Author: Dale

A lesson

Posted on by Dale

The plural of anecdote is not data, but I have a little story to share with you that illustrates some of where we are in the United States.

Many years ago, I was a wee media specialist at East Coweta High School.  You have to understand that I grew up in the city and attended Newnan High School in town, and that when I transferred as a teacher out to East Coweta, it was a definite culture shock.

This school was literally in the middle of the cotton field.  It was across the highway from a dirt track racing establishment.  And the students were rural.

The “upper class” of the school lived in the minuscule towns of Senoia and Sharpsburg; the rest lived out in the country, along roads which may or may not have been paved.  They lived among family and friends, and they always had.

The faculty knew all the students—the school was only 800 students, 6-12—and more than that, we knew who they were.  We knew their mama ‘n’ ’em, and nobody so much as sneezed without everyone else knowing about it.  We taught whole families, sometimes in generations.

This was in the 80s, and this close-knit community was the water in which all my students swam.

Cut to twenty years later.  I was then the media specialist at Newnan Crossing Elementary School, and I was doing a lesson on the atlas for second graders.[1] I showed them the different sections, how the maps were laid out and numbered, and how the index worked.  They were fascinated, I’m sure.

We looked up a couple of things to start with, probably Atlanta and New York City and Washington, DC.  Then I asked them to look up where they were born.

Out of a class of about 24 7-year-olds, half of them were not even born in North America.[2]  That’s right: half a second grade class in Newnan, GA, were born on other continents, and I mean all of them except Antarctica.  We had Asians, Indians, Africans, South and Central Americans, and even Europeans.

It was an eye-opener for me, to be sure.  I felt as if I were not in Kansas any more.

And trust me, Kansas knows it, too.  All those people with unpronounceable last names, whose grandfather was not on the school board or attended any of the churches hereabouts.  Their funny food, their funny accents, their funny clothes sometime.  And so many of them!  Look at all the stores springing up that either have names we don’t understand, or a definitely not-from-around-here person and their seemingly endless children behind the counter as we buy our Slim Jims.

It’s no defense, of course, for anti-immigrant behavior or voting for a man who promises to toss out millions of people just because they don’t look like you.  But it is an explanation: most of the students I taught (and the world they lived in) were kind-hearted, but they didn’t like new and they didn’t like change.

The U.S. has changed and is changing.  They have fought back in regrettable ways.

——–—
[1] This was not because my second graders needed to know how to pull a book off the shelf and look up a country, but because of course it was on one or more of the standardized tests which so improve our students’ achievement.

[2] And less than a quarter of the class was even born in Coweta County.

A meditation on the locker room

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You should know that last week I joined the gym.  Ugh.  But especially during the winter months I become more and more sedentary, and it’s just not healthy.

The problem is that the only—and I mean the only—form of exercise I can stand for more than five minutes is swimming.  Yes, I can walk around my lovely neighborhood and downtown (risking that I’ll become the next ‘character’ out there), and yes, we have an elliptical downstairs, but OH MY GOD THE TEDIUM.

Why swimming is any less tedious is just one of those weird mental glitches, I suppose.

So I joined up out at OneLife Fitness, gaining a student rate because of my steely-eyed insistence that I would never, not once, use any machine, take any class, and in general not even look at any part of the facility other than the pool.  Which is both saline and heated, thank you.

I used to swim regularly back when the old Racquetball Club was open on Bullsboro Drive. I would leave school and go straight there every day.  But then it closed and I just never got back into the habit, possibly because the alternative gyms were not on my way home.

It is important to understand that I was never an athletic child.  On the contrary, I was a stick-thin weakling.  Super thin.  Starvation-level thin.  All the other boys grew chests and biceps; I never did, so that’s been a point of envy for a very long time here.

Also, because I was not athletic I was not a habitué of the locker room.  I vividly remember the first time I entered the locker room at Stegeman Hall at UGA for a required PE course.  Merciful heavens, all these creatures walking around stark naked, all bigger and burlier and sleeker than I would ever be.  I was daunted, if that’s the word I’m looking for.

So when I joined the Racquetball Club, I was surprised at how quickly I got over all that.  Trotting from the locker to the sauna to the shower without bothering with a towel just became second nature.  I was not even abashed when one day a member of the church choir I directed at the time inquired about a tattoo that otherwise he would have never seen. Part of that was being 40-something instead of 16, of course, but part of it also was coming to terms with my own body and what it was.

I was therefore not concerned about this new venture, other than the usual uncertainty about the culture therein.  (For the record, out-and-out nudity doesn’t seem to be the thing there.)  It’s a very nice locker room, all wood and tile and luxurious appointments.  There’s a flatscreen TV. Tuned to Fox.

So why am I writing about this at all?  This gym is a much bigger, much busier place than the Racquetball Club, and fitness culture has likewise ballooned since the last time I swam, so there are a lot more men in the locker room than the old place, and more than a few of those men are beautifully put together, prime examples of young manhood.  It’s kind of thing that you would be lying if you said you didn’t notice.

And I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me aware of my now-60-something body in comparison.  But you know what?  Because of what I’ve done in thinking through, planning for, and participating in 3 Old Men—my theme camp for burns—all that happens when I see a nicely built younger man is that I think, “Yep.  My body doesn’t look like that, because I am an Old Man.  I have the body I have because of who I am, of what I’ve lived through and experienced. Cool.”

Plus the godawful amount of work they have to put into maintaining that physique.  OH MY GOD THE TEDIUM.  Ugh.

To see what my thinking was that led to 3 Old Men, at least about the physicality of our bodies, see here and here.

Who you gonna believe?

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It’s not often you can escape the loop of he-said-she-said-nuh’UH when it comes to the evidence available to us these days.  All those screaming memes on Facebook, convinced that Those People Did This THING, Can You Believe It??

Well, no, you can’t.  I even have posited the Lyles Rule of Internet Fuppery, which I have to deploy so often that I have a macro to type it up for me. Watch: Remember the Lyles Rule of Internet Fuppery: If it’s too outrageous to be believed, don’t believe it.

Remember the Lyles Rule of Internet Fuppery: If it’s too outrageous to be believed, don’t believe it.

Remember the Lyles Rule of Internet Fuppery: If it’s too outrageous to be believed, don’t believe it.

Remember the Lyles Rule of Internet Fuppery: If it’s too outrageous to be believed, don’t believe it.

Enough of that.

However, this recent foofaraw over the attendance at the Current Occupant’s installation has given us a break out of the endless loop.  Let’s recap.

Soon after the installation, this little image started popping up all over the intertubes:

Look, it said: on the left, Obama’s 2009 inauguration, and on the right, the Current Occupant’s.

That’s a pretty stark difference.  Incredibly stark.  Unbelievably stark (but I repeat myself).

Once again, boys and girls: Remember the Lyles Rule of Internet Fuppery: If it’s too outrageous to be believed, don’t believe it.

So my first inclination was to think, you know, I’m thinking that second photo must have been taken much earlier in the morning, before all the loyal Trumpsters found their way out of the Metro and into the daylight.  Of course, the Capitol faces west, and we can already see that the second photo was at least taken… after noon?  So maybe this is after the Trumpsters wandered off?

More research was required.

We will pause a moment here for a short lesson.  That’s what you do, folks, when presented with evidence that makes you cock your head to one side.  You go try to verify it.

But all the evidence confirmed that, sure enough, the man claiming to have swept the election in a “historic landslide”[1] couldn’t even fill up the Mall.

Reaction was predictable.  The photo was taken earlier/later in the day.  (It wasn’t.)  Trumpsters, being the respectable, god-bothering, horny-handed laborers that they are, had to work at their jobs (THEIR JOBS, KENNETH!) and therefore couldn’t attend the coronation.  (Pffft.)

Still, there was no way of knowing, was there?  Hold that thought, we’re going to come back to it in a big way.

Then, I accidentally found this:

And there you have it.  The entire day, in time lapse video.  VIDEO, KENNETH.  No editing, no chicanery, no claiming that a 10:00 am photo was at the moment of actual inauguration.  Even your racist aunt can see that the Mall never filled up.[2]

The reaction by the Current Occupant was completely predictable.  Obsessed with ratings, he went into a rage (which as late as yesterday had still not subsided) about the lying media out to get him blah blah blah.  He sent out his poor press secretary to throw a tantrum in his stead, and Sean Spicer was immediately eaten alive by the world at large, including by people whose job it is to be on his side.

That was followed by the infamous Kellyanne Conway “alternative facts” appearance on Face the Nation, and off we went.[3]

Is this important?  The answer depends on the antecedent of “this.”

If “this” is “How many people were at the inauguration on Jan 20, 2017, as opposed to Jan 20, 2009?”, then no, it’s not important.  Only insecure wannabe strongmen think that kind of thing is important.

However, if “this” is “What kind of relationship to the truth does the current administration have?”, then we have a real problem.

Let me preface this part of the post by saying that we should all keep in mind the principle of Trump’s Razor, i.e., the safest bet where Trump is concerned is the stupidest possible answer.  It’s entirely possible that neither he nor his minions (or puppetmasters) are doing any of this on purpose.

It’s also entirely possible that doesn’t matter, because the damage is going to be the same.

First, the whole #AlternativeFacts thing is not a new phenomenon.  All the way back in 2011 we had Sen. Jon Kyl (Guess which party–AZ) to kick around with his “not intended to be a factual statement” bullshit.  And as I said at the time, what the hell was it intended to be, then?

The answer is that it was intended to manipulate the minds of listeners, and it still is.

And the manipulation it intends is to make you a) doubt whether anything is true; and b) not care one way or the other.

This post is too long as it is, and so to explain my point I’m going to send you off to read the following two articles:

Go.  You have reading for homework.

—————

[1] He didn’t.

[2] Further evidence.

[3] If nothing else, these events seem to have shaken our news media out of their stenographers‘ dreams.

Hi ho the glamorous life

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You know how it is, the endless performances and appearances that make life such a grind.  This weekend, for example, I had two galas to attend, both on Saturday night.

Fortunately, they were right across the street from each other.  Backstreet Arts, the dream of Kim Ramey, opens its doors next week, and started its gala at 7:00.  Newnan Theatre Company, my old stomping grounds, started its gala at 8:00.  So this was not a problem, despite the fact that as a performer I was supposed to be backstage at 6:30.

The purpose of the NTC gala was to announce the 2017–2018 season, i.e., the season that begins in August and runs through next year.  I will be directing Rick Elice’s Peter & the Starcatcher, the dazzling, touching story of how a nameless orphan boy became Peter Pan.  It auditions a year from now and opens March 8, 2018.  Mark your calendars.

Here’s my intrepid cast, who performed the Prologue and a slightly modified Scene One:

Rich Aagesen, John Caldwell, JP VanSant, me, Molly McInturff, Chaz Ferguson, Kevin McInturff, puss.

We had a great time slamming it together in two rehearsals, and the audience seemed to love it.  I’ll be blogging about my progress in preparing for the full production over at Lichtenbergianism.com, where I will be showing how the Precepts of Lichtenbergianism are used in practice.

I would offer to share with you the entire season, but for some reason involving schlepping back and forth between the two galas, I didn’t quite catch the whole thing.

Backstreet Arts was actually a two-parter.  There was the gala on Saturday night, then an open house on Sunday afternoon.  The following photos are from the open house.

The gala was swanky and elegant.  The open house was casual and open to the public.  Those of us who are going to instruct/assist/encourage anyone who walks in the door set up sign-up sheets for everyone.  The space is large, clean, beautifully appointed.

And look at these cookies!

Here’s my little set-up:

I got five or six cards, and I’m sure that once Backstreet is fully open for business, we will slowly build a walk-in clientele from Bridging the Gap, the back of whose building we occupy.

And that’s what I did with my weekend.

New toys!

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So I did a thing.  In an effort to reduce costs around here, we went to the AT&T place to see about getting all our devices onto one account.  In the process, we ended up with new phones, of course.

We were overdue.  Both of us had iPhone 4’s, and that’s pretty antique.  Both were completely functional, but it’s always a matter of time before Apple leaves us behind and we can no longer update the phone or the apps on it.  Better to make the jump to a phone that behaves completely differently than the one you’ve carried for years.

That’s what happened to the Lovely First Wife’s laptop: a little MacBook from years ago, it was still running Mountain Lion or some such as the operating system, and she could no longer update the browser, which threw monkey wrenches into her online payments.  So she got a MacBook Air last month and is humming along.

Meanwhile, upstairs, my old 2012 MacBook Pro was beginning to hiccup.  The battery has been corrupt for a couple of years now; the trackpad no longer allowed me to click and drag; the hard drive was uncomfortably full.

And then last week, I was working on a blog post for lichtenbergianism.com, and suddenly the screen went black, and I found myself looking at the log in screen.  The computer had logged me out without warning.

This has never happened to me, not once in over 30 years of Mac ownership, so I knew it was time to start shopping.

I am now the owner of a brand new MacBook Pro, the spiffy one with the new Touch Bar and Touch ID, which is going to take some getting used to.

I haven’t transferred All The Things from my old laptop yet; the cable I needed to do that was not the cable that ended up in my shopping bag yesterday.  (I’m not going to say that the helpful young salesperson grabbed the wrong box, but the helpful young salesperson grabbed the wrong box.). I know I could do it via wifi, but I can’t imagine how slow and painful that would be.

So after the store opens in another 30 minutes, I’ll be off to correct that error, and then I’ll probably be stuck shepherding my apps and documents onto this new machine.

Light a candle for me.

School improvement… how does it even work?

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Betsy DeVos, super-wealthy Dominionist, is the current nominee for Secretary of Education.  She is rabidly anti-public education, which is pretty odd since neither she nor anyone she knows, including her children, have ever been involved in any kind of public school.  Ever.  Not one.

Instead, she champions that rightwing shibboleth of “competition,” because competition makes everyone better, right?  You know, like when you line up the whole class of children and make them all race to the other end of the playground, and that one chubby kid just keeps getting faster and faster every day?  Just like that?

That’s right, boys and girls, if you let “the money follow the child,” then if a child is in a “failing” school, his parents can “choose” to send that child to any other [charter/private/religious] school of their choice, and presto! their child can now “succeed” instead of being “trapped” in a “failing” school.

OK, let’s look at that, because there’s a lot of sleight of hand going on here.

First of all, who decides when a school is “failing”?  That’s an easy one: we have standards set by a variety of levels of government from local to federal, and if a school doesn’t meet those standards, they are “failing.”  It is unusually curious that those standards for the most part align with the socioeconomic status of the students in any school.  A recent study (the link to which I cannot find; you’re just going to have to trust me) found that you didn’t need to run students through all those tests: you could get the same results by tabulating their parents’ income and education level.  THE SAME RESULTS, KENNETH.

Second, DeVos is militant that those standards should not apply to her charter/private/religious schools.  Is that incredible to you?  Go see for yourself.  That’s a pretty sweet deal: enforce standards that make it impossible for certain schools to “succeed,” then suck their funding dry for your for-profit schools while evading those same standards.  I’ve written about this before.

And here’s the biggest sleight of hand of all: Everyone has been convinced to keep their eye on the charter/private/schools and argue about whether they are “succeeding” enough to justify draining public schools of their funding and students.  But that’s not the question.  The question is whether all this “healthy competition” is actually causing the “failing” schools to suddenly succeed.  In other words, is the chubby kid getting faster and faster every day just because you took some of the faster kids off the playground?

I submit to you that he is not, and that the whole “school choice” plan is a con of the most blatant and disgusting sort.  At no point are these people actually concerned about improving all schools for all children.  DeVos has never presented such a plan, nor will she.  She wants to kill off public education once and for all, and the only reason I can think why she would want to do this is to take the money and run.  Oh, and that whole Dominionist thing.

Keep your eye on the lady, folks.

Not so simple question

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Since the Congress is determined to throw healthcare in the country into a death spiral, I thought it would be worth asking:

What is your plan to protect the gains we have made in providing health coverage to our citizens?

I of course do not expect a response.  These people do not actually care what their constituents think.

Backstreet Writers

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One of my Lichtenbergian proposed efforts for this year is to develop a writing/writers program at Backstreet Arts.

As with any major project, I have a Waste Book:

I began it back in 2015, on a camping trip on a sweltering couple of days in July.  Kim Ramey and I had been talking about her dream of establishing a free art studio for homeless/underserved populations, and several streams of thought had begun to merge in my life that led me to this goal.

The first was the realization that my life was no longer governed by cycles, e.g., the school year, the GHP cycle, the theatre season.  I no longer knew where I would be and what I would be doing a year in advance.  My life was now linear and it was up to me to plan it.

The second was an exhibit we saw in Asheville that featured the publications of Temporary Services, an organization in Chicago that publishes a broad range of work, from serious authors to folk/street/outsider writers.  I began to think that I needed to be doing something similar here, although I am under no illusions that I am going to end up with a major operation like that.

So yesterday those of us who are going to offer classes/workshops at Backstreet had a meeting to begin shaping what our services were going to look like.  I pulled this waste book out and looked over what I had written eighteen months ago.  It was instructive.

Here are my Abortive Attempts:

It is my VISION to create a space where anyone in the community is comfortable enough to come and tell their story to the rest of the community in printed form.

It will be the MISSION of the Writing Project to produce printed material—books, booklets, pamphlets [et al.]—that reflect the history of members of the community, particularly those who have been marginalized by our society.

  • The art of writing is a political act.
  • Storytelling is innately human.
  • [blank]

I CONFESS THAT

  • In my privilege, I have no idea who the writers may be, nor what their stories are, and therefore
  • I have as much to learn as anyone who comes to me.
  • I have no idea what the needs of our writers may be.
  • The quality of our publications may or may not be “worth” reading, but
  • Every work we publish creates a new center of influence, the ripples of which may affect a reader or potential writer in ways we cannot foretell, and
  • The more circles of influence we can establish, the more likely it is that we will produce works of real value.

Now that I actually have to Do The Thing, I find that these scribbled notes are still valid.  I have no idea of who is going to be coming to work with me.  They may be nearly illiterate; they may already be polished writers.  They may write drivel; they may have a compelling story to tell.  They may be eager learners; they may be obnoxious know-it-alls.

In other words, it will be just like teaching writing in my classroom.

At the moment, pending further reality, I am thinking we may shoot for some kind of quarterly journal kind of thing, perhaps a 16-page booklet, that we can put out at the coffee shops, waiting rooms, etc., to create those ripples.  Having a deadline and a venue for publication [AUDIENCE] is also a great motivator for anyone.

Whatever my plans are, of course, they all have to wait until I actually have writers.  I’ll keep you posted.

Writing, art, and galas galore

Posted on by Dale

You should do these things.

NTC Season Gala

This Sat, Jan 21, at 8:00, the Newnan Theatre Company will announce its 2017–18 season.  I will be directing the big spring show, [redacted].  No, the name of the show is not [redacted].  The name of the show is literally redacted, since it hasn’t been announced yet.  But I am directing it next year and will be directing a scene from it for the Gala.  (I will also be appearing in it, since apparently there are not eleven males who could give up four nights in their total life to do this scene.  I’m not bitter or anything.  Yet.)

Backstreet Arts Gala

Backstreet Community Arts (full name) is ready to open its doors, and to celebrate they too are having a gala.  And how convenient is this?  It’s across the street and about the same time as NTC’s!  (Both were trying to avoid competing with Newnan’s Burns Supper on the next weekend, and so they ran headlong into each other.)  That’s Sat, Jan 21, at 7:00—so you could start at Backstreet and end up at NTC.  I understand there will be a signature cocktail, which I did not create.

a clean, well-lighted space

Backstreet Arts Open House

Then on Sun, Jan 22, 2:00–4:00, Backstreet will have an open house so you can come and meet the artists who will be offering classes/workshops for the target population.  At both events you can give money to help support this group’s mission, which is to provide space, supplies, and instruction for those in our community who would not otherwise have the opportunity to express themselves through art.

I will be there because I will be starting the Backstreet Writers.  Inspired by some of the work of Temporary Services in Chicago, I want to see if I can provide a venue for people to tell their story.  That’s all I have at the moment; since I don’t know who will be interested enough to attend any seminars, nor their skill level, nor anything; all I can do is say that I’m doing this thing, welcome anyone who shows up, and then meet their needs however I can.

You will recall that this project is actually one of my Lichtenbergian Proposed Efforts. I will write in more detail about my thinking about this tomorrow.  In the meantime, here’s a photo of me that Kim Ramey took up against her angel wall:

You see why you want to be there.