So what does that say about Shakespeare? What does it say about social media?
Post-texting, what do you think will be the next big thing to come along? (Go Mindlink!)
Well, my friends, the world we’ve built for our children is too strange they may not even want to know when it gets here. Who knows, perhaps we’ll be speaking Elizabethan face to face.
Meanwhile, this bantering between the Earl and the King kinda make me think of Warren Zevon’s, Werewolves of London: “He’s the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent!”
Folk Journalistical Historical Note: Mr. Zevon came to the San Francisco radio station where I worked in the late 1970s and left us a promotional version of the song: “Ah-ooo werewolves of KSAN!”
Yesterday I came across a wonderful quote from writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. In describing the first story he reported for Washington’s City Paper, he “found out that journalism is a done thing. In other words there is no ‘better than you.’ There’s just the story you produced. That’s what it is. Either you repeatedly asked questions or you didn’t. That was a deep sort of lesson – that the winner is the person who keeps asking questions. That’s the winner.”
Yes, a motto for folk journalism world over: Keep Asking Questions.
As a folk journalist, trying to create a space by invading someone else’s, you can connect. With the right question, you bring a moment to life that might help a fellow human find meaning. You can try to make room enough so a conversation can become as big as your subject’s world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ newest book is Between The World And Me, called a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States”(NY Observer)
Here’s a link to his memory of first committing journalism, in a recent issue of New York Magazine where writers, musicians, and actors recall when they found their life’s passion: http://nymag.com/news/features/beginnings/ta-nehisi-coates/
As more and more of our relationships play out over social media, with political squabbles passing for conversation and emojis standing in for genuine expressions of affection…
Meghan Daum, LA Times February 18 2016 on how Justices Scalia and Ginsberg could share common joys despite their political differences
People yearn to elevate the “national” conversation. When a culture like ours lacks decent political dialogue, comedians act as our philosophers and guides. We turn to Samantha Bee and John Oliver.
I do, for guidance.
Meanwhile, do you think texting has helped the national conversation?
I don’t. When you don’t have to face a convo-correspondent, you can grind them down and out by turning a give-and-take into a rugby grunt. It’s so easy to push and shove aint it? But screaming angry and lost is not a conversation.
Political conversation can be enlightening. Despite what you may take from current debates. And the best way to join a national convo? Start one. Locally. Here’s an example:
In August of 1968, I was sitting on the floor of our “family room” in Detroit watching the Democratic convention being broadcast on NBC. (My parents liked Cronkite, but Huntley-Brinkley were great covering conventions.) Suddenly there on our 19-inch Magnavox were policemen in Chicago swinging billy clubs at protestors, knocking them into dark streets.
I turned to my father sitting behind me. My father always watched TV shows from the sofa with the evening’s Detroit News on his lap.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Why are the cops beating up those students?”
My father folded the newspaper on his lap. The continuing mayhem kept flowing right there in front of us in uncut black-and-white news footage, and he seemed at a loss.
“I don’t know, son,” he said.
“I don’t get it,” said the 13 year-old son.
“I don’t understand that, either,” said the dad.
And this is when I first learned to – the phrase was already popular on protest buttons —“question authority.”
Because guess what? Authority did not have all the answers. Sometimes authority didn’t know what was going on. It was time for me to join the national conversation. (Ask your grandparents for more details.)
By Andy Rash
Back Pocket Banter
Perhaps some folk journalism seeds were planted during that 1968 Democratic convention. I remember seeing NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur brandishing his microphone like a weapon, flashing past competing convention floor reporters from ABC and CBS, adjusting the antenna on his portable headset—made him look like My Favorite Martian — and shouting: “Buzz off guys, this is my interview!”
Questions
What do you think of our current discourse?
Do you ever write letters to a newspaper or call a radio talk show? What about?
A popular button worn during the revolutionary days of the 1960s said: “Question Authority.”* Do you ever question authority? What kind of response did you get?
Cultural Convo
Write a short thank you letter to a public figure who has had a positive influence on you.
Shoot an email to a local, statewide or national politician about something they said. See what kind of response you get and tell others about it.
Join “the national conversation” online or on a street corner. Annotate, annoy, amuse and inform others. With verses of your own devising, drive eyeballs open 24/7. “Write your ream or only dream.” Go ahead and pull a leg pull a face pull a prank. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters of the 1960s defined a prank as, “Something never been seen before: You bomb them, but you do it at night, with poetry.”
America is talkin’. It is this conversation that I find fascinating and vital. It is who we are – a highly opinionated, multimillion-voiced choir with Internet access. I think the anonymity allows people to honestly state what’s on their mind. The ugly Americans and all the rest come out to play.
Henry Rollins in The LA Weekly February 2014
In the mixed-up scrum of politics and media that our so-called national conversation has become….[it’s] a roiling cauldron of outside observers, all bent on ‘bearing witness’ to the situation.
Mark Leibovich, “Let Us All Bear Witness To The Conversation!” NY Times Sunday Magazine September 2014
Just another sorta darn decent quick-opener. That’s what folk journalists call it.
Something to get it started. A convo popper if you will.
Try it sometime. I did, with excellent results just this morning outside a Peet’s in Santa Monica.
A gentlemen sat down and I said, looking at the sky: “Rain’s comin’.”
You could smell it. (Not the conversation, the rain.)
But indeed this did lead to a lovely conversation with this fellow. A jazz musician just back from Japan, trying to recover he said because he was so jet-lagged from a 14-hour flight.
“How long were you in Japan?” I ventured. Two months, he told me, adding how awful it was trying to get his bass clarinet in the overhead bin of the airplane due to the protestations of the host aboard Thai Air who wanted him to check it, but of course he made it fit.
“Never fly Thai,” he said.
Then he pulled out his phone and showed me two wonderful spots in Thailand where warm springs run not far from a hideaway cabin.
“I didn’t play any music there,” he said. “I just sat and wrote music.”
In downtown Osaka he lived with his wife in a hotel while he played. How wonderful the Japanese people were to him. But although they loved jazz in Tokyo, “in Osaka, I don’t know what kind of music that was.”
With the coming rain came the end of our conversation. He bowed a farewell, told me about some music he cut with jazz legend Kenny Barron and where to find it on YouTube.
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT WHAT WE TALK ABOUT LIKE WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT IT BEFORE
sketch by Flash Rosenberg
My compliments to the ocean.
Dick Cavett in a restaurant after being served a nice piece of fish.
A good folk journalist makes for a good emcee. Like Mr. Cavett, bringing the table together. A Master of Ceremonies. Bring on the Fun Conversations. That’s me!
How does one speak MC ?
Here’s one thing to try: Offer remarks that bring the most amount of people together at one time:
“Well, it looks like introductions are in order!”
“Did you make that yourself?”
“What’s your sign?” (Mine is Slippery When Wet. Thanks to Wavy Gravy for this.)
From “Twentieth Century Etiquette, An Up-To-Date Book For Polite Society” by Annie Randall White
So are you ready to emcee yourself?
[See QUICK OPENERS, DECEMBER 7 2015 for Paul Sills’ advice: “Encourage the laggards.”]
Expert Catherine Blythe suggests in her book The Art of Conversation aiming for about four minutes before cutoff. No longer than that. Keep that convo moving, “like a good game of Frisbee.” Otherwise, she says, it becomes boring — I mean, people and their freakin’ monologues, right?
Q: What is having to listen to somebody talk for fifty minutes and not getting paid?
A: The opposite of therapy!
How does a folk journalist avoid that happening?
A lot of people get into conversations just to let you know who they are. They have no interest in you. (Hard to believe, right?) So why bother listening to them playing the same tape made-to-impress? And how to get an edge in word-wise and actually have conversations with people who talk a lot?
Folk journalists know that wrangling the ego of such a talker takes semi-masterful talk techniqueing. So here’s how to enjoy listening to them, even as they go on and on ad infinitum.
The growing field of Ethnomonology* is here. Finally!
Taught online usually, for profit, and soon to be a major growth industry, ETM teaches that humanity’s monologues may actually teach us about said person rattling saying along. There’s the guy who narrates his lives as he goes through it. Often you see him with ear buds and a phone, describing what corner he’s approaching (BEING HERE THEN!). He often uses Elmore Leonard’s “marijuana tense”** which author Martin Amis describes as dialogue using a present participle that creates a hazy sort of meandering now: “Bobby saying,” and then the dialogue follows.
If this seems difficult to handle, don’t despair. Think this is hard — try living in Papua, New Guinea; at least one tribe there speaks in 17 different tenses.
Still however, you may find yourself learning very little by listening. Nothing, maybe?
When walking with such individually-linked to themselves lingua leaders, remember this: Out amongst his own self, desiring nothing more than to be marveled at/gazed upon, heard in all his incredible incrudibleness, which he believes after all to be the next evolutionary stage of a human being — doubtful: By observing you may still pick up a lot of visual information to enjoy and/or play with.
Or as Yogi Bear once put it: Heyyy Boo Boo, from this viewpoint we can get a better outlook! (Or was that Yogi Berra?)
But if all your emcee attempts fail, chalk it up to what Holden Caulfield describes as, referring to conversations, “Goddam boring ones.” In Catcher In The Rye, he gets involved in more than two dozen confabs. But don’t worry, some of them he finds, “slightly intellectual.” ***
Finally, if still in doubt, you can blame it on The System, referring yourself to this Firesign Theater video:
