A Post for My Past

I think I was about 11 years old when I discovered Gordon Korman.

 

If you haven’t heard the name, he’s an incredibly prolific author of children’s books.  He was one of the few authors I could name as a kid.  Him and Beverly Cleary were probably it.

 

I stumbled across his books quite by accident, flipping through the Young Adult collection.  The title of the book?  Beware the Fish.

 

A great title, right?  A title like that is funny, but it also implies that the book could be about pretty much anything.

 

As it turns out, it was part of a series that revolved around two characters named Bruno and Boots.  Which wasn’t terribly important.

 

Here’s what was important.

 

First, the book was very, very funny.  To this day, I don’t often laugh out loud while reading, even if I think the book in question is hilarious.  But Korman made me laugh.  (A Semester In the Life of a Garbage Bag is probably my favorite.)

 

Second, there were many, many books, even back then.  Korman is some kind of YA author-machine, as near as I can tell.  The man puts out at least two or three books a year.  This is probably what cemented him in my brain, since I kept going back to the library and finding more books he had written.

 

But here’s the big thing – the author biography at the end of every book announced that Korman had published his first novel when he was 12 years old.

 

And of course, I was reading these books, and thinking, “Well, I’m (almost) 12 years old...”

 

And so I decided to write a novel.

 

There was one central problem with this plan, namely that I didn’t know how to write a novel.  I read voraciously, but it never occurred to me that plots had to be constructed, and dialogue written a certain way, and that it would be a good plan to have an actual story idea before moving forward.

 

Ultimately, I tried to write a novel three different times. 

 

My first attempt was supposed to be a fictionalized account of an extended visit to my cousin’s house.  My cousin had, like, horses and a barn and a lot of land to run around on, so I thought I could create a cool story from that.  Ultimately, I wrote a paragraph and quit, because I had no idea what I was doing.

 

Not long after that, an aunt gave me a copy of The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which continued the story of Huck as written by Twain.

 

At the time, I didn’t know anything about the concept of fan fiction, but now I was aware that for some reason it was okay to write a sequel to a book you didn’t write.  So I figured I would continue to tell the story that Further, uh, furthered.

 

I think I came up with a title.  And I remember I called the first chapter Up in Smoke, and I was going to start it with Huck escaping up a chimney.  I don’t recall why.

 

I do remember that I wrote a paragraph, and stopped, because once again the concept of “plot” was juuust outside my reach.

 

Somewhere in that time frame, I read a book about a red fox, which I swear was called The Red Fox, but the internet isn’t helping me to find it, and anyway the plot is a mystery to me now.  I do remember it made foxes sound really interesting, and that it was kind of like Bambi in that it didn’t involve human interaction.  It was strictly a story about animals.

 

Somewhere in my brain was the book Rascal, which featured a young boy and his pet raccoon. 

 

 I started writing a novel about a boy and his red fox. 

 

I recall that I got a little farther that time.  Maybe a few pages.  I was in the seventh grade by then, and I was tasked with writing a short story, so I wrote one that featured the boy, his family, and the fox, and I remember it revolved around Christmas.

 

I never gave up on writing that novel.  Eventually, time just got away from me, and I lost whatever notebook it was written in.  And then I discovered Stephen King, whose novels were four and five and eight hundred pages long, and I started to think of that as being “real” novel length,, and who in the world could write 500 pages worth of novel?

 

Not me.

 

So I sort of forgot about it.

 

And then years passed, and I wrote a few novels, and I couldn’t get an agent, so I put them out myself.

 

Then one day, a publisher wanted to put out a novel that I wrote.  In ebook.  And on paper!

 

Here’s the paper version:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Calling-The-Series-Volume/dp/1937733297/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1349112996&sr=8-2&keywords=blood+calling

 

And here’s the Kindle version:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Calling-Book-ebook/dp/B009IYB5FI/ref=la_B005OGX39K_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1349113026&sr=1-6

 

I’m 36 now, three times the age I was when I thought it would be really cool to write books for a living.  And while the “for a living” part is probably a ways off (if it’s possible at all), well, I still get to wake up every day for the rest of my life and know that I wrote a novel, and found a publisher willing to put it out.

 

I’ve managed to do a lot of cool things in my lifetime, things my 12-year-old self would never have expected me to do.  But this was one thing 12-year-old me thought would be pretty cool.

 

So high five, 12-year-old me.

The Return of Ben Folds Five and Aimee Mann

About five years ago, I realized I’d finally reached an age where I just wasn’t all that compelled to seek out new music anymore.

 

It makes sense.  I stopped listening to the radio years ago, with the exception of those two minutes in the morning when my alarm clock goes off. 

 

What this means is, I mostly only buy new stuff by people whose work I’ve liked in the past.  Or things that get so popular that they’re sort of inescapable.  In other words, the Adeles of the world.

 

(Or, you know, the popular stuff that hits Glee, and makes me seek out the originals.)

 

So in the way, it was kind of magical that I felt compelled to pick up two CDs (I know!  In 2012!) on the same day.

 

The first was Aimee Mann’s newest, Charmer.

 

Aimee was one of my last major discoveries.  Much like everyone else who wasn’t a music critic, I bumped into her wealth of material when I saw the movie Magnolia.  The movie was interesting, but I was more struck by the quality of the songs.  I not only bought the CD, but picked up the sheet music as well.

 

After that, I dove into her back catalogue.  I bought the previous releases.  I picked up Bachelor No 2, which was, at the time, her current album.  I even went back and got some of her work with Til Tuesday, which was equally great.

 

The thing of it is, if you like some of Aimee’s work, I can’t really see how you wouldn’t like all of it.  She isn’t the AC/DC of indie rock, putting out the exact same album each time, but she has a definite niche, it’s a small one, and she concentrates on hitting the exact same target every time.

 

And so it is with Charmer.  It’s mostly mid-tempo, just like her other work.  It contains bright melodies (for the most part) and charmingly sad lyrics (for the most part). 

 

And… well, it’s an Aimee Mann recording, pretty much like all the others.  It’s a little more keyboard-riffy, I suppose.  But otherwise, it’s sharp, and pleasant, and in general it’s fun to sing along to, loudly.  What more could you ask for?

 

On the same day, Ben Folds Five released their first album as a band in twelve or thirteen years, depending on how you look at it.

 

I was a fan of the group going back to Whatever and Ever Amen.  I still remember catching the back half of One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces on MTV, late at night, back in college.  Here were three insanely talented players who were really, really rocking out.  No guitar.  Just…

 

It kind of blew my mind.  So I bought Whatever, and then went back and picked up their self-titled CD, which was also pretty great.

 

Naked Baby Photos came out, and I sort of bought it reluctantly.  It was kind of fun to get the odd little drips and drabs and rare stuff, but it didn’t exactly feel essential. 

 

Not long after that, they put out The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, which was… odd.  There were songs on it, yes, but several of them were sort of strange and wander-y and experimental.  An I read somewhere that the album had been chopped and shuffled a bunch of times, turning an actual song sequence into something else entirely.

 

I liked it, but not as well as the previous work.  And then the band fell apart.

 

Ben himself went on to a nice little solo career, releasing albums that were sometimes more mature (Songs for Silverman) and some were kind of iffy (Way to Normal has some great songs, and some other stuff that’s just forgettable) and a strange little experiment where he put out three EPs, and then combined them into one record, only he dropped some songs and added a song from a soundtrack…

 

The thing of it is, I sort of forgot how much I really liked the guy until recently, when I picked up his Retrospective, and I ended up listening with a sense of awe at just how many great songs Ben had created over the course of a fairly short career.  I ended up rediscovering songs (You Don’t Know Me, Learn to Live with What You Are) that I didn’t remember, but which were minor masterpieces.

 

And then, of course Ben Folds Five got back together.  And they made The Sound of the Life of the Mind.

 

The thing of it is, I’m still a little torn up about the whole thing.  Ben Folds Five made beautiful music, and also snotty and bratty music, and while it’s fun to listen to the old CDs, there comes a time when you shouldn’t really be allowed to write songs like that anymore.

 

So what did we get out of this return to the group?

 

Well, we got the bass and drums back, and I have to admit I kind of forgot how much I missed it in this context.  These three guys are LOCKED into each other.  They are not a piano with some bass and some drums.  They’re a true trio, bouncing off of one another, and I dig it.  I dig it a lot.

 

And then there are the songs.  They always had ballads, whether it was Ben Alone (The Luckiest) or together (Boxing, Evaporated).  And the ballads are here too, and they’re just as pretty as ever.  So that’s all to the good.

 

There’s a leftover here, from Ben’s last solo excursion with Nick Horby, where Nick wrote all the words.  There’s an actual BFF collaboration song, and there aren’t a ton of those.

 

There’s a little experimentation (Erase Me, the opener, is a kind of cousin to The Unauthorized Biography, I think) and some semi-rock (Do It Anyway) and there’s some brattiness (Draw a Crowd) which feels like something they should have grown out of by now, but it fits, and it gives you a nice tinge of nostalgia.

 

So…

 

I read a movie review once, wherein it was stated that the movie was funny, but in a way that made you smile the whole time, instead of laughing, and I think that’s what we’ve got here.  Ben and Aimee and crew are back again, and there isn’t much in the way of new tricks.  But the old ones are just as fun as ever.

What I'm Watching: TV Returns!

 

Community

 

Recently, a friend of mine asked me to name the best comedy of all time.  He was pushing for Community, which he and his family watch and rewatch with a near-religious fervor.  I said I didn’t know, though I offered up Scrubs, a show with a similar formula: Ensemble, lots of flights of fancy, an emotional core that pops up in the last three to five minutes of every episode.

 

The more I thought about it, though, the more I came to feel that while I do love me some comedy, I think that other shows are funnier.  Off the top of my head, I rattled off Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls (technically a drama), and Supernatural, which is supposed to be a horror show…

 

Ultimately, we shared some nice memories, but he held onto Community as the top tier, the best of the best.

 

And that’s fine.

 

My wife and I have been powering through the show these last few weeks.  We’re a couple of episodes away from finishing season 2, and after that we should be able to get to season 3 just in time for season 4 to start.  I imagine it will be a bit of a struggle to keep up, but, hey, it’s only been renewed for 13 episodes. 

 

I think the speed we’re getting through the show would indicate that we love it with all our hearts, but no, I’d say it’s more of a very strong like.  My wife can’t stand certain episodes, and I went from thinking I wanted to own the show to DVD to suspecting that I could wait until the whole thing is crammed into a cheap box set and sold at $20 for the complete series. 

 

The thing of it is, it’s a fun show.  It doesn’t talk down to the audience, it really does truck in bizarre and impressive writing, and the show is different just about every week, tackling various bits of pop culture in its own special way.

 

I think it’s great that it does that, but it also means that the show can be alienating.  Recently, I saw the episode where they riffed on Pulp Fiction and My Dinner with Andre.  I love Pulp, and I know quite a bit about Andre, even though I’ve never gotten a chance to sit down and watch it.

 

My wife, however, barely remembers Pulp, and Andre meant little to nothing to her.  Subsequently, large chunks of the episode didn’t register with her.  She liked it, she was amused by it, but it wasn’t “great.”

 

And that, I think, is Community’s fatal flaw: it is what The Big Bang Theory claims to be, a show that’s deeply enmeshed in nerd/geek culture.  And the sad fact is, a show that’s deeply enmeshed in nerd/geek culture, and not just playing at it, was never long for this world.

 

I have heard that the next season is going to be starting with a Hunger Games pastiche, which is the kind of thing that might have saved it two seasons ago.  But now?  On a Friday night?  With new showrunners?  The true fans will watch to the bitter end, and the show will vanish.

 

Which is too bad.  There’s a lot of love going into it.

 

Warehouse 13

 

What can I say?  13 started as a pleasant show with minor returns.  It was fast and funny, and it locked onto a formula and made it work early on.  Then it got really good, and demonstrated what you can do to an audience once you’ve engaged their emotions.

 

And the show is doing so well, it’s gone from 13 episodes a season to 20.  How is that not a win?

 

I’ve been liking these season a lot so far, but I find myself troubled with the fact that I don’t see how it can end with anything other than a reboot, wherein the show more-or-less casts this season aside as though it never happened. 

 

This might be why I don’t write for Warehouse 13.

 

I must admit, I’m still amazed that I love this show so much, and that my life loves it as well.  If I had to nail it down, I’d guess it’s because at its heart, every hour they put out is really just an excuse to hang out with these fun characters again, and maybe somewhere in there we’ll solve a mystery, too.

 

It’s like a warm hug from your TV.  Truly.

 

Glee

 

Man, I was a little afraid of this one.  Glee has finally returned, with much of a the cast sheered away and the show now functioning as both itself and its spin-off, wherein Rachel and Kurt go to New York.

 

Having watched the first episode, most of this seems to the good, though much of the goings-on were about pressing reboot on the show again.  The last season ended with the Glee club triumphing, and suddenly being big winners at the school.  Now all that has been undone.

 

In a sense, the show is a fresh pilot, and while it wasn’t as great as the first pilot, it was solid enough that I didn’t want to walk away in disgust.

 

So yeah, I’ll be here through the season.

 

My big curiosity now, however, is what’s going to happen to the show audience-wise.  They have the X Factor as their lead-in, and that show ain’t doing all that great.  And they’re up against a lot of other hard-to-beat shows that aren’t going to go away any time soon.

 

I suspect they’ll get a full year, just to make it to a point where they can syndicate the show and get some back end money.  But unless American Idol gives them a serious lift, I think we’re watching the slow winding down of Glee.  And if it plays about as well as last night did, well, that’s just fine.

The Author Vanishes

So I kind of abandoned this place again.

 

Well, no, that’s not true.  Actually, I wrote probably a dozen updates, all of them perhaps 1000 words long, and then I trashed them because I kind of hated them. 

 

It’s a stress thing.

 

Why am I stressed?

 

Some of it is pretty normal stuff.  My daughter started kindergarten, which means there’s a new schedule at my household. 

 

Previous to that, we had a summer that was so busy I think we got one weekend off from running somewhere, all the time.

 

Heck, my little one was gone for a week, and so we scheduled time with all the people we literally hadn’t seen in months.

 

We even saw a movie in a movie theater for the second time this year.

 

My wife and I are also prepping to start a second adoption process, which means rearranging our entire house.

 

In the midst of all of this, I was working on another novel.  And trying to get my movie-making book done, because it should have been done a long time ago.

 

And I wrote a little novella that I was hoping would make it into the Red Iris Books anthology.  I was trying to do Lovecraft justice, and I think I did okay, and as it turns out Red Iris agrees, so that’ll be out before too long.

 

Which is good, so you should totally check out their web site here:

 

http://redirisbooks.com/

 

Also you should click that link so you can see the new artwork for Blood Calling, which is no longer going to be published by me.  No.  It’s going to be published by Red Iris Books.

 

Along with the two sequels.  And Baby Teeth. 

 

Just this morning I sent Red Iris my final edit, which means we just have to get through the final copyedit and then the book will launch for the second time, and then we get to start all over with Misfits.  And also Baby Teeth.  And then The Enforcers.

 

And I’m already really tired.  Did I mention that?

 

But wait, there’s more!

 

In the middle of working on those edits, I got an email from my writing partner, Stephen Unger.  He had a manager who wanted to see The Paper Castle: The Feature Film Version.  So I looked at the script, and gave Stephen some notes (because I just didn’t have time to edit it myself…) and now one manager has passed it to another and… something might happen?

 

I am quite certain I shouldn’t say anything else, because that would probably be a major faux pas.

 

So yeah.  I’m tired.

 

Which means that all the little bits that usually come together when I start writing aren’t.

 

Meanwhile, here’s what you need to know:

 

The Red Iris Anthology will be out… soonish.  There will even be a physical version!  Which means that people can finally buy a physical book with my work in it.  This will be very exciting to some people.

 

The Blood Calling books will be out as we edit them.  They’re being reworked a bit.  If you want to buy them again, to support a new author, go ahead.  But they won’t be all that different from the original versions.

 

Because of this, by the way, the old versions will be coming down off Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I already pulled the Smashwords versions weeks ago.

 

At the rate we’re going, I’m guessing I probably won’t finish another new novel until the end of the year.  We shall see.  We shall, indeed.

 

And now, I need to get back to editing.  I shall return.

Reality TV, Glee, and Jealousy

I’ve watched a few TV shows die over the years.  I caught Firefly when it was first shown out of order, and tried to get people to watch, only no one would listen.  Now, ten years later, people are still wandering up to me and asking if I’ve seen it yet.

I used to rant more about it.  I do it less now.

I also caught a show called Drive, which was cancelled after four episodes, with two never making it to air (you can buy all six online).  And Wonderfalls, which ran four episodes, and then wandered onto DVD as a complete 13 episode tale.

That one was mind-blowing to me, with the series not even getting to the halfway point.  And it was a solid series, that later developed a touch of a cult following.  You can still get it on DVD even as I type this.

Most of those shows, however, didn’t go quite so quietly as one I ran across recently.  A short little series called The Next Big Thing: NY.

I found the way the show was handled fascinating, though frankly I didn’t like the show much.  It was a reality series that mostly followed this guy named Trapper, who is some kind of musical mentor/manager type.  He had a cadre of kids, and spent his time coaching them towards musical endeavors, like making albums and getting on Broadway.

Some of his kids have been on commercials and in movies and such as well, but I don’t know if he had anything to do with that.

Trapper might be good at what he does, and in fact he must be, because he has two assistants and a massive rehearsal area, and knowing what it costs to rent space in New York the guy has to be doing well for himself.

But man, what a not-fun guy to watch.  He yells a lot, frequently at his performers.  And at least two plotlines involved him lying to people in elaborate ways for reasons I didn’t understand.  As in, he told a producer that one of his kids was also part of a sister singing act.  Only they weren’t.  So he got the kids and made them into an act.

And then he held some benefit and used it entirely as an excuse to show off his kid collection, in hopes that they would get more work, because of course that means he gets more money as well.  Or not.  The show didn’t exactly explain that.

The point is, I can’t say that I could spend time with him in real life.

And then there are the kids.  A couple of them, I really liked.  They were down to earth, funny, talented, and working hard to get jobs.

But some of them.  Ugh.  In particular, one girl was like a real-life Veruca Salt.  She spent her dad’s money recording pop songs and making a music video (more on that in a moment) and she got some sort of massive party for her 17th birthday, where she also got to perform with her girl group and with some guy she liked, and her mom made sure that a bunch of buff dudes were walking around in their underwear serving people.

(One hopes that they were informed, vigorously, that most of the girls at the party were underage.)

Oh, and when she was told there would be a party, she was mad that there were only going to be 100 people there.  Yes.

Now, granted, I don’t think these people were Jersey Shore hateful, and maybe that’s why the show failed.  It was a behind the scenes show with people who didn’t suck enough to be interesting, or who you cared about enough to, well, care.

And then there was the scheduling.

The show debuted right after The Glee Project, which is a fairly plum spot, and pretty well-matched, what with the whole kids and show business thing.  But then, well, things went South in a hurry.

Next ran after Project for two weeks.  Then, the third week, it was shoved to Wednesday, at six PM.  Granted, they tossed a promo up during Project to alert you to this fact, but it was clear it was a last-minute shrug of a decision, throwing this show into a time slot no one was watching or looking for it. 

It ran there for another week, bringing the number of aired episodes to four.  Then, the next week, it aired an episode at 5 PM, and the second at 6 PM, and that was the finale, and boom, the show was over.

Yikes.

Granted, I already stated I wasn’t much of a fan of the show, but I was curious just how dire the whole thing was.  So I hopped on YouTube to find out whatever happened to the music video I wrote about a handful of paragraphs ago.

Now, it’s worth noting that the video was by the Veruca Salt girl, that it looks reasonably professional, and that the song was reasonably catchy.  Neither great nor awful. 

Two days after the episode aired, it had a few hundred views.

A week later, it had barely cracked 1000. 

I gotta be honest, I felt both good and horrible about this.  The fact is, a large chunk of the video was shown on a TV show on a cable channel.  That’s a major, major push.  Short of hiring a major music producer/director, which would probably run into the millions of dollars, this thing had some serious backing.

And yet, maybe 1500 people have looked at it.  That’s not going viral.  That’s going anti-viral.

Despite the fact that I didn’t care for the show, I stated that I felt a little bad for the people involved, and I stand by that.  A bunch of people made the show, and they had jobs, and now they don’t.  Some of these people seem genuinely nice, and fun, and talented, and they had gotten on TV, and that’s going to lead them pretty much nowhere, because no one was watching.

I’ll come back to that, too.

I already mentioned The Glee Project, which I’m watching again because my wife wants to and now it’s half-over anyway, so I guess we should just wait and see what happens, y’know?   I mean, we’re almost there.

We’re talking, of course, about a show that’s tied to another show that’s slowly dying, and I joked with my wife that the stars of Glee are a lot more willing to drop by for a visit because they need the money now that they’re off the show.  Or about to be off the show, when it finally limps off the air a year from now having created just enough episodes to make it to syndication.

This year, there are a lot of talented people on the show, and the singing is often first-rate.  So that’s nice.

But something is kind of off about the show, and it took me a while to figure out what it is, and really, there’s a bizarre letdown factor here.

Last year was kind of exciting.  They were coming off year two of Glee, the ratings were way, way, up, and the Project itself had a few fun twists in it.  Four winners (kinda).  The return of all the kids at the end, so everyone could cheer their friends.

There were moments.  And now, we see those moments again, and they’ve lost some of their luster.

There are other issues, of course.  After last year, it’s clear that we’re not watching a singing competition, so much as we’re watching Ryan trying to turn these people into characters he can pop into his show.  He’s not collecting talent so much as he’s collecting dolls.  (“Whoah, a Muslim!  I don’t have one of those yet!”)

And then there are the contestants, who keep talking about how badly they want this, about how important this role is, and then one of them flat-out admits they’ve never heard a particular song, only it was on Glee, so clearly they aren’t what you’d call a huge fan.

I’ll be curious to see if they’re putting up casting notices for a third year of this show, when the finale hits in a handful of weeks.

Speaking of things going through a revamp, people are now backing out of American Idol, now that the mutual fame bump has carried everyone as far as they can go.  Steven is back together with his band, and they’re heading out on the road.  The bad news is, they’re also putting out a new album, and the song they sang on Idol demonstrated that their songwriting chops have taken a serious hit.

On the other hand, they’ve got an hour of hits and more than a handful of filler, and they’ll make some money and that will be nice for them.

And Jennifer, of course, has this other TV show, and a new boyfriend, so she’s stepping down too.

There’s talk of Randy leaving as well.

Oddly, I was just having a conversation with some friends, wherein we were talking about when enough is enough.  I joked to my wife that if they offered me 16 million dollars to do Idol for a year, she should let me do it.  Even if I’m not home for seven months straight, at the end we’re set for life.

Randy has 11 years in now, and I’m sure his checks have gotten sizeable.  His coffers are filled.  And this is his side job.  He can wander away from everything secure in the knowledge that both he and his kids will never, ever, ever have to work again.

Of course, there’s a bigger question there.  If he leaves, would it help the show?  Would Fox get two more years if he left, and they brought in all new judges?  Would the show finally sink to the point where they decide to get rid of it?

How much does the nation love Randy Jackson?

For that matter, how much does the nation love the idols they picked?  There are 11 of them now, and a bunch of people who lost who are still doing pretty well for themselves. 

That’s the thing of it, really.  I find myself looking at all these people, on all these shows, and all of them want to be stars.  They want to get out into the world, and be creative, and be loved for it.  And maybe they don’t need to be rich, or really famous, they need just enough love that they don’t have to go into an office each day.

And maybe that’s what kind of tears at me, as I watch these people, on shows both well-loved and massive and barely noticed and forgotten.

It’s that two-sided thing, where you see people getting there, becoming someone who just gets to wake up every day and do what they wanna do, and you think, “I could do that.  Why don’t I get that?  What do they have that I don’t?”

And you see them fail, and you kind of laugh, and say, “I don’t get this, and you don’t get it either, so at least the world is kind of fair for a moment.”

It’s a strange thing, really, the human mind, that it wants people to succeed because it means you can, and then you want them to fail because someone has something you don’t.

A Nice Man Makes Me Feel Stupid

Donald J. Sobol was probably the first man to ever make me feel stupid.

Granted, I don’t think he did it on purpose.  But at some point in my young life, one of his Encyclopedia Brown books was thrust into my hands. 

The format of the book was simple.  Various short mysteries were presented, and then Encyclopedia Brown would make some sort of vague statement, and then, if you were very, very, very smart, you (and Encyclopedia, naturally) would solve the case.

Of course, if you couldn’t figure it out, you could always flip to the back and learn the answer.

Over the years, I read several of the books, and I can count the number of times I solved a mystery on one hand.  Actually, I can count the number of times I solved a mystery on no hands.

I never solved a single mystery.

Really.  Not one. 

What’s worse is, over the years, some of the books got new titles, or were reissued with new artwork, and I’d find myself sitting at home reading a mystery I’d already read once before.

And then I would fail to solve the same mystery a second time.

One would think this would cause me to give up on the mystery genre altogether, but no.  Over the years, I read several books of this type, and I almost always failed to beat the book at its own game.

Granted, this wasn’t really my fault.  Most of the mysteries involved knowing some totally random fact that a kid my age had no reason to know. 

Ultimately, I was much more entranced by the companion volumes the author produced, which went under the title of Weird and Wonderful facts.  It was trivia stuff, with no real agenda or story beyond, “Here’s some crazy stuff about the world we live in.”

And perhaps that’s what I took away from Mr. Sobol, in the end.  I might not have gotten to feel “smart” reading his books, as I got mystery after mystery wrong.  But I certainly learned a few things.

And what can be better than a little failure and a little knowledge?

A new Encyclopedia Brown book came out a couple of years ago, after a very, very long hiatus.  I considered picking it up at the time, but in the end realized that certain childhood pleasures aren’t always as much fun as an adult.

But maybe now I’ll pick up the book, just to see if I really am older and wiser now than I was then.

And hey, even if I’m not, I’ll still learn a thing or two.

My Flash Mob Story

Okay, I’m just going to admit that it’s been way too long since I updated here.

Subsequently, if you come back here from time to time, you will now be subjected to a story that I have quite literally never told anyone:

The Time I Was In a Flash Mob

Now, there’s a bit of backstory here, so hold on for a moment.

First, the term Flash Mob didn’t exist when I did this, which might explain why I sort of mentally filed it away and forgot about it (there’s another reason, but I’ll come to it at the end).  The world of YouTube and cheap digital cameras has made it easy to capture and upload these types of things for the world to see.

But this was back in, I’m going to say, 1992.  If my research is accurate, the name Flash Mob didn’t exist until 2003.  And if anyone had videotaped the one I was in, trying to get anyone a copy would have required multiple VCRs and a lot of free time and postage expenses. 

It was a one-shot deal, it was over in two minutes, and then I totally forgot about it.

Here’s how it happened (more backstory, folks!).

Starting in the summer after eighth grade, I began attending a music camp every year.  I would pack up, my family and I would drive to the campus it was held on, they’d drop me off on a Sunday and then come back and get me on a Saturday.

The upshot was, when they came back, they got to see me perform in whatever I’d signed up for.

The rule was, you had to be in at least one large group (choir, band or orchestra) and then you could either take classes or sign up to be in another, smaller group.  I usually did the latter, with Musical Theater being my additional choice.

I just realized, about five minutes ago, that this meant I memorized anywhere from 30-40 minutes of music, plus some dance steps, in five days every year for four years.  I suddenly find the performers on American Idol a lot less impressive.

Anyway.

I passed on musical theater one year so I could take some extra classes.  In particular, 20th Century Music, Commercial Composition, and Choral Choreography.

I took the last class because I was, at that juncture, preparing myself to be a music teacher.  I figured as long as I was there, I might as well learn something that could help me in my future career.  Good gravy, I’m a boring dude.

So, I took the class.  Much of it was about ideas.  Ways to make another concert by a bunch of high school kids more exciting, either through basic choreography, costumes, or staging.  We did some of each. 

And in the middle of it all, we did some dancing.

The man leading the class was, in my estimation, a brilliant dude who had clearly been teaching for a long time and who had a ton of ideas to fall back on.  One of his suggestions was choosing a popular song, locating the music video for that song, and stealing the choreography of the video for your presentation.

Well, he probably said borrowing, but there you go.

In this case, he had selected the Janet Jackson song Rhythm Nation.

By that time, the album was a couple of years old, but it was one of those releases that had clearly grabbed the public consciousness.  It had gone platinum six times.  Everyone at the camp knew it, because all of us were teenage kids deep in the maw of pop culture.

Thinking back on it, I’m especially impressed that he chose a song by a black artist, making it a song all of us, regardless of ethnic background, probably knew it.

He spent a handful of minutes explaining that music videos are, of course, all about takes.  Everyone stands, then falls to their knees, and they do that six times and then they take the one where everyone hits the ground at the same time.

He also explained that no one can dance that much and sing.  In concert, all the people in the back would be dancing like mad while Janet stood up front singing and keeping a basic beat.  It sounds obvious, of course, but something about hearing it stated crystallized it for us. 

He then went through the first couple of minutes of the video, pausing and showing how he broke down the choreography bit by bit, wrote it down, and adapted it for an actual stage with no camera moves.

And we started learning it, one step at a time.

We didn’t do the whole song.  All told, we learned about 80 seconds of actual choreography, along with some simplified dance moves that could be applied to this or any other song.

And then we were stuck.  What to do with this new knowledge?  After all, if you learn how to dance, and show no one, what was the point, really?

The teacher mentioned that there was a courtyard outside the main building where we all ate.  If we waited until the last 15 minutes of the lunch period, we could perform this newly acquired move-busting for a few hundred other kids and teachers.  We all thought this was swell.

He then emphasized that this should be a secret, in order for it to have the most impact.

So we ate, we went to the courtyard, and we waited for the teacher to press play.

What do I remember about it?  I remember being curious about the reaction.  I remember the moment the music started, and about how we’d all been instructed to walk, as through mesmerized, to our appointed dancing place.

I also remember hearing some kid, off on the sidelines, remark to one of my classmates that “he knew some choreography for this song, if you want to learn it.”

Mostly, I remember it being over quickly.  The song started, we walked to our spots, we started dancing, I tried to remember everything I was doing, and then at the end of our routine, the music was still going, and we didn’t have a plan.

So the song kept playing, and we all wandered off in various directions, and then it was over with the firm click of a Stop button.

Was there applause?  Shock?  Surprise?  Did anyone tell me how awesome it was?  I don’t recall, which I suspect means that it wasn’t all that interesting to people.  It was, after all, a music camp.  People constantly burst into song spontaneously, so why NOT have a dance number?

Weirdly, I can’t even remember how well or poorly I danced.  I’m not all that great a dancer, and all I really remember was that the girl next to me was generally worse at remembering her moves, so my only hope was to be better by comparison.

It ended, and we went to class.

Back when the movie Once won an Academy Award for best song, the guy who wrote and sang it got all giddy and called out, “Make Art!”  The problem with art is, of course, that even if you create it, no one has to look at it or care about it.

I went to multiple concerts in college that were attended by less than 20 people.  The folks performing were talented and fun, but people were either busy, or just didn’t care.

And so I wonder: Is it worth it?  Probably to musicians.  They were crossing the country and I’m sure they got paid for the night, regardless of the number of people in the audience.

But for a bunch of kids in a courtyard, with no money coming in?  No fame?  Did we gain anything?

I dunno.

I guess what I’m asking is, what does it mean when you put your art into the world, and is received with a shrug?

Also, I’m glad YouTube didn’t exist in 1992.  Because seriously, I’m not sure anyone wants to see my flailing like that.