This is just to say

Monday, September 9, 2019

I love copying my kids’ drawings and writings into my diary. Copying seems like a mindless activity when you first start out, but by the time you’ve finished your copy, you usually learn something about the thing you’re copying and/or you discover something of your own.

The first grader wrote this poem last night at the pizza joint. (He and his brother have been watching the poetry episode of Classical Baby and reciting WCW’s “This is Just to Say.”)

While I copied the poem, I noticed how he writes his lowercase a’s and how he forms the letters starting from the bottom. I thought about Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems and about how the size of the paper we write on affects what we write. I thought about how quickly kids move towards parody with their own work, and how here I was, again, making a copy of a copy.

When I copied the tablecloth, I noticed that the original pattern could become a skull or some kind of death mask.

When I copied the exploding earth, I wondered what was with the teeth, until I realized they were exploded parts of the poles.

Copying is a way of paying closer attention.

Side note: I find it interesting how whenever I post something “dark” that my kids make, strangers assume that they’re “dark” kids. They’re actually quite cheerful kids… it’s called “imagination,” man!

Keep it on The One

Sunday, September 8, 2019

Prince would get mad when people called his music magical: “Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules.”

Here’s Bootsy Collins laying down the #1 rule of funk: Keep it on the one.

“It’s however you feel, you just gotta fit it in that little space that you’ve got…. Once you got it, you can do anything you want to do with it! Just keep it on THE ONE!”

(Lynda Barry shows this video to her comics classes.)

Collins learned about The One from his former bandleader James Brown. Collins thought he was “killin’ ’em” with all his wild playing, but Brown set him straight:

“Son, give me the one. You give me the one, you can do all those other things.” So, I started to understand: If I give you the one, I can do all these other crazy things.” James Brown was the one that told me: “Son, you need to give me the one.” […] He didn’t know the power of that. That changed my whole life. Once I learned where the one was at? It was on.”

What did James Brown himself say about The One? In the introduction to his biography, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, RJ Smith quotes him:

“The ‘One’ is derived from the Earth itself, the soil, the pine trees of my youth. And most important, it’s on the upbeat—ONE two THREE four—not the downbeat, one TWO three FOUR, that most blues are written. Hey, I know what I’m talking about! I was born to the downbeat, and I can tell you without question there is no pride in it. The upbeat is rich, the downbeat is poor. Stepping up proud only happens on the aggressive ‘One,’ not the passive Two, and never on lowdownbeat. In the end, it’s not about music—it’s about life.”

The One is both practical and mystical. It’s about artistic freedom through the constraint of form, but it’s also about something bigger.

Here’s Miles Davis at the end of his autobiography:

I have never felt this creative. I feel like the best if yet to come. Like Prince says when he’s talking about hitting the beat and getting to the music and the rhythm, I’m going to keep “getting up on the one,” brother, I’m just going to try to keep my music getting up on the one, getting up on the one every day I play. Getting up on the one. Later.

Half mooned

Saturday, September 7, 2019

A few days ago at Trader Joe’s my 4-year-old grabbed a box of Half Moon cookies off the shelf. Only later did I realize the moon was in its 1st quarter and we were eating Half Moon cookies on the half moon!

And in another coincidence (?) my friend Jason Polan posted this on his Instagram the next day:

Listen to the voice

Friday, September 6, 2019

I’m still thinking about that interview with Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk:

The show’s most frequent listener these days might in fact be Ray himself. He said he still listens to the show “all the time,” mostly to hear his brother’s voice and remind himself about times they had together. To remind himself of the jokes they shared. To remind himself of the good times.

“I love to hear his laugh, and I love to hear his take on things,” Ray said. “It’s a rare opportunity that I’ve had to still communicate with my brother that most people don’t get.”

A few years ago at I heard Cord Jefferson tell a story at Pop Up Magazine about a voicemail his mother left him a month before she died of cancer, and about “the power of the human voice and what we lose when a voice goes away.” (At one point he cites a study that concluded a Mother’s phone call is as comforting as a hug.) “It seems increasingly worth considering what we’re missing out on when we neglect the voices of the people we love.”

My wife and I used to make homemade audiobooks with our phones and play them for the boys in the stroller. Now the boys can read on their own, and I wonder whether those recordings will survive, whether anyone will ever listen to them again.

My mom has an old tape of me at age 5, singing Christmas songs for her. A few years ago, I archived it onto a CD so she could play it on her boombox whenever she wants.

My first grader has recorded songs for several years now, and he’s so obsessed with recording everything around him that he asks me at least once a day to record something on my phone. Until this moment, I haven’t realized what a favor he’s been doing me. I can listen to his little voice wherever I am, whenever I want, as long as my hard drives last.

Mechanics who hate cars

Thursday, September 5, 2019

I used to take my ’97 Honda Accord to Sam Bell at the Lusty Wrench in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He recently closed up his shop after 40 years, and this is what he had to say about cars:

I was reminded of Sam when I read this profile of Car Talk’s Ray Magliozzi:

Let’s get something out of the way up front: Ray Magliozzi hates cars. And not in a my-car-is-a-pain-in-the-ass-and-it’s-always-breaking kind of way (though there is some of that too), but in a they’re-killing-the-planet kind of way. “How could you not?” Ray told me earlier this year. “They’re ruining the fabric of our lives.”

Ray talked to a podcast called The War on Cars about how much his brother and co-host Tom Magliozzi hated cars, too:

It was kind of odd that we did the show together for so many years, but he hated the idea of cars consuming our lives, our money, clogging up the streets, polluting the air, all the things that you hate, too…. My brother hated cars. And yet he—for years and years, I tried to convince him that if he didn’t live in Cambridge and wasn’t able to get around with public transportation or by walking, he’d have to have a car that was reliable…. But he was against cars because of all the things they do to our lives and to our world. And I agree on all of those points.

That was, of course, part of the genius of Car Talk: You didn’t have to even like cars to enjoy listening to it. (Or making it, obviously.)

The same was true of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting. From a 2001 NYTimes piece:

Ross’s expanding circle of viewers are, for the most part, not even painting, nor do they have any plans to start. They watch because ”The Joy of Painting” is the most relaxing show on television….

“It’s funny to talk to these people,” said Joan Kowalski, the media director of Bob Ross Inc. and Walt’s daughter. “Because they think they’re the only ones who watch to take a nap. Bob knew about this. People would come up to him and say, `I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’ve been putting me to sleep for 10 years.’ He’d love it.”

“There are people who just like to hear him talk,” one station manager said. “We even get letters from blind people who say they tune in because he gives them hope.”

And while we’re talking famous public media figures, Mister Rogers hated television and only got into it because he thought he could make it a lot better. (A kind of negative self-definition.)