Things that people on Metafilter have said “should be taught in schools”:
- Creationism (x 2)
- The skill of questioning the veracity and value of an information source
- Good literature
- “applying basic skills to accomplish daily tasks”
- these first three paragraphs
- The latest accepted standard for page markup
- This letter
- “ignoring people unless they can have a direct effect upon my life”
My buddy Beth is a choir director who came to visit me in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago. She made me a lovely list of musical recommendations that managed to combine my indie rock tendencies with her love of Renaissance music. Here’s the list, posted mostly for my easy access and so I’m allowed to throw away the index card:
-Brandi Carlile, especially the acoustic album
- Bon Iver / DeYarmond Edison (one of her old students plays with them, too!)
- Bobby McFerrin, Circlesongs and the album with Chick Corea, especially “Spain”
- Sarah Vaughan, Live at Mr. Kelly’s
- Ellis Paul, the live album
- Fleet Foxes
- Jewlia Eisenberg, Trilectic
That’s the more modern stuff, but she also included some rad early (and classical) music, with her favorite performers:
- Gesualdo, especially the Motets
- Perotin (which is early polyphony), especially performed by the Hilliard Ensemble
- Victoria, “Requiem,” especially performed by Harry Christophers and the Sixteen
- Trio Mediaeval, Stella Maris
- Beethoven’s later string quartets
So, pending the coming move to Lebanon, I’ve been making some serious attempts at learning Arabic. This certainly comes with its struggles. Here’s what’s up so far:
- There’s not time for me to get into a class, and only recently have I understood the script well enough to warrant private lessons. But with only two more months in these United States, and not a lot of money to go around, it’s all independent study, all the time.
- Arabic has a ton of differing dialects. The one I’ll be around the most will be Levantine Arabic (and let us not forget the French). Teaching materials are typically created for Modern Standard Arabic – MSA – and trying to speak it is much like hopping out of a cab in front of Grand Central and delivering one of Hamlet’s soliloquies. “Hark ye, kind sir. The grace of God be upon you on this day of light. Forsooth, couldst thou kindly direct me to the shining doors of the L train?”
- I’d eat bugs for some cognates. So far, we’ve got “beij” and “sah’ra”: “beige” and “desert.” To be fair, though, they’re written as “نيغ” and “صعلرا”. Remember to read ‘em right-to-left!
Wrestling with all my strength with a language has its rewards, though. German looks like the simplest thing in the world. The internets provide great little corners of help: streaming BBC television news, PDF versions of dictionaries, class syllabi. If anyone’s interested, I’d be happy to slap up some links to my favorite treasures so far. For now, I’ve earned myself a reward beer.
Do the people who were prisoners in the Stanford Prison Experiment have confirmation bias in seeing their number again? The numbers were short enough that it seems like they might legitimately come up pretty often.
Knowing I was born at 9:24 seems to mean I see that time at least a few times a week, and see those numbers in a row pretty often. ‘Cause I’m primed to notice them, I’m sure.
Do you have any numbers that recur in your world?
Man, some of the things this (fictional) guy says really hit home in terms of the ever-growing capacity to mechanize the scenic industry. Scenic artists all tell ourselves that drops printed large-scale can’t come close to the results acheived by extremely highly trained people working in a way that’s been passed down for hundreds of years. Luckily, this is still mostly true, but those robots are getting better all the time.
I liked this so much, I’m half-tempted to write a script paralleling this one about my job:
http://www.xwordinfo.com/Hampfield.aspx
The cartoon was made by Michael A. Charles, whose website is found here. He seems like a fairly wonderful person.
This one’s another of those so-obvious practices that took a while to get through to my brain. My first day at Old-School Scenic, I was working with a lovely woman named K. We spent most of the morning mixing a bunch of colors – a sort of nerve-wracking activity on my first-ever day of union work, but it seemed to go pretty well. My buddy M. (another apprentice) said that he kept looking across the shop floor and getting nervous on my behalf.
For the most-of-the-people-I-know who don’t do this for a living, mixing colors is a really finicky activity that takes a lot of practice. It’s about stored-up knowledge from years of getting colors wrong: if the vibrant magenta you’re mixing is a little too vibrant and a little too light in value, you can pop in some raw umber (a green-tinged brown) to get the shade you want. Picky, picky knowledge. And easy and expensive to get wrong, but really satisfying to get right.
For the painters I love, then: lots of times when you’re mixing a color, you find yourself getting mighty close and then needed to lighten it a little, right? Those colorants can really take the value down while you’re trying to find your hue. As you’re adding white, instead of just dumping the white straight into the color you’ve been working on, pour some of the mix off first. This way, if you put too much white into the whole thing, you can pour in some of your old mix (the stuff you’ve just poured off) to bring it back to exactly what you were looking for.
K. kept reminding me, gently, to pour off some of the mix before I added more white, especially in circumstances where it seemed like I was having to add much more white than I’d thought I would. This all, of course, traces back to the idea that if you’re trying to get a pastel, you oughtta start with the white and mix in the color, rather than vice versa. No guilt here, though: the colors I was trying to rock were pretty far from pastel.
Now that I’m finally working on some union gigs, a crazy amount of stuff has changed. One of the biggest new things is the presence of “industrials,” who are lovely people whose job it is to keep everything in the shop all stocked-up and moving smoothly. Industrials are creating a lot of mysteries already in my mind: it’s such a super-specialized set of tasks that I have no clue how anyone would ever find out the job existed in the first place. They’re members of the same local as I am now, but I don’t know if they test or just apply or have to know someone special or what.
On the union site, a few industrials have postings in the “member gallery” section that has samples of people’s work. One lady wrote out her job’s tasks as follows:
§ Responsible for shop-area set-up and preparation for Scenic Artists’ daily work
§ Maintaining inventory of shop and multiple NYC locations’ on-site supplies
§ Research – locating vendors, materials, items for purchase, pricing and availability
§ Purchasing/Invoicing – monitoring individual budget lines, monitoring of labor estimates per assignment, purchase orders, bill coding, petty cash
§ Payroll: daily submissions of coded Labor Reports to accounting; weekly submission of time cards for Scenic Department; submission of Monthly Labor Report to USA Local 829 Union for Annuity and Pension/Welfare employer contribution monitoring.
I’m not sure how much of this is sometimes/usually the job of the charge artist, but from what I’ve experienced, the industrials run around the shop cleaning things and prepping things and answering a million questions all day long. They’ve got the keys to the magic storeroom full of prizes, and seem to be instantly there the second you look confused about something. These people know where things are.
Form follows function
You have to be squatting around down on the floor either way, but pulling staples from a drop would be pretty nice with a guy like this, right? It’s even got a magnet in the end, so now there are no excuses. There’s gotta be some way to attach one to a pole…
One cool summer night at the Black Hills Playhouse, the stone-walled room under the snack bar (“the Pit”) was filled with people watching or playing in the Texas Hold-Em finals, a culmination of a summer’s worth of poker nights. I was sitting next to my friend Jeff, and we were ruthlessly trying to distract the players during a hand. Our buddy Valerie has a notoriously weak stomach, and so the Puke Game was born.
The script of the game, if Jeff and I are playing:
Me: “Hey, did you have any of that cottage cheese at lunch today?”
Jeff: “Yeah, why do you ask?”
Me: “I don’t know. [Pause.] Did it smell weird to you?”
Jeff: “I guess, now that you mention it, but I’m sure it was fine.”
Me: “You look a little funny. Are you feeling all right?”
Jeff: “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Then Jeff’s job is to go through the pre-sick gestures, all the while denying that anything’s wrong. My job is to keep pressing to make sure he’s all right. Everyone who plays this game has different opening moves, but they usually include heavy sighing, a lot of swallowing, casual spitting, and holding their hands to their face.
Memorable playing styles include Kato’s “What If You’re Lying Down?”, Tyler’s “One-Too-Many Birthday Shots” (that one was a true work of art) and Niles’s “Can’t Run Away Quickly Enough.”
Hey, are you okay?
For the record, Valerie was a rock through our ridiculous behavior. I’m pretty sure she even won the hand.
Why I should have just fixed the bathroom myself:
These tiles look a little smaller.
Our bathtub has been leaking on the neighbors downstairs for a couple of months now, and after a dozen or so phone calls to the super and to the poor neighbors, we finally worked out that the super could fix the mess on Monday morning at 8:30.
He came Sunday at noon. Then he requested an extension cord, a pan for water, a marker, and some paper towels to help him get the job done. I’m not an expert on home improvement, but I think the tiles you put in should be about the same size as the tiles you take out. And I think there’s supposed to be some grout in between them things, amirite?
To the neighbor’s credit, they have been really friendly to us through the whole silly mess, despite the super snowing them with tales of our refusal to let him in. One of the polite notes they left said, “According to Benny (our lovely super), he’s been unable to get into your apartment to caulk your tub – he says you won’t leave him a key. I am inclined not to believe a single word that exits from his mouth.” You are right, wonderful neighbor. He still has never returned a phone call.
This degree of craftsmanship was really predictable, and I really did want to do the project myself, but all kinds of liability stuff happens in NYC if a tenant tries to fix something. The work I get paid to do takes precise work in such a similar context that seeing the end result of Benny’s job makes me kinda cranky.
Anyway, I’m gonna be stinky for a day or two while we wait for the mastic to dry (and we’re running a pool on when/if he comes back to caulk the tub), but we also got some promising new neighbor friends out of the deal. I think that actually makes it pretty worth the trouble.
Also, I almost forgot to say that I finally took my union pledge last week and am now an honest-to-God union member. IATSE Local USA 829 is the place to find scenic artists and designers.
The drawback is that I have had this song in my head for a week straight.
The advantages include better pay, benefits, more reasonable working hours, a safety officer who seems to know just about everything, and the ability to work for Broadway, television, and movies. Oh, and the classes that come along with the apprenticeship program look to be nigh-on wonderful. “Stained Glass for Television?” Yes, please.
I just got back (okay, like a week and a half ago) from St. Michael’s Playhouse up in Winooski, Vermont. They had me in to charge a show called Moonlight and Magnolias, but I ended up staying a wee bit longer to cover for the next painter who was arriving a little later. After some serious madness toward the end of the Moonlight build involving six cumulative hours of sleep over four consecutive nights, this was the state of the shop:
This was also the state of my mind at that moment.
But I had warned John Devlin, the production manager, that I was gonna remake the shop in my own image, and by God, we got it done. I had a whole magical day wherein any number of beautiful shop intern types asked me over and over what they could make next. They made a few shelves, a backboard for the mixing table, and Joe Toole (the shop supervisor) made a brand new cabinet to hold brushes and markers. We got rid of a remarkable amount of wicked-smelling rotten paint, and sealed and labeled everything we could salvage.
Check out this nonsense! How pretty is that?!? Na NA na NAH!
A big happy thank-you, therefore, to Emily and Laura and Maria and Joe and Amanda and Evan and Libby and Dawn. You all win everything. The St. Michael’s kids are gonna love you for this.
This is one I play with my brother. He is really really good at guessing the right answer.
Me: “Oh yeah, with friends like you, who needs friends?!”
Brother: “Uh, Rushmore?”
Me: “YEAH!”
Brother: “One more!”
Me: “So we both have dead people in our family.”
Brother: “Oh, man… um…. Oh! Rushmore.”
Me: “You are awesome at this game.”
This is one for the ages.
1. Set someone up in a lawnchair.
2. Give them a pair of binoculars.
3. Back up about thirty feet and have them look at you through the binoculars.
4. Run up to them and pretend to punch them a couple of times when you’re about ten feet off.
If you’re lucky, they’ll fall out of the chair.
In college, I lived with a house full of amazing and ridiculous people. We had a painter, a playwright, a poet, a literary critic, and little old me. This led to a number of outrageous projects.
One day I found myself armed with a rather abridged paperback dictionary (this happens way more often than I oughta admit), and one thing kinda just led to another. This then, is the Dictionary Game.
The object of the game is to define all of the words on a page. If you can, you get to sign the page at the top.
1. One person is the reader, another the guesser. Anyone else around can see the definition, but they cannot help guess!
2. The guesser names a letter, and the reader stops at the first page they get to within that letter. The guesser’s initials are written at the bottom of the page.
3. The reader calls off one word at a time, skipping proper nouns ’cause that’s just going too far. The guesser gets to ask as many yes or no questions as they want.
4. If the word has more than one definition, the reader skims through and tells the guesser how many they’re going to have to dredge up. It’s almost never as many as the dictionary lists, unless the reader is a jerk.
5. If the guesser gives up, the reader draws a line before the word that finally took them down. You know, for posterity.
6. If the guesser gets a definition verbatim – this really does happen sometimes – the reader marks some kind of happy symbol beside it.
7. If the guesser clears the page, they get to sign the top. And maybe name the page, if any weird kind of theme emerged.
Hints:
- The Dictionary Game is completely about tenacity, not word-nerdiness. Although the nerdiness can help.
- You can also play it in reverse, where a player gets a definition and then has to name the word. The guesser almost always has to sing the alphabet song at some point, which is just nice for everyone.
- In our worn-out dictionary, we also checked off words we looked up, and recorded in the back words that we couldn’t find in the book. I remember “hermeneutical” was one, and my friend Reuter wrote his own name into the list of missing words. Chump.
- If someone doesn’t want to play along, the preferred excuse is, “No, thanks: I’m more of an encyclopedia man, myself.”
Before I lived in the city, the best people-watching I could ever find was at the airport during holiday season. You can assume a lot of probably mistaken things about folks making their way through airports. In the spirit of simplicity, my friend Steve and I narrowed it down to two categories: Friendly or Furious.
Step One: Get a pretzel. With some cheese.
Step Two: Sit down in some nonchalant place along a wall in a very wide hallway.
Step Three: Predict.
has some neat-o things.
There are phones, in private or semi-private booths for superheroes, or in the corner if you’re a boring old unsuper patron.
There are also ratty old signs in the bathroom stalls that have a bizarrely post-modern meta-style kinda passive-aggression to them. Are they trying to send me an email the old-school way?
I was having a traditional Nessonian flip-out, where the best known solution remains finding the nearest well-stocked library, pulling down a copy of Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, and pretending like I have a direction for this directing thing. I have simply got to figure out why theatre is relevant anymore. For what is my generation hungry? My best answers so far include: silence, stillness, and ritual.
Speaking of which, I think activities for tomorrow will also include a long library visit.
You can tell from this photograph how much I love my friend Jeff.
That is why, in order to honor him, I drew a version for a white elephant present-off at his Festivus party. The motto of the night was “The night’s not over until Jeff gets pinned!” so our friend Chris made that happen as soon as he walked in the door with an innocuous-seeming hug. Jeff was giggling so hard he never had a chance.
