Great Roads of the Pacific Northwest, Vol. 1: The Endless Road to Soggy Saddle

With my hiking partner, I'm working on book project number 2: Great Roads of the Pacific Northwest. Everybody knows about the great hiking in the region, but what about all of those great roads, which are wonderful not only to drive  and ride bikes on but just plain walk. Together, we have a list of some 15-20 roads that we will pare down for a book that will serve as a sort of anti(guide). 

Foggy Bottom on the Road to Soggy Saddle: This is the view that I think of when I think of the PNW

Here's the first entry in our project, a screed on The Road to Soggy Saddle:


When I lived in Ireland, one of the prime additions to my vocabulary was the concept of the local. Your local is the pub by your house, the old standard, the constant steady where you'd go and everybody knows your name. Your local wasn't flashy (unless you lived in a flashy neighborhood) but was good and consistent and had been around for donkey's years. But it was reliable and there was a sense of coming home, which is essentially the origins of the word "pub," which is a public house (Irish, almost by definition, do not ever drink at home...you more than make up for your abstaining  at home by drinking at the pub, which is your home away from home).  

The Olympic Mountains and Whidbey Island from Soggy Saddle

Soggy Saddle is our local. In terms of walks, it's not flashy. It's not a trail to glory carved by thousands of boots on a July day. It's a forest road that leads through clear cuts and demolished land to some decent views. The cynic would say "nothing to write home about," but we keep coming back to it as if Soggy Saddle offered postcard panoramas of a space forgotten. You always know what you're going to get with Soggy Saddle. You don't arrive with great expectations of walking over a glacier or peering up to a rock face that defies gravity or your very threshold for beauty. It's just a walk through broken forest and shrubs. For how close Soggy Saddle is to our home in a relatively small but certainly populated college town of 100,000 or so, Soggy Saddle remains desolate, not a soul in view, which is how I like my walks. 

An ice field and Mar overlooking Bellingham Bay

When you hike in the Cascades, as big as an area that the Cascade encompass, the most common trails welcome the visitor with parking lots that rival those of WalMart. You arrive at your trail on a weekend in late August and there are literally thousands of Subarus full of weekend warrior families getting hike # 3 of 5 for the year. Dads toting packs with babies stowed on top, the family dog roped on top of the Subaru with the rocket carrying case that resides there year round, reducing the fuel efficiency of the Subaru, for the 5 trips up to the mountain that the family makes. They're so civilized. You'll most often be welcomed with a perfunctory hello and not an ill thought would cross the family's mind as you walk by them. They are perfectly OK with hiking this trail with half of Seattle and a good portion of Everett, too. They are so happy.The Washingtonians are so polite about the whole thing it just frightens me. I look forward all week to my outing, drive 100s of miles to what looks like a beautiful location in the guide book thinking I'll be getting some peace and quiet to reflect and just get away for a bit, and I arrive at the parking lot for the trail and I see half of Seattle--well that disturbs me. I know. I'm not from here. And I will always be an alien in this part of the world. Which is weird because I've felt more at home in remote villages in Mexico or on the streets of Shanghai than I do living in my own country in the Northwest, but part of this equation is my belief that if I'm going out to nature to get some R and R. Even in my overpopulated home state of California, it seems easier to find peace and quiet. One does not have to drive far north of San Francisco to get into godforsaken wild and wooly coasts where it seems not a soul has trodden upon. And I like that.

Close Encounters with a Creepy Critter aka Lupe

Which is why I seek out the weird hikes. Soggy Saddle is not even a hike. It's a walk on a logging road that any day now I could return to and share the road with a large logging truck carrying out the last few decent sized trees left here. Actually this is the case when you're driving on the road that leads to the road to Soggy Saddle. Once, when I was driving that road in my pickup with Lupe hanging out the front window a logging truck came so fast and occupying the whole road that I had to take evasive action and swing into a ditch and Lupe flew out the window. But Lupe's a tough dog and she bounced up and sprinted after that logging truck, barking at it, wanting to kick its ass. That's just the kind of dog she is. But I'm the type that recognizes that the road is here so that trucks can get logs and bring them to mills who bring them to Home Depot. In this part of the world we live in houses are made from wood. And you have to be OK with that fact to live here. Just like if you eat meat you should know what it's like to slaughter an animal. Of course, if you know what it's like, you'll never eat a feed farm factory raised animal ever again. But that's another story. I'm OK with the logging trucks and I don't have any illusions about the public lands, which I really love, but they truly are lands of many uses. And the reason there are roads there is not so people can hike or recreate in whichever way they choose--shooting cans, blowing up small animals--but so that we (the public...or the government) can maximize the profits made in their investments in those lands. Just a fact of life that I don't argue with. 

Icicles on the eroded roadside

I'm not happy hiking with half of Seattle. If I wanted to hang out with thousands of people, I would have made my to WalMart to spend my day. It's not that I don't like people because I'm OK hanging out with 23 million people (much more people than there in the whole of the PNW) on the condensed streets of Shanghai. It's just that when I'm outside, I need some quiet with my soul. And that's where Soggy Saddle fits in. It's tranquil because it has been destroyed by people in the past. There's not a false sense of preservation that you get, for example, especially so in National Parks, which are nice and pretty but are just glorified zoos. (Would you really witness animals acting like they do in Yellowstone outside of the park's borders? Of course not!)

What's interesting and telling about a place like Soggy Saddle is that it's so rich with animal life. Rarely do I see spores from animals on any of the glory hikes listed in all the guide books read by everybody else. But every time I'm up at Soggy Saddle I feel like we are going to see a cougar. I've seen some very fresh cougar tracks and scat. I once saw so many steaming piles of bear scat that I had to turn around. Soggy Saddle is crawling with the critters who hightailed it away from those glory hikes with parking lots full of people.

Bobcat, coyote and Lupe tracks. You can see her way up ahead.

There is something deceptively beautiful about Soggy Saddle besides the fact that it's a place not too far from home where we are just about guaranteed not to see anyone else. It's so removed, even if there are slash piles and litter strewn around and bullets laying in the muck. At the gate to the forest road leading to Soggy Saddle, there lies the refuse from a dishwasher. Somebody left their boat there as if it were the detritus from the last great flood. Tarps hang in the swamp around the gate. All other refuse is just haphazardly thrown about like the remains of a battlefield after a bloody fight. It's just god awful. But endearing.

A cure for claustrophobia

There really are 2 kinds of people in this world: Claustrophobes and agoraphobes. We fall definitely into the former category, which is a horrible fate because living in the Northwest, we live engulfed in claustrophobia--constant low-hanging clouds, deep dark forests, haphazardly created towns constructed with no real thought of how to manipulate light, thereby increasing it (the entire purpose of sound architecture), in a place where light comes at a premium for so much of the year. To cure our claustrophobia we have to drive to the East side, the other side of the Cascades where Western Washingtonians feel an impending sense of agoraphobia. They look down on the eastern side not just because the people are different but they just can't seem to fathom the open skies, the abundance of light. It's quite scary to them. But that's where I feel at home. Our other cure for claustrophobia is to head up to Soggy Saddle, big and open views of clear cuts and river valleys. It's a sad thing about the clear cuts, but if there weren't clear cuts, there wouldn't be views. It's really crazy in this evergreen state but it is really, really difficult to find land that hasn't been destroyed by the hands of industry. Even the nice forest walks are second growth. Only tiny pockets of land where even helicopters couldn't pull the trees out of the canyons cliffs so steep no man could log them (which brings up another entry on the Great Roads of the ONW--The Hidden Pockets Where Not Even Helicopters Could Pull Out Trees).

Slash pile, dog, mountain. That's the North Twin Sister lurking over Lupe.

Lastly, the name. Why Soggy Saddle? The day we realized the beauty of Soggy Saddle we snowshoed in the rain up to its hump. No views--the clouds were in the way--and we were so soaked that we were soggy. My partner tried to light a cigarette at the top and well...it was too soggy to light. But there was something so satisfying about the walk. A consistent upwards grade, a climb that offers enough exercise to get the heart going and clear the soul. Hiking in such cold rain we earned our pizza and beer at the North Fork Beer Shrine in Deming, our post-walk ritual and the greatest place in the galaxy. And that to me is a perfect day. An 8-mile hike--quiet with views, nothing extraordinary, a pint or 2 of extraordinary stout and a pizza bigger than my face. 

Ice crystals and sunset over the Lorax mountain range.

Soggy Saddle: If you lived here, you'd be home. And Soggy Saddle is my home away from home. 

Sunset over the Lorax mountain range

Self Confidence

Self confidence and assertiveness should be my New Year’s resolutions every year and should have been my resolutions for all prior years of my existence. When I'm at my worst, it's my self confidence that kills me, which is unfortunate because of what Jack Welch said: "Control your destiny or someone else will."

Here’s what I know about self confidence:

It’s a skill (and therefore trainable).

Definition: Self confidence is the ability to believe in yourself to accomplish something bigger than yourself.

Self confidence is a function of repetition, which means don’t bail after the first fail. Here is one of the most important rules for life: Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. It takes somewhere around 10,000 hours to master something, anything worth mastering (an instrument, a language, a specialized skill). Even youthful prodigies like Mozart and Jimi Hendrix failed during those first 10,000 hours at their crafts. And guess what? There are like 10 billion to 1 odds that you are at Hendrix or Mozart levels of innate talent in whatever it is you do.

To be self confident, you need to be the captain of your ship.

Get away from people who tear you down.

You have to catch yourself when you’re good: Analyze what went well instead of what went wrong. Example: A basketball team down on its luck should analyze tapes of when it did things well rather than be hyper-focused on the mistakes it made. Self-awareness of faults is important to a point but then you need to key in on what you’re good at. You have to know your core competencies and transfer them to the right fights. Picking the right fights is another component to this crucial battle.

Make a list of all the things you are, a note to yourself. A mantra to repeat every day. Here’s mine:

Kendall, congrats on living an extraordinary life. You’re persistent, approachable, and you know people. You know how to dig into the heart of a problem and solve it. You’re a storyteller—when you write, you’re like a sculptor, slowly but persistently getting to the marrow of the issue, and sucking it down. You know how to connect with people and find out what makes them tick. Congrats on getting a PhD before you turned 40. And an MBA. You are a Master Doctor Master. But what you really are is a writer and a researcher. And an enjoyer of life.

Bottom line: No one will believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself. Practice believing in yourself. Read this mantra every day.

Lastly, a thought from an amazing human being for these times: Elon Musk. Musk is at the nexus of Transport, Energy and Space Travel. He’s CEO and Chief Technology Officer of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity.

In an interview with Chris Anderson, curator for TED, Anderson asked Musk just how he does it. What is Musk’s special sauce???

Musk has no real answer at first. Here is a guy who is going to get us to Mars before any national government will and he’s kind of speechless, which isn’t a sign of a lack of self confidence but a quiet confidence. Anderson then suggests that it’s Musk’s ability to think at a system level of design—to pull together design, technology and business into one package and synthesize it in a way very few people can.

And here’s the critical thing: Musk can feel so confident in that click-together package that he can take crazy risks and bets his fortune on it.

Musk’s response to Anderson's statement is that you should start with a framework for thinking—physics—and boil things down to fundamental truths. Which is true. Fundamentally. But it’s his confidence that does it. You can’t get to Mars without some confidence.

1980 Dead: On the Cusp (again)

Every year for the 30-year history of the Grateful Dead’s touring history is a year of transition. You could calmly and sanely assert that 1972 is a transition year. And so are 1973 and 1974, it could easily be argued. 1971 and 1977 are transition years, too. Oh, but 1970, what a year of transition that was. And 87 and 90, too, man. And you could keep going for hours, debating how each year is a year of transition.

Blindfold a Dead aficionado and put on a recording from just about any show and they will easily  be able to tell the vintage of the show. Because each of these years of transition is so marked, so inherently different from the other years of transition. Because they’re all years of transition with wild change, exploration. Each song takes on a new life depending on the year, the show, the synergy with the audience, which is why I can’t get my hands on enough Dead show recordings. So, I picked up Dave’s Picks Volume 8 from 11/30/1980 from the Fox Theater in Atlanta, and we find the Dead in fine form.

In 1980, the Dead are really on the cusp. Once again, they're just always on the cusp of something great because they’re always in transition, never afraid of changing and digging deeper and going further. It’s what’s missing, what would send them to the other side of the cusp, that makes the journey worth it for the Dead. And makes collecting the next show so worth it.

1980 Dead

1980 is a vintage that I wanted in my collection and this show is a fine representation of that year. I had to get my hands on some 1980 Dead because my old Dead Set CD wore out from playing it so much.

I also had a theory about 1980 that I wanted to test out. I like all eras of the Dead but I definitely lean toward that magic window of 1972-74 as my preferred era. Even still, Brent has the most technical chops of the Dead keyboardists (if we’re not including Bruce, who most Deadheads seem to ignore when considering this question) and his tenure during the 80s is outstanding. But while Brent has the most chops, both on keys and certainly as background vocalist, with his harmonies much cleaner than those of Donna, what I don’t like about the Brent years is that there’s just a bit too much Brent. What was great about Keith, and is probably the reason I like 72-74 as my favorite years, is that he knew how to get out of the way. Keith’s magic was in the understatement. While Brent’s essence is the overstatement. When Keith is on, he’s brilliant. But he never dominates. Brent, particularly in the late 80s, is consistently brilliant but dominates to the point that we don’t hear the magic from the other guys in the band. In fact, in many instances, Brent must be covering up for Jerry and the rest of the boys’ bad nights.

A young Brent Mydland on the keys

But here’s my theory: In 1980, Brent was still the new keyboardist and he was still unsure of himself and he didn’t drown out the other members of the band with the brash 1980s sound of his synthesizer sounds, which every once in a while are titillating, but too often are just plain cheesy. I base my theory also on Dick’s Picks 5 from 12/26/79 Oakland, which has some outstanding playing by Brent but nothing in which he dominates too much.

Despite the fact that every year is different, there is one overarching thesis behind the music of the Grateful Dead: A Rainbow of Sound. In 1980, Brent takes the baton from another great piano player and continues this musical mission. And indeed, he adds his own very unique textures to The Rainbow of Sound. And I don’t mean to take away from his brilliance by noting his tendency toward cheesiness because the Rainbow of Sound is very much alive on this recording, and Brent is a big part of this colorful sound that we love about the Dead.

1980 Garcia with Tiger. He got really good sounds with this guitar

There  was another reason I picked up 11-30-1980. The setlist. There were a couple of songs that were a bit lacking in my collection--a “Saint of Circumstance,” the promise of a truly exploratory post-hiatus “Playing in the Band,” a “Bird Song” (always one of my favorites), an extraordinary “Scarlet Begonias-->Fire on the Mountain,” which does really cook and is different but stands up to the 77 versions of this mammoth combination of songs. Jerry's playing is really sizzling. But what stuck out, besides the songs I wanted, were the little details. One of the best versions that I know of “Little Red Rooster.” “Feel Like a Stranger” has an extended and very worthy Jerry solo. A tender but powerful “Loser.” “Ship of Fools” has never been performed with such vigor, such tenderness and depth--really enjoyed that one. Another standout is the as-advertised “era-defining ‘Deal.’” The first set clocks in at 100 minutes; “[F]ast or slow, Jerry or Bob, routine or rare: they nail them all.”

My personal favorite from the recording is “The Wheel,” which is one of the slower versions I’ve heard and it’s very serene, calm and uplifting and profound at the same time. Definitely worth having in your collection if you’re a fan of The Wheel. There’s a moment at the end where it sounds like they’re going to transition into Playing, but we go straight into China Doll. (The setlist is not unlike that of Dick’s Picks vol. 29 (May 19th, 1977, also from the Fox Theater.) It’s funny to hear this hesitation, the reluctance between the players--the drummers are off for the Playing segue but Jerry takes it back down to China Doll. Here, we know the band is just really making it up as they go. It truly is fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants music. Totally unplanned. Seemingly unorganized, yet still it has its own system and the parts fit very well when it all works itself out. And certainly there are musical blunders by our heroes in this recording. But that’s the inherent risk of making music as you go, literally composing a new song every night.

Flawless this show is not but good and worthy it most definitely is.

The sound must also be commented. The Matrix recording--a blend of a Dan Healy soundboard and a Bob Wagner audience tape--sound makes for an imperfect yet warm sound. Big, meaty, spacey, deep, like being stuck in a deep forest with a pagan ritual going on. I’ve been listening to too many (not enough) perfect soundboards lately, so it was nice to hear a more ragged recording but with a deeper verosimilitud.

During the transition from “Space” to “The Wheel,” you can actually hear someone in the crowd quietly ask, “What song is this?” There are a couple of other moments in which we are very close to the intimate conversations that those people around the recording device are having. And these interruptions do not take away from the recording. In fact, they make it more real and more warm. The crowd’s energy is well integrated into the sound of the music. There are certainly imperfections in the recording but these imperfections give it life.

(Another added bonus are the liner notes by Nick Paumgarten, whose New Yorker piece on the Dead is about as canonical as a 2/13/1970 “Dark Star.” Worth checking out.)

I've always loved how the Dead had Oriental rugs on stage, making for a loose atmosphere. It was like they were playing in their own living room

As always for the Dead, the beauty is in the paradox. The imperfection makes for perfect listening. Their playing is serious fun. When they are really tight, telepathically playing each note as if it’s their last, there is a looseness that holds them together. Each individual part is so good that it makes the collective that much better than the sum of all the parts. We're in the meat here for the Dead--they're not in their wild youth of the 60s and early 70s, and they've most definitely hit their stride, but they haven't yet taken that stride for granted. And there’s just enough Brent to keep it very colorful but not too much that we lose what's good about the Dead: the Dead.

Things to be Thankful For

Things That I'm Grateful For:

1) That I was close to my mom as a kid because being close to her taught me to respect women. She gave me a sense of style in how I dress and how I present myself and she has taught and continues to teach me to appreciate food. Also, she taught me to appreciate stories and that's probably why I like to write. She also taught me to be OK with my emotions. I don't know if you've noticed but men who aren't close to their mothers tend to bottle up their emotions, which can have some potentially explosive negative consequences.

2) That I'm an only child not because I'm selfish (I probably am), but because it gave me time to be OK with myself, something I'm also very, very thankful for. It also means that the friends I have are close, because they're like the only family I have.

3) That I like reading (I'm not a boring snob that thinks TV is evil--I do have a few shows that I'm very loyal to and though I don't have TV I really do miss watching sports). But reading helps me think. When you read an author, that is as close as you can be to someone. When we are speaking to people in conversations, it's difficult to organize thoughts and only a rare few can extend a number of thoughts together in a way that's both coherent but without bravado or having to show off to an audience. Sure, writers sometimes show off to their readers and some don't organize their thoughts well but we can close their books or leave their web pages if we don't like them. When I'm stuck in a conversation with someone like this, it just makes me want to grab a book. 

4) That I'm not afraid of getting out of my shell  I've learned more by traveling--both in the US and abroad--than I have completing any other activity. I have an MA, a PhD and an MBA that taught me a few things, but traveling taught me a whole lot more.

5) That I've been fortunate enough to choose where I live and that I've been able to live in awesome places. These are the following places where I've spent 3 seasons  or more in less chronological order: Menlo Park, CA; Walla Walla, WA; San Francisco; Berkeley; Barcelona; Madrid; Dublin, Ireland; Lawrence, KS and Bellingham, WA. These places are extraordinary world class places and all have taught me great things, usually from the inhabitants who lived there. 

6) That People Have Taken a Chance On Me I'm so thankful that people have taken a chance on me. There's a sort of blind leap of faith when you enter into important relationships and I'm thankful that people like my wife or my current boss took a leap of faith to marry me or hire me, respectively. The world is a better place because those things happened. 

7) That I have an ear for music and that I still have hearing left to listen to it If it's worth listening to, it's worth listening to loud. I'm not sure I get the concept of background music and I have a very wide palate for music. Music is the essence of our soul and no art is closer to what we are as humans. Music literally gives a pulse to our lives and makes life meaningful. I'm so glad that I can hear it and be moved by it. When it's good, it's really, really good. People who are immune to music make me think they're immune to life and that would be really sad if true. 

8) That I'm OK with God I think I've talked with God on several occasions. I very much lean science first and I like to see hard data before deciding on things, so it's hard to just take a leap of faith and believe in something that exists only in your head, but sometimes I let my defenses down and it's nice to think that there's a creator, who can also be our adviser, and that there's angels that watch over us.

9) That I met Lupe, my batshit crazy flat-coated retriever/border collie mix, who taught me the meaning of the word Love. Without Lupe, I wouldn't have met Marcos, my Lab/greyhound sweetheart of a buddy, who sweetened the pot for my wife Kirsten when we decided to get married.

With Marcos and Lupe in a beautiful place

False Dichotomies: Edison, Tesla, Jobs, Gates, AC, DC, Humanities, Science, And The Answer Is Always Both Innovation Method

I recently saw a cartoon extolling the evils of Thomas Edison in comparison to the wonders of Nikola Tesla. I have not gone back in time and I have not had the fortune to meet the 2 geniuses, so it’s hard for me to judge the character of either man, but what bothered me was one of the reasons given by the cartoonist for deeming Edison an ass: Because he had a business acumen and was good at promoting his products.

Given, Edison reportedly electrocuted dogs and cats in a PR campaign to prove that Tesla’s Alternating Current was dangerous is enough to deem him an asshole, and most probably he was, but the fact that he knew how to make meaningful products (the Pearl Street Station, the first central power plant in the US) and then promote these products does not make him any less important than Tesla, whose contributions are also important.

 The dichotomy the author of the cartoon was trying to achieve was geek (Tesla) versus non-geek (Edison) and the distinction might be important but very much overly simplified in the cartoon, because the world is better when geeks and non-geeks work together. The world is also better when we stop thinking in false dichotomies and look for those nuanced gray areas where the secrets of life really happen.

 I’d like to chew on the nuances in the space between geek and non-geek and other false dichotomies—Government/Business, Open/Closed Systems, Microsoft/Apple, AC/DC—and look at how finding some sort of middle ground in a spirit of collaborative competition is what makes innovation happen. This post was prompted by recent readings of biographies on Tesla and Jobs but morphed into a whole other beast as I sat down and wrote, so that’s why it might appear jumbled, but all of it revolves around the idea of how innovation happens in the gray areas.

 The times that Jobs and Tesla lived in are not that different. The Gilded Age Tesla occupied was a wild time with banks and railroads failing, the economy crashing, but even with all the chaos an Age of Invention was taking place. Sound familiar? The parallels between the late 19th century’s attempts at electrification and our own age in disseminating broadband are uncannily similar. Just as rural electrification took time (not until the 1940s did most rural areas have electricity, despite the US having a rural economy), now we are facing the difficulties of the digital divide and there is a notable disparity between those who have access to broadband and those who don’t.

 It’s strange that we always forget that necessity is the root of innovation. When we can’t rely on Big Government or Big Business, inventors make it on their own with really mad ideas. Even still, the dichotomy between Government and Business—just as real of a debate then as it is now—is a false one because being anti-government is most definitely not pro-business. The two behemoths work best in partnership and when little guys find their place in the space between the two. It’s sad that the current public debate has been debased and simplified so much that people actually think that being against the government helps business when so many of our innovations (electrification and broadband Internet are the first to come to mind) come from the great partnership between government and business, though surely there is a time when government needs to get out of the way and let business do its job. After sparking the innovation with research grants and the like, because businesses have a hard time working on their own when it comes to innovating for the long term or for longer out than the reporting of next quarter’s operating results, government needs to find a position that doesn’t stifle innovation. It’s also curious that Tesla and Edison operated in this strange space between Big Government and Big Business that was widened when both behemoths were failing. (But then Edison became Big Business and Tesla joined Westinghouse who became Big Business.)

Thinking about our geek/non-geek dichotomy, on the geek spectrum Steve Jobs falls into the non-geek area (but of course with a lot of geek creds). Like Edison, as a non-geek (he couldn’t program), a businessman first, asshole, his lack of geekiness in a milieu of geeks (computer programmers), combined with his innate business acumen and even his tendency to be an asshole, were what helped him to create great products that benefit society.

 Jobs pays homage to Edwin Land of Polaroid who made reference to the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, which represents the San Francisco Bay Area of Jobs’s time, where you have engineers at Ames and the legendary Stanford Engineering Department but you also have a rich music and cultural scene that inspired creative thought and was really pushing boundaries. Jobs’s greatest contribution to world history was that he obsessed over being at the nexuses of sciences and the humanities, technology and liberal arts, commodities and art. And nobody capitalized on this important intersection more than Jobs, as the iPod perfectly exemplifies, and only Da Vinci did it as beautifully.

Not an engineering geek per se, what Jobs excelled at was obsessing over a product to the point where he made the product truly meaningful to human beings. Jobs’s father, a mechanic and hobbyist cabinet maker, taught him that you have to build the back of cabinets right even though you don’t see them, a classic wood worker’s mantra. This lesson from his father isn’t surprising given Jobs’s attention to detail on products. 

Having grown up in the Bay Area, I deeply relate to Jobs’s obsession with the elegant design simplicity of Eichler homes (Eichlers are the little details I really miss about home)—clean modernism made for the masses of engineers, doctors and professors, condensed along the 280 corridor, particularly in the South Bay Area. In many ways, the simplicity of Eichler homes became a model for the iPod and the first Mac. 

Working for a powering solutions company that makes power supplies for broadband applications, I appreciated Jobs’s obsession with power supplies as a way to improve product and the power supplies’ very importance in how Jobs innovated computing. Geeks like Wozniak paid little attention to the analog and very mundane power supply, but Jobs, because he was obsessed with detail, obsessed over the power supply in the Apple II. In particular he wanted to provide power in a way that would allow the Apple II to go without a fan, and this lack of fans is something that characterizes Apple products to this day. The less is better mantra makes Jobs’s products more useful. Jobs dropped by Atari where he used to work and visited Rod Holt, a chain-smoking Marxist who turned Jobs onto power supplies like those used in oscilloscopes, which instead of switching power on or off 60 times per second, switched power thousands of times in a second, allowing it to store power for a longer time and release less heat as a bi-product. Hence, Apple’s fan-less products created fans of efficient and beautiful products.

 For Jobs, packaging was key and he knew how to package from the get-go. Wozniak deserves the credit for the design of the Apple computer’s clean circuit board and related operating software, which was one of the era’s great feats of solo invention. But Jobs was the one who integrated Wozniak’s boards into a friendly package, from the power supply to the sleek case. He also created the company that sprang up around Wozniak’s machines while Wozniak was more like a goofy geek who just wanted everybody to have fun and not get caught up in Jobs’s tirades or the idea of making a profit from the enterprise. Noble but naïve ideas, but the world is better because Jobs promoted products with unique packaging.

 The day Jobs got Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1979 to “open the kimono” and show him what Xerox’s West Coast skunk works division was working on was a historic day that put Apple on the map. Jobs instantly recognized that PARC was sitting on a gold mine and “borrowed” so many ideas that PARC was working on, like a GUI with a bitmapped screen and the mouse. Per Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” The difference is artists know how to package their theft well.

When people complain about Apple products, they complain about their tight integration and the notion that the products are packaged too well, as if it were a bad thing. It wasn’t as if Jobs just stole PARC’s mouse to commercialize it. He took an entirely theoretical idea with little to no practical application and made it user friendly. PARC’s mouse couldn’t drag items around on the screen and really couldn’t be used for anything practical when Jobs first saw it.

Jobs’s team ran with the desktop metaphor theorized by PARC and transformed it into virtual reality by allowing the user to directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate desktop icons. Using complex coding, they made regions in which windows could overlap each other, something that we take for granted now but was a big deal in its time. What makes Apple products is the tight vertical integration between application software, operating system and hardware device. Jobs was all about control and the closed system that Jobs championed is anti-hacker, anti-free spirit and against some of the espoused ideas of his 60s ideals. No time in our history represents such strange contradictions.

But Jobs was a man of many contradictions and that he could stand in between these contradictions is what made his ideas so innovative. As Walter Isaacson, author of his biography points out: Jobs “was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.” Once again, here we are back at the idea of false dichotomies and the notion that innovation happens in the gray areas.

In his dedication to tight integration, Jobs was so strong-willed that he didn’t want his creations mutated by unworthy programmers. As ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber said, tinkering with Jobs’s products “would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.” Jobs instituted such practices as designing a case so that it couldn’t be opened with a screwdriver just to keep people from tinkering.

One thing I learned from reading about Jobs’s life was that we have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose and the false dichotomy between Microsoft and Apple, and nowadays it’s Apple versus Google. Jobs and Bill Gates were tighter as friends and collaborators than I would have imagined. One of Jobs’s more humble moments comes when he convinced Gates to still design software for the Mac and got an investment from Microsoft in Apple: “Bill, thank you for your support of this company. I think the world’s a better place for it.” And it’s true that these 2 very different philosophies work better for everybody both when they’re competing and working in harmony at the same time in a sort of collaborative competition.

The Open and fragmented versus Closed and integrated question when it comes to operating systems and computing products will be a perennial one, but I’m a believer that the answer is always both. Advancement of humankind by putting the best tools in our hands only happens when we utilize the advantages of both these competing paradigms and what they have to teach us. The tidy user experience, unified field theory, a testament to Job’s control and belief in simplicity and unity doesn’t allow the tinkering and customizing a product might need for certain applications that a Gates-philosophy product would give us. The answer is always both, and both Jobs and Gates came to that conclusion in a 3-hour discussion they had near Jobs’s death after Gates walked through Jobs’s back gate. What surprises, even more than Jobs keeping a rather simple house instead of a mansion, just allowing Gates to walk in through the back door, is the deep friendship the two had, and the (dare I say it) heart-warming discussions the 2 purported adversaries had. 

Just like we have a Jobs because we had a Gates pushing him, and vice versa (coincidentally they were born in the same year), we have a Tesla because we had an Edison pushing him.

Much has been made of Edison not having invented the light bulb, an urban myth commonly repeated in polite conversation because nobody can think of the person who did. Let’s credit a number of scientists and inventors who either worked in unison or borrowed each others’ ideas in a spirit of collaborative competition, which also marks Tesla and Edison’s divisive but productive rivalry. In the end, Edison was the first to make a commercially practical incandescent light and the first to market the light bulb to households, but much credit must be given to his predecessors.

Edison was strong at promoting his inventions. Tesla worked for a time as a ditch digger because he could not convince others of the worthiness of his AC inventions while Edison furthered his campaign against AC. Tesla’s AC eventually won out in its time but there are a number of advantages to DC in certain applications: safer low voltage operation, increased efficiency, seamless transfer, use in electronics and battery applications. The competitive collaboration, because their lives did touch, though not usually in friendly ways, was what made innovation happen in power.

While Jobs found use for other people’s inventions, Tesla sometimes suffered when he experimented without thought for use of his inventions, which isn’t really bad, but just made it harder for him. Jobs made the important contribution of making technology more than just technology for technology’s sake but for real and practical use. Tesla, though genius, had a hard time crossing the dichotomy and finding the middle grounds between technology/invention/art and mundane human tasks whereas Jobs succeeded when he got that very subtle notion of not being a programmer/technologist or really a “true” businessman, but understanding the importance of being at the nexus between the two where creativity happens.

In the end, we have to let go of false dichotomies, which doesn’t mean we don’t fight for our ideals (which all of these innovators did). We just have to know when to concede and where to find the middle ground that is really meaningful. It’s hard work, but somebody’s gotta do it.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The title of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is so great that this review/reflection/summary of the novel will have no other name. 

As the title suggests, there are 2 stories that slowly but deliberately coalesce, one about a hard-boiled wonderland in a semi-futuristic Tokyo (and what Tokyo wouldn’t be futuristic for a Western American?) and the other about the End of the World, creation of the main character’s consciousness, a strange world where people seem to live eternally but without mind and without shadow. 

The End of the World imagined by the main character/narrator is not unlike a voyage I once took to the end of the world: Finisterre, Spain, which for a long time was literally the end of the known world for Europeans at this most northwestern point of the Iberian Peninsula. Prior to Columbus’s sailing for the New World, one would look out from a viewpoint and could only imagine a deep dark space filled with monsters of the unknown beyond the horizon. This not knowing, this battle with the unknown, eternal, but in a way peaceful, because deliberately there is a peace in not knowing, is like Murakami’s End of the World. “There is no beyond,” the librarian at the End of the World says to our protagonist. “Did you not know? We are at the End of the World. We are here forever.” 

Our protagonist’s job at the End of the World is to read Old Dreams that come in the skulls of unicorns that the Librarian hands him ad nauseam until his job is “finished.” 

Our protagonist in the Tokyo of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland, whose consciousness is creating this End of the World, is a Calcutec who shuffles information and his shuffling password is “End of the World.” And we begin his story wandering through an infinite labyrinth of hallways—one imagines an MC Escher painting— in a skyscraper that seems to have no end and through a waterfall to the laboratory of an old Professor, who is the mad scientist responsible for rearranging our protagonist’s consciousness so that he can shuffle. In a mad experiment, Calcutecs, shufflers of information, maintain the sanctity of information, transferring it through the tubes of thought.

In his Calcutec training, our protagonist is told by the System: 

After a certain age—our calculations put it at twenty-eight years—human beings rarely experience alterations in the overall configuration of their consciousness. What is commonly referred to as self-improvement or conscious change hardly even scratches the surface. Your ‘End of the World’ core consciousness will continue to function, unaffected, until you take your last breath […] All efforts of   reason and analysis are, in a word, like trying to slice through a watermelon with sewing needles. They may leave marks on the outer rind, but the fruity pulp will remain perpetually out of reach. Hence, we separate the rind from the pulp. Of course, there are idle souls out there who seem to enjoy just nibbling away on the rind. In view of all contingencies, we must protect your password-drama, isolating it from any superficial turbulence, the tides of your outer consciousness. Suppose we were to say to you, your End of the World is inhered with such, such, and such elements. It would be like peeling away the rind of the watermelon for you. The temptation would be irresistible: you would stick your fingers into the pulp and muck it up. And in no time, the hermetic extractability of our password-drama would be forfeited. Poof! You would no longer be able to shuffle.

This whole description of shuffling and password-drama seems like a strange metaphor for being a worker bee in our current Information Age, shuffling through data on spreadsheets or in the infinite library and parallel universe unto itself, the Internet.

The mind goes when your shadow dies in the strange dimension that exists in our protagonist’s consciousness at the End of the World. When this happens, the shadow dying, the mind won’t matter, according to the Colonel who shares a room with our protagonist at the End of the World. “It will go, and with it goes all sense of loss, all sorrow. Nor will love matter. Only living will remain. Undisturbed, peaceful living.” Here is life’s great dilemma in a nutshell. We want peace but we only get peace when we are at war, struggling with life’s big ideas. It would be nice to not have a mind. Indeed, maybe peaceful. The mind is imperfect, “but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow.” But where do they lead? To oneself. “That’s what the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere.” The fear of losing oneself or one’s mind when the shadow dies elicits the question of eternality. And belief. Because “to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind […] When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the the way of the mind.” Which puts us in a strange position. Do we choose eternality, peace, and not having a mind? Or do we choose life and all of the inherent problems it presents? 

The End of the World is a visualization, a mapping of the mind, its core consciousness. As the protagonist creates memories, he’s creating a parallel world. Professor: “The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound, painters do the same for color and shape. Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels. It’s the same basic logic. Of course, as encephalodigital conversion, it doesn’t represent an accurate mappin’, but viewin’ an accurate, random succession of images didn’t much help us either.” It would be amazing to transpose our minds into a world that others can see and hear, and this is what great art does.

The idea of shuffling shows the mind as a black box. As the Professor informs us: “Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself. That’s your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity’s last terra incognita.” The protagonist of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland thus becomes part of an information warfare as in his shuffling he carries the Professor’s data from experiments. The Calcutecs and the Semiotecs are at war and our protagonist’s mind is the booty, but the Calcutecs and Semiotecs are two sides of the same coin. One protects information while the other steals, and they’re like the snake that is constantly biting off its tail. Not unlike the debate we have today with our information, privacy and the NSA and Wiki-Leaks and everything in between. We want privacy but we choose a form of communication that puts our lives into a strangely permanent universe, preserving it for posterity and for everybody to see, if they can just get through a few clicks of a password-drama.

The Library of Babel

The Internet, the End of the World, is this endless circle of data, not unlike Borges’s ficción “The Library of Babel.” With the great power that the Internet bestows upon us comes great responsibility and great questions: Who owns this information? Who owns information? Does it really matter? Can you really own it? The Chinese don’t seem to think that you can own Intellectual Property, and they have a really strong point there, because you can avoid the drama of having your information stolen or having your privacy infringed upon. Because, really, Who owns information? Does privacy exist? Which is why so many open source systems seem to be taking off even in the West. You can avoid the whole drama of having your information stolen by making every piece of data “open” and forgetting this whole notion of privacy, which really was a fiction anyway. The information warfare continues, though, as information is the new gold in our Gold Rush. 

What we get in Murakami’s novel is a strange, complex, but really fun theorization of the mind and a look at life in the Information Age, and is highly recommended for those who love having their minds transported to other dimensions. 

Just Outside of Outer Mongolia: Paul Pena and Tuvan Throat Singing

I’m not one to repeat watching a documentary but, though the filmmaking process was kinda shoddy and unprofessional, Genghis Blues is right up my alley and for the second time in two viewings it brought me to tears.

 

The poster for Genghis Blues

The premise of Genghis Blues is the journey of blues man Paul Pena to Tannu Tuva after he learns the techniques of Tuvan throat singing, hearing it come in on a Moscow radio station on his shortwave radio but, like any great story, goes a lot deeper than that and hits me at an intersection of a number of my interests.

Firstly, the documentary strikes at probably one of my hugest passions: Music. Paul Pena was an underappreciated San Francisco bluesman who played with T-Bone Walker’s band and opened for the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band, and is probably most famous for writing “Jet Airliner,” made popular by the Steve Miller Band. He only really made 2 albums, the most famous being New Train, which has an upbeat barbecue rock sound perfect for happy picnics. Pena, though, could play a sophisticated blues infused with the knowledge of Jazz scales, and it’s tweaked a little bit. Just how I like it.

What blew me away about the story told in the documentary is Pena’s enormous effort and passion put into learning not only Tuvan throat singing but learning the Tuvan language. If you’ve never heard of Tannu Tuva, it’s just outside of Outer Mongolia and was only a recognized country between 1921 and 1944, after which it was swallowed by the Soviet Union, and is now part of the Russian Federation. Like any country engulfed by an empire, its language, culture and traditions are threatened by extinction, a fact made starker by the Tuvans’ nomadic tendencies, which make it difficult to exist in our current world.

Tuvan throatsinging utilizes the art of hitting up to 3 notes at a single time in complicated overtones and strange pitches and harmonies, unrecognizable by the western musical language. Sonically, hearing the singing is like visiting another dimension. At one of the last Grateful Dead shows I went to, I was able to hear the Gyuto Order of Tibetan monks chant with their overtone chordal chant style of singing. And though it wouldn’t be something I’d want to listen to for more than a half hour, hearing otherworldly voices with 25,000 people was an extremely powerful experience. The Tuvan throat singing is also powerful but, in many cases, it’s just one singer who is making these strange sounds and the tones that the Tuvans can achieve are even much wilder.

Secondly, the movie hit me at my second biggest passion: Travel. Paul Pena is the perfect traveler. Pena is such a huge bear of a man and emanates an enormous warmth and kindness. Paul’s character is one that the Tuvans immediately gravitate toward because of his generous spirit. Pena is completely blind and has to be led around through the strange country by a wonderfully friendly and adventurous Tuvan guide, and you can see the strong bond that develops between the two in their travels. It must be so wild and difficult to travel through such a strange country in a world in which people get 95% of the information about their surroundings through their eyes.

 

Pena and Kongar-ol Ondar on a river, the subject most common to Tuvan throat singing songs

Tuva is about as strange as it comes in the world of travel. At a topical glance, the wild steppes don’t look too much different than Montana, but clearly we are in another world when we hear the strange languages and see the customs of the nomadic Tuvan people, who are made up of Uyghurs, Turks, Huns and other ethnics groups. It’s another time’s forgotten space, and produces a feeling I experience when I ponder the central steppes of Asia. If you’ve ever read Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, you know what I’m writing about. There is just something so otherworldly that it becomes almost like another planet. One imagines a world from a science fiction film the 1950s, but just a bit more weird.

Pena’s humility is such that people know that he is genuinely blown away that the Tuvans find him to be such an excellent throat singer, and it’s amazing that he has such deep appreciation for this random far flung place. The Tuvans respect his genuine passion for the music and the place because he genuinely respects them. This mutual respect is real and powerful.

 

The friendship develops between Pena and Kongar-ol Ondar, master Tuvan throat singer

Pena is versatile as a musician—his great ears are what allow him to learn both the Tuvan language and the strange singing style. I’m no expert in Tuvan throat singing, but it’s clear that Pena gets all of the little nuances that make it unique, and that is why he wins the throat singing contest. There’s something about his spontaneous demeanor, one that is so essential for a musician who works in improvisatory music styles, and this spontaneity also makes him a great traveler. He doesn’t break stride when his guitar string breaks on stage and he is handed a traditional Tuvan instrument that he plays as if he was born with it in his hands.

Pena’s generous spirit of adventure gave me deep homesickness for the San Francisco Bay Area, where people are so open to new experiences and different kinds of people.