I read a phrase today that I think should be used more commonly. Where I saw it, though, I do not remember. It appeared to be a typo, but if it was written like this on purpose, it looked like an artful accident. The writer described a learning experience as a “learning curb.” How great a pair of words is that?
I like collecting phrases like that. I enjoy proudly coining them myself even more, so I wish I could claim credit for this one. But I can not. I wish I could credit this writer—but does he or she know that there were was this epic phrase in their post? As I said, it looked like an accident, a typo. In the context it looked like they thought they had typed “learning curve.”
Many of my learning experiences did not have mere learning curves or even steep learning curves; indeed, there were “learning curbs,” on which I banged my forward progress to a sudden stop or flipped my vehicle.
Learning to drive, of course. An easy example. My first driving teacher was my father, and he is still with us and driving, and I am still here, so he must have done a good job. (I no longer drive, because of my spinal muscular atrophy; more than once I have watched my right leg move when I meant to move my left leg, my left for my right, and neither leg when motion from either one would have been good, which sucks and is sufficient to keep me unambitious about driving again. There are cars with hand controls, though.) My sole memory of my father teaching me to drive is his selection of an unreasonably steep hill in the City of Poughkeepsie (Noxon Street) to test my parallel parking skills. It was smart in that it made the lesson difficult and made the point: For my dozen years as a driver, I successfully avoided all parallel parking situations. I parked across town and walked to avoid parallel parking. I still have dreams in which I fall off the side of a city.
My next driving instructor was a coach at my high school, and he made me aware of something that I have struggled with my entire life, and not only when driving: I am a control freak, to use that overused expression. He gazed on my white knuckles pushed against the steering wheel, my fingers spread wide to enclose as much of the wheel as I could hold in my hands at once, and said, “Relax your hands. Those cars have drivers, too. You can only drive this one.”
I failed my first driving test. Of course. Sixteen years old (or whatever age) and a white, preppy-ish, suburban kid, like the boy-child I was? If anyone reading this is a driving tester, I hope you please flunk anyone matching that description, at least once. I earned my license on the second test, which my memory tells me I took later that same day, but knowledge of how things actually happen on Planet Earth tells me that this could not have been so.
I am a control freak. And I usually fail the first test, the tests in life where any coincidences between information in books and the facts in reality are revealed to be rare or nonexistent. (Any script that any retail manager has given me, no matter how well I have memorized it, has been blown up by the first real customer on the sales floor, who inevitably asked me something that did not appear anywhere in the script. Like if I knew the location of a bathroom.) But life has given me more than my share of second chances at these tests, more than I deserved or expected, deserve or expect. Eventually I learned that you can drive your vehicles far better than I can drive yours for you, as long as I pay attention to mine. Life gives us some steep learning curbs.
__________________________________ The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 25 declares, “Our free-write is back by popular demand: today, write about anything—but you must write for exactly ten minutes, no more, no less.”
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“You will meet some people who find themselves unreasonably perfect. Unforgivably, unbelievably golden. Stay away from them.”
No one said this to me as I ventured into life as we know it. I do not know why; if I am blessed enough to be referred to by someone as their father someday, it might be one of the first things I tell the little one. In the hospital. Well, not the first. It might be a part of some advice I give as he or she heads off to college. Perhaps. Or maybe he or she will need to learn it on their own.
“They will tell you that they are their own worst critic themselves, but they will fight you bitterly if you ever criticize them or offer suggestions.”
* * * * “I am my own worst critic.” I have heard this sentence many times and I have even heard me say it about myself. I probably said it about myself a few days ago. It is bunk. Most (not all) of the people who declare this (including me) are asking you to verbally pat them on the shoulder, tell them they need to go easier on themselves, congratulate them for their high standards. (Some people truly are too hard on themselves, but they tend to not declare this.)
A critic’s job is to attempt to figure out how something works, usually a work of art, and point out the spots where it is not working or not seeming to work well enough. Where it is failing to communicate. Ironically or not, it is not a job for someone who likes tearing things down. That’s what a reviewer does, and not a good one. (Someone should produce an annual book, “A Guide to Reviewers.” Very few reviewers are critics in the strict sense, because doing real criticism is grueling and gets into the nuts and bolts of a thing. It is a job in which one writes 25 pages on a two-page long, 48-line, poem. [It was “Skunk Hour,” by Robert Lowell.] On the other hand, there are a lot of writers who call themselves reviewers, but really they are critics who figure things out and explain it all to us, and I love reading them.)
I was the type of kid who liked taking things apart and putting them back together, enjoyed the search for the one necessary part that appeared to make the thing run when it was in place. The one part in whose absence the thing did not function. Now, I know that one could call this “slow-motion breaking things,” as very few gadgets that I played with were ever restored to a state one might call “functional,” but it is the outlook of a critic. I also loved doing magic tricks. How does a magic trick work? It isn’t by magic.
I enjoyed diagramming sentences, which is a similar thing. (My sentences do not vary in structure, much, I know, I know.)
If I had been truly my own worst or harshest critic, well, my life might have headed somewhere else. (I might not be writing.) No, I was my “worst” critic in that I did not see things clearly, how things worked and did not work. I was my “harshest” in that I liked, perversely liked, tearing myself down. And then I would feel angry at myself for my failure to: Get published, or finish a degree, or father a family, or something else. (Hey, you! Yeah, you. You want to know how to get published? Shhhh. Come over here. I’ll tell ya. Closer. Ready? FIRST, WRITE SOMETHING!) I never began anything so how could I legitimately moan at the absence of the sweet rewards of success? That is a terrible critic; really, it is just a bully. I was my own worst bully. (I am not that anymore.)
I was perpetually caught between my devil and the deep blue me.
The above is an honest assessment, briefly sketched. Honesty is a rare social commodity. One ought to attempt, at least attempt, to be rigorously honest. Not brutally honest. That particular word pair, “brutally honest,” has become a common phrase of late, and while I do not know its origin I do know that it is empty. A completely empty phrase. Any honest communication, from “I love you” to criticism, is not brutal if it is honest.
“Let me be brutally honest,” she said. “I like that cologne.”
We can be brutal, and it can be honest, but “brutal” trumps anything the word is modifying. When I was young, I learned the art of telling complete truths, honest truths, about TMI matters just to deflect questioners about things I really did not want to talk about. That is brutal honesty, I suppose.
Criticism, or anything, offered as brutal honesty is neither honesty nor is it criticism. It’s just brutal.
__________________________________ The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 24 asks, “How are you at receiving criticism? Do you prefer that others treat you with kid gloves, or go for brutal honesty?“Because the question was titled, “Handle With Care,” well, here:
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Comedy Central’s two main franchise shows are both recorded in a part of New York City called “Hell’s Kitchen,” a section of Manhattan that extends about 25 blocks south and west of Central Park and west of Midtown over to the Hudson River. Most of the buildings in the neighborhood are former walk-ups and townhouses that are now offices for media companies; “The Colbert Report’s” studio looks like it was a house or storefront once upon a time.
The Thursday, September 18, 2014, broadcast of “The Colbert Report” was a very special one because I was in the audience, as I wrote yesterday, in “Four Minutes and 24 Years.” Terry Gilliam, the legendary film and theater director (the list is epic and includes: “Time Bandits,” “Brazil,” “The Fisher King,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “The Zero Theorem”) and Monty Python animator and cast member, was the guest.
The studio is on the same level as the street outside, but it takes a lifetime to get there. Sorry, that was a sentence from a television ad for a college course in broadcasting that I am working on. We should go back outside.
The tickets for live-on-tape broadcasts are free, because these shows need a full and loudly enthusiastic house for each and every show and the producers do not want people who feel that sense of hostile proprietorship that can come with a ticket purchase. (They do not want an audience of people with crossed arms and an attitude of, “Entertain me.”) A theatrical performance in front of an empty house could nonetheless be great but a television show performed to silence and a performer feeding off the silence could be horrifying to watch unfold. (Only Johnny Carson seemed to be able to work with a not-yet-impressed audience.)
The producers also do not want an audience of people off the street, happy to receive free things, but not aware of how to be an audience. Talk with a stage actor sometime. He or she will tell you stories of the weirdest things that have happened during performances: cell phones going off, of course, but also people taking the phone call; people walking across the stage (especially in theaters with the stage and seats on the same level) looking for a restroom; audience members yelling at or asking questions of the characters as if they are in their easy chair yelling at a TV screen; babies crying. The audience is supposed to be separate from the performance, with some exceptions. A live television show audience is not at a stage show; the audience is a part of the show: the audience is the soundtrack.
Thus, the audience is coached on this point by producers before the taping begins. And then re-coached. The performance at first felt like a pop quiz to gauge how well we had absorbed the coaching. It also felt like if we were insufficiently enthusiastic, we would be escorted back out to 54th Street.
The process of acquiring these free tickets varies from show to show but all of the shows use the method to establish that the audience is made up of fans. (Willing to be loud. Happy to pretend to not be faking enthusiasm.) Some shows use online trivia contests to winnow out the casual fans. My method was the easiest for me: I have a friend who has done this before (he attended “The Daily Show”) and wanted to do it again and invited me.
(Would that we had attended “The Daily Show” last Thursday; former President Clinton was there that day.)
The tickets one receives for registering online for a television taping are not tickets as one usually thinks of them. They do not guarantee a seat. They guarantee a spot on line, in a covered alleyway where one waits for the doors to open. We arrived early, chatted with the show assistants, and waited some more. The assistants are talented at a particular task: they quickly learn who is with whom, names, who has special needs. My friend’s wife sat with me at a coffeeshop for a few minutes while he held our group spot on line, then they traded: she went back and he sat with me. When he and I rejoined the line we found that we could not see her; one of the assistants got our attention (not vice versa, They. Ran. Us. Down), gave us our seat tickets, and ushered us into a room in the building, where she already was.
My thumb.
In that room, one goes through a security checkpoint and then waits. For over an hour. It is a square room, maybe 25 X 25 feet, extraordinarily air conditioned. Several monitors play old Colbert shows on a “Best of” loop. The walls are plastered with Colbert memorabilia. Over the next few minutes, the entire audience-to-be was herded into this room, which made clear the need for extreme air conditioning. Seeing I walk with a cane, one assistant walked me through the crowd to a bench.
Twice an assistant addressed the crowd. Both times the message was: “This is very special. Stephen is going to chat with you before the show, so have some questions ready.” (Perhaps he does this every show and they tell the audience it is special.) “When you’re watching the show at home, you only chuckle at the jokes because you’re thinking about your own life and you hear the audience in your TV laughing uproariously. You’re the audience in someone’s TV now. Whatever you’re going to laugh at, laugh loudly.”
The doors to the set were opened and people were ushered in by ticket number but in small groups; my group of four friends went in together. The bleachers do not have banisters, something which I was anxious about as a person with spinal muscular atrophy and thus almost no balance on stairs, even with a death grip on a railing. One of the assistants saw my cane and the four of us were thus seated in the front, over by the interview table. The stage manager and then the warm-up act coached us some more in the finer points of yelling our laughter. (Since all of you have heard my voice in an earlier post, you should be able to hear me clearly if you watch the show. Of course.)
Contrary to what I thought, the show is not taped in real time; Colbert made one verbal typo and they recorded a do-over, the commercial breaks were over ten minutes each, the interview with Terry Gilliam was over 15 minutes, of which about not quite 10 made the show. The affection between Colbert and his staff was obvious: at one point, while a hairdresser was combing his hair, he started pretending to comb hers. He indeed took questions before the show and again after. All told, we were in the studio for a bit over an hour for a 21-minute show.
The broadcast will be available for free on the website for the rest of this week, so here is the link: The Colbert Report with Terry Gilliam. And here is the 60 second edit:
It was a fun day and night in NYC, thanks to Gerry, Theresa, Ron, Bob and Kevin, and all of New York City. Even the panhandler on the train from Secaucus.
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____________________________________________ The WordPress Daily Prompt for April 9 asks, “If you could learn a trade—say carpentry, electrical work, roofing, landscaping, plumbing, flooring, drywall—you name it—what skill(s) would you love to have in your back pocket?” TV host. I am heading to NYC today with my one and only, Jen, to view tonight’s taping of “The Nightly Show,” starring Larry Wilmore. It is in the same theater as “The Colbert Report” was recorded each night. That is the reason for re-running this column from September. Tune in tonight at 11:30 EST on Comedy Central to see if you catch a glimpse of me and my love. Full updates tomorrow.
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