Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros

Liner notes (1999) say, "this album is dedicated to all freedom fighters. a big shout out to all long distance session rats and night hoods everywhere, blimey, luce." The name of the CD is Rock Art & the X-Ray Style, and Strummer, formerly of the Clash and now deceased, is the only musician's name on it that I recognize, but that doesn't mean anything. I stumbled across it at the library, where you never know what you'll discover, bless the place.

Keep the lantern bright
Keep food upon the table
If you shape it well tonight
As well as you are able...
(from "Sandpaper Blues")

I've been listening to this daily for about three weeks now, and the library wants it back, so I guess I'll return it and listen to something else. Hard to articulate what it is I like about it, so maybe I'll just go outside and dance about architecture instead of trying to talk about music. One thing I can say is that talent will out, and the really good ones smash the boundaries between categories, styles, genres.

Hold onto your hats because we gotta go,
Because the noise inspectors with the sound detectors
Were coming on down the beach...
It was a techno D-Day, a techno D-Day,
Way out on Omaha Beach,
Where the troops believe in a life of freedom,
And this is all about free speech.
(from "Techno D-Day")

One of the downsides of living largely unplugged from pop culture is that I don't hear about stuff until years later, after the buzz has passed and the players are either out of the business or gone from this worldly incarnation. So, for example, I didn't listen to the Clash until Jessi Golly played a mix tape for me in 2001 or 2002. Better late than never I guess. And thank goodness for records.

Even though Gven Golly, in her territorial imperative mood on a Sunday afternoon, wouldn't let me play it really loud the way it's meant to be played, she did pick out the best unpolished gem of the whole disc the first time she heard it, as she always does: it's "Willesden to Cricklewood," the last track that brings all the tormented energy and emotional range of the other nine songs to a sweet conclusion.

How I would love to speak
To everybody on the street
Just for once to break the rules
I know it would be so cool

Dave Holland Octet

Gven and I went to a really good concert Saturday night at Weigel Hall on the Central Swingstate Megaversity campus. Being a born tightwad, I don't often spring for the prices tickets go for these days, but when I saw the ad in the Sunday paper, I decided this would be an exception. And it wasn't even that expensive.

Dave Holland is one of those nonstars of the music business who has been playing with the greats for so long that it's probably his turn to get some recognition. I am no jazz aficionado by any stretch of the definition, but I've seen his name on so many albums and heard his name on the radio enough to know he's got the chops. But I've never seen him play.

The man who walked unassumingly out on stage was the most relaxed performer I've ever seen, smiling and nonchalant, dressed in slacks and a loose shirt. He introduced Trilok Gurtu, an Indian drummer who would join him for a "musical conversation" in the opening set, and the two of them set about doing just that in an intense hour or so of bass and drums (tabla, conga, and a bunch of others) back and forth. They traded solos, made a lot of eye contact, and Trilok did a little mouth percussion and other Indian rhythmic vocalese that spiced the mix. A couple of times it made me close my eyes and almost drift off, kind of hypnotic the way an all-instrumental David Grisman concert once did, which is a strange reaction to music I was enjoying.

They took a break. Sophisticated, well-dressed central swingstaters milled about the aisles, the lobby, and outside, talking, smoking, and waiting in line for the inadequate restrooms. We walked around to stretch our hamstrings, got a drink of water, and returned to our seats. Interesting crowd, although the young man sitting next to Gven seems to have bathed in his cologne.

When the octet sauntered onstage, the cast of characters would have made a good movie. Picture "The Usual Suspects" with instruments. Holland in back with the drummer Nate Smith on his left (our right) and the vibes and marimba player Steve Nelson on his right (our left). In front with their music stands and sheet music stood Gary Smulyan, a short, rotund baritone sax player wearing a long jacket; Robin Eubanks, a muscular kind of shooting-guard in tight black leather pants, on trombone; Sasha Spiagin, a quiet, circumspect, blond Russian on trumpet; Antonio Hart, a smallish alto sax player with glasses; and sandy-haired Chris Potter on tenor and soprano sax.

A moment of unscripted drama occurred during the first piece. When Holland introduced the band members, he got the alto and tenor players mixed up, apologized, and left out Potter's last name. As they launched into the first piece, Potter walked off stage right as everybody else played (I don't remember what the thing was like, but he didn't call them 'songs', he called them 'compositions'), and during one man's solo, the others looked quizzically about, shrugging, like where's Chris? Holland was laughing after a bit, and I'm thinking Chris is getting him back, like mess with me, mister big international bandleader. Eventually Chris returned, having made his point, and played his part. It was fun watching their reactions. Cool jazz guyz.

The music - oh, yeah, there was also music - ranged all over the place. I think my favorite piece was "Blue Jean," which Holland dedicated to his wife's mother in London, who loved Ellington. Like a good ball team, each member contributed a lot, although I enjoyed the baritone solos the most, and the drummer could have laid back a bit more. It was clear to me that all these young hot-shots played off Holland, the bass/trunk-of-tree for all their branches, and he looked like a took great pleasure in providing the unifying thread when all the parts went off and eventually returned. Gven liked the trombone player's pants.

After hot tea and baklava at the little Greek place across High Street, we speculated on the way home about where these dudes would go after the show. I'm thinking they find their way to a good restaurant for a nice dinner, then the older guys go back to the hotel, while Nate, Steve, Robin, and Sasha scout out a club somewhere and party. Being both old and clueless myself, I have no idea where that would be, but I trust that they know where to find it.

production/editorial/dream/space

While sleeping late the other day, I dreamed that I was sleeping late. I got up (in the dream) still groggy, to find a house full of guests for dinner. Without brushing my teeth or hair, I walked/staggered into the living room, where about a dozen people I didn't recognize were about to sit down for a meal. It seems there is a holiday I had not anticipated. There were several small tables placed around the room rather than everyone sitting at one large table, and I found myself sitting across from three people I didn't know, still half-asleep, rumpled and unwashed, with a stale taste in my mouth. Everyone was on their best behavior and tried to be a good sport.

I left the dinner early and went with a male friend to a coffee shop where I had never been before. The friend introduced me to the waitress, who gave me a plate of eggs and a manuscript to read. I let the eggs sit there on the counter - we were sitting at a counter, not a table or a booth - while I started to read the manuscript. The friend on my left and the waitress on my right watched me read. After the first page, I said it seemed to be a "transcription" of some sort. The waitress glanced up at the friend and took away the plate of eggs, saying, "I'll get you some Western eggs." Or maybe it was "western eggs." My friend nodded knowingly. I interpreted this exchange as recognition that I was qualified to do the work on the manuscript, whatever that was, and that whatever jazzed-up Western omelette she brought me would be better than the plain eggs that sat there flat on the plate getting cold.

A couple of nights later I dreamed I was riding in a big car. My co-worker Meso-chick was driving a big old American car, like a 1975 Lincoln Continental or Chrysler New Yorker, with huge sumptuous beige or tan leather seats, a wide dash, and a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. Meso-chick seems to know where she's going, and she has a map, of course, and a sense of direction. For some reason I'm sitting in the back seat, and no one is sitting next to her up front, so I began to wonder why I'm not riding shotgun.

Finally I decided to climb over the console and settle into the front passenger seat, and I saw out of the corner of my eye someone travelling alongside us on the shoulder of the road. At first I thought they were in a car, but when I looked again they appeared to be on a bicycle, and I thought, wow, they're going really fast. Because the person beside us was keeping pace perfectly, I inferred that she (a tall female unknown to me) was following along on purpose. When I looked again, she wasn't on a bicycle but was running or walking alongside the big car, which had by then slowed down quite a bit. We were driving through desert-like terrain. Very mysterious. Or transparently symbolic of - something I'm not seeing. Anyone?

Bracket Blues

It's another Monday mornin' and I can't afford to snooze,
I'm just lookin' at my brackets and cryin' in my shoes,
All my teams are full of talent and all they do is lose,
I've got those college basketball tournament bracket blues!

Now that I've had a couple of days to recover from the carnage of the opening rounds, let me just share a few bitter thoughts. Okay, I knew Illinois and North Carolina were not as good this year as last year, but somehow I thought they would advance past the likes of Washington and George Mason. I know the Big Ten has not had a stellar year overall, but Iowa losing to Northwestern Louisiana?

The conventional wisdom (TV commentators' hot air) is that these upsets demonstrate the parity in college basketball today - or was the parody of college basketball that the tournament has become? Just as long as there are enough fools sitting through commercials of Coach KKK shilling for Chevy, there will be ample air time for Billy Packer to fill with his all-knowing blather. Does it really increase anyone's knowledge or enjoyment of the game to have this egomaniac passing judgment on every decision made by players and coaches?

There is all this talk about the "power conferences" that dominate, or at least influence, the selection of tournament teams and seeds. By my count, ten teams in the Sweet Sixteen are from those conferences, including five from the Big East. The Big Ten has a big zero, the ACC has (the Anointed) One, the PAC Ten and SEC have two each, and the Big 12 has one, while the "mid-major" Missouri Valley has two giant-killers still in it. As a thoroughly humbled midwesterner, I am drawing no conclusions just yet.

But I will make some predictions for the next round. Because I like the sound of their names, I'm picking G-town vs. V-nova, G-Mason vs. U-Conn, G-zaga vs. M-phis, and Puke vs. Texas, which just won't fit the pattern. Then on Monday morning I'll have something else to cry about.

Vernally Equinoxious

It's all about balance in the midst of change, or so I tell myself. Maybe that accounts for the solid workout I got at the yogafactory. Since it was the vernal equinox, I stayed for vinyasa class and almost kept up with the athletic young women to my right and left. I ended up doing a halfway decent tree pose and headstand, although my tight hips and knees limit what I can do seated.

Still I felt good going home, building a fire, heating up lima bean soup that by pure luck had just the right combination of peppers (9 dried cayenne, 3 pickled jalapeno). Gven had a book group meeting, so I ate sitting by myself at the kitchen table listening to Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros' "Rock Art and the X-Ray Style" and reading David Markson (nonreview to come).

Strummer's post-Clash disc struck me initially as an uncomplicated rock and roll with shades of the Talking Heads, then after listening a few times I started to hear more jazzy rhythms and vocals that remind me of Pete Townsend, John Lennon, David Bowie. Gven, who knows more about music than I do, likes the last track in particular, but it's the drivingly danceable "Techno D-Day" that really gets me going.

Markson started to lose me halfway through Wittgenstein's Mistress, but then it suddenly became funny and interesting again. Is it me, or did I get to the "good part" after trudging through the boring middle? There's no way to tell. The universe is an uncertain place. Or maybe it's me.

The threatened winter storm either fizzled on its way into central Swingstate or veered around us, and we woke to bare ground. The tulips and daffodils were untouched, and the fire in the hearth lasted all night. It's really a pleasure to step out of a hot shower into a cool room, dress for the weather, and walk into another room warmed by a wood fire.

Tuesday, the first full day of spring, I was all set to drum for J.S. Bach's birthday, wellsprings, lifesprings, but nobody showed up, and instead I drummed by myself and composed an announcement in my head cancelling the drum circle. In a participatory democracy, people vote with their feet, and when their feet go elsewhere, the people have spoken.

Walking the dog later, I still had one of Joe Strummer's songs jumping around in my head, and pretty soon my walking fell into the rhythm of the song, or maybe the song in my head fell into the rhythm of my walk. A funny thing happened then, as the Strummer song morphed into "Satisfaction," which has a similar rumba-like beat, and for a while the young Rolling Stones of 1965 propelled me around several blocks of old Methodistville on the edge of the Brethren campus under a crystal clear sky.

What's vernal about it anyway? Like vernacular? Nope, Latin ver (spring) from Greek ear (spring) from Sanskrit vasanta (spring).

We'll always have Cleveland

The occasion for an evening in Cleveland was Angel's birthday. Since she was turning fifty and loves parties, everyone was urging her to have the bash of a lifetime, but she decided on several smaller celebrations - one for her family, one for old friends, and one for church people in Bedford Falls, where Angel's husband Rico is the minister at the Baptist church. Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.

Gven and I stopped in Cuyahogaville to pick up Helga on the way. Gven, Helga, and Angel go way back. When Helga was in elementary school and all our baby sitters were graduate students, they would do big-sisterly things together, go shopping, out to lunch, or to the zoo. Angel and Rico asked Helga and Jessi to house-sit for their cats and plants once or twice when they were in high school, and later they had them over for dinner. They have always treated our kids as people, the way adults like to be treated. We have a huge houseplant in our den that was a tiny table ornament at their wedding. That kind of friends.

We made our way up the road to Bedford Falls, a picture postcard of an established, working-class, eastside suburb. Antique street lights, Italian restaurants, lots of trees, ravines, and a park along a tributary of the Cuyahoga. Michele was already there in her Volvo. Laurie, the one local friend whoa apparently fits the 'old friends' profile, arrived from Cleveland Heights while we were sipping our pomegranate juice.

A little background is in order. Angel, Michele, and I went to graduate school in the same program at the same time, sharing an advisor, several seminars, and a wonderful little windowless office with three other fellow sufferers on the third floor of labyrinthine Larkins Hall. It was the best of times and the worst of times, as we helped each other survive the stresses and intellectual growth spurts of our thirty-something career crossroads. I was the oldest and had two kids already but the last to start grad school. We were all making life decisions on the fly in the movement arts enclave of physical education. It didn't take Gven long to bond with Angel and her sharp sense of humor.

After graduating, Angel, Michele, and I stayed in Columbus working at this and that, while our office-mates Sarah and Bob migrated to California and North Carolina. Michele opened her own yoga and bodywork studio; Sarah got tenure teaching dance at Cal State; Bob wrote software documentation and taught yoga; Angel did counseling and taught yoga. Around the time Gven and I moved to Methodistville, Rico got the job as minister in Cleveland after years of house painting and musical theater. Gven did massage therapy and taught yoga. I baked bread, did landscaping, and edited textbooks. Just your average phys ed majors.

It was cool to see their new place after almost three years. The basement they've made into dual offices, the tradition Italian second kitchen, the tiny but beautiful back yard, the new furnace, the deer browsing across the street. We mostly stood in the kitchen watching Angel chop garlic and fry chicken while keeping up a running conversation and sipping Chardonnay, which, by the way, does not come from Chardon, Ohio, but should.

Then we ate this fabulous meal and laughed a great deal. Angel blew out a kitchen match because nobody thought to bring candles, and the cake - white sponge cake with fresh strawberries, whipped cream, and little panels of white chocolate - was outstanding. We really could have kept talking all night but declined the offered futon and finally headed home at some ridiculous hour. But it was so damn worth it. Happy birthday, Angel, and don't wait another fifty years to do it again.

to spring

[from Old High German springan, to jump] to move by elastic force; to issue with speed and force or as a stream; to make a leap or series of leaps; to release or cause to be released from confinement or custody (selected definitions from Merriam-Webster's Tenth edition).

It's a little premature to be making this pronouncement, but when the spirit moves, what are you going to do? Move with it, of course. The weather was warm over the weekend with a little sunshine and a little rain. No need for a jacket most of the day. A chance to fix loose boards on the fence, split and stack wood, talk to the neighbors, and think about tying a cable from the leaning pine tree to a straight pear tree next to it, hoping to keep the injured pine from getting worse.

A good time to sit outside with a glass of white wine while it gets dark and call Helga at school. She has papers and other projects due this week, exams to take, and other business to take care of on time - taxes, applications, financial aid forms, a lease, a deposit, a job. It's a full plate. Hearing her voice, it is clear that she has a handle on the multiple tasks, and she has shown that she knows how to take things one at a time.

That was Sunday. Monday was warm enough to leave windows open and listen to the birds during my early-evening class. I had such a good workout that I decided to go for a bike ride instead of staying for yoga. A few minutes out, the lowering darkness, heavy traffic, and the approaching storm convinced me to cut it short. So I turned around at Maxtown Road, and heading home against a strong headwind saw the first impressive lightning of the season cut across the south sky. Feel the ions in the electric air!

Just enough light remained to stack a row of firewood under the shed while the storm poured down, giving my mind a chance to process some of the day's events - bank deposit, tuition payment, software training, internships - while my hands handled wood. It's funny how that works, the visual and tactile doing their thing while other thoughts do what they have to do.

A Fine Madness

Let the season within the season and the games within the games begin. I am woefully uninformed about the nitty-gritty of this college basketball season, having absorbed what little information I happened to stumble across in watching Saturday televised games and reading Sunday papers. But I've been a fan since the early 1960s when Ohio State and Cincinnati were the titans of the tournament. If you've heard of Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek, and Fred Taylor, that was them. Short shorts, Converse All-Stars, grainy black and white TV, if any.

I'd been to college ballgames in the late 1950s when LaCrosse State played other Wisconsin state colleges from Platteville, Wausau, Menominee, Stout, EuClaire. I'd been to high school games between the local rivals Central (on the Southside), Logan (on the Northside), and Aquinas (Catholic). When we left LaCrosse and moved to Detroit, a new world of big-time sports opened up, and I was an eager witness.

Chas Golly took me to Pistons games downtown, first at Olympia Stadium, really an old classic hockey arena, and then at Cobo Arena, the ultra-modern dome on the riverfront. We saw some of the great old players like Bob Cousy and Bill Russell of the Celtics, Elgin Baylor and Jerry West of the Lakers, Bob Petit and Cliff Hagen of the St. Louis Hawks, Oscar Robertson and Wayne Embry of the Cincinnati Royals, and of course Wilt Chamberlain. That was big fun.

The University of Detroit had some good teams back then - Dave DeBusschere was the hometown hero - along with national powers like Loyola, Dayton, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Kansas. By the time I was in junior high school, Michigan was on the map. When they were still playing in Yost Fieldhouse, an antique little gym on South State Street, Cazzie Russell was an absolute phenomenon and a household word. Michigan had good enough players around him to make it all the way to the NCAA finals against UCLA, losing to a great John Wooden team with Gail Goodrich at guard. This was the beginning of the UCLA dynasty that later included Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Bill Walton, and lots of other great players.

Pardon the trip down memory lane. If I sound like I'm recounting the Lives of the Saints or tales of mythic figures, it's because it's true. To someone who grew up playing the game and got joy from seeing it played well, those men were a little bit godlike in my eyes. When they were also admirable in other ways, as Bill Bradley was coming out of Princeton before helping DeBusschere and the Knicks to an NBA championship, they became real heroes. As the next generation wanted to be like Mike, we wanted to pass like Cousy and play D like Russell. Their names were synonymous with power, speed, finesse, and uncanny skill. If you made a great move in the gym or the driveway, somebody would yell "Cazzie!"

My teacher and guru in fandom, Chas Golly, was present at the creation of the tournament, or at least listened to it on the radio, when it was 16 teams and the NIT was the big show. Dad wanted someone to go to ballgames with and talk to about sports, and I was the privileged elder son initiated into the mysteries. When we weren't shooting hoops in the driveway, we were passing the ball around the family room during commercials. And then there was the time a stray bounce pass got away and landed in a bowl of spaghetti on the kitchen table. Game over by order of Mom.

I rarely get to a game anymore, although I'd like to see LeBron play in Cleveland some time. Once a year, however, I make it a point to go to the 'O' Club Classic right up the street in Methodistville, where every December there's a holiday tournament. Four smallish Division III teams reflecting the regional culture of whatever provincial small town they are from - upstate New York, eastern Kentucky, northern Michigan, it's a trip and a half. A few years ago Chas, Jessi, and I saw Savannah State play in the 'O' Club Classic, coached by none other than Cazzie Russell, pacing the sidelines all elbows and knees with the same grimace on his face as in 1965.

Goods and Services

The basic data are:
126k - 108k - 8k = 10k

I'm a grammatical conservative. I still believe that plural nouns take a plural verb (go figure), therefore the data are accurate, the media are parasites, and the criteria are vague. If you want to start a fight, go ahead and try to convince me that "the data is wrong," "the media is responsible," or "the criteria is clear." Go ahead.

But that's not what I'm riled up about. What's on my mind is the quantitative value of a house and the privilege to call it home for a while. The housing industry is huge, for the obvious reason that everybody needs one. And while Thoreau harped wisely on the virtue of simplifying the means of one's existence, it's a challenge to say the least.

I'm reading a poem called "Bluesmoon" that a friend wrote and I have tacked on my cubicle wall, a longish poem which concludes,

I listen to the creaking of the shelter
I occupy, abandon, occupy, and learn to call it home.

Remember story problems in your math book? Living in the world is a long series of story problems. After acquiring a little equity by making payments on time, one can refinance a smallish older brick house in Methodistville, Central Swingstate, by borrowing 126 kroner and using 108 of those kroner to pay off the rest of the original loan. It costs around 8 more kroner to pay all the folks who do the paperwork and crunch the numbers and transfer the funds and keep track of the title and taxes and insurance required to live in the house that Jack built. That leaves about 10 kroner for the farmer and his wife to buy several new windows and doors, put a new floor in the bedroom and bathrooms, a few new light fixtures, and pay a couple of other bills.

It's all worth it, especially with the juicy metaphors provided by the finance industry. Gven and I have "locked-in" a slightly lower fixed rate of interest and "cashed-out" some of our equity to fix up the old place. Fix fix. To accomplish that, we played telephone with an inexperienced, illiterate, but well-intentioned finance trainee, and by playing the game by the rules eventually ironed things out. Then we spent a lovely evening sitting across a table at the Sawbuck's on Starmill from a more knowledgable person from the title company, signing documents and drinking green tea. Sign sign. In the meantime, we've employed the know-how of several other skilled professionals who make a living by processing loans to responsible homeowners. Soon some of that money will circulate into the window, door, floor, and fixture industries, nourishing the economic growth that makes this country great.

Again, it's all good. It doesn't mean I love the process, but it's the means to an end, not that the 'end' is truly the end of anything.

When you're strange

I had no idea what I was doing when I decided to write my freshman English term paper about The Stranger by Albert Camus. Even though I had done alright in comp class as a junior in high school - not great, just alright - I had no idea what was up in existentialist literature, which was hot at the time. I had no idea what Camus was getting at in his alienated French-Algerian colonial condition. Maybe it's a required part of the first-year college experience to write in a disciplined way of things about which one is clueless.

So I did. And being a stranger has resonated - in strange ways - ever since. Like last Sunday when Rev. Susan talked about xenophobia, the value of being a stranger, of being around stangers, and the pressure to cover. Ostensibly everybody's in favor of diversity here in the land of opportunity, meltingpot, tossed salad, land of the free, home of the brave, whatever. Diversity is easy as long as those Other people behave according to the standards of the decent ruling-class folks who were here first. Oh, sorry, they were not here first, but they killed most of the Others, so they don't count.

In short, it's okay to be different as long as you blend in. Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps so you can afford to look, act, eat, dress, wear your hair, and consume the appropriate products, in short, be just like the dominant group. It's a time-honored tradition in Whitebreadland: homogenized, pasteurized, vitamin-enriched, processed and packaged people achieving success and distinguishing themselves as unique individuals by covering their differentness.

Just for fun, I just did a tiny bit of field research by walking past my three bosses' offices. I noticed that all three white male managers were wearing light blue shirts with their khaki pants, in perfect adherance to the company's definition of 'business casual'. NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. It's a business after all. Furthermore, I like and respect all three of these men; they are not my oppressors, in fact they treat me well. They are good at what they do, and they (usually) make it easier for me to do what I do. More importantly, they represent real diversity in this workplace, in spite of or because of their skill in covering any remnants of strangeness by wearing the uniform.

I'm not here to blow anyone's cover, theirs or mine. I see people pushing the envelope in small ways all the time, and I like seeing that. But there is always a risk, otherwise the Doors wouldn't have recorded "When You're Strange," and if anyone was ever all about pushing the envelope, it was Jim Morrison. And he's been dead for how many years? Let that be a lesson to you. Don't be a stranger, eh?

Match Point

Gven Golly and I went to a movie Friday night, almost like a real date except she paid. We saw "Match Point" expecting something different from Woody Allen, which is asking to be let down, and we were. Very clever in the usual Woody ways, in which rich, sophisticated, manipulative people drive each other crazy in London instead of New York. How very original.

Same self-destructive, self-serving desires and deceptions, same whining wives and bitter mistresses, same graciously meddling in-laws. Same hash of the familiar obsessive themes of his last ten movies, but without the humor, dressed up with fabulous set designs and location shots in classy London settings. How very innovative.

The Allen, Joffe, et al. team must save a lot of money by recycling the credits of their last ten movies with actors' names spliced in, in case anybody's still watching by the end. At least those talented designers provided some cool art gallery visuals so there was something to look at while the current herd of young actors, anxious to have a Woody film on their resumes, recite tired dialog without conviction. If they're smart, they'll hire a different writer and director for their next project.

The most interesting scene was outside the theater after the film was over, as Gven and I walked to the little Italian restaurant next door. In a cinema verite set in a shopping center in Central Swingstate, we ran into co-workers Amelia and Alice coming out of the theater after seeing "Brokeback Mountain." Small world or just small town, it was a juicy moment to stand there on the sidewalk in the mild March air and share our reactions to two movies.

In another version of that scene, we all would have gone out for dessert and decaf to talk about "Match Point" and "Brokeback," apply the premise of each to our own relationships, and compare the characters to people we know. We would cast our favorite actors in the remake set in Methodistville, retitled "Backlash Mountain." Just reconstructing a backstory for the Amelia-and-Alice date in my overactive imagination was more entertaining than the movie that had just cost my date sixteen dollars.

thestarsalign

A hermeneutic reflection on random particles that organize themselves into waves. But how would I know that, being just another organized wave of random particles?

This morning a few pieces started to fall into place, pieces that had resisted my vain efforts to plan, design, organize, cajole, wedge, or manage them into place for what seemed like a long time. Perseverance furthers, sayeth the book some call the Old Man in the Yellow Coat. So I persevered with firmness and something finally yielded. Or things happened when they were ready regardless of my efforts.

Small things like the student who showed up two weeks ago, sounded positive but didn't commit, then didn't show up, left a message, a familiar tale of good intentions and recidivism. She showed up at class this morning, paid for a series of ten classes, and left smiling. I love being proven wrong.

A couple of hours later, I made contact with the rec center director I'd been playing phone-tag with for weeks, and within minutes we had worked out an agreement on class size, fee structure, room arrangement, day and time for a Monday night class at the shiny new rec center down the road. Small world note: the architect who designed the new rec center is the father of a co-worker of mine in the social studies technology group (aka Tech Gurls).

Isn't it great when things just work out?

I hadn't talked to Jessi or Helga for what seemed like a long time. I left a couple of voice mails, received a couple of messages from them, and finally the ice broke Tuesday night - Shrove (or Fat) Tuesday, for what it's worth, maybe it all has more meaning than us Enlightenment rationalists credit - and I happened to reach both of them on the phone within a couple of hours.

Helga has a new campus job in the equipment room at the stadium at NESU. Not exactly what she was looking for, but it will do for now. She completed the online FAFSA forms which will determine next year's financial aid, so it's good to have that out of the way. Helga and her roommate Brooke have found an apartment just north of downtown. It's cheap, it's on a bus line, and it has enough space for the two of them next fall semester. It looks like it would be an easy bike ride down Crain Ave. to campus, avoiding that hectic downtown Cuyahogaville traffic. She's almost finished with her larger-than-lifesize ceramic pinecone. I can't wait to see it.

Jessi has been reading The Dark Is Rising, a five-book series of magic-realist children's books. He's been taking Spanish and self-defense classes at the Dry Creek Collective and talking to a contractor friend about starting a construction coop. He built a bike from a teal, gray, and yellow Raleigh aluminum frame that fits his long body. At Havoc House, the chickens have the run of the yard, except where they've been fenced out of the garden, and now they are laying eggs, mostly in the chicken coop but sometimes in the house, and they've been known to lay an egg on a sleeping human. Jessi is planning to move back to New York in time to work in the More Gardens Coalition summer camp.

I'm still waiting for a couple of other odd things to fall into place, but that was a pretty good run for one day.