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.

September 15th - The Book Tour Begins. . .

The Technological Habit
The Museum Legs book tour officially began in mid-September. It is now early November as I begin to share the chronicle. The choreographer Twyla Tharp has a book The Creative Habit about her process, which includes daily disciplines and routines. I am hopeful my inner Luddite will turn a corner and start faithfully keeping this blog accordingly. Part of the delay has been that, truth be told, I don't understand blogging. The word sounds as melodious as Book Legs, the 'bleg.' All that said, I have undertaken to drive a big clockwise loop around the country, both a Museum Legs book tour and a 'where to live' project. I would like to record it and share it with friends.

From here on out, I will call this a travel journal.

The trip began September 10th in Fairfield as my brother's wife Alexi picked me up at the train station and delivered me to Hertz to get the rental car. This car is my home for these three months and I can pay it the best compliment of rental cars everywhere: It is innocuous. And fuel efficient, and safe. Auspiciously, it is exactly the same kind of car I almost bought from Pete and Becky, that Pete paid the high compliment, "It's not a car I worry about ruining a friendship over." Also, auspiciously, it has Pennsylvania plates, the first stop on the tour.

The book launches. . .
Museum Legs debuted at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 13th. Greg Albers, the publisher of Hol Art Books, was also debuting the press and came out to New York from Tucson for the occasion. We sat at a pink (signature press color) table and greeted readers.



My mother came up from Georgia for the events. She was the first person to buy a copy of Museum Legs, and proceeded to walk around the fair with the book in hand, facing outwards, and a Hol button on her lapel (motto: Art Books for Book Lovers). I saw her again a half hour later and she confided, "I changed the button. I thought it was a little obvious."



The Book Festival was a glimpse at the first truth of writing a book: It is so nice to have those kinds of gatherings of people that it's almost worth writing a book just to have them. Maybe some people feel this way about weddings.

Jen Rork and Tom Craig drove down from Williamstown with Maddy.



Maddy is a very serious and pensive reader of Museum Legs.



Darby and Juliette and Galen came over too. Galen is a Hol button man, though subtle by my mom's standards since he's not carrying the book too.




Lots of other people stopped by, some by accident and some on purpose -- Jorge Just, Alex Tilney, Alex Carroll, Stacey and Paul, Kari and friends. . .





Two of my favorite comments from the festival, from people I didn't know:

1. One girl to her friend, “I really want to read this but I don’t want to pay for it.”

2. A lovely, dignified, warm man in a houndstooth jacket who leaned against the post of the booth reading Museum Legs for a good long while. He was still wearing his nametag from church. I kept watching him, somewhat surreptitiously. He would occasionally chuckle. Then he looked up and said, “You write very well. But I would never read a book on this subject.”

Book festivals have the same energy of retail where people can sense desperation and go to great lengths to avoid it, so reaching out to the public is a delicate combination of enthusiasm and leaving people alone. . . .

The book festival actually kicked off the night before with a "gala" at St. Francis' College. Greg the publisher invited me to come along.  I brought my mother.



We were handed glasses of champagne and then summarily asked to chuck (or down) them to gather in the auditorium for an awards ceremony. Edwidge Danticat received the first St. Francis College writing prize, a couple of weeks before she became a MacArthur fellow. And Marty Markowitz, the incredibly entertaining borough president of Brooklyn, talked up the literary occasion. We adjourned to the lunchroom for the reception, where I ran into Evan Hughes, writer and brother of Claire Hughes Johnson. Evan would later send pictures of Museum Legs in a bookstore (McNally Jackson), next to real other books.




As Claire rightly pointed out, I had achieved notice by the biggest bibliophile on earth.

The official party for the book was Monday, September 14th, graciously hosted by Rory Riggs, an old friend and my current boss. Rory is a longtime biotech entrepreneur, among other things, and embodies a sort of artistic practice in his own work. He is also a great champion of other people finishing creative projects and had watched this one through some of the final hurdles.

The party was originally planned for Monday because the US Open finals were to be played on Sunday. Because of rain delay, the finals got bumped to the same day as the party. So, Rory left the US Open finals in the second set to come host the Museum Legs book party. And thanks too to Margaret and friends who left in the fifth set to be there.

The more I see sports played up close at that level, the more I think art has nothing on sport, or that they are part of the same thing. So, I am unduly honored that the Federer upset occurred during the Museum Legs party. Arguably harder to tear oneself away from than, say, "rapt contemplation of a Raphael."

The party was a gathering of friends from a lot of different areas of my life -- getting people together like that is a huge and rare gift, and I had a great time. My brother and sister were there. My mother missed class (anathema to her conscientious approach to teaching and running an English Department). I'll insert a bunch of photos here. The last is a very artistic shot: me, brother, and hand.












In Rory fashion, "my old friend Alison" is going to put the party together. Alison turns out to be a brilliant well-known chef, who in turn brought in a friend Robert who is also a foodie magician, for a delicious and comfortably wonderful spread. Louise Mai, who was in from England, and her sister Bee made a cake for the occasion -- with my picture on it. I must confess, I am not used to seeing my own picture on a cake, but I am learning to get used to it, since the book tour involves walking into venues where my picture is on the door -- or even on the flyer on the wall of the ladies' room.

I spent the day after the party moving into storage and packing up the car. (Note to readers: the car is not yet named and I am taking suggestions. Lou Cecil in Birmingham pointed out that it looks like a polar bear.)



So, on September 15th, I moved into storage in the basement of the Gutman's (my sister's in-laws) building in New York, with the help of kind and incredulous doormen. At about 7pm, I rolled out of town, en route to Philadelphia.

I took the first night as an 'in-between' time and headed for a bed and breakfast near my first top the next day in the Valley Forge National Park area. At around 11pm, I overshot the Pennsylvania Turnpike and took a 'scenic' commuter route from Philly out to Phoenixville.

Phoenixville is the kind of place you can get directions from a guy in a dirt-covered 4x4 outside a gas station late at night with no concern for your safety but awe at his manners. Meanwhile, a police car drives up and the officer (Sergeant Wakeley) stands outside his squad car staring at a maimed hawk jumping around in the parking lot. As he said, animal control won't help you with raptors. I am hoping the injured bird is neither omen nor metaphor of any kind.