Kegel's Porn Cops

So I posted this brief mention of it on Twitter and on Facebook, but what happened this weekend was this...

I try to teach my students the importance of enunciation. This weekend, for example, I worked with young kids on simple commercials. 1 child kept misreading "Kellog's Corn Pops" as "Kegel's Porn Cops." I can't make this stuff up.

What was even better was when the teenage girls in class started asking, "Wait...what did he say?!" They started laughing and almost fell out of their chairs.

I couldn't stop from laughing a bit and said, "Leave it...please?"

The young boy who said it replied, "Wait! What did I say?!"

One of the teenage girls blurted out, "Kegel!" while laughing nearly hysterically.

ALL of the teenage boys turned and stared at each other in confusion saying things like, "What the hell is a Kegel?! Why is that funny?!"

The boy who had said it looked really confused and yelled, "Why can't anyone just tell me what I said and why it's so funny? And yeah...what's a Kegel?!"

I said, "We're not going into that."

"Are the girls laughing because he said 'porn cops?'" one of the boys asked.

A 16 year old girl answered, "No. Not exactly...but that was funny too."

I tried to get decorum back in the room and had the boy read the commercial out loud again...and again he misspoke with, "Kegel's Porn Cops" trying to correct himself as he went...and that's when one of the girls fell out of her chair laughing just repeating the word, "Kegel."

All four boys turned and looked to each other like a band of angry union workers and one of them stood up and said, "OK! Someone HAS to tell what this Kegel thing is!" 

I refused. We pressed on. I took my lunch break. I came back after an hour and the boys came up to me and said, "We looked up Kegel on our smart phones! That's what he was saying?!"

I replied something like, "Yes. Good. You're all very smart and better educated now. Congratulations."

"We all know what Kegels are!" one of them said as they high fived each other.

"Yeah. Great. The mystery of life is open to you. Wonderful. Now you can silently exercise too. Leave me alone." That was the last thing I said as I walked out of the room to hit the restroom before class.

I Was There

I work in Tyson's Corner, VA at a place called Youth Film Academy.


Nearby is one of the many Border's stores that just announced they would be closing due to their recently declared bankruptcy.


I sat in it today eating a cheap lunch I bought at a nearby 7-11 and decided to write this poem.


M

I WAS THERE

I was there when the empire fell

I wolfed down a sandwich
                while low, low prices were marked down
                while permanent fixtures were sold
                while consolidated shelves were dismantled

I devoured potato chips
                in the presence of other shoppers
                in and amongst aisles of magazines
                in the air-conditioned warehouse store

I would have inhaled a cookie
                but for the absence of pastries
                but for the absence of  employees
                but for the absence of a café

I was there when the empire fell
                I was full, and then suddenly hungry

Educational Conversations with H

One of the teachers, who I will refer to as "H," from my high school, Northern Burlington Regional High School,  posted the following as a description to a link on Facebook:

This program [a PBS reports episode] reports on the pressure that S. Korean students are under in school. I don’t think we want to totally emulate their system, but I have to laugh when public officials rant about teachers and teacher tenure. In their view the solution is to get rid of the bad teachers. Sure there are bad teachers, but the bad teachers are not the problem. They are the tip of the problem. Our culture needs a total attitude [change].

I responded by writing about what is actually necessary to change the results that come out of the American education system.  An interesting exchange followed.  I thought I would share it here.  Here are my thoughts:

No joke! The kids I teach when I work at universities are often, sadly, pitiful at most any basic academic skills, but their ineptitude is only outdone by their sheer arrogance and pride in what they believe to be their intelligence. I've had some substandard teachers in the past, but I got myself to learn the material despite their lack of ability to communicate the information. 

Working as an actor and teacher over the last few years has taught me a lot of what makes a strong teacher and student, and what defines the strongest relationship between the two. 

The problems I can identify in substandard teachers doesn't usually lay in a lack of knowledge of the subject matter, but in HOW they communicate (or are incapable of communicating) a thought, or series of thoughts. Ours is a society that shirks the responsibility of what once was a necessity for every student to learn throughout all levels of education.

Rhetoric.

Many of our teachers are unskilled in this, and so, many students never learn this...and this trend has been devolving for many generations, aided along by the rise of video, digital, and other technologies that take a lot of focus off of communicating clearly, effectively, and persuasively with the spoken word.

What this does to teachers who don't possess a natural "gift of gab," or "a common touch" that can jump from appealing to aristocratically minded types, to the more working class, is that it shuts them off from their students in total. The teacher becomes locked in simply repeating facts that have little to do with appealing to the imaginative and emotional lives of their students. I firmly believe that to educate a student one must teach them the information at hand, but, above that, one must show them learning will help their own self-esteem, their own sense of collaboration/cooperation with their immediate peers and communities, which will, in turn, help them build a healthy sense of themselves. 

Language, SPOKEN language, and how to use it in any subject or endeavor, is the ultimate teacher of this. 

However, this is an ideal that cannot always be reached. That is why on the other side with the student, a simple, yet very difficult lesson, must be taught, again and again, from a very young age, and that is the value of Humility. This humility must not just be taught as a subservience to a teacher, or authority figure, but as a reverence to the material at hand, and a respect to the person attempting to transmit, or SHARE, this information with the student.

It's in this exchange between teacher (skilled and open communicator) and student (reverential and respectful listener) that has the potential to create a loving, caring, nurturing environment for both to communicate and listen to lessons and questions. Above all, it creates Love...as holistic and stupid as that sounds, that is what is essential. To be clear, I'm not talking about romantic love, or an environment that doesn't challenge the student (or the teacher) but a love that is built between two mutual respects...for teaching and learning, and learning and teaching. 

To bring it to it's base elements I guess what I'm saying is clear is:

Respect

Humility

Clarity (through Rhetorical practice)

Love

Thoughts?

H offered up the following as a response:

“Above all, it creates Love...as holistic and stupid as that sounds, that is what is essential.“

Mark, thanks for this quote. Yes, we all know we have ineffective, and even “bad” teachers, and that needs to be corrected, but our real problem is our attitude towards learning, as I think you spoke about. Effective teachers love their subject area. They think it is extremely exciting and important. When they exhibit that love and interest, most students pick up on that. Also, IMHO the learning process is about a relationship between teacher and student. We often do not develop that relationship. In defense of teachers, it deflates their enthusiasm when they are repeatedly bombarded with indifference and lethargic behavior. As in most aspects of our lives, it’s our attitudes.

What is the answer? I don’t know but I bet it is not to constantly rant about “bad” teachers, attacking tenure (I don’t think we need it, but we do need some type of due process. Once you get a teaching job, getting fired is a death sentence for your teach career, unlike other occupations.) begrudging teacher salaries, reducing pension, and health care. We do not get the top 10% of college graduates wanting to teach now, how will these actions get us closer to that goal?

OK, I’m just ranting now, and taking away from your very insightful response. 

I offered up the following as a response to that:

I didn't think you were ranting at all.


I have been thinking about this conversation for a few days now (clearly) and am thinking about even more since some of my old friends have been posting mini-rants of their own about the fact that the documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN was snubbed by the Academy Awards and wasn't nominated for Best Documentary. I haven't seen the film, but in reading about it I've learned that the film heavily scapegoats teachers unions, promotes charter schools, and touts there are fairly simple solutions to all of the complex problems facing the American educational system.

One article I came across (http://www.thegrio.com/reviews/why-waiting-for-superman-wont-fly-with-some-audiences.php) offered a great quote by H.L. Mencken that summarized my thoughts on all of these issues before I heard about the documentary:

"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

Ultimately, even the thoughts I offered up aren't meant to be a simple solution. They are meant to be part of a guiding list of principals that teachers, students, and administrators can take as thoughts as to how to re-engage the balancing act that has to constantly keep happening in any school, or local, state, or federal educational system.

I'm sympathetic about what teachers at the high school level and below just to get jobs, or preserve them. I'm even more sympathetic about them when a documentary like WAITING FOR SUPERMAN comes along and offers a slick set of solutions that may work for one community, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, one country in total. I think the problem, the trap that people fall into when thinking about how to "fix schools" is the same one I realized I fell into when thinking about it.

Everyone wants to start with the product. How do we know kids are college ready? How do we get better test scores out of them? And many other questions of this sort are asked, but they are focused on the end of the line.

The focus should be on the other end of the problem, i.e. the process of learning/teaching, and, even before that, and going back to my first set of comments, how we prepare both students and teachers for engaging each other TODAY. Yes, this isn't what a government policy maker would want to hear, but it's where the conversation about education ultimately has to start, where the process has to start, so that the product at the end of it all validates that process of education/learning.

What is troubling for me in any article I read, or conversation I have about education is that a lot of solutions I hear these days start to sound like schematic outlines for how a factory assembly line should work. Come up with one system. Put it in place. One size fits all. Essentially, one comes up with a system that works for all to pump out the right product. If that's the case, then we have to start taking into account the modern assembly line's dictum of "planned obsolescence." The product has a limited life, and eventually parts of the product have to be replaced and evolve into other parts. However, when one has one "one-size-fits-all" assembly line design for all one bit of unplanned obsolescence tends to happen, and that is the obsolescence of the system in total.

Take a look at General Motors and the large lumbering dinosaur that it became. It was too big, too diverse, too complex to turn itself around quickly. It's system collapsed and needed outside help to be saved. Essentially, that's what we did with policies like "No Child Left Behind." We tried to create a product-oriented assembly line that fit the whole country.

What happened? Creativity in education stagnated. Schools closed. Teachers were blamed. Students lost out. And the list of consequences goes on, and on...

We need a durable system of education, and that is defined as a system that has a complete local connection between educator and student, and the ability of both to evolve and adapt to the demands and needs of each other ultimately.

That only comes about through diverse solutions for different communities. Scapegoating exclusively teachers won't solve this problem. Offering up a new blanket national system won't eradicate it. It takes constant adjustment and evolution.

Let The City Fall

I met up with a friend and colleague of mine, Dara, earlier this week on Tuesday.  We discussed the poem No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats. 

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

We discussed what it meant, how it could be presented (or performed), where to take breaths, what words to stress, etc.  I had never heard of the poem, and had to admit to her that I don't read as much poetry as one would like.  Anyway, I thought the poem should probably be performed as a Mickey Rourke type of character sitting at a bar trying to figure out why this woman had caused all these problems in his life, making these poetic realizations about her in the moment.  I think my exact words to Dara were, "Think of it as a sequel to Barfly!"  She just stared blankly at me and then smiled while replying, "OK Mark." 

Somehow that's what I feel most responses to my conceptual ideas are these days.  Still, one should be so lucky to have a night spent discussing poetry and conceptualizing it for performance.  There aren't enough of those days lately.

Another thought came to mind later as a general idea for performance.  A dark stage slowly being lit as a female lounge singer sings the Swedish band Cinnamon's song "Me As Helen of Troy."  She'd sing the song in the soft, gentile way it's originally sung (maybe even a bit more sultry), and then a man watching her from the crowd surrounding sitting at cabaret tables would stand up and start speaking the words of Yeat's poem.  And then...  Who knows?  Sounds like an idea for a devised theatre piece. 

Here is a link to the video for "Me As Helen of Troy" if anyone is interested:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZKxdYscpvw

I'd Like My Own Poison Pill, Thank You

So many people like this Julian Assange guy and I can't figure out why.

Here is a man sitting on tons of sensitive material, releasing it whenever it pleases him, redacting information seemingly at random and revealing the names and identities of hundreds of informants around the globe, putting the lives of military personnel and (even worse) civilians around the world in jeopardy. Now, he's threatening to release a "poison pill" of files if he's detained too long, or extradited to Sweden.

It's one thing to want true transparency in international relations and to expose the ineptitude of American diplomats, but to sit on sensitive material and to release it at one's leisure, or to use it as an ultimatum, or blackmail, to save his own ass, and, barring that, just as revenge for extradition, makes me think this guy is not an innocent. He seems to be only interested in either saving himself, or promoting his own interests and has ended up making himself a walking contradiction of what Wikileaks was supposed to stand for in the first place; an unofficial check and balancer to local and world dealings that could expose true corruption that could be a detriment to everyone.

It wasn't meant to be an organization formed to be used as a bargaining chip in court to save one person. This isn't a revolution of empowering the people and encouraging transparency. It's just another moment in history when a minor megalomaniac is using a stockpile of virtual wealth he fell ass backwards into and he's not afraid to abuse the information as much as the diplomats who stupidly reported it.


If this is the face of the next people's revolution I'd rather take my own poison pill.


What a joke.

Burning Mice, Polish Generals, & Turkey: A Perfectly American Thanksgiving

It's been a relatively laid back, easy-going Thanksiving this year.  That's in part due to our extended family deciding not to meet up together as an absurdly large unit, which we normally do, and that decision is in part due to such facts as the unstable economy, family living distances away in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and various areas in Maryland.  Normally we would brave against such sensible decisions as staying home and being calm and relaxed and congregate somewhere, but this year my mother and father both are hobbled by injuries and surgeries they've had in the past year.  And so...here we are...spending Thanksgiving as an immediate nuclear family unit in Forest Hill, MD. 

We ate what could be called "dinner" at around...1pm, but that was because my younger brother Matthew and his girlfriend Laura needed to head on down to Columbia, MD in order to visit with the part of her family that lives there.  So as a family we decided to eat earlier than normal.

The meal itslef was fairly simple and small for a traditional Polish-American gorge-fest.

No pierogi.

No gołąbki.

Not even any macowiec for dessert.

It was, in fact, very American.  Turkey (sans stuffing), with gravy, mashed up potatoes, green beans covered in garlic and butter (okay so that's at least "Ukranian style"), cranberry sauce (from the can), and corn (from the can), along with one pumpkin pie (store bought), and one pecan pie (made by a friend of mine) for dessert.  Things couldn't have been more traditionally American...except for the discussions before, during, and after the early dinner.

I started off the morning by waking up around 7:45am and making my way downstairs to take a three mile run on the treadmill.  My mother was already up and warned me not to let the dogs downstairs seeing as she didn't want them to get snapped or stuck in any of mousetraps in the basement. 

Yes.  My parents have mice loose in the house and they're using traps to fight their presence --- both the snapping and glue variety.  I find glue traps to be exceptionally cruel and barbaric.  I can remember living with an ex in Dallas and we were beset with mice and rats in our house.  It was awful...especially whenever we caught a mouse, or a rat in a glue trap.  One doesn't see a verminous scavenger in that situation, but a lost, suffering, anxiety-ridden creature who has no idea what is happening. 

At that time I disposed of these traps in one of two cruel ways (neither of which I enjoyed doing).  I either decided to put the mouse out of its misery by beating it to death against the concrete curb outside our house (because...you know...a hammer was just...inhumane...), or, after giving up on the "beating method," I would simply take the glue trap and toss it into a nearby dumpster and try not to think about the rodent's suffering.  Eventually, we decided to use high pitched frequency emitters that kept the mice away...miraculously. 

I should suggest those things to my parents because they didn't seem to bother that particular ex's dog, and my parents have two dogs.  However, they haven't gotten with the "high frequency" program yet, and my older brother George has a most interesting way of getting rid of mice caught in glue traps...one he was able to implement not once, but twice this morning before dinner. 

He puts on a pair of rubber gloves, walks into the basement where the trapped mouse is "resting" (or resisting its fate), puts the mouse (trap and all) into a plastic grocery bag, ties a knot into the top of the bag, and then walks back upstairs, leaves the house via the garage door, and walks out to the far edge of my parents' large lawn where stands a large fire pit, that looks more like pot-bellied fireplace with a smoke stack.  Prior to having walked into the basement, George had started a fire with a crude assortment of kindling sources and fuels made of layers of coal, small bits of wood, paper, and all lit with a small butane lighter.  When he gets out there, he tosses the mouse, bag and all, into the flames and let's it burn to death.  So while the turkey is roasting in the oven, my older brother is in the backyard roasting a mouse or two. 

Charming, I know.

I tried to focus on which wine I would rather drink with dinner...the Riesling, or the Beaujolais Nouveau.  White tends to go better with turkey...according to the signs at the liquor store.  I couldn't help but wonder, "What goes with mouse?  My guess would be...the red?"  My mother tried suggesting that we try some port with dinner, but I had to be the one to tell her that's much more of a dessert wine.  We should wait to try that with the the pecan and pumpkin pies.  "And not with the mice," I thought. 

Eventually, the mice were no longer an issue, and had, metaphorically, long burned away from our memories.  Time flies when cooking, setting the table, burning rodents, and serving food.  One would think all that could follow would be pleasant conversation...

My mother gave a lovely toast at dinner, but my thoughts stayed elsewhere during her giving thanks for a lovely, simple dinner, and her whole family (inlcuding my younger brother's girlfriend...for whom I had to choke back grumbles of disapproval when my mother called her "a part of the family").  About ten minutes before sitting down my father started complaining about the new president of Poland, Bronisław Komorowski...

Apparently President Komorowski thought it would be a good idea to invite former President, and general of the Polish armed forces responsible for imposing the last bout of martial law in Poland, Wojciech Jaruzelski, to a meeting of the National Security Council, comprising of former presidents and prime ministers, ahead of Russian President Medvedev’s visit in December.  This invitation is more than a bit of a scandal in Poland...as well as in my parents' houselhold...even more so because my father and I both voted in the most recent Polish Presidential election that put Komorowski into the Polish President's office.  However, my father voted for Komorowski's opponent, Jarosław Kaczyński, who is a bit of a conservative and a nationalist.  I voted for...Komorowski...a fact that, at the time, and to do this day, has never pleased my father.  He even once remarked, "What is wrong with you?"  I looked back at him and said, "You voted for McCain and Palin and you ask what is wrong with me?"  That conversation ended quickly...as do most political discussions between my father and I.

However, for the first time in my life, my father has been finding little ways to dig "the Komorowski problem" into my side like a knife with any small, questionable decision he makes.  So, a hugely questionable decision, like officially inviting someone who many Solidarity-era Poles consider to be a traitor and a tyrant, to a Security Council meeting is a boon for my father in saying (without actually having to say it), "See!?  You voted for a piece of shit and an idiot!"  Smatterings of this point came up during dinner, and dessert with such generalized, but very pointed questions, like, "Who would vote for an idiot like that?"  I wonder...

My brother George, fresh from his adventures in burning living mice, chimed in with such gems as, "What's Jaruzelski going to suggest to Komorowski?  'Hey...let's leave NATO and the European Union, reinstitute making religion illegal, and bring Poland back to the Dark Ages!'" Yeah...to my brother's and father's credit, Komorowski did suggest leaving NATO during his presidential run...and then turned around on that suggestion. 

However, my father also reminded us of that point during dinner.  "That idiot even suggested leaving NATO!" 

I kept my head down and just mumbled something like, "Yeah...that's great.  Could someone pass the mouse...I mean...turkey?" 

We ate.  We drank.  We napped. 

Like I wrote earlier...a perfectly straightforward American Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving one and all.

Dig! - A Review

I posted the following about 8 months ago on hulu.com as a review to the film, Dig!, about the relationship between members of The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.  Go to the film's comment thread on hulu if you wish to read more comments about what I wrote.



All the reviews here are right.


Yes this is a good movie/documentary.

Yes the people involved are just a bunch of overly self-involved ego-trippers who think they're a part of some revolution when really they're just a bunch of vain, fame-hungry idiot kids.

Yes it's annoying.

Yes it's fascinating.

And yes...it's satisfying.

I don't think either of these bands was all that influential. The Dandy Warhols were part of the early to mid 90s alt-MTV media machine and didn't have enough talent to give them real staying power, or wide appeal that would have catapulted them past their very slick advertising. Like they say in advertising, nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. The Dandy Warhols aren't a bad product necessarily, just one that most people wouldn't want to buy, and they stand now as a semi-well known band with a decent following, but they ain't leading any revolution... that's for sure.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre would have suffered a similar fate, and similar amount of financial success, if they weren't just a bunch of dysfuctional, really psychologically screwed up bunch of grown children. Their star never rose to some sort of menial prominence, like the Dandy Warhols did, because their talent was standing on a foundation of mental illness and addiction. When they did influence some people and other artists they were young and able to hold their stuff ogether through sheer will power. It seems that's why they were able to play some good gigs, put together some half-decent demo quality albums, and convince themselves (and others) they had a chance of being...something. However, this film clearly illustrates the cracks began to show gradually from their seemingly bright and promising inception, and then, the moment they were handed even a modicum of responsibility with a record contract, they quickly crumbled. The Massacre is still around today, but I know only of a handful of people (and that's being generous) who've heard of them, and even less who regularly listen to them.

Again, revolutionaries they are not, either The Dandy Warhols or The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Still, there is something eminently watchable about this documentary. The Dandy Warhols story is relatable because they're a bunch of mostly well-adjusted suburban kids just working hard and pulling minor media stunts (slick videos, girl playing naked in public, etc) to gain fame, career longevity, and the ability to start their own seemingly well-adjusted families. The Brian Jonestown Massacre is everything their band name advertises. They are a group of people willfully drinking their own poisoned, half-sweetened Kool Aid while listening to some decent rock music for a soundtrack. The whole band, much like Anton Newcombe himself, is a group of individuals that resembles something sweet, cute, severely abused puppies. They have the quality of being something bright-eyed, engergetic and promising, but end up becoming something maladjusted and angry, baring their teeth and snapping at the very people that try to pet or feed or feed them. There are people in the world drawn to such qualities in others, and find them engaging and charming, but the story always ends the same. That's why the fans of TBJM haven't stuck around for the long term. Like a woman or a man in a long-term abusive relationship, they probably got tired of being let down, and, in some ways, assaulted by this band's willful self-destruction.

Essentially, this film is a really great character study of what happens when a bunch of ambitious, moderately talented, incredibly flawed and naive American suburbanites get elevated to some sort of prominence through their hobbies, and then their personalities are allowed to play out against each other over time in the public eye. Great stuff.