Seven Great Performances

I have arranged these in such a way that you can listen to all of them simultaneously. Try it!

The Call of a Mockingbird

One of those idiotic and intrusive car alarms went off a while ago, you know the type that breaks into a series of signals that must have been originally based on the call of the mockingbird.

I photographed this mockingbird earlier this morning from my back garden. It is a lovely creature with a wondrous range of songs -- much more impressive than the stupid, mechanical version emitted by parked cars in our big cities so regularly that they amount to nothing more than noise pollution.

Paranoid Americans worried about protecting their possessions care nothing for the quality of life of those around them. Anyone sensible disables these stupid devices. In Taipei, BTW, people get so angry at car-owners with car alarms that they attack them (and their vehicles.)

Now, I understand that auto theft is still a problem in some areas and that when it occurs it is an invasive crime. But most new model cars have automatic shut-off systems that make it essentially impossible to steal a car.

Thus, why should we be forced to endure all of that noise pollution any longer? These devices need to be banned.


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Family Albums

"That is really strange for an American, to have so many kids," said a Latino friend when I told him I have six.

It does sound strange, especially because for some reason, when people hear about my career as a writer, journalist, educator, author, screenwriter and new media entrepreneur, they often seem surprised to find out I am a father at all.

Yet, as proud as I am of my professional accomplishments, they are just that -- accomplishments. I don't display award certificates or posters of my book covers or lecture appearances in my house. What I have on the wall, mainly, are family photos and pieces of art my kids have drawn or painted.

That's because in the mirror the person I see is a father, first; and a writer, second. That's the way it is; that's the way it's always been. I write because I have to. I'm a father (and now a grandfather) because I am fortunate.

Period.

Love Isn't About Something Else

I do not pay much attention to celebrities. To me, a celebrity by definition is a person famous for being famous. But I will admit to feeling very sad when I learned of the death of Michael Jackson.

As a journalist, I'm trained to be skeptical. In that sense, I always remained skeptical about everything I heard or read about this man -- good or bad.

But, as a human being and a father, I have learned to trust my feelings when a child speaks. Today, at the memorial for her father, the words of his 11-year-old daughter truly broke my heart.

How awful to lose your father at that age. How magnificent to be able to share your ineffable loss on a stage in front of 20,000 people. I suppose it's in the genes.

But be that as it may, I cried. You will too. Click on the headline of this post and scroll down to see the clip. Or just cut and paste this link:

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/stopthepresses/54003/buzz-log-the-most-memorable-moments-from-the-michael-jackson-memorial/

You may wish to have some tissues at hand before you view it, and that is a good thing.

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He Who Died on the Fourth of July

When a friend sent me the sad news this morning, my heart sank. A sinking heart yields waves of helplessness, hopelessness, and then, finally, beat by beat, pure anger.

First the news, Eric De La Cruz passed away on the Fourth of July. He was the young man whose plight inspired people all over the world to send money to help him surmount the insurmountable barriers placed in his path by the corrupt U.S. health care industry.

Eric suffered from a rare heart condition that, by the age of 27, was slowly but inexorably killing him. Thanks to "Eric's Army" on Twitter, roughly a million dollars was raised and the De La Cruz family was able to finally able to get him admitted to a hospital and placed on the list to qualify for an upcoming heart transplant.

Unfortunately, as doctors eventually explained to his family, they were two years too late. A mechanical heart was inserted to prolong his life, but he never regained a healthy enough status to actually go through the rigor of a transplant operation.

He died on Saturday afternoon, as the nation was celebrating its independence.

The truth about Eric De La Cruz's case is that this country has a huge blot of shame on its very name -- the United States of America, and that is the abysmal state of our health care system. Every person I know who has immigrated here from any country overseas is shocked at the absurdities and cruelties -- not to mention the costs -- imposed by our system.

This is a society that apparently doesn't care about the health of its own people. The shameful capitalist free-for-all in this corrupt economy respects only money. If you are poor, you are to blame. If you are sick, you are to blame. We are so brainwashed that our favorite phrase in all walks of life is "help yourself."

Help yourself. That phrase alone makes me sick.

The only way this gentle soul, Eric, shall not have perished in vain is if all of us answer the call to fundamentally reform our health care system from the bottom up and the top down. We need to surgically remove the greed and corruption that layers every level of health care, from doctors who accept free drugs and other gifts from pharmaceutical companies, to insurers who reject people like me on the basis of a non-existent "pre-existing condition."

Neither of my adult daughters were allowed to qualify for health coverage when they were pregnant. Pregnancy is a pre-exisiting condition! Don't talk to me about risks, and how insurance companies need to limit their risk. Only a society that hates its own people would demonize pregnancy itself, the basis of continuing life.

The fact is this is not a great country or a great society at all. This is a shamelessly bloated, wasteful society that has its priorities dead wrong. Accordingly, all of us are as helpless as Eric De La Cruz, should calamity strike.

In his name, and for all of our children and grand-children, we must do better.

Please read Eric's sister Veronica's lovely tribute on Twitter.

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Mid Summer Holiday

The City's temperature range this weekend is 40 degrees, from the high 40s to the high 80s. I find it hard to believe that yesterday, on a hot, windless afternoon near the top of that temperature scale, I actually played soccer barefoot on the turf with my kids.



When my flat is filled up with my kids and grandkids and their friends are coming and going, I'm probably at my happiest. I slow-cooked boneless thick pork ribs in a pressure cooker; they turned out so soft you could pull them apart with a fork.



We've been harvesting plums, dozens of them, but the tree is nearly finished with this year's crop. Lettuces, broccoli, tomatoes, green onions, basil, cherry tomatoes and several other edible vegetables and fruits can be gathered daily.



My 11-month-old grandson with the impossibly huge, bright blue eyes particularly likes sweet peas right out of the pod. The flowers, fish ponds, a few young trees, grape vines, morning glories, sunflowers, and several large rose bushes and herb bushes (rosemary) are all thriving. There are a few specialized exotic plants here and there hidden in our sprawling, chaotic yard.



Every visitor loves it here, especially whilst eating my tender pork with garlic, olive-oil-roasted baby white potatoes. After yesterday's heat peaked, a massive wave of white fog swept in from the Pacific. It rolled in over Twin Peaks and looked like it was a half-mile high. I imagined a real wave of water pushed by a tsunami. If that happened, of course, that would be my last memory.



I feel certain that along with mortal fear, I would think to myself, "God that is beautiful!" The Mission did not disappoint last night. This is one of the best neighborhoods in America for the 4th of July. Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, Pacific Islanders, Europeans, Native Americans, and Middle-Easterners alike lit fireworks on every corner.

Today, fog blanketed even our end of town, and strong winds kept sending more from the west. We were cold as we pursued a reprise of our soccer match; this time, no dehydration! This time, of course, I took a water bottle! This time I wore shoes.

I still can't believe I played soccer. Of course all three of my young kids out-maneuvered me.

Happy Independence Day

With four of my kids here, one grandson and a son-in-law, I'm happily doing what I do -- cooking, straightening up, photographing, and blogging.

Wherever you are, I hope this weekend is happy and safe for you.

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Kindness of Strangers

My friend called me in distress; she was stranded with a flat tire in a rural part of the peninsula. I left a business lunch in Palo Alto to head north to help her, but the traffic was awful, and it took much longer than it should have to get there.

By the time I did, two young guys had stopped and changed the tire for her. "Neither of us had ever changed a tire before," one told me.

"Thank you, thank you," she kept saying, reverting to her Japanese upbringing by bowing as well.

"These angels have helped me,"she said.

The boys went on their way, riding bicycles near the Crystal Springs Reservoir. As we bid them ado, I gave her a hug. I felt wetness on her cheek.

It's hard to fathom the courage it takes for a single person in her mid-40s to leave Japan with all of its deep-rooted cultural restrictions and expectations, its "culture of dependence," and immigrate to the U.S.

Everything seems the opposite of what she knew in the past. Much of the time, cultural misunderstandings and language barriers confine her attempts to assimilate to confusing sidesteps and unpleasant encounters.

But then events like the flat tire enable her to experience the kindness of strangers that is one key element of American culture at its very best. It's enough to make her shed tears of gratitude.

And for me to be proud of my people.

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Pre-Digital History Washes Away in Flood

My return home from the desert was not stress-free. Somehow I managed to lose two credit cards, after some 20 years of never having lost anything of value -- with the costly exception of several relationships. I'd even memorized those 16-digit account numbers!

Any sequence of numbers eventually becomes like an old friend. But after searching my luggage, and checking with the resort, I concluded that they had vaporized or had been hijacked by aliens, so I canceled both accounts.

Out with the old; in with the new. Change is good. I'll just get cozy with two new 16-digit sequences.

At the house, the carpet in my laundry room was saturated with water. Turned out an ancient cast-iron pipe had fractured in an inside-out, rust-driven, jagged line north to south.

Rich came over today, cut the pipe high and low, and mounted a new PVC "band-aid" and tightened it over the remaining cast-iron original sections. Good as new, at least for now.

Anyway, the point of this story is that many of my old magazine stories and clippings were in cardboard boxes in that laundry room. Some of them were ruined beyond repair. As I tossed them into the garbage, I figured this is a good thing.

There is a major dilemma for those of us pack-rats whose lives and careers span the decades before the Internet era and today's world. Now, every bit of information is digital and theoretically able to be saved indefinitely -- or at least as long as the servers hosting this content remain viable.

What to do with all the old stories? They need to be scanned and digitized. The paper versions are rotting away anyway. I doubt anyone will ever want to sort through my old articles. There are literally hundreds of them, barely if at all indexed or even listed anywhere I'm aware of.

I can't help wishing I had a library intern volunteer, or somebody like that, who could scan in all of this stuff before it disappears form history. The flooding of my laundry room woke me up to the fact that being a pack-rat is not a wise strategy going forward.

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Desert Images

These grainy photos, I hope, speak for themselves. They were shot over the past few days outside of Tucson. We saw bunnies, coyotes, deer, and road-runners.

Who the hell would have imagined road-runners outside of an animated cartoon? It turns out they live in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico and a bit into Central America. I've simply led too sheltered a life to have known that -- until now.

I did not actually see one myself but one of my colleagues did, in fact he saw three. Apparently they can grow to two feet in height, and although they are capable of flight, they usually act much as they do in cartoons, simply outrunning any predators who show up in the open desert air.

Anyone who has ever watched a cowboy movie (which is everyone alive on earth by now, except perhaps the pathetic victims of North Korea's absurd dictatorship), would instantly recognize the scenes of the countryside where I have been since the middle of last week.

Movie studios in fact share a facility near here from which to shoot their flicks. Perception. Reality. This is the background for so many fantasies.

But the cacti don't know, the coyotes don't know, the road-runners are clueless. Only you and I, fellow humans, know how we have used their ecological niche as a set. I wonder whether the creatures who survive the coming global climate calamity will get a hold of the images we leave behind?

Somehow it comforts me to imagine an audience of road-runners, pausing for a moment at an outdoor theater, as a desert butterfly pushes the button, releasing the soundtrack and the moving image on the big screen -- yes, the show must go on.

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One girl's canvas...

...is our front yard.

This depicts a place "like Alcatraz" on one side of the stairs connected by water to a place "like San Francisco" with the sun shining brightly.

Back before cable TV, the Internet, and smart phones, chalk and a sidewalk were pretty much all a girl needed to stay amused, especially if a friend was available.

You still see a game of hopscotch played here and there around town, but it is a rare occurrence.

Drawing outside with chalk also means its summer vacation. Today's kids do not have enough time during the school year for that kind of leisure activity. They are scheduled.

A little kid's social life and appointment calendar can be much busier and more complicated than her father's. At some point in recent years my youngest found a pile of those old paper appointment books (that displayed a week at a time) from a much busier stage of my life.

They are crammed with ink and pencil notations indicating numerous appointments every weekday and many weekend days as well. She put them in a purse, along with a calculator, a small portable phone, and several other objects, and invented an imaginary game.

From time to time she still plays it. Out come the calendar books, the small phone, the calculator and she moves between one room and another, busily doing -- something. I've never asked her what the game is about, although I know she also plays it with a friend when one is over for a playdate.

She'll tell me about the game on her own time. She'd tell me if I asked -- for sure -- but it simply has not occurred to her talk about it yet. That's how it goes with flights of imagination. You don't talk about them because they are imaginary.

I get it. And I don't want to break into her magic world until she invites me in...

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Bent by the Sun

It all depends what you're made of. Some of the plants in our backyard, including the trees, can become permanently bent by the predominant winds that sweep in from the Pacific to our west.

Flowering stems bend toward the sun, regardless of the wind, seeking their maximum exposure to the solar power that is such a key component of their growth strategy.

Birds and butterflies ride the winds in and out of the neighborhood. A certain species of flies hover; they occupy only a certain band of the atmosphere, as if any elevation higher or lower would be unsustainable.

Hummingbirds dart in and out of the trees to flowers that please them, landing occasionally. Honeybees land for a while on lily pads. The fish swim gracefully throughout the big pond peacefully until one of us approaches. Then they race to the surface, expecting to be fed.

A spire of red wax from a lighted candle ran down the edge of a can on the back porch. Once detached from the can, it stood proudly on its own. Then, as out temperatures increased one recent afternoon, the spire began to bend back onto itself.

Everything adapts; bends but does not break.

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Different Window, Different View

Sonora

On a ridge far outside of Tucson in a conference center, I first glanced, then stared, open-mouthed, at the morning view. Arriving after dark, in a cab, I was unaware of the natural surroundings.

But this is the kind of place that transforms you to suit its own needs. As when I visited Death Valley earlier this year, I'm transfixed. The plants that thrive here thrive only here.

An ecosystem uniquely spare and lovely stretching as far as the ridges and mountains permit. In your imagination, it never ends.

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the Athlete, the Flowers, and me

There he goes, dribbling with one hand, pushing off an opponent with another. "Using his body" is the expression coaches use.

A long time ago, growing up around the then-great city of Detroit, I used to watch my dad coach basketball. He was patient but demanding; he liked kids. I'm not sure how successful his teams were, in winning percentage, but I know he was well-liked back by his players.

One of whom, for a while, was my cousin, Ed. Eddie was a natural athlete, who played several sports well, and eventually made all-state. One time we went to see him play in high school, for Royal Oak Dondero.

Possibly happy to have the chance to impress his old coach and uncle, Eddie had a "career game," as it's called, hitting shots from everywhere for 17 points, leading his team to an insurmountable lead, by halftime.

They coasted after that and he ended up with 27 points.



Once you have the physical gifts and the practice, athletics becomes emotional. You have to want to win to win. Which is the simple reason athletes often excel in business; they are used to hard work in pursuit of a goal; they're not easily side-tracked by failure; and they believe that they will ultimately prevail.

Artists, however, run on a different sort of fuel. I was talking to a singer/song-writer friend today about how hard it can be to do what he knows he must do to succeed. You see, it's all about marketing. You've gotta burn a CD, and aggressively push it out to the handlers, the agents, the door-keepers for the stars.

Once they sense your talent and that your style might mesh well with one of their clients, you might get the chance to front for them on a tour. After that, the sky is the limit for a musician.

If we are talking about boys here, boy athletes and boy musicians, there are girls who just adore athletes and girls who just adore musicians. We all know this. The truth is that girl athletes and girl musicians do not always garner the same adoration.

But from the perspective of what the producer wants and needs, as opposed to the consumer, it really doesn't matter what the fans think. An athlete wants to play, she wants to win. A singer wants to sing, she wants to connect emotionally with her audience.

There are plenty who care mainly about money, and there always will be. They sort themselves into professions called marketing, banking, or investment adviser. They have their place and their own small moments of meaning and accomplishment.

But they don't need to be celebrated. Wealth is its own reward.

That's why I write about athletes and artists, primarily. Theirs is the much harder path to travel in this life. You may be jealous of the success a few of them enjoy, but that simply identifies you as neither an athlete nor an artist.

No one does these things primarily for money. Money happens. More often than not, it doesn't. Personally speaking, all of the money the U.S. Treasury could print could never, for me, replace the pleasure of watching one of my child athletes glide across a court, a field, or a pitch with the speed of a rocket and the grace of dancer, handling a ball as if it were an extension of their lovely bodies, fending off opponents as if they were fleas, streaking toward a result that will make them and their mates successful in the challenge at hand.

Nor can money touch the feelings unleashed by art, be it writing, painting, photography, film, performance, dance, poetry, or my favorite, music. Money will never buy my love.

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Dad Bird Free Flying

So here is one of the pictures my ten-year-old daughter made for me for Father's Day. It's of me riding a bird high in the sky. She made many pictures, all of which had the phrase "just keep living" attached to them.

I think I will do my best to live up to her entreaty.

Obama's Speech Helped Ignite Revolution in Iran

This is my 1,400th post on this blog, and tonight my purpose as a journalist is to explain how and why President Barack Obama is the main person who ignited the most important democratic uprising so far of the 21st Century, which is the grassroots revolution now occurring in Iran.

Please go back a bit in time and review what I wrote as I watched Obama's brilliant speech offering a "new beginning" to Muslims in Cairo earlier this month. These were hardly the words of a man who was unaware of the power of the moment.

These were, rather, the words of a speaker acutely aware of who was listening.

Which explains precisely why Obama has been relatively measured in what he has stated publicly since the rebellion he helped trigger and that, I now believe, will ultimately topple the oppressive regime that purports to control Iran, and is one of the greatest enemies of America and American ideals.

Obama, alone among all politicians, is an astute student of history. Even those who oppose him ideologically must stand aside tonight and bear witness as our brilliant young President changes the world in ways that only six short months ago would have seemed unimaginable.

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Father's Day

So, tomorrow is Father's Day. It's one of two days each year I do not look forward to. The other is my birthday.

This is something I've never reflected on; it's just the way I feel. But tonight, I am going to try and figure out why this is so.

Until the early days of 1999, Father's Day was never about me, for me, because my own Father was alive. Every year, it was an opportunity for me to try and express the ineffable -- my deep love for him.

Like many, though not all, fathers and sons, we had difficult moments. It didn't help that he, a man of his time, i.e., a conservative World War Two veteran who had come of age in the Depression; had me for his only son -- a Baby Boomer congenitally disinterested in most of his true passions, like golf, real estate, old music, money, conventional thinking, cliches, and cigarettes.

But we did share many personal values -- optimism, a belief in striving for happiness, deep love for our family members, and baseball, among others. And in eyes, my father, even though he did not appreciate my passions for art, new music, the bizarre, unconventional thinking, original language, and different addictions, never ceased being my hero and the man I loved most in this world.

As I sat with him the night he died, I told him over and over how much I loved him and I held and stroked his hand and kissed him.

For me, when he died, so did Father's Day.

But, I now realize, this was quite selfish of me. For a decade now, I have been the patriarch of the Weir clan, the oldest male in my father's family tree, and the father of six wonderful children of my own.

Unless I show up on occasions like tomorrow for them, I am robbing them of their chance to celebrate their relationship with me. For some reason tonight, for the first time I am realizing this essential truth.

It's time for me, finally, to grow up and act like a man, and the father I am, for their sakes. My own Dad knew how to do that far better than I have (until now) and so once again I honor him, even as I, still with some discomfort, try to walk in his shoes.

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The Rebellion Becomes a Revolution

(Update: The video below was removed from YouTube, and then re-posted.)

The Tiananmen Square moment has arrived in the streets of Iran today. This is a pivot pivotal moment in history. The government is cracking down on protesters.

Please do not play this embedded video if you are not prepared to witness the graphic death of a young woman who was allegedly shot by one of the armed militiamen sent to quell the rebellion by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic.

I am posting this after reviewing thousands of reports on Twitter and YouTube because I am convinced, as a journalist, that it is an accurate portrayal of an event that has occurred today in Tehran.

News reports over CNN now mention several deaths and many injuries as the government's violence against its own people has now been unleashed.

It is also apparent that protesters have moved well beyond their initial demands that the results of the recent Presidential election be overturned to demand regime change. Therefore, the question now is, will Iran's clerics do what China did 20 years ago and crush the rebellion before a revolution succeeds?

Or will the people braving the possibility of death continue to occupy the streets and force the clerics from power?

Tweet by Tweet, The Iranian Rebellion Continues

This YouTube video from Tehran shows how the mass rebellion over last week's disputed Presidential election is playing out. Borrowing a page from the 1979 Revolution, protesters are gathering on their rooftops all over the city to roar at the tops of their lungs Allah-o Akbar, or "God is Great."

In and of itself, this may not seem like rebellious behavior, but within the context that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i, has tried to suppress the rebellion with all the clumsy moves to be expected by a 20th-Century authoritarian, it is.

In a speech today, Khāmene’i warned the protesters that they must desist, or they will be held accountable for whatever violence ensues. That is generally being interpreted as a threat to crush the rebellion by force. Since he is the head of the country's armed forces, this may prove to be no idle threat.

Opposition leaders have been arrested this week. As journalists become more skilled as communicating via outlets like Twitter, reports of violence, arrests, and the scope of demonstrations are beginning to be better documented.

Twitter is still one of the best places to monitor what is going on on the ground inside Iran, including RTs from supporters around the world and the top trending topic is #Iran Election:

* @Iran09World: @iran09 New BBC Persian Satellite: Telstar T12, 15° West , 12.608 GHz (horizontally polarised) #iranelection #GR88 less than 10 seconds ago from TwitterFox

* Tonight in cities across iran, gun shots fired into air to scare ppl,ppl just respond with louder chants of "God is great" #iranelection less than 20 seconds ago from web

* pariya Twitition: Google Earth to update satellite images of Tehran #Iranelection http://twitition.com/csfeo @patrickaltoft less than 20 seconds ago from Twitition

* waxmati How to set up or mirror a proxy: http://r3blog.nl/iran.proxy... #iran #iranelection #gr88 #tehran #iranians less than 20 seconds ago from web

* qrsmania #IranElection Tehran Mousavi Amadinejad Iran - Blocking the Internet in Iran , Stopping FREE communication - http://bit.ly/Z3Dpr less than 20 seconds ago from Twitterizer

* rohnee Khomenei: instead of taking responsibility 4 the chaos HE CREATED in his own country he blamed other countries. Unbelievable! #IranElection 1 minute ago from web


The flow of material is continuous. By monitoring it for 15 minutes or so, you can spot the trends in Tweets and get a fairly good sense of what to believe and what not. Many media outlets, including the BBC and VOA are actively reporting on Iran and being distributed via Twitter and other social media.

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David Hoang's Real-Time Art for #Eric

The inspiring story of how a network of strangers helped the family of a dying young man, Eric De La Cruz, cut through the red tape of our dysfunctional national health care system, and get placed on the list for a heart transplant that is needed to save his life still makes me cry, every time I think of it.

Today, thanks to The Expert, one of the key players who triggered a mass outpouring of support, including somewhere around a million dollars in donations, comes news of another form of media creation over Twitter that I believe is unprecedented -- original art by the visual artist, David Hoang.



If you watch this YouTube video of him creating his lovely drawing of Eric and his sister Veronica De La Cruz, you may wish to have a box of tissues nearby.

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