About eight years ago, I found myself at an adult spelling bee in downtown Austin, which I'd read about the day before. I hadn't been living here long at the time. I did spelling bees as a kid, and at that time had just started playing Scrabble tournaments. Sounded like my kind of thing, and I figured I might do well, though you never know.
The way the adult spelling bee here works is that they first pass out a written test. Contestants circle the misspelled words on the page, the panel grades the tests, the top X finishers go on to take a second written test, and the top 20 or so from that test get to go onstage and compete. I went down there alone, didn't know anyone and I'm hardly a social butterfly to begin with. So I've got my first test but we haven't been told to open it and start yet, and I'm standing there with a beer in hand, finishing up a cigarette (five years quit now! but this was eight years ago, remember), pacing a little nervously...I was feeling competitive excitement, sure, and spelling was on the short list of things I would have been confident about at the time, but as far as I know I was not outwardly displaying that to any great degree.
What happened next is why I'm telling you this story. A woman came up to me, I don't know, fiftyish? Barely remember her, but I remember what she said: I bet you're going to win this. You just look like you will. I said, well, shucks, I hope so...I did end up winning, but...how the heck did she pick up on that? I hadn't said a word to her. Yes, the situation was not like others for me, but she couldn't have known that at all. I didn't look bookish, nor intimidating - just some nervous but generally happy-looking guy in jeans and a patterned shirt finishing off a smoke and a beer and waiting to open his test. I have no idea what I was doing that made her think I had supreme confidence (even more than I actually had).
Last year, I competed in this event again, as I usually do. I've done it seven times and won five times. There's a highlights video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl-jiVilS9U
My family emailed the video around, and one of the viewers noted that she thought I oozed confidence here. What's strange is that to me, watching this video, I look nervous - rapidly blinking eyes, shifting posture. That the viewer thought I was supremely confident could have been confirmation bias (she knew I'd won the event multiple times), but I suspect not. Other people who were there or have seen the video have volunteered similar observations. Yes, in the video I'm spelling quickly as if I know the answers, but only because, well, I did happen to know them, and like a lot of people I tend to speed up when I'm nervous. I had also drunk maybe four beers rapidly on an empty stomach, which is, what, like six or seven normally, so I had a good buzz going and was feeling a little queasy and was trying to manage that. I've almost always had a lot to drink at these things, and it's part festive and part trying to calm my nerves since there's a lot of socializing. Yeah, I'm confident when I'm up there, but that's not really the internal dialogue - I'm not up there thinking, man, I'm a badass. I'm thinking, yikes, I hope I don't get a word I don't recognize, guess wrong and get knocked out. I'm always a little surprised when I win. Honestly.
So I'm perceived as giving off this super-confident vibe in this situation, and this situation alone, even when I'm not really all that confident. And it was true before I ever won, so it's not just people knowing I've won before. Again, what the heck are people picking up on? If I could identify what I was doing right there and replicate it at will, I'd do it all the time, because intense but calm confidence is the optimal social strategy.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
My 2011 in Scrabble
Lots going on but little I'm inclined to write about here just yet, so I'll turn to a familiar subject. I'm not playing any more tournaments this year, so I'll recap my 2011 Scrabble season:
February: Texas State Championship, Salado, TX. Finished 1st of 14; won this event for the second time (previous win was in 2008). North American TWL rating up from 1941 to 1970.
March: Dallas Open, Dallas, TX. Finished 3rd of 70; lost a close final game to the first-place finisher, Dave Wiegand. North American TWL rating up from 1970 to 2014, a new peak rating; new peak rank of #7 in North America. A couple of club members made me a cake!
Later in March: West Coast World Championship Wordlist Challenge, Ashland, OR. Switching to the big word list now. Finished 4th of 18, just out of the money; would have finished 2nd or 3rd with a win in the final game, but Nathan Benedict bingoed out to beat me. North American Collins rating down from 1986 to 1968. (Note: "Collins" refers to the word list, published by the Collins dictionary company, used in tournaments everywhere except North America and for a small but growing number of tournaments in North America; "TWL" refers to the smaller North American word list.)
Memorial Day, Houston, TX: Finished 4th of 14, just out of the money again, by losing the final game by a mere 10 points to second-place finisher Orry Swift. The game began with five passes, and had I made a sixth pass the game would have ended in a tie and I would have finished 3rd. Tough call to make in the moment; I chose to play it out, but in retrospect passing was probably better. Oh well. North American TWL rating down from 2014 to 2004.
Austin June one-day tournament: Finished 1st, 4-2 record, playing in our first-ever Collins division. North American Collins rating slipped just a bit, down from 1968 to 1962.
July 4 weekend, one-day San Antonio tournament: Finished 5th of 6, 2-4 record, North American TWL rating down from 2004 to 1968. Near-total trainwreck. One-days can go that way sometimes. Glad to see tournament Scrabble action in San Antonio, though!
National Scrabble Championship, August, Dallas, TX: After a miserable NSC in 2010, I had hopes of redeeming myself. It looked good halfway through, as I was 12-4 and playing at Table 1...and then I went on one of the worst losing skids I've ever had, losing 10 of 11. Finished 16-14-1, 40th place of 108 in Division 1, North American TWL rating down from 1968 to 1928. Not as bad as the previous year's debacle, but still a poor result. I'm very happy about one thing, though: I've never been calmer or more Zen at a tournament than I was in Dallas. Surprised myself how well I handled the roller-coaster ride emotionally, and I didn't feel bad about the outcome. I did my best, that's all you can do. I think that calm, if I can maintain it, will help me in future tournaments.
Austin August one-day tournament: TWL this time; I usually direct these events and don't play, but we needed an evener and I joined the field. Finished 1st, 5-1 record. North American TWL rating up from 1928 to 1940.
Toronto International Open, September: Finished 3rd of 22, behind a couple of pretty good players named Adam Logan and Nigel Richards. Given the strength of the top of this field, I was very happy with that result. North American Collins rating up from 1962 to 2007, a new peak on that list and in the top 10 North Americans. WESPA international rating up from 1940ish, I forget, to 1991 going into Worlds.
World Scrabble Championships, Warsaw, Poland, October: Finished 16th of 107. Got as high as fourth on day 2 and managed to eke out a win against Adam Logan at table 1, but day 3 and the morning of day 4 weren't as kind, and I had to rally to win my last five and get into the top 20. Played a lot of very strong players, so a top 20 result is respectable, though of course I wanted more than that. Ten-day European vacation/endless pub crawl/major international tournament. Whew! This was my third Worlds, and it's always a rewarding experience. Great to see and play old friends and meet new ones. WESPA rating up from 1991 to 1999.
North American TWL rating started the year at 1941 and ended at 1940; I'm ranked 31st now.
North American Collins rating started the year at 1986 and ended at 2007; I'm ranked 12th on that list now, 8th or 9th (something like that, too lazy to check) if you don't count one-off foreign players or Quackle.
WESPA International rating is 1999 after Worlds; I'm now ranked 28th on that list.
(Yes, having three ratings is weird.)
Money won this year: about $1,800. After expenses, I lost a fair amount, which isn't really unusual; very, very few people make a profit playing Scrabble while going to the types of tournaments I often do. I would guess that I've broken about even over the eight years I've been playing tournaments, and that includes nothing for the time spent practicing. Worth it for many other reasons, though.
***
Outlook for 2012 (etched in jello, as always)
I'm committed to playing four tournaments: New Orleans in January, Texas State Championship in February, Las Vegas in February, and the Dallas Open in March. At this point, I plan to take an extended indefinite break from tournament play after that and focus more on some non-Scrabble things. There is a small chance I might play a strong event like the British Masters (do I have that right? I can never keep those British tournaments straight...EDIT: no, not quite: it's not the Masters, it's the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship) in August. Almost surely not playing Nationals this time, as much as I'd like to wash the last two years' results out of my hair. (The two NSCs before that were pretty good, though.) It's possible I may not play out of my region, or much at all, before the 2013 Worlds, which is too far in the future to say much about now.
As a player...well, I recall thinking around 2008 or so that I'd gotten about as good as I was realistically going to get. A year or so later, I recall thinking I might be able to make a push and get up another level, but that really didn't happen. Now, I'd say I'm a better player than I was three years ago, but not by much; my instinct then that I've found my level has proved to be correct. I'm not and most likely never will be one of the top 10-15 players in the world - I'm somewhere in the next group of, I dunno, 30? 50? 100? A lot of good players out there now...anyway, I'm cool with it. The question is whether to do what is required to stay where I am. I can't imagine not doing the words at least some, and I'll still play games now and then in club and elsewhere, so even my time off won't be a total break. So who knows. After thousands of games, I still enjoy playing; Scrabble's a very replayable game. Not every game turns out to be interesting, but enough do to keep me engaged. And more important, I've got lots of friends in the scene.
February: Texas State Championship, Salado, TX. Finished 1st of 14; won this event for the second time (previous win was in 2008). North American TWL rating up from 1941 to 1970.
March: Dallas Open, Dallas, TX. Finished 3rd of 70; lost a close final game to the first-place finisher, Dave Wiegand. North American TWL rating up from 1970 to 2014, a new peak rating; new peak rank of #7 in North America. A couple of club members made me a cake!
Later in March: West Coast World Championship Wordlist Challenge, Ashland, OR. Switching to the big word list now. Finished 4th of 18, just out of the money; would have finished 2nd or 3rd with a win in the final game, but Nathan Benedict bingoed out to beat me. North American Collins rating down from 1986 to 1968. (Note: "Collins" refers to the word list, published by the Collins dictionary company, used in tournaments everywhere except North America and for a small but growing number of tournaments in North America; "TWL" refers to the smaller North American word list.)
Memorial Day, Houston, TX: Finished 4th of 14, just out of the money again, by losing the final game by a mere 10 points to second-place finisher Orry Swift. The game began with five passes, and had I made a sixth pass the game would have ended in a tie and I would have finished 3rd. Tough call to make in the moment; I chose to play it out, but in retrospect passing was probably better. Oh well. North American TWL rating down from 2014 to 2004.
Austin June one-day tournament: Finished 1st, 4-2 record, playing in our first-ever Collins division. North American Collins rating slipped just a bit, down from 1968 to 1962.
July 4 weekend, one-day San Antonio tournament: Finished 5th of 6, 2-4 record, North American TWL rating down from 2004 to 1968. Near-total trainwreck. One-days can go that way sometimes. Glad to see tournament Scrabble action in San Antonio, though!
National Scrabble Championship, August, Dallas, TX: After a miserable NSC in 2010, I had hopes of redeeming myself. It looked good halfway through, as I was 12-4 and playing at Table 1...and then I went on one of the worst losing skids I've ever had, losing 10 of 11. Finished 16-14-1, 40th place of 108 in Division 1, North American TWL rating down from 1968 to 1928. Not as bad as the previous year's debacle, but still a poor result. I'm very happy about one thing, though: I've never been calmer or more Zen at a tournament than I was in Dallas. Surprised myself how well I handled the roller-coaster ride emotionally, and I didn't feel bad about the outcome. I did my best, that's all you can do. I think that calm, if I can maintain it, will help me in future tournaments.
Austin August one-day tournament: TWL this time; I usually direct these events and don't play, but we needed an evener and I joined the field. Finished 1st, 5-1 record. North American TWL rating up from 1928 to 1940.
Toronto International Open, September: Finished 3rd of 22, behind a couple of pretty good players named Adam Logan and Nigel Richards. Given the strength of the top of this field, I was very happy with that result. North American Collins rating up from 1962 to 2007, a new peak on that list and in the top 10 North Americans. WESPA international rating up from 1940ish, I forget, to 1991 going into Worlds.
World Scrabble Championships, Warsaw, Poland, October: Finished 16th of 107. Got as high as fourth on day 2 and managed to eke out a win against Adam Logan at table 1, but day 3 and the morning of day 4 weren't as kind, and I had to rally to win my last five and get into the top 20. Played a lot of very strong players, so a top 20 result is respectable, though of course I wanted more than that. Ten-day European vacation/endless pub crawl/major international tournament. Whew! This was my third Worlds, and it's always a rewarding experience. Great to see and play old friends and meet new ones. WESPA rating up from 1991 to 1999.
North American TWL rating started the year at 1941 and ended at 1940; I'm ranked 31st now.
North American Collins rating started the year at 1986 and ended at 2007; I'm ranked 12th on that list now, 8th or 9th (something like that, too lazy to check) if you don't count one-off foreign players or Quackle.
WESPA International rating is 1999 after Worlds; I'm now ranked 28th on that list.
(Yes, having three ratings is weird.)
Money won this year: about $1,800. After expenses, I lost a fair amount, which isn't really unusual; very, very few people make a profit playing Scrabble while going to the types of tournaments I often do. I would guess that I've broken about even over the eight years I've been playing tournaments, and that includes nothing for the time spent practicing. Worth it for many other reasons, though.
***
Outlook for 2012 (etched in jello, as always)
I'm committed to playing four tournaments: New Orleans in January, Texas State Championship in February, Las Vegas in February, and the Dallas Open in March. At this point, I plan to take an extended indefinite break from tournament play after that and focus more on some non-Scrabble things. There is a small chance I might play a strong event like the British Masters (do I have that right? I can never keep those British tournaments straight...EDIT: no, not quite: it's not the Masters, it's the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship) in August. Almost surely not playing Nationals this time, as much as I'd like to wash the last two years' results out of my hair. (The two NSCs before that were pretty good, though.) It's possible I may not play out of my region, or much at all, before the 2013 Worlds, which is too far in the future to say much about now.
As a player...well, I recall thinking around 2008 or so that I'd gotten about as good as I was realistically going to get. A year or so later, I recall thinking I might be able to make a push and get up another level, but that really didn't happen. Now, I'd say I'm a better player than I was three years ago, but not by much; my instinct then that I've found my level has proved to be correct. I'm not and most likely never will be one of the top 10-15 players in the world - I'm somewhere in the next group of, I dunno, 30? 50? 100? A lot of good players out there now...anyway, I'm cool with it. The question is whether to do what is required to stay where I am. I can't imagine not doing the words at least some, and I'll still play games now and then in club and elsewhere, so even my time off won't be a total break. So who knows. After thousands of games, I still enjoy playing; Scrabble's a very replayable game. Not every game turns out to be interesting, but enough do to keep me engaged. And more important, I've got lots of friends in the scene.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
The most underreported news story of my lifetime
This link shows the overall and per capita crime rates for the U.S. from 1960 to 2010:
http://www.disastercenter.com/
Scroll down and look at the crime rates per 100,000 inhabitants. To anyone braying that civility is dead and that we are on the brink of societal collapse, um, yeah:
The rate of overall violent crime has dropped from a peak of 758.1 per 100,000 to 403.6 - nearly cut in half. This is the lowest figure in any year since 1972.
The murder rate in 2010 was 4.8; this is less than half of the peak rate, in 1980, and lower than any year since 1963.
Oh, but surely rape is on the rise, given the changes in our culture...nope. Peaked in 1992, down over a third from that peak, and the last year lower than 2010 was 1976.
Aggravated assault? Peaked in 1992, now down over 40% and at its lowest rate since 1977.
The peak robbery rate, in 1991, was 272.7 robberies per 100,000 people. Last year the rate was 119.1. The most recent year lower than that was 1967.
The rate of vehicle thefts is similarly down from its peak, and lower now than in 1964, despite the ratio of cars to people being considerably higher than it was then.
And all these numbers are rapidly trending downward.
It's not my point here to speculate on why the crime rate has fallen so sharply in the past 20 years - the rate of crime in a society as large and diverse as ours is an exceedingly complex thing, and anyone who attributes the drop to one or two pet causes is, well, I'd say he's talking out of his ass. I don't know very much of the answer, and neither do you, and neither do the politicians or the pundits or the cops or the criminals.
But we never, ever hear about this. I would bet a good sum of money that if you polled a random sample of people my age or close to it (I'm 41), the majority of them would guess that crime in the U.S. has either stayed about the same or increased since they were kids. And, as the statistics above show, they'd be ludicrously wrong. (I would also bet that those respondents identifying as social conservatives would be even more likely to get this wrong than the sample average; however, before we heathens get too giddy about that, if the same poll were conducted in 1995, the reflexive "the world was better when I was six" response would have happened to be correct. Crime did go way up before it went way down.) How is it that perhaps the biggest societal shift in the past twenty years has glanced off our skulls?
People freak out nowadays even more than I remember them doing when I was little and they were scaring us with the specter of the Soviets nuking us. Terrorist attacks. School shootings. Mexican drug cartels. And every time they turn on TV news, it's another story about some crazy woman killing her 3-year-old or something else horrific and a half dozen commentators in suits are dissecting the crazy woman's court case in the tone used by studio analysts at halftime of NFL games...well, yeah, if you drink a steady 24-hour diet of that psychological poison, which now you can, you're bound to think, oh my god, the world is gonna end. And even if you can ward off the assault well enough to avoid consciously being paralyzed by fear, well, fear operates well below the conscious, does it not? Ask any advertising exec or political speechwriter, they'll tell you. Scaring people for no reason pays. People eat that up.
I was in high school in the 1980s. Yeah, yeah, the world back then had drugs and gangs and child abuse and serial killers and all that dark side biz, trust me. Quite a bit *more* than we have now, apparently. My parents' world had less of it than that, but their world was far from perfect or sustainable and the social upheaval that followed happened for good reason, despite some of its more troublesome side effects...and if you go back five or six hundred years, you were WAY more likely to die a violent death by another's hand than at any time in the last century. (Steven Pinker's latest book discusses this.) What is it? No news is good news, therefore good news is no news? The overall rate of violent and property crime, in a multicultural nominally democratic society of over 300 million people, is down over FORTY PERCENT from just 20 years ago, and the next parade or Nobel Peace Prize awarded to this mind-boggling achievement will be the first. Yeah, I don't get it. Shouldn't *somebody* throw out a high five or two for this?
This isn't to say we should sit on our laurels. Of course not - we should keep trying to get those numbers down. I'm in favor of longer sentences for most violent crimes than we have now, and more resources toward early intervention for those at risk of becoming violent offenders. Even with our recent massive improvement, the U.S. is still far behind most other industrialized nations, though we have some challenges to a degree most of them don't. But jeez, when I was a kid, yeah, the boogie man stories existed, paranoia existed, dead animals with open eyes on the side of the road existed, but at least I was allowed to play outside. And, by the numbers, I was more at risk than the kids of today are.
http://www.disastercenter.com/
Scroll down and look at the crime rates per 100,000 inhabitants. To anyone braying that civility is dead and that we are on the brink of societal collapse, um, yeah:
The rate of overall violent crime has dropped from a peak of 758.1 per 100,000 to 403.6 - nearly cut in half. This is the lowest figure in any year since 1972.
The murder rate in 2010 was 4.8; this is less than half of the peak rate, in 1980, and lower than any year since 1963.
Oh, but surely rape is on the rise, given the changes in our culture...nope. Peaked in 1992, down over a third from that peak, and the last year lower than 2010 was 1976.
Aggravated assault? Peaked in 1992, now down over 40% and at its lowest rate since 1977.
The peak robbery rate, in 1991, was 272.7 robberies per 100,000 people. Last year the rate was 119.1. The most recent year lower than that was 1967.
The rate of vehicle thefts is similarly down from its peak, and lower now than in 1964, despite the ratio of cars to people being considerably higher than it was then.
And all these numbers are rapidly trending downward.
It's not my point here to speculate on why the crime rate has fallen so sharply in the past 20 years - the rate of crime in a society as large and diverse as ours is an exceedingly complex thing, and anyone who attributes the drop to one or two pet causes is, well, I'd say he's talking out of his ass. I don't know very much of the answer, and neither do you, and neither do the politicians or the pundits or the cops or the criminals.
But we never, ever hear about this. I would bet a good sum of money that if you polled a random sample of people my age or close to it (I'm 41), the majority of them would guess that crime in the U.S. has either stayed about the same or increased since they were kids. And, as the statistics above show, they'd be ludicrously wrong. (I would also bet that those respondents identifying as social conservatives would be even more likely to get this wrong than the sample average; however, before we heathens get too giddy about that, if the same poll were conducted in 1995, the reflexive "the world was better when I was six" response would have happened to be correct. Crime did go way up before it went way down.) How is it that perhaps the biggest societal shift in the past twenty years has glanced off our skulls?
People freak out nowadays even more than I remember them doing when I was little and they were scaring us with the specter of the Soviets nuking us. Terrorist attacks. School shootings. Mexican drug cartels. And every time they turn on TV news, it's another story about some crazy woman killing her 3-year-old or something else horrific and a half dozen commentators in suits are dissecting the crazy woman's court case in the tone used by studio analysts at halftime of NFL games...well, yeah, if you drink a steady 24-hour diet of that psychological poison, which now you can, you're bound to think, oh my god, the world is gonna end. And even if you can ward off the assault well enough to avoid consciously being paralyzed by fear, well, fear operates well below the conscious, does it not? Ask any advertising exec or political speechwriter, they'll tell you. Scaring people for no reason pays. People eat that up.
I was in high school in the 1980s. Yeah, yeah, the world back then had drugs and gangs and child abuse and serial killers and all that dark side biz, trust me. Quite a bit *more* than we have now, apparently. My parents' world had less of it than that, but their world was far from perfect or sustainable and the social upheaval that followed happened for good reason, despite some of its more troublesome side effects...and if you go back five or six hundred years, you were WAY more likely to die a violent death by another's hand than at any time in the last century. (Steven Pinker's latest book discusses this.) What is it? No news is good news, therefore good news is no news? The overall rate of violent and property crime, in a multicultural nominally democratic society of over 300 million people, is down over FORTY PERCENT from just 20 years ago, and the next parade or Nobel Peace Prize awarded to this mind-boggling achievement will be the first. Yeah, I don't get it. Shouldn't *somebody* throw out a high five or two for this?
This isn't to say we should sit on our laurels. Of course not - we should keep trying to get those numbers down. I'm in favor of longer sentences for most violent crimes than we have now, and more resources toward early intervention for those at risk of becoming violent offenders. Even with our recent massive improvement, the U.S. is still far behind most other industrialized nations, though we have some challenges to a degree most of them don't. But jeez, when I was a kid, yeah, the boogie man stories existed, paranoia existed, dead animals with open eyes on the side of the road existed, but at least I was allowed to play outside. And, by the numbers, I was more at risk than the kids of today are.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Running to catch up to a car half a mile up the road
(First: yes, I've read the Paradox of Choice.)
There's just so much. Not saying it's too much, because how much beauty is too much, but so much. Songs, books, movies, games, puzzles, paintings, food, blogs, forums, websites, shows, plays, ideas, experiments, debates, sports, travel, technology, journalism, history, science, meditation, math, architecture, language, dance, nature, relationships, love, pain, joy, sorrow, birth, rebirth, death, sunrises, sunsets. Whatever our human race still lacks...do we lack contentment, yes, but do we lack content, holy god no.
And it's easy as breathing to find yourself wishing for a thousand hours in a day for a thousand years to take it all in, even figure out *how* to take it in. And even that wouldn't be enough time. Not even close. Start a bucket list and the bucket grows to see you at eye level like a large-breed dog you've heard *probably* won't bite you but still...and then the bucket is twice your height, ten times your height; twenty, thirty. Any decision you make is arbitrary, and any wasted moment spent in stillness, spent not taking something, anything in, feels like blasphemy.
A few rare, blessed and well-dressed individuals can swim in this current and not be rushed, but most of us cannot. Most of us will go where the tide takes us, kicking and screaming on occasion when we briefly become aware of how utterly little control we have and, even if we had that control, how enduringly ignorant we are of what we really want or need. We're served a thing by life that smells like some vegetable we hated as children and we reject the thing by instinct, but if not that, then...what? And why? Shoot, half the stuff I've wished for over the years would have been disastrous had the wish come true.
It's okay, man, don't take it so serious, they say. They are right. You won't get to lots of stuff. I love to learn words. No, I don't know why. I might finish learning the nine-letter Scrabble-acceptable words someday. I might even learn the tens, if I am old and the hamster in my mind wants that wheel. The elevens, dubious, the twelves, hopeless without cutting across the infield. You may ask what the point is, but I, in turn, would ask you why you expect there would be a point. Shah mat. Life's anxieties stack up. We do what gets us through the night. We climb those mountains it feels impossible not to climb. No, it doesn't "matter"; that's ridiculous. Any mountain worthy of the name is not stirred for a moment from its sleep by your tickling ascent of it. But maybe you will be.
There's just so much. Not saying it's too much, because how much beauty is too much, but so much. Songs, books, movies, games, puzzles, paintings, food, blogs, forums, websites, shows, plays, ideas, experiments, debates, sports, travel, technology, journalism, history, science, meditation, math, architecture, language, dance, nature, relationships, love, pain, joy, sorrow, birth, rebirth, death, sunrises, sunsets. Whatever our human race still lacks...do we lack contentment, yes, but do we lack content, holy god no.
And it's easy as breathing to find yourself wishing for a thousand hours in a day for a thousand years to take it all in, even figure out *how* to take it in. And even that wouldn't be enough time. Not even close. Start a bucket list and the bucket grows to see you at eye level like a large-breed dog you've heard *probably* won't bite you but still...and then the bucket is twice your height, ten times your height; twenty, thirty. Any decision you make is arbitrary, and any wasted moment spent in stillness, spent not taking something, anything in, feels like blasphemy.
A few rare, blessed and well-dressed individuals can swim in this current and not be rushed, but most of us cannot. Most of us will go where the tide takes us, kicking and screaming on occasion when we briefly become aware of how utterly little control we have and, even if we had that control, how enduringly ignorant we are of what we really want or need. We're served a thing by life that smells like some vegetable we hated as children and we reject the thing by instinct, but if not that, then...what? And why? Shoot, half the stuff I've wished for over the years would have been disastrous had the wish come true.
It's okay, man, don't take it so serious, they say. They are right. You won't get to lots of stuff. I love to learn words. No, I don't know why. I might finish learning the nine-letter Scrabble-acceptable words someday. I might even learn the tens, if I am old and the hamster in my mind wants that wheel. The elevens, dubious, the twelves, hopeless without cutting across the infield. You may ask what the point is, but I, in turn, would ask you why you expect there would be a point. Shah mat. Life's anxieties stack up. We do what gets us through the night. We climb those mountains it feels impossible not to climb. No, it doesn't "matter"; that's ridiculous. Any mountain worthy of the name is not stirred for a moment from its sleep by your tickling ascent of it. But maybe you will be.
Flashback: November 30, 2010 - Wherein I Drink Bad Beer So You Don't Have To
(originally posted on my LJ Scrabble blog at the time)
So I felt like getting some beer after work. Self-actualization can wait a day. But hey, let's learn something. I ordinarily don't drink crappy domestic beers of the sort hawked by pretty girls every five minutes during NFL games on TV, but I have never tried a beer with 55 calories before and I'm trying to shed some weight. So here it is, a sixer of Budweiser Select 55. (For non-beer drinkers, the scoop: a regular beer is about 150 calories per 12-ounce bottle, a standard light beer is 90-100. 55 is ridiculous.)
I'm midway through the six as I type. This beer does not taste bad or good, just really weak. It's like someone took a bottle of Bud Light, turned down its nasty creamy aftertaste (thanks for that) and poured it into a bottle of Perrier. And it has 2.4% alcohol, which is awfully wimpy. We'll see how that scales in about 45 minutes.
The calorie-to-buzz ratio is the point of interest. Calorically, six of these wussy things equals 2.2 normal beers. If six of these, just 330 calories, get me as buzzed as 3 or 4 normal beers, which is to say not really but it's a good start, I'm ahead on the deal. But that's before accounting for the fact that the beer makes Swiss cheese seem as spicy as kimchi by comparison, or that it seems to have diuretic qualities even beyond normal beer.
Some minutes later...verdict: no. Go for a quality light beer instead. Which was my hypothesis before I started, but the work of science is often mundane and true revelation is rare.
So I felt like getting some beer after work. Self-actualization can wait a day. But hey, let's learn something. I ordinarily don't drink crappy domestic beers of the sort hawked by pretty girls every five minutes during NFL games on TV, but I have never tried a beer with 55 calories before and I'm trying to shed some weight. So here it is, a sixer of Budweiser Select 55. (For non-beer drinkers, the scoop: a regular beer is about 150 calories per 12-ounce bottle, a standard light beer is 90-100. 55 is ridiculous.)
I'm midway through the six as I type. This beer does not taste bad or good, just really weak. It's like someone took a bottle of Bud Light, turned down its nasty creamy aftertaste (thanks for that) and poured it into a bottle of Perrier. And it has 2.4% alcohol, which is awfully wimpy. We'll see how that scales in about 45 minutes.
The calorie-to-buzz ratio is the point of interest. Calorically, six of these wussy things equals 2.2 normal beers. If six of these, just 330 calories, get me as buzzed as 3 or 4 normal beers, which is to say not really but it's a good start, I'm ahead on the deal. But that's before accounting for the fact that the beer makes Swiss cheese seem as spicy as kimchi by comparison, or that it seems to have diuretic qualities even beyond normal beer.
Some minutes later...verdict: no. Go for a quality light beer instead. Which was my hypothesis before I started, but the work of science is often mundane and true revelation is rare.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Amnesty
Think of all the people you’d say you know. Not just the ones you live with or talk to every day - everybody, no matter how well you know them or whether you like them or not. What percentage would you say you’ve had substantial interaction with in the past three to six months? By “substantial” here, I mean an exchange that displays or reveals people’s personal qualities: that is, not just small talk. I would guess that percentage isn’t very high for most people. There are a great many people I haven’t really hung out with or talked to much in two, five, ten, even fifteen years or more, and if I were asked whether I knew them personally I would still say yes. And with the rise of social networking, it’s even more true now.
What this means is that the conceptions we walk around with about a great many people we know - the majority - are seriously out of date. While I think it’s probably true that most of our basic personality doesn’t change too much throughout life, there are just so many roads we travel, in our lives and in our minds. Thousands upon thousands of changes big and small conspire to shape what we are right now. Some are visible to the outside world, but many we keep to ourselves or only reveal to our closest fellow travelers.
And these changes, even profound ones, can occur very quickly sometimes. You meet a stranger and one thing leads to another and you’re never the same. You buy a house, get a pet, become a parent. You read a book or see a movie or experience art that changes how you think and feel. You discover a new pursuit that really drives you and becomes central to your life. You get rich; you get poor. You travel the country or the world, which cannot help but give you a perspective you didn’t have before. You develop a new far-reaching habit, either a good one or a bad one. You get sick, or narrowly escape death, or something distressing happens to a loved one. You get therapy, or you come to need it and can’t or don’t treat the problem. You take up a religion, or leave one behind. You change careers, maybe multiple times. You do something wonderful and the afterglow stays with you for a long time, or you do something terrible and the guilt clings to you just as tightly. You fall in love, fall out of love, gain a friend, lose a friend, make an enemy, make peace; you witness births and you witness deaths. These and many others like them, big and small, assemble us piece by piece. Everyone is a work in progress.
What I take from this is the folly of making assumptions about people based on out-of-date information - the folly of holding grudges. There are just too many variables. People’s lives and attitudes and desires can change so much, so quickly, and even most who know them won’t realize it. As with many other things I write about, this is a lesson I would have done well to learn long ago and should seek to learn much better now. I certainly wouldn’t want others to form their opinions of me on the basis of an exchange from five or ten or twenty years ago - even an image formed a year or two ago might well be wildly inaccurate today - and I shouldn’t form my opinions of others that way either.
If I renounce sizing up others that way, then the next step must be wiping the slate clean of all those outdated resentments and grievances. If the John Doe of ten years ago rubbed me wrong, it doesn’t mean the John Doe of today would. I may not choose to spend any time to find out what he’s up to now, and there’s no law that I have to like everyone or that everyone has to like me, but at least I can learn to free myself from continuing to resent him.
I’ve made this mistake countless times. I don’t want to make it anymore, though I’m sure I will. So I’ll start my effort right now: I hold nothing against anyone.
What this means is that the conceptions we walk around with about a great many people we know - the majority - are seriously out of date. While I think it’s probably true that most of our basic personality doesn’t change too much throughout life, there are just so many roads we travel, in our lives and in our minds. Thousands upon thousands of changes big and small conspire to shape what we are right now. Some are visible to the outside world, but many we keep to ourselves or only reveal to our closest fellow travelers.
And these changes, even profound ones, can occur very quickly sometimes. You meet a stranger and one thing leads to another and you’re never the same. You buy a house, get a pet, become a parent. You read a book or see a movie or experience art that changes how you think and feel. You discover a new pursuit that really drives you and becomes central to your life. You get rich; you get poor. You travel the country or the world, which cannot help but give you a perspective you didn’t have before. You develop a new far-reaching habit, either a good one or a bad one. You get sick, or narrowly escape death, or something distressing happens to a loved one. You get therapy, or you come to need it and can’t or don’t treat the problem. You take up a religion, or leave one behind. You change careers, maybe multiple times. You do something wonderful and the afterglow stays with you for a long time, or you do something terrible and the guilt clings to you just as tightly. You fall in love, fall out of love, gain a friend, lose a friend, make an enemy, make peace; you witness births and you witness deaths. These and many others like them, big and small, assemble us piece by piece. Everyone is a work in progress.
What I take from this is the folly of making assumptions about people based on out-of-date information - the folly of holding grudges. There are just too many variables. People’s lives and attitudes and desires can change so much, so quickly, and even most who know them won’t realize it. As with many other things I write about, this is a lesson I would have done well to learn long ago and should seek to learn much better now. I certainly wouldn’t want others to form their opinions of me on the basis of an exchange from five or ten or twenty years ago - even an image formed a year or two ago might well be wildly inaccurate today - and I shouldn’t form my opinions of others that way either.
If I renounce sizing up others that way, then the next step must be wiping the slate clean of all those outdated resentments and grievances. If the John Doe of ten years ago rubbed me wrong, it doesn’t mean the John Doe of today would. I may not choose to spend any time to find out what he’s up to now, and there’s no law that I have to like everyone or that everyone has to like me, but at least I can learn to free myself from continuing to resent him.
I’ve made this mistake countless times. I don’t want to make it anymore, though I’m sure I will. So I’ll start my effort right now: I hold nothing against anyone.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
By special request, Ram It Down
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtu20Ejv3SI
The title of Judas Priest's 1988 release achieves a singular, overarching clarity perhaps unequaled by any other rock album title. "Ram It Down" captures in just three words the entirety, every part and the whole, of the band circa 1988 and its music. The three words *are* the album and *are* the band as it existed at the time. This obviates the need to even hear the album or have seen the band on that year's tour; it is only necessary to know that Judas Priest made an album called Ram It Down in 1988. And unlike with any other band and its album, that fact can be known a priori. I mean, what else could that collection of music be named, and who else both could and would have made it?
Readers here may recall that I have talked in other contexts about the idea of rerunning a person's life as a simulation with millions of iterations. Parallel universes, Markov chains, that sort of thing. No matter what parameters one could possibly set for such an exercise, it is clear that Judas Priest, with that exact lineup of members, would have made an album called Ram It Down in 1988 in every single one of them. Just try to conceive of a world where that didn't happen, and you'll quickly see that you cannot. Philosophers talk about free will, but in this case the band had not only no choice, but no decision to make - had they not recorded Ram It Down in 1988, it would have constituted a contradiction of the nature of their existence across every theoretically definable universe, a cosmic fabric-rending eternal separation between "is" and "does", the uprooting of the very idea of definition itself. There is no such thing as a Judas Priest that does not ram it down, given any nonzero quantity of it, the existence of any means of ramming, and downward space relative to any conceivable perspective in any conceivable universe. It is at its heart the same question as the age-old one about whether an all-powerful god can build a rock so large that he cannot lift it, or shall we say, use His Fist to ram it downward as the cover art depicts.
What does this mean for us as listeners? It means that Judas Priest in 1988 - unconsciously, remember - managed to do away with the chasm that separates art from artist, not by building a bridge between the two, but by forcibly merging the two banks of the river into one in Mind. This is alluded to in the opening couplet of the third song, "Love Zone": "Been awake all night, can't get no sleep/I need a steel blue heart walkin' down the street". This signifies not merely the desire for a fundamental change in the nature of matter and its attributes - steel blue hearts, wherever they might exist, do not now possess the capability of walking down streets - but the presence of both the volition (awake all night by choice: there's Great Work to be done!) and the power to define a heretofore undefined zone where that change is made real. And the listener then represents a coplanar third instance: we do not travel *to* the love zone (nach Hause), but rather are already by definition localized *in* that zone (zu Hause). Even when - nay, especially when - you and your friend Dean are playing the drinking game of trying to read the lyrics aloud without laughing. Trust me, it's not easy.
Also worth noting: the album came out in 1988. The year divided by 4 (the number of the great cross) is 497. The running time of the album is 49 minutes and 32 seconds, and the leader length on a standard cassette is perhaps five seconds at each end, bringing the total click-to-click time to 49:42 - exactly one-tenth of 497. The year is thus divided into forty (forty days, forty nights; Wild Nights, Hot and Crazy Days had appeared two years earlier.)
Some may focus on the "it" in Ram It Down, the object. Is it a possession, an abstract quality - or rather, is "ram it" being used as an indivisible phrasal verb? That last theory might easily be dismissed, except for this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOYY6futWBc
But I think the simpler theory is the sounder one: Watch the JP video "Hot Rockin' " from seven years before and I trust you'll see what I mean without me having to explain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki3TpFZY7cU
What you just saw is the "it". Not any one element in the video, but rather the essence, its DNA if you will, its many fractions reduced as far as they can be. The concepts "ram", "it" and "down" (Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos; yin, yang, velocity/orientation/event space) are everywhere present and already have their permanent angular relationship to each other. I think you'll agree that IT could have been no other way.
Eh, Ram It Down mostly sucks by Priest standards. Blood Red Skies and the title track are okay. And Johnny B. Goode, WTF?
The title of Judas Priest's 1988 release achieves a singular, overarching clarity perhaps unequaled by any other rock album title. "Ram It Down" captures in just three words the entirety, every part and the whole, of the band circa 1988 and its music. The three words *are* the album and *are* the band as it existed at the time. This obviates the need to even hear the album or have seen the band on that year's tour; it is only necessary to know that Judas Priest made an album called Ram It Down in 1988. And unlike with any other band and its album, that fact can be known a priori. I mean, what else could that collection of music be named, and who else both could and would have made it?
Readers here may recall that I have talked in other contexts about the idea of rerunning a person's life as a simulation with millions of iterations. Parallel universes, Markov chains, that sort of thing. No matter what parameters one could possibly set for such an exercise, it is clear that Judas Priest, with that exact lineup of members, would have made an album called Ram It Down in 1988 in every single one of them. Just try to conceive of a world where that didn't happen, and you'll quickly see that you cannot. Philosophers talk about free will, but in this case the band had not only no choice, but no decision to make - had they not recorded Ram It Down in 1988, it would have constituted a contradiction of the nature of their existence across every theoretically definable universe, a cosmic fabric-rending eternal separation between "is" and "does", the uprooting of the very idea of definition itself. There is no such thing as a Judas Priest that does not ram it down, given any nonzero quantity of it, the existence of any means of ramming, and downward space relative to any conceivable perspective in any conceivable universe. It is at its heart the same question as the age-old one about whether an all-powerful god can build a rock so large that he cannot lift it, or shall we say, use His Fist to ram it downward as the cover art depicts.
What does this mean for us as listeners? It means that Judas Priest in 1988 - unconsciously, remember - managed to do away with the chasm that separates art from artist, not by building a bridge between the two, but by forcibly merging the two banks of the river into one in Mind. This is alluded to in the opening couplet of the third song, "Love Zone": "Been awake all night, can't get no sleep/I need a steel blue heart walkin' down the street". This signifies not merely the desire for a fundamental change in the nature of matter and its attributes - steel blue hearts, wherever they might exist, do not now possess the capability of walking down streets - but the presence of both the volition (awake all night by choice: there's Great Work to be done!) and the power to define a heretofore undefined zone where that change is made real. And the listener then represents a coplanar third instance: we do not travel *to* the love zone (nach Hause), but rather are already by definition localized *in* that zone (zu Hause). Even when - nay, especially when - you and your friend Dean are playing the drinking game of trying to read the lyrics aloud without laughing. Trust me, it's not easy.
Also worth noting: the album came out in 1988. The year divided by 4 (the number of the great cross) is 497. The running time of the album is 49 minutes and 32 seconds, and the leader length on a standard cassette is perhaps five seconds at each end, bringing the total click-to-click time to 49:42 - exactly one-tenth of 497. The year is thus divided into forty (forty days, forty nights; Wild Nights, Hot and Crazy Days had appeared two years earlier.)
Some may focus on the "it" in Ram It Down, the object. Is it a possession, an abstract quality - or rather, is "ram it" being used as an indivisible phrasal verb? That last theory might easily be dismissed, except for this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOYY6futWBc
But I think the simpler theory is the sounder one: Watch the JP video "Hot Rockin' " from seven years before and I trust you'll see what I mean without me having to explain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki3TpFZY7cU
What you just saw is the "it". Not any one element in the video, but rather the essence, its DNA if you will, its many fractions reduced as far as they can be. The concepts "ram", "it" and "down" (Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos; yin, yang, velocity/orientation/event space) are everywhere present and already have their permanent angular relationship to each other. I think you'll agree that IT could have been no other way.
Eh, Ram It Down mostly sucks by Priest standards. Blood Red Skies and the title track are okay. And Johnny B. Goode, WTF?
Friday, September 9, 2011
Luck and Skill
Let's say two expert Scrabble players, creatively named player A and player B, are playing a game against each other in a tournament. It's getting near the end of the game, and player A looks nearly certain to win. Player B then makes a clever setup play. If he draws the exact right tiles from the bag, he will have an unblockable bingo to go out and win. (For non-Scrabblers, a bingo is when you play all seven tiles and get the extra 50 points.) It's a real longshot: we'll say about 1-in-50. But as it happens, if player B makes any other play, his chance of winning is zero.
So 98 percent of the time, player B will lose anyway, and 2 percent of the time he'll pull out the miracle win. The question: If the miracle happens, all other things being assumed equal, does this mean that B's victory can be attributed 98 percent to luck and 2 percent to skill?
Well, yeah, it does. To the argument that the skill really caused the victory since without player B's astute setup play there's no way the win could have happened, the obvious response is that without hitting the 1-in-50 draw, there's no way it could have happened either. No matter how brilliant a Scrabble player our friend B is, a minimum of 49 times out of 50 he loses this game. Both the skill and the ridiculous luck are needed.
***
Why does this matter? Well, we commonly judge people by outcomes, with the implicit assumption that the outcome was an unavoidable consequence of the decisions behind it. Let's introduce another fellow, Bob. Bob is a bright, resourceful sort and has spent many an evening in his basement tinkering and experimenting. A few years ago he invented a gadget made of metal and plastic and computer parts - let's say it's a kitchen appliance. He formed a company to make and sell the things, and it turned out demand was high, and now he's got millions of dollars. Quite a success story!
Bob invented the gadget, he formed the company. The millions are all him, right? Ah, but the events that conspired to bring this situation about were in motion long before:
- A sizable portion of the world lives in poverty, often without access to clean water, food, sanitation and health services. Political unrest and war also affect millions upon millions of unlucky people. Had Bob been born in any such place, and the odds of that have to be at least 30-40 percent or so, he ain't becomin' no kitchen-appliance kingpin no matter what he does. Instead, he was born and lives in one of the safest, most prosperous places on earth (pick one). HUGE lucky break there.
- Bob is healthy. He doesn't have any major physical, mental or emotional disorders. Those don't absolutely rule out the type of success he's had, but many of them would have made it a hundred times harder if not impossible.
- Bob's family was well-off enough to live near good schools and send him to college.
- Bob hasn't had his life commandeered by family challenges or troubles.
- Bob has been able to get jobs that pay well enough to support him and leave him with enough free time and energy to tinker incessantly in his basement.
- Bob's invention uses metal, plastic and computer parts. Bob, of course, had nothing to do with mining or refining the metal or making the plastic or computer parts, nor with inventing the means by which these things are mass-produced and made available at a price regular folks like Bob could afford. He just bought the stuff and recombined it in a novel way. He went through a lot of metal and plastic during the invention and prototype phase, so he needed to have the luxury of ready materials for as long as it took to stumble on the right ones.
- Many, many inventions and scientific and technological advances are the result of happy accidents. Granted, someone has to be busy in the workshop or lab in the first place to observe and interpret the accidents, no fortune involved there, but that makes the happy accidents themselves no less unlikely. Penicillin is perhaps the best-known example: If Alexander Fleming's lab had been less messy, we might not have penicillin today. In Bob's case, it may be true, though it's not knowable, that a thousand other would-be inventors are just as ingenious as he is, but haven't stumbled on their one big happy accident yet.
And by no means is it only the big accidents that make a difference. Any creative or experimental process has many steps, and thus many places for happy accidents to occur. A great story I heard from an audio engineer long ago: during the recording of the Tubes' 1983 hit She's A Beauty, the producer liked how the song was shaping up but felt the chorus was missing a hook of some kind, and for a long time no musical idea seemed to fit. One night during playback, someone in the control room happened to spit his gum out into a metal trash can at exactly the right moment in the chorus. The sound of the spit and of the gum hitting the trash can gave the producer the idea to add the reverse-gated snare hit after the first line of lyrics, right before "she's a beauty..." Hard to imagine the song without that sound effect, and it helped make the chorus catchy and the song a big hit. Yeah, the producer had to be thus inspired, but without the guy spitting his gum out, that sound effect doesn't get added.
- Bob's business started in a good economic period, but as with many startups, it took a while before the company attracted interest and capital from investors. Had he started in an economic downturn, he would have had a harder time selling the product to begin with and investors would have been choosier - he might well have gone bust before his ship had a chance to come in.
- Once Bob started his company, that meant he had to hire. Even if one is smart about hiring, some hiring decisions work out far better than others and some good fortune is needed to find the right people for the job.
- Bob was also lucky someone else didn't get there first. If he gets beaten out by six months, Bob will have to find another way to riches. While Bob's a good inventor, so are lots of other people.
***
I could go on, listing twenty or thirty more ways in which Bob has either been smiled upon by good fortune or has benefited greatly from work done by others past and present. Even given that Bob is industrious, persistent, committed and wise, his millions are still a much, much longer shot than the 50-1 Scrabble play I mentioned before. There are a lot of industrious, persistent, committed and wise people in a world with a population of 7 billion. The overwhelming majority of them aren't close to being millionaires. (Bob is also intelligent, which surely has a good deal to do with his success - if Bob had an 80 IQ this doesn't happen - but intelligence is itself just another lottery at birth, so I didn't include it with the other personal qualities above.)
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, are you saying that Bob's success was just luck or that he didn't earn it or that hard work and persistence isn't actually valuable since it's all a roll of the dice anyway? No, I am absolutely NOT saying that, and no sensible person would. If Bob sits on his couch eating Doritos and watching old movies all day every day, his chances of getting wealthy drop to nothing regardless of how many good breaks he's gotten, unless he wins the lottery or something else ridiculous. Bob's hard work is absolutely necessary here - but it is not anywhere remotely close to sufficient. If it were possible to rerun Bob's life a million times, giving him all those same positive personal qualities each time but randomizing everything else, we can guess he would make out well much of the time relative to his peers, but in very, very few of those parallel lives would he be as rich as he's turned out to be this time.
This all strikes me as obvious, but as a culture we strongly resist attributing the main portion of success or failure to chance even when reason demands it. Not hard to see why: we think it's demotivating. We desperately want, maybe even need, to believe that if we just captain the ship well enough, we'll make it through any storm, even when confronted with a storm that is so much bigger than we are and could toss even the hardiest and wisest captain overboard to drown on its slightest whim.
But you know, we don't have to live in that kind of denial. If we focus only on the winning or losing, only on the extrinsic result, then we can't accept the primacy of chance in our lives, because if only the W or L matters, and the Ws and Ls are mostly determined by luck, then yes, trying is bound to feel futile. But if we focus on the intrinsic and just say, okay, I'll make the best decisions I know how to make and not worry about the outcome, then the fluctuations of luck become just part of the puzzle, not to be judged as either good or bad. And, getting back to Scrabble, that's exactly how I want to learn to approach every rack of every game, though I'm a long way from being there: focus only on making the best decision.
So 98 percent of the time, player B will lose anyway, and 2 percent of the time he'll pull out the miracle win. The question: If the miracle happens, all other things being assumed equal, does this mean that B's victory can be attributed 98 percent to luck and 2 percent to skill?
Well, yeah, it does. To the argument that the skill really caused the victory since without player B's astute setup play there's no way the win could have happened, the obvious response is that without hitting the 1-in-50 draw, there's no way it could have happened either. No matter how brilliant a Scrabble player our friend B is, a minimum of 49 times out of 50 he loses this game. Both the skill and the ridiculous luck are needed.
***
Why does this matter? Well, we commonly judge people by outcomes, with the implicit assumption that the outcome was an unavoidable consequence of the decisions behind it. Let's introduce another fellow, Bob. Bob is a bright, resourceful sort and has spent many an evening in his basement tinkering and experimenting. A few years ago he invented a gadget made of metal and plastic and computer parts - let's say it's a kitchen appliance. He formed a company to make and sell the things, and it turned out demand was high, and now he's got millions of dollars. Quite a success story!
Bob invented the gadget, he formed the company. The millions are all him, right? Ah, but the events that conspired to bring this situation about were in motion long before:
- A sizable portion of the world lives in poverty, often without access to clean water, food, sanitation and health services. Political unrest and war also affect millions upon millions of unlucky people. Had Bob been born in any such place, and the odds of that have to be at least 30-40 percent or so, he ain't becomin' no kitchen-appliance kingpin no matter what he does. Instead, he was born and lives in one of the safest, most prosperous places on earth (pick one). HUGE lucky break there.
- Bob is healthy. He doesn't have any major physical, mental or emotional disorders. Those don't absolutely rule out the type of success he's had, but many of them would have made it a hundred times harder if not impossible.
- Bob's family was well-off enough to live near good schools and send him to college.
- Bob hasn't had his life commandeered by family challenges or troubles.
- Bob has been able to get jobs that pay well enough to support him and leave him with enough free time and energy to tinker incessantly in his basement.
- Bob's invention uses metal, plastic and computer parts. Bob, of course, had nothing to do with mining or refining the metal or making the plastic or computer parts, nor with inventing the means by which these things are mass-produced and made available at a price regular folks like Bob could afford. He just bought the stuff and recombined it in a novel way. He went through a lot of metal and plastic during the invention and prototype phase, so he needed to have the luxury of ready materials for as long as it took to stumble on the right ones.
- Many, many inventions and scientific and technological advances are the result of happy accidents. Granted, someone has to be busy in the workshop or lab in the first place to observe and interpret the accidents, no fortune involved there, but that makes the happy accidents themselves no less unlikely. Penicillin is perhaps the best-known example: If Alexander Fleming's lab had been less messy, we might not have penicillin today. In Bob's case, it may be true, though it's not knowable, that a thousand other would-be inventors are just as ingenious as he is, but haven't stumbled on their one big happy accident yet.
And by no means is it only the big accidents that make a difference. Any creative or experimental process has many steps, and thus many places for happy accidents to occur. A great story I heard from an audio engineer long ago: during the recording of the Tubes' 1983 hit She's A Beauty, the producer liked how the song was shaping up but felt the chorus was missing a hook of some kind, and for a long time no musical idea seemed to fit. One night during playback, someone in the control room happened to spit his gum out into a metal trash can at exactly the right moment in the chorus. The sound of the spit and of the gum hitting the trash can gave the producer the idea to add the reverse-gated snare hit after the first line of lyrics, right before "she's a beauty..." Hard to imagine the song without that sound effect, and it helped make the chorus catchy and the song a big hit. Yeah, the producer had to be thus inspired, but without the guy spitting his gum out, that sound effect doesn't get added.
- Bob's business started in a good economic period, but as with many startups, it took a while before the company attracted interest and capital from investors. Had he started in an economic downturn, he would have had a harder time selling the product to begin with and investors would have been choosier - he might well have gone bust before his ship had a chance to come in.
- Once Bob started his company, that meant he had to hire. Even if one is smart about hiring, some hiring decisions work out far better than others and some good fortune is needed to find the right people for the job.
- Bob was also lucky someone else didn't get there first. If he gets beaten out by six months, Bob will have to find another way to riches. While Bob's a good inventor, so are lots of other people.
***
I could go on, listing twenty or thirty more ways in which Bob has either been smiled upon by good fortune or has benefited greatly from work done by others past and present. Even given that Bob is industrious, persistent, committed and wise, his millions are still a much, much longer shot than the 50-1 Scrabble play I mentioned before. There are a lot of industrious, persistent, committed and wise people in a world with a population of 7 billion. The overwhelming majority of them aren't close to being millionaires. (Bob is also intelligent, which surely has a good deal to do with his success - if Bob had an 80 IQ this doesn't happen - but intelligence is itself just another lottery at birth, so I didn't include it with the other personal qualities above.)
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, are you saying that Bob's success was just luck or that he didn't earn it or that hard work and persistence isn't actually valuable since it's all a roll of the dice anyway? No, I am absolutely NOT saying that, and no sensible person would. If Bob sits on his couch eating Doritos and watching old movies all day every day, his chances of getting wealthy drop to nothing regardless of how many good breaks he's gotten, unless he wins the lottery or something else ridiculous. Bob's hard work is absolutely necessary here - but it is not anywhere remotely close to sufficient. If it were possible to rerun Bob's life a million times, giving him all those same positive personal qualities each time but randomizing everything else, we can guess he would make out well much of the time relative to his peers, but in very, very few of those parallel lives would he be as rich as he's turned out to be this time.
This all strikes me as obvious, but as a culture we strongly resist attributing the main portion of success or failure to chance even when reason demands it. Not hard to see why: we think it's demotivating. We desperately want, maybe even need, to believe that if we just captain the ship well enough, we'll make it through any storm, even when confronted with a storm that is so much bigger than we are and could toss even the hardiest and wisest captain overboard to drown on its slightest whim.
But you know, we don't have to live in that kind of denial. If we focus only on the winning or losing, only on the extrinsic result, then we can't accept the primacy of chance in our lives, because if only the W or L matters, and the Ws and Ls are mostly determined by luck, then yes, trying is bound to feel futile. But if we focus on the intrinsic and just say, okay, I'll make the best decisions I know how to make and not worry about the outcome, then the fluctuations of luck become just part of the puzzle, not to be judged as either good or bad. And, getting back to Scrabble, that's exactly how I want to learn to approach every rack of every game, though I'm a long way from being there: focus only on making the best decision.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Streaks like this happen more than you'd think; Thanksgiving 1980
From 1952 through 1971 in pro football, no game ended with a score of 14-0.
Between 1978 and 1980, there were seven 14-0 games in the NFL. I actually remember watching one of them on TV. In 1980, the Redskins, in the midst of an off year not helped by John Riggins' holdout, were shut out at home by a Seahawks team that would end up 4-12 and give up over 400 points on the year. I didn't remember that Joe Theismann threw 4 interceptions that day, but I remember how shockingly badly the Redskins played as a team in that game. I do remember one of the interceptions, because it was batted in the air by a bunch of different players before a Seahawk came down with it and I thought it was funny. And I remember I was watching it upstairs - but wait, do I have that right? That would have been my baby sister's room by 1980. But the TV was up there for a while. Maybe Mary was still sleeping in Mom and Dad's room at the time of the Skins-Seahawks uglyfest. She would have been six months old then.
I remember Thanksgiving 1980 much more clearly, but not for pleasant reasons (well, it's funny now), and the Seahawks were also involved. I was ten. I woke up latish that morning, maybe 9:30 or 10, and was surprised to find no one downstairs. Not my parents, not my 8-year-old brother, not my baby sister. Very unusual. I was hungry and looked in the cupboard next to the stove where the cereal usually was, but again I was shocked: we had none. I had cereal for breakfast every day - the universe was not right, what would I do? The pantry wasn't promising either, but I did find something I liked: a can of vienna sausages. Six wrapped around one in the middle. Yeah, there we go. Mom usually gives me just two or three, but now I've got the whole can. Victory! Hmm, they have this funny goop on them - they usually don't when Mom serves them to me. Oh well, I guess these are a different kind. The goop I didn't like, but it didn't occur to me to rinse it off. I was a hungry boy and plowed through the sausages in a hurry. Then I settled on the couch to read my new 1980 Stars of the NFL book and fell back asleep for a little while.
I woke up near the end of the first football game, and turned on the TV around the fourth quarter of the Bears vs. the Lions. Walter Payton had an 85-yard TD run called back on a holding penalty, if I remember right. Game went to overtime, and oh my god, the Bears ran the kickoff back, game over! That had never happened before in NFL history. David Williams's claim to fame. Next up was the Cowboys and Seahawks. By this point I was starting to feel sick to my stomach, and I was wondering what the heck was going on - it was Thanksgiving afternoon, and I still hadn't seen anyone come downstairs. Surely there was going to be turkey and all that, right? No one had told me there wasn't. Didn't know what else to do, so I curled up under the covers on the couch and read my book and watched the game while I got sicker. Still no one for a while. The then-mighty Cowboys really laid it on Seattle; hopeless game. I was rooting for Seattle, but after a while just wondered how high the score would go. The final was 51-7, by which time my stomach felt about as good as the Seahawks did.
Finally saw my mom, in her robe, around the time it was getting dark. She got me some Coke and saltines, comfort food for her kiddo's upset tummy (yes, it works really well), and explained the day: both my parents had been bedridden and throwing up all day from a blazingly nasty virus. My brother Brian was similarly miserable and indisposed. Miraculously, my baby sister slept nearly the whole day, and the night following. Mom put on her coat and I put on mine and we got in the car and went to the only place that was open, a small convenience store on highway 301, near the park where my dad played softball. I think we got ham sandwiches or something - I don't think it was turkey, despite the holiday. I felt bad but I was starving and anything to banish the unspeakably foul daylong memory of the vienna sausage, stock included, was welcome. I had liked vienna sausage before that day, but have not eaten it in the thirty-one years since. Sure enough, the sickness everyone else got was hitting me too by this point, and it was a rough night, but I think I got off easier than the rest of the family had. And strangely, some or all of us got sick on a few of the Thanksgivings after that. It was an unfortunate family tradition for a while there.
Between 1978 and 1980, there were seven 14-0 games in the NFL. I actually remember watching one of them on TV. In 1980, the Redskins, in the midst of an off year not helped by John Riggins' holdout, were shut out at home by a Seahawks team that would end up 4-12 and give up over 400 points on the year. I didn't remember that Joe Theismann threw 4 interceptions that day, but I remember how shockingly badly the Redskins played as a team in that game. I do remember one of the interceptions, because it was batted in the air by a bunch of different players before a Seahawk came down with it and I thought it was funny. And I remember I was watching it upstairs - but wait, do I have that right? That would have been my baby sister's room by 1980. But the TV was up there for a while. Maybe Mary was still sleeping in Mom and Dad's room at the time of the Skins-Seahawks uglyfest. She would have been six months old then.
I remember Thanksgiving 1980 much more clearly, but not for pleasant reasons (well, it's funny now), and the Seahawks were also involved. I was ten. I woke up latish that morning, maybe 9:30 or 10, and was surprised to find no one downstairs. Not my parents, not my 8-year-old brother, not my baby sister. Very unusual. I was hungry and looked in the cupboard next to the stove where the cereal usually was, but again I was shocked: we had none. I had cereal for breakfast every day - the universe was not right, what would I do? The pantry wasn't promising either, but I did find something I liked: a can of vienna sausages. Six wrapped around one in the middle. Yeah, there we go. Mom usually gives me just two or three, but now I've got the whole can. Victory! Hmm, they have this funny goop on them - they usually don't when Mom serves them to me. Oh well, I guess these are a different kind. The goop I didn't like, but it didn't occur to me to rinse it off. I was a hungry boy and plowed through the sausages in a hurry. Then I settled on the couch to read my new 1980 Stars of the NFL book and fell back asleep for a little while.
I woke up near the end of the first football game, and turned on the TV around the fourth quarter of the Bears vs. the Lions. Walter Payton had an 85-yard TD run called back on a holding penalty, if I remember right. Game went to overtime, and oh my god, the Bears ran the kickoff back, game over! That had never happened before in NFL history. David Williams's claim to fame. Next up was the Cowboys and Seahawks. By this point I was starting to feel sick to my stomach, and I was wondering what the heck was going on - it was Thanksgiving afternoon, and I still hadn't seen anyone come downstairs. Surely there was going to be turkey and all that, right? No one had told me there wasn't. Didn't know what else to do, so I curled up under the covers on the couch and read my book and watched the game while I got sicker. Still no one for a while. The then-mighty Cowboys really laid it on Seattle; hopeless game. I was rooting for Seattle, but after a while just wondered how high the score would go. The final was 51-7, by which time my stomach felt about as good as the Seahawks did.
Finally saw my mom, in her robe, around the time it was getting dark. She got me some Coke and saltines, comfort food for her kiddo's upset tummy (yes, it works really well), and explained the day: both my parents had been bedridden and throwing up all day from a blazingly nasty virus. My brother Brian was similarly miserable and indisposed. Miraculously, my baby sister slept nearly the whole day, and the night following. Mom put on her coat and I put on mine and we got in the car and went to the only place that was open, a small convenience store on highway 301, near the park where my dad played softball. I think we got ham sandwiches or something - I don't think it was turkey, despite the holiday. I felt bad but I was starving and anything to banish the unspeakably foul daylong memory of the vienna sausage, stock included, was welcome. I had liked vienna sausage before that day, but have not eaten it in the thirty-one years since. Sure enough, the sickness everyone else got was hitting me too by this point, and it was a rough night, but I think I got off easier than the rest of the family had. And strangely, some or all of us got sick on a few of the Thanksgivings after that. It was an unfortunate family tradition for a while there.
Snapshot
What I do right now: playing Scrabble, directing the local Scrabble club and tournaments, writing and recording music, practicing drums and vocals, meditation, work, exercise, spending time with family and being Uncle Geoff to a number of recently born individuals, reading (nonfiction mostly), blogging, reading Scrabble- and pro sports-related sites and Facebook/Google+, learning math and languages, taking walks, eating restaurant food, patronizing my local convenience store too often, drinking beer (less lately, which is wise), sleeping. That's plenty.
Still live in a small one-bedroom apartment, which is more than enough. Almost never have company. I've never had or wanted a pet. No TV, no video game system. Very rarely see a movie; I much prefer comedies when I do. Never listen to the radio. Don't read a daily paper or visit news sites online very often. I believe that while the ever-present news cycle is not a bad thing in itself, it's good for one's happiness to check in on it rarely.
My entire list of furniture: double bed, two card tables, two folding chairs. I own fewer than twenty books. Enough clothes to get me through a week in winter or summer, and one suit that doesn't fit me so well as it did ten years ago, but not much more. My music collection, to the extent people even need music collections these days, is almost entirely mp3s. I don't collect anything else. I have a rickety laptop, a netbook that mostly is used for Scrabble club and on trips, an iPhone I just got and an iPod that I'll probably move along soon. Music equipment: digital recorder, electronic drum kit, keyboard, electric guitar, 6-string acoustic, 12-string acoustic, a bass, a saxophone (can't play it in the apartment though, too loud), a microphone, small studio speakers, small guitar amp. It all gets used. My Toyota Camry is from 1993, has almost 230,000 miles on it and rocks a lovely array of cosmetic deficits, but it has air conditioning and gets me where I need to go most of the time. (I recently looked into upgrading in the transportation department, and I'll have to write another entry about that. Bizarre.) I own almost nothing I haven't just mentioned, and that's how I like it.
I attach sentimental value to an object extremely rarely - a thing is a thing is a thing to me. By far my longest-tenured possession is a ratty blue plastic giveaway tote bag with the American Health Care Association emblem on it, from a convention held in Hawaii in late 1974. My father worked for the AHCA at the time and so he and my mother went there and gave us (me, four, and my little brother Brian, two) these tote bags when they got back. All sorts of things have been stored in the tote bag over the years: little kids' let's-play-dress-up clothes, baseball cards, bad poetry, cheap cassettes with songs taped off the radio, hidden cigarettes and dope, tangled guitar cables, old music magazines, love letters, Scrabble books. There's nothing in it now; it just sits on the floor of my closet, as it has since near the back border of my memory. It wouldn't break my heart to lose it, but I think I'll hold on to this one.
Happier right now than I've ever been, except for no one around to share it with. Making relationships last has not been my strong suit heretofore, but if that never happens, so what? Why dwell on what you don't have when there's so much in the world to appreciate? Maybe in a couple or three years if everything goes well, I'll start to look that direction. There's no rush. I'm very used to and comfortable with being alone, and the workshop table is full.
I'd enjoy reading other people's versions of this, what their lives are like.
Still live in a small one-bedroom apartment, which is more than enough. Almost never have company. I've never had or wanted a pet. No TV, no video game system. Very rarely see a movie; I much prefer comedies when I do. Never listen to the radio. Don't read a daily paper or visit news sites online very often. I believe that while the ever-present news cycle is not a bad thing in itself, it's good for one's happiness to check in on it rarely.
My entire list of furniture: double bed, two card tables, two folding chairs. I own fewer than twenty books. Enough clothes to get me through a week in winter or summer, and one suit that doesn't fit me so well as it did ten years ago, but not much more. My music collection, to the extent people even need music collections these days, is almost entirely mp3s. I don't collect anything else. I have a rickety laptop, a netbook that mostly is used for Scrabble club and on trips, an iPhone I just got and an iPod that I'll probably move along soon. Music equipment: digital recorder, electronic drum kit, keyboard, electric guitar, 6-string acoustic, 12-string acoustic, a bass, a saxophone (can't play it in the apartment though, too loud), a microphone, small studio speakers, small guitar amp. It all gets used. My Toyota Camry is from 1993, has almost 230,000 miles on it and rocks a lovely array of cosmetic deficits, but it has air conditioning and gets me where I need to go most of the time. (I recently looked into upgrading in the transportation department, and I'll have to write another entry about that. Bizarre.) I own almost nothing I haven't just mentioned, and that's how I like it.
I attach sentimental value to an object extremely rarely - a thing is a thing is a thing to me. By far my longest-tenured possession is a ratty blue plastic giveaway tote bag with the American Health Care Association emblem on it, from a convention held in Hawaii in late 1974. My father worked for the AHCA at the time and so he and my mother went there and gave us (me, four, and my little brother Brian, two) these tote bags when they got back. All sorts of things have been stored in the tote bag over the years: little kids' let's-play-dress-up clothes, baseball cards, bad poetry, cheap cassettes with songs taped off the radio, hidden cigarettes and dope, tangled guitar cables, old music magazines, love letters, Scrabble books. There's nothing in it now; it just sits on the floor of my closet, as it has since near the back border of my memory. It wouldn't break my heart to lose it, but I think I'll hold on to this one.
Happier right now than I've ever been, except for no one around to share it with. Making relationships last has not been my strong suit heretofore, but if that never happens, so what? Why dwell on what you don't have when there's so much in the world to appreciate? Maybe in a couple or three years if everything goes well, I'll start to look that direction. There's no rush. I'm very used to and comfortable with being alone, and the workshop table is full.
I'd enjoy reading other people's versions of this, what their lives are like.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Something I don't do every day
This past weekend, I went out to my parents' place to help my youngest brother, brother-in-law and father tear out some cabinetry and other items from their kitchen. (My mom likes remodeling houses. A lot. To her credit, she has a good eye for home design; the remodels always look better than what they replace.) Half-day job, for the four of us...I'm happy to help, though I wish I could provide more of it. Fortunately, my brother-in-law enjoys and is very good at this kind of thing, and my youngest brother isn't bad either, and my father, while not inclined to be the next Bob Vila, has owned and dealt with houses long enough that he's picked up some of it by necessity. Me...um, no. Or not heretofore: as I was saying back in the jambalaya-cooking entry, just because I'm not able to do something now doesn't mean I can't learn if I put my mind to it. All natural aptitude does is speed things up.
That being said, I haven't attempted to cook anything in the six weeks since I cooked the jambalaya, either. Most people tend to gravitate toward things they have natural aptitude for and away from things they don't, and I'm probably worse in that regard than most people. I figure it's that we get hooked on the feeling of success, those rushes you get big and small when things click, and after a while we can't do without it. Gotta have that endorphin release or whatever it is. And our culture sure reinforces that outcome-based thinking: we're sent the message from an early age, over and over, that you're either a gold-medal winner or you're a loser, that nothing's worth doing unless you excel at it in the eyes of the world, that those who win are the only ones who matter. We watch American Idol, but we don't sing to each other anymore for fear we might not sound as good as the people on TV.
But does it have to be that way? No, I don't think it does, and I'm trying to get away from that conditioning. It's okay not to be good at something; there's nothing to be embarrassed about. Just give it a shot anyway. How does anyone learn or grow if they just avoid everything that doesn't come easily?
So back to the kitchen work, it went okay with the four of us on the case. Most of it was unscrewing cabinets from the wall. Whoever put them in years before my parents bought the house had done kind of a shoddy job, and many of the screws were stripped, buried or both, so that was the biggest thing slowing us down. To get the countertops off, we also had to remove a bunch of tile with crowbars and hammers (that was actually sort of fun, if messy). And there were electrical wiring issues to contend with. But we were able to get everything out of there.
What made me happy, aside from the cherished company of my family, was that I lost my composure only once and very mildly. You see, in the past, I've tended to get angry with myself when I invariably struggle with things I haven't learned how to do, especially in the company of others who are much better than me at what I'm doing. Some part of me still thinks I should know how to do everything perfectly and wants to scream at me whenever I don't. It doesn't usually cause me to flat-out lose my temper, but now and then it has, and that actually *is* embarrassing for me, much more so than not being good at whatever. But I'm glad to say the screaming perfectionist in me is getting quieter.
That being said, I haven't attempted to cook anything in the six weeks since I cooked the jambalaya, either. Most people tend to gravitate toward things they have natural aptitude for and away from things they don't, and I'm probably worse in that regard than most people. I figure it's that we get hooked on the feeling of success, those rushes you get big and small when things click, and after a while we can't do without it. Gotta have that endorphin release or whatever it is. And our culture sure reinforces that outcome-based thinking: we're sent the message from an early age, over and over, that you're either a gold-medal winner or you're a loser, that nothing's worth doing unless you excel at it in the eyes of the world, that those who win are the only ones who matter. We watch American Idol, but we don't sing to each other anymore for fear we might not sound as good as the people on TV.
But does it have to be that way? No, I don't think it does, and I'm trying to get away from that conditioning. It's okay not to be good at something; there's nothing to be embarrassed about. Just give it a shot anyway. How does anyone learn or grow if they just avoid everything that doesn't come easily?
So back to the kitchen work, it went okay with the four of us on the case. Most of it was unscrewing cabinets from the wall. Whoever put them in years before my parents bought the house had done kind of a shoddy job, and many of the screws were stripped, buried or both, so that was the biggest thing slowing us down. To get the countertops off, we also had to remove a bunch of tile with crowbars and hammers (that was actually sort of fun, if messy). And there were electrical wiring issues to contend with. But we were able to get everything out of there.
What made me happy, aside from the cherished company of my family, was that I lost my composure only once and very mildly. You see, in the past, I've tended to get angry with myself when I invariably struggle with things I haven't learned how to do, especially in the company of others who are much better than me at what I'm doing. Some part of me still thinks I should know how to do everything perfectly and wants to scream at me whenever I don't. It doesn't usually cause me to flat-out lose my temper, but now and then it has, and that actually *is* embarrassing for me, much more so than not being good at whatever. But I'm glad to say the screaming perfectionist in me is getting quieter.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Spanish Scrabble
Last weekend my friend Jean and I got to see something live that not many American scrabblers have seen: a tournament in Spanish. A groundbreaking one, at that: the first sanctioned international Spanish tournament held in the United States. There were 14 players - seven from the U.S., six from Mexico and one from Costa Rica. The tournament was held at the home of one of the players who lives here in Austin. We came to be there because one of the players, Travis, is also an expert tournament player in English and one of my good friends in the scene. He came down from Oregon for the occasion. We dropped by around lunchtime and got to meet everyone and see a little bit of the tournament in progress.
Why would Austin be a prime location for a Spanish tournament, you may wonder? The answer is that there are only two Spanish Scrabble clubs in the U.S., and one of them is here. The other is in Miami. The big Spanish Scrabble countries are Argentina, Venezuela and Spain, I gather. Most other South American countries have some presence in the game, Mexico has some but not that much yet, there are a few Caribbean players.
A lot of what I saw and heard reminded me of what I've read about the early days of tournament Scrabble in English. For the most part, Spanish Scrabble has evolved independently of the much larger (but still tiny) English tournament scene. The common point of origin is the box-top rules most people are familiar with, but tournament play by necessity expands and modifies those rules quite a bit...I should add here that, while English Scrabble has had the benefit of 20-25 more years of polishing its rules and practices and it seems clear that Spanish Scrabble would do well to take a look at how we've refined our game, there's nothing wrong with doing many or even most things a little differently. As long as the players are happy and the competition is fair, viva la diferencia (I have no idea whether I'm saying that right...sis?)
Some observations:
- Many things that have been around a long time in the English scene are fairly new to Spanish. For example, Spanish Protiles only recently became available. (For non-Scrabblers reading this, Protiles are the plastic tiles used in official Scrabble play, as opposed to the wooden ones that come with store versions of the game. The difference is that the letters on the plastic tiles aren't indented, so players can't cheat by distinguishing letters or blanks by feeling the tiles in the bag - "brailling" - when they draw.) Before the advent of Protiles, Spanish Scrabble had the rule that you couldn't count for yourself how many tiles were left in the bag; you had to call over a director or helper to do that for you.
- Spanish Scrabble allows each player 30 minutes on the clock instead of the 25 used in English. Not sure what the penalty is for going overtime (in English, it's 10 points per minute) EDIT: just learned it's the same penalty as in English.
- The sequence of a turn is different. In Spanish, you do everything before you hit the clock: place your tiles, add up and announce your score, write your score down, draw new tiles, THEN hit the clock. If an opponent wants to challenge the play, he or she must do so before you draw a replacement tile, as in English. As was the case in English Scrabble early on, the Spanish game has yet to adopt the "hold" rule. There's one more pertinent rule in here: once you place your first tile on the board for a play, you must play in that spot - you can rearrange transposed letters and such, but you can't take your play back or decide to play it somewhere else on the board. This is necessary because otherwise there would be no way to challenge - a player challenged could just take the play back.
As for writing the score down, I'm not absolutely sure about this, but it appears to be a requirement that you write down the main word formed by the play as well. I would support that rule for English Scrabble, to be honest - score checks and recounts are much harder when the players don't write the words down along with the scores.
- Spanish Scrabble is free challenge, so there are a lot of challenges. They have a novel way of addressing the problem of challenging plays frivolously just to buy time to think, which is a problem with free challenge. As is done in England and some other places, but not in North America, challenges are handled by runners. When the runner comes over to take the challenge slip to the computer, he or she brings a piece of square cardboard the size of the game board and covers the board with it so the players cannot study the board while the challenge is being adjudicated. (They also must put their tiles facedown when on neutral time, as we do.)
- Weird rule: score sheets aren't allowed to have the tile distribution preprinted on them. However, there's nothing prohibiting a player from writing the distribution on his or her score sheet manually once the game starts, and most of the better players do so. That sounds alien to an English player now, but in the earliest days of English Scrabble it was debated whether tracking sheets should be allowed and what rules should govern them.
- Spanish Scrabble does have an authoritative list of words like our OWL or CSW, but that's a recent development. The word source has been and still is the Diccionario de Real Academia Espanola (the computer I'm typing on has a weird problem doing special characters, sorry), but before the list, there were a whole bunch of guidelines in their rule book for how to judge from the dictionary whether a word was valid for Scrabble or not. I guess that was true in English in the early days, too.
- Spanish Scrabble has fewer words from 2-5 letters than English does, but many more at longer lengths. I gather this has mostly to do with all the verb conjugations in Spanish - the French list is about like the Spanish one in terms of how many words of each length there are. The effect on the game: more bingos (called "Scrabbles" in Spanish lingo, which makes more sense, I guess; what does "bingo" have to do with Scrabble?) and, at the other end, more racks where exchanging is the right play. There are eleven single-instance tiles in Spanish (we only have JKQXZ), and having an unplayable tile in the endgame is much more common than in English. The supply of vowels is very important, since a rack full of consonants is usually a disaster...Travis says that, in his experience, the English game is markedly more strategy-oriented, though top Spanish players can and do deploy effective strategy and tactics where the situation calls for it.
- Tournaments in Spanish are small and about all of them are opens. There's a huge gap between the top players and everyone else, both in ability and in the way they prepare and play. The stronger players play studiously, but the rank and file players tend not to do so - most of them don't even track tiles, for example. From what I've heard, the same split existed in the early days of English Scrabble also.
- The big tournament in Spanish Scrabble is the world championship, and unlike our every-two-years Worlds that a lot of North Americans don't even care about, they hold it every year. It was in Costa Rica last year, and will be in Mexico City this year.
- It seems like pairing methods are a work in progress in the Spanish game. I saw on a laptop there what looked to be pairing software, but I think it must have been more just record-keeping software. The tournament was re-paired manually after each round. I think they were using some sort of Swiss pairings, but I'm not sure. Maybe one of the tournament software programs used in tournaments in English can be fitted for use in Spanish tournaments too.
- Something English Scrabble players can relate well to: Hasbro sucks. I talked with a few of the Spanish players who were in leadership positions in the game, and they each independently mentioned having called on Hasbro to gauge interest in the Spanish game, only to be haughtily dismissed. One player mentioned proposing a School Scrabble program in Spanish. Hasbro sure loves them some School Scrabble in English - remember, they quit supporting adult tournament Scrabble so they could devote those resources to pushing the kiddie version - but nope, they shot down the idea of Spanish School Scrabble right away. Couldn't be clearer to me why: you can't put the kiddo who wins the Spanish School Scrabble championship on the Jimmy Kimmel Show or wherever and pimp a few extra home sets in the bargain. Lovely.
***
Travis finished the tournament 6-4 ("not bad for a gringo", he added), which should be enough to qualify him to be one of the U.S. representatives at the Spanish world championship. He went last year as well and finished quite respectably for a non-native speaker who'd only been playing the Spanish game for a year or so. What he's doing here is very difficult - I switch-hit between two English word lists, and that's challenging, but at least the smaller list is a subset of the bigger one, so when I play the bigger one I can play every word in the smaller one. And the differences between OWL and Collins are nothing compared to the differences between either one and a list in an entirely different language. Travis did say that he gets tripped up in Spanish Scrabble by his English knowledge sometimes. No surprise there.
Anyway, I really enjoyed getting to see the game and meet everyone, and I'd like to see the English and Spanish scenes get closer. I talked with a couple of people there about the possibility of arranging some joint activity in Austin...be interested to see where that might lead.
Why would Austin be a prime location for a Spanish tournament, you may wonder? The answer is that there are only two Spanish Scrabble clubs in the U.S., and one of them is here. The other is in Miami. The big Spanish Scrabble countries are Argentina, Venezuela and Spain, I gather. Most other South American countries have some presence in the game, Mexico has some but not that much yet, there are a few Caribbean players.
A lot of what I saw and heard reminded me of what I've read about the early days of tournament Scrabble in English. For the most part, Spanish Scrabble has evolved independently of the much larger (but still tiny) English tournament scene. The common point of origin is the box-top rules most people are familiar with, but tournament play by necessity expands and modifies those rules quite a bit...I should add here that, while English Scrabble has had the benefit of 20-25 more years of polishing its rules and practices and it seems clear that Spanish Scrabble would do well to take a look at how we've refined our game, there's nothing wrong with doing many or even most things a little differently. As long as the players are happy and the competition is fair, viva la diferencia (I have no idea whether I'm saying that right...sis?)
Some observations:
- Many things that have been around a long time in the English scene are fairly new to Spanish. For example, Spanish Protiles only recently became available. (For non-Scrabblers reading this, Protiles are the plastic tiles used in official Scrabble play, as opposed to the wooden ones that come with store versions of the game. The difference is that the letters on the plastic tiles aren't indented, so players can't cheat by distinguishing letters or blanks by feeling the tiles in the bag - "brailling" - when they draw.) Before the advent of Protiles, Spanish Scrabble had the rule that you couldn't count for yourself how many tiles were left in the bag; you had to call over a director or helper to do that for you.
- Spanish Scrabble allows each player 30 minutes on the clock instead of the 25 used in English. Not sure what the penalty is for going overtime (in English, it's 10 points per minute) EDIT: just learned it's the same penalty as in English.
- The sequence of a turn is different. In Spanish, you do everything before you hit the clock: place your tiles, add up and announce your score, write your score down, draw new tiles, THEN hit the clock. If an opponent wants to challenge the play, he or she must do so before you draw a replacement tile, as in English. As was the case in English Scrabble early on, the Spanish game has yet to adopt the "hold" rule. There's one more pertinent rule in here: once you place your first tile on the board for a play, you must play in that spot - you can rearrange transposed letters and such, but you can't take your play back or decide to play it somewhere else on the board. This is necessary because otherwise there would be no way to challenge - a player challenged could just take the play back.
As for writing the score down, I'm not absolutely sure about this, but it appears to be a requirement that you write down the main word formed by the play as well. I would support that rule for English Scrabble, to be honest - score checks and recounts are much harder when the players don't write the words down along with the scores.
- Spanish Scrabble is free challenge, so there are a lot of challenges. They have a novel way of addressing the problem of challenging plays frivolously just to buy time to think, which is a problem with free challenge. As is done in England and some other places, but not in North America, challenges are handled by runners. When the runner comes over to take the challenge slip to the computer, he or she brings a piece of square cardboard the size of the game board and covers the board with it so the players cannot study the board while the challenge is being adjudicated. (They also must put their tiles facedown when on neutral time, as we do.)
- Weird rule: score sheets aren't allowed to have the tile distribution preprinted on them. However, there's nothing prohibiting a player from writing the distribution on his or her score sheet manually once the game starts, and most of the better players do so. That sounds alien to an English player now, but in the earliest days of English Scrabble it was debated whether tracking sheets should be allowed and what rules should govern them.
- Spanish Scrabble does have an authoritative list of words like our OWL or CSW, but that's a recent development. The word source has been and still is the Diccionario de Real Academia Espanola (the computer I'm typing on has a weird problem doing special characters, sorry), but before the list, there were a whole bunch of guidelines in their rule book for how to judge from the dictionary whether a word was valid for Scrabble or not. I guess that was true in English in the early days, too.
- Spanish Scrabble has fewer words from 2-5 letters than English does, but many more at longer lengths. I gather this has mostly to do with all the verb conjugations in Spanish - the French list is about like the Spanish one in terms of how many words of each length there are. The effect on the game: more bingos (called "Scrabbles" in Spanish lingo, which makes more sense, I guess; what does "bingo" have to do with Scrabble?) and, at the other end, more racks where exchanging is the right play. There are eleven single-instance tiles in Spanish (we only have JKQXZ), and having an unplayable tile in the endgame is much more common than in English. The supply of vowels is very important, since a rack full of consonants is usually a disaster...Travis says that, in his experience, the English game is markedly more strategy-oriented, though top Spanish players can and do deploy effective strategy and tactics where the situation calls for it.
- Tournaments in Spanish are small and about all of them are opens. There's a huge gap between the top players and everyone else, both in ability and in the way they prepare and play. The stronger players play studiously, but the rank and file players tend not to do so - most of them don't even track tiles, for example. From what I've heard, the same split existed in the early days of English Scrabble also.
- The big tournament in Spanish Scrabble is the world championship, and unlike our every-two-years Worlds that a lot of North Americans don't even care about, they hold it every year. It was in Costa Rica last year, and will be in Mexico City this year.
- It seems like pairing methods are a work in progress in the Spanish game. I saw on a laptop there what looked to be pairing software, but I think it must have been more just record-keeping software. The tournament was re-paired manually after each round. I think they were using some sort of Swiss pairings, but I'm not sure. Maybe one of the tournament software programs used in tournaments in English can be fitted for use in Spanish tournaments too.
- Something English Scrabble players can relate well to: Hasbro sucks. I talked with a few of the Spanish players who were in leadership positions in the game, and they each independently mentioned having called on Hasbro to gauge interest in the Spanish game, only to be haughtily dismissed. One player mentioned proposing a School Scrabble program in Spanish. Hasbro sure loves them some School Scrabble in English - remember, they quit supporting adult tournament Scrabble so they could devote those resources to pushing the kiddie version - but nope, they shot down the idea of Spanish School Scrabble right away. Couldn't be clearer to me why: you can't put the kiddo who wins the Spanish School Scrabble championship on the Jimmy Kimmel Show or wherever and pimp a few extra home sets in the bargain. Lovely.
***
Travis finished the tournament 6-4 ("not bad for a gringo", he added), which should be enough to qualify him to be one of the U.S. representatives at the Spanish world championship. He went last year as well and finished quite respectably for a non-native speaker who'd only been playing the Spanish game for a year or so. What he's doing here is very difficult - I switch-hit between two English word lists, and that's challenging, but at least the smaller list is a subset of the bigger one, so when I play the bigger one I can play every word in the smaller one. And the differences between OWL and Collins are nothing compared to the differences between either one and a list in an entirely different language. Travis did say that he gets tripped up in Spanish Scrabble by his English knowledge sometimes. No surprise there.
Anyway, I really enjoyed getting to see the game and meet everyone, and I'd like to see the English and Spanish scenes get closer. I talked with a couple of people there about the possibility of arranging some joint activity in Austin...be interested to see where that might lead.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
About that schedule...
Today at breakfast, I was looking at the 1965 NFL season on pro-football-reference.com. Striking find of the day: The Cleveland Browns that year made it to the NFL championship game, losing to the Packers 23-12. The Packers, of course, had a winning record that year - and they were the ONLY Browns opponent to do so! That's right: all 14 of the Browns' opponents had finished the year 7-7 or worse.
How did this happen? The NFL back then, pre-merger with the AFL, had 14 teams, seven in the East division and seven in the West. Teams played 14 games, 12 in their own division and just two against the opposite division. The standings show the West as the much stronger division that year. Since there were so few interdivision games, this means the West must have really slaughtered the East in those games, so I checked. Yep, there were 14 interdivision games in the NFL in 1965, and the East won only one of them. The Browns were the only East team to finish above 7-7, and their two opponents from the West were the Vikings (7-7) and the Rams (4-10), both of whom the Browns lost to. Nor were the Browns particularly dominant when they did win. They scored just 38 points more than they allowed, though that is skewed by the late-season 42-7 loss to the Rams, where the Browns had already clinched the East and were playing backups. Even with that, this is an 11-3 team playing a historically wimpy schedule and performing more like a 9-5 team while doing it. Had the Browns played in the West, I bet they'd have struggled to finish .500.
How did this happen? The NFL back then, pre-merger with the AFL, had 14 teams, seven in the East division and seven in the West. Teams played 14 games, 12 in their own division and just two against the opposite division. The standings show the West as the much stronger division that year. Since there were so few interdivision games, this means the West must have really slaughtered the East in those games, so I checked. Yep, there were 14 interdivision games in the NFL in 1965, and the East won only one of them. The Browns were the only East team to finish above 7-7, and their two opponents from the West were the Vikings (7-7) and the Rams (4-10), both of whom the Browns lost to. Nor were the Browns particularly dominant when they did win. They scored just 38 points more than they allowed, though that is skewed by the late-season 42-7 loss to the Rams, where the Browns had already clinched the East and were playing backups. Even with that, this is an 11-3 team playing a historically wimpy schedule and performing more like a 9-5 team while doing it. Had the Browns played in the West, I bet they'd have struggled to finish .500.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Welcome Back Collins
Ahh...
Two things on top of my agenda for this fine Wednesday evening: cleaning the bathroom (beginning after I post this) and some Scrabble word practice. Which words? Well, for the past six weeks or so I've focused my study exclusively on the words that are valid in the OWL, which is the list used for the U.S. Nationals and for most club and tournament play in the U.S. However, the next tournaments on my calendar use a larger list, known as Collins or formerly SOWPODS, that is used in English-language Scrabble tournaments outside North America, including the World Championship, where I'll be competing in a couple of months. I usually study with the larger list, using # symbols to indicate which words are good *only* in the larger list.
Every word that's valid in the smaller OWL is also valid in Collins, so at least I don't have to *unlearn* any words to play in Collins tournaments, thank god. I merely have to remember not to play the Collins-only words when I go back to OWL tournaments. I'm usually pretty good about that, though I'm bound to slip here and there. I don't cough up illegal words often; the greater problem for me is thinking of a word and chickening out on it because I think it's Collins-only, and then finding out later, no, it's actually valid in OWL as well.
Not to rehash a debate that has grown endless and tiresome within the competitive Scrabble world (and please don't do so in comments, thanks), but yes, I think this long-lived state of affairs is stupid and that we should have one word list and one supreme governing body for competitive play everywhere. For many reasons I won't bother with here, I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to happen, though the number of opportunities to play the larger list here is growing. I've been playing both lists for years now and will do so as long as I have to in order to play the tournaments I want to play. As to whether this has been bad for my OWL game, well, sure, on balance it doesn't help to have to block out a fourth of the words I know, but I was ranked as high as #7 in North America earlier this year - the OWL list - so I'd say I'm doing all right. My last two Nationals have been subpar, but dictionary issues weren't much of a factor in that.
So now that Nationals is over, I'm welcoming back the rest of the words. EPICIER, LANDRAIL, LISPOUND, ADJIGO, FOREX, IO, SEEDINGS (yes, seriously, it's not good here - what the...?), EMO, ZAKAT, BELONGER, TOISEACH, DETORT, TOYWOMAN, BHAJI, YUFT, GREX, IMPUNDULU, OARIEST, KILLUT, ZONURE, COLETIT and all you others...come on down.
Two things on top of my agenda for this fine Wednesday evening: cleaning the bathroom (beginning after I post this) and some Scrabble word practice. Which words? Well, for the past six weeks or so I've focused my study exclusively on the words that are valid in the OWL, which is the list used for the U.S. Nationals and for most club and tournament play in the U.S. However, the next tournaments on my calendar use a larger list, known as Collins or formerly SOWPODS, that is used in English-language Scrabble tournaments outside North America, including the World Championship, where I'll be competing in a couple of months. I usually study with the larger list, using # symbols to indicate which words are good *only* in the larger list.
Every word that's valid in the smaller OWL is also valid in Collins, so at least I don't have to *unlearn* any words to play in Collins tournaments, thank god. I merely have to remember not to play the Collins-only words when I go back to OWL tournaments. I'm usually pretty good about that, though I'm bound to slip here and there. I don't cough up illegal words often; the greater problem for me is thinking of a word and chickening out on it because I think it's Collins-only, and then finding out later, no, it's actually valid in OWL as well.
Not to rehash a debate that has grown endless and tiresome within the competitive Scrabble world (and please don't do so in comments, thanks), but yes, I think this long-lived state of affairs is stupid and that we should have one word list and one supreme governing body for competitive play everywhere. For many reasons I won't bother with here, I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to happen, though the number of opportunities to play the larger list here is growing. I've been playing both lists for years now and will do so as long as I have to in order to play the tournaments I want to play. As to whether this has been bad for my OWL game, well, sure, on balance it doesn't help to have to block out a fourth of the words I know, but I was ranked as high as #7 in North America earlier this year - the OWL list - so I'd say I'm doing all right. My last two Nationals have been subpar, but dictionary issues weren't much of a factor in that.
So now that Nationals is over, I'm welcoming back the rest of the words. EPICIER, LANDRAIL, LISPOUND, ADJIGO, FOREX, IO, SEEDINGS (yes, seriously, it's not good here - what the...?), EMO, ZAKAT, BELONGER, TOISEACH, DETORT, TOYWOMAN, BHAJI, YUFT, GREX, IMPUNDULU, OARIEST, KILLUT, ZONURE, COLETIT and all you others...come on down.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Gimme that gearshift
What I'm going to do when I get back from Nationals: first, my brother Brian, who lives in St. Louis now, will be visiting here with his family. I've met his wife Kara, but I've not yet met the children in the family. Kara has two from an earlier marriage: a son, Rhodes, who is in college in New Orleans (and unfortunately can't make it to Austin this time), and a daughter, Eve, who is 12. And Brian and Kara have a new baby, too - Mamie is about two months old. Three years ago today I had no nephews or nieces. Now I have six.
After that, time to slow down and reorganize. I've got more things big and small going on right now than I'm comfortable with. Some of that stretching is fine, it's good to have challenges and irons in the fire, but to get and stay happy I've found I need to know where home is and keep it in view. Home for me is a simple life. Few possessions, no drama, not running this way and that trying to keep up. My short-term resolution is that I will not add anything new to my life - no new toys, no new projects, no new obligations - until I sort out what's on the table now.
After that, time to slow down and reorganize. I've got more things big and small going on right now than I'm comfortable with. Some of that stretching is fine, it's good to have challenges and irons in the fire, but to get and stay happy I've found I need to know where home is and keep it in view. Home for me is a simple life. Few possessions, no drama, not running this way and that trying to keep up. My short-term resolution is that I will not add anything new to my life - no new toys, no new projects, no new obligations - until I sort out what's on the table now.
Lefty vs. Righty matchup
This morning, I went out and shot some baskets, as I've done most mornings the past couple of weeks. As I mentioned here before, I've been shooting almost all lefty in an attempt to improve my left-side strength and dexterity. Today, a check on that: I took 50 pairs of shots. The shots varied in distance, angle and type, and each time I took a shot with one hand I then took the same shot with the other.
Results: Lefty 20, Righty 14! This is not a big enough sample size to mean much, but that surprised me. Does a good amount of recent practice on an emerging skill trump an already established skill that hasn't been practiced? Assuming the skill isn't that complex and the established level isn't very high, as in this case, I guess it's possible. I felt almost more comfortable shooting lefty, and that's entirely recent.
I do think it's true that the first lessons often go the furthest. Scrabble is that way - a new player who learns the two-letter words, a smattering of other useful words, and some basic strategy will make a big leap forward. Music is, too: once you get the basic technique of an instrument down, that opens all kinds of doors.
Results: Lefty 20, Righty 14! This is not a big enough sample size to mean much, but that surprised me. Does a good amount of recent practice on an emerging skill trump an already established skill that hasn't been practiced? Assuming the skill isn't that complex and the established level isn't very high, as in this case, I guess it's possible. I felt almost more comfortable shooting lefty, and that's entirely recent.
I do think it's true that the first lessons often go the furthest. Scrabble is that way - a new player who learns the two-letter words, a smattering of other useful words, and some basic strategy will make a big leap forward. Music is, too: once you get the basic technique of an instrument down, that opens all kinds of doors.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
My Musical Life - Part 9
In June 2003, I moved to Austin, a city that bills itself as the live music capital of the world, and thereupon stopped playing live and have not resumed in the eight years since. Yeah, I know, right? The main reason was that I threw myself into something different: I'd read the book Word Freak, about the tournament Scrabble scene, and heard the call. Not a matter of merely wanting to do it - a matter of having to do it. So I started learning Scrabble words and strategy, and once I got here started going to the Austin club, and on Labor Day Weekend 2003 played my first tournament in Houston. Been doing it ever since, and it's been great - I've had a lot of reasons to celebrate, and I've made a lot of good friends. I'm much better known as a Scrabble player than I ever was as a musician, actually. Those first few years I really studied and practiced a lot, and other things in my life were bound to take a backseat at least to some degree.
I wrote some music here and there, but not much. I was living with my youngest brother, John, for the first couple of years I was here. John had first taken up guitar and then switched to bass as a teenager - he was making progress, but with folks that young it's hard to know how far they'll end up taking it. (My sister Mary also plays some guitar and piano and has a good singing voice, and I have no doubt she too would have done well in music had she pursued it.) When I got to Austin, John was 21, and it was clear he was going to go far on his instrument. He was a full-fledged Tool fanatic by then - certainly an excellent band and bass player for any hard rock musician to emulate - and both his chops and his sound were growing rapidly then and still are. John's got that gearhead piece that I've never really had but often wished I did; he's very knowledgeable about basses and bass amps and other gear and each rig he's built has sounded more refined and thunderous than the last. He's in a fantastic band called Aperture now, who can be heard at their website, aperturesounds.com.
John and I have always been close, and with music we have so much to talk about. I've been really proud and happy to be around to witness his musical adventures and growth. John has busted his ass to get to where he is, and there's not much I respect more than that. I have often wished I could find a way to do more to share my experience with him and help him, though he's doing more than fine on his own. Absolutely a pro-level player, hardworking, energetic, dedicated, a strong composer as well. Seems like we should have played together more, and we still may do so yet...we did have a studio band when we lived together, of a sort. All 47 of our songs are short (the shortest was seven seconds) and most are absurd and/or extremely obscene comedy pieces. Not for the easily offended; available upon request. We laughed our asses off making that stuff.
As for my more serious writing, I didn't do much of it for a few years there. My financial situation improved dramatically in the years after I got to Austin, and I've upgraded my home studio. I have a stand-alone 16-track digital recorder, and over the past four years I've put a good number of new ideas down, over 100. I've wanted to return more quickly and furiously and get music done and available for people to hear - but that's been difficult. Which has been the case often, as you might guess from reading this series. I've never been short of ideas or musical vocabulary, but I've often had a very hard time digging in and getting music fully written and recorded. The gun's loaded but firing it's another thing entirely. I could dwell on why, but I won't, because ultimately it doesn't matter. Right now the fact is that I have a massive backlog of unrealized musical ideas, over 25 years' worth of them. By no means do I think all of them are good or worth revisiting - even the best writers, ones I would idolize, write a lot of junk - and I want to write lots of new music as well. But there's some serious reclaiming to do.
A new thing, and I wish I'd done it a few years earlier: I bought an electronic drum kit in the summer of 2009. (I live in an apartment, so an acoustic kit is out of the question.) I've spent some time learning drums and recording with live drums since, though I'd like to step that up and bring my skills on the instrument up to where I'm not clearly worse on drums than on the other instruments. Still a long way to go, years of practice, but I'm not old, and I've been more motivated this way the past six months or so.
***
Going back to my musical family for a moment...my sister Mary's oldest daughter Natalie's first birthday was at the end of July 2010, and Mary came up with a great idea: record a CD of the family making music, both as a gift to Natalie for her first birthday and a memory for all six of us. I recorded and produced the project, but making the music was a truly collective endeavor. Lots of duets and trios and a very wide range of music: my mom singing lullabies, my dad singing blues and playing piano and organ, two siblings and I covering Steely Dan, my recording of a medley of War Pigs and Kashmir, Brian doing a dead-on imitation of Johnny Cash, Mary singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow and many more. I was newly reminded of just how musical we all are, and what a pleasure it was. We'll listen back to it fondly in ten years and beyond, I am sure.
***
In late 2009 or early 2010, having virtually no music online or, heck, any evidence that I was ever a musician (I was busiest in the era right *before* everything got put online), I decided it was getting about mandatory to put some music up. Even if it was only demos, even if the audio and performances were notably flawed. Screw perfectionism - anything is better than nothing. Busting through the psychological block is the most, perhaps the only, important result. The block is strong: It took me until the fall of 2010 to get around to posting six of the ten songs planned for my current project (I still tend to think of projects in terms of the length of a conventional album, ten songs or so). Felt really good to get those up, but again I couldn't fire the remaining bullets for six more months. Songs #7 and #8 got posted about a week ago, and I did vocals for song #9 a couple of hours ago. #10 is fully composed. Hear the songs here: http://listn.to/TremblesofFortune
So yes, I will have the first Trembles of Fortune album done in demo form very soon. The next thing to do? Start on another. And another. Keep sledgehammering that psychological block until it breaks. Of course, I have to work this into the rest of my life; I have a 40-hour-a-week job, and I direct the Austin Scrabble club now, and big tournaments are coming up in the next three months that I'll need many hours of prep for, and there's time with my family and friends and getting some exercise and all the other things that keep life balanced. Music is a central part of me, but it's just one part.
To move this project further, I'll also need to learn how to get the music heard. I'm behind the curve there - I've never been particularly knowledgeable about promotion to begin with, and it's been years, and the Internet music world has sprung up all around us. I have a lot to learn. And I'll need to reach out to other people to do it - I can sit here and make demos by myself, but if I want to fry bigger fish I'll need to establish relationships that help (and that give me chances to help others). That will be perhaps the biggest challenge, but no man is an island.
***
So have I gotten in music what I came for? Well, I have to be honest, the answer is no, or at least not yet. The primary reason I became a musician and composer was to write, record and perform my own music, exactly the kind I want to write, at a high level. I don't mean a high level of fame and fortune - it's not about those things at all. I mean to where I'm realizing the music in my head, prolifically making honest-to-goodness releasable recordings of it and fronting the bands playing it. With not nearly enough exceptions, this hasn't come to be, and the responsibility is mine. Every day I have to look in the mirror knowing that I haven't made my dream happen, and it doesn't feel good. However long I have left, I'd like to improve that situation. Even achieving some of the dream, parts of it - because anything is better than nothing, and some is good but more is better. All that matters is that I take the challenge head-on and persist.
As for playing live again, yeah, I love it, but I've also been there and done it, nearly a thousand times. If I go out again as a recurring thing, it's got to be me doing what I want to do musically and nothing less. I miss the stage, but I don't miss the bars. And I don't miss the logistical hassles that bands go through, like, for example, pleading with wannabe brownshirt security personnel about parking and unloading gear, or getting home at 4 am on a work night. Doing the club thing can be a real grind at times, especially at the medium and lower tiers of it, and I don't have many contacts in the Austin scene. On the other hand, taking a band out to play my music would be incredibly satisfying. But right now, it's not a concern. Recording music comes first.
But while I regret what hasn't happened, that doesn't mean I regret what did happen. I don't, not at all. I've gotten the chance to play so many kinds of music with and for so many different people, to the point where it required a 9-part series to write about it and I've left a lot of musical experiences out. I didn't talk about teaching lessons, or doing studio work (including a lot of karaoke backing tracks) or arranging, or many short stints in groups, or many individual players I jammed and worked on home-type projects with. (I also didn't write about sex or drugs or alcohol or interpersonal dramas - all of those things were part of the experience, I won't lie to you, but in writing here I wanted to focus on the music itself, not the VH1 Behind the Music elements.) And I could have done even more different things if I'd been more motivated that way. I played with many excellent musicians, from whom I learned much, and made a number of great friends, and had a few special experiences a lot of musicians don't get to have. A lot of good memories, and I'm truly grateful for everything music has given me, past, present and future.
I wrote some music here and there, but not much. I was living with my youngest brother, John, for the first couple of years I was here. John had first taken up guitar and then switched to bass as a teenager - he was making progress, but with folks that young it's hard to know how far they'll end up taking it. (My sister Mary also plays some guitar and piano and has a good singing voice, and I have no doubt she too would have done well in music had she pursued it.) When I got to Austin, John was 21, and it was clear he was going to go far on his instrument. He was a full-fledged Tool fanatic by then - certainly an excellent band and bass player for any hard rock musician to emulate - and both his chops and his sound were growing rapidly then and still are. John's got that gearhead piece that I've never really had but often wished I did; he's very knowledgeable about basses and bass amps and other gear and each rig he's built has sounded more refined and thunderous than the last. He's in a fantastic band called Aperture now, who can be heard at their website, aperturesounds.com.
John and I have always been close, and with music we have so much to talk about. I've been really proud and happy to be around to witness his musical adventures and growth. John has busted his ass to get to where he is, and there's not much I respect more than that. I have often wished I could find a way to do more to share my experience with him and help him, though he's doing more than fine on his own. Absolutely a pro-level player, hardworking, energetic, dedicated, a strong composer as well. Seems like we should have played together more, and we still may do so yet...we did have a studio band when we lived together, of a sort. All 47 of our songs are short (the shortest was seven seconds) and most are absurd and/or extremely obscene comedy pieces. Not for the easily offended; available upon request. We laughed our asses off making that stuff.
As for my more serious writing, I didn't do much of it for a few years there. My financial situation improved dramatically in the years after I got to Austin, and I've upgraded my home studio. I have a stand-alone 16-track digital recorder, and over the past four years I've put a good number of new ideas down, over 100. I've wanted to return more quickly and furiously and get music done and available for people to hear - but that's been difficult. Which has been the case often, as you might guess from reading this series. I've never been short of ideas or musical vocabulary, but I've often had a very hard time digging in and getting music fully written and recorded. The gun's loaded but firing it's another thing entirely. I could dwell on why, but I won't, because ultimately it doesn't matter. Right now the fact is that I have a massive backlog of unrealized musical ideas, over 25 years' worth of them. By no means do I think all of them are good or worth revisiting - even the best writers, ones I would idolize, write a lot of junk - and I want to write lots of new music as well. But there's some serious reclaiming to do.
A new thing, and I wish I'd done it a few years earlier: I bought an electronic drum kit in the summer of 2009. (I live in an apartment, so an acoustic kit is out of the question.) I've spent some time learning drums and recording with live drums since, though I'd like to step that up and bring my skills on the instrument up to where I'm not clearly worse on drums than on the other instruments. Still a long way to go, years of practice, but I'm not old, and I've been more motivated this way the past six months or so.
***
Going back to my musical family for a moment...my sister Mary's oldest daughter Natalie's first birthday was at the end of July 2010, and Mary came up with a great idea: record a CD of the family making music, both as a gift to Natalie for her first birthday and a memory for all six of us. I recorded and produced the project, but making the music was a truly collective endeavor. Lots of duets and trios and a very wide range of music: my mom singing lullabies, my dad singing blues and playing piano and organ, two siblings and I covering Steely Dan, my recording of a medley of War Pigs and Kashmir, Brian doing a dead-on imitation of Johnny Cash, Mary singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow and many more. I was newly reminded of just how musical we all are, and what a pleasure it was. We'll listen back to it fondly in ten years and beyond, I am sure.
***
In late 2009 or early 2010, having virtually no music online or, heck, any evidence that I was ever a musician (I was busiest in the era right *before* everything got put online), I decided it was getting about mandatory to put some music up. Even if it was only demos, even if the audio and performances were notably flawed. Screw perfectionism - anything is better than nothing. Busting through the psychological block is the most, perhaps the only, important result. The block is strong: It took me until the fall of 2010 to get around to posting six of the ten songs planned for my current project (I still tend to think of projects in terms of the length of a conventional album, ten songs or so). Felt really good to get those up, but again I couldn't fire the remaining bullets for six more months. Songs #7 and #8 got posted about a week ago, and I did vocals for song #9 a couple of hours ago. #10 is fully composed. Hear the songs here: http://listn.to/TremblesofFortune
So yes, I will have the first Trembles of Fortune album done in demo form very soon. The next thing to do? Start on another. And another. Keep sledgehammering that psychological block until it breaks. Of course, I have to work this into the rest of my life; I have a 40-hour-a-week job, and I direct the Austin Scrabble club now, and big tournaments are coming up in the next three months that I'll need many hours of prep for, and there's time with my family and friends and getting some exercise and all the other things that keep life balanced. Music is a central part of me, but it's just one part.
To move this project further, I'll also need to learn how to get the music heard. I'm behind the curve there - I've never been particularly knowledgeable about promotion to begin with, and it's been years, and the Internet music world has sprung up all around us. I have a lot to learn. And I'll need to reach out to other people to do it - I can sit here and make demos by myself, but if I want to fry bigger fish I'll need to establish relationships that help (and that give me chances to help others). That will be perhaps the biggest challenge, but no man is an island.
***
So have I gotten in music what I came for? Well, I have to be honest, the answer is no, or at least not yet. The primary reason I became a musician and composer was to write, record and perform my own music, exactly the kind I want to write, at a high level. I don't mean a high level of fame and fortune - it's not about those things at all. I mean to where I'm realizing the music in my head, prolifically making honest-to-goodness releasable recordings of it and fronting the bands playing it. With not nearly enough exceptions, this hasn't come to be, and the responsibility is mine. Every day I have to look in the mirror knowing that I haven't made my dream happen, and it doesn't feel good. However long I have left, I'd like to improve that situation. Even achieving some of the dream, parts of it - because anything is better than nothing, and some is good but more is better. All that matters is that I take the challenge head-on and persist.
As for playing live again, yeah, I love it, but I've also been there and done it, nearly a thousand times. If I go out again as a recurring thing, it's got to be me doing what I want to do musically and nothing less. I miss the stage, but I don't miss the bars. And I don't miss the logistical hassles that bands go through, like, for example, pleading with wannabe brownshirt security personnel about parking and unloading gear, or getting home at 4 am on a work night. Doing the club thing can be a real grind at times, especially at the medium and lower tiers of it, and I don't have many contacts in the Austin scene. On the other hand, taking a band out to play my music would be incredibly satisfying. But right now, it's not a concern. Recording music comes first.
But while I regret what hasn't happened, that doesn't mean I regret what did happen. I don't, not at all. I've gotten the chance to play so many kinds of music with and for so many different people, to the point where it required a 9-part series to write about it and I've left a lot of musical experiences out. I didn't talk about teaching lessons, or doing studio work (including a lot of karaoke backing tracks) or arranging, or many short stints in groups, or many individual players I jammed and worked on home-type projects with. (I also didn't write about sex or drugs or alcohol or interpersonal dramas - all of those things were part of the experience, I won't lie to you, but in writing here I wanted to focus on the music itself, not the VH1 Behind the Music elements.) And I could have done even more different things if I'd been more motivated that way. I played with many excellent musicians, from whom I learned much, and made a number of great friends, and had a few special experiences a lot of musicians don't get to have. A lot of good memories, and I'm truly grateful for everything music has given me, past, present and future.
Friday, July 29, 2011
My Musical Life - Part 8
When I started playing with the UCO jazz program in fall 1997, my contacts in the local music scene got a helpful boost, as many of the other students and instructors were gigging musicians like me. I got some pick-up gigs quickly, mostly on bass (everyone needs a bass player), and word also got around to a couple of local cover bands, fairly high on that particular food chain, with unsettled bass situations. I tried out for one band who were thinking of firing their bass player, but they ended up reconciling. Then I got a call from another band, a very well-established band in the local scene - the guy I spoke with told me that their bass player was moving to Atlanta soon. I went to one of their club shows and sat in on bass for a few songs, and it went well, and it looked like I was going to get the spot. I definitely wanted to join, despite the band's stodgy set list, since the band had lots of gigs and ones that would pay me better than I'd made with any other band before (granted, not that much). I needed the money: note recurring theme. Well, it took an unusually long time for them to get back to me, and when they did I heard the news - their bassist, on the night before he was supposed to leave for Atlanta, totaled his car. He wasn't hurt too badly, but this meant he couldn't afford to move and had to stay in town and with the band. Oh jeez, c'mon, what are the odds of that...
I was bummed, of course. I needed a gig. But what I didn't know was that this would turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. In February 1998, not long after, I got a phone call from a guy named Wayman, who I'd worked with briefly in shipping and receiving at the state health department - seven years (!) before. Wayman was a drummer, and he and I went to lunch together a few times, talked about music, played demo tapes for each other. I hadn't heard from him since then, so this was quite the surprise. Thank the flying spaghetti monster that I have a weird name and am thus easy to find in a phone book. Wayman told me that he had this band called Banana Seat...are you ready for this - with ELEVEN members in it, a full horn section, two female singers...the band did 70s and early 80s music, stuff with big arrangements: Chicago, Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Earth Wind and Fire. A lot of that older stuff I knew and liked. My mind was blowing about then, and he mentioned that they were firing their keyboardist and invited me down to try out. Which I did, with a quickness, and got the spot.
I was going to make my debut with them in a few weeks, but after I got the tapes of the songs to learn, Wayman told me that their departing keyboardist wasn't going to be able to play that weekend. I said I'd do it. This meant learning keyboard parts to 35 songs in four days, and it wasn't just comping piano chords - I had to know the arrangements, a string part here, a synth part there, a hand clap after the guitar solo. At least well enough to get the band through the gig. I stayed up all night charting and learning songs that night. I'm sure I missed a lot of little details in that first show, but no matter. I was wondering how in the heck an 11-member band could manage to get paid playing clubs in the OKC area, and when I got to that first show I learned how: the place was packed wall-to-wall. The band was getting really popular locally just about then. So that was energizing, and even more so, the music was so fun to play! Especially on keys. It was pop, but the task was damn near as challenging as playing jazz, in a different way. Had to juggle a lot of parts on two keyboards, all while handling more patch changes live than I'd ever had to before. I was overjoyed.
I would end up playing in Banana Seat for five years, and we played a LOT. Almost every weekend, Friday and Saturday, for almost the whole time I was in the band. Oklahoma City, Norman, Tulsa, Dallas...plus lots of private parties and weddings (where the real money was made). I did close to 500 shows with the band, more than with every other band I've been in, combined. For the first three years we were at or near the very top of our local scene, as far as cover bands went. We had the top booking agency in town booking us, and we brought in a boatload of money: even after the money was divided 11 ways instead of the four or five that a typical band would have, I was still making twice or three times what I'd made in bands before then. Wasn't quite enough to live on, but not all that far off at the best of times.
What our club shows were like: we'd usually play 3-4 sets, 30-35 songs. Start at 10, quit near 2. Our audience was maybe 60-70 percent female, which I can't say I objected to. Lots of eye candy to look at from the stage. Our stage plot was unusual - Wayman, the drummer, set up front center stage, since he was also the lead singer. The four horns (two trumpets, trombone, alto sax) were on a platform behind him; the two female singers to one side of the stage, with me and the lead guitarist behind them; and the bassist and rhythm guitarist on the other side. We had lots of little period props, like a Lite-Brite and an old TV playing Sid and Marty Krofft kids' shows, and lots of percussion toys all over the place. Tons of mikes, because we had five regular singers. (I wasn't one of them, but it was okay since the keyboard parts had me so busy I couldn't have covered that many backing vocals anyway.) Very often the club stages we played on were too small for us, so we were cramped onstage a lot - I can remember my back hurting after shows sometimes from being wedged in behind my keyboard rig in a less than natural position. You do what you gotta do, and besides, we often got free beer so I didn't feel the back pain until later!
The band's image was...okay, I say this lovingly, if y'all Banana Seaters are reading this, and the crowds didn't seem to mind, but jeez, we looked boring. "Network Solution Associates Business Sales Department, Midwest Region, out on happy hour" would cover it reasonably well. And we weren't making up for it with stage moves either, not that it would have been a great idea to begin with. The music spoke for us, though, and I think we did a good job choosing songs. We took pains to avoid the obvious choices - we wouldn't play the #1 hit, so much as we'd play that follow-up that peaked at #14, but that you have cool memories of. We were always getting requests for the most obvious choices - "Brick House" and "Play That Funky Music" were the most frequent ones. We never played either song; we were a cover band, but we did the covers we wanted to do.
Despite our palpable lack of a cool image, we continued to draw well enough that we got to open for some well-known 80s acts, most notably Men at Work (who were fantastic) and Rick Springfield (who wasn't). Maybe 3,000 in the audience at each show, something like that. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a serious rush to do that, but really, it's not that much different than a smaller show. You still set your gear up, play the songs on the set list taped to the stage by your feet as best you can like you rehearsed them, and then it's over and you go drink some more and talk to people and stuff.
We had some experienced songwriters in the band - Steve, the rhythm guitarist, Chris, the bassist, Wayman the drummer/lead singer, and me. About, what was it, 2000, we started playing a few originals, and we had plans to go into a nearby studio and record a CD. With the good turnouts at our shows, surely we'd sell a few, no? And I was definitely dreaming of writing originals for this band - how could I not? I mean, an 11-piece band, with horns and five or six skilled vocalists and everything, and established in a style that was a comfortable fit for my own? The band could have played the hell out of the Trembles stuff had they a mind to, though that wasn't going to happen and shouldn't have - those songs are in my voice, not theirs. And I'd be writing with other writers - good ones, but stylistically quite different, more early power-pop influenced, not jazz/soul/arena rock influenced as I was. And as fun as a lot of our material was to perform, playing mostly the same covers weekend after weekend was getting a little old, and I hungered to get back into some original music.
The Banana Seat CD, called Everything Glitters, took two years to make. If that sounds like some tooth-pulling was involved, yes, that's correct. The process was drawn out and at times contentious, and by the end of it we were kind of exhausted musically and emotionally, I suspect. One issue was that the four writers were the only ones really that enthusiastic about doing the original thing, which I wasn't happy about at the time, but looking back I understand. It's one thing to ask someone to rehearse once or twice a week, play two gigs on the weekends, have fun and get paid. It's quite another to ask someone to commit to a creative vision not their own, to the point of rehearsing all the time and playing shows full of originals for no money, which might lead to, what, regional touring - let's all get in a van and drive around busting our balls so we can play for tiny crowds in medium-small dot towns up the Pacific coast or wherever...the members of the band were older this time, and some of them were married with kids. Not sure what I was really expecting there; I'd have done all that, but I had nothing to lose. And I was unnecessarily obnoxious about a lot of creative issues, I'll freely admit. But what hurt more on a personal level is that here was a golden opportunity to show what I could do as a writer, and I really didn't back the talk with material. I have two writing credits on the 10-song album, but the number isn't the point; I had a lot of respect for the other writers in the band and was happy to have their work represented as much or more than my own. My songs are good songs, I think, but I was haunted by the thought that I had better stuff in me that I didn't get out when it mattered. And that this might be the best chance I'd ever have with a band - though that didn't really take into account the reality of the situation, either. I was past 30, with no particular successes outside of music, and the selfish sense that this would be my last best run at musical notoriety was in play as well.
We gave it a brief run, playing the songs off the album, selling a few CDs. Didn't really make a splash and we went back to our usual covers business...but there was one great adventure left even then. On the way home from a Tulsa gig, Wayman and I were talking and he mentioned there was this project organized by some musicians in other local OKC bands called the Mixtape Club. The idea was that every month or two the club would put on a show, covering the songs of one particular artist for a whole night; various bands and guest musicians would all pitch in to pull the show off. And one artist they had thought about was Steely Dan, and Banana Seat (who played some Steely Dan already) was about the only band around who could pull something like that off. Both Wayman and I are huge Steely Dan fans - sometimes after rehearsal he and I would stay after and jam on some SD...to say one thing about my friend Wayman, he's an eternal optimist. He believed we could do anything, that huge success was always just around the corner; it wasn't always, of course, but we did have a lot of success when you look back, so in many respects Wayman's been vindicated.
So anyway, we kept talking on that ride home, and what started as one or two sets, total of ten, twelve, maybe fifteen songs, became "we're going to learn three full sets of Steely Dan". And given the timetable of the project, we had two months or so to pull it off. Whoa, shit...as anyone who knows Steely Dan's music knows, it's among the most complex music ever to succeed on the pop charts. Steely Dan themselves didn't play live after their first couple of albums, and most of their classic 70s releases were done with a phalanx of ace L.A. studio musicians who rendered their jazzy tracks smooth as silk. This was another enterprise where most of the band had to be cajoled into it - we were definitely spending whatever currency we had with everybody. A ton of rehearsals, both as a full band and in sections - horns, vocals, rhythm players. There was just so much to learn, so quickly. Aside from handling all the keyboards, a daunting task in itself, my role was to write out charts for the bassist and for the horns. I'd come home every night from work and go at it, for weeks. Constantly on deadline. My chops were up, I'll say that. We had the help of a number of talented guest musicians, too, which was fun and a much-needed boost, I think. We played the Steely Dan tribute show in December 2002, and while it wasn't perfect - how could it have been - we pulled it off damn believably, and it was perhaps the most satisfying live musical experience I've ever had, bar none, even more than opening for big acts or playing in front of large crowds. The second set was the Aja album, in its entirety. We painted a backdrop of the album cover; Marnie and Melissa, our two female singers, dressed in Japanese costumes for the performance of the title track. The night ended with a sloppy but fun rendition of the complex, reharmonized Alive in America version of Reelin' in the Years. There were maybe 50-75 people in the audience, many good friends of ours and guest performers. It was a celebration, one we'd really worked hard for. I'm indebted to everyone in Banana Seat and the guest performers for the joy I got from that night - this was a collective achievement through and through.
Anyway, returning to the Banana Seat album: was it any good? I'm listening to it right now, for the first time in at least five years, probably seven...yeah, it's better than I remember it. Much better. No reason whatsoever we should be disappointed about it. In retrospect, I'm proud as hell of us. Flawed, sure, but you can hear the ambition. What we were trying to do was a bitch, and it wasn't anything like anyone else was doing at the time. There are some soaring performances; for one, Marnie's singing still just blows me away. And the writing's pretty damn good. I love a lot of the vocal arrangements - we had so many good singers in the band. I'm at least a credible rock singer, and I was probably the fifth or sixth-best vocalist among us, put it that way. It's hard to quantify what's missing - a prominent thought I had in the past hour is "what would this album have been if we'd had a producer and recorded in a better studio". That's not to insult our engineer, and maybe that situation couldn't have come about...but some bright spark could have really spun a gem from the best parts of this record. The raw materials were there.
In early 2003, I found myself newly inspired to come up with some songs for a possible second Banana Seat album. We didn't make another album, but we did play a few of those songs live. I definitely felt a sense of too little, too late - these were among the best pop-flavored songs I think I've ever written, but it seemed unlikely that we'd take another shot at album-making after how difficult the first one was. And soon after that, I made the decision to move to Austin, which of course would end my time with Banana Seat. (I ended up moving here a bit sooner than I planned; some of y'all know that bizarre story. A senile 89-year-old driver and a tornado were involved.) I knew I'd miss the band, but Austin was the right move for me, for a number of reasons. Still, what a five-year ride, and if it felt like a missed chance at something even greater back then, that's not the way I think of it now. I only wish I'd savored it all more.
I was bummed, of course. I needed a gig. But what I didn't know was that this would turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. In February 1998, not long after, I got a phone call from a guy named Wayman, who I'd worked with briefly in shipping and receiving at the state health department - seven years (!) before. Wayman was a drummer, and he and I went to lunch together a few times, talked about music, played demo tapes for each other. I hadn't heard from him since then, so this was quite the surprise. Thank the flying spaghetti monster that I have a weird name and am thus easy to find in a phone book. Wayman told me that he had this band called Banana Seat...are you ready for this - with ELEVEN members in it, a full horn section, two female singers...the band did 70s and early 80s music, stuff with big arrangements: Chicago, Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Earth Wind and Fire. A lot of that older stuff I knew and liked. My mind was blowing about then, and he mentioned that they were firing their keyboardist and invited me down to try out. Which I did, with a quickness, and got the spot.
I was going to make my debut with them in a few weeks, but after I got the tapes of the songs to learn, Wayman told me that their departing keyboardist wasn't going to be able to play that weekend. I said I'd do it. This meant learning keyboard parts to 35 songs in four days, and it wasn't just comping piano chords - I had to know the arrangements, a string part here, a synth part there, a hand clap after the guitar solo. At least well enough to get the band through the gig. I stayed up all night charting and learning songs that night. I'm sure I missed a lot of little details in that first show, but no matter. I was wondering how in the heck an 11-member band could manage to get paid playing clubs in the OKC area, and when I got to that first show I learned how: the place was packed wall-to-wall. The band was getting really popular locally just about then. So that was energizing, and even more so, the music was so fun to play! Especially on keys. It was pop, but the task was damn near as challenging as playing jazz, in a different way. Had to juggle a lot of parts on two keyboards, all while handling more patch changes live than I'd ever had to before. I was overjoyed.
I would end up playing in Banana Seat for five years, and we played a LOT. Almost every weekend, Friday and Saturday, for almost the whole time I was in the band. Oklahoma City, Norman, Tulsa, Dallas...plus lots of private parties and weddings (where the real money was made). I did close to 500 shows with the band, more than with every other band I've been in, combined. For the first three years we were at or near the very top of our local scene, as far as cover bands went. We had the top booking agency in town booking us, and we brought in a boatload of money: even after the money was divided 11 ways instead of the four or five that a typical band would have, I was still making twice or three times what I'd made in bands before then. Wasn't quite enough to live on, but not all that far off at the best of times.
What our club shows were like: we'd usually play 3-4 sets, 30-35 songs. Start at 10, quit near 2. Our audience was maybe 60-70 percent female, which I can't say I objected to. Lots of eye candy to look at from the stage. Our stage plot was unusual - Wayman, the drummer, set up front center stage, since he was also the lead singer. The four horns (two trumpets, trombone, alto sax) were on a platform behind him; the two female singers to one side of the stage, with me and the lead guitarist behind them; and the bassist and rhythm guitarist on the other side. We had lots of little period props, like a Lite-Brite and an old TV playing Sid and Marty Krofft kids' shows, and lots of percussion toys all over the place. Tons of mikes, because we had five regular singers. (I wasn't one of them, but it was okay since the keyboard parts had me so busy I couldn't have covered that many backing vocals anyway.) Very often the club stages we played on were too small for us, so we were cramped onstage a lot - I can remember my back hurting after shows sometimes from being wedged in behind my keyboard rig in a less than natural position. You do what you gotta do, and besides, we often got free beer so I didn't feel the back pain until later!
The band's image was...okay, I say this lovingly, if y'all Banana Seaters are reading this, and the crowds didn't seem to mind, but jeez, we looked boring. "Network Solution Associates Business Sales Department, Midwest Region, out on happy hour" would cover it reasonably well. And we weren't making up for it with stage moves either, not that it would have been a great idea to begin with. The music spoke for us, though, and I think we did a good job choosing songs. We took pains to avoid the obvious choices - we wouldn't play the #1 hit, so much as we'd play that follow-up that peaked at #14, but that you have cool memories of. We were always getting requests for the most obvious choices - "Brick House" and "Play That Funky Music" were the most frequent ones. We never played either song; we were a cover band, but we did the covers we wanted to do.
Despite our palpable lack of a cool image, we continued to draw well enough that we got to open for some well-known 80s acts, most notably Men at Work (who were fantastic) and Rick Springfield (who wasn't). Maybe 3,000 in the audience at each show, something like that. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a serious rush to do that, but really, it's not that much different than a smaller show. You still set your gear up, play the songs on the set list taped to the stage by your feet as best you can like you rehearsed them, and then it's over and you go drink some more and talk to people and stuff.
We had some experienced songwriters in the band - Steve, the rhythm guitarist, Chris, the bassist, Wayman the drummer/lead singer, and me. About, what was it, 2000, we started playing a few originals, and we had plans to go into a nearby studio and record a CD. With the good turnouts at our shows, surely we'd sell a few, no? And I was definitely dreaming of writing originals for this band - how could I not? I mean, an 11-piece band, with horns and five or six skilled vocalists and everything, and established in a style that was a comfortable fit for my own? The band could have played the hell out of the Trembles stuff had they a mind to, though that wasn't going to happen and shouldn't have - those songs are in my voice, not theirs. And I'd be writing with other writers - good ones, but stylistically quite different, more early power-pop influenced, not jazz/soul/arena rock influenced as I was. And as fun as a lot of our material was to perform, playing mostly the same covers weekend after weekend was getting a little old, and I hungered to get back into some original music.
The Banana Seat CD, called Everything Glitters, took two years to make. If that sounds like some tooth-pulling was involved, yes, that's correct. The process was drawn out and at times contentious, and by the end of it we were kind of exhausted musically and emotionally, I suspect. One issue was that the four writers were the only ones really that enthusiastic about doing the original thing, which I wasn't happy about at the time, but looking back I understand. It's one thing to ask someone to rehearse once or twice a week, play two gigs on the weekends, have fun and get paid. It's quite another to ask someone to commit to a creative vision not their own, to the point of rehearsing all the time and playing shows full of originals for no money, which might lead to, what, regional touring - let's all get in a van and drive around busting our balls so we can play for tiny crowds in medium-small dot towns up the Pacific coast or wherever...the members of the band were older this time, and some of them were married with kids. Not sure what I was really expecting there; I'd have done all that, but I had nothing to lose. And I was unnecessarily obnoxious about a lot of creative issues, I'll freely admit. But what hurt more on a personal level is that here was a golden opportunity to show what I could do as a writer, and I really didn't back the talk with material. I have two writing credits on the 10-song album, but the number isn't the point; I had a lot of respect for the other writers in the band and was happy to have their work represented as much or more than my own. My songs are good songs, I think, but I was haunted by the thought that I had better stuff in me that I didn't get out when it mattered. And that this might be the best chance I'd ever have with a band - though that didn't really take into account the reality of the situation, either. I was past 30, with no particular successes outside of music, and the selfish sense that this would be my last best run at musical notoriety was in play as well.
We gave it a brief run, playing the songs off the album, selling a few CDs. Didn't really make a splash and we went back to our usual covers business...but there was one great adventure left even then. On the way home from a Tulsa gig, Wayman and I were talking and he mentioned there was this project organized by some musicians in other local OKC bands called the Mixtape Club. The idea was that every month or two the club would put on a show, covering the songs of one particular artist for a whole night; various bands and guest musicians would all pitch in to pull the show off. And one artist they had thought about was Steely Dan, and Banana Seat (who played some Steely Dan already) was about the only band around who could pull something like that off. Both Wayman and I are huge Steely Dan fans - sometimes after rehearsal he and I would stay after and jam on some SD...to say one thing about my friend Wayman, he's an eternal optimist. He believed we could do anything, that huge success was always just around the corner; it wasn't always, of course, but we did have a lot of success when you look back, so in many respects Wayman's been vindicated.
So anyway, we kept talking on that ride home, and what started as one or two sets, total of ten, twelve, maybe fifteen songs, became "we're going to learn three full sets of Steely Dan". And given the timetable of the project, we had two months or so to pull it off. Whoa, shit...as anyone who knows Steely Dan's music knows, it's among the most complex music ever to succeed on the pop charts. Steely Dan themselves didn't play live after their first couple of albums, and most of their classic 70s releases were done with a phalanx of ace L.A. studio musicians who rendered their jazzy tracks smooth as silk. This was another enterprise where most of the band had to be cajoled into it - we were definitely spending whatever currency we had with everybody. A ton of rehearsals, both as a full band and in sections - horns, vocals, rhythm players. There was just so much to learn, so quickly. Aside from handling all the keyboards, a daunting task in itself, my role was to write out charts for the bassist and for the horns. I'd come home every night from work and go at it, for weeks. Constantly on deadline. My chops were up, I'll say that. We had the help of a number of talented guest musicians, too, which was fun and a much-needed boost, I think. We played the Steely Dan tribute show in December 2002, and while it wasn't perfect - how could it have been - we pulled it off damn believably, and it was perhaps the most satisfying live musical experience I've ever had, bar none, even more than opening for big acts or playing in front of large crowds. The second set was the Aja album, in its entirety. We painted a backdrop of the album cover; Marnie and Melissa, our two female singers, dressed in Japanese costumes for the performance of the title track. The night ended with a sloppy but fun rendition of the complex, reharmonized Alive in America version of Reelin' in the Years. There were maybe 50-75 people in the audience, many good friends of ours and guest performers. It was a celebration, one we'd really worked hard for. I'm indebted to everyone in Banana Seat and the guest performers for the joy I got from that night - this was a collective achievement through and through.
Anyway, returning to the Banana Seat album: was it any good? I'm listening to it right now, for the first time in at least five years, probably seven...yeah, it's better than I remember it. Much better. No reason whatsoever we should be disappointed about it. In retrospect, I'm proud as hell of us. Flawed, sure, but you can hear the ambition. What we were trying to do was a bitch, and it wasn't anything like anyone else was doing at the time. There are some soaring performances; for one, Marnie's singing still just blows me away. And the writing's pretty damn good. I love a lot of the vocal arrangements - we had so many good singers in the band. I'm at least a credible rock singer, and I was probably the fifth or sixth-best vocalist among us, put it that way. It's hard to quantify what's missing - a prominent thought I had in the past hour is "what would this album have been if we'd had a producer and recorded in a better studio". That's not to insult our engineer, and maybe that situation couldn't have come about...but some bright spark could have really spun a gem from the best parts of this record. The raw materials were there.
In early 2003, I found myself newly inspired to come up with some songs for a possible second Banana Seat album. We didn't make another album, but we did play a few of those songs live. I definitely felt a sense of too little, too late - these were among the best pop-flavored songs I think I've ever written, but it seemed unlikely that we'd take another shot at album-making after how difficult the first one was. And soon after that, I made the decision to move to Austin, which of course would end my time with Banana Seat. (I ended up moving here a bit sooner than I planned; some of y'all know that bizarre story. A senile 89-year-old driver and a tornado were involved.) I knew I'd miss the band, but Austin was the right move for me, for a number of reasons. Still, what a five-year ride, and if it felt like a missed chance at something even greater back then, that's not the way I think of it now. I only wish I'd savored it all more.
My Musical Life - Part 7
As for my music listening habits, the mid-90s was about when I stopped buying or listening to much current music. I was into all this older stuff deeply, for one, and I had limited funds to buy albums, for two. I could buy older albums cheap in bargain bins, used stores, garage sales. Hey, a lot of that old stuff was new to me...and the prevailing 90s styles didn't really excite me - some of it's better in retrospect, to be fair. But I thought most grunge was kind of drab, the punk revival didn't grab me since I wasn't all that into punk before, I'm not really a hip-hop guy, easy listening got less easy, R & B often became a contest of which diva could oversing more egregiously, boy bands, uh, no, Billy Ray Cyrus, uh, god no...remember when I compared delicious chords and harmonic progressions to chocolate sundaes earlier? To my ears, there were fewer chocolate sundaes in the popular music of the 90s, as a whole, than before or since.
But wait a minute: you or I could just as easily make the same list of criticisms I just did above for any other decade or era of popular music, including our favorite one. There has always been plenty of music we find mediocre or even bad, and there will always be. And the same is true for the good stuff. The reason I've long favored music from the 70s and 80s isn't that it's "better". It just, I dunno, fits me.
***
So in early 1996 I wasn't playing with anyone, and I was living in Norman, and my friend Dean with the huge record collection had moved there also. He was rooming with Chance, who also played guitar and wrote songs. Dean had just gotten out of a band himself, a hippie jam band who'd had a pretty good run...he and Chance had written some songs, and I hung out there some, and eventually we had a band together called the Green Owls. Very different than any of the music I'd been playing for years - much more in the spirit of what Dean and I had played together long before. Whimsical, alternative, psychedelic...the Green Owl himself was a mysterious all-knowing being, as we explained to our audiences in our titular song. Dean played his sweet Les Paul guitar with his 60s tape-echo unit and other vintage effects, Chance played acoustic guitar, I played bass. We had two drummers (not at the same time), first John, then Adrian. We didn't play together that long - maybe fifteen shows? Don't remember exactly.
I didn't write a lot for the band - just one song, "Taking Psychology With You", with lyrics cribbed from a college psych text. Tried to write more but I had a hard time getting a handle on the style - mostly simple guitar chords at its base, but with a good sense of melody and pacing and quirky, memorable lyrics. We'd do some extended jamming live sometimes, ten or fifteen minute stretches, Dean's swooping array of sound effects leading the way. His rig and playing sound nothing remotely like anyone else's I've ever played with, and that's a big compliment. We weren't the tightest band, and I'm not sure I did that well fitting into the band concept, but I enjoyed the hell out of being a Green Owl. And a lot of the fan base were old friends of ours and their friends, so I got to meet and re-meet a lot of cool people. If there's ever a reunion show, I'll drive all night to be there. And, I promise, no Michael Jackson impressions.
The next while after that was mostly spent unsuccessfully trying to get another jazz thing going with Gary (he and I were fine, but our prospective bandmates were flaky as hell and it didn't materialize), doing a few fill-in gigs, trying to get a Trembles thing together with no luck...kind of a dead period for music overall. Wasn't even putting a lot of scratch-pad ideas down.
***
But in the summer of 1997, Gary told me about quite an opportunity: he'd gotten scholarship money, yes, actual money, to join the University of Central Oklahoma jazz ensemble. And I could try out and get the same deal. I sure needed to do *something*, and going back to school was something I wanted to do anyway, and there was financial help, and I'd never played with a big band before...yeah, I jumped at the chance. I went up to Edmond (north of OKC) to the university, auditioned and got accepted. UCO had three jazz ensembles, about 20-25 members each. I played electric bass in the first band, sharing the bass chair with an upright player (I'd never played upright bass, though I did take a semester of lessons on it when I was there), and I played piano in the second band. I also played guitar on a song here and there. Gary played in multiple bands as well. A lot of rehearsals. The year culminated in a successful performance for the bands at Wichita. UCO, while not a monster program like North Texas, is a very respectable jazz program and I met a lot of talented players and teachers there.
Being in the UCO jazz program was a new world for me in many ways. While I'd played in fusion bands for a few years that occasionally veered toward traditional jazz, and I'd worked through a voicings book or two, I'd never really played or listened to much traditional jazz. My natural playing style tends to be jazzy anyway, so the musical vocabulary was easy to dive into, but I didn't have the history; I didn't know the literature. A lot of the lingo was foreign to me. And my reading chops were rusty as hell, though they improved quickly by having to do it so often. There was so much to learn - it all depended on what I wanted to apply myself to.
I could have stayed at UCO, spent a whole lot of time playing music, gotten a bachelor's and more, embedded myself in musical academia. One could argue well that I should have. I'm not really sure why I didn't, but I was there only a year and part of another. Coming off the street from a commercial music background as I did, I found the academic music environment drastically different, though I wouldn't say that's why I didn't stick with it.
There's something museum-like about the way educational institutions handle "serious" music. Hidebound, over-reverent to the tradition. I've always thought that about the way our schools and cultural organizations tend to treat classical music, which I like but have never regularly listened to. What do a lot of people think of when they hear the words "classical music"? High culture. Rich, stuffy patrons; snobs; old people, old culture. Played by people in tuxedos with normal hair. Introduced on the radio by speakers with perfect diction and the expressive palette of golf announcers. Listen to this music because, like your vegetables, it's good for you. And even after you learn that that's absolutely NOT what classical music is, it's hard to undo the associations in your mind when you hear the music, and it's distracting, and worse, misleading. And collegiate jazz programs run the risk, stunningly given the anything but highbrow story of the evolution of jazz, of ossifying the music that same way.
I don't believe in the distinction between "serious" and "popular" music myself, not at all. That's cultural baggage, not music; the suits, not the people in them. There's nothing necessarily more staid and dignified and whatnot about a big-band piece or a classical piece than there is a heavy metal song or a rap song. You think classical music can't inspire people to base passions? People frickin' rioted when Stravinsky premiered "The Rite of Spring". Jazz was controversial as hell too, and there were a lot of attempts way back when to harass jazz musicians and suppress their music. It's bizarre to see the pained, transcendent art of an inner-city black man from the 1940s who died of a heroin overdose flattened into a pedagogic objective.
So anyway, the academic music world struck me as a bit insular and weird, but also amazing in that there's just so much to study and that's where you'd go to do it. The history and theory of music are fascinating, deep areas of inquiry. Besides, at school you can hole up in a practice room and really lose yourself, in the best sense of the phrase.
But wait a minute: you or I could just as easily make the same list of criticisms I just did above for any other decade or era of popular music, including our favorite one. There has always been plenty of music we find mediocre or even bad, and there will always be. And the same is true for the good stuff. The reason I've long favored music from the 70s and 80s isn't that it's "better". It just, I dunno, fits me.
***
So in early 1996 I wasn't playing with anyone, and I was living in Norman, and my friend Dean with the huge record collection had moved there also. He was rooming with Chance, who also played guitar and wrote songs. Dean had just gotten out of a band himself, a hippie jam band who'd had a pretty good run...he and Chance had written some songs, and I hung out there some, and eventually we had a band together called the Green Owls. Very different than any of the music I'd been playing for years - much more in the spirit of what Dean and I had played together long before. Whimsical, alternative, psychedelic...the Green Owl himself was a mysterious all-knowing being, as we explained to our audiences in our titular song. Dean played his sweet Les Paul guitar with his 60s tape-echo unit and other vintage effects, Chance played acoustic guitar, I played bass. We had two drummers (not at the same time), first John, then Adrian. We didn't play together that long - maybe fifteen shows? Don't remember exactly.
I didn't write a lot for the band - just one song, "Taking Psychology With You", with lyrics cribbed from a college psych text. Tried to write more but I had a hard time getting a handle on the style - mostly simple guitar chords at its base, but with a good sense of melody and pacing and quirky, memorable lyrics. We'd do some extended jamming live sometimes, ten or fifteen minute stretches, Dean's swooping array of sound effects leading the way. His rig and playing sound nothing remotely like anyone else's I've ever played with, and that's a big compliment. We weren't the tightest band, and I'm not sure I did that well fitting into the band concept, but I enjoyed the hell out of being a Green Owl. And a lot of the fan base were old friends of ours and their friends, so I got to meet and re-meet a lot of cool people. If there's ever a reunion show, I'll drive all night to be there. And, I promise, no Michael Jackson impressions.
The next while after that was mostly spent unsuccessfully trying to get another jazz thing going with Gary (he and I were fine, but our prospective bandmates were flaky as hell and it didn't materialize), doing a few fill-in gigs, trying to get a Trembles thing together with no luck...kind of a dead period for music overall. Wasn't even putting a lot of scratch-pad ideas down.
***
But in the summer of 1997, Gary told me about quite an opportunity: he'd gotten scholarship money, yes, actual money, to join the University of Central Oklahoma jazz ensemble. And I could try out and get the same deal. I sure needed to do *something*, and going back to school was something I wanted to do anyway, and there was financial help, and I'd never played with a big band before...yeah, I jumped at the chance. I went up to Edmond (north of OKC) to the university, auditioned and got accepted. UCO had three jazz ensembles, about 20-25 members each. I played electric bass in the first band, sharing the bass chair with an upright player (I'd never played upright bass, though I did take a semester of lessons on it when I was there), and I played piano in the second band. I also played guitar on a song here and there. Gary played in multiple bands as well. A lot of rehearsals. The year culminated in a successful performance for the bands at Wichita. UCO, while not a monster program like North Texas, is a very respectable jazz program and I met a lot of talented players and teachers there.
Being in the UCO jazz program was a new world for me in many ways. While I'd played in fusion bands for a few years that occasionally veered toward traditional jazz, and I'd worked through a voicings book or two, I'd never really played or listened to much traditional jazz. My natural playing style tends to be jazzy anyway, so the musical vocabulary was easy to dive into, but I didn't have the history; I didn't know the literature. A lot of the lingo was foreign to me. And my reading chops were rusty as hell, though they improved quickly by having to do it so often. There was so much to learn - it all depended on what I wanted to apply myself to.
I could have stayed at UCO, spent a whole lot of time playing music, gotten a bachelor's and more, embedded myself in musical academia. One could argue well that I should have. I'm not really sure why I didn't, but I was there only a year and part of another. Coming off the street from a commercial music background as I did, I found the academic music environment drastically different, though I wouldn't say that's why I didn't stick with it.
There's something museum-like about the way educational institutions handle "serious" music. Hidebound, over-reverent to the tradition. I've always thought that about the way our schools and cultural organizations tend to treat classical music, which I like but have never regularly listened to. What do a lot of people think of when they hear the words "classical music"? High culture. Rich, stuffy patrons; snobs; old people, old culture. Played by people in tuxedos with normal hair. Introduced on the radio by speakers with perfect diction and the expressive palette of golf announcers. Listen to this music because, like your vegetables, it's good for you. And even after you learn that that's absolutely NOT what classical music is, it's hard to undo the associations in your mind when you hear the music, and it's distracting, and worse, misleading. And collegiate jazz programs run the risk, stunningly given the anything but highbrow story of the evolution of jazz, of ossifying the music that same way.
I don't believe in the distinction between "serious" and "popular" music myself, not at all. That's cultural baggage, not music; the suits, not the people in them. There's nothing necessarily more staid and dignified and whatnot about a big-band piece or a classical piece than there is a heavy metal song or a rap song. You think classical music can't inspire people to base passions? People frickin' rioted when Stravinsky premiered "The Rite of Spring". Jazz was controversial as hell too, and there were a lot of attempts way back when to harass jazz musicians and suppress their music. It's bizarre to see the pained, transcendent art of an inner-city black man from the 1940s who died of a heroin overdose flattened into a pedagogic objective.
So anyway, the academic music world struck me as a bit insular and weird, but also amazing in that there's just so much to study and that's where you'd go to do it. The history and theory of music are fascinating, deep areas of inquiry. Besides, at school you can hole up in a practice room and really lose yourself, in the best sense of the phrase.
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