Cobb

Passion Without Purpose

There is a certain mentality that is as old as history but often forgotten in modern times. It the mindset of the farmer, of the hunter, of the warrior. It has an appreciation and respect for nature and the purposes of plants and animals. It understands the life force and it pays it mind. There is ancient wisdom in that mindset. It values thrift. It values natural order. It values the oneness of structure and purpose.

In modern times, we have changed our minds more than anything else. Like in ancient times, we make tools for accomplishing work. But what we are able to call work today has very little to do with the work of history. So understand that my observation is not a critique of science, technology, tool making or building. It is a critique of mind, of priority, of direction. And so here is the greatest, and most obvious contradiction I know.

Modern women use modern medicine to stop themselves from getting pregnant in order to have carefree sex. Forget about the ethics of the matter and consider the biology of the matter. At their prime, when they would be the most fertile and the most capable of bearing a healthy child, they use tools to make themselves incapable, for the sake of pleasure and for the sake of economics. And a philosophy has emerged because of this change. There is a disconnect between structure and purpose. There is a re-purposing of the human body.

Modern men similarly re-purpose themselves, their minds, their bodies, their philosophies for the sake of pleasure and the sake of economics. And while I can accept the philosophical argument that there is no ‘natural order of things’, it is perfectly obvious that we have engineered ourselves away from that which nature provides. We are able to disrespect ancient wisdom because we have modern tools.

It is the fact that these tools obscure the thinking behind them that gives us problems. The farmer who finds that an ox pulls his plow better than a mule understands the purpose of that improved tool and makes him a better farmer. But the man who finds a better videogame, a bigger screen and a softer sofa, does that make him a better man? Even if it gives him more pleasure and more money and fame?

What do we know of gluttony? We know that if you eat nothing but pies, cakes, and massive amounts of carbs and sugars, your body will fail to produce enough insulin to regulate them. And so you can take pills - enough pills so that you can still eat pies and cakes whenever you please. So who is ever called a glutton? Nobody. We haven’t solved the problem, we have created a workaround.

With our modern tools and modern re-purposing, we understand very well that we sustain economies that fail to encourage our to discipline ourselves to the very simplest demands of ancient wisdom. Eat well. Our work takes us indoors, so I have to do this thing called ‘exercise’ in which I pretend to be be a farmer, a hunter or a warrior. Because I have an economy of likes and followers to fulfill. Is this work? Not really. For me this is pleasure.

Narcotics, recreational drugs, antibiotics, contraceptives, hormone therapies, dietary supplements, anti-inflammatories… there are every manner of cleverly invented molecules that repurpose our bodies temporarily. Why? What is the definition of good health? What does a healthy human body do? What is it supposed to do? Farm? Hunt? War?

These are deep questions we no longer ask. We simply use the tools without thinking. Our purposes are re-engineered by producers of consumer goods we don’t understand or question. We no longer look for purpose, and so we no longer know how to achieve our purpose. We are only encouraged to find our passions. This is the essence of the dysfunction of modern life. Passion without purpose.

Stand and Deliver

When I was a skinny kid, I learned one day at Susan Miller Dorsey Pool, how to do a 1 and a half. As soon as I write this, I am brought to mind of a girl who came there one day and did a 'half gainer'. I had never seen anything like that in my life. A bunch of us kids would do a couple bounces on the board (which was pretty high quality) and manage our 1 and a halfs, but she did what I later learned was called a hurdle, which is the standard way a springboard diver gets the board to flex in a continuous motion to the edge with one final bounce. And she got height, which in our own way of judgment was as important as it is in the real world of competitive springboard diving.

Like most kids my age, I hated being shown up, but I also didn't hesitate with my props. After all, it's about being the best, and she kicked all of our asses that day as well as showing us something new. One of my friends said it was a gainer, but she told me there are five categories of dives. Forward, reverse, inward, back and twist. I knew about inwards, but was never really impressed with them. We did 'backs' off the board lots of times. I couldn't get my head around the physics of a twisting dive, although I could do a back 1 and a half with a half twist. That was my best dive. In the flip-flop world of street tumbling we called that an 'arabian' which started backward and ended with a full front. I did it often enough when I wasn't confident about the doing backs, or I was just lazy. The idea of doing a reverse dive was just frightening beyond belief. How does someone move forwards and rotate backwards at the same time?

For me, the value of diving was adjunct to tumbling. While a few of us had a number of dives, the number of tricks we could do on the grass was much bigger and so were our audiences. I was one of the best divers I knew, but to climb the hierarchy of tumbling at the local parks delivered a great deal more glory. As I went around various area parks, it was good to be king or close to king. My brother Bryan and I were constantly on the lookout for good 'FFG', flip flop grass. I still have vivid memories of impromptu pickup battles at Sportsman's Park, at Centinela Park, at Dorsey and in front of the Olympic Swim Stadium at Exposition Park. Speaking of which, I did dive off the 5 meter platform back in the days when the City of Los Angeles was not so pussified to have them around. I never bothered with the 7.5 and 10 meter platforms. I did wear glasses after all.

I never became the great tumbler I dreamed of becoming. There were a couple of insurmountable barriers. The first came in the form of money and the second in terms of opportunity. The City of Inglewood had a summer program for tumbling over at Rogers Park just around the corner from their City Hall. And like their pool at Centinela, there was one fee for Inglewood residents and another for outsiders. Dorsey pool cost a quarter no matter where you were from. Centinela charged a whole dollar, and you couldn't leave the pool and come back. Similarly, Rogers Park charged an unthinkable $100 for their summer gymnastics program. It boggled my mind. Later, when I attended high school, they simply had no gymnastics team. Also, no wrestling team. Also, no band. All of the things I was decently competitive in, were not an option. My first semester, I hated the place. But there was a diving team.

I joined the AAU diving club in Santa Monica. I can't even remember if I paid much for it. But I finally picked up on all of the techniques I vaguely recalled from the good old days at Dorsey Pool. One or two nights a week, my brother and I would take the bus from Crenshaw to Pico, take the Pico bus to Sears, and then take the Big Blue Santa Monica Bus all the way to Santa Monica High School to practice under the watchful eye of Jim Wood. Jim was probably one of the best influences I had as a teen. He demanded as close to perfection as you were capable of. He always threatened to put my toes in a pencil sharpener. Sometimes it's hard to focus on pointing your toes when you're half scared to death of the stuff you're doing in midair. Carl was our best diver. Chris Horne and Chris Monaghan were my friends. Coleen McNamee was the belle of the ball. Her blonde hair would turn the brightest shade of green of anyone. I, like a flying Q-Tip left my afro at full length. I first borrowed a pair of diving shorts from Chris Monaghan and finally got a pair of my own. Most people don't know, but when you do dives to your feet, like a double front, it is not kosher to hold your balls. But if you are ballsy enough to dive in Speedos, you won't be for long. It stings like the balls of your feet when you land from jumping off a roof. These things I knew at the age of 14.

I lettered varsity in my freshman year according to the points I earned that first season. I peaked in my junior year, making the quals to go to State which was held at Beverly Hills High School. I was good enough for highschool and AAU. I won gold once or twice and I had a decent 11 dive list by that time. My best AAU meet was the Chula Vista Invitational. My first, and worst was at the Jack Kramer Club in fancy Palos Verdes. It was at that meet where I made my first fail dive. I can't even remember what went wrong. There are three horrible things you can do as a springboard diver. The worst is just what you think. You can slam some part of your body on the diving board. That never happened to me at practice or in competition, but some time after highschool I did so doing an inward dive at the pool at Val Verde Park north of Magic Mountain. It wasn't so bad that it drew blood, if I remember correctly and it got me a good dressing down from the lifeguard. I'm sure if I impressed any girls with that stunt, they were the wrong ones. The second horror is called a balk. Just like with a baseball pitcher if you start your hurdle and then stop in the middle and then start over, it will cost you half the points on your dive. I also never balked in competition. I did land a ridiculously laughable and grotesquely embarrassing fail dive at this, my very first meet. Of all things, it was a 1 and a half. This wasn't a serious meet and unlike in more serious competitions you only needed a five dive list. But to get a zero on any dive.. well that sucked.

Somewhere else on this blog, I've thought back about my diving career. The fear of diving with a boner. The days the team called my Kunta Kinte. The win at Leuzinger that made me a role model. My mentoring of Adrian Hernandez and Tremelle Jenkins as captain of the team. My first merciless sunburn at Madera. My win at the Mexico USA dual meet at SMCC. The first year banquet at the Hennebery's in Toluca Lake. The medals and trophies. My rival who smoked me at East LA College. The non-kosher slide at Camp Stevens. The day Chris Horne hit the wooden lane lines at Northridge Aquatics. The black dude with the burn on his left ankle who was an incredibly fast spinner, and of course the mutual contempt held between every diver in California and Greg Louganis. Chris Horne healed up and made the team at USC, but didn't make varsity. California has produced the world's finest divers- the competition is fierce. But I did once get a 7, at Chula Vista.

This past weekend I got up on a diving board for the first time in at least three decades. It was a crappy little joke of a board, typical of the sort you find at home pools, not the glorious and expensive Duraflex sort you find at a high quality pool or at Colleen McNamee's house in West LA. I wouldn't be surprised if more people hurt themselves on these stiff little boards than on public high dives. My inward dive suffered horribly. But I did manage a decent forward half twist and forward pike. My daughter's Instagram of my crumpled back layout got the most likes. Fortunately, or not as the case may be, she published it in a one time fashion with no remaining record. I have yet to get the original video.

There's something dramatic about approaching a diving board. All eyes are on your mostly naked body, your teammates, your coach, everybody in the stands, your parents, other divers and of course the judges. You prepare the acrobatics in your mind, clear the water from your ears and eyeball the sprayers that mark the surface of the water. You get on the board and move the wheel forwards or backwards to your ideal spot. I liked mine a touch firmer than medium for my earlier career. As I gained weight and skill that place was still good. I changed from a three step to a four step hurdle in my sophomre year. Your hurdle needs to be smooth, you have to line up your spot so that you're not staring at your feet as you land them as close to the front edge as possible to gain the maximum momentum of the board which pushes you up and out. It takes a while to feel and trust how the board pushes you forward. You should aim straight up, not out, to get the height you need. Sometimes if you have a lot of rotations, say a forward 2 1/2, you want to grab your knees too soon or throw your arms down before you reach a good top.  The score depends upon three parts of your dive, your approach and hurdle, the 'top' of your dive which includes your form in the air, and your entry which as everyone knows, should make as little splash as possible.

It's during the approach where you have to rid yourself of distractions. They call your name and the dive. On more than a few occasions, they call a dive out of the order you remember submitting on your list. You have little choice once you place your foot on the board. Balking costs. As the crowd hushes and your coach gestures his last signal to remind you not to do that weak part of your dive (Jim makes a cranking a pencil sharpener gesture), you are under maximum pressure. Breathe in. Stand and deliver. Focus and perform. Once the thing is in motion, it's all practiced mechanics and then finding the right split second to reach for the bottom of the pool. Push your arms forward, left hand grasping the right wrist, palms forward, locking your elbows and punching a hole in the water for the whole of your body to pass through. Are you under rotating and short? Are you long with your legs going past your head on entry? Did you finish your twist square with the board? Did you screw up the top and let your legs and feet go limp with frustration? It doesn't matter. The dive is over, you swim over to the side of the pool, adjust your trunks and pull yourself out of the water, triumphant or otherwise. You listen you the judges but you knew what score you deserved the moment you hit the water.  Shake out your hair, grab your towel and prepare for the next dive.

I was pleased to learn that Jason Statham was a springboard diver. You have to have style as well as discipline. You have to be comfortable with your body and abuse it. You need to be fearless of both pain and embarrassment. You get to show off. You get to learn the intricacies of something that takes place in seconds. And other than during the Olympic Games, you don't get to show off how well you can anticipate what a judge will score any particular dive. It's a dying art, I think. The Chinese have taken over the aesthetics of diving. They are slim and smooth and elegant. During my era, the era of Phil Boggs, Klaus Dibiasi and Greg Louganis, a combination of grace and power was what the judges liked. Then when Mark Lenzi came forward, his muscular hairy chested diving was acrobatically amazing. He could finish a forward 3 1/2 pike above the three meter board which is astounding to watch. It changed the sport. Now there were many dives that were included in official competitions with greater than a 3.0 degree of difficulty. Not so graceful but exciting in a new way. The Chinese and all divers, due to the new higher DD dives tend to be a lot shorter than those in the old school. Louganis was 5' 9" and by memory I recall Boggs and Dibiasi to be taller. But the sport moves forward, alas with fewer American world champions and contenders.

I am pleased to have recalled all of this and recognize the impact it had on my life. Getting into the yearbook sports page thanks to the drawing of Gary Suard, was one of my proudest moments as a teen. And doing well in a sport that wasn't my first choice or my second I guess taught me some valuable lessons. But I think the most important was to stand and deliver under the pressure of failure and against all odds. I think I did OK.

How to Hide 1Kg of Diamonds

So let’s start with giving an evaluation. A parcel of stones at VVG1 to VVG2 at an average size of .35 carats with F-G color will net out to about $3250 per carat. 1kg of such stones will be about 14,285 stones worth about 46.5 million dollars US. So really the question is how would you hide about 15,000 little things worth 45 million bucks. Your ability to hide them depends largely upon one thing, which is your ability to sell them.

If you have no ability to sell any of the stones, then you can only use conventional means, IE something anybody could think up on a middle class salary. In which case you might as well just throw them in the ocean because you’re going to get yourself killed or jailed the moment one person finds out. So there’s a Clean Approach and a Dirty Approach.

Clean Approach
So the first thing a smart guy will do is to approach someone with moolah and someone you can trust with your life. So for me, I happen to know a couple such people as I am fortunate in that regard. One of them is a Wall Street broker. He would know someone who deals with that level of investment with whom I would partner. I convert a fraction of my diamonds to cash, essentially 2 million worth, and give the other people the impression that this is the extent of my cache. I then set up an entity through which I can employ my own skills and improve them. This would include a cursory understanding of the diamond trade and a couple of trips to such traders and producers. The aim of these trips is to determine how far I can get away with selling diamonds legitimately without being a known quantity in the business. In other words, I’m setting up a diamond laundering business, but I can remain overground and live fairly large.

Dirty Approach
The other way to go is go underground, which means I live low rather like a card sharp. I produce the occasional rock in card games, to used car dealers, to pawn shops all at a level that people will immediately be able to handle and not talk about. In this case I have to do a lot of low rent stashing and have a 5 year plan to raise about 200k per year.

OK so either approach gets me to the point at which I can use sophisticated means to hide my stash. It costs money to hide money.

The Stashes

One - The Big Pentagram
I’m thinking undeveloped land in New Zealand would be the best thing for buried treasure. It’s not hard to get there. It’s not a dodgy place. I’d keep the biggest fraction there, roughly half, in five plots underground in a pattern. How about a pentagram 100 meters across? Uncleared woods. GPS tracked. Iron rebar markers with RFID tags. On a hill. (25 million)

Two - Obvious
I’m going to make a mistake. So it might as well be a stupid mistake. So I’m going to seed the stupid mistake ahead of time so the over-confident detective gets to talk shit. Which means I’m going to put the stash under my mother’s grave, or in a mausoleum niche having bribed a groundskeeper at a cemetery in my town. I will be observed making regular trips. (2 million)

Three - Attorney Client Privilege
This is the first technically challenging one to place. I troll around to find an attorney like Go Call Saul from Breaking Bad. Living in LA with its drug trade, I’m sure I can find a gang attorney relatively easily. I will put it into this attorney’s hands. I don’t know or don’t care where the attorney puts it, but he only gets his cut as trustee based on his ability to sell the diamonds himself. This is the one I plan to live from. (7 million)

Four - Charity
I use geocaching to place a handful of random stones into that game. Once a year I travel out of the state and place a rock into a geocache. I drop a rock off into the coffers of various churches in my travels. (<1 million)

Five - Rich Bitches
I develop a rapport with douchebags of all sorts who can fence this kind of stuff on their own. I develop a reputation and then flame out quickly. It will cost me getting my ass kicked but among that crowd I will clearly appear broke and flamed out. Kills suspicion. (1 million)

Six - Other Hidey Holes
Smaller versions of the pentagram. All self-service all visited during peak tourist season.

1. Black River National Forest: Michigan
2. Mount Washington: New Hampshire
3. Hot Springs: Arkansas
4. Sturgis: South Dakota
5. Gifford Woods State Park: Vermont

And I periodically check Quora, detective novels and CIA spycraft legends just to make sure I’m up on the best ideas. After all, I’ve got nothing else to do.

Atomic Integrity

Q. Do you honestly feel that you have a genuine mission to help make the planet a better place to live, or one to just be a passive observer on it?

A. There is something called Gall’s Law which I paraphrase. All large complex things that work are comprised of smaller, simpler things that work. Imagine yourself as an atom. If your electrons fly away, if you tend to lose your neutrons, you’re radioactive. You need to be stable. You need to keep yourself together.

As one atom, you don’t have the ability to tell what the state everything else is around you. But when you bump into another atom are you stealing their electrons?

Similarly as one person, your job is to keep yourself together. The very presumption that you could be an accurate passive observer of the planet is ridiculous. How many languages do you comprehend? How many scientific fields have you mastered? Can you even scuba dive? How could you possibly be responsible for the planet? Your university, your employer and your family combined could disappear tomorrow and have no effect on the planet. You could be front page news for a week and have no effect on the planet.

Somebody external to you has convinced you that your every move can be directed as a combination of selfless actions in which you sacrifice for the planet. That sounds to me exactly like an evangelical minister whose god is named ‘Earth’. Is that why you exist? Is that the source of meaning in your life? What about you?

I have listened to people warble with joy that during the SARS2 pandemic, people’s misery, suffering, immobilization and unemployment have done wonders for lowering air pollution. There seems to be, very clearly, a preference for nature over humanity. Nature is full of creatures that kill, viruses and bacteria are among the most deadly. If you don’t believe me, get rid of your refrigerator. The math is very simple. Take away a chunk of humanity and chalk that up to a win for the planet.

I don’t worship Planet Earth.

I don’t pretend my weight is changing its orbit. I am on a mission to improve the lives of people around me directly. It starts with making sure the machine of me is working excellently. So that’s my electrical charge bumping into yours.

The Second Set: Music That Remade Me

I seem to have lived more lives than I expected. These days I tell myself that in life there are two kinds of people, trees and monkeys. I'm a tree for my family, but out in the world I'm a monkey. A flying monkey. So when I looked back at the top 15 albums in my mind that I wrote 10 years ago, I was thinking back. Now a new set of music has ripened and matured in my monkey mind and I need to account for that.

I remember Puck in the first episodes of MTV's Real World. For some reason I associate it with a gig I had down in Jacksonville's Baymeadows district. I stayed at Homewood Suites and ran down to the package store past the gatorholes for a fifth of Jim Beam Rye. The riff from Interstate Love Song was in my head the whole time. Then one day I heard Vaseline and discovered that it was the same band. I had to know more. The album was a revelation, and it seemed that every song was an anthem for dark parts of me. It went in and inverted all of my rock sensibilities. As time went on, STP was for me everything that was right with the new rock, a soundtrack for sections of empty highways on my desolate consulting missions around the country. Lady Picture Show was Cobb Parkway in Atlanta. Meatplow was a two lane strip of black ice in the dead winter cold of Columbus, Ohio. Down was me sitting in a rental car in an alley in Boston. None of it mattered to be timely. I went back and forth in time with it. When I read the release dates of the albums it all seems wrong, like they've existed long before in my mind. They're that deep.

 

The second best apartment I ever had was on the top floor of a walkup brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Seventh Avenue & Flatbush. I bought my NAD amp and my Infinity Speakers for that place. That place with the hardwood floors. With the eat-in-kitchen where I never cooked. With the french doors on the two bedrooms. With the exposed brick. Where the first fat fly of summer buzzed against the windowpanes with the clear view of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. It took me weeks to finally make the D Train go away. It rumbled by spooking me into thinking another earthquake was happening. Especially at night. I went to the brand new Virgin Superstore in Times Square and the pleasant young man told me that he knew everything about classical music. He was so happy that I asked him. "Hum anything", he challenged me. "I'll tell you what song it is." I was embarrassed. All I could think about were the clips in the old montage from 'Hooked on Classics'. I declined. But I did know one thing. I wanted the Appassionata. For years after I first discovered Bach, Liszt, and Debussy there seemed to be no solo pianists I could find to match their purity. Of course I didn't know where or how to look and the first person that asked to be a guide was declined. I thought too much of the encounter. I believed he was flirting with me and saw me too deeply because this was music I truly wanted to experience and I was only on the very edges of it. I was me. I wanted to do it myself. I bought Barenboim. His rendition of the Moonlight Sonata, which I didn't know at the time, has been the reference in my mind ever since. Every night in Brooklyn, I went to sleep with that album in the Sony CD player. It is peace.

 

I was bored on the plane and I had an aisle seat. I don't like the aisle because I have broad shoulders and enough bad experience with food carts and my funny bone to think there might be a conspiracy against me in the flight attendants union. At least it wasn't a bulkhead seat. So I actually plugged my headphones into the inflight station and browsed through the printed program guide in the seat back pocket in front of my knees. Hmm, what's this? A new album, a featured album no less, by Bobby McFerrin. Say what? If you know me, you know that I think there are two great injustices in the music world and they cycle around Fishbone and Bobby McFerrin. I know Bobby McFerrin to be a musical genius. I knew it back from his Spontaneous Inventions album back when people were just discovering Whoopi Goldberg's surfer girl routine. Of course the world has been fixated on that one song that paid for his mansion, but I knew better, primarily because of Medicine Music. I was entranced by Bang! Zoom, and in many ways it had been thematic for my early married life in Atlanta. Kids' Toys is still the ringtone for my youngest daughter, and Friends is to me one of the most perfect songs ever made. But nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on that flight. Beyond Words. This is one of the most inventive and transcendent albums ever recorded. As I listen even in this moment, the phrasing is sublime and the melodies seem crafted to soothe. It is a daddy album. It is a jazz album. It is both subtle and magnificent with the perfect interplay of Chick Corea's piano, Bobby's voice, excellent percussion and the most righteously mellow fretless bass playing I have ever heard. All with no lyrics. It is the landmark in McFerrin's career - he has invented something new in jazz vocals as it perhaps was inevitable that he would. OK. So I'm a fan. And yes he went even further several years later with Vocabularies.

 

There's a piano interlude between each of the cuts on this album that immediately takes me back to the days when my fiancee and I lived up near Grant's Tomb in the City. We had the tiniest of apartments sublet by one of the Urban Bush Women (thanks Christine) and it was a miserably hot summer. I had picked up the album back when I lived in Boston picking through the ruins of hiphop in the days of Jurassic Park. And there it was one complete with the Francophone edge of the Native Tongues, Lucien. And it got better from there. It was refreshing to hear the French approach to rap and I especially liked Democrat D's fricatives as well as the sad mellow of Moda et Dan. Of course MC Solaar was the standout. Some years later I found some comfort in Raggasonic, but this was the collection that kicked off my flirtation with Gallic hiphop. It lasted through a few singles later by Solaar, but Menelik and Lucien disappointed in the long run. This was the bright spot, and unforgettable.

 

 

There once was a videogame called Fez. It was a miracle of multiple dimensions. The game was highly anticipated and starred in a movie about indie game developers, unsurprisingly named Indie Game. The game was a smashing, although delayed success. I seem to recall it drove the lead programmer crazy. That was only the beginning. Its soundtrack was a simple marvel and introduced me to Disasterpeace who has gone on to relative fame. But there was a followup album named FZ: Side F that featured a collection of artists that rebirthed my love with electronic music. That included Solar Fields, Morusque, Monomer and my favorite Aaron Cherof. When I finally got around to Cherof, I was blown away, and so his album Anagnorisis has been in heavy rotation ever since 2013. It remains a standout among all of my new favorite electronic composers and DJs.

 

I got bored of jazz, you know. But I was overly into it for a long time. Obviously I loved the stuff that Miles was doing at the end of his life, and I have been a big fan of the Return to Forever crew, especially Stanley and Chick. Herbie has been a lifelong favorite and of course everybody lights a candle at the shrines of Coltrane, Monk, Basie & Mingus. There are several other dozens to choose from but everything new seemed to be a bit derivative of the best fusion and straight ahead. Truth be told I can put up with a lot of Bony James and contemporary smooth. But very little had gotten under my skin since the early 90s. Out of nowhere, really, came The Bad Plus. I was transfigured by the trio's coordination, by the drummer's prodigious fills and polyphony. It was frenetic and captivating. Their rock covers introduced me to songs I never knew - it had to be at least 5 years before I knew their rendition of Tom Sawyer was not original. (I have since put Rush in its appropriate place, I think). Flim, Velouria, too. All of their music had the energy and sophistication I forgot I was hungry for, and it was truly satisfying. I decided that Dirty Blonde would be my theme song - and I even wrote lyrics for it. The album that kicked it off still holds magic for me.

 

Jacques Loussier is one of the greatest jazz pianists ever. He did that French thing, take something old and make it new. They have said that Wynton Marsalis is one of those rare musical geniuses who is both a jazz and classical prodigy. It's true. But I think it is an even greater achievement to rearrange classical pieces that have been interpreted hundreds of ways for hundreds of years and make them jazzy in unpredictably clever ways that retain respect for the original. These are deeply inventive compositions he has put together with his trio, and it seems magical every time he performs. At least I am very convinced. It is almost impossible for me to decide which of his albums impresses me most, but I'm going to choose his interpretations of Satie. Because. I doubt even Satie could have envisioned his pieces so variantly played and I love the way he redoes them several times on this album. Taking nothing away from his performances of Bach and Debussy, this album is special because he renders them mulitple times, each with its own special flavor. For a long time, this has been my bedtime album.

Hiromi has saved jazz for me. Once again this is an amazing fusion of inventive style, prodigious skill, energy and sophistication that had me wondering why the Stanley Clarke Band's first album in 2010 was so extraordinary. I listened and listened but never read any liner notes. So I didn't really know it was her that made the difference. So I watched this video and knew that jazz was alive. What an outstanding trio. I can't say enough about this one, other than that the music is so excellent that talking about it is almost useless. You just want to listen to it over and over, and so I have. By far, I'd have to say my favorite song of hers is Labyrinth, although her play with Beethoven and Gershwin is fantastic. Watching her performances with Simon Phllips and Anthony Jackson is also a miracle to behold. I think only the Bad Plus synchronize in such fabulous ways, differently of course but spectacular. She's as much fun to watch as to listen - real passion on those keys.

 

I think one of the best things about being such a flathead as I am, so subject to the enjoyment of just about everything, is that you don't know what you don't know. That is to say, if there's a lot of things you can enjoy without getting bored, you will always have another opportunity to discover something wonderful you just haven't gotten around to yet. For me musically, that has meant Glenn Gould. As many times as I have ignored the award winning documentary about him, I should have guessed that he was phenomenal. And I have been in a lifelong quest for the perfect solo piano artist. I can remember first hearing in my college apartment bedroom Andre Watts playing live Listz Transendental Etude #10 so ballistically he popped two strings on the piano. I can still hear the KUSC announcer saying '..and survive it did.' Yes it stands as probably the greatest piano performance ever in my mind and experience. But actually the recorded album, which I eventually purchased, did not meet a very high standard of production. But this is about Glenn Gould. I can remember literally spending an afternoon holed up in a San Francisco hotel room watching the documentary of his second recording of the Goldberg Variations with commentary describing the difference between the newer 1981 recording and the original 1955 version. Astounding. As wondrous as all that is, it has been the French Suites that has captured my imagination. Am I heading down that corridor towards chamber music, after all that Prokofiev? It may be so. The French Suites stands out. It may be that his Scriabin gets me in the end, but for now it is the French Suites.

 

Steve Coleman and I have a very troublesome relationship. He represents the oversophistication of jazz that has made it fun for musicians and theoreticians, but not for listeners like me. A funny story is that my brother, who used to be a sound engineer, was a friend of Steve Coleman's original pianist Andy Milne. I knew about Milne because he ran clinics in Leimert Park at the World Stage, but I didn't know he had played for Steve Coleman. So I went to see him play at the Mondrian for the debut of his new album Forward to Get Back. My brother couldn't make the gig, but I spoke with Andy after the show. I said, I really like your music. I told him that it reminded me of Steve Coleman without the pretense. He cracked up. Ha ha very funny. Anyway, Steve Coleman did release what I say is one of the greatest rap albums of all time. Steve Coleman & Metric Tale of 3 Cities. Dude. I still don't know who the rappers are because I don't care. I expect that the golden age is over and my expectations and tastes have moved on, but damn when I was holding on the the last breaths there are two albums that stand head and shoulders above the rest. This is the first. Well I may as well mention the other which is Aphrocubist Improvisations from the Broun Fellinis, but that's going a little bit too far back dealing with a hiphop thread that is mostly dead. Nevertheless, more than even Buckshot LeFonque, A Tale of 3 Cities is the stand out, last stand standard of the most righteous genre of hiphop, serious lyrical force backed up with funky jazz. This is the last and greatest, right here. Get it if you can find it.

 

There is one last thing to say here and I'm not exactly sure how to say it because on one hand it is very conventional wisdom to say that Radiohead is one of the greatest rock bands ever. And it is also quite conventional to say that OK Computer & Kid A represent them at their most mindblowing and transformative. On the other hand, I like the reggae dub versions of these great songs, for the most part, better than the originals. This album, in addition to being a straight out genius arrangement, holds the distinction as one of the very last CDs I ever went out of my house to shop for. I recall the hybrid store out on the Santa Monica Promenade that let you pick and choose a dozen mp3s and they burned you a disc. But I had to have this entire record. It also bears mentioning that Vitamin String Quartet also Vitamin Dub has done a strikingly awesome cover of Just which is a favorite song of mine to play loud challenging the powers of my subwoofers. Radiodread's version of Airbag had been my daughter's favorite song ever, so it also has to be one of mine.

Nathaniel Rateleiff is, outside of Nancy Wilson, my favorite vocalist ever. I discovered him about 6 years ago. I looked around, bored, for critically acclaimed independent new music. The last time I did that, I found Coldplay. So I was batting 1000. The album cover caught my attention so I gave it a shot. OMG. To this day, I still haven't puzzled out the actual lyrics to half of his songs, but every time I have, it has been rewarding. His music is like nobody else's. It's like bluegrass, but not. Like country but more like western. But that voice. I've never thought I'd seriously consider the genre of 'singer songwriter', but his stuff gets to me. Like an abstract cryptogram of the heart, of suffering and of persistence. Like the souls of Modest Mouse with no need or desire to be stars, but the love of the music just comes through, haunting, vivid, like a bright red rash on the face of a hobo who just fell out of a moving boxcar. This is soul music. Soul music I say. Like Bill Frisell on a lonely day.

 

That's about it. To include more is to go beyond writing about the personal and into more generic music criticism, which I think I've indulged for the last time right here. So let's see. Here are the honorable mentions. Love Stories by Frank McComb, Treat Me Right by Eric Sardinas, Chant Down Babylon the Bob Marley covers by hiphop artists, Dub Chamber 3 by Bill Laswell. Real Enemies by D'Arcy James Argue. All kinds of stuff by Squarepusher, Tycho, Boards of Canada and Big Giant Circles, Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse, Crystal Planet by Joe Satriani and various musics by Gorecki and Elgar.