Too far Under the Radar

Under the Radar surveyed bands like Calexico, The Decemberists, Mates of State, Mercury Rev, My Morning Jacket, and more with the following questions. We'll answer them too.

What was the highlight of 2006 for either you personally or for the band?

Everything in Cleveland had been complicated for a while. I used to teach music in the inner city. My district laid off about a quarter of the teachers over the course of a couple of years, and my position went from one where I could really impact kids' lives, to one where I was basically supposed to contain kids in a room, because there was no where else they could be. For the last two years I worked for CMSD, I taught at a model small-school initiative highschool funded in part by the Bill in Melinda Gates Foundation. By the time I left, I had three times as many students as instruments, more kids each period than the fire code permitted in my room, and almost no students who had had instrumental music in middle school, usually not in elementary either.

In 2006 I interviewed for positions in Seattle (The Lakeside School, where Bill Gates graduated high school from, and now sends his children), Chicago (Lake Forest Country Day School), public schools outside of Boston and Amherst Mass and Burlington Vermont among others. I ultimately took a position at Cincinnati Country Day School (if you saw Traffic, that was the school). It wasn't the interviews that were the highlight, so much as buying music for the trips, and the travelling. We kind of did an Ivy League tour, spending time at Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago and Northwestern - and usually eating delicious Indian food (actually, we just discovered Udupi Cafe in Parma, Ohio - a rare Indian restaurant serving food from the south of the country - Danielle can't get enough of their dosas.

What was the low point of 2006 for you?

A couple years ago I started going into convulsions, sometimes lasting minutes, and as frequently as a thousand times a day. The doctor at the emergency room, and my GP, suspected a seizure disorder, and the first neurologist I saw diagnosed (after an EEG) me with Epilepsy. I was put on increasing doses of three different anticonvulsants over the course of nine months - in the end I had allergic reactions to two of them, and none of them stopped the convulsions. Finally Dr. Lederman at the Cleveland Clinic realized that it wasn't Epilepsy, but a very unusual variation of Tourette's Syndrome. After nine months I was finally on the right drugs (neuroleptics, which are also antipsychotics), and allowed to drive again, but the drugs had horrible side effects. I became so severely depressed that I would sleep 23 three hours a day. One of the neuroleptics I was on is strongly linked to cancer. After we moved to Cincinnati I found a neurologist that placed me on a different class of drugs that controlled my convulsions, without the depression. Nothing in the medical world seems to move very quickly, and in the end we decided it was best for me to resign my position at Country Day and move back to Cleveland (our house in Lakewood never sold). The whole fall of 2006 is lost to me. If only it worked like the beginning of Amelie, and I could stay up for the rest of 2007.

What are your hopes and plans for 2007?

I'm in the process of forming a nonprofit to provide arts education to Cleveland students now that the schools don't (can't) do it effectively. I've done my research, and shortly I'm going to be looking for other people to sign on to the Board of Directors. If you have a music or visual arts background, and you're interested, message me. I hope to make this my work for now, doing everything from finding qualified teachers, scheduling programs, and doing the financial development. I don't think anyone else should be thinking about this as a paycheck just yet (except the teachers of course), but I believe in the mission, and I think it will be meaningful for all involved.

Danielle is waiting on one more letter of recommendation from an old professor, and then she's sending in her application for graduate school. She's found a really cool Master of Interdisciplinary Fine Arts program. She's also just set up studio space in our attic, and is taking on projects from printmaking, to painting, to sewing. Hopefully soon we'll announce her Etsy store.

For the PFOC, we hope to finish our Paul Klee project, and record it. I'm really eager for everyone to hear the Brautigan recordings we made with Chris Bober and Bob. I hope we can record the same way (in our living room using Logic on a Mac), but Bob is in Japan indefinitely, and Chris is looking into grad school out of state.

What do you hope to hear more of in 2007? Less of?

I'm really looking forward to the collaboration of Wilco and guitarist Nels Cline. Cline has been a favorite of mine since his work with Mike Watt. Seeing them together on Austin City Limits has me squirming for more.

As far as less of, there are just so many bands. But probably what I want most is less NEOCON spin.

If the world were ending in 24 hours, what would you do in those 24 hours?

We'd eat a whole cheesecake, and take our golden retriever swimming (but not for half an hour), maybe watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and listen to Revolver.

If you could be one fictional character, who would you be and why?

I don't know about Danielle, but I think I'd want to be Ziggy Stardust. Despite some musical successes, and degrees, I've never felt like I was a particularly talented person. I've always just felt like I was smart enough to understand how music works, but not necessarily adept at it. It would be nice to be a glamrock star from when glamrock was cool. And it goes without saying it would be nice to have god given ass.