Look You Upon My Haircut and Despair

I really enjoy old educational videos. It's a particular problem of mine. I should probably seek some form of professional help. But there is something about outdated pedagogy, horrible acting, and strange and upsetting haircuts that just make me happy. Like I said: it is certainly worthy of years of powerful therapeutic intervention.

I first discovered these educational films as a child in rural West Virginia. We were subjected to a ton of these. We generally watched them on old reel-to-reel machines that, while perfectly quaint additions to some steampunk themed party today, were simply cheap pieces of junk back then. (To be clear: they are cheap pieces of junk now too. Just cool cheap junk.)

I rediscovered them later in life when Mystery Science Theater 3000 started airing them before the shorter, more Roger Corman-y films they showed. I instantly recognized them- creepy, dull, but somehow very real. Like a horror villain. I couldn't get enough. Recently, Rifftrax began airing similar shorts, with a broader (and arguably even creepier) selection of films. Some of these newer ones seemed aimed at urban schools, which delighted me to no end. In part because it made me realize that the super white and suburban short films we saw as a kid were meant for us! Someone had thought through the process long enough to decide, "Oh these bland and terrible films are being sent to West By God Virginia. Make sure to make them PURE WHITE and even duller than usual. Those kids can't handle the truth."

With all the madness for technology in education and Web 2.0 nonsense in schools today, this kind of mass produced madness is probably lost forever. I kind of hope not, personally. I hope that I can bring it back into my classroom, if only for a day. I want kids to study it as a history lesson. My generation may have not been through war, kids. But we saw shag haircuts floating over horrible special effects. We were told about our bodies by afro-sporting white guys in jumpsuits. We learned that drugs were free and available at every school bus stop. Unfortunately, we also learned that those same drugs could make the shag haired freaks in jumpsuits go away...

And that, kids, is why we grew up to be the generation that created reality tv. Don't do drugs.

Great Ecolocalizer Article

Commander Taviri And The School Search

I'm in the middle of an intense, challenging, and somewhat frustrating job search. I've reached the point where I am no longer concerned about where, really. I just want to teach. It's funny, really. Teaching is a job that many think is torture; I have any number of friends who are shocked that I love working with small children. Yet I have spent more than a year struggling to be allowed to do that job. Viri tells me that I'm a good teacher. It's very sweet of him, and I love the positive attitude he has inherited from his Papa. It's better than a criticism of me, surely. Although it'd be hilarious if he was constantly judging me. Not nice, but highly amusing.

I'm excited about the possibilities in my first few years of teaching. I'm anxious to start shaping my classroom, developing my own professional persona. The real work of my life has been to find myself as a father, as a teacher, and as a person. In all of the professional, personal, and spiritual changes that I have been through in the past few decades the everyday elements of work and jobs has been secondary. To the extent that it has existed at all, really. I've never been a career person.

But now my career has met my personal goals. Being a father and husband means finding a way to settle down into a job. Growing as a person means following my goals as a teacher and a colleague. Furthering my scholarly goals means gathering data and learning how to be a better teacher. The different threads have intersected. It's strangely poetic.

It struck me a few weeks ago that if I had a million dollars I would still be looking for a job as a teacher. I know that's easy to say, but I really believe it's true. I'd still be looking for my own classroom. I'd be striving to teach the kids about "constellations, math, and whatever they don't know" as Taviri says. (He's got a pretty exact idea of curriculum.)

I'm continuing to search. I don't have a million dollars, of course. But it's nice to know that I'm happy with wear I'm heading, regardless.* I'm excited about the next stage in my life. I'm ready to have my own classroom. I'll even teach more than constellations and math. I hope Viri doesn't mind.






*I will still take a million dollars. You know, if you got it to spare.**
**Seriously, we're broke.

Playtime! You Will Play Or Be Deleted!

My hobbies may be having some detrimental effects on my children. The kids are currently in a round of "Doctor Who aided by Commander Taviri and Commander Arkaedi versus the Space Zombie Trolls," and the game shows no signs of ending anytime this millenia. It leads to some amazing scenes, scenes which make me wish the kids had Michael Bay's budget and a year to just film themselves. Granted the story would be a little random, with the trolls sometimes being killed by Magic Electricity Bolts and sometimes being turned to stone by the Wizard. The Wizard is a little vague, being Commander Taviri's... alter-ego? Friend? Brother? He's not always sure. (I'd ask, but he fell through a time portal and is a kid right now. A kid who has no answers.)

A high point of the epic film would be Arkaedi's voices. We always joked that with her cute little voice, it would be hilarious to have her say violent things. Her own action film where the last thing the villain sees is a pretty shock of red hair, and a cute face saying, "When you get to hell... tell 'em Pretty Pretty sent you." She has inherited her mother's penchant for mimicry, and it is awesome. Hearing Lizard Men speaking in lizard voices, interrupted by ten to twenty second twitches, is comedy gold. I imagine Commander Arkaedi as the light hearted sidekick in Taviri's gripping space/time/zombie adventure. But I guess the final edit could reveal her true heroism. She certainly has the "hair flying backwards" part of female heroism down pat.

The fun part about their games is how they have no worries about continuity. Commander Arkaedi runs around shouting "Exterminate!" like the Daleks, then the Enterprise beams in and stops her, only to have her turn into Pingu. Then, for a few hours, she's a penguin. There is no call back to her earlier Dalek existence, no story where she laments all of the deaths she caused before she moved to Claymation Antarctica...She's just Pingu now. She is selling fish. Take that, fanboys!

By far the greatest Arkaedi contribution to the game is her "Beaky" shadow puppets. She makes her hands into chicken beaks, and the shadows cast by her hands become "Beaky." Sometimes Beaky is joined by other shadow creatures, but they all say "Beak! Beak!" at every opportunity. Wait, now that I think about it... they are strangely similar to her Dalek character. Maybe there is reason to her game after all!

Wait... Maybe she's the villain! She's really is masquerading as a cute little girl!

I have to admit, she fooled me for these three years. When I get to hell, I'll warn them... Pretty Pretty is coming...

"Beak! Beak! Exterminate!"

Album Title: Music Belies Meaning

I have such a strange relationship with music. I feel like it has taken such a large amount of my energy over the years... yet I periodically reject it in favor of other interests. Perhaps it's an aspect of my general flighty nature. I get excited, enthusiastic by political music, but I know that real meaning is not conveyed through what music gets played.

(That rhyme was unintentional. I promise.)

(If intentional I would have found a way to shoehorn "abeyance" and "conveyance" into the article. My word nerdiness knows no bounds, but my bad jokes, thankfully, do.)

Perhaps nothing better illustrates that than the band I posted above. Now, I love Propagandhi, despite the silliness and the preachiness and all the -nesses that make them, objectively, not a terribly good band. But they defined a clear period of my life, in between hating different musical types. On that very album is the song Anchorless, which I alternatively hated and loved.

(I'd go on to hate and love John's next band, The Weakerthans. Currently I love them again.)

(Wait, maybe... No I love them.)

I'm not sure what it is about this medium that makes me vacillate between extremes. I don't do it with my (more serious?) intellectual and spiritual pursuits. I don't suddenly "hate" Sufism or get all into Glenn Beck. Why does music cause such a flux in what I like? I dont even do it with things that really do deserve some of my creative scorn, like science fiction, fantasy, or poetry.

(Honestly if anything poetry would deserve the kind of waffling that I give to music. Why do I still like Gary Snyder? I just do. Why do I not heap some scorn on Ferlinghetti for his later work? I can't, that's why!)

Maybe it's a two-fold problem. Music is both more ubiquitous and more intimate than other ideas. I can step back from my politics and think, but music is always there. Songs get played over and over, and they get into my brain. Maybe the omnipresence of music is the problem.

I'm going to try and keep my perspective here. Jaime's current favorite is mewithoutyou, and I felt myself falling into a strange dislike of them. Then I realized I was being ridiculous, and I was just too used to them. They are a great band. Once again they are a soundtrack to a certain period of my life, but still hold meaning for me today.

In fact, check them out. They're awesome:

Stages, Steps, Shifts...Something With an "S"

"AND study the classic books,
the straight history
all of it candid."
-E. Pound

Contrary to Pound's excellent advice, I've never been one for sustained scholarship. In fact, I've been quite critical of it, disappointed in some of the menial places it leads writing and thinking. I'm often wrong about that, and miss some great writing and thinking. I can't help but keep up the criticism, however: I think it's a general trend towards movement in my personality.

Wait, I can explain that vague comment.

I was always driven to move, to expand. I have always had a hard time staying in one place, one program... even one country. I see everything in my life as stages towards the next event. This is due to some good reasons (desire to explore, intellectual curiosity, passion for various subjects and geographies) and some bad ones (need for stimuli, tendency towards boredom, an at times critical nature). I didn't, to continue the literary metaphor that Pound used, always desire the candid and historical nature of what I was experiencing. I needed to move on, expand, see the next horizon.

Jaime and I are fond of the mental exercise where you imagine that you've won the lottery. Say you have millions of dollars. What would you do? There are several ways to play this, but Jaime and I focus on two aspects. One: Imagine you have millions, and want to use that millions to live. Two: Imagine that you have millions to live on, and you think of what you would do with your free time.

I like the second one, because it is a better exercise for planning what to do with your life. What would you spend your time doing? This works well for Jaime and I, since we're people who like to work. I guess if my goal was to lay around all day, the exercise would be a failure. But I really want to work, to do something. So, what would I do?

I would teach. I would write poetry. But most of all, I'd travel. I'd spend time going all over the world. I'd find a school in India that let me teach, a school in Japan, Brazil... I'd move. I'm not driven by money. I care nothing for money. But it'd be nice to have the freedom to move around.

So, this week I am working on applying for jobs, finding some places to teach. Maybe here, maybe somewhere else. I don't really care where. Because what I want to do is teach, write my poems, and move around. Staying in one place for years is torturous tome, for all of those good and bad reasons.

Labels, Meanings, and the Secret Pretension of Self

A friend of mine has been involved in an interesting exploration of what it means to identify with a certain group. As is often the case with ideas like this, it leads to some frustrating wheel spinning, but can also yield some insight into your own thought processes. In an effort to maximize the latter, I'm putting some of my ideas down to better explore how these labels can have meaning for me. For me it is important to understand, how does the group identity of a label apply to an individual? Is it a meaningful exercise at all? I'd argue yes... but I'll get to that in a moment.

Some labels are merely descriptive. I say merely, because they don't convey membership in a group per se, but just state a fact of a person's identity. To say I have green eyes, for instance, doesn't imply a real connection to others with green eyes. It just says, Hey, my eyes are green. It's descriptive. The same can be said for a lot of different aspects of a person. But why does it seem to become more meaningful when I connect it other aspects of my self? Why is being, say, a poet, connect me to a history and an ideology that being a green-eyed person does not? Or does it?

I sometimes try and compile labels about myself. Just for fun, in a sense, but also to explore the value of those labels for me as an individual. I can say even a cursory discussion of who I am would include the following labels: Vegetarian, Sufi/Muslim, Poet, Teacher, Father, Husband, Punk rock, Straight edge, Anarchist... the list goes on. I'd argue that these are the main ones, both in terms of how people view me and how I see myself in the world. But what do these say about my membership to other groups? Are they completely personal?

Some are problematic. Sufi/Muslim covers a broad swath of the world. Many of whom would dislike or even hate me, and many of whom would disagree with me as much as I disagreed with them. Punk rock has become vague and ill-defined. But they are still true, and unifying practices mean those labels are real to me. I can't meditate and pray in a masjid and not be Sufi, even if certain people wish me to cease. I can't listen to music and discuss my philosophy without being punk rock, even if I often wish to cease using the label.

Some are descriptive. Father. Straight edge. I have kids. I don't drink. Yet these still invoke a certain community, a connection between myself and people. Is that valid?

I'm exploring this. The labels don't bother me like they did when I was 20. They don't excite me like they did when I was 15. They just are. I'm more comfortable with the sense of an individual being part of a larger whole while functioning as a unique individual. I'm still not so quick to be the lone hold-out, rejecting any sense of individuality a la the Life of Brian guy ("SHH!"). But I'm not so concerned with the pretentious notion that I am somehow above "those people" who need a label to be somebody.

And perhaps holding those labels can help me. Holding the discussion certainly has.