Grammys: U2 Three for Three

While I wasn't even rooting for U2 in their categories (I know—shock), I was delighted by their wins anyway. Who can resist the lads?

(I really like Green Day and The Killers and hoped they'd get a foot in the Grammy door... Green Day did.)



The Edge dedicated the Best Performance by a Rock Group or Duo award to his daughter, Sian, who is suffering from leukemia right now (hence the almost cancelled tour).

Bono looked genuinely surprised by the honor of three wins for Vertigo, expressed that he thought this was the best set of Grammy performances ever (I agree!), and then went speechless (most notable speechlessness of the night).

Then Larry stepped forward to speak directly to the fans who felt jilted by the ticket presale fiasco. It was touching that U2 would use that public occasion to directly apologize (again) to the fans when the vast majority of the audience for the Grammys must not have had a clue what he was talking about. The general hub bub on @U2.com is that they are forgiven.

A few pics and then on to other topics:


Bono with Green Day's Bille Joe Armstrong


Bono singing to his dad

Killing Bono (by Neil McCormick)

Shout out to BethD for sharing her book with me.

When I was 4' 7" tall and fourteen years old (that is not a typo—I really was cruelly short), I used to stand on the top of my dad's stereo console (it was one of those monstrous pieces of furniture that housed speakers and record player and a small illegal alien family). I stood on the hinged lid that covered the turntable underneath. Opposite the stereo was a massive mirror, ornately framed in gold, above our fireplace. Standing on the stereo gave me a perfect full length view of myself, a view I loved to behold.

But, you ask, why on earth would I want to see a full length view of myself while testing the strength of the lid hinges? Destiny: I wanted to sing like Barbra Streisand or rock out like Elton John or belt out musicals like Shirley Jones. I sang and swooned and "shook what my mama gave me" to an audience of one—the hairbrush and I never looked so good.

I always thought I'd be famous. I imagined being a great actress or pop star or both! By fourteen, my dreams were in trouble. When rehearsing as Dorothy for the "Wizard of Oz," I discovered that although I had a "nice voice" it was not a strong voice. California's desert like conditions attacked my vocal chords for the next twenty-five years. I lost my voice so regularly that by the time I hit my late thirties, I couldn't sing. I would mouth the words to songs, but if I sang, it was three octaves lower than the four tenors. When we moved to Ohio, my voice returned within two months and I've not lost it since. Blessed be the gods of humidity! Sweat never meant more to me.

Perhaps if Hollywood had been in Cincinnati, I might have fulfilled that destiny, would have skipped missionary work and gone straight for stardom. But it wasn't and I didn't and I'm not.

Which leads me to Bono.

My fascination with Bono is in part that he is an Irish male alter ego (what I sometimes wish I could have been, right down to the bitchin' sunglasses and world philanthropy in Africa, of all places that I LOVE!)

Neil McCormick in his novel about being Bono's Doppelganger (or alter ego) explores the pain of watching his friend soar to superstardom while he goes nowhere yet believes he is more deserving. Neil does a great job of showing how his dreams crashed and burned while Bono's child-like faith in God, his band and himself led to the top of the world status of both the band and the man. If you have any interest in the music industry (that you missed out on), this book will cure you of ever feeling badly about not getting into it!

I wanted to share a few quotes.

On early use of multi-media in U2 concerts (1979)
There was a white screen set up at the side of the stage with lights projecting on it from behind. During "Stories for Boys," a snappy song about male-fanstasy role models, Bono dragged Alison on stage and they disappeared behind the screen, where their silhouettes groped and snogged one another (97).

On the hard work of being good
"I saw Bono at a bus stop in town sometime afterward. There was another mental adjustment to be made. I thought that record deals were synonymous with limousines, the beginning of the easy life. "You know, you spend all this time and energy trying to get a record deal," said Bono. "Then you get to the end of this whole struggle and find out it's only the beginning. The real work starts now." (110)

On dreaming big (Neil and his brother Ivan)
Ivan and I were born in the sixties, children of a class revolution, the spawn of TV and pop culture. We were part of what was probably the first generation to take fame for granted. Everybody is at it now, of course. Something previously represented as available only to the highest achievers in mankind is now seen as a career option. We wanted to be famous. Therefore we would be. It was obvious, wasn't it? (115)

Bono's songwriting skills
I listened to War with admiration, not envy. I was honestly amazed that they were progressing in such creative leaps and bounds, producing songs of the transcendent quality of "Sunday Bloody Sunday." "You don't write songs," I had once admonished Bono. "You make these fantastic records but if you took away all the layers of sound what's underneath? There's nothing you could just sing in the shower."

"I don't have a shower," he jokingly replied. "I have a bath. Maybe that's the problem!"

Tsunami Death Toll: over 300,000

Atsujin
Earth and metal...                             
although my breathing ceases           
time and tide go on.                            


Japanese Death Poem

James Cone

"No white theologian has ever taken the oppression of blacks as a point of departure for analyzing God's activity in contemporary America." (A Black Theology of Liberation 9)

Is it just me? This assertion knocked my socks off. In twenty-five years of attending church, I can't think of one instance where the pastor addresses the racism of American white Christianity.

In fact, whenever I try to discuss the "issue of racism," I am met with an immediate affirmation of "colorlessness" in Christianity and whites go on to compare the disadvantages of being black to those experienced as an overweight person, or someone with economic disadvantage or even being rejected on the basis of Christian faith. There is no willingness to yield to the possibility that we have been (may still be) a part of a system that was fundamentally evil—that our current social location as white middle class Americans was bought for us on the backs of 350 years of slavery and oppression of enslaved Africans.

Worse, those years of slavery were often justified within the confines of white Christian theology. And if slavery was not justified in northern white churches, Cone rightly asks, "Why was there no passion to overturn the injustice being endorsed and supported in the white southern churches?" He declares that there is no such thing as a "Christian church" that supported racism, slavery or segregation.

That we 21st century white Christians are so quick to identify ourselves with the miniscule number of white Quakers who supported the Underground Railroad, or the white liberals who followed Dr. King during the sixties, when we are in churches and communities that were deeply racist in those eras, continues to astound me. It would be interesting to look at the roots of our particular denominations in America and deal squarely with the implications of the denomination's stand on race during the years of oppression. How has the church "repented in sackcloth and ashes"? Or has it quietly adjusted and gone on?

"Because white theology has consistently preserved the integrity of the community of oppressors, I conclude that it is not Christian theology at all." (9)

And this is the crux of the black theological challenge to whites. We whites don't want to be wrong, we don't want to face our complicity, we don't want to invalidate our denominational heritage. We ask, "Can't we all get along? Doesn't God forgive sins? Even bad sins?" Yet have we even probed the depths of a theology that would endorse and support the evil of slavery? To what are we blind today that is endorsed by a theology we consider pure? How do we continue to perpetuate our superiority as a race without even knowing it?

Teen Logic 101

Teen in Fine Arts class: Dang it! The teacher destroyed my clay pot.

Johannah: No way! Why would he do that?

Teen: He said it looked too much like a bong.

Johannah: But it was a bong, wasn't it?

Teen: Yeah, but he didn't know that.

::pause::

Johannah: Um, apparently, he did.

Writer, know thyself

In my other online life (where I teach writing and help moms teach writing here), I am experiencing a tidal wave of input about the process of writing and teaching that helps me to stay connected to what writing is like for most mortals.

I remember when I began writing for the outside world (not just school papers, but for magazines and newsletters, as a ghost writer and editor, in my attempts to publish a children's book that I wrote with all of my heart), I called on my mother's robust talent and optimism. As a published author (of some 50+ books now) and writing instructor for more than thirty years, I trusted her and knew she'd have writing resources for me to use as I honed my raw skills. She was my first writing teacher, after all, and remains my best.

The first two books she suggested:

Writing with Power by Peter Elbow
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

I had a similar reaction to both—hey, they write the way I write! I had no idea that writers might have similar experiences of the writing process. It was not only a relief (don't we all want validation that how we do things is "normal"?) but it was also empowering. I felt like I had joined a vast current of written self-expression and that I belonged. I didn't need to "get published" as much as I needed to keep writing.

Just this week, one of my student moms wrote that her college writing class had used Writing with Power as their primary college writing text. She shared how freewriting, positive feedback and no grading had given her the courage to explore writing on another level—the level of writer's voice.

Then she wrote the following sentence that knocked my socks off:
When this teacher helped me find my voice, he helped me find me.

Only a grim administrator would roll her eyes worried that the "objectives for a writing class had not been met."

What is it about the educational environment that causes us to distrust our voices, that urges us to shed ourselves in favor of "objectivity" and "rules based writing" that are as unattainable as being made prom queen at forty? Wouldn't it be glorious to find out that through writing, we could know ourselves, we might awaken to who we are at a more profound level? That's education worth paying for!

I couldn't help but think about the relationship between writing, knowing self and religion. Insofar as faith leads people to a deeper, more honest self-knowledge, I applaud it. But so often, it mimicks bad writing classes—filled with rules, impossible-to-achieve results, criticism by "experts" and a denial of the self that the religious community invited to join to begin with.

I wonder if we can find our "spiritual" voices through free-faith, positive feedback and no grading of our sins? What if we were encouraged to shed our beliefs for awhile and focus on what's true? What if our very lives became freewrites wherein we helped each other find our voices, and thus find our selves?

To blogger or not to blogger?

My current question

I'm having some trouble with my other blog which is hosted on my business site, while being powered by Blogger. Seems that the publishing feature is irritatingly fickle. The archiving feature has acted up, my comments have vanished and at least once every other day, I can't publish to the site. I get an error associated with the SFTP socket. I have had no problems with this blog which is hosted on blogger.

Needless to say, for my business, I can't have this kind of recurring problem. So, I am now researching Movable Type, Type Pad and Word Press. Anyone have experience with any of these?

I have the good fortune of a hunky IT guy who shares my computer and my bed so I don't have to use a completely "dummy style" system.

What I find frustrating is that I'd really like someone to just list the features for laybloggers like me:

Archiving in categories
17 templates to choose from
On/off comments

yada yada.

I like blogger because it has been so easy to get started. I noticed that on PCs, the posting window has a rich text editor! Wow. Not on the iBook. But I've been forced to learn a bit of html so that was good for me anyway.

Still, I'm a bit daunted by the templates in CSS and Php. That might push me past my comfort zone.

At this point, just trying to determine what will be the easiest to use while the most reliable for publishing and archiving. I have a pretty high volume of posts so I need a system that keeps track of everything without getting buggy on me.

I'm thinking I'll try WordPress (it's free) and see how it goes.

Any advice?

Ay Caramba! Have we learned nothing?

See this article: The Salvador Option

NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.

Italia—CIAO!

Our family of seven has managed to squirrel away enough Lire (or Euro, to be more up to date) to travel to Italy this summer. We purchased tickets yesterday and will travel to see my aunt and uncle and their two kids in Viareggio first (by way of Pisa):


Can you stand it? LOOK AT THAT BEACH! I will be passed out, blissfully unaware that the Internet even exists.... Ahhhh.....

Then we'll travel to Florence:

Yes, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it!

We'll have to visit the wonderful San Gimignano that E.M. Forster can't stop talking about in A Room with a View (my favorite book of all time).


And finally, we plan to spend five days in Roma:


Bravissima for us!

For inquiring minds, this does mean that I actually got our passport applications off without a hitch. Six! A flylady feat to behold!

Operation "Corrupt Homeschooled Youth"

Frozen lemonade from Jacob's birthday party where conservative Christian homeschooled kids were exposed to imaginary adult beverages and poker... with devastating results.

Cheap teenage intoxication recipe:

1 can of frozen lemonade concentrate
1 pitcher full of ice

Whip, frappe, puree on low then switch to atom-splitting speed in a blender until motor smokes.

Pour into clearance rack champagne glasses post New Year's Eve. Gently open umbrellas so that they don't "freak out" and snap.

Toast the birthday boy.

Watch kids walk into walls, slur their words, tickle each other (touching, touching, touching) and giggle so hard frozen lemonade squirts out their noses... all while saying (each one had to say this at least once): "Man what did you put in this stuff? Tequila? I'm so drunk."

Hours of entertainment without an ounce of Southern Comfort! Such a deal.