The Color Changing Card Trick

I saw Richard Wiseman talk and perform on the Lower East Side a few weeks ago: standing room only, everyone sweaty and crushed and Gumbi necked. We had a blast.

The guy looks and sounds exactly like Wallace, of the claymation capers, and the resemblance has served Wiseman well in his unusual career. Trained as a magician, he turned an interest in psychology into a career researching and writing books, and has been terrifically entertaining about it.

This video was one of the highlights of the evening. Go ahead- try to figure out what’s going on.

Weisman “currently holds Britain’s only Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology.” We need more paying positions like that in the world. His website has links to all his many awesome projects.

My Teenage Dream Tonight

What is there left to say about Lady Gaga? Our minds are made up; we savor or dismiss the music, and all the rest, without blinking. But there are always stories worth finding. John Seabrook writes:

Kenny Gorka, who booked the Stephani Germanotta Band, as the act was called, recalled recently how he met Germanotta. She telephoned him pretending to be her own publicist, raving about this incredible new talent. “She lied to me, talking about how great Stephani was in the third person,” he said. “But it was enough to pique my interest, and I brought her in for an audition and booked her.”

The future Ms. Gaga was nineteen at the time.

On Death and Dancing

This summer, just after Michael Jackson died, I took a walk with my mom in Inwood park. She remembered a fight she got in with a friend over custody of the “Thriller” LP decades earlier. We had once seen a French breakdancing troupe perform; asked after the show about inspiration, every single one of the young dancers said that it was watching Michael Jackson on TV as kids that made them want to dance. I had written about Jackson’s impact in revolutionary Iran a while back. My mom and I tried to imagine all the similar stories we knew people were telling each other that day.

Mourning “requires other people,” according to Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst. Meghan O’Rourke, writing in The New Yorker this week, explains:

Today, Leader points out, our only public mourning takes the form of grief at the death of celebrities and statesmen… This grief is the same as the old public grief in which groups got together to experience in unity their individual losses. As a saying from the Yangtze Valley (where professional mourning was once common) put it, “We use the occasions of other people’s funerals to release personal sorrows.” When we watch the televised funerals of Michael Jackson or Ted Kennedy, Leader suggests, we are engaging in a practice that goes back to soldiers in the Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus. Our version is more mediated. Still, in the Internet age, some mourners have returned grief to a social space, creating online grieving communities, establishing virtual cemetaries, commemorative pages, and chat rooms where loss can be described and shared.

Public wailing and ritual black clothing have largely dissappeared, but we’re always inventing new ways to organize public mourning. My favorite product of the Jackson grief gale last summer was Eternal Moonwalk, which stitched YouTube clips together to create a surreal and powerful testament to the King of Pop’s influence.

Keep your eye on the countries named at the bottom of the screen. Watching the same dance step (executed with hillarious inconsistency) performed by so many disparate people somehow feels sublime, holy. It’s not the man, compromised and creepy as he was, that moves me. It’s us— connected, as always, by similar experiences of joy and grief, and now connected by cameras and satellites and software, status updates and text donations. Making mourning public, as it should be, once again.

See You There

How I Learned I Might Be Obsessed is tonight at Happy Ending, 302 Broome Street (it’s the hot pink awning that says XIE HE HEALTH CLUB), at eight. Tracy Rowland, Jeff Simmermon, Christen Clifford, Erin Bradley and Joel Derfner will be reading. Come!

Sons of an Illustrious Father graciously let me interview them all today and record them practicing for their upcoming show: tomorrow night at ten, Lit Lounge, 93 2nd Ave. Some day soon it’ll all be worked into the radio show.

The Sons, in their kitchen, being cute.

Also some day soon: the calendar will be updated, the blogging will resume, and the actual show will commence. Stay tuned!

Hope for Haiti

This week Haiti has never been far from my thoughts. I feel very sad, humbled, and impotently angry. All my mighty cynicism about television news can’t defang the images on CNN these last few days. The facts are impossible and unbearable.

This is where storytelling matters. We could easily despair, with good cause, in the face of such monstrous unfairness and heartbreak. It would be entierly appropriate, but it benefits no one if we shut down. We need to continue taking our daily footsteps, planning for the future. It’s tempting to turn off the TV and forget; we all know how well we forget, and that sometimes we have to to keep from drowning. But we can also tell stories that let us stay present while retaining (inventing?) hope.

1. Text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the International Response Fund.

Our power to quickly and cheaply share information and resources is very recent, completely miraculous, and potentially transformative. The earth has been killing and maiming us for 200,000 years; we are not ignorant, nor impotent, anymore. “Social networking” often seems silly, but a week like this helps us remember what a blessing it is to be connected to each other. My hopeful story: we care about each other’s well being, even across oceans, and we have the ability to act, even across oceans, more than ever before.

2. There is no evil here.

It’s easy to assume that our greatest enemies are other humans, especially after studying the wretched twentieth century. I don’t think this was ever true, and it seems to be increasingly false. It’s small comfort today, but these mass graves were not the result of any human intention. My hopeful story: we’re all on the same side here, as we increasingly are, struggling against natural forces (disease, poverty) instead of each other.

3. There is, incredibly, grace here.

Humans have endured impossible hardships and found hope in hopeless situations throughout history. This week has been no different. I am proud of the US Marines, NYC firefighters, and doctors from all over who travelled to Haiti this week to help. I am even more proud of the Haitians who have responded with vigor and grace. Some have marched and danced through the streets. My hopeful story: it is a blessing, an inspiration, and a privilege to share a planet with such people.

Give all you can, extend your best wishes to all affected, and find stories that keep you going. This isn’t about denying or forgetting horror and heartache. Storytelling is a creative and willful act that lets us hope, work, and find meaning when the facts would suggest we stop. Don’t stop.

Scrap Relation at The Stone

Some paintings are about the brushes and cloth, emotions and accidents that created them much more than the supposed subject. Scrap Relation makes music like that, about itself, about its own creation, its own beauty and dissonance: this humming, stuttering moment of live sound.

The Stone, a perfect dark corner of the Lower East Side, was filled tonight with a sea of seated bodes and the flash of the brass on the head of the upright bass. At times that bass and the drums melted into one instrument. The sax and guitar asked and answered each other’s questions. I tuned my attention from one instrument to the four voices splashing together in delicate conversation. Then to the room, the audience, and once, when a siren briefly joined the music, to the world outside. All the way back in then, the musicians’ faces, wild fingers flying.

I don’t know enough to place this complicated sound into a larger story about music, as I do, chapter and verse, genre and decade, with pop music. To call it timeless feels cheap, and not accurate, anyway. Instead, I will say that it hung in the present, in that blade of time where it was created. There, then, it filled the air around us, beautifully.

Introverts of the World, Unite!

Once, during a loud party full of people I barely knew, I managed to start and sustain a serious conversation. It was about law, I seem to remember. Sitting there on a couch with a kindred spirit while people stood, drinking, all around us, I was gently teased: I was quoting Adam Smith, at a party, instead of having fun. But I was having fun.

Many of my happiest memories are of lengthy, worthwhile conversations (even in inhospitable environments). The rest are of solitary pleasures: biking the length of Manhattan on a brilliant late summer Sunday, or reading for hours on end. Small talk, crowded, anonymous rooms, and pleasantries exchanged with strangers do not make the list.

I always thought these preferences were vaguely disappointing and embarassing, the result of grouchy, selfish impulses I should be curbing. Then Jonathan Rauch, writing in The Atlantic, set me straight. As Caring for your Introvert memorably and wittily makes clear, introverts are not shy or misanthropic. We really like people. Just not all the time.

And that’s ok. If you suspect that you or someone you know may be one of us, I recommend reading Rauch’s article. You may, as I did, find it welcome, and long overdue.

Thank You, John Hodgman.

So Buckaroo Banzai, he’s a neurosurgeon, and he’s in a rock band, and he travels across dimensions, and also there are aliens in New Jersey, and one of them is John Lithgow, and he, alien John Lithgow, throws his head back and snarls, “Laugh while you still can, monkey boy!”

Also there is Jeff Goldblum. You should see this movie. Here, via my favorite famous minor television personality, are the ending credits.

I will be without internet for the next several days and I wanted to make sure you all felt inspired and entertained while I’m away. Remember: walking around in a group, to music, will banish any lousy mood.

…Or Not to Tweet

I signed up for Twitter a week ago at the request of a family member, and after resisting for so long, I’ve found it to be exactly what I expected: equal parts fascinating and ridiculous. I’ve read the stories about how powerful it was this summer in Iran, and the stories calling that into question. I’ve looked up what a “hashtag” is and wondered what Ashton Kutcher could possibly be saying that is so interesting. (I still don’t know.) I’ve marveled at my ability to look up what people near me are tweeting, and been amazed by how little I care.

One Slate article I read highlights the 90% of users of the service who don’t write often… or at all. Orphaned Tweets collects messages sent by those who “sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return.” They offer strange and often hilarious glimpses into anonymous lives: kttheet was “Wearing a gigantic t-shirt (2XL),” and anord04 was “eating a miniature pie.” DouglasAllen, in his first and only tweet, wrote: “I am writing an email to the makers of Spray N Wash to thank them for making a product that got the blood stains out of my new PJs and robe.”

Click on these accounts and you’ll find most of them have now been updated, after a year or more of inattention, presumably due to this very article. The second kttheet post assures us “My clothing is now appropriately sized,” and anord04 seems to be enjoying his new fame, as he is currently “Making fun of people for following me on twitter.” DouglasAllen, however, has never revealed what came of those blood stained pajamas. I fear we may never know.

Good Advice from Ira Glass

This was sent to me over the holidays, and made my month. The advice is priceless and perceptive, and I think almost everyone can relate: no one gets into game design because they want to make mediocre games, or takes up an instrument if they’re not in love with what music can do. Since it’s delivered by Ira Glass, who every week on This American Life reminds me how great radio can be, it felt like a special gift. Enjoy.

Remember: you’ve got to be a warrior. Best of luck to you all.

This Joyful Radio Show

Every Monday from 2 to 3, starting February first and continuing at least through the summer, This Joyful Noise will be broadcast on WHCR 90.3 FM New York, The Voice of Harlem, from the campus of City College. We have less than a month to get ready; send music, story ideas, events worth promoting, and potential interviews and guests (including your awesome self). Don’t be shy. There is no shortage of stories about New York City to tell, but we do have limited time and limited resources, so all your help is greatly appreciated.

This will be the first time This Joyful Noise becomes an actual audio program: February first is our rookie card, our first edition. Don’t miss it. In the future, when there are podcasts and book deals, and fame and fortune, you’ll want to be able to say you were there at the beginning, before we knew what we were doing.

This blog will also be revised and revitalized. Posts will be shorter, more interesting, and less about me. Tune in tomorrow for the first installment.

This Joyful Noise is hip and with it, and we want to reach as many listeners and contributors and collaborators as possible, so we’re now on Facebook and Twitter. Permanent links will be provided on this site.

News on content and guests will be posted as it becomes available. As always, the best channel for questions and feedback is emailing us at thisjoyfulnoise@gmail.com. Thanks for all your help and support, and here’s looking to a great 2010.