A half-formed, but potentially enjoyable, little home demo of me writing what I know, like. Bears an accidental resemblance to all of Mumford and Sons, so much so that I might rebrand this as some kind of satire.
Hit The Gym
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
She chops! She chops!
She looks like a flower, but she stings like a bee, like every girl in history, She bangs! She bangs! An old Ricky Martin song, She Bangs, tells of the power that women have. In Lizzie Borden’s case however, she chops.
(via wilwheaton)
Drinking in Poetry / Poetry Off the Shelf : The Poetry Foundation →
This is a whole heap of fun.
I’d like to say I know the feeling, but really, what I know is getting about 30% into this feeling, and then doing something else, giving up entirely. If I knew THIS feeling, I’d have a lot more work done.
science tumbled: The Discovery of Vitamins →
This is some interesting information about vitamins and contains the following words in this order:
the Polish biochemist Casimir Funk
Casimir Funk, I don’t know you, but I’m sure the bands named after you are brilliant.
The concept of vitamins is a hundred years old this year.
During the late 19th century, there were outbreaks of fatal beriberi in East Asia. The study of this disease would lead to the discovery of vitamins. Kanehiro Takaki, a doctor in the Japanese navy, took a special interest in the…
Oh. My. Gourd.
Adam Hurt playing a gourd banjo and Matthew Olwell flatfooting at The Garage in Charlottesville Virginia on June 29th, 2011. The tunes are John Riley the Shepherd/Brushy Fork of John’s Creek (from Art Stamper, Knott County, Kentucky. Banjo tuned dBEAB).
www.adamhurt.com
www.mattolwell.com
Sleep disorders plague police officers
- A new Brigham and Women’s Hospital study found that 40 percent of officers have a chronic sleep problem, which in most cases had previously been undiagnosed.
So, as protestors around the US ask police how they sleep at night, the answer turns out to be ‘not great, actually’.
“Sleep deprivation not only slows down reaction time but decreases a person’s ability to stay vigilant with focused attention,’’ Grandner said. “It also impairs the ability to make well thought out decisions’’
It’s really interesting that the rates of these things among cops is much higher than the general population — the article suggests shift work, stress of dealing with criminals, and the higher incidence of obesity in police forces as some sources for the sleep disorders.
While Massachusetts enjoys the fourth-lowest obesity rate in the nation, Czeisler said the State Police on-the-job fitness program, one of a handful in the country, probably also plays a key role.
Two decades ago, the Legislature mandated that State Police officers periodically pass a fitness test, consisting of dragging a dummy in a rescue mission and taking down a suspect by scaling walls and running through an obstacle course.
To get and stay in shape for the test, police are allowed to set aside four hours of work time every week to exercise in a local fitness facility or gym onsite. They can also earn bonuses for their test performance.
That sounds great, because I would like police officers to be alert and clear thinking just about 100% of the time they are not the job, and not demonstrably sleepier that the general population. The mandated exercise probably has lots of other benefits, mental and physical, for the officers in Massachusetts.
If I had any sense, this would motivate me to mandate some exercise for myself. I just… I don’t know how to use any of the machines at the gym and they look like they could kill you.
Okay so here’s a small morning thought
For a long time, I’ve pretended to understand the role the audience plays in art, but I think I’ve been messing it up, working with a false theory.
What I already knew: The audience interprets, and each member has a unique experience of a given work.
I like that idea and on that basis I’ve left some work wide open, for the audience to have a kind of playground where you can construct meaning in ways that might even be opposites. For a small class of people, this is great fun, and exciting. The play is a machine that can process many theories and produce curious results.
I’ve been struggling to write a more accessible play than the last one. Wondering what kind of story to tell, thinking in arcs and traditional story forms. Researching the hero and whatnot. But today I think something important: the storyteller doesn’t tell the story — she just tells me what happened, and I tell myself the story. “Don’t worry about plot. Plot is what’s left when the work is done,” Gerry O’Malley said.
When I meet somebody, sometimes I’m not careful, and I make assumptions all over the place based on how they look, how they seem, and what they are doing. I map the information to a story without even hearing it. I think I like them, or don’t like them, or know them somehow.
Those assumptions are what create the story for me out of the information a piece of art provides. The good storyteller says: this is what happened, and then this is what happened — and all the time we’re trying to fit it to a theory we have about how the world works, to good and evil, and especially to justice (I think). Stories matter when they have the capacity to support or challenge or ideas of how the world works.
I never understood what mattered before. And maybe I don’t now, but if I can lurch through a script on this crutch I’ll be happy. A friend once told me that for something to be at stake it helps for drama to involve families — all other relationships can be gotten out of if they get weird. Family are the people you are trapped on the boat with forever, who share genes with you so that even if you leave you can never stop being family with them.
So there’s more drama if a story happens between family members. Or pseudo-families, like isolated plane crash survivors. More at risk because you’re stuck with them. But maybe what makes something compelling is more to do with how we think the world works. We want to know what happens next because we think we know, but we’re not sure if we’ve got it right. We think the hero will save the day, but that story we keep trying to tell ourselves is constantly put in jeopardy by villains and obstacles. But you can’t turn off an adventure film because the odds are stacked so high that the hero’s never going to make it. The hero story is so powerful that you know they just have to get to the finish line.
And so these two opposing forces are the drama: the story of success as we already invision and assume it, in conflict with elements that would easily destroy it. Adding conflict and tension to the story is not about having a flaming row every five minutes, it’s about putting powerful ideas about the world in jeopardy.
This all feels kind of ordinary now, but at the same time I don’t think I ever really knew any of it in a way that I could work with. I just kind of stumbled around
M for Mark - the classiest joints have your towels freshly monogrammed every morning by… What’s decadent? A Frenchman? A painstakingly trained monkey who is HIMSELF monogrammed by an out of work midwifery lecturer? Make that a French monkey. M for Marceau. And Midwifery.
The sad thing in more ways than one is that I’m sober.
