Author Archive for DavePage 3 of 4

Why do performers perform?

Published
by
Dave
on February 5, 2006
in music and performing
. 5 Comments

I’ve been a performing artist for money ever since I was about 13 years old. Throughout high school and university I thought of myself as a performer. (I’m using the term “performer” because I have called myself a professional musician and a professional actor at several stages in my life.)

Particularly when I was trying to get started as an actor in New York, I used to expend a lot of energy and stress trying to figure out “who I was,” by which I mean what kind of performing persona was most likely to get me hired. Was I a young leading man? A character actor? A comedian? A musical actor? Something else? I never exactly zeroed in on any of those, which might have something to do with my not “making it” big as an actor. (That and my desire to stay married.)

Last night at my church, we had our once-a-year “Open Mike Night,” which is just what it sounds like. Anybody who wants to sing or play something can get on the program. A few dozen people from the congregation come to listen. A handful of folks, some of whom really don’t otherwise get up in front of an audience too much, present their musical tidbits. It’s a lot of fun, and yet we would never dream of putting out a CD of the result. We just do it for fun.

Or, actually, why do we do it?

I was thinking about this this morning. Why does a performing artist perform? For some people it was pretty scary getting up in front of friends and casual acquaintances to sing. You expose a lot about yourself when you do that. It’s not only about one’s singing voice; it’s also about one’s taste in music, one’s confidence in one’s presentation of self to others, even one’s ideology and point of view.

People who perform are famously driven by ego, but this Latin word for “I” can be applied to anyone. Everybody has an ego, and everybody wants his/her ego fed by approval. One of our first urges is for approval from Mom. When our friends approve of our song (recitation, magic trick, etc.), it’s even better. Mom pretty much has to approve, but friends don’t, necessarily. And when strangers approve, well, then you are somebody.

I guess I’ve been looking for approval from strangers all my life. When casting directors and talent agents gave me approval in my New York years, it put me on top of the world. And when I got nothing from them but indifference, it put me into a deep, funky depression.

It’s taken a long time to get a good perspective on this. And I’m still working on it.

Categories: , ,

A sad tale about my car…

Published
by
Dave
on January 29, 2006
in prius
. 3 Comments

I’ve never been a real “car person.” Although I grew up in NASCAR country, I never managed to develop the fascination with cars that other guys my age in my community shared.

For a long time I managed without a car. I lived in New York City for almost four years, and a car would have just been in the way. (I car-sat for a friend of mine who parked his van on the street while his band was touring Europe. For just one month. Biggest pain in the ass I had ever experienced.) For eleven years in Nashville and another seven years in the Washington suburbs, our family of four managed with only one car. It was a challenge, but we made it work.

But a year and a quarter ago, we bought a 2005 Toyota Prius, and the Prius became my car to drive. I had been fascinated with the idea of the Prius for a long time, and when my brother got one in 2003, I knew I would have to have one of these cars someday. It’s not only environmentally friendly, it’s also economical. It’s also the “green car” of choice for a lot of celebrities, like Arianna Huffington. And the great surprise is, it’s a fantastic car in general. Roomy, comfortable, and replete with high-tech gadgets.

I’ve taken better care of the Prius than I ever have maintained any car. In the first year I waxed it three times. I’ve never missed a service interval by more than 100 odometer miles.

Last Tuesday, on my way to school after a teacher workday, I was driving in the center lane with the flow of traffic, at about the speed limit. Suddenly a car that was lined up to turn left in the left turn lane jerked in front of me. No warning, no notice, no time to prepare. I stepped on the brakes, jerked the wheel to the right to avoid contact–and the front left corner of my car hit his car so hard it knocked his bumper off.

So my new Prius is no longer new. My car was smashed in pretty badly on the left front corner. The body damage and the wheel alignment will be straightforward fixes–but if anything’s wrong under the hood, I’m worried.

The fire department guys who arrived at the accident scene gingerly lifted the hood of my car and then took a step back. They didn’t know what was safe to touch in one of those gas-electric hybrid cars until I told them. (Answer: don’t touch anything insulated with orange plastic. Orange is the warning color.)

After four or five days of playing tow-truck-telephone-tag, my car is now at the body shop that the Toyota dealership recommended to work on Priuses. What they’ll do with it, I don’t know. I’ll call tomorrow and express my anxiety (as if that’s going to do any good).

The ultimate irony is this: right after my car was towed to a storage lot, I called the car rental agency recommended by my insurance company. They had only one car free–a Dodge Ram 4X4 pickup truck. A huge beast of a car, the anti-Prius. At least they didn’t put me in a Hummer.

Within 24 hours I made them give me a Dodge Neon. I’m now driving around in a reasonable little car–awaiting word on my beloved Prius.

Categories: , ,, ,

How to observe Martin Luther King Day?

Published
by
Dave
on January 16, 2006
in politics, race and religion
. 12 Comments

Today, Monday January 16, is designated as Martin Luther King Day in the United States. Although this date is not his actual birthday (he was born January 15, 1929), the U.S. government usually puts federal holidays on Mondays. This holiday has been officially observed by the federal government since 1984, resulting in a long weekend off work for many people for the last 22 years.

Dr. King was a man as important in American history as Abraham Lincoln. In the 1950s and 60s he worked bravely, tirelessly, and persuasivly to save us from ourselves. When I started school in North Carolina in 1960 the schools were racially segregated. There was not a black kid in any of my classes until I was in the fifth grade. Nowadays, government-sanctioned racial segregation is impossible to imagine in the U.S. And that is a direct reflection on Dr. King’s work to teach Americans that they should build a just society, once and for all.

So what did I do to observe this holiday? I slept late, since I didn’t have to teach school today; I did a 25-minute exercise workout with FitTV; I shopped for hardware for the new doors for my house; and I went to the movies.

Some commemoration.

I participated in no special commemoration of how far Dr. King brought this country in the thirteen active years of his career. For thirteen years–from 1955 until he was killed in 1968–he put himself in harm’s way again and again. In the 1950s black people in the southern U.S. could be arrested for using the same water fountain as white people. When folks like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and the students at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter started just saying no to this American apartheid, it began to change everything.

Yesterday I was thinking about how hollow this holiday has become for a lot of white people as I was sitting in the choir at my church.

Now, like a lot of churches in the U.S., my church has an aging membership. The church was founded in 1955, the very year Dr. King started his work on the national stage, as an overt gesture of racial integration.

The founding ideals of this church remain at the center of its philosophy, and most of its members can remember the days before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They can remember when the simple idea of “mixing the races” was a powerful notion, when black people as a group were completely disconnected from mainstream, middle-class (read: white) America. In 2005 this view seems quaint, but 40 years ago it was anything but.

As we celebrated MLK Day in church yesterday, we made the standard one-time shift in our musical selections: both the choir and the congregation sang “Negro spirituals” instead of the 19th- and 20th-century European-American hymns we usually sing.

The ephemerality of this one-time change has bothered me for several years now. If these songs are so worthwhile, why do we save them up for the Sunday before the third Monday in January? What point are we making by singing these songs this weekend in particular? And what does it say that practically all the people doing the singing are European-Americans from the suburbs? When we as a choir try to infuse a bit more “rhythm” into our performance, isn’t it a rather lame gesture? (In any event, it’s usually a futile effort. Our choir remains resolutely locked into square eighth notes and diatonic scales.)

I know I’m sounding like a guilty, liberal, self-criticizing curmudgeon, but for some reason, the fact that our congregation is overwhelmingly white struck me yesterday.

I always feel as though I should attend one of the official commemorations of the life of this great man–and I always blow it off and treat the day like just another free day on which I don’t have to work. And then I’m always sorry about it.

Categories: ,

You can’t go back to college again

Published
by
Dave
on January 7, 2006
in midlife
. 12 Comments

I’ve been in Chapel Hill, NC now for about 29 hours, having come here to attend PodcasterCon2006. My brother Howard, one of the other Word Nerds, was here as well.

Howard and I were undergraduates here in the 1970s. I graduated over 30 years ago, and Howard 28 years ago. Chapel Hill is where I met my wife, and we got married while we were graduate students in Dramatic Art here.

Chapel Hill is one of those college towns you never, ever forget once you have been a student (or even a resident). It is the essence of youth and intellectual ferment. Even now, in the dead of winter with no classes in session, there’s a buzz in the atmosphere. It feels like a cool, happening, important place.

And when you’re 52 years old and in town on your own for the first time in about 25 years, it also feels like a very young place.

Last night I had checked into my hotel about halfway between Chapel Hill and Durham, and I decided to drive back into town and stroll around on Franklin Street, the main drag. This was an activity I did countless times in my late adolescence and early adulthood. I learned to be an independent person in this town, learned to spend and save my own money, drink beer, browse for books in a bookshop–in short, to define my adult personality.

This time, however, for the first time in my life, I felt out of place on Franklin Street. A few of the same businesses are still here as were here 30 years ago, and the restaurants and snackbars are the same kinds of places we freqented as young people. But last night I looked at my reflection in the store windows, and I saw an old guy. Not even a mature professor-type, but an old guy.

My undergraduate and masters-degree years faded into history long ago, but I’ve also passed the age at which I could dream of bringing my Ph.D. in German to this school to be a faculty member. That is, I’m now too old to re-enter this community in any legitimate way–except maybe, in 13-15 years, as a retiree.

At dinner tonight, Howard pointed out that our (baby-boomer) generation tends to view ourselves as stuck in age somewhere between 18 and 25 years old. I think he’s right. We somehow assume we can stay in that young-adult mode forever. But we need to let it go and allow ourselves to become “mature adults.”

I love it here in Chapel Hill, it brings back great memories. But it sure is a stark reminder of the inexorable passage of time. And at the same time, I think my pensive regret at being an older person in Chapel Hill is precisely a reflection of that baby-boomer sense of entitlement to our years of youth.

Categories: , ,

Thoughts from PodcasterCon2006

Published
by
Dave
on January 7, 2006
in podcasting
. 4 Comments

I am writing this from the Hampton Inn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, after the first (annual, I hope) PodcasterCon meeting, .

This was the first podcaster meeting of any sort I have ever attended. I was unable to fly across the country to go to the Portable Media Expo in Ontario, and I missed last month’s Washington, DC, podcasters meet-up because of an ice storm. (Will B., my hat’s off to you for attending! Glad I met you in Chapel Hill!)

I attended three sessions, in one of which I was a nominal discussion leader. In the morning I was at the session by Rob Walch and Stephen Eley on the 411 of Podcasting–an introductory session for people interested in getting into podcasting. This was simpler than I needed to do, but I thought I might be able to contribute to the discussion, and I ended up being the quasi-official audio recorder of the session. It was very good to meet Rob and Stephen, both of whom I had admired for some time on the podosphere (and, in the case of Stephen, on the Yahoo Prius group).

Lunch was an interesting, somewhat crowded experience in Murphey Hall of UNC, but I did meet a couple of other people whom I knew only by their voices–in particular Chad Barnard and his wife Amanda, of Me and the Bean. I also saw, but did not meet, Mur Lafferty of Geek Fu Action Grip, and Swoopy and Derek of Skepticality. (Derek looked very strong and in good shape, considering his recent health problems.) I also did a video interview with Joseph of the Mac Pro Podcast, and was interviewed, along with my brother, by Beau and Kevin of the Attack of the Nerds podcast.

After lunch I attended a very interesting session on copyright and intellectual property issues, led by Derrick Oien.

My last session of the day was an “open session” on the use of music in podcasting, with several great and thoughtful participants and led by Chad Barnard and Tom Shad. I was at least nominally a discussion leader of this one; I held my mike and recorded it (and said a couple of possibly worthwhile things as well).

After delivering Howard, the North Carolina Nerd, back to his car so he could drive west, I re-joined the group at Fuse, a bar directly across Rosemary Street from a house where my brother Howard and I lived for a semester as undergraduates. (That slum-dwelling house has been razed and replaced with a new condo building.)

Enormous thanks are due to Brian Russell for single-handedly organizing this event. It was fantastic. It cost us nothing, and Brian fed us lunch and gave us coffee in the morning.

More thoughts on this conference later, I hope. Further information and links to audio recordings of sessions will eventually appear at the PodcasterCon website.

Categories: ,

Time off is wearing me out

Published
by
Dave
on January 1, 2006
in midlife and winter
. 6 Comments

Tomorrow, Monday the 2nd of January, is my last day off from teaching before returning from winter break.

I am oh-so-very ready to return. Not because I look forward to rising at 5:15 AM, or even to having responsibilities to students and administrators in three different schools. Rather, I am looking forward to having some structure to my day.

The last ten days of Christmas break have been days of sloth for me. True, I completely produced two half-hour podcasts and recorded five others. But I’ve also spent the whole time sitting on my bottom, causing the discs in my lower back to compress further. I should have exercised–instead, I took too many naps. My wife and daughter and I all have acid indigestion this evening from all the junk food we’ve eaten the last several days. And above all, my motivation level has dropped to zero or below.

There are plenty of things I should have done during the break. I have checkbook registers to balance, bills to pay, midterm exams to write, tax records to prepare, and general cleaning, filing and straightening to do. Yet I’ve watched old movies on TV and slept very late every day.

Ah well. I should let it go. I think the worst thing about the break, really, is the guilt I feel now for not being “productive.”

The RIAA strikes again

Published
by
Dave
on December 26, 2005
in music
. 3 Comments

I don’t want to get into a lot of “podcast-proselytizing” in this blog, but this piece from today’s Washington Post caught my eye:

“Internet Illiterate” Mom Sued Over Music Downloads

The RIAA has given Patricia Santangelo, a 43-year-old divorced mother of two, a lovely Christmas gift: a lawsuit for music piracy because some kid (not her own kid) got on her computer and downloaded a couple songs. Are they serious? Twelve-year-old kids? Deceased grandmothers who don’t own computers? Divorced moms?

I actually am not a fan of KaZaa (or however you spell/capitalize it) downloading. I think if rights are owned, you really shouldn’t download music tracks for free. It just seems a bit tacky not to pay anybody anything at all for a song.

But this is really beyond the pale. Between Sony’s installing secret quasi-spyware on your computer whenever you buy one of their CDs and the RIAA’s suing computer-illiterate soccer moms for illegal downloading, it seems clear to me that the end is near for Big Music. (And the end’s been on the horizon for a couple years now.)

It’s a shame there’s not yet a great publicity machine for “independent” artists, because there are some genius musicians out there that haven’t made it into Big Media yet (if they ever will). The difference, though, between the music biz now and that of 15 years ago is that now those artists can actually sell their work on places like CDBaby and other web sites, and actually get much of the money that results from the transaction.

Here’s hoping that more “major artists” will see their way clear to jump off the Big Music bandwagon and shift the way we look at popular music.

Categories: ,

More on Christmas

Published
by
Dave
on December 25, 2005
in winter
. 1 Comment

As it happens, there’s a good piece in today’s Washington Post about the history of the Christmas celebration, particularly in the U.S.

I know I’m not the first one to complain about all the panic and consumerism around this season–I’ve been hearing this all my life, in fact. But Penne L. Restad’s piece gives me a nice, clear perspective on this history of my own anxiety.

(I think you have to register to read the Post online; sorry. But it is free.)

Too much podcasting

Published
by
Dave
on December 23, 2005
in podcasting
. 1 Comment

Since it’s Christmas weekend, my partners in The Word Nerds and I agreed that we’d “take it easy” by not recording a new show, but “just” putting out a retrospective of the past nine months.

Therefore, I’ve spent at least nine hours each day of the past two days listening to old programs and assembling our retrospective edition. I finished posting it just minutes ago. I think I worked more on this one, at least as far as post-production is concerned, than I did on any previous edition of our show.

All right, I’m finished now. It should be up and ready for everybody to hear.

Categories:

I gotcha season to be jolly, right here!

Published
by
Dave
on December 23, 2005
in midlife and religion
. 7 Comments

It’s the night before the night before Christmas. Several thoughts have danced in my mind the past couple days:

  • It goes without saying, maybe; but it must be awfully hard to be non-Christian in late December in most of the Northern Hemisphere. Everything revolves around this holiday we now refer to as “Christmas.” Late December (starting, of course, about October 15) seems to be all about Christmas. (Although I must say, I can’t find anywhere in my New Testament where it claims that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born in a European forest four days after the winter solstice.) On behalf of sensitive Christians everywhere, I apologize to all of you non-Christians for the European-American culture shoving this holiday down your throats.
  • The whole “Christmas giving” thing is just about the exchange of value. I’ve realized this this year, finally, for the first time. “How much are you spending on me?” This is a question I’ve heard, in some form or other, from siblings, spouse and others. My God, why don’t we just give each other the money? Or better still, stop pursuing this whole business of “shopping for your Christmas list” and all the associated guilt trips. Or maybe best of all, just mandate that everybody has to go out and spend, say, at least half of one percent of their annual salary on retail crap before the end of the year. We’d still incur painful credit card debt in January, but at least we’d have less of a sense of panic about the actual shopping.
  • Expectations are so high for this holiday that people get crazy. The only murder that I was ever aware of happening near me was Christmas Eve 1991. Two brothers living across the street from me in Nashville got into an argument, and one shot the other dead late at night–thankfully missing Santa and the reindeer. There’s just too much damn pressure. Why don’t we just run Thanksgiving again, shall we? Eat a lot and watch television, and either skip the gifts or just go together to the mall and spend our required percentage to keep the retailers (and office-party performers like me) in business.
  • If I don’t hear another radio “Christmas song” this weekend, I won’t be sorry. I do love Vince Guaraldi and his trio, but the music from the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special is about all I can endure at this point.
  • Finally, the ultimate insult to the “non-believers” appeared in the evening news today, the day before what the Germans refer to as Holy Evening: it was announced that the FBI has been spying on mosques since 2002. Peace on earth, goodwill toward (non-Muslim) men, I guess.

I’m eager for this holiday to be over with and to get back to my routine. I do, however, appreciate the 10 days off from school here in mid-winter.

Categories: ,

Switch to our mobile site