A Sight to See: The Kings of Leon (with Band of Horses) live at the Frank Erwin Center, Austin, Texas, Tuesday, April 12, 2011

“Once the show gets started, it’s bound to be a sight to see.”

-- Caleb Followill, Kings of Leon, from Pyro on the Come Around Sundown album

Not our average Tuesday yesterday, that’s for sure. I even had a costume change, like all good (wannabe) celebrities.

After a rather routine day at the office, Jeanette and I dropped the kids off at the Treetops Learning Center and headed for the Highball club for Austin Voices for Education and Youth’s annual fundraiser, the “Shout Out Awards.” It was great to see Jeanette in her professional milieu. I’m proud to be associated with such a capable, accomplished person who has done so much for kids and their families in two different states.

Plus, she’s so darn sexy!

Then came the costume change – from respectful, preppy jacket and tie to ripped jeans, novelty t-shirt, and hiker sneaks for the Kings of Leon at the Frank Erwin Center. We made our way to the “Will Call” window where our tickets were waiting for us. I purchased them through a friend who works with the band, so they were good seats, as expected. In fact, they were the best seats I’ve ever had for a show of that magnitude. As I said to Jeanette, “These seats have ruined me for all future concerts.”

I’m sentimental at heart, in case you hadn’t noticed already, and being at this show brought me back to my college days. Our seats were the ones I used to look over at, as I was panting and sweating from being crushed on the General Admission floor by other young rock grunts, and wonder how those older people scored such sweet seats.

From this new vantage point I could look down into the pit, where the 20-somethings reveled, singing every word and pumping their arms in that way that can’t help but make you think of Nazi propaganda films from the 1930’s.

At one point I watched a young girl who was on her boyfriend’s shoulders, a few feet above the crowd. If this were a movie, this would be the moment the slow motion kicks in, and the camera zooms in on her face, which holds an expression of pure joy.

I want to make my way over to her, just so I can take her aside and make sure she understands that this moment is one she will never forget, that she will carry it with her always, through the complex landscape her life will eventually become. She’ll need to secure this memory in a safe place, like a treasure, so that she can find it when she needs it. When she’s feeling alone, or overwhelmed, she’ll be able to take out this remembrance, turn it over in her hand and recall the shimmering beauty of this moment.

Of course I don’t do that. I’m too old for the General Admission floor and have the sense those young people would render me limb from limb like rock-and-roll-crazed jackals were I to venture down there. Besides, Jeanette would have smacked me, and the girl’s boyfriend would likely have knocked me out, as well.

So I stayed in my seat and watched her, recalling my own concert memories from years gone by.

Love, Death and Bedtime: Just Another Goodnight Kiss

Our five year old looked at me last night at bedtime and said, almost lovingly, “You’re going to be dead soon, Daddy.”

If you allow yourself to hear this sort of remark at face value, you tend to go right to Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and the “I-See-Dead-People” scene. You imagine that fucked up little dead girl, dribbling the rat poison out of the side of her mouth, standing just over his shoulder, nodding in agreement. But it usually takes only one or two questions with Jackson, before you realize he’s coming from another place altogether.

Usually that place is somewhere out in left field or beyond, but this time, when he explains himself, it kind of makes sense. He’s lying in bed as I tuck him in, asking, “Now why would you say something like that, Jackson? Daddy’s not planning on dying any time soon.”

He reaches up and gently strokes my goatee. “Your beard looks gray. You’re getting old. You’re gonna die soon.”

I explain to him that even though I am aging, I am far from being aged, and I repeat that I plan on being around for a long, long time. He appears skeptical of this point, and a cute little worry line forms between his two perfect eyebrows.

I add the obligatory Lion King Mufasa speech, one I’ve delivered to both sons before, about how when we die we live on in the hearts of our loved ones, and therefore we mustn’t worry about dying. We must concern ourselves instead with how to live our lives in the best way we possibly can.

I’m writing this in a slightly cynical tone, but I really do believe these words quite deeply. I realized it when I said my final farewells to my father, eleven years ago this coming Monday, on April 18, 2000. Even as I was wailing out my sadness and grief in front of family and friends on that beautiful Easter morning of his funeral, I could sense my father there with me, as he always had been throughout my life up to that moment, his gentle, guiding hand on my shoulder. Whenever I need to, I can still feel his comforting embrace.

I want to hold my own boys closely enough so that they can draw upon the memory of that embrace, even after I’m gone.

CONGRATULATIONS: YOU'VE CREATED 100 BLOGPOSTS!!

So what’s up, blogger.com?? No confetti? Nobody jumping out of any cakes?

Not even an automated email, congratulating me on the accomplishment?

You may think it’s no big whoop, blogger.com, but to my mind 100 posts is a pretty major milestone. And there’s been some good stuff put up on the old Navelgazer site, too, my friends. I mean sure, not all of it is Joseph Mitchell, but there have been a number of musings that make me pretty proud.

Look at how far I’ve come, blogger.com: You remind me of it yourself, each and every time I log on. In 2009, when we first met, I posted three measly entries. In 2010, our first full year together, I managed 11.

Now, in 2011, my love for you has blossomed into a daily habit. I have not missed a day of togetherness, having posted all 100 days of the calendar year thus far.

That’s a big deal, blogger.com. There are actual human beings out there with whom I haven’t been able to maintain a relationship this long or this consistently.

So I ask you again, blogger.com: What’s up? Where is the love?

Those Little Fatherly Things You Never Forget

My father was a morning person, and I have memories of the time my brother and I spent with him every day before school. He would sit us each on a knee, as he sipped his coffee in his easy chair; we spent this down time before jumping into the routine of the day. I still recall the details of the experience: His breath smelled like black coffee, and there was a red blinking light atop a distant radio tower that always seemed to grab my sleepy attention.

I thoroughly enjoyed those moments of closeness with my father. The fact that I had to share him with my brother was a given, and I was okay with that for the most part. There were other, more unique rituals than the morning easy chair time. For example, there were the eggshell faces. Sometimes when my father served us eggs for breakfast, he would take the shells aside and draw cartoonish faces on them with a pencil. I do this from time to time for Diego and Jackson, partly, I think, to experiment on them. Will the eggshell faces become a life-long memory the way it has for me?

Another one I remember is the invisible elephant named Harold who lived behind my father’s easy chair. He was the culprit whenever we heard (or smelled) an unclaimed “bottom burp.” “Oh, that was Harold,” my father would say, quite deadpan. I tried having Harold around our house for a while, but the kids are too darn savvy for such things. Then again, I do need to remind myself; it’s unlikely my brother and I believed in Harold at the time, either. It was just fun to have a dad who blamed his farts on imaginary animals.

Occasionally when we sat in that drowsy, before-school time with him on the easy chair, he would take our hands and place them on each cheek. Mike and I would begin to giggle immediately.

“This way’s nice and smooth,” he would say in a singsong voice, guiding our hands gently, with the grain of his stubble, down his face. Sometimes Mike and I sang along. Then abruptly, he turned the hand over and pulled the back of it up his face, against the stubbly grain. This one I remember loving, because of the mixture of fun and physical pain it brought together. The anticipation of that sandpaper skin on my soft child’s hand was almost unbearable, yet I always asked him to do it again and again.

I’ve thoroughly stolen this game, and it is one of the favorites of both my boys – Jackson, especially. He can’t get enough of that one.

There are countless others I’m not thinking of right now, I’m sure. My father was a good man, and an excellent dad. He wasn’t perfect, of course; you realize that as a son more and more as time goes on. My boys will realize the same about me. But he made my childhood a place full of love and safety, and this way he did reach a kind of perfection. After all, isn’t that what every parent would like to do for their children? I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: The greatest gift my father gave me was the capacity to love, and I plan to pass it on along to my boys, in the hopes they’ll do the same someday.

Being "In The Moment" in a World of "Checking In"

There's a term they use in acting a lot. They talk about how important it is to be "in the moment." It was one of the most difficult things for me to do as an actor; kind of like Zen, I suppose, where you reach a higher state of self by being selfless. Be in the moment by forgetting you're trying to be in the moment.

Very difficult.

Today, in this age of texting and the Internet and Facebook and Twitter, “in the moment” has come to mean something else altogether. We’re never really in one place anymore. We are sitting at the bar with our friends, but we’re also “checking in” on Facebook, letting all our friends know where we are.

By the way, at this moment, my friends are at Key Bar, the Purdy Lounge, 10^th St. & Avenue C, the W Hotel in Austin, Chipotle Mexican Grill, and many other places. I checked in a few hours ago, while hanging out with a friend at the Flying Saucer. As soon as I did it, I asked myself, “Why the fuck would anybody care that I’m at the Flying Saucer?”

I guess in a way this was already beginning to happen in 1992 when I taught my first classes at Satellite Academy. The thing back then was pagers. All the cool kids had one. And the more you got “beeped,” the more popular you were.

That beeper took my students, and me, out of the moment. Of course it’s nothing compared to what’s happening with smart phones now. It’s so prevalent, it has changed pedagogy. There are articles in EdWeek and elsewhere written by people grasping for classroom applications for the devices their students already have in their pockets. It’s a total “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality.

Some time in the mid 1990’s, my colleague, Neil Tabot and I were discussing something his office. I noticed that he would periodically look up at his computer screen as we talked, go over to it, watch the print scroll, and then type something.

“What’s that you’re doing?” I asked.

“I’m in a chat room about sea life,” he said.

I took a closer look and saw that there were people interacting with Neil and each other about, yes, sea life. It was the first time I’d ever heard of a chat room. I remember finding it odd that I was expected by Neil to share his time with this scrolling computer screen of people typing about plankton, or whatever. Perhaps the worst part of it was the realization that he found what they were saying much more intriguing than whatever our topic was. (I think we were paired up as “critical friends,” and had been visiting each other’s classrooms. This was our time to discuss what we’d witnessed.)

Right now, as I write this, I am in the moment with you, my imagined reader, rather than sleeping in my bed, where I’m supposed to be.

And now some wonk at Facebook has invented the “check in” feature. Maybe it’s their attempt to get us to appreciate where we are in that moment, rather than clicking our way across the world wide web and back again.

Quirky Dicks

Don’t be alarmed by the title. For those of you who googled the term, looking for, um, something else, sorry, and good luck on your search. I guess.

For the rest of you, no, it’s not the name of my new thrash metal band. (Does thrash metal even exist anymore? I’ll have to check with Jem, my resident expert on such matters.)

No these are the detective brand of dicks; honestly, I was just trying to get your attention. Didn’t mean to toy with you. So to speak….

In my mind, all the best sleuths are oddballs, and I’m not quite sure why that is. They all share super intelligence, although it is sometimes masked by other attributes.

With Monk, it’s his obsessive compulsive disorder, with which he actively has to struggle in order to solve crimes, often to good comedic effect. Theo Kojak has the visual quirkiness. He’s a smooth-talking character, who dresses to a tee, has a bald head and sucks on the ubiquitous lollipop. He’s also got that quirky tagline that you can’t help but dig: “Who loves ya, baby?”

Poirot has that moustache and air of superiority. Holmes is, well, Holmes. He’s the prototype. The hat, the pipe, the drug habit. Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey’s reimagined 2010 version is pretty exciting, if a bit radical in its departure from what we’re used to thinking of when we think of the iconic Basil Rathbone Holmes.

I’ve saved my favorite for last. What Peter Falk did with the character of Lieutenant Columbo is a feat of brilliance, so much so, in fact, that he pretty much doomed himself to being forever associated with that character. When fans call out to Falk in the streets, wherever he goes in the world, they don’t call out for Falk, they call out for Columbo.

Columbo’s genius is in the way he traps the suspect by making him think himself superior to the detective. That show turned the genre on its ear by taking a huge risk. They revealed the murderer in the first act of each episode, and then allowed the audience to watch as Columbo unraveled the mystery. Although every plotline is nearly identical, the writing and direction is at such a high level that it works. That show captivated me as a boy, and it still captivates me as an adult. Like Sherlock Holmes, Columbo is a master of the art of deduction and observation. My theory is that he knows who the murderer is in the first five minutes of meeting him; the rest is just a question of manipulating him into being caught.

I’m sure there are many I’m leaving out. I am currently reading the second Stieg Larsson book, and I enjoyed the first one. I could see Lizbeth Salander becoming an iconic crime fighter eventually.

What about you? Now that I got your attention with the title, who’s your favorite “quirky dick”?

Hey, it could have been worse. I could’ve said “favorite,” but then my wife would have worried….