The Thing is

“It’s Your Thing—do what you wanna do.”

That’s the title and first line of a 1969 Isley Brother’s song. It has a sort of live and let live vibe to it, doesn’t it? The zeitgeist. More on that in a minute.

The other day I was sitting in a “waiting” room at the AM/PM; waiting. That’s what you do. I overheard this conversation between a lady and her brother-in-law who had driven her to the clinic:

HER: What are you doing on that phone; Facebook?
HIM: Candy Crush.
HER: You really like that, huh?
HIM: It’s sort of my Thing.

Your THING?! What kind of guy makes Candy Crush his Thing? Maybe I’m judging too quickly. I don’t actually know what Candy Crush is. Maybe if I tried it, it would be my Thing too. Probably not.

Then I had this moment where I imagined asking the guy, in a condescending manner, “What do you mean, Candy Crush is your Thing? How can that be? Is it your only Thing? Or is it just your Thing when your sitting in waiting rooms with your sister-in-law?”

Then I imagined him saying, “What’s it to you, wise-ass?” I imagined him to be the kind of guy who would use a word like that, while giving you a look like maybe Candy is the only thing he would like to Crush.

Then I imagined him saying, “So, what’s your Thing?” And I panicked, because I couldn’t think of a Thing right then. I mean I had already scrolled through Instagram for new photos of the Grand-Girls, and now I was pretty much just checking out the people in the waiting room trying to guess their ailments and wondering about my chances of getting out of there without catching whatever it was they were spreading. But that’s not a good, manly Thing really, is it?

So for the rest of the time in the waiting room I occupied my mind in a kind of transcendental survey of noble Things I could adopt as my own. That kind of stuff has always been important to me—well for at least as long as I can remember. I believed I wanted to pursue noble things, worthwhile things, at least as I understood them to be.

I worry sometimes about becoming irrelevant—not having a Thing, one of those old guys who has been bypassed by the pace of technology and popular culture and the vitality of life. I used to know stuff. There was a time when I could have told you for instance, which artists were up for the top Grammy awards. Now I recognize few of them. I don’t stay up late enough to see them on Jimmy Fallon, so I’m out of touch. And frankly, I’m becoming so geezerish that I’m of the sincere opinion that most of them are not truly Grammy worthy musicians anyway.

I used to have a utilitarian understanding of the kids’ slang and could use some of it in sentences in a way that seemed natural and credible. You might say I had my on fleek moments.

Maybe being able to converse with the kids isn’t a worthwhile Thing for me anymore. Maybe I’ll keep trying though, and that will make me one of those corny old, cardigan guys. I’ll say stuff and the Grand-Girls will roll their eyes and say, “Oh, Pops, you’re silly.” And maybe I’ll say, “That’s sort of my Thing.”

There was a time, not so long ago, I would have said my Thing was being a “creative catalyst”. It all started when I attended a meeting in New York City with a group called the International Arts Movement. I became a part of the movement and even served on their board of directors. It gave me a language, a vision, and a plan to encourage young creatives, and to look for ways to bring them together in a catalytic way to collaborate and to work as only artists can. It was my Thing for several years and I loved it. I cherish the friendships and memories of that experience.

I am convinced, more than ever, that our world needs the beauty, goodness and truth that art and the creative processes alone can bring. We need creatives to do their Thing and we need it more desperately every day.

There’s another line in that Isley Brother’s song that says:

"I'm not trying to run your life, I know you wanna do what's right."

That brings me back to the start of this post—the 60s zietgiest; or my version of it. The live-and-let-live kool-aid was sweetened for me as a journalism major at the University of Tulsa. We were taught that news reporting, REAL news reporting was objective. “Don’t make value judgements,” we were taught, a guiding principle I tended to think applied to life beyond the reporting of news as well. This synced with my desire to not have my values judged, and my Judeo-Christian upbringing to “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

Maybe that’s the part of the current zeitgeist (as I perceive it) that is so disconcerting for me. It seems that “lines” are being drawn so hard, so furiously, so emotionally. Maybe a better song for the day is Tina Turner’s mid-80s hit, “What’s love got to do with it?” and her cynical lyric, “what’s love but a second hand emotion?”

Don’t get me wrong I am still hopeful and a bit idealistic. I do believe that there is something within us that will prevail. After all, we are created in the image of a Creator, who created us with a capacity to understand that it all comes down to love, ultimately and eternally.

So, my apologies to waiting-room guy, if you’re listening, “I’m sorry for judging. If Candy Crush is your Thing, crush it my brother, crush it!”

Wise Words in Ink

I have a friend named Molly who is contemplating a project that involves letterpressing good quotes on cards, so we were talking about people that are quotable, but maybe not in a ubiquitous way; like, say, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. Mark Twain or Will Rogers. Not that they aren’t extremely quotable, but maybe there are others who are less known but also have good things to say.

The letterpress inked up, locked in and ready

Here are some that fit that bill for me:

Anne Lamott.

“Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”

“You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Wendell Berry.

“This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.”

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.”

Homer Simpson.

“A roadside barbecue stand? Everything tastes better when it's near a road!”

G.K. Chesterton.

“A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”

“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”

Hank Hill.

“You can't just pick and choose which laws to follow. Sure I'd like to tape a baseball game without the express written consent of major league baseball, but that's just not the way it works.”

Woody Allen.

“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.” (Case in point: the current presidential campaign.)

Erma Bombeck.

“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me’.”

Molly the Notecard Maker (photo used without her permission)

Back to Molly and her project: If I were going to commission her to letterpress a quote on a set of notecards for me, which quote would I choose? That’s tough because I love a good quote. I’m sort of a quote collector, and a hoarder of aphorisms.

Who doesn’t love: “Not all those who wander are lost” from a poem by J.R.R. Tolkien?

How could you go wrong with John Muir? “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten C.S. Lewis. “I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Maybe all those are too obvious. After all, if I’m going to have custom cards made, I don’t want them to look like they came from Mardel or a Hallmark store.

Like so many who came of age in the 60s, song lyrics were my poetry. I could definitely find ongoing inspiration from some song lyrics pressed into just the right paper.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
—IMAGINE. By John Lennon

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains within the sound of silence
—The Sound of Silence. By Simon & Garfunkel

That one may be too long, but I like the idea of having the ampersand character pressed on the card as in the name Simon & Garfunkel.

Just the right verse from scripture could be apropos, not so that I would seem holy, but because of the human honesty there. Definitely, my choice would be Mark 9:24. It is the story of my faith journey in six words:

“I do believe, help my unbelief.”

I had a fleeting thought, and I realize it sounds as arrogant as Donald Trump to even verbalize it, but why let humility stand in the way? What if—I used a quote of my own. What if—I had ever said, or could possibly say, something quotable? What if—one of these days, at my funeral, someone could read a eulogy: “He loved his family and music, and as he would always say: ‘blah, blah, blah, blah and blan’,” And people would knowingly nod and turn to one another and murmur in whispers things like: “That sounds like him,” or “If I’ve heard him say that once, I’ve heard it a hundred times”.

The lines I say often somehow don’t seem notecard-worthy, carefully letterpressed one card at a time by Molly or anyone else.

• “I prefer thin crust.”
• “Did you notice how all the pictures on their walls were crooked?”
• “I will never vote for Donald Trump.” (But I’m haunted by the old aphorism, “Never say never!” because I once said out loud I would never vote for Hillary Clinton. That was before I could fathom the day that a cartoon character would be the candidate of the “Party of Lincoln”.)
• “Dang allergies!”
• “Yes, my Grand-Girls are beautiful and amazing!”

How about you? If Molly were going to letterpress your favorite quote on a lovely notecard, what would it say?

What's Age Got To Do With It?

WHAT DO YOU GET when you put together a group of people ages 78, 64, 67, 41, 37, 82,  and 36?

Charles Lloyd & The Marvels.

Charles Lloyd & The Marvels

On January 15, 2016, Blue Note released I Long To See You, the profound new album from Charles Lloyd & The Marvels. The album finds the iconic saxophonist and recent NEA Jazz Master in the company of a new band featuring guitarist Bill Frisell and pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz, along with his longtime quartet members bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland. The album also includes two remarkable guest vocal appearances by Willie Nelson and Norah Jones. — from Blue Note.

The release of this album alone is worthy of a blog post, but that’s only a small part of the reason I’m writing this.

My main point is to highlight the beauty of a multi-generational collaboration, and even more broadly, to acknowledge the power and potential of multi-generational friendships.

I came to this conviction first by seeing it at work in my own life, and then I began to notice it in all walks of life. As I have written before, I am a tested and confirmed introvert. My batteries are recharged in solitude. That’s not to say I don’t have close friends or that I enjoy spending time with friends. I do. But I prefer to spend that time with just a few at a time in a quiet, intimate setting like a coffee shop or bookstore. I’m not saying this is the way it should be, but it is what I prefer.

One day I just sort of noticed something about my friendships, or maybe someone pointed it out to me, but I can count on one of Mickey Mouses’s hands the number of close friends I have that are near my age. Most of my friends are much younger or older than me. I don’t know why. I have a theory or two. But, nothing certain. Maybe I don’t need to know why. I may know more by tomorrow sometime.

Tomorrow night, Charles Lloyd & The Marvels are playing at Jazz At Lincoln Center in New York. I will be there in spirit.

Tomorrow at Noon, I will be having lunch with some of my favorite people. One is 20-something, one is 30-something, one is 60-something and the other is 80-something. I plan to ask them how they feel about being a part of a multi-generational collaboration. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

O Brother

WHEN I THINK OF CALLING SOMEONE "CREATIVE", I think of someone who has artistic leanings: visual artists, musicians, quilters, storytellers, poets, etc. I know there are creative people in the business world as well. I’ve met many of them. I work with some. Obviously, creatives can be found in other fields: science, education, church, sports and more.

Here are some other things I know about “being creative”:

From The Daily Artifact project by Corey Lee Fuller

1. There’s some of it in all of us. Believe what you will about the Creation narrative, but the fact is that we are created in the image of God, and the first thing we learn about God is that he/she is creative.
2. If getting our education system further oriented toward math and science at the expense and even demise of meaningful programs and classes in music, art, drama, creative writing and the humanities, we are doing irreparable damage. Because,
3. A product of “creativity” is beauty, and we need to be in awe and wonder sometimes.
4. Creative people are often compelled to depths that are often dark and darker.
5. Despite that fact, I long to do creative work; not to be labeled “creative” necessarily, but because I will not be satisfied otherwise.

One of the many on-going rhetorical questions in my own mind is, “Would I be willing to be at risk of some state of mental anguish or dis-ease in order to be optimally creative?”

Remember the Faust story; the whole “Selling your soul to the devil” storyline? One of my favorite versions of that theme is in the movie, O Brother Where Art Thou. In this movie, three prison escapees are on the run in a stolen car. They see a guy standing at a crossroads—literally and metaphorically. They pick him up and ask him his story. He explains that his name is Tommy Johnson, and that at midnight, he met the devil at that crossroads and bargained with him: his soul for the ability to play blues guitar.

If you know your Blues lore, you might think that that story belongs to Robert Johnson, who wrote the song “Crossroad Blues”, which was later wonderfully covered by Eric Clapton and Cream. 

The first line of the song goes:

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the lord above “Have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please”

But in the movie, the soul-seller/guitar player is named “Tommy Johnson”. I assumed that the writers didn’t want to directly attribute the story to Robert so used the name Tommy instead. It turns out though that in all likelihood the story is true for Tommy Johnson, but maybe not Robert.

If you’re interested in that whole saga, I highly recommend you listen to this episode of RadioLab (it’s pretty long so you might want to save it for later).
CLICK HERE for the story about Robert and Tommy Johnson on Radiolab: 

In the O Brother movie, two of the three convicts have just been saved and are still wet from baptism when they come across Tommy, the hitch-hiking guitar player. They discuss their respective Crossroads experiences with the third convict, played by George Clooney, claiming that he, having chosen neither God nor the devil, “remains unafiliated.”

But as Bob Dylan (who attributes Robert Johnson for inspiration) wrote:

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls.

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Click on this movie poster image to see a clip from the movie.
 

So back to the conversation I have in my mind: “Would I be willing to be at risk of some state of mental anguish in order to be optimally creative?”

The question comes up in my discussion with myself because there are times when I wonder if maybe I AM a bit crazy. (I heard that.) I often find my perspective and thinking to be so different from the mainstream that I don’t feel normal.

It turns out that maybe the leap from creativity to craziness is a short one:

“Psychological theories propose that the schizophrenic spectrum is accompanied by a decrease in practical reasoning, as schizophrenia patients outperform controls in logical deduction that is in conflict with practical reasoning. Furthermore, it has been suggested that those less restrained by practical cognitive styles may have an advantage in artistic occupations,” study researcher Robert A. Power, MD, of deCODE Genetics and King’s College London, and colleagues wrote. “These results provide support for the notion that creativity and psychiatric disorders, particularly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, share psychological attributes.”

CLICK HERE to read more about this research.
 

We just saw the new biopic Love & Mercy. It is the story of the song writing genius, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. 

The IMBD Database describes the movie this way:

“In the 1960s, Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson struggles with emerging psychosis as he attempts to craft his avant-garde pop masterpiece. In the 1980s, he is a broken, confused man under the 24-hour watch of shady therapist Dr. Eugene Landy.”

CLICK the image to see the movie trailer

Now put on a really good pair of headphones, close your eyes and listen carefully to The Beach Boys sing “God Only Knows”. Listen again and hear the french horns, the jingle bells and that amazing bass line. Listen one more time and hear how Brian uses amazing chord progressions, unique rhythms, and those tight Beach Boys harmonies to create a masterpiece.

You can’t get stuff like that out of a normal brain any more than you can get The Starry Night out of Van Gogh’s.

If I could interview Brian Wilson, I would ask him, “Would you have traded your ability to write “Good Vibrations”, “Sloop John B”, and “I Get Around” for a more sane existence?