Chris Has Stepped Out

Madeleine Albright and Dr. Funkenstein Say Hi

Last week I attended a lecture by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and a concert by George Clinton and Parliament. And while I can’t say that the two events resembled each other -- for one, the smell of pot did not linger in the air at the Albright gig as it did during the Parliament show -- I can report that Dr. Albright and Dr. Funkenstein both offered scathing reviews of the Bush Administration and messages of hope for humanity.

Madeleine Albright has long been one of my favorite public figures. I tend to agree with her politics and as much to the point, she’s always struck me as not just incredibly smart but also incredibly sane. She’s also rightfully well-known for her wit, though she never lets her impeccable comic timing overshadow her arguments. She also can, by her own admission, leg-press 400 pounds, so she’s tough in even more ways than you’d expect.

Her presentation at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last week was largely a passionate and well-articulated criticism of the Bush Administration,  specifically its handling of the war in Iraq. President Bush has left himself and thus our country with “no good options,” she said. Our soldiers are now mired in a civil war that renders them unable to discern who is friend or foe and so “they don’t know who to shoot at until they’re shot at first, which is untenable.”

She also discussed Russia, China, Kosovo, Darfur, Sudan, New Orleans and the growing gap between the rich and the poor in this country, but inevitably kept returning to the President and the damage she believes he has done to the country’s stature and influence as a world leader. Among her accusations: destabilizing the Middle East, ceding our country’s moral authority through the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, severely straining relations with our European allies and squandering diplomatic gains of the Clinton Administration, such as those with Kim Jong Il. Infusing a bit of levity into things, Albright, who met with the Dear Leader to negotiate the discontinuation of his nuclear missile program added, “Our intelligence on him was totally wrong. They told me he was crazy and a pervert. He’s not crazy.”

I’ll admit I’ve been a George Clinton and Parliament fan a lot longer than I’ve been an Albright admirer -- pretty much since they first started cranking out the funk hits in the late 1970s. For a fair number of us of a certain age and sensibility, it takes nothing more than the first few bars of “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” or “Flashlight” to make us freeze in our tracks, drop whatever we may be holding and begin to dance.

I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that the show was smokin’ -- really one of the best I’ve ever been to. The Parliament lineup has morphed over the years (alas, I’ve never seen Bootsy Collins perform as part of the band) but it’s still a huge menagerie of guitars, horns, drums, bass and synthesizers -- at least a dozen people onstage at any given time -- with the requisite outrageous costumes, dancers and freaks. There were feathers and short-shorts and a male guitarist in a wedding gown and of course George was sporting his hot pink and blue dreadlocks.

The humor that I love so much has tended to overshadow the insanely excellent and innovative musicianship of Clinton and the band. They were in full force last week, storming through an extraordinary set that spanned 30 years of rock, funk and R&B and lasted almost four hours without a break. It seemed as if they would never stop the show.

Clinton formed his bands in part as political expression in the late 1960s and there has always been a political current running between the psychedelia and bass line of his music. Just listen to Chocolate City sometime. Indeed, midway through last week’s show, one of his guitarists hoisted a banner over his head that read, “F*** Bush.” Raw, yes, but the crowd roared. And, really, though Albright’s version was far more articulate and substantive and offered actual solutions, her assessment of the President was not much different from Clinton’s. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially she said, “We have two more years of this guy and then hopefully we'll be able to begin undoing some of the damage he has wrought.” And the Dorothy Chandler crowd was no less noisy in its approval of that sentiment than the Parliament audience.

Both Madeleine and George in their very different ways also communicate a fundamental belief that the world can become a better place. As Albright told the crowd, her deep commitment to this country and its people was formed when, upon arriving as a young Czech immigrant, she found herself wholly and unequivocally accepted. Since then she has always wanted to give something back and believes that while the world’s problems are extraordinarily difficult, not all of them are intractable. In other words, there is hope. George’s version may seem of another planet and surely incorporates the word “booty” much more frequently, but there really is a consistency. Ironically, hardly anyone has had their words and music sampled as heavily by hip hop artists and rappers, yet his music has never been about guns and misogyny. His is a language of pleasure, but also of empowerment and faith in the human spirit. As George himself has said -- and I expect Madeleine would concur -- “You don’t need the bullet when you’ve got the ballot.”

The Retiring Life

It’s been almost five years since I moved into my house in Menlo Park and despite the fact that I’m now spending the majority of my time in Los Angeles, I’ve decided to keep this place. It doesn’t make the most economic sense but, frankly, I don’t care. I really like the house and the neighborhood will make a better place than most to live when I retire. Why am I so sure about that? Because of the approximately 200 people who live here, the vast majority are in their 60s and 70s and so I have a lot of reliable firsthand research.

Four of us kids who are in our 40s happen to live just a few houses apart and from time to time we stand under the oak tree in the middle of our street  and discuss this topic.

Nick and Dave live three doors down and bought their house a year before I moved in. Gary lives across the street and has, incredibly, lived here since the development was built 20 years ago when he was just out of college. We were all attracted by the views, the lack of crime, our low-maintenance houses, the utter quiet and the close proximity to both Palo Alto and San Francisco. Gary says he was young and clueless when he bought his house and Nick, Dave and I agree that we were so terrorized by the price of our homes that it wasn’t until after we moved in that we noticed other key details, such as the fact that we were living in what was essentially a retirement community.

But none of us has any regrets. And I’ve learned a lot about growing old by living in this neighborhood.

For example, I’ve learned that if you have a bit of luck and a good investment plan, your retirement really can be one long vacation. A lot of my older neighbors travel often to exotic places or have another house somewhere else in the desert or at the beach or in the mountains. And when they’re around they’re either pulling golf clubs out of their cars after an afternoon round or talking about their painting or cooking classes or the book they’re writing. Suffice it to say that a lot of them are having way more fun than any of us and they’re totally unrepentant about it. It’s something to aspire to.

And if my neighbors are any indicator, we’ll all still be trying to stay in some sort of decent shape when we’re old. There’s a handful of them who play tennis religiously a few times a week. The community tennis court is around the corner from my house and almost every Saturday morning I can hear the steady poink poink poink of the tennis ball getting hit back and forth across the net. It’s a comforting sound, punctuated occasionally by screams of anguish as someone hits a backhand wide or gets nailed in the gut by a brutal volley. The rest of my neighbors just walk -- like fiends. They’re the walkingest bunch of people I’ve ever seen in my life. As soon as the sun comes up there’s at least a half-dozen of them storming around the neighborhood wearing big, puffy New Balance walking sneakers. And the parade of walkers, all wearing sun hats, continues all day long.

Moreover, my neighbors prove that most of us will try desperately to keep ourselves together physically as long as possible. I have one neighbor who looks to be in his late 70s and who makes his way past my house a few mornings a week. Everything about his demeanor and outfit indicates that he’s out for a run. Except that he is bent in the shape of a backwards “C” and really can’t move his legs any higher or faster than a shuffle. It makes my heart squeeze tight for some reason  -- fear? dread? -- every time I see him but I don’t do anything except pick up my newspaper from the driveway and say “good morning.”

And then there’s the inevitable point where you simply can’t maintain yourself physically anymore. Houses don’t come on the market very often in my neighborhood but when they do it’s almost always for the same reason: The owners are simply too old and frail to live there independently anymore and they are moving into an assisted living facility. Or they died. Most often it is the husband who passes away first. Some of the wives stay in the neighborhood. I’ll see them walking in the morning, only one when there used to be two. Others move, the prospect of living alone in that house unbearable. The kids manage the sale and usually a recently retired couple in their 60s buys it. That’s the cycle.

It’s sobering, how life ends. If you live in a more typical neighborhood it’s easy to ignore but this is my neighborhood and so I see it more often and thus can’t help thinking about it sometimes.

Nick and Dave and Gary and I might consider moving because of this generational gap, but interestingly enough, we’ve all kind of dug in. Nick and Dave gutted their house and remodeled it so spectacularly and so beyond the price point of the neighborhood I can’t see how they can ever leave. And Gary last year bought the place next to his and is working on the architectural plans to combine them into one giant mirror-image house. It’s as cheerily and defiantly ridiculous as it sounds and the result will be a 5,000-square-foot bachelor party palace, with plenty of room for a pool table, foosball, the screening room, the spa and the massive chef’s kitchen.  The entire neighborhood is waiting in great anticipation for construction to begin because it’s Gary who throws the raucous neighborhood Christmas party at his house every year. And as most of you know I’ve redone a lot of my house and that work continues.

So we’re here. We all joke that in 40 years we’ll all roll our wheelchairs down the hill, right into the very new, very luxurious assisted living center across the street from Stanford University, where two of our neighbors recently moved. Until then, I have to say that I’ll probably live my life a bit differently than I would have otherwise if I hadn’t moved into this neighborhood. I’ll try to retire earlier, for sure. I’ll try to have as much fun and as many adventures as I possibly can for as long as I can. Because even if life is long, it’s too short.