Why can't I be more like this plant?

I don’t want to be a vegetable, but, oh, to have recuperative powers of a plant.

Consider the above photo: two days before I took this shot, the plant you see was pronounced dead by Catherine. I could see why she said this -- well over half the leaves were yellow, and all were dish-rag limp, some draped over the edge of the pot, looking more like part of the pot than part of the plant -- but I knew otherwise. I have seen this plant come back from much worse, not once, but countless times over the many years I’ve owned it. More to the point, its suffering has always been because of my negligence, as I occasionally forget to water it, so I am not fooled by appearances. And sure enough, this time was no different. After Catherine tolled the bell, I grabbed a watering can, filled it, and over the next day, poured the entire contents of the can onto the plant. I also trimmed out the dead and dying leaves, leaving them in the pot, so the plant could feed on its dead body parts, as it got things sorted out. Now, save for a few missing leaves, which will be replaced, the plant is a picture of health. Really, here’s another shot:

Why can’t I recover like this? A few sips of water, and I’M BACK!

Sigh, instead, here’s my “sip of water”: first thing in the morning, 15 minutes with my feet elevated to force more blood into my addled brain; then 20 minutes of exercises to combat the possible presence of benign positional vertigo (BPV); head to China Basin for 1 hour of HBOT; back home for 20 minutes of Brainporting; more BPV exercises for 20 minutes; followed by another 20 minute Brainport session; and finally, one more set of BPV exercises. And I still feel lousy.

As I said, oh, to have the recuperative powers of a plant.

Those were the days. A tale of living for the music, friendship and finding the holy grail of bootlegs, Bob Dylan's Ten of Swords.

For memory, there's RAM, DRAM, SRAM, flash, disc and tape, and then there's Germanoum, the mysterious substance inside my friend Toby Germano's head. Germanoum remembers all and can recall anything instantly; oddly enough, performormace seems to improve with alcohol.

I mention all this, because the other day I got to thinking about how my bootleg hunting tactics have changed. These days, I simply go online and visit dimeadozen.org or fire up Limewire. But it used to be oh so much different. To make sure I would be able to describe the days of yore, I wrote to Toby and asked him to reminisce about how we both came to posess Bob Dylan Ten of Swords, the bootlegging community's ten-disc vinyl answer to the officially released Biograph. By the way, that's Toby holding his Tele outside the entrance to the studio we had in Whittier, which was just out back of our rented, mostly unheated storage shack, where we Toby, Mike Price (pictured inside the studio) and I (also photographed inside the studio) all lived.

At this moment, you might be scoffing at a lack of heat in LA, where it is always sunny and warm (not), but we lived there during one of the coldest years on record, when snow, yes, SNOW fell in Westwood. But I digress.

Rather than attempt to repeat everything Toby wrote about our quest for Ten of Swords, I'll just let his words do the talking. Toby, you're on: 

It all started with my obsession of collecting bootlegs back in high school. I was dying to get a copy of David Bowie's Santa Monica boot from 1972 (now officially in print) and asked everyone about it. When I was old enough to drive, I used to go to Berkeley and The Haight, seeking this elusive bootleg. I remember driving around with you visiting used record stores and accumulating lots of Stones and Zep boots along the way. Recycled Records and Chimera in Palo Alto were our favorite spots. I remember you buying a Lightning Hopkins album featuring SPIDER KILPATRICK, the same day I bought a Rolling Stones American Tour 1981 Soundboard box set. Finally I responded to an ad in BAM magazine (now defunct), with the tease-RARE TAPES SOLD. I called the guy, and a cheap looking list (on faded Xeroxed yellow paper) arrived in the mail a few days later. I ended up ordering so many tapes from this guy over a six month span that he finally invited me to his Palo Alto home one day. His place was really creepy, and I didn't feel comfortable at all. I think he was some kind of criminal running from the law. What came out of those couple of visits was great information from him regarding where he got a lot of his stuff: The Pasadena Swap Meet. Jump forward 4 years later, when Mike and I went to Pasadena, searching for a cool Talking Heads poster for Brenda's birthday. In a side alley at the swap meet, I found the record dealer, and bought Ten Of Swords, Kate Bush Live 1979, and Kiss Destroys Anaheim. These treasures, along with Brenda's poster, cost me all of the money I had at the time. My $20 weekly grocery budget began at this time, consisting of a Dexatrim 24 pack, a 6 pack of Lender's frozen bagels, Ralph's low fat cream cheese, and 2 cases of generic beer. A few weeks later, I seem to recall you came with me and Mike to Pasadena, and we got the guy's address who had sold me Ten Of Swords. You and I drove down to his bungalow in Long Beach, and you purchased it for (I think) $150. All of this must have taken place in the fall of 1985, because I remember

it being very hot, and football season was in high gear at USC and UCLA (I could never find parking when visiting Brenda at USC on weekends) and I moved back the Bay Area in Spring of 1986.

On a side note, when attempting to visit the strange Palo Alto man one day, his place was empty, a police KEEP OUT sign was posted, and yellow tape was everywhere. Peeking inside the place, the only thing I saw was an old rusted washing machine....

Germanoum. Amazing stuff.

Feeling like a rock star, living like a saint. WTF?

I've read countless stories of rock and roll excess, of nights spent drinking and days spent sleeping, and I confess, I romanticized them all. You can show me every picture there is of cirrhosis of the liver and tobacco stained lungs and yellow teeth and gin blossoms, and though I am throughly disgusted and dissuaded by it all, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the drug addled, hung over, confused rock star. I mean, those pictures of Keith Richards in the 70s? Man, that is rock and roll to me.

And yet, I have no constitution for drink and drugs. Worse, I don't seem to need them these days to feel like absolute hell. Take today, for example. I woke up feeling about as bad as one can feel and still not be in danger of death: a pain emanating from the back of my head deep into my left eye, my legs ice cold, a touch of nausea, tightness in my jaw and far more dizziness than usual. And what did I do the night before? Well, I confess, I did play my guitar a bit, I had a single glass of wine and I stayed up maybe a little later than I should have (reading High Fidelity). But, I also did my Brainport exercises, plus some other therapeutic things suggested recently by a neurologist. In other words, I kept everything in moderation and followed my doctor's orders and still woke up feeling like Keith Richards all too often looks.

Hell, who knows, maybe I am blessed. After all, thanks to my severe traumatic brain injury a few years back I apparently do not require copious quantities of booze, sand dune size piles of coke and injections of heroine to make me feel like utter shit, no doubt saving me vast amounts of money. On other hand, I can live like a pious monk and yet still feel like a God's worst sinner. And therein lies the worst of it: I get nothing but still pay the price. Hmmm, maybe there's a country song in that.

Should ideas be ownable?

The other day, in response to a comment on this blog, I wrote that “ideas should be ownable”. Another commenter disagreed, citing how laws that govern ownership of ideas are so complicated that the only beneficiaries are lawyers and how our Constitution only specifies protections for ideas that “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,…”.

All this got me to thinking.

First up, da law.

To get a better handle on how ideas are protected, I started reading up on patents and  copyrights, but mid-research I decided that there was a more important issue on the table than HOW ideas should be protected, which was SHOULD ideas should be protected. In other words, should my ideas belong to me, if I can establish that my ideas are indeed my own? I think the answer is YES. Granted, the process of establishing an idea as one’s own can get complicated, but that is not a good reason to simply deny anyone the ownership of his ideas (or ones he’s purchased or otherwise legally acquired).

Consider: If people like me were not protected by copyright and patent laws, then we would always be at the total mercy of those who had the most capital. Always. Say, for example, I wrote a song and Coldplay wanted it. Under current law, they couldn’t have it unless I let them. However, if ideas were not ownable, they could just take the song, use their massive capital to record it, distribute it and promote it and capture all royalty payments. I would get nothing. Or think about business: let’s say I have an idea for a fundamentally better approach to memory in a computer (think Rambus). Without patent protection, Intel could just take my idea and integrate with their latest processor design and reap all the rewards. I would get nothing

No, ideas must be ownable. Otherwise, those who own today’s best ideas would always own tomorrow’s, too. And our culture would stratify far worse than it already has, then stagnate, with those in the highest strata would always stay put.

Now, what about The U.S. Constitution, which states that The Congress shall have power… To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries…

Honestly, I have problem with this bit of Founding Father folly. Specifically, I don’t like giving the government power over subjective concepts, such as “progress” and “useful”. I mean, to the Taliban, “progress” is a return to the caveman culture and “useful” could be applied to the Koran, while the Bible, well, that’s not so useful. Instead, I think we would all be better off if ideas were simply ownable, provided one can prove beyond a reasonable doubt to jury of his peers that he indeed either came up with the idea in question or acquired it legally.

Stepping off my pedestal. Thoughts?

Oh, and here are some definitions!

PATENT

the exclusive right granted by a government to an inventor to manufacture, use, or sell an invention for a certain number of years.

COPYRIGHT

the exclusive right to make copies, license, and otherwise exploit a literary, musical, or artistic work, whether printed, audio, video, etc.: works granted such right by law on or after January 1, 1978, are protected for the lifetime of the author or creator and for a period of 50 years after his or her death.

The Fall of the Wall and the rise of the Internet.

On this day, twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. I don’t really remember it. But a few short years after the Fall of the Wall, I moved to Munich, Germany, where I lived for four years. In 1993, just over a year before I returned to the States for good (it seems), I took the train from Munich to Berlin to teach English to former East German border guards. My two-week English class was part of a broader curriculum designed to help these former “shoot-first-ask-questions-later” types to become security guards department stores. The family I stayed with was headed by a former Volkpolizist, which translates as “people’s police”. My days were spent teaching from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM. My evenings were my own, and every day after class ended I boarded the train for Zoo Station, the heart of West Berlin, or Alexander Platz, the heart of East Berlin. Through it all, I learned that while The Wall had fallen a few years before, there were many more walls yet to fall.

The highest wall of all was the wall between people: everywhere I went in the East people were quiet. There were no boisterous conversations on the trains and buses, pubs were nothing like the Biergartens in the West, my students didn’t talk about their personal lives at all. People were not about to share so much as a hello, for the culture they had grown up in made them afraid to share. If you said something someone else decided was anti-government, you were reported and life got bad fast.

Keeping to oneself the way East Germans did was deeply odd to me. More significant, however, was how at odds the East Germans were with the times in general. The whole rest of Europe was in thrall to the promise of unification via the European Union. Everyone basck in Munich talked about the Union, the freedom it would bring as border controls were relaxed and currencies combined, the work opportunities, change. Sure, there were doubters. The Germans fretted over the coming demise of the D-mark, the French worried about their culture being watered down, the Italians nervously sipped cappuccino and wondered how much more of their country would soon be owned by wealthy Germans. The English said bollucks to the whole thing and pouted on the sidelines. The doubters were wrong. From what I can gather here in Fortress America, Europe is more open and prosperous than ever, and East Germany is a borderline only in memory.

In fact, looking back on it all, The Fall of the Wall and the rise of the European Union, I now see it all as a prelude to the Internet Age. Call me an idealist, but The Fall of All Walls is coming. In our heart of hearts, people want to be free to engage with other people and to find happiness wherever it may be. Even East German border guards, who, twenty one years ago today would shoot you on sight under the right circumstances and today will happily tell you where to find the bathroom. In English, no less.