Give me steam
by Anton Zuiker on November 25, 2022
Peter Gabriel’s Us is playing on the bluetooth speaker, filling the house with his songs of love and yearning. Anytime I play this album means I must be feeling lonely. It’s just me and Tilly, the golden retriever, in the house on this day after Thanksgiving. Erin, Anna, Malia, and Oliver are in Cleveland along with most of the other Shaughnessy clan while I stayed back to keep an eye on the house under construction, to play soccer, and, yes, to watch the World Cup.
(I blogged about Us here and here, and this early post explains my first lonely but memorable moments with the World Cup.)
Friends Kelly and Andrew invited me to their home for the big meal yesterday; I contributed a sour cherry pie (see it here). I came home to the empty house and watched Philadelphia, the AIDS-era movie with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington (the soundtrack includes a Peter Gabriel song).
This solitude has been relaxing, and today between World Cup matches I’ll slowly make my way through a list of tasks and chores that I’ve been meaning to get to for months. I like the clean calm and slowed momentum of the days, but damn do I miss my family and their chaotic, kinetic energy.
It should be zero
by Anton Zuiker on October 25, 2022
Last week, Oliver was diagnosed with a fractured bone in his foot, so I have been driving him to his school. Usually we’re listening to the SiriusXM soccer talk show or U2X music station for the short drive, but this morning I tuned to WUNC. As we pulled up the hill and the school property, the hourly NPR news update came on (NPR News: 10-25-2022 8AM EDT).
“The shooting at the St. Louis school was the fortieth this year,” said the reporter at the very moment I turned the car into the drop-off lane and the school resource officer — the armed police offer who is at the school every day — came into sight.
I noticed this intersection of news and relative safety, and I knew Oliver was beside me and listening, and I recognized it was a moment to say something meaningful, but I did not know what to say and a moment later we were stopped and Oliver was getting out of the car, grabbing his notebook case and his saxophone and he was closing the door just as I uttered, weakly, “Have a good day.”
I want to live in a world where soccer highlights and rock-n-roll hits don’t have to give way to tragedy and insanity.
I want to live in a country where there are zero school shootings ever.
Writing spaces
by Anton Zuiker on October 13, 2022
Colum McCann is one of my favorite authors, and back in 2013 the New York Times published an interview with him about his commitment to ‘radical empathy.’ I’ve remembered that for the photo that shows McCann sitting on his cushioned makeshift seat in a tight space between two walls.
Now that we’re midway in building this new house, I need to decide what’s going to be in my work space in a wide hallway between our bedroom and Erin’s front office. My space has a tall, fixed window that looks west to the forest. I’ll have a desk, bookshelves, maybe some cabinets to store supplies and file papers. I’m also trying to figure out how a bench might fit (I’m sitting on the plywood floor at the moment, my back resting agains a 2×4 wall stud).
McCann is a brilliant writer, and I’m no McCann. Whatever I end up with in this space, I know that it is routine, focus, writing and rewriting, that matters. I’m excited for this writing ahead.
Checked, mate?
by Anton Zuiker on October 13, 2022
I started reading this New Yorker feature about Mladen Solomun, “the d.j. who keeps Ibiza dancing.” Then I came upon this:
Bor, the tour manager, oversees what he calls “booth politics,” and any infraction of the unwritten code can lead to ejection. The truly elect are invited to take an occasional shot of tequila with Solomun. The brand on his rider is Clase Azul Reposado, which the club brings in specifically for him. Solomun sometimes drinks more than thirty shots of tequila during a night at the decks, with no visible change in his sobriety.
Come on. The vaunted New Yorker fact checkers must have been out to lunch for that graph. Thirty shots is a lot of alcohol!
Alex Frater once told me that his article was so closely checked that the editor called an entomologist to confirm the number of ants he could have stepped on (I wrote about that here, one of my favorite posts from my Coconut Wireless blog).
On the other hand, maybe the current fact checkers did confirm with a 30-shot lunch.
Finding your drums
by Anton Zuiker on October 5, 2022
Oliver mentioned again over dinner the other night that he wants to take up the drums. We asked him to focus on his saxophone, but he insisted he is interested in the drums.
At that, we told him all the ways he could show us he had a drummer’s rhythm without us buying an expensive kit that he might use a few times and then forget: he could slap the small djembe we’ve had in our house for 20 years, or he could bang on an overturned plastic pail, or he could even get some bamboo and tap on it with a flip-flop.
I pulled up a YouTube video of Futuna Fatuana to show him how the ni-Vanuatu make music with bamboo and with glass bottles filled to various levels. I once brought that troupe to Paama as part of a music education project I organized. I also paid for the generator to run one night so I could show the students (and their families from the surrounding villages) the video Stomp Out Loud. (In Cleveland, before we set out for the Peace Corps, Erin and I had seen the touring music show Stomp.)
Here’s what I wrote in my Peace Corps Description of Service document (a final report before a volunteer closes out his/her service):
Peace Corps Vanuatu offered a Small Project Assistance grant in 1998 to support Anton’s What A Bang! music education project, which brought a popular “stringband” from Futuna Island to Vaum Junior Secondary School to demonstrate instruments made with local materials (e.g. bamboo, empty Coke bottles, and rubber sandals). To this day students improvise music on handcrafted instruments such as ukulele, tin can drums and bamboo whistles. VJSS has begun to collect and use various musical instruments for music education and class sing-a-longs.
After dinner, Oliver retrieved paint cans and plastic pails fro the shed and made himself a makeshift drum kit in the laundry room. He banged on it for an hour or so and called it a night. The laundry room has been cluttered with the kit for the last few days. After his soccer practice yesterday, we were driving past School of Rock—I mentioned he should take an introductory drum lesson, and he quickly found the company’s website and requested more information.