As you may or may not know, I am a wanna-be school librarian. As such, Friday I had the opportunity through my work to attend the UELMA conference (Utah Educational Library Media Association) at Mountain View High School in Orem (“Family City U.S.A.”), Utah. This was my first time attending such a conference, and I actually enjoyed it. My boss won an award based on a nomination letter that I drafted (well, and maybe partly based on all the great things he’s done for libraries in our school district that made it easy to draft said letter). Plus, I got paid to be there and I got a free lunch out of the deal.
Examples of things I learned
All kinds of great and wacky ideas for programs and events to do with students in a library, which got me all excited, until I remembered I don’t have a library to do them in or students and teachers to do them with. This plethora of ideas came courtesy of Lanell Rabner, librarian at Springville High School and also the current president of UELMA.
It turns out that Dickens’ Great Expectations and the beginning novel in Stine’s Goosebumps series are basically the same book. Seriously though, I learned a bunch of cool ideas about archetypes and the universality of narrative, and the importance of libraries/librarians refraining from putting up any impediments to a child’s choosing a book to read, even (and perhaps especially) if it is something lame like Goosebumps. This came from a session by Clint Johnson, a writer and writing teacher at Salt Lake Community College.
Not every session you attend in a conference is great. This realization helped me begin to understand why a few conference-goers seemed so jaded about the whole thing. I am still a rookie and I mostly drank up the kool-aid the whole time.
So that was basically my freshman UELMA experience. Stay tuned for my next post, in which I reveal to the web some exciting information to which only I and a few hundred others were privy as attendees of the conference.
Yesterday morning, having the day off from work, I finally got out of bed at a decent time and got myself on a little hike. It is intolerable how few times I have gone hiking since I moved into Provo Canyon. (It’s also intolerable that, although I live yards away from the Provo River, I’ve never been fly fishing, but that’s another story. Somebody help me, please!)
I went to explore a nice little side fork into the cliffs on the North side of the canyon.
There is a mysterious parking lot on the north side of the canyon, across from what may or may not be called Upper Falls. I have never seen more than one car at a time parked in this lot, and for the most part it is a ghost lot. At some point I noticed a little trail running up the hillside through the grasses and into the cliffs, and I have always wanted to try it. I have no idea if the parking lot is designed as a trailhead for this trail, or as a viewing area for Upper Falls, and I have no idea if this fork or trail has a name. I know I could look at a USGS map and research the trail, but that would ruin much of the allure of my random morning excursion. Even having been there I’m not sure if I’m ready to let go of its unnamed status. I may not be living in this canyon forever, so I chose this as my first of (hopefully) many hikes since it is kind of a wild card excursion. It seemed the place I would be least likely to plan and drive back to hike if I no longer lived close to it, so it was an appropriate and easy place to start.
As it turned out, my hike didn’t last all that long. The canyon soon narrows into a creek bed surrounded by steep rock faces, and the creek still has a respectable amount of water rushing down it. Some of the rock walls were mossy and weeping. I’m no rock climber, and I hadn’t come prepared for going through much water, so eventually I chose to turn around. I didn’t really want to risk ruining my camera. That’s a good excuse, isn’t it? The shot at the top of this article is the view down the canyon from the point that I turned around. It would be fun to splash up the rest of this hike, and I might try it again in a month or two if we haven’t gotten snow yet, and see if the water flow has reduced, or maybe sooner were I to get some fancy hiking sandals. At any rate, I did take some pictures, as I am often wont to do, and a few of them will be popping up here on the Freez in the next couple of days.
I have a a whole list of hikes that I feel it would be unconscionable if I did not attempt while living in this beautiful area. The list includes a possible climb to Cascade Mountain and/or Provo Peak, but culminates with ascending Mt. Timpanogos, something I have never done. I mainly posted all of this for selfish reasons; I want to provide myself some accountability for these hikes. So, I hereby announce my plan to hike Timp sometime in the next month or two, before the snow arrives. So let it be written, so let it be done.
I absolutely love music, but apparently I do not often respond to its performance with prescribed, socially-sanctioned behaviors. Although I have vague memories that, at least in the context of compulsory elementary school performances, I may have actually been a decent dancer and furthermore that I may have actually enjoyed dancing, I don’t dance at all. I might occasionally take the liberty of nodding my head or tapping my feet to some music, but that would most likely be in the privacy of my own home, or the false privacy of my own car. My preferred stance for watching a musical concert is to sit or stand, probably with my arms folded. Symphony or jazz performances work out pretty well for me, but moving beyond those genres I am kind of at odds with the rest of the audience.
This stoicism with regards to musical performances has given me much social trouble and internal anguish for many years (cue the sorrowful strings and/or alienating electronic soundscapes). The first time I remember being cognizant of my socially-maladaptive-live-music-behavior was at a Yes concert my friend and I went to in high school. Even at that time, I was given to understand that going to a Yes concert as a teenager in 1996 was a somewhat nerdy thing to do. And yet as it turned out, I was far too cerebral even for this crowd. Throughout the opening set, played by none other than The Alan Parsons Project, (APP, as I have just monikered them, is the 80s band famous for “Sirius,” that dramatic arpeggio synth/guitar intro that they use to announce the home team players at every Utah Jazz game ever played, that also, when played on the classic soft rock radio stations, leads directly into their proto-Radiohead/Coldplay song “Eye in the Sky,” featuring the chorus, “I am the eye in the sky / Looking at you-ooh-ooh / I can read your mind?” That’s the Alan Parsons Project, and you’d better believe I saw them do it live), this fifty-year-old drunk guy sitting next to me was absolutely spazzing out, dancing, yelling, and swinging his arms all over the place. He inadvertently hit me a few times, and every time he did this and saw that I didn’t really appreciate it I received remonstrations from him and his wife for just standing there and not dancing or being more excited. Apparently I was not simply allowed to freak out and have a seizure over The Alan Parsons Project as they performed their opening set, but I was expected to do so. Also, apparently I’ve never enjoyed life.
Fast forward through the years, and I’ve only gotten worse in regards to correct concert behavior. A year or so after that Yes concert I saw Pearl Jam play a huge benefit concert at High School Memorial Stadium in their home town of Seattle. Pretty cool, right? I haven’t told you how at this General Admission concert, with plenty of room everywhere, I was sitting far, far away from the stage up in the bleachers of the stadium. Also I have not disclosed that I was sitting next to my parents in those faraway seats; they came not for even the slightest love of Pearl Jam or rock music, but because while on family vacation they wouldn’t let me go to a concert by myself in a strange town. Not wanting to destroy my hopes of seeing my favorite band (at the time) perform, they insisted on coming with me and were extremely nice in their paranoid over-protection. To be honest, though, I’m not sure if my behavior at that concert would have been any different had I been there by myself. I may have wandered around the stadium a bit more, but I’m not sure if I would have dared descend to the field in front of the stage where all the action was, among all the people who really “loved the music.” The concert was alright. The sound was tinny, I could barely see the band, and Eddie embarrassed me by swearing a whole bunch in front of my parents, which was kind of lame.
Since then, I have pretty much never gone to concerts. Like I said, I do love music. I have daydreamed and conjectured as to how certain songs or bands sound when played live. I’m curious to see how people manipulate their instruments, and how their voices sound live. I even made this list about a year ago, after finally going to see one of my favorite bands (Broken Social Scene) perform live at a free concert.
But when artists whose records I have pined over for years roll into town, I suddenly find that I am not that interested in going. I fear that they may not live up to my expectations. I don’t have anyone to go with, or I don’t know where the venue is, or I am afraid I won’t know how to navigate all the weird private club business in Utah because I never do it otherwise, or I won’t act appropriately. I won’t dance when I’m supposed to dance. I won’t be wearing the right clothes. I’ll be too old, or too young. I won’t be drunk. I won’t be screaming at the top of my lungs. I generally just won’t fit in with the theoretical crowd of my imaginings. I can think of tons and tons of reasons why I might be uncomfortable and not enjoy the concert, and these worries combine to ruin whatever positive experience I might have listening to the music and watching the musicians.
A case in point would be the aforementioned Broken Social Scene concert. They performed an outdoor concert at the Gallivan Center in Salt Lake City, part of the city’s free summer concert series. For years I had wanted to see BSS live. From what I had read in a couple of interviews and reviews of their concerts, I had intuited that certain songs that on their records featured inscrutable vocals buried low in the mix, or that had been otherwise remixed and deconstructed into oblivion, would be recast as dynamic rockers when played live. On this count my intuitions were correct: the Scene contrast their occasional “shyness” on tape with a robust, celebratory, collective performance. They interact with the crowd, they are good showmen, they have great energy and a strong collection of songs, and musically they have a looseness and a swagger, operating practically like a jam band without the long, tepid noodling. In other words, they are a great rock group.
But the crowd ultimately kind of ruined the concert experience. Before the concert started the people around seemed like good enough folks. There were people who looked to be regulars of the concert series, younger and middle aged couples, a few young families. Hanging around in front of the stage there were a lot of kids who may or may not have been hipsters, I really can’t say, but many were the type of kids that I imagine as filling up a Kilby Court concert (I’ve never actually been to one) and making me feel not very cool, clothed in what I intuited were the latest anti-styles (in this case a year ago it was v-neck t-shirts and tight girls jeans for the guys, unflattering retro-styled dresses for the girls). These were the types of people one would expect to see viewing and enjoying this concert, and that’s great. However, as the concert progressed we stayed in the same spot but everyone who had been around at the start of the concert seemed to have disappeared. In their stead were seething masses of high school kids that seemed to be there just to hang out and didn’t really care about the band or the music at all. It was mystifying to me how quickly the concert mutated into a high school stomp. There were tons of kids up in the front moshing and crowd surfing. There were lots of thuggish kids moving through the crowds, oblivious to what was going on onstage. These guys in front of us took their shirts off and performed dances that looked like aerobics routines, and random girls just came up and danced with them. Where did they all come from and why were they there?
I enjoyed that concert, but over the subsequent months the memory of the crowd has worked on me to the point that I am afraid to go to a concert again. When this year’s Gallivan Center concert lineup was announced, it included several of my current favorite musical artists, including Sonic Youth, who you may notice are prominently included on the above list I composed one year ago. Would all those kids show up and try to push Sonic Youth into playing punk-pop like they were part of the Vans Warped Tour? (Not that Sonic Youth would cede to such a push; that may have been an interesting confrontational concert to watch.) Would they try to crowdsurf to M. Ward’s easygoing folk-rock singer/songwriter stylings? I was afraid to even find out. Because of a busy schedule, but mostly out of fear of a negative experience, I didn’t go to any of these concerts this year; not even my favorite Sonic Youth. Chicken.
* * *
Last Friday evening I walked out into the backyard of my in-laws house, just to feel the cool, rainy air for a minute. After standing out there for a second, I noticed music emanating from somewhere in the neighborhood. It sounded very much like live, amplified music. This was intriguing to me, as my in-laws home is nestled in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, nowhere near any place that would be considered a concert venue. Furthermore, it seemed to be trying to rain, not necessarily the ideal condition for an outdoor performance. Curious, I walked to the front of the house to look for any indications of what was going on. I walked down the street, towards the source of the sounds. The cars parked up and down the street convinced me that it was definitely a party, but I still wasn’t entirely positive that they weren’t just blasting a CD out over a great sound system, because the music was spot-on. As you’ve probably determined by now, I’m not much of a partier, so I just walked around the block for a minute, listening to a really tight country-funk-southern rock groove and the sounds of someone absolutely killing on the electric fiddle floating around the neighborhood. There was no questioning at this point that it was a live band. The only question was, who the heck was this band and why were they playing someone’s backyard party in Holladay?
I went back to my in-laws’ house and found Gin, and asked her to come on a walk with me to see what she thought of the music and to see if she by chance would be able to figure out who these people were and what was going on. As we reached the house, she, being much more socially brave and nonchalant than I, pulled me along and we followed some guy through the garage of the party house and out onto a balcony deck, where we found ourselves overlooking a giant pool party and backyard filled with people of all ages. The band was set up beneath the balcony right by the side of the pool, and an advertising slideshow on a TV set up next to their equipment informed us that they referred to themselves as Bonepony. This seemed a familiar-sounding name for some reason.
So we stood up there on the deck and watched them for a few minutes. This was the first time I had ever crashed a party. At first I kept expecting someone to come and ask us who we were and be irritated at our presence, but the whole thing was very casual. Nobody paid us any mind. There were people playing around in the pool, some of them dancing to the music. There were people sitting in lawn chairs, watching the band. There were people standing in groups talking and drinking beers. I actually saw a guy come up to a woman and say “Do you come here often?” and he wasn’t joking. At one point, the singer invited all the neighbors to come over, rather than call the cops.
Thinking about this house party concert, it is totally illogical to me that at this gig, which looked to be very much a party, rather than a concert, it was easy to just watch and enjoy the music without ridiculous distractions from other crowd members, and without any social pressure to get rowdy. The crowd was not pushing one way or the other; everyone was able to do their own thing and enjoy the experience in their own way. In contrast, many crowd members at several of the concerts I have attended attempt to hijack the concert and turn it into some wild party. I guess what those great men once said is true, “You’ve got to fight for your right to party,” even at a rock concert. I guess it turns out that while I look at a concert as an opportunity to hear and watch some music performed, many people take a concert as nothing more than an opportunity to dance, drink, goof around, grope somebody, whatever. The music and musicians that may be playing are simply incidental to the main purpose: to act like an ass. It turns out you can party to the Alan Parsons Project if you are loaded enough. You can mosh or get crunk to Canadian indie rock collectives. I suppose you can party to Sonic Youth or M. Ward. I guess while you’re doing all of that, I can stay home and listen to my records.
[The title of this post comes from "Do the Standing Still," an entirely appropriate song that the Dismemberment Plan were nice enough to write about me. Listen to it below. At one time, the Dismemberment Plan were my favorite band, but sadly, if nonetheless inevitably, their plan came to completion, and they no longer exist. It must be noted that one of my most regretted concert misses ever was their Death and Dismemberment Tour with Death Cab for Cutie, which happened before the Plan broke up and before Death Cab became kind of like a big deal. This song comes from the Plan's second album, The Dismemberment Plan Are Terrified. I think that album's kind of hit and miss, but their third and fourth albums, 1999's Emergency & I and 2001's Change are stone cold classics of post-emo indie rock hipster geekery. They are sorely missed.]
Yesterday I had the unique privilege of going to our department staff meeting. Usually whenever our department has any kind of meeting (or party) I get stuck on the phones. So, like I said, yesterday I had a unique privilege. Adding to the singularity of this event, it was not just any old regular department meeting, but a retreat to the family cabin of one of my co-workers, located a few miles outside of Preston, Idaho. It turns out that Preston is kind of a long way to drive from Salt Lake just for a four hour meeting and lunch, but it was on work time, I didn’t have to drive, and I usually enjoy road trips to obscure locales. Also, I didn’t really feel like going up the night before and staying over without my wife for the more “retreat” portion of the itinerary.
Beyond the fact that I was getting paid and hanging out with the cool kids, Preston actually turned out to be a very pleasant and beautiful little place. Between what I’d seen of Southern Idaho from driving on I-84 and my impressions of Preston as it is portrayed in a little indie flick you may or may not remember from a few years back, I had kind of low expectations. So I was surprised. Preston shares the pastoral Cache Valley with Logan, Utah, and it’s possible it may actually have the prettier end of it. The aforementioned family cabin was nestled in rolling mountain foothills next to a nice little reservoir. The area is pretty much an all-american idyllic landscape. I can still smell the hay just thinking about the drive to get there. I’m really wishing I had gotten my camera out and tried to take some pictures, because now I have a head full of barns, rolling hills, tractors, old small town main street storefronts, and brown/purple mountain ranges in all directions.
It was hard not to feel the pressure of one the great cult comedies of my generation weighing down on me as we drove through town. I felt that perhaps I somehow diminished or stereotyped the town and its good people by hoping for them to conform to my “Hollywood” expectations. And yet despite such moral misgivings I persisted in my fantasies. When some of my co-workers were about to go golfing at the close of our meeting day, I suggested that perhaps tetherball would be a more appropriate recreational activity. I searched storefronts for the famous Deseret Industries thrift store, where in the past such incomparable treasures as nun-chucks, a dance instruction VHS published in 1982, and a really swank polyester suit had been found. I was tempted to ask the waitress at Pizza Villa, where we ate lunch, if I could have an order of tater tots. (They have pretty good pizza, by the way.) I kept my eyes open for a llama. Over the years I have seen llamas in so many small towns throughout Utah that they have ceased to be very remarkable to me, and yet in Preston I inexplicably kept my eyes open for a llama. Behind each grassy knoll we passed I expected to see a camper van parked and perhaps a mustachioed man throwing a football into the fields for a camcorder. As we pulled out of town and started driving south, I truly felt kind of ashamed for my pathetic, touristy behavior in regards to this place.
Since I didn’t have any pictures of Preston to take home with me, I decided to turn to flickr to fulfill my visual needs. To my surprise I discovered that a good portion of the photos tagged ‘preston idaho’ on flickr pertain directly to scene locales of the allegedly abominable film. Looking through the images, you will see the school steps upon which a boy drew a liger in a notepad, the house of Pedro, the Rex Kwan Do center, and so on, and so on. You will also occasionally see glimpses of that idyllic landscape I was talking about. Upon further research in the sacrosanct annals of Wikipedia, I discovered that Preston has fully embraced this humble motion picture as the central mythos of their town, as it has given rise to an annual grand celebration. A schedule of events from 2006 indicates a literary/media-inspired ritual that could come to rival even Dublin’s Bloomsday, complete with bus tours of significant filming sites, a moon boot dance contest and tater tot eating contest, and numerous performances by the Happy Hands Club. I now feel somewhat relieved and vindicated in looking at the environs of Preston through the eyes of Napoleon’s storytellers. After all, it is not many towns of less than 5,000 residents that are so honored and immortalized with such a sweet film. I wouldn’t be too surprised if that waitress had brought me out some tater tots without a second’s question if I’d actually asked for them.
We met at an art exhibit. We met in the comment section of my blog. We met in a snowstorm in a cottage in the mountains. We met at a symphony concert, sitting next to each other. We met at Family Home Evening and commiserated because we both hated Family Home Evening. We met at the library and traded poems. We met in the Provo temple. We met in empty parking lots and Mexican restaurants and our parents’ houses. We met at a movie theater where we were both making fun of the movie. We met at IKEA, buying bookshelves. We met at an art supply store. We met at a little Chinese place by the hospital. We met on the yellow BART line between San Francisco and Lafayette. We met hiking on a trail in Millcreek Canyon on the last nice autumn day before winter. We met to shovel snow under the full moon. We met because we both liked a painting by Brian Kershisnik.
Question: Is spamming okay if you are spamming for Jesus?
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed I had a new person following me on Twitter. Her username was daretobelieve08. Her picture depicted her as a normal looking black woman. There wasn’t really anything suggestive or inappropriate about her name or appearance. (There are occasionally spam users on Twitter — they go around following tons and tons of other users in an attempt to get attention to their own Twitter feed, which of course has some picture of a scantily clad woman and is of course full of links to their shady business.) Because of the normalness of this name and picture, I decided to look at her recent comments, and they were rather regular, innocuous types of things. If I remember right, she said she was watching a movie with her family, taking her kids somewhere, thanking God for her blessed life despite having a bad day, stuff like that. Some of them had an inspirational Christian type of message. It was all very normal. As far as I could tell there were no links of any kind in her updates. There was nothing to indicate in any way that she was a spammer or had some nefarious motive, other than the fact that she was following over 700 different Twitter accounts. Was she a spammer? If so, she was taking her time to make a commercial connection. Was her motive an attempt to spread the Good Word through Twitter? To let her light so shine? If not, and she was just a regular new user, which most appearances said that she was, I thought it was curious that she had added so many people. Was it possible that, being new to Twitter, she was just ignorant of etiquette and thought that it would be normal or fun to start following a lot of random people and see what they said? I can relate to this because sometimes I myself am ignorant, as a lot of people are; other times I’m not ignorant of etiquette, I just don’t like it and choose not to follow it. When I first encountered blogging several years ago I mistakenly thought it was okay to find all sorts of random blogs of strangers and start following them and commenting on them. If they published it on the Internet they must want everyone to read it, right? Turns out I was wrong. Oh well.
No matter what her motive was for following me and 700 other people, it didn’t really bother me. I didn’t start following her, but I didn’t block her from following me, either. I totally forgot about her until today, when I was looking through my Twitter account and again saw her listed as one of my followers. I clicked on her account to see what she was twittering about these days and if she had turned out to be a spammer or a weirdo or missionary or something, and what I encountered was this. (You really should click on the word “this” in the last sentence; there’s a cute picture of an owl.)
I don’t know whether she turned to the dark side and revealed her twisted spamming motive in the week or two since I first looked at her account, or if she was simply suspended for following so many people: Twitter won’t let me read her updates now. But it brought me to the question I posed at the beginning of this writing. What if she really was “spamming” people on Twitter in an attempt to witness for Christ or inspire hope and faith? Is that a problem? Is this really any different than what many missionaries do in public, and what I did as a missionary for two years? Is knocking on someone’s door or having a conversation with a random person in the street “spamming?” I know as missionaries we certainly made some people as mad as people get when they get spam, just by standing on their doorstep, or by walking down the street or shopping in the grocery store, or by just existing. On the other hand, some people changed their lives for the better in part because of our spamming, which in my mind makes it more than worth it.
Too often these days I am so afraid to bother people that I don’t say or do things that I really should be saying and doing. I am afraid I will do something the wrong way, or at the wrong time. I am afraid people will think that I have the wrong motives. Sometimes I am afraid that I do have the wrong motives. I get overwhelmed and frustrated and I give up or put it off. I think to myself that if it hasn’t been said or done yet it’s always still a possibility, but once it’s been tried, if it’s tried in the wrong way, that’s the end. Account suspended for unusual activity. But I realize that this is the wrong way to think. Some people will take things negatively no matter what you do or how hard you try to do it in a good way. On the other hand, no good can really come from doing nothing. I am speaking of things both temporal and spiritual here.
Conclusion: Basically what I am saying is that spamming is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you are spamming for Jesus. I should probably start doing that.
