In 2014, the average American adult spent four times longer watching TV than socializing and communicating.
The American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, NY Times January 10 2016
Wow. That’s a drag. Let me be the last to wish you Happy 2016. Let’s get out there and conversate!
Depending upon where you are living, or where you suddenly find yourself arrested (See weblog entry: NOW THAT YOU’VE BEEN ARRESTED), learning how to give toasts in a different language can be crucial. Any folk journalist knows — well, this one; I’ve been arrested in Athens, Minneapolis and elsewhere — you are more likely to impress captors by coming off as erudite, perhaps even as someone appearing exotic or full of intrigue. This sometimes can also get one free drinks.
Herewith a few starter tongues to try out:
Cherefa! Turkish for in your honor
Genatseet! Armenia to your health
Gon Bai! Drain your cup in China
Jeveli! means long life in Croatian
Krasivaya! is Beautiful to Russians
Salum! is the Farsi for shalom/salaam/peace
Sastimos! in Romani for good health
Saud! Portuguese
Spakoini Noche! is Good night
And Zie Gezundt!Yiddish, works for so many things
Toasts in Many Countries! Let’s talk soon shall we?
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
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.”
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!
The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known. Pete Seeger
“There are few who do not ardently desire to become good conversationalists.” From the book “Twentieth Century Etiquette An Up-To-Date Book For Polite Society” by Annie Randall White
So what does a folk journalist do? And do you care?
That’s a lesson I learned out there: if you don’t care about your fellow conversant, why carry such a heavy microphone? (Although, yes, flash drive cards have gotten much lighter, I learned at the feet of folks carrying Wollensaks* and other portably massive recording machiens.)
Why stick a mic smack dab into the snoot of every Mr. and Mrs. America? Just to get a story?
Well, yes.
You’ll find them on every block. Spending forty years taking it to the streets of this great entertainment nation — not livingin the street, though I’ve interviewed the houseless and as Dylan said, Who aint homeless? — but as a foreign correspondent too, in Athens and Jerusalem, your friendly neighborhood folk journalist has been fired out of newsrooms from New York to San Francisco.
Also from Los Angeles to Santa Monica.
That’s the nature of the business. But you learn some things. A folk journalist gets nothing less than a learner’s permit for life.**
The world opens when you open with a question. Folk journalists are so freewheeling with questions, they can come off more as “suggestions.” They come with low-expectations. You are trying to create a space (ala RAM DASS; more about him later) where a person can feel comfortable to chat.
I’ve learned so much on mic. And off, of course, with the result being slapped, kicked (Ahh, Athens!), chased out of shops, run down streets by cops. All in the service of asking for that story never heard before.
The famous quote by E.M. Forster comes to mind: “Only connect.”
How?
By presenting voices from America. (More about STUDS TERKEL later) One records people professionally for radio, but also, any average woman-on-the-street-travelling-marshmallow-face-painted-every-kid-who-has-a-podcast gets to pop the vox populi by posing questions. Creating a space by invading someone else’s. The rightly timed question can bring a moment to life that might help a fellow find meaning in their own.
One of the beauties of this job is nobody knows where a conversation can lead.
How to make your great big convo begin?
Are you taking notes? Because poet Robert Bly (More on him, etc.) has the answer!
Bly says, “Ask a question. And listen.”
QUESTIONS
As a folk journalist, some approaches I’ll open with:
“What was the best year of your life?”
“How do you handle stress?”
“What is your conception of God?”
“What’s the richest you’ve ever been?”
“What is the most beautiful word in the (fill in) language?”
“What does this line mean: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. ”
“Do you have a podcast?”
“How do you like your Burning Man experience thus far?”
TIP
Here’s a simple way to start (See Post on “Quick Openers”): “Need any help with that?”
Kind of an easygoing outreach that oft-times returns a response your way and who knows what’s next.
Because after that? (Don’t get nervous now) We’re off and running! And walking and talking and listen…
The Art of Listening: A good talker makes a good listener…. You pay your listeners by a few “brilliant flashes of silence” now and then, the compliment of supposing that they have something to say, and that you are desirous of listening to them.
Toasts in Many Countries! Let’s talk soon shall we?
