television

Thanks to Culture Kitchen's ad lineup, I just learned something I really wanted to know but wouldn't have known to look for any other way, probably. (Keep watching those ads, y'all!)

If Ira Glass' --yes, that's the possessive with an apostrophe and NO extra S! -- new tv show is destined to be as good as his "This American Life" on radio, then I finally have educational justification to add the network airing it to my cable service. His NPR show on superpowers, with John Hodgman interviewing regular folks on the street about whether they'd choose flying or invisibility and why, was an instant classic. And the show about what three things we live and die for -- talk about power of story. . .Ira Glass doesn't tell stories the way anybody else does.

Episode 1 - "Reality Check"
Three stories of people who hatched plans in the hopes of making their dreams come true, but were snapped back to reality by unpleasant outcomes: an elementary school student tries to solve a common childhood problem; a rancher resuscitates a beloved pet, which later turns on him; people team to give an unknown rock band the greatest night of its life.

I remember the last bit, about the unknown rock band, from the radio show. There was a LOT more to it than this, about creativity and community, whether contrived spontaneity and ambush improv is fair (a la Borat?) and whether it's true, for the players OR the unsuspecting audience -- I'm still thinking hard about the cultural questions of meaning it raised for me.

On this day in 1973, "School House Rock" debuted. Last night, apropos of nothing, my youngest brother mentioned that he had never forgotten any of the lyrics to any of the songs. They had become embedded in his brain, always there for access.

I felt the same way when I took a test in eighth grade in which I had to write the words to the Preamble of the Constitution. I, like everyone else in the class, simply sang the song under my breath as a I wrote.

'Course, I can't find the Preamble on YouTube, but I did find "How a Bill Becomes a Law."

Funny, but nowhere in that song does it mention that the president gets to attach any of his goddamned, fucking, wrong-headed, fascist signing statements to those laws.

Just sayin'.

Some of my college students do not know what an adverb is, and would be absolutely clueless if they were asked to diagram a sentence. I'm seriously considering going back to School House Rock as teaching aid. It taught me great things about language and history and the Constitution--even today, I can SING the Preamble the Constitution.

So, here's today's lesson: INTERJECTIONS!!!!