Last Remnants

Location: Gee Point, Finney Peak, Deepest of Deep Skagit

Shaking off

Our Quest to find the last remnants of old growth forest in Whatcom and Skagit counties leads us to stranger and stranger places. The places where it was uneconomical to harvest logs. The places where they would've needed helicopters to log. Up high and trapped in steep canyons. Montaigne forest--mountain hemlocks, spruce and Montaigne Douglas fir.

Gee Point on Finney Peak requires 17 miles of driving on windy forest roads once off another windy road that bends over with one of the most picturesque views of the deep green of the Skagit River. The hike is short in comparison to the drive, but requires bushwhacking before one reaches old growth. 

The high mountain forest on the way to Cow Heaven is attained by hiking up 4000 feet over 5 miles or so. Remote, out of the way, it seems forgotten.

Cow Heaven isn't far from the highway or the Skagit River but requires hiking up 4000 vertical feet over 5 miles or so.

The Days Between: For the Best Fishermom I Know

There were days in between.

There were days days between the day when I uttered my first word--"Bird"--and the day when she and I found the mouth of the Elwah and saw a great blue heron much larger than the smaller version of myself.

There were days between the day she got me dressed and ready for my first day of kindergarten  and the day she tried to give me some final pointers before I left home for college.

There were days between all those days when I went from being a boy to becoming a man.

She gave all she had to give to me. How much I'll never really know.

There were days in between and those were the ones that mattered. All she did was help me grow, grow, grow.

There were days between the day when she pulled the hook out of the first fish I ever caught and the day when I caught my first lunker.

There were days in between the day when she put a band-aid on my first scrape and the day when she pulled a hook embedded in my neck by the wind and my poor casting skills.

There were days in between the day when she caught her first steelhead and the day when we first cast our lines together in the waters of Alaska.

There were days in between when she taught me all about fishing, which is essentially life, an eternal quest in nature for something greater than  ourselves, for finding illumination in God's light, for a search for answers in deep, dark holes and the joy of coming out enlightened or just the joy in the search. She was there during the days in between all of those answers, which were just more questions. But her example was what guided me.

She was there during all the days in between. And that's what mattered.

There were days in between the day when she brought me into this world and the day I realized that she is the best fishermom I know.

There were days in between when all she did was help me grow, grow grow. I took my first steps thanks to her. My fishermom watched over me while I learned the music and the lyrics to the song. I've seen many worlds since then. I've seen many worlds since when I first left home. But I always love coming home to my fishermom.

Growing up with the Dead

Since my wonderful first experience with Brahms

at age four, I've found music to be, among many other things,

a safety net, a lifeline that remains constant 

when all other mental constructs 

are in total Heraclitean flux.

Phil Lesh, bassist, Grateful Dead

This is who I am.

Every thing makes sense now. After reading Phil Lesh's biography Searching for the Sound I felt like I was hanging out with a version of my childhood buddies and myself, just from a time 30 years before my childhood.

Like Lesh, I was raised on classical music and then I became entranced with Jazz and then rock n' roll. Kind of the backwards route for most people.

I love how Lesh describes his first encounter with music and his earliest memory. Brahms. First Symphony. Age 4. I, too, remember when I first "discovered" music. KKHI, the Bay Area's great classical music station in the seventies and eighties, had this Sunday afternoon opera show. My parents had KKHI on 24/7 growing up and I remember this opera show's opening tune blended perfectly with the idyllic backyard patio I grew up knowing in Menlo Park.

Menlo Park, my hometown, is really the birthplace of the Dead, though usually it's Palo Alto that takes the credit because it has a strong claim, too.

Jerry and Phil, cornerstones of the Dead, met up in Menlo Park, at the Chateau, Ken Kesey's house, somewhere near my local drinking hole the Dutch Goose. The Dead's first gig, at Magoo's Pizza, 635 Santa Cruz Avenue, which is now a fancy French restaurant, is where the band discovered the wonderful power of improvisational music. Early folk gigs and meet-ups among the band and Jerry's other folkie friends took place at Kepler's, which is still in Menlo Park but moved across the street, and was a place where you could drink coffee and read books, quite a novelty at the time.

So glad that there was another band called the Warlocks, so the Dead could come up with a much better name. The centuries old Grateful Dead myth is the essence of the band, their community, and is a good rule to live by.

Pigpen learned to sing the blues in blues clubs in East Palo Alto, when I grew up the "other side of the tracks," and now the home of Facebook. Jerry taught guitar at a music shop that might have been where I first took sax lessons, where he met Bobby Weir, who was attending M-A, my old high school, and the idea for the Dead began its embryonic stage. Of course, Weir never graduated. The dyslexic was expelled from every school he ever attended. Quite a prankster!

After their beginnings in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, the Dead became the greatest touring improvisatory band in the history of music blending so many influences (folk, blues, country, jazz, rock, avant garde classical) into one collective and totally unique American experience. They really are an American Beauty.

Dead, circa 1965.

The Dead were 5 non-prodigies. I only trust musicians who are ugly and the Dead were five of the ugliest (in physical appearance) that ever existed. Just think. Pigpen. Organically greasy. I love Lesh's side note on how he never saw Pigpen without his leather vest which was glued onto him. Jerry was the only member of the Dead who exhibited any extraordinary talent, but even his talent was of the kind that is purely from working hard, literally practicing every waking hour of the day his banjo, guitar and pedal steel. Nobody practiced as hard as Garcia in the 60s and 70s.

Pigpen, one of the ugliest dudes ever. Which is why I trust him as a musician.

What made the Dead great is that they all learned how to play together. They didn't develop individual talents and then form. When they formed, they had no real individual talents (except for Jerry). Phil was a classically trained trumpet player who learned to play bass on the fly. As Lesh notes, "For more than 2 months we played together every day and I can't exaggerate the importance of this experience. The unique organicity of our music reflects the fact that each of us consciously personalized his playing to fit with what others were playing and to fit with who each man was an an individual, allowing us to meld our consciousnesses together in the unity of a group mind." The Dead took the concept of "bleshing"--mesh + blend--from Theodore Sturgeon's sci-fi novel More Than Human bringing their freakish X-men like idiosyncratic powers to make music in a completely group think mind-melding experience.

Music, for me, is all about contrast and compliment. Tension and release. These are the 2 big laws of music. And those are the rules that guide the Dead. Build tension, epic tension, and then find beauty in the release. Contrast--Jerry's guitar and Phil's bass were like a Bach counterpoint, contrasting but fitting together in a sort of puzzle, with Weir complimenting and filling the in between sounds.

The show that most impressed Lesh was seeing John Coltrane in a small San Francisco club. Oh how I wish I could take a time capsule to go see Trane, particularly in '59 with Miles, or the Classic Coltrane Quartet in the glory years '64-'65. I'd also of course love to take a time capsule to see the Dead in their most classic shows (2-14-68, 2-13-70, 5-2-70, 8-27-72, 9-21-72, 12-19-73). Oh my! That's all I'd do with a time capsule. That and maybe talk to Lincoln.

Lesh talks about how Coltrane's version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things" was one of the blueprints for the Dead. Listening to Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things" was a moment when music changed for me, too. It really is the quintessential essence of Jazz. Taking a standard and making it completely unique is what Jazz is and what the Dead did so well.

Jerry in the early days playing pedal steel guitar with David Nelson and the New Riders of the Purple Sage

Reading the book was like being in a conversation with my childhood buddies. Lesh has been a musician I've worshiped my entire life. Not worship in an untouchable Jimi Hendrix or Mozart kind of way. Those guys were superhuman meteors and not really of this earth. But worship in the sense that "If I could play bass, this is how I'd play" kind of way. Lesh seems approachable. I try to play my bari sax with a lot of the same influences that Lesh had (from Stravinsky to Coltrane).

Note the Red, White and Blue wristbands. That's my workout gear, too.

The Dead led me to discover Johnny Cash long before he became re-popularized with the movie and the recordings he did in his twilight years with Rick Rubin. Also Chuck Berry--not many kids my age were listening to Chuck Berry, who just about smokes any of the music being made nowadays. Lesh also brings influences from the world of classical like Charles Ives or Brahms. Which brings up 3 wonderful anecdotes Lesh tells about Jerry:

1) Lesh was invited to be a guest conductor for the Berkeley Community Orchestra conducting Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as a benefit. It was in the later years when the band had grown apart and wasn't spending as much time together when they weren't on the road. Lesh didn't tell anybody in the band, thinking none of the guys would show up anyways. But who does he see in the front row when he goes to conduct but his best buddy Jerry. Surprise! It took Lesh aback when Jerry later brought some paintings of him conducting.

2) Lesh tells another story of how he rented a box at the San Francisco Opera for Wagner's Ring Cycle, some 24 hours of German opera. He invited the band. The only member to come for more than 2 nights was Jerry, who came all nights except for the last one, because he had promised to take his teenage daughter to see the Phil Collins concert. It's a pretty funny mental image to imagine Jerry at either a Wagner opera or a Phil Collins concert and it makes me howl out loud laughing to think about.

3) SCUBA diving--Apparently Jerry found peace from all the pressures of being a cultural icon by going SCUBA diving. Phil was always afraid of activities like that but Jerry insisted he come with him. And Phil describes just how happy it made Jerry to be under water. One more anecdote just to close it up: Jerry loved water and Phil describes coming to his house and watching Jerry just swim with his giant New Foundlands in his pool. Lesh describes the immense closet in Jerry's house that is empty except for 8 black t-shirts, the only attire Jerry ever wore.

If anything, Lesh's memoir of playing with the Dead, the greatest touring band of all time, is a story of friendships. Especially, his friendship with Jerry. Although there are some really great anecdotes about Bob Weir and Mickey Hart. That's what it's all about. Traveling with your buddies. Having adventures. Living a dream. Being kind to people in between and making people happy. I have tremendous gratitude for the great work Lesh and his buddies did for the thousands of people they made happy.

Always good to see a happy Jerry (and a wild Weir).

Canonical Business Books: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People

Like other books I've reviewed in my canonical business books series, Dale Carnegie's absolutely classic How to Win Friends and Influence People is not just a business book or a Success Literature book or a self-help book but a book that can help us make it through this crazy thing we call life. It serves as a lesson on how to be happy and teaches us probably the hardest skill to learn or master: how to deal with people.

I use the phrase "deal with" because a lot of times that's what making it through life is: dealing with people, managing them, making due with them, putting up with them, sharing a world with them. It's not easy.

When I was working on my PhD, my Colombian roommate and I had a saying: "Coño, no es fácil," which loosely translates to "Damn, it's not easy." The schoolwork associated with the PhD wasn't that easy, but what was really difficult was dealing with the people. Granted, academics are notoriously arrogant, self-serving, quick to criticize and condemn, and in general are some of the most difficult people one earth to deal with, but even in my life post-academia, there are still not just difficult people to deal with but more poignantly, there are difficult situations in which we have to deal with people.

A survey done at the time of Carnegie's writing (book was first published in 1936) revealed that the prime interest of adults is health. Their second greatest interest was in developing skills in human relationships.Carnegie wasn't just a great public speaker. His main job was to help people conquer their fears and develop courage.

Carnegie's book revolves around a concept that Stephen Covey later borrowed and expanded upon in his canonical book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (see my review here). The principle: Seek first to understand... then to be understood. This habit is about Empathic listening: rephrase content and reflect the feeling. This emphatic listening is also worth keeping in mind for public speaking. The basic principles of public speaking, which is essentially storytelling, are ethos-pathos-logos. Ethos is gaining credibility with the audience through integrity. Pathos is feeling the thrust of what is going on with the audience. Logos is the logic and analysis. Too often we start with logos. We need to first gain credibility by understanding our audience, then feel what they say, and then and only then seek to be understood. Don't bother speaking until you can rephrase your interlocutor's argument in your own words.

The quote that got me to read Carnegie's book is one from Benjamin Franklin who said: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." Read that quote again. And think about it. In an age of so called Big Data, it's important to remember that data, facts and logic are not the key to the mind. In other words, you can't use facts to change a belief. The keys to the mind are metaphors, which connect the unfamiliar to the familiar. The symbolism in metaphors makes us connect at a deeper level. Understanding what is familiar and then presenting it in new ways is one of the most powerful ways to unlock the door to somebody's mind so that they can understand your point of view. Opinion pieces that try too hard to drive home a point will be derided for what they are: one-sided sledgehammers.

Classic!

Let's start with Carnegie's suggested 6 ways to make people like you:

1) Become genuinely interested in other people.
2) Smile.
3) Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4) Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5) Talk in terms of other person's interests.
6) Make the other person feel important--and do it sincerely.

Here's another key topic:

How to keep a disagreement from escalating to an argument.
1) Welcome the disagreement. Remember: "When two partners always agree, one of them is not necessary." Disagreement is the opportunity to be corrected before a serious mistake.
2) Distrust your instinctive impression (to be defensive).
3) Control your temper. You can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.
4) Listen first. Remember: Seek first to understand...then to be understood.
5) Look for areas of agreement.
6) Be honest. Admit errors.
7 Thank your opponents for their interest. Those who disagree with you also must have an interest in what you're arguing about.
8) Postpone action to give both sides time to think through the problem.

Win people to your way of thinking:
1) The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
2) Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say, "You're wrong."
3) If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
4) Begin in a friendly way.
5) Get the other person saying "yes, yes" immediately.
6) Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
7) Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
8) Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
9) Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires.
10) Appeal to the nobler motives.
11) Dramatize your ideas.
12) Throw down a challenge.

Be a Leader: A leader's job includes changing your people's attitudes and behavior. Here's how to do that:
1) Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
2) Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly.
3) Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
4) Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
5) Let the other person save face.
6) Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be "hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise."
7) Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
8) Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
9) Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

Keys to Life!

#TBT to 1996: Steelhead on the Sol Duc

17-pound steelhead on the Sol Duc River

If memory serves, this was back in March of 1996. I had traveled from Walla Walla to Seattle to meet my parents who were coming from the San Francisco Bay Area. Together we went in a rental car to the Olympic Peninsula, what was for us a wild and woolly part of the country patched with clear cuts and old growth forests, big rivers green with glacial till layered with large rocks and stones and moss draping off trees.

We were with a guide we had met while fishing in Alaska and had fished for 2 days completely skunked. Though he was a great guide who knew the rivers well and tied creative flies for a range of conditions, steelhead fishing is like that. Cold, wet and a very low strike per cast ratio.

Late in the afternoon on the last day of our float down the Sol Duc River I casted near a big rock and a powerful undercurrent not far from a bridge that Highway 101 goes over. The same 101 that speeds through the Silicon Valley of the Bay Area where I am from. This other version of 101, going over the Sol Duc, not far from the Forks of Twilight fame and western red cedars as thick as suburban houses was a lot different. Logging trucks rumbled by.

I felt a large tug. Oh the jolt of adrenaline! The reel on my rod was spinning so fast I thought I saw smoke come off it. I held on for dear life. Our guide edged his MacKenzie River boat to shore. I stepped out of the boat and worked the fish which had jumped several times doing cartwheels but wasn't the most acrobatic fish I've ever caught. After a while he slowed down and we netted him by the side of the river. It was probably the biggest smile we'd seen from our guide and probably the first he'd shown in a long time. You can see him beaming in the picture.

A 17-pound buck. The moment cemented in history was a turning point. A few years later, my parents retired and moved out to Port Angeles, where they have lived for almost 15 years. I'm not too far away in Bellingham, which is less than 100 miles away by how the crow flies but is easily 4 hours by car. It takes so long because of the crazy topography and the necessity of getting a ferry to the Peninsula. It's a strange and beautiful part of the world. Rugged, green and wet. The fish was almost a moment that retired me from fishing. How can you beat a 17-pound steelhead on a fly rod?

Canonical Business Books: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Steven R. Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a canonical book and not just a must-read for business people or people wanting to be effective, but I'd say it's a must-read for just about anybody trying to make it through life. And I wish somebody made me read it when I was 19. Although, when I was 19, I probably would have ignored all of Covey's advice. 

Before I delve into the 7 Habits, it's important to point out the background for this sort of book. Covey starts by tracing out the history of a genre that he calls Success Literature, which is a complicated way of saying that it's a self-help book, but I like the attempts at literary analysis. During the first 150 years of American history, Success Literature focuses on what Covey calls the Character Ethic. The foundation of success for those Americans was based on things like "integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is representative of that literature. It is, basically, the story of one man's effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature. The Character Ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character." 

But then we Americans experienced a change in our definition of success. Sometime "shortly after World War I the basic view of success shifted from the Character Ethic to what we might call the Personality Ethic. Success became more a function of personality, of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, skills and techniques, that lubricate the processes of human interaction. This Personality Ethic essentially took two paths; one was human and public relations techniques, and the other was positive mental attitude (PMA). Some of this philosophy was expressed in inspiring and sometimes valid maxims, such as 'Your attitude determines your altitude,' 'Smiling wins more friends than frowning.' Other parts of the personality approach were clearly manipulative, even deceptive, encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them, or to fake interest in the hobbies of others to get out of them what they wanted..." 

Emphasis for the Personality Ethic is on the "quick-fix influence techniques, power strategies," which is one reason I didn't want to read Covey's book. That superficial, manipulative quick-fix stuff is pretty antithetical to my nature, and I thought that his book would have preached that sort of stuff. Quick-fix, a me-centric approach to achieve what we think is good only for us, is why we're in some of the predicaments we are in now as a society and explain why we need help. It can safely be said that Covey's book is not quick-fix nor "Personality Ethic." It's principle-centered and hearkens to the Character Ethic and worthy of reflection.  

I started to really appreciate 7 Habits when I got to Covey's definition of integrity: If Honesty is conforming your words to reality, Integrity is conforming reality to your words. One other important principle that is part of integrity is "being loyal to those who are not present." "When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present." This little detail is a very hard one to understand and live by. We all fail at it. It's amazing how you can lose trust from those present by speaking ill of those not around. It's important to remember that to be trusted is greater than to be loved. People will forgive mistakes of the mind, judgement, but not mistakes of the heart.

7 Habits is a book to re-visit. Everything Covey preaches boils down to some very basic biblical principles (although  they exist in all other great religious texts and mythologies): The Golden Rule and the idea that You reap what you sow. These principles are part of the human condition. So basic and easy to understand, but so difficult to live by. 

Another concept, easy to understand yet hard to live by, is Covey's definition of Emotional Maturity, which he sees as "the ability to express one's own feelings and convictions with consideration for the thoughts and feelings of others." It's easy to blurt out ideas, but ideas only have meaning when we understand what those present are really thinking and feeling.

Most of Covey's metaphors work but they're corny. For example, Covey talks about the emotional bank accounts we have with people and how we make deposits and withdrawals: "When we make deposits of unconditional love, when we live the primary laws of love, we encourage others to live the primary laws of life. In other words, when we truly love others without condition, without strings, we help them feel secure and safe and validated and affirmed in their essential worth, identity, and integrity."

Most of Covey's principles come down to the balance of what he refers to as P/PC. Production/Production Capability. In fact, all of our interactions with our fellow humans should have at their essence this principle: Just because we can get something out of somebody doesn't mean that we should. We don't want to burn bridges just for a short-term goal. He offers the parable of the Goose who lays golden eggs. You don't want to kill the goose who lays golden eggs just to get all the golden eggs out of her. It never works. At least in the long term.

When I see a business book with this sort of title, my reaction is: Just tell me the 7 habits and let's not go through the 300 pages of pontificating about those 7 habits. (See my previous post on another Canonical Business Book). As if the 7 habits alone would make a huge difference. Possibly they might, but certainly in the case of Covey's book it helps to have his explanations. They only become useful when read about in context. But I'll try to summarize.  

Here are the 7 Habits: 

1: Be proactive. Happiness is within and we don't have to let our surroundings dictate it. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.

2: Begin with the End in Mind. Start with a goal. This is a Leadership-oriented habit. Like all leadership habits, it's much easier said than done. 

3: Put First Things First. Become principle-oriented rather than values-driven. Everybody has values, even a gang member in South Central, but it's difficult to live by your principles. Base your decisions on principles. The 7 habits are good principles with which to start. This is a Management-oriented habit.

4: Think win/win. This expression has now become part of our daily lexicon. In our everyday business, we have to agree to communicate until we find a solution upon which the stakeholders can live with.  

5: Seek first to understand... then to be understood. This habit is about Empathic listening, which is also worth keeping in mind for public speaking. The basic principles of public speaking, which is essentially storytelling, are ethos-pathos-logos. In that order. Ethos is gaining credibility with the audience through integrity. Pathos is feeling the thrust of what is going on with the audience. Logos is the logic and analysis. Too often we start with logos. We need to first gain credibility by understanding our audience, then feel what they feel, and then and only then seek to be understood. Don't bother speaking until you can rephrase your interlocutor's argument in your own words.  

6: Synergize. Closely related to Habit 4. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts is the starting point for any great organization. As a musician and a fan of sports, I see this habit as essential to any great team or band. Great bands aren't made of prima donna virtuosos; they're made of people who realize that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

7: Sharpen the saw. Put all the Habits together and practice, but also bearing in mind our basic food. Our basic food is based on 4 spheres: mental, physical, social and spiritual. We need to keep a balance of these 4 spheres and practice them at least every week but ideally every day. 

This is how I sharpen the saw, but it's up to each of us to define it in our own way:

Mental: Read ~200 pages a week. Right now, I'm reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit:  Roosevelt, Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism. 

Physical: I work out with a former NFL Pro Bowler 3 times a week doing football workouts. Would like to get back into swimming because my knees are destroyed from running.

Social: Need to do this better. It's about service. I used to bring my dog to have kids read to him at the Boys & Girls Club but don't have time now. 

Spiritual: Spend at least once a week in Nature and listen to great music.Try to read the New Testament in Spanish every once in a while, too, but most great books tap into the spirit. The Bible has stories that provide an outline, but rarely if ever do stories in the Bible provide the interior thoughts, motivations, and other complexities of its characters. Great literature fills in these voids to help elucidate the human condition. 

Sharpen the saw. Practice. Repeat. 

In many ways, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is poorly titled. What Covey teaches us is how to be happy. Because we're Americans and we're sometimes slaves to overworking ourselves, we confuse being effective and successful with being happy. They're 2 separate things, though clearly related and certainly more so in this country, where we have a more material definition of happiness. It also depends on how we define success and happiness. I'm not sure it's entirely a causal relationship. Those who practice these 7 habits will be more effective but also happier. People who practice these 7 habits with their families and friends will definitely be happier, but they don't necessarily have to be particularly effective or successful in their jobs. 

Either way, the book's worth a look and worthy of being deemed Canonical. And the 7 habits all require practicing every day.

Vijay Iyer and the American Experience

I first discovered Vijay Iyer when I heard an interview he gave on NPR. Well-spoken, interesting and with a captivating story, I then purchased and fell in love with his album Solo which, as its name suggests, features Iyer playing solo piano. The first piece is a cover of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature." It must be said that the first recording I ever bought as a kid was Thriller which I got at Pay-Less when I was about 6 years old. I saved up my quarter a week allowance I got for taking out the trash and think I wore out the cassette playing it on a small tape recorder millions of times. I still think it's one of the best albums of all time, but I don't think I ever really heard "Human Nature" until I heard Vijay Iyer perform it by himself on Solo. It made me go back to the original that I had spent my childhood listening to over and over again without really truly, truly appreciating. Iyer just crushes it.

I then took some time with other Iyer albums that he recorded with his trio like Historicity and Accelerando and Tirtha, recorded with South Asian virtuosos Prasanna and Nitin Mitta. Besides Solo, Accelerando is probably my second favorite Iyer album, but these other albums are also sublime.

Iyer's version of Jazz is extremely percussive. We see music as movement in the way he lays down rhythms. And it's very exciting.

What I like about Iyer, about Jazz in general, is how it's such an American story. The son of parents from India, Vijay was expected to go into maths and sciences. Which he did. And he went really deep. He got his undergrad in Math from Yale, his Masters in Physics from UC Berkeley, where he also got a PhD in Technology and the Arts. Somewhere along the line he departed from Maths and Sciences, though it's not really a departure because his music is so mathematical. Like a series of patterns, each of the rhythms he creates is intricate and precise, syncopation taken to the nth degree. Iyer dissects music with a scientific precision that is still very heartfelt at the same time. His music pulses with life.

As a son of parents from India, Vijay didn't see himself as a Jazz pianist for a very long time. It certainly wasn't expected that a child of Indian parents play Jazz piano. He did start the violin very young at age 3. But for the most part, he became a self-taught pianist. You can hear influences from the Karnatic music from South India in some of his music's  mathematical, hypnotic nature. But Vijay's music is decidedly American. Vijay is deeply rooted in the great legacy of American Jazz. He recalls seeing Dizzy Gillespie on Sesame Street as a kid and being influenced by Johnny Costas' piano work on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. He follows in the line of Thelonious Monk with a wonderful Harlem stride piano on his own version of Duke Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy." This sort of stuff isn't taught or learned. It's felt. And you can tell Vijay spent a long time just feeling the stride piano and making it his own. Like Monk, who taught himself Harlem stride and put his own unique angular spin on it, Iyer offers a unique angle on  stride. Harlem stride is a deceptively rich style that gives performers a lot of leeway to add their own touches. And this version of "Black and Tan Fantasy" is extraordinary and haunting. What a fantastic American composer Ellington was and we gain a new perspective of his work through Iyer's interpretation.

Vijay has truly lived the American experience, the same one I grew up with, having grown up with Star Wars, Michael Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. He took that experience, along with his background, and made it his own, which is what the American art experience is all about.

You have to respect Iyer's ability to keep breaking into new territory as he did with Tirtha, playing with tablas and a guitarist, and the trio plays some mesmerizing Eastern tunes in celebration of the 60th anniversary of Indian independence. Iyer's latest effort is Mutations, recorded with strings and electronic instrumentation. And it is even a further departure, sounding like the more rhythmic recordings of Philip Glass, particularly the Kronos Quartet's recording of his work. Mutations isn't for a beginner, but it's daring and captivating.

There's a pervading view in our times that Jazz music is elitist or too intellectual (especially in a country that has turned very anti-intellectual)--I can't claim that I understand this view as I do not share it, but I think Vijay Iyer's music could break this mould if people gave it a chance. Vijay Iyer's music has the potential to be like the music of Duke Ellington's band in the 1940s, the last time in this country when the most popular music was also the best music being produced. I don't think Vijay Iyer will ever sell as many albums as say a Kanye West or a Katy Perry or a Jay-Z, which is fine. His latest work Mutations is certainly no aspiration for the sales numbers those artists have, but if people gave the time to listen to Iyer's version of "Human Nature" or Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy," people might give an extra minute or two to listen to Jazz and appreciate it as America's greatest indigenous art form.

Behind the scenes of the Internet...

A couple of weeks ago, I went on a quest with some of the engineers with whom I work.

I'm not an engineer but I love a quest and that's why this little adventure was fun. We went to look for a VHUB, which is a virtual hub site. Here's a technical description of a hub site: Hub sites are way stations on the routing patterns that our bits and bytes take to get over the Intertubes to go from the point of origin to our devices. Typically, a hub site is a physical hut and could be as big as a nondescript building that we pass each day without noticing. But a VHUB is virtual. A piece as small as a shoe box could serve the fiber optics for 20,000 wireline internet customers.(See my post on Data Movers and the Pipes that get our information to us for more details on hubs, pipes and how our Facebook posts, Tweets and Instagram photos get to us.).

But we weren't as interested in the VHUB as we were in the power supply and the transponder and how that power supply talks to the VHUB. It's strange that these contraptions talk to each other, but they share a lot of important information.

A good specimen of the power supply, so we thought, was going to be near Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. The power supply was supposedly at such and such address. There we went and in a typical downtown building, part residential and part office space, a number of small businesses were tapping away on the keys in the midst of a normal business day, using the bits and bytes that we are powering.

I peered through the fuzzy glass of a closed office door. A pile of cash was laying on the table. I point out this detail of the cash because, in this day and age, when it feels like all of our transactions are taking place in this semi-fictional space, where large quantities of money are literally swept from one account to another over the electronic Intertubes, it seems strange to see cash. It seems strange to imagine these brick and mortar places where cash changes hands. Where cash could occupy an entire table.

I can't remember the last time I paid for something in cash. Here we were doing some maintenance on the Intertubes so that people can sweep large amounts of money to each other electronically, virtually, and there was a pile of cash on the table.

I paused to reflect on this detail of the cash while we waited for Ricardo, who works for the real estate company as a gopher, and he had the keys to the office where the power supply was. 20 minutes later he came from another address downtown and opened an office door for us.

"No, this isn't what we're looking for. It's a box about yay big." We gestured the size and shape of a power supply. "Aha," Ricardo retorted and took us to the basement. To a broom closet, really, in the remote corner of the building. Deep underground. In the bowels of the city. Surrounded by brooms, mops and ancient office equipment, we found the object of our quest. With some fiber optic and coaxial cabling strewn around in random fashion, we found our power supply in a strange home. And it was blinking.

Imagine 4 engineers standing around a box with a blinking red light as if it were a bomb. And they were trying to defuse it. With deep concentration, theories were abounding. There were lively discussions of Ohm's Law. Wattage. Voltage. Is it a 3 amp or 7 amp power supply? Will this power supply talk to the VHUB? What's up with that blinking red light?

None of the engineers knew what the blinking meant. But I did. My dad had asked me about the blinking red lights on the power supplies, and several months ago I had asked around to figure out the answer. Failed inverter test. Temp sensor not working. A pile of old insulation was laying on the power supply enclosure. At least the thing was well insulated. But here we were and Ricardo said that red light had been blinking for several years. Since they installed it, he said.

And it seems strange. The critical information for some 20,000 households was just sort of hanging in some limbo because of a blinking red light that nobody knew what meant.

I really wanted to see that VHUB. I'd seen what they look like in a brochure but I wanted to see what it looked like in its milieu. Deep under the ground, it would require another field trip. We could either open the manhole cover and descend into the bowels of old time Seattle. Or we could take the tour that goes through underground Seattle to find the VHUB. Did you know that there is another Seattle right underneath the Seattle we currently know? Maybe they'll build another Seattle on top of this Seattle someday.

Behind the Scenes of the Internet: Infrastructure engineers looking at a power supply powering a device providing fiber optics to 20,000 customers. At least it's well insulated. 

Do we really need an app for that? I still do that manually...

Whenever somebody mentions to me that they have a new app to do some task for them, I can only think of a conversation from the cult classic The Big Lebowski between Brad (played by the late and very, very great Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and the Dude himself. 

Brad: Interactive erotic software. The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic!

The Dude: Yeah well, I still jack off manually.

And I suppose I'm like the Dude. I still do things manually. Most things, really. 

The most used app in my family is probably the Peterson Bird Guide app for birders (great app by the way), so I'm not totally anti-app. And there are some things I don't do manually, though I'm perfectly OK with looking up birds in a hardcover book. 

I've spent a long time questioning our app culture, but a line I saw recently really solidified some of my harsh feelings towards our app-centric culture. It was really paradigmatic of how we have sort of degraded as a society: "I have an app to tell me when it's raining. How cool is that?" Well, actually, it's not very cool. Because if you need an app to tell you if the sun's shining, you're probably missing some real important things in life (you know, like going outside). Bob Dylan called it pretty well in 1965: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." 

When I lived through the first dot com boom of the late 90s, early 2000s, the most lasting line I ever heard was from a fat cat wealthy tycoon (actually he wasn't really a tycoon or a fat cat, but he was definitely living the good life and it was a life to aspire to). His wise line, something I'm still trying to aim toward was about cell phones. At that time, when cell phones (you know, the old flip phones) were still a novelty, people would conspicuously talk on them in public places (we still do, but it's becoming more ingrained into our culture). The cell phone was like a status symbol to look important because you had another conversation that was more important than being present with those who were with you. This almost tycoon (but too wise to be a tycoon) told me: "Kendall, the goal in life is not to be one of those guys standing around with a cell phone in public places. The real goal in life is not to have one of those things." He was right. Hopefully, I'll become so important and lose some of my insecurities enough so that I can ditch my phone and become 100% present in what I am doing. I'll know that I have made it in life when I can ditch my phone. 

In English: "Put your cell phone here/The first to use it pays the bill." (Spanish grammar nerds, note the spelling mistake.)

I grew up with Star Wars and so I like technology. I like the idea of us as a species going to space and exploring other planets and using technology to live longer and better lives, but I feel like we've lost the story a bit. A line that made a big impression on me in college was from an interview with George Lucas. He said, "Technology is only a tool." In Lucas's case, technology is a tool he uses to tell a story. It's interesting that his worst movies were made when he forgot that important life credo, when his movies became about the technology itself and not about the story. 

My cautionary tale for app makers and app users is that we should spend more time thinking about the story, our story. What are we really using that app for? Do we really need an app for that? I use the map apps that everybody else uses and they're fine for getting the general direction of where I am going, but I'll do a little jig in my car the next time (the first time really) that one of those navigational apps actually gives me the right directions to where I'm really going. 

I'd like to live a good life. I don't need an app for that. 50 years from now we're not going to regret not having invented an app for X. We'll regret not having cured cancer, stopped the spread of malaria, or having figured out how not to completely destroy the place where we live.

Doctor Zhivago: A Russian Story of Life Itself

It will all pass--politicians, war --but if there’s one grain of art it will last forever. Tolstoy to Pasternak

I have always hated the old cliché that says that the book is better than the movie. Certainly, there are millions of books that are "better" than their movie adaptations. But we're talking about two different genres. Apples and oranges. And when they're both done well, and with art, why compare? This post will refer to both the book by Boris Pasternak (or at least its English translation) and the 1965 film, directed by David Lean (whose previous film was Lawrence of Arabia) starring Omar Sharif and Geraldine Chaplin, and both are wonderful and different.

Dr Zhivago is my father's favorite film. Over last Thanksgiving, we watched it together and I realized why. The film version is just a huge, fairy tale-like, brilliant synthesis of the story capturing the more melodramatic and less grim aspects of the novel into 3 hours on the big screen.

After seeing the film, I knew I had to read the book to even more fully appreciate the story of the Russian poet doctor.

Zhivago is  a derivation of the Russian word meaning life and the story of Doctor Zhivago is a fanfare for life itself in the midst of the chaos that man creates for himself on this earth with his civil war and politics that destroy him and those around him.

Zhivago, the poet, is a spark of of humanity in a land where the revolutionary intent itself is an original action worthy of art, but then becomes a parade of automatons, of bad decisions, of inhumane consequences. And what is beautiful is that life overcomes despite all the horrors.

For Dr. Zhivago, Yura or Yuri, art is life. And that's how he makes it through the horrors that Russia is suffering. He realizes that "art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and always creates life."

Dr. Zhivago's story is one of history happening to him. Surrounding him throughout his personal story, we see Russian history happening. The Revolution. The Civil War between the Reds and the Whites and all the other factions. Zhivago finds himself part of the Russian story. He goes out on the front of World War I as a doctor and then comes back to a Moscow in the throngs of revolution and starvation. He escapes with his wife to a bucolic existence in a town far off in the Urals only to be kidnapped and to serve as a doctor and a prisoner for Red partisans. Dr. Zhivago lives history, like all of us. But his is a story of life itself as he is so close to all of the horrors taking place around him. It's sad and beautiful. And is life itself.

"Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies."

The story of Dr. Zhivago is one of fateful meetings, chance encounters and re-encounters of characters years later in different circumstances. You get a sense of how the revolution and war and history, life itself, has changed them and how they have survived despite it all. Some characters die, like Pasha, only to be reborn as fearsome military heroes in Strelnikov. Nobody can forget Strelnikov with "his great moral purity and sense of justice." And with each meeting of Lara, all of which happen serendipitously, Yuri's love grows for her, even while he is still in love with his wife.

Strelnikov's Train

The original exuberance for the Revolution can be felt in lines from like "Just think what's going on around us! And that you and I should be living at such a time. Such a thing happens only once in an eternity. Just think of it, the whole of Russia has had its roof torn off, and you and I and everyone else are out in the open! And there's nobody to spy on us. Freedom! Real freedom, not just talk about it, freedom, dropped out of the sky, freedom beyond our expectations, freedom by accident, through a misunderstanding [...] Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and she can't find rest [...] The revolution broke out willy-nilly, like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions--his own personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it--the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. [...] These days I have such a longing to live honestly, to be productive. I so much want to be a part of all this awakening."

Cossacks and Revolution in the Streets

But then we see the horrors of the revolution, which can never sit still and enjoy what it has accomplished without causing more upheavals and violence and death: "it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil, they aren't happy with anything that's on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves." It's all more complicated than what it seems. "It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up!" And mixed up it gets. Everybody has reason to be afraid, even the heroic Red army hero Strelnikov.

Strelnikov is the very embodiment of what a Russian could be in this time--a Red army hero sentenced to death because of his success, because of his devotion to the very cause that the Reds celebrated. His third death in the novel--the real one--is just the epitome of tragedy and there we see Russia die a little.

Strelnikov himself

Pasternak's very candid portrayal of the civil war that takes place after the revolution made it impossible for him to publish his novel in Russia in 1956. When he eventually did get the novel published in Italy and then won the Nobel Prize for it, he did not attend the ceremonies for fear of reprisal by the Soviet government. Fortunately for him, he was dying of cancer and it wouldn't be nice of them to torture a dying man. Even still, publishing it was an act of bravery.

When, by chance, Zhivago scores a duck in a Moscow that is literally starving during the beginnings of the civil war, his family has a party but it is like a betrayal. "You could not imagine anyone in the houses across the street eating or drinking in the same way at the same time. Beyond the windows lay silent, dark, hungry Moscow. Its shops were empty, and as for game and vodka, people had even forgotten to think about such things. And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness, so that duck and vodka, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not even duck and vodka. And this was most vexing of all."

The citizens of Moscow are ripping out fences and benches for firewood and it becomes hard to find one's way around the city as pieces of it are crumbling away. And Dr. Zhivago runs into a centenarian woman digging for mushrooms in the city. "And it's true, you know, the town is getting to be like the woods. There's a a smell of decaying leaves and mushrooms."

As the city crumbles, history seems to be happening around them and still there is jubilance. "This is history. This happens once in a lifetime. Put on your coat." With so much life happening in the city--gun battles, skirmishes, etc.--Dr. Zhivago, though, can't even go out to get basic supplies like milk. "All life in the city was suspended until the situation would be definitively clarified." He reads the official announcement that Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established in Russia.

A new page has been turned. The revolution and its effects are brilliantly described. "And the real stroke of genius is this. If you charged someone with the task of creating a new world, of starting a new era, he would ask you first to clear the ground. He would wait for the old centuries to finish before undertaking to build the new ones, he'd want to begin a new paragraph, a new page. But here, they don't bother with anything like that. This new thing, this marvel of history, this revelation, is exploded right into the very thick of daily life without the slightest consideration for its course."

Love in the time of war

Perhaps the best descriptions are of the landscape and those horrible Russian winters, made even more horrible by the misery taking place around them. "Winter came, just the kind of winter that had been foretold. It was not as terrifying as the two winters that followed it, but it was already of the same sort, dark, hungry, and cold, entirely given to the breaking up of the familiar and the reconstruction of all the foundations of existence, and to inhuman efforts to cling to life as it slipped out of your grasp. There were three of them, one after the other, three such terrible winters, and not all that now seems to have happened in 1917 and 1918 really happened then--some of it may have been later. These three successive winters have merged into one and it is difficult to tell them apart. The old life and the new order had not yet come in contact. They were not yet openly hostile to each other, as when the civil war broke out a year later, but there was no connection between the two. They stood apart, confronting each other, incompatible."

Nobody really does trains quite like Pasternak or David Lean, director of the 1965 film, for that matter. If you've seen the movie, you'll never forget the trains moving through epic snowy landscapes with large firs (filmed mostly in Canada with city scenes in Casillas, Spain) and scenes of destruction along the way. I would say it's some of the most spellbinding cinematography in film history. The novel even includes a section describing how all of the 300+ passengers on the train spent 3 days digging the train out of snow. It's just bigger than life.

Trans-Siberia

The film hits hard. The score and original music by Maurice Jarre stays with you for a long while after watching. There is something about Russian music and I'm not just referring to the great composers. Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky. I remember being in a den of iniquity in a port town in the tropics, experiencing a bacchanal of epic proportions. And it was raucous beyond belief. A keyboard, a guitar, some trumpets, an electric bass, some girls dancing and singing, belting out some cumbias. And then some drunken Russian sailors strolled in and they were bigger than life. There weren't that many of them, but all of a sudden, they belted out in song, each with a bottle of vodka in his hand, and they were much louder than the artificially amplified cumbias. So much louder that patrons were moving outside. The Russians were bigger than life, had so much soul. It was an indelible experience.

There is something deeply poetic about the bigger than life aspect of Russia that Zhivago's story captures so well.

It's like an old Russian folk song that "is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song's sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words."

What is great about Zhivago's story is that it's apolitical at its heart. Great art loses power when it becomes too political because, as the epigraph to this post from Tolstoy indicates, politics passes. Everything is politics, but it's such a fleeting, shortsighted element of human beings. Politics is so far from the truth. Zhivago makes this point when someone calls Marxism a science: "Marxism is too uncertain of its ground to be a science. Sciences are more balanced, more objective. I don't know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics doesn't appeal to me. I don't like people who don't care about the truth." Indeed, "what's going on isn't life--it's madness, an absurd nightmare." Even though it might be inevitable because "gluttons and parasites sat on the backs of the starving workers and drove them to death, and you imagine things could stay like that? Not to mention all the other forms of outrage and tyranny. Don't you understand the rightness of the people's anger, of their desire for justice, for truth?"

It's a time when just knowing--no, just thinking--about someone who might be on the wrong side of the war is enough to arouse suspicion and brings thoughts of the firing squad. A time when feeding yourself and keeping warm by stocking your house with firewood could be and is illegal, but nobody can really keep track of all the laws.

And during the civil war, "White and Red atrocities rivaled each other in savagery, outrage breeding outrage." We witness really grim scenes of torture by the Forest Brotherhood. Zhivago spent 18 months on the front, kidnapped by the Red partisans, and eventually deserts on skis in a moment of inspiration.

What Dr. Zhivago sees on his long walk back to Lara, in his attempt to get back to his family, is just absolutely devastating and about as good as it gets in literature: "For almost half his journey on foot he had followed the railway track. All of it was out of use, neglected and covered with snow. He had passed train after train abandoned by the Whites; they stood idle, stopped by the defeat of Kolchak, by lack of fuel, and by snowdrifts. Immobilized and buried in the snow, they stretched almost uninterruptedly for miles on end. Some of them served as strongholds for armed bands of highwaymen or as hideouts for escaping criminals or political fugitives--the involuntary vagrants of those days--but most of them had become mortuaries and mass graves for the victims of the cold and of the typhus raging all along the line and mowing down whole villages. That period confirmed the ancient proverb, 'Man is a wolf to man.' Traveller turned off the road at the sight of traveller, stranger meeting stranger killed for fear of being killed. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The laws of human civilization were suspended. The jungle law was in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of cave dweller."  The images of trains buried in snowdrifts across all of Siberia are like paintings that stick with you forever.

And when Dr. Zhivago finally reaches Lara's house, her letter left behind, with rats crawling over the apartment, it's just unreal. He has to read the announcements on the wall with the Red propaganda that he needs to read to know all the rules that could break him later. "Only once in his life had this uncompromising language and single-mindedness filled him with enthusiasm. Was it possible that he must pay for that rash enthusiasm all his life by never hearing, year after year, anything but these unchanging, shrill, crazy exclamations and demands, which became progressively more impractical, meaningless, and unfillable as time went by?"

Pasternak keeps revisiting the horrors caused by the revolution. "No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries."

Tonia, his wife, has been swept away from him, exiled in Paris, with his son and his daughter, who he has never met. Tonia's letter to him is devastating and aches with the reality of separation.

But Dr. Zhivago is able to find a tiny bit of brief happiness with Lara in an abandoned house in Varykino, a village far off in the Urals in Siberia. He finds happiness in Lara, who is like "a spring evening. The air punctuated with scattered sounds. The voices of children playing in the streets coming from varying distances as if to show that the whole expanse is alive. And this vast expanse is Russia, his incomparable mother; famed far and wide, martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored, Russia with her eternally splendid, and disastrous, and unpredictable adventures. Oh, how sweet to be alive! How good to be alive and to love life!"

Varykino

The happiness lasts for a short few days and then we have more death and misery amidst all of the horrors. But how Dr. Zhivago makes it, how we all make it through the miseries we have to face each day, is through art. Dr. Zhivago scribbles a note to himself "reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache."

Sure, the Hollywood film is more a love story and the book itself more a recounting of Russian history with all of its tragedies and one man's tragedy in the attempt to not merely exist but to live through it all. But both are a story of life itself. Of the beauty of making life art and art life.