Abscission
I see it, a story told in the ephemeral nature of color. It’s impossible not to look, but I close my eyes, and listen. It’s the sound of change. Autumn calling out in its rustling and rain of leaves when the wind blows. I want to remember it. Not just see it, but feel it. On a fall day enveloped in grey mist, a flash of red leaves will interrupt the fog, burning through the space. On a brighter autumn day, sunshine moving through the leaves is as illuminating as enlightenment.
Change is forever our status. Fluidity in time and space, the flow of the circle. We don’t think about change, but sometimes something shakes you into awareness: a birth, a death, or the brief and brilliant leaves coming loose from their branches.
This is part of the cyclical design. Trees are actively cutting off their leaves in a survival process: abscission. As days of autumn fade into cold temps and less sunlight, trees reabsorb nutrients from their leaves. This includes chlorophyll and deprived of it, leafy greenness gives way to color. The leaf shedding allows trees to pull in energy and get through winter. It is a cycle of conservation. And sacrifice. The trees grow new skin over every spot where a leaf once was. The trees will live. The leaves will not, but they are making a grand exit.
Nature shows us tangible, real-time change. Change endlessly seeking balance. Here’s a truth about nature, from the Tao: “heaven and earth are ruthless.” Sometimes brutal. Sometimes bittersweet. Life bulldozes through its bleakness – its broken rocks and its broken hearts and its bankruptcy. It’s a dusty path that leads to more busted rocks and broken hearts. More loss. Loss and gain. Gain too, because it’s a green path as well. Life dances through its brightness – its beauty and its bounty. Hearts and moons waxing to full, emptying, filling. A spectrum from bleak to bright.
Energy is always moving. A seed planted, a harvest reaped. Growth, decay, growth. A mended fence. A broken window. Repair. Despair. Gain. Loss. Life. The ever evolving permutation of things swirling in the yin yang pinwheel. We live, survive, thrive, fail, fly.
There’s a red arrow on the map: You are here on this autumn day. And everything is changing. The leaves animate the space. Vivid. Vibrant. Radiant. For now.
Toni Tan
Marion
Brooklyn, New York, in the late 1950s/early 1960s.
My childhood was not without its rough edges, though I will save those stories for another time. It had its smooth edges, too. A considerable softness came in the form of my older sister and her friends. My most vivid memory of them is when they were teenagers. There were several years between us, enough to make them magical beings, light years ahead of me in the spectral arc of discovery. They were ever moving through this incredible cosmic realm, swirling somewhere between being a girl and being a woman.
Their bedrooms held a menagerie of stuffed animals, yet the air was scented with hairspray and noxzema, and filled with music. It was the radio, or records, and laughter, always laughter, as the backdrop, as they practiced the newest American Bandstand dances, learned the latest lyrics. It was rock and roll. Growing up. Freedom.
I remember their crazy hair curlers, their bumps and curves. We had sodas at Woolworths and sometimes saw a Saturday matinee. I listened to them talk about clothes, and school, and boys. Their essence was within reach, not only in my being intrigued by who they were, but envisioning the near horizon of who I would become. They seemed to know everything about everything, and I was afforded a glimpse into the mystery of their circle.
One of the girls was Marion. She had dark hair, and dark eyes, like most of the neighborhood Italian girls. What set her apart was that she was funny and warm; quick to laugh, and even quicker at getting everyone else to laugh. She was also the one whose eyes would fill with tears when she heard a sad story. If you were hurting, she’d cry with you. I remember her compassionate heart, as beautiful and deep as her soulful brown eyes.
My sister later parted ways with the family. It was a staggering loss. But, it was Marion who would fill that gap for me, keeping the bridge to that wonderful past alive. My mother’s relationship with Marion’s brother brought us all together as family. Marion was married and had her own sweet little girl. I grew up having many Sunday dinners with all of them at Marion’s parents place, and many gatherings at her home, or mine. Great meals, good times.
We spent time together through the years. She remained ever that person who made those funny faces, laughed with you, cried with you. I am grateful that I got to tell Marion that my memory of her was always the teenage version of her, my magical vision of her, and that she was always a big sister to me.
Marion passed recently, suddenly. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. Her husband, daughter, grandchildren, brothers, niece, relatives, and friends, will grieve the staggering loss; love her, miss her, remember her. My mind and heart will always hold her in that ephemeral moment of her teenage youth. Lord have mercy. It was glorious.
Toni Tan
Rock Your Creativity
Your creativity is an egg. Fragile, evolving.
It requires warmth, incubation, nurturance, and the space to crack out of a seemingly unbreakable shell. Rock it till its ready. Let it out. Repeat.
And you? You are stronger than you think.
~Toni
The photo is from Klaus Enrique’s amazing ‘Arcimboldo’ series.
Remembering 9/11
Last night’s sky.
“The living owe it those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.” – Czeslaw Milosz
Piano on the Shore
They say the ocean has its own music….it must be true — one of its instruments appeared on New York’s East River shore, under the Brooklyn Bridge.
What music do you hear?
See my Piano on the Shore series
The Return of Norm Macdonald’s Anti-Meta Comedy Talk Show
My good friend, writer Sam Guthrie, wrote this piece on Medium, in celebration of the artistic genius of comedian Norm Macdonald. If you love Norm, you’ll enjoy it. And, if you never heard of him — this is a fine introduction.
Norm Macdonald Live, the YouTube talk show of veteran comic Norm Macdonald, just launched its second season—guests so far have been Ray Romano, and fellow SNL alums Adam Sandler, and David Spade -—and comedy connoisseurs are pretty psyched about it. Not just because they get to see more of Norm, but because this talk show provides a unique window into Macdonald’s art, and why his peers, seasoned pros like Sarah Silverman, Howard Stern, Conan O’Brien, Dennis Miller, and Super Dave Osborne, to name a few, constantly refer to Macdonald as a comic genius. And why the word “subversive” comes up so much. Fabled Saturday Night Live writer Jim Downey said, “…[Macdonald] is a genius and the most fearless performer. He likes people to laugh at his stuff, he enjoys that, but it’s sort of one of a half a dozen important aspects of what he does.” But just what those other aspects are is not obvious.
Why, for example, can you tell your friends a Louis CK joke and crack them up, but, more often than not, when you tell them about a Norm Macdonald bit—a bit that would wreck them if they saw him do it—they just look at you blankly? Last year on Norm Macdonald Live, Macdonald would often hold up a grilling accessory called the Mangrate—one of the show’s sponsors —and simply by reading the product’s boilerplate ad copy, his eyes glittering madly, Macdonald would put his guest and his cohost into what looked like painful spasms of laughter. It was some sort of demented performance art (the Mangrate company was so offended they immediately canceled their sponsorship, though they eventually came back.) But you cannot convey to anyone what’s so funny about the bit. Search for “Norm Macdonald Mangrate Supercut” on YouTube for a fan-made montage of Mangrate madness.
For the record, merely to say, “It’s his delivery,” doesn’t even begin to cover the mystery of Macdonald’s quixotic art. I think it comes closer to say that Macdonald’s comedy—including his delivery— simply has way more layers than that of most comics, like a demented Russian nesting doll. And maybe we can see more easily into those layers on Norm Macdonald Live simply because in the role of talk show host he shares the spotlight with his guests and his cohost, and this allows him to be more loose, less “on.”
As best I can tell, the outermost layer is some sort of crusty, 1950’s grandfather. Someone’s reference to a recent alt rock festival makes Norm squint critically and say, “I don’t much care for the acid rock.” It’s a character who uses old timey words like “gumption” and “grit.”
But with Macdonald that’s just the beginning, because there’s also a whole meta level to his humor—meta meaning comedy that parodies the contrivances of comedy. It’s evident in almost every utterance he makes on Norm Macdonald Live, but one notorious example of Macdonald wreaking havoc on the conventions of comedy is his appearance on the 2008 Comedy Central roast of comedian Bob Saget.
Comic after comic delivers the usual raunchy, nasty insults typical of celebrity roasts. But Macdonald walks up to the microphone and proceeds to tell six minutes of jokes so exquisitely bad they nearly trigger you into a fugue state. Example: “Bob has a beautiful face, like a flower…yeah, a cauliflower!” and “There are times when Bob has something on his mind…when he wears a hat!” Macdonald’s eyes twinkle mischievously as he tells the jokes, like he’s in possession of some secret comedic gnosis.
And indeed, sublimely awful jokes pop up frequently on Norm Macdonald Live. But more surreal yet are the times Macdonald takes a Dadaist baseball bat to jokes. For instance, if you’ve watched much comedy you’ve probably heard the joke where a comic, after pointing out how “the black box” survives a plane crash undamaged, says, “Why don’t they make the whole plane out of the black box?” Macdonald reads a news story about a kid who stole an airplane that crashed, but the kid survived. Then he mugs slyly into the camera, more a parody of a comic mugging, and says, “Why not make the whole plane out of that kid?” Dennis Miller called Macdonald, “the most subversive cat I know,” and these sorts of jokes, or whatever they are, have got to be at least part of what he’s talking about. Somehow Macdonald manages to deliver jokes with the sense that the telling of any joke is itself an unspeakably absurd thing to do.
And yet, even that’s not quite it, because Macdonald frequently derides the whole notion of meta humor, both in interviews and on the talk show (although the very fact that it comes up in so many interviews ought to make us wonder).
Macdonald’s professed disdain for postmoderny meta humor makes me think that, even when he is mocking the artifices of comedy, he’s also simultaneously mocking the wry pretensions of that very mocking—like that, too, is absurd. For those of you keeping score at home, this would, I guess, comprise a sort of meta-meta humor. If MC Escher were a comedian, he would be Norm Macdonald.
The new season of Norm Macdonald Live retains the same format as last year’s season. Episodes begin with Macdonald engaging in jokey banter (and, occasionally, bizarre little comedy bits) with cohost and “trusty sidekick” Adam Eget. Then the guest comes on—one guest for the whole hour—and the three of them basically just hang out, swap insider gossip about showbiz, and talk shop about comedy and entertainment.
The relaxed, intimate atmosphere of Norm Macdonald Live is part of what makes it almost voyeuristically fascinating. Macdonald allows the humor to find its own rhythm, like a seasoned fighter who never strains for the knockout. The lack of a studio audience and the silence occasionally following jokes adds to the strange hilarity; you get the sense that a studio audience would only add a level of cheesy showbizzyness that would be Norm Kryptonite.
In the last segment of the show, Macdonald looks at his guest and says, usually with a funny bashfulness, something like, “Hey, you want to tell some jokes?” Then he produces a stack of blue cards with pre-written jokes, sometimes loosely disguised as news items or one time, as famous quotes. He doles them out to his guest, to Eget, and to himself to read, more or less taking turns. The jokes are good, bad, meta, everything under the sun, and it’s great fun watching the three deliver them.
Last year, guests included Larry King, Billy Bob Thornton, and Simon Helberg. Most often, however, Macdonald’s guests were comedy pros like Andy Dick, Russell Brand, Kevin Nealon, Nick Swardson, Tom Green, Fred Stoller, Gilbert Gottfried, and the indomitable Super Dave Osborn. This new season’s first guest was Ray Romano, one of the more low-key episodes but still really fun to watch. Sandler and Spade both seemed weary and, frankly, a bit dissipated, but it was still hard to take my eyes off of Macdonald’s quiet unpredictability and evil Leprechaun antics.
Norm Macdonald Live’s aesthetic is what makes Macdonald’s friend, Adam Eget, work so well on the show as cohost. A “funny guy” sideman would epitomize exactly what the two of them are goofing on. But Eget’s hangdog persona—plummeting into shame, struggling dolefully with sobriety, perpetually broke—is the ultimate regular guy. In fact, to me, Eget’s only lapses come in the rare moments where he reveals his actual ability to flow easily with the comedic repartee, and we lose, just for a second, the awkward, anti-entertainer, shlub act. In any case, Adam Eget is the perfect counterpoint to Macdonald, and the two of them have exquisite chemistry. Indeed, Eget seems to get Macdonald on a near-mystical level, constantly feeding the perfect lobs for Norm to convert into vintage Macdonald mayhem.
There’s another unusual thing about Macdonald’s humor. It’s that Macdonald doesn’t just exude a sense of the absurdity of life—plenty of comedians do that, but their response to that absurdity is usually cynicism or irony. Norm Macdonald’s response to the absurdity of life, however, seems to be something else entirely. And, strangely enough, I think that something is sheer delight. That’s what lurks just beneath that devilish expression of barely suppressed laughter that keeps sneaking onto his face.
Macdonald may describe himself as agoraphobic, hypochondriacal, orally fixated, terrified of death and addicted to gambling and fried chicken with gravy. And he may be capable of astounding un-politically correct offensiveness. But I could swear that man’s eyes shine with pure glee, and it’s a glee that’s all the more intriguing because he seems to be trying unsuccessfully to conceal it. This is what comedian Russell Brand meant when he described Macdonald as having a “sparkly innocence” about him. I know it sounds stupid and unfunny to say it, but I think this layer of the Macdonald Russian nesting doll responds to the absurdity of life with something an awful lot like wonder. The unbearable hilarity of being.
But it may be that we have to dig down one more Russian nesting doll to get at the real secret to Macdonald’s comedic magic. It’s a quality he displays at the very end of that infamous Bob Saget roast routine. The jokes finished, Macdonald says: “Bob was the first comedian I ever saw perform, when I was a boy, live, and I loved him. But one thing that bonds us as comedians is we’re bitter and jealous and we hate everyone else that has any success. But Bob honestly has never had an unkind word for anybody, and I love him, and I hope everyone else does, so I just wanted to say that. Thank you.”
Macdonald says this with such naked simplicity the effect is almost disorienting. In the midst of all the mean comedic shtick, his unguarded words stand out like a lotus flower in a New York landfill. It is, of all things, the quality of vulnerability that makes this moment what it is and, I would argue, it’s what shines through all of Macdonald’s work—including, maybe more than ever, on this unusual talk show. And in comedy, or for that matter pretty much anywhere, vulnerability is about as subversive as it gets.
Sam Guthrie
Into: Adi Da Samraj. My wife. Writing. Henry Miller. DFW. The Clash. Raw food healthy geekery. Ungentlemanly martial arts. Kettlebells. Coffee shops. Seinfeld. Website: http://infiniteelephant.com/ Writing: http://authorsamguthrie.com/?page_id=12
Follow Sam on Twitter & Follow Norm and his show, Norm Macdonald Live, on Twitter.
Tears of A Bud
It was winter, with trees asleep and dreaming of spring. In the cold and quiet of morning, the sun-warmed icy branches bloomed with drops of water. I took the shot.
The artist and painter, Philippe Pherivong, saw my photo, and called the image “the tears of a bud.”
The phrasing, more than the image, reminded me that where there is life, there is movement. Even in what appears to be stillness. Even though you feel you are waiting. Process is the path of living things. Change. Growth. Life is the glorious and bittersweet unfolding of continuous becoming. The tears of a bud waiting to be born.
Visit me on Zenfolio and Behance
Won’t You Lend Your Lungs To Me?
It was my own fault, finding myself on Mars like this. Such a strange and hostile atmosphere. The thought of two moons rising trumped common sense, and decent air. I can only take short breaths.
I followed him here, you know. What difference did it make? I was lost to begin with.
He opened the door, but I came and went through the window. It seemed easier that way. The air inside became as strange and hostile as the air outside, only more toxic. What I gave freely, and what was taken away, cannot be recovered. I get that.
But, I shouldn’t have announced my leaving, knowing it would serve no purpose, and would only fuel his rage. “If you go, you can’t get back in,” he’d say. Again and again. For all my threats to disappear, I’d come back in through that damn window, again and again. Inside was the known damaged and damaging atmosphere. Outside was the unknown damaged and damaging landscape.
Out the window I went, clinging to the ledge, ready to jump. I’ve done it so many times. On this exit, he slammed the window down before I cleared the sill. It closed hard on my knuckles. The blood lubricated my hands, and I pulled free. My fingers were scraped and bleeding; my hands, throbbing. I could hear him curse me through the window.
I took shallow breaths, trying to form words – a curse, a prayer…something. It was like a bad dream, when you try to speak, but no words come out. A line from an old Townes Van Zandt song, “won’t you lend your lungs to me,” played itself over and over in my head, “mine are collapsing…”
Every door locked. Every window shut tight. There was no concern with hope or salvation. There was only now, this moment, and the desire to take a long, deep breath, nearly impossible to do in this red and angry place.
– Toni Tan, “Phobos and Deimos” ©2014
Van Gogh’s Birthday
Here’s to life…in all of its pain, its beauty, and its color.
A Dr. Who episode, “Vincent and The Doctor,” brought Van Gogh and his vibrant paintings (like the ones below), to life. It is a beautiful, sci-fi treatment of, and homage to, a sensitive soul, his life, his work, and his posthumous fame.
Remembering Vincent today, on his birthday…..born March 30, 1853. Touch the stars!
VINCENT AND THE DOCTOR (Series 5/Episode 10)
Van Gogh: Hold my hand, Doctor. Try to see what I see. We’re so lucky we’re still alive to see this beautiful world. Look at the sky. It’s not dark and black and without character. The black is in fact deep blue. And over there! Lights are blue. And blue in through the blueness, and the blackness, the winds swirling through the air… and then shining. Burning, bursting through! The stars, can you see how they roll their light? Everywhere we look, complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.
The Doctor: I’ve seen many things, my friend. But you’re right. Nothing’s quite as wonderful as the things you see.
You can read more of the dialog from this Dr. Who episode, Vincent and the Doctor
This Thursday in March
Our wonderful friend and writer, Re Harris…not only has exquisite writing chops — she is a musician too. Her work is up on Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRecord. Give a listen, dance because you’ll want to…. You can download her tracks too.
Water Over Fire 