lies like truth

If there’s any show that can be said to symbolize our present “golden era” of TV, it’s Horace and Pete, the comedian Louis C.K.’s new series set in a Brooklyn bar. C.K. unveiled the 10th and final episode this weekend. This is is an odd thing to say when you consider the fact that C.K. released the series via his website without the need of a network, and that Horace and Pete feels more like a docudrama or an episodic piece of theater than anything I’ve ever witnessed on a small screen.

Nevertheless, here are three reasons why Horace and Pete is brilliant:

1. It tells a story that feels old and new all at once.
I read a tongue-in-cheek elevator pitch-style description of the show in The New Yorker which I thought was right on the nose when it said Horace and Pete was “Cheers meets The Iceman Cometh.” And with its story about a group of blood relations destined to repeat their cycle of woes into perpetuity, a tragic hero who ultimately falls despite striving to do the right thing (C.K.’s role as bar co-owner Horace), and “chorus” of barflies, the series veers into the terrain of Greek tragedy.

Yet at the same time, the plot bubbles and spews with today’s headlines; Donald Trump’s campaign is an intermittent discussion point throughout. And it grapples in an explosive but still non-heavy-handed way with the issues of our time.

One of the most thoughtful scenes, for example, presents a side of transgender politics I’ve never given much thought to before: the question of whether it’s ethical for a transgender person to keep silent about their former gender identity to a person they’re sleeping with. Horace, who’s resolutely straight, has a happy one-night stand with a beautiful alcoholic. In the morning over eggs and coffee — well, Horace has coffee; his date Rhonda (played by Karen Pittman) asks for something a little stronger and her gracious host obliges — the conversation takes a left turn when Horace finds out Rhonda used to be a guy. At least, the possibility of a sex change is strongly inferred, though never explicitly stated. As non-judgmental as Horace is about people who make a habit of drinking whiskey before breakfast, he gets flustered and accusatory at the thought he’s somehow been “duped” into a “homosexual” encounter. Fascinating stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbUMqNBO-W8

2. It refuses to conform to tried-and-tested formats.
The series exists in a liminal space at the intersection of TV, theater, documentary and feature film and strikes an unusual balance between the structural and content mores of these formats. Louis C.K. has created what feels like an entirely fresh way to tell a story by carefully weaving together elements from different traditions.

The series has the cuts and close-ups of a TV serial. It brings in the actualities of the documentary format. And it has the epic, sweeping quality of a movie. The theatricality of the series is what interests me the most though, like C.K.’s penchant for splicing the action with long monologues. My favorite of these is a bonkers-foulmouthed explanation of the famous Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah told by Kurt Metzger playing one of the bar’s regular customers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wbfWfwh6HE

There’s even an intermission to break up the longer episodes and the entire cast takes a bow at the end of the final show.

Oh, and even though Horace and Pete is the work of one of the funniest comedians around today, there are few opportunities for laughter. Unless you count comedy in the sense of the great cosmic joke of which all humankind is a part. C.K. knows all about that, and with this series captures its essence in a bottle.

3. It features some of the most prescient writing and best performances I’ve ever seen in any format. Period.
What’s masterful about Horace and Pete is the casting and the writing. It seems like the two are so closely intertwined (viz Metzger’s Sodom monologue mentioned above, which, judging by the reactions of the other cast members in the scene, strikes me as having been partly or fully improvised) that I need to tackle them both at once.

The blend of standup comedians and dramatic actors is an unusual and powerful one. And each performer brings pathos, shadows and moments of levity to his or her role. I cannot speak highly enough of C.K., Steve Buscemi, and Edie Falco as the bar-owning brothers and their sister. Here we have a trio who show us plenty of fallibility and ugliness while at the same commanding our respect.

And how tightly wound and carefully controlled the writing feels: C.K. reveals dramatic information to us incrementally, doling out hard-to-digest news about the family’s troubled past in lean teaspoonfuls of strong medicine. Yet despite the economy of the dramaturgy, abetted by the claustrophobic indoor setting of the Brooklyn bar with its flat lighting and ugly furniture, C.K. somehow makes his drama feel airy and spacious.

Witness the final episode, which begins suddenly and without explanation in 1976. Here, the principal performers whom we’ve grown to know and love in the present-day setting — C. K., Buscemi, Falco — play their forebears. The scenes are without a doubt the nastiest and most suffocating of the whole series. But then we jump forward to 2016, to find Amy Sedaris, in the role of a sweetly unhinged wannabe bartender, lightening things up. When she skips over to the bar’s old jukebox and puts Simon and Garfunkel’s famous song “America,” about a journey to find meaning in a country that’s lost its way, it’s as if a feather duster had temporarily fluffed away all the creepy-crawlies from a cobwebby corner.

Speaking of which, Paul Simon’s ghostly little theme song for the series, with its sparsely-chorded guitar riff and far-off lament of a vocal line, captures the “high lonesome sound” of the great roots musicians that have been singing about this country’s dashed hopes and failures since the dawn of the Republic. The tune, together with this formidable series, leaves us feeling emotionally drained yet strangely complete.

The following article originally appeared at kqed.org/arts.

The term “pop music” is a 20th century invention — it originated in England in the 1950s to describe the rock and roll frenzy that was sweeping the nation. One of the many inspired things about the first part of New York drag artist Taylor Mac’s lunatic-brilliant A 24-Decade History of Popular Music is how it reminds us that pop music in this country is actually much older than that. Another, is a sense that the greatest hits of the 1770s and 1780s — the tunes that rocked the taverns and bawdy houses of our fledgling republic back in the days when England was pretty unpopular and a mohawk was a member of a native American tribe rather than a way to wear your hair — could easily go viral today.

Mac is training for a 24-hour marathon performance of his A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in New York later this year, in which he will devote an hour of stage time to each decade from 1776 to the present day. For now, he’s getting into shape for this feat by undertaking just the first two parts — or six decades / six hours worth of songs — in San Francisco as part of the Curran Theatre’s Under Construction series of experimental performance. I caught the first three decades (1776 – 1806) on opening night and can’t wait to go back for Part Two (1806 – 1836) in a few days.

In his show, we first encounter Mac when he appears high above the stage on a balcony above the Curran’s orchestra section. Wearing an elaborate hooped dress fashioned from brightly-colored foil ribbons and a voluminous wig that makes him look like Marie Antoinette had an accident in a Mexican bodega, the artist begins an epic journey through 240 years of U.S. musical history that’s as timeless as it is prescient.

That’s in part because of music director and pianist Matt Ray’s creative song arrangements, which make crusty old tunes like “Yankee Doodle” and “Amazing Grace” sound like like they were written just in time for this year’s Grammys. The performances carry it too: Although the show is currently in workshop mode, with Mac, Ray and the band still ironing out a few wonky transitions, the team manages to breathe new life into both well-known and obscure 18th century ditties. And it’s Mac’s mercurial tenor that anchors the experience: the drag queen’s voice is as colorful as his flamboyant sense of style. There’s crushed velvet and feathers in Mac’s mellifluous ballad singing and 8-inch spiked heels in his drinking song belt.

Taylor Mac in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music: 1776-1806 as part of Curran: Under Construction

It isn’t just the music that makes three hours of sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair on a rickety riser breeze by, or Mac’s eye-popping wardrobe. (In addition to the gaudy get-up mentioned above, there’s an “architectural” dress involving a pair of enormous doric columns, each with a plastic doll’s head dangling from the bottom, and another costume topped with an amazing wig made of wine bottle corks and sheaths of barley.) The thematic through-line connecting the musical numbers also helps to take A 24-Decade History of Popular Music beyond regular drag cabaret.

Mac underpins each decade of the musical journey with commentaries on broad social issues, which he spices with liberal amounts of scathing humor and personal anecdote. The first decade roughly and comically charts the founding principles of post-Revolutionary U.S.. In the second decade, Mac takes a piquant look at women’s lib. Part Three is all about booze, where the ripe innuendos of raucous drinking songs like “Nine Inch Will Please a Lady” clash against the stiff, bonneted warblings of a scandalized Temperance Choir (a small guest ensemble of classically-trained singers.) By the time we reach the end of the show, the do-gooder choristers get their comeuppance, pelted in a hailstorm of ping-pong balls. In addition to having fun with a piece of political history, the gambit neatly plays out a more contemporary stand-off between the scrappy, underground world of drag performance and the straight-laced mores of today’s arts establishment. Here, the political becomes personal, as Mac himself has been faced with negotiating these two worlds in his own career.

The socio-political content at times feels a little strained, like when Mac spins a long feminist diatribe out of a mopey little ditty about a young woman fretting about why her beau hasn’t come home from the fair. But Mac’s ability to work the crowd, in particular his obsessive, sweetly overbearing use of audience participation, mitigates this shortcoming. He makes this otherwise sprawling historical project feel intimate and personal.

Mac’s insistence on bringing the crowd into the proceedings might seem tiresome and gimmicky to some — one person complained to me about being pulled into a conga line and forced to wear a pair of fairy wings. But overdoing it, going over-the-top, “carrying on for just a bit too long,” as Mac himself puts it, is part of his stage technique. It’s there to make a broader point about just how topsy-turvy the world is. And like an old song that’s so familiar that it’s stuck in all of our heads, we’re all in this thing together, like it or not.

Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music runs through Saturday, Jan. 30 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. Details here. 

Kathy (Michelle Drexler) and Robert (Keith Pinto) in SF Playhouse’s production of ‘Company.’ (Photo: Jessica Palopoli/SF Playhouse)

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 musical about marriage, Company, is a product of its times. As an affable bachelor, Robert, moves through his 36th year in a blur of dinner parties with married friends and dates with women whom he doesn’t care that much about, clichés abound: The wives are crazy and spend their time making gossip; the husbands are dumb and spend their time making dirty jokes.

The American domestic sitcom was built on such stuff.

Offering alternately funny, touching or bittersweet snapshots of a bunch of marital relationships, the emotional content of Company is in many ways timeless. Sondheim and Furth’s songs, like “The Little Things You Do Together” and “Sorry-Grateful,” repeatedly bring out the crazy-making paradox of feelings people have for one another when they’re in it for the long haul.

Director Susi Damilano’s entertaining production for SF Playhouse, performed with precision and gusto by an endearing ensemble cast, certainly draws out the complexities of these human relationships throughout. Monique Hafen gives a particularly standout performance as the batty, soon-to-be-wed Amy. Hafen reels off the anxiety-choked lyrics of her character’s big number, “Getting Married Today,” with frayed brilliance, her small frame flailing jaggedly at the thought of having to walk down the aisle.  Against Bill English and Jacquelyn Scott’s stark, scaffolding-heavy set, this young woman’s pre-nuptial psychotic break feels like she’s heading to the gallows rather than to a wedding party.  The actress’s comic timing is impeccable.

Aided by joyous live music provided by a pair of pianists who toss Sondheim’s playful phrases back and forth while seated at matching baby grand pianos on either side of the stage, Damilano’s fluid mise-en-scene seamlessly connects Sondheim and Furth’s plotless vignettes. As a result, the whole show possesses an effortless swing.

Yet although the show is undeniably a good time, what this Company seems weirdly oblivious to is just how far the institution of marriage has come in this country since Sondheim and Furth penned those songs.

Back in 1970, gay and lesbian relationships simply weren’t openly depicted on the Broadway stage. (The earliest musicals with gay characters — The Faggot and the Rocky Horror Show — didn’t appear on the scene until 1973.) As such, Sondheim and Furth stuck to depicting the connubial lives of five straight couples. What’s more, they barely even touched on the piquant issues of the day that impacted many of those marriages, like women’s lib and wife-swapping.

April (Morgan Dayley), Kathy (Michelle Drexler), and Marta (Teresa Attridge) in SF Playhouse’s production of ‘Company.’ (Photo: Jessica Palopoli/SF Playhouse)

But in 2015, and in the Bay Area especially, it seems strange to experience a work of art about marriage that deals exclusively with the heterosexual kind. And Company is a musical that seems ripe for exploration beyond the realm of male-female relationships. For one thing, there’s little about the characters in this plotless work that necessitates an intrinsically straight approach. For another, as a man who did not come out as gay until he was about 40, Sondheim would probably welcome a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender couple or two in the mix.

The show was obviously cast long before before the Supreme Court blew open the definition of marriage last month, and in so doing changed not just the lives of people in LGBT relationships, but also touched the entire nation.

One could argue (albeit weakly) that because Damilano and her collaborators doubtless had to make casting decisions ahead of the Supreme Court ruling, how could they have known to include at least one non-hetero-normative couple on the SF Playhouse stage? But even without the blaring headlines, SF Playhouse’s straight-laced casting would have felt dated even a decade ago. Worse than that, the company has wasted an opportunity to capitalize and create commentary on one of the most pressing civil rights issues of this moment.

In his program notes, the organization’s artistic director, Bill English, asks: “Is marriage dated?” But it’s not marriage that’s dated; it’s SF Playhouse’s conception of the institution that seems to be behind the times.

UPDATE:

In an email after this review initially went live, SF Playhouse’s press representative, Anne Abrams, said that Damilano’s original concept for the show in fact revolved around “portraying the protagonist Bobby as bisexual, struggling with his sexuality, even going so far as to consider having one of the people he dates be a man to underscore his struggle.” Abrams said that when SF Playhouse approached Music Theatre International, the license holder of Company,  about making tweaks to the casting along these lines, the request “received a resounding emphatic NO.”

Apple’s podcasting icon (Wikipedia fair usage image.)

Perhaps the most common word that comes up in my daily life these days as senior arts editor at KQED is “podcast.”

Ever since the This American Life spinoff podcast Serial stormed the digital airwaves, it seems like my industry has been seized by the idea that the format will somehow do for public radio what Downtown Abbey has done for public TV.

But what role is public media likely to end up playing in the podcast arena? Will the industry ultimately serve as a producer of original podcasts or rather see the podcasting medium as a way to deliver content along the same lines as it’s done for a long time?

Along with many of my colleagues across the organization, I’ve been listening to a lot — and I mean a lot — of podcasts lately. We’re on the hunt for bankable material. Some of the content I’ve listened to has been produced in-house, and some has gravitated my way from the outside.

The podcast drive comes at a time when the future looks bleak for traditional radio as we know it. It may not be too long before we have an RIP FM situation on our hands. (Norway was recently the first country to announce that it would unplug in 2017.)

And just like iTunes proved that consumers prefer to buy music by the single rather than the album, so signs are pointing to the “a la carte” approach for other kinds of audio content: Listeners want to pick and choose what to listen to rather than be fed what’s what in the order that’s given. The development of NPR One, NPR’s online  is a move to respond to this appetite for content delivery.

So, with the death knell potentially sounding for FM, it makes sense for public media organizations to be jumping on the podcasting bandwagon with particular verve. After all, professionals who produce content for our ears on a daily basis ought, by rights, to have the best handle on leading the podcast revolution, right?

Perhaps and perhaps not.

While we public media pros might have some advantages over non radio people creating podcasting material out there, such as access to professional recording facilities and engineers, it strikes me that we’re still at the very early stages of understanding the format.

One basic question that I’m grappling with is: Should a podcast be an extension of / interchangeable with what already appears on public media? Or should it be its own particular product?  I mean, Serial could have worked just as well as a radio series, and in fact relied on the This American Life brand name and distribution platform for its launch and ensuing runaway success.

I’ve been of the basic opinion up until now that a podcast isn’t a radio show and that it should differentiate itself somehow in content and style. A podcast can cover esoteric ground that mainstream radio can’t so easily program; it can run at any length rather than having to be wedged into a timeframe that fits the NPR clock; its creators don’t have to adhere to the buttoned-up, family-friendly NPR style.

But the “secret sauce” of podcasting remains largely elusive, and we currently have a vast number of podcasts that are, frankly, tiring on the ear: Creators think that saying “like” and “sorta” and “um” every other word frees up the style, when instead the talk just sounds sloppy. Not having to adhere to a strict timeframe leads to long-windedness and an excuse to do little or no pre-production and editing. And podcasters don’t realize that it’s not enough to be passionate and knowledgeable about 1950s Georgia bluesmen, French cheese or Beyonce’s latest outfit; they need to be able to communicate this passion in a way that is meaningful to people other than themselves.

Many of the podcast ideas I’ve seen emerge in public media land doubtless benefit from high quality production and storytelling chops. The producers know to keep the uptick from their voices. And they know how to construct a traditional narrative and use a perky theme tune. But the fact is, I’ve yet to come across a project prototype or concept that truly makes my ears prick up. I fear that many ideas (both generated by the traditional public media mill and elsewhere in the podcast-o-sphere) appear to rehash old tropes like the variety show, the mini-documentary and the three-way conversation.

Which leads me to wonder how this will all shake out: Will public media be a major creative source for the audio content experience in the digital age, or will its greatest strength lie in offering what it’s always offered — the only major difference being the delivery method?

And if that’s the case, then maybe the innovation in terms of content and style will mostly in the end come from elsewhere. And perhaps public media will go on to act as a formidable launching and branding platform to get the ideas out to the biggest possible audience.

Cactus solo by Tom Hemphill at The San Francisco Symphony performance of John Cage’s “Renga.” Davies Symphony Hall, May 17, 2015. (Photo: Stefan Cohen.)

Of all the ear-eye-and-mind-tingling things I’ve experienced on the Bay Area arts scene this week and have not yet had time to chime in about, last night’s performance of John Cage’s Renga by the San Francisco Symphony topped the list.

That’s not to disparage the entrancing solo set I heard on Monday by British singer-songwriter Nick Mulvey at The Chapel in the Mission; I’ve been listening addictively to Mulvey’s moody lyrics and crunchy harmonies all week ever since.

But when it comes to sheer novelty,  there’s really no way a man playing a guitar can compete with a man playing a pair of cactuses.

The cacti in question were stroked, plucked and pressed (ouch!) by San Francisco Symphony percussionist Tom Hemphill during the Symphony’s engrossing presentation of Renga, Cage’s largely improvisational 40-minute work dating back to the mid-1970s. The thorny plants were amplified. At times the sound they made when struck was akin to droplets of water falling into a sink; at others, I thought I was hearing some kind of tinny xylophone. My ears were inspired. Now I want to have a conversation with a cactus.

Cage intended the piece, which is inspired in part by the work of Henry David Thoreau and in part by a Japanese poetic form known as “Renga,” to be played in honor of a head of state or other dignitary. Michael Tilson Thomas presented the work in honor of its composer.

As such, this version of the work, written in 78 parts for whatever assortment of instruments the producer of a performance wishes, interwove a variety of pieces by Cage. These included the Sonata for Clarinet (1933) which was caressingly and spryly performed by SFS principal clarinetist Carey Bell, A Room, a 1943 piece for prepared piano, and Child of Tree, the aforementioned cactus piece. There were many other offerings besides, played in breathy cacophony by instrumentalists and singers dispersed in little clusters around and above the stage.

Also, actor Tim Robbins was on hand to narrate, with humorous somberness, Cage’s Lecture on Nothing from 1950. The monologue is a fitting accompaniment to Renga, with its repetitive incantations about the pleasurable fitfulness of going nowhere, of doing nothing.

The only element of this remarkable musical event that should have been excised was the addition of twin video screens above the stage, sputtering out vintage TV content intermittently as the piece evolved.

The video was supposed to illustrate the culture of Cage’s life and times. Cage’s life spanned nearly the entirety of the 20th century. But the footage didn’t reflect this span. Instead it leaned heavily on the middle period, with kitsch ads for cigarettes and breakfast cereals, and snippets of scenes from beauty pageants and celebrity interviews. I found the visuals to be nothing but mindless distraction from the music.

Then again, perhaps the role of the screens in underscoring the theme of the vacuous nothingness of human existence was intended. Even so, I could have done without this stuff.

No two performances of Renga are the same. I want to hear it again. And next time, I’ll do a radio story about the cacti.

The tributes to Joni Mitchell continue outside the SFJAZZ Center (Photo: Chloe Veltman)

Judging by the floral and handwritten tributes adorning the fence across the street from the SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, you’d think Joni Mitchell had passed away.

The great vocalist and songwriter is still, of course, very much alive, though was unable to attend SFJAZZ’s spangly lifetime achievement award celebrations last night for health reasons.

Mitchell had planned to be at the event before falling ill and ending up in a Los Angeles hospital on March 31. SFist reports that the circumstances surrounding the singer’s health remain undisclosed.

In any case, the spirit of Mitchell’s music was very much alive at the jazz center last night.

Guest artists including Kris Kristofferson, Joe Jackson, Patti Austin, Laurie Antonioli, and Kurt Elling performed interpretations of Mitchell’s songs. The versions ranged from the fairly straight forward, like Kristofferson’s unadorned, heartfelt take on “A Case of You”, to Jackson’s playful-if-not-quite-locked-in boogie woogie piano interpretation of “Big Yellow Taxi.” Vocalist/pianist Judith Hill totally stole the show with her lucid, sparkling version of “River.” That song will never be the same for me again.

The most important idea I took away from the show is a sense of the intersection between Mitchell’s folk stylings and jazz.

I must admit that I was initially confused as to why a jazz organization would want to honor a folk/folk rock artist, even though Mitchell did go through a “jazz phase” with her 1979 collaboration with jazz artist Charles Mingus. And when I listen to recordings of some of her songs, with their far-reaching, ethereal harmonies and her particular brand of “scat”, the link between jazz and Mitchell feels somewhat organic.

But it was the SFJAZZ Collective’s performances of “Both Sides Now” and “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” that really sealed the connection for me. The Collective is a group of top-tier musicians assembled each season to be “in residence” at the Center by a guest artistic director. That position this year falls to saxophonist Miguel Zenon. Trumpeter Avishai Cohen played the latter tune, recorded by Mingus in 1959, with an extremity of emotion, digging into the very top end of the trumpet’s register. I was spellbound.

Mitchell sang: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Thankfully, the folks at SFJAZZ know very well what we’ve got. I’m so glad they decided to celebrate Mitchell while she’s still around. I only wish, like everyone else, that she could have joined us in person. I hope she gets out of hospital soon.

Not everyone’s idea of a crocodile purse. A character from Handspring Puppet Company’s “Ubu and the Truth Commission” at Cal Performances (Photo: Courtesy of Cal Performances.)

Anyone who’s seen “War Horse,” an extraordinary piece of storytelling for the stage that features life-size horse puppets, knows the name of the Handspring Puppet Company.

The South African organization has been around since the early 1980s, and has been making prominent pieces of theater around the world ever since. But “War Horse” is the show that really put the Handspring on the map. Kind of like what “Sleep No More” has done for Punchdrunk.

There is some powerful puppetry at play in the company’s 1997 production “Ubu and the Truth Commission”, currently showing at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley under the auspices of Cal Performances. But even a snappy crocodile purse (pictured here) and a three-headed-dog-suitcase puppet cannot bring this heavy-handed diatribe of a theater production to life.

Written by Jane Taylor and directed by William Kentridge (who also provides fanciful-grotesque charcoal animations projected on a screen at the back of the stage) this multimedia spin on Alfred Jarry’s late 19th century absurdist drama “Ubu Roi” blends Jarry’s violent and obscene protagonists, Ubu and his wife, with the testimonies of witnesses at the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC was a judicial body that was created in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid to give voice to those who identified as victims of human rights violations as well as the perpetrators of violence.

The small size and fragility of the human witness puppets and understated presentation of their apartheid stories (spoken in African languages like Zulu and rendered into English in a neutral tone by a translator sealed in a box) contrasts dramatically with the overbearing, violent and over-sexualized depictions of Ma and Pa Ubu.

There are all kinds of layers of meaning locked in to this show. I suspect many of the ideas are lost in time and geography at this point. For example, knowing that the canvas kit bag used as part of the crocodile puppet belonged to the father of company member Basil Jones who used it during his military service adds to the sinister undertones of the piece.

But the politics of the piece are so didactic and overbearing, that I found myself switching off.

A vewi of the San Francisco skyline from Bernal Heights. April 30, 2015. (Photo: Chloe Veltman.)

In a couple of hours I will walk through the doors of KQED and start my new job as senior arts editor there.

KQED is one of the country’s biggest and most well-respected public media organizations. I’m feeling excited and a little intimidated about what lies ahead.

I learned a lot from my two years at Colorado Public Radio in Denver. It was essentially my first ever full-time, salaried job. I’d always worked for myself until I went to CPR to launch and lead its then brand new arts bureau.

Some of the things I picked up from my time at CPR that will serve me well in the new gig (it’s a very general list that will probably have many of you going “duh!”, but still):

• Listening carefully.
• Learning to be patient. Bringing about change in public media organizations often takes time.
• Understanding that I don’t have control over a lot of things that happen in the workplace and that I have to be flexible and calm and roll with whatever comes my way.
• Knowing that the best ideas often come to me at unpredictable moments and that forcing stuff to happen isn’t generally productive.
• Knowing what battles to fight and when to walk away.
• Staying enthusiastic while keeping it real. Vacuous perkiness is irritating as I discovered from spending time around one or two of my colleagues in Denver.
• Keeping a good sense of perspective.
• Maintaining transparency and openness.
• Spending time getting to know the building and as many of its dwellers as I can — walking around and talking to people not just in my team but also all over the organization is a must.
• Taking breaks.
• Having fun.
• Knowing that I don’t always have to have all the answers right away.
• Maintaining boundaries.
• Understanding that I cannot possibly see every single piece of art happening in the region. But I can get to a bunch of it and build my understanding of the area’s cultural life bit by bit.
• Putting diversity front and center of my thinking when it comes to commissioning stories and who should cover them.
• Experimenting. Wildly.
• Questioning. Unrepentantly.
• Respecting tradition even as I question it.

Wish me luck!