RadioLab: Desperately Seeking Symmetry

Thank you, Cousin Tabitha, for sharing this wondrous and affecting video by the endlessly inventive people at Radiolab with the music of Sufjan Stevens. Don't blink when you watch it!


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When Irish guys are stylin’

Across the country but especially here in Portlandia, I’m famous for evaporating like morning mist. Whether it’s a theater event, an art opening or Storm Large’s surprise party, take your eyes off me for a minute and I’m gone for the night. No. I'm not going through that awkward stage. It’s just hate the long goodbyes that are the fallout of social occasions.

My technique, honed by years of disappearing acts, involves scoping out all available exits upon arrival. Ideal targets? Egresses located just past bathrooms; back doors; secret passageways (oh yes — for some reason these abound in Portland). A quick scrutiny of “alarmed” doors, by way of checking whether their wires are attached or not, often yields handy exits where angels fear to tread. And catered affairs are a bonus; the servers will gladly clue you in about any hidden corridors or tunnels.

Imagine my surprise when “Cousin Tabitha” recently informed me that there's a term of art for the disappearing act: the Irish Goodbye. There’s even a Facebook page dedicated to the practice. So apparently I come from a long line of escape artists; it’s actually my genetic heritage.

Recently, though, that changed for me when I donating my aging Jetta to AllClassical. Now I get around by walking (a subversive act for this former Angeleno), busing, cycling, renting the occasional ZipCar. And also the kindness of acquaintances.

Whereas at first the inconvenience of all this seemed colossal — I mean, the ability to take off on impulse is very nearly the definition of American, is it not? — it’s turning to be a kind of blessing. Last week, for ex, Olga Sanchez and I got lost in the fogbound northwest hills and had a fun adventure together. My bus rides around town have resulted in a great increase of reading (and when you do that for a living, you know that can’t be bad). In attending Superior Donuts last week with my Drammy colleague Barbara, I found much about her storied career that I’d never suspected (since I’d never had the time to ask before). From the bicycling, I’ve discovered that oxygenation is entertaining. And last night, instead of being the first guy out the door at Vertigo, I headed over to The Blue Monk — ostensibly to wait for my ride home, then going on to have a rollicking conversation with playwright Kim Rosenstock and director Megan Kate Ward.

As recently as a few weeks ago, none of this would have happened. Had I still my own car, in each of these cases I would have appeared and vanished suddenly. Like Count Dracula, but without the starched shirt, cape and pomade.

So for now, anyway, it’s farewell to the Irish Goodbye and hello to a more earthbound MrMead than perhaps you’ve spotted fleetingly in the past.

Slán go fóill.

Xtra, Xtra

“If you can type, you can make movies” -- so goes the tagline for one of the hottest websites in the stratosphere these days, Xtranormal. This outfit provides free software that allows you to put your own dialogue into the mouths of prepared animated characters and then watch their conversation play out.

As such, it’s launched a veritable gold rush of snarky cartoons, sometimes giving voice to wish fulfillment conversations we’d like to have, others time reporting outrageous (and often recurrent) dialogue verbatim.

The first one I saw came to me from the my Cousin Tabitha (nhrn), who I have no doubt has had countless conversations very close to this one. (Warning: this piece contains some “language,” so don’t play it full blast whilst at work o whereva.)




Here’s another fave, created by one of Portland’s best actors, Tim True. If you’re a performer, I’ll bet you’ve had much the same conversation with somebody at some time.





And finally, one I especially love because it has been my lot in life, as a writer, editor and dramaturg, to perform the sort of work that many people believe they could do very well at any time if only they were ever in a mood someday to feel like it. If you’ve encountered analogous attitudes in your profession, whatever it may be, you’ll appreciate “So You Want To Write a Novel”:

Zeitgeist in the Heights

Hate musicals? Especially hate the canned, prefab Broadway spectacles with music styling that’s 20 years out of date?

Running right now at the Keller is the antidote to all that: In the Heights, the Tony-winning upset (which snagged Best Musical of 2008, among other distinctions) that gleefully thumbs its nose at all the musical theater “rules” and gets away with it.


Indeed, if you’re a devotee of more typical Broadway fare, In the Heights may confuse you at first. Its Latin/rap-inflected musical idioms aside, it’s almost closer to opera than to musicals per se; it’s all but through-composed, with only a handful of spoken sections. Also, since the first rule of theater stagin in general is to control the eye of the spectator, it’s astonishing (and liberating) to find the show's staging does not always demand you stare at predetermined locations. In the dance numbers — and there are many — so much is going on in every corner of the stage, and it is so individuated (i.e.: not always patterned or synchronized), that you could watch this show several times before you saw it all. The photo at left gives you an idea. (It’s of the original Broadway cast, but I assure you the touring company now here in town is outstanding.)

And what dance it is. The dazzling spectrum of moves is largely free of the shopworn Vegas-style vocabulary that makes many musicals so dull; instead you’re treated to a frenetic, more free-form approach (or at least the illusion therefore) that looks like it’s right off the streets.

Another thing I appreciated about this show: since it’s about a neighborhood (specifically a corner in Washington Heights), it reflects all its residents, to be interracial and intergenerational. Sure there’s plenty of young love going on, but there are middle-aged and elderly residents, too, who get their time onstage. And their experience is beautifully reflected in the songs they sing: survivors favor anthems, older characters go for a lyrical style, and the youngsters sport more muscular, jangly motifs.

This truly is a musical for our time. In short: Starlight Express it ain’t.

The remarkable music and lyrics are by the man who conceived the show, Lin-Manuel Miranda. You can check out his Tony acceptance speech below, which may be the most stirring one ever delivered at the ceremony, and is here courtesy of the legendary Cousin Tabitha, who accompanied me to the Keller last night and loved it. By the way, the book is by Quiara Hudes, the playwright whose Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue got a beautiful, haunting production at Miracle Theatre Group a few years ago.

2009, only the high points

“…and I remember that some of it wasn’t very nice. But most of it was beautiful. But just the same, all I kept saying to everyone was, I want to go home….and they sent me home. Doesn’t anybody believe me?”

Probably you know 2009 won’t go down in my personal history as a favorite year. But I can’t say it hasn’t been interesting. Over the past nine months I’ve hit a lot of new highs and also despaired just as often — may you never find out to what extent. But I’m not just being plucky when I say this year was memorable.

High points included:

· Launching SuperScript, my editing business, which (thank you Jesus, Mary & Joseph) is doing decently well for a new endeavor
· Having PATA’s Spotlight Award bestowed upon me (it’s kind of a like a People’s Choice award from Portland theater folk) when I wasn’t expecting it
· Working with the fabulous people of Wordstock

A few other favorite things:

Most compelling novel I read this year: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Yes, I realize you all read it last year, but what can I say, prior to 2009 I read mostly scripts — at least one a day—for many, many years.

No, I will not select a favorite script of 2009. Too many good ones to mention.

Short story that most bowled me over: Jon Raymond’s devastating “Train Choir” from Livability.

Favorite new music album: can’t decide between the gloomy claustrophilia of Twilight by The Handsome Family (a 2001 release, actually, thus only new to me) or the gleeful psychedelic revival of Merriweather Post Pavilion by the Animal Collective (turn up the volume on the video below to see what I mean).



Beloved musical rediscoveries: “Funny How Love Can Be,” in dueling editions produced by The Ivy League (soulful and a capella) and Harper’s Bizarre (hypercaffeinated), way, way back in the 1960s; also, from the same era, “I Woke Up This Morning,” by We Five (thank you Cousin Tabitha) and “Summer Song,” by Chad and Jeremy.

Favorite theater productions here in Portland: Ragtime (PCS); Apollo, by Nancy Keystone (PCS); Adam Bock’s The Receptionist(CoHo Theatre); Teeth of the Sons by Joseph Sousa (Re-Theater Instrument); Everyone Who Looks Like You (Hand2Mouth); The Lying Kind (Third Rail).

Biggest epiphany transmitted via TV show: Don Draper taking the kids out trick-or-treating, when a parent doling out candy says to him: “And who are you supposed to be?”

So much for the past year. Happy 2010. Let’s usher out the (n)aughts now and look forward to the tweens.

The Hamilton Mixtape!

Am I the last person in America to know about this? Apparently Lin-Manuel Miranda, he of In the Heights fame, performed this slyly humorous new piece last May.

How cool is it that this kind of performance can now happen in the White House? Thank you, Cousin Tabitha, for sharing this with us.

Days have gone by and I couldn't be sorrier.

Yes, I've done it again. Disappeared. But now I'm back.

You did realize I was gone, didn’t you? Well. By way of celebrating my Thanksgiving advent, I’m going to filch from the creativity of some fellow bloggers.

Following playwright Patrick Wohlmut’s lead over at his blog, Draining the Locks, I want to say how grateful I am that you’re checking this blog just to check out my latest mental leakage. (Even if Cousin Tabitha did admit to me last night, during the Thanksgiving dessert course, no less, that she skips over the boring parts.) Back in the day (i.e., last year), when this thing was called Mr. Mead’s PuPu Platter as a way of apologizing for its randomness, the blog felt like a message in a bottle. Nowadays it’s part diary, part safety valve – a way to bridge the gap between the luxurious solitude of working at home and the inconvenient need for contact that apparently comes hard-wired into human consciousness.

Originally I was delighted to get any hits. Nowadays they oscillate inexplicably between ... well, let’s just say much more than a few. Which is a thrill for me personally. Never mind that pundits like Arianna get upwards of 10,000 per day.

Of course a dismaying percentage of my hits comes from intergalactic white noise – people or other entities who wind up here inadvertently and depart seconds later, have ascertained that this place is nowhere near where they thought they were going. I’m grateful for youse, too, and – in homage to SMB’s suit over at From Every Corner -- here’s a shout out to a few recent castaways hailing from Cairo, Helsinki, Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany), Mississauga (Ontario), Hyogo (Japan), Sentjur (Brezovica), Ontario, Essex, Tehran, Toronto, London and Bucharest – not to mention all the mysterious visits from the tireless googlebot. And I’m especially honored by the visits from various corners of Cascadia.

Thanks for coming. I promise everything will be better – next year.

Midsummer palate cleanser

All right already. Summer hasn't been all ink, angst and entropy. The sounds of the season have been redolent of a certain atavistic abandon -- for me, anyway. Here's a sampling.

First, I'm grateful to the far-ranging vigilance of El Splatterson for turning me on to the spellbinding songs of The Handsome Family, a husband and wife team. As iTunes describes their music, it "teem[s] with an eerie old-time country & western sense of foreboding" -- that covers it pretty well for me. Their most recent album, Honey Moon, is a little cheerful for my taste; I prefer the spooky effulgence of the older albums, especially Twilight.

Do check out the website, via the above link, too; it's the most satisfying band blog I've seen since The Decemberist's (which band has a fabulicious new album out, by the way, The Hazards of Love).



Moroever. My obsession with Animal Collective has now led me to its earliest and perhaps most recklessly playful work. Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished has a fauvist, post-psychedelic folk thing going on that reminds me of my favorite band from the olden days, the peerless Incredible String Band.


Speaking of which. Cousin Tabitha gave me an extraordinary ISB tribute album a while back that has become this summer's soundtrack for me: Winged We Were, it's called, and it's a mind-blowing collection of radical reinterpretations of song that most people have never heard in the first place. One of them, Three Is a Green Crown, is so hypnotic that Tabita (NHRN) found she couldn't listen to it and keep driving; she actually had to pull over to the side of the road and hear the song out. You can listen to the original here, then hear an excerpt of its transfiguration here.

Outsider music freaks, get your geek on.

Deja view

Many of you have probably seen the photo at left already, of the benighted fellow protesting the recent decisions of the Iowa legislature. Though it's easy to smirk at the guy, this actually saddened me. Here is this man, making so bold as to publicly misinform others and to display his own ignorance, unaware of something that I believe most people know to be a basic fact.

His hand-lettered placard reminded me of my freshman year in high school. The man who taught my Intro to Psychology course saw fit several times to refer snidely to "the homos" in class. I got my revenge at the end of the year by turning in a term paper about the preponderance of "homosexual" behavior throughout the animal kingdom, including primates.

I got an A.

Though I don't have Mr. R to harrow any more, I was still cheered by a website Cousin Tabitha linked me to this evening, called Sociological Images. This is an excerpt for a post of last year:

A same-sex penguin couple, on the right ... were segregated from the rest of the penguins because they kept stealing eggs. Sneakily, they would replace the egg with a rock and take the real egg for themselves. The zoo keepers eventually decided to give them the eggs of another penguin pair who had a poor record of parenting and, the story says, they are among the best parents at the zoo.

If only the protester picture above were on Facebook, Cousin T & I could rock his circumscribed little world.

16 or so semi-interesting things about ME

Perhaps you too have been a victim of the current Facebook vogue for this exercise: you list some random stuff about yourself (25, supposedly, but I lost interest partway through), then you tag 25 others (!!) who perpetuate the process.

It was fun, actually. And since I wasted an hour of time yesterevening typing all this up, it seems only right to foist it upon unsuspecting readers at this site, too. Enjoy!

------------------------------

1. Not until I was nearly out of my teens did I realize that not all people hear voices.

2. You can divide people into two large groups by asking whether they loved Alice in Wonderland in childhood or thought it was freakishly grotesque. Guess which half I fell into.

3. Likewise with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Some readers think Joyce’s writing perfectly reflects the flow of internal human thought; others reject this and think Woolf is the better reflection. Clearly not everybody sounds the same way to themselves. Me, I’m with Virginia.

4. In the late 20th century, my father turned up in New Orleans after a complete absence of 35 years. I haven’t "had time" to reestablish connections (nor has he).

5. At a very early age, I decided it was better to be spanked than to be ignored. Is that true of all kids?

6. Whenever I watch Mad Men, I find myself envying Betty Draper. Not her daily psychopathology, just her agoraphobia. Why can’t I stay at home all day and clean and cook?

7. This has been discussed on my blog already, but: biofeedback machines don’t respond to me. They sit there as though I’m brain dead. It has been suggested more than once that I may only be a visitor to this time-space continuum.

8. Since I was too young to be able to articulate it, I have had a terrible fear of death and of annihilation; this is my primary motivation for getting anything done on this miserable planet.

9. Years ago my Cousin Tabitha and I got so sick on rum and coke that to this day it nauseates me to smell either.

10. Believe it or not, I was alarmingly skinny until I turned 28.

11. A mania: I believe that if I don’t think about my loved ones before leaving home every day, something terrible may happen to them.

12. Recent development: after 14 years in L.A. with no problem, here in pacific Oregon I’ve acquired a fear of driving on the freeway.

13. Watch out, I can see your aura. Really. But unlike psychics, I have no idea what the colors signify.

14. Fun you can have with your aura: if you mentally imagine pulling it into your body, you’ll become all but unnoticeable to other people, for some reason.

15. Technically I’m hermaphroditic, in that I carry vestigial oviducts in my body. Before you cart me off to the circus, however, one man out of every six has this condition, according to my doctor.

16. My first clue that I was a tad light in the loafers came at the age of four or five, while watching Bonanza. Pernell Roberts showed up all dressed in black – in leather pants, yet, who dressed those boys, anyway? -- and I started feeling all shimmery.

Stop! in the name of love

Desperate times can lead to fast, foolish solutions. I’ve been fuming all day since getting the news that the Oregon legislature is trying to push through a bill that would allow the State to raid millions of dollars in funds that individual citizens specifically donated for the arts.

The bill’s big idea, of course, is to spending these contributions on badly needed operating expenses, rather than on the arts. The long-term damage of this tactic is obvious; why should anybody contribute to this fund again, when it can be reallocated at any time to become the State’s mad money? What a galling breach of public trust.

Once again the arts finds itself cast into an unfair dichotomy: arts vs. education, arts vs. health care. It’s a false spectrum that has to be shattered once and for all, but anyway:

Others have sounded the alarm already, including the Oregon Cultural Advocacy Coalition, Art Scatter and Culture Shock, and they all provide us with the means to speak out against this shameful proposal. Please visit these sites for information about what you can do. The outcome of the protests – an outcome which may come as soon as this weekend -- will tell the nation whether Oregon is really run by progressives, as we like to think, or by a panicked passel of yahoos.


Meanwhile, Nancy Lublin has a money-making proposal I can actually support. Based on the fact that the average wedding costs 20K, she says all we have to do is legalize gay marriage and an estimated 60 million megabucks will flood the economy. How….stimulating.

Nancy, I like the way you think. And Cousin Tabitha, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

What the World Needs Now

Yeah, you guessed it. I have started another blog.

All right, so this announcement is not exactly an epic of massive impact. In fact it has already caused dismay in some people. When I told my Cousin Tabitha I planned to launch an editing blog, her response was: “Oh, no!”

It was unclear whether this had to do with editing or with blogging per se.

The establishment of this new entablature of all things editorial comes as an extension of my SuperScript website. That site, of course, exists to hawk my literary services. But as such there isn’t room to bemuse over, complain about or revel in my obsession with the printed word. Hence: The Editing Room!

And now we digress.

It turns out that there are blogs, sometimes many blogs, in existence on anything you care to make up. Try it – this is a fun game you and your browser can play together. Here are the results of my research, spurred by the flotsam (but not jetsam) of my mind at this moment:

Living by Cartesian principles

Famous nuns of the Reformation

Dangerous international eateries

Sexual embarrassments of early middle age

Now: search for editing blogs, and you yield 16,800,000 results! So in mustering the effrontery to make it 16,800,001, I wanted to do something different. Most blogs of this stripe, it seems, are dedicated to clarifying where apostrophes go, and the differences between “that” and “which.” Not that I’m above that, but, well…..I’m going to try something a little different. Like favoring the jetsam over the flotsam, and eschewing the schoolmarm approach. Because there are blogs a-plenty dedicated to that proposition.

What actually is rare is an editing blog where the visitors ever comment. So let’s buck the trend. Check out the new digs and say something – I dare you.

Hmmm.......

Does this ... put you in mind you of anything recent?



Thanks to my mysterious Cousin Tabitha for this contribution. May your shillelagh never warp.

Happy Birthday to ME

In the interests of astronomical accuracy, my real solar return is still six days away. (I’ll be 74, thank you – one year younger than last time round!) The above-captioned milestone I refer to is actually the blog’s. Because at some point this morning, its site meter passed 10,000 visitors and slogged on to the current tally of 1,008. I have to love that number because it’s divisible by the number of prime numbers below – obviously!

As you might surmise, John Cage is the bodhisattva of the day, since I have nothing to say and I am saying it. Nevertheless and howsoever, I am astonished to have that many entities viewing this blog in the space of 18 months, especially since for the first third of that I only posted once every other month. So thank you, whoever you are, for checking in with me once in awhile.

To mark the occasion, today I thought I would abuse your patience by reverting to the age-old assumption that one’s medical symptoms are of intense interest to the entire blogosphere. Often, over the years, friends and others have accused me of being a space alien of some stripe or other, and not a human being at all. And I’ve come to realize that the evidence for this is mounting.

For ex:

1. I’m supposed to have a unique blood type – something about the blood cells having an odd shape, I don’t understand it.

2. My brain waves will not register on a biofeedback machine. This is true, it’s been tried several times. The machine will sit there as still as though I were dead.

3. Technically I’m hermaphroditic, in that my body houses vestigial oviducts. (According to my doctor, this is not actually unusual – he says one out of six men has this harmless condition. You might want to check into it for yourself if you’re of the male persuasion…)

4. I’m cursed with mixed brain dominance, which is also a mixed blessing. I believe it does have its peculiar advantages, but my leading symptom is that often when I’m trying to speak, too many synonyms crowd into my head at once and what comes out is a garbled amalgam. Hence public speaking is a horror show for me because I never know what will come out of my mouth.

Talking to a physician years ago about all of the above, she commented: “I would have to say that you’re either an evolutionary step forward…..or backward.”

Nice.

I just realized that all these disclosures are going to scandalize my cousin, who is so private that she leaves no trace on the Web whatsoever; she’s as gossamer as the Web itself. Yet here I am, warding away potential clients with all my weirdnesses laid bare.

Sorry, Cousin “Tabitha” (NHRN). But I’m sanguine. Any one of us could develop a list of idiosyncrasies just as odd, though perhaps some would scruple to keep it to themselves.

Happy Birthday to US!