Happiness Is…

…an elusive ideal. Well, constant happiness is. And this is a subject I have seen pop up a lot in lectures, articles, the internet. Company CEO’s like Zappos.com’s Tony Hsieh have supposedly dedicated their careers to figuring it out and then finding a way to deliver it to their customers. John Lennon relied on a warm gun.

When something so overlooked, or assumed, or harmless (on the surface) pops up more than a few times, I take note because most likely there is a larger zeitgeist at work.

Richard Florida, he of Creative Class fame, mentioned in a talk that research shows happiness is derived from three things:  a job you love, challenges and an appealing lifestyle. He talked about other items which need attention and affect those big three.  For instance, social connections are important in providing happiness, as well as quality of place (where you live).

A TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks) that I discovered recently expounded about happiness in the context of choice. It explored how an outcome is more appealing when you have no choice; you can talk yourself into it more (‘getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me’). But when there are two or more equally appealing options, people tend to beat themselves up over whether they made the right choice, and are less pleased than folks who are forced to accept something. They must have committed Robert Frost’s  “The Road Not Taken” to memory.

And even the Reader’s Digest had an article on how to improve your happiness through gratitude, natch.  The piece suggests a person list things they are grateful for every day for ten weeks.  Results showed people who did this were 25% happier, felt better about their job and exercised 1.5 hours more week than those who did not keep a gratitude list.

When society is attempting to affect the overall happiness of its people, I get worried. I must have missed a memo on this subject because there must be a dark side driving these efforts:  are we, as a country, more clinically depressed in 2010 than we were in the past? Are the murder rates up? Is happiness a euphemistic cover-up for another more serious inadequacy plaguing society? I get it, it must be affecting our GDP.

Bipolars included, I tend to think of any state of being, happiness included, as a sine wave. Extremes define an emotion and happiness does not seem to be one of those things you can have pegged on maximum all the time. In fact, I think the norm would be something between agony and happiness. I think we call this “fine” when someone asks how we are doing.

I have this theory that selfishness is the root of all pain in the world.  It may be baloney.  But happiness as a core goal appears self-centered and vain. I hate to play the relevance card, but is life all about hedonism? I thought we were here to do good work, to make the world better one day at a time.

Some days, most days in fact, the serotonin levels in most of us are just so-so, which means an even-keel kind of day. Status quo:  no ecstasy, no crises. This means things are under control. For Type As like me, control is more crucial. As Ice Cube would say “Today I didn’t even have to use my AK.  I have to say it was a good day”. And that makes me happy.

Trusting Your Tongue

The Wall Street Journal had an article on November 14 about the lack of consistency in wine judging. Wine makers have been wondering aloud for years why one wine can win a top taste award at one festival and get nothing at another.  Shouldn’t a top wine be judged by the experts as a consensus winner, like a baseball MVP voting based on statistics, and appear on everyone’s ‘Top Five’ list for that year?

As it turns out, wine judging is—surprise—inconsistent, and for many reasons.  Judging is done by humans, not machines, so each person has personal preferences.  People are influenced by their experience, the color of the wine, what they are told they will be drinking, how many wines they have judged that day,…the list goes on. A winemaker-scientist-statistician mentioned in the article, a Mr. Hodgson, decided to come to some conclusions on the inconsistency factor by conducting some taste test experiments.  His series of experiments, utilizing actual wine festival judges, was pretty neat. In the end, Hodgson determined a wine’s chance of winning a particular competition was basically the flip of a coin, and likewise for not placing in a subsequent competitive tasting. This is big news for wine producers because wine rankings by the connoisseur magazines affects what vintners can sell their wine for.  The higher the rating, the greater the price so it is in the label’s best interest to develop a replicable way to produce tasty, award-winning wine.

Hearing the verdict that producing a winning wine is basically a crap shoot must be pretty disheartening to wine makers. This is the equivalent of a study done on the college admissions process that finds there is no correlation between grades, SAT scores, activities, essays, interviews and college acceptance.

Wine is, in essence, a chemistry experiment. A scientist of taste would want to control as many ingredients and processes as possible so that known variables can be carefully manipulated to fine-tune a perfect wine. However if winning is all luck, why even bother? It is a big slap in the face of both the science and artistry behind wine making to think that the care and decisions taken are meaningless in the presence of blind taste testers.  And these are professional wine judges.

One of my business professors knew a bartender who, when serving drinks to anyone out of his sight line, routinely served mixed drinks with well liquors when a brand name liquor was specified, charged the premium price and pocketed the difference.  If a customer had an objection to the taste, he would gladly remix with the genuine article.  He most likely made thousands.  This stunt amplifies an interesting fact:  even flavor-trained professionals—those who judge wine competitions—cannot reliably identify more than three or four components of a mixture. The author pointed out several instances where wine reviewers and judges will list six or more flavors in a wine, all apparently biologically untenable for humans. Wine becomes a ‘he said, she said’ argument: a reviewer says they can taste and identify it; science says otherwise. Granted most people are not certifiable expert tasters, but a scotch drinker who is willing to pay for quality ought to be able to back it up and know what he is drinking. I have heard similar stories of bartenders passing off well whisky as single malt to the amateur, in which case the saying ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’ comes to mind. A single malt should be enjoyed neat, meaning no mixers or even ice. With one taste to identify, science is no excuse here. If a drinker cannot identify his favorite single malt, he is a consumer of image not substance, a poseur.

As an occasional wine drinker in the presence of more avid drinkers, I had suspicions that either I had a lifetime of study to get to the point where I could supposedly intelligently discuss wine, or the others were pretentious fools.  Now I know it is the latter. 

I suppose the moral is drink, and eat, what you find tasty, not for the gran prix, blue ribbons and gold medals.  Me?  I will stick to my single malt.  Cheers!

My American Dream

As the government mulls over extending the economic stimulus for home buyers, potentially in breadth to include more than just first-time buyers, potentially in depth to offer a greater tax credit, I think of how powerful tax credits are in shaping economic activity. The cash-for-clunkers program cost America $11 billion I believe, according to NPR; yet since the program was halted, apparently car salesman have seen a sharp decline.

Home ownership is a very subsidized industry, and I believe increasingly that subsidies have a time and a place, but probably should not be permanent. The Fed has been offering some sort of benefit to buy a home since the end of WWII, whether it is low-interest loans or the ability to write-off mortgage interest on income taxes. We forget how something so arbitrary, like homeownership (why not vacations to Disney), has become a significant cog in the economic wheel. Should it be?

I think the government is never critical or specific enough about the kind of behavior it hopes to elicit. Instead of any home sales, should it not encorage specific home sales—adopt-a-home, but discourage buying a newly built or custom home? Isn’t the problem a huge glut of built or partially built homes sitting, unoccupied, the targets of vandals, swimming pools becoming mosquito cesspools, condo associations buckling under their own weight because residents pulled out and no one can pay the maintenance?

Home ownership was never part of my American dream. I did want one someday, but I enjoyed renting even to the point my wife and I purchased our first house. Renting is a very responsible and sensible method of living until you are sure you are going to stay in a place for a while, and you can afford it.  To afford home ownership does not mean just the mortgage payment, but the time involved in upkeep, the hidden costs of maintenance, the insurance that seems to go up over 10% a year lately and the taxes that can change with each voter referendum. Just this past year I have had to replace my entire A/C system, repair an under-slab plumbing leak, replace my water heater and other minor headaches. I need to remove a large, mature, termite-riddled tree from the front yard—and that does not include the cosmetic things I would like to do, like paint the house or replace our plastic laminate counters which are pulling off the wall. These are the things a renter must think about before buying.

My American dream is very simple:  own everything I possess.  A quaint notion, you think, how un-2009 of me.  I like the idea of knowing when I go to sleep, everything that surrounds me is rightfully mine, with which I am free to do as I please.  Because, until you actually own something outright, you do not have true freedom with it. And then when you buy anything, you become more encumbered, financially and physically.  Part of me would like to be like Jules in Pulp Fiction in another life and just “walk the earth” as he so simply put it.

I guess for me I am not a man of many creature comforts.  I do not like things or gadgets per se.  I appreciate nice objects for what they are, but I am not sure if I am vain enough to enjoy something I know I cannot afford.  For instance, I could not lease the BWM 3-series that I adore; somehow that would feel fake to me.

Debt-free living is my ultimate goal; it is what I work for.  It might be the asymptote I fight toward, a Sisyphus-like task, and it may never happen. Yet, I am not giving in to the notion that Americans must upgrade everything every four-point-seven five years, regardless of need.  This is where you lose ground in the equity built up, both in “investments” like a house, but in utilitarian objects, too. Financially, I am tethered to my spouse, who has different money philosophies as me.  If something is to be purchased, it usually is not me doing it.  Paige usually buys and asks for forgiveness. So I realize my dream is not completely within my control, and it is particularly difficult when everything financial is a negotiation—and my wife is the better negotiator.

Nevertheless, at the moment I feel pretty good. All my debts, save for my school loans, are shared debts and large debts. If I can only pay off the new air conditioning system, the house, my wife’s car and our collective school loans, my dream will be realized!  Somehow I think my soon-to-be one year-old will figure into this calculation, and then there is the largest future debt of all:  retirement. So I keep working and dreaming…or is it dreaming and working…?

Redneck R.I.P.

Have you come across a fellow driver with a sticker on their rear dash with something like:  “In Loving Memory:  John Doe – Hunting Buddy – 1981-2005?”  Welcome to the South, or at least greater north Florida / south Georgia.  I can only assignthis phenomenon as Southern because I have seen it nowhere else in my travels.  I chalk it up to regionalism, which has a quaintness I appreciate most of the time.  I have even conditioned myself to not physically contort in some way when I hear “y’all”, so I am flexibile in this respect.

Yet I need to address this sticker shock because it is particularly creepy.  They are not bumper stickers, probably because they would draw outright laughter. Every bumper sticker has a built-in humor about it, even political ones. Even a biting quip on a bumper can get you to laugh, think or appreciate something. It is not an adornment I utilize, but I do read them. But the traveling epitaphs I can do without.

Nevertheless, these morbid advertisements I write of are useless. If a sticker on your car is public communication, communication which is intended for other drivers not yourself otherwise you would keep your note or reminder inside your vehicle, then what is the point? Empathy is difficult when you have no emotional connection with the operator. Maybe I am supposed to forgive them for their awful driving because they lost someone. Well how about this: everyone has experienced death of a relative or friend, so everyone hurts as R.E.M. sings.

You are not special.  Although you, Mr. Mobile Tombstone, apparently think you are. Why draw another driver’s attention to your loss? You gain nothing. To prove it is all about getting the attention of other drivers, the sticker is large, close to eye level, in contrasting white against a dark gray window, and obviously printed so other commuters, not the driver, will see and ‘remember’ the person. If it is on the car, it is meant to be read; it is designed for attention. I have seen some uncouth, bad taste embellishment on cars, but this is revolting to me. I would even take the Dixie flag airbrushed on a personalized license plate with flames licking out over it. Driving around with a chintzy sticker on my automobile is the last way in the world I would memorialize someone I cared about.

Culturally, mourning is a personal activity in the United States. I can think of no way that death is publicly celebrated. Yes, we lower the flag to half-mast for important deaths. We have funerals and a necessary procession from the funeral home to the cemetary, but these are not intended to draw attention to themself. They are modest, subtle, tasteful.

Let me further clarify that this is a regional freakism as far as I know. It might happen elsewhere, but I have only seen it here. Let us hope it is a cheesy trend that is waning among those lacking decorum. These emblems also tend to occur on large trucks and brutish SUVs, not minivans and luxury sedans. Draw your own conclusions as to the folk who choose it. Then lose it.

Minivans: A Happy Medium?

When our baby daughter outgrew her infant car seat and needed the convertible (that’s what they call ‘em), I thought it was no big deal. In fact I was excited because the convertible is not portable; it is made to get clicked in and not toted around. Anything that promoted stroller work and decreased carrying was fine by me.

By the way, the booster is the final in the child safety seat metamorphosis.  When there are kids nigh on age ten that still qualify for child seat use, something is amiss. A part of me thinks the booster, and the laws that govern car seat use, are bogus.

The seat we purchased did not look particularly large in the store. My wife has a Mazda Millennia, which is a large sedan. Initially, the Millenia supposedly replaced the 929 when Mazda was overhauling its line, so it is not small. However, the seat in the box could not fit in the trunk or back seat! Bad sign. I had to open the seat in the Babies R Us parking lot and put only the seat and accoutrements in, while tossing the box in a dumpster. Such shame.

We installed the seat, barely. It fits in one spot: the middle of the back seat where there is no driver or passenger seat back. I was flabbergasted—what kind of vehicles do they design these things for?! Clearly something much more commodious than ours.

Using the seat is another feat. Since it is rear-facing, and we only have a sedan, it is not easy to get our kid in without hitting her head or raking her over the padded edge of the seat. It takes a special kind of upper body strength and balance, with complete cooperation from our toddler, to not bump anything on the way in or out—something not dissimilar to an advanced maneuver from Cirque du Soleil.

For the first time I sympathized with all the expectant parents who felt the need to supersize their vehicles, at least on a base functional level. Gas efficiency is another story. Yet, I do not feel our vehicle is unsafe. Nor do I feel it has inadequate space for a small child. I do feel that baby item manufacturers are taking liberties to design with less compactness in mind. Even our stroller, which folds two different ways and both wheels can pop off, does not really achieve compactness. It does not leave much in a trunk that easily fits our luggage for a two week trip. And I thought everyone was focused on lean manufacturing these days?

Back in the 1980s of my childhood, family cars were a large market.  The family sedan was how you got the family from place to place. Believe it or not, a Chevy Cavalier was a common family car back then. Now, parents buy these, new, for their 16-year-olds to shlep around in.

Then the Ford Taurus took over the family car mantle for several years. Minivans, primarily the Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager, were starting to gain momentum. Then the family car was wrested away by the imports, first the Honda Civic, then the Toyota Camry. I think the family car title died with the Camry. You could argue the Nissan Altima is the closest thing to an acceptable family car these days.

In the meantime, we jumped into minivans of all shapes and sizes. Then they got frumpy, or let’s say, their dowdiness was exposed. Americans flocked to the SUV to pretend to be outdoors-y and sporty. Pure image. Now a Chevy Tahoe is a common family vehicle which, to borrow a City Slickers phrase, craps larger than a Cavalier.

What happened to the American family to morph from Cavalier to Tahoe? Back in my day, somehow we got by with our Tauruses. How did the baseline vehicle size for the American family roughly double in fifteen years? Wealth? Vanity?

Well, now look what we’ve done.  Everything is oversized and overdesigned. Seats are bigger than they need to be, vehicles are heavier than they need to be—all to haul our less-than-sporty selves around. We have lost human scale in much of our environment. As someone who works in the design field, I can say it is not easy getting designers to put their creations on a diet. The last thing a designer wants to do is cut, slim, reduce the bells and whistles. A law of design:  it is much more difficult to design minimally. Try to get Congress to pass a lean bill, and you get enough earmarking for a herd of cattle.

How do we design diet:  drastically? A step down approach, counting calories as we go? For some designers, it will take an economic paradigm shift to get through. That is what it took GM to understand, and about twenty years.

Sure, SUVs did go on a small diet to become more crossover-like and hybridized and re-acronymed to disassociate from the S-U-V and emphasize a slimmer car platform. But a spade is still a spade, especially in the gas mileage department.

For the single professional and modern empty-nesters, a Prius is plenty of space.  That is the message via Americans voting with their dollars. A Toyota Prius is a humble vehicle spacially, and frankly, I am surprised and encouraged that so many find it palatable. It means there is hope for the post-SUV diet. We are moving in the right direction, calorie-wise. Alas, a Prius will likely not hold my convertible baby car seat.

Have we come full circle to where a minivan looks like a happy medium again? I hold out hope for something with a little more space inside and decent trunk space. With the height and big wheels built into the Chrysler 300, Cadillac CTSs and their ilk, maybe the cabins will grow a bit taller without looking van-y. I will hold out hope for something a little more car-like. If nothing else, maybe families like mine can migrate to a luxury sedan. I think my babe and baby would look just fine in a Caddy or Lincoln. We are in Florida and regardless of the economy, there are only so many people out there to scarf up those landau tops.

In the meantime, I still seek the next size down, one step lower, something more minimal. This what keeping up with the Jones’ is about in the 21st century.

Single Serving Music

“Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I have ever met.”  ~ Narrator (Ed Norton Jr.) in Fight Club

Elvis and other early rock-and-roll singers of the ’50s offered their music in bite-sized portions via the record single.  These offerings had one song on each side, with the primary hit on the top of the record, A-side, and a ‘lesser’ known song on the bottom, B-side.  In the 1960s, the release of singles evolved into a full record release, where artists would put six or more songs on a record.  The Rolling Stones are a good example of a band that started out releasing music in singles format, and ended up producing albums. Ten to twelve songs became the standard record heft, which is still common today. However, since the rise in popularity of all things i from A—iPod, iPhone, iTunes—there has been more of an emphasis on the rock-and-roll single again.

Digital and internet marketing has probed, as a composition and consumer product, what music is. Inherent in this discussion is the conflict:  art versus commodity. Rock music, like many other artistic endeavors, is both—at least for musicians who desire to make a living from their music. Musicians must have an internal conflict of offering their music piece meal, that is song by song, versus in album format. As convenient, inexpensive and potentially beneficial to hook new listeners, I lobby against marketing the single.

To me, a song’s meaning and power is twofold:  as a composition on an individual unit scale, and as part of a composition of other songs on a record album. To excise a song from its full context destroys a significant part of its value, and renders it a completely commercial construction. My belief is if a song was meant to be understood and enjoyed as a stand-alone composition, it would be offered as such; there would be no album, no name or cover art. But songs relate to something—their creator, current society, its influences—and they record and tell stories.

Clearly the holistic relationship of the parts-to-whole matters or groups would not give an album, or more specifically, would not give it a name that shares a specific track’s name. A singer that has a song and album share a title must feel differently, maybe that the title track has a very strong identity that shapes or dominates the record. Either way, they are aware the music exists in reference to itelf as a singlular song, and in relation to the other songs contributing to a whole, as part of an album.

The malleable format of music recording has played with the boundaries of the container of music.  From A and B-sides, we grew to album sides whether on vinyl, eight-track or cassette. The format for distribution required a physical break in the music, and a flipping over of the medium to listen to the other half.  CDs changed that: all songs played continously from beginning to end, unless there were two discs.  Maybe sometime we will be able to burn 500 minutes on a CD and two discs will become one.  No matter. The musician / artist crafts their message with the medium taken into account.

Single song sales disrupt the art of the album, even if you can purchase the album as a whole. To primarily market music as single song pieces is a fundamental shift from selling an album. Buying an album is a commitment, a statement that you are trying something out and want to listen to an musical artist’s message.  Whereas, buying a single song means nothing; it is shallow, disposable, a trivial taste test. The phrase I’ll try anything for a dollar comes to mind.

When someone scans an iPod and sees “Karma Kameleon” it can easily be explained away, rather than if you found Culture Club’s entire Colour By Numbers album loaded. There is judgement involved.  One song means nothing; ten, however, do. When you buy an album, you buy in to the artist.

Or maybe the bite size sample of one song redefines what it means to be a fan of a band. Maybe owning the equivalent of one album means you are a fan, whereas in the past, you wanted everything ever released to prove your allegiance.

Single song purchases allow some music to be more accessible. It was tough to part with your cash for an entire album of an ’80s one-hit-wonder; but for a buck, you could cherry-pick the one nugget worth anything (“Take On Me”) and have that gem forever without the baggage of possessing the entire album (a-ha’s Hunting High and Low).

This is all moot, however, because songs matter in their context and should not be allowed to be cut-and-pasted so easily. There is a sanctity for the music album that is ignored with the iTunes music purchase model. You may be able to buy an entire album, but it is set up around single servings.

The problems are three. First, the integrity of the album as a composition is destroyed, which is the context in which the musician intended you to listen to the music. Songs are meant to fit into an album, a collection of related songs, and they are to be listened to together. To buy one song is to listen to the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: you may get the pop nugget everyone knows, but you don’t get the artist or the idea behind the composition, or his music. And this is a lot of lost meaning and artistry.

Second, song popularity becomes a chicken-or-egg scenario. Do people listen to the music and buy based on popularity, or does the music offering format determine what is purchased? Music albums were released and the more popular songs were requested on radio stations. Then individual songs were released before the album was available, driving up interest in the album. Heavy play meant more sales of the album.

If the album format is done away with commercially, and only three songs are offered for purchase (from what would have been a ten song album), how are those determined? The commercial format then becomes Darwinistic, affecting which songs become popular. In the past this did not matter because all interest drove album sales, but now it is every song for itself. The rest of the album may not even hit the internet for sales because no one gets to hear the other seven songs to judge their quality.

Third, determining which songs are good or more specifically which will be popular is very, very difficult. If it were easy to judge talent, every record label would have all hits and no misses. The bands themselves are notorious for not knowing what will hit big. U2′s song “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”, a catchy pop hit used in the Batman Forever soundtrack was a supposed throw-away from the Zooropa album sessions. This is one of dozens of examples. Some bands even loath when certain songs they hate hit it big. REM dislikes performing “The One I Love”, quite possibly their most popular song.

As a corollary to this: buying song-by-song precludes the possibility of discovering a song on an album the general public has not discovered or does not find popular. Many friends of mine enjoy finding songs that are better than the ones released or receiving heavy play on the radio or internet [see previous paragraph]. You get a chance to discover it, digest it without public hooplah, and own it. I think most albums I own have better songs than the ones that became popular. Using REM as a case study again, “Country Feedback” is a great song on Out of Time, and one of the group’s favorites. They love playing it live, but most people would only know and request ”Losing My Religion”, “The Radio Song” or “Shiny Happy People”.

Artistically, the argument is huge. What would any of the great concept albums be—The Who’s Tommy, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Radiohead’s Ok Computer—without the context of the other songs to tell the story? The non-popular songs on any album are not useless filler; they are not the water chestnuts in your Chicken and Snow Peas over sticky rice.

Where does this take us? My main thesis is that, until artists come out publicly and release music as single songs, i.e. do away with music in album format, songs should be sold by the bunch naturally. The format of music releases may already be in flux, just as Radiohead offered an album on the internet under the premise the fans will assign it value and pay accordingly. Some songs are already only available for purchase as singles.

It will be interesting to see if things come full circle and we go back to single-focused music releases. One thing is certain: old schools of organization and marketing and new schools of thought are colliding, which will produce something probably none of us have seen. Stay tuned…pun intended, of course.

Happiness is a Good Shoe

I recently purchased a pair of Converse All Stars, again. They are my fourth pair, which ended a sad streak of nearly three years without a pair. It is the only shoe I allow myself to break my own rule about not purchasing the same model of shoe twice. Many who know me know I appreciate a quality, comfortable, stylish shoe, and that being a sneaker designer is one of my dream jobs.

Lately I have made a push to Florida-ize my wardrobe, in as tasteful a way as possible, since it appears I might be dug in here for a while. This means paring down sweaters and jackets and heavy materials like wool and leather in favor of linen and canvas.  Proper mens dresswear will always be based on a foundation of wool and leather, but for more casual attire there is no need to have yard work and dog walk footwear made of leather; it is just too hot for that.  In Florida, things need to breathe, and that means linen, seersucker and silk blends for pants, canvas and woven footwear when attractive and appropriate.

Converse All Stars, or Chuck Taylors or Chucks, are like an old friend.  One reason I purchase them is because I know what I am going to get.  They are based on a successful and classic formula, and their design possesses a profile and beauty that is hard to describe. Its materials, canvas and rubber, are not flashy—pedestrian, plain, inexpensive even, but they keep showing up again and again in Hollywood and fashion circles, every ten or fifteen years like clockwork.  Every so often another hip group discovers them again, like a little brother discovering his big brother’s Led Zeppelin.

The shoes break in quickly and fit like a glove due to eight eyelets up to the ankle. I know their life is shorter than most sneakers and, performance-wise, they are behind the curve for basketball high-tops today to say the least, but I cannot deny them as a reliable casual sneaker—especially when expressed with a little dirt patina to gray up the white rubber. I like wearing them because they are history, frozen sports shoe technology, as if I get to lace up what basketball greats in the 1960s and earlier wore. Just like if I ever want to know what my parents wore in gym class in the 50s, all I need to do is pick up a pair of Keds.

Since Nike’s purchase of financially-troubled Converse in 2003, I am happy to report it has been almost status quo for the All Stars.  Other than a fancy build-to-suit Cons website and corresponding prices piercing the $40 threshold, Nike has pretty much left well alone with the shoe—and that is a good thing. They recognized a golden brand when they saw it, and prevented the rest of us from having to scour the earth for the last remaining pairs, or watch them get hotboxed on eBay for a small fortune. I bought mine for an $18 steal at a discount retailer. Chucks under $20:  that’s more like it.

Converse All Stars are not the type of consumer good to hype because assuredly it will be disappointing if you purchase on a recommendation.  But Chucks are like a Big Mac or KFC, an original secret recipe that is not the same experience every time, but predictably good. And like a favorite t-shirt and jeans pairing with them, age better with time, getting more comfortable as they mold to your body.  This is the essence of the Converse All Star…oh, and that undeniably great aroma of rubber.

My MJ Tribute

In the fall of 1996 I was fortunate enough to study abroad in Finland for a semester. Immersed in an international program, I was the only one from my school, and in fact, I knew only one person outside the U.S. prior to my trip, and that was a student from Finland who had studied at Virginia the previous semester.  Everything about the experiences that semsester were enlightening, particularly on an individual level.  Those who have traveled alone know what I mean.  To travel by yourself is amazing and the achievement of an ideal:  absolute freedom to satisfy wanderlust, to stroll or sprint, follow a program or deviate as needed.  At the same time, traveling alone is a struggle:  no companionship emotionally or physically, no shared memory, no corroboration, no perspective via foil. Regardless of the collegial atmosphere at the university, much of what happened, even socially, was recorded in memory on a personal, singular level.

I lived with another Finn, with limited access to media.  It was 1996:  email was only available at the school computer banks. Altough cell phones were everywhere in Finland, I was tethered to a land line to call home at a mercenary rate I could ill afford.  I penned many letters to my girlfriend back in the States. And on t.v. I remember watching four things given our limited reception in the dorm:  Baywatch, “The Bold and the Beautiful” soap opera, the movie “Leaving Las Vegas”, and European MTV. Anything familiar was a comfort, even a bastardized version of what I knew to be MTV. 

When the right mix of lyrics, melody and mood come together, music has an undeniable way of etching memories. Many songs composed the soundtrack to my semester, from “E-Bow the Letter” on REM’s underappreciated “New Adventures in Hi Fi” to “Wannabe” from the cultural phenomenon, the Spice Girls.  One that stood out was “Stranger in Moscow” by Michael Jackson.

By late 1996, Michael Jackson had fallen out of favor in the U.S. and it had been years since I had seen a Jackson video.  Europe is far more forgiving in respect to social transgressions of public figures, so MJ was still in rotation; simply put, Michael Jackson on MTV was a gift to a lobo solo in the Finland hinterland.

“Stranger in Moscow” resonated with me.  It helped that the song was not released in the U.S. until later, further cementing its significance. The whole composition hit me in perfect stride at the right time of my life. It was as if Michael wrote the song for me, and it helped me through this time of exhilarated individual growth and extreme isolation.

Some people have a tough time divorcing the eccentricities from the artist, but to me Michael Jackson was all art.  The phrase “go big or don’t go at all” comes to mind when I think of his work.  He went big. His music encapsulated American life of the time, our zeitgeist. He was a master collaborator, someone who wanted to work with the biggest stars, but not for association, for synergy. Michael Jackson’s creative polar opposite would be George Steinbrenner, who collected the biggest talents like baseball cards with no thought to the composition.  Michael had it all worked out.

It sounds cliche, but when Michael Jackson died last week, a part of my childhood died, too.  I was stunned; it gave me goose bumps.  I never sought his replica jackets or glittered gloves as a kid, but I own Thriller on vinyl and felt he was a truly unique artist.  God gives everyone talent, but to some he gives a little more, and Michael Jackson had it in spades.  As my wife pointed out, the MJ of my childhood died a long time ago.  True.  But I believe he still had more songs in him, and that loss of even one more potential masterpiece is what makes me sad.  Michael, thanks being my cultural compass when I was lost:  “How does it feel/When you’re alone/And cold inside”…