The Casual Blog

January 5, 2014

Our diving trip to Fiji

Over the end-of-year holiday Sally and I went to Fiji for some scuba diving. It was a long journey with some rough spots, but also some thrilling spots, and on balance it was worth it. For those who might consider such a trip, here’s some of the nitty gritty on the diving, and also a note about our stop on the way home at the Getty Museum.

I’d always thought of Fiji as one of those “island paradise” places in the Pacific, but in fact didn’t know that much about it. The reason we decided to go was we’d heard the scuba diving was good, and it’s relatively uncomplicated to get to from the US. It is situated north of New Zealand, west of Tonga, and east of Vanuatu. Although it looks like a tiny speck on the world map, it is made up of 332 islands, though most of the population of 860,000 lives on just two of them. The large islands are mountainous and very green

It took us about 26 hours door-to-door to get there. Going out, we had three flights, a long cab ride, a wait, and then an hour boat ride to get to Beqa (pronounced Ben-ga) Lagoon Resort. The staff was on the beach under the palms singing and clapping as we floated up. This was sweet, but we were surprised that there was no dry way to exit the boat. You had to step into the water and then onto the beach, and Sally was still in stockings, but on she went. One of the staff put a little garland with flowers around our neck.

The resort didn’t look quite as gleaming as its website suggested, but it had tropical charm, with palms, flowers, sand, pools, and grass-roofed buildings, and the staff was warm, friendly, and competent. We were in Bure (which I’m guessing means cottage) No. 5, which fronted on the beach and had thick hedges on the side – great privacy. That afternoon, I did a short checkout dive, but otherwise we took it easy and had a couples massage at the spa. It was marvelous.

The next day we did two boat dives in the area. The water was a comfortable 82 degrees, but choppy, and the visibility was mediocre – at most 50 feet, rather than the super clear water we were expecting. We were looking forward to the fabled soft coral, of which we saw some, but we were also struck that there were big coral areas that were bleached white (prematurely dead). It was nice to see many small tropical fish that were new to us, including new species of angelfish, butterflyfish, damselfish, anemone fish, fusiliers, wrasse, parrot fish, and my new favorite, the Moorish idol.

At dinner that evening we sat down next to a youngish Swiss couple, Mark and Doris, who spoke excellent English and were charming and lively. We found a lot of interests in common, starting with diving but extending to skiing, travel, and world affairs. Our conversations that evening and for the rest of our stay were a highlight of the trip. As for the eating, the resort accommodated our request for vegetarian meals, and almost everything was tasty.

On the second day of Beqa diving, we enjoyed talking with Rick, a nice Mormon guy who owned a bunch of car dealerships in the heartland. He was up to speed on the self-driving car, a favorite subject of mine, and like me thinking about what this meant for employment and the economy. He was intrigued to hear about our scuba liveaboard trips, and wanted to learn more. He allowed, though, that he wasn’t sure he was passionate enough about diving to do a week focused entirely on that. I agreed – you’ve got to be passionate.

The next morning we crossed back over Beqa lagoon, and got a ride to our dive boat, the Island Dancer II. It was 101 feet long, 22 feet in the beam, and well-appointed for diving. Our cabin was on the main deck past eating/socializing area. It was air-conditioned and quite commodious and bright by marine standards, with a queen bed, desk, large windows, and private bathroom.

Our crew, led by Captain Joji (pronounced Cho-chee) and divemaster Moses, was all Fijian, friendly and hardworking. Our seven shipmates were from D.C., San Francisco, Sydney, and Moscow, and all were very experienced divers who’d all been to several exotic dive locations before.

Our first night involved a nine-hour trip from Viti Levu (the main island) through the Makogai Channel toward Vanua Levu and Namena Reef. The weather was rainy, and the seas were choppy. The boat rocked enough to dump things off of countertops. Fortunately, our stomachs were up to the challenge (thank, Bonine). The next morning it was calm, and we did a check out dive – ostensibly to check how much weight we needed, but, I suspect, more to let the crew verify that no one was going to be a hazard to himself or others. That went smoothly, and we quickly settled into our routine.

Our typical Island Dancer day went as follows: Up at 6:30 a.m. for pre-breakfast (e.g. yogurt, fruit, cereal), first dive at 7:30, breakfast of eggs or French toast at 9:00, second dive at 10:30, lunch at noon, third dive at 2:00 p.m., snack at 3:30, fourth dive at 4:30, dinner at 6:00, fifth dive (night dive) at 8:15, have a glass of wine at 9:30, and then sleep. In short, dive, eat, and sleep. In the background were gorgeous lush islands, lovely sunsets, and usually a mild tropical breeze. The water and air were both mostly in the low eighties. What could be more fun?

OK, not everything was perfect. The visibility was disappointing. It ranged from a best of about 50 feet down to 20 or so – far from the 80-100 feet we were expecting. The captain said at one point it was as bad as he’d seen it in many years of diving the area. He said a tropical depression shortly before we arrived was responsible. So, that was unlucky. We were also initially struck that there were significant areas of the reefs bleached white with not a lot of animal life. There were fewer big animals (big fish, turtles, rays) than we had hoped. At least one person saw a manta ray, but we did not.

But still, there was a great deal to see. A typical site involved a pinnacle (that is, a column), of coral rising from the sand perhaps 50 feet. The top layer would generally be about 15 feet below the surface, and would have an enormous profusion of soft and hard coral, anemones, and thousands of tropical fish. With so many textures and colors, the coral looked in places like a fantastic garden – amazingly beautiful.

Along with the fish, we saw quite a few other interesting and strange small creatures, including various kinds of nudibranchs, flat worms, sea horses, tiny shrimp, pipe fish, blennies, and others still more obscure. There were a few turtles, and a couple of moray eels. One morning we watched a banded sea snake (highly poisonous) swimming for several minutes, and a very well-disguised octopus, who changed disguises a couple of more times. On one night dive we saw three leaf scorpionfish and a giant clam at least four feet across.

The fourth day in, off of Gau (pronounced Now) Island, we did two shark dives, where we saw dozens of gray reef sharks close up. With them were many red sea bass and smaller fish, as well as schools of barracuda. On the first dive we held in current behind a rock wall, while the sharks came in for fish heads. The second involved a drift dive in a fast current, with the sharks zooming in and out.

On that second dive, I got low on air, and shared Sally’s with her extra second stage as we got pushed hard by the current to the exit point. It was a challenging situation, but we worked well together, as usual. We saw a spotted eagle ray during the safety stop.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, we visited a little village on Gau island called Soma Soma. Our guide there told us that 114 people and 3 clans lived there. The people greeted us in a friendly way. Teenage boys were setting off fireworks with a palm cannon to celebrate the new year, and little kids were splashing in the water. We sampled kava, a watery drink made from soaking kava root. Supposedly it can produce a high, but I got only slight numbness in my mouth. The villagers did some singing and dancing, and got some of us to join in a dance.

My Sea Life underwater camera quit working (wouldn’t turn on) after the second day of diving, and so I rented a little Canon G15 camera from the boat. Lacking a strobe, I used my Sola flash light for extra light, which was suboptimal. My photographic aspirations were simple, really – to get a few images that started to convey the incredible beauty down there – but it was still hard to do.

There were so many great shots that got away. A beautiful angelfish would present itself in all its splendor, and either the camera had gone to sleep, or wouldn’t focus. Or in the half second shutter lag interval, the fish would turn away, or another fish would swim between us, or another diver’s bubbles would mess things up. Then, after the shot, the camera would take a few second to recycle, during which time the subject fish would again look gorgeous, but as soon as the camera was ready to go – so was the fish. Some of those little fish are shy! Anyhow, I tried, and I a few times I got an image I liked.

Our trip back was a total of 41 hours, including layovers, but we made good use of the eleven-hour layover in L.A. with our first visit to the Getty Center. The logistics were a bit challenging, in that we couldn’t check our heavy dive bags and so had to cart them by cab and tram to the Getty’s coat check room, but it was worth it.

It is a wonderful museum! It’s perched on top of a hill, surrounded by gardens, with a good view of downtown L.A. It has several connected buildings, with a vibe that’s modern but evocative. The crowd was all ages, international, multiracial, and friendly.

And there was an outstanding collection of European art. We spent time looking at the excellent collection of paintings of Rembrandt and his contemporaries, and of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists. We also very much enjoyed the current exhibit of the works of Abelardo Morrell, a Cuban-American photographer. His works were highly conscious of texture and shape in a formal way, but also touched something emotionally powerful.

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December 23, 2013

A beautiful Nutcracker, Xmas spinning, and getting ready for Fiji (including ebooks)

We were on the fence about whether to go to the Carolina Ballet’s Nutcracker ballet this year. There have been many lovely Nutcrackers, even enchanting Nutcrackers, but after many years of cracking, I worried that the magic might be wearing a little thin for me. That Tchaikovsky music is great, but also very, very familiar. It would be a shame to find that the thrill was finally gone. But Will Levine, son of our friends David and Maggie, dancing the nephew/nutcracker/prince, we decided to go again.

I’m so glad we did. It was a particularly touching and magical Nutcracker. Having a live orchestra to play that delicious music really helped, and this was a good band, ably led by Al Sturges. There were the cute little kids and sumptuous costumes and settings. But most of all, there were the dancers. The Carolina Ballet has so many talented artists just now. They looked like they loved their work.

The star of the evening was Lara O’Brien as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Her SPF was elegant and assured, highly musical, with a slight note of tragic grace. Her pas de deux with Marcelo Martinez was beautiful and moving — so passionate – I got a bit misty.

Also especially wonderful was Alicia Fabry as Butterfly (the lead in the Flowers waltz), and newcomer Alyssa Pilger as the lead Ribbon Candy. Young Will did well, to the relief of his parents, and us, too. As in past years, there were a couple of little kids who could do fantastic handsprings, and big boys whose leaps seemed to defy gravity. It was all delightful. It took me into a magical place, in equal parts childhood fantasy and nostalgia, and reminded me of many happy times gone by.

In other Xmas news, I had an holiday-themed spin class at O2 this week led by the fabulous Jenn. She announced at the start that she just loved Christmas, and she’d made a special Christmas tunes mix for our spinning pleasure.

It turned out to be some hard-driving rock songs of the season, and she kicked us into a very high gear. There was lots of sprinting (including a killer sequence of fast, faster, and fastest) and intense climbing. One new trick – she can ride out of the saddle with no hands, and she thinks we can, too. I gave it a shot, and verified that it is not easy. Anyhow, the class was fun, in a brutal kind of way. I knew for certain at the end I had worked out.

For our holiday, Sally and I are heading out for a scuba diving trip to Fiji on Monday, which should be incredible. It’s taken a lot of planning, and the logistics are complicated. There are quite a few important pieces of dive gear, photo gear, and other stuff that must not be forgotten (some of which is pictured above).

In addition to all those details, I’ve given some thought to what books I want to read. Reading time is one thing to like about long flights. My tablet device makes it easier (less heavy) to carry a lot of books, but pre-loading was necessary, since I don’t expect to have much if any internet connectivity. Also, the tablet is not a good reader in direct sunlight, so I need some old-fashioned paper books as well.

Here’s a quick listing of my current books-in-progress and new ones that I may get going. The are ebooks unless otherwise noted.
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Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., by Ron Chernow. I figured it would be fairly interesting to find out how the Rockefeller became the most successful monopolist in history, and it has been, fairly. Rockefeller was a very driven person, with a high standard of personal morality (a lifelong Baptist) and a low standard of business morality. His trust was a primary inspiration for the beginnings of modern antitrust law.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier. I’m about done with this one. I don’t think the title is much of an exaggeration – big data is transforming many fields, including retail, finance, education, and medicine. definitely worth thinking about.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t, by Nate Silver. The creator of the FiveThirtyEight blog and impressively successful political prognosticator talks about his methods and related things. Based on the first chapter, it appears somewhat padded as a book.

The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business, by Eric Schmnidt and Jared Cohen. I picked this up out of curiosity regarding what the chairman of Google was thinking would come next. I’m about half way through, and finding it not particularly well organized, but there is interesting reporting and thinking on how technology is reshaping our lives. The portion on hacker-terrorist is hair-raising.

Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, by Steven Wise. The author recently brought a habeas corpus action on behalf of a champanizee, which struck me as a legal long shot, but interesting, and I was curious about his theory.

Ordinary Men, by Christopher Browning. A history of a small group of regular joes who worked at ground level as part of Hitler’s final solution. For a long time I’ve been interested in the question of how otherwise normal people could participate in mass murder on an industrial scale, and Browning sheds some light on this.

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, by H.W. Brands. Franklin is by far my favorite founding father, and I’ve read most if not all of the other major contemporary biographies of him. Earlier this year I read Brands’s American Colossus: The Triumph of American Capitalism 1865-1900, and thought it was quite good, so I’m looking forward to getting his view of Franklin and his world.

Reef Fish Identification (Tropical Pacific), by Allen, Steen, Humann, and Deloach (in paper). There are an amazing number of amazing reef fish in the Pacific, and it’s fun to know a bit about them.

Zukerman Bound, by Philip Roth. I got this as a used paperback (price $4.50) of the three Zuckerman novels (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and the Anatomy Lesson). Roth is my favorite living novelist, and for some reason I hadn’t read these key works of his early middle period. It will be a great pleasure.

The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles. A classic, obviously.

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman (paper). The embodiment of what is great – and strange – about America. It seems like a good time to read it again.

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December 16, 2013

My fabulous teachers (fitness, yoga, and music) and seeing Dallas Buyers’ Club

Our geranium on the balcony is a true survivor! Here we are in mid-December, after several nights sub-freezing nights, and it still looks perky. Sally asked me to take a picture of this marvelous plant, and so I did — several in fact, but these are the best.

Getting out of a rut and trying new things takes some energy and effort. It also really helps to have a good teacher. As I came into the home stretch of this week, it struck me that I’m fortunate to have found several such teachers, who’ve been helping me with fitness, yoga, and music.

First, there’s Larisa Lotz, who is my regular personal trainer each Thursday at 5:30 a.m. at Studio Revolution. I always look forward to it, because there’s an element of play and fun, but I also always find I’m barely able to make it through. This is not by accident, of course. Larisa has got my number, and knows about where my limits and weak points are. And she works on those weak points – which get stronger.

This week, as usual, she had some new activities and combinations. For core work, I had a side plank with the top leg pulling in and kicking out to the side, and a TRX suspended push up from the ground followed by drawing the legs in. She had me throwing a soft heavy medicine ball as high as possible, to work on “explosive energy,” which she said was a gap in most people’s fitness regimen.

We did some agility drills with quick stepping in various patterns through a rope ladder. We also did some sandbag work, including a fast intense series with dead lifts, cleans, squats, presses, and rows. And several other things. I took home several ideas for new things to work on.

On Friday morning I got to O2 Fitness at 5:35, and did some of Larisa’s hip and leg exercises and some more traditional upper body work – chin ups, dips, push ups, rows, and presses. Then I took my weekly RPM spinning class with Christy. This class involves dance club music of the throbbing, driving sort, which is not my favorite music, but it makes the hard biking in place in a dark room relatively fun. Our class on Friday involved more sprints than usual. I kept an eye on my heart rate monitor so as not to redline for too long. I topped out at 162 – high, but with all that effort, I was surprised it wasn’t a little higher.

Later that day, at lunchtime, I shot over to Massage Wallah for some therepeutic massage work with Emily Alexander. My neck and shoulders were in need of special attention, so that’s what she worked on. This was my second session with Emily, and it was fairly intense, but good. Emily is not overly chatty, which I appreciate – it’s good to concentrate on the sensation. But I asked her about her story, and learned that she, like me, went to high school at the N.C. School of the Arts, and went on to film school at NYU and movie and TV work in Hollywood. We compared notes on digital cameras. My neck was much better afterwards, and I thought my shoulder was improved.

On Saturday morning I went to Yvonne Cropp‘s Juicy Flow yoga class at Blue Lotus. This is an hour-and-a-half class that combines traditional vinyasa work with kriya practice, which as presented by Yvonne involves three minute or so segments set to dance music with rhythmic movements working different muscle groups. It definitely gets the heart going. I ordinarily can figure out the exercise, but there is one I can’t: rolling backward, then forward and standing up without using the hands. Most of my fellow yogis were doing it, so it’s definitely possible. Another challenge for the future.

It was rainy on Saturday afternoon, which was good weather for a piano lesson with Olga Kleiankina. I played Debussy’s second Arabesque and the first movement of Bach’s Italian Concerto. As usual, Olga made me aware of some new dimensions of sound. We spent a long time working on the silences around the staccato notes in the Debussy. Along with a number of such tiny details, we worked on rhythm in connection with the larger structures.

For the Bach, she pointed out that one could never mistake Bach for Mozart, because Bach made much more use of interior parts of the measure for beginning and ending phrases – sort of like syncopation. She showed me how certain accents and timing tricks would bring the piece to life. Of course, knowing about it is one thing, and doing is another. It will take practice.

That evening Sally and I went out to Cary for dinner and a movie. When we go to the Regal at Crossroads, we like to eat at Tom Yum Thai, where the food is delicious and the service warm and friendly. They will take you at your word if you require things very spicy, and for me medium spicy is about right.

During dinner we talked about Dasani, the eleven-year-old homeless girl featured in a series of five articles in the Times this week. She’s a plucky, smart, athletic kid who faces very long odds at the bottom of the economic food chain. We got to know her large family, her teachers, and her homeless shelter in Brooklyn, where the conditions were dire. The series, by Andrea Elliott, is an extraordinary window into the world of poverty – well worth reading.

We saw Dallas Buyers Club, which concerns a macho Texas rodeo-type guy who gets AIDs in the 1980s and starts a business supplying unapproved AIDs drugs to the gay etc. demimonde. There are some colorful and funny characters, and a tour de force performance by Matthew McConaughey. He is almost unrecognizable, very gaunt, with a ton of grit and attitude. Of course, the subject is tragic. It reminded me of the first wave of the AIDs epidemic, and some of my own precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.

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December 8, 2013

Sleepwalking, yoga, Bach, Schlosser on the nuclear precipice, and Spiegelman’s Maus

So I apparently had another bizarre sleepwalking experience. After what seemed like a normal night’s sleep, I got up to find several unusual things. There were two wine glasses full of beer on the coffee table – one sitting on top of my laptop. There was a bowl with popcorn kernels, and a lot of popcorn on the floor. In the kitchen, the light on the stove hood vent was on, and the microwave popcorn wrappers were strewn about.

My first thought was that we’d had a break in, but the various quasi-valuable things in the vicinity were still around, and the door was locked from inside. That left just two possibilities – Sally and me. When she got up, she verified she had not knowingly done any of this eating and drinking.

From my prior somnambulism, I figured it had to be me. But I had absolutely no recollection of any such activity. And I would never, ever put beer in a wine glass – or worse, set the glass on my computer! And I did not know exactly how to operate the light on the stove hood, which I never use.

It is very strange to think of such complex activity happening without any consciousness whatever. Eating and drinking without meaning to is bad, but it could get worse. Is there any safety module that keeps the sleepwalker from going over the balcony rail? And falling twelve stories?

In the last few days, I’ve taken note of various waking automatic behaviors and strange forgetful episodes. I expect everyone has some. Did I take that pill already or not? I parked that car, but where? My foot is bouncing up and down, which I did not tell it to do. Sally had a good one: she couldn’t find the pomegranate juice, and looked high and low, before realizing she’d already gotten it out of the refrigerator.

So a lot of our behavior is taking place without our consciously knowing anything about it. This is at times surely a good thing, allowing us to save mental energy for where it’s most needed. Cultivating good habits is partly an accommodation to the reality that there’s just not enough time or energy to think about every behavior. We choose a template that we think is likely to be effective in different future situations and repeat it until it is automatic.

But still, sleepwalking is pretty weird.

Some yoga

The weather for most of this week was unseasonably warm and sunny, but it turned cold and rainy for the weekend. So no golf, but I did get in two yoga classes. On Saturday morning Suzanne filled in for Yvonne at Blue Lotus, and led an hour-long open level vinyasa class. She kept things flowing pretty fast, which I like, and I did a reasonable amount of sweating.

On Sunday morning, based on the recommendation of Larisa (my personal trainer), I tried a class with Hayley at Evolve. Her style involved holding poses for longer, which was challenging. When she said we’re going to do hand stands, I was surprised, but game. I managed to kick up and stay up for a while against the wall. Then Larisa asked Hayley to give me some pointers, and I had another go and managed to have a fairly spectacular crash. But I learned something: Hayley theorized that I got a little surprised when I touched the wall and let my elbow bend. Onward and upward.

Bach’s Christmas Oratorio

On Saturday night we had a fine Italian dinner a Caffe Luna, then went to a performance of the N.C. Symphony and the N.C. Master Chorale of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. I was not familiar with the piece, but liked it very much. The chorus sounded great in some very challenging choral writing. The four soloists had pleasing voices and style, and the orchestra played well. Our friend trumpeter Paul Randall had a very high and prominent part in the last cantata, and shined.

My only complaint was conductor Grant Llewellyn seemed overly metronomic — without much rhythmic flexibility. I guess that’s one way to do it, but it seemed to me Bach would have liked more expression. We went out for a drink with Paul and a couple of his colleagues afterwards. It was interesting hearing the younger musicians talk about the intense challenges of auditioning for orchestra jobs.

Command and Control — the Nuclear Weapons Precipice

Speaking again of sleeping problems, for several nights recently I had anxiety dreams, inspired, I think, by reading Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion o Safety, by Eric Schlosser. The headline is: for decades we lived frighteningly close to the edge of an accidental nuclear disaster. A hydrogen bomb could have exploded in any of numerous training or maintenance accidents, while the huge arsenal of missiles could have been unleashed through computer error or human misjudgment.

In the final chapter Schlosser indicates that the risk of an accidental explosion from a US weapon has gone down, but it may have gone up in countries like Pakistan and India. And we’ve still got the irreducible human factor – that is, imperfect humans are in charge of these incredibly destructive weapons, and they could make a bad decision that could cost thousands or millions of lives.

Even before reading the book, I was generally of the view that it is insane to build, maintain, and keep on alert nuclear weapons capable of destroying many millions of innocent civilians and much of the planetary ecosystem – ending, as they say, life as we know it. This was true in the cold war, but even more so now, when there is no existential military threat. Why would any rational person or society do such a thing? After reading the book, and learning more about the theories of nuclear war and the practical engineering problems of the weapons, it seems even crazier.

How can it be that de-nuclearization is not a high priority issue in national and world politics? Of course, we do much hand wringing about Iran’s potential for a nuclear weapon, which makes it even odder that we somehow mostly avoid discussing our own weapons and their disastrous potential. It’s like we’re sleepwalking. Perhaps Schlosser’s book will help us start to wake up.

Maus

On a cheerier note (ha!), I started reading Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel masterpiece about the Holocaust. It’s in part about Spiegelman’s relationship with his father, who was concentration camp survivor. The early pages are about his life in pre-war Poland, first as a bachelor and then meeting Spiegelman’s mother. It’s surprisingly sweet, but also direct and honest, and remarkably vivid. I’ve never read anything remotely like it, and I really like it.

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November 30, 2013

NYC: finding a nice hotel, good food, great art, and mildly disappointing opera

Sally and I went up to New York City last weekend to see sweet Jocelyn, eat, and see some art and some opera. Here’s a report.

Accommodations

For all the great things about New York, one problem for visitors is that good hotels tend to be painfully expensive. In quest of the holy grail of a nice-but-not-exceedingly-dear hotel, we tried a new one: the Carlton, at Madison and 28th. Perhaps because it’s not in a high-profile neighborhood, the value proposition is strong: charm, good service, and rooms under $200.

The high-ceilinged lobby was an eclectic-but-stimulating mix of styles (modern, beaux arts, art nouveau). Our room was quiet and comfy. The shower pressure and hot water supply met Sally’s exacting standards. The furniture and fittings were attractive and modern, except for the bathroom sink, which was old school (rounded porcelain with no shelf space). The gym was adequate and available 24 hours. The location was a comfortable walk from the theatre district and within 10 cab-minutes of everything we had planned.

Food

Jocelyn was waiting for us at the hotel when we arrived, and she’d already scoped restaurants and made a reservation for that evening. We checked in, unpacked, and walked one block to Lexington Avenue and an area rife with Indian restaurants known as “Curry Hill.”

The one Jocelyn picked was Chote Nawab. We love eating Indian, although there are common shortcomings: the food often isn’t very pretty (lots of brown), or the atmosphere is a little formal and downbeat. But Chote Nawab was really lively, with many cheerful young people, excellent service, and delicious curries well presented. Jocelyn was as cheerful and lively as any. She was very excited about her new life in New York, and had lots to report.

Art

On Saturday we did two very different art exhibits: the Art Spiegelman restrospective at the Jewish Museum (92d and Fifth) and the Dutch masters exhibit at the Frick (70th and Fifth).

I was generally aware of Art Spiegelman as a comics artist, but until this exhibit had no clue as to his wide range and depth. He uses a lot of styles and reference points, with courage, exuberance and also humility. His masterpiece, Maus, is a graphic novel about his father’s experience in the Holocaust, which established the graphic novel as a serious art form. The sections I looked at were intriguing and moving. After the show, I ordered a copy.

The show at the Frick was headlined by Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75). This is a painting generally regarded as a transcendent masterpiece, and one that I’d been wanting to see for many years. Vermeer’s work is extremely subtle, with seemingly ordinary subject matter, and seeming straight-ahead realism, but a mysterious emotional power.

The Girl is, at first sight, a fairly ordinary girl. But with more time, the painting transmits a more complicated message. She looks as though she’s been surprised, but not unpleasantly so. Could something be going on between her and the artist, as Tracey Chevalier imagined in her novel? Maybe. The painting is ambiguous, but the truth seems just barely out of reach.

She gave me big, long-lasting goose bumps. I enjoyed the rest of the show, which included works by Rembrandt, Hals, and several other Dutchmen of the 17th century, but nothing that was as affecting. I also revisited the Frick’s permanent collection, which is one of the finest small collections of European painting in the world. Henry Clay Frick seems to have been a particularly brutal captain of industry in the gilded age, but still, he had very good taste. However good or bad the motivation for his philanthropy, I’m grateful.

More good food and some opera

After we finished at the Frick, Jocelyn, Sally and I walked across Central Park as the sun was setting. It was getting colder, so we stopped for some coffee, and then made our way to an early dinner at the Leopard, an Italian restaurant on west 67th Street.

Jocelyn’s friend Mike joined us, and we had an extraordinarily fine meal. My ravioli with braised artichoke and a tomato marjoram sauce managed to be both hearty and delicate. We shared two desserts, which were delicious, and lost track of time. It was snowing when we got out on the street, and we had to hurry to Lincoln Center to make the 8:00 curtain at the Metropolitan Opera.

We saw Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, which is a new production for this season and was completely new to me. I thought the music was gorgeous – as fine as anything Tchaikovsky ever wrote. But dramatically the thing is puzzling and for substantial stretches fairly boring. Why does Eugene reject Tatiana? Why does he ultimately desperately long for her? I don’t know, and worse, the drama didn’t really make me care.

It was quite cold and snowing when we finished the opera at about 11:15, and there were many more people looking for cabs than there were cabs. We walked past Columbus Circle and over to Sixth Avenue, and finally found a cab to get us back to the Carlton.

A little more art

On Sunday we had breakfast at the hotel, and then walked a few blocks up Madison to the Morgan Library. They had an exhibit of Leonardo’s drawings and notebooks, including the famous Codex on the Flight of Birds. Leonardo was, of course, an extraordinary individual – a true Renaissance man, curious about everything in the natural and human world, and constantly innovating, or imagining future innovations.

I didn’t realize how few paintings he made, perhaps because he was so interested in everything. His drawings seem effortless and timeless. But his presumed self portrait in red chalk shows an old, bearded man looking extremely remote and grumpy, if not bitter. It’s hard to reconcile his extreme gifts and imagination, which seem reason for great joy, with this persona.

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November 25, 2013

My quickie to Rio

I had a short work trip to Rio this week – down by the red eye on Sunday night, and back by the red eye on Tuesday night. Though I wasn’t looking forward to the long (9.5 hours from Atlanta) flight, there were several good things.

1. Pre-check. I got pre-check status on another recent flight, and this time I happily concluded it was not purely by accident. Pre-check means you can keep your clothes on and keep your computers bagged when you do the security line. For me, it also meant a much shorter line. Should I feel guilty about being such a privileged character? Maybe, but I don’t.

2. Zone two. For some reason I had my priority boarding status seriously downgraded this year, and have been put in zone three (the last group) on several flights. I’m always pulling a roll aboard and toting a knapsack, which means I need a significant chunk of overhead storage space. Boarding with the last group means all overhead space may be gone. This makes me a little anxious and grumpy. Getting zone two means a positive attitude adjustment, and there was more than enough space for my bags. Whew!

3. Use of electronic devices. Because of the recent FAA rule change, I didn’t have to turn off my tablet device and MP3 device when they shut the cabin doors or began the descent, and was able to use it throughout the flight. One of things I actually like about flying is the opportunity to do some reading and listen to music, but as more of my reading has migrated to the ebook format, the no-devices rule was a real inconvenience. So, one small step in the direction of rationality and happiness.

4. Delta’s Boeing 767-400. A handsome plane with four aisle seats per row and a reasonable amount of leg room, even in the prole seats. Delta communicated the regulation pre-flight data with a video that had some quirky understated humor. But they still include a careful explanation of how to fasten a seat belt. Really now, is there anyone who needs coaching on that?

5. Zolpidem. I usually have trouble sleeping on planes, but 12.5 mg of generic Ambien really did the trick. I got a solid six hours. I considered getting one of those horseshoe-shaped pillows. I decided against it, based on the principle of when in doubt, leave it out (lighter is better when traveling). This was not a great call – I got some neck soreness from sitting-sleep. Next 9-hour-plus trip, I want that pillow.

6. Rio de Janeiro. After working late on Monday night, I finished with what had to be done early Tuesday afternoon, and got a quick tour of Rio. My guide was Mr. Fred, who didn’t speak much English, but was cheerful and a good driver. Highlights were the tram up to Sugarloaf mountain, the little train up to Cristo Redentor, and drive-bys of the big beaches, including Copacabana and Ipanema.

Rio is a sexy city, with lots of curves and indentations, as well as many upthrusting hard places. There are spots where you can see at one time mountains, forests, cliffs, massive high rises, giant slums, beaches, boats, and ocean. It is spectacular.

7. Girl with a Pearl Earring. I read most of Tracy Chevalier’s book on the plane, and liked it. I picked it up in preparation for a short trip to New York in significant part to see Vermeer’s famous painting of the same title. The book consists of a historically informed imaging of the possible backstory of the painting.

The girl narrates the story of going to work as a maid for the Vermeer household and becoming involved with the painter’s work. I learned some interesting things about eighteenth century Dutch domestic life and painting techniques, and also something about how to look at those remarkable paintings. I was surprised how involved I got with the girl, whose life was narrow in a way, but also rich in texture and feeling. Note, the movie of the book with Scarlett Johansson was enjoyable but no substitute for psychological subtlety of the book.

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November 16, 2013

My handstand near disaster, re-reading Shteyngart, and seeing Captain Phillips

That’s the crane for the new Citrix office in the Raleigh warehouse district as viewed from our balcony on Saturday morning. Below is the new apartment building going up facing us from Boylan Avenue. It’s good to see construction all around. Things are happening!

As was probably evident last week when I mentioned doing my first handstand, I was fairly proud to finally get it. From the first time I saw another boy in my neighborhood do one, a small part of me secretly yearned for this skill. Why? I’m not entirely sure. It’s different, and it’s good to be a little different. I like to turn things upside down and see how they look. I also like to dial in to another aspect of bodily control and strength. There’s also something bracing about facing down a bit of fear.

So I looked forward to mastering the handstand skill against a wall, and perhaps eventually unassisted. After my initial success, I did a few more over the weekend. On Monday morning I went up for a workout in the small gym on the top floor of our building. No one else was around. After a half hour on the elliptical machine, still breathing hard, I attempted another handstand. Something went wrong. My right shoulder gave way, and unable to lean quickly, I fell straight down. I tucked my chin and hit hard on my neck and shoulder.

It hurt a lot. I lay in a heap, and wondered if this was what a broken neck felt like. After a bit, I tried to wiggle my toes and fingers, and noted with relief that they seemed to be working. I rolled over and tested my neck, which throbbed, but could still move. I felt stunned, but more or less OK. I was sore for the rest of the week, and a bit shaken. I decided to give the healing process a few days before forging ahead with handstand work.

Super Sad, Funny Shteyngart

This week I finished re-reading Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel, by Gary Shteyngart. A couple of years ago I left my original copy in a hotel room with just 60 pages left, and found that I kept thinking about the world it created. After the mild disappointment of reading The Circle, I decided to download the ebook version of Super Sad, and realized this time around that it’s not only an entertaining read, but a feat of Nabakovian brilliance.

It’s hard to categorize. It’s set a bit in the future, like science fiction, but I wouldn’t call it science fiction, because the world and its technology are not very different from ours. It’s sort of a comedy, and at times hilarious, but also keenly observant, dark, and shocking. With an ease that conceals virtuosity, Shteyngart exposes a underside to our fun technology, and shows it transforming society in a way that not only seems believable, but prophetic. Keep in mind that it was published in 2010, before Occupy Wall Street and before the U.S. first threatened to default on its debt.

A quick note on the subject matter: Lennie is a 39-year-old nebbishy, smart guy who works for an outfit selling life extension services to super High Net Worth individuals. He falls in love with Eunice, a 25-year-old Korean-American who seems to spend most of her time surfing on GlobalTeens shopping sites on her apparat and obsessing over luxury brands like Juicy Pussy handbags and Onionskin jeans. They live in New York City, where there is extreme income inequality, with unemployed veterans of the war with Venezuela and other Low Net Worth individuals camped out in the parks opposing the one-party surveillance state, which is financially teetering and close to being taken over by China.

There are technologies that signal your credit score on surrounding Media Poles and also show your sexual desirability rank in any grouping (“RateMe Plus” technology). Along with new apps there’s new youth slang, which is marginally cruder than our youth slang. Recent college graduates are mostly unemployed and trying to get a job either in Media (a very long shot) or Retail (just a long shot).

Lennie is a bibliophile in world where books and reading are socially toxic. Cool people have mostly stopped reading, and paper books are considered bad-smelling. Colleges teach skimming in place of reading. At one point there’s a blackout, and Lennie and Eunice read some from Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being (as it happens, a favorite of mine, as it clearly is of Shteyngart’s). Eunice can’t at all follow the complex ideas, and even Lennie finds his ability to understand a literary text has grown dim.

A large part of the pleasure is not just the ideas or the plot, but the texture and quirky beauty of the language. Shteyngart is a writer’s writer. I’ll just add that the title will discourage some people who would enjoy the book, but it really is, in part, a love story, in the sense of dealing with human feelings, and with how those feelings are transformed by technology and social context. Obviously I loved it.

In a postscript that would have pleased Shteyngart, when I finished the Kindle version of the book on my iPad, my Twitter account appeared with a tweet that said, “I just finished reading Super Sad True Love Story.” I did not write those words, nor did I want to send such a tweet. And I didn’t. But I could imagine just pushing send, since the message was completely accurate, and something I wouldn’t mind sharing (though not on my professionally-oriented Twitter account). It gave me a slight chill. Is this the first bomb to fall in a new phase of post-literacy, where your machines not only correct your spelling and grammar but actually do your thinking and writing?

Captain Phillips

On Friday night we saw Captain Phillips, the new movie about Somali pirates taking a cargo ship with Tom Hanks. It was not what I expected, but much better. With remarkable directness and economy, it establishes the desperate and impoverished lives of the young men who become pirates, such that they can never be viewed as pure evil. Hanks has made a long career as a leading man who’s not particularly good-looking playing normal people confronted with outsize problems or puzzles (WWII, mental retardation, shipwreck, adolescence, etc.). Here, he does so again with seeming utter naturalness.

As the captain, Phillips seems a decent guy who doesn’t aspire to much more than doing a solid job transporting goods. But under attack, he turns out to have above-average grit and resourcefulness. Trying to manipulate the pirates, he seems like a bad liar, but good enough to fool these guys, who are not diabolically clever. But both the pirates and Phillips and his crew are by moments astonishingly courageous. This is an action movie with true feeling and heart, and also a lot of adrenaline.

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November 10, 2013

Ecstasy and agony: a sweet homecoming, my first handstand, a good massage, a difficult dental appointment, and some beastly Brahms

Happy birthday to Gabe! He’s 29 today, and his mumsy and popsy are proud as can be. He came out from Telluride to visit us for a few days, and it’s been good to catch up.

He’s working hard on his music, experimenting and doing some recording with his band mates. In high school, he got to be a strong drummer, but then lost interest. But he’s come back to making music! All those music lessons were not wasted! And he’s learned the secret of getting better at his instrument (and other things): practice, practice, practice.

Along with his music, Gabe has been experimenting with photography using his iPhone and Snapseed. He starts with something straightforward and does various color processes for a new look. It’s lively and interesting. He’s also following others on Instagram, including someone called yoga_girl. He showed me a couple of yoga_girl’s yoga feats, which included some extraordinary handstand variations.

I hadn’t mentioned that I’d made up my mind to learn how to do a handstand against a wall. I’d gotten a short lesson from Larisa, my wonderful functional fitness trainer, and also gotten Suzanne, my wonderful yoga teacher, to show me her approach after a recent class. And I’d given it several serious tries, which were close – but no cigar.

But after seeing Gabe and yoga_girl, the next morning I had my 5:30 a.m. session with Larissa, and amidst her other challenges, requested another handstand lesson. She suggested approaching it like a cartwheel. We worked on cartwheels for a bit, with some improvement, and then tried again. And I did it! Thanks, Larisa!

When I told Gabe of my milestone the next evening, he was of the view that I also owed some thanks to him and yoga_girl. True enough. He was inspired to try his own handstand. Without a wall. He was there by the third try. That’s my boy!

The same day I did my first handstand, at lunchtime, I had my first massage with Kirsten Bachmann. After a massage hiatus, I’d decided to audition some new massage talent, and possibly get a regular routine for taking care of that part of my make up. I liked Kirsten. She started out with this surprisingly effective machine called the Thumper, which gives you a good Thumping. She did some great work on my right shoulder, which needed it. I look forward to our next session.

But not all my experiences with new technology this week were as wonderful. I was two months late for my six-month tooth cleaning, and drew a new hygienist who used a device called the Cavitron. The tool vibrates at a high frequency, which, she said, “blasts the bacteria.” Maybe. But my it also caused my tooth nerves to vibrate at a frequency resembling a root canal. I like to think that I have a fairly high pain threshold, and tried hard to bear up, but finally had to say, no mas.

Also unpleasant was the piano soloist at the N.C. Symphony on Friday night. Beforehand we had tasty empanadas and margaritas at Calavera, and we enjoyed the first half of the program, which featured Sibelius’s moody and quirky Third Symphony.

But the second half of the concert, Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, featured a Finnish pianist named Olli Mustonen, who was almost comically bad. For the first few minutes, I thought perhaps I was simply not understanding his radical conception, or was just put off by his ridiculously broad gesticulating and other affectations.

But I ultimately concluded that he wasn’t listening to the orchestra, or even to himself. At times he shrugged off the conventions of normal musical phrasing and shaping, and what was left was just not musical. To me, it was painful. I should note, though, that many in the audience apparently found his waving, swaying, banging, and jumping around exciting, since a majority stood up and clapped at the end.

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November 3, 2013

Find out your fitness age

Jocelyn came home for a visit on Thursday, and she was glowing. After six months in New York, she’d (1) learned her way around, (2) found good friends, and (3) got a job she really liked. Also, she’d joined a gym and started working out regularly, and gotten focussed on nourishing herself in a healthy way.

This was music to my ears! My messaging on healthy habits, which I realize can be annoying, has not been all in vain. I’m delighted that my beloved offspring (including also Gabe) are taking good care of themselves.

That same day I came across an article in the online NY Times about assessing your “fitness age,” defined with reference to peak oxygen intake, which apparently is a strong predictor of future health. A large-scale Norwegian study examined oxygen intake levels at ages between 20 and 90, and also developed a tool using indicators including resting heart rate, waist size, and activity levels to determine fitness age.

The article had a link to the fitness age calculator. Needless to say, I gave it a shot. My fitness age? 28! Not bad for a guy born in 1955, right? But I soon began considering how I might get it down to 27.

In our neighborhood, Glenwood South, there’s been a fair bit of construction, and also some destruction. Sally told me that an unattractive building on Glenwood across from the Creamery and catty-corner to the Armadillo Grill that had just been demolished, and I went over to inspect the site on Saturday morning. They’d walled off the site, but I got a good view from the adjacent parking deck. Sure enough, all that was left was rubble. It was overcast, but there was still a nice quality to the light, and I took some other pictures of the neighborhood on my walk over to the gym.

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October 28, 2013

The State Fair, The Circle, and James Turrell

It was clear and brisk in Raleigh early Saturday afternoon when Sally and I got on the bus for the N.C. State Fair. My last fair visit was with Jocelyn when she was in elementary school, about 14 years ago, and just before she began to much prefer going with friends rather than dad. In the years since I haven’t expected that the fun would outweigh justify the headaches of traffic jams and crowds. The convenience of the bus, which stopped on Hillsborough Street just a short walk from us, made us re-do the fun/not-fun calculus, and off we went.

Our main objective was the agriculture exhibits. With most days full of hurry and technology it’s good to slow down and reconnect a little with the rural past. It’s terribly sad to think about mistreatment and needless slaughter of farm animals, but there’s also something sweet about getting close to the gorgeous prize-winning animals at the fair. The chickens and turkeys were amazingly varied, and the cows were generally good-tempered. I’m with Whitman: “I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contained; I stand and look at them long and long.”

We also enjoyed the people watching. There were, of course, rural people, but it seemed like the crowd was much more ethnically diverse than years ago. We took in a free show by a troop of acrobats, including a handstand master. \
We also so a free show of stunt BMX bikers and motorcyclists. These guys were awesome.

Also on Saturday I finished reading Dave Eggers’s new novel, The Circle. Set just a few years into the future, it’s about a young woman who goes to work for a tech company, the Circle, which sounds like a combination of Google and Facebook, and which has some cult-like qualities. It seeks total involvement and devotion from employees and may have a dream of world domination. The Circle promotes a vision of extreme transparency, pushing public officials and others to live completely on camera, open to full time universal internet scrutiny.

The idea is interesting, but the writing had about as much charm and verve as Newsweek. The subject of the book is how technology affects the human mind, but there wasn’t any depth to the characters, or much in the way of psychological insight.

Still, I liked the central thought experiment: what would happen if everyone’s life was totally visible and potentially viewable by everyone else? As The Circle notes, it would probably reduce crime. It would probably initially bring a feeling of a new kind of community. But would it destroy the possibility of human intimacy? Probably. And without intimacy, what would remain of meaning?

On Sunday morning I flew to Los Angeles for the annual meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel, where I’m doing a presentation. In the afternoon I went to the L.A. County Museum of Art, where I wanted to see the special exhibit of the work of James Turrell. He’s best known for his work involving light and space, including environments that completely baffle our understanding of boundaries.

Turrell expects his viewers to enter into his work, literally and psychologically. I found it rewarding to do so. Although the work is primarily concerned with perception, it also inspires a surprising amount of feeling. For me it had some of the calming effects of meditation. I found myself looking at light differently as I left the museum.

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