A brief thought for Earth Day

So I went out to dinner with A Certain Someone last night, and as we were sitting in the Olive Garden waiting for the Giant Vat O'Salad, I found something interesting.

I spotted this amazing little piece of space-age material sitting abandoned on the table in front of me. It was almost perfectly transparent, weighed almost nothing, was waterproof, impervious to fluids or germs, and resistant to mild acids and caustics. On top of that, it was remarkably strong, yet cheap enough to be disposable.

So I remarked to myself on how cool this material was-- what a marvel of technology. Historical geniuses like Sir Isaac Newton or Antoine Lavoisier would have been thrilled to get ahold of this stuff, or even to know that it was possible to make stuff like this. We're pretty lucky to have stuff like this, and the technology that makes it possible.

To us, though, it's a piece of garbage that we don't think twice about throwing away or just dropping on the ground to blow away. It's the plastic wrapper off of a drinking straw.

Take a couple of minutes and consider all the little stuff in the world like straw wrappers and that sort of thing. Then follow that train of thought to the truck that carried it here, the factory that made it, the oil wells the industrial feedstocks ultimately came out of, the thousands of people who work for Dow Chemical or whoever made it, the amount of lab time and brain sweat that went into inventing it, etc. etc. etc.

Suddenly it's not just a straw wrapper, is it? It's the end product of a very long technological chain that depends on finite resources-- a lot of energy and material and time goes into making it, and it gets tossed into a dump after very little use. I don't know about you, but that seems pretty wasteful to me. Consider some of the other materials we use in everyday life-- copper, iron, steel, aluminum, etc. etc. The economics of production and recycling are generally such that it's cheaper to recycle a ton of copper than it is to mine and refine a ton of new copper-- and that's even before you get into the environmental costs of mining and so on. The cost of copper right now is sky-high. Personally, I think that the only stuff that should go into a landfill is material that cannot (or should not, e.g. polychlorinated biphenyls) be reused at all.

This is Earth Day. I said it pretty clearly on my profile-- I'm not a tree-hugger, but I do think that it's a bad idea to screw up the only planet on which we can live. So, in the spirit of humanity, I ask you to please stop messing up my world, or I will have to relocate to my moon base and set my army of ninja stormtroopers on you.

I'm serious.

Snakes.

I had to go to a gravel pit in Southwick today. I walked up to a big pile of dirt and, lo and behold, there was an enormous rattlesnake sitting there. I didn't hear the thing ratting because there was a truck running nearby, and the thing damn near bit me.

This is yet another reason why I should be allowed to conduct all my inspections while armed with a shotgun.


Indiana Jones: There's a big snake in the plane, Jock!
Jock: Oh, that's just my pet snake Reggie.
Indiana Jones: I hate snakes, Jock! I hate 'em!
Jock: C'mon, show a little backbone, will ya?

Bassists I admire, and why:

Two disclaimers….

The first is, yes, I know that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." What can I say? I’m bored.

The second is that I basically picked a few of the bass players who I like the most. I’m not saying they’re the best ever, they’re just the ones I like. Please note the conspicuous absence of Victor Wooten, Stu Hamm, Michael Manring, et al. I’m not discounting anyone, but this is about my preferences, and not yours. Write your own blog, you jazz-funk snobs.

As to why these guys are important to me—well, some of them are guys who made me want to start playing, and others are guys who gave me ideas of what to play like when I did eventually start playing. Some, like Mike Watt, are as much philosophical influences as musical ones. Each of them is, in any case, someone with a unique approach to the instrument and what it can do.

So here we go.

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Mike Watt

Mike Watt is the anthropomorphic personification of all that is good about punk rock, a flannel-clad Buddha. It’s 2008, which means that punk is actually about thirty years old; it’s kind of weird when you realize that there was less time between the Beatles’ "Help" and the first Clash album than there has been between the ’Class of ’77’ and the present. Paul McCartney’s still alive and divorcing, but Joe Strummer and most of the Ramones have died.

Among many musicians, punk rock is frequently sneered at as people who play singing songs they can’t write—and you know, more often than not, they’re right. The basic ethos of punk is basically democratic anarchy—you don’t have to have a degree from Berklee to learn a couple of riffs and bellow ’till your throat hurts, and whoever wants to listen can listen. Just get off your ass, do it as best you can, and make it your own. Make up your own rules as you go along, and be innovative. Throw the whole superstructure of music out the window. Ignore conventions. Ignore music industry A&R rules. Forget about radios and major labels and tour buses and light shows and fog machines—this is DIY rock and roll. If you can’t do it in a room with four bare walls and one light hanging from the ceiling, you can’t do it at all. Ironically, that particular pearl of wisdom was excreted by David Lee Roth…..

When you subtract all the hype and Sid Vicious fripperies from it, like safety pins and Mohawks, you’ll be amazed with what you wind up with—from an ideological and creative point of view, Beethoven was a punk. Stravinsky was a punk. Zappa was a punk. Robert Fripp is a punk. Anyone who has ever learned the rules enough to decide not to follow them is, in spirit at least, a punk. So is anyone who has ever looked at the rules established by authorities and questioned them—and that’s as good a question to ask of politicians as of the music industry. Ask yourself, do you really want to sound like Foreigner, Styx, or Journey? Or, for that matter, Fall Out Boy, The Fray, or Coldplay?

Watt has been doing that since the late 70s, when he founded The Minutemen, which later dovetailed into fIREHOSE (not to be confused with the mall-metal band Firehouse), and then went ’solo’ with Ball Hog or Tugboat, a 1995 record that’s a veritable who’s who of 80s and 90s alternative rock—the musicians include everyone from Eddie Vedder to Nels Cline and MCA from the Beastie Boys. He’s one of the few genuine first generation punks still around, and he’s busier than ever. The guy seriously has three or four of his own bands going at any given time, plus he’s playing bass with Iggy Pop and the Stooges. For those who say punks can’t play, just listen—he’s an amazing player, with a real instinct for groove and melody, and a unique style that’s immediately identifiable—two notes and you can tell it’s him—but which is also malleable enough to accommodate anything from jazz (i.e. the band Banyan) to the Stooges. I have to point out, though, that I was a flannel-wearer before I discovered Watt.

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Allen Woody

Allen Woody was one of the three bassists here who I’ve been lucky enough to meet in person. He was, unfortunately, one of those people who became well-known only after he died. After playing in various local bands and second-string national acts (such as the Artimus Pyle Band, a leftover remnant of Lynyrd Skynyrd), Woody was recruited into the Allman Brothers Band when that group came out of retirement in 1989. He and Warren Haynes, who had likewise helped resurrect the Allmans, then left in 1997 to form Gov’t Mule, a trio that was hailed as the second coming of Cream or Mountain. He died of undisclosed causes in 2000. His friends and bandmates then put together one of the most elaborate memorial projects that any musician has had in recent memory, ultimately producing two CDs (The Deep End, vol 1 and 2), a documentary movie (Rising Low, which I recommend even for non-musicians) and a live DVD, much of the proceeds of which went to support his wife and young daughter.

Woody was sort of my version of The Dude from The Big Lebowski, except as a bass player who distilled forty years’ worth of blues, jazz, folk, and rock into whatever it was he happened to be playing. He was straightforward, unpretentious, and unique, and underneath all the hair and tattoos he was, by all accounts, one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet. He was also a genuinely gifted musician who could play just about anything you asked him to, and in addition to bass he played guitar, mandolin, and a number of other instruments.

I learned a lot from Woody, in one way or another. The whole Rising Low thing was basically a grad school class in the theory and practice of playing bass, from a philosophical standpoint. I can’t really articulate that stuff in any sort of short form, so I’ll just tell you to get the movie, ok? Oh yeah, and 16^th notes are useful.

Larry Graham

Larry Graham invented about half of the funk bass vocabulary. Most people have never heard of him, but he was the bassist with Sly and the Family Stone in the late 60s and early 70s, and then for Graham Central Station for most of the 1970s. He invented the ’slap and pop’ method of playing, and a listen to the Family song "Thank You (Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Again)" will teach you about 90% of what there is to know about that. There haven’t been many real improvements to it since then. He was also one of the first guys to use effects on the bass—Everyday People is fuzz, and Earthquake is fuzz, phaser, and probably a flanger to boot. On top of that, he’s just a holy mofo of a groove machine; he doesn’t play particularly complicated stuff, but ye gods, you just can’t sit still! I bet I can tell you who Flea and Bootsy Collins both spent a lot of time listening to. On the downside, he’s very much a lick player—he tends to recycle the same riffs and phrases over and over again—give him half a chance and he’ll bust out Earthquake, like he did when recording on The Deep End with Gov’t Mule.

Larry’s also a great singer, but sometimes what you need is a crazy bass solo.

No, I don’t know why he’s dressed as the captain of the Love Boat. I’m kind of ambivalent about the "Don’t let Armageddon catch y’all sleepin’!" tagline, too… because, as a Jehovah’s Witness, he means it.

Granted, many cruel things have been done to the concept of funk bass since about 1972, including disco and Verdine White, but some of the worst have been done by jazz musicians playing 32^nd-note diminished licks over a two-chord vamp and calling it funk because they’re either slapping and popping or doing the 16^th-note Jaco thing. That can work for some people, but I’ll pass. Sometimes I just want to go BWOMP BWOMP BWOMP with a fuzz pedal.

The sheer cruel irony is that his most famous song is the utterly bassless and un-funky Barry White-style ballad "One In A Million You," which was played at almost every wedding, prom, and back-seat grope session from about 1980 on.

Jah Wobble

In the beginning, there were the Sex Pistols, which is to say that an ambitious clothing store owner thought he could use a rock band to sell clothing. In short, the Sex Pistols were basically sponsored by the equivalent of Hot Topic. John Wardle was a friend of Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, living in the same London slum. Mr. Wardle, whose name was warped into ’Jah Wobble’ by a drunken Sid, was basically a thug, punk, and petty criminal at the time. He was almost asked to be the Pistols’ third bass player, but the offer was rescinded when the other Pistols realized they were too scared of him. They hired Sid instead. At some point Wobble borrowed, was loaned, or stole a bass and taught himself to play.

After the Pistols broke up, John Lydon, previously known as Johnny Rotten, hired Wobble into a new band called Public Image, Ltd, also referred to as PiL. This band was basically a hodgepodge of punk and art-rock—you could call them a gutter version of King Crimson, in a sense. Most of their songs were not as listener-friendly as this one.

If ever a band deserved an episode of Behind the Music, it’s Public Image, Ltd.—from 1978 to about 1982 they were probably the most dysfunctional rock band ever. Wobble called the band "four emotional cripples, all on different drugs." That pretty much says it.

In one love-it-or-hate-it apotheosis, they punked American Bandstand in 1980… How they ever got invited onto the show in the first place remains a mystery.

Wobble quit or was thrown out of PiL (or simply left without telling anyone) in 1980, after their second album was finished. The less said about most of the subsequent PiL records, the better (with the exception of ’Album’)—at one point, the band consisted of Lydon and some wedding band musicians who he met in a New Jersey bar and hired on the spot.

Mr. Wobble continued to be a rather poorly-adjusted individual during his time with PiL—at one point he set the drummer, Karl Burns, on fire. I guess the name was just too much temptation. He made a few post-PiL records on his own, then dropped out of music and spent a few years as a train driver on the London Underground, getting drunk and then ranting over the intercom at the passengers about how he used to be a famous rock star. By 1986 he was clean and sober, and by 1990 he was back in the music business, this time focusing on what could best be described as world music, which he’s continued to do ever since. This is not world music in the clichéd sense—viz. Paul Simon hiring some African drummers or the Rolling Stones using a reggae beat. Jah Wobble’s extremely prolific post-1986 output (about thirty albums!!!) meanders back and forth between Celtic music, English folk songs, dub reggae, songs made out of William Blake’s poetry, Indian ragas, and so on. He brought in Ronnie Drew to do amazing spoken-word vocals on The Celtic Poets, which is hands-down my favorite record of his. Listen to ’The Dunes.’

I kind of wish he’d stop calling half his songs ’dubs’, though-- I know the guy’s biggest focus was reggae, but when you’re working with a bunch of Laotians who are singing traditional love songs, you’re a little past the point where calling the song a ’dub’ makes any sense. Oh yeah, and now he’s composing orchestral music too—one performance with the London Philharmonic was performed in Latin, and was billed as "Jah Wobble’s Orchestral Dub." Not bad for a guy the Sex Pistols didn’t want, eh?

Tone and feel. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Sometimes one governs the other in any case. Jah Wobble’s been using pretty much the same sort of sound since PiL—if ever a bass could sound like an enormous, deep hole in the ground, it’s his. Check out the Public Image song I linked above… or this one. As far as feel goes, he really goes for a hypnotic sort of vibe, playing the same riff until your brain drifts off into a trance. Yeah, there’s a lot of reggae influence there, especially in the way he emphasizes beats, but it’s also very modal and spacey. If you keep playing the same riff while the chords everyone else plays are changing, you can get some very interesting results, such as here (you can skip the percussion jam intro at your discretion). Oh yeah, he’s also got a good sense of humor.

Just a side note…. I usually don’t put much faith in buying a certain type of instrument just because some famous player uses one. I did make an exception here, though—I bought the Magnum because Jah Wobble uses one. It must be a good bass, because it sounds good even when I’m the one playing it.

John Paul Jones

Yeah, I know, he played bass and other stuff for Led…Led…. Led Banana? Well, it was Led something anyways. Or maybe Deep Purple. I don’t remember exactly. White high school and college kids think they’re the best band ever. Jones started out as a classical organ player and choir director, worked as a session musician for most of the 60s, got into a band, became famous, made lots of money, and then the drummer died and the band broke up. By about 1999 he got bored enough to do a solo record, Zooma, and later a second one, The Thunderthief. I love these two records; there’s everything on them from heavy prog rock to acoustic folk songs, a gothic string section, and even a tongue-in-cheek punk song. There’s also no guitar, other than a few guest spots by the likes of Robert Fripp. I wonder if having had to put up with Jimmy Page for ten years led to the no-guitars approach?

It’s not that he was in a Very Important Band; he also basically ran the band while the two guys out front were posturing. Yes, you heard me. Whole Lotta Love? Black Dog? Nobody’s Fault But Mine? Achilles’ Last Stand? Living Loving Maid? Hello, those are all bass riffs. The Lemon Song, Ramble On, and Hey Hey What Can I do were pretty much built around these laid-back, meandering bass parts. Laugh about hippies and Lord of the Rings lyrics all you want, but Ramble on is a real mofo of a bass line, and it’s the one bit of instrumentation that runs through the whole song. This is the kind of stuff I play when I’m sitting on the back porch on a summer evening, listening to the neighbors smoke pot.

You can blame this guy for my interest in mandolins, steel guitars, and basses with entirely too many strings. I swear, this guy can play any instrument ever made. As cheesy as the Mellotron was, Jonesy did some pretty amazing things with it; I can even forgive him Carouselambra on most days.

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Les Claypool

There are two pieces of music that I can remember, where the first time I heard them I burst out laughing. The first was Frank Zappa’s "Peaches En Regalia," which still rates as one of the best songs FZ ever voided out through certain orifices. The second was the intro to the Primus song ’Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver.’ Those two sentences should tell you a lot about both my taste in music and my sense of humor. Many thanks to Bryan for introducing me………..

Les is…. Well, hard to describe. He slaps, he taps, plucks with three fingers, strums chords, uses bizarre scales and chords, plays a 6-string fretless and a 1-string whamola, and all the while dances around the stage singing songs about pudding, masturbation, puppies, the Department of Motor Vehicles’ waiting room, and lawn ornaments. If you’re not laughing, you’re not paying attention. He’s the Generation X version of Stanley Clarke or Jaco Pastorius—the guy who gets pointed out as a virtuoso.

I went through quite a Claypool phase when I was in grad school—the first Primus songs I learned were My Name is Mud and Too Many Puppies, and I got quite a bit of mileage out of each (and slightly less out of Jerry Was a Race Car Driver). I still do the alternating left hand/right hand slapping from Mud a lot; you can do some really cool syncopations with it, and Puppies is where I learned about strumming chords and stuff.

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John Entwistle

John Entwistle was the guy who made me want to play bass in the first place, but he was also the guy who for several years intimidated me out of starting. He was the bassist for the Who, which was for many years my absolute most favorite band ever, and he was the first bassist I ever really took notice of, mostly because of his out-front playing style. In many respects he helped start the whole ’bass thing,’ dragging the instrument out of the rhythm section’s own private Siberia near the drum kit and plunking it down, metaphorically speaking, right next to the guitarist and singer. In the process, he changed what rock and roll sounded like, and that influence extended through everything that rock and roll spawned, from punk to jazz fusion. Jaco Pastorius is generally given a lot of credit for revolutionizing the instrument by introducing chords, harmonics, and the use of the instrument as a lead voice in a band, but quite frankly, there is very little that Jaco was doing in the 70s that Entwistle was not doing in the 60s. The difference seems to be that John was in a rock band and Jaco was playing jazz, and Jaco got put on a higher pedestal because of jazz’s supposedly greater artistic merit. Is rock art too? Good question. Personally I’d rather listen to Boris the Spider than Portrait of Tracy, but well, that’s just me.

The obvious thing is that John Entwistle played very fast, complex parts, and played them very loudly (Live at Leeds, anyone?). Ok, we get the point, but hey, all you need to be loud is enough money to buy a truckload of amps. His whole wall-of-sound approach to things really revolutionized what rock bands could sound like—now you could HEAR the bass player-- and the concept of the bassist as someone other than just the least-good guitar player changed what bands could DO. The more subtle things will get you too, though—creative chord progressions (Heaven and Hell, for example), a knack for odd time signatures, and so on. On top of that, too, once you realize who’s playing what in the Who, you realize that the bass carries most of the songs, even the poppier songs like Substitute. I have to give him some cowboy credit, too—he was working in a very fluid environment back in the 60s, when there was basically no rule book for what to do, other than the general convention that the bass stayed in the back and just went thump thump thump ala Brian Wilson. When there are no rules, make up your own as you go, based on what you find to be true.

Tony Levin

I guarantee that nobody who isn’t a musician will know who this guy is, but I also guarantee that you’ve heard him playing—for example, on most of the Peter Gabriel songs put out since the late 70s, including all those big 80s songs like Shock the Monkey, Sledgehammer, etc. He’s sort of an antithesis to Entwistle or Mike Watt in many ways—he’s a trained orchestral bassist and a veteran studio player who’s played on about a zillion records—but I think the similarities outweigh the differences. He’s also a very creative player with a knack for taking a counterintuitive approach to things that puts a clever spin on something that might otherwise suck. He does a lot of interesting things with whatever he’s playing at the moment—even if it’s an electric cello or a Chapman stick-- but it’s always very economical without being boring or cliched. It took me a lot of listening to really understand that you could load something creative into bass lines even for stupid pop songs, and then use the same general approach—economy of energy and an emphasis on the foundation-- when playing something in an anything-goes band like King Crimson. Lou Reed’s "Walk on the Wild Side," Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, and King Crimson’s Elephant Talk—they’re all the same guy!

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Justin Meldal-Johnsen

Most people know Justin as "Beck’s bass player." He played on most of Beck’s records and tours since Odelay (the album with ’Loser’ on it), and so on. He’s also done a ton of recording with other people—anyone who likes funky soul music should check out Macy Gray’s "The Trouble with Being Myself." It’s both ear candy and musically ballsy. One of the things I like most about JMJ’s stuff is his approach to effects—distortions, filters, phasers, etc.-- as part of the overall sound of both what he’s doing and what the band as a whole is doing. Treat the bass as a sound source that you process to create the sound you want, in addition to making a musical part with it—make the bass’s actual sound do part of the work. This has, unfortunately, led to me spending a lot of money on effects of my own—I have a dozen pedals on the board right now. Sometimes making Godzilla-versus-the-aliens noises is just as much fun as playing bum-bum-bum-bum.

Jeff Ament

AKA ’The Guy from Pearl Jam.’ Pearl Jam is kind of an unusual band in that they write pretty much exactly what they want to. Lucky them. Ament is a very good bassist who for some reason doesn’t get that much respect in the bass community, perhaps because he gets overshadowed by the whole Pearl Jam thing. Many of Pearl Jam’s most famous songs have very key bass parts to them, though—for example, Jeremy and Alive. The intro to the former is a riff on a 12-string bass, and the latter is built around a fretless part that builds the whole momentum behind the song (you know the part I mean—it’s what’s playing when Eddie’s climbing up the wall in the video). You don’t see too many sliding harmonics in rock songs, either. At the same time, he’s a really solid bassist, and that enables the other guys in the band to do what they do, without having to worry that the bottom’s going to drop out. The Pearl Jam rhythm section—no matter which drummer’s in it at the moment—is as heavy and solid as a cement mixer.

Jeff was one of the guys who clued me in on the sheer number of things a bassist can do to drive and color a song; I mean, what part of Jeremy is it that people whistle or hum? It’s the intro. He makes the songs better.

Brazil

"Brazil" was a movie Terry Gilliam and a few conspirators made back in 1985; in large part, it's a satire on Orwell's '1984' and Thatcher's Britain. I can't believe it's taken me so long to get around to watching it....

One of the first scenes of the movie is a TV interview of a government official, a Deputy Minister from the Ministry of Information named Eugene Helpmann, who reminds me entirely too much of Donald Rumsfeld for this to be a good thing.....



Interviewer: What do you believe is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings?

Helpmann: Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seems to have forgotten certain good old-fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game, they'd get a lot more out of life.

Interviewer: Nevertheless, Mr. Helpmann, there are those who maintain that the Ministry of Information has become too large and unwieldy...

Helpmann: David... in a free society information is the name of the game. You can't win the game if you're a man short.

Inerviewer: And the cost of it all, Deputy Minister..... Seven percent of the gross national product?

Helpmann: I understand this concern on behalf of the tax payers. People want value for money. That's why we always insist on the principle of Information Retrieval charges. It's absolutely right and fair that those found guilty should pay for their periods of detention and for the Information Retrieval Procedures used in their interrogation.

Interviewer: Do you believe that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?

Helpmann: Oh, yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs. We're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.

Helpmann: Why should decent law-abiding citizens have to subsidize criminals?

Interviewer: But Mr. Helpmann, the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year.

Helpmann: Beginner's luck.



Am I completely out to lunch here, or is this not something you could imagine someone from the Bush Administration saying on Meet the Press?

On the other hand, a huge national security bureaucracy, a long and pointless battle against terrorists, and a government that arrests and tortures people arbitrarily.... well, that's just un-American, isn't it? We don't seem to have got to the point of billing people for the expense of torturing them, though...



Note-- apparantly this movie has been edited six days from Shabbos and there are several versions of it; the US version, as usual, apparently has most of the good bits left out.

When Battleships Collide

What follows was originally going to be part of the preceding post, but because it turned out so long, I decided to spin it off into one of its own. I think it illustrates most of the points made in the 'when worlds and brains collide' post, however.

During the late 1800s, the Victorian era, the height of the British Empire, the Gilded Age, or whatever you wanted to call it, the most powerful, prestigious, and strategically important element of the Royal Navy was the Mediterranean Fleet, based in Malta and generally about twice as powerful as the fleet defending the English Channel. This arrangement lasted until the outbreak of the First World War, when agreements between the UK and France divided responsibilities, so that France supervised the Mediterranean, and the Royal Navy operated in the Atlantic and North Sea. The reasons for this concentration of strength in the Mediterranean are twofold: to keep an eye on France, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia, and to defend the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869 and provided a strategic link between Great Britain and her richest colonies in India and the Far East.

In the year 1893, the fleet's commander was the extremely competent Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon, one of the golden boys of the Royal Navy—from a good family, he was at school (Eton, of course) with the best of the young scions of the British establishment, and spent most of his naval career in prestigious positions, including an officer on Queen Victoria's royal yacht, commendable combat duty in the Crimean War, and command of a number of major warships. By 1893 he was sixty-one years old, had spent forty-five years in the navy and two years as commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, and was at the pinnacle of his career. Unfortunately for his subordinates, although he was personable and genteel when off-duty, when he was on-duty he was a dictatorial perfectionist, even by the standards of a navy that expected admirals at sea to be autocrats who 'kept counsel only with God.' Tryon was certainly an autocrat—many of his peers and subordinates confessed that they saw no point in arguing with the man, since he always appeared convinced that he knew better than they, and in point of fact he often did.

Admiral Sir George Tryon

Tryon was also an innovator, who used his fleet as a laboratory for trying out his theories and methods for naval warfare in the age of steam. The admiral was accustomed to putting his fleet through surprise tactical exercises in order to keep them in practice, ordering impromptu changes in formation or course, and indulging in unplanned gunnery practice. Many of Tryon's subordinates resented this because it required them to use their initiative, interrupted dinner, broke the crockery, and required lots of touching-up of the ships' paint to remove the soot and scorch marks. Like all warships of that era, Royal Navy vessels sported lots of decorative brass and woodwork, as well as elaborate paintjobs, the upkeep of which occupied most of the ratings' time, to the extent that the ship's appearance became a tail that wagged the dog.

HMS Victoria

Innovators were never popular men in the Victorian-era Royal Navy; most of the fleet's thousands of officers and men were more than content to rest on their laurels, safe in the cozy assumption that since they had beaten everyone they had fought during and since the Napoleonic Wars, they were still the best in the world fifty or sixty years later. Officers didn't compete over gunnery prizes, but for spiffy paintwork and serving delightful food in the mess. Ever since 1805 the Royal Navy had been mesmerized by the tactics of Admiral Nelson, hero of Trafalgar, to the extent that battle tactics had ossified—it is probably just as well that the Royal Navy never had to fight a major fleet action with steam-powered ironclads when their battle tactics were essentially the same ones they had used a century earlier for sailing ships. It was in this fashion that most of the Royal Navy sailed on through its salad days, happily believing that since they'd beaten the French the last time around, they'd beat the French the next time around too, despite all the technological innovations since Trafalgar. Until 1904, the United Kingdom continued to consider France the most likely opponent in any future major war, an assumption not without reason, but one which tended to blind them to other possibilities.

More to the point, the Royal Navy was overwhelmingly a heavily-politicized old-boy environment. There were virtually no officers who rose from the ranks --'mustangs' in American parlance, and virtually all of the admirals, commodores, and even captains were selected from the 'line' officers, as opposed to the dirty mechanics who called themselves engineering officers. Although line officers were well-trained in command matters, tactics, and ship-handling, they generally considered technical matters to be beneath them. Most line officers came from families who had sent their sons into the Navy for decades, even centuries, and most of whom were deeply vested into the establishment—that uniquely British network of old families that produced men who went to respected public schools and then meandered contentedly back and forth between private life and various government jobs for which they may or may not have been suited. There was no prohibition at the time on military officers holding other capacities, and many army and naval officers, such as Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, sat in Parliament.

For all that most of the Royal Navy was growing moss even while it spent millions of pounds on new battleships, a small minority of officers kept abreast of overseas developments, such as the innovation-obsessed French school of thought known as the Jeune Ecole or 'new school,' with its ambitions of asymmetrical warfare on the high seas, and looked at the increasingly hidebound Royal Navy and its worldwide commitments with increasing trepidation. Their chief concern was that a Continental enemy might be able to use new methods and technologies to overthrow the Royal Navy's dominance of the world's oceans. New technologies like the steam engine, rifled breech-loading guns, mines, and torpedo boats didn't come with instruction manuals, and naval officers had to figure out on their own how to use what the industrial boffins were giving them. What's worse, technology progressed so rapidly that a ship like HMS Inflexible, a world-beater when she entered service in 1876, was hopelessly obsolete fifteen years later. Granted, that doesn't sound like much of a shock to us, but consider that Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, HMS Victory, had entered service in 1765 and was only taken out of active service in 1812, by which time she was considered worn-out but by no means obsolete, since sailing ships and muzzle-loading cannon had changed very little in the preceding century. The dominant contemporary frame of reference assumed that things would change more slowly than they did.

Innovators were resented because they didn't conform to the natural order of things—they criticized hallowed tradition, made waves rather than just sailing on them, took the threat of the torpedo and the mine seriously rather than writing them off as children's toys, and they sullied the paint with gunnery practice. Innovators didn't get anywhere unless they had a lot of pull at the Admiralty or in Parliament, both of which were basically external manifestations of the British establishment, and fortunately for Tryon, he had both. Tryon was unusual because he came from precisely that sort of conservative school-tie background, and yet he was an innovator who was deeply interested in technical matters and the nuts and bolts of the Navy—literally as well as figuratively-- as well as in developing modern theories of naval warfare. A later British commander, General Bernard Montgomery, was fond of saying that "One has to be a bit of a cad to succeed in the Army. I am a bit of a cad." Rear Admiral Tryon was, indeed, a bit of a cad, but by all accounts he had to be in order to overcome the inertia of the Navy's status quo.

One of Tryon's major innovations was a new system for using signaling flags, one less rigorous and detailed than the standard system, which time-consumingly spelled out everything the fleet was supposed to do. Tryon's system essentially put the flagship first in line and ordered all following ships to emulate its movements as best each captain could. This was a bit of a shock to his subordinates, who were used to very specific instructions and rigid, almost ritualized battle plans and tactics, but Tryon and many of the more forward-thinking officers in the fleet understood full well that such rigidity would be disastrous in the event of an actual battle, when the huge clouds of coal smoke and gun-smoke that ships belched out would blanket everything like thick fog, and when events would change very rapidly.

In June of 1893, Admiral Tryon and the eleven warships (eight battleships and three large cruisers) that formed the main strength of the Mediterranean Fleet were on their annual summer exercises, cruising five miles off the coast of what is now Lebanon, then a province of the moldering Ottoman Empire. On the night of June 21, the admiral discussed with his officers a complicated exercise that he planned to conduct the following day—to make things easier on them, the fleet would use the old, standard signaling system, rather than Tryon's new one.

The overall plan was that the fleet would divide into two columns that would sail parallel for a certain distance while 1,200 yards apart, and then when the admiral signaled, each line would turn towards the others, so that the two columns were now 400 yards apart together and headed in the exact opposite direction. It was a fairly complex evolution; yes, it would be useful in battle, for example if the enemy fleet was first spotted behind the fleet rather than in front of it, but it would also have the propaganda value of impressing the spectators watching from the nearby port of Tripoli with the Royal Navy's power and professionalism.

Some of the officers objected, pointing out that the battleships each had a turning radius of 800 feet, and that a distance of 1,200 yards between columns would not allow the ships enough room to maneuver. Several officers, including Tryon's second in command and the captain of his flagship, suggested that the columns should start out 1,600 or 2,000 yards apart in order to avoid a collision, which Tryon initially agreed to. Anyone who can do basic math, Victorian naval officer or not, can understand that two 800-yard distances are going to add up to more than 1,200 yards, and therefore that the ships would cross paths.

Admiral Tryon would lead one column in his flagship, HMS Victoria, named after the queen (the ship was, in fact, launched during the 50^th anniversary of the queen taking the throne). His second in command, Rear Admiral Sir Albert Markham, would lead the second column in HMS Camperdown.

Markham was a competent commander, albeit rigid and old-fashioned, and although he was well-liked by his subordinates, he did not get along well with Tryon. Moreover, Markham was both a bit of a recluse who rarely left his quarters and something of a time-server; he was waiting for retirement, and arguably more interested in his hobbies of archaeology and natural history than he was in naval matters—he had some fame for explorations he had done in the Arctic.

HMS Victoria

Admiral Tryon's flagship, HMS Victoria, was theoretically one of the most powerful ships afloat at the time; completed in 1890 (over five years after she was begun, incidentally), she displaced almost 12,000 tons, carried a crew of 630 men (hammocks for the ratings and luxurious quarters for an admiral), was heavily armored, and had the latest triple-expansion steam engines for a notional maximum speed of about 17 knots, or just under 20 miles per hour. Her most conspicuous feature was her armament: two enormous 16.25" guns in a forward turret, the largest guns in the Royal Navy, in addition to a 10-inch gun aft and batteries of smaller weapons. The ship's design had originally called for the standard 13.5" main guns rather than this pair of cumbersome titans—each gun weighed 110 tons, almost 40 tons more than the weapons originally called for-- but the Royal Navy had shoehorned them in with an eye towards countering a series of new French and Italian battleships. In doing so, however, they didn't compensate for the increased weight of the guns and the changes to the ship's center of gravity; when combined with the ship's low freeboard—her main deck was only ten feet above the waterline, in order to minimize the potential target area—she had serious stability and handling problems. Even by the standards of the day Victoria's main guns were very slow to fire (five minutes to reload, even with a trained crew), woefully inaccurate, and short-ranged. They also wore out after firing 75 rounds, and were so poorly-balanced that they made the ship list when trained out to fire a broadside, but at point-blank range they could blast holes in anything afloat. Besides—size matters.

Granted, point-blank was the only range at which they stood an even chance of hitting the target. Royal Navy gunners usually had an allowance of only six live practice rounds per gun per year—the rest of the time the crew went through the motions and yelled "BANG." Admiral Percy Scott, the Royal Navy's chief advocate of scientific gunnery, was actually shunted into a desk job after a notorious 1907 quarrel with his subordinates and superiors (including Admiral Lord Beresford) over whether gunnery practice was more important than keeping a ship's paint clean and showy—the dispute went all the way up the chain of command to Parliament. At the battle of Santiago de Cuba in 1898, the United States Navy, which used weapons and gunnery methods generally comparable to those of the Royal Navy, fired off some 6,000 rounds in less than two hours, but scored only 130 hits, for a hit rate of a pathetic 2.16%.

HMS Camperdown

HMS Camperdown was a year older and a thousand tons smaller than Victoria, displacing 10,600 tons, crewed by 530 men, and with a notional maximum speed of about 17 knots. While not quite as impressive on paper as Victoria she was, on balance, a better design in practical terms. Rather than two enormous guns in a single turret, she had four 13.5" guns in twin mounts fore and aft, as well as much better handling and sea-keeping qualities, all without sacrificing protection—her armor was up to a foot and a half thick.

For all that they were modern ships at the time, both of these ships could fairly be described as underpowered and decidedly clumsy—armor and firepower took precedence over speed, and most of the hydrodynamic principles (such as drag) that governed the speed of ships were still being worked out in laboratories. Each ship had a normal turning radius of 800 yards, and required several minutes to make changes in direction and speed.

Each battleship was also fitted with a ram, a reinforced underwater knuckle extending from the bow and intended to be used for ramming enemy ships in close combat. Ironically, one of the lessons drawn from the American Civil War (along with railroad logistics, armored warships, telegraph communications, hot-air balloons for artillery spotting, and so on) was that the steam engine had restored to the warship the ability to ram an enemy in a useful and destructive fashion, something that had been given up when sailing ships had eclipsed oared galleys as the primary warship three or four hundred years earlier. This lesson had been somewhat confirmed by the Battle of Lissa in 1866, when the outgunned Habsburg fleet managed to sink two major Italian warships through ramming. The result was that for the next fifty years most battleships continued to have rams built into their bows, even though guns soon became so powerful that even armored warships would have been shot to bits before managing to ram an enemy; even Camperdown's 13.5" guns fired 1,250 pound shells that could punch through two feet of steel armor at a range of half a mile.

On June 22, the eleven ships of the Tryon's squadron were chugging along at eight knots, and at Tryon's signal they started the exercise around 3 PM. Despite the discussion the previous night, for reasons unknown Tryon ordered the columns to close to a distance of 1,200 yards before commencing the turn, and when questioned as to whether this order was correct, he snapped that it was. Rear-Admiral Markham hesitated before passing Tryon's order on to his own column, but a second signal from Victoria read "well, what are you waiting for?" and so Markham repeated an order he knew to be dangerous, sending back a signal to Victoria reading "because I did not quite understand your signal."

Victoria and Camperdown accordingly turned towards each other at a speed of about eight knots, and it soon became painfully obvious that the ships would pass close to each other, if not actually collide. Victoria's commander, Captain Bourke, repeatedly asked Admiral Tryon if he might not reverse engines and abort the maneuver, but only after three requests did Tryon grant it, and by then it was much too late—the ships were within mere yards of each other and a collision was unavoidable.

Camperdown's ram punched nine feet deep into Victoria's hull and tore a 100-square foot gash in the flagship's side, all of it below the waterline. Camperdown lurched backwards as her engines reversed, pulling her clear of Victoria with a mighty wrench, as the rest of the fleet frantically sought to avoid colliding with the two damaged ships or each other. Water poured into the stricken Victoria like a tidal wave, so rapidly that there was no time to close the watertight doors. Within five minutes her entire bow was underwater and water was pouring through the gunports of her turret.

Victoria went to the bottom within fifteen minutes of the collision, so rapidly that there was no time for many of her crew to abandon ship. Of the 715 men aboard at the time, 357 were rescued and 358 died. Admiral Tryon refused to leave the bridge and went down with his flagship; accounts presented during the ensuing investigation and court-martial described Tryon as standing on the bridge as if in shock, unresponsive and repeatedly muttering "it's all my fault."

Victoria sank in about eighty fathoms (almost 500 feet) of water. She hit the bottom bow-first and oddly enough she stuck there like that, with two-thirds of her length buried in the mud of the seabed and her stern pointing vertically skywards. The wreck was discovered by divers in September 2004.

HMS Nile (left) picking up survivors of the sinking Victoria (right)

Camperdown almost went down too. She was nearly as badly maimed as Victoria; most of her forward sections were flooded with hundreds of tons of seawater, and her ram was nearly wrenched off. Her crew managed to construct a cofferdam and seal off the damaged section of the hull, but it was a terrifyingly near-run thing for all aboard.

The officers on each ship were trained and experienced professionals, and whether or not they were old-fashioned or innovators, they knew the turning radii and distances involved, and knew full well that such a maneuver at these distances meant that a collision was all to likely. The inexcusable thing, however, is that all of them, even the ones who had pointed out the flaws in Tryon's plan the night before, obeyed the order even though the danger was perfectly apparent. The very same rigid obedience that Tryon was attempting to train his fleet out of contributed to this disaster, because the officers followed orders they knew to be flawed.

This collision and the loss of HMS Victoria wasn't a unique event—in fact, a very similar event had occurred in September 1875, when one battleship, HMS Iron Duke, accidentally rammed and sank another, HMS Vanguard, outside Dublin Bay on the Irish coast. The difference here was that the Victoria/Camperdown collision had happened in broad daylight, five miles off the coast of a major port, and essentially on the world stage. The loss of a prestigious battleship costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, resulting in the deaths of half of her crew and the fleet's admiral, were a serious embarrassment for the Royal Navy, one that was ultimately due mostly to human error on the part of Tryon, and the blind obedience of his subordinates who essentially followed him off a cliff. The late Tryon was blamed for the disaster during the ensuing court-martial; Bourke and Markham were let off with gentle reprimands, with the court noting that it would be dangerous to blame officers for following the orders of their superiors.

Between 1865 and 1904, the world's major navies lost more warships to human error than to enemy action. Possibly the most notorious of these incidents was the destruction of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in February, 1898. Government and media alike howled that it was the result of Spanish action, sparking a war between the United States and Spain. Although there is no complete consensus on what exactly blew the ship apart, a 1976 investigation conducted under the auspices of Admiral Hyman Rickover concluded that an accident could have detonated the ammunition stored in the ship's forward magazine. Whether it was enemy action or an accident, it gave the jingoistic factions in the United States—including many in what would later be identified as the military-industrial complex—an excuse to launch the county on an ill-planned, hastily-organized venture into imperialism.

As Mark Twain noted, 'history does not repeat, but it does rhyme."

When Worlds (and brains) Collide

when worlds (and brains) collide....

If you've read my profile, you'll know that I'm a liberal-arts type who somehow wound up working in a science and engineering field. This is pretty unusual. Popular psychology splits things into two halves-- science types are stereotyped as hyper-analytical, literally-minded left-brain types, while liberal arts types are considered to be artistic, creative, and generally warmer-and-fuzzier right-brain types. I know plenty of people with science degrees who wound up working in sales or administrative jobs that could be performed by lib arts types, but very few cases like me; the popular mind seems to think it's easier for a scientist to slack off and pick up right-brain stuff for fun than it is for a right-brain type to adapt to the science field. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't—I have no problem with absorbing information and applying scientific theories and methods, but I struggle with math every day.

Personally, I think the distinction between these two 'halves' is not as great as is generally perceived, and I'd wager good odds that someone with a healthy native intelligence and a good work ethic could succeed in either field. Consider the number of figures in history who excelled at both—Da Vinci, for one, or Sir Christopher Wren. So-called 'renaissance men' were acclaimed because they were whizzes at everything, not just one particular thing, and the whole 'Encyclopedie' project of the French Enlightenment was aimed at assembling all the world's knowledge within a single compendium that everyone could use—the encyclopedia. Somewhere there is a theoretical physicist who is writing poetry, and an English major who is reading A Brief History of Time for fun. I myself have two books on my desk; one is Farley Mowat's "The Grey Seas Under," and the other is Freeze and Cherry's 'Groundwater.' This isn't a dichotomy, it's a mishmash.

Granted, I know many science and engineering types are quite patriotic, so to speak, when it comes to their disciplines, and proud of their skills and knowledge. I intend no slight; all that math and lab work probably really *is* much more challenging than your typical art, sociology, education, business, or psych major's curriculum, and engineering or medicine require an attention to detail that is orders of magnitude beyond anything required of an MBA or high school English teacher.

I have, however, become very conscious over the past few years of the big differences in the approaches that left-brain 'science' people and right-brain 'liberal arts' people take towards the world and the things in it, particularly regarding communications and technology. Broadly speaking, left-brain types seek to design the best technology they can, and generally shortchange the aesthetics and user-friendliness of the thing to the extent that the average person can't easily use it, and right-brain types are more likely to come up with something that looks nice and is accessible to the average person, but which may not actually work. I mean, I know search engine optimization makes the InterSystemoftubesWeb go round these days, but the need for balance still applies—sometimes including too many search terms on your page will give you a lot of hits, but if it's gibberish, nobody will actually read it.

If you want the best possible system for the average person, what you need is basically a compromise between the engineering/functional ideal and the aesthetic/humanized ideal. Consider architecture—you can design a structurally sound building that is ugly and uncomfortable, in which case nobody will want to live in it, or you can design a very luxurious building that will fall over in a gentle breeze. In the real world, you need a building with a balance of each side's good qualities.

Case in point, your income tax forms. Last year there was a big squabble on the letters to the editor page of the local paper about how college educations are a waste of time if college graduates (admittedly a vague term, presumably covering everything from pre-med to dance majors) cannot complete a standard 1040 form. Does it make any sense at all to rearrange the entire educational system to train people to fill out tax forms, or are we missing the point here? If college graduates have trouble with the IRS paperwork, I'm inclined to say we need a simpler form, and probably a much simpler tax system overall.

We take for granted that some things are difficult to use when they don't need to be—VCRs or whatever should be simple enough for anyone to program. Why should they be difficult? (For that matter, why are we getting commercials on cable TV? We're basically paying the cable company to pipe advertising into our households.)

I admit it—I actually have a third book on my desk; The Human Factor, by Kim Vicente. It's basically about the stuff I've babbled about so far—Vicente calls it human factors engineering. I highly recommend it. He uses a number of scenarios to demonstrate how you have to balance the human element with the technological design—from nuclear power plants on down to mechanical lathes and VCRs. For example, the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters happened in large part because the reactor plant staff weren't getting enough info about what was going on—they didn't actually know the system was failing until it was too late to stop it. Nuclear power plants are complicated things, which is understandable, but the people who designed the plants didn't take into consideration the needs of the people who would actually be running them.

Communication is much the same—when writing reports, your stereotypical left-brain scientist conveys a lot of hard data, often using graphs or tables, but between a general lack of interest in writing skills and the reliance on technical jargon (I mean no offense, but I speak from experience), the result is often tedious and hard to assimilate. A right-brain person will produce something easily assimilated, but the details might not all be there. Someone with one foot in each 'half' would produce a report with all the data there, in an accessible and possibly even enjoyable form. In either case, you have to consider two things—the info you need to convey and the persons to whom you need to convey it. In other words, consider the reader as much as yourself. If the reader digests tables more easily than prose, include tables as well as text.

For the last several years, I've been trying to make the technical reports I write at work more accessible to the layman—because my boss is rather conservative in many respects (not that I can fault him for it) I've been presenting these changes under the rubric of 'conceptual site modeling,' which is one of the current buzzwords. I cannot sacrifice any of the information the reports have to convey, but rather I must repackage it in such a way that it is sufficiently self-explanatory that anyone from a senior DEP engineer to a bank loan officer to a 72-year-old retired construction worker can understand it. I admit this is still more of a goal than an achievement, but I'm working on it. Sometimes it's as simple as accompanying each contamination data table with a sentence or two which presents the same information in prose, adding explanations of jargon, using pictures to show the thing in question, or adding a paragraph explaining what a Method 1 Risk Characterization is.

This is even more important when giving direct instructions than, say, writing a report—if you're giving orders, you need to be sure that the recipient actually knows what to do and why they should do it. The biggest problem I had in the first year of my current job was that expectations and reasons for things were not made clear, so I was adrift for much of the time in a sea of rules, regulations, report formats, and other things without being entirely sure what applied where, or what was important and what was not. I was able to do my job with a reasonable degree of competence, but it was much harder than it should have been, everything took longer, and we routinely went over-budget.

If you make your orders or requests clear enough, everything will go well. This doesn't mean repeating the whole list of instructions each time; in fact, you shouldn't need to do that, and you should be able to make things clear in advance. This is the basis of boot camp military training—instructing people in how to march, shoot, and so on so that in the future officers can shout something like "forward march" rather than explaining time and again how to march in formation.

There is a vignette out of ancient Chinese history that illustrates this point perfectly. The King of Wu invited General Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, to demonstrate some of his principles. The king provided a couple hundred concubines, to whom the general explained 'right face,' 'left face' and so on. After lining them up in ranks and files, the general shouted 'right face,' only to have the girls stare at him and giggle. The general explained things again, saying to the king that if the orders are not clear, the commander who gave the orders is at fault. Sun Tzu shouted 'right face' again and still the girls just stood there and giggled. This time the general told the king that the orders have been explained but that the troops refused to obey; it is the troops' fault. Two concubines, who had been appointed 'officers' were then executed pour encourager les autres. The third time the general shouted 'right face,' the concubines obeyed.

Valentine's Day

VALENTINE'S

DAY

SUCKS!!!