This past Saturday evening, my friend Phil passed along a 2012 New Yorker essay by Ray Bradbury. Phil knows that Ray‘s my favorite author. But he probably didn’t realize that Saturday was also Ray’s birth date (a cause for celebration at my house).
Phil texted the article to a group of friends, because it’s about “fire balloons” – also known as sky lanterns, Kongming lanterns or Chinese lanterns. They’re small hot air balloons made of paper and fueled by a small fire source at the bottom.
I can neither confirm nor deny that Phil and his “biker gang” (a bunch of middle-aged folks who go on a late night bicycle ride on the night of the full moon) have launched a few fire balloons during their evening excursions on the bike trail.
Ray Bradbury’s essay about fire balloons is really a lovely tribute to his grandfather, and his childhood memories of Fourth of July and family:
I’d helped my grandpa carry the box in which lay, like a gossamer spirit, the paper-tissue ghost of a fire balloon waiting to be breathed into, filled, and set adrift toward the midnight sky. My grandfather was the high priest and I his altar boy. I helped take the red-white-and-blue tissue out of the box and watched as Grandpa lit a little cup of dry straw that hung beneath it. Once the fire got going, the balloon whispered itself fat with the hot air rising inside.
“The balloon whispered itself fat…” — most of us who fancy ourselves writers would give our right hand and our Smith-Corona for the ability to craft such gorgeous imagery.
But I could not let it go. It was so beautiful, with the light and shadows dancing inside. Only when Grandpa gave me a look, and a gentle nod of his head, did I at last let the balloon drift free, up past the porch, illuminating the faces of my family. It floated up above the apple trees, over the beginning-to-sleep town, and across the night among the stars.
Ray Bradbury’s writing was magical, but the process wasn’t. The dude got up every morning, sat down at his typewriter, and cranked out “content.”
Ray wrote brilliant short stories, novels, essays, TV and movie screenplays, poems… In interviews, he often recounted a story from his childhood, when he went to a traveling carnival and saw a performance from a magician named “Mr. Electrico”:
Seventy-seven years ago, and I’ve remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.” And I decided to.
Wednesday’s Washington Post had an interesting article about “toxic positivity”… that term was new to me, but the article made a lot of sense. A positive mental attitude is a good thing, but not if you’re using it to gloss over, ignore or deny underlying issues.
“It’s a problem when people are forced to seem or be positive in situations where it’s not natural or when there’s a problem that legitimately needs to be addressed that can’t be addressed if you don’t deal with the fact that there is distress or need.”
Stephanie Preston, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
“’Looking on the bright side’ in the face of tragedy of dire situations like illness, homelessness, food insecurity, unemployment or racial injustice is a privilege that not all of us have. So promulgating messages of positivity denies a very real sense of despair and hopelessness, and they only serve to alienate and isolate those who are already struggling… “We judge ourselves for feeling pain, sadness, fear, which then produces feelings of things like shame and guilt. We end up just feeling bad about feeling bad.”
Natalie Dattilo, a clinical health psychologist with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston
For the first (and we pray last) time in our lives, we’re dealing with a very trying trifecta:
Coronavirus pandemic
Collapsing economy
Racial inequalities fomenting civil unrest
It’s weighty stuff. And it’s perfectly normal if it weighs you down.
“Recognize that how you feel is valid, no matter what… It’s okay not to be okay.”
Natalie Dattilo
It’s also perfectly fine to spend our pandemic times “one day at a time” instead of some sort of “everything is fine” charade.
“Making the best of it is accepting the situation as it is and doing the best you can with it, whereas toxic positivity is avoidance of the fact that we’re in a really bad situation.”
Jaime Zuckerman, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Philadelphia
So don’t “put on a happy face” if you’re using it to mask some underlying distress that you need to address.
Chuck Cleaver is one of the best songwriters in the known universe. He’s also a funny dude, in his own unique, gruff-yet-lovable way.
Chuck’s in a band called Wussy, and he and the other lead singer/songwriter in that band, Lisa Walker, do a live set of songs every other Friday night on Facebook. (On the alternate Fridays, their bandmate Mark Messerly plays a set. All the videos are here and are well worth checking out.)
The songs are brilliant. The between-song banter is the icing on the cake. It’s funnier than most network sitcoms. Here’s Chuck from a few weeks ago, going on a rant about old folks. (At age 62, he counts himself among that number). I can relate. My daughter drags me up to St. Vincent de Paul nearly every Sunday because if you’re 50 or older, you get a 25% discount:
In my Catholic grade school, this was a popular saying for the nuns who were my teachers:
But I prefer this take on idleness:
“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”
The Over-the-Rhine area of Cincinnati, just north of downtown, has a rich tradition of brewing beer. The neighborhood got its name from the heavy influx of hard-working German immigrants who started arriving in the mid-1800s. And Germans like their beer.
The neighborhood’s distinctive name comes from the predominantly German mid-19th century immigrants who developed the area and became its early residents. Many walked to work across bridges over the Miami and Erie Canal, which separated the area from downtown Cincinnati. The canal was nicknamed “the Rhine” in reference to the river Rhine in Germany, and the newly settled area north of the canal as “Over the Rhine”.[3][4] In German, the district was called über den Rhein.
Prohibition killed off dozens of breweries in the area. But a few survived. And one of those old breweries is getting a major expansion, thanks to a Cincinnati kid who made his mark selling Boston Lager.
Here’s info from the press release a couple of weeks ago:
The Boston Beer Company and Samuel Adams Cincinnati Brewery announced plans for a significant expansion of the brewery located on Cincinnati’s Central Parkway. The project will be the largest brewery investment in the long and storied history of brewing in Cincinnati.
The substantial brewery enhancement will support the growing demand for products across the Boston Beer portfolio, bringing additional production capabilities to the site, including two highly anticipated canning lines and innovative packing equipment to support brands like Samuel Adams, Angry Orchard, Twisted Tea and Truly Hard Seltzer. Once completed, the brewery will be able to quadruple production in Cincinnati. The project will also add more than one hundred new jobs.
Jim Koch, the founder of The Boston Beer Company, grew up in Cincinnati. His father worked at the Schoenling Brewing Co. building that now houses part of Boston Beer’s local operations. The recipe for Samuel Adams Boston Lager came from Jim’s great-great-grandfather. Now his business is adding more than 100 local jobs.
He (Koch) said the 107 jobs created by the expansion will be the kind of well-paying blue-collar jobs that made up the backbone of Cincinnati’s economy in the days when manufacturing was king.
“When I grew up there were a lot of blue-collar craftsman jobs in Cincinnati, like tool and die at Cincinnati Milacron or General Motors in Norwood,” Koch said. “There were once well-paying union craftsman jobs in Cincinnati, and a lot of them have gone away.”
Koch said he worked with the Teamsters union and the median income of the new jobs being created will be $70,000 a year. The contract covering those jobs is being extended to the 130 existing brewery workers as well.
We need all the positive economic news we can get these days, and this Sam Adams expansion is great news. The supply chain challenges of the pandemic (turns out most PPE is made in China – who knew?) have also made more people realize that we need to make more stuff right here in America. And we as consumers need to “shop local” and spend our cash on those products. Including beer. Cheers to that!
This four-minute TV news feature from 2011 gives a nice overview of Jim Koch’s back story.
In 2018, many mounds of money were used to fund the campaigns of candidates who would be loyal to Householder, elect him as Speaker, and vote for passage of the bill. More of the money was used later to thwart a ballot initiative to overturn the legislation (because heaven forbid that taxpayers actually get a say in how their money is used!)
They stacked the deck, and subverted the entire legislative structure for their own personal and political gains. It was underhanded, dirty, criminal… and they nearly got away with it.
How did $60 million in bribes go unnoticed for so long? Why, through the magic of “dark money” of course! FirstEnergy funneled the cash through an organization called Generation Now, a nonprofit “social welfare” organization, allegedly acting in the public interest… and not required to disclose its donors under federal law.
“The millions paid into the entity were akin to bags of cash,” the complaint states. “Unlike campaign or PAC contributions, they were not regulated, not reported, not subject to public scrutiny — and the enterprise freely spent the bribe payments to further the enterprise’s political interests and to enrich themselves.”
If this happened in Ohio, it has no doubt happened (and is still happening) in other states. Think about it – FirstEnergy paid $60 million and got a $1 billion bailout – not a bad return on a crooked investment.
Our political system is supposed to have checks and balances. “Dark money” allows the “checks” to get written to corrupt legislators. We need a lot less secrecy, and a lot more transparency.
It’s been several weeks since Carl Reiner passed away, but I recently read a brief blurb in Parade Magazine (of all places!) by comedian Judy Gold that highlighted something I’d never really considered before: the fact that he wrote a part in The Dick Van Dyke Show for a female writer on the fictional TV show within the show.
Just one more reason to love — and respect — this titan of comedy.
(The full Judy Gold feature is here. She has a new book out called Yes I Can Say That and also makes several other reading recos.)
I don’t watch much TV (even during lockdown), but I’ve enjoyed the heck out of Schitt’s Creek, which recently wrapped up its sixth and final season. It’s a comedy about a family that goes from fabulously rich to terribly poor overnight, and is forced to leave their pampered lifestyle behind and move to a rundown hotel in a tiny town that the patriarch of the family bought as a joke.
(Netflix promo photo)
The mom and dad are played by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy. ‘Nuff said. They’ve been cracking me up since their SCTV days, and of course they were great in the Christopher Guest mockumentaries (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind).
Separately, they are great character actors… together, they are pure comedy gold!
The actors who portray the family (O’Hara, Levy, his real-life son Daniel and Annie Murphy) all were nominated for Emmys this year.
The show was a slow burn, and Catherine O’Hara thinks that contributed to its success:
We got to build the show and develop the characters without worrying about expectations, from anyone. We got to make the show the best we could make it. CBC did a great job of building an audience in Canada and then Pop TV picked it up and it wasn’t a big audience but it was a nice, loyal audience, and then Netflix brought it out to the rest of the world. There’s so many projects that get a ton of attention right at the beginning, maybe before they’re even quite ready for it, and then it’s kind of downhill attention-wise from there. We’re so lucky to do the show we wanted and, apparently, leaving people wanting more.
Catherine O’Hara’s character, Moira Rose, has developed quite the fan following. This excellent Yahoo article describes her as the “the self-dramatizing, language-massaging, ultimately touching mother.”
Moira is hilarious (her ‘wall of wigs’ alone is worth the price of admission) but there’s plenty of heart underneath all the character’s histrionics.
O’Hara, who is 66, is also talks about her own late-career recognition, and I think it’s sound advice for anyone in the 50+ age bracket:
I’m happy to be a late bloomer, I always have been in my life and I’m grateful for it. You have to have a bit of patience in life or just don’t have any big expectations, just carry along and do the best you can and maybe someone will notice, maybe they won’t but if you enjoy the work itself, then that’s enough of a gift.
From the same Hollywood reporter article
Do your best. Be patient. Don’t worry about what others think of you. Enjoy the journey. I’ll drink to that!
I’ve heard (and read) many writing pros who say “writing is editing.”
This piece by Meaghan O’Connell in The Cut vividly brings the concept of multiple revisions to life. Here’s a quick excerpt:
Imagine taking the very sharpest thought you had each day for two years and then adding it to a pile. If someone walked by and looked at your pile of best thoughts, they’d think you were a genius. They might see your thoughts and feel things. It might be an encounter with the sublime. This is the promise of revision and the good news. The bad news is that to get there, you have to start by rereading your own work.
I totally understand what she’s saying, and have no doubt that all great writing has been reviewed and revised to achieve that greatness.
On the other hand, I’m a bit of a Seth Godin disciple, and he’s a big fan of “ship your work.” If you keep waiting (and editing) for your words to be perfect, you’ll never actually deliver a finished piece. (Seth’s “one blog post a day for a week” challenge a few years ago was the kick in the trousers I needed to actually start “shipping” some writing of my own, after having set up a WordPress blog a couple of years earlier and then being afraid to actually post anything.)
The two concepts — polished prose and printed pieces — aren’t mutually exclusive. But I think too many aspiring writers spend way too much time agonizing over the edits, and not enough time “shipping” more of their work out into the world. Writing is tough enough as it is… if you ponder the multiple rounds of edits that await you after your “shitty first draft” (as Anne Lamott calls it), you may find the process even more daunting, and you might never put pen to paper.
I understand and respect the editing process… in fact, I love it. But this is a tiny little speck of a blog, it ain’t no Great American Novel. (It ain’t even grammatically correct sometimes.) I’d rather err on the side of “done” — and I do think that shipping a greater quantity has actually helped improve the quality over the years as well. [You, faithful reader (singular), may beg to differ.]
In other words, if you came looking for the “pile of great thoughts” that Ms. O’Connell mentions, you’ll be sorely disappointed. But if you’re OK with a pile of… er, stuff… then this is just the blog for you!
Your thought for the day… nay, thought for a lifetime for any parent, comes from cellist, composer, and conductor, Pablo Casals:
“Each second we live in a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that never was before and will never be again. And what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all of the world there is no other child exactly like you. In the millions of years that have passed there has never been another child like you… You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is like you, a marvel? You must cherish one another. You must work—we must all work—to make this world worthy of its children.”
impossibly4332b32374 on Light. Laughter. Grace.: “That’s the reply you were talking about! And a reminder to get that book out. I do almost all of…” Apr 27, 15:36
impossibly4332b32374 on Light. Laughter. Grace.: “I’ve got The Wet Engine on my shelf, and think I read about half of it. Time for another look.” Apr 21, 09:15
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