Causing a Scene (Charlie Todd & Alex Scordelis)

Imagine sitting in a random Starbucks when a couple begins a minor spat, a man spills his coffee on his shirt, and another man wanders through the store blaring “Shiny Happy People” on his boom box. Just a random slice of life, you might think. Now suppose all those events (and more) happen again five minutes later. And again five minutes after that. And five minutes after that. You might wonder if your little part of the cosmos had just fallen into some sort of inescapable loop. You’d at least take notice.

That was the idea behind “The Mobius”, an hour-long seamless loop of drama played out by a New York acting group. Improv Everywhere actors, or “agents” as they prefer to be called, specialize in unscheduled, unusual performances in public places in front of unsuspecting audiences. The Starbucks employees weren’t in on the secret during the Mobius, but the spontaneous show entertained the customers and gave everyone a story tell — even if they never understood what had happened.

Charlie Todd founded Improv Everywhere in 2001, after a successful night pretending to be a musician in a New York night club.  This summer Todd published Causing a Scene, a new book documenting the stories behind fourteen pranks his group has staged in recent years. They range from faking a rooftop U2 concert to orchestrating a sudden 5-minute freeze of 200 people in busy Grand Central Station.

There’s no law-breaking or protests or hidden meanings to any of Todd’s pranks. He merely wants to give people an experience. All the agents stay in character and leave the scene with no explanation. Consider the time he slowly trickled an army of eighty agents into Best Buy wearing royal blue shirts and khaki pants. They didn’t pretend to be store employees — only courteous shoppers who happened to be wearing clothes that resembled the store uniform. Double-takes were the norm that day until all those people “waiting for a friend” filed out again.

The same went for the Anton Chekhov book signing and the Olympic synchronized swimming trial in a city fountain. Improv Everywhere agents just put on public shows when no one realizes it. Usually the pranks leave everyone smiling. Watch “High Five Escalator” — a very simple Improv Everywhere stunt not mentioned in the book — and see the glum “going to work” faces become happy in less than 126 seconds. In at least one case (The Amazing Hypnotist), however, agents left people panicked or angry. Such pranks seem cruel to me — amusing only to the performers — but they are the exception.

The creativity with which Todd and his group approached most events in the book left me chuckling. And wishing I had been there.

p.s. Use the link above as a launch pad for other Improv Everywhere videos.

Where the Hell is Matt? (Matt Harding)

Most YouTube videos are barely worth the time spent watching them and yet the most inane among them can attract millions of viewers. A trio of videos by Matt Harding in recent years, however, are exceptions. What began as a personal souvenir by a silly-dancing traveler grew into two corporate-sponsored trips and a world-wide example of people sharing moments of joy together.

In the “Where the Hell is Matt?” videos, we see Harding doing his peculiar little dance (“I jump up and down and swing my arms”) in front of enchanting and famous places around the world. His infectious exuberance and exotic locales drew a lot of interest from the Internet set when they were released, enabling him to involve many fans and spontaneous dance partners for the third video last year.

Harding’s book about his unique experience, Where the Hell is Matt? Dancing Badly Around the World, offers stories behind many of the 4-second snippets seen in the videos. He describes his nerves before stepping out onto the Kjeragbolten, a rock set precariously between cliffs in Norway, and the terror he felt surrounded by giant crabs on a Christmas Island beach. He also danced with whales, jellyfish, and the heads on Easter Island. He danced at the Korean DMZ, the Brooklyn Bridge, Machu Picchu, and in zero gravity.

His ability to connect to people through dancing — or jumping up and down — was an even more compelling thread in the book. Sure, he was almost jailed in Athens after dancing in front of the Parthenon and had run-ins with pickpockets and scam taxi drivers. [Which, at times, reminded me of scenes from Into Thick Air, a book I reviewed last year.] But when the camera started and his legs moved, people in nearly every culture enthusiastically joined in: African villagers, Japanese waitresses, Huli Wigmen in Papua New Guinea, and large crowds in cities from Seattle to Madrid.

The book’s chapters are brief and almost always on topic. In fact, I was surprised by how little he described his travel or lessons learned between filming sessions. In a few cases, he seemed alarmingly disinterested in the wonder around him. I’m a birder and took mild offense, for instance, when I read “the wandering albatross was my favorite [bird en route to Antarctica] … but when someone would spot a southern sooty snow petrel or whatever, I’d retire to the ship’s bar and order a tall glass of who-gives-a-crap.”

That’s not to say he dismissed the people and societies he wandered amongst. He usually showed the utmost respect to the locals and their culture, and often tried to compensate his dance partners in some way. If the smiles on their faces are indications, though, the joy of physical dance was compensation enough.

The videos are magical and complete in themselves.  If you want a little back-story, the book is fine coda.

Let Me Eat Cake (Leslie Miller)

I went to a wedding two days ago with a thought from a book fresh in my mind. “We could eat a cookie or a doughnut or a cupcake every day,” the book said. “Cake is special. You really feel you have to deserve it.” That’s why cake is prominent at celebrations, birthdays, welcome home parties, and weddings.

So amid the matrimonial music, ceremony, gowns, and attractive, energetic young men and women Sunday, I took the time to appreciate my slice of red velvet cake with white butter cream frosting [pictured below]. The newlyweds deserved it, but I was fortunate to be there to share in the celebration.

The book I finished the night before was Leslie Miller’s new Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and a Pinch of Salt, a fun look at the author’s obsession with her favorite food. Although eight recipes are tucked within the pages, this is not a cookbook. It is a very engaging, personal appreciation of cake — thinking about, making, looking at, savoring, and devouring cake.

Call it cake lust. Miller does not want to eat cake; she is compelled to do so. “Addicted, neurotic, weak-willed,” she describes herself. Cake attracts her as she alternates between inhaling and avoiding it.

While I don’t share quite the same affection for cake as Miller, I can certainly relate. My obsession is Italian food. Ladling a thick tomato sauce on pasta has the same effect on me as spreading sweet frosting on a two-layer sponge cake for her.

Miller structures her book in layers and tiers (instead of chapters) and fills it with cake history, personal stories, and humor. The former college English teacher offers up funny observations, comedians’ punchlines, and clever turns of phrase. Example: “I have loved a lot of cakes. And I have loved some of them in shameful ways.”

There is also — in the fourth, fifth and sixth tiers — Miller’s exploration of professional cake-making from mass production bakeries to expensive specialty shops to a Today Show wedding cake competition.

But the personal nature of the writing grabs you whether you’re identifying with her guilt-dispensing Jewish grandmother (who I can vividly hear in my head as I read the words), sympathizing with her gestational diabetes, or comparing her baking experiences for family and school events with your own.

I had the pleasure of meeting the author last year. Our conversations then centered on our mutual interests of birds and photography, but I read this book as if we were picking up our discussion where we left off.

It can’t be a long discussion, though. I have to find a Boston Cream Pie. I’m hungry for cake now.

The 3 Ns: No readin’, No ‘riting, No bloody chance.

With family visiting from out of state this week, I haven’t much time to read — let alone write or post anything. Most of my reading, in fact, has been at the fourth grade level or lower, depending on which child was talking or climbing into my lap.

I’ve been content with the simple pleasure of short conversations.  These conversations always included the question “why?”, and were interrupted by shouts, naps, and sudden urges to get something or go to another room for no apparent reason.  Somewhere in there, I shared the joy of reading with a new generation.  It may have involved nothing deeper than Calvin and Hobbes, but that’s plenty poignant, I’d say.

I’ll have new NF for Mostly NF next week.

The Unwritten Rules of Baseball (Paul Dickson)

There’s No Crying in Baseball. Isn’t that a rule? I’d wager you could find more people able to recite that rule — thanks to Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own — than know the infield fly rule. Some rules are official and enforceable. Crying is … well … it just doesn’t belong in baseball, okay?

The no crying rule is one of many standards players and fans usually agree upon but aren’t part of the official major league rule book. There are a lot of them. Don’t mention a no-hitter while it’s in progress. Pitchers walk off the field, but other fielders run.

Paul Dickson compiled many of them in a book new this spring called The Unwritten Rules of Baseball: The Etiquette, Conventional Wisdom, and Axiomatic Codes of Our National Pastime.  Skip the subtitle; the title’s sufficient. It’s also pleasantly self-contradictory. Dickson writes all the rules we mostly know, and organizes them into tidy rule-book order. “No crying” is rule 1.9.0.

I’m a baseball fan and usually pick up at least one baseball book each season. This was a simple browsing book, filled with anecdotes and short asides. You can keep it near your TV remote, read a page between innings, and set it down again until there’s a pitcher change. Effortless reading.

Some of the “rules” make you wonder about group psychology. Take brawls, for instance. Dickson declares that everyone on a team must participate in a team brawl, and mentions the cases of a player sitting in the press box and an ejected manager sent to the club house. Both men made the effort to get onto the field. They just had to be there. And a batter can complain to the umpire as long as he doesn’t look at the umpire while he’s doing it. That’s disrespectful and might be cause for ejection. Is it in the official rule book? No. But it’s in this one. It’s the same with the custom of fans throwing an opponent’s home run ball back onto the field, bean-ball etiquette, and why some official rules get ignored. (Think: pine tar.)

Two thirds of The Unwritten Rules is laid out like a rule book. The last third is an alphabetical collection of quotes and axioms. That portion was more tedious reading for me, but taken in smaller bites — when I want to mute the inane words of the color commentator, for instance — they might be just as fun.

And there is fun in baseball. Just no crying.

P.S. If you’d like to read The Official Rules of Baseball, I’d suggest a volume with that title by David Nemec. I read it several years ago and thoroughly enjoyed his explanation of each rule, the reasons and implications, and countless quirky stories in which rules were pushed to their limits in major league games.

April Fool’s Part 2

I was lucky enough to set two spoofs in motion this April Fool’s Day. One was for our staff on my library’s intranet page, and one was for the public on Twitter. I posted the staff prank in my previous post. Here’s the one for the public.

My library has many, many online services, including books on tape, downloadable books, online tutorial help, etc. We also have a Twitter account that I maintain with quick, 140-character messages about materials, resources, and life in the library.

Today, I decided to introduce a new service on Twitter — full-length “Books on Twitter” — and posted the following tweets each hour, all-day long. It took all day to finish just the first sentence!  (The full book would have been about 7,194 tweets had I kept going.) This might not be greatest idea, huh?  Oh, well.  It got some fun patron reaction anyway.  A dozen followers retweeted or replied with encouragement. NOTE: Read this in reverse order, starting at the bottom.

April Fool’s Part 1

I’ve done at least ten system-wide April Fool’s jokes at work over the years. I must have a reputation now, because one coworker just passed me in the hall, wagged a finger at me and said “I haven’t looked at the computer yet, Steve, but I just know you’ve been up to something today!”

Unbeknownst to her, I was lucky enough to set two spoofs in motion this April Fool’s Day. One was for our staff on my library’s intranet page, and one was for the public on Twitter. Here’s the staff prank first.

For the last two years, my library system has chosen a book brimming with social context and discussion possibilities for a county-wide reading program. Copies of the chosen book are purchased by the case, programs surround the topics, and everything culminates with a big author event. Today on our intranet site, using the program’s official logo and colors, I proudly announced next year’s title with an over-the-top intro:

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Announcing the book everyone in Pierce County will be reading and discussing next year for our third annual Pierce County READS:

Inside, Outside, Upside-Down by Stan & Jan Berenstain

You may have thought this was a simple children’s picture book, but its provocative manner of plunging the depths of the human experience has kept it in print for more than 40 years and led to translations into 22 languages.

Tucked within the spare, Hemingway-esque language of this classic 32-page book, lies the remarkable struggles of living in a changing world. The protagonist, a humble cub, represents the yearning of the everyman; a soul seeking its place within the greater society – nay, the universe. “Readers often identify with the cub,” Joseph Campbell once wrote, because “he is unnamed; a cipher; a blank slate onto which even the most casual audience surrenders his identity, experiences, and emotions.”

The novel challenges us with its first two action-laced words: “Going in.” The significance of that phrase alone has led to countless academic papers and chat room flame wars. Google lists it on more than 23 million web pages.

Like the book’s main character, you may sometimes find yourself cramped inside a box, only to stand liberated outside that same box during another phase of your life. “It’s like looking in a mirror,” said Las Vegas magician’s assistant Rhonda Goldblum, who re-reads her well-worn copy every year.

Your emotions may be raised highest during the passage in which the cub is tumbled upside-down. The parallels to scenes from Shakespeare, Kafka, and Seinfeld are breath-taking. The culmination of this roiling experience is a long spiritual journey involving freight transport and – we suspect but never know with certainty – hefty D.O.T. fines for roadway debris.

Alan Crawford, a Seattle pharmacy tech, runs one of the many fansites of the book. “Is it a coincidence that the title’s initials are I O U?” he asked rhetorically, pausing to sip his chai tea. “Not a chance! This book’s a life-changer. I owe you everything, little bear.”

Oprah Winfrey, who considers this one of five quintessential novels of the twentieth century, choked back tears when she spoke about the book to Pierce County Library this week. “We become that little bear. Inside the book, we truly become him. And after we turn that last page, we discover that we are that bear outside the book, too. The journey of self-discovery simply turns us upside-down.”

MEET THE AUTHORS

Contrary to popular belief, Inside, Outside, Upside-Down was not written by Stan & Jan Berenstain, but by the Berenstain Bears themselves. The ursines adopted human pseudonyms during a sad era when bears (and woodland creatures in general) were not considered worthy of publication.

The authors will appear for Pierce County READS in the No Fences Amphitheater at Northwest Trek, March 27, 2010.* Attendees will be encouraged to bring huckleberries to the event because huckleberries have become symbols of the social issues entwined with the book’s narrative … and because bears like them.

*Tentative date. The author event may be delayed up to two weeks if hibernation schedules change.

Every Living Thing (Rob Dunn)

“Life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, crashes through barriers… Life finds a way.”

When Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum in the movie Jurassic Park) said those words, he was foreshadowing the disastrous end of a human-designed biological theme park.  But he would have been just as accurate describing the natural world as a whole.  Time and time again, humans thought they understood what life was and what its limits were. Each time, they have been humbled by a new discovery.  For several hundred years, scientists tried to finish their comprehensive lists of earth’s species only to realize they needed more paper.

Every Living Thing [LibraryThing / WorldCat] by Rob Dunn is one of those books that blows your mind: What you know about life isn’t one-tenth of what you don’t know.  I’m not referring simply to something as newsworthy as finding a new monkey (as the book’s subtitle mentions).  We thought we had all monkeys documented and studied, but a new one was found recently.  If a new monkey can still be found, what else is still out there?  There are likely whole ecosystems no one has yet imagined.

Dunn begins in a remote area of Bolivia where inhabitants know the local species quite well.  They are more familiar with their animals and insects than most of us in the industrialized, “educated” world know of our own.  The variety of the world’s megafauna is greater than you might expect.

From there, Dunn plunges us into history.  He follows Linneaus, an 18th century biologist who attempted to list all the animals in the world on a brief sojourn into the Swedish countryside, but came to realize there were many more species than he (or anyone) anticipated.  Leeuwenhoek startled the scientific world when he found countless “invisible” creatures swimming in water tucked under his new microscope.  His studies revealed an environment on a previously unknown scale.

Within our own lifetimes, science had established guidelines for which environments were sterile — too hostile for anything to survive.  But researchers have had to repeatedly erase and reassess.  Entire classes of life have been found in places considered too acidic, too hot, too cold, too pressurized, or too exposed to radiation.  Life has not only been found in caustic sulfur deposits and boiling undersea vents, but it has thrived in those places. Living organisms have been found in rock miles beneath our feet.  Nanobacteria have been found living all around us at atomic scales smaller than a strand of our DNA.

We humans mostly concern ourselves with an extremely thin zone at the earth’s surface.  We know the worms and vegetables a few feet down.  We see the animals and trees near us or slightly overhead.  But the abundance we see is nothing compared to what we don’t see.  Dunn’s book expands that view.  Each chapter leaves you with a perspective of life much larger than you considered the chapter before.

There appear to be no inhospitable environments; no region devoid of living creatures; no dead zones.  If one is suspected, scientists should look more carefully.  “Life finds a way.”

Washington Disasters (Rob & Natalie McNair-Huff)

Most folks living in the Northwest today remember the Nisqually Earthquake of 2001. I was in my office, for instance, mildly eavesdropping on a class in the next room. I stood up when the shaking began and rode it out in the doorway while the people in class chattered in their seats, neither panicking nor reveling in the experience. We reconvened in the parking lot a few minutes later and looked a scant more critically at the building’s facade, searching for either cracks or reassurance.

I share the memory of the 1980 eruption of Mt St Helens with fewer people these days and I’ve heard some long-time Washingtonians recall the infamous Columbus Day Storm of 1962 and even the big 1949 earthquake. Both were before my time. These events were significant milestones in the history of the Northwest; common memories that people in our region share. An earthquake hits and suddenly everyone is swapping stories of where they were when the last one struck or comparing the recent storm to some fierce howler that took down a neighbor’s tree.

Some of these stories are retold in Washington Disasters [LibraryThing / WorldCat], a book by Tacoma authors Rob and Natalie McNair-Huff. The book also recounts the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, the Seattle and Spokane fires, and a few significant plane crashes and shipwrecks. I’ve read other things about the 1910 avalanche that rolled a train down a mountain near Wellington (it was one of the worst train wrecks in the nation’s history), but had never known about the closer-to-home Tacoma Trolley derailment ten years earlier. By coincidence, I drove past the accident site the same day I read about it. Spooky. Both accidents are in the book.

Other readers might be surprised to learn about the estimated 9.0 whopper of a quake the Northwest suffered 300 years ago. In another book — sorry, I can’t recall which — I read how a geologist recently determined the date and severity of that quake, matching Indian legends and local marine deposits to Japanese tsunami records. For people new to the tale, however, Washington Disasters summarizes the big quake in its first chapter.

The stories are short and self-contained, making this a good book to read in random 5-minute bites. The subject matter may become a bit depressing if you take in one sitting anyway. Washington history is one of my amateur specialities, however, so the brevity was actually disappointing to me, but the book offers a good introduction to some significant, non-political events in state history. “Mount St Helens,” the authors correctly point out, “remains one of the most universal memories in the Pacific Northwest” even after more than a quarter century. Sad as they are, these events define the generations.

The Pluto Files (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

Seventy-nine years ago today in Flagstaff, Arizona, young Clyde Tombaugh noticed a dot move on successive photographic plates. It was Pluto shifting against a background of fixed stars. For the next three-quarters of century, Pluto was the oddball ninth planet known to every school kid in the world, but too dim for nearly anyone to see. It was icy and small, but quite a few people had a warm fondness for it.

A few years ago, as if arrogantly rewriting the laws of nature, a committee of astronomers voted to demote poor little Pluto from planet status. And then there were eight.

[Insert violin music.]

I’m making light of this because I saw the whole episode as comical and inevitable. Scientific discoveries happen. Labels change. I have no problem with that. I grew up knowing about brontosaurus and Canada geese and planet Pluto. Now I know about apatosaurus (the reclaimed original name of bronto), Cackling geese (a reclassified cousin of Canada geese after the species was split a decade ago), and dwarf planet Pluto.

The emotional story of Pluto is affectionately told in The Pluto Files [LibraryThing / WorldCat] by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I say “affectionately” not because Tyson was sentimental about Pluto’s planethood. He wasn’t. His museum, in fact, was one of the first to separate Pluto from the other eight planets. And not because he enjoyed the headaches and media circus that surrounded the demotion. I say it because Tyson clearly loves astronomy. The subject is dear to him and it shows in his writing.

Pluto’s story is a tale of passions and Tyson shares them all. The book is filled with the emails and letters of irate museum visitors and saddened elementary school kids. Comments from Bill Nye, Stephen Colbert, Jay Leno, and countless headline-writing humorists worm their way into the text, too. Between them, Tyson emerges as the rational, understanding scientist he is.

The International Astronomical Union’s decision makes sense, as far as I’m concerned. Astronomers believed Pluto was a planet when Tombaugh discovered it in 1930, just as they gave Ceres the same label when it was new to them in 1801. Over time we learned more about both and discovered additional celestial bodies like them: more asteroids like Ceres and more small icy Kuiper* Belt objects like Pluto. It became inevitable that we either count everything as planets or reclassify them as something else. The IAU made the right call.

Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. That fact hasn’t changed. What we know about Pluto has changed, though. That’s science.

Tyson’s book leads us through the facts of the case, the pros and cons, and the emotions and wisecracks surrounding the reclassification. The whole demotion episode was a minor astronomical matter but it spawned surprising emotional reactions throughout popular culture. Illustrated with humor and written in plain English, The Pluto Files makes for a pleasant diversion.

*Kuiper rhymes with piper. The Kuiper Belt is a zone of comet-like objects orbiting the sun beyond Neptune.