Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I bought my ticket back to California on Virgin America a few months ago and was really psyched about it. The cabin description sounded excellent, and the fact that they let me pay $25 up front to reserve a bulkhead seat with extra leg room was a big win. Here are some more impressions after flying with them.

The pre-flight safety speech was pretty funny – “If you are part of the 0.001 percent of the population who have never used a seat belt before…” If I flew them all the time, it would probably get old, but the variation on the standard speech (while still covering the same material) was nice.

The inflight entertainment system is excellent. I loved it.

• They had satellite TV to watch, plus two dozen TV shows available without commercials for immediate play – I watched a couple episodes of Dexter since I’d heard good things about the show.
• The music selection of MP3s was decent – I listened to tracks from a couple artists I’d heard about but didn’t know the music of.
• Decent movie selection (I chose The Bourne Ultimatum but there were several I would have been happy to watch). Movies were $8, but it was nice that I could watch it at my own pace without worrying about falling asleep or when it was starting or anything. I could just pause it, take a break, etc.
• Food at my convenience. It was so civilized that I could order the food I wanted when I wanted it. It was $10, but I ordered a sandwich and chips when I started watching my movie, and my meal showed up less than 10 minures into the movie. It felt almost like the Parkway theater.
• The games were pretty cheesy 2002 shareware games, and I didn’t try the “inflight chat” option.

Unfortunately, all of the goodwilll generated by the entertainment system was thrown away completely by the fact that the flight was delayed three and a half hours. It was scheduled to depart at 6:35pm, boarded after 9pm, and then sat on the runway and didn’t actually take off until after 10pm. We didn’t get in until close to 2am Pacific time, and then there was only one ground crew working so we had to wait 20 or 30 minutes for our bags. A friend of mine who had also had delay issues with Virgin America theorized that they get low runway priority since they are a new airline, and that makes sense but is unfortunate.

It actually made me think of the Peak book and its pyramids. No matter how much the inflight entertainment system delighted me, if my base pyramid needs of getting to where I’m trying to go in a timely fashion aren’t met, then I won’t be happy as a customer. So Virgin America has some work to do.

It’s not a good sign for the airline industry as a whole that I ended up thinking fondly of my Greyhound bus experience. The Greyhound may be crowded and slow and sometimes late, but I can literally just walk into the station and hop on a bus 5 minutes later which is wonderfully convenient. For this flight, I had to spend an hour commuting to the airport. Then I forgot to pull my laptop out of my bag before security, so I got pulled over and they had to do a full bag search. And then my flight was delayed hours. I’ll stick to the bus and train whenever possible, I think.

It’s finally fall in New York. It was still in the 70s last weekend, but rain rolled through during the week, and today is a perfect fall day, sunny and in the 50s.

People say they couldn’t live without seasons, but I have to admit that the only season I missed in the ten years I lived in California was fall. I could get the fun part of winter by going to Tahoe, I never liked hot, humid summers, and Bay Area weather is basically spring ten months a year. But there’s something about fall: being chilly but not cold, the air having a crisp bite to it.

I wonder if I’ll be able to make the time to go out and spend an afternoon out in the trees, scuffling my feet through fallen leaves. I used to love heading out to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston at this time of year, looking at the changing foliage, climbing trees and the like.

I took a walk this morning to take advantage of the weather. I headed out to the Hudson river path with a brisk wind blowing through my hair, needing my new fleece for the first time this fall.

I had an ulterior motive for the walk – it gave me an excuse to head up to H&H Bagels. I got some bagels that were still hot from the oven, and let me tell you, having a hot, fresh bagel is a wonderful experience. Wandering through the streets of New York on a beautiful fall day eating yummy fresh bagels? Sometimes my life isn’t so bad.

Speaking of great New York experiences, my friend Sasha organized a trip to go ice skating on Thursday. We were originally going to go to Rockefeller Center, but it was closed for a special event, so we redirected to Wollman Rink in Central Park.

I think I’ve only gone skating once in the past five years or something. But it was a blast flying around the rink and awakening long dormant muscle memory.

I had one of those “Holy crap, I’m in New York!” moments while there, looking out at the willow trees overhanging the rink, with trees and a pond beyond the rink, and the lights and buildings of New York rising above everything. It was another reminder of why I’m in New York – it really does feel like being in a movie occasionally.

I’ve been meaning to post, but can’t quite put together anything coherent right now.

Things are hopping at work as we beta test the new release of our software, so that’s been keeping me busy. Speaking of work, if you want to see where I spend all day, stop by the Fog Creek Open House tomorrow (Thursday, July 19th) from 5-7pm.

Summer in New York also has too many events to attend:

• Last Friday was the House Jacks at the Bitter End.
• Last night was the Philharmonic concert in Central Park.
• This Friday there’s not one, but two, likeminds: the normal morning one, and a special anniversary evening one.
• Saturday is the Village Voice Siren Music Festival at Coney Island, which I may skip in favor of going to MOMA to see the Richard Serra exhibit with friends instead.
• I may not make it to the Brooklyn Philharmonic Vivaldi/Piazzolla concerts next week either, despite really liking the work of Piazzolla, the Argentine tango master.
• Next week is also the first street mining expedition, which looks like fun.

And that’s not even counting the other museums I want to get to. Or musicals or plays I’ve been meaning to see. Or the stack of books I have piled up. Or movies I want to see. Or blog posts I want to write. Or experimenting with “social physics”. Or or or…

I’ve got only a month and a half before classes start up again! Where did the summer go?!

If anybody out there is interested in joining me on one of these adventures (or just wants to have coffee and talk about life), drop me a line.

A couple years ago, I wandered into a small gallery in SoHo and saw a piece of art that I liked and surprisingly could afford, so I bought it. Since then, whenever I’m in the neighborhood, I stop by the Ward-Nasse gallery in hopes of another find. It turns out that the gallery is a non-profit artist-administered gallery, so artists donate their time and work to the gallery to keep it running. I think this is a worthy goal so I try to support them in their efforts.

This afternoon, I stopped by and they were having another sale of their artists’ work. I saw this photograph by Jack Shurtliff that I really liked, so I bought it. As usual, apologies for the terrible photography on my part – it looks much better in person. It’s a black-and-white photograph, and I initially thought it was an X-ray of a human ribcage. Looking closer revealed that it was actually a plant backlit in some way. The ambiguity appealed to me – the initial impression that I was looking at one thing which then resolves to another seems very apropos to this blog. Shurtliff is apparently a member artist of Ward-Nasse so I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future.

The artists’ sale continues throughout the month of April, so I recommend stopping by if you’re looking for affordable art in New York.

While I was down in Soho, I stopped by the Housing Works Used Book Cafe, which I’ve mentioned before. It was extraordinarily crowded, which I ascribed to it being a Saturday afternoon. But when I checked out (I saw the novel Con Ed, recommended by Seth Godin), it turned out that the first weekend of each month, everything is marked a further 30% off. Such a deal. I’ll have to remember that for the future (and am putting it up here so that others know as well).

This evening I went to go see So Percussion perform Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. Long-time readers will remember that I’m a complete nut for Reich’s work, so I was looking forward to seeing it again, especially since the other So Percussion concert I’d been to was enjoyable. Alas, I was incredibly disappointed.

My expectations were clearly too high going in. I’d only seen 18 performed by Steve Reich’s ensemble, a group that has been performing the piece for 30 years, and has it polished to an incredible level of perfection. Their total mastery of the piece and comfort with its rhythms allowed them to move beyond the performance into this whole other space of art and meaning.

Given my recent posts, it’s probably not surprising that my thoughts during the performance tied this back into management. It’s another illustration that no matter how great the plan is, the team must execute for the plan to work. In this case, I know this is a great piece, and I love the ways in which the chords build on themselves and the interplay between the different instruments. And when it’s performed as intended, it’s a spiritual experience for me. But when the same piece is performed short of perfection, it falls apart into a disjointed set of bangings. Execution matters. Experience matters. Deliberate practice matters.

So why did the performance not work for me? A few things I noticed:

• The tempo was set just a bit fast, and they seemed to do each element the minimum number of times, so everything felt rushed rather than deliberate.
• The performers were excited, which is normally a good thing, but they overplayed their excitement to the point of hamminess.
• The sound mixing was off, so that the singers were sometimes inaudible and sometimes overmiked, making it hard for them to stay in tune with each other.
• The violinist was out of tune – there was one exposed string section, where her A-string was painfully flat, and she kept on playing it and I kept on cringing.
• The coordination wasn’t as tight, which isn’t surprising since the performers had come together for this one set of performances, but there was some noticeable awkwardness compared to the Reich ensemble.

Nothing major. No one thing that leaped out at me and ruined the performance. It was a combination of little things that didn’t quite fit.

This relates to one of the points I made in my last post, where I stated that a team can be greater than the sum of its parts. And when everything locks into place, the results are amazing. The musical analogy I came up with is the overtone series. When a chord is perfectly in tune, you can actually hear the higher order harmonics audibly. If any element of the chord is just slightly out of tune, the chord will still sound okay, but you lose the spine-tingling harmonics. Listening to a chorus like the Tallis Scholars is great because they nail their chords and all of the overtones just pop out of the texture. There are more notes being heard than are actually being sung.

Something similar happens in a well-functioning team. When everybody is pulling together and perfectly aligned, extra output just appears from the synergistic effects of the team. One plus one plus one somehow equals four. But here’s the downside – like the overtone series, if anything is even slightly out of alignment, you lose all of that bonus.

It’s interesting to me as a student of management because it demonstrates that getting 90% of the way there means nothing. It’s only when all aspects of an organization are aligned 100% does it really take off. This reminds me of Built to Last, where the authors point out that the successful companies have built the core values of the company into every aspect of the company. Doing 90% doesn’t cut it because it raises the expectations and then doesn’t fulfill them. To take a made-up example, a company could put all the elements of an employee empowerment program in place, but if one manager micromanages their employees, it may be even more demotivating than if the company had done nothing.

I think that’s what happened at the performance tonight. It was a solid performance, and most of the audience enjoyed it. But having seen two perfect performances, where I’d seen the synergistic effect of the performers and the piece feeding on each other, this was far short of that experience. And because it was almost good enough, it was almost more frustrating than if it had been just terrible. I wanted to like it. I almost liked it. But I ended up being disappointed.

The take home lesson is contained in the post title. Notice the discordant elements in your company. If something doesn’t align with the company goals, remove it. It might seem minor, but it could be preventing synergistic organization overtones from forming. It’s like Peopleware’s description of how to build a team – first avoid all the ways in which you can prevent a team from forming, avoiding teamicide. It’s also similar to the Broken Windows theory, where fixing the little things makes it easier to fix the big things because all elements of the system are then in alignment.

Of course, the first step to figuring out which elements are discordant is figuring out what the goals are. Until you know where you want to go, you can’t align everything else. But if you know what you want to accomplish, and you remove all the obstacles, even seemingly minor ones, then great things can happen. You’ll hear those overtones pop into existence and the company will achieve greater things than you thought possible.

I’d heard of local string quartet Ethel at some other event earlier in the year, but never followed up until seeing they were giving a free concert at the World Financial Center last week.

They’re fantastic. They played a variety of new music which suited their talents, from neoclassical works (I really liked the pieces by Marcelos Zarvos, including a premiere of Double Quartet – Rounds) to more avant garde stuff.

The performance itself was in the Winter Garden, a large atrium with palm trees. The quartet started at one end of the hall, played a few pieces, and then started moving around. Their instruments were wirelessly miked, so they could move around at will, and they played from several configurations, including one set with each player on a different atrium side, and another with two of them playing from the balconies. It was a neat effect, and I was impressed with how well coordinated they remained despite the physical distance between them; even though they had earphones, it’s still difficult to stay in sync without visual contact.

After the performance, I bought
their most recent album Light and have been listening to it about once a day, and enjoying it a lot. Amazon calls it the third best classical album of 2006. If you’re a classical fan, I encourage you to check them out.

A month ago or so, somebody wrote me. They had been looking for information on El Nino by John Adams, came across my account of it, noticed that I was now living in New York, and suggested that I check out the New Amsterdam Singers, where a friend of theirs sang. Intrigued, I checked out the website, noticed they had a concert of Renaissance music coming up, and went to go see it last night.

It was lovely. I was very impressed with the chorus. It was bigger than I expected for an a cappella classical chorus, at about 70 singers, but very good. I’d gone to see another chorus earlier this spring and was very disappointed because I’m a snob, so it was great to see a chorus that was unified in tone, with great diction, who actually looked up from their music, etc. It’s definitely a group I would consider singing with if I had time to join a chorus.

I was also impressed with the repertoire choices. I sang in various a cappella chamber choruses for something like ten years of my life, so I’ve done a lot of the standard repertoire, yet I had only sung one piece on the program. Coming in, I had been most excited to see the Victoria Salve Regina, as Victoria is one of my favorite composers, but that piece didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Fortunately, there was a lot of other great music on the program, including a couple Handl motets, Senfl’s Ave Maria, gratia plena, Tomkins’s When David Heard, and the concluding Buxtehude Missa Brevis. So definite props to Clara Longstreth, the conductor, for finding interesting music in a space I thought I knew well.

P.S. I was sitting in the concert last night, and realized that the past ten months is the longest I have gone without singing in a chorus since my junior year of high school, when I first joined a chorus. I definitely missed it last night. Getting to do something right-brained regularly was good for me.

Last night I opened up my copy of Time Out New York for the first time in a couple months. I have a subscription, but I’ve been so busy with classes, that I was basically tossing it in the recycling as soon as I got it. But I’m done with classes (yay!), so I flipped it open to see what was happening this weekend.

One of the first things I saw was that Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) were performing Duke Ellington’s version of the Nutcracker Suite at Lincoln Center this weekend with the New York Philharmonic. Um, wow. I’ve been a fan of Marsalis for a while, and my respect for him and his orchestra skyrocketed after performing his piece All Rise. But the concert was at Lincoln Center and the tickets were kind of expensive.

I was hemming and hawing, and decided to go check out the web page this morning to learn more about the show. Then I saw the magic words: “Student Rush Tickets”. $12 for day-of seats, available online, and I’ve got my Columbia ID now! That made it a no brainer.

The first half of the concert was kind of eh. El Salon Mexico, by Aaron Copland (which was pretty identifiably Copland from the first two bars), and Symphony No. 2, by Christopher Rouse, who was in the audience.

The second half was awesome, though. The way they did it was that the New York Philharmonic played the original piece, as Tchaikovsky wrote it. Then the JLCO played it Ellington’s way. It made for a tremendously satisfying musical experience. I know the Nutcracker Suite really well, of course, and it was fun to hear the old standard again, even if it is kind of precious.

But then hearing how Ellington riffed on the themes was awesome. One of the things that I knew intellectually about jazz was that it’s about riffing off standard tunes and taking them in new and unexpected directions. But because everybody is riffing, you often only get a couple snippets of the tune, and if you’re somebody like me that’s not familiar with the original , you don’t appreciate the artistry of what they’re constructing. So hearing the original tune straight-up and then the expanded jazz version really made me appreciate what Ellington had done, and how he’d taken the themes of the Nutcracker and done interesting things with them. It was very cool, and of course the JLCO are excellent excellent musicians.

Then afterwards, of course they got a standing ovation, so we got an encore. Yay! And because the conductor had mentioned earlier in the performance that today was the 164th birthday of the New York Philharmonic, the JLCO played Happy Birthday jazz-style. And, again, because the original tune is so familiar, I was better able to catch all the references to it, the riffs off of it, etc. Wynton threw a tremendous trumpet solo in the middle too. Man, he’s amazing.

We kept clapping after that, so we got a second encore. This one they did what they did in San Francisco, where they got a couple of the orchestra members involved, with one of the basses playing the bass line, a trombone player doing a solo, and then the bass player facing off with the JLCO bass in a bass solo contest. Fun fun stuff – I’d seen it before, but it’s still entertaining.

Very cool evening – I would have been happy to pay full price for these tickets, so to have gotten them for $12 is truly ridiculous. Plus, they didn’t check my student ID when I picked them up! Such a deal!

P.S. In other news, I am a total snob. I was really disappointed by the quality of the New York Philharmonic. I know this is a holiday concert, so it’s not the best players, but the playing was downright sloppy in places. Some of that can be blamed on the conductor, who wasn’t very clear, but there were lots of bits where the section wasn’t even together with itself. I’m a bit biased because I performed with them, but I think the San Francisco Symphony is definitely better – better unity, better tone quality, better musicality. Plus MTT rocks, of course.

It’s interesting to me how having gotten the chance to experience some really great stuff like the French Laundry or the chorus has really spoiled my ability to enjoy merely good stuff. When you’ve had the best, the good doesn’t quite satisfy any more. Alas. I know, I know, tough life.

P.P.S. I think I have some sort of event or outing planned every night for the next five days. Think I was ready to be done with classes?

So that plan of mine to post every day during November? Somehow that stopped.

Class is almost done. I had a big presentation due this week in one class, and next week I have to turn in a take-home final, and the final version of master’s project proposal, and then I’ll be done with my first semester as a Columbia student. Yay! Then I have one month of “vacation” where all I have to do is work full-time, so I’m looking for fun things to do with my “time off”.

The “vacation” unexpectedly started early. On Monday afternoon, my friend Dylan called me up and said that he was in town from Milwaukee and we should hang out. I said I’d love to see him, but I had this big presentation due, and I was meeting my study group Monday evening, and had class Tuesday evening, and the presentation on Wednesday evening, and he left Thursday morning, so I didn’t see how it was possible. We agreed to hang out next time.

Also on Monday afternoon, my friends N and C from the San Francisco Symphony Chorus called me and said “Hey, we’re in Central Park! Want to hang out in the next couple days?”, and I had to give them the same spiel. It turned out N was leaving on Wednesday morning, but C was staying through Saturday morning, so I told him I would call him Thursday to arrange time to hang out.

Wednesday evening, the presentation went really well. My group had fun with it – we decided to go for the sales Sales SALES approach of Glengarry Glen Ross, and I think it turned out nicely. During class, I got a voice mail from Dylan. When I checked it later, his message was that now that the presentation was over, I should come out and have a drink with him. After stressing about the presentation for several days, that sounded good. So I headed out and met up with him and some other folks at about 11pm at the Pegu Club (warning: Flash page). Really really nice place – expensive but the cocktails were amazing. We ended up hanging out until 2am when I managed to summon the willpower to head home so that I had some chance of making it to work by 9am the next morning.

While at the Pegu Club, though, Beth mentioned that she had an extra ticket to a show Thursday night at the Bowery Ballroom. The headline act was Rhett Miller and the Believers, of whom Beth is a big fan. So after work on Thursday, I headed out again. Dinner in the East Village, and then to the Bowery Ballroom. Great space – chill bar downstairs, nice stage upstairs. It totally felt like the kind of space where real rock’n'roll happens, especially as we got there early enough to be 5 feet from the stage.

We ended up catching the opening band, Tom Clark and the High Action Boys, who were excellent. Way fun. Songs like “Caught Blondehanded”, “New Toothbrush on the Sink”, and “First Girl After You” (all high energy breakup songs, of course) were really entertaining, and I bought the CD for them (RealAudio available on their website). They also had a couple songs which I’m looking forward to on the next CD with lyrics of “You’re not hot, you’re just good looking, and there are a lot of good looking girls in this town”, and in another song, “If that’s country, I want to know what country it’s from”. I ended up listening to the CD all day today at work, and it’s nice light music to work to.

I wasn’t as impressed with Rhett Miller, although that may be because I’m a straight guy. The women in the audience were certainly swooning . I ended up leaving a bit before midnight, even though the concert wasn’t over, because I was just dead on my feet. Plus, my socializing for the week was not yet done.

I can’t remember where I saw the link any more, but I heard about likemind a few weeks ago, and was really psyched about it. “an opportunity to enjoy coffee and conversation.” Since I love conversation, I was in. I’d been planning to go for weeks. Except it was at 8am on Friday, after having been out late the previous two nights. But I set my alarm and made it down there.

It was excellent. I met some interesting people, including Noah, one of the two guys who started it. Apparently, he and Piers had never met in person, but knew each other through their blogs, so they decided to get coffee a few months ago. Being bloggers, they posted about their plan, and about 15 people showed up. Today’s likemind was likemind #5, and about 30 people or so were there. I observed that it was enjoyable to just sit and talk to people without having an agenda. Noah pointed out that having it in the morning helped with that – after work, people are coming out of work mode and thinking about networking and stuff. At 8am, though, people are still waking up, having their first coffee of the day, and it’s much more relaxed.

So that was a good time, and I’ll definitely be going to more in the future. But I had to bail at around 9:30 to go to work. Then at work, I got back in touch with my friend C (from the beginning of the post) who relayed the plan to go hit the free Friday from 4-8pm at MOMA. So I bailed from work early to go meet up with him and catch up. We wandered through the museum for a few hours along with his friends, and then grabbed a quick dinner before he went to a recital at Carnegie Hall.

My friend Jocelyn had text messaged me earlier in the day about catching a comedy show Friday evening, but I was just too exhausted. I came home instead, wrote this post to talk about my insane week, and will now turn my brain off and watch some TV. I had also discussed doing Guggenheim First Friday this evening with another friend, but that was out too. Too many things to do in New York!

P.S. Other stuff since my last post. Friday the 17th, the day after my last post, was a housewarming party/game night, where we played Settlers and then Apples to Apples until late. Saturday the 18th I had a total body shutdown, where I woke up at 9am, took a 3 hour nap in the afternoon, and was asleep again by 9pm. Sunday the 19th involved running many errands prepping for Thanksgiving weekend, watching the Bears shut out the Jets, then doing some revisions on my master’s project proposals. Monday the 20th was more revisions, Tuesday the 21st was class.

I took the Greyhound up to Boston on the afternoon of Wednesday the 22nd; even with them running busses basically continuously, I was in line for over an hour at Port Authority, and then it took an hour for the bus to get off of Manhattan. But I eventually arrived in Hopkinton, MA, and spent a wonderfully relaxing three days doing nothing, intentionally bringing no computer and no homework. I read a couple silly mysteries, went on a walk, and reaffirmed that Brezhnev’s has the best scallion pancakes ever. And then I was back on Sunday to work on the presentation.

P.P.S. Maybe more brain-ful posts after I’m done with classes.

In September, I was walking through Greenwich Village with a friend. We were chatting away as we passed by the IFC movie theater. Suddenly he noticed that I was no longer talking, and that, in fact, I had stopped several paces behind him. I had been dumbstruck by the theater marquee which said “Buffy singalong”.

Those of you that know me are probably aware of my once-overwhelming obsession with Buffy. So the idea that a theater was doing a singalong to the musical episode of Buffy was really just too awesome for words. I went over and asked about it, and they were doing a midnight showing. I called a few friends, and managed to convince a couple people to come with me to it. We got there at 11:45. There was a line of a couple hundred people on the sidewalk. We went to get tickets. It was sold out. I was denied!

However, they said they would be doing it again in November and that tickets would go on sale the following week. I stopped by the following week and bought six tickets, and then even managed to scare up five people to go with me.

Last night was the long-awaited (by me, at least) second Buffy singalong in New York. We already had tickets (fortunately, as it had sold out earlier in the week), but showed up at 11:20 or so to get in line for seats; there were about sixty people already there by that point. I was not even close to being the biggest Buffy geek in line. I don’t own the musical episode DVD (I recorded it off the air) or the soundtrack CD. I’d probably watched it fewer than ten times (although I did watch it on Friday night to remind myself, and then printed out the lyrics). After hanging out in line, we finally got to go in at midnight.

The show itself was a blast. In light of it being November, they showed Pangs, the Thanksgiving episode from season 4, as the warmup act. Much funnier than I remember it being, or maybe that was an effect of watching it with a crowd of other psyched people. They also had a Spike trivia quiz, which I did embarrassingly poorly on – I only got something like 4 out of 10 right. I’ll have to study up if I go again.

As far as the musical episode itself, they’re trying to jump-start a Rocky Horror-like cult movement, so they had people acting out the various parts on stage, and passed out goodie bags to use as props. They prompted people to yell things at the screen (“Shut up, Dawn!”), throw things at appropriate times, use their cellphones as lighters during Giles’s power ballad, etc. I had been worried that people wouldn’t actually sing along but they did, so I got to sing out and enjoy myself.

Fun stuff. I might go again in December – they’re planning to do it monthly now. Check it out at Buffy Sings.

P.S. Probably more fluffy posts for the next few days as I catch up on homework. As usual, read the comments on my last post for some well-thought-out alternative viewpoints.