Jukebox In My Head

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is set in a grim future where sunlight is blotted out by dark ash clouds. All bird and animal life dead. No history. No future. Cold winds tear at the tattered rags of a man and his son, walking the road, their filthy possessions in a squeaking grocery cart, waywardly following a worn, torn map to someplace near the coast that might be warm.

As they watch unspeakable horror, all the two have is each other.

No chapters. No headings. Just sharply drawn vignettes of life on that grim road. Vignettes that, in McCarthy’s stingy language, offer us the pure essence of humanity in the ruins.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (Vintage International, 287 pp)

Posted by Leland Rucker at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Arborists consider a tree that has never been climbed a wild tree. There are still a lot of wild trees on earth, but none as massive or mysterious as the remnant of coastal redwoods tucked away in Northern California.

I hadn’t thought much about the redwoods until I read a long Richard Preston piece in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. It was one of those stories that only the New Yorker dares publish in today’s quick-bite magazine world: you know, 15,000 words on redwoods. Huh?

I especially love reading about places I’m not likely to visit. “My goal is to reveal people and realms that nobody had ever imagined,” Preston writes in the foreword to The Wild Trees. A climber himself, Preston obliges by taking us into a world – the upper crowns, or canopies, of super-tall trees – that is so old and inaccessible that we know almost nothing about it. And he tells a tale of “passion and daring,” how a small group of people led by Stephen Sillett and Marie Antoine (who were married in a redwood) wound up studying the tops of the world’s oldest and largest living things. Their names seem to fit their stature: Telperion, Adventure, Stratosphere Giant, Zeus, Lost Monarch, Helios.

There are only about a hundred and twenty coastal redwoods that are more than 350 feet tall. We think they were once worldwide, but today they exist only in several small state parks and one national park. The locations of the tallest trees are carefully guarded botanist secrets. Scientists guess that the oldest are between two and three thousand years old, or as Preston says, “roughly the age of the Parthenon.”

From the ground redwood crowns, which encompass only the upper one third or less of redwoods, are completely out of sight, visible only from above or by climbing inside. This area, which scientists considered a “redwood desert” before we actually began poking around in them, includes entire ecosystems, with flora and fauna that live their entire lives in the canopy, which even has its own water storage system.

It is a strange world, filled with deadly obstacles like broken branches that can weigh several tons and sometimes crash to the earth, and filled with incredible beauty. Bonsai versions of redwoods grow from upper branches. Fern gardens take roots in soil that has somehow made its way into cavities 300 feet above the earth. Redwoods are tough trees, pretty much fire-resistant, and there are fire caves large enough to stand in and flying squirrels that have never seen humans before leaping from tree to tree.

I work in downtown Denver, so I looked up some building heights to get an idea of how large these trees actually are. The historic May D&F Tower, at 330 feet, is just below the lower end of the giant redwood scale. Hyperion tree, which was discovered and climbed for the first time in 2006, is, at 379 feet, just less than ten feet shorter than the building where I work, the Bank One Tower at 17th and Curtis streets. Think about that the next time you walk the 17th Street Mall!

Preston uses what he calls a “narrative non-fiction” style, going into great detail about how the lives of Sillett, Antoine and the others who came to this strange calling converged in the redwood forests. I got antsy reading so much personal detail in the first sixty or seventy pages. But every time Preston took me up into the upper canopy, I couldn’t put the book down.

As gearhead Preston reminds us, technology has played its part in the evolution of canopy science. One of the reasons we are able to study these tall trees is that the arborist climbing techniques that professionals use have advanced to that point only in the last couple of decades.

The Wild Trees is illustrated with line drawings that are incredible in their own right. But as I was reading, I longed for photographs of the canopies themselves. I Googled “Richard Preston” and wound up at his web site, which includes, among other things, a gallery of amazing color photos that further boggles my imagination. Given that printing photos like this would double the price of the book, it’s an excellent example of how the Internet can enhance the enjoyment of books rather than being considered a threat to their existence.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 06:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

My first music delivery system was a little red turntable that an aunt living with us in 1960 got for joining the Capitol Record Club. Cheap wouldn’t begin to describe it. The turntable was perfect for 45 singles but so small that albums hung over the side. The speaker was tiny and tinny. Auntie Ann gave me 79 cents to buy my first 45-rpm single, future sausage-baron Jimmy Dean’s immortal “Big Bad John,” which we sang along with until Uncle Jack brought home the double-sided Elvis Presley single, “Little Sister” b/w “(Maria’s the Name of) His Latest Flame.”

Around the same time, for Christmas, I got a two-transistor radio. It was made of plastic, and it had an round dial to navigate the mighty AM stations bouncing around in the Midwest ether. From my Kansas City bedroom I was able to dial in stations in New Orleans, Little Rock, Arkansas and Chicago, bringing me all the top forty as well as regional hits right into my little earpiece. It was about the same size and looked like an iPod.

Those two devices set me off on a long and passionate love affair with recorded music that has lasted, unabated, up to at least this morning. I am still as excited about finding new music today as I was as a child. For almost thirty years, the basic delivery systems for my voracious listening habit and burgeoning music collection were turntables, radios and cassette players.

I went kicking and screaming into the digital age. In 1989 my friend Gil Asakawa browbeat me into purchasing a CD player (thanks again, Gil). I still don’t believe that CDs sound better than albums, but the trade-off in ease of accessibility was pretty compelling. I still play records occasionally, since I have many that haven’t made the transition in my collection to compact disc, and they sound great on my warm 1974 Marantz speakers. My only upgrade was to a six-CD changer more than a decade ago.

Even after portable music players came out and Gil started bugging me about it (and raiding my CD collection for his iPod), I didn’t bite. Not that I didn’t appreciate the technology – I love what the iPod has done for music and I have an early Archos jukebox for recording demos -- but I never have an urge to listen to music when I am walking or hiking or riding the bus – that’s when the Jukebox in My Head kicks in. Besides, I had the best iPod in the world and a fabulous stereo system in my basement. Though I have logged more than my share of hours inside the headphones, I still prefer air between the speakers and my ears. Call me old-fashioned.

But this old dog can still learn new tricks. I got a major Mac upgrade recently, from a one-gigabyte hard drive to a pair of mirrored 300 giggers. And I began playing with iTunes for the first time. But it wasn’t until I realized that the most valuable thing iTunes could offer me is a database for my digitally-stored music that I began ripping CDs into my computer with a vengeance. I have become possessed with burning my collection and building that database. I won’t be happy until every CD is catalogued.

Besides giving me instant access to any digital song I own (as long as it is tagged correctly), it allows me the luxury of knowing what is contained on my three thousand compact discs. Finally, I get to have all my CDs (and hopefully some albums and cassettes someday in the future) at my fingertips.

After all these years, it’s pretty cool to see at an instant what covers of Beatles songs I have, or to find that I have “Like a Rolling Stone” in 11 places in my collection. Oh, do I wish I had that function when I was writing about music for a living.

My friends who have raved about iTunes didn’t tell me about a lot of the unintuitive stuff in the program. There was some frustration during the learning period, and I still find a few things irritating about the way iTunes works. But like the trade-off between vinyl and CDs, the complaints pale in comparison to the unparalleled accessibility.

During the rock-crit days, an important way to run across new songs and stuff I didn’t know I had was through the discovery process of looking through albums, set lists and liner notes for other things. The shuffle function offers that same discovery process – and is much more efficient. I run across a song I had forgotten and head for the original CD to read the liner notes. Already, shuffle has led me to old forgotten favorite songs, tunes from albums that I missed along the line and stuff that I have never listened to before because I stowed the album after one or two listens.

And finally, I now have a radio station that reminds me most of Top Forty, still my favorite radio programming. Only this one doesn’t play bad songs, the playlist just passed 15,000, and I’m guessing I’m about 60 percent done after three weeks of almost constant ripping.

I started out listening to songs as 45 singles. Like anyone else, I bought heavily into the mythology of the album. But I have come full circle. I don’t listen to albums as albums much anymore; I just don’t have the time to put into them. But I am finally listening to my collection as I always imagined.

But don’t come to me about some new technology – this is it, Gil.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 06:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)