You collect yourself in the car. I never knew what that meant before.
I hate the Star Trek doors. I want to feel the weight of a door when you push on it. A building shouldn’t devour you. I don’t want to go in its maw.
There’s something wrong with everybody. Spectator or actor or stagehand or director; doesn’t matter. Everyone’s a mess. There’s a man in pajamas in a wheelchair on the curb smoking a cigarette. It’s twenty. You could grind him up and make a paste of pure corruption.
VCT. That means vinyl composition tile. Twelve inch squares. Hard. Cold. Everyone stares at it and walks. There’s nothing to see and that’s the point.
After a while it’s over. It’s late. What difference should it make in there what time it is? But we are humans no matter the VCT. The moon is up and the sun is down and the day is over and that’s that.
You go down the long lonesome corridor and stare at the flecks in the floor and there’s nothing and nobody for the last fifty yards. You come up hard at a door. There’s a badge and some writing and it doesn’t matter what it says. The room has no people and the television is screwed to the wall in the last place it should be, in the corner at the ceiling, and it yells at no one. Not even me. You stare slackjawed for a moment and the wraiths of some hoary joke are blurted out to the audience of dead souls in an empty room.
My older boy’s science teacher showed him a video made from Tom Lehrer’s musical recitation of the Table of Elements set to a tune from The Pirates of Penzance.
I don’t understand the thinking. Actually, I lied; I understand it perfectly –I think it’s foolish, that’s different.
Science is not interesting because Tom Lehrer wrote a funny ditty about it. Tom Lehrer is interesting because he wrote something witty about something boring. If you’re interested in the table of elements it’s interesting. Just like all things. The idea that all things can be made interesting to all people by making them get up and dance in presentation is silly. To put it in woodworking terms, pointing to the veneer doesn’t make the flakeboard underneath it any more interesting to look at. Besides, people truly jazzed about chemistry are so much funnier than people jazzed about jazz ragging on chemistry. Behold the Boron lady and Phil Spector, PHD: Chicks Dig Boron.
My son was somewhat delighted I knew all about Tom Lehrer and could recite many of his ditties from memory. The Table of Elements song is his least entertaining work I can recall. Short on funny, long in presentation. This one’s much darker, and gleeful:
A certain video hosting outfit erased, without notification, a video of my kid dancing because some venal grasping grabby entertainment company wants to beat pennies from children for every lick on Hollywood’s fecal lollipop, Fair Use under DMCA for mashups and spoofing be damned. So I’m (up)loaded for bear.
That coincided nicely with my son’s kindergarten administrators telling us that he’s: “unable to express ideas in front of a group, unable to selectively listen for sounds, follow multi-step directions,” and our supreme favorite: “unable to to complete assigned tasks in allotted time.”
I don’t have time to bring the little feller’s 522 piece Lego set suggested for 8-12 year olds and stand there while he assembles an entire Beach House, with absolutely no help, using nothing but a 72 page exploded diagram pamphlet. He does it faster than I could do it, but it takes a little while and we’re all too busy for that, and I’m not sure 72 pages qualifies as multi-step, because I’m a dolt. Likewise, I don’t have a video of our boy fearlessly performing a Smashmouth song in front of an audience of 250 or so at Lake Winnepesaukee when he was just four years old, because, of course, I was busy on stage performing with him at the time. I doubt that qualifies for selectively listening for sounds anyway, as the drummer kept coming in early and the boy ignored him.
A pretty girl sent me a picture of it, though:
You can tell he’s not an adult because adults never hold the microphone correctly like he is doing in the picture. Save your wisecracks; I know he’s cute and I look like hell. But cut me some slack, I had a temperature of 104 degrees the night before, as I was suffering from Lyme Disease just then but it was still undiagnosed. I looked like hell but the show went off on time, because I was hired to perform there and we take completing assigned tasks in the allotted time fairly seriously at our house. That assigned task was a four-and-a-half hour drive from our house, but somehow we managed.
The school administrator that summoned us to discuss my boy’s “inability to complete assigned tasks in the allotted time” came in, plopped a slovenly 8″ thick, undifferentiated and dogeared pile of foolscap paper on the table, and was sipping from a franchise restaurant disposable hot coffee container unavailable in the town I live in. And although the meeting was held at their school, had been postponed twice already, and she has a secretary, she was a full twenty-five minutes late.
My boy has never missed the bus.
So you’re “a group.” How’d my little boy do expressing himself in that video?
PS: I’m emailing this to the school administrator right now. Should I email her my earlier entry where I exposed another of our school system’s teachers masquerading as a teenager on the Internet? No, that would be cruel.
Microsoft Songsmith. Like so much of what’s generated under the vague heading of “tech,” it’s useless for anything productive or elegant. But it’s lying there lifeless on the digital ground and someone picks it up and puts it to “good” use anyway.
In a real way, the more profoundly useless a thing is, the more fun people seem to get out of using it. All Your Base Are Belong To Us and Dramatic Chipmunk and the glorified Gong Shows most contest entertainments supply are really the audience putting the fun in what is essentially humorless. Do you really think the suits thought Paula Abdul making dizzy remarks about high-school-talent-show-level singing was going to be a phenomenon? They put it on hoping they could sell ShamWows to shut-ins, and were as surprised as anybody when people made their own fun out of the dreck and made the show a success.
Songsmith supplies “musical” backing to you when you sing in the shower, only you’re not in the shower. Some mildly inspired person decided to strip familiar vocals out of popular songs and feed them into Songsmith’s hopper and see what came out.
It’s like looking at a car wreck on the highway as you roll slowly past the flares and state policemen waving flashlights. Fun!
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