NOTE: If you’ve consulted this site in order to learn how to break the ice on elevators — I am sorry. Let’s get this idea out of the way right now. Other folk journalists may offer tips for conversation while encased going up or down. I suggest taking the stairs. (Better for ya!)
Elevator conversation is awkward enough, but I remember one legend regarding lifts that my parents passed down to me. This is a tale of two white tourists riding an elevator in a Park Avenue hotel in New York. Yankee baseball slugger Reggie Jackson gets in at some point, pulling his doberman along on a leash.
As they all ride together, Jackson commands his dog: “Sit!”
At which point the tourists sit down.
Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand catalogued many similar myths in his funny book The Choking Doberman, W.W. Norton, 1984.
And now back to our regularly scheduled convo tips from your local folk journalist…
P.S. Reggie Jackson, interviewed by a reporter for a Rochester, NY newspaper said he’d heard the story a thousand times but, “I’d never own a dog in New York. Whatever you’ve been told isn’t true.”
Conversation can sometimes seem, yeah I know – old school, y’all.
I mean, look how much we love being pulled away from it by technology tools outside our bodies.
Right? Why is that? Because we want the future and we want it now!?
And yet, even with so many new kinds of ways to communicate, we still move forward through time together talking. Thus the aim of this weblog: how to deal with it and hopefully continue to get closer while doing so. (Poet William Butler Yeats: “That’s all there is for men and women, just to grow closer together.”) (Or was it William Blake?)
Another poet good to quote in conversation is a later 20th century Beat from California named Gary Snyder. Snyder said the only reason tribe members started writing things down was because they couldn’t remember the stories otherwise! And as our tribal-cultural memory has been passed down through aural storytelling, we now see how we’ve begun to forget. (The couple in the cartoon up top may not have devices at the ready; perhaps because they’ve stuck all their memories and what-to-say-to-each-other in them.)
Luckily, friends and convo-lovers everywhere, we’re in the midst of a mass cultural shift.
Yes.
Have you noticed: Storytelling is King!
by Andy Rash
Your intrepid folk journalist was lucky enough to attend a wedding of two storytellers in upstate New York. An older fellow there told me: I haven’t seen this much talent since I was in the Catskills sixty years ago! The grounds were overflowing with tall tale-tellers, ribald playmakers, musicians, magicians, dancers and clowns. I felt part of one village I’d gladly take. Or however that goes.
Many of today’s less mountain-high tribal folks have a tendency to document our humanity as they live it. Via devices like Snapchat et al. Is this an attempt to get it down and pass it on before it goes away? Maybe we’re just simply using the tools we’ve created, playfully. Then again, playwright Thornton Wilder once explained that, “at the end of every great civilization there is a huge explosion of creativity.”
One big banging on a can, man? Is that what’s exploding all around us? Like, I’d love to chat, maybe learn a bit more about each other during my next coffee break, but I’m off attending to my social affairs! My personal media-me needs me! Hey, I’m being social, through a mediated experience. What’s going on here? Have we become what Ethan Hawke’s character in the movie Boyhood described as the robots we fear are coming for us from somewhere else some day?
But back to the storytelling The 92nd Street Y * in New York City, rallying to a belief that the oldest way is still the bestest way to communicate, has astonishing conversations between two good talkers made intimate. Move over on that couch, I gotta sit close to this! (LINKS BELOW)
Back Pocket Banter (Questions for Folk Journalists to Ask)
Have conversations failed you before?
How do they fail all of us now?
Do you consider Facebook a conversation?
Why do you think we distract yourselves with all these new devices?
What kind of new conversation have we created in the social media age?
Cultural Convo
Heard about the new “bullet screens” in China’s movie theaters? Audience members project text messages onto the screen. “At any time the screen may be overlaid with multiple comments scrolling across the action,” said the story I read about this phenomenon. The point, they say, is often not to watch the show, but to “tucao”— in Chinese to “spit and joke around” with friends.
Can that happen here? Sounds like a riff on Joel Hodgson and his Mystery Science Theater 3000** show, where audience banter get riffed over bad movies. In the Chinese version, according to the article, “Even when the videos are boring, the viewers are entertaining each other. Bullet screens are for young viewers who make sharing every thought a way of life.” (And if your battery runs down, just give your seat number to an usher via text; they’ll be by ASAP, “with a portable battery to recharge phones.”)
Now, does this seem like the end times of our amusing ourselves to death? On the bright side, perhaps it signals the return of the triple feature! And as they gaze into other’s screens together, leaning up head-to-head buried in each other’s hair, you have to admit these kids look adorable…
* To hear conversations and great writers reading check out these 92nd Street Y links:
Listen, I really think that stories are the best tool for empathy that we have. Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter “Steve Jobs,” in the Jewish Journal November 6 2015
As a friendly neighborhood folk journalist, I’ve been lucky enough to meet and interviewed people in public as well as inside a radio studio, from Bob Newhart to Eli Broad, Vidal Sassoon to Bill Viola, Wavy Gravy to Avner the Eccentric. For the BBC, CBS, NPR, APM and BAI, which is WBAI in NYC, a Pacifica station like KPFK in Los Angeles and KPFA up in Berkeley.
In radio, you have to look face-to-face, even it means tilting your head to get through all the equipment in between the two of you.
So the face becomes part of the conversation. [See CHAPTER TK: HOW THE DEAF DO IT]
And I’ve been asked,Does a folk journalist ever get tired of hearing someone’s story?
Heck yeah!
Many’s the morning at say, a Peet’s in North Berkeley, where every confab you overhear takes on elements of as Hamlet puts it in Hamlet: “… it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.”
Yuck, right?
Which is why watching much of the culture carrying on via Facebook, folk journalists still prefer best the face-to-face back-and-forth.
Here’s an example. Interviewing clowns in New York City, I asked Dr. Meatloaf (Stephen Ringold), the following:
“What’s it like to be a clown in today’s world?”
First thing he taught me? How my microphone is like his face paint – a prop mask which acts to free up the persona. Lets it come through.
“Hmm.” I said.
Then he said: “My clown parts lately seem to be coming together.”
“Really? In what way?” I asked.
“Like the lovers at end of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale,” Dr. Meatloaf said. “Melting ice and redemption, welcoming what comes, welcoming the wounds of love, you know, opening up to the anima and learning to more and more embrace the part of the clown persona of vulnerability, of suffering laughter.”
Well said. For a clown. (Kidding; I’ve done shows with Mr. Ringold in Germany, the Netherlands, and New Jersey, so he understands.)
Try this at home: Dr. Meatloaf family
Yes, I admit it: some of my best friends are clowns. Dr. Noodle (aka Ilene Weiss) is another hilarious pal. I’ve always dug Wavy Gravy’s definition of one as, “A poet who is also an orangutan.” Dr. Meatloaf, in realizing this persona, uses his long experience and craft in places like the “Clown Care Unit” where he and Dr. Noodle played with stricken children in hospitals and at Paul Newman’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang camp in Connecticut.
Another wonderful clown, Avner the Eccentric Eisenberg is from Maine by way of Atlanta. I interviewed him at McHale’s theater bar on 45th Street in New York (no longer there). Avner explained his practice of humor as healing. A holy goofing healing method involving breathing. Yep, it works medicinally, and has grown continentally, with people starting their days in Laughter Clubs from Mumbai to Middletown, USA. And feeling revivified afterward. http://www.laughteryoga.org/english/club/find_club
Try wearing clown face and taking part in street fairs, whether in San Francisco, Europe, Burning Man or the Catskills. Or simply to entertain ill relatives. Here a new feeling comes live: You find yourself free to say anything to anybody. And as it begins conversations, draws conversations out, it also draws new conversation. Imagine dressing up and chatting with fellow “cosplayers,” partaking in all kinds of fantasy confabs at comic-conventions where instant myths get created right in front of your face. Or if you’re not game, attend and just observe. Nothing’s better than being close enough to get some giggles out of it.
Bonus!
One of my favorite new clowns is Mr. Clown, who helps toddlers close the “30 million word gap”
Listening to President LBJ turn it up in Austin, TX
If one person in a conversation takes the rhetorical levels up to 10 every time, the other person has to rebut at Level 10 and turn monstrous, or retreat into resentful silence. Rhetorical passion, which feels so good, can destroy conversation and mar truth and reconciliation.David Brooks, NY Times Dec 15 2015
Hello again, your neighborhood WalkyTalky here, listening like a folk journalist to people like Lyndon Baines Johnson above, U.S. President 1963-1968; well, that’s a reasonable facsimile thereof standing cardboard lifelike outside the play, “All The Way” by Robert Schenkkan in Austin last spring.
And my biggest fear for the longest time? The fear of having a bad conversation.
My whole body felt bad afterwards, it was like trying to titrate off anti-depressives with my insides going jiggly bzzzzz all over.
Not a good feeling. And during awful chats, are you like me? Do you feel flushed with thoughts flashing through you like, Beam me up please I beg of you, let’s the two of us you and me just wallow off into some other sector goodbye cruel world…
Right?
I felt like I was the only conversational taking-parter in the world who had ever suffered through one like this. Or ever made mistakes.
“We made too many wrong mistakes,” is a line from the great Yogi Berra I obviously hadn’t learned yet. Now, as you get older you get more relaxed (especially if you remember to quote more Yogisms) and you realize: that’s how intense youth is.
In youth, every line you try is like a pitch in the playoffs – so much seems to be riding on it. When you want to say what’s really on your mind — and why not, what’s the point of conducting a real conversation? — you speak your mind, you go to extremes. You let it all out in a howling howling howl, living like what Tropic of Capricorn*author Henry Miller meant when he wrote: “The main thing in life is not to understand it or mold it or even love it…but to drink of its undying essence. Round and round one goes, always over the same ground, always returning to the dead center: the unacceptable now.”
sketch by Flash Rosenberg
Whew.
Enough with the arguing, later in life of course, you learn to keep it in. (“Sit Down And Shut Up!” was recurring mocking rejoinder on Stephen Capen’s radio shows when I produced him in San Francisco and New York) I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good thing, keeping it in more, because of course the more and more you keep in the more you may eventually collapse from your insides and fall to your knees because of what life has done to you, until only by wailing out in shuddering screams re it all may you wake the rest of you up inside.
But think about it. Everyone is looking for an honest conversation. Why? Because nothing’s more refreshing than that. And if you are honestly open about yourself – “try it, they’ll like it”—you might feel better, too.
Or as Sarah Hepola, personal essay editor at Salon put it in her book* *: “The big arc of all personal essays is it’s all their fault and then I realize it’s all mine.”
So best to fess up Parker!
* Henry Miller’s more popular novel is Tropic of Cancer. I like Tropic of Capricorn from 1961, banned in USA for 30 years, which opens with: “Once you’ve given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.”
Humans are wired for social interaction. We want to work with people and have conversations with people. Laura Venderkam, Wall Street Journal Bookshelf (Aug 14th 2015)
Conversation stations can include: a Restaurant, a Diner, a Café, a Park.
How about in a classroom? Among fellow students. Back and forth with the teacher. Or in class after the teacher leaves, even.
Waiting in/on line, waiting for a plane, waiting for your laundry, your coffee, your $$$ lottery winnings.
Okay, picture this: A crowded waiting room. “Everybody waiting…old man sleeping on his bags, women with that teased-up kind of hair…kids with the jitters in their legs and those wide wide open stares.” Joni Mitchell, Just Like This Train
Like Joni, for good talk, I take trains whenever possible.
Why?
Folks are more appreciative on trains. Appreciative of things like TIME. Like lounging, reading, sleeping – folks on a train create a little neighborhood together. It’s like The little neighborhood that never was. Except right now it exists while you are traveling together. Where ya going? Through time? Hey, nobody leaves the room do they? Which makes them great places to appreciate conversation.
So get your convo on in the “Club” car, the “Dome” car, the “Sightseer” car.
Ever been?
Purple dresses in the dome car
It’s where Amtrak-Americans gather for observation, games, and opening up. As a folk journalist, I’ve gone coast-to-coast with a cast of characters thousands of miles and over eight-minutes-long for NPR. *
The youngest get excited about stuff like: “Look at the light rail track over there!” (Apparently little kids love light rail. Perhaps post-Millennial Gen Next will popularize mass transit!)
The oldest, who maybe dislike flying or the bus, know rail travel is more civilized. Amtrak was years ahead of the sharing economy: you are forced to share a table in the dining car. But you get to hear about lives. Ethanol farmers from Kansas, rodeo clowns from El Paso – each takes your mind off your laptop and phone, talking your ear off all the way to Union Station in Chicago, LA, Portland or Spokane.
You get to feel their strong handshakes afterwards.
Rob & Bob, nature guides aboard The Empire Builder
I lucked out once and got seated for dinner while crossing eastern Washington into Idaho and Montana with two nature guides: Bob & Rob. They came aboard to present a “Rails to Trails” talk. Soon the history of the Cascades and a couple of Columbia River dams came alive as the apple capitals and pear orchards flying by. The tunnel we’d come through was the second longest in the world – longest being in B.C. just north of here—and by the time the full moon over Wenatchee rose, I’d learned all about Mt’s Baker and Rainier, and Snokomish, too, so I suggested the duo do a “Bob and Ray” routine because Rob was low-voiced calm and Bob taller and more high strung in his descriptions of vineyards and the delights of Washington cherries.
Cascades seen from Amtrak
Of course, there are other times, a folk journalist will sit staring out a train window, thinking: “Man I have no life.” Then out the same window, passing Ventura, here comes a view of the Pacific Ocean, sea and sky and mountains and everything in between. And then he realizes: I have all of life! And soon I’m engaged in friendly confabs up and down the California coast again…
Working on the RR
Suddenly I hear: “Lookit, Mom! Lookit!”
What is it?
”Bubbles!” the little girl shouts pointing at a polluted river winding down there below the tracks.
“Woo Woo!” goes the train, and all is well.
Williston Station, North Dakota
BACK POCKET BANTER
Where have you traveled on a train or by ship?
What kind of acquaintances have you made on a trip?
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen happen while traveling?
Did you ever learn anything new from conversations on a train, ship or plane?
What is the longest trip you’ve ever been on?
BONUS!
An additional conversation aboard Amtrak is how you are reducing your “carbon footprint” by taking a train instead of flying in an airplane. Which may lead to interesting places and a longer confab in the Dining Car.
ACTIVITIES
Ever ask a diner woman or porter on board what’s their favorite song? They’ll sing it for you.
Freestylers & Foreigners: Fear and Locomotiving on the Southwest Chief There are only three trans-continental trains in the U.S. And, with Amtrak planning on dropping some of its long-distance routes, you might want to put a choo-choo trip across the States higher on your travel to-do list. Hank Rosenfeld took this to heart when he boarded Amtrak Train #4 at LA’s Union Station with a cast of characters including golden-agers and their grandchildren, Central American tourists and ex-cons let out of Lompoc that morning. And all the while, on his 48-hour trip to Detroit, Hank experiences the romance of the rail.
The goal: to get to where the words fall, from a muse-filled sky, down through your mind, and off the end of your quilled tongue. Author Ken Kesey
Comedy loves heart. Paul Sills, founding guru at Second City
At the feet of the great satirist Paul Krassner *
Ready for a few folk journalistically-tested quick openers?
These convo firestarters tend to be terse, bent toward further conversage.
(For one-liners bent toward getting the heck out of a bad conversation in one quick of a hurry SEE WITCRAFT How to Extricate From Any Conversation — TK)
But hey, you take a chance, am I right? The cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty of “Macdoodle Street” fame in the Village Voice, drew one that I kept above my typewriter for years. Its theme: “You have to risk it all every day!”
Now some folks have, as it has become known through cultural history, “the gift for gab.” (In some parts of the country: “the gift of gab.”) Usually these high-energy individuals are able to get away with lines like, “Is that a smile? Are you smiling right now?”
Or this one:
Quick Opener, “Don’t they miss you?” Semi-startled, you answer: “Who?”
Quick Opener Comeback: “Heaven. I know they must be missing an angel right about now.”
Yuck. By adding authenticity to your game, you can avoid this superficial subtext–shallower-than-spit level of a conman. Here’s how to insert yourself into another person’s space. Do what Paul Sills, guru of Second City advises. His mother Viola Spolin wrote the first handbook on improvisational theater games and Sills told us in an NYC class one day something I’ve never forgotten: “Encourage the laggards.”
He meant that in the everyday battle for existence, leaning inside with a quick jab, uttering the first sentence, is not that hard. So try to encourage those you cannot.
“You are in the safest place in the universe,” he’d tell us. “On a stage.”
Our teacher was right. What a safety in freedom we all felt about firing that first volley. We could say anything. Perhaps Sills’ approach came from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” wherein Jacques says: “The whole world is a stage, and all the men and women merely actors.”
But how can you continue offstage, backstage, in real life, without acting out every anxiety, all your neuroses falling out all over everybody because after all, Shakespeare’s Jacques was a melancholy man after all.
Think of professional athletes who “make a play.” A folk journalist is just as serious about playmaking. (And often makes plays at being serious, too.) What do I mean by this?
Make a play for making room enough so a conversation can become as big as your subject’s world. Because when you explore, you find interesting people. People get more interesting by telling you a tale. They might reveal their dreams, or say something obscene, something simple as recalling an episode of their favorite show, or talk about where they went that time with their first love.
BACK POCKET BANTER (Other Quick Openers)
Noticing how pictures on the fronts of t-shirts are just about the same size as a small TV screen, “What is that funny thing on your shirt?”
From mall to boardwalk, it is easy to be encourageable, “Where did you buy that lovely dress? Did you make it yourself?”
“Is that good? What you’re reading. What’s it about?”
“I love the rain don’t you?” (Stolen from Woody Allen where his next line is, “It washes the memories off the sidewalks of life.” May be inapplicable in some western climes.)
“Do you hear that? What’s that song they’re playing?”
Even, “Whacha’ doin?” when gently expressed can get the ball to their side. The Beatles did a whole song with that as their title. **
“I really admire your shoes” is most always welcomed by young women.
And young men have been known to lead with one of the following three:
“Yo!” “Wazzup?” And, “Nice car! Hey!”
Or the equally played betimes: “Hey! Nice car!”
NEXT TIME:“Onward!” Author Henry Miller and radio storyteller Jean Shepherd both said this I think, although Jean (flicklives.com) was more known for “Excelsior!”
* Hear my conversation with Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist and co-founder of the Youth International Party: The Yippies!
