about the experiences of those who died in war, there can only be one reason: they want that child, that babe, to grow up and — follow in his father’s footsteps. They want the family members to believe that those who die in war were heroes, every one of them, even though the officer telling them of this heroism knows the truth: these soldiers died for nothing, in great pain and fear, because the only thing that matters is that they die: their corpses make the Battle-God great. Those liars serve the Battle-Gods, and they make a new generation of little souls thirst for fight; they ensure that their destiny, which could otherwise be grand and great, as any human’s could be, is — to drill and die. This poem criticizes two groups: those who profit from the deaths of soldiers — the Battle-Gods — and those who lie to people in order to get men to agree to be soldiers, and to die for the aggrandizement of the Battle-Gods. The recruiters.

And that’s why I think of it every Memorial Day. Because that’s exactly how I feel about the military.

Those men and women who volunteer to fight because they want to protect innocent lives, because they believe in the cause, or in their country, I have great respect for, in some ways. There is no question to me that the willingness to die for the safety and well-being of another person is one of the most honorable qualities a person can have. I think it less honorable, but still virtuous, to be willing to fight and kill for the same cause — for the sake of other people. This is why I have great respect, too, for police and firefighters and other people who put themselves into harm’s way in order to protect the rest of us. They are brave, they are strong, they are noble and good.

That’s the good stuff. Now here’s the bad.

Our military is not always used to serve the greater good. It is sometimes, because the Army Corps of Engineers builds things, and because the military has been used for rescue missions, for relief missions, and, sometimes, for peacekeeping; I think the National Guard has been used more frequently and reasonably in this way, simply because it is the National Guard, and the U.S. hasn’t been invaded in two hundred years. The National Guard, and the Coast Guard, then become large bodies of well-equipped, well-trained people serving to keep people safe and happy. This is what the military should do, and the only branches that should still exist, in my opinion. Yes, some wars — World War II and the American Civil War, from the Union’s perspective — are actually fought for the greater good; but even those wars do not require a standing military like the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. We could send our National Guard to fight, if necessity required it; even better, maybe we could offer some genuine support, troops and materiel, to the United Nations. Imagine what they could do with the military might of the U.S. Then ask yourself why the U.N. doesn’t have that already.

Because our military is, and has always been, used to do harm. They are sent to foreign lands to kill and destroy, not to help people, but to serve the “national interest.” Not to keep us safe, but to achieve policy goals. Not to die so that others may live — but to make the Battle-God great with their corpses. And this is a crime, and a tragedy, without exception. I refuse to accept, for instance, that the millions who died in Vietnam served any greater purpose, for the United States. For the Vietnamese, one could argue that they died protecting their country from a terrible foe, a foreign aggressor who dropped millions of tons of high explosives, incendiaries, and poison on their country; perhaps that was worth all the murder, all the destruction, all the death. But for us? For the U.S.? What was that war but evil? The same for the war in Iraq, and the extended war in Afghanistan. Perhaps you could argue that Osama bin Laden needed to die for 9/11, but the argument is troubled by the fact that we made bin Laden, training him to fight the Soviets in the ’80’s, and by the fact that we invaded and destroyed Afghanistan but retain strong ties with Saudi Arabia, and with Israel, and with Turkey, and with dozens of other countries with histories of terrible human rights abuses.

Not to mention our own record in that area. How any nation that manned Abu Ghraib, that STILL maintains Guantanamo Bay, can claim to be protecting people or freedom or human rights, is beyond me.

Now it becomes a question of, not the greater good, but the greater evil. It is bad enough to attack a sovereign nation for your own political purposes, bad enough to kill for your ideals; but to use good people as your weapons to do that? Because those people who join the military for noble reasons, the ones who are willing to die for others, are the best of people, those who are willing to send those good people to their deaths, must be the worst of people. They are even more vile when they do it for selfish reasons, which is why Dick Cheney (Who knowingly lied us into war) is a worse man than George W. Bush (Who, for the most part, stupidly believed what he was told, and was otherwise knowingly selfish and arrogant), who is a worse man than Barack Obama. But all of them sent good people to die unnecessarily, and thus are they all villains.

But are even those people the worst?

I think it — let’s say naive — to join the U.S. military for honorable and noble reasons, in the modern era. Perhaps it made sense in the nation’s first century, though I personally consider the American Revolution a political war, not a war for the greater good (Yeah, we won our freedom from the British. So did Canada. How many people died for that one?), and the Mexican-American War and the Indian Wars were nothing but bad. But today, a thinking person cannot believe that joining the military will be all noble or all good. Because in this country, which does still have free speech and a free press, I think it impossible to believe the military only does good things, unless one possesses great skill in the most Orwellian of doublethink, or the deepest ethnocentric prejudices (“Everything we do is good, because ‘Merica!”).

Unless, of course, one is actively, aggressively, and successfully lied to, exactly when one is most vulnerable.

That’s why the worst people in the world, in relation to the U.S. military — if it is not the Battle-Gods themselves, that is — are recruiters.

That’s who Stephen Crane was criticizing in his poem: those who would lie to the family members, who would try to make war seem glorious and good when it is nothing but evil and suffering; those who knowingly manipulate and deceive, in order to bring fresh meat to the grinder, in order to aggrandize the Battle-Gods, to make their kingdoms — not a thousand corpses, but tens of thousands, a million. More.

The people who show up at high schools, particularly high schools with low graduation rates, with terrible college attendance rates, where the local community is economically depressed (Because I never once saw a recruiter in my own upper-class public high school, and I have not seen a single recruiter in the school where I teach now, which has a near-100% college attendance rate — but they were there every damn week in St. Helens, Oregon, which is everything I just described.), and stand there in clean, well-pressed uniforms, challenging children to perform feats of strength — as though it matters in the military how many goddamn pull-ups you can do, over how many people you can kill or how slowly you can die — and handing out prizes to those who “win,” and telling children who don’t know any better that: the U.S. Military is honorable, and glorious, and good; that it protects our freedoms and it makes the world safe for democracy; that joining up will make them better people, give them a better future, and offer them adventure and a wonderful life.

I would excuse those people if I believed that they actually thought what they said was true. And inasmuch as the military uses new recruits to bring in other recruits — which they do, in one of the more callous and appalling pyramid schemes I know of, as they actually offer promotions to those who can lure in larger numbers of fellow victims — I don’t blame the actual people who try to tell their friend that they should join up, too. They are naive children, who have been manipulated and lied to themselves. But that isn’t who mans the recruiting offices, or the tables at high school lunchtimes. Those are the older soldiers. The ones who know better, and who do it anyway. They are the ones who make the military seem good, so that good people will join, so that they can then be used, by evil men, to do evil.

Perhaps the most insidious and harmful part of this process now is the tendency of the military, since World War II and the G.I. Bill, to glorify the military as something other than a military: they make the military sound like a job, rather than an institution that creates death. With this, you have people signing up to serve in the military who don’t have noble reasons, nor evil ones; they just don’t know what else to do with themselves. This is perhaps the worst, because it is the easiest: for these people, you don’t even have to lie that much. The GI Bill is a real thing; the military does offer benefits to veterans; you can indeed learn skills that will serve you later in life. All those things are true. To talk about this, as a recruiter, you just have to ignore two things: one, the vast majority of soldiers do not do skilled work, and so will gain nothing of practical use — particularly not those who may after service have access to money for college, but have not one of the academic skills necessary to succeed in college, possibly because they blew off high school knowing they would just be going into the military at 18 — and two, you have to ignore that the reason the military exists is to kill, and the first job of any soldier is to die. If you can ignore those things as a recruiter, you can make the military sound just fabulous; if you can ignore those things as a recruit, you can look forward to your service. You can also see the military as a way to cure your ills, your laziness, your juvenile delinquency, your chemical addictions, your weight problem; all of these are put forward as valid reasons to sign up, and all of them have brought in new corpses for the kingdom. Hell: we even see military service as a way to get laid, because you get in shape and get a cool uniform and you get to be a badass — and women loooooove a badass in uniform with six-pack abs. Just watch Top Gun. That’ll prove it.

So that’s what I think about, when I see memes honoring soldiers. I think: Did you really sign up to protect freedoms? Or was it just that you couldn’t get a job? If you did sign up to protect freedom, did you think of fighting the Taliban in the hills of Afghanistan, quite literally on the other side of the world, and so removed from anything even remotely good for America that nobody even tries to justify the war any more beyond “You broke it, you bought it?” If you believed fighting in Afghanistan would be noble, who lied to you? And how hard did they have to work to convince you?

It all makes it very hard to look at a serviceman and say “Thank you.” I know it’s not their fault, and I know that many of them do have genuinely noble intentions in joining the military; some of them have noble intentions despite going into it with eyes wide open; and to those people, for their intent, I am indeed grateful, and I will salute them, and I will thank them. The same for those veterans who fought in the past, and those who died, for actual noble causes.

But most of the time, I just feel sorry for them, these little souls who thirst for fight, these men who were born to drill and die — or at least that is what they are told, by the Battle-Gods and their vile minions. All they are is more corpses for the kingdom.
Let me close with another poem, this one by a soldier who died, for his country, soon after writing this.

Dulce Et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

This Is The Voice

24/05/201504/06/2015Dusty Leave a comment

Another season has come and gone; another winner has been named (Once again, it was the wrong one; but this time, like the last, there wasn’t a right one: hence this blog.). This time the final result was spoiled for me, because the internet is a pain in the ass: a world of instant information, and hardly ever the right information at the right time, which makes it the next thing to useless. And not to tangent too much, but this is why books are better: because they are passive. They allow themselves to be collected and categorized and clearly controlled, and thus, with access to a library with a good card catalog, or a volume with a good index, you can quickly find exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, without wasting a ton of time looking at the wrong things: this is what the internet cannot do. Mostly, I assume, because it’s too young to know better. Just like the winner who was just named this week (BOOM! Back on subject, baby! That was no tangent — it was a parabola!), whose victory, once I knew about it, made me want to watch the show a little bit less: the same effect the last season’s final result had; and at the same time that my interest ebbs, a tide of irritation and contempt, caused by the parts of the show that bug me, rises and swells and threatens to wash me away.

Damn The Voice, anyway.

I was excited when it began. Toni and I are fans of contest shows, especially those involving art and talent; cooking shows like MasterChef and Hell’s Kitchen and Chopped; the tattoo contest Inkmasters and the movie makeup show Face Off; Design Star and Project Runway. And, of course, American Idol. We watched the first season of that, and despite Ryan Seacrest and Paula Abdul, despite the show’s need to create mock-celebrities like William Hung or that “Pants on the Ground” guy, we still watched it, most seasons. But we were getting tired of it. They spent too much time bashing on Simon Cowell, who, regardless of what he may be as a person, is and always has been a hell of a talent scout and a top-notch critic, and the main reason the show ever worked. It seemed like every word out of the guy’s mouth required an irritated (and irritating) rebuttal from Paula Abdul or What’s-her-name, Kara DioGuardi, and this was becoming the primary focus of the show. Meanwhile, on stage the talent was getting less impressive, substance swallowed up in style; the bickering between judges, with snark from Seacrest, was the order of the day, and we were getting sick of it.

But here came The Voice. It wasn’t about appearances: you wouldn’t have to look like Carrie Underwood to win. The audition process wasn’t a nationwide weeks-long freak show. The host was Carson Daly, who is to Ryan Seacrest what Jerry Seinfeld is to Andrew “Dice” Clay. The judges – coaches, whatever – were much more interesting, it would seem, than Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson; I love Maroon 5, and Cee Lo Green. They would more than make up for that country guy who I’d never heard of and Christina Aguilera, who I could take or leave.

So we watched the first season. And honestly? That was a good show. The singers were very impressive, varied in their ability and style and the type of music they sang, which made for a good competition. This guy, Javier Colon, had one of the finest singing voices I’ve ever heard. And he won. Perfect! We watched the second season: Jermaine Paul, who won that one, wasn’t my favorite, but he also had a hell of a set of pipes. Carson Daly was solid; Adam Levine was hilarious; it was fun to watch Cee Lo’s eloquence, originality, and creativity; and I had grown to like Blake as much as I had grown to dislike Christina Aguilera.

Jesus – Christina Aguilera. You know, I’ll give her this: she’s really an incredible singer, one of a kind, one of the best singers and performers of our generation. She’s pretty, too, though I loathe her fashion sense. But she’s crap as a coach, and the reason is simple: she’s a diva. Ever since she was – what, four months old when she started singing? – the attention has always been on her, and that’s where she wants it. If you watch the show, there’s only one coach who ever sings along with her team members during rehearsal, and every time, she acts like it’s a gift she’s giving them; and they, who know where their bread is buttered, respond in kind, “Omigawd I’m singing with Christina Aguileraaaaaaaa!!!” Of course, all of the singers she chooses resemble her in terms of singing style and song choice, so it’s not surprising that they would share her love for – well, for herself.

But then the show started to go downhill. The third season was won by the cute girl who sang country, who beat out far better singers to do it. Fourth season was won by the cuter girl who sang even more country, who beat out other country singers, because together they had eliminated the far better singers. The fifth season winner, TessAnne Chin, was indeed the best singer that year – but she was also the most attractive woman on the show. There was a problem, here. It wasn’t all bad in Voice-Town: Christina Aguilera left, replaced by the wonderful and effervescent Shakira, and then by the sweet and amusing Gwen Stefani. Shakira I had always derided as a shaking ass that sang stupid songs out of its other end, but she quickly won my respect for her intelligence and generosity as a coach, and for her humility — despite being markedly more successful as a pop singer than Christina Aguilera. That was a definite improvement. They also, thankfully, got rid of the mind-wrenchingly obnoxious Mouseketeer Christina Milian and her goddamn social media updates. Cee Lo left, which was bad, but Usher was a fine replacement, and Pharrell an even better one. A mixture of good and bad changes to a generally good show—it should have been able to hold it together and keep making good television, while also introducing talented singers to the country. And as American Idol showed us, with Jennifer Hudson and Chris Daughtry and Adam Lambert and others, you don’t need to win the show to become successful afterwards, so even the dominance of pretty wasn’t the kiss of death.

Unfortunately, something happened. It was, as I recall, during the fourth season, when Blake’s All-Country team wiped out all competition, like WalMart smashing through mom-and-pop stores in rural Alabama. Adam’s team had a pair of amazing singers – two of the best the show had seen, one of whom, Judith Hill, I was so sure was a lock to win the whole thing that I was a little annoyed that there was no suspense – and America eliminated them both at one fell swoop, preferring extra tall stacks of country music. (I mean, come on—the Swonn Brothers? Over this? Seriously?) And in the last seconds of that results show, as Carson Daly revealed the final vote, Adam Levine said into a live mike, “I hate this country!”

I think that’s when the shit hit the fan, and sprayed all over the show. It shouldn’t have: Adam was voicing a moment of frustration, both as a competitor and as a lover of good music, because he – and we – lost on both counts, in that one vote. He was right: just then, America sucked. But of course, just as we learned from the Dixie Chicks, celebrities cannot criticize our country. Adam had to apologize for what he said. But that wasn’t enough: the producers had to make sure that that wouldn’t happen again. I think that’s why it’s gone downhill ever since, culminating in this last season, which was not at all good. Sawyer Fredericks is not a great singer. He has talent, certainly, but he isn’t great. Neither were the other contestants, though Meghan Linsey was better, and I liked Koryn Hawthorne when she wasn’t singing the wrong songs – which, sadly, she frequently was. But out of a field of good-but-not-great, Sawyer Fredericks was probably third and maybe farther back. Yet he won. Same thing last season, with Craig Wayne Boyd, the redneck-from-the-seventies, (By the way: here are some other men with the middle name Wayne.) taking it over two better singers (Damien and Matt McAndrew).

But all is not lost. The show still has a good foundation to build on: three good coaches, a good host, a great concept – a contest that focuses on the actual singing, that rewards musical talent, that highlights the best part of pop music: the voice. It really is a good idea, one that has a place in America’s notoriously superficial pop culture. I don’t want to give up on my show. But I haven’t wanted to watch the last season and a half of it – maybe not even since Josh Kaufman won season six, the last guy who was the right one to go all the way, and who did it solely on his voice and not on his looks nor the kind of music he sang.

So, in order to ensure that The Voice can regain its fading glory before it jumps the shark and hires Ellen Degeneres as the fifth coach – or, God forbid, Nicki Minaj – I have some suggestions. Some of them are just my personal preferences, but mostly, they are intended to keep this contest alive, and to honor the hard work and talent of actual musicians, both those who compete and those who have won fame the hard way, because I think it a deep insult to make celebrities out of people who just aren’t that good – it’s bad enough to skip people ahead to the front of the line by putting them on TV in the first place. Here we go: eleven things that will save The Voice.

#1: America should not vote. No, that’s too harsh: America should not be the only vote. Especially not through social media. You want to know why Sawyer Fredericks won this season? Because he’s sixteen, and he’s a boy, and he’s cute. The same thing happened with American Idol, over and over again. Because the show allows people to vote using text messages, and it allows one person to vote more than once. And nobody on this planet texts more often, or with greater speed and agility, than 14-year-old girls. They also have higher turnout in these sorts of votes, like retired conservatives in off-year political elections, because young girls watch a lot of TV, and they fall in love easily, and they – come on, do I need to explain, or can I just say Justin Bieber? When the show allows America to vote, they ensure that the cute young contestants win over older, talented ones. They also push it more towards men than women, generally speaking, simply because teenaged boys are too busy playing video games. Or watching porn.

America can be the fifth vote, the tie breaker; but the coaches should generally decide who stays and who goes. When you watch the battle rounds, when the coaches make the decisions, they almost always choose the right ones; when they don’t, I generally think it is because Blake figured out that America’s votes would go to the cute young ones, and so the coaches lean towards those contestants who can win over those who sing better, simply because they (the coaches) all want to win. The answer, if the show is to be a real musical competition, is to stop letting America decide.

#2: For mostly the same reason, there should be a minimum age to compete, and it probably should be 18. I know there are prodigies out there, but there are a whole lot more mediocrities, and mostly the people who go far despite being very young do it on their looks rather than their ability, which is, unsurprisingly, immature and thus limited, even if they do have real talent. Letting in teenagers is a way to get ratings, not a way to get great singers.

I will also confess that I’m sick to death of hearing children sing about lost love and broken hearts, shattered dreams, and frustrated lives. If I hear one more of those little girls say, “Well, I’ve never had a boyfriend, but I lost a friend in fifth grade (when she told me she hated Justin Bieber), so I’m going to use that emotion while I sing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’” Listen up, kids: you need to experience some life before you can sing the blues, okay? It’s just how it is. So, minimum age. Maybe they could require a high school diploma, so we can encourage public education. I’d like that.

#3: Tone down the production. This is The Voice. It should be a singer, on a stage, with a band and lights; that’s it. No dancers. No wacky background projections. No falling spark-fountains or pyrotechnics. Please stop making these untrained, inexperienced singers work a stage the size of a football field. Give them a mike stand to hide behind, and let. Them. Sing. I suppose you can dress them up in cool outfits, and then compliment them on their style, but that really shouldn’t be a thing that matters. Just – the Voice. Right? Along with that, take out the most contrived and artificial elements: no more pretending to drive up in a car before the battle rounds, no more of the mini-runways leading down into the audience so the singers can high-five some of their “fans” (You know, the people who got tickets to the show having no idea who was going to be singing that night, because I don’t believe for a second that they fill the audience the same day they record), no more gimmicky shit like gospel choirs or kids choirs or having the singer do that back-to-back-crouch-down-and-stand-up-again-ROCK’N’ROLL! WOO! thing with the guitarist like they’ve been playing shows together for fifteen years. It’s a house band. You don’t know the guy’s name. Stop rubbing against him while he’s playing. And stop letting the “singer/songwriters” play an acoustic guitar that isn’t even miked while they are singing. It’s silly. Especially when they give up the pretense after the first chorus and just let the guitar hang there like Tom Robinson’s left arm, and then have to walk down to the front of the stage for high-fives with this giant wooden prop strapped to their chests for no reason.

#4: Stop with the social media. I am extremely grateful, if that wasn’t already clear, that they dumped Christina Milian and the Sprint Skybox, but I must also say: I don’t want to listen to Carson Daly read tweets from the Heartland or from the contestants’ moms, I don’t want to read what the coaches tweet right after a decision is made about their team, and I really can’t stand the Instant Twitter Save thing they’re doing now, where the bottom two or three perform and then one person is saved by tweet-votes. I know what this is: this is market research saying that the more you can get the audience involved, the more loyal they are to the show and the more they watch. But you know what actually makes people watch a show? Make a good show. Ask The Simpsons, who never had twitter-feeds. (Maybe they do now. I stopped watching the show, even though that breaks my heart. Know why I stopped watching? It wasn’t that I lacked buy-in. They just stopped making good shows. Just do a good show, guys, all right? Screw market research.)

#5: Also with the same rationale, you should let the coaches actually coach, which means: let them criticize. Ever since Adam’s blowup – and that may not have been the precipitating factor, though I’m sure it didn’t help – the coaches have stopped telling the singers when they do a bad job. Or when they miss a note. Or when it is the wrong song choice. Or when the production was overdone, or just plain weird. No, all they say now is, “That was great, you’re the best, I’m a fan, I love everything you do, that was the best performance you’ve done (Choose one:) so far/of the night/of the season/I’ve ever seen on this show.” Nothing but praise. Now I’m sure what happened was market research and focus groups: the producers brought in a test audience, gave them those happiness-dials, and had them watch the show; and every time a coach said, “You were off pitch, and that dance routine was just offputting,” the test audience dropped into the red. Because here in ‘Merica, it is rude to criticize. Telling people they did something wrong is judgmental, it is arrogant, it is often racist, sexist, ageist, elitist, and it is a direct insult to that person’s hometown, home state, alma mater, mama, and to God Himself. I saw the same thing with Simon Cowell on American Idol: every time he said the singer did a poor job (and he was pretty much always right), the audience booed, he’d roll his eyes, Seacrest would say something genuinely nasty disguised as funny, and in order to allow the show to move on, Cowell would give Seacrest a level look and just accept his punishment for having the temerity to, y’know, tell the truth.

What’s funny, though? The contestants never really seemed to mind very much. Because honest criticism makes you better, and if you actually care about your craft, then you seek it out and are grateful when you get it. These coaches on The Voice are, I think, generally smart and perceptive and experienced in music and performance; we should let them say what they really think, and be grateful when their advice makes the artists better. And makes the show more interesting – it would be nice if Toni and I didn’t have to fast forward through the commentary after every performance when we watch on Hulu.

#6: No more guests. Unless the guest is going to perform with the contestants, all they’re doing is slowing down the show so they can promote their new single. I can see how that is a good deal for Sia or Gym Class Heroes, but I really couldn’t care less. And also, no more painful pretense of friendship and the casual visit, when Carson goes out into the audience to see his “pals,” the cast of whatever-piece-of-crap-NBC-put-on-after-The-Voice, so they can say they just dropped by to enjoy the incredible talent, and by the way, they’re on at 7 Eastern, 2:15 Central, on alternate Thursdays and Easters. It makes the whole show ring false, and that’s bad for both the singers and the audience. And never, NEVER, does that kind of advertising work. If I want to watch a show, it’s not because “Hey! I saw them in the audience on The Voice, doing nothing even remotely like what they do on the show that I decided I want to watch based on seeing them in an absurd non-sequitur!” Unless they make a show called Audience Crashers. Then, okay.

#7: Along with that No Guests rule, the results shows should be faster. There’s absolutely no reason why it should be an hour. I get that you want to milk it for advertising, but handle it some other way. Maybe a half-hour reaction show with guests afterwards, like Talking Dead, because then I just won’t watch it (like Talking Dead) and everyone’s happy. I’m sick to death of how long it takes to find out what actually happened, and what’s worse, the results shows are so boring, Toni and I tend not to watch them right away, because we have to galvanize our spirits in order to sit through tonight’s special guest Nick Jonas (AGAIN!), and so we get the results spoiled for us by the damn Internet. And tell Carson to just read the damn results, without the minute-long pause between “America . . . saved . . . . . . . .“ and the name. Oh – and if it’s not too much to ask, can you stop asking the contestants to say how much the experience has meant to them? We already know. The answer is always the same. Ditto for asking the coaches why America should vote for this person. But then, this last-second-interview is a standard trope of every reality contest show, and it always annoys me (Maybe the worst for this is Gordon Ramsey, who asks every single contestant up for elimination – two a show, every show, and sometimes more – why they should stay on Hell’s Kitchen. Gets on my nerves. But this is way off topic now.)

#8: More variety of songs. There is a whole world of music out there, going back literally a hundred years. So many fantastic singers, so many wonderful, beautiful songs. And they just keep singing Beyonce. And Simon and Garfunkel. And Sam Smith. And Coldplay. Creedence Clearwater Revival, too. When I was looking up clips to link to for this blog, I kept seeing the same songs, over and over again. Make It Rain. Amazing Grace (oy.). Fix You. Jealous by Nick Jonas (vey). But every time they do this, I think, “Why doesn’t anyone sing blues? Ella Fitzgerald? Jonny Lang? Or what about Ray Charles?” Or Elton John. The Beatles, who rarely show up, or Elvis, who never does. Or what about some hard rock? Aerosmith (Not “Dream On,” of course, but anything else in their forty years of music.)? The Who? If you want ballads, you can’t beat the Scorpions. Seriously. And that guy has a hell of a voice: good fodder for singers.

I wonder quite a lot about the song choices. Sometimes the singers pick their favorite songs, which is sweet and all, but we don’t always like the best songs. We don’t even like good songs. I can’t help but enjoy the Backstreet Boys. The larger problem for a show like The Voice is that we don’t like songs that are good for us to sing. I’m a singer. My favorite bands include Tool, Soundgarden, and, in my cheesier moments, Journey. There’s not a song by those three bands that I could sing well. My voice just doesn’t do that. A song that I love and could sing well is XTC’s “Dear God.” But that’s a song about how Christianity has screwed up the world for humanity, and not, therefore, something I should be singing were I ever on national television, especially not in Jesus-lovin’ ‘Merica. Then there are the contestants who sing songs by people who can’t sing well, like Bruce Springsteen or Tom Petty. Here’s the problem: those guys may write good music (not my style, but to each their own), but that actually makes it worse. Because Tom Petty, for instance, understands that his voice sounds like a live chicken being grated into a pot of Velveeta fondue, and so he uses his songwriting abilities to – ready for this? – hide his own voice. This means that “Free Falling” is a song with a wonderfully catchy hook, interesting lyrics, and a terrible melody to sing. The coaches should know this, and yet they force their contestants to sing unmelodic songs, or anything by Sting, or Whitney Houston, or someone else with a set of pipes that simply cannot be matched.

Here’s my last gripe about song choice. There are some songs that match the original singer, and nobody else. They are legendary classics, often, and this is because they were done so very well that no one can touch them. “I Feel Good” by James Brown. “Dream On” by Aerosmith. “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. “Creep” by Radiohead. These songs, and several others like them, are uncoverable. I know people try, but their versions are crap. Don’t take crap as inspiration to do your own crap. Find a good song that is more anonymous than that. Pick one that speaks to you even more than it spoke to the original artist. Jimi Hendrix did it with “All Along the Watchtower,” which is a Bob Dylan song. Elvis did it with “Hound Dog.” Hell, “Respect” was an Otis Redding tune before Aretha Franklin owned it for all eternity, and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” was Dolly Parton’s. There is a whole world of music out there. If you’re serious about trying to create a moment, take more than a moment in picking your song. Okay?

#9: No more fucking arm waving. This one is personal, I admit, but hey, don’t I deserve something for all this helpful advice I’m offering? I’m saving your show! Now you can do something for me. Take all of those people in the sections right in front of the stage and tell them: stop waving your arms from side to side over your head whenever any singer starts anything even remotely slow in tempo. It’s entirely artificial, and entirely obnoxious. The only time anyone should wave their arms in the air is when they are waving to someone far away, or when the spirit of God compels them, or when the person on stage has just said “Hip hop hooray!” That’s it. It is otherwise never appropriate, and it enrages me every time I see it. Just stop.

#10: No more Christina Aguilera. Please? And for the assistant coaches, get people who actually know what they’re talking about. Get a producer I’ve never heard of who knows how to help people sing better, instead of Meghan Trainor, who is very sweet, but entirely unhelpful. Please note that American Idol‘s first “permanent mentor” was Jimmy Iovine. But seriously: no more Christina Aguilera. Everyone else who has ever been on the show was a better coach. And I’m including Christina Milian, mainly because she never referred to herself as X-Tina. That is, if you’re not aware, Miss Aguilera (and I’m sure you’re aware), a reference to Jesus Christ; Christmas becoming Xmas using the first letter in the word “Christ” when written in Greek. And no matter how well you sing: you are not the Messiah. Just because you personally could win the contest doesn’t mean you should run the contest. Just think of beauty pageants run by contestants. Or prisons run by inmates. It’s a bad idea.

Last but not least, #11: If this is supposed to be a show that makes people stars, that gives them a chance to succeed in the music industry, then please, please, actually do that. There is not a single winner from this show who has become successful, or who was even heard on the radio afterwards, except for, God help us all, the country singers. And the Swonn Brothers. The show finishes with its contestants, and then chucks them away until they want to bring them back for a guest appearance on future episodes. Some of the singers have managed to make it themselves, which of course I respect; but the show is letting down its own people, which is not a good way to bring the best talent on future seasons. I know you can’t actually make people into stars, because pop is fickle; but they should try harder. The coaches always say they love their contestants, and plan to keep in touch with them, and it always feels like a lie.

I don’t want my show to be a lie.

So do it right, and do it for real. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Do it. Thanks very much.

Just Dusty

Dusty Takes Over the Internet!

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