Rock the Garden

After spending seven and a half hours at Rock the Garden two days ago, I have some unsurprising observations.

1. I owe my 14-year old son, William, a huge debt for diving headfirst into alternative rock, thus staving off for maybe a few years my inevitable descent into old-fartitude.

2. Rock is a whole lot more comfortable lying down on a grassy hill in the sun than it is standing in an auditorium or a basketball arena.

3. Tattoos are like other consumer goods. Almost all of them are ugly, cheap, tritely conceived, badly designed, and ill made.

4. Even the best rock is less interesting than Bach or Mozart, and you don't leave the concert feeling you've had an intellectual workout. Am I missing something here?

5. Calexico is way cooler than the audience thought it was.

But mostly, where are the old people? It's not as if the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is selling every available seat.

Jumbo shrimp

The other day my wife asked me, “have you ever read an intelligent tweet?” I didn’t answer. So the next day I tweeted, “my wife asked me last night, had I ever read an intelligent tweet?” Nobody answered, although not a lot of people follow me. And nobody reads this blog either, so again, nobody will answer.

That’s just fine. On matters of life and death like Twitter, it’s best to remain anonymous. After all, 100% of the people who tweet had “The Emperor’s New Clothes” read to them when they were little, and here they all are, me included, terrified to speak out. Who can blame us? The Emperor could turn out to be wearing a magnificent suit, and then we’d have to spend eternity with all the Academy members who didn’t give best picture to North by Northwest or The Wild Bunch.

It’s probably best to ask questions instead of supplying answers. Here are some that may or may not be good. 

• If you set millions of people to writing Emily Dickinson couplets, how would they do?
• What percentage of people who tweet know who Jenny Holzer is?
• And what percentage of those people are embarrassed that they’re not as good?
• If Twitter turns out to be no different from the Sunday coupon inserts, will you mourn?
• What could you be doing instead?
• If your writing is stupid, does that mean your thinking is stupid?

Or, back off a little, and consider that many things that aren’t any good turn out, 100 years later, to be important artifacts of cultural history. That’s a pretty good weasel.

Bad math

I lost it in the 9th grade. No, not what you're thinking, those were simpler times. I mean my ability to do math. I've always blamed my teacher, whose name I've forgotten so thoroughly that I couldn't pick it out on a multiple choice test. But I do remember that she was old, with haunted-house grey hair and huge folds and wrinkles. She was fat, and wore what I would later learn was a muumuu, with body parts flopping loosely around inside. She had warts, a lot of them. And she was crazy, yelling "I'm going right on" when any of us dared to raise a hand and ask a question.

This wasn't some hillbilly backwater. It was a class that did grades 7, 8, and 9 in two years, in one of the finest junior high schools in the New York City public school system, back when that meant the best education on the planet without paying for a New England prep school.

Yes, I've always blamed my teacher, that is, until this spring, when my older son, in the second half of 8th grade, lost it. He's not doing 7, 8, and 9 in two years, so it's exactly the same time as I lost it. And his teacher is notorious for being a bad teacher, even though the school is as close as Minneapolis comes to a New England prep school. The mothers, who pay more attention to this kind of thing than the fathers do, are up in arms. But I'm not so sure, and I'm not planning to join their lynching party. Instead, I'm spending my time thinking about the power of DNA molecules to direct our lives. And while I'm not discovering any hidden affection for my nameless math teacher, who's certainly been dead for 30 years, I'm ready to accept at least some of the responsibility.