Cockroaches scatter when you turn the lights on. Waterbugs, their older, larger and blacker cousins, do not. They just stand there, looking at you. I’m not sure if they’re stupid and playing dead — doubtful, since their younger cousins are very bright –or tough and just don’t care. I grew up with waterbugs.

My second floor bedroom in my house in Jersey City had a radiator with pipes that extended down through the floors to the basement, where a drain sat in case the water heater overflowed or the basement flooded. I never actually saw it happen, but I hypothesized that the waterbugs came up through the drain, crawled up the radiator pipe into my room and hung out on my desk or wall, or shelves, or when they were feeling particularly friendly, my bed. I slept in fear many nights, only to jump out of bed intuitively, flick the lights on and confront my guests. I hated them. They soiled endless soles on my shoes, used up paper towels, and genuinely made my life miserable. I tried to understand them, but I’m not sure I ever did, because I never knew what they wanted. Aliens visit other worlds for a reason, yes?

As an adult, I suffer night terrors sometimes. I wake up in a fit and think there are spiders descending on me from the ceiling or hovering in front of me. I throw the sheets off in a panic, jump out of bed and put the lights on, only to find nothing.

The thing is, I have no beef with spiders. No phobia. No history. Why spiders, and not the nemeses of my youth? I guess I’ll never know. Sometimes the motivation of the mind, like the motivation of waterbugs to climb two floors to taunt a young child, is meant to remain a mystery.

The only difference is what he decides to do with the song in between those times. Rearrange it. Change the key. Change the words. Maybe even invite the public to join him and collaborate and make it participatory. The only constant the beginning and the end, the arriving and the leaving alone, and the running. Always the running.

1. WHAT CAN KILL YOU TODAY – A daily recap of news reports of new things that can kill you, be them milk, peanut butter, sitting down, waking up, rice, Frosted Mini Wheats, etc.
2. THE BRENTWOOD BIKER - A blog about what it’s like to be a bike rider and live in Brentwood, Tennessee and commute to Nashville. I don’t live in Brentwood anymore, though, so it really wouldn’t work.
3. FOUND IN THE USA – I’m always amazed when I go to wash my hair, or pick something up in the store and discover that the product I’m holding is made in the United States. It warms my heart. I would take a picture of the item and post it to the blog, as if to say, “Ah-Ah! We make things!”
4. CHRIST! – This would be a daily, maybe multiple-times daily, accounting of the stories and news I come across that make me say, “Christ!”
5. TWO WHEELS AND THE TRUTH — You know the famous Harlan Howard quote about all you need to write a good country song is three chords and the truth? This blog is like that, except it’s about biking.
6. AYFKM — An acronym for “Are You F**kin’ Kiddin’ Me?” that I owe to my good friend Kevin. It would be a companion blog to CHRIST!
7. LEFT IN THE USA — Technology has made a lot of things obsolete,  like newspaper boxes and telephone booths, that litter the urban landscape. I would document these things.
8. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ME – This is where I take the readings and the Gospel from Sunday mass — I’m Catholic — and interpret them each Sunday night in a very matter-of-fact straightforward way.  Like every time Jesus tells someone he’s the Son of Man, what he’s really saying is “Do you know who I am?” or that time he said he wouldn’t do anything to help that dead person, and someone called him on it, and he raised the person from the dead just to shut them up.
9. THE EGGPLANT CHRONICLES – A blog about, and involving stories about, eggplant.
10. THAT WOULD MAKE A GOOD BLOG - Since “You should start a blog” has supplanted “You should write a novel,” discarded ideas need to go somewhere.

About a year ago this time, I was profiled twenty-questions style in Nashville Arts Magazine. To the question of ‘What does it feel like to be you these days,” I answered “I feel like I’m always busy. Always trying to make something happen.” That was the best answer I could come up with, and I was being honest. I hadn’t really thought about that answer until this weekend when I read an article by Tim Kreider in the New York Times called “The Busy Trap,” that proposes that the “crazy busy” life many of us lead is almost entirely self-imposed, and that work we’re doing that keeps us busy maybe has no value at all. Maybe it’s just us trying to impose value on ourselves and justify our existence.

While the New York Times article does a great job of making the case for personal reflection and slowing down, it fails to acknowledge the true reason many of us are crazy busy. It was in the second sentence of my Nashville Arts answer.

We’re hustlers.

It started for me in my early teens when I became an altar boy. Being an altar boy is great. You learn discipline and responsibility, and develop a profound respect for the sacrament of communion. But there were some other benefits. If it was a weekday mass, you got to go to class a little late. If it was a wedding or a funeral, you often got a tip from a groomsman or a pallbearer (depending, of course). I could make ten bucks at a funeral; twenty bucks at a wedding. So I started hustling, taking whatever weddings and funerals were offered. If you wanted to meet up before class, I couldn’t. I was busy.

I got my first job when I was 12-years-old, at the grocery store around the corner from my house. I started between ten and twenty hours a week, making deliveries, stocking shelves or bringing up cases of two-liter soda bottles from the waterbug-invested basement. I would remove all the bottles from the cardboard case, shake out the box to make sure no critters tagged along, and put the bottles back in the box before using the hand truck to bring them into the store. And I did this on the sidewalk outside the store. How no passerby ever figured out what I was doing is beyond me.

By the time I was in eighth grade, I was working thirty hours a week, which meant as close to financial independence from my parents as possible. I could buy my own records and books, and wear whatever I liked. Cash meant freedom.

By the time I got to high school, not only was I working thirty hours a week, I was selling and running football tickets for the bookie around the corner, further enhancing my cashflow and my connections. High school also meant getting serious about writing, so while I was excelling at my studies and working thirty hours a week at the grocery store, I was also reading and writing all the time, and editing my school newspaper. My sophomore year I got a guitar, which meant I started writing songs while working at the store, often on the separated insides of empty cigarette cartons. In my junior year, my writing ambitions scored me an internship at my local paper, and three years later, when I was named an official staff writer, I was the youngest ever in the paper’s 100-plus year history. This is not to brag as much as to point out that at this time I was 19-years old and not only in college, but still working part-time at the store, writing for my college newspaper and in a rock band that rehearsed five nights a week and gigged all the time.

Sometimes it’s all a bit of blur to me — which jobs I worked and what year and what else I was doing. It goes on and on with music and writing projects, and extracurricular activities. There was just always this sense that I had to be doing more than the basic thing I was doing, whether that was school or a job or a band or a relationship. Just getting by was never enough. I always had to have something else going on. Something had to be happening, in addition to the thing that just happened.

Even now. I work full-time in a job that for the last six years has included what seems like another full-time job stuffed into it. That’s plenty, yet I still feel a need to take on freelance writing jobs, or the occasional pro bono publicity gig or ask to be on a committee. It’s the older, more mature version of running football tickets, I guess. I book the occasional music gig. Play some bocce ball. It’s no wonder that my outdoor exercise activity of choice is bicycling. I’m going somewhere and doing something.

I’m obsessed with my own productivity.

So why am I like this? While it was about the money when I was 12-years old, it’s certainly not anymore. Am I overcompensating for something? Afraid to stand still? Am I, as the New York Times article suggests, just trying to justify my own existence? I’m not sure. I wonder if it’s some trickling-down of the immigrant experience. My father was an immigrant from Italy, and in addition to working long hours, sometimes 12-hour days selling men’s clothing, he would play cards all hours of the night at the Italian club. He would watch soccer games on TV, but I don’t get the sense he liked to sit still very often. My sister is the same as me, but on speed. I don’t know how she accomplishes all she does, working a full-time job, raising two teenagers, resurfacing furniture, walking seven miles a night, keeping up with her friends and calling my mother to check in. And that’s just the beginning of what she does. She’s the only person I know who can lose a job in this economy and get a new one in two weeks.

She’s a hustler.

If it’s not the immigrant experience, maybe it’s the neighborhood I grew up in. I imagine most of the people I grew up with, or any kids that grew up in middle class, mostly-immigrant families in the city, feel the same way I do. Most of us were never home much. Why would we be when there was a whole city to explore. We didn’t get used to the couch. Or the TV. We looked out the window and there were things happening. So we had to make things happen, too. And that became our natural state of being.

So maybe “crazy busy” does sound silly. And maybe some of us are indeed trying to justify our existence. But maybe some of us can’t help it, either. It’s just who we are. We still stop to smell the roses, and take time to contemplate and be reflective. We just do it in our own way and on our own time, even if that means having to schedule the time to do it. We’ll make it happen. Especially when we constantly worry that the roses won’t be there to smell tomorrow.

# # #

Frances W. Preston and John Seigenthaler

I’ve thought a lot about Frances Williams Preston lately. The legendary music industry executive and former president and CEO of Broadcast Music, Inc., very much responsible for turning Nashville into Music City, died last week at the age of 83. I worked at BMI for seven years, from 1998-2005, and was there for a couple of years before she retired. I enjoyed my work, and believe strongly in what the performing rights organization does. As a singer-songwriter myself, and as someone who can honestly say that music changed my life — maybe even saved it — on those nights I’d listen to rock radio on my headphones in order to escape what often felt like hell in my teenage years, I know how important it is that songwriters are fairly compensated.

But it was my work on behalf of BMI at the annual Country in the Rockies benefit event in Crested Butte, Colorado, that I truly loved. The event was dreamed up by Frances, and served to raise money for the T.J. Martell Foundation and its funding of cancer research at the Frances Williams Preston Laboratories at Vanderbilt Medical Center. I was a behind-the-scenes, jack-of-all-trades guy at the event for several years. I worked with others on the brochures, program book and website leading up to the event. I wrote an occasional letter on behalf of Frances, and created multimedia slides for auction events. At the event itself, I did whatever was necessary. I ran the slides during the auction, helped out with publicity, picked up people at the airport, and even handled celebrities, including one year, Kenny Loggins. I was at the service of Frances and whoever else needed my help. The long week of work and very little sleep prepared me, I’m certain, for the work I’ve done with the Nashville Film Festival over the last six years.

But as much as I loved Country in the Rockies, BMI, Frances and BMI vice-president Tom Annastas (my dear friend and mentor and the reason I moved to Nashville in the first place), I left BMI in 2005. And I left because of Country in Rockies. The event was unique in that as much as there was celebrities and skiing and parties and food, and a bar that seemed to be open ALL the time, it never lost sight of why it existed. It was a fundraiser to help people. The joke was that that the work we were doing was really — you guessed it — curing cancer. Survival stories were shared. Videos were shown. And tears were shed. At the 2005 event, I met a man who was dying of pancreatic cancer. Much had been done to keep him alive, but his options had dwindled. He knew it. His family, who was with him, knew it too. He was amazing, living his life to the fullest, playing with his children and accepting his fate with an unparallelled grace. We became friendly, and not long after the event, I received a card from him and his family thanking me for my kindness.

I returned to Nashville after that event and told my wife I was leaving BMI.

You see, all those hours watching Frances give of herself so passionately, and with so much integrity and oft-times humor, was slowly having an effect on me.  And the impending death of my new friend was pressing on me. Life was too short to live it without passion, without drive to truly have an impact on the world around you and the ones you love. Here was one person tirelessly living her life. He was another fighting off his tiredness for as long as possible.

At BMI, I was stuck. There’s only so much room for advancement and promotion in a not-for-profit-making company that treats itself like a non-profit, and that’s to its credit. I wanted to do more, and make a bigger impact, and honestly, maybe make a little more money. And there was nowhere to go. My supervisors, especially Tom and my immediate boss Michele Reynolds, were great fans of mine and my work. They tried to help, but their hands were tied.

So I left. I pursued my music for a while, touring and writing. I got decent critical reviews and some good college radio airplay. But it was hard to make a living. I have a journalism background, and started doing some freelance writing and PR work for Nashville publicist Cathy Gurley, who coincidentally, I met while working on Country in the Rockies. Funny how things work out that way.

I eventually found my way to managing media relations at Nashville Public Television, where I am today. It’s a job that for the last six years has also included doing publicity for the Nashville Film Festival.

BMI and Frances were never far from my mind, though, and as I became more immersed in film, I thought more and more that Frances’ life deserved a proper documentary. But documentaries cost money. While I have a bubbling desire to produce documentaries some day, I’m not there yet.

When I heard last year that Frances’ health was failing, I felt an even greater urgency to have her story told. NPT has a show called “One on One,” in which a prominent Nashvillian sits down for a half-hour discussion with John Seigenthaler, the great journalist and former assistant to U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy. I pitched my bosses on it and offered to produce, and they agreed within seconds. It took some time to get it scheduled, and get Frances’ photos gathered and scanned, but we made it happen.

Tom escorted Frances to the studio that day, and after the shoot, the three of us went to Sunset Grill for lunch. She told stories and we listened. When Tom and I told stories, she listened to us in the same way she described to Seigenthaler — just an hour before — President Bill Clinton’s ability to focus on the person in front of him, fully present as if no one else was in the room.

It’s a memory I’ll cherish. I wish I could have done more than that one episode of “One on One” to capture her legacy, but it was the least I could do for the person who built the company that gave me a job when I first came to Nashville, and worked hard to compensate the songwriters that for so many years have brought joy and meaning to my life. But ultimately, it was a way to give back for all that inspiration she’d given me.

# # #

You Need This!

Welcome to the morning productivity and anti- aggravation tool (MPAAT). Real easy to use. Simply slip your iPhone in it at night, and when you wake up in the morning, you’re reminded not to open the damn thing. Drink some coffee, read or write a little. Meditate. Voila! Say farewell to something pissing you off in the morning and starting you down a rabbit hole, and hello to a new day. At 9:00 a.m., simply slip your iPhone out and you’re ready to go. Let me know if you want me to make you one. They’re cheap.

I was in Atlanta recently to catch  Dean and Britta perform their excellent “13 Most Wonderful: Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests” at the Woodruff Arts Center, and in the process had the pleasure of catching the “KAWS: DOWN TIME” exhibit at the High Museum of Art . KAWS (Brian Donnelly) grew up in my neighborhood in Jersey City Heights, so it was a particular thrill to finally see his work in person.

You can read my review of “KAWS: DOWN TIME” in this month’s Nashville Arts Magazine.

ArtNow Nashville is a fantastic new online arts website in Nashville, with reviews of art shows, films, music, theatre and more. I’m honored to be one of the arts writers, and in the past few months have had the opportunity to visit a half dozen or so exhibits in town and come back with reviews for the site.  There are great creative things going on in Nashville, and Im proud to be a part of spreading the word. You can read all of my reviews — including a book review — here.

ArtNow is an offshoot of the gorgeously designed and produced Nashville Arts print magazine. You can also read a piece I wrote for them, on the wonderful emerging artist Margaret Elliot, here.

(Book) The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier- Imagine our pain, physical, psychological and emotional, illuminating from our bodies. If we saw each others pain, would we become more empathetic human beings? Or take it all in stride? That, to me, is the central question raised in Brockheimer’s (dystopian?) novel. And amid all that pain, there is love, represented by a book of declarations that no one seems to want to let go of. Love, somehow, can be more important to hold on to than pain, it seems. Yet we often choose the opposite.

(Film/Film Review) Poetry / Review of Poetry in the New York Times- There are several things that can draw you to a film: word-of-mouth recommendations, favorite directors or actors, enticing trailers or great reviews, et al. Earlier in the year, it was a single review of Poetry by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times that made me want to see it. It was one of the most beautiful and well written reviews I could recall. When Poetry finally arrived at The Belcourt some months later, it was for me one of the most highly anticipated films of the year (take that, War Horse). It was heartbreakingly beautiful. Thank you, Manohla.

(Film) The Artist – So entertaining I saw it twice, and brought my sister along the second time. She, for whom “black-and-white silent film” does not scream “must-see,” loved it.

(Concert) U2 360 Tour at Vanderbilt Stadium – It was everything I wanted it to be, and saved me from having to admit I had only seen U2 on the awful PopMart Tour. They brought the stadium rock show, and I was redeemed. Hell, I even enjoyed “Even Better Than The Real Thing,” a song I always skipped on Achtung Baby. And classic U2 songs aside, I forgot how much I like that song “Stay (Faraway So Close).”

(Band/Show) The David Wax Museum at the Americana Music Association Festival – The best part of attending a festival of any sort is discovery. I might be late to the game, but The David Wax Museum’s gig at the Station Inn was the find, and highlight, of the Festival for me. Thoroughly unique and highly entertaining. This year, I seemed to be really interested in things that made me happy. They made me happy. As does the video for “Born with a Broken Heart.”

(Art) Norma Jeane #Jan25 at the Venice Biennale — I got lucky this year and was in Italy at the same time as the Venice Biennale, which has long been a dream of mine to attend.  One of the few personal blog posts I wrote this year was about the exhibit by the alias known as Norma Jeane:

It’s an interactive installation meant to break down and transform over time as visitors engage with it.  It started as a tidy block of plasticine in late May (see the picture below of how it started) in the colors of the Egyptian flag: black, white and red, and its title, #Jan25 (#Sidibouzid, #Feb12, #Feb14, #Feb17…) refers to some of the most popular hashtags on Twitter during recent Egyptian and Arab world uprisings. You can still make out some of the block in the pictures, but you can also see how complete and creative chaos have taken over the room. Visitors are encouraged to take apart the block and for the most part, do whatever they please, even take some of it with them, as long as they don’t leave it in another exhibit. The result is overwhelming and moving. And sometimes it’s funny, even though what Norma Jeane is getting at is nothing but. There are love notes, “I was here” type creations, and humor.

Check out the rest of the pictures on the original post or over at My Modern Met, which was kind enough to publish them as well. And speaking of, My Modern Met may be my favorite web site discovery of the year. It’s a daily dose of beauty and inspiration.

(Film) Midnight in Paris — I’m not sure there’s a film more tailored-made for English majors then this one, but its themes are universal, even if you studied finance.  Charming, witty and funny, its a film for anyone whose ever had romantic notions about living another time. And it reminds us that the time to truly live, and the one most romantic, is of course, now. Owen Wilson is excellent in it, and the over-the-top stereotyped portrayals of famous writers and artists, especially Hemingway as played by Corey Stoll, are wonderful and hilarious. The whole cast is spot-on perfect.

(Art) de Kooning: a Retrospective at MoMA / Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence at MoMA — With 200 works, the Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is overwhelming, not to mention trying to take it in with thousands of other people. But MoMa does an excellent job in his presentation, and you go from room to room, it’s like getting an art history class on abstract expressionism, from the master of the form.  If I lived in NYC, I’d have to go back once a week for awhile, during quieter times, to really soak it in.

At the same time I saw the de Kooning retrospective, MoMa had just begun the Sanja Ivekovic exhibit, the first major museum show for the artist from the former Yugoslavia. I knew nothing about Ivekovic, but was immediately intrigued. Like de Kooning’s returning to abstractions of the female form, Ivekovic has turned to appropriating glamour magazine advertisements and celebrity magazine photos to make powerful statements about culture and feminism.

(Book) The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White and the Birth of a Children’s Classic by Michael Sims — Sims’ delightful (this really is the best word for it) book is not only a story about how E.B. White came to write the beloved children’s book, it’s also about the writing life. It was probably the most enjoyable thing I read all year.   And then I followed it by re-reading Charlotte’s Web, which was a close second (only because I read it before).

(Film) Le Quattro Volte – More like a video installation, Michelangelo Frammartino’s film has almost no dialogue as it traces the cycle of life in one small Italian town in Calabria. You’re not really sure what you’re watching at first, but then it starts to make sense, and you can’t turn away. It thrives on anticipation. Like life does, I guess. Yet, there are also times when it’s genuinely funny. Like life is, I guess.

(Film) Kinyarwanda – Every year at the Nashville Film Festival, there’s an indie film that really gets inside me. This was it. Alrick Brown’s film takes place during the horror that was the genocide in Rwanda, but he focuses his story on faith, reconciliation, forgiveness and absolution. There’s one scene. In a mosque. A young girl who feels responsible for the death of her parents asks for absolution from a priest. It might be one of the most moving moments I encountered in a film all year.

(Magazine Profile) Chris Jones profile of Mark Kelly in Esquire – Astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of representative Gabrielle Giffords, had a hell of a year. I read a lot of magazine profiles, but Chris Jones’ profile of Kelly really struck me. It’s not very long, but it’s incredibly tight and packs in more than I would think is possible in a short magazine profile. Kelly is a great American. And Jones is a great American writer.

(Film) Bill Cunningham New York - The Style section is the first part I open when I get my New York Times on Sunday. Which means Bill Cunningham’s street style photos are some of the first pictures I see each week. This warm and entertaining documentary by Richard Press reveals a man who lives to work and loves what he does. And he rides a bike. And it’s really inspiring.

Some songs I liked: “A Road Song” and “I Hate to See You Like This” from Fountains of Wayne; “Positive” by James Maddock; “Cry Cry Cry” and “Heavy Boots” by Nicole Atkins; “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele; “Closer to the Edge” by Burlap to Cashmere; “There’s a Starbucks (Where the Starbucks Used to Be) by John Wesley Harding… great video too;

Happy New Year!