Rich Loves Science

“If you asked the little boy what he’d be when he grew, he said I’d rather be a fireman than paint.”

-Mr. Oysterhead

How does it work? Apparently, that’s what I asked Mrs. So-and-so when she brought an Apple IIe into our nursery school. I vaguely remember the rooms of the school, goldfish (the crackers, not the vertebrates), and the computer. I do not remember asking how it worked but I’m not surprised that I did. Mrs. S turned to me and explained again about the mouse and the keyboard and a bunch of other bullshit. I looked back at her and repeated, I know, but how does it work?

She was stunned! She called my parents after school and told them I was a brilliant four-year-old who’d probably end up working for NASA. Twenty-two years later, I wonder whimsically if my parents are disappointed. Thing is, I always want to know how it works, whatever the “it” is. As soon as I read about a boy who took things apart, I realized I could take things apart as well. And so I took shit apart. I’d unscrew any screws, pop off lids, dig around inside trying to understand what was going on, and then put it back together again.

There was another thing about nursery school: I was in trouble a lot. I was always running a little too fast when I was supposed to be sitting quietly. And biting people. I did that too. Maybe I’m part wolf or something. Wouldn’t that be funny? Call National Geographic. Anyway, my teachers and just about everyone in my life are divided about me. Half of them think the energy is great and want it around. The other half want to lasso me into a spiky pit at the bottom of the earth.

As the great chemist, Hughch Von Chuh pointed out: it’s the combination that makes the lolly pop stay on the stick. We take a little insatiable curiosity, mix in a few drops of explosive tenacity and…

An obsession with solving problems and answering questions. Especially tangible, mechanical queries. Can we paint it? If we put a support rod here, will it hold up the camera? Does the weight balance out? But go a little further and… Does this file work when you load it to YouTube? What type of compression is it? What is video compression? Why does the screen show these lines when the action moves too fast?

If I’ve got a “problem” in front of me, it doesn’t matter if it’s hooking up a stereo or taking apart my laptop. I won’t eat. I’ll push past tired and fall asleep at the desk. Trying to answer questions and get at a finished, working product is an addiction.

And my favorite question still remains: How does it work?

(drums)(breathe)Cerebellum(walk)(blink)

Apparently, the Cerebellum is sometimes called our “reptilian brain.” It’s old. It plays a big role in rhythm and is thought to hold emotional value for music.

When I execute the ‘build’ in They Promised You Life, I never sway with the exact meter of the eighth-note-triplets I’m playing on the snare. The triplets are the product of motor cortex, vision, thought, consciousness, and a fruit salad of other neuron bullshit that people hear as neat-o. The loving, patient, inhaling/exhaling rhythm of my swaying is my cerebellum. The magic trick for the non-musician is that they think it’s the triplets giving them an erection. Machines are sexy; alive is sexy; cerebellum is life-rhythm.

Bicycling in New York City is probably eighty-seven times as dangerous as motorcycling in New York City. Yup, this is coming from a whopping two months of motorcycling and you know what? I’m right. On a motorcycle, you are a loud, heavy package with turn signals, a horn and enough girth to command a lane of traffic. Although drivers are as stupid as endo assholes (the dickboxes who give motorcycling it’s bad name), a biker can keep up with traffic by rolling his wrist and accelerate out of trouble by rolling it a little more. On a bicycle, the only way to move like cars is to push your legs into the pedals as hard as humanely possible. Braking is shorter but skidding is more likely. And the cars? They don’t see you and don’t want to see you. You couldn’t command a lane of traffic if you were Jesus and moses riding a bicycle built for two. Anyway, my cerebellum is probably the only reason I’m alive here today writing this. Taken as a collective, the cars swell and flow like tree branches. There’s a brief inhale as a light turns green before a car exhales itself into an intersection. Just before a car cuts me off, I can always sense the anxious anticipation of a car about to turn. If my Cerebellum couldn’t tap into this rhythm, I’d be dead.

Ain't Karma Grand?

The following isn't true, but it makes me laugh to imagine something like it happening to someone.

I pulled up to the club on my Sportster, guitar strapped to my back. Outside, a gorgeous girl sauntered up to me before I'd cut the engine.

"I like your bike." she said, with a southern accent that would melt the honey out of a beehive. "Are you playing tonight?"

"Yyyyup."

"How's about taking me for a ride when you're done with the show?"

"I think that'd be just fine - I'll meet you right here in about an hour."

Now, I have rules about riding and going out. Actually just one rule: If I'm on two wheels, I'm not drinking anything, period. So I I hang out for a half-hour, hop up on the stage and plug in. Before the first song ended, a fat guy with an enormous cowboy hat yelled up at me:

"Why dunt you grab a beer en let someone else play, asshole!?!"

I replied to the crowd through the mic, "Well, you can't please them all, right?" A good chuckle, some applause here and there, but this guy wouldn't let it go:

"I dunt see you drinking none - what are you, some sort uh homo?"

"Wow, well, I guess we'll just move along to the next song then, shall we?"

And I played through the set with this guy yelling at me anytime I wasn't making noise. He was convinced that because I wasn't drinking like everyone else in the bar, I was "a bitch that ought to be stretched out on the subway tracks." It was painful as hell - every minute of the gig stretched on to an hour with this jerk-off screaming up at me.

After I packed up, I walked back outside and my southern bell was walking down the street towards me. Apparently she had missed the show - what luck! And better yet, she still wanted to go for a ride. So I started the bike, hopped on, and let her sit behind me, hands around my waist.

Then she said, "My brother is staying with me in the city for the weekend - I have to wait for him to come out of the bar so that I can tell him how to get home." About a minute later the douchebag from the show walks out of the door towards me. Perfect, I'm thinking. This is all I need - this guy is gonna ruin everything. But before I had a chance to say anything, she said to him, "Clarence, you walk on down the block and take the L-train to Lorimer. Walk three blocks to Jackson street and you'll know where you are. I'll see you in the morning."

He knew exactly who I was and I knew exactly who he was and neither of us said anything for a beat.

I shrugged and added, "Have a nice night on the subway, asshole!" and rode off.

Sankofa

Nostalgia: Pronunciation: \nä-ˈstal-jə, nə- also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl-\

Function: noun

Etymology: New Latin, from Greek nostos return home + New Latin -algia; akin to Greek neisthai to return, Old English genesan to survive, Sanskrit nasate he approaches

Date: 1729

1 : the state of being homesick : homesickness 2 : a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia

The danger of wistfully yearning for a return is that you might fool yourself into thinking that you can travel back in time and relive or (oh God no) change the past. Enter the most beautiful print the world has ever known.

It's hard to bring the magic of Dudley home with you. It's harder than working for your Cub Emblem or Senior Flag because once you leave the campus, your support system of leaders, staff, and campers isn't condensed into forty+ cabins surrounded by the Adirondaks. I spent last weekend cleaning up the Witherbee Theater. To say the building is sacred space is a gross understatement - it holds nearly everything wonderful I've done in the fourteen summers I've lived and worked in Westport, NY.

On my drive home, the nostalgia not just of past summers but of the past forty-eight hours is already eating at my heart! I wish I could go back to Friday night when I walked down the Dudley road and Davo drove up to me blasting some funk/horn tune out of his station wagon; when I met Matt Storey for the first time that evening. I wish I could go to Saturday afternoon when I vacuumed an entire summer's worth of grass out of the stairwell leading up to the office; when Ryan Joyce showed up for lunch. I wish I could go back to Saturday night when Ben Schloat surprised me by showing up for s'mores and a fire; when my sister and her girlfriend broke out guitars and screamed lyrics at the surrounding woods...

There isn't an easy answer, solution or magic machine that can let you go back. But there is an Adinkra symbol. I guess that'll have to do for the time being...

Re-Introduction

Apologies for my month-long vacation. I began working for a new website geared at revolutionizing the way kids access education. As a professional musician (am I a professional musician? Sometimes I am. Other times I'm a film editor. A lot of the time, I'm a program coordinator. A lot more of the time, I'm a manager for a band, albeit a defacto one.) I wrote mostly short paragraphs about pitfalls and triumphs in the music scene.

Now back to the show...

I work at a non-profit. I take in applications and forms and responses and I do things with them. Important things. Mind-altering things. Lemme ask you, the general public, a question: Do you live in two places simultaneously? When you get mail, do you have two addresses that each letter/pkge/magazine gets sent to? No?

Why in Christ's name would someone put down two email addresses on a form? Why? I want to know. I want to know right now. Why would they do this? Why would they do this to me? Someone tell me. What the fuck am I supposed to do with john.doe@gmail.com and jdoe@blowme.edu? If I were to put that into a field and try to use it in any sort of data analysis, the program would call me an asshole and crash.

I hate this shit.

He Went to Work

As soon as he closed the door, I ran around the apartment opening drawers smelling everything. I know we rely on our eyes and ears and fingers for the present but smell connects us to the past. The blanket in the library: popcorn and deodorant - we used to watch movies on Sundays in the basement. The tennis shirt on the dryer: ick! sweat – he used to hang it on a table in the laundry room.

Every new drawer was a mountain of memories. His hairdryer. How many times did I stand in the doorframe of the bathroom watching him dry his hair? Surely I must’ve had something better to do. Towel around his waste, he’d run the dryer with the comb attachment straight back over his head. At the end, he’d either get a drink and sit watching tennis or he’d part his hair to the side and finish getting dressed.

My mother's dressing table didn’t have the curlers and alligator clips I expected. Instead, it was modernized to carry what she needs nowadays. Further evidence that the concrete foundations I set my world upon were made of dust and duct tape. That’s not a bad thing, just a disorienting part of growing up I guess.

Take the pots and pans we had when I was young. They felt eternal, like they were the only pots and pans we would ever own. I’m sure my parents have always bought new pans every few years but the years when I was young lasted forever! When I see new cookware in their kitchen, I have to remind myself that it's normal to replace old pots with new ones.

So lucky to have had dinner with him. If he died tomorrow, I had dinner with him tonight. There will always be questions that I want to ask him - I want to spend more time with him now than ever before. As I grow closer to his age, experiencing more of what he has experienced, any chance to ask questions and get answers is a gift from the heavens.

Smile, and know that you know nothing about the world. He’s laughing at himself as he answers your questions, knowing that he asked the same ones for the same silly reasons… Life is a crazy parade.

Three from Flight 27 (and San Francisco) part 2

The first time I ever road a motorbike was in 2007. Ilana and I were living in Ghana, working at an NGO when our Director told us about the “largest Film Festival in Sub-Saharan West-Africa,” FESPACO. We took a 20-hour bus from Accra to Ouagadougou and found a place to stay with some people we met in a taxi crossing the boarder into Burkina Faso. It sounds insane now, three years later, to say that we quite literally hopped on a bus in Ghana with no set plans or preparation for lodging or the road home, but that's pretty much exactly how it happened.

In addition to the amazing food (Burkina Faso is a former French Colony) everyone owned a two-wheeled something or other. Bicycles, mopeds, motorbikes, motorcycles… it was dizzying to watch the traffic race by, Muslim garb dancing behind the riders.

Naturally, I had to get my hands on one. We found someone to loan me his bike for a few days in exchange for an absurdly small fee. With a top speed of forty or fifty miles an hour and a marijuana leaf sticker pealing off the front, you’d never guess that it had the heart of a Harley. Riding the bike, we explored all that the Film Festival had to offer: Films (obviously) cafés, West-African grub, and an enormous crafts market. At every outlet, there was hundreds and hundreds of bikes parked next to each other. It was paradise surrounded by the Sahara.

One night, on our way home, we decided to ride around a lake near the house we were staying in. I opened the throttle as wide as I could - racing us through cool air from the lake. A boy riding a motorbike with his girlfriend’s arms locked around his waste at midnight next to a lake in West Africa.

In love?

Last Saturday, at 7:30 a.m., I held the front brake of a Suzuki such-and-such 250 and swung my leg over the saddle. It had started pouring the day before and wasn't going to stop anytime soon. Worse than the rain, the wind lurched up in gusts strong enough to knock over the porto-potty at one end of the vacant lot. Although waterproof rain-gear covered my entire body, the water quickly soaked my hands and feet and then climbed my arms and legs towards my chest. Whenever we were lined up, I hunched over the gas tank and touched the engine block with my gloved-hands to keep them from going numb. We rode for about four hours, barely going above ten or twelve mph, learning how to manipulate the clutch, throttle and brakes.

In love.