The Casual Blog

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August 14, 2010

Good wine food and a note on spinning

Last night Sally and I tried a new “wine restaurant” in Cameron Village called Cafe Caturra. I wasn’t entirely sure what a wine restaurant was, but they pulled off the neat trick of creating (at least for me) a natural, comfortable new category. A young waitress greeted us and told us we could sit anywhere (it wasn’t crowded) and order food, but we might first want to stop by the bar and choose a glass of wine.

The bar was tended by a tall, friendly guy who showed the wine-by-the-glass choices — ten or so whites and as many reds. As soon as we expressed interest in one of the Chardonnays, he produced a taste of the wine, which was buttery and delightful, and we happily ordered a glass. Then we found a table and ordered — a veggie panini for me and a little pizza for Sally. These were simple, hearty, and delicious. I liked the servers and the artsy bistro look of the place. I wasn’t crazy about the background music — hard rock, my least favorite genre — but it wasn’t overwhelming.

The music was several times louder at my two spinning classes at Rapid Fitness earlier in the week. Sally asked me how I liked it, and I told her that I liked the second one better, when I knew to bring ear plugs. These were my first ever spinning experiences, and I was a little anxious going in, as with anything new. The only thing I knew about spinning was that it involved riding a stationary bike, which seemed like such a simple idea that I had trouble believing people would give it a particular name or do it together. Since it had a name and a following, I figured there were also rules and norms, and of these I knew nothing. Was it possible to screw up spinning? I didn’t know, and since this was a group activity, I worried just a little.

Fortunately I managed to get to class a few minutes before the 6 am start time and have a brief orientation chat with Paul, the teacher. He showed me how to set up the bike adjustments and gave me the lowdown on bike shorts and shoes. He also recommended that I pick a bike near the fan, because we were going to be sweating. He suggested that since I was new, I might find at points that I needed to gear back a little from his recommended intensity. I thought this was both mildly insulting and probably wrong, since I couldn’t see hnow a stationary bike could be all that serious a fitness challenge. But boy, was he right.

A few minutes later a group of eight or so had assembled. Paul put on a microphone, fired up the dance music, and told us to get going. For the next hour he combined straightforward coaching (“now, crank it up”), cheerleading (“you’re doing great!”), and a story line about a bike ride over three mountains (“the group ahead is looking back and sees you’re gaining on them”). After twenty minutes my heart was pounding, I was drenched in sweat and considering the real possibility that I would not make it through a full hour. Following Paul’s tip, I eased back a little, then found some more energy, and ramped back up. At the end of the class, even my shoes were soaked. As my heart rate got back to normal, I noticed an unusual mellow, light feeling — the endorphins of happiness. I did a few minutes of yoga breathing and stretching, and felt really good.

So, spinning turned out to be a kick-butt workout and more fun than expected. I considered whether my well-settled idea that I was not the sort of person who likes exercise classes might be simply wrong. At any rate I was happy to find a new activity to vary the mix of my morning exercising. It’s good to change things up.

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July 10, 2010

Driving on the left

When we rented a car in St. Croix last weekend, the Hertz agent informed me that they drive on the left.  The guard at the airport exit reminded me again to drive on the left.  As did a policewoman at a drunk driver check point.  And with good reason:  it’s hard!  I’m guessing a lot of American tourists have accidents or narrowly avoid them.  The rule that one drives on the right gets deeply grooved into the brain.  The first two days, I consciously reminded myself repeatedly that left was right.  But by the third day left was starting to feel natural.  Then we came back to Raleigh, USA.  The first day I found myself hesitating — left or right?

That minor culture shock quickly receded in the face of the everyday challenges of work etc.  I did have a couple of days, though, where it seemed that every leaf on the trees I saw on my commute to work was distinct and clear.  The short Caribbean adventure transformed things just a bit.

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July 7, 2010

Greetings from St. Croix

Last July 4 weekend Sally and I decided to burn a vacation day to make a four-day  trip to St. Croix.  The main objective was to dive some of the largest coral reefs in the hemisphere.  We were eager to try out some new diving equipment and see some exotic flora and fauna.  The program we settled on involved a night dive, four daytime dives, and a snorkeling trip.

The diving was rewarding.  The reefs were reasonably healthy, and there were luminous tropical fish in abundance.  We saw our first spotted eagle ray, a magnificent and haunting creature.  We had our first see horses, first spotted moray eel, and first rock beauty.  We saw two large sea turtles and barracuda. Especially on the night dive, we saw many bizarre critters whose names we didn’t know.  It’s hard to do justice to the beauty of  reef diving.  The visibility was not great by Caribbean standards – around 40 feet most of the time – but we could see a lot.   So much life, in so many shapes and colors, some shy, some friendly, some intimidating.

Along with the diving, we had several unusually rewarding talks with various travel companions.  On the flight down, we met a 22-year-old guy working on Wall Street with a hedge fund.  One of our divemasters was a guy from Indianapolis, another from New Zealand, and another from northern Virginia.  They all had interesting personal stories.

I’ve been thinking recently about the way we each create and embody stories.  Constructing them is part of the work of being human, and communicating them is a defining characteristic of our species.  That is, to be complete, actualized humans, we need to tell our stories to each other.  On this theory, I’ve been more conscious of encouraging people to tell their stories, particularly if it seems they might be at all interesting.  I’m usually not disappointed.  Often stories that I expected to be ordinary turn out to be unusual and absorbing.

I used to have an aversion to the clichéd expressions of small talk, but fortunately I got over that. I’m now convinced that these clichés serve a very important purpose as tools for encouraging story telling.  “Where are you from?” is an invitation to begin a narrative.   The same goes for “How are you doing?”  From there, the story can go in any direction.

We had our setbacks and frustrations.  My regulator malfunctioned when we first tried a night dive at the Fredricksted pier, so we had to scrub that attempt.  The next night we made the intimidating jump from the pier to the dark water below, but got separated halfway through the dive.  The travel home involved painfully slow gate agents and customs agents, and a connection in Miami that was too close for comfort.  But we made it, and it was worth the trouble.

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June 26, 2010

Supreme Court connections to gifted people

This week I signed a letter in support of the nomination of Elena Kagan that was written by Peter Keisler and Harry Litman and signed by most of the Supreme Court clerks from the year (OT ’86) our group worked for the Court.  I always liked and respected Elena.  She was bright and friendly, and I was happy to guard her in our clerk basketball games, where I was fortunate to have a meaningful height advantage (she could shoot).   I find it reassuring that in a world where Tea Party whack jobs are sometimes taken seriously that Elena with such old-fashioned and relatively unexciting qualities as intelligence, balance, and decency has quietly risen to the apex of the legal profession.

I made another Supreme Court connection this week when I caught up with Larry Lessig.  Lessig clerked for Justice Scalia a few years after I did.  Now a law professor at Harvard, he’s distinguished himself as a constitutional and intellectual property law scholar and reformer.  His work on copyright law, including Free Culture and Remix, challenges the received wisdom that more copyright protection promotes greater creativity and shows that the opposite may be the result.  In this area, he’s a true rock star.

Lessig’s current project is focusing on the corrosive role of money in our political system.  On Tuesday Mel Chernoff and I attended the talk he gave at Campbell Law School promoting public financing of elections.  He’s well known for his extraordinary slide shows, which use super quick cuts to press points, and this was a good one.  We’d corresponded by email previously, and it was good to make a face-to-face connection after the event.  In addition to being brilliant, he seemed like a warm and sincere guy.

When I have personal encounters with really gifted people, I generally find it unsettling.  It’s inspiring, and I find myself thinking so much more is possible, but also being more-than-usually aware of my personal limits.  As John McPhee once noted in the context of great tennis players, there are many levels of the game.   It’s a privilege to play with higher level players, and rewarding. If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.  But it does not promote calm and tranquility.

It is

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June 19, 2010

Liberation — death, sorrow, life

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been a big news story these last few weeks, but the news reports have given little coverage to the fact that millions of sea creatures that will die.  Our scuba experiences in the last couple of years have made us more conscious of the teeming life in the oceans, the unbelievable profusion, a cornucopia of bizarre, beautiful life.  The loss of life now taking place is impossible to fully grasp, and painful to consider.  I think it’s good, though, to try grasping it, and accept the pain of it.

We humans are generally deathophobes.  At the same time, it’s obvious that death is a fundamental part of life.  It’s in front, behind, and all around us, and avoiding it is really not possible.  We may as well have a little courage and honesty and figure out how to think about it.

I keep coming back to the line by Wallace Stevens in his poem Sunday Morning:  “Death is the mother of beauty.”  When I first read it, I thought he was just being provocative, but I now see he was struggling with something profound.  It isn’t that death itself is beautiful.  But it is an integral part of the natural cycle of change, which is a defining characteristic of life.  In Sunday Morning, Stevens asks, “Is there no change of death in paradise?  Does ripe fruit never fall?”  The Talking Heads got at the same idea with the funny line, “Heaven/ is a place/ where nothing/ ever happens.”  Such a paradise would be inhuman.  And very boring.

But coming to terms with this part of reality is not just a matter of working through the ideas.  It’s also accepting some unpleasant feelings, like grief and sorrow.  It seems natural to avoid such things, but it won’t work.  Those feelings are integral to the human experience; they’ll always be there.  We may as well face them with honesty and courage.  Opening ourselves to those feelings makes us more human.  It’s liberating.

Sally had a harsh and sad confrontation with one animal’s death this week.  She was monitoring her blue bird boxes at the Lochmere golf course for new for baby blue birds, which is usually a cheering thing.  She came upon  a young Canada goose that had had a horrible accident that destroyed its beak and left it bloody and mutilated.   It could still move, but was plainly suffering and unable to survive long.  The poor thing needed to be euthanized, but there was no practical way to capture it without making matters worse.  She had no confidence that the animal control service would be able to assist without increasing the animal’s fear and pain.  There was no solution, other than nature itself.

Sally began to cry as she told the story, and continued to wonder whether there was something else she could have done.  She is a tender-hearted soul, and I love her for it.  I was reminded of the time years ago when she arrived home in tears at having run over a little frog as she was parking her car.  I knew then, once again, that she was the girl for me.

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June 12, 2010

Money, and the ballet

There’s a tension between art and money.  Money is instrumental, a means to an end.  It’s associated with commerce and a variety of  tawdry of human attitudes and behaviors. Randy Newman’s song, It’s Money that I Love, is deliciously ironic, since it’s simply pathetic to love money.  Art is different.  It’s nourishing.  It opens doors.  It expresses our best, and makes us better.  Art feels ambivalent about money, but somehow they need to get along.

Last week I found myself reflecting on art and money after Ginny Hall invited Sally and me to take a tour of the studios and offices of the Carolina Ballet with Ricky Weiss, the company’s artistic director.   We’ve had season tickets for the last decade, starting shortly after the beginning of the company, and have seen all or almost all of Weiss’s ballets, some of them multiple times.  He’s a great choreographer in Balanchine tradition.  He has achieved something truly incredible in building a very strong company in our own Raleigh, North Carolina, and we’re so grateful.

As a longtime fan, I looked forward to talking with Weiss, but felt some anxiety about the money issue. I was well aware that the company needed it to survive.  Sally and I had discussed a possible contribution several times and agreed that we’d feel good about making a meaningful gift.  But it was not something I looked forward to discussing.  Where I’m from, we didn’t like to talk openly about money.  I’m not clear on the reasons, but we didn’t talk about things like salaries and prices for big ticket items.  It was taboo.

In the end, though, our meeting was surprisingly fun.  Weiss and Hall walked us through the studios and work spaces, which were not especially beautiful, but that was part of the point.  He made clear that he’s very conscious of managing money carefully, not spending it on things that don’t matter, and spending as much as he can afford on what counts.  He talked in detail of the cost of point shoes, costumes, and sets, of paying the dancers and staff, and of expenses such as disability insurance.  He compared his productions to those in New York, and admitted his sets were less elaborate, but he took pride that his productions cost a fraction of those.  As a person interested in the backstage, I found all this really interesting.

Weiss told us about falling in love with the ballet as a kid, dancing for Balanchine for 19 years at the City Ballet, leaving to become artistic director for the Pennsylvania Ballet, and leaving there under difficult circumstances.  He also described a six-year period of free lancing and searching without success for  the right position.  He said that during this time he considered leaving the field.  (This would have been a tragedy.)  He talked about the Ward Purrington’s long effort to bring professional ballet to Raleigh with no idea of the long odds against success.

I’d wondered whether Weiss, with his enormous and continual creativity, would find it interesting or helpful to have a philosophy of art and dance.  He did.  He seems to view ballet as not simply expressive, but also magical, transcendental, and yet at the same time basic to human existence, like food.  I was surprised, then, that he had no real trouble with the idea that some people don’t especially enjoy ballet, or even actively dislike it.  He didn’t feel compelled to win over everyone.  He noted lightly that someone once took him to a hockey game, and he didn’t particularly like it.

It turned out that Weiss had an unexpected gift for asking for money.  Without any hints from us, he at last said he’d like us to consider giving the exact amount that we’d already decided we wanted to give.  It was uncanny.  I felt happy and excited.  It’s wonderful that we can help with something that has brought us so much joy.

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May 28, 2010

Clara, a car, goes to the track and does what she was born to do

My car, Clara, had her coming out event this week — a track day at Virginia International Raceway.  After several weeks together, I knew she had many virtues — beauty, sophistication, and awesome power.  Clara is the ultimate product of generations of  German engineering genius   a 2006 Porsche 911 S,in a particularly lovely color, lapis blue.  Is this just a car?   You could say so, and certainly, it serves as transportation.  But viewing her that way seems overly crude.  She’s a work of art.

But calling her art suggests stasis, and her nature is kinetic.  She was bred for speed and agility. She is a sports car.  It would be a waste to treat such a machine like any old car.  Thus I felt a certain responsibility, as her new owner, to get her to the track and let her do what she was born to do. I was happy to sign up for the PCA event at VIR, near Danville, Va.

VIR is a world -class road course.  3.2 miles, 180 feet of elevation change, curves of every description, surrounded by forest and countryside .  As a driver in the novice class, I was assigned an experienced teacher, Glenn Mead.  There were a few rules about such matters as passing and emergencies.  But no speed limit.

We did four half-hour all-out sessions.  Like all drivers, Glen and I wore helmets, and we communicated via a wireless system.  Soon Glenn found a few things he liked about my driving, and several that could stand improvement.  At each of the turns, he was looking for the perfect turn.  I hit a few, and he effusively praised these efforts.  Others were not so great, and he made sure I knew it.  The point of the perfect turn, I eventually realized, was to carry and keep as much speed as possible.  Glenn encouraged greater and greater speed.  It occurred to me that he was not only a good guy, but also a brave one.

After a few imperfect turns, I realized that there was an aspect of Clara that was frightening.  I could not sense the limits of her power, and could not tell where I would lose control.  At each turn, the margin of error was thin.  And I didn’t really yet know Clara’s characteristics of balance and handling.  At one point, Glenn reassured me.  “This car is a ballerina,” he said.  “She’ll do what you tell her to do.”

She was, and she did.  We had a few squeals and skids, but we worked on technique. It got better and better.  I got a big dose of adrenaline, and also the aesthetic pleasure of some beautifully shaped turns.  Clara did what she was born to do.

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May 22, 2010

Daunting derivatives and Sleeping Beauty

Tuesday evening I boarded the flight from RDU to Dallas, and was confused at first as I looked in the coach section for my seat.   5E wasn’t there.  It slowly dawned on me that I had a first class ticket, either as a result of a computer glitch or some unexpectedly generous rewards system.  After I wedged my way forward through the human tide and found my seat,  I tried not to look too ecstatic.  Ah, such a comfy, roomy seat.  And so sweet to have a flight attendant who’s attentive, and little luxuries like warm peanuts and hot towels.  My neighbor was a precocious nine-year-old boy with a stuffed toy traveling to see his mom.  He’d flown this route many times.  He wanted to be an inventor when he grew up.

On the trip, I finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis.  I picked up the book on the strength of his earlier book, Liar’s Poker, and out of concern that I probably didn’t fully understand the drama in the U.S. and world economy in the last two years.  After reading the book, I’m quite sure I didn’t.  I now know a little more, but my larger takeaway is that part of the cause is that the mechanisms involved are so complex that they defy conscious human understanding or control.  I don’t think this is Lewis’s intended message.  He tries to create some heros and villains, or at least intelligent actors and dupes.  The intelligent actors had rational thoughts, and realized that subprime-mortgage-based derivative investments were much riskier than advertised.  He casts some blame on clueless regulators and unscrupulous investment bankers.

Lewis implicitly suggests the slightly cheering possibility that if people were more reasonable and diligent, they might set up regulatory and other systems to avoid financial catastrophe.  I found this encouraging message not very persuasive.  There were surely some monsters and frauds involved in the recent debacle, and plenty of examples of unsavory pure greed and indifference to human welfare.  But right now it looks to me like the big driver was the financial engineering of investment vehicles that were practically impossible to understand, even for professional investors and regulators, never mind individuals.  Creating them was far from unnatural.  In nature, technology, and other human  systems, greater and greater levels of complexity over time is generally the rule.  At some point, there’s simply too much for the human mind to deal with.  Our rational systems are overwhelmed, and our fallback emotional systems have no guideposts from experience.  Disaster is not necessarily inevitable, but we are less and less in control.  Yes, it’s scary.

But life, amazingly, goes on.  Sally and I went to the last program of the season for the Carolina Ballet last night, which was Robert Weiss’s version of Sleeping Beauty.  The music is by Tchaikovsky, and as Weiss explained at the beginning, the choreography comes in significant part directly from Marius Petipa’s nineteenth-century work.  For the most part, this was a very traditional, classical form of ballet.  I generally prefer the more abstract athleticism of Balanchine and his school (including Weiss) with modern dance inflections.  No matter.  Sleeping Beauty was wonderful.  Even the junior members of the corps de ballet showed considerable authority with classical technique, and the soloists were masters who communicate emotional depth within that framework.   Margaret Severin-Hansen as Aurora was etherial.  The costumes were also classically inspired (gowns and embroidered waistcoats and many tutus), and gorgeous.

We got a backstage tour courtesy of our friend Ginny at intermission.  It turned out, the action hadn’t really stopped.  On the stage behind the curtain, some of the dancers were practicing difficult passages or doing deep stretches.  It was disconcerting at first to shift from observer of a carefully planned spectacle to quasi-participant in the assembling of the spectacle, but fascinating.  We met Lilly Vigo, a great favorite of ours who was off for the night, and talked about her new baby, who was six months old that day.  We examined up close the intricate costumes and saw the swan boat and the huge dragon puppet in the wings.  A friend once told me that I was the kind of  person who likes to look behind curtains and see what’s really going on, and it’s true.  One of my fantasy careers is to be a stagehand.

After the show, we decided to have a drink at the Foundation, a tiny bar on Fayetteville Street that features a huge menu of American-made designer spirits.  The downstairs space was crowded, so we settled on stools at street level and did some people watching.  Two of our favorite soloists from the company, Lara O’Brien and Eugene Barnes, arrived shortly afterwards, and sat down next to us.  They seemed pleased that we were big fans, and we really enjoyed talking with them about favorite ballets, goings on in the company, and the travails of the professional dancer’s life.  This is the end of an arduous season for them, and both are looking forward to recovering from injuries over the summer.  We’re looking forward to seeing them again.

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May 15, 2010

Soccer news — a non-fan’s notes

Last night Sally and I went out to see some professional soccer by our local team, the Raleigh Railhawks, who opposed the Tampa Bay Rowdies.  We had excellent seats (second row, midfield), and could see how young the players were, how skilled, and also how rough.

For me, the point was some refreshment after an intense work week.  In my days at the New Yorker, one of my friends who worked as a proofreader described going to the City Ballet after a hard day of catching tiny printing mistakes as a cool drink for the eyes.   My work also involves close focus on details and constant decision making.  I get that sort of release from ballet, and also from a close-up, live view of professional athletes.  Minor league baseball by our local Bulls and Mudcats usually has this refreshing effect, too.  TV sports doesn’t work the same for me.

Jocelyn was home from Colorado for a visit this week, and we all went out Thursday for some Thai food at Sawasdee.   When the conversation turned to sports, I asked Jocelyn what she thought was important about big time college sports, including those at her alma mater, NC State.  For her, sports and especially football were a fantastic part of the college experience.  She loved tailgating, loved the drama of a come-from-behind victory.  She enjoyed being part of moments when people united in support of a single cause.  And for her, the Wolfpack was definitely special.

I’ve never been a deeply committed fan of a sports team, so I thought this was both sweet and  interestingly strange.  For me, being a part of a sports crowd involves occasional moments of transcendence, so I know generally what Jocelyn meant.  But being in a crowd also usually involves stretches of wishing the people around me were better behaved.  I don’t get heckling, trying to distract players, or yelling when nothing particularly exciting is happening.   I always choose a team to pull for, but the choice seems basically arbitrary.  It’s hard for me to believe that one team is really more virtuous than another.

So, I was excited when the Railhawks scored the first goal, glad when the goalie made a diving save, and outraged when the referee missed a flagrant foul.  I was also annoyed at a young fellow who incessantly heckled the opposing coach.  I was anxious when the Rowdies tied it up late in the game, and disappointed when we lost, 2-1.  Then we went home, and I read for a while, and was moved by some poetry of  Wallace Stevens.

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May 9, 2010

More fun at Red Hat, trying Mirage, yoga, and mindful driving

After the intensity of the trial in Texas and a great win, it was another intense week back at the Raleigh office of Red Hat, digging out of the pile of backlogged work and dealing with new emergencies.  Not for the first time, I felt on Friday as though I’d done a months’ worth of work in a week.  The range of activities was typical, but as always, varied — from solving specific IP problems to formulating strategy to addressing customers’ legal questions to being interviewed by reporters to writing and editing for opensource.com to drafting commercial agreements to dealing with management challenges — and along with these dozens there were literally dozens more still on the short term to-do list. I deal with one interesting issue after another, some of them important, all day every day.  I am never bored.  Is it stimulating?  Yes.  Exhilarating?  Yes.  Stressful?  Yes.

So as a matter of surviving and flourishing, on weekends I try to find some space to recharge and rebalance — some social time, some time alone, some time to care for the mind and body.  As to the social part, on Friday Sally and I went to Mirage, a  brand new club on the ground floor of our condo building which was having its pre-grand-opening.  It’s large (capacity 650) with a dance floor, large island bar on the ground floor, sushi bar in the back, second floor balcony space with another bar, and various side rooms.  The decor uses Egyptian motifs in a Vegas way, large video projections, a mirrored ball, and the waitresses in short gold-plated dresses.  The over all effect was glitzy but not gaudy.  We ran into Charles, who did a short speech as part of the dedication, and Ann and several people who live in the building.  We enjoyed talking to friends.  The sound engineering seemed good — very loud, but somehow tweaked so that it was still possible to talk.  Also, happily, the sound was not audible in our apartment.

I woke up early on Saturday and started to head over to Pullen Park to swim some laps, but then checked to see whether there was a  yoga class at Blue Lotus, which is next door.  There was:  Yvonne was scheduled for 8:00 to do an hour and a half open level class.  From past experience, I’d learned that open classes with Yvonne are fairly advanced classes, and for less advanced students, there’s no quarter given.   So it proved to be.  Yvonne likes to share inspirational words on such themes as oneness and truth, and she pushes the class past known limits of strength and flexibility.  After the first half hour, I wondered whether I could just hang on to the end.  I did, barely, soaked in sweat.  But I felt good the rest of the day.  I have no well-developed theory of why yoga helps over all well-being, but for me, it does.

I took my little German sports car out for a run in the afternoon.  Just east of Raleigh, Old Milbournie Road winds through farm fields and pastures, forests, lakes, and country stores.  It’s got some great curves and hills — an excellent road for just driving for fun.   When I got there, there was a caravan of minivans and pickup trucks led by someone proceeding 10 miles under the speed limit (45).  I had in mind the possibility of exceeding the speed limit (no worries — not too much), but this was clearly  not going to happen, so I tried to practice patience and enjoy the beautiful countryside.  Coming back, though, I had a stretch of the road to myself.  I felt the subtle weight shifts as the vehicle took the curves at speed, and the G forces as I accelerated out of them.  The sound of the exhaust note rising and falling as I shifted between third and fourth was like music.

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