Old Library Man

Artist Book LEAP : FROG

2012-02-10T15:21:00.001-07:00

I received my grade for the "book 0", i.e. the first book assignment in Artists' Books II class last Tuesday. I had 94/100 points. That is higher than I expected because it was an experiment with a flip book that did not work well. The glue and the paper made one side thicker, as I knew it would, but the paper also curled more than I expected, and three days in the press did not flatten it. The curl made the flip action less than ideal. That is what I lost points on.

This is the flip book that failed.

I have been working my brain to the bone to create a book to fulfill assignment number two. I decided to use a photo series from Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion in an accordian book. I chose plate 168; two boys playing leapfrog with a side view and a facing view. I call it LEAP from the "front" of the accordian and FROG from the "back." The images were photocopied on manila drawing paper and carefully torn into small panels. I really like the soft images on the manila paper. Using double sided tape, the panels were afixed to the accordian pages. Except for the manila paper, I don't know what type or grade of paper I used. I rarely buy paper, so I use what bits and pieces I can find in my file drawers that I have collected over the years. The heavy black paper that I used for the covers was too thick. The folds gave me fits. I will not use that paper again for anything that needs precise folds. I like the results, eventhough it may not be within the assignment parameters.

This is the middle of the "front" before the covers were added.

The "back" view before the covers were added.

Another view.

The covers before attaching to the accordian.

The completed book, 4 3/4" by 3 1/8".

I am planning to use more of Muybridge's Animal Locomotion in future book arts projects. I discovered his work in the 1960s while brousing the library art and photpgraphy books at Long beach State College. Then Dover Publications printed a three volume set of all 781 plates in the 1970s. I bought a single condensed volume of 100 or so selected plates, because I couldn't afford to buy the three volumes. I used some of the action series in a few art projects and collages that I was playing with at the time. At one time I built a zoetrope out of posterboard which turned on a record player. I made strips of Muybridge photos to play in the zoetrope. Quite a fun experiment.

Happy Birthday Bekah

2012-02-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is my daughter Rebekah's birthday. I am giving her a hand made journal that I made, because she is a committed journal writer and rarely ever misses a day. I need to be as committed as she is. Boy would I get things done.

The cover of the journal wraps around the text block from the front, back and sides, and folds under the front cover.

The binding is exposed on the spine

But Is It Art?

2012-02-05T22:09:00.000-07:00

Part One: Ramblings

We have had two Tuesday class times in Artists Books where we get to examine artist books from the University of Utah Marriott Library's rare books and fine arts collections. The rare books selections are an interesting way to spend time, and I have examined a few book structures that I would like to try out on my own, I do wonder sometimes what makes these artist books art when I have done bindings with sewing and gluing just as good as these. Some of the texts in these books are not really that creative, just strange and often weird, and of course a few of the author "artists" have to throw in a filthy word or two to prove that it is relevant "art." But is it art?

The selections from the fine arts collection is even more questionable. They remind me of the photo and "art" books that I saw in the book store and library at Long Beach State College, now University of California at Long Beach, in the sixties when I was an art and theatre student there. There were also a lot of these books at the Free Press Book Store in L.A. where I occasionally browsed the shelves. While some of them were clever and eye catching, most of them were just vulgar exhibitionism. They justified it by calling it "art" or "avant-garde" or an expression of rebellion against the moral confines of the ESTABLISHMENT. I should have bought a few of those books back then. I would have quite the "fine art" book collection now, but I would be too embarrassed to show it off.

I did find a couple of the fine art selections to be fascinating in their presentation, Photogrids by Sol LeWitt and Babylonian Misapprehension by Gary Richman. I spent a lot of time examining those two books with a cursury flip-through of the rest of the books. Another book that was put out for us to examine was More Than Meat Joy : Complete Performance Works & Selected Writings by Carolee Schneemann and Bruce McPherson. This had a lot of blury photos of performance "art" with twenty somethings stripping off their clothes and dancing around or rolling on the floor, etc. Is that art, or just a bunch of perverted people calling what they do art in an attempt to justify their perverted view of the world and have the intelligencia heap extravigant praise upon it as an artistic expression of the modern human condition. But is it art?

Part Two

Last Thursday we had book binding demonstrations by Chris McAfee, or the Amazing Christophoro. It was the same demo as last year, but it was good to have a review. He tells lots of stories about himself, which are very entertaining, while doing the demonstrations because he says book binding demonstrations are boring to watch.

Artist's Books and Mail Art

2012-01-31T22:07:00.001-07:00

One of the in class assignments, after experimenting with various methods of paper decorating, was to create an accordion book reading the same from front to back and back to front - a palindrome. My "creation" last year was PITIFUL! I like my effort a little better this year. I used my own paper staining technique to put some color on the paper and then overlaid the pages with tape transfer images. The subject is rather mundane, but it works as a palindrome.

I sent out twenty letters in January, all decorated with my paper staining process. I didn't do any drawing or collaging on the envelopes like I usually do. I think the staining is interesting enough to stand alone. Here are the fronts and backs of two envelopes which are representative of this set of mail art.

The Ultimate Critic

2012-01-30T21:44:00.001-07:00

I found this picture in one of the LIFE magazines in my collection from 1940. It is bad enough when critics pan a picture, but I never heard of theatre managers bad-mouthing their features. As the writer says, the turkeys must have been a good draw.

Artists Books II

2012-01-25T11:11:00.001-07:00

I was able to get into the Artist's Books I and II class at the University of Utah without any difficulty. It seems like there are fewer students enrolled in the class this term. I saw Louise Levergneux, whom I meet last year in the Artist's Books I class. She is a very creative photographer and book artist, and I was looking forward to working with her again. But she decided not to continue with the class this year because there will be too much of a repetition of last year's assignments. Drat! There have been five class meetings now, and I am stressed out again trying to think creatively. I think I am more of a manipulator of other people's ideas than a creative originator of ideas. I like to experiment and adapt existing forms others have developed. Keith Smith said, "... if I didn't say something, who cares how good the technique is?" Maybe that is my creative problem - I don't really have anything to say.

When I arrived at the studio last night, I found Becky Thomas leasurely working on a book.

Becky has been working for the Book Arts department as a teaching assistant for classes and workshops for six years. She is very talented. She is also taking this class as a graduate student.

I really want to explore Keith Smith's different "non-adhesive" binding techniques and patterns, but that is not an "artist" book, just a small part of putting it all together into a unit called a "book." I bought Keith Smith's five volume set of Non-Adhesive: Binding Books without Paste or Glue last year and his new and expanded Structure of the Visible Book this year.

The class this year will again do a collaborative mail art project. This year we will be in groups and we will each exchange two pieces among the group. Each week we will add our own items or make changes before we pass them on the next week.The last person to have the mailable art will send it to one of the class assistants. Here are my first contributions. they are 8 1/2" by 11" and were stained on both the front and back.

The Fantastic Enchanted Island

2012-01-23T14:58:00.002-07:00

Saturday last (Jan. 21), I went to the HD broadcast of the Met production of The Enchanted Island. What a fantastic afternoon of Baroque Pastiche and Shakespearean mash-up, especially for us who are enamored of Baroque music and singing. (Several critics panned it, but what do critics know.) I especially enjoyed the beautiful Joyce DiDonato as Sycorax, and the lovely Danielle de Niese as Ariel. I saw DiDonato in last season's broadcast of Le Comte Ory in a trouser roll. She is becoming my favorite mezzo.

David Daniels (Prospero) and Danielle de Niese (Ariel).

Joyce DiDonato (Sycorax)

Neptune's court.

Neptune (Placido Domingo) singing the "riot act."

Caliban (Luca Pisaroni) and Sycorax.

I do not own these photos and will remove them if someone complains.

I am looking forward with anticipation to the broadcast of Gotterdammerung on February 11.

2012 Goal Report:

My goal to lose 65 pounds by my 65th birthday is underway. I joined myfitnesspal.com at the encouragement of my daughter Rebekah, who has lost 30 pounds and looks gorgeous. I have lost 11 pounds in three weeks. Just 54 pounds to go.

New Beginnings or Old Habits?

2012-01-04T15:27:00.000-07:00

2012 will be my banner year as I turn 65 in October. I don't plan on retiring for a few more years, but it is a milestone year none the less. One of those years where you look back on all the years before and see how different things turned out from what you planned or wanted or thought they would. Oh, well, I am sure the next 65 years will follow closer to the blueprint.

Someone remarked that many people look forward to the New Year to get a good start on old habits, so I have not made any of those pesky New Years Resolutions to break this year. I have set a goal to lose 65 pounds by my 65th birthday. That is only one and a half to two pounds a week; actually 1.625 pounds a week if my calculations are accurate. I have been doing Weight Watchers for Men on line for some time. I have not lost any weight, but I have maintained and not gained any more. I joined My Fitness Pal on line at the insistence of my daughter Rebekah, which is an entirely different system. Between the two systems, I may find what bits and pieces will work for me.

The Canyons District insurance department had a health contest over the holidays to encourage employees to maintain or lose weight over the long school break full of parties and fat food. They offered some nice prizes in a drawing for those who are successful. About 500 people, including me, weighed in at the beginning of the contest. Tuesday and Wednesday were the final weigh in days. I mistook the dates and went on Monday to weigh in. I lost two pounds, yea!, so my name is in the hopper for the drawing; something I would like not to lose. As of Tuesday afternoon, only about a fifth of those who entered have gone in for a final weigh in.

I am going to try to take the Artists' Books II class at the University of Utah this spring semester. I will audit the class as a senior citizen like I did last year in the Artists' Books I class. It only cost 25 dollars a semester for old folks to audit university classes if there is room. I hope I will be able to get into the class. Book arts is growing in popularity and the classes fill up. I was only let into the class last year because I know both teachers and have some background with them. It turned out that about five students dropped the class anyway. That class was tough, and made me work harder and think deeper than I have had to do in a long time to get what little originality and creativity I have to come to the surface. I put my name on the waiting list for this year's class. Last fall I was not able to take the letterpress printing class because it was full, and they could only take a limited number. Even knowing the teacher did not help me then. Registered university students are first served which is only just and right. It worked out better for me anyway not to have the printing class when I wanted it. Maybe next year.

A Memoir of This Date in History

2011-11-22T07:53:00.002-07:00

I wrote this memoir in November 2009, to commemorate 22 November 1963.

Le Mort d’Arthur

Mr. Dilley’s bulk obscures the diagram of intersecting lines as he labels the intersecting points. The shoulder of his tweed jacket is smudged with chalk dust where he brushed against the chalkboard.

“With lines MG and VY being parallel and line CL bisecting the lines at a 70 degree angle,” he drones as he finishes the last label with a flourish, “indicate on your paper which angles are the corresponding vertical angles, alternate interior angles and alternate exterior angles, if, of course, there be any.”

A review quiz! We haven’t looked at this angle stuff for weeks, and now he throws in a quiz. I think I remember this, but I confuse congruent with corresponding; or are they the same? I hate this; I hate this; I hate this. Just don’t call on me when we correct it. I know he will! I hate geometry!

Muffled static erupts on the speaker over the door, as someone fumbles with the microphone in the office broadcast center. Mr. Lucas’ voice is faintly heard urgently speaking to somebody else out of microphone range. Mr. Dilley frowns at the interruption, and we students take a break from paper and pencil with audible sighs.

“Students and teachers,” intones Mr. Lucas hesitantly, at last speaking into the microphone. “There is … we ... we feel that an announcement needs to be made at this time. The president … President Kennedy was shot in Dallas just a few minutes ago.” There is gasp, a shout, a moan from various students as Mr. Dilley slumps into his chair like he himself were shot. “Everyone remain calm. He has been rushed to a hospital. We have no more details at this time. We will try to play the radio broadcast over the intercom to keep you informed. Please stay in your rooms until lunch. School is not over; no one is excused to leave the campus.”

The fuzzy radio news bursts through the speaker that rattles with the volume. They adjust the volume down and up and down until we can actually hear what the commentator says. “Dallas … President’s motorcade … Texas school book depository building … three shots … Governor Connally … approximately 12:25 p.m. … sniper… Mrs. Kennedy … blood covered dress.”

The class numbly stares at the speaker over the door as if it were a television set. We struggle to visualize the horrendous event 1200 miles away while the limited details are repeated over and over by this reporter and that witness. The chaos and hysteria reminds me strangely of the old news reels of the Hindenburg disaster or the bombing of Pearl Harbor I have seen on television.

I do not like Kennedy or his silly Camelot thing everybody is hyped-up about, but I certainly don’t want him shot. I am a sixteen-year-old Republican, born and bred, but I don’t want the President dead; I just want him voted out of office. What kind of person would even think of shooting the President, and who would be stupid enough to actually do that?

As time creeps slowly on, the radio becomes a blur of background noise. I am only hearing part of it. Girls are comforting one another while crying and blowing their noses and parading back and forth to the waste basket to deposit used tissues and grab a few more from Mr. Dilley’s desk. Mr. Dilley has said nothing about no one working on the quiz. Leaning back in his chair, fingers peaked at his chin like Dürer’s Praying Hands, he stares reflectively at the ceiling listening to the radio.

The other boys in the room seem stoic. I don’t know how I am supposed to feel right now, maybe they don’t either. What I do feel is empty, hollow, disconnected from everything around me: lost. Maybe that feeling is from shock or disbelief or maybe just plain sadness mingled with fear for what comes next.

Just after 11:00, the broadcast cuts to an official news release, and someone named Malcom Kilduff speaks into the microphone. Through the jostle of bumped sound equipment and garbled voices and an airplane fly-over he says solemnly, "President John F. Kennedy… died at approximately 1 o’clock … Central Standard Time today … here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound … in the brain. Dr. Berkley told me it was a …a simple matter of … a bullet right through the head.”

The bell rings. It’s time for lunch, but nobody moves. Mr. Dilley pulls himself up from his chair and walks to the door, and we follow like sheep. I shuffle through the hall of silent whisperings and exit the building into the cool air of a glimmering gold, fall day. So, what do we do now?

Veterans' Day Memoriam 11.11.11

2011-11-11T07:23:00.003-07:00

I dedicate this Veterans' Day to the memory of my friend, Warren Guthrie Harding ,Jr., who died in Vietnam in 1968. I wrote two memoirs about Warren during the six years that I participated in a memoir writing workshop sponsored by the Jordan School District. The first was written in 2007, and the second in 2010. I present them here in memoriam with pictures I took at the Vietnam War Memorial and the only photos I have of Warren.

At The Wall

It was a physically stressing position, leaning into the polished, black granite wall trying to hold the strip of newsprint with one hand snug against the third name from the bottom of the panel and rubbing the graphite pencil over the incised letters with the other hand. I could feel my face reddening with the strain of holding my body at that awkward angle. My eyes teared with a flood of sorrow, regret, anger, and maybe a twinge of survivor’s guilt as the W-A-R-R-E-N appeared on the paper. The paper shifted slightly as I rubbed the pencil over the G, but I finished the name even though it was crooked.

I took the second strip of paper and smoothed it over the letters, but this time I held the strip on the left side with my knee giving me a free hand to hold the paper straight as I rubbed over the letters again.

When I stood, my legs were a little unstable, my face was flushed, my eyes were wet, and my breathing was shallow. Looking at my reflection in the black, mirror-like stone of the wall, I took a couple of deep breaths and steadied myself. Backing away from the panel, I almost bumped into a man who had been watching me; watching me and the dozens of others along the angling gash in the grassy slope on the north side of Constitution Gardens.

“Oh, excuse me,” I stammered as our eyes met.

“No harm done,” he said with a mild British accent. He was about my height, a few years older, but thinner. He wore a brown plaid shirt, a light tan blazer, blue jeans, and a bemused smile that was very close to a smirk. “Tell me,” he said, glancing leisurely left and right along the 54,000 names. “I don’t quite understand. What does all this mean to Americans?”

Looking at him with my mouth open, I couldn’t even explain what it all meant to me, or what I was feeling at that moment let alone what all this means to millions of other “Americans.” How do you give an answer that covers ten years of friendship with the very first kid you met when you moved to California: or guilt at not having time to talk the last time you saw him when he came by the house to say good bye; or unspeakable grief standing by an ugly, black gash in the cemetery grass on a beautiful hill above San Diego Bay; or the vague thought that your name could be on that wall if an ulcer the size of a small bullet-hole in your gut hadn’t been enough for a jocular corporal to stamp your selective service papers with a 4F? How do you meaningfully answer “What does all this mean?”?

“I can’t say. I don’t know,” I said haltingly, with my pencil in one hand and two WARREN GUTHRIE HARDING rubbings, reverently held in the other, fluttering slightly as the afternoon cooled. “There’s no easy answer.”

“Hmmmm,” he said, frowning at me like a tourist disappointed with his tour guide. Losing interest, he pivoted smartly to the left and ambled down along the wall shaking his head.

Turning to the wall, I had one last, long look at myself reflected among the names; one last, lingering touch of the incised letters; one last, wavering breath and sigh before returning to the top of the slope and my patient wife.

That Boy

I try to focus on the words, but my attention is drawn to the ships and small boats plying the San Diego harbor far below the slope of close-cropped lawn I stand on. The chaplain’s words mingle with the chittering of the black birds in the towering pine trees that shelter the endless rows of cold white headstones resting in peace in the bright early afternoon sun. My thoughts wander.

“What are you doing in here?” my mother asks. She can plainly see that I am watching television. It is a warm, late August afternoon outside, and it is cool in the den with the lights off and the curtains pulled shut.

“I’m watching television,” I answer innocently, though with an underlying twinge of rebellion.

“Why aren’t you outside playing with that boy that came to the door?” She demands.

“It’s hot outside and I don’t want to go play football in the street with a bunch o’ kids I don’t know!” My sister and I are still miffed about being ripped away without warning from our friends in Hobbs, New Mexico, to be plopped down in a rental house in Westminster, California, three weeks before school is to start. The only advantage we can see to the move is that now we have twelve television stations to watch instead of three.

“You get out there right now,” she commands as she flips the off switch on the television. “That boy made an effort to come over here and invite you to play with the kids in the neighborhood, and you are going to play!”

“I don’t want to!” I protest, as I reluctantly drag my carcass off the couch.

“I don’t care whether you want to or not. Now, get out there,” she insists while pushing me out the door. She probably locks it so I can’t sneak back in later. I can feel her eyes glaring at me from the living room window as I slowly meander up the street, glowering with head bowed and hands jammed into pants pockets, toward the noisy kids.

That boy that came to the door is the first to see me shuffling up the street. He leaves the knot of kids and comes over to stand in front of me on the sidewalk. He is tall like me and stocky, but still thinner that I am. He has thick, dark, wavy hair, a round face and a beaming smile.

“Changed your mind, huh?” he says, thrusting out his hand. “I’m Warren. Warren Guthrie Harding, just like the President.” I shake his hand and we become best friends for the year I live in Westminster, and good friends for another seven years after that.

Warren is a simple, honest country boy transplanted to California from South Dakota. He is four months older than me, and we are in the same grade at Johnson Intermediate School, eighth. When school starts, he shows me around and introduces me to kids he knows from the year before. We don’t have any classes together, but I stop at his house every morning, and we walk the three blocks to school. After school, we hit his house for a snack or a drink. We can’t watch television at his house because his mother usually has laundry stacked in the living room every afternoon with the ironing board stationed in front of the television and American Bandstand. We go to my house to watch the reruns of adventure movie serials. My favorite is about two Boy Scouts lost in South America; his are the Westerns. We go trick or treating together this year for the last time, and our families join together for Thanksgiving and Fourth of July.

When I move five miles away to Huntington Beach, Warren and I ride our bikes back and forth on weekends. At least once a month we stay over at one or the other’s house on a Friday night. I like him staying over at my house because we sleep out in the camper shell and don’t have to be quiet, and we each have our own bunk. When we stay at his house, we have to share a double bed in his room. He thinks he is being funny by poking me in the ribs at all hours of the night. He calls it tickling; I call it torture. But a few bruised ribs are worth it because his mother makes the best buttermilk pancakes in the entire known world: thin like crepes with a slight rubbery texture.

We see less of each other as we go through high school, and his family moves to Long Beach for a few months. But at least once a month we go to a movie, or a football game, have a sleep over, or spend a Saturday at Knott's Berry Farm or Pacific Ocean Park. Our high schools are rivals, and we have to be careful when going to football games. I am almost beaten up at one game when I raucously cheer for Huntington Beach as the team makes a stupendous touchdown play while we are sitting in Westminster’s section of the stadium.

After high school, we don’t see each other very often. Warren joins the army. I start college, go on a mission and return home to my job at Disneyland. The last time I see Warren he is on his last day home from Vietnam on a two week furlough to visit his ill father. Warren spends most of his visit talking to my father in the kitchen. I am distracted, rushed to get ready for the closing shift at the Disneyland Main Street Camera Shop and don’t have time to sit a chat. We shake hands as I usher him to his car and wave as he drives away.

“Well,” says my father as I return to the kitchen, “he came to say goodbye.”

“I know,” I say, glancing at the clock and snatching my keys.

“No,” he said. “He came to say, ‘Goodbye’.”

A volley of rifle fire jars me from my reverie. The shrouding flag is lifted from the casket enclosing his shattered body, folded and presented with solemnity to his mother. The small clutch of mourners ambles to the waiting limousines that have driven us the hundred miles from the mortuary to this lovely slope of grass in the Rosecrans National Cemetery. My legs are stone; they will not move. My thrumming heart is strangling me; I cannot breathe. My vision blurs staring into the black gash in the earth. Waves of grief entomb me, and my weeping is like retching with dry heaves. Warren’s uncle returns from the limousine and tenderly rests his arm across my shoulders. Whispering comfort, he gently draws me away from the pit and that boy.

Warren G. Harding, Jr. 11 July 1947 - 28 February 1968

Pet Peeves with American Speakers of English

2011-10-24T21:55:00.001-06:00

On the 10th of October, my wife and I went to the Hale Center Theatre in West Valley City to see My Fair Lady. I wasn't that excited about seeing the show again since I have seen the show and the film several times, except for the fact that our good friend, Mark Knowles, is playing Henry Higgins in this production. It was an excellent production, and Mark did a wonderful piece of work as the curmudgeonly Higgins. One of the early songs in the show is Henry Higgins's "Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?" After going though a litany of deplorable English pronunciations, Higgins says "the Americans haven't used it (English) in years!" Amen!

This is one of my "pet peeves," i.e. the lousy pronunciation and deplorable grammar of American speakers of English. It is not isolated among the young and illiterate, but is rampant in those who are supposedly well educated and should know better. The flattening out of diphthongs, sliding vowels and vowel pairs is epidemic in American speakers, and to hear such lazy pronunciation drives me crazy. Just ask my wife. I hope it is just laziness and not out right ignorance. My great fear is that being forced to hear incorrect language I may begin to speak the same way. I hear this in the speech of students, their parents, newscasters, advertisers, politicians, and broadcasters ad infinitum. Examples of this vocal crime: pronouncing "feel" as "fill," "meal" as "mill," "pail/pale" as "pell," "sail/sale" as "sell," and too many others to list.

Perhaps fifteen years ago, I saw a sign posted on a huge pile of dirt which said, "Dirt for sell." The writer's incorrect pronunciation of the word "sale" had led to his misspelling of the word "sale!" I see this phenomenon quite often in children and adults. They mispronounce and therefore misspell. I have seen four times in the newspaper this week the incorrect spelling of "than" as "then," as in "more then" or "less then" instead of "more/less than." Are there no proofreaders anymore?

The death of grammar is accelerating because grammar is no longer emphasized or even taught in school language arts classes. Supposedly, children will pick up correct grammar if they read a lot of books. Unfortunately, too many of the books children and young adults are reading have egregious grammar problems on top off the atrocious grammar they hear every day. There is the age old problem of "who/whom" and "can/may" and, of course, subject/verb agreement problems, but in the last few years there has been epidemic of the infamous use of the reflexive personal pronoun "myself" in place of the correct and simple subject or object personal pronouns "I" or "me." Some nincompoop must have thought using "myself" sounded upper class and started the corruption rolling. Now everyone from the President of the United States to the language arts teacher uses that corruption. Hearing that abomination is like ice picks jammed in my ears. I want to scream at everyone who blathers that ridiculous affectation.

But the true dagger in my heart is the death of the subjunctive case of "to be." It is a lost cause. Too few English speakers and writers use it any more even if they know what it is and how to use it. But if I were king, and I wish I were, I would drub grammar and elocution into every man, woman, and child so I might save my poor assaulted eyes and ears from seeing and hearing the murder of the English language one mispronounced word, one poorly constructed phrase, one run on or fragmented sentence at a time.

Postal Art

2011-10-23T21:37:00.001-06:00

These are some envelopes I did last June for graduation cards for some of my former students, my Venturing Scouts, and the son of dear, old friend which I have never posted on this blog. I have fallen way behind in my blogging.

I need to begin my Christmas card envelopes soon, or I will run out of time. I have not started my Halloween cards yet!

Getting "Hacked" Is a Heart Wrenching Experience

2011-09-07T14:51:00.000-06:00

Well, it has happened, through my negligent stupidity, my long time email account is corrupted and lost to me forever. Last Friday my account was hacked and hijacked. The password and security answers were changed within minutes, and scam/spam was hitting the in-boxes of my friends and relatives. I quickly received a phone call from a friend telling me I had been hacked. These scumbags who steal accounts and corrupt the Internet with spam and scams are certainly thorough in their practice of evil.

I contacted MSN immediately and tried to reclaim my account, but the MSN account retrieval site is useless. No, it is worthless! One must have a photographic memory to supply the information required by the site. Even so, I did give more than sufficient information, email addresses and subject headings to prove that I am the true owner of the account. Not once, but three frustrating times. In fact, I gave an email address and subject line that I had used less than an hour before I was hacked. I don't think the person or machine monitoring the reclamation site could identify an elephant in a police lineup of cats.

I asked, nay, begged them to shut down the account if they were not going to restore it to me, but it is still up and spamming and scamming all my friends. So if you receive a message saying I am in London, don't believe it. I am not there and never have been there. I don't have a cousin there who needs an operation. And while I could use 2700 dollars, don't send any money to the scammer because I will not reimburse you and neither will the scumbag scammer who is pretending to be me. Beware and be smart.

On Tuesday, MSN sent an email to my alternate email address with a survey about their account retrieval site. I am sure that they were looking for a bucket load of praise and satisfaction. They didn't get it from me. I told them exactly how angry and frustrated I am with their worthless site, without profanity or vulgarity, but in no uncertain terms. I also told them a couple of things they could do to actually help victims of these scumbags. They haven't responded. I assume they are ignoring me again as they did all weekend when I needed help.

Be aware and be safe. It can happen to anyone, and there is no help for you when it does.

I Am Glad I Don't Have Turner Classic Movies!

2011-07-24T20:55:00.001-06:00

A few years ago, I broke down and bought a basic cable package through Concast. I have no interest in all the other channels offered on the higher paid packages. In fact, there are a whole lot of channels on the basic cable that I don’t want and never watch. I have always wanted to have Turner Classic Movies channel, but I don’t want to pay a lot more money just to have that one channel. I would gladly trade all the basic channels I don’t want or use just to have TCM.

I spent most of the last week up at my family’s time share condo at Snowbird. My parents bought the time share thirty years ago, and for many years they drove up to Salt Lake City from California to spend the week at Snowbird. My wife and I would drive the children up the mountain two or three times during the week to spend time with grandma and grandpa and swim and hike. Now it is just my family that uses the time share if my brother or sister doesn’t make the trip from California.

Anyway, this year I had Tuesday night and Wednesday at the condo alone because everyone else in the family had to work. The condo has TCM, and like the fool that I am, I turned it on. Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), staring Claude Rains and Vivian Leigh had just started so I watched it. Then Dream Wife (1953) with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, a pleasant little comedy, came on. This was followed by the non-musical version of Kismet (1944) staring Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich. Since I like both of them, I stayed up to watch. (He and his voice were magnificent as the “king of beggars,” and she was silly, but beautiful, as the “queen of the vizier’s harem.” James Craig was totally miscast as the Sultan of Bagdad, but I do like him in The Human Comedy (1943), one of my all-time favorite movies with Mickey Rooney, Fay Bainter, and Frank Morgan.) Finally, after midnight, and blurry eyed, I turned off the television and dragged myself to bed.

Wednesday morning, after sleeping in till after eight o’clock, I again tempted fate and turned on the television. I came in just after the beginning of The Green Promise (1949) with Walter Brennan, Natalie Wood, and Marguerite Chapman. It was Natalie Wood’s birthday, so all the films on Wednesday morning had her in them. The next film was Our Very Own (1950) with Jane Wyatt, Ann Blyth, Farley Granger and Natalie, followed by No Sad Songs for Me (1950), a real tearjerker with one of my five favorite actresses, Margaret Sullavan, and Wendell Corey, Viveca Lindfors, and birthday girl, Natalie. The last film I watched was a real turkey as far as I am concerned: The Silver Chalice (1954). I have seen it before, so I didn’t watch every minute of this silly sword and sandal drama with hokey religious trappings. Natalie was a young slave girl near the beginning of the film who grows up to be Simon Magus’s (Jack Palance) girlfriend (Virginia Mayo). I think this was Paul Newman’s first big part as Basil the young sculpture. The sets of this dreadful mess were obviously sound stages with all straight lines, angles and black backgrounds looking more like modernistic stage sets than epic movie scenery. Natalie certainly wasn’t as good as a teenager in this film as she was as a child in the first three.

So, after wasting all Wednesday morning and the night before watching seven movies onTurner Classic Movie channel, I am glad I don’t have this channel on my basic cable package. If I did, I would be getting even less done by wasting my whole life watching television: BECAUSE I LOVE OLD MOVIES.

Previewing The Help

2011-07-17T13:01:00.003-06:00

On Thursday the 14th of July, my wife, daughter, niece and I were able to see a preview showing of the film The Help, based on the best selling novel The Help. I was pleasantly surprised by the adaptation of the many storied novel. I do feel that substance of Mini's "horrible terrible" is revealed maybe a little too soon and made almost the focal point of the film and made to overshadow the more important issues of the story. (It has been a few months since I read the book, but I seem to recall that the full revelation of the "horrible terrible" had a more shocking impact even though many hints were placed along the way.) Of course, revealing it early does give the Hollywood types a chance to giggle and chortle over the multiple use of "four letter words."

Anyway, we all, having read the book, enjoyed the movie. It is a harsh glimpse into the harsh times of racial prejudice. I hope we have come a long way from these attitudes. The actresses did a superb job, and I hope there will be several award nominations in several categories for this film.

On Friday the 15th, my wife and I saw the last Harry Potter film. We both enjoyed it, and thought it was a fine finale to the series. I liked the vindication, somewhat, of poor ol' Snape, who I always thought had more to him than hating Harry. It has been a few years since I read the last book, and I can't remember how it was handled in the book. I will have to read the last book again; I read all the others a second time to prepare for the final volume. I was sad at the end, because it is the end, and there isn't any more.

Saturday evening I watch Great Performances on PBS. It was a movie version of Verdi's Rigoletto, staring Placido Domingo in the staring roll. It was a beautiful, high quality production, but it lacked something that a true opera experience must have: show-stopping thunderous applause, cheers, and bravos after solos, duets, and that fabulous quartet in the last act.

My Ride with the Valkyries

2011-05-20T15:51:00.002-06:00

Last Saturday my wife and I went to the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast of Die Walküre at our local multiplex theatre in West Jordan. I had been looking forward to this event all season. I am a big Wagner fan. I have even said that one must love opera to just like Wagner, and I love Wagner. Not his politics, prejudices and life style, but his glorious music. I once heard Jim Swejda on KUSC quote or make his own statement that Wagner used up all his goodness in his music and had nothing left for his "real" life. At lease that is what I remember him saying after these many years. We were at the theatre from 10:45 until about 4:30. There was a thirty minute delay at the beginning because they were having trouble with the set computer.

Anyway, my wife is not as great a fan of opera as I am, but she does go with me to the broadcasts from time to time. She was looking forward to this production as well I, but perhaps, not with the same degree of enthusiasm. We both thought the principle singers were stupendous, the acting well done, the emotional tension tremendous. And we quite enjoyed the set, or the "machine" as the cast and crew call it, especially how it was used in the Walkürenritt "ride of the Valkyries" and the magic fire at the end of the opera.

Deborah Voigt

Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde) was quite attractive and delightful in her flowing red wig hefting her spear and shield. We saw her last in La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) as a blond. Bryn Terfel (Wotan) was imposing and powerful. Jonas Kaufmann (Siegmund) was electrifying. His voice and passion remind me of my favorite Siegmund, Lauritz Melchior, at least in the recording made in 1941 with Astrid Varnay as Sieglinde. I am looking forward to seeing him next year in Faust. Eva-Maria Westbroek (Sieglinde) was lovely, and the passion and tension and acting between her and Kaufmann drove the first act to a wild and emotionally satisfying conclusion. I could watch and listen to the last half of the fist act over and over again.

One of my favorite parts of the HD broadcasts is the backstage interviews, and the live camera shots of the crew changing and preparing the sets for the next act. The Met crew is fantastic as they work against the intermission clock.

My wife wants to go to New York and see a production live just to say we have been there. I like the HD live broadcasts because it fills the theatre screen, you can see their faces close up, and you have fascinating entertainment during the intermissions. But still, it would be fun to see an opera live in the Met.

Artists' Books Show at University of Utah: "Booking a Brouhaha"

2011-04-29T11:02:00.001-06:00

When the Artists' Books class ended, the final book project from each student and juried books from earlier assignments were arranged in an exhibition titled "Booking a Brouhaha." The show also displays the collection of "books" made by each student for an assemblage project and the collaborative mail art produced during the class. The exhibition will be in the Special Collections Gallery on the 4th floor of the J. Willard Marriott Library on the campus of the University of Utah. The exhibition will run through May during library hours. In June the collection will be transported to Jackson, Wyoming, for exhibition through the summer.

I was able to spend a little time helping to set up the show, and had the opportunity to arrange the display of my two books that are in the show. Here they are in the display cases.

Eighty Million Dead

RAMdom Memory

Here are some pictures of setting up the books for the displays and some of the finished display cases. There is a wonderful variety of work produced by the members of this Artists' Books class. A few of the students were art majors, but most of the members came from various back grounds. Most were young (20s) university students, but there were a few old timers in the mix. I was one of the oldest, if not the oldest participant. I had to really stretch my creative muscles this semester.

Mary Toscano, Exhibitions and Book Arts Coordinator, arranging a display for the case.

Mary by the display case we just finished.

This is the book arts studio where Chris McAfee and Marnie Powers-Torrey, the Artists' Books instructors and talented, accomplished artists in their own right, and for whom I have great admiration, are feverishly working to finish grading. On the tables in the studio are some of the books being arranged for the display cases. I can only remember a few of the artists' names, but those I do remember I will label.

This is Patti Pitts' work. She is a textile artist, who makes beautiful dyed silks. This is a bracelet of small silk bound books.

The following photos are the cases in the exhibit area which were finished before and while I was there to help.

The two photos above show the contents of the assemblage to which each student contributed one "book" item. Each student in the class made an edition of 35 so that all class members have one piece of the other student's work. The book I contributed is the cream-colored book lying in the middle. My favorite in this assemblage is Louise Levergneux's City Shields, photos of manhole covers, which is seen in the top photo, lower right corner. Her work is in several museum and university collections. I felt privileged to work with her in this class.

This book is striking when held and seen up close. It commemorates the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in April 2011. The book behind it and shown in the next two pictures is by Joe Carter, a fine artist with paintings in several local galleries. His realistic paintings are so precise that they can be mistaken for photographs.

This interesting accordion fold book is by Michael Hurst.

This is Louise Levergneux's final book, based on her name and all the songs that have the name "Louise" in the title or the lyrics. Each page is created like an old 45rpm record. The stack of "records" fits in the metal canister.

This is Patti Pitts' final creation containing several books within the larger book and telling a story of the discovery of silk.

Artists' Books, Part 7

2011-04-25T16:08:00.000-06:00

This was the final project for the Artists' Books class. My original idea was to publish ten Coptic bound copies of twenty memoir pieces that I have written during the last seven years at a Jordan District Writing Memoir class. I was planning to title it Random Memory, because the memoirs are not in chronological order. The instructors said it was a good project for a different class, but not for an artists' book class. It wasn't "avant garde" enough. So I had to start over on my idea.

I wanted to keep the memoir idea and the title, but I had to think of a new way to present it. I happened to see an article on Inca quipos, the long knotted strings that were used as memory aids to recall information. This reminded me of the "book mobile" that I made several years ago to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of mount Jordan Middle School. The two ideas combined in my mind as the form for my final book. Long strings of photo cards depicting random events in the last 63 years.

The 50th anniversary book mobile, 2005.

As I progressed, the idea of computer memory, RAM -random accessible memory, came into the picture. I found an old slide set box with two cassette tape containers and some nonfunctioning pieces of computer equipment, and the idea became solid. Our school computer tech gave me some obsolete RAM sticks and I was set to put everything together.

I made 150+ photo tags at random and of various sizes from my photo collection and tied them on the strings attached to the computer pieces. On the backs of some of the tags, I printed exerts of the memoirs I had planned to print. In each of the cassette cases I put a folded blue print: in one a diagram of a computer memory circuit, and in the other a scan of the human brain. I retitled the assemblage: RAMdom Memory.

Postal Art for April

2011-04-24T21:36:00.000-06:00

These are some of my postal art cards for April. I sometimes forget to take a picture before I send my cards and letters out. Once they are sent, they are gone forever. I sent out several post cards to Mail Art calls this month. One each to Arizona, Colorado Netherlands, and two to Portugal.

I sent this post card to Portugal.

Artists' Books , Part 6

2011-04-23T22:19:00.000-06:00

The book three assignment for the Artists' Book class was to stretch the idea of bookness as far as possible and still be justified as a book. I used an old Kodak slide carousel as the basis for the shape of the book and the "spine" that holds everything together. I used eighty sheets of card stock that I stained with crepe and tissue paper and water. The stains on most of the pages remind me of marbling. Other pages suggest stained glass.

I made a template and cut all eighty pages so they fit in the slide tray. Each page is folded and glued on the inner edge.

I originally thought I would stamp a number on each page, but I decided that the numbers on the slide tray would be enough for the pagination. Without numbers on the pages, they can be removed, examined and rearranged in any order. I also thought I would do some type of design on each page, geometric or or free form, but i couldn't conceive of a design progression for eighty pages. I also did not want to detract from the coloring of the pages, each one being unique.

I also took the slide tray box and fashioned a box to house the finished "book." The title of the book is Quatre-Vingts Feuilles or Eighty Leaves (sheets). I chose a French title to lend an air of elegance.

Artists' Books, Part 5

2011-03-21T08:54:00.001-06:00

This is my book number two for the Artist' Books class: Eighty Million Dead. I was inspired by seeing the opera, Nixon in China. The music by John Adams is a driving repetition that gave me the idea of a driving repeated theme running through the whole volume. I designed the pages around quotations from Mao's Little Red Book, Communist propaganda, and old photos of the Communist regime. The repetitive element is the silent chant of "eighty million dead" in English and Chinese on each page. Jesse Peng, the Chinese teacher at Mount Jordan Middle School, helped me with the Chinese calligraphy and the cultural elements. "Eighty million dead" comes from the high middle range of estimates on the number of those who died under the reign of Mao Zedong either by design or as collateral damage from his failed policies.

The materials I used were things that came to hand: cheap white drawing paper, white butcher paper, old book binding tape, watery paint, wall paper and used mat board for the covers, a torn piece of plastic table cloth for the wrapping.

The pages are taped side by side in a concertina fold and glued to the front and back covers. The pages may be turned one at a time or the book may be opened as along banner. There is a memorial banner attached to the back that may be read if the book is opened from the back cover.

The black printing on the xerographic image was difficult to read until I placed the red transparency sheet over the page. If the transparency is turned back over the preceding page the text can be read through the red smear of paint.

I couldn't resist painting the lips.

Although red is the color of happiness and joy, I have used it for "blood" to smear on the white pages of the memorial for the dead. The white memorial banner is attached to the back.

After the weeks of working on this book, I am relieved and grateful to be finished. It was spiritually oppressive to work on, and I felt as if a great weight were crushing my chest each time I took up the labor and heard the unrelenting, repetitive music throbbing in my brain.

The grade critique from the instructors, Marnie and Chris: "Michael! This is a real move forward in meshing the experimental with the traditional! The obsessive filing in of the counterforms is suggestive of marks made on a cell wall or some such, and it becomes a background, the horrible truth becoming like wallpaper, that jar the reader/viewer when it again becomes legible. Marnie agrees with Chris regarding the appropriateness of the materials, fitting to those that would be used by the oppressed to tell their story. We both feel like we should do some heavy research in Chinese political history in order to understand all the layers of subtlety. But the echoes of Maoist propaganda are loud and clear, even to those who aren't as familiar with the historical details. Fantastic enclosure device - elegant when displayed, suggestive of bondage when in place, and durable! One note: in terms of binding convention, the square is very large. The sounds of the crackling paper and the plasticy wrap add to the overall experience."

Postal Art for March

2011-03-20T17:16:00.000-06:00

Here are a few of the St. Patrick's Day card envelopes that I sent out this year. The green is a crepe paper dye. There were only a few shamrocks in my box of junk, so I used the stars because they were green and I had them. I hope all the envelopes made it throught the post office in tact.

Artists' Books, part 4

2011-02-17T20:54:00.001-07:00

Gelatin print on tissue paper.

Tonight we had four printing and paper decoration demonstrations and an hour or so to practice the techniques. It was fun doing gelatin prints and proof press printing again. We also melted bees' wax on pages for an interesting paper effect. The pages are translucent and smell like honey. Now I must create an origami folded book from one of the printed papers. Next week we have two days of book artist reports. As I have looked at several of the artists on the list we were given, I have been amazed that most of the early book artists were part of the avant guard art movements of the '50s, '60s, and early '70s. It is interesting that they were all drawn to the book form as a medium of artistic expression.

When I left the university campus and turned east on Sunnyside Drive, the full moon was just cresting the mountains. It was a gorgeous sight and a bit of a distraction trying to drive without gazing at the moon.

Gelatin print on opaque paper.

Artists' Books at the University of Utah, Part 3

2011-02-15T21:57:00.002-07:00

Front cover

We turned in our second book assignment tonight and had a round robin critique session. Some of the books were absolutely amazing. All of them were creative. Mine was a little on the standard side. I am, having a bit of trouble thinking out of the traditional format. I was hard pressed to come up with a text only or image only book. I wanted to reformat some old poetry of mine, but as I read through my stuff after many years, all I can say about my poetry is that it is very bad writing and even worse poetry! The only writing that was any good, well, very good were my translations of a few poems of Lope de Vega Carpio, 1562-1613. They are free verse translations which I feel convey his thoughts and images but are not exact translations. The poems are deeply religious, but they approach the subject from a strange point of view. I have always enjoyed reading them and find them thought provoking.

I decided to transpose the form of the poems from the standard poetry form in which I had originally written them and bind the signatures together with a pamphlet stitch. I agonized over the cover for several days and decided to use gold wallpaper and a red cord for the binding. The red cord I had in mind turned out to be too fine, so I dyed some gray cording red and used an exposed spine. I left the ends of the cord long to use as a tie to secure the cover.

This shows the inside of the front cover.

This is the first poem in the book.

Artists' Books blog one. Artists' Books blog two.

Valentines Day

2011-02-14T21:27:00.001-07:00

Today was a furlough day for the employees of the Canyons School District. My wife, Chris, who teaches in the Jordan District had to go to work today while I stayed home. I spent the morning baking six dozen sugar cookies. There was not enough powdered sugar for frosting so I went to the store. I also needed food coloring, but, alas, there was no food coloring at the store to which I took my "green" shopping bag. There was a tiny bit of coloring in the drawer at home, so I was able to make a little red frosting, and when I ran out of frosting, I mixed more powdered sugar into the bowl and created some pale pink. I then spent time taking cookies to my neighbors.

The rest of the day I cleaned house, read ten more chapters in Behemoth, my new favorite steam punk series, and cooked dinner for my lovely valentine. I had planned to take her out to dinner, but she said "no." Why? She still has tons, and I mean tons, of paper work to finish to prepare for report cards, parent conferences, and oh yes, she up for her three year teaching evaluation review this week.

Happy Valentines Day!

Nixon in China - Met Opera HD Broadcast

2011-02-12T20:14:00.003-07:00

I went to the Met premier performance of John Adams Nixon in China this morning. I was a bit hesitant. I like some, but not all of John Adams' music. Two years ago the Met broadcast his second opera, Doctor Atomic. I didn't like it at all and couldn't listen to it. I turned off the radio and busied myself with something else. I have heard pieces of this opera and liked most of it, so I decided that I would go see this broadcast of his first opera, Nixon, which was the Met premier performance. John Adams was the conductor of this performance and Peter Sellers, the original director of the opera, was the stage director for this Met performance. I love the HD theater broadcasts because of the "extras" like interviews and the back stage camera showing the scene changes during the intermissions.

I very much liked the first two acts, but I could have done without the last act. The innocuous description of the act does not prepare one for the sexual perversion depicted on the stage by Mao and his secretary and his wife. Listening only to that act would not have helped much since Madam Mao screeches the "F bomb" near the beginning of the act and everything disintegrates from there.

Oh, well. I know what to avoid now.

Artists' Books at the University of Utah, Part 2

2011-02-02T14:44:00.003-07:00

The Artists' Books class I am taking at the University of Utah is a bit different than I was expecting: less making of books and more exploring the philosophy of bookworks. There is a lot of reading and some interesting discussion of what is "book arts." We do have to create four major works and several quick books based on class demonstrations. I must also do a 5 to 10 minute oral book artist report on the 22 of February. I chose Johanna Drucker as my subject. The rare books department at the university has copies of three of her bookworks that I may use in my report. They do not have Twenty-Six '76 Let Hers: Not A Matter of Permission, but there is a fascinating page from that book on the Internet that I will use.

The second week of the class, Luise Poulton, of the university library Special Collections/Rare Books division presented a History of the Book and Artists' Books (pre-1960), wherein we were able to handle and closely examine 21 books from the collection. That may not sound too exciting for some people, but it is like I told my wife when I spent as much time as I could in the art museums in Washington, D.C: It is one thing to view a work of art in a printed source or on the computer screen, but it is an entirely different emotional experience to stand before the actual, physical object and embrace the reality of the object. I took notes on several of the bindings and formats used by the book artists so that I can experiment with my own books.

Last week we participated in paper decoration: paste papers, stenciling, various image transfer methods, all of which I have done numerous times; and Suminagashi, which I had seen demonstrated before but had not yet done myself. We then made a small accordion fold book with the decorated papers.

Yesterday was session number seven. Bill and Vicky Stewart, owners of Vamp and Tramp Booksellers, brought a wonderful selection of the books that they travel around the United States selling to collectors and libraries. There were several that I would have liked to buy, but they are way out of my price range. I will just have to make my own.

In the second batch of readings that we discussed last night in the class, there were several lines and paragraphs that jumped out at me. The following is from Book Arts in the USA by Richard Minsky, founder of the Center for Book Arts:

A single copy of a book is a curious thing. Even when part of a large edition, it is rarely considered disposable. People have books on their shelves that they haven't looked at in years, yet they don't throw them out or even give them away. A passing glance at the shelf gives a reassuring feeling, a reminder of the knowledge one has absorbed. They are old friends, these volumes, and just seeing them reminds us not only of their stories or facts, but of the time we spent with them. ...

In Book Arts the container works with the content. ...

My Wall of Heroes

2011-01-16T19:47:00.008-07:00

This week we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Though he has become one of my honored heroes, I did not know much about him while he was alive. I was 14 when he gave his moving "I Have a Dream" speech in August 1963, and twenty when he was assassinated in April, 1968. Much of what I had heard about him at that time was negative propaganda. There was no civil rights movement where I lived. I don't remember seeing an African American at any time in Huntington Beach, CA, in the 60s when I lived there. There were no African American students at my high school. I was insulated from racial problems by the society in which I lived. The "black" neighborhoods were in Los Angeles, thirty-five miles north. I had my first association with African Americans when I was a seventeen-year-old freshman at Long beach State College in 1965, one month after the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. That association was one English professor and one fellow student in an anthropology class. My associations and friendships with people of races other than my own greatly expanded when I worked at Disneyland from 1966 to 1970. As I have progressed though my life, I have had numerous, close and satisfying associations with fine people of many ethnic backgrounds.
Over the last forty years, I have listened many times to recordings of the dream speech, and I am emotionally involved each time I hear it. I think of myself as being "color-blind" when it comes to race, that I truly judge men and women by the content of their characters and not the color of their skin. I long for the day when there are no hyphenated Americans, just Americans.
On the wall above the circulation desk in my school library, I have a collection of black framed photographs and paintings of men and women whom I admire and reverence as my heroes. Also on the wall is a framed quotation from Elizabeth Brown Pryor, a biographer of Robert E. Lee, which I often ponder when I hear people trying to "clean up" characters of the past, or worse, condemn them by today's politically correct "standards." Ms Pryor says, "If we are going to embrace heroes, it is important that we accept their human frailty as well as admire their achievements. If we do not, we create empty icons, whose hollowness undermines any ability to inspire."
The twenty heroes on my wall of heroes are George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Banneker, Phillis Wheatley, Abraham Lincoln, Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Marian Anderson, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Mohandas K.Gandhi, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nelson Mandela and Ronald Reagan. They are on this wall because they inspire me by their courage and intellect and wisdom and the content of their characters. There are some other heroes of mine that are politically incorrect for the school venue, religious figures that are my spiritual anchor: Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young among others.

Artists' Books at the University of Utah

2011-01-15T14:00:00.002-07:00

I was very blessed this week. I am able to take Art 4090, Artists' Books, at the University of Utah on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is a class run through the Book Arts Program at the Marriott Library. I have taken numerous book arts workshops and one university class for non-credit during the last ten years. I teach origami books, art books across the curriculum, and a history of the book for honors language arts classes at my school. I have also taught basic book arts for several libraries in the Salt Lake County Library System, at professional conferences, and at the Barnes & Noble in Sandy, Utah. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about books, making books, and teaching others to make books. I am now of an age where I am able to audit university classes as a "senior" citizen (I don't feel like a senior citizen). It is a state mandated program administered through the continuing education departments of state universities and colleges. You pay a small audit tuition for the term and any class materials fees required for the classes you want to audit. Of course, you also have to hope there is room in the class and that the instructor will give you an add number to complete the registration.

This is the opening page of a book I made for my grandson.

I saw the class listed in the Book Arts schedule on line and thought and pondered much about how I could organize my overly busy life and take the class. After investigating the senior audit possibilities and learning how the program works, I decided to throw caution, and a few of my too many school and out of school activities, to the wind and try it. Tuesday after school, I went to the first class to see if there were any room left for an old man to take the class as an audit, and if so, procure the add number I needed to complete my registration through continuing education. The class was almost full with three university students needing to add the class. The instructors, Marnie Powers-Torrey and Chris McAffee, from whom I have taken many workshops and classes in the past, said the university students should have the slots, and I agreed without hesitation or reservation. Marnie said I could stay until the end of class to see if any one would drop out and leave room for me. I stoically hid my disappointment behind a nodding smile as I listened to Chris cover the syllabus and demonstrate the Guillotine paper and board cutters. Of course, no one dropped out.

Before the end of class, after they had given the three students add numbers, Marnie talked to me and said that she and Chris wanted me to be able to take the class even though it was full (to the top and over flowing). I told her that I didn't want to be a problem for them. She said I wasn't a problem, and if I would come to class and not take a seat, maybe sit on the side where the aides sit, unless someone was absent they would let me in. I said I would be happy to sit on the floor in the corner if need be. She gave me a class add number, and Wednesday morning I completed the registration. I am very grateful to Marnie and Chris and am extremely happy that I have had a past association and history with them such that they know I am not going to disappoint them. On Thursday when I arrived, Chris told me that a student had dropped the class so everything was fine. I wouldn't have to be a sideline sitter or sit on the floor in the corner!

I finished the first assignment, a class sketchbook/journal, before class on Thursday and have been deeply pondering how I am going to create the first artist book, Sequencing a Single Image, which is due on January 25. My only problem is sifting through all the flashes of ideas to settle on just the "right' one. As Mark Twain said, " The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." So it is with Artists' Books!

It Is Impossible to Clean As You Read

2011-01-10T19:24:00.001-07:00

I have been cleaning my office/studio for the last month with little success. I thought that with school out for two weeks during the holidays I would accomplish so much. Alas, it is impossible to clean as you read. I have a collection of close to a hundred LIFE magazines from 1937 to 1947 that I am putting into ziplock polypropylene sleeves to protect them and hopefully extend their "life." If I had a full set there would be over 500 issues. There were at least a hundred issues that I had to throw out over the years, because they were destroyed by mildew and water damage. I acquired the magazines in 1960 from my eighth grade English/history teacher, Mr. Carmichael, at Johnson Intermediate School in Westminster, California. He hired a couple of us boys to come and help his wife and him do garden work, garage cleaning, and general work around their house. The LIFE magazines were stored in boxes in his garage. He was throwing them away, so he let me have them. My mother wasn't happy about it; more junk to clutter things up. To this day, I can hear her saying, "What do you want those dusty, old things for, anyway?" But I saw her looking through them at times when she thought I wasn't watching. I have saved them for fifty years.

Of course, as I pick up each one to slip into its new, zip locked sealed home, I have to thumb through it looking at the pictures and reading an article or two. They are "on the spot" history as it happened in the ten years before I arrived on the scene. When I finish handling them, my fingers are gray from the ink that sloughs off the thick black and white pages. Unfortunately, I am missing some issues that I know I had, and I know were not ruined with mildew. I have/had one of the 380,000 first issues of the magazine after Henry Luce bought the name from the original Life Magazine and launced it as a photojournalistic magazine. It hit news stands the week of 23 November 1936, and featured Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana on the cover. I must have stored the missing issues in another place for safe keeping. They are so safe I can't find them.

Henry Luce's first issue

LIFE was famous for its photography and short, pithy articles. There were a lot of graphic war photos of dead soldiers and civilians that probably would not be published in a magazine today, and a lot of "tasteful" nude photos as well, which seems strange for the 1930s and '40s. Perhaps they weren't as shocking in black and white. I puppose the graphic blood and guts and nude photos, whether tasteful or not, all in living color, are all now found in abundance on the internet.

As I read some of the articles in my collection, I find that many of the topics of seventy years ago are strangely current. The July 12, 1937, issue has a photo spread on striking WPA workers angry over cuts to the WPA budget. One striker's sign proclaims: "THE RICH CAN PAY FOR THE WPA." The title of the piece was "WPA Cuts Bring Strickes, Riots, Protest Parades: Relief jobs now seen as careers." The text says: "To support and give jobs to the unemployed (exclusive of CCC, subsistence homesteads, etc.) the U. S. Government has spent some $7,000,000,000 since the spring of 1933, $1,800,000,000 of it in the fiscal year which ended June 30. Over the protests of hardheaded Congressmen who felt that the time had come to stop such prodigious spending, President Roosevelt and Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins secured for the new fiscal year an appropriation of $1,500,000,000. Even that much meant that Administrator Hopkins faced the hard task of lopping 315,000 persons off relief rolls, getting them down to 1,600,000 by July 15. The cuts fell hardest on artists and white-collar workers, chiefly in New York City where 11,800 WPAers were let out June 30. The result, which you see on these pages, was a fresh burst of angry parades, strikes, coercion and riots for bigger and better Relief."
Would it not be nice to have only a seven billion dollar problem instead of a fourteen trillion dollar problem?

New York Times Debates the Need for Books

2011-01-09T12:40:00.003-07:00

I was reading the Times blog "Do School Libraries Need Books?" and, as a bibliophile and school librarian, I pulled out a couple of the quotes that jumped out at me, and the emphasis within the quotes are mine. The first is from Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, professor of English at the University of Maryland:

Do schools need libraries and do students need books? Of course they do. There are the predictable brickbats: Not everything is digitized yet, nor soon will be. A screen is less conducive to deep concentration than the stillness of the page. Bits are brittle.

I am among those who believe that in time, and maybe soon, these arguments will seem less damning than they do now. But I’m also aware of how deeply books, and metaphors of books, have penetrated our design of digital documents and digital reading — whether we’re talking about Alan Kay’s vision of a “DynaBook” in the early 1970s, a Web “page” (with its scroll bar), or the latest tablet device to hit the market.

Books and libraries are working (or living) models of knowledge formation. We need them for the same reason we need models of atoms and airplanes. They are hands-on. They are immersive. Holding a book in our hands, we orient ourselves within a larger system.

Walking the stacks, following a footnote or checking out what’s on the shelf above P96.T42K567 2007 is a bit like getting a glimpse at the ducts and plumbing behind the drywall. Or the Web site’s source code.

The second quote is from William Powers, author of Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. Again, the emphasis in the quote is mine:

The idea that books are outdated is based on a common misconception: the belief that new technologies automatically render existing ones obsolete, as the automobile did with the buggy whip. However, this isn’t always the case. Old technologies often handily survive the introduction of new ones, and sometimes become useful in entirely new ways.

Seventy years ago, many believed the advent of television spelled the end of radio. Wrong. Likewise, the automobile didn’t kill off the passenger train. On this crowded, environmentally troubled planet, it turns out pulling up all those old rail lines was short-sighted and dumb.

So it goes with books. What are often considered the weaknesses of the old-fashioned book are in some ways its strengths. For instance, a physical book works with the body and mind in ways that more readily produce the deep-dive experience that is reading at its best. When you read on a two-dimensional screen, your mind spends a lot of energy just navigating, keeping track of where you are on the page and in the text. The tangibility of a traditional book allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden: you feel where you are, and this frees up the mind to think.

Moreover, I believe that in a hyper-connected age, the fact that books are not connected to the electronic grid is becoming their greatest asset. They’re a space apart, a private place away from the inbox where we can go to quiet our minds and reflect. Isn’t that the state in which the best kind of learning occurs?

The comments of all five contributers can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/35jmyev

A Morning at the Opera

2011-01-08T16:56:00.007-07:00

My wife, Chris, and I went to see the Metropolitan Opera's HD live broadcast of La Fancuilla del West at the Jordan Landing theatre complex this morning. It is not one of Puccini's better known or widely produced operas even though he claimed it as his best work. It was based on the David Belasco play, Girl of the Golden West, who also wrote the play Madam Butterfly, which Puccini had also previously operatized. December of 2010 was the 100th anniversary of its world premier at the Met. I thoroughly enjoy these HD broadcasts of the Met because they show the stage hands changing the scenery during the intermissions as well as interesting interviews with the stars and other people involved with the productions. I have heard the complete "Fancuilla" and excerpted scenes from it before today, but have never seen a live or recorded production. There aren't really any arias except for the third act "Ch'ella mì creda libero..." (Let her believe I am far away and free). Most of the opera is "dialog" and chorus and a lot of dramatic music, but I like it. My favorite act is the second, where Minnie cheats in a game of poker with the sheriff, Jack Rance, to save the life of Dick Johnson, a.k.a. Ramirrez the bandit, with whom she is madly in love having only met him twice. This sounds rather stupid unless you have seen it and are a sucker for operatic melodrama like I am.

Scene from the world premier, act three, with Enrico Caruso, Emmy Destinn, and Pasquale Amato. (photo in public domain) Arturo Toscanini was the conductor, and Puccini was in the audience, 10 December 1910.

As an interesting note about the opera, every time I hear the end of act one where Johnson sings a climactic phrase,"Quello che tacete", I am reminded of the "Music of the Night", from Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera. I nudged my wife during the scene and whispered, "Always sounds like 'Music of the Night' to me." Apparently it has sounded like that to a few other people too. I looked up the opera on the internet when I returned home to gather some background and found out that after Phantom's big success, the Puccini estate filed suit against Webber accusing him of plagiarism. The suit was settled out of court and the details were not released to the public, so inquiring minds will never know. I think "borrowing" is a better term here than plagiarism. Borrowing was something that all the great composers of the past, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, et al., did without anyone getting upset and throwing a hissy fit over. You know, "plagiarism is the highest form of flattery." Of course, that was before copyright, "creative control" and profits. Anyway, Webber, I think must really love and admire Puccini's music. That operatic scene in Cats, "Growltiger's Last Stand," my favorite production number in the show, was totally Puccini-esque!

Another note, maybe not interesting to anyone but me, Jeanette MacDonald, and Nelson Eddy starred in a musical film version of Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West in 1938, which I have seen and like very much. I enjoy all the films they did together and have recordings of many of them. They were great together on screen, even though I have heard they had a very rocky love/hate romance off screen for thirty years. When I was in high school in the early '60s, a very good friend of mine introduced me to her aunt, the singer Gale Sherwood. She was Nelson Eddy's singing parner from 1953 until he collapsed on stage in 1967 with a cerebral hemorrage at age 65, two years after MacDonald had died of a heart attack. I met Miss Sherwood a couple of times in 1965, but, though I was promised, I never got to meet Nelson Eddy. Drat!

New Year, New Hobby

2011-01-01T13:32:00.005-07:00

As if I needed another way to ~~waste~~ spend time, I have started doing Postal Art. This consists of decorating the envelope of the letters one mails through the US Postal Service. Yes, I still send letters by snail mail, as well as myriad others who form that long line at the post office every time I go to mail my letters. With so many customers standing in line waiting to spend their money, I am hard pressed to understand why the US Postal Service is always running in the red.
Anyway, I have had a lot of fun decorating envelopes. I do the art work mainly while watching the brainless entertainment that dominates television. (I do like NCIS, The Closer, and a few others) I decorated 52 Christmas and Hanukkah cards and had them all mailed before the respective holiday. I also decorated 40 invitations for each of the faculty and staff for my annual library "holiday munch and mingle." My wife, Chris, says it is going a bit too far when I decorate return envelopes before sending out my bills.
Here is the return envelope that I sent to Classical 89, KBYU-FM with my yearly contribution. The photos are blurry, I took them with my cell phone and I shake a lot, but one can get the basic idea. The student assigned to open the contribution letters probably threw it away with the uninteresting envelopes, but perhaps someone saved it as a curiosity.

I sent my "little" sister a card for her birthday:

Here are some more blurry photos:

You get the idea.

2010-04-08T11:32:00.002-06:00

EDUCATION: THE POLITICAL FOOTBALL:
Eric Hanushek, writing in Educationnext (Florida Positions Itself at the Forefront, 04/07/2010; http://educationnext.org/florida-positions-itself-at-the-forefront/ ) says:

"Over the past decade, Florida has shown its laser-focus on student performance. ...
Now it is showing additional leadership by moving aggressively on issues of teacher quality. It is poised to pass legislation that would do two things. It would do away with teacher tenure for newly hired teachers. And, it would require that half of teacher pay increases be based on student performance.
Who could be against these ideas? Certainly parents and students cannot be. But just as certainly, the teachers unions are aghast that anybody would want student outcomes to play a prominent role in teacher retention decisions."

After 37 years as a teacher, one of many questions I have for Mr. Hanushek and those who have enthroned "student performance" as the only measure of good teachers and good schools is: What about those students who refuse to do anything to learn anything? Yes, even in this make-it-as-easy-as-possible-for-everyone-to-feel-good-about-themselves-with-little-or-no-effort-at-all society there are children who refuse to participate in their own education. Regardless of teacher and school efforts in their behalf, some, and the number is growing, have no interest in participating in or contributing to their own learning. And who can blame them. There are no consequenses for failure. A student can fail seven classes and be passed on to the next grade, not by the frustrated teachers, but by the system which is controled by the government and politics. So why are these students even there? Some are there because it is the law and they are forced to obey: some are there because their parents use school as public funded day care; some are there to stroke their attention needs by disrupting the learning of others; and some are there simply to socialize and talk, talk, talk. I had a son who went to school only because it was the law, and though he is very intelligent, he did only enough to usually earn a "D" and not an "F." I would never want any teacher or school judged by his refusal to participate responsibly. (Happily, after almost not graduating from high school, he did later decide to go to college where he was a "A" student. Much to my relief, he has become a responsible adult.)

Now, how does the government these days judge a teacher or a school to be failing? By the ridiculous NCLB pie-in-the-sky standards, where one child in one subgroup can fail an entire school. Yes, dear reader, out of forty unrealistic chriteria for judgment of a school, the school must pass all forty. 39 is not passing. This is never explained to the public; they see only "passed" or "failed" reported in the media. And if the government bean counters mistakenly proclaim a school to be a failure, the retaction of their mistake is never reported to the public. Parents would riot if teachers graded their children by the same standard the government uses to grade schools: 100% you pass; 99% you fail. This is what happens when political agendas set standards for those who have limited influence over the final outcome; teachers are working with individual human beings of varying abilities, desires, and effort not robots which can be programed for perfect results on standardized tests. Of course, if there were no "failing school" crisis, real, imagined or manufactured, our dear politicians would have no emotionally charged political football to kick around every time there is an election looming on the horizon.

Don't get me wrong, I am for high educational standards. I am against unreasonable standards not grounded in reality and common sense, and where the responsibility of the variable element, the student, is ignored. My solution to all rediculous education "reform" legislation is to require all politicians to teach eighth grade math, science, language, or history for three weeks before they can submit any eduaction bills. Then we just might end up with reasonable, informed, intelligent education standards. But, alas, along with all my other solutions to world problems this will never happen either.

Life at the Frontier

2010-03-15T21:06:00.002-06:00

Memoir Class: I finished the latest memoir for my class that meets next Tuesday. We were to write about a club we belong to or have belonged to. I had planned to write about the Order of the Arrow and my Brotherhood or Vigil ceremony, but as I was cleaning out a box of my old manuscripts, I found a short story about a movie theatre I went to in the late 50s. Much of the story was memoir, so I removed the fictional portions and rewrote the piece as a memoir. The subject is an unofficial club, but it met regularly and had a hugh membership. If you read this, please comment.

Life at the FRONTIER

c. Michael L. Goodman

High noon and cars begin to ease up to the curb at the corner of South Shipp and West Dunnam to disgorge chattering children onto the sidewalk under the marquee of the Frontier Theatre. Mom turns our two toned, blue and white ’57 Ford Country Squire station wagon into line with the rest of the mother chauffeurs. After checking to make sure we each have our dollar and an extra dime to call home, Jill and I hop out into the warm marquee shade with the growing crowd of mostly elementary and junior high kids. Girls in peddle-pushers or pale print dresses, almost all of them with bangs and ponytails that bob and swish as they collect excitedly into familiar gaggles. Boys with crew cuts and flat tops dressed in blue jeans or slacks with white or geometric print button-down shirts and white tee shirts visible at the collar meander singly or in pairs pretending to be interested in the “NOW PLAYING” and “COMING ATTRACTIONS” posters. No one willfully ventures out of the shade into the scorching Saturday sun and the heat radiating off the building’s red brick façade and the sidewalks.

High schoolers usually come later when the kiddie crowd has moved into the theatre, or they wait till the evening show and come with dates; but there are always a few who come to the early matinee. These few older boys among us run a comb through their greased hair to make sure their wimples and ducktails are perfect and furtively check out the older girls in tight skirts with pastel colored blouses who are checking their lipstick or adjust the chiffon scarves at their necks.

When the circular ticket office at the left of the entrance finally opens, we cheer and jostle into a ragged mass of a line. Impatiently, we wait our turn to push our money through the half-circle hole at the bottom of the ticket window. A cool hurricane of stale cigarette smoke mixed with the smell of eau de cologne and the hum of the ceiling fan blows through the hole in the window into our faces. If we do not carefully hold on to our dollars as we push them through, they will escape from our hands and fly back out the window on the breeze. The bored looking girl behind the glass punches colored buttons on the counter, and a ticket jumps out of a slot. Change rolls down a miniature slide into a dish just inside the window. Clink! Clink! Clink!

We push through the glass, double-door entrance, and a flustered, teenage boy in a red jacket and pill box hat punches our ticket. “Stop pushing,” he chides us. “You’ve got time! It hasn’t started yet. Stop pushing!”

The foyer with its charcoal colored walls trimmed in red is always dark as we come in from the bright outside. The red carpets with gold flowers and the red velvet curtains have a faint, comfortable, musty odor of age and stale popcorn mixed with the smell of fresh popcorn from the glass-cased popper behind the snack bar candy counter. The light from the glass candy cases is defused by the pressing crowd of noisy kids. The suspended corn popping pan rumbles as it drips popped corn like golden lava into a yellow mountain below. The candy counter girls have shoveled the last mountain of popcorn into paper bags and thin cardboard boxes and lined them up in regiments against the glass case to await the attack of the matinee kids. Jill and I always buy the same three treats: a dime box of popcorn, a Dr. Pepper, and a nickel Big Hunk. Jill likes Bit-o-Honey sometimes, but I stay with the Big Hung because it’s bigger and lasts longer.

When we have our treats in hand, we weave in and out of the tangle of kids past the steps that lead down to the men’s restroom and pass through the red velvet curtains into a curved, gently ramped hall. The pale blue walls reflect the blue lights high in the ceiling and seem to glow in the darkness helping us find our way up the ramp. At the end of the ramp, we enter a wide, high walled aisle that runs across the middle of the theatre. Kids our age never go up the steps to the raised area above the wall called the “balcony.” That’s where the high school kids sit. I always take Jill to the middle opening in the wall and walk half way down the aisle toward the screen. Sitting in a seat on the middle aisle has the best view of the screen, even though other kids climb in and out of the row. If Jill has to go the bathroom it is easy to get her back to the lobby and return to our seats without having to climb over other kids. I don’t mind taking her when it is not a double feature. We always stay and see the single features twice, so I don’t miss anything.

The side walls have murals painted in shades and tints of blue. On the right wall is a riverboat and trees along the river shore, and on the left is an Indian maiden waving to the riverboat from more trees. After seeing all those westerns, I wonder if she is a decoy for an Indian attack on the riverboat. The murals fade to black when the blue ceiling lights are turned off. The screen flashes into life with a Looney-Tunes or Disney cartoon and the kid chatter turns to cheers and whistles. Usually there is a short subject, a news reel, a cartoon, the feature, and a preview of next week’s movie.

I am enamored with the movies. In the coal dark theatre, I am a participant in a world that is real for only a glittering afternoon. Westerns are my particular favorites. The colored shadows that flicker on the screen in front of me is the only reality for the afternoon, and I relive the stories all week. I am there with Charleton Heston as he parts the Red Sea; I watch the clock inch toward high noon with Gary Cooper; I struggle to pull the African Queen through the feted swamp with Humphrey Bogart; I stand in the Teton valley with Brandon DeWilde and cry for Shane to come back. And I also blubber through tear jerkers like Old Yeller, twice.

After the second showing, the white lights are turned on and the theatre ushers start cleaning up before the evening show. The matinee diehards that are left in the theatre file out into the foyer and line up at the pay phone to call home. We then push out into the real world of a faded afternoon to wait for a ride.

The rows of white light bulbs under the Marquee are now on and they splash light on the windows of passing cars. Neon tubes of red and white on the tower above the marquee spelling out “FRONTIER” sputter and buzz like a thousand angry insects. It is especially nice if it has rained while we were inside. Then the colored lights shimmer on the wet street and passing cars. The sidewalk beneath the marquee is a bright cave where whirling tides of exhaust fumes and ozone and wet dust smells wash over us. But it’s not raining this evening, so warm evening air wafts over us as we read the “COMING ATTACTIONS” posters and count the number of weeks we have to wait for the movies we want to see.

2010-03-13T20:46:00.005-07:00

The Salt Lake City St. Patrick's Day parade was a very wet and cold morning experience. We go every year to see Emma and her lifelong friend, Sarah, dancing down the street with the Crawford Irish Dance School. Alex loves the day, and he has gone with us for several years. His mother was able to go with us this year. Alex brings a sack with him, holds it open at the side of the street, and the paraders drop candy and treats into his sack. It is easier than Halloween. Here is our little leprechaun, Alex, before the parade and the rain. We usually stand at the northeast corner of the Gateway across the street from Old Navy. A few years ago, we were about the only people who stood along that street. Now several more families have found this area, which is the least crowded, best view, and most candy. Most of the Irish danced schools either march/dance along the parade route or have a truck pulling a platform for the dancers to perform on as they move down the line. Crawford School dances down the street, and they always have a huge group. To me, it looks like they have the most dancers of all the schools, at least in the parade. We were happy that the dance schools were performing after the parade in the Union Pacific Building. We always eat lunch at the California Pizza Kitchen. We had only a twenty minute wait this year. The rain sent a lot of people home early, and Gateway was the least crowded I have ever seen it on St. Patrick's Day.

Here is Emma in middle of the second row with a big smile.

One of the many Pipe and Drum Bands pumping up the crowds!

Emma in the middle and Sarah on the left in the Union Pacific Building after the parade.

We caught another leprechaun!

Librarians Meet and the Heavens Weep

2010-03-08T18:21:00.002-07:00

The Utah Educational Library Media Association yearly conference was last Friday at Mountain View High School in Orem, Utah. Even with a morning snow storm, we had 100 more attendees than were expecting from the 350 preregistrations. The number of conference attendees keep growing each year, which indicates the interest and dedication of the school librarians in the state of Utah. Our librarians are devoted to their students and spend their own money and time to improve their skills and expand their knowledge in all areas of knowledge and technology. Research continues to show that dedicated librarians in schools are essential for student achievement even while an increasing number of school districts throughout the nation are eliminating librarians and libraries to save money. This these districts do to the detriment of their students.

Anyway, the conference commenced with a keynote address on advocacy, School Library Advocacy: Ensuring Libraries for a Lifetime, by Dr. Ann Ewbank, from Arizona State University. We had a power outage just after she began, but she never became flustered, just adapted, as librarians always do. She moved off the stage closer to the audience, and we all moved down closer to the front of the auditorium. A prepared-for-anything librarian handed her a flashlight to read her notes in the dim glow of the emergency lights, and off we went. Just before she finished, the power came back on, and we saw a few of her slides on the screen.

Three talented Utah authors were guests and presenters at the conference. Utah authors, popular speaker Michael Ramsdell, author of Train to Potevka; James Dashner, author of The Maze Runner and The 13th Reality Series, and LaRene Ellis, author of the Stones’ Quest Series and her memoir How to Rebuild Shattered Dreams. Many of the sessions were packed because the classrooms were smaller than conference rooms we have been used to in the past, and many of us had to scramble to get to other sessions or "camp out" to be in the sessions we just had to see. I was fortunate to be in the session on the Flip Camera co-presented by my old friend and neighbor of 34 years, Brent Woffinden.

The session before lunch, my daughters, Rachel and Rebekah, both childrens' librarians in Salt Lake County Library System, presented their "Prop Me Up: Story Telling for Children." Rachel presented two years ago, and I invited her back with Rebekah last year when I was conference chair. They were the most popular session at the conference last year. They beat me out by two votes. I didn't present this year. I'm taking a rest; can't take the competition.

The lunch was an experience. The caterer had planned to have the attendees pick up their lunch as they entered the cafeteria. But the librarians got ahead of them and came in faster than the caterer could set up, so they sent everyone to sit down at the tables to be served. The problem with that was there were only two girls to serve. Several people started picking up plates and serving the tables at which they were sitting. With four hundred and fifty people to be served everything fell apart. UELMA board members and a few other altruistic librarians joined in to serve, as librarians always do. Fortunately, everyone seemed to be patient and helped direct us to tables where the hungry were waiting. It was extremely difficult to weave our way through the closely packed cafeteria, but we made it, hopefully before too many lost their patience or missed the next presentation at two o'clock.

After a stormy morning, the sun broke out and the rest of the day was beautiful, eventhough I went back to my school and worked for a few hours cataloging new books.

The Big Twit

2010-03-02T14:51:00.001-07:00

Social Media-Twitterpated: I opened a twitter account this morning, and I can say that I am a big twit when it comes to understanding the mechanics of this social media. I don't find many of these social media accounts "user friendly" at my age. Maybe my brain is too concrete and not sufficiently flexible and intuative to go with the flow. When a novice, who was perfectly content being less wired, joins up, the site presupposes that the person knows all about it and can start right in. Maybe in the case of others, but not me. I decided to seek out some Twitter Tutorials on YouTube and found a few that promised to help make things easy. Unfortunately, the tutorials must have been done a while ago since some of the features they were tutoring me in are not found on the twitter page at which I was looking. Then I went to Wikipedia, and all I found was the history of Twitter, nothing for a novice to learn anything practical about using it. I then went to Google and found Mashable: The Social Media Guide. This is an excellent site for learning the how tos and where fors of social media. There I found the answer to the burning question: "What the retweet button, and how do you use it?"

I tried to use the Find People section like it was demonstrated in the You Tube tutorials, but the "email your friends and let them know you are tech savey by using your contact list" only allowed AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo, not Hotmail as shown in the tutorial. Of course, I have no contact list on AOL, Gmail, or Yahoo, but I do have an extensive list on Hotmail. So I had to do a lot of copy/paste manuevers to send out a notice that I have another wire sticking out of my head.

My "Alice in Technoland" adventure continued when I found I was following seven twitterers by only clicking on one Canyons District IT tweet. AND there was one follower. Wow, all this in a hour and a half.

On Mashable I found this quote about The Twitter Guide Book:
“Twitter is a social network used by millions of people, and thousands more are signing up every day to send short messages to groups of friends. But where’s the user manual for Twitter? Where do new Twitter users go to learn about Tweeting, retweets, hashtags and customizing your Twitter profile? Where do you go if you want to know all about building a community on Twitter, or using Twitter for business? How can you find advanced tools for using Twitter on your phone or your desktop? To answer all these questions and more, we’ve assembled The Twitter Guide Book, a complete collection of resources for mastering Twitter. Happy Tweeting!” - Pete Cashmore, @Mashable

2010-02-26T14:49:00.001-07:00

Social Media: Darren Draper ask me what impressed me about Will Richardson's presenteations at the Literacy Promise conference last week. First, Will’s enthusiasm for how his own children (ages 10 and 12 I believe) are connected to so many intelligent people throughout the world (with his oversight and rules) caught my attention. Second, he demonstrated how he uses Google Reader for his RSS, and how he manages what could be an overload of information. I watched what he does and said, “I can do that!” Third, his emphasis on ethical and safe practices, and the concept of having hundreds of people reading and filtering information, writing articles and reviews, and communicating directly with authorities in your fields of interest startled me awake to the possibilities for classroon use. I started thinking how nice it would be for all the students at my school to have Google accounts they could use at home and school.
I'm sorry, I didn’t feel that way when Darren presented the list of 24 social medias to the district teacher librarians with a deadline to become familiar with 20 of them. I looked at the list and could only count seven that I had already done. Exploring and using 13 more in two months was like throwing more piranhas into the pool. Richardson stated at one point in his presentation: “Part of literacy is fixing mistakes.” So I am now attempting to fix that mistake. I still don't think I want to twiter, but I did add texting and internet to my cell phone , and I am texting (to my daughters' amazement). I signed up for RSS immediately and subscribed to Richardson's blog, wiki, and Powerful Learning Practices web site on Google Reader. I want to jump into the rest, but I am the kind of learner that likes to see it demonstrated, usually while I am following along, so that I don’t waist time slogging through on my own making tons of mistakes. Fortunately, says Richardson, there is a plethora of YouTube tutorials on many of the things I want to do. I don’t know if this addresses Darren's question, but it is too late to be brilliant. I like this quote from one of the articles I read at Powerful Learning Practices:

"Gaining confidence is extremely important in using new tools in the classroom. I notice that I usually have two options, roll it out and the class learns with me at the same time or I need to find a group of teachers to play with.
Either way I still find myself with no skills and don’t want to look foolish. Let’s see if we can work this out here. …We are going to help each other to learn how to use these tools in our classrooms."
“Gaining Confidence” Brian Licata, quoted in “We Are Going to Help Each Other Learn” by Lani Ritter-Hall .

I'm Back to Writing Again

2010-02-24T22:34:00.005-07:00

Social Media: Thursday and Friday last week, the 18th and 19th of Feb., I went to the 2nd biannual Literacy Promise conference in Salt Lake City. I am alway energized by going to teacher conferences when the sessions are so well done. The high light for me were the two sessions by Will Richardson on the use of social media in increasing one's own learning and creating children who are independent learners. Even though I consider myself to be a life long learner, a Renaissance man, the older I grow, the more desperate I become as I see so much that I do not know and want to know; so much that I have not learned and want to learn. My favorite quote for many years is by Eric Hoffer: “In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” (I sometimes long for that world that no longer exists.)

Evenso, I have been cautious about jumping into social media, though I do have this blog (which nobody reads), several e-mail accounts, too many listsevr subscriptions, and a Facebook account. Darren Draper, Dir. of Technology Servicess for Canyons School District, Sandy, Utah, has strongly challenged the librarians in the district to become conversant with and use 24 types of social media. I have been reluctant and a bit resistant to the idea because of the time involved in gaining even cursory familiarity with them. I have so many people clamoring for my attention and time every day that I feel like I am swimming in a pool of piranhas. I also could not see an educational value to most of them. Will Richardson certainly opened my mind to the educational possibilities of social media, if not directly for the classroom right now, certainly for my own personal learning right now. I started Google Reader for my RSS today, and tomorrow I might investigate wikispaces.

During my 37 years as a classoom teacher and a librarian, I have been saddened and frustrated when I have had to deal with children, more than a few, who vigorously demonstrate that they don't want to learn; or those who seem more than content to know very little. Yet many of these same children demonstrate knowledge and expertise in technology, both harware and software. I have had a couple of these electrified students help me with computer problems and have used free computer time as an incentive for other students to improve grades.I can see some applications of social media as a tool for helping these wired types of reluctant learners become connected learners within and outside the educational institution.

I taught for many years with Lloyd Naylor who said that the way to get a horse to drink the water to which you have led him with love and care, is to salt the oats. I contended that there will always be a "horse" or two willing to shrivel up and die of thirst rather than accept the fountain you offer, regardless of how much you love and care for them. My mind is now opening to the idea of incorporating social media networks into classroom instruction and research projects as a way to reach reluctant learners and expand the resources of those already excited about learning. Lifelong learning is probably in the mission statement, goal statement, or DRSL of every school and every district in the United States. But, we cannot measure lifelong learning in our students without following them around for the rest of their lives. We can, however, measure the skills necessary to become a lifelong learner, which skills we strive to inculcate into our students. Maneuvering around the internet is now one of the necessary skills of lifelong learning. Students are using and will use social media for good or ill whether we like it or not, whether we guide them or not. I don't know how or what can be done to minimize the real dangers of life on the internet for the young and immature (of all ages), but the potential for harm must be addressed before we fully embrace the electronic biome in our schools. Will Richardson has written some interesting observations on social networking on his blog.

Ballet West: Friday night after the conference, Chris and I went to Ballet West's new production of Swan Lake. This is my favorite ballet among all the other ballets I really like, and I have seen it at least six times. Our daughter Rebekah has sesson tickets with us, but she had a conflict and decided to go to the other activity. Emma went to the ballet in her place. We had a lite supper at Siegfried's Delicatesen and arrived at the Capital Theatre ten minutes before the curtain went up. It was a stupendous production, but Chris was disappointed that we didn't see her favorite principal artists Christiana Bennett as Odette/Odile, and Christopher Ruud as Prince Siegfried. Bennett is a tall, gorgeous dancer with beautiful red hair, and is Chris' favorite as is Ruud. We saw Katherine Lawrence and Thomas Mattingly. She was very good; he was a little weak. Christopher Sellars did a fine job as the prince's friend and would have made a stronger prince. Sellars is from Huntington Beach which I claim as my home town, because I spent my teenage years there. The production had all the popular standard dances, but new choreography for some parts, which we enjoyed very much. Especially impressive were the finale changes in act IV.

Hale Centre Theatre: On Monday we went to see Fiddler on the Roof at Hale Centre Theatre. It was a good, but not great performance. Evenso, we enjoyed the evening. The singing was strong and the dancing was adequate. I am always impressed with the way this theatre company utilizes the in the round stage.
This has been a very "theatrical" weekend considering that Chris and I also went to see the Percy Jackson movie on Saturday afternoon.

2009-12-27T18:05:00.004-07:00

ONE:
Chris and I went to se Me and Orson Wells yesterday. We went to an early showing, a private showing if you will, because we were the only audience in the hugh theatre. The movie is about the the landmark production of Wells' and John Houseman's 1937 Mercury Theatre (Julius) Caesar. Christian McKay's portrayal of Wells was stupendous-the voice, the mannerisms, and most probably the vulgar, profane language of the creative genius. I don't know why all these great artistic geniuses have to be so vulgar and immoral in their "real" lives. It just makes me more satisfied that I did not pursue the professional acting career I wanted when I was young and went into education and communitiy theatre instead. While the acting and production values of this film were wonderful, especially the interior theatre scenes, I think it went beyond a PG13 rating for language alone, and the sexual content (continually talked about but not shown) was borderline R. We couldn't figure out for what audience the film was made. If non theatre young people don't know who Orson Wells, John Houseman, Joseph Cotton, et al. were, and the artisitic impact these men and the Mercury Theatre ensemble made on stage, radio and film, I don't think they would pay money to see this. Unless you are over sixty and an old movie buff like Chris and I are, you wouldn't have any schema on which to attach this film. I suppose younger audiences might go to see Zac Efron, who was very good, by the way, but I don't think they would catch the Wellsian, ground-breaking theatricality that is swirling around Efron's character. Another question we have is why was this film made in 2008 and only being released at the end of 2009 with little advertising? Anyway, Christian McKay deserves an Oscar for his portrayal of Wells. If you know little or nothing about Orson Wells or would like a little background, you might find this education site on the film interesting. http://www.filmeducation.org/meandorsonwelles/welles_caesar.html

TWO: This is purple prose and political, so you may want to skip it.
Chris would not let me watch any news or be political from December 24 to 26. She did not want me to fume about the clown congress passing horrible legislation in the dead of night. But alas, the great and self-serving Senate of the People's Democratic Republic of America, while throwing the late great United States of America under the Socialist bullit train, strained mightily in the night and with bribes and the persuasion of force brought forth an abomination of desolation which future generations of enslaved Americans shall rise up in their chains and curse. But, hopefully, the quagmire of both wings of the clown congress coming together to blend their abominations into one monstrosity will sink the whole mess and some actually inteligent reform might come forth. NOT

Christmas 2009

2009-12-25T10:50:00.003-07:00

Merry Christmas to one and all. The snow from the 22nd of December is still clean and bright, so we are having a white Christmas. We had a big family and friend dinner last night at our home (24 guests), and the Big Guy with the flowing white beard (Bekah this year) came to cheer everyone with a little gift to tide us over till Christmas morning. Santa did a great job for the little ones who were with us, but Alex slipped once and called Santa "Bekah." I sent out 38 Christmas cards this year before the big day. There are a few more to get out when I find the addresses. Last year all my cards were late and became New Years cards. This is the picture I sent out this year. We took it after the luau at the Polynesian Cultural Center during our October trip to Hawaii, which was a Christmas present that we promised the family three years ago. It took that long to get everyone on the same scheduled week so we could actually take the trip together.

Box of Little Bricks

2009-12-22T12:04:00.002-07:00

I survived the winter solstice and am so ready for the longer days ahead. Today was my annual library open house for the teachers and staff at Mt Jordan Middle School. I started this open house a few years ago to treat all the people I work with. It is hard to give out little remembrances and cards at the Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and other religious/secular festivals at this time of the year and not forget someone or go broke or offend one or another of our diverse group. Everyone seems to like the schmooze time throughout the day, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I get to be Julia Child for a day.
I make hot sausage dip, three batches this year, will probably need four next year; cheese trays, crackers, chips, salsas, fruit and vegetable trays, salad and desserts. This year I added Grenache Marin-cabbage, noodles, and ham cooked in chicken broth. My aide helps with the food and set-up. Several teachers have also brought things to contribute to the buffet table. We ran out of somethings before the second lunch was able to make it into the library. Next year I will have to double up on everything.
I am taking the memoir writing class again this year for the fifth time. The second assignment topics did not thrill me, and after a month of false starts I threw something together the night before on the topic of a toy. Here it is:

The Box of Little Bricks
© Michael Goodman
While digging in a back yard flowerbed, I unearth a weathered piece of milled wood. A little brick shape, a quarter inch thick, two inches long with eight round nibs on one side and eight matching round slots on the other. Holding it in the palm of my hand, I turn it over a few times rubbing off the dried, powdery clay. The once bright red stain, where it hasn’t worn off, is faded to a pale, dusty pink. This relic was part of my “Santa” present in 1959 when I was barely twelve.
Actually, my big Santa present was a deluxe magic set that had some parts missing out of the box. The week after Christmas, my mother took me back to the toy warehouse where Santa had bought it. Unfortunately, there were no other deluxe magic sets in stock, but not being too interested in magic tricks anyway, I wasn’t extremely disappointed. Especially not when my mother said I could buy whatever I wanted from the store, as long as it didn’t cost more than the refunded money.
I ambled up and down the aisles of floor to ceiling shelves carefully investigating and examining box after box of play time fillers that would totally bore an electrified kid of the 21st century. It must have been an expensive magic set because I was able to buy two big toy sets: a huge set of Civil War battle figures complete with soldiers, horses, cannons, caissons, supply wagons and assorted accoutrements molded in blue and gray plastic; and a heavy box of miniature, wooden building bricks.
My sister and I spent hours on end sprawled out on the floor of the den building houses for her paper dolls with the bricks and our old Lincoln Logs. I am sure we exercised our imaginations and had more fun with those building bricks than anything else we ever owned.
In the first couple of years of high school, I had a few friends who enjoyed combining the bricks with the Civil War set to have massive battles with bombed out farm houses and walls. It is impossible to picture high school freshmen and sophomores today doing anything akin to that. We, or the times we lived in, were much simpler then, less sophisticated. We discovered that the bricks were fairly steady when stood on end like dominos, and we pains-takingly created long interweaving lines of “brick-inos” that would start a cascade with the least breath. I later gave away what was left the Civil War set, but I kept the box of bricks.
Mastering the art of standing the bricks on edge, I fashioned structures that resembled Greek and Roman architecture, my classical period. On a base of interlocking bricks, I arranged vertical bricks in rows like columns. On top of the columns, a double row of interlocked bricks solidified the structure and allowed for another level of columns to arise or for a carefully gabled roof to be built. Those miniature temples were amazingly sturdy until a strategic column or two were removed and sections would collapse like a fabled edifice of antiquity. Even in college, when I needed some down time from work and school pressures, I would pull the box of bricks from under the bed, clear a section of my desk, and build a fantastic structure fit for the Olympian gods.
After leaving California to finish college in Utah, and marrying, having children and buying a home, the box of bricks showed up at my door one year in the back of my parent’s truck along with other childhood paraphernalia that my mother miraculously had not thrown away. We stored the tattered, sagging box in the basement until our children grew older; then my wife let them play with the treasure of my early years. They scattered the bricks throughout the house and into the yard, and over time my treasure, which meant nothing to them, was lost to all but memory.
I turn the artifact over in my hand several more times and put it in my pocket. There are days even now when I wish I had my box of little red bricks, the ancestors of the boxes and bags of shiny, multi-colored, sterile, plastic Legos that infest the toy cupboard in the family room.

2009-12-21T13:03:00.001-07:00

Wow! I haven't written anything since last April. It doesn't matter; no one reads this anyway.
I finished all my Christmas cards today and mailed them. I am trying not to think of politics and the Liberal Progressives destroying the country I love at this time of the year. That would be easier to do if the Clown Congress were not ramming through corrupt legislation in the middle of the night. Well, I just cannot NOT think about such things it seems. It is so over-poweringly oppressive and depressing. It is as Lincoln said - no foreign power can rise up to destroy the United States, only we ourselves can do that. The next election is too far away to save us.

What Happened to March?

2009-04-07T08:19:00.000-06:00

WOW! What happened to March? The Utah Educational Library Media Association annual conference, for which I was chair, was one month and two days ago. It was a success by most accounts, 98% of the evaluations were positive to very positive with very few disgruntled individuals (2% of those who filled out evaluations) who apparently hated everything. There were 430 attendees. I couldn't have pulled it off without my wife who took the day off and came to help me out. I crashed for a few days after the conference and the rest of March was a blur as I tried to catch up with everything that I let slide while I was working on the conference preparations. Well, it wasn't a total blur. I took two Book Arts workshops at the University of Utah, one the Saturday after the conference and the other two weeks after.

2009-02-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

Smiling All the Way

Well, I watched President Obama smile broadly as he signed the boondoggle stimulus bill that sends us, our children, and grand-children for untold generations into economic slavery. This thing had better work, but I have no faith in it. Of course, Congress has no Constitutional authority to bail out companies or citizens who make stupid mistakes, but, then again, they don't have Constitutional authority to enact most of the social legislation they have enacted for the last eighty years or so. The federal Gummit continues to usurp the powers delegated to the states and denied to the feds by articles nine and ten of the Bill of Rights. But hey, it's hard to know what is in the Constitution when you haven't read it since you were in high school, and we all know how well teenagers pay attention to dry stuff like American history. The members of the great Den of Thieves don't amend the Constitution to get what they want, they just ignore it.

Last Friday, my wife, Chris, and daughter, Rebekah, went to the Ballet West production of Madam Butterfly. It was a wonderful production danced to Puccini's lush music, but I did miss the singing. Madam Butterfly was the first opera I saw live. The first memoir I wrote for my memoir class three years ago was about that experience.

Mia Notte Bella

“Hey, kid, are you an usher?” asks the man working the push broom on the sidewalk in front of Melodyland Theatre. I guess I look like an usher in my dark brown, vested suit.
“No, I am here to see the opera.”
“You’re a little early aren’t you? They won’t open the box office for another hour,” he smirks as he pushes dust into the flower bed.
I am a little embarrassed, so I don’t answer. I ignore him and go stand in front of the poster display of coming attractions with my hands in my empty pockets. Empty pockets. That means something, but it doesn’t register. Too excited to think about anything but what is going to happen in a little over an hour, I sit on the cement bench next to the main doors by the box office. The push broom guy glances over at me and smirks again. Yeah, guy, I’m a little early.
OK, so I’m a lot early. I am so early that mine was the first car in the parking lot. After I had sat in the car listening to Beethoven on the radio for half an hour, mine was still the only car in the parking lot. That had made me nervous. I took my ticket out of my shirt pocket a couple of times to make sure I had the right day. Then I turned off the radio and waited there for a few more minutes. The late afternoon sun was heating up the car. I got out of the car, made sure the door had locked when I shut it, and took a walk around the theatre. The Saturday afternoon traffic on Harbor Boulevard a block away was a rhythmic hum punctuated occasionally with steam train whistles and bells from Disneyland on the other side of Harbor Boulevard.
This adventure began last Monday, during morning announcements. The student announcer mentioned that the office had a few student discount tickets for a production of Madame Butterfly staring Licia Albanese[1]. I had just enough money in my wallet to buy a ticket- three dollars. Right after class I maneuvered my way through the crowded halls and across the commons to the office before they could run out of tickets. I was the only senior to buy a ticket. Heck, I was the only student out of 3300 kids to buy a ticket. Silly me for worrying they would run out of tickets before I got there.
Sitting on the bench, anticipation builds. I have seen a lot of plays and musicals in Los Angeles and Orange County, but this is my first live opera, and the principal singers are all Metropolitan Opera stars. I have heard these singers on the radio because I listen to the Saturday Texico Opera broadcast whenever I can. I bought the complete Aida album with Leontine Price a couple of years ago and have almost worn it out. I have excerpt recordings of other operas, and I have seen The Pearl Fishers on television. But this is my first in-the-flesh opera experience.
People finally start arriving. The box office opens. As more people arrive, the chatter grows louder as they stroll around looking at the spring flowers or mingle in casual conversation outside the doors. Everyone is dressed up: suits, ties, evening gowns. I am squirming a bit on the hard bench impatient for the doors to open into the lobby that encircles the theatre. I am ready to move inside to a padded theatre seat.
Finally! The doors open. I slide off the bench and blend into the first group of patrons flowing into the lobby. I maneuver to the left and find “Door B” where my ticket says I am to enter the theatre. The door usher tears the stub off my ticket, and says, “To the aisle on the right, please.” Another usher hands me a program and directs me to row five, section B. I slip into the row and ease into the third seat from the aisle. Melodyland Theatre is in the round, so all the seats have a good view of the stage. I have been here once before, last fall, when the drama club came to see Martha Raye in The Solid Gold Cadillac.
I sit. I wait. I thumb through the four page program and read the half-page insert.
The stage is set like a Japanese garden, and the lighting gives the impression of evening sunlight filtering through trees. It reminds me a bit of the Japanese decorations for the junior/senior prom theme “Sayonara.” I wonder what Karen McNeil, my prom date, is doing tonight as the small orchestra starts tuning up. I wonder if I had had enough money for two tickets if she would have come with me. She likes popular musicals, but she’s not really into classical music.
None of my friends and none of my family like opera, and they can’t understand why I do. It’s hard to explain why it is so enjoyable for me. Once I got hooked on classical music, opera seemed to be the next step for me. I know that there are many people who like classical music but don’t care for opera. To me it is the ultimate theatrical experience: the heightened sense of drama, or melodrama, the characters, the staging, the voices, the extreme emotions intensified by beautiful music. I have always been a sucker for schmaltz, so it doesn’t matter how outlandish or sentimental a production might be, I’ll most always enjoy it; and, unless a production is completely awful, I have a complete suspension of disbelief.
The lights dim. The conductor comes out, and we acknowledge him with polite applause. Everything is silence . . . the music begins. Now there is no reality except for what is happening on the stage, in the music, in the voices. Life is wonderful.
The action in act one is stopped a few times by applause, almost like the audience has control over how the plotted events of the story will proceed. In act two, the emotional tension is building as Cio-Cio San (Albanese) refuses to accept the fact that she has been abandoned by that bounder Pinckerton. She begins to sing softly “Un Bel Dì.”, a melodious whisper murmuring over the tremulous strings of the orchestra. Her voice rises with strength and power until she pulls out all the emotional stops and soars triumphantly into the climax of the aria. Almost before she hits the final note, the audience explodes. I am on my feet with the rest of them cheering and clapping. The man next to me yells, “Brava! Brava!” I hear others calling out the same. I am too self-conscious to yell “Brava” myself, so I clap louder. My hands hurt, but I keep clapping. Albanese is bowing to each section of the auditorium. Several people throw roses onto the stage, and she gracefully picks them up. The conductor tries to proceed, but we drown out the orchestra. From across the auditorium I hear someone call out for an encore. In a moment, I am yelling “Encore! Encore!” and clapping to the rhythm of this powerful chant along with the rest of the audience. The conductor, surrendering to our demands, nods his head to the audience, then, turning, nods to Albanese. He faces the orchestra and holds his baton at the ready, waiting for the audience to settle back into our seats. There is a cough here and there as the rustling fades, and it is silence again. The introduction of the aria begins, and she sings again those hopeful words: “One beautiful day, we shall see a strand of smoke arising over the far horizon on the sea, and then the ship appears …”
The last act is hard to get through. I didn’t bring any Kleenex. I struggle through the last half of the act trying to keep my tear ducks under control. I have done my opera “homework,” darn it! I know the plot; I know the characters; I am familiar with the music. I just want to enjoy the music and the voices and not get emotionally involved. But that darned Puccini music sucks me in, beats me up, and leaves my heart beating painfully in my throat, my face flushed, my eyes rheumy. When the final dissonant cord rattles through me I am emotionally exhausted, but I jump to my feet with everyone else, cheering and clapping.
This spiritual and emotional cleansing, this catharsis, is what opera is all about. Non opera lovers might feel the same at a raw, emotionally charged sporting event where two closely matched teams clash on the brittle edge of exultant victory or humiliating defeat. In an opera, regardless of the interpretation of the production, there is no question about how it will end: it’s in the script; the plot is always the same. But as with sport, it is the glorious struggle to reach that end which is so satisfying.
I relax in my seat watching the rest of the audience flow out of the theatre with happy after-the-show chatter and laughter. My hands are red and throbbing from clapping. Finally, I leave my seat and amble out into the cool May night. It is long after midnight, and there is a moist, early morning chill in the air. The parking lot is quickly clearing out as I saunter to the car savoring mia notte bella, my beautiful night.
Then I remember: empty pockets.
Stunned, I lean against the hood of the car and take a deep breath to clear my mind. The last few cars rumble out of the parking lot abandoning me to the dark beneath the faint glow of the lampposts. I stride anxiously back to the theatre, the joy of the evening trammeled by my stupid carelessness. I take my emergency dime out of my wallet, put it in the pay phone, and dial the number. After a few rings my dad groggily answers the phone.
“Dad, I’m sorry to wake you up, but I locked the keys in the car.”
[1] Licia Albanese, b. 22 July 1913

2009-02-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

February Musings

Happy birthday Abe. 200 years old today, and look what a mess has been made of the country you kept together. The Constitution hangs by a thread, and the government of the people, by the people and for the people has been hijacked by a den of thieves, but happy birthday.

I suppose I should wish Chuck a happy 200th birthday too. He turned the world upside down with his theories on the origin of the species. He has been misunderstood and misinterpreted by his devotees and his enemies alike. Look what Social Darwinism has brought to the world: euthanasia, the perverted racial theories of German National Socialism, and Planned Parenthood-originally founded to make poor minorities even more minor.

I watched a little of the President's news conference on Monday. When does telling only half the truth really telling a lie? He said we are in this economic crisis because banks were making loans to people who could never make the payments. That part is true, but why would banks, which are in business to make money, make so many loans which would not make them money. Hmmm. What the President conveniently neglected to say was that the banks were under extreme pressure from powerful liberal Democrats in the Senate lead by the great whiny liberal Barney Frank and his cronies. They threatened and pressured Fannie Mae amd Freddy Mack, Freddy and Fannie passed it on to other lending institutions. So, Mr. President, tell the whole truth or you are telling a lie. But this is how you are making capitalism and individual liberty the villans as you enthrone the new national socialism as the savior of the American collective. Of course, all the idiots who want the Great and Abominable Federal Gummit to take care of them don't care about truth. President O could recite "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and they would fall down before him and call him blessed.

The unfunny comedian, Al Franken, is still trying to worm his way into the Senate, the unfunny den of thieves. I see that he owes between $50,000 to $70,000 in back taxes and penalties. If he does manage to weddle his way into the Senate, he will fit right in with the rest of the thieves. The liberal Democrats love to raise taxes, as long as they don't have to pay them.

2009-02-06T11:32:00.000-07:00

Gray February

February should be red or red, white, and blue, but I look out the window and all I see is gray. I took down the winter decorations of January from the library and put up the red hearts and cupids for Valentines Day and portraits of Abe and George for Presidents' Day. But it is still gray outside with the threat of snow this weekend.

I just read an article by Pat Buchanan about the New York Times editorial page (whose editors relish labeling as racist hate mongers anyone who has a differing opinion or disagrees with their liberal/progressive view of the world) which seems to have been purchased by Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire who gave the Times $250 million to stave off bankruptcy. The last lines of the article say:

Let it be said. There is nothing wrong about Americans fighting to preserve the culture and country they grew up in. That is what patriotic conservatism is all about. And if the Times can understand and support the right of native tribes like the Navajo and Apache to preserve their unique character and culture, why this viral hatred of those of us who wish to preserve the Western and Christian character of America? Why does the Times want to see our America destroyed? From what poisoned well comes this hatred of the America we love?

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=30593

It was an informative article.

This is a scherenschitte (paper cutting) I did several years ago. I am thinking of using it as a valentine card cover this year. It isn't mounted on red paper, but I think the blue sets off the negative space better. I also used a computer manipulated version of this cutting as an ATC (Artist Trading Card).

Here is another memoir which is basically from the Lordsburg period:

Darktown Strutters’ Ball

It was a source of disquiet when I grew up and discovered that a seemingly innocent song I heard my father sing in my childhood had racial undertones that have, with the passage of time, become what some people call “politically incorrect”.
When I was very young, I would hear my father early in the morning getting ready for work. He would sing or whistle while he was shaving and combing his hair and getting dressed. Our house was small and compact, and the thick, outer adobe walls seemed to amplify the sound of his voice on those cool, dark mornings. Sometimes I would pull myself out of bed and shamble into the bathroom to watch him shave.
“Some of these days,” he’d croon while carefully dragging the razor across his cheek, “you’ll miss your honey. Some of these days, you’ll feel so lonely.[1]” The words would get distorted when he shaved under his chin, and he would just hum while maneuvering around his upper lip and chin. Once in a while he would nick himself, and a thin crimson line would streak the glistening white shaving cream on his neck that vibrated when he warbled a note.
He liked to give a lot of vibrato to certain words like “woman” and “rings” if he were singing “Saint Louis Blues.[2]” I liked that one. It was supposed to be a sad song, but he made it sound happy. “Saint Louis womaaaaan, wid all her dimon’ riiiings, pulls dat man roun’ by her apron striiiings. Da da da daaaaa, da da da store-bought hair …” There was whistling the melody or “da da das” to cover the places where he couldn’t remember the words or chose not to sing them.
The song I liked best was “Darktown Strutters’ Ball[3]” because he sometimes picked me up and danced me around. “I'll be down to get you in a taxi, Honey,you better be ready about half past eight.” We’d jive down the hall, and my mother would tell him to “pipe down” before he woke up my brother and sister. She said he sounded like a sick cow. His singing was wonderful to me, and I wish I could hear it again. “Now, Deary, don’t be late, I want to be there when the band starts playin’.” He’d flop me down on the bed and sashay over to the closet to get his white shirt.
“… Goin' to dance out both my shoes, when they play the ‘Jelly Roll Blues,’tomorrow night, at the Darktown Strutter's Ball.” He’d adjust his tie, slip on his jacket, give himself a last look in the mirror, and he was ready to leave for the high school where he taught history, P.E., and coached football, basketball, baseball, and track.
I asked him what “strutters” were and he said something about “high steppers” or “fancy dancers.” When I asked what “Darktown” was, he said, “Oh, that’s where Negro people live, black people.”
“Is that like Mexican Town?” That was the area of Lordsburg north of the railroad tracks where at that time all the Mexican families lived.
“Yep, like Mexican Town.”
“Do we have a Darktown?”
“Nope.”
And that was true. There were no black people living in Lordsburg. In fact, there were no black students in any of the eight schools I attended in New Mexico and Southern California until I went to Long Beach State College in 1965. I was not unaware of people of color, but I had no connection or contact with them growing up. While I believed in equality and civil rights and never heard racial put downs or slurs at home, my early impressions of African-Americans were stereotypical, based on old movies, songs, and television. As my age and experience grew, I recognized attitudes and actions that were offensive and demeaning to African-Americans through most of the 20th century. Although I still love the songs and the performers, I cringe when I hear Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys sing about the “darkies” dancing in the Mississippi mud, or see Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Judy Garland, and Mickey Rooney in black face putting on affected Negro accents.
While “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” isn’t as blatantly racial as many other songs from the period, often written by Black composers but sung by White performers, it now gives me a twinge of mental discomfort and colors my memory. My father knew the racial undercurrent of the song, slight as it might be, but he sang it anyway because he liked it. I can hear his voice in the back of my mind, and I sing along because I like it too. We both know that innocence replaced by knowledge is no fun.

“I'll be down to get you in a taxi, Honey
You better be ready about half past eight
Now, Dearie, don't be late
I want to be there when the band starts playing.
Remember when we get there, Honey
The two-steps, I'm goin' to have 'em all.
Goin' to dance out both my shoes
When they play the "Jelly Roll Blues"
Tomorrow night, at the Darktown Strutter's Ball”

[1] Brooks, Shelton, “Some of These Days” 1910. Sophie Tucker’s theme song.
[2] Handy, William Christopher, Father of the Blues, “Saint Louis Blues” 1914 Bessie Smith did possibly the best version of this song in 1929 in a 16 minute sound film, Saint Louis Blues, directed by W. C. Handy himself.
[3] Brooks, Shelton, “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” 1917

You can hear some versions of this song on Youtube here. (The best one, by the Charioteers, has been removed, darn it!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRR8ECI-1GQ

Here is Sophie Tucker singing the original 1911 version of "Some of These Days."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V164YjqoFCw

Here is the only film recording of Bessie Smith singing "Saint Louis Blues" in a 1929 film directed by W. C. Handy himself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afS-jsXRBvQ

2009-02-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

February Is Here Already?

Wow! I have been so busy getting things ready for the Utah Educational Library Media Association (UELMA) conference that I haven't had time to do anything that I want to do. That is the way of the world-you always have to do the things you have to do before you can do the things you want to do, or something like that.

I won't go political today except for two comments: The regime that was to bring us change certainly hasn't (same old/same old - politics as usual); and the regime that was to unite and bring us all together certainly hasn't (the divide is wider). Of course, it has only been a couple of weeks, so any time now we may have change and unity.

Memoirs

As I continue to write memoirs for the class I take every year, I have decided to group my memories around the places I lived. That gives a loose chronology to what I have written to date and will focus future writings. The sections would then be: 1) Clarksville, Indiana and Clovis, New Mexico, 1947-1951(mainly my memories of what my parents told me about the time); 2) Lordsburg, New Mexico, 1952-1954; 3) Roswell, New Mexico, 1955-56; 4) Hobbs, New Mexico, 1957-59; 5) Westminster, California, 1960; 6) Huntington Beach, California, 1961-70; 7) Provo, Utah, 1971-72; 8) Sandy, Utah, 1973; 9) West Jordan, Utah, 1974-until too old to write.

This memoir sample is from the Lordsburg period, 1952-54, and is the last one I wrote for my class:

The Old Green Chair

What I remember as the “old green chair” wasn’t really much older than I was. It was one of the first pieces of furniture my parents bought after they were married in Clarksville, Indiana. It was a bulky, hardwood and steel wired, over-stuffed living room chair covered in a soft, velvety, “true-green” colored material and had a solidly-built, matching ottoman. My dad said it had a long seat that was just right for his long legs. It was his newspaper-reading, radio-listening, and storytelling chair. I assume my mother curled up in it under a comforter when she was expecting, feeding, and holding me as she later did with my sister and brother. Sitting in that chair, I held my baby sister for the first time. Whenever I was near that chair, I would slowly rub the palm of my hand over the soft material and watch it change to light or dark as I reversed the direction of the fabric nap with my hand.
My folks hauled that chair and the few other pieces of furniture they owned in a makeshift trailer across the country to Clovis and Portales and Lordsburg, New Mexico. In Lordsburg, the chair ruled the living room sitting a foot or two away from the tall, narrow window that overlooked the east side yard of Bermuda grass and bottle brush trees.
Mornings, the warm, sun-bright space between the chair and the window was a delightful place to play. The window sill, wider than the thick adobe wall and only a couple of feet from the floor, held an army of small toys and was completely shielded by the chair. The dust flap at the bottom of the chair back was a perfect hiding place for contraband.
When I was four or five, all the kids used to buy little six packs of candy cigarettes at the ramshackle grocery store around the corner from my house. They were hard, white sticks of candy like peppermints are made from, about a quarter inch thick and four inches long, with one end dyed bright red. We practiced holding the candy between our fingers like we had seen our dads hold the real things and pretended to puff out clouds of smoke. A few practiced holding the “cigs” lazily out of the corner of their mouths like the grizzled old-timers and leather-skinned ranch hands we often saw lounging on the sidewalks down town. I usually just chewed mine.
My father’s real cigarettes were much more fascinating than candy, so one morning I took a couple from his pocket before he left for school and hid them behind the chair. The pungent, earthy odor of the shredded tobacco smelled much better unlit than when my dad was actually smoking. Behind the green barricade, I was pretending to blow smoke rings like my dad when my mother appeared next to the chair.
“So,” she said, “think you want to smoke?”
“Sure,” I said, elated and excited about entering into real adult activities at the age of five.
She plopped me down in the chair, slipped one of the cigarettes between her lips, struck a match and “lit up.” She handed me the cigarette and said, “Puff away.” I managed two, maybe three, drags before I became violently miserable and threw up on the polished, hardwood floor. Without comment, my mother extinguished the cigarette, picked me up and carried me to my bed, cleaned up the mess and never mentioned it to me again. However, from my bed that night, I heard her have a laughingly good time telling my dad all the sickening details. “That’ll be a lesson for him,” she declared, and it was; I never ever had a desire to smoke again.
After she painted the living room orange, my mother decided the green of the chair didn’t harmonize. While recovering the ottoman with a print fabric, she determined that she wasn’t up to a full re-upholstery job on the chair. She told my dad to move it out back for the trash men. So my dad muscled the green monster out of the living room, down the hall, and through the big kitchen, being careful not to gouge or scratch the wood floors or rip a hole in the kitchen linoleum. He had to turn it on its side to angle it top first through the back door and inch it onto the small open porch. Then he dragged it down the steps, across the gravel path, and through the gate to the trash cans outside the back fence.
Some neighbor kids were playing on the old buckboard by the barn, and they immediately ran over to watch. The chair was larger than either of the metal trash cans or the burn barrel, so it had to be broken down to either burn or cart away. My dad figured he could use some of the wood and nails and wire, and he set himself to carefully taking the chair apart. With all us children close up watching his every move, he carefully loosened the chair back-panel with a screwdriver and popped it off the chair.
Everyone jumped back a few feet with a horrified shudder. There, infesting the yellowed padding of the old green chair was a writhing colony of at least a hundred, huge BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS. We strained forward to examine this awful sight. A breathless moment passed before spiders on the perimeter of the undulating mass dropped to the ground and wobbly walked toward us.
Then all was pandemonium. Girls screamed and ran to the buckboard. Boys picked up sticks and rocks to pound the ugly creatures or stomped on them with their boots before they could escape to a dark hideaway. My dad grabbed a gas can from the shed by the back gate, sprayed the wriggly mass with gasoline, and flicked a flaming matchbook on the ground under the spiders. The chair exploded in flames and black, acrid smoke mushroomed into the warm afternoon like the atomic bomb on Bikini Atoll. The cremation of the old green chair and all its poisonous cargo was an exciting end to an old friend.

2009-01-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

Musings for a dreary January day:

1) I was watching one of my favorite movies last week, which I haven't seen for a couple of years. A real schmaltzy melodrama from 1936, staring Mickey Rooney, Jackie Cooper, and Freddie Bartholomew: The Devil Is a Sissy. Rooney was 15, Cooper 13, and Freddie 12, but by 1936 they were all experienced, veteran movie stars. The boys end up in trouble with the law, but haven't broken any big ones, and have to meet with a juvenile court judge played by Jonathan Hale, who has a beautiful speaking voice by the way. He tells the boys that the devil is a "weak sister" a sissy because he can't take the heat; he causes trouble and runs away. A real "tough guy" takes his medicine, takes responsibility for his actions, fixes his mistakes. It seems to me that there are an awful lot of sissies in the U.S .of A. today. The slightest bit of rough going and they run away, or if they are big shots with huge screw-ups they run to the Federal Gummit to bail them out. Then there are all the "weak sisters" in the congress who are directly responsible for such things as the housing market collapse because they strong armed lending institutions to make home loans to minorities who had no conceivable way to make the payments. They whine and blather on and run away from their responsibility for the collapse by blaming others who had no hand in the sordid affair.
Anyway, I really like the movie. You can watch the whole film on you-tube starting at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ4Coolb8F8&feature=PlayList&p=DC4658260FF5DBCA&index=0&playnext=1

One small section of the film is missing from the clips, but it doesn't hurt the story line.

Here are Mickey, Freddie, and Jackie from a production still of the film.

2) I watched the coronation of the new messiah on Tuesday. After the inaugural speech, I thought maybe we were all supposed to quit our jobs and let the Great Gummit take care of us. I was disconcerted by the hate and disrespect that was shown to President Bush by the peace, love, tolerance and diversity crowd. Is it not strange how liberal socialist/progressives who preach love, tolerance, and diversity, not to mention environmental "green," spew forth such hate, close-mindedness,and utter contempt for opinions not their own, not to mention leaving the mall looking like a county garbage dump. Yes, I know that there are some conservatives who can be close-minded, hateful, and litter-bugs to boot, but conservatives don't claim, as liberal socialist/progressives do, to being THE party of love, tolerance, diversity, and uber protectors of the environment. So, it is difficult to over look when they are joyfully hateful and intolerant, and act like a bunch of "pigs." Oops! I shouldn't say that; it's not fair to the pigs. And who pushed over the porta-potties anyway?

3) It seems to me that all past Presidents have done some good and some bad things. Some have done more good than bad and vice-verse, they are only human beings, after all. But it really worries me when the majority of the people choose a president who says and does things that are not constant with the founding principles of our country, like capitalism. That to me spells BIG BAD. We have had a few BIG BADS in the past century, and it took years to overcome the damage.

2009-01-20T08:17:00.000-07:00

Part One:
Today is, as everyone seems duty bound to say, an historic day in the history of the United States: the inauguration of the first black President of the United States of America. Only time will show whether it is a great day or a tragic day for the country. I am not against having a black man, or woman (black or white) for that matter, as President: I am just not convinced this is the right one. There are several conservative black men whom I highly respect, and for whom I would have voted without hesitation. They have economic and political knowledge and expertise far beyond the "hope and change" rhetoric of Mr. Obama, but are not politicians, have no political machine, and could never be elected.

I hope that President Obama takes a more moderate road than the one on which he campaigned and that he will eschew the radical, far-left, socialist agenda of some of his biggest monetary supporters. I sincerely hope he will reflect deeply on the oath of his office: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."(Article II, Section 1., paragrph 7); and not try to reinterpret the Constitution by executive order or by further encouraging activist judges. I am hopeful but worried, having read many of his statements about the Constitution.

Part Two:
Here is another memoir. Background: In February, 1967, I left home as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At that time missionaries spent a week in Salt Lake City for general training and instruction before leaving for the mission field. Those who were going to non-English speaking missions were sent to Provo to learn the basics of the languages they would be speaking. There was no Missionary Training Center then: language missionaries were housed in different dormatories on the BYU campus or around Provo. I was to learn Spanish, so I was sent to Knight-Mangum Hall on campus with my companion, Elder Barker.

The Smack Heard ‘Round the World
By Michael L. Goodman

I deliberately throw back the covers, swing my feet out of bed, and slowly sit up. The pain in my chest throbs with each heart beat. The narcotic pain pill isn’t working: I feel like death warmed over, but I know exactly what I am going to do in the next thirty seconds.
I have been at Knight-Mangum Hall, the Spanish language missionary training facility on the BYU campus, for two months. Actually, two and a half weeks of that time I have spent across the street in the campus medical center suffering with a viral heart infection. My companion, Elder Barker, and I had occupied the room on the southeast corner of the fourth floor all by ourselves until the week I had my “heart attack.” That week two new greenies were assigned to our room, and we lost the convenient storage space of the empty bunk beds by the door. I remember Elder Evans’ name only because of what happens this evening.
Elder Barker and the greenies have gone down to the showers at the other end of the hall. I have turned out the lights and eased into bed after taking my pain pill. As I lie here in the soothing dark solitude wishing I were home, a rumble of voices, banging doors, shouts, laughter, and running foot-falls begins to swell in the hall. A shaving cream fight has erupted down by the showers, probably instigated by fun-loving Elder Barker, and is rolling through the hall sucking missionaries out of their rooms to join the melee.
Into the room burst the greenies; on go the lights! They are giggling and jostling and punching each other while rummaging through their things searching for ammunition. They don’t hear me asking them to be quiet or to turn off the lights as they fling themselves back into the battle. The door is open. The lights are on.
Knowing that they are just going to come back anyway, I foolishly pull myself out of bed, shut the door, and turn off the lights. I am tempted to take another pill. Happily, the noise level ebbs somewhat as the action flows back to the far end of the hall and the showers.
A few minutes after I am back in bed, the noise level drops significantly. There is only the thump of running feet and quickly slammed doors and anxious, hushed voices admonishing, “Hurry!” Move!” “Go!” The zone leaders from three floors down must have come up to investigate the commotion, and the combatants are beating a hasty retreat.
The lights flash on as the greenies rush into the room, flushed, giggling, and too doped on adrenaline to be quiet or ready to sleep. They hop into their bunks, chatting and recounting the whole history of the whom and the what and the when and the where of the great shaving cream war.
I ask them again to be quiet. “Please,” I implore, “I am still sick. I’m exhausted, and I need some sleep. Please turn off the light and go to sleep.”
Elder Evans on the top bunk, rises up on his elbow, smirks at me and then says with a simpering tone and sarcastic smile, “Tuck us in and give us a kiss, MOTHER.”
His smirky smile vanishes when he sees me throw off the covers and sit up in bed. He cowers back slightly as I approach. His eyebrows rise as his eyes enlarge. He thinks I am going to hit him. But I am not going to hit him. I deliberately take his head between my hands and plant the biggest, loudest smack of a kiss I am able to pucker upon his hot, flushed cheek.
“Now,” I say through a tooth-clenched smile, enunciating each word, “be-quiet-and-go-to-sleep.”
Without taking my eyes off his horrified face, my hand slaps the light switch by the door, and the room is plunged into dark, terrified silence. Shuffling back to my bed, I clasp my hand over my mouth to stifle a chortle. Didn’t think I’d do that, did you, Elder. Well, now you know. Don’t mess with Goodman.
When Elder Barker finally returns, he is greeted by a stereophonic “Shhhhh” from the greenies’ bunks and an urgently whispered, “Don’t make any noise.”
I smile off to sleep.

2009-01-19T18:40:00.000-07:00

I was looking through some transcripts of tape recordings I have made of my father for family history. He has told a few stories about things that happened when I and my sister Jill and brother Mark were little, as well as stories that happened long before we were born. I go through them occasionally when I am trying to jog my memory or am needing a topic for a memoir. He was born in 1923. I found this little fragment that happened in about 1928. I don't know if I should call it: "Song and Dance Man" or "Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now."

In Detroit, when my father was four or five years old, his mother would often send him down the block to the speakeasy to tell his father to come home. My father would kick on the door, and the doorkeeper would look out the peephole. My father would continue to kick the door until the man looked down to see him and let him in. Then he would search through the crowd until he found grandpa. Grandpa would heft dad up onto the bar. The piano player would pound out a popular tune while my father danced along the bar, like a lot of street urchins did in those days to collect a penny or two from passersby. Sometimes he would sing as well, if he knew most of the words. The customers would tell him how cute he was and pinch his cheeks and buy him sodas and candy bars. He said that it sometimes took him a while to remember why grandma had sent him to the speakeasy because he was having so much fun.

2009-01-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

For the last three years, I have been writing memoir pieces an in-service writing class sponsored through the Jordan School District. I started the class as a way to practice and improve my writing skills while, at the same time, putting my life history on paper for my children. But I found memoir to be a different style of writing about life experiences, a very different discipline than simply writing a chronological life history. I have certainly found the struggle of memoir writing to be a life experience in and of itself.
For everyone, even we unimportant people, there are hundreds of fascinating stories from and about life that, if well told, are interesting to one's family and friends. I strive to write a letter to my family and friends monthly, and I include a piece of memoir with it. My ninety-year-old mother-in-law is my biggest fan.
I am going to post on this blog some past memoir pieces that I have revised many times, and I hope that they are in their final form. By posting, they will be electronically "out there" in the ether somewhere forever. So here goes the first post.

At The Wall
Michael L. Goodman

It was a physically stressing position, leaning into the polished, black granite wall trying to hold the strip of newsprint with one hand snug against the third name from the bottom of the panel and rubbing the graphite pencil over the incised letters with the other hand. I could feel my face reddening with the strain of holding my body at that awkward angle. My eyes teared with a flood of sorrow, regret, anger, and maybe a twinge of survivor’s guilt as the W-A-R-R-E-N appeared on the paper. The paper shifted slightly as I rubbed the pencil over the G, but I finished the name even though it was crooked.
I took the second strip of paper and smoothed it over the letters, but this time I held the strip on the left side with my knee giving me a free hand to hold the paper straight as I rubbed over the letters again.
When I stood, my legs were a little unstable, my face was flushed, my eyes were wet, and my breathing was shallow. Looking at my reflection in the black, mirror-like stone of the wall, I took a couple of deep breaths and steadied myself. Backing away from the panel, I almost bumped into a man who had been watching me; watching me and the dozens of others along the angling gash in the grassy slope on the north side of Constitution Gardens.
“Oh, excuse me,” I stammered as our eyes met.
“No harm done,” he said with a mild British accent. He was about my height, a few years older, but thinner. He wore a brown plaid shirt, a light tan blazer, blue jeans, and a bemused smile that was very close to a smirk. “Tell me,” he said, glancing leisurely left and right along the 54,000 names. “I don’t quite understand. What does all this mean to Americans?”
Looking at him with my mouth open, I couldn’t even explain what it all meant to me, or what I was feeling at that moment let alone what all this means to millions of other “Americans.” How do you give an answer that covers ten years of friendship with the very first kid you met when you moved to California: or guilt at not having time to talk the last time you saw him when he came by the house to say good bye; or unspeakable grief standing by an ugly, black gash in the cemetery grass on a beautiful hill above San Diego Bay; or the vague thought that your name could be on that wall if an ulcer the size of a small bullet-hole in your gut hadn’t been enough for a jocular corporal to stamp your selective service papers with a 4F? How do you meaningfully answer “What does all this mean?”?
“I can’t say. I don’t know,” I said haltingly, with my pencil in one hand and two WARREN GUTHRIE HARDING rubbings, reverently held in the other, fluttering slightly as the afternoon cooled. “There’s no easy answer.”
“Hmmmm,” he said, frowning at me like a tourist disappointed with his tour guide. Losing interest, he pivoted smartly to the left and ambled down along the wall shaking his head.
Turning to the wall, I had one last, long look at myself reflected among the names; one last, lingering touch of the incised letters; one last, wavering breath and sigh before returning to the top of the slope and my patient wife.

2009-01-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

Wow! I haven't written since November 2008. Not a faithful blogger, I! I am spending too much time trying to finish preparations for the annual Utah Educational Library Media Association (UELMA)conference in March 2009. I have had nothing but problems with organizing this conference. People sign up to help and then drop out. I had a big name author signed in 2007, but because his representative messed up, the conference date was not on his calendar, hence, it was scheduled over. I was not happy about it, but nothing could/can/or will be done about it.

I noticed an article on the front page of the paper this week that our new president, Barack Obama, wants a bailout package without any pork attached. This just proves that he is too inexperienced and naive for the job. His one, unfinished, term as junior senator from Illinois in the great U.S. den of thieves taught him nothing about how our great and abominable federal gummit works.

I really shouldn't complain about the great and abominable Congress of the United States. After all, it is the very best congress that liberal Democrats and special interest money can buy! It is a great tragedy that the American people don't have any lobbyists in Washington to protect their interests.

2008-11-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

WELL, I haven't posted in two months. I knew this would happen when I have so many time drains with work, church, and professional organizations pulling me in ten directions.

Last week my family went to California for family visits. On Wednesday my three daughters and I left after work and drove down to Mesquite, Nevada. Thursday morning we drove to San Diego to visit my father at his assisted living center and get some legal papers signed. My wife arrived in S.D. by train on Wednesday night from Fresno where she was spending a week with her mother. My son, daughter-in-law, and grandson flew into San Diego Thursday afternoon. We had a picnic in Balboa Park, and that evening my sister provided us with a wonderful meal. We were only there for one day.

On Friday the eight of us went to Disneyland, and stayed over night at the old homestead, my father's house in Huntington Beach. Saturday we drove up to Clovis, CA, and that night my other son and daughter-in-law flew into Fresno. We spent Sunday with my mother-in-law and celebrated her 90th birthday at her assisted living center. On Monday all ten of us drove home to Salt Lake Valley.

Artist Trading Cards

2008-09-16T11:16:00.000-06:00

The trouble with having hobbies is having the time to devote to them. Work gets in the way! But, of course, without work there are no funds to pay for hobbies. I have been collecting postage stamps since the late 50s. Not too many people do that anymore, so I buy stamps from approval books now instead of trading.

Genealogy is also time consuming, but I really enjoy it from time to time, especially when I am traveling to or through places where my ancestors lived. I also take a few classes on memoir and history writing. I have collected and verified the data on over 1500 individuals on my blood and branch lines back to 1656.

I have been creating handmade books, everything from "simple" origami folded books to full hard cover bound books, for the past ten years. I have participated in at least one or two workshops at the University of Utah every year. Internet searching for Book Arts sites lead me to ATCs or Artist Trading Cards.

Artist Trading Cards are small works of art, 2.5 x3.5 in., or 64 x 89 mm if you are into metric. ATCs were first created in 1996 by Swiss artist M. VÄNÇI STIRNEMANN. The idea was generated by the need to show his larger works in an exhibit without the expense of a printed catalog. The first show was in Zurich, Switzerland, in April and May of 1997, where Stirnemann displayed 1200 cards. Those who attended the showing could take any of the cards as long as they replaced it with one of their own creation, thus the concept of trading and not selling the cards.

Cards are designed as one-of-a-kind originals; a series of originals around a single theme; or an small, numbered edition of one original design. On the back of each card is the artist's name, some type of contact information, e-mail or snail-mail address, the title of the work and the number, i.e., 1/5, 2/5 etc. I also like to put the date of creation. The back of a card, the "signature," is often as artistic as the front of the card.

I generally make editions of two, one to keep and one to trade, or editions of eight or ten. I use collage, wax crayons, water color, inks, acrylics, scherenschitte and computer manipulations to create my cards. Here are ten of my cards. These copies in some cases do not look like they are the correct size, 2.5 x 3.5 in., but in reality they are.

2008-09-14T21:49:00.000-06:00

Well, I finally decided to try a blog. I will have to see what becomes of it. My children have had blogs for some time, but I have shied away from this endeavor because of the time commitment. I have taught middle school for the last 36 years; for the last eleven of those years I have been a school librarian.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I sometimes hesitate to say. Not because I am not proud of what I do, but because I am not sure what name to put on what I do. I suppose I could fall back on Shakespeare’s, “What’s in a name?” But would a rose smell as sweet if we decided to call it an onion? Most of us have past olfactory experience with roses and onions and may have strong opinions about both of them. Would those experiences change our perception of the rose with such a name change?
Many school districts call school librarians “media specialists,” and name our base of operations the “media center.” To me, these titles have a cold, metallic ring that brings to my mind circuit boards, plugs, cords, cables, blips on a computer screen, TVs, and VCRs. While I deal with all those items, that’s just not me or what I do.

When I took my position at Mt. Jordan Middle School, in Sandy, Utah, I called myself a “Professional Library-Media Teacher!” After all, I am a teacher; I am a professional; and my stock-in-trade is library and media stuff. I now simply call myself a school librarian. To me, the title “librarian” says more of being an information specialist and reader’s guide than the title “media specialist.”
This is what I do: David, an awkward seventh grader reading on a 12+ level, said he was tired of teenage books and wanted to read a classic. After he rejected several suggestions, I went to the shelf and pulled out Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Hall.
“I read this in high school,” I said, “but you are a much better reader than I was at your age, and I am sure you can handle this.” I did a little book talk with him, and he agreed to try it. I warned him that the beginning was a little slow and encouraged him to stay with it.
Two weeks later, David came into the library and slammed the book down on my desk. “I hate you!” he exclaimed, glaring at me.
“Why? What did I do?” I asked warily.
“You made me cry!” he said, emphasizing each word.
“Ah,” I said smiling. “The last chapter got to you, did it?”
We spent the next half hour discussing the characters and their choices and consequences and made connections to ourselves, to other books, and to the world. Though I had and would help him many times to solve information problems for reports and projects, to access databases and use text files, and the myriad other things school librarians do for their students, he remembers me because of our connection as readers. I know this because when I met him by chance six years later, he wanted to talk, not about how he was using all the research skills in his life, but about the books we were each currently reading.
I know that school and public librarians the world over have many similar stories that they cherish, that make them proud of who they are and what they do, and inspire them to go back to work every day in hopes of having another such experience. We are librarians! Touching hearts and opening minds through reading is what we do!