Wavy Gravy

PoSt MoDeRn CoNvERsaTiOnS

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT WHAT WE TALK ABOUT LIKE WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT IT BEFORE

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?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Conversation-Neglected-Pleasure/dp/1592404979

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.

Languages of Papua: http://www.ethnologue.com/country/PG/languages

“You get my drift?”

– I’m following your smoke.

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:

Confidence in The System https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDqk8o6y13Y&feature=kp]

Enjoy!

* Invented for entertainment purposes only.

** Elmore Leonard’s “marijuana tense” http://austinkleon.com/2005/12/22/elmo-leonards-present-participle/

*** J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye is terrific for lovers of conversation: http://mentalfloss.com/article/64836/13-things-you-might-not-know-about-catcher-rye

with Paradise Lost at UCSD — Paradise Lost found near Geisel Library on the campus of UCSD

We are all staring into the mirror trying to shake hands with ourselves.

Wavy Gravy Merry Prankster/Woodstock Emcee/Beat Poet Hugh Romney/Ben & Jerry’s Flavor

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.)

Dr. Meatloaf clowning with family on Cape Cod — 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.

http://www.bigapplecircus.org/clown-care

http://www.holeinthewallgang.org

Classical Clowns — by Gregory L. Blackstock

Ringold also does a mean Ebenezer Scrooge every Christmas in New York’s Morgan Library, where they have the original text of Christmas Carol:

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/dickens/ChristmasCarol/62

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

Folk Journalist Activity

Learn to carry a microphone like wearing a mask.

Interview clowns.

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”

http://mrclown.tv

To read my interview w/ Dan Berkley, a Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey circus clown:

http://www.jewishjournal.com/articles/item/clowning_around_20060728

For more about the amazing, the original Wavy Gravy: http://www.wavygravy.net

PoMo ConVo

Conversations With Clowns