My Time as a Human

Every year my Pink Palace housemates and I scatter across the globe for our various New Years adventures, and miss the opportunity to welcome the new year together. We now have a tradition of gathering in late January to re-celebrate with an event we call “Re-New Years”. We get dressed up in our finest, stroll out to fancy hotel bars, and do countdowns from twelve to negative two before shouting, “Happy New Years!” and then heading to the next place to repeat the ceremony.

This year Delia insisted that we all add hats to the usual snappy attire. This resulted in a variety of interpretations, including vintage hats and beautiful peacock-like plumage formed from a pasty. I thought we all looked pretty sharp, although not that unusual, but as we strode into the Driscol necks were snapping all around us. We gathered around the piano and within minutes a security guard with a cable dangling from his ear appeared as if by magic, suddenly standing stiffly and silently beside us as though trying to blend in with the wooden post behind him. We were quick to order a round of vintage cocktails, if nothing else to assure them that we were just common folks here to, at a minimum, finance the repairs of any potential shenanigans with our purchases.

At the piano an ancient but lively and brightly adorned woman returned to running her fingers up and down the keys, swinging piano hammers into the old metal strings with great enthusiasm. As the jazz bounced and tapped its way back into the room, just as in any old cowboy film, the patrons slowly turned their heads back to their conversations and the general mumbling ambiance rose up to join the musical background.

Damien Di Fede quickly set about taking photographs of cocktail glasses at odd angles, squinting into his tiny camera from below the piano. As the minutes passed without our having done anything more spectacularly dangerous, people began approaching us to ask what this, “was all about”. We were happy to tell them about Re-New Years and people really loved the idea. I’m always a little surprised when people still find my friends’ antics unusual in this town, but it would be even more surprising to me if we weren’t always then met with friendly, curious inquiry. There’s a folksy friendliness that’s one of the best parts of the Texas side of Austin, even among the most hardened of republicans.

Always one to mix with the help, it didn’t take long before I was chatting up the feisty old woman at the piano and she was daring me to come up with a song challenge. “Anything from 1940 on, I can do it.” I started out easy with Misty and then convinced her to tear it up on Take the A Train, just to give her jazz improv spirit some room to move. In between she poured out stories. She told me about how that particular song was written by two guys on opposite coasts (Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington) over the telephone. She told me about a time when she was playing a gig and a nice young man walked up, said he loved her playing, and asked if he could sit in on drums. She was skeptical at first, and from the moment they started they were in perfect sync. He was following her every move and tempo change and the chemistry was amazing. They played for several hours until finally she turned and pointed at him and said, “OK, that’s it, who are you?!” He laughed and turned out to be one of Duke Ellington’s drummers.

The pianists name was Patricia Griffin and she had along with her a slightly younger friend who’d brought her a present and was sitting beside the piano for the gig. At one point this friend was putting on a coat and leaving and I said goodbye, but when I turned back she was back at her seat. “I thought you were leaving,” I said, “not that I wanted to see you go.” “Oh,” she said, “Patricia convinced me to stay. Said she should walk me to my car.” Patricia assured me that it wasn’t safe for a woman to be walking to her car alone after dark. She convinced her friend to wait until the gig was over.

A little while later someone came over with a walker. This enthusiastic chaperone, while plenty willing and able to tear it up at the piano for hours, could hardly stand up! I laughed to myself. Who, exactly, was waiting to walk whom safely home? I silently promised to be even half as cool as Patricia when I got to her age.

Soon enough I’d spun enough women through swing dancing moves and we’d gathered plenty of artsy photographs of cocktail glasses. We declared it time and all loudly called out the countdown to negative two. We hugged and cheered and replaced the words to Auld Lang Syne with the traditional, much more memorable, and much more fun, “Matt Shaw”. Singing, “Matt Shaw Matt Shaw Matt Shaw Matt Shaw, Matt Shaw Matt Shaw Matt Shaaaaaaaaawwww…” we gathered our coats and headed off to the Stephen F. Austin, pausing only briefly at the door to extract Leo Evette as his stunning good looks and simple, “hello” almost picked up a girl on the way out.

This last Wednesday my friend Shawn Dodd faltered in a long fight with an old demon, one that at times seemed beaten only to sneak back out after lying dormant long enough to be forgotten. His demon was depression and it did what it does best in creating a cloud so dark one loses context and forgets one’s innumerable talents, dreams and friends. Without the ability to see the beauty that was so clear to the rest of us, he ended his life.

I met Shawn working at a software startup, pcOrder, where we spent many long nights together hacking out code like enthusiastic little monkeys. He was very sharp and had an ability to pick up new technical skills at amazing speed, but he wasn’t one to promote himself or sing his own praises. He liked being in the background, making things happen. I remember a time when David Howard and I were worried that our manager, Gordon, didn’t realize everything that Shawn regularly contributed. The two of them were in a meeting one day discussing using a new technology and Gordon turned to David and ended our concern by saying, “Just ask Shawn. He’ll know, and if he doesn’t, he’ll get it within the hour.”

A lot of people have talked about his brilliance and about his love of technology and interfaces and what made things work. All of these things are true, but he was so much more than that. I learned a lot about kindness and about being a gentleman from Shawn. He had a way of doing things with style and would forever be finding subtle ways to make me feel good about myself. I remember wearing a new shirt and having him tell me, “you wear that really well,” with such sincerity that I genuinely felt like I was making the shirt look good.

He was enthusiastic about so many things. When I last saw Shawn, he rolled up to my house blasting Indian Bhangra music, the music of the region of India where I spent time earlier this year. He was loving it and was eager to tell me what he knew and share the story about finding himself accidentally dropped into the middle of an Indian wedding afterparty to hear it for the first time. He stayed grooving with the happy crowd for the rest of the night and spent the next day digging up whatever he could about the music.

When I got into the Austin swing scene, Shawn was always down to get dressed up and head out to hear great bands with me, although he preferred to sip a cocktail and look good while I fumbled around the dance floor. In much the same way, when he later dove into electronic music, he had a friend build an amazing wooden case for his decks so that he could learn to DJ despite never being interested in dancing.

He was someone who loved creating and facilitating great experiences for other people. When he decided to become a great bartender, he made the most amazing Mexican Martinis I’ve ever had. We had a regular group gathering every Monday night at Josh Hildebrand’s house where we would all gather to watch our favorite TV show. Our free jazz band would play as the little crew gathered and then we’d pile into the living room to watch catch the show and rant about the social politics woven within. No evening was complete without one of those frosted glasses kissed with fresh squeezed limes and filled with the hand shaken mixture Shawn created, and I’ve tried unsuccessfully over the years to find anyone who can produce anything close to the one cocktail I’ve ever liked.

I have so many memories of Shawn. Juggling pins at four in the morning as we excitedly brainstormed new ideas. Going out for great dinners and talking about life. His laughter and his joy at the absurdity of the stories I’d share from places like Burning Man. I very much wish we could have spent some more time together in the years I have remaining, but I’m learning to love and appreciate what we can all manage to squeeze into our short span as humans together instead of regretting what we can’t. Despite the way he had to go, I hope that he enjoyed the better times as much as I did. I’ll miss you Shawn.

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In Memoriam: Shawn C. Dodd

David Howard’s Blog

One of my dear and daily readers, who also happens to be my beloved Aunt Wilma, is in the hospital. I wasn’t quite ready to start scribbling here again about my adventures over the last few months (the very adventures, I might add, that have kept me from my daily writing) but I want her to have something to read as she recovers. Guilt! A powerful motivator! Readers! Equally powerful!

I’ll be trying to squeeze my writing around the intense coding crunch I’m in as I try to catch up with everything happening back here in Austin, but life has priorities and once you can eat, well, earning money falls immediately, and far, below people.

It had been a long time since I had been around old school guy guys. Despite the amount of time spent discussing sex around my house, it’s usually in mixed company and of a certain flavor. I climbed into the van full of filmmakers and they paused long enough to say hello before launching back into the continuous outpouring of raunchy patter and boob jokes that had already been in full force. To his credit David did turn to me and say, “oh, right, I probably should have warned you.” By the end of the night, as we left our first dinner together, I found myself in a group hug with this same crew, talking about opening our hearts to the experience before us and giving Jef the space and support to be truly vulnerable. Somewhere in this mix, this seeming dichotomy, was the essence of our next few weeks of filmmaking.

The idea was to create a film that was a mixture of storyboarded narrative, documentary style interactions and improvisations. The structure from which the film hung was that “David” (the character) had just turned thirty and was writing a letter to himself on his deathbed. Knowing that this future self must have worked his way through the existential crisis he was now facing, he continually asks questions and describes his process as he surfs along on borrowed couches, pull out beds and floors through Portland and Seattle where the stories that shaped him once played out.

In practice, this meant that we had a thin skeleton of a film and a whole lot of space that might, through the act of placing ourselves into the hands of god and the universe, be filled with amazing moments. Or go nowhere. We frequently made reference to the moment in Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, where the film has degenerated into a slow slog upriver through the jungle and the cast and crew are given daily shot lists containing only the words, “scenes unknown”.

We did have a daily list of locations and people for our lead actor, Jef, to interact with. Many were people with incredible stories about spiritual awakenings, tragic war stories, or personal loss, like a man who’d lost his twin baby girls just weeks after they were born. Others were representative characters from David’s personal history. Having just watched, Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s latest ultra-meta film, I was well primed to enjoy the beauty of watching Jef, the actor, playing “David”, the character, based on David, the writer/director, who sat watching as Jef kissed David’s former crushes and ex-girlfriends, who were often playing the roles of other, different ex-girlfriends from David’s past. Most of the people Jef was to interact with were non-actors and so through their interactions, they would ask questions probing into who he (David, the character) was. This would prompt Jef to improvise and feel out the character that was emerging, and occasionally ask David (the director) to give him a story or talk about how he would respond to a given situation.

While I (and many others) originally questioned why it was that David didn’t simply play himself in this journey, it quickly became clear that he had made the right choice. Jef was unburdened by David’s ideas about what he could and couldn’t discuss with the people who had great personal weight in his life. There was also room for David himself to step back from the situation and see the interactions in a new light, as well as have enough distance to make decisions about what to cut and where to dive in deeper.

To Be Continued…

Next Episode: It Begins!