First day of the school year here in Brooklyn. Lunch has been packed, the pencils sharpened, a brand new Keeper has been Trapped. I know I’m not the one going, but it’s exciting nonetheless, anticipating new homework and classes and conversations and memories being made, like when Potatohead made that ridiculous face that we all found hysterical at lunch. Ah, Potatohead.
I was not a fan of homework as a child. I am not a fan of homework today either. I did enjoy “word problems”, challenges that put me in the role of a young investigator seeking answers in clever mysteries, like “two trains leaving opposite towns at the same time”. But I’ve always really loved learning practical knowledge; things I could use, building blocks I could make something out of.
My sources of knowledge were limited, but I really do believe that it used to be easier to learn stuff. I know that sounds naive, given that we carry the knowledge of all ages in our pockets, but that often feels like drinking from a firehose: everything I’ve managed to know I learned individually, one fact at a time, and most everything was related to something else I was interested in. I was an investigator, collecting clues.
• listen to an album by a favorite artist,
• notice the amazing guitar player,
• go to the record store to figure out what other albums they’ve played on
• discover a new artist
I can discover an artist on my phone, but for the most part they are spoon fed to me, pushed in my face like 3D pancakes. I used to actually hunt for knowledge, a human search engine with 3 TV networks, maybe five radio stations, a handful of magazines and a couple of giant reference books with credits for music and film. No internet, but lots of conversations with people about art and history and science, books and food and travel. I built a mosaic of passion and experience that felt more personally curated than logarithmic.
Ok, that made it sound kind of cool. It definitely wasn’t. I was a middle school kid that watched what I’m going to call an entirely disproportionate amount of PBS. That’s where Monty Python was, and Doctor Who, and the most wonderful show I had ever seen, a series of historical lectures (told you it wasn’t cool) called “Connections”. Helmed by the jauntily British James Burke, the show demonstrated cause and effect throughout human history, a series of if/then statements connecting, say, the invention of the plow directly to the jet engine. It was like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon if Kevin Bacon had six degrees from Oxford.
That’s what I thought learning was, because my other two influences were my mom (who believes there is always something to learn anywhere) and the World Book encyclopedias. Between the three of these, I found everything interesting. I still do, kinda, and the most wonderful coincidences happen. A quick example:
As mine was a bold youth during the reign of Michael J Fox, I enthusiastically saw everything he was in. The other day a movie of his popped in my head called “Light of Day”, where he was a punk rocker whose sister was played by Joan Jett. I did not remember it as a classic, but I kept humming the theme song for some reason, so I looked up the movie in The New World Book = Wikipedia. It was indeed not revered as a classic either in its time or any time after. It is NOT available on iTunes, and its current rental price has been reduced from 99 to 72 cents on Amazon Prime.
But I learned that original star of the film was supposed to be Bruce Springsteen, and whaddya know? He wrote that theme song I couldn’t get out of my head. Oh, and the original title of the movie? “Born in the USA”, which Bruce took with him as a little souvenir and put to a much better use.
What was really surprising is the screenwriter’s credits. The very next film he wrote was one of my all time favorites, The Last Temptation of Christ, and his two previous scripts?
Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver.
I learned all that in a 2 minute break from doing dishes. See? Learning is fun.
Awkwardly, I collected what I’ve learned in paper form, so we now have loads of books that explain how-to do things, like how-to repair anything, or how-to read secret codes and ciphers, or how-to make a movie on a used car budget. Cookbooks and biographies and maps and The New England Journal of Medicine… we never really leave school. But it is wonderful to get a few unnecessary pens and new notebook once a year. To be perfectly honest, it was always getting a new lunchbox that defined the season for me. I guess that’d be silly now… unless they make an “Oppenheimer” one.
Oh, who am I kidding: I’d get “Barbie”.
Blerd Association.