Monthly Archives: October 2009

More on Kerouac

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A post I did from last week, that was ostensibly about recent side projects by members of Death Cab for Cutie, referenced Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard’s work on the soundtrack for an upcoming documentary titled One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur.

Well, now a blogger at Wired has opened the door for me to say more about Jack:

Calling all Kerouac fans: How did On the Road and Kerouac’s other writings affect your world view?

Let’s put it this way, Jack Kerouac contributed significantly to this New Jersey native having crossed the country and settled down in the Pacific Northwest.

For me, though I love On The Road, and it was in my heart as I rode Amtrak west from New York, through Denver and westward to the Pacific, The Dharma Bums is the Kerouac book that impacted me the most. When I first read it, I was lost in the wilderness of Los Angeles. I’d moved there to hang out with friends, and decidedly NOT because I was attracted to the city. After a few years there, I was suffering badly from what a friend calls Nature Deficit Disorder, not because there were no natural areas nearby — there is great hiking in the Santa Monicas and San Gabriels — but because I was immersed in the urban L.A. lifestyle.

And then, two things happened right around the same time that changed my life forever: 1.) I read The Dharma Bums, with its wonderful passages of hikes in the Sierras and Cascades; and 2.) the first REI store in Southern California opened. This was 1991, and I was there on opening day, bought my first real pair of hiking boots, and was soon taking off regularly on the weekends to explore the surrounding mountains.

Within a year, after five years total in an urban wilderness, I packed up my belongings, only what I could fit in my Volkswagen Jetta, along with camping gear for two and a good friend, and I headed north, following Kerouac’s footsteps to the state of Washington. Jack landed atop Desolation Peak, and I landed about 90 miles west in Bellingham.

In addition to geographical and lifestyle changes, The Dharma Bums had another huge impact on me. While I had certainly been enthralled by On The Road and its wild stories of, as Thoreau called it, sucking the marrow from the bones of life, The Dharma Bums had more spiritual content than anything I’d read previously, and it was the first time that Buddhism really got through to me. There was something about Kerouac’s wrestling with Zen, particularly his own impressions of his having been a failure as a practitioner, that, ironically, finally helped me understand some key Buddhist concepts.

I could write a  lengthy essay on this topic, but this is blog for crying out loud!

How did On the Road and Kerouac’s other writings affect your world view?

Yeah, I guess you could say he affected me.

Good news a novelty?

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In my experience, it’s quite an unusual thing to find a piece of good news on the front page of the paper edition of the New York Times. (Granted, it was below the fold.)

That said, I’ll take it. It’s refreshing!

Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None

Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations.

The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.

Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth’s atmosphere.

The funny thing here is that there’s a very fine thread connecting this post to the one I posted yesterday about the cell phone vs. the clown on a unicycle study at WWU.

The Times article mentions Seattle, but 90 miles north, here in Bellingham, sustainability is like the clown on a unicycle. To some extent, it’s a wonder that I even noticed the Times piece, given how much is going on here in the areas of reducing, reusing, recycling, composting, green building, alternative transportation, biodiesel, etc., and we even boast a zero-waste burger joint.

Regardless, it’s refreshing to consider how significant this is for the subject of zero-waste to make it to the cover of the Gray Lady, to consider how the massive reach of the New York Times can bring the concept to towns that have made significantly less progress concerning sustainability than Bellingham.

Refreshingly hopeful. Hope is sustaining.

There’s nothing novel about hope.



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Researchers don’t get out much

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Initially I was very excited to come across a web article (LiveScience.com via Gizmodo) with this photo, shown here, of some very familiar surrounds: Red Square, on the campus of my employer, Western Washington University (WWU or Western).

Then, as I observed that this article was in response to a study conducted by WWU professor Ira Hyman, and that it will be published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, I was excited, because WWU is not primarily a research institution, and so it’s great for Western to get this kind of exposure.

Then I read the article. Excitement gone.

The gist of Professor Hyman’s work is that cell phone users are dangerously distracted while on the phone, as indicated by their having not paid much attention or even noticed a clown pedaling a unicycle in Red Square.

Seriously, Professor Hyman’s got mad credentials, but I read this and I was left wondering how a holder of a PhD in Psychology could be so utterly oblivious of human behavior constantly on display in his immediate environs.

Red Square, for anyone who has spent even a short time on campus (OMG! Hyman’s been working here for 18 years!), is a magnet for exhibitionists, especially on a sunny day, leaving no doubt that WWU is a liberal arts university. And, it’s not just liberals and artists who flock to this public square to juggle, dance, play instruments, and even streak on a regular basis. Several times throughout the year we get visited by Christian evangelicals carrying, no exaggeration, 30-foot high banners that read “REPENT OR YOU WILL BURN IN HELL”, and once a year we’re visited by the so-called Genocide Awareness Project, an exhibit by a pro-life group that equates abortion with genocide, showing very large photos of aborted fetuses in order to shock people.

As a commenter at LiveScience put it, reassuring me that I’m not alone in reacting like this:

What this study doesn’t take into account is that strange people and activities happen in Red Square ALL THE TIME. We’ve learned to tune it out because the “unusual” is usual to us. I mean, I saw the unicycle guy almost every day, and things happened such as the time where a friend of mine jumped a fence, tearing down horrifying abortion billboards posted all around Red Square.

To be honest, I believe this study would have been more valid had it been conducted somewhere central and well-populated which is not as familiar with odd people and events.

Professor Hyman, if you read this, I know I’m being a little harsh, and I actually happen to agree that cell phones CAN be dangerously distracting, but mostly I’m concerned about you. Please try to get out some more, spend some time actually observing the students you teach and the kind of campus they inhabit.



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Flaming Lips update

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Check this out. As I was writing my last post, I received an email from a friend of mine who was writing from San Francisco, he didn’t know what I was writing about, and he reports to me that he’s going to a Flaming Lips show that evening.

How weird is that?

Later Update: I started watching some Flaming Lips YouTube clips, and it turns out that my friend who wrote from San Francisco looks a lot like Lips frontman Wayne Coyne.

See? Pretty weird, huh?

Pink Flaming Floyd Lips

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Consider me skeptical.

Pitchfork reports that the band The Flaming Lips is working on a song-by-song reinterpretation of Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic Dark Side of the Moon.

In an embarrassing disclosure, I don’t know the music of The Flaming Lips, a critically acclaimed group that’s been around for over 25 years, nor am I familiar with the band they are collaborating with on this project: Stardeath and White Dwarfs.

Yet, the fact that I don’t know their music isn’t really the reason why I’m wary of this project, and I’m certainly not opposed to covering the music of other artists for purposes of reinterpretation, as that is exactly what I do as a musician.

No, this simply has everything to do with just how much of a classic masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon is. When I think of nearly perfect albums, only a few come to mind, and Dark Side is at the top of my list. But, don’t just take my word for it. It is the 6th all-time highest selling album in the U.K., it is amongst the top 25 all-time highest selling albums in the U.S., and it spent a record 741 weeks on the Billboard 200 list.

It takes considerable cojones to attempt a reinterpretation of  Dark Side of the Moon, so I can’t help being impressed with the ambition and look forward to hearing the results. But, Lips, you better brace yourselves for the inevitable. You can’t mess with something that is so precious to so many and not piss some folks off.