The TLB’s first press

Shoot me, I’m excited.

Check it out. We’ll be signing copies on Saturday at Bobby Q’s.

A message from a friend in Iran

I got an email yesterday from one of my Iranian friends.  My fears have come true; he wound up hospitalized, along with a couple of his family members, after having taken part in one of the June 20th demonstrations.  Here’s his story:

I am writing this email to let you know all that what is taking place in Iran and especially Tehran is a barbaric crack down of the people who want nothing but their very basic rights. So many people have been killed and injured and you can easily find out the picturtes on the cyber social networks worldwide. All commmunication systems are blocked in Iran and Iranain people can hardly be heard overseas.

Yesterday, June 20th, was one of the most terrible days in the history of democracy in Iran. The central Tehran looked like a red carpet of blood. I personally witnessed so many people were shot dead or beaten by the savages who call themselves as “the owners of Iran”. These hardliners are a very limited minority of Iran who hold the power and have no fear to slaughter the Iranian students, women and children. They have stolen the Iranian votes and announced Ahmadinejad as the president. As an Iranian, and as your friend, I am trying to tell you all that the supreme leader of Iran (Ayatollah Khamenei) and his servant (Ahmadinejad) do not represent the reality of the Iranians who look for peace, friendship and bright future for everyone.

Yesterday, I was beaten on my head and back and my brother mother were beaten too. We spent the night in a hospital which was full of injured people. Among the people who were killed in the last few days, there were many students and some of them were from the University of Tehran. The regime have overtly denied that they have been killed and do not deliver their bodies to their families. The ironic point is that people try to demonstrate silently (no slogan, no violence), but they receive very brutal response from the riot police and the milita. The state-run television calls millions of people as “terrorists” and “hooligans”!!!!

What I explained about is a domestic unrest and the consequences of an Islamic Fascist regime in power. But, the global consequences of such regime in power will definitely affect the lives of people worldwide either directly or indirectly. The regime who does not fear to slaughter its own people, have no mercy on  other nations. As an Iranian student who has so many restrictions to get his voice out of Iran, I do kindly ask you all to inform your families, friends and colleagues in every possible way about the awful situation in Iran. This Islamic Fascist regime is not to be officially recognized by the world.

This is exactly what President Obama was referring to in his statement yesterday:

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

I wrote back to my friend last night asking him whether he was sure he wanted me to post his message, and got this in response:

That would be great if you post my message on your blog. Don’t worry, I’m a tough cookie. What hurts is not my own injuries or my family’s, but the people especially very young people who lost their lives on the streets. I saw a teenage girl die in the arms of her father. I don’t know really what to say. I feel so bad. Any attempt to spread the information about Iran is well-appreciated. The world needs to know.

I don’t know what else I can do at this point except act as a conduit and hope other people read this.

Iran

As I write this disclaimer, the one that says that I’m not looking to draw any sort of parallel between the Islamic Republic of Iran’s current media crackdown and the filtering policy employed by the school district in which I work, I realize that you, the reader, are probably going to assume that I, as a teacher who works in a school with a really dumb strict filtering policy, am going to draw such a parallel. If you see it, it’s your problem, not mine. You savvy?

 

Once again, there’s massive political turmoil in a country in which I have good friends.  I remember the protests in Serbia in early 2008, and the worry I felt for my friend Alek, whom I’d met in Scotland the year before.  And the violent demonstrations in Greece later that year, during which I hoped fervently that Ioanna would keep her head down.  Now, in June of 2009, with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad apparently the victor in a very fishy looking election, I hope that Kasra and Amir and their friends and loved ones are safe.

I think, though, that the current situation in Iran represents the danger of insisting that your way of doing things is the only correct way, to the exclusion of all other opinions, methods, or beliefs.  In any human endeavour, there has to be communication and empathy.  Hardliners in any situation–whether it be a theocratic dictatorship or a family squabble–prevent reason from prevailing.  Shutting out the other side’s views can’t work.

We see that in Iran right now.  The government has blocked a lot of internet traffic, as well as disabled text-messaging and cell-phone transmissions.   It can’t shut everything down, though.  As stupid as Twitter seems to be–and that would be plenty stupid–it might have found its niche as a way to disseminate otherwise-censored information:

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, says Iran — like a university campus — pipes the Internet into the country through a central, controlled gateway. That allows the government to block Web sites and do other kinds of filtering.

But, like resourceful American students in search of Facebook, many Iranians can get around blocks, using proxies and other methods. Complicating matters for the authorities, Zittrain says, is the fact that social networking services tend to be decentralized.

Twitter and other proxy-accessible social networking sites are great for calling the world’s attention to what’s happening as the regime attempts to impose a national blackout.  The current state of Iran + Twitter offers some very interesting educational possibilities, too, according to Will.  Even more importantly, though, the voices of dissent online remind the regime that their claim to the only official reality is shaky.  It is important to remind those with whom we disagree that we disagree–not necessarily in a violent confrontation, but in a respectful way.

My parents will celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary later this year.  I didn’t grow up in a calm family; however, we generally were good at letting each other know when we disagreed with what was happening.  There were screaming matches, of course, and tantrums and silent treatments and that sort of stuff.  But under all of that was an undercurrent of constructive criticism that, when I look back on it, has led to a pretty strong bond between the five of us to this day.  My sister and I were talking yesterday about how, despite our definite lack of family perfection, we are in a much better place than a lot of families we know, where the adult children now don’t speak to each other or their parents, let alone acknowledge their existence.

Conflating a repressive regime with the comparative insignificance of suburban American family dynamics is kind of silly, I admit, but my head’s been in this space for the past few weeks.  Since Erica and I got engaged in early May (and even before that) one of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how our two very different immediate families will become one.  Her family is more traditionally welcoming, I think, than mine–it could just be because I’m still a guest when I go over there, but they’re quicker than my family is to do the traditional host/hostess stuff.  My family is mostly quieter and less protective, but when things blow up, they blow up pretty big.  Both families are capable of holding grudges (I still don’t know why my parents and one of my aunt/uncle sets didn’t speak for years when I was in middle and high school) and both families are capable of astounding demonstrations of love and affection.  

When we try to imagine what our family will be like, we naturally gravitate toward the environments in which we each grew up.  I foresee myself as a parent the way my parents were (and are) parents, and Erica does the same thing for her family.  The reality, of course, is that neither of our families will be the exact model for the new unit that we’re creating.  All we can do is try to emulate what we admire and attempt to avoid the negative examples that have been set.  It’s not going to be easy, but I know we’re both up to the challenge.

Wedding FAQs

Erica & I, originally uploaded by One Ping Only.

When are you getting married?
Some time between May and October of 2010, give or take.

How many people are you inviting?
Not very many. Start looking for your Golden Tickets.

Why?
We believe in paying for it ourselves. Also, we’ve each been to big weddings and haven’t had too much fun at them. I personally think it’s awesome when everyone at a wedding gets to meet some new people and it turns into the kind of party that everyone can enjoy.

Where is it going to be?
Outside. On the beach if at all possible. Somewhere between New Jersey and Rhode Island.

Jeff, how do you feel about weddings in general?
I don’t want to have a wedding, but I want to be married. Erica signed up for an account on The Knot, which made me twitch a bit. There are so many people who want to sell you things when you decide to get married. It’s kind of distasteful, I think. As soon as it got to the point where there’s so much minutia involved in a modern wedding that you need to hire someone to keep track of everything for you, weddings officially jumped the shark.

I’m not that cheap, but I also don’t want to get sold a bunch of stuff we don’t need. I want everything to be simple, somewhat classy, and fun. The way we are as a couple.

The most important thing is that we’re getting married and having a party. That’s all there is to it.

Jeff Wasserman is engaged.

What awaited us, originally uploaded by One Ping Only.

I don’t have Facebook, so I knew I’d have to miss out on the awesomely postmodern way of letting people know about major changes to my life. So instead, I popped the question and brought Erica to a surprise gathering of our friends and loved ones. Now everyone who needs to know knows.

We spent today, our first full day of being betrothed, running grown-up errands (including ordering a couch and a chair for our new apartment). Everywhere we went, Erica kept checking out the ring, which isn’t even the real ring. The real ring that she’ll be sporting has yet to be made. It’ll use the diamond from her great-grandmother’s engagement ring, but she’ll be designing the setting, since the antique ring’s setting is damaged to the point where it can’t be used.

I love the idea of Erica wearing something from her ancestry on her finger. I feel like it connects me to her family and brings the past to the present and the future.

There’s plenty more to write about this whole thing, but I’m going to save that for another day. Right now, I’m just enjoying this brand-new feeling of officialness, of a major turning point turned, of overwhelming emotion every time I see Erica’s finger glinting in the light.

PJ Harvey and John Parish go off the boil.

Let me give some context for what I’m about to say about PJ Harvey and John Parish’s new album, “A Woman a Man Walked by”…

I am a PJ Harvey obsessive. Her last CD, ‘White Chalk’ easily made the top of my best albums list for 2007. It was the kind of record which made me want to go and spend a couple of thousand dollars on a piano (which I can’t play) and spend the next year trying to write even a single line a haunting as those she had put down. The list of great work from PJ Harvey doesn’t end there. Who can forget albums like “Is this desire?,” with its vicious industrial scrawl, or the exquisite “Songs from the City, Songs from the Sea.” Just in case I haven’t made my point, perhaps I can introduce my cats: tabby female “Polly Jean” and long haired ginger female “Harvey.” Yes, when I fixate…

So it’s a sad day when I come to “A Woman a Man Walked by” and have to admit that it has some serious problems. There are some dubious lyrical choices. The lyrics to “April” seem surprisingly prosaic, for example. “Pig Will Not” ends with Harvey shouting “I will not” again and again, and makes you wonder if she really has anything to say this time around.

There are still some great, moving, tracks, like “Passionless, Pointless” and “Leaving California,” but the overall album is very uneven. I’m a little more bitter at this because the single, “Black Hearted Love” is deceptively like an excellent track from “Songs from the City…,” so it raised my hopes that this might be the best new release of the year from an established act. That accolade still goes to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs right now (perhaps until Maximo Park next month?). Meanwhile I’m sad to say Harvey needs to rethink things a little, if she’s to produce the great new music I know she is still capable of.

[Nick also writes for Ryan's Smashing Life and Nick Sounds Off]

Apparently, this site is worth something.

Our old domain, rhinosplode.com, lapsed a couple of years ago. Someone bought it and wants $648 for it. Six hundred forty-eight dollars. For a domain name.
Now, I’m not knocking the ‘Splode–it’s a decent little site, after all–but $648? In its current incarnation as a WordPress blog, our biggest day in terms of pageviews was just over 50. That’s not very much at all, even in this age when everyone and their moms have blogs. My mom does not yet have a blog. –Ed.
But I guess it’s worth something. I’m assuming the value of domain names is determined by some weird formula involving searches or something. It couldn’t be that some shady character is convinced that what we have to say here is worth shelling out $648 for, could it?
Anyway, I’d maintain that this place is worth something. As a group blog (a very small group, but that can change), the writing here is certainly a bit more polished than your average tweet. The value, though, at least for me, lies in the community that we have–er, had–on Rhinosplode. There was a lot of writing here, and photos and jokes and all kinds of other stuff, including a thriving message board. And I’d love to have that back, but I think the times have moved on and left this sort of site behind.
Still, it’s kind of fun to go to the Wayback Machine and look through some of the old things. Like this letter, reprinted in its entirety:

Dear Rhinosplode,

I have recently had the misfortune of being hounded by gypsy ladies who want me to kiss their baby. Please send me as many free products as possible.

Yours truly,
A concerned citizen

I’m leaving Facebook.

Garage, originally uploaded by One Ping Only.

And no, it has nothing to do with the new layout or whatever–it’s ugly and dumb and too Twittery for pretty much anyone’s tastes, but that’s got nothing to do with it.

The problem is that Facebook doesn’t do anything better than any other app, and yet it’s way more time-consuming.

Let’s see–what have I used Facebook for recently?

• Looking at photos of lots of people smiling, most of whom I don’t know. I have a Flickr account that’s way more flexible than the Facebook photo app.
• Mail. I have an email address. Gmail works great. Also, even our super-retentive network filter at work lets us check email.
• Finding out what friends are doing. Actual human contact is kind of cool, as are phones. Email’s good enough. Twitter? Not so much.
• Getting invited to events. If someone really wants me to go, they’ll call, text, or email. Just no more evites, please, okay?
• Promoting shows. We’ve been using Facebook to invite people to Terryl Lee Band shows, but we’ve got a mailing list that’s better.

What else do I do online? I follow a couple dozen blogs via RSS, use Google Docs for my word processing, and occasionally stream some audio.

The worst part about this is that I feel like I’m just doing the electronic equivalent of telling you kids to get the hell off my lawn. I’m not anti-Facebook the way some of my colleagues are. I definitely get it. I get Facebook so much, in fact, that I’ve let myself waste way more time on it than I care to admit publically.

And that’s really why I’m looking to bail out. I want to get some time back. With Facebook, I found myself logging in to check one or two things–who’s coming to a show, for example, or whether I was tagged in the photos from last weekend’s festivities–and then 30, 45, 60 minutes would go by as I checked people’s status updates, photos, news, etc. And I think I’d like that time back. Checking email and reading stuff via RSS, while time-consuming, is much more manageable, with much less of a sense of urgency and transience.

I’m reclaiming my time in the only way I know how–pulling myself out of what for me has become a huge timesuck. I want to use my after-work Facebook time for getting stuff done, so that I can then spend more evening and weekend time with the people I love. I might even start reading more, or watching the movies that Netflix sends me, or taking more pictures, or spending more time outside. None of these are bad things, and Facebook isn’t either. It’s just not for me anymore.

I’m shrinking my world, in a good way. And I’m still not going the Luddite route–I’m actually planning on spending the weekend upgrading my laptop so I can do more with it–and I still believe in social networking. It’s just that I need more control over how much information I feel like I need to deal with in any given day. My soul needs to select its own society, as Emily Dickinson might say.

Filling the time will be easy. Spring is here.

Grown-man Business

In the past couple of weeks, as the reality of our impending cohabitation meets the reality of my enormous amount of stuff (specifically books and CDs), I’ve started culling. This first round, which has been pretty easy, has seen me getting rid of (via trade-ins and donations):

• books from college that I’m never going to read again (mostly by ancient Greeks and Romans)
• books from the Greenwich dump’s book swap that I grabbed and don’t need to read right now
• CDs by bands I used to love (Nine Inch Nails, for example) whose last few albums have been nothing but disappointing (Nine Inch Nails, for example)
• CDs by artists that meant something to me, in terms of sentimental or associative value, back in college that I haven’t listened to in years (Handsome Boy Modeling School, Dr. Octagon)

As I said, it’s been pretty easy so far, because I’m operating under one rule: I’m only taking with me things I won’t be mad at myself for packing. Since I’m not even planning on renting a truck for my part of the move, let alone hiring movers, I’m going to be cursing and sweating every box I bring myself.

So how do I figure out which music I want to bring? Well, I’m a grown-up now. I want to listen to grown-up music that rewards repeat listening. I need something with a high emotion to novelty ratio, something that unfolds, something I can think about while I listen. I need good lyrics when there are vocals, excellent musicianship when there are instrumentals, and a sense of arc to the whole album.

Bands like Radiohead, Wilco, the Decemberists, and Talking Heads fit the bill. I know I’m turning into one of those musical canon guys, but I’m not about to part with Astral Weeks, Music from Big Pink, Dusty in Memphis, or Otis Blue. Most of my jazz collection will remain intact, as will most of my weirdo Jewish music stash (unless you know anyone who wants a lot of Tzadik Records stuff).

I understand there’s been a lot of throat-clearing here, but I needed to give you a little intro to my state of mind before I launch into my review of Wring’s brand-new EP, The Spire. The CD, which is available as a free download from wringband.com, is fifteen minutes of exactly what I’ve been looking for–grown-up music, written by grown-ups for the consumption of grown-ups. The band, led by Rhinosplode’s music guy, Nick Parker (ex-Disband and Cobra Kai Dojo), sounds different on each track. The disparate parts, however, build up to a cohesive and ultimately highly satisfying whole.

I listened to The Spire for the first time while driving at night. The opener, “Colum,” with its piano and nonlinear vocal melody, gave me the distinct impression that this was going to be some sort of moody pseudo-Radiohead disc, which I was perfectly okay with. But when “Autobarn” kicked in, the distorted bass and poppy pre-chorus (with its off-kilter drums) let me know that, in the tradition of Parker’s previous efforts with the Disband, this was going to be one of those CDs that create their own specific sound worlds.

The Spire doesn’t disappoint, except for its brevity. I’d love to hear more past the beautiful closing track, “Coming Past Song.” I have no idea if Wring will be able to perform live (there’s a lot of studio stuff going on in these songs), but I definitely want to hear more from them.

One more thing–I know that’s its totally suspect to write a review for a project by a guy you used to play with and still are friends with, but any regular reader of this site knows that I have a pretty strong BS/sycophant filter, and this CD more than makes it through. I’d pay money for a copy of The Spire and anything else Wring sees fit to put out in the future.

The great disconnect

The writer behind Post-Punk Nerd once described a big problem.  His/her writing had become terrible.  It was

usually short, no more than a few paragraphs…and add[ed] very little to the public discourse. I have, once, tried to write a piece deeper than the typical blog fare, but in review I find the results to be poor: the language struggles, the sentences enjamb unnaturally and it reads as if I were a mumbling street preacher. What I am trying to say is important, I don’t doubt that, but I lack the skills to say it.

I bookmarked that post and have come back to it time and again.  It almost always leaves me feeling a little empty–not because it doesn’t say anything, but because the solution it poses is simultaneously elegant and impossible in my line of work.  Post-Punk Blogger has decided that rather than write a whole lot of short blog posts, s/he will now focus on writing longer, deeper, harder-hitting pieces.  They will be published less often, but will be of a higher quality than the typical blog writing one often sees around the Internets.

This is a great idea.  Twitter and whatnot have their places, I’m sure (though I still can’t figure out why I’d want to limit myself to 140 characters about a sandwich), but my professional concern is with writing.  Real writing.  The kind of writing that examines and develops and spreads ideas.  The kind of writing against which current school practices seem almost diametrically opposed.

Let’s take timed, in-class writing assignments as a particularly easy example.  And let’s ask a very simple question: What’s the point?  What is the possible educational merit behind having a roomful of students write something until the bell rings, something that will be assessed as evidence of skill at writing, or formulating ideas, or something like that? 

I guess you could make the argument that it’s the kind of writing students have to do on standardized tests like CAPT or the SAT.  Fine.  Respect.  But what else is it for?  Aside from exams (in college, perhaps, or in civil service or the military), when will students have to do this kind of writing?

I know, I know, the tests exist.  But where is the movement to change the tests?  Rather than bitch and moan about having to prep the kids for various state exams, college entrance exams, &c., why not push for tools that actually assess skills that students will need when they enter higher education or the workforce? 

I don’t know a single instance in my professional life when I’ve achieved more with the very first rough draft version of something I’ve written or created than something I’ve labored over.  From budget-nag emails in my first job out of college to software manuals I’ve written to lesson/unit plans to grad school admissions essays to songs, the experience has been the same.  Pushing something out for the sake of pushing it out leads to, at best, mediocre work.  If we’re about teaching students that it’s better to hand in some kind of crap rather than nothing at all, we deserve what we get.

This week, my colleagues have been into talking about Turnitin.com, a very expensive subscription website that schools use to make sure their students aren’t cheating when they write papers.  And fine, whatever, I have no problem with teachers who want to use it.  I won’t go near Turnitin, though.  The one semester I did have my students was a psychological hellride–rather than spending my time getting to know my students’ writing, I found myself hunting down every single highlighted passage in their work, rubbing my hands together with glee when I discovered an unattributed source.

If writing, especially school writing, is about playing gotcha with students, I need a new job.  I don’t have the temperament for that kind of work; if I did, I’d be a detective, which would at least get me out of having to go to faculty meetings.  But is it possible that there’s a way to rethink student writing, even at the high-school level, that increases students’ ability to write clearly and stylishly and makes it far less likely that they’ll cheat?