This week is the third annual People Talking and Singing benefit for
826 Seattle—one of seven writing centers across the country
co-founded by author Dave Eggers. This year’s gala is hosted by the
loquacious if dentally challenged John Roderick of the Long Winters and
features readings by Eggers and New Yorker pop music critic
Sasha Frere-Jones, comedians Todd Barry and Eugene Mirman, and
musicians Rosie Thomas and Geologic of Blue Scholars. The
Stranger got in on a three-way call between Roderick and Eggers to
find out exactly what Ben Gibbard wears under his fuzzy sweater.
THE STRANGER: Rock stars aren’t typically
considered good role models for kids. Does that trouble you at
all?
EGGERS: That’s a good point. How do you answer that, Roderick?
RODERICK: I’m going to redirect that to you. At all the 826 benefit
shows, music is a big part of it. Is music just putting butts in the
seats? Are you just trying to sell tickets?
EGGERS: Typically, we do try to keep the musicians away from the
kids when they overlap onstage.
RODERICK: I think overlap was the wrong choice of words.
EGGERS: Pass in the shadows? No, that’s not good either. Yeah, we
know the problems, just from Roderick down to a hygiene level. It’s
something we don’t want the kids to see or take any cues from.
RODERICK: I’m working on that.
EGGERS: But I think the students like to blur those lines so it
doesn’t have to be just a strict reading, with 12 people in succession
reading their work, or just a concert. I think the two things work
together really well, and the students like the cross-pollination, the
energy that comes from that. The audiences generally do, too. There’s a
very loose atmosphere because it’s always a different lineup. I don’t
think we’ve ever had the same lineup for any two 826 shows. This one in
Seattle will be very different than pretty much anything we’ve done.
It’ll be especially fun as long as Roderick doesn’t screw anything
up.
RODERICK: There’s going to be comedy at this one, which will make a
lot of my screwups seem intentional.
EGGERS: Eugene Mirman just did a benefit out in Boston for 826. He’s
hysterical; he did a great job.
So everybody’s sort of familiar with each
other.
EGGERS: Not really. John, have you met Eugene?
RODERICK: I’ve never met Eugene. I had dinner with Sasha
[Frere-Jones] earlier this year; I love his writing in the New
Yorker. At the 826 events that I played in New York and Chicago,
part of the fun was the backstage area. It’s a really lively place, all
these different people getting to know each other. And then as we each
take the stage you come back and you’ve got this group of people you’ve
been talking to who’ve just seen you perform for the first time, and
there’s a real exchange. The fact that we don’t all know each other is
no impediment—I think it actually works in the event’s favor.
EGGERS: I think so, too. They’re all so real and fresh. It’s madness
sometimes. In Seattle, we had a backstage area with people counting
money that was collected during intermission—that was the first
time we did the money during intermission, the donation/passing the hat
situation, and that was just like mass chaos, with 12 or 15 people
counting literally piles of money. It looked like something very
illegal was happening.
RODERICK: [Laughs]
EGGERS: But there’s always that kind of thing. The audience always
knows they’re seeing something one-of-a-kind. I think it’s better that
way than if it was always the same lineup and really well-
rehearsed.
RODERICK: And the chance collaborations are another great thing
about these shows that you hardly ever see anymore—not since the
Rat Pack in Vegas. There haven’t been as many different situations
where people are joining each other onstage and collaborating
spontaneously, which is a little dangerous, but good for you.
Aside from you, John, it does seem like the musicians
involved are of the tame, fuzzy-sweater rock variety: Ben Gibbard,
Sufjan Stevens, this generation of lit rock that’s popular right
now.
EGGERS: You know what—I’ve actually never seen Ben Gibbard in
a fuzzy sweater. I have to say that. He’s never worn one around me. I
don’t know what he wears at home.
Roderick: I have seen him in a fuzzy sweater, but he wasn’t
wearing anything else.
EGGERS: But there’s going to be some hiphop at this show. And 826
performers, students in some of these shows in the past, or songwriters
who appreciate a good turn of phrase and are good at it themselves…
that’s the connection. They’re very similar in the attention paid to
the written word, whether it’s in hiphop or—what did you call it?
“Lit rock”?—which I hadn’t heard before, but I like that. I think
the students recognize the common DNA to all those forms. So many of
our students also do spoken word. They can put words on the page and
perform them, too. There’s a blurry line between all those forms, but I
think the bottom line is that the words are important and they mean
something.
RODERICK: You hit the nail on the head. There’s a culture-wide lack
of respect for articulateness that’s growing by leaps and bounds. Part
of the problem is pushing articulate people into a fuzzy-sweater ghetto
because that’s the only place where they can speak articulately and be
respected and not shunned. What I like about 826 is that it’s
intervening in kids’ lives, offering a place where articulateness is
not a badge of shame, where they’re not going to be ostracized or
teased for being as smart as they are, however smart that is.
EGGERS: That’s so true. On the one hand, 826 is helping a lot of
kids for whom English is not their first language or they might be
behind a grade level on reading and writing and self-expression skills.
But on the other hand, it’s a safe haven for kids who love writing and
reading at a very advanced level. You have both sides and everything in
between. We have so many kids who come in and are like, “Oh,
finally—there are kids from all over the city who like to
read at my level and write at my level and really care about the
written word.” You can just tell how intensely they favor being there,
being around their peers, and having a really high-level discussion
about contemporary writing that they don’t always get, or they don’t
have to be embarrassed about how sophisticated their tastes are.
RODERICK: Even kids who aren’t at a college level, reading at
whatever level they’re at, it’s nice to be validated for that. And not
have somebody be like, “Reading is for idiots! Sniff more glue,
man!”
I volunteered at 826 in San Francisco, teaching a class on
music criticism, and I was amazed at how into it the kids
were.
EGGERS: That class always fills up. The movie-criticism classes and
the very young art-criticism classes—middle schoolers take that
one—they all fill up and do well because it’s something the kids
care a lot about. And then you try to build in critical-thinking skills
and the ability to express themselves clearly and convincingly. So
there are a lot of classes that are all trying to do the same thing.
Which is, “What are you feeling and what are you passionate about? Now
try to put it down convincingly.” Whatever that access point is…
that’s how I started out writing for newspapers and stuff—I was a
record reviewer for many years. It’s always a good starting point for
those kids for whom music is their first deep and passionate cultural
experience.
RODERICK: It was my first experience, too, both as a writer and a
reader. My point of entry into reading the newspaper was reading the
culture stuff first. Then I became aware that somebody was writing
about culture, and that was its own aspiration and you could disagree
with it. That happened to me at a very early age, understanding the
role of a critic and having that be my entrée into writing and
thinking critically. I’m often at the pointy end of
criticism—literary and music and otherwise. I know, Dave, that
you get reviewed quite a bit, probably to your frustration a lot.
EGGERS: I’m smart enough not to read anything. I haven’t read
anything in seven years because I don’t think it’s my role to read it.
That’s a conversation that I’d be eavesdropping on. The subject of any
review is not the intended readership; it’s a conversation between the
reviewer and the potential customer, the buyer, the experiencer. I knew
a while ago that I was superfluous to that conversation.
RODERICK: My challenge in that is that reviews and criticism were my
favorite thing to read prior to making culture myself. I’d read reviews
of movies I had no intention of seeing, read reviews of books I was
never going to read. And so my love of the art of criticism really puts
me in a tough spot when, as I’m reading down a column reviewing
records, I see my own record there and I go, “Oh! I shouldn’t read it,
I don’t want to, but God, I’ve read every other review here.” I have to
find out.
EGGERS: Oh no! I will heal you. I’ve healed many people away from
that temptation. It makes you a much happier, more balanced person once
you heal thyself away from that. But we’re on a major tangent here.
What else should we say about the Seattle show? We’re giving away
money, too. Everyone who comes gets a hundred-dollar bill. Should we
say that, John, or should that be a surprise?
RODERICK: There are six tickets to my chocolate factory that are
going to be hidden under the seats.
EGGERS: That, too. And some very
special guests with one name,
and it might be Cher. 