Fenn Street, in Los Angeles, was up a mountain overlooking East L.A. and downtown. A dirt road, leading to a dead end, where I lived at two vastly different times in my life. The first time I drove up there was to see Paul Lagos, then drumming for John Mayall and the Johnny Otis Revue. Driving up and around the hill and turning onto that dusty gravel, then seeing a hand drawn sign: "Wild Game Reserve" which was put up by his neighbor Glenn (sp?). Peacocks and dogs coexisted on that road and who knows what other animals. The peacocks were beautiful, but the loud cries made you glad the "reserve" was at Glenn's, not too close to Paul, who kept goats for milk. This pastoral scene was just a few miles from downtown Los Angeles and about once a year, the L.A. air was clear enough to see Catalina Island out over that stretch of the Pacific.

Glenn was a leathery-skinned woman of indeterminate age, but one or more of us would occasionally hang out for a few moments over at her place, which was pretty much a shack of a house. She had a Philippino man  living with her, Eddie I think his name was, and I know he helped her do the physical things she couldn't do. One day he got sick, and I believe he died shortly after. I was stopping over there whenever I passed by then, and I learned some things that made Glenn unusual and to some extent, a hermit. First was the fact that she was very close to a Japanese woman who was interned in a camp near L.A. during the war. I'd never seen or spoken to anyone like that before. This is one of many things Americans like to forget about. Well, she had gotten over the past and she and Glenn met for tea or coffee from time to time. Another odd thing about Glenn is that she was in the movies in Hollywood at some point. She showed me an 8x10 black and white photo of her in a scene with Ingrid Bergman. Ingrid was then a beautiful young woman, but Glenn was adorable as perhaps a Swedish au pair, with braids in her hair and an innocent but seductive smile. I didn't ever hear more about Glenn's Hollywood days, but I guess she was an extra in a movie or two.

Every human being has a story. Some have many stories. Wars and catastrophes change millions of lives, yet most of us have never had any involvement with these inevitable events. I know Glenn eventually died, not that long after "Eddie".

Seeing Ingrid Bergmann on cable TV last night reminded of that photo Glenn showed me, and of how she had been one of the most colorful and interesting characters I'd ever met in a place where nearly everyone you'd meet in my line of work was colorful and interesting. And that decades before, she was a very attractive young woman. What other changes had she seen in her life? What brought her to this hermit existence at the outer edges of East Los Angeles, Highland Park and Montecido Heights?

If you haven't seen Casablanca for a while, it is a radical change from much of the unsubtle, explosion and car chase-filled fare of our times. We watched it all the way through last night and I still find it's one of the best, most universal and engaging stories ever made into a movie.

What trace will you leave when you're gone? Is there a wikipedia entry on you? A foundation in your name? A bench at a park? Will you live on in the memories of others whose paths you've crossed during your life? WIll your music echo in the ears and imagination of someone who heard you play years before? Will your paintings make vivid visual dreams for another person who saw them hanging somewhere or in a book?

I think for me it happened around 1977. I was living in L.A. at that time, and since I had been interested in amateur radio as a kid, I found out there was a whole social network out there on VHF and UHF repeaters in the L.A. Basin, mountains and valleys. People used to check in all day, just like Twitter or Facebook, and meet up in person all over the area. In fact, I met a few women back in the day. One of them went on to become a radio operator on an Arco ship. I wonder if she's still working for an oil company? Her passport said, "Occupaton: Seaman", which made her (and us) laugh.

Speaking of L.A. reminds me of a moment down there in 1993. I was down in Orange County somewhere, we were recording What Kind of World with Larry Taylor who was playing with Tom Waits at the time, and the drummer from Waits' band whose name escapes me for the moment. Larry and I were staying in a motel, on the PCH, I think and there was some slow traffic going by even in the middle of the night. Then came a van with a 1,000 watt boom box system playing at 11. What's funny is, it was playing opera music. Only in L.A. would you get this!

Twenty years after my first experience with L.A. social networking, in 1987, I was using a tool at the office daily that I didn't understand at all, called the Internet. You typed some commands on a Unix console and were copying or fetching files between France and the USA at a rate so slow it took all day for source code archives, which is all text.

In 2006, I heard about this crazy new thing called Twitter, which mostly did what my Chez DiDi site was doing ten years before, a kind of chat on  a regular HTML web site. In those days (only 4 years ago!) you could call the guys from Twitter on their cells, so I did that early in 2007 and Jack was nice enough to put our Kiva Talkathon on the front page of Twitter for a week before it happened. Yes, we were  a trending topic! But how many people were on Twitter 3 years ago? A hundred thousand? Maybe less?

In 2007 I joined Facebook, although I also left it in 2007. At that time you got the "you can come back anytime" and the answer to how to delete an account was "you can't". That's right, I had to argue via email for two weeks with someone over there until they promised to delete my account and all associated data. Not that there was much of that, since I didn't post much. I don't use Facebook except on behalf of other people, and every time I get on the site I marvel at how bad it is as a web site. Searching is confused and works poorly, finding hard info on dealing with various problems is hard.

A lot has happened since 1997, but the basic concepts of social networks haven't changed and probably never will. Note that because radio waves travel at the speed of light, communication on those social networks was faster in 1997 than it is now.

Some of my most poignant musical memories took place in a club called
Shelley's Manne-Hole, in L.A. I lived there in the early 70's, way after
a deceased friend wrote about it as "a green and groovy place to be". It
was already a smoggy and brown place to be, but there was excitement as
a young musician trying to hook up with gigs and recording dates.
 
"Cop and blow" was always a big thing, go look at the people who changed
the idiom, like Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner (Trane was
already dead and I never saw him play live) and lots of locals like
Bobby Hutcherson. In a jazz club, then as now, while brilliant talented
people compose gems live for you on stage, materialistic conversions
between dealers and hookers and their public go on unhindered.
 
Why "poignant"? Because in the case of Bill Evans and Monk, both were
visibly at the end of their tethers, tired, sick and almost beyond the
reach of the ecstasy that such artists must have felt in their earlier
gigs when they were moving up, not only in fame, but in power of
expression.
 
Wow, that seems so heavy I need to insert an anecdote that might make you
laugh as it does me when I recall it. This was in another jazz dive, The
Lighthouse in Redondo Beach. The band playing was Airto. He always had
to say, "Ey, Ear, Toe" and point to the body parts. Good musician and a
spirited human. His (wife?) was Flora Purim, remember she sang on Chick
Corea's Return to Forever version of Spain and all that. Another
far-reaching music innovation. So anyway, Airto and Flora are standing
next to each other at their mics and they each had a marked round pot
belly. The Brazilian music they were playing was loud and had a lot of
breaks to mark the rhythms. Conversation was impossible (not should one
want to converse) but my saxophonist friend Richard A. turned to me and
said, exactly at the moment of a four beat break, when the entire
crowded room was absolutely silent: "Can you imagine them shtupping?"
and then the music started up again.
 
 
Here's a link to a much earlier Bill Evans recording at Shelley's