Fleet Week

I looked up my post from this time last year when I focused on the Blue Angels flying team. It’s an iconic phrase from my youth seeing them at Moffat Field in Sunnyvale. They’re coming back to SF this weekend but I thought this year I’d take a different slant on it. My current phrase is ‘war machines’.

We’re a little better tuned to the neighborhood this year and so we’re more aware of the Navy ships docked at the cruise ship pier and a couple of other places along the waterfront. We’ll probably go and tour at least one of them. We’ve seen a few sailors along the Embarcadero. They have all been scrubbed clean and in their natty uniforms. I made eye contact with a couple and smiled. They smiled back.

I really don’t want to be ‘that guy’ and I don’t hold anything against any of them personally. (How could I? I don’t know them at all.) But . . .

I want to ask them if they ever think about the core function of the organization they are a part of. It’s about killing or frightening people until they submit to your dominance. The US military does a lot of good things but never forget their main purpose.

The Republican candidate for President has been sounding increasingly unhinged lately. When I read about what he is saying, I can’t believe that he has the level of support that he does. I’ve reminded people that he got 73 million votes in the last election. That’s more than any candidate ever except for Biden.

Who are these people? There are even some in this liberal enclave of San Francisco! Like the sailors, they are probably nice on a personal level. Why do they support this jerk? And, to circle back around to my original topic, why do they support the gigantic sums we, as a country, spend on our military?

As a parent of a first responder, I am particularly sensitive to the adulation given to our military. ‘Support our troops.’ Color guards and flyovers at football games. The core purpose of these things is to destroy. Police and fire men and women are in our home towns actually protecting us from danger. I am aware of the many problems we have in America with policing. I’d still take a police officer over a soldier. At least the training for a police officer is not focused on killing people.

So, if we go one of of these ships, we’ll be nice to the sailors. There’s nothing to be gained by getting in a fight with a worker. I’m sure the ships will be very interesting from a technical standpoint. I’ll try to focus on that part.

My Bookshelf

I had this idea the other day . . .

I was looking at the bookshelf beside my bed. It’s rather small; essentially a nightstand. I have books in a couple of other places in the house but my total book count is about 10% of what it was when I was living in Grass Valley. Some of that attrition came through my divorce but most of it was making choices as I downsized through the last dozen years.

So, these books are important to me and I thought I would use a photo of them to talk (write) about why. It may be that details of the photo will be hard to see so I think I may have to list everything with comments. It’s not a big bookshelf but there are 20 or 25 books there nevertheless. This post will either be long or broken in installments. We’ll see . . .

So, here’s the photo:

Starting from the left, first group: Science Fiction:

  • Larry Niven: Protector, All The Myriad Ways, Tales of Known Space, A Hole In Space, The Smoke Ring, A Gift From Earth, World Of Ptaavs, Ringworld. So-called ‘hard SF’, Niven’s books take a couple of leaps from today’s science to get started but they are carefully crafted stories with interesting characters and realistic alien worlds and races.
  • Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five. Needs no explanation
  • Pat Frank: Alas, Babylon. Somewhat dated now (written in 1959), it is the story of a small community in Florida that survives an all out nuclear exchange.
  • John Brunner: Stand On Zanzibar. I was introduced to this book when I was a junior in high school by fellow student Ted Hile. More recently, Ted and I were friends on Facebook until I got tired of his ultra-conservative screeds. I ‘unfriended’ him before I understood that I could ‘hide’ people from my feed. Ted, if you’re reading this, let’s try again. I never look at this book without thinking of you. The book is a dystopian novel about
  • John Varley: Demon. Third book in a trilogy imagining that a moon of Saturn (Titan, title of the first book) is actually a sentient being. The world of Titan is populated with more-or-less humanoid races with an Earth atmosphere so when the human crew of a NASA spacecraft (think 2001) arrives, there are many adventures. I have several other Varley titles on other bookshelves.
  • Joe Haldeman: The Forever War. Haldeman served in the US Army in Vietnam and came away with a cynical view of wars and the militaries who prosecute them. Also, he’s a physicist so his ‘hard’ science is solid.

Second group , , ,  well it’s kind of a hodge-podge after Science Fiction.

  • On High Steel by Mike Cherry. A book about an iron worker in New York in the 1970’s. He’s a union man so there is a lot of insight into East Coast unionism that I find interesting. He narrates several deaths due to a combination of drinking and pre-OSHA safety procedures.
  • The Seven Sisters by Anthony Sampson. Somewhat dated now but a great snapshot of the oil business in the early ‘70s along with some great history of the Middle East.
  • Basic Writings by Chang Tzu, trans Burton Watson. Le Guin (see below) was my entry point to this philosopher. Her book The Lathe of Heaven has chapter quotes from Chang Tzu and they resonated with me in a profound way.
  • The Way of Chang Tzu by Thomas Merton
  • Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, trans by Ursula K Le Guin
  • The Land and Literature of England by Robert Adams. Kind of a strange conceit but it works. Adams uses the literature of England as a frame to write its history. One of the few books that weren’t mine that I got out of the divorce.

Then there’s the Tolkien. Copies of The Hobbit and the trilogy in editions that came out after the first Fellowship movie. I still have my copies of the paperbacks I bought while still in high school. I went at least ten years reading the trilogy annually. Despite my serious fandom for these books, I never read the other Tolkien books (Silmarilion). I do have an original paperback copy of the Harvard Lampoon’s Bored Of The Rings in storage. I find it hilarious. It takes nothing away from the original.

Herman Wouk’s Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Wouk refers to these books as a ‘romance’. There is a love story but the framework it hangs on is solid World War Two history. I recently saw a documentary on the Battle of Midway and I was able to refer to these books for solid perspective. The protagonist is in a difficult marriage that he ultimately escapes from so I identified with him during my own hard times.

A modern paperback edition of the complete Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne. Drawings by E. H. Shepherd. The hardcover set my father gave me in 1955 I still have carefully stored away Two books of stories and two books of poetry, for those who don’t know. Don’t ever watch the Disney version.

Hidden behind Winnie-the-Pooh is:

  • A Band Of Misfits signed by the author, Andrew Baggarly. About the 2010 SF Giants championship baseball team.
  • The Control Of Nature by John McPhee. Three essays originally published in The New Yorker. At one time, I had a bunch of stuff by McPhee, many concerned with natural things. Control of Nature examines three situations where humans attempt to control natural processes with varying degrees of success. The US Army Corps of Engineers trying to keep the Mississippi River in its course through New Orleans. The people of Iceland trying save a town threatened by a lava flow. Los Angeles dealing with the rocks and debris coming down out of the San Gabriel Mountains. Great stories and still relevant.
  • Bill Graham Presents, My Life Inside Rock and Out by Bill and Robert Greenfield. An oral history. Bill was one of my heroes when I dabbled in promotion in high school. He was running the Fillmore at that time. Years later, I worked for BGP many times and got to know some of the people in the book.
  • Things a Boy Can Do With Electrochemistry by Alfred Morgan. Copyright 1940 with Dad’s name on the inside front cover.

Innovation

. . . is quite the buzz word here in the (self-proclaimed) tech capital of the world. I won’t cast judgment on those who work in the industry. By all accounts it is keeping San Francisco from becoming nothing but a tourist town. That’s another topic.

I was doing a crossword puzzle this morning and the clue was ‘Postal area’. The answer was ‘zone’. I thought that was interesting since the US hasn’t had postal zones since the introduction (innovation!) of Zip codes in the 1960s. It struck me that that is an innovation that is wildly successful. No one thinks twice about it and it just works.

I have a vague memory of watching a TV show many years ago. It was probably the ’60s. I think it must have been ‘What’s My Line’ because the guest turned out to be the inventor of the Zip code system. When he was revealed at the end, there was some ribbing about it. Maybe that was the schtick; I wasn’t sensitive to such things then, but I certainly got the sense that mainstream America thought Zip codes were another one of those newfangled things we could do without.

On a tangent, thinking about innovation and game shows of the ’60s, I remember that a common prize on those shows was an ‘Amana RadarRange’. When the contestant won it, there was the usual extolling of its virtues. It all went over my head. Even as a science-oriented person in, say, 1965, I couldn’t comprehend how an oven could be like radar. Of course, now I realize they were talking about a microwave oven. I suppose somewhere someone did a thesis on the moment that product became mainstream in America. I’m going to let it pass. Clearly another innovation success story, though.

photo of Zach

We got a new printer which in today’s world includes scanning and copying capabilities. I had a stack of photos so I went through them to test the scanning process.

There really isn’t anything special about this photo. I’m not sure of the year or the place. The prints were marked with a December 2000 date so it had to be before that. Most likely in the summer in the foothills.

Earlier that year we had all gone to England for two weeks. It turned out to be a great trip. Zach was 11 and spent much of the time holding my hand as we walked around London. I remember thinking how precious that was and how unselfconcious he was doing it. I miss you son.

San Francisco

I live in San Francisco. When I was growing up, San Francisco was always ‘The City’. No qualifiers needed. The only comparable similar usage is Londoners referring to the oldest part of London. Whenever someone asked my father where we lived, he would say we lived on ‘The Peninsula’. Again, no qualifier.

While I do not know the technical definition of a peninsula, I’m pretty sure that most geographers would say that Santa Clara is not on the San Francisco Peninsula. Dad worked in Menlo Park, which is on the peninsula. Maybe he felt there was a certain cachet to living on the peninsula. We’ll never know.

Anyway, while I was growing up, San Francisco was a place to go on the day after Thanksgiving with my cousins. We went shopping at Union Square or went to Fisherman’s Wharf. I suppose we ate out because I have an enduring memory of watching the Mr Planter sign go by in the total darkness as we headed for home.

I came up here to work and live in 1978 and stayed through 1990. I got married, had kids, and established myself in my profession. We did lots of things around town and it was mostly a good time.

The only thing that bugged me was the weather. Growing up in the South Bay I liked warm summers. Our house in SF had a view to the east and sometimes I would look out the windows at the Hayward Hills and wistfully think, ‘It’s 80 degrees over there.’ At our house it was cloudy and 60.

For a number of reasons that made sense at the time, we moved to Grass Valley in 1990. It had nice hot summers and crispy winters and that was fine.

After many travails, I started working in San Francisco again in 2008. On one of my first trips down here from the foothills, I came around the turn on highway 80 where the Golden Gate Bridge comes into view. I could see the huge bank of fog surging over the city and through the Gate and I thought, ‘This is where I want to be.’

I’ve come to embrace the summer fog and the year ’round mild weather. It suits me. I never go out without at least a light jacket. I never wear shorts or just a T-shirt. I do appreciate that the neighborhood we live in now is not foggy all the time. Sunshine is good!

When we walk around The City™, I am always aware that it is a human construct. Whatever was natural on the tip of the Peninsula™ 250 years ago has been long since covered over with stuff. And, while the weather overall may be changing due to climate change, San Francisco will remain the city between the ocean and the big valley and thus subject to the tug of war between the warm and cool air masses there.

—

I put this post in the ‘Travel’ category because none of the other categories seem to fit and I don’t want to add more categories. Do you care? Probably not.

Jet lag

I’m beginning to think that this getting older thing is real. Last year when the time changed, it took me several days to re-adjust. At the time, I put it down to work stresses.

We came back from the Eastern time zone last Wednesday. Today is Saturday, ten days later. This morning is the first time I’ve felt like I’ve gotten decent sleep that is aligned with the sun.

It’s weird; both times the symptoms weren’t overt. I wasn’t getting up exactly three (or one) hours earlier, etc. It was more like being generally unsettled. This time, it was complicated by the fact that I didn’t have to go to work every day. Laying in bed in the morning – or going to bed early – was an option that I took advantage of.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it took longer. Hmmmm . . . .

So, I am retired now. I did go into Davies Hall one time to help with some transition issues but mostly my schedule is completely open. We had some doctor appointments; we got the car serviced, but this is the new normal.

The trip was great. We went to Toronto and Montreal and visited Sepi’s sister’s family. Jet lag issues on the front end were relatively minor. I attributed our fatigue more to the fact that we came out on a red-eye. But, we also were thrown into doing things! I’ll have to remember that.

I’ll do a write up in a separate post. I have the time now!

Sasha

I just put up a post that I wrote last week and only just got out. In the meanwhile, life went on, and in the due course of things, we took the Symphony to its annual appearance at Stern Grove last Sunday. At the end of the concert I was busily packing up the various bits and pieces when suddenly our concertmaster, Sasha Barantschik, was standing next to me.

As with Esa-Pekka, my relationship with Sasha has been cordial and professional. Unlike Esa-Pekka, Sasha is not an international star. He has been concertmaster for the SF Symphony for more than 25 years, a not insignificant accomplishment. Not being a jet setter, Sasha goes out into the trenches every week, playing whatever and for whoever, happens to be on the program that week. Given that, I have a more relaxed relationship with him. We can make little jokes with each other when it’s time for him to go out and tune the orchestra. Or, at Stern Grove, where we don’t have our usual methods of signaling, I had to walk out to where he was sitting on stage to tell him it was time to start. We always get a little chuckle out of that.

Sasha’s wife, Alena, plays occasionally with the orchestra as a sub. She was with him on Sunday.

He came up to me and said, ‘This is goodbye.’

I was taken aback until I realized that Sasha always takes off for the summer pops season. This had been our last concert together with me as Stage Manager. Flashing on my picture with Esa-Pekka, I said, ‘Can we get a picture?’ He said, of course, and Alena took this lovely photo.

Sasha has the same birth year as me. I made a little joke about him joining me in retirement. He didn’t bite.

Esa-Pekka

I don’t usually think about having my picture taken with anyone, much less famous people. I’ve spent my whole career working with more or less famous people and, for the most part, they’re there to do a job just like I am.

With the end of my time with the Symphony approaching, I thought about my relationship with Esa-Pekka Salonen. His time with the Symphony is not coming to an end like mine but his status has changed profoundly in the last six months. Like mine.

Our relationship has been cordial but businesslike. I like to think I’ve earned his respect as a stage manager. Any social contact I’ve had with him has been in the context of a party with lots of other people around competing for his time.

Anyway, with the orchestra retirement party last week, I thought it would be cool to have a picture taken of just the two of us. It turned out he wasn’t at the party very long so I missed that opportunity.

Yesterday was his last concert and I was sure he’d be jetting off somewhere right away. I asked Shoko, his secretary, if she could identify a moment when I could get a picture with him. Her first question was, what about tomorrow? He was staying for the Principal Bassoon audition.

But we already had plans to go to Mom’s after Sepi’s PT appointment. I resigned myself to not getting one.

The concert was Mahler’s 3rd Symphony, a six movement, 100 minute behemoth performed without intermission. Afterwards, we were busy clearing the stage for the auditions so I was running around, not thinking about it, when suddenly there he was in the hallway with Shoko!

She said, do you want to take that photo?  I said yes and it was done!

Retirement party

Trying to write after a long layoff . . .

I get ideas – usually in the small hours of the morning – but translating them to written text has been extremely difficult. Is it writers’ block? I don’t really consider myself a writer. I would like to write more. I think I write well. I don’t think I am a ‘writer’.

I spend a lot of time at work on a computer. At home, I actually have a decent setup but there always seems to be something else I should do. I keep thinking I will use that early morning good energy time to write. Someday . . .

And someday may be approaching. After Sepi and I made the decision last January that I could retire, the actual date has crept closer and closer. Jon at work got me a countdown display that shows days and hours (and minutes and seconds!). I keep it on the Stage Manager’s desk for anyone to see. I believe it’s on 41 days today.

Yesterday at work was an annual event honoring the members of the orchestra who are retiring. Surprisingly to me, I was included in the celebration. Esa-Pekka made a little speech during the concert in which I was called out on stage for applause from the orchestra and the audience.

After the show there was a gathering with food and drink in one of the backstage rooms. Michele got up and said some nice things about me. I then spoke briefly, thanking my crew, Michele and Tim but forgetting Sepi. I found that I got rather emotional doing it. I really love the orchestra. They all appreciate what we do.

I really do consider it the pinnacle of my career. It’s a hard job but being part of the team that helps a great orchestra make great music is very satisfying.

After many years of hiding it, I let the cat out of the bag to certain members of the orchestra that I like to play music. I was reluctant to do that because I know how good these musicians really are. I’m not even close to their level. To a person, though, they have been supportive of my music making.

Lately, a common question I get is what am I going to do in my retirement. I say play more music. Then I say write more.

70

I turned 70 a couple of months ago. It’s completely freaky to be referring to myself as being that age. I suppose that because I still have hair, most people I tell are amazed. They say I am well preserved for that age. I tell them I’m rotten inside!

I was a freshman in high school when the Simon and Garfunkel record ‘Bookends’ came out. It had the hits Mrs. Robinson, At the Zoo and Hazy Shade of Winter on it but it also had some different tracks that didn’t make much impression on my 14 year old self: Save the Life of My Child was a strange story about someone’s child jumping off of a building. Voices of Old People was recordings of old people talking about nothing in particular – I thought. Then there was the Bookends Theme, with the line ‘ . . . how terribly strange to be 70.’

That line has been rolling around in my head for the past few months. I don’t know what Paul Simon – then not even 30 – was referring to specifically, but it sure resonates in me now.

I get to have lunch with a group of stagehand friends every couple of months. Everyone in the group is retired except for me. The first question I am asked when I see them is, ‘Are you retired yet?’

So far, the answer has been no but that will change this year. While the Symphony Stage Manager job is tremendously rewarding in some ways, it is very stressful and I decided that last years’ Christmas Holiday programming – always the hardest month of the year – would be my last. My friend and colleague Jim J. finally retired last fall at the age of 75. Many of us thought he should have gone sooner. Not because he couldn’t do his job but because we all recognized that sometimes the body doesn’t work the way it used to. And sometimes that happens with little warning. I’m ready to enjoy life a little before it’s too late!

I think about my friend and former band mate Tim I., dead from prostate cancer at the age of 59. I’ve had my PSA checked every year since then. So far, it’s still very low.

I had three surgeries last year under general anesthesia and one more (skin cancer) under local. It’s time to not take anything for granted.

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