RIP Adam Schlesinger

I bought you
A light blue
T-shirt last night
From some band
I couldn’t stand
But their logo was alright...

That’s a lyric from Adam Schlesinger, who passed away at 52 yesterday from COVID-19.

You may not know his name, but you probably know his music. His band Fountains of Wayne had a huge hit with “Stacy’s Mom,” as well as a whole catalogue of smart, funny, cool pop songs.

He also wrote songs for That thing You Do (remember that Tom Hanks  movie about a one-hit wonder pop band?). And he won Emmy awards for his songwriting on the tv show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

And it would be hard to overpraise his contributions to the Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore romcom Music and Lyric. The core song of that movie, “Way Back into Love” is fantastic, both on its own and as a way of reinforcing the theme and advancing the movie’s plot.

But this is my favorite of his. Adam’s the bass player and backing singer, and these guys were a really great songwriting team. Fuck.

RIP, Adam.

Collages and quarantines

In the part of your life that is about being alive, your one wild and precious life, what it’s like to be you, your sense of who you are and how you fit in with everything, all that, doing creative work hangs out near the center circle, along with love, beauty, laughter, and the other alltime greatest hits on the Super Awesome Mixtape of your soul.

I’m mostly talking about my own experience, but I guess I’m evangelizing, too.

Doesn’t matter what it is. Doesn’t matter if you’re doing pro quality work.

Years ago, in my thirties, hanging out with a friend who was into collaging, I started making collages on a once-in-a-while basis.

I found it really satisfying and therapeutic. I incorporated it into my parenting, too, making collages with the kids. It’s a great way to pass time, you fall into flow, and at the end there’s something interesting to look at and think about.

I get old magazines for free from the library, sort through them, various images or phrases catch my eye, and I cut and arrange and glue, and an hour passes. And I’ve made something! I keep a notebook that has color copies of the old ones. I enjoy flipping through it sometimes.

The decades-long project, collaging alone and with others, gives me a mental health boost. It also serves some of the same function of dreams, processing stuff that is hanging out right below the obvious surface of mind.

And it sharpens the saw in terms of something like lateral intelligence, combinatorial insight, meaning-making, the broadest sense of the word “play”  (like the immersive way kids play, or the play of light on water, or the cool brain riffs we call wordplay, or the way it feels to lose yourself in the moment when playing music or sports or games), you know, man: all the juice I need to be there for me when I’m making my For-Real art, writing my poems, stories, and songs. The collaging takes all that stuff out for a walk, gives it some air and light, knocks off some cobwebs. And it feels like being awake and alive. 

Anyhow, I recommend you find some kind of arroyo to channel the flow of your creative energy.  I’m gonna do some writing. Play some guitar.  Sing.

And, as you’ve likely deduced, I’ve made a couple of collages during these days of self-quarantine.

Live from the Cactus Cafe

New song on the YouTube channel. It’s called “Ledger,” and it’s about the record-keeping we all do in our heads. 

The lyrical idea comes from a Kacy Crowley prompt: a hundred mistakes. The idea is that at the Cactus Cafe’s songwriters’ open mic, Kacy will toss out a phrase to stimulate song ideas. If you write a new song from that prompt by the next week’s open mic, you get a free drink at the bar, which is a fun incentive to write. “A hundred mistakes” led me to ponder the notion of taking internal inventory, all the wins and losses, and how to make sense of them.

I went to that open mic a bunch this last summer and had a great time. Kacy is, besides being an excellent writer and performer herself, a terrific host! 

The space is historic and legendary. It’s literally the stage where Townes, Lyle, Ruthie, and any number of great Texas songwriters used to regularly play in their early days. It’s a thrill to play on that stage, even in an open mic situation. No delusions of grandeur here, but it connects me, loops me in as a small part of a beautiful tradition. I recommend it.

Now that the school year has imposed earlier mornings on our family, it’ll be a rarer thing for me to go play, but I’ll be back. 

Meanwhile, here is “Ledger.”

Hamlet: three cool but not super-deep observations

My youngest son played Hamlet in a theatre production this past summer. That meant that (a) I spent a lot of time running lines with him and (b) I saw the play four times on four consecutive days. So I spent a lot of time with the play and noticed some things. Before it all fades away, I want to capture a few of the thoughts I had about the play.

Here are three of them . . .



1. I’m stealing this one from the literary critic, essayist, and communication theorist Kenneth Burke, from his essay about literary form. He uses Hamlet as an example, noting that when Hamlet is about to first encounter his father’s ghost, there is a distraction right before the big moment. As noises from the castle drift down to where Hamlet and his friends keep watch, Hamlet begins to kvetch about how much he hates the waste and rowdiness of the king’s parties. The ghost we’ve been waiting for then arrives, startling the group of friends. It’s a great example, Burke notes, of how form works, creating an anticipatory desire (seeing the ghost),  delaying the fulfillment of that desire (Hamlet’s rant about the stupid king and his stupid parties), and then fulfilling the desire (oh shit, that’s a GHOST!) to maximum effect.

2. We get a glimpse into Hamlet’s complexity right away, by seeing three versions of him in his first scene. First we see him talking to his mother and uncle. As they push him to move on from grieving for his father, urging him to adjust to the new normal, Hamlet steps to the edge of politeness in his responses to them, and we see him being smart and controlled, even as we understand that he is suffering and angry and struggling. Secondly, when he is left alone, we get his deepest thoughts, see how he is scorched with grief and rage. It’s a powerful moment of dropping the public mask and seeing into the private soul. And thirdly, when Horatio and friends appear, Hamlet gets it together and kind of bullshits with his buddies for a minute, engaging in dark humor as they catch up on all that’s been going on. So: the first appearance of the protagonist gives us three views of him, establishing that there’s way more to Hamlet than meets the eye any given moment.

3. The funny stuff is really-really funny. There is a bit of hilarious double entendre dirty talk with Hamlet talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where they are ostensibly saying it’s good to be not too happy and not too sad. They personify Fortune as a woman, and make jokes about how not being at the top or bottom of Fortune, that is, neither her cap nor shoes, would mean that one was near, um, Fortune’s waist, you know, near her secret treasures, and so on. It’s a funny bit of schtick, comic relief from a heavy theme, and right on point for these university students goofing around with wordplay.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: three cool but not super-deep observations

Spoilers below. You have been warned.

1. Brad Pitt’s deadpan dopey sort-of-amused reaction to people breaking In with weapons and threats is a fantastic callback to his very fine but brief performance as Floyd in the Tarantino-penned 90s movie True Romance. Well played, all the way around.

2. The thing Pacino tells Dicaprio, that having a daunting hero from the past lose a fight as a way to boost the new protagonist‘s cred, is exactly what is going on with the Bruce Lee scene. That bit of dialogue is a funny moment of inside baseball, Tarantino referencing a method he himself is using.

3. There are a couple of  instances of beautiful and glamorous women snoring. This is close to the heart of the movie’s theme about reality vs depictions thereof.

Design thinking and making things better

I work at the City of Austin’s Office of Design & Delivery. We recently designed a new website and form for police oversight.

The form gives people a chance to lodge complaints, of course. However, it also offers a chance to recognize officers who are doing good work. By making it easy for people to give feedback, we encourage input.

I just learned that an officer earned recognition from the department for having gone above what was expected in handling a recent sexual assault case. The survivor felt that the officer was excellent in really listening and helping her feel supported and safe to talk about what had happened. She felt that way strongly enough that she took time to fill out the feedback form, which is remarkable.

Everybody knows this approach hasn’t always been the case for how these kinds of cases have been handled (everywhere).

The chain of feedback has been significantly shortened. The officer got that positive feedback quickly. This creates a virtuous circle for the department, pushing back harder and sooner for negative behavior, and giving due credit sooner and better for officers doing good work.

Proud to be working there. This is part of how the world gets better.

Here’s my recent blog post regarding the form we built and the design thinking that informed it:

https://medium.com/civiqueso/a-case-for-style-as-substance-4a050d43c774

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the web . . .

Hello reader, how's it going?

Thanks for stopping by! If you're enjoying what you read here, you might also like some of my writing elsewhere around the web:

Fiction (Short Story):
https://sunlitstorytime.com/lateststory/noshovelnobacon-jeffknight

Essay (about a favorite Grateful Dead song):

http://www.radiuslit.org/2018/05/05/set-out-running-friend-of-the-devil-has-become-a-friend-of-mine/

Fiction (Romantic Comedy novella):

https://www.amazon.com/Lunchbox-Love-Letters-Smartass-Romance-ebook/dp/B01IZ1L040/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1541854111&sr=8-2&keywords=Lunchbox+love+letters

Song (the most recent addition to my youtube channel):

https://youtu.be/C5byGod0E4E