Posts filed under 'citizenship'
Well, it's been an interesting evening: When I returned to my dressing room tonight in Philadelphia, after performing my Franklin monologue and then staying onstage to lead the audience in singing "Happy Birthday" to Ben Franklin -- who was just turning 300 -- I discovered that my wallet, my Treo phone (which also had my PalmPilot info in it), and (I just realized this after getting back to my hotel room) my iPod had been stolen. It's weird that anyone was able to get to my stuff, as there were two members of the theater staff in front of the dressing-room doorway during the entire show. Kind of a surreal scene as well, as I had intended to join the large contingent from the audience who had repaired to an upstairs room in the theater to continue toasting Ben's 300th.
The theater people called the police, who took a couple of hours to respond, since it wasn't a robbery in progress or anything. Eventually a blonde policewoman, looking like a cast member from a TV show in which we are meant to accept that 18-year-old actresses are actually cops, showed up. I took her downstairs to the labyrinthine bowels of the theater, where the dressing rooms are. She asked a few questions. It was not at all like Columbo, but that may have been because I wasn't the guest star who had committed the nearly perfect crime except for the one thing I'd overlooked. ... Rather, I was the visiting monologuist -- a very un-Hollywoodish theater performer who would, if anything, be cast as the wacky bald sidekick to the teenaged blonde policewoman. No, not the sidekick -- I'd probably be her dad. I believe the actual policewoman's last name was "File." So let's say the show would be called The File Files -- and I'd be her gruff but loving bald dad, Phil File. I left the force years ago because I wanted to get into the theater; now, years later, I'm realizing that theater's a dying art -- the people want glitz and jump-cutting, don't you know. So what do I do? I sit at home and drink unhealthy amounts of Peet's coffee, alternately doting on and worrying about my devil-may-care cop daughter, Phyllis. ... Then one night she comes back from work: turns out a monologuist has been robbed, right out of his dressing room at the theater. The case is at a standstill -- but maybe, just maybe, with my theatrical experience I can help her hunt down the perpetrators. ...
Okay, I'm babbling. ... But let me just mention (if I haven't already) that the real-life Philadelphia policewoman said she suspected this was an inside job.
Two other things, and then I'll stop writing about this. One, I called my bank to cancel my two credit cards and they told me that both cards had already been used -- at a gas station! Two, I don't drive! ... So is that fair? They steal from a non-driver and then try to use my credit cards for gas? There should be a law. ...
Okay, just one more thing about this: I had this idea that maybe, since the perpetrator(s) used my credit cards at a gas station, they got caught on a security camera. Hesitantly, I mentioned this to Policewoman File, thinking she would just nod gruffly and keep walking (perhaps muttering something about people who watch too much TV and think they know how to solve crimes). Instead she said something like, "You know, that's possible." She told me that some detectives would be in touch -- though since I no longer have my cellphone, I'm not totally sure how they'll reach me. ...
So anyhow: Happy 300th Birthday, Ben Franklin!
As far as I know Franklin didn't set up America's first police force -- but he did organize our first volunteer fire department. Also (and this is just off the top of my head, at 1:15 a.m. after a long day of performing and being robbed) he set up our first successful insurance company (irony noted), along with the first public school, lending library, and public hospital. He invented bifocals (which I recently found out I need -- though in my case, they are sexily referred to as "progressive lenses"), along with the grabber (you know, that device you can use to pull down a cereal box from the top shelf at the grocery store), the first smokeless coal-burning stove (the "Franklin stove"), the glass armonica (an ethereal instrument that Mozart, among others, ended up composing for), an elegant typeface that still bears his name, and -- oh yes, right -- the lightning rod. He was the only person to sign all four of the fundamental founding documents of our country: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the peace treaty with the British. He co-founded the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society. On the boat ride back from France -- in his 70s, suffering from gout and other ailments, and having just saved the American Revolution with his brilliant diplomacy -- he occupied his time by charting the Gulf Stream. Also (and I learned this yesterday, during my dinner with a bunch of Franklin scholars) while on that boat ride, he redesigned the sailors' soup bowls and the chickens' feed bowls so that neither would slosh as much. He refused to take out patents on any of his inventions, believing that everyone should have access to them. ...
And did I mention that at the time the peasants of Europe had a superstitious fear of potatoes, thinking them poisonous? And that while in Europe Franklin, knowing that the potato could provide sustenance for many of these peasants, arranged for a sumptuous feast to be prepared in which everything -- bread, whiskey, soup, etc. -- was made from potatoes? And that he made sure the success of this meal was widely publicized? And that his plan worked, and peasants started eating pototoes like there was no tomorrow? ... Well, all that stuff really happened. ...
And you already know about Poor Richard's Almanack, and his best-selling Autobiography. ...
And I promise I won't go on much further about Ben, but my father-in-law, who is himself a great scientist, loves to talk about two of Franklin's lesser-known scientific experiments. In the first, he wanted to find out whether different colors absorb different amounts of heat -- so he placed several strips of paper, of different colors, in the snow on a sunny winter's day. Sure enough, the differently colored paper strips absorbed different amounts of heat from the sun: the proof was that the ones that had absorbed more heat had melted further down into the snow. ... In the other experiment, Franklin wanted to determine the exact width of a molecule. So he poured a bit of oil in a French pond and waited for it to completely spread out on top of the water, figuring that its ultimate thickness would be that of one molecule. (Okay, I admit I'm kind of lost here myself -- but the guy sitting next to me at dinner last night confirmed that Franklin's measurement was incredibly close to being accurate.) ...
He was vegetarian for a while, but then he gave it up. There was a Scottish folksong that made him cry. He lost a beloved son, at four, to smallpox -- and then, when the false rumor spread that his son had died from being inoculated, Franklin, in his grief, wrote a pamphlet explaining that his son had not been inoculated and that everyone should be inoculated. He spent over 10 years in England trying to get the British to treat the colonists fairly; not only did he fail, but he was also falsely accused at home of secretly being a British agent. In France, in his 70s, he proposed marriage to an elderly widow of enormous wit and intellect; she turned him down, gracefully.
He had two years of formal education: second and third grade. After that, his father pulled him out of school, reasoning that there wasn't enough money for him to go to college anyway. He was apprenticed to his older brother James, who -- possibly jealous of his younger brother's obvious genius -- beat him. He ran away, and was caught and brought back. He ran away again, and made it to Philadelphia. ...
Okay, it's 1:58 a.m. and I have two shows to do tomorrow. Franklin is now officially 300 years and one day old. I have less stuff than I had this morning, but I have enough. Officer File will report to the detectives. And to you, who possibly even read all the way to here -- or, more sensibly, skipped down to see how all the blathering would end -- I wish a peaceful good night.
January 17th, 2006
I'm incredibly excited about the show that we'll be taping this Friday. I'll be interviewing two brilliant political thinkers, Danielle Allen and George Lakoff, each of whose work has profoundly affected the way I think of myself as a citizen.
Allen, a dean and professor at the University of Chicago, has written a book called Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education. It is a deep, yet accessible, meditation on what it means to practice democracy "on the ground" -- on street-corners, at our jobs, and elsewhere in our daily lives. A classicist and political theorist by training, she draws on influences as ancient as Aristotle and as recent as Ralph Ellison as she weaves a persuasive argument that laws alone are not enough: democracy can live only when all of us adopt the habits of political friendship that allow us to communicate meaningfully through our differences. ... One of the reasons I have found her book so inspiring is that it's helped pull me out of the very frustrating mental framework of waiting for all change to happen through the so-called political process. I am hugely interested in that process -- it was a thrill for me to chat with Sen. Barbara Boxer, the episode that's re-running this week -- but the notion that my involvement as a citizen does not begin and end in the voting booth is a very energizing one to me.
And speaking of frameworks: Lakoff, a professor of Linguistics at Berkeley, is the author, most recently, of Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. In recent years I've been puzzled about how complex subjects like taxation have been demonized, reaping great political benefits for their reframers. For example, as Lakoff points out, once "tax cuts" had been reframed by their proponents as "tax relief," the conceptual war had already been won: if you were against the cuts, then you were against "relief" -- and who in their right mind would be against relief? ... My resistance to framing has been that I don't want to reduce subjects on which I am ambivalent (and that's a lot of subjects!) to simplistic "frames" that may be effective in the political wars but don't capture how I honestly feel. Lakoff argues that to frame is not to oversimplify, but rather to be clear as to what you do believe. (And I know that in this brief description, I am oversimplifying Lakoff's ideas! Good thing he'll have a chance to speak for himself on the show.) ...
Tomorrow we'll be taping a little "Wandering Josh" segment that attempts to elucidate one or more of the political ideas propounded by Profs. Allen and Lakoff, and will accompany their in-studio interviews. I'm looking forward to figuring out what exactly that segment will entail. In fact, I should probably begin that figuring-out process right about now. ...
November 1st, 2005
I write to you this afternoon as a huddled mass yearning to breathe free. Yesterday morning, as I emerged from the shower, I felt the familiar spasmodic clenching of the muscles of my lower back -- a sensation that for the past several years has meant that my back was about to go out.
I don't like it when my back goes out. It usually means that I'm going to be in a lot of pain for at least a few days, and discomfort for at least a few weeks. So for the past year or so I've been doing various exercises and stretches to try to keep it from happening. Also, on the recommendation of someone I met at a party (always a sound scientific approach), I bought a little book called Treat Your Own Back.
According to that book's author, a physical therapist named Robin McKenzie, the key area is your "lordosis" -- the natural inward curve at the bottom of your spine. Modern life, he explains, often bends us unnaturally forward, eliminating the lordosis for long periods of time -- for example, while you're riding in a car, or while you're doing what I'm doing right now: sitting and typing at a computer. This flattening results in the pinching of the nerves that run through the squished area, giving us sciatica and other back-related pains. In order to combat this flattening, he writes, you must do these little exercises that restore and maintain the lordosis.
I've been doing his exercises (among others) for a while. Perhaps that's why this time (so far) my back hasn't gone out completely, as it has in the past. But what I've noticed is that maintaining the lordosis has somehow become kind of a mantra for me. ... Am I feeling on-edge? Perhaps my emotions are becoming too stretched out, and I should maintain the lordosis. ... Does our democracy depend on the flexible give-and-take of respectful disagreement? Then maybe the current infexibility of our polarized public discourse indicates that, as a nation, we need to maintain the lordosis. ...
Anyhow, right now, lordosis or no lordosis, I'm feeling kind of bedraggled. Yesterday, we were out in Menlo Park, shooting a "Wandering Josh" segment, and I stopped in at a restaurant to ask for some ice. They gave me some in a plastic bag, which (to the amusment of the restaurant staff) I gratefully stuck inside the back of my pants. And in retrospect, I think that might have been a pretty good strategy -- if only they'd double-bagged the ice. But at the point when I felt a cold dripping wetness spreading down my butt, I began to sense that perhaps it was time to rethink this particular treatment.
Which, of course, has nothing to do with maintaining the lordosis and everything to do with being very careful about putting ice in your pants.
Hmm ... I think I feel a self-help book coming. ...
October 15th, 2005
The buzz-saws are whirring outside. The big old magnolia tree behind our building just got reduced to little more than a stump, and by 5 p.m. it's scheduled to be gone completely. Apparently it was dying -- and the theory going around among my neighbors is that its illness was due to the management company's curious decision, several years ago, to cover the soil all around the tree with some heavy plastic material. Or maybe not so curious: it seems that the plastic simplified maintenance of the grounds, somehow.
The tree looked great eight years ago, when our son was born. We had just moved in, and he could see it from his crib. Its branches were lush, dark-olive-colored, elegant. I don't know much about magnolias -- in fact, truth be told, I'm not sure of the relationship between the tree and the flower (what is it? is the flower the blossom of the tree or some unrelated thing?) -- but I have the vague sense that the trees, at least, go back to dinosaur times. Or at least that's what we told our son, as he was going through his dinosaur-obsessed phase a couple years back. (Let me also mention here, gratuitously, that P.T. Anderson's beautiful 1999 film Magnolia never fails to lift my spirits. The soundtrack album is incredible, too, until -- as Daniel Handler has pointed out -- "the Supertramp songs come on and spoil everything.")
Lately we noticed that the branches were looking notably sparse. We hear now that the roots, denied water by the plastic, were unable to bring needed moisture to the rest of the plant. So we're upset at the management company for (allegedly) mistreating the tree and at ourselves for (definitely) not really focusing on the matter until now.
A glimmer of hope, as usual, comes from our amazing upstairs neighbor Tedi Crawford -- a grandma, an indefatigable volunteer at our local public school and in Berkeley at large, and just generally a great citizen. This weekend, Tedi called the woman who actually owns the building (the management company only manages it -- who knew?); the owner, also very sad about the de-magnoliazation, assured Tedi that a new tree (presumably a sapling) will be brought in as a replacement. Tedi suggests that when the new tree is planted, we residents do some sort of welcoming dance around it.
Which I think is a great idea. Also, we're going to look out the window now and then and make sure we don't see plastic covering the roots. ...
UPDATE: The magnolia tree has been completely removed. The workers looked very sad.
October 3rd, 2005
On the show that will air tonight at 7:30 (and be repeated Friday night at 10:30), I interview Burning Man founder Larry Harvey. I knew next to nothing about this annual festival before I started preparing for our conversation -- nothing except a vague sense that participation would require the denial of comfortable bathroom facilities. But the more I read about Harvey and Burning Man -- starting with their informative website, and continuing with the very helpful comments that some of you left on this blog -- the more questions I wanted to ask him. Because it turns out that the easy, simplistic notions about Burning Man -- naked people! running around! in the desert! -- can easily distract you from the profound community-building ethos at the core of this project. I hope that viewers get a glimpse of the passion and intellect beneath the wry and laid-back surface of this visionary guy. ...
Also, there's a "Wandering Josh" segment in which I got to hang out with some amazing artists in San Francisco as they prepared their gigantic pieces for Burning Man. Continuing a trend in which WJ producer Paul Sullivan has clearly been trying to kill me, I attempted to climb up some razor-sharp wire inside an enormous blue head, and then used a very scary tool called (I think) a plasma gun (though, sadly for my son, not a plasma lightsaber) in order to impress members of the Flaming Lotus Girls art collective. ...
And now, apropos of nothing (except that it shares the title of this little blog item and it's been happily running a lot in my head lately), let me parenthetically mention that the song "Hot Topic," from the first album of the group Le Tigre, is incredibly catchy. That is all.
September 26th, 2005
My interview with Golden State Warriors center Adonal Foyle runs tonight at 7:30 (and will be repeated on Friday night at 10:30). If you get a chance, check out the website of Foyle's organization, Democracy Matters. They're doing very cool work around the public financing of political campaigns.
Also on tonight's show: a "Wandering Josh" segment that graphically demonstrates my acrobatic talents.
September 19th, 2005
Next Posts
