Neil Young and Dumpsters

Sooo, I played basketball after school with some of the kids at Downtown Magnets, as if I needed confirmation I was out of shape. Get home, Karla's at work. Get a phone call from Jeremy, of No Little Kindness fame. Says he has tickets to Neil Young at the Kodak Theater. Haven't seen Jeremy for a while, nor had hopes to go to a concert anytime soon, what with first year marriage budget and all. How much? Free. Can I pass that up? No. Plus I haven't been out after dark in a while. It's like being in Middle School, only with fewer phone calls. It's 7:30. Concert starts at 8:15. Screw it. Let's go. He swings by in a beat up Volvo, the glove compartment door keeps falling into my lap...the jerry-rigged latch out of three pieces of tape isn't working. We head the wrong way on the 210. It seems we have to pick up some tickets in Covina first. We make it quick, like clockwork we meet our contact at the in and out off the freeway, then head down the 10 into LA. I call Rob on the way, but he is at an art gallery chatting up some woman who wants to get into publishing and is looking for some new writing. He's inspired. No time for Neil Young. We get to the Nokia, park underneath in what can only be described as way beyond hoopdie status. The parking employees raise their eyebrows, we park and exit undaunted. We meet Beast, Jeremy's friend with amputated (?) legs, from just above the knees down. He walks on prosthetics and we haggle with a fellow looking for our fourth ticket and parlay the sale into one beer apiece at the ridiculously priced concession stand. Neil is halfway through his set. The crowd looks to be a mix of people from the valley and the OC. Definitely white bread. Odd mix of people maybe three miles from my school site. Two young men in front of us draw the ushers' attention with their glowing rolled paper and rising plumes of smoke in the indoor theater. The end of the acoustic set is delectable. The electric set from the new release, the lame-duck Chrome Dreams II (Young is hit or miss these days) almost puts me to sleep, nary a hook to be found, just 12 minutes of guitar fuzz. But he's got some energy. Some encore songs and we head out. Back to Beast's, who works at USC, where three day old, caked and crusty bowls of half eaten guacamole lie on counters with cockroaches scurrying underneath as his roommates sit on the porch and the hazy night sky of Los Angeles rolls past overhead, and I am reminded of college apartments in white trash towns where untold drug dealers and small time hoods stashing disposable cell phones roam uninhibited. We spend 15 minutes, as Jeremy tells of his job and Finn, his young son, who pines for Bob Dylan. We head back to Pasadena talking of marriage and sacrifice and he swerves into the lot behind Trader Joe's for "one last stop." We are now officially dumpster diving. He pulls out flowers, red bell peppers, a sack of potatoes, oregano, tomatoes, chicken, aubergines, all still shrink wrapped and pretty much lying on top of the dumpster. That's Jeremy. Ever the energetic pragmatist. He jumps back in the car, giddy "That's my shopping for the week." Waste not, want not.

In other news

In slightly less meandering and heady news, there are several things going on around LA this weekend. It's the City of Angels Film Festival, sponsored by our very own Fuller and Tribe, among others. It's also AJ. reading "The Year of Living Biblically" at Vroman's, which I am interested in. Meanwhile, The Boss and Neil Young are coming to town. There are maybe four movies out I haven't seen but would like to(Michael Clayton, Dan in Real Life, and Gone Baby Gone...although I am tired of simply consuming movies as entertainment instead of using them selectively as guides to live more deeply...sorry, sorry, here I go again) Unfortunately, on our current budget, for some reason I have such limited monthly resources that, after two nights out with friends this month, and the odd trip to starbucks I am now $80 over budget for the month. Netflix anyone? Sure, thank you. Also, USC plays Oregon and the World Series is on. Did I forget anything? Oh yeah, I'm going through that weird once every six months phase where I wish I was a man about town in LA, drinking cocktails in swank, old hollywood, dimly lit bars, ignoring the cigarette policy, instead of an ill-tempered, morose, balding, out of shape malcontent whose band just broke up and who can't play an instrument well enough to make music by himself. Hmmm. There's the power of positive thinking for you.

Salvation

There's a biblical idea of conversion, metanoia, which literally means "a turning." Traditionally, this means a turning from darkness to light, from sin (death), to virtue (life). In my own life, I've tried to move past the confining understandings of a moral piety (as valuable as that may be), finding that, like Blake, it means there are too many priests "binding with briars my joys and desires." This is not a sweeping injunction to hedonism (although Blake placed emphasis on sexual energy, or at least sexual tension, which I would certainly include in any "unified theory of the good life") I certainly recognize the value of boundaries in in growing in maturity, in developing a spiritual life, etc. but I don't buy the injunctions of the morality brigade either. That doesn't resonate with me as much as an injunction to "suck the marrow out of life." Hm. I apply that to my current situation. Now, for some, sucking the marrow out of life leads to visions of treks round the world and gold medals extreme sports, this is partially the result of advertising and a culture that values the vitality of youth and a sense of possibility as the highest good. All for that, in some ways, but of course, we're all different. For myself "sucking the marrow out of life" brings to mind other quotes about "a life half lived" etc. I recognize the need to embodied, physical experience, even the necessity for novel experience, but first and foremost "the marrow" would be depth, the search for it, the immersion in it, through attentive reading, writing conversation. I get more excited about new lines of thinking, this being for me a kind of spiritual journey, more deeply into truth. Of course, not all new ideas are truthful ideas and lead us more deeply, which calls for a discernment. But right now, living as the embodiment of modern man's disconnection and fragmentation, pretty much any idea seems like a cloud worth chasing. I teach at a downtrodden High School facility for the LAUSD. There are no windows in this renovated radio station. We are right by two freeways. on the edge of downtown on the border between Chinatown and Echo Park. The air is heavy. While there can be moments of joy, these underpriveleged kids have to settle for reality as it presents itself. This is not only their daily reality, it is a Magnet School, a step up from their local school, whether Jordan or Locke or wherever. Things are more peaceful, the school smaller, less gang activity. While frequent drug use and even some prostitution is known to occur, it is by and large a more inviting place than many other schools. But still, it is an overcrowded inner city institution with an unhealthy environment, unhealthy food, the occasional mouse, rat, or cockroach, with no thought of the concept of holism. A friend of mine has a blog entry about his stepdaughter's high school in Santa Monica (of course). It sounds not only like a good high school, it sounds like college education might be modeled after it, as a place of holistic, critical thinking. What might this model look like in my own context. Would there be any carry over of ideas? And in this meaningless dail;y drudgery of trying to get 9th and 10th graders familiar with the ideas of persuasion, exposition, and literary analysis (ideas which have zero relevance to their everyday lives), I feel like we run a holding pen sometimes, even as our new principal institutes positive changes, and my honors classes attend to their tests at the moment. They have little sense of what it takes to succeed academically. I wonder how well even the honors students are prepared for real college work. I wonder about the vested interest of the dominant class in having a local, uneducated workforce, even as we trumpet the virtues of affordable college education for all. On the other hand, a college education is also not for everybody, and I definitely believe we should have some sort of apprenticeship and trade school model, practicums and that sort of thing for those whose lives should not be limited and defined by their academic abilities alone. I am tempted to visit the Crossroads school to see if there is any valuable information I can glean and adapt to my own context, but I am also in the midst of basketball season (37 kids in the class from which the team is drawn, 2 of my best players are on the verge of being expelled, 1 of whom is in trouble with the law, I still have no gym to practice in, only a small outdoor court that is heavily polluted and right next to a freeway), I'm not finished with my completely pointless BTSA busywork for the District Teacher training program. I would recommend a mentorship program, where veteran teachers are paired up with 2-3 new teachers who walk through with them, observing, improving, attending seminars together, giving feedback, instead of toting these heavy binders so full, they're impossible to sift through, let alone master. The information overload is insane. There are fifty going paradigms of what to do, how to do it, how to assess, how to plan, how to reflect on your planning, how to implement the planning, how to use technology, how to use rubrics, how to include variations for race, age, etc. How to engage students in reading, how to engage special needs students, gifted students, how to communicate with their families, how to structure instruction, how to layer instruction, how to reflect on the layering of instruction, how to reduce the achievement gap, how to follow the state standards, how to get the most out of your students, how to start your lesson, how to end the lesson, how to teach writing to English Learners, how to teach reading to the young Black male. I feel like Poseidon might also be the god of education. All the while, sifting through this endless sea of perspectives, different methods and paradigms, with grading and busywork and mouthy kids (and some that really like you), you feel like you're making no difference at all in the lives of the kids, not completely sure what the point of education should be, or if your following the right path. This has little to do with metanoia and the Bible, mind you, but it makes it hard to penetrate deeply in a search for the truth. Things remain frustratingly superficial, with this behemoth of a job, and perhaps my own need to be in a structured setting with space to explore and guides to point the way toward depth and truth. Where have all the mentors gone? Where are the mystics?