The Center Can Hold
Tonight is the biggest debate of the election season for the Democrats. And it's in my home state. I wish I could be at the Kodak Theater watching, but there are two big problems: it's 300 miles away and I don't have a ticket. So...I'll watch it on my computer (I don't have cable either).
I've enjoyed this year's election quite a bit. I love seeing candidates battle for the brass ring. And there has been plenty of battling on both sides. If you love politics and you aren't excited about this election you don't have a pulse. The only down side is that major news in Washington and Iraq is being lost in all of the election hoopla. The press seems to have forgotten that the world doesn't stop during campaign season.
In the clash between Clinton and Obama what is interesting to me is just how similar these candidates are in terms of substance. If you look at their views on the domestic and foreign front it's as if they are the same candidate. Yes, Obama came out against Iraq early, but he wasn't part of the Senate back then. My guess is that if you look at the voting records of each candidate in the Senate over the last couple of years they have been essentially two peas in a pod. They are both political centrists. Neither is liberal in my book.
The difference between the two is not one of substance. It's all about style and background. If you want charisma and a post-boomer you go for Obama. If you want a boomer who minds the details you go for Hillary. And maybe that's why this campaign has become so personal. They can't discuss substantive political differences because they don't have any. Their key differences are in the realm of personality. As a result, you have Clinton talk about how Obama is a babe in the woods; and yesterday Obama talked about Clinton as if she was a tired old, bitchy grandmother.
The left of the Democratic wing has globbed on to Obama as a kind of savior. The word "Kennedy" keeps coming up both in terms of endorsements and role models. It's a funny and ironic thing to see because the last time this happened, the person in question was a young, very smart man from Arkansas untested in national politics, Bill Clinton. In the end, Clinton disappointed the left sorely because he ran a centrist presidency. Why the left thinks that Obama will run a more left oriented presidency is beyond me. There is nothing in his record to indicate that this will be the case.
I'd be happy with Obama as president, but he wouldn't be a liberal. He would, like Bill Clinton before him, disappoint Democrats on the left. My view is that liberal politics are almost dead in this country. This is a country that almost always leans to the right. It took a depression and a war with 50,000 dead to get it to lean to the left. Except in those extraordinary times, this country has been dominated by an ethos that hates government, hates taxes, is suspicious of intellectuals and is all about the power of the individual. Given this ethos, the left can only influence the political process, they can't dominate it.
I still favor Hillary Clinton over Obama because I like people who mind details and I am inherently distrustful of those who are charismatic. That said, I will be more than pleased to see either in the White House. It will be a relief to get back to centrist based political policy after eight years of the hard right lunacy of Cheney and the neocons. There's nowhere to go but up.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Sex and The Singer
OK, I know what you're thinking with this title. But get your mind out of the gutter! This isn't about the sexual exploits of singers. Sorry.
I've been listening to one CD a lot lately, Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie. In the liner notes, it talks about how Sinatra prepared: cutting down on smoking and taking a steam bath to protect his voice. He'd come out in a tuxedo with a handkerchief folded oh so right and entertain, a man's man singing his songs.
There were a lot of guys like that at the time, men with a swagger singing standards in cabarets. And they are almost all gone now. You have Tony Bennett still crooning amazingly at 70 plus or however old he is. And then you have Michael Buble. But Buble isn't a man's man, he's just a cute little boy toy. Real men sing rock or rap nowadays. They wouldn't touch singing standards. The exception of course is Rod Stewart, who somehow parlayed imitating Sarah Vaughn (something drag singers have been doing for quite some time) into a second career. But how long can a guy sing "Do You Think I'm Sexy" in a spandex suit? He's always had a little of the drag queen in him.
The world of singing standards in cabarets has shrunk tremendously since its hey day. And if you look at the roster of singers in these plush hotel singing clubs they are almost all female. Some are old. Some are young, tall glasses of water who know how to fill out a black dress. But singing standards is now almost solely a girl's game. And if things in the US don't work out and they are blonde, they can always try their hand at it in Japan.
For a female singer, it's a better gig I think than any other alternative. Country music, as I noted in a post a while back, has in contrast to cabaret singing, become a male dominated industry. The reason is simple. The primary audience for country music is now soccer moms. They want to see a hunk, not get jealous about the slim hips of a singing siren. Female singers in country music are a vanishing breed.
A female singer can sing pop as well. But the parameter space of that is now largely limited to girls around 16 and those who want to be public tarts. If you are over 20 and want to be a female pop singer, the model you pretty much have to follow is that of Madonna: act like a slut and pretend the stage is a strip club. Girls next door are largely out of the picture. Singing talent doesn't matter all that much. I note that Nelly Furtado last year revived her career by transforming herself from a girl next door into the slut du jour. It can be done. And apparently, if the career of Madonna is any indication, you can keep your slut persona going well into your 40s. I wouldn't have thought it possible.
Why have male singers abandoned cabaret singing of standards? I think it has the same answer as "why does country music have so few female singers." It's the audience. What's left of the standards audience consists mostly of middle age males. And they don't want to see some guy doing his thing. They want some sexy girl in a long gown with a dulcet voice. If the soccer moms would stop lusting after Tim McGraw and start listening to cabaret, you'd see males - not just boy toys, drag queens, and spandex wearing aging rockers - enter the marketplace again.
OK, I know what you're thinking with this title. But get your mind out of the gutter! This isn't about the sexual exploits of singers. Sorry.
I've been listening to one CD a lot lately, Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie. In the liner notes, it talks about how Sinatra prepared: cutting down on smoking and taking a steam bath to protect his voice. He'd come out in a tuxedo with a handkerchief folded oh so right and entertain, a man's man singing his songs.
There were a lot of guys like that at the time, men with a swagger singing standards in cabarets. And they are almost all gone now. You have Tony Bennett still crooning amazingly at 70 plus or however old he is. And then you have Michael Buble. But Buble isn't a man's man, he's just a cute little boy toy. Real men sing rock or rap nowadays. They wouldn't touch singing standards. The exception of course is Rod Stewart, who somehow parlayed imitating Sarah Vaughn (something drag singers have been doing for quite some time) into a second career. But how long can a guy sing "Do You Think I'm Sexy" in a spandex suit? He's always had a little of the drag queen in him.
The world of singing standards in cabarets has shrunk tremendously since its hey day. And if you look at the roster of singers in these plush hotel singing clubs they are almost all female. Some are old. Some are young, tall glasses of water who know how to fill out a black dress. But singing standards is now almost solely a girl's game. And if things in the US don't work out and they are blonde, they can always try their hand at it in Japan.
For a female singer, it's a better gig I think than any other alternative. Country music, as I noted in a post a while back, has in contrast to cabaret singing, become a male dominated industry. The reason is simple. The primary audience for country music is now soccer moms. They want to see a hunk, not get jealous about the slim hips of a singing siren. Female singers in country music are a vanishing breed.
A female singer can sing pop as well. But the parameter space of that is now largely limited to girls around 16 and those who want to be public tarts. If you are over 20 and want to be a female pop singer, the model you pretty much have to follow is that of Madonna: act like a slut and pretend the stage is a strip club. Girls next door are largely out of the picture. Singing talent doesn't matter all that much. I note that Nelly Furtado last year revived her career by transforming herself from a girl next door into the slut du jour. It can be done. And apparently, if the career of Madonna is any indication, you can keep your slut persona going well into your 40s. I wouldn't have thought it possible.
Why have male singers abandoned cabaret singing of standards? I think it has the same answer as "why does country music have so few female singers." It's the audience. What's left of the standards audience consists mostly of middle age males. And they don't want to see some guy doing his thing. They want some sexy girl in a long gown with a dulcet voice. If the soccer moms would stop lusting after Tim McGraw and start listening to cabaret, you'd see males - not just boy toys, drag queens, and spandex wearing aging rockers - enter the marketplace again.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Again and Again
The other day I watched the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback. In its construction, it's very similar to An Inconvenient Truth in that it follows the life of one person, in this case Brian Steidle, and one cause. But this movie isn't as glib as An Inconvenient Truth and for me Brian Steidle is a far more sympathetic person than Al Gore.
Brian Steidle was once a captain in the Marines. He loved combat - he is a type A thrill seeker through and through - and when faced with the prospect of four years at a desk job, chose to leave the Marines and sign up for a job as a peacekeeper/observer in Sudan. He had no idea what he was getting into. Instead of playing a significant role in keeping peace, he was forced to simply watch, camera in hand, as the Sudanese government murdered and raped its own citizens in Darfur. He possessed no military hardware. His shooting consisted of picture after picture documenting the horror.
Yesterday, in his State of the Union address, Bush condemned genocide in Darfur. He should be commended for doing so. The question is what exactly will Bush and the US do about it. The toll so far is roughly 300,000 dead and about 2 million displaced. I hope that indeed the US actually does do something.
But the world's track record in dealing with genocide is a poor one. Over the last 100 years, we have idly watched government sanctioned murders, mostly driven by ethnic cleansing, in a number of countries. The toll is over 10 million.
1910s Armenia 1,500,000
1940s European Jews 6,000,000
1970s Cambodia 1,700,000
1990s Rwanda 800,000
2000s Darfur 300,000
It's astounding to me that a world can watch such inhumanity openly on display. My parents, who both managed to survive the Jewish genocide of WWII by a mixture of luck, brains and iron will, used to always say that the reason that the world did nothing during the Holocaust was that the world hated Jews. In my parent's view, many in western Europe and the US were actually happy to see the Holocaust happen.
This harsh assessment is clearly one that I don't share. Rather, my own view is that the magnitude of human suffering in each of these cases is so great that it is impossible for others to comprehend. In my father's town, there were twenty thousand Jews before the Germans invaded. About 100 survived. In his region in the Ukraine, there were over one million. About 1000 survived. The annihilation was thorough, complete and barbaric involving both Germans and Ukrainians. In the remembrance book of my father's home town written by the survivors, you can read descriptions of German soldiers literally taking babies by their thighs and ripping them open.
Faced with barbarity of such magnitude, the response seems to be one where outside governments capable of intervening turn away. Exactly at the time when they are needed, their revulsion to what they see makes them feel powerless. The problem seems too great and they are repulsed.
In the case of Darfur, outside African nations seem incapable of doing anything positive, just as they were incapable in Rwanda in the 1990s. China, which is deeply economically involved in Sudan, simply wants their oil and seems more than willing to let the Sudanese government engage in ethnic cleansing. And similar to Rwanda, the US has done nothing of substance in Darfur. This country talks a good game that as the world's sole democratic superpower it has a moral duty to help those in need. It's time for us to deliver.
The other day I watched the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback. In its construction, it's very similar to An Inconvenient Truth in that it follows the life of one person, in this case Brian Steidle, and one cause. But this movie isn't as glib as An Inconvenient Truth and for me Brian Steidle is a far more sympathetic person than Al Gore.
Brian Steidle was once a captain in the Marines. He loved combat - he is a type A thrill seeker through and through - and when faced with the prospect of four years at a desk job, chose to leave the Marines and sign up for a job as a peacekeeper/observer in Sudan. He had no idea what he was getting into. Instead of playing a significant role in keeping peace, he was forced to simply watch, camera in hand, as the Sudanese government murdered and raped its own citizens in Darfur. He possessed no military hardware. His shooting consisted of picture after picture documenting the horror.
Yesterday, in his State of the Union address, Bush condemned genocide in Darfur. He should be commended for doing so. The question is what exactly will Bush and the US do about it. The toll so far is roughly 300,000 dead and about 2 million displaced. I hope that indeed the US actually does do something.
But the world's track record in dealing with genocide is a poor one. Over the last 100 years, we have idly watched government sanctioned murders, mostly driven by ethnic cleansing, in a number of countries. The toll is over 10 million.
1910s Armenia 1,500,000
1940s European Jews 6,000,000
1970s Cambodia 1,700,000
1990s Rwanda 800,000
2000s Darfur 300,000
It's astounding to me that a world can watch such inhumanity openly on display. My parents, who both managed to survive the Jewish genocide of WWII by a mixture of luck, brains and iron will, used to always say that the reason that the world did nothing during the Holocaust was that the world hated Jews. In my parent's view, many in western Europe and the US were actually happy to see the Holocaust happen.
This harsh assessment is clearly one that I don't share. Rather, my own view is that the magnitude of human suffering in each of these cases is so great that it is impossible for others to comprehend. In my father's town, there were twenty thousand Jews before the Germans invaded. About 100 survived. In his region in the Ukraine, there were over one million. About 1000 survived. The annihilation was thorough, complete and barbaric involving both Germans and Ukrainians. In the remembrance book of my father's home town written by the survivors, you can read descriptions of German soldiers literally taking babies by their thighs and ripping them open.
Faced with barbarity of such magnitude, the response seems to be one where outside governments capable of intervening turn away. Exactly at the time when they are needed, their revulsion to what they see makes them feel powerless. The problem seems too great and they are repulsed.
In the case of Darfur, outside African nations seem incapable of doing anything positive, just as they were incapable in Rwanda in the 1990s. China, which is deeply economically involved in Sudan, simply wants their oil and seems more than willing to let the Sudanese government engage in ethnic cleansing. And similar to Rwanda, the US has done nothing of substance in Darfur. This country talks a good game that as the world's sole democratic superpower it has a moral duty to help those in need. It's time for us to deliver.
Monday, January 28, 2008
A Different Way of Learning
Over the last couple of months I've been trying to get better at two skills, piano and Yiddish. I don't think I'll ever combine the two and write Yiddish songs, but you never know. In the case of piano, the kind of music I wrote for my last CD and am writing now tends to be piano based. Plus I'm having problems with occasional arthritis and I'm finding the piano an easier instrument to play these days than the guitar. With regard to Yiddish, I'm working on a book where it would be highly desirable for me to be able to read Yiddish with some facility.
In both cases, I come with very rudimentary skills. I took piano lessons for a year or so in my teens and then again in my twenties. Give me some sheet music and I can clumsily make my way through most any song. My knowledge of music theory far outstrips my piano playing ability and that's not saying much.
I spoke Yiddish as a kid and then in Israel when I was in my teens. But my parents are long gone and I haven't spoken it, except with my cat and she doesn't answer back, for almost a decade. My vocabulary is limited to everyday conversation, not the stuff of literature. And I've never spent any time, except for an occasional letter from an Israeli aunt, reading Yiddish. My Yiddish is from the street, crude and loaded with slang.
My goals with both are pretty simple. I want to be able to play my own tunes and a few standards well enough on the piano so that I don't embarrass myself. With Yiddish, I want to be able to read texts without fumbling with the dictionary every third word. It will likely never be a pleasure to read Yiddish, but I don't want it to be such a painful chore.
In expanding my current lousy skills with both, I'm finding out something odd about my learning process. When I was a kid, I had an easy ability to focus on the details. And I'd learn skills by mastering each little detail and building from the ground up. This incremental approach is the way most people learn I'm guessing, especially when they are young. In a language, you learn new words and then try to string them together in sentences using rules of grammar. In music, you learn passage after passage and then string them together in as fluid a way as you can manage.
But I can't employ that detailed-based approach successfully. My brain just doesn't work that way anymore. It's hard to explain and maybe it's the result of already having some rudimentary knowledge of both subjects, but I'm finding that the best way to get better is a top down method. I have to know the flow of the music and sentences first before I can attack and learn the details. I need to know the overlying theory and then apply it to specific examples.
When you're young you just do. When you're old you ask why you are doing it. That difference is one of the reasons you want your soldiers to be young. And I'm guessing that how I'm learning piano and Yiddish nowadays comes from this difference in mindset as well. I need to know the patterns first. Then I can get down to the specifics of hitting a note or speaking a word. It's as if I have a completely different brain than I once did. It's intellectually interesting to observe the change and also very odd.
Over the last couple of months I've been trying to get better at two skills, piano and Yiddish. I don't think I'll ever combine the two and write Yiddish songs, but you never know. In the case of piano, the kind of music I wrote for my last CD and am writing now tends to be piano based. Plus I'm having problems with occasional arthritis and I'm finding the piano an easier instrument to play these days than the guitar. With regard to Yiddish, I'm working on a book where it would be highly desirable for me to be able to read Yiddish with some facility.
In both cases, I come with very rudimentary skills. I took piano lessons for a year or so in my teens and then again in my twenties. Give me some sheet music and I can clumsily make my way through most any song. My knowledge of music theory far outstrips my piano playing ability and that's not saying much.
I spoke Yiddish as a kid and then in Israel when I was in my teens. But my parents are long gone and I haven't spoken it, except with my cat and she doesn't answer back, for almost a decade. My vocabulary is limited to everyday conversation, not the stuff of literature. And I've never spent any time, except for an occasional letter from an Israeli aunt, reading Yiddish. My Yiddish is from the street, crude and loaded with slang.
My goals with both are pretty simple. I want to be able to play my own tunes and a few standards well enough on the piano so that I don't embarrass myself. With Yiddish, I want to be able to read texts without fumbling with the dictionary every third word. It will likely never be a pleasure to read Yiddish, but I don't want it to be such a painful chore.
In expanding my current lousy skills with both, I'm finding out something odd about my learning process. When I was a kid, I had an easy ability to focus on the details. And I'd learn skills by mastering each little detail and building from the ground up. This incremental approach is the way most people learn I'm guessing, especially when they are young. In a language, you learn new words and then try to string them together in sentences using rules of grammar. In music, you learn passage after passage and then string them together in as fluid a way as you can manage.
But I can't employ that detailed-based approach successfully. My brain just doesn't work that way anymore. It's hard to explain and maybe it's the result of already having some rudimentary knowledge of both subjects, but I'm finding that the best way to get better is a top down method. I have to know the flow of the music and sentences first before I can attack and learn the details. I need to know the overlying theory and then apply it to specific examples.
When you're young you just do. When you're old you ask why you are doing it. That difference is one of the reasons you want your soldiers to be young. And I'm guessing that how I'm learning piano and Yiddish nowadays comes from this difference in mindset as well. I need to know the patterns first. Then I can get down to the specifics of hitting a note or speaking a word. It's as if I have a completely different brain than I once did. It's intellectually interesting to observe the change and also very odd.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Another Reason We Need The Middle Class
As you get older, you notice patterns in your experiences. You get enough data from the day to day to make inductive statements. This is especially true when it comes to driving. For instance, it's obvious that young males tend to be lousy drivers. They drive too fast and are often too busy talking to their friends or listening to their ridiculously loud stereos to pay attention to the road.
But there's another less obvious trend that I've noticed in my years behind the wheel.
Within a few miles of my house I can find some of the richest people in America. They live in a town called Atherton. It's a town filled with mansions of Silicon Valley near billionaires, billionaires and sports stars. And when I drive my bicycle or car through Atherton on my way to work, I have to be very careful. These people in their Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs view stop signs and stop lights as mere suggestions.
Just a few miles from Atherton is another town, East Palo Alto, that in striking contrast had the highest per capita murder rate in the country several years ago. Its inhabitants are just struggling to get by. And while their cars - beater Japanese and American sedans - are quite different than those in Atherton, the driving style is the same. They too don't seem to believe in stop signs and stop lights.
The poor and the rich are both horrible drivers. They are both very aggressive. When they take the road, they tend to assume that it's everybody else's job to get out of the way. They change lanes at random without looking first. Driving alongside the rich or poor is a bit like driving in Naples, Italy, definitely the worst place I've ever driven in the world. You have to have eyes in the back of your head to survive sometimes.
When I see a beater car or a spanking new $100,000 job on the road next to me nowadays, my reaction is immediate. I get very cautious. These people are dangerous. In contrast when I'm on the road surrounded by Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys, I feel safe. I'm with my crowd, normal drivers who pay attention to the road and aside from doing the standard things of not signaling and driving a routine 10 mph over the speed limit, do obey the law.
The America I grew up in was defined by the emergence and establishment of a middle class. This new class owned their homes, often modest, and their cars, practical and relatively new. They sent their kids to good public schools. Over the last thirty years, that middle class has started to fray. We are being separated more and more into a society of rich and poor. And maybe, just maybe a minor consequence of that fraying is that there are a few more lousy drivers on the road.
As you get older, you notice patterns in your experiences. You get enough data from the day to day to make inductive statements. This is especially true when it comes to driving. For instance, it's obvious that young males tend to be lousy drivers. They drive too fast and are often too busy talking to their friends or listening to their ridiculously loud stereos to pay attention to the road.
But there's another less obvious trend that I've noticed in my years behind the wheel.
Within a few miles of my house I can find some of the richest people in America. They live in a town called Atherton. It's a town filled with mansions of Silicon Valley near billionaires, billionaires and sports stars. And when I drive my bicycle or car through Atherton on my way to work, I have to be very careful. These people in their Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs view stop signs and stop lights as mere suggestions.
Just a few miles from Atherton is another town, East Palo Alto, that in striking contrast had the highest per capita murder rate in the country several years ago. Its inhabitants are just struggling to get by. And while their cars - beater Japanese and American sedans - are quite different than those in Atherton, the driving style is the same. They too don't seem to believe in stop signs and stop lights.
The poor and the rich are both horrible drivers. They are both very aggressive. When they take the road, they tend to assume that it's everybody else's job to get out of the way. They change lanes at random without looking first. Driving alongside the rich or poor is a bit like driving in Naples, Italy, definitely the worst place I've ever driven in the world. You have to have eyes in the back of your head to survive sometimes.
When I see a beater car or a spanking new $100,000 job on the road next to me nowadays, my reaction is immediate. I get very cautious. These people are dangerous. In contrast when I'm on the road surrounded by Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys, I feel safe. I'm with my crowd, normal drivers who pay attention to the road and aside from doing the standard things of not signaling and driving a routine 10 mph over the speed limit, do obey the law.
The America I grew up in was defined by the emergence and establishment of a middle class. This new class owned their homes, often modest, and their cars, practical and relatively new. They sent their kids to good public schools. Over the last thirty years, that middle class has started to fray. We are being separated more and more into a society of rich and poor. And maybe, just maybe a minor consequence of that fraying is that there are a few more lousy drivers on the road.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Tour Guide to the Stars
A couple a days a month, I give guided walks to see elephant seals on the coast. It gets me out to the beach regularly. I get to do a little teaching. I love it.
About 50,000 people a year come out to see the seals. The types of people who usually go out on these walking tours are either grade school kids coming in on school buses or granola types of adults, often from Europe. But there are exceptions. There are always exceptions.
Yesterday, I was giving a tour to a group of 23, a mix of grade school kids from Marin, two elderly sisters from Jerusalem (I got to work on my very, very rusty Hebrew), and a strange couple with a kid about 10 years old. The couple with the kid struck me immediately as being a bit odd. The woman, pretty in her 30s, had this beatific smile and said not a word. The man, with reflective sunglasses, had a permanent snarl. The kid was one of these ADD types who you couldn't control.
When I get people like this, I watch them very carefully. They are the kind of people that potentially could get too close to the seals and cause problems. These people barely were there mentally. If they were getting anything from this tour, it wasn't obvious to me. The man out of apparent playfulness knocked the woman down into the sand a couple of times during the tour. She just smiled. The kid rolled down the sand dunes.
Toward the end of the tour, the man pulled out his cell phone and started speaking some Scandinavian language. Cell phones aren't allowed on the tour. I mentioned that to him. He was oblivious.
A few minutes after I was done with the tour the maintenance guy for the park came up to me excitedly. "Did you know that you just gave a tour to the drummer of Metallica?" He asked. No I didn't. "You mean the guy with psychological problems with the woman and the kid?" I asked. He nodded. I asked him how he knew. He said he loved metal. He knew all of the bands.
You never know who you run into on these things. Sometimes you get to be tour guide to the stars.
A couple a days a month, I give guided walks to see elephant seals on the coast. It gets me out to the beach regularly. I get to do a little teaching. I love it.
About 50,000 people a year come out to see the seals. The types of people who usually go out on these walking tours are either grade school kids coming in on school buses or granola types of adults, often from Europe. But there are exceptions. There are always exceptions.
Yesterday, I was giving a tour to a group of 23, a mix of grade school kids from Marin, two elderly sisters from Jerusalem (I got to work on my very, very rusty Hebrew), and a strange couple with a kid about 10 years old. The couple with the kid struck me immediately as being a bit odd. The woman, pretty in her 30s, had this beatific smile and said not a word. The man, with reflective sunglasses, had a permanent snarl. The kid was one of these ADD types who you couldn't control.
When I get people like this, I watch them very carefully. They are the kind of people that potentially could get too close to the seals and cause problems. These people barely were there mentally. If they were getting anything from this tour, it wasn't obvious to me. The man out of apparent playfulness knocked the woman down into the sand a couple of times during the tour. She just smiled. The kid rolled down the sand dunes.
Toward the end of the tour, the man pulled out his cell phone and started speaking some Scandinavian language. Cell phones aren't allowed on the tour. I mentioned that to him. He was oblivious.
A few minutes after I was done with the tour the maintenance guy for the park came up to me excitedly. "Did you know that you just gave a tour to the drummer of Metallica?" He asked. No I didn't. "You mean the guy with psychological problems with the woman and the kid?" I asked. He nodded. I asked him how he knew. He said he loved metal. He knew all of the bands.
You never know who you run into on these things. Sometimes you get to be tour guide to the stars.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
One Dummy Down, One Left To Go
When you go to the gym, there's a certain personality type you'll often see. It's someone in great shape, someone who works out religiously to keep their body fat down and their tone up. They exercise with relish. They probably have loved to run and do all kinds of physical stuff since they were kids. It's what they do best.
And when those "body gods" look at the others in the gym, the ones with some flab who are exercising not because they love it but because if they don't they'll be carried off in a gurney at some untimely age, they have a certain expression on their faces. Usually it's something very close to if not in fact disgust. You can see what's going on in their minds. "How can these people let themselves go? It's gross!"
I understand that look very well. I employ it too. But for me, it's not someone else's body that's an object of ridicule. It's their mind. I have little patience for dummies. Call me arrogant. I don't care. Dumb people annoy me. When I see some lazy thinker - like George W. Bush for instance - I get irritated. And I know what runs through my head. "How can people use so little of their brains? It's disgusting!"
Dumb thinking can take place in the most unlikely of places. I can remember one time when I was living in North Carolina and having dinner with my wife and 11 year old daughter. We were talking about something or other and it hit me. "This is the most intelligent conversation I've had all week." Here I was working at a bastion of intellectualism, and all of those supposedly brainy Ph.D.s I was around weren't as smart as my own family. That moment probably was the beginning of my desire to leave academia.
This presidential election has been, in contrast, rather heartwarming when it comes to intellectual prowess. Most of these guys (and the one gal) are very smart. I was watching part of the Democratic debate this past week and while I was not happy to see Obama and Clinton give each other a black eye, I was reminded about how whip smart both of them are. They are quick on their feet mentally. It was a pleasure to see.
The Republicans too have some people with mental firepower. But there have been two notable exceptions. Yesterday, one of them, Fred Thompson, decided to hang it up. Man that guy had nothing but oatmeal between his ears. Watching him speak or debate was painful. There's a tape from the Nixon years where Richard mentions just how dumb Thompson is. Richard Nixon was many things both good and bad. But one thing I always liked about him was that he didn't suffer fools. In his eyes Thompson was a fool. I definitely agree.
Now we're down to one dummy on the Republican side, Mike Huckabee. The man is painfully ignorant of the world around him. And he seems to be quite proud of his ignorance. Like Bill Clinton he comes from Hope, Arkansas. Unlike, Bill Clinton he never sought to expand his world view. He went to some hick bible college in Oklahoma. When asked about his lack of international experience and exposure he made some joke about staying at Holiday Inn Express. He doesn't believe in evolution. He wants to find a way to do what our founding fathers explicitly did not want: make the US a Christian nation first and foremost.
We are finishing up eight years of ignorance in the White House. The result has been devastating for the US and the world. I don't want to see another dummy as president. I'll be happy when Huckabee hangs it up. One dummy down. One left to go.
When you go to the gym, there's a certain personality type you'll often see. It's someone in great shape, someone who works out religiously to keep their body fat down and their tone up. They exercise with relish. They probably have loved to run and do all kinds of physical stuff since they were kids. It's what they do best.
And when those "body gods" look at the others in the gym, the ones with some flab who are exercising not because they love it but because if they don't they'll be carried off in a gurney at some untimely age, they have a certain expression on their faces. Usually it's something very close to if not in fact disgust. You can see what's going on in their minds. "How can these people let themselves go? It's gross!"
I understand that look very well. I employ it too. But for me, it's not someone else's body that's an object of ridicule. It's their mind. I have little patience for dummies. Call me arrogant. I don't care. Dumb people annoy me. When I see some lazy thinker - like George W. Bush for instance - I get irritated. And I know what runs through my head. "How can people use so little of their brains? It's disgusting!"
Dumb thinking can take place in the most unlikely of places. I can remember one time when I was living in North Carolina and having dinner with my wife and 11 year old daughter. We were talking about something or other and it hit me. "This is the most intelligent conversation I've had all week." Here I was working at a bastion of intellectualism, and all of those supposedly brainy Ph.D.s I was around weren't as smart as my own family. That moment probably was the beginning of my desire to leave academia.
This presidential election has been, in contrast, rather heartwarming when it comes to intellectual prowess. Most of these guys (and the one gal) are very smart. I was watching part of the Democratic debate this past week and while I was not happy to see Obama and Clinton give each other a black eye, I was reminded about how whip smart both of them are. They are quick on their feet mentally. It was a pleasure to see.
The Republicans too have some people with mental firepower. But there have been two notable exceptions. Yesterday, one of them, Fred Thompson, decided to hang it up. Man that guy had nothing but oatmeal between his ears. Watching him speak or debate was painful. There's a tape from the Nixon years where Richard mentions just how dumb Thompson is. Richard Nixon was many things both good and bad. But one thing I always liked about him was that he didn't suffer fools. In his eyes Thompson was a fool. I definitely agree.
Now we're down to one dummy on the Republican side, Mike Huckabee. The man is painfully ignorant of the world around him. And he seems to be quite proud of his ignorance. Like Bill Clinton he comes from Hope, Arkansas. Unlike, Bill Clinton he never sought to expand his world view. He went to some hick bible college in Oklahoma. When asked about his lack of international experience and exposure he made some joke about staying at Holiday Inn Express. He doesn't believe in evolution. He wants to find a way to do what our founding fathers explicitly did not want: make the US a Christian nation first and foremost.
We are finishing up eight years of ignorance in the White House. The result has been devastating for the US and the world. I don't want to see another dummy as president. I'll be happy when Huckabee hangs it up. One dummy down. One left to go.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
O! Irrational World!
The other day like many Wisconsinites past and current I watched a bit of the Packers/Giants game. Like a few, I wore some cheese-like foam in support of "my team," in my case a bow tie (see last post about said tie). I did have a scheduling conflict, however. At seven, I had tickets to go see jazz guitar god Bill Frisell up in the city, about a 50 minute drive from my house. The game started at 3:45 and with all of the commercials, that meant that I was only able to watch half the game.
When I left for the concert, The Pack was ahead. I listened on the radio going up to the city. When I got out of the car, the game was tied 20 to 20. I took my cheese tie off, but tucked it in my coat jacket as a good luck charm and walked into the club. It was windy and cold outside, at least for San Francisco. I knew it was a lot colder in Green Bay.
It was a great concert, probably one of the best I'll see all year. The club, Yoshi's, is a sweet place to see music. Bill Frisell and a young and talented side crew deconstructed the late 20th century American song book with flair and playfulness. Even the food was good, a rarity for a music club. I was smiling as I left.
Then I turned on the radio and got the bad news. The Pack had lost. And in my irrational head, of course the thought came to me that had I been a true loyal fan and watched the entire game, Brett Favre would have marched down the field in overtime to lead The Pack to victory. But no, I had to go to my concert selfish me. And instead of leading his team to victory, Favre threw an interception. Of course, The Pack wasn't to blame for this error. I took the cheese bow tie out of my coat pocket and threw it into the back seat. Clearly, I was responsible for The Pack's loss.
Now this is silly thinking. Rational Stu knows that this isn't possible. The presence or absence of my eyes on a television has no influence on a game 2400 miles away. But irrational Stu knows better. And try though I may to dismiss him, irrational Stu rules more frequently than he should.
The one positive thing I can say about this is that at least I (usually) know when I'm being irrational. And being irrational isn't always a bad thing. When I asked my sweetie to marry me, that was not a rational act in the least. Rational Stu would say, "The likelihood of spending a lifetime with someone is small. Live in sin for however long it lasts." Rational Stu would be wrong on this matter.
In the world at large, however, we often try to mask our irrational behavior with some truly flimsy rationalizations. For example, let's look at the state of the American economy. Our economic health or lack thereof is truly an irrational thing driven by purchasing. Individuals buy stuff they have no need for in droves. Institutions buy other institutions they don't need in droves. All of this unnecessary buying creates the turnover in money necessary to keep the engine going.
Our nation's economy is a complete house of cards. It's been that way for a long time. If people stop buying stuff they don't need - new cars, TVs, cell phones, etc. - the economy goes caput. If institutions stop making unnecessary deals and buying stock, the economy bombs. And that's what's happening right now. It won't last. For some reason, people - including me - will go back to buying more crap that they don't need and companies will go back to making deals they don't have to make - and the house of cards will be rebuilt. Right now, though, things are scary I admit.
But mark my words, the economy will come back from its current state in the doldrums. It always does because we always go back to buying crap we don't need. We try to fool ourselves into thinking we need to buy the latest gadget. For instance, I was at MacWorld last week and tried out the new Mac Air laptop. I was smitten. Irrational Stu did his best to try to convince me that if I didn't order this thing immediately I would suffer a permanent emotional scar and my productivity would plummet.
Similarly, our government thinks it can somehow control the damage from our nation's temporary loss in economic confidence. We have slashed interest rates to try to make sure that companies continue to buy up other companies for no good reason. The fact is that money is already ridiculously cheap to obtain. If a deal can't be made at five percent interest, it probably won't be made at four percent.
Another irrational effort we make in an economic downturn to try and aid our economy is to promote "incentive packages." This is silly beyond belief. For example, the size of the current proposed incentive package, 150 billion dollars, is about one percent of the overall value of the stock market. To put this in perspective, the top five Wall Street firms handed out more than 25 percent of this amount in bonuses alone this past year. 150 billion dollars is a spit in the ocean. The world markets have lost forty times this amount in value this month alone. Who are we kidding when we think that 150 billion dollars is going to help anything.
O! Irrational world! We think we can control things that we are powerless to change. The presence of my cheese bow tie on my neck had no influence on the outcome of the Packers/Giants game the other day. But it did make me feel better. The presence or absence of an incentive package will have no influence on our economy. But it makes us feel better. Now, perhaps if everyone on Wall Street wore a cheese bow tie for a day...
The other day like many Wisconsinites past and current I watched a bit of the Packers/Giants game. Like a few, I wore some cheese-like foam in support of "my team," in my case a bow tie (see last post about said tie). I did have a scheduling conflict, however. At seven, I had tickets to go see jazz guitar god Bill Frisell up in the city, about a 50 minute drive from my house. The game started at 3:45 and with all of the commercials, that meant that I was only able to watch half the game.
When I left for the concert, The Pack was ahead. I listened on the radio going up to the city. When I got out of the car, the game was tied 20 to 20. I took my cheese tie off, but tucked it in my coat jacket as a good luck charm and walked into the club. It was windy and cold outside, at least for San Francisco. I knew it was a lot colder in Green Bay.
It was a great concert, probably one of the best I'll see all year. The club, Yoshi's, is a sweet place to see music. Bill Frisell and a young and talented side crew deconstructed the late 20th century American song book with flair and playfulness. Even the food was good, a rarity for a music club. I was smiling as I left.
Then I turned on the radio and got the bad news. The Pack had lost. And in my irrational head, of course the thought came to me that had I been a true loyal fan and watched the entire game, Brett Favre would have marched down the field in overtime to lead The Pack to victory. But no, I had to go to my concert selfish me. And instead of leading his team to victory, Favre threw an interception. Of course, The Pack wasn't to blame for this error. I took the cheese bow tie out of my coat pocket and threw it into the back seat. Clearly, I was responsible for The Pack's loss.
Now this is silly thinking. Rational Stu knows that this isn't possible. The presence or absence of my eyes on a television has no influence on a game 2400 miles away. But irrational Stu knows better. And try though I may to dismiss him, irrational Stu rules more frequently than he should.
The one positive thing I can say about this is that at least I (usually) know when I'm being irrational. And being irrational isn't always a bad thing. When I asked my sweetie to marry me, that was not a rational act in the least. Rational Stu would say, "The likelihood of spending a lifetime with someone is small. Live in sin for however long it lasts." Rational Stu would be wrong on this matter.
In the world at large, however, we often try to mask our irrational behavior with some truly flimsy rationalizations. For example, let's look at the state of the American economy. Our economic health or lack thereof is truly an irrational thing driven by purchasing. Individuals buy stuff they have no need for in droves. Institutions buy other institutions they don't need in droves. All of this unnecessary buying creates the turnover in money necessary to keep the engine going.
Our nation's economy is a complete house of cards. It's been that way for a long time. If people stop buying stuff they don't need - new cars, TVs, cell phones, etc. - the economy goes caput. If institutions stop making unnecessary deals and buying stock, the economy bombs. And that's what's happening right now. It won't last. For some reason, people - including me - will go back to buying more crap that they don't need and companies will go back to making deals they don't have to make - and the house of cards will be rebuilt. Right now, though, things are scary I admit.
But mark my words, the economy will come back from its current state in the doldrums. It always does because we always go back to buying crap we don't need. We try to fool ourselves into thinking we need to buy the latest gadget. For instance, I was at MacWorld last week and tried out the new Mac Air laptop. I was smitten. Irrational Stu did his best to try to convince me that if I didn't order this thing immediately I would suffer a permanent emotional scar and my productivity would plummet.
Similarly, our government thinks it can somehow control the damage from our nation's temporary loss in economic confidence. We have slashed interest rates to try to make sure that companies continue to buy up other companies for no good reason. The fact is that money is already ridiculously cheap to obtain. If a deal can't be made at five percent interest, it probably won't be made at four percent.
Another irrational effort we make in an economic downturn to try and aid our economy is to promote "incentive packages." This is silly beyond belief. For example, the size of the current proposed incentive package, 150 billion dollars, is about one percent of the overall value of the stock market. To put this in perspective, the top five Wall Street firms handed out more than 25 percent of this amount in bonuses alone this past year. 150 billion dollars is a spit in the ocean. The world markets have lost forty times this amount in value this month alone. Who are we kidding when we think that 150 billion dollars is going to help anything.
O! Irrational world! We think we can control things that we are powerless to change. The presence of my cheese bow tie on my neck had no influence on the outcome of the Packers/Giants game the other day. But it did make me feel better. The presence or absence of an incentive package will have no influence on our economy. But it makes us feel better. Now, perhaps if everyone on Wall Street wore a cheese bow tie for a day...
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Confessions of an Occasional Fan
A few days ago I was in a coffee shop and there was this girl with a Milwaukee Jewish Day School sweatshirt on. That's not a typical sight around here in California. It's probably not a typical sight even in Milwaukee. Then she took off the sweatshirt and underneath wore an Echo Bowl t-shirt. That's definitely not a typical item of clothing anywhere. I had to chat it up with her. She told me that the Echo Bowl, a bowling alley in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin where I rolled many a ball, is no more. It's been replaced by a Walgreens. Time marches on.
The Echo Bowl was not a particularly good bowling alley. The lanes were not well maintained. I was a serious enough bowler that I had my own ball - oh yes, ordinary people do that in Milwaukee, buy balls custom fitted to their hand - but the balls available at the lanes were lousy. Still, it had a decent little greasy spoon of a restaurant and something unique at the entrance, a very grainy black and white picture blown up to an 8 foot by 8 foot mural of a little man in a pork pie hat bowling at the Echo Bowl. The little man was Vince Lombardi. Echo Bowl once had been blessed by the presence of a god. They weren't going to let anyone forget.
To say that Vince Lombardi was my idol when I was a kid would be an understatement. I would have licked the soles of his shoes. I know that sounds kinky. But it's true. I had an unhealthy obsession about the Green Bay Packers and its god-like coach. They won game after game. I dutifully watched game after game.
I was also a very good football player. It was true that I was kind of slow. But I had my assets, my strength and the fact that on the field I was a maniac. I let my inner mean streak run rampant on the football field. People were scared by my intensity. I had dreams of playing in high school and beyond. But then I discovered drugs. My inner mean streak went into hibernation as a result. And I lost interest in playing football altogether.
About the same time, the Green Bay Packers started to lose on a fairly consistent basis. And I lost interest in them as well. I found out something about myself in the process. I'm not a loyal sports fan. When a team does well I am interested. When they don't, I completely forget about them. There is a term for this of course, the dreaded phrase "fair weather fan." I think that's kind of harsh, myself. I prefer to be called an "occasional fan." I watch on the occasions when "my team" is doing well.
I understand the value of loyalty in life. But sports are entertainment. And there is no entertainment for me in watching a team play poorly. It's just not my thing. Sports are just not that important to me.
Anyhow, I note that the Green Bay Packers are doing very well right now. Not surprisingly, I have a renewed interest in "The Pack." I've even watched two or three games this year. Brett Favre is truly a joy to see play. He's clearly having a fun time out there. His enthusiasm is contagious.
I haven't watched "my team" in about ten years. Not coincidentally, it was the last time that they were winning. Back then, I bought a cheese bow tie to wear during the big games, the conference championship and the Super Bowl. It's a funny thing made of foam. Above is a bad picture of one.
Foam ties it turns out only last several years. The foam hardens and turns an ugly shade of gray. I had to throw my old one away. But a couple of years ago I was in my home state and spotted a new one for six bucks, a steal of a deal. I snatched it up. I told my sweetie that I'd wear it the next time The Pack was in the conference championship and hopefully the Super Bowl.
That time has arrived. This Sunday I'll pull that cheese tie out of its plastic wrapper and wear the thing while I watch The Pack play. Yes, I'm an occasional fan. But with that cheese tie on, I look so silly that I swear that I can pass for the real thing.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
I Want To Be Special
I finished a memoir over the weekend written by Bernard Malamud's daughter, My Father Is A Book. Malamud is one of my favorite authors. He's not an outstanding talent as a writer, but there is a class of writers I admire because I can see how hard they are working. They have as much will as they have talent. I read people like Malamud or Eugene O'Neil or Theodore Dreiser and I can see how much they sweat to overcome their lack of facility for creating fluid prose. I know that's how I write. The appeal of these authors is that they are kindred spirits. And they are also writers who while they don't have a gift for prose do know how to tell a story.
In my view, Malamud never quite received the kudos he deserved. The other two of the Three Musketeers of Jewish American writing of that era, Bellow and Roth, achieved far greater fame, one receiving a Nobel Prize. I don't think Bellow or Roth were better writers than Malamud. But they were both quite willing to forsake their Jewishness. In fact, they trampled all over it. This sounds harsh, but the disdain Bellow and Roth consistently showed in their writing for their "provincial" upbringing was the key to their public success. Malamud, in contrast, embraced his provincial background. In the era he was writing, this approach was viewed with suspicion if not disdain.
In Janna Malamud's memoir, Bernard comes across as a loving father who is also more than a bit of a jerk. He treats his wife as a servant. He carries on an affair with a student some thirty years his junior. The affair, mostly emotional and briefly sexual, seems to last for most if not all of his remaining life.
Most writers are jerks it's true. They tend to be selfish and narcissistic. I don't mind as long as they produce excellent art. We are all human and that means we all come with our unique set of flaws. It's probably true that the characteristics that make someone a brilliant artist are antithetical to them being a decent person.
You can get a good idea of just how much of a jerk Bernard Malamud was from his letters to his wife and his lover. There's one particular letter that sticks in my mind right now. It's to his lover. He says to her, "you are one of the most beautiful people I have ever met." I know I'm being picky here, but "one of?" I'm sorry Bernard. If you're having a passionate illicit affair with some young thing that's the age of your daughter and break your wife's heart in the process, "one of the most beautiful" just doesn't cut it. Don't be so stingy.
If I'm the sweet young thing in question and I read that letter, I write one back that says, "Bernard you selfish jerk, go to hell." I don't want to be "one of." I don't want to be part of a gang. I want to be the one, the most beautiful person he has ever seen. If I'm doing the deed with some old fart more than twice my age, I want to know that I'm special in his eyes. I don't care if he's screwed Halle Berry or Nicole Kidman in the past. He could have even bedded them at the same time. I don't care. I am the one. I want him to lie if need be. It's a matter of self respect.
I suppose you could say that Malamud isn't being a jerk. He's being truthful. But if love can't make him see that this girl is in fact the most beautiful person he has ever met, then he is at best a lousy lover. Great writers aren't necessarily great lovers I'm sure. Maybe Malamud isn't a jerk in this case. Rather he could be simply a complete dud when it comes to passion. I don't know which is worse.
I finished a memoir over the weekend written by Bernard Malamud's daughter, My Father Is A Book. Malamud is one of my favorite authors. He's not an outstanding talent as a writer, but there is a class of writers I admire because I can see how hard they are working. They have as much will as they have talent. I read people like Malamud or Eugene O'Neil or Theodore Dreiser and I can see how much they sweat to overcome their lack of facility for creating fluid prose. I know that's how I write. The appeal of these authors is that they are kindred spirits. And they are also writers who while they don't have a gift for prose do know how to tell a story.
In my view, Malamud never quite received the kudos he deserved. The other two of the Three Musketeers of Jewish American writing of that era, Bellow and Roth, achieved far greater fame, one receiving a Nobel Prize. I don't think Bellow or Roth were better writers than Malamud. But they were both quite willing to forsake their Jewishness. In fact, they trampled all over it. This sounds harsh, but the disdain Bellow and Roth consistently showed in their writing for their "provincial" upbringing was the key to their public success. Malamud, in contrast, embraced his provincial background. In the era he was writing, this approach was viewed with suspicion if not disdain.
In Janna Malamud's memoir, Bernard comes across as a loving father who is also more than a bit of a jerk. He treats his wife as a servant. He carries on an affair with a student some thirty years his junior. The affair, mostly emotional and briefly sexual, seems to last for most if not all of his remaining life.
Most writers are jerks it's true. They tend to be selfish and narcissistic. I don't mind as long as they produce excellent art. We are all human and that means we all come with our unique set of flaws. It's probably true that the characteristics that make someone a brilliant artist are antithetical to them being a decent person.
You can get a good idea of just how much of a jerk Bernard Malamud was from his letters to his wife and his lover. There's one particular letter that sticks in my mind right now. It's to his lover. He says to her, "you are one of the most beautiful people I have ever met." I know I'm being picky here, but "one of?" I'm sorry Bernard. If you're having a passionate illicit affair with some young thing that's the age of your daughter and break your wife's heart in the process, "one of the most beautiful" just doesn't cut it. Don't be so stingy.
If I'm the sweet young thing in question and I read that letter, I write one back that says, "Bernard you selfish jerk, go to hell." I don't want to be "one of." I don't want to be part of a gang. I want to be the one, the most beautiful person he has ever seen. If I'm doing the deed with some old fart more than twice my age, I want to know that I'm special in his eyes. I don't care if he's screwed Halle Berry or Nicole Kidman in the past. He could have even bedded them at the same time. I don't care. I am the one. I want him to lie if need be. It's a matter of self respect.
I suppose you could say that Malamud isn't being a jerk. He's being truthful. But if love can't make him see that this girl is in fact the most beautiful person he has ever met, then he is at best a lousy lover. Great writers aren't necessarily great lovers I'm sure. Maybe Malamud isn't a jerk in this case. Rather he could be simply a complete dud when it comes to passion. I don't know which is worse.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Maybe It Was the Chayote
A couple of days ago, I walked out of my office and there were these three thorny green pear shaped things right next to the stoop in the dirt. I have no idea how they got there. They looked like some sort of tropical fruit. The family in back of my office plays mariachi music full blast on summer afternoons, so I figured these things must have somehow made it over their fence. I picked up the biggest one, about the size of a small pineapple and very heavy, and brought it home.
Saturday, I went on Google to try to identify the thing. I typed "green pear shaped thorns jpg." Google is amazing. A few minutes later I had found the thing in question. It was a chayote, a summer squash grown in Latin America. I decided to cook it up on Sunday, and had my sweetie go online to verify that it was indeed chayote, not some poisonous thing that would kill us on the eve of our anniversary. She said that we ate the stuff in Costa Rica a few years ago.
So I cooked it up last night with some almond/corn meal encrusted sturgeon. Very nice. Then I had this bad dream. Maybe it was the chayote.
I was back at being a professor at my old place. And somehow, I was assigned to teach a biology class on human sexuality. A colleague of mine - by far the biggest lecher in the department - said not to worry. He'd done it before. It wasn't a bad gig. So I took the elevator to the 11th floor classroom in the biology building, except that it clearly wasn't a modern classroom in a tall building, but some 1920s thing with oak desks, a shallow ceiling and bad lighting.
The room was packed. There were a couple of wedding cakes in the back that students were looking at curiously. I asked what the normal class size was for this class from a woman who said she was the "biology proctor." She said about 50. I estimated that there were about 110 students in my class. The proctor also said that she was there to make sure I was doing a good job. She'd given a couple of instructors the hook as of late. Then she introduced me.
I got in front of the class. I had no syllabus and on my lectern was the textbook, the first time I'd seen it. I flipped through the pages. It was all freshman biology kind of stuff, the nuts and bolts of sex. I gave a sigh of relief. This I can do I thought. I started to talk about what the class would entail. A student walked up and turned on an ancient TV - big walnut cabinet thing with a hand dial tuner - in back of me. I turned it off. The class groaned. They wanted to watch TV.
I shot the class an angry look. I looked at their faces. They looked bored beyond belief. They clearly didn't want to be there. This was probably one of those "take a science class to fulfill a requirement" deals. My stomach sank. I remembered a class from hell I taught in my second year, one that was like this. I had handed out homework every week. They resented the work load. They resented me expecting them to have read the text before class. My father died in the middle of that semester. When I came back, I was met with looks of absolute hatred. It was clear they didn't went me back.
I took a big breath. Maybe this class will be better, I thought. I continued to lecture. I said that we'd not only be discussing the biology of human sexuality, but use the text as a launching pad to discuss the social aspects of sexuality in class. The students groaned again. Half of them got out of their seats to leave. They milled around the front of the class. I looked at the proctor. She gave me this look that indicated nothing particularly bad was going on. Out of nowhere my daughter appeared in the class and came up to me. She said, all things considered, I was handling this quite well. I said thanks.
I wasn't worried. I shouted out in a matter of fact way that those who wanted to leave should do so quickly so I could get on with my lecture. Then I woke up.
It should be noted that teaching wasn't something that I liked to do. It wasn't the lecturing. The problem was that most students didn't want to be there and resented anything more than about two to three hours of expected reading and homework a week.
A couple of days ago, I was talking to someone who was in graduate school at Stanford. He said he'd been to Dartmouth and Brown before. He couldn't believe the difference. He called Dartmouth and Brown "social clubs." You went there to make social contacts for later in life and didn't do any work. He said that at Stanford undergraduates were actually taking school seriously. He seemed dumbfounded by this.
I told him I knew all about the social club aspect of private East Coast colleges. I said that from a teaching aspect it was demeaning and dispiriting to be at a place like that. He said he could understand that perspective. I didn't tell him that I was skeptical Stanford was that much different. But that conversation was probably where this dream came from. That and the chayote. ;)
A couple of days ago, I walked out of my office and there were these three thorny green pear shaped things right next to the stoop in the dirt. I have no idea how they got there. They looked like some sort of tropical fruit. The family in back of my office plays mariachi music full blast on summer afternoons, so I figured these things must have somehow made it over their fence. I picked up the biggest one, about the size of a small pineapple and very heavy, and brought it home.
Saturday, I went on Google to try to identify the thing. I typed "green pear shaped thorns jpg." Google is amazing. A few minutes later I had found the thing in question. It was a chayote, a summer squash grown in Latin America. I decided to cook it up on Sunday, and had my sweetie go online to verify that it was indeed chayote, not some poisonous thing that would kill us on the eve of our anniversary. She said that we ate the stuff in Costa Rica a few years ago.
So I cooked it up last night with some almond/corn meal encrusted sturgeon. Very nice. Then I had this bad dream. Maybe it was the chayote.
I was back at being a professor at my old place. And somehow, I was assigned to teach a biology class on human sexuality. A colleague of mine - by far the biggest lecher in the department - said not to worry. He'd done it before. It wasn't a bad gig. So I took the elevator to the 11th floor classroom in the biology building, except that it clearly wasn't a modern classroom in a tall building, but some 1920s thing with oak desks, a shallow ceiling and bad lighting.
The room was packed. There were a couple of wedding cakes in the back that students were looking at curiously. I asked what the normal class size was for this class from a woman who said she was the "biology proctor." She said about 50. I estimated that there were about 110 students in my class. The proctor also said that she was there to make sure I was doing a good job. She'd given a couple of instructors the hook as of late. Then she introduced me.
I got in front of the class. I had no syllabus and on my lectern was the textbook, the first time I'd seen it. I flipped through the pages. It was all freshman biology kind of stuff, the nuts and bolts of sex. I gave a sigh of relief. This I can do I thought. I started to talk about what the class would entail. A student walked up and turned on an ancient TV - big walnut cabinet thing with a hand dial tuner - in back of me. I turned it off. The class groaned. They wanted to watch TV.
I shot the class an angry look. I looked at their faces. They looked bored beyond belief. They clearly didn't want to be there. This was probably one of those "take a science class to fulfill a requirement" deals. My stomach sank. I remembered a class from hell I taught in my second year, one that was like this. I had handed out homework every week. They resented the work load. They resented me expecting them to have read the text before class. My father died in the middle of that semester. When I came back, I was met with looks of absolute hatred. It was clear they didn't went me back.
I took a big breath. Maybe this class will be better, I thought. I continued to lecture. I said that we'd not only be discussing the biology of human sexuality, but use the text as a launching pad to discuss the social aspects of sexuality in class. The students groaned again. Half of them got out of their seats to leave. They milled around the front of the class. I looked at the proctor. She gave me this look that indicated nothing particularly bad was going on. Out of nowhere my daughter appeared in the class and came up to me. She said, all things considered, I was handling this quite well. I said thanks.
I wasn't worried. I shouted out in a matter of fact way that those who wanted to leave should do so quickly so I could get on with my lecture. Then I woke up.
It should be noted that teaching wasn't something that I liked to do. It wasn't the lecturing. The problem was that most students didn't want to be there and resented anything more than about two to three hours of expected reading and homework a week.
A couple of days ago, I was talking to someone who was in graduate school at Stanford. He said he'd been to Dartmouth and Brown before. He couldn't believe the difference. He called Dartmouth and Brown "social clubs." You went there to make social contacts for later in life and didn't do any work. He said that at Stanford undergraduates were actually taking school seriously. He seemed dumbfounded by this.
I told him I knew all about the social club aspect of private East Coast colleges. I said that from a teaching aspect it was demeaning and dispiriting to be at a place like that. He said he could understand that perspective. I didn't tell him that I was skeptical Stanford was that much different. But that conversation was probably where this dream came from. That and the chayote. ;)
Friday, January 11, 2008
My Lousy Intuition
The recent elections in New Hampshire showed the fallibility of pollsters. And like those pollsters, my ability to predict is often lousy. I'm fairly good at political predictions both in terms of office politics and governmental politics. I simply assume that people operate strictly on the basis of self interest never mind their rhetoric. Using the self interest principle usually is good at making predictions on a wide variety of political topics from the actions of a university dean to the actions of Congress.
Where I often fail is at a more personal level. I'll meet someone and my intuition will tell me that this person is a jerk. And eventually I'll find out that I'm quite wrong. The opposite is true as well. I'm a horrible judge of character based on first impressions. My gut is good at judging food not people.
And then there are my predictions as to art. For example, I'm not really a person who likes movies - mostly I view them as "books for dummies" - but there are exceptions. It's my ability to predict those exceptions that is lousy. I've seen three movies recently and my intuition was wrong on every one of them.
First I went to see the movie Atonement. I wasn't expecting much. The movie is based on a wonderful book by one of the best writers in the English language today, Ian McEwan. When I read McEwan, I find some of his sentences so exquisite that I involuntarily stop for a bit just to savor them. My intuition told me that there was no way a movie could come close to the experience of reading a McEwan novel. The movie was bound to be a book for dummies.
But I was wrong. The movie was well made and intelligently written. It couldn't possibly replicate the wonderful prose of McEwan. Rather it substituted exquisitely precise writing with exquisitely precise cinematography. And what I found out from the movie is that the plot of McEwan's Atonement, unlike many wonderful novels, is good enough to stand on its own. Take away the world class prose and you still have a damn good story.
Score zero for one for my intuition. Usually I try to stay away from dramas like Atonement. It's true that I still don't understand why anyone needed to make a movie out of the thing when there was already a near perfect book. But I probably should go see dramas more often.
Comedy is my thing when it comes to movies. I like a good laugh. And I was expecting a good laugh when it came to Tamara Jenkins' The Savages. Ms. Jenkins wrote and directed another movie, Slums of Beverly Hills, a few years ago that I thought was funny as hell. Based on Ms. Jenkins' experiences growing up, the movie hit very close to home. The character of her brother - a pot smoking, conniver who liked to try out for musicals - was essentially me at 13. There was a scene in that movie where her brother is practicing for an audition in his underwear in front of a mirror. Oh my god. That was me to a T. It had me cackling.
But The Savages didn't have me laughing much at all. It was a dreary kind of thing. The acting was superb - it doesn't get any better than Laura Linney and Phillip Hoffman folks - but the script was flat. The drama was trite. The comedic scenes were predictable. It was very much like a bad Albert Brooks movie. Score zero for two for my intuition.
And now on to zero for three. My sweetie got the movie Hot Fuzz from the library. I'd read positive reviews. But I was convinced that this was not going to be a movie for me. I'm not a fan of cop movies so the idea of a parody of them left me cold. I'm in general not a fan of parodies; they tend to be rather crude. I'd recently seen a very dumb comedy - Superbad - that was so bad and crude that I almost turned it off in the middle and that's what I was expecting with Hot Fuzz.
But it wasn't so. I thought Hot Fuzz was clever and funny as hell. The fact that I didn't know any of the specific cop movies being parodied didn't seem to matter. The movie stood on its own. The dialog was snappy. It went on a bit too long, but it ended up being a very cute buddy movie with a nice little twist at the end.
Given that I'm 0 for 3, maybe I should just pick movies at random. Maybe I should go to the next Spiderman. Um. No.
The recent elections in New Hampshire showed the fallibility of pollsters. And like those pollsters, my ability to predict is often lousy. I'm fairly good at political predictions both in terms of office politics and governmental politics. I simply assume that people operate strictly on the basis of self interest never mind their rhetoric. Using the self interest principle usually is good at making predictions on a wide variety of political topics from the actions of a university dean to the actions of Congress.
Where I often fail is at a more personal level. I'll meet someone and my intuition will tell me that this person is a jerk. And eventually I'll find out that I'm quite wrong. The opposite is true as well. I'm a horrible judge of character based on first impressions. My gut is good at judging food not people.
And then there are my predictions as to art. For example, I'm not really a person who likes movies - mostly I view them as "books for dummies" - but there are exceptions. It's my ability to predict those exceptions that is lousy. I've seen three movies recently and my intuition was wrong on every one of them.
First I went to see the movie Atonement. I wasn't expecting much. The movie is based on a wonderful book by one of the best writers in the English language today, Ian McEwan. When I read McEwan, I find some of his sentences so exquisite that I involuntarily stop for a bit just to savor them. My intuition told me that there was no way a movie could come close to the experience of reading a McEwan novel. The movie was bound to be a book for dummies.
But I was wrong. The movie was well made and intelligently written. It couldn't possibly replicate the wonderful prose of McEwan. Rather it substituted exquisitely precise writing with exquisitely precise cinematography. And what I found out from the movie is that the plot of McEwan's Atonement, unlike many wonderful novels, is good enough to stand on its own. Take away the world class prose and you still have a damn good story.
Score zero for one for my intuition. Usually I try to stay away from dramas like Atonement. It's true that I still don't understand why anyone needed to make a movie out of the thing when there was already a near perfect book. But I probably should go see dramas more often.
Comedy is my thing when it comes to movies. I like a good laugh. And I was expecting a good laugh when it came to Tamara Jenkins' The Savages. Ms. Jenkins wrote and directed another movie, Slums of Beverly Hills, a few years ago that I thought was funny as hell. Based on Ms. Jenkins' experiences growing up, the movie hit very close to home. The character of her brother - a pot smoking, conniver who liked to try out for musicals - was essentially me at 13. There was a scene in that movie where her brother is practicing for an audition in his underwear in front of a mirror. Oh my god. That was me to a T. It had me cackling.
But The Savages didn't have me laughing much at all. It was a dreary kind of thing. The acting was superb - it doesn't get any better than Laura Linney and Phillip Hoffman folks - but the script was flat. The drama was trite. The comedic scenes were predictable. It was very much like a bad Albert Brooks movie. Score zero for two for my intuition.
And now on to zero for three. My sweetie got the movie Hot Fuzz from the library. I'd read positive reviews. But I was convinced that this was not going to be a movie for me. I'm not a fan of cop movies so the idea of a parody of them left me cold. I'm in general not a fan of parodies; they tend to be rather crude. I'd recently seen a very dumb comedy - Superbad - that was so bad and crude that I almost turned it off in the middle and that's what I was expecting with Hot Fuzz.
But it wasn't so. I thought Hot Fuzz was clever and funny as hell. The fact that I didn't know any of the specific cop movies being parodied didn't seem to matter. The movie stood on its own. The dialog was snappy. It went on a bit too long, but it ended up being a very cute buddy movie with a nice little twist at the end.
Given that I'm 0 for 3, maybe I should just pick movies at random. Maybe I should go to the next Spiderman. Um. No.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Could Be The Race of a Lifetime
In 1968, I shook the hands of Gene McCarthy and Faye Dunaway (a McCarthy supporter and I definitely dreamed of more than a hand shake) and became hooked on presidential politics. The sad fact, however, is that since 1968 most primary elections have been rather boring affairs. At least on the Democratic side, the quality of the candidates hasn't been particularly strong. Someone usually emerges almost by default even though they fail to electrify the electorate. In hindsight, the primaries of my lifetime have usually been a snooze.
But this one may be different. The Democrats have two candidates who are bringing in big crowds. People so far have been streaming to the polls. The buzzword is "change." Who doesn't want change? Congress is broken, beholden to lobbyists and ridiculously divided along party lines. We have the most incompetent president I have ever seen in office. The voters of Iowa and New Hampshire seem to be rising out of a decades long slumber - a slumber that began with Richard Nixon and Watergate - to try to bring democracy back to this country. It's a heartwarming thing. I hope and think it will spread to other states.
This could be the greatest primary race I have ever witnessed.
I'll be working the phones for my girl Clinton. In this race, it's turning out that little things matter. A month or two ago, Clinton had a stumble concerning driver's licenses for illegal aliens in a debate. Those thirty seconds of waffling led to a major drop in the polls and eventually the loss of Iowa. This past week, she showed her soft side in a debate saying "that hurts my feelings" and in a nationally televised sound bite discussing why she's running when she teared up. New Hampshire soccer moms* responded by voting overwhelmingly for Clinton, bringing her a critical victory.
I have a blind spot for stuff like this. I just don't get it. But it is democracy in action. And at least people are getting some information from these debates even though it's pretty trivial information. I note that a few decades ago a candidacy for president, Edmund Muskie's, was derailed in New Hampshire because he showed tears. We didn't have Dr. Phil back then. Tears used to show weakness. Now tears are a good thing. Now they show that you're genuine, authentic, yada, yada. Times change.
On the other side of the coin, you have a black man who is exciting people the way Bobby Kennedy did way back when. He has the ability to have his optimism reflect back to the crowd listening. You can't teach someone how to do this. Obama has star quality.
One of the reasons I didn't sign up for Obama in this election was that I was convinced that a black man couldn't win. My view goes back to an election in 1990 in North Carolina. A black man, Harvey Gantt, was running for Senator. On election day, I stood in line to vote. The line was huge. And it wasn't filled with black people even though half of my district was black. Rather it was filled with a lot of grim-faced, blue-haired white ladies and elderly white men literally with straw hats. The chatted in the line. "We're gonna win this war," one blue haired lady said. And they did. I was shocked at just how deeply seated racism still was in this country.
But those old folks who voted on the basis of race back then are long dead. It's a different and better country. A black man can walk into middle America in a state with a tiny black population and with charisma and a message of hope win an election. I think the race issue is now a canard. It isn't 1990 in North Carolina anymore. Obama can win this whole thing.
That said, I still believe that Clinton is the better candidate. In my view, she is more knowledgeable and experienced. She knows how to get things done. And the Clintons know how to run a campaign. I'd be happy with either candidate in the White House, though.
On the Republican side, two candidates with little money have now won the first two significant primaries. How great is that for democracy in this country? And in my view, there are still four candidates on the Republican side who could win. My guess is that, unlike the Democrats, the Republicans will stick with a white Christian, anti-abortionist male. But who knows? This could well be the most exciting presidential race in my lifetime for both Republicans and Democrats.
*Correction, it wasn't the soccer moms. It was the less affluent waitress moms.
In 1968, I shook the hands of Gene McCarthy and Faye Dunaway (a McCarthy supporter and I definitely dreamed of more than a hand shake) and became hooked on presidential politics. The sad fact, however, is that since 1968 most primary elections have been rather boring affairs. At least on the Democratic side, the quality of the candidates hasn't been particularly strong. Someone usually emerges almost by default even though they fail to electrify the electorate. In hindsight, the primaries of my lifetime have usually been a snooze.
But this one may be different. The Democrats have two candidates who are bringing in big crowds. People so far have been streaming to the polls. The buzzword is "change." Who doesn't want change? Congress is broken, beholden to lobbyists and ridiculously divided along party lines. We have the most incompetent president I have ever seen in office. The voters of Iowa and New Hampshire seem to be rising out of a decades long slumber - a slumber that began with Richard Nixon and Watergate - to try to bring democracy back to this country. It's a heartwarming thing. I hope and think it will spread to other states.
This could be the greatest primary race I have ever witnessed.
I'll be working the phones for my girl Clinton. In this race, it's turning out that little things matter. A month or two ago, Clinton had a stumble concerning driver's licenses for illegal aliens in a debate. Those thirty seconds of waffling led to a major drop in the polls and eventually the loss of Iowa. This past week, she showed her soft side in a debate saying "that hurts my feelings" and in a nationally televised sound bite discussing why she's running when she teared up. New Hampshire soccer moms* responded by voting overwhelmingly for Clinton, bringing her a critical victory.
I have a blind spot for stuff like this. I just don't get it. But it is democracy in action. And at least people are getting some information from these debates even though it's pretty trivial information. I note that a few decades ago a candidacy for president, Edmund Muskie's, was derailed in New Hampshire because he showed tears. We didn't have Dr. Phil back then. Tears used to show weakness. Now tears are a good thing. Now they show that you're genuine, authentic, yada, yada. Times change.
On the other side of the coin, you have a black man who is exciting people the way Bobby Kennedy did way back when. He has the ability to have his optimism reflect back to the crowd listening. You can't teach someone how to do this. Obama has star quality.
One of the reasons I didn't sign up for Obama in this election was that I was convinced that a black man couldn't win. My view goes back to an election in 1990 in North Carolina. A black man, Harvey Gantt, was running for Senator. On election day, I stood in line to vote. The line was huge. And it wasn't filled with black people even though half of my district was black. Rather it was filled with a lot of grim-faced, blue-haired white ladies and elderly white men literally with straw hats. The chatted in the line. "We're gonna win this war," one blue haired lady said. And they did. I was shocked at just how deeply seated racism still was in this country.
But those old folks who voted on the basis of race back then are long dead. It's a different and better country. A black man can walk into middle America in a state with a tiny black population and with charisma and a message of hope win an election. I think the race issue is now a canard. It isn't 1990 in North Carolina anymore. Obama can win this whole thing.
That said, I still believe that Clinton is the better candidate. In my view, she is more knowledgeable and experienced. She knows how to get things done. And the Clintons know how to run a campaign. I'd be happy with either candidate in the White House, though.
On the Republican side, two candidates with little money have now won the first two significant primaries. How great is that for democracy in this country? And in my view, there are still four candidates on the Republican side who could win. My guess is that, unlike the Democrats, the Republicans will stick with a white Christian, anti-abortionist male. But who knows? This could well be the most exciting presidential race in my lifetime for both Republicans and Democrats.
*Correction, it wasn't the soccer moms. It was the less affluent waitress moms.
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