Mark Pritchard's Open Salon Blog

Lisa B's 'Poetry of Groove'

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:11:25 -0500

Here's my friend Lisa B, with a nice little video for her jazz-pop tune "The Poetry of Groove." I like the dancing and the kinda DIY low tech quality.

Lisa's one of a circle or artists and activists I got to know in the mid-80s, among them my great friend Christine (lower left in this picture), who was then a dancer and performance artist, and is now a painter in the desert. Then Lisa was mostly a poet; now she's a singer. Then I was a performance artist and singer (as seen in this photo); now I'm a writer. I like thinking about the journey we've all made.

Trojan joins Shell, Lexus as OS sponsor?

Sat, 7 Nov 2009 17:11:14 -0500

I know some OS members were a little upset when Shell became a sponsor, and befuddled when Lexus joined them. From there it would seem the logical progression would be Hilton -- gas up your Lexus and drive to a hotel.

But OS is apparently skipping the hotel sponsorship and going straight to what happens in that hotel. From what I've heard about what goes on between some OS members, it seems to me that Trojan is a COMPLETELY APPROPRIATE Open Salon sponsor.

Stay classy!

Update: I wish to point out that 5:04 pm is the exact time the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area in 1989. Yes, the earth positively moved.

Think you deleted that ill-advised blog post? Think again

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 16:11:05 -0500

All of us have, at one time or another, posted someone on a blog that is angry, stupid, insulting, possibly even illegal (threatening, etc.). And then we think better of it and take it down.

It's gone, right? No longer exists?

Sorry, no. Google sucked it up, and perhaps the best way to demonstrate is to use Google Reader, their RSS feed reader.

I ran across this today when I discovered that one of the bloggers whose feed I subscribe to had posted this:

Obviously I had to take that last post down, but thanks for your comments. I'll sort things out, one way or another. But really: it is a shitty line of work.

Hmm! That made me curious, and since I had missed "that last post," I just changed my Google Reader to display "all items" instead of only "new items." Voila:

There it is, in all its angry, frustrated, glory.

You can't prevent Google from sucking up and saving anything you post to teh internets. But the moral of the story is: If you do post something, then take it down, don't draw attention to it by saying "I took down my last ill-advised post." It just makes people curious.

Something writers should (but don't need to) do

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 17:11:03 -0500

Here's a fine column from the MSNBC site about the Chinese drywall scandal. Briefly, the construction boom that coincided with the recovery from Hurricane Katrina and the real estate bubble meant that U.S. manufacturers could not meet the demand for drywall, a crucial component of building construction. So contractors turned to Chinese manufacturers, and some of the imported drywall was toxic.

Ugh. But my post is not actually about the quality of Chinese industrial imports, the housing bubble, or the economy. It's about grammar.

Here's the last sentence of the story:

China needs to understand that if it wants to be our trading partner, it needs to be a partner in every sense of the word.

The writer wants China and its business owners to cooperate more, to see themselves as fellow citizens with the people who consume their products, and thus be partners in globalization. But I think his sentence actually says something different from what he intended.

It's not China which "needs" to understand what it means to be a partner in globalization. China acts like it doesn't give a shit, and by doing so, it is prospering. Clearly China does not have a "need" to understand anything. It's the U.S. and other countries that need China to understand the partnership concept. I think the author should have written:

China should understand that if it wants to be our trading partner, then it must learn to be a partner in every sense of the word.

All this is to say that the writer of that article has fallen into the pit of the strange new use, circa the late 1970s, of the word "need." Sometime around the 1970s, political and social activists and theorists started using the word "need" instead of the word "should" in sentences like:

The men need to give up their moonlighting jobs and share in child-raising.

That is from a Dec. 6, 1970 story in the New York Times headlined Prescribing Careers--Not Tranquilizers--For Women. This sentence isn't talking about men's "needs" but about women's needs. Substitute "should" for "need to" and the sentence is just as clear, but more honest.

Or look at this sentence from an Apr. 9, 1975 article in the Penn State Daily Collegian:

Americans need to understand that all the children in Vietnam orphanages aren't orphans.

Really? What need is met by that understanding? There's no need at all; Americans continue to thrive whether or not they have the understanding sugested by the writer.

As you can tell, this is a bugaboo with me. But compare the following two sentences and you'll understand the real difference between using "need to" and "should":

Writers need to use the words "need" and "should" properly.

Writers should use the words "need" and "should" properly.

See the difference? In the first one, I'm making a prescriptive judgment about other writers, that they have some strange "need" to use proper grammar. Clearly writers do not need to use proper grammar in order to thrive, but they would be well-advised to. (In some cases it's essential. For example, it would be all right to say that "Newspaper reporters need to use proper grammar or they will be fired.") The second sentence, with "should," contains merely my opinion.

Personally I think it's weird that this "need to" construction has become so widespread. Why do we think it's all right for people to constantly prescribe what others "need to" do? How do I know what others need?

People should know better.

Woebegone

Tue, 3 Nov 2009 22:11:45 -0500

His voice is just a whisper, but amplified by the microphone, it rolls out over the audience, low and mellifluous. What isn't soaked up, by the sellout crowd and the velvet stage curtains, resounds warmly in the auditorium.

They've been waiting for him. Standing in the wings during the early parts of the show as a klezmer-bluegrass band plays, he can feel the audience's tension. They'll smile widely at the bands, laugh generously at the skits, and give a big hand to everybody.

But they don't come for the country-polka-shapenote singing Prairie Grass Girls. They will never buy an album by the delta-blues-Appalachian-jazz Hep Cat Swinging Cowboys. They're waiting for this, his monologue.

When he utters the first words -- which rarely vary, the better to signal that the waiting is over and the main attraction has begun -- "It was a quiet week in our little town..." -- half the audience applauds for nothing, as if he were Liza Minnelli and the piano player had just plinked out the introduction to "New York, New York." Then they lean back and sigh with pleasure. This is what they came for.

What's he going to talk about this week? The same thing -- loneliness, frustration, pain and death; the despair of those who long to break away, and the smug self-satisfaction of those who don't have the imagination to. But because his stories are told gently, and because they're set in a Normal Rockwell small town, people think they're just cute stories.

Look at 'em -- drinking up his words like cats licking up milk. Nostalgia for a small-town past most of these folks never knew. They don't live in small towns. They live in suburbs, and they go to yoga and Pilates and shop at Whole Foods. They have double masters degrees in English and Psychology, and half of them have their own blogs. Yet they want to spend two hours pretending, pretending with him, that they all live in a fantasy world where there's one stop light, one grocery store, one bar, where they've never heard of WalMart.

Now it's time for a laugh, a sure-fire one. Since they're doing the show from home base in St. Paul, there's one sure-fire laugh. As sure as Woody Allen could get a laugh making fun of his Jewishness, as sure as Richard Pryor could get a laugh with the n-word, he can get a big belly-laugh by referring to only thing about his audience that is remotely ethnic. It doesn't matter what it's about, or even if there's a joke at all, as long as he can work a sentence around to ending with the word "Lutherans."

Man, they love that. How long has he been standing up here? Not today -- how many years? Since the early 80s, and the show has hardly changed. He knows why they like it -- it's reassuring, like a Starbucks or a chain motel room -- the same, week after week.

Take that detective skit, it hasn't changed since 1990. The story never makes sense and God knows it's not funny. The audience barely even laughs. But at the end, they applaud just as warmly as they do for anything else.

He knows -- has known for a long time -- that they're not really listening. The detective who never solves anything, who never falls for the dame, who is sidetracked as easily as a character in an Ishiguro novel -- who is doomed to repeat, week after week, the same failure with the badly-voiced femme fatale, the same confusions over small things like keys and street names. Don't they understand -- It's modernism! It's Beckett! It's the theater of the absurd! The jokes aren't supposed to be funny.

They don't get it; still, they laugh politely, and then the Bulgarian tango singers file onto the stage.

Same thing with his monologue -- nobody's really listening. What's he talking about? The Lutheran pastor has to perform the farmer's funeral using hymns from the 1890s that no one knows, with the second verse in Norwegian, so he stays up half the night translating hymn verses from Victorian English to bad Norwegian and pasting the words into Photoshop. That's the thing -- it's not like the town is truly stuck in the past. People have cell phones and cable TV -- the better to make them miserable. But his audience just laughs. They know he'll never really overturn the mise-en-scene. A teenage girl might get pregnant, but it won't be because she was raped. A sensitive boy might dream of leaving town, and he might actually do it, but he won't shoot up the high school with an AK-47. There are certain boundaries, and everyone knows what they are.

He's tried making things edgier, veering into politics from time to time. Before the 2004 election he expressed outrage, attacked the Iraq war, said he was ashamed about Abu Ghraib. His audiences applauded in the same warm way, and a columnist even compared him to Walter Cronkite turning against the Vietnam War, saying "If you've lost Keillor, you've lost America." But in the end it didn't make a bit of difference; Bush was re-elected anyway.

Since then, the stories are sadder. Fans of his work notice that he's killing off some characters. The owner of the tavern, the old Catholic priest, the organist at the Lutheran Church. The Norwegian Bachelor Farmers have been dying for twenty years; he kills another one today, and soon there will be none left. The young pitcher on the town's very minor league baseball team suffers a living death by never making it to the majors. If the pastor preaches a brilliant sermon, it is drowned out by the crying baby, the sound of the agnostic across the street mowing his lawn, and the high-pitched buzz of teenagers surreptitiously listening to iPods.

And if people crack, their breakdown is quiet. The name of the place alone -- doesn't anybody get it? Would it be any clearer if he'd called it the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here-ville?

Well, he's not stuck like one of his characters. He got out. Not once, but twice.

First he got a job on the New Yorker. He could have become the next Thurber, if only he hadn't followed the dictum to write about what you know. A few years later he was back, doing a radio show that has turned into this monster.

Then after 15 years he said the hell with it. He ran off with a Danish woman and moved to Copenhagen. But the dark, endless Scandinavian winter was like being confined in the world's largest maximum security prison -- by comparison, winter in Minnesota is like a night in the drunk tank.

He gets a signal from the stage manager -- it's time to bring the monologue to a close. Somehow he has got the Lutheran pastor in a car on the melting ice in the middle of the lake with the ghost of the Norwegian Bachelor Farmer whose funeral he just conducted. Since Lutherans don't believe in exorcism, the pastor politely asks the ghost to leave, but the ghost replies, "You're cold? I'll show you cold," and clutching at the door handle, his dead, white, already translucent fingers threaten to open the door and flood the car with ice water. And the pastor begins to cry and pray to God, "Don't leave me here. Don't let me die like this," so God in the form of the monologist sends an ice boat that has gotten loose from its moorings and is spinning crazily across the lake, and the pastor manages to jump into the hull of the ice boat as the car begins to sink. The pastor is taken by the boat not in the direction of town but, like Jonah, far away from where he wants to be, way to the other side of the lake, where he spends the night huddled on the shore with nothing to keep him warm but a fire which he started by burning the pages from his Bible, just the Apocrypha was enough to get it started, and since Lutherans don't recognize the Apocrypha anyway, nothing was really lost. The next morning he hikes around the lake and back into town, where he sits down to write another sermon to be delivered next Sunday, and the new organist will play a hymn, and everyone will wait expectantly as he rises to deliver his sermon, and everything will be just as it was.