Wednesday Giggles

Inconsistent and a bit late but this is WORTH IT!!!
No spastic satirical camera make outs this time - I promise.

Just Joss Whedon's newest project, a much needed Nathan Fillion appearance, and some awesome comic book storytelling.

It's a bit long so make sure you top your soda off and your boss is at lunch.

The sync is a bit off so if 'its driving you super crazy here is the direct link.



AND

yes yes yes - this is a two-fer special today -

I've been in a Demetri Martin mood this week and it's been a while since I've featured the bloke so....



Culture is attracted to squiggles!!

(I knew it!)

The Space Between

I love music.

I always have.

It's been my best friend/boyfriend/life coach for many a year. It's is one of those things that helps me feel a little bit less lonely when the feeling creeps up.

I'm a huge fan of live music and especially of live music by the singer/songwriter types. I'm a puddle for an honest piano and literate lyric. Consequently, one of my favorite places in the entirety of LA is a little place on Cahuenga called The Hotel Cafe. It's a music club that’s a singer/songwriter zone only; little, intimate, quality and 1000% awesome.

I love it. I'd work there if I could, for free even. That way I could be there chronically, frequently, and often. This last Friday one of my favorites was playing. Greg Laswell - he was releasing his new album (Three Flights from Alto Nido - go get it right now right now. You'll thank me and bless my future children. Buy them trusts even. It's that good.) and he was having the release show & party there. Needless to say, Patrick (my partner in musical crime) and I were some of the first people in the door.

Greg is awesome. He’s been on my iMeem list for the last year and a half but I hadn't seen him live until the Hotel Cafe Tour show in April. I was a bit nervous to see him because sounding good on an album is one thing, and I really liked his album work, but I bank my love and devotion on live performances. He totally delivered. He's money, absolutle money. He's a rare bird and on the favorite list for this reason; he's a brilliant song writer that is an honest performer. It's a transfiguring experience to see him perform. You just get sucked into the song, launch, and hover above yourself and your life for a few brilliant minutes. It's indescribable.

I know I'm getting caught up in Lizisms, sorry....

Def:
Honest Performance -

I think there are a lot of amazing songs out there that aren't necessarily honestly performed. Ex: Jewel. She’s an amazing writer, but there is a dissonance between the sobriety of her writing and gravity of her meaning and the uppityness of her music. read: me-no-likey.

Contrastingly, I think a perfect example of someone who is completely honest in writing and performance is Tori Amos. There is total union between her music and her poetry in my opinion. There are myriads of others too but shes the first one that comes to mind

I mean, there are bad songs that are honestly performed. Like, I totally believe that the Pussycat Dolls really did want to drive nice cars and have boobies when they grew up, I could just give a damn. Usher really DOES want to make love in that club, but like I said....

Back to Greg-
He is beloved because I think about his stuff. I see his images and relate them to things outside of my iPod. They harrow ideas and memories out of me that typically I don't take out. And sometimes I swear he has peeked into my brain because so many of his images and ideas are intimately familiar to me. Especially June bugs.

**btw: This blog isn't an attempt to get on Greg's street team, I just can't explain the "Space Between" epiphany I had at that show without this slight background**

Patrick, myself, and a few other friends who share our neurosis about meaning have debated over his songs in the past and our current email discussion was regarding one off of his EP, "Salvation, Dear". We all had different ideas where he was coming from and why and were all kind of locked in the folded arm "I'm right" stance.

Q:How awesome is this music if it gets 4 totally different people recreationally discussing meaning?! That don't have the English major reflex like me?
A: very.

Back to the show -

When we were walking in from the valet Greg was coming around the corner and simultaneously Patrick and I thought, "There he is, lets ask him about it!"

Not "ohhmigoshhohhmigoshhohhmigoshh - It's Greg Laswell, maybe he'll sign a CD. " No, we wanted to talk about lyrics. We're geeks. We know. We own it. We love it. That's what family is about.

He was trying to get situated for the show and stuff, but he was insanely cool and stopped and listened to this 6' 4" red head and chubby brunette burble on about speakers and POV and motivation. He was really excited to talk about it too - more cool points. Actually Patrick ran the approach and I joined when it looked like a discussion and not just an over the shoulder hallway conversation. I was trying to be respectful. First rule of LA culture: don't harass or approach the talent. Anyway, I don't think he was anticipating the fire hydrant of questions Patrick and I had.

And honestly, it's an intensely personal song about not being ready for a relationship and our questions were along the lines of "Why weren't you ready? What were your reasons for turning away happiness?" and he gave a polite non-revelatory answer like "I wasn't ready for something and she was so I had to let her go" and that was about it. Then he went on to let us know that his guitar player was about to go on and thanked us for coming out etc.

So as we were walking away Patrick said "Well that explains everything" and I said "What are you talking about? He didn't explain a single thing."

And in all honesty, if two complete and utter strangers had came up to me and asked me to spill my guts about an amazingly painful time in my life I'd start talking about the weather and conditions of the roads as well.

What was fascinating to me (more than the song in question obviously) and what I was in my head about the rest of the night, was the difference in idealistic space crashing together in the physical space between me and Greg. It was like this 18" wide weather system of realities. This was my first time meeting the guy and shaking hands and discussing his work and all that. As a fan I had this really solidified idea of him that I had gleaned and pieced together from his music. What his life has been about, what he must think, his candor about his experiences etc. But seeing him there (he’s much shorter than I imagined) and hearing him speak to things and getting that other 90% of human communication of body language, was someone completely different.

He went from Greg Laswell the idea or voice out of a box, to Greg Laswell, the whiskey drinking guy that forgot to wash his shirt that morning (because he did). There was this precious space between my understanding of the guy and what he wanted me to understand him as that crashed and meet in the foot and a half between us.

The relationship between artist, art and viewer has been debated since the beginning of time, I know. I'm painfully unoriginal, but it’s such an experience, such a mental deflowering, but not in a bad way.

I wasn't let down at all or disgusted by his not knowing me as well as I felt I knew him or being as open as I hoped. That he didn't connect with me like I had connected with him. I mean, I wanted to know why he wrote that song and what he was thinking, but after 30 seconds i knew he wasn't going to really tell me. He was a genuinely pleasant and awesome guy, patient too. Patrick and I have to be quite an experience and getting blindsided by one of us, much less both.... well - it takes a champ.

I'm sure artists deal with that disadvantage of perceived intimacy all the time. It’s got to try your sense of reality after awhile. I don't envy them a jot but I am grateful for ones like Greg.

The show was phenomenal, swelteringly hot, but worth every lost electrolyte.

Seeing Elijah Wood at the valet, Evangeline Lily at the bar and actually briefly meeting Dominic Monaghan was icing on the night.

Man I love LA, and despite it not being very comfortable, I love the Space Between. It keeps me alive you know; feeling, thinking, and wondering. That's art. That's what it’s all about and it’s a realigning experience I hope to have over and over again.

So - see you at The Hotel Cafe next week?

Wednesday Giggles

OK -

So over at Best Week Ever one of their bloggers found this hilarious yet disturbing video that is supposed to be a Converse ad but it didn't work too well because I could only watch about 15 seconds of it.

So they decided to help the millions of Internetites out there and publish this
How Not to Kiss short and it made me laugh like a laughing loon




The whole schpeal is here if you're curious or if you just want a good laugh there you go.

Wednesday Giggles

This was my heartiest laugh this week. Maybe I've been dealing with finicky HR people for too long but I just lost it.

Wednesday Giggles

And it's been a while since I've laughed -

Food for thought for us members of P.O.E.M.

Arcs

So random questions and text and messages from the brother or cousin types aren't a rarity at all.

"What Looney Toons episode was Bugs Bunny a chick? And was it Wayne or Garth that thought he was hot?"

"jumping trashcans should be an Olympic sport"

"Who would win in a fist fight, Nietzsche or Wittgenstein?"

(My money is totally on Nietzsche btw)

So when I got a "Whats your address?" from Patrick it seemed far too much of a normal question. He was either going to drop by that night or I was going to get a puppy in the mail or something.

"Why....." I replied. He laughed at me and then told me he had just finished his CD and wanted to send me a copy.

his CD?.... Erm - I wasn't aware that Pat had a recording contract and if he did I'd be amazed because though the man can move mountains and is worthy of almost every praise possible, he can't carry a tune in a bucket. Perhaps he was exploring beat poetry so I asked -

"What?!"

Apparently he and a few other music connoisseur friend types were engaged in a bit of a competition. It started as a music exchange but then Patrick wanted to "make it interesting" so he made up a theme and they were supposed to make a CD according to that theme. They all send them to each other (the other two are out of state). Patrick had a whole point structure outlined and they all rated each other's stuff and Patrick crowned a winner. I'm not sure what the prize was, bragging rights I suppose, but I thought

What a delightfully constructive creative thing.

And though I laughed at the competitive aspect of it all, I found it fascinating. Mixes with a story, an arc. How delicious. So even though I wasn't part of the contest I still found myself constructing a story in my head with my days worth of iTunes.

The theme Patrick nominated was a "Love to Meltdown" breakup-type mix and heaven knows a silly girl like me has plenty of love songs and break up songs. Its all of my favorite artist's specialty as a matter of fact.

I thought about it for a week or two and got to work, just for fun, and agonized over where a certain song fit in the story arc or what song best tells that part of the story. It was loads of fun. No wonder Patrick was so lit about it.

I decided to do some field research and some of my readers (read: friends) may have gotten a random text asking for their favorite love song and break up song. It was for this. Silly, I know. But like I said before, we Long/Dees types specialize in Charming Random. It's how we roll. :D And I want you to know that I listened to every song that was suggested to me as creative input even if it didn't fit on the arc I'd thought up.

So for those who contributed I figured I owed you a playlist. I found all but one song on iMeem and it's #1 in the line up. So if you're feeling saucy and want the whole experience there it is. I think its one of the strongest songs in the first half of the (meaning my) CD. I was really bummed it wasn't there. Don't people know this is one of the best songs on that album? Gosh!

So if you were wondering:


I'm also incredibly curious to see if I actually told a story. Like, can you see a relationship in between the treble clefs and why they broke up and why it wasn't just a break up but a meltdown?

And its Made All the Difference

I graduated from college on Saturday.

Well - not really. I finished my classes in December and my degree says "seventh day of December two thousand and seven" but June 14th was the date of commencement. That's when I turned the tassel and shook hands and walked the line so that makes it official.

I initially didn't want to walk and deal with all the hoopla but my mom wanted me to. Life kind of exploded for our family in December. Jonathan got married, Nick went on his mission and I finished my undergrad. Needless to say we decided to postpone graduation festivities.

I was just as feet draggy when it came time to walk for my AA back in 01, I just wanted my piece of paper and to slip off into the night but my friends were adamant about me walking with them and when I was sitting with them, robed and standing up in front of my leaders and community I really appreciated them forcing the issue. There is something very important about ceremony, about recognition of accomplishments, that I had forgotten and that I had forgotten was important to me. I worked and cried and bled and agonized over this degree and I earned the right to walk the line, so I did.

It's nearly impossible not to be nostalgic and reflective around times like this. You naturally take inventory of the time you spent and the people you knew and the person that you've become that's all reflected in that little piece of paper.

My college experience has been varied and beautifully singular, just like everyone else's. When I first went into college in the fall of 1996 I started work on a two year degree. I only saw music in my future. I loved to sing, I was good at it, it brought me joy so what else was there right? I declared myself and Opera major and all was right in my world for a month or two. It didn't take me long to learn about the dense and dysfunctional political world surrounding music and theater and that I didn't have the stomach for it.

I was focused on going on my mission at the time so I left music and played water polo, tennis, threw myself into student government and took a regular load of Humanities courses until I went on my mission. I left for Washington DC in Aug of 99.

After I got home in Feb of 2001 my hopes of immediate marriage and family didn't materialize so I applied to CalPoly Pomona, the local 4 year.

I wanted to teach and I wanted to keep the Spanish I had learned on my mission so I applied for "Liberal Studies bilingual option". Orientation was exciting and we were about to get our tutorial for how to register that night and the man said "if you want to teach on the secondary level you need to declare your subject and then credential in that". Well Humanities is just a fancy way of saying "English" so off I went traipsing the strange and hilly CalPoly campus looking for the English building. I was registering in a matter of hours and we had priority and the list of classes I had just planed the next 2 years around had just become obsolete. I needed to find the English Dept office, get a new sheet of required classes, figure out a schedule and get on the phone all within a matter of hours. After 2 hours my pace went from a traipse to a saunter to a frustrated strut to a full on panic jog. I couldn't find the bloody place, no one was on campus to ask and the map they had given me was looking more like Orange county's farm land than a college campus. However, I did find the biology building (it was pratically a crystalline castle that you could see from space) and biology was my second choice (that's a blog for another day) so I took it as a sign that since I could find that building that was what I was supposed to do. So for a whole year I was a declared Micro-biology major. I loved it, we got to do some fun genetic research and I felt awesome and empowered. I had taken the course completely different from either one of my parents. Mom was an English major with a Theater and Art History minor and dad was an Accounting undergrad.

Go me. I was original.

But I wasn't too happy. I was working full time. I've worked full time since I've gotten home from my mission and all the lab time and study time was leaving me with about 3 hours of sleep a night.

Then funding changed. My income disqualified me from the grants I was riding on and the student loan option came up and even though I was working on a very lucrative degree I was hesitant to go into debt over it.

I had kept an English class in my schedule every quarter just to make sure I didn't burst from logarithms, percentiles or DNA sequences, so I had racked up a good amount of English Lit credits, enough for a minor. So randomly one day, while driving around looking for a parking spot (a regular tedious activity at CalPoly) the thought occurred to me to flip my major and my minor and finish faster thereby avoiding unnecessary debt. English major, micro-biology minor, and for some totally irrational reason, all the reservations I had about going into debt totally disappeared with that thought. Even though it was a less marketable degree I was more OK with it. Content even

So I thought, If I'm more willing to go into debt over this degree I'll probably be happier dedicating my life to it.

I'll never forget it, the day I made that decision I found a parking spot and went to my Organic Chemistry class, which is a fancy name for "torturous calculus for no good reason at all". WHO CARES about the percentages of where an electron will be and in which orbital on a molecule? I mean, really... Anyway, I listened to my professor for exactly 5 minutes, got up, and found my way to the English building (which I later learned we shared with the Music, Theater and Foreign Language departments and it says "Music" - thats why I got confused that first day) and just marched into the first class I saw and sat down and breathed easy for the first time in a year.

It took me that long to figure out that part of who I was, admit it, and have the courage to do what would actually make me happy instead of what I thought would glow on a resume.

Its been the best thing I've ever done and I haven't looked back. Not once.

In the English department I met people who have changed my life forever, both students and teachers. The people I shared Chaucer, Milton and Calvino with are now some of my dearest friends who I don't know what I'd do without.

But what I fell in love with more than my fellow students or the text was the Faculty.

This is my Alison. Dr. Alison Baker. She's a lot of people's Alison but she's mine too. This woman is a miracle and probably the reason I made it through. She is our Medievalist on campus and taught 8 of the 20 Core Lit classes I took. Milton, Chaucer, Renaissance Lit, the Capstone, Early European Lit, Epics, Folklore etc. All the really complicated daunting stuff that you need to know but hardly know how to approach. Alison not only knew her stuff backwards and forwards but she made it fun and applicable. She made me read the ENTIRE Canterbury tales in the Middle English and made us memorize the first 10 lines of the Prologue in the Middle English. She pounded me through all of Paradise Lost and ALL of the Inferno. Things I never thought I'd be able to do. We talked about Norse myths alongside the Smurfs and Odysseus along side HeMan. She was first one I saw off the stage that night, the first hug, the first picture and the first tear while saying goodbye. I owe her more than I can possibly ever convey and she is more than I could hope to be.

This is Dr. Kramer (left) and Dr. Rocklin (right). We're on stairs, Dr. Kramer isn't 15 feet tall. Dr. Kramer was my Lit theory professor and he was able to teach me Deconstruction where so many people had failed. Derrida actually meant something to be besides another Frenchman that knew more than I did. That was a miracle. He was also my creative writing teacher and I hear his voice in my head every time I go back to my book I've been pecking at for years. I brought in my first chapter one class and he said "well I want to read the rest of it!" and that had kept me going.

Dr. Rocklin is another one of the coolest professors ever. You see him from 100 yards and you just know - that's a Literature professor. The fedora, the elbow patches on the blazer that rarely match his slacks, the dilapidated car that probably had Nixon on its radio at one point. He lives the dream. He is our Shakespearian and a master. He was one of the few who really made me rethink what a question was an why do we ask them. He doesn't believe in any kind of boxes or thinking inside or outside of them. There is just meaning and it's different incarnations. Whether its a prop in a play or an intonation in performance or a posture or an aside or a comma. What it means is what matters. I've never been able to stomach Hamlet or MacBeth but I ate them up under Rocklin's instruction. He is a genius in so many respects. He's changed my mental landscape forever.

This is Dr. Corley and I don't think I can respect a man more than I do him. Dr. Corley is our Americanist. He made his way through Berkley on the GI bill and is still on reserve in the Army as a corporal (I believe). He's been to Iraq 3 times and let us all know that he'll go back if asked at the beginning of the quarter so there was always that lurking possibility that we could loose him. So, not only has this man put his life on the line multiple times in defense of America, but he has dedicated his life to the study and teaching of it's art. I took him for American Literature and learned Whitman at his feet. Whitman lived through the Civil War and wrote most of his best stuff during that time. Have you ever heard a soldier's poetry read by a solider? I have, and its unspeakably moving. I cried. Right there, in the middle of class. The only time I was ever moved to tears by a teacher's reading was in Dr. Corley's class reading Leaves of Grass. He is a giant among men. I really hope every guy that took his class took MANY pages out of his book to paste in their own. A knight without armor that one is.

I probably won't realize the full extent of their influence till I'm in front of my own class and I hear myself say "It's all connected" or "What is X? What does X mean? What does X do?" but for now I'm sitting pretty warm and fuzzy and light years better for being where I've been and seeing what I've seen and finally making it through.

That night after all the insanity when mom, dad and I were nestled in at The Melting Pot dad asked me what were some of my best memories of college and I only saw faces of people. It took me forever to get to CalPoly and to the English department to be guided and shaped by these amazing people. It was road less traveled and it has made all the difference.