Monthly Archives: January 2018

NAMM

NAMM stands for National Association of Music Merchants. The other day when I said to Sarah that I had just gotten back from NAMM, she gave me a big cocked eyebrow. No, not Nam, NAMM.

Regrading Vietnam, I was lucky to get a high draft number in 1971. It was only the first or second year of the numbers and the troop levels were already being drawn down from their maximum. My friend Bruce had a low number – around 20 or 30, if I recall correctly. The options were to allow yourself to be drafted for two years, and likely go to Vietnam, or enlist for three years and have some control over where you were assigned. Both sounded like forever to my 18 year old self. Bruce enlisted and went to Germany and we lost touch with each other. I’ve been forever sorry for that.

I think the estimated highest number that was expected to be drafted that year was to be around 100 and my number was around 175 so I was clear. I had my CO papers ready though.

I first went to the NAMM show two years ago with my colleague Jack V. Neither of us are really the right type of person the show is designed for, but then neither are many other attendees. Originally intended for guitar, bass, keyboard and drum dealers, NAMM has morphed into a huge exhibition of all that plus all the accessories that are needed for today’s rock musicians: effects pedals, amplifiers, straps, picks, cables . . .

In addition to all that, the Audio Engineering Society has now piggy-backed onto NAMM and now there is a significant pro audio presence among the exhibitors. Jack and I were interested in that, of course, but we also wanted to see the guitars (Chris) and keyboards (Jack).

This year, Jack was supposed to go with me but he had some last minute work issues that could not be avoided so I went by myself. Luckily, our mutual friend Uwe W. was in Southern California to visit friends and was able to join me at the show.

Uwe and I had a grand time walking back and forth through the huge expo halls mostly just gawking at everything. Neither of us had any real interest in purchasing anything either for us or for our employers. Because I agreed to have my picture taken at one booth, I was given a T-shirt and later won a guitar cable. We saw a few people we knew, but only because we went to the booth of the company that employed them. Even getting the two of us together by texts and phone calls took almost a half hour.

It was a long day. I flew out of Oakland at 8:30 am which meant getting out of bed at 5:30 to make BART to go across the bay in time for security and all that. Going home, I left the show for the John Wayne Airport (JWA) at about 5:30 pm for a 9 pm flight. I had seen all I could and didn’t want to miss my flight due to transport issues. I ate dinner in the airport then had to wait another hour for my flight. BART and the drive home took until about 11:30 pm.

The show was interesting and fun but getting in and out of the convention center was very difficult. There were no shuttles from the airport to the show so everyone was trying to park their cars in the garage. There was no place for the taxis to drop people off. They had to wait in lines along the street with all the other cars to get close.

Maybe in two more years . . .

now it can be told

A bit melodramatic, our title is, but the whole thing seems a bit melodramatic sometimes. Nothing will bring Zach back but I still have questions about the night he died.

To that end, I traveled back to Baton Rouge on Tuesday. I never wanted to go back, but I did. I only told one person where I was going because I didn’t want to have to justify it ahead of time. I’ve been calling it my ‘white whale’ because it sometimes seems like an ill-fated obsession.

Well, I’m home safe now, so ‘ill-fated’ it wasn’t. My apologies to Micah and Julie for not letting you know I was in town. I had to maintain my focus and I only had a short time there. I also didn’t (don’t) want to drag them through that experience for my benefit. It’s my obsession, dammit, and I’m keeping it to myself.

Well, not really, because I’m writing about it here. Here’s what I did: I got up early and took a non stop flight to New Orleans, arriving in the early afternoon. I rented a car and drove to Baton Rouge and got a room. I then headed over to the stretch of Lee drive between Perkins Road and the site of Zach’s death. I had a camera, my voice recorder, a laser rangefinder, a notebook. It was about 5 pm and rush hour (I can only assume) was in full swing. Cars were pouring through that intersection without letup for the whole two hours I was there. Actually, by the end I thought it might have lessened somewhat but I also thought perhaps I was just getting used to it.

With the rangefinder I measured the distances all along Lee Drive. I had bought one of those rangefinders designed to be used for hunting that was good for up to 600 yards because I thought I might want to measure the whole distance all at once. In the event, I used the telephone poles along the street that were only about 25 to 50 yards apart. The accuracy of the rangefinder is 1 yard so it wasn’t civil engineering. Actually, the whole thing was pretty ad hoc but I’m not displeased with the results.

I drew a simple map of the street showing the side streets and the distances along Lee. I took pictures and video of the cars surging down Lee with special attention to how and where they merged and where exactly the pavement was no longer two cars wide. I spoke my impressions into my voice recorder.

Oh, and I brought one more thing, a stopwatch. The old fashioned kind that has three buttons on top. Actually, the old fashioned kind only had two buttons. This one is digital and had a clock mode, hence the third button. I wanted this style so I could watch the cars go by a certain point and time them along a known distance. I didn’t want to be fussing around with ‘buttons’ on my smart phone.

It worked great. I stood by one of the telephone poles and timed cars going by at the point near to where I believe Zach was hit. When I got back to the hotel room, I calculated their speeds and tabulated it all in a spreadsheet.

(I will omit a long digression where I first forgot how to calculate rates, then found that I had measured a critical distance wrong. So that last part actually took quite a while.)

I’m going to save the details for another post which will be based on a letter I will write to the Baton Rouge District Attorney asking him/her to reopen the case and file more significant charges against the driver, Shawn Allen. I also think the driver of the other vehicle, Reginald Herzog, Jr, has culpability as well as I believe the two drivers were racing each other and not paying proper attention to the road. My information is that criminal charges can be filed up to 4 years after the incident.

In the morning, after a restless night, I went back to the vicinity and made a video driving through the Perkins intersection from College onto Lee so times could be extracted from that although I did not have a camera on the speedometer.

I took some more photos, particularly of the bike, which is still there. The post accident story of the bike is here.

After that, I couldn’t think of anything else to do. It was still early, but there was nothing else in Baton Rouge for me. I drove slowly back to the New Orleans airport on back roads and flew home.

voices of my children

After posting twice already today with posts that were largely written my children, I found myself thinking tonight about my third child, my only daughter, Sarah.

Sarah is a writer too but her writing is hidden from me. At one time I handled some diaries from her youth. I promised I would not read them and I have kept that promise. I do not know if she still writes like that. She is a very busy person although I will go out on a limb to say that her life has simplified in the last year or so.

When she first returned to California after earning her doctorate in music, she took jobs playing music wherever they presented themselves. Orchestra musicians in the Sf Bay Area sometimes refer to these jobs as ‘The Freeway Philharmonic.’ They are rather widely spread. A friend of hers from college had started a music academy and Sarah got some students there. It was nothing like a regular job, though. Her pay was directly dependent on the number of student she had. In fact, she was more like a contractor in both cases.

One reason for coming back to the Bay Are was that she wanted to continue her study of body mechanics called the Alexander Method. There was a particularly good teacher in San Francisco.

So, for two years she juggled all these things while getting more and more discouraged that she could not make a decent living without spending hours in Bay Area traffic. She even talked to me about going back to school to get a degree in something that she could make a living at.

There are really only three orchestras in the Bay Area that pay well enough for members to live decently without taking other work: San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, and San Francisco Ballet. Sarah took auditions with all three of these organizations but did not play well enough to be hired. She did play well enough, however, to get put on the substitute list for all of them. Who would call first?

It was the Symphony. In October of 2015 I had the great joy of seeing my daughter’s name on the list of string players for that morning’s rehearsal at Davies Symphony Hall. I don’t think it was that first morning, but not long after, my colleague Nancy Foreman snapped this picture of the two of us in the hallway just offstage right:

I told everyone in sight how proud I was of her, and how amazing it was that she was working for the Symphony, but she always told me to be quiet. She said, ‘I’m just one mistake from never being called again!’

While perhaps not literally true, it was true in one respect: if you didn’t continue to play well, the Symphony would call someone else to sub. Sarah knew – knows! – that there are many good violinists out there who would love to play in the Symphony.

So she kept her head down and practiced like a mad person, tried to predict when the Symphony would need another violin and adjust her schedule accordingly. I don’t remember exactly how the early days went. She got a week in October, then I think it was a while before she was called again, then it was more weeks with nothing.

But by a year ago she was working almost every week for the Symphony and she had shed most of the other activities.that were discouraging her so much. Unlike the early times, she now knew sometimes as much as three weeks before the first rehearsal what music she would be playing. (At the beginning, they would often call on the morning of a rehearsal. Come in in two hours and sight read difficult music under the eyes and ears of the best musicians in the world. No pressure!)

I tried my best to allow her space at Davies. When I was there I had my own work to do and I didn’t want to add to the pressure. We see each other when it is needful and most people there know of our relationship. I’ve had the experience of tenured orchestra musicians coming up to me when she isn’t there and asking me why she’s not there, where is she, if she’s all right.They like her!

Best of all, I get to see her step out onto that stage and take her seat with that great orchestra and take care of business.

Back to my original point . . . I caught her backstage Saturday night to give her a birthday present. It was early and few other musicians were around. We chatted and I asked her how she liked the show she was doing. It was Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide with MTT conducting. No pressure.

I was actually surprised when she said she was really enjoying it. She said she could see the singers and hear the dialog. I said, ‘Isn’t the music difficult?’ She said yes but she practiced it.

You can see her name here in the middle of the second violins for her first week in 2015 but most of the last year she’s been playing in the firsts.

Zach after Zero Dark Thirty

Zach has an entry for this date, January 21, in 2013. It was MLK Monday that year. He has some angst about his job, but then he tells of going to see the movie Zero Dark Thirty on the previous Saturday. It didn’t make his ‘list’ but he did say it was engrossing.

Then he goes on with this:

What can’t be argued, however, is how it made me felt…I know this isn’t exactly the greatest example, but it made me feel, as I have many times before, insignificant and wanting to be a part of something greater in my life.  Watching a team of navy seals and the intense training and preparation they show…I’m envious.  Watching a recreation of a meeting of CIA and national security personnel…I’m envious.  Hell, in a weird, horribly perverse way, I’m envious of watching a group of analysts sit around at a conference table.  It’s the feeling that I want to be a part of something bigger, something greater than what I currently am.  To be around intense individuals who want something bigger in their life.  This feeling moved me to go back and read a long passage I wrote when I was coming home from Colorado last summer that nicely captured this same feeling.  It’s still there, and at a greater level than it was last summer, as my dissatisfaction with my job and work environment has amplified.  Even today, while I was at work, I had a short risk/reward calculation in my brain of not doing certain tasks and whether I could get away with not doing them.  How horrible is that?  In the same light, I just literally texted someone how I wished I could be in a professional position where someone would just tell me what to do because I was sick of trying to make decisions on what was important at work.  I don’t feel inadequate; I KNOW I am inadequate, with what I am doing with my life.  Maybe that’s an overstatement.  What I do know, however, is that I just spent 15 minutes looking over jobs at the CIA wondering if I should apply to certain programs… I just feel like I’m soft at life.

What’s hilarious about all this?  The federal government and the CIA is rarely known for its ability to do things really well or for having a strong, effective, efficient work environment.  LOL.  

Jeremy

Jeremy posted on FaceBook yesterday. I didn’t see it until this morning but I thought it was worthy of sharing here as well.

For those who don’t know, Jeremy has been working as a basketball referee for a few years now. He’s been working his way up and has been doing some college games this year. These games from yesterday are high school games, though. I particularly like how this post shows, in clear and concise writing, Jeremy’s calm, professional attitude and work ethic without losing sight of the best that team sports can offer.

Just completed a span of a little more than 24 hours where I officiated:
-A competitive girls JV game where both teams played full-court pressure.
– A girls varsity game for the ages that went to overtime. On the short list of greatest basketball games I’ve ever been a part of.
– A relatively humdrum boys varsity game
– A competitive boys C-team game that came down to a last-second shot
– Competitive girls varsity game
– And in the finale, a tough boys varsity game whose final 30 seconds featured an intentional foul, three made free throws, a made three at the other end, an unforced turnover by the leading team giving the visitors the ball with a shot for the tie, said shot missed, home team rebounds and gets fouled, makes the first FT then misses the second (they’re up by 3 now), shooter crashes in and fouls on a rebound just before time expires, team that’s trailing gets two FT (after we put .5 back on the clock), makes the first FT and purposely misses the second, shooter commits a lane violation and the clock is inadvertently started so we have to put time back again, and finally we’re able to inbound and dribble out that last half-second and go home. I am one tired puppy and ready for date day tomorrow.

pictures of Zach

I’m going to say that I don’t have any pictures of Zach in my apartment newer than about age 10. I have my little ‘shrine’ with Hobbes and some other little things of his but photos of him as an adult still make me wince.

I’m mentioning this because of the page I created on FaceBook. The purpose was to allow people who want to follow this blog to get notifications when I make a new post. I know there are sexier ways to do it but I couldn’t figure it out in a few minutes and FB was easy.

It works well enough. I suppose if you are reading this and hate FaceBook and want notifications you should contact me and I’ll work something out.

Anyway, FaceBook is all about promoting ‘clicks’ so I am constantly getting notifications that I can get more visitors to my page The Zach Project if only I . . . well, pay them money essentially. I don’t read them, to be honest, because the notifications always have pictures of Zach in them and I find that I always look away and scroll down as quickly as I can.

Zach speaks

I’ve used this title before and I’ll probably use it again. It’s a good title for when I quote from his journals, methinks.

So I looked in my little database tonight and I saw that Zach had a journal entry for today’s date, January 13, in 2013. Going to my folder with all the journal files, the first thing I saw was a filename with today’s date on it. Something called The Wayland Living Room.

Perhaps I should explain something first. What I’ve done with Zach’s journals is to save each file as a PDF with a name that indicates the date range of that file. In this case, Zach had a .doc file on his computer named The Wayland Living Room. I looked inside it for a date and then put the date at the front end of the new PDF file I created from it. In theory, nothing is changed except PDF files are harder to edit if someday I choose to release them. For the date format, I use yyyymmdd. Again, in this case, the file was dated January 13, 2013 so the new file name is 20130113 The Wayland Living Room. This way, they all sort out in the order they were created and it’s easy to find something by a particular date.

OK. So The Wayland Living Room is a document detailing rules for a fantasy sports league. There is nothing in it specific to any particular sport. It defines a Fantasy Leadership Council (FLC) responsible for ‘Maintaining the continuity and integrity of all Wayland Living Room (WLR) fantasy leagues.’

It goes on for five pages and is not my subject of choice. The FLC is comprised of four individuals: Zach and three others. If any of the other three individuals – who I am not going to name here – wish to have a copy of this, please contact me privately. I will be happy to share it with you. It is not of interest to me tonight.

Now, looking further in my list of file names – remember, I know the entry I want is from January 2013 – I see 20130108 – 20130519 Corleone Spring 2013. Uh oh. Corleone is Zach code for work related musings. These are often heavy with bullet pointed plans for situations at work and criticism of colleagues. (He’s plenty critical of himself too.) As I look through this document, I realize that my wonderful database which took me months to complete is not complete. I never went through the Corleone documents. Aieee!

The Corleone file has entries for January 8th, 9th, 11th, 12th, and 15th (and more), but no 13th. We’ll set those aside for now, although I did get them into the database.

Is there another 201301xx file? Yes, there is! And it has an entry for this date in 2013! It starts out with:

It feels like eternity since I last wrote in here, mainly because I was only in Atlanta a week ago (crazy) and because this past week of work was relatively busy and my mind was pretty engaged with it all week, and there was a lot of mental energy expanded.  That’s a long way of saying it was a relatively satisfying week of work.

His previous entry was January 6th, a week earlier.

After some talk about exercise, basketball, finances, Rosalie, and movies, he has this to say:

I’m not sure where I found this article but it was talking about STEAM curriculum, which is a play on the Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math, but adds Arts.  I did a little research and it seems like the STEAM concept is being promoted by a faction from UCSD and the surrounding area that is mainly some ph.d’s and a few other education individuals.  Their website talks about how STEM curriculum is myopically focused on one side of the brain and the workforce needs to have more balanced individuals.  It’s a simple concept really and basically the antithesis of the STEM movement but it’s the first time I’ve ever come across any organized usage of the concept or things related to its practical implementation.  Will be interesting to monitor its growth…

An article that I read over the break from Forbes that compiled the “top 10 brain science and psychology stories from 2012” which discussed several interesting concepts: receiving a compliment is like receiving a cash gift, with regards to how our brains respond and two people working on an issue may not be better than one because with two, it breeds overconfidence.

family communication

I haven’t written here in almost a week. As usual, there are many reasons, but one big reason this past week is that I’ve spent a lot of my writing impetus writing emails to my siblings. Last year I wanted to get a new car for my mother. I thought my reasons were good, and I talked it over with both her and Dad. We did some car shopping but it got put on the back burner sometime last fall.

Word of this car shopping got out – it was never a secret – and soon questions were being asked, help was being offered etc etc by my siblings. At some point, I decided the best way to keep everyone informed was to send out a blast email after I got back from a visit with Mom and Dad.

I think it’s been quite successful. Lots of discussion has been engendered that otherwise would have taken place over months, if at all. In fact, one comment I made in an email got back to Mom in a way she didn’t expect and now there’s blowback. Not from Mom, but from another sibling, who feels we are going behind the backs of Mom and Dad.

So, I’ve been spending a lot of time explaining this or that or defending myself. Now I’m trying leverage all of that into a blog post!

The six of us are lucky that both of our parents are still living and living by themselves in their own house. The problem, if you want to call it that, is that all good things must come to an end. Dad has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. No one knows how that will progress except that he will continue to decline. Mom is in good health now and takes care of Dad with few problems but she is nearly the same age as him so the margin for error is razor thin. All of us help as we can but there are more and more issues that crop up that concern all of us as a group.

For me, the solution is easy. I like to write. I write about my time with Mom and Dad and send it out in a blast to my siblings. This gets everyone the same information at the same time and allows (assuming consistent reply alls) a good discussion of the issues.

I don’t know. Nothing is perfect. Not all of my siblings like to write like I do so it’s harder for them to chime in. If we were to try to do group Skype conversations (for example) it would be agony trying to find a time that would be good for everyone.

The best news is that all of us respect and like each other. I’ve heard stories of other families . . .

4.5

I had just gotten back to bed after going to the bathroom. It was warm, and I thought maybe I’d feel better if I cracked the window a bit. The windows in my old apartment are single pane and are rather loose in their tracks. Moments after getting back under the covers, the window started rattling and the bed started shaking. I looked at the clock – 2:40 am.

The rattling went on for maybe 10 or 15 seconds, then faded away. Sleep was out of the question for a while so I flipped open the ipad and went to the USGS web site. There was nothing bigger than a 2.4 anywhere near the Bay Area. The times are always posted by UTC so I spent a few moments trying to figure out the time on the most recent one. Was that 2.4 what I felt? I lay back on the pillow for a moment and then refreshed the page. Now it showed a larger red circle over Berkeley. 4.5 Magnitude 10:39 UTC. So my bedroom clock is a minute fast!

This morning on the news pages it’s a story: Bay Area jolted awake by 4.5 quake!! I don’t know if I would have been ‘jolted’ awake but it sure got my attention.

Well that’s about it. In 1989, after the Loma Prieta quake, the newspapers were full of things like when ‘The Big One’ was going to come. My recollection is that the likelihood was considered very high in the next thirty years. Well, we have two years to go in that window.

Happy New Year

New Years’ Day. A cause for celebrating amongst certain people in Pacifica. I was on the highway heading home last night when the dark hillside in front of me suddenly flashed like a huge strobe light. I was confused for a moment but then I remembered where I was. Pacifica likes nothing more than to blow things up and it had just turned midnight into the new year.

Five minutes later as I pulled up to my apartment, there were skyrockets all over the place, some kind of super bright sparkly thing right on Linda Mar Blvd, and several just plain old explosions. Unlike 4th of July, it was all over in only ten or fifteen minutes. I had a glass of orange juice and a piece of chocolate and went to bed.

Zach had one journal entry on a January 1st, in 2012. It’s long, over 2,000 words. Almost half of that is a bulleted list headed ‘Now, a reflection on personal goals: July 1-December 31.’ It’s structured like a template that he constructed previously with current comments but I can’t find the original.

Here are some excerpts:

    • Maintain reflection/journal, make notes on a daily basis and weekly put 30-60 minutes aside for a “things I learned this week.”  Stay focused and don’t let yourself get caught on little tangents
      • Obviously a strength here.  I’m not sure why I didn’t want to let myself get caught on little tangents, since I think a lot of the value of reflection happens there.  I want to continue what I’m doing in this respect.

. . .

    • Eye on the prize: University President.  The time has come for me to become who I say I am.
      • With both the above two…definitely done a lot of the prep work and now is a matter of actually moving forward and doing it, which is a running theme in my life.

and finally:

    • Keep updating or maintaining a bucket list and Socratic appendices.  A little materialism can sometimes make a big impact.
      • Yup.