Catching up
When I last left you, I was off to a Dar Williams/String Cheese Incident concert in Berkeley with Sumana. This turned into a bit of an adventure when it was moved at the last minute from an outdoor venue to an indoor venue on account of fears of rain. (It didn't end up raining after all.)
Arriving a bit late, we heard the tail end of Dar's performance and found the crowd dominated by String Cheese fans, which we ourselves turned out not to be. The last couple of times I heard a Dar Williams concert, she was paired with another female singer-songwriter from a folk tradition (Noe Venable, who in turn was paired with fellow female singer-songerwriter Kris Delmhorst when I heard her again). But the String Cheese Incident is really extremely different musically, and I think promoters are taking a bigger gamble by linking them up.
Sumana and I got to hang out for a while, and I got to see her new place momentarily -- it turns out to be just downstairs from where Cristina and Michelle used to live. There is also a bar on Telegraph which serves good food and (oddly enough) a large line of alcoholic herbal teas. It's called the Bison Brewery, and we went there for dinner after we left the concert.
At the concert, I bought a copy of Dar's Out There Live album, which has live recordings of songs I'm already familiar with, but they're subtly different from the versions I know. There are changes in tempo or instrumental arrangement or (in what I think is only one case) a lyric. This makes me think of Nick's ridicule of musicians' attempts to revitalize old works by arranging them for a totally unexpected instrument. (I like that practice a lot better than Nick seems to, actually. One thing I still haven't gotten a sense of is how a choice of music instrument changes our experience of a melody. But it really can.)
That concert was Friday the 25th, if I remember correctly. On Tuesday the 29th, I went back to Berkeley to see the documentary N is a Number, about the life and work of the late Paul Erdös -- a really remarkable mathematician. Erdös's friend and fellow remarkable mathematician Ron Graham (a veritable master of the discrete) was there answering questions from the audience about Erdös and assorted topics. Erdös was funny in the movie, not to mention inspiringly dedicated to mathematics (and, like Borges's Funes, "memorious"). I need to go hear some lectures from some of our great living mathematicians. I remember missing Persi Diaconis on Riemann's zeta function (something I still fail to understand well, maybe because I never made it to complex analysis). These lectures are happening all the time, and even in the Bay Area it would be hard to go a month or even a week without some really remarkable mathematician sharing some really profound insight. But I'm out of the habit of going to hear it. I didn't even make it to any of the other films in the Cinemath series.
That makes me a bit depressed in general, to be reminded of all the wonderful opportunities out there which I haven't been taking advantage of. Aaron Swartz just complained about Chicago being boring (which I don't agree with -- Biella's there at the moment, so hang out with her and Chicago won't be boring!), but anyway San Francisco and everywhere else is interesting in proportion to the effort you put into taking advantage of it. I'm realizing that I haven't been making such a serious effort compared to what I could be doing -- seth-trips notwithstanding. (My recent trips to Portland and D.C. put me even more in mind of this; I've only been overseas once, but even the major cities of the U.S. call for a couple of lifetimes' worth of exploration. Amy was speculating about the proverb which claims that only boring people get bored -- there are corresponding proverbs which say that, if you're tired of <CITY>, you're tired of life.)
But, as I was saying, I got to see N is a Number, and ran into several people I knew -- Kragen, Beatrice, and Praveen, the LNX-BBC developer Curtis, and Rohit Khare, of FoRK fame, whom I hadn't met before. We went out to dinner and Rohit, a huge baseball fan, watched the final game of the World Series. (I think most of the rest of us were trying to ignore it; Kragen, in particular, positioned himself facing directly away from the television.)
Friday took me to D.C., where I visited Amy and hung out with lawyers. I continued to feel that D.C. looks a lot like Boston, except for the marble or faux-marble public buildings. I have a sense that it's difficult for me to believe in the reality of any major city I haven't either lived in or visited regularly. (Chicago was an exception. Elsewhere, though, I seem to visit a new city and say "Aha, this city looks like...", and supply the name of some other city I actually believe in.)
I also got to see my friend Cate from high school -- now well-established in the adult world. Wonderful! It's too bad I missed my reunion this year; I'd like to know what more of the people I knew in high school are up to. I guess there's no substitute for e-mailing them directly.
