CUL-DE-SAC

I carry an iPhone and it has an app that tells you the weather forecast. Mine gives the San Diego ‘cast, of course. But I also programmed it to show me the weather in places where I have family or where I used to live.

Places like Bloomington, Indiana and Minneapolis, MN have been showing cool temps in the 60’s and 70’s. September is a fall month in the Midwest. But in San Diego it’s the hottest month of the year.

In just two days, for instance, the smart-phone weather app says it will be 94 degrees,* and that’s not even September anymore. There’s a heat wave in store for the first week of October.

All my adult life, I have lived without air conditioning at home. This is because I’ve never moved into a house with central air, and running a noisy window AC in my bedroom makes it too hard to sleep.

But not having AC also appeals to my puritan streak. I hate the idea of burning a zillion watts of energy just so I can feel like chilled lettuce in a fridge. It also appeals to my love of the outdoors.

I can’t go through the summer and never hear a bird sing, and the only song I can hear is the monotone hum of an air conditioner. This was especially true when I lived in Minnesota, where you have to close up the house in winter. The thought of being cooped up inside all year long was unbearable, even during hot, oppressive Midwestern summers.

When the temperature approaches 100 degrees in San Diego, we have a summer routine that works pretty well. It cools down here overnight — thank God! — so we open up the house at night. In the morning we close the windows and blinds to keep out the sun and trap the cool air inside our stucco house. Typically that keeps the temperature inside 10-15 degrees less than it is outside.

You learn to gravitate to cool environs. One 100-degree day we went to a Padres baseball game at night and sat along the third-base line, which was fully shaded when the game started at 530 pm. The ballpark is on the bay where cool breezes act as soothing balm, and as darkness fell the earlier heat of the day became a distant memory.

Living with heat in the summer is something we all used to do. You slowed down in the middle of the day. Architects built houses that were naturally ventilated. In a world without air conditioning I’m sure workers would be less productive. But is all that productivity worth the cost of the electricity and the climate change that comes from producing it? It’s sad to think that making ourselves cool is making the world more hot.

About a year ago, before we replaced our old shingled roof with red tiles, we looked into installing solar panels again. And, again, we learned that our use of energy wasn’t worth the investment.

In fact, the guy from the solar company looked up our energy use and was discouraged to find out how little we used each year compared to other people.

So what do other people do?  Do they never turn off the TV? Do they keep lights blazing 24 hours? Maybe it all goes into the air conditioner.

Right now it’s 4:08 p.m. and the thermometer outside says it’s 88 degrees in the shade. Inside, it’s 78 degrees, a ceiling fan spins and my son does his homework.

I’m glad we don’t need air conditioning. I’ll also be glad when the heat of summer finally goes away.

*A second look at the forecast for inland SD County showed high temperatures will actually be 102 degrees!

I’m writing this on the 11th anniversary of 911. I remember the summer before it happened when I went to pick up my parents at the airport, and you could still walk up to the gate to meet them.

I went to the airport that day with my 18-month-old son who, though he was alive when 911 happened, will never remember it. It will be history to him, just like the assassination of JFK is no more than history to me.

A funny thing happened today at work. A crowd of visitors came to the KPBS newsroom. Our general manager often gives tours to big donors. But this was a group of German college-age students, who were studying journalism.

I’m situated in the newsroom right next to the elevator, so when visitors arrive I’m the first thing they see. I don’t know if this was done by mistake or design. But it means I regularly schmooze with visitors and sometimes people ask me where the men’s room is.

So I told the German kids I used to live there and I’d just been to Hamburg for a visit. And I talked a little shop, since that’s what their instructor wanted me to do.

The instructor then asked me if there were any other places in San Diego they should visit, and I told them to go to the Mexican border to see our wall. It’s just like the wall they used to have in Germany, dividing east from west, though our wall divides Americans from Mexicans.

In fact, I told them I distinctly remember seeing the Berlin Wall, and I asked if any of them remembered seeing it. The students looked at me for a while before one said that most of them weren’t born yet when the Berlin Wall came down.

Memory to me. History to them.

John Cage died in 1992.

One hundred years ago on September 5th avant garde composer John Cage was born, and he’d leave a mark on music that we may never remove. Read about him on Wikipedia or take a look at the article they ran in San Diego’s local paper, because I don’t want to go into a long biography.

Just let me say he was the Andy Warhol of music. Warhol once said the most beautiful thing in Florence is MacDonald’s. In much the same way, Cage claimed that any sound is music. There is no noise and there is no silence.

Cage’s most (in)famous piece is called 4’33”. It’s a piano concerto, during which the performer walks to a piano in a concert hall, sits on the bench and doesn’t play a note; in fact does nothing. The hum of the air conditioning system, the coughing of concert hall patrons and inevitable jeers of people who think the piece is a bunch of crap are the only “music.”

In the world of music, John Cage is impossible to ignore. I don’t think it’s because he was a great artist. He was a great intellectual, and his intellect took a definite point of view. Here are a couple of well-known quotes from Cage

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”

That’s true and profound. But is all that non-silence music? Here’s another.

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.”

I’m guessing Cage was an atheist, though he apparently thought nature was a woman.

Cage was not an anomaly of the 20th century. In fact, he was one part of a movement in the arts that rejected the rules that sought to define art and beauty. Cage was only different because he took the movement to its logical conclusion, telling us that beauty and art don’t really exist. Why? Because we can’t define them. Here’s another quote:

“The first question I ask myself, when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful, is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”

Here’s a story I once heard about art. It might be urban myth, but what the hell.

I was living in Minneapolis when a local museum got a traveling Picasso exhibition to come to town. Two women went to see it, and they were raving to each other about a Picasso art piece that stood before them. It looked like a janitor’s cart. But what amazing attention to detail! What irony! What an artist it took to find beauty in such ordinary things!

As they were speaking, the janitor walked up and pushed his cart to the elevator so he could continue his work.

It’s a story that sums up the John Cage theory of art appreciation. All things are art, just as all sounds are music. We only define things as art because we choose to perceive them in that way. A janitor’s cart may be just a janitor’s cart. But if you want it to be art, that’s cool. Or is it?

The joke in the Picasso story is told on the modern art crowd and on their notion that beauty has no rules. Cage’s quote about not being able to define beauty makes me think of the U.S. Supreme Court justice, who once said he couldn’t define pornography but he knew it when he saw it.

I think we know art when we see it. And ultimately there is some way to measure the success of, for instance, a piece of music. Maybe it’s the number of records sold (pick your favorite pop star) or the length of time a piece remains popular (Bach’s Goldberg Variations).

John Cage’s reasoning makes perfect sense, but only in the purely intellectual realm. Once you leave that world and start to rely on your emotional senses, things become much different.

Even so, let me thank John Cage on his 100th birthday for giving us the freedom to think about music in a different way. Just don’t take everything he said too seriously.