Ode to Santa Cruz

Her dog dodges neoprene legs
To get a better sniff of the kelp,
pungent and abandoned;
Tribal backbeat, distant,
Perhaps from the market downtown,
Perhaps from the woods
Or just in the crisp air, mixed with
Incense and
Salt.

She comes here each day
To watch the sun slip under the bay,
To let Bodhi run illegally in the field.
She watches for rangers like a spy.
The eyes of visitors take her in,
Snap her photograph,
As she deftly climbs the cold statue
To place a living wreath on the crown
Of the bronze surfer. Which makes her smile.
“Two crimes,” she says to Bodhi.
“Two crimes in one afternoon.”

She gave up her car when she was younger;
She gave up meat after college;
She gave up on men around the same time.

And she came to the edge of the land, the rocky point,
Where the shrouds of cold sit lightly on the houses
And the plaintive barks of sea mammals
Are a counterpoint to gulls and light traffic.

She can’t say that she likes it here.
But it suits her well.
Sticking tight to her body like
Their semiporous neoprene--
Letting in the cold
but mysteriously leaving her
Feeling warm
Outside, and
Inside.



(The Sentinel had a poetry contest last week: an "ode" to Santa Cruz. The winner was read onstage by Garrison Keilor. Needlesstosay, it wasn't this one.)

Magic, Teller, and the EG

Before this year, I always felt Penn and Teller were over-rated. Yea, it was an unfair badge to place on them: I had seem bits of their routine over the years, and have never gone to their Vegas show. But all that changed at the last EG Conference. Teller, the short silent elfish dude in the suit, was a "speaker" at the conference. Now this is unusual, because Teller NEVER speaks. I believe it's important to their act that he never drops character in much the same way that Mickey Mouse (and friends) at the Disney theme parks NEVER remove their costumes in public. We know this is a guy in a mouse suit, but by never speaking and never shedding the costume in public, something magical about the illusion is maintained. Anyway, Teller doesn't speak, so i was pretty curious what he was going to SAY at the conference.

He came on stage, and asked if all cameras and recording devices be turned off. What he was going to do was so so off record, it could only be experienced live. Once. Normally, at TED and EG there are lots of speakers who have proprietary presentations that are revealed with surprising candor, but they are all recorded. Sharing these talks is part of the ethos of these special conferences. But Teller needed radio silence.

And over the next 40 minutes he proceeded to tell a wonderful story of how a certain trick was done. He showed the trick. (Remarkable magic.) Then he told a tale of how the trick was invented, how he refined it over years, showed video of the process, and how he worked with Penn's feedback (who didn't like the trick at first) until it was really something far more amazing than it had been at the start. And after a half hour of taking you behind the trick in every way, he did the trick again. It didn't lose any of it's wonderment and my admiration for him (and Penn) grew exponentially.

(This is NOT that talk, obviously. But it's a cool explanation of "the seven principles of magic...")

As an aside, there is so much of "magic" in editing. I mean, the expression is tossed around frequently (the "magic of editing") but quite literally, editing is much about hiding the edits, hiding the CAMERA -- the mechanism of movie creation -- such that the audience (knowing full well this is a trick) can suspend their disbelief (as the saying goes), and enjoy the movie as a contiguous whole. Misdirection, controlling the focus and attention of the audience as they look at a screen, moving the story along in what could be a set of disjointed images, but ends up being a smooth faux reality - this is the magic in editing, and thinking about Teller and some of these recent articles on "magic" and "psychology" bring it all up for me.

This is an interesting article on magic from this month's WIRED. The guest editor of the issue, by the way, is J.J. Abrams - who gave his own remarkable presentation at TED a few years ago on these topics. It was one of my favorite TED talks of that year. Enjoy that as well.

Tom Lehrer Videos

In the summers when my family would drive from Florida to Maine, we had a small plaid bag full of cassette tapes that we'd listen to in the car; my parents' favorites, they became our vacation soundtrack -- Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon & Garfunkel, the musical HAIR, and my personal favorite "That Was the Year That Was" - the classic album by Harvard math professor and musical satirist Tom Lehrer. At age 9 I often sang these songs around the school yard, much to the consternation of my teachers. They were edgy for the time, funny (in ways I sometimes didn't get) and occasionally profane ("Vatican Rag"?) Then, as now, I knew them all by heart. Then Tom Lehrer dropped off the radar, left Harvard, and never performed again. In the '80s he was re-popularized in a Broadway review called Tomfoolery, but he still never surfaced. It didn't dawn on me until today that I had never actually seen him perform. I didn't even know what he looked like. Here he is in some rare (Ampex!) video performing live in the late 60s.



I did find out, however, where he went when he disappeared from the public stage: he moved to Santa Cruz, California. For more than a decade, I've lived only a few miles from him, apparently. He has taught math here in town, not performing, but going about his way quietly, it seems. Anyway, he's fantastic. Here are a few more songs from this British television show performance. Watch them all at YouTube Enjoy the videos.