SPIN CLASS

(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.) 

This might strike people as odd, given my predilection for blathering, but my least favorite aspect of songwriting is the words part. 

  I hate writing lyrics. 

  Mostly this is because the formal requirements of the pop song are a giant obstacle to the things I like to do with words. Because of the way melody and rhythm operate, complicated and contradictory feelings are difficult to fit into a song. Profound ideas get reduced to inanity; irony skews glib, and storytelling where facts and revelations are carefully kept in check goes against the grain of the form. 

  So I find lyric writing endlessly frustrating and miserable, like delivering newspapers in the rain. 

  The one good thing about it is that I never get tired of my subject, which is the story of how humans think, feel, and talk. How they see the world, how they react to the hand they’re dealt, how they make choices in life, how they talk to others, how they talk to themselves, and so on. 

 I see the songwriter as an amateur sociologist, observing and cataloguing human behavior because it’s so damned interesting. Some aspects are wearyingly repetitive and predictable; I refer to the mundane tendency of humans to act in their own self-interest. 

  For me, the most interesting thing about humans is the endless energy they apply to things that are NOT in their self-interest. Tribalism, for one. 

  I suppose tribalism was the way to go when life was mostly about hunting. Survival meant banding together to kill animals that could easily tear you to shreds, and then eating them. This was a round the clock job. 

  Eventually some clumps of humans figured out that taking stuff from other humans meant you could spend less time hunting and gathering, and tribalism was good for this too. 

  But in our modern society, the practical benefits of tribalism are less clear. Whereas tribalism was once a way to leverage power so you could get food and land, it’s now largely used to keep alive ideas that have little practical benefit. 

  Homophobia is a good example. Gay men don’t roam in packs, killing your sentries and stealing your grain stores and consumer electronics.

HALF-TRUTHS— THE JOHN AND YOKO OF THE RHETORICAL WORLD

(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.) 

I wouldn’t know, but I suppose if you’re in a tournament of some sort, and you’re scheduled to face off day after day against stiff competition, it would be an experience that would affect you in various ways. On the one hand, this is what you’ve been training for, isn’t it? On the other hand, every day you’re thrown into the fire. Every minute you’re competing, it’s crunch time— one false move and you could be eliminated. But every minute you’re not competing, you’re trying to make the right choices about warming up, preparing, staying sharp but not overdoing it, etc. 

  So, the process makes you better, and maybe even gets you to heights you’d have never seen otherwise. This would be the good thing about competition. Then there’s the pass/fail aspect of it— the sense that a loss was a failure, and it invalidates all the improvement and achievement that came before. This is what I don’t like about sports, and about competition in general. The pursuit of excellence and the pursuit of wins are not the same thing, and contrary to the cherished beliefs of many, I’m not even sure they’re consistently related. 

   The Trump era, while disgusting for various reasons, feels invigorating to me. It’s like a tournament where my critical thinking, empathy, philosophy, and sense of humor are tested all day long. 

  I’ve spent my whole life trying to learn how to affect people through craft. I’ve worked hard on the skill of making people laugh, and I’ve also tried my hand at the much more quixotic mission of making them think. 

In short, I’ve tried to entertain and I’ve tried to persuade. Both of these things take a lot of practice, as well as a lot of thought and preparation. Some people focus mostly on the more sordid techniques of persuasion, where you take advantage of the less admirable parts of human psychology to win people over. This is an effective method, and often leads to money and power, but depending on the breaks, it can also lead to you sitting in a bunker with a pistol and a small coterie of lickspittle lackeys. 

  Others, like me, are fascinated by the psychology of persuasion, but also distracted by truth. I find truth to be the ace that takes every trick, the shining grail that can make a fruitless search feel like a noble pursuit.

MY SEXUAL HARASSMENT STORY

(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.) 

For what it’s worth, I’ve resisted posting this. For several reasons. The one that seems most admirable to me is that I don’t want to trivialize what women are talking about. Over the years,  I’ve heard stories from numerous women who’ve been raped, enough to convince me that these crimes are much more common than we want to admit. And the various campaigns encouraging women to tell their stories about rape and sexual harassment have piled up a disturbing amount of evidence. It sometimes seems as if women posting about this stuff are rushing through their lists of horrors, lest they give the impression that their lives have been filled with little but sexual assault and harassment. 

  My experience doesn’t compare to any of that. 

  And yet—two things have caused me to write this. 

  One is that my friend Layla has said that she won’t tell her stories until more men tell theirs. She feels strongly that many men have these experiences too, and are even more unlikely than women to tell them. I expect that men have confided in her because she’s a person who radiates integrity and empathy, and she makes them feel safe. She’s also a person whose disgust for injustice causes her to angrily draw lines in the sand. I’m not so much like that— people who know me, or my writing, know that my preferred tone is martini-dry sarcasm, and that doesn’t feel right to me with this topic. So saying nothing felt right. 

  But even Layla’s passionate post about this wasn’t quite enough to get me to speak. The thing that eventually became the thumb on the scale was how I felt when I started thinking about whether I should tell my story. 

  I feel a lot of things. I like to tell myself it wasn’t that big a deal, especially compared to what almost every woman in my orbit has gone through. I also like to tell myself that I’m basically over it. It was a long time ago, nothing particularly heinous happened to me, I was never physically touched, it was more annoying than scarring, etc. etc. etc. 

  At one point, I made the mistake of actually imagining what words I would literally use to talk about it, if I talked about it. This was my downfall. 

  Americans are fond of the construction “There are no words.” You’ll never hear Karl Straub say that, though.

HATE WORDS ARE NOT “INAPPROPRIATE”

(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.) 

The English language (USA edition) is like Tinkerbell.

   It’s adorable and sparkly, even sexy. It has magical wings that can take it anywhere, so it can pop up at any time and insinuate itself into any situation, but it can also hover safely around unpleasantness, using its ballerina grace to dodge any crass attempts to squash it. Paradoxically, it’s also a drama queen shot through with pettiness, and periodically puts on a big show of teetering on the brink of death, guilt-tripping people into validating it by loudly professing how much they believe in it. 

  If our language is dying, it’s because people no longer reach for it when there’s another device at hand. If reading is dying, this is because people don’t find words alone satisfying enough for entertainment, and they don’t find them sufficiently effort-free to be the best way to get information.

Words need help, if we’re going to listen to them. Give us a video of an attractive person saying the words, and we’ll consider listening to them. If we must have face-to-face interaction using words, we’re going to need to use our faces and voices and even arms and legs to help clarify our meaning. 

If it’s a road sign, we’ll need to use ancient hieroglyphics along with the words. If we must read words on social media, give us a picture of a celebrity arching his eyebrows along with the words, so we can feel something.

  I like talking about this sort of thing, because the responses to it immediately suggest that language will never die. Language is still a go-to communication tool if you want to dismiss another person’s words. When you want to quash those who disagree with you, violence isn’t always convenient, and if you go too far there’s always the danger that you’ll create a martyr.   But for a quick fix with no overhead, you can’t beat namecalling. Namecalling is quick, it’s easy, and it’s effective. 

CHARGES OF HOMOPHOBIA SHOULDN’T BE LEVIED ON A CAKE-BY-CAKE BASIS

(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.) 

I read Hugh Hewitt’s piece in today’s Post, explaining why Christians support Trump, despite what might appear to be grossly un-Christian words and deeds from the man occurring early, and often. 

  Hewitt made a point that really resonated with me, when he accused liberals of having a double standard re: religious groups and intolerance. According to him, liberals give a free pass to homophobic Muslims. 

  I want the record to show that Karl Straub, should he encounter a Muslim bakery that refuses to make a cake celebrating the union of two men, will denounce it with a non-hypocritical level of self-righteous fervor. I’m guessing that these Muslim bakeries must pretty much dot the landscape of the Midwest, and for this reason the phenomenon has hitherto eluded the gaze of the media.