The Eclipse

I have on occasion poked fun at meteorologists for making a career out of being incorrect more often than not, like a ball player’s hitting chances but with more riding on it, but perhaps the jokes aren’t as deserved as they used to be. Nate Silver makes the claim in his book The Signal and the Noise that the science of weather has become much more accurate as of late. When a forecast includes a thirty percent chance of afternoon thunderstorms, the numbers apparently bear that out: ten days under similar conditions will in fact produce close to three afternoons of rain.

Accurate or not, Monday morning led to thousands of people analyzing weather data like never before in preparation for the Great American total eclipse. I checked and rechecked the forecasts late Sunday, early Monday and again en route to determine our final destination.  Initially I was ready to drive to southern Illinois, but the updated forecast read:

Carbondale, IL:  12PM – Partly sunny,  1PM – Cloudy,  2PM – Cloudy,  then afternoon showers

Fulton, MO: 12PM – Partly sunny,  1PM – Partly sunny,  2PM – Partly sunny, then afternoon showers

Partly sunny trumped cloudy, so I along with my son and two of his friends drove the extra distance to Kingdom City, Missouri on Highway 54 and set up shop next to the Pick-A-Dilly Quick Stop along with hundreds of other eager viewers. It was a perfect location, including shade to picnic in, access to a relatively clean bathroom and $1 Diet Cokes to boot. We looked upward with our eclipse glasses through thin, hazy clouds to see the eclipse begin, and for the moment it looked like the weather forecast was spot on.

Then the weather went from mostly sunny with hazy cloud cover to mostly cloudy to downright cloudy and back again, the sun alternating between clearly visible to clearly not.  Not a terrible situation, but it was still an hour away from the total eclipse, and the crowd started getting restless. I made conversation with a man from Wisconsin who had commented on my UW hat, and before driving down from Port Washington he’d narrowed his trip to three possible locations: Carbondale, IL, central Missouri or southeastern Nebraska. Somehow we ended up in the exact same location, and the thickening cloud cover caused him to consider relocating and driving one or two exits east on highway 70 where it looked like the skies might be a bit clearer. The problem was, would there be a place to park and view the eclipse?  Would there be the same splendid access to a bathroom? And would the skies really be any better?

We both conferred with our respective clans and decided to stick it out, wishing the eclipse would hurry up as the clouds to the west grew thicker and thicker. 

1:05 came around, and it looked like the total eclipse was imminent. As clouds slipped away to give us a better view people verbally cheered on the moon as if it were running at a track meet. “Come on! You can do it!” Cicadas started singing in the tall trees behind us. At 1:10 there was such as slight sliver of sun that it couldn’t possible wait any longer to slip behind the moon, but still we waited to an ever-dimming atmosphere that resembled dusk but with lighting that appeared artificial, unnatural, like a giant film set. 

And at 1:13 as the moon overtook the last hint of sun, the clouds that had intermittently blocked our view and caused anxiety for the previous hour disappeared. People oohed and aahed. Camera shutters opened and closed. Taco Bell’s lights across the street turned on. And when it was over, the congregation of sky-watchers clapped. I high-fived my son and his friends.

One of his friends said, “That was amazing.”

I was relieved, not only for having chosen a spot that brought our journey to fruition, but that the teenagers with me were impressed by something that nature created. After all that their young eyes have seen in their short lifetimes, I wasn’t sure the sun and the moon would live up to the hype. 

Fifteen minutes after the total eclipse ended, it started to rain.

Chalk one up for the meteorologists.

To Read or not to Read

A friend of mine reads over 100 books a year.  That’s right.  A staggering feat of one book every 3.6 days with about a 40/60 non-fiction to fiction split. To put matters in perspective, he and I both happened to read Paul Auster’s novel, 4-3-2-1, an extremely dense 850-page book that took me three weeks to finish. That’s about 280 pages a week for me…not too bad, right? 

But at my friend’s rate, assuming an average of 300 pages per book, he must read at more than twice that rate, around 575 pages per week or 82 pages per day. And this doesn’t allow for any I-don’t-feel-like-reading breaks. You know, those days when you just want to open a bag of chips, turn on the baseball game and have a few beers? After reading 4-3-2-1 I needed to cleanse the pallet a little, so I took a few days off of reading altogether before diving into a comic book (Doonesbury: The Reagan Years – an excellent read, BTW) followed by the extremely short and entertaining Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris, and now I’m nearly through yet another light read, Seinfeldia. Only after I complete this lightweight morsel will I finally take on a book with more substance. 

So how does my friend do it? His simple answer to me was “I don’t watch TV.  If I have downtime, I read.” Pretty simple, right? I don’t really watch TV either, except baseball and football, but I am an expert in finding other ways to pass time without actually accomplishing anything (I’m doing one right now!). But clearly the practice of turning off the TV or phone or computer to engage in some other pursuit – reading, practicing an instrument, taking a class, learning to dance – really can lead to amazing results.

Like my friend, I log all of the books I read. I’m up to fourteen in 2017 – a very good clip for me. Here are the tallies for years past:

2016 – 21

2015 – 19

2014 – 11

2013 – 13

2012 – 8

2011 – 12

2010 – 8

2009 – 12

2008 – 28 (I’m not sure what happened here, except to say it was my son’s first year in all-day school, so I must have taken advantage of it.)

Things get a little shaky after this from a record keeping perspective, but you get the idea. Except for the outlier of 2008, I’ve been around a book a month guy, though it looks like I might be inching closer to a book every two weeks guy. Not a bad clip, and it might be a good goal to finish around 24 books a year.

I’m also someone who looks up words when I’m reading and logs the ones I think are worth remembering (I have an Excel spreadsheet of about 420 words I’m trying to master), and that slows me down considerably.  One would hope that over time I would become more knowledgeable and not have research so many words, thereby increasing the number of books I read each year. 

One would hope…and yet, last night I once again had to look up the word feckless, despite its inclusion on my spreadsheet for the past eight years. 

How’s that for feckless?

The Skills of Expression

For the last year or so my workouts and long car rides have been accompanied by Marc Maron, Terry Gross, Greg Kot and Jim Derogatis. Nothing passes time like a good interview, and yesterday while huffing and puffing on a stationary bicycle I heard a doozy of a conversation on Sound Opinions with multi-talented Esperanza Spalding, just another of the seemingly endless blind spots I have in my musical repertoire. I only knew Spalding as the bass player with big hair who beat out Justin Bieber for the Best New Artist Grammy some years ago, but after this interview I’m next in line to purchase her latest album, Emily’s D+Evolution. (Yes, that’s right, if you like a piece of art, you should buy it, not stream it on youtube.) This gal can not only play, she can express herself, think deeply, push boundaries and challenge conventional wisdom. If you haven’t heard the interview, I highly recommend it.

But it was the interesting juxtaposition of something Spalding said and a quote from a character in the Mike Mills film 20th Century Women that prompted me to write this blog.

20th Century Women is if nothing else a love song to punk music, and while I’ve never been a fan of the genre, I was taken with the following exchange as Dorothea – played by Annette Bening – challenges Abbie – played by Greta Gerwig – about the music she’s listening to (thanks to Wikiquote for making this easy):

Dorothea: What is that?

Abbie: It's The Raincoats.

Dorothea: Can't things just be pretty?

Jamie: Pretty music is used to hide how unfair and corrupt society is.

Dorothea: Ah, okay so... they're not very good, and they know that, right?

Abbie: Yeah, it's like they've got this feeling, and they don't have any skill, and they don't want skill, because it's really interesting what happens when your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it. It creates this energy that's raw. Isn't it great?

There’s something to this, I think, and it really made me consider punk music in a new way.  There is something very powerful in expressing oneself in a raw, uninhibited way despite not having tools to do so eloquently. It happens at nearly every outdoor festival I play at. There’s always that one guy – usually shirtless – who stands near the side of the stage and dances. Dances like there’s no tomorrow, like he’s offering a primitive prayer to the heavens, arms and legs flailing, torso gyrating, eyes closed. This man is dancing despite not knowing how to pirouette or jeté, and there’s something very freeing and very pure about this, like when a three year-old joyously shakes and stomps to music. I wish I could express myself as uninhibitedly.

But in the Sound Opinions interview Spalding offers another way to consider things:

“You need technical prowess to express yourself freely. You don’t need to use all of it all of the time, but it really helps to have technical facility.” She goes on to mention dance troops who hire ballet dancers, not because they’re performing ballet, but because they need the technical skills to pull off the dance moves the troop requires. “Music is the same. Jazz music, whatever music. It’s just having more vocabulary, like you want to be a great writer and you discover that your vocabulary is limited, like you feel the crunch, like I want to have a place out here, I need to work on my vocabulary.”

And she is, of course, spot on. I think of the multitude of times that I wanted to get my point across in a sharp, succinct way, but couldn’t find the one word that would have allowed me to do so, instead leaning on very basic vocabulary that diluted my message. Similarly, when I play piano, there have been times when I wanted to take my playing to a new place, and although I could visualize exactly what I’d like to do, I didn’t have the technical skills to take me there.

It’s important that Spalding added the following caveat, “You don’t need to use all of it all of the time.” When my son was just learning drums and starting to come up with his own fills, I played for him the tom fills in Toto’s song, “Africa.” You know it well, but in case you need reminding, go to 1:10, 2:20 and 3:15 of the following video. 

These are three of the simplest tom fills you’ll ever hear, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any more effective. It’s important to note that Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro was among the most talented and most sought after drummers in the music industry at the time, and while he could have overcomplicated things (probably in a very tasteful and interesting way), he opted to offer simply what the song required. I imagine it’s the same in any art form. Ernest Hemmingway wrote relatively simply, but I suspect he could have rivaled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s word wizardly if he’d chosen to or needed to.

And that’s the ultimate aim of any musician, any artist or really any human being: to have the skills to express yourself in any way you see fit. If simplicity is required to express raw emotion like that of punk music, great. But if something more extravagant is needed, you can go into your bag of technical skills and do what’s required.

Who's to Blame for our Topsy Turvy World?

In a recent article by Kadeen Griffiths regarding the upcoming HBO film, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” actor Courtney B. Vance says, “The world is topsy turvy, and everyone is out for themselves. It shouldn’t be like that.” This phrase, topsy turvy, has been coming up a lot in conversation lately, because it seems as if our world has truly been turned on its head, and it’s easy to see who’s to blame.

Number 1 seeds are losing to number 8 seeds (the Blackhawks are the first NHL or NBA number one seed to ever be swept in the first round).

Fox News is now holding its hosts to a higher standard than the American public holds its elected officials.

Oscars winners are announced and then withdrawn.

The White House has gone from hosting Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder to Ted Nugent and Kid Rock.

Superbowl leads of 25 points are forfeited in a quarter and a half.

Alternative truth has become a phrase in our lexicon.

And who set the wheels in motions for this topsy turvy world? No, not Trump. He was merely a by-product. Instead, turn your attention to six days earlier during the waning minutes of November 2 when the Earth shifted slightly from its axis and allowed a little rain to fall onto Cleveland, Ohio. I’d gone to bed early that night (just as I would on November 8) and when I awoke after a brief nap, I thought to myself, “Holy shit! I don’t hear fireworks. The Cubs must have actually lost!” The lovable losers had been up 6-3 in the 7th when I called it a night feeling mildly depressed because without the Cubs, Red Sox and White Sox to make fun of, who was left except my lowly Brewers?   

And then I heard it. The sound of fireworks. Yes, the Indians had come back, ready to claim their first World Series since 1948, but a rain delay turned the fate of the world upside down that evening.

Now, my depression that night and following morning can’t compare to the sick, festering depression that much of America has felt since November 8 and will continue to feel as the country unravels, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the Cubs set the wheels in motion. 

Thanks a fricking lot, Cubbies. Enjoy your little victory dance as defending World Champions while the world crumbles all around you. You’re expected to make another playoff run this year, but hey, in this topsy turvy world you started, don’t get your hopes up.

In fact, in this topsy turvy world, my Brewers might actually have a shot.

Siskel and Ebert

A few days ago a friend of mine and I were discussing movies – what makes a good one and whether a well-executed movie that aims low is better than a poorly-executed movie that aims high – and I recalled a movie review of Siskel and Ebert. As I told it, Ebert was reviewing a Heather Locklear monster movie of some kind - Swamp-something-or-other – and Ebert gave it thumbs up, only to be challenged by Siskel for having given a thumbs down just a moment before for a drama that didn’t quite hit the mark.

And since time travel is possible through the magic of youtube, I can rest easy knowing that although I may not remember someone’s name a minute after he introduces himself, I can recall with stunning accuracy a twenty-eight year-old memory involving two people I never met discussing movies I’ve never seen.

Man, I miss these guys. Some of my most indelible memories are of their movie reviews. I vividly recall their reviews for “Once,” “The Accidental Tourist,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” and on and on. Very often what they said was as interesting or entertaining as the film itself. Sometimes more. 

Last night my wife and I watched “Baby Boom,” which I had never seen before, and after it was over I gave her four reasons why I thought it was a bad film. She humored me, and then humored me more when I said, “We gotta see what Siskel and Ebert said about this.” Sure enough, there it was on the internet. Siskel surprisingly liked the film. Ebert did not. Score one for Roger on that one.

But there were many reviews of both Gene’s and Roger’s that I disagreed with. Ebert put “Minority Report” at the very top of his list of best movies of 2001 – I’m still scratching my head over that one. But that was half the fun. They had opinions, but more importantly, they had personalities behind the opinions, and I genuinely liked both of them whether or not I agreed with them.

By coincidence, I just finished reading Ebert’s memoir, Life Itself, and I highly recommend the read, if for no other reason than the short chapter in which he espouses the virtues of the eatery Steak and Shake. That alone is worth the price of admission. But what I’m really going to take away from the book is a list of art that I haven’t yet explored and that is sure to be thought-provoking: certain movies by Altman and Scorsese, any movie by Bergman or Fellini, and writings by Studs Terkel and Thomas Wolfe. These will keep me busy for a while, and when I need a little break I can go to http://siskelandebert.org/ and take in a few reviews. I could spend a whole week doing nothing but.