Cycle for Survival

This was not news that I wanted to hear to end or begin a year. I'm passing it on here in the hopes that you will help spread the word and that you might consider it one of your causes for the new year.

As all of you know, I have spent the past 4 years battling a rare type of cancer. After 3 surgeries and 22+ months of chemo, I thought I was through the worst of it. However, I just found out this week that my cancer has returned for the 4th time. The doctors are optimistic but I would be lying if I said I'm not scared and extremely frustrated by this recent news.

I am a "glass half-full" type of person so I don't choose to dwell on the following harsh realities of my situation:
• I have a rare type of cancer with no known cure.
• I have already relapsed 3x and without funding to research new alternatives, my options are becoming more scarce
• I am not alone. "Orphan" cancers affect millions of people a year, but don't get the attention and funding they desperately require.

Many of you are asking how you can help and the answer is to get involved with Cycle for Survival, the charity that Dave and I created 3 years ago to raise money for rare, underfunded cancer. You can donate, participate and spread the word.

I know the economy makes it hard to be generous this year however 100% of the money raised will be directed to cutting-edge trials and research at the world's leading institution for cancer care - Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. If you make one donation this year, this money will make the most difference .

Love,
Jen Goodman Linn

Jennifer was a student of mine back when I was teaching middle school. She was a great student and person and has grown to be everything I saw in her then and more.

At the age of 33, Jen was diagnosed with sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Over the last 4 years, she has endured 3 major surgeries and 20+ months of chemotherapy.

Despite these challenges, Jen was determined to help the millions of people impacted by cancer and therefore created Cycle for Survival to raise money for cancer research directed at a broad range of rare cancers.

Please spread the word to anyone you know and visit the website for the organization she helped create called www.cycleforsurvival.org to learn how you can get involved.
Jen and her husband Dave have been doing a lot to raise money for more treatment options.

100% of the funds raised through Cycle for Survival go directly towards cancer research, with a particular focus on less common or "orphan" cancers that affect millions of people a year, but don't get the attention and funding they desperately require. Importantly, many doctors believe that research on these less common cancer types will yield the keys to breakthroughs across a range of the most common cancers. All dollars will be directed to cutting-edge trials and research at the world's leading institution for cancer care – Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

The Event: Cycle for Survival is an indoor "spin-a-thon" on Sunday Jan 25, 2009. Teams will ride at the main location in NYC (Equinox at 44th and Lexington) as well as at a variety of satellite locations around the world. Cycle for Survival was created in 2007 and has already raised over $800,000 dollars for cancer research. The goal this year is to raise $1 Million and have over 200 teams participating on that day.

3 ways to help:

1. Cycle in NYC: To sign-up, just go to www.cycleforsurvival.org and click on Register at the top of the page. Then form a team of 2 to 8 people and reach out to your friends, family, and co-workers to sponsor your team.
2. Form a Satellite Team: If you would like to participate, but can't be in NYC, you can form a "satellite team" anywhere in the world. Satellite teams consist of 1 or more people who find their own location and participate in any type of indoor or outdoor ride (or other form of exercise). To register as a satellite team, go to www.cycleforsurvival.org, click on Register, and then click on "start a satellite team."
3. Donate: You can donate online using a credit card by going to www.cycleforsurvival.org and clicking on the "Make a Gift" button. You can either make a general donation or you can support a particular team or individual. During the donation process, the site will even let you search to determine if your company has a matching gift program.

Questions: Please contact Abby Kussell at Memorial Sloan-Kettering (646-227-2762, kussella@mskcc.org) if you have any questions or need any info that's not on the website.

On Facebook: Type “Cycle for Survival” (WITH spaces) into the Search box in the upper right hand corner. To become a Fan of our “Page”, click on the “Pages” tab along the top of the search results; to join our “Group”, click on the “Groups” tab.

A Year in Less Than A Minute

In this video you have shots from a camera in the same spot taking a photo every once and awhile for one year and then all the images stitched together into a 40 second video time-lapse style.

I find this very pleasant to watch, but a part of me feels like this is the way my life is literally passing. Compressed, moments flowing by so fast, so easily, so unobserved.



Need more time to enjoy things?

The video was made by Eirik Solheim and he also has a year in two minutes, the how-to of his experiments and more on his site.

The White Album: 40 Years On

How is it possible that The Beatles album that became known as The White Album is now 40 years old?

It was released in November 1968 and was their ninth album. It was exactly five years from the November 22 release of their second album With the Beatles. Not a long time, but a lot of changes in them, rock music, America, the world. I would have missed the anniversary but for a great podcast episode on NPR's All Songs Considered. Host Bob Boilen talked with Bruce Spizer, author of The Beatles On Apple Records, about how it came to be.

This is when The Beatles were dissolving and had gone to India and gone transcendental. (Ringo didn't like the food and left India. That Ringo...)

I remember it being released. I first heard the tracks on the radio where it was a release event.

Double albums were quite rare then. The list price then was $11.79. I didn't like the non-cover, but I did like the 4 photos inside (see above) and the poster and the lyrics. Everyone calls it "The White Album" but it really is simply titled "The Beatles" and that is embossed slightly below the middle of the album's right side. The vinyl albums had the serial number 2960203.

This was the first Beatles album that was released in America only in a stereo version. Before this, you could buy mono versions of albums and they were a bit cheaper and sounded better if you only had a crappy record player instead of an actual stereo.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released the previous year. That album had commercial success, critical success and was so influential that the follow-up had to be something different. (Time magazine said in 1967 that Sgt. Pepper was a "historic departure in the progress of music—any music."

It kicks off with that airplane landing and a Beach Boys style rocker (Beach Boy Mike Love was in India with them), and then dissolves into Prudence. That one is about Mia Farrow's sister from their India mediation period. That was a trip that generated a number of songs here. "Sexy Sadie" is a disguised attack on the Maharishi who they suspected was using his position to seduce women.

I liked the softer tracks ("I Will," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "Mother Nature's Son," "Blackbird," "Julia") and the rockier tracks ("Back in the USSR," "Birthday," "Helter Skelter"). It took me longer to get anything from some of the others - 8 minutes of "Revolution 9," "Wild Honey Pie," "Why Don't We Do It in the Road."

I have read that the only western instrument available to the group during their Indian visit was the acoustic guitar. That probably explains the folky feel of so many of the songs written there that stayed that way on the album.

This was the album that was their formal transition from 4-track to 8-track recording which explains lots of the collage effects. I always loved that Paul sings the bass line on "I Will" - the same way my friends and I would sing the bass, guitar and drums of songs thinking we sounded pretty darn good.

I still have a "Paul Lives. WMCA Swings" button from the "Paul is Dead" rumor period that was fueled by some studio games they were playing on these tracks.

Eventually, I liked everything on the album in some way or another. I always tended to like Paul's pop tunes, so Martha & Rocky became friends. I figured out how to pick out some songs on the guitar though I never did get "Blackbird" right.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, The Beatles is The Beatles' best-selling album at 19-times platinum and the tenth-best-selling album of all time in the United States. Technically, that's a cheat because they count each sale as 2 records, so ohers like Abbey Road probably has sold more.

Listen to the November 24, 2008 podcast if you're a fan. Lots of new info there - even more in Spizer's books.

This was the first recording session where a girlfriend/wife was always there (Yoko Ono), though Paul's girlfriend at the time showed up too.

When they were recoding in August, Ringo left the studio session for two weeks because he felt he was playing less and less of a role in the process. McCartney played drums on "Back in the U.S.S.R." and "Dear Prudence" had all the others did some bass and drums.

George's friend, Eric Clapton, played lead on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". (Harrison played on Cream's "Badge" for their last album Goodbye.

After the album was finished, Harrison and Lennon left the band, but I mark Paul's public departure in 1970 as "the end" officially.

How strange is it that on the 40th anniversary of the album's release the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano published a lengthy article which said:

"Forty years later, this album remains a type of magical musical anthology: 30 songs you can go through and listen to at will, certain of finding some pearls that even today remain unparalleled."

I guess the Vatican has gotten past John Lennon's comment that The Beatles are "more popular than Jesus" from the 1960's.

Great album and a good book to read as you listen to it. 1968 was not a great year for me, but music definitely helped me get through it. After 40 years, a lot of the bad stuff has fallen away. This album has remained.

Noe The White Album is available in all formats.



Disc: 1
1. Back in the U.S.S.R.
2. Dear Prudence
3. Glass Onion
4. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
5. Wild Honey Pie
6. Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
7. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
8. Happiness Is a Warm Gun
9. Martha My Dear
10. I'm So Tired
11. Blackbird
12. Piggies
13. Rocky Raccoon
14. Don't Pass Me By
15. Why Don't We Do It in the Road?
16. I Will
17. Julia

Disc: 2
1. Birthday
2. Yer Blues
3. Mother Nature's Son
4. Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey
5. Sexy Sadie
6. Helter Skelter
7. Long, Long, Long
8. Revolution 1
9. Honey Pie
10. Savoy Truffle
11. Cry Baby Cry
12. Revolution 9
13. Good Night



More NPR Beatles stories

• ^{Sgt. Pepper's At 40}
• ^{The Beatles' 'Love' Remixed}
• ^{The Beatles In America}
• ^{The Lost Beatles Tapes}

Chance of a Lifetime

“Now you listen to me — I don’t want any plastics, and I don’t want any ground floors, and I don’t want to get married ever to anyone, do you understand that? I want to do what I want to do — and you — you — ”

Principles of Uncertainty

Maira Kalman wrote and illustrated "The Principles of Uncertainty," her column/blog, for The New York Times for a year (it ended in April 2007).


The blog became a book in 2007, also titled The Principles of Uncertainty What is it? Perhaps it is philosophy or art or memoir or sociology. The easy answer is that it is all those things, though that doesn't help classify it - if that's what you want done.

There's text, paintings, and photography. It is a year in a life. Maybe part of the uncertainty is what kind of book she wrote.

Kalman has also illustrated children's books, New Yorker covers for (including the famous map of “Newyorkistan” with Rick Meyerowitz).

She has 12 children’s books include Max Makes a Million, Swami on Rye and What Pete Ate. She also has designed fabric for Isaac Mizrahi, accessories for Kate Spade, sets for the Mark Morris Dance Company and, with her late husband Tibor Kalman, clocks, umbrellas and other accessories for the Museum of Modern Art. She lives in New York City and teaches graduate courses in design at the School of Visual Arts.

She also took on the task in 2005 of illustrating the venerable The Elements of Style and had a new way of looking at Strunk and White's reference classic with rather whimsical illustrations.

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://www.mairakalman.com/

The Life Before Our Eyes

I read a review of the book The Life Before Her Eyes by Laura Kasischke back in 2002.

That was almost 3 years after the April 20, 1999
Littleton, Colorado school shooting. 12 innocent students and one teacher killed, 23 others wounded at Columbine High School.

It was just after the October 28, 2002 Tucson, Arizona incident where a 41 year old student at the nursing school at the University of Arizona, shot and killed three female professors and then himself.

I had spent 25 years teaching in middle and high school classrooms and had moved to a college in 2000. My wife was still teaching in a high school then, but she left a few years later and the shootings were part of the reason.

We didn't teach in tough inner-city schools. But the school shootings seemed to be happening in the suburban settings where that kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen.

When the tragic shootings occurred at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, I was working at NJIT, the tech university of New Jersey. My wife was at home. My oldest son was headed to Norris Hall on the Virginia Tech campus to meet with his senior project advisor, Professor Kevin Granata, to work with his team on their biomimetic walking robot.

My son had received an email at about 9:30 saying that there had been a shooting on campus, but that classes were on. He was waiting for a phone call from his girlfriend who had gone on a job interview. He decided to wait to go to class.

By the time he read that email, two students in a dormitory were already dead, and the shooter had moved to Norris Hall.

When the news picked up the story, he called his mother and they watched CNN together as he saw people he recognized running from the building.

What they couldn't see inside included Professor Kevin Granata bringing 20 students from a nearby classroom into his office on the third floor and telling them to keep the door locked. He went downstairs to investigate and was shot and killed. None of the students locked in his office were injured.

I came home from the college. It was terrible to watch, but we kept watching, until we could watch no more.

_____________

Last month, I saw the film version of the novel on my Netflix DVD list. I had added it to the list, but kept pushing it down to the bottom.

In the film, The Life Before Her Eyes, directed by Vadim Perelman, Uma Thurman plays an art professor who was witness to a school shooting in her high school when she was a student there. The film switches back and forth from the adult professor to her teenaged self (played by Evan Rachel Wood).

My wife and I did finally watch it, and I'm glad we did.

Since then I've read reviews of it and some are quite negative. They criticize some of the same things I appreciated in the film - the complex structure, beautiful cinematography, and psychological and imaginative direction. It's a movie you should see with people and talk about afterwards.

The film was released for the Toronto Film Festival in September 2007 and I suspect that the events of that past April made the release seem like the wrong thing to do. It was held back and then given a limited U.S. release in April 2008. That timing also seems wrong.

The strongest performance is by Evan Rachel Wood as the high school senior who witnesses a Columbine-like massacre. She is Diana, the wild side of a pairing with best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri), who is an evangelical Christian.

Diana wants out of her hometown to a place she doesn't even want to imagine yet. Maureen wants a husband, kids and the life that she has already planned for herself. Still, they are best friends.

The script for the film is by Emil Stern who adapted Laura Kasischke's novel and it's good at hinting at things that the novel can develop, but that can only be hinted at in the film by a few words, a shot, a look by the actor.

Diana fifteen years after the school shooting (Uma Thurman) can't seem to let go of what happened to her. Diana's eyes are lifeless, especially as contrasted by her younger self. She has a husband and daughter, but things are not right.

Some viewers are probably put off by the alternating adult/teen stories, but it worked for me. The director, Perelman (who also directed The House of Sand and Fog) uses montage to take us from memory to imagination and slow motion to hold on to moments before her eyes. The past, in the acting, photography and dialogue is more "real" than the present dreamwalking life Diana steps through.

I want to read the book in a few months. Not right now. But I did look up some information on Laura Kasischke who I knew as a poet before I knew she had written the novel.

I found this poem in her collection Gardening in the Dark. (The poem is available online.) I don't know that you'd see it as any companion to the novel or film, but it was the one that caught me after seeing the film and starting this little essay.

Sacred Flower Watching Me

Deep in the ground, in the center
of a bulb, in the scarlet
darkness wrapped in crackling

there is a pinprick
of light. It's hot. It stirs. It's spring—
pitiful and sweet as a small girl spanked.

My love, all of it, a life of it, has been
too little. Nor has my rage ever forced any diamonds
out of the blood through the skin.

How awful
resurrection
for someone like me will be. The teenage
girls are being dragged

out of the earth by their hair.

Tongues, testicles, plums, and small hearts bloat
sweetly in the trees. And then

a silence like water
poured into honey—

the silence of middle age.

But there are nights I feel a sacred
flower watching me.
Such affection!
Even in my cradle, it was waiting
warmly, its soft

white gaze

steady on my insufficient face.

Got 10,000 Hours?

I was just reading an interview on GoodReads with Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell published back in 2000 The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference which was a surprising (well, to me it was a surprise, only because I didn't think the subject had wide appeal) best-seller.

I had read articles by him in the New Yorker so I knew he had a following, but the book really made him a popular culture figure too.

His second book was Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking which I also read and enjoyed.

So, the release now of Outliers: The Story of Success is "anticipated" by a good number of readers including myself.

The new book "reveals" what we all want to know: how to become the next Bill Gates. Well, maybe... He says that his inspiration for the new book came from the question "Is it a fair assessment to say that highly successful people deserve all the credit for their achievement?"

"I started with the lawyers chapter [Chapter 5], which looks at a group of people who have reached the very pinnacle of their profession. They were the first to tell me about all the extraordinary opportunities that came their way—that was very instructive and humbling. There was none of the self-serving clapping themselves on the back. The fact that they were discriminated against turned into their greatest opportunity. I interviewed one of the most powerful lawyers in the world and he told me, "At the time, it was the worst thing in the world not to be able to get a job at a fancy law firm, but it's the greatest thing that ever happened in my life." It was a humble acknowledgment of how forces much larger than himself shaped his career. I really wanted to bring that point home."

I had read another blog post about the chapter concerning "10,000 hours." Gladwell's theory is that you will only reach a level of mastery if you are willing to devote essentially 10 years to a particular discipline.

There's nothing special about when you devote those 10 years. Those 10 years can be between the ages of 40 and 50, or 60 and 70. It just so happens that many of us who achieve great things put in those 10 years early in life, but there's nothing special about youth. Youth is not necessary for the process; what's necessary is time and honest effort, which is heartening.

Heartening indeed... I guess I still have time.