the epicenter

Today’s subject is the human brain. And, contrary to the opinion of several of my regular e-mailers – a couple of whom I’m related to – I do have one.

Scientists agree that the brain is the most complex thing we’ve ever encountered in the known universe, with the possible exception of some college-admission forms. Of course, when you get down to it, that assertion is really the brain judging itself. It is, in fact, the most grandiose and yet the most disguised form of narcissism ever – kind of like Woody Allen declaring that the highest form of artistic expression known to humankind are the films of Woody Allen, all while wearing a fake noses and glasses.

We are now learning something about the brain that we figured out about the body a long time ago – that it needs “exercise” to hold off decrepitude, that brains can get flabby just like bodies if we get lazy.

It’s true, folks. There are mental and psychological equivalents to love handles, beer guts, crotch biscuits [a Tina Fey coinage, blame her, not me] cottage-cheese thighs, muffin tops, jello arms – hey, anybody other than me getting hungry?

That means, of course, that on top of all the time you’re spending at the gym – or all the time you’re spending loathing your worthless love-handled hide for not going to the gym – you have to pay attention to brain fitness as well. Oh, joy.

Now, I know what you’re thinking – because I just downloaded that new clairvoyance app for my brain. You’re thinking, “Oh, yeah. I’m already ahead of you there, annoying newspaper guy. I always do a Soduku before I go to bed at night.”

Ha! That’s the sound of me scoffing at your Soduku. You know that guy who looks like a hot water heater in a Harley vest who claims he gets his upper-body strength from lifting cases of Old Milwaukee into the bed of his Dodge Ram pick-up? [No? Your family must be different from mine]. Anyway, that guy is you and your Soduku, OK?

To whip that old brain into shape, you gotta reach higher. The key is to tackle some kind of mental challenge that – and this is important – your brain isn’t already inclined to do. Examples: getting straight all the “begats” in the Bible [non-rabbis only]; memorizing every starting line-up for the Pittsburgh Pirates [non-basement-dwelling, girlfriendless, mouth-breathing sports nerds only]; or understanding the rational business model of the derivatives market [non-greed-consumed, remorseless, slimeball Wall Street traders who are ruining America only].

Yet, you also have to take it slowly. I overdid it a bit last spring when my daughter took honors physics in high school and I offered to serve as her study buddy. I would have been better off signing us both up for an Ironman triathalon in the Himalayas.

People tend to get cocky when it comes to mental fitness. You have to respect your stupidity, just as you do your physical limits. When you see someone by the road with a flat tire, you wouldn’t pull over and offer to lift the car by the front bumper and jog it the mile or two to the person’s home, would you? Yet, you think your liberal-arts degree is sufficient to tackle honors physics? You know that phrase “My momma didn’t raise no fool”? Well, I never say that.

Youth is, of course, the mightiest asset when it comes both to body and brain fitness. My daughter, the same girl who took honors physics last year, is tackling Mandarin Chinese at Cabrillo in the fall [while still in high school, I might add]. With her young, pliable brain, that’s possible. For me, that would be like saying “I’m going to learn how to grow a third arm out from the middle of my chest.” Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.

Still, even if you’ve hit mid-life or slightly beyond, you still have plenty to gain. No, you’re not going to impress Stephen Hawking at dinner. But if you push your brain out of the long-established patterns that aren’t serving you anymore – like the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song, your ex’s Facebook posts, paying attention to Dr. Phil – then you may have room to develop new neural pathways that could ward off … uh, I can’t remember what you call it.

Which leads me to my great business idea: a brain-fitness gym. You pay us a monthly fee and come on down to our fun little meeting place and we’ll give your old coconut a good work-out with puzzles, games, memorization tests, etc. If you want to start slowly, we can do that – women’s dress sizes [for men only]; figuring out Earned Run Average [for women only]; pig-Latin classes.

But soon, you’ll want to get out of the kiddie pool, and swim with the grown-ups: how to rebuild the engine of a Ford Mustang [those with uncallused hands only]; how to jailbreak an iPhone [those who have no idea what that phrase means only]; how to communicate with a teenager or a rock critic [those over 40 only].

Any potential partners with several million dollars getting in the way at home can contact me pronto.

I will admit that this is a big risk. What physical fitness has going for it that mental fitness does not is, of course, sex. You punish yourself in the gym and you get rewarded with a hot bod that will get attention from similarly foxy potential mates, along with various pervs and philanderers. There is no mental equivalent to rocking a new string bikini at the beach, unless you’re a “Jeopardy” fetishist, and I think there are support groups for that kind of thing.

So, unless you’re doing it blindfolded, underwater or suspended upside down – or, preferably, all three – put down the Sudoku and embrace some real challenges. Get in mental shape because people consistently find intelligence sexy. Those people are liars, but sometimes, delusion is your friend.

As I write this, my daughter has yet to formally graduate from high school. But as you read this, she will have done so, and I will likely be resting comfortably in a room at Dominican hospital being treated for dehydration and salt depletion.

Sentimentality is one of my most unmanageable vices but, unless I stumble upon a Ken Burns documentary or that Springsteen song about a wreck on the highway, I can function day to day pretty well.

But, people, what am I supposed to do with this? I don’t have to tell anyone who’s experienced it that parental pride is the bucking bronco of emotions, wild and unpredictable, yet strong and true and beautiful. I prefer my emotions more tame and on a leash, frankly.

They say children grow up so fast, but that’s not exactly true. That’s just the sentimentality talking. When colic keeps her awake in her crib most of the night, when he’s 13 and slamming doors and listening to repugnant music way too loud, when she’s out at her first formal dance, when he’s driving away in your car under your insurance two months after getting his license – these are times when parenthood feels like an interminable slog.

Being a parent, in fact, is to be witness to a miracle in slow motion. That chubby baby I once held in my arms, that 4-year-old covered in finger-paints crying in the kitchen, that fifth-grader showing off her moves in the pool – all those children are as gone to me now as if they were the old appliances that we’d thrown out and replaced with new ones years ago, as if in fact they were each different people. What stands before me now is a young woman, in some ways a finished human being, legally and politically speaking, my equal.

What accounts for the difference between my hair-trigger emotionalism at this occasion and her rather blasé attitude is the fact that I’m quietly mourning the disappearance of all those children she used to be. And, she’s not. All she wants from her parents is for us to take her as she is now, not as she once was. And we owe it to her to do that. That’s the struggle.

I can’t count the times over the years when I would chat with other parents whose children were older than mine at the time. Whether they said the words or not, the message was clear: enjoy this period with your kids, because it will go the way of all things soon enough.

And now as I inhabit that role of the pathetic dad of the graduate, all a-puddle in my sport coat, clutching my program, I want to believe that I did enjoy those periods to their fullest – the face-painting and Halloween costumes, the backyard tea parties featuring the household pets and several imaginary guests, the battles over food and cleaning up, the swing sets and storybooks. But mostly I remember my all-engulfing relief during those moments when I could be alone again, or with other adults, before the whole circus started again the next day. So, I say to anyone with a 7-year-old in the house: Savor all those difficult and taxing kids things because what you know in your mind now – that these are fleeting moments never to return – you’ll only feel in your heart later on.

The young people now graduating are, of course, subject to sentimentality too. But it’s much more directed at their peers, to whom they feel a band-of-brothers [and sisters] solidarity of shared experience, and the painful realization that their relationships with each other are about to change radically. The parents aren’t part of that picture. It’s just common decency as a parent not to shoehorn yourself into that picture. Ours is a role of standing back.

Yet, on another level, I’m just not going to write off these waves of emotion as mere sentimentality. Graduations, weddings, funerals, many of the rituals of change we humans have concocted to mark our lives illustrate a deep spiritual paradox – maybe the deepest spiritual paradox about life as we live it.

At graduation, your child is one of dozens – sometimes hundreds, and on a global scale, millions – dressed exactly alike, having the exact same experience. That’s a reminder that she’s not unique, or even particularly special. But having seen her develop, having known intimately the warp and woof of her young life, you also know that she is unique in the world. The contradiction of those two truths – that life is cheap and plentiful, and at the same time unique and precious – is the source of all awe and wonder.

Banal platitudes? Yeah, sure. But what are graduation ceremonies all about but surrendering to the inescapable truth of banal platitudes? Has there been a commencement speech ever uttered that didn’t arrive at the same place somehow?

So I offer up my deepest congratulations to my daughter and all those donning the cap and gown this month. You’ll find soon enough that maddening paradox will follow you the rest of your days, as you make your way in this indifferent world – you are both unique in the all world, and also merely one of six billion souls struggling to live to your full potential.

And that goes for me too. I’d like to think that my turbulent emotional state when it comes to my own child is unique. But I know that the parent in the next folding chair is going through the same thing, and the one behind him, and the one beside her, and the one next to him …

Man, I hope the hospital is prepared for the rush.

For devotees of a particular artist or musician, an obituary is a painful thing – first, for the obvious reason, that it formally records the tragedy of that person’s death; but also because obits tend to codify how a given artist is viewed by a mass audience. And for true fans, that view is often unjust and dissatisfying.

For instance, Bob Dylan’s obit – which has surely been on file at the New York Times for 30 years or more – will invariably mention “The Times Are A-Changin’” in its first sentence, just as Randy Newman’s will mention “Short People.” Each is a small outrage.

Such was the case this week with the death of the great R&B/jazz poet singer/songwriter Gil Scott-Heron whose obits were quick to point to his “signature” song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and his role as an influence in the development of rap and hip-hop.

Back during my college years, I went through a period in which my life could be best summed up as Eat, Sleep and Gil Scott-Heron. So, this week, it was my turn to get rankled at obit reductionism.

Scott-Heron was certainly an influence in the prehistory of hip-hop, but he mostly thought of himself as a jazz man. Yet his socio-political rage burned with such incandesence that by comparison the snotty British punk rockers that came along during Gil’s most fruitful period look like children playing dress-up.

His blend of the relentlessly political with soulful human-scale balladry made him unique in his time and ours. In an industry where nearly everyone sounds like someone else, and every star has imitators, Scott-Heron was without peer.

He came out of New York in the late 1960s as a writer and poet, and his first records mixed spoken-word screeds more in line with 1950s-era beat poetry than today’s rap with gorgeous piano ballads that showcased an expressive baritone. The former famously included his take on the Apollo 11 moon landing, “Whitey on the Moon.” But his piano songs often translated that acid anger into compassion and tenderness. “Did You Hear What They Said?,” to take one example, is probably the most heartfelt response to the street violence of post-MLK ’60s you’ll ever hear.

Throughout the ’70s, Scott-Heron put out one jewel after another, writing about everything from corruption to drugs to nuclear power, mixed in with life-affirming songs of pride and optimism, all on the Arista label, founded by the ultimate music-industry godfather Clive Davis. Even with that mainstream stamp, Scott-Heron somehow found a way to include on his albums long, music-less political diatribes, full of clever invective and wordplay, set off by Watergate and various racism outrages.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Scott-Heron released what may have been his masterpiece, a long spoken-word proto-rap called “B Movie” attacking Reagan’s history as a Hollywood actor, played against a crisp funk beat and a bouncing bass line. Gil fans had every right to believe that the Reagan years would push him to new heights of creativity.

But then a weird thing happened. Instead of burning with new passions, he just burned out. After a tepid follow to “B Movie,” called “Re-Ron,” Scott-Heron essentially vanished. Plagued by drug addictions and arrests – specifically a monstrous dependence on crack cocaine – he stopped recording for a decade. Then, after a listless album in the mid ’90s, he disappeared again, just when we needed him most.
I got to interview Scott-Heron when he came to Santa Cruz around 1993. He was testy and distracted, and I felt he was contemptuous of the job that I had to do. It was a disspiriting experience for someone who had been such an ardent Gil fan.

But the fact is that Scott-Heron’s music does not hold up today. His insistence on being political in his music made his songs topical, and thus they sound hopelessly dated. That, of course, only illuminates his main role in the 1970s, as a kind of commentator to the ongoing drama of living in America in his day. The earlier recordings of Public Enemy and Michael Franti, as close to disciples of Scott-Heron as you’re likely to find, also sound dated. And that is their glory. They sounded immediate in their time.

There is one Gil Scott-Heron song, however, that holds up brilliantly to modern ears. It’s a stately, mournful ballad called “Winter in America,” a beautifully metaphorical cry in the wilderness about the diminishment of the American dream.

It’s a rich, almost desolate hymn that’s taken a step or two past anger into something approaching grief. It is to political despair what John Lennon’s “Imagine” is to idealism.

Powered by an almost rolling, martial-sounding drum beat – the kind you might hear at a military funeral – and a mournful bed of flutes and electric piano, “Winter in America” sees a land in trouble, “cities that stagger on the coastlines” and “a nation that just can’t stand much more.”

It captures what many disillusioned Americans are beginning to feel about their country today in 2011. And it’s that song that would have made the first sentence in Gil Scott-Heron’s obituary, if I were writing it.

Today is Kyra Megan Pillsbury’s 20th birthday.

Kyra did not live to see this landmark birthday, nor her fifteenth, her tenth, or even her fifth. She died in February, 1996, at the age of 4.

I know this, not because I knew young Kyra or her family – I did not. I know this, because all that information is engraved onto a wooden bench, right there for all to see, in a beautiful little spot near the ocean, at the corner of West Cliff Drive and Woodrow Avenue on the West Side of Santa Cruz. Under her dates is this inscription: “From the bottom of my heart, to the tips of the stars.”

Near Kyra’s bench is another one, perhaps even more heartbreaking because the bench itself is small, kid-sized. On it reads the name Gabriel “Gaby” Jackson who died in 1998 at the age of 3 – I did know Gabriel’s family, a little bit. The inscription on his bench feels like a punch in the heart. It’s a once-popular movie catch phrase forever associated with the experience of being a kid in the 1990s, that in this context takes on a meaning of such power and eloquence, I can barely type it without wanting to cry:

“To infinity and beyond.”

I’m sure that, for the parents and family members of these children, the passing years have done little in easing the pain of the absence of their loved ones. But they have given the rest of us a gift, a kind of human-scale memorial that reminds us that infinity and beyond is never really that far away.

These memorial benches are all up and down West Cliff Drive, and, indeed, all over Santa Cruz County. It’s no coincidence that most of them are near the ocean. From our small human perspective, the ocean has always represented incomprehensible vastness, and gazing out at the sea has always been, at least for me, a tonic against the obsessive brooding on the persistent blues of day-to-day living.

Some may find them morbid or sentimental. Some may not even notice them at all. But count me among those who see the benches as the one element that transforms West Cliff – or the Wharf, or the Harbor – from pretty spots to holy ones.

I have, in fact, become a kind of student of the aesthetics of the memorial bench. The benches lack the sobering sanctity of the graveyard. There is rarely any sort of religious iconography or language associated with them. By their very nature, they aren’t able to convey that kind of gravity; after all, they’re designed to give you a place to park your, uh, well let’s say, the least sacred part of your body.

Plus, you enter a cemetery with the expectation, indeed the desire, to ponder the mysteries of this ephemeral thing we call life. But a memorial bench brings the possibility of accidental discovery, that someone out for her early evening jog might stop and be open to a reminder that she’s alive when others are not, that death isn’t some quarantined thing that stays confined to the graveyard.

In that sense, the bench is a modest little access point to spirituality, a kind of water fountain for the eternal soul.

I like reading the names on the benches, and I think dates are important. Not all of them have dates, and I find that a shame. In what time you lived and for how long are two of the most important facts about you. They are handles on memory.

On those benches that do have dates, I have found a higher-than-usual proportion of people who have died young – perhaps not as young as sweet little Kyra and Gabriel, but long before their allotted three score and ten. Of course, age is the factor that determines whether any given death is a tragedy. And perhaps it’s this sense of injustice that prompts those whose loved one died before growing old to want to carve his/her name into a bench. For whatever reason, the benches of Santa Cruz are heavily populated with people who died in their 30s and 40s, and they usually carrying the most moving epitaphs – “Remember me whenever you see waves shining in the sun,” “With arms wide open, my sacrifice” and, wistfully, “Gone fishing.”

There are, however, among the memorialized, those who squeezed every minute out of their lives that time would allow. There is Mr. Kyushiro Mine, who lived just a few years short of 100: “After a long journey, peace.” Some epitaphs opt to reflect the irreverent spirit of the departed – “Always whittling and whistling,” and, for Brett Gardner, who must have been a laid-back dude, “No shoes or shirts required.”

The best epitaphs, however, remain those that are simple, personal and remind us that there’s a real human behind these engraved numbers and letters – “My bohemian man has gone to the Great Beyond and a better home,” and simply, “My one and only love.”

Taking a breather from a walk or a run, I use these benches for their intended purpose, for sitting and reflection. They create a zone to think about what we too rarely think about: those we love, and what we’re doing every day to create the memories that will, sooner or later, be all that’s left of us.

The benches face the ocean, that beautiful nothingness that reflects back to us all we truly believe. But they are surrounded by the mundane elements of quotidian life, rolling cars, chattering walkers, houses containing the ordinary trappings of living – all of which eventually prompts me to stand, leave the bench and follow my grateful heart back to those I love, to the life I’m inhabiting, to the gifts I’ve been given, to infinity and beyond.

By WALLACE BAINE
James Durbin’s chances of finishing on the top of the “American Idol” heap got much better on Thursday. Not only did Durbin survive the show’s winnowing down of six performers to five, but the one sent home was widely considered one of Durbin’s strongest competitors.

Southern California neo-beatnik Casey Abrams was sent home on Thursday, bidding farewell with a frantic performance of Screaming Jay Hawkins’s classic “I Put a Spell on You.”

Durbin impressed judges and audiences on Wednesday with a blue-eyed soul rendition of the Carole King-penned “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”

The remaining contestants include Haley Reinhart, Lauren Alaina, Jacob Lusk and Scotty McCreery.

Also, “American Idol” announced the dates of its summer tour, featuring the top 11 singers. The closest date to Santa Cruz will be July 13 at the HP Pavilion in San Jose. The 45-date tour will begin in Utah July 6 and close Sept. 10 in Rochester, N.Y. Tickets for the San Jose show will go on sale May 13, with Internet pre-sales to take place on May 12. Ticket prices will be $56 and $78.50. Details: www.ticketmaster.com.

“American Idol” will air on Wednesday, May 4 at 8 p.m. on Fox.

“American Idol” announced the dates of its summer tour, featuring the top 11 singers. The closest date to Santa Cruz will be July 13 at the HP Pavilion in San Jose. The 45-date tour will begin in Utah July 6 and close Sept. 10 in Rochester, N.Y. Tickets for the San Jose show will go on sale May 13, with Internet pre-sales to take place on May 12. Ticket prices will be $56 and $78.50. Details: www.ticketmaster.com.

The following is dedicated to all those condemned to write by circumstance or compulsion:

I write because painting involves clean-up.

I write because sculptors always have dirty hands and stand-up comics rarely get to bed before 3 a.m.

I write because actors have to obey rageaholic, ego-besotted directors and directors have to deal with vain, nitwit actors.

I write because dance requires musculature that my Creator withheld from me.

I write because learning music means merciless practicing of scales or chords and no one has ever suggested that sitting down and writing prepositions on a piece of paper for four hours a day makes you a better writer.

I write because language finds a warm, favorable incubation chamber in my brain. My favorite movie metaphor for what it’s like to be a writer is John Hurt in the movie “Alien.” You’ll remember that he plays a scientist whose curiosity gets him in trouble when some enormous, gelatinous space organism attaches itself to his face. After a few hours, the thing dies and falls off and Hurt thinks he’s fine until that famous lunch with his crew mates when the movie’s namesake explodes out of his stomach and disappears into the bowels of the ship. Artists are merely spawning beds in which experience comes in, and something ugly or powerful or beautiful or utterly mundane bursts out and escapes into the world. It’s a process that’s painful, involuntary and often unexpected, and, as in “Alien,” it usually causes anyone in the immediate vicinity to lose their appetites.

I grew up a collector – baseball cards, comic books, political buttons, among other things – which is a surprisingly common habit of writers. They tend to view language in the same way, words, phrases, ideas to gather and put away in a mental shoe box.

Many years ago, I was jilted by a girl with emerald eyes and hair the color of a Hawaiian cocktail. One day, when I declared my monstrous feelings for her, she fixed me with those beautiful green eyes, brimming with tears, and said, “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just unboyfriendable.”

My immediate reaction wasn’t rage, or horror, or mortification. It was, “Wow, that’s a cool word.” All I remember about her now is that word. Unboyfriendable. I don’t even remember the green eyes or the red hair, though I can say with confidence that she did have eyes, and hair.

And that’s another reason I write. Because writing is a license to lie. And, like almost everyone else on this side of the intelligence scale from Forrest Gump, I take deep and lasting pleasure from lying. Like the urban legend that Eskimos have a hundred names for snow, writers have almost as many words for a lie – fable, myth, novel, legend, allegory, story, etc. The word “memoir,” little known fact, is French for “lying to yourself.”

I also write because I’m lazy. I was still a child, I think, when I learned that the great Mark Twain wrote many of his best works flat on his back in bed. That’s my kind of artist right there. Let’s see Yo Yo Ma or Georgia O’Keeffe or Baryshnikov do that. And yet, I can even trump the mighty Twain on that score. He had to exert himself in the task of writing long hand on paper. Me, I can do my work perfectly well on a laptop with nothing but a pulse of my fingers, the absolute minimum physical exertion the human body is capable of, except maybe for blinking your eyes, and I’m not even willing to concede that point without some scientific backing.

What else would Walt Whitman have become if he were not a writer? He would have never painted a picture of a spear of summer grass, or composed a sonata to it. He would have never gotten around to it. If he were not imbued with the mantle of the great poet, Whitman would have been seen as a worthless reprobate for laying around in the grass, particularly in the 19th century when hard, back-breaking manual labor was the price you paid for staying out of the grave for another day, when being lazy took real guts.

Writing, in fact, endows a certain kind of respectability to people who may have none otherwise. It often give royal robes to scoundrels. It makes some shut-in necrophiliac creep into Edgar Allan Poe. It makes some foul-mouthed drunk into Charles Bukowski. I’m no different than the next guy, deathly afraid of being seen as the next guy, some anonymous drone only to remembered by my children and my creditors. I could use some of that magic for myself.

Writers get the perfect kind of fame – adored by the hordes yet left alone by the paparazzi.

Writing is what you do when you’ve exhausted every other avenue to coolness. As a younger person, I flirted with guitars and motorcycles. Neither flirted back.

So, writing and I, we’re stuck with each other, like two elderly spinster sisters who can no longer distinguish annoyance from love.

And that’s why I write – because I’ve outlasted all those reasons not to.

To be a writer – and this applies to painters, sculptors and other visual artists as well – is to engage in the lonely arts. Those of us who write are constantly wrestling with envy of those engaged in the collaborative arts, because directing a movie, playing in a band, acting in a play, interacting with other artists and audiences – these things are obviously a blast, even a life-altering experience, for those involved in them.

A writer, by contrast, starts as an outsider, and largely stays on the outside. I began writing in high school, mainly because I was socially invisible. I could almost feel people walking through me in the crowded hallways, as if I were made of fog.

And so I was left with writing, exiled in my bedroom, filling spiral-bound notebooks with great gaseous arias of self-pity that I fantasized would be read over the loudspeaker by the principal the day after I was killed while trying to deflect an asteroid that otherwise would have obliterated the school in the middle of third period.

Writing is, in fact, as close to pure thought in art as you can attain. If you screw up, you can’t blame the piano, or the camera, or the oil paint, or any other tool of your craft that you depend on. You can try. You can say, “Well, you know that adjective really let me down. It’s just so hard to create with inferior materials. Stephen King can go out and buy the best verbs money can buy, but I’m on a budget. My wife got me a really nice set of punctuation marks for my birthday, but already a couple of commas are beginning to wear out and my semi-colon is in the shop.”

You can try that. But no one over the age of three is going to let you get away with it. Writing is the artform with no excuses.

And that’s another reason that I began to write. Because you didn’t have to ask your parents for any capital layout. The materials threshold is appealingly low, and inspiration for a writer is as close to free as you can expect, even in the pre-Internet age, thanks to the wonderful socialist innovation known as the public library. And if you’re too lazy to get your hands on a pencil, notebook and library card, then maybe you should starve.
Which brings me to that other reason that I write.

I write because apparently I’m allergic to money, and there is no safer bet to avoid the pressures and burdens of being ridiculously wealthy than to aspire to be a writer. Yes, there are a few of us who have, for whatever reason, tragically slipped into obscene riches. But when you write about wizards and vampires, you should know the risks.
All artists tell themselves and each other that art is essential. But deep down we know that’s not true. What’s essential is water, food, shelter, clothing and, for most Americans apparently, ammo. But that’s just for animal survival. To live as humans, art is very much essential. It becomes so the instant you realize that one day you’re going to die. Living with mortality is impossible unless you’re a creative being, or at least receptive to the creativity of others.

For years, I lashed myself for indulging in writing. “You want to make a real difference in the world?,” the Inner Critic said, “Go be a farmer. Feed people. Build them houses. Your pretty words can’t fill bellies. Your songs, your plays, your paintings, a man will burn them all to keep his children warm.”

That is, of course, a cynical and corrosive worldview. That puts us on an equal plane with cows and birds and pigs and insects. All false modesty aside, the human animal is a first among equals. If we make it our highest calling just to keep our bellies full, we are abdicating our potential as the most advanced lifeform in the known universe. And once we are warm, safe and no longer hungry, art is what beckons us to meet a deeper hunger. Art is the greatest adventure.

And by art, I don’t mean pictures on tote bags. I’m talking about the impulse to find out who we are and where we’re going. Religion and spirituality are forms of art and not until we can see that are we ever going to be truly free. The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, these are all works of writing. They are God’s way of making art, if you’re inclined that way. Greek myths are stories, works of art, that dragged us out of antiquity. And the great religions of the world are now the institutions compelling us to live, and occasionally die, for the sake of a metaphor.

Our species is caught between the literal world and the metaphorical world, and the result is an intractable cycle of unimaginable pain and violence and suffering. Art provides a way out of that in-between place. We all have an individual mission on this earth, to become the best human we can be before our time is up. To be better people than our parents were, and compel our children to be better than we were. That can’t be done without art.

If truth is that far land beyond the horizon to which the inner compass of our humanity draws us, then metaphor is the boat will take us there.

And that’s why I write: to earn my place on that boat.

By WALLACE BAINE

It’s that time of year again to sit down with my words and do a bit of purging, because we all know that your vocabulary is a like a fruit tree – you want it to grow, but it’ll always grows better after some judicious pruning.

Note to self: Next weekend, let’s do a little spring cleaning on those trite analogies.

Anyway, the word this year that I’m considering tossing out like Valentine’s Day Chinese takeout is “talent.” Not that I want to make official what others may already believe – that I have none – but because I’m beginning to have my doubts such a thing really even exists.

My friend Dale Ockerman has his doubts too. Dale is a rock musician and teacher who serves as a mentor to lots of young would-be musicians as the head instructor at Musicscool in Santa Cruz. His most famous pupil is James Durbin, who is currently rising to dizzying levels of fame on Fox’s “American Idol.”

I called Dale to talk about James who most “Idol” fans would believe has talent oozing from his pores. But Dale’s not really down with the T-word, at least as it’s commonly used, and there’s a growing sense among people who think about such things that “talent” is not only misleading, but psychologically and even economically damaging.

Talent may be the sum total of an equation that involves passion, drive, hard work and innate ability, but generally the word is not used like that. Instead, it has come to connote a kind of divinely inspired gift that comes more or less wholly formed in a small number of people who wield it for the entertainment and/or enlightenment of the rest of us.

That’s a sexy, even cinematic idea – that an elite few are vessels through which the magical skills of the gods can brought to a human level – but it can do a number on your psyche. If you believe that talent is a kind of immutable trait, like height, you would think that if it doesn’t make itself apparent immediately, you don’t have much of it. And that if you do have it and aren’t using it to its full potential, you’re wasting your life.

Let’s take, as an example, my obviously commanding and impressive karaoke version of “Werewolves of London.” Is it a gift I was born with? Or is it a result of my consuming passion for all things Zevon and my long, lonely hours of mastering the critical howl – “Aaawwoooo” – in the chorus?

A couple of years ago, writer Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that talent can come to just about anyone provided they are willing to put in the hours to master a particular skill – 10,000 hours to be precise. That really puts a damper on the much more fun notion of talent as a divine spark, and takes a good bit of the awe out of the process as well. Nobody really wants to hear about repetition, experimentation and practice, practice, practice.

After all, we live in a short-cut culture. We give lip service to hard work, but generally we believe the same myths about talent that we believe about wealth – that it’s possible to get to the top without climbing the mountain. That’s where much of this vaunted American optimism comes from, magical thinking.

If you want to think of it in purely Darwinian terms, a culture that puts its faith in drive and hard work – as American culture used to do and as many Asian cultures now do – is going to have an advantage in a struggle for dominance against a culture that believes in inherent superiority, luck and “talent.”

And yet, I can’t help thinking of so many examples that mock the 10,000-hour rule. Mozart, Bobby Fischer, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, Martin Luther King Jr., maybe even James Durbin – how do you account for such unique otherworldly mastery?

There has to be an innate something that pushes you toward one potential talent and away from another. I mean, not even 10,000 years of practice isn’t going to make me into Shaquille O’Neal.

Nobody really knows the algorithm that makes up talent. Most of it is surely a result of nothing but hard work, and hard work only comes from a complicated interplay between passion, focus, confidence, energy, flexibility, discipline, innovation and pure dogged will to continue. None of that stuff comes without exertion and time – lots and lots of both.

There are lessons here as well for us as parents. Tell your kid she’s a special snowflake? Well, snowflakes fall to the ground and disappear amidst all the other special snowflakes. Tell her she’s a flower just waiting to bloom. There’s a prescription for passivity for you.

Tell her instead she can be anything she wants to be, if she works hard enough at it.
That’s Dale Ockerman’s point about Durbin. Dale was not talking about the young man’s “talent.” He was more interested in James’s “laser-like concentration,” and the fact that “he loves (music) so much, he devours it.”

And now we’re getting to the kernel of the mystery of talent – desire. A former college teacher of mine who had to put up with a lot of self-satisfied but mediocre young writers said, “You gotta want it.”

How do you measure that kind of desire? I’d say 10,000 hours is pretty solid evidence for it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some werewolf howling to do, several thousands hours to be exact.

Peter Wallner of Santa Cruz inherited a box of formerly contraband 45-rpm singles that raised a dust-up over copyright law in the 1970s. Photo by Dan Coyro.

The following is a story written by a former journalist friend which sets to trace what many feel is the first mash-up.

By DAN FITCH

Peter Wallner of Santa Cruz had no idea he was being handed live ammunition from a pop-culture revolution. He thought he was helping his father clean the garage.

Cleaning this garage was interesting work. His father John was a disc jockey in the 1970s and ‘80s. His uncle Mark was a recording engineer. In the garage were rare discs, such as white-vinyl Beatles on Apple Records.

Then Peter’s father handed him a box of 7-inch, 45-rpm singles containing a three-minute, 17-second song so dangerous the recording industry tried to kill it.

“He told me the story,” said Peter, 23, a Harbor High graduate. “And I thought ’so these aren’t supposed to exist.’”

The song contains a flawless synthesis of Led Zeppelin and “Gilligan’s Island.” In the 1970s Little Roger & the Goosebumps played a throwaway song matching the lyrics of the television sitcom with the music of “Stairway to Heaven.” Hear it here.

The band had packed East Bay clubs for years, sometimes playing three or four sets a night of original material. But when it began mingling Gilligan with Led Zeppelin, something spiritual awakened in concert-goers. They found it difficult to dance while laughing so hard.

It appeared an unlikely marriage. “Gilligan’s Island” was a comedy aired from 1964-67 on CBS. It became a staple of syndication. The show involves a small seagoing vessel named “SS Minnow” that shipwrecks on a remote island. Gilligan is a gangly adult innocent referred to as ‘little buddy” by a man known only as The Skipper. There is a handsome professor who devises nifty items to aid survival. There is the immortal Jim Backus portraying the stranded millionaire Thurston Howell III. Millions of American boys wrestled with the existential “Gilligan” question: Ginger or Mary Ann?

“Stairway” is a song about a lady who is “buying a stairway to heaven.” There are also passages about a piper and a May queen. It is not humorous.

“Gilligan’s Island” reportedly is being made into a movie. “Led Zeppelin IV,” the record containing “Stairway,” has sold at least 23 million copies, placing it at No. 4 on the all-time best-selling album list.

In 1978 Little Roger & The Goosebumps pressed 5,400 “Gilligan’s Island (Stairway)“ vinyl 45s on their own Splash Records label, and mailed them to FM radio stations. The song induced delirium in many listeners.

“A radio station in Philadelphia played it every hour for 24 hours,” said Dick Bright, a Goosebump. “At the time I think a lot of people asked ‘How did this happen?’”

At the time there was no YouTube, Facebook, sampling, raving, or mash-ups. No texting or Photoshopping. In the clever tradition of American novelty songs, there had been nothing like it. The song quickly became an underground hit on late-night radio. It was a staple of the popular oddities show by Dr. Demento.

But it made the Led Zeppelin and Gilligan people very angry. Lawyers for Atlantic Records – the home of Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, and Ray Charles, among others – issued a cease-and-desist order. “Gilligan’s” producers were enraged. The band was ordered to stop performing the song live. Radio stations were banned from playing it. All copies of the record were ordered destroyed.

The song and record vanished in six weeks. In time, so did the band.

“It was the record that ate the band,” said head Goosebump Roger Clark in a phone interview from his home in Mazatlan.

But like most things pop, it re-animated like a zombie. There was talk it existed. The talk led to academic debate on the limits of sampling and copyright. Weird Al Jankovic told Clark the Goosebumps were heroes and the song was an inspiration for a lucrative career featuring such hits as “Another One Rides the Bus.”

It became a question on a Trivial Pursuit card.

And in a 2005 interview on NPR, Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant said the Splash Records single was his “favorite Led Zep cover version.”

Versions of the Goosebumps song can be seen on YouTube. A young fan recently spliced the beginning of a “Gilligan’s Island” episode to run with the song. Currently two copies of the record are up for bid on E-Bay, both starting at around $15. Clark said he has been told that copies have been sold for as high as $100. Not bad for a one-off single distributed more than three decades ago and crushed by two massive entertainment corporations.

Peter Wallner finds it cool, and somehow fitting, that the remaining bulk of the story wound up in a box in a Santa Cruz garage. Spiritually, the area seems to have a knack for this sort of raw material.

Wallner thinks everyone should have lightened up in the first place.

“I didn’t understand why they got so upset,” he said. “It’s not like people are not gonna like their music, they might like it even more. Obviously they all had big egos, it wasn’t even personal.”

Times have changed. The creation of Napster and its destruction by a desperate recording industry, the birth of music stars on the Internet, and the mainstreaming of iTunes and its ilk have the large companies feeling the fear of obsolescence.

But Wallner also embodies what has become the resistant nature of rock ‘n’ roll. He and his girfriend, Raya Heffernan, have their own band, Grizzeltoe, a duo. The two have known each other since they were 15. Wallner works the counter of the juice bar at New Leaf Market on the Westside, and practices and records music at home.

Wallner says Grizzeltoe play ‘90s indie-pop covers ranging from Kate Bush and the Ramones, on up to originals. Like other young musicians and bands in the county, Grizzeltoe scraps for gigs and audiences anywhere it can get them. Wallner said the band has played house concerts, at Meta Vinyl record store, and at The Crepe Place, where the band will perform later this month.

The source of Wallner’s death-sentenced box set is the product of music industry genes. He says his uncle is the most likely source of the garage find. Mark Wallner, who died three years ago, was a recording engineer and friend of the band. He is credited on recordings by Michael Bloomfield, Chrome, and The Rubinoos. His most noteworthy credit is on “Plastic Surgery Disasters” by the Dead Kennedys. Mark and John Wallner were both friends with Goosebump band members.

Peter Wallner says he’ll hang on to the records. He occasionally sells a copy and said he has gotten as much as $50.

“To the right people, it’s valuable,” he said.

To Bright and Clark, it’s a piece of their history that resurfaces every five years are so in some odd fashion. Fortunately, both men moved on to successful careers and can now afford to be amused by the episode.

“It still survives!” said Bright, who played electric violin for the Goosebumps . “He’s got 69 more copies of it than me. The big picture is that I am still a big fan of combining comedy and music.”

Bright, 57, has combined both into a career in show business. For 11 years he directed a 30-piece orchestra that backed acts such as Santana and Bonnie Raitt at the Bammie Awards. Starting in 1984 he directed a 10-piece band in the Venetian Room Supper Club at the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco. The gig last eight years and the band backed everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to James Brown. The band also made serious cash playing constant gigs for corporations.

Bright also had parts in television commercials and a role in the movie “Mrs. Doubtfire.” He played his a part in another novelty hit in 1981, when the Goosebumps backed Bruce “Baby Man” Baum on the immortal “Marty Feldman Eyes.“ He currently lives in Marin and remains in the music business as a consultant, musician, and club manager in San Francisco.

Clark – “pulling his 50s” – lives in Mazatlan with his wife and twin 11-year-old boys. He said he has “strong mixed feelings” about the “Gilligan” episode.

“It keeps showing up,” he said. “I’m not that inclined to look back, but the song has been the source of great copyright debate. Culturally it’s a funny thing, I’ve had people tell me it was the first mash-up.

“I am proud to be associated with that kind of cultural discussion.”

But he also says it was a drag that a great band was backed into a corner by a novelty song. Record-industry types loved the band’s live shows and music, but were afraid to make a move.

“They’d say ‘we love it. We love it. We love it’ – but we don’t what to do with it.”

Clark moved on to a career in the industry. He booked entertainment for the Claremont Hotel, worked at a major label, and has written songs for other artists. Most recently he wrote the music for a Japanese saki commercial.

Mostly, Clark runs his own business in the resort town in Mexico. One year while on vacation in Mazatlan, he noticed that a lot of old architecture was being replaced by new materials. He discovered that an influx of North Americanos moving to the area wanted their new homes to contain a more historical feel. So he started Hace Mucho to engineer the design, restoration, and construction of higher-end homes using salvaged architectural materials. In the current economy, business is slow, but he has done well.
He wishes Peter Wallner the best of luck with his found box set.

“It wasn’t Elvis’ Sun singles,” he said, “but if somebody’s making money off it, that’s good.”

Wallner said he understands that a fluke can simultaneously spotlight a band, and ultimately doom it. And like millions worldwide, he survived “Stairway to Heaven.”

“I went through a Led Zeppelin phase,” he said. “The only one I can come back to is ‘Houses of the Holy,’ because it just rocks.”