Rock 'n Roll Fantasies

As you probably know, I once was a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. My stories appeared from 1974 to 1977; later on I had another assignment, but I didn't deliver on it. I can no longer remember what the story was, exactly, but it was an investigative piece that some colleagues and I were pursuing from the Center for Investigative Reporting, the non-profit organization I co-founded after I parted ways with Rolling Stone in 1977.

Saturday nights are always weird for me. One of the strangest in my memory was back when I was on staff at the magazine, and my partner Howard Kohn and I had published the first of our stories about the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst; called "The Inside Story."

My boss, the irrepressible Jann Wenner, lived in a Victorian mansion on California Street in those years. He had a bunch of us over for the evening -- a night that was laced with drugs and alcohol. Jann had an early version of a large-screen TV, and we all watched a new show called Saturday Night Live. It featured something never before aired by network TV -- fake ads, and I remember that Jerry Rubin was in one of them.

I'd known Jerry for several years, since my SunDance days, and in fact I'd edited a book of his, "Growing Up at 37," I think it was called. Through a drug and alcohol induced haze, we watched the show and to our delight, Howard and I were mentioned as some sort of off-screen characters -- those two guys from Rolling Stone.

Annie Liebowitz was there, and late in the night she broke into tears as she discovered her cameras had been stolen out of her car parked in Jann's driveway.

A few years earlier, all of the antiques Alison and I had brought back from Afghanistan had been stolen out of our van parked in an alley right near where Jann lived. I'd wandered through the pawnshops of the Fillmore for weeks but I never found our lost items.

Annie never got her cameras back, either, but Jann just bought her new ones.

***

Jerry Rubin, meanwhile, transformed himself from Yippie to investment banker -- one of the more remarkable transformations people I knew made as the collective '60s died away and the greedy '80s emerged. Later still, Jerry was killed trying to race across a street in LA one night. Two other friends of mine were with him when it happened. They didn't dart out, he did. He died instantly.

***

One of my other blogs (I've got about six) is Sidewalk Images. I just had to post the photo at the top of this blog tonight because my ten-year-old Dylan shot it earlier today. You can see his camo shoes and camo pants. You can't see his wool Russian Red Army Cossack hat that he wears even on a hot day like today -- with temperatures in excess of 80 degrees, even after the sun set.

Yes, it's hot here, the kind of October weather old-timers call earthquake weather. Of course, Loma Prieta happened this month in 1989. And the terrible East Bay fire happened in this month as well, a few years later. My friend Dierdre English lost everything in that fire, as did many other writers, including Margaret Hong-Kingston. I was at a party where people gave Hong-Kingston copies of her books that they had, since she no longer had any of her own.

***

A Pink Floyd concert is playing tonight on a local public television station. It's another Saturday night, and as usual I am alone. Except for the four kids sleeping in the other room. I remember how nice it was to watch concerts like this one with somebody by my side.

It's so hot tonight in this city. It's unreal. Maybe the grass in my yard knows something I don't know.


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Being 2, 13, or 40-something 1.1

A child growing up today is subjected to two-and-a-half as many media messages as a kid who grew up in the '60s, according to one of my former colleagues in the Department of Communication at Stanford. What the result of this unprecedented barrage will prove to be is anyone's guess. I know my young children are already cynical about advertisements, partly at their parents' urging, but also that they appreciate ads that are funny and especially creative.

One of the first things I noticed about the web generation of 20-somethings at HotWired when I went there in 1995, was how ad-focused they were. It was as if ads had influenced them much more than the news in traditional news media. I came to realize that new media on the web were as much a reaction to old media as our countercultural magazines had been in the '60s and '70s.

***

Now that I have another child on the verge of becoming a teenager, I'm again acutely aware of how difficult it is when somebody you love completely starts to withdraw from you, however subtlety.

But to change subjects slightly for a moment, I felt utterly shocked last spring when my girlfriend told me we had to break up. "Haven't you noticed that I am not as drawn to have sex with you?" Actually, no, I had not noticed, which is one reason this hit me so hard. But maybe that is about how chemical our connection was -- an order of magnitude up or down really wouldn't have changed my perception that this was pretty close to as good as it gets between two people who are attracted to each other.

***

Back to being a parent. When your child starts becoming a teenager, all of a sudden you may feel transported back to when (s)he was a "terrible two." The little being who just recently seemed so cuddly starts to rebel, and to differentiate himself/herself from dependence on you, the parent. If you are not careful, it can hurt, because it feels personal. But in reality it is a straight-out evolutionary necessity. Plus, you don't really lose your connection with your kid at this stage. They'll be back. But you have to endure a long, painful period of separation.

Maybe it's like that sometimes with adult love, too? After all, most 40-somethings seem to go through a midlife crisis of one sort of another. Maybe when it ends, they'll come back?

Or maybe not.


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A Flower in the City

Pushing up to meet me, pink, moist, soft, and open; a most pleasant way to way up this morning.

A Buddhist monk was hiking in the mountains, when he met a hungry tiger. The tiger started chasing him, intent on eating him. The monk ran to the edge of a cliff and looked over. Jumping meant certain death. Not jumping meant certain death -- getting eaten by the tiger. After a moment's hesitation, he jumped. As he was falling he managed to reach out and grab some roots sticking out of the cliff. This broke his fall, but only for a moment, as he could feel the roots pulling free of the dirt, and there was nothing else to grab hold of. During this brief respite, the monk noticed a flower growing out of a rock nearby.

"What a lovely flower," he thought.

Living in the moment can be so hard to do.

The softest breeze sweeps across the water outside my office window. The sailboat's reflection is perfectly still in the mirror-like water beneath it. Several birds sit motionless in the lagoon. In the distance, cars criss-cross the bridge over calm waters. Large jets vector into their final approach to SFO.

So much of life is routine. Get up, shower, shave, maybe eat a small breakfast. Jump into the car for the commute, listen to NPR, and consider yourself lucky if there are only a few slowdowns this day. Hit the office walking, then up your pace with one, two, three cups of caffeine.

Go to meetings, make decisions, comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. Read the news. Consider the news climate. Reflect on how to contextualize this content, what to emphasize, how to frame it all.

Ride the iterative software development process, where tasks are broken down into micro-steps in order to pursue macro-goals. Read a feed from a prominent site arguing that newspapers are dead; it's only a matter of time before they go the way of all dinosaurs.

Consider your past training. Your B.A. in journalism, awarded 37 years ago. How much has the world changed in 37 years? In every way but one. Your personal judgment is still your greatest asset. Your voice has always been that of a synthesizer. Sort many inputs into a new synthesis that makes sense, that can "advance" the story.

Such is the life of a journalist early in the 21st century. The institutions we were trained to write for are staggering under competitive forces coming from many directions. Most fundamentally, the news cycle has sped up by orders of magnitude, to the point where it is twenty-four/seven. The news never rests.

No wonder you can't!

Living in the moment is not our problem. It's the relentlessness of the next moment, bearing down on us. We are like the monk, hoping only to break our fall long enough to appreciate the beauty presented us...pink, moist, soft and open...one last time.

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X-ray vision

There's a castle in there, I know there is. The light catches it just so, and my shadow is apparent as I shoot this vision. It reveals me, even as the castle, pink and soft, hardens into visibility under the sweet attention of a setting sun.

Meanwhile, I can fly. Didn't I tell you about this before? Well, I have a cape that I usually keep out of view, because it wouldn't be wise for my type to be exposed in most circles. But, over and over, I have swept out into a hostile sky to do battles with an enemy. I've brought home the bacon, comprende? Which, of course, is nothing more than meat for the dinner table.


The city looks peaceful from up here, as I soar slowly, looking down upon my charges.

They go about their tasks, rarely aware that angels and superheroes are watching over them, not even wanting to believe in us until circumstances compel them to do so.

Have you ever been to a funeral? If so, have you noticed how some people squirm in the pews, desperately waiting for the ceremony to end?

These are the ones who don't want to confront the contradictions in their own lives just yet, and it is excruciatingly discomforting to sit still and contemplate the ending of another’s life, one so much like their own.

But the time comes when we all have to go. Soaring above you all, way up here, I have already departed your world. But of course, gravity is unforgiving, and eventually I will be brought back down to earth.

There, I'll have to continue to trudge, step by step, through our common world -- a world of loneliness, alienation, and the terrible sadness of having lost love, over and over.

Even superheroes have hearts. And we all cry sometimes, mainly when no one is there to see. All tears taste the same -- salty. The taste of the oceans from which we emerged long ago, converting our gulls into lungs, and dragging our vestigial tails behind us.

Why, I wonder, given how brief our lives are, can't we just say to one another what we all need so much to hear?

That will be my lament, as I drift slowly towards earth, my super powers drained, and giving into gravity's pull. Dust to dust. Me, you, all of us. Even love can't slow the pre-determined order of things.

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A city confused

San Francisco obviously doesn't know what season this is. It's over 70 degrees here tonight under clear skies. After the softest of rains recently, really just heavy fogs, look what is sprouting in my backyard. Grass!

Nevertheless, it is not spring; it's fall. The light is different, slashing in at a wicked angle that makes driving much more difficult than is normal. Everything seems backlit, standing out with clarity.



We can see every blade of grass, as it stands proudly erect, trembling slightly, fresh and new and apparently quite excited just to be here.

Meanwhile the last few apples have fallen and are rotting amidst the new growth. They, at least, know it is autumn. The fact that the World Series will start on Saturday confirms that it is getting to be late October. Pumpkins are in the fields and the stores. Candy's on "sale," which means it's specially packaged at a higher price than normal.

My 12-year-old son wants to be a bunny, not the cuddly kind but an evil one; my ten-year-old wants to wear only one part of a costume -- his Darth Vader mask; while my seven-year-old, who turns eight 4 days before Halloween, wants to be a "really bad witch."



So, there's a pattern here. Everyone wants to be a bad guy of one sort of another. I wonder why that is?

Maybe one reason is people are always telling them how sweet they all are. While this is true, they also all have their unsweet moments, as only a parent can know. But, in general, they are well-behaved, sensible children who care about others and try to be polite most of the time.

I guess their fantasies, by contrast, are to be powerful evil characters.

There is an assumption among many in our society that power equates with evil. I don't think so. Too much power certainly breeds trouble of many kinds. But I've watched just as many people wield power kindly and compassionately as abusively.
Since I've worked directly with so many CEOs, I've had a glimpse into power dynamics for many years now.

And, of course, I've exercised plenty of power myself.

***

Tonight, I've started accepting the likelihood that I will spend the rest of my life alone, not as half of a couple. This is a thought that not so long ago would have struck terror in my heart. But, tonight, I am feeling a bit differently about this prospect. As much as I love women, and enjoy being in intimate relationship with them, I'm also mindful of how much pain these relationships eventually can produce for everyone involved.

I really don't want to go through that much pain ever again. Plus, although most people who know me well would say I am flexible and accommodating to the women in my life, I've come to realize that is not necessarily a healthy way for me to live. It may be a positive attribute, but I also feel like being much more selfish these days.

That means I want to do things the way I want to do them. I'll bend and I'll adapt, but I also need to preserve my own way of doing things -- much like the way I write. I don't really care when people criticize me; it's amusing more than anything else. After all, nobody has to read this blog. As far as I know, it has not been assigned as compulsory reading by any professors anywhere.



So, tonight, watching baseball on TV, caressing a large stack of good books, preparing to cook up some fresh veggies and sausage for my dinner, I'm not missing anybody. Great women all; and I'll always love all of them. But there are many fish in the sea. (Thanks, Dad.) And I am not at all sure I am ready to let someone new in.

Does that make sense? I've led a life of twists and turns. My days of going after someone aggressively are over. If she wants to be with me, she will adapt to me as much as I will to her.

Otherwise, I can take her or leave her. It really makes no difference to me.

Urbanities

Midtown Manhattan


If there were a Monsieur Manners for how to treat writers, designers, photographers, he might advise people as follows:

1. When you meet a writer at a cocktail party, try not to say, "I've always been meaning to write a book myself, but I've been too busy."

2. If you hire a graphic designer to create invitations to a party, don't tell her that she will be invited to the party and then change your mind. This is not cool.

3. Editors are professionals, too. If you'd like them to edit something you've written, please remember to ask them their rate and offer to pay them for their work.

4. Although many photographers may give their work away free from time to time, always credit them if you republish their work. And, of course, offer to pay them if you want photographs of your family for your holiday cards.

5. When working with a graphic designer, don't try to tell them how to design the item you've hired them to produce. Tell them your objectives and goals; avoid getting into micro-managing them.

6. Try to pay writers and all creative workers a fair wage. Market forces are suppressing what skilled people can earn. You can't underpay a doctor, lawyer, plumber, or electrician. Why should you be able to underpay creative workers?

7. If you like to visit a website or a blog created by a writer or artist, try to notice whether they have little advertisements on their page. Usually these are shown as links. Clicking on them is the only way that writer or artist earns any money for their effort. It's kind of like public broadcasting. It's free, sure. But without your support, eventually it will go dark.


***

I miss country. My favorite music has pretty much always been country music, except for the crass, over-produced, sexist and jingoistic strains. What does that leave, you ask?

White blues.

The origins of the English spoken in Appalachia reach back to 17th century England and Scotland. Language is like any other evolutionary being -- cut it off from outside influences and it turns inward, atrophying, devoid of the inputs needed to grow and thrive.

A wonderful book about human evolution, which includes some references to how our languages reflect our history, is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. I just located my copy of this book tonight, and a sheet of paper fell out. It contained a score from a game played with my Scrabble partner from last year. (We played in San Francisco, Calistoga, Hawaii, Mexico, and other venues.) This particular game was played in Calistoga and the final score was 302-230. Most of our games were much closer than that.


***

One of my college buddies, Fred LaBour, grew up in one of our medium-sized Michigan towns, Grand Rapids, I think. Fred used to say "What could be more country than Grand Rapids?

Freddie and I were roommates at a time that we both had girlfriends staying over, leading to some funny moments. He liked my poetry, and wanted to put it to music. That never happened but Fred's career as a songwriter and performer sure did. As a member of the band Riders in the Sky, Fred has had many great moments, performing as "Too Slim."

But long before his success, I remember him as a sports writer at The Michigan Daily. He wrote a story identifying many of the clues in the "Paul is Dead" rumor that swept the world of Beatlemania.

As a writer, songwriter, and performer, Fred approaches everything from his skewed sense of humor. A small smile always plays on his lips. I miss this guy.

***

I mention Baby Boomers a lot, and not just because I am one of them. This
rat in the python" has always been a difficult group for American society to swallow. We gave our parents collective indigestion, to put it mildly. Even today, it is hard for many of us to turn off our automatic "rebel" button.

"Question authority?" Yep, that's us. But, what are we to do when we suddenly realize we are the authority?

Question ourselves? Yep, that's us too.

Married or un-

So, I admit it. Curiosity provoked me to look around, online, at how people find each other. I trolled the various sites, read the ads, and viewed some profiles.

Do I want to meet somebody?

Not really.

But if someone wonderful suddenly showed up in my life, in the here and now, I'm quite sure everyone who knows and cares and loves me would understand. I have those assurances.

But, one of my conclusions from exploring the online dating world is many, maybe most, people seem to be looking for sex, not love. This leads me to wonder whether most posters aren't married, or at least attached, whether they reveal that in their ads or not.

I suppose I understand that. I've been married a couple of times, and I understand that you could well find yourself in a situation where you don't want to lose the security of your marriage, particularly if you have kids (good), or your partner is rich (bad), or if you just need to feel safe while pursuing something that may feel exciting.

Call me weird. I've been married* and unmarried* and met many women in both conditions. I vastly prefer being unmarried, without obligations to another.

Why? Because I can honestly present myself as available. And, since my main goal is not only sex or friendship, but both (plus more), i.e., relationship, and since I understand that to involve emotionally truthfulness, the way people present themselves online interests me greatly.

Now, I understand why women, especially, may feel driven to conceal details of their identity when seeking to meet people online. But that creates the essential paradox. When ever you should meet, you just have to be you.

Tonight, taking my nightly walk, despite my medical advice to stay off my feet, I did what comes naturally on a warm night. As a child of the cold northern steppe, all I need is a T-shirt on a night like this. I encountered a woman I know, and she was wrapping her arms around herself, even while wearing a jacket.

Now, this is classic male-female stuff. She admitted she always feels cold. I said I always feel warm.

My advice to her: "You need a hug."

And, I'm quite sure she did. I do too.

But I don't know her quite that well, so my advice hung in the windless air above this neighborhood. But she did do one thing, and I don't know why. She jumped in the air and spread her arms and legs. Then she did it again.

Women are so strange! But also, of course, so very wonderful...

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*I do not use these terms in their literal, or legal, sense, since there are many practical reasons to prolong marriages after they are essentially finished, including health insurance, tax breaks, and other important considerations.