Marshall Mathers and I have never met, but I am mad at him right now so it is doubtful that we ever will go for a beer. That’s because by collaborating with a musician known for collaborating with the Republican Party, he has said that there is no difference between disagreeing politically over things like funding and disagreeing over who is a person.
The Marshall I am invoking today is McCluhan.
Blogging is the first thing that I have found that is pure signal versus noise. That’s because blogging began before algorithms and trying to be impressive. I am counterculture to the Internet now because I was extraordinarily normal when it began. There’s a whole group of us that grew up in the machine. I don’t talk to people in Australia to get noticed, I talk to people in Australia because I have been doing it since I was 15 years old and alone in my game room.
The Internet is where creativity and nerdiness have always shaken hands. It has never been a battle for me, it has always been a conversation. If I remind you of Heather Armstrong and Jenny Lawson, there is a reason for that. Even though I am the original, it is not an accident that they have influenced my style and structure. I have never been trying to write like them. You assume the tone of the media you consume if you are a writer. That’s one of the reasons I don’t read much while I’m writing. I do read a lot, but what I don’t do is read the same author repeatedly until I have finished the series or anything of any depth while writing is going on for me.
If I am reading something while I am writing, I start to think about that author. My style & structure comes from them. That is not Leslie Lanagan being Leslie Lanagan. That is Leslie Lanagan trying to be someone else. if I am reading someone else while I am writing, then my voice starts to disappear behind theirs, not with words, but in punctuation usage and thinking about their subject area versus what I’d like to present. I am not David Halberstam, but I know how to sound like him when I need to because I have watched his evolution as a writer through his books. It is the same with Dominick Dunne, Anthony Bourdain, Shane Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and many people who have been White House adjacent over the years.
I joke that Jonna Mendez and I have mutual friends, simply because she used to work with him and I met him at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in the 90s. 😂
My power does not lie in knowing superheroes, it comes in knowing origin stories. My contemporaries are not Wil Wheaton and Heather Armstrong. They are:
- Robert Glasper
- Jason Moran
- Justin Furstenfeld
- Mireille Enos
- Brené Brown
- Matthew McConaughey
Matthew and I have met, but it has been almost 50 years. That’s because I met the others at high school for performing and visual arts- with the exception of Brené. I met her when I was the computer lab supervisor in the graduate school of social work at university of Houston. In addition to those internationally known names, I have met thousands that are famous locally in many cities. That’s because my environment is not that of the stage, but that of the pit.
Dad, I don’t think you want the word “pit” on a wedding invitation.
Pit musicians are confident, but they have no need to run the room because they know that everyone in it worked exactly as hard as they did. There is no sense of entitlement when you don’t think anyone is more talented than you are and that has been my philosophy since I was a child. I wasn’t threatened by Clifton‘s band just because I came from one that wasn’t as accomplished. My game rose to theirs.
That was the arc from Parker to Pewitt to Clifton to HSPVA to Clements to University of Houston to University of Maryland. Now that I have accrued all the information I need, I am beginning to run queries on the database.
The things that make me happy now are the same things that made me happy when I was six. Everything else has been a performance; if Marshall McCluhan‘s message has an inverse, it is that not paying attention to the public message and focusing on what your body is trying to tell you will actually inform you more about everyone else than you ever really wanted to know.
