That feeling carried through my college and early Boston years. Billed as a Boston band, The Cars got as much love as hometown heroes Aerosmith, J.Geils and the Lyres. I loved that The Cars wrote anti-love songs with the same cynicism that guided their stage dress — not punk, not disco, not classic rock. Just The Cars. While Ric Ocasek got the attention as the angular front man, married to a supermodel, it was bassist Benjmain Orr’s lines that drew me in: are punchy, driving and powering the rhythm section in support of, or in opposition to, the synths and guitars. Orr’s vocals (especially on “Drive”) were a dominant term in The Cars equation, up there with Ocasek’s look and quirkiness.

One of my favorite Cars songs is “Bye Bye Love” — a love song that’s not really a love song as much as a plaintive cry for something other than drama in a relationship. What Steely Dan memorialized in the marked-up photographs in “Peg,” The Cars reflect back on self-importance, self-impression and the late 1970s rock and roll life.

When I picked up the bass a dozen years ago, it was one of the first bass lines that I taught myself, thinking it was mostly pedaling on that “E” — it’s much harder than it sounds because Orr is creating space for the chorus with some simple lines, and he keeps an atomic clock beat going through the choruses. It’s not Geddy Lee complexity, but you can dance to it.

With all of that preface, I picked up what is the definitive book about Ben Orr, Joe Milliken’s “Let’s Go,” and got an encyclopedic education. Drummer-turned-guitarist-turned bassist, Cleveland native leading Boston’s first wave of new bands, and first generation American son of Polish and Czech parents who went from “Benny Eleven Letters” (Orzechowski) to a name sake of Boston’s hockey god. Culled from interviews with family members, band mates across forty years of music, and deeply researched in terms of the band membership and dynamics, Milliken’s book reads like a passionate Wikipedia entry for Ben Orr. While the details about group formation and dissolution, instrumentation, and recording activities are robust, there’s very little about what drove those dynamics. What emerges is a portrait of the anti-80s rock star: ego less, incredibly kind and generous, deeply talented and flexible, and yet with subsurface demons including alcohol, fractured relationships and eventually the break up of The Cars. There’s very little about the people side of Orr other than him being, well, a real people person. Milliken’s talent for research brings in an an entire front row of cameos, from WBCN’s Carter Allen to eventual Yes keyboardist Igor Khoroshev to Sherwood Schwartz, who produced “The Brady Bunch.” The Rat (the subject of more than a few pieces here) plays a major role, and brought multiple smiles to my face during two days of reading. It was a fun book that shed light on those right angle turns and the paths around the rock and roll corners.

And then, watching two 70-something rock stars play their hearts out, smile, laugh, joke, and equally cheer on and be propelled to the limelight’s edge by a drummer only slightly older than their tenth album, all of the sadness vaporizes in the reflection of a spotlight and 20,000 fans belting out “Bravado” as loudly and emotionally as they can.

My expectations for this tour were high, given the musical standards Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee have historically set. I’ve endured digestive and mental disagreement seeing my favorite 70s and 80s prog bands tour into their fourth and fifth decades, with the exception of King Crimson, to whom I’ll return shortly. While we all are aged and weathered, they simply sound old: slower tempos, forgotten or simplified solos, and botched lyrics. Seeing Geoff Downes with Yes may have put me off of seeing Steve Howe again. Paul Simon was unable to hear himself or his band, musically sad and forlorn. If 72 is the new 27, it arrives with mobility assistance, a slower click track through the in-ears and finding only enough of the right notes to keep the first ten rows of heads nodding.

Rush took my expectations, wadded them up, and blasted them above the Jumbotron sixteen bars into “Xanadu:” Alex and Geddy playing their double neck, heavy guitars; Anika bringing all of the subtle percussion to the fore; all three of them having loud, raucous fun like a high school band with amps set up on cafeteria chairs.

Alex and Geddy openly discuss their physical preparation for the tour, from arthritis to digestive issues to giving up pot smoking in the Rolling Stone Canada interview. It’s an hour of required watching for fans.

Geddy is playing as hard as ever and his vocal range is more relaxed and improved compared to the last two tours. Alex is technically perfect and having fun on stage. Loren Gold on keyboards gives Geddy more time and space to roam the stage, a freedom he accents with his kicks and jumps that deny he’s in his early 70s. Anika is the perfect drummer to power the band: stroke level precision, more interaction with her bandmates, and keeping time at the original tempos. She is now the obvious joker in the band: taking a selfie in MSG, opening up the Toronto Star, or donning “The Bag” at the conclusion of three consecutive shows. Seeing her bandmates revel in her final flourishes drops an exclamation point at the end of a nearly three hour show. Anika hasn’t inherited Peart’s legacy as a fragile object; she’s picked up the parts and injected them with vital signs.

We caught a show in Chicago that rocked as much as the “Counterparts” or “Show of Hands” tours; but then the Toronto home game took things to a different level. The set lists are varied; there was a full mobile video team for what’s likely an upcoming release; the city was electric with fans mugging in front of the Ontario Legislative Building and the Hockey Hall of Fame. While the signage outside of the Hockey Hall says it’s the “Most Canadian Thing You’ll Do,” seeing Neil Peart’s snare from the “Hockey Night in Canada Theme,” then sipping Tim Horton’s in the HHOF Special Edition, while walking back to the Westin Harbour Castle (the tall building in the cover background of “A Farewell To Kings”) completes the hat trick of Rush immersion.

Leading into set break for the second Toronto show, Geddy said “These kids we play with are tired and need a rest.” Emotionally we needed the reset as much as anyone. Personally, I spent as much time watching Anika’s dance of the pedals, tom toms and cymbals as I did checking out how much force Geddy put on those bass strings.

Between Chicago and Toronto, I spent a week at “prog rock camp,” my annual retreat into the woods to learn from, play with and generally carouse with members of King Crimson, Stick Men, and fellow musicians. King Crimson is one of the few bands that continued to perform at a masterful level from the 70s through their final shows; each incarnation of the band had musicians who owned their parts but also gently interpreted the music. Nobody ever said King Crimson was denatured because Tony Levin picked up John Wetton’s bass lines on Chapman stick or Adrian Belew departed in later line ups.

For a few of the open rehearsal sessions, I parked myself behind Pat Mastelotto, drummer for King Crimson and Mr Mister. He is a master of odd and interleaving time signatures, electronic pads and samples, and hits with a ferocity that makes hammered brass fear him. I got a deeper appreciation for what it’s like to keep time: what you see over the battery’s horizon is the outward aspect, the occasional smile and cymbal hit with a quick ring dampening. Behind the kit you see the feet moving multiple pedals, the change in grips, the sticks placed on a floor tom to switch to mallets or adjust an electronic pad.

With that humbling experience, I have a different view of Anika on drums: she may miss a sixteenth note in a fill, or drop a bass drum beat early in 2112, but Neil Peart equally made fractional time mistakes (mostly chronicled in “Road Show”). Her active, aggressive, and well orchestrated ballet on the kit re-animates a small city of fans each night. Rush in its current lineup puts all of us in the limelight shining with a joy that had turned to only memory for a decade, and now reflects back into lived experience.

I wished that we could do it all again in 2015, and now it approaches the unreal.

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16. “Girl to City,” Amy Rigby, music/biography, finished April 13.
    Recommended based on some 1980s punk biographies
    Leader of the folk-rock trio “The Shams,” Riggs takes a tour through the bohemian (literally) life in the Lower East Side of the mid-80s and -90s, with detours to Boston’s clubs like the Rat and TT The Bears. There are cameos from bands that I recognize. This isn’t a drugs-and-drinking book; it’s more of clunky van rides and bands that start and re-aggregate like magnets tossed into a tray of ball bearings. I’ll be reading the sequel shortly.

17. “For A Limited Time Only,” Peng Shepherd, sci-fi, finished April 15.
    Part of the Amazon.com “Time Traveler’s Passport” series
    A great way to discover a new author via a short story in a collection that I’m reading by “borrowing” the books serially. Inverting the usual “I’d go back and change history” trope, Shepherd’s story makes you focus on what you’d do more of now if you knew the (sad) future.

18. “Constituent Service,” John Scalzi, sci-fi, finished April 21.
    Picking up some short stories/novellas from one of my starred authors
    A novella (86 page) length story that is right down the barrel of the Scalzi canon: quirky aliens, a lovable heroine who doesn’t fit the swashbuckling stereotypes, and an inter-species crisis amplified (literally) by large creatures stomping for joy. Scalzi has a way of making even the most mundane things - dog poop, in this case - heart-warming and interesting enough to make me forget I’m doing most of my reading on a permanently delayed NJ transit train. And then he uses those same vehicles for binding love across as many biological, time or space dimensions as required.

19. “Death of The Author,” Nnedi Okorafor, sci-fi, finished May 1.
    Award nominee, and so well deserved.
    I love finding new authors who push the edges of sci-fi away from space opera and alien politics into exploring what humanity might — or might not — become, and our reflection in and of our technologies. Okorafor crafts a beautiful story that resolves in the last few pages, interweaving Nigerian life and history, the life of the instantly famous author, a story-within-a-story and the roles of community, family, and traditions in maintaining our very long term stories.

20. “The Cartographers,” Peng Shepherd, sci-fi/fantasy, finished May 9.
    Following up on “Time Traveler’s Diary” short story.
    I have loved maps since discovering AAA road atlases and promotional vacation spot maps as a tween. Shepherd crafts a story that is part detective novel, part love story, and an homage to maps and their curation. It unfolds, most gently, sometimes with sudden tears and rips, so you can see the entirety of the landscape before and behind you. I alternating reading with listening to Thank You Scientist’s “Maps of Non-Existent Places” because that’s the premise of the book and touches on that feeling of longing for something beyond the visible edge.

21. “London Falling,” Patrick Radden Keefe, non-fiction, finished May 14.
    Having visited I’m now on a London and Paris kick.
    I really and truly wanted to love this book — my first non-fiction account of life in modern London, a backstory about old school Jewish families and the post-Big Bang (relaxation of banking laws) fintech explosion that mirrored my tech days at Sun Microsystems, and a search for truth about a teen’s death. What emerged, however, was a collage of backstories, sidetracks and soft-center theories that made it somewhat unclear for whom and why Keefe was writing: To demonize the influence of Russian money in the London economy? To reveal he had stumbled onto a police informant and found the business tawdry? To give appropriate memory and respect to Zac Bettler, the young man around whose death the story revolves, and his family’s search for answers that would let them move from grief to memory? This has been a NY Times bestseller, perhaps because of the progressively salacious disclosures, but it has the pacing of a documentary.

    

22. “Waiting On A Friend,” Natalie Adler, fiction, finished June 4.
    Introduced at a book talk at Wolfe & Kron in Asbury Park; Oprah Daily’s top summer reading pick.
    Debut novel from (future) superstar writer Natalie Adler, mid-NJ-famous for her piece claiming Bruce Springsteen’s music for the “others” who hide in the interstitial spaces of his songs. “Waiting On A Friend,” a nod to the Stones song, (and coincidentally released within a day of Sonny Rollins’s death) follows a young woman through 1984’s Lower East Side as her friends die of AIDS. They come back to her as ghosts - gaps in the light, in space, in her visual reference - in a beautiful, longing, loving way, not Ghostbusters-like menaces (Ghostbusters was also released in 1984). Her best friend, whose death is chronicled in the first paragraph, is whom she awaits, and the story deals with love, loss, punk music, counter culture, and listening to the echoes of a place and a time. “Angels in America” and “Rent” progressed our mainstream gross, visceral understanding of the AIDS epidemic; “Waiting On A Friend” will make this accessible to the next generations. Easily one of my favorite books of the year.

23. “Inside The Box,” David Epstein, non-fiction, finished June 5 (but read layered with Adler’s book)
    From Epstein’s Substack, highly recommended.
    Epstein’s book “Range” has become required reading for my work friends and team members; I eagerly awaited my pre-order of “Inside the Box” because innovation within constraint has been a constant theme in everything from driving small research teams to thinking about Phish jams (in my Phish Studies 2.0 conference poster). Constraints force creativity into play, citing Keith Jarrett’s Köln concerts only played in the middle octaves of a damaged piano as a prime example but chock full of other immediately applicable guidance in decision making and using constraints to remove dimensions.

24. “Springsteen Fandom: A Lifetime Conversation,” Nicolas Pethes, music, finished June 10.
    Picked up at author talk with Natalie Adler about “Waiting On A Friend”
    My good friend Bill, who was co-conspirator in college radio, and friend and explorer of progressive rock and jazz for more than 40 years, used to say that the best DJs were the one who made you feel like you were sitting in their room, hearing them play records and talk about music one-on-one. Pat St. John in New York, the late and wonderful Pierre Robert in Philadelphia, Mark Parenteau in Boston - when you were listening, you were the only one on the receiving end of the broadcast. Pethes — a professor of culture at University of Cologne — expands that musical interplay to an exploration of Springsteen fandom. He takes us from one-sided adulation and broadcast to interaction, active participation and evolution. Whether it’s the everyman aspects of his music, the marathon concerts that take on revival reverence, or Springsteen’s openness about his mental health and his sincere, deep memory of former bandmates, Pethes takes an academic, cultural and personal approach to Springsteen. It is rooted in the notion that it is a life-long, lifetime conversation, and therefore fandom ages and evolves over that timeline — rather than the aging fan who wishes for “the way it was.” Pethes constructs a series of frameworks - the use of tradition, stories, live performance, and acknowledging the ghosts of history (hence the wonderful parallel to Adler’s book) - in which it’s easy to build our your own sense of what it has been, and will be, in stand in the light of day emanating from The Boss.

25. “Going Deep,” David Neale, fiction, finished June 12.
    Seen in the Princeton alumni magazine.
    Continuing the college radio references, David Neale was also a college radio peer. After a career in law, his retirement portfolio included his first novel, a perfect albeit sometimes upsetting beach read. There are faint echoes of “write what (or who) you know” coupled with deep dissection of toxic parenting and 1970s attitudes that are just coming to the surface after a luxury car’s worth of therapy. Revolving around his father’s definition of “mensch” (classically a good, caring person, but here your mileage varies) and protagonist Jonah’s sense of success, self-worth, and vulnerability, there are some plot points you can see coming, and others that thoroughly come up from the deep.

26. “Mathey Girls,” Melody Chu, fiction, finished June 14.
    Another Princeton alumni magazine prompt.
    Fresh on the heels of Princeton Reunions and picking up some orange-and-black themed books, I bought Chu’s quasi-memoire of life before a 20th Reunion to look for congruence with my own experiences. In her adaption of her first-year college dorm enclave turning into lifelong friendships, intercepted by the death of their group’s center, there are some parallels to what I experienced at Princeton: feeling the “other,” balancing the dynamic range of opportunities with the veiled elitism with finding my own tribe. The book is equally about strong cultural family structures and how they accommodate (or don’t) grief, loss and adversity. In stark contrast to “Going Deep” (also Princeton tinged) where the protagonist actually is an imposter and hasn’t come to grips with it; the central Mathey character exudes every bit of imposter syndrome before being forced into actual adulthood on the south side of 40.

27. “The Radiant Star,” Ann Leckie, sci-fi, finished June 22.
    Follower and consumer of all of her work.
    Tying together the space opera of the “Ancillary Justice” trilogy with a literal hagiography of saints who seek guidance from a non-existent star on a rogue planet, the story is full of palace intrigue, political side plots and fundamental questions of faith (and science). Leckie uses gender and pronouns to create power, elevation, status, and life goals — reading her work will make you see gender as social rather than biological. There were themes that felt more final to the Imperial Radch rather than convey the history and future of this strange rogue planet and its people, but perhaps that was the point — four religions colliding over governance, famine and a distinct lack of divine presence.

If you watched the Knicks win the NBA Championship last night, you saw stories of fathers and sons — from OG Anunoby’s deep appreciation of his father relenting to buy him a basketball hoop with the promise of hard work, to Jalen Brunson’s father Rick bringing both of their careers full circle. For those of us who watched the Knicks since Bill Bradley was a player, last night represented a state change and a cementing of fan identity. Each of the events commemorated in June - Pride, Juneteenth, Flag Day - similarly mark a phase shift in our collective view of communities including our own standing as a country.

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I finished Natalie Adler’s debut novel “Waiting On A Friend” this week, and haven’t stopped thinking about it despite that Knicks run, Flag Day, and buying Father’s Day cards (as well as cleaning up tackle for our annual fishing trip). The cover itself is a coded flag - the extruded letters form the Lesbian flag colors - and the title is a reference to the Rolling Stones song about deep friendship as a strong familial force. Adler became mid-NJ-famous for her piece claiming Bruce Springsteen’s music for the “others” who hide in the interstitial spaces of his songs, and in her first novel she fills those spaces with characters from one of the most brutal phase shift in New York culture: the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

“Waiting On A Friend,” coincidentally released right around the death of sax soloist Sonny Rollins, follows a young woman through 1984’s Lower East Side as her friends die of AIDS. They come back to her as ghosts - gaps in the light, in space, in her visual reference - in a beautiful, longing, loving way, not Ghostbusters-like menaces (Ghostbusters was also released in 1984). Her best friend, whose death is chronicled in the first paragraph, is whom she awaits, and the story deals with love, loss, punk music, counter culture, and listening to the echoes of a place and a time. “Angels in America” and “Rent” progressed our mainstream gross, visceral understanding of the AIDS epidemic; “Waiting On A Friend” will make this accessible to the next generations. It is easily one of my favorite books of the year, and is a map to the value of marking these identity, social and community transitions for the better.

Ask: please buy this book, and in honor of Flag Day for all flags, buy it today so that Natalie gets some standing in the Amazon micro-category best seller rankings - the hysteresis of groups of purchases will raise visibility for an author who is widely deserving it. Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, I earn a microscopic commission if you buy something through this link.

Our junior year, our ground level room framing the Henry-1903 courtyard entrance had a brass star affixed under one window. The stars commemorate a fellow Tiger, usually one who lived in that room, who was killed in one of the World Wars, Korea or Vietnam. (Ed note: In researching this piece I discovered the stars were placed by the Society of the Claw, of whom one of my close classmates and WPRB alum is now a member). We tended not to think much of those small memorials, passed daily on buildings ranging from dorms to current academic offices. Memorials to Princeton students killed in action dot the campus from Revolutionary War names in Nassau Hall to the George Segal scultpure of the binding of Isaac done as a memorial for the students killed at Kent State in 1970. (Ed note two: the longer piece linked is as much about the Segal sculpture as it is about my Freehold Township High School classmate Steve Voight, killed in action as a member of Seal Team 8. I have written about Steve’s passion for life, friends who carry his memory for three decades, and his outsized personality in previous years).

Early on Saturday morning, alumnae Maria Ressa and Sonia Sotomayor gave talks to thousands of graduates about freedoms and justice and liberty; to that lecture hall’s west stand Abraham and Isaac outside the chapel, and to the south, closer to Nassau Hall is a memorial to Princetonians killed on 9/11, including my classmate Karen Klitzman. As is done in Israel, I include victims of terrorism in my personal Memorial Day remembrances.

Near the centroid of that triangle, near the transept of the Princeton Chapel and at the head of the wall bearing names to those killed in service to our country, I found this battle scarred flag from the 4th USS Princeton. Designated CVL-23, USS Princeton was a a light aircraft carrier built in Camden and sponsored by the wife of then-Princeton President Dodd. It was damaged in a dive bombing attack during the Battle of Leyte in the Philippines, and scuttled after colliding with two ships that came to its rescue. I had never noticed it, despite dozens of campus tours and multiple events in the chapel, and now it is part of my Reunions canon song.

Aging has continuous re-baselines that way in which you reckon time; it’s time before and time until, our current era looking both ways. That is the point of calling graduations “commencements;” our 1984 Princeton commencement is halfway between the loss of the USS Princeton and today; Steve Voight is revered in memory as long as he was loved in life. The point of divinding time into epochs is exhort us not to wait: we can sense the impact and import of events long after they have passed, but the call to action — to be the defender — is clarion and immediate. Lectures and books introduce ideas and discussion; bravery, courage and fearless defense of our colors are the long indelible marks on our timeline from which we measure.

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The spherical cow approximation has literally shaped amplified arena sound reinforcement since the first electronic instruments needed to fill much larger venues. While venues with resonant cavities (Carnegie Hall) can cast the sounds of an orchestra into the upper tiers, assuming a respectfully quiet audience, most modern sound stages emulate a point source — the band’s front of house mix emanating from a single point, or perhaps proximal two stereo points, usually near the drummer and/or bass players. With advances in echo cancellation, speaker towers, and driver design, modern concert venues have sound that is usually bright, loud, and evenly dispersed. My personal experience, though, is that some bass is lost, vocals can be muddied if not carefully amplified and compressed, and some arenas still suffer from echo (I saw Rush at Madison Square Garden in 2010, before they fixed the ceiling, and every Neil Peart cymbal hit found my left and right ears just milliseconds apart).

Three weeks ago I saw Phish at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and it inverted every mental model of concert sound I have constructed. It was as close to a religious experience as I have had at a concert, and I went down the rabbit hole of exploring the technology for all five hours of our return flight. Rolling Stone magazine, usually dismissive of progressive rock and jam bands and their fans, had kind words about the Phish residency.

Phish isn’t really a band you watch for their stage presence, outside of bassist Mike Gordon’s bobblehead impulses driven by his picking style and speed. It’s the lights, the waves of hope and sheets of light and lumens and minor to major chords that create a number of open spaces for your senses to explore. You have sight, you have sound, and depending upon the hygiene and weed quality of the fans in rows around you, quite possibly smell.

With all deference to Dead & Company, Phish is ultimate band to run the Sphere sound and LED video systems through their paces. The visuals were simply astonishing — animations tied to the rhythm and intensity of the jams, virtual Kuroda rigs multiplied across the entire Sphere screen like Mickey’s sorcerer brooms or the hammers in Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”

I’m going way down the sound system rabbit hole, because it delivered an experience that dwarfed, eclipsed and rendered moot every argument made by an audiophile, a high-end stereo magazine subscriber, and those armchair analog engineers who know tubes sound better and your turntable needs to be isolated from the floor of your listening room.

The Sphere inverts the usual concert dynamics of point sound source (in this case, the stage and speaker stacks) diffusing sound through the arena. You, personally, are in the sonic center of more than 100,000 individual speakers, spreading the sound stage across several hundred feet of visual space, and quite literally beaming the sound back to you at the center. The Holoplot sound system can aim particular sounds at specific regions of the seating area, or it can create imaging that directs a very wide, precise sound stage to you.

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The net result is a crystal clear sound, where you hear every piano note, every crossing vocal, every splash cymbal hit with precision (absolutely no delay, jitter or echo), clarity and richness that makes you feel like you’re sitting on the floor of Phish’s practice barn, with the band arrayed in front of you, an audience of one fully immersed in the soundscape. If Trey’s guitar solos deep in a jam are the “hose,” then running them through the Holoplot gives you five orders of magnitude more pinpoint streams tickling your inner ear.

There are more than 100,000 drivers that create for audio transparency, aiming through grillwork, trusses, and accounting for reflection and echo cancellation. While you are seated in a semi-circle facing the Mann Music Center stage, you get perhaps100 by 50 linear feet of audio drivers fanning out to the seats; in the Sphere the audio drivers are beaming down to you, and from the net effect, to you alone.

There is a third (or fourth) sense engaged in the Sphere’s musical output: the proprioception enhanced by the in-seat haptics. Much as your phone tingling in your pants pocket informs you of a new text or Slack message, the in seat haptics add a sensory rumble to anything about two octaves below middle C. When Gordon got plucky with his low B string, or switched on the octave divider to take his lines down into those rumble strip territories, the shake delivered through the seat cushion was totally immersive. I found myself precisely divided between wanting to stand up and dance my floppy puppet moves and relishing those bass hits coming up my spine.

Two nights at the Sphere rank in my top five most meaningful concert experiences (Springsteen at the old Philly Spectrum in 1981, a pure display of showmanship and stamina in my first arena concert experience; Coheed and Cambria at the Rumsey Playfield in 2011, raw energy and the first new music I’d listened to in a decade; the penultimate R40 Rush show in Las Vegas, a musical retrospective perfectly executed that encapsulated 15 years of father-son x prog rock x fan boy love)

The multiplicative effect of the bouncy seats, the midtown skyscraper sized videos, and the beamed sound re-inforced the feeling that you were in the soft chewy center of your own Phish universe for a few hours. It was a mild — and fun — departure from the usual spirit of camaraderie and can-you-believe-it reactions. As a different Phish experience it won’t fully supplant an outdoor venue on a hot summer day with 20,000 of your wayward circus friends but I heartily recommend assuming spherical cow funk.

As strategist and motivational speaker Charles Garfield once said, “Anyone who has taken a shower has a good idea, it’s what you do next.” After transcription, editing, and fixing more than a few weak points, I shared the rough outline with a friend who is similarly saturated in shore lore and an author. Haven’t heard back, implying the middle is too rough to find the story’s edges.

Am I going to do this again? After my last book barely sold through its advance, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t invest the time, energy or passion into another technical book. Search engines, now LLMs, and a general lack of interest in nerd craft have diminished the book market to a quaint boomer artifact. But a music book? A love story? Set along the Jersey shore? Write what you know, the advice is directed.

What I’ve learned in the intervening decade and a half is that you have to be intense and immersed in the project. Much of this insight came from the Three of a Perfect Pair prog rock camp, and before that a few recitals with the So.I.Heard school of music. Whether it’s a book, a recital piece, or practicing a 1970s prog rock song to play with my newest camper friends, my mental duty cycle goes something like this:

• This is going to be exciting and fun. I love this piece, this idea, and the opportunity to express myself through it. [the quarter pole]

• What was I thinking? This is devilishly complicated, with far too many moving parts, lines, and tones, and way above my competencies. I am watching the musical bus pull away while I stand here awkwardly holding my bass. [halfway through]

• I hate this, I hate myself for even thinking it was close to my dexterity with keyboard, fretboard or ability to groove in any dimension, and I am staring at embarrassment in the mirror. [entering the home stretch]

• There is a middle ground between perfection and ability, and if I simplify the lines, themes and style, I can be proud of what I’m creating. [about 90% of the way through]

• With apologies to Peter Frampton, c’mon, let’s do it again! [about an hour post performance or draft emailed to the editors]

As Deb Carter Mastelotto has noted, music camp (like football camp, art camp, and stand up comedy camp for adults) works because it’s immersive: You’re thinking about music from the moment you get coffee and share institutional-quality eggs with fellow musicians to the master classes, performances, and guided listening sessions. Immersion focuses your thinking and allows you to pick up new details; intense practice time amplifies those nuances into longer-term abilities.

When I took wood shop class in 8th grade, we made a minimally functional gumball dispenser - cut the wood for the box, route the channels for the plexiglass front, drill a rotating handle to drop the balls where they’d skitter across the table top. Our shop teacher was very old school. He challenged us to find pleasure in using hand tools making something functional, telling us “In Germany, students make the same cross cut 500 times until it’s perfect.”

It’s taken me 50 years to realize that the German shop class story might have been hyperbole but the he understated the value of intensive practice required to asymptotically approach the axis of skill perfection.

Counterparty to immersion is intensive work. Foundational to “10,000 hours of practice” it involves doing scales, writing exercises, becoming comfortable with the tools of your trade and building up the recall to compound the experiences of immersion. For the past month I’ve been auditing an improvisation class led by Markus Reuter (camp counselor, one-third of Stick Men with two other counselors, and superb touch guitarist). I’m neither a touch guitarist nor playing improvisational music, but the core of the class has been helped me develop strength and comfort with my instrument through exercises that are intentionally limited and challenging.

Cory Doctorow has written about his writing process, producing a fixed number of words each day and then moving on to other projects - he does one page a day, generating a full-length book in a year. John Scalzi summarizes the need for intensive work wonderfully (as always). Susan Righetti has a much more imperative call to get off the schneid with immersion and intensive effort to reach the finish line.

My goal for the warm months is to learn Roger Waters’s bass part on Pink Floyd’s “Have A Cigar” and pull the book into an outline that gets a return nod. Intense, immersive, practiced and rewarding.

Inspirations this quarter: Digging into authors I like. Working through the “Princeton Authors” list. Picking up recommendations from writers (Valente, Doctorow, Harrow) whose work I consume. More book discussions around the bagel table at work.

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1. “Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller,” Bill Griffith, art, finished January 1
   From a Cory Doctorow reference
   Ernie Bushmiller was the comic artist behind “Nancy,” one of the longest running and widely syndicated comics in the “funny pages” but equally one that literally stretched the impact of the comic strip as a commentary on the human condition. Without “Nancy,” there is no “Calvin & Hobbes” — or even wackier extrusions like “Zippy The Pinhead.” Bill Griffith, Zippy’s creator, penned this biography of Bushmiller as a graphic novel, and it’s a delightful romp through the early days of printed comics, in and around the inspirations and creative process that produced a daily strip for decades, and the mechanics that Bushmiller used (from multiple drawing tables to breaking the fourth wall of the fourth estate) to make “Nancy” so adored.

2. “Where the Axe is Buried,” Ray Nayler, sci-fi, finished January 14
   Award nominee in 2025
   Complicated, dystopian, surveillance state thriller where the authoritarian force is blurred between general artificial intelligences and the human operators who spur their instantiation and succession. There is enough Cold War and post-Cold War tension woven throughout to make the book feel equally 1970 James Bond as well as William Gibson cyberpunk. Told from multiple perspectives with a wide dynamic range of characters, it was hard to follow at times but rewarding as Nayler lets you draw your own conclusions.

3. “Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead,” Brian Halligan, David Meerman Scott, music, finished February 5.
   The post-Bob Weir death rabbit hole.
   A fun, simple and remarkably insightful book that could have been written about open source software, social media campaigns or as an intro or addendum to Clay Shirkey’s “Here Comes Everybody.” It was the palate cleanser I needed.
   

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4. “Gap Year,” Lindsey Goldstein, fiction, finished February 15.
   On a list of Princeton alumni authors.
   I wanted to like this more, in the vein of Jodi Picoult and Michael Lewis and other Tiger scribes whose writing is dense while tweaking the brain and heartstrings. It was an enjoyable and quick read, but predictable, about a woman finding self-confidence and footing after her marriage dissolves and her daughter flies from the nest.

5. “Man’s Search For Meaning,” Viktor Frankl, non-fiction, finished February 21.
   Prelude to a Poland trip in May.
   I’ve been quoting Viktor Frankl in my writing for two decades, and in advance of visiting the concentration camps in May decided it was time to read what is regularly called one of the most influential books of the 20th century. It is powerful but not in horror or revulsion. Frankl captures and provides a guide to the strength of the human spirit and uses his psychotherapy techniques to turn even the worst conditions into a meaningful growth and observation.

6. “There Is No Antimemetics Division,” qntm, sci-fi, finished February 25.
   Substack recommendation.
   Wild ride through memes, memory, quantum physics, eldritch horrors, the multi-verse and maybe some time travel along the way. What if you could be exposed to an idea that would eat your memory? Erase itself or part of your shared history with it? Equal parts Charles Stross’s “Laundry” series and extinction-level drama, this was a superb repackaging of the pieces of the story that previously appeared online.

   

7. “Fun City Heist,” Michael Kardos, fiction, finished February 26.
   Latest from a Princeton author I follow.
   A paen to the Asbury Park of the 1970s and the shore bands that never quite made it, it’s equal parts carnie lore, band dynamics, and a not-quite-Oceans 12 themed robbery. Filling in the spaces between major points are characters you knew from high school and the cool parent you wanted to be (or perhaps are, greatly modulating to whom you’ll recommend this book when done.) Should be a summer read (I finished it on the beach in a day) but the publisher’s schedule didn’t see it that way.

8. “Perfection,” Vincenzo Latronica and Sophie Hughes, fiction, finished February 26.
   Recommended (by Cathryne Valente maybe).
   What happens to all of those socially media savvy, digital natives as they Instagra their way to middle age? What if “perfection” is purely illusory, and wending a way through relationships, work (even if it is as a pair of designers immersed in current culture and themes), ex-pat life and finding your true self is in fact the mirror — or a fun house mirror — image of perfection? Incredible language brought out by the translation, including listicles that both reflect the subtle disdain for online life as well as capture the mundane. The main characters don’t really develop at all through dialog (there is none; it’s purely third person), but change their view of the perfect world they have tried to create.

9. “Dancing Naked In The Mind Field,” Kary Mullis, biography, finished February 27.
   On a bit of science and biography streak, but this may have ended it.
   Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing PCR, the process by which DNA testing and sequencing was commercialized. Maybe 20% of the book deals with his interest in chemistry and how he conceptualized one of the major acclerators of modern medicinal chemistry and diagnostics. The rest is exhausting: his views on astrology (it’s real), on HIV (that it has no bearing on AIDS because he couldn’t find the research), on psychedelics (useful), on climate change (not real, in the epoch view, much as Freeman Dyson said), on oncology (he rails against chemotherapy and big pharma in general). He comes across as a misogynist and a victim of his own “if you win a Nobel all doors are opened” braggadocio.

10. “Joiner and Rust,” Lavie Tidhar, sci-fi, finished February 27.
    Read everything he writes.
    A Tor short story (38 pages) with a great set of twists and reveals about two old robot “friends.” If you cried at “Maybe Happy Ending” on Broadway you’ll sniffle at this through one third the running time.

11. “9 Hours, 3 Days, 27 Years,” John Scalzi, sci-fi, finished February 27.
    Part of an amazon.com short story series “The Time Traveler’s Passport”
    Sometimes I think that Scalzi could write about the most mundane things and make them funny and captivating (and he did, with “When The Moon Hits Your Eye”). Other times he takes something serious and mind-warping and turns it into a mundane tale, only until you realize that his 4-D chess has constructed a world so complex it may or may not hold every emotion you want to feel inside of 40 pages. From the collection title, it’s a story about time travel, but dismissing every tenet and trope (“you can’t go back and kill Hitler or the world will unravel”) and instead just assumes that consumer, recreational time travel will be a thing and people will do whatever they want, without affecting our multiverse timelime. Until someone discovers the inevitable loophole. I ended up buying the rest of the series after this opener.

12. “Shampoo Planet,” Douglas Coupland, fiction, finished February 28.
    Continuing to work through Coupland’s back catalog in paperback
    Credited with coining “Generation X” Coupland also captures the zeitgeist of a pre-internet, post-big hair 1980s romance interspersed with enough anxiety and OCD to help us understand current times. Having his older work only available in paperback reinforces the sense that this is a time capsule from the last, simpler generation, but you see every hint of our fascination with attention (the title is subtle).

13. “Maintenance of Everything: Part 1,” Steward Brand, non-fiction, finished March 6.
    One of the best writers on thinking long-term, recommended by NY Geek.
    I had the pleasure of meeting Steward Brand in 1995 at a Kodak strategy off-site. One of the suggestions that came out of that meeting was for Kodak to buy a software company in which to embed their deep image processing software - nearly a decade before the iPhone became the ubiquitous digital camera. Brand has always thought and written about the long-term impacts of strategy and existence, from the “Whole Earth Catalog” to his latest work, what will be at least ten volumes discussing the maintenance of everyday things, and by extrusion, our lives. This was as close to talking to Brand in person as you can get — full of digressions and deep dives, wonderfully indexed and annotated, and replete with insights that will make you close the e-reader and think. Which has always been his intention.

14. “Alex Lifeson Biography,” Curtis A Nelson, music, finished March 8.
    Found while scrolling through upcoming Rush50 tour information.
    Complete and utter junk, a waste of a day of reading and 110+ pages. I think this may have been completely LLM-generated from available information, as it adds exactly zero new information, data, musical insights, facts or stories. There are no primary sources, no quotes, no details on shows, tours, songs, chords, progressions or even guitars used. Everything is superficially outlined and repetitive; the language abuses structures with contrasting clauses.

15. “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” Matthew Crawford, non-fiction, finished March 25.
    Recommended by Amazon via the Stewart Brand book.
    I was hoping for more of a Robert Pirsig “Zen” book, and instead got a mix of essays on middle management, divorcing line workers from their skills, and the general decline of diagnostic capability, decision making and creativity. I agree with all of Crawford’s points, and feel that shop class in middle school was one of the better non-academic subjects becuase it was so inherently real world (you can’t assume a spherical cow when you’re bending metal, to mix metaphors).
    
    
    
    

Enough that I took my own kids ice skating when they were 3 and 5 years old, an afternoon that remains the single most expensive choice I have made in 35 years of parenting. From there, figure skating competitions, ice dancing, synchronized skating, and travel ice hockey were staples of every weekend from Labor Day until Easter.

One game from that first year of travel hockey stuck with me and resurfaced during this year’s Winter Olympics. In a “house league” game, where the roster rules are bit more relaxed and kids play for their local town, our son was skating as a fill-in player for a neighboring town against a very strong club. The final score was 5-1, with all five goals scored by a combination of Bobby Carpenter III (who was all of six years old and skated circles around everyone) and his sister Alex Carpenter. Their dad had recently retired as a NJ Devils player; those “in the know” knew we were seeing hockey lineage that was rare. Our son scored the lone opposing goal, on a breakaway, on a move that had one parent ask him (in the locker room) “Where did you learn that” to which he replied “I saw Patrik Elias do it.”

The kids all had, and have, their hockey heroes.

All of them were white men, perhaps with varying accents, but with very little non-geographic diversity. Hockey in the early 2000s was largely white, middle-class, expensive, and boys. Look at the actors in Disney’s “Miracle” and those are the golden hockey faces of the early part of this century.

In those first few years of travel hockey, we found ourselves in Lake Placid for our annual end of season tournament. The place reverberates with hockey history, the way a sharp winter day amplifies sound reflecting off of snow and ice. I dove in headfirst, reading books about the first town dedicated to winter sports; the first to host two Winter Olympics; about the Russian teams that dominated the 1970s in international play and the 1980 USA men’s team.

About a dozen years sago, I began coaching Mites hockey - the same level where our son and the Carpenter kids faced off in a community rink. I’ve had players who I think will do well at the college level; one or two who might get drafted; and many who played because it was fun and social and rewarding. What I noticed most, however, was the changing face of hockey: kids of all colors and genders, many of them the first in their families to play ice hockey. Gone is the implied exclusivity, and the sport has delivered on the promise that “Hockey is for Everyone.”

I’ve coached a number of young girl players and all girls teams, and watching the USA Women’s team capture gold in Milan means that they now have their 1980 moment. It took almost two full generations, but those American young women with linked arms, swaying during the medal ceremony, are the projection of my mites teams singing songs on the bench because they’re having fun with a sport they love.

This past Sunday, before the medal game, I had my usual group of three early beginner players. We worked up to some stick and puck drills, practicing shooting the puck into the boards while I put on a show of being the world’s worst goalie (not really a show, more trying not to pivot and break another ankle). When one of the young players ended the pass and shoot drill by saying “that’s just like Dougie Hamilton” (NJ Devils defenseman, who takes a lot of one-timers on passes to the point), I smiled — he has picked out his hero. What I sincerely hope is that a few hours later, he had enormous pride in his country, his team and his sport, and that he and his future teammates funnel that into future years of playing — and cheering for — hockey at any level.

And so post-practice, I was sitting in my TV room, surrounded by talismans and rings on the TV, cheering for the underdog. I was wearing my USA Hockey jersey, purchased by my parents during our last trip to Lake Placid twenty years ago, perhaps the final acceptance of my defection to hockey skates twenty-five years earlier. My signed Mike Eruzione jersey was draped across my lap, channeling some of the 1980 Miracle on Ice passion. My son and I were texting comments on the game. I know my father, the retired dentist, winced when Jack Hughes spit his teeth out late in the 3rd period (“bloody chiclets” in hockey parlance; I don’t want to consider how many teeth end up in the Zamboni shavings each year).

And just a few minutes into overtime, Zach Werenski fed a pass right to Jack Hughes, who scored the gold medal winning goal, ending a drought that extended back to my high school years, to the Iran hostage crisis, to memories of the gas shortage, and to a much less diverse hockey base.

Yeah, I cried after that game. I loved seeing the USA men bring Johnny Gaudreau’s jersey and kids onto the ice, after having skated past the JG/MG memorial on our rink’s dasherboards two hours earlier. I thought of how happy my mom would have been to see the USA win both men’s and women’s gold, as she was a proponent of women’s sports from the days when girls basketball players were required to shoot underhanded. I thought of my learn to play skaters having a whole new roster of heroes, some of whom play at the other Essex County rink. I thought of my friend Wally, who still holds the Princeton University record for most saves in a game, sure he had equally been amazed at both mens and womens goalies for the USA teams. I smiled knowing that Alex Carpenter has a gold medal, 25 years after a rec league game that showed her future brilliance. I know that my son and daughter in law have a new hockey hero in their home — Aerin Frankel, home town goalie for the PWHL Boston Fleet and anchor of the USA women’s strong defense.

These are the new golden faces of hockey. And they shine so brightly.

Another three years would pass before my college roommate Tom (a long-time Deadhead who once finished a take-home exam early and let me hand it in for him so he could see the Dead at Red Rocks) played Terrapin Station for me — “Estimated Prophet” was the hook with its 7/4 time signature, crying wah and even more exhorted chorus. I drew and colored an envelope for the Fare Thee Well ticket lottery, and finally saw Phil and Friends, Oteil and Friends, and Dead and Company in the past five years to complete my induction into Dead followership.

Seeing Bob Weir on stage in Philadelphia, powering through “Estimated Prophet,” “Dark Star” and “Eyes of the World” was magic. It will remain one of my most powerful musical memories, from the intense heat on the field to the people spinning their way through the jams to Weir’s vocals calling to that “prophet on the burning shore” in all 60,000 present.

So I am far from a long-time Deadhead, and even further from an authority on their music and legacy, so Bob Weir’s passing hit me unusually hard. Seeing his legacy reflected by other musicians, and considering his body of work, I think we have witnessed one of the stanchions of modern long-term musical history. Just as we continue to listen to Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, hundreds of years after their passing, to study their composition and structure, we will study, perform, and celebrate Bob Weir’s musical legacy for the next five centuries.

Much of our vernacular comes from his lyrics including “long, strange trip” and a midwestern city’s population of dogs named Cassidy.

He likely spent more aggregate time on stage, sharing his inner soul with the audience, than any other musician.

You sense the depth and breadth of the community, the profound respect and raw talent he shared within the comments immediately after his death: Billy Strings called him a “wrangler of the stars.” Trey Anastasio said he was “allergic to compliments.” Memes of him working out and focusing on his health were as rampant as Covid itself, and we all thought he was immortal and eternal. Despite war, disease, inflation, artificial intelligence and electronic music, Bob Weir just kept playing rhythm guitar and writing songs.

Shortly after the release of “Amadeus,” one of my co-workers remarked that if Mozart was alive today, he’d be a hacker — challenging authority, flaunting creativity, making the commons more valuable for all to enjoy. Bob Weir hacked our ability to feel and enjoy music — connecting us, powering us, and forcing us to allocate parts of our minds to new ideas, rhythms and words.

Weir’s amplification went beyond Jerry Garcia: Phish’s Trey Anastasio and pop artist John Mayer join Dead & Co; he brought jazz fusion musicians such as Alphonso Johnson from Weather Report into Bobby and The Midnites, and he continually pulled from every genre.

As the“other one” to Jerry he never played lead, always rhythm guitar. The Dead had a four piece rhythm section with two drummers, Phil Lesh on bass and Bob on rhythm guitar. On the surface that line up with keyboards should have been overly busy, but Bob created room for keys and lead guitar to lift and soar. Shunning simple bar chords of 1970s classic rock, he picked careful arpeggios, accents, and created space for the beats to fall. Bob Weir laid tracks to guide the songs home, using the drums to set the tempo and his rhythm guitar to open things up. Every song is a master class in setting the right notes in the right places.

YouTuber MicksPicks disassembles that 1980 SNL performance, isolating Bob Weir so you can hear every facet of his creativity and how he made “Alabama Getaway” feel as fast and escapist as its title:

When interviewed about my favorite song “Estimated Prophet,” Weir didn’t revert back to Ezekiel and biblical references about fiery chariots; for him it was “about some guy raging in the lot.” That, for me, is the essence of “standing in a shaft of light,” one of the most-quoted lyrics used in his memory. He saw the holy in everyone, everywhere, and used his music to raise it to the surface.

We lost that prophet of the inclusive power of music.

The short form is that it took me ten months to rediscover my voice, my cadence and my tribes, was an underlying theme of empowerment.

The Bass Voice: Meat On The Frets

Through the course of the year I took lessons with three different bass teachers — my five-year Zoom lessons continued with a favorite touring musician as her schedule allowed, and I managed to imitate a real music student taking in-person lessons in two studios, commuting with my bass backpack through the tortuous NJ Transit, PATH and NYC MTA mazes. They each brought a different focal length and depth of field to my education, from pick and slap technique to getting “meat on the frets” and making my playing much more intentional. While I had become disappointed in my tone and the thinness of what I was producing through an upgraded Fender amp, a few hours with one of NYC’s best jazz bassists got that meat on the strings and frets. I now practice standing up, with (better) posture, happily jamming along to everything from Idris Muhammed to Phish to Booker T and the MGs.

One of the forcing functions was my return to “prog rock camp” - the King Crimson alumni camp held in the Woodstock area in early August, where I signed up to play two songs just above the waterline of my ability — Yes’s “Long Distance Runaround” and Haken’s “Lapse.” Ron Carter would say that I found the right notes and just enough of them to make this aspiration fun and rewarding, and I got to rock my wide stripe suit in my best Chris Squire impersonation to fulfill a long-standing dream.

The Commuter Cadence: The Focus Is Sharp in the City

When it was clear I was exiting J&J, I started by making a list of people, companies and industries that I would find rewarding in my final career arc. I thought of this as an audition for retirement: discover a portfolio of roles, contributions and focal points that would keep me busy once the daily 9-5 ebbed. From my initial list of ten dozen contacts, emails and LinkedIn messages cut the portfolio in half; matching skills to needs cut it to a quarter; and the last few turned into some fractional CTO and advisory work. Based on long-term associate Jonathan Sandberg’s description of his work, I roughly classify my thinking as “artisanal algorithms” with data science, data privacy, governance, large graphs and some high-end computing filling the shoulders of the week. Mid-week, I’m now exceptionally happily employed by Applecart, where I put the Distinguished Engineer propeller beanie back on and am laptop-deep in startup culture and pace. My intent was to get back to technology first, application areas second, and that focus has brought me more joy in the last year of work than the previous decade accumulated.

Hybrid work environments rely on in-person design and discussion. When I’m in NYC, I’m at a whiteboard, having informal discussions, and getting code to work. Hybrid where you come in sit on Zoom calls with a distributed team or sit in large, slow-moving meetings is cadence dampening; solving constrained problems with smart people who want to move fast is an amplifier. Literally getting into the office brought another cadence to the front — I’m now a NJ Transit commuter, and I’ve survived every season of disruption from extreme heat to ice on the rails to train-car collisions to aging tunnel infrastructure. There’s a pace to commuting; walking from platform onto a standing train is like catching the pickup note while lurching out of Penn Station should be the soothing 4/4 click of train wheels but is often a 3-3-2 bulgar beat with a phrygian scale mode sad solo on top.

When I started the daily grind in late February, I resolved to test the axiom that you can eat in a different NYC restaurant daily and never have a repeat, like a Phish residency. That lasted five days, until I fell into a routine of salad places (Naya and Sweetgreen), fried chicken (bb.q Korean and Rowdy Rooster Indian), sketchy pizza (on 6th Avenue), and the occasional Japanese market sushi run. Add in my morning stop at the Dunkie’s on 31st, the street vendors selling fresh mango in the spring and summer, and the back beat of Tuesday morning bagels at Applecart (reminiscent of Wednesday Donut Day at Sun Microsystems) and I’m a creature of habit and (new) comfort foods. Sometimes the cadence is remarkably clockwork.

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Found My Tribe: Let’s Get This Show on the Road

There are many advantages of what amounts to four-day stretches in a flexible work schedule, Thursday night to the following Tuesday morning: I took in a large number of shows this year in an attempt to keep some kind of airline and hotel status while doing exactly one and a half business trips (the half was the back end of Phish spring tour). I got to see Phish in four different states, picked up Stick Men in San Diego and TAB in NYC and a host of the Phish Kuiper belt musicians — Natalie Cressman and Ian Faquini in a free show on the Jersey Shore, Dezron Douglas at Dizzy’s, Owls by Day playing in the Mann Music Center parking lot pre-Phish.

The iterant touring life opened other doors: Caught up some some of the academic Phish Studies crew in Chicago, where I also got to help a shomer shabbos friend get into the show (I’d like to believe there’s an eruv around the United Center environs). My goal of publishing non-technical, more mainstream pieces took a step forward when Noah Lehrman and I got to present on Phish covers and their influence at the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association’s fall conference, subsuming the Phish Studies event and bringing it to the East Coast. I also snuck in a day trip to see Geddy Lee discuss his donation of 300 single-signature Negro Leagues baseballs to the museum in Kansas City, complete with book signing and BBQ (more on my affinity for Kansas City early in the new year). The following day, Rush announced a tour after a decade-long hiatus with a new drummer and old familiar venues - setting the stage for this summer’s music tourism and joy.

Some take aways from rounding the quarter pole in the current century:

• Intention matters. Making a specific calling plan for fractional engagement, playing with confidence instead of trepidation, choosing the next hardest song all improved my skills and happiness through the year.

• Dig in. I discovered the joys of the Topps Allen and Ginter card set, combining current and historical baseball players with nature features, musicians and a host of short print and chase cards. Opening the dime wax packs of cards looking for Willie Mays or Hank Aaron, fifty-five years later and adjusted for inflation of all kinds, is a few hours so well spent. I committed to making my morning commute time for reading (and less doom scrolling), while reading the entire back catalog of newly discovered authors. Geddy Lee talks about being a “completist,” someone who enjoys collecting as well as organizing, and that sense of imposing order on chaos (even that caused by the weekly NJ transit adverse operations) lets me tame my anxiety epsilon more.

• Find the point of incremental difference: Sitting on a train delayed in Newark in the late summer, a man walked the aisle asking for financial help — and said he’d be happy with a McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts gift card. That changed my view of helping the unhoused; rather than giving random dollar bills to people I bought a stack of McDonald’s $10 gift cards and gave them to people in need. Being able to eat an entire meal, with the dignity of choice, was the incremental difference. A camp friend started a GoFundMe to cover the gap in his music major tuition. A musician friend self-funded a book project. The arts are under pressure from all quarters: streaming services that deeply fragment musician’s income; an oligopoly of publishers; encroachment of AI tools on anything copyrighted or original and the onus falls on fans and consumers to carefully select our favorite creators — current and future — and compensate them fairly such that it makes a difference in their ability to continue creative work.

If you made it this far, Happy New Year, and please consider (a) sharing this if you liked it (social media, email, word of mouth); (b) becoming a subscriber if you want regular updates (some will be for subscribers only); (c) becoming a paid subscriber as Creating Space is a reader-supported endeavor.

October 11, 1972. I’d just celebrated my first double-digit birthday. Previous summer was spent playing backyard baseball (literally) with hand-me down bats, home-made bases and a few balls that we miraculously kept away from our dining room windows. My friends are I were fiercely supportive of the Pittsburgh Pirates, led by Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente, whose at-bat identities we assumed while self-broadcasting our games. The Pirates were the 1971 World Series champions and we hoped they destined to repeat, with the fervor that a tween applies to sports as a first love.

Until that late Wednesday afternoon, the three of us scattered around my friend’s TV watching Game 5 of the NL Championship Series between the Pirates and the beginning of the Big Red Machine from Cincinnati. Score tied, bases loaded, bottom of the 9th, and Pirates pitcher Bob Moose threw a wild pitch, scoring George Foster in a walk-off error win for the Reds.

I remember my friends’ mom crying on their sofa. She was likely more disappointed for her twin sons, and their overly nerdy friend, than about the game’s outcome. I think it was the first time I’d seen a friend’s parent cry. It was definitely the first time I experienced the gut punch of seeing your favorite team lose in a must-win situation, its star players thrust into the off-season where they would return to off-season jobs, their star brightness diminished for half a year.

“Blessed is the woman who bears a child, for she knows how love covers pain.”
-- Rabbis Fred Davidow & David Fass, a blessing for a newborn child

Robert Clemente was killed in a plane accident while he was on a relief mission to Nicaragua only two months later. It would be 7 years until the Pirates returned to the Fall Classic as the “Lumber Company,” led by Willie Stargell and his “We Are Family” plea for team unity. Personally, the chronological distance was the last year of elementary school to the last year of high school, with baseball fading into the left-center gap as I pondered relationships, college, and more dimensions of love and fandom.

Fast forward to October 2025, and Phillies pitcher Orion Kekering’s errant throw in the bottom of the 11th inning that sent the Dodgers to the World Series and the Phillies and their fans into winter sadness. Albeit with a team from the opposite corner of the Keystone State, so many of my family and friends root for the Phils that I felt this one in my core, 53 years after Bob Moose’s errant throw.

There is grace in seeing teammates connect in times of failure.

These moments forge fan affiliation for young fans; the walk-off endings are a harbinger of adult life. While the season ends, hope remains for the next season, and successive campaigns (unless you’re a Maple Leafs fan). We learn that errors are moments for reflection, and perhaps improvement and practice, but do not define our trajectories. It hurts, and we will be teased about it (thank you, internet) and suffer the ignominy of watching our rivals declare “dynasty” and other superlatives.

“Sunt lacrimae rerum”

– “There are teardrops in things,” Virgil’s Aeneid, as Aeneas contemplates a mural showing the fall of Troy, translated by Princeton Professor John Fleming.

Teardrops within a community, opposed to teardrops for our selves, are likely the first sign of maturity and caring about the commons beyond our backyard playground. There is pain, but our love bridges us to the next season where joy is possible.

Some entirely weird statistics, because counting shows, songs, and milestones is the fan base equivalent of counting beats in a measure:

• 78 shows, in 14 states, including: two raceways, two of the most iconic baseball stadiums, four downpours, five New Year’s Eve shows and one beach.

• Put on tefillin at eight shows in four different states with four different Chabad rabbis. With friend Bruce, the tradition of “tourfillin” comes close to the intended purpose — a moment of peace and reflection before dancing the funky night away.

• The Mockingbird Foundation, focused on music education in cities where Phish plays, is now one of the my top three charities in terms of number of donations (up there with Movember and Princeton University).

• I’ve heard 312 different songs in those 78 shows, a remarkable fact about the band’s breadth of creativity and inclusion of cover songs.

• Met Katy Tur in the green room and was one of 6,000 people who suggested she name her baby “Summer".

• After next week, will have spoken at two of the three Phish Studies conferences and found a musicology and academic peer group with whom to nerd out in other dimensions.

The best part of this traveling circus, however, is truly the friends I’ve made along the way: some old and new work associates who turned out to have donut-shaped interests; family and friends who will share a hotel room or swap tickets; some complete strangers who just needed a ride through the central part of town.

Today is also the anniversary of the day I met my late friend George, a larger than life man who was friend, mentor, confidante, tour buddy, informant, and danced the way he lived.

Celebrate the arts and especially music education. Support people with food insecurity (George felt about Philabundance the way I feel about Movember). Wear something tie-dyed to work. To quote David Byrne, you can dance if you like.

I find I’m drawing more frequent comparison to works I’ve previously read, watched, listened to and loved, so the knowledge (!!) graph of my reading is on full display.

More time as an NYC commuter and two weeks of “beach days” had impacts on my reading consumption - I’m reading more on the train and less at night, and not at all on airplanes. With the right combination of surf, salt and iced coffee I can consume a book a day in the sand. Highly recommended to reset the increasingly jaded world views.

Inspirations this quarter: Phish summer tour and some powerful, creative jams; Talking Heads “Remain in Light”; finding the soundtrack to power through some home improvement projects; a week in upstate New York at adult band camp; the 50th anniversary of “Born to Run;” a birthday; significant music reading to accompany the musical adventures and re-discovering the prose of Fredrick Backman as a prelude to hockey season.

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22. “The Man Who Saw Seconds,” Alexander Boldizar, sci-fi, finished July 3.
    Award nominee.
    Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Quantum Thief” meets “Falling Down” (1993 movie with Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall and Barbara Hershey) and a bit of the closing scenes of “Do The Right Thing” for absolute anarchy when power structures are challenged. In its bones, it’s escalating risk taking and a game of chicken with global consequences because of a single man who can see a few seconds into the future. Parts reminded me of Greg Bear’s “Darwin” series pondering further human speciation, and parts were an absolute thrilling cat and mouse game.

23. “Remember You Will Die,” Eden Robins, sci-fi, finished July 4.
    Award nominee
    Epistolary through obituary - the entire book is written as a series of obituaries covering centuries of alternative history, future history, and family, artistic, and political narratives. There is no narration, no dialogue, and the reader is often treated as a second person sharing in the deep family secrets conveyed only under the cover of death. I loved this as much as Lavie Tidhar’s “Six Lives” and the deeper themes of love, grief, and boundaries on our human attributes resonated profoundly. The liberties taken with recorded history were disturbing and thought provoking. It’s a thoroughly weird pastiche of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, “Blade Runner” and more recent scripts about artificial intelligence — the wending of art, artifice and political statement make you question what is truly “artificial.”

24. “The Third Rule of Time Travel,” Philip Fracassi, sci-fi, finished July 5.
    Award nominee
    A highly restricted framework for time travel - you can only travel in your own timeline for under 90 seconds and can only observe - runs headlong into multiverse theory. I have alway believed that if you work hard to remove entropy in one context, quantum mechanics dictates that the weirdest coincidences have to occur elsewhere in your timeline, and that quantum entanglement might actually be playing with weighted dice (to misquote Einstein). An exploration of consciousness, tech bro culture, and a Terminator worthy of motherly love. The subtlety with which the main plot line is exposed is great writing.

25. “Slash", Slash and Anthony Bozza, music, finished July 20.
    Because I’ve been on a rock and roll bio run
    A counterbalance to half a dozen unauthorized rock and roll histories of Guns N Roses, Slash’s assisted biography tells his side of the stories, through the expected haze of booze, drugs, and escapades. While GNR tried strove to be the anti-hair band, they ended up as an extrusion of the 1980s drug culture. Every sordid tale, like a good conspiracy theory, is rooted in a modicum of truth as seen by the storyteller, and Slash’s book crams almost 500 pages of them into a now almost 20 year old history. (He has since divorced Perla, his wife who helps him get clean at the end of this book). The deep, carnal need to be creative, to be in motion, and to be destructive when those vectors are attenuated comes through as loud as Slash’s studio monitors. GNR, in a form redolent of the “vintage” Stones shirts you find at Nordstrom, are touring outside the US this summer and fall. Cue the media fireworks.

26. “When Franny Stands Up,” Eden Robins, fiction, finished July 25.
    Exploring the Robins canon.
    There are elements of Boardwalk Empire, Carmela Soprano, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Hidden Figures intertwined in this story about an aspiring comedienne who takes on the Chicago mob and society’s biases against women in the workforce, circa World War II. Much deeper, it’s about family, loyalty, love and redemption - all made easier to digest when wrapping in a dramatic story about a comedy (as opposed to a comedic story about drama, which is the Saturday Night Live formula for the last half century). I’m glad I read “Remember You Will Die” first, as Robins’ writing power is more fully deployed in her successor novel, but this was a fun read on its own.

    
    Interlude: “Archangels of Funk” by Andrea Hairston. Another award nominee, and I think requires some unbroken reading time to find the cadence for this dense, joyful work. It’s back in the library.

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27. “Monaco, Unspoken,” A. Moreau, memoir, finished August 10.
    Succession of Threads snippets got me hooked.
    As a limo driver in Monaco, Moreau tends to the upward, downward and inconspicuously rich and famous. The stories of grief, loss, longing and the intersections of art, music, performance and composition present more than a dozen variations on the same themes. Moreau’s writing is dense with metaphor, simile and counterpoint, correlating conjunctions that border on the repetitive. With enough shots on goal, he nets a few phrases that resonate as well as the echoes of his clients.

28. “Tonight In Jungleland: The Making of Born To Run,” Peter Ames Carlin, music, finished August 16.
    Digesting all Springsteen-related content in advance of the BTR 50th anniversary and “Deliver Me From Nowhere” premiere.
    I truly, truly loved this book from the initial dialogue taking place shortly after last year’s Sea.Hear.Now show (where I witnessed and rocked out to Springsteen playing his “early hits”, as well as sharing the stage with Trey Anastasio and my bass teacher on “Kitty’s Back”). Carlin goes deep into Springsteen’s divergence from Columbia records, how the E Street Band’s personnel rotation challenged and solidified the spirit of the album, and how the cathartic closer “Jungleland” went through more variations than a jazz standard, landing that final sequence literally on the drop date for the new album. Released the summer before I started 8th grade, when I was first buying albums and listening with intent to the radio, I saw both sides of the “Springsteen is the future” and “Springsteen is contrived” arguments, and reading the historical recounting of the pre- and post-release coverage confirms that we didn’t realize the musical greatness to which we were witness. A definite win for the Asbury Park beach summer reading reading list.

29. “My Friends,” Frederik Backman, fiction, finished August 20.
    Because I’m a Backman fan boy.
    Backman has a superb ability to unfurl a story like a finely detailed tapestry. It’s a slow, interleaved roll, with you anticipating the turns and folds but still taken aback as each feature or detail is revealed. “My Friends” is about making art, and making friends who love you for who you are, and how those gifts may get passed between generations. I should know better than to reach the conclusion of his books while on the train, because there was definitely something in my eye/in the air as I turned the last page.

30. “Swan Songs,” B. Elizabeth Beck, fiction, finished August 26.
    A Phish friend writes for her tribe, and all of us.
    I met Liz through some Phish related events after consuming her tour-related books. “Swan Songs” looks at aging, regret, pain, and other post mid-life energy fluctuations through a baker’s dozen of short stories. Perfect end of summer beach reading.

    
    An interlude while reading Charlie Jane Anders “Lessons in Magic and Disaster.”

31. “Lessons In Magic and Disaster,” Charlie Jane Anders, fantasy/fiction, finished August 31.
    Appreciate their work in “fantasy adjacent” explorations, recommended on a few lists.

    What if magic isn’t the stuff of Harry Potter pomp and happy circumstance, but instead an on-going attempt to control entropy and emotion? Anders writes about gender and sexual identities, magic, self-regulation and relationships with equal aplomb and flair; at times you feel like she’s transcribing your sitting-in-the-car-scrolling thoughts with uncanny precision. I personally appreciated the Boston setting with the invented liberal arts college and locations, and the parallel stories of mid-18th century literature. The more the world is outraged by things away from the center, the more it has been the same for three centuries, and Anders digs down to those roots that are real, hoped for and imagined.

32. “The Fund,” Rob Copeland, business, finished September 13.
    Seen on a co-worker’s bookshelf.
    I have a fascination with work culture - how it is created, dispersed, measured and evolved over time. “The Fund” dissembles Ray Dalio’s work culture in excrcuciating, sometimes repetitive detail. I’m not quite what the point is or was; if the author intended to show how hard it is to measure human potential, then there are nuggets of insight here. If it’s to claim that Bridgewater Associates is somehow more about people management than the world’s largest hedge fund, then the book misses the mark wide right. I felt the same way about this as I did about the Bowie biography that claimed to be full of unique insight but was a thinly veiled clamoring for readers to dislike the subject.

33. “Automatic Noodle,” Annalee Newitz, sci-fi, finished September 13.
    Part of the Annalee Newitz canon trawl.
    Newitz covers so many topics so well it’s refreshing and fun to see where she goes with each idea. What if the robots from Broadway’s “Maybe Happy Ending” worked in a San Francisco fast food storefront? This novella-length book digs into AI autonomy, the uncanny valley, the politics of divisiveness and hate, and at its heart, the comforts of good food in a post-apocalyptic setting. It’s fun, it has enough quirks and minor characters to make you wish them all well, and as usual, there are deeper themes conveyed quickly.
    Artist pitch: If you liked this, or “Maybe Happy Ending,” subscribe to Jeph Jacques’s Patreon — a fusillade of AI snark, robot sex, and New England college town jokes.

34. “Revolution: Prince, The Band, The Era,” James Campion, music, finished September 20.
    Because I’m a Campion fan boy, and have been since “Deep Tank Jersey.”
    Meticulously researched and conveyed with a sense of intimacy and heartfelt passion for the music, Campion’s latest deep dive into the rock canon makes you feel like you’re sitting in your living room with members of the Revolution. Respecting and appropriately critiquing Prince’s power, prowess, progress and flaws, the book digs into the Revolution era albums and provides an historical view for those of us who were trying to wrap our musical minds around Prince’s album release train.

35. “Us Against You,” Fredrick Backman, fiction, finished September 29.
    Second in the “Beartown” trilogy.
    Partly because hockey season has started again, partly because I enjoyed “My Friends” so deeply, and partly because I’m trying to read less sci-fi and more beautifully crafted fiction, I went back to Beartown and read the middle installment of the trilogy. While I was introduced to “Beartown” as “a hockey book,” it was far more, and while “Us Against You” uses hockey as a literary device, it’s a love story on all of the levels that makes grown men cry about a sport they have only played in garages and basements on cold, wet days.

Editorial Note: As part of my growing interest and efforts in musicology and music business pursuits I had originally outlined this as a talk for “Born To Run At 50,” a conference at Monmouth University taking place in a few weeks. I missed the cut but still wanted to share why “Meeting Across The River” remains one of my favorite tracks on an album where every song has held close meaning my entire adult life.

Every song on “Born to Run” is an ekphrastic masterpiece. Springsteen viscerally describes a snapshot of life, the Polaroids of working class people trying to find direction. Whether it is the sway of Mary’s dress, the engine-driven cages on Highway 9, or the narrator of “Meeting” throwing his cash on the bed, the songs convey the starkness and shadows of an Edward Hopper painting. Dorothea Lange’s photographic exhibit “This Proud Land” showed the desperation of post-Depression Americans living in the dust bowl. Two decades later it would inspire Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up,” a similarly structured song sung as a duet with a now-present Cherry and employing the collection’s title as opening lyrics.

Springsteen similarly captures the lower-case depression in sharp poetry. “Meeting Across the River” has been described as the soundtrack to a film noir, or a jazz piece, but it remains the anti-song on the album. Drums, saxophone, guitar and electric bass are all notably absent. Without a rhythm section, or Clarence Clemons providing his long tones around the melody, there is a distinct lack of drive in the song. Coupled with the “mwah” of Richard Davis’s fretless bass, “Meeting” glides; without a mid-song solo and sequential verses without chorus, it is the least anthemic song on the album.

The bass line slides between major and minor chords, the core of an anthem back to the heart of jazz/blues, where the chords use a sustained 2nd. Musically, this is the inverse of minor 7th or “rock standard” mixolydian chord structure (major with a minor 7th) adding to the sense that “Meeting” is neither sad nor hopeful - it just is, the inverse of “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road” where departure is sad, hopeful and directed.

Randy Brecker’s trumpet playing, from the introduction to the final outro, is a masterwork in itself. The Brecker Brothers “Heavy Metal BeBop” was still three years away, with its breakneck solos, strongly non-diatonic song structure (trying to transcribe “Some Skunk Funk” will frustrate the most accomplished musicologist) and genre mix, but you can hear its roots in trumpet wefting between piano and bass lines. In “The Witches Are Coming,” Lindy West writes that a trumpet is “a machine where you put in compressed air and divorce comes out,” perhaps the best description of our narrator’s promises to Eddie and himself, and what may come of his time with Cherry.

Both “Meeting” and “Jungleland” rely on the imagery of tunnels - making it through a Hudson river tunnel for the proposed deal, and the subway tunnels where the Magic Rat’s dreams are shot to pieces. In each, rather than tragedy, there’s a literal light - ambulance, or bedroom or just hope for another chance. “Born to Run” sets the promise, “Meeting” wanders and vacillates, and “Jungleland” closes with harsher reality, setting the stage for broken heroes to re-appear in “Darkness On The Edge of Town.”

References:

“Tonight In Jungleland: The Making of Born To Run,” Peter Ames Carlin.

“Meeting Across the River: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song,” Jessica Kaye and Richard Brewer (ed)

“Migrant Mother,” Dorothea Lange, retrospective on her work with the FSA

Natalie Cressman, nataliecressman.com, personal communication on “Some Skunk Funk” and “Meeting Across The River” transcriptions.

“Painted Daydreams: Collection of Ekphrastic Poems,” B. Elizabeth Beck, https://elizbeck.com/books/

There is a certain sense of well-being that comes from commutating the short summer work week for an extended weekend “down the shore” — never at the shore, never to the beach, strictly “down the shore” with its own set of cardinal directions (measured with respect to the ocean and ocean parallel boulevards). A friend’s father used to say that cresting the Route 72 causeway onto Long Beach Island split the world into halves.

Here are some observations on six full decades spent down the shore, with family, friends, my own family, and more friends.

Beach badges are the silver dollars of our generation. They mark time and place; duration (day, week, season) and are the sole fiat currency that gets you access to the beach. You see that wavy pin pattern in the off season and are willing to trade the holes it put in your favorite concert tee for the smile.

When you unroll a piece of salt water taffy with your teeth to avoid getting every finger sticky, you end eating a minuscule square of wax paper. It doesn’t matter if the taffy is hot, cold, freshly rolled or remaindered in the bottom of your beach bag. Despite a decade working in the pharmaceutical business, I have no idea what the medicinal chemistry properties of taffy wrappers might include, but they are vital.

Boardwalk pizza takes on ethereal qualities. It’s not the artisan thin crust or curated toppings of your home pizza place; it’s salt spray and humidity being heated just above air temperature that make it taste differently. The oversized slices require folding skills that can only be mastered via a graduate Springer-Verlag topology text book. But we all know them, innately, once we’re old enough to command our own slices.

You will find sand stuck to a body part at bedtime. Independent of showers on the beach steps, or an outside house sand shower, or a high pressure hotel rinse off, sand sticks to skin with something between the strong nuclear force and Gorilla Glue. You could get washed down by a fire truck and there will be grit. That feeling of sand between your toes is invariant from the surf line to the shower pan.

Soft serve ice cream has its own physics that has never properly been studied, because doing so would take away the magic of Jersey Freeze or the Margate Dairy Bar (do not comment, those are the only two serious options).

There is a band playing a pop song in a bar that you will remember for the next decade. For me it’s cover band Springfield playing “Rosalita” at Joe Pops in 1981. James Campion’s “Deep Tank Jersey” (now in its 30th year) captures every sight, smell and sound of one of those summers with the band Dog Voices in ekphrastic beauty.

Long before MTV and TikTok we had soundtracks to our summer. “Born to Run” and the “Jaws” theme at the denouement of 1975, Pilot’s “Magic,” the Commodores “Easy (Like Sunday Morning)” as well as having to explain the Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” to our parents. The barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain has turned 50 plus a teenager, and we have never stopped singing about her.