October 24-27 -- Big Sur to San Francisco

From LA, I headed north up Highway 101.  For old time's sake, here is the Madonna Inn, the bathroom as proxy for the decor of the whole place:

In actual fact, I was in spectacular nature, more of this stripe:

The Dalai Lama and I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway which is surpisingly winding.  I was listening to a book on tape of The Art of Happiness, expansive and hopeful stuff about finding a sense of community and finding commonality with others and joining things.  

It's jarring to drive up the PCH at night by yourself.  You sort of know that the guardrail on the left drops down immediately into the Pacific Ocean but you can't see it.  And I was headed to an unfamiliar state park checking in in the dark, still wearing a skirt and Keds from the day in LA.  Craig of the state park said offered that I shouldn't worry about any large animals but that I should try to avoid skunks.  Somewhere in that disorientation, I was feeling a little overawed by nature, big and small, needing to build my openness, as the Dalai Lama would say, my trust toward uncertainty, skunks and all.

Craig had said the key to my room at Big Sur State Park would be taped to the door and sure enough it was.  It was a relaxingly spare room, the kind of place that would seem the height of luxury if you had been sleeping in a tent for a week, all hot showers and clean corners.  I got into bed in my clothes and slept like a rock.

The next morning I went for a hike, through the redwoods, which was amazing, and up to a view of the Pacific Ocean that was incredible if also slightly -- comically -- marred by this structure right at the lookout point:

I got back in the car and headed to San Francisco, stopping at an artichoke farm where I bought the best almonds I have had in my life.  (A month later, an east coast chef friend would concur, 'oh yeah, that's a joke in California.  The almonds that get sent out here have been in storage for a year.')

On Blogging and Private vs. Public Information. . .

In San Francisco, I stayed with old friends, S and J.  I hadn't started blogging yet at that point, and we had a conversation over dinner that pointed out to me one of the best qualities about blogging so far:


We live in a time when people talk about the death of the newspaper and of traditional publishing.  But what is also true is that we live in an age of specialization, when to really understand something, you might have to do it yourself.  Journalists have natural advantages of professional writing and generalist reporting, but disadvantages, when it comes to specialized topics, of not having experiential knowledge.  This was right around the time that the Rolling Stone article came out calling Goldman Sachs a vampire squid.  J pointed out that the vampire squid writer got so much so right, but at the same time didn't nail it.  It was more like he was corralling an argument than pinpointing it.  On the other hand, J works in a financial services area and had a career-making ability to predict this banking crisis far enough ahead of time he probably seemed crazy.  He would be a great writer on finance but never under his own byline because it would interfere with his work. 


 This leads me to believe that there is much public debate that is now private -- smart people working inside smart companies writing for other people who are, like them, practictioners in industries. This drains public debate down to people who can comment publicly. If you believe that you know something by doing it -- in this case that you understand legitimately complicated financial mechanisms by working in the field -- then that leaves professional journalists to talk about fields they don't technically work in. The result is commentary followed by legislation of the financial industry that corrals rather than nails an understanding of something like, for example, credit default swaps or exact mechanisms of Federal Reserve maneuverings.  I am now starting to see that blogs are in fact important for legitimately democratizing information, the real information, the experiential knowledge.  (For example, see the blog called Calculated Risk.)

Of course, I am not about to explain credit default swaps, just, for now, the story of Museum Legs hitting the road, a book tour that also provides a framing device for driving around the country, and a bit of a "Where to Live" experiment and excuse for a life project.


Having lived in England on and off for a number of years, driving around the country is a way of intuiting and knowing where I am from probably better than I ever have.  All those little things -- like public transportation and local coffee shops and radio stations -- are as telling about where you can live as anything else.  For example, Palm Springs has not one but two Musak stations, whereas you can easily hit the dial in a few places in Philadelphia and come up with almost the entire selection of BMG music club albums I owned freshman year of college.


Reading in San Francisco. . .
I was in San Francisco to speak at Green Apple Books, a lovely, rambling independent, 

and to give a talk at Google.  The reading ended up being a small gathering, if delightful gathering:

And the people at the bookstore were super-nice.  It's one of those used-new bookstores where the used books live in the shelves next to the new books so you can make a buying decision with perfect information of that stripe.  


Giving a talk then tends to place your book on an exciting shelf like this:

I bought some books on tape for the car, and went with friends to a bar that happened to be the same exact bar I had been taken to the night before by a different old friend -- they've not met -- who lives in their neighborhood.  I have a fantasy about all of my old friends getting to meet each other, not thinking they might cross paths by accident all the time. 


Authors@Google

I headed to Menlo Park the next day, in advance of giving a talk at Google.  I was hosted by my friend Claire from business school.  I stayed the night before with Claire and Jesse, and hung out with their lovely children Chloe and Miles, who staged a dance-off in the kitchen.  I bunked in with Miles who shares a bedroom with the guest sleeper sofa.  The next morning at breakfast, he gave me a very funny look of recognition, even though he is too young to speak.  On the theme of noticing the character of places by their radio stations, you can add to that list the mood of law enforcement: I parked overnight on their street, which is not allowed, and received not a ticket or a warning but a "courtesy notice."

Google is the first place I have signed a non-disclosure agreement without reading it.  I can't imagine I have anything secret to share.  Google has a wonderful Authors@Google program that is volunteer run and involves bringing in all kinds of interesting speakers.  They post all of the talks on their YouTube channel.  Among others, I watched one by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the The Pentagon Papers.  In a best-ever introduction, his cousin, who happened by coincidence to work at Google, said that Daniel had asked what to wear.  The cousin explained the casual dress code and offered that Condaleeza Rice and Henry Kissinger had spoken there in suits.  Ellsberg said, "well, if I think I am going to get arrested, I like to be wearing a suit.  That way, people see a man in a suit get arrested and think men in suits are not above the law."  Ellsberg has been arrested more then seventy times. So, I enjoyed watching his talk, also to see that he turned up in a button down and sleek version of a Members Only jacket.

Claire is a seemingly effortlessly gifted speaker who gave me a really kind introduction.  I gave my talk and then she, Peipei (my host), and I had lunch in the Google cafeteria.  I got to see Eric Schmidt make himself a panini, as pointed out "there's something you don't see everyday."  

Peipei has a really interesting job as part of the team that determines the boundary of what is allowed to be on Google search engines in countries around the world.  This means everything from child porn (a grayer definitional line than I've ever taken pause to consider) to things that are illegal in one country but available in others.

Driving back from Google, I watched a British Airways plane land at San Francisco Airport in that state of suspended animation that is what it looks like when planes kind of hover in toward the ground.  I imagined the land far away the way and thought of those people who had boarded that silver bullet over in England and were about to touch down.  It was the same way I used to imagine the land across the ocean from the Brooklyn Promenade when I first moved back.

The audio track for San Francisco was a newfound love, the Flight of the Concords soundtrack. I heartily recommend overall.  Even now, I laugh when I think of that line, “She’s so hot. I want to tell her how hot she is.  But then she’ll think I’m sexist.  She’s so hot she’s making me sexist. . . . Bitch."

I headed for the California College of Arts and Crafts to meet with a brilliant man named Nathan Shedroff who is starting a design MBA program -- that is, an MBA program situated within an art school.  (This appealed to me for a number of obvious reasons, raised my skepticism, and caused me to volunteer to teach, all in one go.)  Many thanks to Sunny Bates, again, recurrent patron saint of the tour, for the introduction, and to Nathan for his time.  Having gone to art school myself in a windowless gallery space for two years, I found the light at the CCAC breathtaking, comfortably spare.

Back at S and J's, she made corn chowder and we watched real live Flight of the Conchords episodes and went to bed.  Leaving town the next morning, the Bay Bridge was closed and I drove up over the Golden Gate and into Marin County.  Sonoma County looks like France.

This was to be the start of driving through essentially European landscapes -- France above, England in Oregon and, in western Idaho, Norway, I think.

I spent the rest of the day in the alternate universe of a very long drive, listening to Harry Potter  through a beautiful farm landscape on 5 North, loving the grain elevators in the bright sun, happening on my first snow covered mountain.  The Lake Shasta area has this impossible formation, vivid deep blue well-like expanses, with a sandy base rising to evergreen trees.  Even the gas station in Calistoga had the feel of being deep into a wooded hike.  It occurred to me for the first time in my life that Shasta cola has a connection to nature, and might have even come from here.