Elephant Talk

For music to become ingrained in memory it requires repetition. You have to continually open the door and allow it to live alongside those same visual/tactile experiences you will remember for years to come.

I knew this would be the case before I left Korea, so I Amazoned a bunch of CDs to arrive at my parents once I got in town. I know that at least three of these will become memory because they’re the three I’ve listened to almost nonstop since I’ve been here:

1. Iron & Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days
This has been the surprise of the bunch. What an awesome road CD — the perfect slice of lyrical and musical Americana that I needed. For the uninitiated, imagine a more introverted Simon & Garfunkel with the addition of banjos, mandolins, and some slide. Great landscape music, perfect for high Sierra drives.

2. Ryan Adams: Easy Tiger
This guy continues to amaze me with his prodigious songwriting output. I still prefer the heart-wrenching genius of Love is Hell, but this is the more upbeat flipside of that great album. It’s also one of the best-engineered and mixed albums I’ve heard in ages. It just sounds incredible. One thought I had on first listen was wow, how come no one else thought of such a simple and brilliant melodic hook as the one the band pulled off with “Goodnight Rose”? But then, a few days later, I listened to the third of my trio below and realized they lifted it directly from Neil. At least Ryan gives him a nod by pulling off a great vocal impersonation in that song.

3. Neil Young: After the Goldrush
Why did it take me so long to buy this album? Maybe because I’m in a minority when it comes to him. My favorite album by far is Harvest Moon (yes, the one with the word “moon” added), and nothing else I’ve bought has lived up. But After the Goldrush has the same kind of vibe. Great melodies, intimate songwriting, just awesome from start to finish.

Incidentally, listen to Neil’s “Only Love Will Break Your Heart” back to back with Adam’s “Goodnight Rose” and you’ll hear what I was talking about up there.

Well, my month-long trip home to America is almost finished. It seems like it went by in a flash, and yet at the same time it feels like months ago when I first arrived and my parents met me at the airport.

I haven’t had the time to write much here, but maybe that’s as it should be. I’ve been too busy playing music, seeing friends, and crashing out exhausted to do much blogging. There’s a lot to say on many fronts: work, school, impressions of California, personal relationship stuff, future opportunities, current endeavors. Hopefully I’ll get to at least some of it soon.

I’ll just say this for now: Compared to Korea, the US is a big fucking country. I drove from Merced to San Jose last night, zipping down HWY 59, then turning West into a blazing sunset along 152. I felt like I could see forever. One of the prevailing impressions of being back is that with all the doomsday bullshit vibe that seems to be happening politically in this country, the real saving grace is the continued ingenuity of many of the citizens here and, well, the land. The land is why this country came into being and gave people the opportunity to thrive as they did. While it’s hard to see much greatness in the US right now, and while it may seem that its institutional integrity is showing signs of wear, the land and its people remain strong. I feel a lot of hope in that.

California, by the way, is just goddamned beautiful. I’m going to miss it all over again.

This whole Michael Vick thing disgusts me. It’s gotten to the point where the NFL is so crime-ridden and corrupt that it’s not worth my time anymore. I think I’ve reached my limit, no more football for me.

Basketball’s my new sport now. The NBA has a certain competitive purity that I admire. … Wait, shit, I there’s that ref game-fixing scandal. It’s starting to look he might have influenced the outcome of the Suns-Spurs playoff series last year. Okay, so basketball’s out.

Thank god we’ve still got baseball, America’s game. Here we are on the cusp of the most treasured record in baseball, the home run record, about to be broken by the greatest hitter of our generation, Barry Bonds. … Wait, Barry Bonds… Right steroids.

…

Tennis anyone?

I’m here to report that there have been many powerful, riveting shots of David Beckham on the bench, scowling, game face fully on. Lots of talk about his ankle. He recently took off his shoe.

I’ve seen interviews with Drew Cary and Jennifer Love Hewitt. Katie Holmes has been sighted in the booth with Posh, and the Governator is watching the game with tremendous focus.

Woah, hold on a minute… Beckham just stood up and raised his arm when one of his teammates was fouled. The TV commentator called the standing up action “exciting.” Who knows what might happen next?

I’m really not into the idea of loading up my Apple with new software. In fact, software doesn’t excite me at all. Give me my five or six apps to master — office stuff, a couple of creative tools, and maybe an app or two for fun — and I’m fine.

But my colleague in Korea is way into Mac wares. He’s also a very persuasive personality. So I’ve integrated about half of his suggestions into my life and I’m happy to have done it. So I might as well evangelize them. They’re all, of course, free:

1. Pando is the perfect collaborative tool. I work with a lot of large files (audio mixes, video files, etc.) and I work collaboratively with people in Korea and the US. Pando is a very clean app for sending and receiving media files.

2. I think most people know about Quicksilver. It’s so much a part of my workflow that I find when I go to a Mac without it, life feels incomplete.

3. Most people also probably know about Skype — an expatriot’s best friend. I can’t imagine anyone with a MacBook not having this as a regular part of their lives. Sometimes technology really is a wonderful thing.

4. Handbrake. This is one I actually found on my own, after trying others that didn’t work. It’s the best thing I’ve found for ripping DVDs to video files. I have to show a lot of video examples in my classes, and with the region code stuff it’s a nightmare. This is a lifesaver.

It’s been too long since I’ve gone hiking in California. I thought I could just revert back naturally to Grizzly Adams. Mountain lions, yeah; poison oak, got that covered. I’m cool. I’m nature boy.

Then, with the hike almost finished and the sunlight fading away, I looked down and saw it: a tick. Fuck. Forgot about ticks. So I dusted myself and saw that they were crawling all over me. Stubborn little bastards, I flicked off as many as I could, but one had already attached itself to my upper inner thigh. Time to go home and break out the tweezers.

Actually, my friend took it out, with some coaching from me. And it was two ticks instead of just one.

I put ‘em in a glass with some alcohol to send them to IgeneX for testing. When I put them together they immediately went at it, attacking each other. Last I checked they had attached to one another, sucking each other’s innards. I guess it’s too much to expect parasites to play nice.

A post like this would have been better served on 7/7/07, but these thoughts didn’t come to me until after I’d absorbed all the media that came from Al Gore’s “Live Earth” concerts.

2007 feels suspiciously like 1990. That year was the 20th Anniversary of Earth Day. I was in my first semester at state college and the environment was a huge issue for me. Like today, we had a Bush in office who ignored our feelings about the fragile state of our planet. We felt motivated by this and the 20th Anniversary was a perfect spark plug. That Earth Day, and the summer that followed, felt like a sea change. It seemed that we were finally getting wise to the bigger picture of our responsibility as a species.

This summer, back now in the US, I see the word “Green” everywhere. It’s something I didn’t see even four months ago when I left for Korea, at least not like this. Global warming, An Inconvenient Truth and the “Live Earth” concerts are the spark plugs this time. I applaud Al Gore’s efforts, and I know that this is a critical time for change.

But it’s also history repeating itself. I’d like to be hopeful, but I know what happened 17 years ago. Time passed and people moved on to other things. There was some moderate change in the Clinton administration, but systemically we didn’t evolve much, and things reverted back once a new Bush came to power. Why? Because in the end, Earth Day 1990 was a fashion statement. Some of us believed, but most of us were along for the fun of it.

Cynicism expands with age, but I do believe that we’re misguided in our approaches to spurring significant, lasting change. We have to stop turning it into a party. I’m disturbed by rock concerts that preach to the converted and alienate the ignorant. In 1990 we had Sting and Peter Gabriel. In 2007 we have Sheryl Crow. Conservatives and energy executives don’t give a rat’s ass about Sheryl Crow.

I’d like to see an movement where everyone’s invited to the party, not just the popular kids.

Well that was odd.

I finally had my first Mexican meal since being back in California. I was holding off for the right moment, so I stopped at a place in Morgan Hill I used to go to in high school.

I was sitting there reading my Korean phrasebook (I have to read something while eating alone) and the very white waiter came over and asked how things were. The strange part was that he said it in Korean. This floored me way more than it should have. Here I am in the midst of rural America, eating my chimichanga, and the Korean floats back in. That muffled sound was my brain doing a double-take.

I asked him how he knew Korean and he said he worked in a sushi restaurant with a lot of Korean clientele.

In other completely unrelated news, I think I’ve met a girl. I’m not quite sure yet. She should be here any minute, which is why I’m sort of rushing my way through this post

From my corner table at the “Coffee Society” in Campbell, CA, I offer ten snapshot observations on how America is different from Korea:

1. More fat people. I mean a lot of fat people.
2. Fewer hot girls.
3. Less spitting.
4. Cleaner air.
5. More bored expressions (less smiling).
6. People pass on the right as they walk by (still adjusting to this).
7. No one stares at me.
8. Everyone looks different from one another.
9. Everyone seems to be doing something very important.
10. Voices have stopped being ambient sound and have now become dialogue.

I’ve been thinking about something Pico Iyer wrote about traveling, that it is akin to falling in love. The metaphor works, not only on a basic level but on many of the deeper ones. Falling for someone is a profound thing. You’re feeling such an incredible sense of newness, giddiness, and uncertainty that you’re sensitive to any possible provocation to express what you feel to anyone who will listen.

But falling in love is also a private thing. In this sense, you’re inclined to keep it to yourself and protect the preciousness of it. You can’t tell your friend about the complexities of this person who now occupies so much of your identity. Sculpting these feelings into sentences taints the purity of it. Rather than risk cheapening something so precious, it’s safer to keep it hidden.

To extend the idea further, staying with that person for a good four months or so deepens the connection and thereby changes the story. I’ve absorbed enough of my life in Korea to have formed a more logical understanding of it. This makes it more difficult to talk about. I can’t just pull up thoughts and observations, but instead feel like I’d have to start at the beginning, to tell the whole story. And there’s never time for that.

This happened last night at the party. My friend turned to me and said something like “So give it to me; what’s it like over there?” I paused and smiled and said “I can’t do that. I can’t just pull it out and say it. It’s too much.” She smiled back and said “Just give me anything.” Even that was hard; nothing came to mind. “Ask me again when we’re alone.”

As much as I want to talk, I can’t, or I won’t, I’m not sure which. I’m fine being back here and enjoying my time in this world. Maybe being here feels like going back to the wife. It’s not as stimulating and new, but it has its own sense of comfort. It’s easy to fall back into the familiar rhythm.

If anything, America is charming to me now. Driving through the Sacramento Valley, I could see its history better than I have in the past. A nice home on a plot of land, some crops to grow, a boat on a river, privacy within a chosen community. The good life, the dream. When you’re living within a particular existence, you’re mostly seeing its immediacy. When you rediscover it, there’s more depth there — time lengthens and you recognize some of the broader scope of that world.