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marylov1029 · 8 years ago

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Julia Child is my food heroine. We have so much in common — we are both a little awkward, late bloomers in life, have an obsession with butter and things fly when we are in the kitchen. I loved Julia’s show “The French Chef” which PBS ran in reruns for years. Her charm was that she just kept on going when things went wrong — she flubbed her flips, burned things, murdered lobsters and dropped things on the floor. She would laugh that infectious laugh and carry on. I knew I wanted to be like her — not cook perfectly, but have fun trying.

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”

So when my husband arranged a trip to Paris for me and my sister, Sue, I knew that I would be searching for Julia Child’s Paris on our trip. My sister has a daughter that is a chef and graduate of the Le Cordon Bleu in Minneapolis, so Sue was in for the adventure. On our last day in Paris we set off early on the Metro with our maps and phones with GPS in hand feeling confident about our adventure. Our first stop was going to be E. DEHILLERIN where Julia Child was a regular. She purchased her kitchenware here while she was attending cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and I wanted some!

E. Dehellerin has been around since 1820. They carry a large range of professional cookware in enamel, stainless steel, or copper which is gorgeous.

After a short trip, we jumped off of the metro at a stop we had calculated about 6 blocks from our destination, fresh and ready to take on Julia Child’s Paris. An hour and 2 cups of espresso later we found it. This is where it seems appropriate to give you a few hints about finding your way in Paris — #1 Just because your GPS is pointing a certain direction — it doesn’t mean you are going that direction! #2 There may be some delay in your GPS reception — consequently you have probably passed your turn before your GPS tells you to turn (so refresh often). #3 One side of the street may be named one name and the other side of the street may have another name. And #4, Paris does not put its crosswalks at the corner of an intersection — they are often 10 to 20 ft down the street — this means your GPS may take you down a street that doesn’t seem to match the street sign you are looking for making it tricky to figure out where to turn.

Finally finding the store washed all of the craziness of getting there away for me. I was in love. The first thing I saw were the charming window displays complete with 4 inches of dust on the gorgeous copper pots– a true sign of a time honored classic store.

I am charmed by what was probably the same window display Julia Child saw in the 50’s.

What on earth do you make in that copper roaster? Turduken?

The inside the store was magical — I’m sure young, hip foodies would be disappointed due to it’s not very hip look. Walking through the door is like walking into an old hardware store, bins, buckets, and walls of gadgets and copper pots — Perfect!

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Lovely vintage window displays

Cooking hardware heaven.

Bins of cooking goodies — it looks like my husband’s shop in the barn!

Cooking gadgets I don’t even know what to do with!

Hidden treasures

Pretty…pretty…sigh

I bought a tiny butter pan, some tart pans and a 6″ copper saute pan. Nothing has a price on it just has a number on it, then you have to look up the price on pricing sheets — just like buying an oil filter for your car!

My Life in France is an autobiography by Julia Child, written with her husband’s nephew and published in 2006.

Much of my vision of Julia Child in Paris comes from the book “My Life in France”, her autobiography. It was also the book that the “Julia” part of the movie “Julie and Julia” was based on. It is really a sweet love story not a cookbook. When I think of her in Paris, I see her in the food markets, chatting up the vendors, squeezing the fruit and veggies and enjoying a meal with her husband Paul in local bistro. She was in love with Paul, Paris and the food of Paris.

We had a happy marriage because we were together all the time. We were friends as well as husband and wife. We just had a good time.

After our pilgrimage to E. Dehellerin we leisurely wandered the streets in the area and were rewarded by finding a beautiful small food market, a bistro where we enjoyed a gorgeous Parisian salad and we ended up shopping in a small flea market around the corner. All in all it was pretty fabulous and my pilgrimage lived up to my expectations!

This work of art was also incredibly delicious!

I would have loved to had access to a kitchen. Next time I need to stay in an apartment so I can do some cooking! Maybe take a cooking class or bring Sue’s chef daughter to make it interesting.

I can see Julia chatting up the vendors and bringing home only the freshest of this seafood. I’m pretty sure there would be lots of butter involved.

France is in growing zones of 7, 8, & 9 which means they have fresh fruits and vegetables earlier than we do in Iowa — however, I don’t think they grow pineapple in France — LOL.

The little Paris market we found had food on one side and clothing etc. on the other side of the street. I found a great sweater and my sister Sue bought an adorable blouse made in France.

Crepes on every corner! Your choice sweet or savory…or maybe both!

A blog about finding Julia Child in Paris would not be complete without a recipe. Since crepes are the street food in Paris it seems like this is the recipe I should share from Julia’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. And bonus you get a recipe for a fresh way we use crepes at our house.

As Julia would say, “Bon Appetit!”

Crepes

Recipe Type: Dessert Crepes

Cuisine: French

Author: Julia Child

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 30 mins

Serves: 12

Light dessert crepes to be used for French Crepes Suzette by Julia Child.

Ingredients

3/4 cup milk

3/4 cup cold water

3 egg yokes

1 Tb granulated sugar

3 Tb orange liqueur, rum or brandy

1 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

5 Tb melted butter

An Electric blender

A rubber scraper

Instructions

Place the ingredients in the blender jar in the order in which they are listed.

Cover and blend at top speed for 1 minute.

If bits of flour adhere to the sides of the jar, dislodge with a rubber scarper and blend 3 seconds more.

Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.

If you don’t have an electric blender proceed as follows:

Gradually work the egg yolks into the flour with a wooden spoon

Beat in the liquids by droplets, then strain the batter through a fine sieve

3.5.3226

Watch Julia Child make Crepes on the Smithsonian website for all of you visual learners! I also highly recommend reading her cookbook she was ahead of her times with wonderful step-by-step instructions for each recipe. You can buy a vintage copy on Amazon!

Crepes are not as hard to make as you think, with a little practice you will be a pro– my husband impressed me when we were first dating with these fruit crepes! (Check out his recipe on my video at the bottom of this blog!) There are many crepe recipes out there, Julia has 3 in her cookbook for different types of toppings. Not all recipes include alcohol, so I would say it’s optional and you could use some water and flavoring to make up the 3 Tablespoons used in Julia’s recipe which is what I did when I made them the other night. PS… Eric did say they “may be as good as his”…LOL

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Julia uses a blender in her book to make them very smooth — you don’t need to but it’s quick and easy this way.

Add 3 egg yolks to the milk and water in the blender

Add sifted flour — I use a fine sieve onto wax or parchment paper to make it easy to add to the blender.

Add melted butter and blend until smooth about 3 minutes. Scrap often as needed. Let the batter rest in fridge for at least 2 hours or overnight.

Add a small amount of oil, swirl in pan. Heat pan until smoking on medium high heat

Take the pan off off the heat and pour in 1/4 cup of your batter. Tilt your pan going around to spread the batter on the bottom as thin as you can.

In 60 to 90 seconds it will be ready to turn. Use a spatula — this is my poor attempt of trying to flip it — bad idea!

This is what it should like like after to you flip it properly. Nice and lightly browned.

The second side will be more speckled and as Julia say’s — use this on the inside! I stack them up on a plate as I make them and use a small piece of paper towel between them to keep them from sticking.

Add your favorite filling and smother in a yummy sauce. Bon Appetit!

Check out my video below for “Date Night Crepes”

Here is the video of Eric’s Date Night Crepes which won me over. Yup, I decided he was a keeper! Eric used a tried and true one from Better Homes and Gardens and recreated the fruit topping and sauce from a restaurant he enjoyed. However, I think Julia would approve of his recipe also — sweet fruit with a sauce made with whipping cream rolled in a light crepe. Yummy!

http://www.farmgirlcookn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Date-Night-Fruit-Crepes.mp4

When my sister Sue and I went to Paris we spent a day "Finding Julia Child in Paris....and crepes on every street corner!" Here is the story! Julia Child is my food heroine. We have so much in common -- we are both a little awkward, late bloomers in life, have an obsession with butter and things fly when we are in the kitchen.

#bucket list #Chefs #Cookbooks #copper pots #Crepes #Farmers Markets #Fleamarkets #Food Markets #FOODIES #France #Julia Child #Kitchenware #Paris #Recipe #seafood #street food

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html

For those of us that are of the age to have experienced the 'Golden Age' of vinyl records, 'Rock N Roll' and coming of age during 'Woodstock' this is a must read article. It will bring back wonderful memories!!!

It also touches another heart ♥️string reaching those with disabilities through music!!! ��🎶

🔈🖤💜💙💚💛🧡❤️🎶🎼🎵🎷🎹🎺🥁🎻

"In that moment, talking about our sons, I realized how all of Young’s obsessions fit together: They are centered in a common understanding of experience and how it shapes us. Human development is led by our senses. Our senses exert a formative and shaping pressure on our brains. So if our experience of the world around us can damage our brains and our souls, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that music can also help us feel better. Every musician, and every music fan, believes that."

Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music

He says low-quality streaming is hurting our songs and our brains. Is he right?

By David Samuel's | Published August 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 20, 2019 1:31 PM ET |

Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees. He hates Spotify. He hates Facebook. He hates Apple. He hates Steve Jobs. He hates what digital technology is doing to music. “I’m only one person standing there going, ‘Hey, this is [expletive] up!’ ” he shouted, ranting away on the porch of his longtime manager Elliot Roberts’s house overlooking Malibu Canyon in the sunblasted desert north of Los Angeles. The dial thermometer at the far end of the porch indicated that it was now upward of 110 degrees of some kind of heat. Maybe the dial was stuck.

When you hear real music, you get lost in it, he added, “because it sounds like God.” Spotify doesn’t sound like God. No one thinks that. It sounds like a rotating electric fan that someone bought at a hardware store.

No one in their right mind would choose to live in the canyons outside Los Angeles, especially in the summertime between noon and 5. There isn’t enough water or shade. After a few months of summer heat, the scrub on the mountainsides is baked dry. Then someone gets sloppy with a stray cigarette butt or a campfire or the power company fails to maintain a power line and a spark accelerates into a terrifying wildfire that sends up pillars of thick smoke that from a distance hovers over the canyons like an illustration from an old Bible. News crews record burning mansions, which are intercut with the winsome llamas of the rich and famous that have been safely removed to Zuma Beach. Stragglers are incinerated in their cars.

The view was incredible, though. Young has been living up here on and off for decades. At one point, he owned more than 1,000 acres of much-coveted Malibu real estate, where movie producers and actors and billionaire tech tycoons build mansions with supersize swimming pools, grotesque advertisements of corruption and hubris, which are some of the major sins that Young rails against.

I enjoyed listening to Young rant on about the modern condition. We were vibing. He is passionately opposed to global warming, genetically modified seeds, corporate greed-heads who are despoiling Mother Nature and an assortment of other sinners who interfere with our God-given right to happiness. His ire this afternoon, directed through me and my notebook and my Sony digital recorder, was focused on the engineers of Silicon Valley, against whom he has been zealously waging war for decades. Silicon Valley’s emphasis on compression and speed, he believes, comes at the expense of the notes as they were actually played and is doing something bad to music, which is supposed to make us feel good. It is doing something bad to our brains.

The same goes for everything else that Silicon Valley produces, of course: the culture of digital everything, which is basically a load of toxic, mind-destroying crap. It’s anti-human.

“I’m not putting down Mark Zuckerberg,” he continued, his voice taking a turn. “He knows where he [expletive] up. Just the look on his face,” he said, wagging his finger toward a television screen inside Roberts’s living room, where the Facebook chief executive was giving sworn testimony before a panel of lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. “You know, he came to me in a dream the other night, and I felt really sorry for him,” he said. “He was just sitting there sweating and kind of didn’t know how to talk, because he [expletive] up so badly.” There he was, Zuckerberg, on the large-screen TV, sweating bullets.

Young was no longer the righteous wandering hippie avatar of his early album covers. He’s an old man now at 73. He’s fleshy and jowly and red-faced, with long, stringy hair. He looked like a prosperous prairie farmer (hogs or cows, some form of livestock) minus the overalls. You can imagine Farmer Neil attending church every Sunday and preaching manic sermons from the pews. What’s still the same are his eyes, smoldering like two hot coals stuck beneath his overhanging brow that featured so prominently on the cover of “After the Gold Rush,” his third album, released in September 1970, back when young people, stoned on primitive weed, might plausibly spend an entire weekend listening to his visions of a lone wanderer adrift in a lost Eden.

As we went back and forth about the dynamics of digital sound-compression and the general evil of big tech, Young got mad about his Facebook user agreement, which not even his high-priced lawyers can untangle. “I’m pissed off about my user agreement,” he says. “I’m pissed off about my privacy policy.”

Yet I could tell that this wasn’t what he wanted to be talking about. Young doesn’t want to be a downer. He is passionate about music. The point of music, and of Young, is to make people feel less lonely. I had taken him to a dark place that he didn’t want to go.

“I really wish this interview hadn’t happened,” he later said, seeming more downhearted than angry.

“I feel horrible,” I answered, and I did. I was hoping to soothe the old rock star, who spoke to me through the headphones of my Sony Walkman at the moments I felt most isolated and alone. The last thing I wanted to do was make him feel bad. It felt awful. What I wanted was to hear him play music and to write more songs. “I mean, the worst thing I could have done is to make you feel defeated,” I told him, “and now that’s what I’ve done.”

Neil Young has always been a little too hot to handle, so passionate and smart and always a little bit off his rocker, which might be part of the glory and also the downside of being Neil Young. Yet what weirds me out most about his emotional weather patterns, which are superfamiliar to me from my teenage Walkman years, is the new sense that each of his individual miniflights and tantrums was being processed by a tiny hyperaware control freak who lives inside Young’s personal control tower. The little man charts every little fragment of new meaning or awareness and what its trajectory might potentially signify on a giant whiteboard. Young hears you listening, and he is hip to that angle, and he incorporates that in his next riff. Polite conversation under such conditions can be a baffling and frustrating type of experience. After an hour, we agreed to turn the tape recorder off, and Roberts orders pizza. But the little man in the control tower was still up there, watching.

My diagnosis, after a lifetime of listening and an afternoon on Roberts’s porch and a couple of longer off-the-record interviews about his life and work, is this: Neil Young is trapped in a cycle of second- and third- and fourth-guessing, which is an affliction that is not unique to his brain. To escape from this cycle, he is continually forcing himself back into the moment and then trying to capture that feeling and energy, which is a specific kind of artistic choice. That larger cycle, combined with his magnificent control over his art, is what makes him such a uniquely vital and generative artist, at an age when peers like Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger have become skeletal holograms of their former selves. When he looks back, which is something he did often during our conversations, it is toward the specificity of what some younger version of Neil Young did in a particular moment when he really nailed it. The latest live album he released was recorded at a gig in 1973, in Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama; it is part of an archival series, and they are all miracles. As Young once put it, “I’d rather play in a garage, in a truck or a rehearsal hall, a club or a basement.” What he is after is not some ideal sound but the sound of what happened. The missed notes and off-kilter sounds are part of his art, which is the promise of the real, but also, even mainly, of imperfection.

The idea that big technology companies are engineering all that back-and-forth out of his music just kills him. It’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t want to write music anymore, he admitted. I tried once again to console him.

“The songs always came to you in bunches,” I said. It’s an encouraging thought. But Young was only willing to meet my optimism halfway.

“I’ve got great melodies, and the words are all profanities,” he answered. “I was just telling Elliot the other day, I’m not interested in making any more records,” he insisted, plunging us down once more into the void. “They sound like [expletive].”

Young’s belief in the saving power of music couldn’t be any more personal. In 1951, at age 5 in Ontario, he got sick with a fever, which turned out to be polio. His father, the hockey writer Scott Young, chronicled the Toronto Maple Leafs and wrote young-adult novels about stouthearted boys on ice that were a staple of Canadian boyhood. Neil was not meant for hockey. His mother, Rassy, was a sharp-witted panelist on the popular weekly Winnipeg television show “Twenty Questions”; she was always intensely protective of her son. When I asked him about what it felt like to be a sick child and to grow up lonely, he said: “I loved playing music, and I wasn’t that alone. You know that’s what I wanted to do, that’s what I wanted to do with my life, and that’s all I paid attention to.”

Maybe Young could have become a big rock star without that childhood illness, without being so complicated. His peers talent-wise, at 19, included genius musicians like Stephen Stills, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix, the last of whom was the greatest American popular musical talent maybe ever. What set Young apart from that company was his sustained refusal to bend to anyone else’s idea of what audiences wanted to hear. His signature move was to accomplish something amazing and then blow it up, in the pursuit of something that would sound even more real.

“Neil Young,” his first solo album, recorded in 1968, at 22, after his departure from the supergroup Buffalo Springfield, showed off ageless melodies combined with clever, wised-up lyrics (“I used to be a folk singer/keeping managers alive”). The album failed to sell. The sound was too pretty and too clever at the same time. His second studio album — and first with his longtime band Crazy Horse — “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” is my personal favorite Neil Young record, and was also Elliot Roberts’s favorite (he died two months ago). It introduced what became Neil’s defining edge, i.e., the sound of his ruminations, distortions and mistakes. The album made it to No. 34 on the American charts, and included the hit “Cinnamon Girl.” He wrote much of the album while running a fever of 103.

Young joined with Stills, David Crosby and Graham Nash (my personal ordering of talents) in the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with Young positioned as the defiant outsider against the gorgeous harmonies of the latter three. CSNY turned Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” (she watched the festival on TV) into a generational anthem, and then imploded. (Side note: The year after Neil Young got sick as a child, Mitchell — then a young girl living in Fort Macleod, Alberta — contracted polio during the same outbreak of that disease. She also found herself in writing songs. Maybe something about that childhood illness, which left both children weakened for several years, altered the way that Young and Mitchell processed the evidence of their senses. The dreamy harmonics both favored, and the way that the music and the words shade into each other, suggests both the wooziness and the emerging clarity that a child coming out of a fever might experience.)

Young’s fourth solo album, “Harvest,” distilled his songwriting gifts, which had been given broad exposure through the supernovalike appearance and implosion of CSNY, into a collection of Southern California-inflected hits like “Heart of Gold,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “Old Man” and “Words (Between the Lines of Age)”; it became the best-selling American album of 1972, despite critics labeling the raw vulnerability of the songs as off-putting, self-pitying or as one critic put it “embarrassing.” The AM radio success of “Harvest” cleared a path toward the stratospheric levels of commercial songwriting success and luxury-hotel-suite destruction enjoyed by the Eagles, a supergroup of superbrilliant songwriters who, unlike Young, preferred highway driving.

In response to the success of “Harvest,” Young switched up his style again, obliterating his hit radio melodies with epileptic seizures of dissonance and feedback. (Young himself suffered from epilepsy, to the point that he would have seizures and sometimes black out.) “Heart of Gold,” as he explained it in his liner notes, “put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”

For the time being, there would be no more pretty melodies and note-perfect guitar playing. Instead, Young’s music centered on a distinctive alternation of melodic beauty, earsplitting feedback and passages where he seemed to be playing his guitar with his fist. On a third or fourth listen, these passages often revealed themselves to be part of larger, deliberate, gorgeous patterns that bent the listener’s ear in the directions that he wanted it to go. You had to listen to the whole albums all the way through to really hear the songs. Young’s own guitar playing sounded too deliberate to express the fullness of his own sound, so he often featured the rhythm guitar playing of Frank Sampedro, who played loud rock ’n’ roll in his garage, which was the sound that Young was after in perfecting imperfection.

Within his own specific lineage of deeply melodic rock-guitar playing, incorporating infinite branching possibilities and a taste for soulful, aggressive dissonance, Young is great to listen to. But a better pure player than Young would be a guy like, say, John Frusciante, the former guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who is wildly talented. Give both men 30 seconds to solo, and Frusciante would blow Young off the stage, just as Duane Allman would blow Frusciante off the stage. Young is something else, though. He’s a genius, a word that can be usefully defined as the ability to create and realize an original style that, in turn, can for decades generate its own genres of music containing the DNA of deeply original songs by other extremely talented, original songwriters and musicians, all of whom owe something to him. His music helped shape the melodic-depressive post-Beatles catalog of Pacific Northwest angst, which was brought to its songwriting peak by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Elliott Smith, the Irving Berlin and Cole Porter of suicidal ideation and addiction. Cobain committed suicide on April 5, 1994. Smith, who was an even more intimate songwriter, in the same catchy, brilliant, self-pitying vein, stabbed himself through the heart and bled to death on Oct. 21, 2003, in an apartment in Los Angeles. While the circumstances of both deaths are disputed by conspiracy theorists, Neil Young is indisputably still here.

But he is stumped. Let’s take a moment to look at the future of recorded sound, the topic that has got him so overheated. The invention of the phonograph in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison, a k a the Wizard of Menlo Park, and one of the great visionaries in American history, marked the culmination of several decades of attempts to capture the magic of sound in physical, reproducible form. Early sound recorders used a large cone to capture the air pressure produced by sonic waves created by a human voice or an instrument. The cone directed sound waves against a diaphragm attached to a stylus, which thereby inscribed an analog of those waves onto a roll of paper or a wax-coated cylinder. The use of electrical microphones and amplifiers by the 1920s made it possible to record a far greater range of sound with far greater fidelity.

Magnetic tape, which was pioneered in Germany during the 1930s, propelled another giant leap forward in fidelity, while also beginning the process of freeing sound from the physical mediums on which it was recorded. Tape could be snipped and edited and combined in ways that allowed artists, producers and engineers to create symphonies in their own minds and then assemble them out of multiple takes performed in different places and at different times. The introduction of high-end consumer digital-sound-recording systems by companies including Sony and 3M further loosened music’s connection to a physical medium, thereby rendering sound infinitely plastic and, in theory, infinitely reproducible. Then came the internet, which delivered on the mind-boggling promise of infinitely reproducible sound at a cost approaching zero.

At ground level, which is to say not the level where technologists live but the level where artists write and record songs for people who care about the human experience of listening to music, the internet was as if a meteor had wiped out the existing planet of sound. The compressed, hollow sound of free streaming music was a big step down from the CD. “Huge step down from vinyl,” Young said. Each step eliminated levels of sonic detail and shading by squeezing down the amount of information contained in the package in which music was delivered. Or, as Young told me, you are left with “5 percent of the original music for your listening enjoyment.”

Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners’ brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn’t there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured.

If you want to envision how Young feels about the possibility of having to listen to not only his music but also American jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular song via our dominant streaming formats, imagine walking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Musée d’Orsay one morning and finding that all of the great canvases in those museums were gone and the only way to experience the work of Gustave Courbet or Vincent van Gogh was to click on pixelated thumbnails.

But Young hears something creepier and more insidious in the new music too. We are poisoning ourselves with degraded sound, he believes, the same way that Monsanto is poisoning our food with genetically engineered seeds. The development of our brains is led by our senses; take away too many of the necessary cues, and we are trapped inside a room with no doors or windows. Substituting smoothed-out algorithms for the contingent complexity of biological existence is bad for us, Young thinks. He doesn’t care much about being called a crank. “It’s an insult to the human mind and the human soul,” he once told Greg Kot of The Chicago Tribune. Or as Young put it to me, “I’m not content to be content.”

I was surprised to find myself talking with Young at all. He only really agrees to speak with the press, or to the press, to publicize something new and weird, like his 3,000 square feet of miniature Lionel train track that he housed in his barn or the experimental film he recently made with his wife, Daryl Hannah. For years, Young also put on a benefit concert for the Bridge School, which educates children who have cognitive and sensory disorders. Young’s sons, Zeke and Ben, both have cerebral palsy.

That’s another thing about Young that rescues him from nihilism and self-pity: He does stuff, even if what he does sometimes seems loony. He made a documentary and a YouTube channel about converting his 1959 Lincoln Continental to operate on alternative fuels, and he has been known to distribute unlicensed non-G.M.O. seeds at his shows, from which his fans can grow their own, uncontaminated grains. A few years ago, he appeared on David Letterman’s show to introduce his PonoPlayer, which was his first attempt to right the wrongs that streaming music is doing to our brains. “It means righteous in Hawaiian,” he told Letterman, who seemed both impressed by the device and thoroughly perplexed by the need for it. “Is this a digital way of recording analogous sound?” Letterman asked. “I’m struggling here to find something I can understand.”

His next remedy, which is why he invited me out to Roberts’s home, is a website that he calls the Neil Young Archives: a digital repository of his recorded work that he introduced last summer at considerable personal expense. (“Let’s say, ‘Well over a million dollars,’ ” Roberts suggested to me later, with a sigh.) The interface for the Archive looks like a set of old file cabinets that might have been heisted from an old-time bail bondsman’s office. By clicking open the various cabinets, you can stream every song that Young ever released and a growing portion of his unreleased songs in information-rich file formats and play them back through a DAC, which is a digital-to-analog converter device that approximates the sound of good vinyl.

“What I do with my life now is I try and preserve what I did so that decades from now it will still be there,” Young said. “I wish I could do this for Frank Sinatra. I wish I could do it for Nelson Riddle. I wish I could do it for all of the great jazz players. I wish I could do it for all the great songwriters and musicians and everybody who recorded during the time and before the time that I did. But I can’t.”

There are audiophiles who mutter politely but approvingly about Neil’s crusades. And there are the non-gear-heads who remain passionate about American popular music and the miracles it contains. Ooooh-la-la-la, la-la-la-la. That’s the harmony on “Down by the River,” and it’s glorious, right? Your whole brain relaxes in a warm bath of sound. Now try to feel that pure glory and relaxation, that sense of wide-open spaces, the unique confluence of cultures and sounds that together make up America’s purest and least-expected gift to humanity and all the history and pain and loneliness and satisfaction behind it, in a lo-fi digital stream.

At the center of Young’s efforts are his own engineers, who are at least as important to him as Old Black, his favored Gibson Les Paul. “He wants the honesty of what went down, not some pasted-together overdubbed representation that’s not the truth,” Jon Hanlon, one of his favorite engineers, told me from the modest beach house where he takes breaks from recording and remastering miles of Young’s tapes. When we met, he had just completed mastering a 1973 live performance at the Roxy of “Tonight’s the Night,” which is one of Young’s finest and most harrowing records. The rawness of the anger and the sorrow and the joy that are all mixed up together on that record transcends any particular cut. “The truth is that the human condition is imperfect,” Hanlon says of that record. “He captures that imperfection. He wants to capture it in its birth, at the moment that it happens.”

Hanlon has spent years working his way up the Young recording hierarchy, at the topmost rung of which lived an engineer and producer named David Briggs, whose driving, funny, off-kilter personality is best captured in a photograph that shows him in a cowboy hat holding a long black rifle; the gleam in his eye suggests that he wouldn’t mind shooting someone. “That’s the guy that I wanted to find out about,” Hanlon recalls. When Briggs died, Tim Mulligan, who had been mixing Young’s live shows since the 1970s, inherited some part of Briggs’s mantle. Then came Hanlon, who was brought up to the ranch in 1990 to engineer “Ragged Glory.”

“He’s a control freak,” Hanlon says, in a tone of complete approval. “If he wants your opinion, he’ll ask for it. If he doesn’t, it’s foolhardy to wade in. He’s 10 steps ahead of you in his thought process.”

Young’s favorite place to listen to his own songs isn’t the studio, Hanlon says. It’s behind the wheel of his car. Consciously, you’re driving the car, which leaves your mind more open, which is a trick that Briggs taught Young. “We get on the two-lane blacktop,” Hanlon explains. “There’s something that happens when you drive, without trucks. You hear what comes to the top without focusing too hard.”

The physical condition of 40- and 50-year-old master tapes from the golden age of rock ’n’ roll depends on how they were recorded and stored and on what kind of tape, which is why remastering old recordings is such a pressing necessity and why digital-recording technology, as opposed to low-quality streaming services, can be a gift to musicians, properly deployed. While some types of tape, like Scotch 250 tape, are usually fine, even after decades in storage, other forms of analog tape haven’t fared as well. “Ampex 456 half-inch, quarter-inch tape,” Hanlon says, when I ask about the worst offender. Run it through a pinch roller to play it, and the backing comes off as an oily gunk. You need to bake it in an oven at low heat to reconstitute the backing and make the tape usable. With Young’s old Buffalo Springfield stuff, you could see right through the Mylar, Hanlon says, which means that the music on those tapes, or some of it, is simply gone.

Tim Mulligan has worked together with Neil since “Harvest,” in 1971. His first session was a remote in the old hay barn where Young recorded “Words,” along with “Alabama” and “Are You Ready for the Country.” The guy who knew how to bake Ampex tape, he tells me, was George Horn, a mastering engineer who worked at CBS San Francisco and later at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. “George had a crude setup using a hair dryer and cardboard box,” Mulligan recalls. “We then upgraded to a convection oven with a candy thermometer and timer.” The tapes were carefully rewound, then cleaned, lubricated and repaired until they were playable again and could be rerecorded. After a few precious days, the old tapes turned back into gunk.

The master tapes for “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” were in particularly bad condition, Mulligan recalls. So it’s important to get the work done right and get it done now.

Even engineers in Silicon Valley can hear a difference in the stuff they are selling and what Young’s team is so desperately trying to preserve. As Tim Cook, the head of Apple, recently told a reporter, without any evident trace of humor, “We worry that the humanity is being drained out of music.”

Steve Jobs, Cook’s predecessor, was also a big music fan. “He listened to vinyl in his living room because he could hear real music,” Young told me. “ And he loved music.” When I ask if he ever spoke directly to Jobs about turning Apple’s iTunes into a platform for music that didn’t sound bad, Young nodded.

“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “He said, ‘Send us your masters and I’ll have my guys do what they can with them to make them sound great.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s impossible, your iPod won’t play anything back.’ ”

Jobs disagreed. “He said, ‘Well, our guys can make it so that your music can play back through it.’ And you know he was right,” Young said. “It does play back, and you can recognize it.” He pauses. “But it’s not my music.”

When Jobs’s biographer asked him about Young’s offer, as related in the biography “Becoming Steve Jobs,” Jobs snapped, “[Expletive] Neil Young.”

All of my life, I had never rid myself of the preposterous idea that someday Young would vouchsafe to me some life-altering truth, until one day it happened. My younger son, Elijah, I told Young, has a great ear for music, but his ability to process sensory information is off, which means that he has been drowning since birth in an ocean of sound. This has led to problems with language and balance and nausea. From the time he was born, his hands were also clenched into tiny fists, and they remained that way for over a year. He seemed to be in some kind of pain.

Otherwise, he is a bright, intensely curious child, who is fascinated by the workings of cause and effect and understands language at a normal 5-year-old level but repeats words with great difficulty. To compensate for his deficits, Elijah was blessed with a rock-star smile that can light up a room — a smile so bright and warm that he learned to use it to distract people from his obvious physical discomfort, in a world that was always wobbling and flipping over, and from his inability first to talk and then to pick up small objects or insert a screw into a bolt. Instead, he smiled at people. When they asked him his name, his inability to produce intelligible sounds made him turn away quickly in frustration, which was usually interpreted as shyness. He would try to build a tower out of blocks, then knock down all the blocks. Then he would turn back to them, laugh and flash that smile.

A child in pain is a tragedy and a burden that can be all-consuming, but that’s not how I experience Elijah. He is my friend. He is a source of joy and love and warmth, who has also been the cause of several hundred sleepless nights, which can in turn be the source of soaring anxiety. Thanks to Elijah, I have become aware that speech is a conscious act that requires the coordination of 32 muscles in the mouth, 16 of which affect the shape and positioning of the tongue.

It could be cerebral palsy, a light case, perhaps, Young replied, in an oblique reference to his sons. It is something like that, but it’s not that, so I wasn’t sure exactly how to answer. It’s not genetic. It’s not fatal. Something was inflaming his young brain, disrupting the formation of healthy neural connections; the cause might be historical, or ongoing. Either way, there were kinks in the channels through which sights and sounds flowed. Either those channels had to be ironed out or new ones had to be opened up.

I asked Young what it does to a marriage to have a child like that. Neil has been married three times. His ex-wife, Pegi, Ben’s mom, was a singer-songwriter and environmentalist but died on Jan. 1, 2019, of cancer. She had worked with Young, to whom she was married for 36 years, before divorcing in 2014, to establish the Bridge School.

“It’s good for the marriage,” he said firmly. “If it’s a good marriage, it brings the marriage even closer together. It’s one of life’s great experiences. It’s an enriching thing because it teaches you the value of love.”

Young’s immersion in a program of intensive therapy for his son Ben led him to become obsessed with new ways of hearing and modulating sound. His album “Trans” was a monument to his attempts to communicate with Ben and to find a musical language that could convey what Ben was hearing — and perhaps even serve some therapeutic purpose. As Neil put it to his biographer Jimmy McDonough, the album was “the beginning of my search for a way for a nonoral person, a severely physically handicapped nonoral person, to find some sort of interface for communication. The computers and the heartbeat all have to come together here — where chemistry and electronics meet.”

In that moment, talking about our sons, I realized how all of Young’s obsessions fit together: They are centered in a common understanding of experience and how it shapes us. Human development is led by our senses. Our senses exert a formative and shaping pressure on our brains. So if our experience of the world around us can damage our brains and our souls, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that music can also help us feel better. Every musician, and every music fan, believes that.

It was this belief that led me to the work of a French doctor named Alfred Tomatis, who, in the late 1940s and ’50s, began manipulating sound in the hope of healing people. Among his patients were opera singers and fighter pilots, whose brains had stopped processing sound correctly as a result of work-induced auditory trauma. Because our fight-or-flight response is connected to our auditory system, any disturbances can cause a host of physical symptoms. Tomatis came up with a treatment that involved decreasing or emphasizing specific frequencies of what he believed to be particularly salient forms of music — including Gregorian chants and the music of Mozart, which is perhaps the most perfectly structured and at the same time most effortlessly fluid sound that human beings have ever made (at once the most human and the most perfect music on the planet). These interventions helped retune the muscles that control the auditory pathways through which sound makes its way to the brain.

In the 1950s, Tomatis successfully used his techniques to help opera singers whose prolonged and eventually traumatic exposure to their own vocal extremes left them unable hear high and midrange sounds. After graduating from medical school, he worked for the French Air Force, where he noticed that prolonged exposure to certain ranges of sound produced by factory machinery and jet engines produced a range of negative physiological and psychological effects, in addition to hearing loss.

But Tomatis’s methods languished in relative obscurity for the second half of the 20th century in part because they didn’t align with the then-dominant machine model of our brains, which suggested the organ contained a set of parts that performed specific functions. Once broken, those functions could not be restored.

The machine model of the brain “has been a disaster clinically,” says the psychiatrist Norman Doidge, who over the past decade has popularized much of the pioneering work in the science of neuroplasticity in two best-selling books. “We now know that mental and sensory experience and activity actually change the brain’s ‘wiring’ or connections,” Doidge told me. As Eric Kandel, one of Doidge’s teachers at Columbia, defined it, “Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change its behavior as a result of experience.” In 2000, Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology.

At dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant in Toronto, I told Doidge about Elijah. What particularly interested me, I said, was that his symptoms mirrored those of a child to whom Doidge had devoted a case history in his second book. Could he help us?

Maybe, he said. With proper reshaping of his auditory cortex, Elijah’s balance might get better and his nausea might stop, which would in turn make it possible for him to develop more normally. Doidge suggested that we take Elijah to the Listening Center in Toronto for an assessment. The center is run by Paul Madaule, who was first Tomatis’s patient in France, then his assistant.

Coincidentally, I added, Young experiments with masking and distorting sound contained some similar ideas. He had two sons with cerebral palsy. “He was probably on to something,” Doidge said.

Spending a day and a night in downtown Fresno, Calif., is like walking into the dreamscape of a midperiod Neil Young album, with once-glorious movie palaces taken over by churches that minister to addicts and drunks. The signs along the way advertise Aladdin Bail Bonds, the Mezcal Lounge and the Lucky You Tattoo parlor. One of the messages of Neil Young’s music has always been that flat spaces are lonely, and the people who inhabit them feel small.

In the next year, Young would announce that he was releasing a book about sound, “To Feel the Music,” written with Phil Baker, who helped developed the PonoPlayer. He also found enough new inspiration to record an album with Crazy Horse, his first in seven years, called “Colorado.” While I was in town, I was able to catch a show.

Fresno’s sizable vagrant population was distinguishable from the concertgoers clustered outside the Warnors Theater mainly by the amount of dust on their shoes. The concert had been announced only a week earlier, which meant that pretty much everyone there was a local — the kind of audience that Young likes best. The inside of the Warnors Theater has been perfectly restored, with a high gilded ceiling and gorgeous acoustics.

“I’m still living the dream we had/For me, it’s not over,” Young sang onstage, facing his band, Crazy Horse, with Nils Lofgren on guitar. There was something clumsy and vulnerable in the way that the men faced each other onstage, bowing back and forth as they soloed in a show of old-school male competitive affection.

“Thanks for coming out,” he told the crowd when he was done. “We appreciate it. Glad you could get those tickets. I like seeing you people here.” A cigar-store Indian hovered over his shoulder. I counted only four people in the audience who were holding up phones. He played “Tired Eyes,” then “Powderfinger,” flailing away at his big old guitar laid across his bouncy gut. “You are like a hurricane/There’s calm in your eye/I wanna love you but I’m getting blown away.”

“God bless you, Neil,” an old hippie lady in a blowzy floral dress shouted. Maybe he only looked cranky. He finished another song and gazed up at the ceiling in wonderment, admiring the great cathedral of sound in which he was standing.

I don’t know if the evils that Neil Young is warning us about will come to pass. I don’t know if G.M.O. seeds are truly killing us or if all the missing information that Silicon Valley is engineering out of music and the rest of our lives is doing something truly evil to our brains or whether these are simply the latest obsessions of a habitually cranky, inventive, restless man.

There are plenty of neurologists who remain skeptical of the idea that sound can help rewire people’s brains. What I can also tell you is this: I listen to rich audio files through a decent-quality DAC and I hear more, and it makes me feel better. Also: I don’t know when or how or if certain parts of my son’s brain will get unstuck. I don’t know whether he will learn to talk in a way that his friends or teachers or people besides me and my wife and his brother and sister can easily understand. I’m not even sure what degree of change is desirable. Some brains, like Neil Young’s and Joni Mitchell’s, are just wired differently.

That said, I will never forget watching Elijah during the first week of his therapy in Toronto, as modified Mozart was piped into his brain and he just suddenly looked down at his little fist and started opening and closing his hand for the first time — because suddenly, he could. After the second session, six weeks later, his reflexes and fine-motor skills had markedly improved, to the point where he could catch a ball or slap his mother across the face when she says “no” to his request for another marshmallow. He isn’t nauseated anymore. He can walk and even run, while continuing to be a joy to be around. Just the other day, in the bath, waiting for his mother to come home, he looked at me and said, “Oh, me home, Mama!”

I listened to the tapes that Elijah was hearing, on which Mozart’s perfect sound was continuously interrupted by filtering that sounded like static, before it then reasserted itself — an effect that is familiar to any Neil Young fan. The filtering effects had helped in whatever way to heal Elijah’s brain. So what is the effect of engineering so much complexity out of the music we listen to, and replacing it with fake, jacked-up sounds, doing to my brain and to yours?

It’s strange to imagine that Young might be a prophet of sorts — but maybe not. His lesson is that everything human is shot through with imperfection. Filtering that out doesn’t make us more perfect; it is making us sick. He’s a great artist, which means that he sees and hears more, which may make him a loon, but is also why he is still worth listening to.

“These places are so great,” Young said onstage in Fresno. “We’re so lucky they’re still here.” He sang, in fine voice: “He came dancing across the waters/With his galleons and guns.” At 73, he is still a man walking through a hurricane, which begins inside a perfect melody that dissolves into dissonance and feedback, inside of which there is something wonderfully, miraculously whole.

David Samuels is the author of “The Runner” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” He last wrote for the magazine about Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s foreign-policy guru.

#tech #technology #musica #music #musicians #must reads #pop music #tech news #news #latest news #entertainers #arts and entertainment #entertainment #u.s. news #u.s. politics #woodstock

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iamnotthedog · 7 years ago

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MORRISON: FALL 1997 / YOSEMITE: JULY 21 – 25, 2001

One night when I was sixteen, I was up in my bedroom watching Pulp Fiction for about the twelfth time, and I was up to the second-to-last sequence—the seventh sequence, which is actually the third sequence if you were to put the whole thing in chronological order (which it most certainly is not).1 The seventh sequence is the sequence after Jules and Vincent have left the apartment where they got the briefcase and Jules quoted that long passage from Ezekiel 25:17, and they killed the two young men (Roger and Brett) and were talking to the third young man (Marvin) when an unknown fourth young man came charging into the room and unloaded a round but somehow managed to miss both of them. Jules was convinced that it was divine intervention. Then, in the seventh sequence, they are in the car with Marvin in the backseat, and they are arguing about the matter (“...this shit doesn’t just happen!” says Jules) when Vincent turns to get Marvin’s opinion on the whole thing and accidentally shoots him in the face. “Oh man, I shot Marvin in the face.” I was laughing out loud at that whole scene when Mom called up the stairs with a tone of voice that I hadn’t heard for years.

“Danny,” she called. “Danny, come downstairs. We need to talk to you about something.” I had just taken a hit from my little chrome one hitter, exhaling the smoke through a small cardboard toilet paper roll stuffed with dryer sheets and out the open window. A train rolled by outside, rattling by on the tracks just beyond our yard, headed west out over the Mississippi River, through the noxious river town of Clinton, and out into the cornfields of Iowa and beyond.2

“Be down in a minute!” I yelled over the racket.

I turned off Pulp Fiction and fished through the pockets of my flannel jacket for my Visine. I put drops into my eyes, then pushed through the blankets I had nailed up over my door, and walked out, through Adam’s room, scattered with action figures—my old G.I. Joes and muscle-bound He-Man figures, and also some new ones I didn’t recognize. In the tiny upstairs bathroom I changed my t-shirt, washed my hands, and splashed some water on my face. Then I walked back through Adam’s room and plodded downstairs.

The steep and narrow back stairway in that drafty old house dumped you out into the wood-floored dining room, with its flowery wallpaper, large table and chairs, a cheap glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and the chest of drawers that Mom called a “buffet,” which was always decorated with some doilies and decorative plates with strangely vague Biblical quotes on them. To your left were the kitchen and, beyond it, the backyard and freedom. To your right was the living room. I reluctantly turned right.

Don and Mom were seated on the floor in the lamplight, leaning back against the couch and facing the recliner in the corner. They never sat on the floor. This was serious. Like they were finally going to call me out for being high all the time. Or maybe one of the grandmas died.

Mom smiled warmly and motioned for me to sit in the recliner in the corner, then put her hand on Don’s leg and looked lovingly at him. The old man looked like he was about to squirm right out of his khakis.

“What’s this all about?” I asked.

“Danny, we love you so very much and we’re so proud of you,” Mom began.

“Jesus, Mom,” I said, chuckling nervously. I shifted in the recliner—folded my right leg and sat on it. Then she looked me dead in the eyes.

“I was in love with Don before I was divorced from Jack,” she said.

I looked right at Don, who was looking awkwardly, silently, at a spot on the carpet. And of all the things I could have said right then, I think I said: “Holy shit.”

But I don’t remember, really. I may have said something else entirely. Mom was going on nervously about how Don was my real father. About how I, and not Adam, was their first offspring. Like I hadn’t understood that immediately. I took it all in. Then, instead of asking a hundred questions like I should have, I started giving orders.3

“Well, everyone has to know,” I said. “We aren’t a family that keeps secrets from each other.”4

“Of course,” Mom said.

“Who does know?”

“No one.”

“No one?!”

“No.”

“Well, everyone needs to know.”

“We can call your brother and sister now. And we can call Jack.”

“Wait, DAD doesn’t even know?!”

“No.”

“He still thinks he’s my biological father?!”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve been calling him DAD for SIXTEEN YEARS!”

“We know, Danny. We know this is tough.”

“Jesus fucking CHRIST!”

“Alright now...”

“I’m sorry, but HOLY FUCKING SHIT!” I yelled. I laughed at my own awkwardness—at everything, really. I laughed quickly, nervously. Then I calmed myself. I took a few deep breaths and forced a smile. “You know I love you guys, but I’m probably not going to change my name. At least not for a while. I’ve been a Duffy my whole life.”

“We understand,” Mom said.

“Of course,” Don said. He cleared his throat.

“I’m also probably going to keep calling Jack ‘Dad’ and you ‘Don,’” I added. “You know, just out of habit.” Don and Mom smiled and nodded. Mom had tears in her eyes. Don just looked...I’m not really sure. But he looked up at me. And I could see it. I could see the similarities in our faces, in the way we carried ourselves. Even in the way that he was sitting there—his shoulders slightly slouched, his hands folded on his lap, his legs out in front of him, the right crossed over the left at the knees. His big, flat feet. His black socks that always had holes in them.

I would think of this very moment almost four years later, on Don’s fiftieth birthday, when Mom bought him a plane ticket to come out to Yosemite and visit me for a few days. That was right around the time that Marcus and I first got the job at Yosemite View Lodge in El Portal. I suppose I should have mentioned it earlier, when I was talking about that job, and Marcus, and Chloe and my desire to get that paycheck and get the hell out of there—but I wasn’t really thinking about it then, to be honest. So I’m going to tell you about it right now:

Mom had called the Yosemite View Lodge one day while I was at the front desk. Marcus answered, and I heard his voice change immediately into that sort of innocent and cute voice that people use when talking to their friends’ parents. Then he looked at me and got this shit-eating grin on his face and I just knew it was Mom on the other end.

“Give me the phone, asshole,” I had said.

Mom went into apologetic mode instantly, so I knew something was up.

“Danny, I’m so sorry I’m springing this on you now, but I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for so long! It’s hard, you being out there in the middle of nowhere. But the reason I’m calling is that your father’s birthday is in a couple of weeks...”

“I know, Mom,” I said. Mom was always reminding my siblings and I about birthdays, and it drove me crazy. She still reminds us today, which is hilarious, because we’re all grown adults who have somehow managed to miraculously learn how to use a goddamned calendar. “I was already planning on calling him.”

“Well, you’re not going to have to call him,” she said, “because I bought him a ticket to come out there and visit you!”

Now, this was obviously my mother trying to give my father an excellent fiftieth birthday gift while also—and most importantly—setting up a perfect setting for some serious father-son bonding. Don and I had thrown around a baseball maybe twice, and we shot hoops together a few times in those beautiful Illinois summer evenings, when Don had just walked home from the hardware store over the railroad tracks and through the neighbors’ back yards, and I was out in the driveway working on my free throws, because I really was a terrible free throw shooter.5 And we also had that one weekend when Mom was on some church retreat and we watched The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and made big steaks for dinner two nights in a row. And I worked for him at Morrison Hardware for a while, but there was very little bonding time at the store. So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not complaining—that’s some quality bonding right there. That’s more father-son bonding time than a lot of kids get in their weird little kid lives. But the fact was that I still called Don “Don,” and—though I knew he was a good man and a more than capable guardian who was great for Mom and our family—I had never really thought of him as my true blood father or treated him as such. And Mom knew that and was trying to change it. She was trying to put Don and his first-born son in a pristine setting and a situation where, even if we didn’t talk—as we rarely did—we would nevertheless have no choice but to share some serious “moments” together. Some real man moments. Like in the made-for-TV movies, or whatever.

So I obviously didn’t tell Mom that I wasn’t getting paid for another couple of weeks and that I was flat broke and hitchhiking to work every morning because my car had no gas. And I didn’t tell her that I had no place to live, and was either sleeping by the river, or in Chloe’s bed or on John’s floor every night. I didn’t tell her anything about being caught stealing and losing my job in the valley, or hitchhiking to San Francisco, or having visions on Mount Dana, or losing my mind about loving Chloe but wanting to leave everything and just wander the country alone forever. Instead of saying anything about any of that, I said, “Aw, Mom, that’s a great idea! I’ll get us a room here at the lodge.”

“Oh, that’d be just great!” she said, in her cheery and sentimental Mom way. Then she went on and on about all the details, and about how I’d have to pick him up at the airport in Merced, and I wrote some stuff down but I was really just thinking about how I was going to have to borrow money from Chloe to put gas in the Olds. Then I heard her say, “How’s Chloe?” and I snapped out of my little panic attack long enough to make up something about getting busy and having to go back to work and thank you so much for calling and I love you and this is going to be fun, etcetera, etcetera.

Two weeks later, on the afternoon of July 20, Don came to Yosemite. I picked him up in Merced and we drove east on the 140 through that rolling golden prairie that stretches from the valley to the foothills. I could have taken the 140 straight to El Portal and the Yosemite View Lodge and we would have been there in an hour. But I really wanted Don to see Yosemite Valley before sundown—and he really wanted to see it, as well—and I wanted so badly to take him past all the grand vistas offered by the southern entrance of the park that we ended up driving about an hour out of our way. So we shot northeast up the 140 into the foothills, then turned southeast on the 49, down through sleepy Oakhurst, and then straight north up Wawona Road and into the park.6

Because of our detour, we got into Yosemite Valley as the sun was setting. Don met John and Marcus and a bunch of other park employees, and he met sweet, sweet Chloe. Don loved the hell out of Chloe, who immediately opened up to him and started telling him about the hike we were all going to take together the following day. He looked at and talked to John and Marcus and everyone else like they were a bunch of circus freaks (which, admittedly, we all kind of were). Don, Chloe and I went to Yosemite Village for pizza and a few beers, then I drove Don out to Yosemite View Lodge where we checked in and passed out.

The following morning, we woke with the sunrise and drove through the freezing cold crystal blue alpine air back to Yosemite Valley, where we picked up Chloe, loaded up our packs with all of our camping gear, bought some coffee, then drove out of the valley up to the high country and Tuolumne Meadows. After a quick breakfast at the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, we shouldered our packs and spent the rest of the day hiking to Vogelsang—a twelve-mile hike up the pristine and alien alpine landscape of Lyell Canyon. We all hiked apart from one another, with Chloe way out in front, Don in the middle, and myself taking up the rear, and Don had it pretty rough. He was enjoying the hell out of all the views and everything, but Chloe and I hadn’t accounted for the fact that he would need some time to adjust to the altitude, and he ended up being sick for most of the day. The trail barely climbs 200 feet in the first six miles and follows a stream with crystal clear water the whole way, and he was fine through all that, but then we reached the six mile junction, when the trail climbs 2,000 feet in a mere three miles. By the time we got to Vogelsang and set up the tent that evening, he looked like a dead man walking. Chloe and I fed him some potato soup and hummus with crackers, and he made some kind of comment about how we ate like squirrels, then threw up his dinner and was passed out in the tent we set up for him, face down in his sleeping bag, before sundown.

The next day, I started to see Don a bit differently than I ever had before. He woke up before Chloe and I, and when I rolled over in my dew-dampened sleeping bag and looked at him across the bright green alpine grass, sitting outside his tent on a rock, staring into the slowly brightening blue sky, he looked young and fresh-faced, even a little naïve, as he had probably looked some thirty years before. He also looked like a man alone. But he looked resolute in his loneliness. He looked like a man who had not had the pleasure of waking up alone in a long time, and was determined to enjoy that experience for all it was worth.

Chloe woke up shortly after I did, and we made some coffee on the camp stove and ate some granola for breakfast, then started the long hike back to Tuolumne Meadows. I hiked with Don the whole way, and we made some small talk, but mostly just walked in silence and enjoyed each other’s company. Don also took some pictures of me that he gave me later, and they are some of the best pictures that anyone has ever taken of me, even though in every single one of them I am walking away.

The following day we took it pretty easy and bummed around the valley for a while, then drove down to the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias to walk among the trees. I told Don had to work the following two days—I really needed the money—and he was okay with it, but was so amped up about having made it to Vogelsang and back that he was determined to keep going—to do another big hike, and yet another one the following day, which would be his last full day in the park. Chloe had another day off and offered to take him up Half Dome the following day, so the two of them went for it and not only did it, but did it well—hiking all the way up, summiting the mountain with the hordes of other tourists, and hiking all the way back to the valley in the time it took me to work one eight hour shift at the lodge desk. We celebrated their feat with more pizza and beers, and then I took Don back out to the lodge for a much-needed soak in the hot tub and a good night’s sleep.

I figured that Don would take his final day in the park easy—maybe hang out with me at the lodge for a bit, then do some touristy things in Yosemite Valley—watch a movie in Yosemite Village, hike to the base of Lower Yosemite Falls, wander through the cemetery, watch a John Muir lookalike give a lecture in the Curry Village Amphitheater—but he was surprisingly up and gone before I even managed to get myself out of bed and over to the front desk to start work. He left me a note that he had taken the Olds into the valley to do another hike.

Eight hours later, my shift was done and Marcus and I walked up to the room to see if Don had returned and to ask him about his day, but he was still gone. Nothing about the room was any different from how I had left it that morning.

“I’m sure he’s on his way back,” I said.

Marcus’s answer was typical: “Well, come smoke a blunt with me, then.”

We walked down to the river behind the lodge and sat on the rocks to smoke while we watched the sky change colors with the sunset. Then Marcus went out to the highway to hitch a ride back to Yosemite Valley, and I went back up to the room and fell asleep on the bed in my work clothes.

I was awakened to the sound of the room’s door closing. It was dark, and I looked at the clock on the desk by the television. It was midnight, and there, standing before me, wide-eyed and delirious, was Don. He was covered in dirt up to his knees and had smears of dust across his sunburnt face, and his white polo shirt was stained with sweat.

“Where are you coming from?” I asked.

He threw down his keys and wallet, took of his belt, and tossed an empty water bottle into the garbage can in the corner. Then he sat on the bed with a grunt and began wrestling with his tennis shoes. “Weren’t you worried about me?” he asked. He pulled one of the shoes off and a cloud of dust went into the air. He waved at the cloud, then looked at me. “Did you call anyone? Ask anyone where I might have gone?”

Quite frankly, I hadn’t even thought about any of that. Not once.

“Nah,” I said, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. “I knew you were okay. Where’d you go?”

Don then got his other shoe off and proceeded to tell me that he had driven that morning to the Tamarack Flat Campground on Highway 120 and had hiked up El Capitan—an extremely strenuous, 15-mile hike with a 2,000 foot change in elevation in a relatively short period of time. And the scary part was that he had taken a cue from Chloe from their hike the day before, and he had attempted a few shortcuts. Unlike Chloe, however, he didn’t really know where he was going and he got turned around several times. He ended up hacking through a lot of underbrush, and had the scars on his legs to prove it. He also didn’t set a non-negotiable turnaround time for himself—as anyone should always do when hiking alone in the wilderness —and he had ended up hiking down from the summit of the behemoth rock in the dark without any water, which he had failed to bring enough of. Had he not run into a friendly and highly-experienced couple of hikers on his way down from the summit, he said, he may have still been up there, dehydrated and wandering around in the dark.

As Don told me the story—terrifying as it was—his face slowly transformed from this amalgamation of frustration and weariness to the face of a man who had conquered his curiosity—a man who had faced his fears and won—a man who had really done something for the betterment of his self. By the time he got to the moment in his story where he realized he was at the trailhead, and where he saw the Olds and realized he was on his way back to civilization and his first-born son and he was alive and well, he was smiling—swelling with pride, and his eyes were the eyes of an ecstatic little boy. Eyes of joy and wonderment. The transformation, I believed, was complete.

Don had a shower and immediately fell asleep. I was to take him back to the airport the following morning, and that saddened me a bit—I regretted not taking more time off for us to be together. I thought about that while I sat there and watched him sleep. And the thing was, while I sat there watching him, I couldn’t see him for seeing myself. Or perhaps that isn’t how I should word it: I could only see he and I—I could only see us as one and the same—one person—one lost and lonely person trudging along from little victory to little victory, adding each obstacle overcome up to what we hope will be the summation of a life well spent. And I knew that this was quite possibly the only chance I would have in perhaps my entire lifetime to see my father that way—to see him as me while he was also lying so close to me—I could hear each of his gentle breaths—and he was so vulnerable, and so very alive, so captivating—radiating the wilderness from where he had so recently emerged—that I didn’t stop watching him sleep until I fell asleep myself. And what I was thinking of more than anything as I was watching him sleep was that night back in Morrison when he was sitting on the carpeted floor next to Mom, and I was in the recliner looking at him and the holes in his socks and being told that it was none other than he who was my true flesh and blood father.

After I told them that night that I was probably going to keep calling Jack “Dad” and Don “Don,” I managed a smile, and we all smiled, and I think Mom was crying, and we hugged, and then Mom and I started making phone calls. We called the grandmas and Jeni and Jim and Jack, and I mostly let Mom do the talking, but I listened in to all of the conversations on the upstairs phone. When Mom told Grandma Jevne—Don’s mom—the old bird said she had known all along, and had spent sixteen years waiting for them to tell her. When she told her mom, Grandma Donalds’ reaction was similar. She seemed to already know, and she was actually happy about the whole thing—like my being Mom and Don’s first-born added more weight to their love for one another, and solidified our family even more. When Mom talked to Jack Duffy, however, I couldn’t bear to listen, and I hung up the phone and sat on the floor next to it, my head in my hands, trying to think of anything but big ol’ Jack, leaning into the phone, his shoulders heaving as he cried somewhere up there in northern Wisconsin.

I still don’t know what was said between Mom and Jack that night, but all I said when Mom called up the stairs for me to get on the phone was “Dad, you’ll always be my dad,” or something vague and cheesy like that. Then he said, “I know, Danny,” and his voice cracked, and I hung up the phone again.

Jeni was next, and I was already pretty emotionally spent, so I only needed to hear her raise her voice once before I hung up the phone. Jeni was angry—and rightfully so—but I couldn’t deal with anger in the moment. I went back into my room and smoked another one hitter. Stared out the window at the train tracks.

Some thirty minutes later, Mom called up the stairs one last time. “Danny,” she said, “your brother’s on the phone.” I walked back through Adam’s room to the phone, which sat on a big leather trunk at the top of the front stairway—a trunk that Mom kept all our old baby shit in. I sat on the floor next to the trunk, and picked up the phone.

“Hey Jim.”

“Hey brother,” he said. “What the fuck is going on?” He laughed, but I could tell he had been crying. It was a laughter through tears—a laughter that sounded like he was trying not to start coughing, or maybe he really needed to clear his throat but wasn’t for whatever reason.

“I don’t really know,” I said.

“Well, you’ll always be my brother,” he said.

“I know.”

“You and Adam both,” he said. “and that’s all that matters.” Then we both sat in silent understanding, breathing into the phone together for a minute. And that was that.

If you care about Pulp Fiction as deeply as I cared about it when I was sixteen, you’ll know that though the order of sequences in the film goes something like this: Diner Prologue > Prelude to Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace > Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace > Prelude to the Gold Watch > The Gold Watch > The Bonnie Situation > Diner Epilogue, the order of sequences if they were to be put in chronological order would be: Prelude to the Gold Watch > Prelude to Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace > The Bonnie Situation > Diner Prologue > Diner Epilogue > Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace > The Gold Watch. If you didn’t know that for whatever reason, maybe go watch the movie again with that in mind. Like, right now. ↩︎

As a child, I was fascinated by the smell of Clinton, Iowa. Whenever we drove through the town to go shop at Target or wherever, I would stare up at the smoke billowing from the factories on the southwest side of town, and I would pinch my nose and laugh and ask Mom what that horrible smell was. She never told me—she said she didn’t know—but I found out years later that the large factory on Beaver Channel Parkway, running parallel to the Lincoln Highway we would always be driving on, was actually a rendering plant. National By-Products, Inc. is a private company categorized under Animal and Marine Fats and Oils. That smell emanating from those smokestacks was actually burning animal tissue. ↩︎

Because I failed to ask enough questions that day and every day thereafter for the rest of my time spent under that roof, it would be another ten years before I and my fellow siblings learned that Mom had been in love with Don from the moment she laid eyes on him. Her relationship with Jack had been on the rocks for a while when Don had joined their little group of friends—those five or six guys and two ladies who would always meet at the bar after their respective workdays, and who would come over to our house for dinner parties, or to play Trivial Pursuit on the weekends. Because of that disconnect with Jack, and because of her instantaneous connection with Don, Mom had started seeing Don very shortly after she had met him. They had slept together very shortly after that, and I had been conceived. This was why, after I was born, Mom had been taking me up to Don’s apartment above Morrison Hardware every Sunday after church. She was showing me off to my real father. ↩︎

If I knew then what I know now about my extended family on my mother’s side, I would have never said such a silly thing. In regards to my mother’s side of the family, this statement is 100% false. In fact, I could have probably said, “Well, nearly every single one of your family members has at least one deep dark secret that they’ve been holding onto for their entire lives,” and that statement would have had a hell of a lot more truth to it. It would have been a little out of place in the context of the situation, but it would have had a hell of a lot more truth to it. ↩︎

Most of my free throws were these high-arching, knuckle ball-looking things that would fall about a foot short of the hoop. I’m talking about not even hitting the rim, the net, nothing. Total airball. Or I’d chuck the thing in a straight line drive—with no arch, and again, no rotation at all—and it would bounce off the backboard and come straight back to me. A strange phenomenon, being that my jumper wasn’t really all that bad. I think it had something to do with the pressure of the moment—standing on that line in the middle of that court with all those eyes staring at me. I was a really self-conscious kid most of the time. ↩︎

Though all entrances to the park are beautiful—the eastern entrance over Tioga Pass being the most stunning, if only for the extremity of its landscape—it is a great experience to take newcomers into the park up Wawona Road because of what is known as the Tunnel View. About twenty miles or so into the park, you have a sense of the landscape around you becoming more extreme, but you can’t really see it because of the dense forest in the way. You can only see the faint outline of the pine-covered slopes beyond the trees looking less like rolling hills and more like mountains. Then there is a clearing—a rocky slope to your left and nothing but sky to your right, and you see for the first time that you are indeed, some thousand feet above everything over there (“everything” being an absolute sea of pine). Around a wide turn, you see your first few massive rock formations off to the left. Then, off to the left in the distance, the immense pine sea builds to a head, then drops away to a sheer granite cliff which falls drastically, straight down into a valley. The cliff is El Capitan—the world’s largest granite monolith, at 3,000 feet in height. And behind El Capitan, facing you through the diffuse azure glow of the valley, the stunning Half Dome. Then you go through a tunnel that takes you straight through the mountain you’ve been traversing, and when you come out the other side you are punched in the face with a majestic, full-on view of El Capitan to the left, Yosemite Valley before you (with Half Dome in the distance), and, off the the right, Bridalveil Falls pours off the granite that folds back behind the waterfall into three stunning peaks known as Cathedral Rocks, and all of it looks unreal, like an oil painting—like you could get out of your car and touch it. ↩︎

#pulpfiction #fatherhood #motherhood #brotherhood #sisterhood #siblings #phonecalls #divorce #weed #yosemite #birthdays #vogelsang #lyellcanyon #tuolumnemeadows #yosemiteviewlodge #elcapitan #thegoodthebadandtheugly

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