In the eye of the beholder

There is so much talent out there. It's a wonder. We have such easy access to such greatness, it's remarkable. I think that somehow, this has happened to us without our fully being able to appreciate it or adapt to it as a society... From a modern perspective, this evolution of social knowledge began in earnest with books, then with radio and as cars and airplanes broke down the barriers of distance, and then a huge step forward with TV, and then a giant leap forward with the Web. And the phenomenon is only accelerating, what with Google and Youtube and iPods and so on.

Here on my flight to work, with no effort on my part at all, I enjoy:
-- the greatest musicians that have ever lived; enormous, profound talents -- Sally Goodin by Flatt & Scruggs (get up and dance, bastard!), Bottle of Wine by the Kingston Trio (used to love that song as a kid), Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin (right to the core of hell and back), Break on Through by the Doors (that's why the 60s were the Zen era), an aria from Rossini's Aragonese, sung magnificantly by Cecilia Bartoli (how can humans create such beauty?), Neil Young's Too Far Gone (have you never felt it?), Matters of the Heart by Tracy Chapman (oh Tracy, I love you so! who could be as vulnerable and perceptive and honest as you are!) and so on.

-- George Carlin's observations on the various kinds of stupid people -- "fuckin stupid", "full a shit", and "fuckin nuts"... Oh yeah. It's like a godsend to have someone tell the truth.

-- Payton Manning's glorious outstandingness surgically dissecting the Denver defense, managing his offense. He's so head and shoulders above everyone else, it's inspiring. He's taken his great physical talent, and his disciplined preparation, and his obvious competitiveness, and added an element of creativity and intelligence -- reinventing the very definition of quarterback, so that opponents live in fear that he has tricks up his sleeve that they have not even imagined, or that they cannot keep up with -- and they are right. He does what every great leader does: he is unbound by traditional definitions; he excels at the core competencies of his role, while adding his own significant stamp, pushing the boundaries, inventing the future. A model of achievement.

It sometimes seems to me that everyone is talented, although there are other times I despair that everyone is an idiot -- definitely a tale of two cities. The people near me on this very flght are composing videos or running companies or architecting breakthrough new buildings on their laptops. As we speak, my good friends are inventing the future of social networking and social entrepreneurship, are brilliant lights from political activism to medieval literature, and more. One looks out the window of a New York hotel -- and the streets and windows are aflower with genius and dynamism, with all the bubbling fervor of self-actualization in the Brave New World. I am myself, perhaps, quite brilliant in my way :-)

Who could be ungrateful for such gifts? If only I could absorb and learn their lessons as well as they deserve, and as well as I should, if I could retain the open, adaptive mindset of youth.

But even the young cannot appreciate their gifts; indeed, I observe that most young people are remarkably parochial in what they can appreciate, in the stingy poverty of their awareness and openness. They do not yet know what they don't know, they are not even really aware that such a category exists, so their world-view is tightly circumscribed by what is fashionable or grossly attractive. Even the most brilliant among them cannot have the depth of experience to perceive the subtleties of importance and talent, and their attempts at insight ring hollow; indeed laughable, albeit noble.

The truth is, the richness of our social knowledge has far far far outpaced our human capacity. The child of man is waiting to be born, who will be ready and able to process all the manifold knowledge and beauty and power that their forebears have brought into being, and who will move forward the world into an unimaginable new frontier.

Thoughts on the flight home

One of my favorite songs ever is Hollaback Girl, by Gwen Stefani. I love Gwen: she's a great writer, extremely creative and personal, but slick and catchy and professional too -- true talent, brilliant range -- and all that as a musician. Hollaback Girl tells a story beautifully, perfectly capturing the feel of the moment and the character in high school. The language, the pace, the style, the silliness (what an inspired use of "Bananas"!), all are perfect.

But my favorite part is a sentence that I mis-heard, and was oh so disappointed to learn was really something else. The real line is the perfectly reasonable "It's not just gonna happen like that" -- where "happen" is pronounced "hap-bin". Well, I heard it as "It's not just gonna have been like that..", which put me into a kind of grammatical ecstacy.

In my version, the sentence writhes through tenses in a way that -- to me -- perfectly expresses the complex thought processes we all perform all the time, immediately and without effort, but which are so hard to convey. The singer does not think it would be OK for the situation to work out in such a way that she had allowed it to be like that. Looking forward, she anticipates that inaction would result in a future where the past had established an untenable precedent, which, here in the current moment while she has a chance to act, she realizes she must prevent. It is not the specific action she must prevent, it is the future in which that action has been allowed to have just taken place, without resistance.

I love how perfectly her pithy phrase captures this, with no hard work, just right to the point, and in language you might truly expect to hear in the mind of a high school cheerleader. It sounds so natural, although when you allow your mind to course over the phrase, it wraps and curls around itself in a lovely, serpentine, moving kind of way that is hours of entertainment for a freak like me. How sad that this was not what she said at all!

And another thing:

If and when I die, and there is a funeral or a celebration or cermony of some sort, someone should please play Sam Cooke's Twistin the Night Away. Nobody else's version, please, but that one. Of course you can play lots and lots and lots of other music too -- Talkin About a Revolution, and Cherry Cherry and Moonshadow and It Aint Me, Babe, and The Battle of New Orleans and Rockin in the Free World and It's In His Kiss and Meet Me at Mary's Place and so many many more. You need to bury me with a whole shitload of my favorite music, playing out loud so the worms can hear it and the grass trembles with it. Beethoven and Mozart too, and all that stuff.

But please play Twistin the Night Away, and everybody dance, or everyone who wants to anyway, and think of me dancing in the upstairs bedroom of the Mission Viejo house, with Ama downstairs washing the dishes and my wife around the house somewhere doing other chores or helping Ama, and a happy young me up there every night holding my one-and-a-half or two-year-old girl on my shoulder, in my arms, singing to the music, swinging her in my arms, tossing her out this way, back this way, up and back, twirling and laughing, night after night. Dancing to the music with my baby. It makes me want to cry every time I hear it. There is no better feeling. There has never been and there will never be anything that meant as much to me as that. Or holding her gently to sleep on my shoulder as we played Moonshadow, humming softly, easing her down onto the bed. Or chasing her down the slide and sitting and telling stories and walking and playing with her in the park at her pre-school. Or walking her home from school. I want to go with that in my heart.