brain food

I recently finished reading a pre-release copy of Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs’ wonderful upcoming book The Know-it-All, which, in short, follows Jacobs – concerned that he’s become steadily stupider over the decade since graduating college – on a quest to counter that trend by reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, cover to cover. The Know-it-All is a surprisingly absorbing read, beautifully blending lessons Jacobs pulls directly from the volumes with the day-to-day impact his quest has on the rest of his life, on his relationships with his wife, colleagues, family and friends.

I enjoyed the book immensely, though I must admit it also brought forth from the back of my mind a similar fear of slow decline since a collegiate thinking peak. These days, I’m thrust into situations that make me think, and think hard, just often enough to remind me that I don’t think hard nearly as often as I should.

I blame that, in large part, on no longer owning a car. Or, to be more precise, on no longer owning a car radio.

I’ve never been a big radio listener outside of the driver’s seat, but, on the road, throughout high school and college, NPR almost never left my radio dial. With each short drive, I’d pick up a small dose of Fresh Air, the World, Marketplace or All Things Considered, any of which never ceased to occupy my imagination.

Certainly, I knew full well that, as a teenage guy, listening to NPR lifted me to nearly unparalleled levels of dorkdom. But I didn’t care. I loved it. I could almost physically feel my brain filling up with new facts and ideas, delivered fresh each day over the airwaves.

In standard New York style, however, I sold my car before moving to the city, and with it the only radio I owned. That was the end of NPR for me, save for short trips out west, when, in cars rented or borrowed, Terry Gross and Bob Edwards once again brought me up to date on the world. I knew that I could theoretically find any of those programs at home, archived online, but, frankly, I was too lazy to do so – I wanted my information pushed, not pulled.

Then, a day or two back, I downloaded a copy of iTunes. I did it mainly because, starting at the end of next week, I’ll be working part-time on a borrowed Mac for a nonprofit consulting project. And, with my trusty Dell laptop slowly disintegrating, I’ve also been toying with the idea of making the Mac switch full-time, trading my Dell for a Powerbook G4 and returning to my Apple roots. I downloaded the Windows version of iTunes as a baby step in that direction, a chance to ease my way into the rounded corners and aqua blues of the Mac world.

Overall, I’ve been fairly impressed with the program. But I was ecstatic about it this afternoon, when I clicked on down to the Radio icon in the left sidebar, just to see what was in there. Ambient, Americana… then, about two-thirds the way through the list: Public.

I clicked. Lo and behold, a veritable cavalcade of NPR stations! I recognized the third on the list, KCRW, from my LA rental car driving, and hit the play button. Instantly: Cory Flintoff, at 128 kilobits per second.

I am not too proud to admit I literally jumped around the room. By another miracle of broadband, NPR will, once again, be flowing back into my brain. Which, frankly, is excellent news, because my apartment doesn’t have nearly enough shelf space for an edition of the Britannica.

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July 2, 2004

talent?

Sure, everyone’s been pointing out inappropriately that Harry Potter‘s young Emma Watson is on the road to babe-dom. And, while after catching the latest Potter installment this weekend I completely agree, I should also redeem my entitled ‘I told you so’ by pointing out that I totally called this a year and a half back.

Just further evidence of a creepy talent for scouting out on-the-rise prepubescent actresses, considering I similarly praised Lindsay Lohan six years back, for her performance in The Parent Trap.

As one might expect, this leaves me feeling both a little proud, and a lot dirty.

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June 7, 2004

Going Solo

Given the frequency with which I watch movies (an occupational hazard), and given that I often see them during the work day, in far-flung cities while traveling, or at last-minute to accommodate my overpacked schedule, I rather often end up at the theater alone.

Some people hate watching movies by themselves, and, at first, I must admit I similarly felt vaguely embarrassed about it, as if everyone pouring into the theater was taking a moment away from their crazed seat search to pity the poor friendless loser parked in the middle of an otherwise empty row. I’d glance at my watch regularly, scanning the incoming crowds as if to say, ‘now, where is my friend (or perhaps date) who’s likely arriving late or simply coming back from the bathroom, because, I mean, I’m certainly not the sort of poor friendless loser who would have to see this movie alone.”

Over time, though, the embarrassment waned. I stopped the friend-search charade (because, honestly, the only thing more loserly than being at the theater alone is being there with imaginary friends), and started simply settling into my seat. I began to appreciate pre-movie time, a rare few minutes in which I could simply sit on my ass without feeling like I should be doing something other than just vegging out.

By now, I’ve reached the point where I often prefer seeing movies alone. For me, at least, there’s something intensely personal about being immersed in a film, and being snapped immediately back into the real world as the credits roll is tough enough without gratuitous post-mortem dissection discussion. Perhaps I’m just a slow thinker, but even when I do want to critique a film, I often feel I need to weigh it mentally for a day or two before crystallizing an opinion.

Which is all to say, basically, that if you see me in a theater, parked like a poor friendless loser in the middle of an otherwise empty row, leave me the hell alone. I’m happy there by myself.

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June 6, 2004

cinema adolescente

I don’t know if it’s a judgement on me or on the state of the American film industry, but I headed out to see Mean Girls last night, and found it one of the best films so far this year.

Also, in the ‘absolutely wrong’ category, I now totally have a crush on Lindsay Lohan.

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May 6, 2004

opus de funk

Headed out to the Blue Note last night to catch legendary jazz pianist Horace Silver who, in his late 70’s, is still in prime form. Though the venue was packed, the group I was meeting (members of a jazz octet with which I play) had arrived early enough to get a table directly in front of the stage, so I ended up sitting about five feet in front of the piano, directly in Silver’s eye line.

Silver pulled up one of his classic compositions, “Song for my Father”, early in the set, and as I had played the same piece earlier in the day at a lunchtime jam session, my fingers were unconsciously moving through trumpet fingerings along with the music. He saw me doing so, winked at me. And for the rest of the show, Silver shot me sidelong glances whenever he did something he was particularly proud of – working bits of Rachmaninoff or “When John Comes Marching Home” (aka “The Ants Go Marching Two By Two”) into his solos, laughing to himself about it along the way.

Most of the rest of the group were younger guys, in their twenties and thirties, and Silver clearly relished the enthusiasm they put forth. “That’s right,” he’d shout, in the midst of their solos, “that’s how you say it!” And, indeed, that was how you say it, as the group laid down funky jazz line after funky jazz line.

I’d not seen Silver play live before, and, as he and many other jazz icons are aging rapidly, I wanted to catch him while I still could. It was indubitably worth it, in part to simply hear such great jazz being played right in front of me, in part to see that, no matter how seriously the audience was taking his playing, Silver wasn’t taking it seriously at all, was simply jamming his heart out and having a hell of a lot of fun.

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May 1, 2004

back to the books

The very best part of the house in which I grew up was that it sat about a block and a half from the Palo Alto Children’s Library. The library and my house were separated by a single quiet street, and I remember vividly finally being old enough to cross that street alone – it meant I could head to the library whenever I wanted, or, more precisely, whenever I had finished a book. At the time, that meant trips nearly daily.

Walking in the library door, I was treated like a regular at the Four Seasons. Everyone greeted me by name. Recently purchased books I might like were set aside, ready for checking out. By my recommendation, books hidden deep in the shelves were moved to featured positions on the carrols. By the time I moved on to the adult library, I had gone through a stack of library cards, wearing the stripes off each.

I read voraciously through high school as well, pretending to be asleep when my parents would check on me so I could switch the bedside lamp back on and turn page after page until I finally finished a book in the small hours of the morning.

When I hit college, however, my pace slowed dramatically. Certainly, I accumulated a slew of class texts – but as a double major in neuroscience and computer science, there wasn’t much on my shelves that could be mistaken for pleasure reading. What little time and energy I might have had for further reading was eaten up by the companies I was starting, the musical groups with which I was playing, or my burgeoning alcoholism. Between it all, reading, and fiction reading in particular, fell by the wayside.

Post-college, I came back to reading fiction in fits and starts. I’d pick up a book and consume it whole. At its end, though, without another to leap immediately onto, whatever small momentum I had built petered. I’d go several weeks before picking up another novel or short story collection, enjoy it enough to curse myself for falling of the fiction wagon, then again wait several weeks more to start another.

Recently, however, the momentum I needed, the long stretch of one book after another it took to get me back into my old ways, came not from fiction, but rather from business books. Setting out to write one of my own, I piled for re-reading the ten or twelve such books I had drawn on most in my busienss past. Driven by the excitement about my own project, I blew through each with startling speed, taking notes along the way. Suddenly, wherever I was – in the kitchen cooking, riding the subway, waiting for a film screening to start – I had a book in hand, filling errant moments with as many paragraphs as I could sneak in.

Those books finished, and with nothing on my shelves calling out my name, I started invading the collections of my roommates. Both writers, they had each amassed row after row of fiction I’d never read. I’d pick up a book one evening, and by the next find I was 200 pages deep. At the end of each, I’d replace the suddenly lifeless block of paper on their shelves, and pluck out the next.

I’m on my fourth book of the past week. And I can’t help but think those Children’s Library librarians would be rather pleased.

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April 27, 2004

archetyping

This past weekend, watching the last Sex & the City, part of me was thinking: “Thank god this thing is ending; the show’s gone so far downhill this is basically a mercy killing. And clearly Carrie’s ending up with Big. I could have called that from the first episode.” Yet, another part of me was thinking: “Thank god Carrie’s ending up with Big, because if she doesn’t, I’m utterly fucked.”

Truth be told, from that first episode, I identified with Mr. Big. Or, rather, I identified with his archetype, the broader class of Bigs who show up in film after film: Jack Nicholson’s Harry Sanborn in Something’s Gotta Give; Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown in the remade Thomas Crown Affair; any of cinematic history’s laundry list of men who too late discover the same traits that made them moguls led them, in their personal life, to push people away, to end promising relationships abruptly, to bounce from fling to fling with no apparent end destination in mind, finding increasingly little joy in each.

While I may only be starting out on the route to mogul, I’m already well seasoned in ending good relationships for bad reasons. Which is why I’m always secretly thrilled by the redemptive endings Hollywood inevitably lays out for these characters. It’s an odd relief to find one somehow changing his spots, reconciling his romantic streak with his inability to actually sustain that romance. The happily ever afters let me tell myself: if that’s the path I’m heading down, at least it ends up somewhere good.

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February 26, 2004

and all that jazz

At most of the jazz gigs I play, the audience is predominated by late-middle-aged, upper-middle-class white couples, the sort who golf clap after each solo, chortling “oh, I say, wasn’t that delightful!”

Every so often, I’m lucky enough to play a bebop gig up in the heart of Harlem, where I’m the token white kid in a band otherwise comprised of wizened black guys in their 70’s, guys who wear bowler hats and say “hep”, “cat” and “like, dig.” There, the audience is little old black couples, who shout “mm hm!! mm hm!!” or “yeah! come on!” while we’re playing.

Nowhere I play, however, do I see many young people. Sure, there are a handful of twenty and thirty year-olds at any gig, but they’re almost invariably musicians themselves. I’m not sure why my peers have never discovered jazz, though in part I suppose it’s the fault of jazz musicians ourselves, who somehow let music once synonymous with defiant, up-yours cool become instead synonymous with soothing elevator rides.

Still, I don’t think today’s musicians hold all the blame – even while the Brittney Spears of the world dominate popular radio, for example, people in their twenties and thirties continue to dig back into rock of the ’60’s and ’70’s. For some reason, however, almost none of them are digging into (or simply digging) that era’s jazz.

But, in many ways, jazz was far enough ahead of it’s time to have less in common with rock of the time, and more with today’s indie rock. Lo-fi? Miles Davis practically invented it. Ironic hipster cool? Check the unimpeachably wonderful names of Charles Mingus compositions, like “The Shoes Of The Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers.” Or perhaps more in common with today’s hip hop – Herbie Hancock’s thirty year-old releases, which fathered both funk and fusion jazz, are some of the most used sources of samples, hooks and beats.

So perhaps there’s hope for jazz after all. Perhaps the fact that jazz now lives relegated to Starbucks sampler CDs and Sophomore year faux-sophisticated hook-up music playlists represents the darkest hour just before dawn. After all, at several points in jazz’s century-long history, the art has been prematurely autopsied, declared DOA just before some new innovators lifted it back up to new heights and new public recognition.

If any music is about comebacks, about the quintessentially American-ness of rising, Phoenix-like, from one’s own ashes, jazz is it. So I have hope. Or, at least, faith. Faith that, even without people looking for it, jazz good enough to revive the medium would find listeners. Find people who may not know exactly what they’re waiting for, but will know it when they hear. People who will, for the first time, understand Louis Armstrong’s timeless description of what makes jazz: “Brother, if you have to ask, then you’ll never know.”

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February 23, 2004