Dave Kessler

Huzzah, my friend Dave is working on a documentary and he's asked me to do some writing!

I don't want to jinx it by writing too much about the documentary or my part in it just yet, but here's a link to a page Dave created.

This documentary will be a collaborative effort, but Dave's vision is guiding all of us--I'm thrilled!

Ed Sabol

I think this is going to be a new section to the blog. The "lost entry" section can be amusing, but it doesn't cover those situations when I simply take two, three or four weeks to write about something that I've been meaning to write about. I think I'll call it "Running Late."

Innovative filmmaker, Ed Sabol was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on August 6th.

Coming from a large extended family of football fans, I grew up watching football frequently. It wasn't every Sunday and Monday, but it was close. And, as cable television expanded in the 1970s and 80s into the suburbs around Philadelphia, the number of channels on which I could watch sports highlights also expanded. Not that I was a big sports fan. I didn't have the discipline, size, or stamina to play. I also lacked the ability to stay focused--an important skill to have if one is going to be a serious fan.

What I did have was a set of working eyeballs, a pulse, and a brain susceptible to the cinematic rhetoric of Ed Sabol.

Sabol's ability to put together to moving images from critical angles, in slow motion and accompanied with a score designed to inspire feelings of heroism, competition, and struggle, made my heart race.

Here's an NFL Films look at the Dallas-Philadelphia rivalry. And, here's an NFL Films look at Philadelphia fans. I love it when Peter Nero, conductor of the orchestra, talks about a concert-goer wearing an earpiece so he can hear the game score as he listens to the orchestra on a Sunday afternoon. Of course, there's also this quote from Mark Bowden of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Philadelphia Fans love football in a really dark and disturbing way. . ."

NFL Films apparently also knows how to do research.

Newsworks.org, the new WHYY news initiative here in Philadelphia, has this list of best NFL Films.

A Good Short Story for the Summer

CutBank, a cool literary magazine out of Missoula, Montana, just published its 75th issue. I recommend my friend Anne Ray's story, "Novio, Novia." You can buy issue 75 for ten dollars. It will be delivered to your residence. I make the additional claim that you will enjoy it.

Ray's story about a college girl trapped in a crappy summer job at the intersection of multiple cultures is funny, engrossing, and at times even a little anxiety-inducing. And, it's perfect reading for this hot summer we've been having. I love it. The craft is elegant but not distracting--it's as though you're immersed in a clear stream of narrative. In fact, when I picked it up off my nightstand this morning, it sucked me in so quickly and so thoroughly that I forgot to make my usual morning pot of coffee. Ray's story won CutBank's Montana Prize in Fiction.

You can buy it here through submishmash: http://cutbank.submishmash.com/submit/6242/account

Silent New York

On July 30th, I had the fortune of being in a strange and wonderful theatrical experiment, Silent New York. Playwright Matthew Freeman invited me to be in the show only a few days earlier, but he assured me there were no lines to learn, no blocking to learn—my part in this production was to simply be onstage as myself. When I received the complete “script” from Freeman, I saw what he meant.

In fact, “no lines to learn" was basically a commandment. There was to be no speaking, and it applied to hand gestures, facial expressions, taps, etc. My job as a participant was to be onstage for approximately ten minutes, and in that ten minutes I could stand, kneel, dance, sit, huddle under the desk onstage: whatever I wanted to do, so long as I didn't speak. I could stand and stare at a member of the audience, and if giggling or squirming developed in either me or the audience member, so be it. But, the point of my presence on stage was to simply be present. Yes, in a way I was “in dialog” with the audience, but at a level more primitive than speaking, even in Freeman’s broad interpretation.

The “script” went on to indicate that I was one of six people in the show: in addition to an announcer, there would be five other people that Freeman knew. Each of us would be announced, walk onstage, be present in that stage space for ten minutes, be thanked by the announcer, and then we would exit the stage. Our direction was to simply be ourselves in that space. I entertained the notion of getting some work done on my blackberry, but that was forbidden too. My job was to be on stage and be stared at by an audience.

I told you it was strange. But, it was also wonderful. When it was my turn on stage, I did a few different things, but I settled into one pose that felt very natural: standing with my big gut stretching my shirt out (I’ve been eating too much junk food this summer) and my hands resting on top of my gut, just below my heart. I stared at the back row of the theater, but I couldn’t ascertain faces. In the days leading up to the show, I had thought about doing many different things, but this was not one of them. However, after a few minutes on stage, it was just what overcame me. It felt right. What the audience was thinking, I didn’t know. I was just trying to find some comfortable space in which to be myself. When I did, I was happy.

As Freeman admitted in the script, Silent New York was more of an experiment. It was based on, and I’m paraphrasing here, the hypothesis that people in and of themselves—devoid of performance, entertainment value, gadgets, skill, eloquence--are worthy of appreciation. Not study, not examination--appreciation. The audience, asked to look at an individual sitting in a chair, or staring at the lights, standing in a corner, or sipping water, will at some point in that ten minutes—if only for a moment--consider that out there, on stage, is a real person. There’s a wonderful compassion, even love, in this simple experiment.

I had a friend tell me once, that he was concerned for the future of the students he was teaching. He basically said that many of them, not all, seemed to regard everyone around them as starring in a video that was either entertaining them (or not). What I love about Silent New York is that it responds, and to some degree rejects, the idea that everyone around us is only one event away from starring in a youtube video.

Yes, for a long, long time, audiences have been asked to recognize the inherent humanity in others, to appreciate their fellow humans, but Silent New York makes it a kind of strange exercise. I use the word exercise carefully here. I bet it was difficult for some to sit there and stare at someone not doing anything intentionally interesting for ten minutes, for ten minutes at someone simply being. It would be difficult for me to concentrate. But, I also think it must have been fascinating and weird. And that’s a good thing. We have, as a culture, travelled so far down into this cave where we see other humans as mere entertainment, it will be work to climb that distance back to the opening where humans are complex and special.

Full disclosure, Matthew Freeman is a friend of mine. I would have participated in this project for anyone who asked, and I would have seen the value in this project regardless of who organized it; I think I just came to these to actions more quickly for my friend.

If you attended Silent New York, please share your thoughts. If you were an audience member, what were some of the thoughts you had throughout the evening? If you were on stage, what was it like for you?

Privacy and Hotel Guest Lists

I can't afford a nice long vacation this summer, so a few short get-aways have become the substitute--and the conclusion of one get-away lodged itself in my conscience. I hope this post can help me work through it.

As I was checking out of my hotel, standing at the front desk signing paperwork, I overheard a local police officer ask the manager for a list of all the guests staying in the hotel for the upcoming week. The manager politely told the officer that she couldn't do that. The officer kept asking. The manager kept politely refusing. Once I signed the bill and sealed the maid's tip in an envelope, I felt like I should go.

This is why I'm writing this post. I felt like I should have said something, but I had little authority in this situation. As someone fascinated with privacy in our society (how we imagine it, define it, use it, abuse it, trade it, etc.) I wanted to offer my opinion. But what exactly was my opinion? My gut told me to tell the manager to stand her ground--that those guests had entered into a private business transaction with her hotel, and she had an obligation to those customers to protect their privacy. From another perspective, the hotel is in control of the names in its registry; is it much different from an old-fashioned registry on a counter? Perhaps it has the right to decide what it does with those names. Furthermore, if there truly is a security issue, perhaps the hotel has an obligation to the community to assist the police? But what evidence did the office have to show that the public safety or security was at risk and that this action was critical to protecting that? Then again, if there is a crime being investigated, perhaps the police can simply get a warrant for this information? Again, though, my interest in privacy is that of the amateur academic.

In the book Understanding Privacy, author Daniel Solove argues that privacy should not be conceptualized as the "individual" versus the "collective." He argues that privacy exists precisely because the collective recognizes the benefits and importance of privacy. Solove uses that point to argue that, therefore, we should conceptualize privacy differently: as a set of "protections against a plurality of distinct but related problems...information collection...information processing...information dissemination...invasion." Solove argues that this is a rhetorical shift away from trying to come to a common definition of privacy, with an agreed upon boundary, into which an issue must distinctly fall inside or outside. Instead, we are now free to talk about problems. And, yes, we still get to discuss whether a specific situation in the real world would be a privacy problem or not, but as Solove claims, this allows us to focus on what makes something a problem: harms (who or what was harmed? in what ways? to what degree? etc.)

For me, what I appreciate most from Solove's book is that in its closing pages he shows that this conceptualization of privacy is good for addressing systemic harms. He shows that, to a fault, U.S. law asks individuals to provide concrete evidence of injury regarding privacy issues. He suggests that that procedure allows too many important privacy problems to be ignored on the basis of receipts of payments made to a therapist (or lack thereof). Conversely, his conceptualization of privacy allows the courts (and legislatures) to consider how ways of life, behaviors, systems of interaction at the individual, group, and societal level are harmed in ways that are subtle, yet critically relevant and important.

In my gut, what I overheard at that hotel makes me conflicted. It seems that the cops were trying to catch criminals. That's good. As for me? I was checking out; I can't show injury. That's good, too. And, the upcoming guests of that hotel--if their names or other information were turned over to that officer were they all going to be rounded up and interrogated? No. So, can they show injury? But, and this is where Solove comes in, would something have been harmed if the hotel turned over all of those names? In my opinion, yes. The trust we place in a business transaction, the upfront way in which we fight crime, the balance we, as citizens, seem to feel between the ideas of "the long arm of the law" and our "that's-none-of-your-business" attitude--all of those realities become, to a degree, harmed by an act like this.

The other irony here, is perhaps too obvious. If the officer and the manager had only spoken privately. . .

There's humor in that, no?

In Honor of Burger King

A friend just told me that the Burger Kings in her area have veggie burgers. In response to this news, I want to honor Burger King's commitment to irony. Please enjoy the photo to your left. Yes, that's a defibrillator. Of course, this is a Burger King near Philadelphia. Here we are buried in cheese steak-lined coffins.

Recalling the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts

Let me tell you about a dream I had last night--no doubt inspired by this artistically-fulfilling summer I'm having. I was my seventeen-year-old self leafing through a book of poetry in a classroom at Mercyhurst college. It was a sunny afternoon sometime during my five-week enrollment in the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts. In the book I found a poem that directly spoke to the project I'm working on now--a poem that I actually only found two months ago. It was a moment of two realities coming together at a critical place in my past. All at once I was overjoyed--yet at peace. I woke up, made coffee, and recalled that the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, actually none of the Pennsylvania Governor's Schools of Excellence, are in existence any more at any college in Pennsylvania. The program was terminated in 2009. I won't get into the politics of it here; I just want to note how successful it was. I can't name a single alum from PGSA not doing something amazing right now in the Arts or Sciences. The creative and problem-solving skills taught there served the students well. It's a loss to our state--to our nation--that that incubator for high school students with merit (not money) is no longer with us. As issues of money and art swirl in my head these days, I post this with the hope that a few of you PGSA alumni might post a short tale about an important/critical moment from your time there. Bittersweet nostalgia? Perhaps. Or maybe we'll have the schools back someday soon. Cheers.

Preparations Continue

The show I'm working on with Angela Colasanti (pronounced Cola-Sahntee) is going well. Saturday was a productive day. We tied-off the loose ends of design in the morning. That left us all afternoon to build.






And build we did. It's quite a wonderful change to work on something creative by using old-fashioned elbow grease rather than fingers on a keyboard.







Plus, all of the pieces in the show will have some amount of recycled product in them. Sure I use recycled paper in my printer, but there's nothing like scavenging for materials. Yes, old fence slats. I like the symbolism. More about that at the show.

Flirtation amidst Foreboding

This poem by CJ Evans, "Even the Smallest Paradise," impresses the hell out of me. I love the compression--love it. I love the way Evans focuses our attention in this narrative on the small trappings of order and decorum--and contrasts them to the larger symbols of change (and it doesn't seem like a good change) from the skies. The society that these trappings help symbolize is soon to be upset. Yes, we've all seen this scene in war films/action films dozens of times--often overwrought and often flavored with a hint of "They're about to get theirs!" But, here, we have Evans evoking something similar but more complex (do these people deserve what's coming?), in what, how long is this, 75 words? Wonderful. Thanks, Poetry Daily. And, thank you, Indiana Review.

Life on Mars

I've always been in love with space exploration. If I had possessed the discipline for overcoming the challenges I faced in the math classroom, I would have loved to work as an engineer in the aerospace industry.

I imagine that in an alternate reality, this Marshall exists. This would be a more mathematically-disciplined Marshall, who places his time and energy into an object that left the shores of Earth. Asleep, he would often have fitful dreams about the mission/about the object. Awake, he would follow the mission closely and he would often smile considering what knowledge humanity was adding to its universities, it colleges, it schools--considering how humanity was exploring for exploration's sake.

In this reality, I held onto space exploration only as a news item or long-form article that catches my attention and demands to be read over breakfast, or at lunch. I decided years ago to put my intellectual energies--small as they are--into writing. I found that I got a fair amount of pleasure in struggling to find the write words to express myself accurately. I learned to whittle long and ugly expressions, into ones short and elegant. I studied poetry. I studied how to teach writing. I used these skills to make a living. What it would have been like to work for NASA or JPL? I don't know, but I think about it.

I think about it mostly when I talk to my brother. My brother works in a lab that studies the ways in which light affects the endocrine system. The lab gets some funding, sometimes, from those organizations I mentioned. My brother even constructed a moonlight machine. It simulates, roughly he would say, the wavelength of light on the moon's surface--as though you stood there. He's not in space no, but I envy him. A moonlight machine.

All of this is to explain how excited I was to hear poet Tracy K. Smith read from her latest book, Life on Mars, last Friday on the PBS Newshour. Poetry. Space. I think I squealed. I love Smith's work for reasons that I won't go into here, and I know that's not much of a pitch, but I encourage you to buy and read her books. Jeffrey Brown interviewed her for a great segment. Here's video of the segment, and this link is web-only content of Smith reading her poems and talking about her work. As the shuttle program closes over the next few days, please re-consider the line between good art and good science. They share at least two qualities: discipline and exploration.

Spectacular Splitleaves Press

For me, one of the best things to come out of Drexel's Week of Writing during the last week in May, was the chance to meet the head of Splitleaves Press. (We got a chance to chat at Ladder 15 during Philadelphia's first Literary Death Match--organized by Painted Bride Quarterly.) Splitleaves is a new independent press in Philly. It's small, but it's doing good things and publishing cool releases. The truth is, a graphic designer that truly understands printing can take a good collection of poems and make it great. This press understands that. And, this press understands that the future of poetry isn't necessarily at chain bookstores, SP's work is carried at independent bookstores across the city. Bravo to Splitleaves Press.

A Week Since Ai Weiwei's Release, and Where Are Things?

Yesterday, the Newshour's Jeffrey Brown posted this interview with filmmaker Alison Klayman. Her upcoming documentary film on Ai has given her some access to the artist, and she has some updates on his situation.

It's better, he's out of detention, but it's still not good. According to the website of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (I found this group in an article by Human Rights Watch) this was most likely part of a larger crackdown against activists, writers, lawyers in light of fears of a jasmine-style revolution taking hold in China.

A friend of mine once asked me if individuals can suffer from paranoia, why not state entities? What would that look like?

Sorry folks, but as Independence Day approaches my mind is on liberty and human rights.