The ghost of cosmos past

In my previous entry about the Whole Earth Catalogue I mentioned that it offered a book by Carl Sagan. That just happened to be something that caught my eye as I perused the big pages of the catalogue - I could just have easily spotted and mentioned a thousand other items. But I guess that grabbed me because Sagan was always a fascinating person to me - a true scientific genius to whom normal people could relate and who could present weighty scientific subject matter in a way the masses could stomach. The guy had an unbelievable resume and a massive bibliography of published works including hundreds of scientific papers, books, and even a novel, Contact, that became a Hollywood movie. He was also, as most people who operate at high levels like that are, controversial. His tenure at Cornell's Laboratory For Planetary Studies was not without problems. He wasn't just some boring planethead.

So that was my first mention of him.

Sunday I drove down to Ithaca with Gilmore to see a John Hiatt/Lyle Lovett concert. We had time to kill so I was showing him some sights I came to know when I was working on some long-term projects that kept me there during the week for extended periods in the early 80s. I got to know the town pretty well. I told him I was going to take him down the best street in Ithaca, one I'd found in my evening cruises back then. It was immediately below the Cornell campus, alongside the Cascadilla Creek gorge (Ithaca is Gorges, after all). It's drastically steep in that area so there are lots of sharp switchbacks, and it's very narrow but lined with these beautiful tudor-style homes. Sort of the Finger Lakes answer to Lombard Street.

Having been years since I had been on the street, it took a while to find, but that was alright because in our search we found a couple of other great spots I'd never seen before. Eventually we found it (Cascadilla Park Road) and as we were descending I mentioned Sagan's name again because back when I was working down there I had heard that he had lived on this street. I never confirmed that it was true but it always seemed plausible and gave the street a little more mystique than it already had to me.

We headed in to the concert (in the newly-renovated State Theater), and the show was outstanding. It was an acoustic set, with these two very formidable musicians sitting side by side and trading witty banter when they weren't playing their formidable songs. Much of the conversation came in the form of Lovett doing some pseudo psychoanalysis on Hiatt. It was humorous and entertaining. I don't really remember why or how but somewhere along the line they got talking about the Dalai Lama and his name resurfaced two or three times before the show was over. It was sort of an odd, out-of-context thing, as his name wouldn't be a typical relate in a country and blues show.

Tonight I watched a portion of a documentary about Ronald Reagan with Annette. The show was all about his unbending foreign policy with regard to the Soviet Union and how that ultimately resulted in the end of the Cold War. I'm not here to extol the virtues of Reagan, but it was an interesting look back at a pretty heady time in world history. A big part of the story was, of course, the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"). One passage showed some of the silly, cartoonish animated renderings that were made to try to explain to the public just what SDI was. It showed little green satellites shooting laser beams back and forth and blowing up missiles. And there in the middle of that segment came a brief flash of a press conference with Carl Sagan. He was cleverly mocking the whole concept of SDI and imitating the little cartoon and the laser gun sounds, much to the entertainment of the press.

Since that was my third close encounter with Carl Sagan in a short period of time, I took that as a sign and did some further digging. I Googled his name, and up comes the link to carlsagan.com, better known as "The Carl Sagan Portal." Oooohh. The first word on the menu that catches my eye is "Blog." Is Carl blogging from his new place in the cosmos? I click on it and it turns out to be written by his widow, Ann Druyan (his third wife, and her resume is equally impressive) and without really reading any of it, I scroll down the window of text and immediately come upon this picture:













His book Cosmos is supposedly the best-selling science book ever published in English, and his Cosmos series is supposedly the most watched show ever shown on PBS.

One of his most intriguing ventures may have been his involvement with the possibilities of communication with life elsewhere in the solar system and the universe. He chaired the committee that planted the gold-coated phonograph discs on the Voyager spacecrafts that contain information from and about Earth. Elvis has left the building and Voyager I has left the solar system, and is now steaming into the great beyond (currently in the heliosheath) carrying a gold platter that has on it some Chuck Berry music, thanks to Carl.

Sagan is buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Ithaca, just a meteorite's throw from the switchback road where he may or may not have lived, and probably under billions and billions of particles of soil:

A war story

Working as a geologist for 27 years has put me in some pretty interesting places and given me a few stories to tell. I've found myself in spots that most people don't get access to. Tunnels, salt mines, coal mines. Nuclear and hydro power plants. Nasty, contaminated industrial sites. The bottom of a deep excavation (with a supplied-air mask) standing on drums of hazardous waste that hadn't seen daylight for three decades. A clean room where CDs are manufactured, which required special sterile clothing. I got caught in a big storm at night on a steel barge on the Great Salt Lake. I got to spend time on a private island or two in the Bahamas. Main Street in downtown Houston on the graveyard shift with a drill rig, along with the hookers and drunk urban cowboys. The list is long and probably boring to most people. Anybody working in the engineering consulting business gets to do things like this and has their own list of war stories. And we trade them regularly. It's what makes the insanity of consulting palatable, for me anyway.

Back in 1990 we were doing a lot of environmental work for Kodak, which had its share of big-time contamination problems. We did a lot of sampling all over Kodak Park, and it usually involved a lot of drilling of soil and rock. Characterizing the geologic conditions was a big part of every investigation. After studying isolated pockets of Kodak Park over the years, it was decided that our company would do a more comprehensive, regional geologic study and report that would serve as a backdrop for all of these individual studies we were doing. This was a boon to us geologists on staff at the time as it gave us free rein to study the overall geology of the Rochester area, both on paper and in the field. I was lucky enough to be involved in both aspects. The field work included getting out and doing some bedrock mapping at some of the few rock outcrops we have in this area.

One of the best places to see the local rock formations is in the barge canal on the west side of the city. It's one long outcrop, and it exposes one of the few faults in the area. We decided in April to take my canoe along the canal because the ice had thawed and they had just begun refilling it for the summer. So the water level was high enough to canoe but not yet high enough to inundate the rock walls. I was joined by two women, Suzanne, who worked with me, and Judy who worked for Kodak. Geologists all. Even though it was only April it was a sunny and calm day, the kind that can give you your first sunburn of the season. We put in somewhere west of Rt. 390 and slowly headed east. The plan was to just take a lot of pictures and notes, and get a few fracture and bedding measurements with the Brunton Compass. We all knew it was a gift of a workday and we were ready to enjoy it. Nothing like getting paid to spend a nice day outside on the water.

Being so early in the season, we had the canal to ourselves. The first thing we noticed was the abundance of flotsam and jetsam being delivered by the current, which we were going against. That included a dead raccoon and other small and decaying organisms. I guess the canal in winter is the place to die if you're a critter. I remember quipping that we better keep our eye out for something bigger and shaped like us. We cruised along, stopping here and there to be geologists and after about a half a day we were somewhere past Buffalo Road. The walls are vertical and fairly high along that stretch, and the slopes above are covered in dense brush. You can't see much from down in the canal, nor can you be seen, except from the occasional bridges.

A tree had toppled from the upper slope into the water and was laying against the rock face like a rake against a garage wall. As we approached it we could see a dark object floating up against it. Because of our earlier joking about the possibility, I think we knew right away what it was, but your mind does play tricks on you, so we couldn't be sure. Like when you're driving along the road and something on the shoulder looks from a distance like one thing but when you get close to it turns out to be something entirely different from what you were sure you saw. I steered the canoe directly toward it, and as we got close, any questions about what it was were imediately answered, by observation and smell. We had us a dead body.

Gruesome is a good word - all bloated and rotten. Pardon the pun but it was doing the dead man's float. Only the shoulders and back were really above water. But the thing I remember most clearly was the stench. We did not stay close for long.

It's pretty weird to come upon a body, especially when that was not our purpose for being there. We weren't on a missing person hunt, but we found one. So now what do we do? Well, it was 1990, but being slightly ahead of our time, we actually had a cell phone with us. More often called "portable" phones back then, they weren't really in common use yet, but we owned a couple of them for project work. It was one of those giant brick phones, and it would get really hot in your hand if you talked for long. We thought it would be a good idea to have it with us. So I dial 911, and it went something like this:

me: I want to report a dead body that we just found.
911: What's the address?
me: Uhh, there is no address. I'm on the barge canal.
911: Where exactly are you calling from?
me: A canoe in the barge canal.
911: Can you give me an exact location?
me: Exact, no, but we're about half-way between Buffalo Road and Chili Ave.
911: Are you sure its a body?
me: Based on smell alone, yes.

A few minutes later she called back:

911: The rescuers should be approaching soon, but they will have to be on foot. They're asking you to make yourself visible so they know where the body is.

I wanted to say leave the rescuers out of this, it's too late, and just tell them to just follow the smell, but I didn't. Something about the oddness of the situation made me want to crack jokes. After about ten minutes our little isolated spot, which was not accessible by vehicle, was crawling with firemen and cops. They quickly had a guy don a wetsuit, climb a ladder down into the canal (about 15 ft. below the edge of the bank) and wrestle this rotten corpse into a basket. The unlucky guy was named Scotty and you know he was the newest guy on the force. They kept yelling encouragement: "That's it Scotty! Great job Scotty!"

Once the job was done, we continued on our way but I don't guess we got a whole lot done after that. I spent time on the phone later with the police and got a call from the D&C that night, asking for details. The reporter said her editor boss, when he heard the story recounted later that afternoon, told her to call me because it sounded weird to him that someone would have a portable phone with them in a place like that. Times have changed.

The victim turned out to be a guy who ran away from a halfway house and they ruled it accidental but I heard through the grapevine they suspected suicide. A sad story to be sure. We shared a headline with him the next day:

[click to expand]

All this jazz

Sunday dawn. I don't know why I'm up so early on a Sunday. But I find this early hour, once I get some coffee in me, to be really pleasant. Up early because I want to be, not because I have to be. And it's even better because I have McCoy Tyner live on the headphones. Nothing like some uberjazz to speed up the rising of the Sunday sun. Although from the looks of the sky as it lightens, it's just going to vary in it's grayness, and begrudge us any sight of the sun. Yesterday was the opposite, with sunny blue sky in abundance. Of course I was in the office most of the day, wrestling with the project from hell. I really oughta be in there today as well. We shall see. There's been too much of that lately.
+ + + + + + +
It's now 10:45, and I've been to church and back. The sky is now spritzing small cold drops. But McCoy is back on, helping me fight off the pall this kind of weather brings on. Fine, fine jazz. It took me a long time to learn how to listen to jazz. My father listened to jazz a lot when I was a kid. Stuff like Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson. Jazz vocalists like the Four Freshman, who gave Brian Wilson his basis for harmonies. So it was there, I was exposed to it, but I wasn't really listening. Like any kid in the 60s, it was the Beatles and the Stones and all of the pop radio hits that put music up front in life. Pop music is easy to listen to, usually conventionally structured and predictable (verse/chorus, verse/chorus, bridge, verse/chorus). It satisfies quickly. On to the next tune.

But jazz is obviously different, and you have to work at it. It came very slowly for me. The fusion bands in the 70s like Weather Report, Mahvishnu Orchestra, and Chick Corea were stretching things out without being too avant garde so as to turn off my young ears, and I dug them heavily. They had enough rock and pop elements to work for me. Miles Davis was a little too far out for me, usually. I knew a lot of people who were listening to other stuff but I wasn't tuning in much.

Eventually I turned around on it and came to appreciate the satisfaction that exists in letting yourself hear what jazz artists are laying down. For me that ability was probably fostered by listening to the Grateful Dead for all those years. Their long jams were jazz in a rock setting and format. It was all improvisation, noisy and intense at times, poetic at others. A lot of people didn't like that part of their shows, but I did, and I guess I was really becoming a jazz fan during those years without realizing it. Now I've grown into a different mind set.

And I'll say without hesitation that I still struggle with the really far out stuff. But at least now I can listen to it, and give it a shot. I've learned to relax into it and let it show you where it's going. There was no better example of that than this year's Rochester International Jazz Festival, where the newest venue, the Reformation Lutheran Church hosted the "Nordic Jazz Now" series. An entire week of bands that offered very unconventional, experimental, challenging music. Difficult stuff. And I found myself loving every one of them. I tried to sit up close, where the sound was as much directly from the instruments as from the P.A. I became very engaged in those shows. I hope there is more of that this year.

But I'm still a jazz neophyte. Fortunately there is a planet full of jazz music out there with enough gravity to keep pulling me in. McCoy Tyner is currently doing a great job of that. His music is actually pretty accessible. He rocks.













[Andrea Pettersen Quartet at the Church-photo by RIJF]

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Brothers, Sons and Pearl Snaps

About three years ago on a Friday night I sat down and sent this e-mail to a handful of people after going out to hear a band:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I left work early today to pick my son up at school and move him home for the summer. After loading up the van with a dorm room's worth of goods and unloading it at home, I checked my work e-mail to see if anything important came in after I left. There was a note from Diamond Dan, which he'd sent to a few of us in the office:

================
"Subject: Bastard Sons Of Johnny Cash......
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
...........tonight at Milestone's @ 8:00. I can't remember who's opening but they are also a fine act. I will see you all there, and I've got your first two beers."
================

I had never heard these guys, but remembered reading about them, and I thought their name was so cool. So I cleaned up and hit the road.

The crowd was sparse when I walked in and there was no sign of Dan or anyone else. The opening act, The Dead String Brothers, a six-piece from Detroit, were already in gear. The frontman was a thin guitar player who brought to mind Beck. The Brothers also had a sister, a big black-haired beauty in very tight jeans who sang harmony. They were firmly entrenched in the alternative country genre, a Wilco/Uncle Tupelo/Whiskeytown amalgam, but still with their own sound. The pedal steel player gave them a nice feel - it was music to drink beer by.

Pearl snaps were prevalent on stage, what with everyone wearing western shirts. As I looked around, I saw there were a bunch of them offstage as well. A tall, thin guy standing next to me had a really gaudy western shirt with all kinds of embroidery that would have been at home underneath one of those Nudie western suits. A long-haired fella, he looked like a graying Jesus ready for line dancing. He was already pretty wound up, hooting and hollering even during the ballads.

After a few tunes the Beck look-alike said the next song was dedicated to a guy they met last night in Buffalo named Ernie, who apparently had gotten pretty excited when they played what Beck called "a relatively obscure cover tune", and they were going to do it again tonight. They broke into the Band's "Get Up Jake." The long-haired guy just about lost it, raising his hooting and hollering to a new level. I figured he must be Ernie. I had to interview him, so after the band was done, we had a chat. He was indeed the aforementioned Ernie from Buffalo, and it as it turns out a personal friend of Levon Helm and Rick Danko. Or so he said. He had come from Buffalo with a bunch of his buddies, who were also starting to hoot and holler, God bless 'em.

The Bastard Sons took the stage after a quick equipment change. They were a four-piece band, and each sported a western shirt, complete with snaps. The frontman played acoustic guitar and sang all of the songs, and the lead guitar player worked the same telecaster all night. This guy was good. Really good. He was the only easterner in the band, hailing from Connecticut; the rest are from California. They did what seemed to be mostly original tunes, with a smattering of Johnny Cash (Long Black Veil & a hepped-up, ska-based Ring Of Fire), Waylon Jennings & the like. I found it to be very satisfying music, and the more they played, the better they got. That improvement was partially fueled by a line up of whiskey shots on the edge of the stage that slowly disappeared one-by-one.

The opening band came out and sat next to me at the bar during the Bastard Sons' set, and had a few shots of their own. After a while, the black-haired beauty had unsnapped her top three pearl snaps to reveal a black bra, and she and Beck got more and more friendly toward each other after each beer chaser. The Buffalo boys hooted, the Bastards rocked, the pearl snaps shone, but Dan never showed. They closed with a rousing version of Viva Las Vegas that would have made Doc Pomus proud.

W.E.C.

I came upon my old copy of the Last Whole Earth Catalogue (1971) and I couldn't not pick it up and do some page flipping. About 440 pages (the original Catalogue in 1968 had 64 pages), oversize, black print on what were once fairly white pages but are now brittle and flaxen in tone, especially around the edges.

It was an amazing collection of tools and information on an indescribably large array of subjects, and it really put the world at your fingertips, or at least made it readily available via the U.S. Post Office. You could order wheels and tires for your motorcycle, or a book on intelligent life in the universe by Carl Sagan. You could order instructions on how to build a windmill, or just buy a windmill itself. Moog synthesizers. Geodesic domes. Books on language. The Art and Practice of Hawking. Woks. Anvils. Boat toilets. Spinning wheels. It's all there. Not just the products themselves (which you generally ordered from other sources, not the WEC), but a seemingly infinite number of sketches, photos, figures, descriptions, testimonies, addresses, listings, all assembled in a way that resulted in no two pages being laid out alike. Sometimes there were random associated notes like, "Warning: funky generators eat fan motors," from the section on giant inflatable structures. It had many letters from readers and users, one of my favorites being from a guy who claimed he cured his warts with a swiss army knife and voodoo: "They now have more or less disappeared leaving only gaping holes and volcano-like craters on my calouses...."

The catalogue was the brainchild primarily of Stewart Brand, who said it was largely inspired by the ideas and teachings of Buckminster Fuller, the iconoclastic and visionary designer slash inventor slash all around outside-the-box thinker. Steve Jobs, in a commencement address at Stanford University said about the WEC: "This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." Stewart Brand went on to be somewhat involved in the evolution of the internet, as a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He's also involved in many other ventures of intelligent and unusual approaches to life on "spaceship earth" as Fuller tagged it.

If you had a burning question about something back in the late 60s or early 70s, your search for answers didn't involve a keyboard. But you might have gone to the bookshelf and pulled down a volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, or maybe the WEC. Flipping the pages of the catalogue was tantamount to today's web surfing.

When I first delved into the catalogue I read the built-in novel called "Divine Right's Trip," by Gurney Norman that was printed in the margin of each page. It was a story of a hippie in a '63 Volkswagon bus (named "Urge") and his mobile adventures. I read it during my trip across the country in my '66 Volkswagon bus. That was not planned. One of these days I'll re-read that story. Right now I've got to brush up on the many culinary benefits of the cattail, as described by the late Euell Gibbons. Of course I may need to also educate myself on how to make a flint cutting tool, so I can efficiently harvest the cattails. Then maybe I'll see if I can still get my hands on How To Keep Your Volkswagon Alive, a book once offered by the Catalogue for $5.50.

[mine looked like this, only more funky]

Words

Tom Waits can write.

His growl of a singing voice can belie some of the most heartfelt lyrics you'll ever hear. My friend Rick gave me a copy of his annual compilation CD, "On A Winter's Afternoon," which had a version of Waits' "Day After Tomorrow" sung beautifully by Linda Thompson. It's written from the point of view of a soldier who is essentially one day from finishing his tour of duty, and he's writing a letter home. This song is simple, straightforward poetry that somehow conveys volumes about war, life and death. It's not just clever wordplay; too many songwriters get caught up in cleverness. We're talking about an average joe, who's just trying to look out for himself and get back home, and the words serve that concept perfectly. But his thought process captures the much bigger picture of man/God/country and how that ends up in the lap of a grunt like him.

"I just do what I've been told,
we're just the gravel on the road....
and only the lucky one's come home
on the day after tomorrow."

He repeats the "day after tomorrow" phrase at the end of every verse, six times in all.

I don't think he makes it home.

Full lyrics: [http://tomwaits.lyrics.info/dayaftertomorrow.html]