Glass Shallot by Adam Baer

RECOUP Ep. 4: Taking Up Space Together

So, I've been doing a podcast with the writer Eva Hagberg called Recoup that has earned some attention from the LA Times. In this episode, however, I speak with my spouse, who is a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist. But the episode is really funny. It's not a pandemic / coronavirus episode, and I urge you to check it out. Thanks for all the positive attention and five star reviews on Apple. We're getting so many listeners from all over the world, and as terrifying and sad as this pandemic period has been it has offered me, as a homebound lifer of cancers and rare diseases, a lot of light and hope. If you don't want to head over to your podcast app of choice you can listen to this episode below with an embedded player. Thank you again, and please share. It's word of mouth that's really helped us so far, and we want to keep doing this to help people. You can always write in to us with your questions or concerns about uncertainty, chronic recuperation, disability, social isolation, and everything in between at [email protected].  -- Adam Baer

The Pressure to Say You're OK on the Stupid Cancer Show

 The Stupid Cancer Show had me on for a second time last night, and it was a roiling good time. The entire show's funny and informative, and my segment at about 24:30 takes us through an op-ed I wrote for the Los Angeles Times called The Pressure to Say You're OK. We also discuss asking the hard questions as cancer survivors--which include money questions and billing practices for a chance at financial transparency--as well as how recently the hospital associated with my alma mater (Johns Hopkins) decided I owed them thousands of dollars without me ever having seen a doctor there! Crazy but true, and the hunt for money to pay for this imaginary medical work only took a year to quash. Listen to the show right here.--Adam Baer

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Go to Music School -- Just Go to a Better One

A few days ago, an op-ed columnist in the New York Times wrote that he didn't think his kid should transfer into a music school. Today, Fred Bronstein, dean of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, responded in the Times. It's a strong, smart statement that takes the piece's headline literally, emphasizing "training" musicians "attuned to their communities" who should be "effective communicators, educators, entrepreneurs, audience development experts and citizen-artists." But there's more to be said on that issue.

I'm a former Peabody student, and I say that if you have the talent and determination, you should go to music school. It's one of the best things that I ever did with my life. It filled my soul and trained my brain to accomplish many other things, including serious writing projects. I'm a big believer in the humanities, and as a musician from a family of musicians, I wanted the immersion in music that they had enjoyed beyond the pre-college music conservatory. But I simultaneously attended Johns Hopkins' separate Arts & Sciences undergraduate program, and I graduated in 2000, a bad time to go to music school. Back then, the older classically oriented ones like mine (Peabody is the country's first conservatory), weren't designed yet to teach students what they really needed to know as the Internet was growing. They were experimenting. But schools that emphasized popular genres like the Berklee College of Music were leaps and bounds ahead, especially with respect to getting students fluent with digital and business.

The issue now isn't really whether or not you should go to music school. It's how strong is the school you want to attend? How well will it train you to be a musician-plus today? Sure, you can go to music school, study an instrument, composing, history, and theory--and you can learn the practical stuff on your own. But you really ought to ensure that you have your sights set on the realities of our time and that the music school you choose really does teach all of its students (maybe even as a "core") the following: business (especially entrepreneurship but also management, marketing, arts administration, contract negotiation, and financial skills); technology (app development, coding, UX, digital production for all genres [hip-hop, pop, songwriting, etc.], recording, video, engineering, music and sound editing for media/entertainment); music education; writing; arts advocacy; film/media composing; and IP/copyright law, as well as perhaps public health (!).

I have long appreciated Columbia University's "core curriculum." Music schools have always had a version of their own, consisting of theory, ear-training, lessons, etc. But now they need new ones full of required courses and skills assessments--it's not just about supplementing music classes with languages and the humanities or intros to the good things that Bronstein mentions (Peabody is lucky to have him). Courses in these subjects need to be authoritative and leave students with strong skills. They need to be practical and effective. I'm asking for a lot, but that's what the world asks of you as a musician, or as any kind of creative professional. So, schools: Please partner with media companies, music publishers, tech startups, small businesses, independent artists, more community schools. Add incentives. Stress the requirements beyond music skills. Stress that these are music skills.

I studied the violin at Peabody while attending Hopkins, but I live in Hollywood now, consult on music and work as a writer, journalist, and editorial content strategist. My first job out of college was at NPR; they hired me to be a cultural producer with a specialty in digital, but getting that gig was a bit of blind luck (although I knew how to code), based mostly on the fact that I'd published music criticism in the Washington Post. I would have benefitted so much from even a few of the aforementioned extra classes. Recording was available at my school, but it was a highly specialized degree program track. So, too, music education. These things were not stressed as necessary for everyone. But they were, and they are critically necessary now. A student at a great music school shouldn't have to learn Logic in an Apple Store.

What's great, though, is that Peabody is now poised to do this as an entity owned by Johns Hopkins University, and Bronstein says he's devoted to the cause. But it should be reiterated that I graduated from college 15 years ago, and Peabody was not moving on these things nearly quickly enough, even though it had been owned by Hopkins for a while. I have great hope for future music students, but also some words of advice: Double-degree program with a university. Or, even better, something new and singular that blends two types of schools like Hopkins and Peabody more seamlessly. That's what I tried to do with my program, and eventually I only took one degree (my Arts & Sciences B.A.). The Music School as a template for higher education needs to evolve more quickly and comprehensively for the sake of all musicians as well as those who will move into other fields while using their music skills. The great music that we love will be thankful.-- Adam Baer

 

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My Rare Disease, and the One Guy Who Might Erase It -- by Adam Baer

A lot of you know I've had cancer(s). That it's been tough, that I've been given the chance to write about it. And that I am lucky to have great health insurance. However, what many readers may not know, even if you've read my work, is that buried in a piece for Harper's Magazine that I published I talk about having a malignant tumor in the base of my skull (not my brain) called Chordoma. The piece makes it clear that I continue to live with it. But to make it more clear, this is one of the rarest diseases in America, and very few people, save for the generous experts who have to date saved my life with surgery and radiation and management, know what to do with chordomas, including a lot of doctors and researchers.

Of course, we're living at a time when a researcher might figure out an ever-better treatment. But a tiny portion of the population may not realize that this silent, fatal disease and its treatments force us to perpetually fight terrible side-effects (among them, the very serious condition of social isolation), and that if this is just one of the cancers you have/have had, life is never "OK," even if you do your best to make everyone around you feel like it is, lest you seem stranger, weirder, more of a reminder of everyone's mortality, a guilt-inducer. Rarer.

At any rate, the guy linked to in a few sentences is pretty much the only one of our generation, without an MD or PhD, working really hard to lead research and other programs that may help people with this specific rare disease. He and his foundation deserve serious support. His name is Josh Sommer, and his non-profit is called Chordoma Foundation. I'm ashamed that I haven't been more vocal about him and his work over the years, and that most times I don't want to read about this one of my diagnoses. But on a day like today, when I have questions about a certain drug that I need for one late effect of a previous cancer treatment, something that might make my chordoma worse, a question that cannot be answered, I feel lucky that Josh is doing what he does. This call for support is long overdue.

I hope that you read about Josh, and back his group. I learned that I have (a) chordoma because of an incidental MRI taken because of headaches. That means that many other people can have it, and that it can be less rare than we think, because who gets head MRIs for no good reason, and who looks into the heads of the deceased? I'd hate to learn of one more person suffering from this deadly problem, but it's highly possible, and that -- not any sympathy for my situation -- is why I posted this. People with chordoma are often told they may only live seven or ten years.

Some of us who've had the advanced treatments and surgeries are optimistic about living a lot longer, but we could be wrong. Josh, and the people he's working with, are not living in the vagaries; they are living and working for change in the now, and they don't feel their job is done with just one magazine article that appears to be a book review. I hope that I can help them more, and that you may decide to allocate some of your disposable income and time to help them, too. -- Adam Baer

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The Believer Interview with a Luthier (who makes guitars for Arcade Fire, The National, Beck, Cat Power, Fred Armisen) -- by Adam Baer

A number of years ago, well before this subject was written about elsewhere, I learned about, met, and began interviewing, the Silverlake-area guitar luthier and music-shop owner Reuben Cox who uses found materials to make equisite instruments that harken back to a period of American guitarmaking that has slipped away. Reuben, a photographer with credits from The New Yorker and New York Times, had opened a place called Old Style Guitars on the eastern/southern edge of the neighborhood -- before it had become hip. Still, bands like The National would drop by and play secret shows in his driveway. And quickly, the place became a node, a scene, for some of the best elite rock musicians in the country: You could see Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire there, Chan Marshall, Devandra B., Bobby Womack, Beck, Sufjan Stevens, Alexi Murdoch, Andrew Bird, tons of studio players, even Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein. It was something like a micro Laurel Canyon for our time, inside a little box with lots of wires and wood. But it's hard to place significant articles about such esoteric subjects in the focused, news-oriented consumer magazines. So, I waited, and then an option to do something creative came up with one of my favorite magazines,  The Believer. Now, I have turned the piece, which at last ran in The Believer's 2014 Music Issue, into a multimedia digital thing, with videos of The National playing at the store, a fetishistic guitar slideshow, and even a video of Arcade Fire using one of Reuben's guitars in Helsinki. Check it out at this URL, where I hope that it will live for a long time. http://logger.believermag.com/post/100588053844/interview-with-a-luthier-i-e-someone-who-makes

My thanks for reading, watching, waiting, and listening.

Adam Baer

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LinkedIn Congratulations

I appreciate how LinkedIn asks you to "congratulate" a connection on his/her birthday. One's best accomplishment is, to be sure, Not Having Died Yet.

For more comments about managing to stay alive, check out my new advice column at The Awl: "Ask Somehow Still-Alive Guy."

Thanks, and live strongly skeptical about people who tell you to Live Strong,

Adam Baer

 

New Way to Read Music -- Not Especially Noteworthy

Recently, I published a VQR piece on the future of sheet music, including a bit on new apps and notation literacy. In related news bloggers are pointing out a new music notation system called Hummingbird (depicted above). I looked it over, tried it out. It borrows its method of displaying rhythm from piano rolls, showing us the amount of time a note should be held, like GarageBand and other music software. What's more, it points up for sharps and down for flats, which a demanding violin teacher might do with a pencil. Aside from that, it's deceptively complicated and requires learning different symbols. How much easier it would be for someone who has never learned music, or lacks a teacher, is questionable.

New systems (and apps) are best when they solve problems, but learning to read Western music notation isn't a problem that requires a solution. It's not easy. But like learning to read English, it's eminently doable, and fraught with fewer variables and exceptions. Reading Western notation—and there have of course been many precursors to what we use now, as well as many alternatives, including Braille and an integer-based system—has also proven to be good for your brain, and we don't need to simplify it. The current sharp and flat note symbols work fine; you just have to remember them.

Hummingbird appears to be a nicely designed dumbing-down, and not an especially noteworthy one in an age of design-fetish and how-to videos. Shortcuts—like guitar tablature—should really be shortcuts. This new system basically just makes reading music different, and it doesn't seem to allow for new ways to notate sounds that we cannot yet notate. I'm in favor of new music technologies and notation systems, but Hummingbird should first show me why Western music notation is a problem, and why Hummingbird is a necessary alternative. For now, especially given our abundance of online music-education resources, it's not.

For more information about alternative music notation systems that may solve what some perceive to be standard notation problems, check out The Music Notation Project.

 

The Future of Sheet Music, My Family's Literature (Spring '13 VQR Essay)

In 2004, when I first wrote about digital sheet music, for the New York Times, pre-iPad, new gadgets were just being sold to display it for traveling musicians like David Bowie's bandmate Mike Garson and violinist Izthak Perlman, both of whom kindly spoke to me for the story. But sheet music has always been a weirdly tense topic, full of salespeople and schemers: Back then, Harry Connick, Jr. (who, of all technologists, has a patent on a digital sheet music reader), had chosen not to comment on the topic but the way my editor had re-arranged my reporting on his lack of interest angered his representative, enough to insinuate legal threats (so, basically sheet music made friendly Harry Connick want to sue me). Then there was the CEO of one of the companies who claimed repeatedly that he had nothing to do with another, which we only found out after digging through his lies to us after the fact. The story -- its subtext, anyway -- turned into a piece about two companies suing each other. Not our intention.

Sheet music should not inspire fights and deception. Or should it?

In my new Spring 2013 VQR piece, "Sound + Vision," I argue that sheet music is literature (a method of storytelling), and I try to explain how it functioned that way for my family as well as discuss its future and some advocates' fears that fewer people seem able to and interested in reading it now more than ever. Is that true? It's hard to know, and I hope that my guess is wrong. What I do know is that a lot of people are creating innovative sheet music solutions for the digital space, and that despite music-budget cuts, plummeting keyboard instrument sales, and music store deaths, a lot of kids and adults want to play music. It's no surprise that the world is always changing, but notated music is in fact coming along for the ride. And thank Life that it is. I want more children to grow up being read to from the piano, or some kind of instrument, and being able to read that way themselves. 

Did Facebook Delete A Writer's Attempt to Use Timeline as a Narrative Tool?

Today I posted "content" in an attempt to use Facebook Timeline in a humorous, narrative way; I was kidding a little, but I thought it could be fun to really use the software to create a comedic, serialized micro-narrative made of short status updates. The post was commented on by a couple of friends, and then removed by someone other than me. I then discussed this in another status update with those same friends. That was then promptly removed by someone other than me. I then reposted the content twice, and now I do not see any of this on my page. If Facebook would like people to care about its IPO -- and that's a foregone conclusion, they do, because billions of dollars are concerned, but let's talk about regular people -- they should not delete writers' attempts to use their tools to create and engage with an audience, in jest or more serious ways. The aforementioned content (copied below) is far from genius and merely average, but I posted it here, which is less "buggy" a virtual "place" and likely watched by fewer programmers who police and react to user content. Perhaps this was all just FB software problems...but if so, who can trust FB with content you do not backup elsewhere. I mean, what if this stuff was actually good?

Here is the attempt at humor I posted, related to the ABC Show Revenge. Do you find it inappropriate?

"When I was 10, a high-school senior in my Monte Cristo-like neighborhood was hired to hang out with and shoot hoops with me before my parents returned home from work. One day, the kind young man suggested I find someone to buy me a tape of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” So, I did, and the next time he appeared, he “borrowed” it, never to return or answer our many calls again. Now, as a rational adult, I plan to use Facebook Timeline, narratively, to track down this man for a final confrontation. Would any of you care to follow this meaningful adventure? I shall call it “My Facebook ‘Revenge’ / Season One: Born to Run.”

I shall move slowly, follow clues, keep my emotions at bay, and friend anyone close to this man and his especially heinous crime, crossing each one off my list one by one. It will be sweet to one day recover this low quality recording, if it still exists, uncompressed and possibly warped. But the ultimate prize will be hearing this man sing under duress the lyrics: “The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive / Everybody's out on the run tonight but there's no place left to hide.”

 

AFTERNOON UPDATE: Facebook was briefly down this morning, and I wouldn't want to think they'd target one person, so it's quite possible that's what happened. Still, the "dangerous"  keywords used in my posts could have triggered a moderator or bot to remove them at different times (people observed their staggered removal individually), and the critique and untraditional use of Timeline the day after FB's IPO announcement is definitely something they might try to quash. 

The important issue remains: Can we trust FB to hold our original life-content as Timeline promises? I'd use a few backups, and make sure you already own the rights to anything you publish anywhere.

My Priceline Staycation... to Dubai?

It was Labor Day. We needed a break. I hated the bullshit word "Staycation," but we had to remain in our city. I turned to Priceline. Madness ensued.

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My watch is gone, my watch is gone: The Mondaine Life

 

See this Mondaine watch? Like it? I do. 

I should. My wife bought it for me as an engagement present, and I adored it the minute it jumped out of its box.  Of course, it didn't really jump, but I like to think that it did. I like to think that this watch can do anything, because it can certainly disappear. 

Back in 2000, when I first found an image of this watch in Rome, it seemed unlike most of the watches around. Here was the anti-Swiss Army, the non-Swatch. The problem is that now the rest of the world loves Mondaine watches, too (although try to find the chronograph version of this one -- it's no longer made).

Watches and I, we've been lovers. As a kid, I read Esquire and GQ, cover-to-cover, paying close attention to the timepiece ads. I recall regularly borrowing the maximum amount of back issues from my local library, and gawking at the watch-faces. "I only read these for the articles," I once joked to the research librarian, who had seen me purposely photo-copying Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. The irony isn't lost on me now as I write for style-oriented magazines (sometimes about gadgets), but I still love seeking out timepiece ads aside long-form journalism. They belong together.

As a kid who grew up in a town where many people lived beyond their means, the watch ads seemed realistic, sold images of a men's life that existed. Maybe, one day, I, too, might find myself wealthy and sport a historic Omega. The imagery of douchebaggery was couched so heavily in quality even during the early 90's that I didn't think about the virtues of many guys I'd seen with a version of my wrist-envy.

But I never got over my timepiece obsession. I didn't--and still don't--consider it superficial. "Time is the most valuable thing I could possess." I wrote that sentence in a childhood journal when I was 11 years old. 

Today, I don't like ostentatious watches, and I basically wear the same pants everywhere. I appreciate design, but things aren't as meaningful to me as an adult. Perhaps that's why I lose lots of them. Often things that represent important moments in my life. Things are just carbon, I rationalize. I can always make more money, replace them. Pieces of matter are just pieces of matter. Everything important is invisible. 

 

* * *

 

I  stayed away from watches for years--first, because I played the violin, and later, because I didn't like anything constricting my left wrist. More recently my reasons have been existential. Still, I've always felt somewhat naked without a watch--too casual or unadorned, childishly free. This is nice when I'm at the ocean, or hiking the hills, trying to work up a sweat, but it has not felt great in work situations.

Given this history with style, I'm now repulsed by watches that brag about one's bank account. But the scale has tipped in the former direction over the last few months. It has something to do with getting older, I think. It concerns wanting to get on a track, focus. Get a few objects--things you care about that you can feel with your hands--and hold onto them. Someone who will always be missed said that to me once.

So when family members offered to buy me a watch last winter, I became excited. Then, instantly, I couldn't decide on one. It seemed like nearly--just nearly--as big a commitment as something human--say, taking on a mate.  My watch would be my watch--at least that's how I would want it--and I would never attempt to purchase more than one. (How wasteful.)

Moreover, I wanted something that might make me look a little more respectable in selvage legs. That way, I could dress down to a lunch meeting and still seem somewhat serious. (LA, if you don't live here, is full of people who dress supercasually but usually wear one serious piece of something to remind you they're not homeless--or, on the other end of the spectrum, that they're fabulously rich. The fun, I think, is never completely knowing the difference.)

This sent me searching for a watch. And when I say searching, I mean hunting (like, with weapons and scopes and anxiety about accidentally shooting a living thing). I looked at the men's mags, I looked in J.C. Penny. I looked at men's wrists at restaurants, often receiving strange turn-glances I couldn't shake for an hour. (No: I didn't want wrist implants.)

I couldn't find anything I appreciated and admired. I was as turned off by the expensive heavy lifters as I was by the Citizens. The middle of the road pieces were equally boring. I wouldn't get a watch just to get a watch. Maybe all watches were inherently less than ideal. Who needs the time anyway?

Then I found it. The watch that I'd imagined even before making a conscious attempt to search for it.  The neatly designed guy at the top of this page. The Mondaine evo chrono. Based on Hans Hilfiker's 1940 design for the Swiss Railway, it wasn't a clunky diving watch that says, "I own a plane." Nor was it something too fancy or overpriced. I appreciated its utilitarian design. I loved the way its red second-hand jumped forward before each minute. I loved the stainless steel case, its circular solidity, its lack of jewelry, the straight lines, and those other little circles clicking around, making sense of the universe in ways I could not fathom.

I'm now told that the thing gets people into the London Design Museum for free, and that it's revered by watch-seekers, even those who throw down thousands to own an IWC that looks like a Timex.  I liked it before I knew any of this. I considered it indubitably clear, loved how light it felt on the wrist, its simple black band. This was a watch I could wear all the time. And it said just a little about me: That I appreciate good design. That I consider clarity an art.

Which is why I was floored when my fiance read my mind--after learning all about how nuts I am concerning what I put on my wrist--and actually gave me the watch I privately loved for our engagement. I hadn't expected an engagement gift. I didn't know prospective grooms received anything other than a story to tell others about buying The Ring. Maybe others don't; I do appreciate how lucky I am.

But I am also now saddened in the wake of what happened last Friday, when, at 300 Medical Plaza, Los Angeles, the building that houses the practice of a haughty UCLA doctor, in Westwood, my watch was lost. Maybe forever.

It might be of some significance that I had been nervous to see this doctor. Not because of what he might decree. But because he probably wouldn't have anything to say. These days, I get sent to lots of doctors because of some medical mysteries. This is an age when doctors don't have to ponder if the out-loud thinking could be used against them in a court of law. That doesn't apply to many of them, of course. I've had excellent doctors. But lest we forget, doctors, and there are a lot of them, are just people like you and me, and some of them, like many Americans, don't want to work very hard. Someone's either special--communicative, and willing to go the extra mile--or he's not. Humanity, insight, and accomplishment in our meritocratic culture often don't go hand in hand with anything else.

Pardon the tangent, but this is what was consuming me as I left my latest unproductive appointment with a world famous specialist: when I forgot to put my watch back on after the exam as I trodded out the room with loosely tied shoes.  I didn't realize I had left the watch there until an hour later as Lina and I ate lunch in a restaurant, calming our nerves with artisan cheese.

I nearly regurgitated the food when the thought hit me. My watch. Not here.  I spazzed. A wanna-be starlet at the outdoor cafe scoffed. I sipped some ice water and cleared my throat. I looked at Lina squarely. I gargled without trying, eggplant still in the throat.

"It's gone. My watch. I lost it."

"You lost it?"

"At the doctor's office. I left it there."

"Oh, god. You got me worried. I'm sure it's still there. Wait, are you sure you left it there? They probably have it. It's probably at the desk. Someone turned it in."

"I know I left it there," I said. "Remember how when I signed out, I didn't have it on my wrist to tell the time?"

"Yeah," said Lina. "And I also remember you having it to check the time on your way in."

"It's been so nice not to have to look at my phone to tell the time anymore."

"You lost your watch."

"I lost my watch."

"We'll go back."

"I'll call."

"You'll get it back, don't worry."

"Ok," I said, realizing only too well what the watch signified, how I'd feel if Lina had left her very expensive diamond ring anywhere but on her finger.

Did this seem like I didn't care about our engagement? About staying on the new path? That I took the whole thing all too lightly? Or worse, did it seem like I might not take it lightly but that I would drop it anytime some smug doctor with four important degrees on his wall would take the time to look me over? How could I have a family if I couldn't remember my watch after a doctor appointment? I was unhinged.

Then, in my wife's eye, I saw a tear.

I had lost the closest thing to an engagement ring I had ever received -- from the only woman I would ever want it from. I would get it back, though. Or would I?

Cut to: Driving hurriedly across Wilshire. Calling all kinds of automated machine-people at UCLA who couldn't, wouldn't connect me to a person. Checking the floor of my bag a million times to make sure I wasn't crazy. Racing around the medical campus' circular driveway, jumping out of the car and almost tripping into a closing elevator door.

 

* * *

 

[Note: The following change of tense must be accepted, because you're reading a blog...]

I'm in the basement of the building now, galloping into the doctor's office. I slow down, calm myself, so no one thinks I'm crazy (hah, this is neurology).

I explain the deal to the lady at the desk. She takes me to the room I used. The examination table flaunts fresh white starchy paper. The doctor is gone, the halls empty.

"It's not here," she says as she checks the floor. "It wasn't turned in."

"Who else was in here besides the doctor?"

"He saw you," she says, "then moved to another room."

"Who cleaned the room?" I ask.

"I actually cleaned the room," she says. "I didn't see it. And it would have been turned in if you left it here."

"I definitely left it here."

"Then it would have been turned in, or I would have found it," she said.

"Maybe the doctor has it?"

"Maybe. I'll have him call you when he returns. Maybe he took it and forgot to drop it off."

"Maybe..."

Was this a viable option, though? Could an Ivy League-educated chief of neurology have taken my beautifully utilitarian and artful watch/engagement gift?

I asked my friend Joe a couple days later, after repeated phone calls to the hospital and no results.

"Why couldn't he have taken it?" he said. "I bet there's a better chance he took it than the receptionist/room-cleaner. Those guys are meglomaniacs."

I agreed with him. My doctor had seemed meglomaniacal, no offense to other doctors I love.

But why would a Neurology Chief -- I imagined he led a tribe -- need a watch like mine? Didn't he earn a healthy six figures?

"It was a pretty nice watch," Joe said. "It wasn't fancy, but it was beautiful. Some people like to steal. Turns them on. Doesn't matter if they treat people with cancer or ALS."

"It was beautiful, wasn't it?" I said. Surely, a fancy doctor could also get off on stealing his patient's stuff. Or I could have just dropped it in the garbage pail. It's nice to fantasize.

I thought about my history with watches. How I never felt I was meant to have them, but simultaneously desired one. Not least some kid's yellow swatch in third grade, the one he could take into the pool his wealthy father had just christened.

I thought about how this one watch symbolized something about me I wanted to share. How my fiance had secretly known this without my having told her, and how she had found it for me. How I had slapped it onto my wrist before she had had a chance to engrave something on the back of it for me, stamping it mine forever.

Something about my impetuosity--my carelessless with objects; my deep reasoning for sometimes, randomly, challenging the world to take away what matters; my anger with people who don't take me seriously; my need to punish myself for continously seeking them out (even in a medical building), even when I know the right people are to be found elsewhere (perhaps a naturopath's house?)... Something like this had ripped this watch out of my reality.

I no longer had a reliable way of clocking time. I now had to take my spotty battery-dependent BlackBerry out of a pocket. I had to make an effort to get on the same wavelength with the rest of society, to now return to the out-of-it feeling I often walk around with; the half-there, half-gone attitude that always sees me nodding at others while I think about more pressing or bothersome concerns.

This was all somehow wrapped up in choosing a watch, wearing a watch, keeping a watch, and realizing that I had found the right person in my wife, confirmed the thousandth time when she had found the watch I had always wanted (i.e. when she had located for me the part of myself I'd always wanted to develop as I matured).

My friend Joe joked as he often does that this was yet another bad meta-sitcom script happening as my life. The rich doctor who has to steal your watch.

"Yeah," I said. "In the bad meta-sitcom, I'd return six months later, and he'd be wearing the watch. I'd ask him where he got it, and he'd say his wife had given it to him for his 25th wedding anniversary, how he'd always hated watches until this one, had never wanted to know the time if he didn't have to, had never liked wearing something on his wrist. Then I'd stare at him and he'd stare back with a smirk. A lone clarinet would play. Nothing would be said, and I'd cut to another scene with me driving home and arriving at my next meeting, an interview with a watch designer, late."

"That's exactly what it'd be like on a bad meta-sitcom!" Joe said.

"Yep," I agreed. Then I looked at the oven clock, a digital readout, across my kitchen to see what time it was. I had a men's magazine article due. A piece about some object for a periodical rife with ads for objects.

"Can you buy yourself another?" Joe asked.

"I can," I said. "Thankfully, the thing didn't cost 10 grand. And I didn't have the one Lina bought me for soooo long, right? I could get another now, re-write my memory like a hard-disk or flash memory, and in twenty years never even remember this mess. In the end, it's just something you wear on your wrist. It doesn't mean anything, right?"

"Sure," he said.

"Sure," I repeated.

Then I realized my oven clock was late. I had fifteen minutes to write an ode to another piece of matter that someone else could fetishize. The bad meta-sitcoms lack satisfying conclusions. Here was something I could count on.

 

Update (January, 1, 2011): The replacement watch my wife purchased for me after losing this one (!) was lost today in New York City, possibly in the garage below my brother's apartment. Mondaine no longer makes this specific model. My wife forgives me, and I wear a $30 Timex that receives compliments daily.

Update (January, 1, 2014): We found another one of these watches in Europe. You can't have it!

--Adam Baer

a fine point

Alex Ross, author of the revelatory blog "The Rest Is Noise," inspiring music critic for The New Yorker, and a consistently welcome reminder to listen to all the Bob Dylan my rock-musicologist cousin loaded onto my iPod last August, raises a good point about Web searching today. He asks linkers to list his blog under his name so as to counteract the irritating way Google has rendered his Web-search-results image, and I, for one, have suffered too many indiscretions at the hand of search engines not to quickly oblige. First there's the "other" Adam Baer, an apparently brilliant installation artist with a Guggenheim under his belt and a rising career that consistently unseats me on Google results lists. Then there are all the embrassingly sophomoric ramblings I contributed to my college newspaper in the '90s. Then there's a bizarre reposting of a simple inquiry letter I wrote years ago to some porn blogger about an article I had been casually assigned by the hipster sex mag Nerve.com, where the editor at hand eventually moved on and seemed to care less and less about the topic he had asked me to investigate: that a college student in Wisconsin had been virtually ruined and run out of town due to the rampant downloading of a private sex video posted on peer-to-peer file-trading sites. So this is how I'm constantly imaged by search-engines: a blowhard college student, postmodern artist, and sex-mag journalist obsessed with some poor girl who achieved urban-legend status for a dorm-room striptease. I don't know what to be more embarassed about: that or my addition to and grandiose mythologizing of bad pop culture. (Just kidding: I'm not embarassed about that. I side with Chuck Klosterman who with great humor rages in November's Esquire against the use of the term "guilty pleasure" to identify the pop-culture obsessions of people who think themselves above such pursuits. I wish the article were online to link to; alas, some writing doesn't come cheap.)