It starts with a simple question

(THE FIRST E-MAIL FROM ADAM)

ADAM: Can you beleive this?

(FOLLOWED BY A LINK TO A NEWS PAGE)

News in brief from eastern Pennsylvania

4/15/2005, 8:46 a.m. ET
The Associated Press
 
SHICKSHINNY, Pa. (AP) — A familiar presence is missing from a Luzerne County bed-and-breakfast, leaving the owner and his neighbors to searched the woods for a $400 department store mannequin nicknamed Belle that has decorated the porch for years.

The figure was always dressed for the season and attracted waves from people passing by the Blue Heron Bed and Breakfast on Bethel Hill Road, owner Jesse Turner said.

Belle was wearing a summer dress, hat, scarf and white gloves when she disappeared from the porch late Sunday or early Monday, Turner said.

So far Turner has found only the arms and some of the mannequin's clothing. "It amazes me that someone would do something like that," he said. "It's unbelievable. It's just some malicious thing."

TOWANDA, Pa. (AP) — A woman accused of stealing more than $500,000 from the Canton Borough Water and Sewer Authority pleaded innocent to charges of forgery, theft by unlawful taking and tampering with public records or information....(snip)

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) — The city signed an agreement to lease Earl F. Hunsicker Bicentennial Park to a Gilbertsville company that organizes youth baseball tournaments for $72,000 for three years...(snip)

READING, Pa. (AP) — The Muhlenberg School Board voted unanimously to remove the novel "The Buffalo Tree," by Adam Rapp, from its curriculum, citing explicit sexual references and vulgar language.

The book had been part of the approved 11th-grade curriculum since 2000, but a few parents told the board that its graphic sexual content was inappropriate for high school students.

Muhlenberg junior Brittany L. Hunsicker, who had complained to the board, read excerpts at Wednesday's public meeting, but board members stopped her after a few paragraphs.

"If this type of book is in our school, then why not have Hustler and Penthouse in the school library?" board member Otto W. Voit III said.

Dr. Joseph S. Yarworth, Muhlenberg superintendent, said copies of the novel were removed from school library and classroom shelves Thursday morning.

The author, reached by telephone, said he was shocked that the novel, describing the life of a young man serving a sentence in a juvenile detention center, was banned. "This is a story about friendship, about survival and about kids trying to make it in the world," Rapp said.

Though it deals with difficult subjects, students can often hear about the same matters on television or the Internet, he said. "I am stunned to think it would be banned in 2005 at a school district in America."

(END E-MAIL)

RESPONSE TO ADAM:

You know, last night Traci and I were toasting you after we got word
of this, but this is horrific.

You were four stories down in a column that led with story about a
molested department store mannequin.

ADAM'S NEXT RESPONSE:

I just received this from a teacher from the school where this went down...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Glen Martin
To: Adam Rapp
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 05:32:29 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: The Buffalo Tree - book banning

Mr. Rapp,

My name is Glen Martin, and I am an English teacher at Governor Mifflin
Senior High School near Reading, PA.  We are a neighboring district of
Muhlenberg, whose board voted Wednesday night to ban your book The Buffalo
Tree from its curriculum.

Though I have not read your book (and, admittedly, was not familiar with it
until this furor arose), I am troubled by the events in this case.  The
school board of Muhlenberg School District listened to a couple of passages
out of context--the favored m.o. of evangelicals who challenge books--and
immediately voted to ban the book.  Though it had been approved several
years ago for inclusion in the 11th grade curriculum--and despite the fact
that a process exists whereby parents can challenge books--the board
professed to be outraged by its content and took this unfortunate action.
Many 11th grade classes were in the middle of reading this book; after the
board's decision, the books were taken from the students and placed in a
vault (I'm not kidding!) to protect the students from the books' purportedly
corrupting elements.

Our department had a similar situation several years ago.  Several
conservative Christian parents challenged Maya Angelou's I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of the scene
in which Maya is sexually assaulted at a young age.  They, too, read
passages from the book out of context and tried to play into the board
members' fears and sense of overprotectiveness.  But ultimately, and
fortunately, our board followed our procedure for challenging a book, the
English department had a chance to defend the work, and the book was allowed
to remain in the curriculum.

I'm writing for two reasons.  First, I want to reassure you that there are
passionate anti-censorship advocates at both Muhlenberg and Governor Mifflin
High Schools who are struggling to ensure that students are exposed to ideas
that may be uncomfortable, but are ultimately essential to developing
critical thinking skills and a broad worldview.  Second, I want to ask your
advice: Have you heard of your book being challenged or banned in the past?
What strategies can you recommend to combat this phenomenon--in which a
small, but determined and vocal, group of evangelicals challenges the
slightest "inappropriate" content in a book?  How can we continue to
introduce compelling literature dealing with the sometimes discomfiting
themes of sexuality, drug abuse, incarceration, etc., into our curricula?

Thank you for your time.

Glen Martin
Department of English
Governor Mifflin Senior High School


THE LAST WORD BELONGS TO JESSE TURNER:

"It's unbelievable. It's just some malicious thing."


 

Computer Lab

The picture on the monitor across the room from me is of two polar bears in the front yard of a snowed-on lower-income suburb. One bear sprawls on his back against a snowdrift, his legs wide out in front of him and belly high, staring off at something that I can imagine is a ball game. The other bear has a more traditional polar-like stance, also looking on with mild interest. The house behind them is one of a row of post WWII ranch homes, and they are blocking a driveway where sits an early 60s red and white trim corvette-like vehicle.

The copier next to me has been making 23 copies of 8 pages for a while now, the rhythm lulling me into dream states. Traci hits the alarm and returns to the room wet from a shower. The mannequins in the hallway of Tisch School are dressed for Shakespeare. Music that will never be heard by anyone else builds vast archetecture in front of my eyes. Hair creme, cigatettes, autistic aliens. Roast pork and wontons. A curbside on 9th has a crack like Guatemala. Orange.

I rock back and forth to the pulse of the xerox. When I drift further to sleep my head does a free fall and I wake with a jerk with the gentlest awareness of where I am, returning to the bear lounging in the snow.

Reading on the job...

I have been working for nearly a month now at NYU. I am the administrative assistant at the Tisch School of Design for Stage and Film. I am a secretary. A receptionist. Both of these roles have taken an excruciatingly long time to adjust to, but now that I am more confident in my duties, I am a sponge.

Recently the students here were honored by a lecture by Jean-Guy Lecat, co author of "The Open Circle" which is a book that chronicles the theater environments of director Peter Brook who has a production going on in Harlem this month.

Some excerpts (quotes from Brook):

"People have said repeatedly that my recent work is 'simple', and this has become a very friendly cliche. The warning I would always attach to such statements is that the road to simplicity is extremely long, and I discourage anybody else from trying to start with the notion of simplicity, because it is something that arises as a result of diverse, sometimes convoluted processes.

"An ethical idea of simplicity as a point of departure can be revealing if it involves discarding everything moot, whether it is a protection or a defensive reflex, and seeing what happens."

" We've never worked to a budget. Micheline used to say, 'Do what you want and we'll find a solution', and we would feel our way, try something, and if it was too expensive cut down on something else and sometimes get into debt...Sometimes newcomers from the outside can't understand our approach: they want to know what their individual budjet is, how they can operate, but the process for us is sort of a jostle, negotiating things as we go along, arguing our priorities, rather like breaking a horse."

The School of Design

Design students who desire to stitch fantastic clothing and arrange physical space with furniture and light for theater works come to the Tisch School at NYU where they draw and paint their fucking asses off. This is because at every step in reaching their great statements in costume and set design, they have to visualize the end result and more importantly, communicate that vision in a way that everyone involved in the collaboration can understand. I am always awed and astounded by the ways ideas are concieved and developed, and witnessing the energy of it happening here is kicking my ass.

This is one large lesson for me as a music maker because collaboration with a band can suffer from not drawing pictures clear enough to demonstrate what can be. Often what is referred to as "vibe" is the result of having left much to chance and hoping for the magic to just "happen", which is one reason why many records feel half-baked. It takes great skill and the work of a focused group to make doors big enough for God to walk through, which is the kind of collaboration great producers and directors are capable of. The skill rquired, as near as I have found, start with great meditation and preparation, and not a kind always made obvious if its done well. By time a recording has started, all the preparation should be distilled into a gesture as simple as plugging in and rolling.

Of course, in the realization of the art, the results always become something of an odd potato toss, with the best parts never planned, and some disapointments arising from what was expected to be the high points. Always at some stage you find yourself outside the vehicle using a tire iron for a broomstick. At these moments, the objective needs to remain clear and communicable: where are you headed? Visualization is a living thing. Even as it remains connected to the original intent, it has to change as the work comes to life. And as they say in the army: no plan survives first contact. Everyone has to stay connected. I have discovered this to be one of my greatest challenges - how to ride the incoming waves and also communicate direction and changes to let everyone know what is now, at this point in the journey, possible to achieve. Sometimes I want to say, "okay, so this is really what we've been doing all this time" but that would sound like I was masterminding it. As Peter Brook says, the experience of finduing your way to the end is something more akin to breaking a horse.

One thing is for sure, though: when communication stops you are dead in the water, and the worst experience is to feel like you are the only one pulling. Moments like this can inspire great epiphanies of hindsight, realizing that you may have been focusing on things that left you unprepared for the place you now find yourself. Regroup. Move forward.

Demonstrate. Design. More now than ever I seek to learn the tools and languages to make the art of music making happen more fully. Pro-tools and effects and microphones and mic techniques are part of the bag of instruments that I have learned little about up to now, and I at least need to know what I don't know. Records and friends and books and experience are the resource. Nothing can be assumed, I tell myself, at all times speak simple and directly to the matter. Avoid the urge to make grand sweeping statements. Above all, give great attention to the inner voices of everyone as they are communing at all times with the emerging life being created.

Yeah, sure, right? Or so I think anyway. But I finish this post dissapointed at my focus. To begin with, there are far greater collaborations than bands. Wives, family, and friends all deserve at least the same attention. I suspect if I ever absorb the wisdom of these lessons, I will not be so consumed by a need to declare my findings or distinguish the media and discipline entailed. But for now, like the great souls awake in these halls, I am weighted by the sense of all I haven't learned yet. Like them, I yell for an echo. Like them, I advance with ambition and the few tools I have, in every way a student.

And like them I get back to work.

Hassel between the gutter and the tassles

Tonight Traci and I walked from West 3rd and MacDougal south into Soho, across Little Italy and Chinatown, returning home through the Lower East Side. Spring in New York...being in a new place..... the blood pumps. We have come to New York to be lucky (luckier?) We've come to do something. To begin. It amazes me to think of how much we have been willing to risk so that we may go for a kind of life that pleases and finally get some shit straight. It amazes me that we are willing to be lucky. Stuff is happening, but slowly. We've managed to pay our bills for the second month in a row, but we have about a week of food money right now. I feel anxiety all the time and wait for the ball to drop, but we are eating well, have a drink everyday, and thanks to the kindness of friends have books and some weed to last a while. I am worried, but I don't stay paralyzed in this state. I keep moving, dotting "i"s and crossing "t" s. It is my only saving grace. Being scared for your life is a special kind of motivator.

This town is everything people say - a constant struggle just to stay here. But it's also everything else they say - a place like no other which will, in your darkest moment, give a little nudge to keep you moving. Case in point:

Yesterday Traci and I walked into 10-64 CoffeeShop in Long Island City. When I ordered my drink the Barista said I looked familiar. I said it was probably my Mossy Oak cap. (Mike, you left it in the upstairs bathroom at Dad's - now it's mine.) But then she asked if I was "Rizzo". By time we left, I had a free latte, and had been asked to play drums in the barista's burlesque show that she is putting together. The barista offered Traci free drinks and bagels and pasteries too, but she had just eaten.

Traci called it Serendipity, referencing the pulp books she'd bought me for my birthday and how I had always said I wanted to play a burlesque show. I was all the more pleased that she was pleased and we both agreed it didn't matter if it ever happened - it was just some good Ju Ju to keep us pushing through.