Twenty Four in 24

An egregiously long and late holiday train of thought

I have never sent a formal end of year letter or family update; I prefer to maintain the privacy of my spouse and kids and their lives and I don’t think my short-term travels or musical adventures are broadly interesting. For a few years I did something of a “best of” list that included travel hacks, work productivity and perhaps a meal cross reference.

In an attempt to expand interest and reach, here are 24 things I learned in ‘24, with some forward references.

1. Grief and memory are the tales of mental tangle, with seemingly random triggers. I lost my mom in March, and the last nine months have been a succession of thinking about texting her interspersed with happy memories offset by walking around that hole of grief. Geddy Lee explores the phase shift between grieving and celebrating the memory of love in “My Effin’ Life.”

2. Unravel the yarns of family stories while those who have first hand life experiences can share them. Some of the best laughs I had this year were listening to my father’s older sister regale us with tales of our immigrant grandparents’ generation. And I discovered I’m tangentially related to Nobel Prize winner Burton Richter. Lavie Tidhar uses such stories of the veiled and tangled family history in “Six Lives.”

3. Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Darkome” was one of the best books I read this year, coming out of his experiences working with RNA therapies and then viewing the pandemic through the lens of a drug hunter. I have a small acknowledgement in the book; Hannu gave a talk to my team literally the same day the world shut down. DNA and RNA hacking, poor policy and government overreach and lack of right to repair are warnings, not a user manual.

4. Never having been one for any kind of exercise regimen, or for gamification of any activity, I found myself enchanted by my Hydrow’s use of badges, lifetime progress and consistency to be just enough of a motivate for me to work out 51 out of 52 weeks. Rather than a competition against people I don’t know, it became a constant resetting of personal best goalposts.

5. I lost almost 60 pounds this year through a combination of GLP-1 drugs, exercise, diet and consistency. My BMI is below 30 for the first time since college (and i’m wearing the same size jeans and tee shirts). I no longer have to pay XXL clothing surcharges. The unanticipated side effect is that I get more instant attention in retail and public settings. When I was wheelchair bound 13 years ago after an accident, I was invisible despite knocking over retail displays with my leg cast. Now I’m not only literally seen but heard, implying a subtle fat shaming of which I was oblivious, but am about which I am now hyper sensitive.

6. Frank Zappa was truly under appreciated. Seeing Steve Vai and Adrian Belew (both of whom played with him) in concert, and hearing their stories, makes you appreciate the standards of musicianship and performance art Zappa demanded. Jakko Jacksyzk discusses these two whammy bars removed relationships in “Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair.”

7. Always play with people above your skill level; far from being embarrassing it will improve your competence and confidence. When I played Friday night pick up hockey we had a former minor leaguer who could still skate circles around us in his post-40 dad life, and he regularly passed me the puck despite my inability to be in the same zone of the ice most of the time. It wasn’t charitable passing but simply the way you played the game. Performing with Pat Mastelotto at summer camp similarly made me rethink my capabilities - I’m not going to tour with a reformed King Crimson but I could confidently be in the zone he so graciously opened up.

   

   Pat Mastelotto (drums), me (bass, with coiled white cord for which Pat gave me undue grief - my 1970s were on full display), at summer prog rock camp

8. Track your referrers. Sci-fi reader brother Marc told me he tracks who gave him book pointers; I’ve started doing this for music, books, and places. Sometimes you go back for the extra bit of context.

9. Build your network. You’re always networking, even when you don’t think you need to, because at some point you’ll want to draw on those cross references. More on this in the coming weeks, as I’m back to networking full time.

10. Bruce Springsteen still rocks, well into his 70s. We saw him on the last US tour date in Baltimore, with 40,000 fans revisiting their salad days, and then two days later on the beach in Asbury Park in what felt like a hometown, hand crafted show for those who grew up in Monmouth County. Seeing Bruce sit in with Trey Anastasio on “Kitty’s Back” was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments — my first musical hero, my current guitar hero, and my bass teacher (Trey’s trombone player IRL) on stage at the same time and rocking the beach.

11. Immersive work grows the mind and skillset. Deb Mastelotto, artist, writer, and Pat’s wife, captured a superb view of why summer adult camp works – because you’re immersed in technique and art.

12. Practice to the edge of discomfort. Markus Reuter, another camp counselor and touch guitar inventor/player/teacher, dismisses the idea of “muscle memory” and instead focuses on skill and dexterity. His guidance was to practice something until it becomes difficult, usually about five minutes, and that advice holds for instruments, coding, speaking, exercise, or anything else where breaking intent forces a reset. Markus is a wide-ranging and innovative musician: buy his stuff, and definitely follow his recommendations if you’re into prog, mathcore, tap guitar or European experimental rock. [Edit: Updated to more accurately reflect Markus’s view and comments, which I had mis-transcribed].

13. Buying a folding keyboard made my phone a viable writing tool. I’m still a medium screen devotee but when I want to make quick notes or capture ideas, the larger keyboard fingerprint area helps tremendously versus thumb culturing my way through spelling errors.

14. Every major Italian city is magical. Florence, Rome, Venice, Bologna, each with its history, art, architecture, religious influences, and food, often intertwined. I plan on returning for a few days with no museum or sightseeing agenda, just to explore the side streets and cafes and surprise photos waiting to be captured.

15. Attend or speak at an academic conference in your current or future field. I presented a poster at the Phish Studies 2.0 conference in Oregon this spring, and learned more about musicology, academic rigor and the state of research than I would have from reading two dozen papers. The people I met show up regularly in my more informed social feeds.

16. The music of the Boomer to Gen X listener is the poetry of generations, and should be studied, respected and archived as such. Song lyrics get short shrift in academic studies. There are some quasi-serious Grateful Dead study programs; Phish is up next; and Taylor Swift will be a Harvard Business Review case study before I retire.

17. Bands are better organizing principles than any management consulting output. You have well defined roles (without crossover, due to instrument function and ranges), a clear shared language for collaboration via musical notation and song writing, and a regular, constant decision making process.

18. Bass players did not have a good year. In addition to Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, Jon Camp, founding member of prog group Renaissance and equally one of my influential bass heroes, died in late 2024. In some sort of dark synchronicity, I heard Santana play the night Jerry Garcia died, and then Phish honored Phil Lesh on the day of his passing. David Hepworth explores aging rock stars in “Hope I Get Old Before I Die.”

19. The Parlor Mob are one of the highest energy, most fun bands you can see; they are something of an Asbury Park hero arc but rock the house anywhere they play. On the other endpoint of a musical career, Southside Johnny retired from performance this year, also having graced the Stone Pony stage enough to engender local hero worship. Go see live music when and where you can. And read Nick Corasaniti’s “I Don’t Want To Go Home,” the history of the Stone Pony over 50 amazing years, outliving all of the smaller NJ venues.

20. Art creates and displaces discomfort. Draw, write, play, paint. Capture feelings and share them with whatever screening is comfortable. Kurt Vonnegut wrote “Practicing an art … is a way to make your soul grow.” (thank you Lev Parikian’s “Six Things” newsletter for the reference)

21. Support the artists you like. Streaming services are not paying musicians a living wage, so see live shows, buy the merch, order the tee shirts and stickers, and when you see copyright infringing content, report it and avoid it.

22. Know why you collect. I spent much of the fall sorting, purging and selling off parts of my coin, casino chip, baseball, hockey puck, and NHL league souvenirs. You can be a completist (like Geddy Lee and his baseball and bass ball collections), or because you find joy in tactile objects (Cory Doctorow’s “Craphound” in “A Place So Foreign”) or because collecting allows you to impose order and control in an open space. After the sell-off, I curated my baseball and hockey cards and now they are, as Doctorow writes, “arranged just so…they tell a story and a poem”

23. I sent handwritten holiday cards for the first time since 1980. It was much more work than I had expected, but the acknowledgements were heartfelt and equally rewarding.

24. Be kind. Through this year of stresses, transitions and challenges, it was the kindness of family, friends and some new faces that made each hill less steep and tortuous.