Daughter

I'm a father of three. One is a daughter. Emily will be 35 in a few days. I was getting ready to be her dad at about the age Soon Yi Previn was when she chose Woody Allen over Mia Farrow. My daughter now has a daughter of her own. It goes without saying that I love them. But why go without saying when there's so much to say, so many places to say it? Take the Woody Allen/Dylan Farrow story. Please. (I know not even Jack Benny can help us now, but we must smile when we can in these times.)

I haven't posted here in nearly a year. I've increasingly gone silent on other social media, all of which seems to me lately an overused skillet for rendering the fat of judgment from the rancid bacon of self-aggrandizement. Or vice-versa, I don't know, stupid metaphor. I scroll through my Facebook feed, hoping to see a new photo of little Zinnia, so the whole thing won't seem like a grotesque waste of time. Usually, there's no new photo, because as a working mother, Emily doesn't have time to waste.

More often than not, this past week, my quick daily scroll has become a series of digressions into the Woody Allen/Dylan Farrow "story." Horrendous. Friends post links to "articles" that feel embarrassing to me in their assured correctness. I'm using the ironic quotes because so much of this chatter is redolent of a peculiarly wretched strain in human nature, now magnified a billionfold by the new forums we've created to amplify our incessant need for notice or certainty or moral superiority. The sanctimony on both "sides" seems ideological. Reading all these things, the idea of participating has felt like wading into a cesspool, with way too many people splashing around in it already, all trying to be the smartest or most judicious shit-splashers, or just the most re-blogged, re-tweeted, re-splashed.

The catalyst for my jumping in was something I saw on Twitter yesterday. It came from Miranda July, whose work I admire. The tweet was one word: "Wife." The link that followed was to this photo.

It gave me pause, which is generally a good thing in any consideration of alleged wrongdoing. It's brilliant, really—a one-word caption before you see the image, and then the picture in place of a thousand words to roll up all the accusations about Woody Allen as a pedophile—a pinprick of provocation to anyone who follows you on Twitter and clicks through. And who wouldn't click through? You're Miranda July. You're provocative. You make people think. Your movie Me and You and Everyone We Know is an amazing portrayal of human relationships and longings and social complexity. Your book No One Belongs Here More Than You is full of stories that offer the same kind of tenderness, wit, and weirdness. I sat and pondered this tweet for a moment. What does it mean to post a photo of Woody Allen with Soon Yi Previn as a little girl, long before she became his wife, captioned with the word "Wife"?

And then my thought emerged from the foggy swamp of topical news, the celebrity tweet, the chatter and the chum for opinion-sharks. I saw with sudden clarity the girl's face. And I thought, That's not Soon Yi.

I could be wrong, of course. But I think Miranda July is wrong. Assuming the photo is real, there's probably a date for it that might confirm this one way or the other. But why bother with hard evidence in the court of public opinion? We can say whatever we want. Is that Soon Yi as a little girl, or is it her daughter (adopted, with Woody Allen)? Look at this photo and see what you think:

That's Woody, Soon Yi, and their two adopted children. Soon Yi has a very distinctive face. Here's a shot of Soon Yi from when she was closer to the age of the girl in the first picture:

Then look at this one, where Woody's and Soon Yi's oldest adopted daughter, Bechet, is closer in age to the girl in the first picture:

I hope Miranda July takes a look at these photos, because unless she's got blinders on, I think she'll come to the same conclusion I did. If she felt compelled to comment on other people's lives in this way, she should at least get the lives right. Her tweet, if any, should have read: "Daughter."

Update: Visiting Miranda July's Twitter page to get a screenshot of the tweet, I find that she's taken it down. In its place, with no reference or context: "I mean Daughter."

That changes the message. Some people might find it even more chilling, viewing this little girl as just another in a long line of Woody's underaged sexual targets. If she is or has been, and if Dylan Farrow really was molested at age 7, it's more horrendous than all the media cesspool that has gathered around the story. If, as he claims, Woody never did any such thing and is himself the target of a revenge smear, it's a deepening and widening of the pool.

I don't know, of course, and to say I don't know doesn't mean I'm "blaming the victim." It doesn't mean I'm discrediting anyone or passively accusing. It means I'm not omniscient. I'd like to suggest that no one is, that we can all learn more, think more, consider more, before offering up an opinion or provocation. As I looked at these photos to make sure I was seeing them clearly, I was trying to think: what do I really know about these people? Almost nothing. I've read a lot, and still I know almost nothing.

What I Think I Know

I know that the break-up of Woody's and Mia's unique, separate-lives/shared-family relationship was precipitated by her discovery of his affair with Soon Yi, or so they all have said. I know the allegations about his molestation of Dylan Farrow came out in the ensuing custody battle. I know the investigation did not find evidence of sexual abuse, that Dylan Farrow's statements have contradicted each other and been characterized by investigators as "coached"—and that these things don't mean the allegations are false. I know Woody Allen says they are. I know that Woody Allen and Soon Yi have been married for about 17 years, and that Soon Yi herself has said that he was never a father figure to her, that she spent very little time with him as a child, and that they became lovers when she was 19. I know that 20+ years later, they're married with two adopted daughters. I know that whatever we think of a 56-year-old man taking up with a 19-year-old woman, there's a huge difference between 19 and 7, and a huge difference between sleeping with someone else's adopted daughter and molesting your own. And I know that even the best, most balanced, comprehensive, clear-eyed writing I've read on this subject ultimately cannot provide the answers we seem to want.

All of it brings me back to my own daughter, her daughter, the way we fall in love with our children and, in a way, with all children—the enchantment we feel in their beauty and aliveness, how thrilling it is to encounter beings who seem unspoiled, undamaged, untouched. I know that for some people, the compulsion to touch the untouched is irresistible. For anyone with an imagination, it's not impossible to see why, and for anyone with a moral conscience, recoiling from that imagined transgression is immediate and powerful. I'm not easily repulsed. It usually takes a child molester, a rapist, a terrible injustice, or an egregious use of social media to do it. I can imagine a lot without feeling that I'm crossing a line or taking a side.

It's easy to imagine the pain of this family. It's also easy, I think, to imagine being accused as Woody Allen has been, and to feel the sense of injustice you'd carry if the accusations were false, the guilt you'd feel if they were true. We can imagine these things because we're really no different than Woody or Mia or Soon Yi or Dylan. We want love. Our families are fraught and fucked-up. We fight, we accuse, we defend, we try to do what we think is best.

I think of Emily and Zinnia. The idea of anyone hurting either of them makes me understand vengefulness. If Mia Farrow believes that one of her children was sexually abused, it's completely understandable that she'd want to destroy the abuser's life. I would, too. Even if the way she and her son Ronan use Twitter to air their enmity and judgment is distasteful, it's easy to understand why they do it. And it's easy to understand why Woody Allen wants no part of it, reluctantly issuing statements to defend himself.

I don't understand the compulsion to take a side in such a personal family matter, where so little can be known with certainty, and lob an opinion about it into the public square. How do people do that and not hate themselves later? Maybe they hate themselves already. Maybe we're all just projecting our worst tendencies onto Woody and Mia, the way we always have with public figures.

When someone as smart and sensitive and deeply-seeing as Miranda July can do something so misguided and potentially hurtful with just a handful of keystrokes, and it can get all the way around the world in an instant, we're no longer even in the court of public opinion. It's just Me and You and Everyone We Don't Really Know. The photo of Woody Allen and his daughter goes out with the caption: "Wife." It floats around the cesspool until it becomes indistinguishable from all the other shit.

And yet that little girl, Bechet, is a person. Born in China, adopted by American parents. She has a daddy. He's famous, so they get their picture taken wherever they go. Some of the pictures get used as weapons against him. We don't know what the pictures really mean or what the effects of this kind of fame and infamy are. We don't know what their relationship is. She's 15 this year. Woody's 150, or probably feels that way. We don't know. If the picture is for real, all we really know is, a girl sat on her daddy's lap. Someone took a picture of it. And then a bunch of shit happened, and next thing we know, the girl has been negated, presumed to be her adoptive mother, and the great game of misinformation and misjudgment and misanthropy goes on.

I wish Zinnia had a different sort of world to grow up in. Emily and her husband are splendid parents, so maybe, to the degree that Zinnia is treated with tenderness, respect, and dignity at home, her world will be different where it really matters.

She deserves that. So does every little girl, every child, and in fact, everyone. All of us adults, we deserve better, too. The great thing is, we can have it.

Maybe we can start by taking all that time and attention we spend on everyone we don't really know and spending it on everyone we do know instead.

We can start by shutting the hell up. And now, I think I will.

♥

So, for Valentine's Day my sis posts on her lovely blog this crushingly beautiful song by Mary Chapin Carpenter:

The video's not much to see, but the song just laid me out, and when you see the lyrics laid out, too, you understand that part of the song's effect comes from its structural perfection, viz.:

Jericho

You can't see me yet

Seeing takes a long, long time

From the outside in

Measuring in shift and sign

As you let your eyes adjust

To the darkness deep within

Sifting through the ash and dust

We are the places that we've been

You can't hear me yet

Listening takes a long, long time

And I've so much to tell

But words die on these lips of mine

In the stillness you may sense

Everything I long to say

Unraveling these golden threads

The walls will all come down this way

You don't know me yet

Knowing takes a long, long time

And time is all we have

Never traveling in straight lines

So memorize each turn and twist

And just be careful as you go

For if a love is a labyrinth

Then my heart is Jericho

The song is built as carefully as a city, or my own high-walled heart, which tumbled down into a heap of rubble and tears this morning, listening over and over, going farther into the center of the song, as easy or arduous a journey as this old map of Jericho might make it.

I listened to the song as if I were singing it to my kids, my darling spousette, my folks, my siblings, all the friends I haven't seen or heard or known in years (or ever, in the song's deep way of knowing). I listened to it as if they were singing it to me. I listened as if my one-month-old granddaughter, the biggest little thing that's happened in the long, long time since I last posted here, were singing it.

"You don't know me yet..." Aw, jeez. I'm a sniffling mess here.

Here's the thing. If you're reading this, I probably love and miss you. It's Valentine's Day. Be mine.

xo
J

Gnostic Unemployment

This five-year-old laptop is giving me fits. Earlier today I shut it down and sat here looking around my office, which doesn't look much better than when I photographed it in May for that last post. A mess. I've been too busy writing and trying to sell myself to tidy up.

On a shelf, I saw some old notebooks. I pulled one down, opened it up to some notes on gnosticism from a lecture I went to in the early '90s, and found this:

Moses supposes

his gnosis Jehovah's,

but Moses supposes theistical-ly.

For nobody's gnosis

is strictly Jehovah's,

as Moses supposes his gnosis to be.

Semi-clever, but "strictly" is a sonic wrong note--it needs something that sounds like "posies," as in "posies of roses"--like "mostly," maybe, but the sense isn't right. I struggled with it there in the margins, writing a list of possible words to rewrite the thing around:

knows

chose his

psychosis

hypnosis

shmos (shmoes?)

closeness

discloses

I'd have no recollection of having written any of this if I didn't have the notebook, which takes me back to the time and the place: 1994, a conference called Body & Soul.

Isn't it handy, the way my iPhone photos arbitrarily load upside-down or sideways? Nice. Flipping pages, I see that Deepak Chopra gave the keynote and told a story about his friend Bob, who got electrocuted on top of a house, fell 15 feet to the ground and landed on his chest, which defibrillated his heart. "He was dead when he fell off the house. The fall brought him back to life."

I didn't write down what this story was meant to illustrate, but I instantly connect to it. I got zapped off the top of a nice, homey career, hit the ground, woke up, and starting running.

What I've done since May:

1. Wrote two big fat humor book proposals--chapter outlines, sample chapters, market & promotion stuff, the works. Two publishers recently expressed interest, but my agent thought I had a deal at Random House in July, and that fell through. So we'll see.

UPDATE: Mr. Agent called to say that Sourcebooks will publish my Tea Party lampoon next fall. The advance is small, but the royalty structure looks good. I'm thinking pseudonym, supporting the book with a political satire blog.

2. Did a couple of consulting days with Infinium in June, working to map out the future for a big local bank. More fun than it sounds like it would be.

3. In August, I hooked up with a former Sprint VP and another business genius to develop a start-up idea. We entered a venture capital contest (mainly to give ourselves a deadline to develop a pitch, for which I wrote and directed a video, among other things), but did not win. We're now working on the business model, web content, and other stuff. These people are so smart. I've learned a ton.

4. Started Hebrew classes. Penny and I are trying to keep with Jonah, who's in Hebrew school now and will be studying for his bar mitzvah over the next four years. Man, it's a mindfuck to study a new language. Spanish in high school was like eating flan compared to learning Hebrew at my age. But I can feel my old language-learning muscles stretching and flexing. It's cool.

5. Adapted a novel by another of my agent's clients. The script is now in the hands of a director who just sent me another set of revisions to do. I'm 50% assured that funding is just around the corner and this won't be yet another spec script thrown down the rabbit hole. The other half of me suspects that it'll all fall apart, as happens far more often than not. The novel, by the way, is called Keeping Time, by Stacey McGlynn.

Turns out, when I don't have a day job, I can write a script in less than six weeks. It used to take me a year, starting and stopping through weekends and evenings.

6. Started a novel of my own, which is really the only thing I want to work on right now. It's going to be a very funny, very sad, very vicious corporate satire. I'm now into the third chapter and completely in love with the first two, one of which is nearly 50 pages long and delights me every time I read it over.

I have to keep reacquainting myself with it, because the search for gainful employment takes a lot of time and energy. I try to accomplish something every day toward that end, viz.:

7. I've been doing some freelance brainstorming and copywriting for a local brewery, which I've really enjoyed.

8: Interviewed at a big marketing/ad agency. Feedback has been encouraging so far.

9: Reconnected with a friend who owns a web design company, and I may have a "freelancer with benefits" deal there, which would really take the worry out of the Damoclesian health insurance sword that's hanging over the end of the year.

Between those last three things, I think financial survival is likely. And if the script can just get a green light, which my agent seems to think will happen early in 2011, or if somebody says yes to one of the books, I'll breathe easier.

In this old notebook, I find the following quote from Elizabeth Roberts, whoever that is:

"To be a human being is to be a swinging door. The inner life and outer life must connect."

I scribbled in the margins, "Also, if you get too busy rushing in and out without paying attention, you'll smack yourself in the face."

The wolf is still at the door. But I do think my inner and outer lives are connecting, especially across the pages of that novel. And I have reason to hope that everything I've done these past six months will make it harder to blow the house down.

Moses supposes

what blows or bulldozes

his house is neurosis or anx-i-e-ty...

Prognosis for Moses?

His prose comes up roses,

if Moses lets goeses and shows he be me.

Some of you have been very supportive during this scary stretch of time. And I love you for it. You gno who you are.

Career Is Dead, Long Live Career

So, I lost my day job. From the inciting event to the wrap-up of the terms of my "retirement" (to which terms I acceded yesterday) took exactly three months. And what a quarter it was.

I got sick in the early throes, immune system no doubt depressed, a brief flirtation with death-by-sepsis that followed an inflammation of my--who knew?--carotid artery sheath. I take that to mean "heartsick."

And one month into it all, before there was any hint that it might end this way, I celebrated my 30-year anniversary on the job. I remember saying to the group of writers and artists gathered for the party that I didn't want my remarks to sound like a retirement speech, but that, then again, "you can be about to retire and just not know it yet." Nailed it!

30 years of fun and creativity and collaborating with some of the coolest people on earth and maybe caring just a bit too much, and it's over. So. What's next?

I don't know. I have another consulting job in June. I'm working on a book, a couple of scripts, and taking, as they say, some meetings with bona fide literary agents and publishers. So I hit the ground running. But now I'm skidding through 30 years of accumulated office detritus. A few of my darling co-workers stuck around after hours last week to help me box it all up. It filled a friend's pickup truck (seriously, getting the last box in was like playing Tetris®. Now with profanity!™). There was no time to sort while packing, and my home office was already pretty crowded. Now it looks like something out of Hoarders.

I had a manila folder for every one of those 30 years. Back before I started storing stuff on hard drives, I kept copies of everything. Thousands of jokes, little verses, names for products, sell-lines and slogans, new business ideas, memos, thank-you notes from editors, consumer letters, goofy poems to read aloud at people's birthdays or milestone anniversaries. The early stuff is either hand-written or typed on a Smith-Corona (and then on an original Mac, saved to flexi-disks I can no longer access), so unless it got accepted and applied somewhere, the writing only exists in these photocopies or on scribbled 3x5 cards. And I'm jettisoning almost all of it. I put eight grocery bags of paper out for the recycling truck yesterday.

It's weird, but the handwritten-ness of some things makes me unable to pitch them. I found two pages that I evidently submitted for a 1990 assignment to predict the next decade's big changes. If it were a Word document, I'd just pitch the hard copy. But it's the only existing version of this thing. You can see some of it here, with a couple of jokes from the brainstorm bowl AND a "modest proposal" I wrote when writers were asked how we could help the company save money back in the mid-90s.

Since Blogger loaded that photo sideways and you can't read it anyway, the cost-cutting proposal starts out, "Kill people." And it goes on from there in Swiftian mode. My predictions included environmental trends, "rampant religious fervor," musings about computer networks (I was still moonlighting at CompuServe in 1990), and "I would also like to mention desktop publishing." The 3x5s say, "You gotta laugh at your problems, cuz let's face it, that's what everyone else is doing" (a little Cope & Encouragement workin' for ya there) and, under the title, "NATURE & YOU: A Poem," this beautiful Message of Love:

If I had plants
instead of thighs,
you'd make them
photosynthesize.

Hadn't heard that rhyme before, and haven't heard it since. I should do a Wikipedia entry on it.

There's a long to-do list before I get to that. It's a big world out here and I want to do big things in it. Not sure if I'll have time for blogging along the way, so there may be even less to see here than usual.

But never doubt my love, O faithful few readers, commenters, lurkers, and drive-by glancers. Hold me close, ya tiny dancers. You know I dig you like clams.

Yr humble,
Jas P Howard

Available for parties, partnerships, and odd jobs befitting a guy besotted with words, words, words.

NaPoWriMo Winds Down

I missed the first day of National Poetry Writing Month, but wrote a poem every day in April thereafter. Might write one for May Day, just to get to 30.

Odd stuff happened along the way. The first poem I wrote inspired my friend Deb Beroset to do a lovely painting that she posted on her Zesty Artista blog. Subsequent poems got me in trouble at work. And a few caught me by surprise, expressing things I didn't know I knew.

If you just keep writing, things happen. Here's what happened today, end of the month, beginning of who knows what:

*

April Ends In Rain

You don't know what could come down
on your head. Every day, we wander out
into the world, avoiding car wrecks
or not, unknowingly dodging bullets flying
elsewhere in the city, pile-ups and ricochets
behind us, fate rolling its red carpet back up
like a tongue that licked around our edges
and decided to eat something else.

There's a man who's been struck by lightning
several times and lived to tell about it,
some magnet in his body drawing down
the charge, boom, and the air crackles,
his hat's on fire, or he's holding a torch
that was a book. Maybe those words
were just asking to be set alight.

Maybe the rain this morning was just to say,
yesterday was a dream. You worked
in the sunshine, you made love, you talked
with friends and played with kids, you wrote
about a wind that blew through and now is
gone. The weeping cherry you planted
when your son was born has shed its last
blossoms for the year. Look how green
the world can be when you wake up
and it's today, and today only.

The sleepwalker has left you, shuffling
off in slippers, a light rubbing sound
like a samba under the echoes of
his song, the one he's been mumbling
since you first fell in love with dreaming
and writing and women and the music
of your own wild imagination. You still
remember the words, 35 years later:
Green, it's your green I love.
Green of the wind. Green branches.
The ship far out at sea.
The horse high on the mountain.
Shadows dark at her waist,
she's dreaming there on her terrace,
green of her cheek, green hair,
with eyes like chilly silver.
Green, it's your green I love.

Who knows what it means? You never did.
But you love it to your soul anyway.
Everything that has conspired to kill
what is most alive in you could not do it.
You are awake.

*

[The quoted section is from Lorca's "Sleepwalker's Ballad," translation by John Frederick Nims, whose book Western Wind cracked me open just enough to glimpse a poet inside.]

Dog Cat Rat (Man)

While dining in a sidewalk cafe on Throckmorton Street in Ft. Worth yesterday, I saw these four creatures:

Yep. A rat sitting on a cat standing on a dog being led by a man. I said to my colleagues, "Hey, look, a dog and a cat and a rat." And they double-took. And one of them said to the guy at the next table, "Hey, did you see that rat on the cat on the dog..." and the guy said, "Oh, yeah, that dude's always walking around downtown. Crazy homeless dude."

Back at my hotel, I googled Ft. Worth+dog+cat+rat, and this vid came right up. The "homeless dude" doesn't seem crazy at all--he just prefers animals to people, sort of like Temple Grandin. And I'm actually more interested in the animal pyramid than I am in him--especially that cat, which didn't fall off when I saw the act live. The balance of a surfer, the restraint of an aikido master, and the bored expression of...a cat.

Now I'm home from Ft. Worth. There's nothing quite like this oddity here. But having seen their little promenade makes me want to pay closer attention to beautiful obsessive weirdness everywhere.

By the way, I also recently met Temple Grandin, which is a whole other story, involving a whole other hotel. And pig-stunning. Also: Throckmorton. Just wanted to say it again.

Books Ruin Everything

February 2010 was the first month in which I failed to post anything since I started neglecting this blog back in aught-six. At first I neglected it in favor of freelance work. Then I neglected it in favor of Twitter. But lately, I've been neglecting Twitter, freelance, this blog, and life itself, in favor of books.

Books. Remember those? They're supposed to be part of what this blog is about, but when's the last time I wrote about a book here? Well, this is about a bunch of books. In the past six months (mostly in the past three), I've read the following:

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill ★★★★½
(I loved this novel so much, I started writing one, then began to suspect that my opening was plagiaristically close to that of a novel I'd read a few years ago, so I checked to see, and got hooked again by that all-too-influential opening, and thus ended up rereading in its massive entirety...
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen ★★★★
East Is East by T.C. Boyle ★★★
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan ★★½
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem ★★
Nobody Move by Denis Johnson (★★★½) which made me reread...
Angels and Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson (a composite ★★★★)

But did I just read novels? Nay, I did not, viz.:

No One Belongs Here More Than You stories by Miranda July ★★★½
Haywire poems by George Bilgere ★★★★
Refusing Heaven poems by Jack Gilbert ★★★
Dearest Creature poems by Amy Gerstler ★★★★
Open House poems by Beth Ann Fennelly ★★★
Unmentionables poems by Beth Ann Fenelly ★★★½
All In The Timing fourteen plays by David Ives (funny little one-acts) ★★★★

I read a memoir:

House of Cards by my pal David Ellis Dickerson (must recuse myself on the rating, because I'm pseudonymously featured in the book and heavily biased in favor of the author)

I read a screenplay:

A Serious Man by Joel and Ethan Coen (I give the film ★★★★, but the weirdly flat script ★★--I don't know how they knew they could make a great movie from it.)

I read what I guess you'd call a how-to:

Story by Robert McKee ★★★ (the best thing of its kind, but that's damning with faint praise)

At work, I was researching The Beatles and ended up rereading In His Own Write, by John Lennon ★★★★. What a hoot.

I also read a fat, densely-packed old issue of McSweeney's, guest-edited by Chris Ware--mostly comics, but it took me longer than any of the other books. I'd rate it from no stars to ★★★★★, depending on where you are in it.

I think that's it.

Why list all these? Simply to say that I'd recommend every one of them, except maybe Chronic City, an oddly detached disappointment. And that I was reminded, these past few months, of how thoroughly books kick television's ass. TV had begun to swallow the evening hours with a habitual couchslump, après-boy-bedtime. I haven't cut it out of my life entirely, but I've begun shoving books between it and my face. They almost always win.

I'm back to reading like I used to read: compulsively. Now rereading Humboldt's Gift and loving it. So there'll be more blog lapses. I suggest Joseph O'Neill et al. as worthy blank spot filler-inners. If you've let books slip to the periphery of your busy life, bring 'em back to the center of the camp. It feels good.

Number Nine

The yungest turns nine tday

Hw weird that my cmputer keybard refuses t prduce the numera nine

The etters " " and " " mysteriusy stpped wrking, t

And I can't type a perid, thugh cmmas and excamatins wrk fine!

Perhaps a series f iPhne birthday candids t cmpete the picture:

Kid surveys treats frm big bday grab-bag as kitty gives us the evi-eye

Presenting Pptarts, rdinariy a frbidden fruit

And ast but nt east, "the beef stick f wisdm" brandished as a weapn, the way wisdm shud be

Party this afternn incudes skating with friends, then dinner with grandparents

And maybe a trip t the Appe Stre is in rder, eh?

Happy Birthday Jnah! We ♥ yu even bigger than nine!

Princetonian For A Day

An odd request to share MY TOWERING WISDOM came in a recent invitation to speak at Princeton University. The subject? Christmas and Christmas cards. The venue? An intro-level course called "Sociology from E-Street: Bruce Springsteen's America," created and taught by renowned sociologist Mitchell Duneier.

~ Sample architectural symbol of aforementioned towering wisdom ~

Why me? For that matter, why Bruce? Because Prof. Duneier is not the usual theory-obsessed academic. He has a deep interest in empathy, both as observed in society and as practiced by sociologists and ethnographers. So his idea of greeting cards as an empathetically-imagined vehicle for social connection met his interest in exploring cultural issues through the lens of Springsteen's famously socially-aware songs (the raucous cover of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" is atypical, but fit this particular hour), resulting in a December 17th class about Christmas, Christmas cards, and associated social meanings.

It was cool. Prof. Duneier interviewed me and a fellow writer in a big lecture hall of about 200 students, with a little Q&A after. We then attended a small break-out section of the class for a conversation that ranged all over the topic. Such bright, sweet kids, so easy to talk to (I'm not sure what I expected... bluebloods with monocles and George Plimpton accents, maybe?), exploring a wide range of issues and sharing personal stories that illuminated them.

At the end of the first class, two kids got up on the stage of the big lecture hall and played the featured song on guitars and harmonica, and everybody sang and clapped along. It was the kind of day that gives a semi-cynical guy a little faith in the future.

Afterwards, a few students came up and asked about the job, internships, possibilities. It's the worst time to apply for work at Hallmark since the Great Depression, but you never know. I'm sure we'll hear from a few of these marvelous kids--either as job applicants or as movers and shakers in the world at large. There was a lot of soulful brainpower in and among those ivy-clad buildings.

~ Nassau Hall at Princeton, where I practice pedantry now and then ~

The school was founded in 1746. My photos of other magnificent buildings came out shitty, shot with an iPhone in low light. It's an amazing campus. If you ever get a chance to be a visiting PRINCETON EDUCATOR LIKE ME, don't miss it.

~ A pedant non-euphemistically "rubbing the tiger" at Nassau Hall ~

I thought I had a picture of Prof. Duneier and me mugging by a statue or something, but all I find is the one above. There's a squirrel in the ivy behind me, but you can't hear it scolding me for touching the big tigger on the steps, or for looking somewhat bloated from being wined and dined on the university budget the night before.

Beautiful place, beautiful people, beautiful day. A great way to close out the year. Happy 2010 from me, Princeton lecturer and holiday deadbeat who sent out only half the usual number of cards. Welcome, new austerity and laziness.

Beautiful Blast from the Piano-Pop Past

I woke up singing this song, for some reason. Maybe it was the soundtrack to a dream I don't remember. What I do remember is how gobsmacked I was the first time I heard it. Senior year of high school, standing in a record store, and the little gallop and kiddie gunshot noises came over the sound system--and then those first notes, with their syncopated accents that made it hard to tell exactly where the beat was. What in the world...?

I fancied myself a teen piano idol in the Elton John mode, with a little Rick Wakeman thrown in, a little Keith Emerson, Tony Banks, a little delusion of grandeur. I went up to the counter, and looked at the LP jacket on the "Now Playing" stand. I'd never heard of Andy Pratt and here he was just playing the ass off the thing.

The story goes, he spent 500 hours in the studio on this song, playing everything except drums. He's every bit as good on bass as he is on keyboards. How does a guy who's capable of this not become a huge star? I remember digging the whole album. But this song is definitely the piece d'irresistible.

There are a couple of other YouTube versions, including one that intercuts a performance video of Andy in his 50s, looking like Art Garfunkel, but it's all obscured by special effects. This little montage of stills will do. And you can see Andy then and Andy now.

Or just close your eyes. It's the fall of 1973. Maybe you weren't there for it. But this song has just galloped into the world, beating "Bohemian Rhapsody" to the punch by two years, a one-of-a-kind musical vision announcing itself, blowing away one delighted listener after another. I was one of them. Still am.

I Sired A Werewolf

All Hallows' Eve PSA: Hey, kids. This Halloween, don't forget to shove sugar into your face until you turn into a monster.
And if you get a mail-order werewolf costume and the shirt attached to it feels like a polyester nightmare, rip out the furry chestal area and then sew it into a nice, soft thrift store shirt that you got for 50 cents and tore up. Or have your mom do this while your dad kind of freaks over the mask, which is genuinely creepy and scares him every time you leap out to surprise him. Careful, he might poop his pants.

Better you should scare your fellow classmates, many of whom showed up in the Scream outfit that apparently was massed out at Target. Do not breathe of the Scream mask, which smells like a PVC meltdown amid cultural decline.

Try to uphold the old traditions, such as trick-or-treating with Isabelle, the girlfriend you've had since pre-school, who dreamily combines her first name with your last name, like something out of a beach bunny movie from the mid-20th century. She's half angel and half devil, and that can be a pretty good combination.

Be a good werewolf. Show up at your girlfriend's house with flowers.

And have a very happy Halloween.

Save This Family. Name This Cat.

Presenting our Replacement Kitty:


She's a miniature of the late, great Tova. Same breed (Birman), same markings (blue eyes, gray points & professorial patches on her hind legs) same delightful disposition (lovey-dovey). If anything, she's even more affectionate than Tova was, lolling about on our laps and napping on Penny's shoulders during the day. We all fell in love immediately.


BUT. It's been two weeks, and we have yet to arrive at a name. Leave it to two writers and a verbally agile child to bollox up the naming process to the point where we all hate each other. We're sick to death of suggesting names and having the other two family members snarl, "No, I hate that, I hate you, and you're making me hate the cat. I hate all cats now. All animals. I hate Nature, the Universe, the fabled singularity. I hate God. But mostly, I hate you." You could probably set that to The Beatles' "I Want You," from the newly remastered Abbey Road," which I'd much rather be blogging about, to tell you the truth.

Penny came up with the best name: Kish. It means pillow in Yiddish, offering a cute diminutive, Kishela. Come here, little pillow. Wait, you're already behind my neck, like a good little Kish?


No wonder it's the perfect name. Jonah and I have been calling her Kish, Kishy, and Kishycat for days, but Penny has decided she hates it. She's around the cat more than any of us. She tried the name, and it just didn't work. Doesn't roll off the tongue or something. Here, let me strangle you so I can see that tongue, try to figure out the problem...

Update: To punish me for posting this, the darling spousette looked up Kish in the Urban Dictionary. It means, "A very swollen vagina." Seriously. I'm not Will Ferrelling you on this. A couple of other meanings, too--a latent homosexual, a warning that someone's coming, e.g., "Kish! Stash the weed! It's my mom!"

What other names are contending? The current top 10::

Ava
Edie
Cali (from Jonah's day 1 remark, "She smells like calamari.")
Pie
Simone
Mimi
Gia
Jess
Tess
Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom

Of those, Pen likes Ava, I like Edie or Pie or Cali, and Jonah hates everything but Kish. I actually know a family who let their young son name a cat, and ended up with the last entry above. Everybody called the cat Indy, except for little Nicholas, who insisted on, "Come here, Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom! Get down from there, Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom! Mom, Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom just coughed up something black!"

We could do worse. Go on long enough with naming, and some wretched things start to sound reasonable. Penny, at wits' end, keeps saying things like, "How about Pebbles?" or "I know--Talullah!" and I keep giving her looks like, "No, Wilma" and "I hate you AND Demi Moore."

Our marriage is in tatters. Our son is ready to be adopted by other, better parents. Please. Save us. Name this cat.



Update: As of New Year's Day, the cat's name is Tavi. Best little kitty we ever had. And that's going some.

If I Might Interject At This Juncture

Here's Jonah at breakfast on his first day of 3rd grade.


He's doing his Timid Pirate voice, which is like a bookish elf crossed with Woody Allen as Broadway Danny Rose. The basic Timid Pirate construction is: "If I, uh, might interject at this juncture...um...ARRR?" or "Could someone please, uh, tie that scurvy dog to the, um, yard arm?" Always with the index finger raised.

We're working on a long skit for the cub scout den, in which all the other boys are regular pirates and Jonah is the Timid Pirate. It goes like so: "12 pirates walk into a BARRRRRR (all the boys chime in with ARRRR). Bartender says, 'What's your pleasuRRRRRe?' And the pirates all say (three groups of boys yell in sequence, 'MARRRRRGARITA!' and 'MARRRRTINI!' and "GROG!"). But one pirate steps up and says, (Jonah, index finger aloft): "Could I perhaps, uh, order a Wild Berry Capri Sun?" And the pirates all go, "ARRRRR! Stupid timid pirate...." Bartender says, "It's Happy HouRRRRR. Would you like any appetizeRRRRs?" And the pirates all order, "CalamARRRRRRRi!" Except for the timid pirate: "Um, could I trouble you for a small house salad with lite ranch dressing on the side?" (Jonah came up with these lines himself--priceless, in his high little voice.) Eventually the other pirates beat him up with their wooden legs...

We're still working on an ending that kind of reverses the roles. Please submit ideas if you have them. (First pack meeting is tonight. My love-hate relationship with this stuff remains intact, but a good skit can transcend the venue.) Seriously. Help me finish this goddamn skit.

In the above photo from August 17 (weird, summer being over so early), he's the Timid Eater: "If I might make a small request...um, could I eat this pancake without being photographed?"

This, along with fart humor (both real and armpit-generated), faking like he's just taken a painful shot to the crotch (we probably hear "oooof...my groin!" at least a couple of times per day), and anything having to do with pineapples (beats me, but he's talking about going as one for Halloween--I think he just likes the randomness of it), currently constitute 90% of the kid's comedic stylings. The rest is on-the-fly wackiness.

He really is one of the most spontaneously funny kids I've ever known. I hope he can keep that alive through the next decade of public school. It's been weird to watch him grow more like other boys as he adjusts to social pressures, the need to be cool. Yep, already. He was always way ahead of everybody his age, verbally, but was a late-bloomer emotionally, a strange combination of oversensitive and under-aware, as if the membrane between him and the world was too thin in some places and too thick in others. He seems closer to the middle of the spectrum now, as other kids have narrowed the gap intellectually and he's learned to deal a little better with what life throws at him.

I can't imagine that he won't always be exceptionally bright and at least somewhat acerbic. This is the kid who, having been called a "know-it-all" by several of his classmates last year, said, "They don't even know what a know-it-all is." I hope he can develop social grace without losing his unique perspective.

If I might make a small, um, addendum to all this, uh...I love you, kiddo.

"A Better Way To Go"

Had a birthday and got feted, free-lunched, fully loved upon the earth. But within a week or two, I was kind of blah, holding back a certain low-level despair, appalled to see political machinations drag down progressive ideas, kind of pissy, not sleeping too well, feeling creatively stymied and generally feckless and fatigued.

Then my old friend Peter Stein sent me a link to this guy, Peter Mulvey, who will kill you softly, telling your whole life with his words, as it were, and playing the absolute ass off his guitar. Dig it:

I'm robbing two Peters to pay back an appall. And whaddya know, I had a little breakthrough on a script idea I've been wrestling with. Found a better way.

If only it were always so easy.

The Book of Love (and Anniversaries)

Here's a lovely vid my sister made for her wife, Pam, on their 5th anniversary (today). Why didn't I do this for my darling spousette on our 14th, mere weeks ago? Because I'm a deadbeat. Get off my back. Plus, I'd never heard this beautiful song until last week. Peter Gabriel's voice just slays me.

Happy 5th Anniversary! from Joy Howard on Vimeo.

The E.E. Cummings poem toward the end is what I read at the wedding, though the version I read from had a typo and I remember mildly wigging out when I got to it, trying to make sure I got the line right. Pam's brother read the Dr. Seuss story, "The Sneetches," which had a huge resonance for this only-recently-legalized event.

My sis posted the video along with a quote from Margaret Marshall, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court that legalized same-sex marriage in the state: “Marriage...bestows enormous private and social advantages on those who choose to marry. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family…Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.”

Congrats, oh my sissers. I love you both.

To Kill An American

I'd forgotten about this clever piece of work by my old Full Metal Jacket friend, Matthew Modine. It still seems relevant, as our country recovers from the international-stature-damaging Bush/Cheney years and presses on in military and economic conflicts around the world.

To Kill an American

May

May blog, or may not.

The confluence of events this month--death in the family, freelance consulting gig, a new script underway, travel, various graduations of nephews and nieces, the boy's goddamn Cub Scouts, my darling's ailing back, and plenty of work at ye olde Happiness Factory--all this has kept me from doing anything on ye olde stale blog.

THIS BEING A DEPICTION OF MY BUSY BUSY MARTYRDOM

I did update my big music post, from which the mp3 player suddenly disappeared (provider went bankrupt) so you can't hear the referenced tunes anymore. At the end of that post, I promised a follow-up where I'd presumably take apart a melody to show...something. I still hope to do it for you few, you happy few, you hopeful, cheated few who read this thing. But I can't see it happening for awhile. Just too much to do.

So. This is a placeholder, a whine, an excuse, a gob of spit, a scrap of proof that the Spulge is not dead, merely busy to the Nines.

Sooner or later, I'll unchain myself from the wheel and put something worth reading up in here.

Meanwhile, happy summer.

NaPoWriMo Through Field Glasses

My friend Stacey Donovan wrote a poem a day in April, and they weren't just little nothing poems. Big, juicy, full of feeling and imagination and lovely phrases, is what they were. Crafted, not sloppy. Fine prosody from one of the superfinest people I work with.

I watched from afar, remembering how I used to write poems relentlessly, always something in the works. Not so much lately. I did teach a writing workshop to some 2nd-graders this month, but even that was mostly watching others create. So I was feeling like a spectator. And egregiously envying those with time and energy to apply such devotion to the art.

And now the month is done. So on this, the last night of NaPoWriMo, I present a little snideswipe from the sideline. My shame is great.

*

Spectators On Parade

The parade for National Poetry Writing Month
seemed long and aimless, wandering toward
the end of a street with no identifying sign,
most of the marchers distracted by themselves,
trying to remember dreams, scribbling notes,
slouching toward dressing the part of a poet,
some glancing at their fellows, resenting
the notebook scribblers or the ones texting
God knows who—can we not just experience
this event? The oneness, the solidarity,
the living poetry? Must everything be grist?
And then there came a complicated turn

around the intersection of form and subject,
a ramp, an elevated expressway, a blind alley
that seemed to stand for something else.
By now, the new proxyism had people trading
places, rank and file observing the spectators’
meanderings—"Say I am you!" someone shouted—
and a child on a tall man’s shoulders piped up,
“This is the most boringest parade I ever saw.”
A hush, a lull, a caesura. The procession
stopped. And then a dozen poets pounced,
quoting the phrase, embellishing it, throwing
rhymes at it, interviewing the child, learning
by going more or less nowhere where to go.

*

Forgive me, Erato (and Stacey--you're your own magnificent parade). That's all I could manage this year.

Music, Melody, Oneness, Vibrating Mind of God

An insane idea I had: to develop a Unified Field Theory of Music. Insane, because I don’t know what a “unified field theory” is, really, and I was a music major for only two years. I’m a hack pianist. My credentials suck. But I compensate with enthusiasm. I love the idea of describing how music works, where its essential power comes from, irrespective of era, genre, or my ignorance. ♫

Researching, I found record producer Daniel Levitan’s revelatory This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Expanding on Stephen Mithen’s “Singing Neanderthals” theory, Levitan says music represents a critical step in human evolution. This is probably the least interesting idea in the book, every page of which has some fascinating insight into the physics of music or the way our brains perceive sound.

Oliver Sacks’s amazing book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain says that Darwin called music an evolutionary aberration with no adaptive purpose (I think he was listening to Air Supply at the time). The preface cites E.O. Wilson, whose theory of biophilia (our innate feeling for other living things) causes Sacks to wonder if music might be a form of it, since music often feels alive. He adds, “There is now an enormous and rapidly growing body of work on the neural underpinnings of musical perception...”

Great. Way bigger brains than mine have stolen my thunder for their rhythm section. I’m both unqualified AND irrelevant.

But maybe I’ll naively stumble into some observation that a colder-eyed observer might miss, if I ditch science to come up with some good guesses, vague notions, and intuitions about how music do what she do. ♪

UPDATE: Come to find out, none of the music samples in this post show up anymore, because SeeqPod, the company that made the ingenious little widget I stuck in here several times, apparently went belly-up a couple of weeks after I posted this. I take full responsibility. And if I get time, I'll replace the widgets with Blip links or something. WAY less convenient, but it'll look nicer than those big gaps in the text. Sorry...

Before We Ditch Science
What’s the unified field theory in physics? Apparently, when quantum theory came along, its implications for atomic and subatomic physics contradicted Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Quantum physics can make sense of electromagnetism and the two (strong and weak) nuclear forces, but gravitation bolloxes everything up. Einstein spent the last half of his life trying to unify the four forces, coining the phrase “unified field theory” for what he was after.

Physicists say that the grand explanation for the interaction of those four forces will describe a oneness, a singular essence that manifests itself in all matter and phenomena. This holy grail is thought to be in the realm of string theory. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, says what he and his fellow nerds are seeking is “an equation an inch long that would allow us to read the mind of God.” This great little vid concludes with Kaku describing what he thinks the mind of God is.



Some specialists in M-theory (the M stands for “mother of all theories” or “mystery” or possibly “magic”) describe Kaku's "hyperspace” in 26 dimensions. But all seem to agree that matter is fundamentally “vibrating strings” a hundred billion billion times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. I love that it’s either 10 or 26 dimensions. Sounds like they’re really closing in on it. ♫

Wasn’t This Supposed To Be About Music?
The physics ruminations on harmony make me think that musicians should be working on string theory. Sound is all vibration, so maybe these subatomic vibrating strings are at the bottom of it somewhere, like zillions of tiny cigarbox banjos.


Let’s apply the four forces metaphorically. Maybe there are musical parallels for them: rhythm, melody, harmony…and what would the fourth be? dynamics? timbre? In a song, the lyric? There might more than four. In any case, it may be easier to describe how these things interact in music than it could ever be in physics.

But is there a problem to solve? What questions would a unified field theory answer? Could it define why some music is great and other music sucks, so that it’s not just a subjective matter of taste? Could it explain how music can give you goosebumps or make you cry? Is our question here something as simple as, “What makes music beautiful?” ♪

Vive Les Contrarieties
The biggest truth I know about beauty: it’s the oneness of opposites. This isn’t original with me. The ancient Greeks considered every art a reconciliation of opposites. Shakespeare was the Great Synthesizer (pre-Moog) of antitheses (“To be or not to be” is one example among thousands). Bach believed that the contrapuntal balancing of opposites in a perfect Fugue connected the human soul to God. Coleridge’s framework for literary criticism was his “principle of polarity,” Marcel Duchamp wrote an essay about the reconciliation of opposites in visual art, and the poet Eli Siegel developed a whole aesthetic theory of human life based on it.

A few opposites we find unified in great music:

Simplicity/Complexity
Logic/Emotion
Inevitability/Surprise

There are others. Those three are pretty obvious, though. Anyone who’s ever marveled at the “simplicity” of a song like The Beatles’ “Blackbird” and then tried to play it on the guitar knows how true that first one is. Even if you don’t fully understand the math that all music is based on (patterns of rhythm and pitch intervals can all be described numerically), you may sense the logic in a piece of music—but what makes it move you is something else, something emotional that seems to be communicated directly from the composer or musician to you. And I can’t think of anything more satisfying in music (or any art, really) than the fulfillment of an inevitable pattern in a surprising way. Think about the piano coda at the end of the original “Layla.” It seems to come out of left field (left ventricle?), and yet somehow is completely prepared for. Perfect.

All those pairs of opposites imply a meeting of the familiar and the strange. I don’t remember where I first heard the idea that the difference between something genuinely beautiful and something merely “pretty” is that beauty has an element of strangeness in it. That’s always seemed true to me. Those Asian-sounding semitones in the bridge of “Julia” by The Beatles, especially the way John Lennon sings them, are unlike anything else in popular music, a strangeness woven through a familiar, lilting guitar pattern.
Update: Dammit. The Beatles MP3 police apparently put the kibosh on "Julia." But the rest of the tracks in this post should play.

SeeqPod - Playable Search
And is there anything more oddly affecting than the almost affectless bleat of Miles Davis’s muted trumpet over the lush chords Bill Evans lays down on “So What” or “Mediterranean Sketches”?

Melodies
Maybe the best way to open an inquiry of opposites, and thus, beauty, is with melody. We all know melodies, we hum and whistle them, they stick in our heads, and they burn lyrics in our memories. They’re most of what we mean by “I know that song.” A memorable melody makes a claim on your brain that you can never renounce.

Because of the way we experience music, Oliver Sacks says that remembering a melody isn’t really remembering at all, but reliving the music in the present. He quotes the philosopher Victor Zuckerkandl: “Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.”

Even that explanation is paradoxical, holding opposites together. To me what it means is, when you sing “I heard the news today, oh boy” to yourself, the whole song is there with you. Your ears may actually hear only the melody and the words, but by singing the song, the rest of the music comes alive in your mind and body. You’re experiencing the feel of the song.

To get to the meaning of that, we need actual melodies to point to, hear in our heads, and explore the workings of. So I’ll end this first post with my starter list: unique, memorable, carved-in-rock melodies from nearly every Western genre (classical, sacred, folk, jazz, show tunes, country, pop/rock), trying to find in each category at least one “pure” melody (unforgettable even without words), at least one transcendent marriage of music and words; and one that plays against its orchestration or chord changes in a remarkable way.

Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring
“Ode To Joy”
The Willow aria from The Ballad of Baby Doe

Ave Maria (Schubert)
Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming
Were You There?

Greensleeves
Shenandoah
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
Scarborough Fair

Lush Life
Autumn Leaves
Ornithology
The Wedding

Somewhere Over The Rainbow
My Favorite Things
Sunrise, Sunset
Send In The Clowns

I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
San Antonio Rose
Crazy
Help Me Make It Through The Night

I Will
Good Vibrations
The Spiraling Shape
Veronica

Thanks to SeeqPod, one of the coolest music sites on earth, you can listen to some of these and then hum them to yourself the rest of the day.


SeeqPod - Playable Search

Better yet, look up tunes you think should be on the list, then check them out to make sure the melody's as distinctive as you thought. You may be surprised.

I thought I’d be most sure of the pop/rock melodies I wanted to use for this, but the genre in which I’m least versed (country) seems like the best, most exemplary group of all. As a little bonus coda, here's a pop melody I didn't know was great until I heard a country singer spin it into gold:

SeeqPod - Playable Search

Next, I'll take one of these tunes and pull it apart to show how it works. It may be like dissecting a frog, but I hope to learn something new. Meanwhile, I’d love to get some suggestions for other great melodies, especially from rock and pop songs. What’s stuck in your head? Is there a song whose melody simply delights you? Why do think it’s so memorable? Any ideas you have, really. I’ll share my Nobel Prize winnings with you. ♪♫

Bravo, Couple 3 Films!

Here are my nephews—my brother's son Sam and Debra Winger's son Noah, flanking the divine Ms. Winger herself—after the lads' triumph at the Oxford Film Festival, where they won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary. That's Noah clutching the coveted Hoka statuette.
Noah, Sam, and a third partner (hence, Couple 3 Films) spent much of last year working on Crude Independence, their unique look at the oil boom in North Dakota. I saw a version of it before the final sound mix, and it's splendid. Apparently, the festival circuit thinks so, too. Last week, Crude Independence made it onto the prestigious SXSW schedule, a fifth festival acceptance.

I love these guys like mad, and am so freakin' impressed by their talent and tenacity. I almost said "proud" instead of "impressed," but pride seems to imply something more self-reflective than the sheer admiration and respect and "wow, is this cool or what?" that I actually feel about their work and its much-deserved success. I'm avuncular, though. Don't punk the unc.

Keep up with Couple 3 via the link in my sidebar, labeled "My filmmakin' nephews." Are they ever.