Category Archives: experimental
Insomnia
It is a loss for me, having nobody, restless, like a phantom limb. The illusions of connection in a world of illusion, never mind. I suppose one should feel satisfied with a random cluck now and then. The sun pries its way through the blinds. Now the birds are out there, with all their idiotic opinions in the airless morning.
TEST
This post is only a test. In the event of an actual post, there might have been some actual content here. But this is only a test. I accidentally subscribed to this blahg while mucking around on the company iPad, I want to see what happens when a person becomes his own follower.
In the empty stadium
The pitcher winds up, back to the batter, corkscrews around whipping a 96 mph heater toward the plate with tremendous movement on it. He sprints in a flash to home plate, grabbing a bat in one motion swinging and sending it to the deepest part of the park, on a high arc into the seats. But racing to the 410 sign, slipping on a glove as he does, he is able to time his leap perfectly and, reaching 18 inches over the wall, pluck the ball out of the air before it can descend into the stands. Falling to the ground after slamming into the wall he manages to stay on his feet, takes a stride and throws a strike back to the first baseman, on a fly, and doubles up the runner who had taken off at the crack of the bat. Double play! He makes it half way down the first base line where he kicks the dirt, the bat again in his hand, and curses the fucking centerfielder, who a second ago was him.
All this drama is watched impassively by 50,000 empty seats. The seats, truly, could not give less of a shit about heroics on the baseball field.
Peak Experience
We experience countless things each day. A person with a great memory, which I am often reputed to have, might remember a few grains of these experiences. Certain experiences are unforgettable, when they involve our senses directly. This cuts both ways, great memories and terrible ones, both enduring. But when things are exciting, fun and spontaneous they inspire us, they stick in our memory. That is because these are the moments when we are most fully alive.
Your soul is on fire, poet, but there is nothing we can do for you but throw spears.
Peak experience is when you operate intuitively against the beat, chose notes and flavors that have not been tried before. Seasoning a new dish with fresh herbs from the garden, a different combination, delicious. Hitting the cowbell perfectly against the side of the beat. The colors spread thickly in a perfect brushstroke gradient, that succulent array of sunset blues going dark. The spatula of a hand, bending supplely against beats from the Indian Ocean.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please send me an email. I will in turn send you a rhythm track to improvise to. You can then send me the youTube link and I’ll add an animation to it. These times are in many ways hellish times, but the technology is getting fucking amazing.
Q & A for TED Fellowship application
How would being a TED Fellow directly help you in your mission?
I’m glad you asked! I am in the strange position of having a program that works very much the way I drew it up, as long as I am doing 99% of the necessary work, much of which I have no experience in. Children are really engaged with it, I’ve simplified the process so that children can work quickly, and the possibilities of the program are vast. But unless I meet the right cohort of people to help me expand the program, the entire project is on very thin ice. In addition the project is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts, with no shoes. Try sliding around on thin ice in that outfit, TED. I imagine that I will be energized and inspired by my contact with other TED Fellows and might, directly or indirectly, meet the people I need to meet to let this successful program expand and begin working with its target kids.
Why are you typing instead of going shopping for food before you have to go to a funeral?
While I don’t believe this is strictly a question for the TED application, it is the best one to ask at the moment. I would have to think about this one. A conundrum, a riddle wrapped in an enigma. Damn. Funny as hell, as shit, as enhanced interrogation and root canal. Funny as the party line, as idiocy itself. I have no answer for this. It is a symptom of something much more serious, something I dare not consider.
Any more questions, wise ass?
Not at the moment. No, ma’am. I’ve got about 15 minutes to get ready to get out of here.
12 Minute Run
Wind sprints, baby, run with it.
20 years ago I was amazed to see a restless class of third graders enthralled by a tape of a 1950s radio show with guest star Bela Lugosi as murderous pyromaniac Nick Segeden. In the end he solemnly reminds children, after cops shoot him, non-fatally, “Crime Doesn’t Pay,” which may also have been the name of the show. He draws the words out like a melodramatic high camp vampire. The kids loved the radio play, wanted to hear the whole thing again as soon as it ended.
Point is– you can make a great radio play with kids, add sound effects, a podcast. You want a story? Hard to animate, animation is for fun ideas, quick, lively, unexpected. Maybe the podcast is the way to go, what chu think?
I do not think, 8:45 left on the timer. Why so chipper? An old friend is struggling with the anaconda of soft tissue sarcoma which has cost him large chunks of his body. Cancer wants the whole thing, my friend is fighting. I think of calling him three or four times a week, but I’m scared. What a good friend I am.
Do not think, 7:15 left on the timer, panned left, my voice imitating Bela Lugosi, panned right, and on three separate tracks, I’m the cops trying to apprehend him.
In the left ear, Lugosi” “not so fast, gentleman…. I have a bottle of gasoline… and a ra-a-a-a-a-g!” Pop, a gunshot, wings Segeden, he drops the bottle before he can set the rag on fire. He cries.
“Relax, Segeden, it’s only a flesh wound. You’ll live to fry for what you’ve done,” I say as one of the cops in the right ear.
I want you guys to write a script for a radio play. OK, fine, improvise a story. We need characters, a setting, a problem, a complication and some kind of weird, funny solution. Yee hah. Damn, it’s going to be fun!
What are you looking at?
3:51 on the clock, keep running, son.
OK, there’s this. Whatever is implanted in your mind that can hurt you will find the best possible time to leap out and do its darnedest. Take this: sure, you’ve been doing this successfully for six months, sure every step has been forward, you’ve proved it can be done, and probably scaled up into a business. But, wait for it, wait…. “YOU SUCK!”
Whenever the voice talks to you like that, ruthless and unfair, smile and nod. “I do indeed suck, at this straw immersed in my milkshake. And, uh, none for you, my merciless old suckless friend.”
1:33 and that’s really the best example you can think of?
It so would appear. Self rah rah sessions become mandatory in a tone-deaf world of worried sphinxes. These sphinxes have a hard enough time without your problems, without mine. They can barely help themselves, so go easy on them, would you?
0:18 I most certainly will.
Divergent Thinking Challenge (twelve minute time limit)
The Challenge:
Set a timer for 12:00, let it count down.
You must first reduce your goal in life into a catchy motto you can say to someone in an elevator. It should be short, it should be witty, but not too witty. If your goal is droll, so much the better, if not, don’t waste words..
While thinking of how to condense your life’s work into a catch-phrase, and being mindful of the timer, imagine a child battling cancer. This kid, a nine year-old, runs out of the school in a panic, asks you to get him a gun so he can kill himself. Professes not to care that he will destroy the lives of his parents and cause bitter tears for all who love him.
The kid draws a series of pictures, the stick figure, labeled “me”, under the force of a giant, powerful magnet that is zapping him with rays. In the next frame the stick figure is broken on top of a bloody pyramid, the magnet is inverted and the power is off. Everything looks dead.
In the third frame there’s the stick figure, labeled “me”, bent in half, its head on the ground. In the next frame he is standing. In the final frame he seems to be exerting a reverse magnetic force and is repelling the magnet.
Our fifth grade interviewer, Elijah, will certainly want to ask about these drawings.
“What are you expressing in this series of frames?” Elijah might ask. And the suicidal young artist would go into his explanation.
While working on the motto and considering how to proceed with the boy seemingly hell-bent on taking his own life, think of a two year projected budget to fund a project that is vital to your own peace and happiness, and to the peace and happiness of countless others.
Not that there is necessarily much peace and happiness in the remaining 37 seconds. Geez, I wish I’d starting coming to the point ten minutes ago. Look, there’s 13 seconds yet, now, eight and, soon enough, the final buzzer.
Googling Gratblahg
click to go to FezBook
Letter to Walter (draft 2.2)
Dear Walter:
I’ve been reading your books since my mother recommended Devil in A Blue Dress to me a few decades back. I admire the story-telling as much as the running themes of the power of imagination to change the world and the gentleness that is at the core of even your most hardened protagonists.
Reading Twelve Steps to Political Revelation not long ago I was struck by the section calling for changes in how education needs to work to ensure a more creative, critically thinking, multi-lingual populace. I agree that the generations coming up now are the last, best agents for the change needed to avert the looming disasters we face as a planet. You gave a great example at the Moth recently, those two young gay strangers on Christopher Street retooling the ugly word “nigger” into a shorthand for their brotherhood.
In the wake of Cheney and Bush I thought up my best bet for helping to bring about the kind of change we need to see. I’ve started a not-for-profit student-run animation workshop, called wehearyou.net, to listen to young children’s concerns and help them show the creativity that is so often ignored in our testing-obsessed prison-prep factory schools.
My hope is to have young kids produce works that will shame the more liberal of the Job Creator types (currently chafing at a theoretical 0.03% stock transaction tax) enough to fund what I envision as a grassroots movement to change the landscape of urban education, starting in the worst public schools I can find in NYC. I worked in one in Harlem for several years, so I’m intimately familiar with the challenges kids in those schools are up against.
I invite to you have a look at some of the kids’ work at wehearyou.net, along with my descriptions of the program I hope the potential of this program, directed and produced by young kids working as teams of creative problem-solvers, lights up your imagination. I would love to speak to you about the program. You can send me an email or call me at (… ellipsis added…). On my dream team of people of vision and action to work and brainstorm with, you’re very high on the list.
Yours sincerely,
[name withheld at request of ‘author’]
gratuitousblahg 