Four Tuna

Dept. of mangled lyrics — from O, Fortuna in Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

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Tejon Ranch

The flat road from San Francisco to LA is dull, a ribbon of highway passing cattle ranches and farmland. But at the valley’s southern end, mountains suddenly thrust from the valley floor, a wild and woolly barrier that’s often impassible during winter storms. As Interstate 5 climbs through Grapevine Canyon, land to the east grows environmentally complex. The Mojave Desert, the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, the great central valley and the southern forests all converge on Tejon Ranch — the only place in California where four ecoregions come together. This collision of ecosystems is the historic Tejon Ranch — an area nearly half the size of Rhode Island that includes rare habitat for the majestic California condor.

Tejon is a region rich in possibilities for mineral exploration, forestry, and tourism. Unlike so many areas of natural beauty, however, Tejon has been largely preserved. And today’s New York Times editorial trumpets that decision, in an unusual feel-good story about something going right with our environment. But the story is not altogether positive — there were tradeoffs for the conservation, deals that will further fragment a huge area of land that can never be restored to its natural state

However, what the Times glossed over was that, piggybacked in with the conservation efforts is a green light for a new city on the land, and also plan for developing luxury vacation homes. This area, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, slashes through the condor’s habitat, and is the “largest single development ever proposed in California,” says the center’s director, Peter Galvin.

Yes, development can benefit the economy in many ways — tourism, jobs, manufacturing, and so forth. But the planet is a finite space, and one day we will run out of land, of new spaces on which to build. Our greatest gift will have been squandered forever, without hope of recovery. Although the Tejon plan is a real victory, surely our environmental thinking can evolve further — and by leaving our great spaces untouched in future conservation efforts, only benefit generations to come.

Change Hurts

Recently, I became one of the many adults wearing braces on my teeth, if only for three months. I’d had them — twice — before, so I figured, “how bad could it be?” I knew that plenty of celebrities, including Cher, Barbara Walters, Janet Leigh, Diana Ross, Tom Cruise, and Carol Burnett all straightened their smiles mid-career. Heck, Whoopi Goldberg is rumored to have even dated her orthodontist! But as it turns out, post-teenage braces pack a wallop for most grownups, yet also hold valuable lessons about learning and change at a later age.

At first I proudly smiled, showing off what is by far my most expensive accessory. And in fact, the tin grin had some unexpected benefits. While watching our friend Jamy Ian Swiss — the virtuoso sleight-of-hand artist and mentalist — perform at the Magic Castle in LA, a tipsy woman sitting beside me asked where I went to college! But soon I tired of double-takes. Suit, cocktail dress, or jeans, I felt ridiculous. I read that Tom Cruise had issued a press release about his braces back in 2002 (and wondered how ortho affected his relationship with then-squeeze Penelope Cruz). On the other hand, Cher, who, like me, only wore her appliances for a few months, went into seclusion behind the regal gates of her Malibu estate. No one saw her, and I knew exactly how she felt. Except for the estate part, of course.

Teeth are important for movie stars…and also for me. Like any other woman, I want to be my prettiest, even when I’m also trying to perform professionally. In addition, my dentist prescribed the ortho for health reasons. So, change. Braces! It’s all OK, right? Now I see how it’s understandable to cocoon, hiding away and then emerging a butterfly. But in general, change doesn’t happen in a vacuum; you need to bounce yourself off others. To learn something new, you may look foolish at first. It only makes sense, as experts in any field were once beginners as well. However, growing pains hurt! I’ve played principal oboe with two major orchestras, performed a debut recital at Carnegie Hall, and recorded major film soundtracks. But when learning algebra as an adult (the music-math connection is a mystery to me — math is not a subject offered in music school) and also learning to play flute, sax, sitar, African drum, and Asian flutes in the last year, I felt like a child — and not in a good way. (Apologies to neighbors.) It’s frustrating. But it’s worthwhile.

When I think about midlife change, I think of Ellie Kinnaird. I had known her as the mom of three sons during the 1970s in our hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She was a good violinist, and as a single mom, she worked hard playing the area’s few gigs and working in the university’s excellent music library. In her mid-50s, however, she fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming a lawyer — a career difficult to access earlier, for a southern woman born in 1931. Toiling through the state’s only part-time law school, she hung out a shingle in Carrboro, NC, by the late 80s. Within a year or two, she was elected mayor at age 56. I saw this remarkable woman at my dad’s memorial service last year, as she was finishing her sixth term as state senator. Although she’d planned to retire, Ellie is running a seventh time at age 74, saying she couldn’t quit with such a dearth of female candidates.

Ellie’s legacy includes sweeping changes in her state’s social policies. She’s championed rights of those with disabilities, of minorities, and improved health care and insurance issues. She’s cleaned up the state’s hog farms, and addressed other land use and environmental issues. What if Ellie had thought she was too old at 55…to old to learn something new, make a change, leave the world a better place? Her life as an attorney and politician comprises over one fourth of her time on earth — and she’s no less the musician for it. Her path was surely challenging, frustrating, and uncomfortable. But what a contribution! Ellie will forever be one of my heroes.

I hope you don’t need braces, as I do. But if you’re willing to take on change, forge ahead out in the open. Stumble, right yourself, and take the next step. I entered journalism school after 20 years as a performing artist, and was surprised and grateful to receive a full-tuition fellowship at age 39. Ellie started law school some 15 years farther along. My Raleigh-based fiddler friend Lyda Cruden told me of her grandmother earning a biology degree at age 80 — and teaching for years after that. And as I talked to my own, sharp, 86-year-old mom on Mother’s Day, I see the possibilities are endless at almost any age.

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Hacking Yourself

The older we get, the more difficult it becomes to untangle yourself from the path you’ve chosen. I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation in technology, and how it translates to other pursuits. One of the best lessons I’ve heard was from a professional computer hacker I met at the Entertainment Gathering 07.

Although hackers would usually be regarded as social pariahs, Paul “Pablos” Holman is hard to ignore. He’s constructed a cute little robot (out of Segway parts) that rolls up to you as you’re computing, and spits out all your secret passwords. But wait — Pablos is far from evil, instead using his understanding to consult with tech companies about ways to thwart hackers. After hearing him speak, you’ll also think twice before going online in a hotel room:

In this presentation, however, I’m most struck with how Pablos describes his mental pathways — equating them with the geek pastime of taking things apart to see how they work, before re-assembling them in a better way, using all that’s been learned and discovered and developed since the device was built. That’s a great way to think about your own path, to step back and look objectively at all your components.

Novelists sometimes use this approach as well, said Sara Anne Fox, a story editor I know. She suggests that at some point, novelists and screenwriters look back on their lives by writing a brief biography…but for their eyes only. It’s a great way of integrating subjects, scenarios and the like into fiction without the story actually becoming memoir.

Pablos’s method is also a good way of looking at the device of your life, but objectively. Take it apart. See where you connected Wire A and Port B and got an unexpectedly good reaction. On the other hand, remember when Wire A touched Port Z and your device exploded. Port B, check. Port Z, avoid! Note also the 24 potentially rich possibilities in between A and Z. It’s easy to land in a deep rut over time — each wrong turn can get you more lost in the forest, or into a morass of metaphors…as this graf is demonstrating…

So take a cue from hackers, who are the most innovative people on the planet. As Pablos says, instead of taking something at face value, like “this is a phone,” they think deeper; “how does this phone work, and how can I make it work differently?” For anyone interested in the possibilities of life, at any age, I suggest writing that short, messy story of your life. But it’s just for you — so think twice about writing it online in a networked hotel room.

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Roots

Last week, we attended the Liberty Hill Foundation’s presentation of its Upton Sinclair Award in Century City. The honorees are muckrakers — the Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon and police detective Ed Burns — who have brought inner-city grit to television through HBO’s series “The Wire.” In Hollywood, it’s rare to see ugly images of equality and justice. But at times it seems rarer still to see citizens devoting their energy to a grassroots effort that only their hometown passion could fuel.

That’s why I was most fascinated with the less-known recipients of the evening — the women of Pacoima Beautiful, an environmental organization in an industrial section of northern Los Angeles. Although the Gabrielino Indians named Pacoima after their “Rushing Water,” it is the sort of place, today, that many dream of escaping. The five mile area, jammed with 100,000 residents and crisscrossed by freeways, is home to five toxic Superfund sites.

Founder Marlene Grossman described the group’s beginnings, as an outreach to have large trash items — appliances and mattresses — hauled away without any immigration inquiries of the person reporting the problem. Today, much of their group’s activity revolves around educating residents to be proactive in understanding, reporting, and solving the city’s environmental issues — like a recent program recruiting neighborhood mothers to record trucking traffic patterns, and thereby identify sources of pollution. Another project centers on cleaning up the old Price-Pfister plumbing plant.

Nury Martinez knows a lot about the Pfister facility. Her mother worked there for many years, organizing hunger strikes to protest the plant’s closing. The place was an important source of employment for people like Martinez’s parents. In addition to Pfister, her mother labored as a seamstress, while her father washed dishes and painted to send their daughter to college at California State University at Northridge. Her political science degree could have sent Martinez on to law, business, journalism, or other graduate studies. But instead, she took that knowledge, and combined it with her passions and sense of justice to improve the community she loved.

Martinez went on to work as district director for a state senator, raising millions for health care, education, and recreation. She sat on the San Fernando City Council, later becoming the city’s mayor and recently built nearly 100 senior-housing units. Now, she has become CEO of Pacoima Beautiful — and helping to anchor a valuable organization that cares for the people who nurtured her development.

I was impressed to hear the evening’s main honorees speak, and to review their accomplishments. They, too, used their unique experiences to change the world. But perhaps the most valuable work comes in smaller increments, growing from the ground level like Martinez’s work. The Baltimore journalist Simon senses it as well, describing his most important work as that teaching middle-school students. It was a lesson for me as well — that the most meaningful change comes from knowing and trusting your instincts and knowledge.

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The Rat and the Chanteuse

Recently, I heard the film composer Michael Giacchino speak at a screening of the Disney-Pixar film Ratatouille. Giacchino had written the film’s music, and said there’d been much discussion about the film’s title song. It was assumed the sound would feature the voice of a classic French chanteuse like Edith Piaf. However, he heard something more contemporary — a sound, a feel and mood not like anything that had come before, yet something that exemplified bohemian Paris — and would endure over years as the film was rediscovered by future generations.

Surely Giacchino’s status had resources to find such a singer — agents, catalogs, favorite recordings; the powerful music department of Disney itself. But what did the composer do instead? He googled. And “french female singer” brought up one “Camille,” whose voice and songs enchanted him enough to pick up the phone and call.

I would have been surprised at the story just a year before. However, my friends who work in film and television production say that they prefer finding material themselves, rather than relying on the filter of agents and managers. Some studios hire people to sift through Myspace and Youtube; any film, television, or music intern knows that part of their job is to surf publications and blogs daily for unique acts.

The democratization of talent has had Hollywood on its toes for several years — along with business, education, and almost every form of culture, which Youtubes, blogs, and otherwise spreads the word via word of mouth. But such a revolution also focuses on individuality. These are artists, thinkers, and businesses that have used their strengths to create something unique — rather than imitating pre-existing success. And as it turns out, uniqueness is what’s most in demand.

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A Little Change

This morning, I took my usual run in the Hollywood Hills. It was rush hour, and cars streamed along the normally-quiet route from Mulholland Drive into the Valley where Universal, Disney, and Warner Brothers revved up for the day. I realized that I’ve become a creature of habit; I recognize the Scorsese-lookalike in his huge BMW sedan, the techie in lovingly restored old Nova, and the truckload of day laborers with lawnmowers and leafblowers.

The drivers are creatures of habit as well — bald-ponytail in his red Miata ran the same stop sign, and green Prius yelled at me for the second day this month “to get the #*$( out of the road!” Although many of them look content, more seem stressed out, their furrows worn by years of cranking the same humdrum existence. Why are so many stuck, unhappy, and repeating the same motions as if something will magically change this time?

It’s a subject tackled in this morning’s Times by Janet Rae-Dupree , who has a surprisingly positive take on the concept of habit — a word often associated with dark subjects these days. Ms. Rae-Dupree suggests shifting your thinking away from eliminating bad habits, as they’re in there for life. Instead, she suggests, form new, productive habits and break free of your confining existence. “In fact,” she writes, “the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.”

It’s uncomfortable to break free from what we know, or even to co-exist with the notion of wonder and curiosity. Studies, the article says, show that our creativity shuts down after age ten. I can remember, for example, exploring the forests behind my house with my childhood friend Cath, naming every patch of moss, creek eddy, and tree after a scene in CS Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia.” Where did that person go? She’s squelched by adults around us, says Rae-Dupree, who writes that as we become teenagers we are taught to be deciders — making a plan to be like someone else, instead of leaning into our interests until we’ve become our unique selves.

Who are some heroes of habit? How about Nicholas Negroponte, who founded the nonprofit organization, One Laptop Per Child? Negroponte, the son of a Greek shipping magnate, could easily have stayed in the architecture career for which he trained. But he went on as an innovator of computer-aided design at MIT’s Media Lab, and then invented a valuable charity like no other — one with the power to truly change the world. The composer Charles Ives could have considered his insurance career as nothing more than a day job, to support his musical ambition. But instead, he went on to found a Hartford insurance firm so innovative that industry experts studying his methods are often surprised to discover he’s the same Charles Ives! The list goes on…poet William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician and man of science; Disney chief Anne Sweeney, who thought outside the box to embrace hand-held video; and Steve Jobs, who together with Steve Wozniak, founded a unique computer operating system that has revolutionized the way ordinary people interface with their creativity.

One of my favorite habit-changers is decidedly low tech; she’s good old Grandma Moses. She’d wanted to paint, but in the 1800s she did what was expected of her — marrying, farming, and raising farm kids in upstate New York. As she grew old, she remembered her interest, went to the art store and purchased supplies. Although at age 75 she’d never raised a paintbrush, Grandma Moses soon produced work so different and compelling that her first few paintings brought more income than her entire life of farming. She lived to 101, with one-fourth of her life devoted to art despite her late start.

I had a revelation of sorts recently, at a friend’s birthday celebration. It was the usual cacophony of “Happy Birthday” where no one agrees on the key — enough to set dogs howling for blocks. I never sing very loud…after all, I’ll never forget the voice teacher I asked my mom to see in the sixth grade. The teacher heard me sing, said I was too young to be attempting such things, and that she’d never teach me. I’ve gone through life thinking I was cursed with a terrible voice. Yet one of my friends turned to me, and said, “You really sing beautifully. Why didn’t we know that?” So that’s my habit for today — I’ll sing a little bit, and see where it takes me.

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The Sweet Spot

What is a “Flair for Genius?” Do you have it? Do I? The truth is, everyone has a unique “sweet spot” — like the perfect place on a baseball bat — where a career or personality suddenly resonates. You can live a fairly successful life, but you know there’s something more there. You see others excelling in business, entertainment, science, and sports, and know that although you may have located it on your tennis racquet, you just haven’t yet found it in yourself.

Whenever I’ve spoken about my first book, “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music” (Grove/Atlantic Press), listeners seem most interested in hearing about my own career change — and how they might do the same. You see, many people would have thought I’d already found my “Flair for Genius.” After all, mythology seems to view classical musicians on a higher, more noble plane — often equating those who play instruments as “geniuses” alongside Mozart, without seeing the complex being inside. (And with Mozart’s penchant for scatological humor, he may not have dignified the term “genius” at the time!) Although I’d had a very nice career playing the oboe all over the world, it felt as if I were acting out someone else’s life.

Truth be told, I’d found one aptitude — musical talent. But there were others, and I suspected my personality was wrong for the intense life of practicing that meant hours of solitude daily. Several years after college, I tried aptitude testing. The Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation (www.jocrf.org) had created their tests back in the 1920s, when General Electric wanted to re-assign employees displaced by technology. GE was smart to realize that people using their strengths, instead of desperately trying to improve their weaknesses, were going to do a lot more for the bottom line. Human aptitudes, my examiner explained, are innate and do not fluctuate over time. And there are no good or bad scores — it’s just a guide to using all your best parts while minimizing the rest.

I took it all with a grain of salt. However, I noticed the aptitude diagnosis was right on — and very different from the way I’d seen myself for decades. From the second I stopped trying to squeeze into a pre-existing job or personality description, life took off. Today, my writing, speaking, and performing careers are constantly evolving, weaving together into an interesting, satisfying career that doesn’t feel like work. But I didn’t leave my music behind. If anything, it’s become the key to days well-lived — and a life like no one else’s. It’s amazing how far, how elegantly, the ball can travel when you just find the sweet spot.

Unique genius

Yesterday, I took my nephew to the open house at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Leo is forever drawing spaceships, describing schemes for Artificial Intelligence applications, and concocting Star Wars plots. That said, it would be easy to pigeonhole an 11-year old as a future engineer. But once we arrived, Leo’s interests looked much more complex — he was attracted not only to math and computers, but also to the dramatic stories of space exploration we heard and saw.

I was reminded how much my own parents, and other adults, “branded” me when I showed some skill in music. And that’s perfectly understandable. Eager to get me started on something at which I’d excel, it was decided that I was a little Mozart, or perhaps even a child prodigy (on the oboe?) As I graduated from an arts high school that offered few academics, my choices faded without the chance to explore my true childhood interests, which had been architecture and veterinary medicine.

It wasn’t until many years after graduation from music conservatory that I came back to those original passions — realizing that I’d been living someone else’s dream throughout the prime of life. Even though I studied math and science in my 30s, the barriers to entry in other fields became much higher as a I aged. But it wasn’t too late — and is *never* too late — to make a change. I started listening to my true talents and ambitions, instead of plugging into a ready-made career that would satisfy others.

As a result, I’m jetting off to Bali to shoot a television travel series I’m creating about world music, I’ve invented a new speaking topic about finding your own flair for genius, and I’m well into my second book, a novel. Watching my nephew grow up, I’m reminded that young people need encouragement and guidance, but also the space to evolve in their unique way — to find that combination of interests and talents that inexplicably resonates.

Maybe Leo will be an astronaut. Perhaps he’ll design spaceships — or teach second grade, create oil paintings, or start an accounting firm. It’s too early to know, and it’ll change a few times. But the gift in watching a young person develop is in seeing the potential in us all — at any age. It’s all inside. It’s just a matter of finding the riches within.

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