Look at Those Bad Boys

On Superbowl Sunday, we made all the game day food (wings, guacamole, etc.) and then Alisa watched Masterpiece Theater. I read Proust. And, oh, yay, without any help from the Petersen family, Manning took a dive so New Orleans could win, selflessly healing the country, just like Sandra Bullock.

Sorry, America. Football is boring.

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Big Star

Zoë has astounded everyone with her announcement that she would very much like to audition for a local production of Seussical: The Musical. This comes from a kid who is pretty close to winning the Oscar for shyest person in the universe.

Here’s a secret video of her song rehearsals. She chose Priscilla Ahn’s song “Wallflower,” which isn’t really a Broadway hit, but we don’t listen to many Broadway hits around here. In this respect, Alisa and I are useless to her budding career in musical theater.

Zoë’s Audition Practice from Todd Robert Petersen on Vimeo.

We’re proud of her. She auditions at 5:15 on Monday. Wish her luck.

Learn how to manage your kid’s career by taking a few courses through one of the many accredited online universities. A class or two in management and your number one star will be on the way to fame.

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Good Point from Jon Ogden

This snippet from an excellent argument on Mormon Artist.

We Mormons have the same expectations of Church members in almost all other professions. We expect, for instance, that dentists will favor dentistry over promoting religious orthodoxy while they are at work. To illustrate, we don’t expect dentists to give the missionary discussions to clients strapped, mouths agape, in the dentist chair. Nor do we expect accountants to slip copies of their testimonies in with their client’s tax returns. Dentists and accountants may be inspired in certain instances to share their beliefs, but we generally don’t expect such acts to be a mainstay of their professions. We shouldn’t expect it from artists either.

This saves me a blog post, really. What’s more important, though, is why so many assume that artists should be doing more evangelical work than a dentist, because they do. My wife’s Uncle Joe has been making this same argument about “uplifting work” for a long time.

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Look Away and They’re Gone

It is nearly ten o’clock, and
from my chair I can hear
pages turning crisply, slowly
in another room.

Thinking I am the only one
still awake, I walk the house
until I find a canted box
of light painting the hallway
in front of my daughter’s room.

I stand in the doorway
with an elbow against the jamb,
fist to my temple.

She’s contorted in her bed,
angling a book toward
the lamp. One sweep of her finger
reveals an ear.

She turns one page, then
another. How long until she
is just a snapshot on the fridge?

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My 15 Minutes of Punditry

I had a great 40 minute conversation with Lisa Carricaburu at the Salt Lake Tribune. She was working on an end-of-the decade piece on shifting cultural values and demographics in the state. It was cool that I’d come up on her radar. Here’s an excerpt of my part in the whole thing. I’m keeping company with a U of Utah research economist, a BYU polysci prof, and a Salt Lake City community activist.

Cedar City writer Todd Robert Petersen explores Utah’s changing landscape in his newly published novel Rift , the story of interconnectedness, conflict and isolation in a small Sanpete County town.

He is not surprised Utahns, such as those he portrays in his novel, are upset by changes occurring around them.

“You can’t blame people for being scared,” Petersen says.

But slowly, with enough time to think about it, “they come to realize maybe all this change isn’t as dangerous as we think it is.”

He sees the promise of a more diverse Utah in the young people he teaches at Southern Utah University.

“Their attitude, whether they’re what I’d call ‘high faith’ or already on their way out [of the LDS Church] is ‘bring it on,’ ” he says. “Utah is amazing. I’m so interested in what’s next.”

Here’s a link to the full article. Should be live for a while.

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My Letter from Santa

One of my favorite new traditions (other than Rickrolled for the Holidays) is the Father Christmas letter, which I write after everything has been sent up, and the incriminating evidence burned. It is completely coercive and really, really fun to write. You’ll notice a certain Snickety tone to the letter, a liberty I have taken because the children are very into the tales of the Baudelaire children right now. So, with about one minute left of Christmas Eve, and with my apologies to Mr. D. Handler, I submit to you, dear readers, Santa’s letter from me to my credulous (but not for very much longer) children.

Dear Zoë and Isaac,

I got the note from your father about Isaac and his rough day. I hear this kind of thing all the time. It’s difficult to be cooped up in the house when it’s cold outside. “Cooped up” means being kept inside a small building, like the ones used to keep chickens or rats. Usually school is a break from all that cooping, so I understand how hard the holidays can be for kids. Just so you know, the elves have put Isaac on the check-twice list for next year. He has twelve months to be good, especially to his mother.

Zoë, you have asked a very good question about stores. You noticed some IKEA labels on your gifts from last year. Sometimes, when there is a perfect gift for kids that has already been made, I prefer to purchase it from a store and save the elves a little time re-tooling the factory. Re-tooling, means changing the factory from making one kind of thing to making a different kind of thing. It takes a lot of time to re-tool, especially at the North Pole, where is it so cold and windy that no one wants to tool anything in the first place.

I hope you enjoy your special gift, Zoë. I understand that you enjoy projects like this and do a very good job. Ike, I believe your special gift will be fun for you and someone else. There is also one special gift for sharing. It should make the rest of the vacation a little more fun.

I enjoyed the fudge. Thank you for sharing. While the reindeer and I were flying North, we saw Madi and Cal, your baby cousins. They were sleeping in the truck with their parents, safe and snug. I’m glad I got a Change-of-Christmas form for them in time. Their presents will be waiting for them in Montana.

Ho, ho, ho…
Love, Santa

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Blue Christmas

This morning Sting was on CBS, talking about his new winter season/Christmas record. I took an interest because I’ve been reading Walking on the Moon, a pretty good book on the Police. It charts the rise and fall of my adolescence—I went to high school right through the belly of the 80s, and apart from a brief departure into Rush, I managed to stay clear of most of the metal and new wave flotsam of the decade. Because of that history, I didn’t change the channel.

During the interview, Sting took a major departure from the standard guy-has-a-new-record feature, and he waxed briefly on Christmas. He pointed out that Christmas is not all “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” A lot of people get depressed over the holidays, which are so focused on home, hearth, friends, family and church. And when you don’t have those things, it can get kind of bleak.

Lamppost

I haven’t agreed with Sting (or bought one of his records) in years, but he nailed it for me. I’d carry it one step forward and say that the holidays can be hard for people who have disconnected from these kinds of relationships on purpose and live most of the year in peaceful isolation.

When my parents divorced and my sister and I started spending our Christmases in different houses, I started to understand that this holiday was joyous and that it also threw loneliness and isolation into high relief. The abundance of food and gifts during the holidays also serveed as a reminder that many are poor and hungry. So, while I was enjoying my presents and dinner at my father’s place, I was also acutely aware that my mother was alone.

Because this all happened as I was coming into my late teens, I was naturally predisposed by my biochemistry to be moody and melancholy, but I saw this feeling was reflected across the boards outside the bounds my own self-obsession. This is when I fell in love with It’s a Wonderful Life, because it really a dark film at its core. Jimmy Stewart is on his way to take his own life before he’s given his visions of the world without him. This really is a great tonic for teen spirit.

Wonderful Life

Similarly, A Christmas Carol is about a man who is warned by a dead colleague to change his ways before he circles the drain of human misery and is lost forever. In high school I played Bob Crachit in a dramatized version of the play; it was the hardest role I ever did, because being believably kind and decent on stage is infinitely harder and more complex than being wretched or pathetic.

I’ve also noticed (and I’m not alone in this) that a lot of Christmas carols are unbelievably sad. “I’ll be Home for Christmas” from 1943 reminds us how unbelievably sad it is to know that everyone else is together and you are not. This is a carol resigned to the fact that you’ll be away, which is why it hit so close to the heart for so many of our troops during WWII.

“Blue Christmas” is pretty obvious, but the older I get the less this song seems like a gimmick (sorry Elvis, your version of this one blows) and the more this song crumples my heart like an empty paper cup. This guy is sitting at home or in a bar somewhere thinking about his girlfriend “doing all right” happy without him. This is the quintessential expression of misery.

And when those blue snowflakes start falling
That’s when those blue memories start calling
You’ll be doing all right, with your Christmas of white
But I’ll have a blue, blue, blue Christmas.

I have had my share of Christmases in this state. I much prefer the ones I have now, but this song is good for keeping my head in check.

Longfellow’s civil war Christmas poem-turned-hymn is particularly full of despair. In most hymn books it has been dutifully cleaned up, striking two full verses:

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound the carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn, the households born
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” from Vincente Minnelli’s Meet me in St. Louis has been similarly flocked to hide its edge. I’d go so far as to argue that 99% of the people listening to and performing this carol have forgotten about the context of the song or its history. The original lyrics were deemed way too depressing for the film. Take a look at the original:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, pop that champagne cork,
Next year we will all be living in New York.

No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more.

But at least we all will be together, if the Fates allow,
From now on we’ll have to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Despite the revisions, the song also became a favorite of troops serving overseas in WWII. I love the lines:

Through the years, we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow

Sinatra purged the last line from the song so it would be more jolly—this is where we get the “hang a shining star upon the highest bough” nonsense. There’s a great NPR piece on this song from 2001 that deals with James Taylor’s decision to put “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” in its full muddleness, into his own Christmas record.

All of this gets to the core of what Sting was saying in his interview on the normally bubbly CBS Sunday morning show. It was a nice leavening of the non-offensive programming of the morning: this piece was slotted between David Pogue’s geek gadget list done in light verse and a Splenda-sweet piece on ugly Christmas Sweaters.

The culture has done the same thing to Christmas, I think. We’ve cleaned it up so that it better fits our need for economic stimulus and for treating bleak midwinter seasonal affective disorder.

Let’s remember that the Christmas story goes like this: a couple of young parents-to-be are living in an occupied territory. The colonial presence has called for a census, so everyone has to go to their birth towns to be counted. All this is to expedite taxation. The pregnant lady has to ride a donkey. When they get to Bethlehem, there’s no place to stay, so the pregnant lady has to sleep in a stable, which was most likely just a cave. She probably has the baby there without a midwife or any help. In a few days the king hears that some “new king” was supposedly born, so he starts killing all the babies. The parents go underground until the heat is off. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. The heat never tapers off.

But behind all that is the miracle. It’s not on the surface. For me Christmas should remind us this is a sad and beautiful world—both things at the same time, perhaps not at even distinguishable from each other. This world is full of glitter and doom, an image I stole from the title of the latest Tom Waits record. He and I see eye to eye on this matter, think. So, I’ll let him have the last word.

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Visions of Sugar Plums

Spent a recent morning with Ike and the kids at Headstart. They were decorating gingerbread men. Suddenly, a tugging at my sleeve.

Young Boy: Hey mister.
Me: What?
Young Boy: I put boobs on my gingerbread man.
Me: Which one is yours?
Young Boy: (pointing to a cookie) That one.

I looked down and said cookie had two great dollops of frosting on the chest, accented with two M&Ms, one yellow and the other red.

Me: So, it’s not a gingerbread woman, is it?
Young Boy: That’s right. It’s a boy.

Young boy walks away, making fart noises to the tune of Jingle Bells.

(And, scene.)

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Lists and Lists

It’s the time of lists (end of a year, end of a decade). I spent a really interesting forty minutes or so today being interview by Lisa Carricaburu from the Salt Lake Tribune about the last decade in Utah, outlining the cultural shifts that have brought the state to the place it is right now. What place it that? Who knows, but it’s definitely a different place now than many people are used to—what, the LDS church supports anti-discrimination legislation for sexual orientation?

I’ve actually been getting kind of sick of the lists, in many cases because they are depressing, but especially when they are outlining all the great books I don’t have the time to read because I am raising children and teaching English courses at a university.

(I do see the irony in this. Don’t even start.)

But today I found a best books list that was really interesting. It’s from the most excellent literary review website The Second Pass. They propose a list of the books people will likely be reading a hundred years from now.

Some of the books from the 2110 List that have really caught my fancy.

Some of the books from the 2110 List that have really caught my fancy.

This list really put some new stuff in my face, and made me want to settle in and turn off the Battlestar Galactica and disappear into some pages. I think there are some good mentions of things well off the beaten path and some writers you might expect as well. Lydia Millet’s comedy on the Manhattan Project seems like a pretty great next purchase for me.

Check it out. The 2110 Club List at The Second Pass.

They also have a DIY list here. Throw your hat into the ring, eh.

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Badass of the Year

I sort of hope I’ll get one shot at looking this intense and half-crazy once in my life.

Badass of the Year

There is a defiant grace in this image, and evidence that the man is pretty much nuts on some level that only comes out on a full moon. It reminds me of photographs I’ve seen of Beckett and Cormac McCarthy.

A man has to aspire to something.

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