Here's to adventurous women

More fun for more people

Dear Friends,

Happy Summer Solstice!

If you don’t mind (and I know that you don’t), I’ll wait until next week to conclude the Millennial Midlife Transition series. Iris turns 38 this coming weekend and I turn 43 🎈. We’re off to a cabin in the Trinity Alps — the perfect place to reflect a bit about how we want to live “the second half of life” in between naps and hikes.

Lately, I’ve been asking friends about the most satisfying job they’ve ever had. Their response comes quick; it’s never the highest paying or the most prestigious — and rarely is it their current job.

My best job was at Esmeralda Books & Coffee, a small independent bookstore and cafe in San Diego that opened out onto a Tuscan-style patio with a fountain and garden.¹ My previous job was the graveyard shift at 7-11, so this perfect bookstore with its hardwood floors, endless walnut bookshelves, and crisp Bose speakers was an unimaginable step up. Could it really be that the owner — an eccentric college dropout from Louisiana² — entrusted me with the keys and alarm code to open up the cafe by myself? I would arrive by 7 am on Sundays to prep the cafe and wipe off the tables ahead of the earliest regulars. The soft morning light slanted onto the unfinished hardwood floors as I chose from a stack of a dozen or so CDs and slid one into what was at the time a very fancy stereo. It all seemed too good to be true.

The CD I chose more than any other was Getz/Gilberto. In 1997, Verve Records remastered the original 1963 album and packaged it in a way that made you feel like you were opening a new Apple product.³ The album opens with “The Girl from Ipanema” — Tom Jobim’s soft jazz chords, João Gilberto’s humming, and Stan Getz’s sultry saxophone draw you into the song like a siren. But it’s not until Astrud Gilberto’s vocals that the ballad comes alive:

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes
Each one she passes goes - ah
When she walks, she's like a samba
That swings so cool and sways so gentle

Astrud Gilberto died at 84 last week. When she entered a New York City recording studio in 1963 as the 22-year-old wife of João Gilberto, she had never sung in a recording studio before. Stan Getz had the idea of recording a cut of “Garota de Ipanema” in English, and Astrud was the only one around who could speak it. When they released the original album with both Portuguese and English lyrics, Astrud wasn’t credited and was originally cut out of the royalties. The following year, though, they edited the track to remove João’s Portuguese vocals and the song became a worldwide hit. In 1965, Getz/Gilberto became the first non-American album to win a Grammy for Album of the Year.

23 years ago, I don’t recall thinking about the girl from Ipanema as an object —having something done to it — rather than a subject — someone doing something. Today, I look at the (ridiculous!) 1964 video for the song and all I can think about is the objectification of women.

In 1964, Les Tomkins interviewed Stan Getz, who told him:

I was doing an album with her husband, Joao, who I love— he's a genius. She was just a housewife then, and I put her on that record because I wanted "The Girl From Ipanema" sung in English— which Joao couldn't do. But "Ipanema" hit and sold over two million— so that was a lucky break for her. And I'm happy for her.

We sure have come a long way. Imagine someone describing Jay-Z as a genius and Beyonce as just a housewife with a lucky break.

Everything but the girl

I could have worked at Esmeralda forever. They gave me free books, free coffee, and free food. What else did I need?

But then in 2001, Qantas Airlines had an irresistible deal on a round-the-world ticket. With enough advanced planning, you could fly anywhere in the world for up to a year for just $2,000. Who could say no to that? When we arrived in Rio de Janeiro, I made a point to visit the tavern where Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes wrote the lyrics to Girl From Ipanema.

By the mid-70s, interest in bossa nova died down until it made a comeback 20 years later. And that comeback in the 90s was largely thanks to the emergence of electronic bossa nova by two UK-based acts: Everything But the Girl and Sade.⁴

So I left my dreamy bookstore and spent the second half of 2001 traveling the world with a college girlfriend. We had 10 CDs with us and two of them were by the British duo Everything But the Girl.⁵ I listened to those two albums over and over on flights, trains, and in rental cars. I can recite the lyrics and rattle on about their themes. (I’ll spare you.)

All young men at some point mature thanks to a woman who provides them with an emotional education, and the lyrics of Everything But the Girl vocalist Tracy Thorn provided it for me. When Thorn and her partner Ben Watt released Temperamental in 1999 after the birth of their twin daughters, I had no idea that it would be their last studio album for 24 years — until last month.⁶

I can’t say that I’m enjoying the new album as much as their classics from the 90s, but the lyrics are as poetic as always and I’ll take what I can get. I recently caught an episode of Terry Gross interviewing Thorn on Fresh Air. They discuss Thorn’s song “Guitar” about an ex-boyfriend who helped give her the courage to become a musician:

I wanted you, I watched you from afar
And I thought you cool, because you played guitar …

Hey boy you only used three chords and opened up the door
And though we kissed and kissed and kissed
You were nothing but a catalyst

Terry Gross said that it reminded her of an observation by the author Joyce Johnson, who wrote a memoir about 1950s New York City when she was Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend.⁷ Gross recalls Johnson’s lament that in the 1950s, only men could have an adventure. The one way for a woman to have an adventure at the time was to date an adventurous man.

I am glad that this is no longer the case, that we live in an age of adventurous women and wider possibilities for everyone. I love joining my wife’s adventures as she takes me to remote villages to meet weavers and artisans. I love following the adventures of my colleagues as they explore the world — often with children in tow. To my sister, to my cycling friends, to every woman who has let me tag along for an adventure, I thank you and salute you.

🎥 Two great movies

Iris and I saw two very different and excellent movies over the weekend.

Past Lives is the impressive debut of Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song. Much of the film deals with the topics of last week’s newsletter — the paths untaken, the former versions of ourselves that we leave behind — but more than anything it’s a must-see for anyone who is or has ever been in a bicultural relationship. It has an incredible (and deserved) 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This is one of those movies that is slow to watch and then stays in your thoughts long after.

Air is a very different type of movie. I just can’t resist any collaboration between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Good Will Hunting — which they co-wrote — was my favorite movie as a teenager and to this day I would happily watch anything that they work on together. The whole movie, you just enjoy being in their presence. And Viola Davis as Michael Jordan’s mother … what a performance.

🧰 A useful tool: The one-thumb map zoom

This past weekend was Friends of Tam — an annual suffer-fest in which San Francisco’s cycling community spends the entire day climbing and descending the four routes up Mt. Tamalpais.⁸ We mostly all go at our own pace and we share our locations with each other so that we can meet up from time to time. It’s hard for me to imagine that up until last year, I didn’t know that you can zoom in and out on any map on your phone with just a thumb:

RIP: Calvin Trampleasure

Last week, legendary Berkeley cyclist and teacher Calvin Trampleasure passed away. I never met him in person, but I loved his essays about bicycle racing in the 70s and 80s; his life of mentorship, curiosity, and exploration strikes me as one worth emulating. My friend Vernon ran into him some years back and posted a short video in which Calvin offers this piece of advice about riding slower as you age: “Whatever part of life you’re in, there’s a perfect speed for it.”

I hope that your week is passing along at the perfect speed,

David

1. When the bookstore closed down, unable to compete with Amazon, a reviewer wrote “Esmeralda's has closed down :( :( :( :(. ugh, I knew San Diegans weren't intellectual enough to appreciate a cultural gem like this one....grrr.” Ooh, burn!

2. A novel was published in 2007 with a character based on the owner

3. In the late 90s, every music lover worth a damn had a copy of Getz/Gilberto and Buena Vista Social Club.

4. A couple of years after the Getz/Gilberto reissue, João Gilberto’s daughter Bebel released Tanto Tempo, and you couldn’t visit a hotel lobby or coffeeshop without hearing it.

5. Back then, no one had heard of the band but everyone knew their hit 1996 single, Missing. (“I miss you like the deserts miss the rain.”); it was an odd part of my identity how much I hated that song and loved the duo who sang it.

6. After she stopped making music, Tracy Thorn started a culture column for the New Statesman, which I loved

7. Describing the girls who hung out with the Beats at the San Remo Cafe in Greenwich Village, she wrote, “they are all beautiful and have such remarkable cool that they never, never say a word; they are presences merely.”

8. Mt. Tam became legendary in my mind after I first read Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. There is a scene at the end of the book when Ray (Kerouac) returns from his summer of working on a fire lookout in Washington State and visits Japhy (Gary Snyder) at his cabin in Corte Madera on the foothills of Mt. Tam. Japhy was hosting a party that turned into a three-day rager. On the third day, both Japhy and Ray tired of the endless drinking and partying and decided to go for an epic hike around Mt. Tam. Ray, out of shape from the fire lookout, becomes exhausted by the hike (‘no more hikes for me forever’). Japhy is an endless reservoir of energy and describes his upcoming trip to Japan and wanting to work “3,000 years” on an epic poem called ‘Mountains And Rivers Without End’. They return to the cabin. Ray is too tired to do anything but sleep. Japhy gets groceries and cooks one last dinner for the two of them before he leaves for Japan. It’s the perfect ending to the book. My best friend from childhood recently gave me a first edition 🤗. And Gary Snyder’s epic poem? He eventually published it in 1997 and I just came across a letter from a dear friend from study abroad who sent me the book back in 2002. Mt. Tam will always be in my heart.