Death and Life in Nashville

 Things are moving quickly. For the moment it feels like an ice jam that is breaking up on river.

When I was in Nashville for Threadfest, I told folks that the last time I visited the city (except for a brief swing through ten years ago), was when I was 23 years old and that I almost lost my life in a car accident. I said I was determined to get through this visit without the same thing happening. I had to remind myself of this several times during the visit, as the hotel where we held the conference in the Opryland district was not particularly well suited for walkability. Even at the crosswalks, the cars were somewhat menacing as we navigated on foot towards the restaurants that were nearby, and where much of the "fun" conference conversations were taking place.

But it a way, I embraced the concept of a "death" there. In some ways I wanted my old self to die--the one that has been mostly passive in this broader fight, and has wondered what I'm supposed to be doing besides writing little software programs for other people which mostly never do anything, and only occasionally do anything helpful.  

At the start of his rallies, President Trump has lately taken to showing a clip from the movie Patton in 1970, which George C. Scott in the title show. It's the famous clip of Patton standing in front of a giant American flag in uniform, addressing his troops. He tells them they will indeed have the stomach for battle once they get on the battlefield, as that is what Americans are. Years from now, he tells them, you won't have to tell your grandchildren that you spent the war "shoveling shit in Louisiana." Patrick Gunnels, the organizer of the conference, loves that line, and do many other people. Up until now, to be honest, I've felt like that's what I've been doing. But somebody has to do that, I guess.

I no longer feel that way. I've joked that I've drafted myself into the Entertainment Corps of the New Media, that I felt like Bob Hope telling jokes at the USO. Perhaps my better role model for Threadfest as co-emcee was Dan Rowan, from the old television show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, from the late 1960s. I remember watching it as a young child. It's a comedy skit show with some light political humor. It's the show where Richard Nixon famously said the show's iconic line "Sock it to me!" while running for president in 1968. Some say it humanized him enough to help him with the election. Goldie Hawn got her start in that show telling sketch jokes wearing a miniskirt.

I read a little bit about Dan Rowan, the pipe-smoking straight man of that comedy team. He was born in Oklahoma in the 1920s. His mother and father were traveling entertainers with a carnival. Back then it was far easier for common folk to eke out a living in theater entertainment, as we needed many more people for that, before television centralized all of theater into broadcast centers. Rowan was orphaned at ten during the Depression. Then during World War II he was a fighter pilot who was shot down over New Guinea. After the war, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles and worked in the mailroom of Paramount Pictures until he could ingratiate himself with the studio head.

Like so many men of that era, they didn't make a big deal out of their wartime badassery when they got back to civilian life. It was just something they had done, and the normal lives they were living after the war were exactly what the whole point of the war had been for them--that we as a nation and a people could do those things again.

It reminds me so much of my own grandparent who was in the Army in North Africa in the war. He barely told any stories to me and his other grandchildren about the war. He didn't talk about it much, until he retired in Florida and lived next to a Wehrmacht soldier. They had lots to talk about, no doubt. 

One of the few stories I remember him telling me was about meeting the playwright Thornton Wilder on a tarmac in Algeria. Wilder was touring the American bases putting on productions of his play Our Town, which was a nostalgic look at American life earlier in the century.  Only a few months after he told me that, I had a chance to be in that play as a high school student. One of the best parts about it was feeling connected to my grandfather's wartime service in some roundabout way. I knew growing up that we had it so good, compared to his upbringing as a poor kid barely scraping by in Indiana during the Depression.

Since getting back from Nashville my life has been busy. While at the conference I was downright embarrassed when I had well-known influencers in our group telling me, "I loved your talk, do you have a website or a Youtube channel?" and I would have to tell them I didn't. I knew it was time to fix that. My biggest priority on return was to start such a channel and to make a video version of my talk, which many people had requested and had followed-up with emails afterwards, asking me, "hey is it online yet, I want to share it?"

How could I not answer that call to duty? I even went forward and cut the parody song I prepared for the conference, and performed only in rehearsal. It took fourteen takes to get a version that I was at least partially satisfied with. The perfect is the enemy of the good, they say. But the half-assed is also the enemy of the good. You have to find that balance.

My goal going into Nashville was to give the conference a "show" feeling, which is what Patrick had said he wanted. I was a pit bull for that during the two days we were on stage, pulling out all my theater chops going back to Our Town when I was sixteen, and also watching the great entertainers of television since the days of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, and I guess it worked.  People loved it. Patrick already wants to do another one in six months (!). 

And now I've got a "channel." Of course I've always had this blog, which started as a movie blog writing about narrative and how it works, while also narrating my own life like a story. In a way everything I'm doing now is the fruit of this long effort at writing. I can't imagine not writing here, as it is my private thoughts that I share publicly, if that makes sense at all, and I write here often directed at a couple individuals who once read my blog, and whom I keep in mind as I write. Now I'll have a more public version of it.

I'm already hard at work on my next project, and I am egged on by people I met there, who seem to want to help me. The next big project is going to be something akin to a homemade Netflix miniseries, with "episodes" and will be dramatic instead of a lecture format. 

As I've been telling everyone, Hollywood is dead, and with it has gone storytelling in our culture (because they centralized it so well years ago). They have given the remaining levers of production over to youthful cultural barbarians only interested in destroying. So we have to build our own from scratch, and that's what I intend to do. I told myself to be patient and take time--several years if necessary, but it's certainly off to a big start. I have more on my plate at the moment than I could possibly do.

And also, for the moment, a day job writing software for someone. I got to get to that. At least it's not a corporate gig. It's rebuilding a database web application for a woman in Washington State who runs a tour booking agency for comedians and musicians, including some ones you've probably heard of. Just by building it, I've gotten to learn a lot about how the contracts work, and also the industry as a whole. Fascinating. It's almost like some kind of synchronicity is happening.