Month: February 2014

Thinking more about yesterday’s post, I believe I may have cleared up a mystery from my younger years.

When I was an undergrad, some of my fellow students seemed to travel in a different orbit from the rest of us. A case in point is Peter Sellars, now well known as a theatre director (he once directed me in a play when we were both at Harvard), was already, as an undergrad, getting the world to do his bidding.

For example, for Sellars avant garde student version “Boris Godunov”, which he directed while he was still a sophomore, he got the city to let him stage the famous coronation scene as a parade down one of the busiest streets of Cambridge.

To put this all in context, when I was a sophomore I was still watching reruns of cartoons featuring Boris Badenov.

I think one difference between us was that Sellars had already mastered a powerful skill that many of us only develop much later: The skill of truly paying attention to the world outside of one’s immediate circle, and understanding that world on its own terms. With this skill comes the ability to make things happen on the larger stage of life.

Today I found myself back at the dorms I lived in as an undergrad at Harvard. In all the intervening years I had never been back, so it was quite a singular experience.

The quad was nearly empty on this cold crisp winter’s day, but in my mind I could see all the people I had shared this space with, as though they had just stepped away, and would be back at any moment.

At first I wondered whether I was really different after all these years. “Was that me, or somebody else?” I found myself thinking. “And how would I know?”

But then something unexpected happened. As I wondered around the neighborhood, checking out houses and shops, I noticed a difference in myself. For example, I stopped in at the local grocery, and greeted the man behind the counter while I picked up a few things — and realized he was the same guy who’d been behind the counter when I was a student. Turns out he’s been running that place for forty years. We got into a nice conversation about the neighborhood.

I realized that in all the time I had lived at the dorm, I had never explored these places, just a few blocks away. I hadn’t learned the geography, hadn’t noticed where the stores were, hadn’t gotten to know the shopkeepers, hadn’t been curious at all about the world outside.

The teenage version of myself had not been an explorer of strange neighborhoods — quite the contrary. In all the time I was at school, I had learned next to nothing about the vibrant places just beyond the dorm.

For the person I am now, such a thing would be unthinkable.

So it seems that people do change, after all.

I was telling a colleague this evening about an experience I had recently. I had been fortunate enough to be invited by a good friend to a book launch party for “The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix”, a newly revised and expanded edition of James Watson’s classic account of the search for the structure of DNA.

There were many brilliant people in attendance — world famous scientists, authors, philosophers, Nobel prize winners. It was quite the gathering.

I stood in the back of that illustrious crowd as one personage after another stepped forward to tell stories that illuminated the saga of Watson and Crick. One speaker even managed to properly acknowledge Rosalind Franklin, which I thought was a bold and important gesture.

It seems that Watson has a way with pithy sayings, and over the course of the evening, various people quoted memorable things he has said. My favorite was this: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

When I heard that, I leaned over to the woman standing next to me and said “Clearly, I am in the right room.”

I am very impressed with AMTRAK. Despite the snowstorm, the trains ran on time today. Which was important to me because I needed to get from New York to Boston before the first class of the semester. The journey took a little longer than usual, given how much snow we needed to plow through. But our train soldiered bravely on, and got there nearly on schedule.

On a day when buses were canceled, planes grounded or delayed, and driving would have been a questionable adventure in risk taking, the trains were dependably there, right on track.

But the best part was the magical transformation of the New England landscape outside the window. Little towns like Mystic and Old Saybrook, streams and docks and bridges and snow dappled trees, all of it had turned breathtakingly lovely, like something out of a fantasy novel.

So I spent my morning happily gazing through the train window at the winter wonderland outside, sipping fresh coffee from the cafe car, and marveling at how, despite its many problems, this world of ours can sometimes be a beautiful place.

This evening I gave a talk about my group’s research.

From a practical level the timing was completely absurd. Tomorrow morning I need to take a train to start a semester sabbatical at MIT, then two days after that I need to fly to the West Coast, and then to Chicago for the AAAS meeting a week after that, and of course I have a million things to do before leaving NY.

So why did I agree to give a talk just now?

I’ve come to realize that I did it precisely because all of these things. I needed to force myself to get up in front of a group of people and take stock, to take a risk during a time of transition, to show brand new demos of brand new research that I’ve never shown before.

You can stay in a little bubble and work on your stuff, and of course you’ll like whatever you’re doing. But in moments of change, it is important to get outside opinions.

In this case, what I learned from peoples’ reactions, from their questions, to which parts they liked or didn’t like, was worth its weight in gold.

In a very important way, giving a talk about your research is itself a kind of research.

I had somehow missed “Boogie Nights” when it first came out in 1997. I knew it had won Bert Reynolds an Academy Award, in a comeback performance that stunned everybody. But somehow I never got around to seeing it, and eventually it dropped off my radar.

That is, until recently, when I rented the DVD, curious to learn more about P.T. Anderson’s early work.

It’s a great movie, and Reynolds was astonishing, easily deserving of his Oscar. But it was the depth of the cast that really stunned me — a succession of great actors, many still yet to become well known.

One by one they showed up on screen — Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle and Joanna Gleason. Mark Wahlberg as the hot-headed young lead knocked it out of the ballpark, William H. Macy in a tragic performance that ripped out my heart, and Alfred Molina who in one electrifying scene managed to be sexy, ridiculous and utterly terrifying, all at the same time.

Even Heather Graham was good.

I remember sitting there, overwhelmed by the sheer bravura talent I was seeing on screen, and thinking “There is no way this movie could be any better.”

Then Philip Seymour Hoffman showed up. And suddenly it was much, much better.

Yesterday there was a guy standing outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art singing Jewish music. But in an interesting mix. One selection was the Kol Nidre, a deeply serious religious prayer sung only during the High Holidays. Several others were from the Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick musical “Fiddler on the Roof”.

Listening to all this, the phrase that formed in my mind was “Judaism for tourists”.

And that got me thinking again about Pete Seeger. As it happens I’m reading David Van Ronk’s excellent autobiography “The Mayor of “MacDougal Street”, in which he points out that the modern folk revival was a study in make-believe.

Actual folk music is generally hundreds of years old, found in traditional tunes and words that are passed down from generation to generation in regions like Appalachia. It’s not trying to be authentic. It is authentic.

Starting around eighty years ago, a few people in America, like Woody Guthrie, followed soon thereafter by The Weavers (including Pete Seeger) and others, wrote and performed songs that often had progressive political messages, in a style that imitated traditional folk music. They would even dress like working folks, to give their performances an air of authenticity.

By the 1960s, as the American Civil Rights movement heated up, the banner was picked up by a new generation of musicians like Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan to channel political protest. It was all synthetic, from the blue jeans to the fake southern twangs. And it worked like a charm.

I’m wearing blue jeans as I type this, and I’m aware that the hipness of this style among today’s intellectuals and bourgeoisie goes all the way back to the “authentically inauthentic” social activism of Woody Guthrie and Will Geer in the 1930s.

It’s odd how this works. People appreciate the authenticity of Emo and Freak Folk, which copies from Grunge, which copied from Springsteen, who copied from Dylan, who copied from Van Ronk and Guthrie, who were copying from old Appalachian music.

Our society seems to be full of such ersatz authenticity, like the “authentic” feel of Levi’s jeans, rustic furniture from Woodland Creek, Tim McGraw’s cowboy hat, the twang of Bruce Springsteen’s guitar, or the rips in Neil Young’s jeans. It’s all a copy, but it copies from something that was original. Or maybe something that copied from something that copied from something that was original.

That’s how we know it’s real.

One of my students was saying the other day that his grandmother reads his tweets. “But she doesn’t tweet back,” he continued, “she only answers by email,” he said, explaining that while his grandmother is willing to read a twitter feed, she insists on responding with a more old fashioned medium.

I told my student that one day, fifty years from now, he might have grandkids of his own. One of them might talk about how she sends messages to her grandfather through whatever is the latest form of communication (maybe something involving brainwaves and neural implants).

“But old granddad,” she might say, “just keeps responding the old fashioned way, with Twitter.”