“I don’t know if that works for your life,” Dr. John Klanderman said to me after our first phone conversation. The phone interview was step two of applying to the School Psychology program at Rowan, and he had asked me if I might consider applying for a graduate assistantship.

Turns out, it did very much work for my life. I had the honor and pleasure of being Dr. Klanderman’s first graduate assistant at Rowan. I chose working for Dr. Klanderman over a job in the writing lab, and it was one of the best choices I ever made. And the writing lab was, to my mind, a dream job: a lab full of iMacs running Mac OS 9, on a fast ethernet network, full of students who needed my help either with their Macs or their writing.

I took the job with Dr. Klanderman initially out of careerist self-interest, but I never once regretted it.

We spent my time as an assistant discussing my independent projects for the department, but our conversations ranged across topics near and dear to his heart, such as the adorability of the Burmese Mountain Dog, his early life in the midwest, and of course, travel, which was his greatest pleasure.

One day, I apologized for some grease stains on my hands after working on a moped I had bought. He observed, approvingly, “you don’t like to sit around.”

Because neither did he.

One of my favorite roles in his service was that of computer support technician. I introduced Dr. Klanderman to the Stickies application on his Macintosh computer (a Toothintosh, if you remember those), and he would gush about Stickies’ utility to anyone who would listen. I met him in Philadelphia, at the Society Hill Towers apartment he bought, to help him set up his new iBook after I graduated, and we nipped out for dinner and a pint afterwards.

While working for him, Dr. Klanderman gently poo-pooed an idea for my graduate thesis, suggesting gently that I complete a study in the service of a colleague. He said I might be able to present the results at the National Association of School Psychologists conference that spring in Chicago. He was remarkably well-connected in a genuine way. That bit of advice, too, worked for my life.

That’s how we came to fly together and attend the conference, where I learned that it was very important to him to get off of an airplane before anyone else. He took delight in showing me around the Windy City; we had dinner at the Italian Village, an old favorite of his from his early days as a school psychologist, and took pictures from the Sears Tower. So smitten with the city was I that I skipped most of the sessions and walked the city, took the elevated train, and ate oysters and drank beer in a quiet corner of town.

An aside: I never really got around to calling him John. He was always Dr. Klanderman to me. He was wise, sagacious; funny and generous, informal but in charge. He was humble, yet distinguished; broad yet focused; self interested yet selfless. I was an adult but he made me feel like a kid, in a good way: his experience was honest and earned over the course of time.

Dr. Klanderman often worked the term “Gestalt” into his conversations, which in psychology is a nod to the theory of perception that we perceive more than the sum of individual sensory experiences.

His love of art: music, and the basoon, and later, of course, watercolor. Travel. Teaching graduate students. Remodeling his apartment and renting it out. All these bits, tremendous achievements in their own right, combine to form a mosiac–indeed, a Gestalt–far greater than the sum of their parts.

“You play the game well,” he complimented me that night in Chicago, over dinner.

Would that I could hope to play the game half as well as John Klanderman did: he loved to keep busy not for busyness sake, but because he loved life and the journey. His was a life fully lived. And mine was just one of many lives he touched.

Obituary

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I asked John to be a reference for me when I applied for my first job in educational administration. He said to me on the phone that afternoon-and I remember where I was, in my car, driving that day-“If that’s what you want.” The subtext was “why would you want that?” He said a lot without having to say much.

Via Tools and Toys:

Ever since the mid–1980s, actor Jeff Bridges has become known by his castmates for taking candid black-and-white photos of on-set happenings between takes, using his trusty Widelux F8 panoramic camera, which he would privately print and gift to fellow cast and crew members.

The Iron 2 photos are fascinating on how they juxtapose a grainy black and white style with what we know is an otherwise futuristic palette.

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Ann Hornaday, Wapo:

[I]t serves as a canvas for Phoenix, who goes to strenuous lengths to deliver a performance of operatic bombast. Alarmingly emaciated, affecting a maniacal laugh that Arthur barks out when he’s scared or angry or confused, he delivers a self-consciously larger-than-life performance in a role that simply doesn’t warrant the gravitas afforded to it by fans and filmmakers alike. “Joker” is, finally, so monotonously grandiose and full of its own pretensions that it winds up feeling puny and predictable. Like the anti-hero at its center, it’s a movie trying so hard to be capital-b Big that it can’t help looking small.

AO Scott, NYT:

It’s hard to say if the muddle “Joker” makes of itself arises from confusion or cowardice, but the result is less a depiction of nihilism than a story about nothing. The look and the sound — cinematography by Lawrence Sher, cello-heavy score by Hildur Gudnadottir — connote gravity and depth, but the movie is weightless and shallow. It isn’t any fun, and it can’t be taken seriously. Is that the joke?

Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com:

The storyline in and of itself is not a total miss. But once the movie starts lifting shots from “A Clockwork Orange” (and yes, Phillips and company got Warners to let them use the Saul Bass studio logo for the opening credits, in white on red, yet) you know its priorities are less in entertainment than in generating self-importance. As social commentary, “Joker” is pernicious garbage. But besides the wacky pleasures of Phoenix’s performance, it also displays some major movie studio core competencies, in a not dissimilar way to what “A Star Is Born” presented last year. (Bradley Cooper is a producer.) The supporting players, including Glenn Fleshler and Brian Tyree Henry, bring added value to their scenes, and the whole thing feels like a movie.

I’m not a cinema buff, but these reviews have me anxious to see Scorcese’s “King of Comedy.” And Glenn Kenny knows how to pussy-foot.

Saw Joker yesterday with the family, and we all agreed it was really good.

A couple of pain points in the plot for me:

• having the Wayne family going out for a movie on the night when everyone else seemed to be expecting major social upheaval, leading to, well you know what.
• the unlikelihood that the Arthur’s bad stand-up footage would have been shown on the Murray Franklin show… having video recording equipment handy in that day and age? Someone just happened to have a suitcase-sized VHS recorded with them at the bar?

Quibbles aside, the movie was gritty, showcasing a simulacrum of seedy New York City in the 70s. A series of events unfold that allow an already unhinged person to realize that he is capable of a kind of violence that makes him feel powerful, after a long life of powerlessness.

The first scene–where Joker defends himself from yet another pummeling where’s he’s literally kicked while he’s down–by shooting his assailants is, despite the consequent investigation, empowering to Joker. Even this moment was thrust upon him in a way: the gun was given to him by a well-meaning, if otherwise cowardly, co-worker after Joker suffers a beating at the hands of some bullying teens. So much of what leads to him becoming Joker are matters of happenstance: not situations that he chose, but rather found himself in.

My initial impression, reinforced by the revelation that Sophie Dumond was not, in fact, cultivating a relationship with Arthur, was that much of what Arthur was experiencing was a delusion: he would remain convinced of Thomas Wayne’s parentage, never having an opportunity to find out otherwise; he would believe he had been featured on the Murray Franklin show, but never truly was; he had a conversation wherein he was invited onto the Murray Franklin show, but never truly was. In the way that his relationship with Sophie was wholly imagined, I thought that his motivations and inducements would be, as well.

Despite some of these points being a little to on the nose for my taste, I did love how Arthur-cum-Joker embraced, organically, the power of spectacle to showcase his brand of terror and chaos. He realizes, in a moment of lucidity, that he was brought on to the Murray Franklin show to be made fun of, and rather than use his own suicide to shock the audience, he turns to a shocking display of TV violence. As the movie closes, he revels in bringing chaos to a world that was cruel to him. He is suddenly welcomed, surrounded by a flock… and crowned the Clown Prince of Crime.

It was really well done.

Inspired by the succinct and fun Top Four by Tiffany and Marco Arment, I offer here my top four egg preparations:

1. Scrambled
2. Fried Over Easy
3. Quiche or Fritatta
4. Omelette

A few notes:

I generally follow the Gordon Ramsay egg scramble method, which is very different from the hard scramble you find in most restaurants and homes in the US. I like a hard scramble just fine, but eggs prepared this way are a real treat.

I try to make a classic French omelette, and one of my favorite tutorials is by Jacques Pepin. He describes both the classic omelette and the country or dinner omelette in this video.

This surely means that the Samurai will return to the US.

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Via Audacious Fox:

Let’s call this “boss email.” It’s defined by nearly immediate — but short and terse — replies. The classic two-word email. For underlings, it can be inscrutable. Is that an angry “thanks” or a grateful “thanks”? Does “please update me” imply impatience with you? Boss email can be the workplace equivalent of getting a “k” text reply from a Tinder date.

I do this quite a bit, but it depends upon the circumstance: Do I have comfortable supervisory relationship with this person? Is this a peer who won’t read into perfunctory replies? Then yes. And sometimes, I realize that really busy people don’t want to read a paragraph, and appreciate an abridged version. In that case? Also yes.

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Great post by Brett on how he uses MailMate… I was delighted to see that he, too, uses SparkMail on iOS, where MailMate doesn’t exist. My particular setup, born in Mail.app, has moved effectively to MailMate for a couple of years now.

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