A collection of what's moving me this month.
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What I'm Working On
Here at The Good Men Project Sports, we closed out the NFL season with our Super Bowl coverage, our #KissLikeaDad Movement, and our general sharing of pictures of affectionate men. Here's me kissing my younger brother, Dave:
At The Good Men Project Sports we've now shifted our coverage from football to basketball. This has given me the chance to riff on pop culture and the NBA with my co-Editor Wai Sallas, do a history of the slam dunk contest, and a wrap-up piece on NBA All-Star weekend's Slam Dunk Contest and Three Point Shootout (as well as #SNL40, the Saturday Night Live anniversary special!). Baseball is up next. Our Why We Run series is also hitting it's stride with so many terrific writers opening up and sharing their unbelievably raw and authentic stories. A few of my early favorites are Daniel Romo's and Whit Honea's.
Outside of The Good Men Project, I just auditioned for Listen to Your Mother, a show that celebrates motherhood. As you may have guessed, I am not a mother. But I do have one. Here is my audition piece. (I did not make it, but I'm proud of my piece)
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Who I'm Reading
Last week, I got to see authors Neil Gaiman and Daniel Handler (of Lemony Snicket fame) at The Brooklyn Academy of Music, where they riffed off each other, took questions, and discussed their writing.It was a wonderful night. Equal parts humor and poignancy:
Handlers Son: "I'm scared every day"
Handler: "Like, are you very scared?"
Son: "No. Not very. But every day."
Handler: (I think he just described the human condition. All of history. For everyone). "Me too. I'm sorry."
- Daniel HandlerGaiman shared Don Marquis' line about poetry writing: "It's like flinging rose petals over the edge of the Grand Canyon & listening for the BOOM."
I have been continuing to read Gaiman, adding Coraline to a list of completed books that includes StarDust, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, and the best book I've read this year, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. My love of Gaiman is epic. One of my favorite pieces that I re-read last week is Gaiman's wondrous poem, Instructions, a collection of life advice gleaned from fairy tales:
"Remember your name. Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story."Next up, Jose Saramago's posthumously published Skylight, David Mitchell's Bone Clocks, and Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I've heard mixed reviews of the latest Murakami, but I also heard this quote from it, so I'm in:
"Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could then transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein."
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What I'm Listening To
Jonah Smith's Big Umbrella, a folksy, strumsy, harmonizing love song:"My baby loves me like a big umbrella She’s got me covered in any kind of weather Always quick with a silver lining She reminds me that the sun is shining . . . somewhere"
Love it so much, I'm at the early stages of working on it myself on the guitar. Very early.
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The xx's Intro, an electronic masterpiece that I could listen to forever. To me, it has undertones of The Cure, but is a chameleon of a song. It's happy. It's melancholy. It's hopeful. It's grand.(And here is the 10 hour long version!) I may be late to the party with this group, but not terribly embarrassingly late. They were featured in the New Yorker last month, in an article entitled Shy and Mighty, which describes the band as "appealingly shy" brits and their music as "a collection of muted love laments written mostly in their childhood bedrooms."
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I know I'm late to the game on Birdy, a 19 year old Brit singer/songwriter who burst on the scene after winning a UK talent competition at the age of 12. Her breakthrough hit, a cover of Bon Iver's Skinny Love is simply gorgeous. She released it when she was 14:
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Cracking Me Up
The things I happen to read and watch this month that are making me laugh include:(1) The New Yorker's fabulous The Eight Serious Relationships of Hercules:
And it came to pass that Hercules took a step back and did a little soul-searching, and in time he realized that he had been using his relationships as a crutch to compensate for his lack of self-worth. So, resolving to be single for a while, Hercules got to know Hercules, and he did not date, and he did not play wine pong—although he did remain open to certain fixups, provided that the girl was “normal” and objectively attractive.
(2) McSweeney's Internet Tendency's take on mansplaining, Mansplaining Mansplaining: A Man Explains Mansplaining.
(3) Lemony Snicket:
“A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead.”
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