Tuesday, July 28, 2009

What I Learned at Stanford

Riding up an elevator in the Washington D.C. Metro with my friend David, I hand him my IPod cued to a live 1969 recording of the Stanford University basketball band. I’m playing saxophone on the song, David is playing trumpet. Now we’re both pushing 60, David is in treatment at NIH in Bethesda, dying of cancer, I’m walking around blithely unaware of what I’m dying of, but I know I do want him to hear “Midnight Hour” one more time.

About 10 seconds into the recording, right on cue, he starts laughing, and I know he’s gotten to the point where, after four big introductory chords and a flourish of trumpets, there’s been an explosion in the drum section, as if the drummers had simultaneously experienced rapture but with great willpower and a communal spasm of energy had managed to fend off transport to the afterlife, and held the beat to finish the song.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but this same thing happens often in rock ‘n’ roll. The first time may have been in the 50s in “Jailhouse Rock,” when the inmate band turns down a chance to make a break out of the joint because as one of them puts it, “I wanna stick around I wanna get my kicks.”

The whole notion of “getting my kicks” was foreign to me when I joined the Stanford Band. In the winter of 1969 I was more or less fresh off the plane from Kansas, plopped down in chaotic, war-protesting, drugged-out, miniskirted-topless-and-worse California and playing rock songs with this zoo band. I was playing arrangements of big hits I hadn’t ever heard, not because the radio wasn’t playing them in Kansas, but because I wasn’t listening. I spent the fall of 1968 in a marching band that didn’t march but scattered, that never did disappearing diamonds in their halftime shows, instead performing theme shows on birth control and salutes to the parts of the body.

By the time basketball season came around, I was hooked. I know the moment it happened. It was about a month into the previous fall and we were on the practice field rehearsing an arrangement by a tuba player named Phil Imming. Imming was cool, what the Band called “godlike,” what Imming himself called “fat,” as in, “You’re fat, man.” He was tuba stocky, surfer blond. He wore T-shirts, shorts and a half-smile.

In these field arrangements saxophones seldom got the melody line. The melody went to the brass, the trombones or trumpets, people who could make themselves heard outdoors or in a noisy gym. Saxophones ended up playing background chords, whole notes, rests, more whole notes.

But in rock ‘n’ roll arrangements we also got the backbeats. I just didn’t know yet what to do with what I got. So we’re on the field and we’re playing Imming’s arrangement of Midnight Hour and Imming is walking up and down the line of players in formation, listening to what’s coming out of the horns.

As he came down the line I thought, “This is weird. What does this guy care what the song sounds like in microcosm?” When he got to me he stopped and listened, and I thought, “This is weird. What does this guy care what my dits sound like?” Because that’s what I was playing, back beat dits, on the second and fourth beats—rest, dit, rest, dit—short, precise, military band dits. “Who’s gonna hear these dits, anyway?”

Well, nobody, of course. At this point, I probably hadn’t heard Wilson Pickett’s original version of the song, and I certainly hadn’t heard Chuck Berry’s dictum “It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it.” On the Wilson Pickett version, there are no dits on the backbeat. There are big, fat, solid BOPs, that nobody could ever possibly lose.

And that’s what Imming started singing to me as I played my dits—rest, BOP, rest, BOP, rest, BOP, rest, BOP—until my dits got longer, and heavier, and more solid—rest, dit, rest, dit, rest, dat, rest, dot, rest, bot, rest, bop, rest, BOP, rest, BOP—and Imming smiled and said, “You’re fat, man.”

I also studied history of the English language and the French Revolution and biology and German at Stanford. But the most important thing I learned was the importance of the backbeat, and those who play it.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Wilford Brimley vs. Humphrey Bogart

They’re at war within me waging a battle for my soul (or maybe who my soul would like to have lunch with). Both of them are intense. Both of them are intensely moral. Both of them have patently goofy names, but they are so intense you don’t even notice how silly the names are.

It’s when you ask these two to step out of the car and walk a straight line that their differences become evident. For Wilford Brimley it’s no problem. He knows what’s what and doesn’t hesitate to share it with others. He’s certain about everything; Bogart is certain about nothing. Bogart is sloppy, nihilistic, sarcastic, funny, self-indulgent, at times self-pitying. He will do right, but only after showing every indication of doing wrong.

My inner Brimley has had the upper hand for years. To maintain a comfortable living and my inner equilibrium I have given Brimley carte blanche to direct the way my mind works. His sense of order directs the way I organize my workday. His moral earnestness reproves my sense of fun in a way that keeps me second-guessing my every outburst of wackiness.

He even appears in my dreams. I am in a van riding to an assignment, a meeting I am covering somewhere on an upper floor of an office building. Brimley is in the van, driving me to the meeting. We go through towering mountains past deep canyon-like pits scoured out of the landscape. (At one point, as we drive through one of the pits, Brimley spots a van like our own teetering on the edge of a cliff above us. He stops our van, climbs out, and, Titan-like, reaches up, lifts the van as if it were a toy, and puts it down on the top of the cliff with all four wheels safely on solid ground.)

When I get to the office building I can’t remember where my meeting is. I climb up stairs from floor to floor until I come to a landing filled with people waiting in line outside a meeting room door, and I join the line, knowing I’m in the right spot—everyone in the line, women and men, is a Wilford Brimley.

Why is this a nightmare? What’s my problem with Brimley? How has he ever steered me wrong? What’s wrong with unflinching moral certainty?

I think the problem is that moral certainty strikes me as bogus, inauthentic, and unearned without the flinches of doubt. When Bogart does the right thing and resumes resistance to the forces of evil at the end of Casablanca, I’ve watched him struggle to seize that moral ground, and I feel like he’s earned it.

When I watch Brimley lay his moral pronouncements on some struggling whippersnapper, it’s like I’m supposed to believe he knows what he’s talking about just because he’s got a deep voice and an authentic Dr. Phil drawl. He acts like he’s got a license to tell other people what to do just on the basis of his blank stare, 19th-century moustache, and folksy accent. I feel like I’ve spent my life following this guy’s advice; now I want to review his resume before I make one more moral choice based on his sense of certainty and order.

In the June issue of the Atlantic there was a fascinating article by Joshua Wolf Shenk about the Grant Study, a lifelong documentation of the lives of a cohort of Harvard graduates from the 1940s to the present day, including examples of the lives of “happy” and “unhappy” lives, with a notion of determining what really constitutes happiness, or a life well lived.

The story included anonymous profiles of some the study’s participants, the most interesting of which was the account of what Shenk calls “the study’s antihero, its jester, its subversive philosopher.” This guy skipped World War II as a conscientious objector and, in filling out a questionnaire for the study right after the war, wrote, “I’ve answered a great many questions. Now I’d like to ask you people a couple of questions. By what standards of reason are you calling people ‘adjusted’ these days? ‘Happy’? ‘Contented’? ‘Hopeful’? If people have adjusted to a society that seems hell-bent on destroying itself in the next couple of decades, just what does that prove about people?”

This guy worked in public relations, married young, had three kids, started drinking, divorced, remarried, came out of the closet. Eventually he became involved in the movement for gay rights. In an interview for the study in the 1970s, he revealed that he loved The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’ famous documentary of the German occupation of France. He said the sort of people the Grant Study described as well-adjusted, happy, and successful ended up collaborating with the Nazis, “whereas the kooks and the homosexuals were all in the resistance.”

The study’s leader, Dr. George Vaillant, doesn’t quite know what to make of this guy, describing him as paradoxically depressed, yet full of joy and vitality. “He could have been a resistance leader,” Vaillant reported. “He really did seem free about himself.”

I’m not prepared to draw judgments about this character, any more than I can reach conclusions about the real Wilford Brimley or Humphrey Bogart, separate from their personas in popular culture. People who lead messy lives often hurt the people around them. People can do great good publicly and behave miserably in their private lives, and vice versa.

Adoph Hitler doesn’t look to me like he was having fun; Ronald Reagan seemed to never have a bad day; George W. Bush appeared never to have had a doubt; Lincoln was wracked by depression. I don’t know how it all sorts out. I have come to believe, though, that whatever doubts, fears, sadness, and second-guessing I’ve subjected myself to in life need not end up as pointless suffering. I believe that real good, even a kind of happiness, can be drawn from getting through the torments of life, and resolving to keep trying.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Pig Paths

My wife MaryElizabeth says the shortest distance between two points is the one that keeps you moving. Whatever Einstein meant by space-time, my wife has a definition all her own.

She says it’s all laid out in pig paths, alternative routes to the most commonly used (and most congested) ways of getting around town.

The way MaryElizabeth sees it, space and time are not separate entities; the point of the game is not to eat up a given amount of space in a set amount of time. Rather, space and time are all one hunk which shrinks as time stranded in traffic diminishes, and expands with every second that ticks away as you sit idle, anywhere along your route. The winners in life are the ones who hold it all to a minimum.

What this has to do with pigs is for MaryElizabeth to know and the rest of us to meditate on, as she steers her way down side streets, across church parking lots, down one-way alleys the wrong way, hopping onto the freeway at one exit and back off at the next, then doubling back a block to her destination.

As most of us measure time, this trip might take more minutes and seconds than just driving down the straightest route and stopping dutifully at the stoplights.

For MaryElizabeth, though, the pig path holds resting in place to a minimum, and in doing so redeems any extra time or effort involved. Getting there isn’t half, or three-quarters, of the fun. What matters is getting there without having to hit your brakes.

I ride shotgun on the pig paths, which is fine with me. If I were driving I’d waste space-time right and left, and ME would be driven nuts. Plus, as the bemused observer, I get to watch her scurry down the paths babbling to herself and emitting little pig grunts. On the road, I feel like Hopalong Cassidy playing sidekick to Gabby Hayes.

Can you imagine what a joy it is to sit back, drop the leading man poses, stalwart demeanor, and straight-arrow lines, and just careen down the road with a wacko who knows what she’s doing? What a delight it is to be George Fenneman to a Groucho Marx?

This is my kind of traveling. For me, on the pig paths, getting there is all the fun.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Macbeth, Tolkien, and My Geekster Son, At One Fell Swoop

So what in the hell does “fell” mean, anyway, and what does it have to do with swooping? Is this English?

Well, it is, and it comes from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the scene where Macduff finds out that Macbeth’s killers have murdered his whole family:

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

First time I read this, my sophomore year of high school, I was so familiar with the turn of phrase (euphemism for cliché) that I read right over it. Only recently did I look it up at the Phrase Finder site and realized out that because Shakespeare coined or popularized more clichés than maybe God in the King James Bible (not just phases but words; if Shakespeare couldn’t come up with the right word on a playwright’s deadline he just threw together some syllables that sounded right), I missed the whole point.

The kite is a bird of prey, and the image is of this killer bird swooping down and taking out the chicks and their momma in, well, in one fell swoop. So what is now obviously the only way to express the idea was originally a pretty nifty metaphor that this showoff came up with out of the blue--and the first time I read it, what I took for lazy writing was in fact a genius making something out of nothing (see King Lear; really, it’s like this pushy know-it-all bastard Shakespeare is inside our brains whispering the ways to end our own sentences).

As for “fell,” that’s an old word meaning “terrible, horrible, awful,” that would have long ago gone the way of “avast me hearties” if Shakespeare hadn’t pickled it in formaldehyde for the rest of time by using it in “one fell swoop.” (I’ve read that Elizabethan English generally sounded like Wallace Beery as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, which is neither here nor there until you start thinking of Moses in the King James, Queen Elizabeth I, or Edmund Spenser talking like drunken pirates, in which case it’s kind of fun.)

I was talking this over with my son Sam, a college kid, gamester, and self-described nerd who reads and writes fantasy stories, and he tells me that “fell” is used all the time by fantasy writers, who (again because of overbearing whims of a trailblazing genius) are driven to cram old-sounding words into their books.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a Middle English scholar at Oxford who came by his tick of using archaic language in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings honestly. This was his academic turf, and though I’ve never been able to get far in his stuff, and I pretty much hate what strikes me as the cuteness of the language in the books, I don’t begrudge his use of it, since that was the world he chose to write about, an imagined archaic landscape.

As for everybody else these days who uses this meaning of “fell” outside of “one fell swoop,” I they should pay me a dollar for each time they fall.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Can a New Brand Save Chrysler? The Dodge Fallopian

All right, my wife agrees that the Dodge Ram truck logo looks exactly
like a diagram of a uterus and fallopian tubes. Did gender confusion
play a role in the fall of Chrysler? Is it Ram Tough or Fallopian
Tough? Should Fiat drop macho and go feminist? I believe
MaryElizabeth would buy a Fallopian pick up just to make a political
statement--would anyone care to join her?


Friday, July 3, 2009

The Price of Breath Is Inhaling

Driving up the Carolina coast for Fourth of July at the beach, we passed miles and miles of Camp Lejeune, home of the U.S. Marines.

This stretch of road is truly Marineland--marquees on churches, grocery stores, dry cleaners, and hamburger stands repeated the same reminder: "Freedom is not free."

This notion first entered my consciousness in the rowdy junior high school I attended in my hometown in Kansas, where our beleaguered principal's motto, warning, and repeated incantation warding off the spirits of disorder was "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

In junior high, I could see the usefulness of this idea, just as I can see how people born without any bones in their body would need to wear a straitjacket to be able to stand up. If you have no self-discipline, I can understand how something like the Marine Corps could provide the exoskeleton you'd need to survive while you were getting your act together.

And six decades of life in America has taught me the light and dark sides of how freedom plays out in this country.

The price of Thomas Jefferson is Sally Hemings.

The price of Abraham Lincoln is the Civil War.

The price of Mark Twain is Ernest Hemingway.

The price of John Ford movies is Wounded Knee.

The price of Fred Astaire is the Great Depression.

The price of the Marx Brothers is the Three Stooges.

The price of Jon Stewart is Dick Cheney.

The price of the Sixties is having to listen to Lee Greenwood sing "God Bless the U.S.A." for the 40 years thereafter.

All in all I believe it's been worth it. But even now, after all these years, I still object to the notion of a trade off for freedom. When Greenwood whines that he's "proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free," it's like the old fart in Hard Day's Night stuck in the train car with the Beatles, grousing about having to have fought the war for punks like them. Says John Lennon, "I bet you're sorry you won."

There is no price to pay for real freedom. It is inherently priceless. In a slave society it's possible to buy your freedom; in a free society you get it by waking up each morning.

If you listen to Bob Dylan and think "Like a Rolling Stone" is about how hard it is to lose everything, rather than how absolutely liberating it is, you haven't got a handle on what freedom is about. He's not just asking a snide question. He's having an orgasm:

How does it feel
How does it feel
Oh, how does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone

Have a happy Fourth.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

The Trees Know Where Your Children Sleep

The old woman was paranoid. When they would pass a flatbed truck carrying goods protected by a tarp, she'd tell her daughter, "There's poison under there. Radioactive poison. They don't want you to know what it is."

Taxes were part of the conspiracy. "Why do they make us pay these taxes? It's not their money, it's our money. Who do they think we are their personal bankers skablanker money not theirs gabearus not fair to us badonkus worked for it and we should get to keepitkabeepit. I don't want to pay for all this stuff and it makes me mad doesn't it make you mad?"

"No, I'm not mad, because my money is going to pay for the national parks and I like the national parks."

"What?!"

"My money is all going to the national parks and that's where I want it to go."

"It doesn't work that way! They take your money and they use it the way they want to."

"Not mine they don't. Mine all goes to the national parks."

"You can't say where it goes. They take the money and do what they want with it."

"Not mine. I say mine goes where I want it to go."

"But you can't do that!"

"Yes, I can, and I'm happy doing it. You're the one who's sitting there having the heart attack, not me."

Was your dad as paranoid as your mother?

"Daddy worried all the time. He worried about us when we rode our bikes in the street. He worried when we climbed trees that we would fall out. He worried about things that logically might happen. But he didn't think the tree was going to suck us into its innards."

It's all part of their plan. The trees inhale the children, and then they fall on the house.

"That's how mother would have seen it--'That damned tree didn't fall on the house, it snuck over and jumped on it.'"