A Couple of Movies I Liked Recently

I'm not a big fan of movies. Usually, I'd rather read a book. But some movies provide a unique window into the world. Last night I watched a documentary on a girls high school basketball team, The Heart of the Game, that was heartwarming and enlightening. It was just a great story, one of those things where the film maker fortuitously found drama in real life. The people who are the focus of the movie - the coach, a very likable middle-aged business professor new to high school basketball, and the star player, an intense girl from the wrong side of the tracks - are magnetic personalities.

Then a couple of weeks ago I saw a Russian film, The Italian, about a six year old boy in an orphanage. The story is a bit sappy, but I have a soft spot for Russian movies. When my parents didn't want me to understand what they were saying they spoke Polish. And then when I started to understand that, they went to Russian. As a result, I have a vague comprehension of Russian, especially when it's spoken with a child's vocabulary. So this movie made me realize that I probably could learn Russian pretty easily. But more importantly, it showed Russian culture with all its grit and bleakness in a way that a book can't quite do. Plus the kid who plays the main role is a very gifted child actor.

It’s Just a Phone But Please Buy One

There are people waiting in line at the local Apple Store today desperate to get their hands on the latest gadget from Apple, the iPhone. Steve Jobs owns a house about eight blocks from that store. I’m sure he’s one happy guy.

Now I like cell phones, I really do. Mine has a screen, a microphone, a speaker and some buttons. I like the speaker-phone option for when I’m being put on hold. It’s a very compact, nifty little thing that works in Europe as well as the US.

And it cost me nothing. Actually, they paid me $150 for selecting that phone as long as I agreed to a one-year contract, a contract that expired two years ago.

So no I won’t be spending 500 bucks for a new iPhone. There are a number of reasons for my lack of interest besides the fact that I’m happy with what I have. Viewing the web on a 3.5” screen holds no appeal. Cingular is a lousy cellular provider in the Bay Area. The plan is 20 dollars more a month than I’m spending now. And then there is the feeding frenzy associated with the item. I’m a contrarian by nature. When I see a line, I run the other way.

The last time I waited in line to buy something was a long time ago. Led Zeppelin IV was coming out, the album that has Stairway to Heaven. It was OK, but by then I had more or less grown out of rock and roll. It wasn’t worth the wait in line for me. I could have easily done without Led Zeppelin IV.

I do note that Led Zeppelin has many, many fans still and had I kept the first day of issue of that album along with the original receipt I might have something of value to sell on Ebay. The country-singer/American-Idol-phenom/recent-breast-job-recipient Kellie Pickler has stated that Led Zeppelin IV is her favorite album for love-making background music (this is the kind of strange information I get as a result of writing country music and making frequent trips to Nashville). Sorry Kellie. I got rid of that album long ago.

OK, enough snobbery for one blog on my part. Steve Jobs is a genius at marketing. My hat is off to him. He has the public waiting in line to spend 500 bucks for a phone. I don’t know how he does it.

It’s not just phones. He managed to create a computer that people are willing to spend a couple hundred bucks more for simply because the design is a little more elegant than that found on PCs (I’m typing this on a Mac by the way). He was slow to get into the music business, but when he did, he created both computer software and a hand held music box that were so easy to use that Apple quickly dominated the market.

Now I understand that it wasn’t all Jobs work that did this. There are many very smart people at Apple who are designing and creating these products. But the company floundered when he left. And now that he’s back, the company is flourishing.

I’m not much of a consumer. If the country depended on my sweetie and I to buy things, we would be in a severe depression. We hold onto things until they break. We own one 20 inch color TV that’s 20 years old. My last purchase (today) was for a bicycle pump to replace my 15 year old one that has a broken handle and a leak. My presence in the economy is a drag on capitalism.

So I’m kind of happy that people are waiting in line to buy a phone. We need people like this to keep our economy humming. Buy something today. If you don’t want a phone, buy something else. It doesn’t have to be a gadget. Go to a mall. Pick out a new shirt. A pair of jeans. A set of plates. Anything. Please. Our country needs you to be a good consumer.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities And All That

I tend to have very vivid, crazy dreams and last night was no exception.

I had lung cancer and was going to die that day. My sweetie had died of the same thing five months before. My parents were somehow still alive and I was living in their house. They knew I was going to die and were very stoic about the whole thing. It’s worth noting that my parents had many interesting qualities and being stoic was not one of them.

Anyway, it was my last day on Earth. I was still in mourning over my sweetie dying and was not feeling well, but I was determined to get out of bed and do something. I decided to go to a poker hall for a couple of hours. I was winning big. But it wasn’t money I was betting. It was heirloom tomatoes, big wonderful juicy tomatoes and I walked home with a sack of them. I knew they would taste great. I also won a couple of tanks of Freon gas which they said they’d deliver to me later in the day.

I put the tomatoes in my chest of drawers in my bedroom. As I did it, I thought this is a dumb place to put tomatoes (there were also red peppers too; I don’t know how I got those), but then I thought, “My mom knows this is where I like to store my tomatoes so this won’t be a problem.” I thought of her making tomato soup with them.

Then I went to a typewriter – a portable manual job – and starting writing my good-bye letter to those I loved. I typed a long letter, three pages long, single-spaced that said that my sweetie and I had had a great life together – sadly shorter than I would have liked – and that I had no regrets. As I typed that letter, I thought, hey I should have written a memoir; it might have been interesting. But then I remembered that I had already written a book that was more or less a memoir. There was no need to write another one.

Then I woke up.

I did what I always do when I wake up. I recited a Hebrew prayer that I’ve been reciting since I was about six thanking the Lord for letting me live another day. And that’s how I feel. Very thankful. I looked at my sweetie sleeping next to me and thought, “Man am I glad she’s still around. I would be one sad person if she wasn’t.”

Maybe more than most people I always have a sense that this could be my last day on Earth. When you grow up in a family where most of your relatives were murdered you have a certain overarching sense of mortality. For me that sense was reinforced by watching my father – at the time, just a little younger than I am now – develop neurological and mental illnesses from which he never recovered.

It’s a cliché that you don’t know how long you have. But every cliché comes from a solid truth. And if I’m living a cliché by trying to make every day that I live enjoyable and rewarding well I’m happy to be so cliche in my motivation.

When my sweetie’s aunt was about the age that we are now, she died of lung cancer. That’s probably where the lung cancer thing came from in my dream. I remember her funeral. The cicadas were out that year; they were crawling all over the cemetery. At that funeral, I was talking to my brother-in-law, all of about 30 at the time. He told me that for some reason his fingertips were feeling numb. Nine months later he would also die of lung cancer. That’s probably where the narrative of my dream came from.

You don’t know how long you have. You better live each day as well as you can and show everyone you love just how much you care for them. Yes, that’s a cliché, but it’s a damn good one.

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I don’t care for college presidents. But today I’m going to back down a bit and give them some compliments.

A while back I chastised the president of Sarah Lawrence for writing a whiny op-ed in the Washington Post about US News college rankings. I said she should stop whining about her inevitable drop in rankings because of Sarah Lawrence’s dropping of SAT requirements and show some backbone. She should stop cooperating with US News.

Well apparently she and a few dozen other college presidents are going to do just that. A majority of the Annapolis Group - a consortium of liberal arts college presidents, some of them from very prominent schools – has decided to no longer participate in US News rankings.

It’s unclear which college presidents are pulling out of the rankings game since few have gone public one way or the other. It’s notable that Anthony Marx, president of Amherst – which is typically in the top three of US News rankings of liberal arts colleges – says Amherst will continue to play the US News rankings game. Mr. Marx has criticized US News rankings in the past. He always talks a good game in op-eds about higher education. Talk is cheap. When push comes to shove, Mr. Marx is showing himself to be just another Orwellian, spineless hack of a college president. Whoops! I said I was going to stick with compliments. Sorry! I need to get back on message.

The Annapolis Group has agreed to:

“participate in the development of an alternative common format that presents information about their colleges for students and their families to use in the college search process. The Web-based initiative, to be developed in collaboration with other higher education organizations, will provide easily accessible, comprehensive, and quantifiable data. The Annapolis Group members will work with the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), among others to develop this common instrument.”

In essence they plan to supplant the US News rankings of liberal arts colleges. Good for them. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that they follow through.

This movement on the part of the Annapolis Group is a good start. Perhaps it will lead to presidents at research universities pulling out as well.

One thing is certain. US News in its rankings of colleges, hospitals, business schools et al. is engaging in outright fraud. They jiggle the rankings every year to gin up public interest. They do it because they need revenue. Having failed as a news magazine, they are desperately clinging to their rankings of colleges and whatever else they can possibly rank.

Brian Kelly, Editor of US News, knows that without rankings US News will go bankrupt. In response to this boycott by college presidents he has started to show signs of wear and tear. His words are increasingly combative. He says US News is bringing “data forward that colleges don’t want to share with the public….The notion … that these are not institutions providing a commodity that needs to be valued I think is also very antiquated....Some of these presidents gleefully sink their heads in the sand.... I think that's like malpractice."* Calm down Mr. Kelly. You're starting to sound like, well you are starting to sound as rabid as me. Tch. Tch. Tch.

A couple of months ago, I happened to be somewhere for a few minutes where MSNBC was on a television screen. And lo and behold, Brian Kelly was the talking head on the program spouting about US News' recent ranking of business schools. He tried to be a good huckster by touting a school that was an “up and comer” in the rankings. But he’s no PT Barnum. He couldn’t even mouth the words with a straight face. He knows that the rankings are as phony as professional wrestling. But he has a mortgage to pay I’m sure. So he tries his best to be a con man.

In a couple of decades, when the current wave of students passes through and colleges become less competitive again, the frenzy associated with college admissions will probably end. And it may be that US News dies as a rankings service at that time not because of a boycott, but because the public will have lost interest. And maybe at that time colleges can focus on education again instead of playing the rankings game and focusing on branding. Here’s to hoping at any rate.

*The quotes from Mr. Kelly come from a podcast on www.insiderhighered.com. In that podcast, he essentially admits that the US News ranking of the upper tier of colleges tries to make distinctions that don't exist. He argues that US News does allow for someone to make the distinction between something that's #1 and something that's #74. Wowee zowee. For that piece of information, does someone really need to pay five bucks for a magazine?

Sometimes Money Doesn’t Talk

It’s a less than perfect world out there and when it comes to America's democracy, Congress is usually so far from perfect that it's just plain awful. Lobbyists have too much power. American citizens don’t pay much attention to what their political representatives do. The very nature of politicians – deal maker egotists - means that they are prone to corruption. All of that is true. But sometimes these folks actually do what they are paid to do: listen to the desires of the American public and create laws that follow those desires.

Yesterday, the Senate passed a law that demands a gradual and relatively modest increase in fuel efficiency for automobiles over the next fifteen years. It looks like the House will soon follow suit. Detroit’s automakers fought this law vehemently just like they have fought every attempt at increased fuel efficiency standards for the past two decades. The reasons are simple. It will cost them money to develop more efficient cars. It’s likely that they will not compete well with foreign automakers in the race to efficiency. They make most of their money out of gas hogs, especially huge trucks and SUVs.

Two weeks ago, it looked like Detroit automakers were going to win this battle. Money talks in congress. And the Big Three lobbyists are incredibly powerful in DC. But then the Senate decided that it would be too much of a public embarrassment for them to succumb to the money of the Big Three yet again. Polls indicated that the public wanted change. Even Michigan-based congressmen were turning their backs to the automakers.

There are two reasons why the public wanted increased efficiency. One is that they are paying a king’s ransom for filling their tanks right now. Maybe they hope that increased efficiency will mean that demand for oil will decrease or at least tail off, which will result in a curtailing of price increases for gas. I doubt that such a hope is realistic. The booming economies in places like India and China – where one third of the world lives – will keep demand for oil high no matter what we do in the US. However, since gas prices in the US seem to be pushed up by a limited domestic refinery capacity, maybe increased fuel efficiency in the US fleet will have a significant effect on the prices we pay at the pump even if it doesn’t impact the price for a barrel of oil.

The second reason is that the American public has bought into the idea that human use of oil is causing global warming. They fear climate change.

I don’t know why public opinion has shifted on global warming. I only know it has shifted. Somehow an issue that could generate zero passion in the American public has suddenly taken hold. When I was a prof, I would lecture on global warming and watch students' eyes glaze over. They could have cared less. My guess is if I were to lecture on that topic now, student response would be significantly different.

Global warming is a fact. It is not debatable. What is debatable is the cause or causes. For about two decades, the scientific world’s best guess – and it is simply an educated guess – is that a significant amount of global warming is due to human burning of fossil fuels. For about two decades, the American public’s response to this best guess was one big yawn.

They aren’t yawning anymore. They seem to be scared. They worry about polar ice caps melting. They worry about the possibility of more draughts and floods. They worry about the possibility of more hurricanes. They worry about sweating more in the summer. A lot of that worry is completely irrational. But it doesn’t matter. A collective fear of climate change has emerged in the public. And as a result, they want the US to burn less oil.

In the face of public fear over high gas prices and global warming, Congress is actually doing something. Sometimes money doesn’t talk in Congress as loudly as the desires of the American public. And whether or not you agree that increased fuel efficiency of automobiles is a worthwhile objective, having a Congress that listens to public opinion at least once in a while is undoubtedly a good thing.

Breaking Down The Song

When I listen to a new song on the radio, I listen the way most songwriters do. I immediately strip it down. In my head, I’m stripping out all of the cutesy production and trying to hear what it would sound like with just a guitar or piano and the singer. I’m asking myself how well do the lyrics scan? Are there interesting rhyme couplets? How well does the writer contrast the verse with the chorus (if there is a chorus)? What chord progressions is the writer using? Does the writer have anything worth saying either musically or lyrically?

The biggest question I have is if the song was simply performed on a piano or guitar with voice would anyone want to listen? The answer to that question is almost always no. But sometimes even the most simple songs will surprise you. For example, look at last summer’s big hit Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. The lyrics are basically a big nothing. And the chord progressions are simple. But. But. But. There’s something compelling (i.e. hooky) about how the chords sometimes move back into the relative major, just enough to keep things interesting. And then that hook comes up an octave, a single note hook on a single word, crazy.

Usually, single note hooks and words don’t work. They are just too boring. But this one does. If you at all play piano or guitar, try this song out. I guarantee you it will sound compelling without all the hoo hah of production.

Most songs on the radio, however, live and die by the production. The songs, by themselves, are just plain bad. This is nothing new. In the big band era, a lot of nothing songs made it on the hit parade because of the snazzy arrangements. In the 60s, Phil Spector famously made hits by taking mediocre to lousy songs and putting his “wall of sound” behind them.

What has changed recently with the advent of software like Protools is that you can do a lot more with production than in the past. It’s a lot easier to take a nothing song and turn it into a toe tapper. More than ever, pop music is about the production rather than the song. It’s why top producers nowadays command so much money. And it’s why songwriters are not in demand. If you have great beats, you can make just about anything sound compelling to the public. The song doesn’t matter.

For example, a big hit last year was Justin Timberlake’s Sexy Back. The lyrics are moronic. The melody is something a six year old would find boring. The chord progressions, um, what chord progressions? Mr. Timberlake’s voice is ordinary and thin. This song is all about production. Play this song with just a guitar or piano and your listener will throw tomatoes at you.

Good or bad, pop music is always simple. None of this is Mahler. It isn’t Cole Porter either. We live in a less literate and sophisticated society than we once did. Well maybe that’s not quite true. Maybe it’s just that we are aiming for a bigger market share than we did in the past, so we have to aim lower. The gift of a great pop song is that it takes very simple structures, melodies and rhymes and still makes them compelling. In some ways, that’s harder to do than when you have the complete arsenal of music theory and the OED at your disposal. It’s like trying to hit a target with a cheap bow and arrow. As a writer, you have to be lucky as well as good.

Billionaire Wanted

In my town, we have a free tabloid daily. It’s something that cropped up about 10 years ago that contains mostly local news in a very sensationalist style. Weird stuff will show up on the front page such as Stanford’s president’s son committing some minor act of vandalism. Facts are very malleable things in this newspaper. Grammatical errors and typos are rampant (about as many as in this blitz blog). It’s so bad that in my neighborhood we used to call Diana Diamond, a former editor, Diana Zircon. Since she left, the paper has not improved.

It’s certainly not useful as a news source. And last week I found out something else the Palo Alto Daily isn’t useful for. I tried to use it in a little canister that I use to start charcoal. You put a couple of pages of newsprint in the bottom of the canister, put the coals on top, light the newsprint, and voila! In 20 minutes, you have ready to use charcoal without any use of lighter fluid.

Last week, I found out that if you try to do this with the Palo Alto Daily it doesn’t work. The paper burns poorly. It just kind of smolders. It’s not good for news. It’s not good for burning.

My nephew just informed me that the Palo Alto Daily is useful for entertainment, having more than one crossword puzzle and sudoku a day. He also just informed me that it folds very well. So much for the plus side.

There are similar newspapers throughout the U.S. in major urban areas with the exact same look and feel. They seem to have been created all about the same time. They have a barebones staff, are chalk full of local ads, and are very profitable. I believe that they are almost all owned by Knight Ridder. And they are all very bad.

Finding quality news is harder than it once was. In this information age we live in, the quantity of news we get has increased dramatically. But its content is generally very poor. The world knows in great detail about the travails of Paris Hilton. It learns very little about the travails of Vladimir Putin.

The Bay Area used to have a good newspaper, the San Jose Mercury. But it went downhill about a decade ago. The editor fell on his sword and resigned in response to staff cuts. Similar degradation of newspapers has occurred throughout the country.

We are down to perhaps four decent newspapers in the US, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. And even they aren’t what they once were. The writing is simpler. The articles are less nuanced. And what shows up on the front page is increasingly news candy, snake handlers in California and such. I do note, however, that unlike the Palo Alto Daily, the New York Times works just great in my charcoal lighting cannister. Thank heavens for small favors.

Then there is television news. I invite you to compare a half hour of Walter Cronkite from the 1960s with Katie Couric of today’s CBS Evening News. It’s like comparing a decent hamburger to a Hostess Twinkie.

I actually believe that there is such an absence of quality news that a smart businessman could make money on a web site that provided top-notch journalism. There would be no printing costs to burden the bottom line. Given the decline in quality in the major news outlets, the bar is so low that it would be easy to surpass them. Such a web site could become the standard bearer of journalism in the US. It would provide the news of record.

Now all we need is a billionaire who wants to make money by providing the public with a quality product. Volunteers, one step forward please.

Protecting the Brand

I note that yesterday, Duke settled with its three falsely-charged lacrosse players for an undisclosed sum of money. Given that the legal fees for the players are likely in the seven figure range, the settlement is likely in the realm of eight figures. It was the right thing to do, one of the few right things Duke leadership has done concerning the lacrosse affair.

What follows now is a rant. I find these things therapeutic every now and then. But not everyone likes to read this kind of stuff. Overall, I think rants are more fun and valuable to write than they are to read. So you may want to end your reading right here. Here goes.

Duke leadership is corrupt. I know it first hand. They are routinely dishonest. They make promises they have no intention of keeping. They aren’t evil; but they sure are slimy. I could write a lengthy and boring detailed statement of my interactions with them and their inability to behave in anything close to a professional capacity. I’ll just give you one example.

Once I received a prestigious award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). It came with some money that required matching funds from Duke. There was an explicit statement from the NSF about the nature of that matching money. It had to be new money from a private source earmarked for my research. Those were the rules. Break those rules and you were in fact committing fraud, a felony offense.

About two weeks before the deadline for matching money, which Duke had promised to me in writing, I sent a reminder to Duke leadership. I received a very strange phone message in response saying that “due to alteration in our situation we can no longer provide moneys like this.” There are certain things that drive me crazy; being stiffed for money is one of those things. I called back mad as a hornet saying that I had a written agreement with signatures from a dean and provost and they were going to honor that agreement. The person seemed surprised by my vehemence. He said they would reconsider.

A week later, I was told the money was found. I filled out my forms for the NSF had Duke officials sign the paperwork and received my NSF money.

About two months later, I found out that the matching money I received from Duke was not new money at all. It came from a general slush fund. Duke officials had lied on the federal form to get the NSF money. By doing so, they made me complicit in defrauding the NSF.

I’m not a Boy Scout. But defrauding the NSF is a big deal. I was not happy. I thought about giving back the money to the NSF. It wasn’t a lot, about 20K. I could easily do without it. But then I would be exposing Duke's act of fraud to the NSF. And I was a Duke employee after all. Duke leadership would not be happy if I did this. It would be the right thing to do. But it would put me in more hot water with Duke leadership, even more than screaming at them to honor their written commitments. I decided to keep my mouth shut.

For Duke, this is run of the mill kind of stuff. And having people sign non-disclosure agreements about financial settlements to sweep misdeeds and problems under the rug is also routine stuff. When I first got there, one employee embezzled nearly 100K from Duke; rather than take her to court and endure bad publicity, Duke quietly signed a financial settlement with her to have her pay back money on the installment plan (something I’m told she has not done). Another professor was buggering male students; he quietly signed a retirement settlement. Settlements are so routine that even I’ve signed two financial settlements with Duke that have non-disclosure agreements, one to stay (when they liked me) and one a few years later to leave (when they didn’t like me and I was happy to say good bye as well). And no I was not guilty of any misconduct. I was just fed up with the place.

While settling quickly with the lacrosse players was the right thing to do, Duke leadership could care less about doing the right thing. It’s all about protecting the brand name of the university. Having a lengthy court battle with the lacrosse players would have been tremendously bad PR for Duke even if they ultimately won the case (and I’m guessing the odds are they would have won). What’s a quick settlement worth to Duke? I’m guessing 10-30 million. And it’s worth every penny.

Is Duke more corrupt than other institutions of its type? My guess is that it’s only slightly more so. Every institution has its skeletons. And the tendency at nearly all of them is for PR and the seven deadly sins to trump doing the right thing on a consistent basis. It’s inherent in the nature of the beast.

There are many good and wonderful people at Duke. But the people in power have no accountability. Without accountability, awful things can happen. Their nominal overseers on the Board of Trustees tend to be Wall Street and Fortune 500 tycoons, hardly the type of people known for having any ethical grounding. For example, to get anywhere near the top of Goldman-Sachs like Robert Steel – head of Duke’s Board of Trustees - managed to do you have to have balls of iron, a heart of lead, and the mind of jewel thief. Google the words “Goldman-Sachs” and “fined” and you get 1,200,000 hits. The company is a sewer. How much ethical oversight can someone like that provide?

What is consistently lacking at Duke is the one person in the corner of the room at meetings who sets some kind of moral and ethical compass. It’s endemic to the institution. And when those people do appear on the scene, they are ostracized. For example, Duke’s Medical Center – like almost every medical center in the country - has significant problems with conflict of interest associated with drug trials. When I was there, they briefly hired a very conscientious and ethical conflicts of interest officer. He lasted less than a year. He was hated; they ground him into dust. Undoubtedly, similar things happen at most medical centers; it’s why drug trials are a national embarrassment.

But I’m sure that there are at least a few institutions in higher ed and in medicine that buck the trend of pervasive corruption in positions of leadership. They frequently try to take the high road. I just haven’t seen them up close and personal like I have institutions of the more typical, sleazy kind. A senior Duke official in response to my exasperation at just how corrupt Duke leadership was said to me once, “Sure, we cut corners.” Fine. And as a result, Duke is paying dearly to sweep their current round of sleaze under the rug.

Had Duke leadership taken the high road with regard to the lacrosse affair, they would have saved themselves both national embarrassment and a lot of cash. But those folks have been in the gutter so long they don’t even know where the high road is located.

Voting Like a Girl

I live in a neighborhood that’s a tiny sliver of land surrounded by Stanford University owned property on three sides. Way back when, the Stanford family wanted this land, but the owner would never sell. It’s a cute neighborhood, quiet with tree-lined streets mostly named after colleges on the East Coast. But because it’s so close to Stanford, it gets a fair amount of traffic from people in a hurry. They speed. They try to cut through the neighborhood to save time.

We don’t have problems with these drivers on my block, but I’m told others do.

A couple of years ago in a attempt to slow these cars down, my neighborhood had a vote to install speed bumps at a few select spots and “calming circles” at intersections. I’m like most guys. I don’t pay too much attention to local issues. I read the sports and national news in the morning and then go on to the business section. So when the issue of these changes came up I did what most guys do. I asked my sweetie, “How should I vote?” She said, “Vote for traffic control.”

I ended up voting like a girl. And I deserve what I get.

Now that these bumps and circles are in place, I have to deal with them. And I’m a typical guy. I don’t like feeling the speed bumps as I speed (a modest 5 miles over the speed limit mind you) through my own neighborhood. I don’t like going in a circle at an intersection where I used to just be able to drive straight through. I want my driving freedom back.

My informal polling of the neighborhood indicates a split of opinion strictly along chromosomal lines. Women love these things. They use the word “safe” a lot when they discuss them. The only woman I’ve talked to who objected said that she didn’t think they really made the neighborhood safe. She wanted more stop signs instead. Great. A stop sign Nazi.

Men on the other hand find these new traffic “calming” devices anything but calming. They want to drive, damn it. And I’m guessing these guys did exactly what I did when the vote came up a couple of years ago. They looked at the piece of paper with the ballot and if they didn’t immediately throw it away, scratched their heads, and then thought, “Beats me how I should vote.” And then they went to their sweeties and said, “Hey honey, how should I vote on this thing?” And all those wonderful, beautiful, smart women of my neighborhood said in return, “Vote for traffic control.”

We all ended up voting like girls. And we deserve what we get.

Back in a Bit

I have too much to do, but I'll be back in a few.

Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits

I have horrible tire karma and the other day I went to get a tire with a bubble on the sidewall replaced. The manager at the store said it would be a one hour wait. Fair enough. I asked if he knew if there was a barber within walking distance and he said no.

I started to write a song, something I tend to do in idle minutes. I had a great hook (i.e., title) from that morning and I like to write when the hook is fresh. I finished a verse in no time. The song was looking great. I’d finish it that afternoon (probably the best song I’ve written in two years).

First verse in hand, I went off walking in search of a barber and lo and behold about a half mile down the road in a seedy part of town was a placard on the sidewalk that said “Haircut $8.” I wasn’t looking for a bargain. But I needed a haircut bad and this was apparently fate.

So I walked to the door. Two Vietnamese women were inside. One was cutting a guy who looked like he’d lived a hard life on the streets. The other rushed to the door, lightly grabbed my wrist and ushered me in. The shop was a very barebones affair with two old chairs and counters covered with cracked 40-year-old Formica. But this was a haircut, not heart surgery. The worst that could happen was that I’d have to wait a couple of weeks for my hair to grow back and look decent again.

The women could not speak English well. The one who started to cut my hair was laboring badly. I could tell my thick curly hair was giving her fits. After the other woman finished cutting the street bum, she came over to me. “No experience,” she said pointing to her co-worker. I looked around and didn’t see any posted licenses. The one who apparently had experience got a scissors and some gel, and took over.

It took her forty-five minutes. She labored over my hair as if she was a sculptor. Was it a good haircut? Um, no. But I’ve had worse, much worse. I happily paid my money and walked back to the tire shop to pick up my car.

I like immigrant businesses. It comes from being the child of immigrants helping out with my parents’ business. When and if I see a kid in an immigrant business, I get a warm nostalgic glow. My bias is that immigrants are more industrious than Americans born here. And their children tend to go off to college and study the hard stuff – engineering and science – that Americans are too lazy to do. That’s my bias. As a result, I’m very pro-immigration. I look at Silicon Valley – where I live – and understand very well that it isn’t Yankee ingenuity that’s driving American technology, but Green Card ingenuity. Without all of those Indian and Pakistani engineers, Silicon Valley would have been left in the innovation dust years ago.

This past week, xenophobic Senators – mostly conservative – shot down a vital piece of legislation concerning immigrants and immigration supported by George Bush. It was one of the only – maybe THE only – pieces of Bush supported legislation that I have liked. These Senators were strengthened in their resolve by a well-organized network of conservative xenophobic citizens.

American citizens have always had at best a wary view of immigrants. It’s the “now that I’m here I don’t want anyone else” approach to immigration. When you point out the past successes of ethnic groups entering this country in large numbers, the tendency of the American public is to say that the new entering group is somehow “different” than the previous groups. Baloney.

An Almost Perfect Game

Baseball is the only sport I watch. I usually go to about a half dozen major league games a year and I’ve been doing that for a long time. When I was a little kid, my dad dutifully took me to see the Braves even though he hated the sport (soccer was his thing). I remember intensely watching the games, glove in hand waiting to catch a foul ball while my father muttered under his breath in Yiddish repeatedly like a mantra, “crazy American sport.” I know he must have loved me a lot.

I don’t like high scoring games. Give me great pitching and great defense anytime. It goes back to my love of Sandy Koufax. My team hit a lot of homeruns and never won anything. Sandy Koufax and the Dodgers would scrape by with a manufactured run or two and win the World Series. Pitching and defense are what winning is about.

But I’ve never seen the ultimate outcome of great pitching and defense, the no hitter. Yesterday, I almost saw it happen in Oakland. Curt Schilling of the Red Sox was brilliant for 8 and 2/3s innings. When he was young, Schilling was simply a flame-thrower. Now at 40, he’s learned how to be a pitcher. He spots the corners. He changes speeds incredibly well. And yesterday, he was in complete command of his game.

It helped that he was pitching on a travel day. The umpires had a plane to catch around dinnertime. Just like girls getting prettier at closing time, the strike zone in the major leagues gets bigger on travel days. But Oakland’s pitcher, Joe Blanton, took advantage of the big strike zone as well and only gave up four hits in a fine performance. It was a fair fight.

Toward the end of the eighth inning, I left my seat to stand behind home plate and get up close. There I found a bunch of other baseball diehards doing the same thing. We were kibitzing about what Schilling was throwing. He looked absolutely unhittable. Left or righty it didn’t matter. Sliders, curves, change ups and an occasional mid-90 fastball. Hitting is a guessing game. And when a pitcher has that many pitches working it’s almost impossible to guess what’s coming.

I was of two minds. I wanted the As to win. But I had to respect what Schilling was doing out there. He’s had a brilliant career, but he’s never pitched a no-hitter. I wanted him to succeed. I could feel the adrenaline flow through me as I watched.

With two outs in the ninth inning, journeyman outfielder Shannon Stewart came to the plate. Schilling had decided to throw a lot of heat that inning. He still was strong. On the first pitch, the catcher called for a slider. Schilling shook it off. He threw a fastball on the outside corner. Stewart guessed a fastball on the outside corner and hit a solid single the other way.

If Schilling doesn’t shake off the pitch, does he get his no-hitter? Who knows? It was still a great performance, one at bat short of perfection. And it was fun to watch.

A little optimism in the music industry

Given that CD sales are in a downward spiral and that half of all pop songs available for sale are now downloaded for free, the music world has a right to be gloomy. Last week, a decent band raised the white flag and announced that they would simply make their album available as a free download. The hope was that they would turn on enough new people to their music that they could make up for lost revenue through ticket sales at concerts. Sounds like a good idea to me. The CD is essentially dead as a source of revenue. Somehow pop musicians are going to have to make up for that loss through performance.

Making money through playing live is exactly what musicians used to do before the recording industry took hold. It's easy to be gloomy about the prospect of musicians making a living this way, but I'm actually not so pessimistic. It's true that there are many sources of competition for entertainment dollars and many people prefer DJs to live performance, but everything cycles. There will come a time again when live pop music is cool and not just for big name performers. There is something about live performance that is innately appealing; it's never going to die although I admit we're in the middle of about a fifteen-year lull in terms of public interest. But live music is like my Governor Arnold in the movie The Terminator: it will be back.

There's another aspect of pop music that is currently in horrible shape that I'm even more optimistic about: songwriting. While I perform, I consider myself a songwriter who happens to sing. Performance is something that I do with some hesitation. I'd rather spend my time writing songs.

For the last twenty-five years, the profession of songwriting has been in a downward spiral that makes CD sales look good in comparison. It first began in pop music. Producers and singers wanted the revenue that used to go to professional songwriters for radio play and CD sales so they started writing their own stuff. The songs were terrible but with the era of the video age emerging it didn't matter that much. The acts were sexy, the production overheated, and the videos were cool. So the stuff sold anyway.

By the 1990s, Los Angeles became a graveyard for professional songwriters. No one wanted their stuff anymore. They could write the greatest, hookiest song in the world and it didn't matter. It wasn't the quality of the song that was driving the industry. It was the look of the act on TV. The song was just an add-on thing and just about anything would do. This paradigm shift in the industry is why pop music has sounded so lousy for so long. Why people bought pop music in the 1980s and 1990s beats me. It was junk. It still is.

Many of those professional songwriters migrated over to Nashville. There the song still mattered. Lyrics mattered. Melody mattered. And for a couple of decades songwriters still thrived in Nashville. But then in the late 1990s, the producer and artist as songwriter bug hit that town too. At its peak, there were 1200 staff songwriters in Nashville. Now there are 200. And similar to pop in the 1980s, the quality of country songs on the radio has degraded seriously over the last few years. But the acts are sexy and the production is overheated so the stuff sells anyway.

OK, enough gloom and doom. With the death of the CD, I think you're going to see a resurgence in the use of professional songwriters. An artist can no longer fill his or her CD with ten or so crappy tunes they or their producer wrote and then one or two hits they co-wrote with a real songwriter. There is no room for filler anymore. Every song needs to be a hit. So there just might be a need for real songs written by real professional songwriters again. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. A new version of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building just might emerge.

Straddling the Fence

Yesterday, I received two very different invites: one for a cocktail party in SF with Barack Obama and one for the President’s Dinner in DC. Cocktails in SF cost 2300 bucks. Dinner with the prez in DC costs 2500 bucks. At face value, Bush just might be offering the better deal although I could easily get an amazing meal for two before or after the cocktails with Obama for 200 bucks. So actually, Obama, a great meal after and 2500 bucks might be better than rubber chicken with the prez.

I’m on the fence on this one.

Politics is all about money. If you got the dough, you can see and shake hands with anyone. If you’ve got a ton of dough, you can influence their decision-making.

It’s odd that I get solicitations from both Democrats and Republicans. I don’t fit the Republican demographic in the least. I live in a town where having a Bush sticker on your bumper is probably a criminal offense. I drive a Prius and a wimpy 180 cc scooter. Before that I had a Volvo sedan. I voted for a Republican congressman once because I thought he was a good guy. That’s it, though. In contrast, I’ve probably voted for 1000 Democratic candidates.

I do note though that when I was in academia I felt like a Republican. Those folks tend to be on the way, way left. I’m just a lefty and an old fashioned one at that. In academia, it’s all about race and gender, race and gender, race and gender. Yawn.

For me, it’s all about class, people struggling to pay their rent even though they are working hard. When I was an apartment manager, I saw this first hand all of the time. I’d see people’s credit applications and note they were working full time making squat, just getting by trying to put food on their table and clothes on their kids backs. These were good, honest, decent people. The idea that somehow these folks could all pull themselves up by their own bootstraps is absurd. We live in a land of very unequal opportunity.

My feeling is that academia turned away from issues of class because the whole enterprise is so beholden to the wealthy nowadays (both benefactors and students) that they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. So they dodge the issue. Instead it’s gender and race. Gender and race. Gender and race. Instead of acting on those issues by actually bringing in students of color from poor neighborhoods, colleges troll prep schools for student diversity. And the debates and academic papers on these issues are usually so full of insider jargon that they are irrelevant to society. It’s pure navel contemplation.

But outside of academia, there’s no way anyone would mistake me for a Republican. So when I get an invitation to have dinner with Bush to “take a stand against secular leftism, against socialism, against appeasing our enemies” (they forgot an “and” in that sentence; I guess Republicans don’t believe in hiring a proofreader before sending out an invitation to a fancy dinner)*, I think, “Hey, they are talking about me!”

So I’m passing on dinner with Bush. And I’m passing on cocktails with Barack, too. I’ve got better things to do than to schmooze with politicians and their benefactors.

*Oh, I know this blog could desperately use a proofreader, too. When you type this stuff as fast as I do, strange things happen.

Entertainment Compression

For the last month or so, the biggest grossing movies have been about a pirate modeled after Keith Richards (Not exactly a great idea for a role model. I mean, when he fell off a tree last year and the doctors found brain damage, how did they know it was the tree that did it? His brain was fried long ago.) and about a kid who runs around saving the world in a spider costume.

I’m a killjoy I know, but I won’t see those movies. They’d bore the hell out of me. I actually did go see the first Pirates of the Caribbean and the second Spiderman movie. My sweetie is in love with Johnny Depp (it’s unrequited as far as I know) so off we went to see a movie based on a ride in Disneyland. And we went to see the second Spiderman because it received glowing reviews. In both cases, I was entertained and smiled. But I don’t need to see anymore. The movies were one trick ponies. Of course, my sweetie is probably sneaking out in the daytime to watch the current Pirates show. She’s probably responsible for ten percent of the movies’ gross revenue.

But one thing about these movies I find interesting is that while their plot, character development and depth are pure kids stuff, their language and conflicts are not. There is pervasive sexual tension and the enemies aren’t just bad guys, but usually bad guys with adult kind of psychological kinks. These movies really aren’t suitable for children. In fact, for what it’s worth they are rated PG-13. Yet parents are bringing minivans full of children to watch these movies.

What has been happening for probably a couple of decades at least is that children are being expected to reach up in terms of entertainment and adults are being expected to slum and put their brains on the shelf. It’s true in movies. It’s true on TV. It’s even true in books if you look at Harry Potter.

We’ve gone to one size fits all kind of entertainment. And the reason for this I think is simple: escapist entertainment designed for the broadest audience possible makes the most money. A G rated movie about a superhero spider battling a psychologically simple enemy would bore adults. An R rated movie about a superhero spider who gets it on with his girlfriend when he isn’t saving the world would block out the kids. So Hollywood splits the difference and makes a ton of money in the process.

Essentially, Hollywood is writing for 13 year olds just about all of the time right now. They’ve compressed the range of entertainment available. When you’re spending so much money to make movies and television shows you have to appeal to as wide a market as possible.

As a result, six year olds are being exposed to quasi-adult situations at a very early age. They are – at least in terms of entertainment – expected to grow up in a hurry. I note that the concept of “childhood” and its array of specialty toys and entertainment is a very recent phenomenon, less than two centuries old. In terms of what’s available for entertainment, we seem to be going back to an older model of society where children are just dumber and smaller adults. Whether that’s bad or good is debatable.

What entertainment compression also does is make sophisticated thought provoking movies, TV shows, and books less prominent and available. You have to scratch the surface to find interesting entertainment. It’s there, but it’s a bit hidden.

There always has been escapist entertainment. I like to escape every once in a while, too even though I am a killjoy. But the brain is one device that gets better the more you work it. For me, a society where adults almost always put their brain on the shelf when they are being entertained is not a good thing.