Deep Blue Static

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

2011-12-16T11:21:00.000-08:00

Frankenstein

2011-10-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

It’s October. The sun-drenched days of shorts, sun block, and barbeques have faded into a chilly mist. Football is on TV, school is back in session, and (as anyone writing about Fall is obliged to report, for some reason) the leaves are turning burgundy and orange and falling to the cool earth. In this gentle season, my tastes also begin to change. I’m drawn to classical music over classic rock, hot apple cider over iced tea and lemonade, and grotesque undead creatures violently terrorizing helpless villagers over, well, whatever the opposite of that would be.

I was ten years old when I first saw James Whale’s 1931 horror masterpiece, Frankenstein. The scene was perfectly suited to a night of cinematic creepiness: a cold and rainy night in October, 1977, me in my Snoopy pajamas sitting on the sofa with my mother, (a classic movie fanatic) who was putting her hair up in curlers while the TV flickered in the corner. Other than the TV, the house was quiet and dark, the hour was late; I remember it being past my usual bedtime. But I had learned long before that my willingness to watch an old movie with mom would automatically grant me a reprieve from going to bed.

It must have been nearly Halloween, and Frankenstein was being shown that evening, along with two other classics Dracula and The Wolfman; a night of triple-feature bone-chilling excitement! It was Frankenstein, though, that had the biggest impact on me.

I spent most of the movie nervously munching on popcorn, tucked tightly into one corner of the sofa, my knees drawn up to my chest, uncertain as to what this hideous cadaverous creature would do next.

I make no apologies for my trepidation; when the film debuted in 1931, audience members gasped, some even fainted, at the sight of the ghastly ghoul as he clumsily made his entrance and proceeded to wreak his fiendish havoc (this is, in my view, a testament to both the makeup artists and to Boris Karloff who brought Shelley’s creature to life, no pun intended). In fact, when Frankenstein and Dracula were shown together in a San Francisco theater in the 1930s, Universal included the provision that ambulances would be on standby for those who couldn’t stomach the visions of horror that would dominate the screen that night.

Frankenstein ranks as my all-time favorite horror movie, and most critics agree that it deserves a high place in the storied echelon of monster movies. But I'd like to indulge myself with a little personal review of the film as seen through my ten year old eyes, and also from the (hopefully) more reflective standpoint of my own middle age. I’m one of those annoying people who believes that there can be important lessons to learn from exploring films and their meanings. I love taking movies scene by scene and examining how, when the scenes are artfully put together, a story emerges that stays with you for a lifetime. Or maybe I’m just a guy who loves movies and is too easily carried away by such things as mummies, monsters, and the macabre. Whatever the case, I hope you’ll turn out the lights, pour yourself something hot to drink, and come along with me for a little journey into one of the eeriest and most remarkable films ever made.

Frankenstein is a film designed from beginning to end to make the viewer feel uncomfortable. Before the Motion Picture Censorship Code went into effect, films released before 1934 were free to depict more daring images and dialogue, both in terms of sexual situations and innuendo, as well as violence and horror. While there is no sexuality and little in the way of harsh language in Frankenstein, Whale took advantage of this freedom in his own ways. Interestingly, the censorship board did omit and alter several key scenes of the film in subsequent releases, thus diluting some of the original feel of the film (the film has since been released in its original uncut format).

The film opens, not with a scene from the story, but with a man, Edward Van Sloan, who steps from behind a curtain – as though on the very stage of the movie theater - to address the audience. His message is delivered in a congenial manner, with a kindly smile. But his words are more warning than welcome.

“We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God. It is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation – life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even – horrify you. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now's your chance to – uh, well, we warned you.”

This would not be the last time we see Mr. Van Sloan, for he also plays the role of Dr Waldman, the professor from the medical school who we’ll get to know in just a bit.

As the opening credits roll (against a rather ill-chosen background of disembodied spinning eyes), we see that the role of “The Monster” is played by: “?”

Of course the role of the creature belonged to Boris Karloff, and would singularly define his career, despite being in many dozens of films and television programs between 1919 and 1971. Karloff was not the first choice for the role. It was originally intended for another giant among horror movie actors of the 30s, Bela Lugosi, and while Lugosi would not ultimately appear in the film, Universal Pictures used the rumor of his presence to its advantage in its pre-release promotional materials. Indeed, many moviegoers attended the film expecting to see Lugosi as the creature.

After the opening credits, we’re presented with a grim scene: a graveside burial service attended by a few somber mourners and a priest. Unbeknownst to them, they’re not alone. For lurking nearby in the shrubbery are a small, burly, wild-eyed man and another, thinner, dour-looking gentleman; Fritz, and his master, Dr. Henry Frankenstein (in Shelley’s story, the misguided doctor is called Victor).


A little late night yard work?

Henry is played by Colin Clive, an English actor who tragically passed away only six years after Frankenstein was released, at just 37 years old . Fritz was played by Dwight Frye who also had a role in the other great horror pic of 1931, Dracula, as Renfield, the hapless visitor to Count Dracula’s castle who ends up a lunatic, although with a steady job as the Count’s roadie after being relieved of a little of his blood.

Watching from the shadows, Henry and Fritz wait impatiently for the mourners to disperse and the gravedigger to finish burying the coffin. When the coast is finally clear, they emerge with shovels and proceed to undo the gravediggers work. A keen observer will notice that Henry manages to toss a shovel of dirt right into the face of an effigy of the Grim Reaper himself, posed a few feet behind – a symbolic moment of hubris in which Henry disrespects the very image of mortality.

As they extract their prize, Henry lovingly pats the coffin. “He’s just resting…waiting for a new life to come.” Wheeling their macabre prize back home, Henry and Fritz come upon yet another body, this one hanging from a gallows on the roadside – likely a criminal who apparently didn’t deserve a proper burial. Henry makes Fritz climb the gallows and cut the body down. But alas, as Henry examines the body, he determines, “The neck’s broken. The brain is useless. We must find another brain!” Don’t you just hate when that happens?

Later, the ever-obedient and posture-challenged Fritz manages to break into the local medical school late at night to steal a brain conveniently sitting in a jar just begging to be used in some sordid experiment. Instead, Fritz is startled into dropping it into a splattering mess on the floor, and grabs the next best thing he can get his dirty little hands on: an “abnormal brain.” This, of course, proves to be a bad idea for everyone involved.

For all his sinister deeds, Henry is, in fact, a gifted doctor. And what he does in his off-time is really none of anybody’s concern. The thing is, he’s also slated to marry the lovely, if slightly ostentatious, Elizabeth. Elizabeth is worried sick (sick, I tell you!) about her fiancée’s apparent decline in mental stability, what with the being out until all hours of the night in some isolated laboratory doing who knows what to who knows whom.

Elizabeth is played by Mae Clarke, known not only for her role in Frankestein, but also for being the woman into whose face James Cagney shoves a grapefruit in “The Public Enemy.”

We see a distraught Elizabeth receiving her friend, Victor (yeah, I know, the name thing is confusing if you’ve read the book), and proceeds to read a letter to him from Henry in which it’s pretty apparent that Henry is in need of a stiff drink and a few days off. Nevertheless, the message is clear: Henry doesn’t expect Elizabeth to understand what he’s up to, but asks to be left alone to complete his very important work, going so far as to tell her that his work must come before her.

For his part, Victor (played by American actor John Boles) is the very picture of the supportive friend. He’s also the very picture of a man who would gladly sweep the lovely Elizabeth away to his mansion in the hills, ply her with a decent Chablis, and impress her by bench-pressing stable ponies whilst wearing a red velvet smoking jacket, if only she’d get over this ridiculous fixation on the science geek, Henry.

The Monster! Wait, no, that's just Victor

But after hearing the letter, Victor looks stern and worried too. He also looks like he’s made of concrete and reinforced sheetrock. Even so, he promises to speak to Henry’s professor, Dr. Walden, at med school on Elizabeth’s behalf and see what can be done about Henry’s shenanigans. Elizabeth appreciates the gesture, but insists on going along, and after she begs the old professor to help the three of them set off to confront Henry at his remote laboratory. (I should really mention here that if you want the full effect of reading this piece, you should try to pronounce it, “labooor-ah-toray” in your head.)

Meanwhile, Henry is a busy beaver; frantically mixing fizzy chemicals and ordering Fritz around. There’s a wild electrical storm raging outside the laboratory, and Henry’s making preparations to fire up the equipment and give this “bringing a dead man back to life,” thing a whirl.

But – wouldn’t you know it! - right in the middle of things, there’s a knock at the door downstairs. An interruption! Now?? Henry tells Fritz to go down and send the visitors away. Of course they persist, and Henry finally relents and lets them in out of the storm. Elizabeth, Victor, and the professor all express their concern for Henry and his zany behavior, Victor finally calling Henry, “crazy,” right to his face. The impertinence! Henry decides to show them just how “crazy,” he is by escorting them to his lab where he intends to wow them with his mad (scientist) skills. He is SO going to win the big science fair competition at school this year.


This will not end well

We all know what happens next. Tesla coils spark to life, switches are thrown, electrical equipment buzzes and whirrs, the corpse is hoisted up to the roof on a gurney as the thunder and lightning explode in peals. It’s all very suspenseful and noisy. The moment of truth comes as the body is brought back down and – sure enough – the wretched, ghastly hand of the corpse begins to twitch and move from beneath the sheet.

Henry, of course, is beside himself and heady with power. “It’s alive, it’s alive!!! Now I know what it feels like to be God!” he raves (that comment about being like God was one of the things the censors eliminated once the censorship code went into effect). Dr. Waldman and Victor try to calm him, even physically restraining him in his moment of giddy triumph. Personally, I think they should have let him enjoy the moment. It’s not every day you get to bring a dead guy back to life. And things won’t be nearly so merry once the electric bill arrives.

Ieeets Aliiiive!!!

Strangely, we don’t know what exactly happens immediately following the hand-twitching incident in the lab. Do they go out for celebratory cocktails? Sit around playing Scrabble and watch Letterman? Is Fritz ordered to get out the clean bedding for the guest rooms? All we know is that later, presumably the next morning, Victor and Elizabeth pay a visit to my favorite character of the entire film, Baron Frankenstein, Henry’s dad (played by Frederick Kerr).

The baron is in his study and he’s not a happy man. He’s wearing a kind of fez, smoking some sort of hash pipe, and has on a vest with a bow tie. He’s like a cross between Winston Churchill, WC Fields and an inebriated Shriner. He’s a wise man, but also a man who simply speaks whatever happens to be in his mind and never mind the consequences. He looks like he’s killed a few charging rhinos earlier in his life, and rather enjoys a good German lager every few hours. He’s entirely befuddled, displeased, and bothered by the news Elizabeth is bringing him, namely that the wedding may have to be postponed due to Henry’s experiments and the little matter of his insanity (the latter Victor and Elizabeth hide from the old man).

The Baron.

You have to admit, Elizabeth and Victor are in a rather awkward position. They’d like to reassure the Baron, but telling him the truth wouldn’t accomplish much. It’s very hard to tell a father, “Your son is fine! He’s just busy robbing graves for body parts in the middle of the night with the help of a strange little Quasimodo guy, and reanimating corpses using an impressive collection of high-voltage machinery and mysterious chemicals, while laughing maniacally in the very face of God. Now won’t you please just relax!”

Without the benefit of specifics, the Baron is left to draw one conclusion: Henry’s gone off with another woman, and, dash-it-all, he’s going to go find out just who this hussy is and have a man-to-madman talk with his son, end of discussion.

While this is going on, Henry and the professor are hanging out in the lab. Henry is still feeling rather pleased with himself, casually smoking, and waxing poetic about the wonders and necessary risks involved in scientific discoveries. This, despite Dr. Waldman’s warnings about having created a dangerous monster, and how only evil can come from all this, and yadda, yadda, yadda. A lot of rubbish from a foolish old man, as far as Henry’s concerned. But it’s during this talk that Henry learns that the brain that was stolen from Waldman’s medical classroom was not a normal one, but a “criminal brain.” Henry is caught off guard by this revelation, scowls, and seems to be making a mental note to self, “Remember to beat Fritz soundly about the ears.”

Suddenly, the conversation is interrupted by a sound coming from the other room. “Here he comes,” says Henry, getting up in a hurry. What follows is a truly remarkable scene, including our first real look at the creature.

Hi Honey. I'm home!

We hear no ominous music. We see no special lighting effects. There’s no groaning or growling or banging around. What we see is simply a large door opening, and a huge Kevin McHale-like figure backing awkwardly into view. The creature turns to his left to face the room and reveals the effects of Henry’s handiwork; the famous flat-headed, dead-gazed, neck-bolted, pale monstrosity. The one cinematic effect Whale does utilize is extremely disconcerting; a brief and sudden close-up of the monster’s face, followed by yet another even closer shot so that for just a moment the gruesome face takes up the entire screen. I can almost imagine a few gasps from the theater-goers of 1931.

Flashing back to that night in 1977, I can trace at least a dozen subsequent nightmares to that particular movie moment; that huge face staring at me in my dreams.

What happens next is poignant and affecting. Henry cautiously manages to get the monster to sit down, albeit rigidly, in a chair. We see Henry open a window above the monster, letting in sunlight. The creature clumsily gets to his feet and begins to stretch and awkwardly reach upward for the light, as though to gather up the sun in his arms. Henry closes the window and the monster settles back down into the chair, but with pleading, imploring hands outstretched to Henry in a gesture of pitiful confusion and distress. “Where did the light go? What is happening to me?” he seems to say. All of this is portrayed by Karloff silently and brilliantly, as viewers are both repulsed and yet sympathetic to the plight of this creature.

But everything changes once Fritz arrives with a torch. It turns out, the monster isn’t too keen on fire, and he makes his feelings known by scuffling with the other three, and trying to get Fritz to put the damn torch away. It’s the first time we see the monster become violent. After a struggle, they manage to subdue the creature, restrain him with ropes, and then chain him up in a dank and sparsely furnished holding cell that could really benefit from some Ikea stuff and a woman's touch.

As the creature strains against his chains, Fritz comes in to shush him using a whip. Henry urges Fritz to leave the creature alone, takes the whip away, and seems to be in the throes of regret about the whole matter. “Just leave him alone!” he pleads, running from the room. But Fritz persists in taunting the creature, this time with the torch. Word to the wise: If you ever encounter an upset massive, undead monster, do not taunt it with fire. Just walk away. Just. Walk. Away.

Moments later, Henry and the professor hear a horrendous scream coming from the holding cell. Rushing to see what’s up, they open the door of the cell to find Fritz hanging from the ceiling, a chain around his sorry broken neck, and the creature none too happy about how his day is going. Frankly speaking, I remember feeling a certain satisfaction at this scene. For all his work ethic and devotion to his master, Fritz was a dick.

Bad idea, Fritz

Henry and the professor now realize they’ve got a real problem. While you can almost hear the professor thinking, “I told you so, Henry, I told you!” the fact is that the monster is now a liability. Murdering people, even Fritz, makes you a bit unpopular amongst non-murderers. The professor convinces Henry that the only solution is to kill the monster using lethal injection.

Henry agrees and prepares the syringe. They let the creature out, Henry deftly distracts him by nearly getting throttled to death, and the doctor administers the shot. The creature drops like a ton of… oatmeal (not bricks, I flatly refuse to let it be bricks).

Right at that moment, there’s a knock at the door (what is it with people coming over without calling first?). It’s Victor, who announces that the Baron and Elizabeth are right behind him and will arrive at any moment! Now personally speaking, I would love to have seen a “Weekend at Bernies” situation where Henry props the monster up between he and Waldman while they pretend to have been drinking, telling jokes, maybe a cigar stuck into the monster’s mouth for added effect. More Young Frankenstein, than Frankenstein, I suppose.

Instead, they drag the monster back to the cell, out of view. Elizabeth and the Baron are now at the front door, the Baron babbling on about how this isn’t a place fit for his son, etc. They’re finally let in by Victor, who is immediately peppered with questions from the Baron about what the devil is going on around here. The professor emerges, but he too fails to sooth the Baron’s concerns. He’s here for one reason only, which is to gather up his son and take him away from this filthy place. Eventually, the Baron, having grown tired of everyone's hemming and hawing, takes Elizabeth’s arm, points with his cane and says in his thick British accent (despite being cast as a German Baron), “Well…let’s go and see what’s up these awful stairs!” I’m telling you right now, the Baron is awesome.

When Elizabeth and the Baron find him, Henry promptly faints to the ground, murmuring things like, “It’s all my fault,” which it really is. Henry is taken away to recover from this mess, and Dr. Waldman is left in charge of Henry’s papers, the lab, and of course, the creature, who he promptly decides to dissect.

While Elizabeth is seeing to Henry in the warm and sunny garden of the Frankenstein estate, the doctor is back at the lab preparing to dismantle the monster. Things don’t go as planned when the monster awakens, gives the professor a good strangling, and escapes the lab.

We somehow then flash forward and - it’s Henry and Elizabeth’s wedding day! The ceremonies are presided over by the ever gregarious and ever-mumbly Baron. There is much celebrating, dancing in the streets, and copious amounts of adult beverages being consumed. The Baron addresses the villagers and announces that there’s plenty of beer, and “lots more where that came from,” which naturally elicits a cheer from the crowd. Free beer?? Cue the merriment and dancing men in lederhosen!

Meanwhile, the monster is staggering through the countryside, completely bereft of beer and merriment. And we’re about to see one of the most famous and controversial scenes in horror movie history.

We see a man and his young daughter at their humble lakeside home. Dad tells his little girl that he has to go check his traps, to stay there and play with her cat, and then he’ll come back and they’ll head into town for a grand old time at the reception. Dad leaves, and moments later you-know-who shows up, stumbling out of the brush like Foster Brooks (Google him, young people).


Maria. Sweet, innocent, and not very bright.

Maria, the little girl, turns to see the creature emerging from the bushes. Rather than screaming her head off like a normal little girl, Maria, clearly intent on a career in sales or PR, introduces herself, invites the monster to play with her, and leads him off by the cold, withered hand, to the shore of the lake. Even the monster seems confused. Maria happily hands him a flower and we see the poor creature smile in spite of himself. Maria hands him more flowers and keeps a few for herself. She tosses a flower into the water to show him how they float like little boats, and the creature follows her lead with his own flowers. It’s all fun and games until he runs out of flowers, and decides to scoop Maria up and throw her into the water too. Maria does not know how to swim.

This scene so shocked movie audiences in the 30s that the censorship board forced Universal to delete portions of it so as to make it less horrible. This, to me, is a kind of cinematic tragedy of its own. For here we see the ultimate problem, the reason the monster cannot survive, the sad truth; that despite the obvious horror the creature feels at the results of his own actions, he’s unable to control them and is forced to make decisions using a subpar brain. Don’t all pretty things get thrown into the lake? No?

Ever get a funny feeling...?

Meanwhile, back at the Frankenstein estate, Elizabeth is feeling apprehensive. She can’t quite put her finger on it, but even on her wedding day she’s worried sick (sick, I tell you!) that something’s happened to the professor (it has) and that something awful is going to happen to ruin the wedding day (it will). Henry tries to reassure her, but then gets word from Victor that the monster’s been seen in the countryside, running amok and scaring the hell out of people. Somehow, Henry has a sense that the monster is in the house, and the search is on. Elizabeth, alone and ensconced in her dressing room, preparing for the ceremony, is unaware that the creature has gained entry and is right..behind...her. Elizabeth turns, sees him, screams her pretty little head off, and everyone comes running. By the time they arrive the monster has left, and Elizabeth is alive, but shaken. And stirred.

Cut to Maria’s father walking into town while the wedding celebration is in full swing. He’s carrying something. A body. A little girl’s drowned, lifeless body. He’s in a stunned trance. It’s all very sad. A lesson here: showing up to a wedding party carrying a dead body is going to bring everyone’s mood down.

One thing’s for sure, these villagers are pretty versatile. The wedding party stops the dancing and laughing, and has now become a lynch mob. Night has fallen. They split up into groups armed with torches, bloodhounds, and yes, pitchforks. There’s much yelling and cheering and blood lust. Henry is among them, having left Victor in charge of looking after Elizabeth (he really uses poor judgment sometimes, doesn’t he?)

Fancy meeting you here!

Henry gets separated from the group and ends up crossing paths with his monster who does not seem pleased to see him. There’s a struggle and, predictably, Henry loses, is knocked out, and dragged away by his own creation. The villagers catch sight of the creature carrying Henry’s body away and let loose the hounds. Now the chase is on. The monster takes refuge in an abandoned windmill. Once inside, Henry comes to his senses and he and the monster have a tremendous fight at the top of the windmill, capped off by the creature throwing Henry down to the ground. Some of the villagers cart him off. The rest now have nothing else on the agenda but to light that windmill on fire, much to the chagrin of the creature who, as Fritz could have told them, doesn’t like fire very much.

Finally, as the monster was meeting his fate in the burning windmill, I (still curled up in the corner of the sofa) was filled with a sense of satisfaction and relief. At last! The monster had his fiery come-uppance and would no longer be terrorizing the townspeople with that freaky stiff-legged gait and his deeply disturbing groans and growls. My mother, however, was having a very different reaction. As the screen faded to black, I noticed her sniffling and dabbing her eyes with a tissue. I was confused. Crying? Crying over what? The monster was dead! This was cause to celebrate and relax! Rejoice! High fives and drinks all around! The monster was gone! Crying was simply not a sensible response to this situation, at least as far as I was concerned. Moms can be strange creatures in their own right.

Wedding party turned lynch mob.

Of course in later years, and subsequent viewings of the film, I understood mom’s sniffles. The Frankenstein monster, though a monster for sure, is a tragic figure; a victim of one man’s reckless dalliances with science and mortality. Engaged in an ego-maniacal tug-of-war with God over defeating death and creating life, Henry is the real monster of the film. The creature did not, after all, ask to be constructed from the body parts of corpses and brought back to life. And once on his feet, his limited intellectual abilities and childlike perception of the world around him caused him to function more like an animal than a human being. The creature was as fearful of his situation and surroundings as others were of him. Perhaps more so. He was scared, uncertain, upset, and liable to remove all your limbs if you lit a match. But he was a “monster” only in so much as he was grotesque in his appearance, unpredictable, and potentially violent when threatened. This description, however, also fits some perfectly decent animals, and some of my friends after a few beers.

I should mention that the film does not end with the burning windmill scene, but on a rather positive note. We see the housekeepers gathering to knock on the door to Henry’s room where he’s recuperating from a decidedly hectic wedding night. I'd love to see their wedding photo album! The Baron opens the door from inside, “What’s all this, then?” he asks them. The maids tell him they thought Henry might appreciate a glass of Frankestein wine to aid in his recovery. The Baron, a man who makes far better decisions than his son, declines to dose Henry, but instead happily downs it himself. A fitting end to a classic and unforgettable horror film.

So, class, what can we learn from the film? (Don’t worry, there will be no quiz)

First of all, we can learn that a truly great story can be retold for generations without losing its potency. Frankenstein is really it’s own ubiquitous brand. Its success has spawned at least a dozen other Frankenstein-related movies: The Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and, of course, the well-loved and often quoted spoof, Young Frankenstein, to name but a few. But beyond the entertainment and chills, Frankenstein is emblematic of a more sobering ideological struggle.

Frankenstein, the film (and of course the book by Shelley, which is an amazingly rich and complex novel you should read), forces us to acknowledge a difference between the actions of a monster and the one who may shoulder a deeper responsibility – the monster’s creator. We’re made to understand that the monster himself is constructed with a bad brain. His is the brain of a psychotic murderer. And that face! Sinister, expressionless, dead. We all know he could use a little botox and a good spa treatment. However, his mortal life is over. His crimes, whatever their nature, are somehow tempered by a fate perhaps greater than his own mortal death.

We all know that the Frankenstein monster is an ugly manifestation of the hubris of a man obsessed with power. Throughout the film we’re reminded that the man behind the mayhem is, in fact, intelligent, educated, wealthy, and loved. Why waste it all on a bad biology experiment? In a word, power. Power over the one eternal human problem: death.

Why do we return to this story over and over again, remaking and revisiting this seemingly simple story of a power-obsessed doctor who creates a really cool monster?

Without dallying in my own dangerous hubris, I feel it’s rather obvious that the story of Frankenstein reflects a dichotomy of belief still very much alive in today’s society; that of the role of science in the creation and extinction of life. I would go so far as to say that Frankenstein is part of the genetic makeup of modern society and its dependence on science to answer the big questions. Perhaps the biggest of these questions entails a certain forced realization that the role of science is to push the envelope of what is possible. In so doing, science has to be acknowledged as the single greatest force to challenge our religious beliefs and ideals. Where are lines to be drawn between what can be done, and what should be done?

It would seem that our ability to invent and devise ways of perpetrating human existence and ending it is almost infinite. Artificial inception, abortion, stem cell research, capital punishment, “right to die,” artificial life support systems, “do-not-resuscitate” orders, induced births, sperm banks; all of these thorny issues exist under the shadow of Shelley’s prescient story written nearly 200 years ago by an 18 year old daughter of philosophers in a castle near Geneva, Switzerland.

Frankenstein leaves us with a heft of unresolved philosophical and moral quandaries that, to this day, plague us. But for those of us who relish the chance to explore the outer edges of scientific facility, as well as both the limitations and merit of our own beliefs, Frankenstein remains a treasure trove of inspiration, examination, and fascination. And what more can we ask from a good old-fashioned scary story?

As for my own memories, Frankenstein represents a period of my childhood I relish. Aside from the intellectual exploits the story invites, those nights along-side mom, the two of us silently suffused in the blue light of the television, enjoying the handiwork of Whale (and Hitchcock, Lean, Wilder, etc) those were moments I’d gladly relive. And while the Frankestein monster has staggered, big and menacing, into more than a few of my nightmares, I still have a soft spot for that big murderous lout. For all his creepiness and brutality, he represents a period of innocent fascination with the strange but welcome sensations of being frightened, intrigued, and enthralled. For that, I will never be able to look on that horrible face without feeling a certain indebtedness to the likes of James Whale, Boris Karloff, Mary Shelley, and my own mother, who remains my favorite classic movie-watching partner.

--Happy Halloween!

Morgenrot

2010-12-13T13:38:00.000-08:00

Film by Jeff Desom, Music by Hauschka

'Some things seen and heard tug inexplicably at one's soul' - Wassily Kandinsky

Hauschka - Morgenrot from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.

Baseball - A Personal and Biased Perspective

2010-09-30T21:38:00.000-07:00

"A hotdog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz" -- Humphrey Bogart

I'm not sure just when I became a fan. In truth, I don't think anyone ever chooses to do it. I don't think anyone ever woke up on a Saturday morning and said to themselves, "Today is the day I learn something about baseball." Baseball isn't like that. Baseball, it seems to me, chooses you.

I know this: most of what I learned about baseball is thanks to my dad. And I suspect that most baseball-loving people over the past 100 years would say the same thing. Baseball is like your great-grandfather's pocket watch handed down to you with care. A kind of inheritance, if you will, from your father, grandfather, uncle; often - but not always - a male authority figure.

Baseball fans are a unique breed. While your average baseball fan can discuss the finer points of the game in great detail, the real love the sport engenders in the avid fan is not easy to define. If you spend any time around baseball, it seeps into you in a hard-to-explain way. It's a connecting thread in the linens of one's life. Somehow, game by game, inning by inning, it gets in your blood, and once you've got it there's no cure. Once really exposed to baseball, it will be, for now and always, a wonderful infection, deeply ingrained in your psyche. If all of this metaphor talk about baseball sounds maudlin or overly-sentimental, you are not a baseball fan. But don't worry, there's still hope for you.

My first exposure to baseball, as I mentioned, was thanks to my dad. Specifically, via the games we would go see played by Portland's minor league team, the Beavers. I suppose I was about 8 or 9 when I saw my first game. I don't recall the score or who the opposing team was. Maybe surprisingly, I don't even remember whether our beloved Beavers won or lost. Being so new to the game, I didn't understand strikes, balls, outs, steals, or anything else that seemed to be happening in some odd mixture of quiet, deliberate order counterbalanced by sudden, riotous chaos. There were cheers, boos, some running, some dust kicked up, some ball throwing, even some stealing (when my father said that a runner stole 2nd base, I recall pointing out the obvious: "No he didn't. It's still there.")

I didn't know any of the players, and couldn't tell the catcher from the mascot. I really had no idea what was going on down there on that huge green and brown expanse. I was a baseball newborn, seeing, hearing, smelling the myriad of sensory experiences unique to this bizarre game for the very first time.

I can only recall aspects of the game that really don't have anything to do with sports or statistics. I will never forget my first sight of the baseball outfield as we entered the stadium, almost blindingly green. I remember the foreign bittersweet smell of beer and the loose crackle of peanut shells under foot, combined with the musky smell of sod and moistened dirt, and of course, the mouthwatering scent of hotdogs, and salty popcorn. There is a perfume to a baseball stadium, and it can be found nowhere else. Most of all, I remember the crack of a 33 ounce bat against a 5 ounce stitched leathery sphere that sounded like a gunshot echoing in the stadium while the players took batting practice before the game, and the ever-present noise of the fans, like an ocean; sometimes a quiet drone, sometimes a raucous tidal wave of cheers or boos interspersed with yells of "Get your glasses on, ump! That was down the middle!" or "He's gonna bunt!" or "Pull that pitcher, he's done!" None of this made any sense to me whatsoever.

Although I was a small boy, experiencing a hundred utterly alien and weird things on that day over 30 years ago, I was overcome with an unexpected feeling - not of being in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar place, but of being at home.

I know that this experience of mine isn't unique. In fact it's almost a cliche. Talk to anyone who loves the game and they will likely have a similar story to tell. But while baseball has not been "my life's passion," my appreciation of the Grand Old Game has reached a point with me where I have no choice but to look a little deeper at this odd phenomenon and explore the game in my own way.

"I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us." ~Walt Whitman

In 1979, the Pittsburgh Pirates, led by Dave Parker and Willie Stargell, won the National League pennant. Anytime I hear their theme song, "We Are Family," by Sister Sledge, I can't help but envision Stargell rounding the bases in his black and yellow Pirate uniform, like some exuberant bumblebee, after one of his famous mammoth home runs. As it happened, the Portland Beavers were the farm team for the Pirates at that time, which resulted in my meeting both Stargell and Parker when they visited Portland during a Beavers game. Whatever they were like in their personal lives, I remember that they exhibited all the hallmarks of the gentlemanly demeanor that the institution of baseball somehow seems to instill in so many of its stars. And I recall that both of them, while graciously smiling and autographing a nonstop supply of baseballs, seemed to have hands and arms of superheros, which, in a sense, they really were.

"When they start the game, they don't yell, "Work ball." They say, "Play ball."' ~Willie Stargell

It was then - having met some of its legends - that I began to pay attention to baseball. Although I was already a fan of basketball and football, I found myself constantly mesmerized - if not downright confused - by baseball and its intricacies. That seeming contradiction between simplicity and complexity is but one of the enigmas of the game. Baseball is, after all, unique. Let's remember a few things about baseball that, in my mind anyway, set it apart from other sports.

First, the game itself is set upon a field arranged in a rather unusual geometric shape. Rather than having a goal of some sort on each end of an elongated field (as most other sports) there is no such goal. No basket, no end zone, no net. Players do not move in a linear fashion, back and forth, across a field or court. Instead, they move around the bases sequentially arranged in a perfect diamond shape, or, when on defense, any-which-way to field the ball or tag a runner.

While the specific dimensions and configuration of the lines and bases on the field are constant in major and minor league baseball, the fields themselves can vary in size and shape. The distance from home plate to the center field fence, for example, can vary as much as 35 feet from park to park.

Second, baseball is not a game depending so much on constant action as it is on moments that can unfold in a split second fastball strike, or a single swing that sends a ball over the fence and brings a home crowd to its feet. Once the pitcher sends the ball toward home plate - a journey that takes the ball about half a second - virtually anything can happen. Anything.

Baseball is sometime criticized (by those who frankly don't understand the game) as lacking action or hard play. This is a little like complaining that tennis lacks enough slam dunks, or that golf doesn't involve enough tackling. And besides that, as anyone who has played, whether a little leaguer or a major leaguer will attest, baseball is plenty demanding when it comes to physicality. The power it takes to smack a ball over a fence 410 feet away (over 1/3 longer than a football field) may only be eclipsed by the sheer superhuman effort it takes to launch a fist-sized hardball into a space the size of a hubcap 60+ feet away...at nearly 100 miles an hour...100 times a night...accurately.

Also note that unlike most sports, there is no clock in baseball. The average major league baseball game lasts two hours, 47 minutes. However, the longest game, between the Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers in 1984 lasted just over 8 hours and went 25 innings (Cubs won, 7 - 6) while the shortest recorded game was a mere 51 minutes between the (then) New York Giant and the Philadelphia Phillies in 1919 - Giants winning 6 to 1. So, during an average game, how much time elapses during which "something's happening?"

Recently, Wall Street Journal reporter David Biderman analyzed the amount of time spent in action during an average major league baseball game. "Action," includes the time it takes for a pitcher to throw the ball, as well as the more obvious time a ball is in the air after a hit, or a player is stealing base, etc. Biderman determined that the average game had about 14 minutes of action in it.

However, as noted by Biderman, the time NOT spent in action during a game isn't exactly time wasted. Between pitches, a myriad of decisions and strategic options may be weighed out. Managers may be busy consulting the hitting chart on an opposing batter before he even steps up to the plate. Catchers and pitchers are constantly having a silent dialogue regarding what kind of pitch to throw and where to place that pitch, depending on a range of factors. And fielders may shift positions depending on the batter, or the game situation to increase their chances of saving runs. While the casual observer may grow frustrated by "all the standing around," in baseball, the more involved fan knows that this time spent between pitches is where the real game of baseball is played. In short, there is always "something happening" during a baseball game.

But the critics who continue to impatiently drum their fingers on their knees and yawn over the "slow pace" of baseball may find it interesting to learn that Biderman also determined the amount of play action during an average professional football game. 11 minutes.

(An interview with David Biderman on this topic can be found here: Biderman)

While it's interesting to consider these aspects of time, most baseball aficionados know that baseball has far more to do with timing. To the novice fan, baseball looks like a sport centered on the pitcher trying to strike out the batter, and the batter trying to avoid such a fate. But to the trained eye, the battle between pitcher and hitter is one of keen decision-making and split-second timing, and it's not a simple thing to analyze. Take pitching, for example.

It would take a supercomputer to properly determine the variables in physics involved in throwing a pitch. From the way a pitcher regulates his breath before the pitch, places his feet on the mound, and adjusts his balance, to the grip on the ball, to the wind-up (often looking like a pained contortionist, but carefully developed by each pitcher to maximize velocity and balance), to the release point (the precise moment the ball leaves the pitcher's hand), and the amount of spin or torque applied to the ball as it is released (the arm swing measured as fast as 5,000 degrees per second!), muscles from neck to toes flexing and releasing, pitching is a perfect symphony of physiological exertion unlike anything seen in other sports. The speed, movement, and break of a pitch largely determines its success, so the slightest deviant motion or off-balance release can make the difference between a perfectly placed strike or a wild pitch. To master all this, a good baseball pitcher is certainly more than an athlete. He's part physicist, part sleight-of-hand magician, and part gambler.

Batting is no different. A skilled hitter is a combination of laser-like focus, cannon-force power, and gymnastic balance at the plate. The position and angle of the bat before the pitch is released, as well as the stance, head angle, and knee bend, can be different from hitter to hitter. And then there is the swing itself. There is, as it turns out, a specific way one is supposed to swing at a pitch. Turning the upper body toward the pitcher as the ball is released, rotating the shoulders, and extending the arms only through the strike zone - not before - while following the ball with your eyes, and throwing the entire weight of your hips, arms, and shoulders into the (hopeful) contact. Got it? Good.

Of course not everyone hits this way and keen observers can recognize some ball players merely by their stance at the plate. For an object lesson in contrasts of batting styles among active players, observe the differences between Ichiro Suzuki, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Kevin Youkilis, and Alex Pulhols at the plate; all outstanding hitters, and yet all possessing radically different batting stances and styles.

Obviously, not everyone cares about such things as whether a hitter is "pulling the ball to left field," or how a pitcher manages to throw a ball in such a way that the trajectory actually changes in mid-flight. As fascinating as these things are to me, I know that the average sports fan probably doesn't spend much time thinking about them (although it can be argued that there's nothing "average" about a baseball fan).

"Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything." ~Toby Harrah

Truthfully, the one element of baseball that was, for a time, off-putting to me is the absolute pervasive worship of The Statistic. Baseball, more than any other sport outside of world economics, perhaps, takes statistics very, very seriously. Some have compared the lust for baseball statistics to a drug addiction. It seems that almost nothing can happen during a game - no matter how trivial - that isn't being meticulously documented by somebody somewhere. We've all seen box scores, displaying the runs, hits, and errors, by innings for a given game. Some of us have even looked up things like "lifetime batting average," for a given player, or "best ERA for a closer since 1955." But this does not scratch the surface of statistical obsession with which baseball fans preoccupy themselves.

For example, were you aware that on September 5th, 2006, seven teams shut out their opponents? Or that on July 24th, 2006, the Detroit Tigers became the first team in 115 years to score 5 or more runs in the first inning of three consecutive games? Or that only two brothers ended up with the exact same batting average in the same season (Mike and Bob Garbank, in 1944, a .261 average for both). How, I ask you, have you managed to live so long being so blithely unaware of such earth-shattering information?

Well, let me let you in on a little secret: you do not need to concern yourself with such trivia in order to thoroughly and genuinely appreciate the game of baseball. But here's an even deeper secret: the more you watch baseball, the more you will become genuinely fascinated by such seemingly meaningless facts. And you might just learn something in the process. Thanks to baseball, I learned how to calculate a pitchers ERA, a hitter's batting average, and other (gasp!) mathematical feats.

One of the most compelling aspects of baseball to me is that it's really a game within a game, within a game. Like some sort of fractal image, baseball can be enjoyed on virtually any level. But the closer you look, the more you see. The greater your attention, the more details are revealed. To commit to becoming a student of the game means becoming a kind of archeologist who digs deeper and is rewarded with ever more intriguing information. After more than 30 years of personal appreciation and observation, I am still learning the game. From pitch selection, to situational fielding positions, to the strategy of the batting lineup based on the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing starting pitcher, baseball is a bottomless well of fascination for anyone intrigued by variables, odds, statistics, and just plain luck.

I've rambled on about the ins and outs of baseball for some time now. But what is it about this game that really so grabs me as a fan?

I guess the answer to that runs deeper than stats or home runs or hotdogs. I think the real answer is that baseball delivers something to my life I've found nowhere else: A sense of belonging. Belonging to a history, a tradition, a heritage that not only stands the test of time, but also makes time somehow irrelevant. Think about it. This game has been played, essentially in the same way, since the Industrial Revolution. Through world wars. Through political upheavals. Through social unrest, and times of economic boom and depression. It has served as both a focal point and a distraction for numerous generations. It's been a touchstone of American history, both reflecting and deflecting the stressors and influences at work outside the ballpark.

And it's not just an American phenomenon. It's nearly impossible to find a town of more than a few hundred people anywhere on the planet that doesn't include a group of kids swinging a stick at a ball, many with dreams of one day knocking a walk-off homerun out of the park in the bottom of the 9th inning of a World Series game 7 (Hey, I still have that dream!).

"The other sports are just sports. Baseball is a love." ~Bryant Gumbel

Baseball has it's losers and champions, heros and goats, its integrity and, yes, its scandals. Like the men who play the game, baseball itself isn't perfect. But somehow, in some mysterious way, baseball inspires, enthralls, and entertains like no other activity.

As for me, I'm grateful dad took me to that first game. I'm happy to have baseball as a part of my life and education. And I've learned more than a few things from baseball over the years. From Babe Ruth, I've learned that the mystique of history can, in fact, endure into the postmodern age. From Jackie Robinson I've learned that the power of a man's spirit and skill can overwhelm the bitterness of prejudice. From Lou Gehrig I learned that we are all ultimately mortal, and yet all capable of performing superhuman feats. From Ken Griffey Jr. I learned that there's little better in life than enjoying what you do. From Derek Jeter I learned that you don't have to be a jerk to win: it's possible to succeed with both style and grace. From Cal Ripkin Jr. who played a record 2,131 consecutive games (think about that) I Iearned the value of resilience, determination, and guts. From Bill Buckner I learned that major league mistakes don't change the fact that life goes on. From Yogi Berra I learned that "Baseball is ninety percent mental, the other half is physical." The list goes on.

A few years ago, my dad and I took my son to his first Portland Beavers baseball game. I don't remember much about the game. I don't recall the opposing team. I don't even recall whether our beloved Beavers won or lost. What I do recall is a great feeling of satisfaction, that I was now able to do what dad had done for me by introducing him to this strange and wonderful world of strikes, steals, and sliders. Little had changed since my first game. The smell of beer and hotdogs still permeated the air. The field was just as green, the fans just as boisterous, the crack of the bat just as sharp. And, sometime around the 6th inning, sitting there in the stands with my father and son, I recall the distinct and irreplaceable feeling of being at home.

"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again." --- James Earl Jones (as Terrence Mann) in Field of Dreams

Time Lapse

2010-04-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

I'm just a sucker for this kind of thing...

Timescapes: "Death is the Road to Awe" from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

2010-02-22T21:28:00.000-08:00

"Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning or an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it."

------- James Lee Burke

An Ounce of Madeira, A Step Back in Time

2010-02-16T21:16:00.001-08:00

“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.” ---- Proverbs 31:6-7

When I was a teenager, I imagined what my life would be like at 42: immensely successful, impeccably fit, well traveled, highly respected, funny, ruggedly attractive, immaculately-dressed, indiscloseably

wealthy, and entitled to make up words like “indiscloseably.”

Now that I’m here, at 42, I’ve had to settle for “funny,” and even that is a trait I only possess in moderation. So it’s fair to say that while I’m pretty content with my life at 42, it certainly hasn’t lived up to the teenaged fantasy. Kind of like ordering a Big Mac; it will look absolutely nothing like it does in the TV commercials – a perfectly constructed, two-handed, mouth-watering, juicy hamburger - but you eat the greasy thing anyway, don’t you?

Big Macs might reveal too much about the refinement of my adult tastes (or lack thereof), but that’s another thing I thought would be different about being in my 40s; I thought I’d be busy indulging in the finer things in life. I thought I’d be more likely to be spotted at the symphony rather than on my couch watching baseball. I thought I’d belong to an elite golf club rather than riding my stationary bike on long rough terrain tours in the garage. I thought I’d be wearing tailored Brooks Brothers suits as opposed to jeans and a button-down from Target. And, most importantly, I thought I’d really be into wine.

Wine is very popular with successful people. They drink it frequently and know all about it. They know their recioto from their reds, their sherry from their shiraz, and their vintage from their vin mousseux. While it’s true that wine is a wonderful beverage with a deeply rich history, let’s face it: for many people, it’s a status drink more than anything else. That’s not to say that everyone who drinks wine is a pretentious ass (I do know I’m playing amid generalities here, so forgive me, wine people). It’s just that I’ve found myself so often put-off by the attitudes of some wine lovers and all things vinous, that I’ve come to associate wine drinking with a certain degree of conceitedness. So while I beg the pardon of St. Vincent (the patron saint of wine-makers) I’ve avoided drinking much wine and have stuck to my bourbon or beer when imbibing.

You might think I’m being a tad unfair in saying that wine drinking is often tied to status. But the relationship of wine to status isn’t new. In fact wine, it can be argued, has lubricated the machinations of the upper crust for eons. The ancient Greeks, the first known connoisseurs of fermented grape juice, knew full-well that you served finer wine to those you wished to impress, and gave your slaves wine diluted with water in a 4 to 1 ratio. The Romans practically built their culture around wine; so many farmers abandoned their grain crops in favor of the much more profitable vineyards, that grain had to be imported from elsewhere to compensate for the food shortage. They too used their best wine to schmooze honored guests, and made sure to serve their better wine at the beginning of the evening’s festivities, and then bring out the spoiled wines later on, once people were too soused and slurred to know the difference. The best wine, in any wine-appreciating culture, has always been reserved for the elite (and sober), while the diluted, spoiled, or vinegary wine – called “lora” or “posca” in ancient Rome was provided to the slaves and lower classes. It was likely a sponge soaked in posca that was offered to Jesus as he suffered on the cross. Imagine that; there you are giving up your life for the sins of humanity and somebody offers you the equivalent of spoiled Franzia, out of a bucket, from a sponge on a stick, no less.

Today’s version of posca might be certain cheap fortified wines of relatively high alcohol content often sold in jugs or boxes (and that, say some, contribute to vagrancy and homelessness).

While I know enough to opt for a decent chardonnay over a bottle of Night Train, truth-be-told, I think I’m intimidated by the whole “wine” thing. There’s just so much to it; so many do’s and don’ts. I know a few basics, like “never serve white wine with hot dogs,” and “a full-bodied merlot is ill-paired with Doritos.” But don’t be fooled by my apparent sophistication. The fact of the matter is that when it comes to wine, the guys living under the bridge sharing flasks of Thunderbird probably have more refined palates than I do. I just don’t pay attention to the more subtle aspects of wine tasting. The “bouquet?” The “nose?” The “finish?” Are we drinking here, or picking out flowers and furniture varnish? I generally fall into the category of wine drinkers concerned with the aspect of “taste,” as in, “Hey, how’s the wine?” “Oh, tastes pretty good, thanks!”

I know, I know, the world of wine tasting is one of refinement, elegance, subtle appreciation, and discernment. That appeals to me. But if I’m entirely honest about it, I approach wine like I approach most drinks; does it taste good, and if so, may I please have some more?

Now I recognize that my overall exposure to wine has been relatively limited. I have not, for example, sampled some of the more expensive wines, like a 1982 Bordeaux Blend Lafite Rothchild, which runs about $8,000 a bottle. But I live by a maxim passed down to me from my grandfather, who, just before he died, said, “Do not drink anything that costs more than your last car, unless someone else is buying.” Words to live by. But then again, I don’t know if he was speaking from experience. Maybe dropping a few K on a good gulp of vino would be worth it. Did Grampy try it? On his income? Probably not. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I had that kind of money. Bill Gates Money. (Bill Gates Money is, to me, the kind of money that, due to its overwhelming prevalence, ceases to have any value of its own. It’s like if ice suddenly became currency. We’d all own land in Antarctica, and carry Coleman coolers instead of wallets.). So what if I had a fistful of Benjamins and plunked it all down on the bar and placed my order, “Bartender, a magnum of 1982 Bordeaux Blend Lafite Rothchild please, and pour it into a diamond-encrusted stein. Dirty.” “Certainly, sir. Right away.”

I would expect that, after such an investment, my first sip of an $8,000 wine would, at the very least, imbue me with the kind of everlasting life Indiana Jones got from drinking out of the Holy Grail. Throw in the looks of Adonis, or at least those of Harrison Ford, and I might empty out my IRA and tip back a few. Somehow I doubt it works that way.

But alas, while I have coughed up $100 on a fine single malt scotch back when I was making a good living, I cannot see myself spending more than $30 on a bottle of wine. I know myself too well for that. Let me give you an example: the last bottle of wine I bought was purchased at a convenience store in southeast Portland. I was waiting to pay for my Cheetos when a small wine rack next to the counter caught my attention. There was chardonnay, merlot, a Riesling, and a couple Zinfandels. I opted for the $9 Riesling, which I thought might complement the Cheetos nicely. I brought it home, uncorked it, let it “breathe” for five minutes, and then poured it into a Guinness pint glass. I would say that the nose was crisp, with notes of apricot, apple, and a finish of light vanilla that persisted for nearly one full minute. Drinking it through a straw was a last-minute decision and, to me, a stroke of genius.

By now, you may have gathered that my appreciation of wine equals that of a music lover who claims to be enraptured by the aural strains of the Backstreet Boys. I mean, the way I see it, wine is a lot like laundry. There are lights and darks and as long as you don’t mix them, you’re good.

However, while I admit to approaching wine with the erudition and delicacy of Fred Flintstone, I do have a confession to make. I have acquired a grape-based guilty pleasure that has, somehow, managed to make me into a full-on, hardcore, lover of wine; a connoisseur, aficionado, and unabashed lover of a particular kind of wine you may have never heard of. It’s called Madeira, and it changed my life.

Made on the picturesque island of Madeira off the coast of Spain, Madeira wine-making goes back to the 15^th century and is rife with history. It was Madeira that America’s founding fathers drank to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. George Washington was a known Madeira buff, rumored to consume a pint or more daily. And it was Madeira that was used to christen the legendary USS Constitution in 1797. This is not a drink to be trifled with.

With varying degrees of sweetness and dryness, Madeira is usually served as an aperitif or dessert wine, like Port or Sherry. In fact, it’s a kind of “anti-wine;” its characteristics derived from doing the opposite one would normally do to produce, say, a stunning merlot. For one thing, while most wines must avoid contact with oxygen until it’s time to drink, Madeira is intentionally allowed to oxidize, giving it a dense, rich body, like a fine liqueur. While the natural sediments in wine are typically allowed to settle to the bottom of the bottle (or cask), Madeira wine is intentionally moved around from time to time to infuse and concentrate it with flavor derived from those sediments. The result is a wine of rich, deep substance, with an amazing spectrum of subtle flavors, including chocolate, caramel, anise, walnut, coffee, spice, toffee, coconut, vanilla, and velvety brown sugar. It is, to me and other Madeira lovers, a deeply enjoyable adventure in both taste and history.

Madeira first reached European palates in 1515, when shipped to King Francis the 1^st of Spain. Wine importers initially worried that Madeira would prove to be a lost cause, what with all the jostling and stifling heat it had to endure in the hold during the long sea voyages; not ideal for most wines. But shippers soon realized that the constant movement of the ship and excessive (and unavoidable) heat, actually worked to improve the taste of the wine rather than degrade it. This resulted in Madeira becoming known as the vinho da roda, or “wine of the round voyage.” So when King Frank got his first taste, the deal was sealed and Madeira became highly prized among European imbibers. And because Madeira is a fortified wine, it has the added advantage of being able to be stored and consumed over long periods of time making it feasible for Madeira lovers today to enjoy the same wine people were enjoying more than a century ago. Indeed, Madeira wine of over 200 years old can be found in some restaurants, even today.

My first exposure to Madeira came in the Fall of 1990, when I visited a local Indian restaurant renown for its wine list; one of the best on the west coast. My father and I had just finished an astounding meal of Chicken Tikka Masala, curried scallops, and biryani, when our server inquired as to our feelings on the topic of dessert. Having stuffed ourselves on fine Indian cuisine, we were disinclined to give in to further temptation.

That’s when our server, Craig, a wine expert, leaned over our table and said, “I might mention that we are having a special on a fine Madeira. A 1928 Bual.” Dad and I looked to each other with raised eyebrows, curiosity whetted. Neither of us had the faintest idea what this man was talking about, but it certainly sounded interesting. Craig, taking pity on our obvious ignorance, filled in the blanks, “Madeira is a wonderful fortified wine that isn’t as affected by exposure to oxygen as most wines and therefore can be stored, opened, and enjoyed over long periods of time.” As discreetly (and somewhat sheepishly) as I could, I inquired as to the price. “We normally sell this wine at $32 per ounce,” said Craig, “but tonight an ounce is $18.”

An ounce? Eighteen bucks for an ounce of anything street-legal caused my mind to reel for a moment. I think I had a small seizure, but tried to look indifferent with a casual nod. Craig eyed us both for a moment, probably regretting his suggestion and about to recommend a pitcher of Coors Light instead, and said, “I’ll leave you some time to decide. But I would mention,” he added in a hushed tone, “that once people taste a Madeira of this magnificent quality, they become aficionados for life.” And then he walked away. The bastard.

Aficionados? For life? Dad and I looked at one another and pondered the implications. What did this mean? Aficionados for life? Would we be getting badges? Can I add that to my resume? Will there be some sort of ceremony? How’s my hair?

I was picking up the tab on the meal this evening and had already spent a small fortune on dinner. But then again, Dad and I rarely had a chance to dine out together. This was quality time with Dad. This was a special occasion. And, you know, this 1928 Buoy Al, or whatever, was almost half price! Always the bargain hunter, I decided to throw caution (and some cash) to the wind and we ordered up two ounces of the stuff. Craig, appearing pleased with us, did a brief head cock, bowed slightly, and heeled off toward the wine cellar. Somewhere deep in my pocket I felt my credit card roll its eyes and toss up its hands. But dammit all, this was our chance to elevate ourselves into the sacred and elite realm of the wine aficionado and I was not about to blow it over 36 measly dollars!

It took quite some time for the wine to arrive. I suppose one must be rather careful when pouring two ounces of wine when $36 is on the line and the wine is almost 60 years old. It was brought to our table by two winged angels riding chariots made of gold whilst the Mormon Tabernacle Choir hummed Ode to Joy with smiles on their faces. Actually, it was brought in two tiny little wine glasses by Craig, but he delivered it with great care and flourish, placing our glasses gently before us as though handling a couple ounces of plutonium. He had clearly done this before. We hadn’t. So after Craig delivered the goods, he bowed again and said, “Gentlemen. Enjoy.” He departed, leaving us alone with my investment. I mean, Madeira.

Dad and I spent a moment looking at our tiny glasses of amber-colored wine. Dad is a man who likes to savor a fine drink and a choice cigar whenever the opportunity presents itself, which isn’t often enough. So I was not worried he would simply down this spendy liquid like a shot of tequila. But then again, is there some protocol for drinking such a thing as a 1928 Madeira? We elected for the traditional clinking of glasses, careful not to spill a drop of the precious liquid inside. He said, “Here’s to 1928!” and we took our first sip.

It’s a funny thing how such unexpected pleasures in life leave their mark. I realize how absurd it may sound, but as we lowered our glasses from our lips, we said nothing, only smiled, and allowed our senses to be absolutely overwhelmed by this sensation. It was metaphysical. It was glorious. It was sweet, rich, aromatic, slightly spicy, and felt as if my mouth had been suddenly upholstered in some sort of fine, luxurious velvet. I think we attempted to comment, but couldn’t, being in the throes of a moment of absolute bliss. There was really no need to discuss it. Craig was right. This drink, this…wine, was some sort of divine panacea, a magic elixir. As I took my second, precious sip, life became an experience of complete and utter satisfaction. For the moment, life’s problems melted into the background. This was no posca. This was enchantment in a tiny glass.

In 1928, Sonja Henie won her first gold medal in the 2^nd Winter Olympics in St Moritz, Switzerland. Charles Lindbergh was presented with the Medal of Honor for his first trans-Atlantic flight. Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin. Herbert Hoover became President of the United States. Mickey Mouse made his screen debut in the cartoon “Steamboat Willie.” And somewhere on the island of Madeira, someone began making the 1928 Bual my father and I savored that crisp autumn evening in 1990.

It takes quite an experience to render my father and I speechless. But as we sat there sipping our Madeira, I noticed Craig, standing at a distance next to the kitchen, a slight, knowing smile on his face. I worried that he might judge us unworthy of our purchase. Pearls before swine, or something. But Craig is a wise man and superb server, and at heart he seems eminently concerned with the satisfaction of his patrons. Mission accomplished. Craig rules over his wine collection like a lion over his pride. So as he looked on favorably while Dad and I continued our sipping, I realized that he was right. We were instant aficionados of Madeira. I also realized that I was hooked, and expense aside, I would soon be returning to sample more of this sacred tonic.

In the months to come, I would taste a 1930 Barbeito, a 1923 Malvazia, a 1926 Sercial, a 1900 Verdelho, an 1892 Verdelho, and a dozen others. Each presented its own unique, wondrous drinking experience. I have spent a small fortune on these taste excursions; an ounce-by-ounce pleasure, but without an ounce of regret. Someday I intend to finally sample the legendary 1795 Terrentez, at around $200 per ounce, or perhaps the oldest known vintage, a 1715 Terrentez. What might wine made in the year Louis the XIV died taste like?

So at 42, I have not become the suave, urbane bon vivant I had envisioned. I’ll still opt for a good pulled pork sandwich over a filet mignon more often than not. But as I sat there with my father, watching him agreeably relishing this simple, ancient taste sensation from a bygone age, our little glasses of Madeira provided me with something more important; a sense of connection to history, to life, to the grape-infused vein of human refinement, and to my old man. Can one ask for anything more from a glass of wine?

It’s true that my life is not one of complete refinement, sophistication, erudition, and class. I still can’t recommend a fine Merlot to properly represent you at your next dinner party. And most of the wine world remains a mystery to me. But I do have my niche as a Madeira lover. It’s one infused with rich flavors, a hint of history, and a bouquet of fond memories in which life is truly, tastefully, good.

Happy Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T12:05:00.000-08:00

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

I REALLY want to see this movie. Or wait... maybe I already have...

2010-01-22T13:27:00.000-08:00

2009-12-22T22:52:00.000-08:00

A note about the following piece: For some while now, I’ve been wanting (or needing, actually) to stretch myself a little, writing-wise. I’m not sure why I decided on this particular piece, other than it definitely feels like a stretch. I hesitated to post it, mainly because the subject matter is something I can’t claim to represent properly, expressing a voice I can’t own, and addressing a topic I really have no business discussing as a male. Still, in my occasional role as “life coach,” I’ve encountered many situations like the one described below. I’ve tried to draw on those experiences, and to represent them in a respectful but honest way. As this is not my typical subject matter, feel free to provide your honest feedback, should you feel so inclined.

Leaving

She knew that the time had come to leave. The time had come, actually, long ago. But there was something different now. Something inside her had broken down. Or broken through. For three days, she had been living with the odd sensation of falling backward through space, as though down a well or chasm of some kind, watching a familiar world disappear above her. She took it as a kind of sign that she’d let go of something, and as disconcerting as the falling sensation was, she was beginning to realize that sometimes falling was better than holding on. This, of course, was something he would never understand.

She had believed in him for so long. That he could change. She had held so tightly to that one, sacred thing: hope. She clung to it with steel, bittersweet tenacity. Hang on. Don’t give up. Keep hope alive! But the hard truth is that hope has a funny way of turning sour after awhile. Hope, it seems, collects like unpaid bills, and eventually becomes denial if unfulfilled. Hope spoils somehow, like a meal left uneaten, cooling on the table for too long. She remembered something from church. The Bible said, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick..." Yeah, she thought, that pretty much sums it up.

When and how it all changed, she still didn’t know. She always thought that if she knew her role, things would work out. But her role, that role she fought so hard to attain, of the Faithful, Loving Wife, had somehow mutated into something she herself detested; the Victim.

Her sister had told her, “You’re living on a river in Egypt: De Nile!” And in response she clearly, patiently explained to her sister, who had been, and would probably always be, single, that she was NOT in denial at all, and that it took a LOT of personal commitment to make it work, and that she should stop pretending to know about a life she's not living. You can’t just up and run the minute things get tough. Nobody is perfect, and when you get married, there are no guarantees that he will always remain Prince Charming. He’s a Good Man, dammit, and she was not about to abandon him. You just have to stick it out sometimes and remember that marriage isn't all wine and roses. She had chosen this path, after all.

But the past three days, the past bloody, loud, surreal three days, had made all those words ring like some hollow joke that gets told to an audience who just stare back, blankly. Hope had spoiled and turned decidedly toxic. The path, her path, seemed to lead to a precipice overhanging an abyss of uncertainty and risk. Her excuses and cliche-laced arguments were now as threadbare as the old goose down comforter she sobbed into so many times in the dead of night it doubled as a sponge. The irony: that comforter had been a wedding gift only a few short years before. And its role as "comforter" was far too much to put upon a poor worn out pile of cloth and feathers. If she didn't do something, she'd end up the same way. She knew the time had come. She knew the glowering, disapproving nurse at the ER by her first name. And it was time to leave.

_____

Making up her mind about leaving brought about an odd and disturbing realization. One she couldn’t even admit consciously, let alone speak aloud. When the realization first occurred to her, she was folding the laundry and it struck like a bolt from the blue, and she tilted her head, like a dog hearing an unusual sound. Curious. Uncomfortable. The realization was that she would miss his hands on her. Both the loving, grasping, squeezing hands, as well as the vicious, angry, reckless hands. The sex, such as it was, sustained her need to be reminded that she was, in fact, still a woman. The sex was an animal need. Or was it spiritual fulfillment? She couldn’t settle that debate. The arguments, or, well, the beatings, on the other hand, were horrible. Violent, yes, but it wasn’t the violence itself that hurt her the most, and she knew full well he could have killed her many times, if only by accident. He lost control, but not so much that he would kill her, and this somehow seemed a silver lining. She had gotten so she could predict them, the beatings. There was a look in his eyes and a slur in his voice. But she recognized in herself a kind of sick attraction to the deliciousness of the pain. What was wrong with her? She couldn’t deny it, and couldn’t entirely ignore it. That pain. So genuine, so intentional. It was a raw, red version of existence, an enlivened existence, in jagged contrast with the rest of the time when she was essentially numb. Pain was her resurrection. It snapped her awake. She hated it when he said, drunkenly, tearfully, that he didn’t mean it. Of course he meant it! Why should she suffer so, both from the pain and the strange, terrible addiction to that pain, if it was all accidental, like some casual misstep on his part? What was the matter with him? The pain meant something. She meant something. She had purpose when she felt the pain. She knew herself better. She mattered enough to be smacked; first reviled and struck, and then craved and worshiped like the Holy Mother with a tearful sinner at her feet, begging absolution.

Yes, of course it was wrong! It was horribly wrong. But weren’t so many things in life? Nobody's business, and who can judge?

Once, he kicked her, full-force, on the side of the head when she was on the floor already. She didn’t see it coming, and she’d lost consciousness. When she came to, she realized she’d been carried to bed, her clothes removed, nightgown clumsily put on her like a mannequin, twisted up under her arms, and he was sitting in the chair at the foot of the bed, asleep with his chin on his chest, an empty bottle of beer precariously hanging from his fingers. Her head was aching, but somehow not terribly so. Had he given her something for the pain? She pulled the covers up to her neck, tucked her knees up tightly to her stomach, and went back to sleep. He had left for work by the time she awoke.

____

He wouldn’t be home tonight. He hadn’t told her so and he didn’t need to. She knew it instinctively, which is to say, she was conditioned enough by past experience, and she was nothing if not observant. He was “working late,” which could mean almost anything, except that he’d be home before 2AM. How he managed it, she didn’t know. What, with a 50 hour a week job, and then to be out drinking with his buddies, only to rise like clockwork at 6am again the next day. Somehow, she admired him for it. Look at him go!

On those nights when he did come home before dawn, she would be there, waiting in bed. She would hear him quietly enter the dark room, sometimes stumbling or dropping his keys, whispering profanities to himself. He would enter the bathroom, only turning on the light after the door was closed behind him. She would hear the toilet flush and know he’d be emerging a moment later. Then he would climb into bed, coughing once or twice, and wrap his burly, hairy arms around her small back. And she would draw those arms close, bringing his body closer, sometimes even causing her to wince as he unconsciously pushed against the very bruises he had inflicted on her only a night or two earlier. She would smell cigarettes, rum, and sometimes some kind of sweetly rancid perfume on him, and it would hover heavily like a ghost over them through the night. And if he wasn’t too drunk, there might be sex. And if he was too drunk, which was most nights, he’d begin to mouth breathe, and eventually break into a rhythmic, deep snore which both kept her awake and comforted her. There he was. Her man. Home safe.

______

“You have to get out, Julia!” her mother insisted,” He’s just like your father, and I don’t want that kind of life for my daughter. Come back home. It’s not that far away!” In terms of mileage, her mother was right. It wasn’t that far away, maybe 500 miles. But with the passing of time, a few hundred miles now seemed like light years. She couldn’t go back home. Going home meant failure; something Julia was taught not to accept. Failure is not an option. Where had she heard that? Some movie? She would not fail. She would not return home, at least not willingly. It was a trip to Mars. Too far. Too much emotional baggage she would have to endure in exchange for her remittance of the current emotional baggage, which she knew so well. To trade a little unkindness for disgrace? What kind of deal is that? What’s the difference, after all? Out of the frying pan, into the fire. She could go any number of places, sleep on any number of sofas or in guest rooms of friends who, she knew, would take her in without too much questioning, or blatant judgment. But that was, after all, another kind of failure.

She never told her mother that he beat her. She said he was “mean” to her. But the message was clear enough. Her mother wouldn’t have really understood anyway. The beatings weren’t arbitrary events without meaning. He wasn’t just some angry gorilla. This was a man who had suffered in life. This was a man who was hurt. The world hadn’t been fair to him, and he had to get all that out somehow. He had to flush it out, didn’t he? He couldn’t hold it in. It would kill him. So he slapped her. He yelled profanities at her. He threw a half-full bottle of beer at her and connected with her shoulder as both glass and bone shattered. And she felt herself to be a kind of sacrifice for his clandestine pain that must, she thought, be so much more than he could inflict upon her body. So she could and would bear it. Just a storm passing through. It all seemed so reasonable in the dead of night. Less so when she had to explain herself to the girls at the office. I’m just a klutz! she would say to them, with the same cute shoulder shrug that only recently failed to calm him when he was drunk and belligerent. She couldn’t tell if they believed her. She suspected not by their half-smiles and raised eyebrows. It didn’t matter, really, as long as her story kept them from asking questions.

_____

The worst of it - the absolute worst, most detestable, unsavory, hurtful, unacceptable part of this situation was this: although she had made up her mind to leave him, she knew, in the end, that it was a choice. Why? Why must it be a choice? For that, she had to assume a responsibility. She had to take on the burden of having actually deciding to do it. She didn’t have to leave. No. She could stay. Maybe she should stay. Maybe she should stay simply because she could stay.

But in the end, there was a reason for leaving. It was so ironic, that after all these years, the final straw was this: during her last visit to the emergency room, she was told that the injuries to her legs would not fully heal and that she would be left with three scars for the rest of her life. This, from him drunkenly flailing at her with nothing more than a butter knife. A butter knife! But this changed things. Her legs would be scarred forever. Her beautiful, shapely, perfect legs. The one physical attribute she was the most proud of. Some women had a perfect face. She didn’t. Or perfect skin, or round breasts. She didn’t. But she had somehow been blessed with dancers legs, said her mother, like Cyd Charisse, whose legs were insured by MGM for a million dollars. Julia had been proud of her legs going back to grade school. Legs that looked good on the beach. Legs he used to caress with such tenderness and want. And these legs would now bear the scars of frustration from this same man, this husband, who not only produced the injury, but did so without the singular awareness that he , on occasion, needed to see this bruised, middle-aged body as some object of desire. That he would ruin that! That he would damage the very thing that made her the most attractive and appealing, to him, after all! Wasn’t that just pissing on your dinner plate? Now what would happen? No. From this transgression there was no return, no healing, no forgiveness. Silly, maybe. But there it was.

Funny, she thought. That after everything, it should take the disfigurement of her most treasured feature to make her leave him. But now, on this night, and no other before it, it seemed neither good nor bad, but simply inevitable. It was a choice, yes. But now - now with her legs irreparably damaged, never again to be properly displayed in her many skirts, some tasteful, some flirty - the choice was clear. For that, and for nothing else, he would be left alone. Left to wonder, to rage, to cry, to threaten suicide. Fuck it. Let him do it.

_____

The first step was to put on some music. She chose Sheryl Crow, who she never really liked, but who seemed to provide some sort of feminine courage she desperately needed. Then she found her suitcases and opened them all and placed them on the bed. One still held an old piece of sexy lingerie she had packed during their trip to Hawaii three years ago. Black lace. He'd always liked black lace. She'd never worn it. As it happened, they fought the whole time and only had sex once, on the last night, when the both of them had been too drunk on mai tais to fight, but not too drunk for other things. She threw the lingerie into the dirty clothes hamper anyway, a sad but slightly mordant smile at the fact that he’d eventually find it there with the socks and towels. She had expected the packing to take hours; it took only 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes and she had what she needed to leave. Three suitcases, a duffle bag, one Sheryl Crow CD, and it was done. She was amazed at this. All this time, she had been only 45 minutes away from having enough packed to leave for good. In the midst of those long, agonizing nights, she had always been just 45 minutes from actually leaving. It was a kind of miracle.

__

She loaded her bags into the old Subaru, started the engine, and went back inside. Her decision had been made, or had it? She stood in the kitchen, alone, the harsh fluorescent light buzzing quietly overhead. She stood very still and quiet for several minutes; a statue. The clock over the stove ticked and tocked, and she wondered for a moment whether those tick-tocks were slowing down. She looked around, blankly, weakly. Those curtains, she wouldn’t miss them. Ugly orange things his mother had given them one Christmas and he demanded they go right in the kitchen window. Then she noticed his dirty plate from breakfast in the sink, and instinctively moved to rinse it off and place it in the dishwasher. But she caught herself, and instead, for some reason she couldn’t really define, dropped the plate in the garbage can.

She intended to say goodbye to this place. But she couldn’t do it. There would be no goodbyes at all, for anything or anyone. She felt herself suddenly surrounded by a host of voices or some sort of spirits begging her to stay, reminding her of her commitments, of the good times, asserting the need for hope, dedication, and conviction to her values. This is home, Julia. In the end, the ghosts could not compete, for once, with the simple fact that Julia was clad in her favorite shorts. Denim. Snug, but not obscenely so. And, as she looked down at the faint but evident scars, the ghosts had no choice but to retreat, silenced in their supplications by a decidedly palpable reality of raised purple lines strewn along shapely legs he'd already seen the last of. She felt a shiver run down her back and she let out a long sigh and brushed her hair from her face with the back of her hand. No, these legs would no longer stay where they were not appreciated and loved. No, this was enough. This was home no longer. The time had come. And it dawned on her that she had left this place months ago. She left the light on in the kitchen, turned quickly on imperfect but strengthened legs, gently closed the door behind her, and drove into the summer night.

__

At 3:11 AM he returned, quietly letting himself into the house. She had left the light on in the kitchen, the stupid bitch. Did she even bother to look at the electric bill? He turned it off and carefully entered the dark bedroom, relieving himself in the bathroom and rinsing the cotton feeling from his mouth before climbing into bed. Even as wasted as he was, he immediately sensed a difference. The bed was cold. Empty. He wondered. He froze. And then he answered his own question. He wanted to get up and search the house, the city. He wanted to find her hiding somewhere. He wanted to track her down and hurt her. To make her feel the pain she was inflicting on him, the anguish that was already scraping out his insides. Kill her, maybe, or himself. But instead, he didn’t move. His body felt heavy but small, thick, and dead. Like a little boy, he wrapped his arms around her pillow, pulled it close to his face, and, as he would do more often than not for many months to come, cried himself to sleep.

###

Holiday Cheer

2009-12-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

John Lenski

2009-11-12T22:01:00.000-08:00

(From the series "A Vintage Upbringing")

The Lenskis lived around the corner, about three blocks to the north. They lived in a modest but comfortable three bedroom home with a real picket fence, and a gravel driveway with the best basketball hoop in the neighborhood. I say “best,” because it actually had a net but although the ground was level, the gravel made for some rather surreal trajectories when it came to dribbling the ball. To this day, I retain a scar on my knee from a failed dunk attempt on the basketball hoop in the Lenski’s driveway. If I had been wearing the ankle-length baggy shorts kids today wear, I might have escaped unscathed. But no, I wore the crotch-high white shorts that kept my voice from lowering and made me look like an escapee from The Village People. That, along with a horizontally-striped red, white, and blue tank top that fit like a cigar wrapper was my basketball uniform of choice. I deserved to scrape up my knee.

I won’t bore you with a complete description of the Lenski family except to say that for Scott and I, John Lenski was a 70s god. John was 17 when we were about 12, but the age difference seemed much more immense at the time. To us, John was an adult – an amazingly cool adult. He was everything we wanted to be and had everything we wanted to have in 1978. He was cool, in the way Hutch from Starsky and Hutch was cool. Blonde, tan, thin, slightly dangerous and yet seemingly in control of his life.

John had a 1974 red Camaro, which he worked on almost as much as he worked on his blonde mane of Ted Nugent-like hair and mustache. It was – the Camaro that is – a thing of beauty. When started up, it roared like the cannons of Navarone, and rumbled like a Zeus’ own thunder cloud. It looked like it wanted to kill something and I was pretty sure it would go from zero to the speed of light in about one second.

I discovered just what the Camaro could do one day when John allowed Scott and I to sit in the back seat of the car while John did a “test run” to see how his newly installed carburetor was working. Once comfortably ensconced in the back seat, enveloped in smoky, black leather, John slowly taxied out onto the street. Even idling, the Camaro chugged like a locomotive. “Peel out!” Scott goaded as we sat at one end of a long straight-away about a mile from home. John revved the engine, cranked up Foghat on his 8-track, and obliged. I remember a cloud of smoke enveloping us as tires squealed to life against the poor, tortured blacktop, and we emerged with our backs pressed so hard against the seat I expected to end up in the trunk. We lurched forward and I distinctly remember feeling like an Apollo astronaut leaving the launch pad. The scenery outside seemed to shake and blur as the engine screamed and the little plastic hula girl glued to the dashboard went into a full convulsive seizure. It was the fastest I had ever traveled as a mortal human being, and I was sure we were about to either die in a fiery crash or escape the bonds of gravity, and either way I just didn’t care. Thinking about it now, dying to “Slow Ride” was maybe not the most prosaic way to go.

After what seemed like an eternity of deafening noise and violent vibration, we came to a screeching stop. My heart wanted to jump out of my chest, my stomach was crying like a baby in a corner, I was about to vomit, and I began seriously rethinking my career choice of becoming a race car driver. In spite of all that, Scott and I both yelled in our prepubescent falsettos, “Again! Yeeeah! Again!!” And, of course, John obliged again, deftly spinning the car around like Jim Rockford chasing cocaine smugglers, flinging us back into our seats for another stomach-wrenching launch.

This was the kind of thing that endeared John to us, but it was only one of the reasons we loved him. Another reason was because of his room. Somehow, he had managed to turn the attic of the Lenski household into his own private bachelor pad. You entered John’s room by climbing a ladder into the attic (which, in and of itself, was pretty damn cool). You emerged into John’s room as though escaping through the hatch of a submarine. And what met your eye as you stepped up into the room was a kind of 70s paradise. The whole attic, extending the length of the entire house, was carpeted in lime green and white shag carpet. I’m not talking about the floor alone. I’m talking about the walls too, vaulting upward from each side to the peak of the roof. And this carpet was so thick, it was like someone had plastered the room in sheep. It smelled of the 70s - incense ash, leather, burnt wiring, and Brut cologne. It had the effect of feeling both expansive yet cave-like, with a certain hushed quality. It was so aromatically, acoustically and visually amazing, Scott and I could only stand in quiet reverence at the spectacle we beheld upon our first visit. It was the dimly-lit Cathedral of Cool and we were but humble acolytes.

Pinned to the carpeted walls and ceiling were around twenty posters. If an alien civilization were to visit our planet in a thousand years and wonder what the 70s were all about, all they need to know could be gleaned by a glance at the walls of John Lenski’s bedroom. There was Boston, Peter Frampton, Styx, Rush, Journey, and - this almost goes without saying - Farrah Fawcett and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. There was a poster of Uncle Sam in his famous “We Want YOU!” finger-pointing pose, except this version added the phrase “…to STOP WAR NOW!” There was even the “Hang In There, Baby” poster, with the kitten clinging to a thin string of yarn.

John had a row of black lights installed along the top beam in the room, which made things like our shoe laces and Farrah’s white toothy grin glow like radioactive material.

As you might expect, John had an amazing stereo system. In the 1970s, the best way to judge the overall quality of a stereo system was to look at the size of the speakers (the bigger the better, unlike today). John not only had eight speakers, each the size of a Greyhound bus, he had somehow mounted them to the ceiling (I would later try the same thing, with disastrous results and some structural damage). The stereo was always tuned to the hard rock station, and seemed to generate enough heat to hatch eggs. I used to love hearing the beginning of Fly Like An Eagle, by Steve Miller through John’s stereo, that long opening drum fill rolling through the room like a row of five ton dominoes falling over.

John’s closet was built into one side of the wall. Inside were enough polyester shirts and bell-bottom pants to make John Travolta weep. Me? I still had Garanimals in my closet.

John slept in a heated waterbed covered with a zebra-striped comforter. Within reach of this was a stack of Mad Magazines and Rolling Stones, and his own, private, miniature refrigerator. I know! A refrigerator in his room! Can you believe it? This was no ordinary fridge. For inside, John kept a small stock of Schlitz Malt Liquor. Nevermind that he wasn’t old enough to drink; it was there, none-the-less. He never offered us any of his “magic brew,” and we never asked. It was enough, at our age, to be in the mere presence of all this beer, rock, shag and polyester Shangri-La.

John had it all. But the one thing he had above the bitchin Camaro and the ultimate 70s teen bachelor pad was something Scott and I would never have: Trish. Trish was the Cleopatra to John’s Marc Antony. The Josephine to his Napoleon. The Minnie to his Mickey. She was the ideal girlfriend of the younger worshipers of a cool 70s high school teenager. Which is to say: she was a real live girl with curves who smiled at us sometimes. And, Ozzy, what a smile.

I’m not going to get into a physical description of Trish and all her physical attributes because that’s just rude, juvenile, and unnecessary. I’m an adult now, and fully understand that women are not just “objects” to be stared at. But if you were to ask me about her in 1979, I would have gotten shaken up in hormone-saturated teenaged lust, blushed, and looked away shamefully. Scott would have just said, “Hells bells, what a fox!”

Trish and John were the “It” couple of the neighborhood, maybe of all of Felony Flats, and we often stopped riding our bikes just to watch them drive away in that Camaro, Trish checking her lip gloss in the visor mirror and tossing her gorgeous brown hair at us as they drove by. She was just one of those girls who always seemed to move in slow motion, like a Bo Derick walking out of the surf while Scott and I stared with our jaws hanging open.

When John eventually dumped Trish, Scott and I decided to go to his house to basically say, “Dude! What are you thinking??” Of course we had no such balls to confront John Lenski as to his decisions where women were concerned. After all, what did we know? Maybe she was a bitch. Maybe she was mean to him or didn't like his car. Maybe…ahh, whatever! The girl was the pinnacle of hotness, and it was just hard to understand how John could have left her. In a way, the act itself made him all the more hardcore stud to us. We were friends with the guy who dumped Trish Morgan! Still, the break-up sent shockwaves through the neighborhood.

There’s one last story to tell about John Lenski, and I’ve wrestled with just how to convey it. John was our idol for all the reasons I’ve described above. But it was an incident in June 1979 that actually solidified him as a bonafide mentor in my life, that shaped a portion of my character as child and adult. And the funny thing is that I’m confident that to this day, wherever John is now, he has no idea…

During the summer, we used to play flag football in the street. John and his brother James were both older and more athletic than Scott and I. So in our two-on-two games, I would often be paired with John, who served as quarterback, while I attempted to use what little agility I possessed to avoid getting flagged and gain some yardage. Our “flags,” incidentally, were strips torn from one of John’s old greasy mechanics rags, so it was always hard to explain to mom how my hands ended up with engine grease all over them when all we were doing was playing football.

During this particular game, John and I were tied with Scott and James and the hour was getting late. Scott had already been called home for dinner, and I knew I would be called home soon as well; a lukewarm tuna casserole and peach slices on cottage cheese awaiting me.

John and James were highly competitive individuals, and I always felt the need to do my best to help him win against James. Being on John’s team could be a blessing or a curse depending on the outcome of the game. He wasn’t a good loser, and would often mope for a day or two after a loss. John, being bigger and stronger, often overthrew the ball to me, and being a gangly kid, I wasn’t exactly Lynn Swann. But this game had turned into a real slugfest, and I knew John wanted to win, at any cost. Scott and James had already tied the game when Scott eluded me and ran between the two bean bags in the street for a game-tying touchdown.

When John huddled with me on the last play, we were both sweaty and tired, and he just said two words in a very serious tone of voice: “Go long.” I hated this, because it meant he was going to launch the ball and I would run like crazy only to watch it bounce on the pavement about ten yards beyond where I was. And as we lined up for the play, I realized that, unlike most times, James was going to cover me this time, instead of Scott. James; fast, mean, rough, and built like a tank. More than willing and ready to send me scraping me onto the pavement without an ounce of remorse.

Too late to protest. “Hut, hut, HUT!!” and I was off, down the street, prepared for the worst. James was matching me step for step, but – I noticed – huffing and puffing like a locomotive. I was a scrawny kid, but my lack of heavy musculature was paying off; I was gradually outpacing him. A few yards down the street, I glanced back to see John avoid Scott easily, and launch the ball into the air like an Apollo rocket. I instantly knew I wouldn’t catch this pass. This pass was like a Kenny Stabler hail Mary pass. It was going to end up in the next zip code. It was showing up on NORAD’s radar. As the ball began its decent from the ionosphere, I heard John shout from behind me. And what he said changed me as a person. “You’re going to catch it, so run your f*$&ing legs off!” The voice was desperate, intense, and certain. It was also cursing, which always scared me as a kid. Of course I didn’t have time to think about this. Nor did I realize that I was going to be a different person by the time the ball came down. All I knew was that, yes, I was going to catch the ball, and yes, I was going to run my legs off doing it. Somehow, I flushed my legs with a fresh supply of adrenaline and, despite feeling like I was about to collapse, I kicked my scrawny legs into a higher gear, left James behind me, and leaped forward, hands outstretched, as the ball plunked into my fingers. I cradled the ball like I’d caught a baby falling out a three story window, and slid about eight feet along the rough pavement.

I got to my feet, bloodied, bruised, and, for one of the few genuinely rewarding times in my life, victorious. Looking back up the street, I saw John leap into the air yelling, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeeeeeah!" I didn’t receive a high five or get carried around the neighborhood. But John looked me in the eye as I staggered back, poked me hard in the chest, grabbed me by the shirt and quietly said, “I TOLD you, you’d catch it.” That, such as it was, was the high point of my summer.

Kind of a silly story, maybe. But it was a life lesson for me. Every so often, life launches a hail Mary pass in my direction. It often seems so far away and unreachable that I just want to sit down and give up. The older I get, the more I realize that life’s full of such passes, and to be perfectly honest, you won’t catch most of them. But the odds don’t change the fact that there are ultimately two kinds of people. Those who throw themselves against the pavement with their arms outstretched, and those who don’t. When life throws a pass my way, I know I have a decision to make. That’s when John Lenski’s voice enters my head and reminds me that, yes, I am going to catch that pass. Even if I have to run my f&$%@ legs off.

"What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach??"

2009-10-21T12:39:00.000-07:00

An 86 year old WWII vet speaks his mind on the topic of gay marriage and what it means to be a true American.

Ultra Deep Field

2009-08-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

Don't you just love things that make you feel like an insignificant speck? I know I do!

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy...

2009-06-26T09:25:00.000-07:00

Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson both passed away on 6/25/09; yesterday, as I write this. I wasn’t planning to write anything about these events, as it looks to me like a surplus of articles, blog posts, commentary, tweets, and stories are already inundating the web and airwaves. But as both a student and a product of pop culture – and an old Gen Xer – I felt inclined to add my single, small voice to the choir of those affected, in varying degrees, by these two losses.

Like most people, I have no personal claim to the lives of Farrahand Michael. I never met them, and they obviously lived their amazing lives well beyond my little social circle, probably yours too. Yet I feel their deaths are strangely affecting. Admittedly, the sense of loss I have in their wake is personal, but not intimate. Perhaps it’s more of a sense of loss of some fragment of my own history and youth. They were, after all, cultural icons whose influence will last much more than their lifetimes could. They meant something to me, maybe to you too, and I’m curious as to what it might actually be.

So what, really, is the big deal? People die every day. Yesterday, my local evening news reported the death of a homeless man who fell down drunk in the middle of a street. A truck, its driver unable to see him there in the dark, simply ran over him. Who mourns him? Even now, people are putting their lives on the line, and sometimes losing them, in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere. Only days ago, the world watched in horror as a young Iranian girl, known only as Neda, was shot dead protesting the supposed democratic re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Neda’s last moments caught on video and broadcast around the world are a blunt reminder both of the fragility of life, as well as the sheer boldness and courage of a human being acting under their own unyielding sense of duty. A meaningless loss? Or a sacrifice for a greater good? Who decides? Service men and women have been dying at such a rate in Iraq and Afghanistan that many blithely note the daily losses the way one might check the stock report; is it up or down today? It’s simply impossible to process the immensity and impact of each loss and the real mourning must be the unpleasant and terrible responsibility of the friends and family of the one who has passed. This particular reality is still a very fresh one for me; just weeks ago, I lost a family member, someone very dear to me and to many in my family, in a sudden, terrible way. I’m still coping with the depth and sting of that grief and I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever really heal.

In what way can we really compare such events? Who deserves the ache of a heart? Clearly, the loss of a loved one must trump that of a celebrity, or even that of a brave young woman whose blood, we hope, was shed to move her country and her people toward stability. The weight of one’s grief must somehow correlate to proximity and relationship.

Yet as I write this, untold thousands worldwide are mourning together, crying, and remembering Farrah and Michael; two people we all knew, and yet never met. How do such people, known to us only through the media, elicit such an outpouring of genuine grief and heartache from so many left in their wake? All I can do is search my own experiences for answers.

As with many in my generation, my initial encounter with Farrah came in 1976 when I first laid eyes on that iconic poster, in this case, taped to the wall of my boyhood friend, Scott’s bedroom. I walked into his room one day and there she was, in that red one-piece bathing suit, ringlets of long blonde hair draped around those shimmering eyes and a smile as big as her home state of Texas. I took one look and thought, “That is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” Granted, at ten years old, any pretty girl in a bathing suit seemed to have a certain, still undefined, appeal. But what I knew as I stood there slack-jawed, trying to absorb her stunning loveliness was that, this time, I meant it. I quickly developed a habit of staring at that poster whenever I went to Scott’s house. I thought I might stare at that smiling beauty until the poster faded and fell off the wall under the weight of my constant gaze. No male alive in 1976 will blame me for that. That one poster sold around 12 million copies and was, I suppose, the Mona Lisa of 70’s boyhood. For much of my more impressionable years she occupied a place in my mind as “the ideal woman.” And what an impression she made.

Farrah was a remarkable blend of “girl-next-door” wholesomeness and good-natured fun with a healthy dose of decidedly scintillating sex appeal. Her magnetism seemed universal, and her appearance caused a sensation in hair design; seemingly overnight, girls and women of all ages adopted that feathered, bouncy “Farrah-do” hairstyle. She was the much-adored, all-American girl of the 1970s. Shortly after the poster came out (or perhaps it was around the same time), she appeared on Charlie’s Angels, a TV show I was not always allowed to watch. I did anyway, of course. You put Kate Jackson, Jacqueline Smith, and Farrah Fawcett on television, and you can bet your bellbottoms I’ll be tuning in.

I can’t say I remained a lifelong fan of Farrah. Probably like many, I lost track of her life and career until the news of her cancer began to surface. Much has been written about her courage during her last months, and I can’t pretend to be able add to that, let alone properly eulogize her from a distance. But I can pay a certain tribute to the small but strangely significant impact she had on one pre-teen boy. She was my first dream girl. And even in the video footage of her last days, as her body was clearly fighting a heroic but losing battle against a relentless foe, I noticed that same wonderful smile, though a little wearier, that I saw over 30 years ago. Cancer couldn’t change the fact that I was still looking at the face of the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

During the summer between 7^th and 8^th grade, I came down with a severe head cold. I spent days in bed, covered in Vicks Vapo Rub and listening to the radio. It was 1979. The radio station I listened to seemed addicted to a steady rotation of The Cars, Journey, The Eagles, Donna Summer, and Billy Joel, and I had pretty much tuned it all out in favor of some comic books when a song came on that hit me like a bolt from the blue. “Don’t Stop til You Get Enough” was the first single off “Off the Wall,” and to this day I can’t listen to it without some serious toe tapping. At the time, it was new, exciting, and somehow – even to a 13 year old, awkward white kid from Portland, Oregon with a Kleenex shoved up his nose – accessible. Against all odds, I could relate to this music. My mother, feeling sorry for me for being so pathetic (I played it up a little), called to ask if she could bring me anything on her way home from work. I didn’t hesitate. I asked if she would be willing to stop at the record store and purchase Off the Wall. To my immense gladness, she did, and for the next several weeks I listened to nothing but Michael Jackson yipping and whooping and crooning through one hit after another.

My grandfather wondered aloud whether he was in pain, what with all the “hee!” and “hoo-hoo!” His verdict: “Sounds like somebody torturing a cat.” My mother, of a younger generation and with some fond recollections of the hits of the Jackson 5, was a little warmer to the music. She could often be observed bopping around the house and singing along to “Workin Day and Night,” and “Rock with You,” as that record would spin for hours on my turntable.

Understand that Michael’s music was not what I was into at the time. Rush, Styx, Cheap Trick, Queen, The Police, yes. Michael Jackson? Disco? Who was this guy anyway? Looks a little like a girl, and sings like one too. But he quickly became a lifelong guilty pleasure, and like pretty much everyone else who heard his music or saw him perform, there just was no way I could deny his outlandish talent and strange appeal. But what would my hard-rock-loving friends say? Black Sabbath, this was not. Turns out, they were all falling under the same spell and some of us admitted to one another that we kinda, sorta, liked Michael’s music, the way we might have quietly admitted to still sleeping in Scooby Doo pajamas. His music won me over, and song after song found their way into the soundtrack of my life.

While this was my own introduction to the MJ phenomenon, all of this was just another chapter in the amazing story of Michael’s rise to stardom. By the time Off the Wall came out, he was more than a seasoned performer. He was a veteran of the stage and studio by the age of 10. But even with a multi-platinum record under his belt, no one, including Michael himself, could have predicted the absolute immensity of what was to come in terms of popularity.

In 1982, Michael released his masterpiece, Thriller, the top-selling album of all time (mind you, this was not just a best-selling pop album or rock album, but any and all albums, and this was before you could download albums with the click of a mouse). Thriller has sold nearly 110 million albums worldwide, more than double the 49 million sold by the runner up, AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” The album is only 42 minutes long and contains only nine songs, but every one is a flawlessly crafted pop recording. To call Thriller a “pop” album is accurate, and yet misleading. It’s “pop” in that it is, in the real sense of the term, popular music (if Thriller wasn’t popular, nothing was). But it also transcended any one label or genre. Michael’s musical gift was his ability to weave influences of R&B, soul, jazz, funk, and rock into a cohesive hybrid that somehow sounded both accessible and completely original. Besides its amazing musical presence, Thriller demonstrated something else, something almost subliminal. It was a record of dualities, juxtaposing elements of black and white, dark and light, good and evil. Michael himself was nothing if not enigmatic. His life, as we all know, was full of odd and unsettling dichotomies. Thriller, with its alternating themes of paranoia and optimism, love and betrayal, pacifism and aggression, seems strangely revealing of its creator in retrospect.

Thriller also continued a trend Michael started with Off the Wall, by breaking down more barriers, musically and culturally. Thriller was essentially an album of nothing but hits, perhaps none bigger than Billie Jean, and the accompanying music video was the first made by a black artist to crack the “color barrier” at MTV. Telling the ostensibly true story of a deranged fan’s allegation that Michael had fathered one of her children, Billie Jean was smooth and soulful, as well as eyebrow-raising. Whatever reticence the executives at MTV had to air a video by a black artist moon-walked their way out the door as soon as Billie Jean hit the screen; it became one of the most-watched music videos of all time and helped propel both Michael and MTV to a new stratum of success.

As much of a staggering impact as Thriller had, not just on the recording industry, but on pop culture as a whole, it was still only a slice of the success – perhaps the unbearably heavy success – Michael would earn in the months and years to come. He became, for better or worse, a kind of god to the millions who loved him. Thousands would flock to catch a glimpse of him boarding an airplane. CIA-style tactics had to be used to simply transport him to and from a concert venue to avoid gridlock, and the inevitable and reckless actions of fans who might even throw themselves in front of his vehicle in hopes of a peek at the King of Pop. Crowds would bring city streets to a standstill to watch him run from curb to doorway. The only thing one could hear in the roiling ocean of fans was the constant cry, “Michael! Michael!” He was idolized in a way that bordered on the insane.

It certain can be argued that all of this is ridiculous fan obsession. Just a bunch of people with too much time on their hands wasting their own lives obsessing about someone else’s. If there was ever “too much” adoration heaped upon a celebrity, Michael Jackson must also hold that record. Then again, the very word “fan” is a derivative of “fanatic,” and Michael inspired fanaticism as much or more than anyone before or since. It’s the heavy chore of some biographer to attempt delineate the extent and impact of all of Michael’s successes. I wouldn’t relish that immense challenge, especially in his wake. How can you sum up a life so complex and sometimes bizarre? Since his death only a few hours ago, the range and variety of adjectives used to describe both the man and his talents are legion: “electrifying,” “inconceivably gifted,” “musical perfection embodied,” “a true musical genius,” “an unstoppable creative force,” “other-worldly.” But there are other terms that are applied not to the pop star so much as to the man: “childlike,” “wounded,” “wonderfully kind,” “lonely and compassionate,” “a modern-day Peter Pan,” “misguided and imprudent,” “dangerously out of touch.”

Fred Allen, the classic old-time radio comedian once said, “A celebrity is someone who works all his life to become well-known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.” It’s an amusing observation, but sorrowfully true in Michael’s case. His drive to succeed won him every ounce of success the world had to offer. But in the end, he seemed somehow unable to fully shoulder the load of that success and to meet the expectations of millions who had deified him.

When I heard the news of his unexpected death, it felt like someone had hit the rewind button on my life. I was drawn back to a dozen memories of this song, or that one; images of a sequined glove pulling down a Sinatra fedora over dark eyes; a thin and fragile looking man, angular yet graceful, slinking and gliding in the spotlight to the frenetic adoration of the audience; and the ever-changing countenance of a strange and heartbreaking man-child whose complex life may never be thoroughly understood.

Now that he’s gone, what do we make of him? Was he an innocent, caught in the bright lights of stardom, who only wanted to love and be loved? Was he so robbed of his childhood that his very work was only a means of recapturing it? A dangerous and misguided man who used his image and power as both weapon and shield to manifest some darker needs? An abused abuser? Did fame do him in? Or was it a lifelong battle to meet the expectations of cruel and perpetually demanding father that simply wore down his spirit? If you find these kinds of questions as tedious as I do, better get used to them. For now that he’s gone, those who were not free before to speculate are loose, their tongues wagging overtime, and the picture of Michael Jackson is not likely to become any clearer because of it.

Maybe the most ironic and poignant truth, one of the few that can safely be asserted, is that Michael Jackson did crave love in whatever way he could get it. Yet even with untold millions of adoring fans worldwide, it was his own colossal success which kept him so utterly distant and alienated.

I spent a couple hours downloading a dozen or so Michael Jackson songs today, replacing the music I had lost or misplaced years ago, as well as reclaiming a few treasured memories along the way. I never knew Michael, so I can’t say I’ll “miss” him the way I would miss someone close to me. But I will miss his place, and Farrah’s, in my life; as voices and faces from my personal history; like treasured souvenirs I keep tucked away in my mind. I can't deny their impact on me, and whatever one's view of it, their influence has left an indelible impression on millions. I suppose even after writing this, I'm really no closer to articulating just how or why two dead celebrities would leave me with such a hollowed-out feeling of loss. It can certainly be argued that there are greater, or perhaps more tragic losses (though not to their families and loved ones, of course). But I do know that while their loved ones mourn for them deeply, I mourn for something else too; for the pressure and heavy price we place on celebrity, and the unrelenting expectations we heap on our heroes and stars to fill something up in our lives.

During his last official interview in 2003, Michael said that the real hope of any artist is that his or her body of work will outlive them, and continue to live on to inspire others after the artist is gone. In Farrah's case, her bravery, grace, and very struggle to live was an inspiration. And with Michael, there is a vast legacy of music and a treasure trove of video footage that millions are discovering, and us older fans are rediscovering. It’s a dog-eared cliché, but I think it’s safe to say that both of these remarkable people will most certainly live on in the hearts and minds of those of us who admired, cherished, and wondered at them from a distance.

An Only Child's Only Childhood

2009-06-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

I was an "only child." Such a sad and lonely term isn’t it? And yes, sometimes it is sad and lonely being an only child. But being an "only" also has its perks. I don't remember the first time I heard that term, but it's never been one I've warmed up to much. For one thing, there are so many stereotypes about it, positive and negative: Only children are spoiled. Only children are antisocial. Only children tend to have higher IQs. Only children make good leaders.

I blame psychologists for some of this. I also blame China. Let me explain.

Alfred Adler, renowned psychologist and part of the famous "Vienna Psychoanalytic Society," was the first to consider the role of birth order where personality development was concerned. He decided that firstborn children were more likely to be "problem children," and that only children were especially likely to be very spoiled. And G. Stanley Hall, eminent psychologist of the early 20th century actually said that being an only child is "a disease in itself." Wow! I feel so.... special!

In addition to Al and Stan, other researchers have deemed only children to be aggressive, bossy, antisocial, and petulant. But it's NOT true, dammit! And I'm ordering you to take that comment back right now, or I'll slap you in the head and never speak to you again!

As for China, here is a nation that has battled the challenge of overpopulation for generations. In the 1970s, the Chinese government instituted the "one child per family" policy as a means of reducing the drain on resources simply by reducing family size. The result is a surplus of only children; children who, according popular belief are often so spoiled they're referred to as "little emperors."

I'm sure that in some cases, the "problematic-spoiled brat-disease-ridden-emperor, likely-to-get-into-a-bar-fight-bossy-jerk," label fits some only children to a T. But the fact of the matter is that even though being an only child might come with its own unique troubles, more recent research indicates that many of the only child stereotypes are more myth than fact. Social psychologist Susan Newman says, "There have been hundreds and hundreds of research studies that show that only children are no different from their peers."

I guess that means I'm not special after all.

In my experience, Newman's right. I've never been able to spot another only child in a crowd, and I wouldn't know what to look for if I wanted to. Onlies don't have any secret clubs (and if they do, they need contact me!). They don't have special handshakes or wear their hair in any unusual ways. They do have their own website though: www.onlychild.com . And there are plenty of famous only children, like:

Frank Sinatra

Robin Williams

Rudy Giuliani

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Natalie Portman

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Cary Grant

Lauren Bacall

Mahatma Gandhi

Cole Porter

Leonardo da Vinci

Lance Armstrong

John Lennon

Joe Montana

Tiger Woods

...so I think I'm in some pretty good company. And that company is growing. Only 20 years ago, less than 10% of children under the age of ten were onlies. Today, nearly 25% of households with children have just one.

Now that I'm in my early 40s and almost an adult, I thought I'd write down a few thoughts on the subject as it pertains to me (Yes, it's all about me and my petulance. Get your own blog).

Before going any further, a little more non-fascinating autobiographical background might be pertinent: My mother and father divorced when I was about three years old. I have no real memory of this event. It wasn't a terribly bitter divorce, although I know that it was a very difficult time for them both as they loved each other, but couldn't make it work. It's a real blessing to me that they both still do love each other, in spite of it all. Loving someone and being able to maintain a marriage are two very different circumstances, as I myself would learn in my own marriage and divorce. As with most situations, there were many factors leading up to my parent's divorce, but it really boiled down to the usual "irreconcilable differences." So, one rainy Oregon day, mom packed her things, packed her baby (me) and left to live with her parents, my grandparents. And that was how I would grow up: mom and me living with my grandparents, and me seeing my dad on an occasional basis.

My childhood had its ups and downs, but was pretty good overall. Some people have very remarkable childhoods, often for some terribly traumatic reasons. Mine had its "moments," but I have to say that I was, for the most part, a pretty happy kid. Sometimes a little shy and frequently uncomfortable, yes, but I wasn't forced to live in the cellar (we didn't have a cellar anyway), was not beaten, ignored, or yelled at (much). My mom and grandparents certainly weren't perfect and never claimed to be, but I was pretty fortunate in that I grew up in a loving, comfortable, and very supportive environment. In spite of tough times, we all stuck together in a spirit of love and connection. It was an unconventional family, but it worked, and it often seemed a preferable situation to that of some of my friends with "normal" families: a mother and father, with 2.5 children.

There are some good things about being an only child. One of the perks is that you don't have to share your stuff with any nosy, grabby brothers or sisters. There are no sibling rivalries or competition. Nobody runs off with your stuff, nobody pesters you when all you want to do is sit and watch some Bugs Bunny cartoons over a nice cold glass of chocolate milk, and there’s no fighting over toys or candy. You pretty much get to reign over your room and stuff according to your own desires (with consulting assistance from mom, in my case).

The downside is that you have trouble finding playmates. Adults generally make terrible playmates. They really do. The adults in my family certainly tried to engage me on a playmate level. But these were three adults, two of them close to being senior citizens, all working full time. When they made it home from a long day at work, they were disinclined to want to wrestle, or make car noises while helping me put mileage on my Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars.

So, when you're on your own, you make your own fun. And like any kid, I found ways of entertaining myself with books and toys, or else I just ran around in yard a lot and pretended I was Captain Kirk stranded on an alien planet unsettlingly reminiscent of Earth and wondering when the hell Scotty would have the transporter fixed so I could get back to my bridge.

I tend to think that only children have to rely even more heavily on their imaginations than their sibling-abled peers. That sounds like a nice thing, but it has a dark side. In my case, I used to be scared of things that weren't there. I would go into my room at night, flip on all the lights, and check everywhere - under the bed, in my closet, behind the door - to make sure that no trolls or Sasquatches were lying in wait for me. Yeah, I was one of those weird kids who believed that there were monsters around every corner. This was when I was very little, of course. I usually don't worry about things like that anymore. Much.

Later in life I would discover that some children invent imaginary friends. Only children do this a lot, for obvious reasons. To this day, I kick myself for not thinking of that on my own. It's brilliant! Why didn't anyone clue me in? You're small, alone, and terrified of things that aren't there (but maybe are there). What better ally to have than an invisible friend to handle the bodyguard duties? I would have come up with a damn good imaginary friend. Maybe something like a Transformer, in the guise of my school book bag, that could transform into an indestructible, 14 foot-tall missile-toting badass capable of dispatching any half-sentient ghoul (or bully) upon my command. But I never had an imaginary friend. I guess my imagination got as far as conjuring up something terrifying, and then basically took a coffee break and left me to face the invisible evil hoards on my own. Thanks a lot, imagination! Sheesh.

There are logistical issues to consider too, when you're an "only", especially where toys are concerned. If someone gives you a game for Christmas, you look to see how many players it requires, and you're kinda screwed if it says: "For 4 to 8 players." For that matter, most board games are out. Try playing Monopoly or Connect Four by yourself. It's fun for about six seconds. I liked playing Battleship, and I always seemed to win (and lose)! Only children don't usually play with walkie talkies because, well, it's all walkie, no talkie. Frisbees? Is there anything more pathetic than a lone kid with a frisbee? Foosball? Hungry, Hungry Hippos? Badminton? Gimme a break. And don't even bring up the Twister incident.

I was once given a baseball glove and a solid rubber baseball, which I would throw against the side of the house and catch on the rebound. I would spend hours doing that - THUNK - against the house, catch, throw, THUNK. Playing catch with the house! After weeks of this, I was strongly encouraged by my grandfather to use soft Nerf balls instead. Come to think of it, I still don't know how I lost that rubber baseball. Odd.

The advantage of Nerf toys is that you can play with anything labeled "Nerf" indoors. Or so it was advertised. This is very important if you live in a climate like Oregon’s, where if you want to play outside you get to choose between playing in the rain and mud, or during the sunny, warm and dry season, which was usually on August 12th. But the truth of the matter is that even a soft squishy Nerf ball, when thrown with sufficient force and insufficient aim, is capable of breaking knick-knacks, or in my case, one of my mother’s bells from her crystal bell collection. Nerf stuff is cool, but just because it's made of orange foam rubber doesn't mean it can't get you into trouble. Word to the wise: waking up adults early on a Saturday morning with a barrage of Nerf darts in the face doesn't make you the most popular kid in the house, even if you're the only kid in the house.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of toys for an only child to play with. I had an Etch-A-Sketch, LiteBright, Magic 8 Ball (which continues to guide many of my biggest life decisions), and as I mentioned in a previous post I had lots of action figures. And then there was Simon. That UFO-shaped battery powered thing with the four colored buttons that would beep and light up in difference sequences and you had to memorize the sequences, and...ah hell, you know what I mean. I was a butt-kicking Simon player. I got really, really good at it. I fantasized about entering into some sort of World Simon Championship. I tried to get people to play with me, to the point of taunting them. "You talkin to me? Are you. Talking. To me? Yeah ok, meet me behind the school at 3 o'clock. Bring Simon. And some batteries." Nobody ever agreed to the duel because they were clearly flat-out terrified of my Simon skills.

But the real salvation of an only child in the late 70s was video games.

In about 1979 I received an Atari 2600 for Christmas and my life hasn't been the same since. Once attached to an old black and white television in the family room, I entered into that most intimate and sacred of teenage relationships: a boy and his console. I'm sure my mother had no idea what she had just done when she gave me that thing. All she knew was that I was around 12 years old when I got it, and about 33 when she next saw me. I don't remember all the games I had, but I had enough to stay busy for hours, if not days at a time.

Of course by today's standards these were the Tinker Toys of the video game genre. Pitfall, Frogger, Chopper Command, in all their blocky, pixilated glory! Today, my son, also an avid gamer (and an only child too), watches in amazement when I “go all old school" on him and play Galaga, Asteroids, or Ms. Pac Man. He thinks it's funny. It must be the equivalent of watching some old-timer rolling a big hoop down the street with a stick. Nevertheless, I routinely kick his teenaged butt at Galaga.

Before my love affair with the Atari began, my next-door neighbors and boyhood friends, Scott and Chris, were gifted with a Pong console from Sears. Pong, in case you were born yesterday, is a two-dimensional game in which each player has a "paddle" (a white rectangular block) you control with a knob to keep a little white square-shaped thing (the "ball") from getting by you. It was beautiful, monochrome, zen-like simplicity. Or it was tennis for morons. It all depends on your perspective. Whatever the case, we played the hell out of it. Of course, as an only child, it was a blast to be able to play against Scott and Chris. But even better, the game allowed you to play against the computer, thus eliminating the need for a human opponent. So when I finally scored my own Pong game, I would disappear into a trance-like state for hours in the dim light of the television. So on behalf of only sons from the late 1970s, thank you, Pong!

While video games dominated my attention as a kid, I also still played with “regular” toys. In 1980, a Hungarian named Erno Rubik first invented, then managed to get Ideal Toys to sell, a little something he (rather unoriginally) called "Rubik's Cube." Of course I had to have one. Only children are supposed to be amazingly patient. That’s another stereotype I managed to burst. After screwing around trying to solve the Rubik's Cube for about an hour, I became more interested in how it was actually put together. I didn't see how each of the rows of little blocks could move independently of one another. So I took it apart and learned the magical secrets of its engineering. It really is kind of interesting. But alas, like Humpty Dumpty, you can't put a Rubik's Cube back together again once it's in pieces. Such was my own "solution" to Rubik's Cube.

Being an only child (or any child) isn’t all fun and games, of course. New social situations used to cause me great anxiety. On the first day of 1^st grade, I was dropped off at school by my dad. My mother couldn’t bear to do the deed, so dad stepped in and managed to dislodge me from his car, and send me, with my Gunsmoke lunchbox and sweaty palms, into Mrs. Howard’s 1^st grade classroom for the first time. I was there early, and there were only a couple of other kids around. I felt utterly alone and afraid. It was all very foreign to me. It smelled funny and the lights were too bright. Nothing about it felt right. It was a very “Woody Allen” moment. Standing in the middle of the room while other kids began to arrive, I started to cry, and I saw from the window that dad’s car was gone. I was on my own.

But then something happened that would eventually prove to be a milestone of social salvation for me. Some skinny kid sitting on the floor in the corner of the room noticed me standing there, teary-eyed. He waved to me and said matter-of-factly, “Hey. You want to play army men?” His name was Carlon, and he would become my best friend throughout most of my school years, all the way through high school. Playing army men certainly seemed preferable to spending my first day of school hunched-over, red-eyed and snot-nosed in the middle of the room. My tears quickly dried, and Carlon and I reenacted a battle involving much in the way of explosions with the little green army men flying around the room. Eventually, class began, and I knew I’d be all right.

Carlon was, in one sense, just like me, and in another, completely different. Whereas I was an only child, Carlon came from a family with 14 brothers and sisters. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, we bonded like brothers. I’m sure my life as an only child was a curiosity to him, and I occasionally listened in amazement as he talked about his own living conditions; he and two other brothers sharing a common room in the basement. Neither of us came from families with money, but with 14 kids to clothe and feed, I’m not sure how his parents managed to do it; lots of hand-me-downs and leftovers, I suppose. So from 1^st grade through senior year of high school, Carlon and I – the only kid, and the kid with a Leviticus-sized family – went through the indescribable dramas and insanity of growing up. We listened to Black Sabbath and Kiss. He liked Jethro Tull and Frank Zappa, and I liked Styx and Rush. We went through heartache and despair at the hands of some girls, while occasionally competing for the affections of others who rarely acknowledged our presence. We rebelled against the authorities of our private school by skipping class and running off to the 7-11 to play Asteroids, or by inventing our own swearwords that didn’t actually get us into trouble if overheard by adults. We defied school policy by letting our hair grow over the tops of our collars, and then took to folding our collars down even lower to allow for longer hair. We read the underground classic teenage literature of the day: Mad Magazine and Rolling Stone, and we discussed the quality of the stereo equipment ads only found within the glossy pages of Playboy. I’m not sure how we managed to avoid getting into much trouble, but we somehow emerged from our schooling mostly unscathed, and relatively happy.

School can be an ordeal for any kid. But when you’re an only child, finding a good friend is like finding a lifeboat when it feels like your ship is sinking. Maybe you value those people in your life who choose to be there for you a little more than those who are expected to be.

Being an only child isn’t easy. But the older I get, the more I realize the value of my upbringing. I learned about self-reliance and how to enjoy my own company when no one else could be there with me. I also learned a lot about the adult world at an early age. If there’s an accurate stereotype about only children, it’s that they’re likely to be keen observers of human nature. I remember being hungry to understand how the adult world worked. I’m still working on that. But I figured out pretty early on that adults weren’t perfect. Still, in spite of the views of most of my friends, nor were they irreparably flawed embodiments of evil. They were really just older kids, with responsibilities I couldn’t completely comprehend. They had beautiful dreams, not all of which would come true. They had dark problems, not all of which would completely resolve. While I spent childhood dreaming of becoming an adult, when I could earn money and buy my own toys and stay up as late as I wanted, I now spend much of my adulthood missing those days of cartoon-watching, trick-or-treating, first-kissing, semi-innocence. The freedoms you long for are never the freedoms you have, I suppose.

I also have observed the lives of my friends, those with siblings and those without. Most of my schoolmates are, of course, my age, and it’s interesting to see their lives unfolding. Some have become successful and secure. Some have not. Some of the school bullies are now wonderfully compassionate human beings, and some who were expected to do great things, well, haven’t yet. A few of the wild partiers have settled down into a strikingly domesticated existence, and some of the bookworms are busy recapturing their youth, or a youth they are just now discovering. One of my classmates from a relatively poor family is now one of the most successful plastic surgeons in the country. And one former class genius is barely making ends meet. Irony is the natural by-product of the wild twists and turns of unforeseen circumstance. I wonder what ironies they see in me.

It’s funny how time alters one’s perception of good and bad, right and wrong. It seems to me that life as a child was a simple matter of learning right from wrong. Knowing the good guys from the bad guys. Understanding the consequences of the obviously unwise choices and just doing the opposite. But aging is a process of watching the black and white world resolve into varying shades of gray, at least for many in my generation. There is no right or wrong to being an only child, or any child. Life simply moves too fast to waste energy on such worries. And a happy life depends on connecting with something decidedly un-adult. Whether I’m 8 or 42 or 82, I hope I can always maintain contact with that strange, creative, lonely, inventive, mischievous, curious child inside.

Notes From the Twilight Zone

2009-06-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow -- Charlotte Bronte

Have you ever wondered why middle-of-the-night television programming is so dominated by infomercials? Is it because when you're sleep-deprived, like I am, you'll buy just about anything? Soap that will wash the spots off a leopard? An upright vacuum that generates its own black holes? An automatic dog food dispenser? Perfect! Wait a minute, I don't have a dog. It's 3 am, and I think I just bought a time-share in Beirut.

Insomnia: from the Latin for "no sleep." When you suffer from insomnia, you have time for things like looking up word origins and watching infomercials. As entertaining as that might seem, I can tell you from experience it's a poor substitute for "the balm of woe," as Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney called sleep.

I don't know when the sleeplessness started, probably when I was in college and playing as a drummer in a 90s grunge band. In those heady days of my youth, I was quite used to being up late, or sometimes all night (weren’t we all?). Back then, sleep was to be avoided when possible, in favor of playing music, discussing the meaning of life, or - most importantly - feebly trying to impress girls.

Today, it's different. Sleep isn't an enemy, but a long-lost friend. Here I am in my early 40s, leading what some would call a "normal life," and my mind still wants to party like it’s 1999. When it gets to be bedtime I’m about as sleepy as a ferret on a black coffee drip. My nightst usually go something like this: Sometime around 11 or 12, I dutifully brush my teeth, get in bed and just...lie there. I read, watch TV (usually cartoons or old classic movies), or listen to calming music, but nothing seems to produce the desired somnolence, and I remain frustratingly, persistently conscious. Time seems to play games with my mind, sometimes moving too fast, sometimes too slow. Either way, minute by minute, I roll this way, then that way, wrestle with my pillows, stick a leg out from the covers and pull it back in, watching the clock stubbornly progress from 1:30 to 2:00 to 3:15, and all too soon the sky begins to lighten and I hear a chorus of birds playfully chirping outside my window. Birds that ought to be shot.

Insomnia stinks. But even as I toss and turn in the wee hours, I know I’m not alone in my red-eyed sleeplessness. More than 64 million Americans suffer from some form of insomnia. And all that wakefulness doesn't come cheap; every year, those sleepy Americans spend 14 billion dollars on sleep aids, devices, prescription drugs, and other treatments, all in hopes of getting some shut-eye. Some researchers think that nearly half the world's population routinely experiences sleep deprivation severe enough to cause memory lapses, health problems, and the desire to take violent action against innocent birds. Yes, we are insomniacs, we're irritable, and we are - yawn - legion.

Historically speaking, too, I’m in some pretty good company. Marlene Dietrich suffered from insomnia. Her remedy? A sardine and onion sandwich on rye. Greta Garbo said "I vant to be alone", but it was Marlene’s late night eating habits - and breath - that probably provided her with plenty of personal space. Theodore Roosevelt had his share of sleepless nights, but cured it with a shot of cognac in milk. Groucho Marx was a notorious insomniac. Notorious because Groucho coped by phoning people in the middle of the night to insult them. Too bad for Groucho's friends that this was all before caller ID. Vincent Van Gogh, had considerable trouble getting to sleep. His remedy of applying camphor to his pillow helped him sleep, but had an undesirable side-effect: it poisoned him.

But the world of the insomniac isn't all prank calls and cognac. There are, in fact, a host of sleep disorders, conditions, and oddities that plague us night owls.

One curse insomniacs often endure in their nightly pursuit of slumber is a propensity toward excessive and obsessive thoughts. Homer said, “There is a time for many words, and there is a time for sleep.” In the case of many of us insomniacs, there’s no real distinction. During those dark, sleepless hours, one's mind is racing. But not just "racing," - inventing, scheming, devising, innovating, philosophizing, and problem solving. Insomnia can be torture, but it also can be a fount of great ideas. In my case, my head is filled, not with visions of sugarplums, but with story lines, book ideas, ways of ending world hunger, and reducing gas prices. It’s one of the ironies of the condition for many of us: the time when you should be dead tired coincides with the mind galloping along like a thoroughbred at the Kentucky Derby. For me the insatiable mental restlessness combines with stunning creativity, and I begin to develop a kind of self-deluded confidence in my ability to problem-solve. Economic recession? No prob! Energy crisis? Bring it on, baby! Unified field theory? Child’s play. Want to know what’s really at the center of a black hole? Well it’s…nah, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I jest, and yet I’m pretty sure that in the middle of the night -- in that "strange dimension of both shadow and substance," my mind seems to have somehow tapped into something almost superhuman, inspirational, and extraordinary. And that, gentle reader, irks me.

It irks me because those high-voltage moments of creative inspiration that keep me awake at night have gone the way of the Dodo by daybreak. I heard of of people who do drugs and have these kinds of experiences. I know people who meditate and have these kinds of experiences. Me? I go to bed every night and spend several hours mentally puzzling my way through a myriad of life's riddles, wonders, and mysteries big and small, composing poetry, music, and making plans to become a sculptor (I do have some Playdoh around here somewhere), and when I'm back on my feet the next morning, my brain has reverted to that of a Neanderthal. I might be Einstein or da Vinci or Tolstoy at 2am, but by daybreak, I'm like Rocky Balboa after a fight: thick-tongued, baritone-voiced, and staggering around.

What is it about those sleepless hours spent in the dim blue light of the television that seems to fire up the synapses to an agonizing level of wakefulness? There is something surreal and fantastic that happens during those sleep-scarce nights, and I'm not alone in wondering what it is. Even Edgar Allen Poe wondered at the intensity of mental experiences he had, "only when I am on the brink of sleep."

As it turns out, sleep researchers tell us there really is a kind of Twilight Zone where sleep is concerned; a state where the rational aspects of the conscious mind overlap with the fantasies and free-spiritedness of our unconscious. It’s a state of heightened creativity,but also of tortured restlessness. It's called the “hypnagogic state."

Hypnagogia is a kind of bridge between wakefulness and sleep. As the tiny neuro-electrical impulses of our brains gradually slow down from a frequency of around 15 cycles per second during wakefulness, to 10, and then 6, and 3, we pass through this hypnagogic state and drift into a deep, peaceful sleep. That is, unless you are an insomniac, in which case your brain can actually stall-out in the middle of the hypnagogic state and stay there all night long. Being in this half-awake, half-asleep state is like being stranded in some sort of strange, Rod-Serlingesque purgatory where the mind is overly active, senses are on edge, and unusual experiences abound. And it ain’t always fun. It’s a little like parts of New Jersey; the fortunate drive straight through, the unlucky get stuck there.

Consider this, from Wikipedia: "The hypnagogic state is sometimes proposed as an explanation of experiences such as, alien abduction, apparitions, or visions, also known as a trip or psychedelic experience. Transition to and from sleep can be attended by a wide variety of sensory experiences. These can occur in any modality, individually or combined, and range from the vague and barely perceptible to vivid hallucinations.”

Poe, as mentioned, had such experiences and described them as, "a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are thoughts: they seem to me rather psychical than intellectual. They arise in the soul...only at is epochs of the most intense tranquility...and at those mere points in time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams."

Poe wasn't the only one enamored with the strangeness of hypnagogia. Salvadore Dali understood the inspirational power of the hypnagogic state and created a strategy for intentionally inducing it. He took naps while sitting upright, holding a spoon over a metal pan. Just before he would drop into deep sleep, the spoon would fall to the floor and clatter against the pan, waking him up. This allowed him to immediately begin painting while the myriad of surrealistic images were still fresh in his head.

Others too, like 18th century philosopher, mystic, and all-around interesting guy Emmanuel Swedenborg intentionally cultivated the hypnagogic state and used it as a means of inducing fanstastic visions of traveling to Heaven, Hell, and other spiritual realms. Maybe even Vegas. Mystics have long thought of this unusual state of mind as a kind of portal to deeper, esoteric wisdom. Again, Vegas naturally comes to mind.

Sleep experts confirm that hypnagogic states have been associated with experiences of unexplained presences, night terrors, holy or evil visitations, loss of body control or awareness, sleep paralysis, and auditory hallucinations. Unexplained presences? Evil visitations? Mother-in-law jokes aside, try sleeping through that!

So what's really going on here? According to researchers like Andreas Mavromatis, hypnagogia is a state of mind in which the conscious and unconscious literally overlap. In his 1987 book, Hypnagogia, The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep, Mavormatis describes hypnagogia as a kind of halfway house between the familiar sticks-and-stones world of wakefulness, and the decidedly bizarre landscape of the inner mind; it’s a place where horror and ecstacy commingle, and where ideas flow unencumbered by things like logic and common sense (need I bring up Vegas again?).

Mavormatis conducted his own experiments with hynpagogia by relaxing subjects as close to sleep as possible, without actually drifting off, and then asking them to report their experiences. Here's just one typical sample: "I saw a large green eye opening and closing...The impression of color - bright greens and yellows - water falling into a cup or chalice. Hills, mountains, or pyramids, a drinking glass on a shelf, a snail, the back of a person...also fish - I don't actually see the fish but I can smell it. Swirls of light." It reads a little like a David Lynch screenplay, doesn't it? One weird and seemingly disjointed sensation after another.

Of course there's more to hypnagogia than pyramids and fish. One interesting phenomenon insomniacs can experience is the so-called "Tetris Effect." Named after the hugely popular video game developed by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985, the Tetris Effect refers to the obsessive tendency of the brain to mentally visualize various puzzle-piecing activities, such as rotating differently-shaped colored blocks to make them fit together like you do while playing Tetris. People who spend a lot of time in hypnagogic states are prone to this sort of thing. Whether it's Tetris, chess, or Solitaire, games easily find their way into our obsessive tendencies and have been responsible for many sleepless hours (but some pretty solid high scores) for plenty of people.

Hypnagogic jerks might sound like a cool name for a punk band, but in fact it's yet another of the rather upsetting experiences of the insomniac. Maybe you've had this happen to you: You're dozing off into a nice, peaceful sleep. Your muscles begin to relax. Your breathing is slowing to a smooth, slow rhythm. You are floating down into the gentle arms of Morpheus. But the thing is, your brain isn't getting the full picture and it interprets this physical relaxation as a sign that your body must be falling through space. Before you know it, you've startled awake, heart racing, adrenaline surging, and gasping for breath. It's certainly better than actually falling off that cliff you were just dreaming about, but not very conducive to sleep, and about as fun as being poked with an electric cattle prod.

But there's another phenomenon associated with hypnagogia fewer people are likely to be familiar with. It goes by the staggeringly alarming name: "Exploding Head Syndrome." That's right, the good old EXPLODING HEAD SYNDROME. As if I needed one more thing to keep me awake at night. According to Wikipedia, Exploding Head Syndrome, "causes the sufferer to occasionally experience a tremendously loud noise as if from within his or her own head, usually described as an explosion, roar, or a ringing noise. This usually occurs within an hour or two of falling asleep, but is not the result of a dream and can happen during the day as well. Although perceived as tremendously loud, the noise is usually not accompanied by pain." Call me old-fashioned, but I like my nights, sleepless or not, free of explosions.

(Reassuringly, Wikipedia also mentions, "Note that exploding head syndrome does not involve the head actually exploding." Well, there's a relief.)

All things considered, I guess my hypnagogic hyper-thinking isn't as bad as it could be. No evil presences, no alien abductions, no paralysis, and, so far, my head hasn't exploded. And truth-be-told, I rather enjoy those moments of heightened inspiration that only seem to come in the dark of night. After all, life can be a little mundane at times, and trust me - there never really is much on TV after midnight. If I'm going to be awake anyway, why not enjoy the feeling of strange inspiration, fantastic ideas, weird imagery, and maybe a game of Tetris I never seem to lose?

What if all the secrets to life really are kept in that twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep? All the answers to life, the universe, and everything could be just a sleepless night or two away. Maybe hypnagogia is a kind of built-in drug trip we all have access to, where windows to hidden mysteries are opened for us, and the next great novel is already composed, waiting for someone to just write the damn thing down.

Then again, who am I kidding? I've got bags under my eyes big enough to require wheels and a luggage claim tag. I'm drowsy and crabby most of the day. And I just misplaced the remote control again. If sleeplessness is a drug, it's one I'd be better off without. Maybe having written all this blather on my hypnagogic dilemma, I'll actually get a couple hours of sleep tonight before heading off to work. Meanwhile, though, I'd sure like to find a better way to tap into that strange, dormant brilliance I wish I really possessed, and coax out into the daylight that too-shy muse that resides in us all, somewhere, in the Twilight Zone.

Ant Antics

2009-03-19T22:53:00.000-07:00

"Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television." ---- Lewis Thomas

About 18 months ago I moved into a condo in a scenic suburb west of Portland, Oregon. It's a wonderful, quiet, attractive neighborhood, with lots of tall pine trees, creeks, walking trails, etc. There are birds of several varieties, including osprey, and owls that hoot outside my window many nights. Occasionally deer will be spotted roaming through backyards, coyotes prowl through the shrubbery in the dark of night, and plenty of squirrels, possums, and raccoons liven up the place considerably.

But lately I've run into a different species of critter I'm far less enthused about having around: ants.

Here's the scenario: I come home from a long day at the office, trot up the stairs from my front door, drop my jacket and laptop in the chair and flip on the light in the kitchen where I place my keys and mail. Lately though, as the light comes on, I notice movement on the countertop or floor. Tiny black ants, silently skittering their way along the ceiling, down the wall, and onto the counter. While their routes along the wall or floor are as orderly as a Marine Corps drumline, when they reach the counter, they seem to enjoy wandering around aimlessly. My reaction is to be overcome with a combination of irritation and exasperation, as this has become more routine than I would like it to be. Then, I slam the mail on the counter and swear. @!*%@# ANTS!!!!

There are lots of species of ant, but the ones invading my home are known as "Odorous House Ants." They're extremely common, and if you live anywhere north of the equator, you're probably within a few dozen feet of an ant nest or two as you sit there reading this. They're everywhere, all the time, winter and summer. They can nest in rocks, wood, concrete, or probably lava. Of the few places on the planet you won't find them is at elevations above 11,000 feet or Antarctica. Otherwise, their colonies and supercolonies (which are multiple colonies linked to one another by elaborate tunnel systems) are ubiquitous.

They get their unappealing name because when you crush one of them they emit a slight odor, sometimes compared to a stale coconut. And it's true! They do vaguely smell like the tube of off-brand suntan oil I've had sitting in the bottom of my drawer since about 1988. When you crush them, anyway. Which, truth be told, I do.

Now let me mention that I have trained as a Buddhist. Not a full-fledged, shaved-head, robe-sporting Buddhist. But I am quite familiar with the doctrine of "ahimsa;" the Sanskrit term meaning "do no harm," and I am generally against inflicting pain and suffering on other living things. I was raised as a Christian, and while Jesus did trash the money changers who were turning the local church into a strip mall, I don't recall him being very clear on doctrines pertaining to violence against ants. Either way, while I'm not terribly squeamish about death in general, I don't really like being the guy doing the killing. But when it comes to ants, I'm sorry to admit that the whole "do no harm" thing basically goes out the window and I tend to approach the ants much in the same manner Godzilla deals with Tokyo architecture: I squash them flat.

Bad Buddhist.

I do have some ant killing spray. But I don't like using it in the kitchen, and I feel that if I have to end their little lives, better to be quick about it than coat them in chemicals as they stagger around and die. Not how I would want to go, anyway. Chemical weapons really aren't my forte. So, I take a more direct approach and squash them with a paper towel, magazine, whatever's within reach. Sometimes, yes, I do squash them with my BARE HANDS!! Hopefully you won't judge me for that, but if you need to, knock yourself out.

Let me mention that I'm fully aware that a minor ant problem is nothing to get too worked up about. What with the economy tanking, the wars, the environmental concerns, and what Brittney Spears has been up to, a few hundred ants running through my condo is, well, no big deal in any global sense. But if you're me, it's a serious nuisance that makes what's left of my hair fall out in frustration.

I've seen ants in people's homes before, and it never really disturbed me much. But now they're in MY house, in MY kitchen, crawling on MY coffee maker and on MY silverware, and, well, it's more than I'm willing to tolerate. I used to think that if you had ants in your house, you probably were slacking on the housecleaning. But I take back that judgment, as I'm pretty much a neat freak, and it hasn't deterred the ants at all.

Any kid who's eaten his lunch outside in the summer will tell you that ants love crumbs and can smell them from the next county. If you're an ant, a few crumbs from a tuna sandwich left on the floor is like an overturned truck full of M&Ms to a busload of 3rd graders. Manna from Heaven! And ants don't just show up one at a time to grab a bite and head on home. Ants have a sophisticated system of communication based on scent that allows a single ant to get the word out about the latest buffet on your kitchen counter to a colony of around 10,000 ants within five to ten minutes. Ant IT guys must be geniuses. These ants can organize a party around a stray piece of a Dorito faster than AIG can spend federal bailout money.

So they show up en masse, stay until there is nary an atom left of your lunch remains, and then...do they compliment the chef and politely leave? No! They hang out. They stay. They call their friends and cousins. They're like that relative who loses their job and asks if they can crash at your house for a few days (just until they find something else), and a year later they're still eating your leftovers and borrowing your favorite shirt. Anyway, these ants meander around, perhaps assuming that if you were clumsy enough to drop food in that spot before, you'll eventually do it again. And you know, they'd be right except for one thing: There are ANTS all over the place! Given that fact, what do they get for their trouble? Well, they usually get squashed.

So, you get sloppy with your food, inside or outside, and you can expect ants. Ants wear out their welcome, and they get squashed. Yes, it's the ciiiiiiircle of life!

But I shouldn't have ants because while I have numerous faults, messiness isn't one of them. I'm...what's the word my ex-wife used...oh yeah, "fastidious."

I clean all the time. The kitchen sink is not a storage bin for dirty dishes. The countertop isn't a place to leave the remnants of your snacks. Bathrooms should sparkle, toilets should gleam, and you should be able to walk around barefoot without things sticking to your feet. I don't go to bed with foodstuffs or dirty dishes out. One of the few things I like about living alone is that I can clean up the place the way I want to. If I decide, at midnight, that the stairs could use a vacuum, well that's what they get, dammit. I suck at keeping my laundry folded, but aside from that, I'm too much Felix, not enough Oscar.

So unless the ants are prepared to contribute to the upkeep of the place, or kick in some cash here and there on the utilities, I haven't felt inclined to be overrun without a fight. Hence, the ant squashing. A part of me would like to tell you that I feel horrible about it, but that's just not true. It's almost kind of stress-relieving. Like popping the bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap. Again, judge me if you must.

While I've been complaining about my little infestation a lot lately, I have to admit that in the past few days, my attitude toward the ants has softened a little. This mostly has to do with having watched a nature documentary on television about them. I'm kind of a nerd for such shows, and I'm afraid that much of what I know about animals is thanks to television shows like Nature, Nova, and pretty much anything on the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. I think it might have led to some misunderstandings about how the animal kingdom works, in my mind. For example, I'm inclined to believe that when cheetahs run after a gazelle, they somehow do it in slow motion.

This particular show focused on what they called "Killer Ants," complete with dramatic CGI diagrams of ferocious looking ants sporting massive chomping mandibles, hairy angular legs, and lifeless bug eyes seemingly focused on nothing but opening up one of your veins. The narrator often spoke in deep, ominous tones about these "relentless killers" inhabiting the warmer, wetter climates of our planet. Of the ants discussed was the famous "Army Ant," or "Siafu," the legendary insect predators found mainly in Africa and South America. Renown for their aggressive raiding tactics, they strike en masse, and have been known to act like piranhas, swarming around prey many times their size, and essentially relieving them of their flesh in a matter of minutes. Although it's a dubious claim, they are rumored to have killed humans, leaving little more than a surprised-looking skeleton behind. Unlike most ant species, Siafu are often on the move, transporting their nests from one location to another in search of new food sources in a sophisticated logistical process any modern human army would envy. They basically move in, wipe the area clean of anything they can take down, and then move on to the next buffet. This relocation process is even more impressive when you realize that colonies can sometime reach nearly 20 million individuals. So that's a little like the residents of both New York and Tokyo suddenly evacuating and relocating somewhere else in a few hours' time. They accomplish this feat thanks to the highly specialized ways in which different kinds of ants perform their tasks. Each ant has its own job and somehow knows just what to do and when to do it. This is not, apparently, due to individual talent or ambition as much as simple biosocial necessity. If some of the ants suddenly decided to slack off and not do their jobs, they wouldn't get fired, they'd get killed. You don't find ants taking smoke breaks or surfing the internet when they're on the clock. And they're always on the clock. All actions performed by any one individual are for the greater good and well-being of the colony and Siafu queen (who, by the way, has her own team of body guard ants who will use deadly force to protect her, sacrificing their own lives if necessary). And they are frightenly efficient in their ceaseless quest for sustenance.

Siafu can kill and consume up to 100,000 animals and insects per day, including other ants, snakes, beetles, spiders, scorpions, chickens, pigs, and goats. Yes, I said CHICKENS, PIGS, AND GOATS. These guys don't fool around. If they can catch it, they'll kill it.

They can climb trees and invade bird's nests, bridge creeks with their own bodies, dig into spider burrows, surround a fleeing snake, and outrun a scorpion. Almost makes you feel sorry for the other creepy-crawlies, doesn't it? Imagine this: you're a snake in the jungle. Oh sure, you're venomous and quick-striking. But you're pretty laid-back too. Minding your own business. Waiting for a nice tender mouse or frog to carelessly wander within striking distance. Suddenly, you sense a vibration in the ground, like a sizzle, getting louder, moving closer. You can't locate the exact location from which this sizzle is coming, but you know it's closing in by the second. The jungle, calm a moment ago, seems as though it's coming to a boil. Maybe it's lunch! Looking around, you see a reddish black wave rolling over the foliage like a tsunami of certain death. It's not lunch. You are. Oh, you can try to slither away. Or you can turn to face the onslaught. Whatever you do, three minutes later, you're nothing but a snaky memory.

Whew! Suddenly, my little Odorous House Ants seem like benevolent cuddly pets by comparison! They eat crumbs, but - so far anyway - not me!

I do have to mention another influence in my changing attitude toward the ants: Edward O. Wilson, a noted biologist and one of the most famous myrmecologists in the world. As everybody knows, myrmecology is the branch of entomology concerned with the study of ants. For more on this, you might want to consider subscribing to the Myrmecological News, an international, independent, non-profit journal dedicated to ant research. I hear the centerfolds are airbrushed, but otherwise, it's a fine publication. Anyway, E. O. Wilson really deserves a blog post to himself because of his genius and influence in areas of life far beyond that of ants. But for now, I'm discussing him because he exemplifies something - a character trait I guess you could say - that I not only admire, but aspire to embody: the undaunting, insatiable curiosity that shows up as a kind of childlike wonder about the world. Wilson is, unarguably, one of the most brilliant and accomplished biologists of the 20th century. He's a researcher, theorist, lecturer, author, naturalist, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, environmentalist, and he's blind in one eye.

Wilson's work with ants has resulted in his occasionally controversial views on social biology; the idea that behavior (such as that of ants as well as humans) has a biological or genetic basis. Ants, of course, are prime examples of social creatures - not in the "let's meet at Starbucks and talk about how work sucks," social sense, but in the way that ants organize and run their colonies with such precision and responsiveness that Wilson himself has suggested that ants may possess true "group consciousness;" the colony acting like one large brain made up of individual neurons. The importance of ants, and insects in general, goes well beyond interesting social models for Wilson, as he emphasizes here:

"If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."

Science reporter Robert Krulwich recently interviewed Wilson at the 92nd street Y in New York City. When asked about how he became interested in bugs, Wilson told Krulwich, "Every kid has a bug period, but I never grew out of mine." This led to Wilson being nicknamed "Bugs" in school. Wilson goes on to describe how his work with ants helped explain many of the mysteries of ant behavior and social organization, including how ants use scent trails to locate food, and how their individual biology gives rise to their highly organized colonies. Wilson makes it clear that while science can appear complex and daunting to the layperson, the reality is that most of the best work of science is simply driven by good old-fashioned curiosity and determination. He was compelled to discover the way ant scent trails work simply by noticing how ants drag their abdomens along the ground, and decided, "I'm going to get to the bottom of this. "Believe me, folks," he says, "this is how science works. It really is simple-minded." So, armed with little more than some common dissecting tools, a microscope, and a hungry mind, Wilson managed to unravel one of the most compelling mysteries of the insect world. He observed ant behavior in detail and even pain-stakingly dissected ants, removing their impossibly tiny organs and brains for examination. What he found was that the abdomen-dragging behavior was the ant's way of leaving a scent trail indicating just what the ant was up to. If the ant comes across food, the scent trail changes and ants hear (or actually smell) the dinner bell ringing. All of this happened simply because E. O. Wilson decided to "get to the bottom" of it. "There is no better high," he insists, "than discovery."

I think about "Bugs" Wilson now, as a lone ant crawls across my laptop screen in search of some invisible late night snack. He's a scout. And if he finds something worthwhile on my table or floor, the word will go out, and a tiny black hoard will converge on some microscopic table scrap I happened to miss while cleaning up. What an amazing creature, an ant. Perhaps not sentient or self-aware. Perhaps only a kind of biological robot, carrying out a set of preprogrammed instructions on behalf of the colony. They're certainly not very cuddly. To most of us, nothing more than a meaningless bug. But to people like E. O. Wilson, ants are things of almost endless fascination, and studying them has led to some of the most important discoveries ever made in biology and even sociology. And that such a creature - the result of millions of years of uninterrupted evolutionary adaptation that has made this ant and his kind more vital to Earth's survival than human beings - is now running along the edge of my table gives me pause. That so much mystery and biological history can be wrapped up in something so fragile and tiny is - I'll just say it - a kind of miracle.

I can't say I won't cease my attempts to keep the ants out of my home. I won't even lie about the fact that I'll probably still squash a few here and there when they get too close to my tuna sandwich. But this one ant, at least, can go about his business tonight, and continue doing his job without interference from me. I hope E. O. Wilson would approve.

Postcards from a 70s Childhood

2009-03-18T21:19:00.000-07:00

Spike TV was showing all three old school Star Wars movies the other night. I watched most of the first one. Episode IV. A New Hope. What a film. Even all these years later, it still surprises me at how entertaining that movie is. I've seen it a million times and still get sucked into watching it.

I'm old enough to have seen that in the theater, first run! That movie really changed my life, and I guess, everyone else my age who saw it. What better age than 10 years old to see that come out! Wow. I was such a Star Wars junkie. I still miss my X-wing fighter with my action figures. I once pretended that Greedo broke into a Rebel base and stole the X-Wing. I never had the Millennium Falcon, so I used my Big Jim camper to soar through space, track down Greedo, shoot him down, and salvage the X-Wing. Yeah. A camper. In retrospect, Douglas Adams would have been proud. It was a very "Hitchhiker's" moment.

Big Jim, in case you don't know, was not a porno pseudonym. He was an action figure from the 70s, and man did he look like it. He was basically Mattel's answer to Hasbro's GI Joe. But see, GI Joe was all militant and shit, all dog tags and camo fatigues. Big Jim? He was into motocross, and exploring, and martial arts. He didn't have a buzz cut. He had hair over his ears and sideburns! He had a tattoo! And he had cool friends. One was a Native American dude, another was an African American badass, and a third was some sort of Australian big game hunter. I don't remember their names, but think: Tonto, Shaft, and Crocodile Dundee. Man, those guys were fun. And unlike GI Joe, these guys had lots of special features. You pressed a button on their backs and their arms did this karate chop action. You could flex their muscles. Ok, so they were all built like Chippendale's dancers on steroids. But they rocked. With the amount of time I played with those guys, I guess it's amazing I'm not gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But hey. I was an only child! I needed friends. (Still do). Back then, my friends were all plastic and under 9 inches tall. Ahh...good times! So yeah. If it weren't for Big Jim, one X-Wing would have fallen into the hands of the Empire, and then, well, let's not even go there.

Another toy I loved as a kid was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle set. I received that as a birthday gift when I was about 11. That big ring of fire you see in the picture was made of cardboard, so it lasted about three days. But I think I put more mileage on that motorcycle than the real Evel did on his. It was everything a toy should be: durable, detailed, and freakin' loud. I don't know why toy makers always feel compelled to include crap like the little plastic gas can. Like any kid is going to sit around pretending to gas up the bike when you could be sending Evel careening down the driveway! Unless you're going to include REAL gas or some other flammable liquid, spare us the little gas can and tool set. I mean, if you really wanted to make it true to life, they should have included a bottle of bourbon, some pain pills, and a pair of crutches.

To get your fun out of this toy you first attached Evel to the motorcycle, which meant wrapping his little rubber hands onto the handlebars, and jamming his ass onto the seat. If you were rebellious, you'd leave his helmet off, although the helmet was really too cool to leave aside. Then you shoved the bike onto the red thing that geared into the real wheel, cranked the hell out of it, and when you were pretty much out of breath and the little motorized engine was whining and growling like an angry Rottweiler, you released the safety and Evel went buzzing across the living room, usually straight into the coffee table, wall, or occasionally, cat. If you were lucky, Evel would go flying off the bike, soar through the air, and collapse in a heap in the corner with a satisfying THUNK (much like the real Evel would do on horrifying occasions).

As anyone who has ever owned action figures knows, they take a lot of beating. They're tossed from 2nd floor bedroom windows onto the concrete driveway below. They're drowned in bathwater while combating rubber sharks. They get tossed down staircases. They're sometimes shot at with boys with bb guns. They sustain such a range of injuries, they're completely uninsurable. Broken limbs, twisted torsos, and head injuries are common. Yet like the real Evel, my little toy Evel stood up to whatever life (or me) threw at him. But one problem with Evel was that his sparkling red, white, and blue jumpsuit was actually made of cloth. This was a nice attention to detail, but it resulted in Evel looking like he had spent 3 days sleeping off a serious bender under a bridge somewhere. The other problem was that he was about three inches shorter than the rest of my Big Jim guys. So if Evel happened to show up during one of Big Jim's adventures, it was a little like Frodo showing up at an Orc convention. And Big Jim couldn't ride Evel's motorcycle without looking ridiculous. Being imaginative, I compensated by deciding that Evel had undergone some secret government experiment involving a shrink ray. In spite of his smaller stature, Evel did take part in several Big Jim escapades. Once, he was assigned to rev up his bike and plow through a handful of plastic dinosaurs that were threatening to trash Big Jim's Rescue Rig - something no one, even dinosaurs, should attempt.

Another of my favorite toys was called TCR Racing. This was one of the first electric race car sets that were NOT slot cars. The cars raced freely on the track and could change lanes with the flip of a switch on the controller. You could pass, slow down, accelerate, and crash! Take a turn too fast, and you'd be off the track and into the shag carpeting faster than you could say "Dale Earnhardt Senior" TCR = Total Control Racing. It also had another feature no other racing set had before: the jam car. The jam car was a third car on the track that ran around on it's own, usually at a slower speed. This meant that you had to deal with your opponent's car, as well as the jam car, apparently driven by a little old lady lost who had taken a wrong turn on her way to the piggly wiggly. For me, this proved too frustrating, and I eventually just left the jam car off the track. To this day, I wish I had the same sort of option on my commute to and from work.

Another action figure I was fond of was my Six Million Dollar Man figure. For those of you who don't know, The Six Million Dollar Man was a TV show airing from 1974 to 1978 starring Lee Majors as "Colonel Steve Austin" (NOT the pro-wrestler "Steve Austin, who is neither a colonel, nor bionic as far as I know).

Steve, as everyone could plainly see from the opening credits of the show, was involved in a little fender bender while test piloting some new sort of advanced aircraft. Ok, so that's a little bit of an understatement. He actually slathered himself and millions of dollars in Air Force technology all over a runway after a serious mechanical malfunction in the aircraft he was testing. During the violent crash, he managed to lose both legs, an arm, and an eye, but somehow survived. His friend, Dr. Rudy Wells, just so happened to be an expert in the field of "bionics." So when Steve disintegrated himself, Rudy stepped in, picked up what was left, and rebuilt him. "We have the technology," said Rudy while the opening theme music played, "we can rebuild him. We can make him better than he was. Better. Stronger. Faster." And all for a measly six mil! So they scraped what was left of Steve off the runway and replaced his missing human parts with biomechanical parts. His legs and arm now have super strength, and his eye is replaced with a bionic eye capable of seeing like a telescope. And he goes to work for the OSI (Office of Scientific Intelligence - you know, as opposed to those dorks over at the Office of Scientific Ignorance) to combat, umm, bad guys? I don't remember.

I do remember the show featuring Bigfoot in a few episodes. You heard right: Bigfoot. Now I do happen to have a certain fascination with all things Sasquatch-related, and I'm sure I'll get around to explaining myself regarding that at some point. But with regard to the Six Million Dollar Man, the addition of Bigfoot to the roster of recurring characters was just a dream come true for me as a 9 or 10 year old.

Watching the slow-motion, overly dramatic fight scenes between Bigfoot and the bionic man, I felt so many of my inner personalities being satisfied (cryptozoologist, hand-to-hand combat expert, technology geek, etc.) Bigfoot was actually played by Andre the Giant (and sometimes by the guy who played Lurch from the Adam's Family). I really don't remember why or how Bigfoot made it into the storyline for the show, but I didn't care a bit. I expect the whole thing stemmed from one of those, "Hey, who would win in a fight? Bionic Man or Bigfoot?" kinds of debates among the show's writers.

Anyway, the show was highly successful, so of course there had to be an action figure. He wore a red jumpsuit (what the hell was with all the jumpsuits in the 70s??), had a bionic grip, and a bionic eye you could look through (thanks to a hole in the back of his head), which provided some degree of magnification - but also made Steve look a little like a cyborg pirate. But as with Evel, there was a height discrepancy, although on the other end of the scale. Steve stood 13 inches tall; massive by most action figure standards. Even though he was a lot bigger than my other action figures, he was also a little more fragile. The joints of his arms and legs seemed a little less durable than Evel's or Big Jim's, so when Steve went tumbling down the stairs, he'd end up looking like a pile of tanned limbs in a red jumpsuit staring back at you with that one pirate eye glowing and one arm laying in the opposite corner. It could take awhile to re-attach and straighten out his arms and legs back to what looked like a normal human being (I was no Rudy Wells). Steve's bionic arm was covered in some kind of soft rubber you could pull back to see his "bionics." This was cool, although with time, this stuff began to loosen and flake off, which wasn't pretty. I wish I had held onto this figure, because the word is that they're relatively rare these days and fetching a pretty penny with collectors. Sadly though, my Steve Austin action figure suffered a severe head injury when I inadvertently ran over him with my bike. His head was broken into pieces, the lens for his bionic eye lost, and he was just unrepairable. However, my Six Million Dollar Man lunchbox survived longer, and made me the envy of my friends in 4th grade. I can still remember making the "bionic" sound as I unscrewed my thermos in slow motion- "Cha-cha-cha-cha-sst-sst-sst..."

As a kid, these toys were a part of my world. I thought of them as possessions and playthings, which they were. But I guess as I get older, I also see them as childhood memories in their own right. They were a part of the substance of my world and the world of thousands of other kids my age. So I guess in one way, they do hold some cultural or developmental significance. I can't say my life in any way reflects that of Big Jim, Evel Knievel, or Col, Steve Austin. But in a way, I suppose a carry around a little of each of them in my psyche somewhere. You'd think my life would be a little more exciting! But hey, isn't that what toys and imagination are for?

How Fast Are We Moving??

2009-03-14T21:46:00.000-07:00

Lessons Outside the Classroom

2009-03-14T21:17:00.000-07:00

I work in the personal growth industry. For many years, I've worked with thousands of people who, though focused on different goals, share in common the desire to become happier, healthier individuals. While the personal growth industry offers countless tools and techniques for improving one's life, I feel compelled to address an aspect of personal development and exploration close to my heart. That aspect is nature. More specifically, the connection - or lack thereof - we have to nature.

I suppose it's rather normal to look to nature as a means of personal transformation. It's certainly not a new concept. Thoreau, Carson, Muir, Bugbee, Beeston, and others have demonstrated that when we can become silent, reverent, and watchful of nature, it will teach us a great many of things untaught in classrooms. Although it no longer feels like it to most of us, watching nature is really a way of watching ourselves.

Watching nature is not merely observing something "out there," but also "in here" in the deepest, most existential way. The more we gaze into the ocean, the more we see a reflection of ourselves. The more we spend time among the trees, the more we are reminded of our kinship with them. The more we go into the deserts, the freer we are to see ourselves without distraction. So nature isn't just a series of places or things, but an environment, our natural environment, the environment from which we humans were planted and grew. And no matter who you are, or how you view nature, you are, in fact, a product of this environment.

But for most of us living in the new millennium, nature is "out there," beyond the steel and glass of our cities, away from power lines and power lunches, removed from the fabricated environments where we spend most of our lives. To most of us, nature is mainly a place without the things we're accustomed to having around us; not just objects, but also sounds, smells, tactile sensations. Indeed, nature has become, in light of our industrialized, mechanized, digitized environments, something "other," like a foreign land, with different customs and citizens speaking in unknown tongues. Even in this age of SUVs, state-of-the-art camping gear, and Global Positioning Satellites - things designed to facilitate our contact with nature - we somehow seem more removed from nature than ever before. I sit before my laptop, in the certain and comforting environment of a thriving metropolis. Yet only a few miles away, the din of city life is silenced, and replaced by sounds and sensations I'm not attuned to.

Ironically, when we are in nature, away from "civilization," it does not often feel "natural." It feels alien, uncertain, perhaps even scary. Few of us live more than twenty miles away from a forest, river, mountain, lake, desert, or ocean. Yet aside from occasional excursions, we rarely really get to know this territory. Nature exists on the vague periphery of modern awareness, and because of this it has become a place of uncertainty and danger.

A friend of mine who lives in a rather crime-ridden urban area recently went to spend a week hiking in the Alaskan tundra to get away from the tension and turbulence of city life. What had inspired the trip was that he had been mugged at knifepoint in a church parking lot a month before. After that trauma he decided he needed a break from the city. Before he left, his mother warned him not to go to the wilds of Alaska for fear of the many dangers "out there." Despite what he had been through with the mugging, she would have preferred that he stay home, where he would be "safe."

A mother's well-meaning concern. But it shows not only the degree of separation we've developed in our relationship with nature but also the kind of desensitization we've developed about the very real dangers of human society all around us. It's not that being away from our cities and offices and houses is any more or less dangerous than traversing a cascade ridge, or sailing the high seas. Indeed, being in the wilderness is often safer than walking the well-populated streets of our cities. But life and risk go hand in hand. And sometimes it seems that we have become too comfortable with the known set of risks we've generated for ourselves. We're so used to crime, pollution, and mental and emotional stress, that we barely recognize them as threats anymore. Of course there are risks in nature. But when we've exhausted ourselves on the challenges and excesses of the digital age, where can we turn but to nature for new experiences?

Perhaps what disturbs us most about nature is that it reminds us that our manufactured sense of "control" over our environment we've created is illusory. It does something unusual to one's ego to stand at the brink of the Grand Canyon, to stare into the vastness of space from high desert at midnight, or to walk along the edge of a continent with the immense ocean surging at your feet. It reminds us of our utter smallness.

Small or not, we have managed, through our constant struggles against each other, against nature, against disease, against death, to wreak enormous damage on the ecosystem designed to sustain us. Yet while we affect these forces, we do not control them; indeed, we're often at their mercy. And when we spend time in their direct presence, we may feel that the stored up sense of power we have in our ego-selves is immediately siphoned out of us, stolen by forces we neither control nor completely understand. We are, in a sense, drawn out of ourselves and into something greater through this vulnerability. For some, this is a blissful experience of connection with something divine and mysterious. For others, it's a terrifying object lesson in the flimsiness of human ego constructs.

Either way, the point is that nature is not "the other." We are not separate from nature but a manifestation of it. We need not vilify nor deify nature in order to understand our place within it. Nature is not a foreign land - not heaven or hell - but home. Perhaps nature can be thought of as an element of our collective identity we've forgotten. "Human nature" seems to stand in stark contrast with nature proper. But while we may have withdrawn into the recesses of city and suburban life, only venturing into nature for a weekend fishing trip or drive along the coastline highways, nature remains a powerfully compelling presence capable of transforming and awakening us to ourselves and to our natural home.

I feel that it's important to develop a balanced perspective when we talk of our "relationship" with nature. We ask of nature things nature does not always willingly provide. We want to see beauty, order, purity. Author and naturalist Barry Lopez provides a thoughtful sense of this balance when he reminds us that our collective notion of nature has grown somewhat naive. Today, our contact with nature is often made through the sanitized interface of video, books, and television specials. Media lends itself to whitewashing the more mundane elements of reality while sensationalizing those aspects that appeal to our sense of aesthetics and fantasy. Lopez believes that many people today have developed a kind of idealized "made-for-television" concept of nature where the sun always shines, butterflies flutter sweetly overhead, and all is beauty, peace, and grace. This, Lopez reminds, is not nature in its entirety. Nature is not always rated a safe "PG.". Nature can challenge our sense of beauty, perfection, and goodness. It can open us to the very things we often seek to escape; pain, death, violence. It can be as dangerous and unforgiving as any dark urban alley. Some speak of the "harsh reality" of nature. But while we barely flinch when hearing of the daily murders, rapes, and bombings reported on the evening news, we feel ill-prepared to watch a pack of wolves stalk, attack, and kill an elk after a long, exhausting, and bloody battle between hunters and prey. The clear irony is that our minds are far more tolerant of the needless cruelty perpetrated by our own kind than to witness the simple actions of natural survival.

Nature is not an idealized fairyland. It's sometimes dirty, gritty, bloody, even unfair and ugly by "civilized" standards. But this makes nature capable of providing our minds and spirits with something sorely lacking in many lives today; contact with something genuine. It can challenge us to embrace the more difficult facts of our physical existence on a planet alive and ever-changing. It can show us what we've long forgotten about our own very nature.

I went to college with a talented artist named John Farrell. John is a sculptor. When I first met John he was sculpting using tools; he always carried around a little bag full of chisels, picks, knives of various sorts. He used these implements to make beautiful little carvings of animals, totem poles, and fish. One day I noticed that he didn't have his carving implements with him and I asked him what was up. "I got rid of them," he said matter-of-factly. "I realized that the tools were keeping me at a distance from the art. I was using them to make art, rather than using me." John explained that he felt he had lost touch with the medium of the clay he was working with because he never really touched it. His hands were always clean and soft. He always used his tools. So by using his own two hands rather than the implements, he began to make some truly outstanding pieces. It was hard work, and in some ways, his art took on a rough, unrefined appearance. Yet they also looked the way he wanted them to; as a piece of nature produced by another piece of nature.

The moral here is simply this: our contact with nature ought not to be solely through the media or via some removed extension of ourselves, but through a direct contact with it. It's ok to get your hands dirty. Find some mud, and get dirty.

But what can we hope to learn from nature when most of us are so thoroughly insulated from it?

In ecology, there is the notion of natural equilibrium; the belief that nature, if left to its own machinations, will achieve an inherent balance. The organisms that inhabit nature are adapted to one another, and often survive thanks to a range of symbiotic relationships. While there is great debate as to whether the actions of humans should be considered a part of this symbiosis, there can be no denying that, if true, humans have managed to do far more to upset the natural balance than support it. Indeed, civilization, in the common way of defining it, has to be considered parasitic in that it provides nature little in return for what it takes from it to survive.

But while we may have failed nature in a macrocosmic sense, we can reestablish a relationship with nature on an individual level. Perhaps, say some, this is the only way in which to replace what we've taken from our natural environment; to engender an understanding and appreciation of nature on a deeply personal level.

In ancient spiritual traditions, God - or whatever you associate with God - is revealed in nature. From Siddhartha's meditation beneath the Bodhi Tree, to Moses' burning bush encounter on Mt. Sinai, to Jesus baptism in the Jordan River, to Joseph Smith's revelation in the "Sacred Wood," to Muhammad listening to the voice of Allah in the wilderness, nature is a place of heightened wisdom, learning, and evolution. Enlightenment, however you see it, seems to be more readily available amongst the flowing streams, towering pines, and arid deserts than in our contrived world of skyscrapers and traffic jams.

At the same time, I feel strongly that our civilized world is in need of those who artfully bring to bear the lessons of nature upon this world of cities, political unrest, and financial obsession. Who is the true "man of nature"? And what can he teach us?

In 1908, Jack London published an article about "The Nature Man." This man, or animal, or some combination, briefly captured the imagination of London's readers as a real-life Tarzan. A man who, through some odd circumstances, lived a kind of fanstasy I suspect still stirs in the hearts of many; abandoning the trappings of modern civilization in favor of living - truly - off the land.

Ernest Darling was raised in my own home town of Portland, Oregon. Darling, as it happened, was afflicted with some sort of illness that was, at the time, want for a clear diagnosis, even by his own father, a respected physician. Darling was not thriving, and was wasting away, down to around 90 pounds. No one seemed able to determine the problem, although the problem was clear: Ernest Darling, not even 30 years old, was dying.

After spending ample time with doctors, psychologists, and even doing a brief stint at an insane asylum, Darling elected to pack a bag and leave for the wilderness. Now, the wilderness in Oregon is nothing to be trivialized, and within a few weeks of living in the woods during a solid Oregon winter, Darling returned to Portland, still alive, but barely. Yet his time in the woods suggested to him that the answer to his life-threatening dilemma remained in nature, not in the cities and in the educated minds of doctors.

"So he made arrangements to travel to Tahiti, a decidely more accommodating climate than the snowy, rainly Oregon forests. Darling took to Tahiti immediately, and began establishing himself as the "Nature Man," living off the land, walking around naked, catching or growing his own food, and all but abandoning all remnants of his "civilized" existence. The result was nothing short of transformative. As London reports:

But in the brush Darling found what he was looking for—rest. Nobody bothered him with beef-steaks and pork. No physicians lacerated his tired nerves by feeling his pulse, nor tormented his tired stomach with pellets and powders. He began to feel soothed. The sun was shining warm, and he basked in it. He had the feeling that the sunshine was an elixir of health. Then it seemed to him that his whole wasted wreck of a body was crying for the sun. He stripped off his clothes and bathed in the sunshine. He felt better. It had done him good—the first relief in weary months of pain.
As he grew better he sat up and began to take notice. All about him were the birds fluttering and chirping, the squirrels chattering and playing. He envied them and their health and spirits, their happy, carefree existence. That he should contrast their condition with his was inevitable; and that he should question why they were splendidly vigorous while he was a feeble, dying wraith of a man was likewise inevitable. His conclusion was the very obvious one—namely, that they lived naturally, while he lived most unnaturally; therefore, if he intended to live, he must return to Nature.
Alone, there in the brush, he worked out his problem and began to apply it. He stripped off his clothing and leaped and gamboled about, running on all fours, climbing trees, in short doing physical stunts—and all the time soaking in the sunshine. He imitated the animals. He built a nest of dry leaves and grasses in which to sleep at night, covering it over with bark as a protection against the early fall rains. "Here is a beautiful exercise," he told me once, flapping his arms mightily against his sides. "I learned it from watching the roosters crow." Another time I remarked the loud, sucking intake with which he drank cocoanut milk. He explained that he had noticed the cows drinking that way, and concluded there must be something in it. He tried it and found it good, and thereafter he drank only in that fashion."

Darling continued to live a fulfilling, though obviously unconventional, life thanks to his radical shift toward a natural existence. Obviously, for most of us, this kind of change is simply too dramatic. But then again, if presented with the option, if not the necessity, Darling simply made a choice based on a rather logical conclusion: "this way of living is not working and will result in my early death."

For Ernest Darling, nature was his salvation. As I sit here, surrounded by news of suidide bombings, economic decline, escalating political tensions, I can't help but wonder if Darling was on to something big.

Sacred Spacing

2008-12-15T22:59:00.000-08:00

How to Slow Down When Life's on Overdrive

"… Meditate in your heart upon your bed and be still." ----- Psalms 4:4

The Drug of Expedience

We live in a world obsessed with expedience. We want our computers to be faster, our banking to be quicker, and checkout lines to be shorter. We want eyeglasses made in one hour, photos developed in half an hour, and an oil change in no more than twenty minutes. We want our coffee makers to have the coffee brewing before we're up. We want news and information in sound-bites. We use our commute as time to make cell phone calls, eat breakfast, and apply make-up; that is, if we aren't telecommuting already. If it happened yesterday, it's ancient history. If we can't get it today, we don't want it at all. If you can't keep up, get out of the way! We post-modern homo sapiens move urgently, think quickly, speak rapidly, act suddenly, and work at break-neck speed. For most of us, from the time the alarm clock jolts us into action at dawn, until we collapse into our beds late at night, we are blazing through our days. Life is a blur.

This rapid-fire way of living is deemed "convenient." Faster = better. In our culture, the "convenience drug" is highly addictive, and most of us are hooked.

The irony is that all of this seeking after convenience may be having something of an opposite effect. Rather than making our lives easier, we may actually be complicating things. There is a price to pay for all of this high-speed, rapid-fire expedience, and in some cases it's a matter of life and death.

By some estimates, over 80% of visits to the doctor’s office in the U.S. alone are due to conditions either caused or exacerbated by stress. And psychologists are quick to point out that stress isn’t simply something we feel when things go wrong. We’re inadvertently generating stress in our lives by constantly revving up the pace of life itself. While we’re busy trying to make our lives easier, we’re burning the candle at both ends when it comes to our health.

Stress isn’t simply a mental or emotional response to an external stimulus, but a physical state that can be generated simply by how we manage our thoughts. Some psychologists assert that simply thinking about something stressful is, to your body, essentially the same as actually experiencing it. Such is the power of imagination!

When stressed, a host of problematic changes happen to our physiology. Changes in metabolism, increases in cortisol, imbalances in the production of dopamine, melatonin, DHEA, serotonin, etc. These changes result in everything from sleeplessness and hypertension, to chronic pain, hair loss, and premature aging. There are literally hundreds of factors that conspire to undermine our health when we’re under stress. And the problem is that our bodies and minds are almost always under stress. Physiologically, many of us live in a constant state of red alert. Our adrenals are producing high levels of cortisol and repressing DHEA production. Our cortical activity is reduced, while systems within the brain responsible for survival (fight/flight) are constantly vigilant. We spend less time producing restorative delta brain waves at night, and then wonder why we’re so tired in the morning. We eat our meals on the run, and wonder why our digestive systems can barely break-down the nutrients we consume and properly eliminate wastes. And we’re so used to it, we’ve begun to think of it as “normal.”

Author Richard Carlson sums things up nicely by stating: “Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.”

(If you’re still wondering about the physical effects of stress, check out this article)

Even the noise generated by our high velocity lifestyle can have dire health consequences. According to an August 2007 report at www.guardian.co.uk:

Thousands of people in Britain and around the world are dying prematurely from heart disease triggered by long-term exposure to excessive noise, according to research by the World Health Organisation. Coronary heart disease caused 101,000 deaths in the UK in 2006, and the study suggests that 3,030 of these are caused by chronic noise exposure, including to daytime traffic.

Deepak Prasher, professor of audiology at University College London, told the New Scientist magazine: "The new data provide the link showing there are earlier deaths because of noise. Until now, noise has been the Cinderella form of pollution and people haven't been aware that it has an impact on their health."

The WHO's working group on the Noise Environmental Burden on Disease began work on the health effects of noise in Europe in 2003. In addition to the heart disease link, it found that 2% of Europeans suffer severely disturbed sleep because of noise pollution and 15% can suffer severe annoyance. Chronic exposure to loud traffic noise causes 3% of tinnitus cases, in which people constantly hear a noise in their ears.

Research published in recent years has shown that noise can increase the levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenalin in the body, even during sleep. The longer these hormones stay in circulation around the bloodstream, the more likely they are to cause life-threatening physiological problems. High stress levels can lead to heart failure, strokes, high blood pressure and immune problems.

"All this is happening imperceptibly," said Prof Prasher. "Even when you think you are used to the noise, these physiological changes are still happening."

Yet despite all the warnings, life seems to move at warp speed, with no signs of slowing down.

The Anti-Quiet Culture

It seems that our culture has become prejudiced against stillness, opposed to motionlessness: an anti-quiet culture. We worship movement, activity, noise. That's what gets our attention. Yet that’s what’s stunting our development and shearing years from our lives.

We usually don't equate progress and growth in life with stillness. We don't think there's much to be gained by remaining motionless. There doesn't seem to be much to learn from quietness. Without a stimulus for our eyes, ears, mouths, what is there?

When was the last time you heard someone say, "I'm really proud of my son. Yesterday, he sat in his room all day, alone, and deeply contemplated life"? Most people would say, "When's he going to quit sitting around and get a job?"

But could something as simple as spending a few minutes in quiet stillness each day actually alleviate the effects of stress? By now, most people are quite familiar with the benefits of meditation. Whereas only twenty years ago, meditation was almost never cited as having any potential benefit in conventional medicine and mental health circles, it’s now seen by many as a staple of good health, along with proper diet and exercise.

I’ve been involved in the meditation community for over 20 years. In that time, I’ve come in contact with tens of thousands of people from around the world interested in meditation, yet who also confessed a series of problems with maintaining a practice. They would say things like this:

“I’ve tried meditating, but never really got anything out of it.”

“I used to meditate, but it took too much time.”

“I’ve got kids and a full-time job. When am I going to find time to meditate?”

“I work 60 hour weeks and travel all the time. I don’t have a spare moment to myself. How could I meditate?”

“Meditation is too hard. It’s boring and after awhile my back hurts.”

“My doctor said I should learn to meditate. So I went to a couple of classes but couldn’t really make it work.”

“I try to sit still, but my legs fall asleep.”

“I’d love to find the time to meditate. But with my schedule, there’s just no way”

Our lives are often so rich with family, friends, social obligations, work, and yet we’re impoverished when it comes to finding a few minutes to ourselves. As Gandhi once said of Western culture, "Here are people with everything, except stillness."

I’m familiar with all the reasons and excuses for not meditating. I've certainly made my own fair share! Meditation can be a tough thing to do. After all, it takes time, and nothing much really happens. At least on the surface. On one hand, there can’t be anything easier for a human being to do than to simply sit down and not do anything. But if you’ve tried it, you know that “simple” and “easy” don’t mean the same thing. If you want to see just how addicted to activity and stimulus you are, try spending 20 minutes in complete silence with nothing to read, watch, listen to, feel, eat, or drink. To some people, it’s akin to torture.

A friend of mine named Mike Bardelli used to teach beginning meditation classes. He commented that most classes began with about 20 to 30 new students, and within two weeks, the number dwindled to about seven or eight. Once he began asking those who stopped coming to class their reasons why, most responses were like those listed above. Basically: “1) too time-consuming, 2) too boring, 3) too hard.”

With this in mind, I began assisting would-be meditators with a new strategy. Rather than insisting that they simply discipline themselves to meditate, in hopes of the benefits keeping them motivated to continue, I decided to suggest a method of meditation that would address the “big three” objections.

This method is called “Sacred Spacing” and it’s both simple and easy (though there are rules). It involves nothing more than simply finding a space in your home where you can sit in comfort, undisturbed, for fifteen minutes at a time. This space must belong to you and you alone. It’s not shared space. It’s space that only you will occupy. It can be an entire room, or a single cushion in a corner on the floor of your bedroom. It can be the chair you occupy at the dinner table, or anywhere you can be alone and undisturbed. Once each day, spend fifteen minutes sitting in your space. Bring with you one candle of any kind and light it, and a small glass of cold water. During your fifteen minutes, you can talk to yourself, but no one else. If you have an itch, scratch it. If you are uncomfortable in one position, switch to another. But you may not: watch television, speak to anyone else (including phoning and texting), eat, play games (yes, that means Sudoku is out), write, read, surf the internet, or listen to music or the radio. No pets or kids allowed. Remain in your space for the full fifteen minutes, with nothing more than your candle and your glass of water. When the fifteen minutes are up (set a timer if you wish), blow out the candle, finish drinking your water (even if you’re not thirsty), stand, and bow to the space you just occupied, then go about your day.

After you’ve practiced this Sacred Spacing exercise for a few weeks, begin noticing any differences in how you’re spending your time in your sacred space now, as compared to when you first began. Begin noticing how you feel after you blow out the candle, finish your water, and bow today, compared to how you felt on your first day.

The idea is not to think about anything in particular, or to avoid thinking about anything. The point is simply to establish a space within which you can be, and not do. I admit that this technique seems so simple, it’s almost corny and silly. But I also promise that anyone who makes it a daily routine will begin to see their lives in a different way.

The Value of Emptiness

One early morning, several years ago, a homeless man approached me on a downtown street asking for fifty cents. He smelled of cheap wine and the stench that comes from days and nights on streets and under bridges.

I was on my way to work, in a hurry, and in no mood for interruptions. I reached into my pocket and realized I had no change; but I had a few dollars. I handed him two one-dollar bills, hoping he'd let me get on with my walk to the office. His eyes lit-up and he quickly reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a small object. Looking into his grubby hands I noticed that it was a ring made of thick copper wire with an empty mounting on top. He explained that he had just made it the previous day. He handed it to me and had me hold it up in the misty morning light.

“See there,” he said in a hushed voice, pointing to the top of the ring, “that's where the diamond would go!” I looked at him standing there, smiling at me proudly from under his dirty gray beard. I smiled back, handed him the ring, and began to walk away. “Wait!” he said, grabbing my arm, “it's yours.” “Thanks,” I said, “but you keep it.”

He stepped in front of me, “But this could be a diamond ring, you know. All it needs is the diamond!” He held the ring in front of my eyes as if displaying a priceless piece of real jewelry. it took me a minute, but it finally occurred to me: it was indeed a priceless piece of jewelry. I smiled at him and said, “Well, it's an original, isn't it?” He put the ring in my hand and began to walk away with an air of satisfaction. “There's not another one like it!” he said as he headed down the sidewalk. I called out, “Thank you,” and went on my way.

I've encountered several such people before. But this one man sticks in my mind. For him, the reality of not having a diamond to go in his ring was not a problem. Rather, he found happiness in creating a spot for the diamond, a place for value and beauty, a space for something of worth. He could have just made a simple band with no place for a stone, since he had none. Or he might have substituted something for a gem; a marble or maybe a piece of glass. But his satisfaction came from his effort to make a space for something valuable, not from investing it with false wealth or fake riches.

I imagine that while he was making the ring he did so with a sense of the value and meaning of what he was creating; a value and meaning far beyond what society would usually define as valuable. And when he offered me the ring - nothing more than a piece of copper wire with an empty mounting - I experienced that same meaning and value.

Today I keep that ring with the empty mounting with me at all times; it's not for sale.

Meditating means making a place for value, setting aside time for solitude, contemplation, and stillness. Yes, it will require time and space. But I don't have time to meditate! Can't I meditate on my way to work? Can I watch TV while I meditate? It's so easy to fill our time with other things; often things of less value than a mere fifteen of sacred, uninterrupted time.

Meditation is an oil upon the rushing waters of our high-velocity lifestyles. But therein lies its power. It doesn't mix in. It isn't something you do while reading the paper or balancing your checkbook. It doesn't always fit neatly in between appointments, phone calls, or episodes of Lost and CSI Miami. For some, it requires a lot of sacrifice, devotion, and discipline. But if nothing else, it really only requires us to see value in emptiness. When we can allow ourselves the luxury of that fifteen minutes without the habitual compulsion to fill it with something, we find ourselves in a different world; one where emptiness does not represent lack, but possibility. Where silence doesn't mean boredom, but serenity; where we are able to shed uniforms we wear to undertake our work and other responsibilities, and just be.

This cannot happen without the time and space we must sometimes wrestle away from wild and frenetic external pressures. Simple? Yes. Easy? Not for most of us. Most of us are not used to stillness. We are not comfortable when it's too quiet. We really don't know how to make a place for value because we tend to fear the sacrifice of time necessary just to carve out a few minutes each day. Not to mention, stillness can be, well, boring! But bear in mind that boredom is nothing more than the mind without its pacifier. It might take time for the mind to wean itself from the addiction of stimulus, but as the withdrawal passes, a new level of centeredness and harmony supplants it.

Remember that a sacred space is not merely the physical environment in which you meditate. It begins on the inside, with the commitment to yourself that the space and time you make is, in fact, sacred. The countless demands on your time and energy may be important and necessary to attend to. But the space and time you make when you meditate is for you and you alone, a precious gemstone placed carefully in the center of it all.

Architects of the Senses, Part 3

2008-11-26T14:34:00.000-08:00

We've seen how Claude Debussy composed rich, sensuous music as a painter creates vivid paintings, and how Wassily Kandinsky created bold, expressive paintings as though they were musical compositions. To complete this series, we'll take a look at an artist who was neither painter nor musician, and yet who found ways of using words to create pictures and sounds in the minds of his readers, and who inspired America's first counterculture.

Writing at Escape Velocity - Jack Kerouac

He was a thorn in the side of the establishment to some, a literary and cultural revolutionary to others. He was a Buddhist, a poet, an alcoholic, who inspired an entire generation, yet crumbled under the weight of his own success. His life was the proverbial candle burning at both ends, and his name has come to represent a compelling but cautionary tale of genius, success, and excess. He was one of the most enigmatic and iconic tragic-heroes of the 20th century. Yet as far as Jack Kerouac was concerned, "I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

While intense attention has been focused on the frenetic life and times of Jack Kerouac, I'd like to also focus here on his literary stylings and how his writing style was derived from another art form: jazz. Still, as with any artist, a glimpse into their lives is necessary to fully understand the art they produced, especially one as compelling as Jack Kerouac's. And in his case especially, it's impossible to understand him on the page without an appreciation of the man behind the words.

"It ain't so much whatcha write as it's the way thatcha write it." ----- Jack Kerouac

Born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents, Jack (Jean Louis) Kerouac spoke French before he learned to speak English. Known to family and friends as Ti Jean, the young Jack wrote stories compulsively, and was captivated by radio dramas like "The Shadow." Jack was athletically gifted, and had it not been for a leg injury his freshman year of college, we might well know him as a successful football player rather than the literary icon he would become.

Dropping out of college (due to the leg injury, as well as his overall disillusion with formal education), Jack began developing close friendships with a range of like-minded individuals such as Allen Ginsburg, William S Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Occasionally argumentative, free-thinking, and hungry for life experience, Jack found himself challenged and stimulated more outside of school than within. He forged relationships with others who, along with Jack, would come to embody a unique spirit of youth in 1940s New York. In 1943 he joined the US Navy, but was discharged for psychological reasons, being branded "schizoid." His first novel, "The Town and the City" sold poorly, but gave hints of his unique take on the contrast between small-town values and big-city attitudes. The book also reflected Jack's own growing disillusionment with what he felt were the oppressive, unjust aspects of a nation becoming increasingly dehumanized and obsessed with progress. From an early age, Jack had little tolerance for bourgeois pretentiousness, and would come to represent its antithesis in life and writing.

Among his friends, Jack was known for carrying a notebook with him everywhere he went. He was constantly seen scribbling thoughts and long, rambling letters to friends and family, jotting down virtually every loose thought. This was not a personal journal; he shared virtually everything he wrote with anyone who would read it. (He was, in a sense, the first blogger!) His friends described him as somewhat manic - funny one moment, dark and raw-nerved the next, sometimes animated and talkative, then distant and reserved. Often, the determining factor in Jack's frame of mind was simply the amount of alcohol in his system. But whatever the mood of the moment, Jack never stopped writing.

By the 1950s, Jack was seeking a salve for his mental restlessness through travel. He wrote incessantly, and while back home in New York in 1951, he began work on what would become a manifesto for the first American counter-culture: the Beats. Taping long sheets of tracing paper together, and trimming them to fit his typewriter, Jack began work on "On the Road." This was done as an attempt to avoid the mere interruption that replacing a single sheet of paper would impose upon his creative process. The result was a 120 foot scroll (certainly one of the more unusual literary submissions in modern time!). Inspired by his travels through middle America, and infused with the influences that would define the Beats - drug use, jazz, and poetry - On the Road would become his greatest success, and according to some, the impetus for his demise. It was 1957. Jack was 35 years old.

Though still debated among critics as to its literary strength, On the Road was an articulation of adventure, personal exploration, and self-destruction unlike anything before seen. Normally ambivalent about such works, the critics generally loved it, and Jack would soon find himself in a place in which he was not psychologically comfortable: the mouthpiece and harbinger of a new generation. He became ultimate expression of something revolutionary - the antithesis of the "Ozzie and Harriet" world of the hard-working, family-oriented, media-obedient middle class. (To read the famous New York Times review of On the Road, click here)

Critical acclaim, the holy grail of every writer, did not produce the consequences Jack had hoped for. Though hailed as "the voice of a generation," he was too often viewed more as a curiosity than anything else. There were cautionary warnings infusing the positive reviews; "this is what can happen to your children if you're not paying attention," was the message parents of impressionable youths heard. This was not what he had hoped for. Rather than shaking the masses out of their coma of conformity, On the Road became a well-conceived, but ominous warning in the mind of mainstream America. In a sense, Jack became just as disillusioned with the success of his work as he had been when inspired to create it.

While he did crave success and notoriety, Jack was completely unprepared for the consequences of his own celebrity. He was chased by fans, tracked down by journalists, and became a kind of guru or savior for the disenfranchised. He was beaten up outside San Remo Bar in New York one night by some thugs who recognized him. He couldn't enter a jazz club without photographers and devotees hounding him. He got so tired of interviewers asking him, "Why did you write On the Road?" he began to answer by sarcastically stating, "Because it's what I experienced." The added pressure and attention drove him further into substance abuse. He typically began drinking upon waking in the morning, and continued through the night. But even before the success of On the Road, Jack was seeking ways of managing his ever-restless mind. He needed respite, peace of mind. For this, he took up Buddhism, partly through the influence of his friend, Buddhist poet Gary Snyder. Jack approached Buddhism with considerable zeal, and genuinely devoted himself to its study and practice. He eventually composed his own "dharma," a 420 page collection of his own thoughts derived from his studies and meditations. The Buddhist themes of emptiness and impermanence resonated deeply with Jack, especially in the wake of his stifling celebrity status. But while Buddhism would have a meaningful affect on both Jack's life and writing, it ultimately failed to provide him with the solace he sought.

Meanwhile, the sequel to On the Road was eagerly anticipated by Jack's critics and readers. Still wary of escalating the discomforts of success, Jack managed to produce a new book anyway. The Dharma Bums was published in 1958. The book was masterful in some sense, but garnered less positive critical reaction. More troubling for Jack personally, Dharma Bums was also dimly viewed by some in the Buddhist community. At the time, Buddhism was making its own debut in western culture. A hard-drinking, loose-thinking rebel was not exactly the kind of ambassador Buddhism wished for at the time. Jack took the criticism harshly, but couldn't argue with the assessment. Remarking to a friend he said, "I've become so decadent, drunk, and dontgiveashit. I'm not a Buddhist anymore."

Although Jack was frustrated with his failure as a Buddhist, as well as his success as a writer, the entertainment industry was still smelling blood. Beat culture was picking up momentum, and there was a growing appetite for the strange, raw, unconventional Beats among adults and youths alike. In 1959, Jack was convinced to write a screenplay for a movie called "Pull My Daisy," which was intended to further popularize Beat culture. The film sensationalized the Beats, and featured Jack prominently as the narrator of the film. Though eventually acclaimed as "innovative," and "the only legitimate Beat film," it fell flat upon it initial release, which only confirmed in Jack's mind the in incongruency between the ideals of the Beat Generation and the craving of middle America for something new and unusual with which sate its appetite for entertainment.

Whatever Jack's personal reservations, the Beats continued to grow in popularity, and began to take-on their stereotypical image among the collective American consciousness: berets, black clothing, cigarette-smoking, poetry-reading, jazz music aficionados. Men and women of the Beat Generation were often deemed sexually-deviant. But to Jack, all of this was an unfair, cartoon-like portrayal. For him, "Beat" meant a kind of lifestyle representing a state of mind, and often an intentional act of resistance against the forces of greed and market-driven culture. Whatever else it was, Jack felt strongly that the Beats were not merely an oddity of the American fringe. If Jack had anything to say about it, The Beat Generation was not about crime, violence, or debauchery. Unfortunately, Jack wasn't the only Beatnik, nor was he always able to personify the more virtuous aspects of the movement. Mainstream America was developing a kind of seductive relationship with the Beat Generation. Their art, attitudes, fashion, and lifestyle became a kind of guilty pleasure for some, a sign of America's supposed moral collapse to others, but compelling to all.

While Jack often felt a degree of responsibility for how the Beats were publicly perceived, it's important to note that he was not the sole architect of "Beat Generation." This was an artistic and cultural movement spanning nearly 20 years, with a broad range of original thinkers and innovative artists behind it. It was also a bi-coastal movement in America, with many of the Beat artists moving westward in search of new experiences. Jack himself was artistically active on both west and east coasts. This illustrated another basic principle of the Beats compared to middle-America; a kind of itinerant lifestyle, with groups of artists moving like small nomadic tribes along the highways and byways of America. They weren't "tied down" to a job, family, house, or town. They were mobile, like gypsy minstrels, often earning their travel money by producing and selling their art from town to town.

While it's easy to assign the impetus of the Beat movement to simple social discontent, the reality is that there was another artistic influence without which there might well have been no Beat Generation at all: jazz.

In a sense, Jazz was it's own cultural movement, one far older, richer, and ultimately longer-lived than the Beat Generation's artistic movement. American Jazz was in full swing by the time Jack Kerouac began writing On the Road. It was the era of Bebop and and Free Jazz, embodied by jazz giants like Lester Young, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, and Charles Mingus. Though it's debatable as to whether jazz was (or has ever been) considered "mainstream," it was, especially in the 1950s, the dominant musical force. Explosively innovative, by turns sentimental, rebellious, or outright sexual, the raw power of jazz seemed to know no bounds. In nightclubs nationwide, jazz of all flavors and hues could be heard nightly from Kansas City to New Orleans, and from New York to San Francisco, and it was in this dark, smoky, nightlife of the jazz culture that Jack found himself most inspired and in his element.

It's no wonder jazz appealed to Jack and the other Beats. It was the soundtrack to their lives, and in Jack's case, the very well-spring of artistic expression. Like the Beats, jazz was not focused on marketing or mass appeal. It was dynamic and fluid, but always stood on its own. Jack often likened himself to a kind of jazz musician, favoring improvisation over form, even in writing. "I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues on a Sunday," Jack said.

He argued against strict rules of grammar and punctuation, claiming that such requisites interfered with the flow of expression when writing. Commas and other punctuation were overused, "usually useless," and were, in Jack's way of thinking, a hindrance and distraction to the expressive act itself. He preferred a kind of free-form verbal expression in which the written word was, in effect, a kind of dictation from an inner performance. This was more than a simple break from formal poetic expression toward "open form" poetry. It was not so much an attack on the modern artistic focus on craft so much as an embrace of spontaneity in art. Jack strove to establish a new kind of compositional literary style he termed "spontaneous bopprosity [bop prose]." For Jack, jazz represented a new kind of language in which whole conversations could be observed between the solos of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, with not a word or glance between them. As musicologist Phil Ford has explained, Jack believed writing should be done the same way. He strove to "write at escape velocity;" the point at which the writer is unencumbered by the editorial inner voice, self-doubts, or pauses between paragraphs. The only pauses Jack felt were a genuine part of writing were no different than the pauses Charlie Parker made while taking a breath during one of his ear-bending solos. To write genuinely meant getting one's analytical or critical mind out of the way of the process. This, believed Jack, was the only real way to honestly express oneself. While Phil Ford doesn't necessarily believe Jack imitated jazz compositional structure intentionally at all times, he does believe that Jack's method of writing does provide us with "a glimpse into the creative intellect in flight."

Whatever can be said about his literal intentions, there is no doubt that Jack succeeded in his efforts to inject the tangible texture of jazz into his writing. This has caused many to see Jack as more of a "performance poet" than writer, in that his thoughts on the page seem to beg to be spoken aloud (and definitely carry more power when they are). There is, in fact, a discernible difference between reading a Kerouac piece and listening to Jack read one. This is wonderfully demonstrated by the video embedded below, a clip of one of Jack's appearances on the Steve Allen Show, in 1959.

Jack used language as a kind of dynamic medium, in which the nuances of tempo, tone, and accent defined the piece, just as the same elements often define a jazz performance. The result is a kind of stream-of-consciousness outpouring of vivid scenes and experiences as seen through Jack's keen observational eye. A single piece of his prose could contain elements of parable, fable, travel narrative, metaphor, psychoanalysis, and journalistic play-by-play, all braced by and infused with the flow and movement of a quintessential jazz expressionist.

Although Jack Kerouac is viewed by many as a kind of cultural hero, who took on the restrictive and oppressive ideals of "the establishment," Jack himself was far less inclined to accept that role. As he neared the end of his rather short life, he grew frustrated and critical of what he saw as a gross over-simplification and sensationalism of the ideals of the Beat Generation, to the point of nearly disowning the Beat concept altogether. As the Hippie movement of the 1960s succeeded the Beats, Jack didn't welcome the comparisons and largely viewed the 60s counterculture as pointlessly hedonistic and selfish. His reaction was to withdraw into his own world; a world dominated by solitude and alcohol. Jack Kerouac died on October 21st, 1969, due to liver complications brought on by a lifetime of heavy drinking.

Like many great talents, Jack was eventually overcome by the weight of his own success. Yet he remains a singularly potent example of a flawed yet brilliant artistic force who believed that the power of expression was not something to be defined, structured, or imposed upon by traditional form and technique. In 2007, the University of Massachusetts bestowed a posthumous honorary degree on Jack Kerouac. It's quite possible that Jack would have refused the honor if offered to him during his lifetime. And though the Beat Generation is largely a historical phenomenon now dissolved, Jack and the other Beat artists continue to inspire and invigorate new generations of young artists striving to live and create at escape velocity.

Architects of the Senses, Part 2

2008-11-18T19:58:00.000-08:00

Alchemist of Color - Wassily Kandinsky

"Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings." -- Wassily Kandinsky

Is there a spiritual element in both the process and product of art? Can art properly convey both the inner and outer experiences of the artist? Is there some "inner necessity" that compels an artist to delve into himself to draw out inspiration? And can the elements of music be synthesized with painting? At least once artist affirmed all of this about art, and much more.

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Russia, December 4th, 1866. In time, he would almost single-handedly launch the genre of abstract art and become one of the preeminent art theorists of his time. Though he wouldn't pursue art as a career until the age of 30, Kandinsky would quickly establish himself as a master of transcendent images and a forefather of both what is sometimes called "New Age Art" and modern graphic design.

In his youth, Kandinsky studied law and economics; not typical fields of interest for an artist. But at age 23, Kandinsky was part of an ethnographic expedition to a rural region north of Moscow. There he spent two months studying the customs and beliefs of the local villagers. In particular, he was impressed with the way in which the buildings and objects were painted with bright, vibrant colors, often against dark backgrounds (a theme Kandinsky would echo in many of his later works). Upon entering the buildings he was struck with the distinct impression of stepping into a painting. Often, the individual objects and curios found on the shelves of these simple people were so heavily and brightly painted, he could barely tell what they were, as though the object had dissolved or given way to the colors it wore. His experiences studying Russian folk art would be among the first seeds to eventually flower into the absorbing works with which Kandinsky's name would come to represent.

Five years later, in 1896 he experienced a kind of artistic epiphany upon viewing Monet's "Haystacks" in which Monet seemed to use color as an entity independent of the subject itself. Of this Kandinsky said: "That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I dimly felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendour." Again, as with the folk art in his native Russia, Kandinsky was confronted with the notion that the subject matter of a painting could be a secondary recognition to that of color. The experience was a kind of revelation, one of many that would launch him into realms of artistic discovery no other artist before him had explored.

Also in 1896, the third watershed moment for Kandinsky came when he attended a performance of Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin at the Bolshoi theater in Moscow. It was during this performance that Kandinsky experienced the transposition of senses, beginning to hear color and see sound, a singular experience enveloping him and replacing his ability to discern the individual elements in favor of the whole. Like Debussy, Kandinsky may have experienced a literal synethesia: cross-sensory perception. For Kandinsky, Wagner's music stirred in him memories of a beloved time spent in his youth in Moscow. "The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me. I did not dare use the expression that Wagner had painted 'my hour' musically."

What Kandinsky likely did not realize at that time was that he and the composer of Lohengrin were very much kindred spirits where art was concerned. As Kandinsky would soon describe in his own terms, Wagner had already described through his music in epic proportions; the perfection of expression through a synthesis of poetic, musical, dramatic, and visual art forms. For Wagner, this was reflected in his majestic and richly symbolic Der Ring des Nibelugen (The Ring of the Nibelung, commonly called "The Ring Cycle).

Art and music was not the only place Kandinsky found inspiration. He was also influenced by the work of esoteric philosopher Rudolf Steiner, and that of H. P. Blavatsky, the chief proponent of Theosophy, which held, among other things, that an understanding of nature stemmed from a geometric progression of points, beginning with a single point. This would prove to be another idea Kandinsky would realize and use, especially later in his career. For Kandinsky, Theosophy provided the basis for his belief in the link between art and spirituality, but it would only be through his painting that he would be able to actually demonstrate these ideas.

1896 also saw Kandinsky enrolled in art school in Munich. By this time, he was already relatively well-established in law and economics, which some music historians believe provided him with both a financial and psychological advantage over some of his younger, more reckless school mates. However, in spite of his new artistic interests and experiences, Kandinsky did not thrive in art school, and he found his own ideas on the subject of art more compelling than most of what he was expected to learn. Still, a diligent student, he improved his methods while indulging in his own experimentation. He learned from some of his more enlightened teachers how to discern the essence of a subject, find the inner language necessary to express it, and then execute the painting as a kind of sacred act. It was, for Kandinsky, an alchemical process, mystical and fascinating. And although his early work was conventional by most standards, it hinted at Kandinsky's emerging genius.

Kandinsky was as interested in art theory as in producing great works himself. He was fascinated by the process of creating art, not as a feat of manufacturing, but as an act of mining one's inner world for inspiration. In Munich, 1911, Kandinsky, along with several other influential Expressionist painters (including Paul Klee and Franz Marc), founded Der Blaue Reiter, an art almanac which, among other things, gave Kandinsky a platform from which to express his views. The almanac's name was taken from one of Kandinsky's own works ("The Blue Rider"). Blue, to Kandinsky, was a very important color as it represented the spiritual within art (and happens to be why this blog is named as it is).

Der Blaue Reiter largely a Kandinsky-driven project, espoused the ideals he would soon become associated with: the connection between painting and music, the symbolism of color, the value of geometry, and, perhaps most importantly, the suffusion of the spiritual in the artistic. But the publication wouldn't last long; the outbreak of WWI caused the members of Der Blaue Reiter to retire to safer havens than Munich provided. Some less fortunate, like Franz Marc, would be killed in combat. Kandinsky returned to Russia. But in spite of Der Bleue Reiter's brief lifespan, it was not Kandinsky's only outlet for ideas. He also published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a short but weighty treatise in which Kandinsky makes his case for a kind of revolution in art. It remains today, as much a compelling philosophical manifesto, as a book about art.

More than seeing Kandinsky's paintings, it's by reading his writings that it appears evident that he cannot be viewed as a typical artist, picking up bits and pieces of inspiration from here and there and then finding ways of representing those bits and pieces in a work of art. Instead, Kandinsky was both a kind of "mystic" and "spiritual engineer" when it came to art. He wanted to know how art "ticked," and was willing to deconstruct the process all the way down to the soul level of the artist to find out. What constituted inspiration for Kandinsky existed on the level of metaphysical ideals more than methods for rendering images. Kandinsky insisted on the need to delve beneath the realm of the physical subject when painting, and to instead portray the interplay between the outer and inner worlds. He was less interested in technique, and much more interested in the mysterious and esoteric process by which some inner element of an artist's soul manifests and concretizes as a real piece of art. His abstract work, for which he is ultimately best known, was not a result of his improvements as a technical painter, but rather as a kind of liberation of himself from the confines of proper form, and releasing his expression through color and shape. To capture a form in painting was mere mimicry to Kandinsky, and little more than a trained skill. On the other hand, to free up the essence of that form through imagination or spiritual reflection was what Kandinsky sought as the highest aim of art. For Kandinsky, that was a kind of adventure, albeit an often laborious one. And it resulted in some of the most innovative and startling use of color and shape ever seen. Kandinsky was, in a sense, a maestro of organized chaos on the canvass.

Kandinsky's views on art are often richly esoteric and sometimes a bit ill-defined, making a study of his work both incredibly immersive and occasionally frustrating. Critics of Kandinsky sometimes assert that, all things considered, it is Kandinsky's ideas about art that prove more important than the art he produced. Although one could spend years studying his work and theory, for the purposes of our brief tour of Kandinsky's approach to art, we can simply point to Kandinsky's own definition of three different kinds of paintings: Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions. These categories were chosen to reflect the inner origins of the painting first, the product second.

In Kandinsky's own words:

1) A direct impression of outward nature, expressed in purely artistic form. This I call an "Impression."

2) A largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, the nonmaterial nature. This I call an "Improvisation."

3) An expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, which comes to utterance only after long maturing. This I call a "Composition." In this reason, consciousness, purpose, play an overwhelming part. But of the calculation nothing appears, only the feeling."

While the first two kinds of painting are interesting, it is primarily the third concept that came to preoccupy Kandinsky's artistic efforts for the rest of his life. The idea of a painting as a "composition" contained layers of meaning for Kandinsky. For one, he had become acutely aware of the link between music and color. Hence, in one sense, to produce a "composition" was to create a visual representation of music, a visual symphony. It's easy to see this at work in some of Kandinky's Compositions, the bold colors and twisting shapes often interacting with sharp angles and geometric symmetry, an orchestration of amorphous forms and vivid hues.

[Composition VI]

It's not uncommon for a viewer of a Composition to feel immersed in more than a visual experience, and to sense hidden elements there - a bit like seeing the shapes of animals and faces in passing clouds. Kandinsky felt strongly that a Composition was the ultimate artistic and spiritual culmination of expression. He viewed the creation of a Composition as a process of transfiguration from subject to pure painting. And creating one was not an easy task.

Before he had even painted a Composition, Kandinsky knew it was what he was meant to do. "The very word composition called forth in me an inner vibration. I made it my aim to paint a "composition."

In all, Kandinsky would produce ten Compositions. The first seven he painted during an intensely creative period between 1909 and 1913. The first three were destroyed by Nazis during WWII (part of their campaign to eliminate so-called "degenerate art") although black and white photographs of them survive. The rest remain as quintessential abstract masterpieces, each with a kind of life of it's own in the mind of the viewer. To attempt to define the meanings behind any one of the compositions is to be surrounded by the myriad of classical, esoteric, and eclectic elements inhabiting Kandinsky's imagination. As such, these works carry a definite dream-like quality, as though looking through a window into the subconscious.

Kandinsky would often work to the point of exhaustion on his Compositions, frequently making dozens of pencil sketches and studies, testing different color combinations, or adjusting the dimensions and positions of forms he chose to incorporate, before ever painting the final version. Like the alchemist he was, forever measuring, heating, cooling, and combining his shapes and colors, Kandinsky pushed himself to discover the inner essence of every part of his painting, and render it, sometimes boldly, sometimes in a kind of diffuse haze.

[Composition X]

What often appears at first glance to be a rather aimless mess of color and reckless geometry is, in fact, the result of much careful planning and is executed with absolute intention.

Once, while in the throes of typhoid fever, Kandinsky said he was overcome with a vision of a completed painting; a painting which would become Composition II. Like so many remarkably talented individuals, the key for Kandinsky was simply getting onto the canvass what was already, somewhere, in his unconscious.

In viewing the Compositions in sequence, it's possible to follow the evolution of Kandinsky's vision of his own evolving process. While the first seven works show wild blendings of color, and shapes hovering over or melting into one another, some appearing to emerge from the 2D surface of he canvass and others almost shyly hiding, Compositions VIII, IX, and X show something new. While VII was done in 1913, it would be ten years before Kandinsky would finish VIII. By that time, Kandinsky had found yet another tool he could use in the pursuit of his artistic ideal: geometry. Hence the final three Compositions utilize circles, triangles, strong, clean lines, and are almost whimsical in comparison to previous Compositions. This new use of form was, for Kandinsky, another step toward his "great synthesis," but perhaps a step taken in new shoes. In truth, Kandinsky had always had a certain fascination with geometry, albeit more as an esoteric component than a mathematical element (as with his interest in Theosophy). Still, Kandinsky managed to demonstrate the fluidity of his theories by applying all the same principles to geometric renditions as he had with his more impressionistic work. Yes, there were checkerboards and circles, but like the previous work, these images would generate an atmosphere of mood and musicality. Kandinsky proved that whether painting images of an angel or a square, there was always, always, more than meets the casual eye.

Art historians and connoisseurs have spent much time and effort dissecting and analyzing these works. It's tempting to do, as these ten pieces seem like inexhaustible sources of information and insight into deeply intriguing ideas bridging art and spirit.

[Composition VIII]

Themes like the resurrection, the deluge, rebirth, and the apocalypse (used mainly in the earlier Compositions) beg for iconographic interpretations or at least psychological inquiry. But in the end, it's perhaps best to simply engage the Compositions as Kandinsky himself did - as gateways of color and form into another realm of the senses, where symphonies of meaning and feeling carry us away.

Part 3 to come...

Architects of the Senses, Part 1

2008-11-09T00:11:00.000-08:00

" I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." -- Mark Rothko

We usually think of art as being a kind of catch-all term encompassing a vast array of individual disciplines: painting, music, poetry, dance, graphic design, sculpture, etc. These are "art forms," and those who rise to the top of their art form are icons, and often household names. But while we associate Mozart with music, Monet with painting, and Walt Whitman with poetry, it could be argued that these great artists of history approached their craft more as a means to an end, rather than the end result. They saw their art not as a window, but as a mirror - reflecting upon itself, and often, on altogether different mediums.

Whatever their talent, great artists often seemed driven to express a juxtaposition or their work with that of another artist or art form. More than that, they drew from, and pointed to, a feeling, sensation, or emotion in the listener or viewer. It would seem that there is art in terms of a product, and there's art as a means of transcending the medium and transporting us to a level of feeling or sensing something unexpected. One definition of art certainly must include the notion of a destruction of one's awareness of the art form. Like scaffolding around a building under construction, the paint, musical notes, clay, or meter must eventually disappear from the awareness of the observer, and allow the creation to be appreciated on its own terms.

A talented ballet dancer isn't expressing "dance" when she moves. She's expressing a feeling; fear, longing, desperation, joy. These feelings are not being explained or defined, but simply expressed through every nuance of her movements. Jazz saxophonist John Coltrane created his "sheets of sound" solos with soaring arpeggios and astounding stacked layers of scales - not because he was thinking about "jazz music" or how to best play the sax, but because he was busy creating feelings and sensations for the listener. As he himself said, "I never even thought about whether or not they understood what I'm doing. The emotional reaction is all that matters. As long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it's understood." In these instances, the artists and their instrument, be it a saxophone or their body itself, become a singular representation of something altogether ineffable, if not spiritual.

It's been said that no great art springs from a void. All art is, in a sense, impressionist and derivative, which is as it should be. Art represents, reflects, refracts, and, if successful, engenders a feeling on the part of the observer, especially if the observer is willing to immerse him or herself in the mysterious experience of discovering a new way of sensing some aspect of the world. Art is, if nothing else, a way in which we human beings expand our senses. Normally, we hear sound, see color, feel textures, smell scents. But through art, we find new sensory apparatus on what has to be considered a higher plane of perception. A kind of artistic synesthesia is effected in which we can find texture in sound, color in word, or scent in shape. Or perhaps it's all simply a matter of deriving something of form or sound from feeling itself, and producing some representational pattern over the top of it, like seeing constellation figures amid the stars at night. But whatever the case, some sort of feeling or emotion seems to run like a thread through the creative process; from inspiration, to creation, to presentation, to perception, feelings drive each step of the experience. Artists, after all, have always said as much: "I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues." -- Duke Ellington

So I wanted to explore this idea a bit more, and highlight a few of the many artists whose art form is correlative in some way to another art form, and to the mysterious way art expands our sensory awareness and evokes feeling. It might seem obvious that art plays this role as a kind of partner with the senses, or that it is indeed a cousin to spirituality in some way. Yet we'll see that many of the artists in history who adopted this view were considered revolutionary, and often controversial.

In this Part 1, we'll look at the impact of one of history's most renowned composers who sought to transcend the usual methods of composition. We'll then see how a Russian painter and father of abstract art saw music as "the ultimate teacher" and sought to capture the essence of music in his paintings. Lastly, we'll consider how a poet used meter and tempo to harmonize with the aural and cultural landscape of jazz within which he lived and performed.

[Let me mention that I am not an art critic, historian, or biographer. While I love to read about and study artists and their works, this article is intended as nothing more than a - hopefully - interesting little tour through the minds and work of some rather remarkable artists.]

Sonic Landscapes - Claude Debussy

"How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling." --- Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy was born August 22nd, 1862 in France. The son of shopkeeper, Debussy's modest beginnings gave little indication that he would eventually come to define the music of his era, and redefine music for generations of composers to come. If you ask a musicologist to name the most influential composer who ever lived, you might well hear Debussy's named mentioned before Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven. For it was Debussy more than anyone else who ushered in the modern era of musical composition in the 20th century.

Although he hated the term, Debussy was nothing if not an Impressionist composer. Others call him a musical "Symbolist", using his compositions to stir the emotions of the listener in ways no other had done before. He accomplished this not only by innovative composition alone, but by experimenting, and extracting new sounds from the very musical instruments themselves. For example, Debussy used the piano in unusual ways: using the pedals to leave the strings undampened, creating long, haunting sustains and fluid melodies, and by alternating sparse tonality with rich flourishes of cascading scales. The adjectives used to describe Debussy's music are myriad; lush, romantic, glittering, sentimental, heartfelt, dreamy, and seductive. The adjectives used to describe Debussy himself are a little thornier; difficult, argumentative, opinionated, and decidedly brilliant.

Listening to Debussy's compositions is a little like savoring a glass of fine wine, or finding yourself in a well-kept flower garden, amid color and fragrance, surrounded by sensuousness. This is no accident, as Debussy himself derived musical inspiration from non-musical sources. He was an ardent fan of Baudelaire's poetry. He loved to be surrounded by beauty, flowers were abundant in his studio, and he is said to have been particularly affected by and attracted to pleasant smells and colors. He was also influenced by the Japanese artist Hokusai, who created the famous "Great Wave" paintings, one of which Debussy elected to use on the cover of his score for La Mer.

Many of these influences must have appealed to Debussy because of their aesthetic dichotomies. Baudelaire was renown for being particularly offensive at times, while exhibiting the capacity to express great beauty and sublime expression. The Japanese wave paintings exhibited ferocious power while also being undeniably beautiful. Like so many great artists, Debussy was himself a kind of duality. Though difficult in demeanor, and plagued by stormy relationships, Debussy's music is nothing if not gently melancholic, graceful, and often delicate.

Despite his popularity at the turn of the 20th century, Debussy was not always appreciated by the critics of his day. In retrospect, most musical historians agree that this was due simply to the fact that Debussy did not compose music in the traditional manner. His unique stylings, bitonality, and unusual modulations jostled conventional musical approaches and challenged the compositional techniques of his contemporaries and predecessors. Yet what, at that time, some critics called "bizarre," and "poorly realized" are today regarded as landmark works that represent the foundation of much modern music. And not only in terms of classical music; musicians like Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and the minimalist composer Steve Reich also claim Debussy as a major influence. Regardless of whether the critics loved or hated his work, Debussy expanded the horizons of music in ways never achieved before and often seemed driven to innovate by the very confines the critics attempted to build around him.

For his part, Debussy detested critics, often chastising their tendency to, "...kill in cold blood all the mystery or even the emotion of a piece." It's ironic, then, that so much music analysis has been aimed at his work and style, so-called "Debussyism". He would have hated it. In spite of some musicologist's assertions that Debussy incorporated aspects of mathematics into his compositions at times, Debussy clearly preferred to see music as an catalyst for an emotional experience, not a technical hobby or scientific pursuit. As one of Debussy's more articulate biographers, Simon Trezise said, "Debussy called for an imaginative involvement on the part of the listener, a willingness to be immersed in a complex but principally pleasurable aesthetic experience."

He hated playing in public, and though considered egotistical, detested being the center of attention. Yet his music, and often his personal life, was definitely a matter of public focus for most of his life. He was frequently depressed, and on more than one occasion is said to have considered suicide. Yet his music rarely hints at this inner turmoil. In listening to La Mer, Claire de Lune, his Etudes, or Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, the listener is compelled to enter a sonic landscape of color and texture few other musical composers have ever created. "One must seek the poetry in his work," said his friend and fellow French composer, Paul Dukas, echoing the sense that Debussy's music is not music alone.

Debussy stands in place in this article as the quintessential musical impressionist - as there's no other word for it. Debussy did not reflect individual elements of the world in which he lived, he reflected all of it. Not historically, necessarily. He was not a social commentator or political pundit. And in a sense, he was not merely a musician or composer. He was an artist in the complete and integral use of the term, using the tools of music to produce something wholly emotive and evocative. It's not surprising, then, to find that Debussy had, in his younger years, aspired to be a painter before music settled his destiny. While he gave up painting for music, in a sense he really simply switched a brush and palette for a baton and pen.

Debussy died of cancer in March, 1918. His funeral procession took a hurried path through the war torn and deserted streets of Paris as German planes bombed the city. With the intensity of World War I cresting, there would be no grand public funeral or requiem performed for one of the most influential artists the world has known; which is likely just as Debussy would have wanted it.

Part 2 to come....

The Grease Race

2008-11-05T09:50:00.000-08:00

Why can't they BOTH win??

Presidential Speechalist

2008-11-02T11:49:00.000-08:00

Well this explains a few things....

Free Fall

2008-11-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

Ever wanted to know what a Solid Rocket Booster has to go through after separating from the shuttle after launch? Wonder no more.

You will either find this the most boring thing you've ever seen, or you'll simply enjoy the ride.

HaPPy haLLowEEn

2008-10-31T15:55:00.000-07:00

A Portlander In New York

2008-10-21T23:23:00.000-07:00

As we drew near New York I was at first amused, and then somewhat staggered, by the cautious and grisly tales that went around. You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave 'til you were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel lobby with military precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was to awake the next morning without money and baggage, or necessary raiment, a lone forked radish in a bed; and if the worst befell, you would instantly and mysteriously disappear from the ranks of mankind.
---------Robert Lewis Stevenson

Last June I took my first trip to New York. Now if you're from the east coast, or you travel on business a lot, that probably doesn't seem very adventurous. But for me - a guy from the Pacific Northwest, who also happens to have considered New York one of my top ten places to visit before I die - well it was pretty damn cool. Here are a few reflections from those few days I spent in New York, including the good, the, bad and the ugly.

First let me mention that most of what I knew about New York before my visit was gleaned from watching old movies like "On The Town," "Taxi Driver," or pretty much anything Woody Allen ever directed, and by listening to many a Frank Sinatra song (thanks to my mother). I also happen to be a NY Yankees fan (one of my great, great uncles removed on my 9th cousin's best friend's hair-dresser's landlord's side was the Babe Ruth). And I am kind of an old school Beastie Boys fan. But really, that's about it. I don't have any other special claim to New York. Not from there. Not Italian. Not working in the fashion industry. Not an art critic. Not fond of bagels or whatever other thing one might use to link me to New York. I'm just saying, while I have always maintained this odd attraction to New York, and in some weird sense always felt I was, at heart, a New Yorker in absentia, I really don't know why. Or at least I didn't know until got there and discovered something I should have known all along.

The trip came about thanks to a seminar my company was holding in midtown, at The New York Palace Hotel. My boss graciously let me come along on the company check, which meant that not only was I going to New York for five days, I would be staying in style and luxury. Now it's certainly possible to live on the cheap in New York for a few days. But take it from me: don't. Go with money. Lots and lots of money. You can eat at McDonald's and Starbucks all day long if you want, but you can do that anywhere. In New York, you might wander into a dimly-lit entryway some evening, find yourself in an eight-table restaurant, be handed a menu, and end up having the Italian meal of a lifetime. Worth every penny, but it'll cost ya.

Newark--

We flew into Newark on a Thursday afternoon. Now if you're from Newark, please skip down a few sentences for me and just forget about reading this next part. It's not going to be very interesting for you because it's just a description of the area, which you already know about. So go grab a sandwich, and when you come back, skip down say, oh, ten or twelve lines and then keep reading. Ok? Ok.

(Are the Newark people gone? Ok.)

Newark was, how should I put it, one of the most god-awful, horrifically repugnant places I've ever seen. It was like Mordor with an airport. Stepping outside after disembarking from the long flight, we were almost literally overcome with one of the hottest, steamiest, foulest smells we had ever encountered. Our collective reaction was to stop in our tracks, scrunch up our faces, and look to each other in disbelieving disgust. Someone said, "So this is where the whales go to die." I contemplated running back into the terminal and hopping the first flight back home. But it was too late for that. It's like when you're in the dentist's chair with that piece of rubber clipped to your lips and the the drill is slowly being lowered into your mouth: it's just too damn late to do anything about it now; you just scrunch up your face and bear it. We weren't the only ones suffering. A few others from our flight (obviously Newark virgins like us) were having similar reactions - eyes watering, nose-plugging, tie-loosening, etc. One man took up cigar smoking on the spot to counteract the smell in the air. Another woman was using her purse as a breathing mask. It rapidly became clear to us that we needed to get our bags, get a taxi, get the hell out of Newark, and just pray New York didn't smell the same way. (Now to be fair, I'm sure Newark has its charms. But I'd sure like to know where they keep 'em.).

Taxi of Death---

Have you ever had a near-death experience? Would you like to have one? It's easy! Here's all you do: get into a taxi at Newark International Airport at about rush hour and ask the driver to take you to midtown Manhattan. Our cab driver was a friendly and very small man from somewhere very far away. I noticed that only one of his eyes actually looked straight ahead, which isn't something you want to notice in a cab driver (or surgeon, dental hygienist, hunting partner, etc.) He didn't say much. He did, however, enjoy listening to talk radio and driving like a hellion. He didn't "drive" so much as just use the gas pedal to propel the car toward some point in the distance without regard for things like traffic signs, lanes, other cars, or pedestrians. I think he viewed the gas pedal as some people view spiders on the ground - 'There it is! Quick! Step on it!! Mash it into the floor!!' Either that or he was a big believer in Einstein's theory of Special Relativity and is using speed to effectively warp the space/time around his cab, thereby extending his life by many years.

Whatever the case, getting between this cab and its destination was like getting between Paris Hilton and the paparazzi; just a bad idea. The problem, of course, is that getting from Newark to Manhattan during rush hour meant half the world's population was between our cab and its destination. As we were launched from the airport terminal, the secondary rocket boosters fired, and I was pushed back into my seat from the sheer G forces. The scenery began to blur as we approached escape velocity. I assumed that within minutes there would be pain, carnage, dental records being consulted, police involvement, and a story featuring our cab on the evening news. But shortly after leaving the airport, we were met with complete gridlock - traffic as far as the eye could see, leading into the Lincoln Tunnel. It looked like it would be a long wait. But it turned out to be no problem for our driver, who promptly spun the wheel to the left, drove over the concrete median, and proceeded to floor it past all the silly law-abiding drivers now being left in our wake.

I cannot really convey to you just how terrifying this ride was. My friend Ron, sitting up front with the driver, was softly muttering a few things under his breath like, "Oh god." And, "Please god." And, "Holy shit," his legs pressed hard against the floorboard, fingers digging into his knees. He was leaning so far back in his seat he might as well have been sitting in the back. He began to make up some other swear words on the spot, like, "Motherhammer-forkandsaladtongs-dammit," or something like that. He did mention to our driver that we really weren't in any hurry, to which our driver nodded and smiled broadly, and continued on, undaunted. We did learn a few things about him during the trip. For example, we discovered that his favorite hobby was to spot a 7 inch space between two stopped vehicles, speed toward that space at about 90 mph, then stand on the brake pedal until we lurched and twisted to a stop, somehow managing to fit INSIDE that 7 inch space. And lanes? What are lanes? We laugh at lanes! Lanes are for the weak-minded! I never knew you could fit so many cars into two little lanes of traffic. Taxis are especially capable, through some miracle of physics, to wedge themselves into impossibly tight spots. Packed sardines have more elbow room. At one point I looked out my window and realized I was physically closer to the guy in the cab next to me than I was to anyone else in my own cab.

Anytime you travel somewhere and the two words that sum up your first hours there are "stench" and "terror," you are going to be having some second thoughts about the whole trip. But somehow (and I really don't know how it happened) we did make it to midtown. Manhattan! Finally! Most of the terror we had felt on the ride into town was replaced now with a kind of quiet amazement. Outside the cab it was like we had entered an ant farm but on an immense scale. Cabs, buses, cops, and pedestrians in every size, shape, style, race, and mood moving at roughly three times the speed people in the rest of the world move. Cue the crazy circus music. None of us had been to New York before, so we started staring out the windows of the cab, craning our necks up at impossibly tall buildings, and simply gawked, awestruck by the raw human energy of the place.

In midtown at rush hour, nobody pays attention to the "don't walk" signals. Cars don't worry much whether a traffic light is green red, blue, or paisley, and drivers just love honking their horns. Now where I'm from, Portland, Oregon, you could make the evening news by running a red light. Cops would give you a stern warning if they caught you jaywalking. And if you honk, even in downtown, everybody looks to see what your problem is. In New York, well it's just not like that. It's a surging, hurrying, moving, noisy, landscape where humanity is a blur in constant motion against a backdrop of unmoving, imposing, monolithic skyscrapers, ultra modern storefronts, and old brick-faced buildings that seem to lean over the streets like 2am drunks. Yet to the careful observer, a strange sense of order could be detected beneath the more obvious chaos.

Finally, we made it to the hotel. Exiting the cab, we kissed the ground, thanked Jesus, bowed to Mecca, said nine Hail Mary's, and sacrificed a goat. Well, not really (sacrificial goats are one thing Manhattan is shamefully short on). But speaking for myself, I was grateful, and a little surprised, to still be alive.

The Palace---

Our hotel, The New York Palace, is aptly named. It's one of the finest hotels in midtown, located directly across the street from St Patrick's Cathedral, a few blocks away from Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, and within walking distance of practically everything else. I can't say enough about the hotel accommodations and staff. It is, of course, a 5-star hotel, so one expects a certain degree of luxury and opulence. And The New York Palace delivers. Fifty-five stories of lavish comfort, courteous, patient staff, and unimaginable attention to detail. When I die, I hope Heaven is exactly like The New York Palace.

It should be noted that the Palace was formerly "The Helmsley Palace Hotel." Yes, billionaire Leona "Queen of the Mean" Helmsley's hotel. You remember her, the one who said, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." Of course she wasn't kidding, and ended up spending 19 months in jail for federal tax evasion in 1989. Apparently big people who don't pay taxes go to jail sometimes. She had a terrible reputation for abusing her staff and generally making Cruella Da Ville look like Mother Theresa. Whatever the hotel and its staff suffered under Leona's ownership, it is today, as their website says, "an icon of Manhattan splendor."

An Impromptu Walking Tour---

After getting situated in my room, which looked directly over to the Waldorf Astoria, I met up with friends for dinner. We ended up an Italian restaurant somewhere off Lexington. I have to say that while I was famished and appreciated a hot plate of lasagna, my first meal in New York wasn't memorable. But the walk we took later that night was. Some of our friends attending the conference had been to New York several times, so they gave us a little late night walking tour. It was a magical night for me. New York! I couldn't get Sinatra out of my head. It was noisy, unbearably humid, chaotic, dirty in places, and I loved every square inch of the place.

If you haven't been there, the one overriding truth about New York is this: walking is the preferred method of transportation. Everyone walks, everywhere, all the time. Subways are also a staple of getting around. And then there are the taxis, which, as I think I made clear earlier, would be further down the list of options unless you have a death wish. But walking in New York is not without its risks. The main rule is simple: when walking, don't stop. People in New York don't stroll, meander, or otherwise casually jaunt. They walk like it's a business. If you're marching up Madison Avenue with ten thousand New Yorkers behind you, and you stop, you cause a traffic jam, and if you get your latte jostled out of your hands by those unwilling to slow down on your behalf, well too bad, brother, there's another Starbucks within 50 feet. If you want to stop walking, you do the same thing you would do if driving, you get the hell out of the way and then stop. So it was pretty easy to tell the tourist from the New Yorker. The former was staring up, walking slowly, zig-zagging, pointing, while the latter was generally looking straight ahead, and could side-step a gawky tourist without breaking stride.

I knew beforehand that New York was not what it had been 20 years earlier, which was a much dirtier, more dangerous place. While even midtown isn't exactly danger-free, I was unprepared for the degree of gentrification NYC seemed to have undergone. Crime is down, urban beautification projects up. Some credit Rudy Guiliani, others simply feel it was the result of the city's unified perspective after 9/11. While some New Yorkers apparently feel the city has lost a bit of it's "edge," most seem content with the changes NYC has undergone over the past decade or so. And it shows. Overall, New York (albeit I'm taking about Manhattan here), was one of the cleanest and friendliest places I've been.

To walk off our dinner, we first headed over to Grand Central Station. Technically, it's Grand Central Terminal, the hub of the subway system (officially, Grand Central Station refers to the nearby post office, not the subway station). Stepping into the cavernous main concourse is like stepping into an aircraft hangar. It's a truly gorgeous building. Dead center is the famous four-faced clock, each face made of opal (the clock's estimated worth is somewhere between $10 and $20 million and would look fantastic in my office). We wandered across the concourse floor, and I found myself playing the awe-struck tourist, staring up, slack-jawed, at the celestial ceiling above, trying not to collide with the natives, who, I told myself, were used to this kind of behavior. Talk about a hub of activity, it's the largest train station in the world and welcomes a staggering 500,000 visitors a day. I could have stayed there for hours (is there a better people-watching venue on the planet??), but there was more to see, and time was ticking.

We headed outside and, a few minutes later, managed to locate the Empire State Building, conspicuously swathed in the bright glow of a hundred upwardly shining lights. Unaccustomed to the proper procedure for viewing such buildings, we realized that getting too close meant not being able to see much of the building other than the entrances. It was best seen, at least from ground level, from about three blocks away. Disappointingly, there were no giant apes swatting at biplanes on the building that night. But a friend of mine was taking photos of the Empire State Building while failing to notice that while she was caught up in the moment of viewing one of the most iconic buildings in the world, a transient gentleman was situated to her right, removing his pants for some (thankfully) unknown reason and mumbling something about donuts and Vivaldi, I think. (Maybe a former Bear Stearns exec.)

In a sense, that event characterized the general impression I would come away with from New York. It became clear that we were, in fact, tourists. We were staring up at things, pointing, asking, "what is that?" and scanning everything for some identifying piece of history while life, all the while, was unfolding around us in the quirky, odd, and sometimes disturbing ways life does. But tourist or not, I was beginning to feel at home.

Crossroads of the World---

The same night, we headed up to Times Square, crossroads of the world. While nowhere on the scale of NYC, Portland isn't a tiny town. It's a thriving metropolitan city, and one I'm used to. I'm relatively at ease with it's bustling downtown area, clubs, restaurants, shops, and busy waterfront. I've also spent time in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Reno, Las Vegas, Seattle, St. Louis, etc. But nothing really compares to Times Square at night in terms of sheer, audacious activity. Digital billboards adorn almost every upright surface. The buildings seem like 60 story advertisements. The animated LED signs alone are enough to send one into a light-induced seizure. Yet the dominant feature of Times Square are not the bright lights but the crowds. I heard, before arriving in New York, that New Yorkers avoid Times Square like the plague, overrun as it is by tourists. This made me want to avoid the place too, and yet I had to come to terms with the fact that, in the end, it was place where I, a tourist, belonged. Here, to fit in, you take out your camera and start photographing anything that blinks or flickers. Tourists from every corner of the globe wandered around in a grinning daze, snapping flash photos upward at the towering Sony Jumbotron, while street merchants ran like wild rats, seeking a dollar here, twenty bucks there, for their wares. Among these, of course, are paintings, photos, watches, handbags, t-shirts, and more, every bit of it emblazoned with an "I love NY" logo. Vigilant of the fact that Times Square was also a haven of pick-pockets, I carried my wallet in hand. The crowds, even late at night, were stifling; not a place for the claustrophobic, even though the place is vast. I had a flashback to being in 4th grade during a field trip to the zoo, wanting to take the hand of my "walking buddy" for fear we'd lose each other in the rush and crush of humanity around us.

To see what's happening in Times Square right now, click here.

Finally, we managed to get away from the cacophony of Times Square, which isn't as easy as it sounds. You look for a side-street, and start plowing your way through the crowds and taxis until you can hear yourself think, and your heartbeat settles down, the lights and noise fading into the night. I loved Times Square, but one visit was enough!

After hiking what felt like twenty miles, I was ready for bed and slept like a log, but dreamed of honking taxis, bright lights, and tall buildings.

Henry and Salvador---

The next day, we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was, for me, like a visit to Mecca. I love art and history. And while I'm no connoisseur I do know my Degas from my Dali and my Matisse from my Monet. As an aside, let me mention that we did take a taxi to the Met. This ride was less traumatic than the first, although one tip for the uninitiated: when preparing to exit the cab, have your money ready. Our cabbie let us out a block away from the museum, parked in the middle of the street, and impatiently demanded that we pay and leave as quickly as possible. I think his exact words were:"Pay! Get out! Get out! Pay and get out! Get out!!" All the while, a cop was motioning frantically for him to move on while the honking behind us began. We tossed some money into the front seat, and were expelled onto the street to dodge oncoming traffic and get to the sidewalk as soon as possible.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art borders Central Park, and in searching for the proper entrance (there was construction going on, causing pedestrians to take long walks around orange cones and yellow tape), we ended up taking a brief detour through part of the park. It was humid, overcast, and I was sweating like a pig. But I was not unaware of the fact that I was, after all, strolling through Central Park, a dream of mine - such as it was - since I was a kid. Over 200 movies contain scenes shot in Central Park, making it the most filmed park in the world, and like so many other things in New York, its historical status as a worldwide icon can't help but impress you on your first visit there. Once we had walked all the way around the museum, we found our way up the steps toward the entrance. Here, we found a dozen or more street performers, delighting handfuls of casually-dressed tourists who slurped their shaved ice and applauded appreciatively.

Entering the museum, we were quickly searched by security. For what, I don't know, though I suppose when you're in a building with several billion dollar's worth of art, they might want to make sure you weren't packing a couple cans of spray paint. Once we paid our admission, we were handed a little button with an "M" on it, which we were told to wear on some visible part of our clothing while there, and a little map. The map, as it turned out, was basically useless. Not because it was inaccurate, but because we ignored it and just started walking. Why do you need a map when you're always standing within ten feet of a masterpiece to take your breath away?

If you've been to this immense museum you know that it's simply an overwhelming experience. Conscious of the fact that we couldn't possibly see everything in the course of a single visit, we decided to simply walk until something caught our attention, then stop and simply take it in. That worked well, except that we were stopping to take things in once every few steps or so. Paintings, sculptures, religious relics, clothing, musical instruments, armor, and a myriad of other objects d'art were found at every turn. The Egyptian exhibit alone could take hours to thoroughly appreciate, complete with a full scale assemblage of an actual pharaoh's tomb you can walk through. I'd tell you more about the mummies there, but they wanted it kept under wraps -- ba-dum-tishh!

We had been there about two hours and had only seen about 15% of the place. We had to pick up the pace. Although I'm sure I managed to blithely walk by some of the world's most important works of art, I can tell you that I was personally struck by two rather unlikely pieces. The first was found in the amazing armor exhibit, where we managed to locate the field armor of King Henry the VIII. Henry, as you may recall, was a big guy with many failed marriages. While many of the other suits of armor looked like they were made for Andy Warhol or Andy Dick, this one looked like it had belonged to an NFL linebacker. I tend to be one of those people easily impressed with making contact with the historical implications of specific objects. I get carried away in antique stores, and mesmerized by the sensation of standing in the presence of some piece of history that, well, created history itself. So something like standing before Henry VIII's armor was stunning for me. My second artistic head smack came when I viewed Salvador Dali's Christus Hypercubus. Apparently, Ayn Rand used to visit the museum just to gaze upon this piece, and I can understand why. It's striking, undefineably powerful, majestic, and huge. Depicting Christ crucified on an unfolded four-dimensional cube, it's a provocative and masterful work. The curators placed this work at the end of a hallway, which is really the ideal way to view it. As you approach the piece, it almost seems to grow in height, and give you the perception-bending sensation of looking up at the crucifixion scene which, I can tell you, is a little eerie.

It's odd that of all the astounding pieces of art in the museum, it was these two that stood out so clearly in my mind. But that, in a sense, is to be expected. Even for someone fascinated by history and art like me, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an overwhelming experience, from which you're lucky to come away with any distinct impression outside of pure awe.

A Step Back in Time, and a Very Expensive Martini---

Visiting the museum had been checked off the list of "things to do while in New York." But there was more to come. One evening, after our seminar had ended for the day, we wandered over to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. This was, for me, a kind of journey into the past. Built in 1931, the Waldorf is the epitome the class and luxury of a bygone era. The Waldorf was the occasional home to people like Marilyn Monroe, Bugsy Seigel, Cole Porter, and Nikola Tesla. It's hosted numerous political meetings, celebrity parties, and charitable events. It's a place that has somehow retained that slightly musty yet perfumed aura of the past; ghosts of the golden age of entertainment abound. You half expect to see Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio rounding a corner, paparazzi in pursuit, all in black and white.

We took a seat in Sir Harry's Bar, located off the main lobby of the hotel, and enjoyed the sensation of melting into our chairs, surrounded by the dark, rich furnishings and casually elegant ambiance. If it hadn't been for the fact that my favorite drink ran about $22 each, we might have stayed a little longer, but hey - the peanuts were free! (thanks for the drinks, boss!).

A Moment of Peace (with a couple of squeaks)---

For me, one of the most memorable moments was when we finally walked across the street from the hotel and stepped into St. Patrick's Cathedral. It's said that the great cathedrals of the world were designed to overwhelm the ego of any who enter, and to replace one's sense of self with a feeling of overpowering reverence. That was certainly my experience. Completed in 1878, it seats over 2,000 people and is constructed of white marble. It's the largest gothic-style cathedral in the United States. It is a place that makes one want to simply stand and drink-in the tranquility and bathe in the stillness. While the frenzy and rush of Manhattan is just outside the door, inside the cathedral you're standing in a massive cocoon of serenity. Having been on my feet all day, I decided to take a seat in one of the ancient wooden pews. Of course it had to be the squeakiest one in the entire cathedral, so by the time I planted my butt, it sounded like I had murdered a family of church mice. A man a few rows back, who had been deep in prayer before I showed up, looked at me blankly. I smiled sheepishly at him, stood up slowly, and walked on. Simply walking around the cathedral is like being in a museum. Towering saints, bas-relief sculptures, a massive Pieta, and ornate confessionals encircle the sanctuary. Unfortunately, we had managed to arrive near closing time and were eventually sent back out into the warm Manhattan evening. But our short visit to St. Patrick's provided some respite from the mania of city life outside.

My New Hometown---

There's more to my experiences in New York than I can describe here. But all too soon, it was time to leave. Granted, I had only seen a handful of landmarks, and never really traveled more than a few miles from the hotel in midtown. But spending that short amount of time, with limited exposure to the rest of the city, I still came away feeling enthralled. Leaving New York would be hard to do. I had arrived there prepared to feel alienated by its immensity, disenfranchised by what I was told by some was a very "dehumanizing" place, and overpowered by the sheer force of the city. But in all honesty, I've never felt as welcomed by a place in my life. It was alive like no other place I've been. Like some old man, it carries the scars of a life lived hard. It's seen the best and worst humanity has to offer as generations have struggled to thrive and survive as America's very history unfolded. But in another way, its spirit is eternally youthful, in a state of constant flux and movement, always renewing itself optimistically before your eyes. Like a young prize fighter that just doesn't know the word "quit," it's brash, honest, and uncompromising. It's the epitome of sensory overload, from the ceaseless honking of the taxis, to the howl of the subway beneath a million marching feet, to the enticing scents of ten thousand mouth-watering Italian meals beckoning from every corner (eat at Giambelli on East 50th, you won't regret it!). Walk a mile in New York and you'll be shoulder to shoulder with people from every nook and cranny of the planet, hearing a dozen different accents at once, and seeing every human expression on any number of passing faces.

All of this ought to make someone like me feel alien and out of his element. Instead, I realized what all those movies and songs had been trying to tell me since I was a kid, that New York belongs to everyone. It's not a gated community, but the center of our global village. New York has learned that to thrive, it has to keep doing what it's always done: welcome humanity in, and embody the spirit of possibility and hope America was designed to represent. It might sound a little corny in this cynical age, but whether an American or a world citizen from anyplace on the globe, New York is your home town. Thomas Wolfe said it best: "One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years." For me, it was an experience I won't forget, and one I plan to repeat as soon as I can. I was there for five days, but now I know I'm a New Yorker for life.

A Note About the Book Reviews on This Blog

2008-10-11T14:39:00.000-07:00

I've worked in personal development for around 20 years, in part as a life coach. Over the years I've published around 40 book reviews for my company's email publication, mostly on books related to personal development and meditation. I've posted several of them here, mainly to serve as examples of my reviews (and for those simply interested in these books). They're reprinted here by permission of the copyright holder.

If you happen to be a publisher, author, or agent in search of book or product review services, feel free to email me with a description of what you're looking for: bluestatic1@gmail.com

Book Review - The Alchemist

2008-10-10T23:20:00.000-07:00

The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho

1998 Harper Collins
(Originally published 1988 as 'O Alquimista' in Brazil
by Editora Rocco Ltd.)

"To realize one's destiny is a person's only obligation." --- from The Alchemist

If it's possible for a book to realize its own destiny The Alchemist has done so. Originally published in 1988, the book sold only 900 copies and seemed destined to dissolve into obscurity. But author Paulo Coelho didn't give up. He believed his fable about a shepherd boy in search of treasure and knowledge carried a deeper meaning for those on a spiritual path. He believed his book had a destiny that would eventually influence millions worldwide. He focused on that belief, and that's what manifested.

In spite of its weak initial sales, the book generated a small but enthusiastic readership. In 1993, HarperCollins published 50,000 copies of the book, which was the largest initial print ever run of a Brazilian book in the United States. It was then published in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, and eventually in 60 languages worldwide, finding slots in numerous international bestseller lists. In 2002, the Portuguese literary review, "Jornal de Letras", the great authority on literature and the Portuguese literary market, declared that The Alchemist had sold more copies than any other book written in Portuguese in the entire history of the language. Now, with almost 30 million copies of the book sold worldwide, Paulo Coelho has realized something of his own destiny, and through the message of The Alchemist, has helped millions of others do the same.

Artists, musicians, actors, politicians, business leaders, doctors, scientists have all found something valuable in the pages of The Alchemist. Anthony Robbins says of The Alchemist, "I recommend it to anyone who is passionately committed to claiming the life of their dreams - today." Madonna called the book, "a beautiful book about magic, dreams and the treasures we seek elsewhere and then find at our doorstep." Author Gerald Jampolsky, M.D., said, "It is a rare gem of a book, and will most certainly touch the very core of every heart earnestly seeking its own destiny"

What is it about this little fable that has touched so many hearts and minds over the past 16 years?

The central theme of the book is the discovery of one's "Personal Legend," the set of experiences or realizations one is drawn to throughout life via the twisting, turning series of circumstances we all encounter. In Coelho's vision, life is indeed a journey, and in The Alchemist, Santiago, the protagonist of the story, embarks on a physical, intellectual, and spiritual journey; a quest to fulfill his own Personal Legend.

As Santiago (referred to in the book almost always as "the boy") comes to believe that his destiny is to locate a vast treasure hidden near the Great Pyramids in Egypt, he leaves behind the simplicity of his shepherding life, and sets out across the desert to find his treasure.

Along the way the boy meets a variety of characters; some are sympathetic to his venture to find his Personal Legend and his struggles to comprehend the mysteries of love, self-worth, and destiny. Others are less accommodating, and the boy is faced with learning several hard lessons about human nature, both individually and collectively. Refusing to allow himself to become hardened and cynical in spite of the challenges, the boy persists with his quest, constantly working to remain open to what the universe teaches him with each new experience along the way.

On the surface, The Alchemist reads like a fairy tale or children's bedtime story. A few hasty readers have even criticized the book for being "too simplistic" or "not sophisticated enough." While some people like to see profundity in the truly mundane, that is not the case with The Alchemist. Though simple in style, Coelho develops layers of the story that unfold their symbolic and allegorical meanings page by page. As with many of the most effective spiritual authors, Coelho is skilled at conveying basic truths within the context of human experience in a graceful, memorable way.

Above all, Coelho is an excellent storyteller. While the characters could not be called complex or vivid with respect to Coelho's portrayal of them, the real characters of the story are not people at all, but rather elements of the quest, not just Santiago's quest, but the common quest of those seeking out their own personal destinies and meanings in life. Faith, truth, self-worth, love, persistence, and the power of listening to our hearts and to the universe itself - these are the real characters of the story.

The Alchemist is an adventure of the heart, a parable of spiritual maturing and change, and Coelho is a master of blending an exotic sense of magic with an earthy, gritty depiction of life's many challenges. The result is a mystical and poetic amalgam of human spirit, passion, and existential searching. Coelho is indeed a talented alchemist.

Much of the story takes place in the desert, a place archetypical of mystery and danger. Yet it is the relative emptiness of the desert, and other such places, that seems to force us to reflect on the landscape's only seemingly significant feature: ourselves. Coelho allows the reader to be in constant contact with this self-reflecting process of Santiago and most readers will find themselves empathizing with the boy's bouts of uncertainty, questions of self-worth, and fears. Though few of us will ever traverse the desert in search of treasure, we all have experienced something of Santiago's journey none-the-less.

In spite of the daunting challenges Santiago faces - both from his external environment and from within his own heart - the book is compellingly hopeful, reminding us that the power to fulfill our dreams does not reside in some far-off land or at the end of a rainbow, but rather within us. The destination is the journey itself. Alchemy is more than a science of turning base metals into gold. It is the transformative process Santiago experiences during his remarkable journey; one we all are destined to experience if we will listen to our heart.