Ken’s Blog

Ever since I got one of these cool metal mesh coffee makers, my life has settled into a happy morning ritual: Fill a cup to the brim with water, pop it in the microwave for three minutes. Meanwhile, rinse out the filter and yesterday’s coffee mug, put the now clean filter over the now clean mug, fill with coffee from the fridge – just in time for the microwave to beep. Pour water into filter, wait a minute, and voilá, fresh yummy coffee.

Wonderful, right? Well, not always. You see, by definition making coffee in the morning is something I do before I have had my morning coffee. At which time of day my brain cells are essentially useless. And there’s the rub.

I have lost count of the sheer number of ways in which my little ritual has gone awry in the few months that I have had this device. There was the time I did everything but fill the filter with coffee grinds. That morning I ended up with fresh steaming hot water.

Then there was the morning when I did everything right except actually turn on the microwave. It turns out that if you don’t do this, none of the other steps actually do any good.

One morning I put the cup in the microwave without any water, another day – after a particularly late evening – I successfully boiled the water, only to turn from the microwave oven to discover that I had left off the entire filter/coffee grinds part of the rigamarole.

The most dramatic morning was the one in which I got almost everything right – with one crucial step. I boiled the water, washed the filter and mug, poured just the right amount of fresh aromatic coffee grinds into the waiting clean metal mesh, thinking all the time about that great mug of fresh hot coffee that was only a minute away.

And I was still lost in my thoughts about that mug of steamy fresh coffee even as the dark stain began to spread over the countertop. Soon coffee was spilling and pouring everywhere – into the sink, onto the stove, down onto the floor.

It seems I have forgotten only one little detail – placing the filter on top of the mug. Darn.

But things could be worse, and I count my blessings. You see, this mesh filter has been my morning’s great savior. The proof is hiding in my cupboard, where I lock away my trophies of shame – all of the wonderful coffee makers, once sparkly and new, that now sit there charred, blackened useless, their once-shiny plastic handles melted off. So many coffee makers that I had promised to honor and to use with care, now betrayed, destroyed by my careless morning love.

But not my mesh metal filter. I think this one’s a keeper.

Seeing the latest production of “Guys and Dolls” on Broadway this evening, I was reminded of something I noticed many years back: the title tune starts with the same five notes as John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane”: 1 2 4 3 1 of a major scale. For example, in the key of C major the notes would be: C D F E C.

Now, nobody would ever argue that the sardonic musical theatre of Frank Loesser has anything at all in common with the earnest late-sixties folk rock of Mr. Denver, and yet – as Edna Mode would say – here we are.

Are there, perhaps, certain combinations of notes that are so compelling that they can enter the brain of a composer spontaneously, just as a kind of proto life form can emerge from a mix of chemicals after an electric spark? Perhaps these lifeforms have the ability to jump from host to host, and thereby propagate, spawning progeny in the form of new songs that incorporate the same melodic theme.

After all, it is practically certain that John Denver would have heard the music from “Guys and Dolls” at least once, given the specific cultural eras involved, even if he was not consciously aware of Frank Loesser as an influence. And so the five note virus attached itself to a new creative brain, and spawned.

There are probably many thousands of such viral strains lurking out there by now, waiting to jump into the next song. I wonder whether we could study the gradual spread of certain recurring musical themes by applying the mathematics of epidemiology.

We often say a melody is catchy. Maybe there is more truth in this than we think.

I was prepared to be impressed with Continental Airlines. On the way to Delhi they had surprised me in a good way – every seat, even in coach class, has an electric outlet. And you can choose any one of two hundred and thirty seven movies to watch. Unfortunately I’d already seen most of the good ones.

I did manage to see “Holiday”, starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, which is delightful by definition, because it stars Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Although I felt very sad for another character – the young woman who is Cary Grant’s fiancée at the start of the film. She seems to be unaware that her own dear sister, whom Mr. Grant is about to meet, is Katherine Hepburn. Which means that she herself is basically roadkill. In their way, RomComs are a theatre of cruelty.

That was on the way out. The journey back was much worse, and therefore much better. Once we were all in our seats we were told that Continental’s vaunted entertainment system was broken, kaput, dead as a post. No two hundred and thirty seven movies, just a blank screen in front of every seat for fifteen hours.

The Continental folks were not quite apologetic. They kept announcing, repeatedly and somewhat proudly, that they could have repaired everything, but that would have delayed the flight by several hours. I can’t fault their logic – I would much rather be home on time than see a few movies – but it’s odd how smug they seemed about it.

And so I was reminded once again that a strange sort of attitude has taken hold among much of the U.S. airline industry. Namely, that customers have gradually become, in some odd and not quite definable sense, the Enemy. Rather than a profuse apology for inconvenience, the tone was a sort of smug message of “Yes, there was a problem, but we are professionals, dammit, and life is tough enough already, so don’t you mere passengers dare raise a fuss. Just be happy we’re still feeding you.”

Imagine an alternate Universe in which an airline actually asked the paying customers for their opinion on which option to take – perhaps taking a vote among the passengers. I suspect that if a U.S. airline were ever to do something so outrageous as to show that much respect for its clients, the Universe and everything within it would immediately collapse into a singularity.

Anyway.

Then they proceded to turn off the rest of the electrical system at the seats. No reading lights, no handy dandy little recharger plug. And no food service for most of the flight either. Just a planeful of forelorn passengers sitting in darkness for another fourteen hours.

I noticed a lot of people looking sadly at the books they had brought along on the flight – books that would remain unread for the duration. I’m not sure about the logic, but I think the airline wanted everyone to sleep so they’d be less trouble. Unfortunately, this resulted in a planeful of people who would be seriously jetlagged: If you go to sleep on a plane at 1am in Delhi, that’s 2:30pm in New York – exactly the wrong time to be falling asleep.

The airline folks then helpfully suggested that we not eat our little snack too quickly, because we wouldn’t be getting anything else for another thirteen hours. The young guy two seats away from me was sleeping when they handed out the snacks, so he was out of luck. I felt bad for him, so at some point I wandered to the back of the plane and nabbed one from a little stash I found there when none of the flight attendants seemed to be looking, and I brought it back to him.

Oh, and then the airline handed out vouchers to everyone (reminding us sternly that if we didn’t take our voucher right now, we couldn’t ask for one later). The voucher mostly gave you some little stuff that used to be free but that now you have to pay for. My favorite was the free headset. No entertainment system, but you can get a free headset. Honest. I couldn’t make up stuff like this.

To their credit, by the end of the long and grueling trip, the folks from Continental sounded truly contrite and apologetic in their parting announcements. It took seeing what fourteen hours of unrelenting boredom and darkness will do to a planeful of people to make them realize that there was something here to apologize for, but apologize they did in the end, and with conviction.

The strange thing was that for me this was all great. Nerd that I am, I had brought enough spare laptop batteries to last the whole trip, and then some. Without movies to distract me, I actually got a tremendous amount of programming done on the computer. I had a swell time, coding blissfully away.

Which just goes to show you: If only we had universal programming literacy, everyone on that plane would have had as much fun as I did.

In marked contrast to yesterday, I now find myself – still in Agra – listening to a group of scientists having a debate about String Theory. In some ways this is the opposite of the Taj Mahal. Where that is tangible and real and human scale, String Theory is a product of pure thought alone. Even the physicists who study it don’t have any confidence that it really does describe how to unify our theories of the universe.

But it is beautiful, and intricate, and lovely to explore. Perhaps this is the goal of all of our human architectures, whether made of marble or of mathematics.

Today something more upbeat.

I had known about the Taj Mahal all my life of course – we all have. I thought countless pictures would prepare me. But they did not.

Only when you are actually in its presence do you realize the genius of its architect. The Taj itself is not only beautiful, with perfect symmetry and balance of form, but also vast, imposing, far beyond human scale.

When you walk through the outer gates and catch your first glimpse and approach, you understand all this. What you are not prepared for is what you will find inside. The intimacy of it.

The whole enterprise is constructed as a cleverly proportioned set of nested spaces, so that when you reach the tomb itself, where the king and his bride lie side by side, you are in a very intimate space indeed, a small room just for two – like a lover’s nest for eternity.

I have never seen anything else quite like it. This juxtaposition of the vast and imposing with the small and intimate. The nearest thing I can think of is Wright’s “Falling Water” – but even that doesn’t quite achieve what the Taj does.

It makes me want to learn more about the architect, this genius who was commissioned by a king in mourning, and responded by creating such a wonder for all of humankind.

I just – in these last hours – received the very sad news that someone has passed away, someone who has been enormously influential on my life, a great mentor and a true friend.

When you are young, you instinctively look for mentors. And one day, if you are fortunate, you encounter someone who has chosen to travel a noble and perhaps difficult path through life, who one day smiles at you and says “Come join me in my walk – you and I might enjoy travelling together for a while.” Of course you know that the journey is more than a simple walk. For when you stumble – and you will stumble – your mentor’s guiding hand reaches out to steady you, while gently teaching you how to steady yourself.

Part of my heart refuses to believe that he is really gone. Yet in an important way he is not really gone – he will never be gone. His light even now continues to shine upon me, and within me. And if I am brave enough and strong enough to honor his example, that light will continue to shine upon some of those who come after me. It will shine every time I reach out to a young traveller in friendship and fellowship, every time I show my faith in the potential of another, and every time I offer an encouraging smile and a steady helping hand.

Have arrived in Agra, and am still trying to decode the jumbled impressions of a first-time visit. Things are different here from southern India, very different. I am reminded that the concept of India as a single country is a relatively recent historical occurance – one created by the British during their colonial expansion. There are layers to unpeel in trying to understand what I am seeing. Behind the veneer of “western” surfaces is something else, but it is a very different something from what lies behind those surfaces in Mumbai or Kalkuta or Bangalore.

I’m still thinking it over, and tomorrow I may have a more clear impression. Perhaps a visit to the Taj Mahal will help… 🙂

Flying from New York to Delhi is a surreal experience. The flight I took is 14 hours – direct – but of course there is the 10.5 hour time shift. So landing was just around a full day later from departure, by the sun.

The flight to the other side of the world puts your mind into a strange fugue state. I am writing this on a lovely Sunday morning in New Delhi, and yet it is still the evening before back in New York City. I know objectively that this post is following my sequential one-per-day habit of posting, but on some deep instinctive level, everything tells me that Saturday – yesterday here now – is something that didn’t really happen. Rather than being a full day in my life, it felt like a strange interstitial experience, somewhere in that place where we keep memories that hover in our recollection between reality and dream.

The sun is so bright here, and of course the people in the bustling city outside my hotel window are so insistently – and enjoyably – loud and pleasant. People are shouting directions in all mixes of Hindi and English, cars are honking, strange clanking noises emerge from the never-ending construction with such intensity, that it is hard to deny the reality of this time shift. I enter a bright, and somewhat strange world, ready to be – as James O’Brien might have put it – on the far side of the world.

And so it will be, until I return back to New York, when I will most likely have the equally magical and uncanny experience of receiving back that lost half day in my life, this loan of time that I have made – simply by moving across the planet – finally repaid.

I recently picked up my guitar again after a long time away. This has happened to me before – it’s a long-standing pattern for me. Usually I’ll pick up the guitar in response to some emotional crisis in my life. I’ll start playing intensely, go for lessons again, really work at it. Then the crisis will subside, or I just won’t seem to need to go to that place anymore, and eventually – it might take two years or five years – the guitar will recede from my life. Until the next time.

But this time the pattern is different. Nothing is wrong – I’m just drawn to the guitar, and I find myself playing at odd moments of the day or night, enjoying the sound of it, the feel of my fingers over the fretboard.

But one thing remains the same. As always, my way back in is the “First Prelude” by Heitor Villa Lobos. It was the first “classical” piece I ever learned, and it’s the one piece I never forget. My fingers just seem to find it automatically whenever I pick up a classical guitar, no matter how many years I’ve been away.

There is no other pleasure on earth quite like playing a piece that has seeped into your soul on some deep level, the one you can simply escape into, the one that has gotten you over your crises in times past. You know you can just show up at its door like an old friend in the middle of the night, and you know it will let you in, will put on a pot of tea, and stay up talking with you until you’re ok again. For me, the “First Prelude” is that friend.

Señor Villa Lobos, wherever your spirit may be in the universe, thank you.

Evolution is not an absolute – survival is always relative to an ecosystem. Which means that almost any idea you come up with can fail when dropped into an incompatible ecosystem – even if the same idea has been a wild success in a different ecosystem.

The idea I described yesterday for finding the best young minds and nurturing them along to success – an idea that is being used successfully in India right now – might simply not work in the U.S. There are so many differences between the two cultures.

For example, I noticed the last time I was in India (I’m actually flying over there again tomorrow, which is probably why I’m thinking about this) that people over there have a much more intense and idealistic view of democracy than we do here in the U.S. It’s not that there isn’t corruption – there is lots of corruption. It’s more that even local elections in India are approached with an air of fierce pride. From what I saw when I was there, they take the right to vote very seriously. I think many people in India would be astounded by the fact that so many people in the U.S. have the right to vote yet don’t bother going to the polls.

That’s just one example, among many, of a difference in the way the two cultures think about things. I wouldn’t be surprised at all, given those many differences, to find that the idea I described yesterday simply wouldn’t work over here.

Darwin pointed out that every genotype requires a viable phenotype. In plain english, that just means that every generation along an evolutionary path needs to survive – not just most generations. A mutation that kills off its population at some point is a dead end, no matter how wonderful would be its final outcome three generations later.

And in the case of creating and maintaining an incentive program to find and support the top one percent of kids, there may simply be no viable phenotype – no path for growth without a fatal weakness – along the many steps that would be required for such a program to take root and flourish.

I’m not saying that this is true. But I am saying that if you did want to create such a program here, it would be a good idea to think about ways of providing it with an immune system of some sort, some way – at each stage of its development – to defend itself from its enemies.