P.S. A Column On Things

Danville Community Band at Lesher

Last Sunday at 4, I got together with 80 or so of my friends in the Danville Community Band to present a concert at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek. It was a risk; we normally give free concerts. We draw about 900 people each year for our Christmas concert, for example. But when you play at the Lesher, you have to charge admission unless you're so well off you can rent the hall and not care about getting paid back. We haven't played there in years. In fact, the last time we played, we were scheduled for the same afternoon as my former band, the Contra Costa Wind Symphony. We went first, but I still think the double booking hurt the audience for both bands. In any case, we lost money and haven't been back since.

We didn't fill the hall this time; to my eye, we were just under half-full. I don't know whether we lost money or not, but we sure had fun playing in the beautiful hall, and our audience enjoyed listening. My daughters recorded my announcements at the concert. You can't tell, but I'd had a persistent cough for days (it was eventually diagnosed as bronchitis), and my voice is unusually low and rough, Still, the show must go on; I don't think most people noticed me coughing into my hankie after I sat down to play tenor sax, my instrument in the band.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, next to teaching, playing in a brass band is the most satisfying thing I do. There are brass bands everywhere, at all levels of skill. If you ever played a non-string instrument, find out about the one near you, and either go to its concerts or join it!

Last Day of School

My 10th year as a teacher wrapped up last week, with a "minimum day" on Friday. I teach 8th graders, all of whom were gone on a field trip to Waterworld in Concord, so I stayed behind to help wrangle the 6th and 7th graders. My main job was to DJ some you-tube based karaoke in the auditorium.

The end of school is always bittersweet. After 39 weeks of teaching, I am ready for a new batch of students and some time off to recharge. I can barely see my desk for all the deferred projects I don't have time for when I'm teaching. If it isn't urgent, or related to school, I barely ever do it between September and June. So, summer is project time. Also, some travel this summer: to Albuquerque, Bodega Bay, Los Angeles, and Tillamook, Ore. to ride the coastal dinner train, something I have been meaning to do for years. My older daughter will join me. I will only be in Portland on my way to and from the coast; that will make it my briefest stop there in decades. But with  both parents gone, my brother out of the country, and our long-time neighbors moving (or already moved), there isn't much to draw me there.

Political Briefs

• GMO's unacceptable elsewhere, good enough for Americans: Japan Suspends Some Imports of U.S. Wheat
• NSA Snooping Scandal reveals out constitutional
• Response To Ho-Hum, Nothing New, Move Along Coverage

Humor

• Message From Pres. Obama
• On Tolerance

Now You See Us

4 stars out of 5

Sure there are plot holes you could drive a truck through. As for me, I will sit through any film (even a two-hour one) with Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson (what an interesting career he's had), Morgan Freeman (America's narrator) and Michael Caine. Director Louis Leterrier, with the help of several hundred CGI shots, turns in a competent, albeit bloated (two hours!) piece of frothy entertainment. Still, writers Ed Solomon and Boaz Yakin  & Edward Ricourt (to give them their properly punctuated credit) were apparently playing hooky from film school on the day they covered narrative coherence. I mean, what's Michael Caine here for? Or for that matter, Morgan Freeman, until the penultimate scene? A handy exposition device, but a crude one.  Basically this film is a McGuffin/Red Herring fest, which throws to the side of the road any pretense of intelligent foreshadowing. The one attempt I caught, the statement that Woody can hypnotize people on the telephone, probably explains one of his more amazing tricks, except the director (or the screenwriter) left out the scene where he actually did it. If it was the director, thank God, because this film didn't need another two minutes. And yet, after all that, I give it four stars? Well, yes, because it was rollicking good entertainment. You don't criticize a roller coaster for not being a symphony orchestra. Fine film-making, this isn't. Fun, it is.

The Internship

4 stars out of 5
Maybe my standards just slip during the summer, but I laughed all the way through director Shawn Levy's film, written by Jared Stern and the film's co-star, Vince Vaughn. Joining Vaughn are Owen Wilson, Rose Byrne, and the Googleplex, which should get fourth billing. A lot of the external shots were actually made on campus. Shakespeare it isn't. Too long, it is. And while I laughed, some scenes were hard to watch, Ever since I was boy watching Lucille Ball, I have had trouble with the humor of embarrassment. I laugh when I see someone being a jerk on the screen, but it makes me uncomfortable. At home, once I have laughed at the setup, I fast-forward through the rest of the scene. I do that a lot when I am watching Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, for example. You know the plot if you've seen the trailer. Two middle-age doofuses serving as Google interns, hoping for a job there. Relax, go along for the ride.

Joe Edwards on We the People, Dan Grobstein File

Apropos of last week's We the People item, Joe Edwards notes:

There's a folk group in Maine called Schooner Fare that wrote and performed a song called We the People.  They are true folkies and very left-leaning, so as you would expect the song is anti-war and pokes the Establishment just a bit.  It might, however, work in very nicely with your project.   "Send the good news, send the word.   We the people will be heard."

Dan Grobstein File

• Op-Ed Columnist Who Needs Reporters? By FRANK BRUNI You do. No matter how awful we've been. But more politicians are finding self-flattering ways around us.
•     David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) 6/2/13, 2:40 PM
  This is truly idiotic. Our competitors around the world must be laughing!
• The Special Interest Group Who Writes Your Daily Newspaper

• Critic's Notebook

  Supreme Court's DNA Ruling Tests the Scriptwriter's Art

  By NEIL GENZLINGER

  What's a police-procedural writer to do when DNA testing is no longer a dicey issue?

• Water fountain or bubbler? Lightning bug or firefly? Pop or soda? Take the linguistics test
• Bob Fletcher Dies at 101; Saved Farms of Interned Japanese-American
• Robbing a Gas Station: The Hacker Way - NYTimes.com
  

  By NICOLE PERLROTH

  A security consultant discovered that by taking advantage of a software vulnerability, he could pop open a cash register with a smartphone.
• Waving My Tweak Flag High - NYTimes.com
  

  By JEFFREY LEWIS

  Even for the likes of Dylan and Jagger, a tiny lyric change can often make a big difference.

• 0p-Ed Columnist

  How to Monetize Plagiarism

  By JOE NOCERA

  So Jonah Lehrer has a book deal. This is a column about second chances. Earned or not.

• Is this who runs Prism?

• How To Sell Coke To People Who Have Never Had A Sip
  Coca-Cola is returning to Myanmar after 60 years. They'd been kept out of the country by international sanctions. This week they officially opened their new plant outside of Yangon. 

End of June 10 column

We The People

One of the strains of writing a column as long as I have written this one (16 years!) is the strain of coming up with something new to say about a perennial event. I have solved that for Thanksgiving and Christmas by re-rerunning the same column every year (an idea I got from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, now, alas, nestled snugly behind a paywall).

Every few years, I print a paper copy of  my columns (just the original items, not the links, reviews, or reprints). This last time, my daughter Marlow was available to proofread it. When she was done, she said to me, "You realize that your coverage of annual events, or even recurring events, starts to sound similar after a while." And I guess she's right.

Anywho, after rereading last year's column on the We The People project, which I have now done in May for eight years, I am filled with a desire to reprint it, since my feelings are exactly the same. Some people call it a rut, I call it a comfortable routine (which is another of my catchphrases).

Some of you will recognize "We The People" as the first words of the U.S. Constitution. Others of you will recognize the name as that of the massive year-end project for 8th graders at the school where I teach 8th grade social studies. We spend the entire month of May preparing and practicing for the students to make group presentations on aspects of the Constitution. It is the most difficult project of the year. Parent judges come in to judge the presentations, and both the students and I have been working our ****s off all month.  But, like some many things in life, it is weeks of preparation for 10 minutes of performance (Four minutes of presentation, four minutes of q and a, two minutes of critique) and then it is over. And not a minute too soon. It takes a lot of minutes, but is worth every minute. Not to mention 140 points, more than twice the value of any other single test or project during the year.

Bombs and Believers

Bombs and Believers
A former colleague of mine from decades ago, Ken Sonenclar, has written a book, and it's a corker. There was a twist in the first 10 pages that took me totally by surprise, and I'll wager it will you too. It is often difficult for me to review fiction, because, thanks to my terrible humanities education (technical high school, technical university), I lack some of the critical skills needed to articulate my opinions. Good fiction to me is like porn to the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it. Suffice it to say that the prose here was good. Not terrific, or amazing but good; in some places, very good. A few of the plot twists after the first one also surprised me. A few dull moments, a bang-up finish. As I have grown older, I have developed the guts to put down  novel that does not engage me. This one engaged me. Like virtually every novel I've read in decade, the ending seems rushed, but I'll forgive that and suggest you give Bombs and Believers a try.

As I read it, I was conscious that, in a few years, when I retire, I intend to try my hand at fiction, after 40 years of non-fiction. Thus (in the same way that I marvel at how actors know what to do with their hands when they are walking), I marveled at every felicitously turned phrase, every evocative description, every metaphor that went far enough, but not too far.

Political Briefs

Republicans Literally Trying To Starve Americans
Hans Christian Noonan
Japan's Lost Decade (economically): We're Next