Thoughts on the Tobolowsky Files Live at the Moore

Nine months ago, Stephen Tobolowsky and I took the stage at the Neptune Theater in Seattle to perform The Tobolowsky Files live. It was a sold-out performance, and every seat in the 850-seat auditorium was filled. We were given 10 tickets to distribute amongst local friends. We didn’t even fill all the slots.

Last night, we did a packed show at the Moore Theatre in Seattle. This time, we brought 35 people with us, a testament to how drastically my life has changed in just the past 9 months. I was grateful to see so many of my awesome local friends and colleagues in the theater last night, cheering us on and enjoying Stephen’s wonderful, powerful, moving storytelling. I will never forget last night for the rest of my life.

Walking onto stage in front of 1,110 people, almost all of whom are there because they are fans of something you helped to create: there’s nothing else like it. Thanks to everyone who came, to Stephen for being his usual amazing self, and especially to Adam Zacks, the man with the plan, for making it happen.

Experimenting with Music

The 1 Second Everyday project continues! This past month was marked by thousands of miles of travel, plus my dear brother’s wedding. The numerous shots of planes are meant to convey what an intense month it was, but by using them, I was unable to use any other seconds from those memorable days. Quite the conundrum, and one of the limits of the project (i.e. conveying two ideas from the same day). Another limit is trying to convey the momentousness of a wedding using only one second. I wish I could’ve “borrowed” seconds from other, more boring days to use instead, but I do ultimately feel that that ends up betraying the spirit of the project.

I also tried something new: adding music to the proceedings. Some observations on this:

  • I agree with an earlier observation I blogged about that music totally sets the mood for the entire video, regardless of what the mood for these seconds actually is. While each second differs dramatically in tone, the music sets a single tone for the entire thing.
  • The video with no music is able to convey a sense of momentum, just by the perpetual, continual change of the sound of each 1-second clip. It takes us inexorably into the future. The video with music is unable to do this quite as effectively, but it feels like it conveys an entirely different type of momentum altogether. 
  • In general, I think the type of music you can use for this situation is either really pensive/somber, or really upbeat and happy. Anything in between (e.g. hip-hop, folk music, etc.) just feels “off” to me, but your mileage may vary.
  • The track I used was Dave Porter’s “Matches in the Pool,” off of his Breaking Bad soundtrack. I recorded a podcast about the Breaking Bad soundtrack that you can listen to here.

I’m undecided as to whether the final video will include music, so I’ll most likely still end up producing two versions of it. Your thoughts are welcome.

On the Possibility of a Sane Wedding

I still remember the day when I was sitting in church in Lexington, MA and Pastor Chuck Lowe gave a sermon in which he commented on the out-of-control cost of weddings. When did it become acceptable in our society to spend $10,000 on a big, lavish, one-day party? Has it ever occurred to anyone that there are better uses of that money? Like, say, a down payment for a house? Or to be even more radical about it, a better way for that money to be used to serve others?

Turns out Pastor Lowe’s $10,000 quote was a bit premature. The average wedding in the United States costs about $25,000 these days. This level of a price tag is no longer treated as a luxury; it’s simply expected.

 In the midst of all this, my brother and sister-in-law decided to go a different way for their wedding this past weekend. They decided that they’d try to do their wedding in a way that was sane, cost-effective, and utilized the considerable talents of their incredible group of friends. They minimized costs in every single way possible, but always thoughtfully, never carelessly. Jessie, for instance, hand-made all the gorgeous bouquets for herself and her bridesmaids. They asked a few favors from their friends, each of whom graciously pitched in to make the wedding an amazing production. The result was not only a wedding that cost well under $6,000, but one that felt like it was a collaboration, as opposed to a show. The feeling of, well, love that permeated the entire day was palpable and truly memorable.

I’ve been to many weddings. I’ve photographed them, performed/sung at them, given speeches at them. And you know what? I couldn’t tell the difference between any of those weddings and the wonderful ceremony and celebration I witnessed this weekend.

 I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t pull out all the stops for your own wedding. By all means, do whatever your heart tells you. But most people who are getting married feel like they HAVE to do things a certain way, that society is pressuring them, their families are pressuring them, their inner selves are pressuring them them. All I’m saying is, it is possible to take control. I could not be more proud of my brother and his new wife. Because this past weekend, they showed that you can still have an amazing, beautiful, and (most importantly) sane wedding on your own terms.

In doing this, they inadvertently demonstrated that truism that the Beatles crooned to us so many years ago: All you need is love.

The First Three Months

I know updates have been sparse on here recently. Honestly, between my job, all my podcasts, and trying to do social things outside of those things to keep myself sane, I barely have any time to do anything else these days.

BUT! My 1 Second Every Day project soldiers onwards. Here’s a video that shows the first three months of my life in Seattle (approximately):

A couple of observations:

  • After three months of this, it’s difficult to fight some of the “sameness” that creeps into these images. By far, that’s the biggest challenge: trying to make sure what you shoot today isn’t similar to what came before it.
  • The biggest weakness of this project is that there is pretty much nothing here of my work at Microsoft. I don’t really do any shooting on campus because I don’t want to risk the possibility of revealing anything confidential, but it remains a huge part of my new life that remains undocumented.
  • When I’ve presented this project to my friends, the one thing they all overwhelmingly say is: “If I did a project like that, it would be incredibly boring.” As I mentioned in my initial post, maybe if that’s the case you should try and make some serious changes to your life. But I have a corollary now to add to that: you don’t need to have a super interesting life to make a decent video with this project. You just need to be able to find the beautiful, fascinating, amusing things worth highlighting in each day. I think it’s a challenge worth undertaking. 

What Kind of Week This Has Been

[This post appeared earlier on my Facebook, which you can also subscribe to]

There’s an episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION called “The Inner Light” (Season 5 Episode 25) in which the Enterprise discovers a strange alien probe. The probe knocks Picard unconscious, and while the crew struggles to revive him, Picard’s consciousness is transported to that of an alien world, where he inhabits one of its people’s bodies, QUANTUM LEAP-style. While there, he learns the people’s customs and basically ends up living an entire, meaningful lifetime in this world that was so unfamiliar to him not too long ago. But the alien species is dying; their planet’s environment is on the fritz. As Picard’s inhabited body is approaching the end of his life, we find out that the alien race will launch a probe into space, a means of carrying on the species’ memory as they face extinction. And turns out, it was Picard (the original one) who was chosen for this task. He awakes on the Enterprise to discover only 20 minutes have passed in the real world.

Sometimes it feels like a lifetime can pass in the blink of an eye. That’s what this week felt like to me, as though I have experienced enough emotion and learning and intensity to last me for a long, long while. In situations like these, I am overwhelmed to the point of exhaustion. I can only hope to make use of the lessons that I’ve learned, remember fondly those things that I’ve experienced, and honor those that have inspired me.

P.S. Damn, that was a good episode of Star Trek.

Reactions to the Paul Ryan VP Pick

Today, Mitt Romney announced his choice of Paul Ryan to join him on the ticket. It will be the first GOP ticket in history to not include a single Protestant. Here are some reactions to the news that I found informative:

Ryan Lizza writes that Ryan’s policies will be more instructive than Romney’s: “To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.”

Ezra Klein believes that “This is an admission of fear from the Romney campaign. You don’t make a risky pick like Paul Ryan if you think the fundamentals favor your candidate. You make a risky pick like Paul Ryan if you think the fundamentals don’t favor your candidate.”

Michael Tomasky writes that this choice is how “Mitt Romney tells America that he is not his own man and hasn’t even the remotest fleeting desire to be his own man. He is owned by the right wing.”

Behind The Scenes at Merriam Webster

Fantastic piece by Jen Doll, about how Merriam Webster gives is alive and well, and providing a window into our culture:

So, what are people thinking? Affect and effect are among the most looked-up words on any given day; other frequently searched terms include paradigm, ubiquitous, integrity, conundrum, and pragmatic. “Most of them have classical roots and slightly abstract meanings; they send people to the dictionary,” he says. But you can break it down even further: People go to the dictionary for a few different reasons: for usage (as with affect and effect), for spelling (a word like fiancé), or for comprehension or definitions (with love, another frequently looked-up word, “they’re not going for the spelling,” says Sokolowski). Sometimes it’s easy to connect a word spike to a news story, like in the case of Boson, but often it’s more abstract, he says, referencing democracy and socialism. In those cases, “it’s just about the zeitgeist.”