1.1 2025 January
1.1.1 2025 January 1 - Happy New Year
A Happy New Year to all my web-page readers.
I'm told the fitness gyms are packed wall to wall
for the first two weeks in January with people
who swear that this year they're going
to stay in shape.
My New Year Resolution is going to be keeping up my
weblog
pages.
Time will tell how well I do with it.
Here is a link directly to the
most-recent
entry.
1.1.2 2025 January 1 - From "Law and Order"
I love the television show "Law and Order,"
especially the inter-generational, inter-cultural banter,
usually around Detective Lenny Briscoe and his younger colleages.
1.1.3 2025 January 3 - Moab Pictures and Videos
Okay, the trip was last year,
2024 December 20-22,
but I finally got Tyler's drone videos and put them all together
http://the-adam.com/stuff/htm/moab2024.html
on a web page with links to the daily pictures,
my hand-held flying videos,
and, now, Tyler's drone videos.
The drone videos are fantastic and, alas,
they are also quite large,
large enough to tax some people's download speeds.
So I have the link to a smaller version and then a
"(large)" link to the full-size video.
There are also drone videos from an early trip,
2024 October 26-27,
to Bryce Canyon.
1.1.4 2025 January 4 - Aviation Day of Joy
Flying friend Shanley invited me and
other flying friend Tyler to a brunch gathering of
her local Phoenix chapter of the
Ninety-Nines
in beautiful-red-rocks Sedona (SEZ).
We flew up together in my Piper Cherokee N8377W
and had a delightful breakfast with good company
where we were welcome guests at their table.
There was talk of airplanes and airports
and flying and careers and other aviation subjects.
It was great.
As we were leaving Sedona
we bumped into the Sedona chapter of the Ninety-Nines
who also were having a meeting at Sedona Airport (SEZ)
and I got to see both groups taking a big group photo.
On the way back to Falcon Field Airport (FFZ)
we passed a local back-country airstrip called Red Creek,
the shortest runway in Arizona where I land my Cherokee.
"I'm not saying it's where angels fear to tread,
but they step lightly in these scary places."
Looking down on this seldom-inhabited aviation landmark
we saw an airplane on the side of the runway,
so we decided they might want company.
Radio calls unanswered,
we flew over the airstrip
to let them know we were landing, they waved at us,
we waggled our wings, I did a nice
landing
there, and our now new friends taxied over to greet us.
Matt is into aviation fire fighting and agriculture,
aviation careers outside the airlines
or the flight schools,
and interesting topics for young pilots
like Shanley and Tyler,
who are curious about careers in aviation.
It was a delightful conversation and
we admired his cool Piper SuperCub.
When we were coming back to Falcon
the radio sounded like a rapid-fire square-dance caller
and I was anticipating having to find five free seconds
to call my position and intentions,
"Falcon Tower, Cherokee
November Eight Three Seven Seven Whiskey,
inbound with [radio information] Echo,
south parking."
The last is squeezed in there
in the hope that the guys in the tower
will be kind enough to let us land on the south runway
further from where we are but closer to where we park
so we don't have to cross the south runway on the ground.
Air traffic controllers are usually pretty amazing
and they handle a lot of airplanes.
At so-called general-aviation airports like Falcon
they're handling lots of less-experienced pilots
which is a lot more stressful than sequencing airline pilots
who have thousands of hours and recent training
and who fly all the time with their excellent radio skills.
It's an interesting relationship between
pilots and controllers and usually it works very well.
We cede control of our immediate destiny to controllers
after telling them what we want
and their job is to get everybody where they want to be
safely and quickly.
It's like police where we give them control
so they can keep us safe and happy.
Whatever you may think of how good or bad
police-civilian relationships are in your town,
I have found air traffic controllers are my friends in the air.
Well, this time was above and beyond.
Just as I was anticipating introducing myself on the radio,
the point where we pilots tells controllers
who we are, where we are, and what we want to do,
I heard on the radio,
"November Eight Three Seven Seven Whiskey,
do you park on the south side?"
I sat up with a start.
Not only had I not introduced myself
to this frantically-busy tower controller,
so he must have been looking at the tracks
on the traffic display
(where on earth did he find the time
to look for me?),
but he also remembered I parked on the south side
and I might want to use the south runway,
not the north runway nearer my current position.
So I answered, "Seven Seven Whiskey, yes, please."
"Seven Seven Whiskey,
fly to the confluence
(a known reporting point for Falcon pilots)
for extended base leg to Runway Two Two Left."
Wow, yes sir,
"Seven Seven Whiskey, fly to the confluence, thank you."
After being cleared to land and landing,
I was able to get off the runway quickly
(to help him with traffic behind me) and,
as an encore,
he gave me taxi instructions to get to my parking space
so I didn't have to call the equally-busy ground controller.
We did find a gap in the radio chatter to thank
the controllers for doing a kick-ass job for us.
The whole day was pleasant, wonderful, and surreal.
1.1.5 2025 January 7 - The Gloomiest Week of the Year
The solstices are the longest and shortest days of the year,
summer being the most daylight hours and winter being the fewest.
However, the earth's orbit is not a circle but an ellipse,
the earth is tilted on its axis, and the result is an effect
called "The Equation of Time" in some books.
The result is the winter solstice is neither
the earliest sunset, usually around December 7,
nor the latest sunrise, usually around January 7,
check out the
analemma
for more details.
So, for morning people like me,
especially morning people that like to ride a bicycle
and don't like doing it at night at my more-advanced age,
that makes this week the gloomiest week of the year.
At least there's nowhere to go but brighter mornings
until sometime around June 7.
1.1.6 2025 January 11 - Making Cool Friends
This one isn't really my story,
but I got to enjoy the moment today.
My buddy Tyler was playing some video game online,
I'm older and I don't play these games
(although I did go through a bunch of first-person
virtual-reality games like "Castle Wolfenstein"
and "Doom" and "Heretic" a few decades ago),
and he met a fellow Hayden.
This fellow was Out There in Cyberspace,
who knows where, some user handle in an Internet universe.
The same gregarity that got Tyler and me to become friends
from a chance meeting from a flat tire he got at another airport
got Tyler and Hayden to ask the next questions.
These are questions like "Where do you live?"
and "Can we meet in real life?"
Well, the short version is they did meet,
they have other interests in common,
and I got to meet Hayden today on a flight to meet
another friend for breakfast
out in the Middle of Nowhere,
the Wayside Oasis restaurant at Alamo Lake
in western Arizona.
He is truly a delightful and interesting person.
Not all my friends of friends interest me,
but this one does and I look forward to future meetings.
1.1.7 2025 January 14 - Retired from Clear Demand
It looks like my time has come,
at least so far as Clear Demand is concerned.
Jim and I started Clear Demand in 2011 October
and incorporated in 2012 April, thirteen years ago.
With a combination of our very-different knowledge and insights
we became a serious force in retail science
and we made eight or ten clients a lot of money.
With my usual lack of aw-shucks modesty,
my phenomenal ability to turn good ideas
(my own ideas and those of other people)
into working, practical, production-quality software
made our success happen.
We sold the company to M3 in 2024 June,
M3 bought a retail-competitor-data company BungeeTech soon after,
and the combination should be
a stronger, more-complete company,
still called Clear Demand.
Where the company is going is different enough
that my role as an employee is coming to an end.
My last day is today and, going forward,
my connection with Clear Demand will be less and different.
There is opportunity for me to give advice
and to answer questions and maybe to do work with Jim Sills.
I hope to get more exercise with longer bike rides
and to continue
my aggressive
(I consider eighty concerts a year "aggressive")
concert season,
enjoying my vinyl and tape collection on my
hifi,
flying my airplane with friends to wonderful places,
seeing total solar eclipses
with Barcelona
(2026)
and Luxor
(2027)
on my planning horizon,
and enjoying my family and friends.
1.1.8 2025 January 17 - Car Crash - Ouch!
A delightful, and delightfully redheaded, paramedic
named Monica chatted with me for a while
and reported to me, and to others I presume,
that I showed no symptoms of anything other than
impending soreness.
I asked specifically about apparent vocabulary or memory issues,
slurred speech, anything like that, and she said I seemed fine.
Monica assured me I could still go to a hospital then,
or tomorrow if I felt bad then.
After a bunch of forms professionally and politely
offered by police, who also were nice enough to get my
stuff from my car for me,
I walked to a nearby petrol station and took a Lyft ride home.
My neck and lower-right ribs are uncomfortable.
We'll see how sore I am tomorrow.
1.1.9 2025 January 19 - Smart People Conversation
I have some smart people in my
professional and social life and
I never stop enjoying dialogue with them.
It's a myth that
reasoned conversation reliably reaches consensus.
You know the message
that if we keep cool heads and discuss something reasonably
that we will reach a common-good conclusion.
Even if every party is reasonably intelligent
the result can still be back-and-forth babble
not getting anywhere useful or interesting.
It's especially difficult when the two people involved
have different cadences.
I'm smart, Charles is smart, but I'm quick and Charlies isn't.
When we have conversations I have to remember that Charles
will get it, but it will take him fifteen seconds to one minute
to get what I get in two or three seconds.
That doesn't make me smarter, only faster,
and I have to remember to wait the extra time
for his equally-valid, equally-insightful ideas to emerge.
Charles and I have been having conversations
for forty-seven years and we have worked it out.
There are media like email that allow for each step
to be reasoned carefully where an extra five minutes doesn't
impede communication.
A conversation shouldn't feel like a chess game
with a ticking clock.
I was having one of those
politically-relevant math converations with Baxter.
It was about voting schemes.
We are both frustrated that the current election process,
with or without the Electoral College,
pretty-much guarantees victory for
one of the two big parties
even when a third party actually has more popular support.
It's not a new issue nor is this a new discussion for us,
but the subject is especially topical
right after a major U.S.-Presidential election.
My scheme is algorithmically consise,
people submit a list of preferred candidates,
intially any U.S. native-born citizen over thirty-five years of age.
We take everbody's first choice on the list of candidates,
rank order the candidates by that count,
and keep enough candidates for half the vote.
Usually we expect one candidate to get half the vote and it's over.
Otherwise we keep just the candidates that total half the vote
and repeat the process with people's first choices on
the new, much-shorter list.
We repeat until only one candidate is left.
In the case where most people prefer D or R
it comes out the same as now,
but supposing there is strong support for some third party,
we would see that support in official ballot counts
because people could vote their Libertarian or Green or other choice
first knowing their D-vs.-R choice would still
affect the outcome.
His scheme is to have people vote just YES or NO
for each of those same initial list.
In practice they could list up to, say, five names.
We're interested in the case where there are two, three, or four
candidates a voter prefers rather than having
vote lists like every U.S. citizen except one person.
There were points in our recent discussion
where we debated the notion of numerical-score voting
where my hope-he-wins candidate gets a score of one,
my hope-he-loses candidate gets a score of minus one,
and some third party candidate gets some numerical score reflecting
the voter's confort with that candidate.
I rebelled strenuously on that one claiming
I might trust people to state a preference
but not to say they liked one candidate some numerical amount
more than another.
Baxter's scheme was that people would list their acceptable
candidates for office and whoever got the highest number,
regardless of rank among a voter's choices, wins the election.
At the end, I said,
"Look, in the current scheme of things,
we would both be mostly satisfied if we could name
one or two candidates for President of the United States
and in my scheme the two-choices voter expresses a preference
and in your scheme the voter just lists both names."
What made it cool with a converation between
two smart people is there was clear recognition
that this captured the essence of our difference.
I find myself in conversation with less-smart people
we get enmired in details and
I find myself unable to communicate essential differences
amid a flurry of minor issues.
I'm a smart person, no mystery there,
and I use other people's ideas well which makes me smarter.
Maybe another part of smartness
is being able to codify the essential difference in a discussion.
Of course that requires both parties in the discussion be listening.
Thank you, Baxter, for being a friend who gets it.
1.1.10 2025 January 21 - Recovering and Relaxing
My neck is a lot less sore from my
accident
on Friday night,
my lower-right rib is still tender,
so I'm not doing my twice-daily plank exercises
or riding my bicycle yet.
I plan to see my doctor soon to check things out,
but I figure I'll wait a couple more days,
once because I want to see how I'm doing after about a week
and again because I tend to procrastinate.
(I keep meaning to look up "procrastinate"
and I keep putting it off.)
Meanwhile I'm enjoying my life of leisure
to catch up on home-computer-system issues,
tools I use that don't work quite the way I want.
There are some new projects I'm going to start soon.
(There's that procrastination bit again.)
One project I'm starting is transcribing my old "master" tapes
to high-bit-rate digital.
During my graduate-school days in 1980 and 1981
I recorded about forty big-reel tapes
(Ten inch reels of 1-mil tape,
48 minutes at 15 inches/second (38 cm/sec))
of local jazz in and around Stanford,
really sweet recordings with the life and energy of live music
and the musical resolution and spatial imaging of
only-two-microphone stereo recording.
There were Maxell-brand reels which are pristine and wonderful,
no problems there,
and I'm starting with those.
There are also Ampex Grandmaster-456 reels that have succumbed
to Sticky Tape Syndrome where they get all gooey
and can't be played the way they are.
It turns out they can be baked in an oven
at 60° C (140° F) for twelve hours,
left for a day,
and then played for the next two or three days.
That window is wide enough not only to make digital copies
at high resolution
(24 bit depth at 96K samples/second resolution, "24/96" in geek-speak,
I made compact-disk (CD) 16/44 copies of these tapes twenty years ago
and they're pretty good)
but also to copy them onto Maxell reels I bought
from The Tape Warehouse in Atlanta twenty years ago.
That means I get to listen to these wonderful moments from my past,
more than forty years ago.
1.1.11 2025 January 23 - Itzhak Perlman
We normally think of violinist Itzhak Perlman
as being a classical musician with exquisite interpretations
of the great composers.
On the Mendelssohn-piano-trios compact disk (CD)
his name gets more than half the album cover,
mostly because "Ax" and "Ma" are such shorter names
than "Perlman."
This concert was different.
He was in a band called "Fiddler's House"
where they played Jewish music from eastern Europe
centered around 1875,
a decade before seven of my eight great-grandparents left that area.
It was fun to hear the music and the banter and the stories.
In a world ripe with strife
it was wonderful to have a concert
celebrating Jewish tradition without
politics.
The joy of the music and the culture and, of course, the food
was the message and the audience had fun with it as well.
One of the fun moments was a brief discussion
of the piano part of the group.
These people were nomadic enough that they tended
to play instruments they could carry with them
and the piano doesn't quite fit that bill.
One voice mentioned electric keyboards and it was pointed out
there weren't a lot of electric keyboards
one hundred and fifty years go.
There was talk of good times and good matzo-ball soup
and wonderful weddings.
It was a good evening all around.
1.1.12 2025 January 25 - The Texas Tenors
The Texas Tenors is three men singing with a band,
a little religous and a lot American patriotic
with a variety of other sorts of music, a lot of fun for me.
They are regulars at Chandler Center for the Arts and at Musicfest.
Two years ago, 2023 January 21, they did a concert at Chandler.
One of them, Marcus, often goes out into the auditorium
and interacts with members of the audience and, this time,
he stopped by my aisle seat and started doing something
atop my head.
I figured if he was going to do something terrible
there would be close to two thousand witnesses,
so I kept still.
After about a minute he asked for my cell phone and took a selfie
of him and me after he had done my hair into a ridge line.
There isn't much to work with up there, but he did the job and,
in the lobby after the show, several people came up to me and said,
"you're the hair-do guy!"
Fast forward two years to 2025 January 25
and a woman named Luanne comes up to me,
my gray hair looking its normal sparse way,
and said, "you're the hair-do guy from two years ago!"
She even had pictures from back then on her cell phone.
She's from Dallas
and her son and his wife both work in the arts in
the Phoenix Valley of the Sun,
I saw the daughter-in-law at the Phoenix Symphony a few days later,
and it was fun all around.
When I said "hi" to him two years later
I don't think Marcus knew me from, well, you know,
but it will still fun all around.
1.2 2025 February
1.2.1 2025 February 9 - My Tape Project
There was an
outfit
called The Tape Project
where they found master tapes of deserving record albums
and sold high-quality "master-dub" copies for about $300.
I believe they ultimately failed because they put about $100
in packaging around each box they sold and didn't make money,
but I have no way of knowing what actually happened.
My own tape project is a little different.
I have forty tapes I made in 1981 and 1982,
15-inch-per-second, half-track, quarter-inch reels,
that deserve preservation.
The later reels on Maxell tape are fine,
but the old Ampex reels have succumbed to Sticky Tape Syndrome
where the tape gets gooey and sticky and yukky.
There is a process of baking them for twelve hours at 60° C
where they get dry and playable for two or three days
so I can copy them onto Maxell reels I bought
just over twenty years ago that are still good.
(I discuss this in Section 1.1.10.)
I'm copying them all onto digital files
at 24 bits and 96000 samples per second,
high-enough quality to be almost as good
as the original tapes.
(I have copies I made at compact-disk (CD) quality,
16 bits and 44000 samples per second
and they're not too bad.)
For now I'm just copying the newer Maxell reels to digital files,
I bought a big beef-jerky oven to bake the Ampex tapes later on.
So, this morning, I'm back in time, 1981 April 2 9:30pm
in Palo Alto at Chuck's Celler listening to Solar Plexus.
It's very nice, the sound is terrific, and the memories are terrific.
1.2.2 2025 February 21 - Car Accident and Back Pain
Good news is my car-accident injuries are abating.
You know the drill:
"My doctor says I'll get better and my lawyer says I won't."
My car crash on 2025 January 17 left me with sore lower-right ribs
and difficulty turning my head up-down and left-right.
The rib injury is pretty-much gone and
the neck injury is abating, still some trouble,
and still some concern riding a bicycle where turning my head
is a useful thing to avoid getting hit.
That part of my medical life is getting better.
I'm having some sciatic-style pain that concerns me.
When I stand up for more than ten or fifteen minutes
I get pain in my left leg, not localized,
just everywhere in my left leg.
It's a little and then a little more and then more and then a lot.
I suspect it's some kind of sciatic pain
and I have an appointment with my doctor next Monday.
In 1985 I herniated my L5 disk, the lowest lower-back vertebra,
and on 1986 February 14 I sneezed in the middle of the night
and had twenty-one hours of severe sciatic pain
I don't every want to relive. Whee!
That pain has only returned in faint shadows
of its original intensity and I've had periods of about a month
walking with a cane, but never have I had a recurrance.
My latest cane usage is completely different
with my left knee "worn out" from forty years of running,
not the same thing at all.
I've known in the back of my mind
there might be a time when that disk would squeeze down
and my sciatic nerve would be pinched so I would be
in agony for the rest of my life.
I just hoped that day would be the day after I die.
This isn't that, at least not yet,
but social, casual conversations with a medical doctor or two
tell me it might be something surgically fixable.
I expect Monday's doctor visit to result in me getting
a scan (MRI) to find out what's going on in there and then
to figure our what I'm going to do.
It might get better, good, or it might get worse.
Right now I have no pain at all while sitting or lying down,
only when standing for a while.
While not being able to stand around would be a life change
as I have several stand-up social settings in my life,
at least now I have the relief of being able to sit down.
I'll keep you all posted.
1.3 2025 March
1.3.1 2025 March 12 - Hifi
Hi Jim,
I hope you enjoyed joining my hifi journey yesterday.
and I hope you enjoyed finding out how wonderful
hearing-aid technology is in 2025,
especially for music.
Turning the hearing aids off and on made clear
how much they do.
That proves how wonderful hearing aids can be for music.
We know they help us
(say it out loud)
wreck a nice beach,
and now it's clear they help us perceive and resolve
musical information as well.
On Steely Dan's record "Aja"
we heard a lot of musical detail.
Apparently your high-frequency loss isn't as severe as mine
because you were able to hear the little bell in the right rear
on the chorus of the title track "Aja" and I wasn't.
I'll point out that one of my hifi revelations was hearing
that bell on that track on a really-good hifi amplifier where,
instead of just being a high-frequency "ting" in the background,
it had shape and form as part of the music.
We walked through three digital recordings
from a reel-to-reel tape of Ravi Shanker,
16-48, 16-96, and 24-96.
The first is sixteen-bit depth with
forty-eight thousand samples per second,
the second is still sixteen-bit depth with
ninety-six thousand samples per second, and
the third is twenty-four-bit depth still with
ninety-six thousand samples per second.
With your hearing aids you clearly heard the differences
to the point where the first was limp and uninspiring,
the second better, and the third was quite engaging.
Since I prefer to play tapes all the way through,
I was lazy and didn't produce the final step
to the tape itself,
but my point was well made
that your old ears with the new hearing aids
were able easily to hear the differences.
When I put on the digital copy of my tape
from 1980 February 13 at The Bucket bar in Palo Alto,
a wonderful evening of wonderful jazz from forty-five years ago,
the stereophonic presentation of the stage
and the placement of the instruments,
something we hifi weenies call "image,"
gave the reproduction a strong sense of authenticity and fidelity.
The recording was made with a portable compact-cassette deck,
a Sony TCD5, on Maxell UD tape, no chrome, no metal in those days,
and no noise reduction,
just a plain-jane compact cassette,
and the recording was joy.
On a similarly spatious stereophonic recording
of a Swedish choir on the Proprius label,
it was clearly better when I changed the vertical tracking angle
of my phonograph cartridge from the angle best for "Aja"
to the angle best for Proprius records.
On a Mercury Living Presence record of Spanish music
an even-smaller adjustment,
even on an outer groove where it makes less difference,
was still audible improvement.
I played some of your own recordings,
only MP3 quality alas,
of your own guitar-and-vocal performance.
You were pleased that you didn't make any
(or many)
mistakes
on the recording and I hope,
when an appropriate venue presents itself,
you decide to let me make a proper, analogue recording.
I also shared with you a fun merger
of 1955 and 2025 technologies where an old "staggered" tape
with left and right channels time spaced for tape-head isolation
was able to be heard from a post-1955, new "stacked" deck
using FFMPEG computer software.
The recording was a Haydn symphony and the corrected playback
had a clear orchestral sound with a glorious stereo image.
My hifi insight is considerable
over five decades of being an audio weenie.
We have talked about this,
that much of my "genius" is that I understand the
insights and vision of other people who often know more than I do,
and much of my hifi vision comes from my
forty-four year relationship,
as a customer and as a friend, with Mel Schilling.
Most of my equipment is related somehow to Mel,
the Quad ESL
(for ElectroStatic Loudspeakers)
in my hifi room were his,
he gave them to me
(for $800, that was a gift)
in 1985,
and I figure he used them for twenty years before that.
He sold me my Linn Sondek LP12 turntable in 1979,
his associate John Iverson made my amplifier in the 1980s,
and my EK-1 phono-pickup system was a partnership
between Mel and John circa 1980.
Actually, in 1980, his "techie" Mike Frasier sold me
the two ReVox tape decks that I still have and use.
Mel's insight into music and sound are a major part
of my own hifi insight and understanding.
1.3.2 2025 March 30 - Increasingly Dense Traffic
I've noticed a disturbing trend in the
Phoenix Valley of the Sun,
the increasing density of road traffic.
Not only are they denser, they're more numerous.
(Get it?)
Having more cars on the road is scary enough,
especially when I'm spending more time on my bicycle.
More cars means more opportunity for one of them to hit me.
It's worse than that because each of those drivers
is looking at more other cars and that means
they have less attention available to look for me.
The last-few years randomization of the traffic light sequences
in Scottsdale is also disturbing.
We used to be famous for the "lagging left"
where our green left-turn arrow came after
the straight-traffic which has several advantages
for both motor traffic and for bicyclists and runners.
Now about half of them come before and half come after,
so there isn't even method to the madness.
Drivers distracted by randomized traffic lights
of course have less attention to devote to avoiding
hitting bicyclists.
My last beef is the change in attitude.
I believe this is a migration from the California coast.
If Los Angeles is the "Mental Desert,"
then Phoenix has become tne "New Mental Desert"
where people who can't afford California real-estate prices
or people who don't like the results of California politics
decide to come here.
(Alas, they may dislike the results of California politics
but these people generally do not renounce the political positions
that made things that way, so they're bringing the same problems here.)
When I lived in the Golden State of California
a few decades ago, the driving was a major problem for me.
Drivers weren't just negligent and stupid,
they were perverse.
Bay area drivers tend to hide just behind another driver,
in the other driver's so-called blind spot.
I guess they figured they wouldn't be hurt if they couldn't be seen.
It doesn't work that way and I found myself "pinned" in a lane
by some other driver who rushed from behind to block me in.
Los Angeles drivers tend to drive next to others at their speed,
again changing their speed perversely to be in the way.
As those drivers migrate east to Arizona,
their bad habits come here as well.
I find myself having to do more lane changes this year
than in years past,
more than the increased number of cars would suggest.
I find other drivers also have the perverse habit
of slowing down when I get behind them
and speeding up when I try to pass,
both bad things to do.
Add this to the dramatic increase in no-signal drivers
and the increased tendency to make wide turns into the wrong lanes
and the result is a more-stressful, less-safe road system.
I'm open to suggestions what is the best way to deal with this.
A few years ago I raised the turn-signal, wide-turns, and
randomized traffic lights to the Scottsdale traffic regulators.
I'm a bright, articulate, Stanford-Ph.D. person,
I spoke carefully and calmly from notes with my reasons
for concern,
and I expected some dialogue, but I was completely ignored.
Oh well, maybe it's just going to get more and more awful.
1.4 2025 April
1.4.1 2025 April 10 - Arts Cultural Revolution
I'm having a bit of frustration with
a trend in some of the local performing arts,
local in place and local in time.
Let me get the local-in-place off my chest.
Many so-called "classical" pieces of music are written in movements.
Symphonies usually have four movements,
concerti usually have three movements,
but there are many examples with different numbers.
Some story-style pieces have ten or more movements.
When and where I come from we are silent between movements,
maybe clearing a throat or a cough, but never applause.
(When I took my mother to the Philadelphia Orchestra
we would often smile at each other as if it were our secret
how beautiful this piece of music was,
kind of like we winked at each other watching detective shows
as if we were the only ones who knew who committed the crime.)
Per cliché this between-movement silence is golden,
a romantic, holy chasm in the plateau of sound.
Alas, while this respect is nearly universal back east,
here in Phoenix applause between movements happens
and it frustrates me, especially at the Phoenix Symphony.
I had a short conversation
with then-music-director Tito Muñez
where he defended it by suggesting that
between-movement applause was okay in Mozart's time.
I still maintain it's not a good thing in our time
and I try to encourage people near me to keep quiet
and I raise my arms in the air as a signal to those behind me.
Who knows?
I may yet win this battle as more and more concerts
seem free of between-movement applause.
My other, local-in-time, beef is a kind of cultural revolution
in performing arts.
Some so-called classical concerts have electronic music
or amplified instruments, a little bit of modernism creeping in,
but my greater beef is when my two ballet companies,
Arizona and Philadelphia,
have selections that have no ballet in them.
I'm a huge fan of all kinds of dance,
Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Dave Parsons, Momix, Pilabolus,
Dorrance, Alvin Ailey, Aspen-Santa Fe, et cetera,
along with international dance including
Flamenco, Irish tap dancing, Indian, and Cambodian styles.
They have their own individual "vocabularies" of dance movement
as different ballet choreographers have their own vocabularies.
George Ballanchine was a major force in ballet
here in the United States during the Twentieth Century.
I have seen ballets that are different,
pressing their metaphorical noses against the glass walls
of the ballet medium,
but only one that felt extended his intensity and energy
with new movements and forms without pressing the limits.
(My reservations about "outside the box"
is I had a cat who thought that way and I had to clean it up
each morning.)
That ballet exploring new frontiers completely inside the box
was "PS" by Juliano Nunes in Philadelphia.
I remember less of what I saw and more of what I felt,
but I had no doubt it was all ballet, it was new and exciting,
and it was not Ballanchine.
So it can be done.
When I see a half-hour ballet where I see no ballet movements,
or very little,
I feel something essential is missing.
I get the response, "Well, it's contemporary."
If I go the opera and a jazz band comes out with no vocals,
then my response is to feel robbed, not to feel it's okay
because "it's contemporary."
Of course the post-modern cultural vibe is our minds
should be open, at both ends sometimes,
a vision I don't share.
Like my opera example, I want some of my ballet shows
to be new and different, but not to abandon their ballet roots.
My response to the notion that these dancers should have
an opportunity to show their abilities in fora other than ballet
is to suggest having a show that specifically says it's not ballet,
that's it's our "Modern Dance Show" or something like that.
I believe the effect of being open minded to extreme
is to create an atmosphere that, all too soon,
will forget the traditions that make the original art
wonderful and special.
We have seen what "cultural revolutions" have done
in China and here in the United States
where past glories are forgotten in the quest for new vision.
I want my orchestra to keep playing
Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, et cetera
and I want my ballet companies to keep doing
"Swan Lake" and "Sleeping Beauty" while they explore new frontiers,
and I want those frontier still to keep traditional roots.
Is that too much to ask?
1.4.2 2025 April 14 - Opera Aida in AI
Just in case my opera-jazz example was too esoteric,
I saw a production of "Aida" yesterday at Phoenix Symphony Hall.
Instead of the usual magnificent sets and theatrical blocking
and creative costumes,
they had the usual orchestra in the pit,
the singers and chorus onstage,
and a big screen with AI (as in "artificial intelligence")
generating a visual image following the music.
The images were creative with computer-generated lip-synching
for some of the arias.
Aida is set in ancient Egypt in a war with Ethiopia
and they managed to have tanks and rocket bombs for the war,
solar panels on the rooftops,
twenty-first-century windmills in the scenic backgrounds,
and an old, rotary-dial telephone for one intimate conversation.
I found myself quite happy with the performance
once I ignored the visual effects.
I'll point out that one of my seat neighbors
thought the visuals were a good thing,
interesting and creative and supporting the plot of Aida.
The fourth act had the computer screen completely dark
and I don't know if it was technical failure
or reflecting the darkness of the buried-alive-in-a-tomb
death sentence for him-and-her characters Radames and Aida.
I have been to concert-opera events before.
Avid opera conducor Riccardo Muti was
the music director at the Philadelphia Orchestra
for a dozen years and he managed to sneak in
some operas performed in a concert setting
without sets or costumes.
These were wonderful musical events,
but nobody pretended these were real opera performances.
Unlike the movie-screen shows of actual, live operas,
the music here was all live and it filled the hall with joy
as only a live-performer presentation does.
They told us up front the visuals would be computer generated,
but, still, I wasn't the only one who felt it fell short
of an actual on-stage opera.
I'm sure "it's contemporary,"
but I missed the opera in the opera
as I missed the ballet in the ballet
a few weeks earlier.
If anybody has any opinions to offer here,
then I'm "all-ears" interested to hear them.
Lenny Briscoe: I always wanted to learn guitar.
Ed Green: Actually it's a bass, a Rickenbacker.
Lenny Briscoe: Is that good?
Ed Green: It was good enough for Elvis.
Lenny Briscoe: Now you're talking my generation.
Ed Green: Actually, that's Elvis Costello.
Lenny Briscoe: Who's on first?
I was driving home
in my new, ten-week-old Volkswagon Golf GTI
from dinner at the home of friends
northbound in the left lane of Hayden Road in Scottsdale.
(I was in the left lane rather then the center lane
because there had been some traffic in the center lane.)
All of a sudden a red car appears to my right
making a left turn "across my bow" not stopping,
just moving directly into my path.
I hit the brakes hard figuring I would stop before impact,
that didn't happen,
I heard a crash,
and, the next thing I knew,
my car was stopped and I was surrounded by white airbags.
I slithered my way out of the car and walked around.
My front end was completely destroyed, "squished in,"
and the other car was on its side with people inside.
Needless to say, the primary effort of the police and fire folks
was getting them out of their car to safety.
Here
are my pictures after the crash.
14:00:44 Mountain Standard Time
(MST).
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