Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

Since You Liked Those…

Author: January 28, 2016 11 Comments

I was completely flabbergasted by the response to yesterday’s post in which I shared some of the pottery I’ve made, and I always appreciate any excuse to use the word “flabbergasted”. It’s up there with “effluvia”, “rictus”, “discombobulated”, and “xenium” on my list of words I don’t think get used often enough, but that’s another story.

Since I’ve been in a bit of a creative dry spell lately here are some of my other pottery works. The first thing I ever made in pottery class was a coffee mug.

005

pawprintmug

I also made a small bowl.

017With a tremendous amount of help from my instructor–so much so that I feel a little guilty claiming I made this–I made another bowl on the wheel. Expert potters make using the wheel look incredibly easy, but, as my instructor told me, it took her seven years of almost daily practice to reach the point that she can imagine something and make it.

021My best piece, though, is one I made for a friend who’s a fellow Doctor Who fan. If you’re a Whovian–and I know some of you are–you’ll appreciate how twisted I am for giving this to him as a gift.

angel

When things don’t turn out right–and I have made a lot of junk–it can be very frustrating. When they do turn out, though, it’s extremely satisfying.

Submitted For Your Approval.

Gone To Pottery.

Author: January 27, 2016 12 Comments

I take pottery classes, something that’s both a creative release and an occasional source of frustration. Making things is very appealing. On Inside The Actor’s Studio there’s always that question at the end, “What profession, other than this one, would you like to attempt?” Obviously I’d like to be asked that as a professional writer since that’s what I want to do, but sculptor would be my second choice. And since I don’t have the patience to take on the wheel I sculpt things from slabs. One night I couldn’t decide what to make so I tried to make my classmates laugh by saying, “I once went to Africa and shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”  And that led me to make a little Groucho Marx figure. He looked lonely so I made Harpo and Chico to go with him.

marxists

Who’s up for a night in Casablanca?

Cute, right? Except part of Harpo’s hair fell off and disappeared during firing. But I was determined not to let it get to me. It would be easy to remake Harpo, right? Easy–if I hadn’t fouled up the dimensions. Clay shrinks approximately 17% from molding to firing and, well, I’ve never been that good at math.

harpo

Actually everything about the first attempt, on the right, is better.

And while I haven’t been asked yet what profession I’d like to attempt my pottery instructor did ask me, “So what do you plan to do with your Marx Brothers?” And I didn’t have an answer. It may seem strange but I just made them because it was a fun idea and the main thing I’ve learned in pottery class is you never know how something is going to turn out until you do it. And it’s become a matter of personal pride that I get Harpo right. Once that’s done I have no plans for them.

I’m open to suggestions.

Submitted For Your Approval.

Planets Will Guide The Peace.

Author: January 25, 2016 10 Comments

sagittariusI had to get a new smartphone. My last one was more than three years old. Wait a minute. Why did I have to get a new smartphone? The one I had was only three years old. I’ve eaten cheese that was older than that. After a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth and screaming “FORGET IT! I’M TAKING IT BACK!” at least twenty-seven times before we even got home and a sleepless night and a lot of frustration with trying to transfer most of my data I finally accepted my new smartphone. Mostly. I still wonder who the idiot was who thought putting the headphone jack on the bottom was a good idea, which I realize is a change Apple made not long after I got my previous smartphone and which, three years later, is still one of the stupidest ideas ever, but that’s another story.

Let me be blunt: I hate changing technology because I think 99.999999999% of upgrades are completely unnecessary and while I’m not a violent person the fact that technologically oriented people all seem to believe that new or different automatically equals better makes me want to punch something. And it doesn’t help that when I’ve talked to tech-types about this I feel like I’m talking to a character from Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano.

If it weren’t for the people, the god-damn people’ said Finnerty, ‘always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, the world would be an engineer’s paradise.

A lot of my frustration was what I lost. The songs I’d downloaded were gone. Well, not gone, really, but needed to be downloaded again because they’d been put back in “the cloud”. Songs I’d added from CDs–soon to be an obsolete technology, if it isn’t already, because it’s so darn old–would need to be reloaded. Podcasts I’d been saving to listen to were gone. And several of my favorite apps simply don’t exist anymore. I had to hunt around and find new ones to replace them. One of my favorite astronomy apps is gone but I found a new one called SkyView that’s free–my favorite price–and, much as I hate to admit it, is actually much, much cooler than the old one. I was playing around with it on the bus and had some idea of where we were in relation to Mercury, Venus, and the constellation Sagittarius, still below the horizon.

The bus and all the riders and all of us were–and are–travelling in space. Being able to see where we are in relation to some of our closest neighbors, and some very distant ones–stars so distant we’re really only seeing them as they appeared long before humans even appeared on this planet–gave me some perspective.

In the book Centauri Dreams Paul Gilster goes over a lot of possible scenarios for reaching Alpha Centauri and other nearby stars. It’s pretty daunting. Our closest stellar neighbor is more than four light years away so even if we could get a probe there it would still take more than four years for the data to get back to us. It seems unlikely we’ll get there in my lifetime. Our nearest planetary neighbors are much more within reach—and if you count unmanned probes we’ve been able to get at least near all of them.

I could have put the SkyView app on my old phone, but I didn’t know it was there. I didn’t think to go looking for it until I got a new phone. It helped me make peace with my new phone, and I can accept that sometimes technological change is a good thing.

Just don’t get me started on how stupid it is that the power cords have changed.

As a bonus here’s a picture of the moon and Aquarius over my house. It was actually a crescent moon but SkyView superimposes a picture of a full moon, in case you don’t know what that sickle-shaped thing in the sky is.

moonandaquariusmoon

 

Adventures In Busing.

Snowfitti.

Author: January 23, 2016 7 Comments

There’s a Ray Bradbury short story called In A Season Of Calm Weather about a man who dreams of owning an original work by Picasso. I won’t say any more—go look it up and read it—except that it might make you consider the idea of art as something intended to last. The truth is we leave our little marks upon the world and sometimes may intend them to be bulwarks against the ravages of time, but everything is ephemeral.

snowfitti

American Graffiti.

No Vacancy.

Author: January 22, 2016 8 Comments

Friskie. "After all this time?" Always.

Friskie.
“After all this time?”
Always.

Snow days were the best. They were an opportunity for completely unstructured time, time when my friends and I could do whatever we wanted. In school and sometimes even on the weekends we were on a schedule. We had things to do. Snow days wiped out everything. Time was as clean and unbroken as the stretches of snow across our yards and it was ours to make whatever we wanted of it. Or it was just mine. I spent a fair amount of time on my own. There was a drainage ditch behind my house that led, like a path, up the hill to a rocky vacant lot where I sometimes went with my friends—like the time Chad and I found a black widow spider under a rock, throwing our parents into a panic—or just went with my dog Friskie. She was the ideal companion because whatever I wanted to do she was up for, but that’s another story. There was a road just past the vacant lot and another bigger vacant lot beyond that, and Friskie and I eventually moved on to it, making it our special domain. A rocky wall rose up abruptly at the back of it and in one spot there was a miniature waterfall, even when it hadn’t rained for a week or more. The water probably drained down from the condominiums above and beyond the wall. There were tiny mosses and lichens and algae that grew there. I could get up close and feel like a giant looking down over an exotic landscape. In the rocks I also found smoky quartz crystals that I collected and gave to friends, and in one rock what I was convinced was a fossilized tyrannosaurus rex tooth. It was probably just an oddly shaped rock.

In the spring and summer there were a few plants and grasses and stunted cedar trees, and in the winter it became a barren landscape. One winter we had an ice storm and I ran up there with a camera to take pictures of the frozen waterfall and the glassy tree branches.

One day in the fall Friskie and I went up there and found a couple of scruffy-looking guys in t-shirts and jeans setting small fires around the lot. They were wearing overalls with nametags so in spite of having hair that looked like it was dipped in 30-weight and about six teeth between them I thought they might be doing something official, so I politely asked why they were setting fires.

“Oh, we’re clearin’ all this shit out,” one of them drawled. “There’s a whole bunch a new condos goin’ in here.”

I was devastated. This was my—oh, wait, Friskie was with me, so it was our—special place. And I figured it had been left vacant because there wasn’t enough space to put condos in there. I didn’t realize it was just a matter of money.

Also I did kind of like the condos that were already there. I’d met a few friends there when I was five and six, although they and their parents moved away as soon as they could and I never heard from them again. Throughout the rest of my years there my friends and I would sometimes go and just wander through the condos—not inside them but up and down the sidewalks, even though the place had kind of a sketchy reputation. One of my friends was walking there alone when a guy who lived in one of the condos invited him to come inside and maybe go for a swim in the residential pool. My friend declined the offer. We never told our parents this because we figured we’d be banned from ever going back there. And that would have been terrible. For my friends and I the condos and the vacant lots were anything and everything we needed: a primeval forest straight out of Tolkien or a barren moon on the outer rim of another galaxy.

Before the new condos came in Friskie and I discovered an even bigger vacant lot behind the existing condominiums. Nestled between a high ridge and a line of trees it was more secluded and, stretching more than half a mile, it offered even greater opportunities for adventure, whether for me and my friends or just me and Friskie. It was covered with low scrubby brush but also had rocky spots and pools where I found tiny white leeches gliding along.

For the two years of junior high school it was also directly between my house and the school. Walking home from school was always exciting to me. It was a chance to decompress after a hard day of learning stuff, but it also felt like my first true taste of independence. And that’s why I also loved the seclusion of that vacant lot. If I was there with Friskie no one knew where I was or how to find me. It sounds terrible now, especially when I think about the implications. If something had happened to me, if I’d fallen off a rock and broken my leg or my skull, no one knew where I was. It could be hours or even days before I’d be found. Friskie was a great companion and very protective of me, but she couldn’t talk. And if something had happened to me she probably would have stayed right by me. Even though she was ten times smarter than Lassie I’m not sure she could grasp the concept of going to tell the sheriff I was trapped in the abandoned mine shaft.

This is what I think about whenever I hear anyone criticize helicopter parents or say that the lives of kids today are overscheduled, that kids don’t learn independence. Maybe in some cases that’s true, but I find it hard to blame parents for being overprotective when I think how lucky it was that I didn’t become a statistic. If I had kids of my own the idea that they were wandering vacant lots and climbing eight-foot crumbling rock walls, far out of sight of anyone, with no protective gear, would make me want to make sure they were accompanied by a drone camera, and not just a Springer Spaniel, everywhere they went. And if I thought they were wandering around sketchy condos I’d want to fill their days with wall-to-wall bassoon lessons and bowling practice.

And then I go and look at those old places I once roamed. Every one of those vacant lots is now gone—condos or houses have been squeezed into every available spot. I wonder if any kids live there now. I wonder what they do on snow days.

Here's the old 'hood. The blue circle marks my house. The site of the first vacant lot is in green. The second is in yellow. The third is in red. The shape is kinda fitting, ain't it? Source: Google Maps

Here’s the old ‘hood. The blue circle marks my house. The site of the first vacant lot is in green. The second is in yellow. The third is in red.
The shape is kinda fitting, ain’t it?
Source: Google Maps

The Weekly Essay

Going Local.

Author: January 21, 2016 22 Comments

chickenGoing to KFC for Nashville Hot Chicken is like going to McDonald’s for Japanese sushi. That’s the first thought that came to me when I saw KFC’s new offering and then I wondered if “Japanese sushi” were redundant. Aside from the difference in certain ingredients what differentiates sushi in Japan from the sushi I get here in Nashville?

If the recipe’s the same would it still be Nashville (Tennessee) hot chicken if it were made in Nashville (Indiana)? It’s not like KFC—formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken—is really from Kentucky, at least not anymore.

Nashville hot chicken, by the way, is spicy fried chicken that, I think, really started to come to prominence with the 2007 start of an annual festival, although it also got a mention in 2002 on Dave Attell’s show Insomniac. He stopped and got some of the very hottest chicken at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack–where hot chicken is generally believed to have been invented–and sweated through several bites.

And that got me thinking about the fact that I can stand in my backyard and throw stones and hit restaurants that describe themselves as Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Mexican, Chinese, and Korean. Although I wouldn’t do that. If I’m going to stand in my backyard and throw stones I’m going to throw them at the squirrels and chipmunks that insist on chewing up the wiring under our cars, but that’s another story.

It’s amazing to me that I live in a neighborhood—and that, for that matter—we live in a world—where such a wide variety of cuisines are available. I love being able to go just down the street for some pho, although it frustrates me that they won’t let me order the jellyfish salad. Admittedly I understand. The waiters don’t know I’m an adventurous eater and that even though I’ve never tried jellyfish salad and can’t say whether I’ll like it I’m willing to give it a try. But I’ve been in restaurants and seen somebody of my particular ethnic group order something exotic only to start yelling, “Yuck, I can’t eat this! Take it back!”

I’m sorry to say that’s a true story. And it’s why I don’t blame the waiters when they look at me and tell me, “No, you don’t want the jellyfish salad” and bring me chicken with lemongrass instead.

This also brings to mind another pet obsession of mine: eating locally. I’m not a locavore, but as much as possible I stay away from chain restaurants. When I visit friends in other cities I sometimes drive them nuts. “Let’s go to [GENERIC CHAIN]!” they’ll say, and if you’ve ever heard anyone speak in brackets you know how disconcerting it can be. And I’ll say, “No, no, no, let’s do something local!” When I’m in an unfamiliar place I don’t want familiar food. If I could get the same thing at home what’s the point of traveling?

And yet travel is a luxury that’s not available to everyone, nor is it possible for most of us to go everywhere we’d like to go. As much as I would like to I’ll probably never get to visit Sri Lanka, but a Sri Lankan restaurant is one way to experience the culture. Or is it? Is a Sri Lankan restaurant in the middle of a US city an authentic representation of the culture? And given the increasing interconnectedness of the world and the ease of travel it’s hard to say what authentic culture really is. Going to and from work every day I travel farther than most of our ancestors would in their lifetimes. Being able to share so much with the rest of the world is a wonderful thing but I also wonder what’s being lost. Should some things be kept strictly local?

Alternative title for this post: "This is a local blog for local people! There's nothing for you here!" (Source: BBC)

Alternative title for this post: “This is a local blog for local people! There’s nothing for you here!”
(Source: BBC)

Ramble With Me.

The Envelope Please…

Author: January 19, 2016 6 Comments

theater

[The theater lights are dim. Searchlights wander over the stage curtains. There’s a great fanfare.]

ANNOUNCER

Live from beautiful downtown Cucamonga it’s…the seventh annual Menties! Celebrating the very best in comments from all over the web. And now here are your hosts Ed and Claire!

[A screen at the back of the stage covered with overlapping pages of various blogs lights up. The forward lights then illuminate the front of the stage as Ed and Claire come out from opposite sides of the stage.]

ED and CLAIRE (singing)

Hey, what do have to say?

Drop a comment in the box below!

We want to know what you have to say

Even if the post is from a year ago!

 

We want your thoughts.

Do we have to give you a bribe?

Please add to our hits,

And whatever you do please subscribe!

 

We love to get your feedback,

It feeds our bodies and souls,

It keeps us on track

To see comments stack,

Whether positive or flack,

But please whatever you do,

No matter what they say to you,

Especially if the account is new,

Don’t feed the trolls!!!

[Scattered applause.]

ED

Boy, that was a great opening number, wasn’t it Claire?

CLAIRE

Do you really want to know or are you just fishing for compliments?

[They both laugh.]

CLAIRE

Welcome once again to the annual Menties, celebrating the very best—

ED

And worst!

CLAIRE

That the internet has to offer. So, Ed, where should we begin?

ED

Where else but at the beginning? Let’s start with the award for the very first comment. Dated January 1, 2015 with a time stamp of 00.00.00.001—that’s right, folks, one millisecond into the new year—it’s this comment from user jcope998 on the blog This’ll Fixit.

[“This is very helpful. Thanks.” appears on the screen behind Ed and Claire.]

ED

Wow. That’s so moving. I’m so glad jcope998 was able to get help.

CLAIRE

Even more impressive, Ed, is that the user was coming back from a trip to Australia and had just passed over the International Date Line.

ED

A little down-under action, eh?

CLAIRE

Let’s not go there Ed. Unfortunately jcope998 couldn’t be here to accept the award in person, but did send this message.

[Reading] “I’m honored, I guess? Is this really a thing?”

ED

Wonderful. Now, moving on—

[The lights and screen go dark. Lightning flashes across the screen. Thunder peals through the theater. The lights come back on. A giant stone bridge now hangs over the stage. Ed rides out on a miniature train. As he approaches center stage it falls over.]

ED

It looks like I’ve been derailed. What time is it now? Oh, I’m under a bridge. That can mean only one thing…it’s time to give the award for this year’s best troll. And while the competition was fierce the award goes to…Kevin Jelkins for starting arguments on no less than three-thousand blogs. Come on up and accept your award, Kevin!

[Scattered applause as a husky man with a blonde mullet and a prominent bald spot wearing an ill-fitting t-shirt that says “Sex Machine” comes up to the stage. Claire comes out and hands him the award, a collection of multi-colored threads loosely woven into a rainbow embedded in a clear plastic block.]

KEVIN

Uh, I’m not Kevin. I’m, uh, here taking this for him since he couldn’t be here. So I’d like to thank him for letting me do that. And you all suck. This is just like when Tamerlane first came to power and the—

[Music begins playing. Claire quietly thanks Kevin and directs him off the stage. Kevin doesn’t move.]

KEVIN [Shouting]

The first thing Tamerlane did was register crossbows! And he took away peoples’ carriages! This is just like what the big government data collection is doing to us, people! Wake up! You all suck!

[Two security guards come on stage and drag Kevin off.]

KEVIN

CUCUCMBERS ARE TOO A FRUIT!

[Scattered applause. Stagehands roll the bridge off to the right. Quick cut to the audience. Everyone’s looking at phones or tablets.]

ED

Well, that was really something, just like me. Right, Claire?

CLAIRE

Don’t make me remind you about the restraining order, Ed. And now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the time of the evening you’ve all been waiting patiently for.

ED

Yes, every year there’s one special comment that really stands out, the Comment Of The Year. And the winner is…

[He tears open the envelope and shows it to Claire.]

CLAIRE

Still loading! Available bandwidth exceeded! Thank you, and goodnight everybody!

[An instrumental version of the opening song begins to play. The curtain falls.]

Not Non-Fiction

Unreserved.

Author: January 18, 2016 4 Comments

IMG_2979These plaques were installed in Nashville buses following the death of Rosa Parks in 2005. They weren’t installed in every bus, just some, so you never know when you’re going to see them. It seems to me like a metaphor for what happened to Rosa Parks. The woman who asked her to move didn’t expect to be told “No.”
The story that was taught us in school was that Rosa Parks was physically exhausted, too tired to move. It’s more profound, I think, if she was able to move but mentally exhausted, tired of being told to move by people who were unwilling to take perfectly good seats farther back on the bus. It takes more courage to remain, to take a stand, when you’re capable of moving.
It was an important moment in the civil rights movement, a movement created and led by people who could have moved but instead had the courage to stay seated.

IMG_2981

Adventures In Busing.

He Licked The Big C.

Author: January 16, 2016 6 Comments

schimmel

In the late 1990‘s, when the web was still a novelty, long before YouTube, there was a website, khaha.com. It’s defunct now. It played continuous streaming comedy, mostly standup bits from every comedian you’ve ever heard of and quite a few you’ve never heard of. Doing some mindless task I’d sit and revel in the jokes. One voice stood out. Did he just say what I think he said? This is the filthiest thing I’ve ever heard. And then I started laughing. And I started listening for the sharp-tongued sarcasm of Robert Schimmel, whose birthday is today.

Unlike other X-rated comedians Schimmel often made himself the butt of the joke–sometimes literally. He told a joke about a woman suggesting he try anal beads. He balked at first but then thought, who’s gonna know? Beat. “So I’m in the emergency room…”

He also sometimes went too far. As he told an audience he’d been banned from a late night talk show after telling a joke about the time his dentist said, “You’re gonna feel a little prick in your mouth…”

And he wasn’t always dirty either. He applied that same intense wit to everyday situations, like his daughter’s pet rabbit.

I got her a rabbit like Easter time and about three days later it’s actin’ real sick and it’s just layin’ around and my wife goes, Gee, maybe we should take him to the vet. I said, Yeah, why don’t you just let me take him for a drive? I’m not gonna take a five dollar rabbit to the vet.

Beat. “So we’re at the vet…”

It didn’t surprise me that Schimmel was recognized as a major new talent. He got an HBO special and a sitcom deal.

And then came cancer. Specifically non-Hodgkins lymphoma. In his book Cancer On $5 A Day* (*chemo not included) he describes getting the diagnosis.

“Just my luck,” I say. “I get the one not named after the guy.”

He has a show that night. He then goes on,

I realize instinctively that even though I’ve been told I have cancer, I haven’t been told that I’m going to die. And to prove it, I’m going to do the one and only thing that shows that I am very much alive.

I am going to make the audience laugh.

The original title of his book, by the way, was I Licked The Big C. When he was in remission he went on a late night talk show. He opened with, “I licked the big C!” When the audience’s cheers and applause died down he added, “And I beat cancer!”

The joke wasn’t just cut by the producers. They stopped taping and took him backstage for a little chat.

When I got my own cancer diagnosis I thought of Schimmel. His doctor told him, “If you can keep your sense of humor you’re going to be okay.” I’d read his book years earlier and I didn’t just remember the jokes. I also remembered how honest he was about the trauma of chemotherapy, and a conversation he had at his lowest point with his father. His parents survived the Holocaust, and the conversation saved his life.

I have mixed feelings about sharing this because even though Schimmel beat cancer, even though he went on to make jokes about how he celebrated remission by swimming with dolphins and was told not to stick anything in the blowhole–”What’d I spend fifty bucks on then?”–he died in September 2010 following a car wreck.

But four years later I knew if I could keep my sense of humor I could lick the big C.

Hail and farewell Robert Schimmel. And happy birthday.

 

Hail & Farewell., Happy Birthday.

It’s All Been Done Before.

Author: January 16, 2016 9 Comments

IMG_3155When I was a kid I drew a lot of strange things. At least adults found them strange. I have a very clear memory of one of my preschool teachers telling my mother, “He draws such unusual things.” What I’d drawn was a bunch of stone faces rolling down a mountain. What’s funny is I drew that after seeing a picture of Mount Rushmore. It was just my way of reimagining what I’d seen, because I had no clue what it was or what it meant. I doubt my teacher would have found it that unusual if I’d just drawn Mount Rushmore. About that same time I drew a picture of a bunch of people in a boat in a cave. They were all holding candles. A woman looked at it and told me, “You’re so creative. When I was a little girl I never knew what to draw. You draw such original things.” And I felt guilty. The picture was inspired by my first trip to Disneyworld and the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride. I’d just stripped away all the pirates because I couldn’t draw them and made the cave dark and given everybody candles because, well, it was dark in the cave.

I felt guilty because it wasn’t really original. And I’d spend literally most of my life studying art and art history before I’d realize that there really is no such thing as originality. Everything is a blend of everything else.

The breakthrough would come when I read Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality. In one part he describes art history as a clock. The clock strikes midnight when Jackson Pollock creates action painting, removing the direct contact between brush and canvas that’s been the basis of art since the first cave paintings. It’s the end of originality, the end of art as a progression. It bothered me to think we were living in a post-midnight world, that anything that came after the early 1950’s was merely a repeat of what had come before. Art history was finished, defunct, washed up, in the red, kaput.

Then I realized that’s kind of like saying history itself ended with World War II. History, and art, march on.

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with the graffiti above it’s this: most graffiti I see is abstract. It’s usually a name or a word. This particular work sticks out because it’s a picture of something. And it cracks me up because it’s a narwhal cyclops with, um, wings on its head—a mashup of a few different things.

It’s unusual but it’s not original. And that doesn’t matter. It’s art and that makes it part of art history.

IMG_3156

American Graffiti.