Category: Thought

Aural Stimulation

I’ve got a commute of half an hour to work, a reasonable amount of time (especially considering the hour on the subway each way to get to my last job, in Boston), but still time that I prefer to fill with something constructive, or at least entertaining. The radio can offer some charms, if the station out of the University of New Hampshire is on a good tear or there’s some NPR on, but ultimately it’s unreliable. That’s where my GPS, also known as Authority, comes in– not for directions but for her mp3 capacity.

Back in the days when I was heading up here from Somerville every other weekend to visit Jane (a routine almost a year in the past, if you can believe it), I developed a regular stable of podcasts to load onto Authority for the trip up and back, some two and a half hours total. I’d start off with MPR’s Grammar Grater, then ease into NPR’s It’s All Politics as I approached 95N. Then it’d be time for Radiolab, WNYC’s excellent science program, and on the way back I’d dive into This American Life. Bringing up the rear (and often carrying forward into the next set of trips’ listening) would be the Slate Culture Gabfest, and a show about RPGs, Active Time Babble. There were others that cropped up from time to time, such as the programs that Nancy Pearl, librarian extraordinaire, would do with different Seattle radio stations, and Book Tour, broadcasts of author talks from the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington D.C., both of which abruptly stopped for such a long time that I gave them up for dead.  (Grammar Grater fell into that category a while back as well.)

Now I’ve been reviving some of the old podcast traditions, with my good friends Ron Elving and Ken Rudin keeping me up to date on politics, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich doing the same with science, and Ira Glass and his team filling me in on just about everything else, but these excellent programs only fill up so much time, and there’s five hours to kill each week.  I’d like for my listening to be more focused— to give me information that I could put to use in one of my current writing/editing projects.

With that in mind, I’d love to hear about your recommendations for the best podcasts out there in the following areas:  technology (where our personal devices are headed), history (17th-century baroque and proto-American would be especially helpful), the military (standard practices and lingo), and Northwestern life (Seattle, Portland, etc.).  Ones that can clearly explain economics and architecture would also be good, though the latter probably would suffer from a purely audio format.  I can be drawn in by pretty much any compellingly explained information and explored quandaries, I suppose, and that’s always useful, but I’m constantly pouring this stuff into my head– I could really use some filtering!

Much appreciate your input, and I hope that if you aren’t already tuning into the podcasts that I mentioned, you’ll check them out.  Quality stuff.  Except when Steve Metcalf is being a little too bitchy about some book or movie not sufficiently rarefied for his taste.

Alarmed by Fire

As you may know, I started a job recently that primarily involves editing fire investigation reports. All day, I read harrowing tales about malfunctioning space heaters, pillows that were left just a little too close to nightlights, and the depredations of red squirrels. My colleagues mentioned when I started that some increased fire paranoia would be inevitable. And indeed, I find myself wondering why we haven’t gotten around to getting renter’s insurance yet, and whether all the lamps were turned off before I left the house, and was that smoke I just smelled?

It was kind of a cruel twist, then, when on a recent morning the smoke detectors all started going off (or sounding, as house style would have it) while I was shaving in the bathroom. Jane woke up and joined me in trying to figure out what was going on. There was no smoke. Our upstairs neighbor wasn’t home, but I didn’t see any smoke or fire emanating from his place when I looked outside. Still– what if there was something going on up there? I knew already how quickly a fire could ravage a place if not acted on immediately. We tried to give the neighbor a call, but to no avail.

We didn’t want to call 911. It seemed silly with no evidence of fire. But those damn alarms were just sounding and sounding throughout the whole house, upstairs and down. We called the fire department’s regular number but nobody was there; it was around 7:30 am. So we called the police department’s regular number to try to get advice from someone, and inevitably a fire truck came blaring down our street a few minutes later as a result.

Luckily there were no actual emergencies that morning, and the firemen didn’t mind taking a ladder to the upstairs neighbor’s balcony and checking inside, just in case, as well as explaining to us that the fire alarms were hardwired together to an electrical feed and that we probably would not have a fun time trying to shut them off. We ended up having to call in the landlady and her husband to silence the damn things. It was a couple of them malfunctioning.

So no disaster there. But there very well could have been. I’m actually surprised that there aren’t more fires happening every day, just because of all the crazy shit that can go wrong. Thankfully, there are precautions that you can take to increase the odds in your favor. Here are some quick lessons that I’d like to share with you based on my brief experience so far with fire investigation reports:

* If you’re not an electrician, do not do your own wiring for your house. Yes, it’s more complicated than it looks.

* Just don’t smoke. Sooner or later, you’re going to do something stupid while disposing of your butts and ashes.

* Keep combustible stuff away from stuff that is hot.

* And for God’s sake, get a squirrel gun or something! It is indeed probable that those rodents in your attic are chewing on something they shouldn’t be.

Today Jane and I took a hike up Blue Job Mountain with her mom and surveyed the surrounding peaks and forests from the fire tower at the summit. I’m pleased to report that the landscape remained fire-free. This time, anyway.

 

Hour by Dark Hour

So let me just start by saying that, yes, Persona 3 is a Japanese RPG, or JRPG if you will, so there will be a bit of content here and there that may be geared to horny Eastern males. There are a couple of maid costumes (strictly optional). There is some occasional hypergirly cooing, not to mention an awkward scene at the hot springs. Don’t let this stuff distract you from the fact that the game has a fantastic understanding of the push and pull of daily life, hour by hour– the choices we are constantly making, whether or not we even realize it.

I’m talking about a video game for the PlayStation 2 that came out a few years ago, one that I’ve been playing intermittently for the past couple of years and am on the verge of finishing. Your main character goes to high school by day and fights demons in an extra-planar tower at midnight. The friendships that he maintains and the activities that he pursues during the day make him a stronger fighter at night, essentially, and as the player you make constant decisions about which things this guy will do each day. After school, will he spend some time with the old couple at the bookstore, or will he catch a burger at the strip mall? In the evening, will he get in some battling or will he take the dog for a walk? Late at night, will he do some studying or get extra sleep?

There’s never time to do everything in a given day, or a given week. Only by carefully balancing activities in different areas over a long period of time can you produce a truly well-rounded and powerful character. If that sounds a lot like life to you, then you can begin to appreciate what the game has accomplished. Sometimes I see a Persona-like lens over my days, now that they’ve begun to settle into a regular routine with steady employment. After work, will I do some writing or take a run with Jane? If the latter, can I fit the writing into a later slot in the evening? On a Saturday evening, which social link do I invest time into, that of my girlfriend or my friends?  (Guess which is the safer answer, ha!)  Or do I stay home and read?

Social choices are pretty cleverly implemented in the game, by the way.  You have ongoing relationships with numerous friends and potential romance interests, each of which must be attended to and nurtured over time.  If you are seriously dating someone and you neglect that person for a couple of weeks, the card representing that relationship will become “reversed” and you’ll need to devote extra time to appeasing that person before it can continue to level up.  Ditto if you make plans with someone and then ditch them in favor of other plans!

I can see games becoming even richer in the future through the dual tasks of simulating some aspect of life in a meaningful way, and of causing us to reflect on our own lives through the very game mechanics that they present to us. For example, if someone who spends every weeknight watching TV for four hours could be reminded through a game like Persona 3 that she is continually making a choice, however conscious, of how to spend her time, then who knows what could happen?

And yes, there is a Persona 4 as well, and yes, I am hesitant to play it, considering I’ve already sunk about 120 hours into number 3.  Considering that my old PlayStation 2 still has life in its limbs, though, I’ll probably grab it eventually.

Well, it’s early evening on Saturday, and now I’ve got to make a choice between doing some writing… or playing more Persona 3. Can’t there be time for both?

The Mane Idea

It’s spring, and I now have a job– the long freeze is feeling like it’s over. Well, maybe not so much in the way of temperature, but there’s still time yet. Certainly it just feels good to have someplace to be each day, and using the skills I consider one of my main areas, as well.  Jane and I both get to act as breadwinners and then spend the evenings together, while I wedge in some writing time at some point each night.  It’s a bit of a balancing act.

Along those lines, I have some ruminations on choice and Persona 3, but they’ll have to wait until next time, maybe in a day or two.  I don’t have much in the way of ruminations on the current social turmoils around the world, disasters and revolutions abounding (though isn’t that always the way, to some degree?  It all comes down to the level of severity before the rest of us start to care), or at least not that I could share in the often facile space of a blog.  I will say that one of my next projects, should it ever get off the ground, deals in an unusual fashion with the many evils that plague 21st-century civilization.  Yes, I did say evil.  It’s time to wrest that word back from religious simplification and reapply its power.  I’m not just being a writerly asshole when I say that words have power– they weaken or strengthen our perceptions of things, depending on how they’re wielded.

In any case.  I wish I could make more of a difference in reducing the sum total of suffering in the world, but my resources are limited.  If you count your skills as a kind of resource, then I have something I could use.  There’s a few words I may swat around.  But they’re not helpful here.

Hey, did you know that lions’ manes are a direct product of their testosterone?  Let’s just say that if you meet one without a mane, he probably also has a very high singing voice.  Those manes are so cumbersome and hot that females actually do most of the hunting.

Another Role

Last night I had a dream that I played a minor character in the first season of The Office. And I was terrible. Not funny at all. In the dream, the roles of the characters in the office mostly relied on improvisations, and I just could not think of anything amusing to say or do. I was constantly wrecking scenes with my dull character. He was named Mike, a poor choice when the main character in the show is named Michael, and he had big hair and at first glance could sometimes be confused for Jim, another main character. That’s another bad sign.

I just hadn’t put in the time to think about what my character’s chief characteristic would be, I realized (in the dream) as I looked back a couple of years later as I reflected on my failed role, I think while I was looking at a magazine with a “whatever happened to…?” sidebar about my Office stint. I hadn’t done the homework before each scene shoot– I’d just gone in blindly and produced nothing of value on the spot. You can sum up each minor character in one or two words: Stanley is grouchy. Meredith is boozy and inappropriate. Kevin is lecherous and slow. Granted, in the real season 1 (in the non-dream, real world), these characteristics only gradually emerged and weren’t apparent in the first few episodes. But in the dream season 1, pretty much everyone had a sense of their character but me, and my lack of preparation was the cause.

Things did not end well for “Mike,” the original intern character. He had a flash of humor once or twice, like the scene in which Michael gave him a haircut, but still struggled to find an identity, and in the beginning of the second season he was killed by a bus.

Even in the dream, the fact that I’d had even a minor role for a few episodes on a national TV show seemed vaguely incredible, so I kept looking for proof that it had happened. The magazine helped. I remembered in the dream that I went to college with one of the actors/writers for the show (which is true), so it ultimately seemed plausible.

I am indeed a pretty bad actor in the non-dream world. I’m not nearly expressive enough in my main role as Jeff Deck, sometimes to the point of monotone. I’ve had a few notable roles, though, which helped me almost cross that canyon to a different, more demonstrative person. There was the singing, dancing evil priest in my friend’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar senior year at college. There were my dual roles in Winnie the Pooh, as the Narrator and the Owl (the latter played with a hammy British accent inspired by imitating one of my professors). And one of the most important roles: the semi-autobiographical part of the Brave Tailor in my friend Dana’s wedding play (for real!).

In those roles, I did feel myself approaching a different mental state, a stepping outside myself to inhabit another body– not unlike the feeling during fiction writing, but in a physically enabled sense. It’s like occupying a different dimension in which you are allowed a wholly different set of thoughts. Then, if you can take those thoughts with you when you return to your actual life… why, I wonder if acting can be complementary for writing.

Certainly it’s given me a thrill during the few fortunate circumstances so far when I’ve been able to witness someone acting based on a character I’ve written. The character comes alive in a way that was barely possible before and suggests new directions and dimensions. Returning back to The Office, I think they do incorporate a certain amount of improvisation into each show (though I might be wrong), and that must come from the actors already knowing their characters intimately, perhaps glimpsing those extra dimensions from the inside.