Wristwatches -- Quaint Machinery

From "A New Wrinkle in Time" by Matthew Battles in the November 2010 issue of Atlantic Monthly:

"Who wears a wristwatch anymore? Although luxury mechanical watches remain status symbols, time may be running out for the clock you wear. For a generation with smart phones and other networked devices readily at hand, the utility of the classic timepiece is unclear. “The Beloit College Mindset List,” a much-cited annual index of the rapid pace of cultural drift in the digital age, observes that members of the college class of 2014 are so unfamiliar with the wristwatch that “they’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.” Yup, that’s your wrist, old-timer. Touch of arthritis?"

Music or Lyrics?

Would you listen to a song because the lyrics seem wonderful to you even if the music is boring? And what about the opposite? Do you enjoy some songs that have uninteresting, sometimes even nonsensical lyrics? Do great lyrics compel you to like the music? Does great music compel you to take the lyrics seriously? Can you separate the music from the lyrics?

Take, for example, "Come Together" by the Beatles and more specifically by John Lennon. If you know the song, you know the lyrics are not exactly "We Shall Overcome." But, man, what a great song.

Then there are plenty of songs with interesting lyrics that really don't move me because the music is . . . eh.

Here's Lennon himself from the the Playboy Interviews with John and Yoko (conducted by Urban school father David Sheff) on his own lyrics:

Sheff: With these early love songs, were they about your girlfriends, your love life?

Lennon: They were basically made up. . . . Yeah, we were just writing songs a la Everly Brothers, a la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought to them than that -- to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant.

As for "Come Together," Lennon calls the lyrics "gobbledygook." But about the music he says, "It was a funky record. . . . It's funky, it's bluesy, and I'm singing pretty well. I like the sound of the record. You can dance to it!"

Why the Noise Everywhere?

Is it in our nature to abhor a vacuum of sound?

My dentist of 25 years just started broadcasting Baby Boomer E-Z listening throughout her offices as if an aggressive hygienist or a root canal were somehow insufficiently agonizing. When I inquire about this new feature in her den of pain, my dentist explains, "Oh, it's a service we subscribe to now. Don't you like it?"

I calendar a note to myself to take an iPod for my next dental appointment.

Later, on my way to the airport, I pull up to my local Shell station where I always seem to forget that the pumps have television screens. I insert my credit card and a cheery young face appears. "Welcome to Shell!" she says. "Did you know . . . ," she continues with her enthusiastic promotion of Shell services and products followed by commercials for television programs that apparently evoke uproarious laughter. I turn away from the screen, but I'm near the car, so I can't help but hear several manically upbeat solicitations of my consumer loyalty.

I get in the car where it's quiet. But if I want quiet so much, why did I turn on my radio before driving off? Or was I listening to music? And did I have my cell phone earpiece at the ready in anticipation of some call I might make?

And I admit that when I'm home, I usually have relatively quiet, instrumental music playing from a playlist I've created on iTunes.

Later, when I arrive at the long-term parking for the San Francisco Airport, the waiting area for the shuttle has music, the shuttle vehicle itself provides the same music piped in, areas of the airport, too, have their own Muzak, and the gates have inescapable, and inescapably loud television screens all dialed to CNN where some family is running around screaming during a competition of some sort.

The plane is quiet, except for the white noise of the engine, once we are in the air, but I'm happy with my iPod.

Dallas airport, same thing. Even at the baggage carousel. CNN and more screaming families, but this time it's one of those Judge Whoever small claims shows where we witness humanity at its most petty.

Why are we simply not allowed to indulge our own thoughts in quiet solitude.

This doesn't seem wholly new, but it does seem more widespread and is it just me or is it also louder? Or does it just seem louder because it seems more invasive?

A couple of years ago, I took a cab from LAX to a friend's home in Santa Monica. On the way, smooth jazz, a genre from which the blood has been drained, winds it oleaginous way into the back seat. Without warning, I found myself ensnared in the cab while being subjected to Billy Joel's "I Love You Just the Way You Are," a song I've heard maybe a thousand times, always involuntarily, always provoking a search for a means of escape.

But I was in the cab and there was no escape. To my chagrin, I realized I knew all the words to the song, but not only that. I also knew the ingratiating saxophone solo note for note. How? Because this shit is everywhere, that's how.

Could I have asked the cabbie to turn off the music? Sure, but then I may be denying him the music that makes his job more tolerable. And I'm also faced with knowing that he's thinking, "Who the hell doesn't like Billy Joel?"

Once, for few weeks during a year off from college, I was selling men's suits during the holiday season in a department store in Erie, Pennsylvania, where my folks lived at the time. It was a smallish department and I was usually there alone on my shift. I brought "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" with me to keep my mind occupied. A good thing, too, because I needed it to help me tune out the insipid Xmas music piped in . . . piped into all of America.

Took my lunch into the employee's lounge one day and I'll be damned if it didn't seem like the music followed me in. And, of course, it was louder in that smallish, featureless, all white room.

But I was alone. And desperate. So I went back out onto the floor, found a pair of scissors, returned to the lounge of the damned, situated a small table beneath the speaker in the ceiling, climbed up, pushed the ceiling panel up high enough to reveal the pablum transmitting wire, and, yes, I cut it and jumped down triumphantly to a nice quiet read.

Breakin' the Law, Breakin' the Law. (A horrible song by Judas Priest.)

I frequented that lounge more happily from that day until the end of the shopping rush. A quiet oasis it was. Totally.

I might have really enjoyed an iPod then.



So here's a list of quiet songs you might look up on iTunes or on YouTube:

Trolleyvox -- Midvale
Kaki King -- Ahuvati and Neanderthal
Wayne Horvitz -- Tired
Larry Goldings -- Redwood Portrait
Johann Johannson -- Part 2/IBM 1403 Printer (yes, that's right)
Fink -- If Only
Hem -- Sailor
Philip Bimstein -- As Plain in My Mind as Yesterday
Andrew Bird -- Yawny at the Apocalypse
Keith Jarrett -- Someone to Watch Over Me
Jenny Schneider -- Buoy Song
Steve Tibbetts -- Climbing
Ralph Vaughan Williams -- The Lark Ascending
Lou Harrison -- Waltz for Evelyn Henrichson


And the band in the photo at the top? They walked the streets and plazas of San Sebastian, Spain, a few summers ago. Boisterous and magnificent!

Photos I Like

A view of SF from the Grizzly Peak area above Cal, a closeup of a painting at the East Wing of the National Gallery in DC (can't remember the artist, but I really like the painting), and a water tower viewed from the High Line in Manhattan.

Wacko Conservatives -- How They Misunderstand the Founders and the Constitution

Columbia historian Alan Brinkley reviewing "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History" by Jill Lepore:

The architects of the Constitution, [Lepore] makes clear, did not agree about what it meant. Nor did they believe that the Constitution would or should be the final word on the character of the nation and the government. It was the product of much compromise, and few were satisfied with all its parts.

There were enormous omissions — among them the failure to define citizenship, the lack of a clear definition of suffrage, the evasion of most of the issues connected to African-Americans and Native Americans. Jefferson insisted that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” Madison asked in Federalist 14, “Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” The reality of the creation of the Constitution is a far cry from the idea that it instituted immutable limits to what government could do....

We should not be surprised that so many Americans are angry. Almost four decades of growing inequality have left most of them no better off than they were in 1970, and many worse off. The recklessness and greed of much of the financial world — the principal causes of the crisis — have done far more damage than taxes or the deficit. The corruption and dysfunction of Congress and much of the rest of the government have disillusioned many. Everyone should be angry about these injustices, even if no one has proposed a workable solution to them. The Tea Partiers are right to be angry. But the objects of their outcries — taxes, deficits, immigration and supposed violations of the Constitution — are of far less consequence than the great failures that plague the nation.

I'm White . . . I'd Forgotten

I don't know about you, but for a long time, I'd forgotten that I'm white. Last December, I realized that I had forgotten that I'm a white person. Yes, I have acknowledged that I'm a white guy in the past, and I'd attended various conferences on race relations, diversity, etc., but a fuller recognition of my whiteness had slipped away some. What a luxury it is to just be Greg! What a luxury to let my whiteness come and go and never stay too long! At last year's People of Color Conference (POCC, under the auspices of the National Association of Independent Schools), I didn't rediscover my whiteness because of all the people of color around me. No, I became white again when the students of color from my school became more attuned to being students of color. And they were fired up and clearly in need of talking about it with whomever cared about them. My initial reaction was to defer to our Multicultural Dean, to let him have those conversations because he'd want those conversations, and then it suddenly struck me that all of us should be able to have these conversations with these kids. That the kids should be feel not just comfortable having those conversations with all of us, but also confident that we had something to offer them that recognized them not just as wonderful kids, but as kids of color. So if I was going to have the conversations, I had to acknowledge for myself what is surely apparent to those kids in their fired up state of revelation: Greg is a white guy. If you're white like me, I think we need to make time to consider our whiteness, our consciousness of whiteness, our willingness to address our whiteness with others. I think we need to forego the luxury of not thinking about it . . . if, in fact, you're like me and you haven't had to think about it. Now, I know that my situation - white, male, straight, and at least raised Protestant -- confers a lot more of that luxury than it does for women, Jews, gays. But that whiteness advantage we all share is a substantial luxury. And it may be that people of color would be pleased to know that we address it now and then instead of letting it slip away out of consciousness.